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      ‘Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes’ Review: Hail, Caesar

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      The latest installment in an excellent series finds mythology turning into power.For a series with a goofy premise — what if talking apes overthrew humanity — the “Planet of the Apes” universe is uncommonly thoughtful, even insightful. If science fiction situates us in a universe that’s just different enough to slip daring questions past our mental barriers, then the “Apes” movies are among the best examples. That very premise, launched with talking actors in ape costumes in the 1968 film, has given storytellers a lot to chew on, contemplating racism, authoritarianism, police brutality and, in later installments, the upending of human society by a brutal, fast-moving virus. (Oops.)Those later virus-ridden installments, a trilogy released between 2011 and 2017, are among the series’ best, and well worth revisiting. The newest film, “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” picks up exactly where that trilogy left off: with the death of Caesar, the ultrasmart chimpanzee who has led the apes away from what’s left of humanity and into a paradise. (The scene was a direct quotation of the story of Moses leading the Israelites to the Promised Land, but dying before he could set foot there.) The apes honor his memory and vow to keep his teachings, especially the first dictum — “ape not kill ape.” Caesar preached a gospel of peacefulness, loyalty, generosity, nonaggression and care for the earth; unlike the humans, they intend to live in harmony.The teachings of peaceful prophets, however, tend to be twisted by power-seekers, and apparently this isn’t just a human problem. “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” directed by Wes Ball from a screenplay by Josh Friedman, leaps forward almost immediately by “many generations” (years matter less in this post-human world), and the inevitable has happened. The apes have fractured into tribes, while Caesar has passed from historical figure to mythic one, a figure venerated by some and forgotten by most.That there even was a Caesar is unknown to Noa (Owen Teague), a young chimpanzee whose father, Koro (Neil Sandilands) is leader of his clan and an avid breeder of birds. That clan has its own laws, mostly having to do with how to treat birds’ nests, and that’s all that Noa and his friends Anaya (Travis Jeffery) and Soona (Lydia Peckham) have known.But then one day tragedy strikes, in the form of an attack on the clan by the soldiers of Proximus Caesar (Kevin Durand), the leader of a clan of coastal apes. Noa finds himself alone, searching for his clan, who have been carted away. On his journey Noa meets a human (Freya Allen) who, like the other humans, doesn’t speak.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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      Dan Stevens and the Allure of Kooky Characters

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      Despite his “Downton Abbey” roots, the co-star of “Godzilla x Kong” and “Abigail” likes the kind of role “that makes the filmmaker smile.”The kookiest characters onscreen this season may be the ones played by Dan Stevens.This batch of charismatic weirdos joins the collection of peculiar roles he has amassed since the 2014 thriller “The Guest,” his post-“Downton Abbey” breakthrough. Stevens, 41, lands somewhere between leading man and character actor, and he revels in the mischievous tone required for these offbeat parts, some of which he describes as “funcomfortable.”Right now in theaters he can be seen as a winning monster veterinarian in “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire” and as a corrupt cop turned bloodsucker in the horror comedy “Abigail.” This summer, he will appear in “Cuckoo,” a sci-fi horror mash-up set in the Alps, in which he plays a German scientist whose welcoming facade hides a fascination with a bizarre endangered species.Stevens with Rebecca Hall and Kaylee Hottle in “Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.”Legendary EntertainmentStevens, who is British, recently spoke with The New York Times over coffee in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles. He wore a long-sleeved T-shirt bearing the defining image of “The Holy Mountain,” Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1973 cult classic: a man seated and wearing a pointed hat, framed by two women. During the interview, Stevens talked about his interest in genre movies and why his goal is always to make a director laugh. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.I have to ask about your “Holy Mountain” shirt. That’s a great, trippy midnight movie.I’m a huge fan of Jodorowsky. He’s a true visionary dreamer. I absolutely love filmmakers who present you with unforgettable imagery. He’s a common touchstone with a lot of great filmmakers I admire. 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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      ‘Time of the Heathen’: Postwar Life and Death, an American Tale

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      Newly excavated and restored, Peter Kass’s 1961 movie, full of trippy distortions and grim associations, gets its first New York run at Film at Lincoln Center.Peter Kass’s “Time of the Heathen” is as much artifact as artwork. Symptomatizing both Cold War angst and the birth pangs of the New American Cinema, the movie premiered in late 1961 at the influential film society Cinema 16, where it received mixed reviews and dropped from sight.Newly excavated and restored, Kass’s “psychological drama of guilt and violence” (as it was blurbed at the time) gets its first New York run at Film at Lincoln Center, through May 16.An opening title sets the action four years after the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. A gangly, odd-looking white man identified in the credits as Gaunt (John Heffernan) strides through a generic rural America, Bible in pocket — looking for what?After being questioned by the police, he stumbles across a farmhouse, where we have just witnessed a white man named Ted (Stewart Heller) sexually assault and kill a Black woman, Marie (Ethel Ayler, later to play Clair Huxtable’s mother on “The Cosby Show”), who was a housekeeper for Ted’s father. A xenophobic ornery cuss, Pa (Orville Steward) returns and attempts to frame Gaunt, the haunted loner, who, his life in danger, flees with Marie’s similarly threatened young son, Jesse (Barry Collins), who is deaf and mute.The mood is apocalyptic. (Kass’s title comes from a doomsday passage in the Book of Ezekiel.) Lejaren Hiller’s fanfare-rich score is alternately intrusive and supportive, but Ed Emshwiller’s sharp, inventive cinematography suggests the elemental, visual dramas of a 1920s silent film.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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      ‘Challengers’ and That Ending: Our Critics Have Thoughts

