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      Douglas McGrath, Playwright, Filmmaker and Actor, Dies at 64

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      His one-man Off Broadway show, “Everything’s Fine,” directed by John Lithgow, had opened just weeks ago.Douglas McGrath, a playwright, screenwriter, director and actor who was nominated for an Oscar, an Emmy and a Tony Award, and whose one-man Off Broadway show, “Everything’s Fine,” opened just weeks ago, died on Thursday at his office in Manhattan. He was 64.His death was announced by the show’s producers, Daryl Roth, Tom Werner and John Lithgow. Their representative said the cause was a heart attack.Mr. Lithgow also directed the show, a childhood recollection of Mr. McGrath’s about a middle-school teacher in Texas who gave him an inappropriate amount of attention.“He was a dream to direct,” Mr. Lithgow said on Friday. “None of us had ever worked with someone who was so happy, proud and grateful to be performing his own writing.”Mr. McGrath in his one-man play “Everything’s Fine,” which opened Off Broadway last month to good reviews.Jeremy DanielMr. McGrath had a wide-ranging if under-the-radar career in television, film and theater. In the 1980-81 season, just out of Princeton and still in his early 20s, he was a writer for “Saturday Night Live.” Over the next decade he wrote humor pieces for The New Republic, The New York Times and other publications.By the 1990s he was making inroads in Hollywood. He wrote the screenplay for the 1993 remake of the 1950 romantic comedy “Born Yesterday,” and the next year he and Woody Allen collaborated on the script for Mr. Allen’s “Bullets Over Broadway.” The two shared an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay.In 1996 he adapted the Jane Austen novel “Emma” for the big screen and also directed the film, which starred Gwyneth Paltrow. In 2000 he and Peter Askin shared directing and screenwriting duties on the comedy “Company Man,” in which he also starred, as a schoolteacher who stumbles into a career as a C.I.A. officer.That movie drew some unflattering reviews. But his next, “Nicholas Nickleby” (2002), an adaptation of the Dickens story that he both wrote and directed, was well received. In The Times, A.O. Scott said that Mr. McGrath’s adaptation was rendered “with a scholar’s ear and a showman’s flair.”“The director has produced a colorful, affecting collage of Dickensian moods and motifs,” Mr. Scott wrote, “a movie that elicits an overwhelming desire to plunge into 900 pages of 19th-century prose.”Mr. McGrath, center, on the set of his film “Nicholas Nickleby” (2002), with the cast members Barry Humphries, left, and Alan Cumming.United Artists, via AlamyIn addition to his screenwriting and directing credits (which also included “Infamous,” a 2006 film starring Toby Jones as Truman Capote), Mr. McGrath occasionally took small acting roles in other people’s projects, including several of Mr. Allen’s films. In 2016 he directed “Becoming Mike Nichols,” an HBO documentary about the film director, on which he was also an executive producer. He shared an Emmy nomination with the other producers for outstanding documentary or nonfiction special.Throughout, he continued to work in the theater. In 1996 he wrote and starred in “Political Animal,” a one-man comedy that played at the McGinn/Cazale Theater in Manhattan, in which he played a right-wing presidential candidate.“Beyond the stand-up parody,” Ben Brantley wrote in his review in The Times, “the larger point of ‘Political Animal’ is that it takes a hollow, desperate man to run for president these days.”In 2012 his play “Checkers” — the title refers to a famous 1952 speech by Richard M. Nixon — was seen at the Vineyard Theater in Manhattan, with Anthony LaPaglia as Nixon and Kathryn Erbe as his wife, Pat.Then came Broadway: Mr. McGrath wrote the book for “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical,” which opened in January 2014 and ran for more than five years. His book was nominated for a Tony Award.Last month Mr. Lithgow told The Daily News of New York that Mr. McGrath had sent him “Everything’s Fine” unsolicited, and that he had no intention of directing a play until he read the piece.“It was so play-able,” he said, “I could simply imagine an audience being completely captivated by it.”The show opened in mid-October to good reviews.“It is impossible to overstate Doug’s pure likability,” Mr. Lithgow said on Friday. “In his solo show, he told a long story about his 14th year, and it worked so well because he had retained so much of his sense of boyish discovery.”Ms. Roth, another of the show’s producers, said that Mr. McGrath had been thoroughly enjoying the way audiences were reacting as he unspooled the tale.