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      Disney to Diminish Content Warnings Shown Before Classic Films

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      In addition to wording changes, the warnings will no longer autoplay at the beginning of movies such as “Dumbo” and “Peter Pan.”Disney is preparing to downplay the content warnings on its streaming service that accompany classic movies that include racial stereotypes, altering their language and decreasing their visibility.The content warning that currently autoplays on Disney+ before movies such as “Dumbo” (1941) and “Peter Pan” (1953) cautions of “negative depictions and/or mistreatment of people or cultures,” adding, “These stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now.”The new disclaimer will warn that the movie “may contain stereotypes or negative depictions” and will not appear as introductory text that plays before the beginning of a film, a company spokesman said. Instead, the language will now appear in the details section of certain films, where viewers will have to navigate to find it. (As of Wednesday morning, the original content warning still appeared on Disney+.)Disney is also changing the diversity component of how it rates its executives and makes compensation decisions. Company leaders will now be graded on a “Talent Strategy” performance factor instead of a “Diversity & Inclusion” one, Sonia Coleman, Disney’s senior executive vice president and chief human resources officer, said on Tuesday in an email seen by The New York Times. The new factor will cover how executives “incorporate different perspectives,” “cultivate an environment where all employees can thrive” and “sustain a robust pipeline.”The changes were earlier reported by Axios.The evolution of Disney’s content warnings comes in the wake of other decisions the company has made that signal a shift in strategy on hot-button cultural issues.Pixar, a division of Walt Disney Studios, removed a transgender story line from an upcoming animated series, a decision that became public in December, after the presidential election, though Disney said it was made last summer. Last year, the company also declined to release an episode of a different animated show, Disney Channel’s “Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur,” that depicted a transgender character’s interest in sports.In 2022, Disney’s chief executive, Robert A. Iger, said publicly that some of the company’s products had grown too political and ordered a review of upcoming projects.In December, Disney decided to settle a defamation suit brought by President Trump for $15 million plus legal fees. The accusation concerned an on-air statement made by the ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos that Mr. Trump had been found “liable for rape” in a New York civil trial, when in fact the president had been found liable for sexual abuse (the judge in the case noted that New York has a narrow legal definition of rape).Disney executives, including Mr. Iger, were motivated to settle primarily by the fear that the company could lose the case. But they were also worried about Mr. Trump’s treatment of ABC News should the suit continue and about the company’s reputation among the broad cross-section of consumers it wants to reach. More

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      ‘Captain America: Brave New World’ Review: Anthony Mackie’s Turn

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      The latest Marvel movie introduces a new Captain America in the form of a political thriller.Picture this: a suspected killer running from the government; a gruff president staving off enemies on a plane; a brainwashed former soldier embroiled in a conspiracy. It’s not the spiky political thrillers “The Fugitive” or “Air Force One” or “The Manchurian Candidate,” it’s “Captain America: Brave New World.”Then again, the film recruited Harrison Ford into a cinematic universe that single-handedly welded the modern movie wink — why not give us what we expect? In its early goings, “Brave New World” does indeed read partially as a paranoid ’90s genre film trapped in a Marvel movie, struggling to break free from its franchise constraints: too much setup, too many villains, too much thinly scattered lore.After Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie), a.k.a. the new Captain America, retrieves a valuable substance known as adamantium from the villain Sidewinder (Giancarlo Esposito as a hammy iteration of Gus Fring, his “Breaking Bad” character), he brings it back to a grateful President Ross (Harrison Ford). At a gathering meant to announce a global treaty around adamantium’s usage, the president is nearly assassinated by Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly, a bright spot), a former soldier who goes rogue. Wilson, in turn, goes off to find the mystery villain who is controlling not only Bradley, but also what eventually becomes a hulking-mad Ross.It’s all a lot to process and yet not nearly enough to hold your attention. For all of the movie’s genre ambitions, the only wisps of tangible political intrigue to be found are in the ones unintended, or via allusions to ones already explored (global class politics and the mixed messages about a Black Captain America in the film’s TV precursor, “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier”).What’s left instead is a movie whose idea of tension is mostly to move at light speed with constant explication. The film, directed by Julius Onah, has the frayed tailoring of a movie marked by reshoots and changes: The writing is stiff and the ensemble is mostly charmless, while the visuals are slapdash.As the new Captain America, Mackie was perhaps doomed from the start. And yet, he lacks the megawatt magnetism to elevate, or even just obscure, the poor construction of a tentpole franchise on his own. He is a far better actor elsewhere, but here his stand-alone avenger and the bad blockbuster only show the loose seams.What the film mostly relies on instead is Ford, not only as an actor, but as his alter ego. When the Red Hulk finally does appear, it’s an add-on — a last-ditch effort to instead recapture the kind of fan-service glee of Marvels old. With its cheap action and garish visuals, it’s then that we enter yet another genre altogether: action-figure commercial.Captain America: Brave New WorldRated PG-13 for hulk smashes. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Gints Zilbalodis Discusses ‘Flow’ and the Movie’s Oscar Nominations

