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      Disney’s Iger Returns to Familiar Stage, but With Different Challenges

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      The company reports quarterly earnings on Wednesday, and Wall Street is expecting it to lay out a new streaming strategy and operating structure.When it comes to reporting quarterly earnings, Robert A. Iger is an old pro. He has done it 58 times as Disney’s chief executive. But the next one, scheduled for Wednesday, will require him to give a performance for the corporate ages.“It has to be an impactful, meaningful, tone-setting, agenda-changing day,” said Michael Nathanson, an analyst at SVB MoffettNathanson who has followed Disney for 18 years.Another veteran Disney analyst, Jessica Reif Ehrlich of BofA Securities, agreed. “I don’t know that we’re going to see answers to everything, but Iger’s overall messaging is going to be critical,” she said.So, no pressure.On Wednesday, Mr. Iger will publicly face Wall Street and Hollywood for the first time since he came out of retirement to retake the reins of a deeply troubled Disney. In late November, the Disney board fired Bob Chapek as chief executive and rehired Mr. Iger, 71, who ran the company from late 2005 to early 2020. He is also contending with Nelson Peltz, the corporate raider turned activist investor. Mr. Peltz, 80, whose Trian Partners has amassed roughly $1 billion in Disney stock and is fighting for a board seat for himself or his son, wants the world’s largest entertainment company to revamp its streaming business, refocus on profit growth, cut costs, reinstate its dividend and do a much better job at succession planning.Most of those things were in motion at Disney before Mr. Peltz started his proxy battle, and analysts expect Mr. Iger to provide updates on at least some fronts on Wednesday.More on the Walt Disney CompanyLabor Tensions: Unions that represent about 32,000 full-time workers at Disney World said that members had voted overwhelmingly to reject the company’s offer for a new five-year contract.Splash Mountain’s Closure: As Disney takes steps to erase the racist back story of the Walt Disney World ride, some are claiming to be selling water from the attraction online.Return to Office: Starting on March 1, the Walt Disney Company will require employees to report to the office four days a week, a relatively strict policy among large companies.Pricing Policies: After complaints by visitors about the costs at its domestic theme parks, Disney revised policies related to ticketing, hotel parking, ride photos and annual passes.How are the content pipelines to Disney’s streaming services (Disney+, Hulu and Disney+) going to be managed? At 6:30 a.m. on his first day back, Mr. Iger ousted Disney’s top streaming executive and ordered a restructuring of a restructuring that Mr. Chapek had put into place.For months, Disney has been talking about cost cutting and layoffs. Where are they? “This can’t drag on,” Ms. Ehrlich said. “It’s not good for company morale.” (Speaking of morale, some Disney employees have been circulating a petition to protest Mr. Iger’s decision last month to require everyone to report to the office four days a week.)Shareholders are increasingly worried about the decline of Disney’s traditional television business, which includes ABC and 15 cable networks, led by ESPN, Disney Channel, FX, Freeform and National Geographic. Disney’s cable portfolio has held up better than those owned by some rival companies (notably NBCUniversal), but Americans have been cutting the cable cord at an alarming pace — total hookups declined by a record 6.2 percent from October to December.“We need an honest and appropriate view of the future of Disney’s television business,” Mr. Nathanson said. “Is there an asset change? Does spending change? Under Chapek, the messaging was never very clear.”Even in decline, traditional television remains Disney’s largest business, delivering $8.5 billion in operating income in the fiscal year that ended in October.Disney and other old-line media companies are facing a simple equation that has proved astoundingly difficult to solve: Profit from traditional television is declining at a faster rate than streaming losses are moderating. In Disney’s case, traditional television earnings are expected to decline by $1.6 billion in 2023, while losses from streaming will abate by only about $900 million, according to Mr. Nathanson.In November, Disney said that losses from its streaming portfolio totaled $1.5 billion from July through September, compared with $630 million a year earlier.But Mr. Chapek, who led the company’s November earnings call, reiterated a promise that Disney+ would turn a profit by next October. Wall Street has been skeptical of that assertion, and Mr. Iger may revise it on Wednesday, along with guidance that Disney+ would have 215 million to 245 million global subscriptions by 2024. Disney+ currently has about 164 million worldwide.Companies always try to put the rosiest spin possible on numbers when talking to analysts, shareholders and the news media on quarterly earnings conference calls. But the upbeat tone struck by Mr. Chapek in the November session did not sit well given the numbers that Disney was reporting. Along with widening losses in streaming, Disney had disappointing profit margins at its theme park business and missed Wall Street’s overall expectations for both revenue and net income, a rarity for the company. (When one senior Disney executive privately told Mr. Chapek before the call that his planned remarks were too positive, he called her Eeyore, the gloomy donkey from “Winnie the Pooh.”)Mr. Iger will undoubtedly highlight some of Disney’s recent achievements. “Avatar: The Way of Water,” released by Walt Disney Studios, has generated $2.2 billion worldwide since it arrived in theaters on Dec. 16. Disney received more Oscar nominations last month (23) than any other company. Over the end-of-year holidays, Disney’s theme parks were gridlocked, easing fears about consumer belt-tightening.