Movies

Damien Chazelle directs Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie and Diego Calva in a 1920s story about Hollywood’s good and sometimes very bad old days.The best that can be said about Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon” is that there are still big Hollywood studios like Paramount around to spend wads of cash on self-flattering indulgences. It’s perversely comforting. Despite all the real and imagined existential hurdles that the movie business is facing, its agonies over the future of theatrical exhibition and of streaming, the industry holds fast to the belief that audiences will turn out to watch an ode to its favorite subject: itself. So kudos to Paramount, which also released this year’s box-office titleholder “Top Gun: Maverick” — at the very least, “Babylon” is further proof of life.It’s also a bloated folly, which is in keeping with an industry that has a habit of supersizing itself in times of crisis. To tell his tale, Chazelle has turned back the clock to the years right before the business adapted synchronous sound as the industry standard. In basic outline, he frames this period largely as one of unbridled personal freedom, a time in which film folk partied hard, guzzling rivers of booze while snorting Sahara-sized dunes of drugs and joylessly writhing to jazzy squalling. The next morning, the freewheeling revelers then stumbled into the blazing California sun for another day of filmmaking.Written by Chazelle, “Babylon” centers on three industry types — a powerful star, a soon-to-be minted starlet and an up-and-coming executive — whose lives first intersect in a frenzied blowout crowded with attendees thrashing wildly, their mouths, arms, legs, breasts and assorted other bits flapping in a simulacrum of ecstasy. The star is Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt in usual smooth form), an M.G.M. headliner with a dashing mustache, a string of hits and a romantic life that, despite his boozing, is as robust as his health. The movie’s humor — and Chazelle’s amused approach — is signaled when Jack tells a flirty waitress to bring him multiple drinks. He slurps buckets, and then gets it energetically on with the server.Like the powder nasally vacuumed by another partyer, a grasping would-be star, Nellie LaRoy (a badly used Margot Robbie), Jack’s drinking is, for Chazelle, an emblem of the unfettered spirit of the age before the fun was spoiled by, well, it’s unclear by whom, since the only serious villain is a gangster played by a persuasively repellent Tobey Maguire. (Wall Street, which has done far more damage to the movies than any entity, is conspicuously M.I.A.) Jack’s and Nellie’s abilities to perform no matter what, on camera and off, are among their most defining traits, near-super powers as well as a steady source of strained comedy.Much of the first two hours restively bounces from Jack to Nellie and Manny Torres (Diego Calva), a doe-eyed Mexican naïf whom Jack hires as an assistant. A fast, smart problem solver and a total mensch, Manny soon assumes greater responsibility and becomes a studio executive, a straighter trajectory than either Jack or Nellie’s hairpin roads. Manny is an outlier, an immigrant of color in a predominantly white business, but he’s a survivor, too, open to change and highly adaptable. Like Calva, Manny is appealing, even if the character is preposterously nice for a clichéd Hollywood striver. But it’s never really clear what makes him run and mostly he functions as a proxy for the audience, a gaga witness to the looniness.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.Best-Actress Battle Royal: A banner crop of leading ladies, including Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett, rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.Golden Globe Nominations: Here are some of the most eyebrow-raising snubs and surprises from this year’s list of nominees.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.Compared to the larger-than-life, at times cartoonish, more physically demonstrative performances delivered by Pitt and especially Robbie, Calva is relatively tamped down and reactive, which brings his turn closer to contemporary notions of realism. These differences add complexity and much-needed rhythm changes. Similarly to his characters, Chazelle has embraced excess as a guiding principle in “Babylon, and like his film “La La Land,” this one shifts between intimate interludes and elaborate set pieces, one difference being that Chazelle now has a heftier budget and is eager to show off his new toys. At the inaugural bacchanal, the camera doesn’t soar; it darts and swoops like a coked-up hummingbird.Despite the relentless churn on set and after hours, the movie is strangely juiceless. I don’t simply mean that it’s unsexy (which it is), but that there’s so little life in the movie, despite all the frantic action. There isn’t much going on other than the spectacle of its busily spinning parts, which might be tolerable if the first two hours weren’t so unrelievedly unmodulated, with everything synced to the same monotonous, accelerated pace. This hyperventilated quality initially serves the story and Chazelle’s concept of the era’s delirious excess, but the lack of modulation rapidly becomes enervating. After a while, it feels punishing.There’s something juvenile and paradoxically puritanical about Chazelle’s focus on the characters’ drinking and drugging and hard-living, and not just because their exertions don’t seem very fun. They work and party, hit marks and cut loose, follow directions and run wild; you see their technique, stamina, flubs, upstaging tricks and power moves, as well as their bloodshot eyes. Jack, Nellie and Manny seem to like making films, or at least they like the perks, and each speaks of the magic (or whatever) of movies. But their offscreen habits aren’t interesting — people do drugs and have sex, big whoop — and the real scandal is that there’s nothing special about their films, which Chazelle makes look silly, slapdash