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      Idris Elba, a Gamer, Was Keen on Joining ‘Sonic the Hedgehog 2’

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      When Idris Elba takes on a new role — whether it’s fictional like Stringer Bell on “The Wire” or historical like Nelson Mandela in “Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom” — he usually has some degree of reality on which to base his performance.That was not the case with his latest character, a surly red cartoon echidna named Knuckles.As Elba explained in a video interview on Tuesday, “I’ve never met any short, fluffy guys with big fists. I’m sorry, that’s not my experience. Maybe you have, but I haven’t.”To a generation of gamers, Knuckles is best known as the rival of Sonic the Hedgehog, the high-velocity star of the long-running Sega franchise.The hit 2020 film based on the game, with Ben Schwartz voicing Sonic and Jim Carrey as his human nemesis, Dr. Robotnik, successfully translated the video-game series into a movie franchise that blended live action with animation.A sequel, “Sonic the Hedgehog 2,” which Paramount will release on Friday, brings back the characters and conflicts while adding more familiar faces from the games, including Knuckles, a powerful fighter with unlikely physical proportions and a particular grudge against the hero.Elba, whose expansive film résumé includes action (“Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw,” “The Suicide Squad”), animation (“Zootopia”) and even one motion-capture Andrew Lloyd Webber musical (“Cats”), said that getting to play Knuckles was “mind-boggling.”Knuckles, voiced by Idris Elba, in “Sonic the Hedgehog 2.”Paramount Pictures/Sega of AmericaThat’s partly because Elba, 49, is a dedicated fan of video games, and partly because he (like the author of this article) is the father of a 7-year-old son, and he was eager to make some movies they could share as a family.As Elba explained, “You and I remember those first early games and now here we are — our sons are like, ‘Wow, I can see “Sonic 2” with my dad.’ That’s special.”(Even so, when I mentioned that my son and I have also bonded over video games, Elba warned: “Is he into Minecraft and Roblox? Be careful. Be aware. You might lose your child.”)Elba spoke further about his history as a gamer and the range of inspirations for Knuckles, including the actor’s own parents. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.Were you a gamer before you made this film?One hundred percent. I literally have my Switch in my bag. When I started off, I had a Commodore 64 [a 1980s-era home computer]. Dude, that’s how far it goes back for me. And then when I could afford one, I had a Sega Genesis. And I’ve pretty much had every single console since then. I’m a grown man now, but I still play FIFA and driving games.I started out on a Commodore 64, too. It had a reputation for having software that was incredibly easy to pirate.Well, it’s funny you say that. I remember you could take a blank tape and dub a game onto it. And you had to take the tabs off the cassette so you didn’t record over it. [Exaggeratedly serious voice] But of course, all my games were authorized purchases, I bought them all.How did the role of Knuckles first come up for you?I’ve done voices in animation and I like doing things for a younger audience. But when my agent called with this, he didn’t even get to finish his sentence. I was like, yes, absolutely.You have a whole body of work that your 7-year-old son can’t see yet. Was it important that you do something you could share with him?[Laughs] There’s a lot of stuff my kid won’t be able to see until he’s an adult, and then he can judge me. My daughter’s 20, and she’s lived with me doing earlier work like “Finding Dory.” So it is a really satisfying feeling for my son to see me do something, too.“Sonic” is the rare film of Elba’s that his 7-year-old can watch: “It is a really satisfying feeling for my son to see me do something.”Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesWhat did you and the director Jeff Fowler discuss about Knuckles in your first meeting?We did try out some voices to figure out what he might sound like. He looks sort of menacing — [exaggeratedly flexes arms] rarrrr. I actually wanted to try to play him with a squeaky voice. I thought that might be funny. But they didn’t think that was funny and that idea got nixed immediately. [Laughs] But we did try different voices, cadences, accents. Knuckles isn’t a big talker, but when he does speak, he’s very blunt.You recently made the western “The Harder They Fall.” Was a villain like Rufus Buck still in your head when you were figuring out Knuckles?Not “The