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      What to Know about ‘Unfrosted’ and the Real History of Pop-Tarts

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      In his directorial debut, Jerry Seinfeld tackles the history of the fruit-filled pastries … kind of. Here’s the real origin story, along with a bonus quiz.First, there was the Flamin’ Hot Cheetos biopic (complete with an Oscar-nominated song). Then came “Tetris”; “Air,” about Nike Air Jordan sneakers; “BlackBerry”; and “Barbie.”It is, in other words, a golden age for product-origin-story movies.The latest is “Unfrosted: The Pop-Tarts Story,” a satirical history that Jerry Seinfeld has expanded from his stand-up act. The film, which he directed and stars in alongside Jim Gaffigan, Hugh Grant and Amy Schumer, arrives Friday on Netflix. Unlike its predecessors, it’s not really concerned with actual events. Here’s what to know about the true history of the Pop-Tart — and what the movie gets right and wrong.But first, how did Kellogg’s and Post both end up with headquarters in Battle Creek, Mich.?You would think ground zero in the Breakfast Wars of the 1960s might be somewhere most people could locate on a map. But Battle Creek, Mich., was home to the Battle Creek Sanitarium, known for its water and fresh air treatments, and managed by Will Keith Kellogg and his brother, John Harvey Kellogg. W.K. Kellogg developed a method of creating crunchy pieces of processed grain for his patients (read: Corn Flakes), and one of those patients, C.W. Post, would go on to start his own company in 1895 selling several foods that were veeeery similar to those at the sanitarium.W.K. Kellogg noticed Post profiting from his recipes and established his own firm in 1906, the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company. Within three years, it was cranking out more than 100,000 boxes of Corn Flakes a day, and, thanks to the success of Kellogg, Post and many other cereal companies, Battle Creek became known as the Cereal City. Who were the real Edsel Kellogg III and Marjorie Merriweather Post?Melissa McCarthy, Seinfeld and Jim Gaffigan in “Unfrosted.”Columbus 81 ProductionsThe bumbling chief executive of Kellogg’s, played by Gaffigan, is fictional (thank goodness). On the other hand, Marjorie Merriweather Post — the General Foods owner whom Schumer portrays as a turban-wearing caricature — was one of the first female chief executives and, for most of her life, considered the wealthiest woman in America. (Today she may be best known for building Mar-a-Lago, now Donald J. Trump’s base.)Did Post really come up with a toaster-prepared breakfast pastry first?Yes. In the 1960s, Post, then the biggest competitor to Kellogg’s, invented a process of partly dehydrating food and wrapping it in foil to keep it fresh; no refrigeration required. The process was initially used for dog food, but it also allowed fruit filling in, say, a toaster-prepared breakfast pastry to stay both moist and bacteria-free. (And yes, it was actually Post’s idea, not one ripped off from a Kellogg’s employee via a hidden vacuum cam.)Was the Post product really called Country Squares?Unfortunately, yes. The name was later changed to its current Toast’em Pop Ups, but is that really much better?How did Country Squares and Pop-Tarts end up hitting shelves the same year?Post jumped the gun and unveiled Country Squares to the press in February 1964, four months before they were ready to sell, allowing Kellogg’s time to frantically rustle up its own, much-better-named version.Did Bob Cabana really create the Pop-Tart?Nope, the “Unfrosted” flack (played by Seinfeld) is fictional. The man who helped create Pop-Tarts was a manager named William Post (yes, really), who died in February at 96.Gaffigan, left, Seinfeld, Fred Armisen and McCarthy with boxes of the film’s version of Pop-Tarts with an early (made-up) name.Columbus 81 ProductionsWhat was an actual rejected name for the Pop-Tart?The ones in the film — Fruit-Magoos, Heat ’Em Up and Eat ’Em Ups, Oblong Nibblers, Trat Pops — are made up. But the real rejected name — Fruit Scones — wasn’t much catchier. The final name, coined by a Kellogg’s executive, William LaMothe, was inspired by Pop Art, the contemporary cultural movement.Were