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      What Exactly Is Jennifer Lopez’s “This Is Me … Now: A Love Story?”

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      Yes, Ben Affleck is in it, as are many of J. Lo’s famous friends. Here’s what to know about “This Is Me … Now: A Love Story.”At one point during “This is Me … Now: A Love Story,” a character observes that watching Jennifer Lopez’s love life is like bingeing “Vanderpump Rules” — eventually you stop judging the people you’re seeing and start judging yourself. But in the case of this self-financed multimedia project, you might also question what exactly it is that you have watched. Is it a movie, a collection of music videos, a simple vanity project? Is it a therapy session, or a new genre entirely — the therapy musical? Lopez, who co-wrote and produced this 65-minute spectacle, which is now available on Amazon Prime Video, tries to keep you guessing. You might have a few questions. We have some answers.Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck embrace, mostly, at the premier of “This Is Me … Now.”Mario Anzuoni/ReutersHow much of Ben Affleck is in there?Ben Affleck flits in and out of this like a little-seen hummingbird.He bookends the story as a lost love, a character called the Biker, but he’s a barely glimpsed mystery. Could that be his jawline? Is that his chest? It’s definitely his voice we hear telling a sleeping Lopez, “You know how much I love you?” Going incognito to play cable-news pundit Rex Stone, Affleck dons a bad blonde wig, a prosthetic nose and a Trumpian spray tan. He also adopts a folksy accent that recalls Gary Busey, and a delivery that’s part Tucker Carlson and part Keith Olbermann (a man Affleck once memorably mocked on “Saturday Night Live”). But instead of ranting about politics, ol’ Rexy is concerned with the state of love and connection in the world — a topic of great interest to Lopez’s character, who is simply called the Artist. He’s the anchor of her love, but she’s barely tuning in.It might have served the project better to have less of Affleck on the screen and more of him on the page. After all, this is the guy who co-wrote “Good Will Hunting” — one of the best of all therapy movies. Did the real-life Affleck try to encourage his wife to open up, the way Robin Williams’s therapist, Sean, wanted his patient to do? Did he urge her to think a little more deeply about love and vulnerability? It’s hard to guess from his mid-credits monologue.Can we play Name That Ex?Yes, we can.Marriage might be a sacred union that should only be entered into with the utmost care, as Jane Fonda’s character told Lopez’s in “Monster-in-Law,” but that didn’t stop either Fonda in that film or Lopez in real life from giving it a try four times.In the past, Lopez has used her position as a movie producer to comment on her own marital history. In 2002’s “Marry Me,” for instance, she played an artist who had been married three times. In this new project, she has a whirlwind rom-com sequence, set to the song “Can’t Get Enough,” in which she cycles through three weddings with three interchangeable husbands (played by Tony Bellissimo, Derek Hough and Trevor Jackson). Could this game of musical grooms be a commentary on her past marriages to Ojani Noa (1997-1998), Cris Judd (2001-2003) and Marc Anthony (2004-2014)?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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      Which Oscar Snubs Still Make You Mad? We Want to Know.

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      Greta Gerwig wasn’t the first omission to tick us off. Are you still stewing over “Pulp Fiction” losing to “Forrest Gump” or Marilyn Monroe never getting a nod? Tell us more.As the film editor overseeing movies coverage for The New York Times, I follow Oscar races for a living, so I knew that Greta Gerwig wasn’t a shoo-in for a best director nomination for “Barbie.” Still, when she was snubbed, I was surprised, then somewhat miffed, then truly annoyed as I thought more about it. She brought vision, artistry and both humor and gravitas to what could have been a forgettable summer confection. How could the academy not see this?Of course, as it turned out, I wasn’t alone in my outrage; thank you, Hillary Clinton. If the reaction seemed especially outsized, so has everything about “Barbie,” from the box office haul to the number of think pieces (guilty). And when you throw the Oscars, essentially the Super Bowl of Culture, into the mix, the response is bound to be big.But the truth is that this is only partly about “Barbie.” Most of us have strong opinions about what performances and films are and are not worthy of an Academy Award. We love to get mad when the Oscars mess up. And looking back on movie history, I know they have messed up. So. Many. Times.That got me to wondering: What snubs are you still mad about? It could be a performance, film, director, song, score — you get the idea — that wasn’t nominated. It could be one that was nominated but lost on the big night. Fill out the form below, and we may feature your response in an upcoming story. We will not publish or share your contact information outside the Times newsroom, and we will not publish any part of your submission without contacting you first. More

