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      Jada Pinkett Smith on Will Smith, Chris Rock and Her New Book, ‘Worthy’

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      For decades, Jada Pinkett Smith has been plagued by misconceptions: about the dynamics of her marriage to Will Smith, about her bond with Tupac Shakur and, most recently, about the Slap at last year’s Oscars. But in her revelation-heavy 400-page memoir, “Worthy,” these discordant threads, and others, will be pinned to the ground in no uncertain terms.Even devotees of her hugely popular web series “Red Table Talk” — where she and her daughter, Willow, and her mother, Adrienne Banfield Norris, delved into all manner of personal, social and cultural issues — will realize how little they know of Pinkett Smith. The book, out Tuesday from Dey Street, offered her a chance to provide context for a layered, complex journey that can’t be mined in 45 minutes at the Red Table, she told me in September at the headquarters of Westbrook, the entertainment company she founded with Will Smith in 2019.“How do you captivate people, people who think they already know your story?” said Pinkett Smith, who turned 52 a few days after we sat there sunk into couches, looking out over an atypically drizzly Southern California sky.In the book’s second to last chapter, titled “The Holy Joke, The Holy Slap, and Holy Lessons,” Pinkett Smith chronicles that infamous Oscars night, one of the most surreal of her life — when Smith stunned the world by marching onstage and slapping Chris Rock after Rock made an unscripted joke about Pinkett Smith’s closely cropped hair. She has alopecia, a hair-loss condition, which Rock has said he was unaware of. (It was not his first joke at her expense from the Oscars stage.) After returning to his seat, Smith yelled up to Rock: “Keep my wife’s name out of your [expletive] mouth!” Minutes later, Smith won the best actor Oscar for his role in “King Richard.”She, like millions of TV viewers, scrambled to grasp what had happened. But part of her surprise came from a different place than those who’d tuned into Hollywood’s big night — it was at hearing Smith call her his wife. “Even though we hadn’t been calling each other husband and wife in a long time, I said, ‘I’m his wife now. We in this.’ That’s just who I am,” she told me, adding: “That’s the gift I have to offer, like, ‘Hey, I’m riding with you.’”Smith and Rock had decades of disrespect between them, starting in the late 1980s, before either of them knew her, Pinkett Smith points out. “I didn’t judge Chris, I didn’t judge Will,” she said. “I was like, ‘Oh, this is a spiritual clash.’”“It didn’t have anything to do with Jada,” Banfield Norris told me during a video interview. “That was really Will’s pain.”And he was in tremendous pain, and fragile, Pinkett Smith said. He had recently finished filming “Emancipation,” a hellish Civil War-era drama that was psychologically tormenting for Smith, who plays an enslaved man. (Smith has said that he “got twisted up” in the role, and “lost track of how far I went.”) “I knew in my heart that he needed me by his side more than ever,” Pinkett Smith said.Jada Pinkett Smith and Will Smith at the Oscars ceremony in 2022. In her book, she writes, “It was easy to spin the story of how the perfect Hollywood megastar had fallen to his demise because of his imperfect wife.”Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesAs for Rock’s Netflix special earlier this year in which he mocks Smith and Pinkett Smith, she said she isn’t bitter, but she was hurt. “I remember my heart piercing, my heart cracking, and I remember my feelings being so hurt,” she told me. “And then I remember being able to smile and wish him well at the same time.” (Among the many tidbits shared by Pinkett Smith in her book was that Rock had asked her on a date when he thought she and Smith had split. She corrected him, and they shared a laugh, she writes. Rock’s representatives didn’t respond to a request for comment.)Pinkett Smith also unpacks the vitriol she received for rolling her eyes at Rock’s joke — a reaction that some suggested spurred Smith to storm the stage — to illustrate how women are damned if they do, damned if they don’t. “It was easy to spin the story of how the perfect Hollywood megastar had fallen to his demise because of his imperfect wife,” she writes. “Blaming the woman is nothing new.”“How is it that a woman can be so irrelevant and culpable at the same time?” she asks. “I had to think about the narrative out there of me as the adulterous wife, who had now driven her husband to madness with the command of one look. I had to take responsibility for my part in aiding that false narrative’s existence. I also had to chuckle at the idea that the world would think I wielded that amount of control over Will Smith. If I had that amount of control over Will, chile, my life would have been entirely different these damn near three decades. Real talk!”By adulterous, Pinkett Smith is referring to her relationship with August Alsina, which she called an “entanglement” on a 2020 episode of “Red Table Talk” where — after the information surfaced, becoming a public spectacle — she and Smith hashed out the already years-old chapter of their lives. The conversation ended with laughter and a fist-bump to their slogan: “We ride together, we die together, bad marriage for life.”The truth is the Smiths weren’t together in the traditional sense when she was with Alsina, nor are they now. But they are not in an open marriage, nor are they uncoupled, polyamorous or divorced. They are something else altogether: life partners in family and business, long maintaining an agreement they call “a relationship of transparency.” In recent years, they’ve lived separately. As a 50th birthday present to herself, she bought her own place, moving out of their Calabasas compound.In a way, her new home, also in Calabasas, closes the loop on a dream that started before they dated, when she was renovating an “old-world tiny” farmhouse on the outskirts of Baltimore that sat on an expanse of land that she envisioned filling with rescue dogs and cats, and a horse for her mother. During that time, she’d gotten a phone call from Will Smith, who’d recently split from his first wife. “You seeing anybody?” he’d asked her. “Uhm, no,” she replied. “Good,” he said. “You seeing me now.”Ultimately, it’s family that anchors their union. It’s the reason they married in 1997, while she was pregnant with their son, Jaden. “We wanted to create a family we never had, and we did that. And we enjoy our family,” she said. “For us, our marriage is like a cornerstone of that for now. Who knows in 10 years.”