Aurelia Butler

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    Barry Newman, Star of the Cult Film ‘Vanishing Point,’ Dies at 92

    Panned when it was released in 1971, the movie gained acclaim decades later. Mr. Newman also starred on TV in the legal drama “Petrocelli.”Barry Newman, whose terse integrity and understated rebelliousness made the 1971 movie “Vanishing Point” an enduring hit in the annals of American cinema about the open road, died on May 11 in Manhattan. He was 92.The death, in a hospital, which was not widely reported until this week, was confirmed by his wife, Angela Newman. While seeking treatment for back pain, she said, he came down with a lung infection that spread to his spine and heart.Mr. Newman was briefly a leading man in movies and television in the 1970s. He starred as a Harvard-educated defense attorney who moved to a small Southwestern town to work criminal cases in the 1970 feature film “The Lawyer,” and he reprised the character, Tony Petrocelli, in an NBC legal drama, “Petrocelli,” which ran from 1974 to 1976.Two decades later, he returned to prominence as a character actor, with small roles in memorable movies like Steven Soderbergh’s “The Limey” (1999); “Bowfinger,” also in 1999, alongside Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy; and “40 Days and 40 Nights” (2002), a romantic comedy starring Josh Hartnett.But Mr. Newman’s most notable performance was undoubtedly in “Vanishing Point.”In that film, he played Kowalski, a one-named car-delivery driver who makes a bet with his drug dealer while buying Benzedrine: If he can make it from where they are in Denver to San Francisco in about 15 hours, then Kowalski gets the amphetamines for free.“Vanishing Point” then becomes one long psychedelic car chase. Kowalski skillfully evades highway cops, nonchalantly accepts his deification by a rhapsodic radio D.J. named Super Soul (played by Cleavon Little), and befriends a succession of slender hippie-ish blondes. From conversations among police officers and Kowalski’s own flashbacks, we learn about his past as a decorated Vietnam War veteran, frustrated police officer and demolition derby racer.The bulk of the movie replaces dialogue with the sounds of a revving car engine, a police siren and a shredding electric guitar. The camera is often trained on Mr. Newman’s face — its shaggy hair, stubble, righteous sideburns, sharp jawline and watery blue eyes — as he stares ahead resolutely but wearily at desert highways that never seem to end.The other star of the movie is Kowalski’s car, a souped-up white 1970 Dodge Challenger that can go up to 160 miles per hour. It remains fairly pristine even as it kicks up enough dust to confound the highway patrols of several Western states.With characters making druggy proclamations about “the last American hero to whom speed means freedom of the soul,” the movie did not initially attract critical praise. Roger Greenspun, reviewing it for The New York Times, called it “a dumb movie that is nothing but an automobile chase,” and added, “I suspect that Barry Newman really can act, though in ‘Vanishing Point’ all he needs is a driver’s license.”Yet it is now regularly featured on lists of the best American road movies, car movies and action movies. Bruce Springsteen and Steven Spielberg have both ranked “Vanishing Point” among their favorite films.“It became a cult film without me even realizing it,” Mr. Newman told the movie journalist Paul Rowlands in 2019. “To this day, I’m always being asked to talk about it somewhere.”Barry Foster Newman was born on Nov. 7, 1930, in Boston, where he grew up. His father, Carl, managed the Latin Quarter nightclub. Barry visited on Sundays and saw performances by Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., Milton Berle and others. His mother, Sarah (Ostrovsky) Newman, worked a variety of jobs, including saleswoman at Filene’s Basement and ticket seller at a movie theater.Mr. Newman earned a bachelor’s degree in anthropology from Brandeis University in 1952. He then served in the Army until 1954, playing saxophone and clarinet in a military band.Several years later, while studying for a master’s degree in anthropology at Columbia University, Mr. Newman tagged along with a friend to an acting class being taught by Lee Strasberg. He was “mesmerized,” he told Mr. Rowlands, and soon began pursuing a career as an actor.He married Angela Spilker in 1994. They divorced in 2007 but got back together and remarried in 2018. She is his only immediate survivor.Mr. Newman lived in the same apartment in Midtown Manhattan from 1962 until his death.In portraying both the quick-witted lawyer Petrocelli and the stoic hot-rodder Kowalski, Mr. Newman became known for characters with opposing types of masculinity. That paradox, he told Mr. Rowlands, inspired him to take on the part of Kowalski in the first place.“I had just done ‘The Lawyer,’ where I was speaking nonstop for 90-odd minutes, and I got the script for ‘Vanishing Point,’” he said. “I wasn’t even thinking of the idea of the film or the existentialism of the character — I just thought it would be interesting to do a part where I am playing the antithesis of the character I had just played.” More