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      “We beat James Cameron!” the filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis said with a shy smile during a recent video interview. “Flow,” his second animated feature, is now one of the highest grossing films ever in his native Latvia, surpassing even Cameron’s “Avatar” franchise at the local box office.Latvia has a population of roughly 1.8 million people, and “Flow” has sold more than 255,000 admissions since it was first released in August 2024. The film is still playing in Latvian theaters.“We still have sold-out screenings in week 23 now,” Zilbalodis, 30, said.A critical and commercial success, Zilbalodis’s computer-animated, dialogue-free film follows a group of animals helping each other survive a flood. It received two Oscar nominations last month, for best animated feature and best international feature, and is the first Latvian production nominated for any Academy Award.A scene from “Flow,” which is nominated for two Academy Awards.Sideshow/Janus FilmsZilbalodis also recently won Latvia’s first Golden Globe, beating out two major American studio contenders, “The Wild Robot” and “Inside Out 2,” in the animated feature category. That “Flow” is an independent production largely financed with public funding and conceived on free, open-source software called Blender, makes the victory feel even more of a feat.And the director’s Baltic homeland is not being subtle about their joy over this triumph. The Golden Globe was exhibited for a week at the Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga, the country’s capital, guarded by two cat statues, in an allusion to the movie’s protagonist, a dark gray feline.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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      A Lost Silent Film About Lincoln Was Unearthed by an Intern

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      “The Heart of Lincoln,” a 1922 movie directed by the pioneering filmmaker Francis Ford, was found at a stock-footage library on Long Island.No intern task is too small. Not getting coffee, not running errands and certainly not rummaging through piles of old films only to dig up a long-lost piece of history.When Dan Martin was asked to sort through dozens of old film cans, some of which were rusted shut, at Historic Films Archive, a stock-footage library on Long Island, he was happy to do the unglamorous work. He described the company’s climate-controlled storage vault as a “dark, concrete basement” flush with films.“This is the sort of thing that you go to school for as a film preservation student,” said Martin, 26, who is studying at Toronto Metropolitan University.Standing in the vault during the final week of his internship last August, Martin could have picked his next stack of films from any number of shelves. The one he happened to select included a remarkable discovery: five film cans containing 16-millimeter film of “The Heart of Lincoln,” a 1922 picture that was one of more than 7,000 silent films considered lost by the Library of Congress.“The Heart of Lincoln,” directed by and starring Francis Ford, was among roughly 10,000 films donated about 20 years ago from a university in the Midwest, said Joe Lauro, the owner of Historic Films Archive. “Most of the films from that collection were educational films that were shown in classrooms,” he said. Those films were typically discarded by the institutions when they became worn out.It is the second Lincoln film by Ford — a pioneer in early Hollywood and the older brother of John Ford, the Oscar-winning director — that has been found in recent years. In 2010, a copy of his “When Lincoln Paid” (1913) was discovered by a contractor during a demolition of a New Hampshire barn.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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      Watch Adrien Brody Defend His Art in ‘The Brutalist’

