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    Adam Sandler’s ‘Spaceman’ Has an Identity Crisis, Like Many Space Movies

    With the release of Adam Sandler’s odd, middling and expensive new Netflix film, a look at space movie misfires of the past and how history repeats itself.Not long into “Spaceman,” Adam Sandler’s new somber sci-fi space movie on Netflix, it becomes quite clear that it’s struggling to channel something greater, something better, something already respected.Sandler’s character, a Czech cosmonaut named Jakub, has spent many months alone in a ship investigating a mysterious purple cloud — alone except for an alien arachnid called Hanus (voiced by Paul Dano). Hanus speaks to Jakub — about fear, guilt, pain and the origins of the universe — in a soothing yet stilted tone, evoking the voice of HAL 9000, the conflicted A.I. entity in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” from 1968.The central themes in “Spaceman,” loneliness and disconnection, are fundamental in many cerebral space movies including “2001,” but perhaps more so in Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 Soviet space drama, “Solaris,” about a small crew of scientists who come mentally undone. “Spaceman” also has some “Gravity,” some “Interstellar,” some “First Man,” some “Ad Astra,” the New York Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson wrote in her review.Many middling sci-fi space movies have faced such fates: measured not by what they are but by what they wished they were. Often these films have the potential to be brilliant. “Spaceman” was directed by Johan Renck, who won two Emmys in 2019 for his work on the HBO mini-series “Chernobyl”; Sandler, while a comedian, has soared in complex dramatic roles, notably in “Uncut Gems” and “Punch-Drunk Love”; Jakub’s wife is played by Carey Mulligan, who is up for a best actress Oscar this month for “Maestro.”What is toughest to forgive, though, is that “Spaceman” commits the biggest movie no-no of all: It’s boring. “It is not fun-bad,” Wilkinson writes. “It is maudlin-bad, belabored-bad and also pretty boring-bad.”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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    ‘Code 8: Part II’ Review: Helping a Child in Danger

    In this Netflix sequel, the acting cousins Robbie and Stephen Amell again play gruff men of action — physical and psychic — navigating an urban dystopia.If you didn’t see the 2019 movie “Code 8,” but for some reason decide to take a chance on the sequel, fear not: “Code 8: Part II” begins with a vivid account of a not-too-distant-future where 4 percent of people “possess superhuman abilities” and an authoritarian police force leans hard on robots both two- and four-legged.Having more or less caught you up, the movie, directed by Jeff Chan and streaming on Netflix, once again presents Connor (Robbie Amell), the first movie’s protagonist, now leaving prison and rebuffing his former partner in crime, Garrett (Stephen Amell). (They are real-life cousins, in case you were wondering.)Both are stuck in Lincoln City, a setting as bleak as any other sci-fi hellhole, wherein every day is a day without sunshine.The new story proper begins with Tarak (Sammy Azero), a young criminal who’s trying to help his teenage sister, Pav (Sirena Gulamgaus), find a better life. He steals a bag of money from a couple of corrupt cops and is pursued by a robot police dog in a chase scene that’s brisk, legible and passably tense. He doesn’t get away, and Pav goes on the run. Guess which adult helps her out?Along with a bunch of other contemporary sci-fi tropes (“designer drugs” also feature in this dystopia) we’ve got a child in danger — a child with, naturally, emerging powers of her own. Pav’s talent initially manifests itself by making the TV go wonky when there’s something on it she doesn’t like.In the end, even genre fans with relaxed standards might try to similarly rebel against this insipid offering.Code 8: Part IINot rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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    ‘She Is Conann’ Review: Queen of the Barbarians

