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      ‘Holy Spider’ Review: Brutality Tale

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      Like many a serial-killer drama, this movie about a real-life Iranian murderer who targeted prostitutes is a grisly thriller parading as a morality tale.Like many a serial-killer drama, “Holy Spider” is a grisly-gruesome thriller parading as a moral tale. Directed by the Denmark-based Iranian filmmaker Ali Abbasi, the movie tells the story of Saeed Hanaei (Mehdi Bajestani), a construction worker and war veteran in Mashhad, Iran, who strangled 16 prostitutes to death in 2000 and 2001. His case led to a media frenzy when his purported quest to “cleanse” his hometown — a spiritual hub for Shiite Muslims — generated public support from hard-line Iranians.The irony at the heart of “Holy Spider” is fascinating and timely: How does a holy city not just foster but actively embolden prostitution, a drug trade and reckless slaughter? The film’s genre-movie stylings, however, flatten these sociopolitical questions into psychosexual spectacles. Abbasi seems enamored by the contradictions of Hanaei, who was at once an upstanding Muslim, a family man, a pervert and a ruthless killer. But anyone who reads the news, anywhere in the world, will respond to these rote hypocrisies of misogyny with little other than jadedness.And for all the time the movie devotes to Hanaei’s life, we learn little about the lives of Mashhad’s prostitutes, who only appear briefly before their gratuitously detailed killings. Instead, Abbasi makes the fictionalized character of Rahimi (Zar Amir Ebrahimi) — a Tehrani journalist whose own experience with sexual harassment drives her crusade to catch the killer — the film’s sole representative of women’s concerns, burdened with an implausible cat-and-mouse arc. In reality, Hanaei was arrested after one woman fought him back and escaped, and reported him to the police, in spite of the risks involved. Her story of courage feels far worthier of a movie than Abbasi’s grim vision of murder and mania.Holy SpiderNot rated. In Persian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Novelist’s Film’ Review: Real Talk

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      In Hong Sang-soo’s latest study in small moments and chance encounters, a visit to an old friend prompts a writer in crisis to try something new.Amid the wonderfully diverse and daring output of the South Korean film industry in recent decades, the director Hong Sang-soo has been quietly, prolifically making features of the utmost insight and sensitivity — nearly 30 since 1996 — that have nothing to do with the genre-play, melodrama or over-the-top violence associated with some of his better known compatriots.His most recent picture, “The Novelist’s Film,” is no exception, a Chekhovian study in small moments and chance encounters, which is to say it is a study of human beings as they really live: ambiguously and without exposition, spontaneously and without tidy motives or resolution.Much of what typifies Hong’s work will feel familiar in “The Novelist’s Film”: the budget (low); the dialogue (natural); the characters (creative types in crisis); the camera (mostly a fixed, single shot per scene). The story is likewise reliably spare: On a visit to an old friend (Seo Young-hwa) outside Seoul, the novelist Junhee (Lee Hye-young) has a run-in with a movie director who once jilted her professionally (Kwon Hae-hyo) and a famous actress, Kilsoo (Hong’s longtime collaborator Kim Min-hee), who has stepped away from acting indefinitely.Junhee has been struggling creatively herself, and she is prompted to pursue her own experimental short film, in which she urges Kilsoo to participate. Her request, like many of her conversations, is awkwardly frank. Meaning teems in the uncomfortable silences and deflections; each platitude contains multitudes. Is Kilsoo interested or playing nice?Hong works fast, rarely preparing scripts more than a day in advance, which may help explain how his films can be so talky without feeling scripted — a minor miracle each time he does it, which is about once a year. Long may he run-and-gun.The Novelist’s FilmNot rated. In Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. More

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      ‘Wendell and Wild’ Review: Not Wild Enough

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      This devilish stop-motion horror comedy from Henry Selick and Jordan Peele can’t quite breathe life into its narrative.Why not try to resurrect the dead? Collect some demons in glass jars? Or summon a pair of demon brothers from among the “souls of the danged”? These seem like the ingredients for a wicked fun time.But the devilish new stop-motion horror comedy from Netflix, “Wendell & Wild,” can’t get these pieces to double, double, toil or trouble into a cohesive dish of entertainment.In the film, directed by Henry Selick, and written by Selick and Jordan Peele, a demon named Wendell (Keegan-Michael Key) and his brother, Wild (Peele), aim to hitch a ride up to the land of the living with the help of Kat (Lyric Ross), a teenage girl with a traumatic back story and a boombox called the Cyclops. Wendell and Wild hope to find a way to build an amusement park in the underworld that would put Six Flags to shame. However, Kat has her own plan for the demon siblings, and the