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      ‘How to Rob a Bank’ and the Limits of a True-Crime Documentary

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      The story of a Seattle-area bandit is rife with big questions, but the movie doesn’t explore them. Not every podcast needs to be a film.There is a platitude, beloved of the documentary community, that truth is stranger than fiction. It’s often correct. But lately I’ve been worried that the glut of documentary content required to fill the yawning maw of streamers is putting this axiom to the test more frequently. Not all stories are worthy of the documentary treatment.Such, unfortunately, is the issue with “How to Rob a Bank” (on Netflix), yet another true-crime documentary. Its directors, Seth Porges and Stephen Robert Morse, have turned out great work in the past — Porges as co-director of the fascinating “Class Action Park”; Morse as producer of the influential “Amanda Knox.” This film feels more perfunctory, a strong example of the kind of documentary that could have just been a podcast. (Of course, it has been.)The film tells the true story of Scott Scurlock, a free-spirited fellow known to Washington State law enforcement agents as the Hollywood Bandit. (Sometimes they dropped the bandit part.) In the 1990s, he pulled off a whopping 19 confirmed bank robberies in the Seattle area, stealing more than $2.3 million, with the aid of a few friends and some elaborate disguises.“How to Rob a Bank” is filled with re-enactments of the robberies and interviews with friends and associates, who explain that Scurlock was a gentle soul who lived in an enormous treehouse that was a hub for his friends. He also cooked meth for a while, was an adrenaline junkie and journaled a lot about trying to find his purpose in life. Police officers and investigators are less sanguine about Scurlock, noting at one point that bank robbery is not a victimless crime, even if nobody gets hurt physically. It can be traumatic to anyone who was inside the bank, and to a teller facing a gun. Scurlock tried to paint his crimes as altruistic, and did give away some of his money to friends in need. But people were still hurt — including, ultimately, Scurlock himself.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The True Story Behind Glen Powell’s Character in ‘Hit Man’

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      The romantic shenanigans are the stuff of Hollywood, but the film’s fake contract killer is based on a real man profiled in a Texas Monthly article.“Hit men don’t really exist!” an exasperated undercover pretend assassin says in Netflix’s new romantic action comedy, “Hit Man.” But the very existence of the film, which is loosely based on a seemingly strait-laced community college instructor who moonlighted as a fake assassin for the Houston police, proves just how much they fascinate us.Though plenty of officers have worn wires and impersonated hit men in murder-for-hire investigations, the film’s inspiration, Gary Johnson, was the “Laurence Olivier of the field,” according to a 2001 Texas Monthly article by Skip Hollandsworth. Over a decades-long career, relying on a bevy of accents and a penchant for being a sympathetic listener, Johnson, who died in 2022, managed to ensnare more than 60 people who tried to hire him.That’s just the kind of character that’s catnip for a leading-man-in-the-making like Glen Powell, who plays a version of Johnson in “Hit Man.” Of course, the actor and his director Richard Linklater, who wrote the script together, added a few Hollywood touches, including a rom-com plot involving the fictional Johnson and a woman (Adria Arjona) hoping to hire him to kill her husband.But some of the movie’s most outlandish plot elements — like the teenager who tries to pay Johnson partly in Atari computer games — did really happen. Here’s the story behind the movie and a look at hit men in real life.Who was Gary Johnson, whose life inspired the film?To his neighbors, he was a mild-mannered, middle-aged man who lived alone with two cats and worked in human resources at a company downtown, as he told them. (The baggy jorts and love of birding are Hollywood inventions.)In reality, Johnson, who spent a year as a military policeman in Vietnam, was an investigator for the district attorney’s office in Houston. On the side, he taught classes in human sexuality and general psychology two nights a week at a local community college. (The film switches it up, making Powell’s character a professor working for the police on the side and relocating the action to New Orleans.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Banel & Adama’ Review: A Parable of Two Young Lovers

