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      Film Academy’s Museum Connects With Visitors in First Year

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      The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures attracted about 20 percent more people than it expected since opening in September 2021. Now it needs to keep the momentum going.The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures has been something that almost no one in Hollywood expected: an instant hit.After an almost comical series of setbacks, the Academy Museum opened in Los Angeles in September 2021 and has since attracted more than 700,000 visitors, about 20 percent more than its pandemic-adjusted goal, according to Bill Kramer, chief executive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. (For months, gallery capacity was limited.) Half of the museum’s visitors have been under 40, he added, citing attendee surveys, and half have self-identified as being from underrepresented ethnic and racial communities. Adult tickets cost $25.“There was perhaps a slight concern, and I’m choosing my words carefully, that young people, people under the age of 40, might not be interested in film history or a cinema museum because they are streaming movies in different ways now,” Kramer said. “It has not been true, not even remotely. One of the many success stories of the museum is that it’s helping to cultivate a new generation of cinephiles.”The bad news? The academy now has to keep the momentum going, and with a potential recession on the horizon.“I’ve been thinking a lot about how to encourage repeat visitors — building a sense of community so that, not only do people see new things when they come back again, but they also feel that they’re participating with us in creating this experience,” said Jacqueline Stewart, the Academy Museum’s president. “Our museum depends in a lot of ways on breaking down some of the barriers I think that people might have felt when they hear the term academy. There’s an assumption that it’s an elitist institution.”The museum has sold 24,000 memberships, which cost between $100 and $1,000 annually. Additional revenue has come from hosting more than 100 private events; renting out the glass-domed terrace atop the museum’s spherical theater building runs $50,000 on top of a corporate membership, which starts at $10,000. Fanny’s, the museum’s well-reviewed restaurant, has served more than 150,000 people, according to the academy. Dishes range from $16 to $90.The museum’s gift shop has generated more than $6 million in sales, an amount that Kramer called “beyond our wildest expectations.” An Oscar made out of Legos, which sells for $500, and the $50 catalog for the museum’s Hayao Miyazaki exhibition have been among the top sellers.Add in philanthropic contributions and additional revenue — an opening gala generated $11 million — and the Academy Museum is comfortably covering annual operating costs while delivering returns that will ultimately be used to pay down hundreds of millions of dollars in construction debt, Kramer said.At the very least, the museum’s rosy first-year financial picture makes it something of a rarity among nonprofit cultural institutions, many of which are still reeling from the pandemic.By the time the seven-story museum opened last year, it was four years behind schedule. Its cost had ballooned by 90 percent, to about $480 million. Setbacks included the discovery of mastodon fossils by excavation crews, sparring architects, internecine warfare over the curatorial focus and, of course, the coronavirus pandemic. At the same time, academy leaders became known for one blunder after another regarding their most high-profile undertaking, the annual Oscars ceremony.While the museum’s first-year financial picture is rosy, it will soon face fresh competition for visitors.Alex Welsh for The New York Times“Many began to wonder if the Academy Museum, rising as box office fell, was some bizarre hoax that would never actually be finished,” Mary McNamara, a Los Angeles Times columnist and critic, wrote last year.Soon after opening, the museum was hit with accusations of antisemitism. While taking great care to honor the contributions of women and artists of color to the cinematic arts — achievements long overlooked in an industry historically dominated by white men — curators had excluded the mostly Jewish immigrants, white men all, who founded Hollywood. To rectify the matter, curators announced a new permanent exhibition, “Hollywoodland,” about the founding of the American film industry, specifically the lives and contributions of the Jewish studio founders; it will open next fall.Other upcoming exhibitions include “Director’s Inspiration: Agnès Varda,” and “The Art of Moviemaking: ‘The Godfather.’” “Casablanca,” “Boyz N the Hood” and “The Birds” will be showcased in smaller galleries.But visitors were plentiful from the start. The museum’s retrospective of Miyazaki, the Japanese animation titan behind films like “Spirited Away” (2001), was a major draw, Stewart said. The museum also offers extensive public programs — 137 in year one, including onstage discussions with filmmakers like Spike Lee and actors like Denzel Washington. The institution also operates a separately ticketed cinematheque; more than 500 films were shown in its first year.