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      ‘The 355’ Review: Exile in Bondville

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      Jessica Chastain, Penélope Cruz, Lupita Nyong’o, Diane Kruger and Fan Bingbing star in an espionage thriller that’s slick but banal.Two centuries before James Bond 007, there was Agent 355, a lady spy on George Washington’s side during the American Revolutionary War who helped identify the turncoat Benedict Arnold. Her name was hidden from history, but her code number has been claimed by this slick and grim espionage flick that aspires to become an all-star, all-female franchise — the Spice Girls version of Bond. Jessica Chastain, a producer and star of the movie, even used Twitter to crowdsource casting suggestions for a “#BondBoy.”Why not? But we’re going to need a better plot than one built around a bunch of heroes and terrorists chasing after yet another doomsday gizmo. Chastain’s Mace Browne, a C.I.A. workaholic repulsed by romantic commitment, is hellbent on securing a one-of-a-kind cyber-whatsit able to hack into and hijack any computer-controlled device on the planet, from a power grid to a plane. This device could start World War III, Mace warns an MI6 computer whiz, Khadijah (Lupita Nyong’o), in a rusty clunker of a line that warns the audience that the only novelty in Simon Kinberg’s thriller is the cast. It doesn’t take a super sleuth to fill in the rest. There will be lectures on teamwork, confessions squeezed out “the easy way or the hard way” and speeches about the invisible front lines of modern warfare, all rote hubbub building toward a blowout gun battle that makes sure to set aside a bad boyfriend for a sequel.But what a cast. Chastain and Nyong’o rumble with Diane Kruger, peer pressure Penélope Cruz and are struck dumb by Fan Bingbing, who saunters in halfway through to shake things up. Individually, the women represent the differing national security interests of the United States, England, Germany, Colombia and China; their pitiful male colleagues, however — the lovesick partner (Sebastian Stan) who uses a sting operation to make Mace playact as his fiancée, the distrustful boss (Sylvester Groth) who diagnoses Kruger’s near-feral street fighter with daddy issues — make a case for the women to form a feminist Brawlers Without Borders.Kinberg and Theresa Rebeck’s screenplay races through five continents, and as many betrayals and switcheroos. (The cinematographer, Tim Maurice-Jones, seems most inspired by Shanghai’s iridescent neon blues.) The filmmaking deserves credit for refusing to leer as the ladies convincingly kick and punch — all focus is on the stunts, not on sex appeal.Yet there’s a sense that “The 355” felt forced to pick between being sincere or being fun. It chose solemnity. As a result, it’s flat-footed even when the setups yearn to be playful. Viewers are not invited to giggle when a pursuit detours into a men-only bathhouse, or at a surreal moment in an undercover sequence when Chastain rips off her red wig disguise to reveal … her own identical red hair. The drums thunder as though they’re dead-serious about proving that women can make an expensive adventure that’s every bit as banal as the ones that boys crank out every month with basically the same plot. At least Cruz is allowed to get a laugh in a scene where her married soccer mom learns to flirt with a patsy. The twinkle in her eyes looks just like Sean Connery’s seductive gleam.The 355Rated PG-13 for copious male corpses. Running time: 2 hours 4 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘See for Me’ Review: Steal Away

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      A young blind woman is menaced by a crew of robbers in this forgettable thriller.Ever since Audrey Hepburn tiptoed around three home-invading thugs in “Wait Until Dark” (1967), the blind-person-in-peril narrative has been something of an entertainment staple. And while Randall Okita’s “See For Me” offers the novelty of a disabled character who is rather less than morally upstanding, this uninvolving thriller is as lacking in tension as credibility.Consider, for instance, the police response time to the 911 call made by Sophie (Skyler Davenport), a young blind woman whose cushy house-sitting gig in upstate New York is interrupted by three robbers. By the time law enforcement shows up, most thieves could have cleaned out the property, staged it and put it on the market. Even if we forgive the movie’s pacing hiccups, we’re still left with a surprisingly unsympathetic main character — a snippy skiing champ turned petty crook in response to a degenerative eye disease — and a location so poorly lighted that its layout remains frustratingly unclear.The plot’s coolest trick is to have Sophie fight back by means of an app that connects the visually impaired with sighted volunteers. Guided by one of these assistants — an Army veteran (played by Jessica Parker Kennedy) who just happens to be a whiz at first-person-shooter video games — Sophie takes on the intruders in generic cat-and-mouse setups squintingly illuminated by her cellphone flashlight.Though Adam Yorke and Tommy Gushue’s script highlights the character’s — and the actor’s — exceptional capabilities (Davenport is legally blind), it lacks the imagination to explore Sophie’s scheming nature. Had it done so, I might still have disliked her, but I would have been more inclined to root for her.See for MeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 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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      ‘A Hero’ Review: Debts No Honest Man Can Pay

