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      ‘Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point’ Review: Home for the Holidays

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      Tyler Taormina’s third theatrical feature is a lightly nostalgic ensemble piece set on Long Island.Not much happens plot-wise in “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point,” the third theatrical feature from Tyler Taormina, but it has, as they say, a lot going on. In this ensemble comedy, centered on the Christmas gathering of a family so large that theaters ought to hand out a genealogy chart, the movie is at once hyper-specific about place — western Suffolk County on Long Island — and intriguingly loose about time.Scored to a soundtrack of early-1960s hits, the film is set in the aughts, judging from the dialogue, the cellphone technology and the TV (with its built-in DVD and VHS players) on which some of the kids play video games. The details (a player piano, cherry affogatos for dessert) are quirky enough to feel remembered, and Paris Peterson’s production design makes the home look lived in. The scant overt drama involves disagreement among siblings about how to handle their mother’s decline and whether to sell the house.Those siblings include Kathleen (Maria Dizzia), whose daughter (Matilda Fleming) is giving her attitude and whose husband (Ben Shenkman) awkwardly tries to fit in, and Ray (Tony Savino), who is secretly writing a novel. A cousin, Bruce (Chris Lazzaro), is a firefighter who is cheered on by the others when he rides by on a festively decorated truck. Somehow the film finds roles for not one but two adult children of auteurs, Francesca Scorsese and Sawyer Spielberg — though not as relatives, alas.As in his earlier features “Ham on Rye” and “Happer’s Comet,” Taormina gestures toward the surreal, especially once he steps outside the main location. Two police officers (Michael Cera and Gregg Turkington) spend much of the movie in stone-faced silence; their New York City uniforms suggest that they’re operating out of their jurisdiction. “Miller’s Point” is a Christmas movie more invested in atmosphere, and the qualities of wintry light, than in holiday cheer — and that somehow makes it all the more warm.Christmas Eve in Miller’s PointRated PG-13 for teenage mischief. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Il Grido’: Love and Loss in Italy’s Po River Valley

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      Long overshadowed by Michelangelo Antonioni’s later work, this feature, newly restored, is being revived at Film Forum, complete with once-censored scenes.Michelangelo Antonioni confounded the 1960 Cannes Film Festival with “L’Avventura,” but that high-modernist missing-person mystery did not emerge from a void. Three years before, the Italian master took the top prize at the Locarno festival with a scarcely less radical film, the existential love-story “Il Grido” (The Cry).Long overshadowed by Antonioni’s later work, “Il Grido” gets a rare revival run at Film Forum in a new restoration, complete with several once-censored scenes.Bracketed by the sounds of a hurdy-gurdy tarantella, “Il Grido” tracks the circular journey of the skilled factory worker Aldo (the rugged American actor Steve Cochran) who, rejected by his longtime common-law wife, Irma (Alida Valli), wanders heartbroken through northern Italy’s Po Valley.Aldo, initially accompanied by his 6-year-old daughter Rosina (Mirna Girardi), takes a few odd jobs and hooks up with several women. A not unattractive if glowering hunk, he first drops in on the fiancée he had jilted (the blacklisted American actress Betsy Blair) only to depart the next morning. Stuck in a nowheresville gas station, he briefly takes up with the proprietress, Virginia (Dorian Gray, her voice dubbed by Antonioni’s muse, Monica Vitti), a lusty widow with an alcoholic father.To please Virginia, Aldo sends Rosina home on a bus, but then takes off himself, eventually stumbling upon a vivacious prostitute, Andreina (the British actress Jacqueline Jones, under the name Lyn Shaw) who works an impoverished stretch of the river. Their brief liaison is less than satisfactory for both. Walking with her by the Po, Aldo starts explaining how he met Irma and lapses into confused silence. “What kind of story is that?” Andreina demands.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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      Cillian Murphy, from ‘Oppenheimer’ to ‘Small Things Like These’

