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☆ ‘The Beast’ Review: Master of Puppets
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-04 | by ( Beatrice Loayza | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

Bertrand Bonello’s “The Beast” is an audacious interdimensional romance, techno-thriller and Los Angeles noir rolled up in one. This shamelessly ambitious epic is about, among other things, civilizational collapse and existential retribution, yet it is held together by something delicate. The effect is uncanny, wryly funny, weirdly sensual and very sad. Bonello sustains this unsettling tone throughout the film, although the individual parts are less consistent. This is the toll of shifting time periods, from a costume drama to a modern mockery of incel culture.

Persons: Bertrand Bonello’s “, Gabrielle, Léa Locations: Angeles

☆ When a Job Becomes a Literal Hell
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-23 | by ( Beatrice Loayza | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

The women had suffered lithium poisoning while working at battery factories and began to break into fits of destructive rage during their shifts. In Lin’s retelling, the workers are resurrected as demons, seething with chaotic desire. The restaurant kitchen in FX’s series “The Bear,” which premiered in 2022, is a ticking time bomb of screaming, stove fires and oil burns. (“The Bear,” for all its frenetic pacing, dips into full-blown surrealism only during interludes showing lead chef Carm’s dreams.) These stories portray workers who are not simply anxious and exhausted but violently combusting.

Persons: Candice Lin’s, Lin, Aihwa, Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Éric Gravel’s, Carm’s Locations: New York, Malaysian, Malaysia, French Canadian, Paris

☆ If You Liked ‘Saltburn,’ Consider This Much Better Movie
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-19 | by ( Beatrice Loayza | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

I was at my mom’s house in the suburbs when I watched Barry Keoghan make love to his bestie’s grave in Emerald Fennell’s “Saltburn.”“Promising Young Woman,” Fennell’s previous film, a rape-revenge thriller for the girlboss generation, was a toothless bid at provocation. “Saltburn” seemed to promise a similar blend of all style, no substance, but the online hype had piqued my curiosity. So, there I was, watching Keoghan as an Oxford student named Oliver become one with the soil, my mother snoozing beside me. The moment brought back memories from adolescence of the dozens of times she’d walk into my teenage bedroom — or the same living room where I was watching “Saltburn” — to find me slack-jawed in the middle of “Basic Instinct” or “A Clockwork Orange.” Naturally, she always seemed to waltz in during the most morally compromised or sexually bewildering scenes.

Persons: Barry Keoghan, ” “, ”, Saltburn ”, Oliver, “, — Locations: Oxford

☆ A Mind-Bending 7-Hour Epic About Hitler Gets a Rare Screening
▼ + stars: | 2024-01-30 | by ( Beatrice Loayza | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

This weekend, the hottest ticket in New York is a seven-hour-plus movie about Adolf Hitler. Showing just once at Film at Lincoln Center, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s rarely screened epic, “Hitler, a Film From Germany,” is, according to the programmers, sold out despite its behemoth running time (which includes a few breaks). “There is Syberberg’s film — and then there are the other films one admires,” she wrote. Divided in four parts, the film is a Wagnerian opera on acid, composed of theatrical sketches inspired by the German dictator’s life. Syberberg wasn’t without a sense of humor, either: In one scene, steam pours out of a sculpture of a rear end.

Persons: Adolf Hitler, Jürgen, “ Hitler, ”, Francis Ford Coppola, Susan Sontag’s, Sontag, Syberberg Organizations: Lincoln Center, Hans Locations: New York, Germany, United States

☆ ‘Wingwomen’ Review: A Crew of Femme Fatales
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-01 | by ( Beatrice Loayza | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

“Wingwomen” is the rare French action movie directed by a woman, Mélanie Laurent, the breakout star of “Inglourious Basterds” turned filmmaker in her native France. Laurent also stars as the film’s veteran thief, Carole, a steely, chiseled blonde. 2, is Alex (Adèle Exarchopoulos), an expert sniper and an unabashed flirt whom the older Carole recruited years ago for a diamond heist. Now a seasoned crime team, Carole is the brains, Alex the muscle. Alex gets bruised and bloodied, but so does the meathead baddie.

