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      ‘Argylle’ Review: A Cat Cannot Save It

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      A simulacrum of a spy movie offers few pleasures and plenty of headaches.Last year, while Hollywood’s actors and writers were on strike, people often asked me why the unions had such a bee in their collective bonnet about artificial intelligence. A.I. could never write a screenplay as well as a human, they said. Wouldn’t that ultimately spell doom for any studio that tried to replace their writers, and the whole thing would right itself on its own?My answer, then and now, was that it wouldn’t matter if the screenplay was good. Audiences have become so accustomed to watching movies and TV shows — excuse me, content, half-watched from behind a phone screen — that resembles something they liked once that A.I.’s regurgitations will not feel out of place. It doesn’t have to be better, I said. It just has to be adequate.“Argylle” was not, to my knowledge, written by A.I. (It was written by Jason Fuchs.) But it perfectly embodies the soulless, human-free feel that I worry about. It is ostensibly a tribute to spy movies of an earlier age, not clever enough to be a spoof and certainly not satire. But a homage shows affection for, understanding of and respect toward the thing it is honoring. “Argylle” feels pasted together by a robot manipulating some kind of spy Magnetic Poetry.What pleasure is extractable in “Argylle,” directed by Matthew Vaughn, lies in its mild surprises. Let’s just say the protagonist, Elly Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard, very wide-eyed), is a best-selling spy novelist and, despite her protestations, the very epitome of a cat lady. (Her Scottish fold cat, Alfie, appears entirely computer generated even when I think they surely were using a real cat, and his presence seems calculated to add some whimsy to the plot. It does not.) She lives alone in a nicely appointed cabin nestled between mountains in Colorado, and she is afraid of dating and of flying. Instead she taps away at her novels, which have legions of fans.But stuck on the ending of the latest installment, she hops on a train to visit her mother (Catherine O’Hara), and has the bad luck to find herself seated across from a grungy-looking guy named Aidan (Sam Rockwell). He is reading her latest novel, “Argylle,” named for the fictional spy she both writes about and sees everywhere (played by Henry Cavill, sporting an overemphasized widow’s peak). She tries not to let on who she is; she fails; and then, out of nowhere, things go haywire.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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      Looking to Watch Movies and Make Friends? Join the Club.

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      Around New York City, there’s a robust circle of film enthusiasts showing offbeat movies in bars and shops, where lingering afterward is welcomed.At Heart of Gold, a cozy bar in Queens, a mad scientist recently brought to life a corpse that went on a blood-drenched rampage. But the people nursing their beers there didn’t call the authorities. They cheered.That’s because the undead were marauding on a screen, set up at the front of the bar, that was illuminated by “Re-Animator,” Stuart Gordon’s 1985 horror-science fiction splatterfest. The occasion was a Monday night gathering of the Astoria Horror Club, which meets regularly to watch scary movies over hot dogs, mulled wine and other anything-but-popcorn concessions.Before the film, Tom Herrmann and Madeleine Koestner, the club’s co-founders, introduced “Re-Animator” with a trigger warning about a sexual assault scene and a reminder to generously tip the staff. About 35 people watched the movie seated, but others stood, complimenting the onscreen mayhem with shrieking, gasping and, as a decapitated head got tossed around, an explosion of applause.The Astoria Horror Club is just one of many film clubs that, while not new in concept, are quietly thriving in and around New York City. At many of these events, movies are shown not in traditional theaters but in bars, shops and other makeshift spaces, for small groups of people, many of whom arrive early for good seats and stay afterward to gush and vent.The screenings are open to the public, but mostly it’s Gen Zers and millennials who are joining strangers to watch movies that, in many cases, are for niche tastes and were made before streaming was a thing.These kinds of films are programmed regularly at the city’s revival houses, like Film Forum and Metrograph. But what these film clubs offer is ample space and time, where debate and friendships can blossom without leaving your seat. For cheap, too: At chain theaters, tickets can be more than $20 apiece, not including food and drinks. Many of these film clubs are free to attend, although patrons are asked to pony up for beer or bites.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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      Stream These 11 Movies Before They Leave Netflix in February

