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      Tom Luddy, a Behind-the-Scenes Force in Cinema, Dies at 79

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      Known for his association with Francis Ford Coppola, Werner Herzog and many others, he was also a founder of the Telluride Film Festival.Tom Luddy, a quietly influential film archivist and movie producer who was also a founder of the idiosyncratic Telluride Film Festival, died on Feb. 13 at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 79.The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, said Julie Huntsinger, executive director of the Telluride festival, a half-century-old gathering of cinephiles held in a tiny former mining town in Colorado.A transplant from the East Coast, Mr. Luddy landed in Berkeley in the 1960s, just in time to join the radical political activity that was afoot there, notably the Free Speech Movement that dominated the University of California campus in 1964. He worked at the Berkeley Cinema Guild, a two-screen art house that had once been managed by the film critic Pauline Kael, after which he ran the Telegraph Repertory Cinema, another art-house theater, and joined the Pacific Film Archive, part of the U.C. Berkeley Art Museum, which he turned into a vital resource for film devotees and scholars.By the early 1970s he was organizing as many as 800 programs there each year, from Preston Sturges retrospectives to programs of Russian silent films, new German cinema and movies from Senegal. He presented the United States premiere of Werner Herzog’s “Aguirre, the Wrath of God,” a Conradian tale starring Klaus Kinski as a Spanish conquistador who sets out to find a lost city in Peru, after it had been rejected by the New York Film Festival.As director of special projects for Francis Ford Coppola’s company American Zoetrope, he produced movies like Paul Schrader’s “Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters” (1985), a complicated documentary about Yukio Mishima, the eccentric Japanese author who killed himself publicly in 1970 — a passion project that Mr. Schrader has described as “the definition of an unfinanceable project.” Mr. Luddy was its tireless booster and supporter, funding it early on with his American Express card.In an email, Mr. Schrader described Mr. Luddy as “the big bang of film consciousness.”Mr. Luddy at the Pacific Film Archive in the 1970s. He turned it into a vital resource for film devotees and scholars.UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film ArchiveHe had a capacity for connecting artists to ideas, and to one another, that went beyond mere networking; it was a kind of vocation. The New York Times called him a human switchboard.It was Mr. Luddy who suggested that Agnès Varda, the French New Wave filmmaker who was in Berkeley in the late 1960s, document the Black Panthers’ efforts to free the Panther leader Huey P. Newton from prison in 1968; her sobering portrait of the activists and their mission captured in two half-hour films is an urgent record of those fractious times. When Laurie Anderson set out to make “Heart of a Dog,” her 2015 meditation on love and loss, and wanted to learn how to make an essayistic film, Mr. Luddy asked her to phone Philip Lopate, the film critic and essayist, for a tutorial.It was a measure of Mr. Luddy’s influence, The Times noted in 1984, that he showed “The Italian,” a 1915 film that is considered a model for the immigrant-gangster epic, to Mr. Coppola before he made “The Godfather,” and “I Vitelloni,” Federico Fellini’s 1953 film about a group of young men on the brink of adulthood drifting about in a small Italian village, to George Lucas before he made “American Graffiti.”And it was Mr. Luddy who introduced Alice Waters, his girlfriend at the time, to the work of Marcel Pagnol, the French filmmaker, in particular “Marius,” “Fanny” and “César,” the trilogy he produced in the 1930s about a group of friends finding their way in Marseille. That inspired the name of Ms. Waters’s restaurant Chez Panisse, the Berkeley institution that ignited the farm-to-table movement.Mr. Luddy with the restaurateur Alice Waters in 2011. He encouraged her to name her restaurant Chez Panisse after a character in a French film trilogy.U.C. Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive“We saw the films on three consecutive nights and I cried my eyes out, they were so romantic,” Ms. Waters recalled in a phone interview. “I knew I wanted to name the restaurant after one of the characters. We talked about Marius, Fanny’s lover, and Tom said, ‘Oh no, it has to be after that kindly man who married Fanny, and that was Panisse. And besides, he was the only one who made any money.’”Chez Panisse would go on to global fame, but it remained Mr. Luddy’s dining room, where he could collect like-minded artists and watch the sparks fly. He and the restaurant also figured largely in a footnote to the moviemaking ethos of that decade, or at least of Mr. Luddy’s cohort, captured in an affecting short film by Les Blank called “Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe.”As the story goes, Mr. Herzog challenged his fellow filmmaker Errol Morris to a bet, which was either a publicity stunt organized by Mr. Luddy or a genuine goad from Mr. Herzog: Mr. Herzog told Mr. Morris that if he succeeded in his seemingly quixotic mission to finish his first film, “Gates of Heaven,” a quirky, Gothic documentary about pet cemeteries, Mr. Herzog would eat his shoe. The movie was completed by 1978, and Mr. Luddy, Ms. Waters and Mr. Herzog set to work to honor the bet.Mr. Luddy was the master of ceremonies in 1979 when Werner Herzog honored his promise to eat his own shoe if his fellow filmmaker Errol Morris completed his documentary “Gates of Heaven.” Telluride Film FestivalMs. Waters decided, she said, that the best way to get the job done was to treat the shoe (a leather desert boot, actually) like a pig’s foot or