“I met a guy a couple of weeks ago who said it was his 83rd visit to the museum and was committed to reading every label,” Stewart said.If nothing else, Angelenos now have somewhere to take Hollywood-fascinated visitors that does not involve the dreaded Hollywood & Highland shopping mall or the sticky, stinky Walk of Fame.What the future holds is anyone’s guess. Tourism officials hope that 2023 will mark a full recovery for Los Angeles, which would benefit the museum; the number of visitors to the area, particularly from overseas, is still far behind prepandemic levels. But a recession could just as easily stymie growth.The Academy Museum will also face increased competition in the years ahead. The adjacent Los Angeles County Museum of Art is in the middle of a colossal expansion. And construction has begun near downtown Los Angeles on the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which will house items collected by George Lucas, including 20th-century American illustrations, comic books, costumes, storyboards, stage sets and other archival material from “Star Wars” and other movies.For the academy, the continued financial health of its museum is of crucial importance. The construction debt is secured by the academy’s gross revenues, the vast majority of which come from the annual Oscars telecast. But awards revenue — after rising for decades — declined 10.8 percent in the academy’s 2021 fiscal year, reflecting plummeting Oscars viewership. Kramer, facing the likelihood that broadcast rights for the ceremony will continue to decline in value, perhaps dramatically, is scrambling to diversify the organization’s revenue streams.“It’s what any healthy nonprofit needs to do and should do,” Kramer said, “and the museum is helping us greatly with that.” More

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      Sundance Liked Her Documentary, ‘Jihad Rehab,’ Until Muslim Critics Didn’t

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      The film festival gave Meg Smaker’s “Jihad Rehab” a coveted spot in its 2022 lineup, but apologized after an outcry over her race and her approach.Meg Smaker felt exhilarated last November. After 16 months filming inside a Saudi rehabilitation center for accused terrorists, she learned that her documentary “Jihad Rehab” was invited to the 2022 Sundance Festival, one of the most prestigious showcases in the world.Her documentary centered on four former Guantánamo detainees sent to a rehab center in Saudi Arabia who had opened their lives to her, speaking of youthful attraction to Al Qaeda and the Taliban, of torture endured, and of regrets.Film critics warned that conservatives might bridle at these human portraits, but reviews after the festival’s screening were strong.“The absence of absolutes is what’s most enriching,” The Guardian stated, adding, “This is a movie for intelligent people looking to have their preconceived notions challenged.” Variety wrote: The film “feels like a miracle and an interrogative act of defiance.”But attacks would come from the left, not the right. Arab and Muslim filmmakers and their white supporters accused Ms. Smaker of Islamophobia and American propaganda. Some suggested her race was disqualifying, a white woman who presumed to tell the story of Arab men.Sundance leaders reversed themselves and apologized.Abigail Disney, a grandniece of Walt Disney, had been the executive director of “Jihad Rehab” and called it “freaking brilliant” in an email to Ms. Smaker. Now she disavowed it.The film “landed like a truckload of hate,” Ms. Disney wrote in an open letter.Ms. Smaker’s film has become near untouchable, unable to reach audiences. Prominent festivals rescinded invitations, and critics in the documentary world took to social media and pressured investors, advisers and even her friends to withdraw names from the credits. She is close to broke.“In my naïveté, I kept thinking people would get the anger out of their system and realize this film was not what they said,” Ms. Smaker said. “I’m trying to tell an authentic story that a lot of Americans might not have heard.”Battles over authorship and identity regularly roil the documentary world, a tightly knit and largely left-wing ecosystem.Ms. Smaker wanted to explore what leads men to embrace terrorism. But Arab American filmmakers say that framing was all too familiar. Meg SmakerMany Arab and Muslim filmmakers — who like others in the industry struggle for money and recognition — denounced “Jihad Rehab” as offering an all too familiar take. They say Ms. Smaker is the latest white documentarian to tell the story of Muslims through a lens of the war on terror. These documentary makers, they say, take their white, Western gaze and claim to film victims with empathy.Assia Boundaoui, a filmmaker, critiqued it for Documentary magazine.“To see my language and the homelands of folks in my community used as backdrops for white savior tendencies is nauseating,” she wrote. “The talk is all empathy, but the energy is Indiana Jones.”She called on festivals to allow Muslims to create “films that concern themselves not with war, but with life.”The argument over whether artists should share racial or ethnic identity and sympathy with their subjects is long running in literature and film — with many artists and writers, like the documentarians Ken Burns and Nanfu Wang, arguing it would be suffocating to tell the story of only their own culture and that the challenge is to inhabit worlds different from their own.In the case of “Jihad Rehab,” the identity critique is married to the view that the film must function as political art and examine the historic and cultural oppressions that led to the imprisonment of these men at Guantánamo.Some critics and documentary filmmakers say that mandate is reductive and numbing.“What I admired about ‘Jihad Rehab’ is that it allowed a viewer to make their own decisions,” said Chris Metzler, who helps select films for San Francisco Documentary Festival. “I was not watching a piece of propaganda.”Ms. Smaker has other defenders. Lorraine Ali, a television critic for The Los Angeles Times who is Muslim, wrote that the film was “a humanizing journey through a complex emotional process of self-reckoning and accountability, and a look at the devastating fallout of flawed U.S. and Saudi policy.”She is dismayed with Sundance.