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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

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

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

In Bolivia’s official submission to the next Oscars, an old Quechua couple struggle to find water to sustain them, their crops and llamas.The Bolivian movie “Utama” pulls you in with an uneasy mix of beauty and dread. A fictional tale that draws from real life, it takes place in the Andean plateau — the Altiplano — an arid, mountainous strip with altitudes nearing 14,000 feet above sea level that runs through western Bolivia. There, on hard, cracked land in a tiny, adobe home, a wizened Quechua couple of indeterminate age with no electricity and few outside contacts, yet graced with unflagging fortitude, wait for the rain that will sustain them, their meager crops and small herd of llamas.Stooped with age, Virginio and Sisa — José Calcina and Luisa Quispe, both nonprofessional actors — scarcely speak, the texture and arc of their lives instead conveyed through quotidian rituals, small gestures and stoic expressions. They watch their animals, they watch the world, they watch each other. They also struggle, their agonies weighing most visibly on Virginio. Every morning, and with greater difficulty, he guides the llamas, their ears festooned with pink tassels, across the parched land in search of grass. The arduousness of his days makes for restless nights and a wheezing that Sisa somehow doesn’t notice.The Bolivian writer-director Alejandro Loayza Grisi has a background in still photography, and it shows. He has a feel for the drama of color, form, scale and light, as well as a sensitive collaborator in his cinematographer, Bárbara Alvarez (her credits include “The Headless Woman”). With a lucid eye and a steady camera, he captures the region’s brutal beauty, using stark contrasts — like birds-eye views of isolated houses and people — to accentuate its extremes. At other times, he zeros in on similarities, like those between the weathered faces and the desiccated terrain, suggesting ideas that the characters don’t voice.As the days tick by quietly and more and more disastrously, Virginio’s health and the area’s declining water sources begin to blur, rendering a near-totemic character increasingly symbolic. At one point, Virginio and Sisa’s far more loquacious grandson, Clever (Santos Choque), shows up, and the family’s history begins to emerge. Clever and his father want the couple to move to a city, an idea that Virginio rejects. He has strong, apparently traditional opinions, including about the gendered division of labor. It’s Sisa’s job to collect water, he insists, even when she’s forced to walk a long distance to fill their buckets at a shrinking river.Virginio is clinging to a life that’s disappearing as rapidly as the area’s water. That’s painful, no question, but the complexities of the world that he and Sisa inhabit are as frustratingly elusive as their inner lives. That’s too bad, although this lack of specifics also helps explain why “Utama” has traveled widely on the international festival circuit. (It’s Bolivia’s Oscar entry.) The Altiplano has long endured periods of extended drought that global warming has worsened, leading to Bolivia’s second largest lake drying up and rural migration. Yet while climate change shadows every anxious discussion here, it also remains at a safe remove, a vague threat embedded in an aesthetically soothing package and gently salted with tears.UtamaNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. In theaters. More

Luca Guadagnino’s documentary about the celebrated Italian shoe designer Salvatore Ferragamo reaches for romance and glamour, but falters during transitions.Arriving two weeks before the release of “Bones and All,” Luca Guadagnino’s tatterdemalion drifter romance, the director’s “Salvatore: Shoemaker of Dreams” surveys a more refined coupling, not of people, but of pumps.The documentary opens on an assembly line, where a suite of artisans methodically carve, sculpt and hammer out a pair of sequined vermilion stilettos. Before we even meet the film’s subject, the Italian designer Salvatore Ferragamo, this mesmerizing procedural overture suggests that Ferragamo viewed shoemaking as an art and a science. One wishes the tribute that follows were as nimble.Plodding through Ferragamo’s life, the documentary layers talking-head interviews with archival footage and photographs. Born in 1898 in the Italian village of Bonito, Ferragamo went on to apprentice in Naples before taking arduous passage to the United States. Following his ambition, or perhaps a premonition, he moved to Santa Barbara, where he found success designing custom footwear for movie stars. Throughout, Michael Stuhlbarg reads passages from Ferragamo’s writing in a velvety murmur. “I love feet,” he recites at one point. “They talk to me.”Guadagnino clearly intends for these themes of seduction, allure and glamour to envelop the audience, like silk fabric swathing an arched foot sole. Instead, the film falters, particularly during transitions, which tend to feel abrupt. If Guadagnino sought to reflect the romance of Ferragamo’s red carpet creations, his storytelling is at once more conventional and more awkward in construction. Forget feet; defter hands might have helped.Salvatore: Shoemaker of DreamsRated PG. Running time: 2 hours. In theaters. More