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      “Dune” and “Snowpiercer” are among the action epics, dramas and teen comedies leaving soon for U.S. subscribers. Watch them while you can.Family fun, action epics, historical dramas, teen comedy — there’s a little something for everyone among the titles leaving Netflix in the United States in February. (Dates indicate the final day a title is available.)‘Chicken Run’ (Feb. 14)Stream it here.With the long-awaited made-for-Netflix sequel “Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget” having hit the service barely six weeks ago, you’d think Netflix would have licensed the original installment for a bit longer. Frankly, they should keep it around even if there weren’t I.P. to service — this is one of the most delightful family pictures of the 2000s, a fast-paced and very funny riff on “The Great Escape” and its ilk. Assembled with the customary care and wit by the stop-motion masterminds at Aardman Animations (the crew behind Wallace and Gromit), it’s a delight for kids and grown-ups alike.‘Prometheus’ (Feb. 14)Stream it here.In 1979, the director Ridley Scott had his first big hit with “Alien,” an ingeniously conceived and cleverly executed mash-up of an alien adventure and a haunted-house horror movie. The series continued in the hands of directors like James Cameron and David Fincher, while Scott continued to hone his distinctive style; this 2012 installment was his return to the franchise. Some were disappointed that the results weren’t merely “Alien” redux, but credit to Scott for making “Prometheus” an exploration of the themes and aesthetics that preoccupied him at that point in his long career, rather than merely retreading a past success. The special effects are astonishing, the production design is spot-on and the performances (particularly Charlize Theron as a villainous upper manager and Michael Fassbender as an enigmatic android) are memorable.‘Real Steel’ (Feb. 14)Stream it here.It’s not exactly a promising premise: a washed-up boxer turned sleazy promoter finds a champion on the underground robot-boxing circuit, bonding with his estranged son in the process. To call it hypercalculated is an understatement (our critic parsed its DNA as “‘Transformers’ meets ‘E.T.’ meets ‘Rocky’ meets ‘The Champ,’” and that’s not far off), but as Roger Ebert liked to say, it’s not what a movie’s about, but how it’s about it. The director Shawn Levy orchestrates the events with earnestness, refusing the urge to look down on the material (or the audience), and he has an invaluable partner in the movie’s star, Hugh Jackman, who plays the slimy lead without pulling his punches, yet retains enough of his inherent charisma to make us root for his inevitable redemption arc.‘Operation Finale’ (Feb. 19)Stream it here.Oscar Isaac is in fine form as a tough but sensitive Nazi hunter tasked with finding and extracting Adolf Eichmann (Ben Kingsley), one of the architects of the Final Solution, from his hide-out in Argentina to stand trial in Jerusalem. This true story is efficiently dramatized by the director Chris Weitz (whose filmography, which includes such divergent efforts as “American Pie” and “About A Boy,” might not make him an obvious choice for a tough historical drama), and though Matthew Orton’s screenplay includes juicy supporting roles for the likes of Nick Kroll, Mélanie Laurent and Haley Lu Richardson, its best scenes put Isaac and Kingsley toe to toe and watch them work.‘Babylon Berlin’: Seasons 1-3 (Feb. 28)Stream it here.This German crime epic became an international sensation when it began airing in 2017 — reportedly the most expensive television program ever produced in its home country. Based on the best-selling novels by Volker Kutscher and brought to life by a trio of writer-directors (Achim von Borries, Henk Handloegten and Tom Tykwer, the latter of “Run Lola Run” and “Cloud Atlas”), this sprawling, handsomely mounted narrative is set in the underworld of Germany during the Weimar Republic, the wild and fruitful period that preceded the Third Reich. It’s dizzyingly complex and giddily entertaining, but also timely; as Handloegten noted on its premiere: “All these people didn’t fall from the sky as Nazis. They had to become Nazis.”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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      Minute-Long Soap Operas Are Here. Is America Ready?

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      Popularized in China during the pandemic, ReelShort and other apps are hoping to bring minute-by-minute melodramas to the United States.When Albee Zhang received an offer to produce cheesy short-form features made for phones last spring, she was skeptical, and so, she declined.But the offers kept coming. Finally, Ms. Zhang, who has been a producer for 12 years, realized it could be a profitable new way of storytelling and said yes.Since last summer, she has produced two short-form features and is working on four more for several apps that are creating cookie-cutter content aimed at women.Think: Lifetime movie cut up into TikTok videos. Think: soap opera, but for the short attention span of the internet age.The biggest player in this new genre is ReelShort, an app that offers melodramatic content in minute-long, vertically shot episodes and is hoping to bring a successful formula established abroad to the United States by hooking millions of people on its short-form content.“The Double Life of My Billionaire Husband” is one of the many short features you can watch on ReelShort, an app that offers short dramatic content meant to be watched on phones. ReelShort

      @reelshortapp On your 18th birthday, the Moon Goddess granted you a RED wolf. She said a new journey awaited you, but there were also evil forces after your power… Called weak your whole life, what POWER could you possibly have?! #fyp #reelshort #binge #bingeworthy #bingewatching #obsessed #obsession #mustwatch #witch #alpha #werewolf #moon #wolfpack #booktok #luna #drama #film #movie #tiktok #tv #tvseries #shortclips #tvclips #filmtok #movietok #dramatok #romance #love #marriage #relationship #couple #dramatiktok #filmtiktok #movietiktoks #saturday #saturdayvibes #saturdaymood #saturdaymotivation #saturdayfeels #saturdayfeeling #weekend #weekendvibes ♬ original sound – ReelShort APP 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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      Can You Match Up These Short Stories and Their Screen Adaptations?

