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      ‘The Kiss’ Review: A Romance Without Love?

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      A young military man asks a woman to dance, but they’re in for a bumpy ride in this story adapted from a novel by Stefan Zweig.This movie begins as many conventional period romances set in Mitteleuropa do: at a formal event in the 1910s, as an ambitious young military man, Anton, asks a daughter of nobility, Edith, to dance. She is willing, but a complication becomes clear as she attempts to rise from her chair: She wears braces on her lower legs, which are paralyzed. She totters forward, and there is a fair amount of embarrassment to go around, but Anton, seeking through Edith a path to the favor of the nobility, is not deterred.“The Kiss,” the latest picture from the prolific Danish director Bille August, is adapted from “Beware of Pity,” the sole novel the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig published in his lifetime. Its narrative is persistently discomfiting, but August often tells it in a way that emphasizes the picturesque; if you weren’t paying attention to the postures of its characters, you could possibly mistake it for something genuinely romantic like “Elvira Madigan.”Anton is played by Esben Smed, who’s clearly trying to tamp down his character’s essential callowness, while Clara Rosager shows purposeful restraint in her work as the smitten and hopeful Edith. The picture moves at a stately pace that one supposes was considered period-appropriate but feels merely logy at times. August and his co-screenwriter, Greg Latter, juggle Zweig’s chronology a bit and try to compound his ironies. Then they take a whack at ameliorating those ironies in the movie’s coda, as if they themselves are taking pity on the viewer. As executed, it feels like waffling.This director’s filmography has long been bumpy — he came out of the gate with “Pelle the Conqueror,” which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1988, took another Palme in 1992 with “The Best Intentions” (working from a script by Ingmar Bergman), and took a notable wrong turn with “Smilla’s Sense of Snow” (1997). And despite the best efforts of the cast and technical crew here, “The Kiss” winds up in the land of “meh.”The KissNot rated. In Danish with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Love’ Review: Connection, Oslo Style

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      A poetic drama weaves together the lives of Norwegians as they pursue connection in their own ways.The subject of “Love” is right there in the title. But that might be deceptively simple: The director Dag Johan Haugerud’s gently humanistic drama is one of those films that feels akin to a prism, refracting its theme into the array of colors it contains.“Love,” one of a trilogy of films from Haugerud set in Oslo (the others are named “Sex” and “Dreams”), braids a few stories into one another, the way its characters’ lives are woven together. The central strands are Marianne (Andrea Braein Hovig), a middle-age urologist in Oslo, and the nurse who works most closely with her, Tor (Tayo Cittadella Jacobsen). She is straight; he is gay; they’re both single. One evening after work, they find themselves on a ferry to a neighboring island, where Marianne and her friend Heidi (Marte Engebrigtsen), who’s organizing the city’s centenary celebrations, are meeting with some people involved with the planning. (January 2025 marked 100 years since the name of the city was changed from Kristiania to Oslo.)One of those people is Heidi’s friend Ole (Thomas Gullestad), a soft-spoken architect. Marianne and Ole vibe immediately. He’s divorced, with children, and his ex-wife lives next door. Marianne can’t deny her attraction to him, but the whole thing seems pretty complicated, and she doesn’t mind being alone. On the way back, though, she finds herself on the ferry with Tor, and they fall into a conversation about Tor’s own relationship philosophy — one that’s much more casual and expansive than hers. She decides to try it out for herself.Meanwhile, Tor meets Bjorn (Lars Jacob Holm) one night, then runs into him at the urology office, where he’s been diagnosed with prostate cancer. He finds himself falling into a different sort of relationship with Bjorn than he’s ever sought with another person. It turns out Tor and Marianne both have a lot of room to grow.“Love” moves slowly through its languid moments, set against the backdrop of Oslo and its architecture. There’s a loveliness to every scene, quiet urban beauty that leaves space for the audience’s contemplation. Characters spend a lot of time conversing, with frank openness, about their connections to others and themselves, about the ways they navigate the world. Sometimes during these conversations, the camera pulls back and drifts over the Oslo rooftops, shining in the bright August sun. The voices continue, but we’re observing a broader cross-section of the city, a reminder that these kinds of conversations are happening everywhere in town, all the time. People are interested in love, looking for love, swiping on their apps for love. And for each of those people, love looks a little different.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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      ‘Final Destinations: Bloodlines’ Review: Born to Die

