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      ‘Medusa Deluxe’ Review: Curl Up and Die

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      A gruesome attack on a stylist upends a hairdressing contest in this invigoratingly bold debut.Suffused with the sting of hair spray and the scent of Herbal Essences, “Medusa Deluxe” swaggers onto our screens, all cigarette smoke and mirrors. From its playfully inventive opening to its flash-forward finale, Thomas Hardiman’s wild — and wildly impressive — first feature, set during a British regional hairdressing competition, is a proudly indelicate, painstakingly structured pleasure.Playing out in real time and shot to suggest a single, continuous take, the plot circles the sudden death of the show’s star stylist, who has been found backstage, minus his scalp. As his competitive rivals and their models await questioning by unseen detectives, everyone is under suspicion, not just the creepy security guard with the urgent requests for wet wipes. There’s the mouthy Cleve (Clare Perkins, whose opening monologue is a doozy), a stylist with barely controlled anger issues; the devout Divine (Kayla Meikle), who works part-time for an undertaker and is hence no stranger to dead heads; and the scheming Kendra (Harriet Webb), who may have fixed the contest in cahoots with its silver-pompadoured organizer (Darrell D’Silva).Displaying a flamboyant finesse and a cheeky, can’t-sit-still sensibility, Hardiman hides nuggets of foreshadowing in seemingly throwaway remarks. The whodunit mystery droops well before the end, but the women are fantastic and their dialogue, sharp as a hairpin, has a gossipy tempo that’s fun and energizing. A jumpy, percussive score (by the British electronic artist Koreless) pulses unobtrusively beneath the action, punctuating the characters’ tightly choreographed movements and forming a sonic bond with the crumbling brick of the show’s cavernous venue.Filmed in and around a derelict building in a postindustrial town in the north of England, “Medusa Deluxe” unfolds mainly backstage and below stairs. Clinging as close as dandruff flakes, Robbie Ryan’s snakelike camera follows characters down dimly-lit corridors and echoing stairwells, idling in the fluorescent glare of unlovely bathrooms and dressing rooms before gliding onward.At a time when too many movies feel cautious and constrained, “Medusa Deluxe” is gloriously uninhibited and gaudily diverting. A disco blast of George McCrae will beckon you through the end credits, though the movie is not without poignancy as Cleve remarks that the medium she has spent her life teasing and weaving is dead as soon as it exits the scalp. She knows that her art is temporary, its rewards fleeting, and that her time in the spotlight may never come.Medusa DeluxeRated R for weaponized words and tortured follicles. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘The Pod Generation’ Review: Birthing 2.0

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      This satire on our techno-capitalist future is best enjoyed the way it’s made — without taking itself too seriously.Here’s a new start-up idea: an advanced technology that allows fetuses to listen to podcasts lest they get bored in utero. That’s what the Womb Center offers in Sophie Barthes’s “The Pod Generation,” a wickedly funny and fun, if disconcerting, film that arrives right on time for our age of ChatGPT and artificial intelligence doomerism.In a sci-fi future where everything is ruthlessly, comically optimized by advanced tech, the Womb Center offers digitally monitored, egg-shaped pods that will carry one’s baby to term. It’s an enticing option that puts Rachel (Emilia Clarke), who works for an A.I. company, and her husband Alvy (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a botanist frustrated by society’s disconnect from nature, at odds with each other.As the couple, played with a terrific chemistry by Clarke and Ejiofor, hesitantly opt into the process, the film satirizes our fetishization of a digital utopia, one in which techno-capitalism is the solution to all things, from education and health care to patriarchy and, apparently, all the unsightly, inconveniencing aspects of womanhood (i.e., pregnancy and motherhood). While its heady themes yield commentary that is ultimately just a tad thin, Barthes’s satire is best enjoyed the way it’s made — without taking itself too seriously.Much of the fun comes simply in existing within the comedic dissonance between this absurdist reality and the dubiously soothing, richly observed utopia. The most telling and damning revelation can be found in considering the film’s immersive sci-fi world alongside its distant cousin that exists in Spike Jonze’s 2013 film “Her”: the differences in their sensibilities offer a portrait of the downward progression between the tech optimism of the early 2010s, when start-up culture was still considered cool, and the terrifyingly rapid, consuming forces that our digital future has become since.The Pod GenerationRated PG-13 for suggestive material, partial nudity and brief strong language. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Between Two Worlds’ Review: Juliette Binoche Goes Undercover

