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    ‘When You Finish Saving the World’ Review: Mother and Son Disunion

    Julianne Moore plays a parent to a son (Finn Wolfhard) with whom she fails to see eye-to-eye in this comedy directed by Jesse Eisenberg.“When You Finish Saving the World” is, for better or worse, exactly the movie one would expect from the actor, writer and playwright Jesse Eisenberg: wordy, whiny and self-consciously wry. Adapted from his 2020 audio drama of the same name, this slight debut feature alights on a mother-son dynamic so cringe-inducingly toxic that we can sympathize only with the man of the house (Jay O. Sanders), an academic who exists mainly to complain about his own irrelevance.And not without reason, when neither his wife, Evelyn (a firmly deglamorized Julianne Moore), nor their teenage son, Ziggy (Finn Wolfhard), bothers to attend his promotion to chancellor. Evelyn’s exhausted-hippie look and teeny-tiny car fit perfectly with her job at a shelter for victims of domestic abuse, where she oozes the empathy and attention she denies her son. For his part, the perfectly named Ziggy (his head is filled with stardust) is a self-involved twit who cares for nothing except nurturing his professed “passion and charisma,” livestreaming his dorkily fervent folk rock to a rapt audience of international tweens.When Evelyn, her voice thick with censure and disappointment, inquires about Ziggy’s future plans, he reveals aspirations that go no further than acquiring more followers and more generous tips. Where, she wonders, is the darling child who used to accompany her on protest marches? (Pete Seeger’s rousing version of Woody Guthrie’s “Union Maid,” stomping over the film’s end credits, is an unexpected pleasure.) Once, Evelyn dreamed of editing Rolling Stone; now she dreams of having a son like Kyle (Billy Bryk), the sensitive, caring young man whose mother is one of Evelyn’s abused residents. Deciding that Kyle is too special for the blue-collar life he’s contemplating, Evelyn resolves to help him ascend the class ladder, one Ethiopian meal and college application at a time.Set in suburban Indiana for no apparent reason other than Eisenberg’s fondness for the state (we barely see beyond a handful of indoor locations), this dramatically flat picture, too tidily and predictably resolved, is never more than glancingly funny. The milieu is comfortably upper-middle class, but it’s a cold comfort, and much of it doesn’t ring true. Ironically, the movie’s most credible sequences involve Ziggy’s pretensions, emerging from his infatuation with Lila (a sharp Alisha Boe), a politically engaged classmate who writes earnest poetry slamming colonialism. Ziggy doesn’t understand her social conscience, but he wants it, partly because he’s a hollow that needs filling, but mostly because he believes it can be monetized. He’s not interested in developing a point of view; he just wants to learn how to perform one.Eisenberg has already proven himself a smart wordsmith and a knowing performer of emotional unease, but this “World” is a disappointingly shallow tale of narcissism and negligence. When these characters become too tiresome to listen to, though, look at their surroundings: Working with the excellent cinematographer Benjamin Loeb, Eisenberg displays a promising visual instinct, giving the family a home that’s shadowed and sad, spacious yet suffocating. The dinner-table scenes alone are nightmares of estrangement.Casually satirizing the empty suck of social media and a do-gooder impulse that’s practiced solely with strangers, “World” is at times almost cartoonishly cruel. One scene in particular shows Evelyn, in a “nyah-nyah-nyah” singsong, snidely deriding Ziggy’s music. For the first time, in his pained expression, we see the defensive nature of his overweening self-regard; and had Eisenberg used this moment, and others like it, to deepen and enrich his characters, they might have seemed genuinely redeemable instead of simply insufferable.When You Finish Saving the WorldRated R for extreme rudeness and rotten parenting. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Missing’ Review: Mom’s Lost in the Matrix

