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      Hollywood Strikes Send a Chill Through Britain’s Film Industry

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      Many U.S. studios’ blockbusters are filmed in Britain, so the walkouts by actors and screenwriters have caused thousands of U.K. film crews to lose work.What do “Barbie,” “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning” and “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” have in common? Besides being the summer’s big-budget movies, they were made in Britain, filmed in part at some of the country’s most esteemed studios.Big Hollywood productions are a critical part of Britain’s film and television industry. For years, they have brought in money, jobs and prestige, and helped make the sector a bright spot in Britain’s economy. But now, that special relationship has brought difficulty.The strikes by actors and screenwriters in the United States, which have ground much of Hollywood to a standstill, are also being strongly felt in Britain, where productions including “Deadpool 3,” “Wicked” and Part 2 of “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning” stopped filming. Throughout the late summer months, when the industry would be at its busiest to take advantage of the long days, soundstages at Pinewood, Britain’s largest studios, were instead nearly empty.Film crews, like camera workers and costume designers, are out of work after productions abruptly stopped. Bectu, the British union for workers in behind-the-scenes roles in creative industries, surveyed nearly 4,000 of its film and TV members and 80 percent said their jobs had been affected, with three-quarters not working.The British impact from the Hollywood strikes is mostly on productions using members of SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union, which was picketing Universal Studios in August.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York Times“Irrespective of whether you think the studios are right or whether the unions are right, there are people who are suffering in the U.K.,” said Marcus Ryder, the incoming chief executive of the Film and TV Charity, which supports workers who are struggling financially.In August, the charity received more than 320 applications for hardship grants, compared with 37 a year earlier.Since the first “Star Wars” movie was filmed partly in a studio in England in the mid-1970s, British film studios have been a top destination for American productions, and that impetus gathered pace in the past decade thanks to generous tax incentives and moviemakers’ demand for experienced crews. More recently, Netflix, Amazon Prime and other streaming services have snapped up studio space so quickly they set off a boom in studio building.These big-budget productions employ thousands of local workers, and pour billions into the economy. Last year, a record 6.3 billion pounds ($7.8 billion) was spent on film and high-end TV productions in Britain, according to the British Film Institute. Nearly 90 percent came from American studios or other foreign productions.The number of films or television shows delayed in Britain since mid-July, when Hollywood actors joined the writers’ strike, is relatively small, maybe about a dozen, but they are the big productions that require lots of crew and support an ecosystem of visual effects companies, catering and other services. More

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      ‘Superpower’ Review: Sean Penn Chronicles the War in Ukraine

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      This documentary, which Penn directed with Aaron Kaufman, includes Penn’s interview with the Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky on the first day of Russia’s invasion.Near the beginning of “Superpower,” Sean Penn tries to pre-empt the criticism generated by his previous trips to conflict zones. “Weathered though it is,” he says in narration, “my famous face gets me access to places and people I may otherwise not have known.”That is undoubtedly true, even if, in the past, he has used that access to lob softball questions at El Chapo. When it comes to chronicling the war in Ukraine, the subject of this documentary, which Penn directed with Aaron Kaufman, it is hard to begrudge the actor’s mission. Like the French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy, who has been making his own documentaries on the war, Penn appears to have one eye in the mirror, but at least he’s taking some sort of action.“Superpower” began as a film about the unlikely presidency of the Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky and his path from comic actor to politician. Much of the first part consists of material Penn compiled from the preinvasion period. Experts lay out the complexities of the country’s 21st-century history. Ukrainians reflect on the legacy of the Maidan protests and express skepticism about Zelensky’s potential.Penn scores a coup by getting an on-camera interview with Zelensky on the first day of Russia’s invasion, and he films him on two additional occasions, in a video interview and in person on a later visit. Zelensky’s words — about what his country needs, about how his 9-year-old has prematurely grown into being like a “wise political man” — are often familiar but still stirring. Potentially more of a stunt is Penn’s trip to the front, which seems as much about proving his mettle as getting the story.SuperpowerNot rated. In English and Ukrainian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. Watch on Paramount+. More

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      With Striking Actors Off-Limits, Directors Get Their Close-Ups

