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      Cormac McCarthy Movies: Stream These 5 Film Adaptations

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      The Coens and Ridley Scott are among the directors who took big swings at the novelist’s work. The distinctive writer left his mark on the big screen.By turns terse, poetic and baroque, able to find the essence of human nature in the bleakest of circumstances, Cormac McCarthy, who died Tuesday, was widely considered to be one of the greatest novelists of his generation. His writing, with its Western landscapes, noir-inflected dialogue and biblical inclinations, proved to be catnip to filmmakers, including the Coen brothers, Ridley Scott and Billy Bob Thornton. Here is a look at how this most distinctive of writers left his mark on the big screen.‘All the Pretty Horses’ (2000)Rent or buy it on most major platforms.Probably the gentlest of McCarthy’s Border Trilogy novels, this film adaptation tells the story of John Grady Cole, a young man who high-tails it across the border to Mexico, where he falls in love with a wealthy rancher’s daughter (Penélope Cruz), runs afoul of her family and the law, and navigates the horrors of prison life. Yes, this is gentle by McCarthy standards. Matt Damon, riding the success of “Good Will Hunting” and “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” plays Cole as a sensitive lad dumbstruck by love. Cruz, a native of Spain, does her best as a south-of-the-border lass. Thornton directs with lyrical respect for the source material, if not a whole lot of grit or imagination.‘No Country for Old Men’ (2007)Rent or buy it on most major platforms.The Coen brothers return to the Texas noir roots of their first feature, “Blood Simple,” for the most successful McCarthy adaptation to date. It won Oscars for best picture, directing and screenwriting, as well as Javier Bardem’s supporting turn as one of McCarthy’s nihilistic villains, an implacable killing machine who speaks in riddles and engages his prey in fatal rhetorical jousts. But the heart of the movie, about a briefcase full of money and the in-over-his-head opportunist (Josh Brolin) who pilfers it, is Tommy Lee Jones as a small-town sheriff who wants out of the game, which seems to get more sinister and incomprehensible by the minute. He is the old man of the title and the author’s surrogate, a poetic soul just trying to wait it out until it’s all over.‘The Road’ (2009)Stream it on Tubi, Vudu and Freevee.The novel that brought McCarthy’s world to a wide audience (and won a 2007 Pulitzer Prize), “The Road” redeems a postapocalyptic hellscape with the pure love of a father (played by Viggo Mortensen with heartbreaking intensity) for his young son (Kodi Smit-McPhee, already a young actor of uncommon instincts). It’s a gray land of digitally enhanced wreckage, peopled by cannibals and other desperate survivors played by the likes of Robert Duvall, Michael K. Williams and, in a brief but indelible and terrifying performance, Garret Dillahunt. John Hillcoat directs like he means it. “The Road” is up there with “No Country” as one of the purest visual distillations of McCarthy’s prose.‘The Sunset Limited’ (2011)Stream it on Max.Sometimes McCarthy likes to take a couple of characters, wind them up and just let them riff on what it all means. His 2022 novel, “Stella Maris,” fits this bill, as does this HBO film version of McCarthy’s play “The Sunset Limited,” about a God-fearing ex-con called Black (Samuel L. Jackson) and the secular humanities professor, called White (Tommy Lee Jones), whom Black saves from jumping in front of a subway train. Confined to Black’s apartment, they thrust and parry, Black offering a brand of streetwise divinity, White stewing in his own suicidal juices. Both actors clearly relish the opportunity to speak McCarthy’s dialogue, and who could blame them? This is some of Jackson’s best work, allowing him to return to his theater roots with a high-wire act of philosophy and feeling. Jones’s direction is workmanlike, but that’s all this material really needs.‘The Counselor’ (2013)Rent or buy it on most major platforms.Ridley Scott directs the only original screenplay on McCarthy’s résumé, an unfairly maligned and misunderstood blast of criminal nihilism that carries the noir direction of “No Country” to its apotheosis. Michael Fassbender plays a glib lawyer whose taste for the finer things gets him in deep with a Mexican cartel. Other players come and go, including Brad Pitt, Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Bruno Ganz and Cameron Diaz, who has an amorous encounter with a luxury car that you will never unsee. This is McCarthy and Scott having infectious fun with humanity’s dark side, including two bravura murder scenes notable for their cruelty and creativity. More

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      ‘Miles Ahead,’ ‘The Exiles’ and More Streaming Gems

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      Inventive riffs on the biopic, the movie musical, the classic Western and the celebrity bio-documentary are among the highlights of this month’s roundup of under-the-radar streaming movies.‘Miles Ahead’ (2016)Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.Viewers hoping for a traditional music-legend biopic in the style of “Walk the Line” or “Ray” will likely be baffled by this portrait of Miles Davis from Don Cheadle, who directs, co-writes and stars as the jazz great. Cheadle eschews the cradle-to-grave approach typical of such endeavors, instead building his narrative around a tall tale of Davis and a music journalist (Ewan McGregor) attempting to recover stolen tapes of his latest album. This mostly fictional fabrication gives Cheadle the leeway to create a playful, unpredictable and unexpected work — a cinematic reflection of the music that made him famous. Emayatzy Corinealdi is heart-wrenching as Davis’s wife Frances, while LaKeith Stanfield and Michael Stuhlbarg stand out in memorable supporting roles.