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      Iranian Film at South by Southwest London Offers a Dose of Hope

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      Amirali Navaee’s new film, “Sunshine Express,” screening next at South by Southwest London, is a project more focused on hope than politics.For the Iranian writer and director Amirali Navaee, portraying his country is not about depicting sadness and tragedy, which he feels has come to define the onscreen portrayal of his home in recent years.Iranian filmmakers have been as much in the news as their films have been over the past decade. The writer and director Mohammad Rasoulof fled Iran last year after being sentenced to eight years in prison while finishing “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” which tells the story of a family torn apart by protests that were violently crushed by the Iranian government in 2022-23. His harrowing journey has been well-documented, and the film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last year, with Rasoulof in attendance, where it received a special award from the competition jury. It was later nominated for best international feature at the Academy Awards.The Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, whose films “A Separation” (2012) and “The Salesman” (2017) both won Oscars for best international feature, refused to attend the Academy Awards the second time he won in protest over President Trump’s executive order that blocked entry of citizens from Iran and several other predominantly Muslim countries to the United States.And “Un Simple Accident,” from the Iranian writer-director Jafar Panahi, was awarded the Palme d’Or at Cannes last month. Panahi has been imprisoned several times in Iran because of his work but has continued to make movies in defiance of the Iranian government.“Sunshine Express” tells the story of people in a role-playing game who hope to win a cash prize.Distorted PicturesFor his first feature-length film, Navaee (pronounced nah-vah-YEE), who is also a choreographer and visual artist, said he wanted to express something more complex and less overtly political than other Iranian films. The project, “Sunshine Express,” debuted in February at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and is making its British premiere at South by Southwest London on Wednesday. Shot in a warehouse in Tehran on a small budget (Navaee, 42, said many of his friends helped finance the movie), it tells the story of people in a role-playing game on a train headed to a place called Hermia in the hopes of winning a cash prize.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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      5 New Movies Our Critics Are Talking About This Week

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      Whether you’re a casual moviegoer or an avid buff, our reviewers think these films are worth knowing about.A visual feast that’s too overstuffed.Mia Threapleton and Benicio Del Toro in “The Phoenician Scheme.”TPS Productions/Focus Features‘The Phoenician Scheme’In the latest from Wes Anderson, a shady business tycoon enlists his religious daughter to pull off a convoluted plan.From our review:It’s overstuffed, and thus skims and skitters across the surface of everything it touches, only glancing here and there before it’s taking off to the next story beat, the next exquisitely detailed composition. A breath or two or 10 might have been in order, a moment to contemplate what the movie’s getting at. You sometimes get the feeling it’s afraid to look too hard at itself.In theaters. Read the full review.Doesn’t earn its black belt.Jackie Chan, left, and Ben Wang in “Karate Kid: Legends.”Jonathan Wenk/Sony Pictures‘Karate Kid: Legends’Ralph Macchio and Jackie Chan return as karate masters in this franchise reboot directed by Jonathan Entwistle.From our review:There is at once a roughshod, zippy energy coupled with a sedateness here that results from the simple fact that the film never quite knows how to square the pure awkwardness of two teachers — two stars from different eras of a franchise — instructing a karate kid at once. Their fan service pairing, then, leaves us with the distinct feeling of two wink-wink cameos shoehorned into a commercial.In theaters. Read the full review.Critic’s PickHaunting horror with spirited performances.Jonah Wren Phillips, left, and Sally Hawkins in “Bring Her Back.”Ingvar Kenne/A24‘Bring Her Back’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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      Power Outage in Cannes During Film Festival Is Sabotage, Officials Say

