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      ‘Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore’ Review: The Plot Against Muggles

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      Mads Mikkelsen plays an evil wizard with political talent in the latest “Harry Potter” spinoff movie, which also stars Jude Law and Eddie Redmayne.Like so much children’s entertainment these days, “Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore” is a political primer sprinkled in magic dust. In this third installment in the “Fantastic Beasts” franchise (itself a prequel series to the original “Harry Potter” stories), cuddly critters have mostly been swapped out for darker creatures: Here, scorpionesque freaks guard a prison where activists are tortured (or worse). A chunk of the story is set in 1930s Berlin. The deadly stakes are crystal-ball clear. An alternate subtitle could be “Totalitarianism for Tykes.”It’s a pointed movie from tip to barbed tail. Instead of building the plot around a tedious pursuit peppered with cutesy digital monsters — a misstep in the first two “Fantastic Beasts” films — the returning director David Yates and the screenwriters, J.K. Rowling and Steve Kloves, center “Secrets of Dumbledore” on an election. Grindelwald, the wizard supremacist last seen attempting to incite a global war, hopes to convince the magical world to back his campaign platform to subjugate nonmagical humans. (The role was last played by Johnny Depp; Mads Mikkelsen takes over the role here, and Grindelwald’s threads sound more probable when delivered with Mikkelsen’s bloodless chill.) Rowling’s readers know to refer to nonmagical people as Muggles. To Grindelwald, they’re “animals,” though he concedes they make a good cup of tea.The focus is on the tragic entanglements of Albus Dumbledore (Jude Law), who once romanced the hate-inciting Grindelwald and still wears an old blood-oath necklace that strangles him for thinking mean thoughts about his former love. On top of being pained by his bad taste in men, Dumbledore must make amends with his grouchy brother (Richard Coyle) and tormented nephew (Ezra Miller), a murky figure so visibly miserable that flies buzz around his hands.With Dumbledore grappling with a family full of grievances, the story barely has any room for Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne), the fluttery animal caregiver who tends to the fantastic beasts of the title. Redmayne’s character justifies his existence in the plot by coming into possession of a Qilin (pronounced chillin), a rare, fawn-like creature that holds unusual sway in electoral races — it’s a kind of mammalian dowsing rod that has the power to identify a person’s purity of heart and ability to be a leader. The series seems to be shifting its spotlight away from its supposed lead and his love interest from the previous movies, Tina (Katherine Waterston), who pretty much is only featured in one scene. “She’s very busy,” Newt explains. It feels like a wink to the franchise’s apparent struggle to hold onto actors. Later, in an act of popcorn-movie prestidigitation, all memory of yet another character is erased. No one seems to care.Still, this is the most absorbing and well-paced film in the trilogy to date, despite its nearly two-and-a-half-hour running time — de rigueur for modern spectacles that want to convince audiences they’re getting enough bang for their buck. “Secrets of Dumbledore” gestures toward themes of frailty, thwarted intentions and forgiveness. Even the color scheme underscores that this tale exists in shades of gray. It is odd how recent fantasy films seem to be made primarily for adults — it’s hard to imagine kiddos waiting in line for butter beer at a Harry Potter theme park being enthralled by an explainer of how toxic candidates rise to prominence. (A brief detour to Hogwarts serves as a startling reminder that these movies used to rely on actors under 30.) Yet, there’s a lovely visual that should unite audiences of all ages: a teleportation device made from a swirl of floating book pages. The image is a reminder that fiction is not just a history lesson, but a means of escape.Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of DumbledoreRated PG-13 for some fantasy violence, particularly toward magic animals. Running time: 2 hours 22 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Wyrmwood: Apocalypse’ Review: Maximum Zombie Slayage

