Ridley, Daisy (1992- )

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    ‘Young Woman and the Sea’ Review: Fighting Sexism and Rough Waters

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    Daisy Ridley plays Gertrude Ederle, who persuades her father to pay for swim lessons, and then goes on to be a pioneer.In a brassy set piece from the 1952 classic “Singin’ in the Rain,” its star, Gene Kelly, impersonates a newbie hoofer seeking fame on the Great White Way. “Gotta dance!” he exclaims to anyone he meets. In “Young Woman and the Sea,” Trudy Ederle is fond of singing the 1921 hit “Ain’t We Got Fun.” First loudly, with a ukulele, to convince her early-20th-century immigrant dad to spring for swimming lessons; later, softly, to herself as she prepares to become the first woman to swim across the English Channel. It’s her way of proclaiming “Gotta swim!”The real-life Gertrude Ederle was so utterly compelled that she put her hearing, already damaged by a childhood bout with the measles, at serious risk with her immersions. Based on a biography by Glenn Stout that contains some pretty provocative and reasonably well-supported theories about the ups and downs of her career, this Disney movie runs with those theories hard. Ederle, played by Daisy Ridley, runs up against not just the garden variety sexism of her time, but some male sponsors and coaches who actively sabotage her sporting efforts.This is one of those movies that proves, when they’ve got a mind to, they can still make them like they used to. Which is to say, its production values are top-notch, the cast uniformly competent or better (Ridley is particularly winning), and the filmmaking language — the director here is Joachim Ronning, whose last at bat with Disney was the 2019 critical misfire “Maleficent: Mistress of Evil” — is meticulously calculated to deliver a rousing climax and an appropriately heartwarming coda.It’s also rather rich in cliché. When Trudy is tempted to give up her sport, three angelic little girls show up as if on cue and one tells her, “It’s because of you I was allowed to swim.”Young Woman and the SeaRated PG for intense swimming maybe. Running time: 2 hours 9 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Daisy Ridley Loves Every Single Track of This Stormzy Album

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      When the star of the film “Sometimes I Think About Dying” listens to “This Is What I Mean,” she says, “I don’t shuffle it, nothing. It’s perfect.”For her latest movie, “Sometimes I Think About Dying,” Daisy Ridley plays Fran, a drab, standoffish, occasionally obnoxious office worker. Strangely enough, she found it exciting.“Fran is a woman who loves her job; she loves her routine,” Ridley said in a video interview from London. “She thinks about dying, but she doesn’t want to die. She has just created this very rich inner world for herself because she struggles to connect with people in a real-life way.”Then a new guy moves into a cubicle near hers.“I would not say the film is one of fireworks,” she said. “I would describe it as embers of something being ignited.”Ridley is of course better known for her role as Rey in the “Star Wars” films. She will wield her lightsaber once again in the upcoming “Star Wars: New Jedi Order,” although she hadn’t yet read the script when we spoke.“What I know is the story is really cool, really exciting and very worthwhile,” she said, before explaining why hot baths and reality TV and “Small Worlds” by Caleb Azumah Nelson and Stormzy’s “This Is What I Mean” are among her cultural necessities. “I did not think I would be coming back, but when I was told the story, I was like, ‘OK, that’s [expletive] awesome.’”These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1Back RollersI did a film called “Young Woman and the Sea,” about the first woman to swim the [English] Channel, a German American called Trudy Ederle. I was doing an awful lot of swimming, and my body was pretty messed up afterward. My spine felt like it had been a bit compressed. So since that movie, whenever I roll, my back goes crrrkk the whole way. But there’s nothing nicer than the feeling.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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      ‘Sometimes I Think About Dying’ Review: Life, in Drab Gray

