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      Josh Hartnett Is in His Dad Era

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      Josh Hartnett has never made a movie that his children can see. “I would love to,” he said. “I just haven’t been offered anything like that, honestly.”He is especially reluctant for them to see “Trap” (in theaters), the M. Night Shyamalan film in which he stars as Cooper, a devoted father who is also a prolific serial killer nicknamed the Butcher. When Cooper takes his daughter to a pop concert — an event designed to ensnare the Butcher — those two identities intersect, with devastating consequences.Even as he searches for an escape, Cooper spends much of the movie performing the role of a great dad. Is Cooper good in the part? “He’s a little over the top,” Hartnett said. “He’s gilding the lily a little bit.”Hartnett aims for something subtler, more naturalistic. A star by the time he was 20, Hartnett has often held the movie business at arm’s length. An industry site once referred to him as “quite possibly Hollywood’s most reluctant ‘It’ boy.” He makes few mainstream films and lives with his wife, the actress Tamsin Egerton, and their four children in Hampshire, England, rather than Hollywood.At 46, Hartnett has a squinty-eyed handsomeness that is undiminished (and his biceps, enhanced for the role, are frankly ridiculous), but he moves through the world with more ease now. In a room at the Crosby Street Hotel, in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan, he accessorized his gray pants and gray shirt with an extravagant beaded necklace, a gift from his kids.Hartnett with Ariel Donoghue in “Trap.”Sabrina Lantos/Warner Bros.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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      ‘Deadpool & Wolverine’ Director Shawn Levy on Those Surprise Cameos

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      Shawn Levy explains the thinking behind specific cameos, what was saved from discarded scripts and how they made that end-credits tribute to Fox.Though the director Shawn Levy has spent the last several months promoting his new blockbuster, “Deadpool & Wolverine,” there was so much he couldn’t say until now.“This conversation will be tantamount to therapy for me,” Levy joked last week as he signed on to a video call to discuss cameos and plot elements that had to be kept hidden until after the film’s juggernaut opening weekend. (Major spoilers follow.)Though trailers sold the movie as a team-up between Ryan Reynolds’s meta mercenary, Deadpool, and Hugh Jackman’s surly mutant, Wolverine, the starry supporting cast includes some big surprises, including Jennifer Garner as the assassin Elektra, Wesley Snipes as the vampire hunter Blade and Channing Tatum as the card-tossing mutant Gambit. The film’s multiverse-spanning shenanigans also allow the return of Chris Evans, who retired his Captain America character in “Avengers: Endgame” but here reprises Johnny Storm, the “Fantastic Four” character he played back when 20th Century Fox owned key pieces of the Marvel portfolio.Levy said nearly all of those surprise cameos were hatched in Reynolds’s apartment, where much of the movie was conceived amid pie-in-the-sky brainstorming. “It was the two of us acting scenes out, passing a laptop back and forth and saying, ‘Hey, what if this?’” Levy recalled. “It invariably led to one of us texting that actor and just asking.”Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.Ryan has said that you both had trouble cracking the story before Hugh agreed to come on board. Was there anything from those early, Wolverine-less versions that you kept?A few disparate elements made it all the way through, and one of the bigger ones includes this notion of Wade going through a midlife malaise and selling used cars: This was a guy who had given up on his better self and was living a life of compromise. That survived through the Wolverine iteration of this movie, as did the imperative of having Wade’s chosen family factor in. And I remember [Paul] Wernick and [Rhett] Reese, who co-wrote the first “Deadpool” movies, pitching this idea of a Chris Evans misdirect very, very early: What if we could get Chris Evans and the audience thinks it’s Cap, but he’s actually coming back as Johnny Storm? It was such an A-plus idea that it survived every iteration of the story line.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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      ‘The Interview’: Vince Vaughn Turned This Interview Into Self-Help