‘The Lure’ (2017)Stream it on Max.The Polish director Agnieszka Smoczynska made her feature directing debut with this exhilaratingly odd mash-up of cabaret musical, sex comedy and folk horror tale. Michalina Olszanska and Marta Mazurek are Gold and Silver, a pair of mermaid sisters who leave their comfortable undersea homes in pursuit of a handsome human (shades of “The Little Mermaid”), and end up bumping and grinding at a seedy nightclub. Smoczynska takes this literal fish-out-of-water tale and spices it up with unexpected genre flourishes; it’s the kind of movie where, if you’re not enjoying yourself, you merely have to wait a few scenes for it to become something else entirely.‘St. Vincent’ (2014)Stream it on Netflix.The gruff but lovable geezer, the harried and hard-working single mom, the hooker with the heart of gold — the character types on display in Theodore Melfi’s comedy-drama are, to put it charitably, well-worn. Yet they’re written with such sensitivity and played with such nuance by Bill Murray, Melissa McCarthy and Naomi Watts that the amiable viewer won’t much mind; in fact, these overly familiar characters, and the stock situations Melfi writes them into, allow these actors to give them a good, old-fashioned, movie-star spit shine. All three pros are in fine form, with McCarthy particularly good in a lived-in, semi-dramatic turn that predicts her affecting work in “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” But the standout is young Jaeden Martell, charismatic and charming as the kid who brings them all together.‘The Old Way’ (2023)Stream it on Hulu.So much of today’s B-movie output consists of Xeroxed action movies and unimaginative horror that it’s easy to forget how the Western was once a key corner of that world. This revenge melodrama from the director Brett Donowho serves as a reminder of the genre’s vitality, even on a low budget. Though burdened by a thin script and a distractingly contemporary look, the picture’s flaws are handily outweighed by the presence of Nicolas Cage in the leading role — shockingly, his first turn in an oater in a 100-plus film career. He brings a hard-fought gravitas to this old gunslinger character, his familiar face sharpened by weary eyes and deeply set lines reminiscent of old-school Western stars like Randolph Scott and Audie Murphy.‘Run All Night’ (2015)Stream it on Max.This Liam Neeson vehicle was released the year after “John Wick,” and feels, in retrospect, like the first of that film’s many imitators, with Neeson as a former Mob enforcer who puts his own life in jeopardy when he kills his boss’s trigger-happy son. Whatever its origins, this is one of Neeson’s better late-period action efforts, thanks to a stellar supporting cast (including Vincent D’Onofrio, Ed Harris, Bruce McGill, Lois Smith plus a “John Wick: Chapter 2” co-star, Common) and a tightly focused Neeson performance; he has one especially good scene at the hospital bed of his dying mother, wearing the face of a man who knows how much he’s let her down.‘The Exiles’ (2023)Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.Christine Choy, the initial subject of this documentary from the directors Violet Columbus and Ben Klein, is such a compelling, colorful character — a foul-mouthed, chain-smoking, no nonsense local legend — that one could watch a film merely of her telling stories and barking complaints. But Columbus and Klein are up to much more than that. “The Exiles” details how fellow documentarian Choy spent much of the summer of 1989 interviewing “political exiles” from China’s Tiananmen Square protests (and subsequent massacre) and attending their Stateside events. Decades later, she rediscovers that footage and sets about reconnecting with her subjects, a process that results in poignant reflection and righteous indignation over how their cause was adopted but eventually discarded by the U.S. government.‘Call Me Kate’ (2022)Stream it on Netflix.Katharine Hepburn is the subject of the documentary “Call Me Kate.”NetflixNetflix is notoriously reluctant to license films from Hollywood’s golden era (frankly, it can be hard to find much of anything from the 20th century in general). But they will offer up the occasional documentary study of cinema history, such as “Five Came Back,” “Is That Black Enough for You?!?,” and this recent British documentary valentine to the one and only Katharine Hepburn. The writer and director Lorna Tucker draws from rare archival audio and home movies, elegantly assembling a portrait that both celebrates and demystifies her considerable legend. Intimate and unapologetic, it leaves the viewer with a keener understanding of Hepburn — the person and the persona.‘Tim’s Vermeer’ (2014)Stream it on Hulu.The current hullabaloo over A.I. and visual art makes this a fine time to revisit this provocative and pointed documentary, written by the magicians and self-appointed debunkers Penn and Teller, narrated by the former and directed by the latter. They detail the efforts of inventor Tim Jenison to both investigate and replicate the methodology of Dutch master Johannes Vermeer, whose photorealistic paintings have impressed admirers and challenged skeptics for years. Assembled with the pair’s usual and potent mixture of cynicism and curiosity, it’s a compelling journey into the past with implications for the future. More

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      Jacques Rozier, Last of the French New Wave Directors, Dies at 96

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      Though he never achieved the fame of Jean-Luc Godard or François Truffaut, he was considered by many to be their equal.Jacques Rozier, who directed critically acclaimed films like “Adieu Philippine” and “Du Côté d’Orouët” and who was considered the last surviving member of the French New Wave, if an underrated one, died on June 2 in the village of Théoule-sur-Mer in southern France. He was 96.His death was announced on social media by his friend and former collaborator Michèle Berson.Mr. Rozier was in his 30s when he emerged as part of the French film vanguard of the late 1950s and 1960s, channeling the same insurrectionary spirit as New Wave contemporaries like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, whose last names became one-word signifiers of swashbuckling directorial brilliance.Such luminaries acknowledged him as a member in good standing in what amounted to one of cinema history’s most exclusive clubs, collectively committed to reinventing the art form by upending conventional notions of what a movie could be.And he outlasted them all. After the death in 2019 of Agnès Varda, another director associated with the movement, Mr. Godard said in an interview with the Swiss public broadcasting network RTS that there were now only two of the original New Wave directors left, himself and Mr. Rozier. Mr. Godard, a longtime friend of Mr. Rozier, died last year.