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      Heddy Honigmann, Whose Films Told of Loss and Love, Dies at 70

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      A documentarian, she liked to engage her subjects — Parisian subway buskers, Peruvian taxi drivers, survivors of genocide — in conversations.Heddy Honigmann, the Peruvian-born Dutch filmmaker whose humane and gently paced documentaries of Parisian subway buskers, Peruvian taxi drivers, disabled people and their service dogs, Dutch peacekeepers and the widows of men who had been murdered in a tiny village near Sarajevo, were stories of loss, trauma and exile — and the sustaining forces of art and love — died on May 21 at her home in Amsterdam. She was 70.Jannet Honigmann, her sister, confirmed the death. She said Ms. Honigmann had been ill with cancer and multiple sclerosis.In the economic chaos of Peru in the 1990s, when the government nearly bankrupted the country and inflation soared, many middle-class people began moonlighting as taxi drivers, slapping a “Taxi” sticker on their Volkswagen Beetles or battered Nissans to signal that they were on call.Ms. Honigmann collected their histories in the 1995 film “Metal and Melancholy,” riding in the back seat of more than a dozen cabs whose drivers included a teacher, a police officer, an actor and an employee at the Ministry of Justice. (She took more than 120 taxi rides to find her subjects.)The stories that unspooled included a devastating tale from a man whose 5-year-old daughter had leukemia and who was driving to pay for her costly medical care. When he tells Ms. Honigmann that he encourages his daughter, whom he describes as a fighter, by saying “Life is hard, but beautiful,” it’s a maxim not just for this film but for all of Ms. Honigmann’s work.In “The Underground Orchestra” (1999), musicians busking in the Paris metro — including a disc jockey from Zaire who has escaped a forced labor camp and an Argentine pianist whose torture at the hands of his government nearly destroyed his hands — describe the refugee odysseys that have brought them there. Stephen Holden of The New York Times called it “an open-ended celebration of human tenacity and life force that builds up a compelling personal vision in an offhanded, roundabout way.”Ms. Honigmann rode in the back seat of more than a dozen cabs to collect the stories of cabdrivers in Lima, Peru, for her film “Metal and Melancholy” (1995).Icarus FilmsDespite stories of terrible trauma, the movie is also a celebration of the culture these artists have left behind — a “world-music primer,” as Mr. Holden put it, “featuring some astonishingly beautiful sounds.”The cultural critic Wesley Morris, in his Times review of “Buddy,” Ms. Honigmann’s 2019 film about people with disabilities and their service dogs, called Ms. Honigmann a humanist who “listens to the ignored, sympathizes with the lonely and can ask questions so leading that when her subjects give her a skeptical look before trying to answer, she has to laugh, almost out of embarrassment.”But she was more of a gentle interlocutor than an insistent interrogator. There were no narrators in her films, no propulsive music or quick cuts to tell viewers how to experience what they were seeing. Her pacing was almost languid; she allowed her subjects to tell their stories in their own way and in their own time. And she hated the word “interview.”“‘Interviews were for subjects,’ she would say,” said Ester Gould, who was a co-writer, researcher and assistant producer on many of Ms. Honigmann’s films. “‘I have conversations with people.’”In an interview at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 2002, Ms. Honigmann said: “I think the only rule for me is that when I hear the stories, if they keep my attention, they will also keep the attention of the spectators.” She added: “I lost myself in conversations. And conversations, if they are interesting, they are never boring.”Ms. Honigmann was primarily a documentarian, but she also made narrative films — notably “Goodbye” (1995), about the doomed, highly charged affair between a young preschool teacher and a married man.In “O Amor Natural” (1997), Ms Honigmann invited older Brazilians to read aloud the erotic poetry of the Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade, all of which had been published after his death in 1987 because he worried that they would be seen as pornographic. Ms. Honigmann’s readers took to their roles with gusto and often confided their own erotic histories. Graphic, sensual, tender and at times very funny, the film is a rumination on desire, memory and age.In “O Amor Natural” (1997), Ms Honigmann invited older Brazilians to read aloud the erotic poetry of the Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade.Film ForumMs. Honigmann’s films have won awards at film festivals all over the world and been shown in retrospectives at the Walker Art Center, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Paris Film Festival, among other venues.In 2013 she was given the Living Legend Award at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam. Yet she may be the most famous filmmaker Americans have never heard of, according to Karen Cooper, the longtime director of Film Forum in New York, which has presented the premieres of many of Ms. Honigmann’s movies.“As Americans, we live in a bubble in terms of film, because Hollywood is so dominant that documentary filmmakers don’t get the same kind of attention that narrative fiction film receives,” Ms. Cooper said in an interview. “In this country, among documentary filmmakers, Heddy was a star. In Europe, she was a superstar. In the Netherlands, she’s a national treasure.”Heddy Ena Honigmann Pach was born on Oct. 1, 1951, in Lima, Peru. Her parents were European Jewish refugees.Her father, Witold Honigmann Weiss, an artist and illustrator who created a popular comic strip, was born in Vienna and had been interned at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria before he escaped in 1942, making his way to Peru by way of Russia and Italy. Her mother, Sarah Pach Miller, an actress and homemaker, had left Poland with her family for Peru in 1939. (In Peru, it is the custom to use the surnames of both parents. Heddy dropped the name Pach as a filmmaker.)Heddy studied biology and literature at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú in Lima. Her father wanted her to be a doctor. She first wanted to be a poet — she loved Emily Dickinson — but decided filmmaking was a better medium for her. She left Peru to study at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, and she did not return to her home country for nearly two decades.An early marriage in Lima to Gustavo Riofrio ended in divorce. In the 1970s she married Frans van de Staak, a Dutch filmmaker she met in Rome, and the couple moved to Amsterdam; she became a Dutch citizen in 1978. Their marriage also ended in divorce.In addition to her sister, she is survived by her son, Stefan van de Staak; her husband, Henk Timmermans; and her stepson, Jaap Timmermans.Ms. Honigmann’s film “Good Husband, Dear Son” (2001), told of the women left behind in the village of Ahatovici, just outside Sarajevo, after Bosnian Serb forces killed the men there. Pieter Van Huystee FilmOne of Ms. Honigmann’s most harrowing films was “Good Husband, Dear Son” (2001), about the women left behind in the village of Ahatovici, just outside Sarajevo, after Bosnian Serb forces had murdered the men and burned the place to the ground in 1992. Ms. Honigmann captured the women’s loss by drawing out their memories of their loved ones, and by showing the photographs and belongings the women had saved as mementos.She said she tried to show that the most terrible thing about war is not the numbers of the dead, which she called an abstraction: “The catastrophe is, for instance, seeing that a whole town has lost all the craftsmen, that people who were in love were separated forever, that children who loved to play football and loved music cannot hear it anymore.”“When you are born from immigrants you are educated in melancholy,” Ms. Honigmann said in her 2002 talk at the Walker Center. “You hear all the time of stories of people leaving. That’s in my films. People are left, or they are leaving, or losing their memory.”When Michael Tortorello, her interviewer, asked her what her life might have been like if she had stayed in Peru, she answered promptly: “I would have a been a taxi driver.” More

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      ‘The Triangle of Sadness’ Wins Palme d’Or at Cannes

