Vikander, Alicia (1988- )

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    ‘The Assessment’ Review: Meticulously Planned Parenthood

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    A couple must endure a punishing evaluation process for permission to become parents in this sleek, hermetic science fiction.A sterile drama about state-controlled procreation, “The Assessment,” the first feature from the French director Fleur Fortuné, is visually stark and emotionally chilling. From the elegant severity of Jan Houllevigue’s production design to Magnus Jonck’s coolly unwelcoming cinematography, the movie repels warmth. By the end, you’ll want nothing so much as a woolly jumper.In a future dystopia, two married scientists, Mia and Aaryan (Elizabeth Olsen and Himesh Patel), live and work in their isolated seaside home. Aaryan designs virtual pets (the state has exterminated the real ones, presumably to conserve resources), while Mia experiments with sustainable methods of food production. Work, however, is not enough, and the couple wants a child — a desire that requires a weeklong assessment of their suitability as parents.Enter Virginia (a brilliantly creepy Alicia Vikander), the assessor who will subject them to an escalating program of mental and physical torment. Prim and impassive, she spies on them having sex and collects their body fluids, and her horrifying role-playing as a bratty toddler would make even the broodiest wife rethink her options. As Virginia’s behavior grows increasingly intrusive and even sinister, dislodging secrets that will shake Mia and Aaryan’s marriage, “The Assessment” builds to a baffling act of pointless destruction.Virginia has her own motivations, but the movie’s last-ditch attempt to absolve the character, and reveal the world beyond her repellent games, proves too little, too late. Prioritizing aesthetics over narrative, the film offers only superficial hints of a society riven by class and authoritarian politics: The wealthy enjoy artificially extended life spans beneath an invisible dome, while the rest inhabit an “old world” of deprivation and disease. Consequently, “The Assessment” — much like a brutally honest centenarian (an awesome Minnie Driver) whom Virginia invites to dinner — is much easier to respect than to love.The AssessmentRated R for forced sex and a frightening dinner party. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Henry VIII and Katherine Parr, Who Survived Him, Are the Focus of ‘Firebrand’

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      “Firebrand” focuses on his sixth spouse as she tries to outlast the ailing king and his treacherous court. “I thought of it as a thriller,” the director says.Midway through Karim Aïnouz’s “Firebrand,” King Henry VIII of England takes a break from playing bowls on the lawn to walk with his sixth wife, Katherine Parr. Gripping her arm tightly, limping heavily, the king, played with terrifying menace by Jude Law, offers a threat to those who betray him. “They know what would happen,” he says quietly, turning to face the queen. “We’d have to have their head cut off.” Alicia Vikander’s Queen Katherine smiles faintly. “I’m sure you would come up with something much more creative,” she says.“Firebrand,” which is based on the Elizabeth Freemantle novel “Queen’s Gambit” and opens Friday, is set during Henry’s final months, in 1546-1547. Katherine is trying to keep her head on her shoulders while the king, ill, paranoid and angry, grows increasingly suspicious of her alliance with religious reformers. Egged on by the poison-drip whisperings of the power-hungry bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner (Simon Russell Beale), who fears Katherine’s progressive leanings, a witch-hunt begins in an effort to convict her of heresy and treason.“I thought of it as a thriller,” said Aïnouz, 58, by phone last month from the Cannes Film Festival, where his movie, “Motel Destino,” was in competition. “There are so many stories about the wives who perished under Henry. Katherine was older, politically astute, intellectual, rebellious. She survived. And yet there were no movies about her. This was a way to write history that wasn’t about dead women.”Many people coming to the movie will know that Parr survived Henry, but not “what a battle of wills that survival entailed,” Tim Robey wrote in The Telegraph, after the film was shown in competition at Cannes last year. “This pungent, meaty historical drama posits them as mortal enemies not just in the domestic sphere: ideologically, they were on different pages of separate Bibles.”A historical drama was an unlikely choice for the Brazilian director’s first foray into English-language filmmaking after a career of critically lauded small-scale movies and documentaries. When the London producer Gabrielle Tana approached him in 2020 about “Firebrand,” his first thought, he said, was, “Did she really propose this to me?”Karim Aïnouz, the director, working with Law and Vikander on his first English-language film.Larry Horricks, via Roadside Attractions and VerticalWe 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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      ‘Firebrand’ Review: Placid Queen