repercussions soon spread to affect the whole town.From juicy grubs to booger sculptures to sticky gelatinous goo, “Wendell & Wild” exhibits the same charming, if grotesque, ghoulishness and delectable phantasmagoria of Selick’s other Halloween classics, like “The Nightmare Before Christmas” (1993), “James and the Giant Peach” (1996) and “Coraline” (2009).Key and Peele’s usually unstoppable humor and Selick’s signature combination of morbid terror and fanciful play, along with the film’s wonderfully diverse characters (including an Indigenous woman and a transgender boy of color) and its surprising sociopolitical messaging, seem like they’ll combine to make “Wendell & Wild” a new Halloween fave.But the story lines feel far-flung and disconnected, and the limits and rules of this world’s magical logic are at turns underdeveloped and inconsistent. Though the movie has a delightfully raucous rock ’n’ roll sensibility, the dialogue lacks the wit and punch to match.Every new character and narrative detail in the film — a mysterious janitor, a demonic teddy bear and a carnival of imps and fiends — is an unintentional red herring, not a purposeful misdirection but a residual of all the interesting places this film could have gone but never ventured.It’s especially disappointing given the ways “Wendell & Wild” does succeed — the imaginative visuals and playful character designs, of course, and an interesting protagonist in Kat, a Black punk girl with eyebrow piercings, green hair (about 160 hand-curled strands of wool, according to the press notes, to replicate her natural hair) and no-nonsense platform boots. And then there’s the headbanging array of tunes from Death, TV on the Radio and X-Ray Spex.You’d think demons would have the most fun. And yet, despite the countless courses “Wendell & Wild” could have taken, the route it does choose is, unfortunately, a dead end.Wendell & WildRated PG-13 for demons, zombies and things that go bump in the night. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘The Lair’ Review: Going Underground

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      A band of grunts takes on mysterious underground monsters in this goofy horror movie.Suctioning brains and snacking on innards, the monsters in “The Lair” appear motivated solely by hunger, any higher purpose remaining stubbornly veiled. Though I suppose when you’ve spent more than three decades entombed in an abandoned Soviet bunker, a good meal would be something of a priority.Lively, noisy, dark and daft, this gloopy creature feature from the British director Neil Marshall plays like a loose, if vastly inferior callback to his two best films, “Dog Soldiers” (2002) and “The Descent” (2006). The year is 2017, and Kate Sinclair (Charlotte Kirk), a resolute Royal Air Force pilot, is shot down in a remote region of Afghanistan. Fleeing insurgents, she takes refuge in said bunker, only to face a toothy blob that has eaten one of her pursuers and ripped the face off another. Venturing deeper, she discovers pods containing more beasties in a liquid suspension. Has she found a nursery, or a laboratory?Answers will arrive, but good luck catching them in the ensuing melee when Kate is rescued by a raggedy band of misfit soldiers that excels mainly at delivering B-movie dialogue like “Kill anything that shrieks!” Aside from Hadi Khanjanpour, as a coolheaded Afghan prisoner, the acting is pretty awful, though the script is so clunky and the characters so clichéd it’s tough to blame the performers.If all you’re after, though, is the slap of tentacles and the spaghetti-spill of intestines — and a reminder of the alien autopsy from “The Thing” (1982) — then you won’t care that the action itself is so messy and underlighted it’s a wonder the squad kills anything except the film crew. As for the brain-sucking, by the time the credits roll you’ll probably have a fair idea what that feels like.The LairNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘The Runner’ Is a Gem of the Iranian New Wave

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      Amir Naderi’s scrappy, intimate film, which follows an 11-year-old garbage scavenger in Iran, is getting a second viewing at Film Forum in Manhattan.“The Runner,” Amir Naderi’s stylized memoir of his boyhood in Iran, is a notable feat — a movie at once objective and subjective and single-minded throughout. Shooting from the viewpoint of an illiterate street kid, Naderi employs a mature artist’s disciplined technique to celebrate a child’s new-minted vision of his hardscrabble world.Long unseen, “The Runner” opens on Friday for a two-week run at Film Forum in Manhattan, where it had its U.S. theatrical premiere in 1991. Crisply restored with improved subtitles, it is no less timeless and elemental.Limned against the sky, then seen collecting scrap metal amid a horde of destitute scavengers, the 11-year-old Amiro (Madjid Niroumand) goes on to fish beer bottles out of the harbor, sell ice water in the marketplace and work as a shoeshine boy in a dockside cafe. Life involves coping with bullies and handling deadbeat customers and their false accusations. Looking beyond his surroundings, Amiro uses his earnings to buy old magazines with pictures of airplanes and his spare time to race with a gang of kids — he is the smallest and most indefatigable of the group.The movie’s self-possessed young star, whom Naderi spotted modeling in a