This distressingly immersive horror film by Beth de Araújo traces a group of white supremacist women in real time.Unlike the majority of recent horror films that engage with race relations in the United States and the country’s legacy of white nationalism (like “Get Out” or this year’s “Nanny”), “Soft & Quiet,” written and directed by Beth de Araújo, takes the racist’s perspective.The movie’s title refers to an approach that one of its characters, Emily (Stefanie Estes), sees as the most effective for spreading the gospel of white supremacy. Emily is a clean-cut kindergarten teacher and the leader of an alliance of far-right women. De Araújo and the cinematographer Greta Zozula’s roving hand-held camera trails the group of seemingly innocuous women in what seems to be real time.After a vaguely unsettling opening scene in which Emily quietly pits a student against a Latina custodian, the film escalates with stomach-dropping abruptness when the foil is lifted off a pie Emily has baked, revealing a swastika carved into the dough. It’s just a joke, she claims, though the cheery group’s resemblance to the P.T.A. or a book club for suburban mothers makes their hate-mongering rhetoric especially chilling.More disturbing yet is how fluidly their ideas materialize into something real and physical when four of its members — emboldened by each other, with extra encouragement from a brutish newcomer, Leslie (Olivia Luccardi), a younger woman recently released from prison — impulsively descend upon a mixed race Asian American woman’s home to vandalize it and steal her possessions. Their crimes end up exceeding even their own expectations.The film is a palpable joyride steered by the kinds of women who, de Araújo seems to think, could easily get away with it. In this sense, it attempts to be both a political cautionary tale and a horror film committed to shock-and-awe thrill seeking. The brutal possibilities of the white supremacist mind-set are nothing to shy away from. Still, the film’s admittedly jarring cruelty does little beyond press down on old bruises, turning the realities of racialized violence into an immersive spectacle with the kind of real-world sadistic allure one might find in a serial-killer movie.Soft & QuietRated R for torture, sexual assault and vile language. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

Two likable losers fall into conspiratorial rabbit holes while filming the strange goings-on in their apartment building.“Something in the Dirt” is one of those weird little surprises sometimes found skulking in the crannies of mainstream film festivals, slippery and screwy and impossible to categorize. An ambitious potluck of buddy comedy, paranormal puzzle and whatdunnit mystery, this fifth feature from the filmmaking team of Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead cheerfully substitutes audacity for discipline.A doomy vibe descends immediately as Levi (Benson), a feckless bartender with a sketchy past, moves into a decaying apartment in the Hollywood Hills. Low-flying aircraft rumble overhead and a forest fire belches smoke on the horizon. Inside, there’s a creaking door that won’t close, a dripping ceiling (shout-out to Yah’el Dooley’s excellent sound design) and arcane equations scribbled on a closet wall. Levi’s mood lifts, though, when he meets his new neighbor, John (Moorhead), a recently divorced former math teacher. The two form an instant connection, despite John’s apocalyptic religious views and his apparently blood-spattered shirt.Written by Benson and shot by Moorhead, “Something in the Dirt” is a surreal satire of paranoia and conspiratorial thinking, suggesting both as logical responses to an increasingly scary world. When the friends, hoping for fame and fortune, decide to document what they believe to be supernatural phenomena — a levitating quartz ashtray, a plant that spontaneously grows strange fruit — their obsession with re-enactments digs slyly at the distortions of nonfiction filmmaking. Rambling conversations on aliens and math theorems, time travel and TED talks, contribute to an atmosphere in which everything feels unstable, not least the men’s sanity.Overlong and overwritten, “Dirt” nevertheless unfolds with an enjoyably comic quirkiness, a tale of two doofuses who sought meaning in symbols and found comfort in friendship.Something in the DirtRated R for a little violence and a lot of crazy talk. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More

Two strangers reflect on their lives as they embark on a cross-country drive to join a study involving life after death.In Mali Elfman’s debut feature “Next Exit,” Rose and Teddy (Katie Parker and Rahul Kohli) are two strangers with something in common: They’d both rather be dead.They embark on a cross-country drive to join an experiment run by a controversial scientist who claims there is life after death. But rather than a spiritual meditation on the great beyond, or a dystopian fable, Elfman’s road movie fits the largely conventional mold of stories about people taking stock before ending their lives.The film begins with the scientist (Karen Gillan) presenting evidence of the afterlife — a slightly janky recording of a boy playing cards with his father’s ghost. Her study involves the assisted suicide of its participants, who can now look forward to an afterlife. (The arrangement sounds more macabre than the film fully acknowledges.) Rose is eager to ditch what she regards as an ill-spent life, and she ends up sharing a rental car with Teddy, who is also deeply dissatisfied but tries to be an upbeat companion.On Rose and Teddy’s drive to San Francisco they have instructive encounters with a priest, a regretful cop, a hippie-dippy hitchhiker, and estranged family members. The reluctant pair keeps recalibrating in response, and trade prickly banter. Their trek sometimes taps the tragicomic feel of a soul-bearing late-night conversation in a bar.But the actors’ chemistry feels brittle, and like many road movies it has trouble mining drama out of disparate episodes. When the subject is the explicit consideration of a life’s worth, it’s a tricky road to take and not get lost along the way.Next ExitNot rated. 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More