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      Martin Scorsese Narrates a Scene From ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’

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      The director narrates a “circular ballet” sequence where Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, Ernest Burkhart, is taken in for questioning.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.To tell the sweeping story of the Osage murders of the 1920s in “Killers of the Flower Moon” (nominated for 10 Oscars, including best picture), the director Martin Scorsese opted mostly not to sweep the camera along with the narrative.“Dealing with the landscape and the period, I tended to have more stable images,” he said during a video interview, “images that were almost like old photographs in a way.”But one key moment called for a change. As investigators go to Oklahoma to look into the Osage murders and disappearances, they drill down to a group of individuals they think are involved. And in this scene, the lawmen converge to arrest one person they believe they can get information from, Ernest Burkhart, played by Leonardo DiCaprio.As Ernest sits in a pool hall/barbershop, investigators descend on the space to surround him.“Since the characters are all circling around each other in the movie, and since the circle gets tighter and tighter, my drawing for the shot was simply a circle with an arrow. That was it,” Scorsese said.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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      8 Documentaries About True Love and Relationships

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      These movies go beyond examining a relationship to reveal the glories, discontents and more about romance.Romance and love are oddly tricky to capture authentically in a documentary. So much of what fosters real connection — as opposed to, say, “Bachelor”-style performative love — happens away from cameras. Plus, every love story is a bit of an experiment, and the observer effect applies: being filmed tends to change the results.But you can capture something about romance in a documentary. I don’t mean the kind that ends in disaster and a true crime documentary. I mean the movies that reveal something to us about the highs and lows, the glories and discontents, and above all something ineffable about love itself, transcending just romance.You probably have your own favorites, and your list might include one of mine: “Fire of Love” (2022, Disney+), Sara Dosa’s swooner about the volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft. United in love of one another and, perhaps just as much, love of volcanoes, they perished together in a volcanic explosion in 1991. Their shared interest was a fundamental part of their lives, which made me think of several documentaries about artistic couples, like Daniel Hymanson’s heartbreaking “So Late So Soon” (2021, rent on major platforms) and Zachary Heinzerling’s acclaimed “Cutie and the Boxer” (2013, Vudu), both of which delve into complex relationships that weave together creativity and partnership.Other documentaries tap into the power of love to sustain us across tragedy and hardship. I think of this year’s Oscar-nominated “The Eternal Memory” (Paramount+), directed by Maite Alberdi, about a couple navigating one partner’s deteriorating memory. Or Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s “Flee” (2021, Hulu), in which, on the verge of marriage, an Afghan refugee tells his story of traumatic displacement; his soon-to-be husband has become the only place of safety he can find, but he’s still reticent to trust any home at all. Or there’s “Time” (2020, Prime Video), Garrett Bradley’s gutting film about Fox Rich’s fight to free her husband, Rob, from a 60-year prison sentence. (This was a co-production of The New York Times.)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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      How Kingsley Ben-Adir Became Bob Marley

