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      Book Review: ‘MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios,’ by Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzalez and Gavin Edwards

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      “The Reign of Marvel Studios” captures how movies based on comic-book properties came to dominate pop culture. At least until now.MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios, by Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzalez and Gavin EdwardsHollywood doesn’t believe in immortals. From Mary Pickford to the MGM musical, Golden Age cowboys to teenage wizards, the city worships its gods only until their box-office power dims. So it feels audacious — if not foolhardy — to open “MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios” and find its authors, Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzalez and Gavin Edwards, declaring that it’s difficult to imagine a future where the Disney-owned superhero industrial complex “didn’t run forever.” Even Tony Stark, better known as Iron Man, has yet to engineer a perpetual motion machine.Yet the three veteran pop culture journalists behind this detailed accounting of the company’s ascendancy have the numbers to support it. The Marvel Cinematic Universe, a constellation of solo superhero tales mixed with all-star team-ups, including four installments of “The Avengers,” is Hollywood’s most successful movie franchise of all time — 32 films that have grossed a combined $29.5 billion. By comparison, the book points out that the “Star Wars” series, Marvel’s nearest rival, has notched only 12 films and $10.3 billion.Turning the pages — which are devoid of the usual, and unnecessary, glossy photo spreads — one realizes that superheroes are an X-ray lens into the last decade and a half of Hollywood disruption. Every upheaval gets a mention: corporate mergers; profit-losing streaming services; Chinese censorship; digitally scanned actors; social media cancellations; #MeToo and #OscarsSoWhite; the resurgence of a production-to-distribution vertical pipeline that hadn’t been legal since the 1948 Paramount Decree. Pity there’s no room to examine each in depth.First, the origin story. In the ’90s, the former overseer of Marvel Enterprises, Ike Perlmutter (let’s give him the comic book nickname “The Pennypincher”), empowered his entertainment division to license its biggest stars for cheap, scattering Spider-Man, Hulk and the X-Men across other studios in service of selling more toys. (“MCU” familiarizes us with the marketing term “toyetic.”)The saga of who and what changed the company’s direction involves chancy gambles, pivotal lunches at Mar-a-Lago, rivalrous committees and the waning of Perlmutter’s influence, amid the waxing of Kevin Feige, the book’s hero, a five-time U.S.C. Film School reject who started his production career teaching Meg Ryan to log in to AOL for the romantic comedy “You’ve Got Mail.” To establish their independence, the writers mention at the top that Disney, now Marvel’s parent company, asked people not to give them an interview. Many already had, or chose to anyway, although most shy away from on-the-record quotes about the really salacious stuff. No one will say that the rumored $400-million-plus Robert Downey Jr. earned across nine films factored into the decision to kill off Tony Stark, but the innuendo is thicker than Iron Man’s armored exoskeleton.Signs that the Marvel era is nearing the end of its cultural dominance are everywhere, including in this book. Despite the authors’ rah-rah intro (there are no bad Marvel films, they claim, only “a mix of entertaining diversions and inarguable masterpieces”), they wisely sense that the library’s cinema history section will eventually file Feige next to John Ford as filmmakers who defined the spirit of a moment.“MCU” concedes that three of Marvel’s worst-reviewed films were all made in the last three years, just as one of the studio’s cornerstone creatives, the “Guardians of the Galaxy” director James Gunn, decamped to run DC Studios, the home of Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman.Meanwhile, the churn of faster, cheaper superhero content for Disney+ has led the studio’s weary visual-effects workers (whose exhaustion is well documented here) to vote to unionize. Fandom has become a Sisyphean labor as never-ending spinoff series force a once-rapt audience to pick and choose which story lines they’ll bother to follow.To those seismic grumbles, I’ll add another: Today’s teenagers were toddlers when Marvel first seized the zeitgeist. What generation wants to dig the same stuff as their parents?Marvel’s inescapable obsolescence is the best argument for “MCU”; the genre should be studied with the same rigor as film noir. The book’s admiration for Marvel movies works in its favor, freeing the writers to skip straight to the gossip, like the relative who pulls you aside at Thanksgiving to whisper about your cousin’s divorce. If you didn’t understand the plot of “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” before, they’re not wasting space explaining it here.Instead, the book will satisfy your appetite for Marvel’s endless contract negotiations with Sony over the character rights for Spider-Man, which is easy when one encounter climaxes with the former Sony Pictures chairwoman Amy Pascal hurling a sandwich — and an expletive — at Feige. Battles over screenplay credits are even juicier. That’s where you’ll find the most inventive insults.Elsewhere, one has to read several paragraphs past a doctor willing to estimate that “50 to 75 percent” of Marvel’s stars are Hulked-out on performance-enhancing drugs to learn that he has not, in fact, treated any of the studio’s actors. While the hustle to wrap things up before the tome turns into “Captain America: Civil War and Peace” means racing through the most recent projects in a blur, earlier chapters are able to dish the dirt, like whose script notes triggered the collapse of Edgar Wright’s “Ant-Man” and why Feige refused to continue collaborating with the original Bruce Banner, Edward Norton.After all, the authors know a saga is only as exciting as its villain.MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios | By Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzalez and Gavin Edwards | 528 pp. | Liveright | $35 More

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      How the Queen of Denmark Shaped the Look of Netflix’s “Ehrengard: The Art of Seduction”

