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      From ‘The Exorcist’ to ‘Bambi,’ These Movies Messed Us Up as Kids

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      Our first horror movie is often a memory imprinted on our brain and, for some of us, our heart.How young is too young to watch a scary movie?With Halloween approaching, we asked you, the reader, to share your experiences of this rite of passage. Nearly 1,000 people responded with indelible memories; for some, watching a scary movie at a young age inspired a lifelong love of horror movies.Among those we heard from, the most common ages to be exposed to a hair-raising movie seemed to be from 7 to 10, peaking at age 8. But many were also freaked out as teenagers and even as adults.You watched them at the local movie theater; on a black-and-white television; at your neighbor’s house when your parents thought you were being closely supervised; with an older sibling who let you tag along; or with a grandparent who thought the PG-rated “Poltergeist” was a great choice for movie night.“The Exorcist,” William Friedkin’s horror masterpiece that turns 50 this year, was mentioned most frequently as your first scary movie, followed by “The Wizard of Oz,” “The Birds” and “Psycho.” But even Disney’s 1942 animated film “Bambi” traumatized many.You also had us looking up lesser-known, eerie cinematic moments: the “wheelers” in “Return to Oz” (1985); the creepy hearse driver’s smile in “Burnt Offerings” (1976); the haunted organ music in “The Ghost and Mr. Chicken” (1966); and Large Marge’s jolting transformation in “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” (1985). We also appreciated the crisp, black-and-white splendor of Gort the robot in “The Day The Earth Stood Still” (1951) and the unexpectedly heart-wrenching ending to the Japanese Kaiju movie “Rodan” (1956).Here are some of our favorite responses.‘The Exorcist’ Still Haunts You”The Exorcist” was mentioned most frequently as your first scary movie.Warner Bros.“My parents were watching it, and it was back when TV only had like five or six stations over the airwaves. This was in a cabin in rural Michigan on a B&W set. I remember my parents telling me it was better to watch it to the end and see the resolution. Later that night, my father got food poisoning and was throwing up a lot. After watching that movie, I thought he was possessed.”— Bill Lester of Long Beach, Calif., on seeing the film at age 7.“My parents did not know and would not have approved. I am now 53 years old so we did not even own a VCR. A babysitter brought one over for the weekend, and we watched not only ‘The Exorcist’ but also ‘Deliverance’ (was our babysitter Hannibal Lecter?).”— Jeff Knops of Seattle, on seeing the film at age 9.“I was so frightened that I pulled the hood of my jacket over my head so that I didn’t have to watch it. It didn’t work. The sounds of the movie scared me just as much. I couldn’t sleep for months. Later I snuck into it a second time in order to overcome my fear. It was equally traumatic.”— Jay Frisch of New York, who sneaked into a theater to watch it at age 13.“My mother’s boyfriend would take me and my 5-year-old sister to horror movies. This was in the ’70s, when you could take kids to terrible movies at second-run theaters, apparently. He told us we were going to see “Benji,” the dog movie. This was not recognized as abuse back then. Many things were not. My sister still has nightmares about it — she’s 51 now.”— Jodi Peterson of Central Illinois, Ill., on seeing the film at age 8.Sketchy SupervisionDon’t let the Blob touch you!Paramount Pictures“One girl of 14 who had been tasked with watching me for the day suggested we all watch ‘The Ring.’ She called my mom to ask for permission, but my mom had misunderstood and thought I’d be watching ‘Lord of the Rings.’”— Holly of Arlington, Mass., on seeing “The Ring” at age 9.“My parents had absolutely forbidden me to watch this movie. Uncharacteristically, they forgot to tell the babysitter. In my memory, I barely slept a wink. I could not go to my parents for comfort, because they had forbidden me to watch the film. I could not go to my sister for comfort because she would certainly inform my parents. So there I lay, rigid, hypervigilant and terrified.”— Tess Tyson of Gig Harbor, Wash., on seeing “The Birds” at age 6.“My mother was out and my 10-year-old cousin was watching me. ‘The Blob’ was on the Friday Night Frights. He made the judgment call I could watch it with him, rather than risk missing any of it by putting me to bed.”— Eric Gansworth of Tuscarora Nation Indian Territory, Tuscarora, N.Y., on seeing “The Blob” at age 5.“I was spending the night with my friend Matt. His mom was at a party so it was just the two of us in the house. Matt’s house had HBO, which meant scary movies in all their R-rated glory. Ten-year-old machismo made us eager to watch. So we watched it. Jiffy Pop and Coke were consumed. Super fun! But THEN when it was time to go to bed, Matt said, “I’m going to sleep in my mom’s bed and wait for her to come home,” leaving me alone in his room in a sleeping bag. I was petrified. Absolutely petrified.”— Jason Heck of Belton, Mo., on seeing “Halloween II” at age 11.You Call These Children’s Movies?!The Wicked Witch of the West, played by Margaret Hamilton, fueled many of your nightmares.MGM“My earliest and most vivid encounter with sheer terror took place in a movie theater when I was 3 years old. It was at the Fresh Pond Cinema in Cambridge, Mass., not during a showing of ‘Cujo’ or ‘It,’ but another dog and clown horror classic (masquerading as a kids’ movie), ‘Air Bud.’ Still indelible in my memory is a particular scene in which the sottish, spiteful clown re-emerges intent on snatching Buddy, our endearing, basketball-dunking dog pal, away from his newfound, but kind, young companion. Even now, I’m not sure what was scarier: watching the clown reappear on the screen, or the deafening, collective cry of fear that erupted from me and the rest of the audience of toddlers.”— Clare Goslant of Cambridge, Mass., on seeing “Air Bud” at age 3.