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      ‘Ennio’ Review: Morricone and His Mastery of Film Scores

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      A lively, absorbing documentary about the Italian composer whose music is featured in hundreds of movies, from “A Fistful of Dollars” to “Kill Bill.”“The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” “Days of Heaven,” “Before the Revolution,” “1900,” “The Untouchables,” “Kill Bill,” “Django Unchained,” “The Mission,” “The Thing,” “Fists in the Pocket,” “The Battle of Algiers,” “The Bird With the Crystal Plumage,” “Bugsy,” “Bulworth,” “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!” — if you’ve watched a movie in the last half century there’s a good chance that you’ve heard music by Ennio Morricone, the titanic Italian composer and arranger who helped define films as we know and hear them.When Morricone died at the age of 91 in 2020, it seemed almost hard to believe given how expansive his reach had been and, well, how long he’d been part of my movie life. (His death was announced with a statement he titled: “I, Ennio Morricone, am dead.”) When I was a kid, we had an LP of his soundtrack for Gillo Pontecorvo’s “Burn!” (1970), a period epic about a British intelligence officer (Marlon Brando) who’s sent to a fictional Portuguese colony to stir up trouble. A audiocassette of the soundtrack is stashed somewhere in my house; every so often, I listen to it on Spotify and am again transported by Morricone’s soaring music.In “Ennio,” a lively, absorbing documentary about the composer, Morricone discusses his work on “Burn!” and so many other films. Written and directed by Giuseppe Tornatore, it is a crowded, hyperventilated portrait stuffed with archival and original material, including interviews with Morricone shot in 2015 and 2016. Like several other filmmakers, Tornatore worked repeatedly with Morricone, a partnership that began with “Cinema Paradiso” (1990), the director’s soppy heart-tugger about a friendship between a theater projectionist and the boy he schools who becomes a filmmaker. It’s perhaps no surprise that “Ennio” is another cinephilic paean.With help from Morricone, whose interviews anchor the documentary, Tornatore ably fills in the composer’s family history, though the details become sketchier as the musician’s fame steadily grows. Morricone’s father, Mario, was a trumpet player, and soon Ennio was playing it, too. He began composing music as a child and studied it formally at a conservatory in Rome, where one of his teachers was the composer Goffredo Petrassi. A force in Italian modernist music, Petrassi became a towering figure for his student, the embodiment of a serious patrimony that seemed (to some) at odds with Morricone’s commercial work.One of the movie’s nice surprises is that Morricone turns out to be a total charmer, a low-key showman with a demure gaze that he works like a vamp and an impish smile that routinely punctuates one of his anecdotes. The movie opens with him speed walking in a circle inside a spacious, elegantly shambolic apartment before pausing to execute some calisthenics. It’s an amusing introduction that suggests Morricone’s vitality and determination, as if he were preparing for another leg in the extraordinary marathon of his life. Or maybe he was warming up for this movie, which runs 2 hours and 36 minutes, though never feels like a slog, even with its frustratingly unmodulated pacing. There’s much to see and to hear, most of it delightful.Among the most engaging sections are those involving Morricone’s work with Sergio Leone. They first collaborated on Leone’s “A Fistful of Dollars,” a western set in Mexico, shot in Spain and starring a television actor on hiatus, straight from Hollywood, named Clint Eastwood. Although Morricone and Leone shared some history, they were not initially on the same wavelength when they started work on the film. Leone was reinventing the genre and drawing liberally from many of his adored influences. He lifted the story from Akira Kurosawa’s “Yojimbo” (Kurosawa later sued), and Leone told Morricone that he wanted to use some music from Howard Hawks’s “Rio Bravo” for the climatic duel in “Dollars.”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 Taste of Things’ Review: Love, Loss and Loins of Veal

