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      Daisy Ridley Loves Every Single Track of This Stormzy Album

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      When the star of the film “Sometimes I Think About Dying” listens to “This Is What I Mean,” she says, “I don’t shuffle it, nothing. It’s perfect.”For her latest movie, “Sometimes I Think About Dying,” Daisy Ridley plays Fran, a drab, standoffish, occasionally obnoxious office worker. Strangely enough, she found it exciting.“Fran is a woman who loves her job; she loves her routine,” Ridley said in a video interview from London. “She thinks about dying, but she doesn’t want to die. She has just created this very rich inner world for herself because she struggles to connect with people in a real-life way.”Then a new guy moves into a cubicle near hers.“I would not say the film is one of fireworks,” she said. “I would describe it as embers of something being ignited.”Ridley is of course better known for her role as Rey in the “Star Wars” films. She will wield her lightsaber once again in the upcoming “Star Wars: New Jedi Order,” although she hadn’t yet read the script when we spoke.“What I know is the story is really cool, really exciting and very worthwhile,” she said, before explaining why hot baths and reality TV and “Small Worlds” by Caleb Azumah Nelson and Stormzy’s “This Is What I Mean” are among her cultural necessities. “I did not think I would be coming back, but when I was told the story, I was like, ‘OK, that’s [expletive] awesome.’”These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1Back RollersI did a film called “Young Woman and the Sea,” about the first woman to swim the [English] Channel, a German American called Trudy Ederle. I was doing an awful lot of swimming, and my body was pretty messed up afterward. My spine felt like it had been a bit compressed. So since that movie, whenever I roll, my back goes crrrkk the whole way. But there’s nothing nicer than the feeling.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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      Harmony Korine’s ‘Aggro Dr1ft’ Makes Los Angeles Debut

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      Critics panned “Aggro Dr1ft,” but the film found its intended audience in a surreal experience at a Los Angeles strip club.At the Los Angeles premiere of the filmmaker Harmony Korine’s “Aggro Dr1ft,” which was held on Wednesday night at Hollywood’s Crazy Girls strip club, scantily clad dancers shimmied on three small stages.Mr. Korine, a 51-year-old experimental artist known for directing 2012’s “Spring Breakers,” has been seeking to understand and capitalize on youth culture since he wrote the 1995 cult classic “Kids” when he was only 19. That’s why the enigmatic filmmaker, actor, photographer, painter, D.J. and author is aiming to disrupt the traditional cinematic release format by offering immersive experiences for a group of film, fashion, skate and fine art ventures, which he launched with “Aggro Dr1ft.”At the film’s first public screening, which drew about 400 people, a smoke machine blew softly overhead, creating fog reminiscent of the pouring rain outside. A merchandise station for EDGLRD, Korine’s multimedia design collective — and his D.J. moniker — was set up in the back corner offering branded T-shirts, hoodies, skateboards and more. The screening was followed directly by D.J. sets from the music producer AraabMuzik and from Mr. Korine himself.The film, shot with an infrared lens, was screened inside Hollywood’s Crazy Girls strip club.Gabriella Angotti-Jones for The New York TimesA merchandise station featured “Aggro Dr1ft” skateboards and clothing.Gabriella Angotti-Jones for The New York TimesShowing a movie at a strip club is an unusual choice, which is typical of EDGLRD’s rollout strategy, according to the company’s head of film strategy and development, Eric Kohn.“What we’re leaning into with this company is a more expansive approach to creativity,” Mr. Kohn said. “We’re trying to engineer a new way to get this kind of work out in the world that isn’t beholden to the limited economics of the film market. You’ve never seen a movie in a strip club before but you’ve also never seen a movie like this before.”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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      New True Crime: ‘Lover, Stalker, Killer’ and ‘Mostly Harmless’

