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      When Remaking a Masterpiece Is Worth the Risk

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      Robert Eggers confronts the corrosive effects of power through his depiction of an unspeakable erotic bond.I’ve always thought that one of the most insoluble aesthetic problems going is remaking a movie masterpiece. I certainly understand the impulse to passionately re-engage such a work, but if the definition of a masterwork is something peerless at what it sought to accomplish, how do you remake it without simply reiterating it? There’s a reason no one has tried second versions of Fellini’s “8½” or Coppola’s “The Godfather” or Polanski’s “Chinatown.” In the case of Fellini’s achievement, is someone going to produce a more harrowing portrait of the self-deluding toxicity of male narcissism? In the case of Coppola’s, of the corrosive effects of power? Or in the case of Polanski’s, of the Hey-nothing-personal malevolence of late-model capitalism? (Water itself in that movie turns out to be the commodity that’s manipulated for profit.) When it comes to those who have waded into that kind of deep water, some have tried the Let’s-really-shake-things-up solution. There’s the lamentable 1962 remake of “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” for instance, which not only eliminated the central figure of Cesare the somnambulist but also featured a Caligari who instead of practicing diabolic hypnotism spent his time showing the heroine offensive pictures. Other filmmakers have chosen the even more baffling route of changing almost nothing, such as Gus Van Sant’s nearly shot-for-shot 1998 remake of “Psycho.” The number of disappointed moviegoers you risk in remaking a masterpiece from 1922 is smaller, for obvious reasons, but even so, the director Robert Eggers has made clear in any number of interviews his understanding that his new “Nosferatu” is re-engaging one of the greatest of the silent movies. (In 2016, when he was first attempting to remake the film, he told an interviewer that it felt “ugly and blasphemous and egomaniacal and disgusting” to take up that project so early into his career.)F. W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror” is itself a remake — an unauthorized adaptation of “Dracula,” Bram Stoker’s compulsively readable fever dream of a novel — and Murnau and the screenwriter Henrik Galeen retained much of what was arresting about the original while slipping in their own major changes: They’re responsible, for example, for the now-set-in-stone tradition that sunlight can destroy the vampire, a notion nowhere in Stoker’s book. I likely saw “Nosferatu” at too impressionable an age. I was 6, PBS was showing such things and my babysitter was simply glad I wasn’t burning down the house. But I would have been flattened by it whenever I saw it. It was like having felt a draft from a grave. (Its effects were so long-lasting that 30-something years later I published a novel inspired by the film and its production.) The whole thing wasn’t so much petrifying as insidiously unsettling, and all of that started with the figure of Nosferatu himself. Max Schreck’s performance is, 102 years later, still the benchmark for sinister and dignified repulsiveness. Schreck’s vampire has the stillness of a figure in a bad dream or a spider on its web, and the world he inhabits is at times equally disconcerting. After our hero Hutter’s first frightening night in Nosferatu’s castle, he notices in the mirror that something has bitten his neck, and he smiles.But the most destabilizing figure might well be Hutter’s wife, Ellen, our heroine, who’s again and again shown to be telepathically on the monster’s wavelength, even when he’s thousands of miles away, so that polarities like good and evil or desire and repulsion seem to just evaporate while we watch. That last aspect alone would seem to land this story in Robert Eggers’s wheelhouse. Part of the subversive energy of movies like “The Witch,” “The Lighthouse” and “The Northman” derives from what feels like modern takes on historical characters in thrall to dark passions so that the distantly historical is both granted its strangeness and animated by a scrutinizing modern sensibility. At its best, his version both evokes and reconceives Murnau’s most brilliant visual ideas. Murnau’s masterful use of the opacities of dark archways from which the vampire can emerge and into which he can dissolve is both echoed and made new. Murnau’s famously arresting use of shadows to visualize the vampire’s defiling reach is reimagined when those shadows in this new version extend themselves in a 360-degree pan that evokes their vertiginous inescapability. And the shadow of the vampire’s hand now extends across the entire city, repurposing the most memorable image from Murnau’s “Faust.” “Eggers’s movies have always featured emotional intensities that can seem overdone in their in-your-face aggressiveness.”But this new “Nosferatu” is even more clearly Ellen’s story. If in Murnau’s original, the awfulness is coming for everyone and Ellen is its temporary focus, in Eggers’s it’s coming for Ellen and everyone else is collateral damage. Both movies render the vampire as a grotesque form of desire that’s both irresistibly powerful and catastrophically dangerous. And in both, the woman can only overcome that desire by indulging it, and doing so will insure her destruction and save everyone else. If you’re a female filmgoer, at this point you’re likely muttering, “What else is new?”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. 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      Grieving With Paddington

