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      Pieces of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward’s Life Together Head to Auction

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      More than 300 items that belonged to Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward will be sold in June in a series of auctions run by Sotheby’s in New York.Shackles from the film “Cool Hand Luke”; a script from the 1963 comedy “A New Kind of Love”; the wedding dress that Joanne Woodward wore the day she married Paul Newman in 1958.These artifacts, along with some 300 others, tell the story of a union between two of Hollywood’s most enduring film stars that lasted more than a half century. It began in 1953 and lasted until Mr. Newman, a magnetic titan of the screen, died in 2008 at the age of 83. Ms. Woodward, 93, a formidable talent, has kept a private life since she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 2007.The objects will also take on another kind of value later this year, when they are put up for sale in a series of auctions by Sotheby’s. If previous demand for Mr. Newman’s belongings is any measure, the events are likely to be lucrative: A Rolex he owned sold in 2017 for a record $17.8 million. Three years later, another of Mr. Newman’s watches sold for more than $5.4 million.The auctions, which will take place both online and in person in New York, follow the recent release of “The Last Movie Stars,” a six-part HBO Max documentary series directed by Ethan Hawke and based on audio transcripts of interviews with the couple’s friends, colleagues and family members.Mr. Newman’s posthumous memoir, “The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man,” was also published last year.Putting a Price Tag on ArtCard 1 of 6Hot commodities. More

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      ‘The Holly’ Review: The Tragic Case of a Denver Activist

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      Julian Rubinstein’s investigative documentary traces the engrossing case of a Denver community organizer, Terrance Roberts, who faced charges of attempted murderAt the point where Julian Rubinstein’s investigative documentary “The Holly” begins, an entire biopic’s worth of drama has already happened. After years in gangs and prison, Terrance Roberts became an activist and founded a successful youth program to rejuvenate a troubled Denver neighborhood known as the Holly. Then, in 2013, while organizing a peace rally in the area, he shot a gang member he knew, and was arrested and charged with attempted murder.The film portrays Roberts’s turmoil as the 2015 trial approached, and sorts through a paranoia-inducing churn of local police crackdowns, gang activity and general controversy. Roberts prepares a self-defense plea, but vents about further blowback after he speaks out against the back channels between law enforcement and gangs.Dangling speculations in voice-over, Rubinstein at times suggests a lower-key, adenoidal Nick Broomfield as he taps his surprisingly outspoken sources: amiable former gang members, the flamboyant Rev. Lee Kelly (who takes over as a neighborhood liaison after Roberts) and Roberts’s supportive father, also a reverend.Roberts emerges as a Shakespearean figure of forceful magnetism who fights mightily against being viewed as a walking metaphor for the Holly’s struggles. His fearlessness is both heroic and tragic, though Rubinstein’s sometimes foggy explanations of community politics make the film feel as if it might vanish into the night at any moment. (The director, a journalist, partly shot the movie while writing a more detailed book with the same title.)It’s all a heady brew that leaves one wanting to know even more about Roberts, who is now running for mayor in Denver. The movie resists encapsulating him, or perhaps he escapes its director’s full understanding.The HollyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major streaming platforms. More

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      ‘Women Talking’ | Anatomy of a Scene

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      Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera.Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera. More

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      Growing a Generation of Movie-Loving Global Citizens