    This thriller, about a teenage girl whose mother disappears, plays out on a computer screen.The gimmick behind “Missing,” a strenuous techno-thriller about a teen girl named June (Storm Reid) who takes to the internet to track down her mother (Nia Long), is that the directors and screenwriters, Will Merrick and Nick Johnson, frame the action on computer screens. All of June’s sleuthing is cloistered to apps which she opens in increasing panic. She’s a web-weaned child who barely bothered to speak to her mom even before the parent’s disappearance. Initially, June celebrates having the house to herself by Googling “How to throw a rager.” Her friends dutifully post her drunkenness to Instagram so that we, the viewer, can witness it.June’s mother was last seen headed to Cartagena with her boyfriend (Ken Leung), a dork so drab that even his festive vacation shirts are drained of color. By the end of the first act, June and her best friend (Megan Suri) are scouring the man’s Facebook for clues to hack his email password. (Maybe they should try RedH3rring$.)From there, the story emboldens itself from relatable online stalking to ludicrous plot twists, both of which Reid parries with confidence. When the film momentarily feigns to look like a film, the image zooms out to reveal that the handsome cinematography is really a true crime docuseries streaming on June’s laptop. (In a meta-joke, the show is a glossy re-enactment of the producers’ previous film, the 2018 mystery “Searching,” which shared a near-identical premise.)“Missing” captures the constant distractions of the modern age. Pop-up windows continually tug at June’s attention. However, the film’s more engaging moments tap into the older cyber nostalgia of text-based adventure games from the 1970s, where problems are solved by typing the right command: Enter cave. Brandish sword. Write “Can I see the security camera?” into on online English-Spanish translator while on the phone with your mother’s hotel. It’s not exactly riveting to watch June download and install WhatsApp so that she can video call Colombia. Yet, there’s some pleasure in a brains-over-brawn quest that flatters us to fancy that we might be clever enough to solve it ourselves, despite giggles that arise when Julian Scherle’s score swells so portentously for June’s digital breakthroughs that you’d think Conan had smote an army. Even goofier is an emotional scene that builds to June pledging this teary promise to her vanished mother: “I’ll stop making fun of you for using Siri for everything.”When June’s quest goes viral, the investigation — along with her role in her own narrative — nearly slips out of her grasp. Too much connectivity can be a cancer, Merrick and Johnson seem to say, and most of us already agree. Yet, there’s an oddly emotional sequence when June breaks into her mother’s dating app and, for the first time, learns to see her as a woman with her own desires. Better still is a bit part by the actor Joaquim de Almeida as Javier, a gig worker in Cartagena — “cleaning, electricity, you know” — who June hires to do cheap on-location reconnaissance. Javier has only a two-and-a-half star rating, but he’s so good that I spent the film hoping June would take a minute to write him a glowing review.MissingRated PG-13 for teen drinking and violence. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘All Eyes Off Me’ Review: Scenes of Seduction

    A series of sexual and social situations unspool in this portrait of Israeli youth culture.“All Eyes Off Me,” a seductive triptych, aspires to offer a window into Israeli youth culture by staging its characters in a series of social and sexual situations. The writer-director, Hadas Ben Aroya, seems interested in how hedonistic lifestyles can lubricate certain forms of intimacy while hindering others, and she conveys this paradox through a series of patient long takes.The first chapter trails Danny (Hadar Katz) as she wanders around a house party in search of Max (Leib Lev Levin). She finds him seated beside the enigmatic Avishag (Elisheva Weil), Max’s new girlfriend and the chief subject of the film’s next two parts: in one, Avishag explores rough erotics with Max; and in the final, she initiates a flirtation with a staid older man.Ben Aroya is fond of capturing people in mundane moments: walking dogs, watching internet videos, listening to music. She also frequently fixes her camera on characters as they impassively recount stories of past traumas, such as an abortion and an apostasy; the sedateness of her shots mirrors the dispassion of their accounts.If the film wants to draw a line between its second and third parts — Avishag’s unruly relations with Max and her subsequent attraction to the modest, middle-aged Dror (Yoav Hait) — it does not wholly succeed. Each section feels more like a stand-alone tableau than one domino in a chain of events. Within this framework, Avishag’s wants and needs are not quite legible enough to trace a satisfying arc, but unspooling under the film’s stylish, judgment-free gaze, her interactions are alluring nonetheless.All Eyes Off MeNot rated. In Hebrew, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. Watch on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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    ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ Leads BAFTA Nominees

