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Amazon Gains Creative Control Over the James Bond Franchise
The British family that has for decades held complete control over everything involving the globe-trotting superspy is relinquishing it to Amazon.The British family that has steered the James Bond franchise for more than 60 years, zealously protecting the superspy from the indignities of Hollywood strip mining, has agreed to relinquish control to Amazon.The deal, which was announced Thursday morning, comes after a behind-the-scenes standoff between Barbara Broccoli, who inherited control of Bond from her father, and Amazon, which gained a significant ownership stake in the franchise in 2021 as part of its $8.5 billion purchase of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Ms. Broccoli and her brother, Michael G. Wilson, another Bond producer, had chafed at some of the ways in which Amazon hoped to capitalize on the property, The Wall Street Journal reported in December.In a statement released by Amazon, the siblings and the tech giant said they had agreed to form a new joint venture to house Bond; the parties will remain co-owners. But Amazon MGM Studios “will gain creative control” after the transaction closes later this year. Ms. Broccoli and Mr. Wilson previously had ironclad creative control, deciding when to make a new Bond film, who should play the title role and whether remakes and television spinoffs got made.They also had final say over every line of dialogue, every casting decision, every stunt sequence, every marketing tie-in, and every TV ad, poster and billboard.Daniel Craig in “No Time to Die.” The movie marked the end of a five-film series with him in the lead role. No decisions have been made about a successor.Nicola Dove/Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures, via Associated PressMike Hopkins, head of Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, thanked the siblings for their “unyielding dedication” to the franchise and said the company looked forward “to ushering in the next phase of the legendary 007 for audiences around the world.”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
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‘The Unbreakable Boy’ Review: Surmounting Hardships With Joy
This family drama by Jon Gunn, based on a true story, is told from the perspective of a young boy with autism.The title character in “The Unbreakable Boy” is a whirlwind, a handful, a lot. Austin, an eighth grader with autism, is often in overdrive, whether he’s counting toys or rattling off the courtroom monologue from “A Few Good Men.” He also has a genetic brittle-bone disorder that frequently lands him in the emergency room. Crucially, though, these challenges never diminish his spirit. Played with exuberance by Jacob Laval, Austin is a disrupter and catalyst, a lesson in joyful mettle to everyone around him — especially his parents (Zachary Levi and Meghann Fahy).Jon Gunn, the writer-director and a practiced hand in the inspirational genre (“Ordinary Angels”), adapted the memoir by Scott LeRette, Austin’s father, but flipped the perspective to the boy’s. There are well-deployed bursts of kid’s-eye-view animation and humorous asides, but mainly the story, set in Oklahoma, dispenses its lessons in gratitude, self-forgiveness and sobriety with straightforward sincerity. Sometimes that works, and sometimes it lands with a thud.This is also the story of a marriage. As narrated by Austin and revealed in flashbacks, his parents’ courtship traveled an ultra-brief road from meet-cute to pregnancy, and Scott and Teresa didn’t so much fall in love as do the right thing. Raising Austin spurs them to grow up, although Scott, with his increasing dependence on alcohol, is clearly the laggard. Some might find it comforting that Scott has an imaginary friend (Drew Powell), a cross between a drinking buddy and a voice of conscience. Others will find it merely distracting.Fahy, as the more grounded parent, lends understated warmth to this pleasant but plodding family drama. Amid the gentle nods to churchgoing, 12-step programs and the Japanese art of kintsugi (the mending of broken items using precious metals that accentuate the cracks), “The Unbreakable Boy” could have benefited from a stronger infusion of Austin’s vitality.The Unbreakable BoyRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. In theaters. More
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‘Compensation’ Review: Still Rebellious
