Movies

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Wolfs’ Review: Brad Pitt and George Clooney as Themselves

      by

      They play underworld fixers in this trifle of a movie, though really they’re here to look enviably fabulous.“Wolfs” — a new something or other starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt — would like you to think it’s a thriller with a helping of comedy, though maybe a comedy with guns and guts. Whatever the case, it isn’t remotely tense or mysterious, and its modest thrills derive wholly from the spectacle of two beautifully aged, primped, pampered and expensive film stars going through the motions with winks and a degree of brittle charm. The movie is a trifle, and it knows it. Mostly, though, “Wolfs,” written and directed by Jon Watts, is an excuse for its two leads to riff on their own personas, which can be faintly amusing and certainly watchable but also insufferably smug. It’s insufferable a lot.Clooney and Pitt play underworld fixers, the kind of misterioso professionals whom people with power and money hire to clean up their messes. Much like the character in Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” played by Harvey Keitel — named Winston Wolfe but known as the Wolf — the fixers here swoop in and, with some elbow grease and a duffel bag large enough to hold a body, discreetly make the problem go away, or that’s the idea. Tarantino’s influence is conspicuous throughout “Wolfs,” most notably in its reams of self-aware dialogue, theatricality, casual violence and focus on characters talking to and at each other, including in a diner booth.The fixers in “Wolfs” meet cute, as it were, early on when Pitt’s unnamed character interrupts Clooney’s mid-job inside a sprawling penthouse in a New York hotel. Since neither character has a name, it’s easier to refer to the actors playing them, which is very much to the movie’s meta-referential point. Clooney is tidying up a gruesome mess involving a local politician, Pam (a reliably appealing Amy Ryan). Faced with a potentially career-torpedoing situation — there’s blood and shattered glass on the floor, along with what may be the body of a dead male prostitute — Pam has speed-dialed a mysterious number hoping for help. Clooney comes to the rescue, and it’s on.Pitt’s arrival baffles Clooney and adds to what becomes a messier, more dangerous problem. After some teasingly testy back and forth, the two settle into a wary partnership. Pam cleans up and splits as Clooney cleverly deals with her mess in between side-eyeing Pitt. (If you ever wanted to know how to unobtrusively move a body, this movie offers a helpful to-do list.) And then Pitt spies a backpack holding several bricks of drugs, and the cleanup becomes instantly far more complicated. It gets trickier still when the body turns out to be alive, and he flees into the night. Called the Kid (Austin Abrams), he looks a bit like Griffin Dunne in Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours,” another nocturnal adventure that racks up mileage in downtown New York.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 88 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Transformers One’ Review: Back to the Beginning

      by

      An animated prequel maps out a tidy mythology while indulging in the toy-smashing thrills of the ’80s cartoons.When settling into “Transformers One,” the latest spinoff of the alien robot franchise, you may have a pang of nostalgia for what suddenly feels like the quaint mayhem of Michael Bay’s original film from 2007.Back then, “Transformers” was about as much of a ludicrous commercial tent pole as you could come up with: Bayhem unleashed on a Hasbro toy. The franchise that film spawned has managed to extend its life force well into a movie era defined by intellectual property equations. Say what you will about Bay’s metal masher, but it was, in its early goings, a blockbuster that had its own ethos. Now, 17 years later, we’re down to an animated prequel for kids.This is all what a cynic may think at the start of “Transformers One.” But by the end, the film offers a different kind of nostalgia, one that harks back to and indulges the toy-smashing thrills that an ’80s kid would get from a dose of the original animated cartoons.This movie, directed by Josh Cooley, scraps everything we associate with its cinematic forebears and goes back to the beginning, creating, on a structural level, an effective origin story of the Transformers universe.Before Optimus Prime (Chris Hemsworth) and Megatron (Brian Tyree Henry) were enemies, they were best friends and young nobodies, two miners toiling away as part of an underclass that provided the energy for the planet of Cybertron.But after unwittingly finding a clue to the long-lost Matrix of Leadership, the vital key to the their world’s energy, they, along with Elita-1 (Scarlett Johansson) and a young Bumblebee (Keegan-Michael Key), embark on an adventure and uncover a conspiracy that shifts both the fabric of the planet and of their friendship.It’s a completist piece of lore-building that is sturdily developed but frequently includes stiffly explicative dialogue; Hemsworth and Johansson don’t help much, though Henry gives us a believable transformation into villainy and Key is dexterous comic relief. The missteps can be forgiven and even feel somewhat appropriate when it becomes clear just what kind of itch the film means to scratch: to plot out an immersive mythology in order to have some pulpy fun.That philosophy may explain the film’s confounding computer-generated style — one that can have a rich Cybertron universe but also can revert to what feels like a B-rate children’s TV spinoff. The result is a blockbuster animation film that somehow reads both very expensive and inexplicably cheap.Will fans care all that much, though? Most palpable in its frames are the heart and genuine love for this universe, and when the bots start colliding, with action sequences toward the end that are thrillingly punchy, it’s easy to surrender to the lore. In this way, Cooley’s film makes a good spinoff suddenly seem simple: Sometimes all you need is the imagination for heroes and villains, betrayal and glory — and heaps of plastic to smash together.Transformers OneRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 75 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      ‘The Substance’ Review: An Indecent Disclosure

