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      ‘The Universal Theory’ Review: A Quantum Noir

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      A physicist becomes embroiled in a conspiracy throughout this German meta-thriller. Shot in black-and-white, the film pays homage to Hollywood classics.A slippery meta-thriller from Germany, “The Universal Theory” has all of the elements of a classic film noir, but with an uncanny twist.Directed by Timm Kröger, this slick black-and-white movie features a femme fatale, woozy dissolves that stitch together each scene and a booming Bernard Herrmann-esque score by Diego Ramos Rodríguez that never lets up.And, frankly, an annoyingly convoluted plot.The story, drenched in postwar paranoia, centers on Johannes (Jan Bülow), a young physicist attending a quantum mechanics conference in the Swiss Alps. The year is 1962 — though what is time, anyway? That question is at the heart of Johannes’s yet-uncompleted doctoral thesis, in which he attempts to make the claim that the multiverse is real. His grouchy supervisor, Dr. Strathan (Hanns Zischler), is sick of hearing about it; the portly, LSD-loving Dr. Blumberg (Gottfried Breitfuss), whom Dr. Strathan despises, is more enthusiastic.Then there’s Karin (Olivia Ross), a jazz pianist who ensorcels Johannes with her relentless mystique; inexplicably, she knows obscure events from his childhood.The looming white mountains, shot with a sinister edge by Roland Stuprich, seem to be hiding something, and everyone’s caginess around Johannes turns him into something of a detective figure (a state not unrelated to the manic work of writing his thesis).Murdered individuals then start popping up around Johannes. It’s more than enough to make our hero go mad, though the film fails to present this unraveling with enough psychological grit and narrative momentum to make its more unusual surprises feel impactful. Though visually handsome, the film leaves the audience with the sense that, like a grad student, it is still working out its big ideas.The Universal TheoryNot rated. In German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Rez Ball’ Review: Warriors on the Court

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      This inspirational sports movie follows a high school basketball team in New Mexico with deep Native American heritage.The sports drama “Rez Ball” rapidly shows the tough road ahead for the Chuska Warriors, a New Mexico high school basketball team. When Jimmy (Kauchani Bratt) and Nataanii (Kusem Goodwind) hang out, a bleak Nataanii is mourning the deaths of his mother and sister. When he doesn’t show up for a game, word comes of his death by suicide.Yet “Rez Ball,” which is directed by Sydney Freeland and written by Freeland and Sterlin Harjo, doesn’t dwell on the tragedy. Jimmy misses his buddy, but he’s also fighting resentment about his naysaying mother and insecurity about stepping up as a star player. Rather than milk the sadness of Nataanii’s death, the plot about Native American athletes shooting for the state championship gathers its momentum from their teamwork and persistence.The team’s relatively mild coach, Heather (Jessica Matten), who is Native American, inspires her players with the use of Navajo-language play signals and instills discipline with a sheepherding team-building exercise. Her Warriors rack up wins, falter, then muster enough hustle to compete on a state level. The movie tends to race through actual game play — though the actors at least can handle the ball — and so the film’s strength lies more in the players’ easy rapport and the New Mexico location shooting.The fictional tale is inspired by the book “Canyon Dreams: A Basketball Season on the Navajo Nation” by Michael Powell, a former New York Times reporter, but Freeland and Harjo also drew on their experiences. It’s less a slam-dunk nail-biter than a matter of can-do self-determination, or as Jimmy’s friends say: stoodis (“let’s do this”).Rez BallRated PG-13 for thematic elements including suicide and some teenage smack-talking. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Lee’ Review: A Remarkable Life at War

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      Kate Winslet embodies the tenacity of the photographer Lee Miller, who documented World War II for British Vogue.“Lee,” starring Kate Winslet as the photographer Lee Miller, is smartly trained on a span of 10 years: from 1938 until shortly after World War II.Miller’s biography sounds nearly apocryphal. Born in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., she was a model for Vogue, a student of the artist Man Ray (and his muse), and a fashion photographer whose work often reflected her own Surrealist sensibilities. Miller documented the war for British Vogue — then under the editorship of the English journalist Audrey Withers (Andrea Riseborough) — often in the company of the Life photographer David Scherman (Andy Samberg).It would be hard for any narrative feature film to capture the many facets of the photographer responsible for some of the most indelible images of World War II. Winslet embodies those dimensions — as well as Miller’s propulsive drive — often with an askance look, a whetted remark, a resolve both stubborn and practical.Alexander Skarsgard portrays Miller’s British husband, Roland Penrose. The two meet prickly, if teasingly so, at a gathering in the South of France that also includes French Vogue’s Solange d’Ayen (Marion Cotillard) and her husband, Jean (Patrick Mille), and the Surrealists Nusch and Paul Éluard (Noémie Merlant and Vincent Colombe). Some of these friends appear again at the war’s end; Cotillard is especially devastating as d’Ayen.The movie begins with a framing device: Miller being interviewed by a journalist in her farmhouse in 1977, which allows her to tell her story. The director Ellen Kuras uses Miller’s actual photos and recreates a number of her more piercing images throughout the film — as a tribute, but also as a call to head to the archive. “Lee” feeds the desire to seek out more of her images. Winslet’s performance demands that we consider the force behind the camera.LeeRated R for disturbing images, language and nudity. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Sleep’ Review: Bumps in the Night