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      The sixth installment in the horror franchise might be the most self-consciously silly of the bunch — and it’s all the better for it.It’s no surprise that the “Final Destination” franchise — a schlocky, spectacularly gory series of horror films that kicked off in 2000, spawning a total of five movies — has staying power. Unlike most horror properties, there’s no big baddie (à la Jason Voorhees or Leatherface) — or at least not one capable of getting old and seeming played out. The villain is Death itself, and both onscreen and off, it’s coming for us all, though in the “Final Destination” movies this unseen force is a shameless showboat.That’s no exception in the new, sixth installment, “Final Destination: Bloodlines,” which begins with a terrifically tense set piece in and around a Space Needle-style glass tower in the 1950s. Iris (Brec Bassinger) is on a date with her beau on the building’s opening night when she experiences a vivid hallucination of their imminently brutal deaths by towering inferno. The vision allows Iris to escape her grisly fate and save everyone around her. In this regard, “Bloodlines” follows the template of all the “Final Destination” movies (the first movie saw its characters escaping an airplane explosion, the second film a highway pileup and the third a roller coaster malfunction).But as things go in the “Final Destination” universe, Death doesn’t like being cheated — and it’ll take its lives, one by one, in what has become the franchise’s claim to fame: ingeniously choreographed kill scenes that turn everyday settings and objects into potential murder weapons. Consider some of the series’s greatest hits: death by tanning bed; by head-mashing weight machine; by, uh, slipping on spaghetti and getting your eyeball pierced by a falling fire-escape ladder.“Bloodlines,” gleefully directed by Adam Stein and Zach Lipovsky, offers a compelling tweak on its predecessors by introducing — with a wink and a shove — the element of inherited trauma. The opening glass-tower tragedy, it turns out, happened decades ago and the premonition takes the form of Iris’s granddaughter’s nightmares. Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) is flunking out of college because of these recurring visions, leading her to return home and reconnect with her long-estranged grandmother (Gabrielle Rose).Of the dozens of people who were supposed to die that night, Iris was nearly the last. Death proceeds in the intended order of the original blood bath, meaning it has taken years to work through all its victims — including the children those people were never supposed to have. Iris is now something of a doomsday prepper, having single-handedly fended off Death’s wrath by sheltering in a remote cabin. Her family thinks she’s nuts, but it’s not long before Death works its way down the family tree, making conspiracists out of all of them.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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      Tom Cruise Teaches Cannes About Star Power

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      Whether in “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning” or on the red carpet, the 62-year-old actor ensured that all eyes were on him.At Wednesday night’s Cannes Film Festival premiere of “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning,” the film’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, shared a story with the audience about his imaginative childhood, then clasped a hand on the shoulder of his star, Tom Cruise.“I got to grow up and have my very own action figure,” McQuarrie said.With his deep tan, blinding smile and He-Man haircut, Cruise surely looked the part of a kid’s favorite toy. Certainly, Cannes has proved ever eager to play with him: Even in recent years, when Cruise has moved away from auteur-driven dramas to focus almost exclusively on action films, the festival continues to find new reasons to welcome him back.Three years ago, Cannes honored Cruise with a fighter-jet flyover for the premiere of “Top Gun: Maverick,” where he sat with an obsequious moderator for a 90-minute talk about his devotion to big-screen filmmaking. This time, Cruise’s presence was more subdued. Instead of a solo spotlight, he made a surprise appearance at the end of McQuarrie’s panel, and while major studios often hold lavish parties at Cannes, Paramount staged no such celebration for what’s been billed as the final chapter of the “Mission: Impossible” franchise.(Perhaps the movie’s rumored mega-budget of around $400 million played a part in the studio’s penny-pinching.)The “Final Reckoning” premiere had to stand on its own, then, and Cruise ensured that it would. At two hours and forty-five minutes, the film already dwarfed every Cannes title in competition for the Palme d’Or (though the movie, which opens May 23 in the United States, isn’t in the running for the prize). Cruise further goosed the experience beforehand by signing autographs outside the Palais, where the festival is held, for fans who offered him hand-drawn portraits and beckoned him in for selfies. Even on the red carpet, even as the film’s sprawling cast gathered for a group photo, most photographers kept their cameras focused solely on Cruise.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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      Morris, Alligator of ‘Happy Gilmore’ Fame, Dies at 80 (or More)

