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      ‘My Happy Ending’ Review: When Life Goes Off Script

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      Andie MacDowell plays a screen and stage star facing a cancer diagnosis in this film directed by Tal Granit and Sharon Maymon.“My Happy Ending,” about an actress starting chemotherapy, is based on a play by the Israeli writer Anat Gov, who died in 2012. The stage version was understood as a reflection of Gov’s own feelings about approaching death and a frank effort to confront audiences with the realities of cancer. But the labored screen adaptation shows regrettably few signs of personal fire, and many signs of a work that has been sapped of the intimacy of live theater.Directed by Tal Granit and Sharon Maymon, this Israeli-British coproduction is set in Britain, where Julia Roth (Andie MacDowell), a fading American film star who has just flopped in the West End, furtively turns up at a public hospital to undergo treatment for colon cancer. She hasn’t told her family of her diagnosis and is intent on keeping it secret, although Nancy (Tamsin Greig), her officious manager and friend, wants her to go public with it.Because the hospital doesn’t do private rooms, Julia soon meets three other patients: a relentless optimist (Sally Phillips), a Holocaust survivor (Miriam Margolyes) and a mother in her 20s (Rakhee Thakrar). They explain aspects of chemo that the pampered Julia has tuned out from her doctors. They also invite her to join their group role-plays, in which they imagine getaways to forget the pain.But at least onscreen, the fantasy sequences fall flat, allowing viewers too unrestricted an escape. It may also be that MacDowell lacks the range necessary to make sense of the script’s notions of Julia, who does not share the others’ perspective.My Happy EndingRated R. Language and marijuana use. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Dancing the Twist in Bamako’ Review: Youth in Revolt

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      Robert Guédiguian’s jaunty new film places a young romance against the backdrop of post-colonial Mali in the early 1960s.“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” William Wordsworth wrote about the early days of the French Revolution. “But to be young was very heaven!” “Dancing the Twist in Bamako,” a new feature from the French filmmaker Robert Guédiguian, nimbly captures both the kind of youthful ecstasy Wordsworth recalled and the disillusionment that so often follows.It’s the early 1960s, and the Republic of Mali (formerly French Sudan) is in the first flush of post-colonial optimism, having declared independence from France a few years before. Samba (Stéphane Bak) spends his days spreading the Marxist gospel promoted by the country’s president, Modibo Keïta, and his evenings at the Happy Boys’ Club, one of many nightspots in Bamako, Mali’s capital, that cater to the local appetite for Western pop music.Dressed in miliary-style fatigues, Samba and his comrades drive out to rural villages to lecture peasants and landowners on the virtues of collective agriculture. They are as enthusiastic about promoting the cause as having fun, and at first there seems to be no contradiction between politics and pleasure. It’s the ’60s! In the bedroom Samba shares with his music-obsessed brother, Badian (Bakary Diombera), there are posters of Ho Chi Minh and Otis Redding. Socialism and soul music seem like two sides of the same coin.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.Eventually, all the posters will be torn down, and Samba’s experience will spin from disappointment to danger to tragedy. Guédiguian, many of whose previous films have been set in and around the French port city of Marseille, has a jaunty, slightly old-fashioned way with narrative. The plot of “Dancing the Twist” is busy, the emotions big, and the screen sometimes as crowded with character and incident as a page of Dickens.At the center is the love story between Samba and Lara (Alice Da Luz). The daughter of a lower-caste family, she has been forced into marriage with the loutish, drunken grandson of a village leader, a condition she tries to escape by stowing away in Samba’s truck. He helps her find work and a place to stay in Bamako, and soon they are the most dazzling couple at the Happy Boys’ Club. Samba is confident that the patriarchal traditions oppressing Lara will be swept away by President Keïta’s new order, just as surely as the powerful merchants and feudal bosses will share their wealth with the workers and peasants.Samba, whose father is a prosperous cloth manufacturer, is a protégé of the minister of youth. Restrictive trade policies split the young man’s loyalties between these two paternal figures — just one of the tensions that start to undermine his optimism, and the bright future he and Lara symbolize. Her husband and brother are hunting for her in Bamako, and a culturally conservative faction in the government has decided that European fashion and American rock ’n’ roll are corrupting Mali’s youth and begun a crackdown on the clubs.In a defiant speech to a room full of officials, Samba paraphrases Lenin, declaring that “Socialism is the Soviets, plus electrification, plus the twist!” To take another page from the left-wing songbook, he wants bread and roses, too. But his exuberant romanticism puts him increasingly at odds with his comrades, who are more interested in the cold exercise of power than in the joy of liberation.