“Despite the macro headwinds, the parks still feel incredibly strong,” Ms. Ehrlich said.But Mr. Iger will also need to contend with a lackluster set of overall numbers, at least if analysts’ forecasts are correct. Analysts are expecting per-share earnings of about 79 cents from Disney, down from $1.06 for the same period a year ago, and revenue of $23.4 billion, up from $21.8 billion a year ago.Analysts polled by FactSet estimate that Disney+ will have 163 million subscribers, a slight erosion from the previous quarter.Mr. Iger will probably not directly address Mr. Peltz’s proxy battle, unless an analyst prods him about it. Disney has already made its position clear, saying in a Jan. 17 securities filing that Mr. Peltz had “no strategy, no operating initiatives, no new ideas and no plan.” In a fresh eruption late last week, Trian said there was an “urgent need” for Disney shareholders to drop Michael B.G. Froman from the company’s board and give the seat to Mr. Peltz or his son. In response, Disney aggressively defended Mr. Froman, a senior Mastercard executive and former U.S. trade representative who has been a Disney director since 2018.Some prominent analysts have taken Disney’s side.“He hasn’t made a good enough case for why he needs a seat on the board,” Mr. Nathanson said, referring to Mr. Peltz.Richard Greenfield, a founder of the LightShed Partners research firm, was one of Mr. Iger’s most ardent critics during his previous tenure at Disney — so much so that Mr. Iger blocked him on Twitter and refused to take questions from him on earnings calls. Mr. Greenfield, however, recently published an aggressive defense of Disney titled “Disney Would Be Wise to Keep Peltz Off the Jedi Council.”Perhaps Mr. Iger will take a question from Mr. Greenfield on Wednesday. More

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      Melinda Dillon, 2-Time Oscar Nominee, Is Dead at 83

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      She was a Broadway star at 23 and then quit acting, but later re-emerged in films like “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “A Christmas Story.”Melinda Dillon, who shot to Broadway stardom at 23, withdrew from acting after a mental breakdown, and then, in her late 30s, staged a comeback, receiving best supporting actress Oscar nominations for her roles in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “Absence of Malice,” died on Jan. 9. She was 83.Her death, which was announced by a cremation service, came to public notice in recent days. The announcement did not specify the cause or location of her death.Ms. Dillon was best known for playing mothers coping with grave or silly problems in popular movies of the 1970s and ’80s. In “Close Encounters,” the enduring Steven Spielberg hit from 1977, she played an artist and single mother living on a rural farm who watches her son get abducted by aliens.She played more explicitly archetypal mothers in “Harry and the Hendersons” (1987), a family comedy about having Bigfoot as your pet, and “A Christmas Story” (1983), a series of vignettes depicting an all-American Christmas in midcentury Indiana.The latter film, long a classic of the holiday season on television, inspired a 2020 tribute in The New York Times, which hailed Ms. Dillon’s character, a frazzled Everymom, as a “damn hero.”In “Absence of Malice” (1981), Ms. Dillon played against maternal type as a Catholic woman who must admit to having an abortion.Her star turn of that era came late for an actress — in Ms. Dillon’s late 30s and 40s — and it constituted an unexpected re-emergence, following a crisis that seemed to halt her promising career.Ms. Dillon in the 1983 film “A Christmas Story” with, clockwise from left, Peter Billingsley, Ian Petrella and Darren McGavin.PictureLux, via AlamyMelinda Ruth Clardy was born in Hope, Ark., on Oct. 13, 1939. Her father, Floyd, worked as a traveling salesman, and her mother, Noreen, was a volunteer at a U.S. Army hospital. Noreen fell in love with Wilbur Dillon, a wounded veteran, and Melinda’s parents divorced when she was 5.She took her stepfather’s surname and had the peripatetic upbringing of a child of the military, living for a while in Germany. She left home at 16 and soon began pursuing an acting career.She moved to New York City in 1962, fresh out of acting school. In just a matter of weeks, she landed one of four parts in the Broadway debut of Edward Albee’s play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”She played Honey, the wife in a young couple invited to the home of an older couple for a drink. The premiere, on Oct. 13, fell on her 23rd birthday.“Critics unanimously hailed her performance as superb,” The Daily News announced in a profile published that month that described Ms. Dillon’s “overnight rise from obscurity to stardom.”Her agent, Peter Witt, told The News, “What has happened to her is a one in a million shot paying off the first time out in the theater.”In a 2014 New York Times review of a recording of the play’s original cast, the theater critic Charles Isherwood called the production “one of the seminal theatrical events of the 20th century” and said the actors’ performances, including Ms. Dillon’s, “still feel fresh, fierce and definitive.”But as time went on, the pressure bore down on Ms. Dillon. Sometimes she would perform in a three-hour matinee in the afternoon, then study acting with Lee Strasberg for two hours, and then do another three-hour performance in the evening. Talking to sophisticated, powerful people in the New York theater world terrified her.Ms. Dillon in 1998. After suffering a breakdown, she said: “I had had the American dream — to go to New York and study with Lee Strasberg. I guess I just wasn’t prepared for it all to happen so quickly.”CBS, via Getty ImagesAfter nine months, she left the play and checked into the mental ward of Gracie Square Hospital in New York, where she found herself feeling suicidal.