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Arab News
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Arab News
REVIEW: Guy Ritchie's ‘Fountain of Youth' — ‘Indiana Jones' wannabe fails miserably
DUBAI: You know those fake films you see in TV shows like '30 Rock' or, more recently, 'The Studio'? Guy Ritchie's latest misfire, 'Fountain of Youth,' captures that vibe perfectly. For the latest updates, follow us on Instagram @ A chaotic, charmless attempt at action-adventure, 'Fountain of Youth' clearly takes its inspiration from 'Indiana Jones,' but ends up as a muddled mess of clichés, clunky dialogue, and a lead who never quite convinces. The latter is John Krasinski as Luke Purdue, an archaeologist-turned-art thief racing to uncover the location of the legendary Fountain of Youth — believed to be capable of bestowing eternal life — with the help of rich benefactor Owen Carver (Domhnall Gleeson), a billionaire with a fatal illness who's ready to throw all his money into the quest. When things go awry, Luke reaches out to his younger sister Charlotte (a resplendent Natalie Portman) for help. The squabbling siblings then set off on a globetrotting adventure, while being chased by shadowy organizations and Interpol. The problem? Krasinski brings all the gravitas of a put-upon history teacher on a school field trip. There's a stiffness to him that means you never quite shake off the sense that he's just playing dress-up. Portman and Gleeson fare better. Portman, playing a sharp-tongued art curator and a mother on the brink of divorce, injects moments of tension and vulnerability that almost make you care about the story. Gleeson, meanwhile, steals every scene he's in as he descends into villainy. But even their combined charisma fails to inject life into the limp script. Other noteworthy performances come from Eiza Gonzales, who plays Esme, just one of the many people trying to stop the siblings from uncovering the Fountain of Youth; and Arian Moayed, who plays Interpol's Inspector Abbas. Ritchie's signature snappy style is drowned under a deluge of poorly choreographed chase sequences, same-y set pieces and exposition-heavy dialogue. The film looks expensive but feels lazy, with international locations reduced to postcard backgrounds. 'Fountain of Youth' wants to be thrilling, funny and smart. Instead, it's repetitive, cringey and talks down to its viewers.
Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘The History of Sound' Review: Paul Mescal and Josh O'Connor Make Love and Music in Oliver Hermanus' Affecting Wartime Romance
The false notes are rare in director Oliver Hermanus' affecting and dustily textured romance 'The History of Sound,' written by Ben Shattuck from his own short story about men in love, together and apart, circa World War I and its aftermath. But for a queer love story starring two of the hottest, of-this-moment leading actors around — Paul Mescal and Josh O'Connor — 'The History of Sound' almost perversely denies your expectations of what a gay romance could be. The grandiose, sweeping emotional gestures toward repression and latent desire out of something like 'Brokeback Mountain' are nowhere here, Hermanus instead following the lonesome Lionel (Mescal) around America's hidden corners and eventually into Europe for much of this melancholy mood movie. More from IndieWire All 8 'Mission: Impossible' Movies, Ranked Worst to Best Neon's Tom Quinn Reveals His Oscar-Whisperer Secrets Ahead of the Cannes Awards Mescal and O'Connor play Boston Conservatory music students who meet in 1917, spend winding but limited bouts of time with one another over the years, and on the way to the film's rueful conclusion. While 'The History of Sound' suffers from some pacing issues and detours that turn up as dead ends, following Lionel's path as a budding ethnomusicologist collecting songs and sounds to record on cylinders, this is a lovely movie capable of wounding and haunting you. It's also a vivid big-screen showcase for Mescal. The Irish 'Normal People' breakout and 'Aftersun' Best Actor Oscar nominee seizes the opportunity for understated emotions that are a far cry from the swords and sandals of his most recent film and franchise debut, 'Gladiator II.' 'My father said it was a gift from God that I could see music,' says the older Lionel, played by a wistful Chris Cooper in 1980. 'My father would play B minor, and my mouth would turn bitter.' Lionel is revealed to possess a kind of Nabokovian synesthesia that transforms his ear for sound and music into a kaleidoscope of feeling and mental process. We meet a very young Lionel in Kentucky in 1910 before we're transported to Boston in 1917, where Lionel's life course alters when he approaches David (O'Connor), who's riffing on piano in a smoky bar. They go to bed together in one of the film's demure nods at sex — I wouldn't call any of the lovemaking onscreen in 'History of Sound' sex scenes per se, besides one scene involving Lionel's later relationship with a woman (Emma Canning). 