May 19, 2016
A guide to movies playing at theaters in the New York City area, as well as select festivals and film series.
Ratings and running times are in parentheses; foreign films have English subtitles. Full reviews of all current releases: nytimes.com/movies.
★ 'April and the Extraordinary World' (PG, 1:45) A tricky, eccentric, visually ravishing alternative-history animated sci-fi film from France. Marion Cotillard voices the title heroine, an intense young woman trying to find out who is abducting the great scientists of early-20th-century Europe. (Glenn Kenny)
★ 'Barbershop: The Next Cut' (PG-13, 1:52) Ice Cube returns as Calvin Palmer, whose Chicago haircutting establishment is once again the scene of much sexual, political and race-conscious banter. In this reprise of the popular comic franchise, directed by Malcolm D. Lee, the high spirits are shadowed by violence and anxiety, and the blend of comedy and social consciousness is unusually potent. With Common, Nicki Minaj and, of course, Cedric the Entertainer. (A.O. Scott)
'Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice' (PG-13, 2:31) They fight. You lose. (Scott)
★ 'A Bigger Splash' (R, 2:04) Tilda Swinton stars in Luca Guadagnino's seductive, reluctant thriller about a rock star, her lover, her former lover and a pretty young thing vacationing under the beautiful Italian sun. Bad things happen, because, you know, life is pain — in the meantime, do enjoy the magnificent digs, the designer threads and the frolicking nude stars. (Manohla Dargis)
★ 'Born to Be Blue' (No rating, 1:38) In this moody biographical fantasia, Ethan Hawke gives what is arguably his deepest performance, playing the self-destructive jazz trumpeter and singer Chet Baker, who died in 1988 following years of heroin addiction. The portrait he creates is of a wounded boy genius who lives for only two things: his trumpet and his drugs. As a young man, Baker was movie-star beautiful ("the James Dean of jazz," some called him) and the romantic fantasy of scores of women, powerfully embodied by Carmen Ejogo as a fictional composite named Jane. (Stephen Holden)
'The Boss' (R, 1:39) In her new laugh-in, Melissa McCarthy plays an investment guru with a motivational racket who ends up selling you-go-girl inspiration. The movie isn't much good, but Ms. McCarthy can't help but make you laugh. (Dargis)
'Captain America: Civil War' (PG-13, 2:27) More of a collegial misunderstanding, really, but this episode in the lavish workplace sitcom known as the Marvel Cinematic Universe, in which the Captain (Chris Evans) and Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) quarrel about United Nations policy, does have some amusing banter and a few entertaining superhero brawls. (Scott)
'Deadpool' (R, 1:48) Jokes and bullets are tossed like confetti in "Deadpool," a feverishly eager-to-please comic-book movie about a supervillain (Ryan Reynolds) who suits up like a superhero. Bang, boom, splatter. (Dargis)
★ 'Dheepan' (R, 1:49, in French) A former Tamil Tiger militant finds asylum in a French housing project in this film by Jacques Audiard ("Rust and Bone," "A Prophet"), which is both an exercise in topical realism and a tense, western-tinged action drama. (Scott)
'Dough' (No rating, 1:34) All sorts of bridges are built in this pat but pleasant film about an aging Jewish baker who takes on a young Muslim apprentice and sees business boom after marijuana finds its way into the dough. Racial, religious and generational stereotypes are overcome, mutual respect is earned, and traditions are preserved. Yeah, it's fiction. (Neil Genzlinger)
'Elvis & Nixon' (R, 1:27) Michael Shannon stars as Elvis in Liza Johnson's recreation of the 1970 meeting that the King had with President Nixon (Kevin Spacey). Mr. Shannon's casting makes no sense until you realize that he's the only one that you're paying attention to. (Dargis)
★ 'Eva Hesse' (No rating, 1:48) Marcie Begleiter's documentary is a conscientious and moving portrait of the German-born American painter and sculptor, who died in 1970 at 34. Full of arresting images of her work and revealing interviews with friends and colleagues, it is also enriched by generous excerpts from Hesse's letters and diaries. (Scott)
★ 'Everybody Wants Some!!' (R, 1:56) The last weekend before the start of classes at a Texas college in the fall of 1980. Weed is smoked, beer is drunk, skirts are chased. This rambling, nostalgic excursion, courtesy of Richard Linklater, is sweet and wholesome and surprisingly absorbing, given how little of consequence seems to happen. (Scott)