    The German-language movie received 14 nods and will compete for best film against the likes of “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and “The Banshees of Inisherin.”“All Quiet on the Western Front,” a German-language movie set on the battlefields of World War I, emerged on Thursday as the surprise front-runner for this year’s British Academy Film Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Oscars.“All Quiet,” a Netflix-backed movie about the futility of war, secured 14 nominations for the awards, commonly known as the BAFTAs. Those included best film, where it is up against four higher-profile titles including “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” a sci-fi adventure starring Michelle Yeoh as a laundromat owner who traverses universes; and “The Banshees of Inisherin,” Martin McDonagh’s dark comedy about two friends who fall out while living on a small island, both of which received a total of 10 nominations.Also competing for the main BAFTA prize is Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” biopic and “Tár,” Todd Field’s drama starring Cate Blanchett as a conductor accused of sexual harassment.On its release in Britain, critics gave the Edward Berger-directed “All Quiet” rave reviews. Kevin Maher, writing in The Times of London, said that the movie was “more visceral, more spectacular and certainly more harrowing” than any previous adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel of the same title. “See it on the biggest screen possible. Then watch it again on Netflix,” Mr. Maher added.American critics were less effusive. Ben Kenigsberg, reviewing the movie for The New York Times, said that it “aims to pummel you with ceaseless brutality, and it’s hard not to be rattled by that.”Steven Spielberg Gets Personal in ‘The Fabelmans’The director’s latest movie, starring Michelle Williams, focuses on Sammy Fabelman, a budding filmmaker who is a lot like Spielberg himself.Review: “The Fabelmans” is “wonderful in both large and small ways, even if Spielberg can’t help but soften the rougher, potentially lacerating edges,” our critic writes.Michelle Williams: With her portrayal of Mitzi, Sammy’s mother, the actress moves from minor-key naturalism to more stylized performances.Judd Hirsch: The actor has been singled out for his rousing performance in the film. It’s the latest chapter in a career full of anecdotes.Making ‘The Fabelmans’: In working on this semi-autobiographical movie, Spielberg confronted painful family secrets and what it means to be Jewish in America today.The 14 nods for “All Quiet” is the highest number of BAFTA nominations for a movie not in the English language, tied with Ang Lee’s 2000 action film “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” according to BAFTA officials.Michelle Yeoh, left, and Jing Li in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” directed by Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert.Allyson Riggs/A24Most of the nominations for “All Quiet” are in technical categories. But Berger also secured a best director nomination. He will compete for that award against the directors of “Banshees of Inisherin” (McDonagh), “Tár”(Field) and “Everything Everywhere All At Once” (Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert). Park Chan-wook, the director of “Decision to Leave,” about a policeman who falls in love with a suspect, also secured a best director nod, as did Gina Prince-Bythewood for “The Woman King,” about the women soldiers of the precolonial Kingdom of Dahomey in West Africa. Prince-Bythewood is the only female director among the nominees.There was one upset among the best director nominees: Steven Spielberg didn’t get a nod for “The Fabelmans,” his semi-autobiographical tale of a budding filmmaker coping with a fractious home life, which won him best director at last week’s Golden Globes.The BAFTA nominations, which were announced in a YouTube broadcast, have long been seen as a bellwether for the Oscars because there is overlap between their voting bodies. Nominations for this year’s Academy Awards are scheduled to be unveiled on Tuesday and “All Quiet on the Western Front” has been tipped as a potential nominee in the best picture category.In recent years, the BAFTA organizers has made efforts to widen the diversity of nominees, including requiring voters to watch a variety of movies before they can make their selections.Last year, that led to several unexpected nominees in the best acting categories, many from low-budget British movies. But there are fewer upsets this year. The best actress nominees include Blanchett for “Tár,” Viola Davis for “The Woman King,” Yeoh for “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and Emma Thompson for her role in “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” in which she plays a widow who hires a prostitute.They will compete for that prize against Danielle Deadwyler for her role as Emmett Till’s mother in “Till” and Ana de Armas for “Blonde,” in which she plays Marilyn Monroe.The best actor category sees Austin Butler, the Golden Globe-winning star of “Elvis,” up against Colin Farrell, for his role in “The Banshees of Inisherin,” and Brendan Fraser, for his transformation into an obese, grief-stricken writing instructor in “The Whale.” Also nominated are the rising Irish star Paul Mescal, for his role as a young father taking his daughter on holiday in “Aftersun,” Daryl McCormack, for playing the prostitute in “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” and Bill Nighy, for “Living,” about a bureaucrat given a life-changing medical diagnosis.Whether the nominations for “All Quiet” translate into trophies will be revealed on Feb. 19, when the BAFTA winners are scheduled to be announced in a ceremony at the Royal Festival Hall in London. 