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      ‘Fight or Flight’ Review: Conned Air

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      Josh Hartnett plays a rugged mercenary in an airborne action movie that struggles to stay on course.In “Fight or Flight,” Josh Hartnett plays Lucas Reyes, an alcoholic bleached-blonde mercenary who is living in exile in Thailand.Desperate to recapture his old life, Lucas accepts a job from a mysterious company led by his ex-girlfriend, Katherine (Katee Sackhoff). He needs to board a flight heading from Bangkok to San Francisco and, while midair, apprehend an assassin named the Ghost.Like “Bullet Train,” the bad guys in “Fight or Flight” are a bevy of assassins who are keen to collect the bounty on the Ghost’s head. Reyes’s only help comes from Isha (Charithra Chandran), a young, virtuous flight attendant. Because the action takes place mostly inside the plane, the staging can be repetitive. The only surprises are the tools used for bloodshed, such as a chain saw or a climbing ax, which an invigorated Hartnett wields in the film’s climactic acid trip freakout sequence.The director, James Madigan, doesn’t fully commit to the single location: He often cuts back to Katherine’s comedic bickering with her sniveling co-worker (Julian Kostov) and even positions the film’s stakes as the cessation of child labor.Hartnett and Chandran’s laid back chemistry steady the film’s turbulent tonal shifts, adding a punch that the shakily choreographed action lacks. Hartnett and Chandran are so good together, Madigan’s last-second setup for a possible sequel doesn’t sound like such a bad idea.Fight or FlightRated R for strong bloody violence and heavy drink service. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Caught by the Tides’ Review: Jia Zhangke Sees Constant Flux

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      The Chinese director shot two decades of footage to for his new film, which captures his country in tumult and one woman living through it.In “Caught by the Tides,” the Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke tracks a woman, a couple and a country across two tumultuous, transformational decades. As emotionally effective as it is formally brilliant, it draws on a trove of material — both fiction and nonfiction — that Jia began shooting in 2001 while working on another movie. He continued to document a dizzyingly changing China, a heroic project that has finally resulted in “Caught by the Tides,” a tour de force that is at once an affecting portrait of a people in flux and a soulful, generous-hearted autobiographic testament from one of our greatest living filmmakers.Jia has directed more than a dozen feature-length movies since his 1997 drama “Pickpocket,” about a low-level thief, but the impoverished state of foreign-language distribution in the United States means that his work tends to quickly slip in and out of art houses here before heading to living rooms. He’s a rock star on the international festival circuit, however, and a favorite of the Cannes Film Festival, where his movies regularly screen in competition. Jia won the best screenplay award at Cannes for his 2013 masterpiece “A Touch of Sin,” but he tends to be overlooked by juries because while his movies aren’t difficult, they don’t offer obvious pleasures. They’re thoughtful, and they need to be watched thoughtfully in turn.That’s true of “Caught by the Tides,” which follows a character who’s been featured in some of Jia’s earlier features, Qiaoqiao — Zhao Tao, Jia’s wife and longtime star — a willowy stunner with sharply planed cheekbones and a steady, penetrating gaze. That gaze is especially crucial here because while Zhao’s star charisma immediately commands your attention, her character never says a word. Instead, Qiaoqiao texts and she watches, observing the world and the people in it with eyes that, at times, flash with amusement and anger. When she’s with lover, Bin (Li Zhubin), her eyes also pool with tears that he doesn’t deserve.Zhao is a sensitive, subtly expressive screen performer who can convey a world of feeling with a single look. Even so, a heroine who can speak but doesn’t could have been risky for Jia because her silence could drain the character of complexity and, importantly, a sense of female agency. Here, though, everything that needs to be said is said both in bits of conversation that fill in the elliptical story and in the many documentary passages, which makes her a stand-in for Jia. Bin, a small-time hood more interested in money than in Qiaoqiao, does speak, yet his words are invariably less eloquent than her (and Jia’s) quiet.The story, such as it is, opens in the northern city of Datong and emerges gradually without the usual filmmaking preamble and prompts. If Jia has ever read a screenwriting manual, he probably immediately tossed it, laughing. His work fits more readily into art-cinema traditions than those of Hollywood, but is nevertheless insistently nonprogrammatic. “Caught by the Tides” takes place over some 20 years that, contrary to convention, aren’t shaped into neatly defined three (four or five) acts. Instead, time in the movie flows, just as in life. One minute, Qiaoqiao is young and has a bob and bangs; in the next she’s clearly older, and appears more inwardly directed, her now-long hair pulled back in a ponytail.Qiao and Bin’s emotionally fraught romance winds throughout “Caught by the Tides,” but the movie’s heart and its obvious sympathies are more with her than with him. About a half-hour into the movie, she appears one night watching a joyful, raucous crowd flooding the street. It’s 2001, and China has just been named as the host of the 2008 summer Olympics. (“China won!”) The country is on the move, and Qiaoqiao soon will be too. Shortly thereafter, Bin splits to pursue a business venture elsewhere, and she follows. She’ll keep on following him for the remainder of the movie amid national milestones, more crowds, dramatic turns, many songs and a multitude of young and old, unlined and weathered faces.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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      ‘Forbidden Games’: A War Orphan’s Sweet, Ultimately Shattering Story