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      An arson attack and damage to a transmission tower cut off power in the area, the authorities said. The festival’s closing ceremony on Saturday is scheduled to proceed normally.French authorities said on Saturday that a power outage in the Cannes area in southeastern France that briefly disrupted the film festival there was caused by acts of sabotage, including arson at a substation and damage to a transmission tower.About 160,000 homes in Cannes and the surrounding area were left without power for hours, according to RTE, France’s electrical grid operator, which said service was gradually being restored. The outage interrupted some screenings at the film festival, which quickly switched over to its own generators. Organizers said the closing ceremony Saturday evening — when the Palme d’Or, the festival’s top prize, is awarded — would proceed normally.Laurent Hottiaux, the state representative for the Alpes-Maritimes area, which includes Cannes, said the outage was caused by “major damage to network installations” near the city, including the arson attack and damage to the tower. “All resources are being mobilized to identify, track down, arrest and bring to justice the perpetrators of these acts,” Mr. Hottiaux said in a statement.RTE said the outage started with an overnight fire at a substation west of Cannes. Firefighters brought the blaze under control, and electricity was restored by diverting power from other lines.But around 10 a.m., the company also detected an unstable pylon on a separate line east of the city that was threatening to topple, forcing crews to cut power in the area once more. “We need transparency and fast answers,” Éric Ciotti, a right-wing lawmaker representing the Alpes-Maritimes, said on X, where he posted a photo of a leaning electrical pylon.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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      Give Yourself a Break, Tom Cruise. Give Us All a Break.

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      The new Tom Cruise movie, “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning,” is nearly as exhausting to watch as it must have been to make. Mr. Cruise famously does his own stunts, one of the movie’s biggest selling points. But it’s hard to suspend disbelief watching a picture when you’re thinking about how much Tiger Balm went into its making. Is it possible Mr. Cruise and audiences alike would be better off if he didn’t go quite so hard? You can admire his stamina at 62, but a movie shouldn’t make you feel like you’ve been cornered at a party by a guy who can’t stop telling you how freaking amped he is.“Final Reckoning” — even the full title is taxing — is a movie so big, it has by my count both three MacGuffins and three set pieces with nuclear bombs that need to be disarmed before their timers go off. (Dayenu, as Jews sing at Passover; a single such blessing, or cliché, would have been enough.) We get to see Mr. Cruise dangle off not one but two biplanes and sprint back and forth across the streets of London with arms pumping manfully when he could have taken an Uber. For several scenes in which the necessities of plot and beefcake delivery force him to strip down to his boxer briefs, we also get to marvel at his perfectly toned senior body, which would be the envy at any recreational facility, not just the pickleball courts at the Villages.All movie stars, from Mary Pickford to Margot Robbie, are brands, as familiar and comforting in their way as Coke or Irish Spring, and almost as consistent. But Mr. Cruise, an A-lister across five decades now, has transcended even that exalted status. He’s become a genre unto himself, his movies akin to pornography in the sense that they trade not in illusion but in physical, bodily reality. He doesn’t so much act as endure, his stardom adjacent to martyrdom.“It’s actually hard to breathe,” he recently explained to People magazine, discussing the finer points of hanging off a biplane wing. “You’re so tired. Your eyesight’s blurry. There were times that I didn’t have the energy to get from the wing back into the cockpit, and I would have to almost fall asleep and wait till I had the energy to crawl back because we couldn’t land if I was on the wing. We landed, and I was so cold I couldn’t walk.”Mr. Cruise’s willingness to climb aboard real jet fighters, and subject his handsome face to unflattering G-forces, helped “Top Gun: Maverick” gross $1.5 billion worldwide in 2022 and return audiences to theaters postpandemic. The actor was widely credited with saving “Hollywood’s ass,” to quote (reportedly) Steven Spielberg. But how many things — movies, the world, his public image following its couch-jumping, Brooke Shields-hectoring nadir in the mid-2000s — does he have to save now that he’s nearly eligible for Medicare?When he’s not sprinting or dangling, Mr. Cruise can be a terrific actor, gifted with both talent and charisma, which you can see on display in films as varied as “Born of the Fourth of July,” “A Few Good Men,” “Jerry Maguire” and “Magnolia” (all made in the 20th century). Appearing in teen movies at the start of his career, he stood out as a minor character even among the loaded cast of “The Outsiders.” In “Risky Business” his charm not only held the screen’s center but also transformed what could have been a sour, New Hollywood-style satire of the American way into a rollicking Reagan-era salute to entrepreneurship. That wasn’t necessarily a good thing thematically, but it made Mr. Cruise a star.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 Best Movies of 2025, So Far