and ugly.The shift to sync sound was cataclysmic for the industry and fascinating, though in ways that aren’t evident here, partly because Chazelle isn’t terribly invested in historical accuracy. Instead, with “Babylon” he has whipped up a Hollywood counter history that focuses on the era’s putative excesses and rebuts (and luxuriates in) the industry’s carefully sanitized, high-minded profile. This kind of revisionist take isn’t new; the movies love revisiting and lampooning themselves. Ryan Murphy took a different tack in his Netflix series “Hollywood,” which wishfully rewrites the past so that everyone who the industry marginalized or excluded — men and women of color, gay and straight — gets to triumph.Chazelle doesn’t bother with positive role models or social uplift. Mostly, he is entranced by what Hollywood tried to keep hidden, particularly in the wake of some highly publicized scandals in the 1920s. To deflect attention from the federal government and the censorship threat it posed, the industry began polishing its image and strictly enforcing its self-drafted Production Code (no extramarital sex, etc.). In public, the studios and their fixers promoted stars as ideals while quietly facilitating abortions, hiding affairs and keeping performers deep in the closet — all fodder for the veiled innuendo of gossip columnists and tabloid magazines.There are moments in “Babylon,” say, in one of its set pieces or in Nellie’s skillfully forced tears, when you see what it might have been if Chazelle had paid as much attention to the era’s films, their pleasure and beauty, as to its lurid stories. He’s crammed a lot in, including Irving Thalberg (Max Minghella), the legendary M.G.M. producer who butchered Erich von Stroheim’s 1924 masterpiece “Greed.” A clownish Stroheim-esque type (an uncredited Spike Jonze) also pops up in “Babylon,” and both he and the epic he’s directing are played for laughs. Here, as throughout this disappointing movie, what’s missing is the one thing that defined the silent era at its greatest and to which Chazelle remains bafflingly oblivious: its art.BabylonRated R for drugs, drinking, nudity and lots of elephant dung. Running time: 3 hours 8 minutes. In theaters. More

A transfixing Vicky Krieps plays the Empress of Austria who, at 40, begins to chafe against her predictably cosseted life.The princess industrial complex is usually associated with Disney and its procession of royal girls and women from Snow White to Ariel and Tiana. The category also works nicely for all of the many other ostensibly grown-up entertainments about girls and women with heavy crowns. Few ever seem happy with their station in life, and while some find a prince and secure a happily ever after, others break and still others mount improbable great escapes.“Corsage” is the Austrian writer-director Marie Kreutzer’s bold, visually striking and ingeniously anachronistic portrait of an empress in complicated rebellion. The rebel — a mesmerizing Vicky Krieps — is the Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary, Elisabeth Amalie Eugenie (1837-1898). Married at 16 to Franz Joseph, the ruler of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Elisabeth now has two children, a retinue of servants and no obvious cares. A celebrated beauty, she wears tight corsets and glorious frocks, adhering to a regimen of regular exercise and a diet that often consists of little more than beef broth and the slenderest of orange slices.Elisabeth is whisper thin, but something other than vanity and social mores is eating away at her — boredom, despair, a sense of purposelessness — sending uneasy ripples through her life. “She scares me so much,” a maid timidly whispers of Elisabeth, who’s first seen submerged in the royal tub, the camera pointing down at her. Her eyes are open, and she’s holding her nose, timing her breath ostensibly for health reasons. It’s both a useful exercise and a suitable metaphor for “Corsage” (the word also means the bodice of a woman’s dress), especially given Elisabeth’s penchant for tightlacing her corset, which tests her very breath.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.Best-Actress Battle Royal: A banner crop of leading ladies, including Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett, rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.Golden Globe Nominations: Here are some of the most eyebrow-raising snubs and surprises from this year’s list of nominees.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.“Corsage” takes place over a number of months starting in late 1877, the year Elisabeth turns 40. Hers is a predictably cosseted, sumptuous life. (The locations include the Hapsburg Palace in Vienna, the former principal residence for the titular dynasty.) Kreutzer — this is her fifth feature film — charts the coordinates of Elisabeth’s quotidian reality from the get-go, briskly presenting its luxuries but also, importantly, letting you see how at ease Elisabeth is in this rarefied world. It’s clear that she lacks for nothing, at least materially. From the way that she holds her head, directs her gaze and impatiently speaks to her maids and ladies in waiting, it’s also evident that she isn’t chafing against her entitlements.With wit, a cool eye and fluid precision, Kreutzer tracks Elisabeth across the next eventful months. Turning 40 proves a difficult milestone for the queen and disrupts her life, though not always for the worse. She’s already a subject of gossip inside and outside the palace, and her weight, habits and appearances can set tongues wagging. The pressure of getting older only makes matters worse. At 40, Elisabeth says in voice-over, soon after blowing out her birthday candles, “a person begins to disperse and fade.” Her distress is palpable, and it’s no wonder, given the creepy, slightly comic, near-threatening song that Franz Joseph (Florian Teichtmeister) and others sing to her on her birthday: “Beautiful may she remain.”There’s a knot of complication in the word “remain,” which suggests that