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      ‘Havoc’ Review: Tom Hardy Is Primed for a Fight

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      Tom Hardy is a crooked cop looking to make amends in Gareth Evans’s action-packed film.Brimming with action archetypes — the grizzled hero, the upstart deputy, renegade police, a crooked politician and young lovers on the run — the writer-director Gareth Evans’s gritty crime movie “Havoc” makes it hard to find anyone in it who feels like a real person.The clichés commence with Walker (Tom Hardy), a sadder, more deflated John McClane type estranged from his wife and daughter at Christmastime. In the film’s opening, Walker, speaking with a low grumble similar to the one Hardy uses for playing Venom, laments his unscrupulous life. “You live in this world, you make choices,” he says. “And for a while it works. Until you make a choice that renders you worthless.”A cop-turned-fixer for the mayoral candidate Lawrence Beaumont (Forest Whitaker), Walker is called into service when Beaumont’s troubled son, Charlie (Justin Cornwell), and his girlfriend, Mia (Quelin Sepulveda), are implicated in a high-speed chase that put a cop in the hospital. They’re also tied to the murder of a high-ranking Yakuza gangster. Beaumont needs Walker to retrieve Charlie before vindictive cops like Vincent (Timothy Olyphant) or the vengeful mother (Yeo Yann Yann) of the slain hoodlum find him. In return, Beaumont will release Walker from any further debts.Following the one-last-job path, “Havoc” offers few surprises, taking nearly an hour to map its huge web of characters. In the meantime, Walker leans on paid informants and his upstart partner, Ellie (Jessie Mei Li), to provide him with witnesses, such as Mia’s resourceful uncle (a scene-stealing Luis Guzmán). The gritty rendering of this crime-riddled city, aesthetically recalling “Sin City,” but in color, provides some additional background stimulation. Still, “Havoc” is mostly shifting around characters to bide time until its gory set pieces.Because what “Havoc” lacks in characters and story, it delivers in two audacious waves of indiscriminate killing that are so bruising and relentless they make the “John Wick” movies look like “Sesame Street.” In the first blood-soaked brawl, Walker finds Mia and Charlie at a club. Unfortunately, so do Vincent and the Japanese gangsters. The four parties collide. With his background as an action choreographer, Evans, who directed the “Raid” films, can artfully craft long elaborate action while maintaining coherency. Walker swings a metal pipe, Mia (Sepulveda’s physicality is impressive) wields a cleaver and others blanket the neon-lit party space with bursts of gunfire.The film’s final skirmish, this time with Walker, Charlie and Mia holed up in a woodland cabin, is equally exhilarating. There are goons crashing through windows and coming up through the floorboards, harpoons and hooks used as weapons. Whip pans instill some moments with a crazed franticness, while slow motion in other instances gives the vicious violence an intoxicating glow. Though the characters in “Havoc” are forgettable, the carnage is gripping.HavocNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      Masahiro Shinoda, Leading Light of Japan’s New Wave Cinema, Dies at 94

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      His films tapped into the fantasies of disgruntled youth by embracing brazen sexuality and countercultural politics. But unlike his peers, he did not shun tradition.Masahiro Shinoda, a leading director of the postwar Japanese New Wave whose films, notably “Pale Flower” and “Double Suicide,” fused pictorial beauty and fetishistic violence, died on March 25. He was 94.His production company, Hyogensha, said in a statement that the cause was pneumonia. It did not say where he died.In the 1960s and ’70s, Japanese New Wave cinema, like its French predecessor, tapped into the fantasies of disgruntled youth by embracing brazen sexuality and countercultural politics, with a tinge of nihilism. But unlike his peers, Mr. Shinoda refused to shun tradition. Instead, he used feudal-era theatrical forms like Noh, Bunraku and Kabuki to recount how cycles of violence have persisted since imperial Japan. His films were wrought with poetic imagery — hooded puppeteers, striking femmes fatales (including his wife, the actress Shima Iwashita) — but for all their sensuality, they espoused the idea that nothing really matters.“Culture is nothing but the expression of violence,” Mr. Shinoda said in an interview with Joan Mellen for her book “Voices From the Japanese Cinema” (1975), adding that “human tenderness is unthinkable without violence.”From left, Ryo Ikebe, Mariko Kaga and Takashi Fujiki in “Pale Flower” (1964), Mr. Shinoda’s best-known film.ShochikuWe 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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      A New Requirement for Oscar Voters: They Must Actually Watch the Films

