Subterms
The N.B.A. hosts its 75th draft and Cesar Millan returns to TV with a new show focused on rescue dogs and their owners.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, July 26-Aug. 1. Details and times are subject to change. More
M. Night Shyamalan’s new movie has a trailer that eerily resonates with our strange times; and that’s enough for me.Let me say up front that I do not expect to see M. Night Shyamalan’s latest movie, “Old,” which arrived in theaters last week, for no other reason than that I am traveling and haven’t set foot in a theater in almost two years. But in the past few weeks, I have watched its trailer over and over, enthralled by its combination of existential horror and unintended humor. The trailer introduces us to some people who become trapped on a remote beach, where they begin to age at an insanely accelerated pace. Naturally, they try to figure out what’s happening, floating theories and freaking out. This being a Shyamalan film, the trailer promises they will spend a lot of time looking confused and concerned — the same facial feat Mark Wahlberg sustained across the running time of “The Happening” — and yelling at one another, demanding explanations.This is a familiar, Manichaean, Shyamalan-ish universe: A diverse group of bewildered souls, alone in a menacing void, earnestly playing out whatever endgame logic the scenario dictates. (It’s as though the director were compelled to continually make big-budget versions of “Waiting for Godot” — you think he can’t go on, but he’ll go on.) So we see a family on vacation, headed to the beach. The cast is soon filled out by others: a couple, a 6-year-old girl, a woman in a bikini making smoochie faces at her phone, two more men. Soon enough, the kids find things in the sand: rusted items from their hotel, cracked sunglasses, late-model iPhones. A young bleach-blonde corpse bobs toward a boy in the water. (She did not die of old age, but will decompose in hyperlapse.) Then the real aging begins. Parents confront their kids’ sudden adolescence. The 6-year-old girl grows up, becomes pregnant and gives birth on the beach. Some greater force is afoot, be it fate, God, time, Facebook or nature. Whatever it is, it clearly doesn’t care how many travel rewards points or memory-making family vacations you had in real life.Near the start of the trailer, Vicky Krieps’s character dreamily tells her impatient children: “Let’s all start slowing down.” Then everything starts speeding up. At some point she turns to her husband and exclaims, “You have wrinkles!” (The horror!) But of course “Old” will not be an allegory about the importance of sunscreen. What we’re being shown here looks far more like a meditation on mortality wrapped in a cautionary tale about our accelerated lives — about the scariness of time flying and kids growing up too fast, of bodies going to hell and the inescapability of death, and about the ravages we’ve visited upon the Earth, which will remain blanketed in all our fancy garbage long after it has turned us to dust.Part of what’s so captivatingly strange about the trailer is the way it takes a movie that compresses life into a couple of hours and then compresses that into a galloping two-and-a-half-minute highlight reel. Its breakneck, parodic pace calls to mind Tom Stoppard’s “15-Minute Hamlet,” in which all the most famous scenes from Shakespeare’s play are crammed (twice!) into a quarter of an hour. (In a film adaptation I once saw, Ophelia drowned herself by plunging her head into a bucket.) The title alone reduces the existential horror of the premise to a midlife freakout.The graphic novel from which this movie is adapted — “Sandcastle,” written by Pierre Oscar Lévy and illustrated by Frederik Peeters — was inspired by Levy’s memories of childhood holidays. “He used to travel a lot to a beach exactly like this one, in the north of Spain,” Peeters told the comics site CBR. “Later, he went back with his own children, and one day he had this idea.” The beach could serve as a microcosm of Western society, “with some of its strong basic figures.” This was not a thriller, Peeters said — “it’s a fable.”It takes a movie that compresses life into a couple of hours and then compresses that into two and a half minutes.Shyamalan may be best known for his last-minute twists, but this was an option the “Sandcastle” authors ultimately decided against. According to Peeters, Levy had written a resolution to the story, a final twist — “but we finally decided it was useless, and would have destroyed the frightening dimension of the book.” The frightening dimension, of course, is that there is no escaping time, or death — and neither is there any simple revelatory twist in life that will explain what you’re meant to be doing with your time here.Anyone converting this source material into a movie has a choice to make: Either you embrace the terrifying meaninglessness of our short lives, or you try to offer consolation with a resolution to the story. The trailer tips its hand that Shyamalan has chosen the latter: The last words we hear are Gabriel