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    Yuri Temirkanov, Conductor Who Celebrated Russia’s Music, Dies at 84

    Immersed in his native land’s repertoire — Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev — he drew bold, rich sounds from the world’s major orchestras. In Russia, he was adored.Yuri Temirkanov, a well-traveled Russian conductor steeped in his country’s bygone musical culture, died on Nov. 2 in St. Petersburg, the city where he held sway for over 30 years. He was 84.His death was announced by both the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, where he was music director from 1988 to 2022 — his tenure began when it was still the Leningrad Philharmonic — and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, where he was music director from 2000 to 2006. A close associate in Baltimore said Mr. Temirkanov had had heart trouble and had died in a care facility.When he was a boy, Prokofiev had held his hand; in his prime, he was artistic director of one of the world’s great opera companies, the Kirov, in what was then Leningrad, taking that post before he was 40; and in his later years, he consulted with Shostakovich, conducted some of the world’s major orchestras, and was the object of almost cultlike adoration in his native land.At a glittering memorial service for him on Sunday in the columned hall of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, his coffin lay open as the orchestra played Tchaikovsky.In the Russian repertoire with which he was most closely associated — Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev — Mr. Temirkanov drew bold, rich sounds from his orchestras, each phrase laden with meaning. But he also found subtleties in the understated works of Haydn.Critics praised his ability to shape extended lines with minimal hand gestures — he eschewed the baton — but were puzzled by what some called his unpredictability and inconsistency. And he created an uproar in 2012 when he declared to a Russian interviewer that women shouldn’t be conductors because it was “counter to nature.” A woman, he explained, “should be beautiful, likable, attractive. Musicians will look at her and be distracted from the music!”His handpicked associate conductor in Baltimore, Lara Webber, said in a phone interview that those words were “completely incoherent with the experience I had.”Mr. Temirkanov, she said, was a “really supportive boss” and a “tremendously empathetic humanist.”Mr. Temirkanov largely tried to steer clear of politics; he once insisted to the British critic Norman Lebrecht that while living in the Soviet Union he never joined the Communist Party. But he told the critic Time Smith of The Baltimore Sun in 2004 that President Vladimir V. Putin was a “very good friend, very good.” Mr. Smith noted that Mr. Temirkanov had successfully lobbied Mr. Putin for funding and that he was the first recipient of a new medal created by the president.Mr. Temirkanov after his farewell concert with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra at Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall in Baltimore in 2006.Brendan Smialowski for The New York TimesGregory Tucker, who had become close to Mr. Temirkanov as publicity director for the Baltimore orchestra, said that as Russian orchestras faced financial crisis in the post-Soviet era, Mr. Temirkanov “had a very frank discussion with Putin, that if the state doesn’t step up, these institutions won’t survive.”To his American associates, Mr. Temirkanov was a mysterious but compelling presence, a visitor from the lost world of the Soviet Union’s last years and a disciple of old modes of music instruction that now barely exist. The Baltimore Sun critic Stephen Wigler noted in 1999 that Mr. Temirkanov “doesn’t own a TV set and doesn’t even know how to drive a car.”He spoke English but hardly used it, and he did not go out of his way to cultivate audiences, though those who knew him in Baltimore said that this was less a sign of aloofness than of shyness.“My back must be to the audience, not to the orchestra,” he told The Sun. “When I conduct, I am like an actor, I am talking to the audience, but the words belong to the composer, and I am just the vessel through which they pass.”In 2005, the critic Anne Midgette wrote in The New York Times: “‘Unpredictable’ is a word that has consistently cropped up in assessments of Mr. Temirkanov’s work. And it seems to apply not only to his conducting — which he does without a baton, using circular hand motions that can seem enigmatic to outsiders — but also to his musical tastes and, indeed, to the man in general.”He was known to audiences around the world. Over his career he variously conducted the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic, the Staatskapelle Dresden, the London Philharmonic, the London Symphony, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, among other ensembles.His arrival in Baltimore was greeted with some astonishment: A world-class conductor was coming to an orchestra that, although considered good, was not in the country’s top five. The city had “landed a big one,” a Sun editorial said in 1997. The tone was set for an awed and respectful relationship.For the musicians who played under Mr. Temirkanov in Baltimore, the experience was unlike any they had had with any other conductor.“He was very much into expressiveness, through hands and body movements,” Jonathan Carney, the Baltimore Symphony’s concertmaster, said in a phone interview. “It was like a ballet, watching him. He was not into controlling an orchestra. He was trying to entice us to go into a certain direction. For me, it was like watching a poet on the podium.”That Mr. Temirkanov used few words only added to his aura and helped create a “certain almost fear that you would have,” Michael Lisicky, the orchestra’s second oboist, recalled. Yet, he said by phone, “he would sing the phrase back to you. Everything, when he sang it back to you, it made sense.”“You never knew what he was thinking,” Mr. Lisicky said. “He kind of gives you these hand gestures, as if he was blessing you.”In an interview from his home in Prague, the pianist Evgeny Kissin, who played with Mr. Temirkanov many times over the years, said simply, “He was an extraordinary man.”Mr. Temirkanov conducted the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra during a rehearsal in London in 1979. He was named the orchestra’s principal guest conductor in 1980 and later became its principal conductor.Popperfoto, via Getty ImagesYuri Khatuyevich Temirkanov was born on Dec. 10, 1938, in Nalchik, the capital of the southern Russian republic of Kabardino-Balkaria, in the Caucasus. He was the son of Khatu Sagidovich Temirkanov, the republic’s culture minister, and Polia Petrovna Temirkanova. His father was shot and killed by the Nazis when Germany invaded Russia in 1941; shortly before that, Sergei Prokofiev and his wife, who were evacuees, had stayed with the family.Mr. Temirkanov studied violin at the Leningrad Conservatory, graduating in 1965. He won a prestigious Soviet competition in 1968 and was named music director of the Leningrad Symphony Orchestra the next year.After becoming director of the Kirov Opera in 1977, he was named principal guest conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London in 1980. (He would later become the orchestra’s principal conductor.) In 1988, he was named principal conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic (later the St. Petersburg Philharmonic).Mr. Temirkanov remained active as a conductor roughly until the onset of Covid in 2020, Mr. Tucker said.Mr. Temirkanov’s son, Vladimir, a violinist in the St. Petersburg Philharmonic, and his wife, Irina Guseva, died before him. No immediate family members survive. More