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    ‘Users’ Review: Brave New World

    In this documentary, the artist Natalia Almada explores both the terrors and wonders of technological progress.“Users,” a new essayistic feature documentary from the artist Natalia Almada, deals in a kind of paradox. While the voice-over narration considers how technological progress has inured us from beauty and intimacy, the film demonstrates marvels of film technology — underwater photography, helicopter shots, breathtakingly crisp close-ups, sinuous slow motion — that affirm the opposite.“Could the Wright brothers have imagined that flying would be so commonplace that we’d be disinterested in the miraculous bird’s-eye view of the earth below?” Almada asks — even as she shows us drone shots of oceans and highways that provoke undeniable awe.This negotiation between techno-pessimism and techno-fetishism is at the heart of “Users,” though Almada’s scattered movie struggles to keep them in balance; her broad, rhetorical voice-over is a poor match for the complexity of the film’s images. Almada was inspired to make the film after giving birth to her son and newly confronting technology’s decisive effects on our relationships. Her view of the present anticipates her child’s future: In interludes throughout the film, she describes familiar realities — childbirth, grocery shopping, 24-hour days — in the past tense, as if they were part of a bygone history. It’s a nifty dystopian conceit, but it reinforces the air of presumption that sands down the pleasures of “Users.”The film is at its best when it allows its images and sounds to let us feel things without naming them. At a waste disposal factory, crushed electronics clatter like a symphony, which flows into the rumble of a freight train. Deep inside a grimy ocean, industrial divers float around pipes holding fiber-optic cables, the veins of our information era. Mingling beauty and terror, trash and wonder, these scenes evoke the elusive temporality of technology, which moves us backward and forwards at the same time.UsersNot rated. In English and Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour and 21 minutes. More

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    ‘Brooklyn 45’ Review: A Little Something to Lift Their Spirits

    A group of World War II veterans unwisely perform a séance in this ambitious yet airless supernatural thriller.“Brooklyn 45,” a claustrophobic mystery with horror-movie flourishes, plays out on a December night in 1945 in a Brooklyn brownstone crammed with military memorabilia. The home belongs to Clive (Larry Fessenden), whose wife died some weeks earlier and who has invited a few of his closest World War II comrades for what they believe will be a cheering-up session. But when the well-oiled Clive insists on performing a séance to contact his late wife, the group grasps this isn’t the sort of spirit-raising it had in mind.Less whodunit than who-done-what, the plot (by the director, Ted Geoghegan) unfurls in morality-play monologues that expose the characters’ biases and bigotries. Everyone has a story, and a transformative arc: Marla (Anne Ramsay), a bombing survivor with fearsome interrogation skills; her partner, Bob (Ron E. Rains), a deceptively meek Pentagon clerk; Archie (Jeremy Holm), a closeted war hero and possibly a criminal; and the bloodthirsty Paul (Ezra Buzzington), a uniformed xenophobe still running on battlefield fumes.As the séance progresses, Geoghegan uses the paranormal puffery (self-lighting candles, gooey ectoplasm, and worse) to drag the invisible wounds of war into the light. Imprisoned by a locked room and the deceased’s paranoid demands — expressed through her increasingly deranged former husband — the alarmed friends spiral into confessions and accusations. The demons within them are more destructive than any the séance might have unleashed.An ambitious period piece given an appropriately vintage look by the cinematographer Robert Patrick Stern, “Brooklyn 45” is overlong, repetitive and at times wearyingly stagy. The actors, though, can’t be faulted, convincingly turning unappetizing characters into broken people trying to move on from a war that keeps pulling them back in.Brooklyn 45Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. Watch on Shudder. More

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    It’s the End of an Era at the Metropolitan Opera