Pop-Tarts really an overnight hit?Yes, but the first shipment to stores sold out in two weeks, not 60 seconds, as in “Unfrosted.” Kellogg’s apologized, in advertisements, but this only increased demand. (They were restocked before long.)Were the first flavors really unfrosted?Yes. The original flavors — all unfrosted — were Apple Currant Jelly, Strawberry, Blueberry and Brown Sugar-Cinnamon. The first frosted ones — Dutch Apple, Concord Grape, Raspberry and Brown Sugar-Cinnamon — didn’t hit the market until 1967. (William Post came up with the idea, disproving skeptics who believed the icing would melt in the toaster.) The next year, sprinkles were added to some of the frosted ones.Did Kellogg’s really advertise Pop-Tarts without a mascot?It did, though the decision didn’t set off a Hugh Grant-led mascot rebellion, as in “Unfrosted.” Kellogg’s rectified the omission in 1971, introducing Milton the Toaster. (The little guy didn’t make it out of the 1970s.)Which of these flavors are real?The past few decades have been a smorgasbord of Pop-Tart flavors, some very short-lived. Can you spot the four real flavors here?Chocolate PeppermintFroot LoopsGuava MangoHarry Potter Special Edition: Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans, PopcornMaple BaconTwizzlersAnswer: Chocolate Peppermint, Froot Loops, Guava Mango and Maple Bacon Pop-Tarts have all been on shelves at some point. The Harry Potter Bertie Bott’s Popcorn and Twizzlers flavors remain the stuff of our fever dreams. More

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      Sofia Coppola’s Latest Release? A Lip Balm With Augustinus Bader.

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      The tinted balm was inspired by products that the filmmaker confected as a girl to achieve the “berry-stained lips” of a character in a Roman Polanski movie.As a girl, Sofia Coppola liked to melt down her lipsticks, mixing colors and consistencies to make a tint that conformed to her aesthetic ideal.She was after the look of Tess, the titular character in Roman Polanski’s 1979 film adaptation of the novel “Tess of the d’Urbervilles,” portrayed by Nastassja Kinski. In one scene, Ms. Coppola recalled, the character was nibbling on strawberries “that left her with perfectly berry-stained lips.”That tint, it turns out, is the cosmetic expression of a subtlety that has long been Ms. Coppola’s hallmark as a filmmaker, writer and director. From an early age, she brought her coolly observant, hyper-feminine sensibility to movies like “The Virgin Suicides,” her first film, released in 1999, “Lost in Translation,” “Marie Antoinette” and, most recently, “Priscilla,” Ms. Coppola’s adaptation of Priscilla Presley’s memoir, “Elvis and Me.”The style of her work is all of a piece, Ms. Coppola, 52, said on Monday in a phone interview; her taste, for the most part, is genteelly uncompromising. “I’m making a world,” she stressed, “that I want to look at and share.”With each of her projects, Ms. Coppola, the daughter of the Hollywood titan Francis Ford Coppola and the late artist and filmmaker Eleanor Coppola, aims to create a sense of intimacy. Her low key, insistently gauzy aesthetic can be seen in her films’ costumes and interiors — and now, of all things, in a series of tinted lip balms.The balm is offered in three tints — pink, coral and berry — that Ms. Coppola said suit her complexion.Melodie McDanielMs. Coppola produced the new line in collaboration with Augustinus Bader, a popular skin care brand that she uses. Some months ago, she approached its eponymous founder — a German doctor and professor whose clinic in Leipzig caters to wealthy clients seeking to delay the effects of aging — asking if he would introduce a bit of color to his lip balm. To her surprise, he agreed.The Augustinus Bader x Sofia Coppola lip balm that they developed, priced at $43, is offered in pink, coral and an earthy shade of plum: tints akin to those Ms. Coppola confected in her childhood bedroom.Those colors suit Ms. Coppola’s complexion, she said, explaining that she prefers using subtle makeup to enhance her full lips and aquiline features. She likes the way she looks even more, she added, “when the lighting is right.”Ms. Coppola’s passions for beauty and fashion run