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      In this Australian zombie sequel, a soldier helps a pack of vigilantes rise up against his evil boss.“Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead” was about as calm as a Chihuahua on cocaine, and its new sequel is no exception. The opening titles for “Wyrmwood: Apocalypse” appear over sounds of chaos: tires screeching, machine guns firing, zombies wailing. If you’d like to see the horror-action equivalent of an old metal rock musician lighting his electric guitar on fire and then playing it with his teeth, this is your movie.Though the leads from “Road of the Dead,” Brooke (Bianca Bradey) and Barry (Jay Gallagher) reappear here, the main character is Rhys (Luke McKenzie), a tough soldier with a Mad Max level of resourcefulness and a dead brother-size chip on his shoulder. Brooke killed said brother, so when Rhys’s conspicuously twitchy, blood-covered boss (Nick Boshier) orders him to hunt her down so they can experiment on her — Brooke is a hybrid, able to calm down her zombie side by drinking blood — he doesn’t hesitate. But after nabbing Grace (Tasia Zalar), another hybrid and one of Brooke’s allies, Rhys starts to realize that not all zombies are expendable.“Wyrmwood: Apocalypse” is a must-see for zombie fans, thanks to a quick-witted script by the director, Kiah Roache-Turner, and his brother, Tristan Roache-Turner. In a humorous segment set to the Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds song “Red Right Hand,” Rhys blows away a horde of advancing zombies, then wrangles the stragglers into watering his plants and powering his home.Since this film aims to say that hybrids like Brooke and Grace deserve human rights, it’s strange to see the standard zombies discarded so carelessly. But nobody is watching “Wyrmwood: Apocalypse” for its ethics. In these films, where blood splatters the camera within the first five seconds, high-octane, sicko glee reigns supreme.Wyrmwood: ApocalypseNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. Rent or buy on Amazon, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      Cuba Gooding Jr. Pleads Guilty to Forcible Touching

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      The actor must complete six more months of treatment with no new arrests under his plea deal.The actor Cuba Gooding Jr., who had been accused by more than 20 women of groping or forcibly kissing them in encounters that dated back more than two decades, pleaded guilty in Manhattan on Wednesday to one count of forcible touching.The count, a misdemeanor, charged that he had forcibly kissed a woman at a nightclub in Manhattan in 2018.Under terms of the plea, Mr. Gooding must continue for six more months in alcohol and behavior modification treatment that he has been undergoing since 2019, and he must have no new arrests, the Manhattan district attorney’s office said.If he fulfills the terms of the plea, he can then withdraw the plea and plead to a lesser charge of harassment, a violation, with a sentence of time served, the office said. Also, the record of the plea will not be sealed, the office said.If Mr. Gooding does not comply with the terms of his deal, the misdemeanor guilty plea would stand and he could face up to one year in jail.In a hearing on Wednesday in State Supreme Court, Justice Curtis Farber asked Mr. Gooding if the charge to which he was pleading guilty was true.“Yes, your honor,” Mr. Gooding said. “I kissed the waitress on her lips.”“I apologize for ever making anybody feel inappropriately touched,” Mr. Gooding said in court, adding that he was a “celebrity” and did not want people he met to “feel slighted.”Mr. Gooding had faced a criminal trial on charges of unwanted sexual touching of three women in Manhattan restaurants and nightclubs in 2018 and 2019. The Manhattan district attorney’s office had asked a judge to admit as witnesses 19 other women who it said had come forward to accuse Mr. Gooding of such conduct.Mr. Gooding’s “prior acts demonstrate that his contacts with their intimate parts are intentional, not accidental, and that he is not mistaken about their lack of consent,” the district attorney’s office wrote in a court filing in October 2019.The judge initially ruled that two of the additional accusers could testify against Mr. Gooding at trial, which would have allowed prosecutors to argue in court that Mr. Gooding had exhibited similar conduct for years.But an assistant district attorney, Coleen Balbert, revealed in court on Wednesday that Justice Farber later reversed this ruling, meaning that the additional accusers’ testimony could not be introduced at trial, something that previously had not been made public, she noted.Asked about any such later ruling by the judge, a court spokesman, Lucian Chalfen, said, “In the pendency of any criminal case, there are always discussions about what may or may not be introduced.” Mr. Chalfen said Justice Farber’s later ruling still would have allowed the district attorney’s office to call the additional accusers to rebut any defense testimony in the trial.Mr. Gooding was originally charged in connection with an encounter on the night of June 9, 2019, during a party at the Magic Hour Rooftop Bar, an expensive lounge at the Moxy NYC Times Square hotel in Manhattan. The accuser said that Mr. Gooding placed his hand on her breast without her consent and squeezed, according to a criminal complaint.He was later charged with pinching a woman’s bottom at a Manhattan nightclub in October 2018 and with an additional incident at Lavo, an Italian restaurant on East 58th Street, in September 2018 — the episode to which he pleaded guilty.In court, Mr. Gooding’s lawyer, Frank Rothman, said his client was also prepared to apologize to the women in the two other incidents.One of those accusers — the woman in the incident at the hotel in 2019 — addressed the court on Wednesday.