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Indie gems, a new ‘Predator’ and a boxing biopic are all in theaters

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Indie gems, a new ‘Predator’ and a boxing biopic are all in theaters

Sydney Sweeney plays boxing star Christy Martin in the film Christy, out this week.

Eddy Chen/Black Bear Pictures


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Eddy Chen/Black Bear Pictures

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

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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

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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 

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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 

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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 

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Sentimental Value

In limited theaters Friday 

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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.

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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 

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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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Jewelry Among the Exhibits at a Daniel Brush Retrospective

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Jewelry Among the Exhibits at a Daniel Brush Retrospective

Nearly four years after his death, a retrospective of the multidisciplinary work by the self-taught American artist Daniel Brush — encompassing sculpture, paintings and jewelry in materials as diverse as steel, Bakelite and gold — is scheduled to open June 8 at the Paris location of L’Ecole, School of Jewelry Arts.

“Daniel Brush: The Art of Line and Light” will be the fifth time that L’Ecole has exhibited the artist’s work. But its president, Lise Macdonald, said she believed Mr. Brush’s legacy warranted repeated consideration: “He is a very niche artist, but he is excellent — really one of the greatest artists of the 20th and 21st century.”

The diversity of his creations has been part of his appeal, she said. “We don’t really consider him as purely a jeweler but more a protean artist where jewelry was part of his approach.”

L’Ecole Paris, which operates in an 18th-century mansion in the Ninth Arrondissement and is supported by Van Cleef & Arpels, has prepared programming to complement the show, from conversations with experts on Mr. Brush’s work (to be held on site and streamed online) to jewelry-making workshops for children. Details of the free exhibition and the events are on the school’s website; the show is scheduled to end Oct. 4.

The exhibition is to include more than 75 pieces, which span much of Mr. Brush’s five-decade career. They have been selected by Olivia Brush, his wife and collaborator, and by Vivienne Becker, a jewelry historian and author who said she first met the couple more than 30 years ago. Some exhibits, they said, have never been seen by the public before.

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Ms. Becker, who wrote the 2019 monograph “Daniel Brush: Jewels Sculpture,” said the artist had possessed vast knowledge of the history of jewelry and shared her belief that jewels “answer a very important, very basic human impulse to adorn — that it’s essential to customs, beliefs, and ceremonies around the world.” She also has written a book documenting the L’Ecole exhibition — and with the same title — that examines the artist’s preoccupation with the themes of light and line.

“He loved the idea of making a real, intransigent, opaque metal into something that was almost translucent, or transparent,” said Ms. Becker, citing as an example a trio of bangles made in 2009 to 2010 that are called the “Rings of Infinity.” The lines that he engraved on the aluminum pieces functioned, she explained, to “elevate the jewel from a trinket to a great, great work of art.”

A series of engraved steel panels titled “Thinking About Monet” used the interplay of line and light to achieve a different effect, she said. Mr. Brush made individual strokes in tight formation on the panels, producing gently rippling surfaces whose color changes with shifting light conditions.

The effect “is really hard to understand. I couldn’t,” Ms. Becker said. “So many people ask, ‘Are they tinted? Are they colored?’ It’s absolutely nothing. It’s just the breaking of the light.”

Though Mr. Brush was a widely acknowledged master of skills such as granulation, the application of tiny gold balls to a metal surface, both Ms. Brush and Ms. Becker said the exhibition’s goal was not to highlight his virtuosity — nor, Ms. Becker said, was that ever a concern of Mr. Brush’s. “He didn’t want to talk about the technique at all,” she said. “Technique has to just be a means to an end. He just wanted people to be amazed, to have a sense of wonder again.”

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The works selected for the L’Ecole exhibition reflect his range, which veered from diamond-set Bakelite brooches inspired by animal crackers to a steel and gold orb meant to be an object of contemplation. “He didn’t want to have boundaries,” Ms. Brush said. “He wanted to do what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it.”

The couple met as students at what is now called Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and her 1967 wedding ring was the first jewel that Mr. Brush made.

All of Mr. Brush’s works were one-of-a-kind creations, completed from start to finish by him in the New York City loft that served as a workshop as well as a family home. Photographs of the space, which contained a library with titles on the eclectic subjects that preoccupied him — Chinese history, Byzantine art, Impressionist painting — and the antique machinery that inspired him and that he used to make his tools, are featured in the exhibition and reproduced in Ms. Becker’s book.

Ms. Brush is a fiber artist in her own right, but Mr. Brush also frequently credited her as an equal participant on pieces bearing his name. “I did not physically make the work,” she explained, “but the work would not have evolved or happened the way it did if it were not for the way we lived our lives,” she said.

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Thanks to ‘Mormon Wives,’ Dirty Soda Is a National Obsession

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Thanks to ‘Mormon Wives,’ Dirty Soda Is a National Obsession

The first time Pop’s Social, a catering company in South Orange, N.J., that specializes in dirty soda, served an alcoholic drink at an event, something strange happened.

At the event in December, its nonalcoholic offering, a spiced pear-cider seltzer with vanilla and peach syrups, cream, lemon and cold foam, was a hit. The Prosecco-spiked version? Not so much.

“People were more interested in the mocktail than the cocktail,” Ali Greenberg, an owner of the business, said in an interview.

Dirty soda — a customizable blend of soda, flavored syrup, creamer and sometimes fruit, served over pebble ice — has been crossing into the mainstream for years, especially after the cast of “The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives,” the hit reality show that premiered in 2024, frequented Swig, the Utah chain that started it all.

But its reach has gone far beyond the Mormon corridor, and its rise in popularity has dovetailed with an overall decline in U.S. alcohol consumption. “There’s not a lot of Mormon people in our neighborhood,” said Greenberg. “But there are a lot of people who are sober-curious or not drinking.”

