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      ‘The Shrouds’ Review: For Cronenberg, Grief Is an Obsession

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      The director’s latest stars Vincent Cassel as an entrepreneur who mourns the death of his wife by inventing technology that surveils her entombed body.In David Cronenberg’s latest film, “The Shrouds,” the lines between life and death, emotion and pathology, biology and technology, become blurred. Even the movie’s tone lands in a liminal space where gravitas slips into comedy — I couldn’t help but snicker when someone tells the main character, “Karsh, don’t crash!”A dry macabre humor has long run through Cronenberg’s work, and the uncertainty behind some of his intentions here creates thought-provoking ambiguity. Since an important source of inspiration was the death of Cronenberg’s wife from cancer, in 2017, are we really supposed to find this funny? I would argue, yes — among other details in keeping with the Canadian director’s approach, a woman is revealed to find conspiracy theories sexually arousing — but there is still enough doubt to mess with viewers’ heads.The aforementioned Karsh (an understated Vincent Cassel, in his third Cronenberg movie after “A Dangerous Method” and the terrific “Eastern Promises”) is a Tesla-driving Toronto entrepreneur. His business, GraveTech, involves burying the dead in shrouds that transmit images to screen-embedded headstones. At his cemetery, you can, in effect, watch a livestream of a decomposing body. (This is not so far-fetched, considering recent developments in both wearable technology and invasive voyeurism.)Karsh is personally invested in this corpse cam because his wife, Becca (Diane Kruger), died of cancer four years earlier. She is buried in one of his shrouds, and he can check on her decay’s progress.This we all learn in a surreal introductory scene in which Karsh explains GraveTech to a lunch date, Myrna (Jennifer Dale), at a restaurant overlooking his wired-up cemetery. He even shows her Becca’s feed, which might not beat brandy as a digestif.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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      ‘Queens of Drama’ Review: A Half-Century Feud

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      Alexis Langlois’s musical romance is an unruly story of a love-hate relationship between two ambitious musicians.In the French musical romance “Queens of Drama,” the offices of the Starlet Factory brim with hopefuls warming up for a singing competition show when the punk rocker Billie Kohler (Gio Ventura) struts in. Aching for pop stardom herself, Mimi Madamour (Louiza Aura), all curls and doe-eyed warmth, remarks to Billie that they are each wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with an image of an edgy 1980s singer.What looked to be a moment of an insta-crush turns into a snarky exchange, ending with each petulantly sticking a tongue out at the other. In “Queens of Drama,” these soon-to-be tumultuous lovers meet more contemptuous than cute.The year of that encounter is 2005. But the director Alexis Langlois’s unruly, ideas-freighted romance actually begins in 2055 as Mimi’s No. 1 fan, SteevyShady (Bilal Hassani), recounts the couple’s vexed love story. “This is not about me,” Steevy, a video influencer, says with flair. But of course it is. And it’s SteevyShady’s role in the extended flashback that turns the queer romance into a meta-ride in pop-culture obsession, with nods to every letter in the L.G.B.T.Q.+ rainbow, and considerations both fond and disparaging of punk and pop music.With playful visual flourishes, a willfully garish palette and winks galore (including one to the French feminist writer Monique Wittig), Langlois’s debut has stylistic ambition for days. But it’s not as genre-fluent as “Love Lies Bleeding” and “I Saw the TV Glow,” or as swoon inducing as its volatile couple deserves.Queens of DramaNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The President’s Wife’ Review: Would Madame Get Your Vote?

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      Catherine Deneuve plays the former French first lady Bernadette Chirac in this puckish, highly fictionalized biopic with a pop-feminist edge.From 1995 to 2007, the conservative (if politically capricious) Jacques Chirac was the president of France. But, “The President’s Wife” isn’t all that interested in Chirac, played as a clueless yet charismatic charlatan by Michel Vuillermoz. The first lady, Bernadette Chirac, gets the spotlight, with the French film icon Catherine Deneuve bringing glamour and droll gusto to the part.Spanning the years of Chirac’s presidency, this low-key comedy by Léa Domenach tracks the evolution of Bernadette’s public image from scorned spouse in kitschy-colored skirt suits to beloved girl-boss in modern Chanel threads. A Greek chorus of church singers and a disclaimer in the opening title cards tell us that this quasi-biopic is highly fictionalized. No, Bernadette didn’t secretly meet with rival politicians in confessional booths or frequent nightclubs with pop stars to rally fund-raising for her children’s hospital charity.The film takes creative leaps in scenes like these as part of its puckish approach to mythmaking. Though other seemingly absurd moments are ripped straight from the TV news archives, such as her visit with Hillary Clinton to a primary school in central France (Deneuve is transposed onto footage of that real-life encounter with the help of green-screen tech).Belittled by rivals and family members alike — including her daughter Claude (Sara Giraudeau), who is one of her father’s advisers — Bernadette teams up with her chief of staff, Bernard Niquet (Denis Podalydès), to revamp her political career. The duo’s scheming and easy rapport make up much of the film’s brisk humor, which at times can be a bit too culturally specific to resonate fully with non-French viewers. And while Deneuve brings a wonderful blend of neuroses and feigned indifference to her character, the film’s pop-feminist through line dulls the comedy, creating a more conventionally celebratory portrait.The President’s WifeNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Legend of Ochi’ Review: The Great, Familiar Adventure