Elisabeth is never permitted to change. That’s underscored by her regimented life — with its rituals of deference, its protocols, its quiet and violent power — which is structured to uphold the institution of the monarchy and the divine right of kings, even as the modern world shudders outside. Part of the story’s tension stems from Elisabeth’s role in the empire’s dual monarchy, which makes her leader of two countries she has no real say over. Her realm is the rooms she occupies; her subjects, her staff. She oversees her children, but Franz Joseph is the king.Elisabeth’s rebellion isn’t overt and obvious; it comes in stages, in small and large gestures, in furtive cigarettes, reckless flirtations and wild gallops across far-off fields. Krieps is wonderful to watch in motion, whether she’s in the saddle, crossing swords or just leaving a dinner. But she’s a virtuoso of stillness, and at times she brings to mind old Hollywood sphinxes like Garbo and Dietrich, whose inscrutable faces worked like wonderful screens on which you could project whatever fantasies you wanted. Yet Krieps is also a performer of the present moment, gesturally and otherwise, which is ideal for a character who’s caught between the old world and the new, and between the privileges that at once exalt and suffocate her.“Corsage” opens and closes with Elisabeth facing watery voids, ambiguous visions that speak to her desire for change, perhaps transcendence. Visions of escape run through stories about unhappily pampered women. Rarely, though, do the gilded agonies, especially of princesses and queens, offer real surprises, partly because anything too alien would break the profitable (binge-worthy) illusion of the relatable royal. Kreutzer retains a critical distance from Elisabeth; she’s sympathetic and skeptical of the character, and shrewdly doesn’t try to fashion her into a martyr or feminist role model. Making Elisabeth interestingly human proves more than enough, a feat that Kreutzer and Krieps accomplish to dazzling effect.CorsageNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. In theaters. More

Bill Nighy stars as a buttoned-up bureaucrat transformed by a grim diagnosis in this drama by the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, adapted from an Akira Kurosawa movie.There is a coziness to “Living,” despite the fact that it revolves around death. It’s not a holiday movie, at least not explicitly, but like “A Christmas Carol” and other Yuletide ghost stories, it’s a film that steps back to consider the rituals and routines we perpetuate, the ways we’ve changed since the last break. And the ways we haven’t.“Living,” directed by Oliver Hermanus from a screenplay by the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, is an adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s drama “Ikiru” (or “To Live”). That Japanese classic from 1952 stars the great Takashi Shimura as a drab Tokyo functionary who learns he is terminally ill and begins to question his life.Ishiguro has called “Ikiru” a formative work for him. His books (which include “Never Let Me Go” and “The Remains of the Day”) limn the crisis of confronting one’s own life with newfound clarity, of perceiving the ways in which it is fraught and one’s complicity in its corruption. With “Living,” Ishiguro — a British writer whose parents moved the family from Nagasaki to Surrey when he was five — infuses his beloved parable with nostalgia closer to home.“Living” transposes “Ikiru” to a gloomy postwar London filled with buttoned-up men of dignity; bowler-hat-wearing worker bees who commute in and out of the city with the solemn demeanor of churchgoers. One of them is Williams (Bill Nighy), a cadaverous bureaucrat and the intimidatingly austere head of the Public Works Department. The film opens on a new hire’s first day, but the young man’s illusions are quickly dashed when his new boss, a total gentleman at first glance, proves to be an inert leader. A group of women with a petition asking for the construction of a new playground are kicked around the building — this is under that department’s jurisdiction, no, that one — because no one wants the hassle.Thinking of Nighy and holiday releases, Williams is the total inverse of Billy Mack, the washed-up rocker whom Nighy played in “Love Actually.” Where Mack is lovably sleazy, the creaky Williams is inhibition personified. The chipper Margaret (Aimee Lou Wood), the sole female employee of Williams’s wing, calls him “Mr. Zombie.”When Williams’s doctor tells him he only has a few months to live, his subdued response is both devastating and absurd: “Quite,” he mutters.As with the protagonist of “Ikiru,” Williams is transformed by the news. First, he turns to a local bohemian, Sutherland (Tom Burke), for a boozy tour of the city’s nightlife. Then he spends time with Margaret, a lively companion who gets him in trouble with his son and daughter-in-law, who are convinced the old man is having an affair. Eventually, he finds something to believe in, and alters his legacy in the process.At its worst, “Living” wallows generically, employing an overbearing piano score as the camera repeatedly sits with Williams’s sadness to diminishing effect. Though, captured by the cinematographer Jamie D. Ramsay, there’s also a warmth and twinkle to Williams’s existential plight; as in a David Lean movie, passion mingles elegantly with repression, and Williams emerges as a kind of romantic figure, a man shocked, then delighted, by the thrill of finding himself.LivingRated PG-13 for morbidity and scenes of drunken revelry. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters. More