    As the 2022-23 season ends, the country’s largest performing arts institution looks ahead to a future of fewer titles.The Metropolitan Opera’s 2022-23 season may well have been the end of an era.Since September, the Met, which closes for the summer on Saturday, has put on 22 titles — 23 if you count both stagings of Mozart’s “Magic Flute,” one complete in German and one an English-language holiday abridgment. As a repertory house and the country’s largest performing arts organization, it juggles multiple works at a time. On some weekends, it’s been possible to see four different operas in 48 hours.But is there enough of an audience to fill so many performances in a 4,000-seat theater?Ticket sales have been robust for some new productions, even of contemporary works. But revivals, less obviously newsworthy and less widely promoted, are no longer sure things — especially slightly off-the-beaten-path stuff like Mozart’s “Idomeneo” or Verdi’s “Don Carlo.”In an attempt to make ends meet, the Met has raided its endowment and plans to put on 10 percent fewer performances next season, which will feature just 18 staged operas (six of them written in the past 30 years). The days of being America’s grand repertory company, of 20-plus titles a year, could be slowly entering the rearview mirror.So it was fitting that, last month, the Met said farewell to one of the shows that typified the era that’s ending: its “Aida” from the 1980s. The production was typical Met: hardly cheap but sturdy and flexible, into which you could toss singers with relatively little rehearsal. The company’s model has depended on a core of stagings of the standards like this — ones which could be mounted, and sell well, year after year.If there’s less of a year-after-year opera audience, though, the only solution may be to do less.It’s melancholy to look back on the past season and realize that my two favorite performances were the kind of thing that might go by the wayside in the Met to come. They were revivals of works by no means obscure, but not nearly as famous as, say, “Carmen”: Donizetti’s gentle romantic comedy “L’Elisir d’Amore” and Shostakovich’s ferocious satire-tragedy “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.”From front left, Javier Camarena, Golda Schultz and Davide Luciano in Donizetti’s “L’Elisir d’Amore.”Marty Sohl/Metropolitan OperaThis has been the glory of the Met: the love, care, craft and experience that go into works as different as these two — starkly contrasting titles, both presented at the highest level. In “Elisir,” the tenor Javier Camarena and the soprano Golda Schultz were all tenderness, but were lit, as if from within, with a lively spirit by the conductor Michele Gamba, making his company debut.The conductor of “Lady Macbeth,” Keri-Lynn Wilson, was also making her debut, and showed mastery of Shostakovich’s score, which is in a savage, if often eerily beautiful, mode that would have stunned Donizetti.Neither run was nearly a sellout, but the season would been immeasurably more barren without them.The new vision that the company will be pursuing next season has a silver lining in its doubling down on contemporary opera. Sales for recent works have been pretty robust, though it’s unclear whether they’ve done well because people like them or because they’ve tended to be among the splashy, expensively publicized new productions rather than the perennial chestnuts.But even if successful at the box office, the contemporary pieces this season have not been highlights. This spring, “Champion,” a boxing melodrama by Terence Blanchard — who also composed “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which opened the Met’s 2021-22 season — was musically stilted and dramatically stodgy. Last fall, Kevin Puts’s score for “The Hours,” based on the novel and film, was relentlessly, exhaustingly tear-jerking.While Puts’s work was a vehicle for a trio of divas, including Renée Fleming and Kelli O’Hara, the real star was the third: the mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato as a brooding but dryly witty Virginia Woolf, her voice mellow yet penetrating.Joyce DiDonato as Virginia Woolf in “The Hours.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHers was one of the performances of the year. Another was the mezzo Samantha Hankey’s alert, youthful Octavian in Strauss’s “Der Rosenkavalier.” Hankey was joined by the Marschallin of the radiant soprano Lise Davidsen, who kept her immense voice carefully restrained for much of this long, talky opera before unleashing its full force in the final minutes.In a clunky new production of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” by the director François Girard, the tenor Piotr Beczala seemed almost to float — utterly assured and elegant in the otherworldly, treacherously exposed title role. This is a singer nearing 60 and doing his best work.But the coup of the year may have been the Met debut of the conductor Nathalie Stutzmann. Leading one new production of a Mozart opera is hard enough, especially as an introduction to the company — but two, simultaneously? And Stutzmann’s work in both Ivo van Hove’s austere “Don Giovanni” and Simon McBurney’s antic “Magic Flute” was superb: lithe but rich, propulsive without being rushed or stinting these scores’ lyricism.How was she repaid? Before “Flute” opened, Stutzmann was quoted in The New York Times remarking that McBurney’s production, which raises the pit almost to stage level, lets the musicians see what’s going on rather than keeping them, as usual, in the “back of a cave” where there’s “nothing more boring.” Jokey and innocuous. But for some reason, the musicians flew to social media and condemned her for accusing them of playing bored.Even worse, the Met’s music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, rather than standing up for his colleague or trying to resolve the conflict behind the scenes, publicly cheered this unseemly pile-on, adding seven clapping emojis to an Instagram post by the orchestra. He and the musicians should be ashamed of themselves; Stutzmann should be celebrated.Next season, while curtailed, is hardly free of ambition, offering a profusion of recent works and some intriguing repertory pieces, like Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino” (not seen at the Met since 2006), Puccini’s “La Rondine” and Wagner’s “Tannhäuser.”This new approach to programming is an experiment. Revivals of “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” and “The Hours” will test whether contemporary operas have legs beyond their premiere runs, and we’ll see if the trims to the season increase sales for what remains.Hopefully, it all keeps the Met alive and vibrant. But whatever the coming years bring will likely be quite different. It was oddly, sadly appropriate that the veteran soprano Angela Gheorghiu, absent from the company for eight years and set to return for two performances of “Tosca” in April, came down with Covid-19 and had to cancel.This is a new phase, fate seemed to say, and the old divas — at least the ones not named Renée — need not apply. More