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      Since striking movie stars are not allowed to promote studio films, filmmakers unexpectedly, and in some cases uneasily, have the spotlight to themselves.For more than half a century, a coterie of critics and filmmakers has been making the case for what’s known as auteur theory: the idea that great directors are the central creative forces behind their films, shaping them just as authors shape their books.But outside a relatively small pantheon of great filmmakers, most directors have continued to be overshadowed, at least in the public eye, by their movie stars.The Hollywood strikes are changing that.With striking actors forbidden by their union from promoting studio films, directors suddenly have the spotlight largely to themselves, if somewhat reluctantly. They have been the main attractions at recent film festivals in Venice, Telluride and Toronto and on press tours that were once organized around A-list movie stars.Even star vehicles must be promoted without their stars. With Denzel Washington, one of the most recognizable names in Hollywood, and his co-star, Dakota Fanning, unable to promote the third installment of the “Equalizer” series, it fell to the director, Antoine Fuqua, to go on a one-man press tour.“It’s a strange time,” Fuqua told a TV news reporter ahead of the movie’s Sept. 1 premiere. “I would love to have them here.”At the Toronto International Film Festival, Q. and A. sessions after screenings typically involve actors and filmmakers, but this year, many of the directors — including Ava DuVernay and Richard Linklater — answered questions alone. Behind-the-scenes figures were suddenly in front of the cameras: As the red carpet at the festival opened, a staff member warned the press and onlookers not to be surprised if they didn’t recognize some of the people posing for photos, assuring them that they were associated with the films.Atom Egoyan, a Canadian filmmaker whose relationship with the Toronto festival goes back 40 years, said the focus on filmmaking over celebrity at this year’s event reminded him of the festival’s earlier years, before the increasing presence of studio films made high-profile Hollywood actors more of a central focus there.“Certainly for auteur filmmakers, it’s been a breath of fresh air,” said Egoyan, whose latest movie, “Seven Veils,” starring Amanda Seyfried, debuted in Toronto last week. “The industry is going through monumental transitions, and so this has been a nice little oasis.”And as the Venice International Film Festival closed earlier this month, the director Yorgos Lanthimos accepted the competition’s top prize for his surrealist comedy “Poor Things” without any of the film’s stars behind him.“Celebrity is always going to sell more than a director,” said David Gerstner, a professor of cinema studies at City University of New York. “But it is a moment in which directors are being given the opportunity to shine, to be the centerpiece. It’s just unfortunate that it’s under these circumstances.”The director David Fincher promoted his Netflix movie “The Killer” at the Venice International Film Festival. Kate Green/Getty Images, via NetflixIt is not necessarily a comfortable position for some of the directors, amid broad social pressure to stand in solidarity with unionized writers and actors against the major entertainment studios they are at odds with.And there are already bubbling tensions: When the union that represents Hollywood directors, the Directors Guild of America, made a deal with the studios in June, keeping them out of the labor unrest, it drew some criticism from striking screenwriters.Caught in the middle of the studios that fund their ambitions and the actors and writers who help realize them, directors tend to tread carefully when discussing the strike.“I can understand both sides,” the director David Fincher said earlier this month at a news conference for the Venice premiere of his movie “The Killer,” whose star, Michael Fassbender, was absent. “I think all we can do is encourage them to talk.”It is a particularly complicated moment for directors who are also actors or writers and hold multiple union memberships.Bradley Cooper, who both directs and stars in “Maestro,” about the conductor Leonard Bernstein, decided not to attend the film’s premiere at the Venice Film Festival.And Kenneth Branagh — who both directs the new Agatha Christie mystery movie “A Haunting in Venice,” which debuted in theaters this past weekend, and stars in it as the detective Hercule Poirot — has decided to leave interviews about the film to behind-the-scenes figures such as a top producer, the production designer and the composer.Between the multiple roles many artists hold, and the fact that some actors have been given permission by their union, SAG-AFTRA, to promote independent films, the landscape is a bit confusing.“It’s a little bit like the wild west,” said Peter Principato, chief executive of a Hollywood management production company that represents directors, actors and writers.People are making their own calculations, he said: Some are simply following the letter of the rules, which allows multi-hyphenates to promote movies in a director’s capacity, while others are more wary of taking active roles. In some cases, he said, directors are required by their contracts to promote their films.When “Poor Things” won the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival, its director, Yorgos Lanthimos, was on hand but not its stars. Guglielmo Mangiapane/ReutersOf course, some directors are as much of a draw as their stars. Few directors attract as much natural interest as Martin Scorsese, whose highly anticipated, Apple-backed film “Killers of the Flower Moon” is slated for release in theaters next month, even if the movie’s stars, Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro, are unable to act as the magnets for press that they typically are.And Fuqua, the director of “The Equalizer 3,” has the kind of heightened profile — thanks to a varied career creating music videos for stars like Prince and Stevie Wonder, directing successful Hollywood thrillers, and making documentaries — that can make him a successful emissary for the film, noted Alan Nierob, a publicist for the director. Fuqua promoted the movie by speaking with “Good Morning America” about his career; with movie blogs about the trilogy; and with myriad other publications.The strike is also testing the accepted wisdom of movie marketing. Nierob noted that the limitations around promotion had not appeared to affect the movie’s release; it topped the U.S. box office its first weekend, earning just under $35 million. (Of course, Washington’s name on a movie poster or face in a trailer may do the promotional work as well as any interview.)But it is unusual to see directors carry so much of the promotional weight on their shoulders. With this summer’s Disney horror-comedy “Haunted Mansion” unable to rely on its big-name actors — LaKeith Stanfield, Owen Wilson, Danny DeVito and Jamie Lee Curtis among them — its director, Justin Simien, who is also a member of the Writers Guild, went on interviews alone. “I felt pulled at the seams,” he said in an interview with The New York Times.And to promote the superhero film “Blue Beetle,” which topped the box office last month, Warner Bros. sent the director Ángel Manuel Soto to England, Mexico and around the United States, including Puerto Rico, to host screenings and conduct an estimated 100 interviews.The director Ángel Manuel Soto toured England, Mexico and the United States to promote his film “Blue Beetle.”Valerie Macon/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAt festivals, directors have been faced with questions that, in previous years, they would have sat back and let the actors answer.Lanthimos, whose film “Poor Things” generated buzz at Venice both for its Oscars potential and its many boundary-pushing sex scenes, was the only person at the festival’s news conference who could speak to the movie’s graphic nature and how its lead actress, Emma Stone, had handled it.“It’s a shame that Emma could not be here to speak more about it, because it will be coming all from me,” Lanthimos said at the news conference, where he was flanked by his cinematographer and one of his production designers. He later noted, according to Variety: “We had to be confident Emma had to have no shame about her body, nudity, engaging in those scenes, and she understood that right away.”And at the Telluride Film Festival last month, Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, the directors of “Nyad,” the Netflix film about the marathon swimmer Diana Nyad, were not only without their stars, Annette Bening and Jodie Foster, but without the main subject of the movie, who also happens to be a SAG-AFTRA member.After the film’s first screening, the directors said they wished that Nyad and the movie’s stars could have been there to see it, and share their own perspectives with the audience.“It’s tough to have to try to speak for them,” Chin said.Mekado Murphy contributed reporting from Toronto and Nicole Sperling from Telluride, Colo. More

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      ‘Purlie Victorious’: Ossie Davis’s ‘Gospel to Humanity’ Returns to Broadway