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      A taut and thrilling thriller about sleep issues is also a clever drama about early marriage.Apnea, insomnia, sleep hygiene, sleep aids, sleep tricks: It’s all science but feels like sorcery. Even the most rational person can begin to suspect, three weeks into sleepwalking spells or 3 a.m. wakefulness, that some curse has been placed upon them, and the only cure is some mystical spell. It’s the stuff of horror, and the director Jason Yu harnesses it deftly for his debut feature, “Sleep,” a neatly constructed thriller about the sort of insanity that slumber issues can visit on even the most harmonious household.The household here is made up of the newlyweds Hyun-su (Lee Sun-kyun) and Soo-jin (Jung Yu-mi), who is heavily pregnant. They live in a modest apartment with Pepper, their fluffy and beady-eyed white Pomeranian. On their living room wall hangs a plaque proclaiming a cheerfully optimistic notion: “Together we can overcome anything.” This sentiment, we understand, is about to face a great challenge.First it’s Hyun-su’s sleep disturbances. He scratches his face bloody in the night — a problem, since he’s an actor who is in the middle of shooting a minor part in a TV show. He sleepwalks, and sleep-eats. When Soo-jin observes him in the night, she realizes he is gorging himself on weird and gross food — raw meat and eggs — and she starts to worry, with mounting fright, for Pepper’s safety. Hyun-su seems to not be himself at night. What is he capable of?The couple consult a doctor and take precautionary measures, but Hyun-su’s sleep activities are taking their toll on Soo-jin, who sleeps less and less, especially once the baby arrives. He offers to stay in a hotel for a while; she is convinced they need to be together: As the plaque says, they can only overcome anything together. At the same time, Soo-jin’s superstitious mother tries to talk them into less orthodox cures, and Soo-jin, red-eyed and nearly delirious from constant, wakeful vigilance starts to wonder if her mother has a point.Yu’s direction is confident, and he manages to convey how a little apartment can transform from domestic comfort by day to claustrophobic agony by night. His restraint throughout keeps us guessing. We really don’t know what’s plaguing Hyun-su. Is it nerves, or a neurological disorder, or some dark and shadowy force? Soo-jin doesn’t know either, and it scares her on several levels. But when Soo-jin’s state of mind deteriorates, Hyun-su becomes just as worried about his wife, who, after all, just gave birth, and wouldn’t be sleeping well no matter what.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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      ‘Saturday Night’ Review: Live TV at Its Mildest

