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      Billy Bob Thornton Reflects on Life and ‘Landman’

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      You would think a performing arts hall in Connecticut named after Katharine Hepburn, in a quiet seaside town like Old Saybrook would be safe. You would think a crowd of mostly ex-hippie gray-hairs, who had paid to sit in plush red chairs, hear you sing and have you sign their “Bad News Bears” posters, would be free of hecklers.You would be wrong. And now Billy Bob Thornton, on tour with his rock band the Boxmasters, was going to have to invite a man who had just called him a “condescending jerk” — except he hadn’t shouted “jerk” — to come up and sit on the edge of the stage with him and work this out, man to man. He was going to have to explain, as he has surely gotten tired of explaining, that he isn’t who you think he is.“I can tell you people that I know personally, who will walk by every fan and not even look at them,” he said from the stage. “I stand by the bus and I sign every person’s picture. I talk to everybody. I take a picture with everyone.”It was, in the end, a perfectly pleasant conversation, but one might assume that at 69, a man of Thornton’s acclaim and accomplishments wouldn’t feel the need to plead his case at all. Again wrong. While he was reluctant to talk about the incident when we caught up by phone a few weeks later, he is otherwise open about his insecurities and his feelings of being misunderstood, just as he is open about his disappointments — particularly his disappointments with Hollywood.If Thornton has appeared to pull back from Hollywood a bit in recent years, that is by design. The once up-and-coming filmmaker who wrote, directed and starred in the Oscar-winning “Sling Blade” had already given up writing and directing movies years ago because of how studios treated him just after that 1996 film — something he is “still pissed off” about, he said. He still loves acting but is increasingly selective: His role in the new Taylor Sheridan series “Landman,” premiering Sunday on Paramount+, is one of only a handful of major roles he has taken since “Bad Santa 2,” from 2016.In the new Taylor Sheridan series “Landman,” Thornton plays a guy who is basically Thornton if he had a job putting out fires, figurative and literal, on a West Texas oil field.Emerson Miller/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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      ‘All We Imagine as Light’ Review: Tender Comrades

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      In Payal Kapadia’s extraordinary drama, three women in Mumbai search for connections amid the city’s vibrant and darkly alienating churn.“All We Imagine as Light” is a quiet drama about fragility, beauty and kinship, and what it takes to keep going in ordinary, difficult times. Set in contemporary Mumbai, it centers on three Hindu women, their everyday lives and the bonds that they share with one another as well as with the larger world. It’s the kind of modestly scaled and lightly plotted international movie — with characters who look and sound like real people, and whose waking hours are set to the pulse of life — that can get lost amid the year-end glut of Oscar-grubbing titles. So, it’s worth mentioning upfront that it is also flat-out wonderful, one of finest of the year.The women work together at a busy city hospital, where two are nurses and the third is a cook. The nurses, Prabha (Kani Kusruti), who looks to be in her late 30s, and the much younger Anu (Divya Prabha), are roommates and living with a runaway cat in a small, cluttered apartment. Both nurses have complicated personal lives. Prabha’s husband left her behind to work in Germany and has drifted away from her, leaving her achingly alone. Anu has a secret lover, a young, earnest Muslim man she’s trying to keep hidden from everyone, including her family and Prabha, a reserved woman of decorous sensitivity.The story develops organically to incorporate the cook, Parvaty (Chhaya Kadam), a headstrong, middle-age widow. She’s struggling to stay in the apartment that she had shared with her husband, which developers now plan to raze. They’ve threatened her, if she doesn’t leave on their timeline (they’ve sent goons to her door), but Parvaty talks tough and conveys a resiliency bordering on obstinacy. When Prabha finds a lawyer to support her through her legal troubles, Parvaty flatly rejects the offer. “I don’t need any help,” she says with her back turned to Prabha. Like the two nurses, Parvaty seems determined to go it alone.In time, all three the women grow closer, and their lives become more intertwined, a shift that the writer-director Payal Kapadia develops with unforced naturalness and a remarkable lightness of touch. Kapadia has a background in documentary — this is the first feature-length fiction film she’s directed — and she integrates brief streets scenes of a thrumming Mumbai throughout “All We Imagine as Light.” Crucially, she opens the movie with a series of nighttime images of unidentified men and women working and wandering about the city, milling through busy streets, riding on crowded trains, visuals that she overlays with voices speaking different languages. “I was pregnant,” says one woman, “but I didn’t tell anyone.”This opening — with its seductive blur of anonymous voices and moving, always moving bodies — efficiently sets the scene and tone. As important, it also introduces a characteristic modernist concern with the attractions and the drawbacks of cities, with their frenetic swarms and cacophonous din, their liberating and soul-crushing anonymity. The city gives and it takes in equal measure, though not always fairly. It’s where Anu and her lover, Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon), can escape and melt into the crowd to hold hands, yet the city imperils Parvaty and may leave her stranded amid the clutter of fast-rising luxury towers. “Class is a privilege,” a billboard for one such tower blares. “Reserved for the privileged.”Though all the women receive their due, Prabha is the most central and vividly drawn. Physically reserved, with deep-set eyes that shuttle between searching openness and downcast reserve, she is revealed gradually and often through her interactions with others. She’s unassuming, polite to the point of deference and seemingly unaware of her striking looks. When a doctor, Manoj (Azees Nedumangad), approaches her one night, asking if she’s been working late, she apologizes without apparent reason. “Sorry doctor,” she says, seemingly oblivious of his interest in her, “I lost track of time.” When they go their separate ways, he gives her a poem that he wrote for a competition, though also perhaps for her.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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      ‘Red One’ Review: Santa’s Helpers Have Been Working Out

