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Monique Van Vooren, the Belgian-born actress and singer whose highly eclectic résumé included roles in “Tarzan and the She-Devil,” “Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein,” the Pop Art television series “Batman” and “Wall Street,” died on Jan. 25 at her home in Manhattan. She was 92.The death was confirmed by Geoffrey Bradfield, a longtime family friend.Ms. Van Vooren found fans in many places. Some American moviegoers knew her from her cult-classic films. Others recognized her from her appearances on game shows like “To Tell the Truth” and “Password.” Big-city nightclub patrons knew her as a cabaret headliner.Her profile photos on Facebook included shots of herself with Rudolf Nureyev, Andy Warhol and David Bowie.In Ms. Van Vooren’s youth, writers tended to describe her in terms of her physical attributes — at least one referred to her as “40-24-36” — reflecting an era when actresses’ measurements were a standard feature on their bios.She made her movie debut playing a schoolgirl in “Domani È Troppo Tardi” (“Tomorrow Is Too Late”), a 1950 Italian drama that starred Vittorio De Sica. In her second film (a very American one), “Tarzan and the She-Devil” (1953), she played an evil ivory poacher, alongside Lex Barker (as Tarzan) and Raymond Burr. In 1955 she starred in two French crime dramas, “Série Noire” (“The Infiltrator”) and “Ça Va Barder,” whose title can be loosely translated as “There’ll Be Hell to Pay.”Her next role was especially brief. She appeared only in the opening credits of the Dean Martin comedy “Ten Thousand Bedrooms” (1957).Her other films included “Happy Anniversary” (1959), a romantic comedy starring David Niven and Mitzi Gaynor; “Ash Wednesday” (1973), with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton; “Sugar Cookies” (1973), a low-budget story of erotic games and revenge; and “Flesh for Frankenstein” (1974), also known as “Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein.” Ms. Van Vooren played the Baroness Frankenstein, who develops feelings for the stable boy (Joe Dallesandro) while her husband is busy creating monsters.Two television roles stood out. She was Zizi Molnari, the European starlet, in a 1959 NBC adaptation of “What Makes Sammy Run?,” Budd Schulberg’s bleakly satirical Hollywood novel. Almost a decade later, she played the haughty, hygienic henchwoman Miss Clean on “Batman” (1968), opposite Burgess Meredith, in his last portrayal of the Penguin.She appeared on Broadway twice, two decades apart. In 1953, she played multiple roles in the musical revue “John Murray Anderson’s Almanac.” In 1975, she played Venus in “Man on the Moon,” a musical written by John Phillips of the rock group the Mamas and the Papas. It closed after less than a week of performances.Monique Bronz was born on March 25, 1927, in Brussels, the daughter of George Bronz and Louise (Van Vooren) Bronz. She often spoke about having grown up in a convent — presumably a boarding school. According to her official biography, she arrived in New York in 1950, just after appearing in her first movie, to study philosophy at New York University on a Fulbright scholarship.When asked about the men in her life, Ms. Van Vooren once casually replied, “I’ve been married three or four times.” Biographies sometimes mention a first husband in the 1940s with the surname Jacobsen or Jakobsen. She married Curt H. Pfenniger in 1950; they separated in 1954 and later divorced. In 1958 she married Gerard W. Purcell, a producer and personal manager, and they were together until his death in 2002.Survivors include a son, Eric Purcell, from her marriage to Mr. Pfenniger, and a granddaughter.Ms. Van Vooren was an ardent New Yorker. But, in a cable-television interview in the late 1980s. she complained that the city’s night life had gone downhill.“In New York we have a population of, what, 12 million?” she said, rounding up by about 30 percent. “Maybe 2,000 people a night go out.”She also had a career as a singer. Her first album was “Mink in Hi-Fi” (1958), a mix of French and English songs. The cover showed her in nothing but diamonds and off-the-shoulder white mink. John S. Wilson’s enthusiastic New York Times review suggested that she had been “hiding her real talent under a bushel of cheesecake.”Later, she was known for her cabaret performances. Once, when working at the Rainbow Room, she decided one of her three male backup dancers, Ronnie Walken, needed a new name. “Why don’t you call yourself Christopher?” she suggested. (Mr. Walken has confirmed the exchange.)Ms. Van Vooren was also a writer. Her first and only novel, “Night Sanctuary,” about three women and a male ballet superstar, was published in 1983.Although her reputation was as a sex symbol, Ms. Van Vooren’s only real scandal was financial. In 1983 she entered a guilty plea to lying to a federal grand jury about having taken the proceeds of more than $18,000 in Social Security checks made out to her mother, who had died years before. She received a suspended sentence and was required to perform 500 hours of community service.There was, however, a whiff of romantic scandal in 2001 when Orin Lehman, a longtime New York State parks commissioner and the comedian Joan Rivers’s late-in-life love interest, left her for Ms. Van Vooren. Ms. Rivers responded by ridiculing the new couple’s advanced ages. Ms. Van Vooren retaliated, telling The New York Post: “She’s one to talk. She’s got more miles on her than an old Checker cab.”Ms. Van Vooren’s last appearance in a major film was as “Woman at ‘21’” (referring to the exclusive Manhattan restaurant) in Oliver Stone’s “Wall Street” (1987). Her final screen appearance was in “Greystone Park” (2012), a haunted-house drama of the supposed found-footage genre.No one ever told her a blond bombshell couldn’t make wisecracks. When the newspaper columnist Earl Wilson suggested she had been seen out on the town with a married man, she shrugged off the thought.“I’m so nearsighted,” she said, “I wouldn’t know whether they were married or not.”Julia Carmel contributed reporting. Alain Delaquérière contributed research. More

