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      Book Review: ‘The Director,’ by Daniel Kehlmann

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      A new novel considers the perplexing life and times of G.W. Pabst, the Austrian filmmaker who worked in the shadow of the Reich.THE DIRECTOR, by Daniel Kehlmann; translated by Ross BenjaminMovie stars and Nazis are irresistible ingredients in any book. “The Director,” Daniel Kehlmann’s smartly entertaining new novel about the great Austrian filmmaker G.W. Pabst, offers both, detailing their once intimate, often symbiotic ties. Here, Greta Garbo and Joseph Goebbels have just two degrees of separation between them.Pabst (1885-1967), along with Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau, was one of Weimar cinema’s big three — the most cosmopolitan as well as politically engaged of the trio. Considered a leftist, Pabst achieved renown for a series of socially conscious and sexually frank silent movies, including “Secrets of a Soul” (1926), which fiddled with Freud, and “Pandora’s Box” (1929), the film that established its star Louise Brooks as the era’s most devastating flapper.Red Pabst, as he was called early in his career, made a brilliant adjustment to sound with the antiwar film “Westfront 1918” (1930) and “The Threepenny Opera” (1931). But he was a bad fit in Hollywood, where, speaking little English, he arrived by way of France after the Nazis came to power. He then haplessly returned to Austria, now part of the Reich, perhaps to visit his ailing mother. Trapped by the outbreak of war, he remained there, making several apolitical “prestige” films for the Nazis and forever compromising his reputation.Pabst was “a precise and exacting artist,” according to the film scholar Eric Rentschler, as well as “an extremely private person who did not readily divulge his thoughts.” Kehlmann’s Pabst is a gifted psychologist when it comes to directing actors but a stranger to himself in all other matters, a genius who thinks in motion pictures but is unable to direct the flow of his own life.The novel’s German title, “Lichtspiel” (“light play,” a term for movies), evokes its fluid phantasmagoria: “The Director” is a book of dreams and of dreams within dreams. Indeed, beginning with a chapter in which Pabst’s fictional assistant director is hustled into a disastrous TV interview to reminisce about his former boss, the novel careens from nightmare to nightmare. Some, like the opener, are absurd. Others, like Pabst’s complete inability to navigate a Hollywood party, are painfully comic. Still others, once Pabst and his family return to the Reich, are terrifying.Was Pabst an opportunist, a victim of circumstance, a cowardly practitioner of anticipatory obedience or simply a solipsistic accommodationist? Although he failed to comprehend Hollywood, he learns the rules of the Reich when summoned to the office of propaganda, led in the novel by the unnamed “Minister.” (Suave, menacing and hideously self-assured, Goebbels handily directs the director.)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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      Trump Called for Movie Tariffs After a Meeting With Jon Voight

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      The president’s call for tariffs caused confusion in Hollywood, which has seen a steep drop-off in local film and television production.President Trump’s call to impose steep tariffs on movies “produced in Foreign Lands” came after he met at Mar-a-Lago over the weekend with the actor Jon Voight, whom he named a “special ambassador” to Hollywood this year.The president’s social media post on Sunday that called for a 100 percent tariff on films produced outside the United States caused confusion in Hollywood, which has lost a great deal of local film and television production to states and nations that offer rich tax credits and cheaper labor. While few in the industry said that they understood Mr. Trump’s proposal, some worried that tariffs could cause more harm than good and called instead for federal help in the form of tax credits.Mr. Voight and Steven Paul, his longtime manager, met with Mr. Trump over the weekend and shared their plans to increase domestic film production, according to a statement from SP Media Group, Mr. Paul’s firm. They suggested federal tax incentives, changes to the tax code, co-production treaties with other nations and infrastructure subsidies, the statement said.The proposal also included “tariffs in certain limited circumstances,” the statement said, adding that it was under review.Mr. Voight made the rounds of Hollywood last week, meeting with the Motion Picture Association, Hollywood’s top lobbying group; various unions; and the state representatives who are pushing bills to increase state tax credits for the film and television industries. State Senator Ben Allen, a Democrat whose district includes Hollywood, met with the actor to discuss how to increase production in the state, a representative said.Mr. Voight emerged from those meetings with two one-page documents drafted by the M.P.A. One letter encourages lawmakers in Washington to adopt a manufacturing and production incentive to encourage more domestic employment. The other asks Congress to extend a section of the tax code that expires at the end of 2025 and allows certain film and television expenses to be deducted in the year they are incurred.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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      The 50 Best Movies on Max Right Now

