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      The Best Actors of 2022

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      Welcome to our portfolio of paradoxes. The first is that artists emblematic of great acting in moving images have been captured in still photographs. Another involves the state of the art itself. We chose 10 performances and could easily have doubled that tally, yet all of that talent finds itself in an iffy place. There are no guarantees for a screen actor anymore. There are no guarantees for a screen actor’s audience. We’re not even sure what we mean by “screen.” Read More

      We walked into “The Woman King” intrigued (what, exactly, would a machete-and-sandal melodrama starring Viola Davis look like?) and left astonished. A great performance can amount to something in addition to craft — personality, zeal, observation, lunacy, exactitude, risk, freedom. And that movie had all of those right there in almost every performance. Davis, for instance, did her usual bruising work — an actor at peak intensity. But not only did the film showcase and redouble the might of an established star; it also made one out of Thuso Mbedu, who plays Davis’s — well, just treat yourself.

      Here is someone whom we moviegoers deserve to get to know for years to come. But in what kinds of movies? As what sorts of people? Mbedu can act. But there just isn’t the variety of movies that could sustain all the acting she and many of the performers in the portfolio that follows could do — names you may not know, like Freddie Gibbs and Frankie Corio and, loosely, Vicky Krieps — but who once upon a time would have had a few chances to show what else they’re made of.

      Those chances feel imperiled. And not for the old reasons (for being a woman, for not being white) — although there’s still some of that. The peril is industrial shortsightedness. There’s diminished interest in the human scale of storytelling, particularly in American movies, which increasingly feel the need to go big or risk the audience’s staying home. Perhaps that’s why we’ve turned, along with many an actor, to television, where the ground feels more fertile. Maybe to the point of feeling overgrown.

      And that may be yet another paradox: a state of wild abundance that can seem a lot like scarcity. Talk of the “golden age” of television has receded in the face of the streaming gold rush. There are so many characters and narratives to keep track of. In an economy of scale, the aesthetics of scale can get out of whack. Stories that might have filled out a feature are stretched into six episodes. Eight-episode limited series flop into multiseason epics.

      Yet, somehow, acting thrives in this environment. Mediocre shows and films are often made watchable by the gift and grit of performers (George Clooney and Julia Roberts in “Ticket to Paradise”; Adrien Brody and Rob Morgan in “Winning Time”). There is enough outstanding work on television alone to fill a portfolio twice or three times the size of this one. To that end, we enfolded limited series into the survey and collided with Jon Bernthal, who, on “We Own This City,” managed to turn crooked-cop work into a feat of appalling macho cheer; and were blown away by Toni Collette on “The Staircase,” for which, despite centuries of actors’ simulating death, she invented at least four new and distressing ways to perform dying.

      But there is still, in the midst of all of that, the special lure and allure of the movies, which haven’t actually gone anywhere. Yes, you can stream “The Woman King” at home, but you would miss the bubbling joy of the families with kids — daughters and sons alike — when Davis and Mbedu get in each other’s faces and then join forces to purge their land of slavers.

      Or you would miss the sound of a stranger in the next seat sobbing into his mask during the final shot of “Aftersun,” Charlotte Wells’s memory film about a father and his daughter on holiday in Turkey. All you’re looking at is Corio, playing an 11-year-old Scottish sprite named Sophie, mugging for the camera that her father, Calum (Paul Mescal), is holding as she prepares to board a flight home from their vacation. It’s a jumpy, grainy amateur image (the film takes place in a not-so-distant pre-smartphone past), but it’s also cinema in the most exalted sense.

      Obviously, we hunger for what an actor can do for a movie: for the gruff poetry of Brendan Gleeson in “The Banshees of Inisherin”; for the salty sibling rivalry of Keke Palmer and Daniel Kaluuya in “Nope”; for the pizazz and poignancy of Michelle Williams in “The Fabelmans.” The year’s biggest hit stars Tom Cruise, and its staggering popularity is emphatic proof of what his stardom continues to mean to us. Cate Blanchett, meanwhile, playing a problematic maestro in “Tár,” matched and perhaps even exceeded the character’s mastery. Forget about the multiplex: That’s a performance fit for a concert hall.

      So now that we’ve poured one out for movie-industry scarcity and rebattened the hatches for gushingly abundant TV, what is our true task here? It can’t be lamentation. We’re worried — it’s a critic’s job to be worried — but not yet woebegone. We want to applaud, marvel at and salute the achievement of screen acting, the increasing miracle of it in challenging and confusing circumstances. Because to watch the 10 artists here is to sense that acting remains in fine shape; to watch them is both life-giving and life-affirming. In one montage in “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” time warps everything around Michelle Yeoh except the astonishment on her face. Her surprise — which inspires our own — is proof of the beautiful mystery of the art form, and a reason to reconsider a longtime star’s endurance. How — how — did she pull that off?

      This issue of the magazine is testament to our inability to answer that question. Every great performance is a unique amalgam of training, talent, collaboration and luck. In the end, we don’t know how they do it. What we do know is that we can’t stop watching. More

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      A Trans Icon of the 20th Century Revived by Trans Stars of the 21st Century

