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      ‘Goodnight Mommy’ Review: Behind the Mask

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      Twin boys worry that their mother might be an impostor in this disappointing remake.Far be it from me to quibble over punctuation, but the absence of the vocative comma in the title of “Goodnight Mommy” — an American remake of the Austrian chiller “Goodnight, Mommy” (2015) — should be read as a warning of other, more problematic omissions.Like the prickling atmosphere of dread that blanketed the original and is only pallidly reproduced here. The plot, though, remains roughly the same: Twin boys, Elias and Lucas (Cameron Crovetti and Nicholas Crovetti), arrive at their mother’s isolated country home after an unspecified absence to find her head swathed in gauze and her behavior apparently altered. Telling the boys she has undergone “a little procedure,” Mommy (Naomi Watts) bars them from her darkened quarters, and also — uh-oh! — from the barn. Is she an impostor?That question will be answered, if without the aesthetic elegance, masterly editing or rumbling horror of the first film. Even so, Kyle Warren’s screenplay is potent enough to generate several moments of suspense, and Watts, an exceptional actor sidelined too often by poor choices, is not the problem here. That would be the decision to jettison the children’s most creative cruelties — and consequently much of the movie’s tension — and a director, Matt Sobel, who’s determined to steer the audience toward a specific interpretation of events. The result is a film that feels lazily compressed and overly literal, suggesting a lamentable discomfort with ambiguity that’s all too common in arthouse-to-mainstream retreads.The new movie’s late-pandemic timing and the ubiquity of masking, however, add a fresh layer to the psychological underpinnings of both films. Perhaps never before have we understood so clearly how much of our ability to trust rests on being able to see the entirety of the human face.Goodnight MommyRated R for disturbing dreams and dirty dancing. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. Watch on Amazon Prime. More

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      ‘The African Desperate’ Review: Double Speak

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      Martine Syms’s whip-smart satire brings the invisible, everyday negotiations of a Black artist to startlingly visual life.Martine Syms’s debut feature derives its title from a Freudian slip. In the opening scene, as Palace (Diamond Stingily), a sculptor at an upstate New York art school, describes her thesis project to an all-white faculty panel, she mispronounces “African diaspora” as “African desperate.” It sounds nonsensical, but no one bats an eye, and the professors continue with their jargon-riddled commentary. This is the art world, a place as open to absurdity as it is closed to diversity. Here, people say made-up terms with grave conviction yet are incredulous that a Black woman like Palace has made it to the Venice Biennale.Drawn from Syms’s own experiences as a visual artist, “The African Desperate” is less an art-school parody as it is a portrait of existential incongruity, where contempt mingles with deep affection. After being anointed a Master of Fine Arts, a frustrated Palace is ready to pack up and leave, but she stays on for 24 final hours of debauchery, coaxed by friends, drugs and potential lovers.As Palace stumbles through a series of neon-hued encounters, ranging in tone from slapstick to dark comedy, Syms brings the invisible, everyday negotiations of a Black artist to startlingly visual life with layers of images and sounds. When a white classmate says she’s never heard of the Jamaican writer Sylvia Wynter, Palace doesn’t react, but a meme flashes briefly on-screen with the caption: “What if I told you there were Black theorists?”There’s an echo of Luis Buñuel’s “The Exterminating Angel” in “The African Desperate,” though Palace’s stuckness in her off-putting milieu is less surreal than tragically banal. As alienating as art school might be, it’s also a refuge for our eccentric, orange-haired heroine.The African DesperateNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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      To Deal With Film Festival Pressure, Sarah Polley Heads for the Hills