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      Once upon a time, there was a princess in Denmark who aspired to become an artist.Though she was the eldest child of the country’s reigning king, for the first 12 years of the princess’s life, only men had the right to inherit the throne. That changed when the Danish constitution was amended in 1953, and the princess became her father’s presumptive heir soon after turning 13. She continued to pursue her interest in art throughout her teenage years, producing drawings by the stacks before largely stopping in her 20s.Around the time the princess turned 30 — and after she had earned a diploma in prehistoric archaeology at the University of Cambridge, and had studied at Aarhus University in Denmark, the Sorbonne and the London School of Economics — she read J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings.” It inspired her to start drawing again.Three years later, upon her father’s death in 1972, the princess was crowned as queen: Queen Margrethe II of Denmark, to be specific.Margrethe, now 83, celebrated 50 years on the throne in 2022. But in assuming the role of queen, she did not abandon her artistic passions. As a monarch she has taken lessons in certain media, has taught herself others and has been asked to bring her eye to projects produced by the Royal Danish Ballet and Tivoli, the world’s oldest amusement park, in Copenhagen.Margrethe made 81 decoupages, a type of cut-and-paste artwork, that served as the basis for sets in “Ehrengard: The Art of Seduction.” Interiors at a castle in the film were based on this decoupage.NetflixHer paintings have been shown at museums, including in a recent exhibition at the Musée Henri-Martin in Cahors, France. And her illustrations have been adapted into artwork for a Danish translation of “The Lord of the Rings.” (They were published under the pseudonym Ingahild Grathmer, and the book’s publisher approached her about using them after she sent copies to Tolkien as fan mail in 1970.)Margrethe recently notched another creative accomplishment: serving as the costume and production designer for “Ehrengard: The Art of Seduction,” a feature film that debuted on Netflix in September and has wardrobes and sets based on her drawings and other artworks.The film is an adaptation of the fairy tale “Ehrengard” by Karen Blixen, a Danish baroness who published under the pen name Isak Dinesen. Set in a fictional kingdom, the story is loosely about a woman named Ehrengard who becomes a lady-in-waiting and foils a royal court painter’s plot to woo her.“It was great fun,” Magrethe said of working on the film in an interview in August at the Château de Cayx, the Danish royal family’s estate in Luzech, a village near Cahors in the South of France.“I hope that Blixenites will accept the way we’ve done it,” she said.Conjuring AtmospheresThe Netflix adaptation, a sort of fantasy dramedy, has been more than a decade in the making.JJ Film, the Danish production company behind it, approached Margrethe about working on the movie after she served as production designer for two shorter films it produced, “The Snow Queen” and “The Wild Swans,” which were both adapted from Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales. Those films, released on Danish television in 2000 and 2009, also featured sets based on artworks by Margrethe, who in 2010 became an honorary member of the Danish Designers for Stage and Screen union.For the Netflix film, the queen designed 51 costumes and made 81 decoupages — a type of cut-and-paste artwork — that were used as the basis for sets. (She was not paid by Netflix or JJ Film.) Her sketches, along with some of the clothes and many of the decoupages, are being shown at the Karen Blixen Museum just outside Copenhagen through next April. Afterward, there are plans to show them in New York, Washington and Seattle.The movie, an adaptation of the fairy tale “Ehrengard,” is loosely about a woman named Ehrengard who becomes a lady-in-waiting and foils a royal court painter’s plot to woo her.NetflixFor certain decoupages, the queen cut up images of interiors and pasted the pieces together to create new scenes, like this sumptuous room.Dennis Stenild for The New York TimesMargrethe based her costume designs on clothes from the Biedermeier period, which took place in parts of Europe from 1815 to 1848. Certain details, like leg-of-mutton sleeves, reflected fashion at that time.Dennis Stenild for The New York TimesTo compose the decoupages, the queen cut up images of various landscapes and interiors and pasted the pieces together to create new scenes, like a sumptuous sitting room and a rocky canyon with a fortress and a waterfall.“Sometimes it takes hours, and sometimes things want to come together and they do as you want them to do, and suddenly you’ve done a whole decoupage in an afternoon,” she said. “It’s kind of a puzzle.”She was guided by Blixen’s “very visual writing,” she said, noting that Blixen, as well as Tolkien and Andersen, were writers who also painted or drew.Bille August, 74, the film’s director, described the queen’s decoupages as a “tuning fork” that he used to build “a world that is detached from reality without being a full-on fairy tale.” (He compared the general visual style he sought to the tone of Baz Luhrmann’s “Moulin Rouge!”)“Conjuring that special atmosphere is perhaps the queen’s greatest achievement here,” Mr. August said.Scouts would seek locations that reflected the decoupages, which set designers would then style with props to further emulate the artworks. Elements in the decoupages that couldn’t be found were rendered using computer-generated imagery. Some decoupages were scanned and details from the artworks were added to scenes in postproduction.Blixen did not set “Ehrengard” in a specific time, giving Margrethe freedom to interpret the look of the costumes. She chose to base her designs on clothes from the Biedermeier period in Austria and other parts of central and northern Europe, which took place from 1815 to 1848.Anne-Dorthe Eskildsen, 56, the film’s costume supervisor, said she generally translated Margrethe’s sketches “one to one” when fabricating the garments, which were made with textiles and trimmings that the queen helped select.Bille August, left, the film’s director, described Margrethe’s decoupages as a tuning fork. “Conjuring that special atmosphere is perhaps the queen’s greatest achievement here,” he said.Jacob Jørgensen/NetflixMargrethe said that for one costume she had sketched — a dress in hunter green with pink paisley-like specks — she had hoped to find a sprigged fabric. “But we couldn’t find one,” she said, so the pattern was custom printed. Another costume designed for the film’s grand duchess character was inspired by a portrait of a French queen.