sports magazine, inspired comparisons to the neorealist child actors of “Shoeshine” and “The Bicycle Thief.” Naderi’s technique is equally noteworthy. “The Runner” is admirably lean and remarkably well-constructed. The sound design is deliberate. The camera placement, often at Amiro’s height, is precise. The editing is inventive. Shot during the Iraq-Iran war, it was impossible to film in Naderi’s hometown, the southern port Abadan; instead “The Runner” seamlessly cobbles together locations from nearly a dozen cities. (Naderi has cited Orson Welles’s geographic patchwork “Othello” as a precedent.)Now 76, Naderi is a pioneer of the Iranian new wave, having completed a half-dozen features before the 1979 Islamic revolution. “The Runner” was produced by the same progressive entity, Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, that funded Abbas Kiarostami’s early films. Completed in 1984, it was the first Iranian production to attract international attention, shown the following year at the Venice Film Festival. (Leaving Iran in the 1990s, Naderi lived in New York for a decade before moving on to Japan and, more recently, Italy; Niroumand, whose escape from Iran at age 16 is the subject of a recent documentary short, “A Boy’s Own Story,” grew up to be a college administrator in Costa Mesa, Calif.)Reviewing “The Runner” when it opened here in 1991, the New York Times critic Stephen Holden praised the film for using Amiro’s eyes to find “beauty and wonder as well as squalor in Abadan’s grimy sunsets, polluted harbor waters and dusty railroad depots.” In effect, the movie naturalizes the urban environment. The light is often dazzling; the array of bottles floating in the harbor is bewitching. While acknowledging that every object in Amiro’s world has its price, “The Runner” has a subtle fairy-tale quality. Amiro lives alone on a deserted tanker. Politics and religion are absent — as are women (perhaps a post-revolution expedience). A commitment to individual freedom seems absolute.Paradoxical to the end, “The Runner” concludes with a near-silent tumult of fire and ice, and a sense of triumph founded on the realization that the adult Amiro made this movie.The RunnerThrough Nov. 10 at Film Forum, Manhattan; filmforum.org. More

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      James Cameron and the Cast of ‘Avatar: The Way of Water’ Hold Their Breath

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      The original was the biggest hit ever, but the sequel still took a long time to come together. How will it resonate in a different era of moviegoing?James Cameron knew the question I really wanted to ask about his new sequel, “Avatar: The Way of Water.”“‘What took you so long?’ Let’s not beat around the bush,” the director cracked.It’s a fair query, since after Cameron’s 2009 sci-fi adventure took in nearly $3 billion and became the highest-grossing film of all time, a follow-up that returned us to the beguiling alien world of Pandora was slow to materialize. Hollywood has changed so much in the interim that 20th Century Fox, the studio that financed “Avatar” and Cameron’s megahit “Titanic,” was acquired by Disney right after the sequel finally went into production in 2017.So what did take Cameron so long? On a recent video call with his cast, he confessed to blowing off the movie for a few years while indulging his passion for deep-sea exploration. After constructing a submarine designed to take him to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest-known place on this planet, Cameron accomplished that goal in March 2012, even as his “Avatar” actors fretted.“We kept thinking, ‘I hope he survives to make a new movie,’” Sigourney Weaver said.And even when Cameron convened a writers room to map out a second and third film, “I just wound up with more story than I bargained for,” he said. A tale that was initially conceived to complete a trilogy came to span four more movies, which all required a considerable amount of preproduction: Writing those new movies took four years, and designing their different biomes, cultures and wardrobes took an extra five.But “Avatar: The Way of Water” acknowledges that plenty of time has passed since the first film: In this installment, the soldier-turned-liberator Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and his great love, the blue-skinned alien Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), are parents to a brood that includes three Na’vi children, a human boy who becomes part of their coterie and an orphaned, teenage Na’vi played by the 73-year-old Weaver through the magic of motion capture. (This is a different character than the one Weaver played in the first “Avatar,” and one hopes that any potential confusion is mitigated by the casting decision’s irresistible boldness.)Worthington, right, with the director James Cameron on set. “You’ve got to have something that the actors can get their teeth into” Cameron said of the screenplay.20th Century Studios“Avatar: The Way of Water” also adds new co-stars like Cameron’s “Titanic” lead Kate Winslet, and incorporated several deep-sea sequences that required the cast to film underwater while holding their breath for minutes on end. “You always walk away after an ‘Avatar’ journey feeling like you know more than you did before, and that’s exhilarating,” Saldaña said.Do they feel pressure to replicate the stunning success of the first “Avatar”? “You can’t be a slave to the outside forces,” Worthington said. “You’ve just got to go to work and be fearless and as true as you can.” Still, Cameron is a realist: He has already shot the third film and a little bit of the fourth, but he knows that his ability to finish a five-film franchise hinges on the box office performance of “Avatar: The Way of Water,” due in theaters Dec. 16.