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      Sheriff Delivers Results of ‘Rust’ Shooting Investigation to Prosecutors

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      The Santa Fe County District Attorney’s Office must now decide whether to file charges. The sheriff’s office sought to determine how a live round got into the gun Alec Baldwin was holding.The Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office on Thursday delivered to local prosecutors its investigative report into the shooting on the set of “Rust” that killed the film’s cinematographer and wounded its director, bringing the district attorney’s office closer to a decision about whether to file criminal charges.The submission of the report, which the sheriff’s office declined to immediately release, came more than a year after the office began investigating how live bullets ended up on the set in New Mexico. The film’s cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, 42, was fatally shot when a gun the actor Alec Baldwin was rehearsing with went off.On Thursday morning, the sheriff’s investigative team met with the district attorney, Mary Carmack-Altwies, and the special prosecutor appointed to help with the case, Andrea Reeb, said Heather Brewer, a spokeswoman for the Santa Fe County District Attorney’s Office.“The district attorney and her team of investigators and prosecutors will now begin a thorough review of the information and evidence to make a thoughtful, timely decision about whether to bring charges,” Ms. Brewer said in a statement.A spokesman for the sheriff’s office, Juan Rios, said the report would not be publicly released before Nov. 10. Ms. Brewer said the sheriff’s office needed to redact the document before sharing it with the public.In an August request asking state officials for more money, Ms. Carmack-Altwies wrote that she did not have sufficient funds to prosecute such a high-profile case, and that up to four people could be charged.County investigators have interviewed dozens of people about the shooting, including Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, the armorer who was in charge of guns and ammunition on the film set; Dave Halls, the movie’s first assistant director, who took the gun from Ms. Gutierrez-Reed and later handed it to Mr. Baldwin; and Seth Kenney, who has been described as the primary supplier of guns and ammunition for “Rust.”Ms. Gutierrez-Reed, Mr. Halls, Mr. Kenney and Mr. Baldwin, an actor and producer of the movie, have all denied culpability. Several lawsuits have been filed, alleging, among other things, a failure to properly follow safety protocols; Ms. Hutchins’s family recently reached a settlement with Mr. Baldwin and other “Rust” producers.Ms. Hutchins was fatally shot during the filming of the western on Oct. 21, 2021, while Mr. Baldwin was practicing drawing an old-fashioned revolver for a scene inside a spare wooden church. He had been told it contained no live rounds, but it suddenly fired, killing Ms. Hutchins and wounding Joel Souza, the film’s director.In a television interview last year, Mr. Baldwin said that he was told the gun was safe to handle and that Ms. Hutchins was instructing him where he should point it. The actor said he did not pull the trigger, but rather that he pulled back the hammer of the gun and let it go just before it discharged.State regulators at the New Mexico Occupational Health and Safety Bureau found a serious breach of industry standards, which require that live ammunition should never be brought on set. The production, which plans to resume filming in January, is contesting the fine issued by regulators.If the district attorney decides to bring charges, a judge in New Mexico would consider whether there is probable cause for the charges to move forward. More

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      ‘Run Sweetheart Run’ Review: Escape in L.A.

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      Bursts of experimental style are at odds with a simplistic premise in this slasher movie that poses the tired idea that the patriarchy is a killer.Steeped in social commentary but lacking in basic logic, “Run Sweetheart Run” follows a woman over one desperate night in Los Angeles. The story begins when Cherie (Ella Balinska), a young mom working as an executive assistant, agrees to a client dinner with Ethan (Pilou Asbaek), an affable moneybag. But the slasher thrills really kick into gear once the sweet date turns sour, and then savage: During a nightcap, Ethan attacks Cherie and reveals his plan to hunt her until dawn.Like a bloodstained “After Hours,” the movie goes on to trail Cherie as she scampers away and seeks refuge in a series of urban sites: police station, apartment, overpass, church, nightclub, bathhouse. The director, Shana Feste, renders these settings in a green palette and high-contrast lighting, and their surreality suggests that Cherie has fallen down a rabbit hole; the horror Wonderland where she lands is peopled with doomed women and leering male brutes.Playful elements punctuate the menace. When danger approaches, “RUN!” appears across the screen, like a private alarm bell for our heroine. In other moments, Ethan cheekily breaks the fourth wall to aim the camera elsewhere before he inflicts harm on victims. These bursts of experimental style feel at odds with the movie’s core: a simplistic parable of pervasive sexism. We get it: The male villain is a stand-in for the patriarchy, and for women, it’s an uphill battle just to survive. No need to bludgeon us over the head with it.Run Sweetheart RunRated R. Butchery and battle of the sexes. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. Watch on Amazon Prime Video. More