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      The stars Leslie Odom Jr. and Kara Young and the director Kenny Leon discuss the revival, and why its satirical take on racism is still so timely.Ossie Davis’s satirical play “Purlie Victorious” opened at the Cort Theater in September 1961 with Davis as the charismatic preacher Purlie Victorious Judson and Ruby Dee, his artistic collaborator and wife, playing Purlie’s green but soon-to-be-wise sidekick, Lutiebelle Gussie Mae Jenkins. Six decades later, Leslie Odom Jr. (“Hamilton”) and Kara Young (“Clyde’s,” “Cost of Living”) are stepping into those roles in the play’s first Broadway revival, directed by Kenny Leon at the Music Box Theater.Set in the 1940s on a plantation in the segregated South, the story follows Purlie’s return home to Georgia to claim a $500 inheritance, which he wants to use to buy and integrate the local church. To prevent Cap’n Cotchipee, the white plantation owner, from usurping his family’s birthright, Purlie has to trick Cotchipee — a plan that will also involve recruiting the unsuspecting Lutiebelle to stand in for his recently deceased Cousin Bee, who is the rightful inheritor of the money. In other words, Purlie’s strategy hinges on Cotchipee’s inability to differentiate one Black woman from another, and in so doing, the play uses comedy to expose racism as absurd, arbitrary and detrimental to Black life.That pointed critique of racism, and Davis’s clever use of language, is why the play was so well received. “Although his good humor never falters,” the Times critic Howard Taubman wrote at the time, Davis “has made his play the vehicle for a powerful and passionate sermon.” It ran for nearly a year, and the activists W.E.B. Du Bois, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X all saw it. A film adaptation, “Gone Are the Days!,” followed in 1963, and then came the 1970 Broadway musical, “Purlie.”Davis and Dee’s children, Nora Davis Day, Guy Davis and Hasna Muhammad, remember watching all of those versions. The siblings, who are the executors of their parents’ estate, had personal reasons for reviving the play. “It resonates with us because it is my dad’s specific language,” said Guy Davis, who composed the revival’s incidental music. “My sisters and I just wanted to revisit that part of our lives.”“This soars as a true work of art,” said Kenny Leon, the show’s director. “Everything about being American, definitely about being Black in America, you can find in his play.”Elias Williams for The New York Times“Purlie Victorious” itself was inspired by Davis’s childhood. “Dad grew up in the deepest part of Georgia, and had cause to be irate about the conditions there,” Day recalled. “He tried to write a play that was full of anger, vitriol, and righteousness, but it just didn’t work until he began to look at it and laugh and say, ‘This is ridiculous, that one group of people feels like they can control and own other people.’”But Dee had reservations about Davis’s use of satire.“She didn’t like it,” Muhammad said. “She thought it was stereotypical. How could he have these characters? And then he read it aloud to her, and then she was laughing and realized the power of the language and the value of the piece.”Now Leon, Odom and Young say they are excited to share a work that they consider a classic with new audiences. During an interview last month before a rehearsal, they discussed their history with the play, the power of its satire and what it means to stage this production today. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.The Davis-Dee children, from left: Guy Davis, Nora Davis Day and Hasna Muhammad, who together helped bring the revival to Broadway.Elias Williams for The New York TimesHow did this production come about?KENNY LEON Our producer Jeffrey Richards, whose mom [Helen Stern Richards] was the original company manager of the play and the general manager of the musical, began talking to me about this seven years ago. But I also spent time with Ossie and Ruby when they came to the rehearsals for my first Broadway show, “A Raisin in the Sun” [in 2004]. When Jeffrey approached me about possibly doing this on Broadway, I said, “I’m your guy,” because I love Ossie Davis. And I love this piece. I directed the musical [in 2008 at the Fox Theater in Atlanta]. It’s an exciting play and an outrageous comedy that is somewhere between rage and hope.LESLIE ODOM Somebody had shoved the script in my hand as a young theater student. It was one of those plays that you should look at for an audition or a scene study class. The musical was also done in Philly when I was a kid, at the Freedom Theater, where I started acting as a 13-year-old.LEON But Leslie is what made this production a possibility — being that anchor. I found out that he always loved the play, so to have him want to be in it and produce it with Jeffrey Richards made it a reality. KARA YOUNG I was really surprised that Ossie Davis wrote a play like this. At that time, and this is just my imagination, because “A Raisin in the Sun” was so prolific, he really had the chance to change the world and the way that people thought about Black life. [Dee starred in the original 1959 Broadway production with Davis joining the cast later that year.] He dissected the absurdity of the social and racial structures of this world, and America in particular, and the legacy of slavery in this country. It is Ossie’s gospel to humanity. There are just so many amazing lines here that are