a duck and braise it for hours in duck fat and herbs, which they did in her kitchen. Later, at a screening of “Gates of Heaven” in 1979, Mr. Luddy played master of ceremonies as Mr. Herzog, with the aid of a pair of cooking shears, tackled his meal, which was laid out on a table on the theater’s stage. He bravely choked down a few bites, as did Mr. Luddy. Mr. Blank’s film is a touching, and very funny, ode to art-making, and also to the skillful machinations of Mr. Luddy.In 1974, Mr. Luddy and a group of friends, Stella and Bill Pence and the film historian James Card, conceived a film festival to be held over three days in September in the picturesque former mining town of Telluride, Colo. (Bill Pence died in December.) There would be no prizes, no angling for distribution, no marketing, no paparazzi and no red carpets — just an almost inconceivable amount of screenings, talks and shenanigans. They would show old films and new, local films and foreign, and art films as well as more popular fare, the offerings curated according to the organizers’ own appetites and interests. There would be guest curators from outside the film word, too, like Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo, Rachel Kushner and Stephen Sondheim.You might find Louis Malle at the bar, Robert Downey Sr. declaiming in the town’s plaza that plots were dead, Mr. Herzog and Barbet Schroeder playing table football. Mr. Lopate recalled that during the festival’s first year he found himself on an elevator with Leni Riefenstahl, the Nazi propagandist, and Gloria Swanson. The two women were trading health secrets involving sesame seeds.“It mixes new directors and old ones — the venerable King Vidor is here this year — actors, distributors, scholars and the bristly and ardent society of film buffs,” The Times wrote in 1976. “Everyone is available to everyone else — names and no‐names, young and old — up to the point of exhaustion and past it.”In 2016, A.O. Scott of The Times described the festival, then in its fifth decade, as “a gathering of the faithful, consecrated to the old-time cinephile religion,” adding: “The local school gym and a hockey rink on the edge of town are temporarily converted into what screening M.C.s unironically refer to as cathedrals of cinema. Everyone is a believer.”Mr. Luddy might have been cinema’s most fervent believer, as well as its main officiant. The festival reflected his tastes, which were, as David Thomson, the San Francisco-based British film critic and historian, said, “both catholic and universal.” But, he added, “friendship was Tom’s art, really. He was unlimited in his wish and ability to help people in the broad area of film, and he did it without any ulterior motive, which is not common in the movie world.”Mr. Luddy at the 2017 Telluride Film Festival. The festival became a gathering of devotees to the religion of filmmaking, and Mr. Luddy was its most fervent believer and its main officiant. Pamela Gentile, via Telluride Film FestivalThomas William Luddy was born on June 4, 1943, in New York City, and grew up in White Plains, N.Y., raised by staunch Democrats in what had been a monolithically Republican community. His father, William Luddy, who had worked in newspaper advertising and founded a national merchandise reporting service, was campaign manager for various candidates and, finally, chairman of Westchester County’s Democratic Party. His mother, Virginia (O’Neill) Luddy, was a homemaker and political volunteer.At the University of California, Berkeley, Tom studied physics and then literature, graduating with a B.A. in English. He also ran a film society and played on the varsity golf team.Mr. Luddy is survived by his wife, Monique Montgomery Luddy; his brothers, Brian, James and David; and his sister, Jeanne Van Duzer.Although Mr. Luddy spent most of his time behind the scenes, he did appear in one movie: Philip Kaufman’s 1978 remake of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” in which he played to the creepy hilt one of the first humans to metamorphose into a pod person. “Ah, the ubiquitous Tom Luddy,” The Times quoted a member of a film crew as saying in 1984. “It always seems like there were three or four of him!” More

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      ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ Takes Producers Guild Award

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      The prize is a strong indicator of what will win best picture at the Oscars. The film already won the Directors Guild Award.Add another one to the “Everything Everywhere All at Once” trophy shelf (and slap some googly eyes on it, too).The Producers Guild of America handed its best film award on Saturday night to the sci-fi hit about a Chinese American laundromat owner’s unlikely quest to save the multiverse, extending the film’s award-season momentum after a big win at last weekend’s Directors Guild ceremony.The producer Jonathan Wang took the stage flanked by his cast, including Oscar nominees Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan, Stephanie Hsu and Jamie Lee Curtis, and the film’s directors, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert. Wang spoke movingly about his feeling of never fitting in as a mixed-race child.