Movies

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Montana Story’ Review: A Domestic Drama in Big Sky Country

      by

      Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s new film follows two adult siblings as they grapple with their terminally ill father.In the deft genre rethink “Montana Story,” the American flag doesn’t just flutter and wave, it also sends a warning. It looks so unassuming. Clean and neat, without frayed edges or faded colors, it flies from a tall pole planted in front of a handsome two-story home. There, on 200 acres in southwestern Montana, in a glorious area girdled by mountains known as Paradise Valley, nature beckons and soothes. It looks like heaven; it takes a while to see the rot.The directors Scott McGehee and David Siegel don’t linger on the flag. Instead, they gently nose you into a classic western milieu while simultaneously pulling you into a simmering family melodrama about two adult children grappling with each other and their terminally ill father. He’s the one who bought the family ranch years earlier and — with plenty of help, pretty horses and unethically lined pockets — took up the quintessential American role of the cowboy. That archetype is critical to both his legacy and the movie’s larger ambitions, which draw a line between one man’s patrimony and the country’s fraught bequest.It’s nearing winter when the youngest, Cal (Owen Teague), rolls up to the ranch in his truck. Lanky and in his early 20s, he has the loose limbs of a man who hasn’t settled into his body and a name that evokes “East of Eden,” another domestic drama. Here, the family’s history emerges with discretion, with visual cues and tense talks involving red-alert words like bankruptcy. Cal’s father, Wade (Rob Story), has had a stroke. Comatose and hooked to a machine that keeps his heart pumping, he now languishes in the study, cared for by a nurse, Ace (Gilbert Owuor), and a housekeeper, Valentina (Kimberly Guerrero).Despite the bad news and Cal’s furrowed brow over the unpaid bills, there is an inviting, relaxed quality to this narrative table setting, to the introductions, the carefully arranged genre elements and the casual way the parts begin sliding into place. Part of what’s appealing, even lulling, is that you think you’ve seen this before, if not necessarily in person. With its vistas, small town, lonely ranch and dusty roads, the Montana here looks pretty much like what you’d expect. It’s beautiful, isolated, rugged; it’s also a world that in image and in ethos was partly invented by Hollywood (and currently available to rent through Airbnb).Everything changes with the arrival of Erin (Haley Lu Richardson), Cal’s estranged older sister. She enters like a storm, disrupting the calm; as Cal later jokes, if you don’t like the weather in Montana, just wait five minutes. With brusque, hurried impatience, Erin explains she has flown in from the East Coast to see their father, whom she hasn’t seen since she left seven years ago. She plans to leave again right after. Instead, she stays, and that decision by this angry, wounded, defensive woman — Richardson tightly coils the character’s body inward, as if in hiding — sets a brutal reckoning in motion and this story on its course.What emerges next is by turns hot and cold, elliptical and obvious, effective and sometimes less so. As filmmakers, McGehee and Siegel like to engage with traditional genres, though at a discreet, distinctly self-aware remove. (Their movies include “The Deep End” and “What Maisie Knew.”) This creates a kind of doubled vision (theirs, yours), which isn’t a novel strategy, certainly, but can be tough to pull off. When “Montana Story” works, you are effortlessly drawn into a world — which allows you to go with the easygoing, realist groove — even as you’re taking stock of the artifice and waiting for the hammer to fall.While Cal frets and cautiously approaches Erin, attempting to reconnect, she pushes back, her face by turns opaque and knotted in rage. They keep circling, and the story progresses — there’s a beloved old horse in the barn and an interested party surveying the property — allowing each sibling to emerge with clarity and reveal the family’s relationships and pathologies. Even in dying, Wade remains as much a powerful gravitational force as the canned ideal he once embodied. As the story ticks on, the filmmakers put Cal and Erin’s unhappiness into play with ideas about identity, power, patriarchy and the myth of the west.There’s much to like in “Montana Story,” including Teague and Richardson, who, whether together or alone, retain an emotional integrity. Richardson has the better role, even if her character has to butcher a sacrificial chicken. Teague is burdened with some confessional speeches that, in length and density, feel at odds with the otherwise naturalistic dialogue. More provocative than persuasive, these near-soliloquies add buckets of information, but you can hear the writing in every phrase and weighted pause. And, unlike the fade-outs that punctuate the movie like chapter breaks, they unproductively disrupt the flow.In the main, Cal’s speeches seem contrived to push the story into another storytelling register, away from grounded psychological realism and into something approaching the mythic. It doesn’t always work. There are too many explanations and awkward good intentions; Dante’s “Inferno” puts in a dubious appearance, and the supporting characters, almost all played by people of color, skew homogeneously nice. Even so, when Erin rides the family’s old horse under the sheltering sky, and Cal, in plaintive voice-over, speaks about what they once had and what they lost, “Montana Story” opens a world of meaning that can pierce the heart.Montana StoryRated R for violence. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      After Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle Attacks, Comedy Venues Increase Security