Harder They Fall,” but my character in the Marvel world, in the “Thor” films, Heimdall, there’s a sense of symmetry between those two voices. Look, I’ve got a deep voice and I could just use my voice as it is. I didn’t consciously want to sound like Heimdall too much. But probably, yeah, they sound exactly the same. [Laughs]It felt like you had a specific idea for where Knuckles came from and how you wanted him to sound. How would you explain it?The first thing that we observed was, he comes from an ancient world — he’s a warrior from his tribe and English is not their first language. He doesn’t have a sense of humor in the same way Sonic does. He’s very dry and matter-of-fact, and he uses English just to get his point across and move on. He hasn’t got time for niceties. We used that construct as a way to start to develop what he sounds like.Have you encountered people in real life who are very focused and intense about their goals, but perhaps need more help in personal situations or don’t fully grasp sarcasm?I work in an industry where there’s a lot of instructions being passed left and right — do this, do that — and often the efficient people are the ones who are like, Hey, let’s just get this done. My parents are West African — they moved from Freetown, Sierra Leone, to London in the early ’70s. So when English isn’t your first language and the culture’s different — the English sense of humor, it goes over a lot of people’s heads — I’ve been witness to that.Growing up in London, did you feel like its culture and customs came more organically to you than to your parents?I was born there, so I didn’t recognize that until I was old enough to understand that English culture was not their culture. I remember feeling that. My mom would say, “Back home in Africa, we do things like this.” And I’d never dare say it, but I used to think, We’re not in Africa — we’re in England. That was the beginning of my understanding of that culture clash. But I’ve been to Africa a few times, and I remember going to Sierra Leone and recognizing all this cultural stuff that I’d seen all my life but didn’t know where it had come from. And there it was, in the origin of my parents. It was fascinating.Do you prefer a voice-only role like Knuckles to your other past performances that have involved motion capture?Not necessarily. Motion capture is such a fascinating art and discipline on its own. In this one, there would be no benefit to having any of my facial features for Knuckles. It wouldn’t make any sense.Knuckles is a visitor from an ancient world, and that reminded Elba of his parents’ experience as immigrants in Britain: “The English sense of humor, it goes over a lot of people’s heads — I’ve been witness to that.”Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesSo you haven’t necessarily soured on it after your experience with “Cats”?Thank you for leaping from hedgehogs to cats. I see what you did. From a performance perspective, it is an incredible experience, being a feline. That’s something I’ve experienced and never have to again. That box has been checked.Paramount has been candid that they’d like to do even more with Knuckles, including another “Sonic” movie and his own TV series. Was that part of the appeal for you?It is now. Honestly, when I got it, I didn’t even know that would be on the table. I thought I was just doing one movie. But now, the fact that I can probably get to play more Knuckles and maybe even spin off into his own world is great.There is another film franchise that people would love to see you participate in, that we’re all waiting expectantly to hear about. Is it still a possibility for you?[Silence]You know which one I mean? The spy with the gun?I’m not sure what you’re talking about.He’s got a famous code name with digits —He’s got digits? Knuckles! Knuckles has digits. No guns.Is it safe to say we won’t be breaking any James Bond news in a conversation about Sonic the Hedgehog?Noooooooo. No. I’m sorry to disappoint.Putting that aside, would it surprise you if, many years from now, the roles you are best known for are, say, Stringer Bell, Nelson Mandela and Knuckles?I think for any actor, the dream is to be able to play different roles and not be pigeonholed, and I feel like I’ve been lucky to have that as a career. But it is interesting. I was on a radio show, and they were like, [booming radio announcer voice] “He’s played Luther. He’s done ‘Beasts of No Nation.’ And now: He’s Knuckles.” It’s like, uh, maybe you could say he’s played a seal in “Finding Dory” and a buffalo in “Zootopia,” he’s played a cat. And now he’s Knuckles. That lineup seems a bit more apt. To go from Nelson Mandela to Knuckles is a bit of a reach. More

