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    ‘The Old Guard 2’ Review: Uma Thurman vs. Charlize Theron

    Uma Thurman joins the expanded cast in this sure-footed sequel to the action blockbuster about a team of immortal heroes.Five years ago, “The Old Guard” injected a tired genre of superhumans in capes with existential alienation and grit. The aim of that film, about a crew of immortal vigilantes who go on rescue missions to help mankind, was admirable but also frequently one note.What could another installment offer? The best that a sequel can: buff out those blemishes, expand the universe and subvert the genre again. In “The Old Guard 2,” superheroes saving humanity is out, gods beefing with gods is in. The film, directed by Victoria Mahoney, is a sure-footed romp that tightens the screws, most immediately by flexing a bigger cast and broadening the lore of the original comic book series. All this expansion starts right where the last one ended. Believed to be lost under the sea for centuries, Quynh (Veronica Ngo), a fellow immortal and lover of Andy (Charlize Theron), has returned. She’s discovered by Discord (Uma Thurman), another mysterious immortal who is opposed to Andy’s meddling in human affairs. Aggrieved and feeling abandoned by Andy, who is now mortal, Quynh then becomes a useful tool for Discord.Whereas the first film was focused on the arrival of a new immortal named Nile (KiKi Layne), this one has forgotten immortals popping up (like Tuah, played by Henry Golding). That means a lot of drama, and fertile ground for these supreme beings reckoning with the most human of experiences: love and betrayal, guilt and regret, all complicated by being alive for millenniums.Ngo is the key anchor to these feelings, providing a strong emotional counterpoint to Theron that was just present in flashbacks the first time around. The shared history in their gazes and the pain and recriminations of losing and finding each other again translates the wistful burden of immortality that the first film mostly said, but couldn’t really make you feel.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 Old Guard 2’ Review: Thurman vs. Theron

    Uma Thurman joins the expanded cast in this sure-footed sequel to the action blockbuster about a team of immortal heroes.Five years ago, “The Old Guard” injected a tired genre of superhumans in capes with existential alienation and grit. The aim of that film, about a crew of immortal vigilantes who go on rescue missions to help mankind, was admirable but also frequently one note.What could another installment offer? The best that a sequel can: buff out those blemishes, expand the universe and subvert the genre again. In “The Old Guard 2,” superheroes saving humanity is out, gods beefing with gods is in. The film, directed by Victoria Mahoney, is a sure-footed romp that tightens the screws, most immediately by flexing a bigger cast and broadening the lore of the original comic book series. All this expansion starts right where the last one ended. Believed to be lost under the sea for centuries, Quynh (Veronica Ngo), a fellow immortal and lover of Andy (Charlize Theron), has returned. She’s discovered by Discord (Uma Thurman), another mysterious immortal who is opposed to Andy’s meddling in human affairs. Aggrieved and feeling abandoned by Andy, who is now mortal, Quynh then becomes a useful tool for Discord.Whereas the first film was focused on the arrival of a new immortal named Nile (KiKi Layne), this one has forgotten immortals popping up (like Tuah, played by Henry Golding). That means a lot of drama, and fertile ground for these supreme beings reckoning with the most human of experiences: love and betrayal, guilt and regret, all complicated by being alive for millenniums.Ngo is the key anchor to these feelings, providing a strong emotional counterpoint to Theron that was just present in flashbacks the first time around. The shared history in their gazes and the pain and recriminations of losing and finding each other again translates the wistful burden of immortality that the first film mostly said, but couldn’t really make you feel.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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    ‘Oh, Canada’ Review: Jacob Elordi as a Young Richard Gere