“I had had the American dream — to go to New York and study with Lee Strasberg,” she told The New York Times in 1976. “I guess I just wasn’t prepared for it all to happen so quickly.”After her release from the hospital, she took a few acting roles but then sought safe harbor in marriage, to the actor Richard Libertini, and in motherhood, raising their son, also named Richard.But she did not find contentment in life away from the spotlight. By the mid-1970s, she was single and being cast in multiple major Hollywood productions, including “Slap Shot,” a 1977 film starring Paul Newman.“I spent 10 and a half hours naked in bed with Paul and absolutely loved it,” she told People magazine in 1978.After the apex of her Hollywood career, she continued acting, and into the 21st century she occasionally made appearances on television shows like “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.”Information about her survivors was not immediately available.Ms. Dillon sang in the choir of a Methodist church as an adult, and she threw herself into film roles as mothers. But she came to reject what she had once sought in the life of a traditional suburban housewife.“I left home so early that when I found somebody who wanted to take care of me, I just stopped everything; I could have soared ahead — I really know that — and I chose not to,” she told The Times. In marriage, “I got buried alive,” she continued. “That’s what got me to act again.” More

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      Directors of ‘Skinamarink’ and ‘The Outwaters’ on Horror Experiments

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      Kyle Edward Ball, the filmmaker behind “Skinamarink,” and Robbie Banfitch, who made “The Outwaters,” talk about their creepy, buzzy movies.Universal’s evil robot movie “M3gan” is one of the first big hits of 2023. But two new indie horror films are generating buzz too, even though they were made for next to nothing and are driven by distorted audio, disorienting cuts and other defiantly experimentalist techniques.Kyle Edward Ball’s “Skinamarink” is about two children who encounter a sinister entity in their darkened home. (It’s currently in theaters and streaming on Shudder.) The film channels CreepyPasta videos and experimentalists like Takashi Ito, whose 1984 short film “Ghost” looks like “Skinamarink” on uppers. Ball’s film, which had a $15,000 budget, has made more than $1.8 million at the North American box office.Robbie Banfitch’s “The Outwaters” is about a group of friends who encounter a bloodthirsty force during a trip to the desert. (It opens in theaters on Feb. 9 and will later stream on Screambox.) Also made for about $15,000, it starts as a found footage film but pivots into a sustained, confrontational barrage of blood-soaked fast cuts and panicked sound design. For horror fans this is a love language.Critics have been mostly positive. Writing in The Times, Jeannette Catsoulis said “Skinamarink” is “as difficult to penetrate as it is to forget.” Early reviews for “The Outwaters” are glowing but sound like police reports, with words like “an assault” and “suffocating.” Again, for horror fans these are come-ons.Who are these two directors, and why are their experimental movies getting noticed? Instead of interviewing them myself, I asked them to interview each other. I listened as they spoke over video: Ball, 31, was at home in his native Edmonton, Alberta, and Banfitch, 37 and originally from New Brunswick, N.J., was in Los Angeles. Their conversation has been condensed and edited.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.Meet the Newer, Bolder Michelle Williams: Why she made the surprising choice to skip the supporting actress category and run for best actress.Best-Actress Battle Royal: A banner crop of leading ladies like Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.‘Glass Onion’ and Rian Johnson: The director explains why he sold the “Knives Out” franchise to Netflix, and how he feels about its theatrical test.A Supporting-Actress Underdog: In “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” don’t discount the pivotal presence of Stephanie Hsu.ROBBIE BANFITCH Kyle, if you were a collage, what would you be made of?KYLE EDWARD BALL It would be like a 90s high school girl style collage. But also my favorite movies: “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Black Christmas,” “The Shining,” “The Birds,” “Woman in the Dunes.” I’d put in movies I watch as comfort: the 1931 “Dracula,” “Black Sabbath” by Mario Bava.OK, so Robbie, what made you want to go into filmmaking?A scene from “Skinamarink.”IFC Films/ShudderBANFITCH I knew I wanted to make movies around 7 or 8. What made me want to get into it was “Jaws” and “Jurassic Park,” Steven Spielberg’s films. They exhilarated me.BALL Why did you want to go into experimental horror territory?BANFITCH I never thought of “The Outwaters” as experimental as I was making it. The logic of the story — what would be filmed or not in the situation — makes it experimental in parts. But that was never the plan.All right. Tell me about your influences during high school.BALL I went to a fairly L.G.B.T.