A 4K restoration of Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s thrumming, visually bold movie about a self-destructive club girl retains its capital-L look.Sordid yet transcendent, bathed in neon haze and set to a relentless techno-beat, Hou Hsiao-hsien’s “Millennium Mambo” — the tale of a teenage Taipei club girl — is not only the most pop movie the great Taiwanese filmmaker has ever made but, intermittently, among the most astonishingly beautiful.The movie has a capital-L look, and the 4K restoration, opening at Metrograph in Manhattan on Dec. 23, does it justice.“Millennium Mambo” premiered at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival, where it was given a mixed reception and an award for sound design. Hou’s first feature since his exquisite period piece “Flowers of Shanghai,” the movie marked his entry into contemporary territory occupied by two of his younger admirers, the filmmakers Olivier Assayas and Wong Kar-wai.Hou’s frequent cinematographer, Mark Lee Ping-bin, had just shot Wong’s “In the Mood For Love,” and he reprised its voluptuous imagery: Cigarettes are orange points of light in the blue-on-blue disco where Vicky (Shu Qi) spends her nights; the cramped, cruddy apartment she shares with her emotionally abusive boyfriend, a DJ wannabe (Tuan Chun-hao), is a perfumed miasma. The pad’s lush mise-en-scène sets up a shock cut to a gyrating butt in the hostess bar where Vicky has taken a job and where she meets her sometime protector, a benign gangster with a Buddhist streak (Hou regular Jack Kao).Some took “Millennium Mambo” as Hou’s misguided attempt to connect with a younger generation, perhaps forgetting that he had begun his career as a commercial filmmaker and made more than a few “youth films” — notably the not dissimilar and initially underappreciated “Daughter of the Nile.”According to Maggie Cheung, Hou had originally wanted her to play Vicky, opposite Tony Leung, her co-star from “In the Mood for Love.” Shu Qi is a less subtle actor than Cheung, but the movie is stronger for it. Stunningly photogenic, remote and self-destructive, alternately passive and hysterical, Shu Qi’s character lives in a trance, reminiscent of the Warhol superstar Edie Sedgwick. As the New York Times critic Elvis Mitchell wrote in his mildly favorable review, “the insistence of high-throb electronica calls out to Vicky, so that she pounds the thoughts out of her head.”Vicky’s neurotic behavior makes “Millennium Mambo” almost a case history or, given her repetitive voice-over narration, a kind of ballad. At the same time, like other Hou films, it is a temporal pretzel. Vicky narrates her story, apparently set in the year 2000, from a point 10 years in the future. Not infrequently we hear about events before we see them.Most mysterious are the brief sequences set in the sleepy, snowy Japanese island of Hokkaido — an alpine environment far different from steamy Taipei. Are these unmotivated scenes a flash-forward to Vicky’s untroubled future? A deliberately unconvincing happy ending à la Douglas Sirk? A fantasy triggered by her chance encounter, while clubbing, with two Japanese brothers?That the director is something of a Japanophile — and that, in a spasm of narrative ambiguity, Vicky finds herself in the snowbound town that hosts the Yubari International Fantastic Film Festival — could support any of these theories.Millennium MamboOpens Dec. 23 at Metrograph, Manhattan; metrograph.com. More

Olivia Colman and a precocious preteen embark on a fraught road trip in this affable dramedy.“Joyride,” a grievously schematic blend of odd-couple comedy and life-affirming road movie, traverses the Irish countryside with a small degree of charm and a boatload of blarney.The two leads, however (Olivia Colman and Charlie Reid), sweat to sell the bejesus out of the material, fighting a wan and wobbly script (by Ailbhe Keogan) laden with Celtic clichés. When Mully (Reid), a confident 12-year-old, sees his ne’er-do-well father (Lochlann O’Mearain) swipe money intended for the hospice that cared for Mully’s deceased mother, the boy grabs the cash and takes off in a stolen taxi. Unfortunately, a middle-aged woman (Colman) and her unwanted newborn baby are both snoring in the back seat.The woman, Joy, plans to offload the infant on a childless friend (Aisling O’Sullivan) some miles away, then board a plane for a Spanish vacation. Prickly and desperate, she needs help; and Mully, wise and empathetic beyond his years, is about to prove himself not only a skilled chauffeur but an accomplished breastfeeding coach. To say the film has credibility issues would be an understatement.Growing sillier by the minute, “Joyride” is the first fiction feature directed by Emer Reynolds, a skilled documentary filmmaker. Emotional wounds are uncovered — most poignantly in one spare flashback to Joy’s childhood — but the tone is unruly at best, with perky pop songs and comic cameos (a garrulous van driver, a friendly flutist) interrupting intense conversations about parenting and its attendant responsibilities. The movie’s good-natured bounce, sadly, can’t distract from the visual blandness as our squabbling pair heads toward the end of a journey that’s been clearly signposted since the beginning.JoyrideNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

The academy also released shortlists for documentary, international feature and seven other categories.Will pop superstars like Rihanna, Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga take the stage at the Oscars next year? That possibility became more likely when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences released its shortlist for best original song on Wednesday.The Rihanna song “Lift Me Up” (from “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”) made the cut, as did Swift’s “Carolina” (“Where the Crawdads Sing”) and Lady Gaga’s anthem “Hold My Hand” (“Top Gun: Maverick”).Other songs on the short list include Selena Gomez’s “My Mind & Me” from the documentary about her; the Weeknd tune “Nothing Is Lost (You Give Me Strength)” from the new “Avatar” sequel; and “New Body Rhumba,” the tune that LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy wrote for “White Noise.”Also on the list is the “Spirited” ditty “Good Afternoon” from the songwriting team of Benj Pasek and Justin Paul. They’re familiar names to Oscar voters: In 2017, they won best original song for “City of Stars” from “La La Land.” A nomination