“Adieu Philippine” (1962) was Mr. Rozier’s debut feature, a story about a young television technician’s breezy seaside dalliance with two teenage girls before he heads off to serve in the Algerian War.While the film was not a commercial success, it inspired an emerging generation of mavericks.Cahiers du Cinéma, the French film magazine that served as the bible of the movement, put the movie’s female stars, Yveline Céry and Stefania Sabatini, on the cover of an issue titled “Nouvelle Vague” (“New Wave”) and described the film as “the paragon of the New Wave, the one where the virtues of jeunes cinéma shine with their purest brilliance.”The celebrated directors Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette, who were also aligned with the movement, declared “Adieu Philippine” a masterpiece. Mr. Truffaut wrote that it was “the clearest success of the new cinema where spontaneity is all the more powerful when it is the result of long and careful work.” Before its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, Mr. Godard called the film “quite simply the best French film of recent years.”Even so, it took Mr. Rozier, a single-minded director known for feuding with his producers, years to achieve even modest acclaim across the Atlantic. When “Adieu Philippine” finally premiered in New York in 1973, the critic Roger Greenspun of The New York Times wrote in his review that it was “especially ironic” that “perhaps the most agreeable, and surely one of the loveliest, of all New Wave movies” should have “had to wait so long.”Even then, Mr. Rozier spent the next decades largely as a darling of critics and cineastes. The New Yorker called him the “odd man out” in a 2012 appreciation by the critic Richard Brody, a champion of his work. Observing that none of his five feature films were available in the United States, Mr. Brody wrote that Mr. Rozier “gets the award for Best French Director Undistributed Here.”Mr. Rozier was born on Nov. 10, 1926, in Paris. After graduating from the Institute for Advanced Film Studies (now La Fémis) in his home city, he worked as an assistant in television and on film productions, including “French Cancan,” a 1955 musical directed by Jean Renoir. Mr. Rozier would go on to direct many French television shows throughout the 1960s.Information on his survivors was not immediately available. His former wife, Michèle O’Glor, a writer and actress, died last year, following the death in 2021 of their son Jean Jacques Rozier, who worked as an operator on several of his father’s films.Nine years after “Adieu Philippine” premiered at Cannes, Mr. Rozier returned to that fabled French Riviera festival with “Du côté d’Orouët,” a rambling comedy released in 1973 that was shot on 16-millimeter film. It followed three young women from Paris embarking on a vacation on the west coast of France.More than two and a half hours long “and ultra casual, ‘Du côté d’Orouët’ is the epitome of what Quentin Tarantino would term a ‘hang out’ movie,” the Australian film site Senses of Cinema noted in 2018.A scene from ”Adieu Philippine” (1962), about a young television technician’s dalliance with two teenage girls.via UnifranceRambling seaside films were common for Mr. Rozier. Among them are the 1976 comedy “Les Naufragés de l’île de la Tortue” (“The Castaways of Turtle Island”), about a travel agent who sets up Robinson Crusoe-style vacations in Caribbean islands, and “Maine-Océan” (“Maine-Ocean Express”), a 1986 road comedy set on a train traveling from Paris to Saint-Nazaire on the coast of Brittany.His movies, including his final one, the theater-world comedy “Fifi Martingale,” from 2001, “are deliciously unstrung,” Mr. Brody wrote in his New Yorker appreciation.“He builds them on the basis of elaborate improvisations, constructing long scenes of comic misadventures and amorous misunderstandings,” he wrote. “He casts the minutiae of daily life as cosmic playthings of destiny and invests them with an extraordinary, bittersweet romantic energy.” More

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      Cormac McCarthy, Author of ‘The Road’ and ‘No Country for Old Men,’ Dead at 89

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      “All the Pretty Horses,” “The Road” and “No Country for Old Men” were among his acclaimed books that explore a bleak world of violence and outsiders.Cormac McCarthy, the formidable and reclusive writer of Appalachia and the American Southwest, whose raggedly ornate early novels about misfits and grotesques gave way to the lush taciturnity of “All the Pretty Horses” and the apocalyptic minimalism of “The Road,” died on Tuesday at his home in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 89. Knopf, his publisher, said in a statement that his son John had confirmed the death. Mr. McCarthy’s fiction took a dark view of the human condition and was often macabre. He decorated his novels with scalpings, beheadings, arson, rape, incest, necrophilia and cannibalism. “There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed,” he told The New York Times magazine in 1992 in a rare interview. “I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea.”His characters were outsiders, like him. He lived quietly and determinately outside the literary mainstream. While not quite as reclusive as Thomas Pynchon, Mr. McCarthy gave no readings and no blurbs for the jackets of other writers’ books. He never committed journalism or taught writing. He granted only a handful of interviews.The mainstream, however, eventually came to him. “All the Pretty Horses,” a reflective western that cut against the grain of his previous work, won a National Book Award in 1992, and “The Road” won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007. Both were made into films, as was Mr. McCarthy’s “No Country for Old Men,” which won the Academy Award for best picture in 2008.Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh in the 2007 film adaptation of “No Country for Old Men,” which won the Academy Award for best picture.Richard Foreman/Miramax Films and Paramount VantageThat film, directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, gave the world the indelible image of Javier Bardem as Mr. McCarthy’s nihilistic hit man Anton Chigurh, dispatching his victims with a pneumatic bolt gun meant for cattle.Mr. McCarthy had in recent years been discussed as a potential winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. The critic Harold Bloom named him one of the four major American novelists of his time, alongside Philip Roth, Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon, and called Mr. McCarthy’s novel “Blood Meridian” (1985), a bad dream of a Western, “the greatest single book since Faulkner’s ‘As I Lay Dying.’”Saul Bellow noted Mr. McCarthy’s “absolutely overpowering use of language, his life-giving and death-dealing sentences.”Acclaim for Mr. McCarthy’s work was not universal, however. Some critics found his novels portentous and self-consciously masculine. There are few notable women in his work.Writing in The New Yorker in 2005, James Wood praised Mr. McCarthy as “a colossally gifted writer” and “one of the great hams of American prose, who delights in producing a histrionic rhetoric that brilliantly ventriloquizes the King James Bible, Shakespearean and Jacobean tragedy, Melville, Conrad, and Faulkner.”But Mr. Wood accused Mr. McCarthy of writing sentences that sometimes veered “close to nonsense,” of “appearing to relish the violence he so lavishly records,” and of being hostile to intellectual consciousness.The language and tone of Mr. McCarthy’s novels changed markedly over the decades. Among academics and Mr. McCarthy’s legion of obsessive readers, the essential question about his oeuvre has long been: What’s better, early McCarthy or late?Mr. McCarthy in 1965 when he published his first novel, “The Orchard Keeper.” It was a bleak fable set in the Appalachian South.Joe BlackwellHis first four novels — “The Orchard Keeper” (1965), “Outer Dark” (1968), “Child of God” (1973) and “Suttree” (1979) — are bleak fables, set in the Appalachian South, related in tangled prose that owes an acknowledged debt to William Faulkner. Indeed, the editor of Mr. McCarthy’s first five books, Albert Erskine, of Random House, had been Faulkner’s last editor.These early novels could be carnivalesque in their humor. In “Suttree,” for example, one character has carnal relations with the entirety of a farmer’s watermelon field. The farmer sues, alleging bestiality, but the man later brags, “My lawyer told em a watermelon wasnt no beast.”Mr. McCarthy’s later period began in earnest with “All the Pretty Horses,” the first volume in his Border Trilogy, which includes the novels “The Crossing” (1994) and “Cities of the Plain” (1998). These novels put on display his powerful and intuitive sense of the American landscape. His prose was now rich but austere, shorn of most punctuation. It owed more to Hemingway than to Faulkner. The location in his fiction had shifted as well, to the desert Southwest.The elegiac quality of “All the Pretty Horses,” with its existential cowboys, surprised some of his admirers. One of Mr. McCarthy’s friends, the novelist Leslie Garrett, was quoted as remarking about it, “Cormac finally has succeeded in writing a book that won’t offend anybody.”“All the Pretty Horses” attracted a vast audience, and was made into a film in 2000 starring Matt Damon and Penélope Cruz. It was not merely Mr. McCarthy’s first best seller; it was his first novel to sell many copies at all. None of his previous books had by then sold more than 5,000 copies in hardcover.“All the Pretty Horses,” a reflective Western, won a National Book Award in 1992 and was adapted for film in 2000.Matt Damon in a scene from the 2000 film “All the Pretty Horses.” The book was Mr. McCarthy’s first best seller.Van Redin/Columbia – TriStar, via Getty ImagesEarly Life in TennesseeHe was born Charles McCarthy on July 20, 1933, in Providence, R.I., the third of six children and the oldest son born to Charles J. and the Gladys (McGrail) McCarthy. Within a few years the family moved to Knoxville, Tenn., where Mr. McCarthy’s father, who had graduated from Yale Law School, worked as a lawyer for the Tennessee Valley Authority.According to one account, Mr. McCarthy adopted the name Cormac, a family nickname, to avoid associations with Charlie McCarthy, the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen’s dummy. By another account, given on a website devoted to Mr. McCarthy, he renamed himself Cormac after an Irish king. Still another has it that Mr. McCarthy’s family had legally changed his name to the Gaelic equivalent of “son of Charles.”The McCarthy family was affluent for Knoxville, its large white house staffed with maids. The young Mr. McCarthy was drawn, however, to the city’s seedier side. “I felt earlier on I wasn’t going to be a respectable citizen,” he told the Times Magazine. “I hated school from the day I set foot in it.”He attended Knoxville’s Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee, where he studied physics and engineering in 1951 and 1952. He joined the Air Force in 1953 and served four years, several of them stationed in Alaska. To quell his boredom, he said, “I read a lot of books very quickly.”Mr. McCarthy returned to the University of Tennessee from 1957 to 1959. He learned that he had a knack for language, he once said, after a professor asked him read a collection of 18th-century essays and repunctuate them for a textbook. He began to publish short stories in the student literary magazine. He never graduated, however, and he moved to Chicago, where he worked in an auto-parts warehouse while writing his first novel.He sent the manuscript of that novel, “The Orchard Keeper,” to Random House, he said, because “it was the only publisher I’d heard of.”Reviewing “The Orchard Keeper” in The Times in 1965, Orville Prescott called it “impressive” but noted that Mr. McCarthy deployed “so many of Faulkner’s literary devices and mannerisms that he half-submerges his own talents beneath a flood of imitation.”Mr. McCarthy wrote for many years in relative obscurity and privation. After his first marriage, to a fellow University of Tennessee student named Lee Holleman, ended in divorce, he married Anne DeLisle, an English pop singer, in 1966. The couple lived for nearly eight years in a dairy barn outside Knoxville.