“She was wearing a lovely get-up,” Margrethe said. “It seemed to me exactly what the grand duchess should be wearing.”Certain elements of the costumes, like leg-of-mutton sleeves, reflected fashion at the time of the Biedermeier period. “I quite like that style,” Margrethe said. “I’ve been interested in style and in the history of style and costume for a very long time.”Other details were less historically accurate: Some dresses had waistlines that were slightly lower than those typical of that era, to give them a more flattering fit.Mikkel Boe Folsgaard, 39, the actor who played the court painter, Cazotte, said that when Margrethe saw an early version of his costume, she thought it lacked color. “And she was clear about exactly which colors she wanted to see,” he added.The actress Alice Bier Zanden, 28, who played the title role of Ehrengard in the film, said that at a costume fitting attended by Margrethe, the queen’s enthusiasm was palpable. “You’re just smitten by it,” she said.Sidse Babett Knudsen, 54, who played the grand duchess, described the queen’s presence at the fitting this way: “bare legs, beautiful shoes, nice jewelry — smoking away.” (Margrethe has made no secret of her fondness for cigarettes.)Scouts would seek locations that reflected the decoupages, like this one Margrethe made using clippings from images of landscapes. NetflixMs. Knudsen added that she felt comfortable “clowning around” in front of Margrethe, who has generally been popular in Denmark. According to a 2021 poll by YouGov Denmark, she was the most admired woman in the country (the most admired man was Barack Obama), and in a 2013 Gallup poll conducted for Berlingske, Denmark’s oldest newspaper, 82 percent of participants agreed or partly agreed that the country benefits from the monarchy.Her critics have included members of her family. Prince Joachim, the younger of her two sons, bristled at her recent decision to shrink the monarchy by stripping his children of their royal titles. In 2017 her husband, Prince Henrik, announced that he did not wish to be buried beside Margrethe because he had never been given the titles king or king consort. (He died six months later.)Helle Kannik Haastrup, 58, an associate professor of film and media studies at the University of Copenhagen, who specializes in celebrity culture, said that some detractors have dismissed Margrethe as “a Sunday painter.”But to other people, Professor Haastrup added, the fact that Margrethe is a head of state with a “side hustle” has made her more relatable.‘Honestly, She Can’t Stop’Margrethe sketches and makes art at the chateau in France and at studios at Amalienborg Palace and Fredensborg Palace, the royal family’s residences in Denmark. She described the studios as places “where I can let things lie about,” adding, “I try to clear them up occasionally — but not too often!”“I work when I can find the time,” she said, “and I seem usually to be able to find the time.”“Sometimes, I think people are at their wit’s end because I’m trying to do these two things at the same time,” Margrethe said of her royal duties and her creative undertakings. “But it usually works, doesn’t it?”Annelise Wern, one of the queen’s four ladies-in-waiting, said, “Honestly, she can’t stop.”In the 1980s, when she was in her 40s, Margrethe took weekly painting lessons. She has mostly concentrated on painting landscapes with watercolors and acrylics — or “lazy girl’s oils,” as she called them.The queen said that when she started to make decoupages in the early 1990s, she didn’t know there was a name for the artworks. “I called it ‘cutting and sticking,’” she said.Dennis Stenild for The New York TimesThen, in the early 1990s, she started cutting up pages from The World of Interiors magazines and catalogs from auction houses like Christie’s and Sotheby’s and using the paper cutouts to decorate objects.“I didn’t even know there was a smart name for it,” she said, referring to decoupage. “I called it ‘cutting and sticking.’”Since then, her relatives have occasionally been “smothered in decoupage,” as she jokingly put it. And in needlepoint, which she had learned as a girl and picked up again later in life.Her colorful needlepoint designs, some of which were recently featured in an exhibition at the Museum Kolding in Kolding, Denmark, have been fashioned into purses for family members and have been used to upholster fireplace screens, footstools and cushions for the royal family’s yacht, Dannebrog, which shares its name with the Danish flag.Margrethe’s taste for bold colors can be also seen in her wardrobe. In a 1989 biography of the queen by the Danish journalist Anne Wolden-Raethinge, Margrethe said: “I always dream in color. At full blast. Technicolor. Everywhere. Every shade.”Her clothes often feature vivid prints and fur trims, and are almost always accessorized with jewelry. Among the items in her personal collection are gold pieces by the Danish jewelers Arje Griegst and Torben Hardenberg, whose designs are both baroque and gothic-punk, and costume jewelry like plastic clip-on earrings she found at a Danish drugstore.For her 80th birthday, in 2020, Margrethe had a gown made using velvet that she had requested be dyed a particular shade of sky blue. A floral raincoat she had made with a waxed fabric meant for tablecloths, which she picked out at the department store Peter Jones & Partners in London, has inspired other fashion designers’ collections.“I usually am quite deeply involved,” she said of having clothes made for her.Ulf Pilgaard, 82, a Danish stage and screen actor, has parodied the queen some dozen times over the decades. (He was knighted by Margrethe in 2007.) “I always wore earrings and a necklace and very nice colorful outfits,” Mr. Pilgaard said.For his last turn as Margrethe, in 2021, he wore a bright yellow dress with oversize pearl earrings and a chunky turquoise ring. At the end of the performance, she surprised him onstage.“People got on their feet and started roaring and clapping,” he said. “For a few seconds, I thought it was all for me.”Margrethe wore a pantsuit in the red color of the Danish flag (and the Netflix logo) to the film’s premiere in Copenhagen last month.Valdemar Ren/NetflixAt the premiere of “Ehrengard: The Art of Seduction” in Copenhagen last month, Margrethe wore a pantsuit in the red color of the Danish flag (and the Netflix logo), along with a hefty turquoise brooch and matching earrings by Mr. Hardenberg, who before starting his namesake jewelry line made costumes and props for theater and film productions.Nanna Fabricius, 38, a Danish singer and songwriter known as Oh Land, who has worked alongside Margrethe on recent productions at Tivoli, said, “I think a very big part of why the queen is so liked is because she does things.”“We aren’t totally surprised when she makes a Netflix movie,” she added.“She’s kind of what Barbie wants to be,” Ms. Fabricius said. “She does it all.” More

