Movies

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      ‘When Evil Lurks’ Review: These Demons Are Fast and Furious

      by

      Humans become bloodthirsty demons in a shockingly grisly new contagion horror film from Argentina.Evil strikes fast and mean in Demián Rugna’s punch-to-the-face new film.It begins as Argentina is facing a supernatural plague that turns people into bloodthirsty demons, a contagion that has Pedro (Ezequiel Rodríguez), his brother, Jimi (Demián Salomón), and their rural village on edge. When the brothers come across one of the infected — a man who’s turned into a putrid, drooling. horrifically obese monster — they manage to move him far out of town. But that only spreads the contagion and fear, forcing Pedro and Jimi and their families to flee.Into the picture comes an older woman (Silvina Sabater, wonderfully understated) who is one of the few who knows how to use a strange (and under-explained) device to kill off the creatures, and it’s her wily mother-protector resolve that drives the film’s frenzied final stretch. That is until Pedro makes an out-of-character decision that ends the otherwise smart story on a what-were-you-thinking note.Rugna’s film is at its most electric when it delivers jolts of stomach-churning violence to push the action forward and build its brutal world. A horrific scene involving a dog and a little girl happened so suddenly and gruesomely, I sat up and gasped out loud.If only Rugna’s script had more such explosive moments and fewer directionless loose ends, like Pedro’s undercooked relationships with his mother and his autistic son. Still, this is a dark and timely parable about what happens when trust — among community members, within families, between a government and its people — disintegrates.When Evil LurksNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 150 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      ‘She Came to Me’ Review: A Sea of Troubles (the Romantic Kind)

      by

      A love-triangle comedy from Rebecca Miller, starring Peter Dinklage, Marisa Tomei and Anne Hathaway, gets an emotional boost from an unexpected source.There’s a scene in “She Came to Me,” the writer-director Rebecca Miller’s juggling act of a romantic comedy, that sounds like the setup of a joke: An opera composer and a tugboat skipper walk into a Brooklyn dive bar. The composer’s wife, a psychiatrist, is back at their brownstone. But for the blocked composer, Steven (Peter Dinklage), his wife, Patricia (Anne Hathaway), and his seafaring muse, Katrina (Marisa Tomei), what happens next is hardly a laughing matter.The unexpected liaison cures Steven’s writer’s block. It also provides an object for Katrina’s affection — or, rather, affliction. “I’m addicted to romance,” she tells Steven, revealing an anomaly in her otherwise independent personality. As for Patricia, she’s got her own compulsions. This is a romantic triangle that may recall the screwball of a Nancy Meyers rom-com.Buoyed by a score from Bryce Dessner of the rock band the National, an original Bruce Springsteen song and the expert performances of its all-in ensemble, the film also casts a luminous aura around a first love, that of two high schoolers, Julian (Evan Ellison) and Tereza (Harlow Jane). He’s Patricia’s son and Steven’s stepson; she’s the daughter of their housekeeper, Magdalena (Joanna Kulig in a soulful turn). Tereza’s stepfather, Trey (Brian d’Arcy James), is a persnickety Civil War re-enactor and a court reporter.The teenagers’ relationship hits serious snags, through no fault of their own. Age plays a part, but so does class and Julian’s race; he identifies as Black. Amid the roiling neuroses of the adults, the young beloveds provide the film with a surprising emotional ballast.She Came to MeRated R for salty language. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 88 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Totally Killer’ Review: More Like Marty McDie

      by

      This teen slasher comedy with a time-traveling twist can’t muster up enough charisma to make its mash-up concept sing.“Totally Killer,” a time-travel teen slasher comedy, is quick to acknowledge itself as a mash-up of two 20th-century cultural touchstones. “Have you seen the movie ‘Back to the Future?’” Jamie (Kiernan Shipka), the movie’s teenage protagonist, asks a pair of cops, before later making an allusion to “Scream,” Wes Craven’s spooky-season classic. The somewhat gimmicky genre combination may have had the potential to be a winning combo, but “Totally Killer,” directed by Nahnatchka Khan, struggles to muster up enough charisma to stick the landing.After the Sweet Sixteen Killer, who murdered Jamie’s mother’s friends when her mother was a teenager, makes a sudden return on Halloween, Jamie is thrust into a time machine that sends her back to 1987, when the original killings took place. Posing as the new kid in town, Jamie becomes close with the teenage version of her mother (Olivia Holt), hoping to stop the killer before he begins his rampage.The fun premise can make for a passively enjoyable watch during a Halloween binge, but the film mostly feels like it’s just going through the motions. Its ‘80s throwback setting is short on color and life, and its slasher elements lack the choreographic or cinematic oomph to induce any terror, or even tension. Shipka is the unequivocal bright spot, naturally embodying the charm, emotion and wit that made this movie’s forebears shine in the first place.Totally KillerRated R for bloody violence, language, sexual material and teen substance use. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. Watch on Amazon Prime Video. More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      ‘The Royal Hotel’ Review: Pulling Pints and Watching Their Backs

