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      ‘No One Will Save You,’ ‘Hypnotic’ and More Streaming Science Fiction

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      In this month’s selections, extraterrestrials roam and the Earth wanders.‘No One Will Save You’Stream it on Hulu.I watch a lot of films for this column, and it’s the rare one that worms its way into my head the way Brian Duffield’s alien-invasion thriller did. The writer-director pulls off a double challenge: He tells the story almost wordlessly (making you realize just how many movies lazily rely on people speaking to themselves out loud) and creates a dreamlike world in which memories and monsters jostle for power.The camera almost never leaves Brynn (a fantastic Kaitlyn Dever, of “Dopesick” and “Booksmart”), a young woman living alone in a nice big house. She does not appear to have any family or friends, and aside from the fact that she drives a Subaru, you might think the movie is set in the 1950s or ’60s: Brynn uses a clunky landline, for example, and electronics don’t really figure. Even the extraterrestrials look as if they’d been imagined during that time — they have a prominent forehead and opaque eyes, and arrive in saucer-shaped ships. It is clearly a deliberate choice from Duffield but unfortunately I can’t offer my theory about its meaning without spoiling a key reveal. Suffice it to say that appearances can’t be trusted, starting with the fact that the reserved Brynn turns out to be a tough survivor when she is under attack, and concluding with a resolution simultaneously satisfying and unsettling.‘The Wandering Earth II’Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.In Frant Gwo’s “The Wandering Earth” (2019), our planet, propelled by thousands of thrusters, is roaming the universe to escape the sun’s impending explosion and the destruction of the solar system. Oh, and the now-frozen Earth, its remaining population hunkered underground, is linked to a space station guided by a supercomputer named MOSS. How we got to that nutty situation is the subject of this prequel, also directed by Gwo. And there’s a lot to cover because as you might have guessed, turning Earth into a gigantic spaceship is quite the endeavor. (These being productions from China, that country is the force driving the so-called Moving Mountain Project; the movie is no more or less jingoistic than an American equivalent would be.)“The Wandering Earth II” does not skimp on spectacle and awe-inspiring shots, and Andy Lau (“Infernal Affairs”) makes for a welcome addition as a scientist. Most interesting is the rivalry between competing initiatives to save Earth: physically move the planet out of harm’s way or bank on a digital solution by transferring human consciousness onto digital files. We know which one eventually wins out (or does it?) because this is a prequel, yet the process remains absorbing. And MOSS figures in, too.‘t=E/x²’Rent or buy it on Apple TV+.Narratives involving messed-up timelines are so frequent in contemporary science-fiction movies that you have to wonder what this popularity says about us: that we live in constant fear of missing out and need as many options and parallel universes as possible? That we are obsessed with the idea of regret and crave second, third or 10th chances? This month’s entry in the thriving subgenre is Andreas Z Simon’s low-budget movie, from Germany, that is both cryptic and playful.When we meet Merlin (Mario Ganss, an appealing everyman), he is at a computer, editing a scene in which a talking head expounds on the questionable linearity of time and space — elements that, in a way, Merlin can rearrange at a click of his mouse. Out of nowhere, he receives a vinyl LP (and the antique turntable to play it) containing a message that identifies Merlin as a time traveler and gives him instructions: “Kill the clown and rescue the mermaid.” The film has the type of puzzle-box construction that maddens some viewers and energizes others, but there is something compelling about its indie aesthetic — Merlin’s romantic life, in particular, feels lifted from a mumblecore movie.‘Hypnotic’Stream it on Peacock.Watching A-list stars in B movies tends to be great fun. Perhaps because they are free from the pressure of having to earn awards or deliver box-office results — or loosened up by preposterous scripts — they often give unbound, enjoyable performances. Think Adam Driver in “65,” for example, or Ben Affleck in this sci-fi thriller from the excellent craftsman Robert Rodriguez.Affleck plays Danny, a Texas cop with a heavy past and a present complicated by the murderous machinations of one Dellrayne (William Fichtner), a so-called hypnotic who can mesmerize anybody to do his bidding and creates hallucinatory mindscapes of the kind familiar to viewers of “Inception.” Why Danny appears impervious to Dellrayne’s paranormal power is key to a complicated story involving Alice Braga as a mysteriously helpful psychic and a secret government program called the Division that’s working on a nefarious Project Domino.The dense plot is a lot to absorb and the execution is often goofy — members of the Division wear red blazers, like Avis employees with even greater powers than dispensing free upgrades. But Rodriguez keeps the action moving, and the denouement might just make you rewatch the movie from a different perspective.