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      What Is ‘West Side Story’ Without Jerome Robbins? Chatty.

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      Justin Peck takes over choreographic duties in the Steven Spielberg adaptation of the 1957 musical in which words, not bodies, rule the screen.It’s been days since I watched the Steven Spielberg reboot of “West Side Story,” and I still can’t get a scene out of my head: The fateful meeting of Tony and Maria at the gym.In the 1961 film, the pair lock eyes and move closer and closer as bodies spin around them, and the background, a rich red, envelops them. When they stop, they’re face to face swaying softly. Suddenly, their arms lift to either side and they begin to dance. In the new movie, they spot each other in the gym and meet behind the bleachers. Tony (Ansel Elgort), staring hard at Maria (Rachel Zegler), casually drapes an arm on the metal structure. But before he can speak, Maria stretches her arms out and gives a little snap.This dance — Justin Peck’s reframing of the original choreography by Jerome Robbins — may not be as luminous, but it is a surprise: a slice of unexpected loveliness that speaks to the subtle power of movement. Tony raises an eyebrow, but joins Maria fluidly without questioning the strangeness of it all.“You don’t like dancing?” Maria (Rachel Zegler, center) asks Tony (Ansel Elgort, left). “I like it,” he says. “I like it a lot.”20th Century StudiosHere, in a rare instance, they communicate without words. Yet throughout this film, when there is a right turn, a wrong one tends to follow. More than movement, words are the dominant language of this “West Side Story.” So, brace yourself. Something’s coming — a conversation.“I wasn’t planning on showing up tonight,” Tony says.“You don’t like dancing?” Maria asks.“No, I mean, yeah,” he says. “I like it. I like it a lot. Dancing with you. It’s just you’re— —”Maria interrupts his thought with an observation. Staring up at him wistfully, she says, “You’re tall.”.css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}You’re tall? It’s as if “Riverdale” met “The Bachelor” — or “The Bachelorette” — and you know there’s plenty more drama to come. “West Side Story,” an updated “Romeo and Juliet,” used to be a musical told through movement. Now it is a musical, full of back stories, told through words. So many, many words.For this “West Side Story,” the screenplay, originally by the playwright Arthur Laurents, is by Tony Kushner. Leonard Bernstein’s music and Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics are still here to guide the Sharks and the Jets along as they war it out in the streets of New York City. And then there are Peck’s dances, which have their own life, yet can come off as breezy excursions from the story — and sometimes as reminiscent of numbers from “In the Heights” or “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” — instead of being authoritatively knitted into the whole.The dance at the gym.20th Century StudiosWith so much emphasis on dialogue and character development, the tension — the very glue of “West Side Story” — seeps away. Tony, we learn, is on parole for almost killing a kid. Who cares? He talks about how he first saw the Cloisters, where he takes Maria on a date, while being carted off to prison. It’s hard to imagine how that could have happened, yet again, who cares? It’s like watching dancers with lead in their shoes.It’s not as if back stories weren’t important to Robbins, who conceived, directed and choreographed the stage musical. (He choreographed the 1961 film and directed it, with Robert Wise.) He wanted his actors and dancers to flesh out their characters’ pasts in order to give them greater dimension. But in the new version, there’s another war raging as action and sensation battle a continual need for context.In a 1985 symposium with the four collaborators — Robbins, Laurents, Bernstein and Sondheim — the subject of Cheryl Crawford came up. She was a producer who ultimately dropped out of the original stage production because, Sondheim said, “She wanted us to explain more why these kids were the way they were, and the more we tried to explain to her that this was not a sociological treatise,” but rather “a poetic interpretation of a social situation, the less she understood what we were saying.”She wanted, he said, for “West Side Story” to be more realistically grounded. “If we had gone that way,” Sondheim added, “we would’ve killed the piece.”The new movie hasn’t killed “West Side Story,” but it has muted it considerably — and packed it full of starts and stops. Now when the dances come, they’re less a part of the show’s fabric than an escape.At least they’re there. But how could they not be? Robbins has always been an influence on Peck, the resident choreographer and artistic adviser of New York City Ballet, where, as a dancer, he performed Robbins’s works — including the role of Bernardo in “West Side Story Suite.” In an interview Peck said the experience of working on the film made him realize “how much dance is built into the DNA and the structure of this musical.”Peck, photographed in New York, said working on the film he realized “how much dance is built into the DNA and the structure of this musical.”Lia Clay Miller for The New York Times“You can’t really derail that,” he added. “It’s like dance has to be a part of it. And I think that really speaks to his belief in it and his innovation