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      Chloe Domont on Her Dangerous Date Movie, ‘Fair Play’

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      The writer-director discusses her Netflix film about power dynamics within relationships, and how it might end up facilitating breakups.All is indubitably not fair in love, war, or “Fair Play,” the crackling feature debut from the writer-director Chloe Domont that became a sensation at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. (It sold there to Netflix for $20 million, and is now streaming on the platform).Phoebe Dynevor (“Bridgerton”) and Alden Ehrenreich (“Solo: A Star Wars Story”) star as Emily and Luke, ambitious young junior analysts at the same Manhattan hedge fund. Their seemingly blissful relationship is upended when she gets a big promotion and he doesn’t; a fraught psychosexual showdown ensues. A Southern California native, Domont, 36, sat down for an interview in New York to discuss male fragility, the state of erotic thrillers and making “a date movie from hell.” Below are edited excerpts from the conversation.You had mostly been directing for hire on premium-cable shows like “Billions.” What made you want to tell this story?It was many years of having this feeling as my career started to take off in TV that my success didn’t totally feel like a win, because of the kinds of men I had been dating — that me being big made them feel small. It just made me realize how much hold these ingrained power dynamics still have over us, and that was something that I wanted to put onscreen and explore.Was it always your intention to set it in the world of finance?No, for me it was about getting the beats of the story, how the relationship would implode once the power flipped. That was the heart of it. But I had some friends in that world, and it just felt like something that I could organically write from even though I had no experience in it.The highs and lows, the stakes of that kind of work environment, felt similar to the stakes of the film and TV industry: You slip up once, and you can be out. And the work-hard play-hard aspect, too, I feel like is in both. It was another male-dominated industry that is hard for women to come up in — and when they do, they’re treated differently, as we all know. Alden Ehrenreich, left, with Phoebe Dynevor in “Fair Play.”NetflixHow did you go about learning the jargon?I took a bunch of hedge fund guys out for drinks! [Laughs] I got them drunk and just started asking them very simple questions. It was really like learning a new language, like Spanish or coding or something. And honestly that was the easy part. Writing the emotional arcs of the characters, that was much more challenging.The film really hinges on your two leads’ performances, and their chemistry. How did you find them?When you get [casting] lists, you get the same 15 names that everyone gets. But the casting director mentioned Phoebe because of “Bridgerton,” so I watched the pilot and I just thought she had it. There was a vulnerability but also a fierceness, an untapped fury that I could unleash. There was also something exciting about cutting off the corset and putting her in a suit and turning her into a shark.Alden I had loved since [the 2016 Coen brothers comedy] “Hail Caesar,” But I knew that it was going to take a very confident man to go to Luke’s level of insecurity. Other male actors that I had met with, I could sense their hesitance. But Alden was ready to commit and get in the mud with me on it, and he did.Some critics have touted “Fair Play” as the return of the erotic thriller. Do you think that’s true?I didn’t set out to make an erotic thriller. I set out to make a thriller about power dynamics within a relationship, and that definitely has some crossovers. But I think our job as new filmmakers is to do something different with genre and manipulate it and twist it to serve our stories.I don’t think it’s enough these days just to make a good movie. You need to make something that pierces people in a way and holds up a mirror and gets them to ask questions that they’re not asking and starts conversation and debate. And this just felt like a subject matter that hasn’t really been explored onscreen, at least in not this way.The audience response at preview screenings has been so interesting — clapping, gasping, even yelling at the characters.People were reacting like it’s a horror movie, and that was very exciting to me. The intention was always to create this balloon of tension that you don’t know when or where it’s going to pop, but once it does, it just becomes this total dogfight.This feels like a dangerous date movie. You may end up facilitating some divorces.Couples that have come to early screenings, you see them start to fight on their way back to the car — like the man will say something, and then his girlfriend will slowly look at him like, “That’s what you thought?” So yeah, I can’t wait to break people up. I’m here for it. More

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      Terence Davies, 77, Dies; Filmmaker Mined Literature and His Own Life

