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      5 New Horror Movies to Stream for Halloween on Hulu, Max and More

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      Out this week, a period possession movie starring Sarah Paulson, a chef-driven supernatural thriller starring Ariana DeBose and more.‘Hold Your Breath’Stream it on Hulu.A mother braves the elements, and evil, in this busy but hackneyed feature debut from the directors Karrie Crouse and Will Joines.Sarah Paulson plays Margaret, a loving mother trying to shield her two daughters, Rose (Amiah Miller) and Ollie (Alona Jane Robbins), from sinister entities that she suspects lurk outside their isolated Dust Bowl home. Among them is a mysterious drifter (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) with questionable healing powers.Crouse’s script hurls horror conventions against the wall — possession, survival, eco-disaster, home invasion, folk horror, body horror, religious mania — in hopes that something sticks. But nothing does, so what’s left is a movie about a grieving mother protecting her children from dust and wind for 94 minutes — a scary scenario for 1930s Oklahoma, the film’s setting. But not here.Instead, there are predictable jump scares, creaking floorboards, silhouetted figures in the distance and every 10 minutes another fire for Margaret to put out. It’s “The Mist” but silt, “The Babadook” minus a Babadook, “The Night of the Hunter” with no edge.‘V/H/S/Beyond’Stream it on Shudder.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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      How to Watch Horror Movies Without Being Too Scared

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      The October ritual of watching horror movies in the lead-up to Halloween can be exhilarating. Unless, of course, you can’t quite stomach the gory and gruesome, or even the spooky and spine-tingling.This used to be me, until I made a concerted effort to push past my qualms. It took a while, but now I consider myself something of a horror enthusiast, relishing the thrill, tension and challenges of a genre that can playfully toy with dark themes, like “Shaun of the Dead,” or pull no punches, like “Hereditary.”If you’re someone who wants to indulge in the season but dreads jump scares and buckets of blood, here are five tips that could help even the biggest scaredy cats among us start to open up to the world of horror.Embrace the SpoilerThe first and best line of defense is to read the plot in advance. If you’re feeling brave, go for just a synopsis, but there’s no reason to be a hero. I sometimes read an entire plot in great detail before watching, especially with films I know will tap into my weak spot: movies about demonic possession. Unlike with other genres, knowing what will happen in horror doesn’t necessarily detract from the experience of watching. Your heart will most likely still pound. You will probably still jump. And the visuals and sounds will probably still shock. Knowing what comes next may simply help keep the anxiety and uncertainty in check.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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      ‘Joker: Folie à Deux’ Review: Make ’Em Laugh (and Yawn)

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      Todd Phillips’s “Joker” sequel stars Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga who sing and dance like crazy kids, but the movie is seriously un-fun.“Joker: Folie à Deux” is such a dour, unpleasant slog that it is hard to know why it was made or for whom. That’s admittedly nonsensical — it’s for us! — though no more ridiculous than anything in this sequel to “Joker” (2019). Directed by Todd Phillips and starring Joaquin Phoenix as the sad, mad clown of the title, that first movie was a success, both critically and commercially. The intensity of Phoenix’s performance, with its smoldering violence and unpredictability, drew you in, and the gestures at American violence and nihilism kept you wondering. The movie seemed to have something serious to say, which was finally its big joke.The original “Joker” won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival, and grossed more than a billion worldwide. It was also nominated for 11 Oscars (including best picture), which is only notable because that’s nearly three times the total number of nods that Martin Scorsese received for “Taxi Driver” and “The King of Comedy,” two of Phillips’s obvious touchstones. So, all things considered, and with oodles of money in the offing, a sequel was inevitable even if Phoenix’s sour frown, the movie’s barely-there story, its unrelenting grimness and its commitment to forced eccentricity suggest that no one involved was really stoked to make it.The big non-news about “Folie à Deux” is that it’s a half-baked, halfhearted musical complete with one star who can sing, Lady Gaga as Lee Quinzel a.k.a. Harley Quinn, and another (Phoenix) who can’t or won’t. Gaga and Phoenix perform assorted song-and-sometimes-dance numbers featuring classics from the Great American Songbook that are mixed in with some traditional tunes and recent songs. Anytime that Gaga sings, the movie holds you, and it’s amusing to see Phoenix getting his Gene Kelly on with some tap-tap-tapping. The numbers are distributed throughout the movie, which otherwise largely toggles between scenes of Joker — and his sad-sack civilian alter-ego, Arthur Fleck — locked in a mental institution and of him in a Gotham court, standing trial on multiple counts of murder.Written by Phillips and Scott Silver, the sequel tracks Fleck/Joker in and out of the institution where the guards (played by Brendan Gleeson, among others) are predictably barbaric and routinely mete out the usual cruel punishment. At some point, Fleck meets Lee/Harley, who’s in an adjacent ward. It’s love or insanity or something at first sight, unconvincingly, and soon they’re swapping kisses, trading weird smiles, performing duets and planning mayhem like crazy kids do in storybook romances. Despite the two leads’ obvious attractions, they never make sense as a couple in large measure because the movie itself never coheres.There are appealing moments here and there, including one scene built around courtroom testimony by Gary Puddles (Leigh Gill), a colleague from Fleck’s days as a clown-for hire. In the first movie, Puddles witnesses Fleck (or Joker) stab another colleague to death (that’s entertainment!), and now he has been called to recount the gory mess. Gill makes both his character’s tremulous fear and anguish palpable; it’s a rare moment of feeling in the movie, one that Phillips almost instantly undermines by inserting a shot showing that Puddles, who’s of short stature, is seated on a telephone book. Whether Phillips was daring — or baiting — moviegoers to laugh at this image, the cutaway only undermines the actor’s performance.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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      ‘Rust’ Western Will Premiere in Europe 3 Years After Fatal Shooting