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      The documentary “Framing Agnes” uses transcripts to tell the story of an anonymous woman who became the subject of a series of landmark interviews.LOS ANGELES — In 2017, while sifting through boxes of notes and research materials left behind by the sociologist Harold Garfinkel, who had died six years earlier, the filmmaker Chase Joynt came upon a filing cabinet that had become rusted shut. When he opened it, Joynt discovered a long-lost trove of interviews Garfinkel had conducted with eight transgender individuals at the University of California, Los Angeles, between 1959 and 1963.“We immediately knew we had found something extraordinary,” said Joynt, who came upon the files alongside the University of Chicago sociologist Kristen Schilt.One of the interviewees, Agnes (all of the subjects were anonymized), had already become a focus of Garfinkel’s published research, and was, Schilt said, widely understood to be the first sociological case study of a transitioning person in history. But the interviews of the other seven had never been seen before.“It’s quite rare to find first-person accounts of trans people like these, particularly in a high-stakes situation, like an encounter with a researcher,” said Jules Gill-Peterson, a history professor at Johns Hopkins University and author of “Histories of the Transgender Child.”Not long after the discovery, Joynt, who co-directed “No Ordinary Man” (2020), a documentary about the transgender jazz musician Billy Tipton, knew he had to do something with the materials, maybe a book or a film or a digital archive.Joynt decided to make a documentary, but not one with your typical re-enactments and talking heads. In “Framing Agnes,” now in theaters, viewers not only hear the stories of Garfinkel’s subjects, but also the stories and reactions of the trans actors playing them, who include Angelica Ross (“Pose,” “American Horror Story: 1984”) and Jen Richards (“Better Things,” “Mrs. Fletcher”).Joynt pored over the transcripts of the U.C.L.A. interviews, in which the subjects were asked about everything from their childhoods and past lovers to whether they knew other people “like you.”Michelle Felix/Kino LorberThrough stylized re-enactments of period interview shows, the film also turns the camera’s unblinking gaze back on Garfinkel and other interrogators who have made a study or a spectacle of transness over the years. “The questions being asked by people in the 1950s were the same questions that were coming out of the mouths of Jerry Springer and Sally Jessy Raphael in the ’80s and ’90s,” Joynt said.The format was, in many ways, prompted by the sheer lack of source materials, which consisted of typewritten transcripts of anonymous subjects conducted decades ago. There were no interviewees to catch up with, no family or friends to add context and color. “The flip to the talk show, our desires to play and re-enact and embody in this way, are born of the limitations of the archive itself,” Joynt said. And besides, Joynt noted, no amount of archival information would allow a documentarian to capture a person in their entirety. “One of the things I love about Agnes is that she does not want to be found,” he said. “I think there’s a beautiful power in that kind of opacity and resistance.”The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.An Indie Hit’s Campaign: How do you make “Everything Everywhere All at Once” an Oscar contender? Throw a party for tastemakers.Jennifer Lawrence:  The Oscar winner may win more accolades with her performance in “Causeway,” but she’s focused on living a nonstar life.“Framing Agnes” premiered at Sundance last January, where it won the audience and innovator awards in the festival’s Next category, and went on to garner rave reviews; Ms. Magazine praised its “surprisingly gripping format,” while The New Yorker called it “a film of quiet but decisive radicality.”On a recent morning, at his offices in the Chinatown district of Los Angeles, Joynt talked about poring through the transcripts page by page. The eight interviewees, who were whittled down to six for the documentary, were asked about everything from their childhoods and past lovers to whether they knew other people “like you.”Garfinkel’s questions felt very familiar to the actors tasked with playing the interviewees. “Yesterday, a doctor, who wasn’t my regular doctor, had a lot of prurient questions for me that didn’t have anything to do with why I was there,” said the activist and filmmaker Zackary Drucker, who plays Agnes.Drucker, who met Joynt in 2013 when both were screening short films at Outfest Los Angeles, jumped at the chance to play Agnes, who had gone to U.C.L.A. at 19 with the sole purpose of seeking gender confirmation surgery. To gain access to the treatment, Agnes claimed to be intersex, but years later confessed to one of Garfinkel’s colleagues that she had actually been taking her mother’s estrogen tablets since age 12.“I love how wily she was,” Drucker said. “I’ve been in that situation, all trans people have, of needing to convince a doctor that you are trans enough to get hormones. Many of the structures that Agnes was navigating 60 years ago remain intact.”Drucker, left, with Joynt, played the title character in re-enactments. “I love how wily she was,” Drucker said.Michelle Felix/Kino LorberTo play Georgia, a trans woman who was raised in the South by an evangelical minister, Ross drew from her memories. “It literally is from my own experience growing up with women in the church, understanding that you don’t wear pants to choir rehearsal, you don’t step foot inside the sanctuary without a dress on,” she said.Ross, who became the first openly trans woman to play a leading role on Broadway (starring as Roxie Hart in “Chicago”), can understand why Agnes, a blond woman with a “peaches-and-cream complexion,” became part of Garfinkel’s published research, while Georgia and the others did not.“It’s just like Caitlyn Jenner was on the cover of Vanity Fair and not Angelica Ross,” Ross said with a laugh. “As a society, we sometimes choose whose stories are worth telling and whose aren’t. And a lot of that involves race and class.”The interviews were filmed in Los Angeles over 10 days. Gill-Peterson was then called in to review the footage and serve as the documentary’s narrator and resident expert on transgender history.“When I walked on set and looked out at the team, I was like, Oh! It’s all queer and trans people,” Gill-Peterson said. “Your shoulders relax a bit. You’re less on guard.”The decades-old stories, Gill-Peterson said, are emerging at a time when people are more aware of trans issues than ever before. “But it’s also an era,” she noted,” in which trans people face heightened scrutiny, heightened danger, higher rates of political attacks and violence.”All of which made Gill-Peterson and Joynt question the nature and limitations of the project itself. Is trans visibility always a good, particularly if attacks and violence follow in its wake? Is there an advantage in being Georgia, who got to fade into obscurity, as opposed to Agnes, who became something of a trans icon?“I think especially for trans women of color like myself, sometimes our biggest wish is just to disappear, just to be left alone a little, to not wear that visibility so intensely,” Gill-Peterson said.Joynt wondered, “What does it mean to make things visible?” He added, “Those kinds of tensions and troubles are fertile ground from which to build a documentary project. So let’s not shy away from them. Let’s actually try to hang out and spend some time there.” More