“The wicked witch was the most terrifying thing I had ever seen. I screamed and shut my eyes every time she appeared. That same year, after I had watched ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ I was cast as a wicked witch in my second-grade play. I cried and cried when I came home. I had wanted to play the fairy princess. My mother taught me how to cackle. And she said I’d be the star of the show. She was right.”— Cathy Arden of New York, on seeing “The Wizard of Oz” at age 7.“It was supposed to be a children’s movie, but the scene of Bambi’s mother dying in a forest was something I found terrifying!”— Carter Bancroft of Huntington, N.Y., on seeing “Bambi” at age 5.“My older sister and I were dropped off at the big movie theater for the Saturday matinee. She left me all by myself and went off with her girlfriends. This was before parental helicopter-ing. ‘The Wizard of Oz’ would later be broadcast annually on TV. Kids were able to cuddle with grown-ups in the safety of their own home, with the happy songs, cute little Munchkins and Dorothy’s funny friends. There’s no place like home. That’s a whole different process than I experienced, and it was a whole different picture for me. It was not so much my young age, but watching a family movie in that wild setting, having such a powerful effect on my senses, made it my first scary movie. I was scarred for life.”— Don Feiler of Mattituck, N.Y., on seeing “The Wizard of Oz” at age 5.‘Innocent’ FearJamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode in “Halloween II.”Universal Pictures“The menacing, manic Caligari with his long white hair and elongated hat terrified me as he danced around the tilted landscape and jagged windows. I could not wait for it to be over and for the threatening nonsense to stop. When it was, and my heart stopped racing, I realized I just had my first experience of art.”— Kathleen Brady of New York, on seeing “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” at age 14.“I’m sure I played it cool in front of my friends, but I laid in bed that night filled with dread, fear and regret. Michael Myers was coming for me. I finally went into my parent’s bedroom and woke up my mom and told her what was necessary at the moment — I wasn’t feeling well and needed her help. She took my temperature and tucked me back into bed and I think could tell I just really needed her right then. She sat on my bed and read me stories from a book she kept at her own bedside until the screams of Jamie Lee Curtis were replaced by the laughter of Erma Bombeck, and I was able to drift off to sleep. To this day I’ve never told my mom the truth of why I needed her that night. Maybe she knew all along. But I’m sure it was the last night of her soothing one of her babies to sleep.“My mother is now 90 years old and her senior living facility is showing Hitchcock’s ‘Rear Window’ this weekend. I’m planning to go watch it with her and perhaps afterward we will drink hot tea, finally tell this story, and read her Erma Bombeck book to distract us from any lingering fear. And isn’t that why we watch scary movies? They play out our fears and anxieties on the screen and remind us to find safety in those people and places who make us feel loved.”— Beth Martinez of Austin, Texas, on sneaking into a showing of “Halloween II” at age 14.“The sheer volume of spiders haunts me to this day. I am now a horror cinephile, but that movie wrecked me. The climax has spiders pouring out of the walls, the pipes, the television screen. And when it ended, I experienced this crazy sense of euphoria and pride at having survived something so terrifying. Unfortunately, it also instilled a lifelong fear of all things creepy and crawly — but honestly? I’ve been chasing the high of that first horror movie my whole life.”— Andrew Gombas of Queens, N.Y., on seeing “Arachnophobia” at age 8.“Being frightened by things that can’t really happen is both thrilling and teaches you perspective. Now that I’m grown up, I have a hard time watching scary movies because of all of the scary things that have happened to me in real life. I miss that ‘innocent’ fear.”— Erin Walla of Norway, Mich., on seeing “Horror of Dracula” at age 7.What Were My Parents Thinking?“Here’s Johnny!” is one of the classic phrases spoken by Jack Nicholson in “The Shining.”Warner Brothers“I actually watched this with my dad. Forty-three years later, I continue to jokingly ask, ‘Why did you think this was a good idea?’”— Derik Frederiksen of Seattle, on seeing “The Shining” at age 6.“The fact that no one in the room thought it was a bad idea for a child to be watching gave me true Gen X cred.”— Lynwood Lord, Media, Pa., on seeing “Alien” at age 9.“Why the title didn’t give them pause, I’ll never understand. I had my eyes covered through most of it, so I didn’t see much of the film; the soundtrack was scary enough. When the movie ended, the lights came up in the theater, and still, the stunned crowd sat silent, no one moving. I couldn’t understand why no one was running out of there, and in my little-kid, high-pitched voice, I yelled out, ‘Let’s get out before it starts again!’”— Joey Moskowitz of Paradise Valley, Ariz., on seeing “Psycho” at age 5.Skeptical, but Still ScaredSadako in “Ringu,” the Japanese original of “The Ring.”Basara Pictures“I remember being scared but also dubious of the entire premise of the movie. I just didn’t believe it was plausible for you to run for your life and the guy to catch up with its leisurely stroll.”— Eva Edith of Wasco, Calif., on seeing “Halloween IV” at age 8.“I remembered the scene of Sadako crawling out of the television set very vividly. The only scene that I covered my eyes was when they played the ‘cursed video’ that would give you a call after you’d seen it. Funnily enough, my mom also looked away from the screen. We were a superstitious Asian family, so we weren’t taking any chances.”— Ryan Oquiza, Ashburn, Va., on seeing “Ringu” at age 7.“I remember trying to act cool and not scared, surrounded by my newfound middle school peers. I still had to hide my eyes sometimes. The scene where the demon pops up behind the dad scarred me for life. I had to keep my bedroom door open with the TV on in the next room for the next six months. I swore my house was haunted after that movie.”— Sheridan Posschelle of Denver, on seeing “Insidious Part 1” at age 13. More

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      Sofia Coppola Makes It Look Easy. It Isn’t.

