review

Call “Scary Movie” lazy, dumb and offensive. It would enthusiastically agree. The lowbrow horror parody thrives on shtick about weed, race and genitalia. The only thing that scares it is high expectations.

But amid the rampant stupidity of the first “Scary Movie,” released in 2000, original director Keenen Ivory Wayans discovered two major talents: Regina Hall and Anna Faris. As heroines Brenda and Cindy, respectively, Hall and Faris were daffy, dopey and committed. Alongside a cast of Playmates (Carmen Electra, Shannon Elizabeth) and family members (Wayans brothers Marlon and Shawn), they played stupid like Shakespeare. In two decades since, both gave up the Ghostface to do better things: Hall in “Girls Trip” and “One Battle After Another,” and Faris in “Smiley Face” and “The House Bunny.” (Frankly, Faris deserves to be doing more.) If a sixth “Scary Movie” is going to lure them back for what the ensemble openly frets is a rebooquel — as in a reboot-sequel, here pronounced “re-booty call” — it better be good.

Fine, good is a stretch. The latest “Scary Movie,” which simply recycles the title “Scary Movie,” is as lazy, dumb and offensive as the others. But Hall and Faris, now playing the dotty mothers of the next generation of victims, are hilarious, romping about like their Brenda and Cindy have clearly been knocked on the head too often. (Brenda, fans of the franchise know, has technically already died twice.) I laughed 10 times, which makes this “Scary Movie” the best of the bunch — a pallid compliment.

Directing duties have shuffled to Michael Tiddes, a longtime Wayans collaborator, who gets gutsy performances from three of this entry’s newbies: Olivia Rose Keegan and Savannah Lee Nassif as Cindy’s estranged daughters, a pill-popper and a Wednesday Addams clone, and Ruby Snowber, maximizing every second of her feature debut as a high school tramp.

The Wayans clan left the series early on due to a contract dispute with Harvey and Bob Weinstein. Now seven have returned. Four Wayans (Craig, Keenan Ivory, Marlon and Shawn) co-wrote the script with Rick Alvarez; three more (Kim, Damon Jr., and Gregg) act in the film alongside Marlon and Shawn, who revive their characters Shorty, a stoner with a shrill cackle, and Ray, whose only personality trait is being gay. In one of many homages to “Sinners,” Ray promises a church he’ll act straight. Then he mimes tucking his manhood between his legs and dancing like Buffalo Bill in “The Silence of the Lambs.”

Yes, Shorty and Ray were also murdered in the first movie. No, it doesn’t matter. “Scary Movie’s” one genuinely ingenious move is to resurrect actors without shame. Jon Abrahams’ bad boyfriend (stabbed), Lochlyn Munro’s lout (slit throat), and Electra’s eye candy (pierced through the breast implant) are back, too, as are a pair of erotically linked survivors, Cheri Oteri’s news anchor and Dave Sheridan’s moronic cop, whose spittle-flecked chin is the grossest thing in a film that has a mall Santa costumed like “Terrifier’s” Art the Clown gifting a child a set of severed testicles.

“The Silence of the Lambs” remains the only horror film to win best picture at the Academy Awards. This “Scary Movie” has no delusions of that. Yet in the years since the last installment, 2013’s “Scary Movie 5” — a sequel so awful that even its own director, Malcolm D. Lee, later admitted, “It’s not worth your time” — the horror genre at-large has become ambitious, with “Sinners,” “The Substance,” and “Get Out” earning Oscar nominations and “Weapons’” witchy Amy Madigan seizing the supporting actress prize.

This “Scary Movie” makes fun of all four of those newer hits, as well as the recent rebooquels of “Halloween,” which was earnest, and “Scream,” which couldn’t decide what tone to hit. Each send-up is funny for at least an entire minute, a lifetime when you’re watching Marlon’s Shorty mug for the camera. Either Shorty has the most screen time or he’s just so excruciating that it feels like it.

I cannot make the straight-faced argument that the worst “Scary Movies” were held back by their source material. Still, it’s true that when the series was at its nadir, so few vibrant horror films were being made that it was stuck lampooning the now-forgotten Jessica Chastain chiller “Mama.” Likewise, when this “Scary Movie” takes a jab at Nicolas Cage’s more-kooky-than-tedious “Longlegs,” the limp gag of the creepy Shorthand (Chris Elliot), underscores that the movie itself just isn’t that interesting.

“Scary Movie” inserts two political jokes that earn a solid gasp-giggle-groan. Yet, the most grating new addition is a self-righteous student named Dei Meeks (Sydney Park), who polices the humor. The movie relishes killing the killjoy. A whole mob does her in; it’s the one death that feels angry. I’d have been happy to see her die in her first scene. Not that I empathize with canceled comics who posture as if they’re victims under attack, but it would do this country good if it could occasionally share a laugh.

Don’t waste one brain cell trying to deduce the assassin. The answer is surprising and satisfying. While the script’s hasty nods to “KPop Demon Hunters” and the biopic “Michael” make it feel like it was written on yesterday’s Kleenex, the immediacy allows “One Battle After Another’s” Teyana Taylor to acknowledge that Madigan’s Aunt Gladys stole her Oscar. Swilling tequila shots and hollering “Viva la revolución!,” she’s hysterical in the cleverest opening slasher scene since Drew Barrymore answered the phone in the 1996 “Scream.” I’d watch six more “Scary Movies” if Taylor starred in them. But like Hall and Faris, she deserves better.

Japanese filmmaker Chie Hayakawa isn’t afraid to look death in the eye. The writer-director’s 2022 feature debut, “Plan 75,” imagined an unsettling future in which the elderly are offered a subsidy by the government to be euthanized. For her follow-up, she travels into her own past, drawing from memories of her father’s battle with cancer.

But while “Renoir” features no sci-fi elements, the nearness of oblivion remains just as prominent. Shorn of sentimentality, this gentle drama follows a quietly observant fifth-grader who feels the grim shadow of mortality all around her. How the character will absorb that realization is anyone’s guess — including Hayakawa’s.

Newcomer Yui Suzuki stars as Fuki, who lives in a nondescript Tokyo suburb in 1987. Her soft-spoken dad, Keiji (Lily Franky), is suffering with terminal cancer in its final stages, the emaciated man spending as much time in the hospital as he does at home. Fuki’s mother, Utako (Hikari Ishida), doesn’t seem very despondent, though: One senses an emotional exhaustion that comes from preparing so long for the inevitable that she’s now mostly numb, her anticipatory grief having given way to frayed nerves.

Fuki’s pre-mourning process is equally complicated. Outwardly, she shows no signs of being devastated by her dad’s imminent passing, happily playing with him, almost in denial of his fate. But “Renoir” subtly suggests the impressionable girl is more aware than she lets on, surrounding her with random reminders of death. Local news breathlessly reports on random domestic murders. Even when Fuki gets away from the city, the camera lingers on her watching a campfire’s dying embers. The film derives its title from the girl’s interest in “Little Irène,” a painting by influential French impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir. She asks if Renoir is still alive. No, he’s dead too.

Hayakawa pulls from her childhood in multiple ways for her sophomore feature, which premiered in competition at Cannes last year. “Renoir” takes place in 1987 specifically because that’s the year she turned 11, and, like her protagonist, she was infatuated with “Little Irène.” But there’s a refreshing absence of nostalgia in Hayakawa’s conception of Fuki and her quizzical processing of her father’s fatal illness.

For school, Fuki writes an essay about her wish to be an orphan. She becomes obsessed with hypnotism and mind-reading, an unorthodox strategy to create a sense of control. And, occasionally, she wanders into daydreams that Hayakawa presents so matter-of-factly that viewers may sometimes be unsure if what they’re seeing is actually happening. In “Renoir,” Fuki’s flights of fancy are as naturalistic as her everyday life — a sharp reminder that, for children, imagination and reality are often indistinguishable.

If death has been integral to Hayakawa’s two features, it’s society’s callous reaction to aging that is her primary focus. “Plan 75” eschewed dystopian-thriller conventions to ponder how Japan might one day treat its senior citizens, viewing them as little more than a drain on resources. “Renoir” makes a similar point within a memory piece. Keiji is the one dying, but it’s telling that Hayakawa centers the story on Fuki and Utako, who each, in their own way, seem more concerned about their own personal dramas.

As Keiji’s situation grows more dire, Utako enters the orbit of Toru (Ayumu Nakajima), a workplace advisor with whom she’s instantly smitten, pondering pursuing him romantically. Ironically, Toru preaches the importance of good communication skills in the office, a lesson the film’s guarded family would be wise to heed. While Utako hides her feelings for Toru, Fuki begins a secret odyssey in which she impulsively joins a phone dating service, engaging in conversations with a creepy college student (Ryota Bando) who pushes her to meet in person. This potentially traumatic subplot is the closest “Renoir” gets to traditional suspense, but even here Hayakawa adopts a muted approach, sidestepping shock value for bittersweet commentary about young people’s confusion around love. Both Utako and Fuki chase after human connections fraught with danger, each trying to insulate themselves from the tragedy waiting at home.

“Renoir” may be a delicate wisp of a film, but it’s flecked with thoughtful questioning about whether childhood’s sorrows leave permanent scars on us as adults. Suzuki exudes the fragility and buoyancy of adolescence, playing Fuki as someone constantly imbibing the world, rarely revealing what she’s doing with that stimulus. The simplest moments resonate the strongest, such as when the moody 11-year-old holds a balloon over the balcony of her family’s high-rise apartment, casually releasing her grip so that it tumbles to the ground far below. Does it speak to a desire to jump herself? “Renoir” won’t say, but the character is so poised you feel confident she’ll survive her father’s death. Who knows: Maybe years from now, she’ll even make a touching, emotionally astute movie about it.

Glaciers aren’t stationary. Immense and imposing, formed through the downward trajectory of water from mountains as it collects and freezes, they have always moved. Now, however, they’re leaving. The demise of glaciers is a fact inherent in all the bad news about the effects of climate change on what once seemed permanent. But for Icelanders, whose connection to glaciers is ancient and mythic, our human epoch has become an extended hospice for the landscape of their lives.

Somehow, though, Sara Dosa’s documentary on this matter, “Time and Water,” avoids playing like a funeral in waiting. Built around Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason’s voiced lamentations on a vanishing frozen world, along with archival footage of his family, it’s no simple howl of grief, even when it takes us to a publicly held memorial in 2019 for Iceland’s Ok glacier, the first such “death” diagnosis in the country’s history. Rather, Dosa’s film is a meditation on change — both the kind that we accept with a heavy heart and something more general. “Time and Water” is a curiously vibrant elegy, teeming with appreciation for the intimate majesty that is all life, generational and geologic.

Dosa has finessed this emotional-meets-elemental space before in her Academy Award-nominated 2022 documentary “Fire of Love,” about married volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft. That was a wonderfully eccentric romance forged in molten lava. Here, she’s in a collaboration of sorts with her subjects, both human and elemental. Magnason’s opening narration over spectacular footage of glaciers — up close and from far away — gently informs us that we’re watching a time capsule, one where the bonds of family and environment are intertwined.