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      10 Stages and Screens Where I Saw Connection

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      For our critic-at-large, “Fat Ham,” “Severance,” “A Strange Loop” and “Sandman” were some of the places she found truth and transcendence.I never venture too far from a theater, but when I did have some time away from New York stages, I was watching TV and movies. In so many of my favorites of 2022, there’s a sense of humanity to the work, whether that means it featured people connecting or simply being honest with themselves and others. Here are the plays, musicals, shows and films that stuck with me this year.‘Cost of Living’That Martyna Majok’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2018 play is written with such gut-busting empathy and humanity shouldn’t be a shock to anyone who’s read the script or seen the previous productions. And yet, “Cost of Living” was still surprising — stunning, even — thanks to the four actors (Gregg Mozgala, Katy Sullivan, Kara Young and David Zayas) and their portrayal of caregivers and patients in a story about the ways we look after one another and what that care costs us. Plays about connections can so easily turn into sentimental weep-fests that manipulate you into tears, but the script, cast and Jo Bonney’s compassionate direction made this Broadway gem feel not just tender but true. (Read our review of “Cost of Living.”)Gregg Mozgala and Kara Young in “Cost of Living.”Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘300 el x 50 el x 30 el’When I try to describe this epic work by the Belgian theater collective FC Bergman, I get bogged down in contradictions: Grotesque yet radiant. Chaotic but woven into coherence by theme and feeling. Depressing, yet steeped with something even more forceful than joy — utter transcendence. Transforming the Harvey Theater into a village, with live animals and a pond, “300 el” drew inspiration from the biblical story of Noah’s ark. A film crew circled the stage, providing interior views to a pigeon homicide, a deadly game of William Tell and a feast where even the furniture is devoured. When the production ends in song and dance — a tameless exaltation of noise and movement — it seemed to leave even the air in the theater tremulous with excitement. (Read our feature on “300 el x 50 el x 30 el.”)‘Fat Ham’More than anything — including James Ijames’s whip-smart writing, Saheem Ali’s vivacious direction and the cast’s delightful performances — what most stood out to me in the Public’s staging of “Fat Ham” was the joy that seemed to emanate from every person in the room. Who knew “Hamlet,” a tragedy rife with revenge and murder, could be expanded to become a work about queerness and Black masculinity — and a funny, smart work at that? Ijames, apparently, and Ali, whose gleaming production ended in what felt like a party where everyone, audience included, was welcome to attend. (Read our review of “Fat Ham.”)‘A Strange Loop’It’s been quite a year for Black queer theater, due in large part to the Broadway debut of Michael R. Jackson’s mind-bending, genre-busting musical “A Strange Loop.” The production, starring an unforgettable Jaquel Spivey, succeeds on multiple levels: It provides trenchant commentary on Black art, the Black body, religion, masculinity and queerness, while also being laugh-out-loud funny and heartbreaking. As for the technical elements, its structure, choreography and score coalesce into a prime example of what Broadway can do at its best. (Read our review of “A Strange Loop.”)Jaquel Spivey stars in the Broadway musical “A Strange Loop.”Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘Oratorio for Living Things’I knew I was seeing something special when I went to Ars Nova’s production of Heather Christian’s “Oratorio,” because I was infected with a desperate urge to see it again — even before I was through seeing it the first time. Having grown up with a Catholic education and Sunday masses, I’ve never felt connected to religious institutions, but Christian’s profound work, directed by Lee Sunday Evans, created a kind of secular mass for nonbelievers and believers alike. The exquisite vocals of the cast were magnified by the miniature amphitheater-style setup of the space, which created an aural experience that — like the text itself — felt both grand and intimate. (Read our review of “Oratorio for Living Things.”)‘English’I’m a sucker for works that examine language — the politics of it, the limitations and freedoms that can be found in words. So I was already onboard for Sanaz Toossi’s play, about a class in Iran where the students are preparing to take the Test of English as a Foreign Language, or Toefl. Under Knud Adams’s direction, the cast draws the audience into its word games, linguistic stumbles and individual struggles to learn and assimilate, whether for work or family or dreams of a life in America. (Read our review of “English.”)‘The Sandman’As a fierce fan of the author Neil Gaiman and owner of his complete “Sandman” graphic novel collection, I was so nervous about Netflix’s adaptation that I asked a friend — a fellow fan — to watch the first episode with me for emotional support. The series does justice to its characters with perfectly cast actors, including a mesmerizing Tom Sturridge, who embodies the brooding, awe-inspiring king of dreams with such finesse and gravitas that it’s as though Morpheus himself has escaped from the comics. It’s not just the characters who are well-matched; the world of “Sandman” is portrayed with sweep, imagination and such respect for the original illustrations that much of the dialogue and panels are replicated. I can’t wait for Season 2. (Read our critic’s notebook on “The Sandman.”)Gwendoline Christie and Tom Sturridge in the Netflix series “Sandman.”Netflix‘Severance’“Severance” may be my new favorite TV series. Perhaps I’m being hyperbolic, still buzzed with enthusiasm even months after my second time binge-watching it. Adam Scott gives a stellar performance as an employee of a shady corporation who elects to have his consciousness split between his work and outside selves. The show has an exquisite eye and ear for terror, wit and mundane interactions, so that it manages to be both otherworldly and eerily familiar. As for the script — the dialogue’s so fantastic that it makes me want to be a better writer. (Read our review of “Severance.”)‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’I’ve often wondered, in our age of multiversal franchises, what a multiverse narrative would look like if the story were driven by the characters’ emotional development and interpersonal relationships rather than just battle scenes, Easter eggs, and routes to spinoffs and sequels. “Everything Everywhere All at Once” was my answer. It contained the unpredictability and boundary-expanding possibilities of the multiverse while staying grounded in the story of a family. Every moment of the film held a new delight. (Read our review of “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”)‘Oresteia’When I think back to Robert Icke’s production of “Oresteia,” Aeschylus’ trilogy of Greek tragedies about a family that eats itself from the inside out, I think of one moment. Klytemnestra is grieving after her husband Agamemnon has killed their daughter Iphigenia because of a prophecy that the act would grant his army “fair winds” in war. After the deed, the winds sweep in, the doors to the house are flung open, ethereal white light streams in, and Klytemnestra is caught in a frenzy of flying papers. But what made the production so memorable wasn’t just the special effects but Anastasia Hille’s electrifying performance as Klytemnestra, a woman who folds in to grief and lets it fuel her revenge. (Read our review of “Oresteia.”) More

