Movies

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      Bruce Willis Has Aphasia and Is ‘Stepping Away’ From His Career

      by

      The news of his diagnosis, initially announced by his ex-wife, Demi Moore, prompted an outpouring of support and appreciation for Willis from fans, stars and other notable figures.Bruce Willis, the prolific action-movie star, has been diagnosed with aphasia — a disorder that affects the brain’s language center and a person’s ability to understand or express speech — and will step away from acting, his ex-wife, Demi Moore, announced in an Instagram post on Wednesday.“To Bruce’s amazing supporters, as a family we wanted to share that our beloved Bruce has been experiencing some health issues and has recently been diagnosed with aphasia, which is impacting his cognitive abilities,” Moore’s post reads. “As a result of this and with much consideration Bruce is stepping away from the career that has meant so much to him.”“We are moving through this as a strong family unit, and wanted to bring his fans in because we know how much he means to you, as you do to him,” it continued. “As Bruce always says, ‘Live it up,’ and together we plan to do just that.”The post is signed “Emma, Demi, Rumer, Scout, Tallulah, Mabel & Evelyn” — referring to Emma Heming Willis, Willis’s wife, and his children. Moore is the mother of Rumer, Scout and Tallulah, and Heming Willis is mother to Mabel and Evelyn.The post was accompanied by a comical photo of a younger, smirking Willis wearing a bathrobe, sunglasses, a gold chain with a cross, and a towel around his head.His wife, and Rumer, Scout and Tallulah all posted the same message and image on their Instagram pages.Representatives for Willis did not respond to a request for comment.Willis, who turned 67 this month, is most famous for his role as the rough-around-the-edges, yet clever, New York City cop John McClane in the highly successful “Die Hard” movie series, made up of five films from 1988 to 2013.He has also starred in critically acclaimed films like “Pulp Fiction” (1994), “The Sixth Sense” (1999) and “Moonrise Kingdom” (2012).M. Night Shyamalan, the director of “The Sixth Sense,” has said that it was Willis’s admirably level performance in “Die Hard” that showed him that Willis could pull off the subdued child psychiatrist Malcolm Crowe in his horror-thriller, which would go on to be nominated for six Oscars, including best picture. And when Shyamalan wrote the screenplay for 2000’s “Unbreakable,” he said he did so with Willis in mind.In her New York Times review of “Pulp Fiction,” Janet Maslin said that Willis and his co-stars John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson “may all sound like known quantities, but none of them have ever had quite the opportunities this material offers.” Willis “displays a tough, agile energy when placed in the most mind-boggling situation,” she wrote.In 1997, during the last days of filming the action-thriller “Mercury Rising,” Willis told The New York Times that he was, in a way, surprised to have found success on the big screen. “When I was coming up, there were guys like Robert Redford and Paul Newman and Warren Beatty — those were movie stars,” he said. “It all got handed to me pretty quickly.” Just days later, he would begin working on the highest-grossing film of 1998, “Armageddon,” from the director Michael Bay.In 2013, when asked by GQ magazine to complete the sentence: “If I live long enough, I —,” Willis said: “should approach a bigger task than I approach now.”When asked if he has a motto, he said: “‘Live and let live’ is the closest I have. It works for pretty much everything. It has comic aspects to it and it has the real-deal aspects to it.”On Wednesday, there was an outpouring of appreciation for Willis and support for his family on social media from fans, stars and other notable figures.In response to Rumer Willis’s Instagram post, Sarah Paulson, who worked with Bruce Willis in “Glass,” Shyamalan’s 2019 sci-fi thriller, said: “He was such an incredible acting partner to me, and is the loveliest, most gentle & hilarious man. He reigns supreme in my book.” (In her Times review of “Glass,” Manohla Dargis wrote, “[Samuel L.] Jackson and especially Willis remind you again of how fine they can be when asked for more than booming shtick and smirk.”)In response to Moore’s Instagram post, Jamie Lee Curtis wrote: “Grace and guts! Love to you all!”; and Rita Wilson wrote: “My heart goes out to Bruce, and all of the family. So thankful you shared this with us. Keeping you all in our prayers.”On Twitter, Gabrielle Giffords, a gun control advocate and former congresswoman, wrote: “I’m thinking of Bruce Willis and his family today. Aphasia makes it hard for me to find the right words. It can be lonely and isolating.”The actor Seth Green tweeted, “I have so much love for Bruce Willis, and am grateful for every character he’s given us.”And the actor-director Kevin Smith wrote, “Long before any of the ‘Cop Out’ stuff, I was a big Bruce Willis fan — so this is really heartbreaking to read,” referring to his 2010 movie that Willis starred in. “He loved to act and sing and the loss of that has to be devastating for him,” Smith said. He said he felt badly about his “petty complaints from 2010.” In 2011, on the Marc Maron podcast, Smith had complained openly about working with Willis, saying that working with the action star was “soul crushing.”Thought of primarily as a movie star, Willis has received more accolades for his work on television: For his role as the private detective David Addison (played opposite Cybill Shepherd) in “Moonlighting” — an ABC comedy-drama-romance that ran from 1985 to 1989 — he earned three Golden Globe nominations, winning one, and two lead actor Emmy nominations, winning one.In a 1985 Times review of “Moonlighting,” John J. O’Connor wrote of Willis: “In repose, the actor is not your average leading-man type. He could easily be mistaken for the quiet guy down the street.”Confronted with Shepherd’s “flamboyantly insinuating” character, though, Willis “becomes almost debonair,” O’Connor wrote. “He appears to be constantly bemused, complete with twinkling eyes.”In 2000, Willis also won a guest actor in a comedy Emmy for his role as Paul Stevens, the father of Ross Geller’s much-younger girlfriend, on the NBC series “Friends.”Since 2015, his filmography has mostly been an onslaught of B-movie action productions, including “Breach,” in 2020, and “Fortress,” in 2021. According to his IMDb page, Willis currently has nearly 10 movies in postproduction. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      ‘The Square,’ ‘Sorry to Bother You’ and More Streaming Gems

