Aurelia Butler

A new documentary on Stormy Daniels traces how fame, frenzy and legal battles involving a former president upended her life.The arrival of “Stormy,” a new documentary on Peacock, is timely. In several weeks, former President Donald J. Trump is scheduled to go on trial in a case in which he’s accused of covering up a 2016 payment to the pornographic film star known as Stormy Daniels. (The trial was originally supposed start in late March, but has now been delayed until at least mid-April.)The documentary uses interviews and observational footage to recount the legal saga from Daniels’s perspective. It begins with the requisite accounts of her upbringing, her introduction to the sex industry and the 2006 tryst she says she had with Trump. “Stormy” then pivots to the period after the story of Daniels’s allegation of a sexual encounter with Trump was made public, tracing how the sudden fame and frenzy upended her personal life.After so much media coverage, certain details of the events feel overly familiar. But the director, Sarah Gibson, is often able to put the episodes into fresh contexts. Take the rise and fall of Michael Avenatti, Daniels’s onetime lawyer, who in 2022 was convicted of stealing from her: Rather than merely rehashing Avenatti’s offenses, Gibson positions him amid a wave of supposed male allies.These men go on to betray Daniels in ways that range from vexing to existential. And in a startling twist, some of the film’s footage comes from another documentary — never released — whose director became briefly involved with Daniels while shooting.“I’m not that special. I feel like a hypocrite,” Daniels says in one scene, considering her newfound status as a liberal luminary while preparing for a strip club performance. The sentiment gestures at complex questions about misogyny, female power and sexual agency. “Stormy” wisely lets these issues linger rather than tying a bow over them.StormyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. Watch on Peacock. More

The singer and songwriter invited Alex Gibney to capture the making of his album “Seven Psalms.” The filmmaker was surprised to find a musician losing his hearing.Paul Simon had only one request of the filmmaker undertaking “In Restless Dreams,” a documentary about his life: “He wanted the music to sound good,” the director and producer Alex Gibney said.Over the years, Gibney, 70, has told the stories of many lives, including Elizabeth Holmes’s (“The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley”), Lance Armstrong’s (“The Armstrong Lie”) and Dilawar’s, an Afghan farmer who was tortured to death by U.S. soldiers in 2002 (“Taxi to the Dark Side,” for which he won an Academy Award for best documentary feature). He’s taken on musical legends like James Brown, Janis Joplin and Frank Sinatra.The Simon film, however, came with the most tempting of offers: a chance to come out to the singer’s ranch in Wimberley, Texas, and film him as he worked on his latest album, “Seven Psalms,” which was released last year.“That sort of thing doesn’t happen often at all,” Gibney said. “I got myself down to Texas as quickly as possible.”“In Restless Dreams,” which premiered on Sunday on MGM+ (for TV viewers, the film is split in two, with the second half airing March 24), begins with Simon’s earliest days growing up in Queens, N.Y., as he and his onetime musical partner Art Garfunkel learned to harmonize by listening to the Everly Brothers. We see Simon (and sometimes Garfunkel) create beloved albums including “Sounds of Silence,” “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and “Graceland”; perform in Central Park in 1981, a concert that attracted half a million fans and led to a brief reunion of the duo; and tackle everything from movie soundtracks (“The Graduate”) to acting roles (“One-Trick Pony”).There are several scenes of Simon working on some of American pop music’s most memorable tunes in a manner that has long impressed contemporaries like Wynton Marsalis, who met Simon in 2002. “He has a mystical understanding,” Marsalis said in a video interview. “He can see the timeless through the specific.”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