      by

      Demi Moore stars in an absurdly gory tale of an aging actress who discovers a deadly cure for obscurity.In Vladimir Nabokov’s 1930 novel “The Eye,” a sad-sack Russian tutor living in Berlin dies by suicide, and then spends the rest of the book skulking around the living — watching, obsessing over their lives. He eventually realizes something bleak: Most of us see ourselves only through the eyes of others, through the stories we think they make up about us from the glimpses they get of our lives. “I do not exist,” the narrator writes near the end of the book. “There exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me.”Something of “The Eye” lurks in “The Substance,” Coralie Fargeat’s mirror-haunted gory fable about fame, self-hatred and the terror that accompanies an identity constructed on the backs of other people’s stares. Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), the aging star at the center of the narrative, is very much alive, but she might as well be dead when the story starts. A career spent in front of cameras — first as a celebrated actress, and then as a celebrity fitness instructor on a show called “Sparkle Your Life with Elisabeth”— abruptly ends when an executive (Dennis Quaid) decides she’s too old to be worthy of being seen. He gets to decide if anyone wants to look at her, and if he turns the cameras away, does she even exist?That executive is loud and disgusting and named Harvey, which should tell you a little about the subtlety of this movie, which is to say it has none, and doesn’t particularly want any. He, like most of the movie, is deliberately way, way over the top. “After 50, it stops,” he tells her, through mouthfuls of mayonnaise-coated shrimp, by way of explaining why she’s no longer attractive. Then he sputters when she asks what “it” is.There are mirrors everywhere in Elisabeth’s world: literal mirrors and polished doorknobs, but also pictures of her in the hallways at the studio and a giant portrait at her house, so that her younger body and face are always looking back at her. Everywhere she looks, there she is, or was — lithe, toned, smiling broadly. Elisabeth is still gorgeous by any sane person’s reckoning (and Moore is in her early 60s), but surrounded constantly by a version of herself with a little more collagen, she is being slowly driven mad.Relatable, really. We all see too much of ourselves. Ancient women had pools of water into which they could peer, but our ancestors didn’t have scads of selfies lurking in their pockets. They weren’t tagged in unflattering photos snapped by friends. They didn’t have to look at their own faces on Zoom all day.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 100 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      ‘His Three Daughters’ Review: Sisters at Odds Together