      by

      This month’s offbeat streaming recommendations include several very dark satires, a handful of engaging indies, and two documentaries that cinephiles will adore.‘The Square’ (2017)Stream it on Hulu.The Swedish director Ruben Ostlund follows up his pointed social satire “Force Majeure” with this arch, uproarious and bitter attack on the pretensions of the art world. He adds a few famous faces to the mix (including Elisabeth Moss and Dominic West), but his biting voice has not been tempered — if anything, he cranks up the blatant discomfort and inescapable embarrassment. That doesn’t sound like much fun, granted, and at times it is not. Yet Ostlund’s refusal to soften (or redeem) his characters is admirable, and if you have the right kind of darkly comic sensibility, it’s a deeply funny piece of work.‘Sorry to Bother You’ (2018)Stream it on Netflix.The musician and activist Boots Riley makes his feature directing debut with this wildly funny, frequently bizarre mixture of Marxist dogma and Marx Brothers-style silliness. Lakeith Stanfield (later an Oscar nominee for “Judas and the Black Messiah”) stars as Cassius, a telemarketer who discovers the secret to success and must determine how nakedly to exploit it. That sounds like a fairly straightforward setup, but Riley approaches the material with the surrealistic eye of an experimental filmmaker, and ends up taking Cassius on a journey into the dark heart of extreme wealth and depravity. You may love it or you may hate it, but you’ve certainly never seen anything quite like it.‘God Bless America’ (2012)Stream it on Amazon.If “Sorry to Bother You” pushes the limits of comic satire, “God Bless America” blows them to smithereens — quite literally. The stand-up comedian and comic character actor Bobcat Goldthwait writes and directs this story of a suicidal middle-aged loser (Joel Murray) who teams up with a cynical teenager (Tara Lynne Barr) and goes on a killing spree, targeting sources of frustration from reality-TV stars to movie-theater talkers. Calling this a dark comedy is an understatement — this is pitch-black stuff, certain to alienate a large chunk of the viewing audience. But those who can tune into its wavelength will find a shockingly earnest (if take-no-prisoners) commentary on the toxic nastiness of contemporary culture.‘Identifying Features’ (2021)Stream it on HBO Max.The writer-director Fernanda Valadez makes her feature debut with this striking, patient and frequently wrenching drama of grief and helplessness. Mercedes Hernández stars as Magdalena, whose son Jesús (Juan Jesús Varela) left their home in Mexico, attempting to cross the border, and disappeared. Magdalena attempts to track him down, or determine what happened to him, encountering resistance, secrecy and even apathy along the way. Valadez is an extremely confident filmmaker, trusting her audience to follow the picture’s sad, mournful tone and loaded silences rather than laying out its themes in dramatic dialogue. And her eye is impeccable, particularly in the picture’s haunting, dreamlike concluding passages.‘The Glass Castle’ (2017)Stream it on Hulu.Between his critical breakthrough with “Short Term 12” and his commercial one with “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings,” Destin Daniel Cretton directed this emotionally forceful adaptation of Jeannette Walls’s best-selling memoir. Its main acting attraction is the “Short Term” breakout Brie Larson, but the most memorable performer is the perpetually undervalued Woody Harrelson, whose crackling turn as Larson’s wildly irresponsible father is an ace showcase for his particular charms and peculiar charisma. Max Greenfield (so delightful as Schmidt on “New Girl”) makes an effective counterpoint as Larson’s judgmental, yuppie boyfriend.‘Prince Avalanche’ (2013)Stream it on Amazon.The director David Gordon Green has tried a bit of everything in his career, from broad comedy (“Pineapple Express”) to slasher horror (the 2018 “Halloween”) to inspirational true stories (“Stronger”). But his specialty, from the beginning of his career, has been modest indie dramas like this one, which he builds as freewheeling showcases for terrific actors. This time, those actors are Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch as two mismatched guys spending a summer doing country highway roadwork. Their dislike grows to grudging affection, of course; the story beats are not shocking. But Rudd and Hirsch give their characters life and agency, and Green’s easy-breezy style makes this a pleasing watch.