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      Robert Blake, ‘Baretta’ Star Acquitted in Wife’s Murder, Dies at 89

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      His film and TV career began with “Our Gang” comedies and was highlighted by a performance as a mass killer in “In Cold Blood.” But he led a tempestuous life.Robert Blake, an actor whose career portraying gritty characters like the television detective Tony Baretta was eclipsed by his trial and acquittal in the murder of his wife in 2001, died on Thursday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 89.The cause was long-term heart disease, a niece, Noreen Austin, said.Mr. Blake began performing at 2, when his father would take him and his brother and sister to New Jersey parks to dance for money. By age 5 he was a regular in the “Our Gang” film comedies.He went on to act in scores of films and on hundreds of television shows, all the while making regular visits to late-night talk shows, where he delighted in spouting flagrantly unorthodox views and savagely mocking his own career. He earned a reputation as a Hollywood enfant terrible. He insulted producers, punched a director, fought with fellow actors, abused alcohol and drugs, and sometimes went for years without work.He nonetheless became a television star in the late 1970s as Baretta, a detective who lived in a run-down hotel, had a pet cockatoo named Fred and used disguises — waiter, wino, janitor, barber — to chase bad guys. His catchphrase, “You can take dat to da bank,” became well known.One of Mr. Blake’s most acclaimed roles was as the mass murderer Perry Smith in “In Cold Blood,” the 1967 film adaptation of Truman Capote’s true-crime book. In an interview with Playboy in 1977, Mr. Blake explained that he had sought the part to explore a question that nagged him.“Everybody knows what a murderer is a millionth of a second after he pulls the trigger,” he said. “But what is he a millionth of a second before he pulls the trigger?”A jury — and a transfixed American public — pondered whether he could answer that question during his trial, from late 2004 to March 2005, in the shooting death of his wife, Bonny Lee Bakley.The details of the case could have come from a pulp novel. Witnesses portrayed Mr. Blake as trolling jazz clubs for women, then wooing them in the back seat of his truck. Ms. Bakley was alleged to be a petty criminal who sold nude pictures of herself to lonely men through the mail. She had nine former husbands and a dozen aliases and was on probation for fraud, according to court testimony.By 1999 she was in Los Angeles. She met Mr. Blake at a nightclub and, as both acknowledged, had sex with him in his car that night. At the time, she was having a sexual relationship with Christian Brando, the eldest son of Marlon Brando. When she gave birth to a daughter, tests revealed that the father was Mr. Blake and not Mr. Brando, whom she had first identified.Mr. Blake, whose marriage to the actress Sondra Kerr ended in divorce in 1983 after 22 years, said he had agreed to marry Ms. Bakley for the good of their daughter, Rose. According to trial testimony, the marriage was strained, and Ms. Bakley lived in a separate house on his property. Witnesses said he referred to his wife as a “pig” and spoke of wanting to “snuff” her.Robert Blake during his trial in the murder of his wife, Bonny Lee Bakley, in 2003. He was acquitted.Pool photo by Al SeibOn May 4, 2001, Ms. Bakley, 44, was found dead from a gunshot to her head in her husband’s Dodge Stealth, parked outside an Italian restaurant in the Studio City section of Los Angeles, where the couple had just dined. Mr. Blake said he was not there when she was shot; he said he had gone back to the restaurant to retrieve a gun he had left in a booth.That gun, it was determined, was not the murder weapon; one found in a nearby dumpster was.By April 2002, the police had nonetheless gathered enough evidence to charge Mr. Blake with “murder with special circumstances,” a capital offense. He was also charged with soliciting movie stuntmen to do the killing for him.After he pleaded not guilty to all charges, the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office announced that it would not seek the death penalty. Mr. Blake was initially denied bail and spent 11 months in jail, until March 2003, when he was granted bail, set at $1.5 million, which he posted, allowing him to remain free for almost two years while he awaited trial.On March 16, 2005, after a three-month trial in which the stuntmen testified to having been solicited by Mr. Blake to kill Ms. Bakley, the jury decided that the prosecutors had