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      The Vince Vaughn who lives in my head is one of my favorite comedic actors. He’s the swaggering, charmingly sarcastic and cheerily ingratiating star of that great run of hit comedies from the early 2000s: “Old School,” “Dodgeball,” “Wedding Crashers,” “The Break-Up.” (His cameo in “Anchorman” and recurring role as Freddy Funkhouser on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” are also prime comedic Vaughniana.) And putting my own preferences aside, I’d argue that there’s a whole microgeneration of dudes who tried to swipe the neo-Rat Pack vibes that Vaughn was able to deploy so winningly in “Swingers.”Listen to the Conversation With Vince VaughnI went in expecting a swaggering, overconfident guy. I found something much more interesting.Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Amazon Music | NYT Audio AppIn more recent years, though, after the often R-rated, kind of bro-y comedies with which Vaughn made his mark lost some of their cultural mojo, he has focused more on dramatic roles: the highly anticipated, widely maligned and then critically reconsidered second season of “True Detective,” for example, or his performances in the brutally uncompromising crime films of the director S. Craig Zahler (“Brawl in Cell Block 99,” “Dragged Across Concrete”).But as good as Vaughn can be with darker characters, I never connected those parts to the man who played them. Ahead of our interview, I made the perhaps-common journalist’s mistake of expecting to talk with someone akin to the playfully glib guy from those comedies I love. (That’s in no small part thanks to how Vaughn’s role as a world-weary, wiseass former detective in the new Apple TV+ series “Bad Monkey” scans as a mature update of his comedic persona.) But what I was expecting from Vaughn wasn’t what I got. Instead, I found someone more provocative and earnest, who came most alive when he put me under the conversational microscope. Which is to say, I got a surprise.Hollywood doesn’t know what to do with R-rated comedies anymore. Why do you think they’ve become harder to crack? When you talk about the R comedies in Hollywood, I feel like there’s a set of rules that the executives follow. The goal is not to get fired — they can defend why they greenlit something. The R comedies that took off was the studio saying to young people that were funny, “Go ahead.” They didn’t micromanage. We were on the sets changing lines and trying to make each other laugh. It’s not done as well by committee. They started managing everything too much and trying to control it all.Vince Vaughn with John Favreau in “Swingers” (1996).Miramax Films, via Everett Collection More

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      Yvonne Furneaux, Cosmopolitan Actress in ‘La Dolce Vita,’ Dies at 98

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      An Oxford graduate who spoke five languages, she had an early career as a siren before finding critical acclaim in masterworks by Federico Fellini and Roman Polanski.Yvonne Furneaux, a French-born English actress known for her icy beauty and continental air who brought jet-setting panache to critically acclaimed films like Federico Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” and Roman Polanski’s “Repulsion,” died on July 5 at her home in North Hampton, N.H. She was 98.Her son, Nicholas Natteau, said the cause was complications of a stroke.Ms. Furneaux, an Oxford University graduate who studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, got her start on the British stage, including in productions of “The Taming of the Shrew” and “Macbeth.”Despite her credentials, however, she was often singled out more for her fashion model looks than for her acting prowess.In a review of a 1955 production of Jean Giraudoux’s “Ondine,” the august British theater critic Kenneth Tynan wrote Ms. Furneaux off as a “buxom temptress” who was “more impressive in silhouette than in action.” The Daily News of New York described her in a 1958 headline as an “English peach.”Accordingly, after she made the transition to film, she was often cast as a siren or a damsel in distress in period adventure movies, including two starring Errol Flynn.A poster for the 1959 British horror film “The Mummy,” in which Ms. Furneaux had dual roles — as a 4,000-year-old dead princess and the wife of a late-19th-century archaeologist.Universal, via LMPC/Getty ImagesWe 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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      ‘Trap’ Review: Josh Hartnett Plays a Father With a Secret

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      Josh Hartnett stars as a father with a secret in this M. Night Shyamalan film set at a concert.“Dad, this is the literally the best day of my life,” the teenager Riley (Ariel Donoghue) beams to her doting father, Cooper (Josh Hartnett), in the opening minutes of M. Night Shyamalan’s “Trap.” That feeling won’t last — but for the first half of this mischievous thriller, we’re also having fun.Riley is ecstatic to have stadium floor seats for her favorite pop icon, Lady Raven (Saleka). The child’s attention is on the stage. Ours is on her father who is having visible difficulty concentrating on the show. He’s clocking the cameras, the exits, the unusual number of cops, the no-nonsense F.B.I. profiler (Hayley Mills) muttering into her walkie-talkie. The police are hunting a serial killer named the Butcher, but all they’ve got to go on is that he’s a middle-aged man in this majority girl crowd. Underneath the thumping bass and the squeals, Shyamalan wordlessly clues us in that the unassuming Cooper is also a slayer desperate to escape.Instead of telegraphing evil, Hartnett cranks up that gee-willikers likability that once trapped him as one of Hollywood’s factory-stamped generic leading men. At his most devilish, he’s all apple cheeks, grinning so amiably that a merch salesman (Jonathan Langdon) reveals that the Butcher has his own obsessives. When no one’s watching, Cooper’s eyes narrow at whatever is on his mind. Should he pull the fire alarm? Slip through the hydraulic lift in the floor? Can his daughter tell he’s acting weird?It takes cleverness and control to pull off this unspoken tension. Shyamalan boasts the former and feigns the latter for a while before his hotdogging impulses take over. He’s like a guy who karaokes Hitchcock and then starts ad-libbing his own tune. We’re never onboard with the premise that a 20,000-plus crowd is the perfect place to arrest an unknown man. But we’re willing to play along until it starts to feel like Shyamalan so enjoys being inside Cooper’s head that he doesn’t want to leave. One fairly satisfying ending launches into encore after encore, with Shyamalan holding court past the time the audience is antsy to wrap up.The plot is at its best when it’s simply a dad, a daughter and the puzzle he must solve to stay in her life. Hartnett and Donoghue have an affectionate, believable chemistry that’s boosted by the young actor’s natural charm — she doesn’t hit a phony note. To root for Riley’s happiness means rooting for Cooper’s, so every so often, particularly after we’ve cheered his latest brazen bit of genius, we’re reminded there’s a victim (Mark Bacolcol) handcuffed in his murder house. Worse, whenever Cooper needs a diversion, he’s willing to send a stranger’s daughter to the E.R.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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      ‘Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes’ and the Moment Star Worship Curdled