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      In addition to new Warner and HBO films, the streamer has a treasure trove of Golden Age classics, indie flicks and foreign films. Start with these.When HBO Max debuted in May 2020, subscribers rightfully expected (and got) the formidable catalog of prestige television associated with the HBO brand. But its movie library drew from a much deeper well. Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns HBO, is a huge conglomerate, and its premiere streaming service comprises decades of titles from Warner Bros., Turner Classic Movies, Studio Ghibli and more. Viewed in that light, its recent rebranding as Max seems fitting.That means a lot of large-scale fantasy series and selections from the DC extended universe. Max is also an education in Golden Age Hollywood classics and in independent and foreign auteurs like Federico Fellini, Satyajit Ray and John Cassavetes. The list below is an effort to recommend a diverse range of movies — old and new, foreign and domestic, all-ages and adults-only — that cross genres and cultures while appealing to casual and serious movie-watchers alike. (Note: Streaming services sometimes remove titles or change starting dates without notice.)Here are our lists of the best movies and TV shows on Netflix, the best movies on Amazon Prime Video and the best of everything on Hulu and Disney+.A24‘Aftersun’ (2022)Memory pieces about childhood are nearly always touched by nostalgia, however bittersweet, but Charlotte Wells’s gorgeous, semi-autobiographical debut feature is graced instead by perspective. The memory in “Aftersun” encapsulates a few days in 1999 at a downscale Turkish resort, where an 11-year-old (Frankie Corio) went on her last vacation with her 30-something father (Paul Mescal), who did a credible job at the time of masking his personal anguish in order to make her happy. The MiniDV camera footage the girl captured of the trip tells a different story about him, and the film seizes on it subtly and beautifully. A.O. Scott admired Wells for directing with “the unaffected precision of a lyric poet.”Stream it on Max‘Logan’ (2017)Superhero franchises like the MCU and the DCEU have developed such a predictable template that each new entry can feel at least partially like a paint-by-numbers exercise. Though it extends from the popular “X-Men” series featuring Hugh Jackman as Wolverine and Patrick Stewart as Professor X, James Mangold’s “Logan” has the somber tone and feel of an old-school Western, emphasizing the exhaustion of an aging, battered hero dragged reluctantly to another mission. Having retired to Mexico to look after a sick Professor X, Jackman’s Logan is tasked with protecting a vulnerable young girl (Dafne Keen) whose powers (and history) overlap mysteriously with his own. Manohla Dargis called the film “a strong argument for bringing the comic-book movie down to earth.”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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      ‘Thunderbolts*’ Axes the Asterisk for Surprise Title Reveal

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      A plot twist that comes in the movie’s final moments will now be front and center on billboards. The director Jake Schreier explains the rebrand.If you wondered why there’s an asterisk attached to the title of the new movie “Thunderbolts*,” you won’t have to wait any longer to find out.Sure, you could have satisfied your curiosity the old-fashioned way by seeing the movie in theaters over the weekend, where it claimed the No. 1 spot at the box office. But as of Monday morning, the big reveal teased by that symbol will now be front and center on the movie’s billboards, which have switched from “Thunderbolts*” to the surprising title introduced in the film’s closing credits.(If you would like to remain unspoiled, read no further and avert your eyes from billboards for the time being.)So long, Thunderbolts: This team of misfits, headed by Florence Pugh’s weary assassin, Yelena Belova, ends the film rebranded as “The New Avengers.” And now, on billboards, the movie itself will follow suit.The name change happens in the final scene of the Jake Schreier-directed film: The wily C.I.A. director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) tricks the newly assembled superteam into storming a news conference at which she introduces them to the world as the New Avengers. Then, as the end credits begin, the title “Thunderbolts*” is ripped away like a comic-book page, revealing the new moniker.After three days in theaters, that rebrand has now made its way to billboards. “It felt like, if Val is also trying to pull a switcheroo and sell the New Avengers to the world, we could do that, too,” Schreier said in an interview with The Times on Saturday. “Especially given that the asterisk has been on the movie for a year, hopefully it doesn’t feel sweaty — it feels like this was a plan and we built up to it.”Incorporating the new moniker into the marketing may also be an acknowledgment that keeping a movie secret is harder than ever these days, when surprises can be splashed across social media within milliseconds of release. Schreier, who pitched the asterisk during his initial meetings on the movie, credits Marvel Studios and its president, Kevin Feige, for a willingness to experiment with the title switch.“It’s very fun that they were open to embracing that,” Schreier said. He acknowledged that clips containing the spoiler have already made their way online, so why not make it work in their favor?“It’s so interesting in this world, and Kevin talks about it sometimes, where sometimes they wanted things to leak and they don’t,” Schreier said. “I think we all assumed that it would be a bigger part of the conversation already, so it’ll be interesting to see what happens.” More

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      Wim Wenders on Where the War in Europe Really Ended 80 Years Ago