“When I was with my Chinese family, I never felt really Chinese, and with my while family, I never really felt white,” Wang said. “But in this room with all you other nominees, you shouldn’t have accepted me, you shouldn’t have welcomed me in, but I feel like family in this room with you producers.”There is no stronger best-picture bellwether than the PGA Awards, which are voted on by a guild that shares significant member overlap with the academy. Since 2009, when both groups adopted a preferential ballot and expanded the number of best film nominees from five, the PGA winner has repeated at the Oscars all but three times. Last year, when the Producers Guild opted for “CODA” over the Directors Guild winner “The Power of the Dog,” it offered the strongest evidence that the family dramedy was on a path to Oscar’s top prize. And of the last 15 films to win both the PGA and DGA prizes, 11 went on to win the best picture Oscar.Inside the World of ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’In this mind-expanding, idiosyncratic take on the superhero film, a laundromat owner is the focus of a grand, multiversal showdown.Review: Our film critic called “Everything Everywhere All at Once” an exuberant swirl of genre anarchy.The Protagonist: Over the years, Michelle Yeoh has built her image as a combat expert. For this movie, she drew on her emotional reserves.A Lovelorn Romantic: An ‘80s child star, Ke Huy Quan returns to acting as the husband of Yeoh’s character, a role blending action and drama.A Side Dish of Nothing: Two of the most talked-about movies of 2022, “Everything Everywhere” and “Glass Onion,” delve into nihilism through conceptual foodstuffs. What they do next is surprising.With two significant guild prizes in its pocket, “Everything Everywhere” is heavily favored to triumph at both the Screen Actors Guild Awards on Sunday night and the Writers Guild Awards next weekend. That would be an auspicious clean sweep: In the last 28 years, no film has won the best picture Oscar without first taking a top prize from at least one of Hollywood’s four major guilds.Is the final race decided, then? Well, it’s worth noting that “Everything Everywhere” got a cold shoulder last weekend at the BAFTAs, prizes that are handed out by the British academy, which also shares members with the American academy: Despite 10 BAFTA nominations, “Everything” won only an editing prize, and even season-long sweeper Ke Huy Quan lost the supporting-actor trophy to “The Banshees of Inisherin” star Barry Keoghan. BAFTA gave its best film award to Netflix’s “All Quiet on the Western Front,” though it will be difficult for that war movie to build dark-horse momentum over the coming weeks, as it was not nominated for the SAG, WGA, or Independent Spirit Awards.Elsewhere at the PGA Awards, the documentary film prize went to “Navalny,” while “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio” was named the best animated film. The top TV awards went to “The White Lotus” (best episodic drama), “The Bear” (best episodic comedy) and “The Dropout” (best limited series).Here’s the complete list of winners:FilmBest Film: “Everything Everywhere All at Once”Animated Feature: “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio”Documentary: “Navalny”David O. Selznick Award: Tom CruiseStanley Kramer Award: “Till”Milestone Award: Michael De Luca and Pamela AbdyTelevisionEpisodic Drama: “The White Lotus”Episodic Comedy: “The Bear”Limited Anthology Series: “The Dropout”Television Movie: “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story”Nonfiction Television: “Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy”Live, Variety, Sketch, Standup and Talk Show: “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver”Game and Competition Television: “Lizzo’s Watch Out for the Big Grrrls”Sports Program: “Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Come Off”Children’s Program: “Sesame Street”Short-Form Program: “Only Murders in the Building: One Killer Question”PGA Innovation Award: “Stay Alive, My Son”Norman Lear Achievement Award: Mindy Kaling More

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      French Documentary ‘On the Adamant’ Wins Top Prize at Berlin Film Festival

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      Christian Petzold’s “Afire” took the runner-up award at this year’s Berlinale, where geopolitical crises in Europe and Iran loomed large.The top prize at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival, the Golden Bear, was awarded to “On the Adamant,” a French documentary about a floating barge in central Paris that offers care to people with mental disorders.The immersive feature, filmed by the documentarian Nicolas Philibert over several months, follows the patients of the facility as they create music and artwork that often reflect their personal stories. The festival’s top award is rarely given to a documentary, and in his acceptance speech, a clearly surprised Philibert asked the jury members if they were “crazy.”He said that he had made the film in part to reverse the “stigmatizing” views many have of people with mental health issues, and that his film aimed to erase the distinction between patients and caregivers. “What unites us is a feeling of common humanity,” he said.This year’s jury was led by the American actress Kristen Stewart and included the Spanish director Carla Simón, whose “Alcarràs” took the top award last year, and the Iranian actress Golshifteh Farahani.The runner-up prize went to “Afire” by the German director Christian Petzold, a fixture of the festival. The dry comedy centers on an acerbic novelist ensconced in a vacation home who is forced to reckon with his self-image amid an encroaching forest fire. A special jury prize was given to the Portuguese filmmaker João Canijo’s “Bad Living,” a drama about a group of women running a decaying hotel.The Projectionist Chronicles the Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.The Tom Cruise Factor: Stars were starstruck when the “Top Gun: Maverick” headliner showed up at the Oscar nominees luncheon.An Andrea Riseborough FAQ: Confused about the brouhaha surrounding the best actress nominee? We explain why her nod was controversial.Sundance and the Oscars: Which films from the festival could follow “CODA” to the 2024 Academy Awards.A Supporting-Actress Underdog: In “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” don’t discount the pivotal presence of Stephanie Hsu.The best director award went to Philippe Garrel, a veteran French filmmaker, for “The Plough,” a drama about a family of puppeteers that stars three of his real-life children. The