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      CANNES, France — The satire “Triangle of Sadness,” from the Swedish director Ruben Ostlund, won the Palme d’Or at the 75th Cannes Film Festival at a ceremony here on Saturday. A blunt, ugly sendup of class politics, the movie had sharply divided critics.The awards ceremony ran a relatively painless 90 or so minutes, another reminder that the emphasis at Cannes remains on the movies themselves, not the accompanying circus. Held inside the magnificent Grand Lumière Theater inside the festival’s headquarters — with the nine-person jury watching from the stage — the awards confer critical legitimation and generate much-needed public relations for movies that, years into the pandemic, are headed into a still-difficult world for art cinema.The Grand Prix — the festival’s second prize — was split between “Close,” from the Belgian director Lukas Dhont, and “Stars at Noon,” from the French auteur Claire Denis. “Stars at Noon” was brutalized by critics, but it wasn’t wholly a shock that it won an award: Vincent Lindon, the president of this year’s jury, has appeared in several of Denis’s movies. “Close,” a critical and audience favorite about two 13-year-old boys whose friendship is tragically tested, drew warm applause from the Lumière audience.The Jury Prize, the third prize, was split between two very different dramas: “EO,” a heartbreaker about a donkey from the Polish auteur Jerzy Skolimowski, and “The Eight Mountains,” a coming-of-age story from the Belgian filmmakers Felix Van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch. Skolimowski, 84, began his acceptance speech by thanking (and naming) all six of his donkeys — including a little beauty called Taco. For her part, Vandermeersch seemed to surprise her co-director and partner by repeatedly kissing him right before he started his acceptance speech.The South Korean director Park Chan-wook won the director prize for “Decision to Leave,” an entertainingly twisty thriller (which riffs on Hitchcock’s “Vertigo”), which was a critical favorite. “This is so cool,” Park said in English on taking the stage, though he also added an expletive.The screenplay award was given to the engrossing (and chatty) drama “Boy from Heaven,” from the Swedish director Tarik Saleh. The film traces the political intrigues swirling around a young Egyptian student, a Sunni Muslim, soon after he begins studying at a powerful religious university. After accepting his award, Saleh dedicated his prize to young Egyptian filmmakers: “Raise your voices, and tell your stories.”In one of the bigger surprises of the evening, the best actress went to Zar Amir Ebrahimi, the star of the widely disliked true-crime drama “Holy Spider,” from the Iranian-born director Ali Abbasi. She plays a journalist who faces the indifference and misogyny of the police as she tracks down a serial killer. The best actor prize was given to Song Kang-ho, the brilliant South Korean actor (“Parasite”), for his sensitive, soulful performance as a baby trafficker in “Broker,” the latest from the Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda.A special prize to commemorate the festival’s 75th anniversary was given to Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who were in competition again with “Tori and Lokita,” about two undocumented African immigrants in a cruel, profoundly inhospitable Belgium. The Dardennes are among the most justly honored filmmakers in the history of Cannes, having won the Palme twice (for “Rosetta” in 1999 and “The Child” in 2005). This award was richly deserved. More

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      The Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard Libel Case Is in the Jury’s Hands

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      After closing arguments, the judge asked a jury in Virginia to decide a defamation trial that focused as much on domestic abuse as damaged reputations.After 23 days of testimony that painted conflicting pictures of a tumultuous Hollywood marriage, lawyers for Johnny Depp and Amber Heard delivered their closing arguments on Friday, seeking to persuade the jury that their client had been the person who was abused and defamed.Mr. Depp’s lawyers asserted that their movie star client had been falsely disparaged in a Washington Post op-ed in which Ms. Heard referred to herself as a “public figure representing domestic abuse.”The accusations of spousal abuse that she was referencing, the lawyers argued, had ruined Mr. Depp’s life.“We ask you to give Mr. Depp his life back by telling the world that Mr. Depp is not the abuser Ms. Heard said he is,” a lawyer for Mr. Depp, Camille Vasquez, said, “and hold Ms. Heard accountable for her lies.”Ms. Heard’s lawyers countered that not only were the accusations and the op-ed entirely true, but during legal proceedings in 2020, the actress was unfairly maligned when a lawyer, who represented Mr. Depp at the time, called her abuse accusations a hoax.“In Mr. Depp’s world, you don’t leave Mr. Depp, and if you do, he will start a campaign of global humiliation against you,” argued a lawyer for Ms. Heard, Ben Rottenborn.Now, the case is in the hands of seven jurors who deliberated until Friday evening and left the Fairfax County Circuit Court with instructions to return on Tuesday.The trial has drawn widespread attention because the proceedings have been both televised and livestreamed through a pair of cameras in the courtroom, a rarity in Virginia. On one YouTube channel streaming the proceedings, called Law & Crime Network, more than one million users were reported to be watching.There has been stiff competition to fill the public seats in the courtroom, with observers — most of them fans of Mr. Depp — lining up in the middle of the night to secure a spot. On Friday morning, about 150 people waited in line to get into the courtroom, with hundreds more lining a nearby road, some of them dressed as Mr. Depp’s movie characters.Peyton Elmendorf, a 27-year-old Depp fan, said that when she first heard about Ms. Heard’s accusations, she had misgivings about defending the actor given the #MeToo movement. But now, after hearing other of the actor’s romantic partners speak positively about him, she said she felt confident voicing her support.Our Coverage of the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard TrialA trial between the formerly married actors has become a fierce battleground over the truth about their relationship. What to Know: Johnny Depp and Amber Heard are suing each other with competing defamation claims, amid mutual accusations of domestic abuse.Stan Culture in the Courtroom: The closely watched trial is a case study in what happens when complex claims are filtered through the lenses of extreme fandom. TikTok’s Hate Machine: The online commentary about the trial quickly turned into an internet-wide smear campaign against Ms. Heard. Dressing to Suggest: Both litigants appeared notably sober in their fashion choices. That is no coincidental thing.“I knew he didn’t do it,” she said.Outnumbered outside the courthouse, but unpersuaded, Dan Kim, 26, quietly held a sign nearby that said “I stand with Amber.” He called it “crystal clear” that Mr. Depp had abused Ms. Heard.Supporters of Mr. Depp outside the courthouse on Friday.Craig Hudson/Associated PressUltimately, the jury must consider the veracity and reputational impact of a narrow set of statements. But the six-week trial has encompassed testimony about a vast array of alleged incidents from Mr. Depp and Ms. Heard’s marriage.Ms. Heard has accused Mr. Depp of repeated physical abuse that she said often coincided with drug and alcohol use and began with his accusing her of infidelity. She has also alleged several instances of sexual assault — including an accusation that he assaulted her with a bottle in Australia in 2015.Amber Heard, talking to one of her lawyers during the proceedings on Friday.Pool Photo via Steve Helber/ReutersMr. Depp has denied ever hitting or sexually assaulting Ms. Heard and has portrayed her as the aggressor in the relationship, recalling violence from her throughout their relationship, as well as angry tirades and demeaning name-calling. Ms. Heard has denied hitting Mr. Depp except in defense of herself or her sister.Testimony about the incidents often involved sensational details: disputed affairs with celebrities, graffiti written in blood and a missing chunk of Mr. Depp’s finger that forced the fifth “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie to pause production.In laying out the highlights of their evidence, Mr. Depp’s lawyers reminded the jury of witnesses who said they did not see injuries on Ms. Heard around the times she reported having them, showed a photo of him with a “shiner” that he said she gave him and replayed audio of arguments between the estranged couple in which Ms. Heard admits to having hit Mr. Depp. In one audio clip, Ms. Heard can be heard saying, “I did start a physical fight,” challenging her claim that she only hit Mr. Depp as a defense. (Ms. Heard testified that in those instances, she hit him in response to his own aggression.)His team also pointed to instances where there were no medical records or photographs to corroborate her allegations of abuse.“The ‘mountain of evidence’ that Mr. Depp abused Ms. Heard is simply not there,” Ms. Vasquez argued. “What we have is a mountain of unproven allegations that are wild, over the top and implausible.”Ms. Heard’s lawyers described witnesses who said she had told them about the abuse. Mr. Rottenborn played a video of Mr. Depp angrily slamming kitchen cabinets and showed jurors a text in which the actor told Ms. Heard’s father he had gone “too far in our fight.” He then showed the jury a photo of Ms. Heard with a red mark on her face after, she said, Mr. Depp hurled a phone at her. Elaine Charlson Bredehoft, another of her lawyers, reminded the jury about a forensic psychologist who testified to reviewing a therapist’s notes — which were not entered into evidence — that reflect contemporaneous reports from Ms. Heard where she complained of sexual abuse.“A ruling against Amber here sends a message that no matter what you do, as an abuse victim, you always have to do more,” Mr. Rottenborn said. “No matter what you document, you always have to document more. No matter whom you tell, you always have to tell more people.”Johnny Depp’s Libel Case Against Amber HeardCard 1 of 6In the courtroom. More