“We lived in total poverty,” Ms. DeLisle once said. “We were bathing in the lake.” She added: “Someone would call up and offer him $2,000 to come speak at a university about his books. And he would tell them that everything he had to say was there on the page. So we would eat beans for another week.”Mr. McCarthy’s second novel, “Outer Dark,” was about a woman who bears her brother’s baby; he leaves it in the woods to die. Guy Davenport, writing in The Times Book Review in 1968, praised its language as “compounded of Appalachian phrases as plain and as functional as an ax.”His third novel, “Child of God,” was about a cave-dwelling mass murderer and necrophiliac. Reviewing it at length in The New Yorker, the author and child psychiatrist Robert Coles called Mr. McCarthy a “novelist of religious feeling” and likened him to the classical Greek dramatists.Mr. McCarthy moved to El Paso in 1976 after separating from Ms. DeLisle. The couple later divorced. The settings of his novels soon changed as well.His last of his early novels to be set in the South, “Suttree” (1979), was his most autobiographical. It is set among the fringe characters who populated Knoxville’s waterfront, a milieu he knew intimately. “I was always attracted to people who enjoyed a perilous lifestyle,” Mr. McCarthy once said.Mr. McCarthy in 1979, the year “Suttree” was published. In the book, one character has carnal relations with the entirety of a farmer’s watermelon field.Dan MooreSome saw the novel as a farewell to his raucous old life. He stopped drinking before the novel was published. “The friends I do have are simply those who quit drinking,” he said. “If there is an occupational hazard to writing, it’s drinking.”Mr. McCarthy was briefly living in a motel in Knoxville when he learned, in 1981, that he had won a MacArthur fellowship. (In praise of his many mailing addresses, he commented: “Three moves is as good as a fire.”)‘A Legion of Horribles’The MacArthur money gave him the time to write “Blood Meridian,” which many critics feel is his finest book. A surreal and blood-drenched anti-western about a gang of scalp hunters and outlaws in Texas and Mexico, the book features among its central characters a crazed, hairless, brilliant, seven-foot tall albino judge who put many readers in mind of Melville’s Captain Ahab.The book delineated what he called “a legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners.”After the retirement of Mr. Erskine, his longtime editor, Mr. McCarthy moved from Random House to Alfred A. Knopf and acquired a new editor, Gary Fisketjon, who also worked with Raymond Carver, Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff, among other writers. It was before the release of “All the Pretty Horses” in 1992 that Mr. McCarthy agreed to talk to The Times Magazine for his first major interview.The author of the article, Richard B. Woodward, noted at the time that Mr. McCarthy “cuts his own hair, eats his meals off a hot plate or in cafeterias and does his wash at the Laundromat.”In that interview, Mr. McCarthy named the “good writers” as Melville, Dostoyevsky and Faulkner, a list that omitted writers who, as he put it, don’t “deal with issues of life and death.” About Proust and Henry James, he commented: “I don’t understand them. To me, that’s not literature. A lot of writers who are considered good I consider strange.”“All the Pretty Horses” is a gritty but often romantic narrative about a young man named John Grady Cole who, evicted in 1950 from the Texas ranch where he grew up, heads for Mexico on horseback along with his best friend. The book sold nearly 200,000 copies within six months.The next two books in the Border Trilogy also sold well, although some critics were not as taken with them. “It’s axiomatic in publishing,” Mr. Fisketjon said in a 1995 interview, “that the thrill of discovery is followed by a backlash.”Mr. McCarthy for many years maintained an office at the Santa Fe Institute, a nonprofit scientific research center founded in 1984 by the particle physicist Murray Gell-Mann and others. He moved from El Paso to live nearby. He enjoyed the company of scientists and sometimes volunteered to help copy-edit science books, shearing them of things like exclamation points and semicolons, which he found extraneous.“People ask me, ‘Why are you interested in physics?’,” he was quoted as saying in a 2007 Rolling Stone profile. “But why would you not be? To me, the most curious thing of all is incuriosity.” He would drive to the institute after dropping John, his young son, off at school.Mr. McCarthy published his stripped-down existential thriller “No Country For Old Men” in 2005. The next year he published “The Road,” a grueling novel about a father and son’s struggle to survive in a postapocalyptic landscape.“The Road” a grueling novel about a father and son’s struggle to survive in a post-apocalyptic landscape, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007.The novel is dedicated to his son.“I think about John all the time and what the world’s going to be like,” Mr. McCarthy told Rolling Stone. “If the family situation was different, I could see taking John and going to New Zealand. It’s a civilized place. ”In the same interview, Mr. McCarthy said he had never voted: “Poets shouldn’t vote.”Writing Till the EndMr. McCarthy sold his archives, 98 boxes of letters, drafts, notes and unpublished work, to Texas State University in 2008 for $2 million. A year later, the Olivetti typewriter on which he’d written each of his novels sold at auction for $254,500. He immediately began working on a new Olivetti, the same model, purchased for less than $20.The Olivetti manual typewriter on which Mr. McCarthy typed all of his novels from 1958 to 2009, the year it sold at auction for $254,500.Christie’s, via Associated PressIn 2012, Mr. McCarthy wrote a screenplay, “The Counselor,” about a lawyer in the Southwest who falls into the drug business. Ridley Scott adapted it for a film in 2013 starring Michael Fassbender and Cameron Diaz.Mr. McCarthy was married for a third time, to Jennifer Winkley, in 1998, when he was 64 and she was 32. The marriage ended in divorce in 2006. In addition to his son John, from Mr. McCarthy’s third marriage, he is survived by another son, Chase, from his first marriage; two sisters, Barbara Ann McCooe and Maryellen Jaques; a brother, Dennis; and two grandchildren. His first wife, Ms. Holleman, died