      by

      Natasha Lyonne, Carrie Coon and Elizabeth Olsen play sisters who are caring for their dying father in this tender, funny family drama.Every so often in the heart-heavy drama “His Three Daughters,” the filmmaker Azazel Jacobs frames the actress Natasha Lyonne in radiant close-up. Her character, Rachel, is one of the daughters of the title, and while she thrums with palpable energy, she also has a quality of stillness about her. When Rachel stares into the distance, as she tends to do, lost in thought or maybe just lost — her huge eyes shining, her face edged by flaming red hair — she brings to mind a hummingbird hovering in midair, its wings beating impossibly fast against the strongest headwind.Rachel is the youngest of the sisters who’ve convened to care for their father, Vincent (Jay O. Sanders), at the end of his life. With her older siblings Katie (Carrie Coon) and Christina (Elizabeth Olsen), Rachel drifts through the New York apartment where their father is fading away, his heartbeat now supplanted by the beeping machinery that he’s hooked up to, which creates an eerie rhythm throughout. It’s a hard, painful setup but also absurdly funny, intimate and human. Jacobs is sensitive to life’s contradictions; he knows how abruptly love seems to boil over into hate, and how quickly adult siblings can turn into whining, raging children.Set over an inexact number of days and nights, the movie tracks the sisters during the course of their vigil. Katie is the scold (and surrogate angry patriarch), who also lives in the city, while Christina (an anxious maternal type from California) plays the part of the diplomat. Outwardly, at least, Rachel — who lives with their father in the apartment — slips readily into the role of the black sheep (and unruly child), especially given her pursuits and pastimes. When she’s not fleeing from her sisters, Rachel is hunkered down in her room, watching sports on TV, playing the odds and taking hits off a blunt. Rachel seems to be in a fog, but she’s perfectly lucid.Most of the movie takes place in the apartment, a modest, pointedly ordinary space with plenty of windows and a couple of bedrooms on the upper floor of a building in a large complex. It’s humble by mainstream, art-directed movie standards; it looks like a real apartment where real people live. There’s nothing fancy about it, just photos, tchotchkes and furniture people might actually use, middle-class people, working-class people, people lucky enough to have an affordable New York (Manhattan!) apartment. It’s a moving emblem of a nearly lost city and, by turns, a haunted house, a cozy home and a theater for the family’s drama, one that the sisters enact at times while reciting grievances they clearly committed to heart long ago.Emotions are already raw when the movie opens on Katie. Seated against a white wall, arms tightly folded across her chest, she is in the midst of an epic tirade directed at an offscreen, silent Rachel. As the camera holds on Katie, she talks and talks, her words running together into a near-indistinguishable slurry. It’s as if she didn’t believe in punctuation or the niceties of conversation; it soon becomes clear she has next to no patience for Rachel. Katie asks her a question without waiting for the answer, emphasizes the obvious, makes demands. It’s not for nothing that the first time you see each sister she is alone in the frame.As the vigil continues, things shift and settle, and other characters come and go, including a hospice worker, Angel (Rudy Galvan); a security guard, Victor (Jose Febus); and Rachel’s friend, Benjy (Jovan Adepo). Each brings some air into the fraught scene; more subtly, they reveal something about how the sisters relate to the larger world. Katie, for one, jokingly refers to the hospice aide as an Angel of Death, which isn’t funny the first or the second time she does so. That Rachel talks more readily to Victor than to her sisters says much about the family — about the siblings’ relations, worldviews and aching need for connection — as does the moment when, in her bedroom, she wearily rests her head on Benjy’s shoulder.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 75 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      ‘A Different Man’ Review: Face, Off

      by

      Sebastian Stan and Adam Pearson star in a marvelously inventive dark comedy about a man who can’t change his insides.Cinema obsesses over doppelgängers and doubles. Perhaps that’s only natural since movie cameras let us record ourselves, and then play our images back in front of our own eyes. According to ancient folklore, seeing your doppelgänger was a harbinger of doom. So we get “Vertigo” and “Mulholland Drive” and “Possession” and “Us,” all haunted by some primal psychological dread.“A Different Man,” written and directed by Aaron Schimberg, taps that apprehension with wryly absurd humor. Deft and clever, “A Different Man” is itself a doppelgänger of sorts for “The Substance,” the horror film starring Demi Moore, which opens on the same day. They both stick their fingers in a festering wound: our deep-down belief that if we could only shed our flaws, we’d unveil the cooler, more svelte, and above all happier selves that dwell within. They are films for our moment: It’s never been easier to alter our own appearances, and never been harder to escape our own faces.But where “The Substance” is glossy and frantic, “A Different Man” lopes and zags and rubs some gratifying schmutz on the lens. There’s some John Carpenter in this film, and some Woody Allen, and some John Cassavetes, and a healthy dose of Charlie Kaufman-style surreality. The result is shrewd, and fantastic, and something all its own.The story begins with Edward (Sebastian Stan), an aspiring actor with neurofibromatosis, a genetic condition in which tumors grow beneath the skin. It has mainly affected his face, distorting his features. He has little confidence, and it doesn’t help that his latest gig is in a cheap and patronizing corporate training video aiding viewers in “accepting” and “including” co-workers with facial disfigurement.Edward lives quietly in a small, old New York apartment populated by the usual New York characters: loudmouths and weirdos and people who pound on the ceiling when you walk too heavily. One day, though, the gorgeous and friendly Ingrid (Renata Reinsve) moves in next door. She is an aspiring playwright, and she and Edward strike up a friendship.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 75 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      Making ‘The Wild Robot’ Even Wilder