    This feminist riff on “Conan the Barbarian” is a sci-fi horror movie sprinkled with a bit of glam-rock fairy dust.“She Is Conann,” Bertrand Mandico’s gonzo-feminist riff on “Conan the Barbarian,” plays like an opera from hell. In the first few minutes, Rainer (Elina Löwensohn) — a humanoid hound who could be related to the Crypt Keeper — terrorizes an old woman wrapped in foil. The creature, who wears a boxy leather jacket and aviator sunglasses, struts around and monologues in a snakelike whisper, and then bites off a chunk of the woman’s flesh.Rainer leads the hapless dame into a sparkling cavern, where the queen of the barbarians herself, Conann, is perched on a high tower, clutching a human heart that looks more like a Christmas tree ornament.“She Is Conann” is a particularly nasty kind of sci-fi horror movie, sprinkled with a bit of glam-rock fairy dust. It unfolds almost entirely in a foggy underworld that resembles an elaborate haunted house. As opposed to computer-generated imagery, Mandico relies on built sets and practical effects, which give the film a stagey feel. Its unabashedly excessive scenes of violence also offer a gross-out realism.With Rainer as our guide, the plot loosely revolves around Conann’s ascension to power through the ages. First, she’s an innocent white teenager (Claire Duburcq) who witnesses a band of sadistic warriors chop her mother in half; then, she’s an androgynous 20-something (Christa Théret) who looks like the offspring of David Bowie. In the lengthiest act, she’s a Black woman with a fierce buzz cut and metallic threads (Sandra Parfait) living in a metropolis with her girlfriend.It’s more of a fever dream than an actual story, offering a queer counternarrative to the macho vision of the legendary warrior that is as hypnotic as it is gnarly.She Is ConannNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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    Gary Graham, ‘Alien Nation’ and ‘Star Trek: Enterprise’ Actor, Dies at 73

    In a 50-year acting career, Mr. Graham appeared in several shows, including “Starsky and Hutch” and “The Incredible Hulk.” But it was in science fiction where he made his biggest mark.Gary Graham, a veteran actor best known for portraying Ambassador Soval on the television show “Star Trek: Enterprise” and the detective Matthew Sikes in the “Alien Nation” franchise, died on Monday at his home in Spokane Valley, Wash. He was 73.His death was confirmed by his wife, Becky Graham, who said the cause was cardiac arrest.After studying pre-med at the University of California, Irvine, Mr. Graham’s first credited role came in 1976, when he appeared in an episode of “The Quest,” a western series starring Kurt Russell and Tim Matheson. That role led to appearances in “Starsky and Hutch,” “The Incredible Hulk,” “The Dukes of Hazzard” and other television series.His first regular role in a series was in the “Alien Nation” franchise, which began as a 1988 film starring Terence Stamp, Mandy Patinkin and James Caan. In 1989, Fox adapted it as a television show about extraterrestrials adjusting to life in Los Angeles and trying to blend in. Mr. Graham was cast as Matthew Sikes, the human detective whom Mr. Caan had played in the film. He was paired with Eric Pierpoint as George Francisco, a “Newcomer,” as members of the alien species were called.The show ran for only one season, but it was rebooted for multiple television movies, including “Alien Nation: Dark Horizon” in 1994 and “Alien Nation: Body and Soul” in 1995.Mr. Graham, right, with Eric Pierpoint in “Alien Nation.”AlamyMr. Graham also played Soval, a Vulcan ambassador to Earth, in 12 episodes of “Star Trek: Enterprise,” which served as a prequel to the original series. It wasn’t Mr. Graham’s first experience with the “Star Trek” franchise. He had also played Tanis, a member of the Ocampa species, in an episode of “Star Trek: Voyager.”As with other notable portrayals of Vulcans, such as Leonard Nimoy’s Spock, Mr. Graham skillfully depicted a race practiced in suppressing emotion and employing logic as a primary driver of life.After “Enterprise,” Mr. Graham took part in unofficial “Star Trek” fan-produced projects, including the 2007 film “Star Trek: Of Gods And Men.”Gary Rand Graham was born in Long Beach, Calif., on June 7, 1950, and grew up in Anaheim, Calif. His father, Ralph Graham, was a surgeon, and his mother, Rosemary (Taggert), was a homemaker.Mr. Graham’s marriages to Susan Lavelle and Diane Graham ended in divorce. In addition to his wife, Mr. Graham is survived by a daughter from his marriage to Ms. Lavelle, Haylee Graham; his sisters, Colleen Bertucci and Jeannine Michele Graham; and two stepchildren from his marriage to Ms. Graham, Scott and Steve Deer. More

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    ‘Alphaville’: A Film That Feels Brand-New