‘The Deal’Stream it on the Roku Channel.Rent or buy it from most major platforms.This film gains if you look at it as being not as much about a dystopian future as about a dystopian past, more specifically one set behind the Iron Curtain of the mid-20th century. (Uncoincidentally, perhaps, the director, Orsi Nagypal, is Hungarian). Callbacks to communist societies abound, starting with the locale: a drab city of brutalist gray high-rises, protected from the outside world — which has been wrecked by a global pandemic — by a forbidding wall. There, Tala (Sumalee Montano) paints propaganda posters in a classic Socialist-Realist style for the authoritarian government. She has taken “the deal,” which gives privileged access to resources in exchange for the recipient being terminated after 20 years.This is a good way to control population when necessities are scarce and there seems to be waiting lists for everything, including lifesaving operations. That last issue becomes a critical problem when Tala’s daughter, Analyn (Emma Fischer), needs to get a kidney transplant. The two women embark on a journey in which they discover, among other things, black-market doctors and how the one percent lives. But the plot is almost besides the point: “The Deal” works best as an accretion of quotidian details about life under an oppressive regime. More

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      ‘Saw X’ Review: Blood, Guts and a Little Heart

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      The 10th movie in this horror series gives the fans what they want.For better or worse, I’m fascinated by the “Saw” movies — mesmerized by their inventively staged kills, in which victims are locked into medieval-looking contraptions and given a choice: a) hack off a limb or scramble an eyeball or b) face certain death by bear-trap helmet or ribcage-ripping metal claw; infinitely amused by the soap opera-esque narrative used to string together, and sort of justify, these sadistic games. I’ve willingly stuck it out through every movie in the horror series, so there’s no use beating around the bush: “Saw” is my kind of trash.For all its inanities, “Saw X,” the 10th “Saw” movie, should hit the bar for the like-minded: the traps are disgusting; the plot, so self-serious its absurd (and knowingly so). And unlike the sundry sequels before it (by the third “Saw,” any pretense of ingenuity had been hacked off), this one manages to make you feel something beyond gross-out adrenaline — assuming you have affection for the franchise’s mainstays.The first “Saw” movie, released in 2004 and written by the fresh-faced creative team of James Wan (who also directed) and Leigh Whannell, was an edgy novelty, unleashing one of the most sordid trends in Hollywood horror, so-called torture porn — an unintentional nod to the war on terror’s abused military detainees.John Kramer, a.k.a. Jigsaw (Tobin Bell), is an avenging angel with brain cancer. He appears — like Jason or Freddie Krueger — in every edition of “Saw.” You could say he’s the franchise’s beating heart. According to his arbitrary logic (what is good and evil, anyway?), he kidnaps wrongdoers and places them in his rusty traps. Those who manage to escape often gain a new lease on life, and, bizarrely, we’re rooting for creaky old John more than any of his would-be disciples. In “Saw X,” he winkingly refers to himself as a “life coach.”The events of Jigsaw’s latest flesh-fest are set between “Saw” and “Saw 2.” John, our ailing antihero, heads to Mexico for an experimental medical procedure that turns out to be a big fat scam. The crooks behind the swindle become his future victims. The director, Kevin Greutert, puts a surprising amount of effort into building out the arc of the betrayal John suffers, beefing up the stakes in ways that the previous, hyper-nihilistic “Saw” movies never bothered to address.Set on the outskirts of Mexico City, the film employs a jaundiced sepia filter to signal the shift to exotic territory, and though the plot entails a white guy knocking off Latinos, the more robust setup muffles bad-faith accusations of racism — not that the film’s commentary on such matters is sophisticated; in this world of juvenile thrills, we all look the same on the inside. This “Saw” avoids the dreary political baiting of “Spiral,” the 2021 spinoff, which linked the Jigsaw killer’s moral mandate to the Black Lives Matter movement.In any case, the biggest baddie, the swindle’s ringleader, is a coldblooded Scandinavian, Dr. Cecilia Pederson (Synnove Macody Lund), who may care less about her Spanish-speaking underlings than John himself.The Robin to Jigsaw’s Batman, “Saw” regular Amanda (Shawnee Smith) shows up to help the boss-man with his latest stunt, kidnapping Cecilia and three of her colluders. One-by-one, each victim plays their game, punctuated by John and Amanda’s soul-baring huddle-talks, Cecilia’s pitiless scheming (one maneuver involves a rope made out of a casualty’s intestines), and, for devotees, fist-pump-inducing appearances by symbols from the extended “Saw” universe — like a puppet reminiscent of a shrunken-head Michael Jackson.This is the most well-groomed “Saw” movie to date. The story mostly makes sense and Greutert pulls back on the frenetic editing techniques that made the older movies look like the blood and guts equivalent of white noise. Bell’s Jigsaw is the same placid psychopath we’ve come to rely on for gruesome titillation (and a few snickers) and here, he’s a little cuddly, too — just like the fans always thought he was.Saw XRated R for graphic torture scenes and drug abuse. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. In theaters. More

