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      Sigourney Weaver Has Us All Fooled: She’s Really Quite Silly

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      In her life onscreen, Sigourney Weaver has faced down ghosts, aliens and serial killers, romanced the likes of Harrison Ford and Mel Gibson and studied the clannish movements of gorillas in the mist and of suburban swingers in Connecticut. But before you knew her for any of those feats, an outrageous stage performance bestowed a lesson that has spanned the length of her five-decade career.“It was so good for me,” Weaver said, “to play a girl with a hedgehog in her vagina for a few months.”The year was 1976, and the production was “Titanic,” an Off Broadway play by Weaver’s frequent stage collaborator Christopher Durang (not her frequent film collaborator, James Cameron, who would make his own, very different “Titanic” two decades later). Durang’s sex farce asked her to play roles that ran the gamut from a black widow with deep décolletage to a pigtailed girl hiding a hedgehog in her vagina. The New York Times, in an amused review, described Weaver as “a cover girl beauty with a dry wit” and the play’s principal attraction.But what’s all that praise worth when weighed against one withering comment? One night, after an Actors Studio teacher came to see “Titanic,” Weaver asked for his take on her performance.“Well,” he sniffed, “I didn’t really feel that you had a hedgehog in your vagina.”This season Weaver will be seen in four very different roles, including a teenager in “Avatar: The Way of Water” and an abortion-rights activist in “Call Jane.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesUndone by the criticism, Weaver spent the next day overthinking things. Every waking minute was devoted to imagining the hedgehog and mapping out the little creature’s wants and desires; by the time she was onstage that night, throwing her leg onto a table to feed the hedgehog some lettuce, she could swear she felt a real animal moving to claim its prize.And how was all that hard work received? “There was not a laugh in the house,” she said. “It was absolute stone-cold horror.”Well, the performance earned one laugh, at least — a rueful, belated one from Weaver herself, as we sat by the beach at the Venice Film Festival in August. “I think the Actors Studio and comedy may not go together,” she told me, chuckling.Acting can sometimes be a battle between intellect and instinct, and by either measure, the 73-year-old Weaver is formidable. Co-stars talk about the way she marks up her scripts, scribbling down the motivations behind every line, action or lifted prop; onscreen, she projects that intelligence in a calm, cool way and can handily outthink any scene partner. But Weaver’s natural instincts have proved important, too, ever since her first starring role as the resourceful Ellen Ripley in the 1979 sci-fi classic “Alien.”“She’s reduced to instinct and survival, and goes from this person who knows the rules to someone who’s just flying by the seat of her pants,” Weaver said. “So I got a very good drenching in that right away.”The Return of ‘Avatar’The director James Cameron takes us back to the world of Pandora for the sequel “Avatar: The Way of Water.”What to Know: The sequel opens on Dec. 16, 13 years after “Avatar” shattered box office records. If you remember little about the original movie, here is a refresher.Holding Their Breath: Cameron and the sequel’s cast discussed what it took to get the new “Avatar” made and to bring it to life in a changed world.Sigourney Weaver: Hollywood has never quite known what to do with the actress, who has four films out this season, including the “Avatar” sequel. She spoke to us about her unusually fluid career.Back to the Theater: To help reacquaint audiences with the 3-D filmmaking that dazzled audiences in 2009, the first movie was rereleased in theaters on Sept. 23.Some things about Weaver are immutable, like her height (she stands nearly six feet tall) and honeyed voice, but she is credible in comedy, drama and action tentpoles and has put together an unusually fluid career that’s on full display this season. In September, you might have caught her in the indie comedy “The Good House,” in which she played Hildy, a witty, oft-soused real estate agent; the next month, New York Film Festival audiences met Weaver’s Norma, a wealthy woman having an affair with Joel Edgerton in the fraught, Paul Schrader-directed drama “Master Gardener.”Weaver can currently be seen as Virginia, an abortion-rights activist in the period drama “Call Jane” (out this weekend) and in December, she reunites with Cameron in “Avatar: The Way of Water,” despite the fact that her character died in the first film. Since the “Avatar” movies are shot mainly via motion capture, Cameron crafted a whole new role for Weaver, and it’s a corker: She plays Kiri, a 14-year-old, blue-skinned alien.It’s a role that reminded Weaver of her own adolescence and the winding path she has carved since. Born Susan Weaver to a television-executive father and actress mother in Manhattan, she picked the name Sigourney out of “The Great Gatsby” as a teenager, an act of willful reinvention in a life that would be full of such choices. “But I have gotten very far away from the intellectual person I was when I started my career,” she told me in Venice. “I’m pure instinct, and I’ve learned to trust those instincts.”Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.Weaver as a 14-year-old Na’vi girl in the “Avatar” sequel. Early on “I was very self-conscious and shy, so it wasn’t until I hit 14 — when I began to find my footing and I picked the name Sigourney — that my life actually began.”20th Century StudiosDoes this feel like an unusually prolific phase of your career?I’ve just been doing one film a year, but they’re all coming up at the same time as if I threw some magic beans out the window and suddenly there were all these great plants. But I’m happy about it because I’ve always secretly had this dream of being an actress in a repertory theater. Once that didn’t happen, I thought, “Doesn’t matter, I can do it myself. I’ll play the maid one day and the queen another, and I’ll keep jumping around, hopscotching from one genre and one kind of role to another.” So it’s a lovely expression of my earliest dream.When you pick a role, is it informed by the last role you played?It’s never about the role for me, ever. It’s about the script, I