      by

      Will Smith slapped Chris Rock onstage at the Oscars. Dave Chappelle was tackled at the Hollywood Bowl. Now some venues are increasing security to protect comedians.It was a joke about a mother, cocaine and Walmart that set the man off.He had been sitting with a woman at the Laugh Factory in Chicago this winter, shouting enthusiastically in response to a joke about drugs when, after being needled about his relationship with the woman, he said that she was his mother.So when Joe Kilgallon, the next comedian, took the microphone, a joke popped into his head.“That’s healthy — cocaine with your mom on a Monday,” Mr. Kilgallon recalled quipping. “Getting some real Walmart vibes here.”The man leaped from his chair, cursed and made a beeline for the stage, club officials and Mr. Kilgallon recalled. A security guard grabbed the man before he could climb onstage and hustled him out of the club through an emergency exit.It wound up nothing more than a minor confrontation, the kind that comedians have had to deal with for years, given that making fun of people and mixing it up with hecklers is basically part of the job description. But a couple of recent high-profile physical attacks on comedians — Will Smith slapping Chris Rock onstage at the Oscars in March and a man tackling Dave Chappelle as he performed at the Hollywood Bowl last week — has left some comics wondering if the stage is becoming less safe, and has led some clubs and venues to take steps to beef up their security at comedy shows.Laugh Factory officials say that as a result of the recent unrest, they have added cameras and metal detectors and increased the number of security guards at some of their locations. They have made a few additions — “This is not a U.F.C. match!” “We do not care about your political affiliation!”— to the standard monologue about two-drink minimums people hear as they walk in the door. The Uptown Comedy Corner in Atlanta last weekend hired an off-duty police officer to bolster its security, moved one of its guards closer to the stage and began using metal detecting wands to check patrons and their bags at the door. And the Hollywood Bowl said it had implemented its own “additional security measures” after the attack on Mr. Chappelle.Garrett Baney was searched this week as he entered The Laugh Factory on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles.Alex Welsh for The New York Times“When a comedian gets onstage, what is their only goal?” asked Judy Gold, the comedian and author of “Yes, I Can Say That: When They Come for the Comedians, We Are All in Trouble.” “To make you laugh. That’s it.”“When you take the comedian’s intent out of the formula and you decide ‘I am going to take this joke the way I perceive it, instead of the way the comedian intended it,’ ” she said, “and then say ‘I didn’t like that joke, I want that person canceled or silenced or beat up,’ I mean, it’s just devastatingly sad.”In interviews, comedy club owners and comedians themselves expressed varying degrees of concern over the recent events. While some spoke of a worrisome uptick in audience outbursts that predates the Oscars, others cautioned against conflating what happened to Mr. Rock and Mr. Chappelle and drawing overly broad conclusions.Trevor Noah addressed the situation with comedy last week, when he warily walked out onto the stage of his Comedy Central program, “The Daily Show with Trevor Noah,” under the watchful eye of a man in a black windbreaker that said “Security” who appeared to murmur into a Secret Service-style earpiece as Mr. Noah opened the show.Noam Dworman, the owner of the Comedy Cellar in New York, said he viewed the Smith-Rock confrontation as a highly specific “one-off” in which Mr. Smith seemed to be trying to embarrass Mr. Rock more than physically hurt him. Seeing an audience member tackling Mr. Chappelle was concerning, he said, but might be part of a broader trend.“It just seems like violence is creeping up on us,” Mr. Dworman said, citing recent riots and protests that have turned violent. “We have a lot of people equating words with violence. And the logical extension of equating words with violence is to say that it’s reasonable to answer words with violence.”Some comedians brushed off concern about their personal safety, noting that they are not, for the most part, big names like Mr. Rock and Mr. Chappelle. Several made clear they did not plan to soften their material. But some worried that societal forces, including the bitter debates of the Trump years and the difficulties many faced during the pandemic, may have left people increasingly on edge — and less willing to take a joke.After Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars and was allowed to stay at the ceremony, some comedians feared it might embolden copy cat attacks. Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesJamie Masada, the owner of the Laugh Factory, said he had been counseling his comedians to take into account that some audience members have spent much of the last two years inside their apartments during a grueling pandemic. Mr. Kilgallon said he believed that after so much time alone, “people don’t know how to act in public” — whether it be in comedy clubs, bars or sporting events.Comedy clubs have long employed bouncers and security guards to deal with the occasional patron who has been overserved, or who is heckling a tad too much. And long before Mr. Smith strode onto the Academy Awards stage to slap Mr. Rock as retribution for a joke about his wife, there have been scattered instances of people confronting comedians during their sets, or in some cases, physically assaulting them.In the aftermath of the Oscars slap, some comics warned of the potential for copy cats. Mr. Smith was not only not removed from the Dolby Theater after hitting Mr. Rock but was given a standing ovation soon afterward when he was awarded the Oscar for best actor. (He was later banned from the Oscars for 10 years.)“These people gave him a standing ovation and no punishment,” Ms. Gold said of Mr. Smith. “We all said there will be copycat assaults. And there was.”The attack on Mr. Chappelle was murkier. A man carrying a weapon tackled Mr. Chappelle onstage at the Hollywood Bowl, where he was appearing as part of “Netflix Is a Joke: The Festival.” The Los Angeles city attorney charged Isaiah Lee, 23, with four misdemeanors in connection with the attack, including battery and possession of a weapon with intent to assault; Mr. Lee has pleaded not guilty.The Los Angeles police have not released any information about Mr. Lee’s motive for the attack on Mr. Chappelle, whose comedy has provoked controversy in the past. Mr. Chappelle discussed the encounter at another comedy show in Los Angeles later that week, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Mr. Chappelle told the audience that he had spoken to Mr. Lee after the incident, and said that Mr. Lee had said he did it to draw attention to the plight of his grandmother, who had been forced out of her neighborhood by gentrification, the trade publication reported.The Laugh Factory recently installed a new security camera.Alex Welsh for The New York Times“More than the incident itself, it’s the reaction people are having and saying — saying this is an ongoing or repeat thing,” said Angelo Sykes, a co-owner of Uptown Comedy Corner, which stiffened its security after the attack on Mr. Chappelle. “When you hear those things it makes you say, ‘OK, we can’t take those chances. We’ve got to be on the safe side.’”In telephone interviews last week, several comedians in Los Angeles said the attacks had been a topic of conversation between comics after shows. Ms. Gold described some of her fellow comedians as “weary and tired” and said others were “freaking out.”Comedy, she noted, is often a work in progress. “We don’t know where the line is until we bring up our material,” she said. “The audience informs us.”Tehran Von Ghasri, a Los Angeles-based comedian, was among those who said an increasing share of “hypersensitive” audience members seemed to be coming to shows and either inviting confrontation, “looking to be offended” — or both.Mr. Kilgallon said social media was also to blame. He has noticed that audience members are now quick to pull out their phones if a controversial topic is being discussed or a tense moment arises. But he said that the fundamentals of comedy remained the same.“Over the last five years, people come up to me after a show and say, ‘It’s got to be tough these days doing comedy — everyone’s so sensitive,’” Mr. Kilgallon said. “And I say, ‘No, it’s not.’ I perform in the bluest parts of the country and some of the reddest parts of the country. If you’re funny — no matter what the joke is, people laugh.” More