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      In this social-justice drama, the French actress plays an investigative journalist who poses as a cleaner to expose worker exploitation.In “Between Two Worlds,” Juliette Binoche plays Marianne Winckler, a woman struggling to make ends meet in the Normandy region of France. When she arrives at an unemployment center at the start of the film, she’s sheepish and bewildered, selling herself as a “team player” to secure a minimum wage gig.In a voice-over, the details of her quest for steady work are articulated in a matter-of-fact tone. Subtly, the director Emmanuel Carrère reveals this social-justice drama’s real stakes: Marianne, an investigative journalist, has gone undercover. Her mission? To reveal the ways in which low-income workers are exploited — specifically women working graveyard shifts while under contract to private sanitation companies.The film is a loose adaptation of “The Night Cleaner” (2010), the nonfiction best seller by Florence Aubenas, a French journalist who went underground and lived a double life as a cleaner for an English Channel ferry.“Between Two Worlds,” written by Carrère and Hélène Devynck, departs from its source material with a fictional arc: Marianne, a savior figure driven to expose the system’s injustices, is also guilt-ridden about keeping her true identity a secret from her co-workers like Christèle (Hélène Lambert), an edgy single mother. This rift is echoed in the casting, with the usually glamorous Binoche acting alongside nonprofessional actors.Carrère — known primarily in Europe as a writer of nonfiction books with a literary twist — applies a mood of cool journalistic sobriety to Marianne’s scandalous discoveries. At her worst job, for instance, she’s forced to prepare over 100 beds in less than two hours. Less compelling is the sentimental crisis that plays out because of Marianne’s deception. It does little else beyond remind us that advocacy work is too often in a tango with a bad case of main-character syndrome.Between Two WorldsNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Aporia’ Review: Killing Time

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      Strong acting helps stabilize this dopey sci-fi/family drama.Even the most casual consumer of science fiction can tell you that tinkering with the past, however commendable the reason, is a fool’s game. This may be news to the three adults at the center of Jared Moshé’s film “Aporia,” a deeply silly time-travel weepie buoyed solely by the soapy warmth of its performances.Ever since Sophie (Judy Greer) lost her husband, Mal (Edi Gathegi), to a drunken driver eight months earlier, she and her preteen daughter (Faithe Herman) have been struggling. Enter Mal’s best friend, Jabir (Payman Maadi), a physicist and refugee from a dictatorship that killed his entire family. Obsessed with past wrongs, Jabir has been quietly building a time machine, a contraption that looks like a janky iron lung. The machine doesn’t actually go anywhere, but (and don’t quote me on this) can send particles back in time to murder your chosen victim. Someone like, say, the driver who killed Mal.But softhearted Sophie, unable to enjoy a successful assassination, can’t resist befriending the erstwhile driver’s widow and daughter, only to unearth a second villain. Every erasure, of course, demands several minutes of soul-searching and causes unexpected, increasingly troubling repercussions; maybe just one more murder will set everything right?Filled with idiotic behavior and logical ellipses (and a beyond-infuriating ending), “Aporia,” which means an expression of doubt or uncertainty, more than justifies its title. The film’s most beguiling idea, though, is its insistence on the significance of shared memories: When time resets, only Sophie and Jabir remember the original timeline, leaving them excluded from an alternate past — even their own.AporiaRated R for forgivable language and unforgivable behavior. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Justin H. Min, Travel Writer? The Path Not Taken for a Rising Star