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      Hailed on its release as the most troubling French film made in the aftermath of World War II, it returns for a week at Film Forum.René Clément’s “Forbidden Games” (1952) uses a 5-year-old’s wartime ordeal as the basis for a remarkably unsentimental allegory of childhood innocence and adult ignorance. Straightforwardly simple but psychologically complex, the movie is sweet, sardonic, and ultimately shattering.Widely (if not universally) hailed on its release and periodically rediscovered as the most troubling French film made in the aftermath of World War II, it returns for a week at Film Forum in a new 4K restoration.Evoking multiple traumas, “Forbidden Games” unfolds on the eve of France’s surrender to Germany; the opening sequence depicts the panicky exodus of an estimated two million Parisians in June 1940. Crawling through open countryside, the caravan of cars and wagons is ruthlessly bombed by the Nazis. Paulette (Brigitte Fossey) bolts from the family auto to pursue a pet puppy. Her parents follow, the Germans strafe the road. The adults are killed, but not Paulette. Physically unharmed, she wanders off, cradling her dead dog, into fields as verdant as Eden.A beautiful, golden-haired child with a clear direct gaze, Paulette is discovered by an 11-year-old farm boy, Michel (Georges Poujouly), and brought home to his rustic family. They have their own issues, benignly ignoring Paulette. Unable to process what has befallen her parents, she focuses on burying her dog in the company of other small creatures found dead. Eager to join her obsessional play, Michel helps create a secret cemetery, stealing crosses to mark the graves.Denied the possibility of mourning her mother and father, Paulette creates her own ritual. That the child neither recognizes the farm family’s totemic “Good Lord” nor understands the symbolism of the crucifix suggests that she may be Jewish (or had freethinker parents). Be that as it may, her difficulty in comprehending her loss highlights the failure of French Catholic metaphysics. Indeed, Paulette’s naïveté renders the customs she observes all the more strange.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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      ‘Sinners’ and Beyoncé Battle the Vampires. And the Gatekeepers, Too.

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      This moment might call for excessive, imaginative Black art that wants to be gobbled up. That’s Ryan Coogler’s new movie. That’s “Cowboy Carter.” Let’s throw in some Kendrick, too.When Beyoncé wails, in the opening moments of her “Cowboy Carter” album, that “them big ideas are buried here,” I’ve imagined “big” standing in for “racist” but have never hit pause to wonder about the GPS coordinates. That song’s called “Ameriican Requiem,” so the cemetery is everywhere. And yet partway through Ryan Coogler’s hit “Sinners,” I thought, Oh, this is where ‘here’ is, inside a movie about a 1932 juke joint whose music is so soulful that vampires, who are also a white minstrel trio, want to suck its blood.She’s envisioning utopia — a place where a Black woman feels free to make any kind of music she wants, including country. He’s imagined a nightmare in which Black art is doomed to be coveted before it’s ever just simply enjoyed. She’s defying the gatekeepers. He’s arguing that some gates definitely need to be kept. To that end, the movie keeps a gag running wherein vampire etiquette requires a verbal invitation to enter the club, leading to comic scenes of clearly possessed, increasingly itchy soul junkies standing in a doorway begging to be let in. People have been calling certain white performers interested in Black music vampires for years. Here’s a movie that literalizes the metaphor with an audacity that’s thrilling in its obviousness and redundancy.There’s never a bad time for good pop art. There’s never a bad time for Black artists to provide it. But these here times? Times of hatchet work and so-called wood-chipping; of chain saws, as both metaphor and dispiriting political prop; a time of vandalistic racial gaslighting. These times might call for an excessive pop art that takes on too much, that wants to be gobbled up and dug into, an art that isn’t afraid to boast I am this country, while also doing some thinking about what this country is. These here times might call for Black artists to provide that, too, to offer an American education that feels increasingly verboten. That’s not art’s strong suit, pointing at chalkboards. But if school systems are being bullied into coddling snowflakes, then perhaps, on occasion, art should be hitting you upside the head and dancing on your nose.Beyoncé on the opening night of her “Cowboy Carter” tour in Los Angeles last month.The New York TimesNow, it’s true that the knobbiest moments on “Cowboy Carter” and in “Sinners” are the equivalent of diagramed sentences. The album uses elders to do its explaining. Before “Spaghettii” gets underway, the singer and songwriter Linda Martell stops by to dissertate on the limitation of genres; Dolly Parton connects her “Jolene” to the home-wrecker in Beyoncé’s now nine-year-old “Sorry”; and Willie Nelson, as the D.J. on KNTRY, Beyoncé’s fictional broadcast network, turns his dial past some real chestnuts to tee up “Texas Hold ’Em.” They’re vouching for the validity of her project’s scope and sincerity, while, especially in Martell’s case, spelling everything out.The spelling in “Sinners” happens right in the middle of its young protagonist’s first big blues number. Earlier, we’d gotten a taste of what Sammie (Miles Caton), a preacher’s boy, could do. Caton’s molasses baritone and impaling guitar work were really doing it for me when the sound muffles, and in come not one but two micro lectures about this music’s power to “pierce the veil between the present and the past.” And as these explanations of Black music tumble forth, I was surprised to find a very Funkadelic fellow making love to an electric guitar right next to Sammie. Over by the kitchen twerks a woman arguably conjured from some extremely City Girls place. The temperature of instruments changes from live drums to what sound like drum machines. And I soon spy dashikied tribesmen, b-boys, a ballerina and, I’m pretty sure, a decked-out Chinese folk singer, and they’re all gettin’ in the way of the blues.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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      Lorraine Bracco, Brenda Vaccaro, Talia Shire and Susan Sarandon Talk ‘Nonnas’