‘Django & Django’ (2021)Stream it on Netflix.From the title and thumbnail art on Netflix, you might think this is some sort of bonus feature for Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” (also currently on Netflix). Some familiarity and affection for that 2012 film is helpful, but that’s merely an entry point for this documentary celebration of the Italian genre director Sergio Corbucci, who helmed the original 1966 “Django,” from which Tarantino drew his title and aesthetic inspiration. Tarantino dominates this entertaining and informative bio-doc, telling Corbucci’s story and sharing his readings of the filmmaker’s subtext (as well as a closing-credit fan theory about one of the film’s biggest questions). But the “Django” star Franco Nero and that film’s assistant director Ruggero Deodato (who would become a notorious filmmaker in his own right) also appear, to detail the making of Corbucci’s greatest films, and help clarify how his work helped change the Western genre forever.‘Oscar Micheaux: The Superhero of Black Filmmaking’ (2021)Stream it on HBO Max.For once, the title isn’t just hyperbole, or an example of the framework we apparently have to attach to everything in popular culture — Oscar Micheaux was born in Metropolis, Ill., which has tried to claim itself as the home of Superman, a striking choice when the town is the real home of a cinematic groundbreaker. His is a truly American story, of a man born to modest means who became an author and filmmaker. That story is told here by historians, directors and cultural figures, breaking down the nuts and bolts of how Micheaux built a network of self-distribution within Black America, while analyzing several of his surviving works. “I wonder how many know him?” Morgan Freeman asks, early on; hopefully, thanks to this film, more will. More

    • 163 Shares109 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Trust No One: The Hunt for the Crypto King’ Review: Coins and Misdemeanors

      by

      In this sensationalist Netflix documentary, aggrieved users of a defunct cryptocurrency exchange grow convinced that the company’s head absconded with their money.Like a garden-variety con man, “Trust No One: The Hunt for the Crypto King” relies on razzle-dazzle to deflect from an emptiness of insight. The documentary (on Netflix) centers on Gerald W. Cotten, the founder of a Canadian cryptocurrency exchange called Quadriga CX who died in 2018, leaving many users shut out from accessing their funds.The movie aligns viewers with a handful of Quadriga users who team up as amateur detectives on the case. One, speaking under the name QCXINT, wears a disguise to protect his identity. Another floods his YouTube channel with theories. As the men scour social media and trade motivating comments on message boards, the director Luke Sewell uses dim lighting and theatrical re-enactments to track their digital sleuthing with an outsized sense of drama and gravitas.For while Cotten’s death — which was not made public until a month afterward — is peculiar, it soon becomes clear that the aggrieved Quadriga users are uniquely unfit investigators of its mystery. Distrustful of authority, the men become keyboard vigilantes who, egging each other on, grow convinced that Cotten faked his death and absconded with their money.Sewell does speak to journalists and experts who offer some coherent analysis. Had the movie prioritized such clearheadedness over crude true crime tropes, it might have emerged as a sharp window into the dangers of speculation — both in the purchase of assets and on conspiratorial Reddit boards. Instead, this sensational documentary feels bankrupt at its core.Trust No One: The Hunt for the Crypto KingNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      How Film Forum Became the Best Little Movie House in New York

