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      ‘Clock’ Review: That Biological Ticking Is Now a Time Bomb

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      A woman who does not want children is pressured into changing her mind, with horrific results, in Alexis Jacknow’s fitfully scary horror movie.Ella (Dianna Agron) has a successful career as an interior designer, with spare time for afternoon sex with her handsome, loving husband (Jay Ali) and volunteer work. The only cloud over this perfect picture is that Ella does not want children, and feels bad about not feeling bad about it.Motherhood has long been a major subject of horror movies, which have feasted on such themes as intimate invasion — the call came from inside the womb! — and perception-distorting imbalances. The writer-director Alexis Jacknow incorporates these and more, messily so, in her Hulu feature “Clock.”Unmoored by conflicting impulses and desires, Ella finally gives in, largely to appease her widowed father (Saul Rubinek), a Holocaust survivor who begs her to keep their family line alive. She enrolls in an experimental program that feels as if Goop had been dreamed up by David Cronenberg and is run by the alarmingly soothing Dr. Simmons (Melora Hardin). The treatment to make her more receptive to having children involves talk therapy, drugs and a mysterious intrauterine implant.Agron, fresh from a strong turn in the indie “Acidman,” anchors “Clock” with a restrained, histrionics-free performance somewhat at odds with the film’s perfunctory jump scares. “Clock” is a psychological thriller, or perhaps even a satire, in horror clothing, tantalizing us with thought-provoking ideas, only to abandon them: nature versus nurture, the influence of the wellness-industrial complex over minds and bodies, the oppressive expectations placed on women — including by themselves. Most dramatically potent is the relationship between Ella and her father, fraught with guilt. Alas, time runs out on that one, too.ClockNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      ‘Broadway’ Review: Life on the Margins

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      Christos Massalas’s compelling debut feature follows a winsome troupe of castaways in modern Greece.The true performer knows that their craft demands seduction, for the lure of the stage is the thrill of escape. “Broadway,” the kinetic debut feature from Christos Massalas, captures the grim duality, in all its freedom and peril, of life at the margins. Set in Athens and visibly haunted by the specter of Greece’s economic crisis, the film follows a charismatic ensemble of misfits who make their living — at least nominally — as street performers. More precisely, they rely on the distraction of their rapt audience so that they may pick their pockets clean.In ponderous voice-over, prone to the occasional cliché, Nelly (Elsa Lekakou) recounts her foray into their world: she is discovered in a strip club by the mercurial Markos (Stathis Apostolou), a seasoned thief, who whisks her off to the Broadway, an abandoned theater complex replete with an open-air rooftop cinema. She immediately assimilates into this clan, all of them either outsiders or defectors: the charming couple Rudolph (Rafael Papad) and Mohammad (Salim Talbi); Locksmith (Christos Politis), a shadowy old man and functional patriarch; and finally, the mysterious Jonas (Foivos Papadopoulos), hidden away with a bruised and bandaged face.Feverishly pursued by a formidable gangster known only as the Maraboo, Jonas transforms into Barbara, a veritable bombshell with billowing bronze locks, pirouetting alongside Nelly in glittering jumpsuits for a spellbound crowd. When Markos is sent to prison, Barbara and Nelly establish a sweet romance, imperiled by the cloud of Markos’s inevitable return.Amid some uneven characterizations, the cast enlivens “Broadway” with their compelling performances, sealed by a stirring finale and a characteristically soaring score from Gabriel Yared.BroadwayNot rated. In Greek, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Wynonna Judd: Between Hell and Hallelujah’ Review: The Show Must Go On

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      A documentary about the country star, whose mother and singing partner, Naomi Judd, died last year, mostly fails to kindle unguided emotions.As portrayed in the new documentary “Wynonna Judd: Between Hell and Hallelujah,” the country artist Wynonna Judd experiences, in real time, a cruel kind of suffering. Her mother and longtime singing partner, Naomi Judd, died by suicide last year. In the director Patty Ivins Specht’s film, Wynonna is left to pick up the pieces.The film’s wistful opening frames are hauntingly emotional, showing the two women in conversation in their early years of performing as the Judds. But Wynonna is also a superstar with a history of her own, one that Specht’s film mostly omits in favor of a sweeping statement about perseverance and the importance of a solid support system in the face of tragedy.The doc, which captures the singer on a tour she was supposed to share with