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      Jon M. Chu Waited 20 Years for the Chance to Direct ‘Wicked’

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      On a recent morning, Jon M. Chu was in his office in the Toluca Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, describing what it was like to direct “Defying Gravity,” the thrilling finale of his forthcoming adaptation of “Wicked.” In the Broadway version of the scene, the green-hued Elphaba, a.k.a. the Wicked Witch of the West, rises above the stage atop a huge platform, its mechanical guts hidden behind an enormous black cape. Onstage, the effect is showstopping.In Chu’s version, however, Elphaba really flies, crashing through windows and barnstorming Oz. “We’re whipping her around with C.G. monkeys and C.G. backgrounds on a physical set,” Chu said. The Wizard’s guards are rushing in, the wind is blasting, and Cynthia Erivo, who plays Elphaba, is performing the signature song live, “even though I said she didn’t have to.”“That scene took all of us,” Chu said. “But without Cynthia, who is just a powerhouse, it would have been all for nothing.”Directing a film adaptation of “Wicked” would be a plum assignment for any fan of American musicals. Since its debut in 2003, “Wicked” has become one of Broadway’s most beloved shows, winning three Tonys and playing to more than 63 million people worldwide, from London’s West End to Tokyo. So how did Chu, who’s done lots of movies with music, but not a whole lot of musicals, get the gig? “I really am a newbie in the musical world,” he admitted. “So I feel like I’m living the theater kid’s dream.”Scenes from a career: Chu’s credits include, clockwise from top left, “Justin Bieber: Never Say Never,” “Step Up 2 the Streets,” “In the Heights” and “Crazy Rich Asians.”Indeed, Chu, 45, has been a lover of musicals dating to his earliest days. As a boy, he regularly saw shows in San Francisco and grew up on a steady diet of film musicals, including “The Sound of Music” (“That was on all the time in our house”) and “Singin’ in the Rain.” An early viewing of “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” the 1942 George M. Cohan biopic, inspired the young fan to start signing his name “Jon M. Chu,” in tribute.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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      ‘Spellbound’ Review: Borrowed Wonder

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      Any magic this animated musical has feels distinctly, almost insultingly poached.Princess Ellian, heir to the throne of Lumbria, has a problem: A year earlier, her parents, traveling through the Dark Forest of Eternal Darkness, fell under a curse. That sort of thing happens when you’re passing through a wood “so dark they named it twice” — but let’s not cast blame. The curse transformed the king and queen into roaring, rampaging monsters. They can’t comprehend much or speak, but they can be distracted with chew toys.Ellian (voiced by Rachel Zegler), now 15, has assumed their duties and, along with two government ministers (Jenifer Lewis and John Lithgow), helped hide news of the metamorphosis from Lumbrians at large. She hopes that somewhere, deep under her parents’ new scales and feathers, the minds of the king and queen are still there. So, too, may viewers of “Spellbound” occasionally sense the enchantment zones of their brains lighting up, more as a reflexive response to dim memories of past animated features than as a genuine reaction to the derivative pastiche onscreen.The movie, directed by Vicky Jenson, one of the filmmakers behind “Shrek,” has assembled all the standard ingredients: fairy tale trappings; a treacherous, “Oz”-ian journey across a mystical land; wizard types voiced by Broadway pros (Nathan Lane and Tituss Burgess), for comic relief; and would-be earworms by Alan Menken and Glenn Slater that are catchy in the moment but that you might struggle to hum afterward. Lithgow’s “I Could Get Used to This,” an “Under the Sea”-style showstopper that his character sings after swapping bodies with Ellian’s purple rodent pet, is an exception.It isn’t fair to say that “Spellbound” lacks musical or visual invention. Zegler can belt out a song, and the evil storm that transmogrified the royals is pleasingly lo-fi. (It looks like a scribble-scrabble twister.) But the magic feels distinctly, almost insultingly poached. Ellian rides with her friends on giant, flying cats (shades of “The Neverending Story” and “How to Train Your Dragon”). The idea of emotions made physically manifest is a concept that animated features have used quite recently (“Inside Out,” “Soul”). The oracles played by Lane and Burgess, who argue about having traded in multiple wands for a universal fob, engage in the sort of self-conscious riffing that has become a de facto requirement of family filmmaking.The king and queen eventually find their voices — one assumes that Javier Bardem and Nicole Kidman, reunited from “Being the Ricardos,” were well-paid for what sounds like swift work — but even flurries of excitement, like an escape over a quicksand desert, can’t shake the sense that “Spellbound” has been consciously designed to play things safe. One of its big numbers is called “The Way It Was Before,” words that sound suspiciously like a mission statement.SpellboundRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Gladiator II’ Review: Denzel Washington and Paul Mescal Entertain

