Aurelia Butler

Mariska Hargitay sets out to learn about her mother, the Hollywood actress Jayne Mansfield, through intimate conversations with her siblings.When Mariska Hargitay was three years old, her mother, the Hollywood star Jayne Mansfield, was killed in a car accident. Hargitay was seated beside her brothers in the back of the vehicle, and was lodged under a seat during the crash. She was almost left behind by rescuers, until her brother asked about her. In her moving documentary “My Mom Jayne,” Hargitay relays this past trauma with a mixture of sorrow and gratitude.Best known for starring as Olivia Benson, the dogged detective in “Law & Order: SVU,” Hargitay begins the film — her feature directorial debut — by explaining that she set out to learn about Mansfield, the mother she hardly knew. But instead of the typical biographical approach of interviewing historians and writers, Hargitay sits down for intimate conversations with her three elder siblings, whose testimonies she pairs with archival material depicting Mansfield’s life in the public eye.As Hargitay shows, the grainy footage tells one story while the family’s recollections tell another. Over her career, Mansfield curated an image of a ditsy coquette. She affected a Minnie Mouse speaking voice and received leering men with a genial giggle. This performance of vacuity belied Mansfield’s profound intellect and talents as a classically trained violinist, but it was an easier sell in Hollywood, and so she used the persona as a stepladder to climb to the top.For much of her life, Hargitay judged her mother for these acts, and although she doesn’t draw a line from Mansfield’s work as an actress to her own, it’s tempting to wonder whether Hargitay’s powerhouse role in “SVU” was a disavowal of the blonde bimbo archetype. It’s this tension that makes “My Mom Jayne” as much an experiment in autobiography as in biography, closer in kind to Sarah Polley’s “Stories We Tell” than the polished or salacious celebrity profiles clogging up streaming platforms.Like that predecessor, “My Mom Jayne” eventually builds to a brave personal disclosure where Hargitay shows how the mysteries encircling her mother’s life complicated her own identity as a daughter and sister. She makes the revelation with gentle courage, in a spirit of honesty and appreciation for the small ring of people who loved her family enough to avoid sharing the information.Folded into the project are questions about what defines a person’s legacy. Is it the face one puts on for the world or the private one shared with kin? Since Hargitay has little memory of Mansfield, how does she reconcile her mother’s many selves? Hargitay explores these ideas in voice-over, and settles on a generous understanding of Mansfield that centers on her talent for music. These efforts offer a clean conclusion, but it is the exquisitely relatable messiness of this exceptional family tale that lingers.My Mom JayneNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Watch on Max. More

Everyone’s favorite campy killer doll returns in a movie that has some thoughts about artificial intelligence.The “M3gan” franchise — look, we all know there’s going to be a “3.0” — is the opposite of serious. In 2022, the first film played on the time-tested horror trope of the killer doll, adding an artificial intelligence twist. It became an instant camp classic, owing largely to clips from the trailer that were meme-ified all over the internet, especially its queer corners. Critics even loved it, probably because it clearly knew what kind of flamboyant nonsense it was aiming for and leaned all the way in.“M3gan 2.0” is no more serious than the original, but occasionally feels like it’s trying to be. When we last saw Gemma (Allison Williams, still sincere and excellent) and her tween niece Cady (Violet McGraw), they were picking up the pieces of their lives after M3gan, the A.I.-powered android that Gemma programmed to protect Cady, followed her prime directive so single-mindedly that she wreaked total havoc on their lives. Now, two years later, Gemma has become an author and an advocate for legislation and safeguards in A.I. development, and she carefully monitors Cady’s tech usage.This is an interesting turn of events for a movie like this, because it seems to take Gemma’s concerns seriously, laying out convincing arguments for not leaving all the A.I. development to profit-obsessed tech bros. Watching “M3gan 2.0,” I got the sense someone had done their homework, thinking about the ways that rhetoric about enhancing mankind’s future and creating a better world can, and do, function as a smoke screen for less altruistic ends. Once in a while, I caught myself thinking this movie was more grounded in the reality of A.I. in our world than films like the “Mission: Impossible” series.But it’s still a killer doll movie. With her labmates (Brian Jordan Alvarez and Jen Van Epps), Gemma is still developing products designed to help humans live in this brave new world, like a kind of exoskeleton that increases human stamina and strength. She’s also struck up an ambiguously warm relationship with the tech ethicist Christian (Aristotle Athari). But when a mysterious weapon named Amelia (Ivanna Sakhno) turns up abroad, and a billionaire (Jemaine Clement) starts sniffing around Gemma’s lab, it’s clear things are going go to sideways.In returning to M3gan’s world, the screenwriter and director Gerard Johnstone repeats some of the same formula, most notably the reappearance of the deranged A.I. doll (once again performed by Amie Donald and voiced by Jenna Davis). It’s still camp galore, with lines designed to be meme-ified again, and a lot of elaborate silliness. There’s acrobatic fighting; there’s a dance scene; there’s a hilarious nod to an A.I. product that notoriously flopped in the real world.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