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      ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ Review: The Spectacle of War

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      Edward Berger’s German-language adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel aims to rattle you with its relentless brutality.In his auteurist film history “The American Cinema” (1968), the critic Andrew Sarris compared similar scenes in two World War I films, King Vidor’s “The Big Parade” (1925) and Lewis Milestone’s “All Quiet on the Western Front” (1930), the first screen adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel. Vidor, Sarris felt, had a more satisfying approach to showing two soldiers from opposite sides in a shell hole, one dying. Vidor emphasized the faces of his characters, Sarris wrote, rather than pictorialism and spectacle.The first sequence of Edward Berger’s new German-language adaptation of Remarque’s novel announces about as loudly as possible that it’s on the side of pictorialism and spectacle. It opens with a landscape: a quiet wood and mountains, seemingly at sunrise. A fox sucks from its mother’s teat. A Terrence Malick-like shot looks upward at impossibly high and peaceful treetops.Berger then cuts to an aerial view of drifting smoke, which clears to reveal an array of corpses. A barrage of bullets suddenly pierces the near-still composition, and the camera turns to show the full extent of the carnage and the muck. This is war as a violation of nature. And that’s even before Berger trails a scared soldier named Heinrich (Jakob Schmidt), who charges ahead in a pair of unbroken shots — take that, “1917” — only to die offscreen. In a device that owes something to the red coat in “Schindler’s List,” Heinrich’s uniform will be stripped from his body, cleansed, stitched up, shipped to Northern Germany and eventually reused by Remarque’s protagonist, Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer), who notices someone else’s name on the label.Does this version of a literary classic go hard or what? In truth, opting for pure bombast — a pounding, repeated three-note riff by Volker Bertelmann, who did the score, never fails to quicken the pulse — isn’t necessarily an ineffective way of translating Remarque’s plain-spoken prose. Berger has more tools at his disposal than Milestone did with the challenges of the early sound era, yet those advantages somehow make this update less impressive: The magnification in scale and dexterity lends itself to showing off. Still, the movie aims to pummel you with ceaseless brutality, and it’s hard not to be rattled by that.This “Western Front” places its faith in big set pieces and powerful images. Even the scope has been widened. Berger cuts between Paul’s experiences in the trenches and cease-fire talks between Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Brühl), who chaired Germany’s armistice commission, and Marshal Ferdinand Foch of France (Thibault De Montalembert). The 72-hour deadline that Foch gives Erzberger to sign adds an element of ticking-clock suspense to the overall narrative, albeit by departing from Remarque’s first-person point of view.The fates of the author’s soldiers are also tweaked. But there are moments here that resonate. When Paul trudges through the trench and collects dog tags from his fallen comrades, he finds a friend’s distinctive eyeglasses in the mud. Rats scurry to avoid the earthquake of approaching tanks. Paul, his face caked in dirt, tries to silence the dying gulps of the French soldier he has stabbed, in this movie’s counterpart to the Vidor-Milestone scene. Tjaden (Edin Hasanovic) jabs at his neck after realizing he’ll have to live as an amputee.The closest thing the movie has to affecting character work comes in the relationship between Paul and Katczinsky (Albrecht Schuch), who enjoy one last mission to steal food from a farm during the final hours of the war — when neither the violence nor Berger plans to relent.All Quiet on the Western FrontRated R. Extreme war violence. In German and French, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 27 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Please Baby Please’ Review: Hyper-Masculinity, on Its Head