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      Despite little outward resemblance, the actor worked for months to get the look, sound and movement right for the new film “Bob Marley: One Love.”Bob Marley, the beloved and singular reggae luminary, was a dreadlocked Rastafarian from Jamaica who sang and played guitar. Kingsley Ben-Adir is a Brit with close-cropped hair who doesn’t sing or play guitar, and stands seven inches taller than Marley did. Despite the lack of external similarities, Ben-Adir was cast as Marley in a new Hollywood biopic, the culmination of a yearlong search for the right actor.“We tried to find someone from Jamaica who could speak the dialect we needed,” said Ziggy Marley, Bob Marley’s oldest son as well as a Grammy-winning musician, and a producer on “Bob Marley: One Love,” which opened in theaters on Feb. 14. But physical verisimilitude, he decided, wasn’t the key to portraying his father: “Kingsley brought an emotional depth that nobody else brought to the auditions, and a magnetism,” he added.The choice of Ben-Adir has been denounced by many Jamaicans, who point out that at least since 1990s films like “Cool Runnings” and “How Stella Got Her Groove Back,” Hollywood has been using non-Jamaican actors with diluted accents. “We were not meant to have agency over our narratives,” Danae Peart wrote in RiddimStyle Magazine, which covers culture in the Black diaspora. She added that Hollywood executives are obsessed with “making everything palatable for the ‘white gaze.’”Reviews for “Bob Marley: One Love” have been almost uniformly negative, but even some of the harshest critics have praised Ben-Adir’s performance. “In a film that mostly sticks to reliable formula, he is one thing to love,” Olly Richards of Empire wrote. Recently, Ben-Adir explained in detail how he made the transformation, despite little outward resemblance to Marley.Landing the RoleZiggy Marley, left, with Ben-Adir on set. “Kingsley brought an emotional depth that nobody else brought to the auditions, and a magnetism,” Marley said.Chiabella James/Paramount Pictures“On the audition tape, I knew that my Jamaican patois was going to be basic and wrong,” Ben-Adir, a lean, alert 37-year-old dressed in a dark Adidas track suit, said during an interview in a Times Square conference room. He chose one scene from among three he’d been sent, and had only two days to prep his audition — not enough time to nail the accent. “Working actors don’t have the luxury of time and space.” He crammed by studying “Live at the Rainbow,” a Marley concert video shot in 1977.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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      The Best True Crime to Stream: Viral Stories With a Twist

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      What happens when widespread attention plays an unexpected role in a crime or investigation? Here are four picks across television, documentaries and podcasts that explore the question.These days, it’s common for a true crime story to go viral, but that interest often gathers momentum only after an investigation, documentary, podcast or online conversation brings to light a previously unfamiliar saga. For this streaming list, I wanted to look instead at stories that were, to some degree, viral already, and where that buzz was essential to the yarn itself — altering or shaping the unusual events. Here are four memorable offerings.Documentary film“The Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker”Caleb McGillvary, known as Kai, may have been among the first so-called milkshake ducks, a term for a noncelebrity who delights the internet, only to fall from grace.In 2013, he was interviewed for an on-the-scene news segment in which he recounted how he had intervened to stop a crime while hitchhiking in Fresno, Calif. The video, where he is referenced as “Kai, the Homeless Hitchhiker With a Hatchet” quickly went viral, and McGillvary — a goofy, charismatic, eccentric vagabond — was hailed as a hero.Quickly came a bonanza of memes and television appearances — including a segment on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” — as well as talks of his own reality show. But the good times didn’t last. A few months later, he was arrested on charges that he had killed a man in New Jersey.This 2023 Netflix documentary, from the director Colette Camden, unpacks McGillvary’s internet fame, the subsequent fallout and his murder trial. It also serves as a time capsule of sorts, capturing the frenetic pace and fickle mood of American web culture in the mid-2010s.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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      Life Imitates Art as a ‘Master and Margarita’ Movie Stirs Russia

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      An American director’s adaptation of the beloved novel is resonating with moviegoers, who may recognize some similarities in its satire of authoritarian rule.By all appearances, the movie adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s cult favorite novel “The Master and Margarita,” in Russian theaters this winter, shouldn’t be thriving in President Vladimir Putin’s wartime Russia.The director is American. One of the stars is German. The celebrated Stalin-era satire, unpublished in its time, is partly a subversive sendup of state tyranny and censorship — forces bedeviling Russia once again today.But the film was on its way to the box office long before Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine and imposed a level of repression on Russia unseen since Soviet times. The state had invested millions in the movie, which had already been shot. Banning a production of Russia’s most famous literary paean to artistic freedom was perhaps too big an irony for even the Kremlin to bear.Its release — after many months of delay — has been one of the most dramatic and charged Russian film debuts in recent memory. The movie refashions the novel as a revenge tragedy about a writer’s struggle under censorship, borrowing from the story of Bulgakov’s own life. The emphasis, for many Russians, has hit close to home. And, for some defenders of Putin, too close.“I had an internal belief that the movie would have to come out somehow,” the director, Michael Lockshin, said in a video interview from his home in California. “I still thought it was a miracle when it did come out. As for the response, it’s hard to expect a response like this.”Michael Lockshin, right, the movie’s director, with Tsyganov during the production of the movie.Mars MediaWe 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