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      When the Whole Country Watched a Nuclear War Movie at Once

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      The 1983 ABC movie “The Day After” was a landmark moment that proved contentious even before it aired, as a new documentary shows.In 1980, the year the new documentary “Television Event” (in theaters) opens, researchers found that about three-quarters of Americans believed there would be nuclear war in the next 10 years. Schoolchildren participated in evacuation drills. There were enough nuclear weapons in America and the Soviet Union to wipe out the world’s population many times over. And yet, as participants in the film repeatedly point out, for the most part people couldn’t bear to think about it. We find it hard to live with our own imminent destruction and also remember to take out the trash regularly.That knowledge, though, gave rise to “The Day After,” the controversial TV movie that aired on ABC in 1983 and was watched by more than 100 million people, about 67 percent of the American viewing public that evening. The film, shot in Lawrence, Kan., depicts the very real-feeling aftermath of a nuclear attack.The production and release were fraught. Some executives felt that TV wasn’t the place to scare people; there was a lot of strife behind the scenes. To tell the story of “The Day After,” the director, Jeff Daniels, weaves together copious behind-the-scenes production footage with contemporary interviews. The “Day After” director, Nicholas Meyer, still seems a little scarred by the experience. Brandon Stoddard, then president of ABC Motion Pictures, talks about conceiving the idea for a movie that “has meaning, that has import.” The more skeptical, practical Stu Samuels, then vice president of ABC Motion Pictures, speaks at length about the many challenges of getting this kind of movie shot and on the air, including run-ins with the network’s standards department. Edward Hume, who wrote “The Day After,” and Stephanie Austin, an associate producer, talk about the film, as does Ellen Anthony, who lived in Lawrence and played the youthful Joleen, a girl who must live in an underground bunker with her family.“Television Event” makes a very compelling case that “The Day After” was a groundbreaking cinematic achievement, even if it was made for the small screen. There were plenty of difficulties, both on the ground and in the edit room; there was network skepticism and even, eventually, some disapproval by the federal government. One flaw in documentaries of this sort can be a chorus of interviewees who all echo one another and seem basically in agreement, but that is not the case here: The subjects of “Television Event” often express skepticism or outright animosity toward one another, giving different versions of events and opinions about the process. That not only makes it a fascinating glimpse into this production, but reminds the audience how tricky it is to get anything made, let alone a movie like “The Day After.”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 True Crime to Stream: Dramatizations That Deliver

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      Across television, film and podcast, here are four picks that successfully give well-known true-crime stories the scripted treatment.Not long ago, comically bad re-enactments were the cornerstone of true-crime movies and TV shows. Despite their cheesiness, these staged scenes served a purpose: to bring scenarios to life, of course, but also to offer some relief from talking-head interviews and still shots of photographs and documents.But in the last decade or so, the number of true-crime stories that have received scripted treatment, often casting A-list actors, has exploded. It’s a phenomenon due in part to Ryan Murphy’s true-crime anthology series “American Crime Story” — which debuted in 2016 and has taken on the O.J. Simpson saga and the assassination of Gianni Versace — and more recently “Monster.”Coming this summer is a Paramount+ mini-series about the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, the child beauty queen who was found strangled to death in her family’s Colorado home in 1996. It will star Melissa McCarthy and Clive Owen as JonBenet’s parents. And over at Hulu, a scripted series about the Murdaugh family murders is being developed. Like their predecessors, these series will most likely aim to hew closely to their stranger-than-fiction origins while giving the creators artistic license in how the cases are brought to life onscreen.Ahead of those, check out these four offerings that give such stories the dramatized treatment to great effect.Mini-Series“The Staircase”Few true-crime stories have held my attention over the years as this one about Michael Peterson, a North Carolina novelist and aspiring politician who was charged with the death of his wife, the telecom executive Kathleen Peterson. She was found crumpled and bleeding at the base of the staircase in their upscale Durham home in 2001.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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      How Mia Threapleton Created Her Deadpan Nun in ‘The Phoenician Scheme’