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      The selections at this year’s New York International Children’s Film Festival blend fantastical elements with serious real-world themes.The characters in the offerings at the 2023 New York International Children’s Film Festival often resolve crises in unexpected ways: by tossing magical seeds. Or slamming enchanted doors. Or, in what may be the most startling example, following a giant porcupine as it lumbers through the streets of Rotterdam.These fantastical elements, however, appear alongside realities that more commercial movies for young people usually avoid. This year’s festival, which begins on Friday evening and continues for three weekends — two in Manhattan and Brooklyn theaters, and one at the Sag Harbor Cinema on Long Island — explores subjects like the civil war in Syria, accelerating threats of natural disaster, the plight of unauthorized immigrants and, in one short documentary, the effects of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on a family with members in both New York and Odesa. Now in its 26th year, the festival seeks not just to entertain young audiences but also to expand their worldviews.“There’s a concerted effort to talk about human rights and focus on global citizenry,” Maria-Christina Villaseñor, the festival’s programming director, said in an interview. But, she added, “I think that playfulness is really rolling out in all kinds of interesting ways throughout our slate.”That menu, comprising 16 features and nearly 60 short films, which will be offered entirely in person for the first time since 2020, begins with Friday’s world premiere of “Ernest & Celestine: A Trip to Gibberitia.” (This title and many others will be shown more than once.) An animated film from France and Luxembourg, it follows Ernest, a gruff but good-hearted bear, and Celestine, a vivacious mouse, as they journey to Ernest’s homeland to have his cherished violin, a “Stradibearius,” repaired. Once there, they’re shocked to learn that the country has prohibited almost all music-making.“Ernest & Celestine: A Trip to Gibberitia,” which will make its world premiere at the festival, follows a bear and a mouse on a wild journey that touches on themes of autocracy and personal autonomy.GKIDS/StudioCanalThe filmmakers, Julien Chheng and Jean-Christophe Roger (Roger will visit the festival for an opening-night Q. and A.), have filled the movie with wild chases, narrow escapes and a full-fledged musical resistance. But it also touches on autocracy and personal autonomy — relevant themes in a world where dissenters are sometimes imprisoned and certain children’s books are being banned.“Kids are able to enter these films at the level that they are comfortable or ready for,” said Nina Guralnick, the executive director of the festival, which offers titles for viewers as young as 3 and has a jury that judges a broad swath of the short films. (The prizewinners then become eligible for Academy Award consideration.) “But that’s also what makes those films last,” she said, “because they will come back and think about them as their thinking becomes more sophisticated.”The Projectionist Chronicles the Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.The Tom Cruise Factor: Stars were starstruck when the “Top Gun: Maverick” headliner showed up at the Oscar nominees luncheon.An Andrea Riseborough FAQ: Confused about the brouhaha surrounding the best actress nominee? We explain why her nod was controversial.Sundance and the Oscars: Which films from the festival could follow “CODA” to the 2024 Academy Awards.A Supporting-Actress Underdog: In “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” don’t discount the pivotal presence of Stephanie Hsu.Marya Zarif, a Syrian-born filmmaker who lives in Montreal, said in a video interview that she intended “Dounia & the Princess of Aleppo,” the Canadian and French animated feature that she directed with André Kadi, to be a festival film to which young viewers can repeatedly return for new insights.Dounia, its vibrant 6-year-old heroine, sees the war steadily encroaching on her joyful life in Syria. But she has powerful protection: nigella seeds, a Middle Eastern spice. In the movie, they have mystical properties that Dounia discovers after she and her grandparents become refugees on a dangerous and sometimes heartbreaking odyssey.“I needed a magic that was rooted in Dounia’s culture,” said Zarif, who will appear via video link for a post-screening Q. and A. on Sunday. “And I needed something very small but that had big effects, like Dounia herself.”The festival also has fare for viewers well into their teens. “Suzume,” an anime feature by Makoto Shinkai that is already a blockbuster in Japan, will receive its North American premiere at the festival on Sunday.The title character, an orphaned high school student who lives with her aunt, encounters Souta, a youth who is “a closer” — one who has the task of shutting ordinary-looking doors that, when left open, unleash terrors like earthquakes and tsunamis. When a spell transforms Souta into a walking, talking chair, Suzume shoulders his world-saving burden.Such stories of female empowerment are a favorite with the festival, which annually features the short-film program “Girls’ POV.” Its offerings this year include a story that illustrates the frustrations of obtaining menstrual products and a documentary about an American all-girl tackle football league.Girls also take charge in the Dutch live-action feature “Okthanksbye,” whose two main characters are deaf 13-year-olds. When the beloved Parisian grandmother of one of the teenagers is hospitalized, they leave their Netherlands boarding school and head to France. Portrayed by Mae van de Loo and Douae Zine El Abidine — young, deaf first-time actresses — the girls embark on an adventure that includes traveling with a female punk band.The film’s director, Nicole van Kilsdonk, who wrote the script with Lilian Sijbesma, said the movie wasn’t meant to be about disability, even though the girls’ situations — one has a cochlear implant; one doesn’t — play a role. Van Kilsdonk, who on Saturday will attend the first of two open-captioned screenings and take part in a sign-language-interpreted discussion, said this coming-of-age story held a universal message: “You can do more than you think.”Douae Zine El Abidine, left, and Mae van de Loo are first-time actresses, both deaf, who play deaf teenagers in the Dutch coming-of-age feature “Okthanksbye.”Labyrint FilmFar more perilous border crossings lie at the heart of the features about immigration. “Home Is Somewhere Else,” a Mexican documentary, chronicles, in their own words, the experiences of young people with different legal statuses. Framed by the spoken-word poetry of José Eduardo Aguilar, who was himself deported from the United States, the film eschews live action in favor of vivid, varied animation.“That also was a way to protect our protagonists’ identity,” said Jorge Villalobos, who wrote and directed the film with Carlos Hagerman. (Hagerman will participate in a Q. and A. after the film’s screening on March 11.) But the men, who dealt with families on each side of the U.S.-Mexico border, also found that animation gave them freedom to employ visual metaphors and depict the world through their subjects’ eyes.“Usually, documentaries are kind of talking about how the system doesn’t work,” Hagerman said. “And we are more into experiencing how does it feel to live in these situations.”Similar struggles infuse “Totem,” Sander Burger’s fictional live-action feature from Germany, Luxembourg and the Netherlands, which focuses on Ama (Amani-Jean Philippe), an 11-year-old whose Senegalese family lives in Rotterdam without documentation. Regarding herself as thoroughly Dutch, Ama ends up on the run and searching for her father after the authorities detain her other relatives. This high-spirited heroine gets aid from her spirit animal, a massive porcupine.The strong language in both immigration-related features hasn’t deterred the festival’s organizers, who provide parental advisories online. And families who may be reluctant to take children into theaters during a virus-filled winter can look forward to the festival’s Kid Flicks National Touring Program, which, in the summer, will begin sharing selections from some of its short-film packages — including Celebrating Black Stories and the Latin-themed ¡Hola Cine! — with museums, libraries and cinemas. (The festival also offers film-based curriculums for schools.)“We think we’ve doubled the number of programs that we send out,” Guralnick said. “And I feel like we just keep adding partners.” All share a goal, she added: “growing that next generation of filmgoers.”The New York International Children’s Film FestivalMarch 3-19; 212-349-0330; nyicff.org. More