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      Cillian Murphy of “Oppenheimer” fame plays an Irishman interrogating a system of abuse and forced labor, despite everyone’s warnings to look the other way.“Small Things Like These” plays just a little like a gangster film, except the web of power at its center is spun by nuns. Set in 1985 and based on Claire Keegan’s 2021 novel, it is a story about how people create and maintain control and the many shades of complicity that result. In this case, the setting is southeast Ireland, and the nuns’ control has woven its way into every aspect of life in a small town.Bill Furlong (Cillian Murphy) sells and delivers coal and fuel in that town, an occupation that barely supports his wife, Eileen (Eileen Walsh), and a house full of daughters. But they’re doing OK. He can put food on the table, and they have a happy home life. One day, however, something changes inside Bill: He sees a young woman being nearly dragged into a building near the local convent, and it troubles him. He suspects that she is pregnant and unmarried, like his own mother was, and is being brought to the nuns by her horrified family. She is, quite literally, kicking and screaming. Bill can’t stop thinking about her.Much of “Small Things Like These,” directed by Tim Mielants from a screenplay by Enda Walsh, happens in flashbacks. After Bill sees the girl at the convent, he drives home and notices a small, hungry-looking boy by the side of the road, and these two sightings seem to trigger some memory in him that he can’t shake. Even his wife notices his change in mood. It’s Christmastime, but the customary comfort and joy seems beyond him; instead, he keeps dissociating, slipping into a reverie about his own childhood. It wasn’t all sad: His mother was able to keep him with her, thanks to a kind employer, which meant that Bill was, in a sense, lucky. Yet there were mysteries he never quite understood.Murphy, fresh off his “Oppenheimer” Oscar win, is both producer and star of this film. His performance is unsurprisingly searing and nuanced, especially since Bill is not much of a talker. A lot of his performance is in extreme close-up, his panic showing up like lava pooling below a thin surface, ready to burst through at any moment. He’s buried his grief and fear, but not nearly as far as he thinks, and the girl outside the convent has brought it all to a head. He’s a little bit like a synecdoche for his whole country.Slipping inside the convent one day to deliver an invoice, Bill starts to suspect that the nuns, led by Sister Mary (Emily Watson), are mistreating the young women waiting out their pregnancies there. His dissociation turns into panic attacks, especially when he realizes there’s very little he can do to change the situation.From the distance of history, it’s quickly obvious that this convent was one of the so-called Magdalen Laundries, institutions run by orders of Roman Catholic nuns as homes and profit-making laundry facilities. Text at the end of the film dedicates it to the more than 56,000 young women who were sent to the institutions between 1922 and 1998 for purposes of “penance and rehabilitation.”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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      ‘Heretic’ Review: Hugh Grant Puts His Charm to Fiendish Use

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      In wily, vamping style, the actor plays a friendly neighbor to two missionaries before turning his home into a horror-filled slaughterhouse.One of the great benefits of watching too many movies are all the life lessons they impart. For instance, if your host mentions that the walls of his house happened to be lined with metal, you should immediately feign a headache and split before he closes the front door. If the windows in his house look too small even for a child to squeeze through, you should also exit. And if there’s also a framed image of hell on a wall, you should definitely conk him on his head and run. That said, if the host is played by Hugh Grant, you may want to stick around. From the moment that the two young women in “Heretic” introduce themselves to Mr. Reed — played by a wily, exuberantly vamping Grant — it’s obvious that the smart thing would be for them to say, oops and sorry, wrong address. They don’t, of course, because they’re delectably juicy bait, and the horror genre demands at least a pound or two of ravaged flesh, just like life itself. So, the women enter the house smiling, and they keep on smiling, as if they were asking for the inevitable ultraviolence, the kind of splatter and spurt that can transform an outwardly ordinary home into dangerous ground and, in time, a bloody slaughterhouse.As soon as they appear onscreen, the women, a pair of missionaries from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, start warming up the movie — and your sympathies — with pleasantly innocuous talk. They’re sweet and eager, even if Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) has a wary mien and darting gaze that don’t jibe with her more incautious companion, Sister Paxton (Chloe East). Having been called to serve, the two have been wheeling their bikes around Anytown America and head over shortly to Mr. Reed’s. He’s requested some information about their church so before long they’re exchanging pleasantries in his home, a gloomy space with the yellowish, crepuscular lighting of a 1990s David Fincher film.The queasy lighting — like Mr. Reed’s oddly small windows and metal-lined walls — would give most sensible women pause, but the writer-directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods haven’t designed Barnes and Paxton to be prudent. The women are prim, proper, outwardly trusting; they’re on a mission and true believers. They’re also women, so, you know, they’re built for niceness. For propriety’s sake, they don’t want to be alone with Mr. Reed — they politely ask him if his unseen, unheard wife can join them — but because they’re committed to teaching the gospel, they stay. Their faith makes them innocent or so they seem, which makes them catnip to Mr. Reed, whose wide smile and wild eyes quickly grow wider and wilder.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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      ‘The Best Christmas Pageant Ever’ Review: How It Got So Great

