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      In ‘The Taste of Things,’ the Food Was Prepared by the Actors

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      “The Taste of Things” didn’t use cooking doubles, but a pro offscreen helped guide the stars. Getting the meals right was everything to the director Tran Anh Hung.Viewers may emerge from “The Taste of Things” desperate to find a restaurant that serves a good vol-au-vent, a turbot in hollandaise sauce or the meringue-coated ice cream confection known as baked alaska. But while the film, set in France at the end of the 19th century, features period-appropriate cuisine designed by the celebrated chef Pierre Gagnaire, the secret to what makes it so enticing isn’t the menu. It’s the gestures.“Something that is very important for me, from my childhood, is that I like watching people working with their hands,” said Tran Anh Hung, who received the best-director prize for the movie at the Cannes Film Festival in May. He remembered that as a boy in Vietnam — he has lived in France since 1975 — he would spend the whole day watching someone craft a door. He brought that interest in handiwork to “The Taste of Things,” which opens in New York on Friday. The drama centers on the relationship between an epicure, Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel), and his longtime cook and lover, Eugénie (Juliette Binoche). Their romance is in some ways expressed more through cooking and eating than through words, which is one reason that accentuating the sensuality of the food was important for Tran.But keeping the mechanics of cooking in sync with the apparatus of filmmaking is not easy, as Tran and past makers of foodie cinema have discovered. In “The Taste of Things,” there were no cooking doubles for the stars: Binoche and Magimel performed all the preparations that are shown onscreen themselves, Tran said.Jonathan Ricquebourg, the film’s cinematographer, recalled seeing Gagnaire at work and understanding what he was in for. “I realized how fast the magic disappeared,” he said. “When you take out a meal from the oven, for instance, the meal is very nice for a bunch of seconds.” But that disappears, he added, “when the crust is opening, because there is a changing of temperature.”A chef offscreen was instructing the actors as they worked.Carole Bethuel/IFC FilmsWe 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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      Jonathan Majors Had History of Abuse in Relationships, Women Say

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      The actor denied physical abuse. Separately, he said he wasn’t told of accusations of misbehavior on the set of “Lovecraft Country.”Since the actor Jonathan Majors was found guilty in December of assaulting and harassing a girlfriend, he has maintained his innocence and his hope of reviving a once-skyrocketing career that disintegrated in the wake of his conviction. In a televised interview last month, he said that he had “never struck a woman.”But in pretrial statements to the prosecution in that assault case and, separately, in interviews with The New York Times, another former girlfriend, Emma Duncan, accused him of emotionally and physically abusing her — choking her, throwing her around and bruising her. A third, Maura Hooper, also said that he had emotionally abused her.Speaking publicly for the first time, Ms. Duncan and Ms. Hooper, actresses who dated Mr. Majors before he shot to fame as the supervillain Kang in Marvel projects, described him as a controlling, threatening figure who isolated them from friends and career pursuits. “You lose your sense of worth,” Ms. Duncan said.And in interviews with former colleagues, The Times found that Mr. Majors had a history of volatility on the set of the HBO series “Lovecraft Country” that included confrontations with female co-workers that led them to complain to the network.On Thursday afternoon, a lawyer for Mr. Majors, Priya Chaudhry, said that Mr. Majors had not physically abused Ms. Duncan. She described the relationships with both women as “toxic” and said that Mr. Majors was taking responsibility for his role in them. She added that “countless” women in the entertainment industry “can attest to his professionalism.”This article is based on interviews with 20 people, including some who requested anonymity for fear of career repercussions, and on statements submitted to the prosecution in the December case, in which Mr. Majors was found guilty of harassment and misdemeanor assault of Grace Jabbari, a former girlfriend. He is scheduled to be sentenced in April, though his lawyers asked on Tuesday that the judge throw out the jury’s guilty verdict.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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      Academy Awards Announces New Oscar for Achievement in Casting

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      After decades of lobbying from the casting field, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is adding its first new award category since 2001.The Academy Awards is introducing an Oscar for casting, the ceremony’s governing organization announced Thursday, making it the first new category in more than 20 years.Casting directors have been pushing for the category for decades, arguing that their work is critical to the success of a film, but the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which puts on the Oscars, has rejected the idea — until now.The new category will be introduced for films released in 2025, meaning that fans won’t see a statuette given out until 2026. The Academy tends to be conservative when it comes to introducing new awards: The last category to be created was the Oscar for best animated feature film, which was established in 2001. (It went to “Shrek.”) In 2018, the Academy scrapped the introduction of a new category for achievement in “popular” films after blowback from the public and some Academy members.Destiny Lilly, the president of the Casting Society of America, a professional organization for people in the field, said the society was created in the early 1980s in part to help push for this award.“It feels like a long time coming,” said Lilly, who was the casting director for “The Color Purple,” which scored a supporting actress nomination for Danielle Brooks at the upcoming ceremony.The Academy created a branch for casting directors in 2013, which currently includes more than 150 members. Lilly said the new branch allowed for other Academy members to fully understand the extent of what casting directors do.“It was an education process, a building of understanding of what our contributions are as casting directors to a finished film,” Lilly said.The award show’s recognition of off-camera, sometimes overlooked categories was the subject of consternation two years ago when the Academy presented eight categories — including film editing, makeup and hairstyling, and production design — before the live telecast. The decision was met with a wave of criticism asserting that the move communicated that the Academy valued some moviemaking jobs more than others. The next year, the Academy’s new leaders reversed course and gave out all of the awards live.In a joint statement making the announcement, Bill Kramer, the Academy’s chief executive, and Janet Yang, the Academy’s president, said, “Casting directors play an essential role in filmmaking, and as the Academy evolves, we are proud to add casting to the disciplines that we recognize and celebrate.”The Academy’s board of governors voted to add the category on Wednesday.A common argument against a casting award has been the length of the ceremony: Last year, the show ran three and a half hours, and in 2002, it hit the four hour and 23-minute mark.The move puts the Oscars in line with some other awards shows, including the Emmys. The BAFTAs added the category for its 2020 ceremony, helping to fuel calls for the Academy Awards to do the same. More

