Movies

PARK CITY, Utah — When the writer-director Benh Zeitlin was unexpectedly thrust into the middle of the Oscar melee in 2012 with his debut feature, “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” it was a surreal, discomforting experience filled with stiff tuxedos and awkward small talk — light years away from his ragtag existence in New Orleans, where he makes lyrical, atmospheric movies with his friends.Zeitlin was soothed somewhat by the people he met on the trail: a sit-down with Daniel Day-Lewis, a kind word from Sally Field, an interaction with Martin Scorsese, who was struggling at the time with his edit of “Wolf of Wall Street.”“It was cool to see someone that legendary be just as stressed as me when I was cutting ‘Beasts,’” said Zeitlin, a Hollywood outsider who before his Oscar run had only visited Los Angeles once in his life.Eight years later, this one-time Oscar wunderkind finally popped back up at this year’s Sundance Film Festival with his sophomore effort, “Wendy,” a grass-roots “Peter Pan” seen through the eyes of a liberated, adventurous Wendy Darling. Where had he been?The pressures of the Oscar spotlight can be enormous. As nominees this year have surely discovered, becoming part of the Hollywood ecosystem comes with its own set of challenges, ones that often require you to conform to specific expectations rather than to pursue your own creative endeavors. Zeitlin and another director who went through a similar experience, Tom McCarthy of “Spotlight,” resisted that pressure — and at Sundance this month, the results of their decisions were on display.Zeitlin’s time among the glitterati had crystallized what he wanted his future to look like, and it was nothing like theirs. As the recipient of two highly coveted nominations — best director and best adapted screenplay (his film also drew a best picture nomination) — Zeitlin had earned an invitation into the club. He could have easily parlayed his success into a hefty studio payday. Yet he chose a decidedly different route. He did hire an agent, temporarily, to fend off incoming offers, including the opportunity to work on a mega-budget “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie for Disney. “He served as my bouncer,” said Zeitlin, now 37, who instead took his newfound cachet and created his own pirate adventure.“When it became clear that we were going to have this opportunity to make whatever we wanted, we were like, ‘O.K., we got to make the craziest one now, because who knows if they’ll ever let us back in,’” he said.The Oscar visibility did buy him something: a bigger budget, a more ambitious palette and significant development money from his new studio partner, Fox Searchlight — the company that secured a first-look deal with the auteur when it paid $2 million for U.S. rights to “Beasts.”He filmed on the islands of Montserrat and Antigua, Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula and in Louisiana. Postproduction lasted close to two years. And the film was made using the same unconventional approach he employed for “Beasts”: writing and rewriting all the way through production with his sister, Eliza Zeitlin, who also served as the production designer; casting nonactors to play the roles; preferring practical magic — like using a thermite mixture to create underwater fire — to computer graphics.Zeitlin debuted his film on Sunday to mixed reviews. The Playlist’s Greg Ellwood said “Zeitlin’s talent to soar cinematically remains intact,” while Leah Greenblatt of Entertainment Weekly wrote, “By the ninth montage of cliffs and shore and joyful screaming down a hill, it all starts to feel a little like a film-school reel.”Zeitlin’s decision to spend so much time on his own arts-and-crafts project left many shaking their heads. They may be equally perplexed to see the writer-director Tom McCarthy, who took on the Catholic Church in the best-picture winner “Spotlight” (2015), return to Sundance with “Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made,” a kids’ movie co-starring a computer-graphic polar bear that will debut on Disney Plus next week.