the voices of a million people and a million spirits.LEON I don’t want people to shortchange Ossie Davis’s craftsmanship and his writing an outrageous comedy that embraced different styles, like vaudeville, broad comedy, and a little bit of the drama from “A Raisin in the Sun.” Look at this penmanship, poetry, movement and song. Many times, I think for an African American work, they have a different set of rules to gauge its greatness. But this soars as a true work of art.In addition to Young and Odom Jr., the cast includes Vanessa Bell Calloway, far left, and Heather Alicia Simms, far right. Elias Williams for The New York TimesHow do you think it will land at this moment?ODOM I’m curious, too. When I think about the last incredible experience I had in this town with a piece of work [“Hamilton”], and I think that if that piece of work had been written five years before, it might not have done the thing. So, I am excited to discover why now, and I am along for the ride.YOUNG I feel like the timing is almost perfect.LEON We were talking earlier about how every generation has to fight for democracy. We have to fight for true freedom and beauty, and what better time to be reminded of that than right now as we engage in the 2024 election? As we think about those things that Ossie Davis talks about, we got to stay in truth.YOUNG And remember our history.LEON What’s that line Purlie says? “Give us a piece of the Constitution.”ODOM “We want our cut of the Constitution and we want it now: and not with no little teaspoon, white folks. Throw it at us with a shovel.”How do you balance the play’s humor and its politics?ODOM It’s a romp. It’s a real hoot. We’re having a ball. As joyful and as light-filled as this experience is, he realized it was too painful to ask an audience to sit through it. It’s already an act of great generosity and grace that he decided to put it together in this way. He wanted us to be able to witness these people that he grew up with, this country that he grew up in, this farm that he knew so well, but he wanted you to be able to stand it and to tolerate it. LEON We’re telling it in a joyous way and dealing with some real stuff.YOUNG There are just so many gems about the violence of our just existing. There is a line I said the other day that reminds me of gentrification. Lutiebelle says, “The whole thing was a trip to get you out of the house.” I’m a Harlemite, and I’ve been feeling the violence of gentrification for years. I know that’s not what the play is about, but these things are dropped in the story, and because it is so dramaturgically sound, they can live on their own.LEON That’s so beautiful because that, to me, is what artists are supposed to do. We’re supposed to revisit the work from the previous generation and say, “How does that relate to me now?” I treat revivals like they’re new plays. Everything about being American, definitely about being Black in America, you can find in his play.Is that why you changed the structure from three to two acts, without an intermission?LEON I read plays five times to inform me of what I will do with them. After the fifth reading, I came away with the idea that it is about getting to that last page and scene. And getting to that last scene meant it’s about the rhythm of what’s happening onstage and people in the audience not thinking about time. I don’t want the outside world to come in. I just want them to get lost in this world.Kara and Leslie, what is it like to invoke the spirit of Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis onstage?YOUNG I’m a huge fan of Ruby, oddly also as a Harlemite. Ruby and Ossie are great examples of what it means to be organizers and activists and to be a force of change. But what it means to step into a role that Ruby Dee originated, I can’t quite put that into language. But this is also a role about a young woman and her journey, about finding a sense of self and her importance in the world for the first time and standing in that. It feels like a very universal story for a Black girl.ODOM The thing about these drama schools around the country is that they train you in the classics. My training prepared me for this. But I think my responsibility as an artist is to choose the projects that I’m a part of thoughtfully, collaborate with people that I respect, and work on things at the highest level. That’s what I’m supposed to be doing. It takes a while to get there. We’re doing this play as written in 1961, but people will be so surprised at how hip it is and how much it stands up. The more we learn, the more we build trust with Mr. Davis and his words. It rises to support us. How do you want people to feel after leaving “Purlie Victorious”?LEON That this feels like a new play. I think that’s what Ossie would want: us to introduce this to live human beings whose lives are affected daily.YOUNG The irony of racism. When you really break it down, the construct of racism is just really absurd. But, even in those power structures, these characters need each other. We need each other.ODOM Recently, I read Clint Smith’s book “How the Word Is Passed.” He paints a more honest picture of chattel slavery and the truth of that in this country. “Nostalgia is a fantasy about the past using no facts,” he says. “And somewhere in between is memory, which is kind of this blend of history and a little bit of emotion.” Man, did that strike me. I want this “Purlie” to feel like a memory. I hope that it feels like the facts need emotion. More

