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      ‘Barbenheimer’ and a Film Critic’s Perspective, in Review

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      Manohla Dargis, the chief film critic for The New York Times, shares her thoughts on the movie event of the year and an industry still reeling from the pandemic.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.Manohla Dargis’s notebooks are full of illegible words and phrases.The chief film critic for The New York Times, Ms. Dargis takes note of memorable scenes while watching films she intends to review. In the darkness of a movie theater, her notes are rarely coherent, she admits, and distractions are inevitable.“Every so often when I’m watching a film, my pen drifts onto my shirt and I ruin it,” she said. “This is one of the great tragedies of being a movie critic.”This week, Ms. Dargis reviewed two much-talked-about movies new to theaters, “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” — nicknamed the “Barbenheimer” movie event of the year on the internet.This highly anticipated film pairing comes at a fractious time for the American film industry, as 160,000 actors represented by SAG-AFTRA went on strike last week. They joined the thousands of television and film screenwriters already on the picket line over issues including pay and the use of artificial intelligence in creative capacities. The strikes have brought Hollywood productions largely to a standstill.In an interview, Ms. Dargis shared her thoughts on the industry’s recovery from the pandemic and what the strikes may bode for the imminent future of film. This interview has been edited.How does one begin to cover two of the most highly anticipated movies of the year?I’ve been at The New York Times for about 20 years, so I’ve experienced similar moments when two huge movies open on top of each other. Around Christmas time, movie studios release their big, so-called prestige movies, for example.I try to avoid reading about the movies before I write about them, but I do background research. I just want to have my own experience with a movie and know that a review is made up of my thoughts.How do you decide which films to write about?I try to find a balance that works for readers and what they expect from a film critic. I also have to be interested in the film. I reviewed an array of movies the other week, like the new “Mission Impossible,” a big studio movie, and “Earth Mama,” a smaller independent film.That week in some ways represents my ideal mix, where I’m really covering the field. I think if you only cover the spectacle blockbusters, you’re really missing out on the splendor of cinema.Can you take me through your review process?I try to see movies about a week in advance of their release date. I go to screenings; some are called all media screenings, where there are several hundred people in a big room at a commercial movie theater or at a movie studio. There are also smaller private screening rooms scattered across Los Angeles, where I live. I like seeing movies with other people. There’s something very special about the kind of energy that you have from being with others, particularly when you’re watching a comedy or horror movie and there’s a crowd dynamic.I always bring a notepad and a pen and write in the dark. Writing helps me remember things later because I try to absorb as much as possible while watching a film.You wrote in January about your optimism about women in film amid a range of movies centered on female characters. Are there other trends you are seeing in film right now?I mentioned that I reviewed a film called “Earth Mama” by a woman named Savanah Leaf; it’s her first feature film. It’s exciting to me that she’s one of a number of Black women filmmakers. We’re nowhere near where it needs to be, but there is a diversity of women who are making movies.Has there ever been moment like this in the movie industry?One of the funny things about the American movie industry is that it has lurched from crisis to crisis over time. Part of my optimism and hope is hanging onto the idea that the industry has managed to survive its transition to movies with sound, for example. Then TV came along and everyone thought it was the end. And then the internet happened.The American movie industry is built on crises. Right now, the streaming bubble has passed. We don’t know what happens next. That’s my greatest concern.Which film did you screen first, “Barbie” or “Oppenheimer?’I saw “Barbie” first; I saw them a few days apart, so I could be in the right head space. “Barbie” is enjoyable, but it didn’t linger with me. It wasn’t something where I came back home and said to my husband, “I just need to talk about ‘Barbie’ and its deep impression on me,” because it didn’t have one. I enjoyed it and then I had to figure out how to write about it.After a heavy film like “Oppenheimer,” do you need a film palate cleanser? How do you come down?Right after a movie, I often don’t want to talk to anyone about it. Except maybe my husband. When you leave a movie that really affects you, you’re still in the bubble of the movie for a while. That can be a joyous experience sometimes. I remember seeing a “Fast and Furious” movie and really enjoying it. But I also remember driving home a little too fast that night.A film like “Oppenheimer” — a smart, thoughtful movie talking about profound issues of great philosophical meaning — is pretty damn special. Even though I was shocked by the movie, I was happy to say that the film made me think about life. I am grateful for that experience. More

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      AMC Theater Chain to Stop Charging for Better Seats