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      ‘The Monk and the Gun’ Review: A Satirical Fable in a Faraway Land

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      This feature follows two monks in Bhutan, often portrayed as a Shangri-La, as the country readies for its first democratic elections.“The Monk and the Gun,” a modestly scaled, lightly comic and blithely ingratiating tale set in Bhutan takes place in the recent past, when the country held mock elections.In 2005, the Bhutanese monarch announced that he was stepping down in 2008, a move that helped clear the way for the country’s transformation to a democracy. While the abdication went smoothly by all accounts, the mock elections — a nationwide practice run for parliamentary voting to come — are disturbing the citizenry in this fictional movie, a smooth piece of work with grand landscapes, nonprofessional actors, toothless politics and a story as contrived as just about anything you’d find at your local multiplex (or at Sundance).There are two monks in the movie, and several more guns than the title indicates. One monk is a wizened, unnamed lama (Kelsang Choejey, an actual lama), with a wispy white beard who spends his days meditating in a temple and is given to gnomic comments. One day, he orders his disciple, a sturdily built young monk, Tashi (Tandin Wangchuk), to procure two guns. “I need them by full moon,” the older lama says, adding that they will allow him to set things right. He doesn’t explain what exactly he means by that; largely, it seems so that his instructions can give the story a touch of mystery as Tashi sets off on his feature-length quest.That journey is at once literal and metaphoric, sluggishly paced and filled with pretty scenery. It brings Tashi in contact with other characters, including some with separate plotlines that function like little discrete stories and eventually converge. Among the more vibrant ones is a young city dweller with a sick wife and money problems, Benji (Tandin Sonam), who’s trying to broker a deal with an American gun buyer, waggishly named Ronald Coleman (Harry Einhorn). A different Ronald Colman starred in Frank Capra’s 1937 adventure “Lost Horizon,” an Orientalist fantasy about a diplomat who crash-lands in the Himalayas, finds Shangri-La and meets a high lama played by the American actor Sam Jaffe.The gun dealer’s name is a winking detail, if one that probably works best for movie critics of a certain age (ahem). The West’s fetishization and exploitation of countries like Bhutan — regularly described as the world’s last Shangri-La — informs the movie ever so gently. To that end, the American character is stupid and predictably greedy, which allows the writer-director Pawo Choyning Dorji (“A Yak in the Classroom”) to take a few pokes at the United States. However sincere and justified, the digs are so innocuous that their main purpose seems to flatter Western viewers who will nod along as they coo at the landscapes and chuckle knowingly about ugly truths they think have nothing to do with them, but do.The Monk and the GunRated PG-13 for — I kid you not — “some nude sculptures and smoking.” There are also guns. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Here’ Review: A Celebration of Connection

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      In Bas Devos’s muted and luminous Belgian drama, two lonely souls repeatedly encounter each other.One-word titles like that of the Belgian writer and director Bas Devos’s “Here” can create a minuet of meaning. In this hushed drama that gently rebuffs the beats of a love story even as it hints at one, the word is a call for the viewer’s attention and an acknowledgment of place.“This is my home,” Stefan (Stefan Gota), a Romanian construction worker, says to himself, looking out over the city from his apartment in the Jette commune, northwest of Brussels.Sitting in front of his refrigerator, Stefan pulls out vegetables and sniffs containers. He makes a soup that he’ll deliver to friends before he leaves on vacation. But he also alludes to leaving the city for a longer spell. Did we mention he’s struggling with an insomnia that keeps him walking the streets in the still hours, paying heed to things that might be lost in the daylight’s bustle?Across the city, a graduate student named Shuxiu (Liyo Gong) describes a state of being at a loss for words before being fully awake, as images of the natural world unfold. Stefan is observant because he’s sleepless, and Shuxiu, a bryologist who studies moss, is attentive by calling.When Stefan first encounters Shuxiu, he is sitting, soaked, in a Chinese restaurant. When they meet again in a wooded area, it is coincidental and freighted with possibility. What will become of them isn’t the purview of the film, or its point, exactly. And, yet, in this painstakingly muted, luminously photographed testimony to connection, nothing much and everything happens — or could.HereNot rated. In Dutch, French, Romanian and Mandarin, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘They Called Him Mostly Harmless’ Review: Digital Sleuthing