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      ‘Palm Trees and Power Lines’ Review: A Teen’s Cautionary Tale

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      Lily McInerny stars as a 17-year-old girl who is groomed by a predator in Jamie Dack’s feature debut.It starts with a wink at a diner. When the 17-year-old, Lea (Lily McInerny), the heroine of “Palm Trees and Power Lines” sees it — or maybe just the man delivering it — her world falls off its axis. The wink flusters Lea; it also apparently primes her. So when the guy later rolls up next to her while she’s walking home, his mouth and engine both running, she responds to his attention, somehow oblivious to the Klaxon horns of warning shrieking in the viewer’s head.Directed by Jamie Dack, who shares screenplay credit with Audrey Findlay, “Palm Trees” tracks the bleak, depressing story of Lea, who falls for the wrong guy only to tumble headlong into the abyss. Set in an especially cheerless pocket of Southern California, where high-voltage lines loom over the sparsely treed landscape, it opens in the summer. Lea is on a break and conspicuously bored. Under the inattentive watch of her single mom (Gretchen Mol, doing what she can), Lea drifts through the days and nights, sunbathing in her yard and hanging out with friends. She gets high, hooks up and so it sluggishly goes.Everything shifts when the diner guy rolls into her life. He calls himself Tom (Jonathan Tucker), although once he gets talking it’s hard to believe anything that he says. Lea, though, is nothing if not credulous, and after jokingly ordering him not to murder her, she climbs in his truck next to him. She awkwardly lights a cigarette, he asks for a drag, the camera framing their hands hovering near each other. Lea and Tom chat, and her wariness soon eases, his flirting and her interest warming the cab. They keep chatting, she asks his age — he’s 34 — and by the time that he drops her off, Lea is a goner and the story is on its way.Ambitious, torpid, wildly overlong and frustratingly underdeveloped, “Palm Trees” follows Lea as she falls for Tom, who turns out to be as awful — and as much a near-parody of villainy — as his clichéd smooth talk. He’s less overtly sleazy and certainly less well-written than the pimp played by Harvey Keitel in “Taxi Driver,” but Tom’s moves and words come right from the same predator playbook. Unfortunately, and curiously for a 21st-century sentient teenager with a phone in her back pocket, Lea seems not to have watched a single movie, television show, newscast, Instagram story or viral TikTok about human trafficking.It would be easier to believe Lea’s sorry tale, her naïveté and spiraling trajectory, if she had more of a discernible personality. McInerny gives the character a convincing physical diffidence, a droopy reserve that, by turns, registers as shyness, apathy and self-protectiveness, and which can make this slight, already young-looking performer look even younger than her character’s age. But Lea’s personality is as lacking in expressive detail as her bland house and cramped world, and she rarely comes persuasively alive and then not for long, which might be interesting if it seemed intentional. Instead, too often, she is a narratively convenient blank.That’s a problem for a movie about sexual agency and sexual exploitation. Dack rightly doesn’t pass judgment on Lea, and she remains on the character’s side throughout. But because she never gets in the teen’s head and even seems oddly incurious about the girl’s inner life, she fails to adequately engage with questions of sexual consent, free will and whether Lea’s choices (or those of any underage child) are truly her own. Dack takes obvious care to make sure that the filmmaking and camerawork don’t further exploit the character. Yet it’s a bummer that the ethical and political thoughtfulness that she extends during Lea’s most harrowingly vulnerable moments doesn’t extend to the rest of the movie.Palm Trees and Power LinesRated R. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘What We Do Next’ Review: A Political Morality Play