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      Two new movies reflect the range of quality in the booming genre. They also raise questions about why we are drawn to such stories.Remember the old “Arrested Development” axiom that “there’s always money in the banana stand”? For streamers, that banana stand is true crime, judging from the rate at which these movies are turned out. Many of the lurid tales of kidnapping, murder and stolen identities have been covered already in podcasts, but documentaries add tantalizing visual elements — photographs of the deceased, talking-head interviews, archival footage — that apparently keep fans coming back.Of course, as entertainment goes, this is nothing new. Flicking through cable stations years ago would reveal plenty of documentaries and docudramas that retold similar tales. What’s changed is how bingeable they are — you can listen to endless podcasts and watch endless streaming shows, one after the other — and, perhaps as significantly, how the anonymity of the internet has become a key feature of both the crime and the investigation.Two of this week’s new releases fit this mold, and also indicate the quality range of these kinds of films, from passable to genuinely revelatory. (Both, incidentally, have already gotten the podcast treatment at least once.)On the lesser end is the Netflix documentary “Lover, Stalker, Killer,” directed by Sam Hobkinson, which recounts the ordeal that a man named Dave Kroupa went through when he started receiving strange, menacing messages from an ex-girlfriend he met through dating apps. The tale is mildly twisty, and Kroupa and several others participate in the documentary, which makes it watchable. But the major turn happens far from the end of the film, and it’s hard to maintain tension after that. Most of the filmmaking feels perfunctory, too. Yet, as our critic Glenn Kenny put it in his review, “By now these are accepted conventions, so there’s little point in complaining.”My expectations weren’t all that high for the Max documentary “They Called Him Mostly Harmless,” directed by Patricia E. Gillespie, about a dead hiker found in Florida’s Big Cypress Natural Preserve. He was emaciated and had no identification on him but, curiously, did have food and cash. Trying to identify his body, law enforcement found itself at a standstill, with no idea who he was.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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      Five Black Romantic Movies to Stream

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      For Valentine’s Day and Black History Month, watch these selections that brim with Black love, heartache and desire from across the diaspora.Much like Blackness is not monolithic, neither is Black love. The relationships in this collection range from young passions to midlife romance, and the types of movies range from glossy studio pictures to vital queer indies. They are poetic, comedic, rapturous and politically minded films — told with soul-stirring intimacy.‘The Best Man’ (1999)Rent or buy on most major platforms.It’s been years since Harper Stewart (Taye Diggs) has seen his old college buddies. With his best friend, Lance (Morris Chestnut), a star running back, getting married to Mia (Monica Calhoun), he must travel to New York City to attend their wedding. That prospect would be easier if Harper, a writer, didn’t base his new book off his friends’ lives. During the long weekend leading up to the wedding, Harper works to keep Lance from reading the novel, which contains a secret he’s kept from the groom, and from acting on his desires with an old flame, Kendra (Nia Long).Composed of a deep ensemble — Terrence Howard, Sanaa Lathan and Regina Hall included — the film follows multiple relationships as these adult friends confront their romantic futures through biting humor and unflinching honesty. And thankfully, it kicked off a charming romantic film and TV franchise.‘Boomerang’ (1992)Stream it on Paramount+.The Black romantic studio pictures of the 1990s were far different from their 1970s Blaxploitation predecessors. Rather than depicting an urban milieu populated by hustlers and pushers, the films that arrived during the newer decade captured an emerging, well-educated Black middle and upper class occupying high rises and boardrooms.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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      In ‘The Taste of Things,’ the Food Was Prepared by the Actors

