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      Joe Don Baker, Actor Who Found Fame With ‘Walking Tall,’ Dies at 89

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      His performance as a crusading Southern sheriff made him a star after a decade under the radar in character parts. He went on to play a wide range of roles.Joe Don Baker, the tall, broad-shouldered character actor who found overnight fame when he starred as a crusading Southern sheriff in “Walking Tall,” a surprise hit both at the box office and with critics, and who went on to an impressive range of screen roles over the next four decades, died on May 7. He was 89.The death was announced by his family on Tuesday. The announcement did not say where he died or cite a cause.Released in the era of “Dirty Harry” and “Billy Jack,” “Walking Tall” (1973) is the story of a Tennessee man who moves back to his hometown and finds it hopelessly changed by illegal gambling, prostitution and careless moonshiners. The movie, as Dave Kehr described it almost 40 years later in The New York Times, is “a wild-eyed fantasy about an incorruptible leader who finds it necessary to subvert the law in order to save it.”A low-budget production, directed by the journeyman filmmaker Phil Karlson, it opened on Staten Island months before it arrived in Manhattan but proved to be a phenomenon. Vincent Canby, reviewing the film in The Times, called it “relentlessly violent” but also “uncommonly well acted.”It was soon noticed and praised by a wide array of prominent critics. Pauline Kael of The New Yorker called it “a volcano of a movie” and saw in Mr. Baker, a 37-year-old unknown with a decade of credits, mostly on television, “the mighty stature of a classic hero.”“The picture’s crudeness and its crummy cinematography give it the illusion of honesty,” she wrote.Vanity Fair wrote in 2000 that “Walking Tall” had “a major asset in Joe Don Baker,” whom it compared to Elvis Presley.MGM, via LMPC/Getty ImagesWe 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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      ‘The Damned’ Review: Unfortunate Sons

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      In Roberto Minervini’s intimate and impressionistic drama, a group of Civil War scouts faces the harsh realities of the uncharted Montana territory.The skies are overcast and the tone is contemplative in “The Damned,” as a small company of Union Army soldiers sets out in 1862 to explore the dangerously unmapped territories of the American West.What emerges, though, is more akin to a mood poem than a war movie. In keeping with the socially conscious sensibilities of its director, the Italian-born Roberto Minervini (whose previous work has sometimes probed the forgotten souls of rural Texas and urban Louisiana), “The Damned” is shaped as a wistful and laconic study of the minutiae of survival. Though billed as his first fiction film, it wobbles tantalizingly on a permeable line between narrative and documentary. Unscripted events and largely unnamed characters emerge organically from the director’s offscreen prompts and the men’s immersion in the life of the camp where much of the movie takes place.This means that, for long stretches, we’re watching the soldiers pitch tents, play cards, do laundry and complain about the deepening winter and declining rations. Embedded alongside the men, we eavesdrop on conversations that range from instructive to confessional, hopeful to cautiously philosophical. They have come from all over, with beliefs as varied as their reasons for enlisting. A golden-haired 16-year-old admits to having shot only rabbits and squirrels before following his father and older brother into the Army. When the three pray together, secure in their faith that the only happiness lies in the afterlife, his innocence is heartbreaking.If God is here at all, he’s in the details: the pot of coffee bubbling on a laboriously built fire; the dusting of snow on a pitch-black beard; the veins of gold in a lump of quartz.“This land has it all,” one man marvels, seeing beyond the conflict to the promise of the soil and the wildlife around them. At times, these moments are acutely lyrical, as when we watch a soldier lovingly clean his horse’s head (of mud or blood, we don’t know), then press his forehead against the animal in silent communion.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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      ‘Sister Midnight’ Review: The Feminine Mystique, but Make It Macabre

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      A housewife’s domestic distresses take a horrifying turn in this dark comedy set in the slums of Mumbai.Malaise turns macabre in “Sister Midnight,” a shape-shifting tale of an arranged marriage gone awry. The film, written and directed with thrilling originality by Karan Kandhari, is set mostly in the slums of Mumbai and follows a sullen housewife named Uma (Radhika Apte), whose lack of fulfillment manifests as a dark, voracious hunger.Uma is distressed by almost every facet of her new domestic life, but her first agony arrives in the film’s opening minutes after her withdrawn husband, Gopal (Ashok Pathak), leaves her in their single-room home without cash for groceries. She’s lonely, hungry and bored, and the days that follow offer little to relieve the tedium. As time wears on, her misery gives way to flulike symptoms that send her to bed with fatigue, vomiting and chills.This is when the film takes a turn for the paranormal, with Uma’s affliction — and its nastier nighttime expressions — serving as a metaphor for her discontents. If the writer Betty Friedan once abstracted the horrors of being a housewife as “the problem that has no name,” “Sister Midnight” calls the horrors just that, and then gives them the genre hallmarks to match.In his first feature, Kandhari makes use of morbid humor and expressive imagery, including stop-motion effects. He rarely relies on dialogue and favors a fuzzier plot, which leaves the story with a shapeless and sometimes confusing midsection. Eventually, a repetitive pattern sets in that can feel stifling. But if it’s troubling to us, just imagine how Uma feels.Sister MidnightNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Desert of Namibia’ Review: Ups and Downs

