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      ‘Speak No Evil’ Review: He Seemed So Nice

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      In this horror remake, James McAvoy plays an aggressively friendly British stranger who extends a dubious invitation to an American couple. Suckers!Given the travel horror stories that fill the news — cruise-ship contagion, passengers trying to open plane doors mid-flight — the movies have some serious competition when it comes to fear mongering. Yet filmmakers keep trying to top reality with familiar stories about the terrors that await you when you venture into the world. Characters keep heading down dark roads. They visit weird hotels and isolated cabins (come on!), invite creeps into their homes and enter those of people they scarcely know (as if!). These travelers don’t ask for trouble; they beg for it.The first time that Louise (Mackenzie Davis) and Ben (Scoot McNairy), an American couple, really notice Paddy (an exhaustingly over-the-top James McAvoy), he’s taking a splashy leap in a pool. They’re on vacation in Tuscany and having a good time, and meeting new people is fun (unless you’re in a horror movie, that is). Paddy seems excitable, a bit over-eager — for attention, certainly — but he and his wife, Ciara (Aisling Franciosi), are friendly, attractive and British, so they’re easy to talk to. Like Louise and Ben, they have a boy, Ant (Dan Hough), so they must be nice. They’re like us, you can almost hear Louise and Ben thinking.For reasons that never make any sense — rationality is often in short supply in horror cinema — it isn’t long before Louise and Ben take up Paddy and Ciara’s invitation to visit them at their house in the English countryside. First, though, the writer-director James Watkins stirs up some marital tension for Ben and Louise, who have moved to London, upturning their lives. (Davis and McNairy starred in the great AMC show “Halt and Catch Fire,” and are persuasively cozy together.) She seems to be just fine, but Ben is unhappily unemployed, a divide that Watkins also uses to feed the story’s themes, chiefly masculinity and middle-class norms.Red alarms have already begun blinking by the time that Louise and Ben and their 11-year-old daughter, Agnes (Alix West Lefler), an anxious child who self-soothes with a stuffed bunny, pull up to Paddy and Ciara’s house one portentously dark night. Once inside, the alarms start flashing faster. Louise tries to put on a good game face, but she’s visibly put off by the house, an uncomfortable, ramshackle warren of cluttered rooms with low ceilings that boxes them in. Soon, Paddy is slaughtering a goose (uh-oh) and pushing a forkful of cooked bird at Louise — a vegetarian — and the atmosphere has appreciably soured. Things only get worse because they have to.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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      ‘My Old Ass’ Review: If She Could Turn Back Time

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      A buoyant comedy with a big heart follows a teen girl who meets her older self the summer before college.That summer before college can be strange, a moment suspended between life stages, and Elliott (Maisy Stella) is right in the thick of it. She’s turning 18 in the tiny picturesque community in Muskoka, Ontario, where her family has farmed cranberries for generations. She has a janky little motorboat, two best friends and a massive crush on the girl behind the counter at the local coffee shop. And she’s looking forward to heading to Toronto in a few short weeks to start the next chapter of her life.Sounds familiar. You might even relate. But “My Old Ass,” written and directed by Megan Park, does not go in expected coming-of-age directions. It’s as much about reframing middle-aged regrets as it is a story about youth, love and possibility — and thus the emotional heft it wields is two-pronged.Elliott belongs to a newish and very welcome variety of teen girl movie protagonist. For decades, these characters were mostly siloed into vapid types, the better for us, I guess, to “understand” them: Goths, cheerleaders, ditzes, bookish wallflowers, cool girls, bullies. Elliott, on the other hand, is funny, capable and comfortable in her own skin. She can drive a tractor and steer a boat, and also forgets to show up for her own birthday dinner with her family. She is very thoroughly 18, with as strong a sense of self as you can really have at that age, while also being kind of a jerk at times to her parents and brothers. She loves them. She just finds them kind of annoying, though she’s not above apologizing for her behavior.Elliott’s characteristics aren’t markers of being a Strong Female Lead so much as just an actual teen girl, the kind you probably know, or maybe were. I found myself thinking of various characters played by stellar young actresses in recent films: Haley Lu Richardson in “The Edge of Seventeen,” Emilia Jones in “Coda,” Lily Collias in “Good One,” Saoirse Ronan in “Lady Bird.”With this complexity in mind, it makes sense that on Elliott’s 18th birthday, she and her friends Ro (Kerrice Brooks) and Ruthie (Maddie Ziegler) decide, with age-appropriate recklessness, that it’s time to have a transcendent experience. They obtain psychedelic mushrooms and head to a little wooded island to camp out and experience their trips, whatever they might be like. Elliott is at first disappointed that the shrooms don’t seem to have any effect on her, but then the unimaginable occurs: Her older self suddenly appears at the campfire. (You see now where the film’s title comes from.) Elliott at age 39 (Aubrey Plaza) is a Ph.D. student and, perhaps relatedly, more cynical than she was as a teenager. But she seems delighted to meet her younger self, and offers a load of advice, including warnings to stay away from someone named Chad who might turn up soon. And though the mushrooms wear off, the connection between younger and older self outlasts the drugs’ effect, to both Elliotts’ surprise.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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      Film Noir Was All About Ticking Clocks and Checking the Time