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      James Wong Howe: A Gutsy Cinematographer Finally Gets His Due

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      A retrospective at the Museum of the Moving Image looks at a career filled with sublime images made at a time of strong anti-Asian sentiment in Hollywood.The Chinese American cinematographer James Wong Howe was an industrious, peripatetic youngster. In modern parlance, he was a hustler, but so was everyone in the early, exploratory years of cinema, when the fledgling film industry churned out dozens of titles every week. During the 1910s, the silent film directors who won acclaim — like D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille — seemed to rise through shrewd business acumen, false confidence and good luck.Wong Howe had all of those things, but he was gutsier — he had to be. It was clear in the boundless, reckless innovation of his work; his reputation as a supreme perfectionist; and his success and respected status in an industry that saw virtually no place for artists of Asian descent. James Wong Howe was defiance personified.His decades-long career, which spanned the silent era, Hollywood’s golden age and the New Hollywood renaissance of the 1960s and ’70s, was emblematic of a creative spirit that persisted despite changing fashions, industry upheavals and discriminatory practices. He revolutionized the way films communicated visually, developing new techniques that could convey feelings without the need for words or even performers — like the expressionistic use of wide-angle and fish-eye lenses in John Frankenheimer’s body-swapping science-fiction drama, “Seconds” (1966); or one of the earliest aerial shots in the final moments of Joshua Logan’s Technicolor romantic comedy “Picnic” (1955).Rock Hudson in “Seconds,” which Wong Howe shot in part using wide-angle and fish-eye lenses.Paramount Pictures/Photofest via MoMIThese and other examples of Wong Howe’s photographic prowess can be seen in a continuing series dedicated to his work that runs through June 26 at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens.James Wong Howe was born Wong Tung Jim in Kwantung, China, in 1899. In the early 1900s, he was whisked away to Pasco, Wash., by his entrepreneurial father. There, he experienced racism, learned to box and began tinkering with cameras before his father’s death, in 1914, set off a period of drifting. Not unlike Charlie Chaplin’s classic character the Tramp, Wong Howe was a game outsider stumbling from misadventure to misadventure. He went to Oregon, San Francisco, and then Los Angeles, where the 18-year-old Jimmie Howe eventually finagled a job on the janitorial staff of Lasky Studios.DeMille took a liking to Jimmie; he was amused by the young man’s floral shirts, the contrast between his small stature and the outsize cigars he smoked on set. Wong Howe was not passive; he seemed to take the matter of his skin color as a challenge. In his free time, he began familiarizing himself with the studio’s equipment and practiced taking pictures with a still camera. Soon, he was promoted to assistant cameraman.No one at the time was what we might today consider a bona fide camera expert. People learned on the job, improvised and experimented with the new technologies, so the crew members who distinguished themselves were the ones who found creative solutions to the problems that arose on set. This was Wong Howe’s forte and the source of his first big break. The actress Mary Miles Minter, impressed by Wong Howe’s still portraits of her, insisted he shoot her next film. He had devised a solution that could keep her blue eyes from turning white on camera, a problem caused by the blue-sensitive orthochromatic film used at the time. From then on, his reputation as a formidable cameraman was assured.Wong Howe, left, on the set of “The Glory Guys” (1965). His career ran from silents to the New Hollywood renaissance.United Artists/Photofest, via MoMIWong Howe wasn’t the only Asian artist hanging out on the studio back lots. There was the Japanese-born actor Sessue Hayakawa. Hollywood’s onscreen enforcement of anti-miscegenation laws restricted him to playing forbidden-lover roles or sadistic Svengali types, but his popularity among white women viewers made him a bankable presence. Then there was the Chinese American actress Anna May Wong, a go-to supporting performer as the film industry began to mount bigger, more spectacular productions in “exotic” settings. Wong Howe, in fact, would shoot her in one of her first major roles, as the Indigenous princess Tiger Lily in Herbert Brenon’s “Peter Pan.”But renewed anti-Asian sentiment and the Production Code of the 1930s, which put a chokehold on the depiction of interracial relationships, further diminished the industry’s willingness to work with performers of Asian descent. Wong Howe initially floundered during this period, but his work — particularly his penchant for dramatic, high-contrast lighting, which earned him the nickname “Low-key Howe” — spoke for itself. His split-screen shot allows Ronald Colman’s Major Rassendyll to speak directly to his doppelgänger in John Cromwell’s “The Prisoner of Zenda,” (1937), and the fight scenes he filmed in Busby Berkeley’s “They Made Me a Criminal” (1939) are so visceral you can almost feel the boxing gloves jabbing.Though he was adored by the press — what a novelty that an Asian man could be so talented and so full of personality — and respected by his collaborators, Wong Howe was often scorned by the white crew members under his command. He dealt with laws and prejudices that relegated him to second-class citizenship all of his life. During World War II, he wore a button that read “I am Chinese” to ward off harassment should anyone think he was Japanese. Though he had been living in the United States for nearly four decades, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 prohibited him from gaining citizenship; without it, he was forced to turn down exciting creative opportunities, like joining John Ford’s wartime documentary crew.Wong Howe’s split-screen shot allowed Ronald Colman’s Major Rassendyll to speak directly to his doppelganger in “The Prisoner of Zenda” (1937).Warner Bros.Most devastating perhaps was his marriage to the novelist Sanora Babb; the couple tied the knot in Paris in 1937, but California’s anti-miscegenation laws and the studios’ morality clause prevented them from going public until decades later. For his suspected association with Hollywood Communists, he was put on the “graylist” by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee; Wong Howe kept out of politics for the most part, but it didn’t help that China had become a Communist state.Still, he carried on during the precarious ’40s, working with Fritz Lang on the provocative war thriller “Hangmen Also Die!,” and capturing Ida Lupino in all her shades of ambition and vulnerability in Vincent Sherman’s pitch-black melodrama “The Hard Way.”Wong Howe’s images are sublime, his expressive interplay of light and shadow summoning moral conflicts out of thin air. He re-envisioned New York with a bleak, otherworldly flair with “Sweet Smell of Success,” Alexander Mackendrick’s 1957 drama about a vicious newspaperman, a work that many consider to be Wong Howe’s chef d’oeuvre. He coated interior-set walls in oil to give them a surreal shimmer, and used long-focus lenses to make buildings look clustered together, emphasizing a sense of claustrophobic delirium.Walter Brennan in “Hangmen Also Die!” (1943), which Wong Howe shot for the director Fritz Lang.Cohen Media GroupThere are few individuals whose work so comparably ushered in cinema’s transition from mere dime-ticket spectacle to art form. Still, Wong Howe was hungry. Since the 1920s, he had wanted to direct, and though he was given the opportunity in the form of commissioned documentaries and “B” movies, his real ambitions were too often denied. There was a project about rickshaw pullers in China, as well as a script he wrote with Babb about San Francisco’s Chinatown, but both ideas were ultimately dropped for lack of financing. If you can catch only one screening at the Museum of the Moving Image, make it Wong Howe’s sole directorial feature, “Go, Man, Go!” (1954), which stars a fresh-faced Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee in a drama about the Harlem Globetrotters. It is a bare-bones production, but the grit and spirit of something even greater was just beneath the surface, like Wong Howe himself.Wong Howe didn’t deny his Chinese roots. For a time, he ran a popular Chinese eatery that was frequented by Marlene Dietrich, Mickey Rooney and Tyrone Power. And in his final years, he took to wearing traditional Chinese clothes. In Todd Rainsberger’s 1981 study of the cinematographer, it becomes clear that Wong Howe, who died in 1976, longed to create a more expansive portrait of Americanness, one that felt true to him, if not his employers. He was one of the great American cinematographers and a two-time Oscar winner, but he wanted more because he knew he deserved it. Such was his defiance.“How It’s Done: The Cinema of James Wong Howe” runs through June 26 at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens. For more information, go to movingimage.us. More

