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How to Watch the 2024 SAG Awards: Date, Time and Streaming
The awards, which are streaming live on Netflix for the first time, will offer a preview of some key Oscars races. Barbra Streisand will be on hand, too.Cord-cutters rejoice: Normally, watching an awards show involves subscribing to a live TV service (or remembering which of your email addresses you haven’t already used for a free trial).But on Saturday, for the first time, Netflix will be streaming the annual Screen Actors Guild Awards, potentially bringing them to a much wider audience.The 15 awards, which are voted on by actors and other performers who belong to the SAG-AFTRA union, honor the best film and television performances from the past year. They can be a bellwether for the Oscars, happening this year on March 10. (Since 1996, 83 of the 112 stars and films that won Oscars for best picture or acting first won a SAG Award.)This year’s ceremony is shaping up to be a “Barbenheimer” rematch: The two summer blockbusters — “Oppenheimer,” Christopher Nolan’s biopic about the physicist known as the father of the atomic bomb, and “Barbie,” Greta Gerwig’s unique spin on the Mattel doll — each picked up a pack-leading four nominations and will be competing for the guild’s top prize, best ensemble.There’s also intrigue in the best film actress race: Lily Gladstone, who plays an Osage woman married to a white man involved in a murderous conspiracy in “Killers of the Flower Moon,” has blazed a trail through awards season, taking home honors from the Golden Globes, the National Board of Review and the New York Film Critics Circle. But Emma Stone, who plays a grown woman with the mind of a child in the “Frankenstein”-inspired black comedy “Poor Things,” came out on top at the BAFTAs and the Critics Choice Awards (and won her own Globe in the musical or comedy category).Now, on Saturday night, we’ll get our strongest indication yet as to which way academy voters are leaning. We’ll also get an appearance from Barbra Streisand. Here’s how to watch.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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In This Heroes’ Tale, Real People Risk Their Lives to Get to Europe
Matteo Garrone’s Oscar-nominated feature “Io Capitano” dramatizes the harrowing journeys made by thousands of Africans each month looking for a better life in Europe.At the end of “Io Capitano” (“I Captain”), Matteo Garrone’s harrowing contender for best international film at next month’s Academy Awards, a map tracks the journey taken by the film’s two teenage protagonists: over 3,500 miles from Dakar, Senegal, to Sicily, via the scorching Nigerien desert, horrific Libyan prisons and a nerve-racking Mediterranean crossing aboard a rickety vessel.Such perilous voyages, taken each year by countless Africans seeking a new life in Europe, is “one of the great dramas of our times,” Garrone said in a recent interview, and “Io Capitano” is framed as an epic, modern-day Odyssey, with protagonists no less valiant than Homer’s hero.“It’s a journey that’s an archetype so that anyone can identify with it,” said Garrone, who is best known to international audiences for the hyper-realistic 2008 drama “Gomorrah” and his dark and fantastical “Pinocchio” (2019).“Io Capitano” is also, he said, a “document of contemporary history.” This month alone, over 2,000 people reached European shores by crossing the Mediterranean, while at least 74 died, bringing the number of people who have gone missing in that sea in the last decade to more than 29,000, according to the International Organization for Migration, a United Nations agency.Many Europeans learn of these landings, and deaths, from short news segments, often accompanied by clips of lawmakers pledging to stop illegal migration. Garrone’s film, which won the Silver Lion for best directing at last year’s Venice Film Festival, goes beyond the statistics with a plot based on stories of real people crossing the Mediterranean.Garrone said that the migrants’ stories he heard called to mind the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad.via Cohen Media GroupWe 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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Documentaries That Examine Russia’s War in Ukraine
After the death of Russian dissident Aleksei A. Navalny, these four movies examine the war in unexpected ways.Veselka, the Ukrainian diner on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, is one of the few restaurants in the city that truly deserves to be called venerable, even iconic. Mention it to most anyone — especially those of us who were here around the turn of the 21st century — and it provokes pierogi- and borscht-inflected rhapsodies, happy memories of a late-night tuck into a steaming plate of Ukrainian comfort food.Veselka has also become a center for New York’s support for embattled Ukrainians, as shown in Michael Fiore’s new documentary, “Veselka: The Rainbow on the Corner at the Center of the World.” (David Duchovny narrates.) Veselka’s third-generation proprietor, Jason Birchard, is of Ukrainian ancestry, and many of the staff are from the country as well. When war broke out, the restaurant started collecting money and clothing to send to the front; what’s more, Birchard began helping staff sponsor family members in their efforts to move to safety in America.The film (in theaters now) starts as a fun story about a New York institution, and its tone is resolutely hopeful and convivial. But it rapidly becomes a demonstration of a community’s efforts to support loved ones under siege, and that makes it much richer and fuller than it might otherwise have been. If you know Veselka, you might choke up a bit.I happened to be watching “Veselka” the day news broke of dissident Aleksei A. Navalny’s death in a Russian prison, which is not the same story but certainly related. I wrote about “Navalny,” Daniel Roher’s Oscar-winning documentary that covers his opposition to Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, and thought of other films that help illuminate the war in Ukraine years into the struggle.“Donbass” (streaming on the Criterion Channel and Kanopy) is Sergei Loznitsa’s darkly absurd comedy that elliptically pokes miserable fun at the way ordinary people become caught up in propaganda, violence and systems of repression, specifically in eastern Ukraine. “Donbass” isn’t technically a documentary (there are actors and a script), but Loznitsa often makes nonfiction, and elements threaded throughout this film blur lines between fiction and nonfiction, making you wonder what you’re actually looking at.“A House Made of Splinters” (rent on most major platforms), directed by Simon Lereng Wilmont, was nominated alongside “Navalny” at last year’s Oscars. It’s an observational film, set in an eastern Ukraine home for children who are separated from their parents. Through their eyes, we gain a new view of the bleak human factors that spring up in wartime — violence, drugs, poverty — and that suggest, with an almost unbearable gentleness, the generational repercussions to come.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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‘Mea Culpa’ Review: Who’s Really to Blame, and for What?