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      Success came relatively easy — until he tried acting. For a moment, journalism seemed more viable. But now he’s the lead in “Shortcomings.”Five years after Justin H. Min began pursuing acting by Googling “how to pursue acting,” he thought he was getting the hang of it. He had made a viral commercial, and he was in contention for three major roles.He landed none of them.“I was not nervous and I did everything I wanted to,” Min recalled of the auditions. “And that’s the most devastating because you’re like, ‘I guess I just don’t have it.’”It was in this less-than-healthy head space that Min decided to pivot to a different unstable profession: travel writing. He had caught on with a British magazine and it seemed he might cobble together full-time work as a freelance writer if he got on a plane to London.So Min told his manager he was moving. But rather than beg him to stay (as Min had secretly hoped), the manager gave his full blessing. Before Min could head for the airport, though, a fellow actor urged him to reconsider — timely encouragement that set Min, now 34, on the path to “a star-making performance,” as a critic for The Times put it, in the new comedy “Shortcomings,” as well as fan-favorite turns in the Netflix series “Beef” and “The Umbrella Academy.”“This sounds absurd, but I don’t think I’ve really ever struggled with failure until I started to pursue acting,” Min said in a prestrike interview. “So I will absolutely savor this.”INDEED, EVERYTHING IN the first 20-ish years of Min’s life had come to him with relative ease. He concedes this only very sheepishly and with many disclaimers about how fortunate he feels.In Cerritos, Calif., the predominantly Asian suburb where he grew up, Min felt little sense of difference. He found that most success was attainable through application. Min was class president all four years of high school and elected king of the winter formal. He was so good in speech and debate competitions that he won thousands of dollars in prize money that helped pay for a Cornell education. Given his gifts, he thought he might become a lawyer — or maybe a politician.But on the day Min was to graduate from college, he woke up to nine missed calls. His grandfather, who had flown in for the occasion, had died that morning. And so Min’s commencement walk ended in a teary embrace with his family.The death of Min’s grandfather pushed him to reflect during a solo, cross-country road trip back home to Cerritos.“What do I really want to do?” Min recalled asking himself. Life was fleeting, he now understood. Becoming a lawyer or a politician just didn’t feel right anymore. He liked public speaking, writing and storytelling. And back under his parents’ roof, he was near Los Angeles anyway. He decided to give acting a shot.“I think everybody saw something in Justin and I did, too,” said his fellow actor Amy Okuda.Tracy Nguyen for The New York TimesHe soon discovered, however, how hard the business of acting really was and that applying himself would not be enough.When he ran into college friends and they asked about his acting career, “I remember feeling so shattered and so lost in terms of what to say or how to present myself because I no longer could stand on accomplishments,” he said. “I didn’t have that anymore.”IT WAS SLOW going at first. Min dove into Reddit threads, took classes, searched for agents and discovered Wong Fu Productions, a content company run by young Asian Americans that would become a popular part of Asian American media as YouTube blossomed in the 2010s. The guys running it asked Min to audition for what he said they called a “narrative thing, but like branded content.”The “narrative thing” was essentially an eight-minute advertisement for a Simplehuman trash can. But it was built around an exploration of adulting, and the video received tens of millions of views.That work didn’t pay much, and Min began to dabble in journalism as a side hustle. He was a good writer and his photography, like most things in his life, had drawn praise.He traveled to Mexico City to interview the chef Enrique Olvera at Pujol; and to Chicago to pick the brain of Grant Achatz at Alinea. What was not to like about work trips to two of the world’s most acclaimed restaurants?Which helps explain why Min was willing to give writing a full go when he got those back-to-back-to-back acting rejections. But as he pondered his next move, Min had dinner with a friend, the actress Amy Okuda. She tapped the brakes on his travel plans.“I think everybody saw something in Justin and I did, too,” Okuda said in a prestrike interview. So she sent a note about Min to her own manager, Joshua Pasch, who got in touch with him almost immediately; Pasch even had Min submit an audition tape for “The Umbrella Academy” before the pair met.“The rest is history,” Pasch said. “He was on the show a month later.”MIN HAD LANDED THE ROLE of Ben Hargreeves on what would become a hit for Netflix. His part was modest at first — a dead brother in a superhuman sibling squad who occasionally shows up as a ghostlike figure that only the drug-addled sibling, Klaus, can see. The character had very little screen time, and Min was not a series regular initially.Min, left, on “The Umbrella Academy.” He landed the role after a friend urged him to stick with acting.NetflixBut Ben became surprisingly popular in Min’s hands. Steve Blackman, the showrunner, came up with a way to expand the role and even bring Ben back to life as a different, meaner version of himself in later seasons.