[embedded content]Last year, “Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw” got a jump on its Super Bowl movie-ad competitors, releasing a trailer on the Friday before the NFL championship game. The movie went on to gross more than $750 million worldwide.If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. The next film in the “Fast & Furious” franchise, “F9: The Fast Saga,” has unleashed its first promo two days before this year’s Super Bowl. This one doesn’t feature Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) or Shaw (Jason Statham), but Vin Diesel returns as Dominic Toretto, a reformed criminal and ex-street racer who has settled into retirement with his wife, Letty (Michelle Rodriguez), and their young son, Brian — named after the late co-star Paul Walker’s character.Perhaps trying to make up for the absence of Johnson, “F9” has recruited another wrestler-actor, John Cena, to join the cast as Jakob, Dominic’s younger brother. Described as a master thief, an assassin and a high-performance driver, he’s sent by the cyberterrorist Cipher (Charlize Theron) to kill his sibling.Also added to the ensemble are a pair of musicians, the reggaeton star Ozuna and rapper Cardi B, as yet-to-be-disclosed characters. The trailer does contain one major reveal, though: Sung Kang reprises his role as Han Lue, a driver who had apparently died in the 2006 “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift.”Directed by Justin Lin (returning to the series for the first time since “Fast & Furious 6” in 2013), “F9: The Fast Saga” hits theaters on May 22. More

PARK CITY, Utah — A runaway bride, wildly rambunctious women and two quietly resolute girls — the Sundance Film Festival is one movie celebration where the so-called second sex consistently comes out on top. Now in its 36th year, the festival has long made room for female filmmakers even when there weren’t all that many. In 1985, its inaugural year, it presented 85 movies, 10 from female directors, about half non-Americans like Lina Wertmüller, one of the few such filmmakers on anyone’s radar back then. Of this year’s 128 features, nearly half are from women. (The festival ends Sunday.)These numbers are impressive; the movies even more so. At some events, female filmmakers sometimes seem to have been invited simply to check a box, a practice that, however well-intentioned, inevitably suggests that women are second-class talent. This year’s Sundance, by contrast, underscores that when women receive real opportunities — serious money and institutional support — the pool of work expands, bringing new stories, styles and worldviews. For the 2020 edition, you didn’t need to dig to find female talent, make excuses for substandard work or politely yawn through another worthy endeavor. It was right on the screen, blissful and unbound.In the case of the very different documentaries “Time” and “Saudi Runaway,” the desire to make movies isn’t simply about having a say — getting the chance to pick up a camera and share your vision with the world freely — it is also a matter of life itself. Each documentary centers on an extraordinarily gutsy woman who put her everyday existence on camera, detailing her days and nights in intimate, pointillist detail much like a diarist. Each woman subsequently handed over what she had shot to a female director, who then shaped the material, turning self-expression into collective vision.One of the most critically admired titles at the festival, Garrett Bradley’s “Time” tells the story of Fox Rich, a Louisiana activist, family woman extraordinaire and impressively dedicated memoirist. (The movie is a coproduction of The New York Times.) Processed in black-and-white, it tracks Rich over her decade-plus efforts to support her six sons and find her sense of a whole self all while advocating for the release of her husband from a punishing 60-year prison sentence. Using both original material and a trove of vivid home videos that Rich shot herself, Bradley creates a portrait of a woman that exponentially expands into a complex chronicle of a marriage, a family, a community and finally a country.