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      With Producers Guild Nominations, the Oscar Picture Gets Clearer

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      “Barbie,” “Oppenheimer” and “Killers of the Flower Moon” made the cut as they did for the directors and actors groups. But “The Color Purple” was left out.Rounding out a busy awards-season week that included the Golden Globes and nominations from Hollywood’s directors and actors guilds, the Producers Guild of America announced the 10 films nominated for its best feature award on Friday. As expected, the group included “Oppenheimer” and “Barbie,” twinned box-office behemoths that have so far dominated awards season just as they ruled the summer.Here is the producers’ list of feature-film nominees:“American Fiction”“Anatomy of a Fall”“Barbie”“The Holdovers”“Killers of the Flower Moon”“Maestro”“Oppenheimer”“Past Lives”“Poor Things”“The Zone of Interest”The producers organization is considered the group with the best track record of presaging the Oscars. Over the last five years, only six movies snubbed by the this guild went on to receive an Oscar nomination for best picture.Three of those came just last year, when PGA picks “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” and “The Whale” were supplanted by eventual Oscar nominees “All Quiet on the Western Front,” “Triangle of Sadness” and “Women Talking.” Those substitutions illustrate the difference in sensibilities between the populist-leaning producers and Oscar voters, who are more inclined to support international and independent films.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      With ‘Mean Girls,’ When Trailers Hit Mute on the Musical

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      With “Mean Girls,” “Wonka” and “The Color Purple,” why have studios spent much of their marketing budget downplaying and disguising their movie musicals?Regina George has a secret. She sings.Despite what its marketing might suggest, “Mean Girls” (in theaters), the latest in a set of pink-accented nesting dolls, is irrefutably a movie musical. Adapted from the 2018 Broadway musical, which was itself based on the 2004 film, which was in turn inspired by the 2002 nonfiction book “Queen Bees and Wannabes,” this new version has singing. It has dancing. It has one delectable moment in which the members of the school marching band raise their saxophones and tubas high.Barring a split-second shot of the band, you wouldn’t know that from the film’s trailers. The first trailer, from November — set to Olivia Rodrigo’s “get him back!” — included no original music. It was made to look instead like a vaguely edgier remix of the 2004 film.The second trailer, which arrived on Jan. 3, offers a line or two of “Meet the Plastics,” then cedes the soundtrack to a new song, a collaboration between Megan Thee Stallion and Renée Rapp, who plays Regina, the suburban high school’s apex predator. That song, “Not My Fault,” is admittedly in the actual movie. It plays over the credits.These “Mean Girls” trailers join “Wonka,” which opened Dec. 15 and “The Color Purple,” which opened on Christmas Day, as films that have spent much of their marketing budget downplaying and disguising their vexed status as movie musicals. At the close of the “Wonka” trailer, Hugh Grant’s Oompa-Loompa threatens to break into song, only for Timothée Chalamet’s Wonka to say, “I don’t think I want to hear that.” This from a character who invents a chocolate that makes people burst into song!We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      ‘Lift’ Review: Kevin Hart Is a Hero in This Flimsy Action Film

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      This poorly written action vehicle pits Kevin Hart as a hero against an eco-terrorist villain.Kevin Hart plays Cyrus, a master thief, in the undercooked heist flick, “Lift,” directed by F. Gary Gray. Written by Daniel Kunka, the film consists of luxurious locations like Tuscany and Venice and elaborate set pieces including a speedboat chase in the opening scene, but they are not infused with any sense of suspense or danger.The film relies on a cartoonish villain, the eco-terrorist Lars Jorgensen (Jean Reno), who wants to game the stock market by paying some shadowy hackers half a billion dollars in gold bars to disrupt the world’s water supply. Beyond the windfall Jorgensen will get from shorting water utility stocks, it’s unclear what he gains from this elaborate ruse.An Interpol agent, Abby (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), enlists Cyrus to steal the passenger plane carrying the gold bars before any damage can be done. Although Abby and Cyrus are old flames, the film doesn’t pick up any romantic steam, either, thanks to what passes for banter. “I was looking at the questions that weren’t being asked,” Cyrus tells Abby. “Too cool for school, huh?” she says.Though he tries to play Cyrus in the mold of Tom Cruise in “Mission: Impossible” or Robert Redford in “Sneakers” (two similarly framed heist films), as a leading man, Hart is stuck in neutral. You never understand why Abby would fall for him or why his team, composed of broad characters who seem to function solely as the source of creaky quips, are so steadfast. Hart possesses neither the charisma of Cruise nor the charm of Redford necessary to shoulder these action movie mechanics, a failure that demonstrates what happens when character actors are told they’re movie stars.LiftRated PG-13 for cheap violence and sexless romance. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Role Play’ Review: Mommy by Day, Killer by Night