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      The director Brady Corbet narrates a scene from his film, which is nominated for 10 Academy Awards.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.An architect defends his work to concerned financiers in this scene from “The Brutalist.”In the period drama, Adrien Brody stars as the Jewish Hungarian architect László Tóth, who has been commissioned to design a community center in Pennsylvania. During this sequence, László is walking a group of community advocates and financiers through the construction site. One of those people is Jim Simpson (Michael Epp), a local architect concerned more about the ballooning costs of the project than the vision of it.Narrating the sequence, Corbet said that they shot the scene in a granite quarry outside of Budapest “because we couldn’t afford to build a set.”The conversation in the scene becomes heated, and builds up to a moment where László essentially tells Jim that everything ugly in the world is Jim’s fault. The one-take sequence has a single establishing cutaway shot.Corbet said that he prefers to shoot his scenes in one take because, “that sunlight-in-a-box feeling that you have, that you’ve captured this ephemeral thing, it only occurs in sequence takes.”Read the “Brutalist” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      Where the Oscar Race Stands After ‘Emilia Pérez’ Controversy

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      “Emilia Pérez” is hobbled, “Anora” is revitalized and plenty remains up in the air ahead of the March 2 awards ceremony.Sometimes, the period after the Oscar nominations can feel like a snooze. There may be a notable snub that’s worth discussing for a few days, but things eventually settle down and people begin to behave themselves as they head into the final stretch of the season.This hasn’t been that.The last two weeks in particular have been some of the most tumultuous in recent memory, thanks in large part to the controversy involving old tweets made by one of the “Emilia Pérez” stars, Karla Sofía Gascón. The initially defiant actress went rogue to defend herself, keeping her scandal in the headlines during several crucial voting periods. Now, a film that led the field with 13 Oscar nominations has been hobbled.After all of that turbulence, where do things stand? Here are five narratives now emerging from the season that I plan to keep an eye on.‘Anora’ ascendant“Anora,” starring Mark Eydelshteyn, left, and Mikey Madison, has momentum as the race enters its final weeks.Neon, via Associated PressAs this year began, the awards-season aspirations of “Anora” appeared to stall out. The Sean Baker-directed comedy went winless at the Golden Globes on Jan. 5, and that failure-to-launch feeling lingered over the next few weeks when the Critics Choice Awards, where “Anora” hoped to score anew, were postponed from Jan. 12 to Feb. 7 because of the Los Angeles wildfires.What a difference a weekend makes. On Friday, “Anora” picked up a best-picture prize at that delayed Critics Choice ceremony, and scored top honors the next night at separate shows held by the Directors Guild of America and the Producers Guild of America. Any movie that triumphs with both of those guilds has to be considered the best-picture front-runner, even though five years ago, “1917” conquered at the PGA and DGA awards and still lost the top Oscar to “Parasite.”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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      A Turn as Trump Made Sebastian Stan an Unlikely Oscar Nominee

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      For years, it seemed fair to assume that the actor Sebastian Stan could make a career on both sides of Hollywood. There was dabbling in juicy supporting roles — he played the ex-husbands of both Tonya Harding and Pamela Anderson — while comfortably returning to the action-hero part for which he is best known: Bucky Barnes. As the erstwhile sidekick of Captain America, Stan has been a regular in the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies since 2011 (including “Thunderbolts*,” which hits theaters in May). There are surely worse fates than simply maintaining that balance.“There’s a group of actors — I’ll put Colin Farrell in this group as well — that are so handsome that in some sense it works against them,” said Jessica Chastain, Stan’s friend and castmate in “The Martian” and “The 355.”While being too good-looking a movie star may be world’s-smallest-violin territory, a whirlwind year with two standout unconventional performances now has the 42-year-old cast in a very different light. It has also already brought in some leading-man hardware, with more maybe to come.In the surreal comedy “A Different Man,” an actor who has a condition that distorts his facial features has a medical procedure to make himself instead look classically attractive — specifically, to look like Sebastian Stan. Stan’s gutsy subversion of his looks won him the Silver Bear for leading performance at last year’s Berlin International Film Festival and the Golden Globe for acting in a comedy or musical last month.Sebastian Stan, an Oscar nominee for his portrayal of President Trump in “The Apprentice,” called the movie “a fresh lens on him — but also on an American truth that doesn’t always get picked apart in this way.”Caroline Tompkins for The New York TimesThe other movie, “The Apprentice,” is about a showy, morally questionable real estate mogul in 1970s and ’80s New York named Donald J. Trump. Stan plays Trump, his looks this time buried underneath both considerable physical makeup and all the figurative baggage viewers bring to the subject. From the movie’s premiere at the Cannes Film Festival last May, it was unclear if the film would find distribution and open in theaters, let alone be a part of awards season discussion.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