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      The new rule, announced this week by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, was greeted with laughter and disbelief that it had not been required all along.It has not always been necessary to read the book in order to write a book report, as many a devious middle schooler familiar with CliffsNotes or A.I. can attest. And it turns out that Oscar voters have not always had to watch all the films they passed judgment on.But now the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is trying to change that.The academy announced a new rule this week that most filmgoers could be forgiven for assuming was already in place: From now on, members of the academy will be required to actually watch all the nominated films in each category they vote in.Cue the collective side eye.“Like ‘Casablanca,’ I am shocked, shocked to discover that there are academy members who don’t watch all the movies,” said Bruce Vilanch, a comedian who has written for 25 Oscar shows, who added that the new rule was “kind of hysterical.”Skyler Higley, a comedy writer who was on Conan O’Brien’s writing team when he hosted the Oscars last month, called the new requirement “un-American.”“What we do in this country is we sort of vote based on vibes and preferences and biases,” he said. “So to suddenly require that these guys know what they’re talking about when they’re voting, it’s just not what we do in this nation.”Doug Benson, a stand-up comedian and host of the podcast “Doug Loves Movies,” said the rule was “crazy” because most voters were too busy making movies to watch them. “This sucks for academy members,” he said. “But the upside for moviegoers? Maybe award-bait movies will start clocking in at a more reasonable 88 minutes. If they implemented the rule this year, ‘The Brutalist’ would have won squat.”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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      ‘Until Dawn’ Review: They Keep Dying, You’ll Keep Shrugging

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      Based on a video game, this movie is done in by mediocre monsters and muddled time loops.Watching someone play a video game that they never let you play is a singular kind of boring. A similar “why am I here?” dullness arrives early and stays late in “Until Dawn,” the new supernatural slasher film based on the popular horror video game of the same name.The game, about the eerie goings-on that happen after sisters go missing from a remote mountain resort, is played in a choose-your-own-adventure style. With interactivity off the table, the film relies on a traditional slasher formula: Clover (Ella Rubin) and a group of her friends make the terrible decision to visit a remote valley’s welcome center seeking answers about the strange disappearance of Clover’s sister.Inside, a masked killer starts slaughtering the characters one by one. But here’s the “Happy Death Day”-style twist: Each night the characters’ lives, and deaths, get reset by an hourglass clock. It turns out there’s a deus ex machina madman at work in this uncanny valley, and as part of his diabolical project to learn more about the mechanics of fear, he reboots days and forces his victims to survive (they don’t) until (you guessed it) dawn.The director, David F. Sandberg (“Annabelle: Creation”) does an exhausting job moving along a script, written by Gary Dauberman and Blair Butler, that’s made slack by mediocre monsters, muddled time loop stuff and underdeveloped characters who seem straight out of a lesser “Goosebumps” episode. The spectacular and repulsively funny deaths by spontaneous combustion deserve their own, better movie.Until DawnRated R for face bashing, gut busting and exploding torso jump scares. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Magic Farm’ Review: A Droll Delight