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      A newly mourning daughter finds an unexpected companion in the beloved films, whose star, a little bear, sets an example of how to live with loss.It was on the flight home from my father’s funeral that I first met Paddington. In search of an easy watch to take our minds off things, my partner, David, and I thought a movie about the adventures of a C.G.I. bear in a floppy red hat might do the trick. We went in cold, neither of us having grown up with the children’s books.If you’re familiar with the story, you’ll know this was a naïve, if not poor decision in a time of grief. Almost immediately, Paddington, already an orphan, loses his Uncle Pastuzo in a cataclysmic earthquake in Peru. Soon after, his Aunt Lucy tells him that he must find a new home — alone, without her. Orphaned doubly in the first 10 minutes. I began to cry.Since I was a child, I had been consumed with my father’s needs and longed not to be the parent to my parent. Poor Paddington, forced to navigate the world of adults.The “Paddington” films have acted as a strange benchmark. At 31, I watched the first movie the day after laying my father to rest in a pine box, and the sequel, which was pure delight and offered a reprieve from the darkness of mourning, a few months later. By the time “Paddington in Peru,” the third movie, is released on Feb. 14 in the United States, it will be nearly two years since my father passed. The series has become an unexpected grief tracker; Paddington, my fortuitous companion.My father and I had, at best, a complicated relationship, as he had with just about everyone. An addict with more than a few mental health disorders and, later, dementia, he’d burned bridges with anyone who tried to offer that fleeting, suffocating thing called help.There were years of unemployment, stints in rehab, bouts of disappearances and countless emergency-room visits. I thought I had “pre-grieved,” to borrow a term from Roman Roy, so the ripples of hopelessness and thoughts of what’s the point of it all? that followed his death arrived as a sick aftershock. I was emptied.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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      Demi Moore, On the Verge of Her First Oscar

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      Demi Moore is the star of one of the goriest, most audacious films ever nominated for an Oscar, the feminist body-horror satire “The Substance.” Onscreen, Moore, 62, dissolves and mutates in often grisly ways — nude, and in extreme close-up. And she could not be more self-actualized about it.The role required “wrestling with the flashes of my own insecurity and ego,” Moore explained. “I was being asked to share those things that I don’t necessarily want people to see.”She was speaking in a video interview last week, dressed in casual black and big glasses, twisting and tucking her legs under her, on her office couch, with every thought. Filming through that discomfort was a “gift — silver lining, blessing, whatever you want to call it,” she continued. “Once you put it all out there, what else is there? There’s nothing to hide. Being able to let go was another layer of liberation for me.” The following night, she won the Critics Choice prize for best actress.Her career and cultural resurgence is overdue, said Ryan Murphy, the showrunner and a friend who at long last convinced her to work with him in last year’s “Feud: Capote vs. The Swans.” She had the beauty and aura of an old-school movie star, he said, with the professional discipline to match, but the flexibility of a seeker: “Game to do anything,” he said. “She’s a pathfinder. We all talk about what she’s done for the business and for other women.”“The universe told me that you’re not done,” Moore said in her acceptance speech at the Golden Globes, talking about her role in “The Substance” that has her on the verge of an Oscar.And, he added, “she is one of the most emotionally intelligent people that you’ll ever meet. Whenever I have an emotional dilemma or I need advice, I do not go to my shrink — I go to her.”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 Sly Stone Primer: 15 Songs (and More) From a Musical Visionary