We learn how Iceland’s glaciers, essentially rivers of varying pace, begat their unique ecosystems, but also how they provided the breathtaking terrain upon which Magnason’s grandparents Hulda and Árni fell in love. (Grandma Hulda was the first woman to fly in Iceland, itself a very cool fact.) The onset of dementia in Árni spurs his grandson to consider what’s lost when the markers of memory depart. “Time and Water” touches on the epic verse called rimurs, passed down via chanted song by Icelandic women, their descriptive, sorrowful tales like dispatches from previous ages.

“Tone poem” is an overused term in cinema, but the humbling “Time and Water,” graced with a playful, atmospheric Dan Deacon score, earns that distinction. Naturally, it helps that you can never tire of all the air-crisped glacier imagery, captured digitally and in 16mm. Folded into the cozy slide-show vibe of Magnason’s home videos and the carefully chosen archival footage, the movie plays like a scrapbook portrait in which home just happens to boast the grandest of backyards.

How much longer will Icelanders enjoy it? The glaciers are predicted to be gone within 200 years. That’s an eternity or a drip, depending on whose survival we’re talking about. Still, “Time and Water” collapses the notion that we are somehow separate from these ancient, essential formations: an encouraging hello to the future from inside a sobering goodbye.

Cape Fear,” premiering Friday on Apple TV, is a 10-episode limited series remake of a 1991 Martin Scorsese remake of a 1962 film adapted from John D. MacDonald’s 1957 novel “The Executioners,” and as in a game of telephone each subsequent version adds new material and moves a little farther from the original. (The credits to the series, created by Nick Antosca, note all previous sources and screenwriters.) Thirty-four years having passed since the last go-round, we are treated to such modern advances as catfishing, drones, deep fakes, social media and pushy true-crime podcasters.

In each iteration, a family is menaced by a recently released ex-con who blames one or more of them for his incarceration. Antosca fills his extra-long take on the material with complications and inventions; though the series is also chock full of borrowings from and allusions to its predecessors — you can hardly call them Easter eggs, lying there as they do in plain sight. (And sound: Bernard Herrmann and Elmer Bernstein‘s earlier scores share space with Jeff Russo’s new one.)

In every version, the antagonist is a now-charming, now-menacing psychopath named Max Cady (Javier Bardem), memorably played by Robert Mitchum in 1962 and Robert De Niro in 1991. In the novel and movies, Cady was serving time for rape; here it’s for the murder of his wife and unborn child, when new evidence suddenly springs him from prison after 17 years. We are invited to suspect this evidence from the very beginning, though this suspicion will itself become suspect. “Or is it?” is a question you’ll be prompted to ask through the series.

The objects of Cady’s slow-boiling vengeance — seemingly — are married lawyers Tom (Patrick Wilson) and Anna Bowden (Amy Adams), sharing the position previously represented solely by Gregory Peck and Nick Nolte in turn. Anna, who had unsuccessfully represented Cady, ironically works for an Innocence Project-type nonprofit, whose chief, Noa Toussaint (CCH Pounder), is only too delighted to fundraise on the back of Cady’s celebrity. Cady, claiming no hard feelings, insinuates himself into their world, apparently friendly, apparently helpful, so that it’s not always clear what’s sincere and what’s strategy. Is he a wolf in sheep’s clothing, or just a creepy, sometimes violent sheep? (“Killed his wife, didn’t kill his wife,” a minor character will volunteer, “he’s an arrogant bastard either way.”)

There are now two Bowden children in the picture, doubling earlier versions. Natalie (Lily Collias), Anna’s daughter from a previous relationship, is a good girl looking to go just a little bad, who feels unseen by her busy parents. Sad, sullen younger half-brother Zach (Joe Anders), unrecovered from a social media misstep, is acting more strangely than teenage boys usually do.

This is a cat and mouse — or cats and mice — melodrama, with customized stock characters given dark secrets and backstory traumas less as explanation than complication. (Good, bad, whatever, everyone’s got issues.) Cady, who has a prison-acquired brain injury — cue flashback, in black and white, naturally — suffers from headaches and hallucinations, reacting painfully to flashbulbs (a Chekov gun, I wondered?), seeing visions of his dead wife and son, whom he pictures grown. (He is sad about it, whether or not it’s his fault.) And is that masked woman in green he keeps seeing real or imagined?

On a nuts and bolts level, it’s all screwed together tight, even the pieces that stick out at weird angles. (Is there a reason to make Cady an apparently talented chef, other than to demonstrate his knife skills?) The actors fill their parts with feeling. Bardem gets the most, and most extreme attitudes, to play, whether cozying up individually to the Bowdens, threatening a groupie, undergoing a religious conversion, acting normal or being weird. Adams is low-key forceful as his primary opponent. (Tom’s comparatively weak character is underscored by his secret habit of microdosing LSD and a nothingburger flirtation with a colleague.) Collias is impressively real. The dialogue is well-crafted, the Southern atmosphere (Atlanta doubling Savannah, with Savannah here and there standing for itself) suitably oppressive.

Nevertheless, it’s fair to ask whether this story, even with its yards of extra material, could be told in under nine hours? The answer, most assuredly, is yes. And might it be better shorter? It might.

Not that I’ve ever been a fly on the walls of the executive conference or dining or washrooms where such deals are made, but I suspect the length has less to do with artistic necessity than A) the obscure economics of streaming and B) the not unrelated habits of viewers, who, to judge by questions I get asked, abhor a vacuum. A 10-episode series will put off the moment when they have “nothing to watch,” while the streamer gets to keep them in the ecosystem longer. “Cape Fear” is hardly the only series to which this applies. As I imagine the series will do well — mystery with a smattering of horror seems very much what the people want — more may be just the ticket for some people. Still, there’s a sense that the story has expanded to fill the space, with plotlines for all and crazy side trips (snakes! drugs!) in escalating levels of nuttiness.

That might be more feature than bug, but I can’t say I felt much of anything for the characters, or was concerned whether the Bowdens would emerge from their ordeals a stronger family. (Whatever the outcome, I’d say they have work to do.) Having been given only eight of 10 episodes to review, I’m interested, in a disinterested way, how this all will shake out, when the story finally moves to the Cape Fear River, and whatever final twists — that there will be twists, I am certain — an inevitably Action Packed Finale has in store.

Los Angeles County prosecutors are reviewing two sex assault cases against Sean “Diddy” Combs that stem from allegations made by a Florida music producer last year, law enforcement officials and the alleged victim said Wednesday.

Investigators from the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department presented the cases to prosecutors in January 2026, according to a statement from the district attorney’s office.

A spokesman for the district attorney’s office declined to say when the alleged incidents occurred or explain why it has taken nearly nine months to make a charging decision.

Combs — who rose to fame as a hip-hop mogul in the 1990s as the face of Bad Boy Records — has gone through a years-long public downfall following myriad allegations of domestic violence and sex abuse. In July, a New York jury convicted him of transporting prostitutes across state lines for drug-fueled bacchanals referred to as “freak offs.”

He was sentenced to four years in federal prison and remains incarcerated at a minimum-security prison in New Jersey.

Combs’ reputation and business began to publicly unravel in 2023 after federal authorities raided his homes, and a leaked video showed him beating his ex-girlfriend, Casandra “Cassie” Ventura, at a Los Angeles hotel.

TMZ first reported on the D.A.’s office’s decision to review the L.A. allegations. A spokesman for Combs declined to comment.

In November, The Times reported that the Sheriff’s Department was investigating Combs on suspicion of a sex assault that happened in East L.A.

Jonathan Hay — a Florida-based music producer who was working with Combs on a project to remix songs written by deceased rap legend Notorious B.I.G., also known as Christopher Wallace — said Wednesday that he is the alleged victim in the cases under review by the district attorney.

Hay told several media outlets in 2025 that he was the “John Doe” from a civil lawsuit filed last July that accused Combs of sex assault in 2020 and 2021. Hay first reported the assaults to police in Largo, Fla., he has said.

According to the suit, Hay, Combs and others were at a Los Angeles warehouse that stored some of Wallace’s possessions in 2020 when Combs “provided drugs to everyone present” and subsequently began masturbating in front of Hay.

Combs “started watching porn on his cell phone, grabbed one of Biggie’s shirts off a rack, and began to masturbate with it in front of the plaintiff,” the suit alleges. In a separate incident in March 2021, Hay alleged Combs forced him to perform oral sex, according to the suit.

“I have an overwhelming feeling of hope as we are knocking on the door of criminal justice,” Hay wrote in an email to The Times on Wednesday. “I am beyond grateful that both the LASD and LAPD investigated this case thoroughly for many months and submitted it to the District Attorney.”

Combs’ civil attorney Jonathan Davis has previously denied Hay’s allegations.

“Let me make it absolutely clear, Mr. Combs categorically denies as false and defamatory all claims that he sexually abused anyone,” Davis said in a statement last year. “He looks forward to vindicating himself in court, where such matters are decided — and not in the media — based on admissible, material evidence, not rank speculation and unsubstantiated allegations.”

Times staff writer Richard Winton contributed to this report.

What will today’s kids think of He-Man, the muscle-bound ’80s relic with the most iconic bob after Anna Wintour? Launched in an era where machismo meant a goofy wrestler or metal singer with an eight-octave falsetto, the steroidal beskirted barbarian has always been a bit ridiculous. C’mon, his name is He-Man. What in the testosterone is that?

And so, director Travis Knight (“Bumblebee”) has made his reboot of “Masters of the Universe” a dopey, friendly comedy about modern masculinity in crisis with a He-Man who openly wonders what kind of a man to be. Hurtled out of the kingdom of Eternia as a boy, this Prince Adam (a terrifically game Nicholas Galitzine) came of age in Oklahoma City as a sweet guy who happens to be obsessed with swords. Instead of transforming into the strongest man in the galaxy to protect his throne from the evil duo of Skeletor (voiced by Jared Leto) and Evil-Lyn (Alison Brie), earthbound Adam parries HR complaints while sitting behind a desk plate that labels his gender identity not as He-Man but He/Him.

Times have changed. Even He-Man’s talking pet tiger (Tom Wilton) asks for consent before giving him a lick.

Galitzine’s He-Man is more Clark Kent than Superman, a gentle, funny, under-estimated dweeb. On a blind date, his descriptions of magical griffins and burning deserts sound humiliatingly immature. Dumped before dessert, he sulks home where his bro-y roommate (Christian Vunipola) secretly watches the weepie “The Notebook” when no one is looking as the soundtrack spins an acoustic cover of the Cure’s “Boys Don’t Cry.” Every man in this movie has a public persona and a private one. Even Adam’s irritable female boss, Suzie (Sasheer Zamata), hides under a people-pleasing mask. “This is my mega-serious face,” she says with an unnerving grin.

The performances are good; the plot, postcard-sized: Adam returns to Eternia, unleashes his alter-identity He-Man and wrestles with the pressure to live up to his new biceps. Although Adam must rescue his royal parents (James Purefoy and Charlotte Riley) from Skeletor, he reaches for empathy before a blade. Could Skeletor really be that bad, he asks his childhood friend Teela (Camila Mendes). “He has a skull for a face,” Teela insists. In this world, everyone’s measured against their looks.

