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      ‘On Swift Horses’ Review: Putting It All on the Line

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      Daisy Edgar-Jones and Jacob Elordi lead a melancholic drama about love and longing in the 1950s.Often the movies treat love and desire as if they’re easy to define: romantic, platonic, familial, sexual. Either you want him or you don’t; either you love her or you don’t. But the messy places in between those poles are where real life lies, and that’s where “On Swift Horses” dwells. Based on Shannon Pufahl’s 2019 novel, the story is set in the 1950s, in a world in which characters might act on desire but do not really speak of it directly. The air around them is thus charged with something that crackles and explodes, and the movie, when it works, is electric.It doesn’t always work, but you won’t mind that much, because it’s so beautiful to look at. The story centers on Muriel (Daisy Edgar-Jones), who is engaged to Lee (Will Poulter), a soldier who’s on leave from his tour of duty in Korea. We meet them in bed at the Kansas house she inherited from her mother, whose voracious hunger for life and experience set an example that Muriel yearns to follow.Within the first few moments of the film, Muriel repairs to the bathroom in a filmy nightgown for a postcoital cigarette and, leaning out her bathroom’s second-story window, discovers the long body and smiling face of Julius (Jacob Elordi) sprawled across the hood of his car below, brazenly shirtless, soaking in the sun. If you thought this was going to be a buttoned-up and modest film, think again: The director Daniel Minahan has no compunction about the fact we’re here to admire these people. The two spark, exchanging cigarettes and repartee, with the ease of strangers who nonetheless know each other. Julius is Lee’s brother, already discharged from his own tour in Korea, and Muriel has been expecting him.Julius soon comes inside and spends the evening with Lee and Muriel, and that’s the genesis of everything that follows. It’s a tangled kind of story: Lee worships Muriel and longs for a house, a family, a life. Muriel loves Lee back, but maybe in a different way, something that starts to become evident when they move to California and she meets their neighbor, Sandra (Sasha Calle).Yet she also senses an instant connection with Julius, who soon takes off for Las Vegas and a job in a casino. Julius is a gambler, both the literal and metaphorical kind; he inspires Muriel to try betting on horses soon after she and Lee move to California. He falls into a relationship with another casino employee, Henry (Diego Calva), but they dare not let that fact outside the room they share.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Blue Sun Palace’ Review: A Whole World Inside

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      A gorgeously intimate debut feature explores the lives of Chinese immigrants in a massage parlor in Queens.The first scene of “Blue Sun Palace” lingers on a couple at dinner, eating a mouthwatering chicken, speaking Mandarin to one another. The man seems older than the woman. They’re on a date, but you can tell something is a little off — like this relationship is very new, or there’s some unresolved power dynamic.It’s not until after dinner, and a subsequent trip to a karaoke bar, that the pieces of Constance Tsang’s sensitive, lovely and ultimately devastating first feature fall into place. The man is Cheung (Lee Kang Sheng), a married Taiwanese migrant who is working a menial job and sending money back to his wife, his daughter and his mother. The woman is Didi (Haipeng Xu), who works in a massage parlor in Flushing, Queens — the Blue Sun Palace — which officially doesn’t provide any “sexual services” but is frequented by a series of men, most of them white, looking for just that. Didi and Cheung, however, have a different kind of relationship, one built partly on companionship, and she sneaks him into Blue Sun Palace to spend the night.But Didi’s closest friend is another of the Blue Sun Palace employees, Amy (Ke-Xi Wu). Tsang’s film starts out like a chronicle of workplace friendship, albeit an unusual workplace. Amy and Didi hang out on the staircase in their building, eating lunch and sharing dreams and plotting toward the day they’ll head to Baltimore, where Didi’s daughter lives with her aunt, and open a restaurant together. Wu and Xu’s performances are light and full of life, two women who are making the best of a situation that isn’t ideal but certainly could be worse. They and their other co-workers form a network of support and joy. In these early moments, “Blue Sun Palace” feels like it could have some kinship with “Support the Girls,” both films about the community that women build together to survive a world that isn’t made for their them to thrive in. But “Blue Sun Palace” is gentler, with the cinematographer Norm Li’s camera drifting around the space, capturing the play of light or air on a curtain.This first section is a prelude. On Lunar Near Year, sudden tragedy strikes the massage parlor. It happens so abruptly, and with so little cinematic heralding, that it feels almost happenstance, the full blunt weight of the impact only landing moments later. To underline this, Tsang borrows a page from a number of other films in the recent past (perhaps most notably Ryusuke Hamaguchi in “Drive My Car”) and delays the film’s credits till 30 minutes into the movie, signaling to us where the real story has begun.It turns out this is not a tale of friendship; it’s a story of grief, and of the unexpected, fraught bonds people build in the midst of it. In the wake of violence, Amy and Cheung fall into a kind of friendship, two people brought together by mutual pain and by their shared experience as immigrants with jobs of necessity. Cheung takes her to the restaurant he took Didi, to the karaoke bar where they’d gone afterward. But Amy is not interchangeable with her friend, or any other woman, as much as the men around her might like to treat her that way.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘April’ Review: A Doctor’s Dilemma

