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      Watch an Awkward Party Scene in ‘Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret’

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      The screenwriter and director Kelly Fremon Craig narrates a sequence from her film.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 party game becomes the source of dramatic tension in “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,” the screen adaptation of Judy Blume’s beloved novel about adolescence.In this sequence, Margaret (Abby Ryder Fortson) attends a party at the home of one of her classmates. Things get rowdy when Nancy (Elle Graham) proposes a game for the group: Two Minutes in the Closet. The girls are all given numbers. The boys draw those numbers from a bowl. The two people whose numbers match retreat to the closet, or in this case, a guest bathroom, for two minutes.The director and screenwriter Kelly Fremon Craig staged the scene in a heightened way, creating a thriller-like intensity while also playing key moments for laughs.“Where I placed all of the actors was a conscious decision,” Craig said in an interview, “because it was important to me how far they had to walk to get to each other, how far Margaret had to walk to get to the bathroom, all of those things.”In addition to the blocking, the scene comes together through a combination of performance, lighting and song selection, with the Dusty Springfield hit “Son of a Preacher Man” helping to further elevate it.“This was the luckiest I’ve ever gotten on a needle drop,” Craig said, recalling that she and her editor haphazardly added the song during the editing process. “It wound up that it scored the moment so perfectly that we couldn’t believe it. And actually, we have never moved it, even a single frame from that very first time we dropped it in.”Read the “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” review.Go behind the scenes of the film.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      Stream These 6 Titles Before They Leave Netflix in May

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      A couple of comedies, a couple of coming-of-age tales and more are leaving for U.S. subscribers next month. Catch them while you can.This month’s mix of titles leaving Netflix in the United States include two coming-of-age comedy dramas, a twisty thriller throwback, a wrenching Holocaust documentary and two uproarious comedies (one of them smuggled into an animated family film). Give them a stream before they’re gone. (Dates reflect the last day a title is available.)‘Side Effects’ (May 16)The director Steven Soderbergh is always a little bit ahead of the curve, and back in 2013, years before the current vogue of nostalgia for the erotic thrillers of the ’80s and ’90s, he assembled this steamy, twisty story of sexual deception and left-field double-crosses. (It was the early 2010s, so there is also a healthy dose of villainy for the health-care and pharmaceutical industries.) The final film before his short-lived retirement, it had Soderbergh reuniting with several of his previous stars, including Jude Law (“Contagion”), Catherine Zeta-Jones (“Traffic”) and Channing Tatum (“Magic Mike”), who are joined by Rooney Mara in a femme fatale turn that is alternately sensuous and scary.Stream it here.‘The Last Days’ (May 18)The first film released by the Shoah Foundation, and executive produced by no less a major name than Steven Spielberg, “The Last Days” won the Academy Award for best documentary feature of 1998. It tells the story of a grim and lesser-known chapter of the Holocaust: how German troops invaded Hungary in March of 1944, long after it was clear that World War II was lost, and proceeded to murder hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews anyway. This chronicle of pure evil is told by the director James Moll as a story of survival and perseverance, focusing on five survivors of the Holocaust and the inspirational ways they spent their spared lives.Stream it here.‘Edge of Seventeen’ (May 31)One of several gay-themed coming-of-age comedy-dramas of the late 1990s, this earnest and truthful tale from the director David Moreton and the screenwriter Todd Stephens has become something of a classic in the queer canon, and for good reason. Set in Stephens’s hometown, Sandusky, Ohio, circa 1984, it beautifully captures a moment when both explicit and coded gay content was becoming part of the mainstream, and when its sensitive teen protagonist, Eric (Chris Stafford), was finding out that his romantic ideals were not quite reflected by his Midwestern, mid-80s reality. Moreton’s direction deftly approaches its rom-com conventions with uncommon candor.Stream it here.