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      How “Bottoms” Reinvents the Coming-of-Age Fight Scene

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      The hero vs. bully template made famous in the ’80s gets subverted in this indie comedy, as well as in Hulu’s “Miguel Wants to Fight.”The director Emma Seligman narrates a sequence from “Bottoms,” featuring Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri.Orion Pictures Inc.You know the setup: one boy, the underdog, is forced to face off with a boy with more social clout — and, likely, more muscles. They’re in the gym, the hallway, or the schoolyard, and by the time the last punch is thrown, the underdog, our hero, has taken his first steps into manhood.For decades the school scrap was a prevailing coming-of-age trope in movies and TV. The ’80s produced some of the most memorable scenes, whether it was Clifford versus Moody in “My Bodyguard” or Ralphie versus Scut in “A Christmas Story.” Then in 1993, Richard Linklater gave us the memorable freshmen versus the paddle-swinging Fred O’Bannion and his cohort of sadistic seniors in “Dazed and Confused”; and in 2002, Sam Raimi offered Peter Parker decking Flash Thomspon in high school. Even SpongeBob has found himself caught in a boating school scuffle with a classmate.But teen brawling onscreen has since evolved to becoming more than just a metaphor for boys at the cusp of adulthood learning to assert their masculinity. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the queer sex comedy “Bottoms,” which de-genders and subverts the boorish maleness of the school tussle as a male developmental milestone, ultimately making it about young women asserting their identities and pushing back against convention.PJ and Josie are best friends who start a female fight club at their high school, with the goal of losing their virginity to two popular cheerleaders. The entire premise of this delightfully absurd offbeat comedy is predicated on two young women using a narrative often tied to masculinity to their advantage. PJ specifically models the concept of the extracurricular on “Fight Club,” which also works as a meta-commentary: The girls in “Bottoms” are flipping gender in the same way “Bottoms” itself is reworking the testosterone-pumped, fist-bumping, male-targeted genre of fight movies like that much-worshipped film. (“I love David Fincher,” one of the girls gushes about the “Fight Club” director in passing as she walks into the first club meeting.)Rachel Sennott, Havana Rose Liu and Ayo Edebiri in “Bottoms.”Orion PicturesWhereas that Brad Pitt vehicle rewards the savagery of its virile men with sex, violence and destruction, their aggression brimming with homoerotic undertones, “Bottoms” offers its girls the same gratification, but with more comedy and explicit queerness.PJ and Josie take male posturing to the extreme, capitalizing on a rumor about their being hardened juvenile delinquents. Even when it seems they’ll be called on their bluff, they double down, as when, early in their charade, PJ goads Josie into punching her in front of the group of their peers and Josie ends up on the floor smiling, blood streaking down her chin. The girls’ popularity soars. So does their self-confidence. Somehow, these girls aimlessly bruise and bloody one another into a sense of camaraderie, even newfound strength.The movie’s wry gender subversions extend to its ridiculous depiction of PJ and Josie’s male peers, specifically the jocks, who spend the entire movie in their football uniforms. Despite these guys wearing the armor of masculine dude-bros — literally, protective shoulder pads included — “Bottoms” often makes them effeminate. They fit more squarely into a misogynist’s stereotype of women: They’re petty, sensitive, underhanded and, ultimately, the ones who need saving by the end of the movie. (The one notable exception is an example of the opposite extreme, masculinity gone wild in the form of a feral male student who spends his school days locked in a cage.)Tyler Dean Flores in “Miguel Wants to Fight.”Brett Roedel/HuluAnother recent film, “Miguel Wants to Fight,” on Hulu, also pokes holes in displays of violent masculinity, albeit with less of a payoff. Miguel is a teenage boy who also doesn’t really meet the criteria for the uber-masculine Tyler Durden type. He lives in a neighborhood where fighting is everything: Kids get into brawls on the regular, and guys who dominate in the boxing ring are revered as local heroes. Despite all this, and the fact that his father is a boxing coach, Miguel is the only one of his friends who hasn’t been in a fight. When Miguel learns his family’s moving in a week, he decides he must get into a fight before he leaves.But Miguel hesitates on the sidelines as his three buddies come to blows with another group of peers. The one scuffle he gets into involves more awkward embraces than punches. Miguel is more apt to make friends with an opponent than fight them. Even his fantasy fight sequences, in which he imagines himself as the star of his own anime or martial arts movie, sometimes end with him emasculated. In one, he wears a yellow tracksuit like Bruce Lee’s in “Game of Death” as he faces off against a bully; even after Miguel lands a strike the bully simply laughs and asks why he’s “dressed like the chick from ‘Kill Bill.’”Instead of framing the fight as Miguel’s great hurdle to self-assurance and maturity, the movie shows how Miguel’s obsession with fighting is misguided, just a distraction from the anxiety and sorrow he feels about moving away from his friends. The pressure Miguel puts on himself is all internal; he thinks his father wants a fighter son when his father just wants him to be happy and safe. Every fight scenario either causes Miguel embarrassment or ends with him selfishly alienating his friends. And when Miguel does finally get into a fight, it’s not the heroic, cinematic experience he imagined. In fact, he says to his buddy, “It sucked,” throwing in an expletive for good measure.This is the ultimate subversion that the two films pull off: While “Bottoms” ends with its female protagonists getting into a massive, bloody gladiator-esque battle and reigning victorious, the coming-of-age movie that’s actually about a boy getting into a fight ends with a 36-second tussle and a sweet reconciliation between bros.So perhaps that old saying is wrong: Fighting is sometimes the answer. It just depends on who’s throwing the punches — and what’s at stake. More