      by

      It’s just before 8 p.m. on a recent Friday night in Manhattan, and a crowd of moviegoers is lined up to see “Great Freedom” (2021), an Austrian film that tells the tender and terrible story of a concentration camp survivor in Germany who’s repeatedly imprisoned for his sexuality. Sebastian Meise, the film’s director, and its star, Franz Rogowski, will be giving a Q. and A. after the showing, so there’s a palpable sense that this is an event.Outside on West Houston Street, the glow of the marquee — “Film Forum” written in curving, blue neon letters — beckons like a spaceship. Upon seeing it, I feel the thrill of catching a movie in an actual cinema: It’s my first visit to Film Forum since it reopened in 2021 following a nearly 13-month closure on account of Covid-19.In the lobby, there’s anticipatory chatter: film students talking into their phones and older Greenwich Village and SoHo locals (like me) discussing the state of the world. The reserved seating system — a measure instigated during the pandemic — ended this month, and the first-come-first-served rule resumed, bringing back with it the kvetching about grabbing a preferred seat. The theater director, filmmaker and painter André Gregory, a devout Film Forum fan, once left sweaters on a pair of chairs while he and his wife, the filmmaker Cindy Kleine, went for chocolate egg creams in the lobby and returned to find people sitting in them. “The woman said, ‘I don’t care. We’re not moving,’ and [her companion] threw my sweater in my direction,” Gregory says with a laugh. In 2018, the theater underwent a renovation — prompted in part by a common refrain, “Love the movies, hate the seats,” from guests in an audience survey two years earlier — and upgraded its chairs, which are now softer, wider and infinitely more comfortable.The rest of the interior is also welcoming, with big red columns, and walls hung with movie posters, film schedules and original art. At the lobby concession stand, there’s good espresso and great snacks, both the requisite popcorn and baked goods, including a particularly delicious orange-chocolate Bundt cake. The theater’s director, Karen Cooper, who has been in charge of Film Forum for 50 of its 52 years, may be fiercely political in her choice of films — tonight’s movie was her discovery — but she’s all doting mother when it comes to the sweets, most of which come from Betty Bakery in Brooklyn.The view from inside theater 1, which, since Film Forum’s 2018 renovation, features wider seats.Blaine DavisA corkboard display case in the lobby shows current and future screenings and events.Blaine DavisThe story of movies as art, especially in Manhattan is, in part, a tale of the rise and fall of independent cinemas. When I was a child, there was the Art on 8th Street, the 8th Street Playhouse and the Bleecker Street Cinema, all within blocks of one another. By the end of the 1990s, though, these had all shut down. But Film Forum, which opened in 1970, has always been special and thrives to this day, playing as many as 400 or 500 films every year (a fourth screen was also added in the renovation).It has spawned and nurtured a real community of cinephiles, who come to laugh, cry and argue. Sometimes, the audience feels like a part of the show — I once heard a fight break out in Russian in the back row. And before a screening of “Amazing Grace,” the 2018 concert documentary of Aretha Franklin’s 1972 gospel performances in a Los Angeles church, I witnessed a lobby packed with middle-aged women of all races singing “Respect,” as if they were teenagers about to enter a rock concert.For many, Film Forum is also a place to get an education. Peter Nelson, a cinematographer and director, most recently of the acclaimed honeybee documentary “The Pollinators” (2019), says, “In the early ’80s, when I was at N.Y.U. film school, their incredibly diverse program of indies, foreign movies and classics provided access to films that were often not shown anywhere else in town.” Nelson adds, “From time to time, I would do a ‘cinema binge,’ where I would finish watching a film, leave the theater and line up for a different one, often with a delicious brownie to hold me over.” Gina Duncan, the president-elect of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, is also a fan. “Anyone who wants to run their own cinema imagines a place like Film Forum: a dedicated audience, good concessions and great programming,” she says. “It’s unpretentious, and I think that’s got a lot to do with Karen Cooper.”Karen Cooper, Film Forum’s longtime director, stands in a theater and against one of the space’s instantly recognizable red columns.Blaine DavisCooper was a newly minted Smith College graduate when she arrived back in her native New York City in 1970 and started looking for a job in the arts. In 1972, she became director of the nascent Film Forum, then located in a small loft space on West 88th Street with 50 folding chairs. “My annual budget was about $19,000,” she says. “And I made the coffee.” She’s held the same title ever since. In 1975, Cooper moved Film Forum downtown to the Vandam Theater; in 1980, she built a two-screen cinema on Watts Street. In 1990, Film Forum moved once more, this time to its current location between Varick Street and Sixth Avenue. Today, Cooper’s budget is around six million.At 73, Cooper, who lives in the far West Village and walks to work every day, is vividly articulate and fast moving, a dynamo who oversees a staff of 50 (give or take), the cinema’s fund-raising (Film Forum is a nonprofit with a board of 24) and much of programming. It’s Cooper who, along with the programmer Mike Maggiore and the deputy director Sonya Chung, looks after the new indie films and documentaries, while repertory director Bruce Goldstein handles revivals with the associate repertory programmer Elspeth Carroll. Cooper attends at least a couple of international festivals each year, and she’s rubbed elbows with everyone in the business from Werner Herzog to Robert Redford, but never name drops. “No one really knows celebrities,” says Cooper. “I wouldn’t pretend otherwise.”She believes the best documentaries can help change the world. “I grew up in the 1960s, during the civil rights movement, the war in Vietnam, the women’s movement, the gay rights movement — all essentially about human rights — and they move me deeply,” she says of the nonfiction narratives.The view of theater 1 from inside the projection booth.Blaine DavisCooper has brought in films like Spike Lee’s “4 Little Girls” (1997), about the children killed in the 1963 bombing of a Birmingham, Ala., church, and, in March, Christine Turner’s “Lynching Postcards: ‘Token of a Great Day’” (2021), a documentary short about 20th-century postcards depicting scenes of murdered Black Americans and bloodthirsty white onlookers — once souvenirs — and the way Black activists repurposed them to combat the horrors of lynching.Sergei Loznitsa’s “Babi Yar. Context,” the devastating 2021 documentary on the 1941 Nazi massacre of tens of thousands of Jews over two days at the Babi Yar ravine on the edge of Kyiv in Ukraine, is slotted for an April 1 showing, but was programmed months before the current Russian invasion. No doubt, Gregory, who was born in France and fled Europe with his Russian Jewish parents just before the Nazi invasion, will catch it. “I have a similar interest in films about fascism,” he says. Cooper confirms this: “André has seen every one of my Nazi movies,” she says, “and that’s saying a lot.”10 Movies to Watch This Oscar SeasonCard 1 of 10“Belfast.” More