with it.”But in Spielberg’s film the choreography doesn’t drive the action with the same force. So where does the dancing fit in? Certainly, there are moments of beauty and energy in Peck’s contributions, yet often the impetus behind the dances seem to be more about camerawork than choreography. It’s out of his control.One of the biggest changes is confusing. It was critical to Robbins that the Jets had a different dance language than the Sharks. He even enlisted the choreographer Peter Gennaro — he was credited as co-choreographer — to help create the Latin numbers. In the new film, it’s hard to put a finger on just how the Sharks move differently than the Jets. Peck brought on Patricia Delgado, his wife and a former principal at Miami City Ballet, and Craig Salstein, a former soloist at American Ballet Theater, as associate choreographers. Delgado helped with the Latin influence, but as the groups dance together, what’s clear is that they are dancing together — it’s one language, not two.Peck said he was more interested in creating a cohesive company of dancers, to build camaraderie among them. And if you know Peck’s work that makes sense. The group aesthetic of “West Side Story” reflects the dance communities that Peck builds onstage, too, at City Ballet and beyond. (Peck is an in-demand choreographer who makes works for many ballet companies and won a Tony for “Carousel.”) This is “West Side Story” as seen through the eyes of a choreographer who started out making dances on his friends.They want to be in America: Ariana DeBose, center, as Anita.Niko Tavernise/20th Century StudiosThat brings a different kind of velocity to “West Side Story.” Sometimes the dancing is so joyful, so light, that the performers seem to forget who they are. As the brooding Bernardo, David Alvarez is spectacular. Yet when he is dancing, should his expression be so full of bliss? He is the leader of a gang — and, sigh, here reimagined as a boxer.Watching the back stories unfold — and, later, trying to keep track of them — made me think of the way this movie could really have leaned into dance. What if the dream ballet, part of the original musical, had been included? In it, Tony and Maria sing “Somewhere” in her bedroom until the walls open up and the room disappears; now members of both gangs unite, dancing together in harmony “in a world,” as the script reads, “of space and air and sun.”The dream ballet probably never stood a chance. To most, the language of dance can be trusted only to a point. But what if it had been included — and updated? Now that would have been a thrill, a progressive act.That sense of harmony echoes how many of Peck’s dances look on the stage. When they work — the two I love are “Rodeo: Four Dance Episodes” and “The Times Are Racing” — they rise beyond steps and structure to land in a place of feeling, sweep and scope. That is what you think of when you think of the poetic, elusive “Somewhere.”But there’s another scene that follows in the stage musical, which is even more rarely performed: The dream turns into a nightmare. Riff and Bernardo appear, their deaths are re-enacted and Maria and Tony are separated amid chaos and violence. They end up back in the bedroom, where they sing together: “Hold my hand and we’re halfway there. Some day, Somehow, Somewhere!” I would have voted for the dream ballet — all the way to the nightmare. It had so much more to say. Maria and Tony, after all, are desperate. They’re holding onto air, and that calls for a dance. More

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      ‘Don’t Look Up’ Review: Tick, Tick, Kablooey

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      Adam McKay wants you to know that it’s the end of the world and you should absolutely, unequivocally not feel fine. (But do laugh.)Movies love to menace Earth. It’s human nature. In some of the most plausible doomsday flicks — “Meteor,” “Deep Impact” and “Armageddon” — a big space rock threatens annihilation. Usually, if not always happily, someone finally comes to the rescue, though that isn’t the case in the 1951 film “When Worlds Collide.” Before it makes good on its title, this shocker rockets survivalists on an ark to colonize another planet, which is more or less what Elon Musk has talked about with Space X.The director Adam McKay is not in the mood for nihilistic flights of fancy. Our planet is too dear and its future too terrifying, as the accelerated pace of species extinction and global deforestation underscore. But humanity isn’t interested in saving Earth, never mind itself, as the recent Glasgow climate summit reminded us. We’re too numb, dumb, powerless and indifferent, too busy fighting trivial battles. So McKay has made “Don’t Look Up,” a very angry, deeply anguished comedy freak out about how we are blowing it, hurtling toward oblivion. He’s sweetened the bummer setup with plenty of yuks — good, bad, indifferent — but if you weep, it may not be from laughing.Maybe bring hankies, though don’t look for speeches about climate change and global warming. Rather than directly confronting the existential horror of our environmental catastrophe, McKay has taken an allegorical approach in “Don’t Look Up” with a world-destroying comet. Oh sure, on its website, NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office (yes, it’s real) isn’t worried about near-Earth objects, as they’re called: “No known asteroid larger than 140 meters in size has a significant