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      Watch Vin Diesel Drive Through a Minefield in ‘F9’

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      The director Justin Lin narrates an explosive sequence from the latest chapter in the “Fast & Furious” saga.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.“‘Peligro, minas,’ what does that mean?” asks Roman (Tyrese Gibson), as he, Dom (Vin Diesel) and others in the crew are being chased through a jungle in the fictional Central American locale Montequinto. He will soon, and loudly, discover the answer in this scene from “F9,” the latest in the “Fast & Furious” franchise.A car chase through a minefield will feel perfectly appropriate for fans of these films. The series continues to up the ante on its repertoire of outrageous stunts. Here, the director Justin Lin uses an area in Southern Thailand to double for Central America, and blows up cars in a field amid gorgeous landscapes.It’s the first major action set piece of “F9” and was staged by having stunt drivers navigate through real explosions. In this video, Lin says these kinds of practical effects are essential to the spirit of the franchise.“It doesn’t matter if it’s the 200th explosion of my career, it always feels viscerally just as impactful.”Read the “F9” review.Read a “Fast and Furious” explainer to get caught up on the franchise.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      Ilana Glazer on the Terror of the Modern Birth System and ‘False Positive’

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      The “Broad City” co-creator starred in and co-wrote a horror film about pregnancy. It’s being released just as she is becoming a mother.Ilana Glazer was trying without much success to think of movies devoted to the experience of conceiving and carrying a child.“There’s not a lot from the pregnant person’s point of view,” Glazer said. She pointed, for example, to “Knocked Up,” the 2007 comedy that starred Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl, but that was told “from the inseminator’s perspective,” she said.There was “Rosemary’s Baby,” the 1968 thriller adapted by Roman Polanski, which fit the narrative bill but was still difficult to endorse. As Glazer succinctly summarized: “Great movie — not a great guy.”And the 1987 comedy “Three Men and a Baby” definitely didn’t make the cut. “How many men do we need to tell about how this baby got here?” Glazer exclaimed.The topic was especially personal for Glazer, a creator and star of the Comedy Central series “Broad City.” She was 36 weeks pregnant during this phone conversation in late May and apologetic for the fact that she was eating while she spoke.“I’m stuffing my face,” she said. “I have no choice. I’ve got to be eating this pita and dip right now.”Glazer with Justin Theroux in a scene from the film.Anna Kooris/HuluThe subject of childbirth is also of particular interest to Glazer because she is the star and co-writer of a new film, “False Positive,” that casts her as a woman whose efforts to have a child draw her into a nightmarish spiral of uncertainty and deceit. The movie, which is directed and co-written by John Lee, made its debut last week at the Tribeca Film Festival and was released by Hulu on June 25.In reviews of the film, The Hollywood Reporter praised “False Positive” as a “juicy genre entry about how women’s reproductive systems are treated like coveted real estate,” and The Wrap called it a “smart, sharp shocker.”Glazer, 34, started working on “False Positive” long before she became pregnant, and while it is one of the most prominent projects she has appeared in since “Broad City” ended in 2019, it is by no means a comedy.It is an unapologetic work of body horror — one that begins with the image of Glazer’s character disoriented and awash in blood as she wanders the streets of New York. The provocations escalate from there.This onscreen version of Glazer is very different from the one audiences have grown accustomed to seeing — not happy-go-lucky, but frantic and fighting for her life — and writing and filming the movie tested her in ways that comedy had not entirely prepared her for.But Glazer said these efforts were necessary to tell a story about a modern childbirth process that she fears has become debased and commodified, particularly in the United States — fears she had held well before she became acquainted with it firsthand.“I’m really obsessed with how in-plain-sight evil the system that we live in is,” she said. “It’s absurd and it’s funny, even though it’s horrible, the way we are stripped of our humanity. Everyone is gaslit into thinking it is normal.”Glazer wanted to tell a story about the modern birth process and how it has become commodified: “Everyone is gaslit into thinking it is normal.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesGlazer and Lee started working together when Lee, a creator of subversive TV comedies like “Wonder Showzen” and “Xavier: Renegade Angel,” was hired to direct episodes of “Broad City” beginning with its first season in 2014.They bonded over a shared worldview and talked about their work outside the show, including an amorphous narrative piece that Lee was writing with the author and TV creator Alissa Nutting (“Made for Love”).Lee, who described that piece as a “tone poem,” said that it drew inspiration from tragic events in his life: his wife and frequent collaborator, Alyson Levy, had had a miscarriage and his father had died. More

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      ‘The Ice Road’ Review: The Mighty Trucks