“In the independent film world there is a lot of weaponizing of identity politics,” Ms. Ali said in an interview. “The film took pains to understand the culture these men came from and molded them. It does a disservice to throw away a film that a lot of people should see.”From Firefighter to FilmmakerMs. Smaker was a 21-year-old firefighter in California when airplanes struck the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. She heard firefighters cry for vengeance and wondered: How did this happen?Looking for answers, she hitchhiked through Afghanistan and settled in the ancient city of Sana, Yemen, for half a decade, where she learned Arabic and taught firefighting. Then she obtained a master’s from Stanford University in filmmaking and turned to a place Yemeni friends had spoken of: the Mohammed bin Nayef Counseling and Care Center in Riyadh.The Saudi monarchy brooks little dissent. This center tries to rehabilitate accused terrorists and spans an unlikely distance between prison and boutique hotel. It has a gym and pool and teachers who offer art therapy and lectures on Islam, Freud and the true meanings of “jihad,” which include personal struggle.Hence the documentary’s original title, “Jihad Rehab,” which engendered much criticism, even from supporters, who saw it as too facile. “The film is very complex and the title is not,” said Ms. Ali, the Los Angeles Times critic.To address such concerns, the director recently renamed the film “The UnRedacted.”The United States sent 137 detainees from Guantánamo Bay to this center, which human rights groups cannot visit.But reporters with The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic and others have interviewed prisoners. Most stayed a few days.Ms. Smaker would remain more than a year exploring what leads men to embrace groups such as Al Qaeda and the Taliban.Saudi officials let her speak to 150 detainees, most of whom waved her off. She found four men who would talk.A film still of the guard tower. Ms. Smaker envisioned the documentary as opening with accusations facing the men — bomb maker, bin Laden driver, Taliban fighter — and peeling layers to find the human.Meg SmackerThese conversations form the core of the movie and cut far deeper than earlier news reports. That did not dissuade critics. Ms. Disney, a titan in the documentary world, picked up on a point raised by the film’s opponents. “A person cannot freely consent to anything in a carceral system, particularly one in a notoriously violent dictatorship,” she wrote.This is a debatable proposition. Journalists often interview prisoners, and documentaries like “The Thin Blue Line” give powerful voice to them, without necessarily clearing this purist hurdle of free consent.Ms. Disney declined an interview request, saying she wished Ms. Smaker well.Lawrence Wright wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11” and spent much time in Saudi Arabia. He saw the documentary.“As a reporter, you acknowledge the constraints on prisoners, and Smaker could have acknowledged it with more emphasis,” he said. “But she was exploring a great mystery — understanding those who may have done something appalling — and this does not discredit that effort.”To gain intimate access, he added, was a coup.Ms. Smaker envisioned the film as an unfolding, opening with American accusations — bomb maker, bin Laden driver, Taliban fighter — and peeling layers to find the human.Distrust yielded to trust. Men described being drawn to Al Qaeda out of boredom, poverty and defense of Islam. What emerged was a portrait of men on the cusp of middle-age reckoning with their past.Ms. Smaker asked one of the men, “Are you a terrorist?”He bridled. “Someone fight me, I fight them. Why do you call me terrorist?”Her critics argue that such questions registered as accusation. “These questions seek to humanize the men, but they still frame them as terrorists,” Pat Mullen, a Toronto film critic, wrote in Point of View magazine.Mr. Metzler of the San Francisco festival said a documentarian must ask questions that are on a viewer’s mind.The film in fact dwells on torture inflicted by Americans at Guantánamo Bay. Ali al-Raimi arrived at age 16. “Every day was worse than the last day,” he said.He tried to hang himself.“Nothing,” he said, “was worse than Guantánamo.”The men longed for the prosaic: marriage, children, a job. Khalid, a voluble man, was trained as a bomb maker; in the film, he said he now crafts remote-control car alarms in Jeddah. Ambiguity lingers.Success, InterruptedSundance announced in December that it had selected “Jihad Rehab” for its 2022 festival, held the following month. Critics erupted.“An entirely white team behind a film about Yemeni and South Arabian men,” the filmmaker Violeta Ayala wrote in a tweet.Ms. Smaker’s film had a Yemeni-American executive producer and a Saudi co-producer.More than 230 filmmakers signed a letter denouncing the documentary. A majority had not seen it. The letter noted that over 20 years, Sundance had programmed 76 films about Muslims and the Middle East, but only 35 percent of them had been directed by Muslim or Arab filmmakers.Sundance noted that in its 2022 festival, of the 152 films in which directors revealed their ethnicity, 7 percent were Middle Eastern. Estimates place Americans of Arab descent at between 1.5 and 3 percent.Sundance officials backtracked. Tabitha Jackson, then the director of the festival, demanded to see consent forms from the detainees and Ms. Smaker’s plan to protect them once the film debuted, according to an email shown to The Times. Ms. Jackson also required an ethics review of the plans and gave Ms. Smaker four days to comply. Efforts to reach Ms. Jackson were unsuccessful.The review concluded Ms. Smaker more than met standards of safety.Ms. Smaker said a public relations firm recommended that she apologize. “What was I apologizing for?” she said. “For trusting my audience to make up their own mind?”Prominent documentary executives said Sundance’s demands were without precedent.An executive who has run a major festival went so far as to write an email to Sundance cautioning that its demands of Ms. Smaker might embolden protesters. Festivals, the executive wrote, will ask “two, three, four times what are the headwinds” before extending an invitation.That executive had earlier invited Ms. Smaker to show “Jihad Rehab,” but she had declined as her film was not yet completed. This executive asked to remain anonymous out of concern of offending Muslim filmmakers.