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      Hiking helped the actress-turned-auteur as she premiered her buzzy drama “Women Talking” in Telluride and Toronto.TORONTO — The scene inside the restaurant Lapinou was loud and hectic on Tuesday night as a crowd of Hollywood power players, including Rooney Mara and Claire Foy, navigated narrow hallways, passed plates of beignets and an endless stream of well-wishers with declarations of Oscar buzz.It was the Toronto International Film Festival after-party for the new drama “Women Talking,” though to do any real talking (as opposed to shouting), you had to escape outside, as I did midway through the night with the film’s director, Sarah Polley. Clad in a sharp suit and tie, Polley appeared unruffled by both the noisy soirée and the high-stakes premiere she had just come from.“I feel really happy and calm,” Polley told me with a serene smile. She thought about it, then amended her statement: “Kind of happy — not in a jacked-up, nutty way.”Higher levels of happiness would have been perfectly warranted after the two weeks Polley has just had: Following a successful launch of the film at the Telluride Film Festival, she and her cast flew to Toronto for another warm reception that ensured “Women Talking,” due in theaters this December, will be one of the season’s most-discussed movies.Based on the novel by Miriam Toews, “Women Talking” follows the female members of a Mennonite colony as they decide whether to stay or go. Their cloistered lives have been ruptured by a series of sexual attacks committed by the men of their community, and to stay would preserve the status quo, for better and for worse: While it would keep their families together, the women and their daughters would be in danger of continued assault.But for these Mennonite women, who have never seen a map nor been taught to read or write, leaving the only world they’ve ever known is a tall order, too. So a council is appointed: A group of women, including characters played by Mara, Foy and Frances McDormand, will gather in a hayloft and debate the decision that could change the rest of their lives.Though “Women Talking” has sparked Oscar talk for Polley and her cast after the film’s Telluride premiere two weekends ago, anxieties initially ran high in advance of that first screening. So Polley proposed a hike.“The operating principle was that we should just have a great morning so that if the film goes terribly, we’ll at least have had a great day,” she said. “I think it’s smart to start with something good that can’t be taken away from you.”That mountain trek with her cast went so well that even after the premiere, the actress Jessie Buckley decided to lead them on a second hike the next day. “But Jessie’s actually, like, a really serious hiker,” Polley said, “and I almost passed out, so l turned back.”Hiking was less necessary before the Toronto premiere, since the city is Polley’s hometown, the place where she acted in films like “The Sweet Hereafter” before her segue to directing. In fact, she was so convinced the Toronto audience couldn’t be topped that though “Women Talking” has a busy slate of festival appearances and premieres ahead, from now on, Polley plans to politely excuse herself each time the movie unspools.“I decided that the first time it played in Toronto would be the last time I watched the movie,” she said. “There was a sense of completion around it tonight: You’re saying goodbye to all the scenes and every frame of the film.”But if there’s one thing she’ll miss now that she’s no longer watching her film with an audience, it’s the occasional moment in this weighty drama when something light happens and the moviegoers around her realize they’ve got permission to laugh.“That’s when you feel the audience coalescing and having some kind of a collective response,” Polley said. “It’s thrilling to have laughter happen when you’re watching a film like this.” More

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      ‘Terra Femme’ Review: How Women Have Seen the World

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      An assemblage of travelogues shot by women from the 1920s through the 1950s, this experimental essay film can be seen with either live or prerecorded narration.Blurring the line between experimental essay film and performance piece, Courtney Stephens’s “Terra Femme” can be seen in two versions. Most screenings will have regular voice-over, but at the Thursday screening and at one of the screenings on Sunday, Stephens will deliver the narration live, in the spirit of how some of the material in the movie was originally screened.“Terra Femme” compiles amateur travelogues shot largely by women from the 1920s through the 1950s. The footage filmed by Kate and Arthur Tode, a couple who circumnavigated the globe, for example, was shown at cinema clubs in the 1930s and 1940s, and as with Stephens’s presentation, the films would be narrated while they unspooled.Although the two versions are said to be similar, the live edition — the one I saw at a press screening — conceivably adds something extra, because “Terra Femme” is partly about Stephens’s own relationship to the material. At one point, she discusses trying to recreate certain shots from India and not quite framing them correctly.Stephens asks whether these travelogues might reveal that women, who at the time had few opportunities to direct movies professionally, see the world differently. She considers the lives of the camerawomen, like Annette Dixon, of Philadelphia, whose films were archived under her husband’s name; Adelaide Pearson, who captured what may have been the first color cinematic footage of Gandhi; and Armeta Hearst, who filmed in a predominantly Black neighborhood of Seattle in the 1950s. The first reel of Hearst’s footage was accidentally scanned backward, making it look as though subjects who were exiting their homes were instead being absorbed back into them, inescapably.“Terra Femme” addresses many more issues: changing domestic roles in the 20th century, self-consciousness in amateur filmmaking, women’s potential access to historic moments and even — obliquely — climate change. Stephens’s ideas and presentation make for a dense, continually absorbing hour.Terra FemmeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 2 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Jokes + Exasperation + Subtext = a New York Club Comic on the Rise