‘Galaxy Quest’ (May 31)This wry and witty cult comedy from the director Dean Parisot mixes two wonderful comic ideas well. It is, first and foremost, a winking satire of not only “Star Trek” but also the entire (and, at the time of its 1999 release, comparatively nascent) fan-catering “geek” culture, focusing on a short-lived “Trek”-style television show that has become an obsession object for a generation of super fans. And it is also a swashbuckling comic adventure of its own, playfully borrowing the “Three Amigos” model of fictional characters mistaken for real heroes, as the cast of the sci-fi show is drafted to prevent a real alien invasion. Sigourney Weaver is having a blast, Tim Allen invokes the bloated ego of his Shatner-esque star with ease and Alan Rickman steals the show as the classically trained Shakespearean thespian saddled with the show’s Spock role.Stream it here.‘My Girl’ (May 31)Every generation has its own story about the movie that unexpectedly reduced them to a weeping mess. And if their parents were ripped to shreds by “Old Yeller,” most ’90s kids can tell you their own sob story about heading to the multiplex for what looked like Macaulay Culkin’s charming follow-up to “Home Alone,” only to find … well, not that. Let it suffice to say that the future fast-talking, foul-mouthed “Veep” co-star Anna Chlumsky (the film’s actual star; Culkin’s was a minor supporting role) is charismatic and sympathetic as a young woman going through one of those summers where everything changes, while Dan Aykroyd and Jamie Lee Curtis provide both warmth and comic relief as the grown-ups in her life.Stream it here.‘Rango’ (May 31)The Disney juggernaut (and, to a lesser extent, the Illumination Entertainment invasion) has become so pervasive in family entertainment that it’s easy to miss kid-friendly entertainment that appears without that imprimatur. But this 2011 adventure from Nickelodeon Movies and Paramount Pictures is a delight, offering as much entertainment for parents as for kids — or perhaps more, as the screenwriter is the “Gladiator” scribe, John Logan, and his clearest inspiration is the decidedly adult ’70s classic “Chinatown.” Gore Verbinski directs his “Pirates of the Caribbean” leading man, Johnny Depp, in the title role of a lost chameleon who becomes sheriff of a small animal town in the desert; the similarly adult-friendly supporting cast includes Ned Beatty, Isla Fisher, Timothy Olyphant, Bill Nighy, Harry Dean Stanton and Ray Winstone.Stream it here. More

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      In Nida Manzoor’s World, Martial Arts and Jane Austen Belong in the Same Movie

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      The writer-director set out to make “a joyful film about South Asian Muslim women” that didn’t revolve around trauma. The result is “Polite Society.”“Polite Society” is an action caper filled with martial arts battles and secret lairs. It’s a romance in which two smart, impossibly attractive people fall in love. It’s a Jane Austen-esque comedy of marriage in which a teenager meddles in her older sister’s love life while their parents look on in dismay.It’s also a movie with a lavish, Bollywood-inspired musical number, because why settle on a single genre when you can cram in as many as possible?Yet this new British film does not feel tonally inconsistent or stylistically scattered; rather, form imaginatively fits function.“It’s about women dealing with norms and expectations and rules, and wanting to push them,” the writer-director Nida Manzoor explained in a video conversation from Bristol, England. “When they’re breaking them, I’ve got to break genres as well. So it all felt like it was working together, not just me being insane.” She laughed. “Maybe a bit of me being insane.”Reviewing “Polite Society” for The New York Times, Amy Nicholson called it a delight that signals the arrival of Manzoor as “a promising new thing: a first-time filmmaker impatient to evolve cultural representation from the last few years of self-conscious vitamins into crowd-pleasing candy.”Kansara, left, and Ritu Arya as South Asian Muslim sisters in Britain. Parisa Taghizadeh/Focus FeaturesIn the film, Ria, the youngest in a British Pakistani family, attends high school while training hard to fulfill her dream of becoming a stuntwoman. (She idolizes Eunice Huthart, a real-life Liverpudlian with extensive experience as a Hollywood stunt double.) And so the actress portraying her, Priya Kansara, had to get with the program — fast.