Garcia Bernal’s character saying, “We’re here for a reason!” Maybe we are and maybe we are not, but my time on Earth is limited, and any story that attempts to wrap up the problem of life will feel like a waste of it.As I watched this trailer over and over, I was also, coincidentally, in Spain, where I lived for many years while growing up. I am writing from my brother’s new apartment in Madrid, which happens to be next door to the childhood home of a childhood friend. Walking my dog past her building, then meeting with her later, I find myself dwelling on the trailer, on the nature of time passing, on how compressed and accelerated it can feel. It’s strange to sit across from people you met in elementary school but haven’t seen in years. It makes you feel like the couples in the trailer, watching their spouses transform into their future selves. Time seems to pass at an accelerated rate when you return to a place periodically, over a long period, with large gaps in between.During the past year and a half of paralysis — this remote, isolated, slowed-down time, during which some of the most privileged among us were able to isolate in safety and comfort — it could seem as if the future were on hold. (It was not.) Time felt endless and slow until, for me, it accelerated significantly. I lost my mother suddenly. After 18 months of not traveling anywhere, I came back to the city where I lost my father, where my nephews were born, where my parents’ still-living friends have become elderly. It is funny to see how much has changed, and which things never change. I met a friend at a gallery opening and mentioned on arrival that I’d forgotten to iron my dress. He seemed happy to hear this: “You’re still you!” he said.Perhaps, for some of us, last year felt like a pause. But there was no pause. There never is. You look away for a moment, and your kid is tall. Your dog is old. Friends move away. You begin to wonder where this is all going. What’s the twist? When will it arrive? And then maybe you realize where you are, which may be a very old city — old to you and old in history, though not as old as some — and here you are, repeatedly watching a trailer for a movie, feeling a strange feeling.Carina Chocano is the author of the essay collection “You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks and Other Mixed Messages” and a contributing writer for the magazine. More
His “Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears” was named best foreign-language film in 1980, beating Truffaut and Kurosawa. U.S. critics demurred.Vladimir Menshov, a prolific Soviet actor and director whose film “Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears” won the Academy Award in 1980 for best foreign-language film, surprising the many American critics who had panned it, died on July 5 in a hospital in Moscow. He was 81.Mosfilm, the Russian film studio and production company, said the cause was complications of Covid-19.“Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears,” a soapy, melodramatic crowd-pleaser, attracted some 90 million moviegoers in the Soviet Union even after it had been broadcast on television, not long after it was released theatrically in 1980. Its theme song, “Alexandra,” written by Sergey Nikitin and Tatyana Nikitina, became one of the country’s most beloved pieces of movie music.Even so, when “Moscow,” only the second film Mr. Menshov had directed, won the Oscar, many moviegoers and critics were taken aback, given the competition that year. It was chosen over François Truffaut’s “The Last Metro” and Akira Kurosawa’s “The Shadow Warrior” as well as the Spanish director Jaime de Armiñán’s “The Nest” and the Hungarian director Istvan Szabo’s “Confidence.”“There was more condescending good will than aesthetic discrimination behind the Oscar voted to ‘Moscow,’” Gary Arnold of The Washington Post wrote when he reviewed the film, which was released in the United States after its Oscar victory.The film follows three girls quartered at a Moscow hotel for young women in the late 1950s as they hunt for male companionship, and then revisits them 20 years later. It starred Vera Alentova, the director’s wife and the mother of their daughter, Yuliya Menshova, a television personality. They both survive him, along with two grandchildren.From left, Aleksey Batalov, Vera Alentova and Natalya Vavilova in “Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears.”SputnikMr. Arnold noted that Mr. Menshov’s movie “revives a genre Hollywood has failed to sustain, reliable as it would seem: the chronicle of provincial girls, usually a trio, in pursuit of careers and/or mates in the big city” — a genre that ranged chronologically at the time from “Stage Door” (1938) to “Valley of the Dolls” (1967).Vincent Canby of The New York Times conceded that the film was “decently acted” but wrote that at two and a half hours, it “seems endless.”