“If we make some money with two and three,” Cameron said, referring to the sequels, “it’s all mapped out. Scripts are already written, everything’s designed. So just add water.”Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.It’s not easy to follow up making the highest grossing movie ever, but James, you’ve now had to do it twice. What did you learn from the aftermath of “Titanic” that could be applied as you follow up “Avatar”?The Return of ‘Avatar’The director James Cameron takes us back to the world of Pandora for the sequel “Avatar: The Way of Water.”What to Know: The sequel opens on Dec. 16, 13 years after “Avatar” shattered box office records. If you remember little about the original movie, here is a refresher.Holding Their Breath: Cameron and the sequel’s cast discussed what it took to get the new “Avatar” made and to bring it to life in a changed world.Back to the Theater: To help reacquaint audiences with the 3-D filmmaking that dazzled audiences in 2009, the first movie was rereleased in theaters on Sept. 23.From the Archives: Cameron “hasn’t changed cinema, but with blue people and pink blooms he has confirmed its wonder,” our critic wrote after the release of “Avatar” in 2009.JAMES CAMERON You can’t think in those terms. If I brought that into every decision I make, then it’s like, “OK, is the color that’s going to go on the back of this Ilu going to make the difference of $10 million global gross?” I have to remind myself constantly to just have fun and enjoy the day because otherwise you’re competing with yourself.So is this a more fun James Cameron?SAM WORTHINGTON Yeah, absolutely.CAMERON Don’t all speak at once.What was the biggest difference between making the first and second film?ZOE SALDAÑA There were many more challenges. I was younger in the first installment, I didn’t have children. Now I have three children.Zoe Saldaña as Neytiri. She learned to hold her breath underwater. “I come from generations of island people,” and on colonized islands “you are taught to love the ocean as if it’s a goddess, but you fear it.”20th Century StudiosCAMERON And Zoe and Sam now play parents, 15 years later. In the first movie, Sam’s character leaps off his flying creature and essentially changes the course of history as a result of this crazy, almost suicidal leap of faith. And Zoe’s character leaps off a limb and assumes there’s going to be some nice big leaves down there that can cushion her fall. But when you’re a parent, you don’t think that way. So for me, as a parent of five kids, I’m saying, “What happens when those characters mature and realize that they have a responsibility outside their own survival?”Did having children change the way you take risks in your own life?CAMERON Yes, I was pretty wild in my misspent youth, and there are a lot of risks that I wouldn’t take now. I see some of that wildness in my own kids, and there are stories that are embargoed until they’ve turned a certain age. But it definitely colors your whole perspective to have children.I also want to do the thing that other people aren’t doing. When I look at these big, spectacular films — I’m looking at you, Marvel and DC — it doesn’t matter how old the characters are, they all act like they’re in college. They have relationships, but they really don’t. They never hang up their spurs because of their kids. The things that really ground us and give us power, love, and a purpose? Those characters don’t experience it, and I think that’s not the way to make movies.WORTHINGTON Jim wrote this family in a great way where not only are the stakes life and death, but the conflicts are quite domestic. You’re still having these arguments with kids that you have every day, like, “Pick up your clothes, eat your food,” even though the world is at war. To be honest, I’ve used a lot of what I learned from reacting to teenage boys in the movie and put it back into my real life, because I’ve got three boys — it’s a zoo at my house — and someone’s got to be the Great Santini and keep them in line.James, even before you had kids, a lot of your action films explored that parental dynamic. I’m thinking of Sarah Connor and her son, John, in “Terminator 2,” or Ripley and Newt in “Aliens.”CAMERON I think it’s a question of what interests one as a writer and director. The one thing I’ve learned is that you’ve got to have something that the actors can get their teeth into, something that they can draw on from their life experience. I knew as I was writing it that Sam and Zoe were new parents and that this stuff would resonate for them, but if you’re speaking to a young audience, let them feel validated that kids on another planet, 200 years from now, are going through the same crap they’re going through right now.Sigourney, how did you react when you learned you’d be playing a moody, motion-captured 14-year-old?SIGOURNEY WEAVER I remember when Jim finally made the decision, he said, “You can do this because you’re so immature. Nobody knows this but me, but I know that you’re just 14 at heart.” And