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      Gene Hackman, Hollywood’s Consummate Everyman, Dies at 95

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      Gene Hackman, who never fit the mold of a Hollywood movie star but became one all the same, playing seemingly ordinary characters with deceptive subtlety, intensity and often charm in some of the most noted films of the 1970s and ’80s, has died, the authorities in New Mexico said on Thursday. He was 95.Mr. Hackman and his wife were found dead on Wednesday afternoon at the home in Santa Fe., N.M., where they had been living, according to a statement from the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Department. The cause of death was unclear and under investigation. Sheriff’s deputies found the bodies of Mr. Hackman; his wife, Betsy Arakawa; and a dog, according to the statement, which said that foul play was not suspected.Mr. Hackman was nominated for five Academy Awards and won two during a 40-year career in which he appeared in films seen and remembered by millions, among them “Bonnie and Clyde,” “The French Connection,” “The Poseidon Adventure,” “Mississippi Burning,” “Unforgiven,” “Superman,” “Hoosiers” and “The Royal Tenenbaums.”The familiar characterization of Mr. Hackman was that he was Hollywood’s perfect Everyman. But perhaps that was too easy. His characters — convict, sheriff, Klansman, steelworker, spy, minister, war hero, grieving widower, submarine commander, basketball coach, president — defied pigeonholing, as did his shaded portrayals of them.Still, he did not deny that he had a regular-Joe image, nor did he mind it. He once joked that he looked like “your everyday mine worker.” And he did seem to have been born middle-aged: slightly balding, with strong but unremarkable features neither plain nor handsome, a tall man (6-foot-2) more likely to melt into a crowd than stand out in one.It was Mr. Hackman’s gift to be able to peel back the layers from characters who carried the weight of middle age.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Oscars 2025: Print Your Ballot to Make Your Predictions

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      The New York Times
      2025 Oscars Ballot
      Best Picture
      ☐ “Anora”
      “The Brutalist”
      ☐ “A Complete Unknown”
      ☐ “Conclave”
      “Dune: Part Two”
      ☐ “Emilia Pérez❞
      ☐ “I’m Still Here”
      ☐ “Nickel Boys”
      “The Substance”
      ☐ “Wicked”
      Best Director
      ☐ Jacques Audiard,
      “Emilia Pérez❞
      ☐ Sean Baker,
      “Anora”
      ☐ Brady Corbet,
      “The Brutalist”
      ☐ Coralie Fargeat,
      “The Substance”
      ☐ James Mangold,
      “A Complete Unknown”
      Best Actor
      Adrien Brody,
      “The Brutalist”
      Timothée Chalamet,
      “A Complete Unknown”
      ☐ Colman Domingo,
      “Sing Sing”
      ☐ Ralph Fiennes,
      “Conclave”
      ☐ Sebastian Stan,
      “The Apprentice”
      Best Actress
      ☐ Cynthia Erivo,
      “Wicked”
      ☐ Karla Sofía Gascón,
      “Emilia Pérez”
      Mikey Madison,
      “Anora”
      ☐ Demi Moore,
      “The Substance”
      ☐ Fernanda Torres,
      “I’m Still Here”
      Best Supporting Actor
      ☐ Yura Borisov,
      “Anora”
      ☐ Kieran Culkin,
      “A Real Pain”
      ☐ Edward Norton,
      “A Complete Unknown”
      ☐ Guy Pearce,
      “The Brutalist”
      Jeremy Strong,
      “The Apprentice”
      Best Supporting Actress
      ☐ Monica Barbaro,
      “A Complete Unknown”
      ☐ Ariana Grande,
      “Wicked”
      ☐ Felicity Jones,
      “The Brutalist”
      ☐ Isabella Rossellini,
      “Conclave”
      ☐ Zoe Saldaña,
      “Emilia Pérez❞
      Original Screenplay
      ☐ “Anora”
      “The Brutalist”
      ☐ “A Real Pain”
      ☐ “September 5”
      “The Substance”
      Adapted Screenplay
      “Conclave”
      ☐ “A Complete Unknown”
      “Emilia Pérez❞
      “Nickel Boys”
      “Sing Sing”
      Animated Feature
      ☐ “Flow”
      ☐ “Inside Out 2”
      “Memoir of a Snail”
      “Wallace & Gromit:
      Vengeance Most Fowl”
      “The Wild Robot”
      Production Design
      ☐ “The Brutalist”
      ☐ “Conclave”
      ☐ “Dune: Part Two”
      ☐ “Nosferatu”
      “Wicked”
      Costume Design
      ☐ “A Complete Unknown”
      ☐ “Conclave”
      ☐ “Gladiator II”
      “Nosferatu”
      “Wicked”
      Cinematography
      “The Brutalist”
      “Dune: Part Two”
      ☐ “Emilia Pérez❞
      ☐ “Maria”
      ☐ “Nosferatu”
      Editing
      ☐ “Anora”
      “The Brutalist”
      “Conclave”
      “Emilia Pérez”
      “Wicked”
      Makeup and Hairstyling
      “A Different Man”
      “Emilia Pérez”
      “Nosferatu”
      “The Substance”
      ☐ “Wicked”
      Sound
      ☐ “A Complete Unknown”
      “Dune: Part Two”
      “Emilia Pérez❞
      “Wicked”
      ☐ “The Wild Robot”
      Visual Effects
      “Alien: Romulus”
      “Better Man”
      “Dune: Part Two”
      “Kingdom of the
      Planet of the Apes”
      ☐ “Wicked”
      Original Score
      “The Brutalist”
      “Conclave”
      “Emilia Pérez❞
      “Wicked”
      “The Wild Robot”
      Original Song
      ☐ “El Mal”
      (“Emilia Pérez”)
      “The Journey”
      (“The Six Triple Eight”)
      “Like a Bird”
      (“Sing Sing”)
      “Mi Camino”
      (“Emilia Pérez”)
      “Never Too Late”
      (“Elton John: Never Too Late”)
      Documentary Feature
      “Black Box Diaries”
      ☐ “No Other Land”
      “Porcelain War”
      “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat”
      “Sugarcane”
      International Feature
      ☐ “I’m Still Here,” Brazil
      ☐ “The Girl With the
      Needle,” Denmark
      ☐ “Emilia Pérez,” France
      ☐ “The Seed of the
      Sacred Fig,” Germany
      ☐ “Flow,” Latvia
      Animated Short
      ☐ “Beautiful Men”
      “In the Shadow of the Cypress”
      “Magic Candies”
      “Wander to Wonder”
      ☐ “Yuck!”
      Documentary Short
      ☐ “Death by Numbers”
      “I Am Ready, Warden”
      “Incident”
      “Instruments of a
      Beating Heart”
      ☐ “The Only Girl in
      the Orchestra”
      Live-Action Short
      “A Lien”
      “Anuja”
      “I’m Not a Robot”
      “The Last Ranger”
      ☐ “The Man Who Could
      Not Remain Silent” More

