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      ‘Joker: Folie à Deux’ Review: Make ’Em Laugh (and Yawn)

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      Todd Phillips’s “Joker” sequel stars Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga who sing and dance like crazy kids, but the movie is seriously un-fun.“Joker: Folie à Deux” is such a dour, unpleasant slog that it is hard to know why it was made or for whom. That’s admittedly nonsensical — it’s for us! — though no more ridiculous than anything in this sequel to “Joker” (2019). Directed by Todd Phillips and starring Joaquin Phoenix as the sad, mad clown of the title, that first movie was a success, both critically and commercially. The intensity of Phoenix’s performance, with its smoldering violence and unpredictability, drew you in, and the gestures at American violence and nihilism kept you wondering. The movie seemed to have something serious to say, which was finally its big joke.The original “Joker” won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival, and grossed more than a billion worldwide. It was also nominated for 11 Oscars (including best picture), which is only notable because that’s nearly three times the total number of nods that Martin Scorsese received for “Taxi Driver” and “The King of Comedy,” two of Phillips’s obvious touchstones. So, all things considered, and with oodles of money in the offing, a sequel was inevitable even if Phoenix’s sour frown, the movie’s barely-there story, its unrelenting grimness and its commitment to forced eccentricity suggest that no one involved was really stoked to make it.The big non-news about “Folie à Deux” is that it’s a half-baked, halfhearted musical complete with one star who can sing, Lady Gaga as Lee Quinzel a.k.a. Harley Quinn, and another (Phoenix) who can’t or won’t. Gaga and Phoenix perform assorted song-and-sometimes-dance numbers featuring classics from the Great American Songbook that are mixed in with some traditional tunes and recent songs. Anytime that Gaga sings, the movie holds you, and it’s amusing to see Phoenix getting his Gene Kelly on with some tap-tap-tapping. The numbers are distributed throughout the movie, which otherwise largely toggles between scenes of Joker — and his sad-sack civilian alter-ego, Arthur Fleck — locked in a mental institution and of him in a Gotham court, standing trial on multiple counts of murder.Written by Phillips and Scott Silver, the sequel tracks Fleck/Joker in and out of the institution where the guards (played by Brendan Gleeson, among others) are predictably barbaric and routinely mete out the usual cruel punishment. At some point, Fleck meets Lee/Harley, who’s in an adjacent ward. It’s love or insanity or something at first sight, unconvincingly, and soon they’re swapping kisses, trading weird smiles, performing duets and planning mayhem like crazy kids do in storybook romances. Despite the two leads’ obvious attractions, they never make sense as a couple in large measure because the movie itself never coheres.There are appealing moments here and there, including one scene built around courtroom testimony by Gary Puddles (Leigh Gill), a colleague from Fleck’s days as a clown-for hire. In the first movie, Puddles witnesses Fleck (or Joker) stab another colleague to death (that’s entertainment!), and now he has been called to recount the gory mess. Gill makes both his character’s tremulous fear and anguish palpable; it’s a rare moment of feeling in the movie, one that Phillips almost instantly undermines by inserting a shot showing that Puddles, who’s of short stature, is seated on a telephone book. Whether Phillips was daring — or baiting — moviegoers to laugh at this image, the cutaway only undermines the actor’s performance.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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      ‘Rust’ Western Will Premiere in Europe 3 Years After Fatal Shooting

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      After the Alec Baldwin movie turned into the scene of a tragedy with the death of its cinematographer, the film will debut next month at a festival that celebrates cinematography.The movie “Rust,” which has become synonymous with the fatal shooting of its cinematographer on set in 2021, will be screened publicly for the first time in November at a film festival in Poland devoted to cinematography.The festival, Camerimage, said on its website that the premiere would honor Halyna Hutchins, the 42-year-old cinematographer who was killed on Oct. 21, 2021, when the movie’s star, Alec Baldwin, was positioning an old-fashioned revolver for the camera and it discharged a live bullet.Ms. Hutchins’s husband, Matthew Hutchins, and their son, who was 9 years old when she died, will benefit financially from the movie’s release under the terms of a settlement agreement in a wrongful-death lawsuit. Filming resumed in 2023 with no real weapons, and the writer and director of “Rust,” Joel Souza, who was injured in the shooting, returned to see the movie through to the end.“Rust” is a western about an orphaned 13-year-old boy who, after accidentally shooting a rancher, escapes a death sentence with his outlaw grandfather, played by Mr. Baldwin. The finished movie, which was initially filmed outside Santa Fe, N.M., and finished in Montana, does not include the scene that Ms. Hutchins was working on when she was killed.The decision to finish the movie was somewhat controversial in the film industry, as the production restarted during the prosecutions of Mr. Baldwin and the movie’s original armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed.Ms. Gutierrez-Reed, who loaded the gun with a live round before it went off, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to 18 months in prison. A judge dismissed the manslaughter case against Mr. Baldwin during his trial in July, citing the prosecution’s withholding of evidence.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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      ‘Daaaaaalí!’ Review: Keeping It Surreal

