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      George Michael Preferred Music to Fame. The Doc He Made Does, Too.

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      “George Michael: Freedom Uncut,” a film the musician worked on with his longtime collaborator David Austin, tells the story of his professional life via interviews and previously unseen footage.George Michael and David Austin were best friends who met because their mothers were best friends. Austin’s family lived at 67 Redhill Drive in the working class East Finchley area of North London, and Michael’s family was at 57. The two wrote songs together and remained close even as one became a global superstar and the other didn’t.Michael was a gifted and determined musical dynamo who became a star at the age of 19, first as a member of the British duo Wham! He won two Grammys in the solo career that followed, and collaborated with some of the greatest stars of the previous generation, including Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Paul McCartney and Elton John. He was a gifted writer, producer, arranger and musician, sometimes playing all the instruments on his songs. And as a singer, he moved fluidly from Motown pop to hard funk to Brazilian bossa nova, with a voice that was sure, expressive and flush with poignancy and drama.Neither Michael nor Austin had significant movie directing experience, but neither lacked confidence, so around 2014 they began directing a documentary detailing the vicissitudes of Michael’s career and life, including pop supremacy and international scandal, euphoric love and lacerating deaths.In December 2016, they’d picture-locked the film and planned a screening for their families, who’d gathered, as they often did, to celebrate Christmas together. “We were going to show it to our parents on Boxing Day,” Austin said. “George was immensely proud of it.” But Michael died in his sleep at 53 and was found by a lover, Fadi Fawaz, on Christmas morning. The cause was a heart condition.Austin trimmed Michael’s final cut to fit a TV time slot on Channel Four in England, where it aired in October 2017 as “George Michael: Freedom.” But he was dissatisfied with the edit because it didn’t tell the full story as Michael saw it. So in the following years, while resolving some worldwide rights issues, Austin restored the final cut and added an introduction by Kate Moss and tribute performances by Adele as well as Chris Martin of Coldplay. The film, now called “George Michael: Freedom Uncut,” debuts in theaters worldwide on Wednesday.“Freedom Uncut” was preceded in 2004 by the BBC’s “A Different Story,” which included interviews with Michael’s close friends as well as his father, a Greek immigrant who’d viewed his son’s dreams of stardom as juvenile and foolhardy. Throughout “A Different Story,” Michael discusses his private life with self-mocking candor, which was one of his most charming traits: “Oh my God, I’m a massive star and I think I may be a poof,” he says at one point, describing a time when he began coming to grips with being gay. “What am I going to do?”So for “Freedom Uncut,” Michael wanted to focus on his professional life. “He said, ‘This is a different film. This is about me and about the people I work with,’” Austin recalled in a phone call from his office in London. The documentary includes interviews with fellow music stars, including Elton John, Stevie Wonder and Mary J. Blige, the comedians Ricky Gervais and James Corden, the producer Mark Ronson and the supermodels Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, and others who starred in his “Freedom! ’90” video. The film includes recently discovered 35 mm footage shot by the director David Fincher, who directed “Freedom! ’90” before his successful career in Hollywood, and unseen home videos Michael made of Anselmo Feleppa, his longtime boyfriend, who died in March 1993 of an AIDS-related illness.Michael was a self-described homebody who was happiest playing with his dogs at his country house, but his career brought him into contact with music and fashion’s biggest stars. “What struck me instantly was how down to earth and what a sweet, beautiful soul he was,” the supermodel Naomi Campbell wrote in an email. “He was unique, a one-of-a-kind divine personality of our time.”IN THE RAPID-ASCENT stage of his career, Michael was a remarkably prolific songwriter: Starting in 1982, Wham! (the duo he formed with Andrew Ridgeley) had four Top 10 U.K. singles in a row. The pair’s second album, “Make It Big,” gave them three No. 1 songs in the United States: “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” “Careless Whisper” and “Everything She Wants.” When I interviewed Michael following the breakup of Wham!, he described the duo as a carefully plotted return to pop escapism. “I can understand why people wanted to punch me out,” he admitted.Everything Michael learned about craft and marketing conjoined on his first solo album, “Faith” (1987), which made him a star on the magnitude of Michael Jackson or Madonna. But the celebrity he’d desired and attained “had taken me to the edge of madness,” he says in “Freedom Uncut.”For the release of his next album, “Listen Without Prejudice Vol. 1,” he insisted his name and face not appear on the cover. He refused to promote the record or appear in his own videos. And in his song “Freedom! ’90,” he deconstructed pop stardom and exploded the foundational illusion of fandom: “I don’t belong to you, and you don’t belong to me.” It was, regardless of its message, a massive hit.Michael felt that his record company, Sony, was not promoting his new album avidly enough, and in 1992, he sued in the hope of terminating his contract. By then, he’d met Feleppa and felt loved for the first time in a sexual relationship. “I was happier than I’d ever been in my entire life,” he says