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    ‘After Love’ Review: The Other Woman

    In this intelligent melodrama by the director Aleem Khan, a British woman discovers her husband has been leading a double life.“After Love,” the first feature by the director Aleem Khan, envisions the act of mourning as an existential crisis, a passage through the eye of a storm. In the opening scene, the camera remains still, the frame boxy and rigid, as Mary (Joanna Scanlon), a 60-something white woman who had long ago converted to Islam, finds her husband, Ahmed, dead.For much of the first half of this intelligent melodrama, Mary remains silent, pensive. She clutches her grief close to her chest, even when — or especially because — she finds out her beloved, an English-Channel ferry captain, had been leading a double life.When she takes the bus from Dover to Calais to confront the other woman, she is mistaken for the new cleaning lady and runs with it, quietly taking the opportunity to investigate.At first, Genevieve (Nathalie Richard) appears to be a stereotypical mistress. A lithe Frenchwoman, she’s the physical opposite of the portly Mary, and perhaps annoyingly modern, too, in Mary’s traditionalist eyes. Then Solomon (Talid Ariss) appears, the angsty son of Genevieve and Ahmed, and a closeted gay teenager wounded by his father’s recurring absences. Childless Mary is wracked by envy and heartache even as she finds in this other home a fraught way of assuaging her loss, extending Ahmed’s life by inserting herself into the half he kept secret, touching his things, admiring his offspring. She imagines what he lacked here that always brought him back to her.Mary also withholds her true identity while forging intimacies with Genevieve and Solomon, a tense — if overused — dynamic that promises a dramatic reveal made all the more stinging by the solemn mood and the restrained emotion of Scanlon’s minimalistic performance.The film’s structure may be conventional, and yet its story is unusually rich, and uninterested in easy answers as to why people hurt the ones they love. Consider “After Love” a rarity; these days, a good adult drama — the kind whose power is premised on the intricacies and deceptions that shape our everyday relationships — is hard to come by.After LoveNot rated. In English, French and Urdu, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Only in Theaters’ Review: A Family Business in Changing Times

    Laemmle theaters have fed generations of Los Angeles cinephiles. This documentary looks at their past and present.Is it said that the comic poet Ogden Nash, noting the hiring practices of a certain founder of Universal Pictures, once wrote the couplet “Uncle Carl Laemmle/has a very big faemmle.” Carl Laemmle made no secret of his nepotism, and frankly it’s hard to argue against its results. His son, Carl Laemmle Jr., for instance, produced visionary 1930s monster movies including “Dracula” (1931), “The Mummy” (1932) and “The Bride of Frankenstein” (1935). One of the elder Laemmle’s cousins, like Laemmle a European immigrant, was William Wyler, who became a protean American director.There are still Laemmles in the movie business, and any Los Angeles cinephile will avow that the family is doing God’s work. “Only in Theaters” tells the story of Laemmle Theaters, a set of art houses that dot the Los Angeles area.The small theater chain was founded by two nephews of Carl Laemmle Sr., who turned it over to Robert Laemmle, who then passed the baton to Greg Laemmle‌, his son. The theaters once hosted the West Coast premieres of powerhouse international films by the likes of Ingmar Bergman and François Truffaut, who became friends of the Laemmle family.This documentary’s director, Raphael Sbarge, had his eyes opened to these movie houses when screening a film at one of them. His decision to chronicle the theaters and the family that runs them coincided with a major turning point for the business. By 2019, Greg Laemmle contemplated selling the movie houses. There’s footage of him agonizing over the idea. And then the coronavirus pandemic arrived, which compelled Greg to make a substantial sacrifice.Ultimately the movie is as scattershot as it is enthusiastic. When the French director Bertrand Tavernier is mentioned, the screen displays a shot of the French director Bertrand Blier. Repetitive paeans to the theatrical experience (from interviewees including the critic and historian Leonard Maltin, and the filmmaker Ava DuVernay) are offered willy-nilly. But the narrative about the theaters’ present-day fight for survival is undeniably compelling.Only in TheatersNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters. More

