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      In Steve McQueen’s ‘Occupied City,’ a Marriage of Art and History

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      Steve McQueen collaborated with his wife Bianca Stigter to make “Occupied City,” a four-hour documentary that brings Amsterdam’s World War II history into the present day.When the British filmmaker Steve McQueen was considering making a feature film about a free man who was captured and sold into slavery, his wife, the Dutch journalist and historian Bianca Stigter, suggested he start with a true story.She found a 1853 memoir by a New York man who was kidnapped, sold and enslaved for 12 years in Louisiana, named Solomon Northup. McQueen was immediately intrigued. “What was so interesting about it was that the script was there,” he said last week, over lunch with Stigter in Amsterdam. “I didn’t have to invent a story.”His resulting 2013 feature film, “12 Years a Slave,” adapted from Northup’s memoir by John Ridley, won three Academy Awards, including best picture.For the couple, it was just one example of a kind of creative symbiosis that has defined their 28-year relationship. In 2022, when Stigter made her first film, “Three Minutes: A Lengthening,” a documentary based on rare footage of a Polish village before the Holocaust, McQueen was a co-producer and “a sounding board,” she said.Over 187 days, McQueen and his team shot 960,000 feet of film showing daily life in Amsterdam.Lennert Hillege/A24McQueen’s latest film, the four-hour documentary “Occupied City,” which opens in theaters in the United States on Dec. 25, is the couple’s most extensive collaboration to date. He adapted the movie, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, from Stigter’s book, “Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945,” a 560-page historical encyclopedia that was published in Dutch in 2019, and she is one of the movie’s producers.Stigter’s reference book records the geographical dimensions of that period of Nazi rule in Amsterdam — where the bombs dropped, where rallies were held — but it also memorializes places where Dutch people suffered and died: soup kitchens during the 1944 to 1945 famine known as the Hunger Winter; apartments where Jewish families committed suicide; and public squares, train stations, a theater and a day care center where Jews were held before their deportation to concentration camps.In “Occupied City,” Stigter’s text is read out in unemotional voice-over by the British actor Melanie Hyams, while the camera shows scenes from contemporary Amsterdam. But because it was mostly shot from 2020 to 2022, much of the footage captures the city during Covid-19 lockdowns.McQueen, who was born and raised in London, is both a filmmaker and a Turner Prize-winning visual artist, recognized by Queen Elizabeth with a knighthood in 2022. But he has lived a more under-the-radar life in Amsterdam, Stigter’s hometown, since the late 1990s. The couple raised their two children in the city, though they declined to discuss how they met or when, precisely, they got married.He said that he has always felt Amsterdam’s cityscape represented layers of history that must be excavated, from the 17th century, when it was the hub of Golden Age Holland, up through the horrors of World War II. “There are always archaeological digs going on in your brain as you walk the streets,” he said. He’d long wanted to make a film that simultaneously engaged the present and the past.The footage was then overlaid with a voice-over drawn from Stigter’s book “Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945.”Lennert Hillege/A24Around 2004, McQueen said, he was conceptualizing a film that might somehow draw the city’s World War II past into the contemporary moment.“I had this idea to physically map one image over the other,” McQueen said, “to illuminate the ghosts from the past.” He heard the tapping of keys from the next room, he recalled, where Stigter was writing the first version of her “Atlas,” and thought: “What if the past is text and the images of now are now?”McQueen set out to shoot every address in Stigter’s book — more than 2,000 locations — and the filming was planned long before any signs of the pandemic. But when lockdowns in the Netherlands began in March 2020, McQueen decided to go on undeterred.