Naomi, seems content to exist primarily as a lifeline for others who have experienced loss. When Wynonna’s sister, the actress Ashley Judd, appears, it’s clear they’re working on their relationship, but not why they have to. Earlier, though, when Wynonna flips through old family photos at her mother’s home, that action is heartbreakingly specific. For the viewer, it’s a more palpable feeling.The rest of “Between Hell and Hallelujah” amounts to a performance-focused tour diary with Hallmark-movie energy. Though Wynonna powers through the songs with admirable grit and grace, Specht’s approach is too awkwardly methodical and cloyingly vague to kindle enough unguided emotions. Without those rich details that make a song like the Judds’ “Flies on the Butter” come to life, the film plays like a country song with more chorus than verse.Wynonna Judd: Between Hell and HallelujahNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Watch on Paramount+. More

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      Harry Belafonte, 96, Dies; Barrier-Breaking Singer, Actor and Activist

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      In the 1950s, when segregation was still widespread, his ascent to the upper echelon of show business was historic. But his primary focus was civil rights.Harry Belafonte, who stormed the pop charts and smashed racial barriers in the 1950s with his highly personal brand of folk music, and who went on to become a dynamic force in the civil rights movement, died on Tuesday at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was 96.The cause was congestive heart failure, said Ken Sunshine, his longtime spokesman.At a time when segregation was still widespread and Black faces were still a rarity on screens large and small, Mr. Belafonte’s ascent to the upper echelon of show business was historic. He was not the first Black entertainer to transcend racial boundaries; Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald and others had achieved stardom before him. But none had made as much of a splash as he did, and for a while no one in music, Black or white, was bigger.Born in Harlem to West Indian immigrants, he almost single-handedly ignited a craze for Caribbean music with hit records like “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)” and “Jamaica Farewell.” His album “Calypso,” which included both those songs, reached the top of the Billboard album chart shortly after its release in 1956 and stayed there for 31 weeks. Coming just before the breakthrough of Elvis Presley, it was said to be the first album by a single artist to sell more than a million copies.Performing at the Waldorf Astoria in New York in 1956.Al Lambert/Associated PressMr. Belafonte was equally successful as a concert attraction: Handsome and charismatic, he held audiences spellbound with dramatic interpretations of a repertoire that encompassed folk traditions from all over the world — rollicking calypsos like “Matilda,” work songs like “Lead Man Holler,” tender ballads like “Scarlet Ribbons.” By 1959 he was the most highly paid Black performer in history, with fat contracts for appearances in Las Vegas, at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles and at the Palace in New York.Success as a singer led to movie offers, and Mr. Belafonte soon became the first Black actor to achieve major success in Hollywood as a leading man. His movie stardom was short-lived, though, and it was his friendly rival Sidney Poitier, not Mr. Belafonte, who became the first bona fide Black matinee idol.But making movies was never Mr. Belafonte’s priority, and after a while neither was making music. He continued to perform into the 21st century, and to appear in movies as well (although he had two long hiatuses from the screen), but his primary focus from the late 1950s on was civil rights.Early in his career, Mr. Belafonte befriended the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and became not just a lifelong friend but also an ardent supporter. Dr. King and Mr. Belafonte at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem in 1956.via Harry BelafonteEarly in his career, he befriended the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and became not just a lifelong friend but also an ardent supporter of Dr. King and the quest for racial equality he personified. He put up much of the seed money to help start the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and was one of the principal fund-raisers for that organization and Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.He provided money to bail Dr. King and other civil rights activists out of jail. He took part in the March on Washington in 1963. His spacious apartment on West End Avenue in Manhattan became Dr. King’s home away from home. And he quietly maintained an insurance policy on Dr. King’s life, with the King family as the beneficiary, and donated his own money to make sure that the family was taken care of after Dr. King was assassinated in 1968.