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      Gene Hackman, a Life in Pictures

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      Gene Hackman, a celebrated actor whose death at 95 was announced on Thursday, stood out in Hollywood for his ability not to stand out.Not until he was 42 did he make his star turn, winning the Oscar for best actor for playing a gruff narcotics detective in “The French Connection.” But at that point he already had more than 30 television and film credits and a reputation for charming intensity that would stay with him throughout his career.A tall man with thinning hair and a deep voice that was befitting a former Marine, he is easily remembered for distinctive mustaches and tweed jackets. Yet he was equally convincing in roles as a paranoid communications expert, an archnemesis of a superhero, a big-hearted basketball coach, a sinister sheriff and an eccentric patriarch of a family of troubled geniuses.And if he seemed to some to have appeared out of nowhere in the 1970s as a fully formed star, he disappeared just as abruptly, doing one final film in 2004 and then walking away without any formal declaration that he had retired. He spent his remaining years in Santa Fe, N.M., painting and sculpting and staying out of the spotlight.He was Hollywood’s Everyman, but had a career — and a life — that few could even attempt to recreate.Everett CollectionMr. Hackman made an impression on Warren Beatty in 1964 despite a small part in the film “Lilith.” Mr. Beatty subsequently brought Mr. Hackman along for “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967), in which he managed to thrive in a cast that included, from left, Estelle Parsons, Mr. Beatty, Faye Dunaway and Michael J. Pollard. The performance earned Mr. Hackman an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Morgan Freeman, Gwyneth Paltrow and Others Mourn Gene Hackman

