Movies

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      At Cannes, the Dogs Were Good Again This Year

      by

      The festival has long embraced canine stars like Messi, the hero of “Anatomy of a Fall,” while human stars are happy to take their furry friends along.On the morning the Cannes Film Festival opened, Messi, the canine hero of last year’s Palme d’Or-winning “Anatomy of a Fall,” was practicing climbing the stairs of the Grand Lumière Theater. The majestic entry is typically reserved for stars dressed in their finery, but the official red carpet had not yet been rolled out. Messi’s owner and trainer, Laura Martin Contini, coached him to bound up to the first landing and pose. He wasn’t quite hitting his mark, stopping just one step below, but he eventually got the hang of it. Contini rewarded him with coos of “Oui, jolie” and “Oui, bravo” and a squeaky soccer ball toy he seemed to particularly enjoy, his blue eyes growing even more intense at the sight of it.Messi was rehearsing for the opening credits of his new talk show, “Messi: The Cannes Film Festival From a Dog’s Eye View.” In the series of shorts for French TV, the star was going to interview talent (using the voice of a human actor).His presence was proof of an incontrovertible fact about the festival, now in its second week: Cannes loves dogs. You could see that as Demi Moore, star of this year’s “The Substance,” brought her Chihuahua, Pilaf, to the photo call. And you could see it as Messi went through his paces, occasionally carrying a camera in his mouth, and onlookers just outside the barricades took photos. “It’s like if I had George Clooney with me, but it’s just a dog,” said Tim Newman, a producer who came up with the idea for Messi’s program.Demi Moore brought Pilaf along during a photo call Monday for her new film, “The Substance.”Sebastien Nogier/EPA, via ShutterstockThe talk show is something of a victory lap for the pooch, who emerged as one of the biggest stars of the 2023 festival, even receiving the Palm Dog Award, given annually to the premier canine performer, though he couldn’t make that ceremony. “Last year we were not able to climb the famed steps of the Cannes arena, so this time we are returning and we are able to be at the red carpet and to support all of the dogs that will be considered for the Palm Dog,” Contini said, speaking through a translator.So why is this particular festival so friendly to pups? “Cannes is a good place for dogs to get a showcase because the French have a very sensible approach to dogs,” the Palm Dog founder Toby Rose said, explaining, “They are always pretty much without exception welcome to join in restaurants, which I know to the Anglo-Saxon American and Brits is almost heresy.” (Indeed, on the first day of my stay in Cannes this year a regal greyhound tottered in and out of a creperie while I ate.)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

    • 163 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      Ivan F. Boesky, Rogue Trader in 1980s Wall Street Scandal, Dies at 87

      by

      An inspiration for the Gordon Gekko character in the movie “Wall Street,” he made a fortune from insider trading before his downfall brought a crashing end to a decade of greed.Ivan F. Boesky, the brash financier who came to symbolize Wall Street greed as a central figure of the 1980s insider trading scandals, and who went to prison for his misdeeds, died on Monday at his home in the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego. He was 87.His daughter Marianne Boesky said he died in his sleep.An inspiration for the character Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s movie “Wall Street” and its sequel, Mr. Boesky made a fortune betting on stock tips, often passed to him illegally in exchange for suitcases of cash. His guilty plea to insider trading in November 1986 and his $100 million penalty, a record at the time, sent shock waves through Wall Street and set off a cascade of events that marked the end of a decade of frenzied takeover activity and the celebration of conspicuous wealth.As federal investigators closed in on Mr. Boesky, he agreed to cooperate, providing information that led to the downfall of the investment bank Drexel Burnham Lambert and its junk bond king, Michael Milken.Mr. Boesky brought an aggressive style to the once-sleepy world of arbitrage, the buying and selling of stocks in companies that appear to be takeover targets. Sniffing out impending deals, he amassed stock positions at levels never seen before.At the top of his game in the mid-1980s, he had a net worth of $280 million (about $818 million in today’s currency) and a trading portfolio valued at $3 billion (about $8.7 billion today), much of it financed with borrowed money. Home was a sprawling estate in Westchester County, N.Y., its main house adorned with a Renoir and carpets embossed with his monogram, “IFB.” (The estate was once owned by the Revson family, founders of Revlon cosmetics and, before that, the family behind Macy’s, the Strauses.)Besides a Manhattan pied-à-terre, there was a retreat on the French Riviera, a lavish Paris apartment and a condo in Hawaii. Through his first wife, Seema Boesky, he was part owner of the celebrated Beverly Hills Hotel, a lush pink concoction favored by Hollywood stars as well as by titans of finance attending the Predators’ Ball, Drexel Burnham’s annual get-together.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