“I won’t lie,” the woman, who identified herself as Kelsey Harbert, said. “I’m very disappointed that we are here today discussing a plea deal.”Ms. Harbert said that she wanted to talk about what had happened to her and also to explore some broader issues, which drew an objection from Mr. Rothman, who said she should not be “making a statement for the rest of society.”Ms. Harbert, saying she would limit her comments to her own experience, told the court that she had been “super excited” to see Mr. Gooding and then encounter him while she was out one night with friends. Her excitement turned to dismay, however, when she felt his hand on her breast, she said.“I was mortified,” she said. “My body was being placed under the dominion of someone else without my consent.”Ms. Harbert said it was “very devastating” to her that Mr. Gooding would have the chance to “move on” after six months, while she has experienced continuing feelings of trauma and violation as a result of her contact with him.After Ms. Harbert completed her statement, the defense lawyer, Mr. Rothman, spoke again, saying he had watched a video recording depicting the events at the hotel. “What she said happened here for the last 20 minutes is a product of her imagination in large part,” Mr. Rothman said.After court, Mr. Rothman said in a phone interview, “This case should have been resolved years ago.” He said that he had met with the new district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, after he took office in January, who “took a harder and more in-depth look at the pros and cons of the prosecution.”“We reached an agreement that all sides could live with,” Mr. Rothman said. “It’s fair and appropriate under all of the circumstances.”Mr. Gooding, a Bronx native, had his first major success playing the lead role in the 1991 film “Boyz n the Hood,” and he won an Academy Award in 1997 for his supporting role in “Jerry Maguire.” He played O.J. Simpson in the 2016 television series “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story.” More

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      ‘We’re All Going to the World’s Fair’ Review: Is It Horror, or Just Ennui?

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      In Jane Schoenbrun’s first feature, a teenager finds terror and distraction in a multiplayer online game.Way back in the 1965, Susan Sontag observed that “we live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror.” Still true, but with the added wrinkle that nowadays it can be hard to distinguish banality from terror.“We’re All Going to the World’s Fair,” the debut narrative feature from Jane Schoenbrun, exploits the overlap between tedium and fright, and locates both in the everyday dystopian realm of the internet. Part of a sturdy genre of web-based horror, the movie turns the familiar rituals and hacks of online life into a source of dread.A bored teenager named Casey (Anna Cobb) seeks diversion in a scary multiplayer game — a “creepypasta” — called the World’s Fair Challenge. After an initiation ritual that involves daubing blood on the screen of her laptop, she contributes videos to a growing body of lore purporting to document the game’s sinister consequences. People claim to lose feeling in their bodies, to find themselves turning into inanimate objects, to gradually and irreversibly lose their grip on reality.How terrifying is that? It’s hard to say, since for many of us the slackness, anxiety and dissociation of the World’s Fair Challenge is just another name for Tuesday.Rather than jolt you with gimmicky scares in the manner of the“Paranormal Activity” movies (an explicit point of reference for Casey and her fellow fairgoers), Schoenbrun goes for quiet, spooky effects, accompanied by a glum score by Alex G (for Giannascoli). The film also resists ostentatious found-footage gimmickry. While a lot of what’s onscreen is video collected by Casey’s devices, there are also moments when the camera — the cinematographer is Daniel Patrick Carbone — explores off-line moods and realities.Not that we learn much about Casey. She lives in a town that looks like it might be somewhere in the Northeastern U.S. — patchy snow on the ground, battered strip malls off the highway, tree-covered hills in the distance — with her father, who is heard but not seen. He keeps an assault rifle in the barn, where there is also a video projector. Casey watches ASMR videos when she has trouble sleeping.Most of what might count as her real life — school, work, friends — is either nonexistent or none of our business. Cobb, making her first appearance in a film, has a knack for simultaneously soliciting and deflecting curiosity about Casey’s inner life. Is she a troubled adolescent putting her