“It was like the way Dutch people still just go out into the streets and cycle when it’s raining — the weather doesn’t change the plan,” he said. “We just had to embrace it.”For two and a half years, McQueen and his crew shot on location, producing 960,000 feet of film, he said, far more than he would need, even for a long documentary. Stigter sometimes attended the filming, but not always. “It felt a little like I was in the way,” she said.Shooting was planned before the coronavirus pandemic, and carried on throughout the lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. “We just had to embrace it,” McQueen said.Lennert Hillege/A24Some of the shots show quotidian activities, suggesting that life goes on, oblivious to the past. We see a shuttered H&M store, where we learn that young Dutch volunteers once stood in line to register for the Waffen S.S. People joyfully play in the snow and walk their dogs in the Sarphatipark, where one of the final roundups of Jews took place in 1943.But filming during the pandemic meant that the life captured by the cameras wasn’t ever entirely ordinary. Sometimes, the drama unfolding in the present moment reminds us that we remain as vulnerable to catastrophe as ever, as in a scene where elderly Dutch citizens line up for Covid vaccinations.At other times, wartime themes and contemporary visuals converge in unusual and unsettling ways, like when hundreds of unmasked protesters gather on Museumplein, a central square in the museum district, in early 2021, to decry the new masking regulations. The protesters are forced out of the square by police on horseback, and using water cannons and dogs.It is ambiguous whether the footage is suggesting a link between the World War II era and Covid times. This is a touchy moral question, because protesters and far-right Dutch politicians have, in recent years, made false equivalencies between the Holocaust and the government’s Covid-19 regulations.Yet McQueen said that such onscreen convergences were merely an attempt by the viewer to “make sense out of nonsense.”“I wanted the screen to be a mirror where people saw themselves reflected back on them, so you ask: Who am I in this?” he said. “It’s more of a meditation than a history lesson.”“Occupied City,” which includes 130 of Stigter’s addresses, clocks in at 247 minutes, plus a 15-minute intermission. But this is not the end of the project for McQueen and Stigter. He was in the process of planning a future artwork, which he said would attempt to include every address in the book. For Stigter and McQueen, the process of bringing the “Occupied City” to the public — as a book and a film, and soon an artwork, as well — has been a shared labor of love, which, like their relationship, is an ongoing conversation.“I’ve been with this woman for 28 years and without those 28 years, this artwork would never have been made,” McQueen said. “It was just the case that we live together, we share our lives together, and this is one of the things that has come out of it, along with two children. It’s never been an effort. It’s only been a mutual appreciation.” More

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      Sofia Boutella Talks ‘Rebel Moon’ and Madonna

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      Sofia Boutella knows what it’s like to lose a home.Born and raised in Algeria, Boutella was 10 when she and her family fled to Paris after Algeria descended into civil war.Now 41, she drew on that formative experience for Zack Snyder’s sci-fi epic “Rebel Moon — Part One: A Child of Fire” as Kora, a mysterious woman who has been uprooted from her former life and must create a new one in a village on a distant moon. Like Kora, Boutella understands what such a journey takes from you and what it gives in return.“There is something that happens when you remove yourself from your country of origin that is very powerful,” Boutella said. “I don’t feel a sense of belonging to a territory. But at the same time, I feel such a strong sense of being part of this earth and a connection to it as a whole.”Before turning to acting, Boutella danced — attending ballet class in Algiers when she was a girl and, finding a semblance of stability when she continued with ballet as well as jazz, contemporary and hip-hop in France. She also tried rhythmic gymnastics and spent a year on her new country’s national team.When she was 19, she became a dancer for a Nike Women’s campaign, crisscrossing the globe, and soon landed a gig as a stage dancer for Madonna, a life-changing experience that opened the door for work with Rihanna and Usher.“I was a tomboy when she met me,” Boutella said of Madonna. “She gave me my first pair of heels.”Boutella as Kora, the mysterious woman at the heart of “Rebel Moon.”Clay Enos/NetflixWe 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?  More

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      Bradley Cooper’s ‘Maestro’ Won’t Let Leonard Bernstein Fail

