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      ‘Stormy’ Review: Stormy Daniels Traces How Trump Case Upended Her Life

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      A new documentary on Stormy Daniels traces how fame, frenzy and legal battles involving a former president upended her life.The arrival of “Stormy,” a new documentary on Peacock, is timely. In several weeks, former President Donald J. Trump is scheduled to go on trial in a case in which he’s accused of covering up a 2016 payment to the pornographic film star known as Stormy Daniels. (The trial was originally supposed start in late March, but has now been delayed until at least mid-April.)The documentary uses interviews and observational footage to recount the legal saga from Daniels’s perspective. It begins with the requisite accounts of her upbringing, her introduction to the sex industry and the 2006 tryst she says she had with Trump. “Stormy” then pivots to the period after the story of Daniels’s allegation of a sexual encounter with Trump was made public, tracing how the sudden fame and frenzy upended her personal life.After so much media coverage, certain details of the events feel overly familiar. But the director, Sarah Gibson, is often able to put the episodes into fresh contexts. Take the rise and fall of Michael Avenatti, Daniels’s onetime lawyer, who in 2022 was convicted of stealing from her: Rather than merely rehashing Avenatti’s offenses, Gibson positions him amid a wave of supposed male allies.These men go on to betray Daniels in ways that range from vexing to existential. And in a startling twist, some of the film’s footage comes from another documentary — never released — whose director became briefly involved with Daniels while shooting.“I’m not that special. I feel like a hypocrite,” Daniels says in one scene, considering her newfound status as a liberal luminary while preparing for a strip club performance. The sentiment gestures at complex questions about misogyny, female power and sexual agency. “Stormy” wisely lets these issues linger rather than tying a bow over them.StormyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. Watch on Peacock. More

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      Paul Simon Faced Unexpected Struggles. Cameras Were Rolling.

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      The singer and songwriter invited Alex Gibney to capture the making of his album “Seven Psalms.” The filmmaker was surprised to find a musician losing his hearing.Paul Simon had only one request of the filmmaker undertaking “In Restless Dreams,” a documentary about his life: “He wanted the music to sound good,” the director and producer Alex Gibney said.Over the years, Gibney, 70, has told the stories of many lives, including Elizabeth Holmes’s (“The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley”), Lance Armstrong’s (“The Armstrong Lie”) and Dilawar’s, an Afghan farmer who was tortured to death by U.S. soldiers in 2002 (“Taxi to the Dark Side,” for which he won an Academy Award for best documentary feature). He’s taken on musical legends like James Brown, Janis Joplin and Frank Sinatra.The Simon film, however, came with the most tempting of offers: a chance to come out to the singer’s ranch in Wimberley, Texas, and film him as he worked on his latest album, “Seven Psalms,” which was released last year.“That sort of thing doesn’t happen often at all,” Gibney said. “I got myself down to Texas as quickly as possible.”“In Restless Dreams,” which premiered on Sunday on MGM+ (for TV viewers, the film is split in two, with the second half airing March 24), begins with Simon’s earliest days growing up in Queens, N.Y., as he and his onetime musical partner Art Garfunkel learned to harmonize by listening to the Everly Brothers. We see Simon (and sometimes Garfunkel) create beloved albums including “Sounds of Silence,” “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and “Graceland”; perform in Central Park in 1981, a concert that attracted half a million fans and led to a brief reunion of the duo; and tackle everything from movie soundtracks (“The Graduate”) to acting roles (“One-Trick Pony”).There are several scenes of Simon working on some of American pop music’s most memorable tunes in a manner that has long impressed contemporaries like Wynton Marsalis, who met Simon in 2002. “He has a mystical understanding,” Marsalis said in a video interview. “He can see the timeless through the specific.”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

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      A Filmmaker Needed a Quiet Place to Write. Where Better Than a Tuscan Villa?