-friendly public school in Edmonton called the Victoria School of the Arts. I also discovered a video store called the Alternative Video Spot that has since closed. I gravitated toward edgier stuff: Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, John Waters. But David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick are the two guys I want to emulate. They pushed boundaries without being pretentious and still reached an audience. You can do that as long as you give them something worthwhile.Growing up, did you look up to gay filmmakers?BANFITCH I don’t know that I did. But I did look up to the character David in “Six Feet Under.” In the beginning, he’s still in the closet, living with his mom. I was watching “Six Feet Under” while closeted, living with my mom and watching the show with her. He came out to his mom and then right after, my mom asked me if I was gay but I said no. But I believe she’d already found my “Queer as Folk” box set under my bunk bed. She knew, but she was letting me take my time.What’s at the heart of “Skinamarink”?BALL I have a canned answer that evolved out of doing interviews: I had a YouTube channel where people would comment on things that scared them. But as I kept giving that answer, I realized there are a lot of things that inspired this movie that I’m not even comfortable to say. At the heart of it is pain and sadness and a little bit of anger.Do you think your movie would have been better or scarier if you had a multimillion-dollar budget?BANFITCH I don’t think it would have. The whole point was to feel raw and unfinished.A scene from “The Outwaters.”CinedigmBALL I feel the same. It works because it’s small and contained. Horror is one of those examples where the glossier something is the less scary it is.Do you like delving into what people say about your film online?BANFITCH I’m interested to know what people think but I’m happy with the movie as it is. The only thing that annoys me is when people make an assumption that’s not true but state it as fact. For example: This is obviously a rich kid who used his parents’ money. It’s like no, I worked at Greenpeace and the movie was made on a budget after I paid my rent and ate from my nonprofit paycheck.BALL Both of our movies are polarizing. How do you process hate your movie gets?BANFITCH I read it and think about it. But it doesn’t bother me.BALL You’re pretty thick-skinned. I take everything personally.BANFITCH I’m thin-skinned about plenty of things but not this movie.BALL The only thing I don’t super take personal are the professional reviews because they plead their case fairly well. Except the one from The New Yorker because it felt like, oh, a poor made a movie. I may have been taking that the wrong way.Truth be told, the other day I said to my boyfriend, oh, The New Yorker didn’t like it and then I thought, even that’s incredibly privileged. Five months ago I would have been aghast that I was saying, oh, The New York Times liked it but The New Yorker didn’t, like I’m Scorsese or something. More

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      Reflections on Star Quality From a Golden Age of ‘Junk TV’

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      In a new memoir, a longtime casting director revels in memories of a bygone Hollywood, matching actors with the roles that made them stars.Stop to consider the movie and TV characters that are most permanently seared into the American psyche, and their impact is rarely a function of screen time. Usually, the effect on audiences is immediate: Think Tim Curry’s first appearance in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” or Stockard Channing breezing into Rydell High alongside her fellow Pink Ladies.Whether they were memorable because of their abrasiveness (Danny DeVito in “Taxi”), their rebellious streak (Ms. Channing in “Grease”) or their ability to solve a crisis with a slice of cheesecake (the titular golden girls of “The Golden Girls”), every actor who eventually went on to make Hollywood history first had to clear the hurdle of a casting department. And for many of the biggest movies and TV shows of the last half century, Joel Thurm was a central part of those teams, handpicking the actors whose performances would resonate for decades to come.In his newly released memoir, “Sex, Drugs & Pilot Season: Confessions of a Casting Director,” Mr. Thurm, 80, details what he saw in stars like John Travolta, whom he cast in “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble.”“I knew he wasn’t Vinnie Barbarino,” Mr. Thurm said of managing to look past the actor’s biggest role to date, on the ABC sitcom “Welcome Back, Kotter.”Being able to spot the je ne sais quoi that many refer to as star quality is a skill, one that Mr. Thurm has capitalized on throughout his 35-year career.“The best example I have is when someone walks into a room and has something special that you haven’t seen in other people,” Mr. Thurm said in an interview this week. “Are they astoundingly beautiful? Are they so incredibly good-looking? They could be bad-looking! It’s individual; you can’t really explain it.”Mr. Thurm had a hand in casting some of the biggest hits of film and TV, including “The Love Boat,” “The Golden Girls,” “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” and “Airplane!”Charles Sykes/Getty ImagesThat “it” factor is the common denominator among all the stars who go on to become household names, according to Mr. Thurm, who said he had seen it immediately in Farrah Fawcett when she auditioned for the role of a stewardess on “The Bob Newhart Show.” She didn’t get the part, but Mr. Thurm said he had known “there was something special about her.” He also instantly saw it in a 17-year-old John Travolta when he met him in New York.“He had a presence, and you can feel it,” Mr. Thurm said. “They had that little extra something.”At the time, Mr. Travolta was most popular for his role on “Welcome Back, Kotter,” and producers would not move ahead with “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble,” a TV movie, unless a big star signed on to the project, Mr. Thurm said. He spent a lot of time with Mr. Travolta’s manager sitting on his “back deck getting melanoma and reading scripts,” Mr. Thurm said. When the script came up, they both lobbied Mr. Travolta, who agreed to sign on. Mr. Thurm later cast Mr. Travolta in “Grease,” and the rest is Hollywood history.Mr. Thurm, who retired from a full-time casting position with NBC in 1990, hasn’t kept especially close tabs on the stars of today, but he does know enough to recognize that they tend to skew young.