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      Experts say the genre was all about suspense, and what better way to convey that to audiences than an obsession with time?The race against the clock — to solve a crime, to outwit a villain, to escape one’s fate — has propelled the plotlines of dozens of the movies that define Hollywood’s golden age of noir, the dark movies that dominated screens from the 1930s to the ’50s.“Time and film noir go together like ham and eggs,” said Alan Rode, an author and a director of the Film Noir Foundation, which sponsors Noir City, a continuing series of film festivals that this month has been scheduled in Chicago, Detroit, Washington and Philadelphia. “Time is a continuum not only of our lives, but also in film noir.”That foreboding sense of time defines film noir — in English, “dark film” — a phrase that was coined in 1938 by Lucien Rebatet, the French author who wrote under the pseudonym François Vinneuil, but is most closely associated with the French film critic Nino Frank. He used it in 1946 to define the cynical films of postwar America.The genre itself, however, has not been defined anywhere near as clearly.Some film scholars have said it describes detectives or private eyes caught up in a world of crooks and femme fatales who lead them astray. But a broader definition has been the immoral journey of a protagonist caught in downward spiral, all of it being clocked somehow in the shadowy black-and-white of film.“Film noir is replete with time moments, partly because the driving mechanism of its stories is suspense, and partly because the lost chances and missed deadlines of noir lends a strong mood of regret and pathos,” Helen Hanson, an associate professor of film history at the University of Exeter in England and the author of several books on noir, said by email.“Perhaps because film noir existed in an era defined by time and life lost during World War II, it featured a heightened sense of how quickly life can go haywire.”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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      James Earl Jones Movies: From Darth Vader in ‘Star Wars’ to Mufasa in ‘Lion King’

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      A look at standout movies featuring the actor, who died on Monday at the age of 93.James Earl Jones died on Monday at the age of 93. Like his contemporary Sidney Poitier, Jones helped change the perception of Black actors in Hollywood, creating indelible movie and TV characters who defied the prevailing stereotypes.Born in Mississippi and raised in Michigan, Jones spent much of his early career in New York, working in theater, TV and radio, where he trained his deep, booming voice. Because of his rich vocal tones and authoritative air, the actor was in high demand throughout his professional life, as both a narrator and as someone who could bring a sense of seriousness to supporting parts.The 12 movies below predominantly showcase Jones’s voice and his skills as a character actor. But the few leading roles show that if he had been given the same kind of opportunities as Poitier, Jones might have been just as big a star.‘Dr. Strangelove’ (1964)Rent on Apple TV or Amazon.Not many actors have the good fortune to make their big-screen debut in one of the greatest films of all time. Jones only appears in a handful of scenes in Stanley Kubrick’s grim nuclear war comedy “Dr. Strangelove,” but he does a lot with those few minutes, playing a bombardier whose consummate professionalism leads him to follow the orders of any crackpot commander or incompetent politician who barks in his ear.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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      Demi Moore and the Subversive Politics of the Naked Body