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      The tennis movie comes to an abrupt stop midmatch, so we don’t know who won. Does that matter?The relationships in “Challengers” are complicated. Patrick (Josh O’Connor) and Art (Mike Faist) were close pals on the juniors tennis circuit when they met Tashi (Zendaya), a phenom. As the years pass and they become entangled in on-court rivalry and off-court sexual tensions, the film builds to a vicious challenger-circuit match between Art, now a top-ranked pro with a confidence problem, and Patrick, sleeping in his car between tournaments. In the stands is Art’s wife and Patrick’s ex, Tashi, who turned to coaching after an injury cut short her career. The film ends abruptly, the outcome of the match unclear — and that has been the subject of much discussion online. So we asked our critic at large Wesley Morris and our movie critic Alissa Wilkinson to weigh in. Caution: Spoilers ahead.WESLEY MORRIS Alissa, we’re here to discuss the final moments of “Challengers,” and in order to do that, I’m committing a big personal no-no and talking about a movie that people have had only two weeks to see. Sometimes it takes me — a culture professional — a while to catch up, so I’d imagine other folks might appreciate some distance between opening weekend and the instant media chatterboxes start breaking down the dismount. I also understand that’s a very 1988 flavor of film discourse and that a judge would overrule me.So: People are confused about this ending? Or intrigued? Either way, I ask: Which part? The storm of final shots (final camera shots) that boot us out of the theater midmatch? Or the final encounter between Tashi and Patrick, which I refuse to ruin? Or her final glimpse, on match eve, of a sleeping Art?If we’re talking about that shot storm, which goes down in a third-set tiebreaker between Patrick and Art, is it so intriguing that it warrants a conversation? There’s one image of Patrick crouching and another of Art aloft, mid-slam, that I’ll always remember. What follows? Eh. I don’t know who these characters are, who they’re supposed to be, or what they might want, even secretly. So I didn’t care what happens after this match.If anything concerned me, it was the fact that this finale takes place in the middle (or the end, I suppose) of the third point of the tiebreaker, which has at least four or five more points to go. Is caring who wins the match gauche? Is it safe to assume that, based on the number of warnings and penalties the exasperated chair umpire (Darnell Appling) Frisbees out, whatever’s happening in that final scene is the end of the match anyway, because one of these guys is getting ejected? Did I just wind up re-enacting what people are doing with this movie anyway and express genuine intrigue?Josh O’Connor as a down-on-his-luck pro in the film.MGMWe 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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      Bernard Hill, Actor in ‘Titanic’ and ‘Lord of the Rings,’ Dies at 79

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      With a stout frame, bushy whiskers and a weathered visage, he embodied men of authority facing down danger with weary stoicism.Bernard Hill, a British actor who incarnated a humble style of masculine leadership in three hugely successful Hollywood movies, “Titanic” and two films in the “Lord of the Rings” franchise, died on Sunday. He was 79.His death was announced in a family statement sent by a representative of Lou Coulson Associates, a British talent agency. It did not say where he died or provide a cause.Mr. Hill drew praise from critics for his work in serious TV dramas, small-budget films and theater. But he was best known for playing the ship’s captain in “Titanic” (1997) and the ruler of a horsemen’s kingdom in the second and third installments of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, “The Two Towers” (2002) and “The Return of the King” (2003).By appearing in “Titanic” and “The Return of the King,” Mr. Hill became the first actor to star in more than one film to gross over $1 billion and the only actor to appear in two of the three films to win a record 11 Oscars (the third is “Ben-Hur”), The Manchester Evening News reported in 2022.In each film, his stout frame, bushy whiskers and weathered visage helped him embody men of authority who faced danger with reluctance, then acceptance and, finally, self-sacrificial stoicism.In “Titanic,” he was Capt. Edward J. Smith. Early in the movie, he grasps the ship’s railing, looks out to sea and instructs one of his crew to increase the ship’s speed: “Let’s stretch her legs,” he declares. The movie ultimately suggests that the undue speed of the ship is a factor in its fatal collision with an iceberg.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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      Laurent Cantet, Whose Films Explored France’s Undersides, Dies at 63