“I’ve seen a lot of people win Oscars, win best pictures, do that thing, and then it’s like they’re almost trying too hard to go back to the well,” McCarthy said. “I didn’t want to do that.”The awards race marathon — which this year concludes on Feb. 9 — is a boon for the industry: Studios spend gobs to promote their best films, and the Hollywood ecosystem froths from the trickle-down economics. Everybody from trade publications to florists to limo drivers benefits from the awards industrial complex — everyone, except maybe the talent. Yes, their star power rises in both ephemeral and concrete ways, but for those hellbent on creating their own destiny, the months away from their work can be dispiriting.Zeitlin had been away from his New Orleans home for most of the year following the Sundance debut of “Beasts.” “I was both desperate to get home and desperate to get to work,” he said. “It was the first year I hadn’t created anything, and that was the most intense feeling.”McCarthy too had moved his family temporarily to Los Angeles for his awards-campaign obligations. It was a “wholly uncreative” time, he said.The 53-year old director, who began his career as a character actor, had been warned years earlier that this would happen. Back in 2004, he had a toe-dip experience with the awards race when his directorial debut, “Station Agent,” vied briefly for accolades against Peter Jackson’s final “Lord of the Rings” installment. McCarthy kept running into the New Zealander on the campaign trail, and Jackson’s frenetic pace didn’t align with the rest of the nominees’ behavior. His secret: In between all the glad-handing he would hole up at a hotel in Los Angeles writing “King Kong” with Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens.“He said to me, ‘If you can, cling to the work,’” McCarthy recalled.Cut to 2016, and McCarthy found his creative reprieve two weeks before the Oscars, when his New York theater friend Brian Yorkey asked him to help out on a new Netflix series “13 Reasons Why.” A surprising follow-up to “Spotlight”? Maybe. But the project was set to start shooting soon, and McCarthy could dive in, writing and directing on what would become one of the streaming giant’s most popular series.“I really just wanted to work,” McCarthy said. “I didn’t have another movie ready, and I didn’t want to just jump into another movie.”That same ethos has now returned McCarthy to Sundance, 17 years after the festival launched his directing career. His friends have given him grief for giving up his indie cred; one text message read, “See you’re keeping it real at Sundance with your Disney movie.” He, too, is aware of the irony. For “Station Agent,” his producers gave out beef jerky as the film’s party favor. For the “Timmy” premiere, Disney created an ice sculpture of a polar bear.Still, McCarthy finds no shame in making a kids’ movie. To him, chronicling the adventures of a quirky, complicated kid detective was just as invigorating as depicting the Boston Globe newsroom in “Spotlight.”“This film was still a tremendous challenge, dealing with what does it mean to make a movie for 10-year-olds, and what does it mean to have a polar bear in the movie? Whenever I’m engaged like that, I’m happy,” he said.Zeitlin’s grand experiment of keeping Hollywood at arm’s length has also meant he could maintain his single-minded approach to making movies. It helps that he’s changed very little in his life since “Beasts.” He moved into a different rented house, though not a nicer one. He’s single. He doesn’t own a car, or even a pet.“My biggest fear is not being able to make my art,” he said. “If people don’t like my movie or whatever, knowing that I can always go home and live, and make things that I want to make has always been really important to me. So, I’ve never taken on anything that would be a real problem if I lost it.” More

The director Osgood Perkins specializes in not-quite-horror movies: eerie, patient, female-centric tales that hint at far more than they reveal. In “I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House” (2016), he teased a standard haunting into a conversation between life and death. And with the more bloody “Blackcoat’s Daughter” (released in the U.S. in 2017), he used shifting timelines and an isolated girls’ boarding school to examine grief and abandonment.“Gretel & Hansel” finds him relying once again on atmosphere over narrative. Flipping the title of the well-known fairy tale, he sends the two siblings (confidently played by Sophia Lillis and Sammy Leakey) into the deep, dark woods. Famine and disease have ravaged the countryside, and the children’s distraught mother, unable to feed them, has cast them out to fend for themselves. A friendly hunter (Charles Babalola) warns them not to talk to wolves, however seductive; but it’s their human counterparts who are more to be feared.[embedded content]“Are you intact?,” a leering nobleman asks the teenage Gretel in response to her pleas for a housekeeper position. And when, starving, the two are enticed into the suspiciously food-filled cottage of an old crone (an unsettling Alice Krige), the vile secret behind her abundant vittles might put you off your own.Essentially the story of a young woman coming into her power, “Gretel & Hansel” is quietly sinister, yet too underdeveloped to truly scare. Together, Jeremy Reed’s production design and Galo Olivares’s photography weave a chilly spell that’s regrettably undermined by the opacity of the storytelling. Like our two babes in the wood, the movie needs a bit more meat on its bones.Gretel & HanselRated PG-13 for bloody offal and sickening sweets. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. More