not proved Mr. Blake’s guilt. In interviews afterward, jurors said the stuntmen had not been credible because they had admitted to being drug addicts. Mr. Blake said three restaurant workers had seen him return to get his gun, but he did not produce them.Ms. Bakley’s family later sued Mr. Blake in civil court for wrongfully causing her death. They won a $30 million judgment, which, after Mr. Blake appealed, was cut in half on the grounds that Ms. Bakley had been earning her living by illegal means. Mr. Blake filed for bankruptcy in 2006.Michael James Vijencio Gubitosi was born on Sept. 18, 1933, in Nutley, N.J. His childhood, as he later described it, was a Dickensian one whose horrors began before he was born. He told CNN in 2012 that his mother had twice tried to abort him with a coat hanger. In a series of interviews in 1992 and 1993, he said his father, who worked for a can manufacturer, had been an alcoholic who forced him to eat from the floor, locked him in closets and sexually abused him.When Michael was 2, his father enlisted him and his two older preschool siblings to dance for money in parks as “the Three Little Hillbillies” while the father played a guitar. “It was either doing that or stealing milk bottles off other people’s porches,” Mr. Blake said in a 1959 interview with The Los Angeles Times.Inspired by the success of child stars like Shirley Temple, his father in 1938 took his family to Hollywood. Michael was hired as an extra for the “Our Gang” shorts, later shown on television as “The Little Rascals.” When another child actor flubbed a line, Michael told the director, “I can do that.”From left, Robert Blake; Billie Thomas, known as Buckwheat; and Carl Switzer, known as Alfalfa, in ”Bubbling Troubles,” an “Our Gang” short made in 1940.MGMHe could, and he was eventually cast as a lead character, Mickey. He was billed as Mickey Gubitosi in most of the “Our Gang” shorts, and as Bobby Blake in the last few. He acquired the stage name Robert Blake in 1956.After the “Our Gang” series ended in 1944, he appeared in more than 70 films over the next decade, establishing himself as a tough, fast-talking young character actor with a mischievous grin. In “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” starring Humphrey Bogart, he was the Mexican boy who sold Bogart the lucky lottery ticket that set the plot in motion.Mr. Blake was thrown out of five schools before finally graduating. He neglected to register for the draft, and the penalty was immediate conscription into the Army. He was stationed in Alaska. After his discharge, he applied to study at the Actors Studio in New York with the acting guru Lee Strasberg. Strasberg, he said, advised against pursuing an acting career.Returning to Hollywood, Mr. Blake found work as a stuntman. He continued to act in movies, including “PT 109” (1962), about John F. Kennedy’s wartime experience in the Pacific; he played one of Kennedy’s fellow sailors.Robert Blake, left, and Scott Wilson in “In Cold Blood” in 1967.Columbia Pictures CorporationHis breakthrough movie was “In Cold Blood,” which received excellent reviews, as did he. But his next few movies struggled at the box office, and after filming “Busting” (1974), a detective drama in which he starred alongside Elliott Gould, he considered suicide, he told Playboy, and checked himself into a hospital for psychiatric treatment.Mr. Blake returned to television in January 1975 to take the title role in the ABC detective series “Baretta,” a retooled version of “Toma,” which had starred Tony Musante. When Mr. Musante quit after the 1973-74 season, the show was taken off the air, but ABC decided to reactivate it as a midseason replacement and asked Mr. Blake to be the star. He accepted, even though he made it clear in interviews that he considered himself above series television. He proceeded to make many suggestions to shape the renamed show to his liking.“I could have my name all over ‘Baretta,’ but I’ve never taken credit for writing or directing any of the shows,” he told Playboy. Mr. Blake won a 1975 Emmy and a 1976 Golden Globe for his performance, and “Baretta” was briefly a Top 10 hit, but it was canceled in 1978.Speaking of Mr. Blake in an interview with People magazine in 2002, Stephen J. Cannell, the creator of “Baretta,” said: “Complex doesn’t even begin to capture his personality. If you were in business with him, you just had to strap in really tight, because you were going to get lurched around a lot.”Mr. Blake claimed to be inspired by daredevils like circus high-wire performers and rodeo riders.