“I have no prior martial arts experience or anything like that,” Kansara said in a video chat. “I was cast around six, seven weeks before we started the shoot, so that’s the time I had to learn as many of the stunts and the fight choreography. It was intense because there was so much to get through. And Ria is just a crazy kid; she doesn’t really stop.”The plot moves at a fast clip peppered with a lot of action, which is nearly always layered with rambunctious comedy. When Ria, who usually has no time for “girlie” accouterments, is forced to endure a wax, the scene is shot like a dramatic interrogation in an early James Bond movie — “but with this kind of villain Auntie character,” Manzoor said, referring to Ria’s nemesis, played by Nimra Bucha.The film is often cathartic in the way it lets girls and women do — with contagious glee — things we have seen men do onscreen for decades. When Ria and her sister, the art-school dropout Lena (Ritu Arya), go out for burgers, they wolf them down with memorable gusto.“Nida came up to us, like, ‘Just go for it, eat like you haven’t eaten in hours and you cannot wait to get into it,’ ” Kansara said. “Me and Ritu took the note literally and we went for it. After that take, Nida came back up to us and was like, ‘OK, maybe not that much.’ ”“Polite Society” lets Kansara, left, and Arya do things onscreen the way men have for decades.Samuel EngelkingFor Arya (best known as Lila Pitts in the Netflix series “The Umbrella Academy”), being encouraged to chomp was a refreshing change from what she usually sees in movies or on television. “I love watching people eat, but onscreen they are often sort of playing around with their food because of the amount of takes they have to do,” she said in a joint chat with Kansara. “Which is why it’s satisfying when you see people actually eating. I love that scene for that reason.”Arya was familiar with Manzoor’s sensibility because they had worked together before, most notably on the 14-minute comedy “Lady Parts,” which Manzoor made for Channel 4 in 2018 and in which Arya played the lead singer of the short film’s titular punk band, a raucous quartet of Muslim women. (Because of scheduling conflicts, the part was recast when the short became the series “We Are Lady Parts,” which streams on Peacock in the United States; Manzoor is currently writing Season 2.)Manzoor started writing “Polite Society” around 10 years ago but kept running into obstacles as she tried to get the project off the ground. Very early on, before such suggestions became less acceptable to make, potential financiers would ask if she could make the central family a white one. Others would have preferred something a little bit less action and more art house. Later, the emphasis on comedy became a problem: Couldn’t there be some weighty issues like, say, an arranged marriage?Manzoor did not budge. “It was like, ‘It’s a joyful film about South Asian Muslim women,’ ” she said. “So much of the reason I’m a filmmaker is because I want to not have our stories only be about trauma.”Giving “Polite Society” emotional ballast is the bond between Ria and Lena, which was inspired by the one between Manzoor and her own sister, Sanya, who is a year older. (Their brother, Shez, worked on the soundtrack.) After collaborating with Arya on “Lady Parts,” Manzoor felt she was a natural fit for the role of Lena. “She has the quality of my oldest sister,” Manzoor said, “that natural, inherent sort of alternative brown girl, which is quite rare, actually, in actors. It’s kind of mercurial and wild and vulnerable at the same time.”Even a brutal brawl between Ria and Lena, at a low point in their relationship, was inspired by real life. “I used to fight with her — we used to do martial arts together,” Manzoor said of Sanya. “I have this memory of when we were in a martial arts class and our instructor always wanted us to fight when we did sparring.” She laughed. “It was kind of creepy.”Asked why she was so keen to put women being active and physical at the heart of her film, Manzoor dug back into her past again.“I used to love sports, and doing martial arts and dancing,” she said. “And then around 12, 13 years old, your body changes and you become objectified. I felt so alienated from my body, so ashamed of it. I realized I’m drawn to genres that allow women to be in possession of their bodies: playing an instrument, being onstage. That was something I lost when I was a teenager, that physicality,” she added. “In my art, I’m always trying to show women have it or regain it or find it.” More

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      ‘The Trip to Greece,’ ‘Moonwalkers’ and More Streaming Gems