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      When Mia Threapleton learned that Wes Anderson wanted her to star in his next film, she did what any normal person would: She asked her agent to call the casting director back to make sure there had been no mistake, and then found a quiet spot on the train she was riding in, curled up and sobbed.“I couldn’t believe it,” the 24-year-old British actress said. In Anderson’s latest, “The Phoenician Scheme,” Threapleton plays Sister Liesl, a nun who is estranged from her father, the eccentric businessman Zsa-zsa (Benicio Del Toro). He wants to reconnect and make her his heir.Chic in a white sleeveless top, her long blond hair falling in loose waves around piercing blue eyes, Threapleton was preparing to head to the Cannes Film Festival, where “The Phoenician Scheme” premiered this month. The movie is by far her most prominent role to date — not that you would recognize her in it even if she were a familiar face.“It was a lot,” she said of the I-did-my-makeup-in-a-closet-and-cut-my-hair-with-garden-shears look: blunt brunette bob, garish turquoise eye shadow, bold red lip. But she trusted Anderson because she had long admired his work. She grew up with the director’s stop-motion “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” and his coming-of-age romance, “Moonrise Kingdom,” is a personal favorite.“I remember watching it and thinking, ‘I’d love to be able to do that,’ so then having this opportunity to do that was such a surreal experience,” said Threapleton, who, unlike Sister Liesl, laughs readily and occasionally breaks into a smile that plays up the likeness to her mother, the actress Kate Winslet.Threapleton as Sister Liesl in “The Phoenician Scheme.”TPS Productions/Focus FeaturesWe 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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      ‘Karate Kid: Legends’ Review: The Student Becomes the Teacher

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      The latest installment to the long-running franchise is a messy entry that tries to throw too many legacies into a blender.“Karate Kid: Legends,” the latest installment to the franchise that spawned from the 1984 team of Ralph Macchio and Pat Morita, a.k.a Mr. Miyagi, certainly shouldn’t come as a surprise. And yet, among the modern crop of revamped movie franchises, it is, in fact, a somewhat bizarre outlier.In many ways, the original film should by all means have become a fond and nostalgic relic of the 1980s, a sleeper hit that almost wholly symbolizes the retrospective cheesiness we project onto that decade. Instead, its remarkably simple story, of a master fighter teaching a kid how to defeat bullies, has retained tremendous staying power, spawning, across decades, several sequels and reboots, a Netflix spinoff show and now a revamp merging its past iterations.As if fully aware of the humble and ultimately thin material for another franchise restart, “Legends” tries to make practically three movies in one, tossing all of its legacies into a blender that’s powered more by Macchio and Jackie Chan’s names than anything else.Adhering to its blueprint, “Legends,” directed by Jonathan Entwistle, starts with a kid traveling to a new city, falling in love with a girl and facing a violent bully. Li (Ben Wang) is a martial arts student in Beijing, studying under his Uncle Han (Chan), until his mom (Ming-Na Wen) moves them to New York City. While there, Li quickly takes a liking to Mia (Sadie Stanley), much to the chagrin of Conor (Aramis Knight), a vicious karate student who begins harassing Li. But rather than learning how to fight off Conor, Li instead trains Mia’s father, Victor (Joshua Jackson), who enters a boxing tournament to pay off his debts to a local thug (who is also Conor’s karate teacher).That’s all in the first two-thirds of the film. In the latter third, Jackson disappears entirely, Li must prepare for his own fight tournament, and Chan and Macchio are clumsily looped in, as if the film suddenly remembered who was on its poster. What we end up with is a “Karate Kid” movie with three teachers, two students in two tournaments and many training montages.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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      ‘Tornado’ Review: She Wants Revenge