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      By the end of the 1990s, after years of giving her all to Hollywood and baring most of her all, too, Demi Moore began her fade-out. She had been a major film star that decade, complete with huge hits, humbling flops, famous friends, a celebrity marriage and headline-making magazine covers. Like all stars, she put in the work and sold the merch, herself included. And, like a lot of female stars, she made movies with male filmmakers who turned her into a spectacle of desire, a spectacle that she partly sought ownership of via her body.You see a lot of her body in Moore’s latest movie, “The Substance,” from the French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat. (It opens Sept. 20.) It’s a body-horror freakout that satirically takes aim at the commodification of women, and Moore is ferociously memorable in it as an actress who’s fired when she hits 50. It’s a performance that’s strong enough that you stop thinking about the fact that she’s naked in a lot of the scenes, strong enough to make you stop wondering what her exercise regime is or what work, if any, she’s had done. By the end, I admired how she had risen above the material; I also hoped she has better movies in her future.She deserves them. Her performance in “The Substance” is a gaudy, physically demonstrative role that requires her to convey a range of outsize states that dovetail with the movie’s excesses, from her character’s plasticky on-camera smiles to her private despair and boiling rage. Like some of Moore’s best-known movies, “The Substance” also requires her to shed her clothing. Even after decades of watching her perform in states of undress, it is startling to see Moore, now 61, stand naked before a mirror as the camera slowly travels across her body. There’s a near-clinical quality to how she looks at herself and, I think, a touch of defiance.Demi Moore as an actress coping with issues of aging in Hollywood in “The Substance.”MubiThe 1980s weren’t a welcoming period for women in the mainstream movie industry, yet Moore gradually succeeded in making a name for herself in between hanging with her pals in the Brat Pack and appearing in mediocre films (“St. Elmo’s Fire”) and flat-out rotten ones (“About Last Night,” ugh). Her big break came with “Ghost” (1990), a dreamy, sad romance in which she plays a dewy-eyed artist whose lover (Patrick Swayze) is murdered. Moore looked “terminally wistful much of the time” in the film, as Janet Maslin observed in The New York Times. Yet Moore also “combines toughness and delicacy most attractively,” which nicely expresses her gift for characters who often seem compelled to safeguard their vulnerabilities.“Ghost” was the top-grossing movie of the year, racked up more than a half a billion dollars at the global box office and catapulted Moore into true stardom. She followed this by starring in, as well as producing, “Mortal Thoughts” (1991), a deliciously nasty noirish drama about two working-class Jersey friends (Moore and Glenne Headly) who cover up the murder of one of their husbands, played with relish and persuasive vulgarity by Moore’s husband at the time, Bruce Willis. One of her finest movies, it gave her a chance to express her range partly because she was working with a real filmmaker, Alan Rudolph. In contrast to many of her earlier directors, he didn’t treat Moore like a sex puppet but instead helped her create a nuanced, teasingly elusive woman.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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      What’s on TV This Week: Lots of Awards Shows and the Presidential Debate

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      The VMAs, Creative Emmys and Emmy Awards are on the schedule, while ABC is hosting the first debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.For those who still enjoy a cable subscription, here is a selection of cable and network shows, movies and specials scheduled for this week, Sept. 9-15. Details and times are subject to change.MondayGREASE (1987) 8 p.m. on Paramount. “It turned colder, that’s where it ends,” the characters Danny Zu-ko and Sandy Olsson sing in their duet “Summer Nights,” expressing a sentiment appropriate to that season when summer flings end. Of course, for Danny (John Travolta) and Sandy (Olivia Newton-John) summer evolved into fall, when they serendipitously started the year at the same school, setting the stage for more teenage drama, drag races and lots of hangs at the local diner.TuesdayPRESIDENTIAL DEBATE 9 p.m. on ABC. This debate, between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, will be our first chance to see the candidates one-on-one as they discuss issues and their proposals. Hosted by ABC and moderated by Linsey Davis and David Muir, the debate is intended to be more orderly than the ones in recent election cycles. Trump and Harris (begrudgingly) agreed on a plan to mute the microphone of whoever is not actively speaking.Wednesday2024 VIDEO MUSIC AWARDS 8 p.m. on MTV. After Sabrina Carpenter released an album with songs that fans think are about Shawn Mendes and Camila Cabello, all three will be under one roof and ready to perform at this annual show. Megan Thee Stallion will be on double duty — hosting and performing — and Katy Perry is set to receive the Video Vanguard Award. Think of this ceremony as the rebellious little cousin of the Grammys, featuring lots of fun performances, onstage shenanigans and dance numbers.Seth Meyers on “Late Night With Seth Meyers.”Lloyd Bishop/NBCA CLOSER LOOK WITH SETH MEYERS: PRIMETIME LIVE ELECTION SPECIAL 10 p.m. on NBC. After you’ve taken some time to digest the debate and gotten a bit of a palate cleanser with the VMAs, Seth Meyers is hosting an hourlong special to break down everything we saw in the debate in his typical funny but informative format.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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      Why You May Never See the Documentary on Prince by Ezra Edelman