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      His acclaimed “The Class” walked a provocative line between documentary and fiction. In that film and others, he explored the inescapable traps of late-stage capitalism.Laurent Cantet, an eminent director who made penetrating films about the prickly undersides of French life and society, died on April 25 in Paris. He was 63.His screenwriter and editor, Robin Campillo, said he died of cancer in a hospital.Mr. Cantet’s best-known film was “Entre les Murs” (“The Class”), which won the Palme d’Or, the Cannes Film Festival’s top prize, in 2008 and was nominated for an Oscar as best foreign-language film. “The Class” was something new in French filmmaking: an extended snapshot of the inside of a schoolroom in a working-class district of Paris, using a real-life ex-teacher and real-life schoolchildren and treading a provocative line between documentary and fiction.That ambiguity infuses the film with a rare tension, as a hapless language teacher struggles with his largely immigrant students, trying (with difficulty) to gain their acceptance of the strict rules of the French language, and French identity. In this frank chronicle of classroom life, the students, many of them from Africa, the Caribbean and Asia — bright, sometimes provocative — have the upper hand.Along the way, Mr. Cantet surgically exposes the fault lines in France’s faltering attempts at integration, showing exactly where the country’s rigid model is often impervious to the experience of its non-native citizens. Reviewing “The Class” in The New York Times, Manohla Dargis called it “artful, intelligent” and “urgently necessary.”The film touched a nerve in France, selling more than a million tickets. Right-leaning intellectuals like Alain Finkielkraut denounced it for devaluing classical French culture — unwittingly underscoring Mr. Cantet’s point.Mr. Cantet was invited to the Élysée Palace to discuss the film with President Nicolas Sarkozy. He declined the invitation. “I’m not going to speak about diversity with someone who invented the Ministry of National Identity,” Mr. Cantet said at the time, referring to one of Mr. Sarkozy’s more ill-fated initiatives.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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      Barbara O. Jones, Actress Who Brought Black Cinema to Life, Dies at 82

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      Her arresting roles in movies like “Bush Mama” and “Daughters of the Dust” helped shape a generation of independent filmmakers.Barbara O. Jones, an actress whose captivating work in films like “Bush Mama” and “Daughters of the Dust” helped define the cerebral, experimental and highly influential Black cinema movement that emerged in Los Angeles in the 1970s, died on April 8 at her home in Dayton, Ohio. She was 82.Her brother Marlon Minor confirmed the death but said the cause had not been determined.Starting in the early 1970s just a few miles from Hollywood, a generation of students at the University of California, Los Angeles, began making films that pushed hard against many of the tropes of commercial moviemaking.Budding filmmakers like Charles Burnett, Julie Dash and Haile Gerima eschewed polished scripts and linear narratives in search of an authentic Black cinematic language. They relied on actors like Mrs. Jones, drawn from far outside the mainstream, to bring their work to life.Mrs. Jones was in some ways the typical Los Angeles transplant, having moved from the Midwest in search of a film career. She took acting classes, but, rather than gravitating toward Hollywood, she fell in with the politically charged, aesthetically adventurous scene around the U.C.L.A. film school, a movement that the film scholar Clyde Taylor called the L.A. Rebellion.She appeared in several short student films, including Mr. Gerima’s “Child of Resistance” (1973), in which she played an imprisoned activist loosely based on Angela Davis, and Ms. Dash’s “Diary of an African Nun” (1977), adapted from a short story by Alice Walker.Mrs. Jones in Ms. Dash’s short film “Diary of an African Nun” (1977), adapted from a story by Alice Walker.Julie DashWe 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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      Jerry Seinfeld Can No Longer Be About Nothing

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      The comedian, long beloved for his apolitical riffs, has been wrestling with what it means to be Jewish amid the Israel-Hamas war. Not everyone is pleased.Jerry Seinfeld became a mic-cradling, cereal-eating, “did-you-ever-notice”-ing avatar of American Jewish life with a brazenly shrugging persona: a merry indifference to weighty material as a comedian and in his megahit TV show about nothing, as petty and apolitical as he seemed to be.Now — off-camera, at least — Mr. Seinfeld appears to have reached his post-nothing period.Since the attacks of Oct. 7 in Israel, and through their bloody and volatile aftermath in Gaza, Mr. Seinfeld, 70, has emerged as a strikingly public voice against antisemitism and in support of Jews in Israel and the United States, edging warily toward a more forward-facing advocacy role than he ever seemed to seek across his decades of fame.He has shared reflections about life on a kibbutz in his teens, and in December traveled to Tel Aviv to meet with hostages’ families, soberly recounting afterward the missile attack that greeted him during the trip.He has participated, to a point, in the kind of celebrity activism with which few associate him — letter-signing campaigns, earnest messages on social media — answering simply recently when asked about the motivation for his visit to Israel: “I’m Jewish.”And as some American cities and college campuses simmer with conflict over the Middle East crisis and Israel’s military response, Mr. Seinfeld has faced a measure of public scorn that he has rarely courted as a breakfast-obsessed comedian, intensified by the more vocal advocacy of his wife, Jessica, a cookbook author.This week, as the couple and their children appeared together at the premiere of Mr. Seinfeld’s new movie (“Unfrosted,” about Pop-Tarts), Ms. Seinfeld attracted attention for another reason: She promoted on Instagram, and said she had helped bankroll, a counterprotest at the University of California, Los Angeles, where clashes with pro-Palestinian demonstrators have turned violent.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