gender-neutral award for best performance was given to Sofía Otero, a first-time actor, who played an 8-year-old grappling with gender identity in “20,000 Species of Bees.” The tearful speech by Otero, the youngest to win the award, left many in the audience crying.The award for best screenplay was given to Angela Schanelec’s “Music,” an elliptical retelling of the myth of Oedipus, and the award for best supporting performance went to Thea Ehre, who played a transgender ex-convict working with a police investigator in Christoph Hochhäusler’s “Till the End of the Night.”Although the Berlinale has long been the most political of the major international festivals, this year’s edition was especially touched by world events. Two previous winners of the Golden Bear — the Iranian directors Jafar Panahi, whose film “Taxi Tehran” won in 2015, and Mohammad Rasoulof, whose film “There Is No Evil” won in 2020 — were imprisoned in recent months for opposing the Iranian government. (Both were eventually released.) During the festival’s glossy opening gala, Farahani, who is herself exiled from Iran, drew a lengthy standing ovation for a rousing speech in which she called for Europe to stand on the “right side of history” by supporting Iranian protesters.This year’s festival also featured several films about Ukraine, including “Iron Butterflies,” about the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in 2014, and “Superpower,” a documentary by the actor and director Sean Penn that includes an interview with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, filmed the night of the Russian invasion. Appearing at the opening gala via video link, Zelensky praised the Berlinale for its “principle of openness, equality and dialogue without borders.” Although Russian filmmakers were allowed at this year’s festival, films that had been financed by the Russian government were banned.After two years of pandemic disruptions and restrictions, this year’s festival — one of the largest in the world by audience numbers — was a return to sold-out theaters, industry parties and red-carpet glamour. The attendees included Anne Hathaway, whose absurdist comedy “She Came to Me” opened the festival, and Steven Spielberg, who was on hand to accept an honorary Golden Bear for lifetime achievement.This year’s competition lineup was heavy on German directors and notably broad in tone and scope. It included two animated features — “Suzume” from Japan and “Art College 1994” from China — as well as “BlackBerry,” a Canadian comedy about the inventors of the eponymous hand-held device, and “Manodrome,” a violent drama about one man’s crisis of masculinity starring Jesse Eisenberg.Some of the buzzier titles screened outside of competition, such as “Passages,” an erotic drama featuring the German actor Franz Rogowski, a Berlinale favorite. Sydney Sweeney, who stars in the American TV series “Euphoria,” also drew acclaim for her performance in “Reality,” a drama about Reality Winner, the intelligence contractor who leaked classified reports to the press in 2017.German critics have largely praised organizers this year for balancing a focus on global events with artistic ambition and glitz. Alongside screenings, the festival included several explicitly political events, including a protest on the red carpet on Friday to mark the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Several of the award winners also acknowledged the political context in their speeches, including Canijo, who ended his with a Ukrainian rallying cry, “Slava Ukraini,” or “Glory to Ukraine.” More

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      This Year, the Berlin Film Festival Sparkles

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      After two years of pandemic disruptions, the festival returns in full, with Kristen Stewart as the jury president and gems like Celine Song’s “Past Lives.”In February, when the Berlin International Film Festival takes place, the German capital is reliably what meteorologists term “bloody cold.” The overriding fashion aesthetic is puffer jackets, the puffier the better, accessorized with a scarf and a scowl.That might be one reason that, contrary to other major European festivals in Venice or Cannes, the Berlinale, as it’s also known, has never acquired much of a reputation for glamour: One can’t expect too many stars to hazard shoulder-frostbite in red-carpet gowns, especially as Oscar night looms in a couple of weeks.But this year’s festival, which runs through Sunday, feels a little different. Call it the trickle-down effect of appointing Kristen Stewart — whose effortless, dressed-down cool and sulky, up-all-night charisma make her very much the Berlin of American movie stars — as the jury president. Or perhaps it’s the result of Steven Spielberg being in town to receive an honorary lifetime achievement award presented by Bono, or the fashionably late arrival of Cate Blanchett, alongside her German co-star Nina Hoss and the director Todd Field, to toast the German premiere of “Tár.”Most probably it’s the rising tide of an unusually strong of lineup — which has scattered high-profile titles among debuts, documentaries and world-cinema darlings — that has lifted all ships. After an online festival in 2021, and a restricted, in-person 2022 edition, the Berlinale Bear has fully emerged from pandemic hibernation ‌‌this year, set to dazzle its attendees, however bulky their outerwear.Kristen Stewart, the jury president for the film festival, on the Berlinale red carpet.Ronny Hartmann/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIt’s a tricky line to walk, including starrier U.S. titles without seeming to be pandering. But not even the snobbiest cinephile could grumble at the selection of the American director Tina Satter’s “Reality,” based on her Off Broadway play “Is This a Room?” and starring a de-glammed, deeply convincing Sydney Sweeney as the whistle-blower Reality Winner. Using dialogue exclusively taken from an F.B.I. transcript, it is a gripping look at the mechanisms of state power brought to bear on an individual; every sniff, every pause and every non sequitur, culled from the original ‌recording, somehow highlight just how unreal reality can be.