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      Big Mess on Campus: Making ‘Emergency’

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      A talk with the director Carey Williams and the screenwriter KD Dávila about their college dark comedy streaming on Amazon.Comedies about wild times in high school and college have long scattered the movie landscape like red cups on a frat house porch. The antics of “Animal House” in the late 1970s gave way to a string of zany ‘80s movies like “Porky’s,” “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” and “Revenge of the Nerds.” The ’90s brought “American Pie” and “Can’t Hardly Wait.” But historically, often either missing, put to the sidelines or made the punch lines in these films, were characters of color.Spike Lee’s “School Daze” (1988) was a rare exception of one that focused on a nonwhite cast. But the college comedy “Emergency” (streaming on Amazon), hopes to add something fresh to the genre, making race, and the perceptions that come from being a person of color in certain environments, a central plot point. Its lead characters experience a wild night, but not in the way they would have hoped.The film stars Donald Elise Watkins and RJ Cyler as two buddies who want to become the first Black men on their campus to complete a college party circuit called the legendary tour. But plans go south when they find a young white woman passed out in their house. They must try to figure out, with their other roommate (Sebastian Chacon) what to do, because for three men of color, calling the cops in this situation is a risky option.The makers of “Emergency” understand this tricky calculus. The film was written by KD Dávila, who is Mexican American, and directed by Carey Williams, who is Black. Their feature emerged from their 2018 short, which won prizes at the South by Southwest and Sundance film festivals. In a video interview, the two discussed building humor out of an intense situation, and how British comedies came to be an influence on the film.Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.The director Carey Williams and the screenwriter KD Dávila on the set of “Emergency.”Quantrell ColbertWere there specific elements you wanted to reference from the high school and college comedy genre for this film?KD DÁVILA On the writing side, definitely. In many ways, it was an opportunity to subvert a lot of those tropes. I think we all grew up watching things like “Superbad” and “Booksmart” and everything. But it always struck me as funny how the stakes in those movies are emotional, primarily. They’re never very high. And so this movie was an opportunity to take a lot of things very seriously.Our characters wish that they were in one of those party comedies, like they wish they were going to be in “Superbad” or something, but they ended up in a kind of a thriller instead.What do you think is at the heart of the film?DÁVILA We wanted to do a movie that was about perception and the burden that people of color have of having to anticipate how you’re being perceived at all times. And that’s where a lot of the humor and the drama comes from in the movie: that they have to keep anticipating how they’re being perceived at any given moment.How did you work at striking that tonal balance between comedy and drama here?CAREY WILLIAMS For me, the film was always really like a love story about these two guys and their friendship. And so that was the entry point into balancing the tone of this film through the course of this night. In focusing on this friendship, the humor was going to come from how they interacted with each other, about their differing world views of how to handle the situation.Did you have film references in your mind when making this?WILLIAMS I purposely tried not to watch anything that I felt like would be held in conversation with this film because I didn’t want to be influenced in that way. I did feel the essence of Spike Lee’s work in my mind when making this. But I wanted it to feel not like a college comedy movie. I wanted to have it feel very authored, cinematically. Movies that feature young Black people don’t get that cinematic treatment as much as they should in this world, especially the college comedy. But you know, it’s funny because after I made the movie, I keep thinking about “Y Tu Mamá También” as something I feel like this movie has synergy with. But I don’t think I was thinking about that when I made the movie.DÁVILA When I hit college, I started watching a ton of British comedies. And I think that British comedies operate almost like horror thrillers. Like it’s like the horror of being embarrassed or something. And you are always thinking of how this looks. And so I think that watching so many just British comedies influenced this movie a lot, which sounds probably very strange considering the subject matter of the film and what it ended up being.What is your favorite high school or college comedy?WILLIAMS “Weird Science.” That movie’s ridiculous, but I’ve watched it so many times.DÁVILA This is not a high school or college comedy, but it’s definitely a late-bloomer coming-of-age story: “Shaun of the Dead.” I love it so much. It works on so many levels. More