next month would be their fourth in this category.The shortlist for documentary feature included biographical studies like “All the Bloodshed and the Beauty” (about the photographer Nan Goldin) and “Moonage Daydream” (David Bowie), as well as historical examinations like “Descendant” (focused on the Clotilda, the last known ship to bring enslaved Africans to the United States) and “The Janes” (named after a collective that provided abortions in the years before Roe v. Wade).Meanwhile. the international feature shortlist is stacked with festival favorites from around the world, including “Decision to Leave,” the South Korean noir from Park Chan-wook; “Bardo” (Mexico), directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu; and Alice Diop’s “Saint Omer” (France), based on a true story. Pakistan’s “Joyland” also made the cut: It features a relationship involving a transgender woman and was temporarily banned in that country.In all, the academy released shortlists for 10 categories — including visual effects, score, sound, and hair and makeup — in advance of the nominations on Jan. 24. Here are the shortlists for song, documentary feature and international feature. For the rest of the categories, go to oscars.org.Original Song“Time” from “Amsterdam”“Nothing Is Lost (You Give Me Strength)” from “Avatar: The Way of Water”“Lift Me Up” from “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”“This Is a Life” from “Everything Everywhere All at Once”“Ciao Papa” from “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio”“Til You’re Home” from “A Man Called Otto”“Naatu Naatu” from “RRR”“My Mind & Me” from “Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me”“Good Afternoon” from “Spirited”“Applause” from “Tell It like a Woman”“Stand Up” from “Till”“Hold My Hand” from “Top Gun: Maverick”“Dust & Ash” from “The Voice of Dust and Ash”“Carolina” from “Where the Crawdads Sing”“New Body Rhumba” from “White Noise”Documentary Feature“All That Breathes”“All the Beauty and the Bloodshed”“Bad Axe”“Children of the Mist”“Descendant”“Fire of Love”“Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song”“Hidden Letters”“A House Made of Splinters”“The Janes”“Last Flight Home”“Moonage Daydream”“Navalny”“Retrograde”“The Territory”International FeatureArgentina, “Argentina, 1985”Austria, “Corsage”Belgium, “Close”Cambodia, “Return to Seoul”Denmark, “Holy Spider”France, “Saint Omer”Germany, “All Quiet on the Western Front”India, “Last Film Show”Ireland, “The Quiet Girl”Mexico, “Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths”Morocco, “The Blue Caftan”Pakistan, “Joyland”Poland, “EO”South Korea, “Decision to Leave”Sweden, “Cairo Conspiracy” More

Forget the men: A banner crop of leading ladies, including Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett, rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.Clockwise from top left, Margot Robbie in “Babylon”; Michelle Yeoh in “Everything Everywhere All at Once”; Danielle Deadwyler in “Till”; Cate Blanchett in “Tár”; Michelle Williams in “The Fabelmans”; and Viola Davis in “The Woman King.”Scott Garfield/Paramount Pictures; A24; Lynsey Weatherspoon/Orion Pictures; Focus Features; Merie Weismiller Wallace/Universal Pictures, via Amblin Entertainment; Sony PicturesBy their very nature, awards shows are designed to exclude, barring all but a few from the glory of earning a nomination.Still, this year’s race for the best-actress Oscar is so stacked with contenders that I’m ready to comb the academy bylaws for a workaround. Are five slots really enough to honor a field this formidable? Couldn’t we swipe a few more from the wan best-actor category, at least?The truth is, even 10 slots would barely scratch the surface of what the best-actress race has to offer. Many of the season’s most acclaimed films, like “Tár” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” have given career-best signature roles to their leading ladies, though only one woman can collect the Oscar. Meanwhile, a vast array of up-and-comers, actresses playing against type and underdogs worth a second look will be vying simply to make the final five. Here are the women contending in this season’s most exciting category.The Front-runnersIn the fictional world of “Tár,” the conniving conductor played by Cate Blanchett has been showered with an absurd amount of awards. By the end of this season, Blanchett herself may keep pace with her character.The two-time Oscar winner’s bravura performance — she learned German, orchestra conducting and piano for the role — has netted the most notable prizes so far: In addition to nominations from the Golden Globes, Critics Choice Awards, Independent Spirit Awards and Gotham Awards, Blanchett won the Volpi Cup for best actress at the Venice Film Festival and a pair of leading trophies from the New York Film Critics Circle and Los Angeles Film Critics Association. The last time Blanchett triumphed with the critics groups on both coasts, she was well on her way to winning her second Oscar, for “Blue Jasmine.”If she wins her third, the 53-year-old would be the youngest woman ever to reach that milestone. (Meryl Streep, Frances McDormand and Ingrid Bergman are the only other actresses to have won three Oscars each for their performances, while Katharine Hepburn holds the record with four.) But those laurels could also count against Blanchett in a race where her strongest competitor has never even been nominated and is angling for a historic win.Michelle Yeoh came close to snagging a supporting-actress nomination for “Crazy Rich Asians” (2018), but this time, she’s undeniable: The 60-year-old’s leading role in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” as an ordinary woman who becomes the multiverse’s last hope, should earn Yeoh her first Oscar nod.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.Golden Globe Nominations: Here are some of the most eyebrow-raising snubs and surprises from this year’s list of nominees.