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      ‘Donbass’ Review: War in Ukraine, the Prequel

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      Sergei Loznitsa’s film, completed in 2018, presents an absurd, horrific tableau of cruelty and corruption.Sergei Loznitsa’s “Donbass,” which opens in American theaters today, is not exactly a new film. It was an Oscar entry in 2019 after making its debut at the Cannes Film Festival the year before, and the events depicted onscreen — fictionalized recreations of things rumored to have really happened — take place a few years before that, in the wake of Russia’s 2014 invasion of Eastern Ukraine.Watching it now, as reports of Russian atrocities in other parts of Ukraine dominate the headlines, is unnerving in a way that’s hard to put into words. The movie’s timeliness is obvious enough, and its prescience carries, at least for this viewer, a jolt of shame. The images of what was happening then provide a prologue to the horrors we are witnessing now — and amount to an unheeded warning.Could a wider audience for “Donbass” have made a difference before this year? Can it make a difference now? Probably not. Art isn’t a lever that moves history, but a lens that shapes perceptions of it. Certain narrative works, novels as well as films, provide illumination different from what might be found in journalism or history. Loznitsa’s nonfiction features, including the recent found-footage documentary “Babi Yar: Context” and the eyewitness chronicle “Maidan,” are to some extent explanatory, examining the causes and consequences of war and political upheaval.“Donbass,” at once brutally satirical and grimly compassionate, focuses on the subtleties and grotesqueries of human behavior. Loznitsa paints sprawling tableaus of cruelty, corruption, vulgarity and lies through a series of intimate vignettes.In an early scene, a government meeting is interrupted by an angry woman, flanked by cameras, who dumps a small tub of excrement on an official’s head. The raucous, profane free-for-all that ensues turns out to be a model of civil discourse compared to what comes later, but it also sounds what will be the film’s dominant notes.This is a place — identified as “Occupied Territory” in the flashes of text that introduce each scene and called “Novorossiya,” or New Russia, by some of the characters — where violence and absurdity commingle, where chaos is wrapped in bureaucratic punctilio and ceremonial pomp. (Loznitsa and his crew, including the brilliant Romanian cinematographer Oleg Mutu, shot the film in and around the central Ukrainian city of Krivoi Rog). There is a sly anarchy in Loznitsa’s methods: He wanders, with deceptive casualness, from episode to episode, leaving one story in the middle to follow a stray character into the next.Starting and ending in a television hair-and-makeup trailer, he takes us to a maternity hospital, a Ukrainian border checkpoint, various militia outposts, a crowded bomb shelter, a bus stop and a wedding. We meet a lot of people, often without catching their names, and observe interactions that range from ridiculous to infuriating to unspeakable. The mood is unstable. Amusement gives way to unease; disgust melts into dread, anxiety into despair. This is a tour of hell, and a reminder that hell is other people. The discomfort comes from the sense that we know these monsters. We are these monsters.“Donbass” isn’t easy to watch: A scene in which soldiers lead a prisoner into the street to be humiliated, harassed and then beaten by passers-by is particularly excruciating. But the movie bristles with caustic humor and moral rigor. The separatist fighters and pro-Russian citizens who dominate the action are held up for censure and ridicule, yet are also given a fair hearing when they paint their adversaries as fascists.Do they really believe it? When reality is distorted by authoritarian propaganda, cynicism can be impossible to distinguish from sincerity, and opportunism can masquerade as righteousness. That sounds abstract, but the movie’s bitter achievement is in its granular, ground-level concreteness. It’s horrific, impossible, extreme — and also understated.DonbassNot rated. In Russian, Ukrainian and English, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 2 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Sonic the Hedgehog 2’ Review: Keep Up! Bada-Brrring!

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      Jim Carrey’s reprised role as a villainous weirdo helps this fast-paced, family-friendly video-game-movie sequel maintain a refreshing silliness.Introduced by Sega at the start of the 1990s, the zippy blue hairball Sonic the Hedgehog is now officially over the hill and picking up speed onscreen. “Sonic the Hedgehog 2” is a fast-paced romp that’s silly, filled with quips and unabashedly for children — which is refreshing, coming at a time when so many other children’s franchises have succumbed to Sturm und Drang.This full-tilt sequel by the returning director Jeff Fowler and the screenwriters Pat Casey, Josh Miller and John Whittington finds Sonic (voiced by Ben Schwartz) struggling to relax with his adopted parents, Tom (James Marsden) and Maddie (Tika Sumpter). Their small town is invaded by two animated extraterrestrials: Tails (Colleen O’Shaughnessey), a flying fox who wants to make friends, and Knuckles (Idris Elba), a dog-like bruiser who wants to make mincemeat of anyone who gets between him and an all-powerful whiz-bang of a weapon called the Master Emerald.Things proceed as one might expect, but the road is littered with bits of lunacy that keep the audience on its toes. While the gags can be a hair too reliant on pop culture references — Limp Bizkit and Pantera? — the script has a rare affection for even small characters like Maddie’s quarrelsome sister (Natasha Rothwell), who gets to strut away with the most memorable fight scene.Still, there’s only so far sass can get you, and, as in the last movie, things would sputter to a halt without Jim Carrey’s performance as the fiendish Dr. Robotnik. Carrey may have created the best PG-movie villain in decades: a perfectly calibrated comedy machine whose preening, glowering and frustrated sputtering somehow still seem spur of the moment. Recently, Carrey suggested that he might retire from acting. If these films really do turn out to be Carrey’s goodbye, he is leaving Hollywood with a farewell gift: His built-for-the-big-screen exuberance might just hook this generation of kids on the joy of going to movie theaters.Sonic the Hedgehog 2Rated PG. Running time: 2 hours 2 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘All the Old Knives’ Review: Shooting Daggers Across the Table