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      Dig, if you will, a small slice of Ezra Edelman’s nine-hour documentary about Prince — a cursed masterpiece that the public may never be allowed to see.Listen to this article, read by Janina EdwardsIt’s 1984, and Prince is about to release “Purple Rain,” the album that will make him a superstar and push pop music into distant realms we had no idea we were ready for. The sound engineer Peggy McCreary, one of many female engineers he worked with, describes witnessing a flash of genius during the creation of his song “When Doves Cry.” Over a two-day marathon recording session, she and Prince filled the studio with sound — wailing guitars, thrumming keyboards, an overdubbed choir of harmonizing Princes. It was the sort of maximalist stew possible only when someone is (as Prince was) a master of just about every musical instrument ever invented. But something wasn’t right. So at 5 or 6 in the morning, Prince found the solution: He started subtracting. He took out the guitar solo; he took out the keyboard. And then his boldest, most heterodox move: He took out the bass. McCreary remembers him saying, with satisfaction, “Ain’t nobody gonna believe I did that.” He knew what he had. The song became an anthem, a platinum megahit.The next sequence starts to probe the origins of Prince’s genius, how it grew alongside a gnawing desire for recognition. His sister, Tyka Nelson, a woman with owlish eyes and pink and purple streaks in her hair, appears onscreen. She describes the violence in their household growing up. How their musician father’s face changed when he hit their mother. The ire he directed at his son, on whom he bestowed his former stage name, Prince — a gift, but also a burden, a reminder that the demands of supporting his children had caused him to abandon his own musical career. Prince would risk lashings by sneaking over to the piano and plinking away at it — the son already embarked on his life’s work of besting his father, the father giving and withdrawing love, the son doing the same.Cut to Jill Jones, one in a long line of girlfriend-muses whom Prince anointed, styled, encouraged and criticized. Hers is one of the most anguished testimonies in the film, revealing a side of Prince many of his fans would rather not see. Late one night in 1984, she and a friend visited Prince at a hotel. He started kissing the friend, and in a fit of jealousy, Jones slapped him. She says he then looked at her and said, “Bitch, this ain’t no [expletive] movie.” They tussled, and he began to punch her in the face over and over. She wanted to press charges, but his manager told her it would ruin his career. So she backed off. Yet for a time, she still loved him and wanted to be with him, and stayed in his orbit for many more years. Recounting the incident three decades later, she is still furious, still processing the stress of being involved with him.In the next sequence, it’s the evening of the premiere of “Purple Rain,” the movie, which will go on to win the Academy Award for best original song score in 1985. Prince’s tour manager, Alan Leeds, was with him in the back of a limo on the way to the ceremony. He remembers one of Prince’s bodyguards turning to Prince and saying: “This is going to be the biggest day of your life! They say every star in town is there!” And Prince clutched Leeds’s hand, trembling in fear. But then, as Leeds tells it, some switch flipped, and “he caught himself.” Prince’s eyes turned hard. He was back in control. “That was it,” Leeds says. “But for maybe 10 seconds, he completely lost it. And I loved it. Because it showed he was human!” In the next shot, we see Prince emerging from the limo and walking down the red carpet in an iridescent purple trench coat over a creamy ruffled collar, his black curls piled high. He swaggers, twirling a flower, unbothered: a creature of regal remove.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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      ‘Room Next Door’ Claims Top Prize at Venice Film Festival

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      The film, starring Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, is the director Pedro Almodóvar’s English-language debut.“The Room Next Door,” directed by Pedro Almodóvar, was awarded the Golden Lion for best film at the 81st Venice International Film Festival on Saturday by a competition jury led by Isabelle Huppert. In the film, a journalist with cancer (Tilda Swinton) asks an old friend, played by Julianne Moore, to stay with her when she decides to take her own life.“It is my first movie in English, but the spirit is Spanish,” Almodóvar said of his adaptation of “What Are You Going Through,” the 2020 novel by Sigrid Nunez. In accepting the award, the acclaimed auteur spoke of the decision to end one’s life in circumstances of unresolvable pain as a fundamental right.Moore’s vigil with Swinton takes place in a rented house in upstate New York. The small cast features John Turturro as a former lover and Alessandro Nivola as a police investigator. Almodóvar won a lifetime achievement award at the Venice Film Festival in 2019 and, in 2021, opened the event with his film “Parallel Mothers” (for which Penélope Cruz won the best actress prize).The 81st edition of the festival opened with “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” Tim Burton’s sequel to the original 1988 supernatural comedy. Other prominent films included “Maria,” “Queer,” “Babygirl,” “Joker: Folie à Deux,” “Wolfs,” “Cloud,” “April,” “Pavements,” “The Order” and “Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter Two.”Despite sweltering heat, the stars were back in full force in Venice after last year’s actors’ strike. The list of boldface names was remarkable: Nicole Kidman, Joaquin Phoenix, Angelina Jolie, Daniel Craig, Lady Gaga, Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Antonio Banderas, Cate Blanchett, Adrien Brody, Jude Law, Jenna Ortega, Winona Ryder, Kevin Costner, Michael Keaton, Swinton and Moore.The Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize went to “Vermiglio,” an intimate period drama by Maura Delpero set in an Italian mountain village. The Silver Lion for best director went to Brady Corbet for “The Brutalist,” a three-and-a-half-hour drama about a Hungarian Jewish architect in America. Dea Kulumbegashvili won the Special Jury Prize for “April,” an acclaimed film about a Georgian doctor who performs abortions despite a ban on the procedures.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