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      Kaley Cuoco plays a woman balancing a life of domesticity with her career as an assassin in this spineless comedy thriller.Kaley Cuoco may be our newest caper girl Friday, but even her flame of charisma tapers off early in “Role Play,” directed by Thomas Vincent. Calling on the same knack for high jinks that she perfected on the Max series “The Flight Attendant,” the onetime sitcom actress plays Emma, a suburban mom with a secret: she is actually an internationally-wanted assassin.A minivan wife leading a double life as a professional killer is an agreeable enough premise for a broad action comedy, but the movie’s biggest idea lies not in content, but structure. As the hit woman and her clueless but loyal husband, Dave (David Oyelowo), get sucked into an improbable game of cat and mouse with her former employer, the film takes pride in flashing back to preceding scenes to unveil new details. The point is that Emma is always one step ahead — even of the audience.These mini-twists might have felt exciting had the film waited longer before each reveal; as it stands, the stretches between scene and flashback are shorter than commercial breaks. It is perhaps needless to add that the story often stretches credulity. What does Emma’s ex-boss have against her? Why aren’t the F.B.I. all over Emma’s recent sloppy murder? One is quick to forgive faulty plot machinations when an action movie really revs; “Role Play” merely spins its wheels.Role PlayRated R. She’s number one with a bullet. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Watch on Prime Video. More

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      Did This Couple Inspire Edward Albee’s ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf’?

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      A newly preserved Andy Warhol film documents a combative artist couple the playwright knew. The movie is premiering in MoMA’s To Save and Project.Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton put their marital demons on film in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (1966). But neither they nor their director, Mike Nichols, can take credit for being the first to try to bring Edward Albee’s 1962 play to the screen, or even for being the first movie couple to draw on their own real-life discord in that context.In April 1965, Andy Warhol shot what the writer Sheldon Renan described as a “remake” of Albee’s drama, according to the Whitney Museum’s catalog of Warhol’s early film work. The stars were married artists — the underground filmmakers Marie Menken and Willard Maas — and the concept was consistent with some Warhol films of the period: Set the camera in a fixed position; shoot two reels of 16-millimeter stock as the personalities in the frame engage in a mix of self-dramatizing and simply being; then let those two reels, totaling around 66 minutes, run unedited.The result was titled “Bitch,” and it will receive what is probably its first-ever public presentation on Saturday as part of To Save and Project, the Museum of Modern Art’s annual program of film preservation work.Warhol never made a print of the movie, Greg Pierce, the director of film and video at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, said in a phone interview. “There is a hierarchy to Warhol’s films,” he explained. There are those in the canon, the titles that Warhol stood by, including “Empire” and “Chelsea Girls,” that were printed and shown. But there are dozens of others that Warhol felt didn’t work; in those cases, he simply moved on.Yet he also didn’t discard those failures. “There is very little footage that is quote unquote ‘lost,’” Pierce said. “Warhol saved everything.” And before his death in 1987, he gave all his physical film material to MoMA, where “Bitch,” in a new digital scan, will screen on a double bill with Nichols’s drama.Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”Warner Bros.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      ‘The Settlers’ Review: Writing the History of Modern Chile, in Blood

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      This harrowing drama takes place in Tierra del Fuego, an archipelago in the southernmost part of South America, in 1901.Not long after the Chilean film “The Settlers” opens — after the first shot has been fired and the first blood spilled — an aristocratic-looking horseman rides up to some workers on a grassy plain. Wearing a wide-brim hat and a mustache, a scarf around his neck, he settles into a spacious tent. There, seated at a desk set on a handsome rug, he summons his foreman, whom he instructs to find a route to the Atlantic for his sheep. To accomplish this, he coolly explains, “you will have to clean the island” — a grotesque, civilized euphemism for murder.Among the more unsettling shocks in “The Settlers,” a harrowing, historically based drama that takes place in Tierra del Fuego, an archipelago in the southernmost part of South America, is its time period. It opens in 1901 on a vast plain framed by sloping hills and grazed by both sheep and long-necked guanaco (a relative of the llama). During the day, the small team of men erect a wood and metal fence so impossibly long that its terminus disappears into the horizon. At night, the workers cluster around campfires, gnawing on roasted meat. It’s a scene reminiscent of old and new westerns, though not one like this.The aristocrat is Don José Menéndez (Alfredo Castro), who, like the Scottish foreman, Alexander MacLennan (an effective Mark Stanley), is a villain so flamboyant and outlandish that he seems fake but is in fact based on a real figure. (You may recognize Castro from his roles in Pablo Larraín movies like “No” and “Tony Manero.”) Shortly after Don José delivers his instructions to MacLennan, the foreman sets out on his bloody mission accompanied by Segundo (Camilo Arancibia), a young mestizo with sharpshooter skills, and by Bill (Benjamin Westfall), a coarse white American gun for hire. On horseback, they cross a vast, rough and heart-skippingly beautiful land into unspeakable horror.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      ‘Self Reliance’ Review: Find a Friend, Save a Life