mental health and physical safety at risk, or a canny role-player using her wide eyes and soft features to construct an avatar of vulnerability?She isn’t entirely alone. Sometime after starting in on the Challenge, she receives messages from a player named JLB (Michael J. Rogers), whose avi is an unnerving hand-drawn figure with sunken eyes. The camera follows him offline too, into a mostly empty modern mansion that seems worlds away from Casey’s attic bedroom.His presence in the movie has the effect of dialing up both the terror and the banality, and creating a certain amount of suspense about which will win out in the end. In the tradition of internet science fiction, “World’s Fair” teases the boundary between the actual and the virtual, though in a frame of mind that is quietly ruminative rather than wildly speculative. This isn’t “The Matrix” or a fantasy of sentient A.I. It’s a slice of drab, everyday 21st-century Americana and a daydream of something more intense.We’re All Going to the World’s FairNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Women of the White Buffalo’ Review: Speaking Out on the Reservation

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      This documentary sheds light on the destitute conditions in two South Dakota reservations through the stories of the communities’ women.The documentary “Women of the White Buffalo” explores the myriad challenges experienced by Indigenous people on reservations, as well as the historical roots of these social maladies. The story is told through Lakota women living on the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Indian reservations in South Dakota, where rampant alcoholism, drug addiction, poverty and violence threaten the Lakotas’ way of life and future generations.The director Deborah Anderson features first-person interviews with nine women (and one man), ranging in age from 10 to 98, who are trying to heal generations of trauma in their communities. And though the film lacks a clear narrative arc, put together, these stories draw a line between the historical genocide and displacement suffered by Indigenous people and the present destitution on reservations.Vandee Khalsa-Swiftbird is a survivor of sex trafficking who now works on behalf of other victims and fosters a young girl whose troubled mother could no longer care for her. Julie Richards founded the nonprofit Mothers Against Meth Alliance after her own daughter became addicted to methamphetamine. And SunRose IronShell is a high school teacher who helps her students process their traumas through art.Children are featured prominently throughout the film, whether riding horses or dancing in traditional garb. This choice helps plant the documentary firmly in the present, illuminating the past but not dwelling on it. Indeed, the Lakota women appear more interested in solutions and in instilling in Native children a sense of self-worth and self-determination. The way forward, they seem to agree, is to return to their spiritual roots. Delacina Chief Eagle, a young woman who became addicted to meth after her brother died, said of her recovery: “I found myself, through my culture, through my family, through the children.”Women of the White BuffaloNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      Only Gilbert Gottfried Could Be So Dirty and So Heartbreaking

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      He turned shocking jokes and “Howard Stern” appearances into something of an art form, one he practiced even when the occasion was a school fund-raiser.Some comedians unfurl yarns in the unhurried mode of a jam band, others display the taut rhythms of pop or hip-hop. Gilbert Gottfried, who came of age in a fraught New York City and died on Tuesday at 67, always felt like punk in the classic CBGB mold: nervy, artful, deceivingly intelligent, a tad unhinged, and blissfully — beautifully — obnoxious.The juiciest moments of his decades onstage crackle with impish grandeur. Some bits are renowned, especially his appearance at a Friars Club roast in the weeks after the World Trade Center attacks, where he dared crack a 9/11 joke. Greeted with boos, the comic pivoted to a standard bit known as “The Aristocrats.” It proved so dementedly randy, in his giddy telling, that it seemed to levitate the crowd, Gottfried’s potty mouth momentarily washing away the tension and grief.Other times, he brought opportune lightning bolts to dopey TV fare. In one notorious clip from “Celebrity Apprentice,” the silky host tells the comedian, “Gilbert, I’m proud of you.” Gottfried stares down his latest mark. “Thank you, mein Führer,” he responds, characteristically more concerned about landing his joke than his odds in that season’s competition.Better still is the episode of “Celebrity Wife Swap” in which Gottfried — a notorious miser — parades around town with Alan Thicke’s horror-struck wife, treating the set more like a Marx Brothers film than a reality show. At one point, his date balks at being forced to eat a gratis meal in