(Nonetheless, in 2013 he sued Dr. King’s three surviving children in a dispute over documents that Mr. Belafonte said were his property and that the children said belonged to the King estate. The suit was settled the next year, with Mr. Belafonte retaining possession.)In an interview with The Washington Post a few months after Dr. King’s death, Mr. Belafonte expressed ambivalence about his high profile in the civil rights movement. He would like to “be able to stop answering questions as though I were a spokesman for my people,” he said, adding, “I hate marching, and getting called at 3 a.m. to bail some cats out of jail.” But, he said, he accepted his role.The Challenge of RacismIn the same interview, he noted ruefully that although he sang music with “roots in the Black culture of American Negroes, Africa and the West Indies,” most of his fans were white. As frustrating as that may have been, he was much more upset by the racism that he confronted even at the height of his fame.His role in the 1957 movie “Island in the Sun,” which contained the suggestion of a romance between his character and a white woman played by Joan Fontaine, generated outrage in the South; a bill was even introduced in the South Carolina Legislature that would have fined any theater showing the film. In Atlanta for a benefit concert for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1962, Mr. Belafonte was twice refused service in the same restaurant. Television appearances with white female singers — Petula Clark in 1968, Julie Andrews in 1969 — angered many viewers and, in the case of Ms. Clark, threatened to cost him a sponsor.He sometimes drew criticism from Black people, including the suggestion early in his career that he owed his success to the lightness of his skin (his paternal grandfather and maternal grandmother were white). When he divorced his wife in 1957 and married Julie Robinson, who had been the only white member of Katherine Dunham’s dance troupe, The Amsterdam News wrote, “Many Negroes are wondering why a man who has waved the flag of justice for his race should turn from a Negro wife to a white wife.”Mr. Belafonte with Ed Sullivan in 1955. At a time when segregation was still widespread and Black faces were still a rarity on screens large and small, Mr. Belafonte’s ascent to the upper echelon of show business was historic.Associated PressWhen RCA Victor, his record company, promoted him as the “King of Calypso,” Mr. Belafonte was denounced as a pretender in Trinidad, the acknowledged birthplace of that highly rhythmic music, where an annual competition is held to choose a calypso king.He himself never claimed to be a purist when it came to calypso or any of the other traditional styles he embraced, let alone the king of calypso. He and his songwriting collaborators loved folk music, he said, but saw nothing wrong with shaping it to their own ends.“Purism is the best cover-up for mediocrity,” he told The New York Times in 1959. “If there is no change we might just as well go back to the first ‘ugh,’ which must have been the first song.”Harold George Bellanfanti Jr. was born on March 1, 1927, in Harlem. His father, who was born in Martinique (and later changed the family name), worked occasionally as a chef on merchant ships and was often away; his mother, Melvine (Love) Bellanfanti, born in Jamaica, was a domestic.In 1936, Harry, his mother and his younger brother, Dennis, moved to Jamaica. Unable to find work there, his mother soon returned to New York, leaving him and his brother to be looked after by relatives who, he later recalled, were either “unemployed or above the law.” They rejoined her in Harlem in 1940.Awakening to Black HistoryMr. Belafonte dropped out of George Washington High School in Upper Manhattan in 1944 and enlisted in the Navy, where he was assigned to load munitions aboard ships. Black shipmates introduced him to the works of W.E.B. Du Bois and other African American authors and urged him to study Black history.He received further encouragement from Marguerite Byrd, the daughter of a middle-class Washington family, whom he met while he was stationed in Virginia and she was studying psychology at the Hampton Institute (now Hampton University). They married in 1948.He and Ms. Byrd had two children, Adrienne Biesemeyer and Shari Belafonte, who survive him, as do his two children by Ms. Robinson, Gina Belafonte and David; and eight grandchildren. He and Ms. Robinson divorced in 2004, and he married Pamela Frank, a photographer, in 2008, and she survives him, too, along with a stepdaughter, Sarah Frank; a stepson, Lindsey Frank; and three step-grandchildren.Mr. Belafonte and his wife, Julie Robinson, during a civil rights event — the Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom — at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington in 1957.George Tames/The New York TimesBack in New York after his discharge, Mr. Belafonte became interested in acting and enrolled under the G.I. Bill at Erwin Piscator’s Dramatic Workshop, where his classmates included Marlon Brando and Tony Curtis. He first took the stage at the American Negro Theater in Manhattan, where he worked as a stagehand and where he began his lifelong friendship with a fellow theatrical