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      11 Ways I Escaped Reality This Year

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      Our critic was haunted, in a good way, by the performances she saw in movies, theater and TV that offered glimpses into other worlds.In a year when so much, including our democracy, felt topsy-turvy, I was drawn to entertainment that took me out of our real world to another realm. Be it the supernatural, the surreal, the spirit world, or just a superb performance: Here’s my list of 11 otherworldly movies, TV series, actors and plays that brought me joy and centeredness amid the chaos.‘Macbeth’In Sam Gold’s take on “Macbeth,” I loved the lustful love story between Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga, but is it weird to say that I also really dug the stew? When we entered the theater, the three witches, dressed in sweaters and jeans, were already onstage stirring their pot, and later they utter the lines that seal Macbeth’s fate. But at the end of the play, when everyone in the cast sits together and shares a bowl, this update, along with one of the witches (Bobbi MacKenzie) singing Gaelynn Lea’s ballad “Perfect,” enacted healing. It reminded me that despite the setbacks that befell the cast and our country, being alive and in the community of theater was something to celebrate. (Read our review of “Macbeth.”)‘The Woman King’With “The Old Guard,” the filmmaker Gina Prince-Bythewood proved she had the chops for a feminist superhero flick. But with the Viola Davis-led “Woman King,” she went epic in scale and story. She wove in the history of the Agojie, the all-female army in the West African kingdom of Dahomey; produced brilliant fight scenes with actors who performed their own stunts; and explored war, sexual assault and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Here, prophecy is protection, and though it is never named as such, the Dahomey religious practice of Vodun is a guide for Davis’s character, General Nanisca, as she prepares to take on enemies, foreign and domestic, and confront her own demons. (Read our review of “The Woman King.”)Viola Davis, center, stars in “The Woman King.”Ilze Kitshoff/Sony Pictures‘P-Valley’Set at a strip club in Mississippi, the Starz series “P-Valley” is a “love letter to all women who are scrapping it out, but particularly for the Black women that I think a lot of people thumb their noses at, even Black folks,” according to its creator, Katori Hall. It is a sentiment channeled through the veteran dancer and aspiring gym owner Mercedes (Brandee Evans) and the up-and-coming Keyshawn (Shannon Thornton), who is trapped in her career and abusive marriage. But it is Hoodoo, the spiritual practice introduced to them by the club’s security guard Diamond (Tyler Lepley), that might save them. Based on the Season 2 cliffhanger, I’m hoping Diamond’s efforts worked or that he will be there to ward off evil spirits and people in the future. (Streaming on Starz.)‘Reservation Dogs’A coming-of-age tale told through four Indigenous teenagers — Elora, Bear, Cheese and Willie Jack — in the fictional town of Okern, Okla., “Reservation Dogs” masterfully pokes fun at Hollywood stereotypes and acknowledges the nuances of Native culture. While William “Spirit” Knifeman (Dallas Goldtooth) is a bumbling spirit guide who gives Bear unsound advice, he is also the counterpoint to ancestral “spirits” such as Elora’s grandmother or Daniel, a friend of the four teens whose suicide prompts them to leave their reservation (or at least attempt to). In the wonderfully rich ninth episode, Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis) seeks advice from her aunt and Daniel’s mother, Hokti, who is incarcerated. After Willie Jack makes an offering of Cheez-Its, Flaming Flamers chips and a Skux energy drink, Hokti (Lily Gladstone) reveals that the many spirits surrounding Willie Jack will help her in time. (Streaming on Hulu.)‘The Piano Lesson’ and ‘Death of a Salesman’Ghosts came in different forms this Broadway season. In her revival of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “The Piano Lesson,” LaTanya Richardson Jackson decided to literalize the ghost of the white slave owner, Sutter. Though we never see him, his haunting of the Charles family becomes all too real, making the family’s battles over a piano a deeper allegory of race, property and American history. Equally compelling is Miranda Cromwell’s revival of “Death of a Salesman,” whose all-Black family includes Wendell Pierce as Willy Loman and Sharon D Clarke as his wife, Linda. Willy’s older brother, Ben (André De Shields), is not just a ghost but a griot, too. Sporting a white cane, a white suit and bedazzled shoes, Ben plagues Willy with his success while his spirit beckons his younger brother to the other side. This infuses the play with a new sense of ambiguity, never justifying Willy’s final decision but adding a layer of empathy and compassion. (Read our reviews of “The Piano Lesson” and “Death of a Salesman.”)Wendell Pierce, left, as Willy Loman and Andre De Shields as Ben Loman in “Death of a Salesman.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRegina HallRegina Hall showed her versatility this year with two wildly different performances. In Mariama Diallo’s horror movie “Master,” she plays Gail Bishop, who, as the first Black dean of a residence hall at the elite Ancaster College, must constantly contend with racism and its impact on her and on Black students. In Adamma Ebo’s comedy “Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul,” she is Trinitie Childs, the wife of a disgraced Southern Baptist pastor (Sterling K. Brown) and a woman obsessed with climbing back to her former state of church glory. The way she evokes Trinitie’s pity, pettiness, petulance and pride gives this film its most memorable and haunting moments. (Read our reviews of “Master” and “Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.”)‘Nope’The cinephile in me was pleasantly surprised that Jordan Peele’s “Nope” was a movie about movies. Peele not only pays homage to early film and photography technologies, and the suspense and terror brought on by Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “Jaws,” but he also does so while remembering those African Americans whose early contributions to the motion picture industry have been forgotten or ignored. Thanks to Peele’s clever writing, creative directing and smart casting of his frequent collaborator Daniel Kaluuya (“Get Out”) as well as the magnanimous Keke Palmer, this movie about gentrification, U.F.O.s and racial discrimination ended up being just an old-fashioned, feel-good movie, the kind we still desperately need. (Read our review of “Nope.”)‘The Man Who Fell to Earth’It was a bold move to follow up on a sci-fi classic starring David Bowie as an extraterrestrial. Rather than compete with such memorable casting, Showtime’s 10-episode series “The Man Who Fell to Earth” humanized its protagonist, Faraday (Chiwetel Ejiofor), by doubling his outsiderness: He arrives in the United States as both an alien and a Black man. In an electrifying sixth episode on jazz music, Faraday and other characters discover a sound of their shared humanity and a possible key to salvaging both of their planets. (Streaming on Showtime.)Chiwetel Ejiofor stars in the TV series “The Man Who Fell to Earth.”Showtime‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’I can’t stop raving about this movie — the costumes, the makeup, the editing (oh, the editing!). The fight scenes, the I.R.S. scenes. The marvelous Michelle Yeoh, playing the laundromat owner and cosmic warrior Evelyn Wang, and Stephanie Hsu, playing her disenchanted daughter, Joy. Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, who work under the name Daniels, have said that this is mostly a film about the confusion that arises when its characters believe they are in different movie genres from one another. I also admire how this genre diversity (thriller, sci-fi, martial arts, domestic drama) perfectly captured expansive cultural identities (immigrant narratives, Asian American families, queer children) and the depth of our earliest love story (between mother and daughter) — all of which still seem to be unmined in Hollywood. (Read our review of “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”)Brian Tyree HenryThe surreal TV series “Atlanta” started off focused on the Princeton dropout (Donald Glover) who became his rapper cousin’s manager, but in its final season it was mainly about the rapper, Alfred a.k.a. Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry), and his journey to define himself beyond the trappings of fame, wealth or the music industry. His textured performance gave Alfred more emotional depth as his character confronted feral hogs, white privilege in hip-hop and his own mortality. Henry’s onscreen brilliance led Lila Neugebauer to rewrite and reshoot key scenes in her debut film, “Causeway,” now on Apple+, devoting more time to the friendship between his character and Jennifer Lawrence’s. The result is a moving portrait of grief and hope, in which Henry lights up the film. (Read our review of “Causeway.”) More

