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      ‘Three Thousand Years of Longing’ Review: Desire, Once Upon a Time

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      George Miller directs a visually sumptuous, grown-up fairy tale with Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba. It jumps across time but too often just stumbles.There are storytellers, and then there is Scheherazade, the savvy bride who in “One Thousand and One Nights” entertains her husband, the king of Persia, by telling him stories. The king has a nasty habit of killing his wives, so to keep her head Scheherazade practices narrative interruptus: Each night, she relates wondrous tales without finishing them, keeping him hooked on her cliffhangers so that she can live another day. For her, storytelling is life.The stakes are far lower for Alithea Binnie (Tilda Swinton) in George Miller’s “Three Thousand Years of Longing.” A self-described narratologist, Alithea has meaningful work, reputational standing, a movieland dream house and a potential new chapter in a mysterious being (Idris Elba). She is also a storyteller. But unlike Scheherazade, Alithea risks nothing meaningful when she spins this yarn, a problem for a movie that insists on the importance of storytelling. Despite Miller’s talent and feverish enthusiasm, and the gravitational pull of his stars, the movie’s colorful parts just whir and stop, a pinwheel in unsteady wind.The movie begins with a promising, characteristically energetic Miller-esque whoosh of swooping cameras, brisk editing, pops of colors and a sense of urgency. Things are about to happen! Except — as Alithea explains — everything to come has already occurred. “My story is true,” she says, adding: “You’re more likely to believe me, however, if I tell it as a fairy tale.” And so, with a melodious once-upon-a-time voice, she revs up an elaborate story about a loquacious genie called, well, Djinn (Elba). Soon enough, the story skips back in time, she frees him from a bottle, he offers her three wishes and she reacts warily until she doesn’t.Any movie with Elba and Swinton has its appeal, and the same holds true of “Three Thousand Years of Longing,” which pulls you in every time they’re together onscreen. It takes flight with Alithea en route to a conference in Istanbul. Things quickly get weird, and a certain je ne sais what perfumes the air when she meets a peculiar fellow at the airport and encounters an even odder, ominous-looking stranger at the conference. During a lecture on storytelling, Alithea sits before huge images of modern gods like Batman and Superman, a display that gestures toward the continuity between new myths and those of the ancient world. And then she faints.Certainly, Miller — whose fables include the Mad Max series — is keenly interested in the power of stories. But in “Years of Longing,” he has tethered himself to hopeless, uninvolving source material. That would be a self-reflexive, tediously long story by A.S. Byatt titled “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye,” which also centers on a single, middle-aged British academic who (eventually) travels to Turkey, meets a genie, is offered three wishes and experiences several life-altering changes. Filled with literary allusions and deep thoughts, it is serious stuff, no doubt, but it’s also about a white woman getting laid by an exotic Other.Race doesn’t factor into the original story, or maybe it does; I was so bored I admittedly resorted to skimming chunks of it. Whatever the case, the casting in the movie adds complications because of the way that cinema concretizes ideas. Actors don’t only play parts; they give those ideas flesh, histories, social and cultural meanings. Djinn is a captive to whoever releases him from the bottle; he’s a fictional creation, and this is a fairy tale. Yet it’s also a story in which a sexualized Black man is, at least initially, held captive to the desires of a lonely white woman who wants what he’s got — provocative terrain the movie ignores.“Three Thousand Years of Longing” — it was written by Miller and his daughter, Augusta Gore — has more life than the original story, but it still drags. After Alithea unbottles Djinn, the two face off in her hotel room, where after some awkwardness and silliness (enter a wee Albert Einstein), they settle into matching hotel bathrobes, and he recounts the stories that shaped his previous 3,000 years. As the movie’s title announces, these are suffused with longing. The first involves the Queen of Sheba (Aamito Lagum), another turns on an enslaved girl (Ece Yuksel) and yet another on an unhappy wife (Burcu Golgedar).All the stories have their appeal, and Miller, working with a predictably stellar crew, seems to have an enjoyable time playing with his digital tool kit. Yet his exuberance and delight are most evident — and most infectious — at the granular level. Although several of the tales are heavily populated, teeming with intrigues and swarming with minions, the movie charms most successfully with the beauty and wit of its filigreed details: the gleam of its polished surfaces, the hues of its variegated palette and the inventiveness of its smaller delights, like the bewitching musical instrument that plays itself with its own nimble hands.Despite these flashes of playfulness, the stories blur rather than build. They’re overlong, for one, and because Djinn often narrates their characters’ words, thoughts and deeds, they rarely come alive. Much like the figurines in old-fashioned automaton clocks, they enter at the appointed time, execute clever bits of business and exit, leaving no impression other than admiration for clockmaker’s skill. Worse, they take you away from Alithea and Djinn. And while the last half-hour is lovely — it’s here that you see the movie, and feel the tenderness, that Miller himself clearly yearns to convey — by then, alas, the clock has almost run out.Three Thousand Years of LongingRated R for fairy-tale violence, nudity and sex. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Seoul Vibe’ Review: Grinding Gears

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      Set in 1988, this Korean action comedy follows a blithe driving team that goes undercover with holdovers from the old military leadership.On the surface, the Korean action comedy “Seoul Vibe” resembles any studio product getting a kick out of careening cars and snazzy retro gear. But the setting is 1988, when South Korea was transitioning toward freer elections after years of military dictatorship. The heroes of the movie are a driving team with their own custom-car garage, while the baddies hail from the corrupt old regime and have millions stashed away. (Chun Doo-hwan, the era’s ruling general, died last November and was in fact convicted of collecting massive bribes.)Not that any of this history offers more than curiosity value. “It is a fun and brainless action film,” Yoo Ah-in, who plays the star driver, Dong-wook, opined at a recent news conference, and he’s partly right. In the shapelessly long movie, Dong-wook’s team goes undercover for a government investigation, posing as couriers for a big-hair crime boss (Moon So-ri, aptly hard-boiled) and a psychotic ex-military man (Kim Sung-kyun).Dong-wook and his goofball mates (played by Ko Gyung-pyo, Lee Kyoo-hyung, Ong Seong-Wu and Park Ju-Hyun as the female member and motorbike maven) gawp at the loot they transport and the 1980s booty they collect — sneakers, gold chains, mix tapes. The caper, directed by Moon Hyun-sung, isn’t as fun as it insists it is, playing up the crew and its exploits à la “The Fast and the Furious” and “Baby Driver” but never hitting its stride.But the final half-hour of chases is pleasingly raucous as the team bobs and weaves through the streets during celebrations for the 1988 Seoul Olympics, racing toward a new future.Seoul VibeNot rated. In Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 18 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Adieu Godard’ Review: A Poor Imitation

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      This limp satire about an Indian villager’s encounter with the movies of Jean-Luc Godard rehashes regressive stereotypes and squanders a potent premise.Amartya Bhattacharyya’s “Adieu Godard,” about a porn-addicted Indian villager who chances upon the French classic “Breathless” (1960), tries to milk comedy from a condescending premise: that uneducated villagers are too dumb to understand the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard. Instead, this limp satire only proves that no one fails to understand Godard as spectacularly as filmmakers who think they do.In an East Indian village, a bushy-haired old man, Ananda (Choudhury Bikash Das), spends his days watching foreign pornographic films with his crew of creeps — while his wife and daughter struggle to tune out the moans that sound throughout their house. One day, the local video store owner hands Ananda a DVD of “Breathless” while clearing his inventory. Ananda’s friends are infuriated by the movie: “No song, no dance, no fight, no romance … and it’s a film?” But Ananda is mesmerized, so much so that he decides to organize a French film festival.About a third into the film, Bhattacharyya yanks us out of this narrative — told in black and white — into a color track in which Ananda’s daughter, Shilpa (Sudhasri Madhusmita), relates her father’s story to her filmmaker boyfriend. Her unreliable narration is one of the film’s several aspirational Godardian flourishes, including Dutch angles, nonlinear editing and long conversations about sex and cinema.But it’s a film-school pastiche of the French director’s style, with none of the forward-thinking intellectual curiosity of his movies. Instead, “Adieu Godard” rehashes regressive stereotypes, taking potshots at a mute “simpleton” and turning Shilpa into a vessel for a muddled, moralistic lesson on misogyny. The film looks down the nose at its rural characters, squandering a potent premise about how cinema travels across borders.Adieu GodardNot rated. In Odia and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Out of the Blue’ Review: The Spider and the Fly

