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      ‘Arcadian’ Review: Take Two as Needed for Postapocalyptic Pain

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      Nicolas Cage defends his family against a paranormal siege in this derivative, low-budget creature feature.An important plot point in “Arcadian,” a domestic postapocalyptic drama bearing a close resemblance to “A Quiet Place,” revolves around medicine: people needing it, others hoarding it and so on. What kind of medicine is it? What is it for? The movie doesn’t say. It comes in an aspirin bottle, and the characters just call it “medicine,” and we have to take it on faith that it’s important.“Arcadian” is fashionably oblique, implying more than it explains. (An improvement over the expository whiteboard in “A Quiet Place,” which offered bullet-form creature data like a PowerPoint presentation.) The story is told in a cursory way: Paul (Nicolas Cage) lives on a remote farm with his teenage sons, Thomas (Maxwell Jenkins) and Joseph (Jaeden Martell). By day they forage and scavenge to survive; at night their fortified home is besieged by feral beasts, which (it is faintly suggested) are the mutated victims of an epidemic that wiped out most of humankind.The director, Benjamin Brewer, uses many tried-and-true tricks to conceal budgetary limitations, obscuring his monsters in shadows or putting them behind doors, banging, to make the movie feel bigger than it is. He builds tension in brief pockets of silence, and when we do see the monsters, they look quite good — sticky and spindly in a tactile way, like the aliens in John Carpenter’s “The Thing.”But a competent director can do only so much with a poor script, and “Arcadian” is littered with shortcuts and screenwriting clichés. It is vague to the point of careless, and often seems to be inventing rules for its monsters as it goes along. We hardly need everything to be detailed. But at the very least, it would have been nice to know more about that medicine.ArcadianRated R for graphic violence and disturbing imagery. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead’ Review: The Laughs Are Alive

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      Wade Allain-Marcus has directed a rollicking update of the 1991 cult favorite.Don’t tell helicopter parents, but the gleefully transgressive flicks that entertained a generation of latchkey wildlings are coming back in style. Wade Allain-Marcus’s rollicking update of the 1991 cult favorite keeps the plot — a 17-year-old slacker named Tanya (Simone Joy Jones) is forced to support her even lazier younger siblings (Donielle Hansley Jr., Ayaamii Sledge and Carter Young) — and amps up the immoral humor. It’s a snappy, gutsy comedy about how kids are spoiled and ignorant, and yet the adult workplace is only passingly more mature.A Black single mother (Patricia Williams) has a nervous breakdown and leaves her four children in the care of an aged tyrant (June Squibb) for the summer. Squibb has played plenty of cackling grannies; even so, Ms. Sturak is her most unhinged. “I watch Madea movies! I know how to discipline you!” she screams, pistol in hand. Those sensitive to slurs will be relieved when she keels over. So are the kids, who ignominiously dispose of the corpse and then realize they need money for food.The rapid-fire script by Chuck Hayward squeezes a joke into every sentence and an economic dig into almost every scene. Tanya is aghast that a rideshare driving shift barely covers a restaurant bill; later, her new boss (Nicole Richie) at a fast-fashion brand shrugs off a rash of factory employee suicides. Even condensing the story, there’s no fixing the ridiculous ending by which point the film is out of gas. But despite being affixed to the guardrails of a reboot, this naughty thrill boasts some boisterous jolts and a charming romance between Tanya and a more emotionally developed boy (Miles Fowler) who inspires her to grow up.Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s DeadRated R for teen drug use, language and some sexual references. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Alex Garland on Making a Film About the Civil War Today