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      In the latest film from the two-time Oscar winner Asghar Farhadi, a good Samaritan comes under suspicion.“The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason.” “A Hero,” the new film by the Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi, seems to circle around these lines from T.S. Eliot’s “Murder in the Cathedral,” spinning Eliot’s observation about morality into a squall of questions about ethics and motives.At the center of the movie is what looks like an unambiguous act of decency. A man — the title character, a sign painter named Rahim Soltani (Amir Jadidi) — arranges for the return of 17 gold coins to their rightful owner. What could be wrong with that? What could go wrong as a consequence?Quite a lot, as it happens. Nothing in this stressful, intricately plotted fable of modern life is as simple as we or the characters might wish. Rahim, who has been imprisoned because of a debt, wants to clear the books and restart his life. We meet him at the beginning of a hectic two-day furlough, as he bounces from one encounter to another, hoping to secure his freedom by settling with his creditor, Hossein (Ali Reza Jahandideh), a print-shop owner who is the brother-in-law of Rahim’s former wife.The entwining of family ties and business relations is a central fact of Iranian life as Farhadi understands it. When love, honor and loyalty are at issue, money is never far away. To paraphrase Homer Simpson on the subject of alcohol, it’s the cause of and the solution to most of life’s problems.Rahim’s ex, who remains unseen, is preparing to remarry, and Rahim hopes to do the same. Their son, Siavash (Saleh Karimai), who has a severe speech impediment, lives with Rahim’s sister Malileh (Maryam Shahdaie) and her husband, Bahram, who are Rahim’s main allies. His girlfriend, Farkhondeh (Sahar Goldoust), is the one who found the gold coins, and the couple’s initial plan is to sell them to pay off enough of the debt to satisfy Hossein.Plan B — finding the rightful owner — is Rahim’s idea, and whether it’s an impulsive, impatient act of conscience or something more calculated is a source of much complication and suspense. What feels like a Hollywood ending arrives in the middle of the movie, as Rahim’s selflessness is rewarded with exactly what he has given up.The return of the coins becomes a news story and a social media sensation, the kind of feel-good episode that nobody can resist. The prison authorities are happy to exploit Rahim’s heroism for their own purposes, as is a charitable foundation that presents him with a plaque and the promise of a job. Donations flow in, and pressure grows on Hossein to let bygones be bygones.Why wouldn’t he? Rahim is tall and handsome, with an eager smile and an ingratiating manner. But Hossein isn’t alone in resisting his charm. A fellow inmate sneeringly compliments Rahim on his skill at fooling everyone. Farkhondeh’s grumpy brother thinks he’s a loser. A potential employer insists on pulling at loose threads in the story of the coins, demanding proof of every detail and treating what look like minor fibs as evidence of a larger fraud.Are they? The more time you spend with Rahim, the more you wonder if the skeptics — who at first seem bureaucratic, coldhearted or vindictive — might have a point. Do his occasional outbursts bespeak a violent temperament? Does his hangdog demeanor cover up an essential dishonesty? Or is he just, as he claims to be, a good guy who can’t seem to catch a break?Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      ‘Expedition Content’ Review: Anthropological Maneuvers in the Dark

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      An engrossing documentary looks back at a 1961 expedition to New Guinea and the creation of the landmark ethnographic film that resulted.“But what to do with your eyes?” — this ridiculous question popped into my head early while watching “Expedition Content,” though watching doesn’t entirely describe what I was doing. I was listening, a lot. That’s because for most of its 78 minutes, this startling and fascinating experimental documentary shows you only a black screen. Every so often, a shock of slate-y, steely blue fills the frame, followed by text. Late in the work, there is a cut to a brief scene that was shot from inside a cave. There, silhouetted figures carrying torches move about, faintly illuminated by light from the mouth of the cave.The genesis of this project is 37 hours of audio, recorded in what was then called Netherlands New Guinea (the western half of New Guinea). The tapes were made by Michael C. Rockefeller for “Dead Birds” (1964), a milestone in ethnographic cinema directed by Robert Gardner, which focuses on the Dani (also known as the Hubula), tribal people living in the Baliem Valley. The Dani were apparently unknown to westerners until 1938, when an American researcher and adventurer spotted them from a plane. Two decades later, Gardner heard about “an obscure New Guinea tribe” that engaged in elaborate ritual warfare.By that point, Gardner, a filmmaker and