“Jihad Rehab” premiered in January; most major reviews were good. But Ms. Smaker’s critics were not persuaded.“When I, a practicing Muslim woman, say that this film is problematic,” wrote Jude Chehab, a Lebanese American documentarian, “my voice should be stronger than a white woman saying that it isn’t. Point blank.”Ms. Disney, the former champion, wrote, “I failed, failed and absolutely failed to understand just how exhausted by and disgusted with the perpetual representation of Muslim men and women as terrorists or former terrorists or potential terrorists the Muslim people are.”Her apology and that of Sundance shook the industry. The South by Southwest and San Francisco festivals rescinded invitations.Jihad Turk, former imam of Los Angeles’s largest mosque, was baffled. In December, his friend Tim Disney — brother of Abigail — invited him to a screening.“My first instinct,” he said, “was ‘Oh, not another film on jihad and Islam.’ Then I watched and it was introspective and intelligent. My hope is that there is a courageous outlet that is not intimidated by activists and their too narrow views.”An Elusive Happy EndingIn June, Ms. Smaker received another screening — at the Doc Edge festival in New Zealand.She hopped a flight to Auckland with trepidation. Would this end in cancellation? Word had leaked out, and Mr. Mullen, the Toronto film critic, tweeted a warning.“Oh wild — controversial Sundance doc Jihad Rehab comes out of hiding,” he wrote, adding: “Why would anyone program this film after Sundance? File under ‘we warned you!’”Dan Shanan, who heads the New Zealand festival, shrugged.“What happened at Sundance was not good,” he said. “Film festivals must hold to their belief in their role.”Ms. Smaker has maxed out credit cards and, at age 42, borrowed money from her parents. This is not the Sundance debut of her dreams. “I don’t have the money or influence to fight this out,” she said, running hands back through her hair. “I’m not sure I see a way out.” More

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      Louise Fletcher, 88, Dies; Oscar Winner for ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’

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      She was largely unknown to the public when she was cast as what the American Film Institute called one of cinema’s most memorable villains.Louise Fletcher, the imposing, steely-eyed actress who won an Academy Award for her role as the tyrannical Nurse Ratched in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” died on Friday at her home in the town of Montdurausse, in Southern France. She was 88.The death was confirmed by her agent, David Shaul, who did not cite a cause. Ms. Fletcher also had a home in Los Angeles.Ms. Fletcher was 40 and largely unknown to the public when she was cast as the head administrative nurse at an Oregon mental institution in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” The film, directed by Milos Forman and based on a popular novel by Ken Kesey, won a best-actress trophy for Ms. Fletcher and four other Oscars: best picture, best director, best actor (Jack Nicholson, who starred as the rebellious mental patient McMurphy) and best adapted screenplay (Bo Goldman and Lawrence Hauber).Ms. Fletcher’s acceptance speech stood out that night — not only because she teasingly thanked voters for hating her, but also because she used American Sign Language in thanking her parents, who were both deaf, for “teaching me to have a dream.”The American Film Institute later named Nurse Ratched one of the most memorable villains in film history and the second most notable female villain, surpassed only by the Wicked Witch of the West in “The Wizard of Oz.”But at the time “Cuckoo’s Nest” was released, Ms. Fletcher was frustrated by the buttoned-up nature of her character. “I envied the other actors tremendously,” she said in a 1975 interview with The New York Times, referring to her fellow cast members, most of whom were playing mental patients. “They were so free, and I had to be so controlled.”Estelle Louise Fletcher was born on July 22, 1934, in Birmingham, Ala., one of four hearing children of Robert Capers Fletcher, an Episcopal minister, and Estelle (Caldwell) Fletcher; both her parents had been deaf since childhood. She studied drama at the University of North Carolina and moved to Los Angeles after graduation.She later told journalists that because she was so tall — 5 feet 10 inches — she had trouble finding work in anything but westerns, where her height was an advantage. Of her first 20 or so screen roles in the late 1950s and early ’60s, about half were in television westerns, including “Wagon Train,” “Maverick” and “Bat Masterson.”Ms. Fletcher married Jerry Bick, a film producer, in 1959. They had two sons, John and Andrew, and she retired from acting for more than a decade to raise them.Ms. Fletcher and Mr. Bick divorced in 1977. Her survivors include her sons; her sister, Roberta Ray; and a granddaughter.She returned to movies in 1974 in Robert Altman’s “Thieves Like Us,” as a woman who coldly turns in her brother to the police. It was her appearance in that film that led Mr. Forman to offer her the role in “Cuckoo’s Nest.”