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      ‘Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse’ Review: Graphic Doom

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      In this straightforward documentary, the acclaimed cartoonist reflects on his Holocaust memoir, “Maus,” and other masterworks of subversion.A conventional documentary about a distinctly unorthodox figure, “Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse” has a lot going for it, mostly its title subject and his circle of cool pals and champions. Intimate if oddly unrevealing, it offers an overview of Spiegelman’s life, times and inspirations, charting how a Queens kid created “Maus: A Survivor’s Tale,” his 1986 graphic novel about the Holocaust. “Maus” and its equally lauded second installment are such an important cultural touchstone that the Pulitzer Prize board awarded it a special citation in 1992. It’s so powerful that it has been banned in some American school districts.Those schools, Spiegelman suggested in a 2023 interview, apparently wanted “a kinder, gentler, fuzzier Holocaust” to teach children. The interviewer, from PEN America, assured readers that Spiegelman was “darkly” joking, and maybe he was. Then again, perhaps it is the Holocaust that some want to jettison from minds and curriculums: Anne Frank’s “The Diary of a Young Girl” has also been banned in American schools. Whatever the case, the framing of Spiegelman’s comments brings to mind some of the telling anxiety — about taste, history, propriety, ostensibly highbrow art and low — that at times runs through commentary on “Maus” and “Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began” (1991).“Making a Holocaust comic book with Jews as mice and Germans as cats would probably strike most people as flippant, if not appalling,” a reviewer for The New York Times wrote of the first book on its release, quickly and instructively adding that it’s “the opposite of flippant and appalling.” Writing about “Maus II,” another Times reviewer began his appraisal by reassuring readers of this installment’s cultural legitimacy and seriousness. “Art Spiegelman doesn’t draw comics,” the reviewer began, asserting that the book resists labels.Well, yes but no: “Maus” is, among other things, an illustrated masterpiece. (It’s since been published as a single edition, “The Complete Maus.”) It’s a history, a biography and an autobiographical howl as well as a milestone in the history of comics and a foundational American work about the Holocaust. It traces alternating story lines. One involves Spiegelman’s life, including his difficult relationship with his father, Vladek, and the painful death of his mother, Anja. The other story line tracks the family’s life in Europe before World War II, continues through the horrors his parents endured, the liberation of the death camps, an interlude in Sweden (where Artie was born) and a new, at times excruciating life in America.Directed by Molly Bernstein and Philip Dolin, “Disaster Is My Muse” covers some of that same material, if more prosaically. Using a mix of archival and originally shot material, it wends between the past and the present to chart Spiegelman’s life, giving you a sense of both the man and the artist though without satisfying depth. His story begins in 1948, the year he was born, but more truly seems to have started when he was a boy in New York and accompanying his mother on errands. In a drugstore, he spied a copy of “Inside Mad,” a collection of Mad magazine work that featured a grotesque cartoon of a hyena-like woman by Basil Wolverton in the style of a Life magazine glamour girl. It was, Spiegelman says, “the cover that launched a thousand misbegotten thoughts and brains,” his obviously included.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 Monkey’ Review: A Stephen King Story Adapted Into a Gory Farce

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      A gruesome horror comedy adapted from a Stephen King story mixes nihilism, fatherhood and carnage.Few things are creepier than a creepy toy, especially the kind that has those cold, dead fake eyes. They seem to harbor ill will, perhaps put there by some evil person or spirit, and look like they want to rip your guts out. Thus malevolent dolls stalk horror directors’ nightmares, from Chucky to Annabelle to M3gan. How lucky we are that they pass those torments along to us.Well, here comes another one. The menacing toy of “The Monkey” is right there in the title — more specifically, it’s a medium-sized circus monkey who, when wound up via a key in the back, beats his little drum and stares at the winder unblinkingly. As a fun addition, though, as the monkey plays, someone in the general vicinity dies gruesomely. Very gruesomely.The deaths are so grisly and sudden and weird that they end up being hilarious, like some demented mash-up of “Final Destination” and “Looney Tunes.” Indeed, “The Monkey” is a comedy, and possibly a satirical one. The titular killer is brought home from some travels by a pilot named Petey (Adam Scott) who skipped town soon after, leaving his twin sons to be raised by Lois (Tatiana Maslany), their mother. The boys, Bill and Hal (both played by Christian Convery), discover the monkey while rooting through a closet full of junk. They turn the crank. Death.Twenty-five years later, Hal (Theo James) is estranged from Bill and has his own son, named Petey, but only sees him once a year. Fearing that anyone he’s too close to will somehow become the monkey’s victim, Hal leads a lonely life. But you cannot outrun a curse like that one.Much of “The Monkey” hinges on James’s performance as older Hal, whom the people around him treat as a complete loser but who is likely the only one with a brain. It’s kind of a sustained joke, helped along by the fact that James looks like, well, a very handsome movie star, whereas everyone else in this town seems to have been left in the oven a little too long. Thus, while James’s performance is relatively unremarkable until near the end, it works: He’s just a guy who’s trying to live quietly, but life, and death, have other plans.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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      ‘Pedro Páramo,’ ‘Let’s Start a Cult’ and More Streaming Gems