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      In Raanan Hershberg’s standup, the punchline is not the point; it’s what his runaway emotions reveal that’s funny.Like genius, great comedy requires some mix of inspiration and perspiration, but when it comes to the stand-up of Raanan Hershberg, neither is more important than exasperation.One of the funnier moments in his 2019 special, “Downhill Ever Since,” was his extreme incredulousness over the name of the fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter: “We’re supposed to believe,” he said, pausing to let the crowd register his umbrage, “there’s this cannibal who just happens, just happens, on the rarest of odds, to have the only name in the history of names to rhyme with cannibal.”His breakthrough new special, “Jokes From the Underground,” which premieres Wednesday night on YouTube, finds him plumbing comic aggravation more deeply, this time sparked by a sentence spoken by his mother: “I can’t believe it’s already April.” This sends the comic, a Comedy Cellar regular with a growing reputation, into a head-swiveling frenzy, spitting consonants. Of all the things to disbelieve? Hershberg, 37, launches into an operatic tour of the bizarre events of the past few years. (“Last year marked the only time where the Baldwin brothers weren’t jealous of Alec’s career.”) What began as a skewering of a cliché culminates in the baroque comedy of a man unhinged.Stand-up is an art form full of control freaks, and most reliably funny stand-ups are poised performers who orchestrate laughs from the surprise and insight of their premises and punchlines. In his recent Netflix special “Same Time Tomorrow,” Sam Morril, another skilled Comedy Cellar craftsman, offers a clever bit comparing the jobs of police officers and teachers that relies on an abrupt misdirection he calls a switcheroo. This kind of joke has the structure of a trick: get viewers leaning one way, then startle them by going the other.Hershberg tells some of these kinds of jokes, too, but they tend to be more minor key and straightforward: jabs, not big swings. He favors benign lies or the thuddingly obvious stated with conviction. At one point, he confides that when it comes to sex, his penis is “his spot.” What really distinguishes Hershberg, and makes him the next great practitioner of that fabled artistic genre known as New York club comedy, is when he seems to be losing control, letting his runaway emotions become the joke. His most ambitious set pieces, the ones that get the belly laughs, work not by outsmarting the audience but by playing the fool.To be specific, he has a premise arguing that women talk more about sex than men, but the real punchline is how the unruly intensity of his emphasis on this point actually shows he’s worried about secrets revealed by certain women. The biggest laugh is in the subtext, not the line. This is tricky, clever writing that relies on making sure the crowd sees something the comic isn’t telling them.In his new special, Hershberg displays this gift. He’s more strategic about his delivery than in his previous special, varying the pace, taking a break from his roaring vexation to become softer on occasion, allowing silence for a jarring contrast. It’s also a more stylish production, with camerawork that nicely serves the joke, including a close-up from the side, where his face is framed by candy-colored lights, a shot often employed after a sly comment.Exasperation can easily tip into anger, and there are easy laughs to be had there. But Hershberg wisely steers clear. He wades into touchy territory — the Holocaust, #MeToo, his mother’s sex life — but the aim here is not to tell it like it is but to find obstacles for his hapless protagonist to navigate. His jokes aren’t just tightly written. They have stakes.And yet, his greatest strength is clearly his gravelly, booming voice. Rub sandpaper and the wrapper for a corned beef sandwich together and you might hit its frequency. It can remind you of Gilbert Gottfried, but the comic he most frequently resembles — this comparison has so much baggage that I hesitate to make it — is Louis C.K. The way Hershberg wanders into uncomfortable territory, draws attention to it, then pushes further along the tightrope. His radical shifts of perspective. Even his hand gestures. In some of Hershberg’s punchlines, there are hints of a delight in pure nonsense that suggests a more surreal direction in his future. You see it in some of his most banal jokes, like one about President Biden’s age. It’s almost as if Hershberg needed to find a way to make this bland premise more interesting.Several times he returns to a refrain — “More information beats bad information” — but to say this show has a theme, other than trying desperately to make you laugh, would be a stretch.New York is the best training ground for comics honing ruthless jokes that work for the widest array of audiences. That’s because there are more places to perform than anywhere else. But the scene has its own groupthink that can resist certain kinds of ambition. Some of Hershberg’s most familiar premises, like complaining about cable news, feel dutiful, less personal. But digging into well-worn topics can also be a challenge that excites an imaginative mind.There’s no subject more overdone now than Covid. But he finds a fresh take: This is the first pandemic that people admit to enjoying. “No one in the 1500s said the bubonic plague really gave me a chance to slow down and just live in the moment,” he says. “Thank God the Black Death came along and I finally got to work on myself.”Hershberg is the kind of New Yorker that E.B. White argued brought passion to the city: the one born elsewhere, in his case, Kentucky. You would never know it from his act, which feels firmly located in New York club comedy, a category that for some evokes a certain neurotic sensibility or swagger or density of punchlines.To me, its defining trait is an ineffable comic sound, as nervy and raucous as the subway during rush hour. Hershberg plays that rumbling music beautifully. More

