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      ‘Apolonia, Apolonia’ Review: A Whole Life in Art

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      The painter Apolonia Sokol is the ostensible subject of a wide-ranging documentary about life itself.“For as long as I can remember, I’ve seen the world through my camera,” a woman’s voice says in the early moments of “Apolonia, Apolonia.” Onscreen, we’re watching — presumably through that same camera — a young woman, strong features, entrancing smile, dark circles under her eyes, bearing the expression of a person who’s not afraid of the lens one bit. “But no motif,” the voice continues, “has caught my eye as she did.”The face belongs to Apolonia Sokol, but the voice belongs to Lea Glob, the filmmaker who followed Sokol off and on for 13 years. The pair first met in 2009, and Glob, who is Danish (and speaks mostly in Danish throughout the film), decided to make Sokol the subject of a film school assignment: to create a documentary portrait of a person. She was, she tells us, entranced by Sokol’s life. Raised in a theater in Paris, then in Denmark after her parents split up, having weathered a life-threatening disease as a teen, Sokol returned to Paris when she turned 18 with aspirations to “walk in the footsteps of the great painters.” By that time, the theater (which her father had run) was barely holding on, but Sokol created a world in it nonetheless. That world grabbed Glob and wouldn’t let go.The age-old documentarian’s question — who is really the subject of a nonfiction film? — constitutes a major theme that runs through “Apolonia, Apolonia.” Glob speaks of entering the “magical theater” in which Sokol “played the starring role,” but even as the artist ages, the theater closes and life shifts drastically, Glob stays along for the ride. “Whether I captured Apolonia with my camera or she captured me with her theater, I don’t know,” she says. Glob’s method is observation, without a particular end or point in mind, very nearly to a fault. She even admits, late in the film, that she couldn’t really figure out when to turn off the camera — a question that plagues many an observational documentarian, and most artists and writers, too. Every time Glob thought the film might be finished, Sokol’s life morphed again: a move to New York, to Los Angeles, stints working with artists and for businesspeople. Each time, Glob went back to film some more.This is not the kind of documentary intended to help you learn about the life of the painter Apolonia Sokol. Unless you’re deep in the art world, you may not even know who that is. Instead, it’s a movie about life and how it’s lived, with Sokol’s portraiture forming a pleasing harmony rather than a narrative backbone. The film moves roughly forward in time, but jumps backward and sideways sometimes, as if Glob — in making sense of the present — is remembering something she watched long ago. It’s easy to refashion any artist’s life as a narrative of inevitability, but Sokol paints with no guarantee that she’ll ever break into the mainstream art world. We watch her grueling uncertainty through the eyes of someone who also isn’t really sure what she’s making. The point here isn’t to document the rise of a star, but to observe the process of making.That fact alone sets “Apolonia, Apolonia” apart from the deluge of subject-approved documentaries that have flooded the market and film festivals in the past several years. Those movies are frequently hagiographic, though not inevitably so. The intended audience is the famous subject’s fans, or those who wish to be. Thus these films come with a built-in viewership, which brings along a healthy budget. They’re safe investments for funders and streamers, and the ecosystem is built for them. But they offer few surprises.In a movie like “Apolonia, Apolonia,” however, there’s no obvious path along which the story will unfold when filming begins, which makes it hard to pitch to the people who hold the purse strings. Instead, most of the director’s work comes in the editing stage, when the recurring threads in all that footage become more clear. The subject of this film is expulsion, and the way that Sokol’s story parallels that of women who have been cast from their homes because they refused to fit established molds, and must make new lives elsewhere. This theme is echoed in a more melancholy key in Sokol’s friend Oksana Shachko, a feminist activist whom Sokol took in when she became a refugee from her native Ukraine (and was “already an icon,” as Glob puts it). They live together for years, and describe themselves as a couple, as soul mates, though the nature of their intimacy is kept a bit coy in the film. What matters is their spiritual and creative connection, the support they give to each other in their