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      ‘The Black Sea’ Review: Bulgarian Dreams

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      In this quietly sweet indie, a Black Brooklynite finds himself stranded in a Bulgarian seaside town, where he finds unlikely redemption“They have dreams in Bulgaria?” Khalid asks a man, hiding from the downpour, in “The Black Sea.” One might say they do: “Like the American dream, but in Bulgarian way,” the stranger responds. In a sense, it’s what Khalid (Derrick B. Harden) has unwittingly found as he tidies up in the cafe he’s cobbled together in a small seaside Bulgarian town.Things move fast and somehow both bizarrely and believably so at the start of this somewhat peculiar but endearing indie directed by Crystal Moselle and Harden. We’re barely introduced to Khalid, a charismatic if unfocused Brooklynite, before he finds himself stranded in Bulgaria after the sugar mama he met on Facebook and came to meet is found dead seemingly the moment he arrives.Grounded by Harden’s natural and loosely charming performance, Khalid treats his nightmare scenario with an alternating sense of anxiety and buoyant, joshing can-do attitude. He gets a job with a town-running bully (who’s also his sugar mama’s son) named Georgi (Stoyo Mirkov), but when things go sideways, he turns instead to Ina (Irmena Chichikova), a local travel agent who gives him a place to crash. He finds his footing, makes friends with locals and starts slinging open-faced grilled cheeses and matcha teas out of a makeshift cafe.The fundamentals of this film are just about as arbitrary as Khalid’s personal journey — it’s not everyday that a low-budget American indie focuses on a stranded Black Brooklynite moving and shaking his way to a new life in small-town Bulgaria. Not that there needs to be a point at all.Regardless, Moselle and Harden work with a subtle naturalistic touch that makes for a quietly sweet movie about unlikely redemption. This is mostly rooted in the partnership between Khalid and Ina, a relationship that, in its avoidance of overt romantics, blossoms and finds meaning in the gentle progression of their closeness.The Black SeaRated R for language and some sexual material. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Theater

      ‘Wicked’ Review: Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande in Oz

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      Cynthia Erivo is the strongest draw in this splashy, overly long movie, which is the first installment in a two-part adaptation of the Broadway show.With its flying monkeys and magical shoes, oh my, the story of the Wizard of Oz has been lodged in the popular imagination for over a century. It is, after all, an archetypal American myth: an epic of good and evil, the comfort (and dreariness) of home, the draw (and freedom) of the road, the perils of power and the yearning for transformation. The 1939 film with Judy Garland, in particular, is so embedded in the American cinematic DNA that it’s inspired everyone from Martin Scorsese to David Lynch, Spike Lee and John Waters, who once called (accurately!) the wicked witch “every bad little boy’s and girl’s dream of notoriety and style.”I wonder what Waters will make of “Wicked” and its green-hued, deeply sincere heroine, Elphaba, a ready-made meme machine played by Cynthia Erivo in what becomes a showstopper of a performance. Both the character and the actress are the strongest draws in this splashy, largely diverting, tonally discordant and unconscionably long movie, which is the first installment in a two-part adaptation of the Broadway show “Wicked.” That juggernaut opened at the Gershwin Theater in 2003 and shows no signs of (ever) closing; it will presumably still be raking it in when “Wicked Part Two” is set to open in November 2025.Like the stage musical — Stephen Schwartz wrote the music and lyrics, while Winnie Holzman wrote the book — the movie centers on Elphaba and Glinda, short for Galinda (Ariana Grande, fiercely perky), witches from the enchanted Land of Oz. Written by Holzman and Dana Fox, it opens right after Elphaba, a.k.a. the Wicked Witch of the West, is declared dead. (Dorothy is nowhere to be seen.) Glinda, a.k.a. Glinda the Good, floats in to belt the catchy “No One Mourns the Wicked,” and subsequently goes down memory lane to relate her and Elphaba’s tale, focusing on their tenure at Shiz University, a campus populated by a hardworking ensemble and anchored by a waterfront, Disney-esque turreted castle.“Wicked” is based on Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel “Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West,” and the big surprise in each work is that Elphaba isn’t as bad as her reputation. Hers is a classic saga of misunderstanding retooled for contemporary sensibilities, a chronicle of alienation and belonging, inchoate desire and heavy-handed moralizing that, onscreen, begins in Munchkinland when her father was the governor, her mother was a cheat and Elphaba the inconvenient result. At some point, her mother dies, as they do in fairy tales, and Elphaba grows into a sober, bespectacled child the color of farm-fresh asparagus (Karis Musongole) and, in short order, a serious, very talented melancholic.The director Jon M. Chu opens “Wicked” big and only goes bigger, at times to a fault. His credits include “Crazy Rich Asians” and the musical “In the Heights,” but “Wicked” is a horse of another color and it’s filled with huge sets, some dozen musical numbers and many moving parts that generations of fans know intimately. From the start, Chu gives “Wicked” an accelerated pace, amping it with restless, swooping camerawork and overloading it with a surfeit of everything, with ceaselessly moving bodies and eye-popping props. There’s much to ooh and ahh over, be it Elphaba’s eyeglasses with their seashell spiral or her beautiful Issey Miyake-style pleats, but Chu’s revved-up maximalism doesn’t leave much room to savor it.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 Piano Lesson’ Review: Ghosts in the Instrument