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      In this, her second feature, the Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili takes on the risks faced by an obstetrician who performs kitchen-table abortions.The visually arresting drama “April” is filled with naked and clothed female bodies that are, in turn, possessed by desire, racked by pain, and isolated by convention and otherworldly mystery. It’s a heavy, serious and studiously elusive movie filled with handsome images and troubled by the inexplicable presence of a humanoid creature in weird female form. This entity gives “April” a supernatural sheen, yet the movie is rooted in the material world, in the here and now, in flesh and fluids. Its concern is the haunted faces of women struggling to care for the children they already have and seeking to terminate the pregnancies they don’t want.These faces often turn to Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili), an obstetrician who works in a rural hospital in the country of Georgia. Sharp, empathetic, determined and tightly coiled, Nina has the sober confidence of a battle-tested veteran. She has also attracted the kind of resentment that professional women at times endure through no fault of their own. She lives alone and, at first, she seems OK with this even if she doesn’t seem to have friends, only patients and a former lover. Still, loneliness clings to her like a shroud; it’s as palpable as the danger she faces when she drives off to perform an abortion, which she often does in people’s homes.“April” was written and directed by Dea Kulumbegashvili, who likes minimal dialogue, long takes, narrative ellipses and really big bangs. There’s one near the start of her feature directing debut, “Beginning” (2020), set largely in the aftermath of a church bombing. In “April,” it’s the death of an infant during childbirth that shakes up this world. The birth scene is genuine — there are two in the movie — and it jolts the story into gear. The hospital begins an investigation, drawing unwanted attention to Nina’s work quietly providing abortions. (The procedure is legal in Georgia, but stigmatized.) She fights back, insisting that she did nothing wrong. “Other than my job,” she says at one point, “I have nothing to lose.”It’s a sad, persuasive line, and a memorably blunt admission. Even so, Nina sounds more matter of fact than anguished or desperate, even if the person she’s talking to is her ex, another doctor, David (Kakha Kintsurashvili), who’s been tasked with leading the investigation. What’s most notable about this exchange isn’t what the two characters say and the emotional restraint you hear in their voices. Rather, it’s how Kulumbegashvili stages and shoots the scene, which begins with Nina offscreen and the camera solely trained on David, who’s hunched over on a couch in a cheerless hospital room. Only partway through their conversation does Nina enter the shot, standing still as David rises to embrace her.Here and elsewhere, Kulumbegashvili takes a modestly stylized approach to a seemingly ordinary setup, which nibbles away at the overall realism. Nina and David sound comfortable with each other, but the staging suggests there’s a chasm separating them. When he wraps his arms around her, it takes a few beats for her to fully return his hug. It’s as if she were out of practice, or a performer briefly flubbing her cue. Her physical stiffness is as telling as some of the dialogue, which fills in a bit of their back story. Kulumbegashvili, however, isn’t interested in rekindling their romance. Her focus is on Nina, who — as the investigation develops and other characters enter — comes into view, even as she becomes increasingly enigmatic.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Accountant 2’ Review: Ben Affleck’s Revenge of the Killer Nerd