deep, and have been informed by her stint as an intern at Chanel in Paris in the 1980s, as well as by her presence in the front rows at fashion shows of New York designers like Anna Sui and her friend Marc Jacobs in the ’90s and early 2000s.She also founded a clothing brand, Milk Fed, in the mid ’90s, that was known for kiddie-proportioned, slogan-bearing T- shirts, jackets and dresses. Today, the label is produced and sold in Japan, but vintage original items, coveted by a new generation of Ms. Coppola’s acolytes, can go for hundreds of dollars on eBay.No stranger to collaboration, Ms. Coppola directed a commercial promoting Mr. Jacobs’s Daisy Dream fragrance in 2014, and last year she teamed with Barrie, a Scottish knitwear label owned by Chanel, on a collection of cashmere sweaters, jumpsuits, pants and blazers.She feels no need to justify such projects. “They are an extension of what I do in films,” she said.“I love collaboration,” Ms. Coppola added with conviction. “But in the end, you get what you want.” More

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      ‘Unfrosted: The Pop-Tarts Story’ Review: A Sweet Jerry Seinfeld Comedy

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      Starring Jerry Seinfeld in his feature directing debut, “Unfrosted: The Pop-Tarts Story” is the only corporate saga whose main ingredient is high-fructose sarcasm.Pop-Tarts were invented over four hectic months in 1964. Jerry Seinfeld has been developing jokes about them for over 10 years, first in his stand-up act, and now as a full-fledged, fully ridiculous feature comedy targeted to the audience’s sweet-and-salty dopamine receptors. “Unfrosted,” directed by Seinfeld with a script by him and longtime collaborators Spike Feresten, Andy Robin and Barry Marder, gives the comic his first-ever live action leading film role as Bob Cabana, a fictional cereal flack who revolutionizes the breakfast industry. (William Post, the real-life person who helped create Pop-Tarts, died in February at the age of 96.) Cinema has endured branded biopics on everything from Air Jordans to the BlackBerry to Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. This is the only corporate saga whose main ingredient is high-fructose sarcasm.Should we care about the history of the Pop-Tart? Seinfeld postures that the Kellogg’s launch of a mylar-wrapped, shelf-stable, heatable pastry is a technological innovation on the scale of the space race and the Manhattan Project. One pivotal move comes when Cabana hires Donna Stankowski (Melissa McCarthy) away from NASA’s beakers of Tang. As the launch date nears, the cinematographer William Pope shoots close-ups of scorching toaster springs with the drama of a roiling booster rocket.The film is as estranged from the facts as Pop-Tarts are from genuine fruit. Still, it’s true that Battle Creek, Mich. — “cereal’s Silicon Valley,” Seinfeld once cracked — was ground zero of a Cold War rivalry between Kellogg’s and General Foods to sell a breakfast that broke free from the need for a bowl and spoon. Here, the General Foods’ owner Marjorie Post (Amy Schumer), once the richest woman in America, swans about in jewel-toned turbans and jets off to Moscow to enlist Nikita Khrushchev (Dean Norris) in her cause. At the same time, the dimwitted head of Kellogg’s (Jim Gaffigan) allows his company to align with President John F. Kennedy (Bill Burr), Chef Boy Ardee (Bobby Moynihan), the celebrity fitness guru Jack LaLanne (James Marsden), and the early computer Univac who acts up in ways that recall Bing’s sexually charged A.I. chatbot. Things take an even darker turn with the entrance of a vengeful milkman (Christian Slater) and a threatening figure named El Sucre (Felix Solis) who’s aware that millions of dollars hinge on access to his addictive white powder.As junk food goes, “Unfrosted” is delightful with a sprinkle of morbidity. Building on last December’s publicity stunt where an anthropomorphic Pop-Tart cooked and served itself to the Kansas State Wildcats, we’re here treated to a funeral where the deceased is given Full Cereal Honors. I will spoil nothing except to say Snap, Crackle and Pop have a ceremonial duty.The jokes spill forth so fast that there’s no time for the shtick to get soggy. Yet, the film also crams its running time with goofy detours, like a subplot where the voice of Tony the Tiger (Hugh Grant, once again seizing any opportunity to wear a fatuous cravat) leads his fellow mascots in a rebellion. Despite all these famous faces splashing into the frame, the scene stealer is the child actor Eleanor Sweeney making her debut as an opinionated taste tester. She’s g-r-r-reat.UnfrostedRated PG-13 for some suggestive references and language. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Evil Does Not Exist’ Review: Nature vs. Nurture