      by

      Roz, the beloved protagonist of Peter Brown’s popular children’s book, gets a glow-up for the big-screen adaptation.On the cover of Peter Brown’s best-selling children’s book “The Wild Robot” are massive evergreens and a matching dark green seascape. Atop a pile of enormous boulders is a tiny but unmistakable image of a robot: Roz, the book’s protagonist, with her bucket-shaped head, squared-off shoulders and two headlights for eyes.“With a book, the cover is often all you’ve got to pull the reader in,” Brown said in an interview. “I very deliberately designed Roz to look simple, so that when people saw the book cover they would immediately know that it’s a robot.”Movies, however, have a bit more freedom when it comes to automatons. “There’s motion, there’s sound effects, there’s all this other stuff that can tell viewers pretty quickly that they’re looking at a robot,” he added.So when the artists and designers at DreamWorks Animation set about adapting Brown’s book and its mechanical star for the big screen, they let their minds run free. In place of the static, unblinking silhouette of Brown’s book cover, DreamWorks created a leaping, whirling, battling protagonist who can scuttle up steep cliffs like a crab and swing from place to place via long telescoping arms.As the movie unfolds, Roz’s tools are revealed: claws that can climb sheer cliffs; fingers that shoot flames; arms that function as vacuums and leaf blowers; a homing beacon that emerges from the top of her head; DreamWorks AnimationFor a studio like DreamWorks, makers of the “Kung Fu Panda” and “How to Train Your Dragon” franchises, coming up with the dramatic action sequences and cool character design was relatively easy. The challenge for the film, which opens on Sept. 27: keeping the soul of a character that millions of readers had fallen in love with over the course of Brown’s trilogy, a character that was, yes, a robot who could stand alongside Hollywood’s and anime’s most exciting droids and bots, but was also, at heart, an adoptive mother trying her best to care for an orphaned gosling.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 88 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      Oscar Contenders Emerge After Film Festival Season