in a “Freedom Uncut” voice-over.Andrew Ridgeley and Michael performing as Wham! in 1985, supporting their second album.Michael Putland/Getty ImagesHis disenchantment with stardom collapsed into depression over the following years. In June 1994, a little more than a year after Feleppa died, Michael lost the Sony case. In 1997, his beloved mother, Lesley, died of cancer. And in 1998, he was arrested in a Beverly Hills park for committing a “lewd act” with an undercover policeman, which is when he came out as gay and declared, “I don’t feel any shame whatsoever.”In the midst of these troubles, he released a 1996 album, “Older,” which included the Top 10 hits “Jesus to a Child,” written in tribute to Feleppa, and “Fastlove.” (Michael called “Older” “my greatest moment,” and an expanded edition will be reissued on July 8.) But he made only one more album of original songs in the following 20 years before his death.“Freedom Uncut” vivifies Michael for younger generations that didn’t live through the Pop Star Wars of the ’80s. He loved and emulated Black music, which created controversy in the moment — George Benson’s eyes nearly rolled back into his head when he announced Michael’s 1989 American Music Award win in the favorite soul/R&B album category. But time often engenders empathy, and the singer is now viewed as an ally. “Michael’s journey as a working-class gay white man from London who loved Black music and Black culture gave him an intersectional legacy that few artists (save Prince) will ever achieve,” Jason Johnson wrote in The Root, a website that focuses on African American issues, two days after the singer died.The fact that Michael was able to write, arrange and produce at such a high level places him in “the rarefied air of Sly Stone, Prince or Shuggie Otis,” Mark Ronson added in a phone interview. “It’s crazy, because he made incredible R&B music, but he didn’t go to America to record it” with Black musicians, he noted. “There wasn’t the insecurity of being a white soul boy from England.”Ronson also hears melancholic or even mournful qualities in Michael’s music: “A lot of our favorite artists sound catchy and peppy, but when you peel back one or two layers, you see somebody who’s dealing with serious inner demons.”Michael onstage accepting an American Music Award. The musician won two Grammys for his solo work.Alan Greth/Associated PressIN 1984, WHEN Michael was already a gleaming pop phenom in England, he went on TV and introduced David Austin, who was singing his debut single, “Turn to Gold,” which Michael wrote with Austin and produced. “I’ve known this young man since he was 2 years old,” Michael said, before declaring his pal “the biggest star of 1984.”Austin recalled, “He was telling a porky pie,” and laughed, using Cockney rhyming slang for a lie. “We’d known each other since he was the grand old age of 6 months, and I was 11 months older. From early childhood, right through to our late teens, we were together all the time.”David Austin is a stage name; he was born David Mortimer, to Irish parents. George Michael was born Georgios Panayiotou, to an English mother and an industrious Greek Cypriot father who worked in a fish and chips shop and became a restaurateur.Austin doesn’t often give interviews. Although he’s sometimes described as Michael’s manager, he wasn’t — he was a collaborator, an adviser, a deputy and since his friend’s death, he’s been in charge of the estate’s artistic decisions. In the course of a 70-minute phone call, he talked warmly about Michael, sometimes referring to him in the present tense, and joked about his own modest recording career. (“What career?”)His father made trumpets and other instruments for the British music company Boosey & Hawkes. Their home was full of instruments, and Austin learned clarinet and guitar, while Michael played drums. “We both aspired to be pop stars,” he said.By age 6, Austin had learned to use a Revox recording machine, and he recorded four or five songs with Michael, including “Crocodile Rock” by Elton John, “Wig Wam Bam” by the Sweet, who were Michael’s favorite band, and their first co-written original, called “The Music Maker of the World.” (“I’m never going to tell you what the lyrics are, because I’m going red talking about it,” he said, and chuckled.)The two friends had a band called Stainless Steel, and they decorated Michael’s bass drum with the band’s initials. “But they were slanted S’s,” Austin recalled, which made them look like the Nazi Schutzstaffel logo. “One of the parents came up — ‘Right, off with that!’ We were like, ‘What?’ We hadn’t been taught about World War II yet.”After that, Michael and Austin played in a five-piece ska band called the Executive, with their pal Andrew Ridgeley. “We were terrible, but everyone loved us,” Michael had told me years ago.But when the Executive broke up, Michael and Ridgeley kept working together, finding almost immediate success as Wham! while Austin chased a solo career. “It was very hard at the time, watching my two best friends have enormous success,” Austin admitted. “It took me a few years to accept.”The success of Wham! “opened the door to the industry for me,” Austin continued. But he turned out not to be the biggest star of 1984. After Wham! broke up in 1986, he and Michael went to the south of France and tried to write Austin’s next single. Michael wrote “I Want Your Sex,” which Austin demoed, and the two wrote “Look at Your Hands” together. But Austin’s label didn’t love the songs, so Michael held on to them and released them on “Faith.” (That album has gone 10 times platinum, giving Austin considerable publishing royalties.)As a director, Austin’s strength was his rapport with Michael, and his inside understanding of the singer’s feelings and fears, going all the way back to Redhill Drive. He even knew Michael during his awkward phase: “People have no comprehension of what I looked like as a kid,” the singer had told me, laughing wildly. “I was such an ugly little bastard.”Austin confirmed his friend’s self-effacing analysis: “George didn’t feel attractive as a child,” he said. “People who go on to have extraordinary careers, quite often there’s something lacking in their life. The career is filling a void, and that’s what the extra drive is about.