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      Marina Goldovskaya, 80, Dies; Filmmaker Documented Russian Life

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      In about 30 documentaries she looked at the people and history of her homeland, some of it brutally dark.Marina Goldovskaya, an acclaimed documentary filmmaker who exposed the harsh underbelly of the Soviet Union’s labor camps and later chronicled the heady days that followed the state’s collapse — days that promised democracy but bordered on anarchy — died on March 20 in Jurmala, Latvia. She was 80.Her death was confirmed by her son, Sergei Livnev, who said she died at his home after a long illness.Ms. Goldovskaya, who often operated as a one-woman band, made some 30 documentaries — as writer, director, cinematographer and producer — and was a film professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, for two decades. Her wide-ranging films include a portrait of a Russian circus aerialist (“Raisa Nemchinskaya: Circus Actress,” 1970); a chronicle of six weeks in the life of a television journalist during the Soviet thaw known as perestroika (“A Taste of Freedom,” 1991); and the story of a Russian prince who returns to live in his family’s former estate, now in ruins (“The Prince Is Back,” 2000).In a review of “Solovki Power,” her 1988 film about a Soviet labor camp in northern Russia, Vincent Canby of The New York Times called the work “first-rate film journalism” and “a remarkable documentary about the prison camp said to have been the prototype for all of the gulags that came after.”With a style that calls to mind the films of Ken Burns, “Solovki Power” juxtaposes the cold, white beauty of the gulag’s remote White Sea location with the memories of eight survivors and an official 1928 propaganda film that touted the camp’s clean linens and enlightened teachings. Theologians, historians, poets, mathematicians and economists were among those who were sent to the camp, which operated from 1923 to 1939.In the film, an economist recalls the night she had to wake up her children, ages 4 and 6, to tell them that she was going “away to work.” Her son told her that his papa had already gone away. If they took her, “Who will stay with us?” he asked.And then there was the night, recalled by an academician, when 300 shots were fired in a botched execution — the executioners were too drunk to aim properly — leaving bodies squirming in a dirt pit the next morning.Ms. Goldovskaya began making “Solovki Power” in 1986, when it still could be dangerous to examine the dark side of the Soviet past, since her film would expose the camps as an integral part of the Soviet system, not as an aberration created during the Stalin era.Ms. Goldovskaya in 1990 shooting “Taste of Freedom,” a documentary about six weeks in the life of a television journalist during perestroika.When she told her mother what she was planning to do, “she started crying,” Ms. Goldovskaya recalled in a 1998 interview. “‘You are committing suicide,’ she said. ‘Don’t you remember what happened to your father?’”In 1938, her father, then a deputy minister of film, had been overseeing construction of the Kremlin’s movie theater when a lamp exploded. Stalin believed it was an assassination attempt and sentenced him to five months in prison.Speaking from Latvia, her son, Mr. Livnev, who is also a film director and producer, said: “The film really became very important not just as a film, but as an event in the life of a country. For many, many people it opened up so many unknowns, about how terrible our past was.”Another Goldovskaya film, “A Bitter Taste of Freedom” (2011), was about her friend Anna Politkovskaya, an investigative journalist and fierce critic of Vladimir V. Putin who was shot at point blank range in her Moscow apartment block in 2006. The film included diaristic footage that the filmmaker took in Ms. Politkovskaya’s home over many years.There is “a scene in the kitchen with Anna and her husband, where you can almost smell the food and the coffee, and they’re talking about how they’re afraid,” said Maja Manojlovic, who worked with Ms. Goldovskaya as a teaching assistant and now teaches at U.C.L.A. “Boy, did Marina capture the energy of this fear, the fear of repercussions for her criticism of Putin.”Marina Evseevna Goldovskaya was born on July 15, 1941, in Moscow. Her father, Evsey Michailovich Goldovksy, was a film engineer who helped found, and taught at, VGIK, the All-Union State Institute of Film. Her mother, Nina Veniaminovna Mintz, studied actors’ interpretations of Shakespeare and helped develop and curate theater museums.The family lived in an apartment building built by Stalin in the 1930s to house filmmakers “so that he could keep an eye on them,” Ms. Goldovskaya said in a 2001 interview. She attended VGIK, one of only a few women to study cinematography there. After graduating in 1963, she began working for state television. She became a member of the Communist Party in 1967 and remained one for 20 years.Otherwise, “I would not have gotten ahead in television,” she wrote in her 2006 autobiography, “Woman With a Movie Camera: My Life as a Russian Filmmaker.” “In an ideological organization like television, a camera operator who was not a Party member could never be promoted.”She made close to a dozen films for state television before leaving her job to make “Solovki Power.”“I grew up in a house filled with filmmakers and cinematographers,” she said in the 1998 interview. “Many cameramen died during the war; it was so romantic to die for your country. There were so few women in the profession. My father told me that if I went into it, I would never have a family, that I would be unhappy all my life. But I was young, it was romantic, and I loved to push the button.”In addition to her son, Ms. Goldovskaya is survived by two stepdaughters, Jill Smolin and Beth Herzfeld; two grandsons; and three step-grandchildren. Her first marriage, to David Livnev, a theater director, ended in divorce, as did her second, to Alexander Lipkov, a film critic. Her third husband, Georg Herzfeld, died in 2012.Mr. Livnev recalled his mother “always with a camera.”“She was shooting all the time,” he said. “I can hardly remember her face without the camera in front of her.”In 1991, the year the Soviet Union collapsed, Ms. Goldovskaya was a visiting professor at the University of California, San Diego, when she was introduced to Mr. Herzfeld, an Austrian engineer and businessman. Six days later, he proposed.Ms. Goldovskaya moved to Los Angeles in 1994 and began teaching at U.C.L.A., returning to Moscow in summers to work on her films. Guests to her classes, and then to her sunny, sprawling home nearby, often included noted documentary filmmakers like Albert Maysles, D.A. Pennebaker and Richard Leacock. And she was closely engaged with her students.“She opened up her classes to anthropology students and students from other disciplines,” said Gyula Gazdag, a Hungarian-born filmmaker who was on the U.C.L.A. faculty and teamed up with Ms. Goldovskaya to make a documentary about Allen Ginsberg, “A Poet on the Lower East Side” (1997). “She felt they would bring a new perspective to documentaries,” he added, in a phone interview. “She knew all her students by name, what their motivation for making a particular documentary was.”Ms. Goldovskaya in 2011. “She was shooting all the time,” her son said. “I can hardly remember her face without the camera in front of her.” via Getty ImagesMs. Goldovskaya’s film “Raisa Nemchinskaya: Circus Actress” featured an aerialist who “was in a way very similar to my mother,” Mr. Livnev said. The aerialist died of a heart attack as she was taking her bow after a performance.“She never used a rope for protection,” Mr. Livnev said. “My mom loved this woman, she was a role model, and all her life she lived like this. She would work, work, work all the time. Her dream was to die with the camera rolling, and she would never use this security rope in her life.” More