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    Aja Monet’s Debut Album Blends Jazz and Poetry From a Place of Love

    On her debut album, “When the Poems Do What They Do,” the writer and community organizer offers up a fluid mix of jazz and poetry that evokes the spirit of 1990s spoken-word scenes.A crowd that included musicians and actors filled the Gagosian Gallery on Madison Avenue earlier this spring to hear the poet and community organizer Aja Monet speak about the subtleties of Black love, joy and uncertainty.But for Monet, there was only one celebrity in the room: Bonnie Phillips, her former college adviser, who sat rapt in the front row.“I remember her suggesting what schools to go to and it wasn’t Harvard, you know what I mean?” Monet said in a recent video interview from her home in California. Recalling her high school years in New York, Monet said she asked a lot of questions in class but didn’t have the best grades: “I think I was way more just opinionated and outspoken.”She remains both on her debut album, “When the Poems Do What They Do,” a fluid mix of jazz and poetry out Friday that evokes the spirit of 1990s spoken-word scenes. Featuring a who’s who of instrumentalists she’s known over the years — Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah on trumpet, Samora Pinderhughes on piano, Elena Pinderhughes on flute, Weedie Braimah on djembe and Marcus Gilmore on drums — the LP is a nuanced exploration of Blackness.“Joy is a song anywhere,” Monet declares on “Black Joy,” a sprightly, soulful track. “Joy is a six-block wheelie through traffic, with no handlebars, in the rain.”The poet Saul Williams, who has known Monet since she was 14, praised his longtime collaborator in an email. “Aja stands out because she stood up for poetry, for magic in language, for spell-casting and patriarchy-bashing,” he wrote. “She’s still standing.”Chatting from Los Angeles, where Monet, 35, has lived for almost three years, she roamed from room to room, showing off a few album covers (at least, the ones that could be seen through the still water and dhow ship that served as her artificial backdrop). “That’s my Zanzibar life,” she said, smiling. “It was a beautiful experience. It was the first trip I ever did fully by myself, not knowing anyone anywhere.”Monet grew up in East New York in Brooklyn and started writing poetry when she was 8 because she was “fascinated by typewriters and people who would sit at typewriters,” she said. “The first thing I ever asked my mother for Christmas was a typewriter,” she added, recalling an early interest in “stories and storytelling, and the ways that people tell stories.”An English teacher at Baruch College Campus High School in Manhattan was an early inspiration. “She would read and recite one foot from one desk to the next, and give us encouragement to really see what was happening in the language and what was going on in the stories,” Monet said.At home, she listened to a different kind of poetry: the R&B singers Sade, Whitney Houston and Mary J. Blige, and the rapper Tupac Shakur. She knew they were each saying something profound, even if she couldn’t fully process what it was yet. When she won the school talent show with a poem, “I just remember all my teachers in tears in the front.”Monet didn’t find much community for burgeoning poets like herself, though, so she created her own club: SABA, or Students Acknowledging Black Achievements, a space where others at her high school “with the weird obsession of poetry and art” could convene. After a classmate encouraged her to check out Urban Word NYC, a program that teaches creative writing to minority students, she attended her first poetry slam there and was hooked.“To this day it’s probably one of the most pivotal memories in my life,” Monet said. “Because it was the beginning of me being introduced to a whole world, legacy and tradition that I now found myself called to. It deeply felt like a home that I had been waiting to return to.”“Ultimately, everything I do is rooted in a deep place of love, an overwhelming obsession with love.”Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesThe poet Mahogany L. Browne remembered a 15-year-old Monet at Urban Word. “From that moment, I could see the power of her purpose,” Browne said in a telephone interview. She invited Monet to a poetry workshop at a group home for pregnant teens in Manhattan’s Inwood neighborhood, which opened the young writer’s eyes to what poetry and community activism could accomplish. Later, as a freshman at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., Monet organized a poetry potluck to aid those affected by Hurricane Katrina.“I just remember feeling so powerless, away from the community of poets that I knew understood what that meant and what it felt like,” Monet recalled of her response to the storm. “It was just jarring to see Black people being killed literally by neglect of this country.”Those themes and concerns stayed with her, and inform “When the Poems Do What They Do.” The album blends poetry Monet has written over the years with vigorous live instrumentation. “The Devil You Know” pairs dark, psychedelic jazz with searing observations about America, and “Yemaya” centers upbeat, polyrhythmic percussion with words about the cleansing power of water.Monet uses a similar approach on an earlier stand-alone track titled “Give My Regards to Brooklyn.” Throughout the sprawling nine-minute cut about coming up in the borough, a mix of collaborators discuss their impressions of Monet. “Ever since I’ve known Aja,” a male voice says, “she’s been just this bold force reflecting back beauty in the world.”Monet is quick to pay homage to voices that came before her: Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka and the Last Poets, among many others. “She’s speaking with the guidance of her elders,” Browne said. “She’s never separating herself from the legacy of the work.”Making art as part of an ecosystem of music, writing and grass-roots activism remains central to Monet’s project. “I know that I’m a part of a collective of many people who are working every day in their own way to create a world that is more equitable and just for all,” she said. “So, ultimately, everything I do is rooted in a deep place of love, an overwhelming obsession with love.” More