Finally getting a theatrical run, Zeinabu irene Davis’s 1999 film about two Black couples in Chicago in two different eras earns its landmark status.As a word, “Compensation” evokes labor. In the director Zeinabu irene Davis’s beautifully woven drama of the same name, work does get its close-ups. But it is the loves, labors and vulnerabilities two couples in two different eras experience that make this black-and-white film from 1999 such an elegant and presciently inventive work.Michelle A. Banks, a pioneering deaf theater actor, portrays both Malindy, a dressmaker in 1910, and Malaika, an aspiring graphic designer in the 1990s. John Earl Jelks (“Exhibiting Forgiveness”) plays Arthur, a migrant up from Mississippi, and Nico, a children’s librarian in contemporary Chicago.Each couple meets sweet on the shore of Lake Michigan. (Scenes were shot at Indiana Dunes National Park.) With a fishing rod strapped to his back, a mandolin in his hand and a straw hat atop his head, Arthur looks like a folk troubadour as he heads toward Malindy and her young friend Tildy (Nirvana Cobb) napping nearby. He asks Malindy if she wants some of the fish he’s caught. After trying to make herself understood by signing, Malindy writes on a chalkboard that she can’t hear. Arthur looks at the sign and tells her sheepishly he can’t read. It’s an impossibly poignant moment in a film about the intersections of the deaf and the hearing worlds, the Black middle and working classes, but also the educated and the soon-to-be-educated.For Nico and Malaika’s encounter, the film leans on a bit of rom-com charm. (“Compensation” was written by Marc Arthur Chéry, the director’s frequent collaborator and spouse.) Looking serious, Malaika moves through tai chi forms, Nico jogs by, smiles, stops, jogs back, beaming. She is not impressed as playful thought-bubble intertitles make plain.Davis uses the form of early silent movies to evocative and economic effect. How do you shoot a period picture on a tight budget? Imbue rich archival stills with the sounds of life — babies gurgling, horses clomping, train whistles sounding. Add a beguiling musical score while you’re at it. Scenes of the early 1900s are buoyed by the composer-pianist Reginald R. Robinson’s ragtime notes; the late ’90s by Atiba Y. Jali’s percussive, African-centered grooves. (The movie is open captioned.)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
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Souleymane Cissé, Celebrated Malian Filmmaker, Dies at 84
He won multiple awards during his 50-year career, including the jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and spent his life championing African cinema.Souleymane Cissé, an award-winning writer and director who became the first Black African filmmaker to win the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, died on Wednesday in Bamako, Mali. He was 84.His death was confirmed by François Margolin, a French film producer and a close friend of Mr. Cissé’s.Mr. Cissé had just appeared at a news conference on Wednesday morning to present two prizes ahead of the Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou, known as Fespaco, where he had been set to head the jury.After the news conference — where he was “talking and joking” — Mr. Cissé went to take a nap and didn’t wake up, Mr. Margolin said.Mr. Cissé was catapulted to worldwide fame with the release in 1987 of “Yeelen” (“Light” in his native Bambara). The film won the jury prize at Cannes and was nominated as the best foreign film in the 1989 Spirit Awards. The director Martin Scorsese called the film “one of the great revelatory experiences of my moviegoing life.”Mr. Cissé had been energetic until the end of his life, Mr. Margolin said, working and traveling around the world.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
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‘The Quiet Ones’ Review: Getting Swindled in Copenhagen
Inspired by a real heist, this Danish thriller has more moving parts than it can keep track of.The Danish heist thriller “The Quiet Ones” centers on a big score that involves using garbage trucks to block the major roads in Copenhagen to buy the thieves enough time to raid a cash-handling firm. The many moving parts get the better of the filmmakers.The director, Frederik Louis Hviid, opens the movie with a display of self-defeating virtuosity: a robbery filmed in a single take entirely from the inside of an armored van. (That vantage point stops making sense once the drivers exit the vehicle, but Hviid doesn’t seem like the kind of filmmaker to cut away from a showboating shot for the sake of narrative logic.)One year later, Slimani (Reda Kateb), the man responsible for the van robbery, recruits Kasper (Gustav Giese) to game out the break-in at the cash-handling firm. Kasper is a family man and a boxer, and his competitive streak inspires him to maximize the take. Slimani is a hardened criminal made less menacing by Kateb’s faltering