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      Sofia Coppola is so drawn to the idea of becoming that she sometimes finds it hard to grasp that she became. Over eight feature films — including her latest, “Priscilla,” about the young Priscilla Presley’s tumultuous relationship with Elvis — she has delved deeply into the liminal stage that is a young woman’s coming-of-age. So you can hardly blame Coppola that after staying in that head space for so long, it comes as a surprise that 25 years have passed since filming her debut feature, “The Virgin Suicides.”“It’s weird to reflect back at having a body of work,” she told me. “Like, ‘Oh, you’re a grown-up now and actually established, not just starting off.’”It was a sunny October afternoon in Los Angeles, and we were sitting on a restaurant terrace at the Academy Museum, where the 52-year-old director had come to tout “Priscilla” and autograph copies of “Sofia Coppola Archive,” a new art book assembled from the boxes of letters, photographs and reference images she had collected throughout her career. After the signing, she participated in a conversation moderated by members of the academy’s teen council, who asked Coppola questions about screenwriting and style as a form of self-expression.Teenagers and young women are still her demographic sweet spot, and Coppola, who is now the mother of two teenage daughters, met the young moderators’ queries with encouragement. “These are such good questions from the teen council, right?” she said to the audience. Many of the people attending the panel had come dressed to impress her, though Coppola was simply attired in a navy T-shirt with black trousers and ballet flats, her fingernails painted the same light-pink hue as the cover of her book.The director has released an art book, “Sofia Coppola Archive,” that compiles letters, photos and reference images. She herself has become an inspiration for younger artists.OK McCausland for The New York TimesIn a profession where so many directors are chatty, high-strung neurotics, Coppola is the picture of placidity. But her even keel shouldn’t be mistaken for a lack of caring. In a letter to Bill Murray included in “Archive,” Coppola describes a low moment when it seemed Murray couldn’t be reached to star in “Lost in Translation” (2003) and friends coaxed her out to dinner to consider other options. They soon found that her personal investment in Murray’s casting was more fraught than they could have known. “I broke down in tears at the restaurant (something I never do),” Coppola wrote.This is all to say that Coppola is so serene — and her films, at their best, so sublime — that people may assume it all comes easily to her. (That she hails from a filmmaking family led by a titanic father, Francis Ford Coppola, can only further that notion.) But over the course of our lunch, Coppola was candid about the issues she faces this far into her Oscar-winning career. Making movies the way she wants remains so difficult that all the recent genuflection — like the moment early in our lunch when a young fan with a “Virgin Suicides” shoulder bag came over to praise Coppola for being “such a light” — can still catch her off guard.“To be treated with that kind of respect, it’s surreal,” Coppola said. “Maybe that’s why I’m surprised when I’m in this context, because I’m still fighting to get movies made and getting budgets cut. I don’t think I’m professionally treated in the way that I am when I encounter these young people.”Early in her career, she was told that while women would go to a film starring men, the reverse wasn’t true. Though the prevailing attitude in Hollywood has evolved somewhat since then — or at least executives have learned to stop saying the quiet part out loud — Coppola still faces plenty of skepticism when trying to budget any female-fronted project. “The people in charge of giving money are usually straight men, still,” she said. “There’s always people in lower levels who are like myself, but then the bosses have a certain sensibility.”On the press tour for “Priscilla,” young women keep telling Coppola that they plan to be filmmakers, too. Their ambition gives her hope, though it’s tempered by two and a half decades of experience, including the tough battles she fought to save her new movie.“If it’s so hard for me to get financing as an established person, I worry about younger women starting out,” she said. “It’s surprising that it’s still a struggle.”Cailee Spaeny as Priscilla Presley. The movie’s budget was cut at the last minute and Coppola had to adjust.Sabrina Lantos/A24COPPOLA FIRST THUMBED through Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir, “Elvis and Me,” as a vacation read years ago. Expecting little more than a fun page-turner, she found herself unexpectedly riveted by Priscilla’s predicament: Like the title character of Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette,” she was a teenager who married into royalty, then found herself trapped in a palace that offered everything and nothing. To Coppola, who was just 18 when she gave a harshly criticized performance in her father’s film “The Godfather Part III,” Priscilla’s feeling of being scrutinized by an entire country at such a formative age was all too relatable.Still, it took some time for the story to click into place. Coppola had gone into 2020 readying her biggest project ever, an adaptation of “The Custom of the Country,” Edith Wharton’s 1913 novel, as a five-hour limited series for Apple TV+. But though the streamer has a reputation for spending big on prestige projects, Coppola said executives there weren’t keen on the lead character, the ambitious social climber Undine Spragg, and began to tighten their purse strings accordingly. (Apple did not respond to requests for comment.)