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      Yoko Yamanaka’s film is a brilliantly observed portrait of a young woman simmering with frustrations and coming to terms with her relationships and place in the world.It’s rare that a movie portrays the kind of messy and absurd arguments that can unfold in relationships, so there’s a special awe to seeing a movie that goes for it. Yoko Yamanaka’s brilliantly observed “Desert of Namibia” often boils over with the anger of its young protagonist, Kana (Yuumi Kawai), but it often also just simmers with her frustrations about her place in the world.Outright fights are just one facet of the film’s unvarnished fidelity to Kana’s state of mind. She upends parts of her life, sometimes for the better in the long run, but can’t always reassemble the pieces into a satisfying future. Her boyfriend, Honda (Kanichiro), dotes on her at their shared apartment, but she lurches into another relationship with a writer, Hayashi (Daichi Kaneko), whom she’s seeing on the side. Her mind-numbing job at a hair-removal salon doesn’t help.What clinches the portrait is the sure-handed direction and Kana’s organic performance of a daunting character. Dramatically, Yamanaka finds unpredictable ways into and out of scenes, and she has an eye for the poignant details amid the angst, like neatly packed baggies of food in a refrigerator, and for underplaying other moments, like the breeziness of a doctor who diagnoses Kana over a video call.Kana’s spikiness (which recalls Kit Zauhar’s similarly candid triumph “Actual People”) segues into an eventual need for stability. But Yamanaka is admirably in no hurry to simplify or explain what Kana is still sorting out for herself.Desert of NamibiaNot rated. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 17 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Kiss’ Review: A Romance Without Love?

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      A young military man asks a woman to dance, but they’re in for a bumpy ride in this story adapted from a novel by Stefan Zweig.This movie begins as many conventional period romances set in Mitteleuropa do: at a formal event in the 1910s, as an ambitious young military man, Anton, asks a daughter of nobility, Edith, to dance. She is willing, but a complication becomes clear as she attempts to rise from her chair: She wears braces on her lower legs, which are paralyzed. She totters forward, and there is a fair amount of embarrassment to go around, but Anton, seeking through Edith a path to the favor of the nobility, is not deterred.“The Kiss,” the latest picture from the prolific Danish director Bille August, is adapted from “Beware of Pity,” the sole novel the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig published in his lifetime. Its narrative is persistently discomfiting, but August often tells it in a way that emphasizes the picturesque; if you weren’t paying attention to the postures of its characters, you could possibly mistake it for something genuinely romantic like “Elvira Madigan.”Anton is played by Esben Smed, who’s clearly trying to tamp down his character’s essential callowness, while Clara Rosager shows purposeful restraint in her work as the smitten and hopeful Edith. The picture moves at a stately pace that one supposes was considered period-appropriate but feels merely logy at times. August and his co-screenwriter, Greg Latter, juggle Zweig’s chronology a bit and try to compound his ironies. Then they take a whack at ameliorating those ironies in the movie’s coda, as if they themselves are taking pity on the viewer. As executed, it feels like waffling.This director’s filmography has long been bumpy — he came out of the gate with “Pelle the Conqueror,” which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1988, took another Palme in 1992 with “The Best Intentions” (working from a script by Ingmar Bergman), and took a notable wrong turn with “Smilla’s Sense of Snow” (1997). And despite the best efforts of the cast and technical crew here, “The Kiss” winds up in the land of “meh.”The KissNot rated. In Danish with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Deaf President Now!’ and the Biases of a Hearing World

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      The documentary recalls the 1988 protests that erupted at Gallaudet University when trustees rejected deaf candidates to lead it.In 1988, the board of trustees of Gallaudet University was preparing to announce its pick for the institution’s next president. That’s not an unusual task for a board. What’s unusual is what happened next, as told in “Deaf President Now!” (streaming on Apple TV+).Directed by Nyle DiMarco and Davis Guggenheim, the documentary plays like a high-stakes political thriller, but in an unconventional venue. The film chronicles the week of turmoil and transformation that followed the announcement of Elisabeth Zinser as president. (DiMarco is a Gallaudet alum.)Gallaudet University — founded in 1864 as a school for deaf and blind children, through a law signed by Abraham Lincoln — is the nation’s only liberal arts university designed specifically for deaf and hard-of-hearing students, and it’s officially bilingual, with instruction in both English and American Sign Language. In 1988, however, Gallaudet had never had a deaf president. And Zinser, a hearing person with a background in nursing, had been chosen over two deaf, arguably more qualified candidates.To tell the story, “Deaf President Now!” weaves together archival footage and contemporary interviews with a number of the students and faculty, now middle-aged and older, who led or were involved in the protests. All of the interviewees, filmed against a simple black background, give their answers in ASL, with an off-camera voice (rather than subtitles) providing the translation for hearing audiences.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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      ‘Love’ Review: Connection, Oslo Style