“We’ve tried everything to get away from each other, and we just don’t,” she added, laughing.From left, Willow Smith, Jada Pinkett Smith, Trey Smith, Will Smith and Jaden Smith in a family portrait from the early 2000s.via The Jada Pinkett Smith ArchiveShortly after that 2020 episode, Pinkett Smith, in pursuit of “clarity and emotional sobriety,” became what she calls an “urban nun of sorts.” She meditates and reads texts like the Bhagavad Gita, the Quran or the Bible daily, and abstains from sex, alcohol, violent entertainment and unnecessary spending.Pinkett Smith is centered and self-assured, yet being hitched to Smith’s bullet train has made it almost impossible for her trajectory not to be affected by his.“That’s not unique to me,” she stressed. “That’s just a patriarchal construct.” Not to say that it hasn’t irked her, particularly when it’s interfered with her professional identity: Harvey Weinstein, for example, once wouldn’t pursue a project of hers unless Smith attached his name to it, she said. “I’m like, pause, I’ve been doing this before,” she remembered thinking. “That’s when it would bother me. It was like, I’ve been doing stuff before I married this dude.”On that Friday morning last month, Pinkett Smith seemed to be channeling her younger self, when she was a regular at Baltimore clubs like Fantasy and Signals in the 1980s, earning a reputation as a formidable battle dancer — mixing hip-hop and house, the Running Man and the Cabbage Patch. With pink hair, Girbaud baggy jeans and fresh white Reebok Princess sneakers, she was “considered tomboy-cute,” she writes. “They didn’t see me coming.” When we met, she was still rocking white Reeboks, though well worn; a hot pink Telfar tracksuit; a cropped blonde pixie and an assortment of earrings framing her makeup-free face. Small in size, with an expansive presence.“Worthy” documents an eventful life, which she recounts chronologically, book-ended by a harrowing story. “This isn’t going to be a fluffy journey,” she wants readers to know. “I’m going to drop you right into one of the darkest moments of my life, and then we’ll backtrack.” In despair after her 40th birthday, in 2011, she began scouting California cliffs that might be suitable to drive off, something higher and steeper than what she’d seen on Mulholland Drive. Somewhere that would appear accidental. She’d tried to adhere to the rules of life but was empty: “Those boxes I’d been checking had not delivered the gifts that had been promised.”“There’s been so much that has gone on in Jada’s life that she kept close to the chest,” Banfield Norris said. “Most people just had no idea what was going on and the pain that she was suffering. I had no idea.”“I’ve gone through such a gauntlet of some of the harshest criticism with things that aren’t true, and had to sit in that,” Pinkett Smith said. “So I can totally sit in dealing with what is true.”Erik Carter for The New York TimesA conversation with the father of two of Jaden’s friends presented Pinkett Smith with a potential new way to heal. He told her of his life-changing experience on ayahuasca, and she’d soon set out on a four-night trip. The potent psychedelic presented her with a vision of a panther that would lead her deep into the jungles of her mind. At a critical juncture, she was plunged into a pit of sneering snakes who taunted her. “Mother Aya,” she writes, “is showing me all the unloved parts of myself needing light and love.” After that experience, she’d never again contemplate suicide, she writes. Pinkett Smith continues to integrate ayahuasca into her life. About a year after the 2022 Oscars, she held a friends-and-family session — Smith included. “You’ll have to cut off your spirit’s wrist to break free of our Divine handcuffs,” he told her as it wound down.The memoir, Smith said in an email, kind of woke him up. She had lived a life more on the edge than he’d realized, and she is more resilient, clever and compassionate than he’d understood. “When you’ve been with someone for more than half of your life,” he wrote, “a sort of emotional blindness sets in, and you can all too easily lose your sensitivity to their hidden nuances and subtle beauties.”The situation seems ripe for a vulnerability hangover, I suggested to Pinkett Smith.“I’ve gone through such a gauntlet of some of the harshest criticism with things that aren’t true, and had to sit in that. So I can totally sit in dealing with what is true,” she said.“What people think of me as putting myself out there, I don’t think of it that way,” she added, after some contemplation. “After you’ve had two [9] millimeters to your head, and you survive that, your capacity totally just …” she paused to make an explosion sound.Pinkett Smith writes of a few brushes with death early in her life when, as a teenager in Baltimore, she found success selling drugs, with aspirations to become a “queenpin.” It was a “distorted reality,” she writes.Pinkett Smith eventually moved away from dealing and her hometown. She attended the University of North Carolina School of the Arts before moving to Hollywood, where she’d become best known as an actress, starring in the “Cosby Show” spinoff “A Different World” (a role Debbie Allen wrote for her) and in movies like “Set It Off,” “Menace II Society” and “Scream 2,” then later “Collateral,” the “Matrix” sequels and “Girls Trip.”The memoir introduces people who populated her world along the way: her grandmother Marion, a world traveler and freethinker who significantly shaped young Jada; her absentee father, Robsol Pinkett, a poet and addict who zigzagged through her life; Banfield Norris, a nurse who had Jada as a teenager and would struggle with heroin addiction; and a bevy of friends, especially Tupac