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      Denzel Washington’s performance shows skill, intensity and absolute confidence in Ridley Scott’s pleasurably immersive epic about ancient Roman fighters.When Denzel Washington sweeps into “Gladiator II” — Ridley Scott’s epic about ancient Rome and men at war and sometimes in love — it’s with such easy grace that you may mistake his character’s loose bearing with indifference. What you’re seeing is power incarnate, power that’s so raw and so supremely self-possessed that it doesn’t announce itself. It just takes. And it keeps taking as warriors enter the Colosseum to fight and die in the blood sport that gives this sequel to Scott’s 2000 drama “Gladiator” its sober backdrop and much of its juice. It is a performance of charismatic evil and of mesmerizing stardom both.Like Scott’s filmmaking in this pleasurably immersive spectacle — with its foreign ancients and mentalities, exotic animals and equally unfamiliar calls to human nobility — Washington’s performance has skill, intensity and absolute confidence. Each man has an unqualified belief in entertainment as a value that’s essential to put over an old-fashioned, inherently audacious production like this, the kind that turns the past into a plaything and doesn’t ask you to worry about niceties like historical accuracy. Both director and performer are also veterans when it comes to popular audiences, and since neither has mellowed or slowed with age (Scott turns 87 this year and Washington 70), they still know how to put on a great show.The first “Gladiator” centers on a Roman general, Maximus (Russell Crowe), who circa 180 A.D. serves an aged emperor, incurs the wrath of a young usurper and ends up clanging swords in the Colosseum, where he quickly becomes a crowd favorite. Crowe, then at the height of his leading-man fame, delivered an appropriately muscular if characteristically sensitive lead performance that holds the screen even when challenged by the vulpine charisma of a scene-stealing Joaquin Phoenix as the new emperor. The two characters are dead by the end and Rome itself seems like it may follow rapidly in their wake; they and all the other ghosts from the original movie haunt the sequel, which is set 16 years later.“Gladiator II” tells the story of another righteous, ostensibly simple man, this time named Lucius (Paul Mescal) who is swept up by violent political forces seemingly beyond his control. The story opens in Numidia, a slice of land hugging the northernmost coast of the African continent. There, in a humming city, Lucius lives with his wife, and while their smiles suggest they’re happy enough, they are both soon suiting up to fight a flotilla of Roman invaders. Led by General Acacius (Pedro Pascal), the Romans make quick work of the Numidians. In this regard, the invaders are just as ruthlessly economic as Scott, who demonstrates a commensurate show of his power with the epically scaled, vividly staged and shot warfare.Fast, brutal and absorbing, the shocker opener sets the template for the rest of the movie, which plays — and often feels — like one long, inventively diverse, elaborately imaginative fight. As in the first film, the diversity of the casting here suggests the vastness of the Roman Empire, a variety that’s matched by the many ways characters die: trebuchet, arrow, sword and a (digital) menagerie that includes a saddled rhino and a troop of rampaging baboons. Every so often, the characters put down their weapons to indulge their other vices or to plot an uprising, diverting interludes that advance the narrative and add crucial rhythm, giving the characters enough time to unclench the jaws and for you to keep processing the story.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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      ‘Witches’ Review: Redeeming the Wicked Witch