“Saudi Runaway” is a starkly complementary story of incarceration, liberation and self-determination. Directed by the Swiss-German filmmaker Susanne Regina Meures, “Runaway” is the nail-biting chronicle of a fearless young Saudi — known only as Muna — as she covertly plans to leave the country for good. Using a couple of smartphones, Muna clandestinely serves as her own dauntless cinematographer, shooting herself, her family and, in fugitive glimpses, the larger world. It’s a perilous activity given women’s traditionally subordinate status there, and transforms selfie-style narcissism into radical resistance. (The movie was shot before new rights were granted to women.) As her plans solidify, “Saudi Runaway” progressively resembles a thriller, one filled with harrowingly close calls and an exhilarating countdown.The increased presence of women behind the camera at Sundance marks a crucial shift, given that not long ago the more celebrated women at the event were performers like Parker Posey and Lili Taylor (here playing a mom in the clichéd “The Evening Hour”). For years, women’s roles at this festival seemed best symbolized by the “Sundance It Girl,” a dubious honor that stretches at least back to Andie MacDowell, a star of “sex, lies, and videotape.” That’s the 1989 Steven Soderbergh game-changer that helped kick-start an era in indie cinema, one that often proved as sexist as Hollywood and just as blindingly white.The number of African-American female filmmakers in this year’s lineup offered further evidence of what seems to be a significant, perhaps lasting sea change. A perfect example, and a highlight of the U.S. dramatic competition, “The 40-Year-Old Version” hasn’t secured distribution but deserves the widest release possible. Written and directed by the playwright Radha Blank — who also stars — it traces the rebirth of an artist with lacerating insight, a great deal of warmth and terrific comic timing. It was shot in black-and-white, a visual choice that nods to iconic New York films, most instructively from Woody Allen and Spike Lee. Here, Blank makes the city and its promise her own from the first scene to a last expressive burst of rapturous color.The colors pop bright and hard in “Zola,” a kaleidoscopically hued, periodically discomforting, comically ribald adventure from Janicza Bravo (“Lemon”). Narrated by the title character (played by the game newcomer Taylour Paige), the story unwinds in extended flashback, with Zola detailing an improbable, ridiculous, often funny and sometimes dangerous adventure involving another woman, Jessica (the reliably bold Riley Keough), a stripper with execrable judgment. Bravo skims the surface with impressive control and a great deal of visual wit and, every so often — as with a shot of a Confederate flag — gestures toward deeper, unrealized ideas. (The movie is based on an epic, rather more grim Twitter thread.)A different odyssey is undertaken in Eliza Hittman’s “Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” which tracks a teenager, Autumn (Sidney Flanigan), who travels to New York City to obtain an abortion. With unforced realism, a minimum of music, spare dialogue and no histrionics, Hittman nicely sketches in Autumn’s home life — her mom dresses the kids and the dad both — but mostly concentrates on Autumn and her relationship with the cousin (Talia Ryder) who accompanies her. By refusing to grandstand, Hittman, who wrote and directed, has made the most moving, cleareyed American fiction movie about a woman’s right to abortion since “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” (1982).Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering’s much-publicized documentary “On the Record” looks at several women — notably Drew Dixon, a music executive — who have accused the music giant Russell Simmons of sexual misconduct (allegations he denies). Much of the movie includes interviews, including with writers like Joan Morgan, who puts the personal into larger context. The women on camera make their case strongly; they also legitimize the documentary, which had come to the festival tainted by criticism from Oprah Winfrey, a former executive producer, who cut ties to it, citing creative differences. The filmmakers make some unfortunate choices, particularly in some staged scenes, but the movie belongs to these women, whose truth feels unassailable.Time and again at the festival, you saw real diversity in both the snowy streets and in the theaters, where the American experience in all its complexity was being told and retold in movie after movie. Proof of that came in two of my favorite selections from the 2020 edition, the dramas “Minari” and “Farewell Amor.” To a degree, we have seen these stories before or at least think that we have: each turns on a hardworking family of ostensible outsiders trying to find their place in a not always welcoming country.In “Minari” (written and directed by Lee Isaac Chung), the family is Korean-American and moves from California to Arkansas to pursue the father’s dream of farming vegetables. In “Farewell Amor” (from the writer-director Ekwa Msangi), an Angolan refugee brings his wife and daughter to America after a long, anguished separation, moving them into a crowded Brooklyn apartment. Each movie solicits well-earned tears and turns on a profound crisis that can only be solved when the family pulls together, unity that works as a welcome and, in its underlying optimism, deeply moving metaphor for life in what too often feels like the Disunited States of America. More

