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      ‘The Instigators’ Review: A Star-Studded Boston Heist Movie

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      Casey Affleck and Matt Damon star in a Boston heist that goes sideways.The best joke in “The Instigators” is a crack about the public school curriculum in Quincy, the suburb just south of Boston that outsiders never pronounce correctly. (It’s closer to a “z” than an “s.”) It feels like an inside joke, as do later affectionate jabs at other Greater Boston locales, lingo and corrupt politicians. This is sort of a heist movie, but it is first and foremost a Boston movie, full of Boston guys and Boston accents and (South) Boston places and Boston humor. Heck, “The Instigators” is practically Boston: The Immersive Experience.It will surprise no one to learn that it’s produced by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, and co-stars Damon alongside the movie’s co-writer, Casey Affleck. Its other writer is Chuck MacLean, the creator and executive producer of “City on a Hill,” the three-season Showtime drama about, you guessed it, Boston.The director of “The Instigators,” Doug Liman, is a born and raised New Yorker. But both he and Damon found collaborative success in 2002 with “The Bourne Identity.” This is their first project together since that hit, and it’s studded with stars: Alongside Affleck and Damon, there’s Hong Chau, Michael Stuhlbarg, Alfred Molina, Ving Rhames, Paul Walter Hauser, Toby Jones, Ron Perlman and the rapper Jack Harlow (in his second feature film role).Somehow, in 2024, all that wattage still only merits a one-week limited theatrical release in the August dead zone and a quick hop to streaming. Given a few weeks in theaters to pick up steam, I can imagine it doing well, mostly because it’s so easygoing. “The Instigators” starts out like an “Ocean’s 11” riff, with a group of petty thieves gathered by a stormy crime boss, Mr. Besegai (Stuhlbarg), to pull off a big job and then never speak of it again. It seems the sitting governor (Perlman, ideally cast) is a crook, which all but guarantees his re-election — and the cash bribes that will be brought to his victory ball make it an ideal job.Some of the group, like Rory (Damon), really need the money; he’s depressed and desperate and late on his child support, and his therapist (Chau) is worried about him. Others, like Cobby (Casey Affleck) and Scalvo (Harlow), are just the kind of guys who do this kind of thing. But Mr. Besegai is not Mr. Ocean, having snagged none of his breezy luck. Everything goes wrong right from the start, and Cobby and Rory find themselves thrown together in a comedy of blunders.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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      ‘Girl You Know It’s True’ Review: Milli Vanilli, Fictionalized. Again.

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      This film, based on the lives of the duo who lip-synced their way to stardom and downfall, fills in many of the details behind the facade.The true story of the 1980s German musical duo Milli Vanilli could be seen by cynical observers to have begun as farce and ended as tragedy. But despite this fictionalized film’s arguably goofy direct-address narration — from the actors playing the duo — it takes its subjects and their convoluted, unfortunate circumstances seriously.The movie, written and directed by Simon Verhoeven (the German director is the son of the filmmaker Michael Verhoeven, and no relation to the Dutch director Paul Verhoeven), depicts the difficult childhood of Rob Pilatus. He was adopted by a white German couple, and he is first seen as a boy whose Afro all the neighbors want to touch.The film follows Rob as he takes up dancing and forms a breaking team with the Paris-born Fab Morvan. They develop an eye-catching longhaired, leather-clad look and are discovered by the producer Frank Farian, a Svengali who convinces them that they don’t need to actually sing to reach the top of the charts.They can just lip-sync, though that isn’t the only illusion: Farian pilfered the track that gives this film its title, from a Maryland R&B group whose outrage at getting ripped off is also depicted in this eventful movie.Those events are consistently eyebrow raising, if not jaw dropping. The worm turns when a backing tape they use for lip-syncing glitches during an ostensibly live concert. Soon the duo is forced to face up to the fact that they were willing — albeit self-deceiving — patsies. In 1998, Pilatus died from a drug and alcohol overdose.The lead actors — Elan Ben Ali is Morvan, Tijan Njie is Pilatus — bear uncanny resemblances to their real-life models and are better-than-capable performers. (Other cast members are put at a disadvantage by bad wigs.) Viewers who press play with intent to scoff may be surprised with how genuinely caught up they become.Girl You Know It’s TrueNot Rated. Running time: 2 hours 4 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Dance First’ Review: Beckett Encounters Himself