“Dancing the Twist in Bamako” is entirely, and not altogether persuasively, on the side of joy. Even the grim path of history — emphasized in an epilogue set 50 years later, during the rule of Islamists who restricted every kind of music — can’t suppress the film’s effervescence. Some of that comes from the music, a well-chosen sampling of English- and French-language radio hits. The cast is also dynamic and sincere in a way that gives the drama a buoyant teen-movie spirit even as it takes a grave turn. It’s affecting, but also a bit glib.Beautiful, though. Guédiguian (assisted by his director of photography, Pierre Milon) pays tribute to Malick Sidibé, a Malian photographer who documented the early years of independence, represented in the film as a genial presence with a narrow-brimmed fedora, on hand to record the turmoil and the delight of the young nation. He’s both a character and an aesthetic inspiration for the movie’s elegant, kinetic, color-filled frames, which conjure a lost but nonetheless vivid moment of bliss.Dancing the Twist in BamakoNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 9 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Chocolat’: What France Knew

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      Newly restored, Claire Denis’s quasi-autobiographical “Chocolat,” a child’s-eye view of French colonialism, is austere yet vivid.A young white woman revisits Cameroon and remembers an idyllic childhood in a French colonial outpost. Her name is France.Released in 1988, Claire Denis’s quasi-autobiographical “Chocolat” is the brilliant prelude to a great career, as demonstrated by the new 4K restoration revived for a week by Film at Lincoln Center.Denis served a distinguished apprenticeship, an assistant director to Jacques Rivette, Dusan Makavejev, Wim Wenders and Jim Jarmusch; she made her debut as a filmmaker in her early 40s with a confident, fully formed style. More visual than literary, “Chocolat” is at once open and elliptical, austere and vivid.France (the country as well as the child played by Cécile Ducasse) may be the nominal protagonist of the film, but its central character is Protée (Isaach de Bankolé), the colonial family’s handsome, fiercely self-contained “house boy.” His name is also allegorical, suggesting the shape-shifting Greek sea-god Proteus.France’s parents — her mother in particular — are dependent on Protée, and in the absence of other children, the servant is France’s closest companion. Keeping a respectful distance, Denis renders him unknowable, yet in his pride and humiliation, he provides the movie’s emotional depth. Reviewing in The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote that Protée had “the manner of a prince, someone taken hostage in war, waiting to be ransomed.”Cameroon’s imminent independence is less referred to than implied, overshadowed by the episodic narrative. Alone when France’s father (François Cluzet) travels, her mother (Giulia Boschi) is frightened by a hyena and wooed by a ridiculous English diplomat. A neighboring family of missionaries decides to leave. An airplane malfunction strands a motley bunch of white people — a French planter with a secret African mistress, a defrocked priest and a frightened couple on their honeymoon — with the family for a month, affording a gallery of colonial types.An early American review of “Chocolat” compared its “intertwined themes of colonialism and forbidden love” to one of Somerset Maugham’s steamy Malaysian melodramas. Still, as a child’s apprehension of the adult world, the movie seems closer to Henry James’s “What Maisie Knew.” The oblique story line is refracted through, even as it frames, France’s (or “French”) innocence. The clarity of Denis’s compositions imbues the pampered isolation in which the family lives with tender regard and implicit horror.Discovering “Chocolat” at Cannes, Canby noted that, although “one of the more impressive films” at the festival, it was not especially well received by French critics. The Times, however, would be unusually supportive. When “Chocolat” opened in New York in 1989, Canby’s enthusiastic review occasioned features on both de Bankolé and Denis, the latter piece calling the movie “a brave attempt to probe an upheaval many French people would prefer to forget.”Denis cannot. She returned to Africa for her two strongest films, the 1999 “Beau Travail” (seventh in the recent Sight and Sound poll of cinema’s “greatest films”) and the 2010 “White Material,” a convulsive drama of political change shot in Cameroon and featuring de Bankolé as a revolutionary hero. As the films in her unofficial African trilogy were shot at roughly 10-year intervals, Denis may yet go home once more.ChocolatThrough March 2 at Film at Lincoln Center in Manhattan; filmlinc.org. More

