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      ‘Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight’ Review: Through a Child’s Eyes

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      This drama about a white family in Zimbabwe is told almost entirely from the girl’s point of view.The family drama elegantly realized in “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight” is relayed entirely through the perspective of Bobo (Lexi Venter), a white child who witnesses her mother spinning out against a backdrop of the bloody transition from Rhodesia to an independent Zimbabwe.Written and directed by Embeth Davidtz and adapted from Alexandra Fuller’s memoir, the film takes place during the 1980 election, when Robert Mugabe became prime minister.Tensions are high on the modest farm Bobo’s family, who comes from Australia, maintains alongside a small staff of Black laborers. An outdoorsy child, Bobo understands the world by observing the adults around her, particularly her mercurial mother, Nicola (Davidtz), whose feelings of entitlement over the land degenerate into racist mania. Amid the friction, Bobo’s chief ally is Sarah (Zikhona Bali), a Black maid who indulges Bobo’s longing for companionship despite concerns that her affinity with a white child could make her a target for Black militants fighting for independence.Davidtz, who grew up in South Africa during apartheid, uses jump cuts and an ever-moving camera to build a mood of youthful wonder, and the movie’s best sequences foreground Bobo’s childhood innocence. Because she lacks a conception of colonialism, Davidtz sometimes struggles to negotiate the film’s fidelity to her point of view with a more complete picture of the war. It doesn’t help that a past tragedy meant to round out Nicola’s character comes off as oversimplified. But as the spunky pixie holding the story’s reins, Bobo commands our attention.Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs TonightRated R for violence, assault and grown-up matters. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Brick’ Review: No Way Out?

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      In the overly constructed thriller from Germany, tenants are trapped in apartment building by a mysterious bulwark.“Brick” is built almost entirely of hints and twists. Even so, it feels spoiler-free to share that Liv, an architect who is trapped in an apartment building in Hamburg, Germany, concludes that the material composing the barricades is neither carbon fiber nor liquid granite.Liv (Ruby O. Fee) attempts to escape the apartment building with her video game-designing spouse, Tim (Matthias Schweighöfer). Tim is haunted by flashbacks of a family tragedy, one that provides the movie its iffy metaphorical mortar and moral. Hint: Like the building, Tim’s emotions are also entombed.The pair may be at an impasse, but skills-wise, they are well-suited for the task at hand. The couple are joined by Marvin (an amusing Frederick Lau) and Ana (Salber Lee Williams), who are drug-imbibing lovebirds, as well as the cagey veteran Oswalt (Axel Werner) and his bright granddaughter, Lea (Sira-Anna Faal). They also meet an outlier set on not escaping: Yuri (Murathan Muslu).But what, exactly, is the mysterious bulwark that transforms from a mosaic of smooth black bricks to undulating metal and back again? Does it have anything to do with the inky plume billowing near the harbor? Or is it, as Marvin frets, some sort of diabolical game ginned up by their short-term “super-host”? Or maybe it’s a high-tech fortress keeping them safe from a Deep State catastrophe, as Yuri fervidly claims. The writer and director Philip Koch teases these ideas up to the final image.Make sure to watch this thriller in its original German. Dubbed into English, it goes from mildly diverting to landing like a ton of, well ….BrickNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Daniela Forever’ Review: His Girlfriend’s Back