in 2009.Late in 2022, Mr. McCarthy released a pair of ambitious linked novels, “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris,” to mostly adulatory reviews. “The Passenger” is about a racecar driver turned salvage diver named Bobby Western — he somewhat resembles Mr. McCarthy in his taciturnity, his Knoxville childhood and his fondness for New Orleans and its nightlife — who sees things he should not see. Before long he is pursued not only by G-men but, it can seem, also by all the ghosts of the 20th century. It’s a novel of ideas — about mathematics, the nature of knowledge, the importance of fast cars — that slips into pretentiousness at times but also contains flatulence jokes.The title of the second novel, “Stella Maris,” refers to a psychiatric hospital in Black River Falls, Wis. That is where 20-year-old Alicia Western, a doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, has checked herself in because she’s been hallucinating. Central among her visions is the Thalidomide Kid, a shambolic dwarf with flippers and a bent sense of humor. Alicia is carrying a plastic bag stuffed with $40,000, which she tries to give away to the receptionist. Alicia also happens to be Bobby’s sister. Their father was a physicist on the Manhattan Project.Shortly before Mr. McCarthy’s death, it was announced that he had been at work on a screenplay for a film adaptation of “Blood Meridian,” to be directed by John Hillcoat, who directed the film of Mr. McCarthy’s “The Road.”In 2007, Mr. McCarthy took part in one of the most unlikely cultural collisions of the new century when he agreed to be interviewed on daytime television by Oprah Winfrey. She had chosen “The Road” for her book club.He seemed uncomfortable in the spotlight. “I don’t think it’s good for your head,” he told Ms. Winfrey about being interviewed. “You spend a lot of time thinking about how to write a book, you probably shouldn’t be talking about it. You probably should be doing it.”Alex Traub More

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      ‘Horseplay’ Review: Boys Will Be Boys

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      In this film from Argentina, a bunch of guys rent a villa and, well, act like a bunch of annoying guys renting a villa.Boys will be boys, as the saying goes. In “Horseplay,” the sleek, expansive villa that a group of young, straight-identifying men relax in for the holidays starts to close in as their games of machismo — dumping water on a sleeping guest, for instance — push one another to the breaking point.There’s not a lot of forward momentum in “Horseplay,” directed by Marco Berger and set outside a city in Argentina. Instead, the film plays like a perverse riff on a hangout movie, the “no homo” antics of a film like Richard Linklater’s “Everybody Wants Some!!” taken to extremes, both in its laid back pace but also in the consequences of its characters fooling around.They take naked photos together, send them around, slap each other’s butts. The audience sees something roil in one member of the group, Poli (Franco de la Puente), as he gazes at some of the young men faking fellatio and playacting penetration. But everyone else is content to lounge in the cognitive dissonance of the blurry boundaries of their homosocial intimacy rituals.If only it weren’t all a bit inert. Without a piercing point of view to cut to the core of this male bonding, everything unspools slowly and without propulsion. “Horseplay” is less an acutely mapped-out anthropological study into toxic masculinity and pervasive homophobia and misogyny, and more like having to spend a day chilling with the most annoying guys you know.HorseplayNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. Rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      Golden Globes Are Sold and Hollywood Foreign Press Is No More

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      After a series of ethics, finance and diversity scandals, the embattled awards show will continue but the group that was behind it for decades will not.The Hollywood Foreign Press Association, a group of entertainment journalists from overseas that, despite frequent missteps, built the Golden Globe Awards into a marquee event, died on Monday after a series of scandals. It was 80.The end of the embattled H.F.P.A. was announced after California officials agreed to a complicated reorganization plan that will allow the Golden Globe Awards to continue.Eldridge Industries, a holding company owned by the billionaire investor Todd Boehly, and Dick Clark Productions, which is part of Penske Media, agreed to buy the foreign press association’s Golden Globe assets for an undisclosed price. The proceeds will go to a new nonprofit, the Golden Globe Foundation, which will continue the H.F.P.A.’s philanthropic efforts; it gave more than $50 million to entertainment-related charities over the last three decades.Members of the foreign press association — primarily freelance entertainment journalists — will become employees of a yet-to-be-named for-profit entity that will try to expand the Golden Globes as a brand, according to an Eldridge spokesman. The former members (there are fewer than 100) will earn $75,000 annually for five years, with duties that include watching films and television shows and voting for the awards; and producing promotional materials, including writing articles for a Golden Globes website. It was unclear if the members could continue freelancing (mostly celebrity interviews) for publications overseas.The Los Angeles Times discovered in 2021 that the H.F.P.A. had no Black members, setting off an outcry in the entertainment industry that resulted in NBC canceling the 2022 Globes telecast. The ceremony returned to NBC in January under a one-year agreement. Eldridge and Dick Clark Productions, which has produced the Globes telecast for decades, have since been looking for a new broadcast network or streaming service partner.The 81st Golden Globe Awards ceremony has been scheduled for Jan. 7.In a statement, Mr. Boehly called the dissolution of the H.F.P.A. a “significant milestone in the evolution of the Golden Globes.” He thanked the association’s former president, Helen Hoehne, for helping push through reforms, including “a robust approach to governance” that had helped professionalize an awards entity long known for infighting and scandal.