    Richard Gere and Jacob Elordi star in Paul Schrader’s meditative drama about guilt and seeking forgiveness.Near the beginning of “Oh, Canada,” Paul Schrader’s adaptation of his friend Russell Banks’s novel “Foregone,” a small camera crew is preparing a room for a documentary interview. It’s a beautiful room, with dark wood-paneled walls, antique furnishings, a case containing awards and trophies. It looks like the home of someone who has led an interesting and successful life.The space belongs to Leonard Fife (Richard Gere), a documentarian and something of a left-wing celebrity living in Montreal with his wife and creative partner of many years, Emma (Uma Thurman). Fife is dying. But he’s agreed to allow two former students, Malcolm (Michael Imperioli) and Diana (Victoria Hill), themselves documentary filmmakers, to interview him on camera. They are champing at the bit to memorialize him, but Fife’s motives in agreeing are not purely about the film.The themes running through much of Schrader’s work, especially lately, revolve around redemption — the messiness of it, the possibility of it, the impossibility of it. The man who wrote “Taxi Driver” has, in his 70s, given us “First Reformed,” “The Card Counter” and “Master Gardener,” movies about solitary men wrestling with the task of living in a world that humanity has wrecked, and the dread of discovering oneself personally unforgivable for one’s place in it. A recurring line from “First Reformed” feels like a precis for all of these: Will God forgive us?“Oh, Canada” circles around this theme, too. But while the men of the recent trilogy have preferred to pour their thoughts into journals, Fife is the kind of person who bottles everything up, able to move forward only by ditching the past. His life — at least before he crossed the border into Canada as a much younger man, leaving everything behind — is a series of secrets that not even his wife was fully aware of. His admirers, and history, see his crossing to Canada as bold protest against the Vietnam draft. But the story is more complicated, and now he feels he must get it off his chest before he crosses another border.In other words, he must confess. This religious practice, confession, is the beating soul of “Oh, Canada.” It’s signaled early: When the documentary crew is preparing the room for Fife, they awkwardly move a decorated Christmas tree out of the shot, revealing a portrait of some clergyman on the wall. Then, as the filmmakers get started with the shoot, they tell Fife that they’re going to be using the technology he developed, which seems to be the Interrotron we associate with the work of Errol Morris. It creates a way for an interview subject to feel as if they’re maintaining eye contact with the interviewer while actually looking directly into the camera lens. Morris (and, presumably, the fictional Fife) has said that this leads to more revelation. He’s also compared the tool’s results, its ability to rip away self-consciousness, to Freud’s psychoanalysis couch.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 Kill Room’ Review: Uma Thurman and Samuel L. Jackson Reunite

    The “Pulp Fiction” actors Uma Thurman and Samuel L. Jackson reunite in a bloody saga that is past its “best by” date, but includes an all-star supporting cast.As far as “Pulp Fiction” pairings go, the actors Uma Thurman and Samuel L. Jackson in the satirical crime comedy “The Kill Room” generate more pleasure than seeing Bruce Willis and John Travolta in last year’s hackneyed action thriller “Paradise City.”This is because “The Kill Room,” directed by Nicol Paone from a script by Jonathan Jacobson, gives them a good deal of scenery to chew on together, at least at the beginning.Thurman, a producer on the film, plays Patrice, a gallerist in Manhattan who is refusing to crumble as she faces a set of financial shortfalls. Jackson plays Gordon, a bialy craftsman known to his associates as “Black Dreidel,” whose Jersey City bakery is a front for organized crime.Gordon looks after an assassin, Reggie (Joe Manganiello), whose hits are making them enough cash to potentially alert the authorities. As a cover, he instructs Reggie to start painting and enlists Patrice in a money-laundering scheme in which each canvas represents a murder, and is sold for a respectable amount of money via a respectable check.But the script’s sendup of the gallery world is stale, as is its depiction of organized crime, which has a group of vulgar Russian guys at the top. The premise rests upon a tired and philistine notion about modern art, here iterated by an indignant criminal’s protest, “My five-year-old makes better paintings than that with his fingers.”And while the supporting cast is replete with performers we like to see — Debi Mazar, Larry Pine, and Thurman’s daughter, Maya Hawke, as a feminist artist — the script, in the end, does little to support them.The Kill RoomRated R for violence, language. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Hollywood Stargirl’ Review: Starting Anew in La La Land