“They’re all 12-year-olds,” he said. “I have only seen them once they are already stars. Ariana Grande, she’s already a star.”Whether or not star quality has changed since Mr. Thurm started his career, Hollywood itself certainly has. In addition to snippets of back-room scenes detailing how some of TV’s most beloved characters came to appear on some of America’s favorite sitcoms, “Sex, Drugs & Pilot Season” is also filled with personal anecdotes that would — at minimum — raise eyebrows in a world reshaped by the #MeToo movement.It’s difficult — painful, even — to imagine a world in which Tim Curry never put on the chunky pearl necklace of Dr. Frank-N-Furter. In that sense, the most essential duty of a casting director is to save us all from what might not have been.United Archives/Getty ImagesAs a gay man living in Hollywood in the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, Mr. Thurm often found himself in situations that almost certainly wouldn’t fly today — like massaging the actor Robert Reed’s back after he had to undergo several hair treatments for his role “The Boy in The Plastic Bubble.”“I started to rub his back, then I rubbed, you know, started rubbing a little lower,” Mr. Thurm said of Mr. Reed, best known for playing Mike Brady in “The Brady Bunch.” “He was just miserable on the set because he was not used to not being the center of attention.”In his memoir, Mr. Thurm also details an encounter with his teenage idol, Rock Hudson. At a party with other gay men in Hollywood, Mr. Hudson motioned to Mr. Thurm to follow him to a room upstairs.“I was so anxious and nervous that my body below the waist could not cooperate,” Mr. Thurm wrote.It was a moment he has never forgotten.“I saw every single movie that he ever did and so even to find myself at that party, I thought was amazing,” Mr. Thurm said. “This is my introduction to Hollywood.”Besides detailing his sexcapades, Mr. Thurm also takes full accountability for “the damage you may have suffered while watching David Hasselhoff,” he wrote. He initially cast Mr. Hasselhoff as Snapper Foster on “The Young and the Restless” in 1975. He later cast him in “Knight Rider” — a high-water mark in what he described as an era of “junk TV” — after a contentious standoff with producers, who originally wanted Laurence Olivier. (“Yes, David Hasselhoff and Laurence Olivier on the same list,” he wrote.)The memoir is not just about Mr. Thurm’s dealings in Hollywood but his upbringing: growing up on a kosher milk farm in East New York. Attending Hunter College in Manhattan when it was nearly an all-girls school. Hanging out in Greenwich Village in its bohemian heyday. Flunking out of college and traveling through Italy in his early 20s.“To me, it was just my experiences — you know, growth going through life and growing up,” Mr. Thurm said. “I have no regrets. Nobody died.” More

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      Claudia Cardinale Gets MoMA Tribute for Film Career

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      Ahead of a MoMA retrospective, the actress reflected on her career, which includes over 100 films and many classics of Italian cinema.On a recent afternoon in Rome, Claudia Cardinale recalled the many heartthrobs she worked with during her more than six-decade movie career, and let out a full-throated laugh.“And they also wanted to make love with me,” she said, “but I always refused.”Over the years, the fresh-faced beauty — who David Niven, her co-star in an early “Pink Panther” movie, once described as Italy’s best invention besides spaghetti — had given the cold shoulder to more than one famous screen Casanova, Cardinale said in an interview. “They tried,” she added. “I turned down seducers.”Then she laughed her mischievous laugh again.Cardinale, 84, was in Rome last month for the Italian presentation of a newly restored version of Luigi Comencini’s 1963 film “La ragazza di Bube” (“Bebo’s Girl”), about a small-town girl who stands by her man, even after he is convicted of a crime and goes to jail.“Bebo’s Girl,” which earned Cardinale her first prestigious acting award, Italy’s Nastro d’Argento for best actress, will be shown on Friday at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the first in a 23-film retrospective honoring the Tunisian-born Italian actress that runs through Feb. 21. It is one of a handful of times that the museum has presented a tribute to a living actor in its more than 90-year history.“Beautiful actresses come and go,” Joshua Siegel, a MoMA curator, said in video message shown at the Rome screening. “But they usually don’t endure over a period of some 60, 65 years.”Cardinale with Fabio Rinaudo at the opening night of “8 ½,” in Rome, in 1963. Archivio Luce CinecittàCardinale said she would not be in New York for the retrospective; she no longer travels like she used to. It tires her — she now uses a cane to get around — and she prefers to stay out of the limelight.Cardinale was in the public eye long enough, starring in more than 100 films since 1956. For many film buffs, she is best remembered for her roles in Italian cinema classics: as the young wife Ginetta in Luchino Visconti’s “Rocco and His Brothers”; as Angelica, a commoner whose vitality and beauty seduces Sicilian aristocracy in Visconti’s “The Leopard”; as the enigmatic Claudia in Federico Fellini’s “8 ½,”; or as the feisty Jill, the widow with a ranch to protect in Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West.”She also has boasting rights from her star turn in Werner Herzog’s “Fitzcarraldo,” a legendarily difficult movie that was shot in the Peruvian jungle and described in The New York Times as a favorite of “connoisseurs of production disasters,” and the movie and its making as “fables of daft aspiration.”Cardinale