“We have a great team in place to grow this iconic brand,” Jay Penske, the chief executive of Penske Media, said in a statement.The foreign press association had long been viewed as unserious and slippery. In the late 1960s, the Federal Communications Commission had the Globes temporarily booted from the airwaves, saying it “misled the public as to how the winners were determined.” In the 1990s and 2000s, Harvey Weinstein, the since-imprisoned Miramax co-founder, manipulated the organization in ways big and small — expensive gifts and special access to stars and his own time, at a moment when other studio chiefs could barely hide their derision. He was often rewarded with a stunning number of nominations.Hollywood stopped turning a blind eye to the organization’s failings in 2021, after the killing of George Floyd in police custody in 2020 prompted a national conversation about racism and inequity. More than 100 publicists closed ranks, refusing to make stars available for Golden Globe appearances and contributing to NBC’s cancellation of the 2022 telecast. More

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      Netanyahu Trial Gets a Hollywood Mention From a Political Rival

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      Yair Lapid, a former colleague and now nemesis of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, testified that he had been asked to help a wealthy film producer with a tax break.The leader of Israel’s political opposition, Yair Lapid, testified on Monday in the long-running corruption trial of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, recounting how Mr. Netanyahu had lobbied him nearly a decade ago to back tax breaks favoring an influential Israeli film producer.The claim is a small part of a yearslong prosecution in which Mr. Netanyahu is accused of granting political favors to several businessmen and media moguls in exchange for expensive gifts and positive news coverage, charges that he denies.The appearance of Mr. Lapid — once a colleague of Mr. Netanyahu’s and now his nemesis — enlivened a slow-moving courtroom process that has largely receded into the background of Israeli public life since it began with great fanfare more than three years ago.Mr. Lapid served as prime minister for several months last year, before losing power to Mr. Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving leader, in December.Mr. Lapid briefly gave evidence about two short conversations with Mr. Netanyahu in 2013 and 2014, when he served as Mr. Netanyahu’s finance minister in a coalition government. Mr. Lapid said that Mr. Netanyahu twice had raised the possibility of extending tax exemptions for Israeli citizens who had returned to the country after living abroad, a mechanism that Mr. Lapid opposed.The extension would have benefited Arnon Milchan, a producer of scores of major Hollywood films including “Fight Club” and “Pretty Woman.” Prosecutors say Mr. Milchan gave Mr. Netanyahu’s family expensive gifts, including cigars and Champagne, in exchange for political favors.According to Mr. Lapid, Mr. Netanyahu twice described the tax exemption as “a good law.” But Mr. Netanyahu did not pursue the matter beyond those two exchanges, Mr. Lapid said. The prime minister gave the impression that he simply wanted to go through the motions of asking about it so that he could tell Mr. Milchan that he had tried, Mr. Lapid added.“The whole issue was marginal in real time,” Mr. Lapid said, according to Kan, the Israeli public broadcaster. “It’s hard to remember all the details.”Mr. Netanyahu has been accused of granting political favors to businessmen and media moguls in exchange for expensive gifts and positive news coverage, charges that he denies.Pool photo by Menahem KahanaThe trial began in 2020 and will most likely not hinge on Mr. Lapid’s evidence: It is expected to last several more years and features several more accusations. Among other claims, prosecutors accuse Mr. Netanyahu of promising to pursue legislation that would create unfavorable business conditions for a newspaper owned by Sheldon Adelson, a billionaire supporter of Mr. Netanyahu and President Donald J. Trump, in exchange for positive coverage from one of the newspaper’s competitors.Many Israelis have tuned out of the day-to-day proceedings, with a large proportion having already made up their minds about Mr. Netanyahu. His supporters view the trial as a trumped-up effort to delegitimize an elected prime minister, while his critics say it should disqualify him from office.But regardless of its outcome, the trial has already caused unusual political instability. It has divided Israeli society almost equally between Mr. Netanyahu’s supporters and critics, making it difficult for either Mr. Netanyahu or opponents like Mr. Lapid to win a stable majority in Parliament. That has caused several successive governments to collapse prematurely, leading to five elections in less than four years.The trial is also at the center of an ongoing dispute about the future of the Israeli judiciary.Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition seeks to overhaul the court system, giving the government greater control over the selection of Supreme Court judges and diminishing the court’s power over Parliament. Mr. Netanyahu says the overhaul is necessary to reduce the influence of unelected judges over elected lawmakers, but his critics fear that the plan will ultimately allow him to end his trial. Mr. Netanyahu denies any such intention.Mr. Lapid’s appearance highlighted the nuances beneath the surface of Israeli politics: Though he now seeks Mr. Netanyahu’s political downfall, Mr. Lapid was once his political ally — and socialized with and briefly worked for Mr. Milchan. Under cross-examination, Mr. Lapid recounted how he interviewed Mr. Milchan in the 1990s, during his previous career as a journalist, and even joined Mr. Milchan’s production company for several months.“We remained friends after that,” Mr. Lapid said, according to Kan. “When he would come to Israel, we would meet for dinners. He is a charming man and I liked him.”But that friendship did not extend to helping Mr. Milchan with his tax, Mr. Lapid said.Gabby Sobelman More

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      Can the Tribeca Festival Make Audio Appealing?

