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      Sundance Film Festival Kicks Off With Jodie Foster, Robert Downey Jr, and More

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      At the opening night gala for the film festival, celebrating its 40th edition, actors and filmmakers reflected on what kept them coming back.On Thursday night, the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, which is celebrating its 40th edition this year, was bustling. Banners hung on snowy Main Street, Leon Bridges was performing at a new music venue and the Eccles Theatre was packed for one of the opening films: “Freaky Tales.”And around 7 p.m., some 500 guests shuttled to a convention center about 20 minutes away in Kamas, Utah, for the festival’s Opening Night Gala, hosted by the Sundance Institute. The organization, which puts on the festival and has the mission of supporting independent filmmakers, held this type of fund-raising event for the first time last year.The Sundance Institute brought together a crowd of people, which included film industry players like Christopher Nolan, who found early success through the festival. They filed into a cocktail reception, spread across two floors.The dress code, listed as “upscale mountain chic,” led to ensembles ranging from boxy sweaters to velvet suits. Guests discussed the film lineups, ate dates wrapped with bacon and drank espresso martinis. Nearby, actors and actresses posed for photographers and dredged up old festival memories.Sundance has become known for propelling little-known films and filmmakers into the spotlight. “The Blair Witch Project” (1999), “American Psycho” (2000), “Napoleon Dynamite” (2004) and “CODA” (2021) all emerged from Park City.Jodie Foster remembered the festival in the 1980s. “I was on the jury for the year of ‘Sex, Lies, and Videotape,’ which was a big year,” she said, referring to Steven Soderbergh’s 1989 film.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?  More

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      Menachem Daum, Filmmaker Who Explored the World of Hasidim, Dies at 77

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      His acclaimed documentary “A Life Apart” presented a complex portrait of a religious group usually depicted as somber and impenetrable.Menachem Daum, a filmmaker who co-produced a groundbreaking 1997 documentary that illuminated the cloistered world of America’s Hasidim, died on Jan. 7 in a hospital near his home in Borough Park, Brooklyn. He was 77.His death was confirmed by Eva Fogelman, a friend and the author of a book about Christian rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust. She said Mr. Daum had been treated for congestive heart failure.What made the documentary, “A Life Apart: Hasidism in America,” so striking was Mr. Daum’s ability to get people who scorn movies and television sets to sit on camera for revealing interviews, allowing him to chronicle their mores and rituals. The resulting film offered a complex portrait of a religious group usually depicted as somber and impenetrable; here it offered scenes of Hasidim joyfully dancing.That achievement was not a given. Mr. Daum, though ultra-Orthodox, was not Hasidic himself. And although he had earlier made a film about caregivers for the aged, he was scarcely a seasoned filmmaker.But he was well versed in the Torah, the Talmud and the intricacies of Orthodox Jewish observance. He spoke Yiddish — the Hasidic lingua franca — and lived in a Hasidic neighborhood. He teamed with an experienced filmmaker, Oren Rudavsky, the son of a Reform rabbi, to produce and direct the documentary.The Hasidic movement was founded in the 18th century in Eastern Europe by a rabbi known as the Baal Shem Tov, who felt that Judaism had overemphasized intellectual qualities to the detriment of spiritual fervor and sincerity.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?  More

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      Sundance Film Festival: ‘Freaky Nights’ Is the Hot Ticket

