Movies

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Black Panther’ and the New Blueprint for Female Warriors Onscreen

      by

      Danai Gurira: For Dominique to be out there now is thrilling. We’re both children of immigrants and, though our journeys are different [Thorne’s family is from Trinidad; Gurira’s is from Zimbabwe], we have that similarity when your parents come from another place and you’re used to a dual cultural existence. There’s something courageous in her; she’s not going to walk into a space unprepared. She’s wise for her years and grounded. There was a tender day on set [for “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” filmed after Chadwick Boseman, the franchise’s original star, died in 2020] when we connected deeply. You never expect grief; it just hits when it wants. We had to lean on each other, and Dominique understood what we were dealing with.When I was in grad school [for acting, at N.Y.U.], I was distraught about how terribly African women were portrayed in the West, if they ever were. Putting out stories that countered that — whether through acting in my first play [“In the Continuum,” 2005, co-written with Nikkole Salter] or watching others in my subsequent plays [including “Eclipsed” on Broadway in 2016] — felt like what I was meant to do. The joy for me is to see Black women from around the world getting our stories told: Letitia [Wright, another “Black Panther” actor] is Guyanese British, and she had to learn a ton of Shona when she was the lead in my play at the Young Vic [“The Convert,” 2018-19, in London]. To have her doing our accents and intonations beautifully was like seeing the diaspora embracing itself.culture banner More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Chevalier’ Review: A Black Virtuoso Rocks the Court of Marie Antoinette

      by

      A new movie about Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint-George, may owe as much to “Bridgerton” as it does the history books.Set in 18th-century Paris, “Chevalier” begins with a flourish. In a concert hall in pre-revolutionary France, a man makes a beeline toward the virtuoso conducting a string orchestra to the rapt delight of his audience. The interloper’s back and his white wig give nothing away of his countenance. Cue the collective gasp when this man is revealed to be Black and suggests that the two play a piece together.The duo’s dueling fiddles will deliver a new star and prompt the hot-under-his-ruffled-collar violinist Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to ask, “Who the [expletive] is that?”This will not be the only intentionally discordant gesture in “Chevalier” — based on the story of Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges — but it is the boldest in a film that bows to “Bridgerton,” while lacing its intrigue with contemporary racial-cultural wounds.The real Chevalier de Saint-Georges looks commanding and impossibly handsome in a rare portrait from the era. And the actor Kelvin Harrison Jr. matches that beauty. He also makes believable Bologne’s celebrated vigor and grace. Harrison’s most recent roles have been in a trio of films — “Waves,” “Monster,” “Luce” — notable for featuring young men who are often as troubling as they are troubled. Here the actor brings swagger and hints of hubris to the slightly more mature Frenchman.Born on the island of Guadeloupe, Joseph Bologne was the son of an enslaved Senegalese woman and a French plantation owner. He was, for a spell, an incandescent figure in Marie Antoinette’s court and later, after a change of allegiance, a military leader during the revolution. Outlier and insider, he’s a figure ripe for reclamation. That this movie — directed by the Canadian filmmaker Stephen Williams and written by Stefani Robinson — leans too mightily on romance to the detriment of exploring more fully his genius feels like a missed opportunity.Joseph’s father’s parting words as he leaves his young son at an elite school will become Joseph’s raison d’être as he excels in music, fencing and pretty much anything else he takes on: “Joseph you must be excellent, always excellent. No one can tear down an excellent Frenchman.” As the movie unfolds, that final assertion will require a qualification — namely, unless that Frenchman is Black — but the drive it instills in Joseph also resonates with the current celebration of ‌Black excellence in the United States.In “Chevalier,” colonialism and paternalism have roles in shaping Bologne. But it’s his relationship with four women that proves crucial: his royal ally, Queen Marie Antoinette (Lucy Boynton); his enemy, the opera singer La Guimard (Minnie Driver); his muse and romantic consort, the Marquise de Montalembert, Marie-Josephine (Samara Weaving); and his mother, Nanon (Ronke Adekoluejo).Driver has wicked fun as the diva who throws her support behind the composer Christoph Willibald Gluck when the position as head of the Paris Opera opens. It is a post Joseph wants and feels he deserves. Whether he gets it is one of the movie’s central tensions.Adekoluẹjo brings a cultural shrewdness to Nanon, who arrives from the Caribbean shortly after the death of Joseph’s father. Their mother-and-man-child reunion is teary but also pointed and will usher in a slow dawning in Joseph’s understanding of his Blackness. Joseph has grown accustomed to operating at the top of his game among Paris’s elite. But as Nanon knows, the rules of the game are rigged.ChevalierRated PG-13 for thematic content, some strong language, boudoir scenes and violence. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 50 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Quasi’ Review: Medieval Inanity