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      An unhappy wife leads her younger lover down a dangerous path in this sexy, yet predictable drama from Neil LaBute.From the moment Marilyn Chambers (Diane Kruger) sashays from the ocean in “Out of the Blue,” a vision in a sizzling orange swimsuit, we sense she’s bad news. (And not just because her creator is Neil LaBute, a director not known for writing sympathetic characters.) There’s something about the way she appraises the handsome young stranger, Connor Bates (Ray Nicholson), who’s watching her approach with puppyish delight. Like her adult-movie namesake, Marilyn knows how to cultivate male lust.And poor Connor, a sweet-natured librarian and recovering felon, is instantly mad for her. Soon, though, a discreetly bruised Marilyn will confess a problem: Her wealthy husband, wouldn’t you know, is knocking her about.“Maybe I can be the solution,” Connor offers, his plans to quietly rebuild his life melting between Marilyn’s milky thighs. Marilyn might be a mature-temptress cliché, but she can’t be accused of phoning it in: As the couple bonks relentlessly in the woods, on the kitchen table and even among the book stacks, we can almost see Connor’s brain cells dissolve. And, to be fair, “Out of the Blue” is never less than upfront about the familiarity of its setup (the dialogue repeatedly references “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” most recently adapted for the screen in 1981) and its own old-fashioned rhythms. One climactic scene is even preceded by an actual drum roll.Like most of LaBute’s work, “Out of the Blue” is talky, sparsely staged and presented with his signature detachment. The two leads are fine, though Hank Azaria, as Connor’s probation officer, and Frederick Weller, playing a cross sheriff’s deputy, wrestle with lines that are almost cartoonishly hard-boiled. A last-minute twist comes too late to rescue the plot; Connor, sadly, was always beyond saving.Out of the BlueRated R for enthusiastic, multilocational sex. Running time: 1 hour 44 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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      ‘The Good Boss’ Review: Company Man

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      As the titular boss of this dark comedy from Spain, Javier Bardem engages in underhanded tactics to win an award for business excellence.Julio Blanco (Javier Bardem), the boss of “The Good Boss,” is introduced giving a pep talk to his factory employees, with his words underlined by a jaunty, clarinet-infused score.The company is up for an award in business excellence, he says, so they should be on their best behavior when the judges stroll through. Did he mention they’re like family to him — the children he never had? As if an illustration were necessary, a layoff victim, Jose (Óscar de la Fuente), turns up with his two kids and starts making a ruckus. He demands that someone explain to his son and daughter that he no longer has his job.Julio, in fact, is not the good boss his glad-handing manner might suggest. The movie, a dark comedy from Spain written and directed by Fernando León de Aranoa, follows him over roughly 10 days as he ensures that everything is set for the awards committee. That means interposing himself into the marital dramas of an ostensible friend (Manolo Solo) at the factory. It means using his influence to undermine the protest that Jose sets up across the street. The company makes scales, and sometimes, Julio says toward the end, you need to trick a scale into balancing.“The Good Boss” provides prime material for Bardem, who has to maintain a polished veneer even as his character’s mendacity and troubles mount. As satire, though, the movie is facile: not quite mean, outlandish or energetic enough in the challenges it imagines for Julio, notwithstanding a bracingly cynical use of an unexpected death. Nor is it especially incisive, unless it comes as news that a magnate’s warm persona might be feigned.The Good BossNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Adopting Audrey’ Review: Building a New Home Out of Nothing

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      Jena Malone plays a young woman who’s seeking to be adopted by a gruff patriarch. Deep down, he has, you guessed it, a heart of gold.“Adopting Audrey,” the second feature film from the director M. Cahill (“King of California”), resembles many of the quirky domestic dramas that have populated the film festival circuit since “Little Miss Sunshine.” There’s a wayward young woman (Jena Malone) searching for guidance, and a gruff patriarch, Otto (Robert Hunger-Bühler), in need of human connection to soften his heart. There’s an absurd twist to this stock premise, however: The wayward adult, Audrey, would like to be adopted, which is how she meets Otto and his forlorn wife, Sunny (Emily Kuroda).It’s a little too outlandish to get behind. While Cahill has insisted in interviews and press materials that the film is based on a true story, as a reviewer, I still felt the urge to Google “types of adult adoptions” to double-check the validity of such an arrangement outside of formalizing an inheritance or reuniting with a birth parent. Even if you’re able to suspend disbelief, the bond between Audrey and Otto is weighed down by stilted dialogue and hackneyed attempts at drama.Audrey draws suspicion from Otto’s adult children, John (Will Rogers) and Gretchen (Brooke Bloom), who suspect their relationship is sexual in nature, but that plotline ends abruptly with a sudden freak accident. Sunny’s misery is treated as a shrug at best and a punchline at worst. And Cahill’s attempt to characterize Audrey’s neuroses — her watching puppy videos on her phone for hours on end — might be the laziest effort at capturing millennial malaise.The one bright spot of “Adopting Audrey” is the acting from Malone and Hunger-Bühler, who imbue their characters with more pathos than they probably deserve. Malone especially has made a welcomed return to a protagonist role — hopefully one she can replicate with more substantial material.Adopting AudreyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Alienoid’ Review: Sorcerers, Alien Prisoners and Much, Much More