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      This film adaptation of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play falters in some specifics, but is still vital viewing.Riddle me this: When is a piano not merely a piano? Answer: In “The Piano Lesson,” where one piano contains a whole world.A whole family’s world, anyhow. The piano in question is an old upright, carved all over with the faces and figures of departed ancestors and stolen from the white Mississippi man who once enslaved members of this family. For Berniece (Danielle Deadwyler), that means it’s sacred, a link to past trauma and resilience that must be preserved.For her brother, Boy Willie (John David Washington), the piano represents something else: money. More precisely, when he looks at the piano he sees the cash he needs to buy a piece of land back home in Mississippi and set up his own farm. That’s why he’s traveled up here to Pittsburgh, where Berniece lives with her daughter, Maretha (Skylar Aleece Smith), and an uncle, Doaker Charles (Samuel L. Jackson). Ostensibly Boy Willie has come to sell watermelons to locals with his friend Lymon (Ray Fisher). But it’s the piano he’s after.To others, the piano means other things. For Avery (Corey Hawkins), an elevator operator who dreams of starting a church and marrying Berniece, the piano offers the possibility of a stable future. But for Doaker Charles’s brother Wining Boy (Michael Potts), the instrument is a reminder of the exhilarating, unrelenting life he once lived on the road as a successful pianist, before he became washed up and broke.In 1990, “The Piano Lesson” won the eminent playwright August Wilson his second of two Pulitzers for drama. It’s part of his Pittsburgh Cycle (sometimes called his Century Cycle), a set of 10 decade-spanning plays about Black American life, all set in Pittsburgh. It’s been staged repeatedly since then; the 2022 Broadway revival starred Washington, Jackson and Fisher in the same roles they play in this film.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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      Vic Flick, Guitarist Who Plucked the James Bond Theme, Dies at 87

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      A busy session musician, he also recorded music for the Beatles’ film “A Hard Day’s Night” and contributed to several hit songs.Vic Flick, a British guitarist whose driving riff in the theme for the James Bond movies captured the spy’s suave confidence and tacit danger, died on Nov. 14 in Los Angeles. He was 87.His death, in a nursing facility, was announced on social media by his son, Kevin, who said the cause was Alzheimer’s disease.The Bond films produced signature catchphrases (“shaken, not stirred,” “Bond, James Bond”) that have been endlessly recited and parodied since “Dr. No,” the first in the series, was released in Britain in 1962. But it was the sound of Mr. Flick’s guitar in the opening credits that helped make the spy thrillers instantly recognizable.During the title credits of “Dr. No,” when moviegoers were introduced to or reacquainted with the works of the author Ian Fleming, who wrote the James Bond books, Mr. Flick’s thrumming guitar sounded out through a brass-and-string orchestra.“The selection of strings available in the late ’50s and early ’60s was abysmal compared to today,” he wrote in his 2008 autobiography, “Vic Flick, Guitarman: From James Bond to The Beatles and Beyond.”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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      Singing ‘Wicked’ Fans Are Anything but Popular

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      Some fans who have attended early screenings of the film adaptation of the hit Broadway musical have treated it as a singalong. Not everyone is thrilled.Angela Weir went into a screening of “Wicked” on Monday night ready to be transported to the Land of Oz. But when Glinda (Ariana Grande) began to sing “Popular,” one of the musical’s early numbers, she was not the only one singing.“It started slow. Then people heard each other — it was like they encouraged each other,” Weir said on Tuesday. “It was a beautiful scene, and then you’re taken out of it.”As anticipation builds for the film’s release on Friday, some fans who have attended early screenings have ignored theater norms to sing right along with their favorite characters, much to the chagrin and annoyance of other “Wicked” enthusiasts. Many have taken to social media to issue a strict edict: Shush.As a debate grew on TikTok and Reddit, a possible solution emerged this week: For those who want to join in on the duet “What Is This Feeling?” between Grande and Cynthia Erivo, who plays Elphaba, more than 1,000 theaters across North America will host singalong screenings starting on Christmas Day.A representative for Universal said the company would not comment on the debate, and the off-key serenades have continued in the meantime.Weir, 35, said the singing at a screening in the suburbs of Charlotte, N.C., was particularly distracting during the movie’s finale, when Elphaba belts out the show’s most famous ballad, “Defying Gravity.”