“You get on a high wire without a net,” he said in the 2012 CNN interview. “You get on a bull and they open that goddamn chute and there’s nobody in the universe but you and God. And that’s where I’m comfortable, doing something that’s so scary that I can’t sleep at night.”Mr. Blake became a favorite on late-night talk shows, particularly “The Tonight Show,” where be made fun of himself in his tough-guy Baretta voice and gesticulated wildly with an unlit cigarette.Prodded by Johnny Carson, he excitedly shared his positive views on duck-hunting and negative ones on rodents and insulted Orson Welles for being overweight. Welles replied that he could perhaps be thin, but that Mr. Blake would always be stupid.Appearing in a number of television movies, Mr. Blake was praised for his performance as the Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa in “Blood Feud” in 1983. In 1985, he created the NBC series “Hell Town,” in which he starred as a tough-talking slum priest. Though Mr. Blake needed the income from the show to pay for his recent divorce, he walked away from the job, saying he was emotionally exhausted.He sought solace sleeping in his van, parked in the Hollywood Hills, and worked with a therapist on his childhood traumas. He returned to acting in 1993 in the made-for-TV movie “Judgment Day: The John List Story,” about a real-life New Jersey accountant who murdered his wife, mother and three children.To get that part, Mr. Blake had offered to forgo his $250,000 salary until the film was finished. He was paid in full. His last acting job was in “Lost Highway” (1997), a psychological thriller directed by David Lynch.Mr. Blake is survived by two children from his first marriage, Noah and Delinah Blake, and Rose Blake, his daughter with Ms. Bakley.After his trial, Mr. Blake told CNN, he grew a beard, lived on Twinkies and liked to wander into pool halls for a game of nine ball. “I was born lonely, I live lonely, and I’ll die lonely,” he said.April Rubin More

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      ‘A Doll’s House’ Review: Jessica Chastain Plots an Escape

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      Jamie Lloyd’s compelling, surgically precise revival of Ibsen’s 1879 drama throbs like an episode of “CSI: Norway.”Many plays end with a breathtaking coup, but Jamie Lloyd’s incisive Broadway revival of “A Doll’s House,” which opened on Thursday at the Hudson Theater, also begins with one. After all, it’s not every day you find Jessica Chastain rotating on a turntable like an angry bird in a giant cuckoo clock.Yet there she is for 20 minutes as you take your seat and peel off your coat. Nor is she alone: The five other cast members gradually join her, seated on plain wooden chairs nearby. You can’t help seeing them through her steely gaze as she circulates from one to another, her blazing red hair pulled back and her arms and legs crossed as if sizing up suspects.Clearly, this “Doll’s House” is going to be a procedural. The forbidding, throbbing music by Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alva Noto suggests an episode of “CSI: Norway.”But pay attention to something else as you enter: the year 1879 projected on the back wall of the stage. Without it you might forget that’s when Ibsen wrote the play, and never imagine that’s when this production, using a script adapted by Amy Herzog, is set. With one big exception, “A Doll’s House” is that modern.Certainly it’s chic and visually minimal in the manner of Lloyd’s bucket-of-tears “Betrayal” starring Tom Hiddleston and his rapturous “Cyrano de Bergerac” starring James McAvoy. The black and midnight blue costumes by Soutra Gilmour and Enver Chakartash might be worn on 44th Street today, with Chastain in knitwear and kicky zip boots.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.Feeling the Buzz: “Bob Fosse’s Dancin’” is back on Broadway. Its stars? An eclectic cast of dancers who are anything but machines.And don’t look for props. Even when specific objects are mentioned — a cookie, a wedding band — no effort is made to mime them or acknowledge their absence. Indeed, except for the chairs, the stage is utterly empty; the set (also by Gilmour) depends on light rails descending ominously from the flies to suggest the contours, and pressures, of a home.The home in question is of course the dollhouse of the title: the place where Nora Helmer (Chastain) is kept as a plaything for her husband, Torvald (Arian Moayed). Even as she tries to understand how she got trapped there, and how she’ll get out, Ibsen’s ingenious plot demonstrates that marriage is not the only cage. Any woman who dares to venture beyond the security of the place society has made for her — who tries to discover herself as a full human — will meet with disaster.Except for wooden chairs, the stage is empty. Instead, Soutra Gilmour’s set depends on light rails descending from the flies to suggest the contours of a home.