The tagline of Tyler Perry’s new movie is “everyone’s guilty of something,” but the responsibility for this willfully steamy, decidedly silly thriller is all his.Is creating a guilty pleasure something a director can — or even should — aim for? That’s one of the questions wafting over the writer-director Tyler Perry’s willfully steamy thriller “Mea Culpa.”Cast for sizzle, the movie stars the singer-actor Kelly Rowland as Mea Harper, a Chicago defense attorney, and Trevante Rhodes (“Moonlight”) as a successful painter accused of killing his girlfriend. Her body has yet to been found, but there were skull fragments in one of his paintings.The assistant district attorney Ray Hawthorne (Nick Sagar) hopes to leverage the case for a mayoral run. He’s also Mea’s brother-in-law. In the firm clutches of the matriarch Azalia (Kerry O’Malley), the Hawthornes are an ambitious clan who appear to have borrowed much of their dialogue from the daytime soaps of yore. Among Mea’s reasons for taking this case is the Hawthorne family’s condescension and the excessive deference her husband, Kal, (Sean Sagar) shows his mother. (In case the family isn’t close enough, the actors Sean and Nick Sagar are brothers).Rowland commits to the thankless task of playing a smart woman gone stupid. Rhodes can’t do much with Zyair, whose affect is more flat than seductive. Or, as Mea’s private investigator and friend Jimmy (RonReaco Lee, a bright spot) quips: Zyair’s either a great liar or a psychopath.While the movie teases with its “is he or isn’t he a murderer?” quandary, the soundtrack boasts killer tunes, including Isaac Hayes’s cover of “Walk on By,” playing like a caution the first time Mea visits Zyair’s loft. The warning goes unheeded, and the two embark on a possibly dangerous and decidedly silly liaison, one that taps into spousal angst and features plenty of soft-core intrigue.Mea CulpaRated R for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, language, some violence and drug use. Running time: 2 hours. Watch on Netflix. More
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Manslaughter Trial Begins of ‘Rust’ Armorer in Alec Baldwin Shooting
Prosecutors said the armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, was responsible for the presence of live ammunition on the set and for failing to check the gun; the defense said she was a scapegoat.The involuntary manslaughter trial of the armorer who loaded the gun Alec Baldwin was rehearsing with on the set of “Rust” when it fired, killing the movie’s cinematographer, began on Thursday with prosecutors accusing her of performing “sloppy and incomplete” safety checks of the weapon and of being responsible for the presence of live rounds on the set.During opening arguments one of the prosecutors told the jury that the armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, had treated gun safety protocols on the film set “as if they were optional,” leading her to miss the fact that she had loaded a live round into an old-fashioned revolver she was preparing for Mr. Baldwin.The gun went off as he practiced drawing it at a blocking rehearsal, killing the film’s cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins.“We believe that it was the negligent acts and failures of the defendant, Ms. Gutierrez, that resulted in both the acts that contributed to Ms. Hutchins’s death and to the live rounds being brought onto the set,” the prosecutor, Jason J. Lewis, said in the First Judicial District Courthouse in Santa Fe, N.M., as the trial began.Mr. Baldwin is being tried separately on an involuntary manslaughter charge. He has pleaded not guilty.On the day of the fatal shooting — Oct. 21, 2021 — the crew was setting up a tight frame of Mr. Baldwin drawing a revolver ahead of a gunfight when the weapon fired a live round, striking Ms. Hutchins and then hitting the movie’s director, Joel Souza, who survived.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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‘Io Capitano’ Review: A Migration Odyssey
The Italian director of the film “Gomorrah” focuses his tender yet unsparing lens on two teenage boys journeying from their home in Senegal to Europe.The Italian director Matteo Garrone has a talent for cruelty. There’s always been more to Garrone’s movies than unkindness, but he has a striking facility for crystallizing human baseness in images that are both specific and laden with surplus meaning. When I think of “Gomorrah,” his 2008 drama about a Neapolitan criminal syndicate, I immediately re-see the shot of two dead teenagers in the bucket of a bulldozer — a grotesque Pietà.Two very different adolescents figure in “Io Capitano,” which tracks a pair of Senegalese cousins as they struggle to make their way from their home in Dakar to Europe. Seydou (a tremendous Seydou Sarr) lives with his widowed mother and younger siblings in a cramped house, but spends much of his time with Moussa (Moustapha Fall), his friend and cousin. Both boys want to live in Europe, where Seydou dreams of finding stardom as a musician. So, when they’re not at home or school, they work at building sites hauling heavy loads to save for their trip. They have a wad of cash when the story begins; it won’t be nearly enough.Garrone efficiently fills in Seydou’s everyday life, its routines and textures, its possibilities and limitations, with attentive camerawork, his customary eye for pungent detail and