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      Even before his drama was released, the writer-director faced controversy over his vision of a divided America with Texas and California as allies.One of the most haunting moments in Alex Garland’s new drama “Civil War” comes in the form of a question.A soldier, fingering the trigger of his assault rifle, confronts a group of terrified journalists: “What kind of American are you?” he asks.That question, and its underlying impulse to divide and demonize, is at the heart of why Garland made a much-anticipated and already much-debated film about the implosion of the United States. “Civil War,” opening Friday, warns against the dangers of extreme partisanship, Garland said in a recent interview — the horrors that can happen when American citizens, or any other group of people, turn on themselves.“I think civil war is just an extension of a situation,” said Garland, the 53-year-old British director behind “Ex Machina” and “Men.” “That situation is polarization and the lack of limiting forces on polarization.”In the film, America’s divisions have erupted into chaos. Fleets of helicopters patrol the skies and explosions rock major cities as the secessionist Western Forces, including those from Texas and California, advance on the president, a three-term authoritarian who has disbanded the F.B.I. and launched airstrikes on fellow Americans.If polarization is one of the poisons causing this outbreak, Garland sees the work of a free, independent press as one of the antidotes. His film envisions the Fourth Estate as a check on extremism and authoritarianism.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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      ‘Sasquatch Sunset’ Review: Big Feet and Small Brains

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      Four unrecognizably hairy actors, including Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough, play mythical creatures in this endearingly bonkers movie.If ever a movie seemed destined — nay, designed — for cult status or ignominy, “Sasquatch Sunset” is it. An initial glance suggests the kind of entertainment that emerges from late-night, bongwater-scented dorm rooms; yet surrender to its shaggy rhythms and you’ll find this sometimes tiresome portrait of a family of mythical beasts is not without intelligence and a strangely mesmeric intent.Set in a North American forest (and filmed in the California Redwoods), the movie wraps four dauntless actors in layers of matted, gray-brown hair and impressively molded prostheses. Thus disguised, they lumber through a year of mating, childbirth, death and discovery, unburdened by names or lines of dialogue. To communicate, they grunt and yowl and gesture with a serio-comic zeal that earned my reluctant admiration. It must have been murderously sweaty inside those suits.Little by little, personalities seep out. The alpha male (Nathan Zellner, who co-directed with his brother, David Zellner) is grumpy, aggressive and disruptively randy, courting furious rejection from the group’s sole female (Riley Keough). Her preferred partner (Jesse Eisenberg) is a gentler, more thoughtful soul, as is what appears to be their son (Christophe Zajac-Denek). Predators and poisonous fungi threaten the unwary, but these hirsute hillocks are mostly a danger to themselves — as the alpha will learn when he seems bent on visiting his lust on a hungry mountain lion.A sincere gift to Bigfoot believers or a surreal cinematic prank, “Sasquatch Sunset” mimes the familiar beats of the nature documentary. This may be a one-joke movie, but it’s an oddly endearing jest, the beasts’ resemblance to primates tweaking our empathy. Even as their infantile, often disgusting antics become tedious, the film’s tone shifts from daft to tenderly melancholic as signs of human encroachment on their habitat multiply. The contents of an unattended campsite — especially a cassette player and a mirror — prove transfixing and unnerving; a paved road provokes the evacuation of every available body fluid. It’s a revolting sight, but also a touching one. We can see they’re terrified.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 Greatest Hits’ Review: Yes, She Could Turn Back Time.

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      A high-concept movie about music and grief lacks follow through.“The Greatest Hits” literalizes the familiar heartache: You’re driving down the road, radio blaring at full tilt. Suddenly that song comes on, the one that reminds you of your ex, or of a time that was joyous but now is a sadness-tinged memory. Plunged back into that head space, you feel as though you’ve traveled through time. And the longing it prompts can be unbearable.This is where Harriet (Lucy Boynton) finds herself, except instead of feeling as if she’s moving through time, she is truly hurtling through the fourth dimension. Since having lost her boyfriend, Max (David Corenswet), in a tragic accident, any song Harriet hears attached to memories of him catapults her, quite literally, back to the moment in their relationship when that song was playing. When she leaves the house, she wears noise-canceling headphones to protect against unexpected time travel provoked by radios and errant Spotify shuffles.At home, though, she spends her nights trying to slip backward. Harriet has become obsessed with trying to return to a moment where she can set the world straight and ensure that Max won’t die, which means, even two years after his death, that she is still “hiding out in her grief,” as another character puts it. In the midst of this, at her grief support group, Harriet meets a nice guy named David (Justin H. Min), who’s dealing with loss of his own.Ned Benson, who wrote and directed “The Greatest Hits,” has explored this territory before. His previous work, “The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby,” was a trilogy, made up of two films that explored a couple’s grief-stricken, tumultuous relationship from each of their individual perspectives, and a third that combined them. (As the title suggests, music was part of the story, too.) That film felt personal, and so does this one. It earnestly evokes the way grief mires us in memory, making us feel as if our personal timelines are slip-sliding and looping, eternally arrested in the past. Moving forward seems impossible.But “The Greatest Hits” lacks the imagination of “Eleanor Rigby” and, at times, seems like it might be in the wrong genre. It’s easy to imagine a rom-com version of this movie, since the elements are all there — the hip location (mostly the Silver Lake and Los Feliz neighborhoods of Los Angeles), the meet-cute, the queer best friend (a mainstay of the genre, for better or worse), the crates of vinyl records, the pining, the hot guys, even the chemistry. But this movie lacks the lightness and humor of a rom-com, which might balance out all the dreary moments and make it feel more watchable. The version that exists feels more suited for lovelorn teens just off their first breakup than adults moving through profound loss and sorrow, more acquainted with the ways life can’t just stop when tragedy strikes.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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      ‘In Flames’ Review: A Patriarchy Horror Story