Here’s another question: Could Skeletor really be Jared Leto? Physically, of course not. Skeletor is all pixels with a clattering jaw perfect for chewing the scenery. (The bully is especially hilarious when the story transplants him to an ordinary weight-lifting gym — call him Skele-Chad.) Leto’s grumbling Brit-inflected baritone is an unrecognizable concoction of trilled r’s and plummy vowels — and the best performance he’s done in years. With apologies to Bette Midler, you should hear the gravitas Leto brings to calling his minions “the buttworms beneath my feet.”

Yes, that’s the humor level of the dialogue. Chris Butler, Aaron Nee, Adam Nee and Dave Callaham have written a heavy-handed script in which, when Castle Grayskull comes under attack, Idris Elba’s soldier is forced to yell, “We’re under attack!” You know, in case the exploding laser beams weren’t obvious.

Obviousness is this film’s handicap — and the main joke. In this movie’s lore, juvenile Adam, played by an adorable Artie Wilkinson-Hunt, is the guilty child who invented his meathead He-Man moniker, as well the nicknames of his allies Ram-Man, Mekaneck and Fisto, who all look exactly as they sound to their chagrin. “I don’t fist anyone,” Fisto (Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson) protests. The grown-ups in the audience snicker.

Knight was a kid himself when the cartoon version of “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe” debuted on television. As with his “Transformers” spin-off “Bumblebee,” he makes movies like a child who loves taking his action figures out of the box and giving them a silly soul.

He’s no hack: Knight’s debut film, “Kubo and the Two Strings,” was nominated for an Academy Award for animation. Raised with an affection for brands (his father, Phil Knight, is the co-founder of Nike), he also feels obliged to include so much fan service for his generation that kids will have to swashbuckle through confusing callbacks to discover He-Man for themselves. One battle scene is scored to 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Up?” simply as a nod to a He-Man mash-up video that went viral back in 2005, a clash as wonky as it sounds. Yet Daniel Pemberton’s opening theme music is a rousing crescendo of stadium rock synthesizers. You can hear Queen guitarist Brian May in the score — not merely as an influence. It’s actually him.

Culturally, hyper-machismo has oscillated from cool to lame to ironically cool and back again for decades. Even Queen itself was deemed lame until “Wayne’s World” resurrected “Bohemian Rhapsody” as headbanging slapstick. If you spot a guy swaggering like a brute from Eternia on the sidewalk, masked or not, he probably thinks he’s more awesome than everyone else does. Likewise, when He-Man smashes skulls to a wailing metal soundtrack, I no longer know if I’m meant to be snickering with the electric guitars or at them. Neither does the movie, which seems to decide each scene’s individual tone on a coin flip.

Frankly, the dorky version of Adam is more fun than the heroic He-Man, even with Knight hammering us every minute to laugh that he’s a total weakling. Galitzine embraces the indignity. Zooming through the air in a flying Sky-Sled, he wedges his face into a triple chin. Dazed and enthusiastic, Galitzine’s human charm counterbalances Eternia’s synthetic feel, a blandscape of bright forests and cliffside dungeons that looks dated — not to 1983 but to last decade’s greenscreen-heavy would-be fantasy franchises like “Clash of the Titans” and “John Carter.”

Please don’t make Galitzine do five of these movies, even though he’s very good. An unusually pretty leading man who is quirkier and funnier than he looks, Galitzine is the kind of rising talent Hollywood rarely knows how to handle. In his previous roles, he gave off the impression of being flummoxed by his own attractiveness, whether as a queer prince (“Red, White & Royal Blue”), a Harry Styles-esque pop star (“The Idea of You”) or a popular football jock whose high school classmates are oblivious that he has the IQ of a second-grader (“Bottoms”). Here, Galitzine multiplies that self-conscious gag times a thousand, visibly dazzled by his own six-pack when he transforms from himbo to gym-bro. Even Skeletor is agog over the “big long sword dangling between his thighs.”

Smartly cast, Galitzine could prove to have the potential of Brad Pitt, another blond hunk who longed to get weird, chafing against roles that made him take off his shirt until he hit 55 and realized it was a flex. But shouldering a wobbly, expensive summer tentpole is a risk — just ask Sam Worthington or Taylor Kitsch. If “Masters of the Universe” tanks, here’s hoping Galitzine summons the strength to dig himself out of the rubble.

Hollywood has been waiting for Kane Parsons since the year he was born. The 20-year-old director is the same age as YouTube’s first videos and grew up with no barriers between his creativity and an audience. “Backrooms,” his debut feature, marks the start of a new new wave of filmmakers raised by internet feedback who are ready to reinvigorate the industry.

Young Steven Spielberg screened his 8mm reels for his neighborhood. Parsons uploaded his early shorts online where he could analyze the mass response. When one, an unsettling nine-minute experiment about a warren of dingy carpets, taffy-yellow walls and gridded drop ceilings clicked with 78 million viewers, he made sequels. A24 offered Parsons a deal before he finished high school. He’s graduating into multiplexes having spent his adolescence writing, directing, editing, composing and market-testing what people want to watch. I’d toast to that, but Parsons isn’t old enough for Champagne.

Given that backdrop, “Backrooms” would be one of the year’s most significant releases even if the movie itself was merely fine. But it’s better than fine — it’s a work of honest-to-goodness art. Working with screenwriter Will Soodik, Parsons has gone back into that banal maze to find an uncannily mature story about loss and stagnation, about how our self-serving narratives barricade us from emotional growth.

Set in 1990, “Backrooms” has the fritz of an old VHS tape. (Like so many other Gen Z kids, Parsons is nostalgic for a pre-smartphone era he never knew.) A failed architect-turned-furniture salesman named Clark (Chiwetel Ejiofor, superbly expressive) tumbles through a portal in his store’s basement to the backrooms of the title — less Alice in Wonderland, more Alice in Wonderbland.

“It’s like it was made by a bunch of construction workers on acid,” he muses. The hallways lead to more hallways, the overhead fluorescents whine like hornets. Someone — or something — has piled lamps and stools into the center of one room, scattered chairs in another and embedded shoes into the floor as though the ground were made of sand. The disorder looks like the wreckage of an unknown chaos. Aboveground, Clark is trapped in his own resentments, throwing temper tantrums like a toddler. Down here, frustration feels natural.

Should he be afraid? And if so, then what of?

Distant thuds warn that Clark isn’t alone. Soon after, three other characters follow Clark into this liminal space: his loud employees Bobby and Kat (Finn Bennett and Lukita Maxwell) and his exasperated therapist, Dr. Mary Kline (Renate Reinsve), who is haunted by flashbacks of her agoraphobic mother. There’s also a mysterious man in a lab coat (Mark Duplass) who works for a company that factors into the backrooms’ preexisting internet lore, but doesn’t have much purpose in this script. It’s fine just to see Duplass as a gesture toward corporate apathy. More beings will appear too and cinematographer Jeremy Cox’s deliberately low-fi look forces you to do triple and quadruple takes to comprehend what you’re even seeing.

How does a 20-year-old fathom adult-sized discontent? Lord knows, but Parsons does. One theory is that today’s 20-year-olds were just launching into teenhood when the pandemic teleported them from their classrooms to isolated computer screens. Meanwhile, they overheard their parents fret that society might be forever hollowed out. When a young person looks toward the future, what do they see? Probably not an office building bustling with entry-level jobs.

Think about how the act of buying a couch no longer involves interacting with a salesman like Clark, but peering at a pixelated living room that doesn’t actually exist with a couch that changes colors at a tap. Think about how lately the internet at large feels human-less. Then layer that emptiness over the images here.

Sparse yet gripping, “Backrooms” and its minimalist story accommodate the audience’s own free-ranging imagination. The infinite size of these drab catacombs triggers sense-memories of feeling small and confused in an ordinary place that feels all wrong. It’s a time travel trip back to childhood — mass entertainment made intimate — with Parsons tossing us scraps of Clark and Mary’s personal histories like a breadcrumb trail. I remembered what it felt like to get lost in a motel on a road trip with my grandparents. More recently, I tidied the home of a friend who was in the hospital, the pill bottles and crumpled blankets left in situ as evidence of someone else’s pain. “Backrooms” felt like that, too.

There’s an incredible special effects shot where the camera sinks through the floor of Mary’s living room to find a mutation of the same room — and then another and another — each replica deteriorating further from reality until it becomes a new room altogether that would fit right into the backrooms. This, we wordlessly understand, represents how memories of the past can be at once factually inaccurate and emotionally true. We’ve all been bewildered kids, Parsons more recently than most. Some of the most powerful people on Earth still behave like they’re stuck in that headspace.

Describing “Backrooms” as a horror film doesn’t feel exactly right. It’s a surrealist painting in motion, the equivalent of staring at Salvador Dali’s wasteland of melting clocks until it makes gut-sense. Dali made that famous masterpiece, “The Persistence of Memory,” in 1931, a breath-holding moment between wars when daily life looked normal enough but vibrated with the dread that no, things were definitely not OK. Kids don’t know that, but they vibe with Dali anyway because he keys into their suspicion that the world doesn’t really obey the rules.

That anxiety hums through “Backrooms.” It’s why millions of people watched and shared the original short. Yet as fraught as it sounds — and as abruptly as it ends — I left elated. A major new moviemaking talent has arrived and he’s the beginning of a movement. Other internet-honed young filmmakers will follow with their own fresh insights into genres like action, comedy and romance. Kane Parsons is just the first one through Hollywood’s labyrinth.

“Hell’s Kitchen,” the Alicia Keys musical that has landed at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre in a blaze of rousing sound, deploys the R&B star’s glorious treasure trove of work in the service of a semi-autobiographical version of her coming-of-age story in the Manhattan neighborhood that gives the show its title.

The Hell’s Kitchen of Alicia Keys’ story, set in the 1990s, isn’t the gang-ridden Hell’s Kitchen of West Side Story, set in the 1950s. Keys grew up in Manhattan Plaza, a federally subsidized residential complex that provides affordable housing for artists. But for a teenager in rebellion from her watchful mother, the vibrant, music-filled street life comes with its share of dangers.

Kennedy Caughell as Jersey and Maya Drake as Ali in the North American Tour of Alicia Keys’ “Hell’s Kitchen” at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre.

(Marc J. Franklin)

Ali (Maya Drake, who’s making her professional debut in this North American tour production) is a 17-year-old ready to break out of the cage her mother, Jersey (Kennedy Caughell), has placed her in. Jersey, a single mom, isn’t a tyrant. She just doesn’t want to see her daughter make the same mistakes that she did, namely get pregnant at a young age before she’s had a chance to realize her own dreams.

The book by playwright Kristoffer Diaz (“The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity”) is structured around a loving but combustible mother-daughter relationship amid the creative ferment of New York. This artistic neverland is crystallized in the apartment building that has music pouring out of every floor when Ali rides the elevator.

Maya Drake as Ali and the company of the North American Tour of Alicia Keys’ “Hell’s Kitchen” at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre.