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      Bradley Cooper’s movie has an unrelenting focus on Bernstein’s marriage. What’s missing are his struggles as a musician.Three society women in cocktail dresses stare up at the camera, each with her right fist raised in the Black Panther salute. The cover line: “Free Leonard Bernstein!”This was New York Magazine’s issue of June 8, 1970, which led with Tom Wolfe’s gleeful 25,000-word evisceration of a party that had been held at Bernstein’s Park Avenue apartment that January. The purpose was to raise awareness of — and money for — the 21 Panthers in jail awaiting trial on charges of planning political violence.Their incarceration had become a cause célèbre among a certain set of well-off white liberals, of whom Bernstein and his wife, Felicia — the subjects of “Maestro,” Bradley Cooper’s movie about their troubled marriage, now streaming — were prime examples.The backlash to the party’s “elegant slumming,” as The New York Times put it in an editorial, was swift and brutal. Wolfe’s story, months later, was only the most expansive piece of anti-Bernstein criticism. Jewish groups incensed at some of the Panthers’ positions picketed his apartment building and booed him when he led the New York Philharmonic. “Radical Chic,” as the article was titled inside the magazine, was one of the loudest, bitterest scandals Bernstein ever experienced.It is also one of the many things that go unmentioned in “Maestro,” a depiction of a peerlessly multifaceted musician who was among the great cultural personalities of the 20th century. Bernstein (1918-90) was a composer, conductor, arranger, pianist, best-selling author and TV educator to millions. It can be hard today to imagine a classical musician being a glamorous mainstream celebrity, but that was Lenny. His tenure as music director of the New York Philharmonic in the 1960s — which began as his “West Side Story” star was gleaming — is still considered the orchestra’s modern heyday.Absolutely digging: Donald Lee Cox, the field marshal of the Black Panther Party, speaking at the party at Leonard and Felicia Bernstein’s Park Avenue apartment in 1970.Associated PressEvery biopic is a selective version of a life, and Bernstein’s wide-ranging and eventful life is more in need of selectivity than most. But “Maestro” is unblinkingly focused on Leonard and Felicia’s marriage, its ups and downs caused in large part by his romantic desires toward men.For Cooper, Bernstein’s consistent struggle in his marriage is countered by just-as-consistent success in his art and career. The movie bursts open with the 25-year-old Lenny’s triumphant, last-minute debut with the Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall in 1943. Broadcast nationally over the radio, it jump-started a half-century of renown.From there, it’s a parade of acclaim: the bright-toned early ballets and musicals, the stirring final chorus of “Candide,” a soul-shaking performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony, packed parties (not the political ones), broadcast interviews.There are some flies in the ointment. Bernstein long grumbled that he wished he could compose when all the world wanted was more of his conducting, and “West Side Story” burdened him as he sought fame for his more “serious” music. The film briefly alludes to this, with Bernstein’s manager trying to squeeze as much money as possible out of podium work. But on the whole, “Maestro” shows Bernstein the artist as perfectly satisfied (and perfectly acclaimed), while Bernstein the man is fatally flawed.His relationships with men after his marriage are portrayed as more glancing and casual than they were in reality. And his separation from Felicia in 1976 and ’77, when he tried to live openly as gay, is treated in “Maestro” as a selfish mistake. The most indelible showcase for Bernstein’s sexuality in the film is a late-in-life, almost Mephistophelean dance party — as sweaty as his calisthenic conducting, bathed in lurid red light — as he seduces a student.There’s lots of the man’s defects in “Maestro”; the artist’s are nowhere to be found. Missing entirely is “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” his flop of a musical with Alan Jay Lerner that closed after seven performances on Broadway in 1976. And missing are his three grimly unsuccessful symphonies, the kind of high-minded music he wanted to be remembered for instead of “On the Town.”Cooper-as-Bernstein conducting, with the singers Isabel Leonard, left, and Rosa Feola. Jason McDonald/NetflixBernstein plays a bit