Shakur, whom she met at the Baltimore School for the Arts. Their friendship would be the deepest of her life, and his murder in 1996 was one in a string of sudden losses that would contribute to Pinkett Smith’s depression.She has never talked extensively about her relationship with Shakur before. People have long assumed that it was romantic, but it wasn’t. In “Worthy,” she playfully recollects a time when they’d tried to kiss as teenagers: They’d both recoiled in disgust and dissolved into laughter.A 16-year-old Jada Pinkett, right, with her friends Keesha Bond and Tupac Shakur. “We were both orphans in a certain manner,” she said of Shakur.via The Jada Pinkett Smith Archive“We were both orphans in a certain manner, and we really tried to compensate for that with one another in our relationship and really take care of each other the best we knew how,” she told me, just weeks before an arrest was made in his death. “We just had a deep loyalty.”“Pac’s whole thing was because I knew him when — when he wasn’t Tupac,” she added. “The guy who was poor, the conditions that he lived in. And I was rocking with him anyway.”In “Worthy,” she reveals that he’d proposed to her in a letter while incarcerated at Rikers in the mid-1990s for groping a fan. “Did Pac love me?” she asked. “Yeah he loved me! But I promise you, had we got married, he’d have divorced my ass as soon as he walked through them damn gates and got out.”He just needed someone to do time with him, she said, and Pinkett Smith’s ride-or-die mentality is carved in her bones. It’s the same instinct that kicked in during the Oscars debacle.Threads of loyalty, protection and safety wind their way throughout the memoir, and Pinkett Smith implores readers to learn from her hard-fought lessons. Each chapter ends with what I started to call “guidance pages.” Look inward, she urges, and ask yourself questions like: “Can you recognize patterns in your life and relationships that stem from inherited trauma cycles?” Each of these pages opens with a quote meaningful to Pinkett Smith, whether it be from Clarissa Pinkola Estés, author of “Women Who Run With the Wolves,” a defining book for her; the poet Ntozake Shange; the psychoanalyst Carl Jung; or the actor Steve Martin.“My biggest hope for the book is that it’ll just be oxygen for people who need it,” she said. “I didn’t want to talk about this journey and not give some bread crumbs of how I got out of some of the stuff I was in, because it’s intense stuff.”“I didn’t want to talk about this journey and not give some bread crumbs of how I got out of some of the stuff I was in,” Pinkett Smith said.Erik Carter for The New York TimesAs we prepared to say goodbye, the sun broke though, transforming the gray vista below into a California postcard. She was reminded of perhaps the wisest words passed to her, about 15 years ago, from the actress and civil rights activist Ruby Dee: “Laugh now, because you are going to laugh later.”“When she said it to me, I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about,” Pinkett Smith recalled. “I was like, laugh now? This [expletive] ain’t funny.”But lately, the meaning of those words hits hard. “Ruby was right,” Pinkett Smith said. “A lot of dark times that I can look at and smile at.”“At the end of the day, when you’re on your deathbed — or Chris is on his deathbed or Will is on his deathbed or whoever — all this doesn’t matter,” she said, gesturing to something beyond what was in the room. “And so just learning how to exist in that pocket right now. Not waiting until I’m on my deathbed. Let’s just do it right now.” More

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      Taylor Swift ‘Eras Tour’ Movie Review: Look What We Made Her Do

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      Swift’s cultural phenomenon arrives on the big screen with lots of little revelations, along with some what-could-have-beens.We could talk, I suppose, about all Taylor Swift’s done for the economy, friendship bracelets, seismology and Travis Kelce. But her greatest nonmusical achievement is the innocuous art she’s made of the gape. On a 50-foot screen, the various apertures of her mouth constitute a spectacle. There’s the “Who? Me?,” the “yeah I said it,” the “ouch,” the “ooooo,” the “gosh golly” and the “Sally Field wins another Oscar.” Hers is the story of “oh.”That glee is a reason to be happy about the movie that’s been assembled from her live show — “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,” which was shot at SoFi Stadium outside Los Angeles, the final stop on the tour’s first leg. “Happy” because it’s recorded what a gladdening agent Swift can be on a stage and the stamina summoned to power that agency for the better part of three hours. The movie’s about 165 minutes long, and she’s as ebullient descending into the stage, for her farewell, as she is in the opening minutes magically materializing upon it. The first words she speaks to the 70,000 people hooting for her are, “Oh, hi!,” as if SoFi were a shower we’d caught her singing in.In June, when Swift landed at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., the pushing and screaming — by five high schoolers — to my immediate rear ceased at about the two-hour mark. I turned to check on the state of their ecstasy and found a pile of fatigue — the human version of that crumpled face emoji. Her glee had outlasted theirs, her zing had them zung. If nothing else, this movie’s a monument to that: Swift’s illusion of ease. She doesn’t work as physically hard or as loosely or hydraulically as her dancers. She’s not a Jackson. And she doesn’t sing as enormously or as exquisitely as a Streisand, Carey, Dion or Knowles-Carter. Nor is her show — produced as discrete segments devoted to nine of Swift’s 10 albums — the cultural gymnasium Madonna requires. Swift plays to her enhanced strengths: candied pitch, arresting stature, toothsome songwriting, winking, the very idea of play. Not far into things, right around “Cruel Summer,” she announces that we’ve encountered “the very first bridge of the evening.” There are more to come, because not since Lionel Richie has a major pop star so enjoyed the pleasure in the might of her bridgecraft.It wasn’t until this movie that Swift’s 10-minute breakup ballad “All Too Well,” which she performs alone downstage in a glittering robe and an acoustic guitar, struck me as an achievement of genuine theater. Rapt in a movie theater, I felt the song’s heart-wrung pique in a new way. Some of that comes from watching Swift’s face register the ache, tsking recrimination. The rest comes from the song pooling outward into anthem territory. Live, it’s like watching someone woodwork “American Pie” until it resembles “Purple Rain.”