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Daniel craig outshines 'no time to die' in his final turn as james bond.

Justin Chang

Bond (Daniel Craig) teams up with secret agent Paloma (Ana de Armas) in Havana in No Time to Die. Nicola Dove /Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios hide caption

Bond (Daniel Craig) teams up with secret agent Paloma (Ana de Armas) in Havana in No Time to Die.

It's been more than a year since No Time to Die was supposed to open in theaters, and while the pandemic is far from over, the movie's long-overdue release feels like a good omen for an industry that could use it .

Never mind if James Bond can save the world — can he save the movies in the era of COVID and streaming-service domination? I have no idea. I can only say that it's a poignant pleasure to see Daniel Craig as Bond on the big screen one last time, even if the movie around him is seldom as good as he is.

Daniel Craig is the bookend Bond, giving 007's story a beginning — and an end

But then that's always been the case with the Craig Bond movies, with the sole exception of Casino Royale , the first and still the best of the five. Craig put his imprint on the character from the get-go: Like any good 007, he showed he could rock a tuxedo and toss off double-entendres with ease.

Bond With A Broken Heart: Defending Daniel Craig

But he was also a colder, broodier James Bond — closer to Sean Connery than Roger Moore , but with an aching vulnerability all his own. With this Bond, it was personal: We saw just how anguished he could be when he lost the love of his life, Vesper Lynd, a tragedy that haunted him over the next few movies and continues to haunt him in this one.

As No Time to Die begins, Bond has been retired from active MI6 duty for some time and started a new life with Madeleine Swann, played by Léa Seydoux. But he can't shake the memory of Vesper, and before long tragedy tears Bond and Madeleine apart, setting a somber tone that's beautifully captured by Billie Eilish 's opening theme song.

Coronavirus Updates

New 007 release delayed for 3rd time as pandemic continues to batter film industry.

Five years later, Bond is bumming around Jamaica when a fresh criminal conspiracy convinces him to end his retirement. The plot is too busy and complicated to summarize at length: Let's just say it involves a deadly plague of DNA-targeting nanobots that could wipe out millions of people worldwide, which feels just close enough to our real-life pandemic to suggest why the studio might have opted to hold the picture back a year.

That said, nothing about No Time to Die feels especially timely or urgent. It's the usual assembly of Bond movie clichés, which is nothing to complain about, of course, since clichés — the gadgets, the one-liners, the martinis, the sex — are the lifeblood of this series.

Movie Interviews

Bond gadgets stand test of time (but not physics).

But more than once during No Time to Die , I found myself wondering if those familiar beats couldn't have been hit with a bit more panache. Did it really take four screenwriters — including the great Phoebe Waller-Bridge , the comic genius behind Fleabag — to come up with a script this workmanlike? And between Christoph Waltz as returning villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld and Rami Malek as new villain Lyutsifer Safin, did the movie really need two scheming megalomaniacs, both of whom have facial disfigurements to conveniently signal how evil they are?

Back at MI6, Lashana Lynch plays a highly competent new spy who's been assigned Bond's 007 code number. But their professional rivalry never really takes off. The movie is on more solid footing with Bond's old colleagues: Ralph Fiennes ' M, Naomie Harris ' Moneypenny and Ben Whishaw's Q are as delightful company as ever. And a terrific if under-used Ana de Armas nearly steals the picture as an agent who teams up with Bond during a mission in Havana. It's a witty, suspenseful sequence, with enough flirtatious fun and outlandish stuntwork to recapture some of that escapist Bond-movie pleasure.

James Bond At 50

Picking the best bond: connery and craig rise to the top.

For the most part, that pleasure returns only fitfully over the movie's two-hour-and-43-minute running time. The director, Cary Joji Fukunaga , whose credits include the African war drama Beasts of No Nation and the first season of True Detective , is a skilled filmmaker with a snazzy way with action. But this is a twilight Bond movie, and the mood is overwhelmingly somber. There are continual reminders of Bond's advancing age, of his past regrets and losses. The final showdown feels less like a climax than a benediction.