TWO YEARS AGO, the Spanish filmmaker Albert Moya came to Florence to visit an artist friend who’d unwittingly become the caretaker of a large family estate, left empty after a famous Italian writer died, on the outskirts of town. Moya was staying nearby, at the tumbledown hotel Torre di Bellosguardo, when he learned that another unlikely (and quite strange) residence had become available. It was in the area — the southwestern Florentine hills, quiet and almost suburban, where families have long purchased properties with views of the Duomo — so Moya decided to stop by. “Anyone who lives here looks at the market all the time,” he says over espresso one frosty December morning. “There’s nothing [available], really. So when something comes up, it’s kind of pornographic.”For the filmmaker Albert Moya’s apartment in Villa di Marignolle, in Florence, Italy, the architect Guillermo Santomà designed a carpeted dining table lit from below and a blue velvet curtain to match.Ricardo LabougleMoya and Santomà created separate spaces in the multipurpose living room — one area for lounging, one for editing films and, upstairs, an area for working out.Ricardo LabougleThe director, 34, was raised in a village of 800 people outside of Barcelona, but has spent most of his adulthood in New York and Paris, where he creates videos for luxury brands like Loewe and Louis Vuitton. He entered the fashion world accidentally: The Belgian designer Dries Van Noten was the first to hire him, after seeing his 2012 short, “American Autumn,” about a group of New York City schoolchildren hosting a Surrealist dinner party. Moya had come to Italy in part to work on the script for his debut feature — “about three brothers and their daddy issues, basically” — based on an idea he discussed with the Athens-based screenwriter Efthimis Filippou, best known for collaborating with the Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos on films like “The Lobster” (2015).The entrance to Moya’s apartment retains the original frescoed ceiling. The birch chairs are by Frama.Ricardo LabougleA low platform bed covered in an alpaca fur blanket.Ricardo LabougleMoya initially planned to find a more permanent home in Paris after his working holiday. Instead, after visiting the 2,475-square-foot apartment, he decided to stay in Florence so he could write in solitude. When he toured the rental, “it was full of crap but empty of people,” he says, noting that the last occupant, who bought the place in the 1970s and still owns it, was an Italian soccer player who “had this amazing taste and awareness of space and architecture.” Situated on the sunny second floor, it was one of four flats parceled out in the 1950s from a 14th-century Tuscan estate, Villa di Marignolle, that once belonged to the Medicis. The astronomer Galileo Galilei stayed here several times in the 17th century, until the family of artistic patrons eventually sold it off. Perhaps to counterbalance the house’s intact Renaissance-era frescoes, oak window frames and doors and large garden crowded with cypress trees, the owner had decorated most of the rooms with various types of shiny but handsome wood paneling for the floors, the arches that divide them and the railings of two lofted interior balconies. Those levels are reached via their own staircases at either end of the cavernous, 50-by-16-foot living area, from which the sole bedroom and small kitchen and bathroom branch out. “I like empty spaces and complete austerity because I travel for work. When I’m home, I want calm,” Moya says. “But here, the question was, ‘How do we respect the woodwork?’”A 2022 installation by Moya and the designer Guillermo Santomà.Albert MoyaWe 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 defied the odds to turn “Benji,” a live-action film series from a dog’s perspective, into a smash hit, and turned the film industry on its head in the process.Joe Camp, a pioneering filmmaker who created a groundbreaking franchise with his “Benji” movies, which brought a lovable live-action dog to the masses and became a smash success, died on Friday at his home in Bell Buckle, Tenn. He was 84.His son the director Brandon Camp announced the death in a statement. He said his father died “following a long illness” but provided no other details.Joe Camp began thinking about directing when he was as young as 8 years old, but he would first encounter decades of rejections. While attending the University of Mississippi, he tried to transfer to U.C.L.A.’s film school, only to be turned down. After college, he dabbled in advertising at the Houston office of McCann Erickson and then at Norsworthy‐Mercer, an agency in Dallas, while writing unproduced sitcom scripts on the side.In 1971, Mr. Camp and James Nicodemus, a cinematographer, formed their own production company, Mulberry Square Productions, which was based in Dallas, far from the traditional hubs of the television and film industry, Los Angeles and New York.The idea for “Benji” came to Mr. Camp while he was watching the animated Disney feature film “Lady and the Tramp” (1955) in the late 1960s with his first wife, Carolyn (Hopkins) Camp. Afterward, Mr. Camp observed his own dog’s facial expressions and wondered if a movie could be made starring a real-life dog and told from the dog’s perspective.Higgins the dog appeared on the TV series “Petticoat Junction” before finding cinematic fame as the title character in the first “Benji” film in 1974.CBS Photo Archive, via Getty ImagesWe 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

Though blockbusters are synonymous with computer imagery, dramas and art-house films rely extensively on tech magic, too. Don’t be fooled by the naturalism.A woman crosses a bustling street at night. Cars pass noisily. A streetcar cruises by. Behind her, we see twinkling streetlights, a cinema marquee, towering neon signs. It rained earlier; the roads are still wet. It’s Mexico City in the early 1970s, and it feels vibrantly alive.This is a scene in “Roma” (2018), Alfonso Cuarón’s naturalistic, semi-autobiographical black-and-white drama based on the life of the housekeeper who helped raise him as a child. It’s also, less obviously, a dazzling showcase of visual effects.The huge movie theater in the background is entirely CGI. So is the streetcar, and many of the other vehicles, as well as most of the buildings, signs, facades, lights and pedestrians. Even the reflections visible in the puddles on the road were created on a computer. Though it’s been designed to be completely inconspicuous and convincing, Aaron Weintraub, the head of creative operations at the visual effects studio MPC, describes this moment as “one of our flagship shots.”What comes to mind when you think of visual effects, or VFX? For most people, it’s fantasy and science fiction: aliens in spaceships, superheroes zooming across imaginary lands. And while it’s certainly true that big-budget genre films and summer blockbusters are rife with computer-generated imagery, VFX studios like MPC estimate that about half the work they produce is made to be invisible. For every “Kraven the Hunter” or “Argylle,” there’s a “Ferrari,” “Maestro” or “Killers of the Flower Moon,” movies with sophisticated visual effects that the filmmakers hope you’ll never realize was an effect at all.“When people talk about VFX, it’s the obvious stuff — the explosions, the laser beams, the science-fiction stuff,” Weintraub said. “But there’s a whole world of work being done that’s transparent to the audience, and no one is supposed to know.” He likened it to the work of film and TV costume designers. What attracts attention and wins Oscars, he said, are “lavish period costumes and fancy superhero suits,” but in fact, “you have a costume designer on every film who makes normal clothes that normal people wear, and no one talks about them.”In “Nightmare Alley,” the digital effects include the addition of flames, above, and the deletion of a line of dialogue. Searchlight PicturesWe 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