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The theater chain altogether raised more than $1.2 billion in capital this quarter, thanks in part to Reddit traders, but cautioned that the stock could still sink.It was a conflicted sales pitch: We’re selling new shares of stock, but don’t buy them unless you can afford to lose all your money. Also, free popcorn. More
The Cannes Film Festival announced the movies that will vie for the Palme d’Or in July.PARIS — Sean Penn is a contender for the top prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, to be held from July 6 to 17, the organizers announced Thursday. In “Flag Day,” the actor-director plays a con man. More
Jonathan Rhys Meyers plays the unlikely ruler of a jungle kingdom in this corny tale.To play the British adventurer Sir James Brooke in “Edge of the World,” Jonathan Rhys Meyers sets his jaw and fixes his gaze on the middle distance. The performance — stiff, remote, magnificently arrogant — is odd; but, given the howlers of dialogue Rhys Meyers is forced to utter, it also kind of works.“Here I am a stranger, even to myself,” Brooke intones in voice-over shortly after landing on a Borneo beach in 1839. (The hushed Herzogian narration is a regular irritant.) Having fled a military career and messy personal life in Victorian England, Brooke is disenchanted with colonialism, presenting himself as an observer for the Royal Geographical Society. He will spend the next few years fighting pirates, soothing rival princes and quelling a tribal rebellion. Simply observing, apparently, was not the thrill he expected.Yet Brooke’s determination to wean the locals from slavery and headhunting is given an assist when a grateful Sultan appoints him the region’s ruler.“We don’t belong here!” his friend Arthur (Dominic Monaghan) warns. (A fact that, to be fair, has rarely bothered the British.) But Brooke — whose likely homosexuality is teased, then roundly rejected — is too busy wooing a bride and enjoying his elevated status to entertain Arthur’s concerns.Earnestly directed by Michael Haussman from Rob Allyn’s awed script, “Edge of the World” plugs its narrative gaps with corn and cliché. (There’s a possibility both men overdosed on “Apocalypse Now.”) In the most believable scene, a steamship captain (Ralph Ineson) scoffs at Brooke’s pleas for pirate-fighting help while tucking into a full English. The captain wants the country’s riches for the Crown, and, unlike Brooke, he knows it’s only a matter of time.Edge of the WorldNot rated. In English, Malay, Dayak, Cantonese and Arabic, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. Available to rent or buy on Google Play, FandangoNow and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More
The new film from the D’Innocenzo brothers is stocked with unhappy families and unfortunate haircuts.“Bad Tales” concerns the wretched, sometimes comical, occasionally tender interactions of a group of families in an exurban development on the outskirts of Rome. A narrator introduces the story with a convoluted account of finding a young girl’s diary and continuing to write in it in his own adult male voice.The ensuing chronicle of lust, envy, dysfunction and tragedy similarly mingles the perspectives of grown-ups and children, to puzzling, sometimes creepy effect. In the haze and languor of an Italian summer, three households come into fuzzy focus, each one dominated by a father with an aggressive haircut. These dads all have middle-school-age sons and daughters whose awkward sexual awakenings are viewed with semi-nostalgic prurience.The mood of “Bad Tales,” the second feature written and directed by the brothers Damiano and Fabio D’Innocenzo, might remind some viewers of the lesser work of Todd Solondz. The characters are middle-class suburban grotesques, their strivings and self-delusions treated with a mixture of compassion and contempt. At the end, they are punished with a sadism that registers either the depth of their awfulness or the cruelty of the universe.After catching head lice at a neighbor’s pool, a girl has her hair closely cropped, and later appears in an unflattering wig. Her mother brings her to a play date with an excruciatingly shy boy who is supposed to infect her with measles. A slightly older girl is pregnant. At least two boys are building bombs in their bedrooms. However wayward these kids might be, their parents are worse — moody, vain, selfish, competitive, sexually confused …The icky situations are acted with deadpan sincerity by the younger members of the cast and with misdirected intensity by their elders. The story is both overwrought and underdeveloped, with potentially important plot details insufficiently explained or left out altogether. All in all, the movie lives up to its title, though perhaps not in the way the filmmakers intended.Bad TalesNot rated. In Italian, with subtitles. Watch through virtual cinemas. More