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      How Dumbledore Became Michael Gambon’s Most Recognizable Role

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      The great British stage actor was not initially cast as the wizarding headmaster in the “Harry Potter” films, but he made the role his own.In the latter part of Michael Gambon’s long and storied acting career, some of the most animated analyses of his performances could be found not in theater or film reviews, but in forums for the “Harry Potter” fandom, where dedicated Hogwarts obsessives would dissect his every onscreen utterance as the wizard Albus Dumbledore.It wasn’t originally his role. Richard Harris, the eminent actor who was originally cast, died after filming the second “Harry Potter” movie. Gambon took over in 2003, joining the ranks of great British actors with popular late-career turns as wizards, a lineage that includes Alec Guinness (as the wizard-like Jedi Obi-Wan Kenobi in “Star Wars”) and Ian McKellen (as Gandalf in the “Lord of the Rings” films).Several other well-known actors were initially considered to succeed Harris in the role, including McKellen, who demurred, and Peter O’Toole, who turned it down because of his long, close friendship with Harris.In the end the choice was Gambon, who died Wednesday. He made the role his own, donning the long silver beard and half-moon spectacles and speaking in his unmistakable rich baritone voice, a stark contrast to Harris’s hoarser, more wizened readings as the headmaster of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.He was seen by millions, and after a career playing the characters of Brecht and Pinter it was Dumbledore that became his most recognizable — and probably most debated — role.Once Gambon debuted in “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” imbuing the character with a darker, sometimes mischievous tone, the question was born: Who was the “better Dumbledore”? Harris, with his soft-spoken, kind hearted air? Or Gambon, with his more sinister twist on the character?Gambon was self-deprecating about the role.“I just stick on a beard and play me, so it’s no great feat,” Gambon told a British movie blog in 2007. “Every part I play is just a variant of my own personality.”Gambon, who entered the film series in his early 60s, also chose to avoid reading J.K. Rowling’s source material, an approach that he once said was similar to that of Alan Rickman, who played Severus Snape, and Ralph Fiennes, who played Voldemort. He said bluntly that he tended to take movie roles for the money, telling the blog, “I just say what the script tells me to say.”Over the course of six movies, including limited roles in the two-part finale, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” he became beloved by fans and known as something of a prankster on set, once putting a “fart machine” inside Daniel Radcliffe’s sleeping bag.In a statement sent through his publicist on Thursday, Radcliffe, whose work with Gambon spanned his teenage years, said that the loss of the actor made the world “considerably less fun,” writing:Michael Gambon was one of the most brilliant, effortless actors I’ve ever had the privilege of working with, but despite his immense talent, the thing I will remember most about him is how much fun he had doing his job. He was silly, irreverent and hilarious. He loved his job, but never seemed defined by it. He was an incredible story and joke teller and his habit of blurring the lines of fact and fiction when talking to journalists meant that he was also one of the most entertaining people with whom you could ever wish to do a press junket. The sixth film was where I got to spend the most time working with Michael and he made the hours spent in front of a green screen together more memorable and joyous than they had any right to be. I’m so sad to hear he has passed, but I am so grateful for the fact that I am one of the lucky people who got to work with him.Rupert Grint, the actor who played Ron Weasley in the series, said in an Instagram post on Thursday that Gambon brought “so much warmth and mischief to every day on set.” And Emma Watson, who played Hermione Granger, described Gambon as “kind kind kind” on Instagram, writing: “You never took it too seriously but somehow delivered the most serious moments with all the gravitas.” Onscreen, the darker edge Gambon brought to the role dovetailed with the trajectory of Rowling’s story, as well as the approach of the filmmaker David Yates, who directed the second half of the movie series.“He’s got to be a bit scary,” Gambon told The Los Angeles Times in 2009 of his Dumbledore. “All headmasters should be a bit scary, shouldn’t they? A top wizard like him would be intimidating. And ultimately, he’s protecting Harry. Essentially, I play myself. A little Irish, a little scary. That’s what I’m like in real life.” More