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      This bonkers Korean movie could not pick just one cinematic genre, so it went for half a dozen of them at once.This Korean film starts in the 14th century with an alien creature trying to escape from the human body inside which it has been imprisoned. Thankfully, a hole in the sky opens and an SUV materializes, carrying the interstellar lawman Guard (Kim Woo-bin) and his robot sidekick.And that’s just the first five minutes: The rest of Choi Dong-hoon’s movie then escalates into even more bananas territory.Hopscotching between the present day and 1391, “Alienoid” somehow works a crystal thingumajig called the Divine Blade into its narrative, as well as car chases, aerial wire-aided fights, medieval gunslinging, time travel, magic battles and Transformers-like mayhem, with dashes of comedy and romance for good measure. This is the rare film that makes going off the plot rails wildly entertaining, even if every half-hour or so Choi drops an info dump to clarify (sort of) the story. Mostly, he stitches together scenes that are almost self-contained and powered by such memorable characters as the bounty-hunting rapscallion Muruk (Ryu Jun-yeol), Mr. Blue (​​Jo Woo-jin) and Madam Black (Yum Jung-ah), who go by the Sorcerers of Twin Peaks, and the badass Ean (Kim Tae-ri, in quite a switch from her turn in Park Chan-wook’s gothic thriller “The Handmaiden”)The movie is bursting at the seams, as if Choi, in his first outing since the 2015 historical action drama “Assassination,” was drunk on pure filmmaking pleasure and threw every cinematic genre into a gigantic blender.And there is more to come: as overstuffed as it is, “Alienoid” is only the first installment of a two-movie epic.AlienoidNot rated. In Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 22 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Can a Start-Up Help the Film and TV Industry Reduce Their Carbon Footprint?

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      The global entertainment industry generates millions of metric tons of carbon dioxide a year. A Spanish director has set up a company to try to cut that number substantially.This article is part of Upstart, a series on young companies harnessing new science and technology.The Goya Awards — Spain’s equivalent of the Academy Awards, held this year in February in Valencia — are a glamorous, televised affair. At the event, the actors Javier Bardem and Cate Blanchett each collected trophies.Behind the scenes, the organizers were attempting something decidedly less glamorous: cutting the ceremony’s carbon emissions.They did so with help from Creast, an entertainment-industry sustainability company founded in late 2019 by Eduardo Vieitez, a Spanish film and advertising director. Creast, which advised the awards in the run-up to the ceremony, prevented the release of 100 metric tons of carbon dioxide — the equivalent of 20 car trips around the world and enough to fill 50 Olympic-sized pools — into the atmosphere, according to a news release from the organizers, the Academia de Cine de España, the Spanish film academy.By having staff members take trains instead of flights and stay in hotels close to the ceremony venue, the Goyas’ organizers said they cut transport-related emissions by 55 percent. And by knocking beef off all menus — for staff and attendees — and serving vegetables, chicken and fish instead, they reduced catering emissions by 40 percent.Mr. Vieitez, who has been in the film business for two decades, working with brands like Sony, Samsung and BMW, established the company and its app during the pandemic. “I have worked in more than 20 countries, and it always struck me how unsustainable our processes were,” he said.He started Creast with 300,000 euros (about $305,000) in seed funding from himself, his relatives and friends. The start-up attracted 100 clients in its first year, he said, including Telefónica, IBM, Nestlé and Amazon Prime Video. It now has a staff of around 30 people, including environmental technicians based in Spain, and software developers based in India, he said.When working to advise award shows or film and TV productions, Creast teams look over scripts, budgets and production designs before shooting starts and assesses the project’s carbon footprint based on information on the number of locations; the transportation and accommodation needs, depending on whether crews are local or flown in; the energy requirements for filming and post-production; and materials used for props, costumes, and on-screen vehicles.Once a production gets under way, Creast team members are physically present to carry out checks on site, including measuring lighting