    • 63 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Nitram’ Review: Slouching Toward Infamy

      by

      In this unnerving drama based on a true crime, a lonely outsider reaches his breaking point.The most chilling scene in Justin Kurzel’s “Nitram” — a movie that’s rarely less than freezing — occurs near the end and shows the title character, a disturbed young man, buying multiple firearms and rounds of ammunition. His demeanor is, for the first time, confident and purposeful; his handling of the weapons as natural as if he were born to them. The scene unnerves even if we don’t know where he’s going, because we know where he has been.Tough and unflinching, “Nitram” is about the evolution of a killer. A lightly fictionalized portrait of events leading up to Australia’s 1996 Port Arthur murders, the film is terrifyingly controlled, tipping neither toward empathy nor judgment. The tone is instead coolly observational, the filmmakers betting everything on Caleb Landry Jones’s adamant yet impenetrable performance as the man known as Nitram — a derisive backward spelling of his real name (never spoken in the film) and a loathed childhood nickname.Organized to highlight the dark flags heralding the coming storm, Shaun Grant’s simmering screenplay opens in 1979 with archival footage from a hospital burn unit, showing the killer as a young boy cheerfully assuring an interviewer that he will continue to play with fireworks. This fascination endures into adulthood and is supplemented by other disruptive and dangerous behaviors. Neither his worn-out parents (a memorable Judy Davis and a very affecting Anthony LaPaglia) nor his medication seem able to prevent this straggle-haired man-child from acting on instincts only he understands.A brief period of happiness arrives when he’s befriended — and all but adopted — by Helen (Essie Davis), a reclusive heiress who’s strangely unperturbed by his evident slowness. Yet we worry for her, and we are right to do so, though we have not yet seen him be especially violent. His playfulness seems dangerous enough.With “Nitram,” Kurzel (whose 2012 feature debut, “The Snowtown Murders,” was also based on a particularly gruesome true crime) has created a bleak and passionless tale wrapped in a caul of inevitability. Rather than analyze his subject, the director steers us to the external factors — an inattentive physician, a shocking lack of effective gun laws — that eased his path to destruction. The killings themselves may remain off-camera, but the movie is still an uncomfortable watch. In Jones’s smoldering performance, we see a man stretched beyond his limits, a rubber band just waiting to snap back.NitramNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Google Play, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