chance to hit Earth for the next 100 years.” Whew. But no matter. The planet is on fire, and so is McKay, who’s embraced his inner Roland Emmerich (“2012”) with a fury by lobbing a great big joke at us.That joke is definitely on us or soon will be in “Don’t Look Up,” which follows a studiously curated ragtag collection of scientists, politicians, military types, journalists and miscellaneous others who face — or don’t — the threat of a rapidly approaching comet. “I heard there’s an asteroid or a comet or something that you don’t like the looks of,” a visibly bored president of the United States (Meryl Streep) says to some anxious scientists who have been granted an imperial audience. The scientists really don’t like what they’ve seen but the president has other things on her mind, including upcoming elections and the friendly perv she’s trying to get placed on the Supreme Court.Packed with big names, many locations and ambitiously staged set pieces (and a lot of giddily terrible hairdos), the movie is a busy, boisterous mixed bag, and whether you laugh or not you may still grit your teeth. The story opens in an observatory where Jennifer Lawrence, who plays a grad student, Kate Dibiasky, first spots the comet. Kate’s giddiness over her discovery soon turns to fear when her professor, Dr. Randall Mindy (a terrific Leonardo DiCaprio), crunches some numbers and realizes the worst. Together, they pass along the bad news. Enter NASA (Rob Morgan), the military (Paul Guilfoyle) and the White House, which is where the movie’s breeziness takes a turn for the ominous.Also for the frantic, strident and obvious. McKay’s touch here is considerably blunter and less productive than it has been in a while. In his two previous movies — “The Big Short” and “Vice” — he blended comedic and dramatic modes to fascinating effect. He experimented with tone and pitch, and played up and down different scales, from the deadly serious to the outrageously silly. It didn’t always work. It proved easier to get into McKay’s groove when you laughed at, say, Margot Robbie explaining subprime mortgages while she’s taking a bubble bath in “The Big Short” than when you watched Christian Bale’s Dick Cheney discussing another American war in “Vice.”The stakes are higher still in “Don’t Look Up,” which grows progressively more frenetic and wobbly as the inevitability of the catastrophe is finally grasped by even the most ridiculous of the movie’s buffoon-rich cast of characters. One problem is that some of McKay’s biggest targets here — specifically in politics and infotainment — have already reached maximum self-parody or tragedy (or both). What is left to satirically skewer when facts are derided as opinion, flat Earthers attend annual conferences and conspiracy theory movements like QAnon have become powerful political forces?Even so, McKay keeps swinging hard and fast, and from the start, establishes a sense of visceral urgency with loose, agitated camerawork and brisk editing that fits the ticking-bomb story. He slings zingers and stages bits of comic business, making fine use of funny faces, jumping eyebrows, slow burns and double takes. Part ethnographer, part sociologist, he is especially good at mining the funny-ha-ha, funny-weird spaces in between people. But he’s not always in control of his material, including some cheap shots that slide into witless sexism. Presidential vanity is always a fair target, but too many of the digs directed at Streep’s character play into gender stereotypes.Streep is a great deal of fun to watch when she’s not unintentionally making you cringe, and Lawrence gives the movie a steady emotional pulse even at its most frantic. McKay’s work with DiCaprio is particularly memorable, partly because Dr. Mindy’s trajectory — from honest, concerned scientist to glib, showboating celebrity — strengthens the movie’s heartbreaking, unspeakable truth: Human narcissism and all that it has wrought, including the destruction of nature, will finally be our downfall. In the end, McKay isn’t doing much more in this movie than yelling at us, but then, we do deserve it.Don’t Look UpRated R for violence, language and the apocalypse. Running time: 2 hours 18 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘A Journal for Jordan’ Review: Reflections on Love Built and Lost

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      The actors Michael B. Jordan and Chanté Adams bring a compelling chemistry to the screen as opposites who fall for each other.Jordan Canedy is a wide-eyed baby with excellent lungs at the start of “A Journal for Jordan.” At the movie’s end, he’s becoming a young man, one with traits that his soldier father, Charles Monroe King, had hoped for when he began writing a yet-to-be-born Jordan advice in a notebook while stationed in Iraq.In 2006, while on patrol in Baghdad, First Sgt. King was killed by a roadside bomb. Dana Canedy, King’s fiancé and the mother of their infant son, was then a senior editor at The New York Times. Her 2007 article “From Father to Son, Last Words to Live By,” led to her to write the elegant book about love, loss and legacy upon which this movie is based, and with which it shares its title.So don’t be fooled by that touching title: The journal, in which Canedy added her own stories to King’s writing, is as much the work of a grieving mother driven to make sure her son knows the love story that brought him into the world as it is a devoted father’s guide to decency