Craig has been a terrific James Bond, maybe even the best, and his departure certainly deserves a little fanfare. But I admired the impulse behind this very long goodbye without feeling as moved as I wanted to be. There's something a little too strained and self-conscious about the tragic emotional arc the filmmakers have saddled Bond with over the past several movies, and it feels like more than the character can withstand. Will Bond ever be allowed to be Bond again, a dashing rogue leaping deftly from caper to caper? Not this time — but maybe the next.

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Longtime new york times film critic a.o. scott moving to book review after the oscars.

The critic has reviewed more than 2,200 films for the newspaper over the last 23 years.

By Alex Weprin

Alex Weprin

Media & Business Writer

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The New York Times ‘ film critic A.O. Scott is moving to a new beat.

Scott, who has reviewed more than 2,200 films for the Times over the last 23 years, will shift to The New York Times Book Review where he will “write critical essays, notebooks and reviews that grapple with literature, ideas and intellectual life,” according to a memo to Times staff from Sam Sifton, Gilbert Cruz and Sia Michel Tuesday.

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Scott will leave the culture section for the Book Review in March, after the Oscars and 2023 film awards season.

Scott joined the Times as a film critic in 2000 from Long Island’s Newsday and was elevated to co-chief film critic in 2004, alongside Manohla Dargis, who remains the chief film critic for the paper of record. A Times spokesperson said that the outlet will be hiring another film critic.

With its international profile and large cosmopolitan readership, being a critic for the Times (be it in books, film, TV, architecture, restaurants, etc) means that everything you write will be thoroughly scrutinized. That was true for Scott as well, whose 2012 dustup with Samuel L. Jackson over a review of Marvel’s The Avengers garnered substantial media coverage ( including from The Hollywood Reporter ).

The memo from Sifton, Michel and Cruz is below.

On January 1, 2000, A.O. Scott joined The Times as a film critic, after working as a Sunday book critic at New York Newsday. Eleven days later, we published his first review, of the comedy “My Dog Skip”: “a relaxed, modest evocation of the mythology of small-town mid-20th-century American childhood, with its lazy summers, its front porches and picket fences, and its fat-tired, chromed-plated bicycles.” Four years later, he was named co-chief film critic, alongside Manohla Dargis.

In many ways this is a natural progression. Tony was a literature concentrator at Harvard, graduating magna cum laude in 1987, and is a graduate-school dropout in American literature (Johns Hopkins: thank you, next!). He started his journalism career as an assistant to Robert Silvers at The New York Review of Books and was soon contributing reviews there, as well as to Slate and, of course, to Newsday.

A deep and abiding interest in books and ideas has been clear in Tony’s work here from the start. “It’s the job of art to free our minds,” he wrote in his 2016 book, “Better Living Through Criticism,” “and it’s the task of criticism to figure out what to do with that freedom.” And anyone who read his towering series about American novelists for the Book Review a few years ago, “The Americans,” can see in his work a desire to take measure of more than simply a cultural product, but of the culture itself.

Please join us in congratulating Tony on starting this exciting new chapter in his remarkable career.

Sam, Gilbert and Sia

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“Tár,” Reviewed: Regressive Ideas to Match Regressive Aesthetics

By Richard Brody

The conductor James Levine was fired from the Metropolitan Opera in 2018 following accusations that he had sexually abused four men—students of his—three of them when they were teen-agers. The conductor Charles Dutoit resigned his post with London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra that same year after he was accused of sexual assault by several women. (Both men denied the accusations.) In Todd Field’s film “Tár,” starring Cate Blanchett as an orchestra conductor named Lydia Tár, both men are mentioned, by an elderly male retired conductor, as objects of his sympathy. This peripheral character’s remark should hardly be taken for the writer and director’s point of view—except that the drama is centered on accusations of improprieties levied against Lydia and presents her as a victim. The movie scoots rapidly by the accusations that she faces; it blurs the details, eliminates the narratives, merely sketches hearings, leaves crucial events offscreen, and offers a calculated measure of doubt, in order to present her accusers as unhinged and hysterical and the protesters gathered against her as frantic and goofy. Moreover, it depicts her as the victim of another attack, one that is based on blatant falsehoods, but that, in the wake of the other accusations, gains traction in the media.