has said that “Fitzcarraldo” was the adventure of her life, but during an interview last month, she said she had no particular favorites. “My God, I’ve done some many, I don’t know which one I prefer,” she said, and laughed again. “Maybe ‘Once Upon a Time in the West,’” she said, “and then so many others.”Cardinale in “Once Upon a Time in The West.”Paramount Pictures, via Everett CollectionThe MoMA tribute, organized with Cinecittà, Italy’s national film company, includes some of Cardinale’s better known performances. But for the occasion, Cinecittà also restored three works less likely to be known to American audiences: “Bebo’s Girl,” but also Marco Ferreri’s 1972 “The Audience,” about a man’s obsession with meeting with the pope, and Pasquale Squitieri’s 1990 “Atto di Dolore,” about a widow whose son is a drug addict.Though Cardinale’s name will forever be associated with classics of Italian cinema, she spoke little Italian when she first set foot there in 1957.Cardinale was born in Tunisia in 1938, into a family of Sicilian immigrants that had settled there decades before. “I still feel a little bit Tunisian,” Cardinale told the news agency ANSA in May at a ceremony to name a street in her honor in the port town La Goulette, near Tunis.In 1957, she won the Most Beautiful Italian in Tunisia contest, which came with what turned out to be her ticket to stardom: a trip to the Venice Film Festival.Cardinale on the set of the film “Austerlitz” by Abel Gance (1960).Archivio Luce CinecittàIn “Claudia Cardinale: The Indomitable,” a book published by Cinecittà and Electa to coincide with the MoMA tribute, the author and critic Masolino D’Amico recalls being at that festival and seeing Cardinale for the first time, “splendid in all her youthfulness,” wearing an emerald green bikini and posing for the paparazzi.“She seemed to think that small shower of camera clicks was like a game,” Masolino writes. “She was not — I understand this clearly now — trying to be sexy, and maybe not even attractive. She was simply happy to be there.”In Venice, she caught the eye of Franco Cristaldi, at the time one of Italy’s most important producers, who, in Pygmalion fashion, transformed the young ingénue into an in-demand movie star. He also became her life partner, adopting her son, Patrick Cristaldi. Now 64, he was initially passed off as her brother so as not to crack her “virginal feel and glow,” or to scandalize society, Cardinale’s daughter, Claudia Squitieri said.Stardom had a price. Cristaldi demanded hard work and discipline, and in 1962 drafted a contract that oversaw every aspect of the actress’s life, professional and private. She accepted, if reluctantly: Her family depended on her, and she had a child to raise.That life ended when she met the director Pasquale Squitieri in 1973 on the set of “I guappi,” (“Blood Brothers”) and the two fell madly in love. Their careers took a hit: Cristaldi was a powerful producer in Italy whom industry people feared crossing.“Claudia Cardinale: The Indomitable,” a book published by Cinecittà and Electa to coincide with the MoMA tribute. via Puntoe VirgolaCardinale would make nine films with Squitieri, even after she moved to Paris and he remained in Rome. Never married, they eventually split, but remained close.Claudia Squitieri and Patrick Cristaldi now live with their mother in a house near Fontainebleau, France, where Cardinale has created a foundation to support two causes close to her heart: women’s rights and the environment. Cardinale has been a UNESCO good will ambassador since 2000, for campaigning work to improve the status of women and girls, and she is the honorary president of Green Cross Italy, an environment advocacy group that sponsors an award for sustainable films at the Venice Film Festival. The foundation is “something to continue her shine,” said Squitieri, who runs the organization for her mother.Cardinale said she was very close to Squitieri. “I am lucky to have this daughter, who I adore,” she said. “She looks after me; she looks after everything.”Because Cardinale won’t be in New York this week, Squitieri will do the honors. On Friday, the “Bebo’s Girl” screening will be followed by “Un Cardinale donna” (“A Woman Cardinal”), a whimsical short featuring the actress, produced for the retrospective by Manuel Maria Perrone.Speaking at the film’s Rome premiere, Perrone said that “dealing with an idol, with such a strong icon, is something extremely difficult, even fragile.”“She’s been doing this her whole life,” he said. “Being an icon is her job.”Claudia CardinaleFeb. 3 through Feb. 21, at the Museum of Modern Art; moma.org. More

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      ‘Godland’ Review: Another of God’s Lonely Men Goes Amok (Spiritually)

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      In this striking drama set in the late 19th century, a Danish priest travels to Iceland and is gradually undone by a world he can’t understand.Soon after the Danish priest at the center of “Godland” staggers onto Iceland for the first time, he falls to his knees. For the rest of this sly, brutal movie he will keep on staggering and falling, overcome by the harsh weather, the unforgiving land, his difficult venture and, most crucially, his vainglorious ego. He’s been selected to establish a new church in a small Icelandic community, but somewhere along his travels he has forgotten that crucial lesson about pride, destruction and haughty spirits.A story of faith and struggle set in the late 19th century, “Godland” tracks the priest, Lucas (an effective Elliott Crosset Hove), as he sails to Iceland, which he trudges across by horse, foot and finally stretcher. Outwardly, his mission is familiar. The church will promote the faith and provide services to the coastal flock, a commission that he undertakes with confidence, a stack of heavy books and a large, cumbersome still camera that