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      A two-time Academy Award winner and a dogged Everyman in many of his roles, Hackman was remembered by collaborators and co-stars after his death.Tributes for the actor Gene Hackman, who was found dead on Wednesday at the age of 95 at his home in Santa Fe, N.M., with his wife and one of their dogs, streamed in from collaborators and co-stars as the news spread.Hackman, who played flawed Everymen, inflexible patriarchs and inspirational mentors, had decades of notable roles, prompting generations of mourners to remember their time working with the actor.Francis Ford CoppolaCoppola, who directed Hackman in the 1974 neo-noir “The Conversation,” in which the actor played a wiretapping expert enmeshed in paranoia, posted a photo of them on the set together.“The loss of a great artist, always cause for both mourning and celebration: Gene Hackman a great actor, inspiring and magnificent in his work and complexity,” Coppola wrote in the caption. “I mourn his loss, and celebrate his existence and contribution.”Morgan FreemanFreeman, who co-starred with Hackman in the 1992 neo-western “Unforgiven,” which won best picture and best supporting actor for Hackman at the Academy Awards, posted a picture of them from a later collaboration with Monica Bellucci. In the caption, he said working with Hackman on that movie, “Under Suspicion,” from 2000, was “one of the personal highlights of my career.”Gwyneth PaltrowPaltrow, who played the daughter to Hackman’s eccentric patriarch in Wes Anderson’s 2001 dramedy “The Royal Tenenbaums,” posted a cropped image of that movie’s cast that centered her, Luke Wilson and Hackman. She captioned it only with an emoji of a broken heart.Barry SonnenfeldSonnenfeld posted a still from “Get Shorty,” the 1995 gangster comedy he directed in which Hackman played a B-movie director with a large gambling debt who was chased down by a mobbed-up loan shark played by John Travolta.“He was brilliant, hilarious and always real,” Sonnenfeld wrote in the caption. “And always knew his lines. Couldn’t ask for more from an actor.”Nathan LaneLane, one of Hackman’s co-stars in the 1996 queer farce comedy “The Birdcage,” said in a statement that he thought he told Hackman he was his favorite actor every day during filming. He also praised Hackman’s range in both comedy and drama, saying it was a privilege to share the screen with him.“Getting to watch him up close, it was easy to see why he was one of our greatest,” Lane said in the statement, reported by Variety and People magazine. “You could never catch him acting. Simple and true, thoughtful and soulful, with just a hint of danger.”Hank AzariaAzaria, who played the Guatemalan housekeeper and aspiring drag queen Agador Spartacus in “The Birdcage,” posted stills from that movie with him and Hackman, who played an ultraconservative Republican senator meeting the gay parents of his future son-in-law.“It was an honor and an education working with Gene Hackman,” Azaria wrote. “Mike Nichols said of his genius character acting: ‘He always brought just enough of a different part of the real gene to each role he played.’” More

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      How Yura Borisov of ‘Anora’ Went From the Kremlin to the Oscars

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      Yura Borisov, who is nominated for an Academy Award on Sunday, is pulling off a rare feat: pleasing audiences at home in Russia as well as in the West.On the face of it, the Russian actor Yura Borisov was an unlikely actor to land an Oscar nomination in 2025.Just a few years ago he played a guileless soldier in a Kremlin-sponsored movie that celebrated a Soviet tank model. Later, he starred in a biopic of Mikhail Kalashnikov, the man who invented the Russian automatic rifle.But after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, he stopped playing in militaristic movies. Last year, Western audiences fell in love with him as a tight-lipped but sentimental mafia errand boy in “Anora,” a Brooklyn-based indie dramedy about a stripper who impulsively marries the son of a Russian oligarch.At the Academy Awards on Sunday, Borisov is up for best supporting actor for the role.The war in Ukraine cut many Russian artists off from the West, but Borisov has been among the few who managed to transcend the dividing lines. He has continued a career in Russia, without endorsing or condemning the war, while in the West, he has evaded being seen as a representative of state-sponsored Russian culture.“Borisov hasn’t picked a side,” said Anton Dolin, a leading Russian film critic. “Maybe he is just very smart, or maybe he thinks he is not smart enough,” Dolin said by phone from Riga, Latvia, where he now lives in exile.“It doesn’t matter,” Dolin added. “His behavior and strategy have been impeccable.”Borisov at the BAFTA Film Awards in London this month. Over the past weeks, he has been on the road campaigning for awards for “Anora” and attending ceremonies.Andy Rain/EPA, via ShutterstockWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Becoming Katharine Graham’ Review: A Newspaper Leader, in Her Voice

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      The sibling filmmakers George and Teddy Kunhardt use a straightforward approach in this documentary about the Washington Post publisher, letting a pioneer shine.To tell the story of Katharine Graham, who led The Washington Post during a pivotal period for the paper and the nation, the sibling filmmakers George and Teddy Kunhardt use a standard approach, interweaving archival material with talking-head interviews. The result is a conventional documentary, and by all means an admiring one. But her story is so compelling — wrenching, inspiring, precedent-setting — that the straightforward account, with its fluidly constructed chronology and Graham’s voice front and center, hits the mark.Graham took the helm of the Post in 1963, after the suicide of her husband, Phil Graham, the dynamic publisher who had been tapped for the role by her father. At the time, Katharine Graham was stepping out of the shadows and confronting the cultural taboo against female bosses. Still, it took her a year to summon the courage to ask a question at an editorial meeting.Soon she’d be presiding over the newspaper’s transition from a local publication to one of national impact as it went head-to-head with the Nixon administration — first when it joined The New York Times in publishing the Pentagon Papers, and then when it led the pack in reporting on the Watergate scandal. Excerpts from Richard Nixon’s secret White House tapes — the gift to historians that keeps on giving — reveal, in conversations spewing misogynistic venom, how intent the president was on destroying Graham and her company.The directors also highlight The Washington Post’s 1975 labor dispute with its printing press operators, hewing closely to the management perspective; a more robust and balanced look would have deepened the documentary, or at least injected a welcome bit of friction into its celebratory mood.This is a strong portrait despite such lapses, in large part because it’s fueled by Graham’s voice, via the audiobook of her autobiography and an ample selection of interviews. (She died in 2001, at 84.) With her distinctive upper-crust inflection and striking candor, she quietly explores her unlikely reinvention from self-doubting wife and daughter to groundbreaking businesswoman. Through her eyes, “Becoming Katharine Graham” illuminates a charged moment in American history.Becoming Katharine GrahamNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. Watch on Prime Video. More