“When you initially get there, it’s everything you want.” he added. “Then when it becomes huge, you realize fame will never, ever fill that void.”Rather than repairing anyone’s bad feelings, fame is more likely to exacerbate them. Michael figured this out, Austin said, which is why he spent his last two decades among friends and family, more than in front of fans. “Now I’m gonna get myself happy,” he sang, and he did.“George and I used to fight as kids, and even as adults,” Austin said. “But we were incredibly close. Music, family, close friendships — those are the things in life that fill the void.” More

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      How Real-Life and Fictional Horror Seeped Into ‘The Black Phone’

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      Influenced by “Rosemary’s Baby” and “The Devil’s Backbone,” the filmmaker wove details from his childhood into this supernatural movie starring Ethan Hawke.After scoring a hit with the Marvel movie “Doctor Strange” in 2016, the director Scott Derrickson started working on its sequel, “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.” In January 2020, however, he abruptly left that movie because of creative differences.For his next film, he started with a short story by Joe Hill, which he layered with autobiographical material. “I had been in therapy for a couple of years, dealing with a lot of childhood trauma issues,” Derrickson, 55, said in a video interview.The result is “The Black Phone,” out on Friday, in which Derrickson and Ethan Hawke reunite 10 years after their collaboration in the terrifying horror movie “Sinister.” Now Hawke plays the Grabber, a masked psychopath who kidnaps and kills children in 1978 Colorado. Until, that is, he sets his sights on the resourceful 13-year-old Finney (Mason Thames), who gets unexpected help from the Grabber’s previous victims — their ghosts communicate tasks for survival via a derelict landline — and his own sister, Gwen (Madeleine McGraw).Considering how personal the film is to Derrickson, it comes as little surprise to hear him start off with his own story when asked to list five influences on “The Black Phone.” These are edited excerpts from the conversation.His childhood“The Black Phone” is set in North Denver, where Derrickson grew up. “It was a working-class, kind of blue-collar neighborhood, half-Mexican, half-white,” he said. “There was a lot of violence — everybody got whipped by their parents, there was fighting on the way to school, on the way home from school, at school.”In the film, Finney is always on edge: His dad has a temper when drunk, and there are all these mysterious disappearances. “I think I was 8 or 9 years old when my friend next door knocked on the door,” Derrickson said. “He was crying and he said, ‘Somebody murdered my mom.’ His mother had been abducted and raped and killed and wrapped in phone wire — I remember that detail — and thrown in the local lake,” he continued. “So the serial killer who could just grab you out of nowhere was a real thing for us in that neighborhood. That was always in the air.”‘The 400 Blows’ (1959)Jean-Pierre Léaud in ‘The 400 Blows.’Janus FilmsFrançois Truffaut’s debut feature retraces much of his upbringing — via a cinematic alter ego portrayed by the 14-year-old Jean-Pierre Léaud — in a way that is warm yet also devoid of sentimentality. “The first idea I had was to take a lot of the traumatic events of my childhood and try to make a kind of American ‘400 Blows,’” Derrickson said. “It’s a movie for adults about children that I wouldn’t describe as nostalgic — that’s a really interesting way to approach one’s own childhood experience as a filmmaker.”And yet Derrickson was also keen to show that fortitude is hard to snuff out. “It’s a really wonderful picture and somehow as bleak as it is, it also shows the resilience of children,” he said. “There’s a lot of joy in that movie, too. Even as this kid keeps getting blow after blow, his spirit is very strong. And I think that shows in both Finney and Gwen.”‘The Devil’s Backbone’ (2001)Irene Visedo as Conchita, a teacher at haunted orphanage during the Spanish Civil War.Sony Pictures ClassicsDerrickson is a huge fan of Guillermo del Toro’s supernatural horror film, which is set in an orphanage in 1939 Spain, and he initially brings up the way it visually represented ghost children, as well as the communal relationship between the orphans. “From a storytelling point of view, it was a really influential movie on me,” Derrickson said.But he also picked up tips from the commentary the Mexican filmmaker recorded for the movie’s DVD release. “One of the things that Guillermo del Toro says in that commentary is that when he casts a child actor, he makes sure that the child can imitate him, and this has been so helpful to me,” Derrickson said. “If you’re giving them a direction and it’s just not working, you need to be able to do it for them and have them just do it back for you the exact same way.”‘Rosemary’s Baby’ (1968)Mia Farrow in “Rosemary’s Baby.”William Castle Productions/Paramount PicturesDerrickson gets granular in his admiration for Roman Polanski’s classic shocker, in which a pregnant woman (Mia Farrow) begins to suspect she might be surrounded by Satan worshipers. In particular, he zeros in on a scene in which we watch Rosemary call her therapist from a phone booth.