Some time in 1998, riding high on critical acclaim for her performance alongside George Clooney in Steven Soderbergh’s sultry crime thriller “Out of Sight,” the rising actress Jennifer Lopez approached her manager with an unconventional idea: She wanted to make an album.Lopez recalled his response was not encouraging in a recent “CBS Sunday Morning” interview: “Well, you know, you won’t be taken seriously as an actress now if you make a record, so how about we just stick to the acting right now?” That was not an option. The experience of playing the Tejano singer Selena Quintanilla-Pérez in a 1997 biopic had reignited a fire. “Once I did the movie ‘Selena,’ I was like, No, I’m doing it,” she said with a flash in her eyes.On Sunday, Lopez will headline the Super Bowl halftime show with Shakira, joining the recent ranks of Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Madonna and Katy Perry. Her status as a triple-threat pop cultural polyglot by now feels so inevitable that it can be easy to forget what she risked in 1999 when she released her debut album, “On the 6.” A Los Angeles Times profile from that May — headline: “It’s Not ‘La Vida Loca’ to Her” — wondered why she would “put her red-hot film career on hold for more than a year to make an album.” (It’s hard to think of a contemporary equivalent to this surprise: Perhaps if Timothée Chalamet announced a break to focus on his rap career?) Even in the waning boom days of the recording industry, J. Lo’s music career was far from a guaranteed triumph.But the gambit worked, of course. Her debut single, “If You Had My Love,” held No. 1 on the Billboard chart for five weeks that summer; “On the 6” went multiplatinum and was nominated for two Grammys. Her 2001 follow-up, “J.Lo,” fared even better, and its debut atop the album chart made her the first person in history to score a No. 1 album and a No. 1 movie (“The Wedding Planner”) simultaneously.In some sense, though, that manager’s prophecy came true. “The Wedding Planner” was not exactly “Out of Sight”: The daffy, predictable rom-com that asked its audience to believe that Jennifer Lopez was Italian currently holds a 16 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes. “Gigli” would soon follow — and that’s all that needs to be said about that. In pursuing a pop career, and thus a less solemn and obedient identity as a Serious Actress, Lopez telegraphed early on that she was a bit too restless to play by Hollywood’s rules. Pop music offered Lopez more flexibility anyway: Leading roles weren’t exactly flowing to Latinas, and meaningful conversations about diversity in the movie industry were more than a decade away.Now, over 20 years after her first pivot to music, a jilted Hollywood seems once again to be thumbing its nose at Lopez. Though she was widely expected to receive her first Oscar nomination for her complex, defiantly unsentimental performance as stripper-turned-grifter Ramona Vega in the hit movie “Hustlers,” the Academy left her in the cold. (“First of all, ‘Hustlers’ is not an Oscar movie,” one 91-year-old Academy voter recently told Page Six.) The supporting actress nominees are all white.It does not feel entirely coincidental that this rebuke happened on the heels of yet another year when Lopez worked overtime to remind the world that — far from a side-hustle or a part-time vanity project — she is still very much an active musician. In April she released a new single, “Medicine,” which features the rapper French Montana and has a surreal, Busby-Berkley-meets-haute-couture music video. Then, following a successful Las Vegas residency that ended in 2018, last summer Lopez embarked on the 38-date (and $54.7 million-grossing) It’s My Party arena tour; her performances were an entertaining and impressively athletic blend of showgirl glitz and South Bronx grit.The tour was also evidence that Lopez is particularly well-suited for the Super Bowl halftime show — an event that calls for a glitter-encrusted ringmaster’s charisma, a catalog of hits that anyone can sing along to, and a kind of professionalized sass and sex appeal that does not quite veer into the territory of an F.C.C. violation (as Janet Jackson and M.I.A. can attest). It should be an especially fitting display of her talents: The quintessential Jennifer Lopez experience is an audiovisual one, allowing