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      Ryusuke Hamaguchi follows up his sublime drama “Drive My Car” with a parable about a rural Japanese village and the resort developer eyeing its land.Late in “Evil Does Not Exist,” a man who lives in a rural hamlet an easy drive from Tokyo cuts right to the movie’s haunting urgency. He’s talking to two representatives of a company that’s planning to build a resort in the area that will cover a deer trail. When one suggests that maybe the deer will go elsewhere, the local man asks, “Where would they go?” It’s a seemingly simple question that distills this soulful movie’s searching exploration of individualism, community and the devastating costs of reducing nature to a commodity.“Evil Does Not Exist” is the latest from the Japanese filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi, who’s best known for his sublime drama “Drive My Car.” This new movie is more modestly scaled than that one (it’s also far shorter) and more outward-directed, yet similar in sensibility and its discreet touch. It traces what happens when two Tokyo outsiders descend on a pastoral area where the spring water is so pure a local noodle shop uses it in its food preparation. The reps’ company intends to build a so-called glamping resort where tourists can comfortably experience the area’s natural beauty, a wildness that their very patronage will help destroy.The story unfolds gradually over a series of days, though perhaps weeks, and takes place largely in and around the hamlet. There, the local man, Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), a self-described jack-of-all trades, lives with his daughter, Hana (Ryo Nishikawa), in a house nestled amid mature trees. Together, they like to walk in the woods as she guesses whether that tree is a pine and this one a larch, while he carefully warns her away from sharp thorns. A photograph on their piano of Hana in the arms of a woman suggests why melancholy seems to envelop both child and father, although much about their past life remains obscure.Hamaguchi eases into the story, letting its particulars surface gradually as Eiko Ishibashi’s plaintive, progressively elegiac score works into your system. The company’s plans for a glamping site give the movie its narrative through line as well as dramatic friction, which first emerges during a meeting between residents and the company reps, Mayuzumi (Ayaka Shibutani) and her brash counterpart, Takahashi (Ryuji Kosaka). The company — its absurd name is Playmode — wants to take advantage of Covid subsidies for its new venture. During the meeting, it emerges that the site’s septic tank won’t be large enough to accommodate the number of guests; the locals rightly worry that the waste will flow into the river.The scene, one of the longest in the movie, is emblematic of Hamaguchi’s understated realism, which he builds incrementally. The meeting takes place in a basic community center crowded with residents — some had dinner at Takumi’s home the night before — who sit in chairs facing the reps, who, armed with technology, are parked behind laptops and seated before a projector screen. As the reps play a video explaining “glamorous camping,” there’s a cut to Takumi intently watching the promo. The scene soon shifts to a tracking shot of deer tracks in snow and images of Hana playing in a field as a bird soars above; it’s as if Takumi were thinking of his joyful, distinctly unglamorous daughter. The scene shifts back to the meeting.The site will become “a new tourist hot spot,” Takahashi sums up, badly misreading his audience. “Water always flows downhill,” a village elder says in response, his thin, firm voice rising as he