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      The documentary blends audio interviews with footage from her life to provide a revealing look not so much at the actress, but at celebrity culture.This summer, thanks mostly to the rise of Glen Powell, I’ve been in a lot of discussions about the state of movie stardom. The jury’s still out on whether we have “real” movie stars today, but it’s clear that the process of becoming a celebrity is different now from what it used to be. Social media and the popularity of small-screen entertainment have changed the game.That question of stardom permeates “Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes” (premiering Saturday on HBO and Max), an intriguing documentary about one of Hollywood’s most famous actresses, mostly in her own words. In the 1960s, Taylor gave interviews to the prolific journalist Richard Meryman, who died in 2015. Meryman, who had been known for his interviews with celebrities, was researching a book. Recently, more than 40 hours of tapes containing Taylor’s interviews were found in his archive.That audio, in which Taylor is reflective and candid, is the backbone for this documentary. The director Nanette Burstein takes a smart approach to the material, layering the conversation — along with audio from a handful of older interviews with Taylor and some of her friends — on top of archival footage from her life. Taylor became a familiar screen presence while still very young, with her first screen role, in “There’s One Born Every Minute,” hitting theaters when she was 10, in 1942. Soon after, she starred in “Lassie Come Home” and “National Velvet” and turned into a figure of fascination for the audiences. Thus the cameras followed her everywhere.For the Taylor enthusiast, the film is unlikely to reveal much new information. But that’s not really the point. The movie covers each of her eight marriages and many of her projects, but Taylor’s narration focuses largely on her feelings at the time. Because we’re often seeing footage of her public appearances as she talks about her interior life, the result is almost like a behind-the-scenes track, a fresh disclosure of the disjunction between what we think we know about stars — who they are, how they feel — and what’s actually going on inside.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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      Stream These 12 Movies Before They Leave Netflix in August

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      A ton of great titles are leaving for U.S. subscribers by the end of this month. Catch them while you can.A recent (and worthy) big winner at the Oscars is among the noteworthy titles leaving Netflix in the United States in August, along with a family favorite, an action epic and two franchises of the comic book and slapstick comedy variety.‘The Woman King’ (Aug. 12)Stream it here.Gina Prince-Bythewood has pulled off an unusual (and thrilling) career 180 in recent years, pivoting gracefully from her early, small-scale dramas (“Love & Basketball,” “The Secret Life of Bees” “Beyond the Lights”) to big action extravaganzas like “The Old Guard” and this, its 2022 follow-up. Viola Davis is fierce and unforgettable as Nanisca, the 19th-century general of an all-woman warrior army in the African kingdom of Dahomey, while John Boyega is terrific as the monarch (at least in name) who supports her. But the star-making performances come from Thuso Mbedu, Lashana Lynch and Sheila Atim as warriors in Nanisca’s army — young performers who more than hold their own against their marquee leads. The screenplay, penned by Dana Stevens (with story assistance from the actor Maria Bello) is based on a true story.‘Paddington’ (Aug. 13)Stream it here.Nicole Kidman has played only a handful of outright villains in her long and prolific career, but when she does, she does so with gusto. In this 2014 adaptation by the director Paul King (“Wonka”) of the children’s book series, Kidman appears as an evil museum taxidermist who wants nothing more than to stuff the gentle cartoon bear of the title. It’s a delightfully wild performance, with just the right mixture of menace and camp — and there’s more to love besides, from the warmth of the family dynamic (led by Sally Hawkins and Hugh Bonneville, both charming) to the sweetness of the convincingly integrated animated Paddington (whimsically voiced by Ben Whishaw) to the winking tone, which will entertain children and parents alike.‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ (Aug. 22)Stream it here.Once upon a time, it seemed that the Academy Award for best picture would go only to sweeping period epics and turgid literary adaptations. But a few films in recent years have shaken up our conventional notion of “best picture winner,” including the winner of that Oscar for 2022. A madcap hybrid of action movie, slapstick comedy, family drama and brainy science fiction, this busy and brilliant effort from the music video makers turned film directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, a.k.a. the Daniels. Michelle Yeoh won the best actress prize for her role as a meek laundromat owner whose trip into the metaverse unlocks the hero within; Ke Huy Quan and Jamie Lee Curtis picked up supporting actor trophies for their rich and funny turns as her husband and a harried I.R.S. agent.‘Marcel the Shell With Shoes On’ (Aug. 23)Stream it here.What began as a simple stop-motion animation short on YouTube in 2010 became a viral sensation and then, in 2022, this charming feature film. In it, the director Dean Fleischer Camp reprises his role as the human interviewer of Marcel, an inch-long hermit crab shell, assisting him on a journey to find his family. Isabella Rossellini (pitch perfect) joins the cast as his grandmother. The screenplay, by Camp, Nick Pale and Jenny Slate (who voices Marcel), achieves bespoke whimsy without tipping into self-congratulatory twee, thanks in no small part to Slate’s energetic performance, which combines childlike wonder and no-nonsense practicality with a healthy dose of her comic timing.‘Burn After Reading’ (Aug. 31)Stream it here.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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      The Best Movies and TV Shows Coming to Amazon, Disney+, Hulu and More in August