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      Michael Gambon, Dumbledore in the ‘Harry Potter’ Films, Dies at 82

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      After he made his mark in London in the 1970s, he went on to play a wide range of roles, including Edward VII, Oscar Wilde and Winston Churchill.Michael Gambon, the Irish-born actor who drew acclaim from both audiences and peers for his stage and screen work, and who won even wider renown as Albus Dumbledore, the firm but kindly headmaster of the Hogwarts wizarding school, in the “Harry Potter” films, died on Wednesday night. He was 82.Mr. Gambon’s family confirmed his death in a brief statement issued on Thursday through a public relations company. “Michael died peacefully in hospital with his wife, Anne, and son Fergus at his bedside, following a bout of pneumonia,” the statement said. It did not identify the hospital where he died.The breakthrough that led the actor Ralph Richardson to call him “the great Gambon” came with Mr. Gambon’s performance in Bertolt Brecht’s “Life of Galileo” at London’s National Theater in 1980, although he had already enjoyed modest success, notably in plays by Alan Ayckbourn and Harold Pinter.Peter Hall, then the National Theater’s artistic director, described Mr. Gambon (pronounced GAM-bonn) as “unsentimental, dangerous and immensely powerful.” He recalled in his autobiography that he had approached four leading directors to accept him in the title role, only for them to reject him as “not starry enough.”After John Dexter agreed to direct him in what Mr. Gambon was to describe as the most difficult part he had ever played, the mix of volcanic energy and tenderness, sensuality and intelligence he brought to the role — in which he aged from 40 to 75 — excited not only critics but also his fellow performers.Mr. Gambon in the title role of Bertolt Brecht’s “Life of Galileo” at the National Theater in London in 1980. He called it the most difficult part he had ever played.Donald Cooper/AlamyAs Mr. Hall recalled, the dressing-room windows at the National, which look out onto a courtyard, “after the first night contained actors in various states of undress leaning out and applauding him — a unique tribute.”That brought Mr. Gambon a best-actor nomination at the Olivier Awards. He would win the award in 1987 for his performance as Eddie Carbone in Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge” at the National Theater. Again it was his blend of vulnerability and visceral force that impressed audiences; Miller declared that Mr. Gambon’s performance as the embattled longshoreman was the best he had seen. Mr. Ayckbourn, who directed the production, described Mr. Gambon as awe-inspiring.“One day he just stood in the rehearsal room and just burst into tears — no turning upstage, no hands in front of his face,” Mr. Ayckbourn said. “He just stood there and wept like a child. It was heartbreaking. And he did angry very well too. That could be scary.”Michael John Gambon was born in Dublin on Oct. 19, 1940. He became a dual British and Irish citizen after he and his seamstress mother, Mary, moved to London to join his father, Edward, an engineer helping to reconstruct the city after it had been badly bombed in 1945.By his own admission he was a dreamy student, often lost in fantasies of being other people, and he left school “pig ignorant, with no qualifications, nothing.” When the family moved from North London to Kent, he became an apprentice toolmaker at Vickers-Armstrongs, which was famous for having built Britain’s Spitfire fighter planes.The teenage Mr. Gambon had never seen a play — he said he didn’t even knew what a play was — but when he helped build sets for an amateur dramatic society in Erith, Kent, he was given a few small roles onstage. “I went vroom!,” he recalled. “I thought, Jesus, this is for me, I want to be an actor.” He joined the left-leaning Unity Theater in London, performing and taking lessons in improvisation at the Royal Court.This emboldened him to write to Micheal MacLiammoir and Hilton Edwards, the founders of the Gate Theater in Dublin, claiming to be a West End actor passing through the city en route to New York. An invitation ensued, as did a job as the Second Gentleman in “Othello,” followed by an offer to join Laurence Olivier’s new National Theater, which (Mr. Gambon said) was seeking burly six-footers like himself to play spear carriers.Several small or nonspeaking roles followed — Mr. Gambon remembered little but saying “Madam, your carriage awaits” to Maggie Smith in a Restoration comedy — until Olivier himself advised him to seek better parts in the provinces. That he did, closely modeling an Othello in Birmingham in 1968 on the Moor famously played at the National by Olivier, an actor Mr. Gambon said he always regarded with “absolute awe.”Mr. Gambon didn’t make his mark in London until 1974, when he played a slow-witted veterinary surgeon in Alan Ayckbourn’s trilogy “The Norman Conquests.” One