    • 100 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      Trump Biopic Hits Cannes Film Festival: ’The Apprentice’

      by

      The film covers Donald J. Trump’s relationships with the fixer Roy Cohn and his first wife, Ivana, and tries to explain the future president, at least as a young man.Would Donald J. Trump enjoy Cannes? It’s possible, since the extravagant displays of wealth here — all the yachts and glamour — are typically his thing.But would Cannes enjoy Donald J. Trump?You might be tempted to say no, since the Cannes Film Festival draws the sort of liberal-leaning artists that reliably vote against the former president and his allies. But that clash of sensibilities lent a frisson to Monday’s premiere of “The Apprentice,” starring Sebastian Stan as a young Trump.Directed by Ali Abbasi (“Border,” “Holy Spider”) and written by the author Gabriel Sherman, this origin story of sorts begins with Trump in his late 20s as he aspires to greatness but mostly putters around collecting overdue rent for his father’s real estate company. (One angry tenant responds by hurling a pot of boiling water at him.) Trump is a man in need of a mentor, and he finds it in the lawyer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), who takes an immediate liking to this young striver. And why wouldn’t they spark to each other? On one visit, Trump hops out of a car emblazoned with the license plate “DJT” and sees that Cohn’s own plate reads “RMC.” Game recognizes game.The closeted Cohn character has complicated reasons for keeping Trump close: There’s a one-sided attraction there, and when giving Trump an expensive suit, he tells the younger man, “If you look like a million bucks, I look like a million bucks.” But mostly, he sees Trump as an appreciative vessel for his lessons in venality. Cohn teaches him how to use dirty tricks to succeed in business and imparts three rules that will become Trump’s modus operandi: Always be on the attack, deny everything and never admit defeat.But in its own way, theirs is a “Star Is Born” dynamic: As Trump rises, Cohn falls on harder times, and the protégé who was once so easily impressed now seems sickened to spend time with someone no longer on his level. By the time we reach the 1980s, Trump has married his first wife, Ivana (Maria Bakalova), and broken ground on his crowning real estate achievement, Trump Tower. Still, Cohn won’t be dispatched from his high-flying life quite so easily.Is the movie sympathetic to Trump? Not exactly, though it labors to at least explain him. At first, Stan’s performance feels surprisingly toned down: Though young Trump is certainly full of himself, he seems more abashed in Cohn’s outsize presence. But as Trump gets hooked on success (and speedlike diet pills), Stan transforms into the man we know today, who leads with bluster and arrogance. “The Apprentice” suggests he’s little more than a MAGA magpie, stealing his famous “Make America Great Again” phrase from a Reagan operative and even modeling his orange complexion on Cohn, who liked to tan himself to a radioactive umber.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

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      Lily Gladstone in the Spotlight at the Kering Women in Motion Dinner

      by

      The juror found herself at the center of the Kering Women in Motion dinner, a year after she was a little-known guest for “Killers of the Flower Moon.”At the Cannes Film Festival, much is made of the standing ovation. Every round of applause earns breathless headlines, with outlets racing to report which movie received the most prolonged cheers.But sometimes at Cannes, where you sit is just as important as when you leap to your feet.This is something Lily Gladstone found out Sunday night at Kering’s annual Women in Motion dinner, a star-studded bash that drew the likes of Michelle Yeoh, Julianne Moore, Isabelle Huppert and the jury president, Greta Gerwig. As one of Gerwig’s fellow jurors, Gladstone will help decide the winner of the Palme d’Or. It’s a prestigious position that also represents a full-circle moment for the actress, whose profile was turbocharged last year when “Killers of the Flower Moon” debuted at Cannes.The day after that premiere last May, Gladstone found herself at the Women in Motion dinner. At one point, she made her way to the party’s center table to greet her co-star Leonardo DiCaprio and perched next to him on an empty chair reserved for the festival’s president, Iris Knobloch.Recounting the story to me on Sunday, Gladstone grinned. “Iris and I were just laughing about that, that she had to kick me out of her chair last year and now I’m sitting next to her,” she said. In fact, this year Gladstone had been assigned what could be considered the party’s most prestigious spot, the chair between Knobloch and the Cannes artistic director, Thierry Frémaux.“I’m the Leo this year!” Gladstone said, chuckling. “I’m totally in his seat.”At this point in the festival, Gladstone and her fellow jurors have seen almost half the films in competition. “Last year, I only had to be concerned with one film,” Gladstone said. “This year, it’s 22.” And her jury experience comes after several months spent on the awards circuit for “Killers of the Flower Moon,” which earned her a best actress Oscar nomination.But though Gladstone’s dance card is full — she’ll soon star in “The Memory Police,” a sci-fi film scripted by Charlie Kaufman, as well as a remake of Ang Lee’s “The Wedding Banquet” that will co-star Bowen Yang — she said that taking time out for Cannes has recharged her artistic battery.“I’m ready to get back to work and shift that gear, and immersing yourself in other people’s creativity is a great way to kick-start it again for yourself,” she said. “So I’m enjoying the hell out of it.” More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons and Willem Dafoe on Yorgos Lanthimos’s New Film