her to glide fluidly between music, movement and the theatrical star-power that can keep an audience riveted. And given both Justin Timberlake’s somnolent 2018 performance and Maroon 5 and Travis Scott’s haphazard, cringe-inducing celebration of Adam Levine’s chest tattoos, the past few halftime shows have offered plenty of room for improvement.Lopez’s musical career has not been without its misfires, but she has remained tenaciously committed to it as a necessary creative outlet. Its duration alone, in the fickle and ageist world of pop, is staggering: The 50-year-old Lopez has stuck around long enough to ride the wave of two different “Latin booms,” from “Bailamos” to Bad Bunny. She’s moved relatively nimbly with the changing tides, from the airy confections of the “TRL” era to the harder crystalline beats that accompanied the EDM-crazed 2010s. One of the most successful singles of Lopez’s career, the driving, sing-song-y Pitbull collaboration “On the Floor” came in 2011, a full 12 years after her debut album.But from “On the 6” to her recent Oscar snub, Lopez seems to have found, in her pop career, a sense of freedom and validation that has eluded her in Hollywood, where she continues to vibrate at a slightly different frequency. She founded her own production company and in 2016 starred in one of its creations, the network cop show “Shades of Blue,” while others were leaning toward prestige TV. The figure of the Serious Actress is still cut from a stiff, restrictive cloth. But if you know one thing about J. Lo, it’s that she has an innate desire to move.At least in the pop-cultural consciousness, Lopez was first known as a dancer. There she is grooving in the video for Janet Jackson’s 1993 hit “That’s the Way Love Goes,” and backing New Kids on the Block in an American Music Awards performance that screams 1991. (Even before then, she’d cut her teeth in musical theater, appearing in regional productions of “Oklahoma!” and “Jesus Christ Superstar.”) In 1992, she bested 2,000 other hopefuls when she snagged a coveted spot as a Fly Girl on the sketch comedy show “In Living Color.” But Lopez didn’t want to be hemmed too tightly into that role either: She turned down an offer to be a backing dancer on Jackson’s tour because she wanted to act.By the time she’d established herself onscreen — “Selena” was her breakthrough — and finally got around to giving pop stardom a go, Jenny had been around the proverbial block. On the Billboard charts and MTV, Lopez suddenly found herself competing with upstarts nearly half her age. Remember that 1999 marked not just the year of “On the 6,” but also the arrival of “Baby One More Time” and “Genie in a Bottle” — by 17-year-old Britney Spears and 18-year-old Christina Aguilera. Lopez turned 30 that July.Especially for women, pop is often considered the domain of the almost criminally young. But in her most iconic music videos, Lopez’s age actually gave her something of an edge. Compared to the nymphets sharing her “TRL” airtime, Lopez projected a grown woman who was in full control of her image, at ease with her sexuality and confident in her incessantly Googled body.On an episode of the podcast Still Processing, the New York Times writer Jenna Wortham suggested that Lopez’s music videos created a space in which she could express more of herself than she could in almost any of her movie roles — whether it was the bumbling and questionably Italian rom-com heroine, the cat-fighting rival (“Monster in Law”) or the tragic victim (“Enough”). “You see this woman who knows exactly where she is, in space and time,” Wortham said. “She’s not tripping over things, she doesn’t have to fight with anybody, she’s paying her own bills, her life is not in danger. She is exactly where she’s supposed to be, and she looks like she’s loving every minute of it.”Perhaps because of her varied résumé, Lopez isn’t always thought of as a pop superstar. But when she’s good, she is better than she gets credit for. The pulsating “Waiting for Tonight” remains a Y2K dance floor classic; her brassy 2004 single “Get Right” is an eternal fan favorite; even “Dinero,” her playfully raucous 2018 collaboration with Cardi B and DJ Khaled proves she can ham it up with a new generation of kindred spirits. She has admitted recently that she accepted the gig as a judge on “American Idol” in part to garner a little more respect in the music world. “I don’t think I had been taken seriously up until then for what I knew about music,” Lopez told Variety. (She was a judge on the show from 2010 to 2016.)Plenty of Hollywood types told her that job might jeopardize her film career, too — but Lopez had heard that one before. “I was like, ‘The truth is, I’m not getting offered a whole bunch of movies,’” she said, “so what are they not going to offer me?”The major cultural events of the next two weeks will once again draw attention to the duality of Lopez’s stardom. That will probably be to her advantage. The Oscars are poised to be especially bland this year, with their lack of diversity, predictable narratives and old-fashioned reverence for movies about white male rage. It would have been an honor to have been invited, sure, but that’s not J. Lo’s kind of party anyway. Maybe the greatest gift the Oscar ceremony can offer her is the opportunity to upstage it the weekend before. More