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      Two releases from last year — one an inventive literary adaptation, the other a wild, gross-out comedy — are among this month’s streaming recommendations.‘Pedro Páramo’ (2024)Stream it on Netflix.This adaptation of Juan Rulfo’s 1955 novel is the feature directorial debut of Rodrigo Prieto, who, via his collaborations with Spike Lee, Oliver Stone, Greta Gerwig and (frequently) Martin Scorsese, has become one of the best cinematographers of our time. It is, unsurprisingly, a beautifully photographed movie (Prieto and Nico Aguilar share cinematography credit), filled with astonishing compositions and a surplus of mood. The narrative is haunted by ghosts, dreams and memories. The dialogue is alternately wry and poetic, trafficking in a deadpan magical realism, involving its bustling cast of colorful characters in a circular story, with events revisited via shifting perspectives and time frames. It doesn’t all land, as the picture’s loose ends and shaggy running time occasionally get away from the filmmaker. But if it’s messy, it’s also mesmerizing, and marks Prieto as a talent to keep watching, wherever he may go.‘Fall’ (2022)Stream it on Hulu.So many of today’s thrillers are convoluted, franchise-servicing affairs that this one is worth praising for its simplicity and efficiency: There is a narrative, yes, but it boils down to tracking two young women as they climb to the top of a 2,000-foot TV tower, and are then stranded there, with no obvious way down. The screenplay (by the director, Scott Mann, and Jonathan Frank) works through every possible situation and variation, mining the loaded scenario for maximum scares, thrills and pathos. But the performances ultimately have to carry the show, and the newcomers Grace Caroline Currey and Virginia Gardner are charismatic and sympathetic — even when doing the dumbest things — while Jeffrey Dean Morgan lends gravitas as Currey’s concerned dad.‘Joe’ (2014)Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.David Gordon Green narrates a sequence from his film featuring Nicolas Cage and Tye Sheridan.Roadside AttractionsWe 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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      “No Other Land” Is the Oscar-Nominated Film That No Studio Will Touch

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      “No Other Land,” about the destruction of a village in the occupied West Bank, is one of the year’s most acclaimed films. Still, U.S. studios are unwilling to distribute it.No documentary this season has been more talked about or acclaimed than “No Other Land,” which chronicles the besieged community of Masafer Yatta in the occupied West Bank as Israeli forces demolish residents’ homes and expel families from the land they have lived in for generations, claiming the area is needed for a military training ground.Directed by the Palestinian filmmakers Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal alongside the Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, “No Other Land” has received critical acclaim and collected many honors on the festival circuit. After winning the best documentary award at its Berlin International Film Festival premiere last February, the film also earned the same prize at the Gotham Awards and from major critics’ groups in New York and Los Angeles. Just weeks ago, it received an Oscar nomination.Still, no American studio has been willing to pick up this hot-button film, even though distributors typically spend this time of year eagerly boasting about their Oscar-nomination tallies.“I still think it’s possible, but we’ll have to see,” Abraham told me last week. “It’s clear that there are political reasons at play here that are affecting it. I’m hoping that at a certain point the demand for the film will become so clear and indisputable that there will be a distributor with the kind of courage to take it on and show it to the audience.”In the meantime, the directors have embarked on a self-distribution plan that has put “No Other Land” into 23 U.S. theaters; on the back of strong box office, it will continue to roll out into additional cities over the coming weeks.Adra and Abraham are not just part of the film’s directing team, but its two primary subjects. The 28-year-old Adra was raised in Masafer Yatta and has been documenting the forced expulsion since he was a teenager. Over the course of the film, he builds a strong but tense bond with Abraham, who lives in Jerusalem but travels frequently to Masafer Yatta to write about the situation there for an Israeli audience.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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      With ‘Companion’ and ‘Novocaine,’ Jack Quaid Makes Comedy Painless