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      This 1950s satire from Amanda Kramer broadens the scope of the queer leather canon.A gang of greasers roams the smoggy streets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. They’re decked out motorcycle caps straight out of “The Wild Ones” and “Jailhouse Rock‌”-like striped ‌T-shirts, and they pause their prowling for a dance before violently bludgeoning two passers-by. In the satire “Please Baby Please,” these hoodlums are known as the Young Gents, and their hyper-stylized assault is witnessed by a beatnik couple, Arthur (Harry Melling) and Suze (Andrea Riseborough). The duo is transfixed.This chance first meeting with the Young Gents spells trouble for the married pair — trouble with a capital T that rhymes with G and that stands for gender. From this encounter, the film spins out into a romp through the muddle of 1950s masculinity. Arthur has spent his life resisting what he sees as the prison of his own manhood, and he finds himself drawn to the gang’s pouting pretty-boy leader (Karl Glusman). Suze is unleashed as a blossoming leather daddy in a beehive, taking further inspiration from a provocative neighbor, Maureen (Demi Moore). As Arthur and Suze navigate the physical threats to their safety imposed by their introduction to the Young Gents, they question their relationship and the roles that they play as husband and wife.The director Amanda Kramer takes aesthetic and erotic cues from the traditions passed down by artists like Kenneth Anger and Tom of Finland. The film’s ironic tone largely defangs the transgressive films it parodies, but Kramer does broaden the scope of the queer leather canon. She includes women among those searchers who might find their sense of identity through a performance of hyper-masculinity. Riseborough offers a dynamite performance as Suze, leaning into a thick New York accent as she slouches and slinks through her character’s awakening.Please Baby PleaseNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘A Chance Encounter’ Review: Bland Days In Taormina

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      Andrea von Kampen, a singer-songwriter who has a way with the acoustic guitar, is the most engaging part of this tentative romantic drama.Can a motion picture be shockingly inoffensive? The question sauntered into my mind about a third of the way through “A Chance Encounter.” (A bad sign, as the movie is only about 90 minutes.)The movie’s components are not unfamiliar. A young man, Hal (Paul T.O. Petersen, who also wrote the script with the film’s director Alexander Jeffery), still not close to being settled in life, travels to the Sicilian seaside town of Taormina to honor his mother’s memory (his inheritance is footing the bill) and to find inspiration for his poetry.On a terrace with a killer view, he meets Josie, an American singer with a recent hit single, strumming and singing away.Josie is played by the real-life singer Andrea von Kampen, who’s the most engaging part of the picture. She’s a fine singer and, at times, her guitar work is reminiscent of the cult hero Nick Drake. But that’s the far end of whatever idiosyncrasy this movie has. After Hal and Josie’s meet-cute, they see sights blandly, philosophize blandly, blandly tiptoe around the notion of romance, and criticize each other — yes, blandly, but with an occasional touch of “salty” language. Josie is frustrated with Hal because she considers him a rare talent and thinks he won’t properly commit to the poetic vocation.“And perhaps the sun blows kisses to the moon as it departs/they work two separate shifts with one beating heart” is a representative couplet from Hal’s verse. As too often happens in movies that depict literary aspirants, the writing raises the dreaded question, “Wait, is this actually supposed to be good?” One supposes it is supposed to be. And one just has to sit with that, as “A Chance Encounter” ambles to its inevitable conclusion.A Chance EncounterNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Holy Spider’ Review: Brutality Tale

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      Like many a serial-killer drama, this movie about a real-life Iranian murderer who targeted prostitutes is a grisly thriller parading as a morality tale.Like many a serial-killer drama, “Holy Spider” is a grisly-gruesome thriller parading as a moral tale. Directed by the Denmark-based Iranian filmmaker Ali Abbasi, the movie tells the story of Saeed Hanaei (Mehdi Bajestani), a construction worker and war veteran in Mashhad, Iran, who strangled 16 prostitutes to death in 2000 and 2001. His case led to a media frenzy when his purported quest to “cleanse” his hometown — a spiritual hub for Shiite Muslims — generated public support from hard-line Iranians.The irony at the heart of “Holy Spider” is fascinating and timely: How does a holy city not just foster but actively embolden prostitution, a drug trade and reckless slaughter? The film’s genre-movie stylings, however, flatten these sociopolitical questions into psychosexual spectacles. Abbasi seems enamored by the contradictions of Hanaei, who was at once an upstanding Muslim, a family man, a pervert and a ruthless killer. But anyone who reads the news, anywhere in the world, will respond to these rote hypocrisies of misogyny with little other than jadedness.And for all the time the movie devotes to Hanaei’s life, we learn little about the lives of Mashhad’s prostitutes, who only appear briefly before their gratuitously detailed killings. Instead, Abbasi makes the fictionalized character of Rahimi (Zar Amir Ebrahimi) — a Tehrani journalist whose own experience with sexual harassment drives her crusade to catch the killer — the film’s sole representative of women’s concerns, burdened with an implausible cat-and-mouse arc. In reality, Hanaei was arrested after one woman fought him back and escaped, and reported him to the police, in spite of the risks involved. Her story of courage feels far worthier of a movie than Abbasi’s grim vision of murder and mania.Holy SpiderNot rated. In Persian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Novelist’s Film’ Review: Real Talk