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      Affleck returns as a brilliant C.P.A. who moonlights as a mysterious, gun-toting fixer and gets help from his little bro, played by Jon Bernthal.“The Accountant 2” is a blithely nonsensical, enjoyably vulgar follow-up to “The Accountant” (2016) about a numbers whiz played by Ben Affleck, who has impeccable marksmanship and shaky people skills. Like the first movie, the sequel embraces violence without apology, slathers the screen with (fake) blood and unleashes a small army of stunt performers who convincingly play dead. This one has another complicated intrigue and a great deal of plot, though most of the tension comes from watching Affleck struggle to suppress a smile while sharing the screen with an exuberantly showboating Jon Bernthal.The sequel picks up eight years after the first movie introduced Affleck’s Christian Wolff, a brilliant autistic forensic accountant who moonlights as a freelance avenger with help from friends. (The movie’s breezy embrace of cliché includes the stereotype of the autistic savant.) J.K. Simmons shows up as Ray King, the former director of the Treasury Department’s criminal investigations unit. He briefly enters wearing a cap and soon exits without a pulse, though not before setting the story in motion. Cue the gunfire and choreographed chaos, as well as amnesia, plastic surgery, trafficked women, child hostages and a miscellany of villains, ones who are cruel enough to bring out (and amply stoke) the audience’s bloodlust.King’s successor, Marybeth Medina (Cynthia Addai-Robinson), re-enters afterward to help nudge the story forward as does Christian’s younger brother, Braxton (Bernthal). Everything (and everyone) flows together more or less, even when the story strains credulity, as B-movie shoot-em-ups often do. It helps that there’s less back story here than in the first movie, which revisited Christian’s brutal childhood and his Oedipally nurtured violent skill set. That frees up the filmmakers — like the first movie, this was written by Bill Dubuque and directed by Gavin O’Connor — to focus on keeping all the people and parts nicely moving. Among these is Affleck, whose controlled, inward-directed performance holds the center.One irresistible draw of a diversion like this is that while its good guys are often bad, its bad guys are assuredly worse. Both Christian and especially Braxton have obvious moral failings (ha!), but their kill counts are never the problem, which puts them in fine, crowded company. American movies love gunslingers, after all, whether they have Texas or British accents, wear white hats or gray ones like Christian. Among these are the seemingly ordinary men — blue-collar types, next-door dads, computer jockeys — who, when hard push comes to brutal shove comes to catastrophic violence, will take off their glasses à la Clark Kent to transform into near-mystically gifted avengers. They lock and load, restoring order to a broken world.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Death, Taxes and Ben Affleck: ‘The Accountant’ Gets a Sequel