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      The Sly & the Family Stone leader is the subject of a new documentary directed by Questlove. Here’s what to know about his brilliant career and crushing addiction.In Sly & the Family Stone’s prime, from 1968 to 1973, the band was one of music’s greatest live acts as well as a fount of remarkable singles including “Everyday People” and “Hot Fun in the Summertime.” There was a shining optimism to its sound, which mixed funk with the ecstasy of gospel, a little rock and a touch of psychedelia — as well as a vision of community and brotherhood that stood out in a period of political separatism.The visionary behind it all was Sly Stone, who wrote, produced and arranged the music, winning acclaim as the author of invigorating anthems and an inventor of new, more complex recording sounds. But by the early 1970s, he was ravaged by drug addiction, kicking off a cycle of spirals and comebacks and sporadic, desultory live appearances. Now Stone, 81, is the subject of “Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius),” a documentary directed by Ahmir Thompson, better known as the Roots drummer Questlove, that debuts on Hulu on Thursday.Stone, who was born Sylvester Stewart and grew up in Vallejo, Calif., had gospel in his blood. His father, K.C., was a deacon in a Pentecostal church, and Sly began performing with his younger brother Freddie and younger sisters Rose and Vet in the Stewart Four, which released a single, “On the Battlefield,” in 1956 on the Church of God in Christ label.In 1967, “Dance to the Music” became the first of Sly & the Family Stone’s five Top 10 singles.Stephen Paley/Sony, via Onyx CollectiveAs he learned to play guitar, bass, keyboards, drums and harmonica, Stone’s ambition swelled. In 1964, he produced and co-wrote Bobby Freeman’s No. 5 hit “C’mon and Swim,” and soon talked himself into an on-air gig at KSOL, the Bay Area’s AM soul music powerhouse, where he read dedications in his nimble baritone and mixed in Bob Dylan and Beatles songs to the format. “I think there shouldn’t be ‘Black radio.’ Just radio,” he later told Rolling Stone. “Everybody be a part of everything.”After having a small local hit in the Viscaynes, one of the few integrated groups in doo wop, he assembled Sly & the Family Stone with a lineup of men and women, Black and white. In 1967, “Dance to the Music” became their first of five Top 10 singles. Two years later, they performed at Woodstock, providing one of the weekend’s high points. The days of playing nightclubs were over. “After Woodstock, everything glowed,” Stone wrote in his 2023 memoir.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 Demi Moore Transform in ‘The Substance’

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      The writer and director Coralie Fargeat narrates a sequence from her film, which is nominated for best picture.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.A miracle drug starts to create some side effects in this scene from “The Substance.”Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore) has been taking a black-market drug that has created a younger version of herself, Sue (Margaret Qualley). Her time must be divided between the younger and older versions on a strict schedule, but in this sequence, Elisabeth finds out what happens if she doesn’t respect the balance of that time.She wakes up after Sue’s wild evening to a disheveled apartment and one aged appendage, the result of Sue taking more fluid from Elisabeth’s body to buy more time in her young body. Elisabeth notices that one of her fingers now looks dramatically older than the others.As she runs to the sink to try to wash the age away, the pace become faster and closer. Narrating the scene, the director Coralie Fargeat said, “The idea was all those close-ups that go more and more macro on the finger is to project Elisabeth’s fears and Elisabeth’s thoughts about what’s happening to her.”As Elisabeth calls the Substance company to discuss her “alteration,” she is taunted by a giant billboard out her window that shows her younger self. Fargeat said that she included a shot from above on Elisabeth to “film her discomfort, the fact that she’s now threatened.” This point of view is almost “a face-off with her double, and above her as if she was tiny and oppressed by the situation.”Read the “Substance” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      In ‘Festen,’ a Nightmare Birthday Becomes an Opera

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      The composer who put Anna Nicole Smith’s life onstage has a new piece: an adaptation of a cult movie about child abuse.Mark-Anthony Turnage has a habit of provoking stuffy opera fans.The revered British composer’s 1988 debut, “Greek,” appalled some audiences by transposing Sophocles’s “Oedipus Rex” into to a cursing, brawling working-class London family. And some critics hated the pole dancers onstage in “Anna Nicole,” his opera about the tragic life of the Playboy model Anna Nicole Smith.Now, Turnage is preparing to present “Festen,” in which a patriarch’s 60th birthday party descends into chaos after a speech exposes a family’s deepest secrets. When “Festen” premieres on Tuesday at the Royal Ballet and Opera in London, the show’s dark subject matter looks set to upset traditionalists, too.Based on Thomas Vinterberg’s cult Danish-language movie of the same name, “Festen” includes descriptions of child abuse and suicide. The opera’s 35-strong cast will fight, engage in simulated sex and hurl racist abuse at the show’s only Black character.Yet Turnage insisted in a recent interview that he hadn’t set out to challenge anyone — except himself. “Part of me thinks, ‘Why don’t I just do a nice fluffy story that will be performed a lot?’” Turnage said. “But I know if I did, it wouldn’t be any good.”Allan Clayton as Christian, who accuses his father, Helge, of abuse.Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times“I need to be provoked,” Turnage added. “I need an extreme or strong subject to write good music.”This “Festen” premiere comes just over 25 years after Vinterberg’s movie won the jury prize at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival. Released as “The Celebration” in the United States, “Festen” was created under the banner of the Dogme95 movement, which required movie directors to follow 10 strict rules. Those included only using hand-held cameras and a ban on music, unless it occurs naturally in a scene.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