    Jean-Luc Godard’s hard-boiled sci-fi movie from 1965 returns in a restored version at IFC Center.Cinephiles of a certain age have a Jean-Luc Godard film that when first seen, blew their minds. Mine was Godard’s low-budget foray into dystopian science fiction, “Alphaville.”Having opened the 1965 New York Film Festival, which called it the “first successful incursion of pop art into the cinema,” “Alphaville” returns in a restored, re-subtitled print at the IFC Center, starting Dec. 15.Call it pop art, meta-noir, sci-fi neorealism or the underground precursor to the overblown, effects-driven superhero movies of the 21st century. “Alphaville” inserted itself into popular cinema by appropriating an existing movie icon, the hard-boiled detective Lemmy Caution, played in seven French thrillers by the frog-faced American actor Eddie Constantine.Thanks to Constantine, “Alphaville” is remarkably close to a “normal” movie (by Godardian standards). And thanks to Godard, Lemmy — one icon among many — lives in a self-aware movie universe. My own eureka moment came when, dispatched to find the German pulp character Harry Dickson (Akim Tamiroff), Lemmy asks him if their colleagues Dick Tracy and Flash Gordon are dead.“Alphaville” is pure pop in the form of gritty vérité — shot on high-speed, black-and-white film almost entirely at night and largely in the then-new Paris business district La Défense. As outrageously callous and bluntly stylized as a comic strip, mayhem is accentuated by Paul Misraki’s start-stop, hyper-melodramatic score, while tough-guy Lemmy quotes Paul Éluard.Inventive and pragmatic, Godard transformed ordinary objects into futuristic gizmos: That a jukebox stands for a spy console, a cigarette lighter receives radio transmissions, an electric fan denotes the supercomputer Alpha 60 and the computer’s flat, guttural croak is that of a man with a prosthetic voice box, is a form of surrealism.Godard was pragmatic in other ways, too. Richard Brody’s biography, “Everything Is Cinema,” suggests that “Alphaville” was designed to get Anna Karina, who divorced the director just before filming began, to say the words “I love you.” She does at the end of the film. Audiences did not. Present at the movie’s premiere, the Village Voice critic Andrew Sarris “felt waves of hatred washing up on the screen.”The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther, also there, noted that Godard’s “excessively cinematic prank,” provoked annoyance when, shifting gears midway through, it became “a tedious tussle with intellectual banalities.” Perhaps, but to paraphrase Umberto Eco’s essay on cult films and “Casablanca,” where two clichés make us laugh, a hundred clichés make a myth — in this case Orpheus and Eurydice. (In “Alphaville,” Cocteau’s version is referred to throughout.)Like “1984” and any number of recent opinion pieces, “Alphaville” equates totalitarianism with the debasement of language and allegiance to the algorithm. That it makes its points audio-visually may be why many artists prized the film. The conceptualist Mel Bochner celebrated “Alphaville” with a photo-text grid published in 1968 in Arts Magazine. Decades later, MoMA PS1 hosted a show of contemporary art inspired by Godard called “Postcards From Alphaville.”Those artworks have dated but the film hasn’t. Digitally restored, “Alphaville” not only looks but feels brand-new. The “intellectual banalities” that bored Crowther are so insistently contemporary that “Alphaville” could have been made in 2023. If by some time-traveling Borgesian twist of fate it were, Godard’s film would have been my candidate for the year’s best.AlphavilleOpens on Friday at the IFC Center in Manhattan; ifccenter.com. More

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    ‘Doctor Who’ is Back. Here’s What You Need to Know.