In the first minutes of “The Rhythm Section,” Blake Lively is seen as a purposeful but stressed-out assassin, a mild, loving member of an upper middle class British family, and a heroin-addicted prostitute. She inhabits all these personae with commitment. The actual order of events for her character, Stephanie, is family girl, addict, assassin. The director Reed Morano couches the domestic persona in soft diffused light and the hardened one in shallow-focus claustrophobia.Stephanie has lost her family in a plane disaster. After succumbing to despair, she learns the explosion wasn’t an accident, but an act of terrorism. The Islamic kind. Or was it? The tired script by Mark Burnell, based on his own novel, ultimately doesn’t have the energy to capitalize on red-herring bad faith.[embedded content]Revenge-seeking Stephanie soon finds a rogue, or ex, MI6 agent, played by Jude Law, who teaches her to fight and kill while dispensing bromides like “Even if you succeed, it won’t be worth it.” Her subsequent adventures include an infatuation with an assassination arranger — a rogue, or ex, C.I.A. agent played by Sterling K. Brown.The movie is produced by Barbara Broccoli and Michael Wilson, the keepers of the James Bond franchise keys. “The Rhythm Section” suggests they want to extend a multifilm license to kill to a female character. (Spoiler alert: Burnell’s novel was the first in a series.) But this picture makes an iffy origin tale.The talented Morano, whose work on the TV series “The Handmaid’s Tale” shows a knack for shuddery grim realism, sometimes seems to want to subvert the espionage-action genre by bludgeoning the pleasure out of it. One fight scene pitting Lively against the wiry, insistent Richard Brake is so severely brutal it feels like Soderbergh’s “Haywire” remade by Lars von Trier. Audiences may be more shaken than stirred.The Rhythm SectionRated R for bludgeoning, gouging, shooting and so on. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. More

The Israeli drama “Incitement” grabs a third rail and holds on tight. The movie, directed by Yaron Zilberman (“A Late Quartet”), presents a discomfortingly close-range depiction of what Yigal Amir saw and heard in the roughly two years before he assassinated Yitzhak Rabin, the prime minister, on Nov. 4, 1995.Both the subject matter and the approach are fraught with danger. Even making a movie about an assassin risks elevating him to a stomach-turning level of prominence — although given the shadow that Amir already casts over the politics of contemporary Israel, where Rabin’s rival Benjamin Netanyahu remains in power and the peace process that Rabin fought for has receded into the horizon, perhaps that notoriety already exists.[embedded content]But a film that argues that Amir (played by the extraordinary actor Yehuda Nahari Halevi) didn’t act in a vacuum — that he was a burning fuse that, again and again, friends, family members and rabbis refused to put out — might also appear to be making excuses for his actions. “Incitement” makes the implicit case that such a criticism would have the issue backward: The notion that the political atmosphere and religious extremism in Israel in the 1990s incited Amir to violence is not new. And while Amir may be in prison, this tense, politically angry film suggests that Israel bypassed a reckoning with the nurturers of his fanaticism.Zilberman mitigates some of the perils of the project by subtly differentiating his movie’s perspective from Amir’s. At a screening at the New York Jewish Film Festival earlier this month, the director said he had opted for several distancing devices — odd angles, no melody in the score — to keep viewers from getting swept up in Amir’s point of view.Halevi is in virtually every scene, often in close-up or with the camera over his shoulder, and is frequently isolated within the claustrophobic, squarish frame. (The actor’s sly smile is chilling at the beginning and becomes more so as the movie goes on.)The son of Yemeni-born parents, Amir is shown as a striving law student with a chip on his shoulder. He pursues