“The wonderful response from the audience was cathartic, meaningful and joyful to him,” she said by email. “He often told me he was in his ‘happy place’ onstage telling his story.”Mr. McGrath on the set of “Infamous,” his 2006 film about Truman Capote.Van Redin/Warner Independent, via Kobal, via ShutterstockDouglas Geoffrey McGrath was born on Feb. 2, 1958, in Midland, Texas. His father, Raynsford, was an independent oil producer, and his mother, Beatrice (Burchenal) McGrath, worked at Harper’s Bazaar before her marriage.“People often ask me what growing up in West Texas was like,” Mr. McGrath said in “Everything’s Fine.” “I think this sums it up: It’s very hot, it’s very dusty, and it’s very, very windy. It’s like growing up inside a blow dryer full of dirt.”He graduated from Princeton in 1980.“Planning my future,” he wrote in a 2001 essay in The Times, “I had a very clear idea of what I wanted to do, but a very blurry one of how to do it. I knew I wanted to write and perform in my own films in the manner of my idol, Woody Allen. But when I went, that once, to the Career Counseling Center and faced the bulletin board, none of the cards said, ‘Needed: writer-actor-director for major feature, no experience required, must be willing to earn high salary.’”Yet when a friend told him “S.N.L.” was hiring writers, he sent in some sketches and landed an $850-a-week job.“It seemed too good to be true,” he wrote. “It was. My year, 1980, was viewed then and still as the worst year in the show’s history, which is no small achievement when you think of some of the other years.”In a 2016 interview, Mr. McGrath said his disappointment with the way his screenplay for “Born Yesterday” was handled changed the direction of his career.“I remember thinking, well, if I don’t want to spend the rest of my life doing this, meaning watching someone else muck up what I did, there’s only one way around that,” he said. “I have to become a director.”Mr. McGrath, who lived in Manhattan, married Jane Reed Martin in 1995. She survives him, as do a son, Henry; a sister, Mary McGrath Abrams; and a brother, Alexander. More

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      How Daniel Radcliffe Gets ‘Weird’ in ‘The Al Yankovic Story’

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      The director Eric Appel narrates a scene from the film.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.You know that moment in biopics when artists find inspiration for the songs that will go on to become giant hits? You might see just a little bit of it in a movie like “Respect,” or in a scene from “Ray” that may lead one to hit the road.The makers of the new (mostly faux) biopic “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story” play off those moments with this scene, featuring Daniel Radcliffe as a college-age Al Yankovic who just wants to fulfill his dream of making up lyrics to a song that already exists.He finds inspiration in a package of bologna, as the song “My Sharona” by the Knack plays on the radio. (In this film, like in Weird Al’s song, bologna is pronounced in the way that rhymes with Sharona).Narrating the scene, the director Eric Appel (who co-wrote the screenplay with Yankovic), discussed how he wanted to capture the comedy of the moment.“All of our actors, we had this conversation with them,” Appel said: “Don’t try to go for jokes. The straighter you play it, the funnier it’s going to be.”Appel incorporated big-swing movie moments like slow zooms and a sweeping score to create this a-ha moment where Weird Al comes up with his first parody hit, “My Bologna.”“Where the comedy comes from in a moment like this,” Appel said, “is pushing it past what you’re expecting to see and going into this really bizarre, unexpected heightened emotional version.”Read the “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      Don Cheadle, Lindsay Lohan and Other Stars Share Their Favorite Holiday Movies

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      Don Cheadle, Hong Chau, Leslie Odom Jr., Zoey Deutch and Lindsay Lohan explain what films they turn to at this time of year.How do actors entertain themselves when they gather with family and friends for the holidays? They watch movies, just like the rest of us. Here, a few of the stars from this season’s releases talk about the films that have become longstanding seasonal traditions, and the others they hope will one day.Hong ChauThis season the actress can be seen in “The Whale” and “The Menu.”Her favorite: “The Shop Around the Corner” (1940), Ernst Lubitsch’s romantic comedy with Jimmy Stewart and Margaret Sullavan as seemingly antagonistic clerks in a Budapest store.Why: It’s just got everything. It is set during Christmastime, even though it’s not a typical holiday movie. It’s a workplace comedy. It’s a romantic comedy. And even the supporting characters are all memorable, and the comedy is just timeless. I really love Pepi [William Tracy as a comically cocksure delivery boy], oddly. I like that he wins in the end, and he’s taking over for the Jimmy Stewart character, basically. If they ever do a sequel, he should be