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      In Hong Sang-soo’s latest study in small moments and chance encounters, a visit to an old friend prompts a writer in crisis to try something new.Amid the wonderfully diverse and daring output of the South Korean film industry in recent decades, the director Hong Sang-soo has been quietly, prolifically making features of the utmost insight and sensitivity — nearly 30 since 1996 — that have nothing to do with the genre-play, melodrama or over-the-top violence associated with some of his better known compatriots.His most recent picture, “The Novelist’s Film,” is no exception, a Chekhovian study in small moments and chance encounters, which is to say it is a study of human beings as they really live: ambiguously and without exposition, spontaneously and without tidy motives or resolution.Much of what typifies Hong’s work will feel familiar in “The Novelist’s Film”: the budget (low); the dialogue (natural); the characters (creative types in crisis); the camera (mostly a fixed, single shot per scene). The story is likewise reliably spare: On a visit to an old friend (Seo Young-hwa) outside Seoul, the novelist Junhee (Lee Hye-young) has a run-in with a movie director who once jilted her professionally (Kwon Hae-hyo) and a famous actress, Kilsoo (Hong’s longtime collaborator Kim Min-hee), who has stepped away from acting indefinitely.Junhee has been struggling creatively herself, and she is prompted to pursue her own experimental short film, in which she urges Kilsoo to participate. Her request, like many of her conversations, is awkwardly frank. Meaning teems in the uncomfortable silences and deflections; each platitude contains multitudes. Is Kilsoo interested or playing nice?Hong works fast, rarely preparing scripts more than a day in advance, which may help explain how his films can be so talky without feeling scripted — a minor miracle each time he does it, which is about once a year. Long may he run-and-gun.The Novelist’s FilmNot rated. In Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. More

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      ‘Wendell and Wild’ Review: Not Wild Enough

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      This devilish stop-motion horror comedy from Henry Selick and Jordan Peele can’t quite breathe life into its narrative.Why not try to resurrect the dead? Collect some demons in glass jars? Or summon a pair of demon brothers from among the “souls of the danged”? These seem like the ingredients for a wicked fun time.But the devilish new stop-motion horror comedy from Netflix, “Wendell & Wild,” can’t get these pieces to double, double, toil or trouble into a cohesive dish of entertainment.In the film, directed by Henry Selick, and written by Selick and Jordan Peele, a demon named Wendell (Keegan-Michael Key) and his brother, Wild (Peele), aim to hitch a ride up to the land of the living with the help of Kat (Lyric Ross), a teenage girl with a traumatic back story and a boombox called the Cyclops. Wendell and Wild hope to find a way to build an amusement park in the underworld that would put Six Flags to shame. However, Kat has her own plan for the demon siblings, and the repercussions soon spread to affect the whole town.From juicy grubs to booger sculptures to sticky gelatinous goo, “Wendell & Wild” exhibits the same charming, if grotesque, ghoulishness and delectable phantasmagoria of Selick’s other Halloween classics, like “The Nightmare Before Christmas” (1993), “James and the Giant Peach” (1996) and “Coraline” (2009).Key and Peele’s usually unstoppable humor and Selick’s signature combination of morbid terror and fanciful play, along with the film’s wonderfully diverse characters (including an Indigenous woman and a transgender boy of color) and its surprising sociopolitical messaging, seem like they’ll combine to make “Wendell & Wild” a new Halloween fave.But the story lines feel far-flung and disconnected, and the limits and rules of this world’s magical logic are at turns underdeveloped and inconsistent. Though the movie has a delightfully raucous rock ’n’ roll sensibility, the dialogue lacks the wit and punch to match.Every new character and narrative detail in the film — a mysterious janitor, a demonic teddy bear and a carnival of imps and fiends — is an unintentional red herring, not a purposeful misdirection but a residual of all the interesting places this film could have gone but never ventured.It’s especially disappointing given the ways “Wendell & Wild” does succeed — the imaginative visuals and playful character designs, of course, and an interesting protagonist in Kat, a Black punk girl with eyebrow piercings, green hair (about 160 hand-curled strands of wool, according to the press notes, to replicate her natural hair) and no-nonsense platform boots. And then there’s the headbanging array of tunes from Death, TV on the Radio and X-Ray Spex.You’d think demons would have the most fun. And yet, despite the countless courses “Wendell & Wild” could have taken, the route it does choose is, unfortunately, a dead end.Wendell & WildRated PG-13 for demons, zombies and things that go bump in the night. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More