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      In the movie class of 2016, “The Accountant” was a wild-card.It told an original story for adults, breaking from the family-friendly intellectual property derivatives that crowded the top of the box office charts. And though it resembled a durable breed of man-on-a-mission action thrillers, it had an absurdist, gleefully dorky twist — Ben Affleck playing a neurodivergent bookkeeper and consigliere to the criminal underworld.Audiences responded. “The Accountant” outperformed expectations in theaters, earning $155.5 million globally (according to Box Office Mojo), and was the No. 1 most rented movie of 2017 (according to Comscore), ahead of “Moana,” “Wonder Woman” and “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.”Nine years and a change of studios later, a sequel, “The Accountant 2,” arrives on Friday, with Affleck and much of the original cast (Jon Bernthal, J.K. Simmons, Cynthia Addai-Robinson) returning, along with the director Gavin O’Connor and the screenwriter Bill Dubuque. In two conversations — one at South by Southwest in March, before the film’s premiere there, and another virtually earlier this month — Affleck, O’Connor and Dubuque discussed regaining the rights to the story, the definition of success and a potential idea for a third film.These are edited excerpts from the conversations.Affleck, right, with Jon Bernthal in “The Accountant 2.”Amazon StudiosBill, you wrote the script for the first “Accountant” independently — before an actor or a director was involved. Where did the main character, Christian Wolff, come from?BILL DUBUQUE I know people who are on the spectrum, and I thought something like this might be interesting; I’ve always been interested in how the brain works. I thought we could take this character who has a certain set of skills, a certain set of vulnerabilities, and not make him a victim but put him in a situation that was entertaining and where you felt something for him.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      An Ode to the Blues’ Many Guises, Inspired by ‘Sinners’

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      Listen to an imagined set list for a supernatural juke joint featuring Albert King, Outkast, Cécile McLorin Salvant and more.D’AngeloZackary Canepari for The New York TimesDear listeners,I’m James, a software engineer with The New York Times’s interactive news desk and an occasional contributor to Culture. I cajoled my way into this space this week after being captivated by the musical ideas pulsing through “Sinners,” Ryan Coogler’s genre-bending vampire flick that’s also a tone poem about Black love and pain, and the power and cost of Black creativity.In an arresting scene, a transcendent blues musician plays so fiercely, he summons ancestors and progeny to a Mississippi juke joint in 1932. Suddenly and seamlessly, Jim Crow-era sharecroppers, B-boys from the ’90s, Chinese folk dancers, African griots and funk musicians from the ’70s are all together, reveling to the same kinetic sound. It’s a visual expression of Black music’s shared DNA.My girlfriend and I spent all weekend analyzing that scene, pondering the blues’ connections to what came before and since. Here are 11 songs I could imagine on the set list at a supernatural juke joint unbounded by technology, geography or time.If he don’t dig this, he got a hole in his soul,JamesListen along while you read.1. Albert King: “Cold Feet”This infectious stomper from 1967 would set a warm vibe early in the interdimensional party, satisfying fans of the Mississippi-born blues luminary and the ’90s hip-hop heads who’d recognize it as the foundation of Chubb Rock’s “Just the Two of Us.”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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Ozu Created His Own Cinematic Language

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      The greatest filmmaker of postwar Japan found a new way to show life onscreen.MONO NO AWARE, a phrase that translates to “the pathos of things,” or something like “the beauty of transience,” has been a key aesthetic principle of Japanese art and philosophy for centuries. In the films of Yasujiro Ozu, the most famous of which are quiet domestic dramas set in Tokyo after World War II, that feeling is often manifested in what critics have come to call pillow shots: Every so often, the camera cuts away from the main action to a nearby object — a tree stirred by wind, a vase near a moonlit window, a passing train. It isn’t usually the case that a character in the movie is meant to be seeing that object at that moment, as another director might imply. Rather it’s the filmmaker who’s gently guiding our perspective away from the action, reminding us of the material world that persists outside of the story’s concerns. Ozu once spoke in an interview about deliberately leaving “empty spaces” in his movies as a means of revealing “the hidden undercurrents, the ever-changing uncertainties of life.” More

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      in Television

      Monsters Plague Japan. But What Do They Mean?

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      How ancient history and modern calamities have cultivated a national obsession with menacing creatures.HIROSHIMAON A BLUSTERY afternoon last November, I stood on the esplanade of Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park listening to the solemn gong of the Peace Bell as English and American tourists rang it again and again. A traditional Japanese bell made of oxidized metal, it has a pendular log that strikes at the atomic symbol engraved on its side as if to banish that evil from the earth. A few feet away, a group of Japanese schoolboys stood laughing and gamboling, hanging on each other as schoolboys do everywhere. More