don’t even care who the director is. I was an English major, I can’t help it: I know about structure — beginning, middle, end — and I know the story has to be about more than the people in it. If it doesn’t pass those tests, I don’t care how good you are, it’s not for me. The next thing is the director and their vision, and to work with someone who’s passionate. Not with someone who says, “Well, let’s get this over with.”You’ve had those experiences?Only a little. And that’s why I decided I would stay in New York, after going out to L.A. in the ’70s and waiting to be seen by casting people. I felt that in New York, we talked much more about the nobility of our profession, how important it was and also how much fun it was. And being around actors at that time in L.A., there was a real feeling that it wasn’t a noble profession, that you were there to get famous or something. I found it all too confusing, so I went back.Tell me about playing Virginia, the abortion-rights activist in “Call Jane.”Virginia seemed to pop right out of me. I could have been Virginia in another life, I just felt her rangy style in my body. But it was very hard to get the movie financed. We tried to shoot it in other states, and no state wanted us, and Connecticut finally gave us a place to shoot.Were those states rejecting the film because it was about abortion?Maybe they didn’t like the script either, but it certainly was the subject matter. They didn’t want to be tarred with that.A prelude of events to come.Such a prelude, and I didn’t see it coming. I just thought, “Well, it was probably a conservative mayor, or whatever.” I didn’t see the big picture.Opposite Elizabeth Banks in “Call Jane.” Weaver said it was hard to find a state to film in, in large part because the subject was abortion. Officials “didn’t want to be tarred with that.”Wilson WebbDo you remember your political awakening as a young woman?Freshman year, I arrived at Sarah Lawrence, and a bunch of girls were burning their bras — I thought, “Oh, that’s interesting.” It was quite an exciting place, and I happened to be at college during a very political time. Almost every spring there would be protests, sit-ins. Every time I talked about politics, my father [Sylvester “Pat” Weaver, the creator of the “Today” and “Tonight” shows] would say, “Are you on drugs?” And I’d say, “No, not yet. Give me time.”Did you grow up in a conservative family?Well, my parents seemed quite conservative. I worked for a Republican congressman on Capitol Hill for a summer, but I never voted for a Republican. I think as an artist, we tell these stories about self-expression, about the people’s welfare and how vulnerable they are, and I don’t know how you could be a Republican and tell the stories that actors tell. I’m sure I’m wrong, I’m sure there are lots of Republicans that could, but you have to be able to play anyone, which forces you to have compassion for people with other positions and reinforces your conviction that people need freedom.What were you like at 14, the age you play in “Avatar: The Way of Water”?It was a period of my life when my parents were traveling a lot, and I felt a little like a lost soul. I was this tall when I was 12, and I was very self-conscious and shy, so it wasn’t until I hit 14 — when I began to find my footing and I picked the name Sigourney — that my life actually began. I remember so well being that age, and to be given an opportunity to revisit that in a safe way is a great gift, isn’t it?The role is motion-capture. Do you recognize yourself in Kiri, or does the character seem like someone else?I’ve only seen a couple of scenes, but all I hope is that it’s truthful. When I would do my warm-up, I was able to drop 60 years and feel the 14-year-old bubbling up, and then I just let her go.Does she fall in love?I don’t know if I can answer that question. I know that she just wants to be with Spider, a human boy, all the time. Even though she’s seven feet tall and he’s a human, they just complement each other. He actually puts blue on himself to pass, but I don’t think she notices much else besides the fun of being with him and being in the forest. They’re just free urchins at the beginning, and they have a kind of golden life there, even though they’re at war and in hiding.“If you’re tall, people expect you to be more mature, and for many, many years, I was not that.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesNorma, the character you play in “Master Gardener,” is at the other end of the spectrum. She makes every situation so fraught — even the way she wields a wine glass is like it’s a loaded gun.She’s certainly one of my favorites. Norma is a really complex character — I saw her referred to as icy, but I think she’s a cauldron.She can operate at a remove, but it’s not an icy remove.I’m so glad you see that because I think there’s a tendency to dismiss older women and, if they’re wealthy, to refer to them as icy. It’s one of the best parts I’ve ever had, but I’ve always avoided that kind of character.She’s a fun character to watch, because she’ll so often say or do something that’s wildly inappropriate.It’s one of the best roles I’ve ever had because she is so complex and was never meant to be one thing. There used to be so much emphasis on playing a woman sympathetically, and they only do it to women — nobody worries about the man being sympathetic. Also, I must say, it’s great to play competent women who still have sex lives. It’s something that didn’t used to happen that much in the old days, so I feel very optimistic for me and my peers that as long as they make good stories, older women are going to be a part of it, because they are very powerful in our real lives.When do you feel most powerful in your own life?Gosh, I’m not sure I know how to answer that. Powerful. Well, the Supreme Court decision made me feel very un-powerful, and I think that’s what a lot of women are feeling.In the 1980s, as you were coming into your own as a movie star, did you feel powerful?Whenever I used to go to Hollywood and have to deal with these different studio heads, I was never comfortable. I always felt incredible sexism there, and a kind of resentment that they had to listen to me because I did have this power and I was smart enough to put several sentences together. I used to think, “Oh, it would be fun to direct, but I don’t want to have to deal with those people.”I remember I was trying to raise money for our theater [she was a founder of the Flea Theater in New York], and I asked a studio I have a good connection with if they would make a charitable donation. And they said, “You know what we’ll do? We’re going to give you a bonus, and you can sign that over to your theater.” I said, “It’s not really the same thing. I can make my own charitable contribution.” I was so astonished by their lack of interest, and you’d think after several movies together that there’d be some kind of mutual respect.