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      Taraji P. Henson on Almost Walking Away from ‘Color Purple’

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      Before things started to click for Taraji P. Henson, she sought career counseling from the man upstairs.“I had a talk with God a long time ago when things didn’t pop,” she said. Invoking the women she had watched as a child, like Carol Burnett, Lucille Ball, Bette Davis, and Diahann Carroll, she told him, “I want longevity and work that matters.”This, Henson has had: At 53, she is an Oscar-nominated actress with a long career that includes films like “Hidden Figures,” “Hustle & Flow” and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” She also spent six seasons playing the music-industry matriarch Cookie on the Fox series “Empire,” a juicy role that netted her a Golden Globe and Critics Choice Award.But she is candid about the frustrations she still faces in an industry that undervalues Black actresses. “The fact that I made it through is a blessing because a lot has happened,” she said, noting that she had to step away from work last year when things got to be too much. A monthlong trip to Bali helped to recenter her, as did attending to her successful beauty brand, TPH.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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      Safdie Brothers Are Done Making Movies Together

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      Josh and Benny Safdie are officially splitting up.The Safdie brothers, the filmmaking duo behind “Uncut Gems” (2019) and “Good Time” (2017), are splitting up.Benny Safdie confirmed the “amicable” breakup with his brother, Josh, in an interview with Variety, calling it “a natural progression of what we each want to explore.”“I will direct on my own, and I will explore things that I want to explore. I want that freedom right now in my life,” Benny Safdie told the publication in a wide-ranging interview.A new film that was to be a follow-up to “Uncut Gems,” which would have seen the brothers reunite with Adam Sandler, has been put on pause, according to Variety.The publication reported that while the two were set to co-direct the film, Benny Safdie said “he did not co-write the script and hasn’t been a meaningful part of the creative process, despite reports to the contrary.”In its review of “Uncut Gems,” The Times called the brothers “two of the more playfully inventive filmmakers working in American cinema,” noting that the pair “clearly like working your nerves.” More

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      ‘Night Swim’ Review: Hold Your Breath, Forever

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      The backyard pool is a symbol of love and of terror in this uneven but scary horror film.Hollywood horror often attempts to work out collective anxiety about the suburbs, that place full of pleasant-looking houses creaking with ghosts and terrors. Suburban life is, admittedly, fundamentally strange, with neighborhoods full of atomized worlds and natural features turned into individual, highly-controlled assets. A forest becomes manicured bushes. A lake becomes a pool.Pools are ubiquitous across the American suburbs (just peek out the window when you fly), and the affluence, comfort and fun they represent can turn a middling kid into the most popular one at school, at least during the hot months. They are also ubiquitous in horror, from “Gremlins” to that greatest instance of suburban anxiety, “Poltergeist.” For the Waller family of “Night Swim,” the pool means freedom, friends and a new lease on life. But pools can also be deadly (accidental drowning is the No. 1 killer of young children), so the pleasure comes with an edge, a fact the Waller family are about to learn.Ray Waller (Wyatt Russell) is a former major-league baseball player, a real slugger, whose multiple sclerosis has taken him out of the game. His wife, Eve (Kerry Condon), is eager to finally settle down, proving a lasting home for their two children: breezy teenage Izzy (Amélie Hoeferle) and Elliot (Gavin Warren), who struggles more than his sister to fit in with other kids. They find an old house outside the Twin Cities, fall in love, and buy it, then commence cleaning out the gloppy, unused pool in the backyard. It becomes an oasis. And for a while, the pool seems to be helping Ray get better.But this is a horror film, so the Wallers cannot have nice things and, unfortunately, neither can we. “Night Swim” is the feature debut of Bryce McGuire, produced by the horror mavens James Wan and Jason Blum and based on McGuire’s 2014 short film. (A tidbit too odd to ignore: that short was filmed in the musician Michelle Branch’s backyard pool.) The first half of the movie is remarkably effective, especially if you’ve ever had a pool, and especially if you’ve swam in it at night, though lots of “Night Swim” happens during the day. Jumps abound, and a scene with Izzy and her crush is especially terrifying.But it goes downhill at some point. The inciting concept is so strong — the pool, to rephrase the meme, that makes you dead — that all additions after a certain point start to feel like overkill. The strongest horror concepts are spare and uncluttered: something is chasing you, something is thumping under the bed. They tap into an anguish that is fundamental and gut-level, a level way lower than your head.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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      ‘Memory’ Review: A Contrived Drama With Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard

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      In this contrived movie, Peter Sarsgaard stars as a man with dementia, and Jessica Chastain plays a caretaker with buried family secrets.In “Memory,” a woman haunted by her past meets a man who’s scarcely holding onto his. That’s the setup in the writer-director Michel Franco’s contrived drama with Jessica Chastain and Peter Sarsgaard, whose work in this artsified slab of exploitation cinema is strong enough that you wish their characters would run off to an entirely different movie.Chastain plays Sylvia, a recovering alcoholic with a day job caring for disabled adults. She and her sweet teenage daughter, Anna (Brooke Timber), have a spacious, sunlit apartment in an industrial-looking building in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. There’s a tire store next door and multiple locks on their apartment door. Each time Sylvia returns home, she fastens the locks and arms the alarm with great deliberation, a ritual that Franco repeatedly presents. It’s a habit that like Sylvia’s wariness and physical reserve — she doesn’t readily make eye contact and tends to cross her arms in front of her chest — underscores her guardedness.One night, Sylvia and her sister, Olivia (the always welcome Merritt Wever), attend a high-school reunion. There, a visibly uncomfortable Sylvia withdraws into herself, but when a man — Sarsgaard as Saul — approaches her, she splits for reasons that become torturously clear only later. He follows her onto the subway and all the way to her building’s front door, where he stays even when it begins pouring. The next morning, Sylvia finds him shivering and near-incoherent, sitting in a spare tire on the ground. It turns out that Saul has early-onset dementia and lives in his handsome brownstone, watched over by his no-nonsense brother, Isaac (Josh Charles), whose daughter, Sara (Elsie Fisher), comes and goes.Soon, Sylvia begins taking care of Saul part-time, a job that turns intimate and then unsurprisingly romantic. The relationship doesn’t cohere dramatically, alas, despite the demonstrative tenderness and commitment that the actors bring to it, and the story’s multiple gaps in logic don’t help. It doesn’t make sense that Isaac, who comes off as a fairly self-important professional, doesn’t have any hired help when Sylvia arrives, especially given the family’s obvious economic resources. (I also seem to have missed the scene when he runs a background check on her.) Like Olivia’s husband and kids, a collection of bland types, Isaac mainly serves as a convenient bourgeois prop that Franco can swing at before blowing it up.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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      ‘Mayhem!’ Review: Just When You Think You’re Out

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      A former convict struggles to go straight in this ultraviolent revenge thriller.No one in the mood for subtlety or nuance is likely to be beckoned by “Mayhem!,” a slugfest that cleaves to its title with punishing fidelity. A mood board of mashing, slashing, snapping and splintering, this feature, directed by Xavier Gens, is revenge-movie cliché ground down to the studs.Our rampaging antihero is Samir (Nassim Lyes), a French-Algerian parolee determined to uncouple from his troubled past. His former associates, however, have other ideas; and when Samir is forced to put the kibosh on one of them, his only remaining option is to flee. Five years later, we find him happily settled in East Thailand with a wife (Loryn Nounay), an adorable stepdaughter (Chananticha Tang-Kwa) and a baggage-handling job. This paradise soon implodes when a yen for beachfront property leads Samir to a local gangster (Olivier Gourmet) whose eyebrows outnumber his scruples.Hobbled by a stoic lead character who is all muscle and no mouth (Samir is about as voluble as the original Terminator), “Mayhem!” is emotionally stagnant. Yet Gens and his action designer, Jude Poyer, have clearly benefited from working on the dazzlingly destructive AMC series “Gangs of London,” and they stage the film’s battles with brutal grace. The stunt work is often extraordinary — notably in an elevator melee that unfolds like a deadly game of Twister — and Lyes, a former French kickboxing champion, has moves most action stars can only approximate.These are some consolation for a plot that smothers its immigrant heart beneath a blanket of blood and sweat. Though when the system blocks you from doing the right thing, sometimes your only recourse is to slice open a stomach or two. In slow motion, of course.Mayhem!Rated R for seamy nightlife and shattering violence. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘Artie Shaw: Time Is All You’ve Got’ Review: A Lens on a Jazz Luminary