scene, in which he sat on a child’s chair so low that only half his face was visible, became celebrated for the hilarity it generated. Indeed, Mr. Gambon said, he actually witnessed a man “laugh so much he fell out of his seat and rolled down the gangway.”Mr. Gambon in 1987, the year he won an Olivier Award for his performance in Arthur Miller’s “A View From the Bridge.”John Stoddart/Popperfoto, via Getty ImagesMr. Gambon said he disliked looking in mirrors; so unpleasant did he find his face that he compared it to a crumpled plastic bag. His jowls and his heavy build meant that he never played Hamlet or any obviously heroic or conventionally good-looking characters, yet he won universal admiration for his versatility. He seemed able to grow or shrink at will. For a man compared to a lumberjack, he was astonishingly fleet and nimble. One critic saw him as a rhinoceros that could almost tap-dance.And he brought a paradoxical delicacy to many a role: King Lear and Antony, which he played in tandem for the Royal Shakespeare Company; leading roles in Pinter’s “Betrayal” and “Old Times”; Ben Jonson’s Volpone at the National Theater; and the anguished restaurateur in David Hare’s “Skylight,” a performance he took from London to Broadway, where it earned him a Tony Award nomination for best actor in 1996.At the time he was best known in the United States for a television performance as the daydreaming invalid in Dennis Potter’s acclaimed 1986 mini-series, “The Singing Detective.” Though he always said that the theater was his great love and he pined for it when he was away, he often appeared on screens both large and small during a career in which he was virtually never out of work.Before being cast as Dumbledore, Mr. Gambon was best known in the United States for his performance as the daydreaming invalid in Dennis Potter’s acclaimed 1986 mini-series, “The Singing Detective.”BBCFrom 1999 to 2001, he won successive best-actor BAFTA awards, for “Wives and Daughters,” “Longitude” and “Perfect Strangers.” His portrayal of Lyndon B. Johnson in the 2002 mini-series “Path to War” won him an Emmy nomination, as did his Mr. Woodhouse in the 2009 adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Emma.”His television roles varied from Inspector Maigret to Edward VII, Oscar Wilde to Winston Churchill. And in film he played characters as different as Albert Spica, the coarse and violent gangster in Peter Greenaway’s “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover,” and the benign Professor Dumbledore.Mr. Gambon took over the role of Dumbledore, a central character in the Harry Potter saga, when Richard Harris, who had originated it, died in 2002. Reviewing “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” in which he first appeared in the role, A.O. Scott of The New York Times wrote that the film, though noteworthy for its special effects, was also, like the two earlier films in the series, “anchored by top-of-the-line flesh-and-blood British acting,” and noted that “Michael Gambon, as the wise headmaster Albus Dumbledore, has gracefully stepped into Richard Harris’s conical hat and flowing robes.” Mr. Gambon continued to play Dumbledore through the final movie in the series, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2,” released in 2011.For all the attention that role brought him, Mr. Gambon claimed not to see this or any other performance as a great accomplishment; he tended to answer interviewers who questioned him about acting by saying, “I just do it.” But in fact he prepared for his roles conscientiously. He would absorb a script, then use rehearsals to adapt and deepen his discoveries.“I’m very physical,” he once said. “I want to know how the person looks, what his hair is like, the way he walks, the way he stands and sits, how he sounds, his rhythms, how he dresses, his shoes. The way your feet feel on the stage is important.” And slowly, very slowly, Mr. Gambon would edge toward what he felt was the core of a person and, he said, rely on intuition to bring him to life onstage.Though he was no Method actor, Mr. Gambon did use memories when strong emotions were needed. He found it easy to cry onstage, he said, sometimes by thinking of the famous photograph of a naked Vietnamese girl running from a napalm attack. Acting, he said, was a compulsion, “a hard slog, heartache, misery — for moments of sheer joy.”Mr. Gambon in the 1989 film “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover.”Steve Pyke/Getty ImagesIn person Mr. Gambon was elusive; he said that he didn’t exist aside from his acting and that he hated the idea of celebrity, even popularity. He adamantly refused to reveal anything about his private life to interviewers, though it’s on public record that he married Anne Miller when he was 22 and that together they had a son, Fergus. They both survive him. It is believed that they remained on good terms even after he had two other sons, Tom and William, with the set designer Philippa Hart.He was knighted in 1998.His engineering apprenticeship left him fascinated with the workings of mechanical things: clocks, old watches and especially antique guns, of which he possessed scores. He also took delight in fast cars; he once appeared on the television show “Top Gear” and drove so recklessly that a section of the track he’d taken on two wheels was renamed Gambon Corner.He became notorious for impish behavior on and off the stage. A qualified pilot, he promised to cure a fellow actor of his fear of flying by taking him up in a tiny plane, then mimed a heart attack as, his tongue lolling, he nose-dived toward outer London. Mr. Ayckbourn recalled a moment in “Othello” when Mr. Gambon shoved Iago’s head into a fountain. “Shampoo and set, shampoo and set,” roared the Moor — but such was the emotion already generated the audience reportedly didn’t notice.