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      TWO YEARS AGO, the Spanish filmmaker Albert Moya came to Florence to visit an artist friend who’d unwittingly become the caretaker of a large family estate, left empty after a famous Italian writer died, on the outskirts of town. Moya was staying nearby, at the tumbledown hotel Torre di Bellosguardo, when he learned that another unlikely (and quite strange) residence had become available. It was in the area — the southwestern Florentine hills, quiet and almost suburban, where families have long purchased properties with views of the Duomo — so Moya decided to stop by. “Anyone who lives here looks at the market all the time,” he says over espresso one frosty December morning. “There’s nothing [available], really. So when something comes up, it’s kind of pornographic.”For the filmmaker Albert Moya’s apartment in Villa di Marignolle, in Florence, Italy, the architect Guillermo Santomà designed a carpeted dining table lit from below and a blue velvet curtain to match.Ricardo LabougleMoya and Santomà created separate spaces in the multipurpose living room — one area for lounging, one for editing films and, upstairs, an area for working out.Ricardo LabougleThe director, 34, was raised in a village of 800 people outside of Barcelona, but has spent most of his adulthood in New York and Paris, where he creates videos for luxury brands like Loewe and Louis Vuitton. He entered the fashion world accidentally: The Belgian designer Dries Van Noten was the first to hire him, after seeing his 2012 short, “American Autumn,” about a group of New York City schoolchildren hosting a Surrealist dinner party. Moya had come to Italy in part to work on the script for his debut feature — “about three brothers and their daddy issues, basically” — based on an idea he discussed with the Athens-based screenwriter Efthimis Filippou, best known for collaborating with the Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos on films like “The Lobster” (2015).The entrance to Moya’s apartment retains the original frescoed ceiling. The birch chairs are by Frama.Ricardo LabougleA low platform bed covered in an alpaca fur blanket.Ricardo LabougleMoya initially planned to find a more permanent home in Paris after his working holiday. Instead, after visiting the 2,475-square-foot apartment, he decided to stay in Florence so he could write in solitude. When he toured the rental, “it was full of crap but empty of people,” he says, noting that the last occupant, who bought the place in the 1970s and still owns it, was an Italian soccer player who “had this amazing taste and awareness of space and architecture.” Situated on the sunny second floor, it was one of four flats parceled out in the 1950s from a 14th-century Tuscan estate, Villa di Marignolle, that once belonged to the Medicis. The astronomer Galileo Galilei stayed here several times in the 17th century, until the family of artistic patrons eventually sold it off. Perhaps to counterbalance the house’s intact Renaissance-era frescoes, oak window frames and doors and large garden crowded with cypress trees, the owner had decorated most of the rooms with various types of shiny but handsome wood paneling for the floors, the arches that divide them and the railings of two lofted interior balconies. Those levels are reached via their own staircases at either end of the cavernous, 50-by-16-foot living area, from which the sole bedroom and small kitchen and bathroom branch out. “I like empty spaces and complete austerity because I travel for work. When I’m home, I want calm,” Moya says. “But here, the question was, ‘How do we respect the woodwork?’”A 2022 installation by Moya and the designer Guillermo Santomà.Albert MoyaWe 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

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      Joe Camp, Filmmaker Behind ‘Benji’ Franchise, Dies at 84

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      He defied the odds to turn “Benji,” a live-action film series from a dog’s perspective, into a smash hit, and turned the film industry on its head in the process.Joe Camp, a pioneering filmmaker who created a groundbreaking franchise with his “Benji” movies, which brought a lovable live-action dog to the masses and became a smash success, died on Friday at his home in Bell Buckle, Tenn. He was 84.His son the director Brandon Camp announced the death in a statement. He said his father died “following a long illness” but provided no other details.Joe Camp began thinking about directing when he was as young as 8 years old, but he would first encounter decades of rejections. While attending the University of Mississippi, he tried to transfer to U.C.L.A.’s film school, only to be turned down. After college, he dabbled in advertising at the Houston office of McCann Erickson and then at Norsworthy‐Mercer, an agency in Dallas, while writing unproduced sitcom scripts on the side.In 1971, Mr. Camp and James Nicodemus, a cinematographer, formed their own production company, Mulberry Square Productions, which was based in Dallas, far from the traditional hubs of the television and film industry, Los Angeles and New York.The idea for “Benji” came to Mr. Camp while he was watching the animated Disney feature film “Lady and the Tramp” (1955) in the late 1960s with his first wife, Carolyn (Hopkins) Camp. Afterward, Mr. Camp observed his own dog’s facial expressions and wondered if a movie could be made starring a real-life dog and told from the dog’s perspective.Higgins the dog appeared on the TV series “Petticoat Junction” before finding cinematic fame as the title character in the first “Benji” film in 1974.CBS Photo Archive, via Getty ImagesWe 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