anthropologist (he died in 2014), had established the Film Study Center at Harvard College. He had made several shorts of his own and worked on John Marshall’s “The Hunters,” a documentary feature about hunter-gatherers in the Kalahari Desert. Fortified with that experience, Gardner set about finding a new film to make. Part of what drew him to the New Guinea tribe, he later wrote, was the thought that he could “carefully document a small part of the still accessible and fully functioning Indigenous life.” The internet did not yet exist; the world was much larger, its people far less known.Gardner was aware of the region’s geopolitical turmoil and the fight for control over the western half of the island of New Guinea. Indonesia had declared its independence from the Netherlands in 1945, and in the years since had been trying to wrest western New Guinea from the Dutch. (Papua New Guinea comprises the island’s east half.) The dispute involved assorted international Cold War parties, including the United States, which in 1958 provided covert military aid to Indonesian anti-Communist rebels. By the time that Gardner’s team arrived in New Guinea, in 1961, Indonesia’s President Sukarno had threatened military and economic intervention in west New Guinea, including the expropriation of Dutch capital.“Expedition Content” engages with that history but provides comparatively little concrete information. Instead, its creators, Ernst Karel and Veronika Kusumaryati — the credits note that it was “composed by” them — let the audio speak for itself, as it were, an optimistic approach that assumes viewers have both a firm grasp on Indonesian history (not so much, in my case) and an appreciation of cinematic experimentation (way more). Those assumptions are immediately tested when, soon after the title flashes onscreen, the movie cuts to all black and the sounds of unidentified men speaking in English.“Everything is blue, there’s no filter,” says one man. He adds that the “key note” of the film’s photography is to achieve naturalism, asking if “Bob” agrees. “Not exactly,” says a man I assumed was Gardner, who answers in the same deep voice that narrates “Dead Birds.”Six minutes later, Karel and Kusumaryati sketch in some background with text, including the year, the names and professions of the expedition’s participants and the works that resulted from this venture. The composers also list some facts about the Rockefeller family, starting with a 1935 agreement between Standard Oil — which was founded by Michael’s great-grandfather, John D. Rockefeller — and Royal Dutch Shell to explore oil in New Guinea. Among the other details listed is Michael’s disappearance and presumed death in New Guinea in late 1961. This brief family bio ends with a reference to Michael’s father, Nelson A. Rockefeller, “who ordered the police assault on the Attica prison uprising.”The Attica detail feels like a provocation, partly because it leaves you wondering what exactly Attica has to do with a 1961 expedition across the globe or why the histories of the other participants aren’t included. Be patient! As it turns out, these snippets of text are bread crumbs that help lead you — gradually, elliptically — down the movie’s darkly lit path. That journey is surprisingly engaging, though I admittedly needed to chill out, get into the movie’s groove and just drift along on the soundscape as I looked around the screening room, closed my eyes (briefly) and so on. The audio includes Michael Rockefeller’s time stamps, descriptions (“sounds of nature”) and bumbling with the equipment, as well as the beautiful music made by animals whirring, chirping and buzzing and the Dani people’s singing and chanting.The Dani also talk, murmur and yell, but not everything they say is translated, which is another provocation. The expedition participants speak in English and almost everything they say is understandable, at least if you speak the language. Whether this means that you, as an English speaker, are aligned or even implicated in the expedition is a question the movie presents without answering. Certainly, for those who don’t speak Dani it is frustrating not to know what they’re saying, which is presumably to the movie’s point and the questions it raises about anthropology. By narrating “Dead Birds,” for instance, Gardner didn’t simply speak for the Dani: He translated them for his viewers and the greater world.The problem of translation — who speaks for whom and why — echoes through “Expedition Content,” which builds to a shattering climax during a long, boozy revel in which the expedition men joke and laugh. They’re celebrating, cutting loose. And then they start talking about jazz, and their talk grows progressively squirm-inducing, upsetting, ugly. Whether the conversation serves as an indictment of Gardner’s project and, by extension, the white ethnographic gaze, is left open. I found it heartbreaking, and instructive. I still love “Dead Birds” but when I reread Gardner on its making, I also lingered over his observation that anthropology could reveal “the meaning of one’s own life as well as, or even better than, the meaning of the lives of ‘others.’”Expedition ContentNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 18 minutes. In theaters. More

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      The Oscars Want Crowd-Pleasers, but Where Are the Crowds?