(Marc J. Franklin)

The story isn’t the strong suit of “Hell’s Kitchen,” which is powered by Alicia Keys’ versatile catalog, which has been supplemented with original material. The hits — “You Don’t Know My Name,” “Girl on Fire,” “Fallin’,” “If I Ain’t Got You,” “Like You’ll Never See Me Again,” “No One” and “Empire State of Mind,” among them — reverberate inside the Pantages with a thrilling exuberance.

What’s most impressive, however, is the way these tracks have been arranged both musically and dramatically. Jukebox musicals are notorious for shoe-horning in beloved songs without regard for storytelling integrity. “Mamma Mia!,” which crammed in as many ABBA hits as possible, hardly even bothered to find pretext for their inclusion. The lucrative example paved the way for more than two decades of musical theater shamelessness.

The company of the North American Tour of Alicia Keys’ “Hell’s Kitchen” at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre.

(Marc J. Franklin)

“Hell’s Kitchen,” directed by Michael Greif, takes a more dignified approach, raiding Keys’ greatest hits in a way that doesn’t cause dramatic offense and better yet, adds a layer of surprise to music that is so well known.

The songs are allocated in unexpected ways. Numbers that you might think belong to Ali are divided among the company. Jersey is first in line, and Caughell makes the most of her opportunities. But sharing in the bounty are Davis (Desmond Sean Ellington), Ali’s mostly absent and chronically unreliable father; Knuck (Jonavery Worrell), Ali’s forbidden love interest; or Miss Liza Jane (Roz White), a pianist who lives in the building and becomes Ali’s formidable mentor.

There are other characters who offer luminous assistance, but these are the principals in a musical tale built around Ali’s central relationships. Keys’ origin story is more dynamic on an atmospheric than dramatic level. A mother having difficulty with her boy-crazy teenage daughter isn’t exactly breaking any ground, and Diaz avoids venturing into more turbulent territory. Ali’s divided identity, stemming in part from an all-too-present white mother and all-too-missing Black father, sets up issues that are touched on but never deeply engaged.

Desmond Sean Ellington as Davis and Kennedy Caughell as Jersey and the company of the North American Tour of Alicia Keys’ “Hell’s Kitchen” at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre.

(Marc J. Franklin)

Miss Liza Jane spots Ali’s musical gift right away and fills her with a sense of pride and responsibility in her Black heritage. But her character’s role is somewhat earnestly compartmentalized. Knuck recognizes that Ali’s fascination with him stems in part from the way she sees him, much as her mother does, as a “thug.” But their tentative affair is secondary to the complex bond between Ali and Jersey, whose troubled connection with Davis helps Ali understand why her mother is so paranoid about her romantic choices.

But these concerns fall away when the performers start singing. Drake has a beautiful voice, but her Ali is slighter than that of Maleah Joi Moon, who won a Tony for her Broadway debut performance. I didn’t mind that Davis sings “Fallin’,” as Ellington has a voice of luscious thunder. Worrell’s Knuck more than holds his own with his duets with Ali. (In fact, I was more taken by his velvety interpretation of “Like You’ll Never See Me Again” than Ali’s more straightforwardly pretty version.) White’s Miss Liza Jane takes the Pantages audience to church in her numbers. And when Caughell magnificently directs “No One” to Ali, I can’t imagine there’s a dry eye in the house.

Desmond Sean Ellington as Davis and Maya Drake as Ali in the North American Tour of Alicia Keys’ “Hell’s Kitchen” at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre.

(Marc J. Franklin)

This tour production isn’t crisp in all areas. The dancing isn’t always smooth, the costumes struck me as a road show idea of New York cool, and the acting didn’t do much to compensate for some of the book’s less subtle moments.

But the energy of the production is infectious. “Hell’s Kitchen,” a New York story of a wunderkind discovering her gift, helped me get over my allergy to the jukebox genre. The soaring quality of the orchestra and the delectable company of voices pay exhilarating homage to a singular artist, who seems right at home at the Pantages.

“Pressure,” the new World War II movie from director Anthony Maras and writer David Haig, is a hyperfocused look at the days leading up to D-day with a special focus on the weather. It’s a one-setting thriller that unspools in the pressure-cooker environment of General Dwight D. Eisenhower’s war room at an English country estate. The movie works backward from a famous 1961 Eisenhower quip to JFK that attributed his success in Normandy, France, to the Allies having “better meteorologists than the Germans.”

If you’re skeptical about how exciting a movie about the weather on D-day might be, “Pressure” takes that as a creative challenge, an argumentative stance from which to start. For the next hour and 40 minutes, Maras and co-writer Haig, who also wrote the 2014 play from which the film is adapted, explain to us exactly how important the meteorologists of D-day were, beginning with the disastrous D-day rehearsal Exercise Tiger.

With the weather app at our fingertips these days, it can be hard to imagine just how difficult it was to forecast the weather in the 1940s, especially in Northern Europe. That was the predicament facing Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser) just 72 hours before the planned D-day launch of June 5, 1944. But we know that D-day happened on June 6, so the arrival at that date is part of the film’s narrative intrigue.

After a devastating glimpse of Exercise Tiger, red blood mixing with blue ocean waves and white sandy beaches, we’re quickly introduced to our protagonist, Group Capt. Chief Meteorologist James Stagg (Andrew Scott), in his cozy home with his pregnant wife before he’s swept into critical war planning.

He’s stern, terse and no-nonsense. Stagg is the kind of person who wants to be correct more than he wants to be liked and he insists on a careful collection of live data, using weather balloons, phone calls and mathematical charting. His foil is Col. Irving Krick (Chris Messina), a charming American meteorologist and Eisenhower’s chosen weather guru, a yes man who relies on selective historical data and a persuasive speaker whose approach rankles the fastidious Stagg. Eisenhower instructs the two men to come to an agreement and “Pressure” follows the ups and downs of their working relationship over the course of several days.

The movie becomes a two-hander between Scott’s Stagg and Fraser’s Eisenhower, the former convinced that a storm on June 5 will make conditions less than ideal, the latter raging at the uncertainty while simultaneously attempting to placate a phalanx of military personnel. The troops are requisitioned, the destroyers in place, the full moon just right, the secrecy of the invasion delicate. Fraser’s explosive performance underlines the immensity of the stakes, balancing every precarious element of this enormous mission.

Maras, who is known for another terrific one-setting thriller based on a true story, 2018’s “Hotel Mumbai,” both directs and edits and his films are put together like precision clockwork: propulsive and relentless, the pace italicized by Volker Bertelmann’s scores. “Pressure” is skillfully directed, sweeping us into this world with a kind of addictive immediacy, and is also beautifully lensed by cinematographer Jamie Ramsay. Maras and Ramsay make the wise choice to shoot the film with richly saturated color instead of the usual grayish, desaturated look often assigned to period pieces set in this era. It’s not gritty and harsh, but rather stunning and lovely — an eerie contrast to the terror and bloodshed of the day itself.

While Fraser delivers an external performance as the tough American general, Scott offers a restrained, mostly tamped-down depiction of the repressed and methodical Stagg. But when he finally bursts with a cathartic eleventh-hour speech about the inaccuracy of Krick’s historical forecast, Eisenhower listens. Scott, as seen in “All of Us Strangers” and “Blue Moon,” is so good at this kind of acting, processing every emotion internally but allowing just enough to show to let the audience into his character’s emotional state. It’s wildly compelling to watch.

In a quiet conversation with Eisenhower’s close confidant and aide, Kay Summersby (Kerry Condon), she jokes that weathermen are boring. Stagg reminds her that the weather itself isn’t. Weather feeds us, it can destroy us — it rules our existence, he says. “People ask, ‘When will the wind stop blowing?’ No one ever asks, ‘Why does the wind blow? What is the wind?,’ ” revealing himself as a sort of philosophical poet of the weather. His forecast was the crucial edge in D-day and the volatility of the weather is increasingly relevant in our lives, especially with our changing climate.

Boring? Never. Thrilling and history-making? Indeed.

Katie Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.

Mexico’s consulate in Los Angeles helps thousands of citizens each week, assisting them with registering births, obtaining passports and, increasingly since President Trump’s second term began, accessing legal help for loved ones who have fallen afoul of his administration’s immigration policies.

Although it serves the country’s biggest Mexican community, all 53 Mexican consulates in the U.S. provide services that make Mexican people’s lives easier — just like the nine U.S. consulates in Mexico improve the lives of Americans south of the border.

The U.S. State Department has launched a review that might lead to the closure of an unknown number of Mexican consulates. Although it hasn’t said why, the review is happening against the backdrop of the immigration crackdown, some thorny bilateral issues and far-right theories that the consulates have been interfering in U.S. politics and encouraging Mexicans to migrate northward.

Azucena Aviles, a 33-year-old mother who drove more than an hour to the L.A. consulate this month to renew her Mexican passport and get one for her daughter, said consular services are invaluable — especially in California, which is home to nearly 13 million people of Mexican descent, including an estimated 1.7 million who are in the U.S. illegally.

“It wouldn’t be fair if they messed with the Mexican people, especially with our support systems, which come from the Mexican consulate and which, in some way, help or protect our fellow Mexicans,” she said.

Trump has been exerting growing pressure on Mexico, with questions looming over issues including human rights, national sovereignty and regional diplomacy.

His administration has given only the broadest of explanations for launching its review.

“Department of State is constantly reviewing all aspects of American foreign relations to ensure they are in line with the President’s America First foreign policy agenda and advance American interests,” Dylan Johnson, assistant secretary of State for global public affairs, wrote in an email.

Among the possible reasons for the review is that it could somehow fit into the Trump administration’s immigration efforts to deport people in the U.S. illegally. The largest contingent of such people — an estimated 4.3 million, according to the Pew Research Center — are Mexican.

Relations between the two countries could also play a role, with Trump increasing pressure on Mexico in the run-up to free trade negotiations important to both nations’ economies, taking a more aggressive approach toward the U.S.’ southern neighbor and even threatening to take military action against Mexican cartels.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has avoided head-on conflicts with Trump and instead relied on diplomacy, including sending top officials to Washington and seeking to maintain a strong relationship with the Trump administration by cracking down on Mexican cartels. Sheinbaum and her predecessor have also been key allies in slowing migration to the U.S. and speeding up the deportation of other Latin American migrants.

But Sheinbaum has taken a firmer stance in regards to the deaths of Mexicans in U.S. immigration detention centers, calling them unacceptable and saying the conditions in such lockups were “incompatible with human rights standards and the protection of life.” She instructed Mexican consulates to visit detention centers daily to help ensure detained citizens are being held in safe conditions.

Relations rapidly deteriorated in recent weeks after the U.S. indicted several Mexican officials on drug trafficking charges, and two CIA officers died following an anti-narcotics operation in northern Mexico — American involvement that Sheinbaum said her government had not authorized. That drug raid raised uncomfortable questions in Mexico about the extent of U.S. involvement in domestic security operations.

Years of tit-for-tat tariffs between the two countries have also added strain.