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat’s what happened to Anne-Marie (Tasha Lawrence), who left her own child years ago to become Nora’s nanny, and is now the nanny of Nora’s three children. And that’s what happened to Nora’s schoolmate Kristine Linde (Jesmille Darbouze), who shows up at the Helmer home at Christmastime, widowed and in need of a job.Nora’s disaster has been less visible. To the outside eye she has lacked for little, and with Torvald about to become the manager of a bank, she will soon lack for nothing. But unknown to him, that security has come at a terrible price, with more yet to be paid. Having borrowed money secretly to save his life during a health crisis, she finds herself under a new threat from the lender, the disreputable Nils Krogstad (Okieriete Onaodowan).Deprived of any independent vision of the world, she can imagine only three solutions. One is to tell Torvald the truth, hoping he will offer to do “the most beautiful thing” — take the blame. Another is to ask their best friend, Dr. Rank (Michael Patrick Thornton), who has long been in love with her, to pay Krogstad off. But the first would be to defer again to the supposedly greater moral fortitude of men, and the second to make herself not just Torvald’s doll but Rank’s. The third is suicide.That we see these options so starkly is because everything else is pared away. Herzog’s dialogue, pruning the social floweriness and conversational whorls of Ibsen’s naturalism, gets right to the point of every line, leaving the text raw and red, as if exfoliated. What the first English translation of the play, by William Archer in 1889, rendered as “You see, it is very difficult to keep an account of a business matter of that kind” becomes, for Herzog, “It’s impossible to keep track” — five words instead of 17. The play, usually nosing past three hours, comes in shy of two.But in cutting and modernizing the language, Herzog does not make the mistake of trashing the social conventions that create the drama in the first place. She doesn’t need to; most of them are still too familiar. In Torvald’s presence, Nora remains a recognizable type, the strategically chirpy songbird pursing her lips and cooing in baby talk. Yet in her superb scenes with Kristine and Rank, the only two people she is not afraid of, we see her other side: calculating, callous and kind when she can afford it.Chastain puts this all across beautifully. As Nora begins to understand the cracks in the stories she’s been told about the world, we feel the cold air of knowledge shivering her. Sharply, she asks Torvald why only mothers are blamed when children turn out badly. Outraged, she wonders how a law that punishes a wife for saving her husband can be moral. And when her options shrink almost to none, she short-circuits; the seductive tarantella she dances to keep Torvald from reading a fateful letter becomes a kind of seizure.Jesmille Darbouze, left, as Nora’s schoolmate Kristine Linde, a widow seeking employment. Darbouze and Chastain’s scenes together are superb, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe staging enhances that interiority at every turn. The children are mere voices. Ben and Max Ringham’s sound design makes the dialogue sound as if it’s piped direct from the hypothalamus. In rotating each new scene toward Nora on the turntable, Lloyd highlights the transfer of information from character to character as if it were a shuttlecock — or contraband.Exhilarating as the approach is in vindicating Nora, this modern take on “A Doll’s House” does hit a wall with Krogstad and, crucially, Torvald. Casting Onaodowan, a Black actor, as the play’s most obvious villain, and then underlighting him for scary, shadowy effects (the lighting is by Jon Clark), may be a way of provoking and then subverting a racist response. And it’s true that the character is greatly softened here in Onaodowan’s ultimately sympathetic performance.But Moayed, a daring actor, has less leeway with Torvald. If the other characters feel comfortably at home in 2023, his insufferable, inexcusable paternalism leaves him utterly behind, a relic of 1879.It’s worth noting that linguists generally translate Ibsen’s title — “Et dukkehjem” — as “A Dollhouse” instead of “A Doll’s House.” The prison isn’t just Nora’s; she and Torvald are equally trapped in it. My only real quibble with this compelling, surgically precise revival is that it doesn’t seem to be interested in preserving that unity: in keeping our sympathy for both characters as balanced as Ibsen evidently intended. When the astonishing curtain coup finally comes, you should feel his loss no less than her liberation.A Doll’s HouseThrough June 10 at the Hudson Theater, Manhattan; adollshousebroadway.com. Running time: 1 hour and 50 minutes. More