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      In this thriller, Thandiwe Newton and Chris Pine work to out-smolder and outwit each other as old C.I.A. colleagues and former lovers catching up over dinner.Espionage thrillers usually traffic in globe-trotting mayhem, so in “All the Old Knives,” it’s refreshing to find one whose main ingredients are two stars out-smoldering each other over dinner.Chris Pine plays Henry, a C.I.A. operative. Thandiwe Newton plays Celia, a colleague who left the agency after their team in Vienna failed to resolve a flight hijacking that ended in mass fatalities. The present action is set eight years later. The head of their division (Laurence Fishburne) has learned that a mole may have fed information to the perpetrators. If it was Celia, Henry, her former lover, is ideally situated to catch her in a lie.So the two old flames meet in a water-view restaurant in Carmel-by-the-Sea, Calif., to gab about how fresh the fish is, how good the bacon on Henry’s appetizer smells and whether Celia leaked secrets to international terrorists. Flashbacks show us who was where and when. And apart from a show-offy (apparent) single take that swans around the Vienna office introducing personnel, the director, Janus Metz, working from a screenplay by Olen Steinhauer (who also wrote the novel), mostly keeps things fast and easy, making everything look like a magazine spread.One downside of the small scale is that it only allows for a handful of suspects; the incriminating call Celia may have placed could just as easily have come from her boss (Jonathan Pryce, delivering infinitely subtle variations on how to act nervous in every scene). While “All the Old Knives” keeps cleverly resetting the table it’s laid out, it can’t fundamentally alter the meal.All the Old KnivesRated R. Sex, with a dash of Viennese sophistication. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters and on Amazon Prime Video. More

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      ‘Metal Lords’ Review: Shred of the Class

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      Teenage boys battling angst and bullies form a heavy metal band in this genuine Netflix movie.In the charming coming-of-age movie “Metal Lords,” misfit teenage musicians form a band. Not just any band — a heavy metal band. These are kids who lag in gym class and get shoved into lockers, but in the privacy of their makeshift practice space, they sure know how to solo, riff and headbang.The movie (on Netflix) opens on a basement band practice. Posters of Motörhead, Black Sabbath and Slipknot line the walls, and a stack of amps is ready for use. In the middle of it all is our hero, Kevin (Jaeden Martell), who takes his cues — musical, social and otherwise — from his bestie, Hunter (Adrian Greensmith). Kevin’s on drums while Hunter assumes lead vocals, guitar and fantasies of stardom.Don’t you dare confuse them with a pop group. These boys are hardcore. Just take their band name: It starts with “skull” and ends with a word too obscene to use in their local Battle of the Bands. A metal fanatic and rabble-rouser, Hunter is hellbent on winning the music contest; Kevin is more intrigued by parties with the popular crowd and by his budding romance with a mercurial cellist named Emily (Isis Hainsworth, a magnetic newcomer).Written by D.B. Weiss (“Game of Thrones”) and directed by Peter Sollett (“Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist”) — and with Tom Morello of the rock band Rage Against the Machine as executive music producer — the movie shows a keen awareness of how nerdy, shy or bullied children are drawn to metal music for its brute power and the high caliber of expertise it demands. Conventional but genuine, “Metal Lords” comprehends the riot of adolescent emotions and the many ways teenagers manage them.Metal LordsRated R for teen rage against the machine. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘As They Made Us’ Review: If the Apple Falls, Who Retrieves It?