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      The contentious initiative will be abandoned next month, though the company will roll out a new one involving lounge-style seating in the front rows.AMC is abandoning plans to charge more for movie seats depending on their location. But higher prices for center-middle seats at theaters where AMC has been testing the concept will remain in effect this weekend, when “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” are expected to draw significant crowds.AMC Entertainment, the world’s largest theater chain, said on Thursday that it would “pivot away” from a contentious initiative called Sightline, in which seats at evening screenings had three tiers of pricing, ending the long-held cinema custom of charging the same amount for any seat in a theater. (Discounts of $1 to $2 were offered for the neck-craning front row, increases of $1 to $2 for the center-middle and the status quo for the rest.)The concept was rolled out in March at theaters in New York, Illinois and Kansas to howls of protest from some moviegoers. AMC always labeled it as a test.The experiment will end sometime in August, an AMC spokesman said. But the company plans to start a new trial involving front-row seats, which often go unsold. Later this year, AMC said it would pull out traditional front-row seats and replace them with “large, comfortable, lounge-style seating areas that will allow guests to lay all the way back.”AMC and other theater chains, after steadily raising prices at their concession stands, have started to focus more intently on seats for revenue growth. Increasingly, for instance, multiplexes have been pushing customers toward premium-priced tickets for screenings that feature extra-extra-large screens or enhanced sound systems.Adding to the pressure, attendance has still not recovered from the early pandemic, when many theaters were closed for months. So far this year, ticket sales are running roughly 20 percent behind the same period in 2019.AMC said Sightline did not pan out as it had hoped. In particular, the company saw “little or no incremental lift in front-row attendance, even with a price reduction applied to those seats.” About three out of every four customers who previously sat in center-middle seats paid the surcharge to continue doing so, AMC said. Some of those people moved to other seats. A small percentage stopped buying tickets at AMC.Notably, competitors did not follow AMC in re-pricing seats, making the company less competitive in the test markets.AMC’s plans to stop the initiative were reported earlier by Bloomberg News. More

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      ‘Bawaal’ Review: Getting Some Perspective

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      In this Bollywood production, a narcissistic history teacher reconnects with his wife on a trip through Europe.“Bawaal” is a sensationally absurd Bollywood production that tells a simple moral story about what it means to be a Real Man. Directed by Nitesh Tiwari (“Dangal”), this globe-trotting romance is, like many Bollywood movies, willfully over the top. But this one’s not very fun.Ajay (Varun Dhawan), a grade-school history teacher, is only interested in one thing: looking good. Impeccably groomed and chiseled, he doesn’t seem to care that his students aren’t learning, nor that his wife, Nisha (Janhvi Kapoor), is desperately unhappy.Ajay keeps Nisha out of sight and at home with his parents — she has epilepsy, and he fears tarnishing his image should she have a seizure in public. When Ajay is suspended from work for slapping a student, he cooks up a scheme to prove his pedagogical worth. He heads to Europe, where he delivers video lectures from various historical sites to his students back home in small-town India.Nisha tags along, despite Ajay’s protests, and proves herself, too. In Europe, she’s much more capable — and, of course, more beautiful — than Ajay had cared to realize, while he, in sleepy comic-relief segments, suffers through travel’s minor hardships: lost luggage, pickpockets and a dastardly exchange rate.Ajay becomes more compassionate with each leg of the trip. Monochrome fantasy sequences plunge him and Nisha into battle on the shores of Normandy; in another, they’re victims inside an Auschwitz gas chamber. It’s an egregious metaphor for the dire state of their relationship, and one of the film’s many unearned pivots to high drama.Dhawan (too convincing a narcissist to pull off a change of heart) and Kapoor (devoid of charisma) don’t have chemistry, and you’re never truly rooting for Ajay so much as you’re hoping Nisha makes a run for it. The film’s macho, save-the-marriage traditionalism will seem icky to some viewers — especially because, absent genuine laughs or stakes, there’s little else to take in.BawaalNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 17 minutes. Watch on Prime Video. More

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      ‘Fear the Night’ Review: Party Raid

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      Neil LaBute’s new thriller, starring Maggie Q, feels stapled together from a pile of threadbare tropes.One rarely roots for the bad guys in a home-invasion shocker, but, as the majority of the victims in Neil LaBute’s “Fear the Night” are either insufferably stupid or gratingly snippy, their survival is perhaps not the priority it ought to be.In any event, most of them will be slaughtered before we can tell them apart in a movie that appears not so much written by LaBute as stapled together from a pile of threadbare thriller tropes. The plot could fit on a pistol barrel (or, in this case, an arrowhead): Eight women descend on a remote farmhouse for a bachelorette party, only to find their stripper-and-sex-toy revelries interrupted by leering louts who favor artisanal over mechanical weaponry. Bloody chaos ensues as the ladies bemoan their inability to sprint in high heels and struggle to memorize a three-count knock signal that differentiates friend from foe.“What is happening to us?” one distraught partygoer inquires, echoing my bewilderment. Like her cohort, she will turn hopefully — and, in the case of Mia (Gia Crovatin), longingly — to the one guest that no one else seems to like: Tess (a valiant Maggie Q), a super-serious military veteran and recovering addict. Tess has suffered. Tess has seen things. Tess will use her very particular skills to rally these nitwits or die trying.Pausing mid-murders to allow for a touching reconciliation and a romantic confession (not the time, Mia!), the back-of-napkin script stumbles forward. As for LaBute, a once incisive chronicler of male cruelty and ineptitude, his continued dabblings in genre are lamentable. Perhaps the kindest thing to do is pretend this dud never happened; it certainly worked for the Farrelly brothers’ “Dumb and Dumber To.”Fear the NightNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘The Venture Bros.: Radiant Is the Blood of the Baboon Heart’ Review: Return of the Glorious Weirdos