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      In this schematic HBO true-crime documentary, amateur detectives take the lead in the quest to identify the body of a male hiker.In 2018, an emaciated male body was found in the Florida wilderness. Blood work showed that he was healthy, with no drugs in his system beyond Tylenol. Among his belongings were food and money, but no phone. The man had been hiking the Appalachian Trail. Several hikers recalled encountering him within the eight months before his death — he was handsome — but they only knew him by his trail name, Mostly Harmless.Mostly Harmless did not want to be found.Directed by Patricia E. Gillespie, the HBO true-crime documentary “They Called Him Mostly Harmless” is, on one level, about the quest to identify the body. Hikers, a detective, and the Wired journalist who wrote the articles that inspired the documentary, feature as talking heads.But the other, arguably more unsettling, half of the story centers on the amateur detectives who helped crack the case — all middle-age women involved in a Facebook group dedicated to the cause.This artless documentary, composed primarily of interviews and B-roll footage (of walks along the trail from a first-person perspective; the amateur detectives looking at their computers, brows furrowed), mechanically pieces together the mystery. It’s a film for those who don’t know the outcome, playing upon the viewers’ thirst for answers as it chips away at a clearer portrait of the man.More interesting is the film’s meta-true-crime dimension, which links the case’s obsessive amateurs to a broader fascination with the genre and its fraught form of escapism. Dead ends and false leads aggravate the digital sleuthing hive (a cancer survivor testifies to the online harassment he faced after being falsely identified as Mostly Harmless), and petty rivalries ensue between the Facebook group’s leaders. The documentary doesn’t treat them with outright mockery, but the tone is mildly condescending — a feeling heightened by an outcome that points to the futility of it all.They Called Him Mostly HarmlessNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. Watch on Max. More

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      ‘Cobweb’ Review: A Film Within a Director’s Cinematic Ego Trip

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      Kim Jee-woon toys with the absurdity of filmmaking itself in this story of a director compelled to take his cast and crew captive to shoot one more scene.To be a director is to be a madman of sorts. It’s a rare artist that has the will and belief required to pull together so many forces to create a movie, let alone a good or even great one. In other words, it’s a space only occupied, perhaps, by the delusional or self-involved.“Cobweb,” directed by Kim Jee-woon, mines the comically absurd reality that is filmmaking, at times with bouncy cinematic verve, at others somewhat aimlessly and a little too indulgently.In the film, set in early-1970s South Korea, a director, Kim (Song Kang-ho), desperately struggling to prove he isn’t a sham, has come up with a new ending to fix his current film that he insists will transform it into a subversive masterpiece. Working surreptitiously around his studio’s president and the government censorship agency, he reconvenes his cast and crew, boards them up in a sound stage, and gets to work on his opus. Personalities clash and antics ensue, as the movie set becomes as much of a soap opera as the movie they’re making, whose scenes are cut into “Cobweb” throughout.Even if “Cobweb” often feels like it’s a film that is telling itself its own industry insider joke — poking fun at the competing, wounded egos of directors, actors and studio brass — Kim Jee-woon captures it all with a sleekly choreographed charm that keeps us along for the ride. Until it doesn’t. Toward the second half, the film becomes overlong, losing its narrative thread and including too many scenes of the movie being made. Eventually we feel a little trapped in the sound stage ourselves, as “Cobweb” falls victim, ironically, to its own punchline — becoming a movie that is too obsessed with itself.CobwebNot rated. In Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. Rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘Drift’ Review: Cynthia Erivo Keeps a Breakdown at Bay

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      Anthony Chen’s quiet character study follows a traumatized Liberian woman (Cynthia Erivo) on a Greek island who befriends an American tour guide (Alia Shawkat).“Drift,” a patient character study set on a craggy Greek island, proves a mesmerizing showcase for the actress Cynthia Erivo’s talents. She plays Jacqueline, a traumatized Liberian refugee whose cautious air is a gentle source of forward motion even as the film around her stalls.The story takes place during a season of vagrancy in Jacqueline’s life, tracking her efforts to find shelter and enough food to keep from fainting. She spends her days selling foot massages to sunbathers and her nights sleeping in sandy beach nooks, and is often pictured alone against the coastal scenery. Eventually, she meets Callie (Alia Shawkat), a chatterbox American tour guide whose hunger for friendship helps Jacqueline to open up.The director, Anthony Chen, is sensitive to Jacqueline’s struggles, and shows her mental state as a delicate equilibrium. The film features limited dialogue, and Erivo conveys feeling through body language, expression and small glances. What emerges is a portrait of a young woman using survival mode as a means to stave off an impending breakdown.“Drift” frames the source of Jacqueline’s psychological torment as a mystery, meting out cryptic flashbacks to the character’s back story in Liberia. Those scenes culminate in seemingly inevitable tragedy that the film treats as a grand reveal. This upheaval is informative, but the film is at its strongest when it lingers in present tense, exploring how Jacqueline’s strategically cultivated myopia keeps her alive.DriftNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More