and manhood.Denzel Washington directs this adaptation (the screenplay is by Virgil Williams) with care, respect and a deep-seated knowledge of the Black love stories that don’t make it to the big screen nearly enough. The actors Michael B. Jordan and Chanté Adams are similarly attuned, bringing a compelling chemistry as opposites who fall for each other.In the movie, Dana meets Charles on a visit to her parents’ home near Fort Knox, Ky. Charles is chiseled, polite and oh-so good looking. He sends a gentle helping of “ma’ams” her way. She appraises him. He’s a 10-and-2 kind of driver. She reaches from the passenger side to blare the horn. Though different, their attraction is palpable. It also helps that they are both single (sort of). He’s going through a divorce, and she recently ended a relationship.Michael B. Jordan embraces Charles’s rigorous ethos as well as his tenderness. Charles might drop for morning push-ups, but he’ll also bow his head for grace at a restaurant. He travels with push-up bars but also a sketch pad. If Dana sees a flaw, it may be Charles’s single-minded devotion to his soldiers. She has her own doubts about being a military wife.Canedy acknowledged her edges (and curves) in her book, and Adams embodies them in her portrayal. When she begins writing her son, Jordan, her anecdotes can be frank, or frisky. She even shares a doozy of an argument, the kind that either breaks up a couple or makes them stronger.While the movie makes it clear that Dana and Charles are successful, it doesn’t always get at the labor necessary to get them there, both as a couple and as individuals. While it’s easy to rely on the shorthand of countless wartime movies to signal Charles’s ascendancy, Dana’s own story deserves a few more beats.A Journal for JordanRated PG-13 for a loving and passionate congress, salty language and brief marijuana use. Running time: 2 hours 11 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Parallel Mothers’ Review: Almodóvar’s Brutal, Beautiful World

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      The Spanish director finally confronts the legacy of his country’s political violence in his new film, starring Penélope Cruz and Milena Smit.“World-building” usually refers to how the makers of science fiction and fantasy construct their domains, populating them with imaginary creatures and allegorical meanings. But among living filmmakers, the most prodigious world builder might be Pedro Almodóvar. Plenty of directors have a style. Almodóvar conjures a cosmos — a domain of bright colors, piercing music (often by Alberto Iglesias) and swirling melodrama. If you’ve visited in the past, you will be eager to return.This isn’t to say that Almodóvaria, as I sometimes think of it, is a realm entirely apart from the drab planet where most of us live. It’s a version of Spain (most of the time), informed by that country’s aesthetic and literary traditions, a legacy that encompasses the perverse whimsy of Surrealism and the openhearted pathos of flamenco. “Parallel Mothers,” Almodóvar’s new feature, adds an element that he had previously avoided: the legacy of the Spanish Civil War and the nearly 40 years of dictatorship that followed.At first, the war seems like an unlikely, poignant entry point into a uniquely Almodóvarian swirl of present-day romantic complication and domestic anguish. Janis (Penélope Cruz, never better) is a photographer shooting a very handsome forensic anthropologist for a magazine spread. His name is Arturo (Israel Elejalde), and his grim specialty is examining the remains of Franco’s victims, many of whom were buried in unmarked mass graves. One of those graves is in Janis’s hometown. Her great-grandfather was part of a group of men taken from their homes early in the war and never seen again. She asks Arturo if he can help in the investigation.He offers to do what he can, and then he and Janis sleep together. She gets pregnant — he is married — and decides to raise their child on her own. All of this happens quickly, and seems like a complicated narrative mechanism designed to introduce Janis to Ana (Milena Smit), a teenager she meets in the maternity ward. Almost simultaneously, they give birth to girls and promise to keep in touch.Their relationship will pass through friendship, love, devastating loss, deceit and despair. The central plot of “Parallel Mothers” is vintage Almodóvar: a skein of reversals, revelations, surprises and coincidences unraveled with style, wit and feeling. The contrasts of background and temperament between Janis and Ana provide the dominant tones. Janis, the child of a hippie mother (who named her after Janis Joplin), was raised by her grandmother. She has grown up to be a practical, independent Madrileña, warmhearted but unsentimental. Her best friend is an elegant magazine editor played by Rossy de Palma, a statuesque avatar of Almodóvarismo in its purest essence.Ana is the child of an (unseen) father, who lives in Granada, and a mother, Teresa (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón), caught up in her acting career. In spite of Ana’s unhappy circumstances (her pregnancy is the result of rape), an aura of privilege clings to her family. Teresa, the kind of woman who might have been the heroine of an earlier Almodóvar picture — he is often drawn to theater, and to the toughness and vulnerability of actresses — is something of a villain here, an entitled narcissist who can’t fully acknowledge