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    ‘Aloners’ Review: Plugged In but Shut Off

    The director Hong Sung-eun’s debut feature is a quietly tragic tale of alienation and the ennui of modern life.Jina (Gong Seung-yeon), the reclusive figure at the center of “Aloners,” is lonely but never alone. Or perhaps it’s the other way around. She isolates herself at every point of her day — when she eats, when she works, when she smokes — turning to screens for companionship. She is always on her phone, scrolling even while talking to customers at the call center where she works. At night, she falls asleep with the TV on.Yet it’s clear in the director Hong Sung-eun’s quietly tragic tale of alienation, Jina is really just numb. Her mother has recently died, and she is estranged from her father. But at the call center, an eager new hire (Jung Da-eun) begins to push up against Jina’s walled-off existence.Hong’s greatest strength is restraint. At every moment in which she could turn the film into an easier, feel-good story about a woman being taught how to wake up to life, she pulls back. Life is not so simple, and healing is hard. As much as “Aloners” is about grief, it’s also a portrait of the ennui of modern life, how easily people can shut themselves off and fall into the void — and how mundane that withering away looks. Yet you can spot, in the superb, subtle performances from Gong and Jung, the pain and desperation under the surface. The only way out is if Jina might see the same in someone else and reach out.AlonersNot rated. In Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. Available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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    ‘Flamin’ Hot’ Review: Neon Dust, Hollywood Corn