This spinoff of “Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron” is a bland, bubbly romp through the Wild West, with a heavy dose of girl power.Nearly two decades after “Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron” and its eponymous yellow mustang came on the scene, “Spirit Untamed” — a chirpy, digitally reupholstered spinoff — has arrived. While both are from DreamWorks Animation, the reboot has little in common with the 2002 original, which clung to hand-drawn visuals at a time when the pseudo-realistic computer animation of “Shrek,” also from DreamWorks, and Pixar movies like “Monsters, Inc.” began taking over. For better or worse, this new “Spirit” takes a modern approach.Instead of a heavy-handed, power-ballad-filled melodrama about a bronco and his saintly Native American comrade, “Spirit Untamed” is innocuously geared toward young (horse) girls everywhere. It uses the racially diverse characters from the Netflix series “Spirit Riding Free,” which debuted in 2017 and reintroduced the franchise, to deliver a coming-of-age tale with a predictably heavy dose of girl power.At the film’s center is the thrill-seeking Lucky Prescott (Isabela Merced), who is essentially banished from her stuffy East Coast abode and sent to spend the summer with her estranged father (Jake Gyllenhaal) in the frontier town of Miradero. Instantly drawn to a stallion she names Spirit, our American Girl-esque protagonist strives to earn the horse’s trust, simultaneously getting in touch with her Mexican roots and defying her dad, who remains scarred from her mother’s horse-riding-related death.Thankfully, Lucky (who also goes by her real, Spanish name, Fortuna) is not a loner. When brutish wranglers horse-nap members of Spirit’s herd, our heroine is joined by her intrepid gal pals on a perilous obstacle course-like rescue mission through the outback.The kiddies, I’m sure, will be satisfied. The film (directed by Elaine Bogan) is a bubbly, fast-paced romp through the Wild West, which is not to say it’s an improvement on the maudlin original. With its saucer-eyed, bobblehead-like characters, it’s a version barely distinguishable from the majority of animated children’s movies these days — more like Spirit domesticated.Spirit UntamedRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. In theaters. More
This biopic examines the creator of the Moomins, Tove Jansson, but it skimps on artistic insight in favor of unsatisfying romances.The biopic “Tove” examines the early life of Tove Jansson, the queer artist who created the children’s fantasy series, the Moomins. The Moomins were a visually and narratively original concept, a gentle family of hippopotamus-shaped trolls who lived with their friends in a valley, where all pursued adventure and mischief. The series is by turns satirical, melancholic and fantastic, and the Moomins made Jansson a beloved literary figure. How disappointing then that “Tove” should be stuffy in style and rather incurious about how Jansson either developed or implemented her unique artistic sensibility.The biopic begins in Helsinki during World War, II when Jansson (Alma Poysti) was a young painter, struggling to win grant money and the approval of her sculptor father. Though her paintings receive little acknowledgment, her illustrations are noticed first by the leftist philosopher Atos Wirtanen (Shanti Roney), and then by the bourgeois theater director Vivica Bandler (Krista Kosonen), both of whom become involved in long-term affairs with Jansson. Most of the movie is a tug-of-war between the passion that Jansson feels for the unfaithful Vivica, and the comfort she receives from the reliable Atos.The romantic turmoil unfortunately leaves little screentime for illustration, painting, writing or the other artistic projects that Jansson pursued in her lifetime.The director, Zaida Bergroth, offers glimpses of Jansson at work, but shots of her sketchbooks pass in flashes, offering only a cursory acknowledgment that the drawing was done amid the flim-flam of half-hearted romances. The soft-focus cinematography is beautiful but drippy, and this general tendency toward mushy melodramatics presents an unflattering contrast to the sharp-lined vivacity that Jansson brought to the page.ToveNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More