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      With a poetic sensibility, “Distant Voices, Still Lives” echoed his Liverpool upbringing, and “The House of Mirth” put Edith Wharton’s novel on the screen.Terence Davies, a British screenwriter and director known for his poetic, intensely personal films like “Distant Voices, Still Lives” and literary adaptations like “The House of Mirth,” died on Saturday at his home in the village of Mistley, Essex, on the southwest coast of England. He was 77.His manager, John Taylor, confirmed the death but did not specify the cause, saying only that Mr. Davies had died after “a short illness.”An obituary from the British Film Institute said, “No one made movies like Davies, who precisely sculpted out of a subjective past, creating films that glided on waves of contemplation and observation.”The very specific “Distant Voices, Still Lives” (1988) starred Pete Postlethwaite as a violently abusive Liverpool father who terrorizes his wife and children. When the film was rereleased in 2018, The Guardian called it the director’s “early autobiographical masterpiece” and declared it “as gripping as any thriller.”When critics referred to Mr. Davies’s film dramas as musicals, they were only half joking. Songs are sung or heard in his movies just as they are in real life — at bars, at celebrations, at church and on the radio.In “Distant Voices,” the townspeople and their children sing “Beer Barrel Polka” in a bomb shelter to distract themselves from the horrors of World War II. Audiences hear “If You Knew Susie” at a wedding reception, “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” while Mr. Postlethwaite takes a curry comb to a horse and “Taking a Chance on Love” issuing from a radio in the background even during the most brutal scenes.The film won the International Critics’ Prize at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival.Mr. Davies directing Gillian Anderson on the set of “The House of Mirth,” which was released in 2000. “Brilliantly adapted,” The Village Voice said.Sony Pictures Classics/Everett Collection“The House of Mirth” (2000), based on Edith Wharton’s 1905 novel, starred Gillian Anderson as the doomed heroine, Lily Bart. Writing in The Village Voice, J. Hoberman called the film “brilliantly adapted” and Ms. Anderson’s performance “unexpectedly stunning.”Stephen Holden of The New York Times found the film “funereally gloomy,” but he had to admit, he wrote, that the story was “so gripping, it almost doesn’t matter how it’s couched.” And The San Francisco Chronicle praised it as “such a mesmerizing downer.” For all that, it grossed only $5 million worldwide (a little more than $9 million in today’s currency).The industry eventually forgave him for his commercial limitations and continued to back his films, including “The Deep Blue Sea” (2011), starring Rachel Weisz, which was based on Terence Rattigan’s 1952 play about a judge’s wife having an emotionally destructive affair.It was not a blockbuster either, but critics were generally admiring. A review in New York magazine noted Mr. Davies’s “ability to blend the particular with the iconic, to turn ordinary moments into something almost mythical.”Terence Davies was born on Nov. 10, 1945, in Liverpool, England, the youngest of 10 children in a working-class family.When Terence was 7, his father died of cancer. He grew up in his mother’s Roman Catholic faith but developed doubts and rejected religion completely when he was 22.“Then I realized it’s a lie,” he recalled in an interview with The New Yorker in 2017. “Men in frocks — nothing else.”He left school at 15 and worked as a shipping clerk and a bookkeeper. More than a decade later, he changed course and enrolled in a drama school in Coventry, more than 100 miles south of Liverpool, near Birmingham.A scene from “Distant Voices, Still Lives,” Mr. Davies’s 1988 portrait of a working-class English family. From left, Freda Dowie, Dean Williams, Angela Walsh and Lorraine Ashbourne.Mary Evans/BFI/Ronald Grant/Everett CollectionHe was still a student when he began work on his first short film, “Children” (1976), later edited into “The Terence Davies Trilogy” (1983).The next half-century or so brought Mr. Davies awards, film festival attention and a prestigious list of credits.He did “The Long Day Closes” (1992), a young gay man’s battle with the church, his family and his own guilt; “The Neon Bible” (1995), starring Gena Rowlands, based on John Kennedy Toole’s novel, set in the American South; the documentary “Of Time and the City” (2008), a history of and reflection on his hometown, Liverpool (a “lovely, astringent film,” A.O. Scott wrote in The Times); and “Sunset Song” (2015), starring Agyness Deyn, based on Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s novel about coming of age in early 1900s Scotland.Finally, Mr. Davies, who always said that he was drawn to the past, began to explore the lives of the poets themselves.He made “A Quiet Passion” (2016), in which Cynthia Nixon portrays Emily Dickinson, the reclusive 19th-century American poet. The Times’s critic found that Mr. Davies possessed “a poetic sensibility perfectly suited to his subject and a deep, idiosyncratic intuition about what might have made her tick.”His last film was “Benediction” (2021), a drama about the World War I poet Siegfried Sassoon. The New Yorker called it “an energizing and inspiring movie about the vanity of existence itself.“Mr. Davies, who was gay and never married, leaves no known survivors and had lived alone since 1980. He had tried the gay dating scene, he said, and dismissed it for, among other reasons, what he called its devotion to narcissism.Lamenting the age of complete license — in the arts as well as in daily life, he told L.A. Weekly in 2012: “The first thing that goes is subtlety. The first thing that goes is any kind of restraint or even wit sometimes. I don’t know how to deal with that in the modern world.” More

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      ‘The Mill’ Review: A Cog in the Machine

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      This spare dystopian thriller offers a serviceable but mostly unimaginative satire of a capitalist nightmare.If we as a nation are reaching an increasingly critical juncture over the fate of labor, “The Mill” is a film that appears startlingly well-suited for the moment. The dystopian thriller, directed by Sean King O’Grady, almost literally translates the idea of cog in a machine, following Joe (Lil Rel Howery), a middle manager within a major corporation called Mallard, as he mysteriously wakes up in an open-air prison and is forced to push a grist mill hundreds of times, 18 hours a day. He doesn’t know how he got there, only that, as a neighboring prisoner who talks to him through a vent explains, you better keep working or get “terminated.”It’s an intentionally spare work — most of the film is confined to this one small outdoor space — but its stripped-down nature exposes the film’s often graceless execution. While it aims for sharp-edged commentary, the movie at times reads, ironically, like an A.I. generator took a handful of anticapitalist talking points — the ruthlessness of the corporate apparatus, the unwieldy danger of Big Tech’s algorithms, the power of labor organizing — and spit out a serviceable but unimaginative dystopian satire.The film lacks any well-executed surprises to help it push past one-dimensional satire, and Howery is not strong enough of a dramatic actor to keep a single-setting, single-character film like this consistently engaging. As Mallard’s computer overlord increases Joe’s work demands and punishments, the film has the feel of an overextended, limp episode of “Black Mirror”: moderately entertaining, but lacking any teeth to its political bite.The MillNot rated. Watch on Hulu. More