“I was caught by surprise when Louise came onscreen,” Mr. Forman recalled of watching “Thieves Like Us.” “I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She had a certain mystery, which I thought was very, very important for Nurse Ratched.”Ms. Fletcher in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” “She had a certain mystery,” said Milos Forman, the film’s director, “which I thought was very, very important for Nurse Ratched.”Herbert Dorfman/Corbis via Getty ImagesReviewing “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” in The New Yorker, Pauline Kael declared Ms. Fletcher’s “a masterly performance.”“We can see the virginal expectancy — the purity — that has turned into puffy-eyed self-righteousness,” Ms. Kael wrote. “She thinks she’s doing good for people, and she’s hurt — she feels abused — if her authority is questioned.”Ms. Fletcher is often cited as an example of the Oscar curse — the phenomenon that winning an Academy Award for acting does not always lead to sustained movie stardom — but she did maintain a busy career in films and on television into her late 70s.She had a lead role as the Linda Blair character’s soft-spoken psychiatrist in “Exorcist II: The Heretic” (1977) and was notable in the ensemble comedy “The Cheap Detective” (1978), riffing on Ingrid Bergman’s film persona. She also starred with Christopher Walken and Natalie Wood as a workaholic scientist in “Brainstorm” (1983). But she was largely relegated to roles with limited screen time, especially when her character was very different from her Nurse Ratched persona.After a turn as an inscrutable U.F.O. bigwig in “Strange Invaders” (1983), she appeared in “Firestarter” (1984) as a fearful farm wife; the police drama “Blue Steel” (1990) as Jamie Lee Curtis’s drab mother; “2 Days in the Valley” (1996) as a compassionate Los Angeles landlady; and “Cruel Intentions” (1999) as Ryan Phillippe’s genteel aunt.Only when she played to villainous stereotype — as she did in “Flowers in the Attic” (1987), as an evil matriarch who sets out to poison her four inconvenient young grandchildren — did she find herself in starring roles again. And that film, she told a Dragoncon audience in 2009, was “the worst experience I’ve ever had making a movie.”Later in her career, she played recurring characters on several television series, including “Star Trek: Deep Space 9” (she was an alien cult leader from 1993 to 1999) and “Shameless” (as William H. Macy’s foulmouthed convict mother). She also made an appearance as Liev Schreiber’s affable mother in the romantic drama “A Perfect Man” (2013). She appeared most recently in two episodes of the Netflix comedy series “Girlboss.”Although Ms. Fletcher’s most famous character was a portrait of sternness, she often recalled smiling constantly and pretending that everything was perfect when she was growing up, in an effort to protect her non-hearing parents from bad news.“The price of it was very high for me,” she said in a 1977 interview with The Ladies’ Home Journal. “Because I not only pretended everything was all right. I came to feel it had to be.”Pretending wasn’t all bad, however, she acknowledged, at least in terms of her profession. That same year she told the journalist Rex Reed, “I feel like I know real joy from make-believe.”Mike Ives More

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      Will Anyone Give ‘Don’t Worry Darling’ a Chance?

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      Olivia Wilde’s new film is trying to fight free of its pre-release reputation.Years ago, when I was a film critic, I was asked out for coffee by a guy who’d just been hired at the review-aggregating website Rotten Tomatoes. I can’t remember the purpose of the meeting. I just recall the sense — as he ventilated about the site’s “Tomatometer” rating, which would soon crush all my elitist insights into hard data — that I’d been summoned to witness the digging of my own grave.This was actually fine with me. I was already demoralized by the whole enterprise. I’d always seen the role of the critic as a conduit, someone who has an aesthetic experience and then reports on what it was like; I never cared to tell others what to see or avoid, imposing a hegemony of tastes and interests that I didn’t believe in. At work, though, I was feeling the pressure to serve readers with ratings and recommendations — and, increasingly, sites like Rotten Tomatoes seemed to push a binary of “good” and “bad,” all based on consensus. It was depressing, all this holding up of fingers to the wind. Consensus is a snowball with a hard, mineral center, barreling down a slope, and few people want to be on the wrong side.Sometimes consensus accretes around the story of a movie, even before people see the film itself. A couple of weeks ago, I attended a screening of “Don’t Worry Darling,” which I’d been looking forward to since first getting a glimpse of its poster. I had been vaguely aware of some noise emanating from the film’s press rollout, I suppose, but it wasn’t until the now-infamous spit video that I realized just how much flak the movie was catching. The video showed Harry Styles, one of the film’s stars, approaching his audience seat at the Venice Film Festival, suavely buttoning his jacket, leaning down and then — according to nothing but gleeful online supposition — purportedly hocking a loogie on another of the film’s stars, Chris Pine, who stops clapping and, with his eyes, traces a trajectory from Styles’ lips to his own lap. No actual spit is discernible in the video, and no motive was ascribed. But none were needed. Those few frames of video were scrutinized, analyzed, slowed, zoomed, dissected and compared to the Zapruder film so often that the joke begged for mercy.People were happy to believe anything — even the baseless-rumor equivalent of jumping the shark.To me, though, the Cold War artifact it recalled was Kremlinology — the practice of scrying every available scrap of information to discern the hidden motivations and power struggles of distant, unknowable figures. The events that drew such close attention to “Don’t Worry Darling” were not huge ones, in the scheme of things: They included a supposed feud