“I have gotten very far away from the intellectual person I was when I started my career,” Weaver said.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesIn a 1994 interview, you said, “I always felt a little bit illegitimate. Whenever they talked about serious actresses, I always felt that I had one foot in the land of Arnold Schwarzenegger, one foot in the land of Ivan Reitman and maybe a toe in the land of Meryl Streep and Glenn Close.”If you’re a woman, they want to know, are you a babe? Are you a comedian? Are you this or are you that? They didn’t know what to do with me. It was always off-the-track directors who would wake up in the middle of the night and go, “Oh, Sigourney Weaver, she could do this.” And then these things would come to me out of nowhere.After “Alien,” I was sent all these serious-person scripts and most of what I’d done was comedy onstage. I thought, “God, when am I going to get back to that?” That has been frustrating because a good comedy is hard to find, and so are love stories — I love them, but they couldn’t really imagine me in a love story. If I came in the room, all the producers would sit down, and if there was a leading man, he’d usually sit down, too, because they wanted someone different, someone much smaller.Did you feel pigeonholed because of your height?If you’re tall, people expect you to be more mature, and for many, many years, I was not that. I think because of my career, I’ve kind of fooled people into thinking that I’m a serious person. There are some things I feel quite serious about, but in general, I’m on the silly side. I think that’s why I love working with Jim Cameron — if it’s an adventure, let me at it. But this is something any actor has to deal with. Anytime a movie registers, you get 10 more offers like that — after “Ice Storm” [1997] I got so many mean, cold ladies. I think the only recourse is just find things to surprise yourself, and you’ll surprise your audience.What’s a good example of that?They didn’t want to see me for “Galaxy Quest” [1999], but I thought, “This is my chance to show my own insecurity when I go out to L.A.,” because no matter who you were, [Hollywood] could make you feel as vulnerable as [her character] Tawny feels. It was one of the reasons I made her such a babe: Babes should have all the friends in the world, but I’m not sure they feel secure about that because they think it’s only skin-deep when it’s not.So now that you have planted these magic beans, and by sheer luck they’ve all bloomed at the same time, what do you do with this garden that you have outside your window?I don’t want to pick it! Probably no one will get as much enjoyment out of these four films as I do. Imagining Norma and Hildy and Virginia and Kiri together, I just feel like I hit the jackpot, man.I would love to see those four characters in a room. Who would get along?I’m not sure what Kiri would think being in a room like that — I’m sure she’d find Norma completely terrifying. I guess it would depend on what kind of wine Hildy brought to the gathering. More

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      ‘Armageddon Time’ Review: Hard Lessons About Life in America

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      New York in 1980 is the setting for James Gray’s brooding, bittersweet story of family conflict and interracial friendship.Can you remember the first day of sixth grade? Would you even want to? James Gray, in the opening scene of “Armageddon Time,” his tender and lacerating new film, brings it all back with clammy precision.We are at Public School 173 in Queens, New York, at our desks in Mr. Turkeltaub’s class. It’s 1980 — maybe you’re old enough to remember that, too — and two boys are about to get in trouble, one for mouthing off during roll call and the other for drawing a picture of the teacher (Andrew Polk) with the body of a turkey. It seems like if your name was Turkeltaub and you taught sixth grade you might be able to take the joke, but on the other hand, maybe not being able to take the joke is the whole reason you’re teaching sixth grade in the first place. This is a man, after all, whose job requires him to utter the words “gym is a privilege, people” with a straight face.“Armageddon Time” isn’t about Mr. Turkeltaub, though his contempt for his students helps to propel its plot. It’s not about gym class either, but it is — astutely, uncomfortably and in the end tragically — about privilege.The two troublemakers — Johnny Davis (Jaylin Webb) and Paul Graff (Banks Repeta) — become friends, bonded by their dislike of Turkey (as they call him when he’s out of earshot) and also by the kind of shared interests that connect boys on the edge of adolescence. For all their rebellious bravado in Turkey’s class, there is still something childlike in the way Johnny and Paul approach the world, and a sweet softness in the mannerisms of the young actors who play them.Johnny collects NASA mission patches and dreams of becoming an astronaut. Paul thinks the Beatles will get back together soon. He also tells Johnny — matter-of-factly rather than boastfully — that his family is “super rich.” This isn’t quite true. Paul’s father, Irving (Jeremy Strong), is a boiler repairman. His mother, Esther (Anne Hathaway), is a home-economics teacher and P.T.A. officer who is considering a run for the local school board. With help from Esther’s parents (Anthony Hopkins and Tovah Feldshuh), they are sending Paul’s older brother, Ted (Ryan Sell), to private school, where Paul will eventually join him.In a fairly short time — between the start of school and Thanksgiving, with the election of Ronald Reagan in between — Paul will arrive at a clearer, harsher understanding of how power, status and money work in America, a lesson that will come at Johnny’s expense.Johnny is Black, Paul is white, and even as they navigate the world together, they experience it in different ways. Mr. Turkeltaub may punish them both, but he is much harder on Johnny, calling him an “animal” and ridiculing him in front of his peers. Johnny, who lives with his grandmother, is one of a small number of Black students at the school, and their presence alarms some of the ostensibly tolerant adults in Paul’s family.Interracial friendship is an old and complicated theme in American culture. Think of Ishmael and Queequeg bedded down at the Spouter-Inn in “Moby-Dick,” Huck and Jim adrift on the Mississippi in “Huckleberry Finn” or Dylan and Mingus tagging up Brooklyn in Jonathan Lethem’s “The Fortress of Solitude.” In almost every case, the white character’s perception is central (these books are all first-person narratives, and in a palpable if not literal sense, “Armageddon Time” is too). The Black character, however brave, beautiful or tragic he may be, is the vehicle of his companion’s moral awakening.