the Friars Club kitchen. “What are you, the queen of England?” Gottfried charges.Along with his strangely endearing stand-up act, the comedian found his mightiest platform through his years as a guest on “The Howard Stern Show.” These are tapes that should be rocketed into space to alert the galaxy of the brassy attitudes that lurk in our neck of the woods — perhaps they will scare any hostile aliens away. With the simpatico host, Gottfried is Rodney Dangerfield on “Carson” or Andy Kaufman on “Letterman”; his every appearance offers a glimpse of a berserk, quick-to-boil New York of yore.Remembering Gilbert GottfriedThe gravel-voiced comedian, whose credits ranged from the family-friendly “Aladdin” to the unfettered vulgarity of “The Aristocrats,” died on April 12.Obituary: Gilbert Gottfried’s manic, loudmouthed stand-up routines mixed old-fashioned borscht-belt shtick with cringeworthy vulgarity.An Appraisal: The comedian could bring opportune lightning bolts to anything from dopey TV fare to school fund-raisers.The Dirtiest Joke Ever Told: A Times columnist recalled Mr. Gottfried’s notorious 2001 performance of “The Aristocrats” not long after 9/11.Offstage Life: The world knew the comedian for his abrasive style. But to his wife, Dara, he was a “gentle genius.”Gottfried’s perhaps most fabled minutes on the show occurred one late-’90s morning when he wasn’t even scheduled to appear. A German-accented woman called in from Los Angeles. She explained that she worked as a babysitter for the filmmaker Amy Heckerling, who had dispatched her to pick up Gottfried from the airport. (He was too cheap for a cab.) The woman furiously recounted how, during the car ride, she had informed the comedian that her parents were Holocaust survivors. Is it any surprise that Gottfried immediately began cracking Holocaust jokes? Such was his superpower.Stern got Gottfried on the line. The comic sounded as if he was still in bed — but, like a samurai who has been attacked in his sleep and leaps to battle, he gamely began peppering the poor woman with more Holocaust jokes. Eventually, horrifyingly, the comic invoked the child the caller was babysitting: “Can she sit on my lap while you tell her about the Holocaust?” he queried. Like his later “Aristocrats” recital, it is a brilliant double negative: Gottfried follows one ghastly subject with something even more distasteful. The world thus gets contorted into a joke, the punch lines batting away our deepest woes.A few years ago, I wrote about these Stern show segments for my comedy zine, The Lowbrow Reader. The essay grew from a chance encounter I had with Gottfried at the home of Professor Irwin Corey, the anarchic comedian and the other subject of the piece. Corey was deep into his 90s but, like Gottfried, emitted riotous humor in his every step. It struck me that Gottfried provided the rare connection to the fabled funny men of a much earlier era: unrestrained, uproarious and often Jewish comics who were set on gaining a laugh at the expense of all else.The Lowbrow Reader was moribund at this point — we had recently published a book anthology, neatly ending our little run. But I so yearned to write about Gottfried, Corey and Stern that I revamped the magazine and essentially assembled an issue around the essay. Most thrillingly, Gottfried consented to let us publish two of his wonderfully eccentric drawings, which brimmed with devilishly grinning ogres, Dracula, a tiny Hitler and penises.I was fully aware that nobody cared about my stupid comedy zine’s rebirth, but it was a huge deal for me. I nervously picked up the issue from the printer, then went downtown to sell some copies to a record store, only to find it closed for the night. I headed to an event lugging a backpack full of zines — never a suave look — then walked home, depressed at having unloaded precisely zero copies.It was late at night on a misty Memorial Day weekend, and the city had emptied out. At 13th and Sixth, I waited for the light to change, sharing the corner with the only other pedestrian in sight. I side-eyed the man to make sure that he was not preparing to stab me. Then, I did a double take. It was Gilbert Gottfried.He didn’t know me from Adam, but I hurriedly thrust a copy of the publication in his confused face. “Great,” he said. “I long for somebody to write a big article about me, and then when it happens it’s in … this.”We slowly walked up Sixth Avenue to our mutual Chelsea neighborhood. His famous stage bray was muted, replaced by the oddly calming cadence later familiar to listeners of “Gilbert Gottfried’s Amazing Colossal Podcast,” his whipsmart showbiz series with Frank Santopadre. The roaring jokes and generous laughter remained. I like to think I can be funny enough when talking to my family and friends; walking with Gottfried, I felt like a weekend guitarist trying to jam with Hendrix.As we approached West 18th Street, a group of young women spotted the comedian and instinctively began laughing and, oddly, cheering. The comic gave a wave as he