“I remember watching the scene and being immediately struck by the distorted phone filter on the psychiatrist’s voice — and her voice had the same filter,” he said. “I was very struck by how powerful and strange it felt. There was an otherworldliness to it and somehow it felt scary to me.”Derrickson started by putting a similar filter on Finney’s voice when he’s talking to the Grabber’s victims on the black phone. In postproduction, though, he slightly modified that approach so the filter is applied to the dead children when they manifest. “It creates a real tactile feeling of ethereal unpresence and presence at the same time,” Derrickson said. “And all of that was the result of me thinking about the phone filter that’s in ‘Rosemary’s Baby’ in that one shot.”‘A Prayer for Owen Meany’On the surface, there is not much linking “The Black Phone” to John Irving’s novel from 1989, in which the title character is convinced that he has a connection to God and his life is building up to a preordained event. But it inspired Derrickson when he and co-writer C. Robert Cargill were trying to figure out what to do with the characters they were adding to the original short story. “The big expansions were Gwen and adding four other kids based on kids I knew in middle school,” Derrickson said.But then he was stumped: How would those children fit in the plot? “When I thought about ‘A Prayer for Owen Meany,’ I thought, ‘Oh, that’s it: They’re giving Finney missions,’ ” Derrickson said. “And when I did that, I felt, ‘OK, I know how to do this movie. I know how the structure works.’ ” More

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      Paul Haggis Arrested on Sexual Assault Charges in Italy

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      Haggis, who wrote and directed the Oscar-winning crime drama “Crash,” was accused of assaulting a woman in Ostuni over the course of two days.The Oscar-winning director and writer Paul Haggis was arrested on charges of aggravated sexual violence and aggravated personal injuries in the Southern Italian city of Ostuni on Sunday, according to the local police.According to a statement from the prosecutor’s office in the nearby city of Brindisi, which ordered the arrest, the accuser was not Italian. The statement identifies the man who was arrested as P.H., a Canadian; Vincenzo Leo, the duty officer of the local Italian police, confirmed it was Mr. Haggis.The statement said that after two days of “nonconsensual intercourse,” he had brought the woman to the Papola Casale airport in Brindisi on Friday and left her there “at the first lights of dawn, despite the precarious physical and psychological conditions of the woman.”The airport’s staff and the border police noticed her in the airport in a “confusional state,” assisted her and took her to the local police office, the statement continued. She was then brought to a hospital where she was treated following a protocol used in Italy for victims of violence against women; she subsequently reported the violence to the police.According to the accusations, Mr. Haggis, 69, “would have forced the young woman, that he had met some time before, to endure sexual intercourse.”“I am confident that all allegations will be dismissed against Mr. Haggis,” Priya Chaudhry, a lawyer for Mr. Haggis, said in an email. “He is totally innocent, and willing to fully cooperate with the authorities so the truth comes out quickly.”Mr. Haggis, who won a screenwriting Oscar in 2006 for the crime drama “Crash,” and who wrote acclaimed movies such as “Million Dollar Baby,” was in the southern city to attend the Allora film festival, where he was set to participate in panels and discussions with the audience, starting on June 21, according to the festival’s program.Mr. Haggis was sued for sexual assault in New York in 2017 by a publicist, Haleigh Breest. Ms. Breest accused Mr. Haggis of forcing her to give him oral sex before raping her after a premiere in 2013. Mr. Haggis has contended that the encounter with Ms. Breest was consensual.Following the lawsuit, which is still pending because of delays related to the coronavirus pandemic, three other women accused Mr. Haggis of sexually assaulting them, according to The Associated Press.A lawyer for Mr. Haggis, Christine Lepera, has denied the three other accusations, saying “he did not rape anybody,” according to The A.P.’s report.Mr. Haggis got his start as a TV writer in the 1980s and went on to help create several series, including “Walker, Texas Ranger,” the long-running drama starring Chuck Norris. But he is perhaps best known for his film work, notably “Crash,” the 2005 ensemble drama he directed and co-wrote. The film won best picture at the Academy Awards as well as best original screenplay for Mr. Haggis and Bobby Moresco.In 2009, Mr. Haggis left the Church of Scientology over its support of Proposition 8, the ban on same-sex marriage passed by California voters and later overturned. In a resignation letter that was circulated in Hollywood, Mr. Haggis wrote that the church’s position was “a stain on the integrity of our organization and a stain on us personally.” In the documentary “Going Clear” and elsewhere, Mr. Haggis has become among the more prominent critics of the church. And he has said that, in response, the church has mounted a campaign of harassment.In a court filing last year, Mr. Haggis asserted that the pending sexual assault lawsuit in New York had essentially frozen his career, leaving him unable to work as a director or producer.“I have had discussions with producers and financiers, but have been repeatedly told that they cannot work with me until I clear my name,” he wrote in the filing, which was submitted as part of a motion requesting that the court set a trial date.Stephanie Goodman contributed reporting. More

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      ‘Civil: Ben Crump’ Review: What Becomes of a Missed Opportunity?