the main character. And the music is romantic and sweet, even that little song in the bit about the cigar box. I like being transported whenever I watch a movie. And getting to be in that shop full of wonderful little items, and having all of the signage in Hungarian, does that. I wish I could be in there and just get to examine and touch everything.My daughter is 23 months and I think it will be a good one for her. She actually watches a lot of older movies, like “Singin’ in the Rain” and the “That’s Entertainment” compilation. So she has seen a lot of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds.Don CheadleTerry Jones, left, Graham Chapman and Michael Palin in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” a favorite of the Cheadles.Sony PicturesThis season the actor can be seen in “White Noise.”His family’s favorites: “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” (1975), the medieval send-up directed by Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones, and “Dr. Strangelove” (1964), Stanley Kubrick’s Cold War satire starring Peter Sellers.Why: I don’t really have a “put us in the spirit of Christmas” movie. I mean, the low-hanging fruit is “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which is a great movie, and if it’s on, I’m going to watch it. But the ones that we would somehow always end up watching when my kids were home on Christmas break — they’re adults now and out of the house — are “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” and “Dr. Strangelove.” Neither are holiday movies, but they always seem to find their way onto our TV.Every character that Peter Sellers played in “Dr. Strangelove” was hilarious. The president, the captain, the Nazi doctor — they are all insane. And for “Monty Python,” it’s the whole cast. My kids know all the lines forwards and backwards, and we sometimes text each other out of the blue. “What makes you think she’s a witch?” “Well, she turned me into a newt!” “A newt?” “I got better.” They’re both just great movies, very funny in very different ways. And they’re dark, which fits my family’s brand of humor.Zoey DeutchTaylor Momsen and Jim Carrey in “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” Zoey Deutch’s holiday go-to.Ron Batzdorff/Universal PicturesThis season the actress can be seen in “Something From Tiffany’s.”Her favorite: “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” (2000), Ron Howard’s live-action remake of the animated Dr. Seuss classic, starring Jim Carrey as the holiday killjoy.Why: “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” came out when I was 7. I remember watching it for the first time and not knowing who I was more jealous of, Jim Carrey or Taylor Momsen. I wanted to be both the Grinch and Cindy Lou Who at the same time. They were filled with humor and heart and everything in between. I loved everything about the world that was created and how it was executed. The story, the costumes, the music, the camera movements, the direction, the set design, the acting. I find myself going back to it every year and marveling at how original and fun and moving it is.Lindsay LohanThomas Sangster as a boy in love and Liam Neeson as his stepfather in “Love Actually,” a film Lindsay Lohan often returns to.Peter Mountain/Universal StudiosThis season the actress can be seen in “Falling for Christmas.”Her favorites: “Love Actually” (2003), Richard Curtis’s relationship comedy; “Miracle on 34th Street,” the 1994 remake (from director Les Mayfield) about a department-store Santa; and “Elf” (2003), the Jon Favreau-directed comedy with Will Ferrell as Santa’s helper.Why: I love the movie “Love Actually.” It’s just really heartwarming. That scene when Hugh Grant dances [through 10 Downing Street] is hysterical. And Liam Neeson’s story line with his son, where he runs through the airport as his crush is leaving on a plane, always gets me crying.And then “Miracle on 34th Street.” When I was really young, I remember I watched it at my Grandma Sullivan’s house with her and I was sitting on the floor. I remember this actually very well. It just made me want to be in Christmas in New York City and the whole meeting Santa thing.Especially during the holidays, I always like to reminisce, and whenever I’m with family, we go to “Elf” at some point. That’s why it was special to do “Falling for Christmas.” My sister got to play a little role and she did a song. I was lucky to have my husband come to the set, and it’s the first time he’d seen me acting. It was very sentimental. I’ve never done a Christmas movie, so this is a special feeling because it’s something that I’ll be able to show our kids.Leslie Odom Jr.Macaulay Culkin in “Home Alone,” which Leslie Odom Jr. has watched since he was a child.20th Century FoxThis season the actor can be seen in “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.”His favorite: “Home Alone” (1990), the Chris Columbus comedy with Macaulay