“Eras” is studded with little revelations like that. Another: the “Reputation” section of the show contains her freest, most ambitious singing and movement. That album is the first in which she approximates the mischievous, cunning, swaggy music that Beyoncé or Rihanna could make. But the kick of its first six songs is that Swift invites the dare. She spends this part of the show dressed in a serpentine unitard. She knows.One more aha: Swift can command a stage. I’d never thought of her as someone a camera has to take in. But anytime she’s in one of those glittering bathing suits and a pair of spangled knee-high boots, the length of her demands in-taking. She can strike a formidable pose. But early, when she points to different spots in SoFi and those sections start to roar, she jokes that that kind of power is “dangerous” before kissing her biceps, except I don’t think she’s joking. She understands her power and she’s skilled at performing the accident of having so much of it, like she can’t also believe how the country would react if she, say, started going to football games and chest-bumping folks and being associated with a thing of nearby chicken fingers. Her embodiment of lightness and blitheness and insouciance constitutes a talent. Another gape: Did I do that?The show confirmed my sense that Swift can’t be serious — doesn’t want to be — for long, lest she be labeled self-serious. She’s fine with attention but less so with her own monumentality. That discomfort strikes me as the source of the Taylor-as-Godzilla imagery of “Anti-Hero,” a dirge in jam’s clothing. In concert, Swift is as committed to skipping like a cartoon first grader along the stage as she is to sashaying and skulking around it. She’d rather be running than standing still, accruing meaning. She’d rather use her body for screwball comedy than for totemism. She knows what a holy object we’ve made and seems to be trying to undercut that. These are thoughts that could occur to you live in the moment of the show itself. But now the camera permits you to savor it.So it’s a shame that the shots here are all over the place — the stage, the sky, too close, too far, too kinetic; only occasionally, in medium close-ups, just right. The director is Sam Wrench, and it’s unclear whether he’s making a movie or a salad. Under the circumstances, he’s done the best he probably could. For one thing, his camera operators and editors have to compete with the jumbo monitors that project what’s at the center of the stadium to its farthest reaches. Few movie screens can hold a candle to one of those — the screen at my theater wasn’t one of them, anyway. The projected image delivers a Swift who seems to be in higher resolution than the woman onstage. The breakthroughs in screen imaging have changed the concert-going experience for better and worse. They’ve democratized it, and that’s great.You can actually experience Swift more clearly in the upper decks than in the inner circles. The concert screens literalize her cultural magnitude. But they seem like hell on good filmmaking. Unless, no one prioritized attempting to shoot around them so that Swift isn’t being upstaged by herself. Of course, that inner-circle seat is, if not priceless (there was definitely a price tag), then certainly far more valuable since, whenever Swift makes her way to the stage’s lip, we can shove a phone in her face. That introduces a modern eyesore for a concert film: other people’s movies. The “Eras” crew has clearly aimed to keep the amateur films mostly out of the shots. But they’re there, nonetheless, as intrusive in a movie as they are at the show itself.Concertgoers can actually experience Swift more clearly in the upper decks than the inner circles, our critic writes, but the screens that enable that at a live show are an obstacle for filmmakers.TAS Rights Management/Variance FilmsWhat is it we should expect from a concert movie? Cinema or fax? “Eras” is proof that an event took place and that the event was fun. There’s more it could have been, of course. “More” just opened a few weeks ago — well, reopened in the form of “Stop Making Sense,” the 1984 concert movie Jonathan Demme made from a few Talking Heads shows, also in Los Angeles. The film predates the camera phone but not the audience. You barely hear one, and he rarely cuts away to it. The film captures one man expanding into a family and the family into a kind of small choir. Maybe Swift is too big for that movie’s living-room approach. But surely there’s a more imaginative strategy to bring her to us than point-and-shoot.I know. “Eras” wasn’t made to be art. It was made to be an index of art that got made. It was made for posterity. Oh — and for the hundreds of people in the parking lot at every Eras show who could sort of hear Swift and had to make do with seeing only each other. The movie is for them. And they’re gonna gape their faces off. More

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      Academy Museum Postpones Gala, Citing Israel-Hamas War