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      Streaming Horror: ‘Marry My Dead Body,’ ‘Good Boy’ and More

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      This month’s picks will take you on a global tour of terror, with tales of a Taiwanese gay ghost and a Norwegian canine whose owner is a dog’s worst friend.‘Marry My Dead Body’Stream it on Netflix.There’s nothing remotely terrifying in this charming opposites-attract ghost comedy, a box office hit in Taiwan. Give it a shot if your taste in scary movies is the flavor of Horror Lite with a side of screwball romantic (ish) comedy.When Wu Ming-han (Greg Hsu), a homophobic police officer, picks up a red envelope on the street, he gets roped into the folk ritual of a ghost marriage, a wedding to a dead person. His betrothed is Mao Mao (Austin Lin), a gay man who was killed in a hit-and-run and who still carries a torch for his ex-boyfriend. Despite their differences, the husbands agree to stay married to complete the ritual and solve Mao’s death, and in the process they forge a sweet “Odd Couple”-like companionship.Cheng Wei-hao’s film is a comedy of many kinds — horror, queer, romantic, supernatural — that evolves from a gay panic farce into a slapsticky but heartfelt bromance about forgiveness and the singular power of coming out. Hsu and Lin are winsome leading men with a natural rapport that fuels the film’s goofy gay spirit, which lives somewhere between the endearing British comedy “Kinky Boots” and the cringey cop comedy “Partners.”‘Subject’Stream it on Screambox.On his way to prison, Willem (a terrific Stephen Phillips) gets intercepted by a government agent who offers him the chance to be part of a secret mind-monitoring experiment instead of doing time. Willem agrees, and gets placed in cramped quarters lined with cameras.As the film jumps between Willem’s suffocating present and his harrowing past as a drug-addicted father, it also moves between perspectives and camera styles, including surveillance, digital and even early-era video art. When a monstrous, mummy-like entity appears in an adjacent room and menacingly watches Willem through their shared window, this formally audacious film kicks into high gear as it careers toward a despairing finale.The director Tristan Barr and the writer Vincent Befi seamlessly blend science fiction, horror and psychological thriller as they explore the horrors of addiction and the dangers of a dystopian state. As shot through a low-fi and intensely claustrophobic lens, Befi’s script is both a disorienting cautionary tale and a fever dream. Are Willem’s living nightmares real, or are we watching his life as imagined in his increasingly besieged head? I still don’t know despite a post-credit coda that tries to explain it all — and that’s what makes this one of my favorite under-the-radar horror films of the year.‘Good Boy’Rent or buy on most major platforms.Christian (Gard Lokke) leads a privileged life. He’s loaded, lives on his dead parents’ estate and is blessed with model good looks. And he’s got a cute and devoted dog named Frank. I take that back: He doesn’t have a dog, because Frank is a guy in a dog costume who Christian treats as his full-time canine companion — a hardcore manifestation of puppy play, a dom-sub scenario popular in the kink community.Sigrid (Katrine Lovise Opstad Fredriksen), who Christian meets on Tinder, at first is weirded out by Frank. But eventually she comes around to the situation, and agrees to go with the two on a weekend getaway, where Christian convinces Sigrid to put away her phone. That’s when this Norwegian film takes a sinister twist I didn’t see coming.The writer-director Viljar Boe doesn’t go overboard during most of his entertaining and exploitation-like parable about power, privilege and punishment. But that reserve goes out the window as the film’s enthusiastically sordid final stretch reaches its climax with a symphony of spanking, heavy metal and primal screams. It’s a hoot.‘Insidious Inferno’Rent or buy on major platforms.I lost count of how many conventions — haunted house, demonic possession, supernaturalism, giallo — the writer-director Calvin McCarthy packs into his low-budget meditation on grief and loss. The result is both under and over baked. But it’s also unabatingly odd and enthusiastically macabre, with a soft uncanniness akin to what made the recent weirdo thrillers “Superior” and “Outpost” so darkly entertaining.Monica (Stephanie Leet), reeling from her father’s mysterious death, heads to his secluded cottage with her husband, Andre (Neil Green). There, she hears her father’s deathly screams, has nightmares in red and vomits up chunky blood. To get away from it all, Andre spends time jogging through the forest, where he keeps encountering a strange white-eyed woman (Chynna Rae Shurts, wonderful), whose dire warnings for Andre and Monica to leave the house he ignores with deadly consequences.Stylistically, McCarthy’s giallo touches — frenzied zoom-ins, gasps, saturated red and purple cinematography — are delicious. Bonus: McCarthy gives a loving shout out to Lucio Fulci’s “The Beyond,” one of my favorite giallo films.‘Tell Me a Creepy Story’Stream it on Freevee.Two great scares front load this anthology of four international horror shorts you can stream for free.The best comes first and from the U.K.: Paul Holbrook and Samuel Dawe’s “Hungry Joe.” The title character, played by several actors as he ages, won’t stop eating, and his appetite tests the patience of his increasingly resentful mother (an excellent Laura Bayston). As Joe grows into a feral man-child, his hunger, and the film, take a gruesome turn that asks a difficult question: What responsibilities does a mother have to her not-so-little monster? (All this in just 22 minutes.) ASMR makes my skin crawl, so I was extra creeped out by Joe’s incessant sucking, chomping and slurping.The second film is Félix Dobaire’s gorgeously shot evil vegetable movie “Myosotis.” In French but nearly wordless, it reiterated one of horror’s most important housekeeping life lessons: Never leave a knife in the dishwasher blade side up. More

