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      ‘Oh, Canada’ Review: Jacob Elordi as a Young Richard Gere

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      Richard Gere and Jacob Elordi star in Paul Schrader’s meditative drama about guilt and seeking forgiveness.Near the beginning of “Oh, Canada,” Paul Schrader’s adaptation of his friend Russell Banks’s novel “Foregone,” a small camera crew is preparing a room for a documentary interview. It’s a beautiful room, with dark wood-paneled walls, antique furnishings, a case containing awards and trophies. It looks like the home of someone who has led an interesting and successful life.The space belongs to Leonard Fife (Richard Gere), a documentarian and something of a left-wing celebrity living in Montreal with his wife and creative partner of many years, Emma (Uma Thurman). Fife is dying. But he’s agreed to allow two former students, Malcolm (Michael Imperioli) and Diana (Victoria Hill), themselves documentary filmmakers, to interview him on camera. They are champing at the bit to memorialize him, but Fife’s motives in agreeing are not purely about the film.The themes running through much of Schrader’s work, especially lately, revolve around redemption — the messiness of it, the possibility of it, the impossibility of it. The man who wrote “Taxi Driver” has, in his 70s, given us “First Reformed,” “The Card Counter” and “Master Gardener,” movies about solitary men wrestling with the task of living in a world that humanity has wrecked, and the dread of discovering oneself personally unforgivable for one’s place in it. A recurring line from “First Reformed” feels like a precis for all of these: Will God forgive us?“Oh, Canada” circles around this theme, too. But while the men of the recent trilogy have preferred to pour their thoughts into journals, Fife is the kind of person who bottles everything up, able to move forward only by ditching the past. His life — at least before he crossed the border into Canada as a much younger man, leaving everything behind — is a series of secrets that not even his wife was fully aware of. His admirers, and history, see his crossing to Canada as bold protest against the Vietnam draft. But the story is more complicated, and now he feels he must get it off his chest before he crosses another border.In other words, he must confess. This religious practice, confession, is the beating soul of “Oh, Canada.” It’s signaled early: When the documentary crew is preparing the room for Fife, they awkwardly move a decorated Christmas tree out of the shot, revealing a portrait of some clergyman on the wall. Then, as the filmmakers get started with the shoot, they tell Fife that they’re going to be using the technology he developed, which seems to be the Interrotron we associate with the work of Errol Morris. It creates a way for an interview subject to feel as if they’re maintaining eye contact with the interviewer while actually looking directly into the camera lens. Morris (and, presumably, the fictional Fife) has said that this leads to more revelation. He’s also compared the tool’s results, its ability to rip away self-consciousness, to Freud’s psychoanalysis couch.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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      ‘Nightbitch’ Review: Motherhood? Woof! Grr!

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      Amy Adams plays a stay-at-home mom who comes to believe that she’s a dog in Marielle Heller’s adaptation of the Rachel Yoder novel.The sly, teasing conceit in “Nightbitch,” a fantasy starring Amy Adams, is that one day her character — a beleaguered, bone-weary mother — turns into a dog. That isn’t a metaphor, though maybe it is. The movie is wily on that point, even as you see her turning into a glossy-coated, tail-wagging, fang-baring canine. It looks kind of fun. Unlike poor Gregor Samsa, whose transformation into a giant insect in Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” ends tragically, the mother’s change proves exhilarating. Among other things, she no longer needs to behave like a good girl. Hers is a galvanizing rebirth, one that’s red in tooth and claw.Written and directed by Marielle Heller, and based on Rachel Yoder’s novel of the same title, the mother — she doesn’t have a proper name until she starts calling herself Nightbitch — enters shortly before her great transformation. She, along with her unnamed husband, 2-year old son and criminally neglected cat, lives in one of those nice movie houses in a leafy, generic suburban neighborhood in Anytown, U.S. Unhappy with day care, the parents have decided that the mother, an artist who’s had critical success, will stay home. It isn’t going well. Their toddler is, ta-da, a toddler, and a babbling bundle of joy, energy and raw need.The mother’s awakening begins, appropriately, with her canine teeth, which seem to be getting sharper. Her body also seems hairier. She’s puzzled but also intrigued. For his part, her husband (Scoot McNairy, in a largely thankless role) seems oblivious, his usual state. Before long, she is scrutinizing a bump near her coccyx that’s big enough to send most of us to urgent care. The mother, though, isn’t like most people; she’s a clever, at times comic, engagingly offbeat fictional vehicle for some familiar and dubious ideas about female identity as well as maternity, domesticity and femininity. All of which is to say, this is also about power.Heller’s previous explorations of the lives of women include “Can You Ever Forgive Me” and “The Diary of a Teenage Girl,” her feature directing debut. For her adaptation of “Nightbitch,” Heller has retained the novel’s claustrophobic intimacy; the mother leaves the house, though it never feels like she gets out enough, in part because she’s usually with just the kid. That her interior life proves far more interesting than her material reality isn’t a surprise. Heller makes that clear early with the use of visual repetition, underscoring the monotony of the mother’s dawn-to-dusk life with shot after shot of her frying up breakfast and reading a bedtime book. The point is made quickly, but Heller keeps making it.More successful are the scenes in which you hear both what the mother says and what she thinks. To allow you to get into the character’s head, Heller has translated passages from the book’s stream-of-consciousness narration into chunks of voice-over. This makes for some nice comedy, especially when the mother’s spoken utterances are in sharp contrast to her unvarnished, panicky, annoyed voice-over. “Do you just love getting to be home with him all the time?” an acquaintance asks. Er, yes and no. Most people, though, her husband very much included, don’t seem really interested in what she says, never mind what she thinks. It’s no wonder that even when she’s nodding along with others, her thoughts run wild.The story takes a surreal turn when the mother pierces the cyst on her back with a needle, a visceral, entertaining gross-out moment that, as milky liquid oozes out, briefly shifts the movie into body-horror terrain. When she pulls a wispy tail out of the cyst, the movie slips into magical realism and starts getting down to its weird business. The mother gives the cat the side eye and chases a squirrel, her toddler giddily in tow. Then one evening, while the husband is away and the boy is (at last) asleep, she changes into a floofy dog with a luxuriant tail. Enter Nightbitch. She finds a pack, pads around the streets, runs wild.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 End’ Review: It’s All Come to This