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      The documentary “Civil” follows Ben Crump, the prominent attorney who has represented families affected by police violence, for one turbulent year.At the beginning of “Civil” — a documentary about the civil-rights attorney Ben Crump — a phone call from Tera Brown, a cousin of George Floyd, comes into Crump’s office. Crump listens compassionately as Brown relates the 2020 murder of her cousin by a Minneapolis police officer. Crump gently offers her some advice about next steps, then rests his head in his hands. The image of Crump holding his own head, and of Crump rubbing his eyes, is repeated throughout “Civil.” It is the weary physical response to ongoing injustice and to a schedule that keeps the lawyer on planes and on his smartphone, pursuing lawsuits intended to make police departments and municipalities pay financially — and the media and the court of public opinion pay heed.Most viewers will likely recognize Crump as a high-profile legal representative for family members not just of Floyd but of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Breonna Taylor and Andre Hill, too, to name some of his clients’ loved ones who have been killed during encounters with the police.The director Nadia Hallgren filmed Crump over a year during 2020 and 2021, and her portrait has instances of tag-along intimacy. The phone calls to Crump’s wife, Genae, and daughter, Brooklyn, as well as his check-ins with his mother, Helen, provide ballast amid the upheaval. And the biographical details about the college, law school and fraternity that shaped Crump tease his roots in Black communities.Yet “Civil” yields fewer insights than hoped. At times, the neat documentary feels nearly as tailored as Crump’s suits. (Perhaps this is what happens when verité-style filmmaking follows such a camera-ready subject?) Given Crump’s vital role in momentous litigation, “Civil” may be crucial viewing — but it’s not always revealing.Civil: Ben CrumpRated PG-13 for strong language and images of violence. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      Events for Fans of Horror Films in New York City

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      For fans of scary movies, three horror series around New York just may keep you up all night.Forget the Bahamas, horror fans. This summer, New York is your paradise.That’s because three of the city’s highbrow cinema presenters are offering ambitious and adventurous horror movie series with scares enough for everyone, from squeamish newbies to hardened connoisseurs.The biggie is “Horror: Messaging the Monstrous,” which runs for a whopping 10 weeks at the Museum of Modern Art. With more than 110 features and short films, the series digs deep into sociopolitical horror cinema, with sections devoted to gender, race, sexuality and additional concerns.The other programs are equally enterprising. Film at Lincoln Center and Cinecittà, the esteemed Italian film studio, are partnering on “Beware of Dario Argento,” a 20-film retrospective of Argento, the horror movie master best known for “Suspiria.” The director himself will be at select screenings.And the Museum of the Moving Image is hosting “Films of the Dead: Romero & Co.,” an 11-film series dedicated to zombie movies by, and inspired by, the maverick horror filmmaker George A. Romero, who died in 2017. It’s a companion to “Living With ‘The Walking Dead’” (June 25-Jan. 1, 2023), an exhibition about the origins and impact of the AMC series. A second film program, “White Zombies: Nightmares of Empire,” follows in August.Caryn Coleman, a guest curator on the MoMA series, said it should be no surprise that all three organizations are turning to horror to “process the world.”“We’re certainly in a collective moment of turmoil, so it seems right on target for New York to be hosting horror programming as both a tool of discussion and celebration,” she wrote in an email.To make your decision-making less scary, here’s one horror lover’s guide to what to watch.From left, Debra De Liso, Michelle Michaels and Andree Honore in “The Slumber Party Massacre.”New World Pictures‘Horror: Messaging the Monstrous’ (June 23-Sept. 5)Museum of Modern Art, moma.orgThe Guilty Pleasure: ‘The Slumber Party Massacre’ (1982)What happens when a female director (Amy Holden Jones) and a feminist writer (Rita Mae Brown) team up to make a movie about a deranged murderer with a power drill who kills high schoolers on the night of a sleepover? You get this crazed classic from the golden age of slashers, a film that continues to inspire new generations of female horror moviemakers.The Must-See: ‘The Last House on the Left’ (1972)Wes Craven wrote and directed this rape-revenge film about two young women who are brutalized by psychopaths. This one’s a don’t-miss movie only for folks with a strong constitution and a morbid curiosity about a game-changing but troubling exploitation film. Consider this: Howard Thompson, reviewing for The Times, called it “sickening tripe,” and said he walked out before the film ended.The Find: ‘Jack Be Nimble’ (1993)A terrific rediscovery in the series is this horror-fantasy film from New Zealand. Directed by Garth Maxwell, it stars Alexis Arquette and Sarah Smuts-Kennedy as twins who reunite as adults after being separated and raised in broken homes. In his Times review, Stephen Holden called it a “superior” genre film with “hallucinatory power and psychological refinement.”The Throwback: ‘Def by Temptation’ (1990)The writer-director James Bond III stars as a young man who visits New York to see a friend (Kadeem Hardison), but instead falls under the spell of a succubus (Cynthia Bond). A supernatural investigator (Bill Nunn), a medium (Melba Moore) and a preacher (Samuel L. Jackson) all try to keep the evil at bay. For a low-budget horror