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      There are laughs aplenty in this month’s off-the-grid suggestions for your subscription streaming services, along with a trio of wildly different but equally thrilling action pictures.‘The Trip to Greece’ (2020)Stream it on Hulu.The most unlikely film franchise this side of Richard Linklater’s “Before” trilogy, the decade-long “Trip” series began as a feature film recut from a six-part BBC2 television series, with the British comic actors Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon taking a road trip to review restaurants in northern England. As subsequent installments spread across the continent, ambitions expanded as well; what began as, essentially, a foodie tourism show became a meditation on celebrity, aging and friendship. This most recent (and reportedly final) installment finds the duo retracing the steps of Odysseus, but this time around, it’s not just about pretty scenery and funny imitations. We’ve grown attached to these slightly fictionalized versions of the actors, and the pathos of the closing sections are both unexpected and genuine.‘Moonwalkers’ (2016)Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.Rupert Grint has kept a fairly low profile since the “Harry Potter” series came to its conclusion, but his starring turn in this ’60s-set, what-if comedy-thriller indicates his capacity for a strong second act. As a small-time rock promoter who gets pulled into a scheme to hire Stanley Kubrick to help fake the moon landing, Grint conveys a hilariously sweaty desperation and up-for-anything spirit, while Ron Perlman is nicely matched as the hard-nosed C.I.A. man coordinating the operation.‘Beatriz at Dinner’ (2017)Stream it on HBO Max.A question for the good liberals: What would you do if you found yourself invited to your employers’ dinner table, and, by pure accident, seated across from Donald Trump? That’s the provocative hypothetical for this comedy of manners directed by Miguel Arteta and written by Mike White, who would follow up this feature with similarly pointed questions of class as the creator of “The White Lotus.” Salma Hayek plays the title character, a massage therapist whose last-minute invite to dinner with regular clients puts her in proximity to a Trump-esque real estate developer (John Lithgow), and seething at his every affable insult. Running a trim 82 minutes, this is a compact hypothetical whose plot twists are genuinely eyebrow-raising.‘Official Competition’ (2022)Stream it on Hulu.Films about filmmakers, especially in recent years, tend to lean into self-congratulation — misty-eyed valentines to the magic of moviemaking, and to the noble if flawed souls who strive to put their art onscreen. This wildly funny and unapologetically cynical satire from the Argentine duo Gastón Duprat and Mariano Cohn is a welcome antidote to all of that. Penélope Cruz (in perhaps her loosest and looniest performance to date) is an eccentric filmmaker hired by a multimillionaire to helm a film adaptation of his favorite book; her reputedly uncompromising artistic integrity proves flexible for the right price. She uses that financial leverage to bring in Spain’s biggest movie star (Antonio Banderas, of course) and its most respected actor (Oscar Martínez), setting up a heady battle of celebrity vs. talent. All three actors clearly have a ball biting the hand that feeds them, and their fun is infectious.‘Hit & Run’ (2012)Stream it on HBO Max.The character actor Dax Shepard stars, writes, and co-directs (with David Palmer) this cheekily silly and undeniably entertaining throwback to the car-chase comedies of his youth. (Who’d have thought blockbusters would become so dire that we’d one day long for the pleasures of “Smokey and the Bandit”?) Shepard is all charm as a one-time criminal whose stint in witness protection comes to an abrupt end, sending him gunning for the hills with his current girlfriend (Kristen Bell) in tow. Shepard stages his chases and crashes with élan, fills his supporting cast with colorful characters and generates genuine stakes and chemistry with Bell — unsurprising, since they’re longtime, offscreen partners.‘The Last Stand’ (2013)Stream it on Netflix or Hulu.The (comparative) box office indifference to Arnold Schwarzenegger over the past decade or so has been a real bummer, since he’s doing some of his most challenging and surprising work to date. In this energetic and entertaining barnburner from the director Kim Jee-woon (“The Good, The Bad, The Weird”), Schwarzenegger stars as an aging sheriff whose small border town is the last line of defense against a drug lord on the run; Luis Guzmán, Johnny Knoxville, Peter Stormare and Forest Whitaker are among the stellar supporting cast. Kim cooks up a flavorful stew of influences, blending the “Rio Bravo”-style neo-Western narrative with the action pyrotechnics of vintage Schwarzenegger and Kim’s batty, comic, postmodern style.