“There are suggestions of social satire from time to time,” Mr. Canby wrote, “but they are so mild they could surprise and interest only an extremely prudish, unreconstructed Stalinist.”While he considered it understandable that “Moscow” was one of the Soviet Union’s most successful films, Mr. Canby concluded, “One can also believe that portion of Mr. Menshov’s biography (contained in the program) that reports he failed his first three years at the Cinema Institute in Moscow and wasn’t much more successful as an acting student with the Moscow Art Theater.”He added tartly, “I assume we are told these things to underscore the lack of meaning in these early failures, which, however, appear to be summed up in his Oscar winner.”Vladimir Valentinovich Menshov was born on Sept. 17, 1939, to a Russian family in Baku (now in Azerbaijan). His father, Valentin, was an officer with the secret police. His mother, Antonina Aleksandrovna (Dubovskaya) Menshov, was a homemaker.As a teenager, Vladimir held blue-collar jobs as a machinist, a miner and a sailor before being admitted to the Moscow Art Theater School. After graduating from the school in 1965 and from the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography in 1970, he worked for the Mosfilm, Lenfilm and Odessa Film studios.He had more than 100 credits as an actor, including in the hit “Night Watch” (2004), and was also a screenwriter. He made his debut as a director in 1976 with the film “Practical Joke.” More
Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera.Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera. More
AT&T may not want HBO Max anymore, but the streaming platform is gaining traction with customers.HBO and HBO Max, home to genre-bending franchises such as “Game of Thrones” and “The Sopranos” and Hollywood blockbusters like “Wonder Woman 1984,” have added 10.7 million customers in a little over a year, with 2.8 million coming in the three months ending in June, AT&T reported on Thursday. Those figures include both HBO Max and the HBO TV channel.The company has 67.5 million subscribers to HBO and HBO Max, with 47 million in the United States. AT&T, which has struck a deal to sell its media businesses, expects HBO and HBO Max will have between 70 million and 73 million customers by the end of the year, exceeding earlier predictions.Netflix, the most popular streaming service, has 209 million subscribers, with about 66 million in the United States. It gained customers in the second quarter, but growth has considerably slowed and it lost 430,000 subscribers across the United States and Canada, a sign that cracks are beginning to show in the streamer’s long-held dominance.Speaking on the broader streaming industry, Jason Kilar, the chief executive of AT&T’s media arm, WarnerMedia, said in an interview: “The only thing I can promise you is change. There is no doubt that change is coming, and that’s appropriate because we live in a dynamic time.”WarnerMedia, which includes CNN, the Warner Bros. film and television studios and the Turner cable networks, is about to become the property of Discovery Inc., as media companies continue to gobble each other up in an effort to take on Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. The deal, which is expected to close around the middle of next year, will create the second-largest media business in the United States, behind the Walt Disney Company and ahead of Netflix and NBCUniversal.Mr. Kilar, who learned of the acquisition only weeks before it would be announced, could be out of a job after the deal closes.Both companies are prohibited from working together until the merger is approved by government regulators, including striking any employment agreements. Still, such deals often involve tacit arrangements about leadership. Mr. Kilar said that he had met socially with David Zaslav, the head of Discovery, but that he hadn’t broached the topic of his employment.“David and I have known each other for a long time,” he said, “and I think it’s fair to say there’s a lot of shared respect between the both of us.”Mr. Kilar, who took charge of the company only 15 months ago, said he did not have plans to step away. “There will be a point where I pick my head up next year where I think about this topic,” he continued. “But I certainly don’t intend to do it until 2022.”Jason Kilar, the chief executive of WarnerMedia, in Dallas last December.Allison V. Smith for The New York TimesMr. Kilar, who was the founding chief executive of Hulu, is considered within Hollywood to be a bit of an iconoclast. In 2011, he broadsided the industry with a now-famous manifesto on the future of entertainment that, to many, came across as a blistering critique of Hulu’s corporate ownership.The post panned traditional TV for running far too many commercials. Mr. Kilar also blasted cable, predicting that viewers would eventually drop expensive packages.After Mr. Kilar joined WarnerMedia, he quickly shuffled the executive ranks and cut costs in an effort to streamline the business.Then he angered Hollywood (again) by breaking with tradition and releasing the entire 2021 lineup of Warner Bros. films on HBO Max on the same day they were scheduled to appear in theaters. The move would have cost some of Hollywood’s biggest