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      “The Taste of Things” didn’t use cooking doubles, but a pro offscreen helped guide the stars. Getting the meals right was everything to the director Tran Anh Hung.Viewers may emerge from “The Taste of Things” desperate to find a restaurant that serves a good vol-au-vent, a turbot in hollandaise sauce or the meringue-coated ice cream confection known as baked alaska. But while the film, set in France at the end of the 19th century, features period-appropriate cuisine designed by the celebrated chef Pierre Gagnaire, the secret to what makes it so enticing isn’t the menu. It’s the gestures.“Something that is very important for me, from my childhood, is that I like watching people working with their hands,” said Tran Anh Hung, who received the best-director prize for the movie at the Cannes Film Festival in May. He remembered that as a boy in Vietnam — he has lived in France since 1975 — he would spend the whole day watching someone craft a door. He brought that interest in handiwork to “The Taste of Things,” which opens in New York on Friday. The drama centers on the relationship between an epicure, Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel), and his longtime cook and lover, Eugénie (Juliette Binoche). Their romance is in some ways expressed more through cooking and eating than through words, which is one reason that accentuating the sensuality of the food was important for Tran.But keeping the mechanics of cooking in sync with the apparatus of filmmaking is not easy, as Tran and past makers of foodie cinema have discovered. In “The Taste of Things,” there were no cooking doubles for the stars: Binoche and Magimel performed all the preparations that are shown onscreen themselves, Tran said.Jonathan Ricquebourg, the film’s cinematographer, recalled seeing Gagnaire at work and understanding what he was in for. “I realized how fast the magic disappeared,” he said. “When you take out a meal from the oven, for instance, the meal is very nice for a bunch of seconds.” But that disappears, he added, “when the crust is opening, because there is a changing of temperature.”A chef offscreen was instructing the actors as they worked.Carole Bethuel/IFC FilmsWe 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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      Jonathan Majors Had History of Abuse in Relationships, Women Say

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      The actor denied physical abuse. Separately, he said he wasn’t told of accusations of misbehavior on the set of “Lovecraft Country.”Since the actor Jonathan Majors was found guilty in December of assaulting and harassing a girlfriend, he has maintained his innocence and his hope of reviving a once-skyrocketing career that disintegrated in the wake of his conviction. In a televised interview last month, he said that he had “never struck a woman.”But in pretrial statements to the prosecution in that assault case and, separately, in interviews with The New York Times, another former girlfriend, Emma Duncan, accused him of emotionally and physically abusing her — choking her, throwing her around and bruising her. A third, Maura Hooper, also said that he had emotionally abused her.Speaking publicly for the first time, Ms. Duncan and Ms. Hooper, actresses who dated Mr. Majors before he shot to fame as the supervillain Kang in Marvel projects, described him as a controlling, threatening figure who isolated them from friends and career pursuits. “You lose your sense of worth,” Ms. Duncan said.And in interviews with former colleagues, The Times found that Mr. Majors had a history of volatility on the set of the HBO series “Lovecraft Country” that included confrontations with female co-workers that led them to complain to the network.On Thursday afternoon, a lawyer for Mr. Majors, Priya Chaudhry, said that Mr. Majors had not physically abused Ms. Duncan. She described the relationships with both women as “toxic” and said that Mr. Majors was taking responsibility for his role in them. She added that “countless” women in the entertainment industry “can attest to his professionalism.”This article is based on interviews with 20 people, including some who requested anonymity for fear of career repercussions, and on statements submitted to the prosecution in the December case, in which Mr. Majors was found guilty of harassment and misdemeanor assault of Grace Jabbari, a former girlfriend. He is scheduled to be sentenced in April, though his lawyers asked on Tuesday that the judge throw out the jury’s guilty verdict.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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      Academy Awards Announces New Oscar for Achievement in Casting