‌In tension-building, closed-space prowess, that film is matched by Ilker Catak’s “The Teacher’s Lounge,” a thornily unsettling drama of clashing social and generational values set in a German school where a teacher (Leonie Benesch) copes with an outbreak of theft. Then there is Ira Sachs’s excellent, sexy and conflicted “Passages,” starring Franz Rogowski, Ben Whishaw and Adèle Exarchopoulos. Such is the strength of the year’s selection that these two excellent films, along with “Reality,” played in the Panorama sidebar, when they could easily have slotted into the competitive sections.Not that the main competition lacks in luster. After premiering at the ‌Sundance ‌Film Festival last month, Celine Song’s shimmeringly soulful debut “Past Lives” provides Berlin with some radiance. Greta Lee plays Nora, a Korean-Canadian playwright living in New York City, like Song herself, who reconnects with her Seoul-based childhood sweetheart Hae Sung (Teo Yoo) before meeting and marrying an American writer (John Magaro). It sounds like a standard love-triangle setup. In fact, it is anything but, unfurling into a gorgeous, glowing, aching thing that connects with viewers from every conceivable background, so universal are its highly specific observations on love and friendship.Naíma Sentíes in the feature “Tótem,” in which a family gathers to celebrate the birthday of a dying man.LimerenciaIf “Past Lives” doesn’t grab the Golden Bear, the festival’s highest honor for a feature film, my pick would be “Tótem,” the second film from the Mexican director Lila Avilés (“The Chambermaid”), a vibrant child’s-eye portrait of an extended family gathering to celebrate the birthday of a dying man. Blithely ignoring the W.C. Fields adage about never working with children or animals, Avilés manages to corral both, often in the very same shot, delivering deceptively naturalistic performances that plunge us into a young girl’s first experience of the terrible and beautiful coexistence of life and death.The flagship German festival always debuts some outstanding homegrown work. “Afire,” from Christian Petzold, has many of the hallmarks of the celebrated director’s recent work: a woozy edge of ever-so-slight surreality; the transformative deployment of a music track, here “In My Mind” by Wallners, an Austrian band; the actress Paula Beer. But it’s also subtly different from Petzold’s recent titles “Undine” and “Transit,” unfolding largely in a chatty, Rohmerian register. Petzold’s films are many things, but rarely are they as funny as this discursive tale of an insecure writer struggling to finish his book — the press corps’ laughter felt ruefully self-directed — during a beachside getaway with a friend, while forest fires threaten nearby.At the opposite end of the accessibility spectrum, there’s the severe German formalist Angela Schanelec’s “Music,” a beautifully composed but extraordinarily opaque riff on Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex.” It’s the definition of not for everybody, but if you’re the kind of masochist who enjoys the Sisyphean challenge of a movie that refuses to give up all its secrets, no matter how much you mentally wrestle with them, it might be for you.The contrast between those two titles highlights the exciting diversity of this year’s thoughtful curation. One can only applaud a competition selection that includes a fun, true-story, rise-and-fall comedy from Canada (Matt Johnson’s “Blackberry”); a stark, despairing Australian colonial-oppression allegory (Rolf de Heer’s inaptly titled “The Survival of Kindness”); and a Spanish trans-themed coming-of-ager (Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren’s “20,000 Species of Bees”).The competition also featured three pleasantly eccentric Asian titles: Zhang Lu’s “The Shadowless Tower,” a personal favorite; Makoto Shinkai’s wild-ride anime “Suzume”; and Liu Jian’s animated slacker memoir “Art College 1994.” Even the films that did not appeal to me — such as Philippe Garrel’s “The Plough” or Margarethe von Trotta’s “Ingeborg Bachmann — Journey into the Desert” — added something to the overall picture, both representing the old guard of European auteur cinema.Toward the end of a festival I always get a little sentimental — chalk it up to lack of sleep or a surfeit of stories vying for space in my addled brain. But this robust, often sparkling edition of my beloved Berlinale has earned certain indulgences. When I sit in the Berlinale Palast for the last time this weekend, the lovely starburst trailer — my favorite festival ident, a glittering rain of gold briefly coalescing into the outline of a bear — will feel starrier still. More

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      ‘Cocaine Bear’ Review: She Never Forgets Her Lines

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      The greatest joke of this blood-spattered horror-comedy from Elizabeth Banks is that it exists.When you were in high school or college, did you know someone who would stay up late, get stoned and wonder what would happen if you got a pet high? That person went to Hollywood. How else to explain “Cocaine Bear,” a chaotic, blood-splattered major studio horror-comedy whose greatest joke is that it exists.The title, which has drawn comparisons to the equally functional “Snakes on a Plane,” says it all. The year is 1985. After a pratfall in a plane leads a smuggler to drop a ton of drugs on the mountains of Georgia, a bear discovers it, snorts it up and turns into a mix of Tony Montana and Jason Voorhees.Directed by Elizabeth Banks from a script by Jimmy Warden, this movie arrives in theaters with considerable anticipation, based on the