Movies

Subterms

    More stories

    • 100 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      ‘The Union’ Review: Old Flames and Spy Games

      by

      When a mission goes pear-shaped, a covert operative (Halle Berry) turns to a secret weapon: her high school boyfriend (Mark Wahlberg).The “Mission: Impossible” series went missing in action this summer, but that’s no reason to settle for Netflix’s “The Union,” a depressing illustration of the wisdom that sometimes you shouldn’t buy — or stream — generic. The movie combines a catalog of elements from the Tom Cruise franchise (supersecret agents, exotic locales, stunts) with a high-concept twist so silly it might as well have been selected by A.I.: What if — hear this out — the lead operatives happened to be former high school sweethearts?“The Union,” directed by Julian Farino, kicks off in Trieste, Italy, with a blatant retread of the first “M:I” installment: The agents are on a mission to retrieve a traitor with a stolen hard drive. Suddenly, violence breaks out, and almost the whole team is killed. A survivor from the group, Roxanne (Halle Berry), pitches her boss, Tom (J.K. Simmons), on who to turn to for help: “If he’s anything like that guy I remember,” she says, “he’s exactly who we need.”“He” is her onetime boyfriend, Mike (Mark Wahlberg), now a construction worker in New Jersey who is hooking up with their seventh-grade English teacher (Dana Delany). Roxanne hasn’t seen him in 25 years when she approaches him in a bar. His credentials are that he is, in Roxanne’s words, “a nobody”: Because of the nature of the pilfered intelligence on the drive, she and Tom need someone who has left virtually no civic footprint.Besides, their spy outfit, the Union — so covert that half the intelligence community doesn’t know it exists and the other half regrets finding out, Roxanne says, as if reciting a tagline — prefers blue-collar guys to Ivy League suits. They are, in theory, way more fun than the C.I.A. (Stephen Campbell Moore appears as a stiff from Langley.) Mike used to be a star athlete and is accustomed to spending all day on a sky-high beam. With that background, shouldn’t a three-and-half-minute training montage suffice?The other Union members are defined largely by their specialties — physical force (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), psychology (Alice Lee), computing (Jackie Earle Haley) — and the movie makes a few feeble feints at fish-out-of-water humor. (Mike may never have left the tristate area before, but does he really not know what side of the road the British drive on?)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

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in Elections

      ‘Red Island’ Review: Madagascar Is Shifting Beneath Their Feet

      by

      Robin Campillo relies on the power of suggestion to sketch life in this former French colony, filtering it obliquely through a young white boy’s eyes.The striking rusty color that gives Madagascar the nickname the “great red island” comes from the rich iron content in its soil. The drama “Red Island” — about a white French boy from a military family living there in the early 1970s — suggests that a fair amount of blood has seeped into the earth, too. The boy is just 10 but he grasps more than other kids might because his experiences are filtered through the life of the French filmmaker Robin Campillo.The boy, Thomas (Charlie Vauselle, sweet and saucer-eyed), lives in a pleasant, airy house with plenty of room and a red-dirt backyard. There, tucked in a corner, he shuts himself up in a large wooden crate reading comics featuring Fantômette, a plucky female superhero whose adventures routinely come to life in his imagination. When he isn’t immersed in his comics, Thomas bikes around, gets into harmless trouble and observes his modest world, especially its people. He’s particularly attentive to his loving homemaker mother, Colette (a very good Nadia Tereszkiewicz), and his father, Robert (Quim Gutiérrez), an army officer.A drama about a child, his family, a social set, their adopted home and the larger world, “Red Island” is by turns seductively sultry and frustratingly elliptical, with a structure that brings to mind matryoshka dolls, those colorful nesting figurines of differing sizes. For the most part, Campillo introduces these nesting elements just fine; it’s integrating them that proves difficult. As befits his autobiographical subject, he fills in the details of Thomas’s worldview, a limited vantage that’s manifested by the crate he hides in. Those limits are also evident in the awkwardness with which Campillo tries to do justice to history and to Madagascar, which solidified its independence from France a decade before the story opens. There’s a dreamy innocence about Thomas that never meshes with the movie’s very adult, historical backdrop.“Red Island” is a coming-of-age story in which not all that much happens to the protagonist even as everything around him changes. You can sense that Thomas’s home life will soon take a turn by the naturalistic conversations that he overhears as well as some of the fraught scenes he witnesses. Campillo, who directed the very fine drama “BPM (Beats Per Minute),” about young AIDS activists in the early 1990s, has a talent for catching the charged energy and the friction that a room of people can produce when they’re thrown together in close quarters. Here, when some drunken officers and their wives dance in the family’s home, bodies pressing in toward one another, the circuitry of desiring and resentful looks is electric.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