      by

      Two young women struggle to handle the obstreperous patrons of a remote Australian pub in this coolly calibrated thriller.We are barely 12 minutes into Kitty Green’s “The Royal Hotel” before the first C-word is dropped, but it isn’t gratuitous. The film’s language, dominated by the braying of obnoxious, bellies-to-the-bar boozehounds, is both spice and thickening agent in its pervasive mood of clammy menace. Our reward for enduring this relentless churn of apprehension is not the one we anticipate.Teasing expectations — to some viewers’ ultimate disappointment, no doubt — is much of what this keenly calibrated thriller is about, the familiarity of its setup raising our most bloodthirsty horror-movie hopes. Place two young, attractive female backpackers in a forlorn mining town somewhere in the Australian Outback; surround them with sex-starved, boorish miners; allow them no access to cell service or reliable transport. Their ensuing trials are a cyst that Green and her co-writer, Oscar Redding, take their sweet time to lance.Until then, we must gnaw our fingernails as Hanna and Liv (Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick, both terrific) refresh their finances by working as live-in bartenders in the titular establishment. The hotel’s dilapidation — to say nothing of its grubby, grabby, mostly male clientele — is a far cry from the yacht parties the women were recently enjoying in Sydney. The bar owner (an indispensable Hugo Weaving) is a raging alcoholic, yet his girlfriend (Ursula Yovich) seems kind and possibly protective. And while one regular (Daniel Henshall) is frankly terrifying, another (Toby Wallace) is so clean and cute that his off-color humor is easier to ignore. At what point should the women feel alarmed enough to leave?That question haunts every frame of a movie that persistently taunts us with the likelihood of male violence, its blasted landscapes and aura of desolation pumped relentlessly by Michael Latham’s brooding cinematography. Green, in her second collaboration with Garner (after the similarly themed — if significantly less raucous — “The Assistant” in 2020), is proving a cool chronicler of workplace abuse and the kind of harassment that disguises itself as harmless fun. Sometimes a woman’s only defense is to trust the pricking skin and spasming gut that warns her otherwise.Inspired by Pete Gleeson’s 2016 documentary about two Finnish backpackers, “Hotel Coolgardie,” “The Royal Hotel” is after something more subtle than pure horror. In its destabilizing presentation of men whose motivations appear to shift from scene to scene — the women’s fun-loving English predecessors seem genuinely sorry to leave — it places the audience on a knife edge. This, along with the general drunkenness and the bar’s oppressive gloom, can be exhausting; but Green, filming for the first time in her native Australia, displays such a sure hand with the movie’s tone that even her brief slips into genre cliché (like a surprise snake and a convenient storm) inflict minimal damage. Her overtly feminist climax, though, feels more problematic, a betrayal of the movie’s carefully drawn ambiguities and concern for its more vulnerable characters. Hanna and Liv were never looking for a fight; all they really wanted was to see some kangaroos.The Royal HotelRated R for female skin and men with a skinful. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 88 Shares159 Views

      in Movies

      ‘More Than Ever’ Review: A Shared Melancholy

      by

      This middlebrow weepie about a woman dying from a rare lung disease stars Vicky Krieps and Gaspard Ulliel in his final role before his death in 2022.Since her star-making turn in “Phantom Thread,” the Luxembourgish actress Vicky Krieps has found fertile work, particularly in European productions, playing women responding to tragedy, sometimes with recklessness or self-harm.“More Than Ever,” a solid (mostly) French-language weepie, follows suit, with Krieps playing as Hélène, a 30-something married woman suffering from a rare and debilitating lung disease. Directed by Emily Atif, this middlebrow drama showcases Krieps’s captivating blend of melancholic fragility and spiky tenacity, riding on the strength of its performers, including the Gaspard Ulliel in his final live-action role before his accidental death in 2022.Ulliel plays Hélène’s loyal hubbie, Matthieu, whom we first see applying mascara to his feeble wife before a social outing. Their pals tiptoe awkwardly around the knowledge of Hélène’s health, triggering a minor meltdown by Hélène that also sketches out the tensions that inform the rest of the film.Matthieu refuses to give up hope while Hélène inches toward an acceptance of her fate that requires her to reframe her life. This means untethering herself from the past, her spouse included. This understanding comes courtesy of an “Eat Pray Love” style excursion to rural Norway, where Hélène bunks with a friend she met on the internet, Bent (Bjorn Floberg), a blogger with terminal cancer, a dark sense of humor and an idyllic property at the edge of a lake.Krieps and Ulliel give weight and texture to the couple’s push and pull. Guilt and grief intermingle, but no single feeling stands up to the brute fact of Hélène’s physical deterioration, made stark against an impassive backdrop of crystal waters and shivering woodlands. If her past films haven’t already made this clear, this is one of Krieps’s trademarks: transcendence through willful obliteration.More Than EverNot rated. In French, English and Norwegian, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 3 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 150 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      ‘My Love Affair With Marriage’ Review: A Tale of Love and Loss