novice, Sidney Poitier.Finding anything other than what he called “Uncle Tom” roles proved difficult, and even though singing was little more than a hobby, it was as a singer and not an actor that Mr. Belafonte found an audience.Early in 1949, he was given the chance to perform during intermissions for two weeks at the Royal Roost, a popular Midtown jazz nightclub. He was an immediate hit, and the two weeks became five months.Finding Folk MusicAfter enjoying some success but little creative satisfaction as a jazz-oriented pop singer, Mr. Belafonte looked elsewhere for inspiration. With the guitarist Millard Thomas, who would become his accompanist, and the playwright and novelist William Attaway, who would collaborate on many of his songs, he immersed himself in the study of folk music. (The calypso singer and songwriter Irving Burgie later supplied much of his repertoire, including “Day-O” and “Jamaica Farewell.”)His manager, Jack Rollins, helped him develop an act that emphasized his acting ability and his striking good looks as much as a voice that was husky and expressive but, as Mr. Belafonte admitted, not very powerful.A triumphant 1951 engagement at the Village Vanguard in Greenwich Village led to an even more successful one at the Blue Angel, the Vanguard’s upscale sister room on the Upper East Side. That in turn led to a recording contract with RCA and a role on Broadway in the 1953 revue “John Murray Anderson’s Almanac.”Dorothy Dandridge and Mr. Belafonte in a scene from the 1954 film “Carmen Jones.”20th Century FoxPerforming a repertoire that included the calypso standard “Hold ’em Joe” and his arrangement of the folk song “Mark Twain,” Mr. Belafonte won enthusiastic reviews, television bookings and a Tony Award for best featured actor in a musical. He also caught the eye of the Hollywood producer and director Otto Preminger, who cast him in the 1954 movie version of “Carmen Jones,” an all-Black update of Bizet’s opera “Carmen” with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, which had been a hit on Broadway a decade earlier.Mr. Belafonte’s co-star was Dorothy Dandridge, with whom he had also appeared the year before in his first movie, the little-seen low-budget drama “Bright Road.” Although they were both accomplished vocalists, their singing voices in “Carmen Jones” were dubbed by opera singers.Mr. Belafonte also made news for a movie he turned down, citing what he called its negative racial stereotypes: the 1959 screen version of “Porgy and Bess,” also a Preminger film. The role of Porgy was offered instead to his old friend Mr. Poitier, whom he criticized publicly for accepting it.Stepping Away From FilmIn the 1960s, as Mr. Poitier became a major box-office attraction, Mr. Belafonte made no movies at all: Hollywood, he said, was not interested in the socially conscious films he wanted to make, and he was not interested in the roles he was offered. He did, however, become a familiar presence — and an occasional source of controversy — on television.His special “Tonight With Belafonte” won an Emmy in 1960 (a first for a Black performer), but a deal to do five more specials for that show’s sponsor, the cosmetics company Revlon, fell apart after one more was broadcast; according to Mr. Belafonte, Revlon asked him not to feature Black and white performers together. The taping of a 1968 special with Petula Clark was interrupted when Ms. Clark touched Mr. Belafonte’s arm, and a representative of the sponsor, Chrysler-Plymouth, demanded a retake. (The producer refused, and the sponsor’s representative later apologized, although Mr. Belafonte said the apology came “one hundred years too late.”)Jacob Harris/Associated PressWhen Mr. Belafonte returned to film as both producer and co-star, with Zero Mostel, of “The Angel Levine” (1970), based on a story by Bernard Malamud, the project had a sociopolitical edge: His Harry Belafonte Enterprises, with a grant from the Ford Foundation, hired 15 Black and Hispanic apprentices to learn filmmaking by working on the crew. One of them, Drake Walker, wrote the story for Mr. Belafonte’s next movie, “Buck and the Preacher” (1972), a gritty western that also starred Mr. Poitier.But after appearing as a mob boss (a parody of Marlon Brando’s character in “The Godfather”) with Mr. Poitier and Bill Cosby in the hit 1974 comedy “Uptown Saturday Night” — directed, as “Buck and the Preacher” had been, by Mr. Poitier — Mr. Belafonte was once again absent from the big screen, this time until 1992, when he played himself in Robert Altman’s Hollywood satire “The Player.”He appeared onscreen only sporadically after that, most notably as a gangster in Mr. Altman’s “Kansas City” (1996), for which Mr. Belafonte won a New York Film Critics Circle Award. His final film role was in Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman” in 2018.Political ActivismMr. Belafonte continued to give concerts in the years when he was off the screen, but he concentrated on political activism and charitable work. In the 1980s, he helped organize a cultural boycott of South Africa as well as the Live Aid concert and the all-star recording “We Are the World,” both of which raised money to fight famine in Africa. In 1986, encouraged by some New York State Democratic Party leaders, he briefly considered running for the United States Senate. In 1987, he replaced Danny Kaye as UNICEF’s good-will ambassador.Never shy about expressing his opinion, he became increasingly outspoken during the George W. Bush administration. In 2002, he accused Secretary of State Colin L. Powell of abandoning his principles to “come into the house of the master.” Four years later he called Mr. Bush “the greatest terrorist in the world.”Harry Belafonte demonstrated against nuclear weapons in Bonn, Germany, in 1981.Klaus Rose/Picture-alliance, DPA, via Associated Press ImagesMr. Belafonte was equally outspoken in the 2013 New York mayoral election, in which he campaigned for the Democratic candidate and eventual winner, Bill de Blasio. During the campaign he referred to the Koch brothers, the wealthy industrialists known for their support of conservative causes, as “white supremacists” and compared them to the Ku Klux Klan. (Mr. de Blasio quickly distanced himself from that comment.)Such statements made Mr. Belafonte a frequent target of criticism, but no one disputed his artistry. Among the many honors he received in his later years were a Kennedy Center Honor in 1989, the National Medal of Arts in 1994 and a Grammy lifetime achievement award in 2000.In 2011, he was the subject of a documentary film, “Sing Your Song,” and published his autobiography, “My Song.”In 2014, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave him its Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in recognition of his lifelong fight for civil rights and other causes. The honor, he told The Times, gave him “a strong sense of reward.”He remained politically active to the end. On Election Day 2016, The Times published an opinion article by Mr. Belafonte urging people not to vote for Donald J. Trump, whom he called “feckless and immature.”“Mr. Trump asks us what we have to lose,” he wrote, referring to African American voters, “and we must answer: Only the dream, only everything.”Looking back on his life and career, Mr. Belafonte was proud but far from complacent. “About my own life, I have no complaints,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Yet the problems faced by most Americans of color seem as dire and entrenched as they were half a century ago.”Karsten Moran for The New York TimesFour years later, he returned to the opinion pages with a similar message: “We have learned exactly how much we had to lose — a lesson that has been inflicted upon Black people again and again in our history — and we will not be bought off by the empty promises of the flimflam man.”Looking back on his life and career, Mr. Belafonte was proud but far from complacent. “About my own life, I have no complaints,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Yet the problems faced by most Americans of color seem as dire and entrenched as they were half a century ago.”Richard Severo and Alex Traub contributed reporting. 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      ‘The Oak’: A Post-Communist Pinwheel

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      Lucian Pintilie’s newly restored mad farce, now at Film Forum, paved the way for the Romanian new wave.Playing the last days of Romanian communism as frenzied farce, Lucian Pintilie’s “The Oak” is set in a world so despoiled a Hieronymus Bosch landscape might seem bucolic by comparison.First shown in 1992, some three years after the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife were executed and a year after a new constitution replaced single-party rule, “The Oak” has been restored and revived for a week at Film Forum. Ensuing decades have scarcely mitigated its power.Following the death of her father, a onetime colonel in the secret police, the disheveled and seemingly demented Nela (Maia Morgenstern) departs the squalid Bucharest apartment they shared and, carrying dad’s ashes in a jar of Nescafé, makes her way to Copsa Mica, the Transylvanian town where she has been hired to teach.The place is a citadel of pollution — industrial and otherwise. Nela is sexually assaulted by a gang of drunken workers. After she is dumped in a hospital bed (its previous occupant unceremoniously relocated to the floor), Nela meets a kindred soul in Mitica (Razvan Vasilescu), a surgeon similarly sent to the Transylvanian back of beyond. Equally unrestrained, Mitica eschews bribes and physically attacks his superiors, often with a fixed grin. The pair team up in a scattershot, anti-authoritarian conspiracy of two.As wildly impulsive Nela, Morgenstern gives a performance no less anarchic than the movie. (It’s a minor irony of cinema history that this whirlwind actress would be best known for her somber portrayal of Jesus’s mother in “The Passion of the Christ.”) She’s so much fun to watch that “The Oak” loses velocity when attention shifts to her cohort.Punctuated with sudden explosions, random mayhem, yelling, cursing, and ringing telephones, “The Oak” is impossibly busy as well as incredibly