      by

      The new film from the comedy troupe Broken Lizard is a goofy take on the story of the famed hunchback Quasimodo.You’ve heard of Quasimodo, the hunchback of Notre Dame, the actor Brian Cox announces at the start of “Quasi,” but you haven’t heard this version. And maybe you shouldn’t — unless, that is, you’re in a certain state of mind at a certain time of night. In “Quasi,” the latest film from the comedy troupe Broken Lizard, the disfigured peasant from the famed Victor Hugo novel is working in medieval torture chambers when he’s suddenly thrust into a web of murderous royal intrigue.After the queen of France (Adrianne Palicki) takes a liking to Quasi, he finds himself at a dinner with the obnoxious king (Jay Chandrasekhar), who asks him to assassinate the pope (Paul Soter), a longtime rival. During the attempt, though, the pope asks Quasi to kill the king, leaving the hunchback in a bind.The high-stakes political affair takes place with the goofy, lighthearted energy you’d expect from the comedy group behind “Super Troopers” and “Beerfest” (“Quasi” is directed by Kevin Heffernan, who stars in the film alongside the rest of the Broken Lizard troupe): It’s dumb fun that is at times entertaining, at times flat.At the heart of this film is a thematic twist that would be at home in a Seth Rogen movie: a repressed bromance between Quasi and his “hut-mate,” Duchamp (Heffernan), both of whom refuse to admit they’re each other’s best friends. The parodic period-piece framework lends an added layer of whimsy and offbeat jokes to the Broken Lizard sensibility — though that is perhaps not enough to justify a film that can, at times, feel like a so-so sketch that didn’t warrant a feature. But you’ll most likely get a few laughs and mild enjoyment when you just surrender yourself to the inanity of it all.QuasiRated R for language, some crude/sexual content and violence. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

    • 63 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Trenque Lauquen’ Review: Lose Yourself