“I’m actually serious about my work,” Mr. Gambon once said. However, much of that work came to a premature end after he played a wily, drunken, needy Falstaff at the National Theater in 2005, followed by the alcoholic Hirst in Pinter’s “No Man’s Land” in 2008.Having admitted that he often felt terrified before making an entrance, he had panic attacks while rehearsing the role of W.H. Auden in Alan Bennett’s “The Habit of Art” in 2009 and was twice rushed to a hospital before withdrawing from the production. By then he was finding it difficult to remember lines. After playing the nonspeaking title character in Samuel Beckett’s “Eh Joe” in 2013, he announced that he would no longer perform onstage.He continued to appear on film and television, notably as the ailing title character in “Churchill’s Secret” in 2016. But his departure from theater meant that he ended his stage career with a deep sense of loss.“It’s a horrible thing to admit,” he said. “But I can’t do it. And it breaks my heart.”Alex Marshall More

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      Onstage, Michael Gambon’s Depth Transcended the Unspoken

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      The actor conveyed the gravitational force of mortality, tugging the men he played so commandingly toward a void beyond meaning, our critic writes.Even in silence, he thundered. Make that, especially in silence.The last two times I saw the mighty Michael Gambon onstage, his characters didn’t have much to say, and in one case, nothing at all. Both the plays in which this British actor, who died on Wednesday at the age of 82, was appearing on those occasions were by Samuel Beckett, “Eh Joe” and “All That Fall.”Few, if any dramatists, made better use of the resonance of the unspoken than Beckett. And few actors brought such profound visceral weariness — and agitation — to Beckett’s wordlessness. Even in performances that required him to bellow, quip or speechify, Gambon made sure we were aware of the gravitational force of mortality, tugging the men he played so commandingly toward a void beyond meaning, beyond will, beyond life.He was not an obese man, but he was an uncommonly solid and fleshly presence in live theater, from his haunted, corrugated face to his bearlike torso and unexpectedly expressive feet. Here was someone, you felt, whom it was better never to cross.That impressive avoirdupois made him a natural onscreen for roles as different as the magisterial wizard Dumbledore in the “Harry Potter” movies; the terrifying, vengeful gangster in Peter Greenaway’s “The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover”; and the hospital patient, fantasist mystery writer in Dennis Potter’s sublime television mini-series “The Singing Detective.” Onstage that presence allowed Gambon to convey, effortlessly, the subliminal menace and explosiveness in the husband and lover of Harold Pinter’s “Old Times” and David Hare’s “Skylight,” and the rueful rage beneath Falstaff’s heartiness in the Henry IV plays.Yet he always gave the impression that all that powerful density might melt into the helplessness we associate with the newborn and the dying, a sense that thrums like a bass line through Beckett’s work. In “Eh Joe,” a television play that was brought to the London stage by the director Atom Egoyan in 2006, Gambon’s role was almost entirely passive.The only words we heard were spoken by an unseen woman, who voiced a droning litany of accusations of a life lived in bad faith. It was Egoyan’s conceit to have Gambon’s face projected on a scrim in immense, simultaneous video close-up, registering each blow of memory with flickers of expression so subtle as to seem subterranean.It was a device that reminded us of the miraculous way cameras can discover, in certain seemingly unchanging faces, a multitude of conflicted feelings. The astonishment was how even more complete a portrait Gambon provided through the physicality of his live presence, when the camera wasn’t running.Wearing a threadbare bathrobe in a shadowed, shabby room, Gambon’s Joe began the play by running his fingers across window curtains as he closed them, then sitting with immense weariness onto his bed. For much of those opening moments, you couldn’t even see his face.Nonetheless, you sensed you had been vouchsafed a vision of a man at his most defeated, so overcome by his own futility that movement had become pointless. The very set of his shoulders let us know that Joe was so raw, so spent that you felt, as you sometimes do with great actors, that you were violating a privacy you had no right to witness.I am sorry I missed