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      New Books About Hollywood and the Art Industry

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      Books about Viola Davis, Harvey Fierstein, Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward and more take us “into performance and creativity, slipping down old lanes, conducting close readings.”Millie von PlatenThe one thing we want to know about art is the one thing no one seems to be able to tell us. How, exactly, does the magic happen? It seems to be a site for danger and vulnerability, and the people who do it keep secrets inside them — sometimes biographical ones, certainly creative ones — that they aren’t always able to convey. But still, we read hungrily about them, trying to understand how some eyes see more than ours do.A set of books this season takes us into performance and creativity, slipping down old lanes, conducting close readings of a career, a character, even the pandemic-as-theater. The ones that go furthest from the present are the most comforting. But perhaps because they’re all written by academics, journalists and actors, they each contain a little shudder of the apocalyptic.Catching at gossamer is what the film critic David Thomson has been doing for decades, in editions of his “Biographical Dictionary of Film” and his more than 20 books, like last year’s elliptical lament about film directing, “A Light in the Dark.” Movies are a memory machine, and Thomson is a master at writing about his own inner screen. The last two years (the last six, the last 30) have been a mess, and Thomson’s DISASTER MON AMOUR (Yale University, 212 pp., $25) carries you backward into them. Of course, film is always his thought-companion, but it is a little surprising that Thomson goes so deep so fast on the Rock schlock “San Andreas.” Still, you cannot fault him; he lives on the West Coast, so thoughts of “the big one” are never far off. This book — chatty, discursive, essayish — is his way of surviving under such shadows.The devastation of a school in Aberfan, South Wales, 1966.Mirrorpix/Getty ImagesOther catastrophes Thomson addresses here include the 1966 Aberfan slag heap disaster, our fast-burning environmental collapse, and, of course, the Covid pandemic and its pre-existing condition, the Trump administration. He makes telling reference to Daniel Defoe’s “A Journal of the Plague Year,” which recorded the plague in 1665; I think Thomson believes his own book, slim and digressive, is just that kind of briskly conducted, pocket-size diary, applicable to our current crisis. After a bracing cold-air quote by Defoe, though, Thomson’s thinking can seem a little less … toothsome. “Sometimes one can think that people are the great disaster, and innocence the essential affectation,” he writes. Lot of qualifiers in that.One of the least pleasant stylistic touches in the book is an ongoing imagined conversation with an old lady, a figure he borrows from Hemingway’s “Death in the Afternoon,” who sits at the author’s shoulder and asks him questions, congratulates him on his son’s intelligence and makes cracks. “May I share an amusing remark with you?” she asks.Author: It would be most welcome.Old lady: That Dr. Birx — if she knotted together all her scarves and shawls, she might be able to escape from the prison.Author: A Rapunzel?That’s it. The chapter ends there. Thomson knows everything there is to know about film; he has been taking dutiful notes on disasters. He does not, though, know how to write a button.If you dance over that stuff, the short book moves rapidly, like film rewinding through a projector. It’s certainly a record of a mind that runs a bit faster than the rest of ours, one crowded with frames from films and lines from books. The finest section is an in-depth examination of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road,” first the film, then the novel, and Thomson’s passion for it stirs the book. He demonstrates for us something quite practical: In times of catastrophe, art gives us an object in the near view to focus on. Struck by the glare of a great sentence, our eyes can’t see the horror just beyond the page — and in some blessed moments, the book offers exactly that kind of dazzled respite.The Gravitas and Vulnerability of Viola DavisThe Oscar-winning actress has become one of the bestof her generation, one powerful performance at a time.Inside Out: Viola Davis has faced trauma and grief throughout her life. The painful experiences have left a mark on her performances.By the Book: In an interview, the actress shared what recording the audiobook version of her new memoir, “Finding Me,” was like.An Iconic Character: In “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” Davis brings the 1920s blues trailblazer, Ma Rainey, to life. Here is what she had to say about the role.‘The First Lady’: The artist plays Michelle Obama in the Showtime series, which explores the lives and fashion of three U.S. first ladies.What about one of the people who have been on the screen, showing Thomson (and the rest of us) our humanity? There are two things hidden in a performer: their art and everything else. The great actor Viola Davis’s memoir, FINDING ME (Ebony/HarperOne, 291 pp., $28.99), restrains itself to the everything else, plunging us again and again into her childhood, which was a cauldron of pain. The memoir thins when it moves away from trauma, taking on speed and lightness like a runner breaking free of a muddy stretch of track. It means that apart from some thoughtful meditations on her Juilliard experience (How did being trained to play in exclusively European “classics” help or limit her? She weighs it carefully), we can read and read and find very little about how Davis actually achieved her spectacular performances in “Doubt,” in “Fences,” in “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.”Viola Davis at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival.Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty ImagesInstead you read “Finding Me” to discover how she got her courage. She does not need to tell us at the outset that the book originated in her public speaking engagements — each chapter moves toward self-discovery, and even the worst revelations (including sexual assaults, domestic abuse, violence, hunger and a variety of poverty-related humiliations) come with an arrow pointing out of them. Look, each chapter says, I survived and thrived. Davis’s from-the-shoulder prose doesn’t pretty it up: Her father, MaDaddy, was a source of terror. But he changed, and she allowed him to shift his place in her heart. She brings this fierce, cleareyed refusal-to-forget and willingness-to-forgive to her time in the industry, too. She cites the statistics and her own experiences of racism, including some self-abnegating choices to play roles she knew were beneath her. The best parts of the book have this angry clarity; they sound like a call to arms. For fans of her artistry, though, you will have to look elsewhere to understand the mechanisms of her craft.Likewise, you won’t find a key to Harvey Fierstein’s creative mysteries in his kicky memoir, I WAS BETTER LAST NIGHT (Knopf, 384 pp., $30), though you will find boatloads of charm and gossip and some sudden ice-water drops into fury. His playwright’s mind is always keeping notes, and, as Fierstein says, “The jockey never recalls using a whip. The horse never forgets.” He certainly hasn’t forgotten his childhood or time in the 1970s and ’80s downtown theater scene, both of which he describes in lush detail. These unmissable chapters are slick with makeup and sweat: acting in Brooklyn, anonymous sex at the Trucks, a scarifying coming-out experience (do not leave certain kinds of photos around your house), late-night snacks on the Warhol Factory’s tab, his first drag costume, AIDS, love, crushes, grief and the first stirrings of a triumphant talent.Once we reach the greased-rails part of his career — after he broke through, he succeeded fast and young and often — Fierstein assumes a certain amount of familiarity from his reader. So any neo-Harvey-phytes will need to rent “Torch Song Trilogy” and “La Cage aux Folles”; you might want to find a bootleg of his Broadway performances in “Hairspray” and “Fiddler on the Roof,” too, just to fully understand what he’s talking about. He cheerfully addresses frequently asked questions (Why does Arnold have so much bunny paraphernalia in “Torch Song”?), but reader, beware: These might not be universally asked questions.From left, Mary Woronov, Nancy McCormick, Fred Savage and Harvey