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      Joshua Oppenheimer’s postapocalyptic musical about a wealthy family in an underground bunker is placidly disturbing.Joshua Oppenheimer is our age’s great bard of cognitive dissonance. His previous two films, “The Act of Killing” and “The Look of Silence,” are technically documentaries about the horrific Indonesian mass killings in 1965-66. But they’re more fundamentally about the extraordinary lengths to which the human mind — or, really, the human soul — is prepared to go in justifying its own coldblooded atrocity. I don’t have to tell you that this goes far beyond one historical event, and so do these two documentaries. The subjects are men who perpetrated the massacre and seemingly feel no remorse at all. Something inside them has rotted away.They’re disturbing films, chilling the viewer to the bone. So, too, is “The End,” which when I first heard about it sounded like a particularly unlikely Oppenheimer project. The film, which he wrote with Rasmus Heisterberg, is not a documentary at all: It’s a musical, set in the nearish future, about a family living in a vast and luxurious underground bunker while the world literally burns above them. And they, it turns out, caused that apocalypse.The man of the house was an oil mogul when the world was alive, a great defender of fossil fuels and an affectionate guardian to his family. He is named only “Father” in the press notes, and played by Michael Shannon, who sings and dances very well. His wife (Tilda Swinton, with an appropriately reedier voice) is a nervy former ballet dancer, spending her days rearranging the well-appointed rooms of their dwelling, the walls of which are decked out with the world’s greatest masterpieces. They brought them when they fled the surface, apparently.Mother and Father have a son (George MacKay, suitably strange) who was born underground and now is in his 20s. He’s been well-educated in this bunker, even doted upon by all of these adults — his parents and the few others they allowed to come with them. His best friend is also his mother’s best friend (Bronagh Gallagher), who in the past was a great chef. They also have an affable butler (Tim McInnerny) and a grumpy doctor (Lennie James). And for decades, that’s been everyone. There’s next to no one left above.Musicals mostly deploy songs when characters are experiencing great emotion: desire, or fear, or exhilaration. But “The End” plays with these expectations, because emotion is a tricky subject for these bunker-dwellers. Yes, they sing lyrical songs with great swelling orchestral harmonies, and sometimes they dance. (Oppenheimer wrote the lyrics, with music by Joshua Schmidt and score by Schmidt and Marius de Vries.) But in between smiles, their faces slip into mask-like panic, with eyes that are dead. Oppenheimer modulates the lighting during the scenes from cool to warm and back again, underlining the vacillating feelings they can’t acknowledge outright.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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      When a Baby Killer Isn’t a Straightforward Villain