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      This 1950 film, a psychological thriller about four differing eyewitness accounts concerning a pair of crimes, was directed by Akira Kurosawa and is considered a cinematic masterpiece. Most of the script was adapted from “In a Bamboo Grove,” a short story by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa, with elements of another Akutagawa story as well. What is the name of the film? More

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      Malia Obama at the Sundance Film Festival

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      The former first daughter’s short, “The Heart,” focuses on a sensitive man racked with guilt when his mother dies after they have an argument.If you’re a celebrity seeking to rebrand, the Sundance Film Festival can offer a useful assist. From Marvel superheroes seeking an indie turn to teenage movie stars hoping to segue into spicy adult roles, the snowy event is the perfect place to debut a new direction.This year’s big rebrand was so skillfully executed that many people I ran into here at Sundance didn’t even know it had happened at all. If they had, we might have gotten a mob scene at one of the typically sedate short-film showcases, where an 18-minute project called “The Heart” premiered from a fledgling filmmaker credited as Malia Ann, though she’s much better known as Malia Obama, the daughter of the former president.Now 25, Obama is no Hollywood neophyte: After interning at the Weinstein Company in 2017, she studied filmmaking at Harvard as a visual and environmental studies major and then, upon graduation, wrote for the Amazon series “Swarm.” That show was cocreated by Donald Glover, who also served as executive producer of “The Heart” and has been helping to steer Obama’s nascent career: “The first thing we did was talk about the fact that she will only get to do this once,” Glover told GQ last year. “You’re Obama’s daughter. So if you make a bad film, it will follow you around.”That’s not a fate likely to befall “The Heart,” a well-shot and spare debut. Effectively a two-hander, the short stars singer-actor Tunde Adebimpe as Joshua, a sensitive man who still lives with his mother (LaTonya Borsay). After they have a passive-aggressive fight about the groceries and share a silent, side-by-side TV dinner, Joshua goes upstairs for a shower. Minutes later, his mother clutches her chest, collapses to the floor and dies alone.Tunde Adebimpe in a scene from “The Heart.”Sundance InstituteRacked with guilt, Joshua finds it hard to move on, not least because he must now carry around a jar containing his mother’s preserved heart, as per her will. But he gets a second chance of sorts when he encounters a stranger on the street who looks just like his departed mother. Determined to say the things he never got to tell her when she was alive, Joshua ultimately learns that maybe he should go a little bit easier on himself.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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      Herbert Coward, Actor Who Played Toothless Man in ‘Deliverance,’ Dies at 85

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      The actor was killed in a motor vehicle accident in North Carolina, the authorities said.Herbert Coward, the actor whose modest career included the small but memorable role of Toothless Man in the 1972 thriller “Deliverance,” was killed on Thursday in a motor vehicle accident in North Carolina. He was 85.Mr. Coward died after he drove onto U.S. Highway 23 in Haywood County in the western part of the state and was struck by a truck, said Sgt. Marcus Bethea, a North Carolina State Highway Patrol spokesman. A passenger in Mr. Coward’s vehicle, Bertha Brooks, 78, was also killed, as were a Chihuahua and pet squirrel, Sergeant Bethea said.Mr. Coward, who lived in Canton, N.C., in Haywood County, was often seen with his pet squirrel, according to local news reports.The 16-year-old driver of the truck was taken to a hospital with minor injuries, according to Sergeant Bethea. He said that it was unclear what had led to the crash and that no charges had been filed.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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      For ‘Barbie’ Fans Online, a Bitterly Ironic Oscar Snub

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      Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie missed Academy Award nominations for director and actress, respectively — a fact that was a little too on the nose for some.When the 2024 Oscar nominations were announced this morning, the snubs of the two most prominent women involved in “Barbie” — the director, Greta Gerwig, and the lead actress, Margot Robbie — became the breakout story.The top-grossing film of 2023, passing the $1 billion mark worldwide, is based on the imagined life and times of the iconic Mattel doll. A cultural phenomenon on its own terms, “Barbie,” along with “Oppenheimer,” became half of an unusually thoughtful summer blockbuster duo released on the same day in July (“Barbenheimer”): nothing to sneeze at.As it turns out, the internet has strong opinions about today’s announcement.“Let me see if I understand this: the Academy nominated ‘Barbie’ for Best Picture (eight nominations total) — a film about women being sidelined and rendered invisible in patriarchal structures — but not the woman who directed the film. Okay then,” read a viral X post by the writer Charlotte Clymer.The film wasn’t completely shut out — it was nominated for best picture, while Ms. Gerwig picked up a nomination with Noah Baumbach for adapted screenplay, Ryan Gosling for supporting actor, and America Ferrera for supporting actress. But the fact that Mr. Gosling was tabbed for his towheaded Ken, who discovers the idea of patriarchy and then attempts to dominate Barbieland, before Ms. Robbie’s character destroys gender-based oppression, was too much for some to take.“We’re actually doing patriarchy very well,” the writer Jodi Lipper wrote in an Instagram story, quoting a Ken line from the film.(In a statement released today, Mr. Gosling wrote, “To say that I’m disappointed that they are not nominated in their respective categories would be an understatement.”)Indeed, because “Barbie” functions as a commentary on sexism and a metacommentary on its own place in feminist discourse, the movie itself was the first place some of its fans reached to express their outrage over the snubs.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