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      European Directors Sometimes Get Lost in Translation When Going Hollywood

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      The history of European directors “going Hollywood” and making the leap to English-language filmmaking is long and uneven.When Pedro Almodóvar’s “The Room Next Door” won the Golden Lion for best film at this year’s Venice Film Festival, it was the first time that the Spanish director had garnered the top prize at one of Europe’s major film festivals. What made this victory even more impressive and unusual was the fact that “The Room Next Door” was Almodóvar’s first full-length film in English.For a leading auteur of contemporary cinema, and one whose work is so bound up with the textures of his native tongue, Almodóvar’s late-career shift to English-language filmmaking feels daring. If the film’s reception at Venice is any indication, it appears that the gamble has paid off and that he has succeeded where many others have failed.Almodóvar, 75, is only the latest in a long line of European directors to make the leap to English-language filmmaking. The history of such transitions is uneven, and ranges from the Golden Age Hollywood classics of the Austrian-born Billy Wilder to infamous missteps by Ingmar Bergman and François Truffaut.The Hungarian filmmaker Kornel Mundruczo said that both working in English and directing Hollywood stars presents European directors with a unique set of hurdles. “It was a huge challenge to understand the cultural differences and not to create something which is symbolically, say, sinking into the Atlantic Ocean,” he said, recalling the making of his English-language debut, “Pieces of a Woman,” in a recent phone interview.“There are so many movies like that,” added Mundruczo, who finished shooting “At the Sea,” his new film starring Amy Adams, in Boston this August.Kornel Mundruczo, center, on set with Ellen Burstyn, left, and Vanessa Kirby in 2020, making “Pieces of a Woman.” Mundruczo, a Hungarian filmmaker, has found creative opportunities working in English.Philippe Bosse/Netflix, via Everett CollectionWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What to Know About ‘The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim’

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      You don’t have to know an orc from a Mumakil to enjoy the new animated adventure, though it’ll certainly help.If you would like to know who the Helm of Helm’s Deep is, you are in the right place.Also, if you are an anime fan who has never watched a single “Lord of the Rings” film, welcome.A new Warner Bros. animated adventure, “The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim,” is in theaters, the latest installment in a franchise of seven — soon to be eight — movies based on the novels of J.R.R. Tolkien. Set roughly 200 years before the events of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, it tells the tale of a storied king’s quest to defend his land from an invading army.Here’s what to know about where the story came from, how it fits in with the rest of the “Lord of the Rings” universe and which familiar characters you might find.Did Tolkien write this story?The characters in the film, directed by Kenji Kamiyama, are based on details in the appendices at the end of the “Lord of the Rings” novels. They cover the history of the rulers of Rohan, the fictional kingdom in Middle-earth known for its horse-tamers and riders.Obviously, turning footnotes into an animated film required some rewriting and fleshing out — the filmmakers’ task was essentially to bring a family tree to the screen, which includes Helm Hammerhand, a legendary king of Rohan; his sons, Haleth and Háma; and an unnamed daughter. The producers chose to focus on Helm’s daughter, whom they called Héra for the film. (Tolkien left her fate unclear.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What ‘Wicked’ Has to Say About Our Current Political Moment

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      By breaking the story into two movies, the emphasis in “Part One” shifts to a nation’s potential decline into authoritarianism. Sound familiar?In the big-screen adaptation of “Wicked,” Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) uses magic to defend her sister and unwittingly destroys a courtyard mural of the Wizard at Shiz University. When her outburst shatters the wall, it also unearths an image that has been intentionally covered up: the school’s original founders, animal professors whose ability to speak, teach humans, and organize politically posed a threat to the Wizard’s autocratic reign.This surprising fact is revealed early on, but as I watched it, I realized Elphaba’s discovery came too late.As a repeat viewer of Broadway’s “Wicked,” I’m usually fascinated by how the story’s retrospective lens encourages us to sympathize with Elphaba, who eventually will become the Wicked Witch of the West. Her rich back story — she’s a perennial outsider and highly empathetic person — has forced me to rethink my assumptions about her and reflect on how easily I accepted L. Frank Baum’s own prejudices and his representation of her as a one-dimensional villain in his novel, “The Wizard of Oz.”But, unlike the stage version, which tracks Elphaba as a young adult to her fateful encounter with Dorothy, the movie delves even more into Elphaba’s biography. It follows her to Shiz University, where she ends up rooming with her frenemy, Galinda, later renamed Glinda (Ariana Grande), whose jealousy of Elphaba’s magical powers leads to conflict. The film ends at the characters’ climactic midpoints. “If Part One is about choices,” the director, Jon M. Chu, recently told Entertainment Weekly, “Part Two is about consequences.”But for now that also means the story remains unresolved. At the end of the Broadway version, there’s relief in the surprise ending when we learn that the Wicked Witch was far kinder than we gave her credit for and that she successfully challenged the Wizard’s dominance.Instead, onscreen, Elphaba is left suspended in midair (on her broom), made a scapegoat by the Wizard (Jeff Goldblum) as the Shiz professor Madam Morrible (Michelle Yeoh), falsely warns the people of Oz about an enemy who must be captured. Madam Morrible goes even further, blasting on the loudspeaker, “Her green skin is but an outward manifestorium of her twisted nature. This distortion! This repulsion! This wicked witch!”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Children’s Movies to Stream Now: ‘That Christmas,’ ‘Transformers One’ and More