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    ‘The Taste of Things’ and the Transcendence of a French Meal

    “The Taste of Things” is the latest movie to luxuriate in France’s gourmand tradition, a safe way of attracting audiences outside the country.In France, a robust appetite is a virtue if not a heroic trait.Eating gratifies all the senses: We take in the aroma of a handsome dish, delight at the sound of a sizzling steak or crave the crunch of a crusty baguette. So to fully appreciate the various sensory dimensions of a fine French meal is, essentially, to express a sophisticated artistic judgment.“The Taste of Things,” by the director Tran Anh Hung, is a 19th-century French romance powered by this understanding of food’s transcendence. The feature opened in theaters Wednesday in France and will play on screens at New York’s Museum of Modern Art on Nov. 10 before its Oscar-qualifying run in mid-December.The movie is about a distinguished gourmand, Dodin (Benoît Magimel), and his preternaturally gifted chef, Eugénie (Juliette Binoche). They live together in the French countryside and together concoct lavish meals for themselves and Dodin’s coterie of foodie friends. Their lives entirely revolve around the cultivation and creation of these dishes, which Hung emphasizes through long, elaborate cooking scenes.“The Taste of Things” is an 18th-century French romance powered by this understanding of food’s transcendence. via Carole Bethuel/IFC FIlmsWhen I first watched “The Taste of Things” at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, I was surrounded by a delightfully vocal audience. The oohing and ahhing was ubiquitous and, apparently, a visceral response, similar to what is elicited by beholding Monet’s water lilies or being wrapped in the velvety textures of Whitney Houston’s voice. Savoring a tasty meal (or even just watching one come together on a big screen) brings a kind of joy that can’t be explained by logic or reason.Reviews of the film in France have been mixed. Le Monde’s Clarisse Fabre found its blissful atmosphere and near-absence of dramatic tension perplexing and boring. Olivier Lamm of Libération wrote that there’s much more to the film than its food-porn attractions — it’s also about the assault of junk food and globalization on French standards.“Chocolat,” starring Juliette Binoche, also celebrated the French devotion to the culinary arts and made a lot of money at the U.S. box office.AlamyThe country’s rich gastronomic tradition — and its long history of federally regulating the quality and authenticity of its wines and produce — is a particular point of national pride, and French film industry leaders have embraced the gourmand label. This year, “The Taste of Things” was selected as the French submission for the Oscar’s best international film category over Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or winner, “Anatomy of a Fall.”The decision was met with objections from French critics, who said Triet was punished for the political charge of her acceptance speech at Cannes. However, the selection of Hung’s film isn’t all that surprising given the selection committee’s evident partiality to films commenting on the country’s national identity — or, from a more cynical standpoint, films that offer Oscar voters a tourist-friendly idea of France.The French devotion to the culinary arts is a bit of an onscreen cliché, and Hollywood films like “Ratatouille” and “Chocolat” (the latter, also starring Binoche, made big money in the United States, but fared far less well in France) have relied on stereotypically French settings, like a rustic village and a Parisian bistro, to communicate lessons about food’s revolutionary and unifying powers.More rewarding — and complex — is the 1956 French classic “La Traversée de Paris,” starring the