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      Watch Austin Butler Cause Hysteria in ‘Elvis’

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      The director Baz Luhrmann narrates a sequence in which Elvis gives an early performance that stirs up the audience.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.It was the hip swivel that changed a generation. And it is at the heart of this scene in the biopic “Elvis” that introduces the musician to the world.In the sequence, Elvis (Austin Butler) is giving one of his first performances in front of an audience while Col. Tom Parker (Tom Hanks), the man who would become his manager, watches on.While historically Elvis’s first big introduction was said to be at Sun Records, performing for its owner, Sam Phillips, the film takes a different route.The director Baz Luhrmann wanted that moment to take place in front of a crowd, showcasing all of the pieces that came together when the rocker performed.“Elvis wasn’t just about what he sang,” Luhrmann said, narrating the scene. “It was as much about how he looked and how he moved. But most importantly, it was his effect upon the audience.And boy, what an effect here. As Elvis sings and moves his hips, he seems to prompt almost uncontrollable screams from the women in the audience. That builds to a kind of infectious hysteria that feels as shocking as it does organic.Luhrmann worked with Butler (and some very airy trousers) to get the moves right. But the key to the scene was the extras. The moment may seem chaotic, but it was heavily designed. A movement coach and choreographer, Polly Bennett, worked with a team of performers they called the scream queens. These women had training in producing hysterical movements and also in high-pitched keening that solidified the action of the sequence.Read the “Elvis” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      ‘The Princess’ Review: Holding His Heart in Her Hands

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      Joey King is credible and compelling as a vengeful would-be princess bride in this over-the-top action fantasy tale.Le-Van Kiet’s fantasy “The Princess” opens in a traditional manner, with the trill of Celtic-inspired flutes, a pink sunrise and a slow climb to the top of a spindly tower, where an unnamed princess-bride-to-be (Joey King) lies on a bed strewn with rose petals. But here, the royal beauty feigns sleep. Five minutes into this slender yet vigorous blood-spattered fable, two enemy guards enter to drag our heroine to the chapel — and she brutally kills them. Clearly, the classic genre that galvanizes Kiet and the screenwriters Ben Lustig and Jake Thornton doesn’t hark back to ye olde European fairy tales but rather to the feminist revenge thrillers of the 1970s: works of exploitation and wuxia cinema where warrior women stuck it to the man. With knives.The plot proceeds like an arcade game. Her highness must fight her way downstairs to defeat her naysayer, including a tyrannical fiancé (Dominic Cooper), his cruel consort (Olga Kurylenko) and the princess’s own father (Ed Stoppard), a hapless weakling who believes he can combat fascism with calm and sensible reason. Using scant dialogue, the film makes a counterpoint: It takes physical violence to control the throne. That’s one opinion on which the princess and her villainous betrothed can agree.Long takes highlight both King’s gumption (as when she somersaults back and forth over a card table to dispatch a trio of goons) and the admirably creative fight choreography by Stanimir Stamatov and Samuel Kefi Abrikh, which emphasizes quick-thinking defensive moves that make use of found objects — hairpins, pearls, heads of lettuce — to parry swords, axes, chains, whips and helmets with sharp horns. The high-aggro guitar score is a misstep, but a panting, battered King is credible and compelling as she kicks, stabs and screams for the right to choose her own destiny.The PrincessRated R for rapacious bloodshed. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      ‘Mr. Malcolm’s List’ Review: A Finalist for His Affection