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      The filmmaker Ramata-Toulaye Sy illuminates this elliptical story, set in unnamed Senegalese village, with daubs of strong colors and strikingly vivid imagery.A love story suffused in beauty and mystery, “Banel & Adama” draws you in right from the start. Set in an unnamed Senegal village during an unspecified time, it opens on two young lovers quietly blissing out on each other. The two are first seen in striking close-up — early on, the movie cuts from an image of her lush, pretty mouth to a shot of one of his steadily adoring eyes — like puzzle pieces that the movie bids you to fit together. Given the dreamy vibe as well as the bright, vivid palette, it is an invitation that you readily take up.Banel and Adama — played by the appealing Khady Mane and Mamadou Diallo, both nonprofessionals — live in a small house in a small village that looks like it could exist today but also decades earlier. (The villagers use kerosene lamps, and I don’t recall anyone using a cellphone.) There, Adama tends a modest herd of cattle as Banel keeps him company, their smiles, laughs and movements pleasantly in sync. Like all besotted lovers, they seem to exist in a private realm, one that the French-Senegalese filmmaker Ramata-Toulaye Sy illuminates with cozy framing, daubs of strong colors and a bold, graphic sensibility.The story emerges in morsels of naturalistic dialogue and brief, on-point scenes that incrementally sketch in the characters’ intimacy, shared history, familial relationships and distinct temperaments. Two years earlier, Adama, now 19, married Banel, his brother’s widow and second wife. Tradition, as his mother and others insist, decrees that he now assume the role of the village chief, a position he refuses. He’s content simply to be with Banel, and together they plan to move out of the village once they dig a nearby house out of a mountain of sand. Each day, they dig and they dig, a task that soon groans with portentous symbolism.Sy has a terrific eye and, working with her cinematographer Amine Berrada, she quickly hooks you with the beauty of Banel and Adama’s world, pulling you into their everyday life with hints of drama and myth, though mostly with the graceful compositions and the region’s natural riches, its green fields and blue skies. The camera moves just so, never racing or crawling, which allows you to luxuriate in the details that fill in the picture and deepen the realism. Sy’s attention to physical surfaces — shimmering water, nubby cloth, smooth bark — is particularly adept and helps create a sense of texture so strong you can almost feel it in your hands.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Erich Anderson, Actor in ‘Friday the 13th’ and ‘Felicity,’ Dies at 67

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      Mr. Anderson had a breakout role in “Friday the 13th” and went on to appear in more than 300 TV episodes, including a recurring role as the father on “Felicity.”Erich Anderson, an actor known for his breakout role in the “Friday the 13th” franchise and recurring appearances on television series like “Felicity” and “Thirtysomething,” died on Saturday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 67.His brother-in-law, Michael O’Malley, said the cause was esophageal cancer.In the late 1980s and ’90s, Mr. Anderson played a recurring love interest on “Thirtysomething,” a drama about a group of friends navigating life and love in Philadelphia;the ex-husband of a detective on “NYPD Blue”; and the father to Keri Russell’s lead role on “Felicity,” a series about an introverted high school student who follows her dream guy to college in New York City.By 2013, he had appeared in roughly 300 episodes of television shows including “Boston Public,” “The X-Files,” “CSI,” “ER,” “7th Heaven,” “Star Trek,” “Monk,” “Tour of Duty” and “Murder, She Wrote.”But it was his first feature film role, in “Friday the 13th: the Final Chapter” — the fourth film in the franchise, which follows the serial killer Jason Voorhees — that stuck with fans throughout his career.When the film was released in 1984, Mr. Anderson thought, “I had a good time and really enjoyed the process and learning about it,” he told a “Friday the 13th” podcast in 2013. “This is out in the world now.”But over the years, especially as he began attending fan conventions, Mr. Anderson came to realize that his role as Rob Dier, who seeks to avenge his sister’s death only to be killed by Jason himself, was “by far the most enduring thing” he had done.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Longing’ Review: A Test of Paternity