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      The 640-pound, 11-foot gator memorably played a golf-ball-stealing, hand-chomping terror in the 1996 Adam Sandler film.Morris, an alligator who appeared in numerous films and television shows, most notably in the movie “Happy Gilmore,” died on Monday in Mosca, Colo. He was at least 80.The cause was old age, according to the Colorado Gator Farm, which announced his death.“His exact age was unknown, but he was nine feet long in 1975, and by his growth rate and tooth loss, we can estimate his age at over 80 years,” the farm said.“He started acting strange about a week ago; he wasn’t lunging at us and he wasn’t taking food,” Jay Young, the farm’s operator, said in a video accompanying the announcement. Tearfully stroking the gator’s head, he said, “I know it’s strange to people that we get so attached.”Morris was 10 feet 11 inches long and weighed 640 pounds at the time of his death.He was discovered in Los Angeles, but not at Schwab’s Pharmacy like so many actors of yore. Rather, he was found in a backyard, where he was being kept as an illegal pet. His acting career began in 1975 and ended in 2006, when he retired to the farm.His most memorable onscreen role came in the rollicking 1996 comedy “Happy Gilmore,” with Adam Sandler in the title role as a failed hockey player who becomes an unlikely sensation on the professional golf circuit.Morris’s big scene comes when he grabs a golf ball, leading Happy to confront him with an iron. Happy notices that the gator has one eye, recognizing it as the same one that had bitten off the hand of his mentor, Chubbs, played by Carl Weathers. (“Damned alligator just popped up, cut me down in my prime,” Chubbs says in one of the film’s many beloved quotes.)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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      ‘Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning’ Review: Tom Cruise Defies All

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      For the eighth installment of this stunt-spectacular franchise, the star returns to fight off A.I. planetary domination, the bends, gravity and maybe mortality itself.For nearly three decades, Tom Cruise has been running, soaring, slugging and white-knuckling it through the “Mission: Impossible” series. It’s been fun, on and off, but it’s no wonder he looks so beaten up on the poster for the latest edition, “The Final Reckoning.” Cruise — who turns 63 this year — long seemed impervious to ordinary time, with a boyishness that lasted well into middle age. His early stardom had already granted him a kind of immortality. Yet as the lines on his face discreetly deepened, and he kept pushing himself to lunatic extremes in this series, it seemed as if he were challenging physical death itself.Cruise is at it again in “The Final Reckoning” — the enjoyably unhinged follow-up to “Dead Reckoning Part One” (2023) — plunging into deep waters, hanging off an airborne plane and insistently defying the odds as well as his own mortality. It’s unclear why the title changed between the two parts. It might have been a marketing decision; dead is a bummer, of course, and the word implied that Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, an American operative extraordinaire, was heading toward the sort of bleak sign-off that capped Daniel Craig’s run as James Bond. Whatever the case, the change suits Cruise’s Ethan, whose abilities have grown so progressively super since the series began in 1996 they seem quasi-mystical.“Dead Reckoning” ended with Ethan and his team trying to stop an artificial intelligence called the Entity that’s set on destroying Earth. (Why? Why not?) The A.I.’s plan is the ultimate power grab, although it also seems like overkill, given that humanity is already hurtling toward self-destruction. But the Entity’s exceedingly possible mission keeps everyone busy, including Ethan’s right-hand whizzes, Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg), along with his love interest, Grace (Hayley Atwell), and the giddily anarchic one-woman wrecking machine Paris (Pom Klementieff). Mostly, though, the Entity’s annihilating designs mean that Ethan has to step up his game from superhero to global redeemer.So, once more, Ethan et. al. go unto the breach as they try to stop the Entity, which has thrown the world into chaos, inspired a doomsday cult and is trying to seize the world’s nukes — the usual. One of the dividends of the better big-studio productions is that they tend to be crowded with talented performers who can keep a straight face when delivering nonsense and sometimes bring feeling to the proceedings. So, as the clock runs down, characters enter and exit, including Angela Bassett’s tight-jawed American president and an army of appealing supporting players: Tramell Tillman, Janet McTeer, Shea Whigham, Holt McCallany, Nick Offerman and Hannah Waddingham.This is the fourth “Mission: Impossible” movie directed by Christopher McQuarrie, who keeps the machinery well-oiled and smoothly running, even when cutting among multiple lines of action. (He shares screenwriting credit with Erik Jendresen.) Shrewdly, he often uses a similar approach when the pace slows and characters convene to explain what’s going on and why (mainly to us), cutting from one person to another, as each delivers a helpful sentence or two. This conversational turn-taking livens up all the information-heavy explanations and helps feed the forward momentum. None of it makes any sense, of course, no matter how sincerely the actors say their lines, yet everything flows.Logic isn’t the reason movies like this exist or why we go to them, and one of the sustaining pleasures of the “Mission: Impossible” series has been its commitment to its own outrageousness. Cruise’s stunts have always been among the most outlandish and most memorable attractions in the series, which was spun off from the 1960s television show of the same title. He stepped into the role by escaping a wall of water and descending spiderlike into a luminously white, high-security vault, hanging by an unnervingly thin rope. The entire thing popped with cool stunts, striking locations, exotic doings and the sheer spectacle of Cruise’s intense physical performance.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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      Cannes Reacts to Gérard Depardieu Verdict With Soul-Searching and Shrugs