pursuit of creativity and determination to avoid motherhood.Glob, on the other hand, gets pregnant and bears a child during the course of the filming — a fact that interests Sokol for how it represents a creative woman evolving her life. At the start of the film, the 20-something Sokol seems to be constantly performing for the camera, showing Glob the tapes her parents made of her own conception and birth. But as time wears on, the friendship between them, which slips on and off screen, grows into something more symbiotic. Mirrors appear: Sokol’s youthful illness is reflected in Glob’s life-threatening pregnancy complications. Sokol’s portraiture keeps shape-shifting as she matures as a painter, just as Glob’s portrait of Sokol keeps mutating.“Apolonia, Apolonia” is beguiling as a portrait of women with ambition, but also bittersweet. Glob repeatedly refers to her filming and Sokol’s painting, their work of creating portraits, as cheating death — something they both do in their real lives, too. “The truth is, I never had that control,” Glob says. It took her more than 13 years to understand what she was looking at: “life itself, larger, tougher, and more beautiful than I’d ever imagined.”“Apolonia, I’m going to turn off the camera now,” she says, as we see the smiling face of an older, wiser Sokol, less interested in performance now than in a full life. And then the screen goes black.Apolonia, ApoloniaNot rated. In Danish and French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Book of Clarence’ Review: Messiahs Wherever You Look

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      LaKeith Stanfield leads a predominantly Black cast in a retelling of the story of Jesus that’s both irreverent and devoted.The subject of a Jesus movie is technically Jesus. But every movie based on the biblical account of Jesus — and there are many such movies, stretching back to 1898 — says at least as much about the people who made it as it does about the man himself. Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” paints a heavily Catholic, heavily bloody image of a suffering hero. Franco Zeffirelli’s “Jesus of Nazareth” draws a romantic, Rennaisance-derived portrait of a lush, otherworldly Christ. “The Jesus Film,” produced for evangelistic purposes, takes its text entirely from the biblical account, attempting to render a literalist version of a savior. William Wyler’s “Ben-Hur” functions almost like a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern version of the story, with the main character crossing paths with Jesus only occasionally while experiencing a more broadly appealing revelation about radical forgiveness and loving one’s enemies. (And, yes, racing chariots.)“The Book of Clarence” is something entirely different than these and dozens of other renderings. But it bears some passing resemblance to another contemporary Jesus hit: “The Chosen,” a wildly popular television show that was crowdfunded and produced by Angel Studios (of last year’s megahit “Sound of Freedom”), and was so popular on streamers that the CW bought the rights to broadcast the first three seasons in 2023. (The fourth season will premiere exclusively in theaters this February.) Its popularity owes as much to a broad appetite for faith-inflected content as to its central concept: This is Jesus and those around him as you’ve never seen them before. They’re humans, with lives and dramas — not flat figures on a stained-glass window, or storybook characters, or ethereal saints. (It helps that the Jesus of “The Chosen,” unlike many other representations, actually looks like he’s from the Middle East.)As with that series, “The Book of Clarence” is a highly ambitious attempt at relatability, with an added reverence for the old-school “Ben-Hur”-era Hollywood biblical epics. Jeymes Samuel, who wrote and directed the film, clearly knows and loves the Bible story. He also doesn’t feel particularly beholden to a literalist rendering of the text. Here, Jesus and the apostles and their neighbors and friends are played by Black actors from around the diaspora, mostly in their own accents. The white actors play the Romans, a colonizing force of oppression.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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      Adan Canto, ‘The Cleaning Lady’ and ‘X-Men’ Actor, Dies at 42