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      In These CGI-Heavy Movies, There’s Not an Explosion in Sight

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      Though blockbusters are synonymous with computer imagery, dramas and art-house films rely extensively on tech magic, too. Don’t be fooled by the naturalism.A woman crosses a bustling street at night. Cars pass noisily. A streetcar cruises by. Behind her, we see twinkling streetlights, a cinema marquee, towering neon signs. It rained earlier; the roads are still wet. It’s Mexico City in the early 1970s, and it feels vibrantly alive.This is a scene in “Roma” (2018), Alfonso Cuarón’s naturalistic, semi-autobiographical black-and-white drama based on the life of the housekeeper who helped raise him as a child. It’s also, less obviously, a dazzling showcase of visual effects.The huge movie theater in the background is entirely CGI. So is the streetcar, and many of the other vehicles, as well as most of the buildings, signs, facades, lights and pedestrians. Even the reflections visible in the puddles on the road were created on a computer. Though it’s been designed to be completely inconspicuous and convincing, Aaron Weintraub, the head of creative operations at the visual effects studio MPC, describes this moment as “one of our flagship shots.”What comes to mind when you think of visual effects, or VFX? For most people, it’s fantasy and science fiction: aliens in spaceships, superheroes zooming across imaginary lands. And while it’s certainly true that big-budget genre films and summer blockbusters are rife with computer-generated imagery, VFX studios like MPC estimate that about half the work they produce is made to be invisible. For every “Kraven the Hunter” or “Argylle,” there’s a “Ferrari,” “Maestro” or “Killers of the Flower Moon,” movies with sophisticated visual effects that the filmmakers hope you’ll never realize was an effect at all.“When people talk about VFX, it’s the obvious stuff — the explosions, the laser beams, the science-fiction stuff,” Weintraub said. “But there’s a whole world of work being done that’s transparent to the audience, and no one is supposed to know.” He likened it to the work of film and TV costume designers. What attracts attention and wins Oscars, he said, are “lavish period costumes and fancy superhero suits,” but in fact, “you have a costume designer on every film who makes normal clothes that normal people wear, and no one talks about them.”In “Nightmare Alley,” the digital effects include the addition of flames, above, and the deletion of a line of dialogue. Searchlight PicturesWe 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

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      ‘The American Society of Magical Negroes’ Review

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      Kobi Libii’s satirical comedy, starring Justice Smith, tries to explore the trope but leans too hard on the conventions of superhero tales and rom-coms.Kobi Libii’s satirical comedy, “The American Society of Magical Negroes,” opens in an art gallery where people are milling about. A young Black man tries to walk through the crowd, constantly apologizing and sidestepping the gallery-goers. He acts as if he feels in the way and out of place. But as we learn when he arrives at his own yarn installation, he’s one of the artists whose work is for sale.The scene says a lot with a little, hitting comic beats but ending deflatedly thanks to the art dealer’s ruthless reaction to this diffidence. Yet the behavior of the young artist, Aren (the enormously talented Justice Smith), is exactly what catches the eye of a bartender at the show, Roger (David Alan Grier), who hides a secret identity. Cue the title of the film, which turns the movie trope of the “Magical Negro” character into a mission statement: Roger belongs to an elite group tasked with eliminating discomfort for white people and making them feel better about themselves.Roger recruits Aren, and within moments, they’re helping white people leap their anxieties in a single bound. Libii’s premise rests on the rationale that “the happier they are, the safer we are,” as Roger puts it. When he and Aren pacify a disgruntled white cop by helping him get into a nightclub, it seems clear that the stakes involve the threat of racial violence, though these ideas prove to be a challenge to explore in a film that leans into romantic comedy.Aren’s big assignment is to go undercover at a tech company and build up a co-worker, Jason (Drew Tarver), who’s feeling down for a couple of reasons. He’s hit a dead end at work, and he’s sweet on his superior, Lizzie (An-Li Bogan), but barely seems to know it. Aren must help Jason realize his dreams while suppressing his own: Aren and Lizzie have already flirted, quite promisingly, in an early meet-cute scene.Libii’s story underlines the self-negation involved in the trope of the title and ridicules the expectations and constraints forced upon Black people in myriad ways. The American Society of Magical Negroes has a hideout where Aren and other agents are trained on scenarios that echo the selfless-helper plots of “The Green Mile” and “The Legend of Bagger Vance.”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