Frenchest of all Frenchmen, Jean Gabin, as an artist-turned-black market courier in Nazi-occupied Paris. This black dramedy stars Gabin and the comedian Bourvil, who play a bickering duo who must transport four suitcases of contraband pork across the city while evading the authorities and a horde of hungry hounds.Political instability not only cuts off access to revered foodstuffs, it drains the very spirit of those committed to the art of eating. In the 1987 Danish film “Babette’s Feast,” Babette (Stéphane Audran), a French chef, is forced to flee from her Parisian neighborhood when the Paris Commune, an insurrectionist government, seizes power in 1871.Seeking refuge in the Danish countryside, Babette moves into a spartan Protestant household manned by two Protestant sisters accustomed to eating the same brown fish stew, which has a mudlike consistency. Fourteen years into her employment with the sisters, Babette miraculously wins the French lottery and, rather than fund her return to France, spends all her winnings on a multicourse dinner for the townspeople.Stéphane Audran as Babette in “Babette’s Feast.”Entertainment Pictures, via AlamyThe feast — a turtle soup, stuffed quail, rum sponge cake and more — breaks the guests’ brains, while Babette, in the final scene, emerges as an emissary of the sublime. Her culinary gifts, her cooking’s ability to disrupt the very foundations of what her Danish friends perceived to be reality, make her angelic.At the same time, isn’t fine dining — like certain kinds of music, literature and art — rather bourgeois? Nothing screams upper middle class like the prim and proper dinner scene. This is delightful in films by, say, Éric Rohmer, who was fond of depicting the natural choreography of mealtime, the mess of wine glasses and plates of fruit and cheese floating between guests in the middle of a meandering conversation.In other films, dinnertime can seem ridiculous. Consider Luis Buñuel’s “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,” in which three couples try over and over to enjoy a white tablecloth feast, but do not actually eat. Over the course of the film, their polite mannerisms and refined gestures become increasingly absurd.Marco Ferreri’s “La Grande Bouffe” plays like a glutton’s version of “Salo,” linking the pleasure of eating to consumerist society and the gross hedonism of the leisure class. In the film, four friends literally feed themselves to death, feasting on an endless parade of shrimp, turkey, pot roast and sausage while reading excerpts from canonical works of literature and, notably, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s gastronomical bible, “The Physiology of Taste.”Philippe Noiret, Ugo Tognazzi and Andréa Ferréol in “La Grande Bouffe,” which links the pleasure of eating to consumerist society.Alamy“La Grande Bouffe” is a nauseating showcase and a welcome retort to the glorification of tunnel-vision foodies like Brillat-Savarin. Ferreri was also a gourmand, and he reportedly had difficulties keeping himself from binge eating. His film points a finger at himself as well as society at large.“The Taste of Things” is an adaptation of the 1961 novel “The Passionate Epicure” by Marcel Rouff, which was itself inspired by none other than Brillat-Savarin. “The Physiology of Taste” is supposed to be about the science of eating, but it often veers off into discussions about sex, love and sensuality.Brillat-Savarin’s passion for food is not unlike the passion he might develop for another person, a dynamic that Hung’s film depicts with a hypnotic warmth. When I see Binoche’s Eugénie, laboring away on a buttery risotto or a vegetable omelet, I’m overcome by the sense memory of something deliciously intimate, like being held tight or a loved one’s scent. In that moment, nothing else seems to matter. More