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      As contenders like “West Side Story” and “Belfast” struggle for audiences, can a blockbuster like “Spider-Man: No Way Home” swing into the Oscar race?After last year’s Oscar ceremony honored a group of small, challenging movies and tanked in the ratings, you can bet that this year, the academy is eager to nominate films that audiences can get excited about. Indeed, this year’s crop of awards movies includes several old-fashioned crowd-pleasers to choose from.There’s just one problem: The crowds are remaining stubbornly hypothetical.Just look at “Belfast.” The Kenneth Branagh-directed family drama, considered a top best-picture contender, has petered out with a domestic box office gross under $7 million. Best-picture winners usually hail from far more successful stock: Among recent winners, only last year’s “Nomadland” made less, and it was released at a time when vaccines were scarce and theaters were just barely beginning to reopen.“King Richard” hasn’t fared much better: Though it was released simultaneously on HBO Max, you’d still expect stronger box office results for an inspirational drama that stars Will Smith as the father of the tennis legends Venus and Serena Williams. Instead, “King Richard” has made just $14.7 million in North American theaters, the lowest gross for a Smith movie in decades.And then there’s Ridley Scott’s “The Last Duel,” which feels like it could have been the biggest hit of a bygone Oscar season. This medieval drama boasts huge stars (including Matt Damon, Adam Driver and Ben Affleck), weighty themes and top-tier production values. Now that it’s available on demand, not a day goes by without someone on my Twitter timeline discovering the film and announcing, “Hey, this is actually pretty good!” Maybe they’re surprised because “The Last Duel” famously bombed during its wide release in October, earning only $10.8 million domestically.Adam Driver, left, and Matt Damon in “The Last Duel,” which in a bygone era might have been the hit of Oscar season.Patrick Redmond/20th Century StudiosIt’s true that many of these Oscar contenders are aimed at older moviegoers, who have proved difficult to lure back to theaters during a prolonged pandemic. A smaller film like “Belfast” used to debut in a handful of cities, carefully building word of mouth with that core demographic as it expanded to new theaters every week. Now, distributors are so skittish about the absence of older audiences that many specialty films are shoved into hundreds of theaters right off the bat, expected to draw huge crowds from scratch.Still, the underwhelming performance of these movies can’t be blamed on older moviegoers alone. Over the past few weeks, “Spider-Man: No Way Home” has earned a staggering $621 million domestically, a total you simply can’t reach without every available demographic turning out in record numbers. If older adults are willing to go see “Spider-Man,” it becomes harder to make the argument that they can’t be wooed at all.Marvel’s rising tide, though, has not lifted any boats: Instead, every other title is drowning. Are audiences really so skittish about seeing the most acclaimed films of the year? Or have these movies simply struggled to make the case that they’re worth watching?I believe the latter issue bedeviled “West Side Story,” which seemed to have so much going for it when it debuted in December: Directed by Steven Spielberg, the movie received rapturous reviews and is adapted from one of the most famous stage musicals of all time. Though “West Side Story” was originally intended to come out last winter, Disney executives delayed this exhilarating film a full year, expecting a four-quadrant smash.They didn’t get it. “West Side Story” made just $10.5 million in its opening weekend and has struggled to reach $30 million in its first month of release. For a movie from Hollywood’s most reliable hitmaker, that is a disastrous result: You’d have to go all the way back to “Empire of the Sun” from 1987 to find a Spielberg movie that did this poorly, and that film didn’t cost north of $100 million, as “West Side Story” did.The usual suspects have come in for blame — the pandemic’s winter surge, the paucity of older moviegoers — but I lay this failure squarely at the feet of the marketing campaign, which missed crucial opportunities. The posters for this romantic musical were oddly grim, and the trailers and TV spots remained way too bashful about selling Spielberg, the movie’s biggest name. The trailers should have emphasized his iconic films like “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,” “Jurassic Park” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” positioning “West Side Story” as part of an impressive theatrical lineage: The obvious message being, “Those were events worth leaving the house for and this will be, too.”Tom Holland as Spider-Man. Will the box office success of his new film matter to Oscar voters?Sony PicturesUltimately, that may prove to be the most significant lesson of this awards season: If you can’t make your movie feel like a big event, people simply won’t go. It’s clear that the only film this winter that has really managed that feat is “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” and because its astonishing box office returns dwarf everything else in theaters, power players involved with the Marvel-Sony movie have begun making the case that it should be nominated for best picture.Does Spidey have a shot? I’m not so sure: Oscar voters have shown they’re willing to nominate a big blockbuster, but they prefer the kind of impeccably crafted tentpole that can compete in a host of categories: Think of “Black Panther,” which won Oscars for its score, production design and costumes; or “Mad Max: Fury Road,” which prevailed in just about every tech category it was nominated for. This year, “Dune” will be a major player in those below-the-line races, boosting its ultimate bid for best picture, but the flatly shot “Spider-Man: No Way Home” is more of a storytelling and scheduling feat than some sort of artistic stunner.Still, there’s no denying the movie’s huge box office success. If adult dramas continue to underperform as the pandemic sprawls into its third year, they may vanish from cinemas entirely, and the theatrical experience will simply become a high-end way to watch Marvel movies. The Oscars are supposed to forestall that sort of thing: They lend buzz to the smaller, artier films that desperately need it. But if all these nonfranchise crowd-pleasers can’t manage to entice people into theaters on their own, the movies have a bigger problem than just another low-rated Oscars show. More