Culkin as Kevin, left behind by his family.Why: I was 9 or 10 when I first saw it — the same age as Kevin — and he was the perfect avatar for every boy who wanted to be as clever as he was when he took down the bad guys. And who maybe wanted to escape from their parents for even a day. The movie has all the traditional trappings of the season: snow and fire, wreaths hung on the door, pizza night, late-night packing for early flights the next morning. It’s a record of all we love about the holidays. All that stresses us out about the holidays. It’s portrayed with honesty and real charm and so ends up being a classic story that stands the test of time. And the score, by John Williams, is so signature. It has just as much to do with the overall effect of that film as the great performances and the great set pieces and gags.My kids are 5 and 1½, and they’re a little too young to understand it. But one day, I hope we’ll watch it together. And I’ll tell you: When they spend the night with their grandparents, my wife and I have our own fun home alone. It’s good for the parents, too.Now I’m working on my own Christmas movie: “The Exorcist.” More

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      ‘The Estate’ Review: No Good Will

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      Toni Collette and Anna Faris play sisters trying to weasel their way into their wealthy aunt’s will in this black comedy.In the black, downright venal comedy “The Estate,” Toni Collette and Anna Faris play sisters on the brink of financial ruin. They run a cafe together and have just heard that the bank denied their loan application when they receive what passes for good news in this mordant farce: Their rich Aunt Hilda (Kathleen Turner) is dying.Savanna (Faris) is the more unscrupulous sister, and she convinces Macey (Collette) that they should try to cozy up to their ornery aunt in the hopes of being written into her will. But when the pair arrive at Hilda’s home, they find their equally shameless cousins, Beatrice (Rosemarie DeWitt) and Richard (David Duchovny), engaged in similar plans. The family commences a race to the bottom of their dying aunt’s cold heart. But Macey and Savanna are ill-suited to beat Beatrice and Richard when it comes to bedside manners. And so they escalate their efforts at ingratiation, plotting disastrous reunions first with Hilda’s estranged sister, and then with her former flame.The movie’s director, Dean Craig, is best known for writing the comedy “Death at a Funeral.” As a filmmaker, his images are perfunctory. “The Estate” features a desaturated color palette, and the production design looks shabby, even inside Hilda’s multimillion-dollar mansion. But Craig’s writing retains enough caustic wit for his excellent cast to work with. Collette plays the straight woman to her ruthless relatives, and the contrast between her moral dismay and Faris’s mercenary willpower drives some of the film’s best laughs.This is a comedy that takes a vicious, over-the-top look at family greed, and fortunately, the cast members are game to play their characters’ attempts at flattery in the most unflattering manner possible.The EstateRated R for language, sexual references and brief nudity. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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      In ‘Dangerous Liaisons,’ Alice Englert and Nicholas Denton Play the Game

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      In a decadent new Starz drama, the two actors play young versions of literature’s most poisoned and poisonous power couple.It could never work between them, Alice Englert insisted on a recent afternoon, lounging in a corner banquette at Ladurée, a French spot in Lower Manhattan. In a relationship this toxic, she said, they would have no choice but to ruin each other, slowly or all at once.Nicholas Denton, sitting beside her, draped an arm around her shoulders. “That’s the game of it,” he said, grinning.The game is power. The field is pre-revolutionary France. And the contestants are the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, arguably literature’s most poisoned and poisonous power couple. Or not quite. Not yet. In “Dangerous Liaisons,” a decadent drama that debuts on Starz on Sunday, Englert and Denton play much younger versions of the characters introduced by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos in the epistolary 1782 novel.In the book, these characters are aristocrats, with decades of conniving and debauchery underneath their wigs and powder, who conspire to corrupt a chaste woman. In the show, they are barely out of puberty, seducers in their youth. Even before its premiere, the series has already been renewed.The couple — lovers who treat each other with anything but love — have fascinated readers and audiences for two centuries and counting, popping up in plays, operas, ballets, radio plays and movies, including the 1988 Stephen