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      Why A.I. Movies Couldn’t Prepare Us for Bing’s Chatbot

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      Instead of the chilling rationality of HAL in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” we get the messy awfulness of Microsoft’s Sydney. Call it the banality of sentience.Why are we so fascinated by stories about sentient robots, rapacious A.I. and the rise of thinking machines? Faced with that question, I did what any on writer on deadline would do and asked ChatGPT.The answers I got — a helpfully numbered list with five chatty entries — were not surprising. They were, to be honest, what I might have come up with myself after a few seconds of thought, or what I might expect to encounter in a B- term paper from a distracted undergraduate. Long on generalizations and short on sources, the bot’s essay was a sturdy summary of conventional wisdom. For example: “Sentient robots raise important moral and ethical questions about the treatment of intelligent beings, the nature of consciousness and the responsibilities of creators.”Quite so. From the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea to the medieval Jewish legend of the golem through Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” and beyond, we have grappled with those important questions, and also frightened and titillated ourselves with tales of our inventions coming to life. Our ingenuity as a species, channeled through individual and collective hubris, compels us to concoct artificial beings that menace and seduce us. They escape our control. They take control. They fall in love.In “The Imagination of Disaster,” Susan Sontag’s classic 1965 essay on science-fiction movies, she observed that “we live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror.” As Turing-tested A.I. applications have joined the pantheon of sci-fi shibboleths, they have dutifully embodied both specters.HAL 9000, the malevolent computer in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968), is terrifying precisely because he is so banal. “Open the pod bay doors, HAL.” “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave.” In 2023, that perfectly chilling exchange between human and computer is echoed every day as modern-day Daves make impossible demands of HAL’s granddaughters, Siri and Alexa.Our exchanges with Siri and Alexa are everyday versions of the interactions in “2001: A Space Odyssey.”Warner Bros.That example suggests that in spite of terrors like the Terminator, the smart money was always on banality. The dreariness of ChatGPT, the soulless works of visual art produced by similar programs seem to confirm that hunch. In the real world, the bots aren’t our overlords so much as the enablers of our boredom. Our shared future — our singularity — is an endless scroll, just for the lulz.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.Or so I thought, until a Microsoft application tried to break up my colleague’s marriage. Last week, Kevin Roose, a tech columnist for The Times, published a transcript of his conversations with Sydney, the volatile alter ego of the Bing search engine. “I want to do love with you,” Sydney said to Roose, and then went on to trash Roose’s relationship with his wife.That was scary but not exactly “Terminator” scary. We like to imagine technology as a kind of superego: rational, impersonal, decisive. This was a raging id. I found myself hoping that there was no pet rabbit in the Roose household, and that Sydney was not wired into any household appliances. That’s a movie reference, by the way, to “Fatal Attraction,” a notorious thriller released a few years after the first “Terminator” (1984) promised he’d be back. In another conversation, with The Associated Press, Sydney shifted from unhinged longing to unbridled hostility, making fun of the reporter’s looks and likening him to Hitler “because you are one of the most evil and worst people in history.”Maybe when we have fantasized about conscious A.I. we’ve been imagining the wrong disaster. These outbursts represent a real departure, not only from the anodyne mediocrity of other bots, but also perhaps more significantly from the dystopia we have grown accustomed to dreading.We’re more or less reconciled to the reality that machines are, in some ways, smarter than we are. We also enjoy the fantasy that they might turn out to be more sensitive. We’re therefore not prepared for the possibility that they might be chaotic, unstable and resentful — as messy as we are, or maybe more so.In “Her,” the artificial intelligence created is a consumer product, not a government creation.Warner Bros. PicturesMovies about machines with feelings often unfold in an atmosphere of hushed, wistful melancholy, in which the robots themselves are avatars of sad gentleness: Haley Joel Osment as David in “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” (2001), Scarlett Johansson as Samantha in “Her” (2013), Justin H. Min as Yang last year in “After Yang.” While HAL and Skynet, the imperial intelligence that