      by

      This sprawling Argentine film, about a missing botanist, finds liberation in being lost — and treats mystery as an end in itself, not just as a road to revelation.“Trenque Lauquen,” a wondrous multipart epic from the Argentine director Laura Citarella, opens with men on a quest. Laura (Laura Paredes), a visiting botanist working on research in Trenque Lauquen, a town southwest of Buenos Aires, has disappeared, leaving only a cryptic note behind: “Farewell, farewell. I’m leaving, I’m leaving.” Rafael (Rafael Spregelburd), Laura’s boyfriend, and Ezequiel (Ezequiel Pierri), her research colleague turned almost-lover, drive through the countryside, seeking her traces.As the film unfolds across twelve chapters (split into two feature-length parts), the men’s pursuit grows like a wild, proliferating vine: Missing women multiply, and the film’s mysteries fork into new ciphers. Yet it’s only in the seventh chapter that someone questions the very premise of the search for Laura, asking Ezequiel, “What makes you think she wants to be found?”“Trenque Lauquen” undermines the hubris of discovery — a distinctly masculine impulse, and a narrative principle we often take for granted. Produced by El Pampero Cine, an Argentine production company known for sprawling, Borgesian films like the more than 13-hour “La Flor” (2019), Citarella’s film posits that being lost can be a kind of liberation, and that mystery, in movies, can be an end in itself, rather than a path to a revelation. The first, six-chapter part alternates between two timelines and two quests: Rafael and Ezequiel’s search for Laura, and flashbacks to Ezequiel and Laura’s attempts to track down the identity of Carmen Zuna (played in fantasy sequences by Citarella), a schoolteacher who had a passionate affair with a local landowner in the 1960s. Laura finds their erotic love letters hidden away in books at the library and becomes enamored, her passion soon infecting Ezequiel.The second chapter starts to illuminate the circumstances behind Laura’s disappearance, only to unwrap an entirely new puzzle: this time about two lesbian lovers in the suburbs who seem to be conducting a scientific experiment, secretly raising a mutant creature. Frankenstein comes to mind here and also as a metaphor for the film’s patchwork structure. Relayed through letters and notes in the first half, and Laura’s voice-over in the second, the many micro-stories that make up the narrative seem to take on lives of their own, crisscrossing and diverging unexpectedly. Familiar hints of horror and detective stories appear like red herrings, but the ultimate effect is of a campfire tale: The pleasure lies in the telling — the invention of fictions, the performance of emotions — rather than in the details of plot. Once you lose yourself in the thickets of “Trenque Lauquen,” you won’t want to be found.Trenque LauquenNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 4 hours and 22 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 88 Shares159 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Carmen’ Review: We’re Not in Spain Anymore

      by

      The choreographer Benjamin Millepied’s directing debut is an of-the-moment but scattered take on a classic love story.You can’t have “Carmen” without the color red.In the choreographer Benjamin Millepied’s debut film — an adaptation of the classic story, previously told in prose by Prosper Mérrimée and more famously in opera by Georges Bizet — it’s there from the start, in the opening titles, the pedals of a rose, the title heroine’s shirt.But nothing more than color signifies that this is a “Carmen” tale, that old psychosexual drama of a male soldier so seduced by a Spanish femme fatale, he forgets his duties and is driven to jealousy and murder. No, here Carmen is instead a young Mexican woman both headstrong and naïve, restless and searching — much like the film itself.That is disappointing for a movie seemingly assembled from promise: in Millepied, an enterprising dance-maker who pioneered small-screen performance during the pandemic; in Nicholas Britell, a composer of knockout, earworm-rich soundtracks; in Rossy de Palma, an alluring, otherworldly fixture of Pedro Almodóvar films; and in Paul Mescal, a fast-rising, Oscar-nominated star capable of conveying swaths of biography and feeling in a sadly handsome smile.They make for a film with elements of dance on camera, musical, of-the-moment melodrama and visual poetry — but without a thorough commitment to any one of those and few, if any, moments of coalescence. The screenplay is spare to the point of meager; characters speak in clichés, like claiming that music won’t pay the bills, and are divided, boringly, into categories of unequivocally good (Mexican immigrants mainly) and bad (all white characters except Mescal’s Aidan).No dialogue, anyway, communicates more effectively than Britell’s soundtrack, a constant presence, tense and evocative, functioning like opera by fully integrating with, if not driving, the story rather than underscoring it. The movie also says more through movement than speech: percussive flamenco; climactic krumping in a fight sequence starring and set to an original song by the D.O.C.; a touching pas de deux of Carmen’s balletic fluidity and Aidan’s awkward, failing attempts to match her.Little seems to keep this couple of lost souls — he a tormented war vet, she an undocumented Mexican immigrant on the run — together other than fear. As Carmen, Melissa Barrera is beautiful but somewhat blank, an obtuse mystery next to Mescal, his face having the shape and solemnity of a Roman statue, but eyes that repeatedly betray his pain. De Palma is a welcome source of levity as Masilda, a nightclub owner who tells Aidan that if she were younger she would eat him up like a plate of chilaquiles.Masilda tells Carmen that her name means poem, that she is “the most beautiful poem made into a woman.” Yet much of the film’s poetry comes from the cinematography of Jörg Widmer — a veteran of Terrence Malick’s sweeping, awe-struck camera gestures — who renders a desert landscape expansive and entrapping, and finds wonder in the otherwise stressful tangle of Los Angeles freeways. Millepied relishes close-ups of bodies in motion, and scatters dreamy symbolism throughout the story, populating his world with angels of death.Carmen and Aidan are connected, before they meet, by small flames that rise spontaneously from the ground. In the end, they are separated by tragedy. Their trajectory couldn’t be simpler, but this film, at nearly two aimless hours, doesn’t seem interested in, or capable of, that kind of focus.CarmenRated R for language, nudity and violent dancing. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 63 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Plan 75’ Review: Leaving Early