'The History of Sound' never comes out and says, 'These men are gay!,' nor does it strain to depict self-inflicted and necessary repressions of queer men at the time. Though that's not to say that Hermanus' film — closer in tone to the South African director's 2019 portrait of apartheid-era pining, 'Moffie,' than his 2022 looking-back-on-your-life Oscar bid 'Living' — isn't about queer suffering. The draft threatens Lionel and David's taciturn romance, while Shattuck's script hinges more on gestures and exchanges than literal declarations of feeling, and both the traumas of war and existential uncertainty about his sexuality and desires eventually plague David. More than, perhaps, they do Lionel. 'I don't worry,' Lionel says at one point. 'I admire you,' David responds. The two men eventually embark on an impromptu journey through the backwoods of Maine to collect American heritage songs sung by the local people, a kind of self-enterprised academic assignment whose aims and goals they aren't sure of just yet. But it gives Lionel and David time to spend together, in each other's arms naked in a tent, over a handful of nights and weeks, away from the rest of the world. 'The History of Sound' is careful not to reveal too early or too explicitly how much David and Lionel are feeling for each other, though a trepidated departure at a train station tells you what you need to know: 'See you next summer?' 'Sure.' Lionel shakes in David's farewell embrace over what could be the last time they see each other. At least for a while. These are the moments when the enormously talented Mescal as Lionel, withdrawn but never holding back, pierces the screen. Shattuck's script and story more intimately follow Lionel on his own expedition into a sentimental education. In later years an established music teacher, he appears to have had some kind of fraught relationship or hook-up situation with a European protégé while teaching in shimmery, summery Italy, though the closest he's able to get to anyone other than David is his girlfriend Clarissa (Canning, in a short but sharp performance), a musician who wants Lionel to meet her parents. Clarissa's mother warns her to leave him, as Lionel seems to radiate only sadness and a secret within, David probably never not on his mind over the years. (Cinematographer Alexander Dynan gorgeously captures Lionel's chapter in Europe with all the glimmery tactile feel of a Luca Guadagnino movie, where moments trudging through the American middle-of-nowhere adopt a more muted palette.) O'Connor gets less of a recognizable emotional arc to work with, though that's because 'The History of Sound' only shows us David through Lionel's eyes, his memories, the rare and tremulous moments of togetherness they have. Composer Oliver Coates, who coincidentally also provided the ethereal, regret-twinged music for 'Aftersun,' writes an original folk score for this film that stands on its own, with Mescal also doing his own singing and evoking a Kentucky accent that's both boyishly earnest and tentatively coy. Not all of 'The History of Sound's' second half lands with the same emotional assuredness of the first, as Lionel's path wends and expands even while ever looking back at David as the one he couldn't contain in his grasp. That's partially due to outside social forces that demand their love be kept private, behind closed doors or the canvases of a tent, but Hermanus and Shattuck aren't interested in piling on that context, which has already been explored in so many other movies more directly. And I speak on behalf of queer audience members such as myself when I say we are, at this point, over it anyway as a storytelling cue. 'The History of Sound' is as plaintive and lilting as a piano note in minor key, never wallowing in its own misery but still keen to explore the psychic sensations, afterglow, and wreckage of a meaningful connection. If the film lacks heat, that's because Hermanus is committed to making what is decidedly not a Big Gay Sweeping Romance. The emotions flood and hit hard, though, in a final chapter in which Lionel encounters David's eventual wife Belle (Hadley Robinson, who gives a stirring monologue), who is restless and desperate for company and hopes Lionel will stay for just a little bit longer. There's a shot of a cigarette left to burn on its own in an empty kitchen that epitomizes Hermanus' patient gaze, never in a rush to move things (such as things like the course of love) along for the sake of narrative momentum. When the grown-into-old-age Lionel (Cooper) says he was 'never happier than when collecting songs,' what he means is he was never happier than during the times he spent with David. He just can't come out and say that, forced to live in a closet that 'History of Sound' never identifies or addresses, and the film is better for it. The soundtrack takes a bracing hairpin turn when Joy Division's post-punk epic ballad 'Atmosphere' jolts in, a shocking clash against the folk songs prior, songs that almost evoke Arthur Russell, the sound of a man alone in the woods with his thoughts, ruminating over his desires, where it all went wrong or was left unsaid. 'Don't walk away in silence,' Joy Division's Ian Curtis sings. Lionel eventually does walk away in silence, but he's haunted by the sounds and impressions of a romance that was anything but. 'The History of Sound' premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. MUBI releases the film later this year. Want to stay up to date on IndieWire's film and critical thoughts? to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings — all only available to subscribers. Best of IndieWire The 25 Best Alfred Hitchcock Movies, Ranked Every IndieWire TV Review from 2020, Ranked by Grade from Best to Worst