the reality of her daughter’s experiences.Janis doesn’t exactly replace Teresa in Ana’s life. She has her own problems to confront, some of which resemble Ana’s, some of which put them in conflict with each other. “Parallel Mothers,” in effect, critiques its own title. The two characters mirror each other in some ways, but nobody’s story moves in a straight line. Entanglement is unavoidable. Almodóvarian geometry is hyperbolic, non-Euclidean, kinked and convoluted.But Almodóvar’s art is also characterized by emotional precision and moral clarity. What happens to Ana and Janis isn’t just a matter of accident or narrative artifice; there is a political dimension to their relationship that is the key to the film’s structure.When Arturo comes back into the picture, he brings a reminder of unfinished historical business. If, at first, the horror of the past had seemed like the scaffolding for a modern story, the final sections of “Parallel Mothers” suggest the opposite. Injustice festers across generations. The failure to confront it casts a persistent, ugly shadow.That shadow is a new element in Almodóvar’s imagined universe, and it challenges some of his artistic assumptions. A reality as stark, as brutal, as unresolved as the fascist terror that dominated Spain in the middle decades of the 20th century doesn’t fit comfortably within his elegant frames and melodramatic conceits. That may be the point of “Parallel Mothers,” and the rawness of its final scenes is a measure of its accomplishment. We build new worlds to understand the one we’re in.Parallel MothersRated R. Sex, violence, tragedy. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 3 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘American Underdog’ Review: A Football Fairy Tale

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      Zachary Levi plays the N.F.L. star Kurt Warner in this biopic. It’s a wan parable about love and hard work.The biopic “American Underdog” centers on the quarterback Kurt Warner, a football player from Iowa who had an unconventional rise to becoming a National Football League champion. Warner’s story is inspirational but intricate, and this wan film struggles to balance simple storytelling with the complexities of the sport.Unlike many football stars, Warner (Zachary Levi) wasn’t drafted into the N.F.L. after graduating from college. For years following his graduation from the University of Northern Iowa in 1993, Warner worked at a grocery store, building highlight reels to send to sports agents on his time off. The film begins in this fallow period, dramatizing how Warner met Brenda (Anna Paquin), the woman who would become his wife. The couple shared common faiths in Christianity and each other. With Brenda by his side, Warner was eventually given a place on an arena football team. The opportunity enabled Warner to prove himself at a professional level, if not yet on an N.F.L. scale — that would come afterward, in 1997, with an offer from the St. Louis Rams (now the Los Angeles Rams). The rest, to football fans, is history.Romance was an important part of Warner’s story, and the performances from Levi and Paquin are convincing — a feat, given their characters’ inexplicably helmet-headed hairstyles. But the film has minimal insight into how Warner navigated the institution of professional football. The movie’s directors, the brothers Jon and Andrew Erwin (“Woodlawn,” “I Still Believe”), glaze over the details that depict how teams seek talent. Warner’s triumphs seem to rest more on his noble character than on gameplay specifics — a dubious notion given the N.F.L.’s competitive standards.The Erwins’ film presents a parable of how love and hard work can lead a hero down a prosperous, predetermined path. It’s a pleasant narrative, but it feels like the picture-book version of a more complicated story.American UnderdogRated PG for suggested sexual situations. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Memoria’ Review: In Search of Lost Time

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      Tilda Swinton stars in Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s elusive and enchanting new film, set in Colombia.In the middle of the night, Jessica hears a noise — loud and slightly metallic, somewhere between a bang and thud. Later, talking with a young sound engineer named Hernán, she will describe it as large ball of concrete slamming into a metal wall surrounded by seawater, a remarkably vivid image that Hernán patiently attempts to synthesize.Jessica, a British expatriate living in Colombia and played by Tilda Swinton, refers to what she heard as “my sound” — “mi sonido” in Spanish — and it seems to exist for her ears alone. Or rather for her and the audience watching “Memoria,” Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s enigmatic and enchanting new film.The sound startles Jessica at dinner with her sister (Agnes Brekke) and brother-in-law (Daniel Giménez Cacho), and follows her from Bogotá to a small town in the mountains. The possibility that it’s an auditory hallucination is raised at one point, and there are other moments when the reliability of Jessica’s perception seems to be in question. Is Hernán (Juan Pablo Urrego) a figment of her imagination? If so, how could he have offered to buy her a refrigerator for the orchids she is raising on her farm in Medellín?Even though Jessica visits a rural doctor, asking for Xanax to help her sleep — the doctor offers