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      ‘The Marsh King’s Daughter’ Review: Smoke on the Water

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      Neil Burger’s thriller aims to capture a mother pushed to protect her family from her past.In the director Neil Burger’s harrowing yet thin thriller “The Marsh King’s Daughter,” adapted from Karen Dionne’s same-titled novel, a young Helena (Brooklynn Prince) learns how her fairy tale is actually a nightmare. She lives in a woodland cabin with her stern mother, Beth (Caren Pistorius) and her huntsman father, Jacob (Ben Mendelsohn). Jacob often brands Beth’s white skin with Indigenous inspired tattoos and instructs her how to track and hunt.When a lost wanderer on a four-wheeler comes looking for directions, however, Beth flees with Helena on the vehicle to the police, leading to Jacob’s arrest. Unbeknown to the young Helena, twelve years prior, her supposedly loving father kidnapped Beth to be his bride.As an adult, Helena (Daisy Ridley) shares a daughter with her husband, Stephen (Garrett Hedlund). But Stephen is clueless to Helena’s past. That changes when Jacob escapes from prison. Helena opts to hunt Jacob before he steals her daughter (Joey Carson).This is a film superficially about trauma. Rather than mining the emotional and psychological complexities of Helena’s devastation, potentially ripe subjects, Burger hastily pushes ill-fitting thriller tropes onto a character study frame.While Mendelsohn is often adept at portraying villains, his potential to deliver menace is restricted by a one-note script. Putrid hues of greenish-yellow lighting, meant to signify jumps into the past, also underwhelm the suspense. Still, a game Ridley, along with a brief cameo by a soulful Gil Birmingham, provides the necessary stakes for Burger’s film not to idle in narrative mud.The Marsh King’s DaughterRated R for violence. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Quiz Lady’ Review: Dog in Jeopardy

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      Sandra Oh shines in this road trip buddy comedy about a pair of sisters getting on a TV quiz show to pay the ransom for their stolen dog.Jenny (Sandra Oh), a 40-something ball of chaos, is introduced in “Quiz Lady” the way you might expect of someone whose life savings are contingent on a hazardous fish bone-related lawsuit against a chain restaurant called Choochie’s: off in the distance, skittering heedlessly across the street before she’s suddenly struck by a car. Naturally, she pops right back up before having a meltdown over the mechanical entrance to the senior home where her younger sister, Anne (Awkwafina), is frustratingly watching from inside.It’s often said that comedic roles are deceptively trickier to play than dramatic ones, and Jenny is the type of character that would seem rife with potential pitfalls for an actor like Oh: an over-the-top eccentric whose humor can easily fall into caricature. Yet, “Quiz Lady,” a mostly winning comedy directed by Jessica Yu, is elevated most of all on the shoulders of Oh’s delightful and nuanced performance.When Jenny shows up at the senior home, Anne is already fed up. Their mother has run off to Macau to escape an $80,000 debt she owes Ken (Jon Park), a doggy daycare-owning gangster, and Anne naturally will be the one to take care of things. It’s the way things have been ever since Jenny, who has always lived a more free-spirited, if erratic and unstable, life, exited from their lives and left Anne to take care of their mother.Isolated and working as an office drone, Anne’s only form of solace is a Jeopardy-esque quiz show she’s watched religiously since childhood. When Ken steals Anne’s dog as collateral, Jenny, feeling the surge of her latest pipe dream of becoming a life coach, kidnaps Anne and drives her to an audition for the show in the hopes she’ll win the money to pay off the debt.Like so many road trip buddy comedies, the effectiveness of the enterprise rests, arguably more than the writing or direction itself, on the balance and chemistry between the central duo. And “Quiz Lady” in particular is predicated upon a role-reversing gamble: Typically a dramatic actress, Oh is playing the freewheeling Jenny, while her co-star, Awkwafina, who aside from her role in “The Farewell” has mostly made her name as the often cartoonish comic relief (“Crazy Rich Asians,” “The Little Mermaid”), is the serious and high-strung Anne.But the pair finds an easy harmony together, even as Oh does most of the heavy lifting. While Awkwafina’s little-sister turn often falls into uptight, one-note outbursts, Oh is a charismatic and natural counterbalance as the outsize Jenny. She knows when to reel her choices in and, most important, imbues Jenny’s kookiness with an emotional depth bubbling just underneath the surface.The funniest scene comes toward the end, when Jenny and Anne play a high-stakes game of charades on the quiz show. As they hit their stride, the sequence, punctuated by a strikingly tender moment that would have rung forced in lesser hands, floats off the comedic brilliance of Oh, at once natural and ridiculous, as her answers burst out of her via an intuition that could only exist through a lifetime of sisterhood.Quiz LadyRated R for some drug use and language. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      ‘Nyad’ Review: Neptune’s (Estranged) Daughter