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      Liam Neeson fights for traction as a big-rig driver in this mildly entertaining thriller.“Now I’m angry!” Mike McCann (Liam Neeson) hisses halfway through “The Ice Road,” signaling the moment we’ve been waiting for. As any Neeson watcher will tell you, you don’t mess with his action characters once their dander is up.Sadly, Neeson’s dander is no match for a hackneyed plot, poorly visualized stunts and characters whose behavior can defy common sense. They have plenty of opportunity in a setup that sends three eighteen-wheelers charging across a thawing Lake Winnipeg, bound for a diamond mine in Northern Manitoba. A methane explosion has trapped the miners, they’re running out of oxygen and the equipment needed to effect a rescue weighs more than 30 tons.Driving identical payloads (to ensure action-movie redundancy), Mike and his fellow big-riggers — played by Laurence Fishburne and the delightful Amber Midthunder, whose character can barely see over the steering wheel — endure storm and avalanche, cracking ice and saboteurs. Cuts to the lolling miners deflate the film’s momentum, as does a sappy subplot involving Mike’s brother (Marcus Thomas), a veteran struggling with P.T.S.D.Written and directed by Jonathan Hensleigh, “The Ice Road” musters more tension than credibility. Despite the valorous efforts of all involved — the movie was filmed without the use of a green screen — the action is at times incomprehensible. In one scene, two trucks capsize and are righted, seemingly in minutes, with barely a glimpse of a winch or a traction pad. And in another, lives are risked in an insane attempt to retrieve a sinking truck that, we have already been informed, is expendable. The poor souls gasping their last in that mine would have been better off waiting for the cast of “Ice Road Truckers.”The Ice RoadRated PG-13 for attack by gun, snowmobile, vegetation and frozen water. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Sun Children’ Review: Treasure Hunt

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      Majid Majidi’s social-realist drama about street children in Iran trades narrative complexity for precious visuals.“Sun Children” opens with a series of striking shots. A montage rifles through images of swanky car hoods as a band of pint-size carjackers try to find their pick in a garage; a boy runs through Tehran, the streets rippling around him like water; kids frolic in a circular pool that, shot from above, sparkles like a blue sun. Majid Majidi’s latest feature doesn’t lack in style or charm, using a child’s perspective — a staple in Iranian cinema — to locate beauty and hope in a cynical world. As is often the case with the director’s work, however, precious visuals come at the cost of narrative complexity.The story follows the 12-year-old Ali (Rouhollah Zamani) and his feisty gang as they infiltrate a school for street kids on the orders of a local gangster. Enticed by the promise of a treasure buried beneath the school, they dig away between classes, dreaming of the new lives they might buy for themselves and their destitute parents, who struggle with poverty and addiction. Majidi alternates the kids’ mini-mafia high jinks with a social-realistic arc about the school, where resource-strapped but sincere teachers gradually (though predictably) break through the insouciant exteriors of our tiny con men.Save for a few turns that subject the characters to surprisingly harsh disillusionment, there’s little in “Sun Children” that doesn’t feel predetermined. Zamani makes an admirable effort with his wide-eyed expressiveness, but the film’s pristine compositions and maudlin score leave no room for the textured ambiguity that, in the work of Iranian directors like Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf, makes children’s lives feel fascinating and mysterious even to adult viewers.Sun ChildrenNot rated. In Farsi, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘False Positive’ Review: Pregnancy Scares

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      This Hulu horror movie is a tepid, scattered look at the dark side of childbirth starring the “Broad City” co-creator Ilana Glazer.In recent years, mainstream horror movies like “Hereditary” and “It Follows” have embraced a seemingly more sophisticated form that unites social and psychological drama with a sleek visual sensibility. But possessing these ingredients does not a winner make. Case in point: “False Positive,” a handsome new Hulu feature that aspires to be a modern version of “Rosemary’s Baby,” but that ultimately lands somewhere between tepid and confused.Directed by John Lee from a screenplay he wrote with Ilana Glazer, his “Broad City” collaborator and the star of the film, “False Positive” explores the dark side of pregnancy in the age of fertility treatments.The concept, at least, is promising. After two years of attempting to conceive, Lucy (Glazer) and Adrian (Justin Theroux), a wealthy Manhattan couple, turn to John Hindle (Pierce Brosnan), a debonair fertility doctor with a menacing glint in his eyes. The oddly simple procedure works and soon Lucy is carrying not one, but three babies.To prevent future complications, however, she is forced to undergo “selective reduction” that will either destroy her male twins or her single girl. Against Hindle’s recommendation and her husband’s desires, she chooses the girl, unfurling what may or may not be a conspiracy to wrest control of Lucy’s pregnancy from her.That women continue to lack autonomy over their own bodies is indeed a horrifying reality. But Lee and Glazer, torn between the impulse to satirize an upper-crust milieu of would-be parents and the desire to depict a complex mental breakdown, unleash a watered-down and occasionally contradictory critique of, well, just about everything — white liberals, the health care system, the patriarchy.And despite its vaguely unsettling clinical ambience, very little about the film as it makes its way to an ultimately flat and predictable final twist, manages to feel tense or thrilling. Or even funny for that matter.False PositiveRated R for disturbing/bloody images, sexual content, graphic nudity and language. Running time: 1 hours 32 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      ‘I Carry You with Me’ Review: When You Can’t Go Home Again