of it on the piano at the beginning of the film, but otherwise missing, too, is “A Quiet Place,” the serious opera he longed to write his whole career — and which some 40 years later is still being futzed with by his estate to try and make it work onstage. While a scene in “Maestro” is set at the premiere of his “Mass,” which helped open the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in 1971, we aren’t made aware of its mixed reception.And from that smash debut at Carnegie on, the film treats Bernstein as unimpeachable on the podium. But though he is today widely revered as a conductor of the music of others, that was hardly a universal opinion at the time. A 1967 Times review by Harold Schonberg, a longtime Bernstein skeptic, describes “an overblown and rather vulgar performance” of Mahler’s Second: “He took a terribly slow tempo, and that made his heavy-handed expressive devices — those pauses! those rubatos! — all but wrapped up in comic-strip balloons: Pow! Wham! Sigh!”But no one in “Maestro” nay-says Bernstein’s music making. This artificially heightens the contrast of his career with his marriage, distorting the viewer’s sense of him and his legacy. As an admirer of Bernstein’s work, warts and all, I was disappointed to find his life as an artist depicted as less complex — and less interesting — than his life as a husband.Cooper doesn’t pay much attention to Bernstein’s personal stumbles, either, if they don’t relate to the marriage. Most glaring is the “Radical Chic” affair, in which his critics seized on the contrast between Upper East Side progressivism and open radicalism, with Bernstein being quoted in The Times (unfairly, he said) as answering a Panther’s call to seize the means of production with “I dig absolutely.”It would have been an intriguing episode to include in “Maestro” since both Bernsteins were implicated in the blowback, which served to unite them in fiasco. But that would have been jarring because it’s so unlike the scenes preferred by Cooper, in which Lenny is the perpetrator and Felicia the victim. Omitting the whole scandal contributes to the film’s flattening not just of Bernstein’s life but also of Felicia’s, which was full outside the marriage, too. (She was active in the American Civil Liberties Union, the civil rights movement and protests against the Vietnam War.)“Radical Chic” was big news. But what I missed most in “Maestro” was a minor bit of Bernstein: the 1952 one-act “Trouble in Tahiti,” a deceptively peppy, stealthily devastating piece about a prosperous, unhappily married suburban couple.This was an autobiographically charged work; the main characters were originally named Sam and Jennie, the names of Bernstein’s parents, who fought bitterly through his childhood. (The wife’s was eventually changed to the more singable Dinah, the name of Bernstein’s paternal grandmother.)But the movie presents Bernstein as a fully formed genius, without an evident childhood or parents beyond a passing mention of his father’s cruelty. It would have made sense for Sam and Jennie to have been more present in “Maestro,” if only to offer some context for Bernstein’s own difficult marriage. The sense of history repeating itself might have relieved some of Cooper’s insistence on Bernstein and his sexuality bearing sole responsibility for his problems with Felicia.All these omissions lead to a rigid, either-or, black-and-white atmosphere. And for all Cooper’s well-practiced facsimiles of Bernstein’s galvanizing, perspiring, emotionally all-in style on the podium, that gives the film a stilted, brittle quality at its core. More

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      ‘Barbie’ Makes a Strong Showing on Oscar Shortlists

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      The film is the equivalent of a semifinalist in the song, score and sound categories. “Killers of the Flower Moon” also landed on several lists.Will the Oscars also be living in a “Barbie” world when the statuettes are handed out in March? Maybe, if the shortlists in what’s known as below-the-line categories are anything to go by. The academy released the equivalent of semifinalists for best song, documentary and more on Thursday, and “Barbie,” the director Greta Gerwig’s feminist smash, made a strong showing.Three songs from the film — Dua Lipa’s “Dance the Night,” Ryan Gosling’s “I’m Just Ken” and Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For?” — landed on the list for best song, while the film also showed up in the best score and sound categories.“Killers of the Flower Moon” was also well-represented, appearing on the lists for makeup and hairstyling, song (“Wahzhazhe (A Song For My People)”), score and sound.What about the other film that contributed to our Barbenheimer summer? “Oppenheimer” made the cut in three categories: score, sound and makeup and hairstyling. It tied with “The Color Purple” (for score and the songs “Keep It Movin’” and “Superpower (I)”); “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” (for score, visual effects and the song “Am I Dreaming”); and “The Zone of Interest” (international feature, score and sound).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?  More

