Something for nearly everyone at cinemas this weekend: A boxing biopic, an epic set in the Pacific Northwest, a new Predator flick and an anguishing postpartum story. Also quieter titles: a recreation of a 1970s interview with a celebrated New York art scene photographer, and a father-daughter drama from the filmmaker behind the 2022 standout The Worst Person in the World.
Christy
In theaters Friday
Christy Martin, whose life story is featured in the new film Christy, grew up a coal miner's daughter in West Virginia. After playing Little League baseball and basketball with the boys, she got a basketball scholarship to college. Then she began boxing in local amateur tough-man contests. She wore pink trunks, had a mean left hook, and enjoyed trash-talking her opponents. She kept winning fights, and was the first woman signed by promoter and boxing impresario Don King.
In the 1990s, Christy Martin was considered the most exciting and successful female boxer. She won titles, fought at Madison Square Garden and made it onto the cover of Sports Illustrated. She was later inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame. Martin says inside the boxing ring, she felt safe. But her private life was a different story. For two decades, she suffered her husband's emotional and physical brutality. Actress Sydney Sweeney portrays Martin in the film, which is more than a rise-to-fame biopic: Christy depicts how Martin's then-husband tried to make good on decades of threats, and how Christy survived being stabbed and shot by him in 2010. — Mandalit del Barco
Die My Love
In theaters Friday
Director and co-writer Lynne Ramsay adapts Ariana Harwicz's novel Die, My Love and gives Jennifer Lawrence the challenging role of Grace, a new mother in the throes of severe postpartum depression. Grace feels ignored in the isolated, rural family home she shares with her aloof partner Jackson (Robert Pattinson). Lawrence is a compelling presence and more than game to go through the pangs the part calls for, and she shares some strong scenes with Sissy Spacek, playing Jackson's empathetic mother Pam. But the storytelling is too abstract and at a remove to fully lock in emotionally, and as Grace's descent takes unsurprising turns, I was reminded of other, more successful works conveying this delicate subject matter — A Woman Under the Influence, for one. — Aisha Harris
Predator: Badlands
In theaters Friday
In sequels and novels, comics and video games, various Predators have faced off against everything from Aliens to Batman to, recently, a very resourceful young Comanche woman, in 2022's Prey. Predator: Badlands is the latest iteration of the franchise about an alien race that hunts things using all sorts of space-gadgets. In this version, Dek, the runt of his Predator litter, goes to the deadly planet of Genna to hunt down a hideous monster, because he's determined to prove to his clan that he's got what it takes to belong to the species of intergalactic badasses that audiences first met back in a 1987 Schwarzenegger movie. This Predator, played by Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi, is aided by the top half of an abandoned robot named Thia, played by Elle Fanning. — Glen Weldon
Peter Hujar's Day
In limited theaters Friday
Writer and director Ira Sachs' character-portrait two-hander will likely sound stagy and static, but it turns out to be not just resonant, but surprisingly cinematic as played by Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall. Sachs is recreating an interview that writer Linda Rosenkrantz recorded with photographer Peter Hujar on Dec. 19, 1974, for a never-published book about the daily lives of artists. The two were friends, and she asked him to relate in detail his activities of the day before. The original audio tape was lost, but a typewritten transcript of the interview lived on, donated by Rosenkrantz to the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City. It was published as a book in 2021.
The film's recreation finds Hujar, fidgeting and chainsmoking as he namedrops casually about members of the 1970s downtown art scene — Susan Sontag, Lauren Hutton, Bob (Robert) Wilson, Fran Lebowitz, William S. Burroughs — to regale Rosenkrantz, who is comparatively laconic. The most sustained (and most amusing) anecdote begins with Hujar debating whether to wear his red ski jacket or a more bohemian coat to shoot Allen Ginsberg for The New York Times. He decides on the jacket, and regrets it as he heads to Ginsberg's apartment for the shoot. The beat poet proves a difficult, testy subject, but Hujar gets the shot he needs. Then he buys liverwurst for a sandwich, develops the photos in his darkroom, has a few conversations, lets a friend whose hot water isn't working take a shower. It's all minor key, but thoroughly engaging, somewhat in the manner of Louis Malle's My Dinner with Andre, or perhaps the less formal artists-gabbing films of Andy Warhol. The director lets daylight fade to a candlelit evening meal as the minutia of Peter Hujar's Day becomes an understated aria for Whishaw, and a spoken-word concert both for Hall's active listener — and for the movie audience. — Bob Mondello
Sentimental Value
In limited theaters Friday
Joachim Trier's eloquent drama centers on the two long-neglected daughters of a film director (Stellan Skarsgård) overly caught up in his career. Nora (Renate Reinsve, the star of Trier's The Worst Person in the World) is suffering a case of stage fright when we meet her, possibly because she knows her father won't show up. Her opening night will end in triumph with her sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), an academic and former child performer in their father's biggest artistic triumph, present to back her up.
Shortly after, at their mother's funeral, things are the other way around — Agnes a basket case and Nora the strong one — when dad shows up, not to mourn the wife he left long ago, but to drop off a script he's written for Nora. She angrily turns him down, and he reluctantly casts a visiting American star (Elle Fanning), having her alter her hair color to match Nora's. Trier anchors the film in the ornate Victorian home that's been in the family for generations. If its walls could talk, they'd tell of mom dying by suicide, the girls growing up, and dad's new movie, which is set at the home, almost incestuously. The dynamics are fraught, the performances as understated as they are heartbreaking. And the plot, which keeps you guessing up to the final moments of the final scene, is riveting. — Bob Mondello
Train Dreams
In limited theaters Friday; streaming on Netflix Nov. 21
The grandeur of the Pacific Northwest, and the irrevocability of change, love, memory, cruelty and heartbreak all come together in Clint Bentley's gorgeous historical drama set in the early 20th century. It's the age of the steam locomotive and westward expansion, centered on an intimate portrait of Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) a taciturn day laborer and logger who meets Gladys (Felicity Jones), the love of his life and the mother of a daughter he seldom sees, since he's forever off working to support them. Grainier is passive, amazed, and often bewildered in a story crammed with incident — a Chinese coworker tossed off a bridge in a fit of anti-immigrant pique, a felled tree killing three loggers, a comet streaking in the night sky, memories made and lost, stones laid out in a square to mark the future walls of a log cabin, a forest fire laying waste to dreams. It's breathtaking, with Terrence Malick-esque visuals and wrenching emotions. — Bob Mondello
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