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      The star-studded Hollywood fund-raiser, which had already been complicated by the actors’ strike, was to have honored Meryl Streep and others on Saturday.It’s hard not to see the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures’s attempt to put on this year’s gala — a glamorous party that raises more than $10 million for the museum and burnishes its image by drawing Hollywood A-listers — as anything but ill-fated.First the Hollywood strikes complicated efforts to hold the party, since striking actors are barred from promoting films and few would want to rub elbows socially with executives from the big studios that they are on strike against. That difficulty was ironed out after studio executives, who are among the museum’s biggest financial supporters, agreed not to come and union officials said actors could attend as long as they did not promote films.Then the Israel-Hamas war cast a shadow over the festivities, which had been scheduled for Saturday night. First the museum announced that the red carpet — where stars parade in their finery for photographers before going in — would be canceled. Then, on Thursday, the museum announced that the gala would be postponed.“Out of respect for the devastating conflict and loss of life happening overseas, we have made the decision to postpone the Academy Museum gala this Saturday,” the museum said in a statement on Thursday evening. “We look forward to rescheduling at a later date. We thank everybody deeply for their support.”The gala was to have honored Meryl Streep, Oprah Winfrey, Michael B. Jordan and Sofia Coppola. The chairs of the gala, which is raising money for exhibitions, education and public programs, are the director Ava DuVernay, the actor Halle Berry, the producer Ryan Murphy and the producer Eric Esrailian, a physician and a trustee.The museum through a spokeswoman said it had no further comment. More

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      Five Horror Movies Streaming for Halloween: ‘Appendage,’ ‘Accused’ and More

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      Deranged siblings, a creepy voyeur and nasty tricksters are among this Halloween’s scary movie treats.‘Megalomaniac’Rent or buy on major platforms.Martha (Eline Schumacher, magnetic) endures repeated sexual assaults by a worker at the factory where she’s a night janitor. She carries her trauma home to the weird Gothic mansion where she communes with a circle of creeps, including her overprotective serial-killer brother, Felix (Benjamin Ramon), sinister long-limbed creatures that lurk in the hallways and uncanny mirror images of herself. Then there’s the young woman that Felix brought home to be a “kitty,” as Martha calls her. I’ll stop there because to say more would give away too much of this depraved film’s sadistic surprises.Karim Ouelhaj wrote and directed this film, which is loosely inspired by several unsolved murders of women around the Belgian city of Mons in the 1990s — source material that Ouelhaj unflinchingly mines to examine generational wounds and mental illness. The cinematographer François Schmitt makes the horrors look Grand Guignol gorgeous; it looks like a Dior commercial but with stomach-churning violence swapped in for chic pantsuits, a welcome throwback to the movies of the New French Extremity.This film deservedly won the Jury Prize at last year’s Fantasia Film Festival, where the judges called it an “astonishing, brutal piece of art.” I agree, and it’s one of my favorite horror movies of 2023.‘15 Cameras’Rent or buy on major platforms.Sky (Angela Wong Carbone) and her boyfriend, Cam (Will Madden), got lucky with their starter home. It came cheap, with reason: It’s where a landlord murdered one of his tenants, as documented on Sky’s favorite true-crime series, “The Slumlord Tapes.” The house has room for Sky’s sister, Carolyn (Hilty Bowen, hilarious), and adjacent quarters for two young renters, Wren (Shirley Chen) and Amber (Hannah McKechnie). When Cam finds hidden-away cameras that the landlord left behind, he makes the very bad decision to spy on his tenants, until he becomes both the watcher and the watched. It’s here that Danny Madden’s psychological thriller takes off on its ferocious final stretch.Some people might be put off by how the writer PJ McCabe finds laughs in sexual voyeurism of the criminal kind. But I found the film to be a smart, twisted and twisty nail-biter about don’t-mess-with-me women and the piggish men they put up with — until they don’t. It’s a more naturalistic companion of sorts to this year’s “Jethica,” which also starred Will Madden (Danny’s brother) as a guy who doesn’t know when or how to stop being creepy.‘Accused’Stream it on Tubi.Harri (Chaneil Kular) is on a train to his parents’ country home outside London when a deadly bombing strikes the station he just left. When his parents leave home the next morning, Harri settles in for some quiet time with his dog at his side and dark woods out back. But then the authorities release a photo of a suspect who looks a lot like Harri, a resemblance a former classmate points out on social media. Anonymous hands take to social media to claim Harri as the bomber, and in almost real time, we watch as Harri’s life is turned upside down by people eager for vigilante justice based on lies and speculation. Then the phone rings at Harri’s house, and that’s when this well-crafted Tubi original really puts its foot on the gas.In most home-invasion films, the attack happens quickly. But in this tense and timely thriller, the drama comes slowly and deliberately, a shrewd choice that the director Philip Barantini handles assuredly in 88 taut minutes. Kular gives a deeply empathetic performance as a man under siege by assailants on a too-familiar witch hunt in which vengeance is the goal and truth is the victim.‘V/H/S/85’Stream it on Shudder.Bad news: The recent films in the “V/H/S” franchise have been bloated and boring. Good news: The latest entry is pure found-footage mayhem, with two standouts.My favorite is Gigi Saul Guerrero’s “God of Death,” set during Mexico’s devastating 1985 earthquake. As a morning television show opens, the earthquake topples the studio live on air, an effectively terrifying way into the found-footage format. As rescue workers make their way through the rubble in search of survivors, the film morphs into a perverse and gruesome (and darkly funny) disaster film about an underworld god who’s famished for human flesh.I also got spooked by Scott Derrickson’s “Dreamkill,” which channels straight-to-video era horror in a supernatural story about a serial killer who sends videos of murders to the police before they happen. The film takes an evil twist I didn’t see coming and ends with a fantastically gory blood bath.