Jesus as a safer, more effective treatment — her psychological state isn’t really what “Memoria” is about. Saying exactly what it is about poses a quandary that multiple viewings are unlikely to dispel. Every scene unfolds with quiet, meticulous clarity, but Weerasethakul’s luminous precision only deepens the mystery.Whenever you think you have a handle on where the story might be going, the ground shifts. Jessica is baffled by the sound and other, vaguely similar phenomena, but she doesn’t seem to be delusional, or even unduly troubled. She is curious, gently questioning people she meets — notably an anthropologist (Jeanne Balibar) and a second, older Hernán (Elkin Díaz) — about their work and its potential relevance to her situation. The film operates in a similar spirit, following an invisible map toward a surprising destination.Along the way, Weerasethakul pauses to contemplate the remnants of ancient civilizations and the chaos of a modern life, as flickerings of supernaturalism, disrupted chronology, science fiction and the literary speculations of Jorge Luis Borges illuminate Jessica’s journey.The director, most of whose previous films take place in Thailand, has a longstanding interest in the visual, social and metaphysical contrasts between city and countryside. His urban spaces, like the university where the first Hernán works and the hospital where Jessica’s sister is a patient, tend to be sleek and institutional, governed less by commerce or political authority than by science and technology. The Southeast Asian jungles in his “Tropical Malady” and “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives” — and the lush Andean mountainside where the second Hernán makes his home — are zones of magic, where the modern distinction between myth and fact does not apply.This doesn’t quite make Weerasethakul a magical realist, though the South American setting of “Memoria” might make that description especially tempting. His imagination is philosophical and speculative, and in style he is more a poet than a fabulist, at home in the gaps between our various ways of making sense of the world.His refusal to explain can be a challenge, and “Memoria” demands patience and attention. I found it an emotionally wrenching and intellectually fulfilling experience, but not one I can easily summarize or classify, partly because the feeling of radical uncertainty — Jessica’s feeling, but also mine — was a little too real. Her gradual unmooring from any stable sense of reality, and her perseverance in spite of that dislocation, strike me as utterly familiar, even as the causes of her alienation remains elusive. I am haunted by the plight of the second Hernán, a man blessed and cursed with a prodigious memory that connects him to a universe of suffering even as it condemns him to a state of isolation.Swinton and Díaz are subtle, charismatic performers, and their scenes together, which make up most of the film’s last section, bring it to a new level of intensity. What passes between Jessica and Hernán, and the sequence of images that follows, represent a quietly mind-blowing moment of cinema, something as wild and argument-provoking now as the end of “2001: A Space Odyssey” was in 1968.You have to see it to believe it, and to see it you’ll have to go to a movie theater. “Memoria” is opening in New York this week and then making its way across the country, one cinema at a time. It’s worth the wait, and the trip.MemoriaRated PG. In Spanish and English, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 16 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Dead Man’s Switch: A Crypto Mystery’ Review: A Staggering Scam?

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      A new documentary tries to unpack how $200 million went unaccounted for after the Canadian cryptocurrency entrepreneur Gerald W. Cotten died.The realms of bitcoin and cryptocurrency can be confounding labyrinths for those of us comfortable with paper money. “Dead Man’s Switch,” an at times absorbing documentary, demonstrates there’s nothing new under the sun in terms of stealing, whether the cash is material or virtual.Its director, Sheona McDonald, has sufficient confidence in the story and lays out many of the juicy bits as the opening credits roll. A brash, well-liked young bitcoin entrepreneur dies suddenly in India, she tells us early, after which the money that was sunk into his venture by scores of ambitious investors goes missing. When the film ends, we’re told that over $200 million is still unaccounted for.The entrepreneur was a fresh-faced Canadian named Gerald W. Cotten, and his trajectory — from Canada’s Pied Piper of cryptocurrency to a soon-to-be pariah keeping one step ahead of allegations of his misdeeds — is nearly whiplash inducing. McDonald enlists a small army of investigative journalists to piece together Cotten’s rise and fall. And, for poignancy’s sake, she features a couple of new-money in-crowd wannabes who wound up losing their life savings to Cotten’s company, Quadriga CX.There’s some comedic value here. The movie details how the transparency supposedly inherent in cryptocurrency actually enabled Cotten to run what appears to have been a brazen Ponzi scheme. So a seemingly better way of banking turns out, perhaps, to be a better mousetrap for those willing to take the bait.And yet. The orphanage he and his new wife traveled to India to open turns out to have been real! And despite the discovery, by some intrepid journalists, of the peculiar comings and goings of his corpse, his death, too, seems to have actually happened. At the movie’s close, onscreen text states that neither the F.B.I. nor the Royal Canadian Mounted Police would comment for this movie because of ongoing investigations. So stay tuned for a sequel, maybe.Dead Man’s Switch: A Crypto MysteryNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 18 minutes. Watch on Discovery+. More