passed them. “Must be your article,” he said.Years later, my daughter enrolled in the same public elementary school as Gottfried’s two indisputably charming children, briefly overlapping with his youngest. Gottfried’s wife, Dara, was a P.T.A. hero — at her last meeting, she received a standing ovation — and she oversaw an annual comedy show to raise money for the school. Naturally, Gottfried would always perform.Although the show took place at a grown-up comedy club, the audience was essentially the crew from school: parents, some teachers, the principal. In a secular society, this can feel like one’s congregation. I had witnessed Gottfried’s club act. Surely, he would not be reciting his sex jokes for these gentle souls?Yet that would be like asking Pavarotti not to sing, or perhaps a dog not to bark. And so, Gottfried stood before his community, proudly screaming his fiercely idiosyncratic material. There were surrealist rants, crooked bits that gazed at the world in childlike wonder, and bizarre jokes that answered to their own logic. And, of course, there was riotously filthy, inconceivably revolting humor. It was all so irreverent it could break your heart. More

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      Michel Bouquet, Award-Winning French Actor, Dies at 96

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      One of his country’s great theater actors, he went on to appear in over 100 films during a decades-long career.Michel Bouquet, a French actor whose talent for suggesting passion and turmoil beneath a bland, middle-class facade made him a favorite of New Wave directors, has died. He was 96.The Élysée Palace, the office of the French president, on Wednesday announced Mr. Bouquet’s death. The news release did not give a cause of death. Mr. Bouquet, one of France’s great theater actors, found a special niche in film in the late 1960s and ’70s playing ordinary Frenchmen, somber and reserved, with complicated inner lives and deep reserves of emotion, a contrast heightened by his impassive, guileless face.He played the lethally jealous husband in Claude Chabrol’s “Unfaithful Wife” (1969) and the advertising executive leading a double life in that director’s “Just Before Nightfall” (1971). He was also one of Jeanne Moreau’s hapless victims in the François Truffaut film “The Bride Wore Black” (1968).An actor of considerable range, Mr. Bouquet was equally at home in comedy and drama, and both in sympathetic and unsympathetic roles, like the unsavory detective Comolli in Mr. Truffaut’s 1969 film “Mississippi Mermaid.”Mr. Bouquet appeared in more than 100 films, and won a new generation of admirers with his performance in 1991 as the older incarnation of the title character in “Toto the Hero.” His two best actor Césars, the French equivalent of the Oscar, came when he was in his 70s. The first was for his understatedly menacing performance in “How I Killed My Father” (2001), as a feckless parent who sows emotional chaos when he re-enters his sons’ lives.“He’s a greatly original actor,” Anne Fontaine, the director of “How I Killed My Father,” said of Mr. Bouquet in an interview with The New York Times in 2002, noting that she had written the role with him in mind. “Even if he has a very relaxed and smiling air, there’s something in his acting that’s disconcerting, destabilizing, that provokes strangeness all the time.” He sometimes described himself as “a calm anarchist.”Mr. Bouquet won a second César for his tour de force as François Mitterrand, the ailing French president, in “The Last Mitterrand” (2005).“Charming, arrogant, childlike and teasing in turn, Bouquet offers up a master class in understated character acting, and delivers an indelible interpretation of a complex, infuriating man,” The Daily Telegraph of London wrote of that performance.Michel Francois Pierre Bouquet was born on Nov. 6, 1925, in Paris, to Georges and Marie (Monot) Bouquet. His mother was a milliner. His father was an officer in the French Army who was taken prisoner by the Nazis soon after the invasion of France. To help support the family, Michel worked as an apprentice to a pastry maker and as a bank clerk.Encouraged by the actor Maurice Escande, he began studying at the National Conservatory of Dramatic Arts in Paris and, after appearing in a production of Albert Camus’s “Caligula,” took his first major role in Jean Anouilh’s “Roméo et Jeannette.”He went on to build a distinguished theatrical career, in which he was known especially for his work in plays by Molière, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Eugène Ionesco and Thomas Bernhard.