‘Appendage’Stream it on Hulu.If, like me, your idea of an exciting Halloween night is to stay home with a silly-scary movie, invite friends over for this horror comedy from the writer-director Anna Zlokovic.Hannah (Hadley Robinson) is getting worried about a bloody lesion at her hip that keeps growing. And I mean growing: One day it suddenly grows beady eyes and sharp teeth and in a nasty, guttural tone gives voice to Hannah’s insecurities. “You have no good ideas,” the creature growls to her face.When the monster pops out of her body, Hannah wrestles it into submission, a move that unleashes in her a creative streak that impresses her exacting fashion designer boss (Desmin Borges). But Hannah’s little worry-wart parasite is determined to bring its host down, and that’s when she seeks help from an appendage support group whose kindly members have anxious and angry demons of their own — hungrier ones than hers.As a parable about battles with self-criticism and inner doubt, the film is far from subtle. But Robinson’s winsome performance and the goofball creature-feature design by Amber Mari Creations — think “Basket Case” but with feeling — won me over by the end. More

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      ‘What About Us?’ Strikes Leave Other Hollywood Workers Reeling.

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      The lives of hundreds of thousands of crew members have been upended, and even a deal between the actors and the studios might not help much in the short term.Katie Reis has been a Hollywood lighting technician for 27 years, rigging equipment for movies like “Independence Day” and TV shows like “Quantum Leap.” But she hasn’t had a paycheck since May, when the first of two strikes — screenwriters, then actors — forced cameras to stop rolling.Ms. Reis, 60, has since been turned down for jobs at Target and Whole Foods. She is now looking into seasonal work at the mall.Her son Alex, a high school senior, recently had to go without new shoes for the start of classes. “If I go into Alex’s college fund, I have probably four, five months left,” she said. “But then I have nothing.”The recently settled screenwriters’ strike and the continuing actors’ strike have upended the lives of hundreds of thousands of crew members — the entertainment industry’s equivalent of blue-collar workers — and many are growing desperate for work. Caught in the crossfire for more than five months, they have drawn down savings accounts that in some cases were already diminished because of the pandemic. Some have been unable to afford groceries. A few have lost their homes.The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, for example, which represents 170,000 crew members in North America, estimated that its West Coast members alone lost $1.4 billion in wages between May and Sept. 16, the most recent date for which data was available. The extreme loss of hours worked, in turn, hurts funding for pension and health care plans.Even if entertainment companies and the actors’ union come to an agreement soon — which became less likely after the collapse of negotiations this week — production is not expected to return to normal until January at the earliest, in part because of the time it takes to reassemble creative teams, a process complicated by the coming holidays. Preproduction (before anyone gathers on a set) for new shows can take up to 12 weeks, with movies taking roughly 16 weeks.“I’m trying to manage my panic because it’s not going to be over when the strikes are over,” said Dallin James, a hairstylist who counts on red carpet premieres and other studio-related work for about 75 percent of his income.Dallin James, a hairstylist, said workers like him were “collateral damage” in the Hollywood strikes.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesThe Writers Guild of America, which represents 11,500 screenwriters, reached a tentative agreement with studios on Sept. 24 and soon called off its 148-day strike. Writers have celebrated their new contract as the equivalent of winning a Super Bowl, describing the pay raises and improved working conditions they secured as “exceptional.” The Writers Guild said on Monday that its members had ratified the contract with 99 percent voting in favor.The actors’ union, SAG-AFTRA, appeared to be closing in on a deal of its own after being on strike since July 14, clearing the way for Hollywood’s assembly lines to grind back into motion. But talks between the guild and the studios broke down after a session on Wednesday, creating more uncertainty. The actors have asked for wage increases, including an 11 percent raise in the first year of a new contract; a revenue-sharing agreement for streaming shows and films; and guarantees that studios will not use artificial intelligence tools to create digital replicas of their likenesses without payment or approval.Cue whipsawing emotions for entertainment workers who didn’t have a say in the strikes and who won’t be receiving a pay increase when they return to work.“I understand why they had to go on strike,” Mr. James said. “On the other hand, what about us? We haven’t really been considered in all of this. It feels like we’re collateral damage.”The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains with unions on behalf of the major entertainment companies, did not respond to a request for comment for this article.More than two million Americans work in jobs directly or indirectly related to making TV shows and films, according to the Motion Picture Association, a trade organization. They include writers, actors and other “above the line” creative personnel, along with studio executives. But a vast majority contribute in more humble ways. They are set dressers, camera operators, carpenters, location scouts, painters, costume designers, visual effects artists, stunt doubles, janitors, payroll clerks, assistants and chauffeurs.A big-budget superhero movie can easily employ 3,000 people, with the cast numbering fewer than 100, including credited extras.Gabriel Sanders, a longtime boom mic operator in Georgia, has started teaching fitness and yoga classes.Audra Melton for The New York Times“It’s desperate — our crews are really suffering,” said the actress Annette Bening, who is the chair of the Entertainment Community Fund, a nonprofit that provides emergency financial assistance and other services to workers in the industry. “These are people who are hardworking, who have a lot of pride. They are not used to being in a position of having to ask for help. But that’s where we are now.”With her husband, Warren Beatty, Ms. Bening has been among the celebrity donors to the fund, which has distributed more than $8.5 million to roughly 4,000 film and television workers since screenwriters went on strike. (That breaks down to $560,000 a week, compared with about $75,000 a week before the strikes.) The organization also hosts online workshops to help Hollywood workers navigate eviction notices, among other topics.