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      In this three-person chamber drama, an ex-convict, a politician and a white-collar defense engage in tense conversations while pursuing their individual goals.“What We Do Next” is a three-person chamber drama that takes the scheming and blackmailing of political thrillers like “House of Cards” and shapes them into something like a morality play.In seven acts, the film tracks the relationship between Elsa (Michelle Veintimilla), an ex-convict; Sandy (Karen Pittman), a New York City politician; and Paul (Corey Stoll), a white-collar defense attorney. Years ago, when Sandy was running for office, she gave Elsa some cash to presumably flee her family home, where her father was sexually abusing her. Instead, Elsa bought a gun and shot him dead.Her lengthy prison sentence is an injustice in and of itself, the film makes clear. Like many women, Elsa is the victim of a criminal justice system that too often fails to take into account the context of abuse and survival in which such crimes take root. After being released, Elsa is left with a criminal record that has largely condemned her to low-paying work.Elsa refuses to settle for this, challenging the authenticity of Sandy’s progressive platform in the process. She threatens to publicly reveal Sandy’s connection to the killing in exchange for a decent job, while Paul, desperate to rebrand himself and transition to anti-corruption law, inserts himself into the women’s negotiations for the sake of good public relations.These talks unfold in various small and nondescript locations — the film was shot during quarantine — but the drama’s stripped-down, dialogue-heavy approach isn’t entirely an extension of the minimalism that defined many sets at the height of the pandemic. The writer and director Stephen Belber is best known as a playwright, which explains many of the film’s strengths and weaknesses. Elegantly composed if ultimately visually bland for the big screen, “What We Do Next” is essentially a series of debates powered by the performers and Belber’s intelligent script, an intricately drawn microcosm of the country’s dynamics of power. The result doesn’t make the best use of the medium’s powers, but the chatty ride does make for good food for thought.What We Do NextNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 17 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Gods of Mexico’ Review: A Portrait of Indigenous Residents

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      This abstract-leaning nonfiction film consists of a series of vignettes and tableaus of communities in Mexico.Onscreen, “Gods of Mexico” is subtitled “a portrait of a nation through its land and peoples,” although its human subjects rarely speak and aren’t identified by name until the end. The director, Helmut Dosantos, making his first feature, eschews context. This abstract-leaning nonfiction film, made from 2013 to 2022, consists of a series of vignettes and tableaus featuring Indigenous residents of Mexico. Chapters are labeled by geographic region and, more obliquely, with the names of Aztec gods.Some of the movie shows life in motion. The camera observes salt harvesters sloshing water in rhythmic synchronization. A shot descends into a crater until all that’s visible is the crater’s floor, which resembles a giant eye.Other stretches of “Gods of Mexico,” which shifts between black-and-white and color, are built from shots that contain barely any motion. A fisherman who has his catch strung from a bamboo trunk carries the beam behind his neck, as the wind ripples across his clothes. A cow-drawn cart and its driver remain surreally in place on a beach as waves lap the shore. Women balance baskets on their heads while standing frozen against a spare, desert-like backdrop.Viewed as still photographs, these images have a raw power, and sound contributes to that effect. But the temporal element of cinema makes the compositions feel mannered and overly posed. (“Just one more second,” you picture the camera operator signaling to the women with baskets.) When, late in the film, miners playing a dice game converse, it only calls attention to how artfully — and perhaps artificially — withholding the preceding scenes have been. This nominal portrait of people isn’t interested in what they have to say.Gods of MexicoNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Forger’ Review: Hiding in Plain Sight

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      This German drama follows a young Jewish man in early 1940s Berlin who survives by falsifying passports and concealing his identity in public.Before the opening credits in “The Forger,” a brief flash-forward scene shows a young man scampering into a lost and found office. Barging toward the desk, he is promptly reprimanded and ordered to wait his turn. This bathetic prelude is perhaps meant to communicate the man’s impudence, but it also readies the audience for a film of modest ambitions. Set in Berlin in 1942-43, the German period drama is less interested in wartime crises than the daily imbroglios of a life of hiding in plain sight.The film, directed by Maggie Peren, follows the Jewish 21-year-old Cioma Schönhaus (Louis Hofmann), a documents forger sustaining himself on ration coupons, chutzpah and sheer daring alongside his friend, Det (Jonathan Berlin). For a span, the pair reside in Cioma’s family home — their relatives have already been deported — and find that they can enjoy extravagant outings to restaurants and dance clubs by posing as naval officers.The screenplay, which Peren adapted from Schönhaus’s 2008 memoir, unspools with a certain complacency, and often seems to lack an emotional engine. Fleeting moments of suspense or melancholy are undermined by Cioma’s unremitting insouciance — no matter the situation, he wears a smirk — and a series of underwritten relationships muck up the narrative rather than enrich it. Peren is clever to favor mischief against a backdrop of gloom, but in doing so she draws a frustrating distance between her subject and the audience.The ForgerNot rated. In German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More