between the director, Olivia Wilde, and the lead actress, Florence Pugh, possibly involving a pay gap between leads; the actor Shia LaBeouf’s being replaced, under disputed circumstances, with Styles; LaBeouf’s leaking messages from Wilde about Pugh; Wilde’s being served with custody papers from her ex-fiancé, Jason Sudeikis, while onstage at CinemaCon; and, above all, Wilde’s becoming romantically involved with Styles, 10 years her junior. Where the theoretical animosity between Styles and Pine was supposed to fit in was unclear. But by then people were happy to believe anything — even the baseless-rumor equivalent of jumping the shark — as long as it kept building the story of a woman who fostered a work environment so fraught that one star would spit on another, in public and on camera, for no apparent reason.More on ‘Don’t Worry Darling’In this much gossiped-about feminist gothic, Florence Pugh plays a seemingly happy housewife whose world starts to crack apart.Review: “If Pugh’s performance never gets beneath the shiny, satirical surface, it’s because there’s no place for it or her to go,” our critic writes of the film.Publicity Crisis: It was one of the hottest projects in Hollywood. But a series of missteps on the promotional trail, hinting at supposed feuds and behind-the-scenes drama, have raised questions about the film’s viability and about Olivia Wilde, its director.Bad Reputation: Amid all the rumors and negative press, a vocal portion of the public seems to have grown oddly invested in witnessing Wilde’s comeuppance. Will that affect the movie’s ratings?“Don’t Worry Darling” is just the most recent example of a film maudit, or “cursed film.” That was the term coined for Jean Cocteau’s Festival du Film Maudit in 1949, describing works that had been wrongfully neglected, or deemed too outrageous to merit serious attention — “movies rendered marginal by disrepute,” as J. Hoberman would later write in The Village Voice. Films made by women are not the only ones stuck in this defensive position, but they seem disproportionately prone to it, often with criticism centering on the director herself. (Elaine May’s experience on “Ishtar” was such that Hoberman classed her as a cineaste maudit; she wouldn’t direct again for decades.) Hints of a production’s chaos or excess are less likely to be taken as signs of unruly genius, and more often framed as messiness or lack of authority. The more that talk swirled around “Don’t Worry Darling,” the more its quality — and then, specifically, Wilde’s competence — were called into question.Out comes the Tomatometer, and the party’s over.Cinema has a century’s worth of lore about films troubled by budget overages, clashing personalities and on-set affairs: Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski’s wanting to kill each other while making “Fitzcarraldo,” mental breakdowns on the set of “Apocalypse Now,” Peter Bogdanovich’s leaving his actual genius of a wife after an affair with a young Cybill Shepherd on “The Last Picture Show.” These productions were plagued by bad press and rumors, but they never faced the wrath of stan Twitter. These days, fans spread rumors and memes, which are picked up by media outlets, which disguise their prurience with speculation about box-office prospects or reviews. Then out comes the Tomatometer, and the party’s over.But of course the idea that this consensus opinion emerges from some pure, objective place is disingenuous. Press always colors reviews — and now some vocal portion of the public seems oddly invested in Wilde’s comeuppance, a fact we may see reflected in ratings. (Given statements Wilde has made about some of the film’s real-world inspirations, it’s not hard to imagine the online response including the kind of organized backlash that has greeted other disfavored films.) And while critics’ responses won’t be actively malicious, they won’t be magically free of their own biases, either. “More or less the definition of the history of cinema,” Richard Brody wrote in The New Yorker in 2012, “is: the stuff that most of the best-known critics didn’t like, or damned with faint praise — it isn’t that they didn’t care for it, but that they didn’t care about it.” Male film critics outnumber female ones 2 to 1, and tend to award “slightly higher average quantitative ratings to films with male protagonists,” according to studies conducted by Martha Lauzen of San Diego State University’s Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film.It’s odd that this could be the fate of “Don’t Worry Darling,” a film about men trapping women in a regressive, suffocating place where dissent means repudiation and exile — a film whose big plot developments must be hard for Wilde to resist talking about, given how much the narrative surrounding the film echoes their point. But it’s impossible to discuss without spoiling the story, so I’ll just share an anecdote. My 14-year-old daughter came with me to the screening, unencumbered by external baggage. When the credits began to roll, she announced, “That was the best movie I’ve ever seen in my whole life.” Seeing Wilde’s name among the cast, she asked which character the director had played. When I told her, she was impressed. She said: “I want to be her. I want to do what she does.” It made me happy to hear this. And then I started to worry.Source photographs: Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images; Screen grab from Warner Bros.Carina Chocano is the author of the essay collection “You Play the Girl” and a contributing writer for the magazine. She frequently writes for the magazine’s Screenland column. More

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      Ryan Grantham of ‘Riverdale’ Sentenced to Life for Mother’s Murder