“Armageddon Time” plants itself in this tradition, but it is also honest about the limitations of its own perspective. Gray tells the story of Paul’s discovery of the iniquities of race and class, but doesn’t pretend that this painful knowledge might redeem him, much less rescue Johnny.Nor does the cruelty of American racism come as news — certainly not to Johnny, and not in the Graff household either. They are Jews whose ascent into the American middle class is shadowed by generational memories of Cossacks and Nazis in the old world and less lethal brushes with antisemitism in their new home.Anne Hathaway and Jeremy Strong in the film as Paul’s parents, Esther and Irving Graff.Anne Joyce/Focus FeaturesThe moral center of the clan is Esther’s father, Aaron, who has a special fondness for Paul. He’s a gentle, playful, didactic presence in the boy’s life — Hopkins finds the essential grit hiding underneath the twinkle — dispensing gifts and jokes and hard nuggets of wisdom. He’s a comforting presence for Paul, who is terrified of Irving’s violent temper and at an awkward stage in his relationship with Esther.Gray’s filmography — he has directed and written eight features so far, starting with “Little Odessa” in 1995 — can be understood as a series of inquiries into the meaning of home, which is usually somewhere in the outer boroughs of New York. After venturing further afield in his last two movies (the Amazon in “The Lost City of Z” and outer space in “Ad Astra”), he has swerved into deeply personal territory.But even as Paul Graff is an unmistakable alter ego, his situation is a version of the predicament faced by the young men played by Joaquin Phoenix in “We Own the Night” and “Two Lovers.” His curiosity may push him toward rebellion, adventure and the testing of taboos, but at the same time he is entangled in the warm, sticky tendrils of family obligation and tribal identity.Gray surveys the Graff household with an eye that is both affectionate and critical. (The eye of the director of photography, Darius Khondji, finds the precise colors of coziness and claustrophobia, and the subtle shades of nostalgia and remorse.) A different filmmaker might have made Esther, Irving and Aaron avatars of liberal hypocrisy. They despise Reagan and root for the underdogs. They also send Ted and Paul to a school whose major benefactors include the Trump family, and drop toxic morsels of bigotry into their table talk.But “Armageddon Time” is less interested in cataloging their moral failings than in investigating the contradictions they inhabit, the swirl of mixed messages and ethical compromises that define Paul’s emerging sense of the world and his place in it. He hears a lot — including from one of the Trumps — about hard work and independence, and also about the importance of connections. He is told that the game is rigged against him, and also that it’s rigged in his favor. He’s instructed to fit in and to fight back, to follow his dreams and to be realistic.And Johnny? The messages he receives are much more brutal, though hardly less confusing. But what happens to him can only be guessed, by Paul and the audience, because one of the lessons Paul learns is that his friend’s story was never his to tell.Armageddon TimeRated R. Bad feelings, bad behavior, bad language. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters. More

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      In a German ‘All Quiet on the Western Front,’ History Has a Starring Role

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      More gruesome than previous film adaptations of the novel, a new Netflix feature looks to other conflicts past and present.“All Quiet on the Western Front,” Erich Maria Remarque’s seminal World War I novel, has had several onscreen adaptations.The book, which has sold up to 40 million copies since it was released in 1929, tells the story of the German soldier Paul Bäumer and his comrades: high school boys who idealistically enlist only to be forced to adapt to the horrors of trench warfare by abandoning their own humanity.“All Quiet” first arrived on the big screen in 1930, in a feature directed by Lewis Milestone that won two Oscars and still appears on lists of the best Hollywood movies. A 1979 CBS color version, starring Ernest Borgnine and Richard Thomas, strove for visual authenticity a few years after the end of the Vietnam War.But Edward Berger, the director of a new, lavish version arriving on Netflix on Friday, said his film included a perspective that helped it capture the antiwar spirit of the original novel better than its predecessors: For the first time, a German-language team is behind the writing, directing and acting.The impact of the country’s two brutal — and fortunately unsuccessful — world wars on the collective German consciousness informed how Berger approached the project.