“Tár” is a regressive film that takes bitter aim at so-called cancel culture and lampoons so-called identity politics. It presents Lydia as an artist who fails to separate her private life from her professional one, who allows her sexual desires and personal relationships to influence her artistic judgment—which is, in turn, confirmed and even improved under that influence. It presents the efforts to expand the world of classical music to become more inclusive, by way of commissioning and presenting new music by a wider range of composers, as somewhere between a self-sacrificing gesture of charity and utterly pointless. It mocks the concept of the blind audition (intended to prevent gatekeeping conductors, musicians, and administrators from making decisions on the basis of appearance). It sneers at the presumption of an orchestra to self-govern (which the one that Lydia unmistakably conducts in the film, the Berlin Philharmonic, does in real life). It derisively portrays a young American conducting student named Max (Zethphan Smith-Gneist), who identifies “as a BIPOC pangender person,” and who says that he can’t take Bach seriously because he was a misogynist. The film looks at any social station and way of life besides the money-padded and the pristinely luxurious as cruddy, filthy, pathetic.

Lydia’s backstory—of a sanitized, résumé-like sort—is dispensed in the movie’s first long scene, a New Yorker -centric one, featuring my colleague Adam Gopnik, as himself, interviewing Lydia onstage for The New Yorker Festival. He introduces her by way of a litany of her achievements: conducting posts with the great orchestras of Cleveland, Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, and New York, a background in ethnomusicology and the music of Indigenous peoples, a repertory that involves commissioning music from female composers and performing it alongside venerable classical works, even an EGOT . As Gopnik recites her bona fides, her assistant, Francesca (Noémie Merlant), who obviously compiled them, silently lip-synchs along offstage.

Lydia is married to Sharon Goodnow (Nina Hoss), the orchestra’s concertmaster, a relationship that began around the time of Lydia’s appointment to the group’s leadership. They live, with their young daughter, Petra (Mila Bogojevic), in a Brutalist apartment of a pristine monumentality (though Lydia keeps her old place, in an old building, to work in). Lydia is the co-founder of a program to mentor aspiring young female conductors. Francesca, one of her former students, works tirelessly as Lydia’s factotum, amanuensis, and personal assistant, in the expectation of becoming her assistant conductor in Berlin. Another former student, Krista Taylor (Sylvia Flote), is seemingly stalking Lydia, who has meanwhile been thwarting Krista’s career by dissuading orchestra administrators from hiring her. There’s the hint that Lydia had had sexual relationships with both Francesca and Krista—but only a hint, and enough calculated vagueness to leave viewers debating in the lobby.

“Tár” is a useful reminder of the connection between regressive ideas and regressive aesthetics. It’s also a useful illustration of the fact that there is no such thing as “the story,” no preëxisting set of events that inherently define a character’s life, rise, or fall. This movie, launching the action with the barest of hints that Krista is the bringer of trouble to paradise, does almost as good a job at effacing the specifics of whatever may have gone on between them as Lydia herself does of deleting Krista’s incriminating e-mails. (One hint of the nature of their relationship is an anonymous gift—a signed copy of Vita Sackville-West’s novel “Challenge,” based on the author’s romantic relationship with a woman who attempts to die by suicide—that Lydia tears and discards.)

The movie takes the point of view of Lydia throughout. She has lived for so long in the world of private jets and private foundations that anything else seems like a dreadful comedown. It identifies so closely with her perspective that it even depicts several of her dreams—yet, despite getting inside her head, Field can’t be bothered to show what she knows of her relationships with two of the key characters in the film; he doesn’t convey what Lydia knows of her ostensible misdeeds, whether with flashbacks, internal monologues, or the details of investigations. The film seems to want it both ways: it sustains Lydia’s perspective regarding music, her professional relationships, and her daily aesthetic, while carefully cultivating ambiguity regarding what Lydia is charged with, in order to wag a finger at characters who rush to judgment on the basis of what’s shown (or, what isn’t). By eliminating the accusations, Field shows which narrative he finds significant enough to put onscreen. By filtering Lydia’s cinematic subjectivity to include disturbing dreams but not disturbing memories, he shows what aspect of her character truly interests him. By allowing her past to be defined by her résumé, he shows that he, too, is wowed by it and has little interest in seeing past it.