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      Wim Wenders, the renowned German film director, is nearly 80 years old, as old as the peace in Europe that followed the capitulation of the Nazi regime.“From my childhood onward, I have lived 80 years in peace,” he says in a short film he has directed to commemorate the end of World War II. But now, with a war in Ukraine that he calls “a war against Europe,” Wenders says that the stakes have rarely been higher.“Eighty years after the liberation of our continent, we Europeans are realizing again that peace cannot be taken for granted,” he says in the film. “It is now up to us to take the keys to freedom into our own hands.”In an interview in his Berlin office, Wenders said that the decades of peace “defined my life,” as the war had defined the life of his parents. His father, an army surgeon, spent five years at the front and was the only one of his class who did not die there, Wenders said. “I had the privilege to be among the first generation of Germans who lived for 80 years in peace,” he said. “None of my ancestors had that privilege.”Europe and Germany are crammed with varied efforts to remember the end of the war this week, including somber memorial events at concentration camps like Dachau and Bergen-Belsen. But Wenders’ film is a rare personal and political testament from the man behind award-winning movies including “Paris, Texas,” “Wings of Desire” and “The American Friend.”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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      Cora Sue Collins, a Busy Child Actress in the 1930s, Dies at 98

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      She was in films with Greta Garbo, who became a friend, and Myrna Loy, Bette Davis and others. She ended her career after being sexually harassed.Cora Sue Collins, who as a dimpled, chubby-cheeked child actress in the early 1930s appeared opposite A-list stars like Greta Garbo, Myrna Loy and Merle Oberon, but who cut her career short after being sexually harassed by a screenwriter, died on April 27 at her home in Beverly Hills, Calif. She was 98.Her daughter, Susie McKay Krieser, said the cause was complications of a stroke.Miss Collins made about 50 pictures over 13 years, including 11 in 1934 and another 11 in 1935. She was one of the era’s galaxy of child stars, a list that included Shirley Temple, Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, but she did not become as famous as they did. In her first movie, the 1932 comedy “The Unexpected Father,” she played a waif whose newly wealthy adoptive father (Slim Summerville) hires a nurse (ZaSu Pitts) to care for her. Praise for 4-year-old Cora Sue came quickly.Miss Collins made her movie debut in “The Unexpected Father,” a 1932 comedy in which Slim Summerville played her adoptive father and ZaSu Pitts played a nurse.Universal PicturesA critic for The Richmond News Leader in Virginia labeled her a “baby star” with “amazing acting ability and an appeal that walks right into your heart.” The Kansas City Journal wrote, “The little Collins girl walks away with the picture.”Miss Collins played Garbo as a child in “Queen Christina,” the acclaimed 1933 movie about the Swedish monarch. At the time, she told one newspaper that Garbo “ was so friendly and liked my new teeth a lot.”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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      Where Would Hollywood Find Its Guillotines or Pay Phones Without Them?

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      When the Netflix series “Wednesday” needed a guillotine recently, it did not have to venture far. A North Hollywood prop house called History for Hire had one available, standing more than eight feet high with a suitably menacing blade. (The business offers pillories too, but the show wasn’t in the market for any.)The company’s 33,000-square-foot warehouse is like the film and television industry’s treasure-filled attic, crammed with hundreds of thousands of items that help bring the past to life. It has a guitar Timothée Chalamet used in “A Complete Unknown,” luggage from “Titanic,” a black baby carriage from “The Addams Family.”Looking for period detail? You can find different iterations of Wheaties boxes going back to the ’40s, enormous television cameras with rotating lenses from the ’50s, a hair dyer with a long hose that connects to a plastic bonnet from the ’60s, a pay phone from the ’70s and a yellow waterproof Sony Walkman from the ’80s.History for Hire’s 33,000-square-foot warehouse has aisles and aisles of items grouped together by topic or theme.Need a guillotine? They can help.They have a large collection of vintage cameras.History for Hire, which Jim and Pam Elyea have owned for almost four decades, is part of the crucial but often unseen infrastructure that keeps Hollywood churning, and helps make it one of the best places in the world to make film and television.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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      David Harbour Is Conflicted About Becoming a Morning Person

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      Working on the new movie “Thunderbolts*” and the TV series “Stranger Things,” he said, “You’re up early at 6 in the morning. But I still have that beast inside me that wants to sleep till 1 p.m.”The Red Guardian never made the varsity squad of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but that’s more than OK with David Harbour.“Of the people that do love these movies, we are not the favorite,” he said of the antiheroes in the new Marvel film “Thunderbolts*.” “But we really poured our hearts into this movie and tried to make something that is about isolation in modern society and light and the darkness that is within all of us.”During what Harbour called a bit of a nightmare, he worked on “Thunderbolts*” at the same time he was shooting the final season of the Netflix series “Stranger Things,” in which he plays Hopper, the heroic small-town police chief. He is currently working on “DTF St. Louis,” an HBO limited series and the first thing he has produced, with Jason Bateman and Linda Cardellini.In a video call from Los Angeles, he elaborated on the headphones, sunglasses and Zen mantra that he considers essential. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.An AmericanoI drink it all day long. My doctor has told me to knock it off, but it is the last vice I have. I have an assistant and she does a lot of great things for me, but probably the No. 1 job is she brings me too many Americanos throughout the day.Wired HeadphonesI love a tangled cord. I used to carry a CD player back in the early 2000s and I would put on headphones and walk around the East Village and have my little soundtrack to my life. Just sort of float through.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