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      Set in Pakistan, the story of a young woman and her family, hemmed in by men, shifts from realism to genre, with heart-pumping consequences.It takes about an hour for “In Flames” to reveal itself as proper genre horror, but trepidation lurks from the start. In Karachi, Pakistan, the 20-something Mariam (Ramesha Nawal) lives with her widowed mother, Fariha (Bakhtawar Mazhar), and her younger brother, Bilal (Jibran Khan), who’s mostly glued to his video games. The family has been financially dependent on Fariha’s father-in-law, but as the film opens, he has just died — and Fariha’s brother-in-law, Uncle Nasir (Adnan Shah Tipu), is suddenly very interested in the relatives he had been neglecting.Fariha teaches at an elementary school, and Mariam is studying for exams that will qualify her to be a doctor. They’re smart, capable women who are less concerned with dismantling established social orders than they are with keeping their home and family intact. Yet their lives are hemmed in by the men around them, with a constriction that’s suffocating. For one, there is Uncle Nasir, who has offered to pay the family’s outstanding debts if Fariha signs some documents, which Mariam pleads with her to avoid doing. But there’s also the man who throws a brick through the car window when Mariam is driving to the library, calling her a whore. Or the man who lurks outside her window, masturbating. Or even the nice young man from the library, Asad (Omar Javaid), who won’t leave Mariam alone.As the women scramble to save their home, the walls close in on them, and that’s the point: “In Flames,” a confident feature debut written and directed by Zarrar Kahn, is one of several recent films from around the world that frame patriarchy as a nightmare. The most recent may be “Shayda,” set in Iran, but even movies like “Poor Things” and “Promising Young Woman” play with the same idea, albeit with a lighter touch. This one is set in Pakistan, in the midst of debates about religious fundamentalism and gender roles, but the outlines are familiar even to audiences in very different circumstances. Men commit obvious, blatant offenses, confident the system is stacked in their favor. But even the “good guys” are locked in a culture that rewards them for refusing to listen to the women who, it’s made clear, are holding the country together.That means the horror extends to the male perpetrators, who couldn’t find their way out of the maze of unjust systems if they tried. But there’s no question the women bear the brunt of it, whether the perpetrator is abusive, or greedy, or just clueless. To seek help is fruitless, and dangerous; being in debt to yet one more man is another way to put yourself at risk.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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      ‘Civil War’ Review: We Have Met the Enemy and It Is Us. Again.