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      ‘Royalty Free: The Music of Kevin MacLeod’ Review: Into the Spotlight

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      A musician who gives away most of his music may be heard everywhere, but few know who he is.Kevin MacLeod is arguably the most prolific composer you’ve never heard of — although it’s very likely you’ve heard his music. The Wisconsin-born musician, who has at times resided in New York, is a pioneer both of digital production and distribution. Essentially, he gives much of his music away. Working though the nonprofit organization Creative Commons, he makes his instrumental pieces available either for a one-time fee, or free. His works wind up on YouTube and TikTok videos, in video games, in big-budget studio films (like Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo”) and pornographic movies.Directed by Ryan Camarda, “Royalty Free: The Music of Kevin MacLeod,” conveys the scale of its subject’s achievement while offering an unnerving portrait of the man himself. He is in his late 40s, and he’s not quite what you would call amiable. He has a lot of definite ideas on a variety of topics, including morality in art, and his statements are sometimes startling. At one point he asserts that he wouldn’t care if his music found its way into a movie about “Nazis killing puppies.”The documentary is shot and edited like an infomercial, although it wanders from issue to issue to the extent that a viewer can’t be sure just what it’s pitching. And while it sometimes celebrates MacLeod, there are instances when the filmmaker seems to fret about how many instrumentalists are being put out of work by one-computer bands like MacLeod (something that’s been worrying musicians’ unions and others since even before the all-electronic band Kraftwerk made waves in the early 1970s).MacLeod then drops in a very personal detail, about an hour and 15 minutes in: “Right now, I treat a lot of my depression with alcohol, and it works.” Which throws an already wobbly movie into another orbit entirely.Royalty Free: The Music of Kevin MacLeodNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Piano Lesson’ With Samuel L. Jackson Plans Fall Broadway Bow

