Movies

“He’s our Picasso,” the actor said of Bob Dylan.It has been more than four decades since an Armani-clad Richard Gere slunk around Los Angeles in Paul Schrader’s “American Gigolo.”Now Gere, 75, and Schrader have reunited on “Oh, Canada,” an adaptation of Russell Banks’s 2021 novel, “Foregone,” about a dying documentarian who wants to confess, mostly to his wife.Gere and Schrader were each dealing with end-of-life losses when they jumped into the project: Banks, a close friend of Schrader’s, had died from cancer in 2023. Gere’s father also died that year.“We were coming from emotional places,” Gere said.In addition to “Oh, Canada,” Gere made his American TV series debut last month in “The Agency,” an adaptation of the French hit “The Bureau.”“My wife and I binge-watched the French show and genuinely loved it,” he said. “So when I got a call saying they wanted to do an English-language version, I thought, Hmm, that’s kind of a double-edged sword. One, yeah, that sounds interesting, but two, the French one was so good, would they screw this up?”Gere was about to travel from Paris to Marrakech to meet his family when he called to talk about his admiration for former House speaker Nancy Pelosi and the chef-humanitarian José Andrés, the Dylan song he can’t imagine not existing and the importance of Tibet. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.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

Maura Delpero’s film “Vermiglio,” which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival, is inspired by her own family in Italy during World War II.The mountaintop village of Vermiglio in the Italian Alps is blessed with picture-postcard views of snowy peaks and verdant valleys. It’s also the scene of a dramatic World War II story that moviegoers outside Italy will soon discover.“Vermiglio,” written and directed by Maura Delpero, is inspired by the story of Delpero’s grandparents, whose bucolic existence as a family of 10 was disrupted in the 1940s by a young Sicilian deserter romancing one of their daughters. The film won the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival in September, and is Italy’s submission to the list of contenders for the Academy Award for best foreign language film.Watching the movie feels like watching life itself: A succession of rustic tableaux — cow milkings, family meals, classroom lessons — are interspersed with moments of high drama that are filmed in the same slow-paced, naturalistic way, without fanfare.Delpero with the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize, which the film won at the Venice Film Festival in September.Louisa Gouliamaki/ReutersIn a recent video interview, Delpero, 49, who splits her time between Italy and Argentina, spoke about life behind the camera and the future of cinema. The conversation, translated from Italian, has been edited and condensed.This movie was sparked by the death of your father in August 2019. He was one of the eight surviving children of your grandfather, the Vermiglio village schoolteacher. Can you talk about that?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

The history of European directors “going Hollywood” and making the leap to English-language filmmaking is long and uneven.When Pedro Almodóvar’s “The Room Next Door” won the Golden Lion for best film at this year’s Venice Film Festival, it was the first time that the Spanish director had garnered the top prize at one of Europe’s major film festivals. What made this victory even more impressive and unusual was the fact that “The Room Next Door” was Almodóvar’s first full-length film in English.For a leading auteur of contemporary cinema, and one whose work is so bound up with the textures of his native tongue, Almodóvar’s late-career shift to English-language filmmaking feels daring. If the film’s reception at Venice is any indication, it appears that the gamble has paid off and that he has succeeded where many others have failed.Almodóvar, 75, is only the latest in a long line of European directors to make the leap to English-language filmmaking. The history of such transitions is uneven, and ranges from the Golden Age Hollywood classics of the Austrian-born Billy Wilder to infamous missteps by Ingmar Bergman and François Truffaut.The Hungarian filmmaker Kornel Mundruczo said that both working in English and directing Hollywood stars presents European directors with a unique set of hurdles. “It was a huge challenge to understand the cultural differences and not to create something which is symbolically, say, sinking into the Atlantic Ocean,” he said, recalling the making of his English-language debut, “Pieces of a Woman,” in a recent phone interview.“There are so many movies like that,” added Mundruczo, who finished shooting “At the Sea,” his new film starring Amy Adams, in Boston this August.Kornel Mundruczo, center, on set with Ellen Burstyn, left, and Vanessa Kirby in 2020, making “Pieces of a Woman.” Mundruczo, a Hungarian filmmaker, has found creative opportunities working in English.Philippe Bosse/Netflix, via Everett CollectionWe 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

You don’t have to know an orc from a Mumakil to enjoy the new animated adventure, though it’ll certainly help.If you would like to know who the Helm of Helm’s Deep is, you are in the right place.Also, if you are an anime fan who has never watched a single “Lord of the Rings” film, welcome.A new Warner Bros. animated adventure, “The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim,” is in theaters, the latest installment in a franchise of seven — soon to be eight — movies based on the novels of J.R.R. Tolkien. Set roughly 200 years before the events of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, it tells the tale of a storied king’s quest to defend his land from an invading army.Here’s what to know about where the story came from, how it fits in with the rest of the “Lord of the Rings” universe and which familiar characters you might find.Did Tolkien write this story?The characters in the film, directed by Kenji Kamiyama, are based on details in the appendices at the end of the “Lord of the Rings” novels. They cover the history of the rulers of Rohan, the fictional kingdom in Middle-earth known for its horse-tamers and riders.Obviously, turning footnotes into an animated film required some rewriting and fleshing out — the filmmakers’ task was essentially to bring a family tree to the screen, which includes Helm Hammerhand, a legendary king of Rohan; his sons, Haleth and Háma; and an unnamed daughter. The producers chose to focus on Helm’s daughter, whom they called Héra for the film. (Tolkien left her fate unclear.)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