sweeps an arm emphatically downward. “What you do upstream will end up affecting those living downstream,” stating a law of gravity that’s also a passionate, quietly wrenching argument for how to live in the world.Lapidary, word by word, detail by detail, juxtaposition by juxtaposition, “Evil Does Not Exist” beautifully deepens. For the most part, the movie is visually unadorned, simple, direct. Hamaguchi tends to move the camera in line with the characters, for one, though the exceptions carry narrative weight: images of nearby Mount Fuji; a rearview look from inside a car at a fast-disappearing road; and a lovely traveling shot of soaring treetops, their branches framed against the sky. The canopied forest echoes an image in a short film by Masaki Kobayashi, who began directing after World War II; the title of his trilogy, “The Human Condition,” would work for every Hamaguchi movie I’ve seen.I have watched “Evil Does Not Exist” twice, and each time the stealthy power of Hamaguchi’s filmmaking has startled me anew. Some of my reaction has to do with how he uses fragments from everyday life to build a world that is so intimate and recognizable — filled with faces, homes and lives as familiar as your own — that the movie’s artistry almost comes as a shock. The dreamworld of movies often feels at a profound remove from ordinary life, distance that brings its own obvious pleasures. It’s far rarer when a movie, as this one does, speaks to everyday life and to the beauty of a world that we neglect even in the face of its calamitous loss. When Takumi asks “where would they go,” he isn’t just talking about deer.Evil Does Not ExistNot rated. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Slow’ Review: We Don’t Have to Take Our Clothes Off

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      The second feature by the Lithuanian filmmaker Marija Kavtaradze asks what a relationship looks like when you factor out the sex.“Slow,” a relationship drama from Lithuania with a delicate touch, offers an understanding of intimacy that is rare in romance movies.Elena (Greta Grineviciute), a contemporary dancer, meets Dovydas (Kestutis Cicenas), a sign language interpreter, at a class for deaf adolescents — she teaches the steps and he translates her instructions for the students. After the first session, the two 30-somethings begin a modest flirtation that inches toward the physical, but Dovydas pulls out a wild card when Elena invites him to her room: He is asexual.The second feature by Marija Kavtaradze, “Slow” takes this difference as its point of departure. What does a relationship look like when you factor out the sex? It’s clear that Elena has a hard time accepting Dovydas as he is, a frustration that links back to her childhood self-esteem issues.The couple’s journey is predictably bumpy, in part because the film aligns too consistently with Elena’s normative outlook. Dovydas’s sexuality baffles her, and Kavtaradze struggles to justify why the couple makes sense together despite this friction. Scenes meant to illustrate their special chemistry seem plucked out of a run-of-the-mill indie movie (an awkward-but-cute dance; in another scene, eyes locked from across the bar).Grineviciute and Cicenas, however, give depth to a story that becomes stuck on the sorrows of the couple’s discrepancies. Dovydas alternates between sheepish and resolute, making his bouts of jealousy feel organic and vulnerable; Elena — we see in fierce, breathy interludes of her dance rehearsals — wields her physicality and thwarted desires as extensions of her personality.Throughout the film, we see Dovydas enthusiastically performing a kind of sign language karaoke against a vivid blue backdrop; his facial expressions are like a lovesick balladeer. The film makes too little of this intuitive connection between lovers, both adept, in their own ways, at communicating passion by other means.SlowNot rated. In Lithuanian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Jeanne du Barry’ Review: A Versailles Scandal at Its Snooziest