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      Your Burning Questions About ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Answered

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      How similar is it to the original? Who’s back? Who’s absent? We have answers.Listen to This ArticleTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.“Top Gun: Maverick” turns and burns its way into theaters this week, landing 36 years after the 1986 original. That’s a lot of time to form a lot of questions about the new film and its relationship to its predecessor — and we’ve got answers.Didn’t this already come out?You would think! Thanks to its complex production, the Covid-19 pandemic and Paramount’s insistence on holding out for a proper theatrical rollout, “Top Gun: Maverick” has set and missed five previous release dates: July 2019, June 2020, Christmas 2020, the 2021 Fourth of July weekend, Thanksgiving of 2021, and then finally, its current Friday berth.How similar are the stories?Very. Both films begin with Maverick (Cruise) engaging in a display of hot-dogging that gets him called on the carpet — but not really, since he’s sent to Top Gun, essentially promoted, by its conclusion. (This time, he’ll instruct a class of hotshot young fliers for a dangerous mission.) The goings-on at the Navy flight school include dogfight exercises, philosophical conflicts and a love story. Plus, a devastating loss is followed by a crisis of conscience before the eventual triumph.The original film’s primary conflict was between Maverick, the cocky risk-taker, and Iceman (Val Kilmer), a by-the-book pilot who finds Maverick’s rule-breaking dangerous. In the sequel, that dynamic is replicated between adrenaline junkie Hangman (Glen Powell) and the more conservative Rooster (Miles Teller), whose tendency to play it safe in the air is rooted in the premature death of his father: Maverick’s old flying buddy Goose (Anthony Edwards).Miles Teller as Rooster.Scott Garfield/Paramount PicturesWho’s back?Only one actor, aside from Cruise, returns: Val Kilmer’s Iceman, now the commander of the Pacific fleet. Teller did not play little Rooster in the original film, but the character was present, bouncing on a bar piano as Maverick and his old man sing and play “Great Balls of Fire”; here, Rooster leads a piano singalong of the same tune, and the director Joseph Kosinski flashes back to that scene (just in case Rooster’s costume, mustache and aviators, identical to Goose’s, aren’t enough of a giveaway).And, as the film critic Alison Wilmore noted, Maverick’s love interest, Penny Benjamin (Jennifer Connelly), while not seen in the first film, was mentioned in an early scene.Who’s noticeably absent?That new love interest means that Kelly McGillis, who played the instructor Charlie Blackwood in the original, does not appear — she’s not even mentioned. Nor does Meg Ryan, whose brief but memorable turn as Goose’s widow was an early career highlight, or Rick Rossovich, who played Iceman’s fly buddy Slider to memorable effect.Do we hear “Danger Zone”?Do we ever. The opening minutes are a painstaking recreation of the same stretch in “Top Gun”: Harold Faltermeyer’s distinctive “bong” and synthesizer score accompany the exact same opening text explaining what Top Gun is and what it does (with one notable alteration: it now notes that the school trains a “handful of men and women”), before we see planes taking off from Navy carriers and roaring into the sky as the score gives way to Kenny Loggins’s pulse-pounding hit “Danger Zone.”The detail of the replication is meticulous, approaching the level of Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot “Psycho” remake. But it turns out to be a head-fake, framing “Maverick” as exactly the kind of empty nostalgia play that it turns out not to be.Jennifer Connelly as Penny, Maverick’s love interest.Paramount PicturesWhat about “Take My Breath Away”?Surprisingly, Berlin’s love ballad (the soundtrack’s other big hit) is nowhere to be found, though Cruise and Connolly’s love scene initially apes some of the compositions of the original scene when it was used. But their foreplay ends quickly for a tasteful cut to the afterglow, as Kosinski seems more interested in (gasp) what they have to say to each other than what they want to do to each other.This is true to the picture’s general approach to romance, replacing the entirely physical attraction of the first film with a solid, complicated relationship between two adults, who’ve lived a life and shared a history. But yes, she rides on the back of his Kawasaki, and her hair looks great blowing in the breeze.How homoerotic is it?Barely, sadly. The guy-on-guy overtones of the original film were so pronounced that they became part of the picture’s lore, articulated by no less a pop culture expert than Quentin Tarantino (in a cameo appearance in the 1994 comedy “Sleep With Me”). But this one mostly