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      “Freaky Tales” with Pedro Pascal, Jay Ellis and Normani, gets a raucous premiere as Hollywood turns out in force for the festival.Hello from the Sundance Film Festival in frigid Park City, Utah, where your faithful Projectionist will spend the next week answering important questions like: Are we about to discover the next great filmmaker? Is it possible to look chic in a puffer jacket? And wait, there’s a Neon party tonight? Why didn’t I get an invite?The festival is celebrating its 40th edition this year, but it’s a Hollywood 40, meaning some effective nips and tucks have kept Sundance seeming fresh and vital even as the industry it’s a part of has changed considerably. In the ’90s, every independent filmmaker dreamed of launching their career at this festival as the likes of Quentin Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh had. Now, with the independent-film market in a precarious position, talent comes to Sundance to schmooze and say, “What I’d really like to do is make a limited series.”And hey, the festival programs those now, alongside the documentaries, shorts and narrative films that remain Sundance’s bread and butter. Some movies have premises so outrageous that you could only find them here: In “Love Me,” Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun play a buoy and satellite who fall in love, while “Sasquatch Sunset” casts Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough as an unrecognizable pair of Bigfoots and, I’m told, plays things utterly straight.Other movies evoke past Sundance classics. On Thursday, I watched “Ghostlight,” about a troubled family that finds solace by staging Shakespeare: It reminded me of the Sundance hit “CODA,” down to the third-act performance that had audiences weeping. Then I booked it to the documentary “Girls State,” a distaff sequel to Apple TV’s 2020 Sundance pickup “Boys State.” The new one follows hundreds of teenage girls as they try to craft a mock government.The opening night’s hottest ticket was “Freaky Tales,” a gonzo anthology starring Pedro Pascal, Jay Ellis and the pop singer Normani. Directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, who’d previously brought their films “Half Nelson” and “Mississippi Grind” here, “Freaky Tales” follows four interconnected stories set in 1987 Oakland that all tend to climax in outrageously bloody scenes of revenge. Whenever the red stuff spurted, the audience hooted.Though Sundance has introduced a virtual portion to its festival that will be available next week, people remain eager to attend in person. Pascal, one of Hollywood’s most overbooked actors, made the briefest of trips to Park City just so he could attend the raucous “Freaky Tales” premiere. “Ghostlight” directors Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson were even more determined to make it to the festival: Though they were still shooting their film just three months ago, thanks to fleet work from their editors, the two were able to submit a first cut to Sundance in early November, just four days after they’d wrapped.It helped, O’Sullivan said, that she had another ticking clock that demanded quick work: She shot the film while eight months pregnant.“I said we had a hard out,” she joked at the premiere. More

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      ‘American Fiction,’ ‘Origin’ and the Pressures Black Writers Face

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      The movies explore what happens when authors who focus exclusively on racism in their work push back against political and commercial stresses.“We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame,” a young Langston Hughes proclaimed in an essay nearly 100 years ago. “If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter.”Seeking to establish his autonomy as a Black writer, he concluded, “If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.”I thought a lot about Hughes’s landmark 1926 essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” after watching how Ava DuVernay’s “Origin” and Cord Jefferson’s “American Fiction” explore the fates of Black writers who push back against political and publishing pressures to focus exclusively on racism in their works.Like Hughes, the protagonists of these movies — the journalist Isabel Wilkerson and the novelist Thelonious Ellison, known as Monk — strive to write as they please. But, by depicting their characters’ struggles, the films offer refreshing commentaries on the social construction of race and its devastating consequences for those at the bottom of the hierarchy.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?  More

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      Watch Adam Driver Keep Time in a Scene From ‘Ferrari’

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      The director Michael Mann narrates a sequence from his biopic about Enzo Ferrari.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.The spiritual meets the primal in this scene from the biopic “Ferrari.”As the sequence begins, the automotive mogul Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver) arrives at a workers mass. The priest gives a speech about the miracle of the internal combustion engine. But attendees are distracted by another event happening simultaneously at the Autodromo, a nearby racetrack. Maserati is challenging Ferrari for the record there. So scenes of worship are intercut with the driver, Jean Behra (Derek Hill, the son of Phil Hill, the first American-born Formula 1 champion), navigating the course. In the church, Ferrari and his workers have their stopwatches out to time the Maserati.Narrating the scene, the director Michael Mann said, “My serious intent was to imbue into audiences minds what’s in our characters’ minds, which is there’s something almost religious and deadly serious about it. The metaphysical, the savage power is really what is wedded together as a value in this scene.”Read the “Ferrari” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      2024 Awards Season Fashion: All the Stars Dressed in Red