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      In this agreeably unpretentious science-fiction feature, Henry Golding plays a DJ who has lucid dreams about his dead girlfriend.Since his feature debut, “Timecrimes” (2008), the Spanish writer-director Nacho Vigalondo has carved out a niche as a reliable purveyor of clever, science-fiction-tinged genre fare that makes few claims to be much more than that. His latest, the likable if plodding “Daniela Forever,” continues in that agreeably unpretentious vein.Alternating between a retro video format and glossy widescreen to differentiate two parallel realities, the film concerns Nicolas (Henry Golding), a British DJ living in Madrid. In the drab video segments, he is mourning his girlfriend, an Italian artist named Daniela (Beatrice Grannò), after she has been fatally struck by a car.A friend (Nathalie Poza) invites the grieving Nicolas to participate in a hush-hush clinical trial run by a group of Belgian scientists. They are testing a drug that enables takers to have lucid dreams. But rather than follow the researchers’ exercises, Nicolas uses his lucid dreams — portrayed in the widescreen sections — to resurrect Daniela. Around her, Nicolas builds a world that is superficially suited to her desires but even more suited to his own.This world unavoidably conjures memories of Christopher Nolan’s “Inception” and Michel Gondry’s “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” antecedents from which Vigalondo does surprisingly little to deviate. (The emptied-out cityscapes look like lo-fi Nolan, and a motif in which Nicolas and Daniela cosplay as a vampire and a shark is pure Gondry.) The philosophical window dressing — would you rather your loved one live a better life if it meant living without you? — doesn’t play to Vigalondo’s strengths.Daniela ForeverRated R for a particularly narcissistic bedroom fantasy. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Rosa la Rose: Fille Publique’ Review: Lady Liberty of the Streets

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      A new restoration of a 1986 drama by the filmmaker Paul Vecchiali melds a candy-colored vision of the world’s oldest profession with a grim take on neoliberalism.Halfway through Paul Vecchiali’s “Rosa la Rose, Fille Publique,” you might think you’re in a lush musical.The luminous Rosa (Marianne Basler), a prostitute, springs around the streets of Paris’s Les Halles district in a blue dress and cherry-red earrings, cheerily taking on new johns — sometimes in pairs — as a Greek chorus-like duo of elder call girls bemoan their own shrinking clientele. But after a first act that ends with a giddy dance number and a tableau vivant restaging of “The Last Supper,” Rosa’s rose-colored glasses come off. It’s her 20th birthday and her life may not be so charmed as it seems.Released in France in 1986 and now showing in a new restoration, “Rosa la Rose” was made by a filmmaker attentive to the queer and feminist rallying cries at the time.His breakout film, “The Strangler,” depicted prostitutes in solidarity, tough and practical. In “Rosa,” the mood is initially jovial, with Rosa enacting her sexual freedom in a startlingly natural way — neither willfully provocative nor limned with secret shame. Vecchiali’s camera elegantly glides around her stamping grounds, showing her close-knit network of clients, co-workers, and pimps with carnivalesque panache.But as the debonair pimp Gilbert (Jean Sorel) reminds her, a job is a job. Gilbert isn’t her boyfriend; he’s her boss. And the teenager who follows her around like a puppy isn’t in love with her; he’s just aroused. Rosa’s disenchantment with the ways of her world gestures at the harsh austerity policies of then-president François Mitterrand. Ultimately, Vecchiali tempers a romantic vision of the world’s oldest profession with hard truths about women’s agency under the auspices of the free market: “public” goods like Rosa are destined to be depleted.Rosa la Rose: Fille PubliqueNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Little, Big, and Far’ Review: Dwelling in the Cosmos