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    ‘This Much We Know’ Review: Asking Why After a Friend’s Death

    L. Frances Henderson’s intricate debut documentary investigates a suicide, raising plenty of questions, including one about its own ethics.Our yearning for answers and the limits of knowing are at the heart of the intricately crafted, unsettling documentary “This Much We Know.” The director L. Frances Henderson based this very personal debut on John D’Agata’s lauded book “About a Mountain,” which deftly yoked the suicide of a teenager in Las Vegas to the Department of Energy’s since-scuttled plans to use Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of that city, as a repository for nuclear waste.Henderson says in her poetic and philosophical narration that she discovered the book while searching for answers to a friend’s suicide. It drew her to Las Vegas, where in 2002 16-year-old Levi Presley leaped to his death from a tower. That same year, Congress was pushing forward plans to bury waste beneath Yucca Mountain. Like many of the words, data sets and facts here, Presley’s final act gets probed.Certainty and doubt are juxtaposed repeatedly. In one scene, Vegas’s longtime coroner upends Henderson’s somewhat hopeful theory of an accidental suicide. In another, a confident engineer of the Yucca project is rattled by a quote Henderson reads to him stating that scientific truths can change.“This Much We Know” opens with a frenetic re-enactment of Presley’s final hours leading up to when a security guard approaches him. This kind of flashy filmmaking sets an ethically disquieting tone the film never completely shakes, even after Henderson gently interviews Presley’s parents and his friends. As eloquent as it is, “This Much We Know” may also be exploitative.This Much We KnowNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters.If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources. Go here for resources outside the United States. More

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    Young Thug Lyrics Will Be Allowed as Evidence in YSL RICO Trial