    • 75 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Sneakerella’ Review: Beauty and the Hypebeast

      by

      This musical remake follows an orphaned boy in Queens as he falls head over sneaker heels for the daughter of a Manhattan footwear magnate.A Queens hypebeast falls for a Manhattan rich girl in “Sneakerella,” the latest rehashed fairy tale to be foisted upon audiences. It seemed inevitable that Disney would swap glass slippers for pumped-up kicks eventually; Cinderella is too shoe-centric a story and Hollywood too besotted with remakes — lest viewers forget, Camila Cabello played the maiden mere months ago — for nobody to dream up a sneakerhead crossover.If this spin on the tale is not quite diverting enough to justify its existence, the movie, directed by Elizabeth Allen Rosenbaum, is at least not a soulless exercise. Peppered with an array of original songs, “Sneakerella” is a hip-hop opera whose music is never mere emotional embroidery. Scenes are often sung-through, with rap and lyrics serving as dialogue. The actors could have used some more lip-syncing practice, but the effect is fun. Lin-Manuel Miranda might be tickled to see how the trickle-down of his stylings can elevate even the most dubious of re-trodden I.P.The story is also gender-swapped. Our orphaned hero is El (Chosen Jacobs), a sneaker fanatic and stock boy in an Astoria shoe store who’s overworked by his stepfather and razzed by his stepbrothers. In line for new kicks, he meets Kira (Lexi Underwood), the daughter of a sneaker tycoon and the heiress to its empire. First comes love, then comes drama: El wants to design footwear for Kira’s family business, and fibs about a wealth of experience to score the gig. It’s a complication as contrived as they come, but then again, so is a prince shoving a kingdom’s worth of feet into a stiletto.SneakerellaNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. Watch on Disney+. More

    • 75 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Foxhole’ Review: A History of Violence

      by

      This small-scale dramatic military anthology tells a familiar story of the endless cycle of war.Jack Fessenden’s war film “Foxhole” is really three short war films spliced together, each revolving around a banal moral dilemma. The first, set during the Civil War, concerns a squad of Union soldiers who must decide whether to abandon a fortified trench to save the life of a wounded man; the second, during World War I, follows American soldiers on the front lines who must decide whether or not to execute a potentially dangerous German captive; the third, set in Iraq, focuses on a detachment of American soldiers who, separated from their convoy and under heavy fire, must choose between fleeing to higher ground on foot or remaining under tenuous cover in their damaged Humvee.The three-part scope is ambitious, but “Foxhole” is a film made on a very small scale. The soldiers in each segment are played by the same actors — a theatrical conceit meant to emphasize, rather tritely, the eternal repetition of war — and the action is almost entirely limited, for the duration of the movie’s 95-minute running time, to the cramped confines suggested by the title. Fessenden, the son of the cult horror filmmaker Larry Fessenden, attempts to disguise the production’s slender means by way of several unconvincing tricks ordinarily found in student films, such as using blown-out high-contrast lighting to hide backgrounds in close-ups, and blanketing wider shots in thick, phony-looking fog. These gimmicks, however, do not mask the thin, superficial writing, which relies on blandly sentimental monologues and an assortment of patriotic war-flick clichés.FoxholeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 63 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      ‘The Innocents’ Review: Head Games

      by

      Four children develop unusual abilities in this wonderfully eerie Norwegian horror movie.“The Innocents” may share a title — and even some thematic fragments — with Jack Clayton’s 1961 ghost story, but its vibe is ultimately more superheroic than spectral. There’s no hint of either characteristic, though, in the movie’s gorgeous opening shot of an angelically sleeping child, the brush of eyelashes on freckled skin glowing in summer sunlight. The child is 9-year-old Ida (Rakel Lenora Flottum), and when she wakes and carefully pinches the thigh of her autistic, nonverbal sister, Anna (played by the neurotypical actor Alva Brynsmo Ramstad), we know Ida is no angel.Yet “The Innocents,” written and directed by Eskil Vogt (probably best known for his collaborations with Joachim Trier), isn’t concerned with adjudicating right and wrong. Rather, this uncannily atmospheric movie immerses us in a childhood world where choices between cruelty and kindness, empathy and hostility must be learned and negotiated. Set in a large Norwegian housing complex, where towering apartment blocks huddle before an encroaching forest, the story pulls Ida and Anna toward two other children: Aisha (Mina Yasmin Bremseth Asheim), sweet and gentle, and the slightly older Ben (Sam Ashraf), moody and intense. Both live with single mothers; but while Aisha’s is lovingly attentive, Ben’s is neglectful, unaware that her bullied son is becoming dangerously angry. And that he has paranormal gifts.Those aptitudes — telepathy, telekinesis and a terrifying ability to control minds — are amplified when Ben is around the other children, who begin to share some of them. Thoughts move unhindered from one brain to another, and an injury to one child causes another to bleed. At first, Ben’s tricks with rocks and bottle caps seem innocent enough, no more worrying than Ida’s double-jointed elbows; but when, in a series of increasingly horrifying scenes, his playfulness lurches into sadism, Ida is the first to recognize that they may all be in danger.Skillfully merging menace and sweetness (when Anna begins to speak, her parents’ delight is incredibly touching), “The Innocents” constructs a superbly eerie moral landscape, one that the children (all of whom are fantastic) must learn to navigate. Keeping the light bright and the camera mostly at child height, the cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grovlen fills his sunny, soaring final shot with chilly foreboding. Ida and Anna, knowing no adult can help them, can only try to save themselves.The InnocentsNot rated. In Norwegian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