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      Upper-crust courtship comes with undercooked social commentary in this Regency-era romance.A tepid Regency-era romance, “Mr. Malcolm’s List” hinges on Jeremy Malcolm (Sope Dirisu), a wealthy, aloof bachelor looking for a woman who meets his 10-point checklist for a suitable mate. The trouble starts when Malcolm rejects Julia Thistlewaite (Zawe Ashton), a singleton who fails Point No. 4 — “converses in a sensible fashion” — and is publicly humiliated by Malcolm, who yawns behind her back. Vowing vengeance, Julia schemes to manipulate the snob into falling in love with her childhood friend Selina Dalton (Freida Pinto), a country naïf whom Julia presents, through bits of trickery, as Malcolm’s dream bride. (In one scene, Selina is made to look like a piano virtuoso.) Selina doesn’t so much agree to her bossy chum’s plan as succumb to it, like a leaf drifting downstream.But the film is too soft at heart to condemn Julia as a manor-bred mean girl. (It might be more fun if it wasn’t.) The early sequences are spritzed with a whiff of pity for this society’s anxious would-be wives. The screenplay, by Suzanne Allain, adapting her own novel of the same name, seems to suggest that a marriage-minded society breeds shallow, superficial girls. Emma Holly Jones, the director, apparently agrees, layering images of pretty birds in cages next to shots of desperate debutantes in pink-plumed hats. In a scene at an opera, Jones shows that the young women are too preoccupied with gossip to pay attention to the soul-stirring Rossini onstage.Jones pointedly sets key romantic scenes during horse auctions and board games, but runs out of things to say beyond the well-trodden suggestion that courtship is equal parts commerce and chess. Once it has established sympathy for the embittered Julia — whom Ashton plays with a marvelously light touch, even when forced into heavy-handed scenarios — the film is stuck doubling back on its own social critique by hustling to resolve the various love plots until everyone’s paired off and all insights into the status of women have been tidily swept under the Persian rugs.Pinto’s Selina is judicious and kind — and as interesting as a plain meringue. Her duped suitor, Malcolm, has little personality beyond his seeming to approach every ball as though the dance floor were made of hot lava. We are frequently told that he’s arrogant. The counterargument is that most of the items on Malcolm’s list — be truthful, be charitable, read books — are reasonable. A more innovative period comedy could be made from his frustration trying to find these basics among the upper classes.Instead, Dirisu’s wary gravitas allows Malcolm, ostensibly the main man, to be outshone by Theo James’s Captain Henry Ossory, a flippant, mustachioed love rival who threatens to win Selina for himself — and strides off with the audience’s affection in the process. The score, by Amelia Warner, announces when to titter and when to swoon. In its cleverest flourish, it accompanies the ladies’ marital campaigns with a rollicking military march.Mr. Malcolm’s ListRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Forgiven’ Review: When the Haves Dispose of a Have-Not

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      Ralph Fiennes and Jessica Chastain play an unhappy couple who accidentally kill a stranger in Morocco en route to a desert bacchanal.“They were careless people,” the narrator in “The Great Gatsby” says of two of that novel’s wealthiest, cruelest characters; “they smashed up things and creatures.” They would probably get along with the similarly careless wretches who populate “The Forgiven,” though especially the unhappily married couple who smash into a teenager, killing him.David (an excellent Ralph Fiennes) and Jo (a decorative, badly used Jessica Chastain) are yelling — and looking — at each other while rocketing down a dark Moroccan road when they plow into the boy. For reasons that are more narratively useful than persuasive, they bring the body with them to their destination, a sprawling compound where a bacchanal is underway. There, after servants whisk away the body, David and Jo join the festivities, assuming their place among the other avatars of wealth, great privilege and bone-deep rot.As Fitzgerald observed elsewhere, the very rich are different from you and me. They are not, though, always dissimilar onscreen, and in far too many movies, they tend to fall into reliably distinct camps of gaudy buffoons, heroic saviors or unrepentant villains. “The Forgiven” is about villains. Specifically, it centers on the kind of white scoundrels who — with their empty hours and seemingly bottomless pockets, their cultivated cynicism and to-the-manner-born prejudices — stir up trouble for less-privileged souls. These monsters twirl their mustaches, seduce the naïve and rob the credulous because they can. They also do so because authors know villains provide easy entertainment, including when they’re object lessons.Certainly, in his adaptation of the Lawrence Osborne novel, the writer-director John Michael McDonagh has done his best to be diverting while he shoots fish in a barrel. His richest, most dubiously easy targets are the party’s hosts, an unctuous British libertine, Richard (Matt Smith, continuing his journey as Jeremy Irons 2.0), and his down-market American lover, Dally (Caleb Landry Jones). They’re introduced lounging in bed — the camera opens on Dally’s naked rear — as a visibly uneasy Moroccan servant enters with tea. Richard smiles at the man or maybe his discomfort. Is the servant uncomfortable with male intimacy, its unembarrassed display or merely his boss’s amused gaze?McDonagh lets the moment linger, which outwardly lets him off the hook. It doesn’t, though, not really, and he is saying something by making two gay lovers the story’s most conspicuous embodiments of neocolonialist excesses. So it goes: That night, Richard refers to the servants as boys, and Dally winds up the party (and your sensitivities) by thanking their “little Moroccan friends” who renovated the compound. The guests in tuxes and gowns laugh and swirl, eating and boozing as Moroccans hover and serve. A shrieking blonde jumps in a pool the size of a lake. Later, Jo casually drops that she and David killed a Moroccan en route to the festivities; at another point, David sneers about “pederasts” and name checks Allen Ginsberg.“The Forgiven” doesn’t get any subtler, although things improve when David agrees to drive off with the dead boy’s father, Abdellah (Ismael Kanater), and a companion, Anouar (Saïd Taghmaoui). It doesn’t make any sense given David’s prejudices and suspicions. He goes simply because the story needs him to, but it does get you away from the compound’s claustrophobia. Mostly, though, it allows you to spend time with Fiennes, whose performance — in its intricate, complex play of emotions and in the push-pull of David’s contempt for himself and for everything else — says more about this world’s nihilism than all the brittle chatter. Fiennes peels David in layers, unraveling this man until you see his hollow interior.McDonagh’s work is more nuanced and his touch lighter in the scenes with David and these other men, even as the story grows heavier and then leaden. There’s less yammering and hyperbolizing, and McDonagh makes fine contrapuntal use of the landscape’s visual drama and of the chasm separating these characters. Here, in the prickling, ominous spaces between David and Abdellah, in their glances and halting words, you see how power flows from man to man, from world to world, and how it nourishes but also engulfs.It’s then that you are reminded of the sharper work that McDonagh has done before, such as “Calvary” and “The Guard,” and how good he can be when characters talk because they have something to say.The ForgivenRated R for gun and vehicular violence. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Fourth of July’ Review: Fraught Family Dynamics From Louis C.K.