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      Grantham, who also appeared in the film “Diary of a Wimpy Kid,” had pleaded guilty earlier this year. He will be eligible for parole after 14 years.Ryan Grantham, a young Canadian actor who appeared in the television show “Riverdale,” has been sentenced to life in prison after admitting to killing his mother as part of a broad scheme in which he said he had planned to also kill Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and carry out a mass shooting in British Columbia.Grantham, 23, was declared eligible for parole after 14 years during sentencing proceedings at the Supreme Court of British Columbia on Wednesday, according to prosectors and a lawyer for Grantham.Grantham had pleaded guilty earlier this year to second-degree murder, which carries an automatic sentence of life in prison. The main issue at the sentencing was when he would be eligible for parole. Prosecutors had called for a 17- to 18-year waiting period before Grantham could apply for parole, Grantham’s lawyer had asked for a period of 12 years, and a judge on Wednesday chose a number in between.The court also imposed a lifetime firearm ban on Grantham, prosecutors said.Grantham has more than 30 acting credits, starting when he was a child. He appeared in the 2010 movie “Diary of a Wimpy Kid,” in which he played Rodney James, and in several other films, including “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.” Most recently he played the character Jeffery in a 2019 episode of “Riverdale,” a dark reimagining of the Archie Comics franchise on CW.His lawyer, Chris Johnson, said that Grantham had suffered from a number of documented mental health challenges including clinical depression and that, since entering prison, he had “committed himself to trying to rehabilitate himself.”The crime occurred on March 31, 2020, when Grantham, then 21, shot his mother, Barbara Waite, in the back of her head as she played piano in their home in Squamish, a town in British Columbia about 37 miles south of Whistler, Johnson said. Grantham recorded a video shortly after that in which he confessed to the murder and then left by car, Johnson said. Grantham told the authorities that he initially had planned to kill the prime minister, but changed his mind and at some point decided he would carry out a mass shooting, possibly at Simon Fraser University, where he had been a student.He did not carry out either plan, and instead turned himself in to the police on April 1, 2020, Johnson said.Grantham had rationalized that it was necessary to kill his mother so that she would not have to deal with the fallout of the crimes he had planned to commit, Johnson said.Susan Beachy contributed research. More

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      ‘Lou’ Review: Unfinished Business

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      A child’s kidnapping ignites a protracted bid for redemption in this down-and-dirty thriller.Whatever else one might say about the Netflix thriller “Lou,” making it must have been murder. Pummeled by near-constant rain, soaked in swampy mud and battered by frequent bouts of hand-to-hand combat, the movie’s headliners look to have suffered miserably.Consequently, my admiration for Allison Janney, already high, skyrocketed. As the formidable title character, a woman of indeterminate vintage commonly accessorized with shovel, rifle or deer carcass, Janney leaves spry in the dust. Unfazed either by the working conditions or by Maggie Cohn and Jack Stanley’s ridiculously over-the-top screenplay, she lends her grouchy character more than a ramrod spine and steely stare: She gives her a woundedness that keeps us watching long after this prolix quest for redemption should have reached its preordained conclusion.When the plot — a dense weave of familial pain and political misdeeds — requires Lou to leave her cabin in the Pacific Northwest and help a young mother (Jurnee Smollett) reclaim her abducted preteen daughter, Lou barely hesitates. Abandoning her careful plans for a final exit, she takes off through a storm-lashed forest on the trail of the kidnapper, distraught mother in tow. The journey will be filled with perils and flashbacks, regrets and secrets as Lou excavates her past; yet the director, Anna Foerster — who, aside from the instantly forgettable “Underworld: Blood Wars” (2017), has worked mostly in television — pays greater attention to the movie’s impressive fight choreography than to the details of its central mystery.Methodically violent and more than a little silly, “Lou” delivers a kick in the head to ageism. When did you last hear an arthritic heroine warn a woman half her age not to slow her down?LouRated R for knives, fists, bullets and a lethal tin can. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘A Jazzman’s Blues’ Review: Tyler Perry Revisits a Jim Crow-Era Romance

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      The writer-director returns to his first screenplay — a dark melodrama with soulful musical numbers — after two decades.“A Jazzman’s Blues,” Tyler Perry’s melodrama about ill-fated teenagers who fall in love in rural Georgia, marks the writer-director-studio head’s return to his first screenplay, w‌hich he wrote in 1995. In the meantime, he broke through with a slew of Madea comedies, and whetted the skills required to deliver the faceted beauty of Bayou — his richest male character to date — with dramas like 2010’s “For Colored Girls.”It helps, too, that he has found a perfect portrayer in Joshua Boone (“Premature”). Bayou, who is embodied with a luminous sincerity by Boone, offers a touching take on the kind of compassionate man a so-called mama’s boy might become.The movie begins in 1987. An elderly version of Hattie Mae Boyd (Daphne Maxwell Reid) paces around her home, listening to a white political candidate (Brent Antonello) being interviewed on television. He blathers about his family’s civic legacy. When he begins nattering on about not being racist, she shuts off the TV. Then, in short order, she