A review of foreign consulates is “usually a sign that a bilateral relationship is in a very, very rocky moment,” said Arturo Sarukhan, a former Mexican ambassador to the U.S. In Mexico’s case, it comes at “the worst moment of the U.S.-Mexico relations” in decades, given all the current points of contention, he said.

Further straining relations is a theory being amplified by Peter Schweizer, a writer with a following among Trump loyalist who has claimed that Mexican consulates interfere in U.S. politics and encourage migration to the U.S. Experts say that although a few Mexican consulate officials may have sought to influence politics back home, there is no evidence of them interfering in U.S. elections.

In response to the State Department review, Sheinbaum said the idea that Mexican consulates are “playing politics in the United States is completely false.” She said the job of consulates anywhere is to “always protect” citizens.

Sarukhan too said that although consulates defend the rights of Mexican citizens, there is no evidence that they are interfering in U.S. elections.

Whatever the reasons for the consulate review, it has stoked worries.

During a weekly public forum at the L.A. consulate, a woman who didn’t give her name and whose husband had been in U.S. immigration detention asked for help finding him a lawyer, highlighting one crucial service consulates provide for their citizens.

An older man said he had heard about the review and asked about possible closures.

Carlos González Gutiérrez, Mexico’s top diplomat in Los Angeles, responded that, as Sheinbaum said, there would be “no reason whatsoever” for the U.S. to close a Mexican consulate.

Indeed, consulates would have significant, devastating effects for Mexican immigrants,” especially in isolated areas, said Ariel Ruiz Soto, a senior policy analyst for the Migration Policy Institute.

Every day, consular officials go to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement holding center in downtown Los Angeles to identify and interview as many detained Mexican nationals as they can.

González Gutiérrez, 62, begins every weekly public forum by noting how many detained Mexicans consular officials have interviewed since the immigration crackdown began in Los Angeles last June.

At that May 11 meeting, the figure stood at 1,940. Nearly half had deep roots in the U.S., he said. About 46% have been deported, 35% have children born in the U.S., 69% entered the country through a port of entry, 6% overstayed a visa and 2.5% requested asylum. Most were men, and many worked in construction, agriculture, gardening and the service industry.

He also disputed the claim that Mexican consulates are interfering in U.S. politics.

“We are guests of this country’s government, just as U.S. consuls are guests of the Mexican government. In that sense, we are neither activists nor spies,” said González Gutiérrez. “We carry out our work openly, within a pluralistic and democratic society.”

Pineda and Janetsky write for the Associated Press. Janetsky reported from Mexico City.

As part of the audit, they are considering numerous factors to work out why it has become such a problem.

For example, Spurs are analysing the “bounce” on the club’s home pitch in comparison to that at rival grounds and their Enfield training centre.

At present, the club have found there is no major difference between the conditions of other pitches in comparison to their home ground, but testing is ongoing.

There is a view that certain knee injuries are unavoidable – Odobert for instance damaged his ACL following an awkward landing.

It is also understood Spurs are confident the on-field treatment of Simons’ injury did not result in additional damage to the Dutchman’s knee.

There has been criticism from supporters after footage showed medics allowing the attacker to put weight on his knee despite having suffered a serious injury.

One of the key improvements Lewindon has recommended is to make medical support more individually tailored – based on factors including strength, fatigue and robustness.

Medical staff will compile bespoke profiles for each player that will include personal insights as well as physical and psychological information to ensure they can deliver expert individual support to treat – but also prevent – injury.

There is also set to be greater leeway for injured players to conduct part of their rehabilitation away from the club’s training facility.

Players across the Premier League are increasingly relying on external medical practitioners to aid their fitness and recovery, while many overseas footballers even return to their homeland for treatment.

That dynamic often causes friction but moving forward Tottenham are open to letting players leave their direct care provided all parties involved agree to one shared recovery plan – though Spurs would ultimately take responsibility for any problems that arise during the process.

The medical team will work closely alongside head coach Roberto de Zerbi and his staff over the summer amid concerns changing managers three times in under 12 months has contributed to their injury problems.

Tottenham will look to introduce an integrated structure that will ensure De Zerbi, or a member of his staff, the medical department and the player are involved in deciding when a player can accelerate their rehabilitation plans.

Psychology is also a key component of the ongoing review with the club set to employ a full-time head of psychology to work with the players and staff.

Skin Rocks is the skincare and anti-ageing brand founded by Caroline Hirons, and it has a steady stream of fans – including our beauty editor. Here’s her honest review of every product…

Octopus one even moderately interested in beauty will know about skincare super-influencer and author Caroline Hirons – as well as her expanding range of products, Skin Rocks. Shunning gimmicks and trends and instead focusing on brilliant formulas with clinically proven results, as well as with no-nonsense instructions, Skin Rocks has quickly become popular with beauty fans – including myself.

As Reach’s Beauty and Wellness Editor, I and my team have been lucky enough to try every product from Skin Rocks, often before they hit the shelves, from cleansers and moisturisers, through to the latest launch, The Strong Acid, so we know which are really worth shouting about. Spoiler alert: I’ve never used a Skin Rocks product I didn’t like – they’re expertly formulated, never irritate my skin, and are well packaged – but here are the products that I would genuinely rebuy when I get to the bottom…

READ MORE: Caroline Hirons on ‘utter filth’ beauty trend and the one product teens should avoid

READ MORE: This is not for everyone’ Caroline Hirons launches Skin Rocks’ strongest acid ever and it’s ‘barely legal’

Pros

• Really well formulated: they’re very effective but never pill or irritate the skin
• Packaging looks and feels great, and is clear to understand, with notes about who it’ll suit (and who it won’t), and handy guides on the lids showing how much to use
• Clinically proven results
• Lots of the products are refillable, with refills costing a little less
• Lots of the products come in fragranced or fragrance-free options (I always choose fragrance-free)

Cons

• The prices range from mid range to high end
• Bottles are made of glass and are heavy (good for recycling, less good for travelling)

Skin Rocks product reviews

Skin Rocks Cleansers:

Caroline has been a vocal advocate for double cleansing since the beginning (before Skin Rocks, she created the two-in-one Double Cleanse with PIXI).

If double cleansing to you still sounds like too much time and effort, here’s why it’s probably worth you doing:

• Oil removes oil, which is why an oil-based balm cleanser is effective for make-up, SPF (especially water-resistant stuff) and sebum, the skin’s natural oil (which you don’t want to strip, but removing excess can be good). If your skin is normal/dry, you don’t use make-up and you’ve not applied SPF, you won’t need an oil-based balm cleanser. (Though by the way, if you’ve not applied SPF, that’s a bigger problem).
• Meanwhile a cream, gel or foaming cleanser will get off all the everyday grime, sweat and pollution – bits that those oil cleansers are not as effective at. That is why you might find the cream or gel cleansers aren’t the best for removing layers and layers of waterproof mascara – it’s not designed to.

The Cleansing Balm, £58 here

Though it’s probably your first step in a routine, this is the latest cleanser Caroline has released – and it’ll come as no surprise to learn that it’s truly one of the best I’ve ever tried. It melts into the skin, breaks down make-up and SPF easily, and emulsifies away quickly with water and a flannel, leaving skin feeling conditioned but absolutely no oily residue left behind.

There are also a few high street cleansing balms that I love and are cheaper, namely Versed Day Dissolve Cleansing Balm, £16.50, and e.l.f. SKIN Holy Hydration! Makeup Melting Cleansing Balm, £11. However, if you love luxe offerings such as Elemis Pro-Collagen Cleansing Balm (I’ve reviewed the newest cherry scented one here), I encourage you to try this Skin Rocks one next.

Side note: the Skin Rocks flannels are the biggest – and best – I’ve found.

Skin Rocks The Cream Cleanser, from £35 here

Skin Rocks’ first cleanser, and it’s a real goodie. As I’ve already covered, it’s not completely effective on layered up waterproof mascara, but for everyday make-up and daily grime, especially if your skin is on the drier side, it’s perfect. If I was only going to use one cleanser from Caroline’s range it would be the next one, but my colleague Octavia, with her dryer skin, would pick this one.

Due to popular demand, this and The Gel Cleanser (below) are now available in supersize 250ml tubes.

Skin Rocks The Gel Cleanser, from £39 here

This is nothing like the typical foaming, drying gel cleansers you’re probably used to. The formula is so unique – thick, nourishing and rich in moisture-locking glycerin – yet washes completely away as a milky liquid, that it would suit all skin types: young or old, dry or oily, sensitive or not. I squeezed out every drop of this and loved it, and would buy it again.

Skin Rocks Acids:

Exfoliating acid toners can brighten, renew and refine skin – though they are easy to overdo if you pick the wrong one for your skin type, age or routine – something I’m definitely guilty of. Caroline’s collection of three, covers all skin types and she’s really clear that the Strong is what is says in the bottle – so it’s not for everyone.

• The Control Acid, £45 hereIdeal for oily, congested and spot-prone skin, this salicylic acid (BHA) helps to control breakouts and minimise pores.
• The Gentle Acid, £53 hereThe brand’s original all-skin-types formula, contains AHA and PHA, is for tackling signs of ageing. It’s not actually that gentle compare to a lot that is on the market, but it’s a great balance of suitable for everyone to use but with effective results. I think you’ll notice a difference within a week if this is the first time you’re adding an acid toner to your regime.
• The Strong Acid, £75 here NEWThis is about as strong as an acid can get and stay on the right side of legal in this country. It’s a combination of AHAs, BHAs and PHAs in a secret formula (to prevent copycats) and even Caroline herself advises you don’t add it to your regime unless your skin is used to acid exfoliators already. You’ll feel it tingling on your skin when you apply (use cotton pads – not hands – for this one, and don’t be afraid to scrub a bit with them as you go to aid exfoliation). Two to three times a week is enough to see impressive results.

Skin Rocks Retinoids:

Retinoid 1, £70 here and Retinoid 2, £80 here

Retinoid 1 and 2 were Skin Rocks’ first products, and are a brilliantly formulated – and foolproof – way to introduce skin-renewing and anti-ageing ingredient vitamin A into your skincare routine: start with Retinoid 1, then move on to Retinoid 2. I find that I can use Retinoid 1 every night without any irritation, peeling or flaking; a rarity for me when using this potent ingredient.

Skin Rocks Retinoid 3, £90 here

Designed for more experienced users, Skin Rocks has launched its most advanced retinoid formula to date, created to deliver powerful results when targeting visible signs of skin ageing. The formula combines the brand’s highest concentration of vitamin A with 0.21% retinal and 0.5% Adapinoid — a third-generation retinoid known for helping to reduce breakouts while also addressing fine lines, texture, and overall skin ageing concerns.

According to Skin Rocks’ clinical studies, Retinoid 3 helped reduce the depth of deep wrinkles, minimise the appearance of UV pigmentation, and improve overall skin texture after four weeks of use. The studies also reported improvements in skin firmness, elasticity, and brightness. In consumer trials, 81% of users said their skin felt firmer after two weeks, while 91% felt their skin looked more youthful after eight weeks. The accompanying before-and-after images and customer feedback are equally impressive.