he straps to his back (his cross to bear). He hopes to photograph the people that he meets during his expedition, a ludicrous, paradoxical idea for a man who proves wholly incapable of seeing the world around him.The rough beauty of that world is crucial to the movie’s appeal and its ideas. The writer-director Hlynur Palmason was born in Iceland and he makes quick, shrewd use of the country’s natural attractions from the moment Lucas lurches on a moodily gray beach, the wind lashing his thin, black-clad body. “You must adapt to the circumstances of the country and its people,” an older priest had warned Lucas, whose overweening confidence remains unshaken even when he hears that a volcano has recently erupted on the island. Like innumerable travelers, he has set out to conquer a land that won’t easily submit.It’s summer when Lucas arrives in Iceland and sets off on horseback with a half-dozen others, including a translator (Hilmar Gudjonsson) and a watchful local guide, Ragnar (Ingvar Sigurdsson). Across a wild, geographically diverse expanse of lowlands, plateaus and jagged mountains, the party pushes relentlessly forward. It’s a hard and perilous excursion, one made increasingly more difficult by Lucas, whose self-confidence — inborn or instilled — rapidly hardens into dangerous willfulness. As Palmason steadily paints a portrait of the country with one panoramic image after another, Lucas’s mind and physical health crumble. He makes reckless decisions, endangers others and prays for deliverance.Built on visual and thematic contrasts, spirit and flesh included, the bulk of the story is roughly divided between Lucas’s journey to the coast and what happens after he arrives. The journey is the strongest, most revelatory section, and the land’s extremes — its beauties and perils, its mossy-green stretches and outcroppings of black lava, its depthless gorges and sweeping plains — set the tone and mood while revealing Lucas’s character facet by facet. Working with a boxy aspect ratio and making expressive use of long shots that can turn travelers into specks, Palmason underscores the grandeur of this place and the puniness of those traversing it.“Godland” gestures at several intersecting themes — belief, the struggle to hold onto faith, the impermanence of being — with greater suggestiveness than depth. It’s a sharp, dryly funny, at times cruel exploration of human arrogance and frailty. And while it can be read as a critical commentary on organized religion (by all means, do), Palmason’s primary focus throughout remains on Lucas’s individual failings, his sour disposition, reckless impatience and stubbornness. He’s a funny-strange, sometimes ridiculous, off-putting character, and Palmason and his actor’s boldest touch is that they never try to make you like Lucas, which leaves you wondering where you should park your sympathies.That uncertainty builds as the journey continues, nicely complicating the story and imbuing it with an unsettling thrum of tension. Is Lucas a fool or simply foolish, a villain or victim? Palmason continues teasing these questions after the priest and the other travelers arrive. There, in an overextended final stretch, Lucas oversees the church construction and enters into a progressively tricky relationship with a family that has a restless daughter of marriageable age (Vic Carmen Sonne) and a sharp-eyed patriarch (the quietly charismatic Jacob Hauberg Lohmann).The final section of “Godland” is engaging and has a persuasively rooted sense of a people and a place as well as some self-conscious filmmaking flourishes (including hardworking time-lapse images of a dead horse decaying over the seasons). Even so, this later stretch doesn’t productively expand on everything that has come earlier during Lucas’s journey — that defining interlude when he encountered the natural world and its splendors, and catastrophically turned the Earth’s divinity into self-aggrandizing tribulation.GodlandNot rated. In Danish and Icelandic, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 23 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Una Vita Difficile’ Review: Life Comes at You Fast

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      Alberto Sordi stars as an idealistic Italian Everyman caught up in a changing postwar world in this rediscovered comedy from the ’60s.“Una Vita Difficile” (“A Difficult Life”) slides and skitters over nearly two decades of Italian history, from the partisan battles with German occupiers after the fall of Mussolini to the economic boom of the 1960s. It’s a movie — released in Italy in 1961 and only now making its way to North American screens — about a great many wonderful and vexing things, including love, honor, money, cinema, politics and Alberto Sordi’s remarkable chin.Most obviously and poignantly, it’s about the experience of time: how the months fly and the hours drag; how life changes all at once and not at all; how hope mutates into regret. Consider just two small, memorable moments, which can also stand as evidence of the wisdom and ingenuity of Dino Risi, the director.At the end of an early scene in an old mill near Lake Como, the camera’s gaze comes to rest on an intact prosciutto suspended from a rafter over an unused bed. The image fades out, and in the next shot a picked-over bone — all that’s left of the ham — hangs over the bed, which is now occupied by Elena (Lea Massari), an innkeeper’s daughter, and Silvio (Sordi, his chin temporarily bearded), an antifascist fighter. A whole love story has unfolded in the slicing of the meat and the splicing of the film, a courtship and consummation in the blink of an eye.A few years later, the war is over, Elena is pregnant and she and Silvio are scraping by in Rome, where he writes for a left-wing newspaper. They run into an aristocratic so-and-so from Elena’s hometown up North, and find themselves invited to a formal dinner hosted