This movie about an artist’s life and work is, for the most part, utterly unilluminating about the music on which it’s centered. It delivers a few superficial details regarding Lydia’s effort to interpret the piece at the core of the film, Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, in terms of the composer’s biography. As for new music, Lydia may commission it and conduct it, she may exhort Max to discover the feelings in it, but the movie never shows what Lydia herself does with it or finds in it. The best moments in the film are the few, of a quasi-documentary import, in which Lydia, in rehearsal with the orchestra, exhorts and directs the musicians in fine points of phrasing and other expressive details.

Yet the music itself is filmed with an absence of style. Not a single image of the orchestra at work has a visual melody or a contrapuntal density, and the filming of performance seems borrowed from any DVD of a symphony orchestra. (By contrast, see Edgar Ulmer’s filming of the real-life conductor Leopold Stokowski and the musicians of his orchestra in the 1947 film “ Carnegie Hall .”) The conducting gestures that Lydia makes, her expressions while conducting, are laughable, not because Blanchett’s performance is in any way ridiculous but because Field’s awkward, lumpish images make it appear so. In a climactic scene, in which Lydia gives vent to her largely stifled rage against her perceived persecution, she emerges from the wings of the Berlin Philharmonic’s concert hall to the sound of the opening trumpet call of Mahler’s Fifth, which Field turns into the equivalent of a baseball player’s walk-on music .

The movie is no less obtuse regarding the artistic side of the power plays and the personal relationships that go into the making of music. A young cellist, Olga Metkina (Sophie Kauer), whom Lydia chooses on the basis of attraction to her, in stealthy defiance of the blind audition, turns out to be a gifted musician whose particular talents Lydia pushes to the fore (with a planned performance of Elgar’s Cello Concerto). Far from alienating the somewhat bewildered orchestra, Olga soon wins their admiration. Moreover, the prime beneficiary of the accusations against Lydia (significantly, relegated to the gossipy New York Post ) is a conductor of lesser talent, a boardroom-friendly art bureaucrat (and a funder of her mentorship program), Elliot Kaplan (Mark Strong). The one moving aspect of the offstage lives of musicians involves the fear of exposure that queer musicians endured, the deformation of their private lives by the pressure to maintain secrecy, and Lydia’s confession about the career-threatening troubles that she and Sharon endured when they made their relationship public. Yet, at the same time, Field has the chutzpah to liken today’s #MeToo era—in which, one character claims, to be accused is to be considered guilty—to the supposed excesses and false accusations of Germany’s postwar period of de-Nazification.

The careful ambiguities of “Tár” offer a sort of plausible deniability to its relentlessly conservative button-pushing, and its aesthetic is no less regressive, conservative, and narrow. The film is constructed as a series of scenes that cut from one place to another, even jumping ahead just a few minutes or hours, and the characterization of Lydia Tár is similarly disjointed. Blanchett’s performance doesn’t suffice: she incarnates each moment sharply and emphatically but, despite her supremely skillful exertions, Field doesn’t forge dramatic unity. The movie is a slew of illustrated plot points and talking points but, between the shots and the slogans, neither its protagonist nor its world seems to exist at all. “Tár” digests great art, and high-flown talk about it, into a smooth and superficial package. It’s as far from the great art of movies as most movie scores are from a Mahler symphony. ♦

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'Spy x Family: Code White' Review: The Beloved Anime Gets a Fun Movie

Anya, Twilight, and the Thorn Princess make their big screen debut!

The Big Picture

• Spy x Family: Code White is a standalone adventure suitable for new viewers, efficiently recapping the series' plot.
• The film balances all main characters effectively, with Anya being the driving force and Yor's role serving as comic relief.
• Code White offers great action sequences and animation but lacks new perspectives, making it more like an extended filler episode.

Of all the things that make Spy x Family so unique, the main element is that we instantly fell in love with the Forgers. Whether we’re following Twilight’s daring adventures, Yor’s intense battles, or Anya getting into hilarious situations, there’s never a dull moment for our favorite fake family. Spy x Family: Code White marks the series' first time on the big screen , and while it’s not without its faults, the film stays true to what makes Spy x Family such an exceptional anime.