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      The film, based on a 1972 children’s book by Barbara Robinson, tells the story of an unlikely group of kids stunning a small town for the holidays.From its title onward, “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever” is not shy about stating its ecclesiastical ambitions. The movie — which is not, it may be prudent to point out, a documentary — is practically hellbent on being heartwarming and inspirational in equal measure. It posits the holiday season as one in which we’ll be called to acceptance, called to change, and, yes, explicitly called to faith.Directed by Dallas Jenkins, the movie was adapted from a 1972 children’s book by Barbara Robinson. Jenkins, and the production company for this picture, Kingdom Story, are prime movers in contemporary Christian entertainment.The movie tells the story of Grace (Judy Greer), a busy mother who finds herself tricked into directing the Christmas pageant for the local church. Adding to her troubles are the six misbehaving miscreants of a local wrong-side-of-the-tracks clan, the Herdman kids. These wild youngsters, for reasons involving but not limited to the church’s ample snack supply, volunteer to perform in the Christmas pageant.Beth, Grace’s daughter and the narrator of the story, watches as the oldest Herdman, Imogene (Beatrice Schneider), starts finding purpose in the pageant role of Mary. The movie manages to provide moments of witty dialogue while moving forward with its spiritual duties.“We were paralyzed with shock,” one church parent observes of encountering the Herdmans. “But you spoke,” Grace counters. “It came in waves,” the parent replies.The acting is fine all around, with Schneider making a particularly strong — and yes, moving — showing as Imogene.The Best Christmas Pageant EverRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Bird’ Review: In Search of Safety

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      Barry Keoghan and Franz Rogowski star in a film about a preteen girl who longs for a stability she’s never experienced.Good parents are a rarity in Andrea Arnold’s movies. Instead, they tend to be neglectful and preoccupied, often for solid reasons: Arnold tells stories of working-class families, mostly British, mostly struggling to get by, mostly the offspring of parents who are, themselves, distracted and uninterested in their children’s lives. An early short film of Arnold’s, “Wasp,” has a mother locking her four children in the car while she tries to woo an old boyfriend in a bar. One of her best movies, “Fish Tank,” features a mother who punishes her daughter by telling her she should have gone through with her planned abortion instead of giving birth. The situation is pretty grim.By those standards, Bug (Barry Keoghan, covered in insect tattoos and grins) is a pretty good dad, if only because he talks to his kids. He has two of them, Hunter (Jason Buda) and Bailey (Nykiya Adams), and they live with him in a chaotic, ramshackle squat in northern Kent. Hunter is 14, born when Bug himself was 14; Bailey is 12, and getting fed up with her life. Her own mother (Jasmine Jobson) lives in another house with Bailey’s three stepsiblings.“Bird,” which Arnold wrote and directed, is really Bailey’s story, but Bug is a key part of it. At the start of the film, he brings home a toad in a plastic shopping bag. Bailey wrinkles her nose as he explains that the toad secretes a hallucinogenic, and all they have to do is get it to secrete the drug and then sell it and then, presto, they’ll be rich! He needs the money to live, but also because, he tells her, he’s getting married this weekend.Bailey is having none of Bug’s nonsense, but she doesn’t really know what to replace it with. She has no reference point for a different life and neither, you get the sense, does Bug. “Bird” is the story of children raising children. The complete absence of anything resembling structure is normal to them, but the feeling that the grown-ups are not really acting like grown-ups — that abuses and harms in their community are going unchecked — has gotten to the teenagers. Hunter has joined a gang of young teenage boys who call themselves “vigilantes” and will beat up a man, for instance, if he is abusing his girl.Bailey is on the verge of puberty, and waffling between anger and depression. One day, she meets a strange man who introduces himself as Bird (Franz Rogowski). He seems different from other adults, nonthreatening and quiet and gentle. Bailey only knows how to be abrasive, but she softens toward him, and they become friends. Where did Bird come from? Why is he here? She doesn’t know, and doesn’t care all that much: To her, he represents safety, though she is not sure why.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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      Ridley Scott on ‘Gladiator II,” Denzel Washington and Joaquin Phoenix