title and its terrific trailer. For an audience desperately looking for a good time, they’ll find it. More discerning fans of junk might see an opportunity missed.The Grisly Tale of ‘Cocaine Bear’The blood-spattered horror-comedy directed by Elizabeth Banks is based loosely — very loosely — on real events.Review: “For an audience desperately looking for a good time, they’ll find it,” our critic writes. “More discerning fans of junk might see an opportunity missed.”An Apex Predator Star: The film is inspired by a real story, but Banks and the screenwriter, Jimmy Warden, gave their furry lead a different ending.The Back Story: In 1985, a 175-pound black bear found and ingested cocaine in a Georgia forest. Here’s the true story behind the movie.A Taste for Human Goods: The strange but true tale that inspired the film is the result of an unusual confluence of events. But wild animals consume just about everything.At its best, “Cocaine Bear” has the feel of an inside joke. It consistently invites you to laugh at it. The producers are clearly aiming to capture the lightning in a bottle that “M3gan” pulled off earlier this year, another Universal horror-comedy whose slick special effects elevated its B-movie conceit. Whereas “M3gan” steered clear of too much onscreen violence, angling for a PG-13 rating, “Cocaine Bear” wallows in it. Viewers with a taste for tastefulness (those weirdos) will balk. But gorehounds, myself among them, appreciate a studio playing around in the muck. Inspired by the slasher films of the 1980s, not to mention great horror-comedies from that era like the “Evil Dead” films, Banks grasps the comic potential of the gross-out.In the blunt spirit of the title, let me get right to the point: Two severed legs, two fingers shot off, a decapitation, some splattered brains, a grotesquely contorted wrist and all kinds of guts and blood and human innards. Banks doesn’t always dole out the viscera artfully (better to follow a leg with an arm, not another leg) but she commits to the too-muchness necessary for comedy.While it beats out “M3gan” in levels of gruesomeness, “Cocaine Bear” doesn’t have that film’s mean streak or moments of acid weirdness. Or its steadily building momentum. In fact, “Cocaine Bear” too often feels like a one-joke movie, stretched thin. Gifted dramatic actors are tasked with thankless roles, including Keri Russell as a protective mom, Isiah Whitlock Jr. as an irritated cop with a bland side plot involving a pet; and by far the best, Margo Martindale as a love-hungry park ranger, who takes more punishment than anyone. The plot twists can seem irrelevant, including a betrayal that has the impact of a soft sneeze. And the script becomes dutifully sentimental at the end with characters forced to say things like “You’re more than a drug dealer. You’re my friend, my best friend.”Nothing comes close to upstaging the bear, an animal perfect for this genre-blurring role, because it moves so seamlessly in the public consciousness between cute (teddy, Yogi) and terrifying (“The Revenant”). At one point, Cocaine Bear sniffs a hint of white powder and emerges with renewed strength. A gutsier movie might have drawn this out and given us an ursine Popeye, with cocaine as spinach.As fun as this movie can be — one chase scene in an ambulance makes up for a few rote jump scares — there are frequently hints of a better one inside it. The best version is a raucous, transgressive comedy, the kind they supposedly don’t make anymore. Banks does seem to get away with some giddy, dangerous moments, like a scene in which two preteens try to do cocaine. It gets a few laughs, but leaves plenty more on the table.The actor who does not is a snarling, gun-toting Ray Liotta (in one of his final roles) as a desperate man trying to regain cocaine for his cartel bosses. But making the drug dealer the one truly villainous character gives “Cocaine Bear” the morality of an after-school special. Early in the movie there’s a clip of the old “This is your brain on drugs” ad, a reminder that the story takes place against the backdrop of the drug war of the 1980s, a catastrophic policy failure with severe human ramifications that we are still living with. That “Cocaine Bear” is cautious about touching on this theme is understandable, maybe even preferable. But it’s also symptomatic of a studio sensibility that seems only willing to risk so much.Cocaine BearRated R for brains on drugs and brains on floor. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Quiet Girl,’ an Oscar Contender, Explores Irish Loneliness

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      The first Irish-language film to be nominated for an Oscar, directed by Colm Bairéad, tells a gentle story of cultural reticence.This article contains spoilers for the film “The Quiet Girl.”For the first 55 minutes of “The Quiet Girl,” the film’s audience does not know why the titular child has been sent to live with strangers in the Irish countryside. Cáit (Catherine Clinch), 9, does not know either. Her parents do not talk to her, and they barely speak to each other.Cáit eventually learns the truth from a nosy neighbor: While her parents prepare for the birth of yet another baby, she has been shuttled from her chaotic family home to spend the summer with some middle-aged relatives, Eibhlín (Carrie Crowley) and Seán (Andrew Bennett), who have their own silent sorrow.This uneasy, unanswered isolation is at the heart of “The Quiet Girl,” which arrives in U.S. theaters on Friday, and is the first Irish-language film to be nominated for an Oscar. A “hushed work about kith and kindness,” as Lisa Kennedy wrote in her review for The New York Times, the film tells a quintessentially Irish story, yet one that is rarely seen by international audiences on the big screen.Irish cinema often features a cast of gregarious men and pious, conservative women, like in Ken Loach’s “The Wind That Shakes the Barley”; “Brooklyn,” starring Saoirse Ronan; and Kenneth Branagh’s Oscar-nominated “Belfast.”