“This is a very lonely job, just like painting,” he told the French newspaper Sud Ouest in 2011. “One does it in public, but the essence of it is secret.”He made his first film appearances in 1947, as an assassin in “Criminal Brigade” and as a consumptive in “Monsieur Vincent,” a biography of St. Vincent de Paul. Two years later, he offered a hint of things to come in “Pattes Blanches,” based on a play by Mr. Anouilh, in which he portrayed a beaten-down aristocrat hopelessly infatuated with the young girlfriend of the local innkeeper.He later provided the narrator’s voice in Alain Resnais’s landmark Holocaust documentary “Night and Fog” (1956).In 1965, he made the first of his half-dozen films with Mr. Chabrol, the campy secret agent film “The Tiger Smells Like Dynamite,” which was followed by his signature performances in “The Unfaithful Wife” and “Just Before Nightfall.”Mr. Bouquet’s talents were ideally suited to Mr. Chabrol’s chilling explorations of love, violence and moral ambiguity. As Charles Desvallées, the jealous husband in “The Unfaithful Wife,” he seethed, schemed, suffered and eventually dispatched the lover of his wife, played by Stéphane Audran.Mr. Bouquet’s marriage to Ariane Borg, an actress, ended in divorce. She died in 2007. In 1970, he married Juliette Carré, who survives him, according to the Élysée news release. Ms. Carré, also an actress, often appeared alongside Mr. Bouquet onstage.Mr. Bouquet (who was unrelated to the actress Carole Bouquet) continued to act well into his later years, appearing in Molière’s “Hypochondriac” on the stage in 2008, and in the films “La Petite Chambre” in 2010 (released as “The Little Bedroom” in U.S. theaters in 2014) and “The Origin of Violence” in 2016. In 2014, he was nominated for another best actor César for his performance as the title character in “Renoir.” More

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      ‘Mississippi Masala’: A Love Story Among the Displaced

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      In Mira Nair’s sweet, sexy film from 1991, an Indian American woman falls for a Black cleaner played charmingly, as ever, by Denzel Washington.Mira Nair’s “Mississippi Masala” begins with a bit of family history that is also a history lesson — the expulsion of Uganda’s sizable South Asian population, ordered from the country by the military strongman Idi Amin in 1972.A prize winner at the 1991 Venice Film Festival, still fresh and newly relevant, “Mississippi Masala” has been restored for a run at the IFC Center in Manhattan, starting Friday.After a vivid prologue, the movie jumps ahead 18 years to pick up on its displaced central family, resettled in Greenwood, Miss. Jay (Roshan Seth), a barrister in Uganda, manages a hot-sheet motel while his wife, Kinnu (Sharmila Tagore, the star of Satyajit Ray’s “Devi,” among other films), runs the adjacent liquor store.Jay still dreams of Uganda; Kinnu is more resigned to exile. Their daughter, Meena (Sarita Choudhury), who cleans rooms at the motel, is beyond that — so robustly American she could stand in for the Statue of Liberty, albeit Liberty in chains. “I’m 24 years old, and I’m still here — stuck here,” she tells her uncomprehending parents.Luckily, Meena is also a reckless driver. Early on she rear-ends the van belonging to a carpet-cleaning business run by straight-arrow but cool Demetrius (Denzel Washington). It is “the first in a series of collisions,” the New York Times critic Vincent Canby noted in his favorable review, between her world and his.As its title suggests, “Mississippi Masala” is a movie of continuous juxtaposition. The first is a cut from Uganda’s verdant paradise to a Piggly Wiggly’s consumer cornucopia in America. Another follows a flashback to the family’s hilltop villa in Uganda with the mock plantations of wealthy Greenwood. Nair came out of documentary filmmaking, and thanks to Ed Lachman’s vibrant cinematography, “Mississippi Masala” the landscapes are also characters.There’s a documentary aspect to the cast as well. Choudhury, a neophyte who grew up in Jamaica where her father was a biologist, is playing a version of herself (at one point she wears a Bob Marley T-shirt). She was so close to the part that, despite the movie’s success, it took her some time to start an acting career. (Most recently, she was featured in the “Sex and the City” reboot, “And Just Like That.”) Washington, a decade older, already awarded an Oscar for best supporting actor, can be seen as guiding her through the film.Hoping the avoid a lawsuit, the wealthier Indians seek to make common cause with Greenwood’s Black population. Meena’s connection is more profound. “You’re like us,” Demetrius’s younger brother tells her. “You’ve never been to India. We’ve never been to Africa.” Meena and Demetrius are both cleaners and correspondingly low-caste. Both must escape family obligations and transcend tribal prejudices. A stolen weekend in Biloxi and a motel room fight sets the phone lines buzzing, involves the Chamber of Commerce and an arraignment before a judge.The pop iconography of chain restaurants, motels and gas stations (as well as Hindu shrines) is characteristic of 1980s independent films. But Nair’s storybook ending is more ’90s, recalling the post-Cold War golden age when it seemed that American notions of “freedom” and self-invention reigned supreme.Mississippi MasalaOpens Friday at IFC Center, Manhattan, ifccenter.com More