By breaking the story into two movies, the emphasis in “Part One” shifts to a nation’s potential decline into authoritarianism. Sound familiar?In the big-screen adaptation of “Wicked,” Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) uses magic to defend her sister and unwittingly destroys a courtyard mural of the Wizard at Shiz University. When her outburst shatters the wall, it also unearths an image that has been intentionally covered up: the school’s original founders, animal professors whose ability to speak, teach humans, and organize politically posed a threat to the Wizard’s autocratic reign.This surprising fact is revealed early on, but as I watched it, I realized Elphaba’s discovery came too late.As a repeat viewer of Broadway’s “Wicked,” I’m usually fascinated by how the story’s retrospective lens encourages us to sympathize with Elphaba, who eventually will become the Wicked Witch of the West. Her rich back story — she’s a perennial outsider and highly empathetic person — has forced me to rethink my assumptions about her and reflect on how easily I accepted L. Frank Baum’s own prejudices and his representation of her as a one-dimensional villain in his novel, “The Wizard of Oz.”But, unlike the stage version, which tracks Elphaba as a young adult to her fateful encounter with Dorothy, the movie delves even more into Elphaba’s biography. It follows her to Shiz University, where she ends up rooming with her frenemy, Galinda, later renamed Glinda (Ariana Grande), whose jealousy of Elphaba’s magical powers leads to conflict. The film ends at the characters’ climactic midpoints. “If Part One is about choices,” the director, Jon M. Chu, recently told Entertainment Weekly, “Part Two is about consequences.”But for now that also means the story remains unresolved. At the end of the Broadway version, there’s relief in the surprise ending when we learn that the Wicked Witch was far kinder than we gave her credit for and that she successfully challenged the Wizard’s dominance.Instead, onscreen, Elphaba is left suspended in midair (on her broom), made a scapegoat by the Wizard (Jeff Goldblum) as the Shiz professor Madam Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), falsely warns the people of Oz about an enemy who must be captured. Madam Morrible goes even further, blasting on the loudspeaker, “Her green skin is but an outward manifestorium of her twisted nature. This distortion! This repulsion! This wicked witch!”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

This month’s picks include a sequel to a 1980s Tim Burton classic and an animated tale of a Christmas nearly gone wrong.‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’Stream it on Max.One of the joys of parenthood is introducing your child to classic films that you once loved. It thrills me that my 7-year-old son adores “E.T.” and the original “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” films. Watching him mimic the “Banana Boat (Day-O)” dance in Tim Burton’s 1988 goth horror comedy “Beetlejuice” has been one of the highlights of my year. For older children that love scary-ish movies, Burton’s long-awaited follow-up film is a kooky medley of wacky scares and outrageous scenarios. Winona Ryder returns as a grown-up Lydia. She’s now a widow who hosts a ghost show on TV, and her goth teenage daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega), is every bit as brooding as her mother was at her age.Justin Theroux plays Lydia’s smarmy boyfriend, Rory, and Monica Bellucci is Beetlejuice’s (dead) ex-wife, Delores. Michael Keaton masterfully yuks it up again as the titular character, and Catherine O’Hara returns as the pompous artist Delia. Alfred Gough and Miles Millar wrote the script (Seth Grahame-Smith shares story credit). If your children delight in dark tales and don’t mind shrunken heads and some campy gore, this one’s worth a watch.‘That Christmas’Stream it on Netflix.Brian Cox sheds any evidence his tyrannical “Succession” character, Logan Roy, to voice none other than Santa Claus in this animated tale of a Christmas gone (almost) wrong. Based on a children’s book series written by Richard Curtis (yes, the one who wrote “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” “Notting Hill” and “Love Actually”), the plot involves intertwining stories about loneliness and the importance of family and friends — Curtis’s sweet spot.Here we meet Danny (Jack Wisniewski), a new kid in the small fictional seaside town of Wellington-on-Sea. His newly divorced mother (Jodie Whittaker, “Doctor Who”) gets called in to work on Christmas, leaving Danny alone as a blizzard blows into town and strands a bunch of parents so they can’t get to their children’s Christmas pageant. Fiona Shaw (“Killing Eve”) voices the strict Ms. Trapper, who tries to keep the youngsters in line as the town goes haywire, and in a nod to “Love Actually,” Bill Nighy teams back up with Curtis here to voice a character named Lighthouse Bill.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

