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      The Best Films of 2024, So Far

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      Our critics pick nine films that they think are worth your time on this long holiday weekend.Looking for a good movie to pass the time this Memorial Day weekend? The New York Times’s chief film critic, Manohla Dargis, and movie critic, Alissa Wilkinson, have you covered. Here are their top picks for the year so far. All are in theaters or available on demand.‘Hit Man’In theaters; June 7 on Netflix.The story: Glen Powell is a philosophy professor who moonlights for the police in New Orleans when he finds himself undercover posing as a hit man in this Richard Linklater movie. An encounter with Madison (Adria Arjona), a housewife looking to hire him, raises the stakes, comedically and romantically.Alissa Wilkinson’s take: “If I see a movie more delightful than “Hit Man” this year, I’ll be surprised. It’s the kind of romp people are talking about when they say that “they don’t make them like they used to”: It’s romantic, sexy, hilarious, satisfying and a genuine star-clinching turn for Glen Powell, who’s been having a moment for about two years now.” Read the review.‘Civil War’In theaters.Kirsten Dunst plays a war photographer in Alex Garland’s “Civil War.” A24, via Associated PressWe 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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      ‘Solo’ Review: Listen to Your Heart

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      Sophie Dupuis’s sensitive French Canadian drama takes a turn when a young, starry-eyed drag queen (Théodore Pellerin) opens up to questionable figures.The glittering “Solo” centers on Simon (Théodore Pellerin), a charming 20-something making a name for himself as a drag queen in Montreal. Simon’s life is glamorous and filled with loving support from the other performers who work at his nightclub; and from his family, particularly his older sister, Maude (Alice Moreault), his confidante and a costume designer who makes dresses for Simon’s drag alter ego, the blonde bombshell Glory Gore.The third collaboration between Pellerin and the writer-director Sophie Dupuis (“Family First”), the film takes a turn from its blissful beginnings when Simon, starry-eyed and tragically naïve, opens his heart to questionable figures. His mother, Claire (Anne-Marie Cadieux), a famous opera singer who abandoned the family years ago to pursue her career, re-enters Simon’s life. Then there’s the gaslighter, Olivier (Félix Maritaud), a new queen at the club whom Simon starts dating.Bitter disappointments and cruel manipulations seem to conspire to dim Simon’s light and idealism — his mother proves distant and superficial, cutting their meet ups laughably short. Then Olivier isolates Simon from his family, takes credit for his rise in the drag scene and smothers his confidence.Simon’s drag performances, captured with sumptuous visuals, are peppered throughout these intrigues, allowing us to register his anxieties through the lens of his act. Before an audience, the tensions between him and Olivier, with whom he performs as a duo, are magnified; so is the agitation caused by his mother, his artistic role model, when she finally attends one of his shows.“Solo” is a subtle snapshot into a gay man’s profound yet familiar upheavals. Simon’s drag spectacles may be intentionally fierce and operatic, but there’s something refreshing about this drama’s intimate scale and lack of interest in sweeping tragedies, especially in the context of queer cinema.SoloNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. More

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      The One Thing That Can Save Cinema From C.G.I. Oblivion

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      The motion-capture acting in “The Planet of the Apes” movies tries to preserve the magic of the physical world amid all the effects in a big budget franchise.He’s a goofy little ape in a puffer vest, and he’s giving us a thumbs-up. This was just a small moment of levity in an otherwise grim and operatic film, the 2017 epic “War for the Planet of the Apes.” But it stuck with me. In the midst of a dire war for the fate of humanity, we watch this misfit creature amble into the frame, dwarfed by a magisterial orangutan on one side and the stately ape revolutionary Caesar on the other, both preparing for battle. He turns to Caesar for approval, waits for an awkward beat and flashes his thumbs-up. I cannot overstate how charming it is.Up to that point, the new “Planet of the Apes” movies had mostly been Caesar’s show, with two films focused on his journey from laboratory animal to building a peaceful simian civilization in California’s Muir Woods. The films follow his evolution patiently — in part, perhaps, because they are following the steps of an actor’s process. Caesar is a digitally rendered ape, but he is played, via performance-capture technology, by Andy Serkis, the man whose bravura turn as Gollum in Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” films elevated him to become more or less the Laurence Olivier of motion-capture acting. Some 10 years later, Caesar was Serkis’s opportunity to build a mo-cap character from scratch in front of an audience, proving just how well an actor could translate legible humanity to a CGI animal. Part of what’s so remarkable about the 2010s “Apes” films was how much they conditioned viewers to thrill at close-ups of this chimpanzee’s eyes, the performance of impossible consciousness behind them.So it was a big deal when Steve Zahn, playing that goofy little ape, snatched his own small moment. The first thing that stood out was its physicality — a wholly digital creature exhibiting unmissably human comic timing. Second was the playfulness: All this technology was being marshaled not for some action sequence or alien vista but for one funny monkey. What was most incredible, though, was its sheer ordinariness as a piece of film acting. Zahn strolled into a series dominated by Serkis’s performance and made one little attention-grabbing gesture — the sort of thing that usually happens organically, between humans on a film set. Yet here it was, rendered in pixels, gesture by gesture: The simple miracle of a stolen scene.The entire recent “Apes” universe, from 2011 onward — which now includes this month’s new “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” — was designed to let this kind of high-tech realism thrive. The films shoot partly on location, rather than using totalizing digital environments. They’re chockablock with action, but their most compelling work takes place in intimate conversation, ape to ape. Between the digital disposability of Marvel’s multiverse and the paint-by-numbers CGI smoothing of seemingly everything on Netflix, the “Apes” films remind us that we once imagined a more humane future for these tools — the re-creation of reality, rather than its replacement. To save cinema from oblivion, maybe we should take another look at the mo-cap actor.You’ll already know motion capture, or performance capture: It’s that thing where actors typically wear ridiculous bodysuits and get covered with little dots, so their movements can be recorded and then applied to computer-generated 3-D figures. When this technology emerged in the movies around the start of this century, it was by turns revelatory and embarrassing. For every Davy Jones — Bill Nighy’s menacing octopus pirate from “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” — there was some unholy nightmare like Tom Hanks in “Polar Express” or Jar Jar Binks, paragliding through the uncanny valley.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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      ‘Sight’ Review: An Eye Doctor’s (Inner) Journey From China