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      Julia Reichert, Documentarian of the Working Class, Dies at 76

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      She took home, to Ohio, a 2019 Oscar for “American Factory,” and in a long career teaching and making films, she paid special attention to working women.Julia Reichert, a filmmaker and educator who made a pioneering feminist documentary, “Growing Up Female,” as an undergraduate student and almost a half-century later won an Academy Award for “American Factory,” a documentary feature about the Chinese takeover of a shuttered automobile plant in Dayton, Ohio, died on Thursday at her home in nearby Yellow Springs, Ohio. She was 76.Steven Bognar, her husband and filmmaking partner, confirmed the death. The cause, diagnosed in 2018, was urothelial cancer, which affects the urethra, bladder and other organs. She learned she had non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in 2006.Ms. Reichert, a longtime professor of motion pictures at Wright State University in Dayton, was in the forefront of a new generation of social documentarians who came out of the New Left and feminist movements of the early 1970s with a belief in film as an organizing tool with a social mission. Her films were close to oral history: Eschewing voice-over narration, they were predicated on interviews in which her mainly working-class subjects spoke for themselves.“Growing Up Female” (1971), which she made with her future husband, James Klein, a classmate at Antioch College in Ohio, was selected by the Library of Congress for the National Film Registry in 2011.Her documentaries “Union Maids” (1976), made with Mr. Klein and Miles Mogelescu, and “Seeing Red” (1983), also made with Mr. Klein, were both nominated for Academy Awards.Both movies mix archival footage with interviews. “Union Maids” profiles three women active in the Chicago labor movement during the Great Depression. “Seeing Red” portrays rank-and-file members of the Communist Party during the 1930s and ’40s.Ms. Reichert was again nominated, in 2010, for the short documentary “The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant,” which she directed with Mr. Bognar, her second husband.“The Last Truck” documented the closing of a an automobile assembly plant in Moraine, Ohio, some of it clandestinely filmed by workers inside the plant. The movie served as a prologue to “American Factory,” which Netflix released in conjunction with Barack and Michelle Obama’s fledgling company Higher Ground Productions, and which won the 2019 documentary-feature Oscar.Reviewing the film in The New York Times, Manohla Dargis called it “complex, stirring, timely and beautifully shaped, spanning continents as it surveys the past, present and possible future of American labor.”The movie is suffused in ambivalence. Having purchased the same plant documented in “The Last Truck,” a Chinese billionaire converts it into an automobile-glass factory and restores lost jobs while confounding American workers with a new set of attitudes.In 2020, Ms. Reichert and Mr. Bognar were invited by the comedian Dave Chappelle to document one of the outdoor stand-up shows he hosted during the Covid pandemic from a cornfield near his home in Yellow Springs. The two-hour feature “Dave Chappelle: Live in Real Life” had its premiere at Radio City Music Hall as part of the 2021 Tribeca Film Festival.Although Ms. Reichert addressed a variety of social issues in the documentaries she directed and produced, her enduring interests were labor history and the lives of working women. Her last film, “9to5: The Story of a Movement,” directed with Mr. Bognar, brought those two concerns together, focusing on the organizing of female office workers beginning in the 1970s.Ms. Reichert with Mr. Bognar and Chad Cannon, who composed the score for “American Factory,” at a screening of the film in Los Angeles in 2019.Araya Diaz/Getty ImagesJulia Bell Reichert was born on June 16, 1946, in Bordentown, N.J., a city on the Delaware River about eight miles southeast of Trenton. She was the second of four children of Louis and Dorothy (Bell) Reichert. Her father was a butcher in a neighborhood supermarket, her mother a homemaker who became a nurse.One of the few students from her high school to go to college, Ms. Reichert was attracted to Antioch because of its cooperative work-study program. Her parents were conservative Republicans, but once she was at Antioch Ms. Reichert’s political orientation shifted left. She canvased for the Democratic president, Lyndon B. Johnson, during the 1964 election and hosted a feminist program, “The Single Girl,” on the campus radio station. She later credited her radio experience with honing her documentary skills.