by stalwarts of the old royalist order. It happens to be the day of the referendum that would abolish the monarchy and establish Italy as a republic. As news of the voting result comes in over the radio, the assorted members of the hereditary elite lose their appetites and shuffle away from the table, leaving Silvio and Elena, the only anti-monarchists at the party, their plates heaped with pasta and meatballs. They toast a bright, democratic future.Sometimes history breaks in their favor: love, valor and salumi in the mountains; democracy and pappardelle in the capital city. But the movie, a stellar specimen of commedia all’italiana by a true maestro of the form, is called “A Difficult Life” for a reason. Nothing goes quite as planned, and Silvio’s irrepressible jollity is no match for the tides and crosscurrents of postwar Italy. (The newly restored version opening at Film Forum this week comes with a helpful introductory note identifying important dates and events). The early years of the Republic bring hardship, disappointment and humiliation.Silvio, like Sordi a native Roman with a big heart and a booming voice, does not exactly cut a tragic figure. This is a comedy, after all, and even at his bravest he isn’t hewed from heroic stock. Elena, a person of lofty dignity and weary tenderness, demonstrates finer courage when she brains a German soldier with an iron, and perhaps greater fortitude as she weathers the misfortunes of their life together.Some of these are Silvio’s fault. Some can be blamed on Elena and her starchy mother (Lina Valonghi), who push Silvio away from journalism and politics toward a respectable career as an architect for which he is utterly unsuited. But the deeper source of his difficulty, and of the pathos that haunts the comedy, lies in a society seemingly determined to betray its own traditions and values. Political repression, mindless consumerism and the hardening of class divisions conspire to threaten Silvio’s happiness and rob him of Elena’s love.Sordi was one of Italy’s biggest movie stars of the boom years — he starred in “Il Boom” (1963), Vittorio De Sica’s definitive satire of the era’s skewed values — though not as internationally celebrated as some of his compatriots. He was a marvelous paradox: an alienated Everyman, a dignified buffoon, an avatar of ordinary Italianness menaced on one side by modern materialism and on the other by the encrusted legacies of feudalism and fascism.It’s a lot for one man — or one movie — to handle, and a smoother, sharper version of the same story could have been told with a different actor at the center, a more inward-turned, psychologically refined performer. But the disproportion that Sordi brings to the part is essential to Risi’s argument, which is precisely that Silvio doesn’t fit the scale of his times. He is at once too big and too modest, too simple in his needs and too unruly in the way he expresses them.Right after “Una Vita Difficile,” Risi made “Il Sorpasso,” a road comedy starring Jean-Louis Trintignant and Vittorio Gassman that has long been regarded as a classic. The original English title of that film was “The Easy Life.” Federico Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” (“The Sweet Life”) dates from the same period. So much life! All of these movies pulsate with the breathlessness and disorientation of a country simultaneously grappling with the past and speeding toward a confusing future. “Una Vita Difficile” belongs in their company. It also stands by itself as an exuberant bad time, a pity party that has no business being so much fun.Una Vita DifficileNot rated. In Italian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Blind Man Who Did Not Want to See Titanic’ Review: Just Like the Movies

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      In this wry Finnish drama, a disabled man embarks on a journey to visit his girlfriend, encountering inaccessible infrastructure and evil goons along the way.The opening scenes of Teemu Nikki’s film tell us two things about its protagonist, Jaakko (Petri Poikolainen): first, that he’s a cinephile who can’t get through a single conversation without referencing John Carpenter; second, that he is blind and uses a wheelchair.“The Blind Man Who Did Not Want to See Titanic” is a darkly comic drama about how Jaakko navigates life as a disabled man in Finland, yet his disability isn’t his defining characteristic. His wry judgments on movies are probably what you’ll remember most vividly about him, including his description of James Cameron’s “Titanic” as “the most expensive and calculated turd ever.”Jaakko may pretend he’s above sap, but he’s a romantic at heart. His daily phone conversations with his long-distance girlfriend, Sirpa (Marjaana Maijala), are as tender as they are witty, and when Sirpa’s cancer worsens, Jaakko embarks on a journey befitting a Hollywood caper: He sets off to visit her on his own, fumbling his way from taxi to train through a dispiritingly inaccessible urban landscape.Like his character, Poikolainen has multiple sclerosis, which has caused vision loss and partial paralysis. Nikki places us squarely within his perspective: The camera stays close to Jaakko, always at his eye level, blurring everything around him. But the script struggles to channel the character’s wonderfully playful, acerbic spirit.The obstacles Jaakko encounters range from banally outrageous (malfunctioning elevators at train stations) to cinematically outrageous (evil, goofy muggers wielding knives). Jaakko can’t help referencing “Fargo” even as he’s being threatened, but rather than follow that cue and dial up the whimsy, the plot eventually thins out into dissatisfying contrivances. Jaakko deserves better — and the charming, arresting Poikolainen does, too.The Blind Man Who Did Not Want to See TitanicNot rated. In Finnish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. In theaters. More