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      Maïwenn wrote, directed and stars in the film, playing opposite Johnny Depp, who is Louis XV. Though he declares he loves her, their chemistry is weak.In the wake of a tabloid-friendly divorce featuring multiple allegations of abuse, Johnny Depp’s Hollywood profile rests at a rather low point. The French actress and filmmaker Maïwenn, for her part, has made headlines in her home country — including last year, when she reportedly assaulted a journalist.One might expect a film pairing these two actors would produce combustible results. But “Jeanne du Barry,” written, directed by and starring Maïwenn, is an ultimately snoozy historical period piece.Given recent trends, it may go without saying that the picture tries to make something of a “girl boss” out of Jeanne, the most prominent mistress of King Louis XV. She transcends her humble roots, entrances the King and flouts 18th-century Versailles protocol.But she also has a, um, kind heart. At a royal dinner she is given Zamor, an enslaved person, as a gift. She befriends him. What fun they have running through the halls of Versailles! She also defends his humanity to Louis’s nasty daughters, who make the evil stepsisters in Disney’s “Cinderella” seem understated. Louis-Benoit Zamor, an actual historical figure, played a role in the eventual fate of the real Jeanne du Barry.Since Maïwenn created Jeanne for herself, it may seem paradoxical to state that she’s all wrong for it. Nevertheless, her broad performance is a consistently unfortunate case study in “whatever she thinks she’s doing, this isn’t it.”As Louis, Depp takes his role, spoken entirely in French, seriously — no Captain Jack Sparrow-style winks are called for or delivered — but the film doesn’t give him much to work with as a character.The meticulous and lush production design by Angelo Zamparutti, captured with practically dewy appreciation by the cinematographer Laurent Dailland, makes the movie easy on the eyes, but every so often its prettiness edges over into souvenir-shop kitsch.Jeanne du BarryNot rated. In French with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg’ Review

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      Subtitled “The Story of Anita Pallenberg,” this documentary gives the life of the actress and model a thorough downer of a treatment.If Anita Pallenberg was, in the words of her obituary in The New York Times in 2017, “best known for her relationships with members of the Rolling Stones,” the documentary “Catching Fire,” directed by Alexis Bloom and Svetlana Zill, shifts the focus to Pallenberg herself: the model, actress and life force who embodied a certain image of ’60s freedom.Made in collaboration with Pallenberg’s son Marlon Richards, “Catching Fire” is a redemptive portrait that nevertheless plays like a downer. Pallenberg’s story involves an unremitting cascade of drugs, addiction, volatile relationships and parenting tragedy, along with a 1979 incident in which a 17-year-old shot himself at her home, possibly playing Russian roulette. No excess is too excessive for this film, until it’s time to chronicle the later (and admittedly less sensational) period when Pallenberg calmed the turbulence surrounding her. To that, the doc devotes 10 minutes.The narrative’s spine comes from an unpublished memoir by Pallenberg. Scarlett Johansson reads excerpts in voice-over. We hear of Pallenberg’s upbringing in wartime Europe (“I didn’t learn to walk — I ran”), her encounters with Andy Warhol and Allen Ginsberg, and her abandonment of modeling for psychedelics (“You couldn’t do both, and I loved acid”). While her relationship with the Stones’ Brian Jones fell apart, a result of his reputed drug use and physical abuse, she landed in the arms of Keith Richards, the Stone closest to her rock. We’re told that, as a child, Marlon was treated as the household’s adult.There is plentiful — maybe too much — archival footage to illustrate all this. The film amasses an insightful array of talking heads, from Volker Schlöndorff, who directed Pallenberg in her film debut, to Theda Zawaiza, a former nanny for Marlon who describes Pallenberg at the time as being a virtual prisoner of a record company. Pallenberg is finally in focus. But the picture is tough to look at.Catching Fire: The Story of Anita PallenbergNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘The Fall Guy’ Review: Ryan Gosling Goes Pow! Splat! Ouch!

