It was always a little too easy to laugh at Imelda Marcos. The gold and the kitsch, the fine art and the tchotchkes, the rows of bedazzled shoes and the towering dome of shellacked hair — it was all so very much, so very vulgar, so very, very expensive. During the roughly two decades that Marcos was the first lady of the Philippines, she became famous for lavish habits that make the Kardashians seem like skinflints. Even after the Marcos family fled the Philippines in 1986, her extravagance o...
“Long Shot” isn’t going to save the romantic comedy, but it’s an adrenaline shot of pure pleasure to the genre’s failing heart. The outline is familiar: Two people meet, retreat and then circle each other, all while talking and talking. The romantic comedy turns on people who fit together — in bed, on the dance floor — but also talk to each other, exchanging words that stop flowing and faltering only with a culminating kiss and teasing fade-out. The difference here is that unlike a lot of rom...Entertainment6 Aug 2024
“The Raft of the Medusa” is a large, foreboding painting filled with drama and writhing male bodies. Painted by Théodore Géricault in the early part of the 19th century, it shows a tangle of men crowded on a raft after an accident. Some appear dead, while others signal toward some unseen sight, perhaps salvation, their ropy muscles tense with effort but also with beauty. In “The White Crow,” young Soviet dancer Rudolf Nureyev visits this painting at the Louvre. What does he see — death, life,...Entertainment6 Aug 2024
The scares are plentiful and sometimes ticklishly funny in “The Curse of La Llorona,” an enjoyably old-fashioned ghost story. It’s the latest installment in a rapidly expanding horror series that started with “The Conjuring” (2013) and now includes the “Annabelle” flicks (about a devil doll) and “The Nun” (a demon nun). The connective tissue among these titles can be very thin; here, the most obvious link is Father Perez (Tony Amendola), who’s on hand again to explain that, why, yes, evil exi...Entertainment6 Aug 2024
Actress Tessa Thompson emotionally expands “Little Woods,” turning a small movie into something more than its textured parts. She plays Ollie, short for Oleander, a daughter in mourning for a mother who has recently died. Junk clutters the yard of the modest North Dakota house they shared; inside it’s clean and homey, though scattered with the evidence of a brutal illness. Ollie still sleeps on the floor of her mother’s room, clinging to a past — and a caretaker identity — that threatens to b...Entertainment6 Aug 2024
The worlds that director Matteo Garrone creates on screen sometimes seem as far out and darkly mysterious as an alternate universe. Best known for “Gomorrah,” a blistering story about a people under siege by the Neapolitan mafia, Garrone looks at an Italy that is dramatically at odds with its touristic image, its charming hill towns and bourgeois niceties. In the satirical “Reality” (2013), a fishmonger loses himself in his desperation to become a reality-TV star, an aspiration that Garrone s...Entertainment6 Aug 2024
Ethan Hawke is the best thing about “Stockholm,” but the moment he strides into a bank things begin going haywire. With strained comedy, unearned sobriety and Bob Dylan on the soundtrack, the movie revisits the 1973 Swedish robbery that inspired the coinage Stockholm syndrome. That term is often used when hostages — or victims of any kind, including of relationships and of long novels — develop an identification with their captors. Hawke plays Lars, the robbery’s would-be mastermind, who appe...Entertainment6 Aug 2024
Soon after I first met Agnès Varda, I drove her to the Hollywood police station. It was 2009 and we were supposed to be at a dinner for the Los Angeles opening of her documentary “The Beaches of Agnès,” a lyrical ramble through her life. At that point, Varda had been making movies for more than a half century, a milestone that then seemed to me as impossible as her death last month at 90 seems to me now.Entertainment6 Aug 2024
Every so often in “High Life,” the latest from French director Claire Denis, there’s a shot of outer space. A cosmic whatsit, the story largely takes place in a black-velvet void with pinpricks of light. Earth is far away, long ago, a memory. Not all that much happens in this immensity, though sometimes a colorful gassy emanation floods the screen and something — a wrench, a body — floats into the great nothing. Inside a spaceship, by contrast, there’s plenty of action: bodily fluids, spasms ...Entertainment6 Aug 2024
Ever since Christopher Nolan took Batman to their mutually productive dark place, the DC cinematic super-universe has been as somber as a grave. There have been exceptions, shimmers of light amid the doom. Outside the animated realm, though, the stories and mood have been downbeat, matched by hues that range from drab to black amid bilious green, raging purple and watery blue. Even the “S” on Superman’s chest looks drained of cheer, more like dried blood than some candy-colored delight.Entertainment6 Aug 2024
Ever since Christopher Nolan took Batman to their mutually productive dark place, the DC cinematic super-universe has been as somber as a grave. There have been exceptions, shimmers of light amid the doom. Outside the animated realm, though, the stories and mood have been downbeat, matched by hues that range from drab to black amid bilious green, raging purple and watery blue. Even the “S” on Superman’s chest looks drained of cheer, more like dried blood than some candy-colored delight.Entertainment6 Aug 2024
Director Jonas Akerlund works hard to deliver on the title of “Lords of Chaos,” a tale of bad music and terrible deeds. Inspired by a true story, the movie ladles up lots of pulpy bits and buckets of blood to tell a depressing, depressingly familiar story about what happens when young men with apparent means and a whole lot of free time get together to build their own precariously hermetic world. In this case, their clubhouse was the Norwegian black-metal scene of the 1980s and early ‘90s, wh...Entertainment6 Aug 2024
The new animated Lego movie is pretty much like the last one. Or maybe I’m thinking of another one, not that it much matters. There are differences between editions, most fairly negligible. The unifying factor, to note the obvious about the state of big-screen children’s entertainment, is that they are all feature-length commercials. The “Transformers” series helped pave the way for Legos by flipping the old idea that movies (like “Star Wars”) were the creative source for the licensed merch, ...Entertainment5 Aug 2024
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