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      Vin Diesel Is Accused of Sexually Assaulting a Former Assistant

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      The assistant filed a lawsuit in California, saying that the actor had groped her and forcibly kissed her in a hotel room during the filming of a “Fast & Furious” movie in 2010.A former assistant to Vin Diesel, one of Hollywood’s most bankable action stars, filed a sexual battery lawsuit against the actor on Thursday, saying that he groped her and pinned her against the wall of an Atlanta hotel room during the filming of the fifth “Fast & Furious” movie in 2010.In the lawsuit, the former assistant, Asta Jonasson, said the encounter took place less than two weeks after she was hired to work for Mr. Diesel. The actor grabbed her, groped her breasts and forcibly kissed her while she repeatedly said no, according to the lawsuit. Mr. Diesel pulled her dress up and moved to pull down her underwear, the lawsuit said, before Ms. Jonasson screamed and ran toward the bathroom.The complaint said Mr. Diesel then “pinned her against the wall with his body, and grabbed Ms. Jonasson’s hand and placed it on his erect penis.” When she again refused to engage, the lawsuit says, Mr. Diesel began masturbating while keeping her pinned to the wall.Representatives for Mr. Diesel and his production company, which is also named as a defendant, did not immediately return requests for comment.Mr. Diesel, 56, rose to fame after Steven Spielberg cast him as a soldier in “Saving Private Ryan”; he established himself as a leading man primed for brawny roles with his performances as a killer in the “Chronicles of Riddick” series and a member of the Navy SEALs in the comedy “The Pacifier.” In 2010, he was filming another starring role in the “Fast & Furious” franchise, which he revisited this past year in “Fast X.”Hours after the encounter in the hotel room, according to the lawsuit, Ms. Jonasson received a call from an executive at the production company — Mr. Diesel’s sister, Samantha Vincent — and was told that it no longer needed “any extra help.” Ms. Vincent, who could not immediately be reached for comment, is also named as a defendant.Ms. Jonasson said in the lawsuit that all employees of the production company had been required to sign a nondisclosure agreement preventing them from sharing anything related to Mr. Diesel.“For years, Ms. Jonasson remained silent,” the lawsuit said, “afraid to speak out against one of the world’s highest-grossing actors, afraid she would be ostracized from the industry which had a pattern of protecting powerful men and silencing survivors of sexual harassment and assault, and concerned that as a green card holder that speaking out could jeopardize her potential future citizenship.”Ms. Jonasson sued under a California law passed in the wake of the #MeToo movement that opened a window for people accusing someone of sexual assault to sue even if the statute of limitations had run out. Her lawsuit, filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, also alleges wrongful termination and retaliation. More

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      France’s President Condemns ‘Manhunt’ Against Gérard Depardieu

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      Emmanuel Macron broke with his culture minister, who had called comments made by Depardieu in a documentary a “disgrace.” The actor is facing renewed scrutiny over sexual assault accusations.President Emmanuel Macron of France this week condemned what he called a “manhunt” targeting Gérard Depardieu, the embattled French actor whose worldwide fame has been tarnished in recent years by allegations of sexual harassment and assault.Macron’s comments, which prompted swift criticism, came after a documentary that aired in France this month showed the actor making crude sexual and sexist comments during a 2018 trip to North Korea.Depardieu, 74, has faced renewed scrutiny in the wake of the documentary, including new accusations of sexual