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      Richard Gere plays it way too cool as a man learning about the son he didn’t know he had.Plausibility complaints always feel cheap, but “Longing” strains credulity well past the breaking point. This is the Israeli writer-director Savi Gabizon’s second try at this premise — he is remaking his 2017 feature of the same title — but it is difficult to imagine that it ever made sense.The movie opens with Daniel (Richard Gere) meeting a former partner, Rachel (Suzanne Clément). He has little time for her, until she drops a bombshell. When they separated, she was pregnant, and their son, Allen, unknown to Daniel, has just died at 19 in a car accident.Daniel travels to Hamilton, Ontario, where they lived, and things get even stranger. Daniel arrives for a graveside memorial service, but no one is present except a priest. Rachel’s husband, Robert (Kevin Hanchard), later informs Daniel that Rachel has been in the hospital for two days. But did Allen have no other friends or relatives?“Longing” soon turns into a series of mostly one-on-one interactions in which people tell Daniel about Allen. Allen’s friend (Wayne Burns) asks Daniel for money that he and Allen owed a drug dealer. Daniel finds that Allen had an obsession with a teacher (Diane Kruger) that escalated to the point of expulsion and possible police involvement. Most disturbingly, Daniel learns that Allen had been staying long-term not with Rachel and Robert but with another family and may have been preying on the family’s underage daughter (Jessica Clement). Unfathomably, Daniel does not immediately question Rachel and Robert about this news.Is the city of Hamilton playing an elaborate prank on the self-absorbed Daniel? No, everything is on the level. Gere coasts on movie star charisma, a quality that apparently enables Daniel to remain cool when any rational person would be continually enraged.LongingRated R. Dark themes concerning teenagers. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘I Used to Be Funny’ Review: Bruising Punchlines

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      The film, which stars Rachel Sennott as a stand-up comedian, looks at the aftereffects of trauma on a character who wields quips as both weapon and shield.The perceptive dramedy “I Used to Be Funny” features a mic-drop performance by Rachel Sennott as a rising stand-up comedian derailed by a vague, internet-viral crime. What happened to Sam (Sennott) is no laughing matter. But she and her fellow comics crack oblique jokes about it, anyway. Making her first feature, the writer-director Ally Pankiw lets most zingers land. Comedy is just how these strivers communicate — it’s how they break awkwardness, bond, fight, forgive and heal.Pankiw warms up the audience with Sam’s roommates Paige and Philip (Sabrina Jalees and Caleb Hearon, both terrific) poking fun at a 14-year-old runaway, Brooke (Olga Petsa), last seen smashing in their front door. “She’s probably loving the missing person posters,” Paige drolls. “They used a selfie, she looks great.”Before she was a recluse, Sam was the lost girl’s nanny. The film is peppered with happier flashbacks to when Sam and Brooke were best pals, a team-up that annoyed Brooke’s humorless dad (Jason Jones). We track time through the perkiness of Sam’s posture and ponytail. Depression films can be a drag. Fortunately, Sennott is entertaining even as a mope.The script takes an annoyingly long time revealing what went wrong (and then rushes the resolution). Pankiw is more focused on the aftereffects of trauma on a character who wields quips as both weapon and shield. A former stand-up herself, Sennott holds a stage with command. Off-duty, unshowered and unable to move on, Sam is self-aware enough to know that she is exhausting her friends — and the film keeps tabs on how often she and her gang must claim they’re just kidding around.I Used to Be FunnyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Francis Ford Coppola: ‘You Can’t Be an Artist and Be Safe’