    • 163 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Gena Rowlands, Actress Who Brought Raw Drama to Her Roles, Dies at 94

      by

      Gena Rowlands, the intense, elegant dramatic actress who, often in collaboration with her husband, John Cassavetes, starred in a series of introspective independent films, has died. She was 94.The death was confirmed by the office of Daniel Greenberg, a representative for Ms. Rowlands’s son, the director Nick Cassavetes. No other details were given.In June, her family said that she had been living with Alzheimer’s disease for five years.Ms. Rowlands, who often played intoxicated, deranged or otherwise on-the-verge characters, was nominated twice for best actress Oscars in performances directed by Mr. Cassavetes. The first was the title role in “A Woman Under the Influence” (1974), in which her desperate, insecure character is institutionalized by her blue-collar husband (Peter Falk) because he doesn’t know what else to do. The critic Roger Ebert wrote in The Chicago Sun-Times that Ms. Rowlands was “so touchingly vulnerable to every kind of influence around her that we don’t want to tap her because she might fall apart.”Her second nomination was for “Gloria” (1980), in which she starred as a gangster’s moll on the run with an orphaned boy.Ms. Rowlands and John Marley in “Faces,” which Renata Adler of The New York Times called “a really important movie” about “the way things are.” Like many of her movies, it was directed by Ms. Rowland’s husband, John Cassavetes.United Archives, via Getty ImagesBut it was “Faces” (1968), in which she starred as a young prostitute opposite John Marley, that first brought the Cassavetes-Rowlands partnership to moviegoers’ attention. Critics spread the word; Renata Adler described the film in The New York Times as “a really important movie” about “the way things are,” and Mr. Ebert called it “astonishing.”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

    • 213 Shares99 Views

      in Elections

      Taraji P. Henson, Keke Palmer and Uzo Aduba Turn Out to Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival

      by

      Summer on the island is packed with cultural events, and for many celebrities, politicians and filmmakers, the Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival is a highlight.“Ready for the Supremes?” the Legendary Chris Washington called out from a D.J. booth inside the packed auditorium at Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School on a recent August evening, as he played Motown hits for the crowd.It was one of the biggest nights of the 22nd annual Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival, a nine-day event devoted to celebrating Black filmmakers. The festival held on Martha’s Vineyard, the quaint Massachusetts island, has drawn luminaries like the actress Jennifer Hudson, the director Spike Lee and former President Barack Obama in summers past.Wednesday night’s crowd of about 800 was there for the premiere of “The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat,” the director Tina Mabry’s adaptation of the best-selling novel about a trio of lifelong girlfriends who call themselves the Supremes, after the 1960s girl group. Backstage, Uzo Aduba, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor and Sanaa Lathan, who star in the film, were posing for a row of photographers as they prepared for the debut screening.Ms. Aduba, who grew up in Massachusetts and occasionally visited the island as a child, said it was her first time attending the festival.“To see culture and art and our stories presented in this incredibly placid and elegant and green backdrop, which feels like it weds so many historic vacation moments for Black culture,” she said, “is wonderful.”Panelists at an event for female executives and influential women shared their wisdom.Gabriela Herman for The New York TimesWe 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

    • 113 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      ‘It Ends With Us’ Soars at the Box Office