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      In a career spanning more than a decade, Mr. Canto played a range of roles, including a control-obsessed criminal, a poised politician and a fiery comic book hero.Adan Canto, the Mexican actor known for his roles in TV series such as “The Cleaning Lady” and “Designated Survivor” as well as for playing Sunspot in the film “X-Men: Days of Future Past,” died on Monday. He was 42.His death was confirmed by his publicist, Jennifer Allen, who said the cause was appendiceal cancer. She did not say where he died.In an acting career that spanned more than a decade, Mr. Canto played a range of roles including a furious criminal hellbent on having control, a poised politician and a fiery comic book hero.Mr. Canto said in a 2013 interview with Collider that he had “always been fascinated by people, their psychology, what drives them and trying to understand them.”Italia Ricci, left, and Adan Canto were both series regulars in the show “Designated Survivor.”Ben Mark Holzberg/ABCIn “The Cleaning Lady,” which premiered on Fox in 2022, Mr. Canto played the gangster Arman Morales, who recruits a woman, played by Elodie Yung, into his criminal organization after she witnesses a murder. The show is entering its third season this year.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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      Marisa Pavan, Oscar Nominee for ‘The Rose Tattoo,’ Dies at 91

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      The twin sister of the Italian ingénue Pier Angeli, she attempted to avoid the pitfalls of fame that befell her sister’s career.The Italian actress Marisa Pavan never achieved the fame of her twin sister, Pier Angeli, a film ingénue of the 1950s who graced national magazine covers, and whose romance with James Dean and subsequent marriage to the singer Vic Damone became the stuff of Hollywood lore.Ms. Pavan — analytical, at times defiant and, in her view, less conventionally beautiful than her sister — nevertheless carved out a successful career herself. She appeared in a number of high-profile films throughout the 1950s, including “The Rose Tattoo” (1955), for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actress.And she did it her way, bristling at the star-making machine that she believed had turned her sister into a sexualized confection of the silver screen.“The studios made her be like what they wanted her to be like, but from this moment on, it was not my sister I had in front of me anymore,” Ms. Pavan said in an interview with Margaux Soumoy, the author of a biography of Ms. Pavan, “Drop the Baby; Put a Veil on the Broad!” (2021). “She had become a studios’ product.”Ms. Pavan, right, with her twin sister, the actress Pier Angeli, in 1952. “The studios made her be like what they wanted her to be like,” Ms. Pavan said of her star-crossed sister.Ullstein Bild, via Getty ImagesMs. Pavan died on Dec. 6 at her home in Gassin, a village on the French Riviera, Ms. Soumoy said. She was 91.Maria Luisa Pierangeli, known as Marisa, and her fraternal twin, Anna Maria Pierangeli, were born on June 19, 1932, in Cagliari, on the island of Sardinia, to Luigi Pierangeli, an architect, and Enrichetta (Romiti) Pierangeli, who later helped guide the careers of her daughters. (Their younger sister, Patrizia, born 15 years after they were, also became an actress.)The family moved to Rome when the twins were 3 and, during World War II, harbored a Jewish general in the Italian Army who was hiding from the Nazis and the Italian Fascists. His last name was Pavan, which Marisa, who had grown close to him, would eventually adopt as her screen name.Her sister’s career started in her teens, when she was discovered on a street in Rome. When Mr. Pierangeli died in 1950, the family relocated to the United States to further her career.Marisa had no interest in the limelight until a friend of the family, Albert R. Broccoli, an agent who would go on to produce the James Bond film franchise, invited her to visit the set of “What Price Glory” (1952), a film set during World War I starring James Cagney and directed by John Ford.Once she was there, the producer Sol Siegel asked her if she could sing in French. She could, and she did. “I sang a song of Jacqueline François,” Ms. Pavan said in a 2015 interview with Film Talk, an online film journal. She recalled Mr. Siegel responding, “You’re going to test tomorrow!”“I took all of this as a joke,” Ms. Pavan said. But she took the script home, learned the scene and returned the next day.She got the part — a French girl who falls in love with a U.S. Marine, played by Robert Wagner — and discovered a passion for acting.Her career reached its pinnacle three years later with “The Rose Tattoo,” based on a Tennessee Williams play. Ms. Pavan played Rosa, the rebellious daughter of a grief-stricken Sicilian widow (Anna Magnani) whose life in a town on the Gulf of Mexico takes a turn when she meets an ebullient trucker (Burt Lancaster).Ms. Pavan with Robert Wagner in “What Price Glory” (1952), her first film.Paramount Pictures, via AlamyHer sister, who by then went by the name Pier Angeli, had a long-term contract with MGM that limited her freedom to choose her roles and control her image, Ms. Soumoy wrote. But Ms. Pavan wished instead to preserve her independence and worked with various studios.