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    Edie Landau, Film Producer Ahead of Her Time, Dies at 95

    She and her husband invented a model for faithfully adapting acclaimed literature, illuminating an alternate path for independent cinema.Edie Landau, who in the 1970s and ’80s was one of the few women producing films, working outside the studio system with her husband, Ely Landau, to offer unconventional movies to a mass audience, died on Dec. 24 at her home in the Century City section of Los Angeles. She was 95.The death was confirmed by her son, Jon.In the 1980s and ’90s, thanks to figures like Jim Jarmusch, Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson, indie film was associated in the public imagination with writer-directors too young and eccentric for the studio system. In the years before then, the Landaus produced artistically ambitious indie movies that followed a different model, adapting great works of literature into movies for both the big and small screens.Their focus was plays. In the early 1970s, the Landaus started the American Film Theater, which invited viewers to subscribe to regular screenings of movie versions of works by Eugène Ionesco, Bertolt Brecht, Edward Albee and others.There had long been movies based on great plays like “A Streetcar Named Desire” that fully translated theater into the idiom of cinema. But the American Film Theater tried something different, faithfully abiding by the plays’ texts in simple, inexpensive productions.The Landaus produced more than a dozen films, often featuring eminent figures in surprising roles. In 1973, the tough-guy movie star Lee Marvin appeared in a film version of Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh.” The next year, in an unusual turn as a film director, Harold Pinter oversaw the adaptation of Simon Gray’s “Butley.”Zero Mostel and Karen Black in the 1974 movie adaptation of the Eugène Ionesco play “Rhinoceros,” one of the first productions of the Landaus’ American Film Theater.Looking back at the project in The New York Times in 2003, the film historian and critic Richard Schickel described it as a “noble experiment,” with some productions that were “close to God-awful” and others that ascended to “masterful movie making.”Ms. Landau frequently acted as a minder of budgets and an organizer on set, but over time she took on an increasingly creative role in her partnership with her husband, particularly after he had a stroke in the 1980s.She took the lead in putting together “Mr. Halpern and Mr. Johnson” (1983), an original HBO drama starring Laurence Olivier and Jackie Gleason. She developed a relationship with the writer Chaim Potok and shepherded his 1967 novel, “The Chosen,” into movie form in 1981 and into a musical adaptation for the stage in 1987.“It was a given that ‘The Chosen’ was to be a musical from the very beginning, ever since Edie Landau approached me with the idea two and a half years ago,” Mr. Potok told The Times in 1987.Richard F. Shepard of The Times praised the 1981 movie for recreating 1940s Brooklyn “with such fidelity that the tree-lined quiet streets of Williamsburg and the particular Jewish life on them seem to have emerged intact from a just-opened time capsule.”A scene from the 1981 film version of the Chaim Potok novel “The Chosen,” produced by the Landaus.Analysis FilmEdythe Rudolph was born on July 15, 1927, in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. Her father, Harry, was a minor-league baseball umpire who later worked as a projectionist at Manhattan movie theaters owned by Edie and Ely. Her mother, Rose (Zatcoff) Rudolph, was an office clerk.After graduating from Wilkes University with a bachelor’s degree in education in the late 1940s, Edie moved to New York City, where she worked as an assistant at radio and television production companies, hoping to move up the corporate ladder. While working at the television distribution company National Telefilm Associates, she met Ely Landau, one of the company’s founders. They married in 1959.That year, WNTA, a New York television station owned by National Telefilm, began airing “Play of the Week,” an anthology series that anticipated the American Film Theater. Ms. Landau worked her way up to become executive vice president of National Telefilm and oversaw some of its original programming, including “Play of the Week.”The Landaus’ children followed them into careers behind the scenes in the performing arts. Alongside the