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      Juliette Binoche stars in an instant culinary classic that exquisitely captures the kitchen’s bittersweet blessing.At the center of everything good in the world is a bittersweet kernel: All things pass away. The grandest cathedral, the most vibrant painting, a beautiful harmony, a perfect aperitif — none of it will last forever. And all great love stories end, one way or another, in sadness.This will break your heart if you think about it very long, as much with grief as joy. Yet somehow it’s also what makes life worth living. This conundrum lies at the heart of “The Taste of Things,” a magnificent culinary romance from the French-Cambodian director Tran Anh Hung. The couple living the conundrum are Eugénie (Juliette Binoche), a brilliant cook, and the well-known gourmand she works for, Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel). It is the late 19th century, and they live in an idyllic house in the French countryside, where Dodin entertains friends and visitors. The kitchen is the beating heart of the house.Nothing matters more to Eugénie and Dodin than crafting exceptional meals, from simple omelets to the kinds of feasts that linger in memory for a lifetime. Nothing except, maybe, each other. They aren’t married, despite Dodin’s pleas over the past 20 years. Eugénie smiles enigmatically and shakes her head; she doesn’t wish to change anything. But it’s inevitable, in the end, that the autumn comes.The film premiered at Cannes with the title “The Pot-au-Feu,” named after one of its central dishes, a rustic meal of boiled meat and vegetables. In French, however, the title is “La Passion de Dodin Bouffant,” which is also the title of the 1920s novel on which it is loosely based (published in English under the name “The Passionate Epicure”). That novel features one of the most indelible characters in culinary fiction, a gourmand whom the author Marcel Rouff loosely based on the French culinary writer Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, born in 1755. (Yes, the cheese is named for him.)Brillat-Savarin is perhaps best known for his book “The Physiology of Taste: Or Meditations on Transcendental Gastronomy,” which tells you a little bit about him, as well as about the protagonist of “The Taste of Things.” His book has recipes, but really it’s an often funny rhapsody of awe at the joy allowed humans in the simple act of eating. Brillat-Savarin famously quipped, “Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are,” an aphorism it’s easy to imagine Dodin trading with his friends around the dining table. In the eyes of men like these, food reveals character. For a host, a meal carefully constructed is evidence of his care for the guest as well as his self-image: Is he boasting? Pleading? Displaying his insecurities? Or inviting others to taste the divine? A guest’s willingness to dive with gusto into a meal prepared before them shows not just care for the host, but for the bounty the earth serves up.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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      Taylor Swift Heading to Disney+ and ‘Moana’ Sequel to Theaters

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      The pop star’s hit “Eras Tour” concert film hits the streaming service next month, part of the company’s attempt to revitalize its entertainment lineup.Disney is deploying Taylor Swift and Moana as part of a campaign to revitalize its entertainment lineup.The company said on Wednesday that it had reached a deal with Ms. Swift to bring her blockbuster “Eras Tour” concert movie to streaming for the first time. “The Eras Tour (Taylor’s Version)” will include five additional performed songs, including the fan favorite “Cardigan,” and exclusively arrive on Disney+ on March 15.The “Eras Tour” movie has sold more than $260 million in tickets at cinemas worldwide. In a statement, Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive, called it “electrifying” and “a true phenomenon.”Separately, Disney said it would release a big-screen sequel to “Moana” in theaters on Nov. 27. The first “Moana” was released in 2016 and took in $687 million against a production budget of roughly $150 million. But streaming is where the characters have really taken off. “Moana” was the No. 1 streaming movie of last year on any service, according to Nielsen, with 11.6 billion viewing minutes. Nielsen said streaming customers have watched almost 80 billion minutes of “Moana” over the last four years.Auli’i Cravalho (the Polynesian princess Moana) and Dwayne Johnson (the tattooed demigod Maui) are expected to reprise their vocal roles in “Moana 2.” The sequel is a musical directed by Dave Derrick Jr., whose credits include “Raya and the Last Dragon” and “Encanto.” The story line for “Moana 2” involves an unexpected call from Moana’s ancestors, which prompts her to travel “to the far seas of Oceania and into dangerous, long-lost waters.”Disney struggled at the box office last year. Its animated “Wish,” the superhero sequel “The Marvels” and the ultraexpensive “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” were all box office failures, prompting concerns about the vitality of various Disney studios. Pixar’s “Elemental” had a disastrous opening, but was ultimately able to generate a decent $496 million worldwide.The generally poor performance — in stark contrast with prior years, when Disney released one billion-dollar-grossing movie after another — has contributed to attacks on the company by activist investors. Trian Fund Management, for instance, is waging a proxy battle for multiple board seats. Disney is trying to fight off such attempts.“Moana 2,” initially conceived as an animated Disney+ series, joins a theatrical lineup for the year that Walt Disney Studios believes will mark a dramatic turnaround. Other planned releases include “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” “Deadpool 3,” “Inside Out 2” and “Mufasa,” a spinoff from “The Lion King.” More

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      Da’Vine Joy Randolph: Major Prizes, Major Attention, Major Unease