“Irish people are always known for the gift of the gab,” said Cleona Ní Chrualaoí, the producer of “The Quiet Girl.” “It becomes almost a caricature.” But in Chrualaoí’s film, Cáit and her new guardians cautiously try to connect through their loneliness and pain.When Cáit (Clinch), left, and Eibhlín (Carrie Crowley) first meet, Cáit is slow to warm to her elder relative.Super, via Associated PressThe depiction of such struggles to communicate has resonated deeply with Irish audiences. The feature — called “An Cailín Ciúin” in Ireland — was named the best film of 2022 by the Dublin Film Critics’ Circle, and screenings in the country have regularly left viewers in tears.The Projectionist Chronicles the Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.The Tom Cruise Factor: Stars were starstruck when the “Top Gun: Maverick” headliner showed up at the Oscar nominees luncheon.An Andrea Riseborough FAQ: Confused about the brouhaha surrounding the best actress nominee? We explain why her nod was controversial.Sundance and the Oscars: Which films from the festival could follow “CODA” to the 2024 Academy Awards.A Supporting-Actress Underdog: In “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” don’t discount the pivotal presence of Stephanie Hsu.For Colm Bairéad, the film’s director, miscommunication is at the heart of both “The Quiet Girl” and its source material, Claire Keegan’s novella “Foster.”“So much of it is under the surface,” he said in a recent video interview, noting that Keegan’s prose was able to capture an Irish inability to open up. “There’s this emotional reticence that hangs over everything,” he added.Irish people “don’t talk about our feelings in the way other cultures do,” said Siobhan O’Neill, a professor at the University of Ulster, whose work focuses on intergenerational trauma. “People who are traumatized,” she added, “don’t want to talk about it.”In both Cáit’s fictional childhood — set in the ’80s, in the countryside — and my own, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in the two subsequent decades, the effects of the historically religious and conservative society hung in the air. Like Cáit, as a child I attended wakes and was aware of the way gossip moves in small communities.This social history had wider implications: I was 4 when the last “Magdalene laundry” — abject institutions usually run by the Catholic Church where thousands of women worked without pay — closed. Like many children of the “cease-fire baby” generation, born just before the end of the Troubles, I struggled to communicate with my parents through an atmosphere of generalized anxiety.The same intergenerational malaise permeates “The Quiet Girl.” While most of the film’s dialogue is in Irish, Cáit’s cold father (Michael Patric) is the only character who speaks exclusively in English, reflecting the distance between him and Cáit.The film’s preference for Irish dialogue has been widely praised in Ireland, as a wider so-called Celtic revival across music, politics and fashion has recently been celebrating the language. Less than 2 percent of the Irish population speaks the country’s native language on a daily basis, but recent Irish-language interviews from Paul Mescal and Brendan Gleeson on the red carpet at the British Academy Film Awards attracted much attention online, including Mescal’s praise for “The Quiet Girl.”When Bairéad, who has raised his children with Ní Chrualaoí speaking Irish at home, read “Foster,” in 2018, he said he knew he wanted to make it an Irish-language film. The book could “be an authentic Irish-language story,” he said. “We weren’t forcing the language into a scenario.”“There’s this emotional reticence that hangs over everything,” said Colm Bairéad of his film “The Quiet Girl.” Nacho Gallego/EPA, via ShutterstockAt the time, he and Ní Chrualaoí were expecting their second child, and both felt drawn to Cáit’s aching loneliness, Bairéad said. In the film, the absence of Cáit’s world unfolds in slow, dreamy glimpses rather than via dialogue: a glove box filled with cigarettes, a child sitting alone in the bath. The pair were also aware, Bairéad said, of how rarely figures like Cáit were the protagonists in Irish stories.“There’s been a tendency in our cinema to pander to something that’s expected of us,” Bairéad said. But a recent wave of Irish films feel “very sure of themselves in terms of their identity,” he added. “They’re coming from the inside out, rather than the outside in.”These films include the fellow Oscar contender “The Banshees of Inisherin,” in which Colm’s (Brendan Gleeson) ennui becomes a self-destructive determination to create a musical legacy. In the 2022 film “The Wonder,” the protagonist’s inability to speak about girlhood sexual abuse is transformed into a belief that God is speaking through her body.In “The Quiet Girl,” we see Cáit grow from a lonely little girl to a more confident and open child. The film tackles the effect of societal traumas, O’Neill said, by addressing what goes “deeper than words,” and how comfort, sometimes, has to come from somewhere other than talking.With words still scarce, Cáit finds comfort in the softness of Eibhlín’s touch, and her discovery — thanks to Seán — of the joy of movement. Although verbal expressions of emotion might continue to be culturally difficult for Cáit and for those around her, in the film’s powerful final moments, we see the child running, silently, toward love. More

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      Ireland Cheers Paul Mescal for Embracing Irish Language

