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      ‘The Ballad of Wallis Island’ Had a Long Journey Back to the Big Screen

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      Almost two decades ago a pair of fresh-faced British sketch comedians armed with a good idea and an able director with a cache of film stock made a charming short film called “The One and Only Herb McGwyer Plays Wallis Island.” The 25-minute outing won a prize at the 2008 Edinburgh Film Festival, was nominated for a BAFTA and announced the arrival of Tim Key and Tom Basden. The two spent the intervening years turning their penchant for absurdist humor into sketch comedy shows, radio episodes, stand up poetry tours and sidekick roles in film and television.But they never returned to Wallis island.Until now. Older, grayer and maybe a little wiser, the friends, onetime roommates and longtime collaborators have expanded their initial concept into a feature film, “The Ballad of Wallis Island.” The film, which ruminates on love and loss, revolves around a musician who is hired by a two-time lottery winner to perform a private gig on an isolated island. It feels like it could have been created only by filmmakers with a little road beneath their feet.“I don’t really regret us not making it 17 years ago, because we just might not have been able to do it right,” said Key, who wrote the script with Basden and plays the rich eccentric, Charles Heath, who prattles through conversations with a stream of nonsensical puns. “I think when we came back to it, we were more ready to make a decent fist of it.”Basden, Mulligan and Key in “The Ballad of Wallis Island.”Focus Features The original director, James Griffiths, returns, and the main conceit of the short remains: The musician, Herb McGwyer (Basden), arrives at the harborless, fictional Wallis Island (portrayed in and around Carmarthenshire, Wales) to perform a concert for his eager audience of one (Key’s Heath). To build out the story, Basden and Key introduce Nell Mortimer, played by Carey Mulligan, McGwyer’s former singing partner and lover from their short-lived duo McGwyer Mortimer. When she shows up on the island unbeknown to McGwyer — whose solo career hasn’t gone as planned — the film gains its emotional heft.“You get a window into what they were like when they were young and into the way that life has or hasn’t messed with their expectations as young people in the music industry, and as a young couple in love,” said Basden, who also wrote the songs for the film. “When you engage with that meaningfully, I think you’re always going to end up having to write about the loss, the heartbreak and the regret that goes with relationships in your 20s.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Best True Crime to Stream: 1970s and ’80s Kidnappings

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      Across television, film and podcasting, here are five stories of child abductions that shook parents across the United States.Documentary Film“Chowchilla”It took just a few minutes into this 2023 documentary for me to be dumbfounded that I had never heard about this chapter in American history, when an entire school bus of children and their driver, 27 people in total, disappeared mid-route on a hot summer day in 1976 in the small California town of Chowchilla.What unfolded from there and the motivation behind the kidnapping are beyond imagination. In fact, those responsible for the crime were inspired in part by the Clint Eastwood movie “Dirty Harry.”In this documentary, from CNN Films and streaming on Max, we hear from some of the abductees, who recall the experience in great detail. Unlike many other such stories, we learn quickly that no one died in the ordeal, but that doesn’t make the decades-long fallout less tragic.The trauma was so acute that the survivors were able to help catapult the field of child psychology forward. “Chowchilla children are heroes,” Lenore C. Terr, a child psychiatrist who has studied the victims in depth, said in the film. “And they continue to teach us what childhood trauma is.”Documentary Series“The Beauty Queen Killer: 9 Days of Terror”For this three-part 2024 docuseries from ABC News, Tina Marie Risico — who survived a nightmarish nine days with the serial killer Christopher Wilder in 1984 before he made the astonishing decision to release her — sits down to tell her story for the first time.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Clive Revill, Original Voice of Emperor Palpatine in ‘Star Wars,’ Dies at 94