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      Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ and Its Insight Into Grief, Family and Gender

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      For one critic, every encounter with this Shakespeare play deepens her understanding of its insights into grief, family and gender.A few weeks ago two friends and I were talking about our obsessions. One had been sleepless all week, playing the new Zelda video game with few breaks. The other revealed that she was deep into Taylor Swift. I said I had so many fandoms that I didn’t know if I could name a favorite.My Swiftie friend quickly set me straight. “We already know your main fandom,” she said. “Hamlet.”It’s true. If you look at my bookshelves, the art on my walls, even the art on my skin, you’ll find anime references and mythological figures, lines from Eliot and Chekhov and illustrations from Borges and Gorey stories. But none of these interests enjoys a prominence as great as the one afforded “Hamlet” in my home — and on my body, where the majority of my tattoos, by far, are inspired by the play.My friends know well that I’ve seen numerous productions of the work, recite Hamlet’s monologues to myself, even put Kenneth Branagh or Laurence Olivier’s “Hamlet” on in the background as I clean my apartment. For me, the text’s themes — about death, duality, gender, family — deepen each time I read, see or hear “Hamlet,” and as I grow older, new insights are revealed about the characters and the language.I first read “Hamlet” in high school, as an artsy poetry-writing teenager who found death a fascinating, albeit abstract, concept. I imagined the young prince — witty, privileged yet tortured, and forever trapped in his own head — as kin. He was less a lofty figure of English literature than the emo kid I crushed on, abandoning his math homework to read Dante’s “Inferno” as angsty pop punk played in the background.When I watched Michael Almereyda’s 2000 “Hamlet” film soon after, it did little to disabuse me of this notion. Taking place in New York City, with Ethan Hawke playing a hipster film student who’s heir to the “Denmark Corporation,” this “Hamlet” was contemporary, rife with irony. Watching Hamlet offer the great existential query of “to be or not to be” while strolling the “action movie” aisles of a Blockbuster store, I learned that even tragedy can contain a hearty dose of comedy.When I reread the play for a class on Shakespeare’s tragedies a few years later, I became fixated on one line in particular: “The rest is silence.” With these four words, Hamlet’s last ones in the play, the prince is acknowledging his final breath, but also perhaps breaking the fourth wall, announcing the end of the play like Prospero at the end of “The Tempest.” Or maybe Hamlet is offering us the line in consolation: After five acts of musing on death, he can assure us that death is simple, and it’s quiet. This line is now tattooed on my right arm.In Branagh’s 1996 “Hamlet” film, an unabridged adaptation that paired inspired direction with refined performances and respect for the text, Branagh wheezes out the words, his eyes glassy and staring into the distance. “Silence” lands after a pause, as though he’s listening to the deafening silence of all of humanity that’s preceded him.Clockwise from top left: Laurence Olivier as Hamlet in the 1948 film, Ethan Hawke in the 2000 film, Kenneth Branagh in his 1996 film, Ato Blankson-Wood (with Solea Pfeiffer as Ophelia) in the 2023 Shakespeare in the Park production, Ruth Negga in the 2020 production at St. Ann’s Workshop, and Billy Eugene Jones, left, and Marcel Spears in 2022 Public Theater production of “Fat Ham.”From Olivier’s fervent philosophizing Dane in the 1948 film to David Tennant’s lithe, boyish interpretation in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2008 production, there’s a reason that Prince Hamlet remains one of the most coveted roles an actor, especially a young man of a certain age and celebrity, can take on. “Hamlet” is, after all, a man’s play.In Hawke’s “Hamlet” and Mel Gibson’s visceral, sensually charged 1990 “Hamlet” I first realized how often directors use the female characters as stand-ins for fatalistic, taboo love. (Which is why I also savor gender-crossed Hamlets, whether in the form of the theater pioneer Sarah Bernhardt in 1899 or Ruth Negga in 2020.) Queen Gertrude is either stupid, selfish or promiscuous, blinded by her untamed lust. Many productions opt for a physical staging of Act III, Scene 4, when Hamlet accosts his mother in her bedchamber. Hawke’s Hamlet grabs his mother in a black robe, then presses her against a set of closet doors. Gibson’s deranged Hamlet also fights and clutches at Gertrude, as did Andrew Scott’s in the 2017 London production by Robert Icke. Thomas Ostermeier’s wild “Hamlet” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last year emphasized Gertrude’s sexuality to an extreme, having her slink and shimmy as though overwhelmed with sexual energy. The text implies that a woman too free with her affections digs her own grave.That includes, of course, Hamlet’s eternally damned love interest, Ophelia (memorialized on my right forearm with a skull and pansy). I used to dismiss her as a frail female stereotype, and have craved a production or adaptation that could give this character agency — any kind of agency — within the space of her grieving, her madness and her death.Kenny Leon’s otherwise underwhelming “Hamlet” at the Delacorte this summer did just that. Solea Pfeiffer played an Ophelia who matched Hamlet in wit and sass, who spoke with a knowingness and rage that lifted the character from her 17th-century home into the present.This duality in Ophelia — between sincerity and performance, raving madness and clear, articulated rage — is welcome. It’s a duality that many directors literalize in their productions overall, some using mirrors as nods to Hamlet’s constant reflections at the expense of action, others turning to hint at the divide between presentation and truth.But as much as “Hamlet” can serve as a character study, for me the story extends far beyond a production’s conceptualization of a lost prince with a splintered ego. This is a story that begins and ends with grief.I have a tattoo for Hamlet and his dear, departed father — a jeweled sword piercing a cracked skull in a crown. Having lost my dad almost a decade ago, I’m familiar with the feeling of being haunted by a father who may not be a literal king but perhaps just a patriarch taking the same cheap shots from the afterlife, like Pap in James Ijames’s “Fat Ham.” In the play, a Black, queer take on “Hamlet” in conversation with Shakespeare’s original text, Hamlet is not just tied to his father through a sense of filial obligation but also through guilt, regret, shame. In Pap I saw my own father’s flaws — the spite, the prejudice, the toxic masculinity. It made me wonder how much of Hamlet’s grief is for his father, and how much for the stability his father symbolized.Lately I’ve been listening with more regularity to Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” monologue, that great conference with death that feels as germane to the English language — our rhetoric, our poetry, our elocution, our linguistic imagination — as soil to the Earth. In the span of about a week this summer, I lost a grandmother, and a dear friend shared that his cancer had returned. Having buried both her parents in the past two years, my mother has been talking more about funeral arrangements and where our family would like to spend our post-mortem days. I, on the other hand, take less stock in the expensive ceremonies and planning around death. I don’t plan to make a show of my finale; like Hamlet, I wonder what it will even mean — in that everlasting sleep, who knows what dreams will come?I didn’t fall in love with “Hamlet” because of its action and intrigue; I love the play because it lets me reconnect with the spaces where death has brushed my life. “Hamlet” helps me sit with my own existential fears, all packaged in words of wit and elegance. Because I’m convinced now that if you let Shakespeare in, his voice becomes the one bellowing from the backstage of your life. More