comedy, the film takes a surprisingly frank look at Black Gen Xers and presents questions of friendship, sex and faith.Jennifer Connelly in “Phenomena.”DAC Film, via AGFA‘Beware of Dario Argento’ (June 17-29)Film at Lincoln Center, filmlinc.orgThe Must-See: ‘Phenomena’ (1985)Argento’s trippy psycho-thriller stars Jennifer Connelly as a young student at a Swiss girls school who discovers she has supernatural powers to control insects. Donald Pleasence is the scientist who helps her use that power to find a killer. The big screen is the best way to experience the film’s spectacular flesh-dissolving bug attack.The Begetter: ‘The Bird With the Crystal Plumage’ (1970)Argento’s directing debut, for which he also wrote the screenplay, is a stylish prototype of Italian giallo. Set in Rome, it’s a thriller about an American writer who gets entangled in a murder mystery after he witnesses a woman stabbed by an intruder inside a gallery. The gore is mild compared to Argento’s later films. But giallo’s visual signatures — plunging razors, menacing lighting, a killer in chic leather — are abundant.The New Kid on the Block: ‘Dark Glasses’ (2022)One of the films I’m excited to see is Argento’s latest, his first movie since the poorly received “Argento’s Dracula 3D.” Ilenia Pastorelli stars as a prostitute who struggles to adjust to a new life after being blinded during her escape from a killer. True to Argento form, the movie looks as sleek as it is deranged.Duane Jones in “Night of the Living Dead.”Janus Films‘Films of the Dead’ (June 25-July 30)Museum of the Moving Image, movingimage.usThe Must-See: ‘Night of the Living Dead’ (1968)When Romero’s black-and-white groundbreaker comes to the big screen, just go. Romero championed the oppressed, and for his first feature film he cast Duane Jones, a Black actor, as the man who protects a group of strangers trapped in a rural Pennsylvania farmhouse under siege by the flesh-chewing undead. Movies that view horror through a social justice lens, especially when it comes to American racism, bow to this one.The Batty Comedy: ‘One Cut of the Dead’ (2017)Shinichiro Ueda’s film is an absurdly gory horror-comedy about a film crew shooting a zombie movie that’s interrupted by actual hungry zombies. Instead of cutting and running, the director forces his cast and crew to keep rolling. What happens next is a meta-marvel of slapstick, butchery and, surprisingly, heart.The Guilty Pleasure: ‘Day of the Dead’ (1985)I have a soft spot for this talky doomsday story, written and directed by Romero. Set in a dystopian future America — one of Romero’s favorite places to visit — it’s about a group of literally underground scientists and soldiers (with fragile egos) who battle the zombies left above ground after an apocalypse. Tom Savini’s gruesome special effects gave me the heebie jeebies back in the day, and still do. More

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      Jean-Louis Trintignant, Star of Celebrated European Films, Dies at 91

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      For 50 years, in movies like “A Man and a Woman” and “My Night at Maud’s,” his specialty was playing the flawed Everyman.Jean-Louis Trintignant, a leading French actor of subtle power who appeared in some of the most celebrated European films of the last 50 years, among them Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Conformist,” Eric Rohmer’s “My Night at Maud’s” and Claude Lelouch’s “A Man and a Woman,” died on Friday at his home in southern France. He was 91.His wife, Marianne Hoepfner Trintignant, confirmed the death to Agence France-Presse. Mr. Trintignant had announced in 2018 that he had prostate cancer and was retiring.Mr. Trintignant seemed to specialize in playing the flawed Everyman and revealing his characters’ depths slowly.“Jean-Louis Trintignant has been, for better than half a century, one of the great stealth actors of the movies,” the critic Terrence Rafferty wrote in The New York Times in 2012. “He knows how to catch an audience unaware.”The occasion was the release that year of Michael Haneke’s “Amour,” which went on to win the 2013 Academy Award for best foreign-language film. In a starring role for the first time in the millennium, Mr. Trintignant, by then nearly blind, portrayed a frail old man caring for his dying wife, played by Emmanuelle Riva — “two titans of French cinema,” Manohla Dargis wrote in The Times — in a film that is both a love story and a stark examination of illness and mortality.It was the capstone to a rich career playing a gallery of characters who were rarely glamorous. Mr. Trintignant was an emotionally fragile Fascist in “The Conformist” (1970); a timid, meticulous graduate student who accidentally falls in with a ribald bon vivant in Dino Risi’s 1962 “Il Sorpasso” (“The Easy Life”); and a repressed Roman Catholic from the provinces who resists the seductive advances of a beautiful divorced woman in “My Night at Maud’s” (1969).“If some people laugh because I did not have sex with Maud, well, I would prefer being thought ridiculous to being thought a hero,” Mr. Trintignant said in a 1970 interview with The Times. “Even kissing scenes bore me.”In 1969 he won the best actor award at the Cannes Film Festival for his performance as a magistrate investigating the assassination of a Greek politician in Costa-Gavras’s political thriller “Z,” which also won the foreign-language Oscar that year.For American audiences, Mr. Trintignant did not fit the conventional images of French film stars, like the wisecracking Jean-Paul Belmondo, the working-class hero Jean Gabin or the suave sophisticate Maurice Chevalier. He was more understated.