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      Viewers of award shows might have noticed a trend in recent years: Some of the red carpets have been colors other than red.But that doesn’t mean the color has been absent from the carpets. This year, red has been among the most popular colors worn by celebrities. Selena Gomez, Ayo Edebiri, Barry Keoghan, Dua Lipa, Meghann Fahy, Charles Melton, Michelle Yeoh, Suki Waterhouse and Margot Robbie are just some of the stars who have worn shades of red at recent awards shows like the Emmys and the Golden Globes.Danielle Brooks, an actress in “The Color Purple,” is another star who has chosen red — specifically, a bright-pinkish shade that lit up with every camera flash as she walked the purplish-red carpet in her strapless gown at the Globes. Of the dress, Ms. Brooks told Vogue: “Red is a power color and I am feeling powerful.”The following assemblage of red looks includes her gown and many more, from sleek and simple column dresses to over-the-top ensembles.Simply RedSarah Snook, a star of “Succession,” received the Emmy award for lead actress in a drama series in a crimson Vivienne Westwood ball gown with a corseted bodice, nipped waist and sweeping skirt.Amy Sussman/Getty ImagesVelvet shoulder bows added whimsy to the cherry-red silk Rodarte gown the actress Janelle James wore at the Emmys.Neilson Barnard/Getty ImagesAt the back of the halter-neck Carolina Herrera gown that Emily Hampshire chose for the Emmys was a giant bow with ribbons that trailed behind the actress as she walked.David Swanson/EPA, via ShutterstockThe actress Julianne Moore kept it relatively simple at the Golden Globes in a strapless Bottega Veneta gown with a full skirt and a pointy scoop neckline.Mike Blake/ReutersZuri Hall, an actress and a television host, chose a fishtail Oscar de la Renta gown for the Golden Globes that had oversize bows running down its back.Michael Tran/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesYes chef! Tom Colicchio, a star of “Top Chef,” turned heads at the Emmys in a chili-colored tuxedo jacket from the Italian label Isaia.Ashley Landis/Associated PressDarker ShadesAt the Golden Globes, the actor Barry Keoghan styled his checker-print Louis Vuitton tuxedo with pearly accessories.Michael Tran/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe singer Dua Lipa attended the Critics Choice Awards in a Prada dress with a textured, ruched fabric that evoked flower petals. Her dyed hair matched the gown’s pinot-noir shade.Michael Tran/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesRoses appeared to be blooming along the neckline of the strapless Armani gown the actress Meghann Fahy wore at the Emmys. Embroidered crystals gave the look some shimmer.Amy Sussman/Getty ImagesAt the Critics Choice Awards, the actor Charles Melton ditched the traditional penguin suit for this spicier Valentino style in a shade of cinnabar.Jordan Strauss/Invision, via Associated PressThe actress Christina Applegate, who has multiple sclerosis, walked onto the Emmys stage to present an award in an oxblood velvet tuxedo dress by Christian Siriano and Dr. Martens on her feet. The crowd reacted with a standing ovation.Mario Anzuoni/ReutersA deep burgundy shade set the actor Matty Matheson’s tuxedo apart from others worn at the Golden Globes.Amy Sussman/Getty ImagesFor the Emmys, the actress Abby Elliott chose a skintight Alexander McQueen dress with a unique three-peak neckline.Robyn Beck/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesSome 450,000 wine-colored sequins were used to embellish the body-hugging Oscar de la Renta gown that the actress Selena Gomez wore at the Emmys.Neilson Barnard/Getty ImagesJoana Pak, right, wore a short-sleeve, mock-neck gown in a rich shade of claret at the Emmys, which she attended her husband, the actor Steven Yeun.Richard Shotwell/Invision, via Associated PressA neck scarf topped the shimmering, garnet-chain-mail Moschino dress that the actress Juliette Lewis chose for the Emmys.Mike Blake/ReutersBrighter TonesAyo Edebiri, a star of “The Bear,” wore a scarlet column Prada gown with an iridescent layered train at the Golden Globes, where she won the award for best performance in a television musical or comedy.Robyn Beck/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesFor the Golden Globes, the actress Michelle Yeoh chose a fiery Bottega Veneta gown with a sculpted silhouette and a split-structured bodice.Valerie Macon/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesA flowing train enhanced the elegance of Camila Morrone’s corseted Versace gown at the Emmys. (The actress attended the awards with her father, who modeled for Versace in the 1990s).David Swanson/EPA, via ShutterstockDanielle Brooks’s look at the Golden Globes, which was designed by Moschino and Gabriella Karefa-Johnson, featured a floor-length stole and a fishtail skirt.Amy Sussman/Getty ImagesThe television host Mona Kosar Abdi opted for a Cinderella-style ball gown by Rita Vinieris at the Golden Globes.Amy Sussman/Getty ImagesJoining the television host Jimmy Kimmel on the Emmys carpet was his wife, the screenwriter Molly McNearney, who wore a rippled column dress and a matching vermillion clutch.Neilson Barnard/Getty ImagesJill Latiano Howerton, an actress and the wife of the actor Glenn Howerton, joined her husband on the Emmys carpet wearing a cascading chiffon dress with puffed sleeves and cutaway sides.Frazer Harrison/Getty ImagesReds That ShineThe actress Katherine Heigl, who had not attended the Emmys since 2014, made her return to the awards show this year in a strapless Reem Acra gown and a coifed blond bob that evoked old Hollywood glamour.Frazer Harrison/Getty ImagesAt the Golden Globes, Ms. Gomez wore a ruby-red Armani dress with an asymmetrical full skirt, a high-neck halter top and black, crystal-embroidered flowers on its peekaboo bodice.Allison Dinner/EPA, via ShutterstockThe actor John Krasinski paired a raspberry-colored, double-breasted jacket with blackberry-colored pants at the Golden Globes.Amy Sussman/Getty ImagesAfter arriving to the Golden Globes in this Sophie Couture gown with a gargantuan skirt, the model and television host Heidi Klum described herself as a big blond tomato in an interview with WWD.Mike Blake/ReutersRed With Something ExtraThe actress Suki Waterhouse showed off her pregnant belly at the Emmys in a Valentino gown with side cutouts and an oversize bow at the waist.Richard Shotwell/Invision, via Associated PressFor the Critics Choice Awards, the actress Emily Blunt chose an Armani gown that was covered in fire-engine-red paillettes and had large rose embellishments along its single shoulder and back.Phillip Faraone/Getty ImagesGrenadine-colored sequins added sparkle to the singer Mandy Moore’s chest-and-back-exposing Elie Saab gown at the Critics Choice Awards.Jordan Strauss/Invision, via Associated PressA bouquet of red rosettes blossomed along the neckline of the off-the-shoulder Balmain gown that Margot Robbie wore at the Critics Choice Awards.Michael Tran/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe actress Florence Pugh is known for taking swings with her fashion. Her look at the Golden Globes — a voluminous sheer Valentino gown dotted with poppies and worn over red hot pants — was no exception.Allison Dinner/EPA, via ShutterstockFor the Critics Choice Awards, the actress Vanessa Morgan chose a cherry-red Zuhair Murad mini dress with a shiny lace bodice and a cascading train that almost blended into the carpet.Frazer Harrison/Getty ImagesOne word to describe the button-front Sergio Hudson dress and matching red hair bow that the actress Rachel Brosnahan wore at the Golden Globes? Marvelous.Amy Sussman/Getty ImagesA puff of marabou feathers added drama to the structured ruby-red gown Michelle Peters wore at the Emmys, where she walked the carpet with her brother, the actor Evan Peters.Neilson Barnard/Getty ImagesSequined sleeves and panels gave a playful touch to the actress Tantoo Cardinal’s otherwise simple gown at the Critics Choice Awards.Frazer Harrison/Getty ImagesThe actress Alex Borstein’s Emmys ensemble had a lot to look at, including roses and marabou feathers clustered at the shoulders. A gaping keyhole neckline and a long slit in the red skirt offered more than a peek at her black lacy bra and underskirt.Neilson Barnard/Getty ImagesElizabeth Paton, Anthony Rotunno and Stella Bugbee contributed reporting. More

