Review: Gal Gadot stars in the routine, less-than-wondrous ‘Heart of Stone,’ plus more
The buzziest streaming movie this week
Netflix’s “Heart of Stone” puts a small but noticeable spin on the globe-hopping espionage thriller by having Gal Gadot play a super-spy operating undercover within a different team of super-spies. Gadot is Rachel Stone, introduced at the start of the film as a low-level MI6 agent: the kind who “stays in the van” and works comms while her team members are out risking their lives.
Secretly, Stone is working for a shadowy organization known as the Charter, assembled from some of the world’s most skilled operatives, dedicated to minimizing the loss of human life via missions overseen by an AI tool called the Heart. Stone is meant to keep tabs on her MI6 crew; but her Charter orders change when the Heart gets stolen by Keya Dhawan (Alia Bhatt), a zealot who believes it’s a dangerous device.
On the grand spectrum of Netflix’s original action movies, “Heart of Stone” lands a bit above the average. Director Tom Harper is a skilled pro, with notable credits in both film (“The Aeronauts”) and TV (“Peaky Blinders”). He gets likably loose performances from Gadot’s supporting cast, which includes Sophie Okonedo as her no-nonsense Charter boss Nomad, Matthias Schweighöfer as Charter’s soft rock-loving tech genius the “Jack of Hearts,” and the always charming Jamie Dornan as Stone’s most simpatico MI6 team member, Parker. Greg Ruska and Allison Schroeder’s script has one pretty good twist, and Harper apparently had a decent budget to work with, judging by the diverse European locations.
But the effects-heavy action sequences still look cheesy in comparison with the likes of “Mission: Impossible” and “John Wick” — and too much of “Heart of Stone” is eaten up by those scenes, in which Stone and her associates zip their vehicles through crowded streets or make impossible leaps from very high places. The slam-bang stuff in this picture is too tediously routine. The movie is much better when it gets philosophical, pondering a world where everybody’s surveiling everybody else but nobody can agree on how to use that information to keep us all safe.
‘Heart of Stone.’ Rated PG-13 for sequences of violence and action, and some language. 2 hours, 5 minutes. Available on Netflix
As hip-hop celebrates its 50th anniversary on Aug. 11, The Times looks back at the artists, songs and innovations that changed the course of popular culture.
The best documentary to stream this week
Before Marcel Theo Hall became the beloved hip-hop artist Biz Markie, he was an orphan growing up on Long Island, drifting from town to town, crashing on couches and making friends with seemingly every future rap legend in the area. In Sacha Jenkins’ buoyantly entertaining, life-affirming documentary “All Up in the Biz,” some of those people who knew Biz as a teenager — including Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, the members of De La Soul and more — tell funny stories about how he was just sort of always around, making everyone laugh with his absurd boasts, weird dances and beatboxing skills. They also say that whenever they tried to get real with Biz about his past, he changed the subject. He preferred to maintain good vibes.
Jenkins follows Biz’s lead. He can’t really get to the bottom of Biz Markie’s private life, so he just rolls with the affectionate anecdotes, and puts them in the context of hip-hop’s late ‘80s creative boom. Even when Jenkins covers the rapper’s 2021 death, he re-creates the final days by putting an adorable-looking puppet in a hospital bed. For the rest of the film Jenkins uses animation, vintage clips and a lot of interviews to re-create the whole Biz Markie experience: the raspy voice, the tuneless singing, and the love of anything kitschy, catchy and fun.
“All Up in the Biz” does get into some thorny issues, including the way a lawsuit over an uncleared Gilbert O’Sullivan sample pushed Biz to shift from being a recording artist to becoming a goofy, up-for-anything celebrity. Yet even then he approached his opportunities with a sense of joy — whether he was DJ-ing at parties or popping up for a scene in “Men in Black II.” The Biz Markie story is not framed as a tragedy here. It’s a celebration of a lovable weirdo who made people happy.
‘All Up in the Biz.’ Not rated. 1 hour, 40 minutes. Available on Paramount+ / Showtime
Evil took on powerfully cinematic form in “The Exorcist,” “Sorcerer” and other films directed by the Oscar-winning William Friedkin, who died Monday at 87.
Blu-ray of the week
When the director William Friedkin died last week, the obituaries and appreciations mostly led with his Oscar-nominated 1970s blockbusters “The French Connection” and “The Exorcist.” But Friedkin continued to produce vital work throughout his career — including 1985’s incredibly entertaining, uncompromising crime picture “To Live and Die in L.A.” William Petersen and John Pankow play Secret Service agents who try to take down a slippery counterfeiter (played by Willem Dafoe) by committing crimes themselves. Working with cinematographer Robby Müller, Friedkin puts a Los Angeles on screen that is equal parts glamorous and seamy, where even the palm tree in the movie’s logo looks like a gunshot wound.
The chase scenes are thrilling, the characters are complex and the propulsive, twisty plot (co-written by Friedkin and Gerald Petievich) doubles as a takedown of the ‘80s obsession with wealth and power. “To Live and Die in L.A.” isn’t currently available to stream, but the most recent Blu-ray edition — released a few weeks ago — is the best way to see the movie anyway. It features a new 4K remaster, plus a frank Friedkin commentary track and more than an hour of interviews and behind-the-scenes featurettes.
‘To Live and Die in L.A.’ KL Studio Classics Blu-ray
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