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      These 'Spider-Man' Villains Return in 'No Way Home'

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      Willem Dafoe, Alfred Molina and Jamie Foxx talk about reprising their bad-guy roles in the blockbuster sequel.They were very good at being bad.At the dawn of the “Spider-Man” film franchise in 2002, Willem Dafoe, the acclaimed actor of movies like “Shadow of the Vampire” and “The Last Temptation of Christ,” inaugurated the superhero series with a credible, formidable villain, Norman Osborn — otherwise known as the Green Goblin.Two years later, Alfred Molina, the distinguished star of film (“Frida,” “Boogie Nights”) and theater (“Art”), donned the mechanical tentacles of the nefarious Otto Octavius — a.k.a. Doctor Octopus — for a sequel, “Spider-Man 2.”Another decade and another iteration of the franchise went by, and the mantle of eminent evildoer was passed to Jamie Foxx, an Academy Award winner for “Ray,” who played Max Dillon and his high-voltage alter ego, Electro, in “The Amazing Spider-Man 2.”Each reset — not to mention the fact that some of the characters died in their films — seemed to preclude the possibility that these actors and the bad guys they played could ever meet up in a single film.But that comic-book fantasy became cinematic reality in the current blockbuster “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” in which an errant spell cast by Doctor Strange brings Osborn, Octavius and Dillon into a dimension where Tom Holland wears the Spidey suit. (Oh yeah, the movie also unites Holland and his “Spider-Man” predecessors, Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield — blah, blah, blah.)For Dafoe, Molina and Foxx, “No Way Home” allowed them to share (or steal) trade secrets. The movie also gave their bad guys the opportunity to try out being good guys: as Molina explained, “All the villains got a chance to not just redeem ourselves but find a deeper, more nuanced level to fill out our characters and make them richer.”In individual interviews, the actors talked about being recruited to the “Spider-Man” franchise, returning for “No Way Home,” and the process and pleasures of doing their dirty deeds. These are edited excerpts from those conversations.What do you remember about first being offered your role in the “Spider-Man” series? What was different about superhero movies at the time?WILLEM DAFOE They offered the Goblin/Norman Osborn part to many people before they arrived at me. I was shooting a film in Spain [“The Reckoning”], and they sent the casting director to Spain and we shot a little audition in my hotel room. It wasn’t business as usual. But it was something I was very interested in doing, and I had a good feeling for Sam Raimi [who directed the original “Spider-Man” movies]. Of course, some people, at that point, thought it was very strange to make a film out of a comic. But I saw there could be a great pleasure and a great adventure in it, so I pursued it.The Green Goblin — and that mask — in the first “Spider-Man.”Sony PicturesALFRED MOLINA These movies have become very specific and almost forensic in the way they’re made. They have to appeal to all kinds of quadrants. On Sam Raimi’s film, I found the best way to handle the enormity of the event was to remember that as an actor, you’re a small cog in a much, much larger machine. You don’t spend a great deal of time exploring character or motivations, particularly if you’re playing a villain. But for me, that’s part of the joy of it — of turning a moment into, hopefully, a fun piece of storytelling.Explore the Marvel Cinematic UniverseThe popular franchise of superhero films and television series continues to expand. ‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’: The web slinger is back with the latest installment of the “Spider-Man” series.‘Hawkeye’: Jeremy Renner returns to the role of Clint Barton, the wisecracking marksman of the Avengers, in the Disney+ mini-series.‘Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings’: The superhero originated in comics filled with racist stereotypes. The movie knocked them down.‘Eternals’: The two-and-a-half-hour epic introduces nearly a dozen new characters, hopping back and forth through time.JAMIE FOXX All I can tell you is that my kids finally thought I was cool. “OK, we get all that other stuff you’ve been doing. But what? You’re going to go where? Are you kidding me?” They just loved Andrew Garfield. I was so jazzed to be able to be a kid myself. Watching the “Spider-Man” television show, back in the day, when his web was like a shoestring or whatever, and then to be part of this huge, huge world, it was just mind-blowing.After your movies, did you ever feel pangs of disappointment to see the “Spider-Man” franchise continue without you?DAFOE Even in the second and third installments [of the Raimi films], having me do little cameos, it was a pleasure to just see everyone again and stick my toe in the pool. But I didn’t have the imagination of continuing on.MOLINA I just walked away from my movie thinking, well, that was fun. I really had a great time. But I never thought, oh God, I wish they’d bring him back. I never had any kind of hankering to do it again. When your character dies, you go, that’s it.FOXX You can never look at it that way. If you look at the disappointments of what could have