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      Samuel Beckett’s life is reduced to mommy and daddy issues in a biopic that offers simple explanations for the career of a complex writer.It may well be that the happiest day of Samuel Beckett’s boyhood was when he flew a kite with his father. It may also be that one of his great regrets was not winning the approval of his disciplinarian mother.Even if true, these details argue for printing the legend. “Dance First,” a Beckett biopic from James Marsh (“The Theory of Everything”), offers simple explanations for the career of a writer whose output famously resists explaining. The movie, written by Neil Forsyth, was surely intended as a tribute, but it plays more like an effort to reduce Beckett to easily comprehensible terms — the sort of terms he most likely would have resisted.This largely black-and-white film opens in 1969, with Beckett (played at that age by Gabriel Byrne) receiving the Nobel Prize. Beckett, uncomfortable with the event, climbs a ladder up the proscenium and escapes, only to encounter … himself, also played by Byrne. As a framing device, Beckett will interrogate Beckett. The back-and-forth owes more to Freudian psychoanalysis than “Waiting for Godot.”We meet Beckett’s mother (Lisa Dwyer Hogg), who disdains his writing. In Paris, where Fionn O’Shea portrays the playwright as a young man, Beckett butters up James Joyce (Aidan Gillen) and becomes an unhappy companion for Joyce’s daughter, Lucia (Grainne Good). Beckett’s affection for his eventual wife, Suzanne (Léonie Lojkine, and then Sandrine Bonnaire), is seen as complicated by a long-running affair with the translator Barbara Bray (Maxine Peake), who lies in bed with Beckett praising the genius of that new play in which “nothing happens.”The film attributes its title to advice that Beckett ostensibly gave a student, but the line also appears in “Godot”: “Perhaps he could dance first and think afterwards,” Estragon says. This movie — snazzy but empty — embodies those words all too readily.Dance FirstNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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      At 50, ‘The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’ Still Cuts Deep

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      Eli Roth, Paul Feig and other directors with movies out this month explain how this gory horror classic has inspired their work.The movies never recovered after “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” hit theaters in 1974. Focused on a family of cannibalistic, butcherous crazies living in a rural house of horrors, Tobe Hooper’s sleaze-oozing film rattled audiences and was banned in some places. It also inspired filmmakers to take horror in new, more brutal directions.Fede Álvarez, director of the forthcoming “Alien: Romulus,” said that the “unapologetic savagery” of “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” influenced his work.“It’s a humbling reminder of how a hard dose of unsolicited anarchy onscreen is a key ingredient for any horror movie that hopes to endure the test of time,” he said.Beginning Aug. 8, the Museum of Modern Art in New York will offer a weeklong run of the film timed to its 50th anniversary, and will follow that with a retrospective (Aug. 13-20) of Hooper’s other less shocking but still daring genre films from the 1980s, including “Poltergeist” (1982) and “Invaders From Mars” (1986).MoMA didn’t dawdle in taking “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” seriously: It added the film to its collection two years after the movie came out.“Its power hasn’t dimmed,” said Ron Magliozzi, a curator in MoMA’s film department and the organizing curator for the series. “It has matured.”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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      Food Porn Gets Dark