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      The actor charms as a swaggering stunt man, alongside an underused Emily Blunt, in the latest skull-rattling action movie from David Leitch.Like a certain energized bunny, Ryan Gosling’s charmer in “The Fall Guy” takes a licking and keeps jauntily ticking as he runs and leaps, tumbles and punches and vaults through the air like a rocket. The actor has shed his “Barbie” pretty-in-pink look, if not his signature heat-seeking moves to play Colt Seavers, a stuntman with a long résumé, six-packs on his six-packs and a disregard for personal safety. Plunging 12 stories in a building atrium, though, is just another bruising day on the job for Colt until, oops, he nearly goes splat.Directed by David Leitch, “The Fall Guy” is divertingly slick, playful nonsense about a guy who lives to get brutalized again and again — soon after it starts, Colt suffers a catastrophic accident — which may be a metaphor for contemporary masculinity and its discontents, though perhaps not. More unambiguously, the movie is a feature-length stunt-highlight reel that’s been padded with romance, a minor mystery, winking jokes and the kind of unembarrassed self-regard for moviemaking that film people have indulged in for nearly as long as cinema has been in existence. For once, this swaggering pretense is largely justified.There’s a story, though it’s largely irrelevant given that the movie is essentially a vehicle for Gosling and a lot of stunt performers to strut their cool stuff. Written by Drew Pearce and based (marginally) on the 1980s TV series of the same title starring Lee Majors, it opens shortly before Colt’s 12-story plunge goes wrong. After some restorative time alone baring his torso, he resumes stunt work, drawn by the promise of a reunion with his ex, Jody (a welcome if underused Emily Blunt). She’s directing a science-fiction blowout that looks like the typical big-screen recycling bin, with bits from generic video games, the 2011 fantasy “Cowboys & Aliens,” and both the “Alien” and “Mad Max” franchises. Cue the flirting and the fighting.Leitch is a former stunt performer who has his own estimable résumé, which includes doubling for Brad Pitt, whom he later directed in “Bullet Train.” Leitch has a company with Chad Stahelski, yet another former stunt performer turned movie director who’s is best known for the “John Wick” series with Keanu Reeves. Working in tandem with physically expressive performers like Pitt, Reeves and Charlize Theron (Leitch directed “Atomic Blonde”), the two filmmakers have, in the post-John Woo era, put a distinctive stamp on American action cinema with a mix of martial-arts styles, witty fight choreography and, especially, a focus on the many ways a human body can move (or hurtle) through space.There are arsenals of guns and all manner of sharp objects that do gruesome damage in Leitch’s movies, “The Fall Guy” included. Yet what seizes your attention here, and in other Leitch and Stahelski productions, is the intense physicality of the action sequences, with their coordinated twisting, wrenching and straining bodies. A signature of both directors is that they emphasize the intense effort that goes into these physical acts, which is understandable given their backgrounds. (Like Fred Astaire, they show off the body, head to toe.) In their movies, you hear the panting and see the grimacing as fists and feet and whatever else happens to be around (a fridge door, a briefcase, a bottle) connect with soft tissue and hard heads.Like the impressively flamboyant practical effects in “The Fall Guy,” this focus on the body reads like a rebuke to the digital wizardry that now characterizes action movies. Each time Colt crashes to the ground in “The Fall Guy,” the moment announces his and the movie’s authenticity (however you want to define that). There’s a macho undertow to this — real men, real stunts — which dovetails with how his romance with Jody is, by turns, comically, sentimentally and, at times, irritatingly framed, including via split-screen mirroring à la “Pillow Talk.” Jody may be Colt’s boss, but he’s the one who has to save the day after some gnarly business with a star and producer (Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Hannah Waddingham).The issue of authenticity is a thread that the story jokingly pulls with a scene in which Colt’s face is digitally scanned and in a subplot involving a deep fake. (It’s funnier if you don’t think too hard about the fact that A.I. was an existentially fraught issue in the 2023 actors’ strike.) Tapping into his inner Tom Cruise, Gosling makes love to the camera and performs some of his own showstopping moves, at one point while atop and almost under a speeding garbage truck. Given that “The Fall Guy” is an ode to stunt work, it’s only right to note that the actor’s stunt doubles were Ben Jenkin and Justin Eaton, his driving double was Logan Holladay while his double on that nosebleed of a plummet was Troy Brown. Kudos, gentlemen.The Fall GuyRated PG-13 for falls, fights, crashes and explosions. Running time: 2 hours 6 minutes. In theaters. More