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      After the Alec Baldwin movie turned into the scene of a tragedy with the death of its cinematographer, the film will debut next month at a festival that celebrates cinematography.The movie “Rust,” which has become synonymous with the fatal shooting of its cinematographer on set in 2021, will be screened publicly for the first time in November at a film festival in Poland devoted to cinematography.The festival, Camerimage, said on its website that the premiere would honor Halyna Hutchins, the 42-year-old cinematographer who was killed on Oct. 21, 2021, when the movie’s star, Alec Baldwin, was positioning an old-fashioned revolver for the camera and it discharged a live bullet.Ms. Hutchins’s husband, Matthew Hutchins, and their son, who was 9 years old when she died, will benefit financially from the movie’s release under the terms of a settlement agreement in a wrongful-death lawsuit. Filming resumed in 2023 with no real weapons, and the writer and director of “Rust,” Joel Souza, who was injured in the shooting, returned to see the movie through to the end.“Rust” is a western about an orphaned 13-year-old boy who, after accidentally shooting a rancher, escapes a death sentence with his outlaw grandfather, played by Mr. Baldwin. The finished movie, which was initially filmed outside Santa Fe, N.M., and finished in Montana, does not include the scene that Ms. Hutchins was working on when she was killed.The decision to finish the movie was somewhat controversial in the film industry, as the production restarted during the prosecutions of Mr. Baldwin and the movie’s original armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed.Ms. Gutierrez-Reed, who loaded the gun with a live round before it went off, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to 18 months in prison. A judge dismissed the manslaughter case against Mr. Baldwin during his trial in July, citing the prosecution’s withholding of evidence.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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      ‘Daaaaaalí!’ Review: Keeping It Surreal

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      The French absurdist director Quentin Dupieux did not make a biopic of Salvador Dalí — he adopted the Surrealist painter’s approach to deliver a particularly loopy tale.Quentin Dupieux’s new film opens with a shot recreating the Salvador Dalí painting “Necrophilic Fountain Flowing From a Grand Piano.” This is as straightforward as the nonsensical “Daaaaaalí!” ever gets, which is the least we can expect from Dupieux, a master of absurdist humor, engaging with the Surrealist artist.Judith (Anaïs Demoustier) is a young, fairly inexperienced journalist sent out to interview the Spanish iconoclast, who is in his 80s. Or is he? Time is as elastic as the melting clocks Dalí once painted: Here he is portrayed by several actors of various ages including Édouard Baer, Jonathan Cohen and Pio Marmaï. They take on the role seemingly randomly (often one starts a scene and another finishes it) in the loopy — in every sense of the word — movie.Set to a jaunty acoustic score by Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter, “Daaaaaalí!” feels like a dispatch from Dalí’s mind (and that of his old accomplice Luis Buñuel). The film follows a dream logic with scant interest in anything linear. The chronology is askew, frames are played backward; an extended joke becomes the equivalent of a set of infinitely nesting Russian dolls.Dupieux captures Dalí’s self-promoting genius but the constant trickery eventually becomes a little tiresome. The filmmaker cranks out movies with rare velocity: His previous opus, “Yannick,” came out in April in the United States, and a new one was released in May in his native France. At least we won’t have to wait long to see how he will make up for this frustrating stylistic exercise.Daaaaaalí!Not rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 17 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘White Bird’ Review: After ‘Wonder,’ a Bully Moves On

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      A boy starts a new school and gets a history lesson from his grandmother, played by Helen Mirren.The world of children’s literature is more complicated than many of us might be aware of. The 2012 novel “Wonder,” by R.J. Palacio, for instance, has spawned several sequels or spinoffs to date. “Wonder” itself, about Auggie, a young boy living with Treacher Collins syndrome, and the unfortunate concomitant bullying by his peers, was made into a pretty decent picture in 2017. “White Bird,” a possibly unexpected origin story, is adapted from a 2019 graphic novel of the same name about the family of one of Auggie’s antagonists in “Wonder.”Yes, you read that correctly. “White Bird” opens with Julian, a newcomer, in the cafeteria of an elite school, torn between the urge to be kind to an outcast student and the desire to sit with the snooty “cool” kids. Julian is here because he was expelled from his last school, for having bullied Auggie. On returning from his first day, he finds his parents are not home. His grandmother (Helen Mirren) from Paris, however, is visiting, and she sits him down for a story.Of her girlhood in France during the Nazi occupation, how she was hidden by a kindly boy named Julien, and their eventual fates. The director, Marc Forster, sets the period action in Movie France, a France whose language is English — English that is spoken by some actors with a French accent, and by others in a British accent. Period detail is conveyed by way of smoothed-out production design and cinematography.One could argue that Forster and company calibrate their anodyne effects to make a Holocaust narrative that’s palatable for younger viewers. But what mostly resonates is a particularly lachrymose brand of show-business hedging.White BirdRated PG-13 for some strong violence and language. Running time: 2 hours. In theaters. More