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      Shots of extravagantly composed dishes have become cliché. “The Bear” and two other summer releases use well-plated food to convey darker themes.We love sexy food: the dressed-up dishes on cooking shows, a camera zooming in on an angelically lit plate. The influencer’s video that’s less about food than vibes. The ambrosial spreads in ads. Food porn titillates the senses to sell an idea, a product or an experience: the memorable opulent meal, the communion of sharing food as a sacred rite. But three recent releases have perverted this approach, offering extravagantly composed plates that traumatize, not tantalize.In “The Bear,” the meaning of the beautiful food that Chef Carmy (Jeremy Allen White) creates now that he is finally running his own upscale establishment has changed. It represents old grievances, lingering fears and simmering power struggles. Season 3 opens with an expressionist self-portrait: no plot, just scenes of Carmy working, interspersed with flashbacks of him in kitchens run by chefs he’s idolized.Some of the memories evoke a visceral joy: Carmy wistfully strolling among fields of veggies and making vibrantly detailed illustrations of menu ideas. He admires a photo of one successful creation that could be a salad, arranged like a bouquet. A sunburst of something orange lies petaled and sectioned like a flower, resting on a bed of wild greens. Carmy texts a picture of the arrangement to his brother, Mikey, who is baffled. The message is clear to the audience, though. It’s not just sustenance we’re admiring; it’s art.When Carmy shares an artfully curated dish, Mikey isn’t sure what to make of it.FXScenes of present-day Carmy lack this brightness, literally and figuratively. Kitchen shots are harshly lit to match his clinical approach to the work. Instead of loving glances of plated dishes, we get unsatisfying teases of food that fly by in succession. When Carmy’s frustration mounts and his expectations become impossible for anyone — even him — to meet, mouthwatering meals are swept aside. Two juicy-looking strips of Wagyu beef are flung into the trash, the metal kitchenware clanging violently against the lid, because, Carmy says curtly, “the cook is off.”Carmy’s diminishing relationship with food provides the closest thing “The Bear” has to an enticing conflict. As he settles into the early weeks of running a fine-dining hot spot, he’s increasingly haunted by memories of his tutelage under the sadistic David Fields (Joel McHale). In flashbacks we see Chef David craning over Carmy predatorily, ready with a bitter rebuke or challenge. By season’s end, food is no longer a comfort for Carmy; producing the requisite artful plate of food is necessary to his restaurant’s survival.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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      ‘Good One’ Review: Revelation in the Woods

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      Lily Collias delivers an extraordinary lead performance in this exquisite debut feature about a camping trip and a moment of self-realization.“Good One” is a drama about human relationships, but it starts with close-up shots of plants and insects, setting the scene in more ways than one. Yes, the characters will spend most of the movie in the woods, and high summer in upstate New York is quite literally full of dirt, bugs and leafy canopies. But contemplating the rich greens and earthy red-browns, I found myself pondering life cycles, the mutating forms and constant shifts of the natural world — and of human life, too. I don’t think that’s an accident.The “good one” of the title is Sam (Lily Collias), who is 17 and on a camping trip with her high-strung father, Chris (James Le Gros), and one of his oldest friends, an underemployed actor named Matt (Danny McCarthy). Matt’s son was supposed to come too, but bailed in a fit of pique, still bitter about his parents’ divorce. So it’s just Sam and the men.Sam is exactly the type to get called the “good one” — not because she’s a prim Goody Two-shoes, but because she’s the sort of teenage girl that adults, especially adult men, feel comfortable around. She’s levelheaded and knows how to snark when necessary. In the woods, she pulls more than her own weight — she can pitch a tent, load up a day pack, filter water, build a fire and cook steaming bowls of ramen. She’ll take advice, but she’s equally good at giving it, an independent thinker with whom any grown-up could talk.And boy, do Chris and Matt talk. Their relationship is rife with old rivalries and structured by all the selves they once were, all the way back to nearly Sam’s age. You can see them fall into an old script, Matt the hapless mess who packs all the wrong stuff and Chris the organized leader who gets mad when the energy bars aren’t in the right place.Sam observes her father’s digs at Matt as they trek across the forest for three days, often silently, only her eyes betraying her thoughts. She has seen this dynamic her whole life. It unnerves her a little, the realization that these guys in their 50s, a couple of life stages ahead of her, are as immature as the boys she knows from home.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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      ‘Cuckoo’ Review: Never Has a Movie Been More Aptly Named