plays it straight, so to speak.OK, but is there at least a beach volleyball scene?There is a beach football scene, but it’s comparatively chaste — skin is bared and muscles are flexed, but it feels like the sequence is actually about the game they’re playing, and not, y’know, other stuff.From left, Jay Ellis, Monica Barbaro and Danny Ramirez in the film.Scott Garfield/Paramount PicturesHow propagandistic is it?The original “Top Gun” was such an effective piece of rah-rah flag-waving that Navy recruiting officials notoriously posted up outside screenings to field inquiries from would-be Mavericks. The new film isn’t quite as jingoistic (though it was again made with the full cooperation of the Department of Defense), emphasizing personal over political conflict. But the central mission, to bomb an unnamed enemy’s “unsanctioned uranium plant” that threatens “our allies in the region,” has some troubling historical analogues.Will I like it if I loved the original?Probably. The culture-war inclined may decry the film’s inclusivity (beyond the opening text alteration, the flying crew is more racially and sexually diverse), but “Maverick” checks all the expected boxes: thrilling action, shades and leather jackets aplenty, and Cruise at his coolest.Will I like it if I hated the original?Speaking as part of this demographic: yes. Cruise and the screenwriters make the deliberate (and frankly risky) choice of making Hangman, the character most reminiscent of Maverick in the first film, the most unlikable character in this one. It proves a genuinely thoughtful and effective method of grappling with what “Top Gun” was, what it said and what it represented at that moment in history — and in this one.Audio produced by More

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      Inside the ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Flying Sequences

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      The makers of the “Top Gun” sequel discuss the challenges of filming practical aerial stunts.Before Tom Cruise signed on to star in the original “Top Gun,” he asked to take a test flight in a jet. Cruise wasn’t yet world famous, so when he arrived at the hangar, his long hair still in a ponytail left over from “Legend,” the pilots, according to one of the film’s producers, Jerry Bruckheimer, decided to give this Hollywood hippie the ride of his life. Zipping at 6.5 G’s — more than twice the G-forces some astronauts endure during rocket launches — Cruise felt the blood drain from his head. He vomited in his fighter-pilot mask.He agreed to make the film.Cruise continued to fly so fast, and so frequently, that he learned to squeeze his thighs and abs to stay conscious. His stomach adjusted to the speed. When the director Tony Scott put a camera in the cockpit, Cruise could smile for his close-ups. His castmates weren’t as prepared.“They all threw up and their eyes rolled back in their heads,” Bruckheimer said in a phone interview. The original footage “was just a mess,” he admitted. “We couldn’t use any of it.”“Top Gun” made Cruise a superstar — and the experience of shooting it stuck with him so much, he was convinced he needed to lead a three-month flight course for the cast of “Top Gun: Maverick,” a sequel, now in theaters, that has had 35 years to build up suspense. In the new movie, Cruise’s Capt. Pete Mitchell (known as Maverick) readies a dozen young pilots for a dangerous mission to destroy an underground uranium plant in an enemy land. Behind the scenes, Cruise did roughly the same thing, gradually raising the actors’ aerial tolerance, and confidence, from small prop planes to F-18 fighter jets. “He’s got every kind of pilot’s license that you could possibly imagine — helicopters, jets, whatever,” Bruckheimer said.In essence, “Top Gun: Maverick” is a 450 mile-an-hour flying-heist caper. The mission leaders devise a difficult set of challenges for the pilots: zoom low and quick, vault a steep mountain, spin upside-down, plummet into a basin and survive a near-vertical climb at 9 G’s while dodging missiles.Cruise, a contender for the most daredevil actor since Buster Keaton, was adamant that every stunt be accomplished with practical effects. Each jet had a U.S. Navy pilot at the controls, while its actor spun like a leaf in a windstorm. The deserts and snow-capped peaks in the background are real, and so are many of the performers’ grimaces, squints, gasps and moans.“You can’t fake the forces that are put on your body during combat,” the director Joseph Kosinski said by phone. “You can’t do it on a sound stage, you can’t do it on a blue screen. You can’t do it with visual effects.”From the safety of theater seats, the audience faces its own challenge: unlearning the computer-generated complacency that’s turned modern blockbusters into bedazzled bores. The imagery of the sky and ground spiraling behind the actors’ heads in “Top Gun: Maverick” looks like it must be digital wizardry. It isn’t.Cast and crew members on the set of “Top Gun: Maverick.”Paramount PicturesThe movie’s aerial coordinator, Kevin LaRosa II, and its aerial unit director of photography, Michael FitzMaurice, filmed from above using three aircraft: two types of jets with exterior cameras mounted on wind-resistant gimbals, and a helicopter, which proved best at capturing the speed of actors whizzing by. One specialized jet could film the same scene using two different lens focal lengths to double the footage captured on a single flight. Once LaRosa heard that the long-anticipated sequel was finally going to become a reality, he also developed his own aircraft, a shiny black plane with cameras that can withstand up to 3 G’s.