“The idea of an unlikable woman wasn’t their thing,” Coppola noted. “But that’s what I’m saying about who’s in charge.”A friend prodded her to find something new to direct, and while laid up in bed for a week with Covid, Coppola took another look at “Elvis and Me” and suddenly saw with crystal clarity how it could work as a film. Even though Baz Luhrmann had just gone into production on the glitzy biopic “Elvis,” Coppola was undaunted: She figured if his version became a hit — and it did, grossing $288 million worldwide and earning eight Oscar nominations — then it would only juice interest in Priscilla’s side of the story.Coppola called up Presley, who had been a fan of hers since “Lost in Translation,” and after careful wooing, the 78-year-old came aboard the project as an executive producer. On the advice of her frequent collaborator Kirsten Dunst, Coppola hired Cailee Spaeny, best known for “Mare of Easttown” and “Pacific Rim: Uprising,” to play Priscilla from ages 14 to 28. Casting Elvis was harder: The real-life icon left impossibly big shoes to fill, and Luhrmann’s leading man, Austin Butler, was about to be Oscar-nominated for his robust spin on the role. Coppola wanted her film to show Elvis’s darker, domestic side, and to play him, she selected the fast-rising Australian actor Jacob Elordi from the HBO series “Euphoria.”“A lot of those movies didn’t get seen,” Coppola said, referring to her earlier work, “and that they are so watched now by a young generation, it’s cool that they speak to them.”OK McCausland for The New York TimesThe project was coming together quickly, but on a tight budget that allowed little room for error. Luhrmann had made “Elvis” for $85 million and Coppola had less than a quarter of that to spend on a lavish period piece that would span a decade and a half and recreate 1960s Memphis in wintry Toronto. Then, just before the film’s start date last October, a key piece of financing fell through. To save “Priscilla,” which was now $2 million short of its budget, Coppola and the producer Youree Henley were faced with an impossible task: An entire week would have to be cut from the film’s already slim shoot. With so little to work with, would “Priscilla” fall apart just as Coppola’s Apple series had?“We were like, ‘If we hold hands and jump out of the plane together, we’ll just figure it out as we’re descending,’” said Henley, who huddled with Coppola to slash 10 pages from the script.“It was one of the hardest things I ever had to do,” Coppola said about the mad scramble to make “Priscilla” work in just 30 days. Though the completed film feels refined and delicate, the shoot was anything but, since key locations were only briefly available and hairstyles, clothing and character ages changed radically between scenes. On the first day of shooting, Spaeny played Priscilla as a teenager graduating from high school; on the second, she shot the final scene as a single mother in her late 20s emerging from the gates of Graceland.It’s a wonder any of it tracks, except that Coppola’s sensibility is so specific, and her actors so eager to please her, that each scene feels distinctly of a piece. At its Venice Film Festival premiere in early September, the film received strong reviews and secured Spaeny the Volpi Cup for best actress, while an emotional Priscilla Presley told Coppola, “You did your homework.”“I still can’t believe our movie came together,” Coppola said now. And though mounting it was difficult, she recalled that while on set, she was in her element like never before.“In the beginning, I was just kind of figuring it out,” she admitted, speaking of her career. “And now, making this film ‘Priscilla,’ I felt like, ‘Oh, I know how to do this.’ All the years of experience start to gel.”LATER IN THE LUNCH, we were interrupted by a 25-year-old who hoped that Coppola would sign her book. She had on the sort of frilly dress that Marie Antoinette would have gone gaga for, with a constellation of arm tattoos that snaked out from underneath her lace sleeves.“My name is Sofia,” the fan said shyly. “I’m named after you.”With a quavering voice, the young woman explained that when her parents immigrated from Panama, Coppola’s movies were among the first they watched. That’s how she got her name and accrued, over time, the desire to follow her idol into filmmaking. “You have no idea the impact you’ve had on my life,” the second Sofia said, a tear running down her cheek.Coppola, who said she lived and worked in a “little bubble,” is always surprised when she meets people who connect this strongly to her work. “A lot of those movies didn’t get seen, and that they are so watched now by a young generation, it’s cool that they speak to them,” she told me.She remembered that Paramount Classics was cautious about releasing “The Virgin Suicides” in the spring of 2000 — “They thought girls were going to kill themselves if they saw it” — and that for a while after it came out, she watched her male contemporaries (including her then-husband, Spike Jonze) book plenty of jobs she wasn’t getting.“I’m still fighting to get movies made and getting budgets cut,” Coppola said.OK McCausland for The New York TimesMaybe it took the world some time to catch up. Though “Archive” is full of photos that Coppola has used for inspiration, Coppola’s own work now seems like the mood board for any number of artists, from the photographer Petra Collins to the singer Lana Del Rey. On television, you can detect the influence of her anachronistic take on “Marie Antoinette” in high-spirited historical remixes like “Bridgerton” and “The Great,” while Coppola often trends on TikTok, much to the annoyance of her daughters, Romy and Cosima, the only teenage girls who aren’t especially impressed by her oeuvre. “They think I’m lame,” Coppola said, though when 16-year-old Romy posted a clever viral TikTok this year, many wondered if she might follow in her mother’s footsteps as a filmmaker.A line can also be drawn from Coppola’s early work to the films of Greta Gerwig. They are two of only seven women to be nominated for the best director Oscar, and both got those nods early in their careers: Coppola was nominated at 32 for “Lost in Translation,” which won her the Oscar for original screenplay, while Gerwig got her directing nomination at 34 for “Lady Bird” (2017). Does Coppola think the blockbuster success of Gerwig’s “Barbie” could help more female-fronted projects find financing?