In “Theater of Thought,” he talks to scientists and other experts about consciousness, quantum computing and whether parrots understand human speech.There’s a moment in “Theater of Thought” (in theaters) when Darío Gil, the director of research at IBM, is explaining quantum computing to Werner Herzog, the movie’s director. Standing before a whiteboard, Gil draws some points on spheres to illustrate how qubits work, then proceeds to define the Schrödinger equation. As he talks and writes, the audio grows quieter, and Herzog’s distinctive resonant German accent takes over. “I admit that I literally understand nothing of this, and I assume most of you don’t either,” he intones in voice-over. “But I found it fascinating that this mathematical formula explains the law that draws the subatomic world.”It’s a funny moment, a playful way to keep us from glazing over when presented with partial differential equations. Herzog may be a world-renowned filmmaker, but he’s hardly a scientist, and that makes him the perfect director for “Theater of Thought,” a documentary about, as he puts it, the “mysteries of our brain.”Emphasis on mysteries. Herzog interviews a dizzying array of scientists, researchers, and even a Nobel Prize winner or two. He asks them about everything: how the brain works, what consciousness means, what the tiniest organisms in the world are, whether parrots understand human speech, whether rogue governments can control thoughts, whether we’re living in an elaborate simulation, how telepathy and psychedelics work, and, at several points, what thinking even is. Near the end of the film he notes that not one of the scientists could explain what a thought is, or what consciousness is, but “they were all keenly alive to the ethical questions in neuroscience.” In other words, they’re immersed in both the mystery and what their field of study implies about the future of humanity.There’s a boring way to make this movie, with talking-head interviews that are arranged to form a coherent argument. Herzog goes another direction, starting off by narrating why he’s making it, then talking about his interviewees as we are introduced to them in their labs or in their favorite outdoor settings. (He also visits Philippe Petit, the Twin Towers tightrope walker, as he practices in his Catskills backyard.) Herzog’s constant verbal presence brings us into his own head space — his own brain, if you will — and gives us the sense that we’re following his patterns of thought.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

Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s buff Marvel hero is overshadowed by unabashedly fun villains.Built on brawn, J.C. Chandor’s action sci-fi picture “Kraven the Hunter” is limited by incomprehensible plotting and dodgy one-liners delivered by a cast who seem to be practicing their worst Russian accents. If not for the bevy of anticlimactic fights, “Kraven the Hunter” could be so bad it’s good. Instead, it’s merely another excursion away from the Marvel Cinematic Universe to Sony’s series of defanged comic book villains.Kraven’s baffling origin story finds a jumbled through-line in half brothers Sergei and Dmitri’s tight-knit relationship. Sons of Russian drug dealer Nikolai Kravinoff (Russell Crowe, adopting a low, growling accent), the boys are persistently pushed by their bloodthirsty father to be stronger than Sergei’s mother, who recently died by suicide. To harden them, Nikolai takes them hunting in Ghana. “Shoot to kill. Fun,” Nikolai grumbles. Fun for Sergei is short-lived when a lion mauls him. Only a potion provided by a passerby named Calypso saves Sergei, imbuing him with otherworldly vision, agility and strength.Fast forward 16 years and a hulking Sergei (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is now a vigilante known as “Kraven the Hunter,” who’s pursuing criminals that remind him of his estranged father. Aleksei Sytsevich (Alessandro Nivola), a Russian mercenary who can morph into a rhino, is not only worried that Kraven will soon pursue him. Aleksei also wants to eliminate his rival Nikolai. Aleksei kidnaps Dmitri and dispatches a time-morphing assassin called the Foreigner (Christopher Abbott) to pursue Kraven. With an adult Calypso (Ariana DeBose) providing aid, Kraven tries to free Dmitri.Thankfully, “Kraven the Hunter” doesn’t take itself too seriously. Like Sony’s “The Venom” franchise and “Madame Web,” the story is incidental to these larger-than-life characters. While Taylor-Johnson does his best Hugh Jackman impression — posing for glamour shots of his ripped body before crawling and flying across the frame — only a couple of actors here know exactly what movie they’re in. Abbott is captivatingly slippery, rolling his slender frame and casting his bewitching eyes on his victims with cool intent. Nivola, on the other hand, is the type of ham you’d find in Joel Schumacher’s Batman films. From his surprising hissing to his stocky build, every choice he makes is spontaneous yet wholly grounded in this troubled character.If the action in “Kraven the Hunter” was as well conceived as its villains, it’d be a riot. Unfortunately, the brawls are physically detached from the environment. The choreography lacks punch and design; the compositions are spatially unaware. Kraven and Aleksei ‘s final tussle, an anticlimactic mud fight in the middle of a field, ends as quickly as it began. The film adds a pound of revenge and an ounce of a surprise to its final moments, but these ingredients, including the entertaining silliness, aren’t enough for “Kraven the Hunter” to catch the biggest game — our admiration.Kraven the HunterRated R for violence, blood and daddy problems. Running time: 2 hours 7 minutes. In theaters. More