Daily Mail
22-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
New Wes Anderson film is branded 'insufferably self-indulgent' and 'bafflingly incoherent' despite its all-star cast
The Phoenician Scheme (15, 101 mins) Verdict: Far too whimsical Rating: Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning (12A, 169 mins) Verdict: Impossibly long ** Rating: Fountain Of Youth (12A, 125 mins) Verdict: Overflows with fun Rating: The Cannes Film Festival closes this weekend and, unusually, two of the films that had the glitziest premieres there have already reached UK cinema screens. That's the good news. Unfortunately, one's a bit of a dud while the other is rather a drag. The Phoenician Scheme is the latest from acclaimed writer-director Wes Anderson, and has a typically top-notch cast boasting several of his unofficial repertory company. Benicio del Toro leads, with Tom Hanks, Benedict Cumberbatch, Scarlett Johansson, Bill Murray and Bryan Cranston among the eye-catching names in supporting roles. Anderson, it is said, is cinematic Marmite: folk either love his films or hate them. But that's not quite so, or to put it another way, maybe it's possible to fall out of love with Marmite. I admired Rushmore (1998) and adored The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014). But The French Dispatch (2021) and 2023's Asteroid City seemed to me insufferably self-indulgent exercises in whimsy for whimsy's sake, often bafflingly incoherent. They amounted to journeys through Anderson's undeniably fertile mind, and while there are always plenty delighted to go along for the ride, rhapsodising about the great auteur's genius, I just wanted to get off. The Phoenician Scheme, alas, offers more of the same. In mitigation it's consistently lovely on the eye. And it has a terrific, genuinely funny opening, but it careers downhill thereafter. Set like Asteroid City in the 1950s, it boasts all Anderson's usual flourishes – above all that mannered artificiality of dialogue, set and costume that has become his trademark. The title refers to the latest dodge by a rich, conniving businessman called Zsa-Zsa Korda (del Toro), who keeps surviving assassination attempts. Korda has nine boys, but only one girl, Liesl. She's a novitiate nun nicely played by (Kate Winslet's daughter) Mia Threapleton, and even though they are estranged, she's the one anointed as his successor, should his enemies ever succeed in killing him. That remarkable cast also includes Michael Cera, Rupert Friend, Riz Ahmed, Willem Dafoe and F Murray Abraham and they all plainly have an absolute whale of a time as Korda whizzes round the world trying to bond with his daughter, finding backers for his dubious project, and confounding assassins. I can imagine how much fun it is to be in a Wes Anderson film. But I for one no longer derive nearly enough fun from watching them. Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning would be a lot more fun if it weren't so ludicrously long-winded, lasting almost three hours. A floppy-haired Tom Cruise plays Ethan Hunt of the Impossible Missions Force, criss-crossing the globe while attempting for the umpteenth time to save it, this time (as last time) from a rogue slab of artificial intelligence known as The Entity. There is one truly spectacular extended stunt, which sees Hunt clinging to the wings of a bi-plane in the clouds above South Africa, but far too much of Christopher McQuarrie's picture gets bogged down in ponderous self-importance, when it should just be tongue-in-cheek escapism. Maybe McQuarrie also felt that a colossal $400 million budget required a commensurately whopping running-time? Whatever, he could have cut half an hour by removing 90 per cent of the references to the world being on the edge of a precipice. As it is, by the end, you might find yourself wishing it would just fall off. Guy Ritchie does a much better job with Fountain of Youth, another action thriller with a potty plot, but which, crucially, never takes itself too seriously. It benefits greatly from John Krasinski's gently, engagingly facetious lead performance as Luke, an art thief, squabbling endlessly with his sister Charlotte (Natalie Portman), a museum curator. Luke, it turns out, is pinching masterpieces by the likes of Rembrandt and Rubens because together they will lead him to the elusive elixir of life, required by his dying billionaire patron (Domhnall Gleeson). The story is unashamedly derivative, borrowing from The Da Vinci Code and the Indiana Jones movies, but Ritchie keeps it bowling along very entertainingly. The writer is James Vanderbilt, of the famously wealthy family of industrialists, whose great-great grandfather went down with the Lusitania in 1915. That's an episode which looms large in the narrative, in a compellingly unlikely collision of fact and fiction. Fountain of Youth is on Apple TV +. A longer review of Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning ran last week.