I think Jim is about 16, so he’s not off by much! But it was incredibly exciting to set loose your inner 14-year-old and to refine it, because being 14 is not all fun. I think we all remember how excruciating it can sometimes be and how unjust things seem in the moment. If you’re playing someone as sensitive as a 14-year-old girl who’s been uprooted, that’s a whole world of adventure you get to have as this character.Sigourney Weaver plays the teenage Kiri, left, in the new film as her character Dr. Grace Augustine, right, died in the original.20th Century StudiosZoe, what was it like to play the mother figure to Sigourney Weaver?SALDAÑA Oh my God, there were moments I would go, “There’s that teenager that just hates me.” I was a daughter before I became a mother, and I do remember those moments with my mom when I felt completely confused and misunderstood.Movies like “Aquaman” and the upcoming live-action version of “The Little Mermaid” take place underwater but don’t actually submerge the actors. “Avatar: The Way of Water” does, and the actors had to learn how to hold their breath for several minutes to shoot some of its undersea sequences. What’s gained from doing it for real?CAMERON Oh, I don’t know, maybe that it looks good? Come on! You want it to look like the people are underwater, so they need to be underwater. It’s not some gigantic leap — if you were making a western, you’d be out learning how to ride a horse. I knew Sam was a surfer, but Sig and Zoe and the others weren’t particularly ocean-oriented folks. So I was very specific about what would be required, and we got the world’s best breath-hold specialists to talk them through it.SALDAÑA The first step is you fake it till you make it: You tell your boss, “Yeah, absolutely, I’m so excited,” and then it’s complete horror, like, “What am I going to do?” At best, you’re going to walk away with a brand-new aptitude, but I was scared. I come from generations of island people, and the one thing people don’t know about island life is that if you’re from islands that have been colonized, a great percentage of people don’t know how to swim. Through folklore, you are taught to love the ocean as if it’s a goddess, but you fear it.When it came to holding your breath, what were your personal bests?SALDAÑA I’m very competitive, but we had an Oscar-winning actress in our cast that did seven minutes.Was that Kate Winslet?WEAVER Jesus, yeah, seven minutes.Did you have any idea she was capable of that?CAMERON No, and she didn’t either! But Kate’s a demon for prep, so she latched onto the free diving as something that she could build her character around. Kate’s character is someone who grew up underwater as an ocean-adapted Na’vi — they’re so physically different from the forest Na’vi, that we’d almost classify them as a subspecies. So she had to be utterly calm underwater, and it turned out that she was a natural.SALDAÑA I got almost up to five minutes. That’s a big accomplishment, you guys.CAMERON Five minutes is huge. Sig did six and a half.WEAVER To the surprise of the teacher! He said to get rid of your mammalian instinct to go, “Oh my God, my face is in the water.” So you spend several minutes just putting your body back into that element and letting those land-person feelings dissolve.SALDAÑA I was just in Europe, swimming in the Mediterranean with my husband and our children, and I passed it down to my boys — they were swimming underwater. I could do that because I surrendered to something, but it wasn’t wonderful from the beginning, I have to say.CAMERON Now it all comes pouring out.WORTHINGTON The trauma!Since the first film came out, environmental issues have become even more urgent. How does “Avatar: The Way of Water” speak to that?WORTHINGTON In the first movie, Jake Sully says, “Open your eyes. Sooner or later, you have to wake up.” That’s what he does in the movie — he wakes up to the world and this other culture — and I think that “Avatar: The Way of Water” is about protecting all of that.Neytiri and Jake Sully in the sequel. Now that they are parents, Cameron said, “what happens when those characters mature and realize that they have a responsibility outside their own survival?”20th Century StudiosCAMERON In the first film, you wind up with a sense of moral outrage about the destruction of a single tree. We have something very similar that takes place in “Avatar: The Way of Water,” and from what we’ve seen from test audiences, people feel that same sense of moral outrage. Does that translate in some tiny way when people come out of the theater into the way they think about the world, about nature, about our responsibility to the environment? Maybe, I don’t know.WEAVER You opened our eyes in the first one, but the second one, because it deals with the oceans and we’re having a crisis with the oceans, I feel it’s so much more transformative. If our goal is to become part of the World Surf League campaign and protect 30 percent of the ocean by 2030, I truly feel that this film is going to advance that goal. And it’s enhanced by the fact that the 3-D will absolutely put you on Pandora, in the water.CAMERON Jacques Cousteau said, “You won’t protect what you don’t love.” He knew that the way to get people to love the ocean is to show it to them with all its beauty and complexity and grandeur. We’re losing the whales, we’re losing the dolphins, we’re losing the sharks. We’re losing the coral