bleak. Trains stall, bridges flood, trucks crash. The army is perpetually holding drills. The hospital doubles as a charnel house. Officials are ineffectual even in their self-dealing. Ordinary people are pointlessly bellicose.The movie is sometimes exhausting but never dull. Indeed, the pace is dizzying to the point of disorientation. “You can’t be sure which way is up,” Vincent Canby wrote in his review in The Times, watching “The Oak” was like exploring “a house of horrors in an amusement park in space.”Pintilie, who died in 2018, has been called the godfather of the Romanian new wave — an example for the talented young directors who emerged in the early 20th century. “The Oak” provided a template for the journey-to-the-end-of-the-night absurdism found in Cristi Puiu’s “The Death of Mr. Lazarescu” (2005) and Cristian Mungiu’s “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days” (2007). In addition, “The Oak” pioneered a mode that might be called post-Communist grotesque, anticipating the Balkan tumult of the Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica’s “Underground” (1995), the frantic labyrinthine surrealism of Aleksei German’s “Khrustalyov, My Car!” (1998) and the political slapstick of Armando Iannucci’s “The Death of Stalin” (2017).Unlike those three films however, “The Oak” has the quality of a personal exorcism. Made upon Pintilie’s return to Romania after years of self-imposed exile, it is a work of bottled-up fury. The movie’s mad energy suggests that Pintilie, some of whose earlier films were personally banned by Ceausescu, is pounding a stake through the dictator’s heart the better to dance on his grave.The OakApril 28 through May 4 at Film Forum in Manhattan, filmforum.org. More

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      Watch These Great Harry Belafonte Screen Performances

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      While Belafonte’s cinematic output was minimal, he made an impact with each role.With the death of Harry Belafonte, America lost a musical genius and an icon of activism, who rose from a life of poverty to one of massive record sales and sellout concerts, using his fame as a performer to shed light on the causes he believed in.But Belafonte was also a major movie star, and though his cinematic output wasn’t exactly prolific — he appeared, surprisingly, in fewer than two dozen feature films during his 65-year film career — he made a memorable impression each time he was onscreen. Below are a few highlights, all available to stream.‘Carmen Jones’ (1954)Rent or buy it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.Belafonte’s first leading role was only his second film appearance, after a supporting turn in the Dorothy Dandridge vehicle “Bright Road.” He reteamed with Dandridge for Otto Preminger’s film adaptation of the Oscar Hammerstein II musical “Carmen Jones,” itself an interpretation of Bizet’s classic opera “Carmen,” modernized and reimagined for an all-Black cast. The production was notoriously tempestuous, but Belafonte couldn’t have asked for a project more suited to his talents: The picture gave him the opportunity to emote and smolder in equal measure as the young soldier Joe, proving that this was no mere pop singer moonlighting in movies. This was the work of a full-fledged film star.‘The Angel Levine’ (1970)Rent or buy it on Amazon and Apple TV.Yet Belafonte’s first burst of work was short-lived. After a handful of excellent dramatic turns in the late 1950s (most notably in Robert Wise’s “Odds Against Tomorrow,” sadly unavailable to stream), Belafonte devoted his time in the 1960s to his civil rights activism. But he made a triumphant return to the screen in this delightfully odd comedy-drama, playing the title role — an honest-to-goodness guardian angel who comes down to earth to help a poor Jewish tailor (the wonderful Zero Mostel) through a patch of bad luck and bad faith. This kind of material can easily veer into either the maudlin or the blasphemous, but Belafonte’s playful yet practical performance achieves the perfect balance of winking wit and gentle lesson-learning.‘Buck and the Preacher’ (1972)Rent or buy it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.The comic chops Belafonte exhibited in “The Angel Levine” would come to define his best screen work in the 1970s. Two years later, he teamed with his fellow actor-activist Sidney Poitier for what was clearly intended as a Black riff on “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” with Poitier and Belafonte in the titular roles of Wild West outlaws leading a wagon train away from white bounty hunters. Poitier plays the straight man, as he often did in comedies, allowing Belafonte to have a blast as Reverend Willis Oaks Rutherford, a con artist masquerading as a man of the cloth. When the original director, Joseph Sargent, was fired a few days into shooting, Poitier took over directorial duties, launching a new career in film.