      by

      In the new Yorgos Lanthimos film “Kinds of Kindness,” a character played by Emma Stone recounts a dream in which she was the denizen of a bizarre world. “There, dogs were in charge,” she murmurs. “People were animals, animals were people.” But being brought to heel by their canine masters wasn’t as bad as it sounds, she says: “I must admit, they treated us pretty well.”Compared with how the human beings treat each other in “Kinds of Kindness,” a dark new comedy that just premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and is in theaters June 21, the dogs would surely be an improvement.Comprised of three separate stories with the cast members recurring in different roles, “Kinds of Kindness” begins with the tale of Robert (Jesse Plemons), a corporate underling whose every interaction in life — including what to eat, how to speak or even who to marry — is controlled by a boss (Willem Dafoe) whose decisions send poor Robert into a tailspin. The second story follows Daniel (Plemons again), who becomes convinced that his wife (Stone) is not who she claims to be and coaxes her into insane tasks to prove herself.And in the third sequence, cult members played by Stone and Plemons search for a woman able to wake the dead, though the whims of their guru (Dafoe) dictate that this mysterious woman also be a certain height and weight and have an identical twin. (Even when it comes to awesome supernatural powers, there are dealbreakers.)Dafaoe and Stone worked on Lanthimos’s “Poor Things” together, for which she won the best actress Oscar. “I still don’t know what that was,” Stone said. “That was cuckoo bananas.”Sam Hellmann for The New York TimesOn Saturday afternoon in a hotel here in Cannes, I met with Stone, Plemons and Dafoe to try to make sense of this triptych. According to the actors, Lanthimos isn’t keen to give too much away. “Yorgos says he likes it when people have different takes on the movie,” Dafoe said. “I think that’s the strength of it.”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

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      What We Lose When ChatGPT Sounds Like Scarlett Johansson

      by

      OpenAI has good reason to aim for a bot voice à la the one in “Her.” But that film was about relationships. What does this real-world turn say about us?When Spike Jonze’s romance “Her” was released in 2013, it sounded both like a joke — a man falls in love with his computer — and a fantasy. The iPhone was about six years old. Siri, the mildly reliable virtual assistant for that phone, came along a few years later. You could converse in a limited way with Siri, whose default female-coded voice had the timbre and tone of a self-assured middle-aged hotel concierge. She did not laugh; she did not giggle; she did not tell spontaneous jokes, only Easter egg-style gags written into her code by cheeky engineers. Siri was not your friend. She certainly wasn’t your girlfriend.So Samantha, the A.I. assistant with whom the sad-sack divorcé Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) fell in love in “Her,” felt like a futuristic revelation. Voiced by Scarlett Johansson, Samantha was similar to Siri, if Siri liked you and wanted you to like her back. She was programmed to mold herself around the individual user’s preferences, interests and ideas. She was witty, and sweet and quite literally tireless. In theory, everyone in “Her” was using their own version of Samantha, presumably with different names and voices. But the movie — which I love — was less the tale of a near-future society, and more the coming-of-age story of one man. Theodore found the strength to return to life in a brief, beautiful relationship with a woman who fit his needs perfectly and healed his wounds.It was thus a tad jarring to hear the voice of the virtual assistant in last week’s announcement of the newest version of ChatGPT, probably the best known artificial intelligence engine in the very real world of 2024. Among other things, the new iteration, dubbed ChatGPT-4o, can interact verbally with the user and respond to images shown to it through the device’s camera. Those who watched the live demo from OpenAI, the company that makes ChatGPT, were quick to note that she sounded a whole lot like Samantha — which is to say, like Johansson.Mira Murati, OpenAI’s chief technology officer, told The Verge that the resemblance was incidental, and that ChatGPT’s nascent speech capabilities have used this voice for a while. But once you hear it, you can’t unhear it.Those who watched the live demo from OpenAI, the company that makes ChatGPT, were quick to note that she sounded like Samantha.Warner Bros. PicturesFurthermore, OpenAI founder and chief executive Sam Altman has professed his love of “Her” in the past. Following the announcement, he posted the word “her” to his X account. And on his blog post about the news, he wrote, “It feels like A.I. from the movies; and it’s still a bit surprising to me that it’s real. Getting to human-level response times and expressiveness turns out to be a big change.”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