reefs due to atmospheric [carbon dioxide] dissolving in the ocean. People will look back a hundred years from now and say, “We had all those things, and we squandered them.” So that’s in [the movie], but in a very organic way as part of the storytelling. The warning is between the lines.The first “Avatar” was a major breakthrough when it came to 3-D. What do you make of what happened to the format in the years after that?CAMERON I think the studios blew it. Just to save 20 percent of the authoring cost of the 3-D, they went with 3-D post-conversion, which takes it out of the hands of the filmmaker on the set and puts it into some postproduction process that yielded a poor result. I do think that the new “Avatar” film will rekindle an interest in natively authored 3-D, which is what I personally believe is the right way to do it. I say either do 3-D or don’t do 3-D, but don’t try to slap it on afterward to get the up-charge on the ticket.SALDAÑA And look, do you want to make a lot of money, or do you want to make something you’re truly proud of that stands the test of time?CAMERON Do I have to choose?SALDAÑA It’s unfortunate, but people chose the moneymaking machine, the post-conversion. And not every director is like Jim, with the level of commitment you put into it. That’s the difference between a project that is just a blockbuster hit and something that is truly special, and I wish more directors would understand that. If they just did a little course at the [Directors Guild of America] …CAMERON I’ll teach it! More

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      She Knew the Cello. The Acting She Learned With Cate Blanchett.

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      Sophie Kauer was a cellist studying for a degree when a friend urged her to audition for “Tár.” She watched Michael Caine videos on acting and dove right in.Lydia Tár commands with the gravitational pull of a planet: Everyone and everything, including the camera in “Tár,” Todd Field’s epic about a fictional maestro, lives in her shadow. But when Lydia (Cate Blanchett), who has been accused of sexual harassment, sets her sights on Olga, a rising Russian cellist, she is confronted with a foil of sorts. Is the young woman disarmingly naïve or particularly cunning?In reality, Sophie Kauer, who plays Olga, is a British-German cellist who, after responding to a vague open casting call practically on a lark, found herself months later plunked down in front of Blanchett shooting two-hander scenes in Berlin. She was 19 and had never acted in her life.“Sometimes I feel like everything’s happening backwards,” Kauer, now 21, said recently on a video call from a professor’s classroom at the Norwegian Academy of Music, where she is studying for a classical music performance degree. “I’ve kind of just been dropped into the thick of it, which is both wonderful and so weird at the same time.”Kauer appeared grateful, dazed and remarkably well-adjusted about the film and the attention. She has been meticulous about scheduling classes around press duties to maintain her school’s mandatory 80 percent attendance rate.Born in London, she picked up the cello at 8 and has always been naturally driven — she speaks five languages, and for early auditions developed her Russian accent through YouTube videos. (After she was cast, two dialect coaches took over.)“If I want to do something, then I’ll just do it,” Kauer said, not with arrogance but rather the air of someone who is self-assured about her passions. Music, she emailed after we spoke, “has been my absolute rock through everything. But what I really don’t like is being put in a box and told that classical music is all I am allowed to do or I am not sufficiently serious about my career.”Kauer spoke about the casting process, working with Blanchett, and what she thinks about that Juilliard scene. These are edited excerpts from our interview.‘Tár’: A Timely Backstage DramaCate Blanchett plays a world-famous conductor who is embroiled in a #MeToo drama in the latest film by the director Todd Field.Review: “We don’t care about Lydia Tár because she’s an artist; we care about her because she’s art,” our critic writes about the film’s protagonist.An Elusive Subject: Blanchett has stayed one step ahead of audiences by constantly staying in motion. In “Tár,” she is as inscrutable as ever.Back Into the Limelight: The film marks Field’s return to directing, 16 years after “In the Bedroom” and “Little Children” made waves.Big-Screen Aesthetics: “Tár” was among several movies at the New York Film Festival that offered reflections on the rarefied worlds of classical music and visual art.What has your life been like these past few weeks?I’m still getting the hang of all of this. Every interview I do is completely different and I learn so much from it. I just think it’s so surreal that someone wants to talk to me. [Laughs]How did you become involved in the film?My friend sends me a casting call that has been posted in our school Facebook group, saying, “Look, they’re looking for a young cellist who could do a Russian accent and feels comfortable in front of a camera. I think you should apply for this.” And I was like, “Oh, but I don’t do any acting. I wouldn’t get it.” And she was like, “Oh, just apply. It’ll be fun.”I wasn’t really thinking about what size the role was. I had a Zoom audition with [Field] and I was like, “This is so cool. I’m