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      Amalia Ulman’s playful second feature follows an American television crew that lands in rural Argentina.A New York City documentary crew sets up shop in rural Argentina in “Magic Farm,” an Americans-abroad satire that teeters between pop treat and indie trifle. It is the second feature from the writer, director and actress Amalia Ulman (“El Planeta”), who across her work shows a knack for droll humor, a soft spot for pretenders and a penchant for play.The story follows Justin (Joe Apollonio) and Elena (Ulman), crew members hoping to salvage a TV segment about quirky subcultures after a gaffe lands them in the wrong country. In the movie, Ulman makes use of a more famous cast — including Chloë Sevigny as a vexed TV anchor — although it is the film’s lesser-known actors who stand out. Apollonio, as a man-child with a crush, is a wry delight, as is the newcomer Camila del Campo, who plays a pouting local coquette.Ingeniously simmering under the folly is a health crisis that has afflicted the agricultural area for decades. This is the film’s joke: If the crew could only get their heads out of their rears, they would uncover a gonzo documentary gold mine.At points, “Magic Farm” idles so heavily that one wonders whether Ulman suffered her own preproduction blunder, stranding her cast and crew in South America without the material to back up her vision. But by pairing the loose subject matter with a curlicued visual style — at one point, she straps the camera to a dog’s head — Ulman suggests that she knows what she’s doing.Magic FarmNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Dea Kulumbegashvili’s ‘April’ Wont Be Shown in Georgia

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      The director Dea Kulumbegashvili’s new movie, “April,” shines a light on the complicated situation for women seeking abortions in Georgia.Dea Kulumbegashvili may be the most celebrated filmmaker to emerge in the past decade from Georgia, a nation of about 3.6 million people that was once part of the Soviet Union. Her debut, “Beginning” (2020), was her country’s submission for the best international feature Oscar in 2021, and her latest, “April,” which opens in U.S. theaters on Friday, won the special jury prize at the 2024 Venice Film Festival.Yet Kulumbegashvili, who lives in Berlin, doesn’t feel particularly welcome back home.“April,” which follows an obstetrician who performs abortions illegally, has not been screened in Georgia. “It has no distribution potential because no one wants to deal with something that would cause a problem with the authorities,” Kulumbegashvili said in a video interview. Though abortion is legal in Georgia for pregnancies under 12 weeks, the reality for women — especially those living outside the major cities — is complicated. A vast majority of Georgians are Orthodox Christians, and traditional ideas about gender roles and domesticity hold sway in most families.The film was “essentially shot in secret,” Kulumbegashvili said. She did not seek domestic funding, instead relying on her producers — who included Luca Guadagnino, the Italian director of “Challengers” and “Call Me by Your Name” — to raise money from international sources.Kulumbegashvili’s grew up in Lagodekhi, a small town at the foot of the Caucasus Mountains, near the border with Azerbaijan; both “Beginning” and “April” were shot there. Underage marriage is a continuing issue in the town, Kulumbegashvili said — as it is in the rest of the country. Ia Sukhitashvili as Nina, an obstetrician who performs illegal abortions, in “April.”Metrograph PicturesWe 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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      ‘On Swift Horses’ Review: Putting It All on the Line