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      The French absurdist director Quentin Dupieux did not make a biopic of Salvador Dalí — he adopted the Surrealist painter’s approach to deliver a particularly loopy tale.Quentin Dupieux’s new film opens with a shot recreating the Salvador Dalí painting “Necrophilic Fountain Flowing From a Grand Piano.” This is as straightforward as the nonsensical “Daaaaaalí!” ever gets, which is the least we can expect from Dupieux, a master of absurdist humor, engaging with the Surrealist artist.Judith (Anaïs Demoustier) is a young, fairly inexperienced journalist sent out to interview the Spanish iconoclast, who is in his 80s. Or is he? Time is as elastic as the melting clocks Dalí once painted: Here he is portrayed by several actors of various ages including Édouard Baer, Jonathan Cohen and Pio Marmaï. They take on the role seemingly randomly (often one starts a scene and another finishes it) in the loopy — in every sense of the word — movie.Set to a jaunty acoustic score by Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter, “Daaaaaalí!” feels like a dispatch from Dalí’s mind (and that of his old accomplice Luis Buñuel). The film follows a dream logic with scant interest in anything linear. The chronology is askew, frames are played backward; an extended joke becomes the equivalent of a set of infinitely nesting Russian dolls.Dupieux captures Dalí’s self-promoting genius but the constant trickery eventually becomes a little tiresome. The filmmaker cranks out movies with rare velocity: His previous opus, “Yannick,” came out in April in the United States, and a new one was released in May in his native France. At least we won’t have to wait long to see how he will make up for this frustrating stylistic exercise.Daaaaaalí!Not rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 17 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘White Bird’ Review: After ‘Wonder,’ a Bully Moves On

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      A boy starts a new school and gets a history lesson from his grandmother, played by Helen Mirren.The world of children’s literature is more complicated than many of us might be aware of. The 2012 novel “Wonder,” by R.J. Palacio, for instance, has spawned several sequels or spinoffs to date. “Wonder” itself, about Auggie, a young boy living with Treacher Collins syndrome, and the unfortunate concomitant bullying by his peers, was made into a pretty decent picture in 2017. “White Bird,” a possibly unexpected origin story, is adapted from a 2019 graphic novel of the same name about the family of one of Auggie’s antagonists in “Wonder.”Yes, you read that correctly. “White Bird” opens with Julian, a newcomer, in the cafeteria of an elite school, torn between the urge to be kind to an outcast student and the desire to sit with the snooty “cool” kids. Julian is here because he was expelled from his last school, for having bullied Auggie. On returning from his first day, he finds his parents are not home. His grandmother (Helen Mirren) from Paris, however, is visiting, and she sits him down for a story.Of her girlhood in France during the Nazi occupation, how she was hidden by a kindly boy named Julien, and their eventual fates. The director, Marc Forster, sets the period action in Movie France, a France whose language is English — English that is spoken by some actors with a French accent, and by others in a British accent. Period detail is conveyed by way of smoothed-out production design and cinematography.One could argue that Forster and company calibrate their anodyne effects to make a Holocaust narrative that’s palatable for younger viewers. But what mostly resonates is a particularly lachrymose brand of show-business hedging.White BirdRated PG-13 for some strong violence and language. Running time: 2 hours. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Outrun’ Review: From Rock Bottom to Recovery