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      ‘It’s What’s Inside’ Review: I Gotta Be You

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      A limp body-swapping comedy doesn’t really know what makes its subgenre so funny.There’s only one really good reason to make a body-swap movie. Yes, OK, thematically they’re meant to teach us to be more empathetic and think about living in someone else’s shoes, blah, blah, blah. But a body-swap movie has one true purpose, and that’s to make us laugh at someone acting like someone else. “Freaky Friday”: a mom and her daughter switch places, and it’s funny. “13 Going on 30”: a teen girl ends up in the body of a mean, gorgeous magazine editor, and it’s funny. “Big”: a boy is in a man’s body, and it makes us laugh. “Jumanji”: four teens end up in the bodies of a beefcake, his sidekick, a dork and a hot lady, and it’s hilarious.“It’s What’s Inside” is trying to be hysterical, too, but with less amusing results. The premise of Greg Jardin’s comedy is relatively promising: Seven 20-something friends from college converge on a beautiful estate that belongs to one of them, who is getting married the next day. They’re going to have one last night of partying before the wedding. Two are a couple who’ve been fighting; one of the guys is carrying a torch for one of the girls; another of the girls, the blonde, has become an influencer; the others also have their own lives now.Then an eighth friend shows up, a guy nobody’s heard from in a long time — not since a terrible and unfortunate event years earlier at a college party. He’s bearing a weird box containing a strange device that, it turns out, can cause them to trade bodies. He proposes a Mafia-style party game, using the box, and things go off the rails really fast.“It’s What’s Inside” feels a little reminiscent of the much better “Bodies Bodies Bodies” (2022), a horror-comedy about a bunch of intoxicated, very online youths in a rambling house playing a crazy party game. But where that one zigged and zagged, “It’s What’s Inside” plods straightforwardly. Even the twists feel obvious and not all that interesting, more the fulfillment of plot points seeded early on rather than startling turns of fortune.The lumpiness is baffling, to be honest. This concept has promise. Some of the fault is in the casting; while half of the actors give performances that are fun and quirky, the others feel as though they’re reading lines, and not particularly well. A little of it is also in a self-consciously showy filmmaking style (weird lighting, fast cutting, freeze-framing) that doesn’t add anything to the film. At times, it distracts, or maybe subtracts.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 Outrun’ Review: From Rock Bottom to Recovery

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      Saoirse Ronan gives another stunning performance in a story about an alcoholic in search of healing.Saoirse Ronan has made it apparent that she is one of the greatest actresses of her generation. Nominated for four Oscars before she was out of her mid-20s, the Irish actress is the sort of performer whose presence in a movie is sufficient reason to see it. She chooses her projects carefully, often movies about complex women, and throws her whole self into them, with unforgettable results.But how she does what she does is harder to pin down. Ronan does not rely on showy exaggeration or wild swings for her craft. Her most acclaimed roles — in “Atonement,” “Brooklyn,” “Lady Bird” and “Little Women” — all feel, at least from the outside, as if they tap into some part of her real self. All four are intelligent and perceptive and plucky and just a little innocent, in need of some hard-knock wisdom. Yet they’re all indelible, and all very different from one another: girls and women for whom life is a good, hard mystery to be lived and then understood.I think Ronan’s great ability lies in giving us the sense that her characters’ minds are always working, something that can only really be communicated through the eyes and nearly imperceptible facial expressions, flashes of anger and happiness and passion and pain. (And a lot of impishness; cheeky Ronan is always a delight.)One might reasonably have expected “The Outrun,” in which Ronan plays a recovering addict desperately hanging onto sobriety, to be a more conventionally brash or hyperbolic role than usual, the kind designed for awards attention. Woman out of control, woman on the road to healing — you know the type. But Ronan is no ordinary actress, and she makes “The Outrun,” which occasionally veers near overdone territory, into a thing of beauty and hard-won joy.The director Nora Fingscheidt wrote the screenplay for “The Outrun” with Amy Liptrot, based on Liptrot’s 2016 memoir. In the film, Liptrot has been transformed into Rona, a 29-year-old woman who, when we first meet her, has a black eye, having been nearly defeated by life. She’s from a tiny village in the Orkney Islands, which lie off the northern coast of Scotland. Rona went to London to earn a graduate degree in biology, where she met friends and a man (Paapa Essiedu) she loved. But a latent propensity for addiction turned into a full-blown alcoholic spiral, and she wrecked her life completely.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