‘Uptown Saturday Night’ (1974)Rent or buy it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.Unsurprisingly, when Poitier directed his next comedy, he again approached Belafonte to participate. Poitier co-stars in this rowdy buddy action-comedy with Bill Cosby (fair warning), leaving Belafonte to steal scenes galore — no mean feat when appearing with Flip Wilson and Richard Pryor — in his uproarious turn as Geechie Dan Beauford, a hot-tempered underworld boss. With “The Godfather” fresh in the minds of moviegoers, Belafonte played the role as a spoof on Marlon Brando’s already iconic performance as Don Vito Corleone, complete with rasping voice, puffed cheeks and pencil-thin mustache. It’s an inspired piece of comic acting, and a reminder that the serious-minded performer was just as comfortable with broad, “Saturday Night Live”-style tomfoolery.‘Kansas City’ (1996)Stream it on Amazon Prime and Arrow Player. Rent or buy it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, and YouTube.Belafonte took another long break — nearly two decades — from screen acting after “Uptown,” and even then, he appeared first as himself in a pair of star-studded Robert Altman pictures (“The Player” and “Ready to Wear”). But Altman got one more great, full-length performance out of the performer with this period gangster comedy-drama, set in the city and time of the director’s youth. As the underworld boss of Kansas City, the wonderfully named and perpetually whispering Seldom Seen, Belafonte eschews his customary warmth and comic inclinations to play a genuinely menacing villain — the kind of man who never raises his voice, because he never has to. It’s a chilling and unforgettable turn, and indicates the kind of third act he could’ve had as a character actor had he chosen that path.‘Sing Your Song: Harry Belafonte’ (2012)Stream it on Vudu. Rent or buy it on Amazon and Apple TV.Instead, he chose to keep fighting. This late-in-life biographical documentary from the director Susanne Rostock, made with the participation and blessing of the man himself, veers occasionally into hagiography and skims over the messier aspects of his long and complicated life. But there’s so much to celebrate, you can hardly blame its makers. Edited at a snappy clip from a wealth of rich archival materials (film and TV clips, home movies, newsreels) and both new and archival interviews, “Sing Your Song” celebrates Belafonte the artist, but even more, celebrates the man — and a life spent working for the causes he believed in, often putting his own career and comfort at risk.‘BlacKkKlansman’ (2018)Rent or buy it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.Belafonte’s final film appearance came, significantly, in a work of protest by a provocative Black filmmaker. He appears in the cameo role of the civil rights activist Jerome Turner in Spike Lee’s Oscar-winning adaptation of the Ron Stallworth memoir — but he’s also playing himself, imparting history and knowledge of the struggle for civil rights. In his single, haunting scene, Belafonte exhibits not only his skills and charisma as an actor, but the gravitas of his decades in the trenches of the struggle. More

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      ‘Centurion: The Dancing Stallion’ Review: Romance on the Ranch

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      A young woman training for a horse dancing competition confronts a medical crisis in this conventional family melodrama.The art of Mexican horse dancing becomes the backdrop for a formulaic family melodrama in “Centurion: The Dancing Stallion,” which stars a stable of equine and human performers gamely mounting a Nicholas Sparks-like story line complete with romance across social classes, a conniving antagonist and grave health crises.The movie begins as the breezy Ellissia (Amber Midthunder), the daughter of a ranch owner (Billy Zane), is training to compete in a local horse dancing competition. The event may sound like fun and games — the animals are clomping crowd-pleasers — but there are also stakes: Ellissia’s family insists a top prize will put their ranch “on the map.” She finds a staunch supporter in Danny (Aramis Knight), a hunky stable hand tasked with caring for Ellissia’s newest mount: the finicky white beauty Centurion.The director, Dana Gonzales, seems at times to embrace an atmosphere of camp. A near-constant stream of slow-motion montages amplifies bouts of action or histrionics, and establishing shots of the homestead, the barn or the outlying fields seem to appear every few scenes, even if the characters have barely moved locations.During its climax, “Centurion: The Dancing Stallion” rather ambitiously aligns the fates of Ellissia and Centurion, intercutting their struggles as they confront parallel medical emergencies. The sequence briefly gestures at the intriguing idea of a psychic alliance between the pair, similar to the one in “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.” But then the moment passes, and any challenging questions are pushed aside in favor of third-act mechanics.Centurion: The Dancing StallionRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. Available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      Harry Belafonte on His Artistic Values and His Activism