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      A poetic drama weaves together the lives of Norwegians as they pursue connection in their own ways.The subject of “Love” is right there in the title. But that might be deceptively simple: The director Dag Johan Haugerud’s gently humanistic drama is one of those films that feels akin to a prism, refracting its theme into the array of colors it contains.“Love,” one of a trilogy of films from Haugerud set in Oslo (the others are named “Sex” and “Dreams”), braids a few stories into one another, the way its characters’ lives are woven together. The central strands are Marianne (Andrea Braein Hovig), a middle-age urologist in Oslo, and the nurse who works most closely with her, Tor (Tayo Cittadella Jacobsen). She is straight; he is gay; they’re both single. One evening after work, they find themselves on a ferry to a neighboring island, where Marianne and her friend Heidi (Marte Engebrigtsen), who’s organizing the city’s centenary celebrations, are meeting with some people involved with the planning. (January 2025 marked 100 years since the name of the city was changed from Kristiania to Oslo.)One of those people is Heidi’s friend Ole (Thomas Gullestad), a soft-spoken architect. Marianne and Ole vibe immediately. He’s divorced, with children, and his ex-wife lives next door. Marianne can’t deny her attraction to him, but the whole thing seems pretty complicated, and she doesn’t mind being alone. On the way back, though, she finds herself on the ferry with Tor, and they fall into a conversation about Tor’s own relationship philosophy — one that’s much more casual and expansive than hers. She decides to try it out for herself.Meanwhile, Tor meets Bjorn (Lars Jacob Holm) one night, then runs into him at the urology office, where he’s been diagnosed with prostate cancer. He finds himself falling into a different sort of relationship with Bjorn than he’s ever sought with another person. It turns out Tor and Marianne both have a lot of room to grow.“Love” moves slowly through its languid moments, set against the backdrop of Oslo and its architecture. There’s a loveliness to every scene, quiet urban beauty that leaves space for the audience’s contemplation. Characters spend a lot of time conversing, with frank openness, about their connections to others and themselves, about the ways they navigate the world. Sometimes during these conversations, the camera pulls back and drifts over the Oslo rooftops, shining in the bright August sun. The voices continue, but we’re observing a broader cross-section of the city, a reminder that these kinds of conversations are happening everywhere in town, all the time. People are interested in love, looking for love, swiping on their apps for love. And for each of those people, love looks a little different.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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      ‘Final Destinations: Bloodlines’ Review: Born to Die

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      The sixth installment in the horror franchise might be the most self-consciously silly of the bunch — and it’s all the better for it.It’s no surprise that the “Final Destination” franchise — a schlocky, spectacularly gory series of horror films that kicked off in 2000, spawning a total of five movies — has staying power. Unlike most horror properties, there’s no big baddie (à la Jason Voorhees or Leatherface) — or at least not one capable of getting old and seeming played out. The villain is Death itself, and both onscreen and off, it’s coming for us all, though in the “Final Destination” movies this unseen force is a shameless showboat.That’s no exception in the new, sixth installment, “Final Destination: Bloodlines,” which begins with a terrifically tense set piece in and around a Space Needle-style glass tower in the 1950s. Iris (Brec Bassinger) is on a date with her beau on the building’s opening night when she experiences a vivid hallucination of their imminently brutal deaths by towering inferno. The vision allows Iris to escape her grisly fate and save everyone around her. In this regard, “Bloodlines” follows the template of all the “Final Destination” movies (the first movie saw its characters escaping an airplane explosion, the second film a highway pileup and the third a roller coaster malfunction).But as things go in the “Final Destination” universe, Death doesn’t like being cheated — and it’ll take its lives, one by one, in what has become the franchise’s claim to fame: ingeniously choreographed kill scenes that turn everyday settings and objects into potential murder weapons. Consider some of the series’s greatest hits: death by tanning bed; by head-mashing weight machine; by, uh, slipping on spaghetti and getting your eyeball pierced by a falling fire-escape ladder.“Bloodlines,” gleefully directed by Adam Stein and Zach Lipovsky, offers a compelling tweak on its predecessors by introducing — with a wink and a shove — the element of inherited trauma. The opening glass-tower tragedy, it turns out, happened decades ago and the premonition takes the form of Iris’s granddaughter’s nightmares. Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) is flunking out of college because of these recurring visions, leading her to return home and reconnect with her long-estranged grandmother (Gabrielle Rose).Of the dozens of people who were supposed to die that night, Iris was nearly the last. Death proceeds in the intended order of the original blood bath, meaning it has taken years to work through all its victims — including the children those people were never supposed to have. Iris is now something of a doomsday prepper, having single-handedly fended off Death’s wrath by sheltering in a remote cabin. Her family thinks she’s nuts, but it’s not long before Death works its way down the family tree, making conspiracists out of all of them.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