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New York Times
16-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘The Voyeurs,' ‘Cyrano' and More Streaming Gems
'Cyrano' (2022) Edmond Rostand's late-19th-century play 'Cyrano de Bergerac' has proved to be quite a durable text, which shouldn't come as much of a surprise; few things translate as well, no matter the period or genre, than the feeling that the person you love could never feel the same. This adaptation by the director Joe Wright ('Pride & Prejudice'), first presented onstage by the New Group in 2019, changes the source of the title character's low self-image: Instead of an oversize nose, he is of undersize height. Peter Dinklage is marvelous in the starring role, finding the cockiness and bluster that Cyrano uses to compensate, while showing the beating heart just under that hard surface. He also provides a pleasant baritone for the songs by members of the National, which are the film's other key deviation from Rostand's original. They're a masterstroke, beautifully conveying the longing and regret of this tragic tale. 'The Last Stop in Yuma County' (2024) Three cheers for this A+ premise: The pumps are empty at the last gas station for 100 miles and the truck with the refill is running late, so stranded motorists are killing time at the diner next door — among them, two crooks who made off with a trunkful of bank loot. The writer and director Francis Galluppi works from his own Swiss watch of a script, equally influenced by 'The Desperate Hours' and the dusty neo-noirs of the 1990s, where the turns are unpredictable yet organic and precise, and there are chances for every one if its character actors to shine. Snappily paced, delightfully stylish and refreshingly bleak, this movie is an assurance that we're going to hear much, much more from this gifted first-time filmmaker. 'The Voyeurs' (2021) There's a fair amount of nostalgia these days for the erotic thrillers of the 1980s and '90s, but most of those with fondness for the subgenre are recalling such major studio releases as 'Basic Instinct' and 'Indecent Proposal.' This Amazon original hews more closely to their direct-to-video stepchildren (celebrated in the recent documentary 'We Kill for Love'), glossy entertainments with interchangeable titles like 'Body Chemistry' and 'Naked Obsession,' in which beautiful squares are tempted out of their vanilla sexual boxes, often with deadly results. Said squares are played here by Sydney Sweeney and Justice Smith, as a young couple whose trendy new apartment offers an unobstructed view of their beautiful and randy neighbors (Ben Hardy and Natasha Liu Bordizzo). Their voyeurism is presented as fairly understandable; we all like to watch, the writer and director Michael Mohan assures us. But then the situation gets sticky. It's a touch overlong, with a plot twist (or two) too many, but 'The Voyeurs' delivers the lurid thrills it promises, along with compelling performances by Smith (of last year's 'I Saw the TV Glow') and Sweeney (with whom Mohan would team up again, for 'Immaculate'). 'Official Competition' (2022) The self-importance of art house filmmakers and Method actors is delightfully skewered in this showbiz comedy from the Argentine directors Gastón Duprat and Mariano Cohn. Penélope Cruz is a brilliant but bonkers director, hired by a rich industrialist to film an acclaimed novel that he has never bothered to read. She hires two diametrically opposed actors — an actor's-actor theatrical legend (Oscar Martínez) and a gorgeous, dimwitted movie star (Antonio Banderas) — and the sparks fly. All three actors are clearly having a gas sending up their profession (and perhaps settling some scores), while Duprat and Cohn, who wrote the script with the Duprat brother Andrés, build their inside-baseball satire to a fever pitch. 'Every Secret Thing' (2015) The gifted documentary filmmaker Amy Berg ('Deliver Us From Evil') makes her narrative feature debut with this tricky and prickly adaptation of the Laura Lippman novel. Dakota Fanning and Danielle Macdonald are excellent as teenage girls suspected of kidnapping a baby, and their complex dynamic recalls the knotty codependency of 'Heavenly Creatures,' while Elizabeth Banks brings a haunted tenderness as the lead police detective. Berg has a good feel for the story's small-town setting, building menace and dread out of everyday assumptions and offhand interactions. 'Never Rarely Sometimes Always' (2020) Autumn (Sidney Flanigan) is a 17-year-old with an unwanted pregnancy. She can't terminate it in the small Pennsylvania town where she lives, so she gets on a bus with her cousin Skylar (Talia Ryder) and heads to New York City. It's a simple premise, but the writer and director Eliza Hittman ('Beach Rats') spins their journey into both a quiet howl of fury (the bureaucratic hoops Autumn must jump through are infuriating, and played as such) and a modest yet powerful character study. 'Look Into My Eyes' (2024) The documentary filmmaker Lana Wilson ('Taylor Swift: Miss Americana') profiles seven New York City psychics, and it's easy to imagine how such a portrait could have been cynical, or even cruel. Instead, 'Look Into My Eyes' is deeply empathic, not only to the clients who come with questions — some tiny and specific, others as big as any we can ask — but also to these souls who try to answer them. Wilson isn't concerned with anything as binary as 'fake' or 'real'; she wants to know what draws these people together, what affirmation is provided by their interactions. Unsurprisingly, many of the psychics are struggling actors and writers, and they have moments of doubt and failure both in and out of their sessions. Some of it is sad, and some of it is funny, but it's never simple. Wilson takes her subjects seriously, and by the film's conclusion, so do we.