    • 100 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      Marina Goldovskaya, 80, Dies; Filmmaker Documented Russian Life

      by

      In about 30 documentaries she looked at the people and history of her homeland, some of it brutally dark.Marina Goldovskaya, an acclaimed documentary filmmaker who exposed the harsh underbelly of the Soviet Union’s labor camps and later chronicled the heady days that followed the state’s collapse — days that promised democracy but bordered on anarchy — died on March 20 in Jurmala, Latvia. She was 80.Her death was confirmed by her son, Sergei Livnev, who said she died at his home after a long illness.Ms. Goldovskaya, who often operated as a one-woman band, made some 30 documentaries — as writer, director, cinematographer and producer — and was a film professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, for two decades. Her wide-ranging films include a portrait of a Russian circus aerialist (“Raisa Nemchinskaya: Circus Actress,” 1970); a chronicle of six weeks in the life of a television journalist during the Soviet thaw known as perestroika (“A Taste of Freedom,” 1991); and the story of a Russian prince who returns to live in his family’s former estate, now in ruins (“The Prince Is Back,” 2000).In a review of “Solovki Power,” her 1988 film about a Soviet labor camp in northern Russia, Vincent Canby of The New York Times called the work “first-rate film journalism” and “a remarkable documentary about the prison camp said to have been the prototype for all of the gulags that came after.”With a style that calls to mind the films of Ken Burns, “Solovki Power” juxtaposes the cold, white beauty of the gulag’s remote White Sea location with the memories of eight survivors and an official 1928 propaganda film that touted the camp’s clean linens and enlightened teachings. Theologians, historians, poets, mathematicians and economists were among those who were sent to the camp, which operated from 1923 to 1939.In the film, an economist recalls the night she had to wake up her children, ages 4 and 6, to tell them that she was going “away to work.” Her son told her that his papa had already gone away. If they took her, “Who will stay with us?” he asked.And then there was the night, recalled by an academician, when 300 shots were fired in a botched execution — the executioners were too drunk to aim properly — leaving bodies squirming in a dirt pit the next morning.Ms. Goldovskaya began making “Solovki Power” in 1986, when it still could be dangerous to examine the dark side of the Soviet past, since her film would expose the camps as an integral part of the Soviet system, not as an aberration created during the Stalin era.Ms. Goldovskaya in 1990 shooting “Taste of Freedom,” a documentary about six weeks in the life of a television journalist during perestroika.When she told her mother what she was planning to do, “she started crying,” Ms. Goldovskaya recalled in a 1998 interview. “‘You are committing suicide,’ she said. ‘Don’t you remember what happened to your father?’”In 1938, her father, then a deputy minister of film, had been overseeing construction of the Kremlin’s movie theater when a lamp exploded. Stalin believed it was an assassination attempt and sentenced him to five months in prison.Speaking from Latvia, her son, Mr. Livnev, who is also a film director and producer, said: “The film really became very important not just as a film, but as an event in the life of a country. For many, many people it opened up so many unknowns, about how terrible our past was.”Another Goldovskaya film, “A Bitter Taste of Freedom” (2011), was about her friend Anna Politkovskaya, an investigative journalist and fierce critic of Vladimir V. Putin who was shot at point blank range in her Moscow apartment block in 2006. The film included diaristic footage that the filmmaker took in Ms. Politkovskaya’s home over many years.There is “a scene in the kitchen with Anna and her husband, where you can almost smell the