★ 'Eye in the Sky' (R, 1:42) This suspenseful film about an American drone attack on a terrorist meeting place in Nairobi, Kenya, is grim farce in which unpredictable human behavior repeatedly threatens an operation of astounding technological sophistication. Helen Mirren, in one of her fiercest screen performances, plays the chilly officer in charge of an operation to capture a radicalized Englishwoman she has been pursuing for years. But as the moment of capture arrives, her plans abruptly change when a cyborg beetle, a small surveillance device, reveals two inhabitants strapping on explosives for a suicide mission. (Holden)
'The Family Fang' (R, 1:47) Jason Bateman (who also directed) and Nicole Kidman star as the struggling children of self-serving performance artists (Christopher Walken and Maryann Plunkett). After an unexpected family reunion, the kids finally try to grow up. (Dargis)
'Green Room' (R, 1:35) A punk band on a hand-to-mouth tour of the Northwest falls afoul of a gang of white supremacists in this nasty, witty siege movie, craftily directed by Jeremy Saulnier ("Blue Ruin.") Anton Yelchin, Alia Shawkat and Imogen Poots are all good, but Sir Patrick Stewart steals the movie as a menacing skinhead graybeard. (Scott)
'Hello, My Name Is Doris' (R, 1:30) An irresistible, stealthily touching Sally Field plays an outwardly ridiculous woman in her 60s who falls in love with a much younger man (Max Greenfield). The director Michael Showalter oversells the goods, but resistance is futile. (Dargis)
'High-Rise' (R, 1:59) Beautifully designed, warmed-over retro-dystopianism, from a novel by J.G. Ballard. (Scott)
'A Hologram for the King' (No rating, 1:37) This film ponders a modern world in the thrall of illusions. Of what essential use a holographic teleconferencing system is, we are never told. In their semi-reality, the King's Metropolis of Economy and Trade and the ghostly holograms being sold might just as well be a desert mirage. Tom Hanks's performance elevates an ominous downbeat reflection on American decline and runaway technology into a subdued absurdist farce with dark geopolitical undercurrents. (Holden)
'The Huntsman: Winter's War' (PG-13, 1:48) Maybe not the worst movie of the year, but an impressive anthology of all the ways a movie can be bad in an age of soulless franchise entertainment. With Chris Hemsworth in the title role, and a lot of other people we can look forward to seeing in other projects. (Scott)
'The Jungle Book' (PG, 1:46) Stuffed with computer-generated flora and fauna (a real boy plays Mowgli), Disney's latest take on the Rudyard Kipling tales is being touted as a live-action movie but there's scarcely anything alive in it. The whole thing is lightly diverting, and canned. (Dargis)
'Keanu' (R, 1:40) In the first movie to showcase Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele together, they play a couple of regular guys who infiltrate the underworld to rescue a kitten; unfortunately they forget to bring along the big laughs. (Dargis)
★ 'The Lobster' (R, 1:59) Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz star in Yorgos Lanthimos's mordant allegory of managed emotion and mandatory monogamy, set in a chilly, plausibly cruel imaginary world. (Scott)
★ 'Love & Friendship' (PG, 1:32) Whit Stillman takes a minor Jane Austen work and whips it up into a sharp, silly farce, starring Kate Beckinsale as Lady Susan Vernon, a Regency schemer on the prowl for money and husbands, some of whom already have wives. (Scott)
'The Man Who Knew Infinity' (PG-13, 1:48) Dev Patel (the "Best Exotic Marigold Hotel" movies) plays yet another earnest, well-meaning character in this portrait of the early-20th-century mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, who was mentored by the Cambridge professor G. H. Hardy (Jeremy Irons) and surmounted racism to become the first Indian to hold a fellowship at Trinity College. The film is tidy, handsome and, yes, earnest. (Andy Webster)
★ 'The Meddler' (PG-13, 1:40) Susan Sarandon plays one half of an insistently winning, hopelessly irresistible mother-daughter duet (Rose Byrne plays the daughter) in Lorene Scafaria's enjoyable, touching comedy. Cecily Strong and J.K. Simmons co-star. (Dargis)
★ 'Miles Ahead' (R, 1:40) In this pleasurably impressionistic movie, Don Cheadle plays Miles Davis as a mercurial fantasy figure who's part boxer, part gangster, part time-traveler and 100 percent enigmatic genius. Purists may howl at the portrait, but Mr. Cheadle – who also directed and cowrote – understands that some legends are bigger than any one telling. (Dargis)
'Money Monster' (R, 1:38) An energetic beat-the-clock thriller with vaguely topical overtones (Wall Street is rigged! Cable news lies!) with fine old-school movie star work from George Clooney and Julia Roberts. Directed by Jodie Foster. (Scott)
★ 'A Monster With a Thousand Heads' (No rating, 1:15, in Spanish) This gripping black-and-white drama, directed by the Mexican-based Uruguayan filmmaker Rodrigo Plá ("The Zone" "The Delay") doesn't try to clarify the details of a case of bureaucratic stonewalling. It wants to make you feel as helpless as its main character, a desperate middle-aged Mexican woman chasing down reluctant doctors and a corrupt insurance company to secure a lifesaving medication for her dying husband. It will make your blood boil. (Holden)