“I’m sure it’ll make things easier, but that’s a very specific kind of filmmaking with, I would imagine, a lot of executives involved,” she said. “So that’s a different thing.”Coppola isn’t especially interested in directing blockbusters, though she once tried to mount a big-screen take on “The Little Mermaid” for Universal and was briefly courted for the final “Twilight” film. “I’ve never expected to be mainstream,” she said. “The culture that I always liked growing up was the side culture.” All she really wants is the ability to tell her stories with the budgets that befit them, and with people around who support her sensibility.But in the era of the comic-book tentpole, even that modest ask can be rejected as too much. Coppola meets frequently with the director Tamara Jenkins — she calls their friendship a “two-person ‘women in film’ coffee group” — to compare the battle scars they’ve earned from trying to get movies made: “We’re like, ‘It’s so hard. Why do we do this?’”Maybe that’s a question with no answer. Or maybe it’s an answer Coppola just has to keep relearning.“When you finish a project, you’re like, oh,” she said, as a Mona Lisa smile appeared on her face. “You have to do it, because it bugs you until you do.” More

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      A Landmark of Black Cinema, Restored for a New Age

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      The British director Horace Ové struggled to get his 1975 film, “Pressure,” made and released. Now, weeks after his death, a new restoration is celebrated in New York and London.On a recent, rainy evening in London, movie fans gathered at the British Film Institute theater for a much-anticipated premiere, though the film was made nearly 50 years ago: Horace Ové’s newly restored “Pressure,” considered the first feature by a Black British director.Ové died last month, just weeks before his film was set to be celebrated internationally with screenings at both the London and New York Film Festivals. Herbert Norville, who starred in “Pressure” when he was 15, said in a speech at the London screening that he hoped the audience saw “what it was like being Black, being British and growing up in an era where racism was rife.”A roiling social-realist drama shot in 1974, “Pressure” follows Tony, a young Black Londoner looking for a job and a sense of belonging. He is pulled in several directions: by his activist older brother, by his pious West Indian mother and by white British society, which refuses to embrace him.Gradually radicalized by encounters with potential employers, a friend’s landlord and the police, Tony reaches a boiling point. In an interview after the screening, Norville, who played Tony, described the film as “pulling no punches” in its depiction of the reality of Black life in London in the ’70s. In an earlier Q. and A. with the audience, he had noted that the film’s themes of “institutional racism and police brutality” were still relevant in Britain today.In recent years, mainstream cultural institutions including the Tate museums and the BBC have been giving work made about Black British, and specifically Caribbean, lives more attention. The restoration of “Pressure” is accompanied by a major British Film Institute retrospective, “Power to the People: Horace Ove’s Radical Vision,” though in prior decades, the director struggled for recognition from the establishment.Oscar James and Sheila Scott Wilkinson in scene from “Pressure.” The film features professional and nonprofessional actors. BFI National Archive/The Film FoundationThe journey to get “Pressure” made was fraught. In 1972, Robert Buckler, who produced the film, was working as a script editor for the BBC, looking for stories about “the struggle for ordinary people,” he said in a recent interview. Buckler, who is white, spent part of his youth in the racially mixed London neighborhood of Peckham, and felt that the BBC’s programming wasn’t “reflecting fully the way our society was changing around us,” he said.In Britain in the 1970s, the Caribbean Artists Movement was thriving and Black British artists, poets, playwrights and theater directors were making work — just not for mainstream film or TV. Buckler said he approached Ové, a documentarian and photojournalist from Trinidad, to develop a script, but was unable to convince the BBC to fund a film “about a Black Englishman.” He recalled executives asking, “‘Well, who on earth would be in it?’”Instead, the British film Institute, or B.F.I., eventually financed “Pressure,” in 1974. Ové cast a mix of professional and nonprofessional actors, and the movie debuted at the London Film Festival the following year. But “Pressure” did not receive a theatrical release until 1978. “Banned is technically the wrong word,” said Arike Oke, a B.F.I. executive responsible for the organization’s archive; the delay in reaching movie theaters was more to do with “bureaucratic cul-de-sacs.” But the B.F.I. didn’t “proactively champion the film” at the time, Oke conceded.Its themes, however, were prescient. In “Pressure,” Tony is beaten by the police and arrested after attending Black Power meetings and marches; in 1976, a riot erupted following Notting Hill Carnival in west London, and as Buckler put it, “a sort of warfare between the youth and the police” broke out.Horace Ové in 1987. After making “Pressure,” he worked prolifically in TV.John Nobley/Fairfax Media, via Getty ImagesIn the same way that New York Magazine would later argue there could be “violent reactions” to Spike Lee’s 1989 film “Do the Right Thing” from Black audiences, Buckler said he wondered if the theatrical release of “Pressure” was delayed because of concerns it would heighten racial tensions.The British movie industry remained tentative about investing in Black talent for decades after the “Pressure” release, and filmmakers that followed Ové, like John Akomfrah and Isaac