Gambon in Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape” in London in 2010. But I did get to see him in a lesser-known Beckett work, “All That Fall,” three years later in New York. Brought to the stage by the director Trevor Nunn, “All That Fall” follows a day in the life of the chattery, scrappy Mrs. Rooney (played, wonderfully, by Eileen Atkins), who goes to pick up her blind, broken-down husband at the train station.Gambon’s Mr. Rooney made his entrance late and didn’t begin to match his wife in loquacity. His physique, though, spoke volumes. He was, I wrote at the time, “a crumpled Goliath,” as he sloped onto the frail support of Atkins’s shoulder. Just to see the two of them, side by side, alone, in their codependency, was to understand the dynamic of a marriage.It is, however, as perhaps befits what was originally a radio play, a single sound that I remember most vividly from that production. The wife had quoted the text from the local church sermon: “The Lord upholdeth all that fall and raiseth up all those that be bowed down.”And with those words, Gambon and Atkins roared, coarsely and deeply, with laughter. To grasp the absurdity of the text, you had only to look at the derelict couple before you. But there was the triumph of defiance in their laughter.That triumph was implicit in every performance that Gambon gave us. More

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      Hattie McDaniel’s Historic Oscar Will Return to Its Desired Home

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      The plaque that McDaniel, the first Black winner of an Academy Award, bequeathed to Howard University has been missing for about 50 years. Now a replacement is on its way.After becoming the first Black person to win an Academy Award, in 1940, Hattie McDaniel called the plaque she received a cherished beacon for all that could be accomplished.McDaniel had earned the award for her portrayal of Mammy, an agreeable slave at the whim of Scarlett O’Hara in “Gone With the Wind,” a movie that arrived as a cinematic triumph but has since been rebuked for its blind eye toward slavery.Before dying in 1952, McDaniel deflected the criticism she received for taking many stereotypical roles throughout her career.“I’d rather play a maid than be one,” she would say, envisioning that her work would open better doors for future Black actors. She also had an eternal resting spot in mind for that beacon, bequeathing the Oscar plaque to Howard University in Washington.But for about 50 years, McDaniel’s plaque has been missing, a cinematic void that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is now filling. The university will receive a replacement plaque this weekend in a ceremony titled “Hattie’s Come Home.”“It’s 100 percent overdue,” said Jill Watts, the author of “Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood.” “It was so meaningful historically as an award. Not just in the history of film, but also within American history and it was meaningful to her personally. She would be absolutely delighted to know that it’s going home to where she wanted it to be.”Kevin Goff, McDaniel’s great-grandnephew, said that his father started petitioning for a replacement plaque in the 1990s, and that the decision would help cement McDaniel’s legacy.Over the years, theories have circulated about the whereabouts of the plaque, which was given to all supporting acting winners from 1936 to 1942 rather than traditional Oscar statues. A spokesman for Howard University did not respond to a request for comment.Goff said there were rumors that the plaque was stolen during student unrest about the university’s mission in the late 1960s.“Apparently, a gentleman said he had thrown it in the Potomac,” he said. “Someone said maybe a drama professor took it with him. But none of it has been verified or proven. It’s never shown up on eBay. So, here we are 50-plus years later and no one has a clue where it is or if it still does exist.”W. Burlette Carter, a professor at George Washington University’s law school, wrote a paper about the missing award more than a decade ago. Her best guess is that it may still be somewhere at Howard, misplaced during a move by the drama department.“That makes sense to me, having worked at a university, that when they moved the department, it got packed and it got lost,” Watts said. “I have this feeling that it’s probably still someplace, tucked away in a box.”Watts said she and several others approached the Academy about replacing the Oscar following her book’s publication in 2005. “We were told no,” Watts said. “Just a flat no.”That stance has shifted. The replacement plaque will soon reside at the Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts.Jacqueline Stewart, the president of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, and Bill Kramer, the chief executive of the Academy, said in a news release that the upcoming ceremony would celebrate McDaniel’s remarkable craft and historic win.“Hattie McDaniel,” they said, “was a groundbreaking artist who changed the course of cinema and impacted generations of performers who followed her.” More

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      ‘Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie’ Review: Sit, Roll Over, Save the World