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      A dutiful daughter navigates the consequences of her parents’ failings in Mayim Bialik’s engagingly compassionate directorial debut.,For her directorial debut, Mayim Bialik — the neuroscientist, sitcom star, and finalist for the “Jeopardy!” host gig — hewed to what she knew: reckoning with the legacy of volatile parents.At the start of her smartly observed, well-cast drama “As They Made Us,” a young Abigail and her brother, Nathan, listen from the back seat of a car while their parents downshift into a nasty argument. It’s clearly not a one-off. The youngsters appear in flashbacks illuminating the power of their parents’ undiagnosed mental illness to shape the adults they become — especially Abigail (Dianna Agron).Dustin Hoffman and Candice Bergen portray the parents as they were — when eruptions of violence and stubborn denial were routine — and as they are now. Eugene is suffering a degenerative condition that exacerbates confusion; Barbara, so uncomfortable with vulnerability, doubles down on control even as she leans on Abigail.Abigail has two children, has been divorced a year and is a columnist for a glossy magazine, The Modern Jew. She’s smart, overtaxed and a textbook dutiful daughter. Decades earlier, Nathan (Simon Helberg) high-tailed it and remains estranged.Bialik gets adroit work from the ensemble. Helberg brings moving nuance to Nathan’s sullen reckoning. Justin Chu Cary keeps Abigail’s love interest on the grown-up side of what could have been a too-good-to-be true character. Still, even with veterans like Hoffman and Bergen, it’s Agron’s film. She and Bialik make Abigail’s filial loyalty as sympathetic as it is exasperating, and as rife with difficult truths about aging as it is understatedly hopeful about growing up.As They Made UsRated R for abusive and explosive language. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Return to Space’ Review: Eyes on the Skies

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      Platitudes prevail in this overlong documentary about the partnership between NASA and SpaceX.Glowing with grandiose pronouncements and uplifting sentiment, “Return to Space,” a draggy documentary about America’s first manned spaceflight since 2011, could be easily repurposed as promotional material for Elon Musk’s SpaceX.This is in part because the company’s decades-long effort to design a reusable rocket is presented almost entirely in altruistic terms, the tests and failures cushioned by a cloud of for-all-mankind babble. NASA’s space shuttle program might have ended 11 years ago, but the need to blast our astronauts into the thermosphere (and onto the International Space Station) remains. Enter Musk, whose belief that humans will be a “multi-planet species” — and whose company was the only viable option — made him the perfect candidate for a $1.5 billion government contract to deliver rockets to NASA.While the filmmakers, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, struggle to wring drama from weather delays and anxious suits clustered around consoles, we hang out, pleasantly enough, with the two delighted astronauts (Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken) who will make the flight. Footage from multiple sources (including video diaries and NASA space cameras) is woven together with interviews containing more starry-eyed boosterism than compelling information.Aside from a few grumpy lawmakers, “Return to Space” is notable for its almost total lack of naysayers regarding this public-private collaboration. Ignoring the transactional in favor of the inspirational, the film pays no heed to SpaceX’s commercial endeavors — watching it, you’d think making money was the furthest thing from anyone’s mind.“We made a point of humanizing Elon,” Chin says in the production notes. Yet the partnership’s uninvestigated details seem consequential, and skeptics might be forgiven their anxiety about what tech companies could get up to in outer space. We’ve seen what they’ve done on Earth.Return to SpaceNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 8 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Aline’ Review: Tale as Odd as Time

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      Celine Dion’s life story gets an unconventional telling from the French filmmaker Valérie Lemercier in this creative but flawed biopic.The best compliment one can give the French serio-comic filmmaker Valérie Lemercier’s “Aline,” a biopic of Celine Dion in which Lemercier plays a fictionalized version of the pop star from infancy through widowhood, is that it evokes the disorientation of discovering the singer as she was on her first album: a 13-year-old with snaggleteeth. The movie’s passion is incredible — but, boy, is it embodied in something awkward.There is barely time to adjust to the sight of the adult Lemercier shrunken through cinematic trickery to the size of a child before we’re forced to grapple with the dawning awareness that this tribute is intended to be heartfelt. “Aline” is no prank, even though the cinematography is as static as a Saturday Night Live skit. The director and her co-writer, Brigitte Buc, whisk through Dion’s timeline with efficiency. Lemercier observes the singer, here renamed Aline Dieu, as she shifts from ballads belted to her mother (Danielle Fichaud) to ones aimed at her Svengali and husband-to-be (Sylvain Marcel), who is sincerely presented as her one great love. Lemercier trots out Dion’s famous outfits and interviews, her 1998 Academy Awards performance of “My Heart Will Go On” and, when the action shifts to Dion’s Las Vegas residencies, does a quite good job imitating the star’s coltish, unpredictable dance moves.All “Aline” needs is a point. The closest thing to one is Lemercier’s insistence that Dion wasn’t simply a larger-than-life icon but a mortal, too, with relatable worries about her children, her sleep schedule and, er, getting lost in her 40-room mansion. To this end, in a film crammed with covers (splendidly sung by Victoria Sio), Lemercier opens and closes with “Ordinaire,” the Robert Charlebois song: “I am not a circus freak,” her star sings, adding, “I’d like to be understood.”AlineRated PG-13 for grace notes of sexual situations and language. Running time: 2 hours 8 minutes. In theaters. More