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      Jack Quaid can guess what people must think of him: Entitled. Overconfident. A jerk, no doubt about it.“Who I am comes with a certain expectation,” he said over breakfast — black coffee, fruit plates — on a Thursday in late January.Quaid, 32, is the son of the actors Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan. (That DNA is strong. You can see his father when he smiles, his mother when he squints.) He grew up in Santa Monica, Calif., grabbing snacks from the craft services table on his parents’ sets and attending a private school with a common room where he could screen his camcorder movies. (An early magnum opus: “Bicycle Cops.”) Which is all to say that Quaid grew up with privilege, and he knows what privilege, unexamined and unacknowledged, can do to a person. He can turn that arrogance on for auditions, which explains why his first role was as a villain in “The Hunger Games” and why he can now be seen as a very bad boyfriend in the thriller “Companion” (in theaters).But the real Quaid is earnestly, acutely, even painfully aware of his privilege. In rooms where people don’t know him, he finds himself, he said, “apologizing for existing.” He isn’t jealous of his parents. (Please, he has been to therapy.) He loves his parents. He loves the life they have given him. “But there’s definitely a need to prove myself,” he said. “There is a little bit of something with identity and thinking, do I have any value outside of them?” As he said this, the divot in his forehead, which deepens when he’s stressed or concerned, had become a crevasse. “Not to say I’m complaining,” he added.Jack Quaid, the son of the actors Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan, is earnestly aware of his privilege.Hannah Edelman for The New York TimesOver the last several years, Quaid has proved himself. And as the star of two movies out this winter, his value as a leading man is confirmed. He is beautifully smarmy in “Companion,” a romantic thriller with a sci-fi twist. (Avoid the trailer if you don’t want that twist unfurled.) And he is a sweetheart of an accidental action hero in the punchy thriller “Novocaine,” due March 14, in which he plays a timid assistant bank manager with a congenital inability to feel pain. (Quaid’s own pain threshold: “Not high!”) He is also currently wrapping the fifth and final season of “The Boys,” Amazon’s body fluid-soaked antisuperhero show. He leads the cast as Hughie, a normal-ish guy in an enthusiastically abnormal world. And he has two other movies in postproduction, the thriller “Neighborhood Watch” and the action comedy “Heads of State.”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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      A New Documentary Uncovers One of Pop’s Tragic Mysteries: Q Lazzarus

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      Her haunting song “Goodbye Horses” had a star turn in “The Silence of the Lambs,” but the enigmatic artist behind it seemingly vanished for decades after.For years, it was one of pop music’s most persistent mysteries: Whatever happened to Q Lazzarus? And furthermore: Who was she in the first place?Most listeners who had heard of the genre-bending artist — if they’d heard of her at all — encountered her song “Goodbye Horses” in Jonathan Demme’s 1991 blockbuster “The Silence of the Lambs” as the backdrop to the scene where the serial killer Buffalo Bill applies makeup and poses strikingly nude. The creepy new wave track, with its minor-key, sci-fi synths and androgynous vocals, harmonized impeccably with the scene’s ominous visuals.“Goodbye Horses” was the only single Q Lazzarus officially released on a physical format while she was alive, but it came with an incredible story: Demme had encountered the musician at her day job — as a taxi driver — and fell in love with the music she played during the ride. But after her song’s star turn in his film, Q Lazzarus’s career stalled, and by the mid-90s, she had seemingly vanished entirely.Some fans and journalists made efforts to track down this enigmatic voice over the years, but the filmmaker who ended up telling her story in the new documentary “Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus” met the artist born Diane Luckey the same way Demme did: in her cab.“Getting into her car was a completely coincidental or fated, as Q and I both felt, meeting,” Eva Aridjis Fuentes, the movie’s director, said in an interview. The two sang along to Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold”; Aridjis Fuentes thought the woman behind the wheel looked familiar, and asked if she’d ever seen Q Lazzarus. They formed a friendship that resulted in Aridjis Fuentes’s film, which opens in a handful of cities including London, Los Angeles and New York next month, with a streaming release expected to follow. On Friday, the Brooklyn record label Sacred Bones will release its soundtrack — effectively the first full-length Q Lazzarus release.“We’re doing this documentary to let you know what went wrong and what happened,” Luckey says in the film. “The truth” about why she disappeared: “Because I had to.”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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      Grant Hill Can Finally Gloat in HBO’s ‘We Beat the Dream Team’