been, you can never do this business.How were you approached about “No Way Home,” and how much did you know about the other actors who were participating in it?DAFOE When Amy Pascal [a “Spider-Man” producer] and Jon Watts [the director of “No Way Home”] called me up and said we’d like to pitch you this idea, I thought, this is crazy. But let’s see what they have to say. I really didn’t want to do a cameo. I wanted to make sure there was something substantial enough to do that wasn’t just a tip of the hat. And the other thing was, I said I really want there to be action — I want to take part in action scenes. Because that’s really fun for me. It’s the only way to root the character. Otherwise it just becomes a series of memes.MOLINA When I got asked to come in for a meeting with Amy and Jon, I actually thought it was for a completely different project, maybe to play another villain, or maybe an interview for some retrospective documentary. As the years had gone by, I thought, they may well bring Doc Ock back. But I never thought they’d bring him back with me. I was witness to my body changing, things moving. I walked in completely innocent. Like everyone else, I didn’t know the full extent of where the film was going. I didn’t get to read a whole script — I just saw the pages pertinent to me.Molina opposed Tobey Maguire as our hero in “Spider-Man 2.”Melissa Moseley/Sony PicturesFOXX They were able to keep the mystique alive in a world where mystique doesn’t exist, anywhere. There’s Instagram posts and it’s about how many likes you get. Imagine if Picasso was screenshotting everything, everybody could see it, like, “Eh, I don’t want to buy that painting.” They kept everything under wraps and we all bought into something.Did anything change about how you played your characters in the new film?DAFOE I must be honest, I am aware that there was some criticism of that [Green Goblin] mask in the original one. We heard it enough that it was probably a consideration, to change it up a little bit. I don’t think about that because I don’t think about emoting with my face. My face follows my heart. It’s just an expression of what you’re feeling.MOLINA In my original film, the tentacles — I almost said my tentacles — they were mechanical. They were played by puppeteers who gave them personality. We were like a gang — I dubbed us the Octourage. But this time around, the technology is so much more advanced that the tentacles were computer-generated and I was on my own. That was a whole other way of looking at it.FOXX There was a character I played in “Baby Driver,” his name was Bats. He got killed off, but this was an opportunity to let Bats a little bit in on Electro. He wasn’t like, I want to [expletive] everybody up — I just want to get mine. Everybody flying through the air, looking good, got girlfriends. That now becomes the mantra of Electro.Had you previously met the actors who play your fellow villains? What was it like encountering them on “No Way Home”?DAFOE [Alfred and I] started at about the same time, so I was aware of his work and I’d see him through the years, so it was fun to see him and hear his stories. He’s got a million of them. And it was really fun to work with Jamie, because I’ve loved him ever since “In Living Color.” He’s a supremely sweet and energetic guy.MOLINA Willem and I met each other briefly on the set of Sam’s movie. They brought me to watch Willem doing a scene as Doc Ock, just a little practical joke, which was delightful. For me, Green Goblin is the absolute zenith of supervillains, and he plays him with such relish. For my money, he’s the top man.FOXX Alfred is the funniest guy on the planet. But then, the first time I saw Willem, I said, I’ve got to bow seven times, bro. He said, [bashful Willem Dafoe voice] “Ah, Jamie, you’re so nice, thank you so much, Jamie.” I said, no, bro, you’re going to get these seven bows. I would just watch these guys work and even small things that they would do, I’d say, ooh, I’mma steal that.Foxx in his first go-round as Electro, in “The Amazing Spider-Man 2.” 2014Sony PicturesYour characters in “No Way Home” each have ample opportunity to be very bad and the chance to turn good. Which side do you prefer?DAFOE Whenever you play a role, it is you and it isn’t you. If you’re going to play one of these archvillains, it’s the most natural thing in the world to cultivate the opposite of what they lead with. You develop a vulnerability and an insecurity against the confidence of the aggression. We all have that little devil on one shoulder and that little angel on the other shoulder. I remember as a kid seeing cartoons with that image. God knows it stayed with me.MOLINA They’re two very different things, but in a way they belong to each other. Whatever element in Doc Ock that is villainous is made more villainous in the minds of the audience because of their knowledge of his goodness. And at the same time, his return to decency is even more poignant because of what we know he’s capable of doing and has done.FOXX Oh, it’s always great to be bad, bro. What makes the superheroes super is how bad the villains can be.If any of the characters you’ve previously played could appear in the same movie, who would you want to see team up?DAFOE Once you finish something, you’ve got to make room for the next thing. So I don’t have much of an imagination for that kind of thing. Maybe I’m a little simpler. One at a time, one at a time.MOLINA Just off the top of my head, I think it might be cool if Doc Ock met up with Diego Rivera [from “Frida”] and lent him the tentacles so he could finish off all those glorious murals. He could get so much work done. He could be working on four or five canvases at the same time.FOXX Oh, man, Django [from “Django Unchained”], Willie Beamen [from “Any Given Sunday”] and Electro would be crazy. If they could share, they’d be like, yo, I need a little bit of that electricity over here. More

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      They Screamed, We Screamed. Now They’re in ‘Scream’ Again.