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      The real-life murderer who inspired “The Girl With the Needle” was “a monster,” said the actress who plays her, “but the movie is also about showing you her struggles.”In 1920s Copenhagen, a woman named Dagmar Overbye was convicted of murdering multiple infants whose mothers had paid her to find adoptive families for them. She confessed to killing 16 babies, though the true number of victims was likely higher.One of Denmark’s most notorious serial killers, Overbye is a character in the movie “The Girl with the Needle,” which arrives in U.S. theaters on Friday and is Denmark’s entry for the best international feature Oscar.Yet the film isn’t a true-crime thriller, and Overbye isn’t portrayed as a straightforward villain. Instead the story is about “finding the humanity in these horrible deeds,” the film’s director, Magnus von Horn, said in a video interview — a tall task considering the deeds involve burning, drowning and strangling babies.How to perform the high-wire act of humanizing a killer?“You focus on the characters,” von Horn said.And you have to cast actors fearless enough to pull it off.Enter Trine Dyrholm and Vic Carmen Sonne, the two leads in “The Girl with the Needle,” and two of Denmark’s most boundary-pushing actors.The movie is based on the story of Dagmar Overbye, one of Denmark’s most notorious serial killers.MubiWe 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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      New Movies and Shows Coming to Netflix in December: ‘Squid Game’ and More

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      This month has a ton of new titles arriving for U.S. subscribers, including a Nate Bargatze special and the return of “Squid Game.”Every month, Netflix adds movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for some of December’s most promising new titles for U.S. subscribers. (Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)‘Black Doves’ Season 1Starts streaming: Dec. 5Created by Joe Barton (known for the stylish series “Giri/Haji” and “The Lazarus Project”), this twisty thriller has Keira Knightley playing Helen, a secret agent so deeply undercover that she is married to the British politician she is spying on — and is the mother to his children. When Jason (Andrew Koji), a man Helen was having an affair with, is very publicly assassinated by London mobsters, Helen’s boss, Reed (Sarah Lancashire), and her close colleague Sam (Ben Whishaw) try to keep the investigation into the murder from reaching back to her and blowing her cover. “Black Doves” is set in a pulp fiction version of England where everyone is hiding something and no one fully trusts anybody — a place where information is currency and people survive on guile.‘Maria’Starts streaming: Dec. 11The third film in the director Pablo Larraín’s trilogy of biopics (after “Jackie” and “Spencer”), “Maria” is a showcase for Angelina Jolie, who plays the opera diva Maria Callas. Set during the final week of the singer’s life, the movie has Callas in a druggie stupor, imagining that she is sitting for an interview in which she reflects on her tumultuous life. Jolie reportedly spent months in opera training, not to learn how to copy Callas’s voice but rather to make sure she could stand, move and breathe like a master.‘No Good Deed’ Season 1Starts streaming: Dec. 12At the start of this dark dramedy, a Los Angeles couple, Paul (Ray Romano) and Lydia (Lisa Kudrow), are anxious to sell their house: a beautiful, century-old home in an upscale neighborhood. A handful of motivated buyers, played by Luke Wilson, Linda Cardellini, Teyonah Parris, O-T Fagbenle, Abbi Jacobson and Poppy Liu, circle the property while Paul and Lydia try to hide their secret reasons for the sale — and their relationship with a dangerous ex-con played by Denis Leary. Similar to the creator Liz Feldman’s previous Netflix series, “Dead to Me,” “No Good Deed” is about people who seem outwardly to be enjoying some material success but whose personal lives are in shambles; privately, they all feel they’re on the brink of disaster.‘Your Friend, Nate Bargatze’Starts streaming: Dec. 24The stand-up comedian Nate Bargatze was popular before he hosted “Saturday Night Live” for the first time in 2023, but that episode — and a second hosting gig in October — helped boost him into comedy’s A-list. This month, Bargatze will be hosting a Christmas-themed variety show for CBS (airing on Dec. 19 and also available on Paramount+); and then on Christmas Eve, he will debut this third Netflix stand-up special. It makes sense for Bargatze to be delivering new material at a time when families are gathering and looking for something to do. He is one of the rare modern comics whose profanity-free jokes are suitable for pretty much all ages, touching on such universal topics as marriage, parenting and how to navigate the modern world’s sometimes confusing etiquette.‘Squid Game’ Season 2Starts streaming: Dec. 26The first season of the Korean mystery-thriller “Squid Game” became an unexpected international phenomenon, captivating audiences with its depiction of an elaborate tournament in a remote location in which desperate people risk their lives for a huge cash prize. As Season 2 begins, rumors about the game have begun to leak out, and several people are looking to find it — including the former players Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) and Jun-ho (Wi Ha-jun). The series’s Emmy-winning writer-director, Hwang Dong-hyuk, returns for the second of a planned three-season run, bringing back the visually spectacular and nerve-racking contests of Season 1. He also adds more social commentary, examining the brokenness of a world, very much like our own, where such a deadly underground competition could exist.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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      ‘Our Little Secret’ and More New Holiday Movies to Stream