“The character of Ben doesn’t really exist that much in the graphic novel” on which “Umbrella Academy” is based, Blackman said. “I wrote Ben in to be someone that Klaus could talk to and only Klaus could see.”But, he added, “the minute Justin embodied the character, I’m like, ‘Oh, we’ve got to do so much more.’”“The Umbrella Academy,” which premiered in 2019, was an “I made it” moment for Min. But he would also earn acclaim two years later for his thoughtful, sincere portrayal of the titular robot in “After Yang,” a quiet sci-fi drama starring Colin Farrell.“He had such a rich life before he became an actor,” Kogonada, who directed “After Yang,” said of Min. “Like all the great actors, he is consumed with his craft. But I feel like I’m getting to know him better through the different roles that he plays.”Then came “Beef,” and the part of Edwin, an irritatingly perfect leader of a Korean church.Lee Sung Jin, the director of “Beef,” was best friends with Min’s brother, Jason, in college. Lee said in an interview that he had called Jason Min, an admired praise leader, into the writers’ room to help craft the character of Edwin. It was a role Lee said he had always intended for Justin to fill.Both Min and Lee recalled being in Las Vegas years earlier for Jason’s bachelor party and promising each other that they were going to make it in Hollywood, and that they would work together when they did.“Drunk confidence,” Lee said.NOW MIN IS PLAYING another Ben. This one, the main character in “Shortcomings,” is not a ghost but a very flawed would-be filmmaker who, in the words of a girlfriend, is brimming with “anger, depression, your weird self-hatred issues and just the relentless negativity.”Min “is probably the only person who could have played him in the way that he did, with such nuance,” Ally Maki, who plays the girlfriend, Miko, said in a prestrike interview.Min recalled reading the script and saying to himself: “I understand this guy because I was this guy” and “parts of me are still this guy.”When he initially read the first scene — in which Ben complains about a “Crazy Rich Asians”-style movie that everyone else liked — Min said the words felt natural tumbling out of his mouth.Ben is dealing with the gap between his elevated tastes and his lack of career success, he said, “and that disparity is crippling. I remember when I started off in this business, I felt the same disparity. I felt such a chasm between the projects I was doing and the projects that I wanted to do.”“It results in a lot of dissatisfaction. It results in a lot of cynicism,” he continued, recalling how, at one point, “I sort of prided myself in being sort of this funny, cynical, dry kind of guy the way that Ben is. And then through many years of therapy, I realized that that was simply a defense mechanism for me to hide and shield myself from the actual pain of feeling like I had failed at this industry that I so wanted to succeed in.”Min holds onto one particular memory from the movie. Ben is sprinting through the West Village — that classic movie moment when the hero tries to salvage the relationship before it’s gone forever. In the midst of the scene, he thought, “This is crazy that I am in New York in the middle of this busy West Village street, running as the lead of this movie,” he said. And he remembered how some of his favorite movies had iconic running shots. “I never thought that I was going to be the guy who was running.” More

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      ‘Winter Kills’ Returns in New Print at Film Forum

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      Part black comedy, part paranoid thriller, the 1979 movie returns after four decades in a new 35 mm print at Film Forum.A madcap riff on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, “Winter Kills,” adapted by the director William Richert from Richard Condon’s 1974 best seller, is part black comedy, part paranoid thriller and — an evocation of cosmic conspiracy that boasts its own conspiratorial back story — part carnival hall of mirrors.The movie, first released in 1979, and then again in 1983 (with its ending supposedly altered), returns after four decades in a new 35 mm print.The President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, known as the Warren Commission and established in 1963, was still hotly contested when Condon wrote his novel, a precursor to literary treatments of Kennedy’s death like Don DeLillo’s “Libra” and James Ellroy’s “American Tabloid.” The movie is redolent of Watergate-era films like “The Parallax View” from 1974, but in the age of QAnon it scarcely