Persons: “, Mélanie Laurent, Basterds ”, Laurent, Carole, Alex, Adèle, Sam, Manon Bresch, she’s, Tom, coy playgirl Organizations: coy Locations: France

☆ A Cannes Winner Asks: What if the Powerful Woman Isn’t Punished?
▼ + stars: | 2023-10-20 | by ( Beatrice Loayza | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

In “Anatomy of a Fall,” Sandra and Samuel’s literary rivalry, and their process of culling their own lives for inspiration, is used against Sandra in court. Triet and Harari treated the feature “as a playground, as well as a nightmare vision of what will never happen to us,” wrote Harari in an email. “Justine is and was more “successful” than I am, but I’m very far from Samuel. Her parents were enthusiastic moviegoers —her father once worked as a projectionist — but her desire to make movies came relatively late. Triet began her filmmaking career making chaotically expressionistic documentary shorts about contemporary politics, including one about the 2007 presidential election in France.

Persons: ” Sandra, Sandra, — Triet, Harari, Samuel, ”, Justine, ” Triet, Frederick Wiseman, Shirley Clarke, Allan King, Raymond Depardon, Triet, chaotically Locations: Samuel, France

☆ ‘Lady Killer’ and ‘The Strange Mister Victor’ Review: A Golden Age
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-03 | by ( Beatrice Loayza | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Compared to other heavy hitters from the golden age of French cinema — think Jean Renoir (“The Rules of the Game”) or Marcel Carné (“Children of Paradise”) — history hasn’t been kind to Jean Grémillon. This is especially the case in the United States, where the director’s work continues to be discussed among cinephiles like a special secret. “Lady Killer” stars the leonine Jean Gabin as Lucien, a womanizing legionnaire. Lucien falls hard for Madeleine and takes up a job at a print shop in Paris so that they can be together. In his early days, Grémillon was a violinist who played with an orchestra that provided accompaniment for silent films.

Persons: Jean Renoir, Marcel Carné, Jean Grémillon, ”, Victor ”, “, Jean Gabin, Lucien, Madeleine, Mireille Balin, Grémillon Locations: United States, France, Paris

☆ A New Subject for a Veteran Documentary Maker: Herself
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-03 | by ( Beatrice Loayza | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Midway through filming “Our Body,” a sprawling documentary about the gynecological ward of a Paris hospital, the movie’s director, Claire Simon, received some medical news of her own: She had breast cancer. Four weeks into the shoot, Simon had discovered a lump beneath her armpit. But rather than cease production, she decided to improvise and turn the camera on herself. “I had to film a lot of naked women,” Simon in a recent video interview. The subjects include abortion, artificial insemination, birth, gender transitioning, menopause and, eventually, disease and death.

Persons: Claire Simon, Simon, “, ” Simon, — Locations: Paris, New York

☆ Patrick Wilson: The Scream King Takes the Director’s Chair
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-07 | by ( Beatrice Loayza | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

“I’d been trying to direct a movie since 2015,” Wilson told me over coffee at a West Village bistro. “No offense, but that’s not how you deal with a problem,” Wilson chuckled. “The Red Door” confronts the trauma of that earlier film from the perspective of a father-son relationship. I asked Wilson if his sons — one is heading to college soon — send him curt one-word texts. “Nah, we have a great relationship,” said Wilson, who since 2005 has been married to the actress Dagmara Dominczyk (Karolina in “Succession”).

Persons: “ I’d, ” Wilson, ”, Jack Torrance, Josh retakes, —, that’s, Josh, Renai, Rose Byrne, it’s, Dalton, Ty Simpkins, he’s, Wilson, curt, Dagmara Dominczyk, Karolina Locations: “

☆ ‘Queens of the Qing Dynasty’ Review: Secret Soul Mates
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-04 | by ( Beatrice Loayza | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

The pair make an odd couple, and yet their bond is intuitive, electric. The story kicks off in the aftermath of Star’s suicide attempt, the film’s tone at once bleakly clinical and deadpan absurd. Star, a neurodivergent foster kid with a sardonic sense of humor, clearly doesn’t register the gravity of her actions. Eyes glazed, she seems out of touch with her own body, and she’s not one for rules, like when she’s kicked out of an apartment for opening it to partiers. Walker, captivatingly raw, makes Star both charming and frustrating in her aloofness.

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