“The best actors in the world,” he once said, “are those who feel the most and show the least.”Jean-Louis Xavier Trintignant was born on Dec. 11, 1930, in Piolenc, a small town in southeastern France, where his father, Raoul, was a wealthy industrialist and local politician. Jean-Louis seriously considered becoming a racecar driver like his uncle Maurice Trintignant, a top competitor in the 1950s and ’60s who was only 13 years older than Jean-Louis. (Another uncle, Louis Trintignant, also raced and was killed in 1933 when his car crashed.)Jean-Louis took up law studies instead, thinking he would follow his father into politics. But while a law student in Aix-en-Provence he attended a performance of “The Miser” by Molière and was so smitten that he decided on a stage career.Mr. Trintignant moved to Paris to study acting and began appearing in theater productions at 20. After touring France in the early 1950s, he was hailed as one of the country’s most gifted young stage actors and was soon offered film contracts.Mr. Trintignant with Brigitte Bardot in “And God Created Woman” (1956), directed by Roger Vadim, Ms. Bardot’s husband at the time.Kingsley InternationalIn Roger Vadim’s 1956 movie “And God Created Woman,” Mr. Trintignant starred as a young, naïve husband who is in love with his diabolically flirtatious wife, played by Brigitte Bardot (Mr. Vadim’s wife at the time) in what was considered her breakout sex-kitten role. Whether true or not, rumors circulated that she and Mr. Trintignant had a real-life affair during the filming. Ms. Bardot’s marriage to Mr. Vadim ended in 1957.Mr. Vadim nonetheless cast Mr. Trintignant in the 1959 film “Les Liaisons Dangereuses,” adapted from a sexually scandalous 18th-century novel about a scheming noblewoman. Mr. Trintignant had the lesser but romantic role of the charming Chevalier Danceny, a music teacher for French nobility.The Académie Française, the official arbiter of French culture, denounced the film as “desecrating a classic,” and it was condemned as salacious from Roman Catholic pulpits on both sides of the Atlantic.Mr. Trintignant shared top billing with Vittorio Gassman in “Il Sorpasso,” which is widely considered Mr. Risi’s masterpiece. He played a shy law student who is enticed by Mr. Gassman’s libidinous extrovert and embarks on a rollicking car journey through the Italian countryside that ends tragically.Still more memorable was Mr. Trintignant’s performance eight years laterin “The Conformist.” Based on a novel of the same title by Alberto Moravia, the film is a chilling psychological portrait of a secret policeman in Fascist Italy. Mr. Trintignant, in the lead role, arranges the assassination of his old friend, a left-wing university professor, whose young wife he covets.Mr. Trintignant assumed his most romantic role, as a racecar driver, in “A Man and a Woman” (1966). The movie was an international hit, generating more box-office receipts than any previous French film. He said his early passion for racing — and an intimate knowledge of the sport conveyed to him by his uncles — had made his performance especially credible.But he professed that he was uncomfortable in the movie’s explicit love scenes, in which his co-star was Anouk Aimée, a longtime friend of his wife at the time, the director Nadine Trintignant.“It was embarrassing to find myself in bed with a woman that way,” he told The Times in 1970. “I had known Anouk for 10 years, and she was Nadine’s best friend, and the whole crew was watching.” The movie’s best scenes, Mr. Trintignant insisted, were his hairpin racing turns in Monte Carlo.He went on to appear in an average of three films a year for the next three decades, more often as a supporting actor than as the lead.Mr. Trintignant in “Amour” (2012), which won the Oscar for best foreign-language film. By then nearly blind, he portrayed a frail old man caring for his dying wife, played by Emmanuelle Riva.Sony Pictures ClassicsAn exception was the acclaimed 1994 film “Red,” the finale of the Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “Three Colors” trilogy. In a work that tracks the parallel lives of a group of people living outside Geneva, Mr. Trintignant played a cold retired judge who spied on his neighbors using high-tech surveillance equipment.He also continued to act onstage occasionally.Later in life Mr. Trintignant returned to his early passion for sports-car racing, participating in the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1980 and the Monte Carlo Rally in 1984. In the ’90s he spent much of his time tending a vineyard he operated in the South of France or acting in theater. His return to film in “Amour” came after an absence of more than a decade.Mr. Trintignant’s first marriage, to the actress Stéphane Audran, ended in divorce. He married Nadine Marquand, then an actress, in 1960 and had three children with her: Vincent, now a director; Pauline, who died in infancy; and Marie, a successful actress (she had acted alongside her father at age 4 in “Mon Amour, Mon Amour,” which was directed by her mother) and the mother of four who at 41 was beaten to death in her hotel room in Vilnius, Lithuania, in the summer of 2003 while filming there.The murder was a sensation in the European press. Ms. Trintignant’s 39-year-old boyfriend, Bertrand Cantat, one of France’s biggest rock stars, later admitted in a Lithuanian court that he had beaten her in a jealous rage over her plans to vacation with an ex-husband.He was convicted of manslaughter in 2004 and released on parole in 2007, angering the Trintignant family and its supporters.After Marie’s death, Mr. Trintignant fell into a severe depression.“For three months I didn’t speak,” he told the Montreal newspaper The Gazette in 2012. “After that I realized I had to either stop living, commit suicide or continue to live.”In 2011 he withdrew from a planned one-man show at the summer Avignon Festival in France when he learned that Mr. Cantat was to appear at the festival as well in an acting role onstage.Mr. Trintignant’s marriage to Nadine Trintignant ended in divorce in 1976. He married Marianne Hoepfner, a racecar driver, in 2000. Information on other survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Trintignant’s eyesight deteriorated in his later years, but he was accepting of his condition. “We weren’t meant to live more than 80 years,” he told The Gazette. “It’s not so bad as all that. I’m still happy when I’m alone. I have an inner life.”Even at the height of his popularity, Mr. Trintignant insisted that acting was always a struggle.“I am not a born actor,” he said in the 1970 Times interview. “Even today, I am not an instinctive actor. I prepare meticulously, and it is only when I am before the camera that I become completely free.” More