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      His voice can be heard for only a minute in “The Empire Strikes Back,” but it provided the first draft of a character that would be a mainstay of the franchise for decades.It was a minute that changed the course of the “Star Wars” franchise. In “The Empire Strikes Back,” the now-celebrated 1980 sequel, audiences were treated to the first on-camera sighting of Emperor Palpatine.After receiving only a glancing mention in the first movie, he could have looked and sounded like anything. A human. A Wookiee. A droid. A turtle. There was, instead, a disfigured, robed face — portrayed by the actress Marjorie Eaton — that terrified fans and etched the character into “Star Wars” lore.But Palpatine’s voice — cool, crisp and commanding — belonged to Clive Revill, who in about 60 seconds set the stage for one of the most feared and infamous characters in science fiction. Mr. Revill died on March 11 in Sherman Oaks, Calif., his daughter, Kate Revill, said on Thursday. The cause, she said, was complications of dementia. He was 94.Palpatine’s appearance, however brief, is pivotal. In the conversation with Darth Vader it is established that Vader, already an iconic villain, has a boss — one whom Vader himself fears. Additionally, Palpatine recognizes Luke Skywalker as a true threat.In just a few lines, Mr. Revill established Palpatine as a cold, dominant figure.When the original trilogy was rereleased in 2004, his voice was replaced by that of Ian McDiarmid, who played Palpatine in subsequent “Star Wars” films, starting with “Return of the Jedi” (1983). But in various iterations of Palpatine since the original — including the franchise films, the video game “Fortnite” and even Lego re-enactments — the character’s voice is built on Mr. Revill’s work.“Those voices are all influenced by this first example,” said Greg Iwinski, a writer on the animated “Star Wars” series “Young Jedi Adventures.” “That was 45 years ago. That’s the importance of that legacy. He was the first guy to do it.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ChatGPT’s Studio Ghibli Style Animations Are Almost Too Good

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      An update to ChatGPT made it easy to simulate Hayao Miyazaki’s style of animation, which has flooded social media with memes.Animated movies, like those from the famed Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, are not made in a hurry. The intricate hand drawings and attention paid to every single detail can make for a slow, potentially yearslong process.Or, you could simply ask ChatGPT to turn any old photo into a facsimile of Mr. Miyazaki’s work in just a few seconds.Many people did precisely that this week after OpenAI released an update to ChatGPT on Tuesday that improved its image-generation technology. Now, a user who asks the platform to render an image in the style of Studio Ghibli could be shown a picture that would not look out of place in the films “My Neighbor Totoro” or “Spirited Away.”On social media, users quickly began posting Ghibli-style images. They ranged from selfies and family photos to memes. Some used ChatGPT’s new feature to create renderings of violent or dark images, like the World Trade Center towers falling on Sept. 11 and the murder of George Floyd.Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, changed his profile picture on X to a Ghiblified image of himself and posted a joke about the filter’s sudden popularity and how it had overtaken his previous, seemingly more important work.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Sundance Picks Boulder, Colo., as Its New Home

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      The Sundance Film Festival is venturing to a new ski town.After a year of deliberations, copious site visits and scores of plane rides, the board of the Sundance Institute has chosen Boulder, Colo., to host its film festival beginning January 2027.“Boulder is a tech town, a college town, it’s a really creative town,” Eugene Hernandez, the festival’s director, said. “It’s just a really creative place. And that integration of the artsy community with the university side of it all is really dynamic.”It’s also 10 times the size of Park City, Utah, where the festival has been held since the actor and director Robert Redford started it in 1981. As the festival kept growing, Park City began bursting at the seams.Ebs Burnough, chair of the Sundance Institute, said the move to another mountain town would help Sundance maintain its connection to the natural world. “It’s easy to get drawn into that amazing thing that Robert Redford really believed in, which was that commune between the artist and nature, and to actually be able to get away from the verticalness of cities.”The Macky Auditorium Concert Hall in Boulder will host Sundance Film Festival screenings.via Sundance Film FestivalTo frequent Sundance goers, the move to Boulder is likely to be less jarring than shifting the location to Cincinnati, one of two other finalist cities. Salt Lake City was also in the running, and the loss of the festival will be significant to the state of Utah. The festival generated $132 million in revenue for the state in 2024, according to a report released by the festival.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Hollywood Has Not Recovered Jobs Lost During Strikes, Report Says