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      ‘Do Revenge’: Paying Homage to Teen Classics by Way of Hitchcock

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      Though Gen Z is the subject, the director Jennifer Kaytin Robinson wanted to honor and critique high school movies of the ’90s.“You’re probably going, ‘Is this like a Noxzema commercial or what?’” Cher Horowitz mused in the opening montage of “Clueless,” laughing with friends in her Jeep Wrangler and splurging at Tiffany’s on Rodeo Drive. That scene, set to the Muffs’ pop-punk cover of “Kids in America,” painted a heady portrait of ’90s youth and excess.Twenty-seven years later, a new version of “Kids in America” — by the indie-pop singer Maude Latour — plays in “Do Revenge” as throngs of rich, Gen Z teens spiral into various states of ecstasy and despair after they unwittingly ingest hallucinogenic mushrooms at a school dinner.The Netflix dark comedy (out Sept. 16) is full of such winks to its teen film forebears. There’s a guided tour of the school’s cliques (as seen in “Mean Girls,” “10 Things I Hate About You” and more) and a requisite makeover (a staple in “Clueless,” “She’s All That” and so many others). But many of the “Do Revenge” references also serve as a playful reckoning, blending nostalgia with wholly contemporary tastes and issues.“I’m obsessed with high school movies,” the director and writer Jennifer Kaytin Robinson said. “But, very specifically, this type of film that I just feel like doesn’t get made anymore.”While in postproduction on her first film, the 2019 rom-com “Someone Great,” she and one of the producers, Peter Cron, began analyzing her favorite ’90s entries in the genre — “Clueless,” “Cruel Intentions,” “10 Things” and “Jawbreaker” — and common threads of campiness and satire emerged. And, with the exception of “Jawbreaker,” they were all reimaginings of classic works. (That would be “Emma,” “Dangerous Liaisons” and “The Taming of the Shrew,” respectively.)Camila Mendes said her role defied the usual studio note to make women more likable: “What ends up happening is you get these really one-dimensional female characters.” Kim Simms/NetflixRobinson and Cron brainstormed vintage material they could rework in a high school setting. Cron suggested looking to Alfred Hitchcock. “Rear Window” had gotten the teen treatment in the 2007 thriller “Disturbia.” What about his 1951 noir “Strangers on a Train”? Instead of two grown men swapping murders, two teen girls could concoct a plot to “do revenge” of the nonviolent kind on their exes.The similarities pretty much end there, but from that germ of a concept, Robinson and her co-writer, Celeste Ballard, crafted the acerbic tale of Drea, a queen bee who becomes a social pariah after an intimate Snapchat video she sent to her boyfriend, Max, is leaked to their entire Miami prep school; and Eleanor, a mysterious outsider looking to bring down a girl from summer camp.“Teenage girls are fascinating. They are these little engines of chaos,” said Robinson, who created the MTV series “Sweet/Vicious” and co-wrote “Thor: Love and Thunder.” She added, “High school in and of itself is its own stage and the perfect way to tell these types of twisty, turny stories.”She found her leads in the “Riverdale” star Camila Mendes and the “Stranger Things” actress Maya Hawke. In supporting roles are standouts from other recent teen-centric fare, including Austin Abrams (“Euphoria”), Alisha Boe (“13 Reasons Why”), Talia Ryder (“Hello, Goodbye and Everything in Between”) and Rish Shah (“Ms. Marvel”). The assembled cast, fittingly, dubbed themselves “The Revengers.”Both Mendes, 28, and Hawke, 24, were skeptical about taking on another teen role, but Robinson’s vision and the characters’ complexities on the page convinced them this wouldn’t be a typical return to the genre.“I was like, ‘Oh, wait, this is really good and really smart. And it’s not just another high schooler. It’s the most badass, psychopath high schooler that I’ve ever read,’” Hawke said of her character, Eleanor. She’s not simply chaotic and crazy, Hawke added, “she’s a hurt person with motive.”Camila Mendes, left, and Hawke were both wary of playing another teenage character but signed on after reading the script. “I was like, ‘Oh, wait, this is really good and really smart,’” Hawke said.Kim Simms/NetflixMendes, who plays Drea, echoed her: “You get this note so much in Hollywood that’s always like, ‘We don’t want her to be too unlikable. She’s got to be likable.’ And then what ends up happening is you get these really one-dimensional female characters. Drea is not that.”While a leaked Snapchat serves as the MacGuffin and texting is pervasive, the director, along with the production designer Hillary Gurtler and the costume designer Alana Morshead, didn’t try to force too many Gen Z-specific trends. Instead the three millennial women tried to create a vibrant “girl world” that blended the past and the present in a colorful way.“Between Gen Z and millennials, you’ve got an incredibly smart audience, visually attuned more than any other previously,” Gurtler said. “So instead of pandering directly to somebody, it’s like, let’s build this incredible world, and their tastes and vision will meet it.”Morshead modeled the Rosehill prep school uniforms after those common in South Korea but reimagined them in a Miami-fied pastel palette of lavender and mint. She sourced accessories and streetwear from small labels run by women and people of color, including Miracle Eye, the Mighty Company and Muaves, and added a smattering of vintage couture where the budget allowed.But perhaps most important in crafting the film’s overall feel, Robinson said, was the music. To achieve a no-skips CD experience like the movie soundtracks she loved as a teenager, Robinson opted for hits by Hole, Meredith Brooks and Fatboy Slim alongside newer needle drops from Olivia Rodrigo, Muna and Caroline Polachek. She hired Este Haim and Amanda Yamate to create an original, neo-noir-tinged score, and enlisted the music supervisor Robert Lowry to pull it all together.“I didn’t really care about them being the most recognizable songs. I wanted them to elicit a feeling in you,” Robinson said. “It was less about the name-iness of the artists or the songs, and it was way more about, does the song bring you back to a time?”Visual nostalgia is likewise key. Teens play croquet on a lawn à la “Heathers.” The popular kids perch on a fountain just as they did in “Scream.” There’s a “10 Things”-inspired paintball date. Eleanor drives a vintage luxury car in a nod to Sebastian’s prized possession in “Cruel Intentions.” And to explicitly tie up the connection between “Do Revenge” and ’90s pop culture, Robinson cast Sarah Michelle Gellar in a small but satisfying role as Rosehill’s headmaster, virtually the only adult character.The costume designs used a Miami-inspired palette of pastels. Kim Simms/NetflixYet, unlike the homogeneity of many high school films of the past, the filmmakers wanted “Do Revenge” to more broadly reflect the youth of today. It centers the stories of Latina and queer teens and, aspirationally, doesn’t allow characters to hurl insults about physical appearance or sexuality. These girls might dub someone a “human Birkenstock” but never a “full-on Monet,” a shift Robinson said she felt a “responsibility” to convey.“We tried to root it all in character, rather than appearance or identity,” Robinson said. “You can be biting. You can be satirical. But those surface-level jabs, those types of mean comments, I hope that they just go away. They’re so boring. If you’re going to be mean, be smart.”Here, the popular bad boy is a nail-polish-wearing, earring-adorned trust fund kid whose androgynous style was partly inspired by that of Harry Styles. “I liked updating that from the mean guys in those ’90s movies we’d seen before,” the costume designer Morshead said. “He doesn’t have to be the stereotypical, brooding jock.”Max’s villainous nature hides behind performative ally-ship — he starts a school club called the Cis Hetero Men Championing Female Identifying Students League — and faux feminist gestures.“I know so many people like that in Hollywood,” Mendes said. “There’s definitely this ongoing joke with me and my female actress friends where we talk about how there are so many Maxes in Hollywood, it’s insane. They’re adored by the public, but all the people in the industry know what they’re capable of, and it can be incredibly frustrating.”In fact, in “Do Revenge” no one is what they seem on the surface. The lines between good and evil characters are blurred, and many who do terrible things find their way to accountability and redemption by the film’s end.“I think that cancel culture is stunting people’s want and ability to actually grow past the wrongs that they’ve committed,” Robinson said. “This whole film is about saying, ‘Yeah, you did some bad stuff. You made some bad choices, but every day is a day where you can become better if you want to turn the corner.’” More