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      It’s been 24 years since the director Ridley Scott scored one of the biggest hits of his career with “Gladiator,” a swords-and-sandals epic starring Russell Crowe that won the Oscar for best picture. Now 86, Scott still works at a prodigious pace, sometimes even directing two films in the same year.His latest is “Gladiator II,” which picks up two decades after Crowe’s character, Maximus, died heroically in the arena. In the years since, Lucius (Paul Mescal) — Maximus’s secret son — has been shuttled to North Africa where he, too, has become a capable fighter. But war waged by the Roman general Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal) will draw Lucius back to his birthplace, where the clever arms dealer Macrinus (Denzel Washington) will try to manipulate the young man to further his own ambitions.In October, I met Scott at his Los Angeles office, which was decorated with posters of some of his memorable films like “Alien,” “Blade Runner” and “The Martian.” True to form, while gearing up for the Nov. 22 release of “Gladiator II,” he was already deep into preproduction for his next movie (a Bee Gees biopic set to shoot in February) and had even begun storyboarding the one after that (a sci-fi adaptation).“I feel alive when I’m doing something at this level,” he said. “I don’t call it stress, I call it adrenaline. And a bit of adrenaline is good for you.”Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.Paul Mescal in “Gladiator II.” Scott said spotting talent is crucial to directing, and added: “To me, a casting director is as important as a good camera.”Paramount PicturesA sequel to “Gladiator” had been in the works for over two decades, making it by far the longest film you’ve ever developed. What made you want to see it through?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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      ‘Elevation’ Review: A High Place

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      Humans flee monsters who refuse to surpass 8,000 feet in altitude in this “Quiet Place” copycat.If certain movies are to be trusted, the apocalypse will occur when monsters swarm the Earth and hunt to kill people who are powerless to survive — unless they abide by one high-concept rule. Such is the story in “A Quiet Place,” a boffo hit franchise, and now “Elevation,” an action-packed copycat.The thriller begins by briskly conveying its premise: Three years earlier, bulletproof creatures emerged from hibernation to wipe out the majority of mankind. The predators — which locate victims by their carbon dioxide emissions, like killer air purifiers — refuse to surpass 8,000 feet in altitude, allowing for select communities of mountaintop survivors.We meet Will (Anthony Mackie), a gruff single father in an isolated alpine community, as he is forced to trek downslope in search of medical supplies for his son. Tagging along on the journey are Nina (Morena Baccarin) and Katie (Maddie Hasson), local tough ladies who swear, punch and effortlessly wield military-grade firearms.Directed by George Nolfi (“The Adjustment Bureau”), “Elevation” is distinctive not for its innovations in form or narrative — it’s got nothing new to offer — but for the anxieties and attitudes it telegraphs.“How do we take our place back?” Katie asks one evening, uncomfortably employing supremacist language. Nina’s reply: “If you study something long enough, you can figure out how to kill it.”Structured differently, “Elevation” might have congealed around themes of humanity and ingenuity in the face of danger. As is, its stance is defined only by aggression.ElevationRated R for language. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More