and sound pollution and reviewing the sustainability certificates of vehicles and accommodations for cast and crew.Creast charges 0.1 percent of the production budget as a fee, Mr. Vieitez said. Creast keeps their fee low because rather than gather detailed and granular data for each new production, the company uses data from past productions (compiled using machine learning and artificial intelligence) to partially extrapolate the environmental footprint of comparable film shoots or events.Earlier this year, the San Sebastián Film Festival in the Basque region of Spain, which runs from Sept. 16 to 24, invited Creast to help cut its emissions, said Amaia Serrulla, who leads the festival’s sustainability efforts.Creast teams have already made recommendations, Ms. Serrulla said, including that the festival work with local suppliers, use recyclable and reusable packaging and implement top-down LED lighting (rather than bottom-up, which is not as sustainable). They also advised cutting back on paper, so the festival is printing half as many festival guides as usual — and charging for them.The festival, supported by a region that prides itself on its cuisine, did balk at one piece of the Creast teams’ advice: “They recommended not using meat,” Ms. Serulla said. “We have vegan options and vegetarian options, but we are not going to take meat out of the menu for now.”The global entertainment industry generates millions of metric tons of carbon dioxide a year, according to the Producers Guild of America, a trade organization representing American producers of television, film and new media. That’s more than the aerospace, clothing, hotel or semiconductor industries, the Guild said.“Climate change is the most pressing global issue facing us today,” said a March 2021 report by the Sustainable Production Alliance, a consortium established in 2010 that includes some of the world’s biggest film, television and streaming companies. The report added that a major production from a studio had an average carbon footprint of 3,370 metric tons, or 33 metric tons per day of shooting. Roughly half of that was from fuel consumption generated by air travel and utilities.The British industry has similar issues. A report released in 2020 by the British Film Institute and other organizations found that on average, a major studio production generated 2,840 metric tons of carbon dioxide, or the equivalent of 11 one-way trips to the moon. Air travel alone produced as many emissions as 150 one-way flights from London to New York, or 3.4 million car miles, according to the report.Creast joins an existing effort to gauge the industry’s carbon emissions, which includes guides and tools like online calculators that allow users to measure their industry footprint themselves.One widely known tool is the Green Production Guide, established in 2010 by the Producers Guild of America and the Sustainable Production Alliance to help cut the entertainment industry’s emissions. Its founders include industry giants such as Amazon Studios, Disney, Netflix and Sony Pictures Entertainment. The site offers a calculator with which a production’s footprint can be measured and an international database of sustainable goods and service providers working in the film and TV production industry.In Britain, Wearealbert.org, a consortium of British television industry participants set up in 2011, has a carbon calculator that has been used by more than 1,300 production companies for more than 7,500 productions, according to its website. The calculator adds up the environmental cost of transportation and accommodation, production spaces (offices, studios and sound stages), time spent in the editing suite and the use and disposal of materials used (paint, for example).Most film productions are working with tight budgets, “so the simpler a tool for greening production, the more likely it is to be used,” Sean Cubitt, a professor of screen studies at the University of Melbourne, wrote in an email. He said, though, that he was not familiar with Creast.A challenge, he explained, is that movies and television shows are increasingly doing preproduction, production and postproduction in several places.“Bigger productions will have their virtual sets built in one country, their effects designed in another, and their editing done in a third,” Mr. Cubitt said. “That used to be true only of mega-productions like the ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy, but the supply chain model is now pretty ubiquitous.”As a result, the environmental costs are generated in multiple locations, making sustainability a much more complicated objective to achieve for companies such as Creast.The Creast app, which calculates total emissions of a production by combining line items like transportation, fuel use and food consumption. Charlotte Hadden for The New York TimesMore important, Mr. Cubitt said, the industry remains a huge polluter because of the media servers used by streaming services, which he said were “already responsible for about as much carbon emission as the airline industry before the pandemic.”In other words, production companies that are “flying crews to remote locations and trashing them” aren’t “the really big culprit,” he said.“Let’s share the blame here,” he wrote. More