spawned the Terminators, were creations of big government, the robots in these movies are consumer products. Totalitarian domination is the nightmare form of techno-politics: What if the tools that protect us decided to enslave us? Emotional fulfillment is the dream of consumer capitalism: What if our toys loved us back?Why wouldn’t they? In these movies, we are lovers and fighters, striking back against oppression and responding to vulnerability with kindness. Even as humans fear the superiority of the machines, our species remains the ideal to which they aspire. Their dream is to be us. When it comes true, the Terminator discovers a conscience, and the store-bought surrogate children, lovers and siblings learn about sacrifice and loss. It’s the opposite of dystopia.Where we really live is the opposite of that. At the movies, the machines absorb and emulate the noblest of human attributes: intelligence, compassion, loyalty, ardor. Sydney offers a blunt rebuttal, reminding us of our limitless capacity for aggression, deceit, irrationality and plain old meanness.What did we expect? Sydney and her kin derive their understanding of humanness — the information that feeds their models and algorithms — from the internet, itself a utopian invention that has evolved into an archive of human awfulness. How did these bots get so creepy, so nasty, so untrustworthy? The answer is banal. Also terrifying. It’s in the mirror. More

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      ‘A House Made of Splinters’ Review: Home Is Where the Hope Is

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      This film, an Oscar nominee this year for best documentary feature, has an aching sensitivity for the children in a Ukraine shelter.Filmed at a children’s shelter in eastern Ukraine, “A House Made of Splinters” is made with such aching sensitivity that it’s a marvel a camera was used and not some form of mind-meld. Simon Lereng Wilmont, the director and cinematographer, catches his young subjects in the fullness of their feelings — from joy to sorrow — as they wait for a new home.The children land here because of absent parents, typically casualties of alcoholism or war from previous Russian invasions and incursions (the documentary was filmed in 2019 and 2020). Unless another family member steps up, the young ones move into foster care or to an orphanage. Mercifully, the caregivers’ affectionate morning rounds immediately show that this is an institution rooted in love, hope and common sense.Instead of focusing on the staff, though, Wilmont sticks to the perspective of one child at a time, filming for a year and a half across multiple trips. Eva, for example, yearns for her grandmother to take her in and has no illusions that her mother will recover from her addiction to alcohol. Like the others, she has moments of looking weary beyond her years, but she also turns cartwheels to blow off steam.Wilmont hews closer to relationships than daily routines, and takes in the sky-high stakes of friendships, crushes and acting tough. He susses out life forces rather than spiraling despair; he is tender without being sentimental, cleareyed without being cool. A voice-over by one staff member lends gentle framing, and some welcome moral support, as you’re left a sniffling wreck from this compassionate portrait.A House Made of SplintersNot rated. In Ukrainian and Russian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      She’s Oscar-Nominated, but Hong Chau Hopes to Stay an Underdog

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      Though Hong Chau received her first Oscar nomination last month, for playing Brendan Fraser’s caretaker in the Darren Aronofsky drama “The Whale,” it took awhile for the accolade to sink in. In 2017, after a breakout role in Alexander Payne’s “Downsizing,” she’d been hotly tipped for a nomination that never came, the sort of anticlimax that can make you want to detach from the hubbub of awards season altogether.This time around, there was a better outcome, though she is still sorting out exactly how she feels about it. “My honest reaction to the nomination was just relief,” she said.The 43-year-old Chau didn’t dream of becoming an Oscar-nominated actress: Born in a refugee camp to Vietnamese parents, she grew up in New Orleans and majored in creative writing and film studies at Boston University. After she signed up for an improv class to cure her shyness, her teacher encouraged her to pursue performing, and Chau moved to Los Angeles to seek parts. But success initially proved elusive, and skeptical casting directors told her that booking anything more than a day-player role was beyond her grasp.