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      The “Holdovers” star Da’Vine Joy Randolph has had a charmed run through awards season so far: Considered the favorite for the supporting actress Oscar, she has already taken the Golden Globe, Critics Choice Award and prestigious trophies from both the New York Film Critics Circle and Los Angeles Film Critics Association.The 37-year-old actress is well-aware of the power of those prizes, and knows that even being in the Oscar conversation can change the course of a career. But does that mean her awards season has been easy to navigate?“It’s overwhelming, if I’m being really honest,” Randolph told me in a candid conversation last week. “You really do earn your stripes going through this awards-season thing.”A monthslong Oscar campaign can be more arduous than people realize: a pileup of Q. and A.s, wardrobe fittings, round tables, photo shoots, interviews, red carpets, ceremonies, movie premieres, cocktail parties and festival appearances that demand always-on levels of poise and adrenaline. Everyone you meet at these events wants something from you — a conversation, a selfie, an autograph, an acceptance speech — and at the end of these glitzy and exhausting nights, there’s not much left over for yourself.Randolph is no novice: Tony-nominated for her role in “Ghost the Musical” (2012), she earned Oscar chatter for her breakout film performance in “Dolemite Is His Name” (2019) and has worked steadily in films like “The United States vs. Billie Holiday” (2021) and TV shows including “Only Murders in the Building,” “The Idol” and “High Fidelity.” Still, nothing she has experienced so far compares to the white-hot awards spotlight shone on her in the wake of “The Holdovers,” and Randolph is still figuring out how to adjust to its glare.Clockwise from top left, Randolph in “Ghost the Musical”; “The United States vs. Billie Holiday,” with Andra Day; “The Holdovers,” opposite Paul Giamatti and Dominic Sessa; and “Dolemite Is His Name,” starring Eddie Murphy.Clockwise from top left: Sara Krulwich/The New York Times; Takashi Seida/Paramount Pictures and Hulu; Seacia Pavao/Focus Features; François Duhamel/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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Perfect Days’ Review: Hanging On

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      Directed by Wim Wenders, this Oscar-nominated Japanese drama gently excavates the life of a toilet cleaner, and the shadows that lurk inside.Pay attention to the shadows in “Perfect Days.” Pay attention also to the trees, to the ways Hirayama (Koji Yakusho) looks at them. They’re as much a character in the story as he is.Hirayama cleans Tokyo’s public toilets for a living, rising before dawn to gently water the seedlings he grows in his home and then drive off to begin his shift. On the way to work, he picks a cassette tape — Van Morrison, the Velvet Underground, Nina Simone — and listens while driving down the highway. Tokyo’s Skytree skyscraper looms in the distance.Hirayama clearly derives enjoyment from performing his work well, but there’s more to his life than labor, and more to this movie than a simplistic celebration of manual toil. He keeps to a simple routine, the kind so carefully constructed you start to wonder if it’s a bulwark against chaos. He exits his apartment and breathes deeply, once, at the same time every morning. He drinks the same coffee, eats the same sandwich, snaps the same photos of the tree canopy. He frequents the same restaurants and bars, public baths and bookstores, places where everyone knows who he is.Pivotal to his peace is Hirayama’s collection of physical media, a surprising sight in a digital world: In addition to his extensive collection of cassettes, he has shelves of used paperbacks and boxes of tree photographs filed and stashed in his small, neat apartment. They are anchors in time, companions throughout his days, riches rounding out his life. When he brings a book to the bar on the weekend, the proprietor tells him admiringly that he’s such an intellectual. “I wouldn’t say that,” he says.In fact, Hirayama says very little. (The first time I saw the film, the subtitles were mistakenly turned off, and the audience didn’t even realize for about half an hour.) Instead he is an observer, attending to Tokyo and to the people in it with a tenderness and forbearance that, if you’re not paying attention, you’ll ascribe to a simple nature. It’s only when you watch his expression, at times, that something else flickers, a pain that flashes only briefly. “Perfect Days” chronicles only a couple of weeks — one easy and placid, the other full of disruption — and slowly, exquisitely hints that the structure of Hirayama’s life enables him to exist in the present, representing a choice that may have come after a long trauma. There are clues in his encounters with family members and strangers and, later, in his rattled response to an unexpected sight.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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      Clyde Taylor, Literary Scholar Who Elevated Black Cinema, Dies at 92