going to tell my grandkids that I did a Zoom audition with Todd Field.” Then I got a call asking if I could send a recording of the piece you hear Olga playing in the film, the Elgar Cello Concerto. I had played it before, but I had to get it back in my fingers in like a day and send it straight away. They were really cryptic the week after. It wasn’t until I actually was put on a Zoom call with Avy Kaufman [a casting director] and Todd that I found out I had got the part. No one had actually explained it to me.Kauer in the film. It’s not clear whether her character is naïve or cunning. “That’s the thing — you are not meant to know,” she said.Focus FeaturesDid you have any acting experience?When the occasional Shakespeare compulsory play came around [in school], I’d play the noble man in the background with the painted-on beard who says “Aye” three times or something like that. [Laughs] That was the extent of it.Michael Caine did these lessons on film acting [available on YouTube]. That was very technical, but I picked up a lot. I kind of figured it out as I went along. When I would have days or hours off, I asked Todd if I would be allowed to watch everyone else act their scenes. I was trying to pick up everything that they were doing,What was it like to go from no acting experience to suddenly working opposite Cate Blanchett?I remember I saw her for the first time she put out her hand and she said, “Hi, I’m Cate.” And you’re just like, “I know!” [Laughs] And then I had to [rehearse with] her after having met her five minutes before.I quickly learned that she’s one of the world’s loveliest people, and she’s so supportive and generous. I would even go as far to say that I learned to act from her and Todd.Olga has a very specific dynamic with Lydia. She seems to be the only one Lydia can’t fully control. Why is that?That’s the thing — you are not meant to know. We have no idea if Olga was just super naïve and very caught up with her life going exactly to plan and her achieving her wildest dreams. Or if she’s super calculating and knows exactly what she’s doing. Part of me would like to think that she’s smart, and the other part of me wants to think that she’s careless and young and kind of free. None of us actually really know the entirety of our characters. I don’t think Todd does either. What do you make of how the film examines notions of power in the world of classical music?The release of this film is very timely because the Independent Society of Musicians just released a study saying that sexual harassment, bullying and racism is at its all-time worst in the classical music industry, and that people feel like they can’t speak out about it because they’re freelancers. And when they do speak out, they face repercussions and are not rebooked.It’s perfect that this film is coming out now. I also think the fact that it’s a woman in a position that a man would stereotypically be in is really good, and in a way is slightly less offensive. People kind of just see the problem for what it is, rather than getting offended.The film has been discussed at length within the framework of the culture wars, in particular with the scene at Juilliard when a student expresses discomfort playing music written by straight white men. Lydia has no patience for him. As someone in these classrooms, do you have sympathies for either side in that Juilliard scene?Of course I do. We need to be open to discussing it and including all these new voices that have been unheard for so long — music by women or including more cultures and ethnicities. And we can’t just forget what has gone before because this is what our whole history is based on. I can’t wake up tomorrow and say, sorry, I’m never going to play a piece written by a white male composer again. Because unfortunately that is just how history is, and that is the vast majority of our music.You can’t exclude the majority of music history because you don’t identify with it. But I also do think that the point he makes is very relevant. There is very little representation for a lot of genders and ethnicities and cultures, and classical music may have been a bit slower to evolve. But it is evolving. Every time I watch, my sympathy for each character changes. Sometimes I think Lydia is totally right, and other times I’m like, no, Max, he’s the one who’s totally right.What’s next for you?I am still in the middle of studying for my music degree, so I have a lot of stuff to catch up on. I’m looking forward to being a musician again. But I did enjoy the acting a lot. I’m still very young, so I’m kind of seeing what happens and taking it one thing at a time. I would like to hope that this isn’t my last project. It was really quite something. More

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      How ‘Terrifier 2’ Slashed Its Way to Box Office Success