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      Dan Stevens and Hunter Schafer face off in this unexpectedly fun and undeniably nutty horror-comedy about cross-species pollination.“Is this normal?” a bewildered hotel guest in “Cuckoo” inquires after witnessing a fellow guest stagger, vomiting, into the lobby. Viewers might be wondering the same thing about a movie whose title could reveal as much about the sensibility of its director as the nature of its plot.Possessed of a singular, at times inexplicable vision, the German filmmaker Tilman Singer proves once again — after his experimental debut, “Luz” (2019) — that he’s more drawn to sensation than sense. Liberated from logic, his pictures dance on the border between bewitching and baffling, exciting and irksome. Sidling several steps closer to an identifiable plot, “Cuckoo” flaps around Gretchen (an excellent Hunter Schafer), a grieving, unsettled 17-year-old whose mother has died and whose father (Marton Csokas) has brought her to live with his new family in a resort in the Bavarian Alps.From the moment she arrives, nothing seems quite right. Missing her mother and her life in America, Gretchen is slow to connect with her brisk stepmother (Jessica Henwick) and her much younger half sister, Alma (Mila Lieu), who is mute and suffers from unexplained seizures. Adding to Gretchen’s uneasiness is the resort’s touchy-feely owner, Herr König (Dan Stevens), who seems weirdly fixated on Alma. Strange screechings fill the woods, and a frightening figure in white appears to be stalking Gretchen as she walks home from her job at the resort’s reception desk. Maybe that switchblade we saw her unpack will come in handy, after all.A tale of human-avian experimentation with phantasmagoric flourishes, “Cuckoo” is unsubtle and frequently unhinged. The narrative may be blurred, but the mood is pure freak show, and Stevens, bless him, immediately grasps the comic possibilities of the movie’s themes and the nuttiness of his character. Reprising his flawless German accent from the charming 2021 sci-fi romance “I’m Your Man,” he gives König a seductive creepiness that’s less mad scientist than horny ornithologist. Obsessed with replicating — in unspeakable ways — the breeding behaviors of the titular bird, König requires the cooperation of willing young women. Gretchen is not eager to become one of them.Shooting on 35-millimeter film, Paul Faltz, backed by Simon Waskow’s whining, fidgety score, leans into the surreality of Gretchen’s predicament with bizarre close-ups. Ears jerk and twitch in response to mysterious calls; throats flutter with a rapid, stuttering pulse; slimy secretions are passed from one woman to another. And as the resort’s dangers escalate and Gretchen’s injuries multiply, the film’s bonkers, body-horror ambitions become the means by which she will overcome her grief and heal her emotional dislocation.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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      ‘Borderlands’ Review: Shoot First, Ask Questions Never

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      In Eli Roth’s caper movie, based on the best-selling video game franchise, Cate Blanchett plays a bounty hunter who is tasked with finding a tycoon’s daughter.In Eli Roth’s “Borderlands,” a cluttered caper flick based on the best-selling video game series of the same name, Cate Blanchett plays a trigger-happy bounty hunter who keeps killing the other characters midsentence before they can fill in the plot. Shoot first, ask questions never — even though the audience has questions of its own: What caused the delay that’s taken this big-budget movie three years to get released? And is it possible that Roth’s credited co-writer, Joe Crombie, who otherwise has no other screenplays or online presence, might be a pseudonym for someone who doesn’t want their real name on this haphazard script?Like the original first-person shooter game, “Borderlands” is set on a junkyard planet named Pandora that was once a home base for an advanced alien species, but has since been overrun by violent marauders and women with formidable push-up bras. Blanchett’s Lilith was born here and begrudgingly returns under the employ of a tycoon (Edgar Ramírez) who’s hired her to track down his daughter, an unhinged teenager named Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt). To Lilith’s annoyance, her one-woman squad swells with new members: a sassy robot (voiced by Jack Black), an autistic xeno-archaeologist (Jamie Lee Curtis), a mostly mute meathead (Florian Munteanu) and a noble soldier (Kevin Hart). When Hart is playing the straight man, you know you’re watching a film that’s throwing everything at the screen.The style is Chernobyl chic. Anything that can have spikes does have spikes — even the terrain. The scrapheap aesthetic is so maximalist that, at one point, our leads take a joyride in a dumpster. The film itself feels salvaged from the properties it aspires to bowdlerize, chief among them “Star Wars.” Key messages are transmitted as Princess Leia-esque holograms; Black’s robot spouts pessimistic survival statistics; Hart barges onscreen in a gothy Stormtrooper get-up that he immediately discards, sneering, “What a stupid helmet.”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