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      Hill and the film’s director talked about the time a team of college basketball players beat Michael Jordan, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson — and the effort to bury it.Grant Hill is a seven-time N.B.A. All-Star, Chris Webber a five-timer and Penny Hardaway a four-timer. Allan Houston was selected twice, Jamal Mashburn once.But back in 1992, they were just a bunch of college students playing a scrimmage against the U.S. men’s national basketball team, otherwise known as the Dream Team, which included Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Charles Barkley, Patrick Ewing and six other future Hall of Famers. The odds that Hill and company could topple a squad that went on to destroy every opponent at the Olympics by an average of 44 points seemed vanishingly thin.The HBO documentary “We Beat the Dream Team,” which premiered on Monday and is streaming on Max, recounts the day in June 1992 when that shocker actually happened — when the Select Team, as this collection of youthful sparring partners was called, stunned the game’s biggest players.Bobby Hurley, the Select Team’s point guard, pushed the pace and shredded the Dream Team defense with pinpoint passes. Houston buried threes. Webber was a force inside. Their elders looked complacent and sloppy, turning over the ball and even missing dunks as the game slipped away. The scrimmage lasted about 20 minutes, but the Select Team finished with a solid 62-54 triumph.Because of a rule change made by the International Basketball Federation, the 1992 Barcelona Games were the first Olympics in which N.B.A. players were permitted to play. For the college players, who were a bit resentful because they had hoped to represent the U.S. at the Games, the scrimmage victory was the ultimate vindication. (A few celebrated with perhaps a bit too much trash talk.)But as the documentary makes clear, their victory was essentially buried. The coach of the Olympic team, Chuck Daly, made sure the scoreboard was shut off before reporters came into the gym. No one really talked about it in the media that day. (Daly had allowed only one camera to record the game.)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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      Jane Fonda, Sneakerhead

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      The actor and activist on aging into her latest role: sneaker model.The activity that Jane Fonda, the 87-year-old Oscar winner, activist and aerobics queen, is most associated with these days is probably environmental protest (well, that, the “Grace and Frankie” series and the “Book Club” film franchise). She did, after all, move to Washington, D.C., in 2019 specifically to draw attention to the climate crisis, getting arrested pretty much every Friday while staging sit-ins at the Capitol. Then she swore off buying new clothes, even for the red carpet.All of which makes her an unlikely choice to front a new luxury sneaker campaign. But for Silvio Campara, the chief executive of Golden Goose, the brand known for its prescuffed sneakers with the sparkly star on the side, she was his only choice. As to why she agreed to do it … well, that’s a whole other story.This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.Were you surprised when Golden Goose got in touch?I don’t do a lot of campaigns because I’m not friendly with a lot of brands. But my manager said: “This is a cool company. They have responsible practices.” And I said, “Well, you know, I like their sneakers.”So you were already wearing the sneakers?Two and a half years ago, I was making “Book Club: The Next Chapter” in Rome, and I would walk every day and look into stores, and there were so many cute sneakers with sequins and sparkles. That’s when I found them. I like the combo of sneakers with glitter and a very structured suit. I think that’s cool.How many sneakers do you have?Quite a lot because I don’t throw them away. I don’t want them to end up in the ocean. I have many, many dozens of all kinds of sneakers, starting with the old colored Reebok high-tops.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