The Guardian
19-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Alpha review – Julia Ducournau's disjointed body horror is an absolute gamma
Strident, oppressive, incoherent and weirdly pointless from first to last … Julia Ducournau's new film Alpha has to be the most bewildering disappointment of this year's Cannes competition; even an honest lead performance from Mélissa Boros can't retrieve it. I admit I was agnostic about her much-acclaimed Palme d'Or winner Titane from 2021 but that had an energised purpose lacking in Alpha and Ducournau's excellent 2016 debut Raw is still easily her best work. Body-horror – the keynote of Ducournau's films – is still arguably the genre here, or maybe body-horror-coming-of age. We are in a kind of alternative present or recent past; some of the film appears to take place before France adopted the euro in 2002, or perhaps in this imagined world, the euro didn't happen. Thirteen-year-old Alpha (Boros), from a Moroccan-French family, royally freaks out her mother (Golshifteh Farahani) one evening by coming back from a party with the letter A tattooed on her arm. (This incidentally indicates a kind of badass rebellious attitude that she never really displays again.) With a dirty needle? A shared needle? Her mother, a doctor, is beside herself because her hospital is now overwhelmed with infection cases of a bizarre new disease, which turns the sufferer into a marble-white statue. However, despite the near-riot developing outside the hospital, Ducournau doesn't show any restrictive hygiene practices and appears to suggest that society ultimately pretty much copes with the white-marble disease, with unstressed doctors and nurses in the same hospital smilingly dealing with a row of patients. This fictional situation could therefore be said to gesture at Aids or Covid, although it is not particularly compelling or scary either on its own literal terms or as metaphor. It could relate to respectable society's horror of drug addicts – who include Alpha's emaciated smackhead brother Amin (Tahar Ramin) whom Alpha's mom once very rashly allowed to babysit the five-year-old Alpha in some scuzzy rented room while patently out of it – he is evidently intended to be some sort of magically sacrificial figure. As for Alpha, her tattoo, and her leaking bandage, earn her some bullying ostracism from the class, who are themselves angrily preoccupied with the disease, and the various infections of misogyny and homophobia are arguably also being satirised. But the madly, bafflingly overwrought and humourless storytelling can't overcome the fact that everything here is frankly unpersuasive and tedious. Every line, every scene, has the emoting dial turned up to 11 and yet feels redundant. Ducournau surely has to find her way back to the cool precision and certainty of Raw.
Yahoo
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
‘Eddington' Review: Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal Shoot Blanks in Ari Aster's Neo-Western, Which Confuses Absurdism With Incoherence
Did we all go completely nuts during those unsettlingly strange first months of COVID-19 lockdown in 2020, when cities became ghost towns and people thrust into isolation started gambling with their mental health by living online and buying whatever the social media echo chamber coughed up? That's the assessment in Ari Aster's Eddington, which views that collective national trauma through the microcosm of a fictitious New Mexico small town. Essentially a modern Western marbled with a vein of dark comedy, the movie is neither suspenseful nor funny enough to work as either. Mostly, it's a distancing slog. After the diabolically well-crafted classic horror of Hereditary and Midsommar, gifted writer-director Aster took a turn into more personal territory with the uneven Oedipal odyssey Beau Is Afraid, a tumble down a rabbit hole of neuroses full of striking nightmarish imagery and poignant confessional moments of crippled masculinity. Ultimately, though, the movie felt more nourishing for the filmmaker than the audience. More from The Hollywood Reporter Ready for a Change of Scenery? Try Côte d'Azur Town Surfing 'Arco' Review: In Charming, Natalie Portman-Produced French Animated Film, a Boy From the Future Must Find His Way Home 'The President's Cake' Review: An Iraqi Schoolgirl's Odyssey Among Grown-ups Is a Tragicomic Gem Aster's fourth feature shares some key qualities with its immediate predecessor. It's bloated, self-indulgent, rambling, crazily ambitious and commendably odd, but so overstuffed it becomes a lethal combination of baffling and boring. The director throws a bucketload of ideas at the screen — about American history, racial disharmony, political standoffs, protest movements and disinformation, for starters — but most of them tend to fizzle before making any cogent points beyond 'Hey, look at the mess we make of our lives when left to our own devices,' both figuratively and literally. Eddington takes digs both at sanctimonious liberalism and self-dealing conservatism, but it's so careful to avoid taking a firm political stance that its barbs seldom land. It also sticks a highly capable cast in user-unfriendly roles that pretty much leave us with no one to care about. It drops us back into that surreal summer five years ago, without the benefit of fresh