New York Times
26-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Review: ‘Curse of the Starving Class' Doesn't Satisfy
When a member of the Tate family stands in front of the open fridge — as happens quite a bit in 'Curse of the Starving Class' — it's with the dejection of a gambler caught in a seemingly endless losing streak. The Tates' fridge is almost always empty, and there's a similar sense of vacancy to the direction and performances in the New Group's lackluster production of this 1977 Sam Shepard play. 'Curse of the Starving Class,' which opened Tuesday night at the Pershing Square Signature Center, begins with Wesley Tate (played by Cooper Hoffman, son of Philip Seymour Hoffman) and his mother, Ella (Calista Flockhart), shuffling around a wreckage area vaguely resembling a kitchen. Cluttered counters, old, mismatched chairs, busted cabinet doors, shattered glass everywhere — the house looks as if it were struck by a hurricane. (Scenic design is by Arnulfo Maldonado.) But the cause wasn't a natural disaster in the traditional sense; it was just Weston (Christian Slater), the Tate family patriarch, returning home once again stinking of booze 'like some rank old animal' and breaking the door. Though Weston's tempestuous drunkenness is responsible for the most egregious disorder, disarray is the usual state of affairs in the Tate household. The empty fridge is the norm, and Ella argues with her daughter, Emma (Stella Marcus), about whether they're part of the starving class, or if it even exists. The Tates are barely getting by, and each one has his or her own solution on how to proceed: Ella plans to sell the house to a skeevy land developer and fly the family out to a new life in Europe, unaware that Weston is planning to sell the house too, to clear his debts. Wesley believes they should keep the house and fix it up themselves. And Emma is plotting her imminent escape from them all. Like Shepard's 'Buried Child' and 'True West,' 'Curse of the Starving Class' is an American tragicomedy, equal parts earnest portraiture and satire. It moves between realism and a stylized kind of theater whose logic is driven more by lyricism and abstractions than by more traditional character arcs or plot progression. Which can pose a challenge to a director, who must ride a Shepard balance board, teetering between the somber and the sardonic, the real and the metaphorical. Scott Elliott's direction fails to fit all the seemingly disparate vocabulary of Shepard's work into a coherent stage language. Throughout the play, the characters randomly break out into monologues that seem taken from a lucid dream state. Emma rhapsodizes about her imagined future life in Mexico as a car mechanic; Wesley recreates the sounds and feelings of the evening Weston came drunkenly crashing into the house. Even the land developer has a speech about the powers and ambitions of corporate America. Instead of incorporating these moments into the play's more straightforward goings-on, Elliott further heightens them by setting a prominent spotlight (lighting by Jeff Croiter) on the character, who delivers these lines not to the rest of the cast but to the audience. These speeches then feel didactic in a way Shepard's script never does, their fourth-wall-breaking execution making the play feel disjointed and self-consciously stagy — which is also a problem with the performances. When the typically passive Ella erupts into an expletive-driven rage later in the show, Weston calmly critiques her inflection of the words, saying: 'Something doesn't ring true about it. Something deep in the voice. At the heart of things.' That could easily apply to the acting as well, which lacks intimacy and urgency. Flockhart's Ella and Hoffman's Wesley aren't just impassive; they're a little dull. Slater does the best work with his take on Weston, whose violent outbursts and wild, lurching movements provide the production with some spark. That's not including Lois, the 4-year-old California Red sheep who nearly steals the show as an animal who belongs to the Tate family and is afflicted with something nasty. Truly, some of Lois's bleating fell perfectly in pace with the dialogue opposite Slater and Flockhart. (Lois is a professional, who was also a featured performer in the living Nativity section of the 'Radio City Christmas Spectacular.') I'm being facetious, but only a little bit — some of the funniest moments on the night I saw the show were unintentional, when a vegetable went flying into an audience member's open hand, or when Lois interrupted a tense argument with a few loud, enthusiastic 'baas' toward the audience. It's telling if a production's gravitas and humor comes mostly from its livestock, especially if it's a staging of a Sam Shepard play. 'Curse of the Starving Class' is a work that intentionally leaves its characters bereft, but shouldn't do the same for its audience.
