There are many voices in Mati Diop’s new documentary, “Dahomey” (in theaters), and one of them belongs to Artifact No. 26. “I lost myself in my dreams, becoming one with these walls, cut off from the land of my birth as if I was dead,” it says in French, its …
Read More »Five International Movies to Stream Now
‘In Her Place’ Stream it on Netflix. Chile’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for best international feature film is a historical psychodrama centered on a true story: In 1955, the writer María Carolina Geel shot and killed her lover in the crowded dining room of an upscale hotel in …
Read More »Is Hugh Grant’s Most Convincing Character ‘Hugh Grant’?
Hugh Grant has been suffering from brand confusion since 1994, when his performance in “Four Weddings and a Funeral” established him as a quintessentially British romantic hero of winning charm and diffidence. But his recent run of strange and sometimes creepy characters plays so effectively against type that you begin …
Read More »They’re ‘Saturday Night Live’ … and You’re Not
It’s easy to get lost watching “Saturday Night”: Jason Reitman’s new film drops us backstage at a moment of maximum confusion — 90 minutes before the 1975 debut of a new NBC show called “Saturday Night.” At the center of all the hubbub is creator-producer Lorne Michaels (played by Gabriel …
Read More »A Birth Scene So Taxing, Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh Needed to Rest
You wouldn’t expect the romantic drama “We Live in Time” to have an action scene, but it does — at least that’s how Andrew Garfield sees it. In the middle of the time-hopping story of a young couple battling a cancer diagnosis, there’s a hilarious yet touching sequence when Almut, …
Read More »Filmed in New York, Hold the Taxis and Radiators
On a rainy morning this past January, Roosevelt Avenue in the Flushing neighborhood of Queens was a stream of yellow cabs, honking buses and weaving cyclists. Nearby, a film crew peering out the windows of a Chinese pharmacy discussed how to make all of that invisible. The film it was …
Read More »6 Takeaways From the Christopher Reeve Documentary ‘Super/Man’
The documentary “Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story” traces the life of the Juilliard-trained actor who found megastardom in the 1970s and ’80s playing Superman, and in 1995 as a different kind of hero, after an accident left him paralyzed from the neck down. It features never-before-seen footage of Reeve, who …
Read More »5 Children’s Movies to Stream Now
‘Trolls Band Together’ Stream it on Netflix. The third installment in the DreamWorks “Trolls” franchise dives into boy band territory, which is fitting since Branch, the films’ main character, is voiced by Justin Timberlake, of ’N Sync fame. For years, Branch has kept his boy band past secret; he has …
Read More »In ‘The Last of the Sea Women,’ Divers Face a Vanishing Way of Life
In the South Korean province of Jeju lives a group of women who may, at first, sound as if they’re mythical creatures. The haenyeo (“sea women”) dive and swim in the depths of the ocean without any breathing gear, harvesting seafood like conch, urchin and octopus, which they sell to …
Read More »‘Lonely Planet’ Review: Leaving Home to Find Yourself
One of the odder trends in 2024 cinema has involved romances, some of them steamy, between middle-aged women and much younger men. Anne Hathaway starred in one, Léa Drucker in another, and Nicole Kidman in not one but two more. This plot is hardly new, either in concept — Hollywood …
Read More »