“This is going to have a long tail,” Ms. Bening said. “We still expect a significant increase of inquiries in the coming months, even once work resumes.” (Ms. Bening, a four-time Oscar nominee who stars in the coming Netflix film “Nyad,” about the marathon swimmer Diana Nyad, has walked picket lines with other actors in recent months. She said the actors’ strike was “imperative” given the deterioration of working conditions and compensation levels in the streaming era.)Other Hollywood nonprofits have also been distributing money and holding food drives, including the Motion Picture & Television Fund and the SAG-AFTRA Foundation, a charity that provides financial assistance to workaday performers. The foundation, which is associated with the actors’ union but is run independently, has been processing more than 30 times its usual number of applications for emergency aid, or more than 400 a week.Starting on Sept. 1, Los Angeles-area workers enrolled in the Motion Picture Industry Pension Plan were allowed to withdraw up to $20,000 each for financial hardship. By Sept. 8, workers had pulled roughly $45 million, according to a document compiled by plan administrators that was viewed by The New York Times. A spokesman for the plan said no updated information was available.Robin Urdang, a music supervisor in Los Angeles whose credits include “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” and the film “Call Me by Your Name,” has no pension plan to fall back on. To pay for living expenses, Ms. Urdang has been dipping into money she had been saving for a down payment on a house.“It’s depressing,” she said, adding that she typically works on four to seven projects at once. Ms. Urdang is still working a bit, including on a series for Amazon that was past the filming phase of production when actors went on strike. But she spends much of her day crocheting sweaters and reading books.Even so, Ms. Urdang said she sympathized with the writers and actors. Streaming has also changed her fortunes considerably. She used to do a lot of work on broadcast television, where an episode would go from script to on air in two weeks. (Most music supervisors, who select and license songs, are paid half their fee at the start of production and the other half when episodes are completed.) Now she does the same amount of work, but the payment schedule on an eight-episode streaming show is spread out over a year.“So I understand where they’re coming from,” she said.The studio shutdown has been felt most severely in California and New York. The strikes have cost the California economy more than $5 billion, according to Gov. Gavin Newsom. But the strikes have also darkened soundstages across the country, as well as in Canada and England. Georgia, for instance, has three million square feet of soundstage space.Gabriel Sanders, who lives in Decatur, Ga., with his wife and two daughters, is a longtime boom mic operator who has worked on films like “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” and series like “Law & Order: Organized Crime.” As the strikes have dragged on, Mr. Sanders has turned to teaching fitness and yoga classes.“It’s good for my soul, but it doesn’t pay very well,” he said.His wife, Carey Yaruss Sanders, a voice instructor, has started a pet-sitting and dog-walking business to help make ends meet.Mr. Sanders said there had been “a lot of internal fighting” in the crew community about the strikes, with some people, like him, cheering on the actors and writers and others saying, “Enough already, we just need to get back to work.”“I have no resentment — do what you have to do to protect your rights,” Mr. Sanders said, referring to the strikes. “But that doesn’t mean it has been easy.” More

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      Talks Between Striking Actors and Studios Are Suspended

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      The sides said they remained far apart on the most significant issues, dealing a blow to hopes that the entertainment industry could soon fully roar back to life.Negotiations between the major entertainment studios and the union representing tens of thousands of actors have collapsed, with both sides saying on Thursday morning that they remained far apart on the most significant issues.The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of the studios, said that it was suspending talks because they were “no longer moving us in a productive direction” after a session on Wednesday. SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union, which has been on strike since July, accused studio executives of “bully tactics,” and said the studios recently presented an offer “that was, shockingly, worth less than they proposed before the strike began.”The collapse of the negotiations is a significant setback for the entertainment industry, which has essentially been at a standstill for months because of dual strikes by actors and screenwriters. On Monday, more than 8,000 screenwriters ratified a new three-year contract with the studio alliance, formally ending their monthslong labor dispute. There was optimism that a deal with the actors would follow and that Hollywood could soon fully roar back to life.But with actors continuing to strike, most television and movie production remains suspended. The financial fallout has been significant. The California economy has lost an estimated $5 billion. Tens of thousands of behind-the-scenes workers have been out of work for months. Share prices for many