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.Rian Johnson:  The “Glass Onion” director explains the streaming plan for his “Knives Out” franchise.The role shows off everything Yeoh is capable of — including her athleticism, precise character work and sense of humor — and she has teared up in interviews while discussing how rarely a movie like that is offered to an Asian actress. In a recent awards round table, Yeoh told the other actresses, “I honestly look at all of you with such envy because you get an opportunity to try all the different roles, but we only get that opportunity maybe once in a long, long time.” Indeed, no Asian woman has ever won best actress, and after 94 ceremonies, the only winner of color in the category remains Halle Berry for “Monster’s Ball.”Can Yeoh pull off a landmark victory? It may help that she has a more sympathetic character arc: While Blanchett’s Lydia Tár compels and confounds in equal measure, Yeoh’s Evelyn Wang learns to drop her guard and let love in. But the competition in this category is fierce, and Blanchett isn’t the only heavyweight she’ll be contending with.For playing a character based on Steven Spielberg’s mother in “The Fabelmans,” Michelle Williams is likely to score her fifth Oscar nomination, which puts her behind Glenn Close and Amy Adams as the three living actresses who’ve been nominated the most times without having won. That gives Williams a potent “she’s due” narrative that could siphon votes from both Blanchett and Yeoh; it helps, too, that she gives her all to the part, playing a vivacious woman whose spirit couldn’t be contained by her marriage.The “Till” star Danielle Deadwyler won the first lead-performance trophy of the season at last month’s Gotham Awards, and she’ll need that momentum to overcome striking snubs from the Independent Spirits and Golden Globes. Still, her emotionally precise performance as the mother of Emmett Till has Oscar-friendly heft, since voters often gravitate toward an actor playing a historical figure.It’s rarer that Oscar voters make room for an action heroine in the best-actress category: Though Sigourney Weaver earned a nomination for “Aliens,” Charlize Theron found no traction for “Mad Max: Fury Road.” But there’s more to what Viola Davis does in “The Woman King” than just wielding a spear. Her fierce warrior is weary and her battle yells pack a cathartic punch. If the movie can make it into the best-picture lineup, Davis should be swept in.Damien Chazelle’s debauched Hollywood dramedy “Babylon” has earned wildly mixed reviews, but the director helmed two Oscar-winning performances — Emma Stone in “La La Land” and J.K. Simmons in “Whiplash” — and that pedigree has pushed Margot Robbie into contention for her role as a fledgling actress convinced of her own star quality. Nominations for “I, Tonya” and “Bombshell” prove that voters like Robbie in ambitious-striver mode, though the movie is stuffed so full of characters that she can’t quite dominate the proceedings like some of her best-actress competition.Oscar voters might consider an ingénue like Ana de Armas for her performance as Marilyn Monroe in “Blonde.” NetflixThe Women Waiting in the WingsCan two Oscar favorites overcome muted streaming launches in a year when theatrical contenders reign supreme? “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” hands Emma Thompson a sexually frank showcase role that had Oscar pundits buzzing at January’s Sundance Film Festival, but the film’s quiet June debut on Hulu drew fewer headlines. And despite a best-picture win this year for “CODA,” Apple TV+ still struggles to get all those “Ted Lasso” and “Severance” viewers to watch exclusive movies like “Causeway,” though the film features a strong, back-to-basics lead performance from Jennifer Lawrence.At least “Blonde” managed a streaming debut that got people talking, though the punishing Netflix drama about Marilyn Monroe had some awfully loud detractors. Can its star, Ana de Armas, rise above those pans? She managed a Golden Globe nomination, at least, and Oscar voters love to single out a rising ingénue, but the film will prove a tough sit in a year with plenty of better-received options.In the first hour of “Empire of Light,” Olivia Colman plays a movie-theater worker who opens herself up to an appealing romance, but in the second, the character goes off her meds and the movie goes off the rails. Even if those two halves don’t quite cohere, Colman definitely gets some big moments to play, and the actress has so quickly become an Oscar mainstay (over the last four years, she has been nominated three times and won once) that she should be considered a perennial option for the final five.Rooney Mara is spirited and sensitive in “Women Talking,” but the studio’s decision to campaign her as a lead actress is tenuous: In this ensemble drama about conflicted Mennonite women, Mara has scarcely more screen time than Claire Foy or Jessie Buckley, who are being positioned as supporting-actress contenders. Then again, Mara is no stranger to category high jinks: Six years ago, she was nominated as a supporting actress for “Carol,” even though she was clearly playing that film’s protagonist.Keke Palmer won a New York Film Critics Circle award for supporting actress for “Nope” even if it really was a lead performance. Universal PicturesThe Dark-Horse ContendersIf social media memes could be counted as accolades, Mia Goth would surely give Blanchett’s haul a run for her money: The young actress’s work in “Pearl,” in which she plays a farm girl who’d kill for stardom, has Twitter awash in Goth GIFs. Ti West’s technicolor horror drama isn’t the sort of thing that Oscar voters usually go for, but Goth is fearsomely committed, knocking out a tour de force, eight-minute monologue that’s topped only by a sustained closing shot of the actress smiling until she cries. At the very least, it’d make for one memorable Oscar clip.I hope that as the membership of the academy grows ever more international, more powerhouse performances will be recognized in languages other than English. In Park Chan-wook’s South Korean noir “Decision