seems dated. One of the novel’s favorable reviews quotes Condon to the effect that, in contemporary America truths are less important than “the illusion of truths.”Jeff Bridges plays Nick, the younger half brother of a charismatic president murdered by a lone assassin in downtown Philadelphia. Given evidence, years later, of a second gunman, Nick is dragged down a rabbit hole, at once aided and thwarted by his all-powerful father (John Huston, essentially reprising his role in “Chinatown”).A greater mystery than the plot may be the cast assembled by Richert, directing his first nondocumentary, and his shady producers, whose major credit was the soft-core movie “Black Emanuelle.” The always sympathetic Bridges and the ineffably sleazy Huston are supported by the veteran heavies Richard Boone, Sterling Hayden and Ralph Meeker; the international stars Tomas Milian and Toshiro Mifune; and the reliable wackos Anthony Perkins and Eli Wallach, plus the ’50s melodrama queen Dorothy Malone, with the supermodel Belinda Bauer as the requisite woman of mystery. Elizabeth Taylor (uncredited and silent save for a single angry word) was canny enough to take payment upfront. The rest of the cast seems to have been strung along for the duration of the start-stop shoot.As chronicled by Condon in a 1983 Harper’s article no less sensational than the movie, as well as a documentary found on the Blu-ray release, “Winter Kills” was six years in production, during which it was repeatedly shut down for lack of cash. (Drug money was involved. One producer was later murdered, his partner wound up in jail.) While these travails may not be evident onscreen, knowledge of the saga adds to the movie’s sense of imperial hubris — the “Game of Thrones”-style credits announcing the stellar cast, the spectacularly superfluous locations shot by Vilmos Zsigmond (between “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “The Deer Hunter”!?).“Winter Kills” is not always easy to follow — Condon’s convoluted plot has been simplified and the film is consequently riddled with narrative lacunae — but from beginning to end, the gist is always clear. The movie “doesn’t make a bit of sense, but it’s fast and handsome and entertaining,” Janet Maslin wrote in her 1979 review in The Times. Preposterous as it is, its vision of total surveillance, constant subterfuge and plutocracy run amok has a measure of social realism.If paranoid thinking is the antidote to chaos, “Winter Kills” demonstrates its appeal. The movie is an article of faith. That it exists at all is something of a miracle.Winter KillsAug. 11-24 at Film Forum, Manhattan; filmforum.org. More

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      Confusion in Hollywood as Some Productions Are Allowed to Continue

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      The striking actors’ union is granting waivers to some projects not affiliated with the major studios, but questions persist about who qualifies and why.When you’re making an independent film every second counts. Ash Avildsen had six days of filming left on his low-budget biopic “Queen of the Ring” — including a climactic scene involving a majority of his cast — when the actors’ union went on strike on July 14.The production, in Louisville, Ky., shut down immediately. If Mr. Avildsen could not receive an interim waiver from SAG-AFTRA, as the union is known, to continue filming, the project was likely to fall apart. The logistical and financial challenges of sending the cast and crew home and then trying to assemble them again after a strike would be too much for the shoestring production.“It was maniacally stressful,” said Mr. Avildsen, who wrote and directed the film, about Mildred Burke, who became a dominating figure in women’s wrestling in the 1930s. “We could maybe have lasted another day waiting, but after two or three days it would have been a house of cards falling down.”“Queen of the Ring” was granted the waiver, one of more than 160 the union has handed out in the past three weeks. To get one, projects must have no affiliation with the studios the actors are striking against and the companies involved must comply with the most recent contract demands the union presented to the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of the studios.Recipients of the waivers have ranged from under-the-radar projects like Mr. Avildsen’s to higher-profile films like A24’s “Mother Mary,” starring Anne Hathaway, and Hammerstone’s “Flight Risk,” directed by Mel Gibson and featuring Mark Wahlberg.For the union, granting the waivers serves three purposes: It allows companies not affiliated with the studio alliance to keep working; actors and other crew members to remain employed when so much of Hollywood has ground to a halt; and major studios to see examples of productions operating while acceding to the union’s latest demands, including higher pay for the actors and increased contributions to the union’s health and pension fund.