“That had never been done before,” LaRosa said in a video interview. As he flew next to the cast, LaRosa dodged trees while keeping an eye on the monitors to make sure FitzMaurice, controlling the cameras from the back of the plane, had gotten the shot.Kosinski, the director, also spent 15 months working with the Navy to develop and install six cameras in each F-18 cockpit, which meant passing rigorous safety tests and securing the military’s all-clear to remove its own equipment. Luckily, Kosinski said, there were “Top Gun” fans among the commanding officers. “All the admirals that are in charge right now were 21 in 1986, or around there when they signed up,” he said. “They supported us and let us do all this crazy stuff.”Usually, the Navy forbids pilots from flying below 200 feet during training. One of the film’s most staggering images is of Cruise in an F-18 whooshing just 50 feet above the ground, a height roughly equal to its wingspan. The plane flew so close to the earth that it kicked up dust and made the ground cameras shake. The pilot landed, turned to Cruise, and told the superstar that he’d never do that again.The actor Monica Barbaro didn’t know how nervous she should be when she agreed to play the pilot Natasha Trace (nickname: Phoenix).“When I met Joe in my callback, first thing he had me sign a waver saying that I didn’t have a fear of flying,” Barbaro said by phone. “I just got goose bumps. I was so excited.”Monica Barbaro as Natasha Trace (known as Phoenix) in the film.Paramount PicturesEach flight day kicked off with a two-hour briefing for the pilots and film crew to go over every upcoming shot, movement and line of dialogue. Next, that sequence’s actors and pilots would rehearse the maneuvers in a wooden mock-up of the jet cockpit until the motions were ingrained. Then, they took to the sky to film as many takes as possible before the jet, or the performers, ran out of fuel. In the afternoon, they did it again.Soaring above the crew, Barbaro and the rest of the cast took on a Swiss Army knife of skills. Instead of hitting her mark on the ground, she had to hit it in the air. The sun was her spotlight. A pilot’s kneeboard on her lap displayed her script, her movements and her necessary coordinates, plus reminders to check her parachute and shoulder straps, fix her hair and makeup, adjust her flight visor, flip on the bright red switch that controlled the cameras, and note down the time codes. Finally, Barbaro had to do her actual job: act.“Tom just really encouraged everybody, if you are going to throw up, just learn how to do it and move past,” Barbaro said. “We would applaud when anyone threw up, so it became celebrated.” Glen Powell (he plays the hot shot Lt. Jake Seresin, who is called Hangman) even brandished his barf bag while gliding upside-down and flashing a thumbs up.Barbaro held onto her lunch. But after her first dailies, she said, her face appeared so calm, it gave the impression that the clouds whooshing behind her were simply a green screen. Cruise’s training had prepared her too well.She was sent back into the sky for a retake. More

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      Remembering Ray Liotta in ‘Goodfellas’

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      His performance as Henry Hill includes many touches that weren’t in the script. But the producer didn’t want to cast him originally.There’s a moment early in Martin Scorsese’s 1990 gangster classic “Goodfellas” that always tugs at my heartstrings. Scorsese’s movie is brutal and cleareyed and unsentimental, yes. But Ray Liotta as Henry Hill, the viewer’s docent into the criminal world, injects a note of tenderness that’s all the more effective for coming out of the mouth of a slick sociopath. (The movie is based on the true-crime book “Wiseguy” by Nicholas Pileggi; the real Hill attained some celebrity in the wake of the picture’s release.)It’s during the voice-over when Henry recalls as a boy envying the wiseguys who hung out at the pizza parlor and taxi stand across the street from his home. The guy who runs the pizza joint is Tuddy Cicero, brother of the mob underboss Paulie Cicero, for whom Henry will be working soon. Narrator Henry says the gangster’s full name and pauses. Then, in an exhalation that has low but strong notes of love and nostalgia, he adds, “Tuddy.”Now mind you, Tuddy is eventually revealed to be as ruthless and coldblooded a gangster as they come. It is he who puts the