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      The low-budget, ultraviolent, no-stars, killer-clown horror film has been in the Top 10 since it was released theatrically earlier this month.Halloween is still days away. But for the writer-director Damien Leone, Christmas is already here.That’s because his horror film “Terrifier 2” — a low-budget, ultraviolent sequel to his brutal killer-clown film “Terrifier” (2016) — has become an unexpected and unlikely hit.When “Terrifier 2” opened the first weekend in October, it cracked the Top 10, taking in $805,000. This past weekend it came in seventh, pulling in an estimated $1.89 million, according to Box Office Mojo, for a three-week total of $5.2 million.So how did an unrated, almost two-and-a-half-hour slasher film — made for $250,000 and starring nobody you’ve heard of — become the little horror movie that could?“Fun and fearlessness,” Leone said.The film ascended from the horror underground into the mainstream mostly through word of mouth and social media chatter, especially after reports surfaced of people puking and fainting at screenings. Media outlets that normally wouldn’t touch an extreme horror release, like the CBS daytime show “The Talk,” covered the commotion.With all of its can-you-handle-it? chatter, it’s giving big studio movies like “Halloween Ends” and “Smile” underdog competition as the most talked about horror movie this Halloween. Even Stephen King recently tweeted about it.Lauren LaVera with Thornton in “Terrifier 2.”CinedigmDuring a recent interview at a Midtown coffee shop, Leone kept his cool but seemed genuinely floored by his film’s runaway success. For folks taken aback by the violence, he had a reminder: It’s called “Terrifier” for a reason.“I’m not worrying about offending anybody or putting any agendas on,” he said. “It’s coming from the place of being a genuine horror fan.”“Terrifier 2” isn’t the first indie film to come out of left field and find mainstream success; “The Blair Witch Project” and “Paranormal Activity” did too, on far bigger scales. But unlike those films, “Terrifier 2” is aggressively and transgressively violent.The film is so gory, it makes other hit horror movies this year, like “Nope” and “The Black Phone,” look like “Ticket to Paradise.” It picks up where the original left off, as an American suburb is terrorized on Halloween by Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton), a psychopathic bozo who slaughters his victims in stomach-churning ways, including flaying, scalping and dismemberment — and that’s just in one scene. There are new, mostly young characters, including its protagonist teenager (Lauren LaVera) and her kid brother (Elliott Fullam).The first “Terrifier” (free to watch on several streaming services) won over many horror die-hards when it was released, in large part because of Art the Clown, a character who “threads the needle between being utterly creepy and absolutely hilarious,” said Jonathan DeHaan, who co-hosts the horror movie podcast Nightmare on Film Street. The Art the Clown Appreciation Society on Facebook has almost 12,000 members.But what’s drawing eyeballs to “Terrifier 2” is more than another creepy clown. In details like Art’s harlequin jumper and tiny top-hat fascinator — and in the gruesome nondigital makeup effects Leone crafted himself — what moviegoers are buying is homemade filmmaking.“People are responding to it because it’s an independent movie that feels like it’s made by people and not a giant studio machine,” DeHaan said. “There are actual people on set doing stuff with their hands, and you can feel it.”But what about the shock, walkouts, regurgitation?“We all wish we could see ‘The Exorcist’ on opening weekend and experience people vomiting in the aisles,” DeHaan said. “This is as close as you’ll get to that.”Who makes a movie like this? A guy who was born in Brooklyn and raised on Staten Island, in a household led by an Italian American single mother who loved classic movies so much, she named her only son after the child Antichrist in “The Omen.”Leone said his mother introduced him to horror landmarks like “Jaws” but also to the sword-and-sorcery sagas she adored, like “The Beastmaster.”But as she watched “Terrifier 2,” she got a little possessed.“She was beyond repulsed, just screaming at me, cursing me out like a truck driver,” he said.But by the end of the movie “she was very proud,” he said. “It was a badge of honor.”For some viewers it may be their first encounter with fantastically line-crossing gore, the kind with roots in the works of maverick directors like Herschell Gordon Lewis and Lucio Fulci. Leone knows the violence in his film is outrageous, and he’s buckled in for the backlash. But he wants audiences to understand that watching it comes with a purpose that’s endemic to horror.“Our mortality is so devastating to us that we need ways to accept it,” he said. “An attraction to violent horror,” he added, “is a coping mechanism.”And if people get sick at his film — and Leone said he really hopes nobody does — hey, it’s all part of the sell.“Sometimes you have to embrace the exploitation, especially if you’re trying to get noticed,” he said. “I don’t pretend that we are not exploiting the violence. We are. But those are the kinds of movies I loved, growing up.”The pluses and pitfalls of “Terrifier 2” were on display at a 10:30 showing on a recent Monday night at a Times Square theater. (The 10:45 was sold out.) The 19 people who started watching the film dwindled to 17 when two men took off after Art the Clown cracked a guy’s head in half before the title credits even started. By the end there were 14, after three folks grabbed their popcorn tubs and skedaddled when a character was gruesomely beheaded.Among those who stayed was Michelle Martinez, 22. She and a group of friends traveled from Brooklyn to see the film because, she said, “the ad looked scary.”And her review? “I’m not really into scary movies,” she said. “But this one is nice.” More