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      Our critics picked 10 films that you might have missed but that are worth your time on this long holiday weekend.“Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning” and the live-action “Lilo & Stitch” are flooding theaters this Memorial Day weekend. But if you don’t want to follow the crowd, it’s also a good time to catch up on some terrific films you may have missed earlier in the year. I asked our chief film critic, Manohla Dargis, and our movie critic, Alissa Wilkinson, to recommend releases worth your time. All are in theaters or available online.‘Sinners’In theaters.The story: The twins Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan) return from Al Capone’s Chicago to open a juke joint in Clarksdale, Miss. That’s when the devil, or rather, an Irish vampire, shows up in this talker of a film.Manohla Dargis’s take: Directed by Ryan Coogler, this “is a big-screen exultation — a passionate, effusive praise song about life and love, including the love of movies. Set in Jim Crow Mississippi, it is a genre-defying, mind-bending fantasia overflowing with great performances, dancing vampires and a lot of ideas about love and history.”Read the review; interviews with Coogler and Jordan, and other cast members; and a critic’s essay.‘I’m Still Here’Stream it on Netflix or rent it on most major platforms.Fernanda Torres in “I’m Still Here.”Alile Onawale/Sony Pictures ClassicsWe 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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      Do You Know the English Novels That Inspired These Movies and TV Shows?

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      Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about books that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions, video games and more. This week’s challenge is focused on popular books set in 18th- and 19th-century England that have been adapted for the screen. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the books and their filmed versions. More

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      Greg Cannom, Who Made Brad Pitt Old and Marlon Wayans White, Dies at 73

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      He won five Oscars as a makeup artist on movies in which characters transformed, like “Mrs. Doubtfire,” “White Chicks” and many more.Greg Cannom, an Oscar-winning movie makeup artist responsible for some of the most striking acts of movie magic in recent decades — including the transformation of Christian Bale into Dick Cheney in “Vice,” the creation of a giant expressive green head for Jim Carrey in “The Mask,” and the reverse aging of Brad Pitt in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” — died on May 3. He was 73.His death was announced by Rick Baker, a frequent collaborator and another of Hollywood’s most admired movie makeup artists, as well as by the IATSE Local 706 Make-Up Artists & Hair Stylists Guild. Neither source provided further details.An online fund-raising drive for Mr. Cannom posted two years ago listed a series of health challenges, including severe shingles, a staph infection, sepsis and heart failure.Mr. Cannom won Oscars for best makeup for his work on “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (1992), “Mrs. Doubtfire” (1993), “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (2008) and “Vice” (2018).In 2005, he won a “technical achievement” Oscar for the development of a modified silicone that could be used to apply fantastical changes to an actor’s face while retaining the appearance of skin and flesh.Robin Williams in “Mrs. Doubtfire.” Mr. Cannom won an Oscar for his work on the film.Getty ImagesWe 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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      HBO’s Streaming Service Becomes ‘HBO Max’ Again

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      Warner Bros. Discovery executives are reinstating the name HBO Max for the popular streaming service. It’s the fourth name change for the app in the last decade.It’s not Max. It’s HBO Max — again.In a surprise pivot, Warner Bros. Discovery executives announced Wednesday morning that the streaming service Max would be renamed HBO Max, reinstating the app’s old name and abandoning a contentious change that the company introduced two years ago.The reason for the change, executives explained, was straightforward.People who subscribe and pay $17 a month for the streaming service wind up watching HBO content like “The White Lotus” and “The Last of Us,” as well as new movies, documentaries and not a whole lot more.“It really is a reaction to being in the marketplace for two years, evaluating what’s working and really leaning into that,” Casey Bloys, the chairman of HBO content, said in an interview.HBO, a trailblazer of the cable era, has been on a very bumpy ride to finding an identity in the streaming era. There was HBO Go (2008), HBO Now (2015), HBO Max (2020), Max (2023) and now, once again, HBO Max (2025).Two years ago, Warner Bros. Discovery executives said that they meant well by changing the name to Max. Their overwhelming concern, the executives said, was that Discovery’s suite of reality shows — “Sister Wives,” “My Feet Are Killing Me” — risked watering down the HBO brand, which continued to produce award-winning series like “Succession.”Further, they said, HBO spent decades branding itself as a premium adult service. That was not exactly an ideal anchor for a streaming service that they envisioned would compete head-to-head with a general entertainment app like Netflix.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