A young man tries to learn why his family left Spain for Australia in this picturesque drama with Edward James Olmos, Paz Vega and Carmen Maura.There’s a lot of beautiful scenery in “Chasing Wonders,” which stands to reason, as the movie was shot in winemaking regions of Europe and Australia. Directed by Paul Meins from a script by Judy Morris, the movie tells the story of a family of vintners who emigrated from Spain to Australia in the early part of this century, and of its youngest member, Savino, who as a teenager returns to Spain in search of answers about his past.“Tells the story” is putting it generously, as it happens. In spite of its tidy running time, “Chasing Wonders” is diffuse and often limp. At a birthday party for a preteen Savino, the boy receives the gift of a telescope, and on the enigmatic instructions of his grandfather (played by Edward James Olmos, who also reads a platitude-packed narration) embarks with a friend to up to higher rocky terrain, the better to survey the night sky. This sets off his protective, stifling father (Antonio de la Torre), and a fractious family struggle ensues. This drawn-out fight is one in which you just know that the long-untouched bottle of wine from the old vineyard in Spain is going to be opened somehow.Other members of the family include Paz Vega and Carmen Maura, both stalwarts of Spanish cinema, and they’re a pleasure to spend time with. (It’s also interesting that Savino as both boy and teenager is played by the same actor, Michael Crisafulli; the scenes in Spain were shot years after the Australian narrative was captured.)The daytime landscapes — sprawling vineyards, blue skies, impressive rock formations — provide unalloyed visual contentment. Some of the night skies appear digitally over-enhanced, although if they’re not, more power to the cinematographer, Denson Baker. The movie’s human element ultimately serves up not much more than triteness.Chasing WondersNot rated. Running time: 1 hour, 26 minutes. In English and in Spanish with subtitles. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, FandangoNow and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More
Paula Beer and Franz Rogowski, who made an impression in 2019’s “Transit,” are reunited by the director Christian Petzold for this adaptation of a European myth.At an outdoor table of a small cafe situated on the ground floor of an imposing brick building, two lovers are ending their affair. The woman of the pair, not happy with this development, bickers with the man about a voice mail message. When that thread is exhausted, she tells him matter-of-factly, “If you leave me, I’ll have to kill you.”Well, that escalated quickly. The woman, whose name is Undine — played with equal parts passion and calculation by Paula Beer — retains our sympathy even as she makes that unreasonable pronouncement. Because, as it happens, it’s not unreasonable. Undine is not mentally ill or morally reckless. What she’s talking about here is fate. With seemingly minimal means, the writer-director Christian Petzold makes the viewer understand this, mere minutes into the story, adapted from a European myth about a water sprite who can fall in love and become human, but who must suffer greatly if her lover is unfaithful.This modern-day Undine is, on land, a historian who instructs wealthy tourists on Berlin’s aesthetic and political schisms over the centuries. These sessions lead to sometimes tense exchanges: an evocation of “an architecture in keeping with national tradition,” for example, prompts the question, “Hadn’t the Nazis discredited nationalism?”But Petzold doesn’t hammer the potential for political parable or allegory here — which is a little surprising, given the lessons on modern German history he offers up in pictures such as “Phoenix.” Instead, this fractured not-quite-fairy-tale parcels out provocative instances of magical realism on arguably larger themes.After being ditched by her sniveling partner Johannes (Jacob Matschenz), Undine almost immediately retreats into the cafe, where she fixates on a small statue of a helmeted sea diver in a fish tank. The aquarium vibrates and soon explodes, knocking her to the floor with another man, Christoph (Franz Rogowski). They’re both drenched, and she’s a bit cut up by shards from the tank.This peculiar meet-cute is handled straightforwardly (the movie’s clean, economical production design, by Merlin Ortner, grounds the picture in this respect), as are the story’s other fantastic elements — including an ethereal catfish and a diving outing during which Undine mysteriously sheds her wet suit, flippers and oxygen tank.Undine’s new love — the kind, compassionate and knowing Christoph (he and Beer were also paired in Petzold’s prior film, “Transit”) — is himself a diver. Being near him makes Undine feel more at home, so to speak. But Christoph’s work, welding underwater turbines, is risky. Soon Undine is presented with a dilemma that forces her to confront a fate she had hoped her new happiness would help her avoid.Petzold’s cinematic storytelling style is elegant but unfussy, perfectly complemented by Hans Fromm’s cinematography and by the sparely used music, which includes the Icelandic pianist Vikingur Olafsson’s dreamy interpretations of Bach and the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive.” “Undine” is ultimately more enigmatic than most of Petzold’s work. It is also, like its title character, eerily beautiful. While it could well serve as a high-end date movie, it’s also something more.UndineNot rated. In German and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More