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      The Artists We Lost in 2021, in Their Words

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      This year, as pandemic deaths ebbed and flowed, a distinctive, eternal beat — that of artist’s deaths — played on as usual, bringing its own waves of collective grief. Some, such as Cicely Tyson and Stephen Sondheim, held the spotlight for generations. Others, like Michael K. Williams and Nai-Ni Chen, left us lamenting careers cut short. Here is a tribute to just a small number of them, in their own words.Cicely TysonAssociated Press“I’m not scared of death. I don’t know what it is. How could I be afraid of something I don’t know anything about?”— Cicely Tyson, actress, born 1924 (Read the obituary.)Melvin Van PeeblesMichael Ochs Archives/Getty Images“I want people to be empowered and also have a damn good time.”— Melvin Van Peebles, filmmaker, born 1932 (Read the obituary.)“I want my steps to speak.”— Liam Scarlett, choreographer, born 1986 (Read the obituary.)“I remember my childhood often, I remember a lot of the past. But when it comes to music, I always look forward.”— Nelson Freire, pianist, born 1944 (Read the obituary.)Bob AvianKarsten Moran for The New York Times“When my parents went out, I would push back the furniture, clear an open space, turn on the record player and leap around the apartment.”— Bob Avian, choreographer, born 1937 (Read the obituary.)“School was a crashing bore and a terrible chore, until one day when I was cast as the girl with the mandolin in ‘Sleeping Beauty.’”— Carla Fracci, dancer, born 1936 (Read the obituary.)“As I grew up in Kyoto, the wood of the Buddhist statues, trees, the grain of the wooden pillars, the patterns on the floor, the stones in the gardens, the bamboo, trees and plants in Kyoto are all a part of me — and as I read a script, I borrow from all these things.”— Emi Wada, costume designer, born 1937“I still feel sky-deprived when in the forested places. Many, many people born to the skies of the plains feel that way.”— Larry McMurtry, novelist, born 1936 (Read the obituary.)Ed AsnerWally Fong/Associated Press“My father told me, ‘You didn’t make a success as a student, you’re not going to make a success as an actor.’ I said, ‘I’ll be the judge of that.’”— Ed Asner, actor, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)Olympia DukakisAbramorama“I came to New York with $57 in my pocket.”— Olympia Dukakis, actress, born 1931 (Read the obituary.)Charlie WattsEvening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images“When I first went to New York with the Stones, the first thing I did was to go to Birdland. And that was it. I’d seen America. I mean, I didn’t want to see anywhere else.”— Charlie Watts, drummer, born 1941 (Read the obituary.)Jacques D’AmboiseJohn Dominis/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty Images“Spread me in Times Square or the Belasco Theater.”— Jacques D’Amboise, dancer, born 1934 (Read the obituary.)“If you have a leading character, they should be in a hurry. You can slow it down when you’re shooting, but it helps in the writing: Even if they’re not moving, they’re thinking about moving on, or getting away from the scene they’re in.”— Robert Downey Sr., filmmaker, born 1936 (Read the obituary.)Joe AllenJim Cooper/Associated Press“I always said I lacked ambition — but that does not mean I was lazy.”— Joe Allen, theater district restaurateur, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)“I don’t assume an audience’s interest. I assume the opposite.”— Charles Grodin, actor, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)Jerry PinkneyJoyce Dopkeen/The New York Times“I solve problems — visual problems.”— Jerry Pinkney, children’s book illustrator, born 1939 (Read the obituary.)Larry KingAlberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images‘‘If you’re combative, you never learn.”— Larry King, TV host, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)Anna HalprinSam Falk/The New York Times“I started to teach people how the body actually works. I looked at the skeleton. I did human dissection. I did all these things to understand the nature of movement, not just my movement.”— Anna Halprin, choreographer, born 1920 (Read the obituary.)“I’m not interested in the intentions of artists; I’m interested in consequences.”— Dave Hickey, art critic, born 1938 (Read the obituary.)Nai-Ni ChenStephanie Berger for The New York Times“My thirst for expressing myself, both East and West, could only happen through creating my own company.”— Nai-Ni Chen, choreographer and dancer, born 1959 (Read the obituary.)Virgil AblohDavid Kasnic for The New York Times“When I studied engineering at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, it was the humanities classes that I had put to the side that ultimately started me on this path of thinking about creativity in a much more cultural context — not designing for design’s sake, but connecting design to the rhythm of what’s happening in the world.”