to Leave,” Tang Wei is a terrific femme fatale, while Léa Seydoux delivers her finest work as a single mother in the French drama “One Fine Morning.” And Oscar voters who regret snubbing Vicky Krieps for “Phantom Thread” could make it up to her by checking out the royal drama “Corsage,” in which she plays Empress Elisabeth of Austria with beguiling irreverence.Comedic actresses are too often undervalued by Oscar voters, but Aubrey Plaza spent 2022 proving she was capable of much more: Fans of her breakout performance in HBO’s “The White Lotus” should check out her dark, edgy work in the drama “Emily the Criminal,” which earned nominations from the Gothams and Indie Spirits. And “Nope,” which topped our critic A.O. Scott’s list of the best films of the year, boasts a charismatic star turn by Keke Palmer that recently earned a win from the New York Film Critics Circle, even if the group had to pretend she gave a supporting performance to get her out of the way of Blanchett’s leading win. Normally, I’d discourage that kind of category fraud, but in this crowded year, I sympathize with the desire to bend some rules. More

Los tres cineastas más importantes del México contemporáneo recuerdan sus proyectos con el actor. “El mejor actor de nuestra generación”, dice Del Toro, quien le dio un papel en ‘Cronos’, su ópera prima.A los 24 años, cuando ya llevaba dos años de la licenciatura en Física, Daniel Giménez Cacho recibió una invitación informal para asistir a una clase de canto. Para consternación de su padre, que era ingeniero, aquella oferta inesperada desbarató el plan de una carrera científica y encendió en él un fervor por la actuación que duraría toda la vida.“Fue un descubrimiento físico, un renacimiento para mi cuerpo”, dijo Giménez Cacho durante una entrevista reciente en un restaurante mexicano de la histórica calle Olvera de Los Ángeles.Giménez Cacho, el aclamado actor que nació en Madrid pero se crio en el corazón de Ciudad de México, y quien ahora tiene 61 años, ha desarrollado un currículo ecléctico que muestra tanto su seriedad como sus dotes cómicas a lo largo de casi cuatro décadas.Desde el viernes lo podemos ver en Netflix como el alter ego del director Alejandro González Iñárritu, Silverio Gama, en Bardo, falsa crónica de unas cuantas verdades, una fantasía onírica de reflexiones personales y políticas.Después de iniciarse en el teatro, Giménez Cacho se dio a conocer más ampliamente a través de la televisión en 1989 con Teresa, la popular telenovela que protagonizó junto a una joven Salma Hayek en el personaje protagónico.En aquella época, en México solo se producían unas pocas películas al año pero, poco a poco, una joven cohorte de cineastas comenzó a impresionar con historias audaces tanto en la pantalla chica como en la grande. El actor estuvo presente en los mismos círculos artísticos y desarrolló su carrera en paralelo a la de quienes estaban detrás de la cámara.Ser el único actor que ha colaborado con los directores mexicanos reconocidos con el Oscar y conocidos colectivamente como los Tres Amigos: primero Alfonso Cuarón, luego Guillermo del Toro y ahora Iñárritu, es evidencia del papel fundamental que Giménez Cacho tuvo a la hora de sentar las bases para el surgimiento del nuevo cine mexicano. Iñárritu comentó, riendo a carcajadas: “Hay que levantarle una estatua por ser el único sobreviviente de los Tres Amigos”.Fuera de México, lo han convocado titanes del cine como Pedro Almodóvar (La mala educación), Lucrecia Martel (Zama) y Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Memoria).Les pedí a Cuarón, Del Toro y González Iñárritu que recordaran cuándo conocieron al actor y cómo fue la experiencia de trabajar con él.El actor como alter ego del director Alejandro González Iñárritu en ‘Bardo, falsa crónica de un puñado de verdades’.Limbo Films, S. de R. L. de C. V. Cortesía de NetflixAlfonso Cuarón: ‘Se convirtió no solo en colaborador, sino en cocreador’El actor y el director se conocieron en el rodaje de Camino largo a Tijuana (1988), de Luis Estrada, donde Cuarón fue productor y ayudante de cámara.Cuarón señaló que se arrepintió de considerarlo de inmediato para protagonizar su ópera prima, la comedia Sólo con tu pareja de 1991, a pesar de que lo impresionó el lenguaje corporal preciso y dancístico del actor.“Tenía miedo de no haber visto todas las opciones, cuando en realidad fue muy tonto eso porque la mejor opción estaba enfrente de mi”, dijo Cuarón por teléfono.Giménez Cacho acabó protagonizando la película y Cuarón se siente afortunado. Al recordar que un invitado a una cena comparó al actor con Marcello Mastroianni por su capacidad para infundir levedad a dramas más bien emotivos, el director explicó que su ópera prima “dependía del interprete. Él tenía que llevar la película con una gracia y una ligereza”. Cuarón añadió que “Daniel se convirtió no solo en colaborador, sino en cocreador de lo que terminó siendo la película”.Giménez Cacho recuerda que estaba indeciso, pues era su primer papel protagónico en una película.“Yo tuve siempre muchas dudas” respecto al papel de un mujeriego cuyas travesuras le pasan factura, dijo Giménez Cacho. “Todavía las tengo, pero ya tengo 61. Siempre tuve mucha inseguridad, entonces fue muy lindo descubrir mi vena cómica”.Después de Sólo con tu pareja, Cuarón animó a Giménez Cacho para que probara suerte en Hollywood y lo ayudó a concertar reuniones con agentes.“Vine y dije: ‘Esto no es para mí’. Me dijeron: ‘Do you want to be rich and famous?’. Y yo les dije: ‘Quiero hacer películas chingonas de las que pueda estar orgulloso’”, recuerda el actor. “La gente William Morris Endeavor creo que me entendieron por ahí y dijeron: ‘Está bien, vete a México y ahí te vamos mandando cosas’. Nunca pasó y yo no lo busqué después”.Una década después, para su conmovedora película Y tu mamá también, Cuarón quería un narrador masculino que evocara a los de Masculino femenino y Banda aparte, de Jean-Luc Godard.