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      Saoirse Ronan gives another stunning performance in a story about an alcoholic in search of healing.Saoirse Ronan has made it apparent that she is one of the greatest actresses of her generation. Nominated for four Oscars before she was out of her mid-20s, the Irish actress is the sort of performer whose presence in a movie is sufficient reason to see it. She chooses her projects carefully, often movies about complex women, and throws her whole self into them, with unforgettable results.But how she does what she does is harder to pin down. Ronan does not rely on showy exaggeration or wild swings for her craft. Her most acclaimed roles — in “Atonement,” “Brooklyn,” “Lady Bird” and “Little Women” — all feel, at least from the outside, as if they tap into some part of her real self. All four are intelligent and perceptive and plucky and just a little innocent, in need of some hard-knock wisdom. Yet they’re all indelible, and all very different from one another: girls and women for whom life is a good, hard mystery to be lived and then understood.I think Ronan’s great ability lies in giving us the sense that her characters’ minds are always working, something that can only really be communicated through the eyes and nearly imperceptible facial expressions, flashes of anger and happiness and passion and pain. (And a lot of impishness; cheeky Ronan is always a delight.)One might reasonably have expected “The Outrun,” in which Ronan plays a recovering addict desperately hanging onto sobriety, to be a more conventionally brash or hyperbolic role than usual, the kind designed for awards attention. Woman out of control, woman on the road to healing — you know the type. But Ronan is no ordinary actress, and she makes “The Outrun,” which occasionally veers near overdone territory, into a thing of beauty and hard-won joy.The director Nora Fingscheidt wrote the screenplay for “The Outrun” with Amy Liptrot, based on Liptrot’s 2016 memoir. In the film, Liptrot has been transformed into Rona, a 29-year-old woman who, when we first meet her, has a black eye, having been nearly defeated by life. She’s from a tiny village in the Orkney Islands, which lie off the northern coast of Scotland. Rona went to London to earn a graduate degree in biology, where she met friends and a man (Paapa Essiedu) she loved. But a latent propensity for addiction turned into a full-blown alcoholic spiral, and she wrecked her life completely.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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      ‘It’s What’s Inside’ Review: I Gotta Be You

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      A limp body-swapping comedy doesn’t really know what makes its subgenre so funny.There’s only one really good reason to make a body-swap movie. Yes, OK, thematically they’re meant to teach us to be more empathetic and think about living in someone else’s shoes, blah, blah, blah. But a body-swap movie has one true purpose, and that’s to make us laugh at someone acting like someone else. “Freaky Friday”: a mom and her daughter switch places, and it’s funny. “13 Going on 30”: a teen girl ends up in the body of a mean, gorgeous magazine editor, and it’s funny. “Big”: a boy is in a man’s body, and it makes us laugh. “Jumanji”: four teens end up in the bodies of a beefcake, his sidekick, a dork and a hot lady, and it’s hilarious.“It’s What’s Inside” is trying to be hysterical, too, but with less amusing results. The premise of Greg Jardin’s comedy is relatively promising: Seven 20-something friends from college converge on a beautiful estate that belongs to one of them, who is getting married the next day. They’re going to have one last night of partying before the wedding. Two are a couple who’ve been fighting; one of the guys is carrying a torch for one of the girls; another of the girls, the blonde, has become an influencer; the others also have their own lives now.Then an eighth friend shows up, a guy nobody’s heard from in a long time — not since a terrible and unfortunate event years earlier at a college party. He’s bearing a weird box containing a strange device that, it turns out, can cause them to trade bodies. He proposes a Mafia-style party game, using the box, and things go off the rails really fast.“It’s What’s Inside” feels a little reminiscent of the much better “Bodies Bodies Bodies” (2022), a horror-comedy about a bunch of intoxicated, very online youths in a rambling house playing a crazy party game. But where that one zigged and zagged, “It’s What’s Inside” plods straightforwardly. Even the twists feel obvious and not all that interesting, more the fulfillment of plot points seeded early on rather than startling turns of fortune.The lumpiness is baffling, to be honest. This concept has promise. Some of the fault is in the casting; while half of the actors give performances that are fun and quirky, the others feel as though they’re reading lines, and not particularly well. A little of it is also in a self-consciously showy filmmaking style (weird lighting, fast cutting, freeze-framing) that doesn’t add anything to the film. At times, it distracts, or maybe subtracts.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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      ‘Intercepted’ Review: The Awful Intimacy of the War in Ukraine