players back-end profits — the commission that top-flight producers and stars earn based on box office receipts — but the company quickly worked out deals to make sure they would be paid.Unlike Netflix, Disney+ and HBO Max and other new entrants into streaming have legacy agreements with cable distributors and Hollywood studios that prevent a more full-throated approach to making films and TV shows immediately available online.For Mr. Kilar, the move wasn’t about upsetting Hollywood, but rather was part of a larger strategy to goose HBO Max.It seems to have worked. The release of made-for-the-big-screen spectacles like “Godzilla vs. Kong” on HBO Max helped to increase the service’s customer rolls.Mr. Kilar intends to keep up that strategy through 2022. Warner Bros. will release 10 films exclusively for the streaming platform. And big-budget films like “The Batman,” a reimagining of the comic book character starring Robert Pattinson, will have relatively short windows in theaters of 45 days before they show up on HBO Max, according to Mr. Kilar.“That’s very, very different than the way the world operated in 2019,” he said. “Ultimately, I do think that as long as you’re thoughtful about it, change could be very, very good for not only the customers but also the people we get to work with.” More
A half-hour at the beach costs vacationers a year in this disquieting new horror puzzler, written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan.In the opening pages of “Dino,” a 1992 biography of Dean Martin by Nick Tosches, the author cites a haunting Italian phrase: “La vecchiaia è carogna.” “Old age is carrion.”When some vacationing families are deposited on a secluded beach recommended to them by a smarmy resort manager in “Old,” the new movie written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, we see a trio of vultures atop a tree take to the sky.Not long after that, unusual things begin happening. The young children of Guy and Prisca (Gael García Bernal and Vicky Krieps, both superb, as is the entire cast) feel their bathing suits tightening. An epileptic psychologist (Nikki Amuka-Bird) unexpectedly finds herself without symptoms. The elderly mother of the trophy wife of a tetchy physician just up and dies. A moderately famous rap star (Aaron Pierre), who had come to the beach some hours before, wanders around befuddled, with an incurable nosebleed. The corpse of his female companion is discovered in the water, prompting the physician (Rufus Sewell) to accuse the rapper of murder.In time — not too much time, because, as it happens, it is of the essence in this situation — the beachgoers figure out that they are aging at an accelerated rate. One half-hour equals about a year.And the beach that is aging them won’t let them leave.Some vacation. Shyamalan adapted his disquieting tale from the graphic novel “Sandcastle,” by the French writer Pierre Oscar Lévy and the Swiss illustrator Frederik Peeters. As is frequently the case with French-produced bandes dessinées, “Sandcastle” is a stark existentialist parable. (It is perhaps no coincidence that the book Krieps’s character attempts to read on the beach is a dual biography of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.) Shyamalan expands on the book in the way one would expect an American filmmaker to — among other things, eventually offering a sort-of explanation that the source material doesn’t.Being PG-13, “Old” does not dwell, as the graphic novel does, on how rapid aging affects the children of this ensemble in the hormonal department once they hit their teens, although one pregnancy does occur during the victims’ shared life-in-a-day. Instead, the movie buckles down on the considerable anxiety and dread felt, and amplified, by the frequently bickering adults. Because time is accelerated here, wounds heal incredibly quickly. The director exploits this for a couple of weirdly harrowing knife fights and an impromptu surgery scene. The horrific potential of bones breaking, then instantly resetting themselves incorrectly, does not go unnoticed.Shyamalan’s fluid filmmaking style, outstanding features of which are an almost ever-mobile camera and a bag of focus tricks, serves him especially well here. Sometimes the camera will pan back and forth in a ticktock pendulum fashion (get it?) and return to its starting point to reveal a terrifying change. The way he switches out his actors as their characters age is seamless. (The filmmaker’s work in the verbal department is not so felicitous. He names Pierre’s rap star “Mid-Sized Sedan”; early on one character complains to another, “You’re always thinking about the future, and it makes me feel not seen.”)If old age is carrion, it’s also, as a “Citizen Kane” character put it, the one disease you don’t look forward to curing, which provides the impetus for the movie’s finale. While Shyamalan is often cited for his tricky endings, it’s arguable that he doesn’t quite stick the landing with this one. He adds to the story a dollop of that much-venerated Hollywood commodity, hope, and also doles out some anti-science propaganda that couldn’t be more unwelcome at this particular time in the real world.OldRated PG-13 for horrific imagery, language and aging. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. More