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      ‘The Kitchen’ Review: No Direction Home

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      Directing their first feature, Kibwe Tavares and Daniel Kaluuya spin a warmly humane story of cross-generational connection.The vitality and bonhomie that characterize many scenes in “The Kitchen,” a dystopian drama set in a near-future London, might seem at odds with the film’s focus on deprivation and persecution. Yet there’s nothing despairing about the close-knit, mostly nonwhite community that swarms and surges inside the titular public housing project, one of the last to be swallowed by private developers.It’s an estate under siege. From the authorities, who block essential services and food deliveries, and from the police, who deploy surveillance drones and armed raids. Inside this vibrant warren of market stalls and cell-like living spaces, though, the air hums with the punchy energy of people pulling together against a common enemy. Standing alone is Izi (a fabulous Kane Robinson), a selfish striver saving for a deposit on an upscale apartment. Izi sells burial packages at a futuristic funeral home, spinning fabricated tales of personal loss to juice his commission. His plans are soon compromised when he encounters Benji (Jedaiah Bannerman), a recently orphaned mourner who proves difficult to dislodge.In part an outcry against gentrification and the privatization of England’s once-thriving social housing, “The Kitchen” dilutes its abjection with unlikely humor and a vividly eclectic soundtrack (mostly dispensed by the community’s resident D.J., played by the former soccer star Ian Wright). The direction, by Kibwe Tavares and Daniel Kaluuya, is sure and unfussy, spinning a warmly humane story of cross-generational connection. Whenever the film threatens to slide into sentiment, the actors yank it back, with Hope Ikpoku Jr. especially effective in a too-brief turn as a wily competitor for Benji’s allegiance.Against expectation, “The Kitchen” ends with a question mark rather than an exclamation point, having said all that it wants and not a word more than it needs.The KitchenRated R for smashed windows and broken promises. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More