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      Glen Powell at the Sundance Film Festival

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      The star and co-writer of “Hit Man” heard that his film had wowed audiences, but because of the actors’ strike, he couldn’t see for himself until now.Glen Powell doesn’t want for much these days, after co-starring in “Top Gun: Maverick” and watching his new film, the romantic comedy “Anyone but You,” cross $100 million at the worldwide box office. Still, for the past few months, there was one little thing he felt he had missed out on.It has to do with “Hit Man,” a comedy Powell co-wrote with the director Richard Linklater that casts him as a hapless teacher who must pose as an assassin for hire. I first saw it at the Venice Film Festival in September, where it proved so crowd-pleasing that the audience broke into applause midway through the movie. A week later at the Toronto International Film Festival, the response was also through the roof.But for months, Powell had only heard about all that secondhand. Since the Screen Actors Guild strike was still going strong during the fall tests, Powell wasn’t able to attend a premiere of “Hit Man” until it played Monday night at the Sundance Film Festival. Afterward, he called me from a car that was speeding him toward celebratory drinks.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 Underdoggs’ Review: Guess Who the New Coach Is, Kids

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      Snoop Dogg, as an egomaniacal retired football star, turns community service into a sport when he sees a chance to rekindle romance with a player’s mom.It’s not until the film’s postscript that “The Underdoggs” suddenly makes sense: The movie, starring Snoop Dogg as a retired athlete coaching a Pop Warner team, is inspired by the Snoop Youth Football League, the real-life organization that he started in 2005. The film, directed by Charles Stone III, is perhaps best understood as something meant as a fun dedication to the program — but it makes for a forgettable, often aggressively perfunctory work.Snoop plays Jaycen Jennings, a former star wide receiver who’s become an insufferable has-been and, after a reckless driving charge, is forced to do community service in his hometown. After running into his old flame (Tika Sumpter), whose son is on a helpless youth football team, he decides to coach the squad to burnish his public image and cozy up to his former sweetheart.It’s a familiar narrative — an embittered narcissist, down on his luck, forced by circumstances to coach, and eventually connect with, a ragtag group of kids — a situation the film knowingly plays with, making frequent references to the Emilio Estevez character in “The Mighty Ducks.” But it can’t come up with any memorable jokes or genuine heart to fill in the beats that it mostly slogs through. The kids in the film are simply too young to make an impact, and Snoop, who is fine enough as an actor, ultimately doesn’t possess the charisma necessary to elevate a lazy script.What we’re left with instead is the occasional chuckle from Mike Epps as the hapless class clown he usually plays, and the vague outline of other movies that have done this story with more charm.The UnderdoggsRated R for pervasive language, sexual references, drug use and some underage drinking. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. Watch on Prime Video. More

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      ‘Tótem’ Review: The Girl Who Sees Too Much

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      In Lila Avilés’s second feature, a 7-year-old girl begins to grasp the severity of her father’s illness while birthday preparations are underway at home.There are worlds inside worlds in “Tótem,” a soulful drama populated by an array of creatures, some with two legs and sad smiles, others with feathers, fur and shells. Set largely in a rambling house on a single momentous day, it focuses on a serious-eyed girl, Sol, who serves as the story’s luminous celestial body. You see much of what she sees, the warmth and disorder. Yet because Sol is just 7, you also see what it means to be a child in that messy reality known as adulthood.The Mexican writer-director Lila Avilés plunges into the mess the minute Sol (Naíma Sentíes), wearing a red clown nose and a floppy rainbow-colored wig, arrives at her grandfather’s house. There, amid the homey clutter of a house that actually looks lived in rather than art directed, two of her aunts are busily, and none too efficiently, prepping an evening birthday party for Sol’s gravely ill father, Tona (Mateo García Elizondo). As people and animals exit and enter the story — a raptor portentously flies overhead early on, part of a menagerie that includes bugs, dogs and a goldfish in a plastic bag — one aunt bakes a cake as the other dyes her hair.Avilés soon maps the house’s labyrinthine sprawl, swiftly building a tangible sense of place with precise, well-worn details and quick-sketch character portraits. “Totem” is a coming into consciousness story about a child navigating realms — human and animal, spiritual and material — that exist around her like overlapping concentric circles. Yet even as the story’s focus sharpens, what matters here are the characters: their emotions and worried words, how they hold it together and fall apart, their individual habits and shared habitat. (Avilés’s 2019 feature debut “The Chambermaid,” set in a hotel, is about another ecosystem.)Sol serves as a narrative through line in the movie, which opens with a kind of prelude set in a single-room public bathroom. She’s parked on the toilet, and she and her mother, Lucia (Iazua Larios), are chatting and laughing. Lucia tells Sol to finish (“push it out”), encouragement that amusingly evokes Freud’s theory about the anal-retentive stage. Whether Avilés herself is pushing, as it were, a Freudian take or not, the scene works as a run-up to what follows. Sol’s childhood reality is expectedly circumscribed, its limits expressed by the boxy aspect ratio and the closely attentive, hovering camerawork. Her reality is also changing, as becomes painfully clear by the contrast between her mother and her fast-fading father.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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      ‘Sometimes I Think About Dying’ Review: Life, in Drab Gray