Spy x Family Code: White

Spy x Family: Code White sees Anya and her parents go on a family road trip as they try to finish a school project . This reasonably simple premise allows the film to focus on the Forgers without diving deep into a massive villain plot or introducing a ton of exposition and unnecessary world-building. Instead, the film sticks to the basics, which is all it ever really needed to do.

'Spy x Family: Code White' is the Franchise at Its Best

Spy x Family: Code White is a standalone adventure that anyone can watch without seeing the anime’s previous two seasons. The film encourages new viewers to jump right in as it does a fantastic job efficiently recapping the show’s plot. When we meet the family in Code White , it’s very much a day in the life of the Forgers, making it easy for all viewers to get into.

The film is essentially a nostalgic journey through Spy x Family ’s greatest hits, as we see almost every major character appear, and the film doesn’t cover any themes not seen in the series. However, it’s still an entertaining watch. The film’s main storyline focuses on Anya accidentally getting mixed up in a villain plot while the Forgers are out on a family trip. Coinciding with Twilight also having to stop said villains, Yor gets suspicious of Loid’s behavior and suspects infidelity. These familiar themes, executed with precision, are what make the film stand out and evoke a sense of connection for returning fans.

One of the major struggles of Spy x Family has always been balancing the screen time between the three main characters. In Season 1, Yor was rarely the main focus, while in Season 2, Twilight’s role was significantly reduced. Code White does the incredible feat of keeping every character relevant to the plot and leaning into their strengths. Anya, like always, is the driving force of the film. She’s the only one consistently aware of what’s happening at all times, which always puts her at the center of events. Anya brings that sense of joy and childlike wonder as she gets into trouble. At the same time, Yor’s role in the film is much more subtle. She’s often used as comic relief, but her fears are real; losing this family can leave her with nothing, and we see that she legitimately cares for Anya and Loid. The threat of this family falling apart is again not entirely new to the series. Still, the execution is good enough to make it feel earned, especially when Twilight’s directives change throughout the film.

'Spy x Family: Code White' Might Not Be Best For Returning Fans

Unfortunately, Code White 's strengths are also a double-edged sword . The film, while entertaining, adds little for those familiar with the series. With little bearing on Operation S.T.R.I.X. , this entire mission can be viewed as an extended filler episode. We know Twilight and Yor stay together and that Anya’s safety is not in danger, which undercuts much of the dramatic tension the film hopes to create. With no real sense of urgency, Spy x Family: Code White feels like it can drag on a bit, especially in the second act. It also doesn't help that the film's main antagonist, Snidel, was not that interesting. He's a serviceable foil for Twilight and Anya, but he serves no purpose outside of being a bad guy who needs to be punched.

The film does have great action sequences , and the animation is some of the best we’ve seen in the franchise. The 1960s aesthetic aids the classic spy feel, making the art stand out. Twilight is in his James Bond bag as the spy antics are amped to a level we haven’t seen since Season 1, while Yor specifically has a highlight moment during her third-act battle with a new villain. Anya and Bond do their usual slapstick moments that are still cute but might overstay their welcome just a bit too long.

The film needed to take bigger swings to have a lasting impact. It keeps the status quo of the anime and doesn’t do anything to give a new perspective or spin on these characters. While the status quo is still the series that has become a cultural phenomenon, we can only look at Code White and wonder just how great it could’ve been if it had attempted something new.

Spy x Family: Code White is a fun adventure with the Forger family . However, it offers very little for those looking for a more character-driven story or even a threatening new antagonist to Twilight. Instead, they keep things consistent with the show so it's an easy entry for new viewers. If you’ve enjoyed the series up to this point, you’d have fun with the film. Just know that it’s not mandatory viewing. That said, a day in the life of the Forgers is still an outstanding time.

Spy x Family: Code White is a fun journey with the familiar characters of the series though doesn't add much of anything new.

• The film stays true to what made the anime series so great.
• All of the characters get the attention they deserve, ensuring the movie remains balanced.
• The animation is some of the best we've seen from the series, with great action sequences providing plenty of highlights.
• While consistent, there is still something lacking from the movie as it doesn't take that extra leap into something new.