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      ’65’ Review: An Extraterrestrial Adam Driver Lands on Earth

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      Millions of years ago, a guy from another planet landed on this one. Like most survivors, he had a moody little girl with him.To paraphrase an old Monty Python sketch, nobody suspects the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction.Certainly the poor dinosaurs didn’t, though for their more obsessive present-day human fans the fact that this movie is called “65” — as in million years ago — might count as a spoiler. When Mills the space pilot crash-lands on a muddy, reptile-infested Earth after his vessel is hit by an asteroid, you might have an inkling of the larger disaster in store.I don’t mean the movie; that would be unkind. “65,” directed by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods (two writers of the first “Quiet Place” film), is not interesting enough to be truly terrible or terrible enough to be halfway interesting. As Mills, Adam Driver does a lot of breathing and grunting as he runs a gantlet of familiar dangers. In addition to the T. rexes and other saurian menaces, he faces quicksand, large bugs, falling rocks, malfunctioning equipment and the withering judgment of a 9-year-old girl.But let’s back up a second. Who are these people, and how did they get to our planet before (if I may quote the opening titles) “the advent of mankind”? The answer is that they belonged to an ancient extraterrestrial civilization, one sufficiently advanced to have invented not only space travel, but the usual array of futuristic sci-fi technology.Their health care system was pretty bad, though. Mills’s adolescent daughter, Nevine (Chloe Coleman), suffers from a persistent, apparently life-threatening cough, and the only way he can afford her treatment is by taking on a high-paying “long-range exploratory mission.” He’s already grief-stricken when the asteroid hits, cleaving his spaceship in two and killing all of his cryogenically frozen passengers except one, a girl named Koa (Ariana Greenblatt).The folks on their home planet, realistically enough, speak more than one language, so Koa and Mills — whose native idiom is English — can’t communicate very well. Also, he’s a grumpy, unhappy man and she’s a moody girl, so we’re on familiar survival-story terrain. “65” is a little like “The Last of Us,” but with dinosaurs instead of mushrooms and no obvious sociological theme that would sustain a think piece.Which would be to its credit, if it managed to be a simple, effective action movie. Or science-fiction movie. Or scary movie. Or something. Like Mills’s emotional back story, the special effects seem to have been pulled out of a box of secondhand ideas. Nor is the execution all that impressive. There’s little in the way of awe, suspense or surprise. Just a quickly hatched plan to get off this God-forsaken planet and leave it to its fate.65Rated PG-13. Dinosaur blood and prehistoric curses. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Punch’ Review: Hitting at the Heart

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      Welby Ings’s keenly observant debut feature follows a young, promising boxer whose priorities shift.Sports dramas, perhaps more than movies in most genres, have an ability to cut to the chase when dealing with themes of gender: The fraught tension between the athlete and their arena so often comes down to how well they adhere to traditional notions of their gender identity. This idea is at the forefront in “Punch,” the feature debut of the New Zealand writer-director Welby Ings, which dexterously balances familiar emotional beats and an impressive, nimble approach to form.Jim’s (Jordan Oosterhof) potential as a boxer is a promise, to himself and to his alcoholic father, Stan (Tim Roth). Jim, a high school student, could finally leave his rural life. He could become the boxing star his father never managed to be. The closer Jim gets to a local queer outcast, Whetu (Conan Hayes), though, the more his priorities shift away from being in the ring.Flowing and keenly observant of its characters and setting, “Punch” swings above its weight class. Though it is too often formulaic in its melodrama, Ings’s film is granted an unusual and compelling out-of-time feel. Its production design, by Iain Aitken, features elements both  modern and not: The training gym appears worn and aged, with paint flaking off the walls and faded pictures that look like they’re from the 1950s. But beneath one photo of the boy and his father, a caption reads “Pirau Boxing Club 2014.” Matt Henley’s cinematography gives the movie a dreamlike texture, as if the bonds between father and son, and fighter and lover, transcend time and place.PunchNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘99 Moons’ Review: On-Again, Off-Again