— Virgil Abloh, designer, born 1980 (Read the obituary.)Yolanda LópezAlexa Treviño“Those of us who make images must always be very conscious about the power of images — about how they function — especially in a society where we are not taught our own history.”— Yolanda López, artist, born 1942 (Read the obituary.)“You’re more anarchic onstage than you are anywhere else.”— Helen McCrory, actress, born 1968 (Read the obituary.)Michael K. WilliamsDemetrius Freeman for The New York Times“The characters that mean the most to me are the ones that damn near kill me. It’s a sacrifice I’ve chosen to make.”— Michael K. Williams, actor, born 1966 (Read the obituary.)bell hooksKarjean Levine/Getty Images“We cannot have a meaningful revolution without humor.”— bell hooks, writer and scholar, born 1952 (Read the obituary.)Norm MacdonaldMargaret Norton/NBC, via Getty Images“Making people laugh is a gift. Preaching to them is not a gift. There are people who can do that better. Preachers.”— Norm Macdonald, comedian, born 1959 (Read the obituary.)“The thing that everybody thinks is going to work will not. The thing that nobody thinks will work will.”— Elizabeth McCann, theater producer, born 1931 (Read the obituary.)“The success of my books is not in the characters or the words or the colors, but in the simple, simple feelings.”— Eric Carle, author and artist, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)“I think children want to read about normal, everyday kids.”— Beverly Cleary, author, born 1916 (Read the obituary.)Young DolphPaul R. Giunta/Invision, via Associated Press“My whole thing is about giving these folks the real.”— Young Dolph, rapper, born 1985 (Read the obituary.)“I try to use words that fit a pattern, that are musical and expressive, but do not sound mechanical. Above all it should have a speech rhythm that is like the rhythms that the audience would speak.”— Carlisle Floyd, composer, born 1926 (Read the obituary.)“Birds were the first composers. They like to sing in spring. Purely serving of the beauty — that’s what we try to do.”— Louis Andriessen, composer, born 1939 (Read the obituary.)Cloris LeachmanAssociated Press“I don’t have a lot of trappings, I think, in my personality. I’m just a simple person, with a silly bone.”— Cloris Leachman, actress, born 1926 (Read the obituary.)“I’m a witness of my time, you know, of a history.”— Hung Liu, artist, born 1948 (Read the obituary.)“Technology is changing the way people work. With electronic mail, the internet, teleconferencing, people are starting to ask, ‘What is a headquarters or office environment?’”— Art Gensler, architect, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)Christopher PlummerTom Jamieson for The New York Times“I’ve made over 100 motion pictures, and some of them were even good. It’s nice to be reborn every few decades.”— Christopher Plummer, actor, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)“After you see your work, you always want to go right back and do it all over again.”— Lisa Banes, actress, born 1955 (Read the obituary.)“I think of the art as dead when it leaves my studio. I don’t even own it anymore. Installing in a museum or a show that’s coming up, I’m not allowed to touch my own work ever. It just seems strange to me. If somebody puts me in front of my drawings, I’d put more text in it. It’s never finished, but none of my work is ever finished.”— Kaari Upson, artist, born 1970 (Read the obituary.)SophieFrazer Harrison/Getty Images For Coachella“I don’t have the need to bring any more clutter into the physical world. And I like the fact that musical data is weightless and spaceless in that way.”— Sophie, pop producer and performer, born 1986 (Read the obituary.)Etel AdnanFabrice Gibert, via Galerie Lelong & Co.“My paintings are not usually titled. Art should make people dream, and when you have a title, you condition the vision.”— Etel Adnan, author and artist, born 1925 (Read the obituary.)Michael NesmithMichael Ochs Archives/Getty Images“We’re a couple of old men, but we sound the same when we play this music — and it nourishes us the way it nourishes you.”— Michael Nesmith, musician, born 1942 (Read the obituary.)“We always put music first and marriage second. One night after dinner, for instance, I was going to do the dishes and Jerry said, ‘Forget the dishes. Let’s practice. I’ll do the dishes later.’”— Dottie Dodgion, drummer, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)Jessica WalterDove and Express, via Hulton Archive/Getty Images“Even my ‘leading ladies’— you know, in air quotes — were characters. They were not Miss Vanilla Ice Cream. They weren’t holding the horse while John Wayne galloped into the sunset.”— Jessica Walter, actress, born 1941 (Read the obituary.)“The last note, the high last note — it must say something.”— Edita Gruberova, soprano, born 1946 (Read the obituary.)DMXChad Batka for The New York Times“I’m going to look back on my life, just before I go, and thank god for every moment.”— DMX, rapper, born 1970 (Read the obituary.)Stephen SondheimFred R. Conrad/The New York Times“Life is unpredictable. It is. There is no form. And making forms gives you solidity. I think that’s why people paint paintings and take photographs and write music and tell stories that have beginning, middles and ends — even when the middle is at the beginning and the beginning is at the end.”— Stephen Sondheim, composer and lyricist, born 1930 (Read the obituary.) More