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      In Alex Garland’s tough new movie, a group of journalists led by Kirsten Dunst, as a photographer, travels a United States at war with itself.A blunt, gut-twisting work of speculative fiction, “Civil War” opens with the United States at war with itself — literally, not just rhetorically. In Washington, D.C., the president is holed up in the White House; in a spookily depopulated New York, desperate people wait for water rations. It’s the near-future, and rooftop snipers, suicide bombers and wild-eyed randos are in the fight while an opposition faction with a two-star flag called the Western Front, comprising Texas and California — as I said, this is speculative fiction — is leading the charge against what remains of the federal government. If you’re feeling triggered, you aren’t alone.It’s mourning again in America, and it’s mesmerizingly, horribly gripping. Filled with bullets, consuming fires and terrific actors like Kirsten Dunst running for cover, the movie is a what-if nightmare stoked by memories of Jan. 6. As in what if the visions of some rioters had been realized, what if the nation was again broken by Civil War, what if the democratic experiment called America had come undone? If that sounds harrowing, you’re right. It’s one thing when a movie taps into childish fears with monsters under the bed; you’re eager to see what happens because you know how it will end (until the sequel). Adult fears are another matter.In “Civil War,” the British filmmaker Alex Garland explores the unbearable if not the unthinkable, something he likes to do. A pop cultural savant, he made a splashy zeitgeist-ready debut with his 1996 best seller “The Beach,” a novel about a paradise that proves deadly, an evergreen metaphor for life and the basis for a silly film. That things in the world are not what they seem, and are often far worse, is a theme that Garland has continued pursuing in other dark fantasies, first as a screenwriter (“28 Days Later”), and then as a writer-director (“Ex Machina”). His résumé is populated with zombies, clones and aliens, though reliably it is his outwardly ordinary characters you need to keep a closer watch on.By the time “Civil War” opens, the fight has been raging for an undisclosed period yet long enough to have hollowed out cities and people’s faces alike. It’s unclear as to why the war started or who fired the first shot. Garland does scatter some hints; in one ugly scene, a militia type played by a jolting, scarily effective Jesse Plemons asks captives “what kind of American” they are. Yet whatever divisions preceded the conflict are left to your imagination, at least partly because Garland assumes you’ve been paying attention to recent events. Instead, he presents an outwardly and largely post-ideological landscape in which debates over policies, politics and American exceptionalism have been rendered moot by war.One thing that remains familiar amid these ruins is the movie’s old-fashioned faith in journalism. Dunst, who’s sensational, plays Lee, a war photographer who works for Reuters alongside her friend, a reporter, Joel (the charismatic Wagner Moura). They’re in New York when you meet them, milling through a crowd anxiously waiting for water rations next to a protected tanker. It’s a fraught scene; the restless crowd is edging into mob panic, and Lee, camera in hand, is on high alert. As Garland’s own camera and Joel skitter about, Lee carves a path through the chaos, as if she knows exactly where she needs to be — and then a bomb goes off. By the time it does, an aspiring photojournalist, Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), is also in the mix.The streamlined, insistently intimate story takes shape once Lee, Joel, Jessie and a veteran reporter, Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), pile into a van and head to D.C. Joel and Lee are hoping to interview the president (Nick Offerman), and Sammy and Jessie are riding along largely so that Garland can make the trip more interesting. Sammy serves as a stabilizing force (Henderson fills the van with humanizing warmth), while Jessie plays the eager upstart Lee takes under her resentful wing. It’s a tidily balanced sampling that the actors, with Garland’s banter and via some cozy downtime, turn into flesh-and-blood personalities, people whose vulnerability feeds the escalating tension with each mile.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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      What to Know About ‘Sasquatch Sunset’

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      An earthquake and an eclipse weren’t the only natural rarities that happened in New York City this past week. Did you hear about the sasquatch in Central Park? The makers of “Sasquatch Sunset” sure hope you did.That’s because the sasquatch was a costume and his stroll through the park was a publicity push for the new film from the brothers David and Nathan Zellner. Opening in New York on Friday, the movie spends a year in the wild with a sasquatch pack — a male and female (Nathan Zellner and Riley Keough) and two younger sasquatches (Jesse Eisenberg and Christophe Zajac-Denek) — as they eat, have sex, fight predators and reckon with death.Droll but big-hearted, the movie sits at the intersection of the ad campaign for Jack Link’s beef jerky, the 1987 comedy “Harry and the Hendersons” and a 1970s nature documentary, down to the hippie-vibe soundtrack.What goes into a movie about Bigfoots? (Bigfeet?) Even after a day of following the costumed sasquatch around Central Park, we had questions for the cast and crew. They had answers, which have been edited and condensed.Even sasquatches can appreciate the halal cart. And sometimes they need a rest.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