Frears film, starring Glenn Close and John Malkovich. All of which makes reinventing them a very tall order. The height of the wigs alone!But Englert and Denton were willing to try. “We’re both quite rough and tumble,” Denton said. “We’re willing to get on the floor in this garb and try and really knock this out and go to hell for it.”A television version of “Dangerous Liaisons” has been in development for nearly a decade, under the partial auspices of Colin Callender, a distinguished producer. Christopher Hampton, who wrote the screenplay for Frears’s film and the stage adaptation that is often revived on Broadway, was attached at one point. Then he wasn’t. When the writer Harriet Warner came on, she went looking for a fresh way into the material and she found it in one of the novel’s letters, which seemed to imply that the Marquise hadn’t been born into nobility, that she had clawed her way into it. She shared that insight with Callender.“The interesting thing was, how did these characters become who they were?” Callender explained in a recent interview.Warner began to devise some answers. Earlier younger riffs on “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” like “Cruel Intentions” (1999) and a recent French film adaptation, moved the story into modern high schools. But Warner decided to keep to the period of the novel, more or less, while aging the Marquise down into Camille, a sex worker, and Valmont into Pascal, a mapmaker exiled from the aristocracy. First they go to bed. And then they go to war.The series found a fresh way into the story through one of the letters in the epistolary novel, which seemed to imply that the Marquise hadn’t been born into nobility.Dusan Martincek/StarzWith that decision made and scripts written, casting could begin. The producers saw about 200 actors for each role. Denton (“The Glitch”), 30, an Australian actor, went through at least a half-dozen auditions and tests, beginning early in 2020. At times, in quarantine, his sister had to read the steamier scenes with him. “Disgusting,” he said. “Bless her soul.”Englert (“Top of the Lake,” “Ratched”), 28, also from Australia and the daughter of the filmmaker Jane Campion, put herself on tape later, toward the end of 2020. With the pandemic in full swing, the two of them couldn’t meet for a chemistry read. (Though Denton had met with other actresses, a plexiglass barrier between them.) So they had their joint audition in separate hotel rooms on Zoom, trying to steam up their relative screens.“It was so funny,” Englert said.Apparently it was more than just funny. “It was better than you could have imagined,” Warner said during a recent phone call. “You just knew they were going to elevate each other and escalate the drama and yet keep all this wonderful raw energy of the fact that they are still kind of unsullied by the industry.”Denton and Englert met in person a few months later, in the spring of 2021, on set in Prague. Englert had just emerged from hair and makeup with a temporary wig balanced precariously on her head. (“I was dreaming that I looked like a flat-chested version of Dolly Parton,” she said.) Wary of Covid-19 protocols, they patted each other on their respective shoulders. A few days later, they were rolling around the rehearsal room floor together. A few days after that, they were filming one of Pascal and Camille’s incendiary fights.“I actually cried at the end of that day,” Englert said, as they started in on fresh coffees to combat jet lag, “just from knowing that we were going to go on such an odyssey.” The constricting costumes — “they just hurt sometimes,” Englert said — may have moved her to tears, too.They were dressed more comfortably that afternoon, if still in the louche spirit of the series. Englert’s pink silk dress was rumpled; Denton’s shirt was unbuttoned well below the sternum. They had an ease with each other — an air of comfort and kindness rather than sexual tension. If six months in and out of love and war and some very silly white foundation can’t make you friends, probably nothing can.Denton, snuggled up to Englert in the banquette, praised the ferocity with which she attacked their scenes. “You have an effortlessness, but also an intensity,” he said. “Which is a very beautiful contrast.”Englert said that she had trusted Denton almost immediately. There was a moment, at the beginning of the shoot, when she had tried to present herself to him in the best possible light, when she tried to hold onto some vanity.“Then that absolutely died,” she said. “And it was so beautiful to let it rot with you so quickly.”“You have an effortlessness, but also an intensity,” Denton said to Englert. “Which is a very beautiful contrast.”Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesWith vanity flown, they could gleefully recounted receiving vitamin B shots — “in our bums!” Denton said — to make it through the shoot. They did, however, demur from telling what both referred to ominously as “the fart story.”The sex scenes could have made for more mortifying stories. But the actors worked closely with the show’s intimacy coordinator, Ita O’Brien, to make them feel safe and liberating. “It was actually a really good bonding thing,” Denton said. And with sex out of the way — lots of it, especially in the first episode — they could navigate the riskier contours of Camille and Pascal’s relationship.“What’s always appealed to me about ‘Dangerous Liaisons’ is that the fantasy of the love is shattered,” Englert said. She was speaking to the novel. Though it’s true of the show, too. “It’s in pieces from the beginning,” she continued.Denton saw it just the same. “It’s so refreshing to watch something that doesn’t get glossed over,” he said, “that doesn’t become a glossy Disney version of what love is. Because I don’t think that’s what love is. Love is elusive, dangerous, corrupt.”The goal of the series was to keep the period details as accurate as possible while ensuring that the emotional atmosphere felt urgent and contemporary. Otherwise it might read as just another polite costume drama, however luxe the costumes. You had to see the real people underneath the corsetry.For Denton and Englert, that meant bringing their own hearts to the roles. It also meant a lot of pretending, because they harbor a shared belief that perhaps they aren’t quite as sexy or as lethal as their characters.“We’re betas pretending to be alphas,” Denton said.Englert agreed. “We’re exceedingly embarrassed all the time,” she said. “But it’s how we go. We enjoy it.”Englert had eaten all the passion fruit macarons, but Denton smiled at his friend anyway. “Alice always says, ‘We’re just Aussies in cossies,’” he said. More

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      ‘Causeway’ Review: Companions on a Hard Road to Recovery

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      Superb acting from Jennifer Lawrence and Brian Tyree Henry brings credibility to an underdeveloped story of trauma and friendship.The early scenes in Lila Neugebauer’s “Causeway” find Lynsey (Jennifer Lawrence) in the first phase of a long healing process. An Army engineer who suffered a traumatic brain injury in Afghanistan, Lynsey — with the help of a patient health aide (Jayne Houdyshell) — must relearn the basic functions of daily life, and teach her body to work again.Lawrence, somber and subdued, gradually coaxes her character into view. Lynsey emerges from a state of anxious blankness, recovering language, memory, physical coordination and the contours of her personality. Returning home to New Orleans, she moves in with her mother (Linda Emond), who is too preoccupied with other matters to pay much attention to her daughter.Not that Lynsey needs babysitting. She pressures her doctor (Stephen McKinley Henderson) to clear her for redeployment. Lynsey is tough, solitary and self-sufficient, attributes Lawrence has shown before — notably in the “Hunger Games” movies and in her breakthrough film, “Winter’s Bone” — but rarely in such a low-key, non-heroic mode.The satisfactions of “Causeway,” Neugebauer’s debut feature (the script is by Elizabeth Sanders, Luke Goebel and Ottessa Moshfegh), come from watching Lawrence and her co-star, Brian Tyree Henry, trading quiet, insightful bits of acting. Henry plays James, who owns the repair shop where Lynsey brings her balky old pickup truck. Recognizing each other as fellow loners — and also, perhaps unconsciously, as fellow sufferers — James and Lynsey start hanging out together.Lynsey takes a job cleaning swimming pools, and she and James spend off-hours drinking beer, smoking weed and floating around at the homes of clients who are conveniently out of town. Hanging out this way is a pleasant respite from the stresses and struggles of existence — for James and Lynsey, and for the audience too. But having brought them together, the movie isn’t quite sure what to do with them.James has lost part of a leg in a car crash that killed someone he loved. Lynsey is also haunted by the loss of a family member. The symmetry of their physical and psychological wounds is perhaps too neatly arranged. The bond that develops between them — and the ways that it is, inevitably, tested — is rooted in shared trauma, which is to say in a screenwriting conceit.“Causeway” is both thin and heavy-handed, its plot overly diagramed and its characters inadequately fleshed out. The burden of making it credible falls disproportionately on Henry and Lawrence, superb actors who do what they can to bring the script’s static and fuzzy ideas about pain, alienation and the need for connection to something that almost resembles life.CausewayRated R. Cursing and cannabis. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters and available to watch on Apple TV+. More

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      ‘Weird: The Al Yankovic Story’ Review: Any Odd? He Beat It.