“We all grew up with the subject inside of us,” he said. “We inherited it from our great-grandparents.” He added, “It colors everything you have, your opinion, your sense of aesthetics, your taste in music.”Berger, whose previous work includes “Deutschland 83,” the popular Cold War-era spy series, said he couldn’t pass up the chance to adapt “All Quiet” for the screen in the shadow of recent geopolitical developments in Europe.The actor Daniel Brühl, who produced and starred in the film, said, “It was really interesting to be able to show the essence, and the essential message, of Remarque’s book, which is an antiwar book, that there is nothing heroic in war.”Production began on “All Quiet on the Western Front” in 2021, and it is Germany’s submission for best international film at the 2023 Oscars. Reiner Bajo/NetflixThe resulting feature, which will be Germany’s submission for next year’s international film Oscar, also arrives as Russia wages a land war in Europe, the most significant armed conflict on the continent in nearly eight decades.Production began in 2021, a year before Russia marched into Ukraine, but this “All Quiet” echoes some aspects of that ongoing conflict. Bäumer and his fellow soldiers are promised the war will be over in a matter of weeks, just as Russia apparently planned to hold victory celebrations in Kyiv just days after attacking Ukraine. And the film’s young soldiers, preoccupied with their own survival, are seemingly unaware they have invaded another country, just as Moscow has falsely claimed that territories within Ukraine now legally belong to Russia.Berger said he had felt, in countries like Germany, the United States and Hungary, a distinct change in public discourse in recent years. In the rawer language being used, he saw a new ascension of totalitarian politics — and renewed relevancy for “All Quiet on the Western Front.”“This film seems timely, somehow, because this kind of language existed also in 1920, where there was this patriotism and blindness — and we know where that can lead,” Berger said, referring to the ascension of the Nazis.To emphasize the horrors of war and the risks of blind patriotism, Berger’s production departs from the novel that gave the film its name.At a crucial point in the plot, a quarter of the way into a nearly two-and-a-half-hour run time, the film briefly stops following the humans engaged in one of the bloodiest conflicts of the last century to focus on an inanimate object.The viewer observes the journey of a dog tag — one of the metal badges worn by soldiers as identification — from the moment it leaves a soldier’s corpse in the trenches of northern France until it is recorded and counted by senior officers in Germany 18 months later.Not only is it a memorable way to show the toll the conflict took on a generation of young people (about 10 million soldiers were killed in World War I; more than 20 million were wounded), but it also opens onto a wider historical view: The list of deaths is handed to Matthias Erzberger (played by Brühl), the member of the Reich government who signed the armistice to end the war in November 1918.Matthias Erzberger (played by Daniel Brühl in the film) was fiercely criticized in Germany following World War I.Reiner Bajo/NetflixIn moments like this, instead of purely focusing on a small band of fictional soldiers trying to survive, as Remarque does, the film weaves in historical fact, juxtaposing life in the trenches with strategy meetings between higher-ranking players in German command, like the cease-fire negotiations.“The cuts back and forth between the big politics and the life of the protagonists give us an idea of how the ordinary soldier is at the mercy of these decisions,” said Daniel Schönpflug, a historian whose work focuses on that era.The film shows how, by the fall of 1918, more than 40,000 Germans were killed on the front every two weeks. We also discover that, even as Erzberger signed the armistice, the German generals running the country’s disastrous military campaign criticized him for ending the slaughter without having “won” anything in return.In Germany, criticism of the efforts to stop the conflict eventually festered into the “Dolchstoss Legende,” or the stab-in-the-back myth, the false narrative that the war was lost because Jews and social democrats sold out the country.The film’s final battle scene has military barbarism triumphing over rational thought, and Bäumer’s honed animal instinct wins out over his humanity. In Berger’s more historically minded version of “All Quiet,” this battle is just a preamble to worse things.“I thought it was important to show that the end of the First World War was used to start a second one, to put that into historical context,” Berger said.The film shows how, by the fall of 1918, more than 40,000 Germans were killed on the front every two weeks. Reiner Bajo/NetflixBrühl sees the film’s narratives as also resonating with the political divisions highlighted by the war in Ukraine.“What I find so shocking is that in this globalized, connected world, when the chips are down, these fronts can form so suddenly and in such an extreme way,” Brühl said.“It’s a pretty bitter realization,” he added. More

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      ‘Peaceful’ Review: A Homage to French Filmmaking

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      Emmanuelle Bercot’s drama about a man diagnosed with late-stage cancer plays like a eulogy for a nearly bygone era of French cinema and its stars.Tracing the final months in the life of an acting coach named Benjamin who is suddenly ravaged by cancer, “Peaceful,” by the French writer and director Emmanuelle Bercot, contains soap-opera levels of melodrama. It also features one too many subplots that appear out of nowhere — to frankly humorous effect — while the film’s intended comic beats often get lost in translation.The film frequently dips into unintentional absurdity, yes, but it also captivates, thanks to the powers of the Gallic film-world heavyweights Benoît Magimel (playing Benjamin) and Catherine Deneuve.Because of these actors, and a subtly self-reflexive script by Bercot and Marcia Romano, “Peaceful” also plays like a eulogy to a nearly bygone era of French cinema. At 48, Magimel isn’t exactly old news, but the actor, who, at the beginning of his career, starred in iconic films like “La Haine” (“Hate”) and “The Piano Teacher,” represents a kind of national stardom. The presence of Deneuve — playing Benjamin’s devastated mother, who, at one point, cradles her son like the Virgin Mary in Michelangelo’s “Pietà” — speaks for itself.When Benjamin is informed of his late-stage cancer diagnosis, he fends off the doom and gloom by defensive sarcasm and plunging into work, instructing his pupils to re-enact scenes of difficult goodbyes and mournful departures. The cancer quickly overtakes him, and, soon enough, he’s in a hospital bed going through the various stages of grief, with anger turning into fear and, eventually, something like wizened acceptance.Benjamin strikes up a friendship with his genial doctor, enters into a romance with another one, fends off advances from a devoted student and grapples with the guilt of abandoning his now teenage son, who shows up midway through the film. It’s a dull aside that fails to evoke any of the resonance one would expect from the arrival of a long-lost child.Early on in the film, Benjamin asks his students to define “presence,” that slippery quality that only true stars possess. They’re unable to come up with a satisfying answer, so the camera cuts to Magimel; glowing and passionate, his face pulls us in. Moments like these make Bercot’s otherwise wobbly drama a decent attraction.PeacefulNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 2 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Call Jane’ Review: Abortion History That’s Being Repeated Now