Fierstein in Ron Tavel’s “Kitchenette,” from “I Was Better Last Night.”Harvey TavelAlso, in his Big Star period, he writes with more caution and delicacy, as he does when he briefly talks about Robin Williams, whom he cherished as a brother. Now, I say “delicacy,” yet there’s a late, hilarious bit about a revival of “Torch Song,” in which he yells at the actor Michael Urie about how to bottom. So there’s delicacy, and there’s delicacy — but “I Was Better Last Night” does ease up in its second half. The last section, after he becomes sober, has a certain tact about it, a refusal to strike hard. I don’t regret this palpable kindness but rather his correspondingly light touch as he talks about his craft. He learned a great deal from Jerry Herman and Arthur Laurents, but what was it, exactly? His accounts of, say, Ron Tavel, an early mentor and dear friend who co-created the Theater of the Ridiculous, are so much more revealing. For some reason, he sees most clearly when he looks back 40 years and more. In other words — it’s an autobiography.If you look further back than that, you start to see different contours — maybe even the big shapes, like landscapes. Mark Rozzo’s EVERYBODY THOUGHT WE WERE CRAZY: Dennis Hopper, Brooke Hayward, and 1960s Los Angeles (Ecco, 454 pp., $29.99) is a sweeping account of a marriage that lasted only from 1961 to 1969 but nonetheless changed the culture. “Everybody” is written like a novel, appropriately, since Hayward (a talent connected to a tortured performance dynasty) and Hopper (the gonzo actor, director and photographer) could both be the subjects of books all on their own. Together, they were combustible, which is a nice way of saying Hopper (who died in 2010) tended to get very scary on drugs. And together, they were also important collectors in a Los Angeles art scene that was, in those days, as fragile as a plant by a freeway. Their house, a gathering place and refuge for many, became a miniature Pop Art museum — full of Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg — and their Hollywood glamour informed and infused the scene.Peter Fonda strums his Gibson 12-string, circa 1965, from “Everybody Thought We Were Crazy.”Dennis Hopper/Hopper Art TrustEven in a busy spring, I have returned to “Everybody” repeatedly since I finished it, eager to sink back into its weird, smoggy, heated atmosphere. Rozzo is a scrupulous researcher and evocative writer — though his descriptions of the artworks too often give way to accounts of their value. (Everything the Hayward-Hopper household bought is now worth a ton, suffice it to say.) Where Rozzo excels is in his description of inner landscape and external geography, whether he’s talking about a beach party at Jane Fonda’s, or Hopper’s upbringing in Kansas (where wheat “shimmered gold like a lion’s mane”), or bitter exchanges in a luxury-stuffed Upper East Side apartment. He takes us cruising along as if we’re in our own road movie — all the emotional abuse and violence safely behind a windshield. Rozzo also comes close to showing us how great art is actually made. Whether it’s a discarded Warhol silk-screen or Hopper’s magnum opus, “Easy Rider,” much of the magic is created by accident, using the things that other people want to throw away. Hayward herself was a devoted trawler of junk shops, her eye careful with treasures ignored in plain sight. Rozzo’s book helps retune our own vision by imparting some of her and Hopper’s art-is-everywhere attitude. You look up from the sensual pleasures of the book, and briefly the ugly old world shocks you — a gallery hung with masterpieces.Now, not every account of the past can contain so much outdoor spirit — a lot of our important American art was made in nightclubs, on the vaudeville circuit (as it broke apart) and on stages where the floor was sticky with beer. In Shawn Levy’s IN ON THE JOKE: The Original Queens of Stand-Up Comedy (Doubleday, 383 pp., $30), a sensitive and vivid study of early female stand-ups, he directs our attention into such dark rooms.Books that aggregate always face one terrible enemy: the introduction. All that research, all that depth, can be flattened so easily by a preface. Levy’s own sounds like a setup for a punchline. Quick: How are Totie Fields, Joan Rivers, Moms Mabley, Jean Carroll, Elaine May, Sarah Ophelia Colley (a.k.a. Minnie Pearl) all alike? To simply say they’re women who made their living in comedy can’t satisfy the demands of the introduction. So to account for the way he has assembled his cast of characters, Levy finds himself arguing that each of them left behind something of their “feminine” nature as they achieved success and fame. “For women to be accepted as comedians, they had to be constrained or distorted in such a way that the womanhood was bled out of them,” he writes.Moms Mabley, left, and Pearl Bailey on “The Pearl Bailey Show” in 1971.Disney General Entertainment Content, via Getty ImagesHis own excellent research quickly counters the claim (many were ribald, frank, giggly, maternal, commanding, etc. from the jump) and rubbishes the slippery terms “feminine” and “womanhood” themselves. (When Jim Varney pretended to be a fool, was he bleeding the manhood out of himself? Don’t be a goof.) So it’s best to flip quickly past the awkwardness of those prefatory pages, to dive straight into his accounts of the women themselves. There he shines. His chapters, each one usually dedicated to a single biography, move with different speeds and pressures — his work on Mabley and Phyllis Diller, performers he clearly responds to, is the best at making the women seem to live again. As our painstaking, knowledgeable guide, he only occasionally shows his own hand as a deft comic writer. Describing Carroll’s sartorial conservatism, for instance, he says she was “walking up a down escalator,” a tidy image, perfectly (and tartly) appropriate. For a book about humor, it does this sort of thing too rarely. But the book, because it is really more interested in biography than comedy, must spend a great deal of its time talking about awful marriages, industry pressure and — in every case other than Elaine May’s — death. He’s right; there’s nothing funny about that.But when we look for meaning these days, usually our eyes land on the closest art at hand: television. Maybe it’s because I spend my days reading criticism, but it also seems to be the art that’s under everyone’s microscope at once. Our heads bump over the eyepiece; who will find something new in these much-examined shows? The introduction dilemma also frustrates our first few steps into Sarah Hagelin and Gillian Silverman’s THE NEW FEMALE ANTIHERO: The Disruptive Women of Twenty-First-Century US Television (University of Chicago, 265 pp., paper, $26), a book with a more scholarly tone but a more popular (and widely known) set of subjects. The authors have expanded on a talk Hagelin gave at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, so while the book treats familiar characters from “peak TV” like “The Americans,” “Girls,” “Scandal” and “Broad City,” the piece still retains a sense of the lectern. Essentially, the essays are a series of close readings, and I yearned to be in a classroom with the authors, joining them in their careful appraisals. But that introduction! Again it falls prey to throat-clearing and overclaiming, and they wind up making windy arguments about women’s successes and failures in the workplace, when we can just feel they only want to get into an exegesis of nudity in “Girls.” So, again, I’d say flip on by.Lena Dunham, Zosia Mamet, Jemima Kirke and Allison Williams filming a scene for “Girls.”Anderson/Bauer-Griffin, via GC ImagesLike that microscope, “Antihero” is strongest when it examines something segment by segment. For instance, in the chapter on “Scandal,” the analysis of an episode from the fourth season, “The Lawn Chair,” contains a deeply felt, and deeply thought, description of a complex set of signifiers. At their best, the authors are connoisseurs of a very specific emotion — shame — and they follow its faint imprint from show to show, body to body. In my experience, though, the chapters on shows I haven’t watched seemed gray and unreadable; only with the ones where I had my own memory of a scene could I fully enter into their argument. As I read, it made me think longingly of “Disaster Mon Amour.” Boy, when Thomson tells you about “The Road,” it rolls out before you. There isn’t comfort in that, necessarily, but there is artistry. I still shudder when I think of it.Helen Shaw is the theater critic at New York magazine. More