    Julia Hart’s bubbly sequel picks up the story in summertime and reframes around Stargirl, a character who in the first movie was auxiliary by design.After I read Jerry Spinelli’s best-selling Y.A. book “Stargirl,” titled for a quirky free spirit who spices up life for a diffident boy, I privately logged the name as a shorthand for stock female characters conjured to make men feel alive.Julia Hart’s movie adaptation of “Stargirl” reproduced the novel’s more noxious clichés by locking us inside the male protagonist’s point of view and according Stargirl (Grace VanderWaal), a do-gooder ukulelist in suspenders, all the interiority of a decorative urn.Loyal fans may then be startled to see that Hart’s sequel, “Hollywood Stargirl” (on Disney+), takes a hard left turn into the carefree young lady’s world. The movie picks up during the summer before Stargirl’s senior year, when her costume designer mother (Judy Greer) relocates them to Los Angeles. Scarcely a day passes in the new city before the flower child meets the wholesome Evan (Elijah Richardson), an aspiring filmmaker who casts her as his co-star in a low-budget musical.“Hollywood Stargirl” could be seen as a filmmaking exercise. How do you build a story around a character who was auxiliary by design? Hart’s solutions are manifold, but her most effective one is to quash the grating altruism that drove Stargirl in the first movie. In its place is a more balanced, authentic charisma. Numerous breathy pop song performances — including one where Stargirl duets with a washed-up musician played by Uma Thurman — leave little time for emotional development, but then again, when you’re starting out as a stargirl, how much personal growth do you need?Hollywood StargirlRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. Watch on Disney+. More

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    Renée Fleming and Uma Thurman Share an Odyssey