bullet in the back of the head of Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) at the fraudulent ceremony at which Tommy is to become a “made man.” But here is Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill, clearly still besotted with a childhood idol and the life he shared with the man. Liotta, who died this week at 67, fills Scorsese’s movie with dozens of equally revelatory touches.When I was researching “Made Men: The Story of ‘Goodfellas,’” my 2020 book about the film, I asked about that moment in the movie several times. The pause and the repetition of Tuddy’s name was not in the script drafts I saw. It was Liotta’s own touch. No one I spoke with remembered whether Liotta suggested it during the voice-over recordings or just added it himself. In any event, it works. Maybe too well, for people who believe that depiction is endorsement. In a movie that relentlessly examines the lure and transgressive thrill of amorality, Liotta’s depiction of Hill is the hook that draws the viewer in.If you saw Hill on television or listened to any of his appearances on Howard Stern, you were likely to get the impression that Henry Hill was what your grandmother might call a schnook. While he did commit acts of violence both gang-related and domestic, he wasn’t intimidating. Edward McDonald, the prosecutor who got Hill and family into the witness protection program, and who plays himself in “Goodfellas,” told me that Hill was more a mob court jester than any kind of master criminal.But Scorsese’s movie isn’t just about real-life gangsters — it’s also about how we mythologize them. “Movie stars with muscle” is how Hill characterizes his crew. And Liotta was a perfect Henry, able to turn on a dime from dry charm to deadly rage. In one of the movie’s famed tracking shots, when Henry escorts his future wife, Karen (Lorraine Bracco), into New York’s Copacabana nightclub by way of a side entrance, Liotta concocted all the bits of charming business a guy like Henry would use: tip a doorman here, shout out to a cook there, steer your date by the elbow lightly, act like it’s just what you’re due when the waiter flies out from the wings and sets a personal table at the side of the stage. Liotta got suggestions from Hill himself — and more from audiotapes of Hill speaking with Pileggi. But the research Liotta did into Hill’s world, and the inner work he did, was crucial.The part came at a point when he might have been headed for a career as a character actor. He was unforgettable in Jonathan Demme’s “Something Wild,” as an ex-boyfriend of Melanie Griffith’s whose possessiveness explodes in still-shocking violence. And in “Field of Dreams” he played a reincarnation of the disgraced ballplayer Shoeless Joe Jackson. Sometimes the crinkle in his eye reminded the viewer of the man’s corruption, but his portrayal was mostly of an awe-struck love of the game he could now play forever in a Midwestern cornfield turned ballpark.When “Goodfellas” was announced, more than one of its eventual cast members told me that it was the movie every New York and Los Angeles actor wanted in on. And Liotta was no exception. Everyone liked him for the part save the producer Irwin Winkler. He did not see the actor’s charm. In his book “A Life in Movies,” Winkler recalls Liotta coming to his table at a Santa Monica restaurant and asking for a word. “In a 10-minute conversation he (with charm and confidence) sold me on why he should play Henry Hill,” the producer wrote. When I interviewed Winkler, he said, rather sheepishly, “You heard the story of me not wanting Ray?” I told Winkler I had and said, “I can’t see anyone else doing it.” Winkler responded “Nor can I.”As it happened, I was not able to interview Liotta himself for my book. Early talks with his publicist were promising. It was possible that I could get some time with him when he was in New York promoting “Marriage Story” at the New York Film Festival; then it wasn’t. We were both represented by the same agency; no dice. He was in a film on which a few close friends of mine were crew members. Can’t go there. And as I worked on the book, I heard several accounts of an intense, serious actor who, upon deciding he wasn’t going to do something, kept to that.He had spoken about “Goodfellas” in other interviews, including an oral history that ran in GQ in 2010. The shoot had its challenges: He suffered the death of his mother halfway through and felt at least slightly shut out by male castmates like Robert De Niro and Pesci. Going through De Niro’s papers at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, I came across a thank-you card from Liotta, and inside was a handwritten note: “Bob, Now I can tell you how much of a trip it was to work with you. You’re the best. Hope we can do it again. But I really mean Do it!” Liotta’s eagerness is palpable. The two did work together again, in “Copland.”But “Goodfellas” was irreproducible. Because it did show off his range, and it is a landmark film. Liotta’s signature role is one any actor would hope to be remembered by.Glenn Kenny is a critic and the author of “Made Men: The Story of ‘Goodfellas.’” More