    A judge ruled on Thursday that at least 17 specific sets of lines from the Atlanta rapper and his collaborators could be used by prosecutors in their gang conspiracy case.A judge decided on Thursday that rap lyrics by the Atlanta artist Young Thug and his collaborators will be allowed as evidence in the racketeering trial of YSL, a chart-topping hip-hop label and collective that prosecutors say is also a criminal street gang responsible for violent crimes.Following months of dueling court filings and a day of arguments about the relevance and admissibility of the song lyrics, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Ural Glanville ruled that 17 specific sets of lines from the music of Young Thug and other YSL artists could be used by the state when the trial begins later this month to argue for the existence of the gang, the defendants’ membership in the alleged criminal conspiracy and their mind state regarding specific crimes they are accused of committing.“The lyrics are being used to prove the nature of YSL as a racketeering enterprise — the expectations of YSL as a criminal street gang,” Mike Carlson, a Fulton County executive district attorney, said in court.Defense lawyers in the case had argued that including the lyrics was a constitutional violation of the First Amendment protecting free speech and would unfairly prejudice the jury.Young Thug, born Jeffery Williams, was one of 28 people initially charged in May 2022 with conspiracy to violate Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations law, or RICO, with some accused of murder, attempted murder, armed robbery and other crimes. Prosecutors say Young Thug, who has denied all of the charges and pleaded not guilty, occupied a leadership position in the gang, known as Young Slime Life or Young Stoner Life, which they say is an offshoot of the national Bloods gang.Jury selection for the trial began in January with 14 defendants, following some plea deals and the severing of other defendants from the case. After more than 10 months, a jury was seated last week; six defendants — including Young Thug — are left, with the remainder of the trial expected to last from three months to a year. Opening statements are scheduled for Nov. 27.The use of rap lyrics in criminal prosecutions has long been a thorny topic, with critics and defense lawyers contending that negative attitudes toward crude and violent lyrics in hip-hop could bias a jury. Lawyers for Young Thug argued in this case that the use of lyrics, videos and social media posts was “racist and discrimination because the jury will be so poisoned and prejudiced by these lyrics/poetry/artistry/speech” that it amounted to “unlawful character assassination.”Brian Steel, a lawyer for Young Thug, said in court on Wednesday that lyrics needed to be specifically tied back to alleged crimes in order to be admissible. “They’re targeting the right to free speech,” Steel said.Doug Weinstein, a lawyer for Deamonte Kendrick, the YSL rapper known as Yak Gotti, said, “There is art here, and the art has got to be separated from real life.”“They’re going to look at these lyrics and instantly say these guys are guilty,” Weinstein said of the jury, adding that rappers were playing characters: “It’s what his audience is looking for and demands in gangster rap.”Prosecutors argued that because they were not charging the rappers for the content of their lyrics — as in a terroristic threat case — but merely using the lyrics as supporting evidence that other crimes had been committed, that they were not protected by the First Amendment and should be admitted.They added, “the Defense would seem to opine that if the Unabomber’s manifesto had been set to music, it could not be used against him.” And in court, Carlson, the prosecutor, raised the frequently cited Johnny Cash lyric, “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die,” arguing that if Cash had actually been accused of killing a man in Washoe County, where Reno is located, “his lyrics would have in all likelihood have been used against him.”Carlson also noted that, in a racketeering and gang conspiracy case like the one facing YSL, “evidence of existence and the nature of the organization is not only relevant, it’s required.”Among the specific lyrics admitted as evidence by the judge — taken from songs like “Eww,” “Just How It Is” and “Mob Ties” — are lines that prosecutors argued would establish the existence of YSL (“this that mob life”); the expectations for its self-professed members (“for slimes you know I’ll kill”); and Young Thug’s role as a leader (“I’m the principal (slime!),” “I’m a boss, I call the shots,” “I was a capo in my hood way before a plaque”).The use of the lyrics at trial, Judge Glanville said, would be conditional, depending on prosecutors laying a foundation for their relevance, with any additional lyrics subject to further analysis before they could be admitted. More

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    ‘Albert Brooks: Defending My Life’ Review: Revisiting Past Hilarity

    This actor, comic, writer and director is seen in a cinematic retrospective that celebrates his talent, but not always in a critically discerning way.“Albert Brooks: Defending My Life,” a documentary about the venerable comedian, filmmaker, actor and writer, directed by his lifelong friend Rob Reiner, has the easy, amiable air of a career retrospective — wistful and hagiographic, it’s the kind of thing that usually accompanies a lifetime achievement award.Now 76, Brooks certainly deserves the recognition: the first four of the films he wrote and directed between 1979 and 2005, “Real Life,” “Modern Romance,” “Lost in America” and “Defending Your Life,” are among the finest American comedies ever made, and his trailblazing work on the late-night talk show circuit during the 1960s and 1970s had a seismic impact on the landscape of contemporary comedy. (To say nothing of his Academy Award-nominated turn in “Broadcast News,” a near-peerless masterpiece.)But there’s a reason we have comedy roasts, not toasts, as the rhapsodic tone of this film makes clear — breathless flattery just isn’t that interesting, no matter how funny the person receiving it. While Brooks deserves acclaim, he deserves it in a format as compelling and dynamic as he is. “Defending My Life” is simply too flat.Brooks and Reiner, lounging in a booth at Matteo’s Restaurant in Los Angeles, reminisce chummily about Brooks’s life and work, while an ensemble of comedy A-listers including Chris Rock, Ben Stiller, Jonah Hill and Larry David gush over his influence in a series of standard-issue talking head interviews. There are also clips from Brooks’s films and standup routines, which render much of the praise from the interviewees redundant. We don’t need to be told that Brooks is a genius. Even a brief glimpse of his work makes the case.Albert Brooks: Defending My LifeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. Watch on Max. More

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    ‘Youth (Spring)’ Review: Garment Rending