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      Starring Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans, this Christmas offering has the courage to ask: What if the Santa Claus story was like a Marvel movie?Over time, Santa Claus movies have become inherently and forgivably silly. After all, there are only so many reasonable commercial twists you can put on one of the most commercialized characters in the Western world. It’s what has given us the contractual Santa (“The Santa Clause”); the pugilistic maniac Santa (“Violent Night”); the one about Santa’s degenerate brother (“Fred Claus”); and later this month, the Satan Santa (“Dear Santa”).Perhaps, then, we should be resigned to the inevitable corporate momentum that produces something like “Red One,” a film that has the courage to ask: What if the Santa Claus story was like a Marvel movie?In this one, directed by Jake Kasdan, Santa Claus (J.K. Simmons) is inexplicably jacked, Dwayne Johnson leads a kind of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. team to protect the Big Red, and Chris Evans has revived the sensibilities of an older superhero alter ego (not the noble sincerity of Captain America, but the slacker snark of Johnny Storm). It’s all a particularly egregious piece of commercial slop — just a little too expensive and passable to qualify for being so bad it’s sort of fun.Cynical and struggling to feel the holiday spirit, Callum Drift (Johnson), the head of security for Santa (a.k.a. Red One), hands in his resignation letter on Christmas Eve before working his final holiday. Of course, Santa is mysteriously kidnapped shortly after, sending Cal into a frenzied search, replete with a dull blur of explosions and far more fight sequences than an earnest Christmas movie should be allowed.With the clock ticking, Cal and his boss, Zoe (Lucy Liu), are forced to call on Jack O’Malley (Evans), the tracker who helped facilitate the kidnapping itself. A deadbeat dad who, naturally, has Jason Bourne’s fighting skills, Jack has been a lifelong naughty-lister who’s only out for himself — until his ice-cold heart begins to melt while reluctantly assisting Cal.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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      ‘Dream Team’ Review: Fax on the Beach