food and the coffee, and they’re talking about how they’re afraid,” said Maja Manojlovic, who worked with Ms. Goldovskaya as a teaching assistant and now teaches at U.C.L.A. “Boy, did Marina capture the energy of this fear, the fear of repercussions for her criticism of Putin.”Marina Evseevna Goldovskaya was born on July 15, 1941, in Moscow. Her father, Evsey Michailovich Goldovksy, was a film engineer who helped found, and taught at, VGIK, the All-Union State Institute of Film. Her mother, Nina Veniaminovna Mintz, studied actors’ interpretations of Shakespeare and helped develop and curate theater museums.The family lived in an apartment building built by Stalin in the 1930s to house filmmakers “so that he could keep an eye on them,” Ms. Goldovskaya said in a 2001 interview. She attended VGIK, one of only a few women to study cinematography there. After graduating in 1963, she began working for state television. She became a member of the Communist Party in 1967 and remained one for 20 years.Otherwise, “I would not have gotten ahead in television,” she wrote in her 2006 autobiography, “Woman With a Movie Camera: My Life as a Russian Filmmaker.” “In an ideological organization like television, a camera operator who was not a Party member could never be promoted.”She made close to a dozen films for state television before leaving her job to make “Solovki Power.”“I grew up in a house filled with filmmakers and cinematographers,” she said in the 1998 interview. “Many cameramen died during the war; it was so romantic to die for your country. There were so few women in the profession. My father told me that if I went into it, I would never have a family, that I would be unhappy all my life. But I was young, it was romantic, and I loved to push the button.”In addition to her son, Ms. Goldovskaya is survived by two stepdaughters, Jill Smolin and Beth Herzfeld; two grandsons; and three step-grandchildren. Her first marriage, to David Livnev, a theater director, ended in divorce, as did her second, to Alexander Lipkov, a film critic. Her third husband, Georg Herzfeld, died in 2012.Mr. Livnev recalled his mother “always with a camera.”“She was shooting all the time,” he said. “I can hardly remember her face without the camera in front of her.”In 1991, the year the Soviet Union collapsed, Ms. Goldovskaya was a visiting professor at the University of California, San Diego, when she was introduced to Mr. Herzfeld, an Austrian engineer and businessman. Six days later, he proposed.Ms. Goldovskaya moved to Los Angeles in 1994 and began teaching at U.C.L.A., returning to Moscow in summers to work on her films. Guests to her classes, and then to her sunny, sprawling home nearby, often included noted documentary filmmakers like Albert Maysles, D.A. Pennebaker and Richard Leacock. And she was closely engaged with her students.“She opened up her classes to anthropology students and students from other disciplines,” said Gyula Gazdag, a Hungarian-born filmmaker who was on the U.C.L.A. faculty and teamed up with Ms. Goldovskaya to make a documentary about Allen Ginsberg, “A Poet on the Lower East Side” (1997). “She felt they would bring a new perspective to documentaries,” he added, in a phone interview. “She knew all her students by name, what their motivation for making a particular documentary was.”Ms. Goldovskaya in 2011. “She was shooting all the time,” her son said. “I can hardly remember her face without the camera in front of her.” via Getty ImagesMs. Goldovskaya’s film “Raisa Nemchinskaya: Circus Actress” featured an aerialist who “was in a way very similar to my mother,” Mr. Livnev said. The aerialist died of a heart attack as she was taking her bow after a performance.“She never used a rope for protection,” Mr. Livnev said. “My mom loved this woman, she was a role model, and all her life she lived like this. She would work, work, work all the time. Her dream was to die with the camera rolling, and she would never use this security rope in her life.” More