arrives at the candidate’s office with a stack of love letters — proof, she says, of her son’s killing in 1947. As the man begins reading the letters, the movie shifts to the past, where it stays for much of the star-crossed, racism-infused romance.Amirah Vann (in a bulwark turn) portrays the younger version of Hattie Mae, the loving mama of Bayou and his brother, Willie Earl (Austin Scott). Solea Pfeiffer, in a promising onscreen debut, is Leanne, the intended recipient of Bayou’s missives.From the get-go, Bayou and Leanne recognize in each other something wounded, yet also sheltering. But their clandestine affection is upended when Leanne’s mother, Ethel (Lana Young), bent on passing for white, wrenches her daughter away. The romance is briefly rekindled when a war injury sends Bayou home to his mother’s juke joint outside Hopewell, Ga., and Leanne arrives, newly wed to a scion of the town’s reigning family.With this turn, the movie might have collapsed under the weight of its twists or drowned in the sentimentality of Aaron Zigman’s score. A volatile scene between Leanne and her childhood-friend-turned housekeeper, Citsy (played with fierce sensitivity by Milauna Jemai Jackson), helps shore it up.When Bayou leaves, this time to avoid a lynching, he heads with Willie Earl and his brother’s music manager, Ira (Ryan Eggold), to Chicago. There, Ira lands a nightclub gig for Bayou, a honey-voiced singer, and his trumpet-playing, heroin-shooting brother. (It is here that the composer Terence Blanchard, who wrote songs for the film, and the choreographer Debbie Allen create some of its most exuberant musical numbers.)“A Jazzman’s Blues” is packed with outsize emotions, but also grand themes. The relationship of antisemitism to white supremacy gets a significant nod. And while addiction, domestic abuse and rape have in the past been Perry staples — and appear here as well — they’re now in the service of a more expansive, chastising saga.A Jazzman’s BluesRated R for scenes of substance abuse, violence, rape, brief lovemaking and cruel language. Running time: 2 hours 7 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Athena’ Review: Oh Brothers, Where Art Thou?

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      A besieged French housing project is the setting for Romain Gavras’s relentlessly kinetic action movie.“Athena” begins in a state of maximum tension and escalates from there. An angry crowd has gathered outside a police station near a high-rise housing project in the suburbs of Paris. A video of the killing of a local teenage boy, apparently by uniformed officers, has gone viral, igniting long-smoldering resentments. Violence breaks out quickly, and before long, the talk on social networks and news broadcasts will be forecasting not civil unrest, but outright civil war.At the center of the maelstrom, spinning in different directions, are the slain teenager’s three surviving brothers. Abdel (Dali Benssalah), the first one we encounter, is a soldier in the French Army, recently returned from combat in Mali. He’s inside the police station when the trouble (and the movie) begins, and his long walk to meet the demonstrators outside symbolizes his predicament. He’s pulled apart by conflicting loyalties, caught between the power of the state and the rage of the streets.His brother Karim (Sami Slimane) is a militant leader in the process of becoming a military commander as protest accelerates toward armed conflict. With guns and vehicles seized from the forces of law and order, Karim and his army of young men stage a small-scale revolution, taking control of the courtyards and corridors of Athena, the high-rise complex where they have grown up in poverty and alienation.Another brother, Moktar (Ouassini Embarek), is a drug dealer whose business is disrupted by the chaos. He and his associates are trying to get out of Athena while Karim is trying to lock it down and Abdel, increasingly desperate and less and less secure in his convictions, is attempting to calm the situation.Fraternal melodrama and social turmoil provide fuel for relentless action. In principle it’s not a bad formula, and “Athena,” directed by Romain Gavras from a script he wrote with Ladj Ly and Elias Belkeddar, is not shy about evoking gangster movies, classic westerns and classical tragedy, investing its contemporary story with brutal, archaic power.Gavras’s filmmaking is technically impressive. He pulls the camera through complex, kinetic tableaus in long, breathless takes. Some of these sequences are thrilling, but after a while they become repetitive, and Athena feels more like a video game background than an actual place. There’s no modulation: Nearly every scene ends in either a screaming argument or a literal explosion. Karim and Moktar rarely utter a line without shouting. Abdel is more of a brooder, at least for a while — Benssalah has a clenched, melancholy watchfulness that holds your attention in the midst of all the noise — but eventually he starts yelling, too.There are other characters: a young riot policeman (Anthony Bajon) who is taken hostage, and a terrorist mastermind (Alexis Manenti) who is coaxed out of retirement to join Karim’s rebels. Their presence complicates the plot, and amplifies the film’s hectic, hectoring gestures toward topical urgency. But like the three brothers, these secondary figures are sociological composites, inserted into a carefully diagramed, ultimately incoherent narrative scheme.You could argue that “Athena” uses the syntax of action cinema to make a point about the state of French society. And while it’s true that there are real issues at play here — police violence, racism, the disaffection of the immigrant underclass — the filmmakers don’t so much explore as exploit them, giving a loud and sloppy genre exercise a patina of relevance.AthenaRated R. Nonstop violence. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More