“Hay un don que pueden tener ciertos actores, que no lo puedes cultivar, que es que la cámara los sigue, el público está atento”, dijo Guillermo del Toro. “Y esa es una de las virtudes que Daniel tiene”.Ricardo Nagaoka para The New York TimesMientras buscaba una voz objetiva que añadiera un contexto irónico, pensó en alguien con acento español y le pidió al director Fernando Trueba que lo intentara.Al final, Cuarón recurrió a Giménez Cacho (a pesar de que pensó que el tono del actor podría ser demasiado cálido para esa tarea) y se sorprendió por la concordancia orgánica entre la voz y las imágenes. El actor grabó el texto antes de ver el material visual.“Daniel no se me había ocurrido porque estaba buscando voces, no estaba pensando en actores, y otra vez, esa fue una tontería”, admitió Cuarón. “Él supo perfectamente que tenía que tener un cierto distanciamiento Brechtiano, pero a la vez no permitió que se arribara a la sequedad”.El actor comentó con una sonrisa de satisfacción: “Nunca he sido su primera opción. Pero como luego no le gusta nadie, no le queda de otra que decir: ‘Bueno, ya que lo haga este cabrón’”.Guillermo del Toro: ‘Estábamos de acuerdo que era el mejor actor de nuestra generación’Mucho antes de convertirse en director, Del Toro fue maquillador de efectos especiales y conoció a Giménez Cacho en 1990, mientras le aplicaba lodo falso y una barba artificial durante el rodaje de Cabeza de Vaca, la obra de época de Nicolás Echevarría que está ambientada en territorio selvático.Con una curiosidad incisiva, Giménez Cacho le hizo preguntas detalladas a Del Toro sobre el proceso de transformación. El futuro cineasta se dio cuenta de que el actor tenía un compromiso obsesivo con cada aspecto de su trabajo, algo con lo que podía identificarse. De inmediato, se hicieron amigos.Del Toro lo apodó el Niño Sapo, al reconocer en Giménez Cacho una alteridad afín. “Decíamos que éramos un par de freaks”, recordó el cineasta a través de una videollamada. Poco después, Del Toro fabricó una réplica del brazo del actor para una escena de Sólo con tu pareja, la película de Cuarón.Según Del Toro, al principio de la carrera del actor, tanto él como Estrada, Cuarón, Carlos Marcovich y otros cineastas “estábamos de acuerdo que era el mejor actor de nuestra generación. Y lo sigo pensando”.A partir de su relación y en el trabajo del actor con el grupo de teatro de vanguardia El Milagro, Del Toro le ofreció el ahora emblemático papel de Tito, un director funerario malhablado pero entregado a su trabajo en Cronos, su ópera prima de 1994.“Estoy muy agradecido de que me invitó a hacer este pequeño papelito en Cronos porque, aunque es un papel pequeño, brillaba mucho, era memorable”, dijo Giménez Cacho.Hoy, después de más de 30 años de amistad, Del Toro se maravilla de cómo la intensidad de la juventud de Giménez Cacho ha evolucionado a una humildad admirable considerando su talento.“Hay un don que pueden tener ciertos actores, que no lo puedes cultivar, que es que la cámara los sigue, el público está atento”, dijo el director. “Y esa es una de las virtudes que Daniel tiene”.Alejandro González Iñárritu: ‘Sabía que me iba a hacer mi trabajo muy fácil’Giménez Cacho y González Iñárritu coincidieron por primera vez en una fiesta en Los Ángeles tras el estreno de Grandes esperanzas, de Cuarón, en 1998, pero pasó un buen tiempo antes de que pudieran trabajar juntos en una película.González Iñárritu describió su primera reunión para trabajar en Bardo como una “conexión cósmica”, pues la afinidad compartida por la meditación y una comprensión mutua de la similitud de sus viajes interiores se convirtieron en la base poco convencional de su trabajo juntos.Aunque Iñárritu no había escrito el papel de Silverio Gama pensando en un actor en particular, sabía que Giménez Cacho daría en el clavo incluso antes de haber leído una sola página del guion.“Me di cuenta que estaba en el mismo lugar que yo a nivel personal, filosófico, espiritual e intelectual”, dijo González Iñárritu durante una videollamada. “Más allá de sus dotes artísticos, que son muchísimos, sabía que me iba a hacer mi trabajo muy fácil porque él compartía la sensibilidad de lo que yo estaba buscando”.Aunque González Iñárritu abordó detalles íntimos de sus propios recuerdos en Silverio, un documentalista que navega tanto por su mortalidad como por su identidad mexicana en viñetas fantasiosas, veía al personaje como una entidad ficticia, no como un reflejo exacto de sí mismo.“Lo que siempre hago en cualquier personaje es traer lo que soy, mis experiencias y mis memorias”, dijo Giménez Cacho.Ricardo Nagaoka para The New York TimesEl director le pidió a su estrella que no reaccionara ante las situaciones, sino que solo las observara: el objetivo era crear una disonancia entre Silverio y el mundo bizarro que lo rodeaba porque la historia se cuenta desde la conciencia del personaje dentro de un sueño.Esa búsqueda de identidad hizo eco en Giménez Cacho, quien a principios de la primera década del siglo XXI intentó hacer carrera en España, pero descubrió que no podía verse a sí mismo más que como mexicano. Para encarnar a Silverio, no imitó a Iñárritu, sino que canalizó sus propias inquietudes y preguntas.“Lo que siempre hago en cualquier personaje es traer lo que soy, mis experiencias y mis memorias, pero aquí aún más”, señaló Giménez Cacho. “Al no haber un personaje diseñado pues lo tenía que tratar de buscar en mí”.El actor se comunica a través de su mirada penetrante y el movimiento corporal hipersensual que se muestra en una escena ambientada en la voz aislada de David Bowie en “Let’s Dance”.Iñárritu compara a Giménez Cacho con el actor británico Peter Sellers por la flexibilidad de su registro y lo describe como un haiku encarnado porque con una modulación mínima puede lograr la máxima emoción.“En Bardo hace lo que pocos actores son capaces de hacer, que es desaparecer el artificio de la actuación para llegar a la esencia y la presencia de algo honesto y verdadero”, concluyó González Iñárritu. “Se necesita mucha confianza interna para eso. Es lo más alto que hay en la actuación”. 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