rhythms in English, the gang’s lingua franca. The bulk of “The Quiet Ones” is set in 2008, occasioning a lot of dubiously relevant references to the financial crisis.The heist takes up more than 20 minutes of screen time, but Hviid — who has to juggle the robbers at the firm, the garbage truck drivers, the police and a security guard (Amanda Collin) — makes a hash of the competing perspectives. The road-blocking gambit is barely shown, and Collin’s character, fleshed out specifically for this moment, is forgotten for much of the sequence.The theft that inspired the movie has been called one of the biggest in Denmark’s history. It deserved a sleeker film.The Quiet OnesNot rated. In Danish, English and Swedish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters. More
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‘Old Guy’ Review: The Veteran and the Rookie
Christoph Waltz plays an aging hit man begrudgingly training his replacement in Simon West’s stale action movie.“Old Guy” is billed as an action movie but it is actually more of a fantasy film. It imagines a world in which an aging hit man kills his targets without consequence before retreating to nightclubs where scads of beautiful young women compete to accompany him home.Presumably Danny Dolinski (Christoph Waltz) has been enjoying such a lifestyle for decades. But when the movie begins, his bosses consider his contract killing career to be approaching its natural conclusion because of the joint pain afflicting his trigger finger. Dolinski would prefer to stay in the game, but Opal, the director of The Company (Ann Akinjirin) insists that he serve as a mentor to Wihlborg (Cooper Hoffman), a promising, and youthful, assassin.So begins a familiar story of the veteran and the rookie, updated to include snide observations about Gen-Z style trends. Between this odd couple, Wihlborg is designed as sympathetic — he is given an arbitrary back story in foster care — but Dolinski is clearly meant as our hero, joined by a damsel in a low-cut dress (Lucy Liu). The director Simon West strains to frame Dolinski as a witty cad whose embittered demeanor (and murderous vocation) belie a sturdy moral code.Beyond the stale plot and groaners that make up the dialogue, “Old Guy” suffers from haphazard pacing, as if every third scene was cut out in postproduction. Watching, one wonders who this movie is for — even within the target demographic stated in the title.Old GuyRated R for guys shooting guns. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More
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‘Millers in Marriage’ Review: Squall in the Family
Three siblings navigate midlife crises in Edward Burns’s glossy look at marriages in transition.Rich people have problems too, is one takeaway from “Millers in Marriage,” the 14th feature from the writer and director Edward Burns. A roundelay of discontent, disappointment and disappearing dreams, this smoothly executed, coolly controlled relationship drama observes three siblings on the wrong side of 50 and, clearly, the right side of the property market.All are artists of one sort or another, and all reside in homes that appear ripped from the pages of Architectural Digest. Andy (Burns), a glumly separated painter, is torn between his attraction to a straight-shooting, happily divorced Englishwoman (a perfect Minnie Driver) and the renewed attentions of his volatile wife (Morena Baccarin). His sister Maggie (Julianna Margulies) is a novelist whose facility at churning out high-society beach reads isn’t helping her husband (a dour Campbell Scott) dislodge his writer’s block. The third sibling, Eve (a warm and engaging Gretchen Mol), a onetime rock musician, is deeply regretting the abandonment of her career to have babies with her former manager (Patrick Wilson), now a perpetually sozzled grouch.Who better, then, to pry Eve loose than a rangy, rakish music journalist (Benjamin Bratt) whose game includes unironic hat-wearing and — like a dispiriting number of men in his age bracket — the unembarrassed deployment of Stephen Stills lyrics?Cutting elegantly back and forth among the siblings, “Millers in Marriage” is a sincere, sometimes trite attempt to address midlife drift and late-marriage frustrations, its empty nests gaping beneath gleaming countertops and gauzy photography. Its characters may be stressed out, but its rhythms are leisurely, the skill of the actors mostly countering the weaknesses in the script. For Burns, though, the difficulty may be getting audiences to invest in the unhappiness of people who wake up each morning in square footage like this.Millers in MarriageRated R for alcoholism, adultery and enviable curb appeal. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More