“Here are independent producers, who generally have less resources than the studios and streamers, who are saying, ‘Yeah, we can make productions under these terms, and we want to and we’re going to if you let us,’” Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the union’s lead negotiator, said in an interview.But the agreements are also causing confusion and consternation around Hollywood. Some wonder about the propriety of working on a production when so many in the industry — the writers have been on strike since May — are walking the picket lines. For instance, Viola Davis was granted an interim waiver for an upcoming film she was set to star in and produce. But she declined, saying in a statement, “I do not feel that it would be appropriate for this production to move forward during the strike.”Viola Davis turned down a waiver, saying she didn’t feel it was appropriate to work on a production during the strike.Christophe Simon/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe actress and comedian Sarah Silverman criticized the interim agreements in an Instagram post. She said that she had declined to work on an independent movie because of the strike, and suggested that she found the waivers counterproductive to the union’s goals.Ms. Silverman said she wasn’t sure if she should be “mad at these movie stars making these indie movies that are obviously going to go to streaming” or upset with “SAG for making this interim deal for these indie movies” during the strike.After meeting with the union’s leadership, the actress said in a follow-up post that she was happy the waivers allowed some crews to continue working, but that she still questioned the validity of granting waivers to projects with big movie stars and loose affiliations with companies that are part of the studio alliance. The alliance declined to comment for this article.One project that drew grumbles in some quarters when it received a waiver was the AppleTV+ show “Tehran.” The show, filming its third season, employs union actors, but an Israeli company oversees the production, which is shooting in Greece. That situation has created a gray zone, Mr. Crabtree-Ireland said, even though Apple, a member of the alliance, is financing the operation.Mr. Crabtree-Ireland called the approval of “Tehran” “outside the norm.”“We have to be mindful that not every country’s law lines up with labor law from the United States,” he said.An Israeli company oversees production of the AppleTV+ show “Tehran,” which is shooting on location in Greece. That situation has created a gray zone, opening the door for a waiver. Apple TV+That has not helped clear up the matter for many in Hollywood. Even when the waivers are granted, there are some — like Ms. Davis — who wonder if accepting them is akin to crossing the picket line.“What’s confusing to us is what should we be doing?” asked Paul Scanlan, chief executive of Legion M, an independent production company that crowdsources funding for many of its projects, some of which await word on interim agreements. “The messaging isn’t clear. There are some people saying, ‘Oh, these interim agreements are bad,’ but then SAG is saying: ‘No, they’re good. They’re part of our strategy.’He added: “We’re sensitive to how we’re perceived in the marketplace, and we don’t want to be one of those companies that is perceived as doing an end run around the strike because that’s absolutely not our intention.”Honoring the interim agreement does raise an independent production’s costs. According to one independent financier, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the strikes have the industry on edge, production budgets can increase by 8 to 10 percent, significant for independent films that already count every penny.There is also the question of timing. Interim agreements can, as in the case of Mr. Avildsen, help a film finish production. But they can also be granted to completed projects to allow actors to promote their films, including at festivals, where they might end up securing a distribution deal with a company that the union is striking against and that has not yet agreed to a new contract. And that could get complicated.“Let’s say we sign an interim agreement,” Mr. Scanlan said. “I do think it makes it harder for Netflix to buy something that has already agreed to terms that maybe they haven’t agreed to yet.”For Mr. Avildsen, he’s still basking in the relief that his movie was able to complete production. The idea that overcoming that hurdle may ultimately imperil “Queen of the Ring” from finding distribution is a scenario he’s not yet ready to grapple with.“It’s a scary thing to think about,” he said. “If by this time next year, when we are ready to release it, if they’re still in their joust, that would be a big drag.” More