major media companies have dropped, and now there is a further threat to next year’s box office results.Like their counterparts in the screenwriters guild, leaders of the actors’ union have called this moment “existential.” They are seeking wage increases, as well as protections around the use of artificial intelligence. Actors have now been on strike for 91 days; screenwriters recently returned to work after a 148-day walkout. The last time both unions had been on strike at the same time was 1960.When negotiations between the actors’ union and the studios resumed last week — just days after the studios and screenwriters had reached a tentative agreement — it represented the first time that the sides had met since the actors went on strike on July 14. There were five bargaining sessions, and many industry observers believed that the talks would soon lead to a deal.In a statement released early Thursday morning, the studio alliance said it had offered wage increases, met “nearly all of the union’s demands on casting” and proposed further protections around the use of A.I. The alliance also said it offered “the same terms that were ratified” by both the writers’ and directors’ unions regarding wage increases and streaming royalties.The alliance also said, however, that the actors’ union wanted a viewership bonus that “would cost more than $800 million per year, which would create an untenable economic burden.”Union leaders accused studio executives of walking away from the bargaining table “after refusing to counter our latest offer.”“These companies refuse to protect performers from being replaced by artificial intelligence, they refuse to increase your wages to keep up with inflation, and they refuse to share a tiny portion of the immense revenue YOUR work generates for them,” union officials said in a statement addressed to members. “Our resolve is unwavering,” the statement continued. “Join us on picket lines and at solidarity events around the country and let your voices be heard.” More

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      ‘The Road Dance’ Review: A World War I Weepie

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      Based on a Scottish best seller, the movie is a standard period drama that arrives at hard truths with a hammy delivery.Set in the Outer Hebrides, a verdant archipelago to the west of mainland Scotland, “The Road Dance” is a standard period drama that arrives at hard truths with a hammy delivery.Kirsty (Hermione Corfield) is a restless beauty living with her sister and mother in a remote crofting (small tenant farming) community. It’s the years around World War I, and forced conscriptions are sweeping the nation — including Kirsty’s beau, a poetry-reading softy named Murdo (Will Fletcher).Before Murdo and three other local men are shipped off to the Western Front, the village honors them with a night of dance and drink. It’s here that Kirsty will be violently raped, an assault which the director, Richie Adams, depicts blurrily, unfolding in darkness.Adapted from the 2002 Scottish best seller by John MacKay, this run-of-the-mill weepie spends the bulk of its time detailing the aftermath of the attack. Kirsty becomes pregnant, and she’s forced to conceal not just her physical state but her mental trauma from the snooping members of her ultrareligious town. Cryptic sermon scenes about sinners and Satan play throughout Kirsty’s ordeal, raising the stakes — though Kirsty’s not the only one who has gone through hell and back in these parts, as evidenced by a whisper network of wizened women who band together to pull her through.The culprit remains unknown until the bitter end, a revelation served with a bland sort of twist — that any man is capable of such violence. It’s an uninspired take, along with the use of rape as a plot device.Shifting between stagy sincerity and startling realism (the labor scene is particularly colorful), “The Road Dance” is a vividly rendered, if ultimately schematic portrait of feminine resilience.The Road DanceNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Reality Winner’ Review: Caught in the Cross Hairs

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      Sonia Kennebeck’s documentary unpacks the circumstances surrounding its subject, but fails to crack her complexity.It is not always fruitful to compare a documentary about an event with a narrative film portraying that event. Yet “Reality Winner,” Sonia Kennebeck’s hazy nonfiction chronicle of Reality Winner — a National Security Agency contractor who was sentenced under the Espionage Act in 2018 when she was 26 — and this year’s film “Reality,” a searing dramatization of her interrogation, form a tidy double feature. The latter eschews context to paint an evocative real-time picture of a young woman in the F.B.I.’s cross hairs; the former painstakingly maps out the state of affairs surrounding Winner, only to see her personhood trickle away, like water cupped in one’s palms.Rotating among a handful of timelines, Kennebeck’s documentary spends the most time with Winner’s parents and sister as they push for Winner to receive a fair trial. These scenes are interspersed with blurred re-enactments (not unlike those starring Sydney Sweeney in “Reality”) and actual field-recording audio, as well as an interview with Winner, who orates directly into the camera à la Errol Morris’s Interrotron technique.One of the more troubling aspects of this complex case was The Intercept’s mishandling of the leaked document, and “Reality Winner” unpacks how The Intercept’s actions contributed to exposing Winner’s identity to the N.S.A. Indeed, the documentary’s most valuable testimonies come from other whistle-blowers (including Edward Snowden) who come across as extraordinarily well equipped to analyze the story’s knottier details.Despite this access, “Reality Winner” fails to decode its ideologically heterodox subject. The film is clear in showing how the media put her into boxes: a traitor, a terrorist, a progressive, an innocent, a lost cause. But who is Reality Winner? This documentary doesn’t dig deeper than her patently well-meaning exterior.Reality WinnerNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More