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      Brigitte Berman’s dazzling 1985 look at the self-taught virtuoso clarinetist and bandleader is showing after a restoration.The documentarian Brigitte Berman has made two spectacular pictures about American jazz pioneers. The first, “Bix: ‘Ain’t None of Them Play Like Him Yet’” (1981), chronicled the life of the brilliant and tragically short-lived cornetist and composer Bix Beiderbecke. It screened in a restoration at Film Forum a couple of years back. Now, her follow-up to that movie, “Artie Shaw: Time Is All You’ve Got” (1985), is similarly restored and booked at Film Forum.Shaw, the clarinetist and bandleader, was a devotee of Beiderbecke, and is interviewed in Berman’s Beiderbecke film. When Shaw walked away from music for a first time, early in what would be a lengthy but nevertheless self-truncated jazz career, he tried to write a novel about Bix. He couldn’t complete it, he says here, because the story had “depth and connotation that I wasn’t philosophically or mentally prepared to cope with.”Shaw was not only a self-taught virtuoso but also often the smartest guy in any room he was in. When he came back to the bandstand, his recording of Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine” was a smash hit of the swing era. An unselfconscious civil rights pioneer, he hired the Black singer Billie Holiday to sing with him at a time when that just wasn’t done.Charming as well as erudite, he married eight times, to Lana Turner and Ava Gardner among others. The marriages didn’t last because of his cantankerousness. The fame he avidly sought in his early years — “like any other American kid, I wanted more of everything,” he notes — eventually struck him as inane and repellent. An all-star roster of interviewees, including the luminaries Mel Tormé and Buddy Rich, contributes to an unfailingly entertaining saga. The movie on its first release did so well — it won an Oscar — that it prompted the ever-unsatisfied Shaw to sue for a bigger share of the picture’s profits.Artie Shaw: Time Is All You’ve GotNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Society of the Snow’ Review: The Stranded and the Faithful