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      This month’s picks include a sequel to a 1980s Tim Burton classic and an animated tale of a Christmas nearly gone wrong.‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’Stream it on Max.One of the joys of parenthood is introducing your child to classic films that you once loved. It thrills me that my 7-year-old son adores “E.T.” and the original “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” films. Watching him mimic the “Banana Boat (Day-O)” dance in Tim Burton’s 1988 goth horror comedy “Beetlejuice” has been one of the highlights of my year. For older children that love scary-ish movies, Burton’s long-awaited follow-up film is a kooky medley of wacky scares and outrageous scenarios. Winona Ryder returns as a grown-up Lydia. She’s now a widow who hosts a ghost show on TV, and her goth teenage daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega), is every bit as brooding as her mother was at her age.Justin Theroux plays Lydia’s smarmy boyfriend, Rory, and Monica Bellucci is Beetlejuice’s (dead) ex-wife, Delores. Michael Keaton masterfully yuks it up again as the titular character, and Catherine O’Hara returns as the pompous artist Delia. Alfred Gough and Miles Millar wrote the script (Seth Grahame-Smith shares story credit). If your children delight in dark tales and don’t mind shrunken heads and some campy gore, this one’s worth a watch.‘That Christmas’Stream it on Netflix.Brian Cox sheds any evidence his tyrannical “Succession” character, Logan Roy, to voice none other than Santa Claus in this animated tale of a Christmas gone (almost) wrong. Based on a children’s book series written by Richard Curtis (yes, the one who wrote “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” “Notting Hill” and “Love Actually”), the plot involves intertwining stories about loneliness and the importance of family and friends — Curtis’s sweet spot.Here we meet Danny (Jack Wisniewski), a new kid in the small fictional seaside town of Wellington-on-Sea. His newly divorced mother (Jodie Whittaker, “Doctor Who”) gets called in to work on Christmas, leaving Danny alone as a blizzard blows into town and strands a bunch of parents so they can’t get to their children’s Christmas pageant. Fiona Shaw (“Killing Eve”) voices the strict Ms. Trapper, who tries to keep the youngsters in line as the town goes haywire, and in a nod to “Love Actually,” Bill Nighy teams back up with Curtis here to voice a character named Lighthouse Bill.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Werner Herzog’s ‘Theater of Thought’ Explores the Mysteries of the Brain

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      In “Theater of Thought,” he talks to scientists and other experts about consciousness, quantum computing and whether parrots understand human speech.There’s a moment in “Theater of Thought” (in theaters) when Darío Gil, the director of research at IBM, is explaining quantum computing to Werner Herzog, the movie’s director. Standing before a whiteboard, Gil draws some points on spheres to illustrate how qubits work, then proceeds to define the Schrödinger equation. As he talks and writes, the audio grows quieter, and Herzog’s distinctive resonant German accent takes over. “I admit that I literally understand nothing of this, and I assume most of you don’t either,” he intones in voice-over. “But I found it fascinating that this mathematical formula explains the law that draws the subatomic world.”It’s a funny moment, a playful way to keep us from glazing over when presented with partial differential equations. Herzog may be a world-renowned filmmaker, but he’s hardly a scientist, and that makes him the perfect director for “Theater of Thought,” a documentary about, as he puts it, the “mysteries of our brain.”Emphasis on mysteries. Herzog interviews a dizzying array of scientists, researchers, and even a Nobel Prize winner or two. He asks them about everything: how the brain works, what consciousness means, what the tiniest organisms in the world are, whether parrots understand human speech, whether rogue governments can control thoughts, whether we’re living in an elaborate simulation, how telepathy and psychedelics work, and, at several points, what thinking even is. Near the end of the film he notes that not one of the scientists could explain what a thought is, or what consciousness is, but “they were all keenly alive to the ethical questions in neuroscience.” In other words, they’re immersed in both the mystery and what their field of study implies about the future of humanity.There’s a boring way to make this movie, with talking-head interviews that are arranged to form a coherent argument. Herzog goes another direction, starting off by narrating why he’s making it, then talking about his interviewees as we are introduced to them in their labs or in their favorite outdoor settings. (He also visits Philippe Petit, the Twin Towers tightrope walker, as he practices in his Catskills backyard.) Herzog’s constant verbal presence brings us into his own head space — his own brain, if you will — and gives us the sense that we’re following his patterns of thought.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Kraven the Hunter’ Review: A Seriously Silly Movie