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      “Batman: Caped Crusader,” “Homicide: Life on the Street,” “OceanXplorers” and “Only Murders in the Building” will be streaming.Every month, streaming services add movies and TV shows to their libraries. Here are our picks for some of July’s most promising new titles. (Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)New to Amazon Prime Video‘Batman: Caped Crusader’ Season 1Starts streaming: Aug. 1In 1992, the animator Bruce Timm cocreated “Batman: The Animated Series,” which appealed to kids and to older comic book fans with its combination of punchy crime stories, 1940s-Hollywood-inspired imagery and colorful costumed villains. Timm is back on the creative team (with Matt Reeves, J.J. Abrams, Ed Brubaker and others) for the new series “Batman: Caped Crusader,” which looks and feels a lot like the old show, albeit a degree or two more adult. Hamish Linklater takes the place of Kevin Conroy as Batman, channeling Conroy’s deep voice and dry humor for some episodic stories set in the early days of the superhero’s career, when the Gotham gangs are running the city.‘The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’ Season 2Starts streaming: Aug. 29This visually dazzling fantasy series returns for a second season, continuing to tell the story of how and why the magical and destructive rings in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” novels came into existence. Season 1 functioned a little like a mystery, as Middle-earth’s various races — elves, humans, dwarves, Harfoots and others — tried to determine what had become of the Dark Lord Sauron, who had torn their world apart and then disappeared. The villain’s whereabouts was revealed in the season finale; and now in Season 2, “The Rings of Power” will cover the ways his re-emergence sows distrust and dissension among the factions who once stood against him. This season will also bring in some bits of Tolkien lore unseen in “The Lord of the Rings” movies, including an appearance by the fan-favorite Tom Bombadil (Rory Kinnear), a very old and sublimely gracious soul.Also arriving:Aug. 1“Influenced” Season 1Aug. 5“Judy Justice” Season 3Aug. 8“60 Day Hustle” Season 1“The Mallorca Files” Season 3“One Fast Move”Aug. 15“Jackpot”Aug. 22“Classified” Season 1Aug. 26“No Gain No Love”Keith Kupferer (center, at head of the table) in “Ghostlight.”Luke Dyra/IFC FilmsNew to AMC+‘Ghostlight’Starts streaming: Aug. 30A critical favorite, this slow-burning drama is about a sullen, temperamental construction worker named Dan (Keith Kupferer), who makes a surprising, spontaneous decision to join a local theater troupe that is preparing to mount a production of “Romeo and Juliet.” Inspired in part by the company’s resident diva, Rita (Dolly de Leon), and in part by the play’s themes, Dan begins to come of his shell after an extended period of grief that has also affected his relationship with his wife (Tara Mallen) and daughter (Katherine Mallen Kupferer). (They are also his actual wife and daughter.) The movie’s writing-directing team of Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson withhold the details of the movie family’s trauma for a while, so that the audience can first appreciate the power of theater for its own sake, before exploring the ways it can be transporting.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