‘Coriolanus’ (2011)Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.Ralph Fiennes stars in and (for the first time) directs this muscular take on one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known tragedies, adapted with wit and grace by the screenwriter John Logan. Fiennes reunites with his “Hurt Locker” cinematographer Barry Ackroyd, and the choice makes sense; Fiennes and Logan update Shakespeare’s tale to the contemporary military theater, and the parallels between this bloody tale of civil unrest and endless war (shot in Serbia and Montenegro) and U.S. actions in Afghanistan and Iraq are impossible to ignore. Fiennes is ferocious in the title role, making a meal of every rich soliloquy, while marshaling an impressive supporting cast, including Gerard Butler, Jessica Chastain, Vanessa Redgrave and a pre-“Succession” Brian Cox.‘Dragged Across Concrete’ (2019)Stream it on Netflix.The writer and director S. Craig Zahler is carving out something of a niche as an old-school exploitation filmmaker, with unapologetically grim and blood-soaked riffs on the western (“Bone Tomahawk”), prison picture (“Brawl in Cell Block 99”) and, here, the cop-and-criminal flick. Vince Vaughn and Mel Gibson star as police detective partners suspended in a high-profile brutality scandal whose need for income makes them step to the other side of the law. Zahler’s skill at staging a bang-up set piece is undeniable, and he displays a welcomely nuanced interest in the blurry, gray lines that separate good and evil. More

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      Hollywood, Both Frantic and Calm, Braces for Writers’ Strike

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      Studios have moved up deadlines for TV writers, and late-night shows are preparing to go dark. But for other segments of the industry, it’s business as usual.Writers scrambling to finish scripts. Rival late-night-show hosts and producers convening group calls to discuss contingency plans. Union officials and screenwriters gathering in conference rooms to design picket signs with slogans like “The Future of Writing Is at Stake!”With a Hollywood strike looming, there has been a frantic sprint throughout the entertainment world before 11,500 TV and movie writers potentially walk out as soon as next week.The possibility of a television and movie writers’ strike — will they, won’t they, how could they? — has been the top conversation topic in the industry for weeks. And in recent days, there has been a notable shift: People have stopped asking one another whether a strike would take place and started to talk about duration. How long was the last one? (100 days in 2007-8.) How long was the longest one? (153 days in 1988.)“It’s the first topic that comes up in every meeting, every phone call, and everyone claims to have their own inside source about how long a strike will go on and whether the directors and actors will also go out, which would truly be a disaster,” said Laura Lewis, the founder of Rebelle Media, a production and financing company behind shows like “Tell Me Lies” on Hulu and independent movies like “Mr. Malcolm’s List.”Unions representing screenwriters have been negotiating with Hollywood’s biggest studios for a new contract to replace the one that expires on Monday. The contracts for directors and actors expire on June 30.“I support the writers,” Ms. Lewis said. “It’s challenging, though. Just as we are starting to recover from the pandemic, we could be going into a strike.”In recent weeks, television writers have been racing to meet deadlines that studios moved up. Worried about the possibility of having no income for months, some TV writers have been trying to push through new projects — to get “commenced,” Hollywood slang for a signed writing contract, which typically brings an upfront payment.One prominent talent agent, who like some others in this article spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation, said there was a “mad rush” to complete deals before next week. Some writers began removing their personal possessions from studio offices in anticipation of a walkout.Likewise, studio executives began calling producers last week to tell them to act as if a strike were certain, and to make sure all last-minute tweaks were incorporated into scripts, so production on some series could continue even in the absence of writers on set. Executives have delayed production for other series until the fall in cases where they determined scripts were not entirely ready.The president of one production company said this week that she was “freaking out” over a TV project in danger of falling apart because the star was available only for a limited period and the script was not ready.The writers room for the hit ABC sitcom “Abbott Elementary” is supposed to convene on Monday — the day the contract expires.