“I came out of radio,” she said in an interview with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Scientists before winning the 2019 Oscar. “So without having to spend any money, I learned a lot about interviewing and editing and mixing music and how to talk — how to tell a story in a time frame.”Ms. Reichert also took a film course at Antioch with the avant-garde filmmaker David Brooks and organized a documentary workshop with Mr. Klein. After making “Growing Up Female,” which was originally intended for consciousness-raising groups, she and Mr. Klein founded a distribution cooperative, New Day Films, which focused on bringing new documentary films to schools, unions and community groups.The couple also collaborated on the documentary “Methadone: An American Way of Dealing,” in addition to “Union Maids” and “Seeing Reds.”Vincent Canby of The Times, who discovered “Union Maids” in early 1977 on a double bill in a limited run at a downtown Manhattan theater, called it “one of the more moving, more cheering theatrical experiences available in New York this weekend.”He was similarly supportive of “Seeing Red,” which was first shown at the 1983 New York Film Festival, and which is arguably the most sympathetic portrayal of American Communists ever put onscreen. Mr. Canby considered it “a fine, tough companion piece to ‘Union Maids.’” Rather than dogma, he wrote, the subject was “American idealism.”Ms. Reichert started a filmmaking program at Wright State University with Mr. Klein. She also directed a quasi-autobiographical feature film, “Emma and Elvis” (1992), written with Mr. Bognar, about a married documentary filmmaker who becomes involved with a young video artist. Although the film received only limited distribution, the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum praised it in The Chicago Reader for “making a filmmaker’s creative/midlife crisis meaningful, engaging and interesting.”Mr. Reichert and Mr. Bognar during the filming of “American Factory.”NetflixMs. Reichert’s most personal film — the first she directed with Mr. Bognar — was “A Lion in the House,” a documentary about children with cancer completed in 2006 after having been in production for close to a decade. It was inspired in part by her adolescent daughter’s struggle with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Her daughter recovered, but after the film was completed Ms. Reichert was herself diagnosed with cancer.“A Lion in the House” won multiple awards, including a Primetime Emmy, the 2006 Sundance Film Festival grand jury documentary award and the 2008 Independent Spirit Award for best documentary.Ms. Reichert’s marriage to Mr. Klein ended in divorce in 1986. She married Mr. Bognar, who survives her, in 1987. She is also survived by her daughter, Lela Klein; three brothers, Louis, Craig and Joseph Reichert; and two grandchildren.Ms. Reichert was very much a regional filmmaker. After graduating from Antioch, she remained in the Dayton area and became a source of inspiration for other Midwestern documentarians, including Michael Moore and Steve James. She also produced a number of films.In an appreciation written for a 2019 retrospective of her work at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, the journalist and author Barbara Ehrenreich recalled that Ms. Reichert had “defied every stereotype I’d had of independent filmmakers.”“She wasn’t rich, and she wasn’t arrogant or egotistical,” wrote Ms. Ehrenreich, the author, of “Nickel and Dimed” (2001), about the working poor in America. (She died in September.) “The daughter of a butcher and a house cleaner turned registered nurse, she dressed and spoke plainly, usually beaming with enthusiasm, and never abandoned her Midwestern roots.”She might have added that virtually all of Ms. Reichert’s films were explicitly collective enterprises.A scene from “American Factory,” depicting workers at an auto-glass factory in Ohio.Netflix, via Everett CollectionIn an email, Mr. Klein wrote that he and Ms. Reichert “came of age with a sense that it was only through community that the type of work we wanted to see being made could happen.”“And Julia really lived her beliefs,” he added.Despite her politics, Ms. Reichert was by her account less interested in ideology than she was in people. In an interview with Cineaste magazine, she called the subjects of “Seeing Red” “some of the most wonderful people you’ll ever want to meet.”“They made a very positive life choice, despite everything they went through,” she said.“American Factory,” which deals with the mutual culture shock experienced by Chinese and American workers and their reconciliation, was Ms. Reichert’s most ethnically and racially diverse film. The movie, she told an interviewer, “tries to be very fair by listening to everyone’s point of view — that of the chairman” — Cao Dewang, the billionaire Chinese entrepreneur who purchased and reopened the factory — “union people, anti-union people, and workers.”Indeed, Mr. Cao, a product of Communist China who teaches American workers the hard realities of global capitalism, is in many respects the film’s protagonist.Although a fully committed artist, Ms. Reichert wore her politics so lightly that almost no one seemed to notice when she concluded her Oscar acceptance speech for “American Factory” by cheerfully citing the best-known phrase from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s “Communist Manifesto.”“We believe that things will get better,” she said, “when the workers of the world unite.”Lyna Bentahar contributed reporting. More