Emma Mackey and Fiona Shaw star in this drama about a young woman in a codependent relationship with her disabled mother.Under a forgiving light, “Hot Milk” plays like a surrealist comedy about a 25-year-old British woman who is too depressed to finish her thesis. Sofia (Emma Mackey) lives with her mother, Rose (Fiona Shaw), in southern Spain. Groups of girls practice flamenco near the rocky beach where Sofia broods in solitude, and the neighbor’s dog, which is chained up to the roof, never stops barking.And one day Ingrid (Vicky Krieps), a bisexual manic-pixie-horse-girl from Germany, enters Sofia’s life and quickly breaks down her defenses with an annoyingly whimsical flirtation style. How are we supposed to react when, for instance, the two women enjoy a moody moonlit tryst and Ingrid breathily declares that she once killed someone?Baffling choices like these make “Hot Milk,” the directorial debut of the playwright and screenwriter Rebecca Lenkiewicz, hard to take seriously. The film, adapted from the novel by Deborah Levy of the same name, is a tonal scramble, which makes the story’s intended throughline — Sofia’s toxic, codependent relationship with Rose — feel unexpected once it finally takes control of the narrative.The mother and daughter are in Spain indefinitely to meet with the renowned Doctor Gómez (Vincent Perez). Mysteriously, Rose is unable to walk, but as her treatment with the doctor continues, her disability seems to be linked to stranger psychological issues — and, perhaps, a desire to control Sofia.Shaw, at the very least, is a hypnotizing and treacherous presence, her seemingly guileless prattle masking deep trauma and cruelty. Mackey, despite flashes of ferocity, feels miscast. Beautiful and angsty, her Sofia doesn’t carry the story’s psychological layers about manipulation and masochism. The film eventually finds its footing, but the journey there might convince you not to care.Hot MilkRated R for sex, nudity, and psychological trauma. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters. More

In tanned, tousled form, the actor stars in a Formula One story about fast cars, last chances and pretty people by the director of “Top Gun: Maverick.”Set in the world of Formula One racing, the easy, oh-so breezy “F1 The Movie” wants you to believe that it’s about winning and losing, talent and teamwork and all the tough love and hard work that go into Grand Prix glory. That’s the pitch, though there’s both more and less at play. An enjoyably arranged collection of all the visual attractions and narrative clichés that money can buy, “F1” is very simply about the satisfactions of genre cinema and the pleasures of watching appealing characters navigate fast, exotic cars that whine like juiced-up mosquitoes. It’s also about the pleasures of that ultrasmooth performance machine, Brad Pitt.At once calculated and almost touchingly sincere, the story is as formulaic as its title subject. Pitt plays Sonny Hayes, a driver who could’ve been, should’ve been, a world-class contender. Recruited for service by an old pal, Ruben (a silky Javier Bardem), Sonny gets one last proverbial chance to prove himself while facing the customary hurdles, including his past, a wary crew, a corporate tool and a hungry young rival. There are crackups, breakdowns, near-misses and some well-lit darkish nights (well, minutes) of the soul. Three women have decent speaking roles; all share at least one meaningful moment with Sonny.The whole sleek package is as hackneyed as it sounds, but when the cars and cameras zoom around the track, it scarcely matters. A great deal depends on your love of or maybe just tolerance for straightforward, ostentatious, professionally crafted spectacles that don’t ask much of you but time and money. In return, you get nearly three hours of fizzy drama, some superficial peeks into a rarefied world and a studiously casual, tousled and tanned Pitt in classic Hollywood Zen master mode. Much like the movie itself, which is an enjoyable metaphor for the filmgoing experience, Pitt’s star performance is nothing if not self-reflexive.To that end, the director Joseph Kosinski showcases Pitt like an old-studio attraction, bathing him in pretty light, putting him in signifying outfits — think of a coyly grinning, blue-jeaned Robert Redford circa the 1970s — and at times stripping off some of that clothing. Kosinski buffed Tom Cruise to a similar high gloss in “Top Gun: Maverick.” As in that movie, “F1” deploys its star for a classic setup between an individual and a community, one in which a loner-outsider rides in to deliver wisdom and near-mystical gifts. (The producers include Lewis Hamilton, a seven-time Formula One world champ, and Jerry Bruckheimer, who, with films like “Top Gun,” helped define modern American blockbuster cinema.)Written by Ehren Kruger, the veneer-thin story opens with Sonny at Daytona, where he awakes in his van next to the speedway, fires up Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” and runs winning circles around the competition. Not long after, his former track rival, Bardem’s Ruben, offers Sonny a chance to drive for a (fictional) losing Formula One team. Sonny takes it, sliding into an aerodynamic open-wheel ride amid some back story, character development, pro forma antagonism with a hotshot teammate, Joshua (Damson Idris), and a romance with the team’s technical director, Kate (Kerry Condon), all elements that the filmmakers use like brick mortar to help build what is effectively a series of races into a cohesive whole.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

He championed works of cinema that were destined never to have a commercial breakthrough — which, to him, was the whole point.P. Adams Sitney, who pioneered the study of avant-garde film, helping to focus attention on a rarefied corner of American filmmaking, died on June 8 at his home in Matunuck, R.I. He was 80.His daughter Sky Sitney said the cause was cancer.In books and magazine articles, and at Anthology Film Archives in New York City, which he helped found, and Princeton University, where he taught film history and other subjects in the humanities for over 35 years, Mr. Sitney championed a type of film that is largely unknown to the cinema-going public, but which forms a distinctive part of the American artistic canon.His passion was mostly short films that had nothing to do with narrative or characters and everything to do with light, images, objects and dreams. His book “Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde,” which has gone through three editions since first being published in 1974, is still regarded as the leading study of the genre.Mr. Sitney’s “Visionary Film,” originally published in 1974, is still regarded as the leading study of the genre.Oxford University PressHe championed the work of avant-garde pioneers like Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Gregory Markopoulos, Jonas Mekas and Peter Kubelka, several of whom helped him found Anthology Film Archives, the East Village bastion of avant-garde cinema, in 1970. He saw their films as pure experiments toward achieving one of cinema’s true vocations: the mirror of the dream state.“Fragmentation brought the imagery to the brink of stasis, so that after some hours hovering around that threshold, the image of a couple walking into a Japanese garden had the breathtaking effect of the reinvention of cinematic movement,” he wrote of an episode in Mr. Markopoulos’s 80-hour, 22-part 1991 epic, “Eniaios.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More