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      Meet the ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Cast

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      From trying not to vomit in flight to oiling up for a beach scene, the actors playing pilots got a crash course in the Tom Cruise school of action filmmaking.Thirty-six years after Iceman, Hollywood and Cougar took to the skies in “Top Gun,” a new team of colorfully nicknamed characters are suiting up in “Top Gun: Maverick.”This time, the aviators are recent graduates of the Navy’s elite fighter school, a.k.a. Top Gun, and they’re tasked with a near-impossible mission overseen by Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, the brash pilot played by Tom Cruise. Flying alongside Rooster, the son of the original film’s ill-fated Goose, are Hangman, Phoenix, Bob, Coyote, Fanboy and Payback, who must help destroy a foreign enemy’s uranium plant and get out alive. (Though the characters all have actual names, they’re introduced by their aviator call signs, and that’s how they’re known.)The intensive tutelage began offscreen: Cruise monitored the actors’ progress during a grueling five-month training program that culminated in the cast shooting their own action sequences from the back of real F/A-18 jets flown by Navy fighter pilots.Here’s a peek at the new generation of actors behind the call signs.Glen PowellThe actor initially auditioned for the role that went to Miles Teller.Scott Garfield/Paramount PicturesAge: 33“Maverick” role: HangmanWhere you’ve seen him before: “Set It Up,” “Hidden Figures,” “Scream Queens”‘Top Gun’: The Return of MaverickTom Cruise takes to the air once more in “Top Gun: Maverick,” the long-awaited sequel to a much-loved ’80s action blockbuster.Review: The central question posed by the movie has less to do with the need for combat pilots in the age of drones than with the relevance of movie stars, our critic writes.Tom Cruise: At a time when superheroes dominate the box office, the film industry is betting on the daredevil actor to bring grown-ups back to theaters.A New Class: Thirty-six years after Iceman, Hollywood and Cougar, a new team of colorfully nicknamed characters have suited up for the sequel.Filming Challenges: The aerial feats on show in “Top Gun: Maverick” look like the result of digital wizardry. They aren’t.Powell originally auditioned to play Rooster (then called Rascal) but lost out to Miles Teller. Then, when Powell was offered the role that would become Hangman, he turned it down for fear it would be a copy-and-paste take on Val Kilmer’s antagonistic Iceman in the 1986 film. Cruise persuaded Powell to sign on, and they worked together to make the character distinctly Powell’s own. Still, the cocky, confrontational pilot shares more than a few traits with Iceman — as does Powell with Kilmer. When Powell moved out of the San Diego hotel where he had stayed during filming, he bumped into Kilmer, who had just arrived to shoot his scene. “The last things that I moved out of my room were protein powder, weights and tequila,” Powell said. “I’m literally wheeling them on a luggage cart into the elevator, and as the doors are about to close, Val steps in. He looks at me. Then he looks at the luggage cart. And he just started dying laughing. He’s like, ‘This is ‘Top Gun’ right here.’”Monica BarbaroThough the actress could change her character’s call sign, she had good reason to stick with it.Scott Garfield/Paramount PicturesAge: 32“Maverick” role: PhoenixWhere you’ve seen her before: “The Good Cop,” “Chicago Justice,” “UnREAL”The military did not allow women to fly in combat until 1993, and in the first “Top Gun,” all of the Navy fighter pilot characters were men. Barbaro’s role in the sequel is a reflection of the service’s inclusive shift, and her filmed flights were all handled by female Navy fighter pilots. “When I found out I got the part, I was like, ‘Mom, I got it! And guess what? I get to play a pilot. I’m not a love interest!’” the Northern California native said. “We used the women that we got to fly with as role models for how we designed the character.” And while the actors were allowed to change their characters’ call signs, it quickly became clear during the cast’s downtime together that “Phoenix” was a good fit for Barbaro: “Let’s just say, we had one pretty wild night, and the next morning they were surprised that I arose from the ashes.”Greg Tarzan DavisHe was a schoolteacher not long before turning to acting.Scott Garfield/Paramount PicturesAge: 28“Maverick” role: CoyoteWhere you’ve seen him before: “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Good Trouble,” “Chicago P.D.”Not long before landing “Maverick,” Davis was an elementary schoolteacher in his home state of Louisiana. “I’m a big believer in following your dreams. I would preach that to my students,” Davis said. “But I realized I wasn’t doing that — because my dream was to be an actor. So I decided to give it a shot.” In a role reversal, Davis, who has gone by Tarzan since his own “wild” youth, said he felt like a kid throughout production, enthralled by the aviation toys and tasked with learning new things. While “Maverick” was in postproduction, he got a call from Christopher McQuarrie, the writer-director of “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One”; the frequent Cruise collaborator was asking him to join the cast, no audition required. “I put the phone on mute and jumped up and down and screamed,” Davis said. “That was my first offer, and having an offer is an actor’s dream.”Lewis PullmanThe back story for his character’s call sign didn’t make it into the movie.Scott Garfield/Paramount PicturesAge: 29“Maverick” role: BobWhere you’ve seen him before: “Outer Range,” “Bad Times at the El Royale,” “Catch-22”Of all the call signs, Pullman’s “Bob” (also his character’s first name) is the most mysteriously straightforward. “Bob is reclusive and quiet and a hard nut to crack,” Pullman said. “One of the original drafts had this moment where he kind of earned his stripes, and Hangman says, ‘I think I know what Bob stands for: Big Ol’ Balls.’ They didn’t end up using that, but it gave me a reference for Bob’s trajectory. He starts out as this unassuming guy, who then finds his strength.” Pullman needed strength of his own when Cruise walked into the first table read. Despite being the son of the actor Bill Pullman, Lewis was star-struck. “Tom basically ripped through the doors. His motorcycle in the background. He’s got his helmet on. The sun is glistening. He takes his helmet off, and his hair is perfect,” he said. “Tom is like Cary Grant and Buzz Aldrin and Buster Keaton and Evel Knievel all woven into one man.”Jay EllisAs a boy, the actor saw the original “Top Gun” with his father on an Air Force base.Scott Garfield/Paramount PicturesAge: 40“Maverick” role: PaybackWhere you’ve seen him before: “Insecure,” “Escape Room,” “The Game”Ellis distinctly recalls the day his father, who was then a mechanic in the Air Force, took him to see the first “Top Gun” in a theater on base in Austin, Texas. “I remember just looking up at the screen thinking, ‘I want to do that. Whatever those guys are up there doing, I want to be a part of that somehow,’” he said. Rather than enlist, Ellis became an actor. Fast forward three decades, and he found himself shooting “Maverick” and paying homage to the original’s beach volleyball scene with a game of beach football as the camera panned over the cast’s glistening muscles for a sun-dappled montage. “We probably went through five different types of oil because the makeup team was trying to figure out what wouldn’t soak into everyone’s skin so quickly,” Ellis said. “We started out with baby oil, then we moved on to argan oil, coconut oil, avocado oil. We switched to glycerin at one point. They were spraying us down with Evian bottles. It made for a very slippery game.”Danny RamirezHe thought he wouldn’t have to worry about his fear of flying. He was wrong.Paramount PicturesAge: 29“Maverick” role: FanboyWhere you’ve seen him before: “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” “On My Block,” “Assassination Nation”Before signing on, the actors had to check a box attesting they weren’t afraid of flying. “I lied,” Ramirez said with a laugh. “I was like, What’s the worst that could happen? It’s a Tom Cruise movie, that means he’ll be the one doing the stunts.” Without his usual commercial-flight routine of wine and noise-canceling headphones, Ramirez found himself struggling not to vomit as his F/A-18 rolled and dove through the air. The actors each had their own tricks to cope with motion sickness: Davis relied on Dramamine. Pullman preferred a preflight diet of rice and fresh ginger. For Ramirez, slowly building tolerance in incrementally smaller and faster planes was key. Adding to the degree of difficulty: They not only had to deliver their lines, but also set up the shots and adjust the cameras themselves once in the air. “I was like, ‘Are we going to get some kind of camera operator credit or what?’” he said. “Having to line up another jet going 500 miles an hour to stay within the frame was an experience I’m probably never going to have again.” More