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      A leading figure in the field of Black studies in the 1970s, he identified work by Black filmmakers as worthy of serious intellectual attention.Clyde Taylor, a scholar who in the 1970s and ’80s played a leading role in identifying, defining and elevating Black cinema as an art form, died on Jan. 24 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 92.His daughter, Rahdi Taylor, a filmmaker, said the cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.As a young professor in the Los Angeles area in the late 1960s — first at California State University, Long Beach, and then at the University of California, Los Angeles — Dr. Taylor was at the epicenter of a push to bring the study of Black culture into academia.Black culture was not merely an appendage to white culture, he argued, but had its own logic, history and dynamics that grew out of the Black Power and Pan-African movements. And filmmaking, he said, was just as important to Black culture as literature and art.Dr. Taylor in 1958 when he was a student at Howard University, where he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English.via Taylor familyHe was especially taken by the work of a circle of young Black filmmakers in the 1970s that he would later call the “L.A. Rebellion.” Among them were the directors Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, Haile Gerima and Billy Woodberry, all of whom went on to have immense impact on Black directors like Spike Lee and Ava DuVernay.As Dr. Taylor documented, these directors created their own, stripped-down approach to narrative and form. They borrowed from French New Wave, Italian neorealism and Brazil’s Cinema Novo to offer an unblinkered look at everyday Black life, often filming in Watts and other Black neighborhoods in and around Los Angeles.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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      Keith McNally, of Balthazar, Discusses His Filmmaking Past

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      Hundreds of moviegoers went to rare screenings of the New York restaurateur’s little-known 1990 film. Afterward, he treated them to half-price dinners at Balthazar and Minetta Tavern.On Thursday night at the Roxy Cinema in Lower Manhattan, a throng of scarf-bundled cinephiles attended the sold-out screening of a black-and-white psychological thriller, “End of the Night,” that was being shown for the first time in more than 30 years.The film’s obscurity wasn’t what drew the crowd: They were there because of its unlikely writer and director, Keith McNally, the downtown restaurateur who runs Balthazar, Minetta Tavern, Pastis and Morandi.Before he shaped New York’s nightlife with his brasseries, Mr. McNally had serious filmmaking ambitions. His first full-length feature, “End of the Night,” premiered at the Directors’ Fortnight showcase during the 1990 Cannes Film Festival, appearing alongside Whit Stillman’s “Metropolitan.” It went on to be a minor hit in Europe before it became a cinematic footnote.In advance of the screenings at the Roxy, an 118-seat art house cinema located in a hotel in TriBeCa, Mr. McNally drummed up interest with a post on his popular Instagram account: “ANYONE WATCHING THIS FILM AT THE ROXY CAN EAT AT BALTHAZAR OR MINETTA TAVERN THAT SAME NIGHT FOR HALF-PRICE,” he wrote in his typical all-caps style.The post also quoted from a Cahiers du Cinéma review that described “End of the Night” as a “noirish tale of self-destruction” that provides an “unsettling look at a man whose life is turned upside down during his wife’s pregnancy.”Mr. McNally at his SoHo apartment. “I think my talent as a filmmaker was minimal,” he said.Lanna Apisukh for The New York TimesWe 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 Toilets Got a Starring Role in a Wim Wenders Movie

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      A behind-the-scenes look at “Perfect Days,” which features Koji Yakusho as a cleaner of public bathrooms in Tokyo.As artistic inspiration goes, public toilets don’t usually stir the spirit.Then again, most toilets aren’t like the public bathrooms in Tokyo.So when Wim Wenders, the German film director of art-house favorites like “Paris, Texas” and “Wings of Desire,” first toured more than a dozen public toilet buildings around the Japanese capital city in the spring of 2022, he was enchanted by what he described as “little jewels” designed by Pritzker Prize winners including Tadao Ando, Shigeru Ban and Kengo Kuma. Those stylish commodes provided the creative sparks for his latest movie, “Perfect Days,” which has been nominated in the international feature category for an Academy Award and opens in theaters in the United States on Feb. 7.The movie — a poignant character study of a public-toilet cleaner with a mysterious past who lives a spartan existence and works with the care of a master craftsman — actually had its roots in a bit of propaganda. Wenders had been invited to Japan as the guest of a prominent Japanese businessman who hoped that the director might want to make a series of short films featuring the toilets, which had been conceived as showcases for Japanese artistry and hygienic mastery.Koji Yanai, the son of the founder of Fast Retailing (the sprawling clothing giant best known for its Uniqlo brand) and a senior executive officer there, had spearheaded the public toilet project to be an architectural display of “Japanese pride.”“If I say Japanese toilets are world number one, no one will disagree,” Yanai said in an interview late last year. He had recruited the architects to design the public buildings with a distinctive aesthetic that would make them as much art as public utility.Originally built to welcome the world to Japan for the summer Olympic Games scheduled for 2020, the toilets did not get their moment because the pandemic forced the postponement of the Games to 2021, which were then staged without spectators.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