      by

      This animated musical about a young woman’s sexual and romantic awakening uses a gloriously tactile aesthetic.“You’re not a complete person without your soul mate,” croon three mythical birdlike women early in the coming-of-age musical “My Love Affair With Marriage.” The vocal trio — who fall somewhere between a Greek chorus and the “Macbeth” weird sisters — are among countless whimsical devices that elevate this beguiling animated feature, which traces the sexual and romantic awakening of a young woman in the Soviet Union.Written and directed with wild imagination by the Latvian filmmaker Signe Baumane (“Rocks in My Pockets”), the film follows Zelma (voiced by Dagmara Dominczyk) over 23 years as she transforms from spunky kid to lovelorn teenager to restless wife to realized artist — all while entangled in a double helix of fallacies about female worth and feminine purpose. Alternating between sass and sincerity, Baumane methodically identifies the origins of these myths and then traces how they pinball Zelma through a series of agonies and ecstasies.It’s a moody, unpredictable tale of love and loss, stuffed with vivid metaphors, Soviet period detail and pedagogical sequences about the physiology of love. The glue holding these disparate pieces together is the film’s gloriously tactile aesthetic: Baumane crafted Zelma’s world by overlaying line-drawn characters on meticulously constructed papier-mâché dioramas. The result evokes an adult puppet show crossed with a graphic novel, and like the budding female identity the film untangles, the whole thing takes a little time getting used to. Once you do, it is remarkably beautiful.My Love Affair With MarriageNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 63 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Foe’ Review: The Space Between

      by

      Saoirse Ronan and Paul Mescal play a farm couple with a less-than-idyllic marriage in the Midwest of the future.Set in a future when devastation of the environment has humanity turning to outer space as a homestead, “Foe” presents a spectacle of futility. Not the climate change disaster itself, which is tangential to the plot, but the sight of great actors throwing themselves into this material, as if they were slogging through a Tennessee Williams marathon instead of the equivalent of a distended “Twilight Zone” episode with an aesthetic that might be described as “Dorothea Lange filter.”The actual source is a 2018 novel by Iain Reid, who wrote the screenplay with the director, Garth Davis (“Lion”). The subject isn’t the dystopia, but a marriage. One night in the year 2065, Junior (Paul Mescal) and Hen (Saoirse Ronan), who live on a farm in the Midwest (played by Australia), are approached by a car with “Blade Runner” headlights. The driver is Terrance (Aaron Pierre), who brings news he insists should be seen as positive. (Pierre does not have a role that calls for the consuming physicality of Mescal’s and Ronan’s, but he does have a sly way of asking for a glass of water — a scarce resource — so the request sounds vaguely like a threat.)Junior has been selected as a candidate for off-world colonization. Nothing will happen just yet, the couple are promised, but of course — to skip ahead to Terrance’s second visit, a year later — something does. Junior’s advancement to the next round means that Terrance will need to move in with them, to probe Junior like a lab rat. Also, don’t worry! While Junior is away, Hen will live with a biological replacement — a replica that has living tissue and Junior’s memories. It’s the high-tech equivalent of leaving a war wife with a photograph, Terrance explains, except that this photograph can live and breathe. All to help their marriage survive, naturally.The proposal gets a bad laugh, perhaps not entirely intended. Junior doesn’t like the idea of Hen cohabitating with a fleshy facsimile, and he suspects that Terrance is trying to drive a wedge between them. But partly because the narrative reveals information piecemeal, the marriage can only be defined in generic, broadly symbolic terms. (The two wed straight out of school; Junior resents when Hen plays the piano.)To their great credit, the Irish stars, often loosely clothed and soaked in sweat from the lack of air conditioning, have such presence and chemistry that it’s possible to believe in their intimacy — the pull and tangle of their bodies, their paroxysms of anguish — and even to pretend in the moment that they have full-fledged characters to play.Drawn to magic-hour vistas and pseudo-poetic shots of ripped greenhouse plastic blowing in the wind, “Foe” looks as if it’s been bronzed. (The cinematographer Matyas Erdely, of Laszlo Nemes’s “Son of Saul” and “Sunset,” works wonders with natural light.) But the cryptic, allusive mode is at odds with the film’s efforts to psychoanalyze a marriage. The archetypal characters of Terrence Malick’s “Days of Heaven” — almost certainly a visual influence — merely had to suggest back story. Here, Hen and Junior’s glanced-at history is asked to carry weight the sketchy outlines cannot bear.The hollowness turns out to be a feature, not a bug, and a completely unnecessary final beat dispels any troubling ambiguities that might have lingered. What begins as a sleek, science-fiction-tinged mystery leaves little more than a cloud of dust.FoeRated R. Spousal estrangement. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      A Spike Lee Joint via Movie Posters and Sports Jerseys