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      Nothing really makes sense in this homage to ’90s cable thrillers, but that’s sort of the point.Nothing about “Dream Team” is very serious, and it would be a waste of time to force meaning onto it. But that’s not a mistake; it’s the whole idea. Directed by the always adventurous team of Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn (“Two Plains and a Fancy,” “L for Leisure”), the film is shot and structured to pay homage to late-night cable thrillers from the 1990s, complete with a cheekily erotic edge.The story, such as it is, is set around 1997 and follows two Interpol agents named No St. Aubergine (Esther Garrel) and Chase National (Alex Zhang Hungtai) as they investigate a strange conspiracy that might involve murderous coral. Their journey takes them to Mexico, where they encounter a bevy of weirdos as well as a seductive scientist named Veronica Beef (Minh T Mia) with that most ’90s of jobs: marine biologist. Back in the office in British Columbia, two young women (Fariha Roisin and Isabelle Barbier) are supposed to be researching the case, but mostly seem interested in working out.It’s pretty silly, but that’s clearly a feature, not a bug. “Dream Team” is broken into episodes with titles like “Coral Me Bad” and “Fax on the Beach” (there is, in fact, a fax machine on the beach) and some naughtier wordplay. The movie was shot on 16-millimeter film, the grainy, smudgy look of which may make you feel like you’ve either dozed off or ingested hallucinogens. For long stretches, we’re just observing underwater corals, watching people dance in a club, or lingering in a desert littered with discarded aerobics equipment. The storytelling only enhances the disjointed sensation: The central plot waxes and wanes, and by the end seems to have trailed off into the sunset.That’s not to say that this is a bad movie, though whether you think it’s a good one will depend a bit on your tolerance for irony and the absurd. It is undoubtedly diverting. I dare you not to chuckle when one character begins researching a case by declaring, “I’ll start searching Lexis,” and the reply is, “got it — I’m on Nexis.” For viewers of a certain age, the nostalgia is enjoyable as well: There are dial-up modems and very old computer graphics and one of those abdominal crunch rocker devices I remember my father keeping in the basement.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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      ‘Emilia Pérez’ Review: A Song and Dance of Transformation

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      The star of Jacques Audiard’s showy new musical about a trans Mexican crime boss, Karla Sofía Gascón, adds soul to the melodrama. Zoe Saldaña also shines.In the floridly off-kilter “Emilia Pérez,” the director Jacques Audiard throws so much at you — gory crime-scene photos, a menacing cartel boss, a singing-and-dancing Zoe Saldaña — that you don’t dare blink, almost. Set largely in present-day Mexico City, the fast-track story follows a beleaguered lawyer, Rita (a very good Saldaña), who’s hired by a powerful drug lord, Manitas (a wonderful Karla Sofía Gascón), for an unusual job. Manitas, who presents as a man but identifies as a woman, wants help with clandestinely obtaining gender-affirming surgery and with tidying up some of the complications that come from a violent enterprise.Audiard, a French filmmaker and critical favorite with a string of impressive credits, likes changing it up. He’s partial to people and stories on the margins, though is especially drawn to crime stories; much of one of his finest films, “A Prophet,” takes place in prison. He also likes dipping in and out of genres while playing with and, at times, undermining their conventions, embracing an unorthodoxy that can extend to his characters. The protagonist in “The Beat That My Heart Skipped,” for one, is an outright thug but also a would-be concert pianist who, at one point, shows up at a recital bloodied after nearly beating another man to death.The complications in “Emilia Pérez” emerge in quick succession. After the brisk, eventful opener — featuring a murder trial, an unjust verdict and two musical numbers — Rita is being driven to a secret location by armed strangers, her head shrouded. Before long, she is seated in a truck, face to face with Manitas, a jefe with facial tattoos, a stringy curtain of hair and an ominously threatening whisper. Manitas delivers a staccato, tuneless rap that promises Rita “considerable sums of money” in exchange for her help. “I want to be a woman,” Manitas reveals sotto voce through soft lips and a mouthful of golden teeth.Rita agrees to help, though there’s little to suggest that she could deny Manitas’s request. To that end, Rita begins jetting around the world looking for a discreet, willing surgeon for Manitas, an expedition that, during one stop, finds her in a circular-shaped Bangkok clinic where she, the surgical team and gowned, bandaged patients are soon singing and striking poses. As Rita and a surgeon discuss options for Manitas, the doctor begins sing-chanting words like “mammaplasty” and “vaginoplasty” and “laryngoplasty,” which others pick up as a refrain. As bodies and the camera spin inside the clinic, Audiard cuts to an overhead shot of the facility, exuberantly tapping into his inner Busby Berkeley.The song-and-dance numbers — the score and songs are by Clément Ducol and Camille, and the choreography is by Damien Jalet — range from the intimate to the outsized, and are integrated throughout. Most seem like manifestations of private thoughts, as in an early number in which Rita voices aloud a trial argument that she’s mentally prepping while in a grocery store. When she exits into the jeweled city night, she is met by a rising rumble of voices from passers-by who are chanting “rising and falling.” As she walks on, her words shift into song, her movements become stylized, and the passers-by turn into an ensemble. Audiard then begins folding in images of Rita typing on a laptop as she sings.At first, this shift between inner and outer realities, between the ostensibly material world of contemporary Mexico and the metaphysical world of the characters, is jarring and amusing. From the start, the movie hooks you because of its abrupt turns, how it veers into places that, tonally, narratively and emotionally, you don’t expect. Yet while Audiard has productively combined classic genres and present-day sensibilities before, even the more personal, confessional numbers here add little more than novelty. It’s galvanizing when Rita belts a song — to herself, to us — about the corruption of Mexican leaders assembled at a banquet, but only because the movie is acknowledging a world that it otherwise uses as a fanciful stage.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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      in Movies