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      A beloved Adult Swim cartoon comes back to tie up some loose ends.Over seven seasons on Adult Swim, the Cartoon Network’s nighttime programming block, “The Venture Bros.” brought to the small screen a fantastical world steeped in absurdist humor, rooted in pop culture and presented in the style of old-time cartoon adventures. Within this exemplar of animated brain candy dwelled a host of glorious weirdos: chief among them, Dr. Thaddeus Venture (voiced by James Urbaniak), a man-child flailing in his superscientist father’s shadow; his goofy, fatality-prone sons, Hank (Chris McCulloch, a.k.a. Jackson Publick) and Dean (Michael Sinterniklaas), whose demises were easily remedied by a basement full of clones; their sex-and-death-machine bodyguard, Brock Samson (Patrick Warburton); and Dr. Venture’s equally petulant frenemesis, the Monarch (Publick), and his gravelly-voiced bombshell wife, Dr. Mrs. the Monarch (Doc Hammer).When the series was unexpectedly canceled in 2020, its creators, Hammer and Publick, told NPR they hoped to bring the gang back to the screen at least one more time, a wish fulfilled by “Radiant Is the Blood of the Baboon Heart.” The film, directed by Publick, picks up where the show left off: with Hank embarking on a dissociative cross-country trip in search of himself and his mother; the Monarch chafing at the Guild of Calamitous Intent’s continual constraints on his mischief; Dr. Venture facing financial catastrophe yet again; and a new villain, Mantilla (Nina Arianda), making her presence known.Hammer and Publick give fans countless Easter eggs to feast on (though the uninitiated and less-avid admirers might benefit from a recap before viewing). More important, the film sticks the landing metaphorically and literally: Toward the conclusion, the Ventures’ skyscraper is brought back to Earth after being sent moonward — a bit of madcap hilarity nicely scored by the composer JG Thirlwell. If we were never to see the Ventures again, “Radiant” lets us part with them on a high note, but hopefully this end is just the beginning.The Venture Bros.: Radiant Is the Blood of the Baboon HeartRated R for potty-mouthed heroes and villains, full-frontal pantsing and threatened kicks to the throat meat. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. Buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘They Cloned Tyrone’ Review: There’s Only One John Boyega

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      In Juel Taylor’s imaginative sci-fi movie, Boyega teams up with Jamie Foxx and Teyonah Parris to find the forces undermining their community.“They Cloned Tyrone,” an ambitious, nightmarish tale about unsettled identity, opens with an image of two blue eyes, strained at the corners. The camera pulls back, revealing the owner of those peepers to be a grinning white man on a billboard with the tagline “Keep em’ smiling.” In front of the advertisement, Black people debate possible sightings of Tupac Shakur and Michael Jackson, now allegedly disguising himself with new Black skin. The food mart, with the billboard prominently displayed by its door, is where these gossiping Black folk hold court, and is one of the many institutions that dot the neglected, fictional urban landscape its residents refer to as the Glen.The director, Juel Taylor, sees the Glen as a self-contained world where conspiracy theories are the news section and the neighborhood drunk (Leon Lamar) is a prophet. At the center of it is Fontaine (John Boyega), a multifaceted drug dealer. Whenever he buys a 40-ounce bottle of malt liquor from the food mart, he never hesitates to pour a cup for Lamar. He’ll also mercilessly ram an unsuspecting rival dealer with his car, and then later care for that enemy’s invalid mother.Fontaine’s moral compass is survival. The same can be said of the shifty pimp, Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx), who dispenses women like Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris) with the assurance they’ll always come back. While collecting a debt from Slick Charles, Fontaine is savagely gunned down by the dealer he hit earlier. Despite the shooting, Fontaine awakes the next morning unscathed. Was it a dream or something more nefarious?The first hour of “They Cloned Tyrone” is surprisingly talkative. Fontaine, Slick Charles, and Yo-Yo — shady neighborhood acquaintances — team up to investigate Fontaine’s brush with death, sharing extraneous banter that often crowds the narrative and slows the reveal. The three eventually discover a series of elevators in familiar haunts that lead to a subterranean laboratory. Taylor positions these sites as places where an outside force can easily undermine the Black community, rendering it pliant through food, religion and beauty products. You wonder, however, whether the film is portraying these spaces as necessary sites for escapist joy or scrutinizing them as crutches.Another fascinating proposition arises when a Black character utters the phrase “assimilation is better than annihilation.” The film covers issues of upward mobility, respectability politics, racial passing, and the distrust some African Americans have of institutional professionals such as the police, doctors and scientists. Taylor portrays Black self-hatred as a danger equal to these extensions of white contempt.A play on “The Truman Show” by way of “Undercover Brother,” “They Cloned Tyrone” also stands firmly on its glossy style — the evocatively smoky John Carpenter-esque cinematography and the Blaxploitation-inspired costumes — and its spirited performances. Even when the dialogue runs long and the film’s frights offer less terror than you’d want in a sci-fi-mystery flick, an inspired Foxx, a subversive Parris, and a ruthless yet melancholic Boyega, who shoulders the bulk of the dramatic weight, retrofit common stereotypes of urban Black life into the rich, dynamic humanism of its reality.They Cloned TyroneRated R for profanity and nude body doubles. Running time: 2 hours, 2 minutes. Watch on Netflix or in theaters. More