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      In interviews and articles in The New York Times, Mr. Belafonte, who died on Tuesday, spoke about the civil rights movement and his frustration with how Black life was depicted onscreen.Harry Belafonte, the singer, actor and activist whose wide-ranging success blazed a trail for other Black artists in the 1950s, died on Tuesday at age 96.A child of Harlem, Mr. Belafonte used his platform at the height of the entertainment world to speak out frequently on his music, how Black life was depicted onscreen and, most important to him, the civil rights movement. Here are some of the insights Mr. Belafonte provided to The New York Times during his many decades in the public spotlight, as they appeared at the time:His musicMr. Belafonte’s string of hits, including “Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)” and “Jamaica Farewell,” helped create an American obsession with Caribbean music that led his record company to promote him as the “King of Calypso.”But Mr. Belafonte never embraced that sort of monarchical title, rejecting “purism” as a “cover-up for mediocrity” and explaining that he saw his work as a mash-up of musical styles.He told The New York Times Magazine in 1959 that folk music had “hidden within it a great dramatic sense, and a powerful lyrical sense.” He also plainly conceded: “I don’t have a great voice.”In 1993, he told The Times that he used his songs “to describe the human condition and to give people some insights into what may be going on globally, from what I’ve experienced.”He said that “Day-O,” for instance, was a way of life.“It’s a song about my father, my mother, my uncles, the men and women who toil in the banana fields, the cane fields of Jamaica,” he said. “It’s a classic work song.”His views on film and televisionMr. Belafonte’s success in music helped him become a Hollywood leading man. In the 1950s and 1960s, Mr. Belafonte and his friend Sidney Poitier landed more substantive and nuanced roles than Black actors had previously received.Nonetheless, Mr. Belafonte was left largely unsatisfied.Writing for The Times in 1968, he complained that “the real beauty, the soul, the integrity of the black community is rarely reflected” on television.“The medium is dominated by white-supremacy concepts and racist attitudes,” he wrote. “TV excludes the reality of Negro life, with all its grievances, passions and aspirations, because to depict that life would be to indict (or perhaps enrich?) much of what is now white America and its institutions. And neither networks nor sponsors want that.”Mr. Belafonte emphasized that his 10-year-old son saw few Black heroes on television.“The nobility in his heritage and the values that could complement his positive growth and sense of manhood are denied him,” he wrote. “Instead, there is everything to tear him down and give him an inferiority complex. He will see the Negro only as a rioter and a social problem, never as a whole human being.”Roughly 25 years later, Mr. Belafonte was circumspect, suggesting in an interview with The Times that little had changed.“Even today, on the big screen, the pictures that are always successful are pictures where blacks appear in the way white America buys it,” he said in 1993. “And we’re told that what we really want to express is not profitable and is not commercially viable.”His politics and activismEven as Mr. Belafonte was in the prime of his entertainment career, he was intently focused on activism and civil rights.“Back in 1959,” Mr. Belafonte told The Times in 1981, “I fully believed in the civil-rights movement. I had a personal commitment to it, and I had my personal breakthroughs — I produced the first black TV special; I was the first black to perform at the Waldorf Astoria. I felt if we could just turn the nation around, things would fall into place.”But Mr. Belafonte lamented that by the middle of the 1970s, the movement had ended.“When the doors of Hollywood shut on minorities and blacks at the end of the 70’s,” he said, “a lot of black artists had been enjoying the exploitation for 10 years. But one day they found the shop had closed down.”Mr. Belafonte remained outspoken about politics in his later years. In 2002 he accused Secretary of State Colin L. Powell of abandoning his principles to “come into the house of the master”; he called President George W. Bush a “terrorist” in 2006, and lamented in 2012 that modern celebrities had “turned their back on social responsibility.”“There’s no evidence that artists are of the same passion and of the same kind of commitment of the artists of my time,” he told The Times in 2016. “The absence of black artists is felt very strongly because the most visible oppression is in the black community.”In 2016 and again in 2020, he visited the opinion pages of The Times to urge voters to reject Donald J. Trump.“The vote is perhaps the single most important weapon in our arsenal,” Mr. Belafonte told The Times in the 2016 article. “The same things needed now are the same things needed before,” he added. “Movements don’t die because struggle doesn’t die. ” More