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      In leaked phone calls home, Russian soldiers grapple with the war they’re waging. This new documentary sets the calls’ swagger and anguish against images of the invasion’s devastation.The voices of the offscreen Russian soldiers and their acquaintances in the powerful Ukraine-set documentary “Intercepted” are matter-of-fact, swaggering and anguished. “I tell you, they live better than us here,” a soldier tells a woman back home. “Right, look how the West supports them,” she says.Sometime later, another soldier explains to a different woman, “We were given the order to kill everyone we see” to protect Russia’s miliary positions. “I’m telling you, I’ve already seen a forest full of corpses, more than a cemetery.” He adds, “I said that I won’t kill anyone.”Not long after Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and Russian troops started flooding into the country, their communications began leaking out, at times with dire consequences. Ham-radio operators and open-source groups began capturing unencrypted battlefield radio transmissions among Russian forces on the ground. Ukraine also intercepted more prosaic phone calls that Russian soldiers made to their families and friends, to their wives and mothers and children. The soldiers talked about how they were doing, what they’d seen, what their orders were and even disclosed their locations; some spoke about whom they had killed.You hear a number of these phone calls in “Intercepted,” which was directed by the Ukrainian-Canadian filmmaker Oksana Karpovych. In a director’s statement for the movie, Karpovych explains that she was working in Ukraine as a producer for the news network Al Jazeera when the invasion began. After the intercepted calls were publicly released, she and a crew of four — including her cinematographer, the British photographer Christopher Nunn — traveled across Ukraine gathering images of devastation, which she has juxtaposed with calls intercepted between March and November 2022. The result is a haunting, often jolting depiction of the profound toll that the war has exerted on soldiers and civilians alike.“Intercepted” is at once subtle and blunt. It opens on three children — one on a swing — next to an otherwise empty country road that stretches down the middle of the shot. It’s an outwardly ordinary, pacific tableaux. There are chalk marks scrawled on the road, a couple of bikes resting on the grass and a woman lingering off to the side. The trees are lush and green, and there are no obvious signs of war. At one point, a car in the distance slowly crosses the road. Karpovych then cuts to a closer shot of the kids, which allows you to see their faces more fully; I think that she wants you to remember them as you watch.That first country street leads to many more. The movie starts in the north and moves south and then west, a route that Karpovych has explained in interviews is meant to suggest the trajectory of the invasion. Using a mixture of vivid, precisely framed moving and still images, she takes you across the war-ravaged country. You travel down dirt and paved roads, some flanked by incinerated military vehicles, and into heavily bombed villages and cities. She also recurrently brings you into people’s homes, including some that look like they were hastily abandoned. In one, a carton of eggs still rests on a kitchen table amid a jumble of crockery, suggestive of an unfinished breakfast. In another house, a woman sweeps up shattered glass.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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      in Theater

      Ken Page, Who Starred in ‘Cats’ and Voiced Oogie Boogie, Dies at 70

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      His career on Broadway spanned decades. But he has probably best known for providing the voice of the boogeyman in “The Nightmare Before Christmas.”Ken Page, whose extensive Broadway career included standout roles in “The Wiz” and “Cats,” but whose rich baritone voice reached its widest audience as Oogie Boogie in the perennial hit animated movie “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” died on Monday at his home in St. Louis. He was 70.His death was confirmed by Dorian Hannaway, a longtime friend. She did not cite a cause.Mr. Page, a St. Louis native, arrived on the New York theater scene in 1975 as the understudy, and later the replacement, in the role of the Lion in “The Wiz.” The next year, his showstopping rendition of “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat” as Nicely-Nicely Johnson in a revival of “Guys and Dolls” brought him his first acclaim.Mr. Page revisited the role of Old Deuteronomy, which he had originated on Broadway. in the St. Louis Municipal Opera Theater’s 2010 production of “Cats.”The Muny“Sometimes it really does happen. Sometimes the fairy tale comes true,” Clive Barnes of The New York Times wrote in 1976. “It happened on Wednesday night at the Broadway Theater to a young unknown, Ken Page.”His many other Broadway credits included the original Broadway productions of “Cats,” in which he played the dignified Old Deuteronomy, and “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” the musical revue built around songs written or recorded by Fats Waller. Offstage, he was probably best known for voicing Oogie Boogie, the infamous boogeyman in Henry Selick and Tim Burton’s 1993 stop-motion classic, “The Nightmare Before Christmas.” It was a role that Mr. Page would revisit often, in video games and at Halloween celebrations.According to a statement released by his agent, Mr. Page was preparing for upcoming appearances as Oogie Boogie when he died.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