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      Kevin Spacey Facing Sexual Assault Charges in Britain

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      British prosecutors said that they had authorized criminal charges against Mr. Spacey, 62, for four counts of sexual assault. He cannot be formally charged unless he enters England or Wales. LONDON — The British authorities have authorized criminal charges against Kevin Spacey on four counts of sexual assault against three men, the country’s Crown Prosecution Service announced in a news release on Thursday.Rosemary Ainslie, head of the service’s special crime division, said in the release that the service had also authorized one charge against Mr. Spacey, 62, of “causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity without consent.”The authorization of charges followed a review of the evidence collected by London’s police force. Mr. Spacey cannot be formally charged unless he enters England or Wales, a spokesman for the service said in a telephone interview. The spokesman declined to comment on whether the service would pursue extradition proceedings if that did not occur. The news release said the charges concerned three complainants. The incidents dated from March 2005, August 2008 and April 2013, it added — a time when Mr. Spacey was artistic director of the Old Vic theater in London. All the incidents occurred in London, except one from 2013, which occurred in Gloucestershire, England. The Metropolitan Police said that one of the men was now “in his 40s” and that the other two were now in their 30s, but did not provide their exact ages.Representatives for Mr. Spacey did not immediately respond to requests for comment.The first person to publicly accuse Mr. Spacey of sexual misconduct was the actor Anthony Rapp, who said in 2017 that Mr. Spacey had made unwanted sexual advances toward him in the 1980s, when he was 14 years old.Soon after that a former television anchor came forward to accuse Mr. Spacey of sexually assaulting her son, and then 20 people who worked with Mr. Spacey at the Old Vic theater in London, where he was artistic director for 11 years, accused him of inappropriate behavior. The theater commissioned an independent investigation, which Mr. Spacey did not take part in, and issued a report that concluded that “his stardom and status at the Old Vic may have prevented people, and in particular junior staff or young actors, from feeling that they could speak up or raise a hand for help.”The report said that the theater had not been able to independently verify the allegations. But some actors and members of the staff did go public. One actor, Roberto Cavazos, wrote on Facebook that he “had a couple of nasty encounters with Spacey that were close to being called harassment” at the theater. “It seems that it only took a male under 30 to make Mr. Spacey feel free to touch us,” Mr. Cavazos wrote.The Old Vic said in a statement that it could not comment on ongoing criminal proceedings. In 2018, Mr. Spacey was charged with the sexual assault of the television anchor’s 18-year-old son in Nantucket, Mass. Prosecutors dropped the case when the accuser invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to continue testifying.A massage therapist sued Mr. Spacey in California in 2019, accusing him of groping and trying to kiss him before offering him oral sex during a massage. The accuser died unexpectedly ahead of the trial and the case was dismissed when his estate dropped the lawsuit.Mr. Spacey is a two-time Academy Award winner. He won the best actor Oscar in 2000 for his work in “American Beauty,” and in 1996 he won best supporting actor for “The Usual Suspects.” He was also a prominent stage actor, winning a Tony Award in 1991 as a featured actor in “Lost in Yonkers,” and he was the host of the Tony Awards in 2017. But he had a rapid fall from grace after the accusations by Mr. Rapp, who has an ongoing lawsuit against him, which were followed by more accusations. After Mr. Rapp’s allegations were first published in BuzzFeed, Mr. Spacey released a statement saying that he did not recall the episode but apologized for what he said “would have been deeply inappropriate drunken behavior.” In court papers, Mr. Spacey denied Mr. Rapp’s allegations that when Mr. Rapp was underage, Mr. Spacey had grabbed his buttocks and lifted him onto a bed.Mr. Spacey appeared in federal court in Manhattan on Thursday for a hearing about the proper venue for Mr. Rapp’s lawsuit. As he left the courthouse, Mr. Spacey declined to acknowledge reporters’ questions about the developments in Britain, according to The New York Post. Mr. Spacey leaving the federal courthouse in Manhattan on Thursday, where there was a hearing about a civil lawsuit he is facing.John Minchillo/Associated PressTV and film producers started dropping Mr. Spacey from projects after Mr. Rapp went public and more allegations followed, including from the Netflix political drama “House of Cards,” which finished its run without the actor. But more recently, he has found roles in smaller films, including an Italian feature and an American thriller.In January, Croatian newspapers reported that Mr. Spacey was shooting a movie in the country in which he played Franjo Tudjman, the onetime Communist general who led Croatia to independence. This month, Deadline reported that he had signed up for a historical drama called “1242 — Gateway to the West” scheduled to start shooting in Hungary and Mongolia in October. The movie would tell the story of one of Genghis Khan’s grandsons. It was being sold at the Cannes Film Festival, Deadline added. His new American thriller was also being sold at Cannes, according to Rolling Stone.Alex Marshall More