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      Top-shelf actors and authentic Tudor table-setting fail to quicken this glumly unfocused take on the exploits of Henry VIII’s last wife, Katherine Parr.Not until I watched “Firebrand” did I think the sight of Jude Law’s naked behind could cause me to recoil rather than rejoice. Playing a late-career Henry VIII, Law is all rutting buttocks and barely mobile bulk, an obese, paranoid ruler with a weeping leg wound where maggots wriggle in ecstatic close-up. Law (and his director, Karim Aïnouz) might be laying it on thick, but his grotesque tyrant is the only thing lifting this dreary, ahistoric drama out of its narrative doldrums.Adapted from Elizabeth Fremantle’s 2012 novel, “Queen’s Gambit,” “Firebrand” seeks to highlight Henry’s sixth and last wife, Katherine Parr (Alicia Vikander), the only spouse to outlive the infamous king. Studious and devout, Parr conceals her Protestant sympathies while arguing in favor of women’s education and an English-language Bible. Her clandestine support for the poet and Protestant preacher Anne Askew (Erin Doherty), however, almost proves fatal when she’s accused of heresy by an oily bishop (Simon Russell Beale).Unfolding in and around Whitehall Palace in 1547, the movie is lavishly, oppressively costumed, the actors imprisoned by fabric and a screenplay that plays fast and loose with the historical record. A plummy voice-over describes Henry’s kingdom as “blood-soaked” and “plague-ridden,” though we see little of either plasma or pustules. What we see is a queen whose downcast demeanor speaks less of a firebrand than of a wife placating a husband who isn’t above spousal decapitation if a younger, saucier option should wiggle past.That Parr deserves a spotlight is easily argued. But the woman who believed herself chosen by God to influence the King is, despite Vikander’s skills, ill-served by this meandering, glum picture. So much so that, in just two brief appearances, Doherty’s vivid portrayal of the reformist Askew makes us wonder whom the film’s title is really memorializing.FirebrandRated R for spousal abuse and celebrity skin. Running time: 2 hours. In theaters. More

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      ‘Blue Bayou’ Review: No Direction Home

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      Justin Chon’s immigration melodrama counters its soggy storytelling with deeply felt performances.“Blue Bayou” opens on a close-up of Antonio LeBlanc (played by the writer and director, Justin Chon) interviewing for a job. Born in South Korea and raised from a child by adoptive parents in Louisiana, Antonio needs to supplement his income as a tattoo artist to support his wife (Alicia Vikander), his stepdaughter, Jessie (Sydney Kowalske), and an imminent new baby. It is immediately clear, though, that the unseen interviewer is less concerned with Antonio’s felony convictions than his origins.In its unsubtle way, “Blue Bayou” strives to draw attention to the precarious limbo inhabited by foreign-born adoptees whose citizenship was never finalized. When an innocent argument in a supermarket lands Antonio on the wrong side of two police officers — one of whom (Mark O’Brien) is Jessie’s biological father and the other (Emory Cohen) no more than a bundle of boorish clichés — the incident heralds a series of escalating threats to a life that’s already far from secure.These give the film a slow, sad drip of inevitability that’s lightened by the warmth and naturalism of Chon’s performance. Beautifully relaxed family scenes help us forgive the ponderous direction, as does a wonderfully low-key Linh-Dan Pham as an ailing Vietnamese American who befriends Antonio and tugs at his Asian identity. In these moments, we see a man with one foot on land and the other on water, his memory haunted by the image of his birth mother and a far-off lagoon. And as the faces and fates of real-life adoptees scroll past in a moving coda, Chon forces us to acknowledge how easily those who believe themselves settled can become in an instant displaced and dispossessed.Blue BayouRated R for racist language and violent law enforcement. Running time: 1 hour 59 minutes. In theaters. More