Skin Rocks The Eye Cream, £65 here

I’m fussy about eye creams – lots either irritate my skin, aren’t moisturising enough, or are too rich – but this one is absolutely perfect – immediately silky, smoothing and plumping. I’d happily use this one forever if I could.

Skin Rocks Moisturisers:

Keeping things as simple as possible, there are only three moisturises in the range – light, normal and rich, with each available fragranced or unfragranced. As someone with combination and occasionally blemish-prone skin, I go for the lighter Moisturiser, and it’s as close to a perfect face cream as you can get. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why it’s so good, but it layers well with other products, leaves my skin looking and feeling much healthier and, crucially, doesn’t cause breakouts.

My colleague Octavia on the other hand, can’t get enough of the the rich version: ‘My skin is normal-to-dry, but generally dehydrated (probably because I’m better at drinking coffee than water) so I love, love, love The Rich Moisturiser, which I’ll happily use all year round. I love the instant drink feeling it has and how well it dried down to a make-up base with no pilling. It’s just silky. It’s not my only moisturiser, I change things up, but it’s a core part of my repertoire.’

This is definitely one I would invest in, beaten only ever so slightly in price by my other ‘near perfect’ moisturiser.

Skin Rocks The Eye Cream,£70 here

I don’t mess about when it comes to eye cream – I’m very particular! Many either irritate my skin, aren’t hydrating enough, or are too heavy – but this is instantly silky, smoothing and plumping. I’d happily use this one forever if I could afford to.

Skin Rocks The Antioxidant, £70 here

Admittedly the one Skin Rocks product I haven’t thoroughly tested, mainly because of the aforementioned stripping of my skincare routine down to basics in a bid to repair its barrier, but I has tried it a few times, and it feels so nice on the skin and gives an instant subtle glow, and I love how it contains more antioxidants than just vitamin C.

The Hyperpigmentation Serum, £90 here

Another I can’t give a full review to as hyperpigmentation or melasma isn’t a big skin concern of mine, but as I’m naturally freckly I used this regularly in summer to try and reduce some of the unwanted post-summer pigmentation. If the clinical studies and incredible before-and-after photos of this new serum are anything to go by, this is the product I’d trust to help to tackle serious hyperpigmentation. I’ve also recommended it to others on numerous occasions and the feedback I’ve had was excellent.

Like all of Caroline’s products, it’s foolproof to use – it doesn’t pill, irritate or need introducing slowly into your routine, and feels wonderfully hydrating on the skin – and the results speak for themselves.

The Amplifier, £70 here

Another newbie on the Skin Rocks roster: a supercharged essence that does more than just hydrate skin – it’s clinically proven to make your other skincare products work more effectively, too, plus it increases moisture and skin firmness, and minimising the look of pores.

I’ve been using this liquid after cleansing and before serums for a couple of weeks now, and it’s an excellent way to add another light layer of hydration to my skin, especially at this time of year when the weather’s getting colder. I haven’t noticed a dramatic difference, but skin does feel smoother, softer and more hydrated afterwards.

I find this one quite difficult, because it’s a literal extra step in your skincare regime that I’d hope was already covered in other areas. But at the same time, it takes every one of your skincare products and makes it work harder, which in turn makes them better value for money. So overall, I wouldn’t say it’s the most essential product to have in your routine (I’d always prioritise a good cleanser, SPF and targeted serum), but if you can afford this additional step, it’s definitely a nice-to-have – a luxurious extra boost.

Conclusions – which Skin Rocks products I’d buy again tomorrow

Overall, it’s difficult to find fault with any of the Skin Rocks products. They’re a brand I completely trust, and I genuinely feel my skin would thrive using nothing but their range. That said, if I had to narrow it down to a few standout favourites, I’d choose the Retinoids, The Moisturiser, and whichever cleanser best matches your skin type and cleansing preferences.

If you’re beginning to notice new signs of ageing and want to introduce something effective into your skincare routine with visible results, I’d especially recommend The Acids. There are three options to choose from, so you can pick the one that best suits your skin’s needs and where you are in your skincare journey.

For more of Caroline’s practical, no-nonsense skincare advice, you can also pick up her books, Skincare: The New Edit, £17, and her latest one, Teen Skincare, £16.99.

The endlessly exploitable Spider-Man is back in “Spider-Noir,” a retro tale set in a recognizable New York in an inconsistent 1933 (to judge by a preponderance of cultural referents). There is a comic-book precedent for this version of the character, called simply the Spider, though research tells me that, costume and superpowers aside, he is different in nearly every respect. I don’t suppose that will be an issue for most of you.

Shot in “authentic” black and white, the eight-episode series, which premieres Monday on MGM+ channel and streams Wednesday on Prime Video, is something of a stunt, but one that offers a reasonable, (imperfectly) period-appropriate approach to the material. (Stylistically, it belongs to a later decade.) An available colorized version, which seems primarily a sop to younger viewers who refuse to watch anything in black and white, works less well, flattening and softening the image, making the special effects look less special, the expressionist photography less expressive and ordinary scenes more artificial. You can probably tell which I’d choose, but you do you.

Nicolas Cage, in his first live-action television role, plays Ben Reilly, a down-at-the-heels private eye, spiking his morning coffee with whiskey helpfully provided by his knowing secretary, Janet (Karen Rodriguez), and barely scraping by on the occasional divorce case. Five years earlier, as the Spider, he was a super-powered guardian of the people; but he gave it up after the love of his life was murdered on the Spider’s account. In this variation, she’s the one who told him that with great power comes great responsibility, that well-worn Marvel homily, quoted in this world as if it were the work of Abraham Lincoln and not Stan Lee. But Reilly, who calls himself a coward and claims to be no hero, regards his mutant abilities as “a part of me I wish never existed. With no power, there’s no responsibility.”

Naturally, in the Spider’s absence, things have gone to pot in Gotham. “The city’s a mess,” says Reilly’s best and only friend, unemployed reporter Joe “Robbie” Robertson (national treasure Lamorne Morris, keeping it real, relatively speaking). “The people could use a hero.”

“Well, I hope they find someone,” says Ben.

Robbie Robertson (Lamorne Morris) is a journalist and Ben Reilly’s best friend.

(Aaron Epstein/Prime)

Nevertheless, you will not be surprised that, much against his will, Reilly will fall into a web, tee-hee, of intrigue; involving the city’s bootlegging crime boss, Silvermane (Brendan Gleeson, serving a full Irish breakfast), whose superpower is that he has very nice hair; Silvermane’s sort-of mistress, femme fatale nightclub singer Cat Hardy (Li Jun Li), a bird in a gilded cage; and Cat’s bodyguard, Flint (Jack Huston), who has gone missing. Nor will it shock you to learn that other super-powered entities will turn up, to give our hero — who soon enough will be swinging through town, somehow never losing the fedora perched atop his masked head — someone his own size to pick on him.

To coin a phrase, some are born super-powered, some become super-powered and some have superpowers thrust upon them, and in every case this comes with a serving of tragedy and trauma, for heroes and villains alike. If there’s a theme to “Spider-Noir,” beyond “make another Spider-Man show,” it’s this, and there’s a spine of sadness that runs through the series, its best and most depressing feature (and, taking “noir” at is word, fitting to the genre).

The photography and production design, achieved through whatever combination of backlot shoots, dressed locations, digital environments and black magic, work better and worse (though never bad) from shot to shot, but Alfred Hitchcock used background projections and model trains, and it’s nice to see Manhattan before those pencil-thin supertowers began polluting the skyline. (It’s the city as King Kong first knew it.)

The pacing can drag at times. The music goes everywhere but the represented period and characters quote lines from movies yet to be released. The writing and the acting boldly flirt with cliche and caricature, which, as the show is about 100% pastiche, drawn from films more than three-quarters of a century old, could scarcely be avoided and isn’t really a problem. (In a way, it’s the point.) You may spot a scene pinched from Orson Welles’ “The Lady From Shanghai,” narrative echoes of “Casablanca,” a line playing off James Cagney’s final words in “White Heat,” just off the top of my head.) But the overall what and why of the story is clever and the conclusion satisfying.

Cage, who voiced a different version of the “Spider-Noir” character in the animated “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” is a good choice for the weary gumshoe. (The series is about 75% detective story, 25% superhero) Metafictionally, he’ll bust out an Edward G. Robinson imitation, mouth Cagney dialogue sitting alone at the movies. But the main model is Humphrey Bogart, whose looks Cage’s recall more than a little; Bogart played Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe in the films most associated with those characters, whose mordant humor creator-writer Oren Uziel seeks to replicate here, with fair success. One can forget that Cage, who finds a middle way between doing a bit and playing a person, is a good comic actor, and not merely a weirdo.

The UCLA comeback kings are Big Ten tournament champions.

A clutch hit by Aidan Espinoza and two reviews fueled the No. 1 Bruins’ rally for a dramatic 3-2 win over Oregon in 11 innings in the Big Ten tournament title game Sunday in Omaha, Neb.

UCLA rallied for wins during all three of its Big Ten tournament games and has earned 28 comeback wins this season.

“I’m just glad we won,” UCLA junior Mulivai Levu said during a postgame interview on the Big Ten Network. “It was a team effort today. Everyone did their job. Once again, we came from behind and did it.”

The Bruins trailed Oregon 2-1 with two outs in the bottom of the ninth when Espinoza tied the game with a single. The Bruins could not tack on another run, and the contest moved to extra innings.

In the bottom of the 11th, UCLA loaded the bases with no outs after an official review determined that Roman Martin was narrowly safe at third base following a bunt.

Oregon closer Devin Bell got Cashel Dugger and Espinoza to strike out swinging. Then the winning run advanced after the umpire ruled Phoenix Call was hit by Bell’s pitch. After a lengthy review, the call on the field was upheld, and UCLA celebrated the program’s first Big Ten tournament title.

“Just a lot of fight,” UCLA coach John Savage said on the Big Ten Network when asked about the Bruins’ penchant for comeback wins. “They certainly believe in one another. We’ve done it all season long. Good teams keep getting better.

”… You might see a couple of Big Ten teams back here in a couple of weeks.”

Will Gasparino was ejected in the fourth inning for malicious contact after he was caught in a rundown and ran over an Oregon player ready to tag him out at third base.

Oregon challenged the on-field ruling that Gasparino was simply out on the play. After a review, Gasparino was ejected and will miss UCLA’s NCAA regional opener.

The Bruins, the top-ranked team in the country, will learn their NCAA tournament seeding and regional matchup Monday morning.

What do we have here? Some of my very favorite actors — Alfred Molina, Alfre Woodard, Clarke Peters and Geena Davis — starring in an eight-episode, B-grade sci-fi comedy-drama, “The Boroughs,” now streaming on Netflix.