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      At the Cannes Film Festival, Discoveries From Andrea Arnold and Rungano Nyoni

      by

      Though the history-inflected “Furiosa” and “Megalopolis” were the hottest tickets, films by Andrea Arnold and Rungano Nyoni proved to be discoveries.It must say something about the anxious state of the movie world that two of the hottest tickets at this year’s Cannes Film Festival draw inspiration from ancient Rome. In George Miller’s “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” Chris Hemsworth zips around a wasteland like a heavy-metal charioteer, while in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis,” Adam Driver plays a guy named Cesar. That each movie offers a vision of a culture in decline seems too on the nose for this festival, where attendees celebrate the art amid nervous chatter about the state of the industry.This year’s festival opened Tuesday under gray skies, as if nature itself were mirroring all the gloom and doom. Yet while the opening-night movie, the unfunny French comedy “The Second Act,” was a dud, the hourlong ceremony that preceded it was unexpectedly touching. The show’s focus on women that night was instructive, and it suggested that Cannes, a festival that has long promoted the cult of the male auteur, is trying to do a better job of righting a historical gender imbalance. Mind you, the number of female filmmakers who get a chance to strut the red carpet remains low: There are only four in the main competition.Louis Garrel, left, and Vincent Lindon in “The Second Act,” from Quentin Dupieux.Chi-Fou-Mi/Arte France CinémaYet things do seem better here, and at least the festival is keen to show its support for women filmmakers. During the ceremony, which was hosted by the French actress Camille Cottin (“Call My Agent”), an emotional Juliette Binoche presented Meryl Streep with an honorary Palme d’Or, and the festival went bonkers over Greta Gerwig. She’s heading this year’s competition jury, which includes two other women filmmakers: the Turkish screenwriter Ebru Ceylan and the Lebanese director Nadine Labaki. When it came time for Gerwig to appear, the festival played a highlight reel of her work and, in giant letters beamed on an even more giant screen, announced that she had “conquered the world in three films.”It was corny, but, reader, I teared up. Among other things, the love for Streep and Gerwig was a break from the drumbeat of bad news about the American movie business. Heading into 2023, Variety had predicted an “extremely bumpy” year for Hollywood; 12 months later, it changed the diagnosis to “rocky” and a conveniently concise headline explained why. “Strikes, Box-Office Bombs and ‘Huge Leadership Vacuum’: Hollywood Says Goodbye to Worst Year in a Generation.” Even Jerry Seinfeld, in an interview with GQ, said “the movie business is over.” I’d already booked my Cannes hotel and flight, so I went anyway.That’s because while the American entertainment business is in the midst of another of its recurrent crises, this hasn’t stopped artists around the world from making movies. The festival as well as several other programs outside the official selection are presenting more than 100 new movies this year from celebrated veterans and untested directors alike, some who may soon dazzle us. In other rooms in and around the Palais — the hulking center where I spend most of my time here sitting in the dark — an estimated 14,000 industry representatives, including buyers and sellers, have some 4,000 finished movies and projects on the table in what is the world’s biggest international film market.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

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      When a Tale of Migration Is Not Just Fiction

      by

      The two teenagers on the screen trudging through the endless dunes of the Sahara on their way to Europe were actors. So were the fellow migrants tortured in a bloodstained Libyan prison.But to the young man watching the movie one recent evening in a suburb of Dakar, Senegal’s capital, the cinematic ordeal felt all too real. His two brothers had undertaken the same journey years ago.“This is why they refused to send me money to take that route,” said Ahmadou Diallo, 18, a street cleaner. “Because they had seen firsthand how dangerous it is.”Critics in the West have praised the film “Io Capitano” — nominated for the 2024 Academy Award for best international feature film — noting its visceral yet tender look at migration to Europe from Africa. It is now showing in African countries, and is hitting close to home in Senegal. That’s where the two main characters in the movie embark on an odyssey that epitomizes the dreams and hardships of countless more hoping to make it abroad.Last month, the film’s crew and its director, Matteo Garrone, took “Io Capitano” to a dozen places in Senegal where migration isn’t fiction. They screened it in youth centers, in schools, even on a basketball court turned outdoor movie theater in Guédiawaye, a suburb of Dakar, where Mr. Diallo and hundreds of others watched it at sunset on a big screen.Seydou Sarr, left, and Moustapha Fall, who play the lead roles in “Io Capitano,” in Guédiawaye, last month.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