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      Many entertainment industry workers have been jobless for months, leading state officials to consider increasing subsidies to keep film and television production in California.Hollywood has yet to recover the jobs in film and television production that were lost when strikes by writers and actors brought production to a halt in 2023 as the industry was shifting, according to a report released Thursday.The report by the Otis College of Art and Design found that jobs in the entertainment sector in 2024 remained 25 percent below their 2022 peak, when the industry was working to make up for time lost during the pandemic shutdown.One measure of production, the number of shooting days in Los Angeles County, decreased by 42 percent last year compared to 2022, according to the report.“The film, TV, and sound sector appears to be settling into a new normal characterized by lower employment and production levels when compared to its pre-strike peak,” the report said.Michael F. Miller Jr., a vice president at the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees who oversees film and television production for the union, said that over the two-year period from 2022 to 2024, roughly 18,000 full-time jobs had evaporated. One recent survey of more than over 700 crew members found that almost two in three reported that their income fell short of expectations last year.The new report found that the entertainment sector added almost 15,000 jobs last year, but that the gains were not enough to make up for all the jobs lost during the strikes.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘A Working Man’ Review: Blue Collar, Bloody Hands

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      Jason Statham plays a construction worker who’s as deft at breaking bones as he is at building high-rises.The writer-director David Ayer began his career concocting scripts for action thrillers that put some psychological nuance into their boom-boom pyrotechnics. Yes, Denzel Washington’s chest-beating boasts in “Training Day” (2001) made theaters quake even if they weren’t equipped with Dolby, but there were further dimensions to his character.It seems as if he threw all that sort of thing out of his tool kit around the time of “Suicide Squad” (2016). Ayer’s pictures are purely blunt-force objects now, and effective ones. And all the more persuasive when Jason Statham stars in them.In “A Working Man,” whose script was coauthored by Ayer and Sylvester Stallone, Statham plays a construction worker with a violent past from which he’s trying to distance himself. (Fat chance in this kind of movie.) When the daughter of his boss is kidnapped, he’s is compelled to go to labyrinthine and brutal lengths to get her back.This movie follows up on Statham and Ayer’s 2024 “The Beekeeper,” a similar payback punishment picture whose forced premise wasn’t helped by its garishly dressed villains. The villains here are garishly dressed too, but there’s a rationale: They’re Russian. In any event, Statham racks up bad-guy kills like he’s collecting Pokémon.As the kidnapped daughter, Jenny, Arianna Rivas takes fruitful advantage of her character’s efforts to fight back, showing acrobatic action chops. The star’s old “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels” mate Jason Flemyng plays a slimy oligarch, and David Harbour is Statham’s wise pal (and armorer); it’s a satisfying cast all the way down. In a peculiar touch, near the end of the movie, its slimiest villain, played by Kenneth Collard, puts on a costume that makes him look like the Brazilian filmmaker José Mojica Marins’s legendary villain, Coffin Joe. I dug it.A Working ManRated R for violence and language. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Julie Keeps Quiet’ Review: Coping at Her Own Speed

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      A teenage regional tennis star moves on at her own pace after her ex-coach is dismissed under a cloud of suspicion.“Julie Keeps Quiet” ignores the usual movie playbook on post-trauma drama with its unusually internal portrait of a teenage tennis player, Julie. After her ex-coach is suspended under murky circumstances, she prefers not to share details of his behavior. But her feelings in the aftermath run deep, and this Belgian film’s virtue lies in its fidelity to her path and her pace.Her life is rooted in the routine and repetition of training and school among (supportive) peers, whether serve-and-volleys or German class. She evades questions from administrators and friends about Jeremy (Laurent Caron), her former instructor, even though he still calls her with doom-laden pep talks. You wonder when the story, written by the director, Leonardo van Dijl, and Ruth Becquart (who plays Julie’s mother), will tip her into a spiral.Instead, her low-key confidence as a player — her biggest smile in the film comes with success on the court — slowly manifests in her growing resolve and clarity in addressing the Jeremy situation. She recalibrates with a new coach, Backie (Pierre Gervais), and takes breathers with her dog. (The tennis star Naomi Osaka lends her imprimatur as an executive producer.)Tessa Van den Broeck, a newcomer, plays Julie with zero affectation. She seems plucked from a high school roll call, or maybe from a film by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, whose company co-produced this one. Nicolas Karakatsanis’s twilit 35-millimeter cinematography mirrors her character’s preoccupied state, echoed by Caroline Shaw’s cracked-lullaby score. It’s a film that maintains that Julie’s story is available only when she’s ready to tell it.Julie Keeps QuietNot rated. In Dutch and French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More