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      What Makes Katt Williams Great? It’s Not the Jokes, It’s the Performance

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      His new special, “World War III” on Netflix, underlines the showmanship and drama that make him the finest arena stand-up of the moment.Katt Williams understands the importance of an entrance.In “World War III,” his new hour of stand-up on Netflix, you first see him racing across the stage like Tom Cruise hustling to save the world. His previous specials have been just as cinematic, with Williams strutting in wearing a massive fur coat and flanked by beautiful women or walking through the crowd in a cape while a voice-over tells you his thoughts.But his most spectacular introduction had to be from “Priceless” in 2014 when the curtain dropped to reveal a smoky stage with two women dancing on either side of a cage containing a lion. Not a sleepy one, mind you. This beast was jumpy. After a shot of the audience, a clever piece of misdirection by the director Spike Lee, the focus returned to the stage where one of the women opened a cage door slowly enough to let your mind wander to worst-case scenarios. Then a different Katt emerged.It’s the kind of showmanship (not to mention punning) you can expect from Katt Williams. In a recent interview with Arsenio Hall, Williams, a prolific performer, said his legacy would be not as the greatest comic, but as the most original. He’s got a case. In a landscape filled with stand-ups straining to go against the grain, carving out brands as renegades, Williams is a genuine eccentric.What other superstar would open his first special on Netflix, a famously global platform, with 10 minutes of local material about Jacksonville, Fla., the town he was performing in? Or say with such conviction that there is no such thing as cancel culture. (“I’m on my fifth second chance,” he once quipped.) Or find himself in so many beefs with amiable peers. He’s called out Cedric the Entertainer and Tiffany Haddish, but his fiercest feud is with Kevin Hart. The substance of their conflict is hard to figure out, but in terms of style, Williams always comes off with more flair: He once used a video any boxing promoter would appreciate to challenge Hart to a comedy battle for $5 million.But his distinctiveness starts with his cadence, a swaggering high-pitched voice that evokes the flow of Easy-E more than it does any comic. His delivery has a rhythm, a quickening beat that, once you clue into it, can make anything funny. Along with his live-wire physicality, this is what makes him the finest arena comic of the moment. His act is not about carefully honed jokes. In his new special, which is not one of his better ones, his take on Joe Biden is that he’s old and the world war of the title is a vague battle between truth and lies that never entirely coheres into a complete thought. He pokes fun at Anthony Fauci and makes some half-baked jokes about Adam and Eve being incestuous. Williams has said he stopped performing in clubs and instead develops jokes in front of thousands of people. You can tell.The tepidness of his material here seems almost like a challenge, as if he’s saying: Watch how I can make even these jokes work.The first 10 minutes of his new hour have maybe two good punch lines, and both are about chicken wings. The remarkable part is that they are completely unconnected. Most comics would have at least used a transition to tie them together and build momentum. But whereas there are many comics who can write a tight joke, there’s only one Katt Williams. He tosses ideas out and then, through force of charisma and performance chops, makes them amusing in a way no one else could.In the first chicken wing joke, the setup leans into his preacher voice, adopting a tone of religious solemnity to explain that the world is in serious trouble, convincing you he’s about to go deep before pivoting to a punchline that delivers the news with apocalyptic exasperation: “Taco Bell’s selling chicken wings.”In the other chicken wing bit, the setup and punchline are almost incidental to what comes in between, which he delights in stretching out: He repeats lines like incantations, asks the audience to imagine a chicken, does an imitation of a chicken, and throws out disclaimers (“Look, I’m not a farmer”) and tangents. Part of what makes this so much fun is the improvisational sense he creates, the way he works off the crowd’s response, but it’s also how quickly Williams moves from silly to serious. As wonderfully goofy as his chicken impression may be, what’s really unusual about Williams is his gravity. Even in his funniest moments, he has an intensity that makes comedy dramatic. Donald Glover clearly saw this when he cast Williams in a dramatic role in “Atlanta,” for which he won an Emmy.In a typical special, the comic spends time warming up the crowd, digs in to race and racism, pokes fun at whatever president occupies the Oval Office and tells some elaborate sex jokes. Williams, who perspires as much as any comic who has ever gesticulated, attacks sex jokes with his entire body. In one of my favorite bits from “It’s Pimpin’ Pimpin’” (2008), he describes his signature sexual move as a try-anything maneuver, pantomiming a sort of one-man Rube Goldberg device.Last year, attending my first arena show since the pandemic, I saw Williams at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, doing much of the same material that is in his new special. It hit harder live. That may be because no comedian is better suited to remind you of the joys of laughing together.Like only a few other comics alive, Williams knows how to turn a huge crowd into a family affair. He buttered us up, then pushed buttons, gushing about having successfully mounted a show this size during a pandemic: “They said it couldn’t happen in New York,” Williams said. Of course, no one said that, but it felt good to hear and we all cheered ourselves.Katt Williams can seem ill at ease with the collegial small talk of show business, coming off as shy in interviews and seeming a bit awkward hosting a roast of Flavor Flav. (In a later special, he did a very funny and searching bit about feeling implicated in the racism of some of the jokes written for him.) But onstage alone, talking to a crowd, he’s smooth as can be. A seductive presence, he has that ineffable quality of stardom: a preternatural ability to connect. More

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      Which Cannes Films Have the Best Oscar Odds?