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      After more than a decade, Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox and David Arquette return to take a new stab at the meta-horror franchise. They didn’t jump in right away.Twenty-five years after “Scream,” Neve Campbell is still seeing Ghostface everywhere she goes.This past Halloween, Campbell brought her children to a pumpkin patch in Hollywood, where they saw fellow visitors dressed in the groaning Ghostface masks worn by the murderers who have tormented her character in these undying horror movies.Though the costumed revelers didn’t seem to notice Campbell, she resisted her older son’s urgings to reveal that they were in the presence of Sidney Prescott, the intrepid “Scream” heroine she has played since 1996.“My 9-year-old hasn’t seen the movies, but he obviously knows about them,” Campbell said. “And he was like, ‘Mom, you should go tell them!’ I’m not going to walk over and be like, ‘Hey, do you know who I am?’” She laughed and added, “Although it probably would be fun for them.”Hearing Campbell’s tale, her two longtime “Scream” co-stars joked about how their connections to the films affected them at Halloween. Courteney Cox, who plays the strident TV personality Gale Weathers, said that she kept her own supply of Ghostface masks: “I bought five from Amazon.”David Arquette said it was even easier to remind people of his screen identity as the hapless officer Dewey Riley. “Why do you think I have this mustache?” he asked.At its release, “Scream” reinvented the slasher picture, populating it with photogenic cast members who were well-versed in the genre’s rules and tired of its clichés. It made a star of its screenwriter, Kevin Williamson, reinvigorated the career of its director, Wes Craven, and kicked off a cottage industry of imitators and parodies.The slow-burn success of the first movie elevated its lead actors: Campbell, a star of the TV drama “Party of Five”; Cox, enjoying her first flushes of success from “Friends”; and Arquette, a scion of a family of character actors. Three sequels bonded them for life, and Cox and Arquette fell in love and got married.Cox and Arquette in the first “Scream,” released in 1996.Dimension FilmsArquette and Cox found themselves with a storyline that echoed their real-life split.Brownie Harris/Paramount PicturesBut following “Scream 4” in 2011, the series seemed to grow tired. By then, Cox and Arquette had separated and would later divorce; Craven died in 2015. A “Scream” TV series only loosely connected to the movies ran for three years on MTV and VH1 but gained little cultural traction.Now, after a decade-long absence from theaters, a new “Scream” — with no numerals or subtitles, from new directors and new screenwriters — will be released on Jan. 14. It is both a reboot and a sequel, introducing new characters (played by Melissa Barrera, Jenna Ortega, Jack Quaid and others) to an audience equally accustomed to franchise do-overs like “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” and art-house horror films like “The Babadook” and “Midsommar.”The latest “Scream” also brings back Campbell, Cox and Arquette as the founding characters, who have grown well into adulthood and been altered in different ways by their past encounters with the various Ghostface killers. For the actors, the proposition of returning to “Scream” is, well, a double-edged one: a chance to rekindle old connections and remember what made the previous films great — tempered by the fear that they will squander the series’ legacy if they cannot duplicate past glories.When she was approached about the new movie, Cox said, “I was really like, What? They want to do another ‘Scream’?” But as she considered it further, she thought, “Why not go back to something that was such a huge part of my life and play a character that was fun? They must have a real vision for this if they want to bring back the franchise and take the risk.”As they spoke in a video interview at the end of November — Campbell and Cox together in one window, Arquette by himself in another — the actors shared a tentative intimacy, like old classmates encountering each other at a high school reunion. They traded goofy laughs as each claimed to have forgotten key details about the past “Scream” films and made self-deprecating jokes about their accomplishments.Asked how she was hired, Cox said her manager suggested her. Or: “It could be that my manager said, ‘She’s not that good and I don’t think you should hire her.’ But who knows?”What they agreed on about the first film was the brilliance of Williamson’s convention-busting script and their admiration for Craven, who previously made seminal horror movies like “The Last House on the Left” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street.” The cast was largely shielded from behind-the-scenes conflicts between him and Dimension Films, which produced the original “Scream” series and had reservations about Craven’s work on the first movie. Campbell said of the director, “He was very gentle and kind and quiet.”Jenna Ortega is among the new cast members trying to escape Ghostface.Brownie Harris/Paramount Pictures“Scream” withstood a fourth-place opening weekend in December 1996, overshadowed by the animated hit “Beavis and Butt-head Do America.” Several days later, Campbell got a call from her