assault, the stripping of several international honors and the removal of a likeness of him from the Musée Grévin, a Paris wax museum. He has denied any wrongdoing.Rima Abdul Malak, France’s culture minister, said she was “disgusted” by Depardieu’s comments in the documentary and that disciplinary proceedings would determine whether he should also lose his Legion of Honor, France’s highest award.But in a television interview on Wednesday evening, Macron mounted a staunch defense of Depardieu, who was once one of France’s most prominent and prolific leading men. Macron said that Depardieu “makes France proud” and castigated an “era of suspicion” against prominent artistic or cultural figures.“One thing you’ll never see me in is a manhunt,” Macron told France 5 television, calling himself an “admirer” of Depardieu.As France’s president, Macron is the grand master of the order of the Legion of Honor, an award created by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802 for “outstanding merit” in a field and given to Depardieu in 1996. Macron said his culture minister had overstepped “a bit too much.”“Am I going to start stripping the Legion of Honor from artists or officials when they say things that shock me?” Macron said. “The answer is no.”“You can accuse someone — maybe there are victims, and I respect them, and I want them to be able to defend their rights,” he added. “But there is also a presumption of innocence,” he said.Macron’s comments reflected the mixed reaction to the #MeToo movement in France, where the reckoning with sexism was hailed by feminist groups, but also fueled worries over the influence of puritanical sexual mores and cancel culture imported from America.France’s movie industry has grappled with several high-profile accusations of sexual abuse in recent years and taken steps to address them. But the country has also given a warm reception to artists accused of abuse — including Johnny Depp and Louis C.K. — exposing a cultural divide with the United States.Feminists and leftist politicians said on Thursday that they were appalled by Macron’s comments.“Manhunts remain prohibited. The hunt for women, on the other hand, remains open,” Osez Le Féminisme, a feminist group, said on social media, while Sandrine Rousseau, a Green lawmaker, called Macron’s comments “yet another insult to the movement to let victims of sexual violence speak out.”François Hollande, Macron’s predecessor as president, criticized him for extolling Depardieu’s acting instead of expressing support for victims of sexual crimes.“No, we are not proud of Gérard Depardieu,” Hollande told France Inter radio, noting that Macron once called gender equality and the fight against sexism a top priority. “And that’s how he treats the issue of Gérard Depardieu?” Hollande said.Depardieu is still an internationally recognized figure who, in the last 50 years, has had roles in more than 250 movies, including “Cyrano de Bergerac” and “The Man in the Iron Mask.”But he has faced a growing number of sexual abuse accusations in recent years.In interviews in April with Mediapart, an investigative news site, 13 women — actresses, makeup artists and production staff — accused Depardieu of making inappropriate sexual comments or gestures during film shoots. Two other women made similar accusations in interviews this summer with France Inter.Depardieu has been charged with rape and sexual assault in one case, which involves Charlotte Arnould, a French actress who says he sexually assaulted her in Paris in 2018, when she was 22, during informal rehearsals for a theater production.Depardieu has not been convicted in connection with any of the accusations, and he has categorically denied any wrongdoing.“I have never, ever abused a woman,” he wrote in a rare letter to the newspaper Le Figaro in October.“All my life, I’ve been provocative, outgoing, sometimes crude,” Depardieu wrote, adding an apology for “acting like a child who wants to amuse the gallery.” But, he added, “I’m neither a rapist nor a predator.”The documentary that set off a new wave of scrutiny aired this month on France 2 and features previously unseen footage of Depardieu on a 2018 trip to North Korea, where he is seen repeatedly making extremely crude and uninhibited sexual and sexist comments about women.The documentary suggests that sexual jokes, comments and attitudes by Depardieu on movie sets were commonplace and widely-known, but that the French movie industry brushed them off.Four women accuse Depardieu of inappropriate comments or sexual misconduct in the documentary, including Arnould and Hélène Darras, an actress who