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      ‘Jurassic World Dominion’ | Anatomy of a Scene

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      Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera.Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera. More

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      ‘Cha Cha Real Smooth’ Review: The Boy in the Bubble

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      A recent college graduate moves back home, drifts along and strikes up an unlikely friendship with a single mother in this Sundance indie.The American indie “Cha Cha Real Smooth” is the story of a young man finding himself. It isn’t much of a search. He’s pretty much the exact same easygoing, uninteresting guy at the end of the movie that he is at the beginning.Things happen between the start and the finish of his journey inward, true. Mostly, though, feelings and hurts and slights are shared, and lessons learned, none surprising. He and the other characters talk and talk some more, and what they mostly talk about is him, the dim star at the center of this small, bland world.“Cha Cha Real Smooth” had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January. But don’t blame the festival, or not entirely. Sundance has always been greater, messier and more diverse — including aesthetically — than the clichés that cling to it. Over time those clichés have changed as the festival has transformed, from its early homespun years to its guys-with-guns era and endless tales of dysfunction. Yet if the festival has retained a reputation for feel-bad-so-you-can-feel-good navel-gazing, it’s partly because it puts a premium on young directors who deliver the most Sundance-y of Sundance movies: coming-of-age tear-jerkers.Although “Cha Cha Real Smooth” opens with an obligatory flashback, Andrew (Cooper Raiff, who also directed) is 22 for most of the story. Recently graduated from college, he works at a fast-food joint and lives in a leafy New Jersey suburb with his mother, brother and stepfather. Andrew pines for his girlfriend, who’s abroad, and has vowed to follow her. But he has no clear path forward, views or interests. (No one here discusses the news, or shows curiosity about the larger world.) He’s nice, dull, quippy, with a toothy smile, full beard and slender frame that bring to mind the British actor David Tennant if David Tennant were a slobbering puppy.Andrew’s path to adulthood largely involves his friendship with Domino (an unconvincing Dakota Johnson), an older, melancholic single mother of a teenager who has autism, Lola (an appealing, spikily real Vanessa Burghardt, who also has autism). Andrew meets them at a bar mitzvah where he’s chaperoning his brother. Andrew notices her straight away, you bet, and before long they’re beaming at each other, exchanging small talk and hitting the dance floor. Women smile at Andrew a lot; at one point, a gaggle of mothers from the bar mitzvah follow him into the parking lot and hire him as “their motivational dancer,” a.k.a. party starter.Soon enough Andrew is playing M.C. at bar and bat mitzvahs, rocking them as he fumbles through the rest of his life. Raiff uses these parties for visual energy and comedy, and while he doesn’t deploy overt stereotypes he flirts with them. Certainly, it’s hard to see him wringing laughs as readily out of, say, confirmations or quinceañeras, much less staging a brawl at one, as he does here, ruining a bar mitzvah (for a kid named Benjamin Schindler, no less) so Andrew can have a teachable moment. As if to reassure the audience that it’s all in good fun, Domino says in one scene, “Sometimes I really envy Judaism.” “Same,” Andrew chirps.Raiff also wrote and helped produce “Cha Cha Real Smooth,” so he is clearly ambitious. But if he has something to say about life, it’s not apparent from this movie. It’s derivative and unpersuasive, and as pandering as any big studio soft sell; it’s filled with stylistic clichés (hovering camerawork, mewling songs), cardboard characters, silly dialogue and absurd narrative contrivances, starting with Domino, a trite male fantasy who’s only a vessel for Andrew’s narcissism. Raiff shrewdly complicates this cliché a touch, though, again, only to exploit it. Their relationship never makes sense; but, then, neither does most of the movie.I didn’t believe a single second in “Cha Cha Real Smooth,” but the movie isn’t trying to convince you of anything. It just wants you to like it. It wants you to smile, nod in recognition, shed a tear or two and feel good about yourself for liking it. It’s an exemplar of American indie entertainment at its most canned and solipsistic.Indeed the most startling thing about the whole thing is Raiff’s regard for his own charms, which presumably explains the close-ups he lavishes on both Andrew and the women who indulge him. Again and again, they gaze on Andrew with misty eyes and crinkly smiles, bathing him in adoration that Raiff clearly shares.Cha Cha Real SmoothRated R for language. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters and on Apple TV+. More