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      Daisy Ridley stars as an office worker who’s just going through the motions.Fran thinks about dying, but not gruesomely. Her mental tableaux of death look as if they were staged by the artist Gregory Crewdson. Sometimes her body is draped dramatically over driftwood on a serene beach or posed in a foggy forest on a soft green bed of moss. She imagines standing alone in a nondescript finished office basement as a giant snake slithers by. She imagines death, essentially, as peace in the midst of ever-changing nature.Her reality is less beautifully hued. By day, Fran (Daisy Ridley) dons drab business casual and works in the sort of space that makes the environs of “The Office” seem like a magical wonderland. A small group of people perform clerical tasks to keep the local port in their tiny Pacific Northwest town running smoothly, and spend most of their time on crushingly banal chatter. Why is this cruise ship docked in such a way that it blocks the views of the mountains? Where are the mugs?By night, Fran’s life isn’t much more interesting, but at least she’s in control of it. She goes home, pours a glass of wine and takes a long, restorative sip, then reheats some kind of insipid patty and eats it with a side of cottage cheese. Sudoku, brush teeth, bed, repeat. It feels like she’s starring in her own one-woman play, one where all other people are background noise — her mother’s phone call goes to voice mail — and nobody is watching.“Sometimes I Think About Dying,” directed by Rachel Lambert, comes by its theatricality naturally; it’s based, in part, on the play “Killers” by Kevin Armento. (The other credited writers are Stefanie Abel Horowitz and Katy Wright-Mead, the latter of whose credits include “Boardwalk Empire” and “The Knick.”) The play entwined the tale of a young woman who thinks about dying with a secondary story about a young woman obsessed with killing, and though I haven’t seen it, I assume that means its themes were very different. But onscreen, “Sometimes I Think About Dying” can do what it could never do as easily onstage: We float in and out of Fran’s mind, entering her mood, her lethargy, her fixations on the back of people’s heads or their mouths while they speak. We start to become a little bit Fran.Perhaps the best term for Fran’s persistent mood is acedia, that feeling of not caring much about anything, especially one’s position in the world. (Ancient monks called it the “noonday demon.”) It’s often equated with depression, but there’s a particular torpor provoked by a soul-sucking office that can bring it on. Many a new college graduate has discovered, quickly, that a 9-to-5 job can become unbearable even if the work itself is simple, pleasant and well-paid. Something about the prospect of everlasting sameness can sap the will to live.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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      Hillary Clinton on ‘Barbie’ Snubs: You’re ‘More Than Kenough’

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      The former presidential candidate joined the chorus of disappointment in the omission of Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie from the best director and best actress Oscar categories.It was hard for fans of last year’s blockbuster film “Barbie” to ignore the twist of fate on Tuesday when Greta Gerwig, the movie’s director, and Margot Robbie, its titular star, were shut out of the best director and best actress Oscar categories. It could have quite literally been a plot point in the movie, which serves as a lesson on the patriarchal structures that shape our institutions and our ways of thinking.On Wednesday, Hillary Clinton joined the conversation by posting a message to Gerwig and Robbie on social media. “Greta & Margot, while it can sting to win the box office but not take home the gold, your millions of fans love you,” Clinton wrote. “You’re both so much more than Kenough,” she added, referencing a phrase that shows up on Ken’s sweatshirt in the film.Perhaps the message couldn’t have come from a more appropriate public figure than Clinton, a former secretary of state who, of course, lost the presidential election in 2016 to Donald Trump despite winning the popular vote.She was just one of many to share their dismay about Gerwig and Robbie being snubbed while the film itself earned eight nominations — including for best picture; for best actor, for Ryan Gosling, who plays Ken; and for best supporting actress, for America Ferrera.On Tuesday, after the nominations were read, Gosling issued a lengthy statement expressing his disappointment: “No recognition would be possible for anyone on the film without their talent, grit and genius,” he wrote. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Ferrera called their work “phenomenal” and said that they both “deserve to be acknowledged for the history they made, for the ground they broke, for the beautiful artistry.”Billie Jean King, the tennis champion who won equal pay for women at the 1973 U.S. Open, posted on Wednesday that she was “really upset about #Barbie being snubbed, especially in the Best Director category.”“The movie is absolutely brilliant,” King wrote, “and Greta Gerwig is a genius.” More

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      ‘Barbie’ Is Adapted? Let’s Fix the Oscar Screenplay Categories.