“I’m making plans to go back to work when we’re supposed to go back to work,” said Brittani Nichols, a producer and writer on the show. “And if that doesn’t happen, I’ll be at work on the picket line.”The last Hollywood writers’ strike began in 2007 and lasted 100 days.Axel Koester for The New York TimesIf there is a strike, which could begin as early as Tuesday, late-night shows, including ones hosted by Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers, are likely to go dark. Late-night hosts and their top producers have convened conference calls to discuss a coordinated response in the event of a strike, much as they did during the pandemic.During the 2007 walkout, late-night shows went dark for two months before they began gradually returning in early 2008, even with writers still on picket lines. Jimmy Kimmel paid his staff out of his own pocket during the strike, and later explained that he had to return to the air because his savings were nearly wiped out.Mr. Kimmel and other hosts, like Conan O’Brien, gamely tried to put together shows without their writers or their standard monologues. Jay Leno, on the other hand, wrote his own “Tonight Show” monologues, infuriating the writers’ unions in the process.Though there’s plenty of uncertainty in TV circles, there are also segments of Hollywood where it has been business as usual.Executives at streaming services seemed to exhibit what one senior William Morris Endeavor agent called a “frightening, freakish sense of calm,” perhaps because they were betting that any strike would be short. Most streaming services have been under pressure to cut costs — even deep-pocketed Amazon Studios laid off 100 people on Thursday — and a strike is one quick way to do that: Spending would plummet as production slowed.“It could lead to notably better-than-expected streaming profitability,” Rich Greenfield, a founder of the LightShed Partners research firm, wrote to investors this month.At several movie studios, there is little sense of alarm, partly because a strike would have almost no impact on the release schedule until next spring. (The movie business works nearly a year in advance.) One movie agent said everyone in her orbit was preparing for the Cannes Film Festival, which begins on May 16 and will include premieres for films like “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” and “Killers of the Flower Moon,” the latest from Martin Scorsese. Many movie executives were also preoccupied with CinemaCon this week, a convention for theater operators in Las Vegas.“The writers’ process is like 18 months to two years away from movies’ hitting our cinemas, generally, so you wouldn’t see an impact for quite a while,” said John Fithian, the departing chief executive of the National Association of Theater Owners. “There is a whole lot of writing already in the can — or the computer — for projects the studios are putting into production.”At the Walt Disney Company, the largest supplier of union-covered TV dramas and comedies (890 episodes for the 2021-22 season), more immediate worries have been the focus. Disney began to hand out thousands of pink slips on Monday as part of an unrelated plan to eliminate 7,000 jobs worldwide by the end of June. The company made news again on Wednesday when it sued Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.During previous union walkouts, television networks ordered more reality programming, which does not fall under the writers’ unions jurisdiction. The long-running “Cops” was ordered during the 1988 strike, while the 2007-8 strike helped supercharge shows like “The Celebrity Apprentice” and “The Biggest Loser.”Paul Neinstein, co-chief executive of the Project X production company, which made the most recent “Scream” movie and Netflix’s “The Night Agent,” said there had been a huge increase in reality TV pitches over the last month, even though his production company was not known for making unscripted television.“All of a sudden everybody’s got a reality show,” he said. “And that to me feels very strike-related.” More

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      ‘Peter Pan & Wendy’ Review: A New Girl in Neverland