agents. “I thought, Uh-oh, something’s wrong,” she recalled. “And they said, ‘It’s at $30 million.’” Her voice dropped to a whisper: “I was like, ‘Is that bad?’” In fact, the film would run until the summer and gross more than $100 million in the United States alone.A sequel was already in production and released in December 1997. (“It was college next, wasn’t it?” Campbell asked. “You went to college,” Arquette affirmed.) “Scream 3” followed quickly in 2000, adding more layers of metacommentary as the characters’ brushes with death continue to inspire a hastily made movie-franchise-within-a-franchise called “Stab.”With each entry, the “Scream” stars said, they never felt the pressure was on them to sustain the overall quality of the series. “In television, when I go out and do something new, it’s petrifying,” Cox said. “You feel nothing can live up to what you’ve done before. But in movies, we get the script and come to play our characters.”But Williamson said that “Scream 4” left him and Craven feeling burned out. “The studio was second-guessing themselves and kept giving note after note after note,” the writer said. “I finally was like, ‘Guys, I don’t know what I’m writing anymore — I’m just typing.’”After Craven’s death, he said, “in my heart, it was over. Without Wes, I didn’t think there would be a ‘Scream.’”Years went by, and the Weinstein Company, which owned Dimension Films, collapsed after its co-founder Harvey Weinstein was accused of sexual assault and harassment by numerous women. (He has since been convicted and sentenced for sex crimes and faces further charges.)The rights for “Scream” were eventually acquired by Spyglass Media Group, which partnered with Paramount to produce a new entry written by James Vanderbilt (“Zodiac”) and Guy Busick (“Ready or Not”) and directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett of the filmmaking group Radio Silence (“Ready or Not,” “V/H/S”).Williamson, an executive producer on the new “Scream,” said that the project had his blessing. “My first thought was, Wait, they’re not going to ask me to write it? How dare they,” he said with a laugh. But after hearing the creative team’s plans for the film, he said, “They had it all figured out. I’m like, ‘OK, this works.’”Naturally, this “Scream” sees another Ghostface once again plaguing the fictional California town of Woodsboro, requiring the return of Sidney, Gale and Dewey. But bringing back the actors who played them was hardly a certainty.The biggest obstacle, they said, was the absence of Craven: “I don’t see how that happens — emotionally but also practically,” said Campbell. “Who’s going to do it as well as Wes?”But one by one, the actors were placated by the film’s directors, who wrote them letters praising their past work and urging their involvement.Campbell in the original “Scream,” directed by Wes Craven. She and her fellow stars had a hard time imagining another movie without the filmmaker, who died in 2015.Dimension FilmsCampbell in the new “Scream.” She consulted with the original screenwriter, Kevin Williamson, before agreeing to return.Brownie Harris/Paramount Pictures“It was weirdly the easiest and the hardest thing to do,” Gillett said. “It’s so easy to express our admiration for them as actors and for Wes and his work.” The challenge, he said, was that “there was a lot on the line and a lot of pressure.”Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      ‘American Gadfly’ Review: A Candid Candidacy

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      This documentary goes behind the scenes of Mike Gravel’s oddball run for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.A victory lap for a campaign that never sought to win, the documentary “American Gadfly” goes a long way toward explaining Mike Gravel’s perplexing run for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.Gravel, the former two-term Alaska senator who pursued the 2008 nomination in earnest, and who died last year at 91, merely tried to qualify for the 2020 cycle’s debates. His run, which lasted for four months in 2019, was mainly the brainchild of two teenagers, David Oks and Henry Williams, who saw Gravel as a storied figure who wouldn’t prevail but could raise hell and push the political discussion leftward. Gravel sat on the sidelines and handed over his Twitter account.“My real end goal has always been to have Bernie Sanders pick up our platform plank,” Williams says at a staff meeting in the movie. Later in the film, in June 2019, Williams says he hopes half the candidates, “possibly including us,” will soon drop out, so that voters can vet contenders with a chance. Casting Tim Ryan, Bill de Blasio and John Delaney as villains — while somewhat incongruously praising Marianne Williamson, who aided Gravel’s fund-raising efforts — the movie suggests that Gravel had more substance than better-publicized long shots.The director, Skye Wallin, presents the correctness of Oks and Williams’s cause as a given. If you can get past that ingenuousness, “American Gadfly” is enjoyable as a chronicle of teenage idealism and its frustrations. (In Iowa, Oks bemoans the inefficiency of meeting and greeting voters.) Gravel, in his appearances, comes across as avuncular, eager to share ideas but even more eager to encourage young acolytes.American GadflyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More