    The actor Eva Longoria’s feature directing debut is a fictionalized account of the birth of a spicy, profitable snack.“Do I have initiative?” Richard Montañez (played by Jesse Garcia) asks his wife, Judy (Annie Gonzalez), in the dramatic comedy “Flamin’ Hot,” directed with affectionate brio by the actor Eva Longoria. Montañez, on whose memoir this fictionalized story is based, is eyeing an application for a job at the Frito-Lay facility in Rancho Cucamonga, Calif. While he’s stumped about that word — “initiative” — soon enough he’ll embody it, as he goes from being a janitor to becoming a family man behind a Cheetos flavor that extended the snack maker’s reach, launching Montañez’s marketing career.Garcia and Gonzalez possess poignant chemistry as the economically struggling couple. They first meet as children. He, a child of farm workers, is being bullied in the lunchroom and at home; she has a bruise that suggests they might have more in common than simply being the brown kids at a predominately white elementary school. Montañez’s youth is recounted in a sometimes boastful, sometimes self-deprecating, always upbeat voice-over that softens the edges of his childhood, which include routine bigotry and outright racism, but also brutality and judgment from his father, Vacho (Emilio Rivera).Montañez came of age in the late ’60s and early ’70s, and the pride and resistance of the Chicano Movement, while adjacent, were not central to his upbringing. Instead, as he tells us in an account that swings from the present to the past, from the biographical to the fantastical, he found friends in a gang. It wasn’t until Judy got pregnant that the pair agreed that things had to change.From the moment he enters the Frito-Lay facility, Montañez is a dogged learner, asking questions about chemical processes, wondering about an extruder, even celebrating an industrial power washer. His curiosity aggravates his supervisor (Matt Walsh), worries the friend who helped him get the gig (Bobby Soto) and breaks down the defenses of an engineer (Dennis Haysbert) who knows the facility inside out, and who becomes Montañez’s initially suspicious mentor.The titular flavor, it seems, didn’t happen overnight. Montañez’s stint begins in the mid-70s and takes off in the early ’90s, when the facility faces hard times. An executive, Roger Enrico (Tony Shalhoub), coaches the beleaguered work force to “think like a CEO.” And the ensuing scenes — of Rich landing his hot idea, inspired by the Mexican street corn elote — charm as intended. “It burns good,” the wee-est of the Montañezes (Brice Gonzalez) proclaims as the family samples seasonings.Longoria, working from a screenplay by Lewis Colick and Linda Yvette Chávez, sprinkles lessons in self-esteem throughout. (The movie is Longoria’s feature directing debut.) And the women here — including Montañez’s mother and Judy — are more than run-of-the-mill catalysts. Still, should it come as a surprise that a movie this puffed up has a dusting of flavors that might not be real? If you read too deeply about the ingredients that went into “Flamin’ Hot,” you might find enough confusion over whether Montañez actually invented the flavor (as claimed) to make your conscience mildly cramp.Flamin’ HotRated PG-13 for some strong language, and drug talk. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. Watch on Disney+ and Hulu. More

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    How ‘The Blackening’ Turns Horror Film Stereotypes Upside Down