says he sexually assaulted her on a 2008 film set and who filed a suit against him in September. Depardieu has not been charged in that case.After the documentary aired, Quebec announced that the actor was being stripped of the Canadian province’s highest honor and a Belgian town where he once lived said it was revoking an honorary title.This week, extra woes for Depardieu piled up quickly. The Musée Grévin said that his wax statue, which first entered the museum in 1981, had been removed. A spokeswoman said that this was “following reactions from visitors who were very shocked by the actor’s comments” and who had then verbally abused employees.On Wednesday, Ruth Baza, a Spanish journalist, told the newspaper La Vanguardia that Depardieu had kissed and groped her without her consent when she was in Paris in 1995 to interview him for a magazine piece.Like many public officials in France — Macron first and foremost — Abdul Malak, the culture minister, said that she was “against cancel culture.”“We are not going to stop watching his movies,” she told France 5 television of Depardieu last week. But she said his comments in the documentary could constitute sexual harassment and were “intolerable,” reflecting badly on France.“He is such a monument of world cinema,” Abdul Malak said, adding that she had received messages from ministers and other cultural figures from around the world “who are shocked, who say, ‘To us, he was such a symbol of France.’” More

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      ‘Anyone but You’ Review: Baring Bums in the Land Down Under

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      Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell romp in a rom-com bomb with gratuitous clothes-shedding, played out against beautiful backdrops.The floundering romantic comedy “Anyone but You” has several things going for it: the rising stars Sydney Sweeney and Glen Powell, a luxurious Australian backdrop, and more white teeth and washboard abs than the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. The plot is a classic switchback prank. Sworn enemies Bea (Sweeney) and Ben (Powell) pretend to fall in love at a destination wedding so that their friends and family (Alexandra Shipp, Hadley Robinson, Bryan Brown, Michelle Hurd and GaTa) will quit trying to trick them into liking each other. It’s a loose reworking of “Much Ado About Nothing,” and, presumably, the first Shakespeare adaptation where a dog does yoga — and certainly the first in which a man (GaTa) serenades a koala. Nevertheless, the film, directed by Will Gluck, who wrote the screenplay with Ilana Wolpert, is so awkwardly assembled that our attention gets pulled away from the leads to the bizarrely lavish buffet spreads in the background. We’re mildly curious about whether these two fakers will slip between the sheets for real — and majorly interested in why a guest bedroom has so many bowls of fruit.“Anyone but You” is being sold as a return to the salacious rom-com, although that’s only true for one good scene. Overall, it’s more bawdy than erotic. “You know a lot about bathroom law,” Ben purrs to Bea when they meet-cute wheedling a restroom key from a barista. After a whirlwind first date, Bea wakes up in Ben’s arms fully clothed. The night appears to have been innocent — at least, that’s the implication from Gluck’s close-up shot of Bea’s cinched belt buckle — but both panic and settle into a shtick of exchanging public insults with the spite of jilted lovers.We can barely make out whether a month has elapsed since that encounter or several years. Just resign yourself to nonsense, like the entrance of Margaret (Charlee Fraser), Ben’s ex, with her new boyfriend, Beau (Joe Davidson), a galumphing surfer who promptly attempts to eat a bundle of ceremonial sage. The running time is all flimsy bikinis and flimsier excuses to get people undressed. A tarantula? Strip off those shorts! Itchy sand? Swim trunks begone! A fire? Snuff out the flames with a dress! By the time Bea tumbles into Sydney Harbor, it’s a shock that Ben leaps in after her without tearing away his pants.Sweeney and Powell could do wonders with a better script, something that makes more use of the way they grin at each other like they ate knives for lunch. She’s skilled at layered insincerity; he specializes in smirky, put-on machismo, shooting the camera a horrifically funny tongue waggle. Here, their performances get bullied around by the insistent pop soundtrack. One genuinely tender scene involves Bea crooning a peppy Top 40 hit to steady Ben’s nerves. But she only gets in a few quiet a cappella bars before Gluck cranks the original at an earsplitting volume — are you not entertained!? — and, for good measure, blares it again at the end over some riotous behind-the-scenes karaoke. You wonder if he spent more time on the closing credits than the actual film.Anyone but YouRated R for nudity and brash language. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Freud’s Last Session’ Review: Film Adaptation and Its Discontents