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      Lorraine Bracco, Brenda Vaccaro, Talia Shire and Susan Sarandon discuss playing cooks in a new film, aging in Hollywood and the movies that their grandchildren cannot yet watch.When I signed onto a video interview with the stars of the new Netflix release “Nonnas,” the conversation was already in progress. Brenda Vaccaro, best known for her work in “Midnight Cowboy” and “Once Is Not Enough,” was raving about the film, directed by Stephen Chbosky, based on the true story of Enoteca Maria, a restaurant in Staten Island where the kitchen is run by older women.“This is my Jimmy Stewart movie,” Vaccaro said in between effusive praise.I wondered if I was ever going to get a word in edgewise.Eventually, I was able to greet the group, which includes Vaccaro, Lorraine Bracco, Talia Shire and Susan Sarandon. The veteran actresses, whose credits include “The Godfather,” “Goodfellas” and “Thelma & Louise,” all play the movie’s nonnas, who are recruited to cook Italian American delicacies by Joe Scaravella (Vince Vaughn), an M.T.A. worker mourning his own mother. Bracco is a brash Sicilian named Roberta whose specialty is a stuffed lamb’s head called capuzzelle. She fights with Vaccaro’s Antonella, loyal to her Bolognese heritage, over which region has the better traditions. Sarandon is the glamorous pastry guru and hair stylist Gia, while Shire is a nun who left the convent to pursue her dreams. (Not all the nonnas here have grandchildren.)With the women, who have nine Oscar nominations between them, gathered on a call, they riffed on their history with one another, their cooking skills, aging in Hollywood and the movies that their grandchildren cannot yet watch. Below are edited excerpts.From left, Sarandon, Vaccaro, Bracco and Talia Shire in “Nonnas.”Jeong Park/NetflixDid you know each other before getting cast?LORRAINE BRACCO: Oh, yes. I knew Brenda. I knew Susan. Talia was the newbie.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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      Milestone Films Will Be Given Away to Maya Cade of the Black Film Archive

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      The distributor’s owners, Amy Heller and Dennis Doros, made the unusual choice to give it away. Their successor is Maya Cade of the Black Film Archive.Milestone Films is a small but mighty distribution company dedicated to discovering works that have been lost to history, restoring them and reintroducing them to anyone willing to watch. It has been run out of the New Jersey home of Amy Heller and Dennis Doros for the last 25 years, but now both are preparing to retire.“One of the things we’ve come to realize is that we are not immortal,” Heller said. As the company’s sole workers, “we are it. It’s the two of us and we want it to continue.”How to keep it going after they step down is something they’ve been discussing for a decade, and now they’ve hit on a novel solution. They’re giving the company away, to Maya Cade, the noted programmer behind the Black Film Archive.Heller and Doros said that last summer they had discussed with Cade, who volunteered herself, the idea of simply handing over their company.“When we met Maya, we just thought, ‘Oh, well, we found her,’” Heller said. “We found the person who we really love and trust and can enthusiastically make this move.”Heller and Doros started Milestone Films in 1990 in their one-bedroom New York apartment shortly after marrying. Since then, it has grown into an internationally recognized distributor that helps bring lost or little-seen films back to prominence. For the last 18 years, the company has been focused on work by and about directors who are Black, Native Americans, L.G.B.T.Q. or women — artists from segments of the population that are underrepresented in the canon.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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      Trump Called for Movie Tariffs After a Meeting With Jon Voight