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      Instead of an engaging erotic romance, the film delivers a dull narrative of two lovers caught in a cycle of getting together and falling apart.Good erotic films are built on an atmosphere of tension. Maybe it’s repressed desire, or a ticking clock imposed on an affair by external forces, or two people with fundamentally different identities coming together against all odds. Jan Gassmann’s “99 Moons” shoots for all three, and yet the tension hangs limply throughout its nearly two-hour running time.The Swiss film, opening in theaters Friday, stars Valentina Di Pace and Dominik Fellmann as Bigna and Frank, characters representing opposites on a spectrum of sexual agency. Bigna, a young scientist trying to advance in her profession by planning a research study in Chile, is controlling to a fault, hooking up with anonymous men in masks to fulfill an elaborate sexual fantasy that the viewer is thrown into during the opening scene. Frank, a loner, weaves his way through hazy nightclubs in search of something that Gassmann never quite articulates. The two meet up through one of Bigna’s contrived escapades, after which Frank immediately bursts into tears. Bigna is confused, and so are we.What follows is a dull, “When Harry Met Sally”-style narrative in which the protagonists pursue each other, get together, and break up over bizarre misunderstandings, before the film jumps forward in time and the cycle repeats itself. (The film’s title comes from this structure; their time apart is measured pretentiously in “moons.”) Gassmann clearly wants to explore the state of love and sexuality in the 2020s — there are more than a few passing parallels to Joachim Trier’s “The Worst Person in the World” — but he succeeds only in conveying the pathologies of two people who can’t figure out what they want from each other.99 MoonsNot rated. In German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Unicorn Wars’ Review: Teddy Bears in Battle

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      The contrast between this animated film’s grim subject matter and its bubbly animation style is a big part of what makes it so creepy, our critic writes.In “Unicorn Wars,” a disturbing animated film by the Spanish director and comic book artist Alberto Vázquez, pastel-colored bears are locked in perpetual warfare against the supposedly diabolical unicorns that inhabit a magic forest. Two brothers drafted into service, Bluey (Jon Goirizelaia) and Tubby (Jaione Insausti), are bobble-headed teddy bears with saucer eyes and a penchant for bed-wetting, yet the vainglorious Bluey in particular proves capable of great cruelty.In other words, these Care Bears are not for children. Even some adults will have difficulty sitting through the film’s parade of exposed brains and cartoon genitals. Though, to Vázquez’s credit, the contrast between the film’s grim subject matter and its bubbly, expressive 2D animation style is a big part of what makes the film so creepy.An antiwar and anti-religion fable, “Unicorn Wars” follows Bluey and Tubby as they train for battle in the forest, where they ingest hallucination-inducing worms and eventually slaughter a young unicorn, inciting the herd into horn-goring action. The bear soldiers are nothing like the ferocious grizzlies of lore, so they’re destined to be collateral damage.Naturally, the war is a sham, justified by some dusty religious text that deems unicorns evil, a myth that the repressed Bluey latches on to with notable zeal. Flashbacks to his troubled childhood — his parents’ divorce, his mother’s death — give reason for his power-mongering and jealous ways, his malice metastasizing despite Tubby’s generous supply of brotherly affection.The film has clear touchstones: it draws from the humanism and worldbuilding of Hayao Miyazaki, particularly “Princess Mononoke” and its civilization versus nature allegory — paying tribute as well to that film’s black-sludge-covered demons and ghoulish ape clan. In the brief unicorn sequences, whose animation style leans more toward the expressionistic, there are parallels with the forsaken doe in “Bambi.” But “Unicorn Wars” is forcefully provocative, trying too hard to push buttons at the cost of more nuanced explorations of masculinity and power. For Vázquez, a pile of cartoon corpses makes enough of a point.Unicorn WarsNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘The Magic Flute’ Review: Mozart Meets C.G.I., With Help From a Tween