    • 75 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      When Motherhood Is a Horror Show

      by

      For the onscreen moms in “The Baby,” “Umma” and “Lamb” — and for an ascendant class of sardonic mom influencers — the source of psychological torture is motherhood itself.In the first episode of “The Baby,” a new comedic horror series on HBO Max, an infant falls into a childless woman’s arms, as if dropped there by a cosmic stork. But the special delivery is not a blessing — it’s a curse.Natasha (Michelle de Swarte), the 38-year-old chef who catches the gurgling babe, does not want children. She has watched with disgust as her friends have vanished into motherhood; now they are always droning on about their babies, going on play dates with their babies, telling Natasha to stop smoking cigarettes around their babies. The baby-from-the-sky quickly reveals himself to be a supernatural manifestation of her own dying youth. Once he starts crawling after Natasha, everyone around her ends up dead or maimed.The show is a not-quite-sendup of a genre that imbues the trials of motherhood with a paranormal charge. The mothers in several horror movies released this year are not straightforward villains (like the mother in “Carrie”) or innocent naïfs (as in “Rosemary’s Baby”), but sympathetic figures who become implicated in haunting family dysfunctions.In “Umma,” a beekeeping single mom (Sandra Oh) is possessed by the ghost of her own mother. In “Lamb,” an Icelandic farmer (Noomi Rapace) adopts a hybrid lamb-human newborn she discovers in her barn, with monstrous results. Marvel’s flirtation with horror, in the director Sam Raimi’s zombified “Doctor Strange” sequel, finds its villain in a mother, a lurching Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen), who is willing to wreak havoc across as many universes as it will take to reunite with her children.Even “The Twin,” an original film from the horror streaming service Shudder, cycles through a mess of clichés (evil twin, Scandinavian occultism, Faustian bargain) before landing on mommy psychodrama. Though these mothers often carry past domestic traumas — abuse, neglect, infant loss — their stories signal that there is something psychologically harrowing about the role of motherhood itself.Inside the World of ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’In this mind-expanding, idiosyncratic take on the superhero film, a laundromat owner is the focus of a grand, multiversal showdown.Review: Our film critic called “Everything Everywhere All at Once” an exuberant swirl of genre anarchy.The Protagonist: Over the years, Michelle Yeoh has built her image as a combat expert. For this movie, she drew on her emotional reserves.The Villain: The actress Stephanie Hsu, who plays an all-powerful evil being, talks about how clothes convey the full range of her character.A Lovelorn Romantic: A child star in the 1980s, Ke Huy Quan returns to acting as the husband of Yeoh’s character, a role blanding action and drama.A Healing Experience: For some viewers, the movie was a way to reflect on how the effects of trauma can be passed down between generations.In pregnancy, birth and young life, the horror tropes abound. Growing another human being inside your body is a natural human process that can nevertheless feel eerie, alien and supernatural. Also, gory. When the photographer Heji Shin began taking unsentimental photographs of babies at birth, “I looked at them and I was like, This is literally ‘The Exorcist,’” she told T Magazine. Bringing life into the world also brings death viscerally close. Thousands of infants die unexpectedly in the first year of their lives. Giving birth in the United States is more than 20 times as lethal as skydiving. Even the most desired and successful of pregnancies (let alone the kind that anti-abortion laws would require be carried to term) can conjure themes of shape-shifting, disfigurement, possession and torture.The pandemic surfaced horrors of a more quotidian nature: the drudgeries of ceaseless child rearing. The veneration of motherly fortitude and sacrifice endemic to nature documentaries and Mother’s Day Instagram tributes has always disguised an American disinterest in functionally supporting mothers and other caretakers. But recently the image of the overworked American mother has assumed a darker valence, as new levels of isolation and stress have unleashed a maternal desperation that’s been described as “primal,” “Sisyphean,” and, as the writer Amil Niazi put it in The Cut last year, “like my brain is burning and so is my entire house and someone just stole the fire extinguisher.”Often a mother’s own fixation on such darker themes is written off, trivialized as old news or pathologized as postpartum depression. So it makes sense for it all to get sublimated into horror. In fact, it makes so much sense that the outcome is often a little too on the nose. Psychological frights that jumped from the screen in earlier mother-focused films, like “The Babadook” (from 2014) and “Hereditary” (2018), now seem to drift wearily through pop culture, as stories of motherhood are retold again and again through the blunt instruments of horror.When a woman notices bizarre behavior in her young son in “The Twin,” the twist is foreshadowed via the diagnosis of a shrink, who tells her that her child “is a mirror — he’s a reflection of your emotions and fears.” In “Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness,” Wanda Maximoff fashions the tension into a tagline: “I’m not a monster, I’m a mother,” she says. And in “Umma,” as Oh’s character endures a tedious possession by her abusive mother’s ghost, a kindly neighbor (Dermot Mulroney) vocalizes the old saw that grinds through the whole movie: “Oh God, I can hear myself turning into my mother.”Tania Franco Klein for The New York Times“The Baby” is clever to convert this mode into comedy, though the mood soon darkens. At first, Natasha’s antipathy toward parenthood feels refreshingly specific, with its focus on the mundane degradations that can haunt the imaginations of the happily childless. A soiled diaper escalates into a scene of body horror; a struggle to collapse a stroller ends with a severed finger. But the murderous-baby metaphor assumes more and more of motherhood’s potential pitfalls with every episode. Soon the show is also about postpartum depression and forced birth and compulsory heterosexuality and intergenerational trauma.There’s something frustrating about this relentless construction of motherhood as a horror show, and not just because mothers experience the full range of human emotions (some of which are more faithfully explored in a Hallmark movie). By breaking a taboo, the genre has created a new cliché: of the exhausted mother pushed to her psychological breaking point. Though the lack of support for mothers is a structural problem, it is reframed as a personal one, with a narrative resolution that resembles a postpartum therapy session or an invitation to collectively scream. Mothers are made to suffer, and then they are flattened into a long-suffering mother persona.On the internet, there is a cutesy horror-inspired term for this kind of mother: the mombie. This lightly ironic version of the overwhelmed mom persona is ascendant on Instagram, TikTok and e-commerce novelty sites, where the lobotomized stereotype of the mommy influencer is countered with a version of motherhood defined by bedraggled debasement. In this exaggerated burlesque performance, motherhood is analogized to prison, or the feeling of a child’s scooter wheel repeatedly hitting you in the ankle bone for all eternity.These jokes are often accompanied by sincere messages about how negative feelings about motherhood are valid, and that it’s important to speak out. But the persona can also seem curiously invested in feeling aggrieved, as if the conversion of suffering into content is itself a balm. A common joke format is to complain that men do not help, but that when they do help, they do not help correctly. If you can’t relate, perhaps it is because you are so smugly privileged that you can pay other women to perform the drudgery of motherhood for you. (A recent “Atlanta” episode actually mines great comedy-horror from this premise: When the Trinidadian nanny for a rich white boy dies suddenly, the parents are haunted by the dawning realization that she was more family to their son than they were.)I found relief from this narrative trap in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” which unchains its overworked mother character from the limits of the domestic horror genre by vaulting her into a multiverse of thrilling supernatural possibilities. The film begins with Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh), a laundromat owner pestered by her aging father, her bumbling husband, her depressed teenage daughter and the I.R.S. Her life has devolved, as she puts it, into the endless repetition of “laundry and taxes” — until she learns that a plethora of Evelyns exist in endless multiverses, that she happens to be living the most disappointing possible version of her life, and that now she must access her untapped potential in order to save the worlds. “Everything Everywhere” accesses familiar themes of fraught mother-daughter relationships and overburdened moms, but this time the film’s whole paranormal dimension is built around Evelyn’s powerful complexity.After a numbing few weeks of watching mothers tortured onscreen, the absurdly funny “Everything Everywhere” is the one that actually made me cry. But even during this elevated viewing experience, I was reminded that I was still living in our universe. Before the previews began, the theater screened a KFC commercial where a family gathers around the table for a fried chicken dinner. We hear each of their internal monologues as they dig in: “Mmm, mac and cheese,” the son thinks. “Mmm, tenders,” thinks the father. Then we hear the mind of the mother, who is nourished only by a respite from her domestic burden: “Mmmm,” she thinks. “Silence.” More