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      The president’s call for tariffs caused confusion in Hollywood, which has seen a steep drop-off in local film and television production.President Trump’s call to impose steep tariffs on movies “produced in Foreign Lands” came after he met at Mar-a-Lago over the weekend with the actor Jon Voight, whom he named a “special ambassador” to Hollywood this year.The president’s social media post on Sunday that called for a 100 percent tariff on films produced outside the United States caused confusion in Hollywood, which has lost a great deal of local film and television production to states and nations that offer rich tax credits and cheaper labor. While few in the industry said that they understood Mr. Trump’s proposal, some worried that tariffs could cause more harm than good and called instead for federal help in the form of tax credits.Mr. Voight and Steven Paul, his longtime manager, met with Mr. Trump over the weekend and shared their plans to increase domestic film production, according to a statement from SP Media Group, Mr. Paul’s firm. They suggested federal tax incentives, changes to the tax code, co-production treaties with other nations and infrastructure subsidies, the statement said.The proposal also included “tariffs in certain limited circumstances,” the statement said, adding that it was under review.Mr. Voight made the rounds of Hollywood last week, meeting with the Motion Picture Association, Hollywood’s top lobbying group; various unions; and the state representatives who are pushing bills to increase state tax credits for the film and television industries. State Senator Ben Allen, a Democrat whose district includes Hollywood, met with the actor to discuss how to increase production in the state, a representative said.Mr. Voight emerged from those meetings with two one-page documents drafted by the M.P.A. One letter encourages lawmakers in Washington to adopt a manufacturing and production incentive to encourage more domestic employment. The other asks Congress to extend a section of the tax code that expires at the end of 2025 and allows certain film and television expenses to be deducted in the year they are incurred.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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      The 50 Best Movies on Max Right Now

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      In addition to new Warner and HBO films, the streamer has a treasure trove of Golden Age classics, indie flicks and foreign films. Start with these.When HBO Max debuted in May 2020, subscribers rightfully expected (and got) the formidable catalog of prestige television associated with the HBO brand. But its movie library drew from a much deeper well. Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns HBO, is a huge conglomerate, and its premiere streaming service comprises decades of titles from Warner Bros., Turner Classic Movies, Studio Ghibli and more. Viewed in that light, its recent rebranding as Max seems fitting.That means a lot of large-scale fantasy series and selections from the DC extended universe. Max is also an education in Golden Age Hollywood classics and in independent and foreign auteurs like Federico Fellini, Satyajit Ray and John Cassavetes. The list below is an effort to recommend a diverse range of movies — old and new, foreign and domestic, all-ages and adults-only — that cross genres and cultures while appealing to casual and serious movie-watchers alike. (Note: Streaming services sometimes remove titles or change starting dates without notice.)Here are our lists of the best movies and TV shows on Netflix, the best movies on Amazon Prime Video and the best of everything on Hulu and Disney+.A24‘Aftersun’ (2022)Memory pieces about childhood are nearly always touched by nostalgia, however bittersweet, but Charlotte Wells’s gorgeous, semi-autobiographical debut feature is graced instead by perspective. The memory in “Aftersun” encapsulates a few days in 1999 at a downscale Turkish resort, where an 11-year-old (Frankie Corio) went on her last vacation with her 30-something father (Paul Mescal), who did a credible job at the time of masking his personal anguish in order to make her happy. The MiniDV camera footage the girl captured of the trip tells a different story about him, and the film seizes on it subtly and beautifully. A.O. Scott admired Wells for directing with “the unaffected precision of a lyric poet.”Stream it on Max‘Logan’ (2017)Superhero franchises like the MCU and the DCEU have developed such a predictable template that each new entry can feel at least partially like a paint-by-numbers exercise. Though it extends from the popular “X-Men” series featuring Hugh Jackman as Wolverine and Patrick Stewart as Professor X, James Mangold’s “Logan” has the somber tone and feel of an old-school Western, emphasizing the exhaustion of an aging, battered hero dragged reluctantly to another mission. Having retired to Mexico to look after a sick Professor X, Jackman’s Logan is tasked with protecting a vulnerable young girl (Dafne Keen) whose powers (and history) overlap mysteriously with his own. Manohla Dargis called the film “a strong argument for bringing the comic-book movie down to earth.”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