    The documentarian Wang Bing examines the cloistered world of young textile workers in China.Despite running three and a half hours, the documentary “Youth (Spring)” withholds a great deal. That isn’t necessarily a criticism. The film is the latest documentary from Wang Bing, a persistent and widely admired chronicler of China’s downtrodden — its migrants, its outsiders, its mental patients and its survivors of forced-labor camps.“Youth (Spring)” is partly a follow-up to his “Bitter Money,” which opened in New York in 2018 and concerned the textile boom in Huzhou, China; the city had become a destination for migrants eager for work. While “Bitter Money” devoted some time to the journey itself, “Youth (Spring)” takes more of an inside-out approach, looking specifically at young textile workers — most of the identified subjects are in their late teens or early 20s — from a radically cloistered perspective.The overwhelming majority of the movie is set in Zhili, a district of Huzhou that holds more than 18,000 workshops that make children’s clothes, according to the closing credits, where Wang typically places his documentaries’ only contextual information. “Youth (Spring)” zeros in on what must be a small fraction of those workshops. Several are on a thoroughfare incongruously named Happiness Road.The trash on the streets (“Heard of public hygiene?” one man shouts) makes the exteriors look even grimmer than the interiors. Visually, the shops are practically interchangeable. Over the long running time, the drilling noise of the sewing machines begins to prompt a Pavlovian flinch. The windows, which generally seem to have bars, barely let in any light, and at times the shops’ dull tube-bulb illumination makes it hard to concentrate on the image without vigorous blinking.But Wang’s implicit thesis, emphasized through duration and repetition, is that these shops have become the complete universe for the men and women who work there, and who live there in cramped, dormitory-style housing. (From what we hear, the managers use their provision of board and food as an excuse for paying low rates.)These settings are where they will find their first girlfriend or boyfriend or prepare for parenthood. Wang appears to prioritize the quantity of subjects rather than characterization, but one of the most vivid sections occurs early, as a young couple, Hu Zuguo and Li Shengnan, make a decision on how to handle a pregnancy. The conversation involves not only them and both sets of their parents but also the shop’s boss, hardly a model of tact. (“Cheer up!” he says. “An abortion is like you got bitten by a dog, and you bite back.”)Near the midpoint, workers at another shop stage what their manager sneers at as a “mass protest,” descending on him as a group to demand better pay, only to get brushed off because he’s supposedly busy with a rush job. Again and again, we see workers and managers arguing over the rates that each item should fetch. “Rate bargaining is hard,” says one of the few subjects to acknowledge Wang’s camera, which mostly observes invisibly. “It can take days.”There is more to come. Wang shot in Zhili from 2014 to 2019, and “Youth (Spring)” is said to be the first in a three-part series. Even for fans of Wang and mammoth docs, “Youth (Spring)” can be an arduous film to sit through. But while the running time may be indulgent, the experience of feeling trapped in this world is difficult to shake. Like Wang’s “’Til Madness Do Us Part,” set in a mental hospital, the movie is an exhortation not to forget the unseen.Youth (Spring)Not rated. In Mandarin, with subtitles. Running time: 3 hours 32 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Dream Scenario’ Review: Space Invader