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      Based on the real life of the pioneering ophthalmologist Ming Wang, this movie follows the character’s struggle to see inside himself.Ming Wang, the real-life physician whose biography is the basis for this fictional feature, is a Nashville-based ophthalmologist whose degree in laser physics has presumably been a boon in his work restoring sight to visually impaired patients, many of whom are children.As is the custom with inspirational medical movies, however, the new film “Sight,” directed by Andrew Hyatt, leans hard into uplift — it provides only the narrative-necessary minimum of the science. Wang’s achievement in developing innovative technology is central to one of the stories here, yes. But the dominating narrative is one of personal growth.Weaving several decades’ worth of flashbacks into its action, otherwise set in 2006, the movie shows Wang’s traumatic childhood in China’s Hangzhou province, where he and his friend Lili are terrorized by the Cultural Revolution’s Red Guard. He wants to be a doctor like his father, who tells him his best “chance” in life is to “become a musician.” You don’t hear that too often.Brilliant at school, Wang is able to make his way to M.I.T., but even in the elite educational environments he passes through, he’s discouraged from pursuing his dreams of becoming a physician. These trials leave Wang with a defensive ego and a tendency to shut out others emotionally. He’s forced to deal with failure and to learn to trust.All of this is laid out in competent commonplace fashion, with the principal actors Terry Chen, Greg Kinnear and the always welcome Fionnula Flanagan displaying the expected professionalism.Wang has written a memoir in which he discusses his Christian faith in some detail. The film proper does not. But the faith-friendly distributor, Angel Films, has appended to the feature a “Pay It Forward” coda (similar to that on their 2023 release “Sound of Freedom”) in which the real Wang testifies to his spirituality.SightRated PG-13 for thematic material, mild violence. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Hit Man’ Review: It’s a Hit, Man

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      Glen Powell stars in one of the year’s funniest, sexiest, most enjoyable movies — and somehow it’s surprisingly deep, too.If I see a movie more delightful than “Hit Man” this year, I’ll be surprised. It’s the kind of romp people are talking about when they say that “they don’t make them like they used to”: It’s romantic, sexy, hilarious, satisfying and a genuine star-clinching turn for Glen Powell, who’s been having a moment for about two years now. It’s got the cheeky verve of a 1940s screwball rom-com in a thoroughly contemporary (and slightly racier) package. I’ve seen it twice, and a huge grin plastered itself across my face both times.That’s why it’s a shame most people will see it at home — Netflix is barely giving it a theatrical release before it hits streaming even though it’s the sort of movie that begs for the experience of collective gut-splitting joy. Oh well. If you can see it in a theater, it’s worth it. If not, then get your friends together, pop some popcorn and settle in for a good old-fashioned movie for grown-ups.The director Richard Linklater and Powell collaborated on the “Hit Man” script, which is loosely based on Skip Hollandsworth’s 2001 Texas Monthly article about Gary Johnson, a faux hit man who actually worked for the Houston Police Department. In the movie version, Gary (Powell) is a mild-mannered philosophy professor in New Orleans with a part-time side gig doing tech work for law enforcement. One day, he is accidentally pulled into pretending to be a hit man in a sting operation, and soon realizes he loves playing the role.Or roles, really: The more Gary gets into it, the more he realizes that each person’s fantasy of a hit man is different, and he starts to dress up, preparing for the part before he meets with the client. (If this movie were solely constructed as a de facto reel demonstrating Powell’s range, it would work just fine.) Then, one day, pretending to be a sexy, confident hit man named Ron, he meets Madison (Adria Arjona, practically glowing from within), a put-upon housewife seeking his services. And everything changes for Gary.A great deal of the enjoyment of “Hit Man” comes from simply witnessing Powell and Arjona’s white-hot chemistry. Seeing Powell transmogrify from nerdy Gary to five o’clock shadow Ron and back again is both hilarious and tantalizing, while Arjona has a big-eyed innocence crossed with wily smarts that keeps everyone, including Gary, guessing. Multiple layers of deception keep the movie from feeling formulaic — you’re always trying to keep track of who thinks what, and why. Eventually, when “Hit Man” morphs into a kind of caper comedy, part of the joy is rooting for characters as they make choices that are, at best, flexibly ethical. In doing so, we get to be naughty too. In a movie starring a philosophy professor, that’s especially funny, a wry joke on us all.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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      ‘Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara’ Review: Church vs. State