      @arweirr i did like it tho #wicked #pleasedontsing #oscars ♬ original sound – Angela 🙂↔️

      @jordycray Time and place! #fyp #foryou #wicked #wickedmovie #arianagrande #cynthiaerivo #musical #popculture #popculturenews ♬ original sound – jordycray 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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      ‘Tuesday,’ ‘The Killer’ and More Streaming Gems

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      This month’s under-the-radar streaming recommendations include an underrated horror-comedy, an action thrill ride, and two vehicles each for two of our most talented actresses.‘Tuesday’ (2024)Stream it on Max.This mixture of dead-serious drama and imaginative fantasy from the Croatian filmmaker Daina O. Pusic is such a big, weird swing that it’s not surprising audiences didn’t flock to it last summer. And it’s a hard picture to summarize without sounding insane; yes, this is a film where Death, taking the form of an oversized macaw, bobs his head and raps along with Ice Cube’s “Today Was a Good Day.” But if you go along with its wild premise — Death visits a terminally ill teenager (the excellent Lola Petticrew) and her mother (Julia Louis-Dreyfus, in a rare and affecting dramatic turn), and they must grapple with their thorny relationship and what this departure would do to it — it’s quite involving, particularly as Pusic (who also penned the script) gracefully pivots to heart-wrenching poignancy in the homestretch.‘Downhill’ (2020)Stream it on Hulu.Those who prefer Louis-Dreyfus in a more humorous mode will enjoy this comedy of manners from the directors Nat Faxon and Jim Rash (“The Way, Way Back”), remaking Ruben Ostlund’s 2014 international hit “Force Majeure.” As before, the story concerns a husband and father (played with well-practiced oafishness by Will Ferrell) who responds to a possible avalanche during his family’s ski vacation by fleeing without hesitation, to the shock and consternation of his wife (Louis-Dreyfus). The screenplay (by Faxon, Rash and the “Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong) isn’t quite as sharp or subtle as Ostlund’s, but “Downhill” scores plenty of keenly observed points about the fragility of masculinity, and Ferrell and Louis-Dreyfus are a well-matched comedy duo.‘The Dead Don’t Hurt’ (2024)Stream it on Paramount+.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 Were Your Favorite Movies, TV, Music and Books in 2024?

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      We want to know what stuck with you this year. What were the best things you watched, read and heard?Toward the end of every year, our critics share their thoughts on the best film, television, pop music, classical music, books, art, dance, theater, video games, comedy and so much more.They’ll be doing it again this year. But we also want to hear from you.What was the best TV show, or episode, you watched in 2024? The best movie? Your favorite book of the year? There are four areas of culture and arts that we want to hear from you about, all listed below. Please pick your one favorite in each category and focus on that, or else we’ll be overwhelmed!You can answer one or all of those questions. We plan to publish some of the responses, but we won’t publish any part of yours without following up with you, verifying your information and hearing back from you. And we won’t share your contact information outside the Times newsroom or use it for any reason other than to get in touch with you. More

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      The Reintroduction of Daniel Craig

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      In love, it can be terrifying to show all your cards, to make yourself vulnerable, to let your desire be fully seen. What is offered to another person without reservation can also be taken without recompense. Still, because we want to be loved, we risk it.Maybe we don’t think much about that aspect of love, preferring to dwell — as most movies do — on all the moony, swoony parts. But that dangerous feeling of exposure is the central preoccupation of the new drama “Queer,” and it can’t be explored without a lead actor who is similarly willing to offer himself up.Enter Daniel Craig, 56, our erstwhile James Bond on a bold new assignment.In “Queer,” due Nov. 27 and adapted from a William S. Burroughs novel, Craig plays Lee, an American expat in midcentury Mexico City who becomes enamored with a coolly distant younger man, Allerton (Drew Starkey). Lee is undone by a desire that is reciprocated only in fits and starts, and watching Craig pine so vulnerably packs a pop-cultural punch: Once considered the very face of masculine cool, his visage is now soaked in flop sweat.Though his performance has been earning raves and Oscar chatter since “Queer” premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September, it may surprise fans to see this side of Craig after watching him play a stoic secret agent for the better part of 15 years. But when I asked the director Luca Guadagnino whether “Queer” is closer to his leading man’s actual sensibility than people might have guessed, he replied, “Every movie is a documentary about the actor playing the character.”If that’s the case, maybe now is the perfect time to be reintroduced to Daniel Craig.“I’m not a method actor, but I’m a nightmare to be with when I’m working,” Daniel Craig said of his intense devotion to his work.Thea Traff for The New York Times“SOMETIMES I FIND it very laughable, the idea of maleness,” he said. It was an early morning in October, and I had met Craig for breakfast at the Sunset Tower Hotel in West Hollywood to ponder the performance of masculinity. “Most men go through life with this act that they do,” he told me. “But it is an act.”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