“From the moment I realized that I wanted to build a career as an actress, I kept telling my agents to only find me quality parts that would fit my own personality and tastes,” Ms. Pavan was quoted as saying in Ms. Soumoy’s book. “The last thing I wanted was to be kept prisoner under contract to one studio like Anna was.”Her other notable roles included the noblewoman Catherine de Medici in “Diane” (1956), a romance set in the 16th century that starred Lana Turner; the wartime fling of Gregory Peck’s conflicted suburban husband and father in “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” (1956); and the love interest of Tony Curtis in the murder mystery “The Midnight Story” (1957).Ms. Pavan and the French actor Jean-Pierre Aumont in 1989. They married in 1956 and remained married until his death in 2001.James Andanson/Sygma, via Getty ImagesMs. Pavan married the French film and stage star Jean-Pierre Aumont in 1956. He died in 2001.Her sister’s life ultimately took a tragic turn as she encountered a faltering career, a series of unhappy relationships and struggles with mental and physical health. In 1971, Ms. Angeli was found dead at 39.Although speculation of suicide has swirled for years, Ms. Pavan remained adamant that her sister’s death was accidental, a reaction to a medication a doctor had given her during a bout of anxiety. It was a loss from which Ms. Pavan never fully recovered.“She felt like she had lost half of herself,” Ms. Soumoy said.Ms. Pavan is survived by her sons, Jean-Claude and Patrick Aumont; her sister Patrizia; six grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.Her eventual parting with the movie business appeared to stem from one clash in particular. While filming the splashy historical romance “Solomon and Sheba” (1959), the headstrong Ms. Pavan squared off against a producer after many of her scenes were cut, and threatened to leave the project. The move resulted in her effective blacklisting by studios, according to her biography.Ms. Pavan pivoted to television, making appearances on shows like the police procedural “Naked City,” the snappy private investigator drama “The Rockford Files” and the soap opera “Ryan’s Hope.” She acted into the early 1990s. Late in life, she expressed no regret over her fate in Hollywood.“It was not in my nature to compromise,” she told Film Talk. “They did change my sister; they made her up like a pinup girl. I could wear a wig to play a certain part, but they could not change me in life.” More

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      Norma Barzman, Blacklisted Screenwriter, Dies at 103

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      After she and her husband, a fellow writer, saw work in Hollywood dry up during the Red Scare, they continued their careers in self-exile overseas.Norma Barzman, a screenwriter who moved to Europe in the late 1940s rather than be subject to the congressional investigations and professional ostracism that overtook her industry for a decade, died on Dec. 17 at her home in Beverly Hills, Calif. She was 103 and widely considered to be one of the last surviving victims of the Hollywood blacklist.Her daughter Suzo Barzman confirmed the death.Mrs. Barzman and her husband and fellow screenwriter, Ben Barzman, were among the hundreds of film industry figures — including screenwriters, actors, directors, stagehands and technicians — who found themselves iced out of Hollywood after World War II because of their unwillingness to discuss their affiliation with the Communist Party or its many associated front groups.The Barzmans were both longtime members of the party, having joined in the early 1940s. Although their membership officially lapsed when they left the country, they did not renounce the party until 1968, after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.“I’m very proud of my years as a Communist,” Mrs. Barzman told The Associated Press in 2001. “We weren’t Soviet agents, but we were a little silly, idealistic and enthusiastic, and thought there was a chance of making a better world.”Mrs. Barzman with her husband and fellow screenwriter, Ben Barzman, in Madrid in 1961. When the opportunity arose for Mr. Barzman to work on a film in London in 1949, they expected to be there for six weeks. They ended up living abroad until 1976.via Barzman familyFor a time in the 1930s and ’40s, being a Communist, or just sympathetic to the cause, was considered de rigueur among the Hollywood left. But with the onset of the Cold War, attitudes began to shift. Rumors of a government crackdown percolated.The couple were sitting on their front lawn in July 1947 when a woman in a convertible stopped to talk. After a guarded