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      This film, based on a true story about the kidnapping of a Jewish child in 19th-century Italy, underscores the devastating consequences of family separation.In the film “Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo Mortara,” a representative of Pope Pius IX arrives at a Jewish family’s home in Bologna, Italy, on a June night in 1858. This unsettling intrusion quickly gains force as it becomes clear the representative intends to take their 6-year-old son, Edgardo (Enea Sala).Unbeknown to Salomone and Marianna Mortara (Fausto Russo Alesi and Barbara Ronchi), a housekeeper had their son Edgardo baptized as an infant. In the parts of Italy that were under papal rule at the time, it was illegal for Christian children to be raised in non-Christian households. The Mortara case — covered by the Italian author Daniele Scalise, whose book the film is based upon, and by David Kertzer, an American scholar and expert on the papacy and antisemitism — became an international cause for Jewish organizations in Europe as well as proponents of the unification of Italy, including the papal states, into a kingdom. Even Napoleon III, an ally of the pope, expressed concern.The director, Marco Bellocchio, anchors the period with a somber visual elegance and employs surreal gestures to tease out the psychological and spiritual aspects of the tragedy. Political cartoons lambasting Pope Pius IX come to life through animation. During an especially sorrowful moment in Edgardo’s confinement, one of the figures of the crucified Christ in the Roman dormitory for child converts takes leave of his cross with the help of little Edgardo.Throughout his life, Edgardo remained faithful to the church. In the film, one gets the sense that the director, in not wanting to rob the adult Edgardo (Leonardo Maltese) of his agency, even if it was woefully compromised, resorts to a horror-inflected score and overdramatic scenes of parental anguish to make clear the devastating consequences of a child separated from his family. The heightened drama seems hardly necessary.Kidnapped: The Abduction of Edgardo MortaraNot rated. In Italian and Hebrew. Running time: 2 hours 14 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Substance’ and ‘Emilia Pérez’ Cause a Stir at Cannes

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      “The Substance” features Demi Moore in go-for-broke mode, while “Emilia Pérez” is a musical crime drama that defies description.Maybe “Megalopolis” was just an amuse-bouche.After Francis Ford Coppola’s $120 million movie polarized audiences during the first week of the Cannes Film Festival, the big swings have continued with “The Substance” and “Emilia Pérez,” two much-discussed films that are either stone-cold classics or total fiascos depending on whom you talk to here.But at a festival where a dozen new movies arrive every day and each title is in danger of being overshadowed, there’s nothing more effective than causing a commotion.The gory horror-comedy “The Substance” casts Demi Moore as Elizabeth Sparkle, an Oscar-winning actress who, as she ages, can find no better work than hosting an aerobics program. Even that gig is in danger thanks to an unscrupulous network executive (Dennis Quaid) who’s dead set on replacing Sparkle with someone younger and hotter. Backed into a corner, Sparkle decides to inject herself with the Substance, a mysterious fluid that promises a path to rejuvenation.But this procedure goes several steps beyond Botox and fillers. After taking the Substance, Sparkle’s younger self (Margaret Qualley) emerges painfully from her body and sets about reclaiming the aerobics gig that the network yanked away. The only catch is that Sparkle’s younger and older selves must trade off every week, agreeing to hibernate while the other one goes out on the town. Failure to maintain that balance could have gruesome effects on their bodies, and it isn’t long before this peaceful trade-off becomes an increasingly disfiguring tug of war.“The Substance,” directed by Coralie Fargeat, offers plenty to talk about, from Moore’s go-for-broke, bare-it-all performance to an outrageous finale that consistently pushes the line on gross-out gore. But the most spirited discussions at Cannes are over whether the movie is trenchant or skin-deep. David Ehrlich of IndieWire praised it as the best of the fest, but several people I’ve spoken to were positively angry about having watched it. Maybe any reaction is the right one when it comes to something so gleefully provocative: In a post online, the writer Iana Murray called the film “shallow” and “painfully unsubtle” but added, “i had a hell of a time though why lie.”“The Substance” is one of the higher-rated movies on the Screen International critics’ grid, a compilation of reactions that often presages the winner of the Palme d’Or, Cannes’ top prize. But another Palme contender, Jacques Audiard’s audacious “Emilia Pérez,” has prompted nearly as much conversation and debate. A crime drama that’s also a trans empowerment epic that’s also a full-blown movie musical, “Emilia Pérez” is virtually impossible to sum up: Imagine Pedro Almodóvar meets “Sicario” meets Jennifer Lopez’s wacky visual album “This is Me … Now: A Love Story,” and you’re only halfway there.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