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      After decades of lobbying from the casting field, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is adding its first new award category since 2001.The Academy Awards is introducing an Oscar for casting, the ceremony’s governing organization announced Thursday, making it the first new category in more than 20 years.Casting directors have been pushing for the category for decades, arguing that their work is critical to the success of a film, but the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which puts on the Oscars, has rejected the idea — until now.The new category will be introduced for films released in 2025, meaning that fans won’t see a statuette given out until 2026. The Academy tends to be conservative when it comes to introducing new awards: The last category to be created was the Oscar for best animated feature film, which was established in 2001. (It went to “Shrek.”) In 2018, the Academy scrapped the introduction of a new category for achievement in “popular” films after blowback from the public and some Academy members.Destiny Lilly, the president of the Casting Society of America, a professional organization for people in the field, said the society was created in the early 1980s in part to help push for this award.“It feels like a long time coming,” said Lilly, who was the casting director for “The Color Purple,” which scored a supporting actress nomination for Danielle Brooks at the upcoming ceremony.The Academy created a branch for casting directors in 2013, which currently includes more than 150 members. Lilly said the new branch allowed for other Academy members to fully understand the extent of what casting directors do.“It was an education process, a building of understanding of what our contributions are as casting directors to a finished film,” Lilly said.The award show’s recognition of off-camera, sometimes overlooked categories was the subject of consternation two years ago when the Academy presented eight categories — including film editing, makeup and hairstyling, and production design — before the live telecast. The decision was met with a wave of criticism asserting that the move communicated that the Academy valued some moviemaking jobs more than others. The next year, the Academy’s new leaders reversed course and gave out all of the awards live.In a joint statement making the announcement, Bill Kramer, the Academy’s chief executive, and Janet Yang, the Academy’s president, said, “Casting directors play an essential role in filmmaking, and as the Academy evolves, we are proud to add casting to the disciplines that we recognize and celebrate.”The Academy’s board of governors voted to add the category on Wednesday.A common argument against a casting award has been the length of the ceremony: Last year, the show ran three and a half hours, and in 2002, it hit the four hour and 23-minute mark.The move puts the Oscars in line with some other awards shows, including the Emmys. The BAFTAs added the category for its 2020 ceremony, helping to fuel calls for the Academy Awards to do the same. More

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      ‘The Monk and the Gun’ Review: A Satirical Fable in a Faraway Land

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      This feature follows two monks in Bhutan, often portrayed as a Shangri-La, as the country readies for its first democratic elections.“The Monk and the Gun,” a modestly scaled, lightly comic and blithely ingratiating tale set in Bhutan takes place in the recent past, when the country held mock elections.In 2005, the Bhutanese monarch announced that he was stepping down in 2008, a move that helped clear the way for the country’s transformation to a democracy. While the abdication went smoothly by all accounts, the mock elections — a nationwide practice run for parliamentary voting to come — are disturbing the citizenry in this fictional movie, a smooth piece of work with grand landscapes, nonprofessional actors, toothless politics and a story as contrived as just about anything you’d find at your local multiplex (or at Sundance).There are two monks in the movie, and several more guns than the title indicates. One monk is a wizened, unnamed lama (Kelsang Choejey, an actual lama), with a wispy white beard who spends his days meditating in a temple and is given to gnomic comments. One day, he orders his disciple, a sturdily built young monk, Tashi (Tandin Wangchuk), to procure two guns. “I need them by full moon,” the older lama says, adding that they will allow him to set things right. He doesn’t explain what exactly he means by that; largely, it seems so that his instructions can give the story a touch of mystery as Tashi sets off on his feature-length quest.That journey is at once literal and metaphoric, sluggishly paced and filled with pretty scenery. It brings Tashi in contact with other characters, including some with separate plotlines that function like little discrete stories and eventually converge. Among the more vibrant ones is a young city dweller with a sick wife and money problems, Benji (Tandin Sonam), who’s trying to broker a deal with an American gun buyer, waggishly named Ronald Coleman (Harry Einhorn). A different Ronald Colman starred in Frank Capra’s 1937 adventure “Lost Horizon,” an Orientalist fantasy about a diplomat who crash-lands in the Himalayas, finds Shangri-La and meets a high lama played by the American actor Sam Jaffe.The gun dealer’s name is a winking detail, if one that probably works best for movie critics of a certain age (ahem). The West’s fetishization and exploitation of countries like Bhutan — regularly described as the world’s last Shangri-La — informs the movie ever so gently. To that end, the American character is stupid and predictably greedy, which allows the writer-director Pawo Choyning Dorji (“A Yak in the Classroom”) to take a few pokes at the United States. However sincere and justified, the digs are so innocuous that their main purpose seems to flatter Western viewers who will nod along as they coo at the landscapes and chuckle knowingly about ugly truths they think have nothing to do with them, but do.The Monk and the GunRated PG-13 for — I kid you not — “some nude sculptures and smoking.” There are also guns. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters. More