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      A 1980s throwback movie about a teenager who sets out on a journey with a mysterious being.There was a pleasing kind of weirdness and danger to a lot of children’s entertainment in the 1980s. Extraterrestrials and fantastical creatures populated the waking dreamscapes of children in those movies, teaching them lessons and helping them to find the courage to face more pedestrian real-life monsters. And because effects hadn’t gotten all digital, even the best of those nonhuman creatures often felt a little janky, like souped-up versions of puppets you might create out of the random bits of craft supplies from your grandma’s closet.It’s very clear that “The Legend of Ochi,” Isaiah Saxon’s debut feature as a writer and director, is an elaborately designed and very effective nostalgia piece for the movies of that time, starting from the title design, which renders each letter in a kind of glowing orange yellow. The movies you’ll think of while you’re watching it are the ones that stuck with you most: For me, “The Neverending Story” and “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.” Here the creatures are a little more smoothed out, but the Frank Oz influence is obvious.Those creatures are the Ochi, which look like a cross between tree monkeys and Yoda. In the world of this movie, they are secluded creatures that live in the woods, keeping away from human civilization. The people of Carpathia fear them, hunt them and teach their children to do the same. One man, Maxim (Willem Dafoe), trains the local boys — including the orphaned Petro (Finn Wolfhard), whom he’s adopted as his own son — in the best ways to find and kill the Ochi.But Maxim won’t allow his own daughter, Yuri (Helena Zengel), to join in, for reasons that have a lot more to do with him than with her. Angry and disaffected, Yuri seethes mostly alone, and longs to talk to her mother, who left the family a long time ago. It doesn’t help that Petro idolizes Maxim and is rude to Yuri in front of the other boys. Then, one night, Yuri discovers a baby Ochi who seems lost and injured. Determined to return the creature to its home, she sets off on a great adventure, with Maxim soon hot on her trail.It is not hard to spot the derivative nature of this plot, with all its classic ’80s movie elements: the creatures the humans would rather kill than understand; the divorced parents; the disaffected young person; the hero’s journey. I don’t mean that in a bad way, though: “The Legend of Ochi” is designed to pay tribute to a kind of movie that rarely gets made anymore, even though the success of the similarly derivative Netflix show “Stranger Things” suggests that there’s an appetite for it. Echoing tropes of that era is one way to remind us of what we used to see down at the multiplex.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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      ‘Invention’ Review: Patent Pensive

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      In this strange experimental feature from Courtney Stephens and Callie Hernandez, a grieving daughter investigates the mysterious gadget her father left behind.“Invention” is the sort of D.I.Y. project that’s tough not to admire, even if its aims remain stubbornly private. This strange, personal movie is a mind meld between the experimental filmmaker Courtney Stephens (“Terra Femme”) and the actress Callie Hernandez (“Alien: Covenant”). Stephens is credited as director, while the two share a “film by” credit.Hernandez plays a barely disguised version of herself, “Carrie Fernandez,” who has just lost her father and is now contending with the logistics. The father character, inspired by Hernandez’s own dad, trained as a doctor but later turned to hawking crackpot treatments. He also had a “different” way of handling personal finances, an executor (James N. Kienitz Wilkins) tactfully reminds Carrie. For a start, he conducted business under multiple names.Carrie’s father has bequeathed her the patent for an “electromagnetic healing device,” a contraption that we’re told the Food and Drug Administration has left in legal limbo. Much of “Invention” consists of scenes between Carrie and her father’s associates as she weighs whether the machine was legit — and what to do about it even if it was. “Did you ever use it?” she asks one of the investors (Tony Torn). “Ah, no,” he replies. “I got a stent.”Video clips of Hernandez’s real father pitching treatments on TV and theorizing on how “cells are like your cellphone” are interspersed throughout. The dialogue and the imagery allude to transcendental writers. (“Invention” was shot on 16-millimeter film in Massachusetts.) Periodically, Stephens will cut to moments in which she and the actors break the fourth wall. Whether these meta elements should mean much to those who weren’t involved may be beside the point. “Invention” is committed to finding its own wavelength.InventionNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 12 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Michael B. Jordan, Ryan Coogler and a Dozen Years of Collaborations