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      The documentary filmmaker Heidi Ewing dramatizes a gay immigrant love story in this empathetic portrait.Iván Garcia, an undocumented immigrant living in New York City, has a sad, strong face and eloquent eyes. Having risen, astonishingly, from dishwasher to chef to successful restaurateur in little over a decade, he still dreams of his home in Puebla City, Mexico, and the son he left behind. Iván has changed countries, but he hasn’t moved on.Turning time and memory into an elliptical portrait of what it means when borders become barriers, “I Carry You With Me,” the first narrative feature from the documentary filmmaker Heidi Ewing, trades distance for empathy. Dramatizing Iván’s story, and his longtime relationship with his partner, Gerardo Zabaleta (both men are friends of the director), Ewing and her co-writer, Alan Page, paint a journey — and a love story — defined by compromise. As Iván and Gerardo (beautifully played for most of the movie by Armando Espitia and Christian Vázquez) work to build new lives, what they have left behind tugs insistently on what they have gained.This gives even the movie’s warmest scenes — like the couple’s first meeting, or Iván’s early bonding with his son — a poignancy that bleeds into Pablo Ramírez’s softly intimate images. Intercutting several timelines, Ewing alights pointedly on the homophobia and familial disapproval that helped propel Iván across the border. Her hybrid, impressionistic style leaves details fuzzy and leans too easily on sentiment; yet it also understands immigrant longing as more complex and elusive than economic imperative.To Iván, “crossing over” was both an irresistible force and a double-edged sword. After closing a door he may never be able to reopen — and exchanging one source of anxiety for another — he knows there is nothing to do but endure.I Carry You with MeRated R for mature themes and a little nudity. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To’ Review: Bound by Blood

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      Two siblings struggle to provide for their freakish brother in this pitch-black family drama.In “My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It To,” director Jonathan Cuartas teams up with his brother, the cinematographer Michael Cuartas, and father, the production designer Rodrigo Cuartas, to make a film about a household of murderers. This may be dark fodder for a family project, but the result is a visually striking meditation on obligation and complicity.The main character Dwight (Patrick Fugit) drifts from scene to scene, halfheartedly abducting victims to feed to his vampiric brother, Thomas (Owen Campbell). Meanwhile their sister Jessie (Ingrid Sophie Schram), the family breadwinner, works tirelessly to keep Thomas out of the sunlight and away from prying eyes. Because we are aligned with Dwight’s perspective — he gets the most screen time — the film undersells Jessie’s efforts, casting her more as her brothers’ warden than their surrogate mother. This feels like a noteworthy choice, given that Jessie is the film’s most prominent female character aside from a one-dimensional prostitute.That’s not to say that Jessie is an angel, just that her humanity deserves as much attention as her rigidity. Jonathan Cuartas said in a statement that “My Heart Can’t Beat” was inspired by his grandmother’s death in hospice, but the film also presents a strong allegory for addiction. Jessie and Dwight both mistake the act of enabling for love, molding their lives around Thomas and denying him agency in the process.In an early scene, Jessie sings the film’s titular line, a lyric from Helene Smith’s “I Am Controlled by Your Love.” Those words could apply to any combination of the three siblings, as they all suffocate in mutual martyrdom. After all, Thomas is not the superpowered, predatory vampire we’re used to in horror flicks. No matter how much blood Dwight and Jessie fetch, he is slowly wasting away.My Heart Can’t Beat Unless You Tell It ToNot rated. In English and Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘God Exists, Her Name is Petrunya’ Review: Her Cross to Bear

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      An unemployed historian living with her parents in a Macedonia town crashes an all-male Orthodox Christian ceremony and enacts a one-woman feminist resistance.In another world, the rebellious title character of “God Exists, Her Name Is Petrunya” might have been a contented free spirit in a John Waters movie. But Petrunya lives in the conservative town of Stip, Macedonia, and she seems dulled into a standstill by patriarchal rules and motherly interference. That starts to change when she crashes an all-male Orthodox ceremony — every year, a priest lobs a cross into a river and men scramble to grab it — and takes the prize.Many townspeople throw a Stip fit over Petrunya’s feat, and at the behest of outraged priests, she’s pursued and detained by the police. Petrunya (Zorica Nusheva, with an eye-flashing frustration just short of antic) rises to the occasion by standing up to the intimidation and condescension. It wasn’t always thus: she starts off the movie stuck in bed, a 30-something unemployed historian living with her mother.The director, Teona Strugar Mitevska, draws on actual events for this good-humored story of occupation and resistance. The independent streak was clearly present in Petrunya somewhere: we’ve seen her fending off a sleazy garment-factory boss and walking off with a mannequin, which she totes everywhere in what feels like a naturally punk move. Mitevska and the cinematographer, Virginie Saint Martin, lend Petrunya’s external world some further off-kilter flair and eye-catching patterns.But the standoff with authorities dawdles and languishes, and a side plot with a TV journalist (Labina Mitevska) feels one-note. Still, we should all look forward to seeing what Petrunya does next.God Exists, Her Name is PetrunyaNot rated. In Macedonian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters and on virtual cinemas. More