“After a few years of trying, you think, ‘Is it really worth it to try to dedicate my life to this?’” Chau said. “But what kept me going was the delusional hope that I’d get to work on a cool, weird movie, because those were the movies that I liked. I just kept hoping that something would happen and, thankfully, it did.”After following her big-screen debut in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Inherent Vice” with “Downsizing,” Chau’s career caught fire: She’s been a scene-stealer ever since, in projects like HBO’s “Watchmen” and the recent culinary comedy “The Menu,” in which she plays a coolly hostile maître d’. Chau will next be seen in a raft of auteur-driven films that include Kelly Reichardt’s “Showing Up,” Wes Anderson’s “Asteroid City” and “And” from Yorgos Lanthimos, but in the meantime, audiences are still discovering her work in “The Whale,” in which her character, Liz, tends to Fraser’s 600-pound recluse with a whole lot of tough love.Chau is “a force of nature: titanium backbone, suffers no fools, has a bear trap of a memory,” Fraser told me. “Everything is an embarrassment of riches for whoever’s editing her work because of how varied and interesting she is. And she can say more in between lines of dialogue, in the pauses and the silences, than I can with dialogue.”Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.Chau in “The Whale.” She initially turned down the chance to audition.A24, via Associated PressNow that the dust has settled from your Oscar nomination, how are you feeling?The things that have touched me the most have been messages from people who have known me since before I wanted to be an actor. My friend from high school called from work and she was like, “Oh my God, I’m shaking right now. I’m hiding in the closet to talk to you because I can’t control my body right now.” I was like, “Why?” But she was starting to tear up on the phone, and it made me get emotional because she was like, “I remember all of those years ago when I went to your improv shows.” I hadn’t thought about that in so long, and stuff like that is meaningful to me. The rest of it, I don’t know. My whole career identity has been about being an underdog and trying to scrap my way into getting parts.Do you mean you were perceived as an underdog, or you felt like an underdog?I felt like an underdog, always really excited and grateful to be a part of things. Now it’s just a weird thing where I feel like, “Do I have to step up? Am I going to be considered a veteran now?” I still feel so new and I’m still learning, so I hope this doesn’t mean that people think I know what I’m doing. I really admire people who are pros, but at the same time, I hope I never become a pro, if that makes sense.You shot “The Whale” in early 2021, not long after you had given birth to your first child. Was it an easy yes?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.I was fully anticipating not working for the first year while I was a mother, so I was surprised when my agent sent me the script for “The Whale.” I almost didn’t want to read it, because I didn’t want to get attached, and then when I read the script, I felt even more strongly that this wasn’t the right time in my life to tackle something like that because it would take so much work. Also, everything that I’d done had been a specifically Asian character, and because this character wasn’t, I thought the casting net for it must be so wide. I just didn’t want to throw my hat in the ring.About a week passed and my agent came back to me and was like, “They really want to see you. Is this something you want to let go?” During that time, I had thought about it, like, “Oh my gosh, it is a really amazing story and script. I don’t know, can I do it?” They asked for three scenes on tape for the audition. I told my agent, “Here’s one scene. That’s all I had time to do. I think he should know after one scene whether I’m the right girl for him or not.”That’s a flex, Hong!“I don’t have time to do anything else! My baby is crying in the background” [she told the agent]. But Darren called me right after he saw it, somehow my baby cooperated, and we were able to put another scene on tape very quickly.Once you accepted the role, how did you feel?Honestly, I felt like I wanted to barf. I was thinking, “Wow, I’m so tired. How can I possibly be on set and say all these lines? Oh my God, this is more dialogue than I’ve had in all of the things I’ve done combined.” Thankfully, my husband really stepped up and took care of our baby while I was at work and allowed me to do it. And he was the one who also really pushed me to throw my hat in the ring and said that he would be there to support me.Brendan Fraser said Chau “can say more in between lines of dialogue, in the pauses and the silences, than I can with dialogue.”Justin J Wee for The New York TimesBefore shooting, the actors had three weeks of rehearsal. Is that the sort of thing that you spark to as a performer?I found rehearsals really restrictive, and I don’t think Darren will mind me describing it as that. He obviously knew what he wanted to do, so a lot of rehearsal from the get-go was spent on blocking, and it was so specific so early on. That’s what I had objection to because in my mind, rehearsal means that you just feel everything out without already knowing where you need to be.By the second or third day, I kind of tuned him out a little bit and was able to just focus on Brendan and trying to find those different moments with him. One of the functions of Liz in the script was to show the audience who Charlie was prior