    • 138 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Royalty Free: The Music of Kevin MacLeod’ Review: Into the Spotlight

      by

      A musician who gives away most of his music may be heard everywhere, but few know who he is.Kevin MacLeod is arguably the most prolific composer you’ve never heard of — although it’s very likely you’ve heard his music. The Wisconsin-born musician, who has at times resided in New York, is a pioneer both of digital production and distribution. Essentially, he gives much of his music away. Working though the nonprofit organization Creative Commons, he makes his instrumental pieces available either for a one-time fee, or free. His works wind up on YouTube and TikTok videos, in video games, in big-budget studio films (like Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo”) and pornographic movies.Directed by Ryan Camarda, “Royalty Free: The Music of Kevin MacLeod,” conveys the scale of its subject’s achievement while offering an unnerving portrait of the man himself. He is in his late 40s, and he’s not quite what you would call amiable. He has a lot of definite ideas on a variety of topics, including morality in art, and his statements are sometimes startling. At one point he asserts that he wouldn’t care if his music found its way into a movie about “Nazis killing puppies.”The documentary is shot and edited like an infomercial, although it wanders from issue to issue to the extent that a viewer can’t be sure just what it’s pitching. And while it sometimes celebrates MacLeod, there are instances when the filmmaker seems to fret about how many instrumentalists are being put out of work by one-computer bands like MacLeod (something that’s been worrying musicians’ unions and others since even before the all-electronic band Kraftwerk made waves in the early 1970s).MacLeod then drops in a very personal detail, about an hour and 15 minutes in: “Right now, I treat a lot of my depression with alcohol, and it works.” Which throws an already wobbly movie into another orbit entirely.Royalty Free: The Music of Kevin MacLeodNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

    • 125 Shares139 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Piano Lesson’ With Samuel L. Jackson Plans Fall Broadway Bow

      by

      The revival of August Wilson’s play, directed by LaTanya Richardson Jackson, will also star Danielle Brooks and John David Washington.From left, Samuel L. Jackson, Danielle Brooks and John David Washington, who will be appearing in the revival of “The Piano Lesson” at the St. James Theater.Caroline Brehman/EPA, via Shutterstock, Leon Bennett/Getty Images, Rosdiana Ciaravolo/Getty Images LaTanya Richardson Jackson first saw August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson” in 1987 — it was the original production, at Yale Repertory Theater, and of course she was going to see it, because her husband, Samuel L. Jackson, was in the cast.This fall, Richardson Jackson will direct a revival of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play, again with her husband in the cast, although in a different role.The Broadway revival — the first since “The Piano Lesson” arrived there in 1990 — will star Danielle Brooks and John David Washington as a sister and brother at odds over whether to sell a piano on which are carved the faces of their enslaved ancestors. Jackson will play their uncle, Doaker Charles (at Yale, he played the brother).Richardson Jackson will be the first woman to direct a Wilson play on Broadway. She is best known as an actress — in 2018, she originated the role of Calpurnia in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and in 2014, she was nominated for a Tony Award for her performance as Lena Younger in a revival of “A Raisin in the Sun.” This will be her first time directing on Broadway, but she has directed elsewhere, including a production of Wilson’s “Two Trains Running” at True Colors Theater in Atlanta.In her view, Richardson Jackson said in an interview, the play is “about the struggle of African Americans in this country to actually face what it is that we’re against.” She noted that her own ancestors had been enslaved, and reluctant to talk about it, and she said that she sees the tension within the Charles family as a vehicle for exploring “us facing all of it.”“I’m dealing with this as a ghost story — I’m unashamedly, unabashedly telling a ghost story,” Richardson Jackson said. “And it’s about the bigger ghosts that haunt us, that are part of our lives, that we are carrying around like an anvil.”“The Piano Lesson” is part of a series of 10 plays Wilson wrote about African American life; each is set in a different decade of the 20th century. “The Piano Lesson” takes place in the 1930s, and, like most of the plays, is set in Pittsburgh.The revival is scheduled to begin performances on Sept. 19 at the St. James Theater; the run is expected to last 16 weeks.Brian Moreland (“Thoughts of a Colored Man”), Sonia Friedman (“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child”) and Tom Kirdahy (“Hadestown”) are the producers. Moreland said the play would be capitalized for about $6 million.The producer Scott Rudin previously planned to stage a revival of “The Piano Lesson,” with many of the same artists, but relinquished the rights when he stopped producing after being accused of bullying employees and collaborators. The actor Denzel Washington, who is John David Washington’s father, last year told The Daily Mail he was planning to produce a film adaptation, with the same stars, and with Rudin as a co-producer; a spokesman for Denzel Washington said the actor is still planning to produce a film adaptation. More