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      The director Elizabeth Sankey’s experience with postpartum depression anchors this documentary about the pop-cultural representation of witches.The arrival of “Witches,” a documentary streaming on Mubi, seems strategically timed. The director Elizabeth Sankey’s contribution is part essay film, part personal testimony, though like Jon M. Chu’s musical blockbuster “Wicked” she, too, starts in the land of Oz.As a child, Sankey explains in a voice-over, she wanted to be Glinda the good witch. But her experiences dealing with mental illness made her see an unsettling correlation between the wicked witches of the world and the women who, like her, have had trouble performing traditional domestic roles.The first part of Sankey’s documentary plays like a cultural history of the witch onscreen, weaving together clips from TV shows and movies across the decades to illustrate a somewhat stale point: that stigmas around women’s health have informed the characterization of witches. When Sankey shares her personal story — weaving in interviews with other women and experts who also have firsthand experience of postpartum psychosis — the details of her illness take on an eerie new light next to pop-cultural images of madwomen, like Mia Farrow in “Rosemary’s Baby” and Isabelle Adjani in “Possession.” Based on the real women’s accounts, the fictional renderings don’t seem outlandish — the satanic underpinnings of witchcraft, clearly a superstitious, and deeply misogynistic, justification.“Witches” eventually explores other parallels — for instance, the demonization of midwives and natural healers with the advent of modern medicine — but the maternal madness framework dominates the bulk of the run time to diminishing effect. The clips also veer from the occult and take on a more generalized creepiness that feels bleary and arbitrary. If all women behaving badly can be summed up as witchy, then Sankey’s documentary too often works like a game of associations.WitchesNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Watch on Mubi. More

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      ‘Sabbath Queen’ Review: Capturing the Act of Questioning

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      Sandi DuBowski’s documentary about Rabbi Amichai Lau-Levie observes the making of a Jewish identity.When Amichai Lau-Lavie was ordained a rabbi, in 2016, he joined a family tradition that had been going on uninterrupted since the 11th century. And yet this had been a fraught process for Lau-Lavie, an Israel-born gay man who just a few years before entering New York’s Jewish Theological Seminary had been a pillar of a “God-optional” community. How he went from the Radical Faeries’ joyous, transgressive vision of queerness — which led to creating his drag alter ego, Rebbetzin Hadassah Gross — to embracing Conservative Judaism is the subject of Sandi DuBowski’s fascinating look at the act of questioning yourself and your family, your surroundings and your decisions.Shortly after completing his acclaimed documentary “Trembling Before G-d” (2001), about gay and lesbian Orthodox Jews, DuBowski started filming Lau-Lavie. He kept at it for the next 21 years, which gives “Sabbath Queen” the rare opportunity to capture its subject in flight, so to speak.Yes, Lau-Lavie reflects on his family’s history during World War II, as well as key points from his own past, like being outed in his 20s. But we also watch him talk about many events, like becoming a father or cofounding the aforementioned experimental Lab/Shul initiative, while he is still in the middle of experiencing them, rather than speaking with the benefit of hindsight.After Lau-Lavie makes a big decision that goes against his recent commitment to the Conservative movement, it becomes obvious that his restlessness has not abated, and his questing days may never be over. He understands all too well that life is just not that neat.Sabbath QueenNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘A Traveler’s Needs’ Review: Language Lessons

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      Iris (Isabelle Huppert), a stranger who teaches French in Seoul, is at the center of an enigmatic film by Hong Sang-soo.“Why’d she come to Korea?” a man (Kwon Hae-hyo) asks his wife (Lee Hye-young) in the park, as Iris (Isabelle Huppert) is walking away from them. Iris is a stranger in Seoul who has started teaching French to the wife. Whether Iris is up to the task is uncertain. She has no background in instruction, and the only language that she and her pupils share is English, which is not a native tongue for any of them.Iris takes an oddball approach to acclimating her students to French: She extracts personal confessions from them in English, then writes wildly extrapolated versions of the French on index cards. “You’ll love your true emotion being expressed in a foreign language,” she says. Better that than to learn phrases from a textbook — something she declines to use. She is also a fiend for makgeolli, the Korean rice wine, of which she claims to drink one or two bottles every day.Is Iris for real? That question hangs over “A Traveler’s Needs,” just as it does over the career of the director Hong Sang-soo. Hong routinely turns out two features per year with methods nearly as baffling as Iris’s: His devotees see infinite subtlety in his use of theme and variation, while the skeptical can’t help but wonder if his movies have become increasingly repetitive and slapdash. In “A Traveler’s Needs,” which won second prize at the Berlin International Film Festival, the sunlit interiors often suggest a deliberately amateurish look.This is his third overall feature with Huppert, who adds drollery and an air of mystery. And there is just enough intrigue this time — one motif involves the difficulty of translating a work by Yoon Dong-ju, a Korean poet who died in 1945 after being imprisoned in Japan — to suggest hidden depths.A Traveler’s NeedsNot rated. In English, Korean (with subtitles) and French. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Porcelain War’ Review: A Defiant Dispatch From Ukraine