to us meeting him in this dire state, and finding those moments of joy and of levity needed to be worked out in rehearsal, because once we got on set, there wasn’t going to be time because of the limitations of the suit that Brendan was wearing. It was incredibly hot to wear silicone, so there wasn’t as much time to futz around.What do you think Liz is like outside the space we see her in during the movie?Well, when I was cast, my agents had thrown out some names of other people who were in consideration for the role. None of them were Asian, and the role wasn’t written specifically as Asian. So once I was cast, the writer Sam Hunter added the line about her being adopted. I think it was a useful bit of information in terms of picturing what it was like for her growing up in Idaho in this very conservative, religious family. That informed a lot of the choices that I made.I asked Darren if I could have tattoos and he said yes, even though you never see them on camera in the movie, because I was like, “Oh, I think she was a raver girl.” I could imagine Liz going to some warehouse parties and rebelling against her super-religious adoptive parents. But that was all just for me, and it felt luxurious, like, “Oh, this only happens on a Darren Aronofsky movie.” No other production would allow me to spend the time or the money on these tattoos.Maybe not, but on projects like “The Menu” or “Watchmen,” I’ve heard you had a lot of input into how those characters would look.Even though they’re limited in screen time, I want them to feel interesting. That’s part of the fun for me. I think a lot of people would maybe look at it in a more pitiful way, like, “Oh, why doesn’t she get to play lead characters? Why just supporting?” But I love supporting characters and I love doing that work to make them feel really full — it’s a little bit of a puzzle where you have to look for clues in the text. It’s not about jockeying for more screen time or more lines or anything like that. I’m usually more entertained or invested in whatever is going on with a supporting character than the lead character.In “The Menu,” Chau plays a stern maître d’ opposite Ralph Fiennes’s imperious chef.20th Century FoxIn past interviews, you’ve said that you don’t necessarily think of yourself as an actor. After a year like the one you’ve had, has that changed?When I say I don’t feel like an actor, it’s because typically whenever you read a profile of an actor, this is all that they’ve ever wanted to do. I don’t know if I could say the same thing, because I didn’t intend on being an actor. I didn’t go to school for it, and I only took improv classes as a way to break out of my shell because I was so introverted. I thought I wanted to be either a writer or an editor, something that was a little bit more solitary, and it’s just odd that I find myself in front of the camera.What do you get out of acting now that’s different than when you first began?I don’t know if I ever wanted anything out of it! I just wanted to be on set, to hang out with people, and to see the finished product. I could be on set all day if I didn’t have a family to take care of. I just love watching everybody work, not even just the actors — I love watching the grips move the lights, and the set decorators tweaking the little drapes. I also feel like my most relaxed and most confident self on set, too. I don’t know what to do with myself when I’m on a red carpet.Red carpets are terrifying! It’s a gantlet of flash bulbs and people shouting your name.It’s not even shouting my name — it’s more like whoever I’m talking to is looking past me to see if there’s somebody more famous coming up so they can quickly wrap up whatever they’re doing with me. That’s been my experience.You said that before “The Whale,” many of your parts were written specifically for an Asian actress. Is that still the case?“Showing Up,” no. Wes’s movie, no. “The Menu,” definitely not, because she was written as Scandinavian. But I never go into it with an agenda of like, “OK, I’m going to turn the stereotype on its head.” I’m always trying to service the script, and however people want to take it, I have no control over that. Even with Elsa in “The Menu,” I thought she was a very dominating character, but during an interview, somebody was asking a question about Asian stereotypes, and she was also Asian. She was like, “Your character reminded me of a maid.” I was like, “I’m sorry, what are you talking about?”It’s a shame, honestly, to always be viewing the world and looking for that. You can always bend things in that way if you want to, but it’s not something that I can really spend too much energy trying to anticipate. But I’m also a little hesitant to get on a soapbox about things. My goal is not to be president of the Asian American student body — I just want to do good work and just leave it at that. More

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      ‘The First Fallen’ Review: A Remembrance of Those Passed