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      The parody musician makes a joke of his own life, with the help of Daniel Radcliffe, in this uproarious sham biopic.Weird Al Yankovic is the most improbable MTV star in modern history: an abstemious accordion player whose family-friendly song parodies have cracked the Top 40 for four straight decades, crowning him the Methuselah of novelty acts. (Compared to Yankovic, the Monkees are a flash in the pan.) “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story,” an uproarious sham biopic starring Daniel Radcliffe, and co-written by Yankovic and the film’s director, Eric Appel, is merely the most recent time the artist has made a joke of his own life from sheltered child to odd teen to rock god.Earlier gibes at Yankovic’s own implausibility include nearly every interview he’s ever given, as well as a 1985 mockumentary (“The Compleat Al”) produced during the heady days of his “Eat It” single success, and a 2010 glossy drama mock trailer, also directed by Appel, that has now been willed into feature-length existence and padded with more lies.Like Yankovic’s music, “Weird” is a note-for-note parody of a genre. Here, the target is the prestige biography and its rote rise-and-fall trajectory that’s become so creaky, it could play backup on his album “Polka Party!” The fibs — er, “facts” — are squeezed to fit the formula. When young Al’s mother (Julianne Nicholson) discovers a Hawaiian shirt in his bed, the score swells portentously as though we’re watching Jackie Robinson clench his first baseball bat. If a scene needs Al’s accordion to be slandered as a vomit-inducing devil’s squeezebox, so be it; minutes later, his music might bring a biker to tears, or Madonna (Evan Rachel Wood) to ecstasy, or incite the cops, during the Jim Morrison phase of Yankovic’s career, to arrest him for lewd behavior.The script deflates any pretensions that Yankovic is a lyrical genius. Teasingly, Appel drags out a sequence where Al, assembling a sandwich, struggles to brainstorm his take on “My Sharona” until the audience is hissing “Bologna!” through its teeth. Later, his mother tries, and fails, to force-feed her oblivious son the libretto for “Fat.” Still, Radcliffe is winningly guileless in his performance, twitching his costume-y eyebrows and mustache like gentle bunny ears even as he lip-syncs “Another One Rides the Bus” with such commitment that his neck veins nearly pop. (The cinematographer Ross Riege is not above backlighting Radcliffe’s wig to resemble a halo.)It’s a testament to Yankovic’s status in pop culture that the film is crowded with so many celebrity cameos that it could have been titled “It’s a Weird, Weird, Weird, Weird World.” (Yankovic himself appears as the record label executive Tony Scotti, who released Yankovic’s debut album.) Only Weird Al scholars will note the pointed irony in a scene where the musician rejects casting offers to play James Bond and Indiana Jones, franchises that would later dominate the July 1989 box office over his comedy flop, “UHF,” chucking him into a creative tailspin. Those expert level Al-thorities may also be the only ones to realize how much of “Weird” is actually true. Yes, Yankovic did acquire his first accordion from a traveling salesman. Yes, he did record his first hit in a public bathroom. And yes, he did achieve almost instantaneous success. Telling it straight turns out to be Yankovic’s greatest prank.Weird: The Al Yankovic StoryNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. Watch on Roku. More