      ‘Conclave’ Is Becoming One of 2024’s Most Memed Movies

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      Thanks to characters we recognize from reality TV, the Vatican intrigues have jumped from stuffy prestige drama to the social-media scrum.On its surface, “Conclave,” the Vatican-set film starring Ralph Fiennes, looks like one of the stuffiest of this year’s potential Oscar contenders.Based on a novel by Robert Harris, it chronicles the behind-the-scenes dealings that unfold when the Roman Catholic Church needs to elect a new pope. The cast is mostly male — save for a showstopping turn from Isabella Rossellini — and, with some notable exceptions, largely white. It does not star any hot young things like Timothée Chalamet or Paul Mescal. Instead, it features a murderers’ row of middle-aged character actors. Purely based on subject matter, it seems like the kind of drama that might dominate the Academy Awards in the mid-2000s.And yet it’s on its way to becoming one of the most memed movies of the year.In the weeks since the film’s release, I have been shocked and delighted to find it all over my social media feeds. “Conclave” fever has hit the internet.On X, “Conclave” has been mashed up with “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and “Real Housewives.” Devotees have made fan cams, or artfully edited videos, of the “Conclave” cardinals. One is set to the Charli XCX song “Sympathy Is a Knife” featuring Ariana Grande. The refrain “it’s a knife” is synced to the nasty looks the clergymen give one another. The X user Camille Argentar posted it and wrote, “so much drama in this #conclave and i loved every minute of it.”Another fan cam focuses on Ralph Fiennes’s Cardinal Lawrence and the song “Diva” by Beyoncé, implying that Lawrence is the diva here. The TikTok account @catholic.memes25 has made multiple “Conclave” videos, including one using “We Both Reached for the Gun” from the musical “Chicago.”“Sympathy Is a Knife” provided the soundtrack for one “Conclave” fan cam.Focus FeaturesWe 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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      ‘Hot Frosty’ Review: The 8 Abs of Christmas