introduction — her name was Norma, too — she told them that there was a police car at the bottom of the hill, stopping anyone turning onto the street to ask them about the Barzmans. Years later, they would realize that the other Norma had taken the stage name Marilyn Monroe.That fall, the House Committee on Un-American Activities called a group of screenwriters, directors and producers to testify about their connections to the Communist Party. Ten of them refused to answer questions, and each was later found in contempt. Though the Barzmans were not among that group, which came to be called the Hollywood Ten, they feared they would be subpoenaed soon.A few weeks after the hearings, a group of Hollywood executives released the so-called Waldorf Statement, which declared that the 10 witnesses, as well as anyone else who refused to discuss their relationship to the Communist Party, would be blacklisted from the industry.Work for the Barzmans quickly dried up. Finally, in 1949, an opportunity arose for Mr. Barzman to work on a film in London, where the blacklist didn’t reach. They set sail on the Queen Mary, expecting a six-week trip.They would not return to the United States until 1965, and they would live abroad until 1976.After several years in London, they moved to Paris; they eventually settled in Provence. They became local celebrities of a sort — the family that defied the blacklist — and made friends with the likes of the French actor Yves Montand and Pablo Picasso.An undated photo from the Cannes Film Festival. From left, Mr. Barzman, Mrs. Barzman and the Italian filmmaker Basilio Franchina.via Barzman familyMr. Barzman continued to write screenplays, usually for European productions, though often without credit. Mrs. Barzman got some work, too, but it was harder, especially since she also was raising seven children.Another friend, Sophia Loren, “pinched my cheek one day and called me ‘la mamma,’ which drove me wild,” she said in an interview for the book “Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist” (1997), by Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle.By the time the Barzmans returned to Hollywood in the 1970s, the film industry and the community around it had changed significantly, and they never managed to restart their careers.“I’ve been so blessed, even when I was suffering,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 2001. “So I wasn’t bitter then, and I’m not bitter now. I guess because I still feel there’s so much hope. You have to work at things, whether it’s a marriage or a democracy.”Norma Levor was born on Sept. 15, 1920, in Manhattan — specifically, she liked to recall, atop the kitchen counter of her parents’ apartment on Central Park West. Her father, Samuel, was an importer, and her mother, Goldie (Levinson) Levor, was a homemaker.Norma enrolled at Radcliffe College, but left in 1940 to marry Claude Shannon, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who later became known for his work in computational linguistics.They moved to Princeton, N.J., where he had a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study and where she worked for the economic branch of the League of Nations, which had relocated there from Switzerland at the start of World War II.The couple divorced in 1941, a year after her father died. Seeking a fresh start, she moved with her mother to Los Angeles — with a six-week stop in Reno, Nev., to finalize her divorce.She worked as a features writer for The Los Angeles Examiner while taking courses in screenwriting at the School for Writers, which was later added to the federal government’s list of subversive organizations.“Shortly after I arrived, I came to understand that all the progressive people I liked and who were politically active were Communists,” she was quoted as saying in “Tender Comrades.”Norma Barzman with her father, Samuel Levor, in Nice, France, in about 1930.via Barzman familyShe met Ben Barzman, another aspiring screenwriter, at a party at the home of Robert Rossen, yet another screenwriter. Mr. Barzman insisted that modern movies were too complex for women to write. She pushed a lemon meringue pie in his face. They married in 1943.Mrs. Barzman wrote the original stories for two films made in 1946: “Never Say Goodbye,” a comedy starring Errol Flynn and Eleanor Parker, and “The Locket,” a noir thriller starring Laraine Day and Robert Mitchum. In Europe, her work included another screenplay, “Luxury Girls,” but her name was kept off it until 1999.Mr. Barzman died in 1989. Along with her daughter Suzo, Mrs. Barzman is survived by another daughter, Luli Barzman; five sons, Aaron, Daniel, John, Paolo and Marco; eight grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.After returning to Los Angeles, Mrs. Barzman wrote a column on aging for The Los