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      ‘A Chiara’ Review: A Mobster’s Daughter Dares to Ask Questions

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      In Jonas Carpignano’s intense and observant new film, a teenager in southern Italy confronts the truth about her family.Chiara is 15, the middle daughter in what seems — to her and to us, at least at first — like an ordinary middle-class family.She goes to school and to the gym, watches television and gets into pillow fights with her sisters, Giulia (Grecia Rotolo), who is turning 18, and Giorgia (Giorgia Rotolo), who seems to be around 8 or 9. With her friends, Chiara (Swamy Rotolo) hangs out in their designated spot along the sea wall in their southern Italian hometown, vaping, scrolling through Instagram and chasing off other girls who dare to encroach on her territory.But at Giulia’s birthday party — a bustling, multigenerational blowout in a local restaurant, with toasts from uncles and cousins and platters of prosciutto — things start to change. Or maybe what changes is how Chiara sees things. “A Chiara,” Jonas Carpignano’s bristling and observant film, is closely tethered to her point of view. We know only as much as she does, and her risky insistence on knowing the truth is what drives the story through harrowing suspense and potential heartbreak.At the party, Chiara notices the quiet, tense conversations her father, Claudio (Claudio Rotolo), has with other men. Her quiet suspicions — captured in darting camera movements and staccato editing — are amplified by a series of dramatic events. Claudio disappears into the night. The carabinieri pay a visit. One of the family’s cars bursts into flames on the street in front of their house. And Chiara discovers a hidden opening in the living room wall that leads to an underground bunker.All of this engenders an especially intense adolescent identity crisis. Claudio is part of the ’Ndrangheta, the ruthless Calabrian analog of the Sicilian Mafia and the Neapolitan Camorra. He’s not a boss, he explains later, but he’s a hard worker and what wiseguys in American mob movies might call a good earner, involved in the international drug trade. He’s notorious enough to be mentioned in news broadcasts. At one point, Chiara is surprised to hear father referred to by an underworld alias, evidence of an identity that has been kept secret from her.The adult women in the family — Giulia and the girls’ mother, Carmela (Carmela Fumo) — opt for silence and strategic ignorance. The less they know, the less they say, the safer they will be. Chiara rebels against that arrangement, for reasons she might not entirely understand. She sets out to find her father, pesters her older cousin Antonio (Antonio Rotolo Uno), who works with Claudio, for information, and acts out in other ways that trouble the established order in her household and beyond it.She’s a complicated character in a complicated situation, and “A Chiara,” while telling her story in a powerful, direct, compact manner — most of the action unfolds in just a few days and nights — does justice to that complexity. In this, it resembles Carpignano’s previous features, “Mediterranea” and “A Ciambra,” which are also set in the Gioia Tauro, a rough coastal town on the edge of Reggio Calabria, the regional capital. Like those films, this one has been cast with local, nonprofessional actors. The people who play Chiara, her siblings, their parents and other relatives are members of an actual family, like the extended Roma clan at the center of “A Ciambra.”This technique has a long history in cinema, from Robert Bresson and the Italian neorealists to the Dardenne Brothers and Abbas Kiarostami more recently. Often the use of untrained performers lends an aura of documentary credibility to fictional stories, as well as an enigmatic element of opacity. Real people know how to behave, but not necessarily how to act. Carpignano, though, seems to have an ability to identify and cultivate natural actors. Swamy Rotolo, in particular, conveys the quicksilver movements of Chiara’s thoughts and moods with the kind of subtlety and specificity that seasoned methodizers might envy.In the neorealist tradition, “A Chiara” is a slice-of-life drama built around an idea and animated by a profound moral quandary. Chiara loves her