With this drama, the writer-director Agnieszka Holland tackles another complicated historical figure in the Czech herbal healer, Jan Mikolasek.As the world’s biggest fan of Peter Watkins’s twisted and superb “Edvard Munch,” I harbor a soft spot for filmmakers who muss up the perfectly coifed looks and reassuring habits of biographical films. The great writer-director Agnieszka Holland — a connoisseur of those deemed “difficult” by society — does not disappoint with “Charlatan,” her fictionalized story of the persecuted Czech herbalist Jan Mikolasek.Mikolasek rose to prominence and prosperity in the 1930s and 1940s by treating patients with natural remedies, scrutinizing their urine for signs of illness. “Charlatan” jumps between Mikolasek’s rise and fall: his apprenticeship as a youth (Josef Trojan) who has an uncanny “I see sick people” gift; and his professional practice as an adult (Ivan Trojan), as lines of patients out the door were eventually replaced by suspicious state security agents.Mikolasek’s fall out of favor after World War II is not hard to figure since this stubborn individualist stuck out for several reasons. Holland tracks his failures to finesse the postwar turnovers in power — though he did find a way with the Nazis — and his unorthodox approach and ample wealth don’t sit well with postwar apparatchiks. But in these conservative times (which persist) he was also singled out for his loving relationship with his handsome assistant, Frantisek Palko (Juraj Loj).Their warm but unequal romance fuels the second half of the movie, after we’ve seen plenty of scenes of inspired healing and urine swirling. Their clandestine love brings some bucolic light and energy to a movie that often mucks about in Mikolasek’s dim, gray clinic. But Holland also keeps spiking the film with doses of the healer’s coldness, which can be shockingly cruel.When Frantisek says his wife is pregnant, Mikolasek offers him an abortive poison to give her. There is also — fair warning — a scene of Mikolasek disposing of a sack of kittens by thrashing them against a rock. The moment is frankly baffling in its brutality, even if it’s interpreted as demonstrating another kind of barbarity in past eras, or as early evidence of Mikolasek’s dark side.Both Trojans’ performance — the actors are father and son — are steadfast in resisting a sense of heroism, villainy, or, really, charisma, and Josef Trojan suggested to me a credible vision of old-fashioned formality as it might actually have felt to be around. A great-man outsider who falls hard, Mikolasek makes for an intriguing counterpoint to the female protagonist of “Spoor,” the fierce, funny, and mysterious film co-directed by Holland and Kasia Adamik.Often as thorny as its subject but also oddly fascinated by his near-magical abilities, “Charlatan” is a temporary cure for the common biopic.CharlatanNot rated. Running time: 1 hour and 58 minutes. In theaters. More
Megan Fox, Emile Hirsch and Bruce Willis track down a killer in a film that feels familiar.“Midnight in the Switchgrass” is the first feature directed by Randall Emmett, whose trademark as a producer — according to a sprawling career overview in New York magazine earlier this year — has been a rash of low-budget movies starring misleadingly top-billed actors like Bruce Willis. “Switchgrass” is superior to those Emmett productions (“Reprisal,” “Survive the Night”), but that bar is on the ground, or even beneath it — buried under the switchgrass, if you will.A second-billed Willis appears here in a barely roused state as an F.B.I. agent, who along with his partner, Rebecca (Megan Fox), is trying to catch a man who has been hunting underage girls in the Florida panhandle. Flouting protocol, Rebecca teams up with a Florida state officer, Byron (Emile Hirsch), who is tracking a serial killer who preys on prostitutes. The victims’ profession means his superiors don’t care about the case. Byron deduces that he and Rebecca are after the same guy.The murderer’s identity isn’t a mystery to us: Ripping off “The Silence of the Lambs” (down to a climactic fake out in which Emmett misleads viewers about which character is on which doorstep), the movie crosscuts between the investigation and the killer (Lukas Haas), a trucker and family man leading a double life, to follow him as he kidnaps a 16-year-old (Caitlin Carmichael). The atmosphere is thoroughly sleazy without being distinctive, and everything about the movie — the emotionless line readings, the half-baked back stories — exudes a terse functionality. Clearly, no one even bothered to proofread the onscreen text. But “Midnight in the Switchgrass” achieves its apparent sole goal: being a movie that exists.Midnight in the SwitchgrassRated R. Violence and disturbing themes. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on FandangoNow, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More