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      In the title role, the singer-songwriter Koki is both charming and indomitable as she goes after a band of thieves led by Sugarman (Tim Roth).This crackling movie begins with what some might take for a bit of misdirection: a quotation from a poem by Arseny Tarkovsky, the father of the great filmmaker Andrei. “I would readily pay with my life / For a safe place with constant warmth / Were it not that life’s flying needle / Leads me on through the world like a thread.”Given that the movie concerns Tornado, a young swordswoman who has to make her way through a hostile British countryside after wastrels kill her father, one might wonder what Tarkovsky has to do with it. But first consider the statement rather than its origin.Tornado (Koki) has been touring with her samurai father (Takehiro Hira) through rural England, performing a charming puppet show. An initially prankish bit of business involving two sacks of stolen gold gets the duo in big trouble with a pack of thieves led by Sugarman (Tim Roth).The writer-director John Maclean, who deftly played with genre in his 2015 feature debut “Slow West,” is similarly sure-handed here. The movie quickly establishes itself as a revenge narrative, and each bad guy goes down in a way designed to suit the viewer’s justified bloodlust.In the title role, the singer-songwriter Koki is both charming and indomitable; when she announces “I am Tornado,” you feel your internal applause sign light up. And Nathan Malone, who plays the little boy following Tornado as she eludes the bad guys, is reminiscent of the nervy star of Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Ivan’s Childhood.”TornadoRated R for lots of violence, some raw language. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Ghost Trail’ Review: A Cat and Mouse Thriller

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      A hypnotizing Adam Bessa anchors this tale about a Syrian refugee living in France who believes he has found the man who tortured him.The fuzzy line between justice-seeking and vengeful vigilantism is by now a common staple of the crime thriller, casting a dark shadow of moral ambiguity over even the most righteous crusades. Jonathan Millet’s “Ghost Trail” takes a mostly conventional approach to this blueprint, in which a protagonist loses their head (and their humanity), but it offers a novel context: the Syrian refugee crisis.Hamid (a hypnotizing Adam Bessa), a former literature professor, was imprisoned and tortured under the authoritarian Assad regime — which was toppled in 2024, with the end of the 13-year presidency of Bashar al-Assad. We meet the somber Hamid in Strasbourg — at the border of France and Germany — scouring refugee centers and questioning other Syrian refugees about the figure in a blurry photograph, whom he claims is a relative.Bessa’s brooding performance, which conveys devastating inner struggles without appearing clichéd, adds to the mystery of this first act. Millet keeps his cards close, slowly and inventively revealing the stakes. From the point-of-view of a computer game, in which a soldier runs aimlessly around a desert battlefield, we hear Hamid conversing in code with other users whom we soon realize are members of a clandestine group seeking to bring down Syrian war criminals in hiding. Though Hamid has never seen his torturer’s face, he knows his smell and voice — and he’s convinced that a man studying at the nearby university (Tawfeek Barhom) is the same guy.The cat-and-mouse game, which involves Hamid tracking his suspect throughout campus, plays out in a relatively low-key manner, with the film relying on Bessa (and eventually, an eerie Barhom) to deepen the survivor’s dilemma. Hamid’s calls with his mother, who is living in a refugee camp in Beirut, and his hapless flirtations with another Syrian refugee working at a laundromat, remind him that he’s meant to start a new life in Europe. He has this in common with Barhom’s student, which adds a provocative, more cerebral undercurrent to the film’s portrait of modern immigration. What is lost by forgetting the past? What is gained?Ghost TrailNot rated. In Arabic, French, English and Turkish with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Phoenician Scheme’ Review: Benicio Del Toro Plans to Save His Soul