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      ‘Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles’: A Guide

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      Here’s everything you need to know about the film that a poll of critics crowned the greatest ever made, including why it’s important and where you can watch.Sight and Sound’s once-a-decade poll of critics has crowned “Jeanne Dielman, 23, Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles” (1975), directed by Chantal Akerman, as the greatest film ever made. Here’s everything you need to know about the film and the poll.What is the film about? It’s nominally the story of three days in the life of a Brussels widow (Delphine Seyrig) as she goes about routine, even monotonous household chores and has sex with precisely one client each afternoon, which is how she supports her teenage son. Read Vincent Canby’s review.What is it really about? The quotidian lives that women lead become the stuff of drama and even suspense here. The Times co-chief critic Manohla Dargis described it as “a 201-minute leisurely dive into one woman’s inner and outer spaces.” Read our critic’s appreciation of the film.Why is the film important? Probably the best known example of slow cinema, it was embraced by academics, critics and feminists when it was first released partly because of its radical politics, in Dargis’s words, and partly because of its technique, which has proved highly influential.With “static, head-on compositions and unblinking blocks of real time,” the writer Dennis Lim once explained, the film’s “observational strategies, long takes and scrupulous framing” can be seen in the work of everyone from Todd Haynes and Gus Van Sant to Michael Haneke and Jia Zhangke. Read an interview with Akerman.Who was Chantal Akerman? The Belgian director, who died in 2015 at the age of 65, was considered a pioneer in feminist and experimental filmmaking. She was only 25 when she made “Jeanne Dielman,” her second narrative feature, and she would go on to make more than 40 all told.For the director, a daughter of Holocaust survivors from Poland, “the generational trauma of the Holocaust was a continuing theme, though below the surface,” the Times obituary said. “In recent decades she explored her own Jewish identity.” Read the obituary and an essay on the filmmaker.What is the Sight and Sound poll? It’s a survey that the British magazine Sight and Sound conducts every 10 years and is greatly respected in the film world, though as you can imagine any subjective list of the best films ever is bound to be controversial. In 2012, the poll made news when “Vertigo,” by Alfred Hitchcock, took over No. 1 from “Citizen Kane” (Orson Welles), which had held the spot for 50 years.For the 2022 survey, Sight and Sound invited more than 1,600 critics, academics, distributors, writers, curators and others from around the world to submit their top 10 films of all time.What did Sight and Sound say about the poll results? “Streaming and digital communication have created opportunities to amplify voices and films that were less seen before,” Mike Williams, the editor of Sight and Sound, said in an interview with The Times. “I think our list is becoming more reflective of the wider world of filmmaking, enjoyment, criticism and conversation.” Read an article on the poll.Where can you watch it? It’s streaming on HBO Max and the Criterion Channel. You can also rent it on Amazon, Vudu or Apple TV+. More

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      Watch Santa Throw a Punch in ‘Violent Night’

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      The director Tommy Wirkola narrates an action sequence from his new film, which stars David Harbour as Santa Claus.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.Santa shows how he deals with someone very naughty in this scene from the action comedy “Violent Night.”David Harbour stars as the jolly (or here, more melancholy) bearded fellow, who is delivering presents to a house when a gang of thieves lays siege to it. Santa confronts one, code-named Tinsel (Phong Giang) and the two tussle around a Christmas tree. Gingerbread houses and Christmas lights all get used as weapons. But viewers also learn that Santa has a few true fighting skills up his sleeve.Narrating the sequence, the director Tommy Wirkola discusses putting Harbour through training for the demanding choreography, as well as using a stunt performer who is also an actor to play Tinsel. The bulk of the fight is shot in one take, and for some of the more aggressive action (like crashing into a Christmas tree or being flipped), a technique called a Texas switch is used to swap out Harbour for a stunt performer.Read the “Violent Night” review.Watch more Anatomy of a Scene videos.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      Christmas Horror Movies to Watch After ‘Violent Night’