You’re reading this week’s At War newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox every Friday. Email us at atwar@nytimes.com.After watching the new movie “1917” this month, I was reminded of a poem written by Siegfried Sassoon in the summer of 1918, or just over a year after Sam Mendes’s critically acclaimed World War I film takes place. It is titled “The Dug-out.”Why do you lie with your legs ungainly huddled,And one arm bent across your sullen, cold,Exhausted face? It hurts my heart to watch you,Deep-shadowed from the candle’s guttering gold;And you wonder why I shake you by the shoulder;Drowsy, you mumble and sigh and turn your head…You are too young to fall asleep for ever;And when you sleep you remind me of the dead.“1917,” a two-hour movie about two young British soldiers trying to stop one battalion’s morning attack on the Western Front, is undoubtedly an incredibly shot war film. But tucked into its cinematics is a portrayal of an innocence that was so readily destroyed in those four years. World War I quickly introduced the horrors of modern artillery barrages, unwavering machine gun fire and wholesale slaughter to a generation that never truly recovered.Mendes starts his film with both characters asleep in a grassy field, only to be woken up by their sergeant to go report in to their division commander. In strange ways, the scene foreshadows the fate of both characters, Lance Corporal Blake and Lance Corporal Schofield, respectively played by Dean-Charles Chapman and George MacKay. From that moment forward, the viewer follows the two soldiers on their journey into the war in what is intended to feel like a single camera shot.Where “The Dug-out” and “1917” unquestionably intersect is on their subjects’ youth. Blake and Schofield are barely in their 20s. And their actions throughout the film portray them in many ways more as children than as soldiers. With such little dialogue, their ages are what ultimately adds to the movie’s heft. It’s through their perspectives that the audience experiences the war. Sasson’s poem accomplishes much the same thing.And so I guess I couldn’t help thinking of Sassoon’s poem as I watched the movie and of my own memories — of how young we all were in my own war and of my friends who were spread out, quietly sleeping in an Afghan compound or on the outskirts of some poppy field. Separated from the violence of war until one kick or shake soon followed, waking them and reminding them of where they were and what lay ahead.The Latest Stories From At WarBehind the Numbers: 4That’s the number of Soviet spies known to have infiltrated the Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico, where the world’s first atom bomb was built. The identities of three of those spies were previously known to the public, but that of the fourth, Oscar Seborer, was revealed recently when the laboratory declassified a trove of internal documents. Seborer, whose code name was “Godsend,” was suspected to have had a granular understanding of the bomb’s inner workings, which most likely contributed to the Soviet Union’s ability to quickly detonate its own bomb in 1949, four years after the Americans. Seborer helped devise the bomb’s explosive trigger, an innovation that was part and parcel of the 20th-century trend toward weapon miniaturization. Even more, he was employed by the unit that worked on developing an “implosion” bomb, a more destructive and sophisticated iteration of the device that was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945. Declassified Russian archives show, among other revelations, schematic diagrams of the implosion bomb, which the nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein described as “betraying their obvious roots in espionage.” Read the full Times report here.— Jake Nevins, Times Magazine editorial fellowEditor’s PicksHere are six articles from The Times you might have missed.“The example we set has global ramifications.” The Pentagon confirmed on Thursday that it is preparing to change its current restrictions on the military’s use of anti-personnel land mines, and the new policy is expected to allow the use of these weapons in more areas of potential conflict. [Read the story.]“All I have are these tears to pour over the past.” Organizers of a ceremony at Auschwitz sought to put a spotlight on the stories of survivors, as this may be the last time that such a large number will be able to gather in one place. [Read the story.]“I heard they had headaches.” The Defense Department said on Thursday that 64 troops had sustained traumatic brain injuries after the Iranian ballistic missile strikes on Ayn Al Asad Air Base in Iraq this month, up 14 from an earlier announcement this week. [Read the story.]“I will cut your son’s throat.” In a hearing at Guantánamo Bay, an architect of the C.I.A. interrogation program testified in a pretrial hearing focused on the torture of the defendants during their years of C.I.A. captivity. [Read the story.]“Any drawdown of our troops would be shortsighted.” American officials, analyzing what they call great power competition, say they are alarmed by Russia’s growing influence in Africa, as well as China’s, as Washington struggles to exert its economic and security goals on the continent. [Read the story.]“The ultimate expression of competence.” America’s special operations forces have developed a problematic culture that overemphasizes combat “to the detriment of leadership, discipline and accountability,” according to a sweeping review conducted by the military’s Special Operations Command. [Read the story.]We’d love your feedback on this newsletter. Please email thoughts and suggestions to atwar@nytimes.com. Or invite someone to subscribe through this link.Read more from At War here or follow us on Twitter. More