      by

      In this quietly bold debut feature, the Japanese government offers a euthanasia program and a 78-year-old woman considers her future.In the lurid 1973 dystopian thriller “Soylent Green,” Edward G. Robinson movingly played a man who embraced euthanasia, dying in a special chamber while being soothed by classical music. That story was set in 2022. “Plan 75,” the quietly bold debut feature of Chie Hayakawa, is on the same page, envisioning a more or less present-day version of Japan that hawks euthanasia services to the aged.As macabre as that sounds, the conceit channels actual anxieties in Japan about providing for a growing population of seniors. The sober drama centers on a 78-year-old woman, Michi (Chieko Baisho), who still has her independence, her health and a karaoke-loving friend circle.The government’s assisted suicide program seems like an over-advertised nuisance to Michi, until she loses her job and finds a friend slumped over dead. Life turns precarious, Michi grows isolated and Plan 75 — the name of the government program — starts to sounds appealing. We are also introduced to a Plan 75 clerk, Hiromu (Hayato Isomura), and a Filipino caretaker, Maria (Stefanie Arianne), who takes an unsavory gig with the program.Hayakawa avoids slipping into satire or a stylized dystopia, making details like a euthanasia spa package seem plausible (and insidious). Yet a somnolence hangs over the film, and Hiromu and Maria are left somewhere between having full-fledged story lines and just being useful foils. Still, Baisho gets across the creeping despair that morbidity and the loss of community can create — a sensation that lets “Plan 75” double as a consummate entry in pandemic-era cinema.Plan 75Not rated. In Japanese and Tagalog, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 100 Shares109 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant’ Review: Call of Duty