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      Wes Anderson returns with another intricately designed film, and an inquiry into the meaning of goodness.With his diorama-like compositions and tales of longing — usually for a loving family — Wes Anderson has taken audiences most everywhere on the planet: Asia and Europe, New York City and the American southwest, a fox’s hole and an island inhabited by dogs. With “The Phoenician Scheme” he globetrots again, zigging and zagging about, but he adds an unusual place to the list: heaven.Or, more accurately, the pearly gates that stand just outside of heaven, guarding the way lest the unworthy sneak in. These scenes are really snippets, rendered in black and white. In them, we repeatedly glimpse the weapons dealer and generally shady business tycoon Anatole Korda, a.k.a. Zsa-zsa (Benicio Del Toro, who is perfect) standing on some clouds before a robed assembly of what the film bills as the “biblical troupe,” among whom are F. Murray Abraham, Willem Dafoe, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Hope Davis and Bill Murray, who, delightfully, plays God.That all of these screen luminaries apparently just popped to Anderson’s set for a day to film a tiny scene is indicative of where the auteur stands at this point in his 31-year career. Still boyish in appearance, he’s just turned 56, with a bevy of awards under his belt. He’s synonymous with his intricate aesthetic, which is perhaps one of the most recognizable in cinema. It’s turned him into a brand, with social media creators and critics alike drawn to examining and imitating him. He curated a show at Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum in 2018, and as “The Phoenician Scheme” was premiering at the Cannes Film Festival, he was simultaneously the subject of a show at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris.He’s also built a career on an ever-expanding universe of returning collaborators and players. While some, like Murray, have been around for a long time, Del Toro is still relatively new to the fold, with “The Phoenician Scheme” only his second Anderson outing (he had a role as a seductive criminal in “The French Dispatch”). He plays the cold and aloof Korda who, upon surviving his sixth assassination attempt, finally admits he needs to appoint an heir to his business and vast fortune. He has nine sons who live in a dormitory across the street from his house — Korda is not a very good dad — but he also has an estranged daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton, all deadpan chain-smoking charm), who is on the verge of taking her vows at the convent. Liesl’s moral sense is as upstanding as her father’s is utilitarian, and when he lays out his plan to her, she senses she might be able to do some good even if she doesn’t trust him.So she convinces him to take the slightly higher ethical ground toward his big, well, scheme — the details of which are laid out so rapidly, and so sketchily, that it’s pretty clear Anderson doesn’t care if we really catch on to what Korda wants to do. Despite its title, this is not a movie about a plan, but about the man with that plan and, most important, his soul.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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      ‘Bring Her Back’ Review: A Foster Mother Like No Other

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      Sally Hawkins plays a menacingly unhinged foster parent to two bereaved siblings in this emotionally potent chiller.We ask a lot from our horror movies, which is perhaps the main reason they can be so divisive, and so difficult to get right. We want them to shock, but not traumatize; to disgust, but not sicken; to creep us out, but not bequeath a month’s worth of nightmares. On top of all that, can we please have some jokes?Instead of stressing over these pressures, some genre filmmakers, a number of them women, are determinedly carving their own idiosyncratic paths. Among these are the Australian brothers Danny and Michael Philippou, who have followed their wonderfully disquieting debut feature, “Talk to Me” (2023), with another three-word imperative, “Bring Her Back.” The two movies have more in common than their titular grammar: Both draw sustenance and momentum from familial grief, and both exhibit an extraordinary sensitivity toward their emotionally flayed central characters.When we meet Andy (Billy Barratt) and his younger stepsister, Piper (Sora Wong), Andy’s father has just died and the siblings must be fostered for three months until Andy can assume guardianship of Piper, who is legally blind. At first, their temporary foster mother, Laura (a delicious Sally Hawkins), seems welcoming, if a little dippy, her somewhat rundown property boasting a taxidermied pup, a mysterious chalk circle and a strange little boy who is mute and near-feral. His name is Ollie (Jonah Wren Phillips, incredible) and I could write several paragraphs just on what he puts in his mouth. Suffice to say that, during one horrifying episode, I didn’t exhale until it was over.Even so, the movie’s forceful visual shocks (executed mostly with practical effects) are easier to bear than its restlessly mounting anguish. Though more logically muddled than its predecessor, “Bring Her Back” operates from a core of tragedy whose weight offsets the nebulousness of the plot. Why is Laura, who recently lost her own daughter, so determined to drive a wedge between Piper and her fondly protective stepbrother? Why is she mesmerized by grainy camcorder footage of what appears to be a bloody satanic ritual? Why must Ollie be kept locked in his room and apparently starved?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