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      The filmmaker David Lowery updates the classic tale with his own pixie dust, saving what’s good and scuttling the rest.“Peter Pan & Wendy” is a case study in one of the agonies of growing up: the realization that some of the entertainment that tickled us as youngsters — as in the many troubling scenes in Walt Disney’s 1953 animated adaptation of J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan novel, including the ditty “What Made the Red Man Red?” — have aged as gracefully as its lead character.The filmmaker David Lowery has opted to update it with his own pixie dust: save what’s good, scuttle the rest, and add plenty of spit and polish for a 21st-century shine.Seventy years ago, when Peter Pan whisked Wendy and her siblings to Neverland so she could mother his Lost Boys, he treated her like dirt and she swooned over his heroics. Now, Wendy (a compelling Ever Anderson) decks Peter Pan (Alexander Molony) and seizes the helm of her own story. “I don’t even know if I want to be a mother!” she protests.Lowery is a wise choice for a salvage attempt. He’s gifted at exploring the haunted corners of familiar tales (“Pete’s Dragon,” “The Green Knight”) and has revealed a morbid reverence for the passage of time — perfect for a story whose villain, Captain Hook (a scene-stealing Jude Law, hiding beneath artificial under-eye bags), is literally stalked by the ticktock of a clock.Having stripped out the questionable or merely dubious themes, he and his co-writer, Toby Halbrooks, are left with many minutes to fill. In addition to including a traumatic back story for Captain Hook, they add two lovely reveries on aging: a montage in which Wendy savors her youth and another where she’s tantalized by the prospect of growing up.The girl-powering of the plot means scrapping the catty mermaids, the glimmer of a love triangle with Tiger Lily (here played by Cree actress Alyssa Wapanatahk) and pretty much everything interesting that Tinkerbell (Yara Shahidi) once got to do, including her multiple attempts to murder Wendy. The fairy is now merely given a camera trick — Tinkervision — a blurred, jittery point of view that has its best moment when she flies through blood spatter.Lowery clearly adores the look of the cartoon. He and the cinematographer Bojan Bazelli pay it tribute with their use of moody skies, striking shadows, unexpected camera angles and a darkly beautiful color palette that shimmers like jewels in a cave. Still, these well-meaning choices struggle to cohere into a satisfying picture. Peter Pan comes across as a pest, and when Wendy belts the movie’s thesis — “This magic belongs to no boy!” — it hits the ear like a distracting clang.By the time the woolly pirates burst into their second rousing sea shanty (kudos to the song composer Curtis Glenn Heath), our minds begin to liken the Jolly Roger to the philosophical paradox of Theseus’s ship: How many planks can you swap out while still claiming it’s the real deal?Peter Pan & WendyRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. Watch on Disney+. More

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      ‘Four Quartets’ Review: Virtuosi in Verse

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      Ralph Fiennes delivers an animated performance of the T.S. Eliot works, but the film doesn’t quite succeed in bringing the stage into the cinema.The English poet T.S. Eliot composed the poems that make up the work eventually published as “Four Quartets” over the course of six years, and at the end of his literary career. The four elegiac, epic poems total more than 1,000 lines, and are devoted to time and divinity. To perform them in a single staged performance is an exercise of memory and sheer will. In 2021, Ralph Fiennes accomplished the feat, acting out Eliot’s “Four Quartets” in a lauded solo production that toured in the United Kingdom, including a run at London’s Pinter Theater. His sister Sophie Fiennes filmed an adaptation of the production after the actor’s live performances ended.Her filmed version uses the original theatrical stage, with towering walls and minimal set decorations. Her camera occasionally sneaks glimpses of existence outside the theater — shots that conjure the views of Eliot’s England, a world of moss-covered stone and fields of grass-fed cows. But there is no visible audience, no sign of a human presence beyond Ralph Fiennes himself.As an actor, Fiennes contorts, stomps and dances — he delivers an animation of Eliot’s language, a forceful performance that treats the accumulation of verse into poetry like the strenuous, mathematical raising of walls in a cathedral. He speaks slowly, granting viewers time to grasp Eliot’s words. Yet for all of the actor’s efforts, the film around him does not match his mellifluousness.The camera remains at a distance, and the editing is prosaic, refusing opportunities to add a cinematic interpretation to complement Fiennes’s central performance. The static images recall the views from live theater, where the eyes of the audience are limited by the proscenium and the angle of a particular seat to the stage. Fiennes brings the fire, yet the air around him remains unmoved, even by his embers.Four QuartetsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. In theaters. More