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      The comedian directs, co-writes and takes a supporting role in this family dramedy. It’s not supposed to be his show, but it is anyway.Jeff, a jazz pianist, is a recovering alcoholic who is almost three years sober. But he hasn’t quite begun to reap the gifts of his new state. In spite of his contented marriage, his soul is a bag of anxiety — one that both his A.A. sponsor and his therapist seem bent on stuffing anew. As Jeff contemplates, with dread, visiting his loutish family for Fourth of July week, the bag is set to burst.The comedian Joe List, who co-wrote the script, plays Jeff with scruffy sad-sack conviction, and his real-life partner, the comedian Sarah Tollemache, is grounded and appealing as his wife, Beth. The couple have a bantering style that’s emblematic of their offscreen gigs. But neither of these talents (or, for that matter, any of the excellent supporting cast) has much to do, probably, with why you’re reading this review.The director and other writer of “Fourth of July” is Louis C.K., the comic artist who is hellbent on maintaining his career in the wake of multiple accusations of sexual misconduct. While Louis C.K. has not faced criminal charges, his actions of past years, which he eventually admitted to, were squalid, callous and harmful. Leading to what some would call a cancellation.The scandals did, in fact, torpedo the release of his 2017 feature, “I Love You, Daddy,” a tale with sexual dimensions that were sufficiently provocative as to be characterized as nose-thumbing. In any case, after complaining that the scandals had cost him millions of dollars, he returned to stand-up, successfully. His recording “Sincerely Louis C.K.” won a Grammy in 2022. And there you have it.What he’s up to with this film, it would appear, is helping out his colleague List, who seems to have put a lot of his own life into this narrative. A narrative that, for better or worse, wrings more glumness than humor from Jeff’s travails. The holiday trip to Maine — and his people’s impressive cabin on a lush mountainside — reveals a clan of possibly unsurpassable awfulness: a mother (Paula Plum) whom Jeff accurately deems “a spider,” and a pack of racist and sexist cousins and uncles who make Archie Bunker look like the Dalai Lama. When a female cousin shows up with her biracial friend, the recently widowed Naomi (Tara Pacheco) — and boy, what a hoo-hah this arrival elicits from the fam — Jeff finds one sane person to talk to. Jeff’s dad (Robert Walsh) will hardly talk at all.As a director, Louis C.K. puts several feet wrong. Casting himself as Jeff’s passive-aggressive therapist is a bad move; his performance is droll but not droll enough to make his presence more than a distraction. Then there’s the soupy Jeff-and-Beth montage when Jeff is playing the piano in the cabin one morning. And the showy green lighting with which Louis C.K. suffuses a scene preceding Jeff’s meltdown — and breaks out again to signal the fragile emotional state of Jeff’s dad. And finally, there’s the ending. The family dynamic here is so unrelentingly brutal that it’s an actual shock to see how glib the movie is in papering it over. Imagine a “Dr. Phil” producer doing a third-act rewrite of a Tracy Letts play. Without Louis C.K.’s involvement, the movie would warrant little more than a “nice try” shrug.Fourth of JulyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Man From Toronto’ Review: Not So Clearly Canadian

