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...
By the time the 72nd Cannes Film Festival ended Saturday, hundreds of new movies had screened and thousands of exhausted attendees crawled toward home.
CANNES, France — The dead keep returning at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, eerie emissaries of deeply troubled times. Nowhere is that return more haunting than in “Atlantics,” a poetic ghost story about trauma, loss and the persistence of love.
(Critic’s Pick): Soon after Charles Manson was indicted on murder charges in 1969, his dream of celebrity became a reality. Life magazine put him on a cover with a headline — “The Love and Terror Cult” — that read like a trashy film poster.
It’s hard not to feel like a party crasher while watching the sloppy comedy “Wine Country,” about a group of close friends on a getaway. You know the feeling: With a hopeful smile, you slide into a clubby, cheery gathering where revelers are grinning and regularly busting a gut, collectively riding the same giddy wave. You think you want in on the joke, but then suddenly, desperately, you’re looking for the nearest exit.
“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.
“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...Uganda New York Times entertainment1 May 2019
“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,...Uganda New York Times entertainment19 Apr 2019
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...Uganda New York Times entertainment19 Apr 2019
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...Uganda New York Times entertainment12 Apr 2019
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...Uganda New York Times entertainment12 Apr 2019
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...Uganda New York Times entertainment5 Apr 2019
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.Uganda New York Times entertainment5 Apr 2019
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 ...Uganda New York Times entertainment5 Apr 2019
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.Uganda New York Times entertainment4 Apr 2019
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.Uganda New York Times entertainment29 Mar 2019
The monsters in “A Vigilante” look deceptively ordinary. One wears an everyday business suit and tie; another is dressed in a simple T-shirt and pants, though it’s hard to make out what he’s wearing because he’s trussed up, on his knees, beaten down.
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