      by

      Jake Gyllenhaal stars in this furious and discomfiting war film that tugs on your conscience for days.“Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant,” the saga of a U.S. sergeant (Jake Gyllenhaal) honor-bound to his Afghan interpreter (Dar Salim), starts like most other movies about the ultimately unsuccessful 20-year effort to suppress the Taliban. There’s aerial footage of parched mountains, sudden explosions of violence and an outdated wail of classic rock exposing a younger generation’s as-yet-unrealized ambition to make war pictures able to stand alongside those that sprang from Vietnam. Sincerity is an unusual tone for its director, Guy Ritchie, who specializes in laddish shoot-’em-ups. Here, Ritchie is not just earnest — he’s morally outraged about the broken promises made to thousands of Afghans who believed they’d earned Special Immigrant Visas only to be abandoned to fend for themselves. For all its clichés, this furious and discomfiting film tugs on your conscience for days, making a powerful case to turn the American public’s attention back to a conflict it would rather forget.John Kinley (Gyllenhaal) is on his fourth tour when his squad partners with Ahmed (Salim), a former heroin trafficker, to scour the countryside for bomb manufacturers. During this ain’t-war-hell opening stretch, Ritchie and his co-writers Ivan Atkinson and Marn Davies attune the audience to the use of language, particularly how most soldiers refer to Ahmed as “the interpreter,” as if he’s a tool, not a person. In the field, John is terse and authoritative; Ahmed, intuitive and polite. “I believe you, but they need to believe you,” he advises one local. Back under the goofily dramatic flickering lights of Bagram Air Base, Ahmed presses John on the distinction between “translate” and “interpret” with the acumen — and enunciation — of a Cincinnati lawyer. (Salim, raised in Denmark, doesn’t slather on an accent.)Then the film pivots. In the second act, the two men are stranded in hostile terrain. Ahmed saves John’s life. Once home in California, John vows to save Ahmed after he learns his protector has been forced into hiding. “I’m on the hook,” John explains to his wife (Emily Beecham), as Gyllenhaal’s watery blue eyes flood with shame. When John braves the State Department’s byzantine phone tree, he soon becomes so irate that he grabs a beer and a hammer. The bombastic rescue attempt that follows is the bitterest form of wish fulfillment — a showcase of individual loyalty intended to embarrass gummed-up bureaucracy.Ritchie’s action scenes suffer from the gamification of combat: Our heroes shoot first, grab a dead man’s gun and repeat. The body count becomes unconscionably high. Yet we eventually submit to the primal awe of the film’s fraught and nearly dialogue-free escape sequences, driven by Christopher Benstead’s meaty, hand-thumping score. Watching the exhausted Ahmed shoulder John through mud and fog while sharing a long opium pipe for the pain, one can’t help overlaying images of Samwise and Frodo in Mordor. Gyllenhaal’s character becomes so stoned that the film rewinds the first adventure in flashback almost as soon he sobers up — an unnecessary flourish whose sole benefit is letting us relax the second time the same pack of long-nosed Afghan hounds comes sniffing back into view, only now in slow-motion and upside-down. For once, Ritchie might not want the audience to giggle. But in the moment, we’re relieved that we can.Guy Ritchie’s The CovenantRated R for grisly violence and language befitting the circumstances. Running time: 2 hours 3 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 100 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Somewhere in Queens’ Review: Rooting for the Underdog

      by

      Ray Romano plumbed the absurdities of family life on his sitcom “Everybody Loves Raymond.” For this, his feature directing debut, he sticks to an Italian American milieu.Someday, when conventional wisdom gives way to common sense, “Everybody Loves Raymond” will be recognized as one of the best network situation comedies. Incisively written and superbly acted, it explored with surgical precision the bottomless hostility animating passive-aggressive family dynamics. Ray Romano, whose standup comedy fueled the series’ themes, very successfully bridged the skill set of a standup comedian with that of an ensemble comedic actor. And yet. No respect, or not enough respect.In any event, the series is now a thing of the past, and Romano is taking a turn behind the camera for his feature directing debut, “Somewhere in Queens,” which he co-wrote with Mark Stegemann. Here, Romano sticks to the outer-borough Italian American milieu of his series. The results are mixed.Romano plays Leo Russo, a likable, “Rocky”-obsessed screw-up who’s the underdog of his dad’s family construction firm. His tough cookie wife, Angela (Laurie Metcalf), is recovering from cancer. Their only son, nicknamed Sticks (Jacob Ward), is recessively shy but fiercely talented at basketball. His gift might yield him a college scholarship and has already attracted Dani (Sadie Stanley), a free-spirited girl.But when Sticks crowds Dani, things cool between the two. Leo, in a fit of desperation, approaches Dani with an appalling proposition that will continue the momentum of the young couple’s relationship and keep Sticks on track for his college tryout.This genuinely discomfiting narrative material hits some raw nerves, and the cast, which also includes the great Tony Lo Bianco, doesn’t back down from emotional authenticity. But if you’ve been following the movie’s music choices, which contain a number of songs that are at least wet-noodle adjacent, you won’t be surprised that Romano eventually contrives soft, and arguably goofy, exits for his troubled characters.Somewhere in QueensRated R for language and some sexual material. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters. More