'Mother's Day' (PG-13, 1:58) Julia Roberts, Jennifer Aniston, Kate Hudson and Jason Sudeikis do director Garry Marshall's uninspired bidding in this not-at-all opportunistic holiday-themed "comedy." While it's still in theaters, you can see it as the filmmakers intended, that is, with your brain turned off. (Kenny)
'My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2' (PG-13, 1:34) A washed-out recycling of ethnic clichés and exhausted jokes, Kirk Jones's embarrassingly awful sequel returns us to the smothering bosom of the Portokalos family — a yapping clan of upraised shoulders and upturned palms. (Catsoulis)
'Papa: Hemingway in Cuba' (R, 1:46) Based on a autobiographical screenplay and shot at Finca Vigía, the author's home near Havana, this film by Bob Yari bristles with authentic detail, down to the very typewriter Ernest Hemingway used. But in the end, with a less-than-powerful actor dispatching that author's thunderbolts of emotion, the film is more artifact than art. (Verongos)
'Pelé: Birth of a Legend' (PG, 1:47) Jeff and Michael Zimbalist's biopic of the soccer superstar Pelé celebrates his rise from poverty to national-treasure fame, but it's more a familiar tale for fans to nod along with than a sports drama with a real kick. (Rapold)
'Sing Street' (PG-13, 1:45) John Carney, best known for "Once," is a filmmaker with many songs in his heart and his heart on his sleeve. This sweet, rough-edged romance, set in Dublin in the 1980s, stars Ferdia Walsh-Peelo as a teenager who starts a pop band to impress a girl (Lucy Boynton). (Scott)
★ 'Sunset Song' (R, 2:15) The rolling green meadows and the radiant face of Chris Guthrie (Agyness Deyn), a bright, hard-working Scottish farm girl in Terence Davies's great film "Sunset Song," fuse into a luminous vision of the land and the people tending it. The movie immerses you in the intoxicating beauty of the natural world, but it doesn't ignore the hardship of the peasantry who toil day in and day out to raise crops and put food on the table. Adapted from Lewis Grassic Gibbon's 1932 novel set mostly in the fictional Estate of Kinraddie in the years before World War I and considered a British literary classic, it has the look and feel of a magnificently illustrated historical novel. (Holden)
★ 'Tale of Tales' (No rating, 2:13) Weaving the wondrous into the everyday, Matteo Garrone's adaptation of three 17th-century Neapolitan fables braids magic and familiar fairy-tale characters (among them an imperiled princess, an ogre and two ugly sisters) into a colorful and kinky exploration of what women want. (Catsoulis)
★ 'The Witch' (R, 1:32) This finely calibrated shiver of a movie from Robert Eggers follows a Puritan family that, in 1630, sets off to live alone in the New England wilderness. Something wicked this way comes. (Dargis)
★ 'Zootopia' (PG, 1:48) This smart, funny animated film from Disney tells the story of a determined bunny named Judy Hopps who wants to become the first of her kind to be a police officer in Zootopia, a metropolis where animals live and work together, having set aside their genetic tendencies to eat one another. There are witty jokes for all ages and messages about inclusion and intolerance that are more nuanced than in most such fare. (Genzlinger)
Film Series
'Black Girl' (through Tuesday) One of the most internationally acclaimed African movies of its time, the Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène's classic gets a new restoration for its 50th anniversary. Mbissine Thérèse Diop stars as a woman from Dakar who takes a job as a maid and follows her employer back to the South of France. Instead of finding the glamour she expects, she experiences a form of domestic slavery — a toxic atmosphere in which she is chronically subject to menial tasks and patronizing remarks within earshot. And increasingly, she begins to fight back. Today it's difficult to imagine the shock that this landmark postcolonialist film may have been to the bourgeoisie, but it still packs a punch. BAM Rose Cinemas, 30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100, bam.org. (Ben Kenigsberg)
Robert Downey (the Original) (Friday through Thursday) Long, long before Robert Downey Jr. stepped into Iron Man's suit, his father, Robert Downey Sr., was making gonzo independent movies. The most famous is probably "Putney Swope" (1969), a "Mad Men"-era satire in which an advertising company's lone African-American executive is elected chairman of the board. The elder Mr. Downey will appear at several screenings in Film Forum's weeklong series. Other titles include "Chafed Elbows," "Greaser's Palace" and the more recent documentary "Rittenhouse Square," shot at that park in Philadelphia. 209 West Houston Street, South Village, 212-727-8110, filmforum.org. (Kenigsberg)