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      ‘Streetwise’ Review: A Bleak Upbringing in a Brutal Town

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      In Na Jiazuo’s striking directorial debut, young people inhabit a place seemingly made up of those who owe money and the thugs who try to beat it out of them.This consistently striking and deeply sad picture is the directorial feature debut of Na Jiazuo, who executes it with an assurance that makes him more than merely promising. The story is set in 2004, in a town within China’s Sichuan Province where not much is going on, it seems, besides criminality and tattooing. Oh, yes, the local hospital is pretty busy, too.Li Jiuxiao plays Dongzi, a fresh-faced young man who’s busting his hump trying to pay off his ailing father’s medical bills — that is, engaging in illegal debt collection for a local boss. His buddy Jiu (Yu Ailei), who limps around with a wannabe movie star swagger, instructs Dongzi on how to slap around those who won’t cough up money: Don’t hit them in the face; strike in a way that won’t let them strike back, like on the knee. When Dongzi gets a bloody nose in a dust-up, Jiu plugs up his pal’s nostril with a cigarette butt.The tough but tender tattoo-shop manager Jiu’er (Huang Miyi) is a source of solace for Dongzi, but strictly platonic — she’s the boss’s ex, for one thing. Dongzi’s father is a piece of work who storms into gambling dens while he’s still in hospital pajamas. After knocking his son down, he’ll kick him for good measure.It’s a bleak life. Jiazuo depicts it with a steady camera that sometimes breaks from the action to show quietly startling sights: a close-up of a pale snail crawling on a greenish-blue railing of high-rise balcony; a palm plant swaying in the orange evening light, then looking ready to wilt in the gray morning; Jiu’er as seen in Dongzi’s mind’s eye (we presume), placid and beautiful. The perspectives here put this picture in a different dimension from the average coming-of-age-in-crime movie.StreetwiseNot rated. In Mandarin, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Return to Dust’ Review: Grit Against All Odds

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      Li Ruijun’s newest feature is a touching portrait of love and resiliency that doubles as a critique of China’s ruling class.According to reliable news reports, the Chinese government never confirmed having banned Li Ruijun’s quietly heartbreaking feature “Return to Dust,” a touching portrait of love and resiliency in a collapsing rural community of Gansu Province.Still, the film was pulled last fall from all Chinese movie theaters and streaming services two weeks after a successful domestic debut. It isn’t hard to see why. China’s leadership has a history of suppressing art that spotlights the failings of its ruling class and ideology, which is exactly what Li’s film does, with a script that feels only occasionally overwritten. That he succeeds without making it feel like homework — which is to say beautifully, humanely — is presumably what made the film so threatening.With superb performances by Wu Renlin and Hai Qing, “Dust” tells the story of Youtie and Guiying, middle-aged strangers pushed into an arranged marriage by families looking mostly to offload them. Youtie is a dirt-poor farmer living in a crumbling mud-brick home on the cold, arid hem of the Gobi Desert, effectively indentured to his brother and a local merchant. Guiying has a chronic illness. Her hands tremble, and she can’t control her bladder; whether her problems or her family’s abuse came first is unclear.As their awkward union evolves into one of genuine trust and affection, their fortunes, if not their long-suffering donkey’s, improve. Their methods are backbreaking, ancient and dusty but also dignified — rendered with golden, poetic sensitivity by the cinematographer Wang Weihua.Unfortunately, we’ve seen enough movies to know what that worsening tremble bodes and what kind of story that donkey is there to observe. Unless he’s friends with Shrek, it probably isn’t comedy.Return to DustNot rated. In Mandarin, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 11 minutes. In theaters. More