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      From “Our Little Secret” to “The Merry Gentlemen,” a roundup of several holiday movies to stream this season.“It’s the most wonderful time of the year,” the song goes. “There’ll be parties for hosting/Billions of movies for bingeing.”If the Andy Williams chestnut doesn’t actually mention streaming, that’s only because it came out long before Hallmark, UPtv, Great American Family and Lifetime decided to flood the holidays with movies. But because time is a finite resource, the following selection of new seasonal offerings focuses on releases from the major platforms. And remember: If you see someone stranded in a blizzard once, it’s a plot development. If you see it 10 times, it’s a cliché. If you see it 50 times, it’s a holiday-movie convention — and this time of year, we love conventions.‘Dear Santa’Stream it on Paramount+.This year’s entry in the bad Santa subgenre goes all out. And that’s because the bearded, stocky guy in a red outfit is actually Satan (Jack Black). He has been summoned by young Liam (Robert Timothy Smith), who mistakenly switched two letters in his note to Santa. And now the devil won’t leave until Liam has requested three wishes, which sounds more straightforward than it turns out to be. “Dear Satan” does not fully deliver on this mouthwatering premise, which is surprising considering the movie is directed by a Farrelly brother (Bobby) and the casting is on point — you feel Black has waited all his life to play this part. Still, there are enough nuts for this fruitcake to go down easy.Watch for: gastrointestinal distress.‘Hot Frosty’Stream it on Netflix.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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      Is the Awkward ‘Diversity Era’ of Hollywood Behind Us?

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      The past decade’s clumsiest attempts to cram new faces into old stories now feel like a moment, and a genre, of their own.Hollywood has its eras, often apparent only in retrospect. Think back several years: Do you remember packed theaters giving Black-power salutes at screenings of “Black Panther”? Do you remember when an all-female version of “Ghostbusters” was treated as a pioneering development? Do you remember when the writer of a “Star Wars” film described the Empire as a “white supremacist (human) organization” after Donald Trump’s 2016 election? Has enough time now passed to say that was all a bit strange?Looking back, you can see a period when identitarian politics were in cultural ascendancy; you can spot the moments when our media overlords — on their back feet over rage at the crimes of Harvey Weinstein, the paucity of nonwhite nominees at the Oscars, the aftermath of George Floyd’s death — vowed to change their ways and atone for their past. But what was particular to the Hollywood of the 2010s was the way these politics fused with the industry’s insatiable demand for sequels, spinoffs and reboots, giving us a curious and mercenary new invention: the inclusive multimillion-dollar blockbuster. (The BIPOCbuster, if you will.) It’s the same old thing, but with a bold and visionary new twist: fewer white guys.Or at least it was. The moment is easier to see now that it has ebbed. Many of the films it produced seemed to imagine themselves as barrier-breaking productions, landmarks like “In the Heat of the Night.” In reality, they have come to feel more like a niche genre of their own, the way spaghetti westerns or blaxploitation films do — unique products of a particular cultural moment that now require context and explanation to understand. They remind me, more than anything, of 1980s action flicks, a genre whose tropes and ideologies feel almost comically redolent of a specific era, whether the films are good or so-bad-they’re-good. This was the decade of Sylvester Stallone’s going back to Vietnam to try to win the war for Reagan’s America in “Rambo: First Blood Part II,” the decade of flat-topped martial-arts commandos, good cops who don’t play by the rules, gunshots that make cars explode, brawny henchmen machine-gunned by the dozens. But by the time we reached the 1993 meta-action-comedy “Last Action Hero” — an irony-laden genre sendup in which a boy magically gets to become the sidekick to a fictional hero played by Arnold Schwarzenegger — you could hear the death knell of the kinds of films Schwarzenegger and Stallone and Jean-Claude Van Damme had been making for years.Is that what watching “Barbie” might feel like in 10 years — once, perhaps, “the patriarchy” feels like a clearly of-the-moment choice for a Big Bad? The tropes of this passing era are as familiar and easily spotted as with older periods. There is, for one thing, the showy, self-satisfied gender-swapping, as with that 2016 election-year reboot of “Ghostbusters.” That movie prompted enough openly misogynistic and racist backlash to make it look as if it must be a noble endeavor — as if any Hollywood executives who got reactionaries frothing at the mouth must be accomplishing something important, even if all they did was tweak the balance of characters in a dusty franchise.Hollywood was right that audiences were hungry for different stories.Then there are the paper-thin “diverse” characters parachuted into major films — put front and center on every poster but given curiously little to do as the plot unfolds. Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel was set up as the most powerful superhero in the Marvel universe but ended up playing no decisive role in its most important films. (She was later joined by a Black woman and a Muslim woman in the sequel “The Marvels,” another in a series of firsts, but still a throwaway film.) Many attempts to diversify old intellectual property only emphasized how awkward and unwelcoming those worlds were to the kinds of people they wanted to include: The characters could do nothing to change the old logic of the stories they were dropped into.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