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      Annette Bening plays the long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad as a woman who doesn’t pity herself. Neither does the film.“Nyad” is about an athlete creating her own lore. Diana Nyad (Annette Bening) is proud that her last name stems from the naiads of Greek mythology. “My ancestors! The nymphs that swam in the lakes and the rivers and the ocean,” Diana trumpets to everyone in earshot. A record-breaking long-distance swimmer, she’s got the lung capacity of a real blowhard. Her ever-patient best friend, Bonnie (Jodie Foster), spends this exuberant and enervating biopic cutting Diana off mid-crow. Braggadocio takes you far in politics or business; jocks, however, have to prove it in sweat. And so, at 60, Diana vows to conquer the challenge that bested her at age 28. She’ll swim nonstop from Cuba to Florida — over two days of sharks, storms, stinging jellyfish and hallucinatory exhaustion. For most of this riveting crowd-pleaser, she fails.“I’m either a stubborn fool,” the real Diana Nyad wrote in “Find a Way,” her 2015 memoir, “or I’m a valiant warrior.” The film, in its first minutes, prefers the latter, opening with a rat-a-tat montage of her many successes: author, linguist, Phi Beta Kappa scholar. I groaned. Please, not an inspirational advertorial about women and aging and grit — the artificial saccharine Diana had to use to peddle her story to corporations who might sponsor her repeated attempts.To my relief, the directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, working with the screenwriter Julia Cox, trace Diana’s mythic roots not just to the naiads, but to zealots like Captain Ahab. Vasarhelyi and Chin specialize in documentaries (“Free Solo, “Meru”) about extreme outdoorsmen whose feats require a misery threshold, and a self-centered monomania, that few can understand. Chin, a mountaineer himself, gets that mind-set — and Vasarhelyi, his longtime filmmaking partner and wife, also knows the strain these adventurers put on the loved ones providing emotional support. Cheerleading can tip over into feeling complicit in their potential death.Bening, who has a convincing sidestroke, shows us a woman willing to endure Hell. I’ve never seen a performance with this little vanity in service of a character drowning in her own ego. “Everyone should have a superiority complex,” Diana says, but the line comes at a point in the film where her superiority looks a lot like martyrdom. We’ve already witnessed her skin blistered by sunburn, her eyes and lips swollen into monstrous bulges, her face and neck lashed with tentacle burns, and her body, coiled on the floor, vomiting — or worse, still in the surf, but so weak and semiconscious and sleep-deprived that she’s paddling in place, suffering agonies without an inch of progress. Hubris keeps her afloat. But it also forces her to jump back into the water.Diana doesn’t pity herself, so neither does the film. Instead, the audience’s empathy is rerouted to Diana’s support team, particularly her weary navigator, John (Rhys Ifans), forever crouched over a map of sea currents, and the film’s second lead, Bonnie, her head coach who is, in essence, a temperature-controlled Jacuzzi overlooking Hurricane Diana. A former racquetball champion and, briefly, Diana’s ex, Bonnie has long since forgiven her friend’s flaws. Their scenes together capture decades of camaraderie in effortless shorthand. Though this is Vasarhelyi and Chin’s first narrative feature, they’re good with actors — although, in fairness, casting Bening and Foster (and their four Oscar nominations each) is like arriving at the poker table with a pair of aces. You get everything about the pair in an early scene when Bonnie throws her best pal the surprise birthday party that she swears she doesn’t want (but, of course, does) only to be ratted out at the door when Diana squints, “Did you blow-dry your hair?”The film switches tones choppily. There’s a scene where a character coughs once and immediately announces that they’re terminally ill. When the swimming is rough, the editing froths into a horror movie with Diana haunted by visions of her sexually abusive childhood coach, Jack Nelson (Eric T. Miller); later, in a halcyon stretch, the film becomes a semi-animated phantasmagoria with Diana posing under the waves like Esther Williams above an imaginary Taj Mahal, colorful fish swirling about her ankles. Diana wants our respect — and by the end of the movie, she’s earned it. While she’s one of the prickliest protagonists you’ll see this year, she’s so raw and earnest and apologetically herself that you adore her anyway — from the safe distance of the screen. But weep for her neighbors, who she wakes up every day at dawn with a bugle blast of “Reveille.”NyadRated PG-13 for salty language and references to childhood sexual abuse. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Radical’ Review: To Sergio With Love