a relationship with Nava (Daniella Kertesz), whose parents, settlers in the West Bank, would rather see her involved with someone else. (Their first scene together is a rare occasion when “Incitement” seems too on-the-nose: “I’m like a laser pointer,” he tells her. “I wonder what your next target is,” she replies.)The product of a politically divided household — his father, a Torah scribe, supports the Oslo Accords on which Rabin staked his leadership, while his mother does not — the movie’s Amir surrounds himself with toxic influences. Early in the film, he listens intently to a rabbi who defends Baruch Goldstein, who massacred 29 praying Muslims in Hebron in 1994. He has a crackpot dream of starting a vigilante militia that will do things the Israel Defense Forces will not, and using religious retreats to lure recruits. Those close to him ignore or dismiss as jokes his declarations that someone should kill Rabin. The most generous interpretation of the rabbis from whom he seeks religious justification for an assassination is that they see his questions as hypotheticals.Potently, “Incitement” depicts Amir as just one member of a self-reinforcing fringe. Few people he interacts with challenge his beliefs. Zilberman gives the movie an extra charge by fluidly interweaving scenes of the dramatized Amir with news clips of political speeches and rallies from the time — the sort of rallies at which posters might show Rabin’s face caught in cross hairs. The overall sense is that, with conditions set, incitement is an easy, even passive process — and that Amir’s murder of Rabin is not only a tragedy, but also a cautionary tale.IncitementNot rated. In Hebrew, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 3 minutes. More

The specter of Harvey Weinstein looms over every frame of “The Assistant,” though we never see the face of the anonymous New York film-company executive whose toxic behavior drives the story. We hear him, though, laughing conspiratorially with a young female hopeful behind his tightly closed office door, or barking reprimands on the telephone to Jane (Julia Garner), his lowliest staffer.After these attacks, Jane’s closest co-workers (Noah Robbins and Jon Orsini) resignedly help her compose the necessary apology email, suggesting phrases laden with gratitude and promises to do better. (They’ve been there; they know how to feed the beast.) Otherwise Jane, a recent college grad who hopes to become a producer, is mostly invisible to them as she washes dishes in the break room, copies scripts, makes her employer’s travel plans and fields his phone calls. The ones from women are the trickiest.[embedded content]Unfolding over one acutely distressing workday, “The Assistant” is less a #MeToo story than a painstaking examination of the way individual slights can coalesce into a suffocating miasma of harassment. That funk is breathed by everyone in a movie that strikingly pairs the executive’s demeaning actions with the stifling moral vacancy of the power structure that shields him. In one virtuosic scene, Jane haltingly complains to a seemingly welcoming human resources representative (a marvelous Matthew Macfadyen). The turn taken by their conversation will hit you like velvet-covered shrapnel.Written and directed by Kitty Green (whose last film was the 2017 documentary “Casting JonBenet”), “The Assistant” is hushed and gray-toned and glacial. More than a few viewers will find it a grim, even taxing watch; but Garner is so wonderfully cast that she makes the slow draining of Jane’s soul almost visible. On the long pre-dawn drive from her Queens apartment to her Manhattan office, the film captures her huddled sleepily in a company car, a small, pale figure dwarfed by rearing skyscrapers. Her fragility, though, is deceptive, and Jane’s anxiety over her boss’s perceived victims must be tugged back into line with a steely self-interest. When she reads his chillingly manipulative email — “I’m tough on you because I’m gonna make you great” — we can almost see her spine straighten with renewed ambition.Jane isn’t one of those victims — “You’re not his type,” the H.R. guy tells her, in a twisted attempt to reassure — but she doesn’t have to be. The degradations lie in the jewelry and stains she clears from his couch cushions, in the blank checks she types and in the nervously chatting ingénue she transports to a nearby hotel: The spoor of the workplace predator is wearyingly familiar and as ubiquitous as offices themselves. In its muted, minutiae-obsessed way, “The Assistant” is saying to these men, We see you. We have always seen you.The AssistantRated R for harsh words and scattered syringes. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. More