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      In this sequel, the canine gang faces Taraji P. Henson’s villain who sends a dangerous meteor toward Earth. And, yes, Kim Kardashian returns too.Adventure City’s fluffiest heroes return in “Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie,” the second film tie-in to the popular Canadian TV show.This time the gang faces a brand-new villain, Victoria Vance, a.k.a. Vee (voiced by Taraji P. Henson), who sends a dangerous meteor toward Earth in an effort to prove herself as a reputable scientist. The Paw Patrol successfully saves Adventure City from disaster, but they soon discover that exposure to the meteor and its magical crystals has given each of the pups unique superpowers: lightning-fast speed, super strength, and so on. This is a particular boon to Skye (Mckenna Grace), the youngest member of the team, who is struggling to fit in as the runt of the litter.Much of the cartoon action and canine wisecracking found in the TV show — and “Paw Patrol: The Movie,” from 2021 — is rehashed here. It isn’t long before Vee joins forces with (former) Mayor Humdinger (Ron Pardo), the mustache-twirling, cat-loving villain from the first film, whose grand plan of stealing the crystals from the Paw Patrol leads to all sorts of antics. There’s even a cameo from Delores, the previous film’s self-absorbed poodle character, voiced by Kim Kardashian.Directed by Cal Brunker, who also helmed the first installment, the film has no shame in being formulaic in plot or execution. Skye’s zero-to-hero plot arc is predictable as they come, though it’s easy to see why younger audiences may find it relatable. The animation is cute, but there are noticeable moments where corners were cut and characters or objects slide awkwardly across the screen.Still, if you can imagine your kiddo enjoying an animated car-chase scene featuring puppies and kittens, set to Icona Pop’s “I Love It,” they’ll probably be thrilled with “The Mighty Movie.”Paw Patrol: The Mighty MovieRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Reptile’ Review: Unusual Suspects

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      Benicio Del Toro plays a detective investigating a suburban homicide in this overstuffed thriller.The tortuous crime thriller “Reptile,” streaming on Netflix, at times feels like the unwise attempt to cram an entire season of a cops-and-perps show into just over two hours. The movie, peopled with a near-bottomless supply of unsavory rogues, tracks the aftermath of a grisly murder by trailing the policemen on the case. Domenick Lombardozzi (of “The Wire”) is even featured among the crew — although his presence is merely another reminder of the sharper stories this movie aspires to replicate.Set in an overcast marsh town in Maine, the movie opens on a couple facing friction: Will (Justin Timberlake), a real estate mogul, and Summer (Matilda Lutz), an agent at his company, converse tersely while readying a house for a showing. The sheeny manor is all stainless steel and vaulted ceilings, a home that, in its moneyed facade and alienating interior, offers an apt metaphor for the pair’s domestic strife.Once Summer is found stabbed to death in a for-sale property, however, the movie shifts into procedural mode. We swivel to center on Tom (Benicio Del Toro), a detective who’s fresh meat on the local force; he and his wife, Judy (a convincing Alicia Silverstone), decamped to the hamlet following a scandal in Philadelphia. Working under the stony police captain (Eric Bogosian), Tom presents as a weary but devoted enforcer of law and order. “There’s only one thing I love almost as much as I love you,” he smolders, less to Judy than at her, “and that’s being a cop.”Thank goodness for that fidelity, for this particular homicide soon proves a Pandora’s box of treachery and pretense. The poised Summer, during her short life in suburbia, managed to mingle with a legion of kooks and creeps, including her ex-husband, Sam (Karl Glusman), an artist fond of stealing human hair for his sculptures, and her glum confidante, Renee (Sky Ferreira), who seems to resent her pal’s success. That’s not to mention the bratty, well-to-do Will, whose resting pout face is only partially the fault of Timberlake’s restricted acting range.In his first feature, the director Grant Singer (who wrote the screenplay with Benjamin Brewer and Del Toro) demonstrates a knack for building suspense. In one stylish sequence, Tom dials a mysterious number that could be the key to cracking the case. As he listens to the tone, Singer cuts to multiple characters reaching for ringing phones. The small scene oozes with Hitchcockian tension.The trouble with “Reptile” is that this impressive moment-to-moment control does not extend to the contours of the broader story, which the writers overstuff with clumsy twists and contrived devices. Once the film gets around to revealing the culprit, we have already lost interest, enervated in the face of a movie that, like an overeager snake, bites off far more than it can swallow.ReptileRated R for coldblooded murder. Running time: 2 hours 14 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More