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      Movies from Park Chan-wook, Lukas Dhont and Hirokazu Kore-eda could be what academy voters are looking for. But don’t count out “Top Gun: Maverick.”CANNES, France — Last year at the Cannes Film Festival, there was one question on everybody’s lips: “What’s the next ‘Parasite’?” You can see why people wondered, since that Bong Joon Ho film had used its Palme d’Or win to jump-start a historic Oscar campaign.But if last year’s festival had an heir to “Parasite,” it proved to be a very unlikely one.Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s talky drama “Drive My Car” didn’t win the Palme d’Or (it settled for a best-screenplay honor) and wasn’t anyone’s idea of the biggest contender coming out of Cannes. Still, after year-end critics’ groups went for it in a major way, “Drive My Car” picked up huge Oscar nominations for picture, directing and adapted screenplay in addition to one for best international film, the category it won.So as this year’s Cannes nears its end with no one film standing head and shoulders above the rest, I think that rather than searching for the next “Parasite,” it would be wiser to ask: What’s the next “Drive My Car”? In other words, which movie from this year’s Cannes crop could keep on building buzz and capitalize on the academy’s growing international user base to snag major Oscar nominations?I see three notable contenders. Foremost among them is “Close,” which is hotly tipped to pick up a major award at the fest on Saturday. It’s the second feature from the Belgian director Lukas Dhont, and it follows two 13-year-old boys as their intense friendship begins to unravel. Some crucial reviews in Variety and IndieWire have been notably mixed, calling out one of the film’s melodramatic plot twists, but Oscar voters have never minded melodrama — in fact, they often crave it, and the most ardent fans of “Close” consider it to be the four-hankie entry of the festival. A24 bought the film on the eve of its premiere, so expect a robust fall push.The South Korean director Park Chan-wook deserved Oscar notice for his twisty 2016 masterpiece “The Handmaiden,” and though his new Cannes film “Decision to Leave” isn’t quite on that level, it’s still a well-directed affair that could see plenty of awards attention. A Hitchcockian romantic thriller, “Decision to Leave” stars Park Hae-il as a detective investigating a murdered man’s widow (Tang Wei) who, in her own femme fatale way, seems to welcome the stakeout. After the explicit sex scenes of “The Handmaiden,” it’s surprising how chaste the director’s follow-up is, but that may actually work to the movie’s favor with older Oscar voters.Our Coverage of the Cannes Film Festival 2022The Cannes Film Festival returns with its typical glitz, glamour and red-carpet looks, and with nearly 50 movies projected for the event.Politics and Grace: In Cannes, politics and polemics are always part of the movie mix. But there is still room for scenes of lyrical beauty.Oscar Odds: Which movie from the Cannes crop could capitalize on the academy’s growing international user base to snag major nominations? There are three top contenders.David Cronenberg: The body-horror auteur shared some thoughts on aging and his new film “Crimes of the Future,” which premiered at the festival.‘Elvis’: Baz Luhrmann brought the King to Cannes with a hyperventilated, fitfully entertaining and thoroughly deranged biopic.Ask a Cameraman: The festival is known for its elongated standing ovations. One of the men tasked with filming them explained what it takes to capture those moments.Hirokazu Kore-eda scored the Palme d’Or in 2018 for his sensitive drama “Shoplifters,” which went on to compete for the international-film Oscar; though it lost to the Netflix-funded juggernaut “Roma,” I suspect a film like “Shoplifters” would play better today and contend for more nominations across different categories. Keep an eye on Kore-eda’s “Broker,” then: This affectionate character study stars “Parasite” lead Song Kang Ho as one of two good-natured criminals who try to sell an abandoned baby. At times, the movie is so sweet that it verges on gooey, but I doubt the “CODA” wing of the academy will complain.Some other Cannes entries could pop up throughout awards season, including “Armageddon Time,” from the director James Gray, about a middle-class Jewish family whose progressive attitudes mask a willingness to climb a few rungs at the expense of those less privileged. Gray is well-liked in France and may pick up a trophy here, but Oscar voters have yet to break for him in any significant way. Stars Anne Hathaway, Jeremy Strong, and Anthony Hopkins will at least attract attention.Vicky Krieps should already have one Oscar nomination under her belt for “Phantom Thread”: since she was snubbed then, perhaps voters could make it up to her for “Corsage,” in which she’s fun and spiky as the Empress Elisabeth of Austria. I’d also be pleased if critics’ groups rally behind Léa Seydoux as a single mother attempting a tricky romance in Mia Hansen-Love’s “One Fine Morning,” my favorite entry of the festival.Seydoux is also quite good in David Cronenberg’s “Crimes of the Future,” where she stars opposite Viggo Mortensen and Kristen Stewart, but the film may prove too out-there for awards voters; ditto “Triangle of Sadness,” from “The Square” director Ruben Ostlund, though that class comedy does provide some of the most gonzo gross-out sequences of the year and contains a memorable supporting turn from Woody Harrelson.Léa Seydoux and Viggo Mortensen in “Crimes of the Future.”Nikos Nikolopoulos/NeonWhat about the expensive Hollywood movies that premiered at Cannes? “Elvis” hails from the director Baz Luhrmann, who managed an Oscar breakthrough with “Moulin Rouge” but whose last film, “The Great Gatsby,” earned nominations only for its costumes and production design. The glittery “Elvis” seems likely to continue that trend: Reviews have been polarizing, and though up-and-comer Austin Butler impresses as Elvis Presley, young hunks usually face an uphill battle in the lead-actor category. (And the less said about the misbegotten supporting performance from Tom Hanks as Elvis’s manager, the better.)The last time George Miller was at Cannes, he premiered “Mad Max: Fury Road,” which went on to earn 10 Oscar nominations (including picture and director) and ultimately picked up six statuettes. Action movies rarely fare that well with Oscar, but Miller broke the mold, and he’s made something else unique with “Three Thousand Years of Longing,” his new film about a djinn (Idris Elba), a scholar (Tilda Swinton) and the unique love that blooms between them. It’s got drama, fantasy, romance, comedy … and you’ll either thrill to all of that, or find it a bit overstuffed. The tech elements of the film deserve notice, but other categories could be a long shot.And then there’s “Top Gun: Maverick,” which launched on the Croisette with a flyby from fighter jets and an opaque conversation with star Tom Cruise. This long-in-the-making sequel is earning stellar reviews and it’s expertly directed. If the academy really wants to push well-done blockbuster material into the best picture race, this could be the summer’s strongest hope. “Drive My Fighter Jet,” anyone? More