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      Actors Seeking Stability Turn to Directing at the Toronto Festival

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      Movies directed by actors were prominent at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. Could the reasons they’re striking also underlie the career move?By my count, there are 10 movies by actor-turned-directors at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. Ten. The majority, including Chris Pine’s “Poolman” and Anna Kendrick’s “Woman of the Hour,” are debuts.I don’t know how many actors choose to be filmmakers at any given moment; “what I really want to do is direct” is a cliché for a reason. But that still seems like a lot. And it is particularly noteworthy right now in Hollywood, when the strikes by the actors’ union, SAG-AFTRA, and the Writers Guild of America have revealed how much disparity there can be in pay and in the ownership of one’s work. Not to mention the willingness of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers to make a deal with the Directors Guild of America but not the other creatives.“Actors directing films isn’t unusual,” said Cameron Bailey, the chief executive of the Toronto festival, “but we saw a larger number this year and invited several, before we got news of the strike.” Besides the Kendrick and Pine movies, actors making directorial debuts included Patricia Arquette (“Gonzo Girl”), Kristin Scott Thomas (“North Star”), Kasia Smutniak (“Walls”) and Finn Wolfhard and Billy Bryk (“Hell of a Summer”).Directing confers control, which confers power, which confers stability, right? At the very least, if you’re directing, you’re not left hanging around.“Everyone is hanging around,” Stacey Sher, one of the “Poolman” producers, told me. “You’re hanging around to get financing. You’re hanging around to get distribution. You’re hanging around to hope that you get a date that connects. You’re hanging around to hope that you get lucky and your campaign clicks and that you’re in the zeitgeist. You’re hanging around hoping that the press likes your movie.” Sher has been producing films for more than 30 years, among them actor-director feature debuts like “Reality Bites” (Ben Stiller) and “Garden State” (Zach Braff).In “Poolman,” for which he also served as a producer and co-screenwriter, Pine plays a Lebowski-style free spirit who ministers a decrepit apartment-complex pool by day and disrupts local council meetings by night. As a director, Pine, who has been acting for two decades, suddenly found himself answering questions about everything around the clock. Sher recalled him telling her, “‘I understand how easy I had it before, just being able to go back and study my lines and prepare and stay in character.’”Though Pine had planned to publicize “Poolman” at Toronto, his support of the strike precluded his attendance because SAG-AFTRA forbids promotions during the labor action. On opening night, Sher presented the film solo, stating: “It is a different premiere and Q. and A. then we had hoped for, but there was never a second where Chris was going to do anything but stand with SAG and the W.G.A.”Pine was returning the favor. He “knew what he wanted and what he wanted was to build a team that could support him in achieving what his goals were cinematically,” Sher said. Patty Jenkins, who had directed the actor in the “Wonder Woman” franchise, was a “Poolman” producer from the start (Ian Gotler was also a producer). Jenkins acted as “directing doula,” available for technical checks and gut checks, Sher said. Pine also worked with the “Wonder Woman” films’ cinematographer, Matthew Jensen. Directing granted him the power to surround himself with people — the kind who are currently striking — who could make his new job easier.“Poolman” was a low-budget film in which almost half of the 22 days was spent shooting in a motel where beds were removed to make way for makeshift offices and dressing rooms, adding to the camaraderie. “I think if you just want the job for control, you’re not going to do a very good job,” Sher said of directing. “The best filmmakers I’ve ever worked with are the most collaborative.”Chris Pine starred in as well as directed “Poolman,” featuring Annette Bening, left, and Danny DeVito.Darren Michaels/ABC Studios“Woman of the Hour” was an exercise in combining the right people in what Miri Yoon — one of several producers on the project along with Kendrick — likened to a kind of “math” problem. Kendrick, who was initially attached only to star, “really drove us over the line,” said Yoon, who recently worked on another major actor-director feature, “Don’t Worry Darling” from Olivia Wilde. It was the way Kendrick interpreted the Black List script by Ian McDonald — a quasi-biopic about the 1970s serial killer Rodney Alcala told through the eyes of women who crossed his path, including a “Dating Game” contestant (Kendrick) — that convinced everyone she should helm.“We’re like, well, what are we doing?” Yoon said. “Why do we even bother going through this whole dog-and-pony show trying to figure out who else can do this movie? Let’s just go.” From that moment, it went fast — about six weeks after Kendrick was tapped to direct, the crew was in prep for a 24-day shoot — and it went hard, with a Vancouver winter standing in for a Los Angeles summer. Despite all of this, the first-time filmmaker was very deliberate, Yoon said: “There’s nothing arbitrary about Anna Kendrick.”I suggested that Kendrick’s preparation might be due to the fact that she’s a woman in the director’s chair, with all the prejudices that entails. Yoon gestured that I had hit it on the nose. While almost half the actor-director films at Toronto are by women, everyone knows by now the challenges female filmmakers face behind the camera. As actress Eva Longoria recently told Variety upon the release of “Flamin’ Hot,” her feature directing debut, “I get one at-bat, one chance, work twice as hard, twice as fast, twice as cheap.”No doubt aware of this calculus, Kendrick herself announced she was “heartbroken” at not being able to attend the Toronto festival for the premiere because of SAG-AFTRA rules. While some independent films have secured interim agreements if they agree to union demands, this year’s festival has seen few American filmmakers and actors doing promotion. Despite that, “Woman of the Hour” still landed the first major sale of the festival in a reported $11 million deal with Netflix.Considering that the stability of Hollywood itself is in question, it is hard to determine whether directing confers more security than having to hang around waiting for an acting job. Neither of the producers I spoke to were able to give a definitive answer, with Yoon saying the industry was still finding its footing in “a landscape that is going through a seismic change.”Bailey, the Toronto festival chief, surmised that the lack of work around the Covid lockdowns led to an abundance of actors directing, an attempt to claim agency over their careers. “I suspect some of these actors used the opportunity of the pandemic disruption to get more personal projects made.” Indeed both Pine and Kendrick have said separately that the pandemic led them to change the way they thought about their work.Yoon did, however, agree that while producing seems to be more about business ownership, directing seems to be more about artistic ownership. She elaborated, “The film’s end result is the sum of many, many, many parts, and the fact that you get to participate in all of those parts, which, as an actor, you don’t necessarily do.”Still, Sher said she thought the reason anyone, including an actor, directs is incredibly personal. “I remember a filmmaker friend of mine said every filmmaker directs for a different value,” Sher explained. “For some people, it’s reality; for some people, it’s about precision, some people performance, some people it’s technical, some aesthetic pleasure. And the more people that are doing it, the more people also realize that it’s an option that they may never have thought that they had.” More

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      C.I.A. Discloses Identity of Second Spy Involved in ‘Argo’ Operation