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      Daisy Edgar-Jones and Jacob Elordi lead a melancholic drama about love and longing in the 1950s.Often the movies treat love and desire as if they’re easy to define: romantic, platonic, familial, sexual. Either you want him or you don’t; either you love her or you don’t. But the messy places in between those poles are where real life lies, and that’s where “On Swift Horses” dwells. Based on Shannon Pufahl’s 2019 novel, the story is set in the 1950s, in a world in which characters might act on desire but do not really speak of it directly. The air around them is thus charged with something that crackles and explodes, and the movie, when it works, is electric.It doesn’t always work, but you won’t mind that much, because it’s so beautiful to look at. The story centers on Muriel (Daisy Edgar-Jones), who is engaged to Lee (Will Poulter), a soldier who’s on leave from his tour of duty in Korea. We meet them in bed at the Kansas house she inherited from her mother, whose voracious hunger for life and experience set an example that Muriel yearns to follow.Within the first few moments of the film, Muriel repairs to the bathroom in a filmy nightgown for a postcoital cigarette and, leaning out her bathroom’s second-story window, discovers the long body and smiling face of Julius (Jacob Elordi) sprawled across the hood of his car below, brazenly shirtless, soaking in the sun. If you thought this was going to be a buttoned-up and modest film, think again: The director Daniel Minahan has no compunction about the fact we’re here to admire these people. The two spark, exchanging cigarettes and repartee, with the ease of strangers who nonetheless know each other. Julius is Lee’s brother, already discharged from his own tour in Korea, and Muriel has been expecting him.Julius soon comes inside and spends the evening with Lee and Muriel, and that’s the genesis of everything that follows. It’s a tangled kind of story: Lee worships Muriel and longs for a house, a family, a life. Muriel loves Lee back, but maybe in a different way, something that starts to become evident when they move to California and she meets their neighbor, Sandra (Sasha Calle).Yet she also senses an instant connection with Julius, who soon takes off for Las Vegas and a job in a casino. Julius is a gambler, both the literal and metaphorical kind; he inspires Muriel to try betting on horses soon after she and Lee move to California. He falls into a relationship with another casino employee, Henry (Diego Calva), but they dare not let that fact outside the room they share.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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      ‘Blue Sun Palace’ Review: A Whole World Inside

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      A gorgeously intimate debut feature explores the lives of Chinese immigrants in a massage parlor in Queens.The first scene of “Blue Sun Palace” lingers on a couple at dinner, eating a mouthwatering chicken, speaking Mandarin to one another. The man seems older than the woman. They’re on a date, but you can tell something is a little off — like this relationship is very new, or there’s some unresolved power dynamic.It’s not until after dinner, and a subsequent trip to a karaoke bar, that the pieces of Constance Tsang’s sensitive, lovely and ultimately devastating first feature fall into place. The man is Cheung (Lee Kang Sheng), a married Taiwanese migrant who is working a menial job and sending money back to his wife, his daughter and his mother. The woman is Didi (Haipeng Xu), who works in a massage parlor in Flushing, Queens — the Blue Sun Palace — which officially doesn’t provide any “sexual services” but is frequented by a series of men, most of them white, looking for just that. Didi and Cheung, however, have a different kind of relationship, one built partly on companionship, and she sneaks him into Blue Sun Palace to spend the night.But Didi’s closest friend is another of the Blue Sun Palace employees, Amy (Ke-Xi Wu). Tsang’s film starts out like a chronicle of workplace friendship, albeit an unusual workplace. Amy and Didi hang out on the staircase in their building, eating lunch and sharing dreams and plotting toward the day they’ll head to Baltimore, where Didi’s daughter lives with her aunt, and open a restaurant together. Wu and Xu’s performances are light and full of life, two women who are making the best of a situation that isn’t ideal but certainly could be worse. They and their other co-workers form a network of support and joy. In these early moments, “Blue Sun Palace” feels like it could have some kinship with “Support the Girls,” both films about the community that women build together to survive a world that isn’t made for their them to thrive in. But “Blue Sun Palace” is gentler, with the cinematographer Norm Li’s camera drifting around the space, capturing the play of light or air on a curtain.This first section is a prelude. On Lunar Near Year, sudden tragedy strikes the massage parlor. It happens so abruptly, and with so little cinematic heralding, that it feels almost happenstance, the full blunt weight of the impact only landing moments later. To underline this, Tsang borrows a page from a number of other films in the recent past (perhaps most notably Ryusuke Hamaguchi in “Drive My Car”) and delays the film’s credits till 30 minutes into the movie, signaling to us where the real story has begun.It turns out this is not a tale of friendship; it’s a story of grief, and of the unexpected, fraught bonds people build in the midst of it. In the wake of violence, Amy and Cheung fall into a kind of friendship, two people brought together by mutual pain and by their shared experience as immigrants with jobs of necessity. Cheung takes her to the restaurant he took Didi, to the karaoke bar where they’d gone afterward. But Amy is not interchangeable with her friend, or any other woman, as much as the men around her might like to treat her that way.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