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      Another movie tackles the story of the Uruguayan rugby players who survived a plane crash and turned to cannibalism.Filmmakers love survival stories, but there are aspects of the so-called “miracle in the Andes” that pose special difficulties for any movie, not least because, a half-century on, the most notorious turn that events took will be well known to most viewers going in.On Oct. 13, 1972, a Uruguayan plane bound for Santiago, Chile, carrying 45 people, including the rugby team known as the Old Christians, crashed in the Andes. By the time of a rescue operation 10 weeks later, 16 survived. They did so through a mix of resourcefulness, endurance, faith and, famously, the decision — in a snowy, mountainous environment without food — to eat the dead. Roberto Canessa, a survivor who became an eminent pediatric cardiologist and long-shot 1994 presidential candidate in Uruguay, told National Geographic that “anthropophagy” is a better word for what happened than “cannibalism,” which might imply killing people for consumption.Mingling shots from the Andes with locations in the Sierra Nevada mountains in Spain, the Spanish-language “Society of the Snow,” directed by J.A. Bayona (“The Orphanage”), has a verisimilitude missing from the 1993 film “Alive,” with its substantially American cast led by a pre-“Reality Bites” Ethan Hawke, sporting magazine-ready hair. But “Society of the Snow,” based on a book by Pablo Vierci, lacks the immediacy that comes from seeing the real survivors, a spectacle offered by the documentary “Stranded: I’ve Come From a Plane That Crashed on the Mountains” (2008).For an action veteran like Bayona, the crash is the easy part. The foreshadowing is relentless and redundant. “This could be our last trip together,” Pancho Delgado (Valentino Alonso), in the early Montevideo scenes, tells Numa Turcatti (Enzo Vogrincic), a passenger who narrates the film (and whose fate the movie reserves for one its cheaper tricks). In flight, a newspaper headline alerts viewers to a boat that has sunk off Montevideo’s coast. The young men discuss how dangerous it is to fly through the Andes because of the suction created by warm winds from Argentina and the cold mountain air.The plane accident is frighteningly visceral. Snow, debris and wind swirl through the opened fuselage. Rows of seats collapse like accordions, impaling some of the passengers. The soundtrack is a whir of rattling metal. After the wreckage comes to a stop, Bayona shoots the first moments in disorienting close-ups, as the characters struggle to piece together what just happened and the geometry of where they are.The long haul proves trickier from a dramatic standpoint. “The problem is, no movie can really encompass the sheer enormity of the experience,” Roger Ebert wrote of “Alive” 31 years ago, and that remains true today. Cinema does sight and sound well, but it’s less effective at capturing hunger, cold and duration, at least when duration is measured in days and weeks.Then there is the matter of how graphic this film ought to get; on that score, “Society of the Snow,” despite at least one rib cage visibly picked to the bone, stays coy. No version of this story has depicted the survivors’ decision to eat human flesh as hasty or carelessly reasoned. This time, once that choice is made, initially three men do the butchering out of the sight of the others. But when an avalanche snows in the group, killing some of them, suddenly eating meat without names and faces attached becomes impossible, Numa says in voice-over. Bayona then shows Roberto (Matías Recalt) cutting into some ostensibly non-anonymous flesh — but tactfully keeps out of frame anything identifiable about the body.The material is fundamentally gripping, and parts of it are tough to resist, including the first sighting of another person by Nando Parrado (Agustín Pardella) and Roberto after the two of them have spent days climbing their way toward civilization. But “Society of the Snow” is a perverse movie to watch the way most people will see it — on Netflix, in the comfort of their homes, with a refrigerator nearby.Society of the SnowRated R. Terror and solitude; anthropophagy. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 24 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘He Went That Way’ Review: Jacob Elordi Plays a Serial Killer

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      In this thriller, the Australian actor Jacob Elordi tries on the tics of noteworthy American performers, from James Dean to Matt Dillon.Apparently, some time in 1964, a professional ice skater and animal trainer named Dave Pitts, on the road with his chimp Spanky, picked up a young hitchhiker who was in the middle of a killing spree. The story of Pitts’s encounter with Larry Lee Ranes, whose brother also became a serial killer, was fictionalized in Conrad Hilberry’s book “Luke Karamazov.” That book is the source of “He Went That Way,” the picturesque feature directing debut of the cinematographer Jeff Darling, who died in a surfing accident in 2022.Jacob Elordi plays Bobby, the nasty, brash killer. Zachary Quinto is Jim, the diffident trainer. Jim’s got troubles — a wobbly marriage, debt, bad work prospects for the chimp. Bobby is certainly apt to add to his woes, but the two bond anyway.Elordi’s performance here lacks the discipline he applied to his work in “Priscilla” and even the wretched “Saltburn.” You sense the star of “The Kissing Booth” (2018) trying to test his wings and see how fast he can fly from teen-heartthrob status. But what comes across onscreen is ticcy and overbaked, though not ahistoric. Elordi seems eruditely conversant with the work of American male actors who played damaged (but cool) goods before him, one minute evoking James Dean with a cigarette draw, the next reminding one of Matt Dillon via a squint. His acrobatics don’t mesh particularly well with Quinto’s dry understatement.But few things in this laboriously quirky picture mesh at all. Evan M. Wiener’s indifferent script feeds Elordi almost as much profanity as Al Pacino uses in “Scarface,” which is nearly twice this movie’s length. The best entertainment here is archival footage of the actual Spanky ice-skating. You have to sit through the rest of the movie to get to it, though.He Went That WayNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More