Julien, worked mostly in gallery spaces, while Ové worked prolifically in TV. He made only one other theatrically released movie, the 1986 comedy “Playing Away.”Zak Ové, the filmmaker’s son, said “Pressure” showed “exactly where we’ve come from and the kind of determination that was necessary.” He added that his father’s “honest depiction of a gritty reality” was a part of history at risk of disappearing if it was not honored.If it wasn’t for Ové, said Ashley Clark, the curatorial director at the Criterion Collection, that history “may not have been captured” at all. The director carved out a space “for Black people to speak for ourselves, in a landscape where a lot of those conversations were being had for us,” he said.Clark, who is British, but lives in the United States, has championed “Pressure” for several years. He said that Criterion plans to release a Blu-ray edition of the movie in 2024, and recalled programming screenings at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where the film played from “a rickety 16-millimeter print.” With the movie’s cerebral Black Power advocates campaigning for Black rights, Caribbean immigrants striving for middle-class security and disenfranchised Black British youths driven to crime by a lack of opportunity, “Pressure” offers “a meeting of different ideas and forms and embodiments of Blackness,” Clark said.At the New York screenings of the film, he said, there were “young, trendy Brooklyn people from across the diaspora” asking: Where has this been all my life? More

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      The Comedy Club Was as Intimate as a Living Room. Actually, It Was One.

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      At Apartment Fest, audiences piled into a Harlem home for four nights of jokes from comedians who have to fight for stage time elsewhere.When Eitan Levine, who’s been doing comedy for about 15 years, announced to his roughly 20,000 followers on Instagram that he would be holding a four-night stand-up comedy event called Apartment Fest in his two-bedroom Harlem home, he wasn’t too surprised when 157 applicants submitted audition tapes.“Good stage time is very hard to come by and bad stage time is also very hard to come by, so you take all of it,” said Levine, 34, who was offering peers a highly coveted 10 minutes each. “I’ve applied to worse shows for less time.”The event, which on some nights featured two 90-minute shows, complete with a headliner and six comedians, took over his apartment. Last Thursday, as Levine pushed back a large sectional sofa, set up some 25 chairs and made sure there was enough beer and water for guests paying up to $25 apiece, he worried about train delays and whether audiences would even show up. “All of those stressors are amplified 5,000 percent because the show is literally in my living room,” Levine explained. He needn’t have worried. The shows were all sold out.This D.I.Y. spirit is reminiscent of the New York’s music scene in the early 2000s, when bands like the Strokes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs were getting their starts in grimy apartments on the Lower East Side. Just as those groups were to the left of the mainstream at the time, today many early-stage comedians have to create their own spaces to be heard. And just like back then, an apartment works perfectly.Eitan Levine, the organizer, pushed a sofa against the wall to make room for the audience.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesBrittany Starna helped with the audio for Apartment Fest.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesLevine’s open-plan living area is painted from floor to ceiling in bold stripes that range from orange to bright teal. A window spans much of the back wall, and the space is open enough to snugly accommodate the crowd that faced a microphone stand.Chloe Radcliffe, 32, worked as a staff writer on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” has a studio comedy feature in development and most recently appeared in a mini-series directed by Steven Soderbergh called “Command Z.” On Thursday, she biked from Ridgewood, Queens, to Harlem to perform at Apartment Fest. She touched up her makeup in Levine’s bathroom and prepped her set from a bench in his bedroom, which was strewn with pizza boxes and was serving as a green room.Radcliffe opened with a bit about the birthmark on her cheek: “I was on the sidewalk and somebody dropped their AirPod and I picked it up and gave it to him and said, ‘Have a good day.’ He smiled, looked at my birthmark and said, ‘Get well soon.’”The crowd responded with uncontrollable giggles. “I would love to find that guy in a couple of years and be like, ‘It won’t go away! I don’t know how to get rid of it!’” she continued.Despite Levine’s nerves, this wasn’t the first time he had held comedy shows in his apartment. He originally got the idea after a rejection in 2019.“I was applying to a bunch of comedy festivals and one day I got an email from a festival rejecting me and I realized I never even applied to it,” Levine said, adding that he “came to stand-up from the improv and sketch communities where it’s very D.I.Y. — you can put a show on anywhere — so I just took that idea.”The idea for Apartment Fest was borrowed from the D.I.Y. spirit of the New York music scene in the early aughts.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesBrandon Barrera, 27, host of the first show on Saturday night, agreed with the D.I.Y. label and described the event as Levine “basically throwing a house party with the people who make him laugh the hardest.”Because of the many comedy clubs in New York, the city is one of the only places in the country where stand-ups can get onstage multiple times in one night. But even then, they can hope to end the evening with 15 minutes of total stage time. Radcliffe, for instance, had two more shows on the docket later Thursday.But bars and club owners can be picky, resulting in more pressure on comedians. Barrera, who moved from Los Angeles when his friend offered him a job as a golf caddy and a place to live in the nearby caddyshack in New Jersey, records multiple podcasts in addition to performing live. Other comedians at Apartment Fest also regularly appear on or produce podcasts, all while constantly posting material on social media, which is often where club and festival bookers find their work.Social media wasn’t as much of a consideration for Levine as he put together Apartment Fest’s bills. Though many of the performers who made the cut were his friends and had thousands of followers on social media, he also included younger comedians who were just starting to share their work online.