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      Woody Harrelson plays a hit man and Kevin Hart the wrong man in this Netflix action comedy.There’s very little Toronto in “The Man From Toronto.” There’s the iconic CN Tower, visible only in a distant establishing shot of the twilit skyline, and a few shots of a remote hide-out somewhere on the outskirts of town, before our Canadian hit man hero (Woody Harrelson) is called away on a mission, and the action moves elsewhere — Minnesota, Puerto Rico, the suburbs of Virginia.Ironically, the movie was filmed almost entirely in Ontario, so Toronto, its capital — as well as Hamilton, Milton and Brampton — will frequently show up disguised as somewhere else. When Harrelson chases Teddy (Kevin Hart), a bumbling fitness buff embroiled in an assassination plot because of a case of mistaken identity, they’re actually cruising beneath downtown Toronto’s Gardiner Expressway — not the streets of Washington, D.C. No one in the cast even manages to pronounce “Toronto” correctly.“Geographic license is usually an alibi for laziness,” Thom Andersen once observed in his feature-length essay film “Los Angeles Plays Itself.” In “The Man From Toronto,” directed by Patrick Hughes, the vague sense of location is typical of a broader lack of effort. Although Hart, as the broadly comic version of the classic Hitchcockian Wrong Man, has a certain goofball charm, his frantic coward routine gets old quickly, with no appreciable change as the action-flick danger continues to escalate. Harrelson, on the other hand, does little with the role of the unflappable super assassin, playing put-upon straight man to Hart’s over-the-top jester without much chemistry.As the shoot-em-up carnage builds to a long one-take fight sequence in Teddy’s gym — reminiscent of the spectacular church battle in the 2014 movie “Kingsman: The Secret Service,” with less panache — the overall feeling is one of simply going through the motions. That’s a shame, eh?The Man From TorontoRated PG-13 for crude language, comic action and some graphic violence. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Sniper: The White Raven’ Review: Rage and Resilience

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      This slick fictional portrait of a Ukrainian sniper begins in tranquillity before thrusting us into the silent brutality of the battlefield.The polished character study “Sniper: The White Raven” tells the fictional story of a Ukrainian free spirit turned specialized soldier. Its release arrives as troubling reports on Russia’s invasion of the country break almost daily, and the movie’s themes of nationalism, rage and resilience resonate even as its glassiness holds viewers at a distance.Directed by the Ukrainian filmmaker Marian Bushan, the movie begins in 2014, as Mykola (Pavlo Aldoshyn), an amiable science teacher, leads a nonconformist existence. He and his wife (Maryna Koshkina) live in a shanty carved into a hillside, and use energy from a rudimentary windmill erected above. A primal mood steers these early scenes, and the looseness of the storytelling makes for a lovely and cogent prologue.But once Russia invades Ukraine that year and Mykola faces a cataclysmic tragedy, the film hardens and darkens. Despairing, Mykola enlists in the military, where he sheds his pacifism and volunteers to train as a marksman. After Mykola commits to the army, he hardly looks back, and we spend much of the remaining running time observing his silent focus on the battlefield.Like many other movies trailing a lone gunslinger, “Sniper: The White Raven” builds to a tense face-off, which for our hero comes to represent a small measure of justice. The story’s beginning in such a tranquil place makes its ultimate devotion to vengeance somewhat difficult to comprehend — though, one might argue, so is an imperialist war.Sniper: The White RavenRated R. Running time: 2 hours. 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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      ‘Clara Sola’ Review: Breaking Free

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      A 40-year-old woman, believed to be blessed with divine powers, has her sexual awakening in Nathalie Álvarez Mesén’s debut feature.A sad paradox of being a woman in this world is that the more one is exalted — as a goddess, a saint, a provider — the less one is allowed to be a person, flawed and whole. Such is the predicament of the heroine of Nathalie Álvarez Mesén’s debut feature, “Clara Sola.”Clara (Wendy Chinchilla Araya) is a 40-year-old woman, with a childlike, volatile nature. She lives in a verdant Costa Rican village with her mother, Fresia (Flor María Vargas Chaves), and her niece, Maria (Ana Julia Porras Espinoza). Because Clara is believed to have been blessed with healing powers by the Virgin Mary, she is trussed up and trotted out by Fresia to help visitors seeking miracles, and guarded fiercely as a model of purity. Fresia won’t let Clara get surgery for a spinal problem (“God gave her to me like this,” she declares), and she rubs Clara’s fingers in chilies to prevent her from masturbating.As the arrival of a handsome horse-wrangler sets off a slow, feral combustion in Clara, the film unfolds as a familiar drama of sexual awakening amid religious repression (with cues from “Carrie,” no less). But “Clara Sola” compels when it dwells in its central mysteries, like Clara’s special, empathic connection to nature and animals. Araya is remarkably tender as she sinks her fingers into the earth or gingerly lifts bugs off the ground, while Sophie Winqvist Loggins’s hushed, soft-focus camerawork imbues these moments with an almost spiritual grace.Is Clara neurodivergent, thus prompting her mother’s coddling, or has her deification had a stunting effect on her social capacities? Does she truly have otherworldly powers, or is she just attuned to the world differently? With its elliptical telling, “Clara Sola” leaves these questions unresolved, gently balancing between magic realism and the more tragic, sobering realities of our world.Clara SolaNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters. More