    Nicolas Cage plays a mild-mannered professor who inexplicably wanders into others’ dreams in this wonderfully weird dark comedy.Balding, bespectacled and bowed by the weight of a thousand disappointments, Paul Matthews (Nicolas Cage) moves through “Dream Scenario” with a schlubby passivity. At the college where he teaches evolutionary biology, his students sigh and fidget; during a lesson on zebras, he explains that their stripes keep them safe by ensuring that they don’t stand out from the herd. Not standing out is Paul’s entire vibe.Then he learns that, inexplicably, he has been popping up in people’s dreams. At first, it’s just the reveries of family and acquaintances — one of his daughters, a former girlfriend — but soon his invasions spread to complete strangers. A droll running joke has dream-Paul refusing to respond to the dreamer’s cries for help: In one scenario, his daughter is being pummeled by falling objects while Paul calmly rakes leaves; in another, a student is being menaced by a gore-soaked pursuer while Paul, sashaying past, declines to intervene. In Paul’s world, as in our own, it’s possible to go viral by doing virtually nothing.This could seem like a one-trick conceit; but the Norwegian writer and director, Kristoffer Borgli, infuses his screenplay with a sadness that foregrounds Paul’s long-burning need for recognition. At lunch with a former graduate school classmate (Paula Boudreau), who has recently published the book about ants that he himself has struggled to write, he attacks her for stealing one of his ideas. Later, he pushes back defensively when a former girlfriend (Marnie McPhail Diamond) describes his inaction in her dream about a dying friend.“You’re still doing that?,” she asks, incredulous. “Searching for the insult?” It’s perhaps the movie’s most important line, adding layers to a character who could seem a fool. But Paul is dull, not despicable, a vaguely resentful academic who’s loved by his stoic wife (Julianne Nicholson) and yearns to be included in their neighbor’s famed dinner parties. His newfound celebrity has him perplexed, then pleased, and ultimately petrified when the movie takes a dark turn and the dreams become nightmares. Now Paul stands out. Now he will be hunted — and not only online.Pondering the downside of notoriety and our willingness to exchange safety for fame, “Dream Scenario” is often funny and frequently surreal. Borgli’s previous feature, “Sick of Myself” (2023), also examined someone going to extremes to gain the attention she felt she deserved. Here, though, he has more ideas than space to execute them, and the movie’s third act can feel overloaded and indecisive of where it wants to land. Sharp, unheralded cuts from dream to reality leave us little time to get our bearings; yet they also leave Cage free to roam the length and breadth of his considerable acting range. The sight of Paul, in his shabby parka and scrubby beard, attempt to re-enact a young woman’s erotic dream — at her request — could make you want to put your eyes out.Full marks in this scene, though, to the terrific Dylan Gelula who, along with other supporting players like Michael Cera (as an advertising pup who wants Paul to carry a can of Sprite into people’s dreams) and Tim Meadows (as Paul’s department head), help ground the film’s cringe comedy. In the end, “Dream Scenario” is less interested in cancel culture than the fickleness of a mass audience that can rapidly swerve from adulation to condemnation — even when, like Paul, you really haven’t done anything at all.Dream ScenarioRated R for awkward groping and awful outerwear. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Manodrome’ Review: The Manosphere Gets a Crude Awakening

    An unemployed dad-to-be is seduced by a misogynist group who call themselves “the guys” in this sensationalizing drama starring Jesse Eisenberg.The word “Manodrome,” the title of a new film starring Jesse Eisenberg, is a riff on the “manosphere” — a catchall term for misogynist online communities including so-called incels and men’s rights activists. If your first instinct, like mine, is to snicker, know that this self-important drama is devoid of humor.Directed by John Trengove, the film tracks the seduction of an unemployed worker turned Uber driver, Eisenberg’s Ralphie, by a group of women-hating men, which sets off a violent downward spiral that is, at the very least, not boring.A gym rat, Ralphie pumps iron to make up for the fact that he doesn’t feel very manly. He’s broke, and he’s expecting a baby with his girlfriend Sal (Odessa Young), with whom he lives in a teeny-tiny apartment in Syracuse, N.Y.Sal isn’t particularly excited about starting a family, but Ralphie seems to think fatherhood will save him — if only the system wasn’t working against him. In other words, he’s easy bait.Ralphie’s workout pal Jason (Philip Ettinger) steps in, and introduces him to “the guys”: a diverse gang of bachelors who bunk together in a country mansion owned by the group’s leader and bankroller, Dan (Adrien Brody). They offer a sense of community and material perks, emboldening Ralphie to act out against Sal and unleash his inner alpha.Eisenberg — beefed up in this role and stripped of the cocky, motormouth bravado he’s known for — plays the edgy Ralphie like a ticking time bomb of pent-up feeling. Though the script, which relies heavily on pseudo-psychology, doesn’t leave room for much mystery. Ralphie is self-loathing, intensely homophobic, and was made fun of as a kid for being chubby — connect the dots and you’ll be able to anticipate half of the film’s twists (and there are surplus twists).Crude and sensationalizing, “Manodrome” is like an amalgam of all the headlines you’ve read about the kinds of men who succumb to warped ideologies.ManodromeRated R for sex, domestic abuse, gun violence and cultlike activity. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More