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      The experimental director Jem Cohen’s latest is an uncategorizable film about astronomers and humanity and love and the stars.Around halfway through Victor Hugo’s novel “Les Misérables,” the omniscient narrator is musing on the ways that the tiniest and grandest building blocks of life in our cosmos intersect. “Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins,” he writes. “Which of the two possesses the larger field of vision?”Good question. In Jem Cohen’s uncategorizable film “Little, Big, and Far,” an astronomer named Karl (Franz Schwartz) remarks that he was surprised as a child to learn that the stars were millions of miles apart, something he tells us while we’re seeing images of the night sky. From his point of view perched on Earth, those stars seemed crowded together, keeping one another company, all connected. This leads him to ruminate on how human relationships can contain vast distances, even when our bodies are in relative physical proximity. For instance, there’s the distance that’s grown between him and his wife of 40 years, Eleanor (Leslie Thornton), who’s also an astronomer, and who seems to be drifting away.That sense of echoes between celestial bodies, our bodies and the tiniest parts of the world — the ways things like uncertainty and harmony and connection and memory are embedded in the natural world, as well as the more metaphysical one — is the theme of “Little, Big, and Far.” But I am not quite sure how to tell you what the film is, other than achingly beautiful. Those who’ve seen Cohen’s previous films, including “Museum Hours,” will have a sense of what they’re in for; I’ve seen “Big, Little and Far” described as an “epistolary essayistic docu-fiction hybrid,” which is accurate but not all that illuminating.Epistolary, because most of the dialogue in the film is in the form of letters between Karl and a younger colleague, Sarah (Jessica Sarah Rinland), who is forming a relationship with Mateo (Mario Silva), also an astronomer. Karl and Sarah share their thoughts about their work, their relationships, their lives and the things that draw them to the stars. Often we’re hearing their letters while seeing images of a giant telescope, people on a town square, traffic whizzing by on the highway, the natural world, the lights in the night sky. We hear a little from Eleanor, too, who speaks about watching an eclipse from a mall parking lot and being just as fascinated by the way the other observers, mostly strangers to one another, form a little community for the moment.During this rumination and many others, most images we are seeing are of real people going about their real lives, whether it’s riding the light rail in Vienna or sitting on a folding chair and watching a solar eclipse. In one stretch of the film, Sarah’s voice reflects on whether museums, as she puts it, must be “places not only of knowledge, but of mourning” in an era in which species are disappearing from Earth at fearsome rates. As we listen, we watch people milling about a natural-history museum, looking at the displays, seemingly unaware of the presence of a camera.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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      ‘Ne Zha 2,’ Blockbuster Chinese Animated Film, Will Get English Version

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      The English-language version will feature the voice of Michelle Yeoh and be released in the United States in August.An English-language version of the Chinese movie “Ne Zha 2,” which has surpassed “Inside Out 2” as the highest-grossing animated feature of all time, will be released in the United States next month.“Ne Zha 2,” which is based loosely on Chinese mythology and a famous 16th-century novel, has made $2.2 billion at the global box office, including $20 million in the United States and Canada, according to A24, which is distributing the English version. That is more than any other animated film when not accounting for inflation; “Inside Out 2” made $1.7 billion last year.The English version will open on Aug. 22 and feature the voice of Michelle Yeoh, the first Asian star to win best actress at the Academy Awards for her role in “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”Yeoh will voice Nezha’s mother. The movie will also feature Aleks Le, Crystal Lee and Vincent Rodriguez III.In the original “Ne Zha,” which earned $726 million worldwide when it was released in 2019, Nezha is born as the reincarnation of a demon with supernatural powers who is destined to live only three years. He fights back against his fate and saves his village.In the sequel, written and directed by Yu Yang, Nezha challenges the political order and authority governing gods and demons, fighting the Dragon King of Four Seas and other creatures.The sequel was released in China in January and quickly became a smash hit, earning more than $1 billion in ticket sales in less than two weeks. “Ne Zha 2” was the first non-Hollywood film to reach that milestone.Yeoh, who also plays Madame Morrible in the “Wicked” movies, said in a statement that she was honored to be part of “Ne Zha 2,” calling it a “landmark in Chinese animation and a powerful reminder of how universal our stories can be.”“I can’t wait for everyone to experience the wonder, heart, spectacular artistry and magic of this film on the big screen,” she said.The success of “Ne Zha 2” has been good news for the Chinese film industry, which was struggling with poor ticket sales amid a weakening economy. The recent films to break through in China have not been the typical Hollywood blockbuster, but domestic features with patriotic themes or those that showcase traditional Chinese culture or folklore. More

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      Danielle Deadwyler on ’40 Acres and Balancing Brutality and Family