    This comedy turns horror film stereotypes upside down. A look behind the scenes.What began as a smirking punchline traded in the clandestine realms of kitchens and living rooms has long since penetrated the mainstream. Now everyone knows: In the American horror film, you can expect the Black character to die first.That joke forms the foundation of the new horror comedy “The Blackening” (in theaters June 16), which arrives with the tagline, “We can’t all die first.” A Juneteenth weekend away in a remote, cavernous cabin turns deadly for a group of friends when they discover a board game in the basement. A Sambo figurehead occupies the center of the board and tests them on various touchstones of Black culture: What is the second verse of the Black national anthem? How many Black actors have guest starred on the television show “Friends”? A masked figure emerges from the shadows to exact the lethal consequences for wrong answers.“The Blackening” is based on a Comedy Central sketch of the same name originally developed by the comedian Dewayne Perkins, who co-stars in the film and wrote the script with Tracy Oliver (a writer of “Girls Trip”). In a video interview, Perkins said the concept came about during his time on the Chicago comedy circuit.“All of the Black people that have been in sketch were like, ‘Oh yeah, we always feel like individually we’re the most expendable within a lot of the institutions that we’re a part of,’” he said. “So that was kind of the impetus. If we put all the Black people together in horror movies, then they’d have to have a system as to who’s going to die first.”Yvonne Orji and Jay Pharaoh in the film.Glen Wilson/LionsgateIn the short, a group of Black friends confronted by a killer must decide who is “the Blackest” — and therefore liable to be killed first. Of course, the comedy lies in what naturally ensues: Everyone gathered tries to prove they are the least Black. One character retches through repeated attempts at insisting that “All lives matter,” the invalidating response to Black Lives Matter. After seeing the sketch, Oliver tracked down Perkins to adapt the piece into a feature. (“The Blackening” recreates the short in one of its funniest scenes.) Initially attached as a producer, Tim Story, best known for “Barbershop” (2002), fell in love with the script and additionally opted to direct. “It’s something that I really wanted to get to the screen,” Story said.The comedian and actress Yvonne Orji, who plays Morgan, was also drawn to the subversive script. “We’re turning the stereotype on its head and I love whenever stereotypes are tipped over,” she said.Foregrounding Black characters in the horror genre upends a fraught legacy that has often deployed them as comic relief or unceremoniously dispensed with them; Perkins explained that it was a purposeful decision to play with these archetypes so that the film is in constant conversation with this history. “My character is a Gay Best Friend, which is a trope. All of these characters, at the beginning, their origin is a trope,” he said. “Then we use the movie to constantly feed that character. And allowing the trope to become a fully realized character was the goal.”Although “The Blackening” functions principally as a comedy, the film also delivers dynamic moments of suspense and chilling scares, a result of Perkins and Oliver’s enduring admiration of horror cinema. “That was my favorite genre coming up,” Perkins said. ”I think that’s why the movie is so embedded with references.”The film’s director, Tim Story, right, on set with Byers, second from right, and other crew. “It’s something that I really wanted to get to the screen,” Story said of falling in love with the script.Glen Wilson/LionsgateAnd there are references aplenty. An incomplete list includes “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” (1974), “The Hills Have Eyes” (1977), “Friday the 13th” (1980), “The Evil Dead” (1981), “A Nightmare On Elm Street” (1984), “The People Under the Stairs” (1991), “Jumanji” (1995), “Scream” (1996), and “I Know What You Did Last Summer” (1997). “The Blackening” revved up audiences last fall when it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. And ahead of its release, it will screen as part of the Tribeca Festival, including a screening on June 13 at the Apollo Theater.Story brought his experience directing comedies to the funnier elements of the film, but he saw a challenge in tackling its scarier moments. “The cool thing about just being a movie lover is you actually end up studying all types of these genres,” he said. “I always wanted to mess with horror, but I had to find something that was still in my world.”The film’s title recalls an idea mentioned in a recently published book, “The Black Guy Dies First: Black Horror Cinema From Fodder to Oscar,” by Robin R. Means Coleman and Mark H. Harris. The authors describe the increase in Black cinema representation of the late 1960s — or the “Blackening.” Both writers are particularly united in their love of George Romero’s “The Night of the Living Dead” (1968), in which the Black guy famously dies last, if doubly tragically: He manages to survive a zombie apocalypse only to be killed by a vigilante mob. Harris credited the film with inspiring what he called in an interview his “love for horror.” Coleman and Harris chronicle these cycles of diversity — which inevitably meet an abrupt end — in their book, from the Blaxploitation era to the urban horror of the ’90s and now this latest, respectable generation of transparently politicized horror.Robertson and Walls in a scene from the film.Glen Wilson/LionsgateAlthough she accounted for the rise and fall of these past movements, Coleman said, “We’re moving away from what I conceptualize as Blacks in Horror to Black Horror, which really is a reflection of Black life and culture, experience.” Coleman, a scholar who also wrote “Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films From the 1890s to Present,” praised the innovation in recent horror films, citing Nia DaCosta’s “Candyman” (2021). “There’s art, there’s music, the vernacular, all of that is there.”In a testament to the sudden streamlining of the genre, at least two of the actors in “The Blackening” can already count prominent features from this wave of social-justice horror among their work. Sinqua Walls, who plays Nnamdi, recently appeared in the Sundance Grand Jury prizewinning film “The Nanny” (2022), and the “Saturday Night Live” veteran Jay Pharoah, who plays Morgan’s boyfriend, Shawn, was in the horror-comedy “Bad Hair” (2020). Pharoah said that he was happy to be in these genre films because of their distinct popularity.“It’s going to be some niche of people or this cult fan base that you have no idea about, that has watched your stuff over and over again,” he said. “They can quote everything and they know how you die. It’s just a cool thing to be a part of.”For Story, filming “The Blackening” was joyous.“What was great about making this movie,” he said, “it was dipped in celebration. I mean, that’s what’s so much fun about it. We are giving the foundation for a lot of great conversations. We want it to represent us and the many facets of us; and also invite others to make their version.” More