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The reality show, which follows a group of Mormon influencers in Utah, helped popularize dirty soda beyond the Mountain States and inspired a wave of TikTok videos on the subject. Swig rapidly expanded — growing from 33 locations in Utah and Arizona in 2021 to now more than 150 locations in 16 states — along with other Utah chains, and spawned copycats nationwide.

Dirty soda has joined other Mormon cultural exports, like tradwife influencers, a “Real Housewives” franchise in Salt Lake City and Taylor Frankie Paul, the Bachelorette who wasn’t, that have captivated America.

With the recent rollouts of dirty soda at McDonald’s, Chick-fil-A and Dunkin’ — behold the Dunkin’ Dirty Soda: Pepsi, coffee milk and cold foam — and the appearance on grocery shelves of Dirty Mountain Dew and a coconut-lime Coffee Mate creamer for homemade dirty sodas, we may have reached peak dirty.

The idea for dirty soda came out of a desire for members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which has millions of followers in Utah and surrounding states, to have more options for social drinking, as the church prohibits the consumption of alcohol, hot coffee and hot caffeinated tea.

When Swig introduced dirty soda in 2010, it filled a need, providing a pick-me-up for car-pooling moms and an after-school treat for their kids. It was quickly adopted by many in the community.

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“In other cultures, parents go, they pick up their coffee in the morning, and for me and for a lot of my other friends’ parents, it was, ‘Let’s go pick up our dirty soda,’” Whitney Leavitt, a breakout star of “Mormon Wives,” said in an interview.

Leavitt was surprised when her dirty soda order became a recurring question from reporters in recent years. “They were so excited to hear all of the different syrups and creamers that we add to our drinks to make whatever your go-to dirty soda is,” Leavitt said. (Hers is sparkling water with sugar-free pineapple, sugar-free peach and sugar-free vanilla syrups, raspberry purée, a squeeze of lime, and fresh mint if she’s “feeling really fancy.”)

In April, Leavitt became the chief creative and brand officer at Cool Sips, a beverage chain based in New York that sells dirty sodas.

“Mormon Wives” inspired Kaitlyn Sturm, a 26-year-old mother of three from Jackson, Miss., to post recipes for dirty sodas on her TikTok. The one she makes the most contains Coke or Dr Pepper, homemade cherry syrup, a glug of coconut creamer and a packet of True Lime crystallized lime powder, which she combines in a pasta-sauce jar filled with pebble ice. “It kind of has become like a ritual, where I make one for my husband as well, and we have it most evenings,” Sturm said in an interview.

The trend has also hit fast-food menus. The new “crafted soda” menu at McDonald’s is riddled with dirty soda DNA. The Dirty Dr Pepper, with vanilla flavoring and a cold-foam topper, is the chain’s version of what has shaped up to be the universal dirty soda flavor. Since 2024, Sonic, beloved for its porous, soda-absorbing pebble ice, has offered “dirty” drinks — your choice of soda plus coconut syrup, sweet cream and lime.

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These drinks might feel new, but there are antecedents in the Italian sodas of the ’90s (fizzy water and a pump of Torani syrup); the Shirley Temple (ginger ale or lemon-lime soda with grenadine and maraschino cherries); and the egg cream, a tonic of seltzer, chocolate syrup and milk. And what is a dirty Dr Pepper with cold foam if not a descendant of the root beer float? “It’s just a soda fountain from 125 years ago,” Kara Nielsen, a food and beverage trend forecaster, said in an interview.

Though Leavitt moved to New York City with her family in December, her dirty soda ritual has remained consistent, with one key difference. “In Utah, we don’t get to walk to dirty soda shops,” Leavitt said. “We have to drive there.”

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Chaos Gardening: A Laid-Back Way to Garden

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Chaos Gardening: A Laid-Back Way to Garden

Annuals include flowers like marigolds and nasturtiums. They grow fast but won’t come back the next spring (though they will drop seeds and possibly propagate). Perennials like lavender and sage will return year after year, but they may take longer to grow. Wildflower and pollinator packets often contain both annual and perennial seeds but are frowned upon by some serious gardeners, because the selection can be haphazard and ill-suited to the area.

It’s a good idea to exercise a little situational awareness. How much rain can you expect? How much sunlight? Dig the earth and feel it between your fingers — is it sandy? Loamy? These are things to keep in mind as you prepare for your journey into horticultural chaos.

“You want to prepare your soil, your site, at least a little bit,” said Deryn Davidson, a sustainable landscape expert at Colorado State University Extension in Longmont, Colo. “Try to get rid of weeds. Make sure the soil is ready to receive seeds.”

Davidson, who has written about chaos gardening, strongly advised covering the seeds with a layer of soil, lest they become bird food. As for watering, that depends on where you live, she added. On the whole, though, the formula is straightforward: “Soil, sun and water is what these seeds need,” Davidson said.

Not everyone is a fan of the trend, or at least the way it has been portrayed on social media. “Nature is not chaos — nature is pattern,” said Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist and the author of “Braiding Sweetgrass,” which recommends imbuing modern life with Indigenous wisdom.

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“It seems unrealistic,” Kimmerer said of the chaos gardening videos she has watched. The feeling of effortlessness they convey — a common social media effect, almost always the result of deft editing — seems to elide the work that goes into a garden, whether chaotic or not, she suggested.

“I want my garden to be natural and biodiverse,” she said. “That’s a good impulse. I don’t think this technique is going to get you there, but that’s an important impulse.”

Boitnott, the maker of the viral video, offered a simple reason for why chaos gardening has become popular: “It just makes you happy.”

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