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      The star plays a stoic matriarch raising a militant brood to protect their land and each other against cannibals in R.T. Thorne’s new horror indie.Onscreen, the actress Danielle Deadwyler has become known for expressing with her eyes what words rarely do. She can appear at once steely and heartbroken, fierce and fragile.She has used this ability to great effect in the HBO Max dystopian drama “Station Eleven”; in Jeymes Samuel’s 2021 western, “The Harder They Fall”; and in Chinonye Chukwu’s 2022 historical drama, “Till,” in which she played the doting mother of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old whose gruesome murder in Mississippi in 1955 helped spark the civil rights movement.Now, Deadwyler, 43, is applying her skill to R.T. Thorne’s first feature, the horror indie “40 Acres,” which is set in the near future. She plays a mother and former soldier, Hailey Freeman, who, alongside her partner, an Indigenous man named Galen (Michael Greyeyes), is preparing her brood for the harsh truths of their famine-decimated postapocalyptic life. They must fight threats from all sides, the scariest of which are bands of ferocious cannibals.The family tries to balance survivalist reality, including grisly encounters, with serene farm life. Days are spent training the four children to be warriors while also honoring their heritage and their land, finding surprising joy in the small things. In his critic’s pick review for The Times, Robert Daniels wrote that “Deadwyler’s forceful energy fills the frame” and that she “lends power and humor to this lovingly stern mother.”Hailey and her family are the descendants of African American farmers who settled in Canada after the Civil War, when the United States failed to fulfill Gen. William T. Sherman’s promise of 40 acres of land for Black Americans freed from enslavement.“It’s a unique family — R.T. said he hadn’t seen Black and Indigenous families together onscreen,” Deadwyler told me in a video interview in June. “I hadn’t either, like this.”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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      ‘Superman’ Review: It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s a Reboot!

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      Beginning again with the Man of Steel, this time in the hands of James Gunn.In one sense I can’t really spoil “Superman.” Even comic book agnostics already know the basic idea: A Kryptonian baby with incredible powers, sent to Earth by his parents ahead of his planet’s destruction, is raised by a pair of American farmers. By day, he’s the bespectacled journalist Clark Kent; by night, he’s — well, you know. That’s been the story since Action Comics No. 1 was published in 1938.On the other hand, the ubiquity of those bare facts makes it extra easy to spoil this newest movie, a hard reboot for the character and his universe, because you’re probably going to the movies to see what they’ve done to the guy now, and the discovery is the fun part. “Superman” is the first film for DC Studios, of which Peter Safran and James Gunn are the chief executives. Elaborate histories of the byzantine path that got us here are available to you, should you be interested, but if you’re just a normie like me, the most important thing to recall is this: Gunn is probably best known for directing the three “Guardians of the Galaxy” films for Marvel and the 2021 DC film “The Suicide Squad” (not to be confused with the 2016 movie “Suicide Squad” — you see what I mean about byzantine).Gunn tends to nail the right tone with superhero material: He mixes big-hearted themes with a dash of real-world allusions and a good-natured understanding that all of this should be treated as if it’s a bit silly because, let’s face it, it is. Guys in capes zooming around, humans with magical powers that let them make big punching fists out of matter and energy, tech billionaires consumed by envy who hang out in shadowy lairs trying to control the universe, I mean, come on.Well, OK, maybe that last bit. And maybe a little more. Let’s not forget that Superman was created by two Jewish men, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who were keenly aware of rising antisemitism and Nazi oppression, as well as the despair of a people saddled with economic depression, looking for someone to save them. Superman took on corrupt politicians, unscrupulous businessmen and substandard housing conditions. And he was staunchly antifascist: In a noncanonical 1940 story titled “How Superman Would End the War,” Superman brought Hitler himself to justice.So while staying true to Superman requires trotting out certain familiar plot elements — his birth parents, his adoptive parents, his susceptibility to Kryptonite, his big old crush on the scrappy lady reporter Lois Lane — it also means tapping into those ideological roots. He’s a metahuman, but he’s also a man who’s almost guilelessly attached to truth, justice and something called “the American way”: protecting the little guy, pummeling the baddies. Set that guy down in the 21st century, and things get complicated.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