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      Of all the storied bonds between visionary directors and their movie star alter egos — Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, Pedro Almodóvar and Antonio Banderas, Kelly Reichardt and Michelle Williams — few have been as seamless as the one between Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan.Since their first meeting, during casting for “Fruitvale Station” (2013), Jordan has starred or appeared in all five features Coogler has directed, including two “Black Panther” movies and “Creed.” Their latest film, “Sinners,” in theaters April 18, raises the ante by assigning Jordan not one part but two — he plays the twin brothers Smoke and Stack, enterprising gangsters who encounter supernatural resistance to the juke joint of their dreams in Jim Crow-era Mississippi.Coogler, a former college football athlete, said he learned the value of a consistent partnership from playing wide receiver.“I knew he was going to be great in the movie,” Coogler said of Jordan in their first collaboration, “Fruitvale Station.”Dana Scruggs for The New York Times“Sometimes I’d have four or five different quarterbacks in a season, and that was always tough,” he said. “It gave me a real appreciation for how important chemistry is when you can find it.”In a joint interview earlier this month, at a cocktail lounge in New York City, Coogler and Jordan broke down their career-long working relationship, film by film. The conversation took an emotional turn during the discussion of “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” which was made after the death of Chadwick Boseman, star of the original “Black Panther.”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 Voyeurs,’ ‘Cyrano’ and More Streaming Gems

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      Exciting new riffs on 1990s genre movies are among the highlights of this month’s recommendations on your subscription streaming services.‘Cyrano’ (2022)Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.Edmond Rostand’s late-19th-century play “Cyrano de Bergerac” has proved to be quite a durable text, which shouldn’t come as much of a surprise; few things translate as well, no matter the period or genre, than the feeling that the person you love could never feel the same. This adaptation by the director Joe Wright (“Pride & Prejudice”), first presented onstage by the New Group in 2019, changes the source of the title character’s low self-image: Instead of an oversize nose, he is of undersize height. Peter Dinklage is marvelous in the starring role, finding the cockiness and bluster that Cyrano uses to compensate, while showing the beating heart just under that hard surface. He also provides a pleasant baritone for the songs by members of the National, which are the film’s other key deviation from Rostand’s original. They’re a masterstroke, beautifully conveying the longing and regret of this tragic tale.‘The Last Stop in Yuma County’ (2024)Stream it on Paramount+.Three cheers for this A+ premise: The pumps are empty at the last gas station for 100 miles and the truck with the refill is running late, so stranded motorists are killing time at the diner next door — among them, two crooks who made off with a trunkful of bank loot. The writer and director Francis Galluppi works from his own Swiss watch of a script, equally influenced by “The Desperate Hours” and the dusty neo-noirs of the 1990s, where the turns are unpredictable yet organic and precise, and there are chances for every one if its character actors to shine. Snappily paced, delightfully stylish and refreshingly bleak, this movie is an assurance that we’re going to hear much, much more from this gifted first-time filmmaker.‘The Voyeurs’ (2021)Stream it on Hulu and Amazon Prime Video.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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      Joan Chen: Exacting Artist, Cool Mom

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      When Joan Chen was in her early 20s she met with the director Ang Lee about starring in his 1993 film “The Wedding Banquet,” a New York-set rom-com about a Taiwanese American in a relationship with another man who marries a woman in need of a green card. Chen was a star in China but had recently moved to Los Angeles, and was intrigued.“Getting married for a green card was something we all kind of thought about,” she said during a recent video interview from her home in San Francisco. “I had such a wedding myself. So it’s a great story.” (She has since remarried.)But it took years to get the funding and Chen never ended up playing the role of the bride. The actress, who turns 64 this month, plays the bride’s mother in the remake directed by Andrew Ahn, in theaters April 18.“I feel like it’s some sort of a karma, it’s some sort of a closure,” she said, her voice growing almost wistful. “It’s also interesting, time passing yet we’re all still here. So fortunate. What a wonderful thing.”Joan Chen in San Francisco. “I’m, in a way, becoming a character actor,” she said.Amy Harrity for The New York TimesThe details of her character, May Chen, are a sign of the changing times: Rather than denying the sexuality of her daughter Angela (Kelly Marie Tran), May is a vocal L.G.B.T.Q. ally who gets down with lion dancers and a drag queen. Angela agrees to marry the boyfriend (Han Gi-chan) of her best friend (Bowen Yang) when the groom agrees to pay for in vitro fertilization treatments for the bride’s girlfriend (Lily Gladstone), in exchange for a chance to stay in the United States.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