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      The movie about the daring mission to rescue American diplomats from Tehran portrayed a single C.I.A. officer sneaking into the Iranian capital. In reality, the agency sent two officers.In the midst of the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, the C.I.A. began what came to be noted as one of the spy agency’s most successful publicly known operations: the rescue of six American diplomats who had escaped the overrun U.S. Embassy — using a fake movie as the cover story.“Argo,” the real-life 2012 movie about the C.I.A.’s fake movie, portrayed a single C.I.A. officer, Tony Mendez, played by Ben Affleck, sneaking into Tehran to rescue the American diplomats in a daring operation.But in reality, the agency sent two officers into Tehran. For the first time on Thursday, the C.I.A. is releasing the identity of that second officer, Ed Johnson, in the season finale of its new podcast, “The Langley Files.”Mr. Johnson, a linguist, accompanied Mr. Mendez, a master of disguise and forgery, on the flight to Tehran to cajole the diplomats into adopting the cover story, that they were Canadians who were part of a crew scouting locations for a science fiction movie called “Argo.” The two then helped the diplomats with forged documents and escorted them through Iranian airport security to fly them home.Although Mr. Johnson’s name was classified, the C.I.A. had acknowledged a second officer had been involved. Mr. Mendez, who died in 2019, wrote about being accompanied by a second officer in his first book, but used a pseudonym, Julio. A painting that depicts a scene from the operation and hangs in the C.I.A.’s Langley, Va., headquarters, shows a second officer sitting across from Mr. Mendez in Tehran as they forge stamps in Canadian passports. But the second officer’s identity is obscured, his back turned to the viewer.Ed Johnson, right, receiving the C.I.A.’s Intelligence Star from John N. McMahon, the agency’s deputy director for operations at the time, in a photo provided by Mr. Johnson’s family. Mr. Johnson was the long-unidentified second C.I.A. officer in the rescue of six American diplomats from Tehran.The agency began publicly talking about its role in rescuing the diplomats 26 years ago. On the agency’s 50th anniversary, in 1997, the C.I.A. declassified the operation, and allowed Mr. Mendez to tell his story, hoping to balance accounts of some of the agency’s ill-fated operations around the world with one that was a clear success.But until recently, Mr. Johnson preferred that his identity remain secret.“He was someone who spent his whole life doing things quietly and in the shadows, without any expectation of praise or public recognition,” said Walter Trosin, a C.I.A. spokesman and co-host of the agency’s podcast. “And he was very much happy to keep it that way. But it was his family that encouraged him, later in life, to tell his side of the story because they felt there would be value to the world in hearing it.”After Mr. Trosin heard Mr. Johnson and his family were visiting C.I.A. headquarters early this summer, he arranged to meet them. At the meeting, Mr. Trosin and his podcast co-host saw how much the C.I.A.’s recognition of Mr. Johnson’s work meant to his family and started looking for a way to tell the story on the podcast.Mr. Johnson, 80, was unavailable to discuss his career on the podcast or with The New York Times because of health issues. Undeterred, Mr. Trosin dived into the agency’s classified archives.Soon after dangerous operations, the C.I.A. often records secret interviews with the participants, to capture so-called lessons learned for its own, classified histories. In addition, for many storied officers, the C.I.A. records classified oral histories at the end of their careers. C.I.A. historians had done one such oral history with Mr. Johnson.“We found out there was this prior interview,” Mr. Trosin said. “And at least portions of which could be made public.”Thanks to the “Argo” movie, the C.I.A.’s role in the rescue of the diplomats, who were being sheltered by the Canadians, has become one of the agency’s best-known operations.The C.I.A. museum, which has a tendency to dwell on the agency’s failures, features a display on the operation. Among the artifacts is a copy of the script — or at least treatment — of the fake movie complete with the Hollywood-esque tagline “A Cosmic Conflagration.” Also displayed are the business cards of the fake production company used as part of the cover story and the concept art for the movie, which featured drawings from Jack Kirby, the celebrated comic book artist who helped create the Marvel universe.Like the painting, the museum display did not identify Mr. Johnson.A painting depicting a scene from the operation hanging in the C.I.A.’s headquarters shows a second officer sitting across from Tony Mendez as they forge stamps in Canadian passports while in Tehran but does not show his face.Jason Andrew for The New York TimesBut C.I.A. officials said Mr. Johnson, an expert in languages and extracting people from tricky places, was invaluable to the operation.At the time of the hostage crisis, Mr. Johnson was based in Europe, focusing his Cold War work on learning how to get in and out of countries that were not always hospitable to Americans.When Iranian revolutionaries overran the American Embassy and took 52 diplomats hostage, six Americans working in the consular office escaped. They eventually ended up under the protection of Kenneth D. Taylor, Canada’s ambassador to Iran, and the C.I.A. began working on a plan to sneak them out of the country.Mr. Mendez, who had worked with Hollywood experts to hone his tradecraft, came up with the plan to use a fake movie, which he named “Argo” after the story of Jason and the Argonauts, the ancient Greek heroes who had undertaken the arduous mission to retrieve the Golden Fleece.While some C.I.A. extraction operations at the time used single officers, the agency decided that for the rescue of the six diplomats, two officers would be needed, said Brent Geary, a C.I.A. historian who has studied the agency’s history in Iran.Mr. Johnson was fluent in French, German, Spanish and Arabic. He did not, however, speak Persian, the predominant language in Iran.Dr. Geary said the agency had Persian speakers, but could not risk sending in someone who might be known to current or former Iranian officials. The belief was also that someone fluent in the local language could draw questions, and what was critical to the mission was having people with Mr. Mendez’s and Mr. Johnson’s skill sets.“They had trained to get in and out of tight spots,” Dr. Geary said.Even without Persian, Mr. Johnson’s languages came into use. Soon after arriving, Mr. Mendez and Mr. Johnson mistakenly ended up at the Swedish Embassy, across the street from the U.S. Embassy, which was occupied by the Iranian revolutionaries.Tony Mendez, a master of disguise and forgery, was played by Ben Affleck in “Argo.”Mark Makela/Corbis, via Getty ImagesOutside the embassy, Mr. Johnson discovered that both he and the Iranian guard spoke German, and the two began talking. The guard then hailed a taxi and wrote the address of the Canadian Embassy on a piece of paper and sent the two fake movie producers off.“I have to thank the Iranians for being the beacon who got us to the right place,” Mr. Johnson said in his oral history.In the “Argo” movie, Mr. Affleck, portraying Mr. Mendez, is shown swiping Iranian forms that were needed to enter and exit the country. But in reality, it was Mr. Johnson who performed the sleight of hand to steal the documents. (Mr. Affleck did not respond to a request to comment.)In his oral history, Mr. Johnson said the “biggest thing” was to persuade the diplomats that they could pull off the movie team cover story.“These are rookies,” Mr. Johnson recalled in the recorded session. “They were people who were not trained to lie to authorities. They weren’t trained to be clandestine, elusive.”But Mr. Johnson recounted that the six diplomats pulled it off, putting aside their nervousness and adopting the persona of a happy-go-lucky film crew.The climax of the real movie — spoiler alert for a film that has been out for more than a decade — involves Iranian government officials reacting skeptically to the cover story, then realizing the “film crew” were American diplomats and chasing the plane down the runway. None of which happened.In reality, there was simply one last security check as the group left the departure lounge.“A couple of young Iranians, they’re patting people down as they went through,” Mr. Johnson recalled, noting that the diplomats were leaning into their parts, cracking jokes as they approached the checkpoint.With that, the diplomats, Mr. Mendez and Mr. Johnson were through the last checks. In the oral history, Mr. Johnson recalled boarding and seeing the plane’s name painted on the side. It was named Aargau, and Mr. Johnson thought to himself, “What the hell?”“After a bit, I forget when, I picked up The Herald Tribune and did the crossword puzzle,” Mr. Johnson said. “And one of the one of the clues was Jason’s companions … Jason and the Argonauts.”In the C.I.A. podcast, Mr. Trosin said the name of the plane and the crossword were simply coincidences.“To be clear,” Mr. Trosin said, “this is not C.I.A. officers with excess free time just planting clues.” More