    The British sci-fi show is celebrating its 60th anniversary with three specials featuring some familiar faces.It’s rare for a television show to celebrate its 60th anniversary. It’s even rarer for a show to be entering a new era on its 60th anniversary.But “Doctor Who,” the British sci-fi show that began airing on the BBC in 1963, is in a period of expansion. Three upcoming specials, celebrating the show’s latest milestone, will arrive weekly on Disney+ in the United States from Saturday, as part of a deal between the streamer and the BBC.And then a new season, starring Ncuti Gatwa (“Sex Education”) in the title role, will arrive next year on Disney+ (and the BBC in Britain) following an extra Christmas Day episode. Russell T Davies, who relaunched the show in 2005, is the showrunner for them all.“Doctor Who” has decades of adventures, villains and complex story lines for dedicated fans to immerse themselves in. But if you’re new to the show, here’s what you need to know before tuning into the upcoming specials.A Quick RecapDavid Tennant, right, as the Doctor in Season 4 of “Doctor Who.” Tennant will rejoin the show for the 60th anniversary specials. Adrian Rogers/BBCThe Doctor is a Time Lord from a planet called Gallifrey, who travels across time and space in a Tardis, an unassuming spacecraft that looks like an old British police box, which members of the public used to call the authorities. His mission is to protect Earth, and the humans who live there, from a variety of threats.“The Doctor is the nerd, the well-read misfit, who isn’t particularly physical, who still wins the day,” said Toby Hadoke, an actor who hosts a podcast dedicated to the show. “The Doctor always offers hope for the person who feels slightly left out.”David Tennant, who played the Doctor between 2005 and 2010, and will be back as the star of the 60th anniversary specials, said that he thought the show’s appeal was “the way the domestic and the simplistic and everyday meets the fantastical and the absurd.” In the show’s world, “the most extraordinary things become very relatable,” he said.The show’s longevity is partly thanks to the fact the Doctor can “regenerate,” meaning a new actor can step into the role, but the show also experiments with genre, and the same season can include a historical drama one episode and a modern political satire the next.“Every time the Tardis door opens and the team steps out to a new planet, or a new time, or a new story, then it begins again,” Davies, the showrunner, said.The Doctor usually travels with a regular human companion, who in the 60th anniversary specials is played by the comedian Catherine Tate.Where Are We With the Plot?Jodie Whittaker became the first woman to play the Doctor in Season 13.BBCAt the end of the last season, Jodie Whittaker, the 13th incarnation of the Doctor, regenerated.Traditionally, a new actor plays each incarnation, and Gatwa is confirmed to be the 15th Doctor. But for the upcoming 60th anniversary episodes, Whittaker has turned back into Tennant, who was the 10th Doctor from 2005 to 2010, and then again for a 50th anniversary special in 2013.Rather than reprising the 10th Doctor, in the upcoming specials, Tennant will portray a 14th Doctor, the first time an actor has played two distinct Doctors. (Keeping up?)“Who is to say you can’t do this?” Davies said. “There’s absolutely no doubt that it can happen.”Tate will also reprise her role as Donna Noble, the Doctor’s companion. But in their last adventure together, which aired in 2008, the Doctor wiped Donna’s memory, and with it all recollection of their time together. If Donna remembers him, she will die. And yet they will reunite in the upcoming specials.“I had left our heroes in a tragic situation separated forever, unable to ever be happy again,” Davies said. “That’s begging for a final act, isn’t it?”How to Watch in the U.S.Ncuti Gatwa will star as the Doctor in the show’s upcoming season.Tolga Akmen/EPA, via ShutterstockWhile “Doctor Who” has aired in the United States for a number of years, including on PBS, the Sci Fi Channel and BBC America, the new international distribution deal with Disney+ could make the show more accessible to a casual audience. For new viewers, the 60th anniversary specials will begin with a prologue recapping the Doctor and Donna’s story.If you would like to dive deeper into the back catalog, older “Doctor Who” episodes are available to stream in the United States on Max or BritBox.An Inclusive Sci-Fi ShowYasmin Finney will join the cast of “Doctor Who” in the new season.Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images“Doctor Who” has long been notable among sci-fi franchises for its onscreen diversity. Whittaker became the show’s first female Doctor in 2017, and in 2020, Jo Martin played an incarnation of the Doctor known as the Fugitive Doctor, the show’s first Black doctor. And Yasmin Finney, a trans actor who played Elle in the Netflix show “Heartstopper,” is also joining the cast.“The show has always been good at appreciating inclusivity, and cherishing the different,” said Tennant, who added that he grew up as a “skinny bloke with specs in Scotland, who didn’t feel like the coolest person in the room.”But “the Doctor celebrates uncoolness,” he added. “And that was something I appreciated.” More

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    12 African Artists Leading a Culture Renaissance Around the World

    In one of his famed self-portraits, Omar Victor Diop, a Senegalese photographer and artist, wears a three-piece suit and an extravagant paisley bow tie, preparing to blow a yellow, plastic whistle. The elaborately staged photograph evokes the memory of Frederick Douglass, the one-time fugitive slave who in the 19th century rose to become a leading […] More

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    Did ‘Demolition Man’ Predict the Millennial?