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      A hunky snowman comes to life in this Netflix holiday rom-com that strikes a certain muscle tone.Here’s the pitch for “Hot Frosty”: A widow wraps an enchanted scarf around a hunky snowman who springs to life and professes his love. Here are the two possible audience reactions: “How dumb!” and “How dumb — can’t wait to watch!”Lacey Chabert, the star of more than 30 Hallmark Channel romances, checks into work as Kathy, a generically sweet small-town diner owner with little to do besides repeat the premise until everyone is onboard. “You just buy that he’s a snowman?” she sputters to her fellow residents of Hope Springs.No matter. The director Jerry Ciccoritti knows all eyes are on Jack (Dustin Milligan), a shirtless naïf with the soul of a labradoodle and the abs of a supermodel. “I am not cold,” he insists with a twinkle. Jack adores fixing roofs, befriending children, baking homemade pizza and rubbing ice on his bare chest. Nevertheless, Kathy is slow to warm to his charms.To be fair, Jack is a tricky role. It’s hard for a male actor to play innocent and seductive. There’s one carnal gag involving a lusty neighbor (Lauren Holly), but otherwise “Hot Frosty” doesn’t stoke much sexual heat. Families can watch together with no risk of grandma getting distracted and burning a batch of cookies.The script shamelessly re-gifts scenes from “Pretty Woman” and “It’s a Wonderful Life,” along with “Edward Scissorhands,” like when Kathy’s martini-chugging pals swoon that a man this perfect has to be magic. But shameless is the goal. Everyone involved knows exactly what movie they’re making — especially Craig Robinson as the hilarious town sheriff, a killjoy determined to arrest Jack for streaking.Hot FrostyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      Freddy Kreuger and 40 Years of Nightmares

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      With the release of “A Nightmare on Elm Street” 40 years ago, the horror villain Freddy Krueger clawed his way to becoming a pop culture phenomenon.When “A Nightmare on Elm Street” hit theaters 40 years ago this month, few would have predicted a pop culture phenomenon in the making. Yet it would become one of 1984’s most profitable pictures and spur a lucrative franchise.The success of the series was due primarily to two factors. The first was the thoughtful approach Wes Craven, a humanities professor-turned-filmmaker, took to the material, drawing inspiration from the terrifying stories of Southeast Asian refugees in America who died in their sleep under mysterious circumstances in the 1980s. He fused those stories with the contemporaneous satanic panic and accusations of widespread child molestation to create the character of Fred Krueger, a high-school janitor accused of sexually abusing several children in the small town of Springwood, Ohio. After the man was freed on a technicality, the parents of Springwood took the law into their own hands, burning Krueger alive. A decade later, the undead Freddy haunts the nightmares of Springwood’s teens, murdering them in their dreams.“Nightmare” is a film of genuine fear, dread and menace in which Craven effectively contrasts the pure Americana of the daytime sequences — picturesque houses, tree-lined streets, chirping birds — with the darkness of Freddy’s gruesome deeds. He’s tapping into universal fears, beyond even those of his slasher-movie brethren; not all of us have been stalked by a masked killer while babysitting or fooling around with a fellow camp counselor, but we all sleep, and dream and have nightmares.The second key to the success of the “Nightmare” films was Robert Englund, the classically trained actor who played Krueger — referred to as Fred in the original film, but by the cuddlier Freddy as the series continued. Each installment brought in new protagonists, new actors, new writers and new directors, who fleshed out the character (pardon the pun) with new dimensions and a broadened back story. He would evolve — if that’s the proper description — from the menacing, murderous abuser of the initial entry to a rakish antihero. By the fourth film, he was like an Arnold Schwarzenegger character of the era, spouting groan-inducing quips at his victims (“No pain, no gain!” he would taunt a weight lifter he was torturing) in films that were as silly as they were scary.Robert Englund in “A Nightmare on Elm Street.”New Line CinemaFreddy was a ubiquitous pop culture presence. He was mentioned in speeches by President Ronald Reagan, featured in pop songs, video games and a “Freddy’s Nightmares” anthology television series, and feverishly merchandised in products including children’s toys and pajamas, odd branding for a character accused of being a pedophile. Englund was among the last names in the credits for the first film; by the fourth, he was billed above the title. As the series progressed, the actor would contemplate the social implications of the character. “It’s a warning of the future,” he told Newsday in 1989. “It’s a fable. It’s the Ballad of Freddy Krueger. I am the ghost story of the late ’80s.”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