Angeles Herald Examiner and a memoir, “The Red and the Blacklist: The Intimate Memoir of a Hollywood Expatriate” (2003).She also became outspoken in her criticism of the blacklist and the role many in the industry played in it. Larry Ceplair, a historian who has written extensively about the blacklist, called her the era’s “keeper of the flame.”In 1999 she joined some 500 other people outside the Academy Awards ceremony, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, to protest an honor being given to the director Elia Kazan.To avoid being added to the blacklist, Mr. Kazan had testified before the House committee, identifying several friends and colleagues in the industry as former Communists and earning long-lasting enmity from many in Hollywood.Mrs. Barzman, who was there with her teenage grandson, carried a sign that read “Kazan Is a Fink.” More

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      Christopher Nolan Leads Directors Guild Nomination

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      Greta Gerwig is also nominated for “Barbie.” Most but not all of the nominees for this prize often go on to Oscar nominations.The Directors Guild of America announced the nominations for its feature-film award on Wednesday, lending further momentum to nominee Christopher Nolan (“Oppenheimer”), who won the Golden Globe for directing on Sunday.The four other directors nominated for the top DGA Award were Greta Gerwig (“Barbie”), Yorgos Lanthimos (“Poor Things”), Alexander Payne (“The Holdovers”) and Martin Scorsese (“Killers of the Flower Moon”).Four of the five nominees will typically go on to receive an Oscar nomination for best director. Last year, DGA nominee Joseph Kosinski (“Top Gun: Maverick”) was the only man to miss out, supplanted at the Oscars by Ruben Ostlund (“Triangle of Sadness”), while the year before, DGA nominee Denis Villeneuve (“Dune”) was cut for Ryusuke Hamaguchi (“Drive My Car”).Since the Oscars often favor international auteurs over big-studio filmmakers, directors like Justine Triet (“Anatomy of a Fall”) and Jonathan Glazer (“The Zone of Interest”) still have a strong shot at making the Oscar lineup. But the DGA snub of Bradley Cooper (“Maestro”) is more concerning for his candidacy, especially since Cooper did make the DGA lineup five years ago for his directorial debut, “A Star Is Born.”Here is a rundown of the nominees in the major film and television categories. For the complete list, including reality shows and children’s programming, go to dga.org. The winners will be announced Feb. 10.FilmFeatureGreta Gerwig, “Barbie”Yorgos Lanthimos, “Poor Things”Christopher Nolan, “Oppenheimer”Alexander Payne, “The Holdovers”Martin Scorsese, “Killers of the Flower Moon”First-Time FeatureCord Jefferson, “American Fiction”Manuela Martelli, “Chile ’76”Noora Niasari, “Shayda”A.V. Rockwell, “A Thousand and One”Celine Song, “Past Lives”DocumentaryMoses Bwayo, Christopher Sharp, “Bobi Wine: The People’s President”Mstyslav Chernov, “20 Days in Mariupol”Madeleine Gavin, “Beyond Utopia”Davis Guggenheim, “Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie”D. Smith, “Kokomo City”TelevisionDrama Series“The Last of Us,” Peter Hoar (for the episode “Long, Long Time”)“Succession,” Becky Martin (“Rehearsal”)“Succession,” Mark Mylod (“Connor’s Wedding”)“Succession,” Andrij Parekh (“America Decides”)“Succession,” Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman (“Tailgate Party”)Comedy Series“Ted Lasso.” Erica Dunton (“La Locker Room Aux Folles”)“Barry” Bill Hader (“wow”)“Ted Lasso,” Declan Lowney (“So Long, Farewell”)“The Bear,” Christopher Storer (“Fishes”)“The Bear,” Ramy Youssef (“Honeydew”)Television Movies and Limited Series“All the Light We Cannot See,” “Shawn Levy“Lessons in Chemistry,” Tara Miele (“Introduction to Chemistry”)“Lessons in Chemistry,” Millicent Shelton (“Poirot”)“Lessons in Chemistry,” Sarah Adina Smith (“Her and Him”)“Daisy Jones & the Six,” Nzingha Stewart (“Track 10: Rock ’n’ Roll Suicide”) More

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      ‘The Beekeeper’ Review: Sting Like a, You Know