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      The Tribeca Festival and audio artists each have something the other wants. Can they make it work?When Winnie and Alex Kemp submitted their first original fiction podcast “The Imperfection” to the 2021 Tribeca Festival, they set their expectations near the curb.The couple, co-founders of the podcast studio Wolf at the Door, believed in the project. Making the nine-episode series — a surrealist caper about two impaired friends whose psychiatrist goes missing — had been a nearly yearlong labor of love, but early signals from the market had been humbling. An agent the couple hired to find distribution for the show had come back empty-handed, and emails to 200 journalists generated just one reply — a rejection.At the Tribeca Festival, which dropped the word “film” from its name that year and expanded its focus on video games, virtual reality, music and audio, “The Imperfection” received a warmer reception. It was among the inaugural slate of 12 officially selected podcasts to premiere at the festival.Being chosen by Tribeca meant “The Imperfection” was featured with the other festival selections on the Apple Podcasts and Audible home pages, helping it reach the top 20 of Apple Podcasts’ fiction chart. The show was later nominated for best podcast of the year and best fiction writing at The Ambie awards, the industry’s answer to the Oscars. And the Kemps got new representation with the Creative Artists Agency; last year, they sold the television rights to the show, and they will co-write the pilot script.“It was a huge boon to us helping our first show get found,” Winnie Kemp said. “There are so many shows out there; the hardest thing to figure out is, ‘How do I cut through the noise?’”Winnie and Alex Kemp submitted their original fiction podcast “The Imperfection” to the 2021 Tribeca Festival.n/aThough it has never equaled the most prestigious galas of the film world, the Tribeca Festival, which began last Wednesday and will feature audio selections this week, has emerged as a uniquely appealing showcase for podcast creators. The demand for credible curatorial organizations is high in podcast land, where an explosion of titles — over two million have been created since the start of 2020, according to the database Listen Notes — has made it hard to break out even as overall listenership has increased.While other festivals exist specifically for audio storytelling, and some documentary festivals include podcast selections, Tribeca’s history — it was founded in 2002 by Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal and Craig Hatkoff — and association with Hollywood talent have made it an instant player in the audio community.“This is the next frontier of interesting, creative, independent storytelling — so much so that discoverability has been a challenge for audiences,” said Cara Cusumano, the director and vice president of programming at the Tribeca Festival. “That’s our forte; there was a place for us to play a role in this ecosystem and deliver an experience that you won’t find anywhere else.”This year, 16 podcasts are competing for various awards in fiction and nonfiction categories. The selections include Alissa Escarce, Nellie Gilles and Joe Richman’s “The Unmarked Graveyard,” a documentary series about the anonymous dead of New York’s Hart Island cemetery; Georgie Aldaco’s “These Were Humans,” a sketch comedy series that imagines the artifacts of an extinct human race; and Glynnis MacNicol, Emily Marinoff and Jo Piazza’s “Wilder,” a nonfiction series about the life and legacy of the “Little House on the Prairie” author Laura Ingalls Wilder.The festival will also host live tapings and premieres of several podcasts that are not in competition, including “Pod Save America,” Crooked Media’s popular political talk show; “Just Jack & Will,” the actors Sean Hayes and Eric McCormack’s new “Will & Grace” rewatch podcast and “You Feeling This?” an Los Angeles-centric fiction anthology from James Kim.Davy Gardner, the curator of audio storytelling at Tribeca, said the festival aims to demonstrate that podcasts deserve a comparable level of “cultural recognition” to films.“Tribeca is giving these creators the full red-carpet treatment,” he said. “This is its own art form and we want to help elevate it and push it forward.”Film festivals have long been the envy of audio artists. In the early 1990s, Sundance helped create a vogue for independent and art-house films that blossomed into a booming market. Filmmakers who entered the festival with few resources and no name recognition could exit it with the backing of a major studio and a burgeoning career.No similar infrastructure exists for independent podcasters. As major funders like Spotify and Amazon have consolidated around easy-to-monetize true-crime documentaries and celebrity interview shows — a trend that has intensified amid industrywide economic woes and a series of layoffs — many artists have struggled to find support for less obviously commercial work.“If you don’t have a promotional budget or aren’t attached to a big network it’s really hard to find an audience,” said Bianca Giaever, whose memoiristic podcast “Constellation Prize” was featured by the Tribeca Festival in 2021. (She is also a former producer of the Times’ podcast “The Daily”). “It’s a vicious cycle, because then less of that work gets made.” Bianca Giaever’s memoiristic podcast “Constellation Prize” was featured by the Tribeca Festival in 2021.n/aOf course, even award-winning films at the biggest festivals don’t always become hits. And podcast creators at Tribeca have to compete for audiences and prospective business partners accustomed to filling their schedules with movie premieres.Johanna Zorn, who co-founded the long-running Third Coast International Audio Festival and presented audio work at multiple documentary film festivals in the 2010s, said the payoff sometimes fell short of the promise.“We went to some fabulous film festivals and we were happy to be there,” she said. “But did they help us get real press coverage? Get us into a room with people who could lead us to the next thing? Give us something that we could really build on? Not so much.”To cast the podcast selections in an optimal light, Gardner and his colleagues have had to learn how to exhibit an art form not customarily experienced in a communal setting. They have planned around a dozen events at theaters and other venues around Manhattan that will pair excerpts from featured work with live discussions or supplementary video.One thing they won’t include? Quiet rooms with only an audio track and an empty stage.“I’ve tried it,” Gardner said wearily. “It’s incredibly awkward.” More