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      When Did the Plot Become the Only Way to Judge a Movie?

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      At the New York Film Festival, auteurs conjure up moods and sensory experiences that show why the story isn’t always the thing.It’s time to take a stand against the tyranny of “story.” In Hollywood these days, “story” and “storyteller” are privileged terms, seemingly interchangeable with “films” and anyone who makes them — a distressing development considering the medium’s wild range of possibilities.The “story” framing used to feel fresh, anchored, however tenuously, to the effort to bridge racial and gender diversity gaps in the industry. It’s not just one kind of story, this line of thinking goes, but all colors and stripes of good stories that matter.As I sunk into my first week of screenings at this year’s New York Film Festival, which runs through Oct. 15, this sentiment didn’t feel wrong, per se. Just insufficient. To think of, say, a full-body sensory experience like Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest” as merely a story about a Nazi family; or Raven Jackson’s “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt,” which consists of lush memory fragments, as merely a story about a Black woman’s coming-of-age, would feel dismissive of the filmmakers’ full intentions.I can’t imagine a single director in this year’s beautifully eclectic lineup who would call themselves a “storyteller” with a straight face — outside of a pitch meeting with investors. One film even satirizes the connection between moviemaking and corporate brand marketing. I’m looking at you, Radu Jude (“Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World”).That’s because movies aren’t just stories. Narrative can play a part, but the medium also encompasses feelings, moods, distortions of time and logic. The movies are exercises in freedom.From right, Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel in “The Taste of Things,” by Tran Anh Hung.IFC Films“The Taste of Things,” by the French Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung, is, at face value, a conventional Belle Époque-era romance about a gastronome (Benoît Magimel) and a cook (Juliette Binoche) who together create sumptuous multicourse meals. Over half of the film is entrenched in the raw physicality of their work, the textures of the foods they wash, boil, chop and sear into magnificent forms. The film doesn’t rely much on dialogue because the couple’s passion is transmitted through a decadent display of food porn. In one scene, a voluptuous poached pear gives way to a shot of Binoche’s disrobed derrière. It conveys an ineffable quality: that of loving and being loved through the act of cooking.When I think about what makes a good story — a tale that traces out a plot and a path from A to B — the answers don’t always square with the parts of movies I love best. I’m not super hot on Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein biopic, “Maestro,” but the scenes in which Lenny conducts are magnificent and powerful, like being thrown into the middle of a sonic storm. The rest — the tortured-genius bad-wife-guy intrigue — sometimes felt like homework. I often found myself thinking, “Let’s get back to the music.”That’s because the best things in life are gratuitous, like sex — kinky sex, weird sex, sex whose finer details you’d think twice before sharing. Joanna Arnow’s deadpan dramedy “The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed” relishes all of the above. The 30-something Brooklynite played by Arnow herself (in a perpetual Garfield the cat scowl) goes on dull dates and powers through a numbing office job. The focus is her sex life, specifically the submissive role she plays in a B.D.S.M. relationship with a divorced lawyer (Scott Cohen). These scenes are cringey and absurd, but there’s something compelling about choosing the conditions of your own humiliation — and having some fun with it.The images in Steve McQueen’s “Occupied City” are of Amsterdam during the pandemic lockdown, but the narration is about the Nazi occupation in the 1940s.A24Steve McQueen’s postmodern ghost story, “Occupied City,” which clocks in at a whopping four and a half hours, forces us to rejigger and expand our understanding of how movies communicate meaning. The film takes an almost pointillist approach to the telling of history. Based on a book by McQueen’s wife, Bianca Stigter (a Dutch filmmaker and historian whose research into the Holocaust also yielded one of last year’s most astounding nonfiction movies, “Three Minutes: A Lengthening”), “Occupied City” consists of hundreds of mostly static shots of Amsterdam during the pandemic lockdown. With each shot, an impassive narrator (Melanie Hyams) details the corresponding crimes that took place in each location in the early 1940s, when the Nazis invaded the country.The conceit is willfully repetitive, and its simple, matter-of-fact approach departs from the manipulations of empathy-generating narratives that tend to dominate the subject matter. Often, my mind wandered throughout the film’s countless enumerations, which triggered pangs of guilt and also putting things in perspective: It’s distressingly easy to forget, to lose focus, in the face of horrors whose size and scope are impossible for