“The minimum buy-in to some other festivals is 15,000 Instagram followers and 50,000 TikTok followers,” Levine said. “Other festivals are trying to sell something or they’re trying to be a festival that makes money. This festival is literally just the funniest people that submitted videos.”Brandon Barrera was the host of the first show on Saturday night.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesLevine was worried that audiences wouldn’t show up, but every set was sold out.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesRadcliffe has a significant following on social media, and while she understands it can be limiting for comedians, she said such platforms have “broadened access by orders of magnitude: underrepresented voices get noticed; more people are tangibly able to participate; comedians can build their own audience and the monetary exchange is more direct,” Radcliffe said.Festivals often pay only in potential exposure. Even as pop-up shows in unexpected places around the city have become more popular, it’s common for bookers to take home the bulk of the money while splitting meager amounts among the comedians.For Levine’s show, the host was paid $30, the featured acts were paid $20 and the headliners were paid $75. The money left over from the ticket proceeds — $1,500 — was donated to the Make-A-Wish Foundation.Levine chose the organization after first encountering it at age 10 when he was diagnosed with Ewing sarcoma. It’s also how he found his way into comedy. After his first wish, a BattleBot, was denied, “I ended up asking them to put me on a comedy show in New York,” said Levine, who grew up in Springfield, N.J. “So they put me up on a show at Caroline’s” comedy club.Levine filmed his sets for use in a special later.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesHe currently appears on an Amazon sports comedy show, “Game Breakers,” and plans to cut a special from sets of his performances that were filmed at Apartment Fest.As for the other comedians, the stage time in a homey apartment offered a chance to connect with an audience in a low-pressure setting.Stef Dag, 28, was quick to point out that while she may be “staring at Domino’s on the floor and clothes everywhere,” she wasn’t nervous. “It almost feels like I’m at a sleepover party — not that sleepovers haven’t been the most traumatizing nights of my life.”“Festivals, especially when you first start doing them, there is like a certain amount of — pressure is a little strong, but you want to do well,” says Ryan Thomas, a 32-year-old comedian from Brooklyn. “Here, the scale is so much smaller, and it makes it so much more fun because everyone is in on the weirdness of the situation and it makes it way more fun to play with the audience.“I just did my set and there was a joke that they didn’t really like, and I got to just talk them through. You’re actually able to look people in the eye.” More

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      ‘Five Nights at Freddy’s’ Review: Creepypizza

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      This adaptation of a video game franchise is more interested in unpacking childhood trauma than packing in jump scares.A workweek’s worth of graveyard shifts should offer ample time to convert an overwrought trauma plot into a congenial camp scare-fest. But although “Five Nights at Freddy’s,” based on a popular video game franchise, reaches for horror-comedy flair, this dreary, mild adaptation never achieves the hybrid pleasures of a movie like “M3gan.” You may chuckle, but it’s hard to tell if the movie is laughing with you.Directed by Emma Tammi, “Five Nights” follows the morose Mike (Josh Hutcherson), whose trouble keeping employment has put him in danger of losing custody of his younger sister, Abby (Piper Rubio). Desperate, Mike accepts a mysterious gig as the sole security guard at the defunct and ramshackle Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, a onetime playhouse showcasing animatronic animals.One might expect that the movie’s built-in timeline amid these creepy machines would translate to a series of set pieces escalating in violence or alarm. Instead, the story takes more of a mystery route. On top of his immediate burdens, Mike is fixated on solving the long-ago kidnapping of his younger brother, and hopes that inducing REM sleep (even while on the job) will replay the memory in his dreams and turn up repressed details.It’s a distressing back story, and Mike’s lingering pain sucks a lot of life out of what could have been an enjoyably eerie affair. The jump scares — hinging on fast cuts to close-ups — are often ineffective, and genre tropes abound: creepy, gawking children; a local policewoman (Elizabeth Lail) dispensing oblique warnings. Come to think of it, the cop’s apparently unlimited time to hang out at Freddy’s while on duty is a little frightening.Five Nights at Freddy’sRated PG-13. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters and on Peacock. More

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      ‘After Death’ Review: Visions at the Brink From Those Who Returned