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      Cillian Murphy, Barry Keoghan, and Paul Mescal Spark a Thirst for the Irish

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      Barry Keoghan, Paul Mescal and Cillian Murphy are among a crop of Irish hunks who have infused popular culture with big Irish energy.Sabrina Carpenter may already be dating an Irish hunk: The actress and singer attended the Vanity Fair Oscars party with the Irish actor Barry Keoghan last Sunday, adding fuel to rumors of their romantic involvement.But any feelings Ms. Carpenter may have for Mr. Keoghan did not stop her from saying she had eyes for Cillian Murphy, another Irishman, in an interview with Vanity Fair filmed before the party. Ms. Carpenter joked that if she saw Mr. Murphy at the event, she would leave with him.After a video of the interview was shared on Instagram, Mr. Keoghan left a comment. It had no words, only two emojis: a person with a hand raised and a shamrock. Another user commented, “She has a thing for the Irish just like me.”Mr. Keoghan, 31, and Mr. Murphy, 47, along with Paul Mescal, 28, and Andrew Scott, 47, have recently infused popular culture with big Irish energy by starring in the films “Saltburn,” “Oppenheimer” and “All of Us Strangers.” As a result, those actors have ushered in a moment for Irish crushes.The film “All of Us Strangers” featured a double dose of Irish hunks: specifically, Paul Mescal, left, and Andrew Scott.Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesSome of them seem to have leaned into their reputation. Mr. Keoghan appeared on a version of the cover of Vanity Fair’s Hollywood issue butt naked. His body was only slightly more clothed in a Valentine’s Day campaign by the dating app Bumble; those images, when shared on social media, had some people drooling in the comments.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

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      AMC Theaters, Looking for Movies, Turns to Blumhouse

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      The theater chain and the entertainment company are teaming up for a five-day festival of old horror films in 40 cities, compensating for a lack of new films.For five days starting on March 29, people who buy tickets to certain movies at certain AMC Theaters will see video messages starring … Jason Blum?It’s a long way from Nicole Kidman, whose breathy “We come to this place for magic” branding spot has become legend. But Mr. Blum, a horror film producer, has been working to build his entertainment company, Blumhouse, into more of a consumer-facing brand. The goal is to create an association between its name and everything scary, sort of like Marvel and superheroes. That, in turn, could make Blumhouse more valuable as an acquisition target in the years ahead.AMC and Blumhouse, which has made more than 200 horror movies and shows, are teaming up for what they are calling the Halfway to Halloween Film Festival. (It’s more like 40 percent of the way.) Previously released Blumhouse horror movies, including “Split,” “Ouija: Origin of Evil,” “The Purge,” “The Invisible Man” and “Insidious,” which will have its 13th anniversary on April 1, will be on offer in 100 AMC theaters in 40 cities.Mr. Blum, 55, will introduce each film with a tailored message, offering an anecdote about the production or a tidbit of trivia. James Wan, who directed “Insidious,” will appear in a video, as will Mike Flanagan, who directed “Ouija: Origin of Evil.” Ticket buyers will also see elaborate ads known as sizzle reels for Blumhouse, which will promote the event through its social media channels.“Horror has always attracted misfits, me included, and participating in events like this allows me to celebrate that,” Mr. Blum said, before referring to one of the company’s signature films. “I like taking risks on stories that other people find too risky — like ‘Get Out’ — and having a brand allows me to do that.”Anya Taylor-Joy in “Split,” which took in $278 million in 2017.Universal/BlumhouseWe 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