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      Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s buff Marvel hero is overshadowed by unabashedly fun villains.Built on brawn, J.C. Chandor’s action sci-fi picture “Kraven the Hunter” is limited by incomprehensible plotting and dodgy one-liners delivered by a cast who seem to be practicing their worst Russian accents. If not for the bevy of anticlimactic fights, “Kraven the Hunter” could be so bad it’s good. Instead, it’s merely another excursion away from the Marvel Cinematic Universe to Sony’s series of defanged comic book villains.Kraven’s baffling origin story finds a jumbled through-line in half brothers Sergei and Dmitri’s tight-knit relationship. Sons of Russian drug dealer Nikolai Kravinoff (Russell Crowe, adopting a low, growling accent), the boys are persistently pushed by their bloodthirsty father to be stronger than Sergei’s mother, who recently died by suicide. To harden them, Nikolai takes them hunting in Ghana. “Shoot to kill. Fun,” Nikolai grumbles. Fun for Sergei is short-lived when a lion mauls him. Only a potion provided by a passerby named Calypso saves Sergei, imbuing him with otherworldly vision, agility and strength.Fast forward 16 years and a hulking Sergei (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is now a vigilante known as “Kraven the Hunter,” who’s pursuing criminals that remind him of his estranged father. Aleksei Sytsevich (Alessandro Nivola), a Russian mercenary who can morph into a rhino, is not only worried that Kraven will soon pursue him. Aleksei also wants to eliminate his rival Nikolai. Aleksei kidnaps Dmitri and dispatches a time-morphing assassin called the Foreigner (Christopher Abbott) to pursue Kraven. With an adult Calypso (Ariana DeBose) providing aid, Kraven tries to free Dmitri.Thankfully, “Kraven the Hunter” doesn’t take itself too seriously. Like Sony’s “The Venom” franchise and “Madame Web,” the story is incidental to these larger-than-life characters. While Taylor-Johnson does his best Hugh Jackman impression — posing for glamour shots of his ripped body before crawling and flying across the frame — only a couple of actors here know exactly what movie they’re in. Abbott is captivatingly slippery, rolling his slender frame and casting his bewitching eyes on his victims with cool intent. Nivola, on the other hand, is the type of ham you’d find in Joel Schumacher’s Batman films. From his surprising hissing to his stocky build, every choice he makes is spontaneous yet wholly grounded in this troubled character.If the action in “Kraven the Hunter” was as well conceived as its villains, it’d be a riot. Unfortunately, the brawls are physically detached from the environment. The choreography lacks punch and design; the compositions are spatially unaware. Kraven and Aleksei ‘s final tussle, an anticlimactic mud fight in the middle of a field, ends as quickly as it began. The film adds a pound of revenge and an ounce of a surprise to its final moments, but these ingredients, including the entertaining silliness, aren’t enough for “Kraven the Hunter” to catch the biggest game — our admiration.Kraven the HunterRated R for violence, blood and daddy problems. Running time: 2 hours 7 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Carry On’ Review: Travel Nightmares Amplified