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      In this action thriller, Jason Statham plays a man who will do whatever it takes to protect his hive.“To bee or not to bee?” That is a question asked to Jason Statham in “The Beekeeper,” a delirious entry in the thriving genre of action flicks about gunslingers who list a different career on their LinkedIn. (See also: “The Painter” and “The Bricklayer,” both released just last week.) The director David Ayer’s previous shoot-em-up, “The Tax Collector,” was woefully short on quips about audits. He and the screenwriter Kurt Wimmer have not made that mistake here. Take a swig of mead every time Statham vows to protect the hive — by which he means society — and you’ll have a fine time. Either way, you won’t remember a thing about the plot.Statham (“The Mechanic,” “The Transporter”) plays Adam Clay, an honest-to-goodness beekeeper who opens the film jarring honey. (Kudos to the costumer Kelli Jones for designing a slim-cut quilted beekeeping suit that gives Statham the panache of a fencer.) In the first minutes, his landlord, a kindly retiree named Eloise (Phylicia Rashad) loses her life savings to a network of internet scammers who prey on the older and the naïve. This cabal of techno thieves rakes in millions every day and boasts the political connections to use the Delta Force and SEAL Team 6 as bodyguards. They’re still no match for a guy who can wipe out a hornet’s nest with a stun gun. As a corrupt former C.I.A. head (Jeremy Irons) sighs, “If a beekeeper says you’re going to die, you’re going to die.”The script’s ridiculous rationale — which our hero repeatedly intones like he’s hypnotizing us to believe it — is that certain beekeepers have pledged to prevent colony collapse, both apoidea and homo sapien. Sure, that’ll do. No less a scribe than William Shakespeare claimed that bees “teach the act of order to a peopled kingdom.”Really, Statham is simply the embodiment of death. There’s no hesitation, no heightened escalation, just kill kill kill. The fight choreography and editing are bludgeoning, though there’s a nifty cut where a goon gets flung over the camera and the cinematographer Gabriel Beristain flips around to watch the man’s body tumble down the stairs. When a marvelous heavy (Taylor James) slides on brass knuckles, the sound of a punch was so startling that I jumped (and giggled).Things drag whenever “The Beekeeper” goes through the motions of being sensible. There’s endless scenes of panicky phone calls and a go-nowhere moral debate between outsider justice and civilized law featuring Eloise’s daughter, Verona (Emmy Raver-Lampman), a heavy-boozing, monomaniacal F.B.I. agent who I suspect was funnier on the page. I’d forgo her subplot for more of Ayer’s giddy villains: the call center creepazoids Mickey (David Witts) and Rico (Enzo Cilenti), their skateboarding tech bro boss, Derek (Josh Hutcherson), and a rival bee freak, Anisette (Megan Le), who enters screaming and exits far too soon.Statham excels as a straight-faced goof. Between his glower and the movie’s high-quality production values, this brain cell-destroying schlock resembles an earnest drama. Yet, Ayer makes it plain that he’s in on the joke. As Statham lays waste to a camo-clad squadron, the shoulder patches on their uniforms read: BS.The BeekeeperRated R for stinging language and violence. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Mel Brooks and Angela Bassett Feted at the Governors Awards

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      The academy honored Mel Brooks, Angela Bassett, the recently widowed editor Carol Littleton and Sundance’s Michelle Satter, whose son died in a shooting.Despite the chockablock ballroom full of Hollywood’s best and brightest, a jovial emcee in the comedian John Mulaney and honorees the audience seemed thrilled to celebrate, a pall of sadness was cast over the Governors Awards — an event created 14 years ago by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to shorten the Oscar telecast by relegating the honorary Oscars to its own untelevised confab.Held Tuesday night, the ceremony — which was delayed two months because of the Hollywood strikes — honored two women who had just experienced remarkable losses. The editor Carol Littleton’s husband of 51 years, the cinematographer and former academy president John Bailey, died in mid-November. Just two weeks later, Michelle Satter, the Sundance Institute’s founding director and the recipient of the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, learned that her son, Michael Latt, 33, had been shot dead at his home in Los Angeles.“We need to talk through a broken heart,” the filmmaker Ryan Coogler said during his presentation to Satter, who had guided him through the making of his first feature, “Fruitvale Station.”Still, as they say, the show must go on. And with Oscar nomination voting set to begin Thursday, A-listers of all stripes were in full campaign mode, working valiantly to try to ensure their spot on the ballot when nominations are announced on Jan. 23.Boldfaced names mingling in the Ray Dolby Ballroom in Hollywood included Christopher Nolan, Margot Robbie, Robert Downey Jr., Greta Gerwig, Leonardo DiCaprio, Colman Domingo, Ava DuVernay, Florence Pugh and scores of others.The first award of the night went to 97-year-old Mel Brooks, who the presenter Matthew Broderick said was older than penicillin, FM radio, polyester and the academy itself.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