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      A vaguely unconventional teacher galvanizes disadvantaged eighth graders in this highly conventional drama.Stop me if you’ve seen this one before: A free-spirited teacher takes a stake in a classroom full of underprivileged youth and unleashes their true potential. This stale and sometimes patronizing premise is recycled in Christopher Zalla’s “Radical,” a sentimental drama that is based on a true story but boxes neatly into familiar packaging. The title is nearly oxymoronic: It boldly belies how close to convention the film hews.Set at an under resourced school in Matamoros, Mexico, the film charts the development of a group of eighth graders after Sergio (Eugenio Derbez) transfers in as their teacher. Drawing side eyes from fellow staff (“the key is to discipline them,” one advises), Sergio adopts a novel method: He lets the students steer their education, and encourages them to seek out knowledge through experiments and play.Sergio’s approach is admirable. But the screenplay distills each of his students into a single salient problem: the one with gang ties; the one saddled with caring for younger siblings; the impoverished one whose timidity veils genius. The film trades in the trope of the angelic, sage child of the slums just waiting for a galvanizing mentor. (One of Sergio’s students constructs a telescope out of garbage heap scraps.)“Do you want to learn from books or from life?” a gang member flaunting a gun asks one of the kids early in the movie, vocalizing the only two paths this movie permits for its young ensemble. Despite its foundation in reality, “Radical” is as by the books as it gets.RadicalRated PG-13 for some gang violence, lots of grandstanding. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt’ Review: Mississippi Memories

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      Raven Jackson’s film offers a rich portrait of growing up in rural Mississippi and heralds a fresh, poetic talent.The opening of Raven Jackson’s debut feature, “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt,” announces the arrival of a filmmaker grounded in the lyrical beauty of her characters and the loamy grace of the place they so deeply inhabit. In this case, rural Mississippi.Mack (Kaylee Nicole Johnson), our protagonist, strokes a fish’s opalescent scales. Frogs call and cicadae whir. Mack’s father (Chris Chalk) guides her fishing as her sister, Josie (Jayah Henry), watches doubtful. This scene offers the first close-up of hands. There will be many more: hands grasping river silt, long fingers against the weave of a blanket swaddling a newborn, hands clasped in youthful want.While several performers portray Mack at different stages of her life, Charleen McClure depicts her as an observant teenager and as a pensive woman. The film sidesteps being a coming-of-age tale, instead looping from Mack’s past to her present, again and again, because that’s how memory unfolds.So, the film isn’t chiefly about what happens, however understatedly: the death of a young mother (the mesmerizing Sheila Atim), the tentativeness of first love, the relinquishment of a child. It is about the where of these events and how they really feel.The movie is steeped in the sensual (like a Toni Morrison novel or a Mary Oliver poem). Exquisite use of close-ups, fluid editing and a deeply observant sound design renders Mack’s story tactile but also poetic, making plain that the salt here is the stuff of tears, the stuff of sorrows and of joys.All Dirt Roads Taste of SaltRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Fingernails’ Review: Love, Factually