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      In this tense thriller, Taron Egerton plays a T.S.A. agent who goes up against an implacable terrorist (Jason Bateman). The man has a funny idea of what he wants to bring on a plane.If you’re a fan of white-knuckle-tension suspense thrillers, you know the debate as to whether or not the 1988 classic “Die Hard” is a Christmas movie. “Carry-On,” directed by the expert technician Jaume Collet-Serra, makes absolutely no bones about being a Christmas movie as it seeks to work your nerves in the “Die Hard” tradition.The setting here is a Los Angeles airport. The T.S.A. agent Ethan Kopek, played by Taron Egerton, finds himself the unwilling pawn of a determined terrorist hellbent on getting a nasty package on an eastbound jet. Kopek has a history of not putting himself out there — for years he’s tamped down his ambitions to become a real police officer — who is now blackmailed into stepping up in all the wrong ways. The alternative is a staggering body count.While the character details are conventional and treacly — what do you know, Kopek’s beautiful wife (Sofia Carson) also happens to be pregnant with the couple’s first child! — the suspense mechanisms of T.J. Fixman’s script, which support a fat-free running time of nearly two hours, are consistently tightly wound.As Kopek’s nameless tormentor, Jason Bateman is chilling. A lot of actors who’ve spent their careers playing relatively amiable characters, as Bateman has, can barely restrain themselves from winking at least a little when they take on a bad guy role. But the actor only ever knuckles down at being loathsome.While the picture doesn’t break any new genre ground, it has several jaw-dropping set pieces, including an incredibly physical fight inside a speeding car. Collet-Serra’s staging is excellent throughout. The simulated airport setting is filled with hustle and bustle that looks just as annoying as real air travel is, especially during the holidays. Except this particular airport is way more sparkling and clean than any in real life.Carry OnRated PG-13 for violence and language. Running time: 1 hour 59 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘September 5’ Review: When the Munich Games Changed Our News

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      Tim Fehlbaum’s journalism procedural, starring Peter Sarsgaard, tracks the broadcast coverage of the terrorist attack at the 1972 Olympics.A tense ethical showdown with the racing pulse of a thriller, “September 5” revisits the day in 1972 when the Munich Olympics became a very different kind of international spectacle. Before dawn that morning, while many of the world’s elite athletes were still sleeping in the Olympic Village or drunkenly heading for bed, eight heavily armed members of Black September, a militant Palestinian group, easily scrambled over a perimeter fence in the village. They quickly made their way to the building where the Israeli delegation was housed and took 11 of its members hostage, shooting two men, who soon died.This grim flashpoint sets “September 5” in motion, but the movie isn’t about the hostages, the militants or the Middle East. It’s a journalism creation story about the men and a few women from ABC Sports who — originally in Munich to report on fencing, boxing and other athletic competitions — ended up abruptly making history themselves when they covered a major news story globally on live television. The correspondent Peter Jennings (Benjamin Walker), for one, who had established the network’s first Middle East bureau, may have thought he would be enjoying a break by covering the Olympics. He was soon huddling on a balcony, bringing a conflict from the region into homes worldwide while coolly reassuring colleagues, in a mic-drop bit of dialogue, that he’s safely out of range of an exploding grenade.Jennings and the other boldfaced-journalism names hover in and around “September 5,” which centers on a handful of behind-the-scenes ABC employees, including an earnest young producer, Geoff (John Magaro). Along with a German translator, Marianne (Leonie Benesch), and a French-Algerian engineer, Jacques (Zinedine Soualem), Geoff is among the first in the group to hear the gunfire that breaks the early quiet. He rouses Roone Arledge, who had brought the Olympics to the network and was the president of ABC Sports. Arledge went on to become the president and chairman of ABC News, superstar status that might explain the flattering decision to cast the camera-friendly Peter Sarsgaard in the role.It takes a few beats for Geoff and the rest of the crew to grasp the magnitude of what’s happening nearby, but once they do, they step on the gas and just go, go, go. Setting an accelerated pace that rarely eases, the director Tim Fehlbaum, who wrote the script with Moritz Binder (Alex David is billed as a co-writer), smartly skips over the usual people-and-places introductions and the throat-clearing rest. Instead, he stirs up a whirlwind of frenetic motion, homing in on the ABC team, and tries to figure out what they’re actually covering. The network’s main face for the games, Jim McKay — who’s seen only in smoothly incorporated archival footage — was meant to have the day off. He was soon in his studio chair earpiece in place, anchoring and delivering updates live on camera.Fehlbaum leans heavily into the logistics of getting the crisis on the air, a focus on the labor and the deadline-fueled energy, which gives the movie the quality of a journalism procedural. People race down halls, burst into rooms, fire up monitors, grab rotary phones and bark into walkie-talkies as big as cinder blocks. (The movie is an analog fetishist’s delight.) Amid the kinetic motion, staffers like Marvin (a very good Ben Chaplin) clench jaws to discuss next moves, telegraphing the tough arguments to come. Among the movie’s stealthiest surprises is that each moving part, every rushed phone call and snap decision, is part of a feature-length argument that the filmmakers are making about journalism in the age of mass spectacle.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More