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      On the red carpet for the British Academy Film Awards, the Oscar-nominated actor gave an interview in Ireland’s national language.Paul Mescal, the Irish actor nominated for an Oscar for his performance in “Aftersun,” is a familiar figure on red carpets. But on Sunday at the British Academy Film Awards, he did something he had never publicly done before: He spoke Irish.Mescal, 27, was walking the red carpet in London when he stopped to talk with TG4, an Irish-language public broadcaster. The interviewer opened the conversation in Irish, also known as Gaelic, and the actor nervously followed suit.For a man whom the BBC had erroneously identified as British only a few weeks before, it was quite a moment. The two-minute interaction, posted on Twitter, has been viewed one million times and set off a conversation across Ireland about the state of one of Europe’s most endangered languages.“I found it very emotional,” said Eithne Shortall, an Irish author who lives in Dublin. “The whole country is bursting proud of Paul Mescal.”The interview resonated in Ireland, where many want to speak the language but may find themselves short on confidence, Shortall said. According to the 2016 Irish census, the latest for which numbers are available, 39.8 percent of the Irish population can speak Irish, which is down from 41.4 percent in 2011. Of the 1.7 million people who said they could speak the language, only 73,803 — 1.7 percent of the population — said they did so daily outside an educational setting.“I’m sorry about my Irish — it was much better when I was in school,” Mescal said in Irish during the interview. “It’s slightly lost on me now.”Interviews With the Oscar NomineesKerry Condon: An ardent animal lover, the supporting actress Oscar nominee for “The Banshees of Inisherin” said that she channeled grief from her dog’s death into her performance.Michelle Yeoh: The “Everything Everywhere All at Once” star, nominated for best actress, said she was “bursting with joy” but “a little sad” that previous Asian actresses hadn’t been recognized.Angela Bassett: The actress nearly missed the announcement because of troubles with her TV. She tuned in just in time to find out that she was nominated for her supporting role in “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.”Austin Butler: In discussing his best actor nomination, the “Elvis” star said that he wished Lisa Marie Presley, who died on Jan. 12, had been able to celebrate the moment with him.Irish is a mandatory subject in primary and secondary schools in Ireland, said Deirdre Ní Loingsigh, director of the Irish Language Center at the University of Limerick. As a result, almost all Irish people have a “cúpla focal” — a few words — but some are reluctant to use them. Shortall said seeing Mescal himself being hesitant to speak was encouraging.“A lot of the reason we can’t or we don’t is we’re nervous, and we’re kind of embarrassed,” Shortall said. “Maybe there’s a feeling that because it is our national language, we should be able to speak it better than most of us can.”Mescal wasn’t the only Irish actor who spoke Irish at the BAFTAs. Brendan Gleeson, a well-known Gaeilgeoir, or fluent Irish speaker, also gave an interview in Irish, while Colin Farrell, his co-star in “Banshees of Inisherin,” slowly backed away and was relieved to quickly find someone who would ask him questions in English.“Shame on me,” Farrell, who is also Irish, said.Mescal’s viral clip appeared against the backdrop of the so-called Green Wave — also affectionately referred to as Ireland’s going Oscar Wild. Twenty-five percent of this year’s acting Oscar nominees are Irish, according to The Los Angeles Times, and this is the first time an Irish-language film has been nominated for an Oscar, with “The Quiet Girl” up for best international feature film.“The language is almost like the central character of our film, you know, it’s been silenced over many years,” Colm Bairéad, the director of “The Quiet Girl,” said in an interview. “There’s something quite appropriate about the fact that the year where we have the most nominations in our history, our language is also part of that.”Irish, a Celtic language closely related to Scottish Gaelic, is the oldest spoken language in Western Europe, according to Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin, a professor at Concordia University’s School of Irish Studies in Montreal. While Ireland was occupied by Britain, speaking Irish was often punished; when Ireland signed its Constitution in 1937 — after gaining independence in 1922 — Irish was designated as the national language, with English considered a second official language. Factors such as mass migration stemming from the Great Famine and present-day emigration have contributed to the language’s decline and led to the creation of Irish-language schools across the country, Ó hAllmhuráin said.Irish is currently considered “definitely endangered” by UNESCO. Shortall said part of the issue is the way the language is taught in schools, which is more academic than conversational. Bairéad said that as a result, Irish had failed to feel like a “living language” to many people and that had contributed to the country’s complex relationship with its native tongue.“Irish people do have a yearning for this expression of ourselves, as a people, that belongs to us,” Bairéad, who was raised bilingual, said. “This is a mode of expression that is ours, and that we can reclaim, but it takes a certain level of commitment. And when you see people like Paul being willing to do that, that’s inspiring for people.”The Irish have a phrase, “Is fearr gaeilge bhriste ná béarla cliste,” which translates to, “Broken Irish is better than clever English” — an idea that Mescal has come to embody, Shortall said.Mescal’s example has motivated her to speak more Irish, even if she needs to mix in the odd English word.“I really don’t think you can overstate how great this is for the language, to have someone so visible, young and cool speaking Irish,” Shortall said.As the interview wound down on the red carpet Sunday, the journalist asked Mescal one final question: Would he ever consider acting in an Irish-language film?“Yeah, absolutely,” he said — in English. More