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      Daisy Ridley stars as an office worker who’s just going through the motions.Fran thinks about dying, but not gruesomely. Her mental tableaux of death look as if they were staged by the artist Gregory Crewdson. Sometimes her body is draped dramatically over driftwood on a serene beach or posed in a foggy forest on a soft green bed of moss. She imagines standing alone in a nondescript finished office basement as a giant snake slithers by. She imagines death, essentially, as peace in the midst of ever-changing nature.Her reality is less beautifully hued. By day, Fran (Daisy Ridley) dons drab business casual and works in the sort of space that makes the environs of “The Office” seem like a magical wonderland. A small group of people perform clerical tasks to keep the local port in their tiny Pacific Northwest town running smoothly, and spend most of their time on crushingly banal chatter. Why is this cruise ship docked in such a way that it blocks the views of the mountains? Where are the mugs?By night, Fran’s life isn’t much more interesting, but at least she’s in control of it. She goes home, pours a glass of wine and takes a long, restorative sip, then reheats some kind of insipid patty and eats it with a side of cottage cheese. Sudoku, brush teeth, bed, repeat. It feels like she’s starring in her own one-woman play, one where all other people are background noise — her mother’s phone call goes to voice mail — and nobody is watching.“Sometimes I Think About Dying,” directed by Rachel Lambert, comes by its theatricality naturally; it’s based, in part, on the play “Killers” by Kevin Armento. (The other credited writers are Stefanie Abel Horowitz and Katy Wright-Mead, the latter of whose credits include “Boardwalk Empire” and “The Knick.”) The play entwined the tale of a young woman who thinks about dying with a secondary story about a young woman obsessed with killing, and though I haven’t seen it, I assume that means its themes were very different. But onscreen, “Sometimes I Think About Dying” can do what it could never do as easily onstage: We float in and out of Fran’s mind, entering her mood, her lethargy, her fixations on the back of people’s heads or their mouths while they speak. We start to become a little bit Fran.Perhaps the best term for Fran’s persistent mood is acedia, that feeling of not caring much about anything, especially one’s position in the world. (Ancient monks called it the “noonday demon.”) It’s often equated with depression, but there’s a particular torpor provoked by a soul-sucking office that can bring it on. Many a new college graduate has discovered, quickly, that a 9-to-5 job can become unbearable even if the work itself is simple, pleasant and well-paid. Something about the prospect of everlasting sameness can sap the will to live.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?  More

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      ‘The Marsh King’s Daughter’ Review: Smoke on the Water

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      Neil Burger’s thriller aims to capture a mother pushed to protect her family from her past.In the director Neil Burger’s harrowing yet thin thriller “The Marsh King’s Daughter,” adapted from Karen Dionne’s same-titled novel, a young Helena (Brooklynn Prince) learns how her fairy tale is actually a nightmare. She lives in a woodland cabin with her stern mother, Beth (Caren Pistorius) and her huntsman father, Jacob (Ben Mendelsohn). Jacob often brands Beth’s white skin with Indigenous inspired tattoos and instructs her how to track and hunt.When a lost wanderer on a four-wheeler comes looking for directions, however, Beth flees with Helena on the vehicle to the police, leading to Jacob’s arrest. Unbeknown to the young Helena, twelve years prior, her supposedly loving father kidnapped Beth to be his bride.As an adult, Helena (Daisy Ridley) shares a daughter with her husband, Stephen (Garrett Hedlund). But Stephen is clueless to Helena’s past. That changes when Jacob escapes from prison. Helena opts to hunt Jacob before he steals her daughter (Joey Carson).This is a film superficially about trauma. Rather than mining the emotional and psychological complexities of Helena’s devastation, potentially ripe subjects, Burger hastily pushes ill-fitting thriller tropes onto a character study frame.While Mendelsohn is often adept at portraying villains, his potential to deliver menace is restricted by a one-note script. Putrid hues of greenish-yellow lighting, meant to signify jumps into the past, also underwhelm the suspense. Still, a game Ridley, along with a brief cameo by a soulful Gil Birmingham, provides the necessary stakes for Burger’s film not to idle in narrative mud.The Marsh King’s DaughterRated R for violence. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Inventor’ Review: Leonardo da Vinci in the Limelight

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      This playful movie uses stop-motion and hand-drawn animation to pay homage to Leonardo as a thinker and tinkerer.More than once in “The Inventor,” an animated feature about Leonardo da Vinci, powerful patrons tell that Renaissance polymath to behave “like a good little artist.” This advice comes first from Pope Leo X (voiced by Matt Berry) and later from Louise of Savoy (Marion Cotillard), the devoted mother of King Francis I of France.The notion of a great mind that is both beneficiary of and handmaid to the agendas of the powerful runs throughout this admirably artisanal appreciation of Leonardo’s intellect and innovative spirit, which follows him (Stephen Fry) as he leaves Rome to become King Francis’s maestro. The directors, Jim Capobianco (who also wrote the screenplay) and Pierre-Luc Granjon, keep the artist’s paintings secondary to his exploits as a thinker and tinkerer. Their engaging voice cast also includes Daisy Ridley as Leonardo’s royal champion, Marguerite de Navarre, and Gauthier Battoue as the king, who proves to be in dire need of an ego-stroking statue.The filmmakers use stop-motion puppetry and hand-illustrated animation to capture Leonardo’s story. This brings to life his fears and fascinations, while drawing out both the wonder and the tribulations he experiences as he searches for the “answer to life itself,” while struggling to work under the command of the powerful. (Here, “The Inventor” shares a theme with a decidedly less child-friendly recent big-screen portrait, “Oppenheimer.”)In honoring this beautiful mind, the plot’s forward motion lags at times. “The Inventor” is rife with somewhat didactic lessons — about power, innovation, curiosity — yet a presumably unintended one might be that lessons themselves, however insightful, are not always captivating.The InventorRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters. More