the human brain to fully process.Every year I try to take in a few films from the Revivals section, which features restorations of vintage titles, many of them previously inaccessible. “Un rêve plus long que la nuit” (A Dream Longer Than the Night), by the French American artist Niki de Saint Phalle, stood out. Years ago I had visited a de Saint Phalle exhibition where one of the most striking pieces was a door-sized vaginal opening nestled between a behemoth pair of legs. Silly, beautiful, and terrifying all at once, the film is a pagan fever-dream that envisions a feminist revolution through the eyes of a young girl, and its best qualities are in the details: the sheer diversity of papîer-mache penises is astounding.Also playing in Revivals is a program of shorts by Man Ray, the artist best known for his photographs, but whose films — dizzying experiments with light and movement — turn familiar objects into alien entities. For Man Ray, conventional photography was about capturing reality, meaning his work would manifest images only possible in fantasies and dreams. Now, in the vertiginous age of the internet, with increasingly sophisticated film technologies at artists’ disposal, it’s worth considering films with similar ambitions: those that make legible the unreal. In “The Human Surge 3,” the director Eduardo Williams uses a 360-degree camera to capture the roamings of a multicultural group of friends, each from a different part of the world: Peru, Taiwan and Sri Lanka. Using uncanny, stretched-out images that resemble those on Google Earth, Williams’s remarkable vision of digital interconnectivity collapses borders and language barriers in wondrous, psychedelic fashion.“Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell,” from Thien An Pham, tracks a man’s journey through rural Vietnam.Kino LorberFor more brain-breaking adventures, I recommend scouring the shorts and midlength programs. Preceding Deborah Stratman’s “Last Things,” an eerie, science-fictional take on evolution (from the perspective of rocks!), is a gem: “Laberint Sequences,” by the visual artist Blake Williams, the only 3-D film in the lineup. This 20-minute short is thrillingly destabilizing, and its considered yet adventurous employment of 3-D makes Hollywood’s innovations look juvenile by comparison. Also of note for their beautifully baffling subversions of the cinematic status quo: Ross Meckfessel’s modernist horror jaunt “Spark From a Falling Star,” Onyeka Igwe and Huw Lemmey’s “Ungentle,” in which a disembodied narrator (Ben Whishaw) ruefully remembers his past — part gay awakening, part spy thriller — over banal shots of contemporary England.A descendant of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s ethereal excursions, Thien An Pham’s transportive feature “Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell” tracks a man’s journey through rural Vietnam after the sudden death of his sister. You could say the film is about faith, the anxiety of fatherhood, or the existential unease of mortality itself, but plot is beside the point.What matters is the riveting sensuality, the way the images ensorcel you, vesting quivering landscapes with an almost divine power. It’s the kind of film that makes our culture’s devotion to movies click: It’s not about watching stories, but inhabiting worlds they have not told us of.For more information on the New York Film Festival, go to filmlinc.org. More

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      ‘Last Stop Larrimah’ Review: The Unusual Suspects

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      This true-crime documentary investigates a murder case in a tiny Australian town, showcasing its brash inhabitants.You might think that a murder case in a one-horse town of 11 people would be a little easier to solve. You would be wrong when it comes to the remote Australian outpost of “Last Stop Larrimah,” a true-crime documentary which gives free rein to the gossip and bickering of its mutually suspicious inhabitants.Fran the meat-pie queen, her pub-owning rival, Barry, and his dog-loving bartender, Richard, are among those holding forth on the mystery of Paddy Moriarty — a “larrikin” (in Aussie parlance) who sounds less and less endearing. Paddy and his dog disappeared one night shortly before Christmas in 2017. The sometimes entertaining residents of Larrimah spin theories about each other for the film’s director, Thomas Tancred, who adds their past incautious interviews for television.Tancred finds initial charm in the Australian embrace of big personalities like these sunbaked veterans of the Northern Territory. But the movie resembles reality shows that string together insinuations and trash-talk without knowing when to quit. The convoluted structure feels like overworked dough, with some dubious song cues and oddly dismissive treatment of police investigators. (As a murder mystery, the movie also games the system by postponing crucial information.)The bloat saps the fun and intrigue from the film, which can’t navigate between playing up eccentricity and committing to the notion that hell can be other people (even in a one-time refuge). The infighting seems quaint in the first hour, but by the second, you just want to get out of town.Last Stop LarrimahNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. Watch on HBO platforms. More