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      Irene Papas, Actress in ‘Zorba the Greek’ and Greek Tragedies, Dies at 96

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      She was best known for commanding movie roles in the 1960s but received the greatest plaudits for playing heroines of the ancient stage.Irene Papas, a Greek actress who starred in films like “Z,” “Zorba the Greek” and “The Guns of Navarone” but won the greatest acclaim of her career playing the heroines of Greek tragedy, died on Wednesday. She was 96.The death was confirmed by a spokesman for the Greek Culture Ministry in an email. He did not know the cause of death, but in 2018, it was announced that Ms. Papas had been living with Alzheimer’s disease for five years.Ms. Papas was best known by American moviegoers for her intensely serious and sultry-strong roles in the 1960s. In “The Guns of Navarone” (1961), filmed partly on the island of Rhodes, she played a World War II resistance fighter who dared to do what a team of Allied saboteurs (among them Gregory Peck, David Niven and Anthony Quinn) would not: shoot an unarmed woman because she was a traitor.In “Zorba the Greek” (1964), with Mr. Quinn, she was a Greek widow who is stoned by her fellow villagers because of her choice of lover. In Costa-Gavras’s Oscar-winning political thriller “Z” (1969), set in the Greek city of Thessaloniki, she played Yves Montand’s widow, who evoked the film’s meaning with one final grief-ridden look out to sea.But in the same decade, she was making her name in Greek film versions of classical plays, often directed by her countryman Michael Cacoyannis, who also directed “Zorba.” She played the title characters in “Antigone” (1961), Sophocles’s tale of a woman who pays dearly after fighting for her brother’s right to an honorable burial; and in “Electra” (1962), in which she and her brother plot matricide. She was also Electra’s mother, Clytemnestra, in “Iphigenia” (1977), the drama of a daughter offered as human sacrifice.In 1971, she received the National Board of Review’s best actress award for her role as Helen of Troy in “The Trojan Women.” Her co-stars were Katharine Hepburn and Vanessa Redgrave.Ms. Papas was born Eirini Lelekou on Sept. 3, 1926, in Chiliomodi, Greece, a small village near Corinth, and grew up in Athens. She was one of four daughters of two schoolteachers and entered drama school at age 12. By the time she was 18, she had already played both Electra and Lady Macbeth. But her first professional stage role, in 1948, was as a party-hopping society girl in a musical.She made her film debut the same year, in Nikos Tsiforos’s drama “Hamenoi Angeloi” (“Fallen Angels”), and appeared in 14 films during the 1950s — some American, some European — before her breakout role in “The Guns of Navarone.”Ms. Papas with James Darren, center, and Anthony Quinn in “The Guns of Navarone” (1961). Everett CollectionThe director Elia Kazan is often credited with discovering Ms. Papas. On a 1954 trip to the United States, she read a scene from “The Country Girl” for him. The following year, she was given a seven-year contract by MGM, although she made only one film under it: “Tribute to a Bad Man” (1956), a western starring James Cagney.Ms. Papas’s other films included “Bouboulina” (1959), in which she played an 18th-century Greek revolutionary heroine; “The Brotherhood” (1968), as a Mafia wife (to Kirk Douglas); “Anne of the Thousand Days” (1969), as the discarded Catherine of Aragon opposite Richard Burton’s Henry VIII; and “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” (1987), based on the novel by Gabriel García Márquez.The Greek tragedies were the focus of her New York stage career as well. She made her Broadway debut in 1967 in “That Summer — That Fall,” based on “Phèdre,” playing a passionate second wife in love with her stepson (Jon Voight), but the production closed after only 12 performances. The following year, she was Clytemnestra in a Circle in the Square production of “Iphigenia in Aulis.” She returned to Circle in the Square as the title character, a woman who kills her own children, in “Medea” (1973) and as Agave, who mistakenly kills her own son during an orgy of drugs, drink and violence, in “The Bacchae” (1980).She was also a singer. She made two albums of Greek folk songs and hymns, “Odes” (1979) and “Rapsodies” (1986), and created something of a scandal with vocals that were condemned by some as lewd on “666,” the 1971 album by the rock group Aphrodite’s Child.Ms. Papas had strong political feelings about her country and made them public. In 1967, she risked her citizenship by calling for a “cultural boycott” of Greece after a military junta took control, saying “Nazism is back in Greece” and describing the country’s new leaders as “no more than a band of blackmailers.” Although Ms. Papas spoke in interviews about a desire to give up acting and a regrettable tendency to be too obedient to directors, she continued film acting well into her 70s. Her final screen appearances included “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” (2001), in which she played Drosoula, the formidable mother of Mandras (Christian Bale), and “Um Filme Falado” (“A Talking Picture”), Manoel de Oliveira’s 2003 meditation on civilization, in which she portrayed a privileged actress sailing the Mediterranean.She married Alkis Papas, a director and actor, in 1947, and they divorced four years later. A brief 1957 marriage to José Kohn, a producer, was annulled. She never married again.She is survived by her nephews, the spokesman for the Greek Culture Ministry said.Having played all those characters from ancient Greece, Ms. Papas had a worldview that took thousands of years of history and philosophy into account. “Plato made the first mistake,” she told Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times in 1969, lamenting an unnecessary delay in the scientific revolution. “He began to talk about the soul and morality, and he prevented the Epicureans from searching the nature of man.” More