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      The filmmaker talks about the inspirations for the characters in “Megalopolis” and “The Godfather,” and responds to recent allegations.The first time that Francis Ford Coppola had a movie in competition at the Cannes Film Festival was in 1967. He was 28 and the movie was “You’re a Big Boy Now,” a neo-screwball studio comedy about a young guy trying to cut loose from his parents. Coppola made it while he was in film school at the University of California, Los Angeles, and it became his master’s thesis project. A month after the festival, he began directing his first big-budget studio film, “Finian’s Rainbow.” It flopped. He then poured some of his savings into a low-budget studio movie, “The Rain People.” It flopped. The next film he directed was “The Godfather.”Coppola, now 85, was back again at Cannes last month with the epic fantasy “Megalopolis,” a big-screen dream that he has nurtured for more than 40 years. It’s his first movie since “Twixt” (2011), a little-seen horror tale about a genre novelist who says he wants to make something personal. It’s a plaintive refrain that Coppola has voiced repeatedly throughout his career. However celebrated he remains for the studio films that he has directed, Coppola is and has always been an unequivocally personal filmmaker, one whose love for the art of film has recurrently put him at odds with the industry and its media mouthpieces.Given Coppola’s history of independence and specifically his record of great financial risks (as with “Apocalypse Now”) and sometimes staggering losses (“One From the Heart”), it was no surprise that much of the initial chatter about “Megalopolis” wasn’t about the movie per se or the sprawling ensemble headed by Adam Driver. Rather, much of the pre-festival talk was about how Coppola had helped bankroll it with “$120 million of his own money,” a phrase that was reflexively repeated in news reports. Even at Cannes, where the word “art” is used without embarrassment, money keeps an iron grip on both minds and movies.By the time the festival opened on May 14, though, the talk about “Megalopolis” had changed course dramatically. That day, The Guardian published a long article on it. Much of the story was based on anonymous sources and was dedicated to gripes from crew members about Coppola’s methods — “‘Has this guy ever made a movie before?’” the headline read — echoing complaints that have dogged the filmmaker throughout his career. More alarming were the allegations that Coppola had tried to kiss female extras during production. In response, one of the executive producers, Darren Demetre, said he “was never aware of any complaints of harassment or ill behavior during the course of the project.”Adam Driver and Nathalie Emmanuel in “Megalopolis.”American Zoetrope/Mihai Malaimare Jr.A FEW DAYS AFTER “Megalopolis” had its premiere at Cannes, I walked under a canopy of clouds to a ship docked near the festival’s headquarters, to speak with Coppola. The yacht belonged to an Italian-Tunisian distributor and Coppola was, as he put it, “mooching” as assorted relatives, friends, colleagues and support staff buzzed around him. He looked tired, and while that’s normal for many attendees at the world’s largest film festival, it was hard not to think that grief had taken its toll, too. On April 12, Eleanor Coppola, his wife of more than six decades, died. On May 18, his longtime collaborator Fred Roos — a producer on numerous Coppola family films, “Megalopolis” included — also died.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Tuesday’ Review: Expiration Point

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      Julia Louis-Dreyfus journeys from denial to acceptance in this imaginative fantasy-drama about grief and motherhood.Before a word of dialogue is spoken in “Tuesday,” a series of magical images introduce Death in the form of a greasy-looking bird as it visits the dying. The beast’s head clamors with their suffering, their terror and bargaining, the sick and the simply worn out. Young and old, human and animal, they call to him before breathing their last beneath the shadow of his gently raised wing.In this fantastical first feature from the Croatian filmmaker Daina O. Pusic, striking special effects and a richly textured sound design lend a cosmic chill to a simple story of maternal grief. The mother in question is Zora (a very fine Julia Louis-Dreyfus), so deep in denial about her daughter Tuesday’s terminal illness that she can’t handle being alone with her. Creeping out of the house each morning, pretending to go to work, Zora wanders from coffee shop to park bench, ignoring Tuesday’s calls.Yet Tuesday (beautifully played by Lola Petticrew) understands. Unable to walk and struggling to breathe, she’s a bright teenager who seems ready when Death appears. Out of sight of her pragmatic nurse (Leah Harvey), Tuesday bonds with Death, requesting time to prepare her mother, and these scenes have a lightness that prevents the film from becoming an extended moan of unrelieved sadness. Like many of us, Death, it turns out, enjoys a joke and the music of Ice Cube. It seems fitting that his taste is vintage.As voiced, quite wonderfully, by Arinzé Kene, the bird — not the expected raven, but a macaw — is a digital star that the human actors must constantly negotiate with for visual and narrative space. Swelling and shrinking in size, he switches in an instant from cute to monstrous, amusing to terrifying, the voices in his head briefly silenced as he confesses that he hasn’t spoken in 200 years.“I am filthy,” he growls, coughing up words like hairballs and flapping his blackened wings, as if the darkness of his mission has stained his once-bright feathers with the dirt of the grave. Yet while Tuesday seems perfectly at ease with her grim visitor, Zora responds with an increasingly hysterical campaign to — literally — swallow her greatest fear.Without much to distract from the three central characters, “Tuesday” can feel overlong and a little claustrophobic. Yet this compassionate fairy tale works because the actors are so in sync and the imagery — as in one shot of the bird curled like an apostrophe in a dead woman’s tear duct — is often magical. Alexis Zabé’s cinematography is both intimate and expansive, reaching beyond the characters’ emotional struggles to show the apocalyptic consequences if Death should be vanquished. The sum is a highly imaginative picture that, while considering one family’s pain, also asks us to ponder the possibility that a life without end means nothing less than a world without a future.TuesdayRated R for pejorative language. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. In theaters. More