perspective. Set over a volatile period in late May of 2020 that could be days or weeks, the film once again stars Joaquin Phoenix, this time as Sevilla County sheriff Joe Cross. He's introduced being pulled over by Indigenous sheriff Butterfly Jiminez (William Belleau) and his deputy for entering their jurisdiction, the Pueblo of Santa Lupe, without a face mask. Joe is a wheezy asthmatic who claims he can't breathe with a mask on. That puts him in league with ornery old-timers being refused entry into supermarkets, where customers queue outside, standing six feet apart. His anti-mask position also puts Joe at odds with the town's 100 percent mask- and social distancing-compliant mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), who's up for re-election. He is working with the New Mexico governor to push through permits for a massive artificial intelligence data center. Ted argues that it will bring wealth and employment to the dying town, while many residents just see it as a further drain on their already dwindling resources — particularly water, due to a prolonged drought. There are several prickly confrontations between Joe and Ted in the film, but nothing that really taxes the two actors or has fun with the genre tropes of an Old West showdown. For a while though, Aster does succeed in drawing us in with the sheer cacophony of noise on social media — from coding experts tracing insidious patterns back to 1956 through a theory that masks make it easier for child-smugglers, bizarre web headlines like 'Is Hillary at Gitmo?' and Joe's mother-in-law Dawn (Deirdre O'Connell) pointing to extensive pandemic drills at Johns Hopkins two years earlier as evidence that the whole thing was planned. The overbearing Dawn, who has outstayed her welcome in what was supposed to be a temporary lockdown solution, is not Joe's only headache at home. His uncommunicative wife Louise (Emma Stone), whose hobby is making artsy puppet dolls with disturbing faces, struggles with mental illness stemming from sexual abuse when she was 16 and subsequently being forced to have an abortion. She's so translucent and fragile she seems at risk of vanishing. The powder keg situation in the town is stoked primarily by the upsurge in Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of George Floyd's murder by a white Minneapolis cop. Joe and his deputies Mikey (Michael Ward) and Guy (Luke Grimes) get caught up in the middle of it; a video of the sheriff's altercation with a violent unhoused man (Clifton Collins Jr.) goes viral as evidence of police brutality. The mayor's son Eric (Matt Gomez Hidaka) and his buddy Brian (Cameron Mann) fall under the influence of fired-up protest agitator Sarah (Amélie Hoeferle). Brian's eagerness to embrace the movement yielded the one time I laughed out loud in the movie, when he spouts a mouthful of newly acquired views at the dinner table: 'We're changing institutions, dismantling whiteness and not allowing whiteness to rebuild itself.' This prompts his flabbergasted father to respond, 'What? You're white!' It's an obvious joke, but it's funny, as is Brian in a public forum proclaiming that it's time for white people to listen, 'Which I will be doing as soon as I finish this speech.' Joe raises the temperature by announcing he's running against Ted for mayor, promising to reopen businesses and remove restrictive mandates. His half-baked campaign soundbites ('We need to free each other's hearts') are matched by misspelled slogans on his car, like 'Your being manipulated.' He makes a blunder by using Louise's trauma as a weapon to discredit his opponent. That makes Lou a susceptible convert to the cult of Vernon Jefferson Peak (Austin Butler), who claims his personal experience of being sold as a boy into a pedophile sex-trafficking ring gave him the empathy to provide consolation to others in pain. Like I said, there's a lot going on in Eddington, even more so when desperation leads to political assassinations and a whole wave of gun violence, while Pueblo sheriff Jiminez starts eyeing Joe as not just a fool but probably a criminal. But none of the tangled threads amounts to much. Maybe the point is that we didn't really learn anything about our national dysfunction during lockdown, or whatever we did learn was quickly forgotten, which, as a conclusion to an almost three-hour movie, seems simplistic. The cast all do what's required of them, but no performance stands out in any major way, aside from the fact that Phoenix's mush-mouth delivery and punch-drunk weariness as Joe make him seem like he's already begun unraveling even before the story gets going. The movie looks fine, but for a DP of the caliber of Darius Khondji working in a physically dramatic setting like New Mexico, it's undistinguished. Bobby Krlic and Daniel Pemberton's ominous score is a good match for the needling quality shared by all four of Aster's features. But if Hereditary and Midsommar got under the skin with genuinely scary storytelling and startling imagery and Beau is Afraid was equal parts squirmy and maddening, Eddington is just annoying and empty. Best of The Hollywood Reporter 'The Goonies' Cast, Then and Now "A Nutless Monkey Could Do Your Job": From Abusive to Angst-Ridden, 16 Memorable Studio Exec Portrayals in Film and TV The 10 Best Baseball Movies of All Time, Ranked