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      ‘Gameboys: The Movie’ Review: An Online Relationship Gets Real

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      This spinoff film from a web series deals with how a young couple handles the highs and lows of a relationship during the pandemic.In “Gameboys: The Movie,” the consequences and uncertainties of the pandemic are the star of the show.Before this feature-length spinoff, the Filipino web series “Gameboys” (later shown on Netflix) used the boys’ love genre — made popular in manga — to confront how the pandemic was taking a toll on relationships. The show introduced audiences to the livestream gamer Cairo (Elijah Canlas) and one of his fans, Gavreel (Kokoy De Santos), with the two finding one another during Luzon’s lockdown and, amid intense isolation, interfacing online. With the film, their relationship moves from the virtual to the in-person realm.And when the two move in with each other, they, like with many pandemic pairings, are forced to deal with some of the more unsavory parts of being together (too much attention, when to shower and the like). Their evolving dynamic is complicated when the quarreling quasi-lovers Terrence (Kyle Velino) and Wesley (Miggy Jimenez), and Gavreel’s conservative Aunt Susan (Angie Castrenc), crash their pandemic home.“Gameboys: The Movie,” directed by Ivan Andrew Payawal and written by Ash M. Malanum, does not take the comic situation and run with it. Instead, it leads with a teen soap tone, and despite billing itself as a film, feels structurally more like a string of episodes smashed together. It toggles between a desktop movie (like the horror film “Unfriended”), with characters on FaceTime or livestreaming, and a straightforward one. But it is at its best when it lets harsh reality — particularly the sacrifices people who love each other have to make — disrupt its more predictable and adolescent impulses.Gameboys: The MovieNot rated. In Tagalog and Filipino, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More