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      A fictionalized drama about the Jane Collective, a clandestine group that helped women secure safe, illegal abortions before 1973, is of the moment.When I first saw “Call Jane” in January, I filed it away as an appealing if familiar period piece, more dusty than revelatory. It’s a fictionalized drama about the Jane Collective, a real-life clandestine Chicago group that, starting in the late 1960s, helped women secure safe, illegal abortions, stopping only in 1973 with the Roe v. Wade decision. Watching it again recently, four months after the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to an abortion, it felt like a different film. History can do that to a movie — and to a critic.The aesthetic qualities of “Call Jane” haven’t changed since my first viewing, of course. It’s an intimate, fine-looking work that has a lightly grainy visual texture (it was shot on film) and the usual era-appropriate swinging hair, skirts and the like. The director, Phyllis Nagy, making her feature film debut, has embraced unobtrusiveness as a style, perhaps to soft-pedal the material. She doesn’t overuse close-ups or indulge in irritating contemporary habits: The camera doesn’t hover pointlessly, there are no self-aggrandizing crane shots. The cast is as appealing as I remembered it; the awkward scenes still jar as do the upbeat music choices.Written by Hayley Schore and Roshan Sethi, the movie focuses on a fictional character, Joy (a solid Elizabeth Banks), a genial pregnant housewife with a nice husband, a teenage daughter, a pleasant home and not much else going on. Shortly after the movie opens, Joy’s doctor tells her that she has a heart condition that will probably kill her unless her pregnancy is terminated. Because abortion is criminalized in Illinois, she is forced to petition a hospital board to obtain one. At the meeting, her doctor makes the case for her — she brings a tight smile and some home-baked goodies — but the all-male board votes against providing the procedure, deeming that there’s a 50 percent chance Joy will survive the pregnancy.Joy is an appealing character, but she’s also about the most anodyne emblem for abortion rights imaginable: a pretty lady with a life-threatening condition who wants to carry her pregnancy to term but can’t. Nagy tries to push the story beyond its cautious framing, but it’s tough going. She wrote Todd Haynes’s “Carol” — about two women in love in the early 1950s — and here shows a similar interest in exploring the smooth surfaces of repression. The first time that you see Joy, she is floating through a hotel like a soap bubble. Chicly dressed with a complicated upsweep that evokes Hitchcock’s blondes, she moves as if in a trance all the way through the front doors, where she sees people rioting. It’s 1968, and youth is in revolt.Joy soon is too, if slowly. She begins pushing back and breaking free after the medical board’s initial ruling, first by claiming to be suicidal so she can obtain a therapeutic abortion. She keeps pushing, and when she discovers the Jane Collective, the movie settles into a liberation story about women, emancipation, autonomy and power. Before long, Joy has joined the activist ranks of a vibrant organization made up of gutsy, opinionated, mouthy law-breakers, most notably Virginia and Gwen — the spiky tag team of Sigourney Weaver and Wunmi Mosaku — characters who amp the energy considerably. No more nice girls, well, almost.“Call Jane” squeezes a lot into its two hours, tethering Joy’s coming-into-consciousness arc to gobs of family drama, a touch of thriller-style intrigue (the Jane activists are always dodging the cops), legal questions, the larger political landscape (enter Nixon) and internecine feminist debates. Both Virginia and Gwen have to explain far too much, with each delivering chunks of exposition that are clearly more for the benefit of the movie’s audience than for any of its characters. Gwen, as the pre-eminent Black member in the collective, carries an additional burden because she has to deliver a righteous lecture about race and intersectionality, a lesson that the filmmakers should have heeded better themselves.If the references to race and class feel ritualistic, it’s because the movie largely centers on one woman, a focus that’s profoundly at odds with the political radicalism of the Jane’s collectivism. The real organization used Jane as a code name, as a generic moniker for a group of radicals, many of them veterans of the civil rights movement, who were risking everything, including prison, to help women. Some of that background filters into “Call Jane,” but the movie’s embrace of the traditional heroic narrative is exasperating and does a disservice to the history it relates. To borrow the title of a relevant book, it’s “Our Bodies, Ourselves.”So, should you see “Call Jane”? You bet. And not just because it’s satisfying to watch Banks, Weaver, Mosaku et al as feminists fighting the patriarchy with wit, intelligence and medical know-how. This is a story that needs to be told, again and again. The Jane Collective has been the subject of several documentaries, including the very engaging recent one, “The Janes,” but in the years between Roe’s passage and overturning, fictional movies have largely avoided abortion and specifically avoided it as a means of female emancipation.“Call Jane” helps modestly correct that sorry history by showing women organizing, raising consciousness and helping one another at great personal cost. In many ways it’s a process movie. It’s also eerily of the moment. Because, by the time I saw the film a second time, its vision of direct action no longer looked musty, but instead resembled the new underground abortion networks operating in states that have banned abortion. It looked like now.Call JaneRated R for language and cannabis. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. In theaters. More