Spy x Family: Code White is now in theaters in the U.S. in the original Japanese subtitles and English Dub. Click below for showtimes near you.

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Challengers stars Zendaya and Josh O'Connor as tennis players caught in a sexy, 13-year-long love triangle

Viewed aerially, a tennis court suggests little room for chaos. It is all stark white lines on solid hues; a perfectly symmetrical blueprint bisected into opposing territories. There are winners and losers in tennis. Victory is the only desire.

Look closer, though, and you might observe something a little messier. The rigid schema of the court cedes to a player's weaknesses: their rapacious ambitions and wild-eyed frustrations.

Limbs splay. Racquet strings fly asunder. Tennis – as it does in Luca Guadagnino's provocative, pulverising new film Challengers – becomes a pantomime for lust and loathing.

Emphasis, of course, on the lust. Under Guadagnino's direction, sport is hardly discernible from sex, with its grunts and moans, sweat and adrenaline.

He shoots the crucial tennis match of the film – between childhood friends-turned-rivals Art Donaldson (West Side Story's Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (a bedraggled Josh O'Connor) – with so much eros that it's almost pornographic.

Each bead of sweat threatens to burst forth from the screen, every close-up of tendon and tissue invites us to gawk at these hulking specimens of athleticism. There is a certain titillation, even, in the way a tennis ball whips past the camera – so dangerously close you can hear it whistle.

It is libidinous spectacle, it is unabashed pleasure.

This big match opens Challengers with an electrifying jolt. throughout the film, it becomes a framing device. Again and again, Guadagnino returns to the showdown with the adroitness of a commentator, merely glancing at the scores before filling in the blanks with a series of elasticated flashbacks.

The thrills accelerate, fuelled by the film's central love triangle. On two corners are Art and Patrick — the former a superstar player whose aspirations have diminished after an injury and a protracted recovery process; the latter a louche dilettante whom we first meet trying and failing to vamp his way into a free stay at a roadside inn the night before the game.

At the apex is Tashi (Zendaya): a one-time teenage prodigy, now a tennis coach whose exacting demeanour might conceal a secret heartache. She's married to Art – her sole client – but Patrick was her first flame.

Over the course of their relationships, each character's alliances slip and shift – fitting, perhaps, for a game where love means nothing.

With a slice of the racquet, we're transported back 13 years to the trio's first encounter in the summer of 2006. Art and Patrick are gangly doubles partners and boarding school bunkmates, who are instantly entranced by Tashi's balletic prowess.

From the grandstands of a junior tennis tournament, the boys watch Tashi prevail in the finals.

"Look at that f***ing backhand," a slack-jawed Art whispers as if it were dirty talk.

Later, they approach her at an afterparty – which becomes a late-night rendezvous in their hotel, where Tashi commands her callow would-be beaus like a seal trainer.

The scene – the steamiest in the film – quickly dissolves into a bouillabaisse of lips, napes and entangled limbs, passion erupting omnidirectionally with the groping desperation of young love.

It sets the stage for a decade of anguish, of competing affections and betrayals that could seem pulpy were it not for Guadagnino's unyielding commitment to the heightened melodrama of desire.

Guadagnino has spent his career mapping the overlapping contours of love – the type of illicit tryst so exhilarating it reaches an operatic pitch in his 2010 film I Am Love, or the guileless, wounding devotion in Call Me By Your Name.

In Challengers, he leans in, hard. Every conversation plays like its own tennis game, the camera ping-ponging between its subjects the way a spectator might swing their head, hoping to glimpse something volatile — a wayward ball, a fizzing romance — in mid-air.

Like the various tennis matches throughout the film, each pivotal exchange – in a screenplay brimming with breakneck dialogue – is scored by a thundering club soundtrack from Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross that reeks of poppers and perspiration.

Tennis, sex, love, raving: perhaps, suggests Guadagnino, they're all the same.

All entail a degree of surrender – a kind of fugue state where the self blurs and the rhythm takes over.

In Challengers' closing shots, the camera blurs too. Tethered to a tennis ball, we're flung skywards, pinwheeling through a smear of foliage and firmament. For a moment, it feels like the film itself; weightless, giddy, intoxicating.

Challengers is in cinemas now.

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