director James Cameron, their son, Jon, produced “Titanic” (1997), “Avatar” (2009) and the recently released “Avatar: The Way of Water.” Their daughter Tina Landau is a prominent theater director. And their daughter Kathy Landau is executive director of the Manhattan arts organization Symphony Space.Jon recalled how being able to work on the movie adaptation of “The Chosen” launched his own producing career, and how his parents invited the producer Hillard Elkins to a performance of a play written by Tina and performed at her high school, which led to its staging in a professional Los Angeles theater.Mr. Landau credited his mother with those breakthroughs. “She was the one who would make things happen,” he said.Ms. Landau was often the only woman in a room full of men wearing suits. The men in this undated photo include her husband, seated second from left.via Jon LandauMs. Landau’s first marriage, to Harold Rein, ended in divorce. Ely Landau died in 1993. Ms. Landau’s children survive her, along with a stepson, Les Landau; four grandchildren; two step-grandchildren; and two step-great-grandchildren.Photographs from her days as a film producer reveal that Ms. Landau was often the only woman in a room full of men wearing suits.She hit back at what she plainly called “discrimination of women” in 1958, when she filed a formal complaint against United Airlines for not permitting her to board a Chicago-to-New York “executive flight” — a cocktail-and-steak journey designed for men only. Ms. Landau — who later earned a law degree from the University of West Los Angeles just for fun — told the airline that she was an executive, too.The incident turned out to be a harbinger of repeated protests that finally led to scrapping the flights in 1970.After retiring, Ms. Landau wrote poetry. One concise work was titled “That Was Then, This Is Now”: “Please remember that I was once a major executive, not just a house wife,/So please trust me now to be C.E.O. … of my own life.” More

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    Prosecutors to Announce Whether They Plan Charges in ‘Rust’ Case

    More than a year after the fatal shooting, Santa Fe County prosecutors said they would announce on Thursday whether anyone would be charged in the case.Prosecutors in New Mexico are set to announce on Thursday whether they will file criminal charges in the fatal shooting of a cinematographer on the set of “Rust,” after more than a year of investigation and delays.The district attorney’s office that serves Santa Fe County said on Wednesday that the district attorney, Mary Carmack-Altwies, and the special prosecutor appointed to investigate the case, Andrea Reeb, would announce the decision in a written statement. The office has spent more than two months weighing a charging decision after the county sheriff’s office delivered its final investigatory report.While requesting additional funding from state officials last year, the office said that up to four people — including the actor Alec Baldwin, who was holding the gun when it went off — could be charged in the shooting. The district attorney’s office said in its request that any decision to bring charges would result in high-profile and costly trials.While Ms. Carmack-Altwies made it clear in the funding request that her office had not decided whether to bring charges — “If charges are warranted,” she began one sentence — it also went into greater detail than she had in the past. “One of the possible defendants is well-known movie actor Alec Baldwin,” said one of the attached documents.The state approved more than $300,000 for the hiring of additional employees, with the possibility of more funds later on.On Oct. 21, 2021, Mr. Baldwin was positioning an old-fashioned revolver for a close-up on the set of the western when the gun discharged, killing the cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, and wounding the film’s director, Joel Souza. Mr. Baldwin has denied wrongdoing, asserting that he did not pull the trigger and that Ms. Hutchins was directing him where to point the gun.Central to the investigation by the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office were Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, the crew member in charge of the guns on the set; Dave Halls, the movie’s first assistant director, who said he inspected the gun that day before handing it to Mr. Baldwin; Seth Kenney, the movie’s primary supplier of guns and ammunition; and Sarah Zachry, the movie’s props master, who worked closely with Ms. Gutierrez-Reed. All four individuals have denied wrongdoing in interviews with investigators or through their lawyers.After the shooting, investigators found five live rounds on the set, in addition to the bullet that had been fired from the gun. The final report by the sheriff’s office did not offer any theories about how that ammunition ended up on the set. More