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      When it debuted 50 years ago, “S.N.L.” was chaotic, rangy, even offensive. But nothing’s wild or crazy in Jason Reitman’s fictional reimagining of its first episode.Movies about tectonic cultural shifts tend to be too neat and tidy, too frictionless. “Saturday Night,” the director Jason Reitman’s fictional reimagining of the debut of “Saturday Night Live,” is a nice, safe movie about a revolution. Busily plotted and sporadically funny, it is a backstage look at the night a gang of comics whom most of the world had never heard of began taking over TVs across the country. It was a comedy home invasion on a national scale, and it was glorious (when it didn’t suck).The movie, written by Reitman and Gil Kenan, has a straightforward conceit. It opens at on Oct. 11, 1975, the night that the show, then called “NBC’s Saturday Night,” is scheduled to debut. (The name was changed in 1977.) In just 90 minutes — ticktock — the show will go live if the performers, writers, crew, network suits and some guy named Lorne can get it together in time. A lot of money, reputations and possibly bright futures are riding on the show, but with its deadline looming, it still seems underbaked and, from some vantage points, overly abstract.To convey that premiere and what it portended, Reitman both sticks to the historical record and embellishes it, building momentum by zeroing in on some mini-crisis amid rapid edits, swish pans and rushing bodies. Everything and everyone at 30 Rockefeller Plaza runs too fast or seems immobilized, with characters either in frenetic motion or huddling in pools of flop sweat. As the minutes pass, Reitman periodically cuts to a clock onscreen or someone calls out the time; at one point, a set designer, Leo Yoshimura (Abraham Hsu), slowly begins installing bricks on the stage of Studio 8H, each brick an emblem of the show’s parts sliding into place.In a (real) 1975 news release, NBC called the show “a new concept in late-night programming.” The network wanted a replacement for weekend reruns of “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson,” and this venture was going to be a comedy show with sketches, musical guests, short films and the Muppets. But it was unclear what it was, maybe even to those behind the scenes. That much seems obvious when an NBC executive, Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman), asks the show’s creator-producer, Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle), if he knows what it is. The straight-faced Lorne responds with an amusing, self-aggrandizing analogy involving Edison, the lightbulb and electricity. Who are you in this metaphor, the baffled exec asks.Lorne doesn’t answer, but the movie does by making him its focus. The character is less interesting than his surroundings — he’s more a blurry place holder than a fully realized personality — but whether here or there, Lorne is the center of this storm. He’s the hub, the visionary, the guy who can see past the chaos. Sure, there’s his wife, the writer Rosie Shuster (a tart Rachel Sennott); the host, George Carlin (Matthew Rhys); and a creepy suit, Dave Tebet (Willem Dafoe, in by far the funniest turn). But the star is Lorne because even genius apparently needs a boss.So, hi Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith), Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt), Jane Curtin (Kim Matula), Laraine Newman (Emily Fairn), Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien), Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris, no relation) and John Belushi (Matt Wood). It’s nice to see them, so it’s too bad that only a few of the actors playing the main cast — and only the men — manage to register. That’s the case even when Reitman gestures at the show’s gender problems, as in a peek at a still-funny sketch about female construction workers learning how to harass a guy in short shorts. It’s Dan’s squirmy embarrassment, and how he then wags his rump, that makes it work.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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      ‘Apartment 7A’ Review: All Devil, Few Details

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      A lackluster prequel to the 1968 horror classic “Rosemary’s Baby” doesn’t have much to add.“Apartment 7A” is a prequel, of sorts, to “Rosemary’s Baby,” still one of the most chilling films ever made about losing agency over your own body. The 1968 horror classic takes place in the fictional Bramford, a rambling apartment building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side that seems to have been colonized by a coven of devil worshipers. Early in that film, Guy and Rosemary Woodhouse (John Cassavetes and Mia Farrow), a young couple new to the building, meet a troubled woman in the laundry room. Her name is Terry Gionoffrio. “Apartment 7A” is her story.In the prequel, Terry (played by the reliably good Julia Garner) is a mousy Nebraskan who moved to New York with stars in her eyes. She’s a dancer who’s dying to see her name in lights above a Broadway marquee, just like millions of young people before her. When we meet her, she’s getting her first big break, which unfortunately for her translates to an actual break — of her ankle, that is, onstage. The accident both sidelines her dancing for a while and earns her a reputation around town as “the girl who fell.”A few months later, desperate to be cast in something, she’s back on the circuit. She flubs her audition for the flashy new show from the Broadway producer Alan Marchand (Jim Sturgess). In a last-ditch shooting of her shot, she heads to the Bramford, where Marchand lives. Things don’t go as expected with him. But she happens to meet Roman and Minnie Castevet (Kevin McNally and Dianne Wiest), a weird but generous older couple who just so happen to have an empty spare apartment that she can stay in if she wants. Just till she gets back on her feet.At this point, you can sketch the rough outlines of what will happen next. That’s particularly true if you’ve seen “Rosemary’s Baby,” because the two films are strangely similar, a fact that makes this one feel self-defeating. Most of the audience for “Apartment 7A” will, presumably, be familiar with the older film’s plot. As characters from that film are introduced, we already know how their stories will end, and the screenplay (written by Natalie Erika James, Christian White and Skylar James) holds few additional surprises.That’s the main problem with “Apartment 7A,” though Natalie Erika James directs competently enough. It’s passably spooky, sure. But all interesting prequels have something in common: They shed new light on their predecessors that expands, illuminates or complicates them in some way. “Apartment 7A” feels like a predictable retread.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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      Want to Turn Your House into the Art House? Try Metrograph at Home.