    • 75 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Operation Mincemeat’ Review: A Bland Hash

      by

      In this World War II drama from Netflix, a team of spies uses a vagrant’s corpse to outwit the Nazis.Hundreds of thousands of British soldiers died fighting in World War II. “Operation Mincemeat,” directed by John Madden, tells the real-life story of one man drafted into the war effort after death — or rather, it tells the story of the men who conscripted him. In this bizarrely celebratory tale, the titular “mincemeat” is a troubling figure, weighing heavy on the conscience as the men who’ve enlisted him engage in petty infighting.Colin Firth plays Ewen Montagu, a former barrister who teams up with Charles Cholmondeley, played by Matthew Macfadyen, after hearing his plan to deceive Hitler by using forged papers attached to a corpse. They’re aided by two girls Friday: Hester, Montagu’s steadfast “spinster” secretary played by Penelope Wilton, and Jean, a younger typist played by Kelly Macdonald.They end up pilfering the corpse of Glyndwr Michael, a homeless Welshman who died from ingesting rat poison. There are conflicting accounts as to whether Montagu and Cholmondeley informed Michael’s family before repurposing his body. Michelle Ashford’s screenplay, based on the book of the same name by Ben Macintyre, has an unexpected relative nearly sabotage their plans before, oddly, disappearing from the script. This seems the filmmakers’ main attempt at injecting some conscience into their protagonists — the scene ends with Montagu declaring, “May God forgive us all.”But “Operation Mincemeat” is overall light on remorse and far more interested in intrigue, both political and romantic. As the leading men spar over Jean (yawn) and their bond is further threatened by a superior officer with Red Scare accusations, we’re expected to lose ourselves in their human squabbles. Alas, the more provocative Michael — and all the existential and ethical issues he represents — lingers in the periphery.Operation MincemeatRated PG-13 for light sexuality and a gnarly autopsy. Running time: 2 hours 8 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

    • 150 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      ‘The Village House’ Review: A Family and the Walls That Enfold It

      by

      Over two decades, babies are born, elders die, young people move on, but a home remains, even though visitors dwindle.In “The Village House,” the four sides of the camera frame find beautiful, painterly pockets of space and time within the four walls of an ancestral home. Achal Mishra’s feature debut, set in Madhopur, a village in east India’s Bihar state, unfolds as a kind of autobiography — a decades-spanning portrait of the director’s family, drawn from childhood memories — and also a biography, of the abode that came before him and whose legacy will outlast him.The film is divided into three chapters, set in 1998, 2010 and 2019. In the first, the sun-warmed house bustles with the activity of an extended family gathered to celebrate the birth of a child. The men play cards on a veranda; the women fry potatoes in hot oil; the children scamper about and pick mangoes.As we segue from one chapter to the next, the passage of time makes itself felt subtly, in the details. The house grows emptier and more worn, deaths and diseases are mentioned in passing, and conversations become increasingly nostalgic. By the end, the house is in disrepair, and its inhabitants have all either died or moved away to the city. In lieu of plot, the film accumulates rituals, traditions and memories, and charts a larger arc of familial change and rural emigration.With its patient lens and attention to textures, “The Village House” often evokes the durational cinema of Tsai Ming-liang or Chantal Akerman, though Mishra’s compositions are more mannered. The film’s still, square images feel so much like paintings that any stray movement — the smoke rising in spirals from a mosquito coil, or a palm tree swaying in the breeze — can seem like magic, a picture come to life.The Village HouseNot rated. In Maithili, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. Rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More