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      Henry Selick and Jordan Peele Team Up on ‘Wendell & Wild’

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      The stop-motion animator and the horror writer-director collaborated on the screenplay for Selick’s latest darkly comic fable “Wendell & Wild.”Nearly two decades ago, the uncanny forces inside Henry Selick’s own home inspired him to summon the original concept for “Wendell & Wild,” his first stop-motion animated feature in 13 years, which is streaming on Netflix.“My two grown sons were once little kids who acted like demons sometimes, so I did a loose drawing of them as demons,” Selick, 69, said by phone. Based on that personal doodle, he wrote a seven-page story about the mishaps of two diabolical brothers, Wendell and Wild, trying to escape hell and come to the land of the living to become rich.To materialize this idea many years later, Selick, an accomplished animation veteran whose credits include “James and the Giant Peach” (1996) and “Coraline” (2009), joined talents with the comedian-turned-director Jordan Peele, long before “Get Out” positioned Peele as a hit-making genre storyteller. Their shared ability for weaving horror and comedy cohesively in their work made for great synergy in their artistic partnership.“The best thing about Jordan, besides that he’s a genius — as a comic, a writer and now as a horror director — is that he loves stop motion animation and he knows all about it,” said Selick. “Even the logo for his company, Monkeypaw Productions, is stop-motion animation.”In 2015, Selick approached Peele and Keegan-Michael Key about collaborating. A fan of their Comedy Central sketch show “Key & Peele,” the filmmaker thought the duo would make the perfect Wendell and Wild. They were both interested, but Peele wished to become further involved by helping to shape the narrative. He shares screenplay credit on the film with Selick.Selick, right, on the set of the film. Paul McEvoy/Netflix“When Henry reached out, he didn’t know I was already a huge fan of his, ever since ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas,’” said Peele during a recent call. “He is a modern-day Roald Dahl in how he can weave the humor and the horror into a whimsical and perfectly inappropriate package.”Originally, Sister Helley (voiced in the film by Angela Bassett), a nun battling supernatural entities at an all-girls boarding school, served as the protagonist of Selick’s story. But because of Peele’s desire for this creation to look and feel unlike any stop-motion vision he’d ever seen before, the spotlight shifted to Kat, one of the young pupils at this institution who lost her parents in an accident.Selick worried that after directing “Coraline,” making another humorously frightful fable centered on a young heroine would seem as if he were repeating himself. Ultimately, Peele’s argument to not only make Kat the lead but also to make her Black convinced the animator. Kat became the angsty Hell Maiden who ushers Wendell & Wild into our realm.Lyric Ross, who voices Kat, understood the unique significance of her character.“I thought her style, her hair, even her mean mug was dope,” said Ross. “I personally had never seen a little dark-skinned Black girl being in a stop-motion picture and being the star of it. I loved everything about her, down to her sick boots.”“I knew that if I had seen a film in Henry’s style featuring someone who looked like her, it would’ve been really life-affirming of my place in the world as a kid,” noted Peele.But when it came to the look of the characters Wendell and Wild, at first Peele and Key were hesitant of Selick’s intentions to use their likeness. It wasn’t until the director showed them the designs by the Argentine artist Pablo Lobato, who specializes in unique caricatures of celebrities, that their perspective changed.“Keegan and I spent so much time dressing up and doing all these characters on ‘Key & Peele’; in a way, becoming these animated demons felt like the ultimate dress up,” said Peele.From the conversations between Peele and Selick, another subject also grew in prominence in the film: the prison industrial complex as a malevolent force. As with his live-action efforts, Peele never sought to sermonize but only to spark dialogue about important social topics.Sweetie (voiced by Ramona Young), with Sister Helley (Angela Bassett) in the film. Selick decided to keep the face seams on the puppets instead of digitally removing them.Netflix “What we owe the younger generation is the ability to have the language and references that we didn’t have, so they can discuss all things,” said Peele. “I believe in pushing the boundaries of the art form for the sake of creating a bigger pool of understanding.”Although they didn’t set out to receive a PG-13 rating from the Motion Picture Association of America, Selick admits that they hoped for that classification because of the creative freedom it offered them. He recalls facing pushback from executives who argued a PG label would enable them to reach a wider audience. But he disagreed.“Let’s face it, a 10 or 11-year-old does not necessarily want to watch a PG movie,” said Selick. “They want to watch what their big brothers and sisters watch.”Kindred devotees of the bizarre, both Selick and Peele credit their mothers for their affinity for offbeat animation. Selick remembers his mother’s love for Halloween and watching “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad” and the “Night on Bald Mountain” segment of “Fantasia” with her.Similarly, Peele holds dearly to the memory of the night his mother took him to see Selick’s “Nightmare Before Christmas” as a teen. “My mother knew that this was going be a special film,” he said. “She even got me the toys for it, even before the movie came out.”With “Wendell & Wild,” Selick didn’t try to advance stop motion on a technical level but instead went back to basics. In aiming for a more raw aesthetic that showed how these worlds and characters are physically manipulated by the hands of artists, he decided to keep the face seams on the puppets instead of digitally removing them, as they did on “Coraline.”“I wanted to retreat to what’s at the heart of what we do,” said Selick. “We touch these things and we breathe a performance into them.” Peele agreed with that sentiment, describing stop motion as a technique that “appeals to something innate, magical and childlike in all of us.”“The craftsmanship Henry and his puppeteers perform is something very special that only few people know how to do,” added Peele. “He’s the best in the world at it.”Selick believes that it was Peele’s success with “Get Out” that allowed them to set up this movie at Netflix — the only company that promised them the resources to make it as they had envisioned it.“We’re cousins in a way,” Selick said. “Jordan is much younger than me, but he has a worldly knowledge of cinema and likes a lot of unusual, weird and fun things.”For Peele, the foundation of their fruitful bond was the mutual and sincere admiration between them. “We’re each other’s biggest fans,” said Peele. 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      Sheriff Delivers Results of ‘Rust’ Shooting Investigation to Prosecutors