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      Jessie Buckley and Riz Ahmed play confused lonely-hearts torn between science and emotion in this adorable near-future romance.Heartache and horror walk hand in hand in “Fingernails,” a disarmingly sweet science-fiction romance from the Greek director Christos Nikou. Opening with a brief explanation of the title — the first sign of heart disease is often noticed in the fingernails — and closing on a note of indescribable yearning, this gently humorous movie operates so smoothly you may not notice its subversiveness.Set in an indeterminate near future (the production design has a warm, slightly worn familiarity), the story follows an unemployed schoolteacher named Anna (Jessie Buckley, glowing beneath one of the most unflattering hairdos since Cameron Diaz’s scary perm in 1999’s “Being John Malkovich”). Though comfortably settled with her longtime boyfriend, Ryan (Jeremy Allen White), Anna feels strangely lost: Ryan is sweet but dull, their interaction as predictable as the job interviews she disinterestedly pursues.“Have you tested?” a friend inquires one evening. Responding to a crisis of dwindling romantic partnerships, scientists have developed a test that can determine whether you and your significant other are truly in love. Years earlier, Anna and Ryan had passed the test with flying colors; so why was she feeling so restless, and so attracted to Amir (Riz Ahmed), her handsome new work colleague?And it’s here, in the sly, dry wit of the movie’s middle section, that Nikou jabs cheekily at the wearying clichés of the rom-com, from its de rigueur tropes (wordless eye-gazing, rain-soaked encounters) to its too-easily-forecast finales. As Anna and Amir work with couples at the Love Institute, preparing them to take the test under the benign guidance of a true believer (perfectly played by Luke Wilson), the cinematographer, Marcell Rév, washes scenes in a comforting antique glaze that grounds their ludicrousness. Like eager children, loving couples perfect their romance skills — like memorizing their partner’s scent and, of course, inhaling Hugh Grant movies — before surrendering to the test. Few are thrilled to learn that this will require one of their fingernails, a pair of pliers and a clanking contraption that looks like a vintage oven.Offsetting its outlandish premise with performances of touching credibility, “Fingernails” chooses restraint over passion and silent longing over emotional declaration. The result may feel too cool for some; but Buckley and Ahmed are so naturally expressive that their scenes together have a haunting, wistful quality that’s more moving than any number of florid speeches. And watching White, currently burning hot off “The Bear,” play an unadventurous dullard is its own twisted pleasure.Like Nikou’s first feature, “Apples” (2022), “Fingernails” is absurd and more than a little dystopian. Both movies are carefully paced and mildly melancholic, their characters alienated from the common herd. This time, though, Nikou is more clearly linking belonging with pain, underscoring the foolishness of believing we can love without risk — and questioning why we would want to.Unlike too many conventional rom-coms, “Fingernails” sees love as ineffable, its ebb and flow impervious to scientific measurement or behavioral tinkering. Maybe, in the words of the unimpeachable Iris DeMent, we should just let the mystery be.FingernailsRated R for bloodied fingers and bruised feelings. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. Watch on Apple TV+. More

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      ‘Wingwomen’ Review: A Crew of Femme Fatales

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      A feisty Adèle Exarchopoulos does the heavy lifting in this otherwise uninspired action-comedy set in France.“Wingwomen” is the rare French action movie directed by a woman, Mélanie Laurent, the breakout star of “Inglourious Basterds” turned filmmaker in her native France. Laurent’s seventh feature, a girl-power spectacle, purports to be a naughtier version of “Charlie’s Angels” — its leading three ladies party, smoke and have vigorous libidos — so it’s too bad these spicier elements are muted by the film’s flat tone and derivative style.Laurent also stars as the film’s veteran thief, Carole, a steely, chiseled blonde. Her bestie, and No. 2, is Alex (Adèle Exarchopoulos), an expert sniper and an unabashed flirt whom the older Carole recruited years ago for a diamond heist. Now a seasoned crime team, Carole is the brains, Alex the muscle. The duo eventually gains a third leg with Sam (Manon Bresch), a racecar driver.Among the three gals, Alex does the heavy lifting on all fronts: She performs most of the kills, and she’s also — thanks to a feisty, potty-mouthed Exarchopoulos — the source of the film’s grit, sensuality and humor. In one scene, she bluntly fast-tracks a flirtation into a romp in the sack, which evolves into a moonlit fight scene with a peeping-Tom hit man. Alex gets bruised and bloodied, but so does the meathead baddie. It’s one of the few moments when the film’s feminist beatdowns feel genuinely triumphant: Alex shifts seamlessly from coy playgirl to seasoned killer, and she’s deliciously blasé about her body count, in both senses of the word.Yet “Wingwomen” isn’t just about Alex, which is a problem because Exarchopoulos is the only player whose charisma shines through the plot’s mechanical proceedings. Carole discovers she’s pregnant and wants out of the crime life, triggering the conflict: Godmother, a Sapphic mob boss played by Isabelle Adjani, says she will grant Carole her exit only if the ladies head to Corsica to steal a painting.Competent, unremarkable action scenes — a low-stakes motorcycle chase off the island coastline, a brief shootout in a woodland fortress — come together with ironic comic beats and snippy back-and-forths among the women. (The comedian Philippe Katerine occasionally steps in, too, as the Bosley-like intermediary Abner.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.We are confirming your access to this article, this will take just a moment. However, if you are using Reader mode please log in, subscribe, or exit Reader mode since we are unable to verify access in that state.Confirming article access.If you are a subscriber, please  More