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      A young tenor enters a world enlivened by computer graphics at a school devoted to the composer’s works in this Roland Emmerich-inspired film.The key to what this film has in store for you lies not with the name of the director (first timer Florian Sigl) nor the screenwriters (Andrew Lowery and Jason Young, whose respective filmographies elicit a reaction between “meh” and “yikes”). Rather, consider one of its producers, Roland Emmerich. The mastermind behind a variety of elaborate blockbusters with topics running the gamut from alien invasions (you may remember 1996’s “Independence Day”) to who the hell really wrote Shakespeare’s plays (you probably don’t remember 2011’s “Anonymous”), Germany’s insufficient answer to Baz Luhrmann here applies his imprimatur to a Mozart-for-tweens exercise.A young English fellow, Tim Walker (Jack Wolfe), gets shipped off to the fictional Mozart International School in Germany, the overall vibe of which is very Hogwarts for musos. Undercut by an imperious professor (F. Murray Abraham, hoping you remember “Amadeus,” or maybe not), distracted by a female schoolmate and ducking resident bullies, Tim nonetheless determines to earn the role of Prince Tamino in the school’s upcoming production of a Mozart opera. One evening that very opera’s three child spirits, doing something of a Tinkerbell bit, lead Tim to a passageway that drops him in the world of “The Magic Flute” itself. Over rugged terrain, he’s chased by a giant serpent, just like in the opera, only here it’s a CGI beast, just like in a Roland Emmerich movie. In a way it’s kind of neat. In another way it’s kind of dopey.The movie toggles between those two states throughout. But the tunes are nice, and it is novel, one could say, to hear them sung in non-operatic modes. Except in the case of the opera’s Queen of the Night, played by the acclaimed coloratura Sabine Devieilhe, who comes through with that famous high note.The Magic FluteNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 4 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Magic Flute’ Review: Mozart Meets CGI, With Help From a Tween

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      A young tenor enters a CGI-enlivened world at a school devoted to the composer’s works in this Roland Emmerich- inspired film.The key to what this film has in store for you lies not with the name of the director (first timer Florian Sigl) nor the screenwriters (Andrew Lowery and Jason Young, whose respective filmographies elicit a reaction between “meh” and “yikes”). Rather, consider one of its producers, Roland Emmerich. The mastermind behind a variety of elaborate blockbusters with topics running the gamut from alien invasions (you may remember 1996’s “Independence Day”) to who the hell really wrote Shakespeare’s plays (you probably don’t remember 2011’s “Anonymous”), Germany’s insufficient answer to Baz Luhrmann here applies his imprimatur to a Mozart-for-Tweens exercise.A young English fellow, Tim Walker (Jack Wolfe), gets shipped off to the fictional Mozart International School in Germany, the overall vibe of which is very Hogwarts for musos. Undercut by an imperious professor (F. Murray Abraham, hoping you remember “Amadeus,” or maybe not), distracted by a female schoolmate and ducking resident bullies, Tim nonetheless determines to earn the role of Prince Tamino in the school’s upcoming production of a Mozart opera. One evening that very opera’s three child spirits, doing something of a Tinkerbell bit, lead Tim to a passageway that drops him in the world of “The Magic Flute” itself. Over rugged terrain, he’s chased by a giant serpent, just like in the opera, only here it’s a CGI beast, just like in a Roland Emmerich movie. In a way it’s kind of neat. In another way it’s kind of dopey.The movie toggles between those two states throughout. But the tunes are nice, and it is novel, one could say, to hear them sung in non-operatic modes. Except in the case of the opera’s Queen of the Night, played by the acclaimed coloratura Sabine Devieilhe, who comes through with that famous high note.The Magic FluteNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 4 minutes. In theaters. More