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      In this fleetingly amusing comedy, a lonely loser becomes the target of reality-show killers.The R rating awarded to “Self Reliance” for its language only proves the heavy-handedness of our rating system, as you’ll strain to hear anything in this genially bonkers comedy that couldn’t have been written by an 11-year-old. Which is exactly the age group most likely to enjoy it.Playing Tommy, an overfamiliar movie sad sack, the likable Jake Johnson (directing his first feature) radiates a shaggy warmth and appealing haplessness. Lost in middle age, Tommy lives with his mother, endures a tedious desk job and wonders why his longtime girlfriend has kicked him out. So when Andy Samberg (playing himself) sidles up in a limo and announces, “Congrats! You’ve been selected,” Tommy almost doesn’t care what for: Anything would be better than his humdrum existence.Tommy’s selection, it turns out, is as a contestant in a dark-web reality show. To win a million dollars, he has to survive for 30 days while an international pack of ninja-like assassins tries to kill him. A loophole forbids his murder unless he’s alone, so Tommy must persuade someone to shadow him 24/7 — bedroom and bathroom included. His family believes him to be delusional, hinting obliquely at earlier suspected breaks with reality; but Johnson’s screenplay would rather add another chase scene than address the more compelling issue of Tommy’s mental health.Tonally wobbly and sappily simplistic — without companionship, living is impossible — “Self Reliance” sends Tommy on a flailing quest for human connection. Both Anna Kendrick and the charmingly named Biff Wiff are diverting as temporary cronies, but the movie is too juvenile and too timid to acknowledge the real-world chill of its online cabal of murderous social misfits. The issue is not whether Tommy will survive, but why we should hang around to find out.Self RelianceRated R for unacceptable language (I guess) and unchecked silliness (I’m certain). Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      ‘Mean Girls’ Review: ‘Get in, Loser,’ Regina George Is Back

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      Still puffily padded but no longer particularly tart, this shape-shifting classic about the girls you love to hate retains its ingratiating charms.Can a movie musical based on a Broadway musical based on a film comedy that in turn was based on a parenting book be any good? Sure — if only because the writer-producer Tina Fey and the producer Lorne Michaels have made sure that little has changed in their money-printing property since the first movie hit theaters in 2004. Few stories, it turns out, are as comically and horrifyingly reliable as those set in high school; few villains are as dependably hissable as a desirable young woman with an ostensibly cold heart.In keeping with this material’s cheerfully derivative history it seems right to start with the New York Times film critic Elvis Mitchell, who called the original film — directed by Mark Waters and starring a preternaturally self-assured Lindsay Lohan — “tart and often charming.” Fast forward to 2018 when the paper’s former theater critic Ben Brantley described the Broadway musical as “likable but seriously over-padded.” For its part, the new “Mean Girls” lands somewhere between these two takes. It’s not especially tart and is undeniably over-padded, but its charms and ingratiating likability remain intact.Once again, the story — by Fey, who also wrote the first movie and the Broadway show — drops Cady (a sweet Angourie Rice), a bright home-schooled teen fresh from Kenya, into a high-school hellscape. There, she meets nerds and jocks, alphas and betas, and attracts the notice of the queen bee, the aptly named Regina (Reneé Rapp, who played the role on Broadway). Flanked by her vassals, Karen (Avantika) and Gretchen (Bebe Wood), Regina reigns supreme at school where, as the student body’s most attentively studied subject, she is feared, desired and loathed, at times simultaneously.As in the original film, the latest Cady is a quick study and soon learns her new habitat’s rules on her way to self-actualization and group acceptance. She befriends a pair of too-cool-for-school art kids, Janis and Damian — the tag-teaming scene-stealers Auli’i Cravalho and Jaquel Spivey — who encourage her to insinuate herself into Regina’s clique, a.k.a. the Plastics, to learn its secrets. Cady does and the usual complications ensue, including a chaste romance with Regina’s ex, Aaron (Christopher Briney), a heartthrob with floppy hair. Betrayal, comeuppance, repentance and triumph follow.In making the transition from stage to screen, the filmmakers have cut many of the show’s songs by Jeff Richmond (music) and Nell Benjamin (lyrics). The remaining tunes blur together with the exception of “Meet the Plastics” and “World Burn,” Regina’s character-defining lung-busters. Nothing if not a show-boater, she enters in black fetish-wear for “Plastics,” belting it out with such old-school diva command that she smacks the movie awake. She doesn’t have the nuance of Rachel McAdams, who played the role in the 2004 film. But Rapp gives the character oomph and swagger (the dominatrix-lite get-up helps), and when Regina howls “I don’t care who you are,” you readily believe her.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More