    The actress and opera star come together in “Penelope,” a Homeric monodrama by André Previn and Tom Stoppard, at Carnegie Hall.When the polymathic musician André Previn died in 2019, he left behind an unfinished score: “Penelope,” a monodrama he was writing for the star soprano Renée Fleming.It was set to premiere that year at Tanglewood to celebrate Previn’s 90th birthday. Instead, the performance became, “as it were, in memoriam,” the playwright Tom Stoppard, who wrote the work’s text, said in a recent interview.That the premiere happened at all was something of a miracle; the incomplete score’s pages weren’t even in an easily discernible order. But David Fetherolf, Previn’s longtime editor, reconstructed and completed the piece, then published a final version after the Tanglewood performance. And now the original performers — Fleming; the pianist Simone Dinnerstein; the Emerson String Quartet; and the actress Uma Thurman, as Fleming’s speaking avatar — are reuniting to bring “Penelope” to Carnegie Hall on Sunday.Previn and Stoppard had collaborated before, on the 1977 play “Every Good Boy Deserves Favour,” but Stoppard said that he was reluctant to take on a project like “Penelope” because “I don’t really have any musical intelligence.” Still, Fleming — for whom Previn had composed works including the opera “A Streetcar Named Desire” — kept asking for a monodrama, and Previn eventually persuaded Stoppard to do it.What Stoppard came up with was a retelling of Homer’s “Odyssey” from the perspective of Penelope, Odysseus’ wife, who waits 20 years for her husband to return from the Trojan War and fends off scores of suitors ready to take his place.“The only idea I had about her was that she starts off by resenting the way that she’s perceived by posterity,” Stoppard said. “The first couple of pages are quite slangy, modernistic and ironic, and even sarcastic. I wanted to end up with a feeling which was not about any kind of grievance she was holding, but about the pain she had gone through. And I wanted to account for her being a byword for wisdom.”If set to music, Stoppard’s original draft would have run for about two hours, Fleming said during a recent video interview with Thurman. As a solution, the piece evolved to portray Penelope with two performers: one singing, one speaking. “Both the soprano and the narrator are Penelope, and should be presented as such,” Fetherolf notes in the published score.Fleming, left, and Thurman, right, with the pianist Simone Dinnerstein and the Emerson String Quartet at the 2019 premiere of “Penelope” at Tanglewood.Hilary ScottThe two performers pass the narrative back and forth, sometimes completing each other’s sentences — the sung part poetically spare (at least relatively, given Stoppard’s idiosyncratic verbal complexity), the spoken one elevated and melodic. In the interview, Fleming and Thurman discussed sharing the role, and what it means to tell Penelope’s story today. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Renée, you have been involved with this from the start, but Uma, what was the appeal of the project for you?UMA THURMAN Renée. And Tom, whose work I have known all my life, and who I met when I was a teenager and was sort of daunted by his work and his beautiful, complex use of language.RENÉE FLEMING Uma, the fact that you were involved was so perfect. You are the archetype. You just stand for everything that we imagine Penelope to be, in your professional persona. I think of you as a Greek goddess: her strength, her ability to say no for 20 years and be clever and work around all of these men. I really cannot think of anybody better to do this with.THURMAN It was very hair-raising: I was in this play at Williamstown when we performed “Penelope” at Tanglewood, and I was stepping into the situation of Tom’s muscular, articulate language inserted into the music.Whenever music and language meet, it’s so different from being in a drama or comedy in theater. When you put language to music, it becomes very specific: the pacing, the dividing of words and sentences; it all has to obey the music. It’s a challenge that makes me feel like I’m doing things for the first time, as if you had to fix a bicycle and then you had to go work on a plane. You need the same skill set, but it doesn’t feel like it.FLEMING When I’ve done theater, even musical theater, I have felt completely untethered because I didn’t have the musical framework. It was terrifying to me; there was so much space.THURMAN It’s kind of like a white space. But actually there has to be an architecture inside of it. In this piece, we do switch between those two disciplines and mediums in a beautifully compact way.The spoken text is nevertheless quite musical. What goes into bringing that out in the delivery?THURMAN It’s a lot of breaking things down into patterns of vowel sounds and muscular nouns that paint pictures, and finding tempo and space. This comes from circling vowels and choosing T’s and these kinds of things. But in general, I think that Tom Stoppard’s use of language is elevated. He has a vocabulary triple the normal usage of anyone. I’ve had some very keen eyes help me on that, too. I wouldn’t interpret Stoppard with only my mind.FLEMING I think he’s a genius, honestly. During my first engagement at the Royal Opera in London, I saw “Arcadia,” which was brand-new then, and I was completely hooked. Vocally, “Penelope” is like a long recitative. André was by nature melodic, but for this, because of all the text, I’m just singing words on pitch. And I’m working as hard as I can to make them understood.How did this piece change your relationship with Penelope as a character?FLEMING What I said to Tom was, I want to know why Penelope waited. But that didn’t register with him, and he’s Tom Stoppard, so obviously he wrote it as he saw it. There’s a lot in the original story that we bristle at today — like the killing of all those handmaidens, because they were doing what they were coerced to do? He didn’t soften any of those points.THURMAN Interestingly, having been a great fan of the myth since childhood, I just bought a nice children’s collection for my 9-year-old and was reading to her and freshly engaging with it. We’re dealing with our history; let’s be real. Tom did redact one reference, which had to do with women’s work. It wasn’t coming from him, it was an interpretation of our history, but it was too much.FLEMING From the beginning, one of the things I connected with was this incredible device of her weaving and unweaving her tapestry every night, for years. To me that notion is so musical. Every version of Goethe’s “Faust” has some sort of weaving aria. And that was something I admired, how clever Penelope was, and her strength of conviction.THURMAN She also says, “In tears we outdid each other in forgiving.” And her defense of herself and honoring her marriage and her choice of which man will take her father’s property — the enormous skill that she has to put into play to defend herself. She’s an admirable politician. And the politics in which she is exercising her rights and her choice are not the politics in which we exercise rights and choice today.What goes, then, into her earning the title Penelope the Wise by the end?FLEMING Well, she survived. She survived by wit and she was — as you said, Uma — wise enough to forgive. More