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      Matthew Perry’s Cause of Death Remains Under Investigation

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      Perry was found unresponsive in a hot tub at his house in Los Angeles on Saturday, the police said. It could be weeks or even months before the cause of his death is established, experts said.As the authorities continued to investigate the death of the “Friends” actor Matthew Perry, experts cautioned Monday that it could take weeks or months for the cause to be determined.Perry was found unresponsive in a hot tub at his home in Los Angeles at around 4 p.m. on Saturday, the Los Angeles Police Department said in a statement. The Los Angeles City Fire Department responded to the scene and declared Perry dead, the statement said. He was 54.Because of Perry’s “celebrity status,” detectives from the robbery homicide division conducted a preliminary investigation, the statement said.“Although there were no obvious signs of trauma, the official cause of Perry’s death is pending the coroner’s investigation,” the statement said. The police have said they had seen no indication of foul play.Earlier on Monday, the Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner said on its website that Perry’s cause of death was “deferred,” which usually means that further investigation was needed. Later on Monday, Perry’s case was not listed on the website at all.The department said in an email on Monday afternoon that it had “not yet concluded its investigation.” It gave no further information.Experts cautioned that it could take weeks or months to conduct a toxicology screening and examine other evidence.Perry had spoken openly about his struggles with addiction, which sometimes led to hospitalizations for a range of ailments. By his own account, Perry had spent more than half of his life in treatment and rehab facilities.In his 2022 memoir, “Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing,” Perry also described some of the health challenges he faced over the years. In 2018, he faced a series of medical episodes including pneumonia, an exploded colon, a brief stint on life support, two weeks in a coma, nine months with a colostomy bag and more than a half-dozen stomach operations.Dr. Judy Melinek, a forensic pathologist unaffiliated with the investigation, said in a TikTok video about the case that it would be important to determine if Perry’s nose and mouth were below the water line when he was found, indicating that he may have drowned.If he drowned, it would be important to know why, she said. Was heart disease a factor? Or intoxication? Test results can take weeks because of a lack of qualified toxicologists, funding and equipment, Dr. Melinek said.Investigators should also look for home security footage that could shed light on the case, she said, and they should investigate the hot tub itself to make sure it was properly grounded and wasn’t heating the water beyond the temperature indicated. If the water was hot but not scalding, she said, it could lead to heat exhaustion and dehydration, which can cause a person to drown.“It’s appropriate for it to take long,” Dr. Melinek said in an interview on Monday. “Sometimes it takes months to do a proper investigation.”Dr. James Gill, Connecticut’s chief medical examiner, said it would be important to know if a person found unresponsive in a hot tub had intentionally gone underwater, indicating a suicide, or if they were unable to get out of the water.A person who was unable to get out of the water may have had a heart attack, he said, or may have taken alcohol or drugs, causing a loss of consciousness.Medical examiners in such cases will often list the cause of death as “pending,” he said, allowing them to release the body to a funeral home so the family can proceed with a burial or cremation while toxicology tests are being conducted. Those tests, he said, can take weeks to complete.Dr. Kathryn Pinneri, a former president of the National Association of Medical Examiners, noted in an email that the authorities haven’t said if Perry drowned.But she said: “Hot tub drownings are usually associated with an underlying heart or neurologic condition or alcohol and/or medications/drugs. So the cause and manner of death are usually pending until the results of those tests come back.”Perry was 24 when he was cast as the quirky and self-deprecating Chandler Bing on “Friends,” a show that changed his life and firmly planted him in the limelight alongside his co-stars Courteney Cox, Matt LeBlanc, Lisa Kudrow, David Schwimmer and Jennifer Aniston.The sitcom ran from 1994 to 2004. Perry went on to star in television shows and movies, some of which — like “Almost Heroes” (1998), with Chris Farley, and “Three to Tango” (1999) — failed to capture audiences at the box office.Matt Stevens More