      by

      The film, which cost $25 million to make, is on track to earn at least $45 million in North America on its opening weekend, analysts say.Colleen Hoover’s book “It Ends With Us” has been a fixture on the best-seller list for years. And now, the movie adaptation has become a smash at the box office. The $25 million film from Sony Pictures is on track to earn at least $45 million in the United States and Canada, box office analysts say.Starring Blake Lively, the romance is based on Ms. Hoover’s most popular book — one that was initially released in 2016 but reappeared on the best-seller list in the midst of the pandemic in 2021 and has since spent some 140 weeks there. Buoyed by TikTok, the book, about a complicated love triangle with undertones of domestic violence, has sold 8 million copies and found fans worldwide.The low-budget film comes at a time when there has been little in the marketplace geared to women, in contrast with last summer when “Barbie” earned $1.4 billion worldwide and became the highest-grossing film of the year. Sony took advantage of this dearth in the marketplace with a potent social media campaign that featured Ms. Lively, guest appearances by her husband, Ryan Reynolds, and the help of her friend Taylor Swift, who contributed the song “My Tears Ricochet” to the film and the trailer.On Friday alone, the PG-13 rated film earned $24 million as audiences tuned in to see Ms. Lively play a florist with a challenging past who falls for a sexy, abusive neurosurgeon played by Justin Baldoni, who also directed the film.The film’s performance is a welcome boost for the box office, which is still down some 15 percent since last year at this time.“Pure romance is not a big performer at the box office, but occasionally the right story based on the right book comes along, and with a well-cast female lead the movie catches fire,” said David A. Gross, a film consultant who publishes a newsletter on box office numbers. “That’s happening here.”Reviews have been middling. The New York Times called it “fitfully diverting, at times touching, often ridiculous and, at 2 hours and 10 minutes, almost offensively long.” Yet audiences are giving it high marks. The Rotten Tomatoes audience score is hovering at 94 percent positive and the exit score, as recorded by tracking service CinemaScore, is A-.The film will just miss the No. 1 slot for the weekend with Mr. Reynolds’s hit, “Deadpool vs. Wolverine,” holding on for its third frame. The Marvel movie will soon cross the $500 million threshold.Things weren’t as rosy for the Lionsgate adaptation of the video game “Borderlands,” which despite the star power of Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart and Jack Black will probably only gross in the single digits. It was a total misfire for the $115 million sci-fi comedy from the director Eli Roth. More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Festival Winners Crowd New York Film Festival Main Slate Lineup

      by

      Top titles from Cannes and Berlin, like Sean Baker’s “Anora” and Mati Diop’s “Dahomey,” join new work by Pedro Almodóvar, Steve McQueen and RaMell Ross.This fall’s New York Film Festival will feature celebrated prizewinners from Cannes and the Berlinale, organizers announced Tuesday, unveiling a main slate that will join new works from the filmmakers Pedro Almodóvar, Steve McQueen and RaMell Ross.The festival, which runs Sept. 27 to Oct. 14, will screen films from 24 countries and include two world premieres, five North American premieres and 17 American premieres.Ross’s film, “The Nickel Boys,” is an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel about two Black teenagers in a Jim Crow-era Florida reform school. It’s the opening-night selection. Almodóvar’s “The Room Next Door,” about a rekindled friendship between women played by Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton, will be the centerpiece. And the festival will close with Steve McQueen’s “Blitz,” starring Saoirse Ronan as a working-class single mother in London who gets separated from her 9-year-old son during World War II.Winners from Cannes and the Berlin Film Festival feature heavily in the festival’s main slate lineup.Cannes imports include the Palme d’Or winner “Anora,” from Sean Baker; the Grand Prix winner “All We Imagine as Light” from Payal Kapadia; best director winner Miguel Gomes’s “Grand Tour”; the two best-director winners from the Un Certain Regard section, Roberto Minervini with “The Damned” and Rungano Nyoni with “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl”; and special prize winner “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” from Mohammad Rasoulof.Berlinale veterans playing in New York include the Golden Bear prizewinner “Dahomey,” a documentary from Mati Diop about the complicated postcolonial legacy of artifacts from the former African kingdom; Philippe Lesage’s Quebecois coming-of-age drama, “Who by Fire”; and the documentary “No Other Land,” about the destruction of West Bank villages by the Israeli military, made over five years by a Palestinian-Israeli collective.Two festival mainstays, the filmmakers Hong Sang-soo and Wang Bing, will each have two films playing this fall.Hong is bringing “By the Stream,” about a former film director, and “A Traveler’s Needs,” which won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the Berlinale and stars Isabelle Huppert as an inexperienced French teacher in a Seoul suburb. (Hong also showed two films last year.)The second and third parts of Wang’s observational nonfiction “Youth” trilogy, titled “Youth (Hard Times)” and “Youth (Homecoming)” and focused on migrant textile workers in the Chinese district of Zhili, will also screen at the festival. The first part of the trilogy, “Youth (Spring),” was included in last year’s lineup.“The most notable thing about the films in the main slate — and in the other sections that we will announce in the coming weeks — is the degree to which they emphasize cinema’s relationship to reality,” the festival’s artistic director Dennis Lim said in a news release. “They are reminders that, in the hands of its most vital practitioners, film has the capacity to reckon with, intervene in and reimagine the world.” More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ Director Shawn Levy on Those Surprise Cameos