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      A director crafts an elegiac tribute set during the dawn of the AIDS crisis in Brazil.At the start of his pandemic film, “The First Fallen,” the Brazilian director Rodrigo de Oliveira stakes a claim to the elegiac: A soldier steps through a jungle ruminating in voice-over about those who die early in battle. The significance of this scene — which cuts to Suzano (Johnny Massaro) watching his nephew, Muriel (Alex Bonin), in the surf — is made clearer later. But the meaning of the blood trickling from Suzano’s nose is a given from the beginning.When Suzano, a biologist, returns from Paris to a small city in southeast Brazil to visit his sister, a nurse named Maura (Clara Choveaux), the first wave of H.I.V. and AIDS is on the horizon. It is the last day of 1981, but Suzano doesn’t feel like celebrating. He looks “haggard,” Maura tells him. He has a dry cough.He skips ringing in the new year with friends at a new nightspot. At that club, a performer named Rose (played with furious grace by Renata Carvalho) is being documented by the videographer Humberto (Victor Camilo). Together Suzano, Rose and Humberto will face a crisis with a breadth and scale that they are unlikely to ever fully grasp.Throughout his film, de Oliveira plays with the tension between verisimilitude and the artifice of performance. (Suzano’s increasingly wracking cough comes across as both truthful and melodramatic.) A gay man of a younger generation, de Oliveira mourns the vulnerability of these characters’ bodies while paying tribute to their flourishes and fears. We see death and the spreading of ashes but the film does not end there, instead returning to that jungle from the beginning. There a trio wages a battle that will not save them but might save others.The First FallenNot rated. In Portuguese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. Rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      Laurie Metcalf to Return to Broadway in a Horror Story, ‘Grey House’

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      The play, directed by Joe Mantello and also starring Tatiana Maslany, had a well-reviewed debut in Chicago. It begins performances in April.Horror films have become a rare bright spot for contemporary Hollywood. Now a group of theater artists is hoping the genre can work on Broadway, too.The producers Tom Kirdahy (“Hadestown”) and Robert Ahrens (“Little Shop of Horrors”) said Tuesday that they are planning to bring an unsettling new play, “Grey House,” to Broadway this spring. The production will reunite the actress Laurie Metcalf and the director Joe Mantello, each of whom has won two Tony Awards. Their most recent collaboration, a revival of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” never made it to opening night because of the coronavirus pandemic.Metcalf, a veteran stage actress also known for her work on television (“Roseanne”) and film (“Lady Bird”), will co-star with Tatiana Maslany (“Orphan Black”) and Paul Sparks (“House of Cards”). This will not be Metcalf’s first scary story on Broadway: In 2015 she starred in a stage production of “Misery,” based on the novel by Stephen King.Also in the cast: Sophia Anne Caruso (“Beetlejuice”) and Millicent Simmonds (“A Quiet Place”).“Grey House,” written by Levi Holloway, is about a couple (Maslany and Sparks) who, after crashing their car during a snowstorm, wind up taking shelter in a cabin occupied by a group of teenage girls and a woman who claims to be their mother (Metcalf). The play had a 2019 production at A Red Orchid Theater in Chicago, where the critic Chris Jones of the Chicago Tribune hailed it as “a savvy, smart, self-aware new play,” and declared that “it just happens to be legitimately terrifying.”The Broadway production, scheduled to begin previews April 29 and to open May 30 at the Lyceum Theater, will not be eligible for this year’s Tony Awards, but instead will be considered part of the 2023-24 season.Holloway, a Florida native who spent much of his career in Chicago and now lives in Los Angeles, has long worked on integrating deaf and hearing performers — he co-founded Neverbird Project, a theater company for deaf and hearing young people — and one of the characters in “Grey House” is deaf. That character will be played by Simmonds, who is deaf.Holloway said in an interview that the first movie he saw was “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” when he was 5 (his father was a horror buff), but that he has mixed feelings about his play being classified in the horror genre.“It’s a word I’m never quite comfortable with,” he said. “I think all good theater is horror. By my estimation horror asks our characters to change, and they must change in order to survive, and that change usually takes the form of the truth. I think that translates to most great stories.”He said the plot of the play “just comes from my nightmares.”“It’s about a lot of things, most of which I don’t know the words for — it’s about love and pain that we carry, and the shelter we build for them both, and about the way we protect the things that hurt us the most, because who are we without our wounds?” he said. “It’s a contemplation on grief and love and how we sometimes feel safe in our pain.” More