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      ‘A Sloth Story’ Review: Slow Cooking

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      A family of sloths take their food truck to the big city in this animated movie directed by Ricard Cussó and Tania Vincent.The prospect of an animated movie about sloths introduces an invigorating challenge. What’s the best way to spin a comedic children’s story about the slowest-moving mammals on Earth? Sid, the central sloth in the “Ice Age” franchise, is slow of wit but swift in body, while “Zootopia” installed its sloth, Flash, as an unhurried employee of the Department of Mammal Vehicles.“A Sloth Story,” an Australian animated feature directed by Ricard Cussó and Tania Vincent, takes slothful speed and applies it not to gags, but to a sentimental story set in the culinary world. The Romero-Flores family have been in the restaurant business for generations, and are known for their slow cooking. But once the foursome survives a natural disaster that destroys their hometown, they’re forced to take their recipes on the road in a clanking food truck.The movie belongs to “The Tales from Sanctuary City,” an Australian franchise, and like its predecessors, “A Sloth Story” suffers from a plasticky visual design. The characters seem stiff, like action figures, and their food items, meant to look appetizing, are often rendered as colored medallions.The plot is a standard clash between art and commerce, embodied by a restless preteen sloth named Laura (voiced by Teo Vergara) and Dotti (Leslie Jones), a fast-food tycoon cheetah. It does make several gestures at real-world issues, most notably in the opening climate catastrophe and in a scene parodying cultural appropriation in the culinary industry. But “A Sloth Story” mainly sticks to the basics — solidarity, identity, growing pains — in a tale generic enough to match its title.A Sloth StoryRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Gene Hackman’s Career Is a Tribute to the Pugnacious Nature of Surprise

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      He could be both paternal and terrifying, and had the ability to almost goad you into liking men who would otherwise be despicable.When you first see Gene Hackman in “The French Connection,” he’s wearing a Santa suit, conversing with a bunch of kids. It’s a jolly image that runs counter to what we’ll soon come to know about Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle, the porkpie-hat-wearing detective that became one of Hackman’s most notable roles. The Santa disguise starts to peel off as he leaves the children behind to sprint after and brutalize a perp. Kindly Santa, this man is not.But that was the extraordinary power of Hackman, who was found dead Wednesday at his home in Santa Fe., N.M., at the age of 95. Throughout his long career — that was somehow too short, thanks to a conscious retirement — he mixed warmth with menace. He could be paternal as well as terrifying, sometimes all within the same film.Hackman often played men doggedly pursuing impossible goals despite looming threats and their superiors telling them to back off, but there was a doggedness about him, too. He had a pugnacious ability to almost goad you into liking guys who would otherwise be despicable, be they criminals, cops or just absentee fathers. Despite their often unsavory behavior, Hackman made it fun to spend time with these people, even if you might not want to encounter them in real life.Hackman never quite made sense as a movie star. When he was cast alongside Warren Beatty in Arthur Penn’s “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967), the movie that would net him his first Oscar nomination, that became obvious. While Beatty as one of the eponymous robbers was smooth with a luscious mane of black hair, Hackman’s Buck Barrow, Clyde’s brother, was jittery and balding — but no less an entrancing and terrifying presence, with a livewire energy that felt genuinely unmoored.“Bonnie and Clyde” cast members, from left: Hackman, Estelle Parsons, Warren Beatty, Faye Dunaway and Michael J. Pollard.Bettman, via GettyHackman routinely inspired the use of the term “Everyman” in articles, but that seemed like an incomplete way of capturing his appeal. In 1989, The New York Times Magazine qualified that description by calling him “Hollywood’s Uncommon Everyman.” Twelve years later, The Times described him as “Hollywood’s Every Angry Man.” He was an Everyman with an asterisk.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More