      by

      Shawn Levy explains the thinking behind specific cameos, what was saved from discarded scripts and how they made that end-credits tribute to Fox.Though the director Shawn Levy has spent the last several months promoting his new blockbuster, “Deadpool & Wolverine,” there was so much he couldn’t say until now.“This conversation will be tantamount to therapy for me,” Levy joked last week as he signed on to a video call to discuss cameos and plot elements that had to be kept hidden until after the film’s juggernaut opening weekend. (Major spoilers follow.)Though trailers sold the movie as a team-up between Ryan Reynolds’s meta mercenary, Deadpool, and Hugh Jackman’s surly mutant, Wolverine, the starry supporting cast includes some big surprises, including Jennifer Garner as the assassin Elektra, Wesley Snipes as the vampire hunter Blade and Channing Tatum as the card-tossing mutant Gambit. The film’s multiverse-spanning shenanigans also allow the return of Chris Evans, who retired his Captain America character in “Avengers: Endgame” but here reprises Johnny Storm, the “Fantastic Four” character he played back when 20th Century Fox owned key pieces of the Marvel portfolio.Levy said nearly all of those surprise cameos were hatched in Reynolds’s apartment, where much of the movie was conceived amid pie-in-the-sky brainstorming. “It was the two of us acting scenes out, passing a laptop back and forth and saying, ‘Hey, what if this?’” Levy recalled. “It invariably led to one of us texting that actor and just asking.”Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.Ryan has said that you both had trouble cracking the story before Hugh agreed to come on board. Was there anything from those early, Wolverine-less versions that you kept?A few disparate elements made it all the way through, and one of the bigger ones includes this notion of Wade going through a midlife malaise and selling used cars: This was a guy who had given up on his better self and was living a life of compromise. That survived through the Wolverine iteration of this movie, as did the imperative of having Wade’s chosen family factor in. And I remember [Paul] Wernick and [Rhett] Reese, who co-wrote the first “Deadpool” movies, pitching this idea of a Chris Evans misdirect very, very early: What if we could get Chris Evans and the audience thinks it’s Cap, but he’s actually coming back as Johnny Storm? It was such an A-plus idea that it survived every iteration of the story line.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

    • 175 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ Is the Type of of Superhero Movie the Franchise Once Mocked

      by

      Making fun of schlocky, overwrought superhero movies used to be the Deadpool signature. But with “Deadpool & Wolverine,” and Disney’s push into the Marvel Universe, that thread is lost.Deadpool movies might as well begin with a fun qualifier for audiences: This isn’t a typical superhero movie; in fact, all genres and tropes are ripe for mocking by this foul-mouthed mercenary hero.In the first “Deadpool,” in the midst of a fight that includes decapitation and maiming, Ryan Reynolds’s Deadpool says, “I may be super, but I am no hero. And yeah, technically this is a murder. But some of the best love stories start with a murder. And that’s exactly what this is: a love story.” In the sequel, Deadpool says, “Believe it or not, ‘Deadpool 2’ is a family film. True story,” as he creatively murders a whole warehouse of Russian criminals. Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” plays in the background.We’ve got a violent superhero movie that’s also a low-key sendup of tender rom-coms, then another violent superhero movie that pokes fun at the loving family film. So what’s “Deadpool & Wolverine”? Nothing as exciting — just another formulaic Marvel Cinematic Universe movie with a saucier rating.This third installment of the Deadpool franchise fails to deliver on that same knowing play with genre. The jokes are mostly about leaning heavily into the rules and standards of the superhero genre as orchestrated by Marvel — a bad omen for the Deadpool brand, formerly of 20th Century Fox before Disney acquired it in 2019.The new movie picks up a thread from the previous one when Deadpool uses a time-travel device to save the love of his life, Vanessa (Morena Baccarin). It’s a blatant deus ex machina, and the film casually undercuts its own emotional arc in order to make meta jokes about whether time travel could have changed the trajectory of Reynolds’s career.“Deadpool & Wolverine” seems to have forgotten its own joke about the earnest use of cheap plot devices like that — it dives headfirst into the commercial wholesomeness, overextended plotlines and shameless fan service that have come to define the majority of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the last few years. In the latest film, Wolverine’s back from the dead (see the end of “Logan” to catch up), thanks to the multiverse, and he and Deadpool team up to keep Deadpool’s timeline from being decimated by the Time Variance Authority (see “Loki” to catch up).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