      by

      After film festivals in Venice, Telluride and Toronto, a slate of contenders has emerged. Still, there are few front-runners.Fall foliage may still be weeks away, but the tea leaves of Oscar season are ready to be read.Now that festivals in Venice, Telluride and Toronto have concluded and all but a handful of this year’s contenders have had their first public peek-out, the story is beginning to come into focus. And unlike the last two years, which were dominated by the season-long sweepers “Oppenheimer” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” this race seems much more wide open.Still, two movies already look like significant contenders across the board. One is “Conclave,” a handsomely mounted thriller about sneaky cardinals plotting to pick a new pope. It premiered at Telluride and stars Ralph Fiennes and Stanley Tucci. Some of my fellow journalists sniffed that “Conclave” was just a potboiler with prestige trappings, but I think that’s exactly what will appeal to Oscar voters, who love to reward a rip-roaring yarn as long as it’s well-made with a soupçon of social-issue relevance. Directed by Edward Berger, whose “All Quiet on the Western Front” won four Academy Awards, “Conclave” could be a big hit with audiences, too.If Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist” felt like the biggest movie of Venice, that’s in part because of its mammoth 215-minute run time, which comes complete with a 15-minute intermission. There’s no denying the outsize ambition of this film, which was shot on the old-fashioned VistaVision format and chronicles the epic tribulations of a Jewish architect (Adrien Brody) as he emigrates to America after World War II. Expect plenty of awards recognition for Corbet and supporting performers Guy Pearce and Felicity Jones, as well as a surefire Oscar nomination for Brody, who somehow still holds the record for the youngest best-actor winner after taking that Oscar at 29 for “The Pianist.”Two buzzy performances from big stars also debuted in Venice. Daniel Craig looks likely to earn his first Oscar nomination, for Luca Guadagnino’s “Queer,” in which he plays an American expat besotted with a young man in midcentury Mexico City. And Nicole Kidman won the best actress award at Venice for the erotic “Babygirl,” which also finds her falling for a younger man. (Perhaps age-gap romances are the new Oscar bait.)The Venice trophy will help Kidman build a case for her sixth Oscar nomination (she won for “The Hours”), though she’ll face a surplus of strong lead-actress contenders who also emerged from the fall fests: Angelina Jolie as the opera diva Maria Callas in “Maria”; the Brazilian star Fernanda Torres in “I’m Still Here”; Marianne Jean-Baptiste as a mouthy malcontent in Mike Leigh’s “Hard Truths”; and the double act of Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore in Pedro Almodóvar’s empathetic “The Room Next Door,” which won the top prize in Venice, the Golden Lion.The director Jason Reitman has crafted a crowd-pleaser in “Saturday Night,” a comedy about the chaotic backstage negotiations that preceded the debut episode of “Saturday Night Live,” though its wide Oct. 11 release will have to go well if the movie hopes to sustain the momentum it earned from Telluride and Toronto. “Joker: Folie à Deux” has the opposite problem: Though this sequel to the billion-dollar hit is certain to make money when it’s released next month, it was coolly received by Venice critics and will face a much more uncertain awards future than its predecessor.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      Hollywood Has Enough Fake Accents. Bring Back the Weird Voices.

      by

      David Lynch’s voice is unmistakable — and a national treasure. The world of film deserves more like it.“Something is coming along for you to see and hear,” mewled the filmmaker David Lynch in a video posted online this past spring. The clip was a teaser for a music project, and it caught the eye via the director’s old-school cool — his shades and upswept silver locks, framed in close-up. But it was another bit of business that actually held attention: the jangle and blare of Lynch’s reedy voice.Larger-than-life screen personalities are necessarily watchable. Some also prove mysteriously listenable. Lynch is among them, a member of the small pantheon of filmmakers whose mystique is partly indebted to the textures of their speech: the gorgeous intonations of Orson Welles, the reminiscing tones of Agnès Varda, the runaway-train enthusiasm of Quentin Tarantino.Over his long career, Lynch has offered his own locomotive thrills. It begins with that unmistakable voice — what the director Mel Brooks once called his “kind of crazy Midwestern accent.” In fact, Lynch’s family moved frequently, and his childhood unfurled across a wide swath of midcentury America. Along the way, his voice settled into a faintly comic register: thin and tremulous, with a hint of helium, containing both the threat of a whine and the chirpy approachability of an archetypal 1950s suburbia.Lynch is a raconteur of some renown; he has spoken of Wookiees, decaying factories and an overfed Chihuahua who resembled “a water balloon with little legs.” He enjoys folksy turns of phrase (“Golden sunshine all along the way,” he often declared in the online weather reports he used to offer) and intriguing maxims (“A washed butt never boils”). Ideas, he argues, are pre-existing “gifts” that artists can “catch.” You can sense a similar pursuit in his interviews: At times he speaks as if he were reciting the words of a dimly heard incoming transmission, wiggling his fingers and shutting his eyes. Even his mundane remarks can take on an air of profundity, ringing persistently in the mind.And sometimes, the ears. Lynch “has to have his megaphone to make his voice sound even more nasal,” the actress Naomi Watts once said, describing his on-set carnival barking. “When he’s two feet away from you as well.” He’s liable to stretch out words like “beautiful,” imbuing them with the deep emotion of an explorer bringing home tales of briefly glimpsed miracles. His born-in-the-’40s diction makes matters even stranger: Lynch, a self-identified Eagle Scout, can be heard in one documentary repeatedly and earnestly exclaiming, “Oh my golly.”Lynch ‘has to have his megaphone to make his voice sound even more nasal.’We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More