relaxed, measured rhythms. Seydou and Moussa’s fondness for each other and mutual dependence are evident in their gazes and gestures, and in the unforced intimacy of how they walk and talk together. They’re sweet, pleasant, optimistic and nice to be around; they’re also teenagers. When Seydou tells his mother that he plans to go abroad, she chastises him — worry radiates off her like a fever — and he quickly backs off. Soon after, though, he and Moussa leave.Their journey is divided into distinct sections that take the teenagers deep into the Sahara, involves a barbaric interlude in Libya and eventually brings them to the edge of the Mediterranean. It’s an often punishing trip, one punctuated with, and increasingly defined by, violence that can be near-phantasmagoric in its depravity. Garrone, who wrote the script with several of his regular collaborators, has drawn from accounts by migrants who have made analogous journeys. It took one of the movie’s advisers, an Ivorian man named Mamadou Kouassi, three terrible years to reach Europe, where he works in Italy advising migrants. (Similar crossings are detailed in reports from organizations like Human Rights Watch.)By the time Seydou and Moussa are on a bus out of Dakar, they have heard about the dangers of their enterprise. But they’re excited by the idea of adventure and by the prospect of fame, their naïveté stoked by the videos they watch on a cellphone. “White people,” Moussa teases Seydou, “will be asking you for autographs.” Seydou also wants to help his family (his mother has a small market stall), though Garrone doesn’t emphasize the family’s poverty. Seydou and Moussa are poor, certainly by the standards of the Westerners who presumably constitute this movie’s target audience. Yet they’re not abject, downtrodden; rather, they are kids, open to the world and eager to chart their own course.This gives Seydou and Moussa’s youthful desires a universal aspect, of course, which initially frames their undertaking as a classic adventure rather than as a docudrama lifted from the news. Whatever the powerful political forces and the socioeconomic conditions that have helped to shape the characters’ lives, the boys themselves approach their journey as an ambitious undertaking, with visceral giddiness not desperation. Their innocence is palpable. It also creates an intense sense of apprehension, at least for viewers aware of the agonies experienced by refugees, migrants and asylum seekers worldwide. I think that Garrone trusts that his audience has some awareness of those agonies, and perhaps even a role in them.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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‘About Dry Grasses’ Review: The Weariness of Hope
The latest intimate epic from the master filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan asks whether the world can change, and we can change with it.Two paths lie before the artist. One is through empathy, identifying deeply with the world and interpreting it so others can peer through the artist’s eyes. The other is detachment, standing apart from everyone and everything, observing it from a position of cool remove.Samet (Deniz Celiloglu), the protagonist of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “About Dry Grasses,” is the second kind of artist, and it has not been great for his soul. Four years into his mandatory service as a public school art teacher in East Anatolia, he’s fed up with the locals, whom he finds to be mostly a waste of time. But he isn’t terribly kind to anyone, including his roommate and fellow teacher Kenan (Musab Ekici), who likes living there and enjoys his work. Samet is miserable, and eager for a transfer to Istanbul.The one bright light — or at least, distraction — in Samet’s life is Sevim (Ece Bagci), his teachers’ pet, a bright-eyed eighth grader who probably has a crush on her teacher. Their interactions cross no lines. But they interact like peers, and Samet brings her a small and insignificant gift, and even the other students have noticed he only calls on Sevim and her friends in class. Which is why Samet is so shocked, and affronted, when he discovers that two pupils have accused him and Kenan of inappropriate contact with students. He can guess who those two are, and he’s mortified and angry.From here the story starts churning, and Samet’s bad mood deepens. Ceylan, the living reigning master of Turkish cinema, loves to throw a displaced intellectual into a confounding situation and watch him squirm, but his camera is always a source of stillness, pausing for long stretches on the same frame, often juxtaposing the natural landscape with a character’s internal life. Here, the landscape is wintry. Everyone is forever trudging through the snow, and the eternal whiteness throws individual figures and faces into sharp relief.Samet sees the potential for a great image — he is an artist, after all. Ceylan sprinkles stunning still portraits into the film, presumably taken by Samet, of the local people, which might suggest he has some interest in their lives after all. But if he feels curiosity, he masks it well. The center of Samet’s world is Samet and his superiority. (He seems of a piece with the misanthropic writer in Christian Petzold’s “Afire”: his irritations with people serve to convince him that he lives a life of more meaning than they do.)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