Molina plays Sam Cooper, a retired engineer — that will be important — being brought grumbling to the Boroughs, a posh, city-sized retirement community plopped down in the middle of the Southwestern desert. Sam’s late wife, Lily (Jane Kaczmarek, in flashbacks and dreams), had planned the move, but she died suddenly, while they were dancing to Bruce Springsteen’s “Thunder Road,” which will become a kind of trigger and motif going forth. Still, fate — in the form of daughter Claire (Jena Malone) and son-in-law Neil (Rafael Casal) — has pushed him solo to the Boroughs and a house on a cul-de-sac. (Seen from above, the town is laid out in a series of concentric circles, as EPCOT was meant to be when Walt Disney was alive and it stood for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. That has no relation to this show; I’m just throwing it out to the fans.)

Before this happens, however, we get a preamble. Is that Dee Wallace, the mother from “E.T.: The Extraterrestrial,” as Grace, a former occupant of Sam’s new home? (Why, yes it is.) Grabbed one night by something clearly not human, she’ll leave the show before the first credit rolls; but we’ll know from the start that there’s a monster on the loose. And even before Sam has settled in, he’ll be attacked by her now-widowed husband, Edward (Ed Begley Jr.), who has escaped to his old house from the Manor — a memory care unit more reminiscent of something out of “Squid Game” than anywhere you’d want to park a beloved fading parent — muttering “The key is in the light, the owl is in the wall,” and thereby turning Sam detective.

The joint is run by young Blaine Shaw (Seth Numrich), who supposedly took it over from his father, who took it over from his father before him, with Hollywood-blond wife Anneliese (Alice Kremelberg) by his side. (It is perhaps no accident that we’re also served a background clip from “Double Indemnity,” featuring a blond Barbara Stanwyck.) They radiate a kind of vampiric smoothness, and it will take you no longer to realize that something’s up with these two than it takes to say “Something’s up with these two.”

Mired in grief, Sam is initially reluctant to interact with his new neighbors, until former weatherman Jack (Bill Pullman) breaks down his defenses. Judy Daniels (Woodard) used to be a reporter, her husband Art (Peters) is a pot-smoking old hippie who pretends to go golfing but heads off to a ghost town where he grows mushrooms, “searching for proof that there’s more to life than just knockin’ about and hangin’ out.” Wally Baker (Denis O’Hare) used to be a doctor, but now needs one. (It’s cancer, and terminal, though it doesn’t show.) They have complicated relationships, but there’s nothing better for ironing things out than creeping together through dark tunnels by flashlight, hoping that nothing jumps out at you, engaging in weightless banter as you go.

Davis plays Renee Joyce, a former music manager who came to the Boroughs to stay with her mother after Renee’s husband stole her money, and stuck around; I think she’s meant to be younger than the rest, but if you want to look up Davis’ age, I will wait here while you gasp in astonishment. She’ll hook up with friendly young security guard Paz Navarro (Carlos Miranda); he played drums in a band once, and they were both at Glastonbury in 2010 and love Barbra Streisand. (What are the odds?) He’ll have a lot to do when a Scooby Gang — that old, invaluable, incredibly satisfying trope — finally comes together.

The series was created by Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews, who were co-writers on the 2018 Henson Co. puppet epic “The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance,” from which they have imported a central plot device regarding vital essences and a magical matriarchal figure. (Called “Mother” there and here.) Their 2020 dying girlfriend film “Life in a Year,” directed by Mitja Okorn, has some thematic mirroring here, as well — death hovers over the story — and it seems probable that somewhere in the series’ gestation, they discussed Ron Howard’s 1985 science-fiction flick “Cocoon,” with its retirement home setting and senior-citizen heroes.

Sewn together from these and other scraps of previous paranormal adventure stories, “The Boroughs” is almost entirely predictable — not a criticism, in this context, since surprises in such a story are liable to bring bad news, and our affection for its heroes ought not to be sacrificed in the name of dramatic effect. That is not the kind of sacrifice the age needs, and this is not that kind of series. Nor is B-grade a pejorative, but rather an honorable tradition, especially when it comes to sci-fi and horror. (We’ll get a glimpse of Roger Corman’s original “Little Shop of Horrors” playing on a TV — cathode ray, of course.) Once you get on its wavering wavelength — sentimental, sincere, sweet, a little silly, not overly concerned with making perfect sense — and realize the show is not out to hurt you, it’s a very enjoyable watch.

Nearly 50 years on from “Star Wars” and the launch of a media empire (large or small “e”? You decide), the fandom has become its own galaxy of warring planets. But based on the success of the streaming series “The Mandalorian,” set around the title bounty hunter, we can all agree that his charge Grogu — green, wrinkled, big-eyed Baby You-Know-Who — is still adorable. Of the many “Star Wars” offshoots, this seems to be the sturdiest.

The brand is back together for “The Mandalorian and Grogu,” which is a movie, a hoped-for franchise revival, a fourth season of sorts and an affable throwback. But it’s never quite riveting enough as canon or fodder to supplant anyone’s memories of [insert favorite “Star Wars” film here].

The expectations game was never going to help series creator Jon Favreau’s big-screen version, written with Dave Filoni and Noah Kloor. Granted, this upscaled, agreeably rangy treatment of an adventure storyline that wouldn’t have been out of place on the show could have attempted more. Especially when it puts sci-fi icon Sigourney Weaver in an X-wing pilot uniform as a veteran of the Rebellion, but barely gives her anything to do besides secure Mando a job and keep tabs on his progress. (Gang, try harder. It’s Sigourney Weaver.)

Aimed squarely at kids of all sizes, “Star Wars” has become a glorified tour of a billionaire’s expanding playworld and “The Mandalorian and Grogu” wants the track well-oiled, not bumpy. The simple pleasures here of good vs evil, IMAX hugeness and composer Ludwig Göransson’s space-opera-hits-the-club score, go down easy enough to not be aggravating. It’s a lot.

But it’s not this reviewer’s position to tell you what “a lot” is — loose lips spoil scripts. When the moment comes at an appropriately dangerous time for our heroes, we sense the kind of thing that only movies can do well when they’re myths writ large: slow things down, shift momentum away from the tyranny of exposition and let emotion, humor, wonder and character co-exist. “The Mandalorian and Grogu” takes the series’ thematic underpinnings — what parenting looks like between a masked human loner and an otherworldly toddler — and deepens them.

The movie takes place in wonderfully detailed environments that evoke the earlier, beloved films. You’re not being pandered to, however; the payoff is a lovely echo. Elsewhere, the action set pieces are serviceably handled by Favreau. (One of them plays like, of all things, an homage to “The French Connection.”)

Otherwise, this is another hunt-and-retrieve narrative for the bounty hunter voiced by Pedro Pascal, physically embodied in armor by Brendan Wayne and, in combat, by fight choreographer Lateef Crowder. Still independent but New Republic-curious, Mando is tasked by Weaver’s Col. Ward to find a wayward scion of the slimy gangster Hutt clan, Rotta (voiced by Jeremy Allen White), whose return will unlock some important information. Of course, things don’t go as planned, which for a while is interesting — are the Hutts like the Corleones, perhaps? — until it’s not, because then the dialogue would need to rise above the level of a middle-school play.

That being said, one of the movie’s strong points, absent its story deficiencies, is that, across its many wordless scenes, it’s at heart a solidly rousing, delightfully icky creature feature, in the vein of a supercharged Ray Harryhausen-meets-Guillermo del Toro joint. “It’s a hard world for little things,” Lillian Gish famously says in “The Night of the Hunter,” a movie nobody will ever confuse with “The Mandalorian and Grogu.” But we all know summer fare like this is only ever as enjoyable as the monsters conjured up for conquering.

It’s not merely trendy psychologizing to salute the qualities of a sturdy tree: a humbling reminder of time’s immensity, but also a living embodiment of shelter, change and growth. Leave it, then, to a massive gingko on the grounds of a medieval German town’s college to cosmically center the three-pronged, multi-generational character study “Silent Friend” from Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi.

Enyedi, from her mesmeric, calling-card period lark “My Twentieth Century” to the eccentric love story “On Body and Soul,” has always been preoccupied with that realm in which the everyday meets the all-seeing and possibility is awakened. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that she’d give a starring role to a 200-year-old tree, which just may inspire the needed answers. And why not? Our living, “breathing,” sky-reaching neighbors have considerable communication skills with each other.

Our entryway is a modern day neuroscientist played by Tony Leung Chiu-wai (and called Tony), who arrives at the University of Marburg as a visiting professor ready to further his groundbreaking research into the mysteries of infant brain development. The gig becomes a lonely endeavor, however, when the pandemic hits and he’s confined to a depopulated campus, sent unwillingly into a kind of monkhood.

It’s as if the nearby natural world, photographed by Gergely Pálos and edited by Károly Szalai, was just waiting for such a solitary moment to draw Tony’s undivided attention into the prospect of green intelligence.

In tandem, Enyedi transports us to 1908 to meet aspiring botanist Grete (Luna Wedler), the university’s first female student, subjected to cruelly patronizing treatment by smug male elders, yet driven to see plants anew when introduced to the light-capturing rigor of photography. The movie’s third woven-in protagonist is a wide-eyed, resourceful farm boy, Hannes (Enzo Brumm), in 1972. While his fellow students spark to the winds of political change and sexual freedom, he becomes fixated on what a lone geranium, imaginatively monitored on its windowsill, might have to convey if given the chance.

The fluid, idiosyncratic charm of “Silent Friend” — which never feels like two and a half hours — is in Enyedi’s heartfelt belief that curiosity is simply a garden that grows progress. It doesn’t hurt, of course, that this veteran dreamweaver’s key cast are entrancing, inviting specimens themselves, led by an inner glow of compassion in Leung that feels like its own natural energy source. When his character contacts Léa Seydoux’s French plant expert, it becomes almost too much rapturously intelligent star wattage for one quietly poetic movie, even if these god-tier actors are just zooming and talking shop.

Hardly anything is overdone here and, in one essential way, Enyedi is also making the case for movies themselves as phenomena to protect and treasure: ecosystems of light, texture, wonder and nourishment. Visually, the film toggles between intimate 35mm black-and-white, grainy 16mm color and multi-purpose digital cameras that visually represent distinct eras. Needless to say, that gingko tree is sublime and majestic in all of them.

Frenchman Olivier Assayas’ canvas is either highly personal (“Suspended Time”) or deliriously global (“Carlos”). He can be hard to pin down as a filmmaker, except when the material does the restraining for him, as the intermittently arresting but overplayed piece of political theater “The Wizard of the Kremlin” proves.

Operating off the same-named novel by Giuliano da Empoli, about a behind-the-scenes manipulator named Vadim Baranov helping to orchestrate Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s rise to power, Assayas and co-screenwriter-journalist Emmanuel Carrère have fashioned a whirlwind shadow biopic of 21st century tsardom that blends the real story (Jude Law is Putin) and an invented one (Paul Dano is Baranov) with all the wisdom-in-hindsight energy of an old-school epic dramatizing How Things Came to Be.

The problem, though, from its clichéd interview framing (Jeffrey Wright plays an American journalist visiting the retired Baranov at his estate) to the tediously narrated flashback structure, is that the movie never lives and breathes inside its stitched-together moments, preferring to be a relentless, country-hopping talkfest in which characters opine as if fully aware of the consequential era they’re in, fully ready to explain it.