      by

      Lee, the director of “Do the Right Thing” and “Malcolm X,” donated more than 400 items for a Brooklyn Museum exhibition.The first image to catch your eye in the Brooklyn Museum’s new exhibition about the director Spike Lee could be a wall projection of “Malcolm X,” the 1992 movie staring Denzel Washington. Nearby hang artworks of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Trayvon Martin, whose killing inspired the Black Lives Matter Movement.Elsewhere, a sign from the segregation era reads “Colored Waiting Room.”The Black History and Culture section is a jarring opening to an exhibition that guides visitors through themes, concepts and objects that inspired Lee, 66, as he became a defining figure in the Black community. He donated more than 400 items for the show, “Spike Lee: Creative Sources,” which opens on Saturday and runs through Feb. 4, 2024.Lee’s “Malcolm X,” from 1992, starred Denzel Washington. Amir Hamja/The New York Times“You don’t have to really be an art aficionado to appreciate so much of this exhibition, because Spike is not only one of those but he’s a bibliophile, he’s a sports fan, he’s a lover of history,” Kimberli Gant, the exhibition’s curator, said.Lee has been nominated for five Academy Awards, winning the best adapted screenplay Oscar for “BlacKkKlansman” (2018). In addition to his popular films — he labels them “joints” — such as “Do the Right Thing” and “Inside Man,” Lee has become a staple in the courtside seats at Madison Square Garden for New York Knicks games.At the Brooklyn Museum, walls splashed in eye-popping bold colors contrast with the wood accents and paneling that turn gallery spaces into what resembles a movie set. Visitors can walk through seven sections divided into categories such as music and sports that Gant said she hoped would appeal to a broad group of people.“I don’t want this show to be so heavy that you’re leaving depressed,” Gant said. “There’s a lot of heavy material, but there’s joy here, too.”New YorkA Brooklyn section of the exhibition includes the Dodgers jersey that Lee wore as the character Mookie in “Do the Right Thing.”Amir Hamja/The New York TimesAn 8-year-old Lee on the cover of New York magazine.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesLee, who was born in Atlanta but raised in Brooklyn, has set many of his movies in New York’s boroughs. One section of the exhibition features news articles about Lee in The Daily News and The New York Times, as well as a photograph of him as a child on the cover of New York magazine.The room emphasizes “Do the Right Thing,” the 1989 film that examines racial tension between Black people and Italian Americans in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. Memorabilia from the movie, which was nominated for two Academy Awards and has been preserved by the National Film Registry, includes the Brooklyn Dodgers jersey that Lee wore as the character Mookie.MoviesThe exhibition’s walls are splashed in eye-popping bold colors.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesLee has an Oscar for best adapted screenplay, for “BlacKkKlansman,” as well as a lifetime achievement award.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesLarge film posters greet visitors in the section dedicated to movies and cinema, where Lee’s Oscar trophy for “BlacKkKlansman,” as well as the honorary one he received in 2015 for lifetime achievement, can be found in a glass case mounted on the wall.Also on display are gifts from other celebrities, including signed posters by the “Jurassic Park” director Steven Spielberg and the “Boyz N the Hood” director John Singleton. An adjacent room focused on photography has a letter written by former President Barack Obama.SportsOne room is devoted to New York Knicks memorabilia, including a net from the 1970 N.B.A. finals, when the team won its first title.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesMichael Jordan autographed a pair of sneakers he wore during the “flu game” in the 1997 N.B.A. finals. Amir Hamja/The New York TimesThe largest section in “Spike Lee: Creative Sources” is reserved for sports, with a small room solely for Knicks memorabilia. Those souvenirs include a jersey signed by Carmelo Anthony and a net from the 1970 N.B.A. finals, when the Knicks won their first title by defeating the Los Angeles Lakers in seven games.A larger room holds autographed items from LeBron James, Serena Williams, Jim Brown and Michael Jordan, as well as news articles signed by Stephen Curry after he broke the N.B.A. record for most career 3-pointers, a 2021 game that Lee attended at the Garden.Aligning with the social justice theme of the exhibition’s entrance, large portions are dedicated to Jackie Robinson, the first Black player in Major League Baseball, and the boxer and activist Muhammad Ali. Near the exit is a signed jersey of Colin Kaepernick, the quarterback who in 2016 ignited a fierce debate on athletes’ rights to protest by kneeling during the national anthem. More