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      A documentary about near-death experiences crescendos with redemptions and literal come-to-Jesus moments.The faith film “After Death” enters a crowded field of testimonials about near-death experiences, a staple of YouTube videos and bookstores. This documentary convenes a supergroup of writers and survivors: from early expounders like the author Raymond Moody (widely credited with coining the term “near-death experience”) and the cardiologist Michael Sabom, to such recent best-selling names as the pastor Don Piper (“90 Minutes in Heaven”) and a surgeon, Mary Neal (“To Heaven and Back”).The members of the group recount their forays into the hereafter, illustrated with murky re-enactments of what brought them there: a car accident, an abdominal rupture, a near-drowning, a plane crash. There’s the initial pretense of scientific objectivity, but it soon feels beside the point. These accounts crescendo naturally with redemptions and literal come-to-Jesus moments.In the documentary, written and directed by Stephen Gray and co-directed by Chris Radtke, not much deviates from the usual tropes: People drift out of their bodies and journey into light, love, and new awareness (with PBS “Nova”-style trippy imagery). That sounds transcendent, and reassuring, but the stories are rolled together in a hash of editing, and the speakers can be oddly low energy. One exception is Howard Storm, a professor-turned-minister who believes he was hustled not toward heaven but to the darkest reaches of hell.Released on more than 2,000 screens by the studio behind the recent child trafficking movie “Sound of Freedom” — at a time when a majority of Americans say near-death experiences are possible — this film also closes with a QR code to buy more tickets. But whether you believe these phenomena are spiritual journeys or visions created by the human mind (or both), the film loses its sense of epiphany in the lackluster jumble of its moviemaking.After DeathRated PG-13. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Yellow Door: ’90s Lo-Fi Film Club’ Review: Cinema Education

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      This documentary is both a look at a small, obsessive film club that formed in the early ’90s in South Korea and an origin story of the director Bong Joon Ho, who was in the group.Every filmmaker, including the great ones, starts somewhere — even if that means making a low-rent stop-motion short called “Looking for Paradise” that’s about a stuffed gorilla searching for freedom while fighting a caterpillar that emerged from its fecal matter. That was how a young, student Bong Joon Ho made his debut, a saga detailed in “Yellow Door: ’90s Lo-Fi Film Club,” a charming documentary about a cohort of South Korean cinephiles formed in 1992.Before becoming one of the world’s most acclaimed contemporary auteurs (through movies including (“Parasite,” “Okja” and “Snowpiercer”), Bong found an education as part of this tiny, makeshift film academy made up of graduate students and other film lovers. The documentary, directed by Lee Hyuk-rae (who was part of the group), gathers the club members to reminisce about these early days, when they’d congregate in a yellow-painted office to watch and study bootleg VHS copies of art-house movies.Their interests were representative of what was then a larger, budding wave of South Korean cinephile culture that would produce major talent, including Bong and the filmmaker Park Chan-wook, though most of the other members of this particular group went on to have careers outside of film.The documentary carries a couple of interesting insights into Bong’s own origins: There’s a surprisingly profound kernel of emotional acuteness in his amateur debut, along with an early instance of the motif of basements that shows up in many of his later films. But the doc mostly amounts to a sweet nostalgia trip about a niche group of obsessive young people. It’s also an ode to young adulthood itself: For most of the group, latching on to cinema was simply a means of finding a community, and themselves.Yellow Door: ’90s Lo-Fi Film ClubNot rated. In Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Deep Rising’ Review: Who Gets to Mine the Ocean Floor?

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      Matthieu Rytz’s documentary about the bounty at the bottom of the sea examines the fight over whether to reap these riches or preserve them.Documentaries on ecological crises often begin by scaring the bejesus out of viewers before adding a note of tempered optimism. For “Deep Rising,” a film about the race to mine the deep seabed (in particular, the floor beneath the Pacific’s vast Clarion-Clipperton Zone), the director Matthieu Rytz eschews shock for awe, and inflammatory rhetoric for measured persuasion.The director’s choice of his two chief characters proves richly dialectical. Gerard Barron is the hipster CEO of The Metals Company, a Canadian mining concern focused on harvesting polymetallic nodules containing nickel, manganese, cobalt and copper among other minerals that the so-called green economy craves. (“Please get nickel!,” Elon Musk can be heard saying in an audio clip.) Sandor Mulsow is a warm, serious-minded marine geologist and the former head of the Office of Environmental Management and Mineral Resources at the International Seabed Authority, the organization the U.N. has tasked with protecting the ocean floor.Rytz takes care not to lionize or demonize either man. Even so, the pitch Barron gives a roomful of high-net investors sounds too good — and low-impact — to be true.The composer Olafur Arnalds’s string-led score and the actor Jason Momoa’s sonorous narration add to the film’s argument that where the world’s biodiversity and the seafloor’s still mysterious environs are concerned, caution and care are paramount.The footage of iridescent creatures with billowing tentacles or translucent bodies mesmerizes but it also creates contemplative pauses amid the documentary’s facts, interviews and the damning history of the mining industry. The optimism here resides in the filmmaker’s trusting his audience to grapple with the entwined fates of the seafloor, its inhabitants and humankind.Deep RisingNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More