family, but her drive to understand its true circumstances might cause her to lose it. She is caught between the sticky, sometimes lethal ties of blood and the impersonal, rational benevolence of the state. A social worker explains to her that women who defy the codes of the ’Ndrangheta are sometimes killed and offers the possibility of escape.Would that be freedom, or a devastating loss? A similar choice confronted Pio, the young Roma protagonist of “A Ciambra.” Carpignano, infinitely sympathetic to these young people and studiously unsentimental about their prospects, doesn’t put a thumb on the scales. You feel the weight of Chiara’s dilemma, the cost of the knowledge she demands, and the heroism of her willingness to pay it.A ChiaraRated R. The life of crime. In Italian, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Tsugua Diaries’ Review: Finding Togetherness in a Pandemic

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      This film possesses both the whimsy and fearlessness of a student project and the technical prowess of a veteran’s opus.The Tsugua in “The Tsugua Diaries” is the month of August spelled backward. And for good reason: The co-directors Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes tell the film’s story in reverse chronological order starting on Day 21. But instead of presenting a stream of reverse motion shots — think Christopher Nolan’s “Memento” or Lee Chang Dong’s “Peppermint Candy”— the filmmakers let the days themselves unfold chronologically. Shot on 16-millimeter, the movie plays like a series of stand-alone shorts, all buttressed by splashes of light and sharp editing choices. The result: a work that possesses both the whimsy and fearlessness of a student project and the technical vibrancy of a veteran’s opus.Set on a farm in an unnamed Portuguese seaside town, the movie plods at first as we watch the trio of friends — Crista (Crista Alfaiate), Carloto (Carloto Cotta) and João (João Nunes Monteiro) build a butterfly house. It’s not until the fourth wall is broken, a third of the way in, does the film find its wings.But “The Tsugua Diaries” doesn’t just break the fourth wall, it demolishes it. The film expands to become a story that includes the crew, producers, screenwriters, directors and even the cooks.Shot well into the coronavirus pandemic that has shaken up what is normal, Fazendeiro and Gomes, a couple directing together for the first time, are not interested in pretending nothing has changed, even when it comes to maintaining proverbial movie magic. Rather, the aim here is that the entire filmmaking team functions as one cinematic organism where individual instincts add up to a truly collective work. And remarkably, it succeeds, demonstrating how to transmute the constraints of pandemic-era moviemaking into a film with humor and, during a time marred by isolation, a sense of real togetherness.The Tsugua DiariesNot rated. In Portuguese and Romanian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Zero Contact’ Review: A Token of the Times

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      Rick Dugdale’s thriller, shot over Zoom early in the pandemic, stars Anthony Hopkins as an eccentric tech genius. It was previously released as an NFT.It seems that innovation is everything to the director Rick Dugdale. In May 2020, while many people were still learning to bake sourdough, Dugdale began to shoot the techno-thriller “Zero Contact” over Zoom. Last year, the director released the movie, a modestly amusing flick, as a nonfungible token, or NFT. “Zero Contact” stars Anthony Hopkins as Finley Hart, an enigmatic engineer and genius whose death is reported in the opening credits. Hart leaves behind hours of recorded video logs filled with twisty, seemingly half-improvised monologues, which give the impression that his tongue can’t keep up with his brain.While Hart was alive, he spent decades developing teleportation technology. Bad things will happen if the machine he left behind implodes. The conceit is to make this familiar ticking-time-bomb plot take place on computer screens. An unseen spy watches Hart’s estranged son (Chris Brochu) and feisty former employees panic during an emergency virtual meeting, and taps into their cellphone and security cameras. Every few seconds, the image glitches, apparently for added realism.Hopkins’s character is a routine riff on the aloof tycoon. “I lost touch with my humanity,” he quips, “boohoo.”There’s a vicarious pleasure to be found in watching Hopkins, the octogenarian actor, getting the hang of technology that allows him to film himself without the usual hovering crew. Indeed, the behind-the-scenes footage that plays over the movie’s end credits is as engaging as its plot. “Who’s that on the left?” Hopkins asks, pointing at a corner of his video-call frame. Told that it’s the screenwriter Cam Cannon, Hopkins beams. “Hey, I’m sorry,” he says, “I hope I didn’t take too much liberty with your writing!”Zero ContactRated R for a grisly moment of violence. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More