    A cult classic saw the future — kind of.Now that we live in the future, we no longer seem to make as many films about the future — at least not the way we once did, when we tried our hardest to imagine a future as different from the present as we were from ancient history. Today, with all of human knowledge in our pockets, we prefer to think in terms of alternate timelines, paths not taken, the multiverse of infinite possibilities. We’re looking sideways, not forward. But for most of the existence of cinema, a glorious near-centennial from “Metropolis” (1927) to, let’s say, “WALL-E” (2008), people used celluloid to dream of what lay ahead.Growing up with those movies, I liked to keep a mental scorecard concerning which of their futures seemed most likely. I would have hoped that by now we’d be experiencing the vibrant urban chaos of “The Fifth Element” (1997). But no. What about HAL and the blind faith in technological advancement that connotes progress in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968)? Kind of. The computers controlled by constant hand-waving in Steven Spielberg’s “Minority Report” (2002)? Not quite. All of these are classics, but the one that I think got it most right is a 1993 action-comedy whose hallmark is a tremendous recurring poop joke.In “Demolition Man,” a cop named John Spartan (played by Sylvester Stallone) is frozen in 1996, for spurious reasons, and thawed out in the year 2032, when Southern California has been merged into an enormous metroplex called San Angeles. He’s tasked with hunting down a homicidal maniac, played by a blond, mugging Wesley Snipes. The joke is that in this future, everyone is kind and gentle to one another. Lenina Huxley, Spartan’s ’90s-loving partner, explains that alcohol, caffeine, contact sports, meat, bad language and gasoline, among other things, are banned. “It has been deemed that anything not good for you is bad,” goes the tao of “Demolition Man.” “Hence, illegal.” ‘Demolition Man’ imagined a future generation who might view our civilization, at the peak of its powers, as utterly barbaric.The movie’s pleasure doesn’t lie in its plentiful violence (well, some of it does). It’s in the humor that arises from these future San Angeleans’ disgust over Spartan’s primitive ways, like his desire to use guns and to smoke and to have sex “the old-fashioned way,” rather than through a virtual-reality headset. They mock him over the fact that he asks for toilet paper. (Everyone now uses something called the Three Seashells, which is never explained.) Spartan is baffled by new technology like the omnipresent Alexa-like morality boxes that issue instant fines for offensive language, and kiosks that offer words of affirmation on the streets (“You are an incredibly sensitive man who inspires joy-joy feelings in all those around you”). Stallone’s cop has been subliminally rehabilitated while frozen and wakes up knowing how to knit. “I’m a seamstress?” he laments.What separates “Demolition Man” from other sci-fi films of much higher aspiration is that it imagined a future generation who might view our civilization, at the peak of its powers, as utterly barbaric. We’re not quite there, but it feels as if the world that the younger generations loathe is the one I was raised in. And in the process, this has turned the film, at least for me, into an explosive, sometimes vituperative allegory for aging. As Spartan finds out, it hurts to wake up one day and find that the world has moved on without you.Some days I feel like I’ve woken up from cryosleep, and am looking around to discover that I’m the only one who misses our previous era of casual cynicism and dubious morality and brilliant jerks. Back in the ’90s, I sat in the cinema and watched this film like thousands of other people, never imagining that I might one day feel like Spartan. I am living in the future, and I don’t belong. Everyone else has moved on. I’m still wiping myself with toilet paper instead of the Three Seashells.It’s a shame that “Demolition Man” doesn’t have more of a place in popular culture. If it has any presence at all, it’s through unhinged libertarians online. There’s a person on X, for example, who takes inspiration from the film and rants about what he describes as the “deranged parallel universe” we’re in. These types might be more similar to the only people who reject society in the movie. Led by a cholesterol-loving Denis Leary, who longs to “smoke a cigar the size of Cincinnati in the nonsmoking section,” they live underground eating rat burgers.I’m more ambivalent. Newly unthawed, how would I live? I turn to “Demolition Man” for guidance on how to navigate the future. Most everyone else accepts this timid new world. I can see why — it’s very appealing. Everyone is extremely nice. There’s no crime. There’s the choice of only one restaurant. (It’s Taco Bell.) No conflict is necessary because they’ve banned everything worth fighting over. If this is where we’re heading, it might be better than the past, if not as much fun, infused with a whiff of the dystopian. Everyone else seems to have made their accommodation with this future. Why can’t I?Perhaps I find this film resonant not so much because it turned out to be prophetic, but because it reminds me that I once was certain of what the future would look like and my place in it. I think I’m like Spartan, but I’m actually more like a wistful Lenina Huxley, surrounded by 1990s contraband, unable to let go. “You’re still addicted to the 20th century,” another cop admonishes her. “High from its harshness.” I know how she feels.Kabir Chibber is a writer and filmmaker. Born in Hong Kong, he lives in New York. More