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      The Metrograph theater in New York has expanded to include a streaming platform that spotlights foreign, art house, independent, classic and documentary selections.When the Metrograph theater opened on New York’s Lower East Side in spring of 2016, it wasn’t just a cinema; it was an experience, offering up two screens of new independent films, archival screenings and special events, as well as an on-site bar, restaurant and bookshop. In the years that followed, Metrograph’s reach continued to grow, as did the opportunities for film lovers to patronize the theater beyond its walls, thanks to the establishment of Metrograph Pictures (a distribution company restoring and championing archival releases) and the Metrograph Journal (featuring thoughtful film writing from a variety of contributors).But like so many other theaters, particularly independent ones, Metrograph faced a crisis in the spring of 2020, as Covid forced the doors to close at 7 Ludlow St. But that July, the company launched what was initially known as Metrograph Digital, with an ambitious calendar of live screening events developed and curated by the theater’s programming team, featuring new releases and repertory titles supplemented by guest introductions and interviews. Those events were initially limited to Metrograph members, but that October, the program expanded to include screenings that were available to nonmembers à la carte.In the years that followed, the service — rechristened Metrograph at Home — expanded from the theater’s website into the streaming platform space, transforming a pandemic stopgap into a specialty streamer spotlighting foreign, art house, independent, classic and documentary selections and monthly verticals. Like similar services we’ve spotlighted here, the library may not be gigantic (it currently boasts 158 feature films, 10 short films, and 55 original videos), but the curation is excellent, the interface is easy to use and the audio and video quality are top-notch. Best of all, it’s affordable; access is bundled with a Metrograph Membership, which is only $5 per month or $50 annually (and which also includes discounted tickets, special events and other perks for in-person members).Here are a few recommendations from their current library:‘The French’: One of Metrograph Pictures’s proudest discoveries is this 1982 documentary from the expatriate American photographer and filmmaker William Klein, who was the first director ever granted permission to shoot at the French Open. He captures the 1981 tournament, in which Bjorn Borg defeated Ivan Lendl, in cinéma vérité style; we see plenty of action on the courts, including Borg’s dramatic victory, but Klein seems less interested in the spotlight than the margins, and the most fascinating footage finds sports gods hanging out and talking shop in the locker room, or trading strategy and gossip in the stands. (There are also plenty of opportunities to observe John McEnroe being a brat.) It’s a panoramic view, keenly observed, and serves as a valuable time capsule of the sport in an earthier and less corporatized era.Isabelle Adjani and Michael Hogben in “Possession.”Gaumont‘Possession’: When Andrzej Zulawski’s psychological horror drama was first released in the United States in 1983, it was in a badly butchered cut, excising much of the film’s weightier material to appeal to a straightforward horror audience that dismissed it. It was all but impossible to see in its original form for years, but Metrograph Pictures oversaw a new 4K restoration, which was the first film screened at the theater when it reopened in the fall of 2021. It’s a deeply unsettling picture, which begins with the marriage of its focal couple (played to the hilt by Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill) in total disrepair, and things go steeply downhill from there; suffice it to say that Adjani’s subway miscarriage is one of the most stunning pieces of acting ever committed to film, a scene that remains indescribable in spite of its notoriety and meme-ability.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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      What’s on TV This Week: Lots of Medical and Police Dramas

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      ABC, NBC and Fox are all premiering new shows about doctors, cops or firefighters. The Voice is also returning, with Snoop Dogg joining the judges’ panel.For those who still enjoy a cable subscription, here is a selection of cable and network TV shows, movies and specials that broadcast this week, Sept. 23-29. Details and times are subject to change.Monday9-1-1: LONE STAR 8 p.m. on Fox. As we reminisce about “The West Wing” premiering 25 years ago and daydream about Rob Lowe’s Sam Seaborn (oh, just me?), it’s the perfect time to turn our attention to his current show about a fire station, which is returning for its fifth season.THE VOICE 8 p.m. on NBC. Gwen Stefani and Reba McEntire are back in their red swiveling judges’ chairs, this year joined by Snoop Dogg and Michael Bublé. While in Paris covering the Olympics, Snoop called the judges “a fearless foursome.”Zachary Quinto in “Brilliant Minds.”Rafy/NBCBRILLIANT MINDS 10 p.m. on NBC. If there’s something that we collectively can’t get enough of, it’s doctor shows. This one is inspired by the work of the famed neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, whose research and widely read writings illuminated disorders and cases he had studied or treated. The show stars Zachary Quinto as Dr. Oliver Wolf, a neurologist who works with his team not only to help solve their patients’ difficult cases, but also to deal with their own mental health.TuesdayMURDER IN A SMALL TOWN 8 p.m. on Fox. Based on the Karl Alberg books by L.R. Wright, this show follows Alberg (Rossif Sutherland), as he moves to a small town to become its police chief. And there is, of course, much more drama than expected in this seemingly idyllic community.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