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      The Santa Fe County District Attorney’s Office must now decide whether to file charges. The sheriff’s office sought to determine how a live round got into the gun Alec Baldwin was holding.The Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office on Thursday delivered to local prosecutors its investigative report into the shooting on the set of “Rust” that killed the film’s cinematographer and wounded its director, bringing the district attorney’s office closer to a decision about whether to file criminal charges.The submission of the report, which the sheriff’s office declined to immediately release, came more than a year after the office began investigating how live bullets ended up on the set in New Mexico. The film’s cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, 42, was fatally shot when a gun the actor Alec Baldwin was rehearsing with went off.On Thursday morning, the sheriff’s investigative team met with the district attorney, Mary Carmack-Altwies, and the special prosecutor appointed to help with the case, Andrea Reeb, said Heather Brewer, a spokeswoman for the Santa Fe County District Attorney’s Office.“The district attorney and her team of investigators and prosecutors will now begin a thorough review of the information and evidence to make a thoughtful, timely decision about whether to bring charges,” Ms. Brewer said in a statement.A spokesman for the sheriff’s office, Juan Rios, said the report would not be publicly released before Nov. 10. Ms. Brewer said the sheriff’s office needed to redact the document before sharing it with the public.In an August request asking state officials for more money, Ms. Carmack-Altwies wrote that she did not have sufficient funds to prosecute such a high-profile case, and that up to four people could be charged.County investigators have interviewed dozens of people about the shooting, including Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, the armorer who was in charge of guns and ammunition on the film set; Dave Halls, the movie’s first assistant director, who took the gun from Ms. Gutierrez-Reed and later handed it to Mr. Baldwin; and Seth Kenney, who has been described as the primary supplier of guns and ammunition for “Rust.”Ms. Gutierrez-Reed, Mr. Halls, Mr. Kenney and Mr. Baldwin, an actor and producer of the movie, have all denied culpability. Several lawsuits have been filed, alleging, among other things, a failure to properly follow safety protocols; Ms. Hutchins’s family recently reached a settlement with Mr. Baldwin and other “Rust” producers.Ms. Hutchins was fatally shot during the filming of the western on Oct. 21, 2021, while Mr. Baldwin was practicing drawing an old-fashioned revolver for a scene inside a spare wooden church. He had been told it contained no live rounds, but it suddenly fired, killing Ms. Hutchins and wounding Joel Souza, the film’s director.In a television interview last year, Mr. Baldwin said that he was told the gun was safe to handle and that Ms. Hutchins was instructing him where he should point it. The actor said he did not pull the trigger, but rather that he pulled back the hammer of the gun and let it go just before it discharged.State regulators at the New Mexico Occupational Health and Safety Bureau found a serious breach of industry standards, which require that live ammunition should never be brought on set. The production, which plans to resume filming in January, is contesting the fine issued by regulators.If the district attorney decides to bring charges, a judge in New Mexico would consider whether there is probable cause for the charges to move forward. More

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      ‘Run Sweetheart Run’ Review: Escape in L.A.

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      Bursts of experimental style are at odds with a simplistic premise in this slasher movie that poses the tired idea that the patriarchy is a killer.Steeped in social commentary but lacking in basic logic, “Run Sweetheart Run” follows a woman over one desperate night in Los Angeles. The story begins when Cherie (Ella Balinska), a young mom working as an executive assistant, agrees to a client dinner with Ethan (Pilou Asbaek), an affable moneybag. But the slasher thrills really kick into gear once the sweet date turns sour, and then savage: During a nightcap, Ethan attacks Cherie and reveals his plan to hunt her until dawn.Like a bloodstained “After Hours,” the movie goes on to trail Cherie as she scampers away and seeks refuge in a series of urban sites: police station, apartment, overpass, church, nightclub, bathhouse. The director, Shana Feste, renders these settings in a green palette and high-contrast lighting, and their surreality suggests that Cherie has fallen down a rabbit hole; the horror Wonderland where she lands is peopled with doomed women and leering male brutes.Playful elements punctuate the menace. When danger approaches, “RUN!” appears across the screen, like a private alarm bell for our heroine. In other moments, Ethan cheekily breaks the fourth wall to aim the camera elsewhere before he inflicts harm on victims. These bursts of experimental style feel at odds with the movie’s core: a simplistic parable of pervasive sexism. We get it: The male villain is a stand-in for the patriarchy, and for women, it’s an uphill battle just to survive. No need to bludgeon us over the head with it.Run Sweetheart RunRated R. Butchery and battle of the sexes. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. Watch on Amazon Prime Video. More