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      Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis probably never met. What the stage-based film presupposes is: Maybe they did?In “Freud’s Last Session,” when the Oxford academic C.S. Lewis (Matthew Goode) arrives late to the London home of Sigmund Freud (Anthony Hopkins), Freud’s chow chow, Jofi, brushes him off. The dog, Freud explains, values punctuality.The men’s encounter — concocted for Mark St. Germain’s 2009 play of the same title — is imaginary, but the timing is not. The setting is September 1939, and Hitler has invaded Poland. The atheist Freud has sought out Lewis, whom he has never met, to learn how such a sterling intellect could believe in God. Given the historical backdrop (we hear radio of Neville Chamberlain announcing Britain’s entry into the war), that hardly seems like the most pressing topic. That’s true even if Freud, who has oral cancer, would be dead before the end of that month.But the war context gives the director, Matthew Brown, who shares screenwriting credit with St. Germain, license to wage a futile campaign against the material’s stage-bound origins. An air raid siren sends Lewis and Freud out of the house and to a nearby church, where Freud helps Lewis through a triggered recollection of his service in World War I. Freud shows off his surprising expertise in Christian iconography, after dismissing his interest as simple art appreciation.The men return to Freud’s den, but the movie, already diffuse with flashbacks, is hardly content to stay put. Before the tête-à-tête is over, the film will have shown us Lewis in the trenches (Freud is fascinated by Lewis’s fixation on the mother of a fallen friend); the Gestapo’s arrest and improbable release of Freud’s youngest daughter, Anna, before the family’s flight from Vienna; and Freud’s father chiding young Sigmund after seeing the boy cross himself.Expanding what was a two-character play, the film adds a major part for Anna (Liv Lisa Fries), a pioneer in the field of child psychoanalysis. Her devotion to her father is depicted as so intense that a colleague diagnoses an attachment disorder. But her dad refuses to accept that she is in a relationship with a woman, Dorothy Tiffany Burlingham (Jodi Balfour). And his professional curiosity about her mind may have monstrously overpowered his compassion as a father.What a viewer (or a therapist) should take from their queasily etched codependency is unclear, and it’s not certain that the script made sense of it, either. But the Sigmund-Anna muddle has more juice than the genteel intellectual parrying between Sigmund and C.S. (or Jack, as he was known to familiars), which has been carefully written to a draw. Lewis argues that the Gospels can’t be myths because they are too disorganized. Freud scoffs that “bad storytelling” doesn’t prove Christ was a divine figure. Lewis pounces when Freud unthinkingly says, “Thank God.” Later, Freud asks how God could let him lose a daughter to the flu and a grandson to tuberculosis.Eventually they bridge their differences, in a détente made grotesquely literal (and Freudian?) when Lewis reaches into Freud’s mouth to help with a dental prosthesis. Hopkins already argued the other side of this case when he played an older, Narnia-era Lewis in “Shadowlands” (1993) — a Lewis who, oddly, gave a near-identical speech to this film’s Freud about humanity’s need to “grow up.” In any case, Hopkins parlayed Lewis’s propriety, airs and implied discomfort around sex into a more compelling character than Goode has been given, and one who — faced with his wife’s death — urgently considered the absence of God.The look of “Freud’s Last Session” could make one doubt the presence of a cinematographer. Shot after shot is so gray, shadowy and colorless that it’s hard not to wonder why Brown didn’t shoot in black-and-white, whose contrast and timelessness would suit the stakes. The filmmakers might argue that black-and-white is no longer commercially viable. But Freud would say that nobody wanted anyone to see this movie.Freud’s Last SessionRated PG-13. A cigar that’s just a cigar. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. More