Jia Zhangke(Monday through May 29) From the time of his underground 1997 debut, "Xiao Wu," the Chinese director Jia Zhangke has chronicled ordinary lives affected by economic change in China. In addition to Mr. Jia's most recent feature, "Mountains May Depart," Anthology Film Archives will show "Still Life," his 2006 Venice Film Festival prizewinner which takes place in the 2,000-year-old town of Fengjie during a period of rapid destruction. The series also includes "A Touch of Sin" (2013), an unexpectedly violent collection of stories. Next Friday, Anthology Film Archives will present "Jia Zhangke, a Guy From Fenyang," a documentary profile of Mr. Jia from the Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles. 32 Second Avenue, East Village, 212-505-5181, anthologyfilmarchives.org. (Kenigsberg)
La Magnani (through June 1) When the plain but full-throated actress Anna Magnani (1908-73) appeared in Roberto Rossellini's "Rome Open City," in some ways she represented the ideal of Italian neorealism, a movement that found heroism in the everyday. Still, this program makes the case for her as much more than that. It showcases her collaborations with Luchino Visconti (the showbiz melodrama "Bellissima"), Pier Paolo Pasolini ("Mamma Roma") and Federico Fellini ("Fellini's Roma"), as well as her Oscar-winning performance in "The Rose Tattoo" (in a role that Tennessee Williams is said to have tailored to her when he wrote the stage version). Many of the movies are rare. Perhaps even rarer, the entire lineup will be shown on celluloid. At various times at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, 144 West 65th Street, and the Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center, 165 West 65th Street, 212-875-5601, filmlinc.org. (Kenigsberg)
Modern Matinees: Fifteen by Otto Preminger (through June 30) The Museum of Modern Art dusts off its collection of prints by the director Otto Preminger, who could infuse nearly any genre with a prickly ambiguity. Several of his greatest works ("Advise and Consent," "Bonjour Tristesse," "Bunny Lake Is Missing") will play alongside titles ripe for re-evaluation ("Daisy Kenyon"), although there are also notable omissions. (Where is "Anatomy of a Murder"?) The program includes "Laura," Preminger's sort-of ghost story from 1944, in which Dana Andrews, investigating a murder, begins to fall in love with the dead woman (Gene Tierney). Clifton Webb has a memorable turn as a newspaper columnist who writes "with a goose quill dipped in venom." 11 West 53rd Street, 212-708-9400; a full schedule is at moma.org/film. (Kenigsberg)
Panorama Europe 2016 (through Sunday) Presented by the European Union National Institutes for Culture, this grab bag of a festival stocks up on recent titles from all over the E.U. The offerings include documentary portraits of refugees and marginalized communities ("Lampedusa in Winter," "Spartacus & Cassandra") as well as genre fare like "The Lure," a tale of vampire mermaids who, after going ashore, find work in a Warsaw burlesque disco. At various times, Museum of the Moving Image, 35th Avenue at 37th Street, Queens; A full schedule is at movingimage.us/panoramaeurope. (Kenigsberg)
Universal Pictures: Restorations and Rediscoveries, 1928 to 1937 (through June 15) The current climate of Hollywood studios' staking their bets on comic-book movies would probably have puzzled Carl Laemmle Jr., who became head of production at Universal when he was 21 and had a reputation for taking chances. The Museum of Modern Art is bringing back many of the most significant movies from this underscreened period; some of the titles have been out of circulation since then. The lineup includes work by John Ford ("Air Mail") and Frank Borzage ("Little Man, What Now?") as well as several films each from James Whale and John M. Stahl. A full schedule is at moma.org/film. 11 West 53rd Street, 212-708-9400. (Kenigsberg)
'What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?' (Friday through Sunday) Norma Desmond, the fading silent-screen idol from "Sunset Blvd.," looks positively stable next to Baby Jane Hudson (Bette Davis), a washed-up former child actress who now spends her days cloistered in a mansion with her sister (Joan Crawford), who was paralyzed in a car accident. When Ms. Crawford plays the nice one, you know you're in for a true battle of the gorgons. And if Robert Aldrich's 1962 feature has often been appropriated for camp, it is hardly a funny movie; the queasy, claustrophobic dynamic between the stars is tough to watch. At 11 a.m., IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas, Manhattan, 212-924-7771, ifccenter.com. (Kenigsberg)
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