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      In the midst of the squabbles about actors and directors, there’s always at least one screenplay to debate when Oscar nominations are announced. Last year, in fact, there were two, and I regularly get collared by people wondering: What in the world were “Glass Onion” and “Top Gun: Maverick” doing in the best adapted screenplay bucket? Adapted from what? Was there some secret book about fighter pilots or tech mogul whodunits they’d missed?Nope. There’s also no previous story about a Barbie who starts thinking about death and sets out on an existential journey. But that didn’t keep the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the industry organization that gives out the Oscars, from kicking “Barbie” into the adapted category.Judd Apatow declared the reclassification of “Barbie,” the biggest movie of 2023 any way you slice it, “insulting” to its writers, Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach. Moving “Barbie” from the best original screenplay category — where it was the probable winner over films like “The Holdovers” and “Past Lives” — to adapted changed its Oscar chances. Now, alongside a slate that includes the juggernaut “Oppenheimer,” it’s a horse race. I don’t know what’s going to win.The academy posts some of its Oscar rules publicly, but not the ones that distinguish original screenplays from adapted ones. The Writers Guild of America, the union to which Hollywood’s scripters belong, does. And for the most part, judging from Oscar history, they’re in sync. Sequels, remakes and screenplays based on underlying material (including nonfiction, like a biography, that contains a narrative) are considered “nonoriginal,” and in awards contexts are usually classed as adaptations. Original screenplays either are not based on material (generally as stipulated in the writer’s contract), or they’re based on a nonfiction book that doesn’t have a narrative, like a study of sailing ships in the 19th century.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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      Why Greta Gerwig Was Snubbed for a Best Director Nomination

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      “Barbie” scored a best-picture nomination and scooped up eight nods overall. Several factors could have led to Gerwig’s omission.In her own world, Barbie can accomplish just about anything. But in the real world, “Barbie” was dealt a significant setback Tuesday morning: Though Greta Gerwig’s colorful comedy skewering the patriarchy was the biggest blockbuster of last year and set a record for the highest-grossing movie ever directed by a woman, Gerwig failed to receive an Oscar nomination for best director.The snub had many in Hollywood scratching their heads, since the 40-year-old filmmaker had earned best director nominations from the Golden Globes and Directors Guild of America for “Barbie” and had picked up an Oscar nod for her solo debut, “Lady Bird,” just six years ago.Ryan Gosling, Ken to Margot Robbie’s Barbie, criticized the academy’s vote even as he himself received an Oscar nomination. “No recognition would be possible for anyone on the film without their talent, grit and genius,” he said in a statement, referring to both Gerwig and Robbie, who missed out on a best actress nod. “To say that I’m disappointed that they are not nominated in their respective categories would be an understatement.”Does the matter come down to simple sexism? Certainly, if it were not for the presence of Justine Triet, the “Anatomy of a Fall” filmmaker, among the directing nominees, the academy would have a lot more explaining to do. Oscar voters have long been accused of ascribing more importance to male-led stories, a bias the academy has tried to rectify in recent years by diversifying its ranks. Still, comedies often struggle to win favor with the Oscars, and a female-led comedy has even more hurdles to overcome, as Robbie found.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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      Jeffrey Wright on His Oscar Nomination for ‘American Fiction’

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      Jeffrey Wright had taken precautionary measures as he awaited news of the Oscar nominations for best actor on Tuesday morning in Brooklyn.“I didn’t have screens on beyond my phone, which I kept an eye on,” the “American Fiction” star said. “I was afraid that I might do damage to one of the screens if the news were different. So I just let the phone tell me what had happened and it started to light up and it seemed that the news was good.”Indeed, Wright received his first best actor nomination for his portrayal of Thelonious Ellison, an author whose works no one reads until, in a moment of fury, he composes a story overflowing with Black clichés under a pseudonym, and it becomes a best seller. The performance has already earned him Critics Choice, Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild nominations.Did he really think he might not hear his name?“One never knows,” he said. Still, “I’m really proud of this film and the work that all of us put into it. We thought while we were making it that we might be onto something good and something interesting and topical, but also buoyant. We thought we might be making a special film, and it seems that audiences who have taken it in have appreciated the story in the ways that we did.”In a video interview, Wright spoke about his character, known as Monk, as a dream role, and why the film’s Oscar nominations — including best picture; adapted screenplay for its director, Cord Jefferson; supporting actor for Sterling K. Brown; and original score for Laura Karpman — matter.Will he do anything special to mark this milestone?“Yeah, I’m going to celebrate by driving my daughter back to college in a few hours,” he said, chuckling. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.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