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      The actor, who was found guilty of sexual assault on Tuesday, was a festival stalwart and had brought nearly 30 movies to the event.In the French film industry, there are perhaps no two bigger institutions than the Cannes Film Festival and the movie star Gérard Depardieu. And on the first day of this year’s festival, Depardieu, who won the best actor prize here in 1990, was found guilty of sexual assault.Depardieu’s conviction was seen as a victory for the #MeToo movement in France, which took hold more slowly than in the United States. He was given an 18-month suspended sentence on charges of assaulting two women in 2021 on the set of the movie “Les Volets Verts.”In the seaside sun of Cannes, Depardieu’s conviction was met with serious consideration by some and a nonchalant shrug by others.But whatever their view, everybody was talking about it, including at a news conference on Tuesday to introduce the competition jury to the media. Reporters asked Juliette Binoche, the French actress who leads this year’s jury, about the verdict multiple times.Depardieu’s conviction was a result for the #MeToo movement, she said, which was also having an effect on the inclusion of women in the competition and jury lineup at Cannes. “I think that the festival is increasingly in step with what’s happening today,” Binoche said, adding that in France, “our #MeToo wave took some while to gain strength.”Many in France took a skeptical view of the movement at first. In a 2018 open letter to Le Monde newspaper, Catherine Deneuve and more than 100 other Frenchwomen in the entertainment industry complained that a wave of public accusations was creating a totalitarian climate.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 Dark Comedies Like ‘Friendship,’ Bad Bromance Brews

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      A spate of recent indie films provide a complicated, sometimes solemn take on male friendship.“Men shouldn’t have friends,” reads the provocative tagline of the uncomfortable new comedy “Friendship” (in theaters), from the writer-director Andrew DeYoung.That tongue-in-cheek statement seems to respond to the deranged lengths Craig (Tim Robinson), a suburban father and husband trapped in a dull routine, will go to feel validated by his much-cooler neighbor, Austin (Paul Rudd).Even as bizarre as the pair’s encounters become, an improbable but genuine loyalty develops between them in the end.But “Pineapple Express” this is not. The last decade has seen several American indie tragicomedies that, like “Friendship,” explore complicated platonic relationships between men with insight that the mainstream brom-coms that were hugely popular in the 2000s weren’t interested in. These new films stir up a kind of bad bromance.Movies such as “The Climb” (2020), “Donald Cried” (2017) and “On the Count of Three” (2022) interrogate toxic masculinity and approach the mechanics of male bonding with searing incisiveness, while still making time for laughs. In these stories, men grapple with regret, forgiveness and their darkest feelings as they relate to their best bros.Kyle Marvin, left, and Michael Angelo Covino in “The Climb.” Zach Kuperstein/Sony Pictures ClassicsWe 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