That doesn’t apply to a scarily good Law, who makes the most of a curiously underwritten featured-player part. When given center stage, his Putin is commanding, reminding us of the real sinister power in the room. But everyone else in “The Wizard of the Kremlin” is mouthpiece first, character second. Post-Cold War Russia’s swerve away from clunky democracy is as fascinating a turn of events as geopolitics gets, but it’s been reduced to an extended lecture on power, divvied up into timeline hits (from Yeltsin’s nascent kleptocracy to Putin’s violent fearmongering) and speaking parts made of aphorisms and commentary. (“If you don’t grab power, power grabs you” or “Russia has always needed a strongman,” etc.)

The Zelig-like Baranov character — understood to be a liberalized avatar for inner circle strategist Vladislav Surkov — is an interesting mix of cynicism and opportunity. He goes from being an idealist directing avant-garde theater to honing his manipulation chops making reality TV and eventually helping a savvy business magnate (Will Keen as Boris Berezovsky) fashion Putin into a palatable, malleable politician for an electorate hungry for stability. But when the ex-spymaster’s cold lust to return Russia to imperial glory becomes vengeful and warlike, Baranov’s principles give way to a ruthless impulse.

If only the sorely miscast Dano had the weight to sell this guided tour of corruption — a role that could have been in the vein of one of Scorsese’s charismatic motormouth narrators. Affectedly hushed and conspiratorial in nearly every scene, his accent an afterthought, the normally evocative actor comes off more like a one-note Bond villain in training than someone whose smarts and complexities are meant to intrigue. There’s also little chemistry in his scenes with Alicia Vikander, herself struggling to find dimension in a trophy girlfriend, whose greatest skill in an ever-changing Russia seems to be as an oligarch whisperer.

As “Wizard” barrels along, content to be aimlessly scornful and sloppy, it’s hard not to be reminded of Assayas’ much more successfully finessed “Carlos” and how this effort feels like a truncated miniseries, trimmed of nuance and emotion. It’s sketched out for cynical skimming rather than deeper psychological consideration.

May 11 (UPI) — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said his department will “review” comments made by Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., about the U.S. military’s weapons stockpiles.

Hegseth’s renewed criticism into Kelly came in response to the senator’s appearance Sunday on CBS’ Face the Nation. Kelly, a retired Navy captain and former astronaut, said he received Pentagon briefings and it was “shocking … how deep we have gone into these magazines.”

“We’ve expended a lot of munitions. And that means the American people are less safe. Whether it’s a conflict in the western Pacific with China or somewhere else in the world, the munitions are depleted,” Kelly said.

In a post on X on Sunday evening, Hegseth questioned whether Kelly violated his oath by discussion the matter publicly.

“Now he’s blabbing on TV (falsely & dumbly) about a *CLASSIFIED* Pentagon briefing he received,” Hegseth said in his post, promising to have the Pentagon’s legal counsel review the comments.

Kelly said the information he shared wasn’t classified because Hegseth spoke on the topic during a hearing of the Senate Committee on Armed Services last week.

“We had this conversation in a public hearing a week ago and you said it would take ‘years’ to replenish some of these stockpiles. That’s not classified, it’s a quote from you.”

Kelly also shared a video of Hegseth’s comments from the hearing in his response on X.

The two leaders have been embroiled in a legal battle after Hegseth tried to censure and demote Kelly from his military rank over comments he made in November telling service members that they have the right and duty to ignore “unlawful orders” made by the Trump administration. Hegseth also sought to reduce Kelly’s retirement pay, calling his remarks “seditious.”

In the fragmented mysteries of the great Argentine filmmaker Lucretia Martel, her explorations always start with sensory flashes: faces, spaces, objects, sounds in transfixing procession. The language is its own, resulting in disorienting but undiluted depictions of the worlds of modern elites (“La Ciénega,” “The Headless Woman”) and 18th century colonists (“Zama”) alike.

But now, with her first feature documentary, “Our Land (Nuestra Tierra),” Martel unravels a political crime and the larger offenses behind it with a vital clarity. The film is centered on the 2009 murder of Javier Chocobar, an Indigenous Chuchagasta man from Argentina’s northwestern Tucumán province, who was shot while defending his ancestral homeland from a thuggish incursion. The weight of the issue at hand — stolen land, territorial rights and the overdue recognition of a colonized country’s original peoples — brings out a tantalizing lucidity from the typically elusive Martel on a serious subject that requires discipline.

In one sense, she’s dealing with a rights issue too painful to be aggressively aestheticized, but she’s also exploring a blood-soaked injustice that can’t be treated conventionally. She begins, in fact, with rolling satellite images from space — as if to say: This appropriation of nature is the world’s problem, not just Argentina’s.

What follows, toggling between a courtroom and vast, contested land (filmed with dreamlike urgency by cinematographer Ernest de Carvalho), is a righteous, visually arresting swirl of fact and feeling, past and present. It’s also anchored by the stories of a community desperate to claim territory they’ve cultivated for centuries. “Our Land” is as honorable a documentary as you’re likely to encounter this year about what fighting looks like in today’s era of grab-what-you-can thievery.

First, we hear from the defendants, captured by Martel’s cameras at their 2018 trial in Buenos Aires (an unconscionable nine years after the shooting). The three accused men — a businessman and two ex-cops — flounder at positioning themselves as the true victims when their own handheld video of the incident shows otherwise: The confrontation with the Chuchagastas only escalated because they brought a gun. Their lawyers obnoxiously push a narrative of ownership versus trespassers, backed by reams of documents and tossed-around historical dates.

But as Martel patiently unfolds the Chuchagastas’ perspective — personal narratives that come to life in intimate photos, atmospheric sound design and warm home footage — we begin to understand that documents and files are a bogus battleground given their hundreds of years of careful tending. One community member distrusts dialogue to begin with, calling it a means to “give up something.”

“Our Land” is the work of a director whose attention is rigorous, whose care is genuine, but who is also conscious of her outsider’s perspective. It’s an ally’s respect. There’s no better proof of that than in her drone shots of this embattled community’s sun-soaked valley: elegant, purposeful, even awkward (a bird hits one) visitations from the air. They’re a reminder that she’s the filmmaker, surveying a story that belongs to others. Documentaries don’t get much more honest than that.

To describe a movie as including a ski mask, a camcorder and $50,000 in cash would certainly lead one to imagine a specific type of story. Add two men and sex work and the brain might roll around more pointed scenarios.

But none of that can prepare you for what micro-indie “Blue Film” has in store. The nexus of perversion, pain and sexual purpose driving writer-director Elliot Tuttle’s dark, discursive chamber drama is of a stripe rarely attempted in even the most self-consciously daring movies. Should you need a self-imposed break afterward from intimate two-handers, even Tuttle might understand, then wink in the general direction of his Pasolini posters. (I’m guessing at this provocateur’s wall art.)

Is it clear yet that “Blue Film,” set primarily in a house in Los Angeles over the course of a revelatory night, isn’t for everybody? Some of that “everybody,” incidentally, includes the festivals and distributors who rejected the queer filmmaker’s debut feature, despite having critical buzz, Tony-winning actor Reed Birney as one of its stars and indie guru Mark Duplass as a mentoring producer.

But certain subjects (spoilers ahead) are bound to trigger a different kind of scrutiny. Initially, our attention is on macho-posturing tattooed camboy Aaron (“Boots” star Kieron Moore), graphically boasting to his followers online of the big payday he’ll receive that evening from a submissive client. What he later encounters, however, at the door of a Craftsman on a quiet street is a masked, polite, older host (Birney) with a camera and, once it’s turned on, a lot of personal questions, the kind that begin to crack the facade of a young man used to being in control of his transactional life.

Then his client’s face is revealed and Aaron recognizes it’s his middle school teacher Hank, a convicted pedophile who once coveted him. Hank, who completed prison time for the attempted assault of a different boy, has made a cross-country trip to seek out the adult version of someone who could have been his first victim. He is still processing what he is, wondering if desire, even love, is available to him anymore.

The question is, will you care? Even viewed through Aaron’s cautious, clear-eyed empathy, it’s a steep ask. But you should. Tuttle’s fearless inquisition won’t insult your intelligence, ask your mercy or hogtie your feelings. Honestly, it’s refreshing to be repulsed and intrigued by a movie willing to plumb these psychological depths when Hollywood won’t. In its commitment to unvarnished talk — even if that leads to a clunky staginess — “Blue Film” has thoughts about identity, choice, sin and salvation. There’s a sincere engagement with humanity’s more difficult realities.

Needless to say, this type of graphically articulated exchange wouldn’t work if the performances didn’t land. Thankfully, Moore’s affecting portrayal of jumbled masculinity mixed with situational curiosity is well-calibrated, while Birney, a pro with a challenge, eases us into Hank’s weary self-possession (if not always the nauseating facts of it) before coloring outside the lines with a believably interesting philosophy about reckoning.

But “Blue Film” is tough, make no mistake. Awkward and searching, it exists in a filmic space that you could argue was opened up by last year’s courageous documentary “Predators.” And sometimes that gaze is just discomfiting, full stop. Tuttle wants that. He has room to improve but he’s someone to watch, plumbing the hard-to-fathom.

May 7 (UPI) — A group appointed by President Donald Trump made its final recommendations Thursday on changes to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, suggesting moves that would put more responsibility back on states and other authorities.

The changes also include reviews of agency staffing and privatizing flood insurance, The Hill reported.

“We need to refocus FEMA to get it back on what its mission originally was,” Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said. FEMA is part of Homeland Security.

Panel members said FEMA has become too involved in politics, specifically mentioning state assistance during the coronavirus epidemic, The New York Times reported. Recommendations included changes in how FEMA helps state and local governments with financial recovery.

“Disaster response is complicated and increasingly expensive,” the final report said. “With taxpayers bearing the burden of funding emergency management in the United States, it is the responsibility of every American to embrace their individual responsibility to lessen this burden by being prepared for disasters. … As our nation returns ownership of emergency management back to local communities and their states, tribes and territories, we encourage every American to review their insurance policies and personal disaster plans as well as engaging with their local community leaders to be better prepared when disaster strikes.”

Trump has said that FEMA’s work is too expensive and that state governors should be able to manage more on their own, the Times reported. He has also suggested in the past that the agency should “go away” entirely.

The changes recommended by the report would require congressional approval. They include tweaks meant to make the reimbursement process, once approved, quicker and more direct, and changes meaning the FEMA plays less of a role in helping disaster survivors find housing.

“These recommendations are all about accelerating federal dollars, streamlining the process, making it less bureaucratic, so that Americans can get the help they need on the worst day of their lives,” said former Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a member of the council. “And this is not a moment for bureaucracy, it is a moment for action, it is a moment for clarity.”

The Environmental Defense Fund said in a statement that Americans are facing increasingly severe weather and the council’s recommendations “don’t meet this reality.”

“The proposed changes would leave communities without the necessary funding, information and access to insurance to stay prepared and safe when disasters strike,” said Will McDow, the fund’s associate vice president for coasts and watersheds.

The group said the proposed changes would “shift enormous burdens onto states and communities and reduce government efficiency.”