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      A new documentary follows artists in wartime, on and off the battlefield.The latest documentary dispatch from Ukraine, “Porcelain War,” brings a message of hope rooted in art. Making art does feel like an act of resistance during the Russian invasion, when Kremlin propaganda attacks the very existence of Ukrainian culture. But what’s intriguing is that the directors, Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev, also celebrate Ukraine’s military defense, making for a jangly mix of idyll and warfare.Slava, who appears in the film, is both a ceramist and a member of a Ukraine special forces unit who gives weapons training to civilians turned soldiers. His partner, Anya, paints the whimsical figurines he creates, and the irrepressible couple weather the war in bombed-out Kharkiv with their more anxious pal Andrey, a painter and cameraman.Anya and Slava find some refuge in their house, and saccharine sequences show off tranquil fields and their cute dog. Some lovely animated moments set Anya’s finely wrought porcelain painting into motion; singing by the Ukrainian quartet DakhaBrakha rings out on the soundtrack.But then the focus shifts decisively to Slava’s army unit on the battlefield. Drone shots track bombs falling on Russian tanks and soldiers; Slava’s comrades hustle through ravaged buildings, equipped with GoPro cameras that give a first-person feel. Elsewhere, Andrey anguishes over spiriting his daughters away to Poland.Impressively, nearly everything was shot by the documentary’s subjects. Yet although their double duty is an awful fact of life in Ukraine, the film lurches between its varying components and tones. As the filmmakers repeatedly tie an inspirational bow on art and beauty, the good intentions yield cold comfort.Porcelain WarRated R for language and images of death. In Ukrainian, Russian and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Out of My Mind’ Review: Schooling a Teacher

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      In this film adaptation of Sharon M. Draper’s novel, a nonverbal sixth-grader with cerebral palsy holds her own.Like many a self-respecting tween, Melody Brooks has a thing or two to say about this and that, and a need to be heard. But that need has a particular urgency: Melody, the central character in “Out of My Mind,” has cerebral palsy and is unable to speak.Her story, set in the early aughts and based on a novel by Sharon M. Draper, arrives onscreen with a family-friendly brightness, buoyed by upbeat montages. The director, Amber Sealey, and the strong cast keep things grounded, though, honoring the serious undercurrents while having some fun.As the ultrasmart girl using a wheelchair who longs for sparkly shoes and escape from educational segregation, Phoebe-Rae Taylor (making her screen debut and infusing the part with her experience of CP) has an expressive, knowing gaze, alive with eagerness as well as exasperation. A fan of “Friends,” Melody imagines her thoughts voiced by Jennifer Aniston and, in an effectively used narrative device, Aniston delivers the 12-year-old’s openhearted and playfully snark-tinged observations. Two effortlessly charismatic performers, Rosemarie DeWitt and Luke Kirby, play Melody’s loving, charmingly harried and ever so slightly cool parents, who battle the insurance company for access to a machine, the Medi-Talker, that enables their daughter to converse with others.One of Melody’s fiercest advocates, a sweet buttinsky neighbor (Judith Light), delivers a searing piece of wisdom in plain language. Melody takes the advice to heart when given a chance to “mainstream” with other sixth graders. She holds her own with the mean girls and schools a wisenheimer teacher (Michael Chernus). Her story is told in an uncomplicated way but not without subtlety. She’s easy to root for.Out of My MindNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. Watch on Disney+. More