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      With the release of “Violent Night,” here’s a guide to streaming genre films that feature a not-always-jolly St. Nick.Genre cinema has always been a welcoming place for films about psychopaths who dress like Santa and go slashing through the snow. But in the new action comedy “Violent Night,” it’s not a make-believe Santa but the fat man himself (played by David Harbour) who goes on a slaughtering rampage. (His victims are evil hostage takers so don’t worry, he’s still the good guy.)Matthew C. DuPée, the author of the new book “A Scary Little Christmas: A History of Yuletide Horror Films, 1972-2020,” says there aren’t many movies about sinister or strange actual Santas because the man is such a benevolent figure, unlike Krampus or other punishing Christmastime creatures from European folklore.“There’s no aspect of punishment to Santa,” DuPee said in a phone interview. “His worst character trait is that he leaves coal instead of a present. It’s in that lack of overtly dark undertones where genre jumps in to explore darker themes.”If you’re a movie lover who thinks getting coal in your stocking is the sign of a year well lived, celebrate the holidays by streaming these outre Santa films. Mystifyingly, most of them are family-friendly, depending on your tolerance for bro humor and grossout horror.Scary Santa‘Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale’ (2010)Stream it on Hulu.This creepy folk-horror fairy tale is about a precocious little boy named Pietari (Onni Tommila), who’s worried that crews drilling on a mountain near his Lapland home will disturb the frigid terrain where an evil Santa-type creature from Finnish mythology is buried in the icy snow. When Pietari’s dad (Jorma Tommila) traps one of the entity’s devilish elves, father and son team up to make sure that this dark-sided Santa and his ancient evil are never defrosted.The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.An Indie Hit’s Campaign: How do you make “Everything Everywhere All at Once” an Oscar contender? Throw a party for tastemakers.Jennifer Lawrence:  The Oscar winner may win more accolades with her performance in “Causeway,” but she’s focused on living a nonstar life.“The Thing” meets “A Christmas Story” is the best way to describe this nightmarish film from the Finnish writer-director Jalmari Helander. (It’s told in Finnish and English.) Based on two of Helander’s short films, it’s a combination of touching family drama, St. Nick origin story and dark comedy, with scares that come mostly from a snarling Santa and his trollish, naked ghouls. The ending will make you appreciate — and fear — your nearest mall Santa the next time you plop a child on his chubby lap.Sci-Fi Santa‘Santa Claus Conquers the Martians’ (1964)Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.It’s been a rough holiday season for Kimar (Leonard Hicks), leader of the Martians. His kids Bomar (Chris Month) and Girmar (Pia Zadora!) are glued to Martian television’s coverage of Christmas on Earth, and they can’t understand why the jolly guy in red doesn’t travel to Mars with toys and cheer like he does for little Earthlings.To soothe things at home, Kimar has the real Santa Claus (John Call) snatched from the North Pole and brought to Mars to set up a toy shop; Earth siblings Billy (Victor Stiles) and Betty (Donna Conforti) get caught up in the kidnapping plot, too. Of course Santa wins over his alien captors, becoming Earth’s Christmas spirit ambassador to Mars.Directed by Nicholas Webster, this is “a Christmasy little movie, with science-fiction trimmings for fledgling astronauts,” as Howard Thompson put it in his New York Times review. This is the most kid-appropriate movie on this list, although little ones might be freaked out by the Martians’ avocado-green faces. Adults will appreciate the Nixon gag and the ultra-mod “Lost in Space”-ish design.Slapstick Santa‘Fred Claus’ (2007)Stream it on HBO Max.Vince Vaughn reunited with David Dobkin, his “Wedding Crashers” director, on this dippy comedy that falls somewhere between the good-hearted goofiness of “Elf” and the rebelliousness of “Bad Santa” — just the thing for fans of SantaCon fight videos.Fred (Vaughn), a smooth-talking Chicago repo man, gets bailed out of jail by his older brother, Nick Claus (Paul Giamatti), and invited to the North Pole on the condition that Fred help the saintly Nick and his elves get through the holidays by pitching in at Santa’s bustling workshop. Things take a dark turn when an unscrupulous efficiency expert (Kevin Spacey) threatens to shut down the toymaking. Goofball that he is, Fred still has a heart of gold, and like a last-minute Christmas Eve trip to the mall, he saves the holiday.The film has a surprisingly starry supporting cast, including Kathy Bates as Fred’s disapproving mom, Rachel Weisz as his put-upon girlfriend, Miranda Richardson as the exasperated Ms. Claus and Ludacris as Santa’s good-time house D.J.Supervillain Santa‘Santa’s Slay’ (2005)Rent or buy on most major platforms.This action-slasher dark comedy stars the pro wrestler Bill Goldberg as a Santa on a killing spree. Set in Hell Township, the story posits that Santa is actually the son of Satan who lost a bet with an angel (Robert Culp) and was sentenced to deliver presents for 1,000 years.Now that his punishment is over, the bomb-throwing Santa is on a scorched-earth mission to exact revenge on the angel and the angel’s grandson, Nicolas (Douglas Smith). The final showdown involves a high-stakes game of curling and a fiery portal to perdition.Despite its low budget, this breast-baring, foul-mouthed film, written and directed by David Steiman, plays like a Hollywood action movie, which makes sense since its fight choreographer, Andy Cheng, worked on “Rush Hour” and other Jackie Chan films. Ridiculous violence, including death by menorah, and decidedly dated jokes drive the humor. (Hold your nose at the casual homophobia.) James Caan and Fran Drescher play a noxious couple in the film’s joyously gory opening scene.A Singular Santa‘Santa Claus vs. the Devil’ (1959) (a.k.a. ‘Santa Claus’)Stream it on Tubi.If your thirst for strange Santas is still not quenched, this discomforting Mexican morality tale will be the gift that keeps on giving — nightmares, that is. (It’s dubbed in English so you won’t miss a baffling word.) DuPée called it “one of the most bizarre Christmas films of all time.”The story begins as children from around the world join Santa (José Elías Moreno) to do his bidding, surely in violation of international child labor laws. (Brace yourself for the racist caricatures). Unfortunately, Satan is out to turn Earth’s kids against Santa and Christmas, like a Luciferian subversion of “It’s a Wonderful Life.” But Santa isn’t having it, and from his workshop/space station, he works magic to thwart the devil’s anti-joy agenda.René Cardona’s funhouse-meets-hell-house film is some hybrid of science fiction, holiday fantasia and Christian children’s television. (Cardona was a king of Mexican exploitation cinema, in films like “Night of the Bloody Apes” and “Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Mummy”). The lessons in good versus evil seem aimed at kids, but only a Scrooge would watch the film with anyone under 13 unless you want to answer questions like: Why does Santa own a giant pair of fuzzy lips? Why would sad-faced dancers terrorize a little girl in a nightmarish dream ballet? What moisturizer does Satan use to make his face glisten like a drag queen? You’ve been warned. More