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      The revival of August Wilson’s play, directed by LaTanya Richardson Jackson, will also star Danielle Brooks and John David Washington.From left, Samuel L. Jackson, Danielle Brooks and John David Washington, who will be appearing in the revival of “The Piano Lesson” at the St. James Theater.Caroline Brehman/EPA, via Shutterstock, Leon Bennett/Getty Images, Rosdiana Ciaravolo/Getty Images LaTanya Richardson Jackson first saw August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson” in 1987 — it was the original production, at Yale Repertory Theater, and of course she was going to see it, because her husband, Samuel L. Jackson, was in the cast.This fall, Richardson Jackson will direct a revival of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play, again with her husband in the cast, although in a different role.The Broadway revival — the first since “The Piano Lesson” arrived there in 1990 — will star Danielle Brooks and John David Washington as a sister and brother at odds over whether to sell a piano on which are carved the faces of their enslaved ancestors. Jackson will play their uncle, Doaker Charles (at Yale, he played the brother).Richardson Jackson will be the first woman to direct a Wilson play on Broadway. She is best known as an actress — in 2018, she originated the role of Calpurnia in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and in 2014, she was nominated for a Tony Award for her performance as Lena Younger in a revival of “A Raisin in the Sun.” This will be her first time directing on Broadway, but she has directed elsewhere, including a production of Wilson’s “Two Trains Running” at True Colors Theater in Atlanta.In her view, Richardson Jackson said in an interview, the play is “about the struggle of African Americans in this country to actually face what it is that we’re against.” She noted that her own ancestors had been enslaved, and reluctant to talk about it, and she said that she sees the tension within the Charles family as a vehicle for exploring “us facing all of it.”“I’m dealing with this as a ghost story — I’m unashamedly, unabashedly telling a ghost story,” Richardson Jackson said. “And it’s about the bigger ghosts that haunt us, that are part of our lives, that we are carrying around like an anvil.”“The Piano Lesson” is part of a series of 10 plays Wilson wrote about African American life; each is set in a different decade of the 20th century. “The Piano Lesson” takes place in the 1930s, and, like most of the plays, is set in Pittsburgh.The revival is scheduled to begin performances on Sept. 19 at the St. James Theater; the run is expected to last 16 weeks.Brian Moreland (“Thoughts of a Colored Man”), Sonia Friedman (“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child”) and Tom Kirdahy (“Hadestown”) are the producers. Moreland said the play would be capitalized for about $6 million.The producer Scott Rudin previously planned to stage a revival of “The Piano Lesson,” with many of the same artists, but relinquished the rights when he stopped producing after being accused of bullying employees and collaborators. The actor Denzel Washington, who is John David Washington’s father, last year told The Daily Mail he was planning to produce a film adaptation, with the same stars, and with Rudin as a co-producer; a spokesman for Denzel Washington said the actor is still planning to produce a film adaptation. More

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      In Joan Collins Documentary, She Just Gets on With It

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      The actress (don’t call her an actor, please) reflects on her seven-decade career, predatory Hollywood and why sometimes it’s better not to relive the past.LOS ANGELES — “I’m not a bad girl,” said Joan Collins, draped across a white sofa. “I was a very innocent girl. But I had dark hair and green eyes and I suppose they said that I smoldered.”This was on a recent, sun-strafed California afternoon in her apartment, part of a luxury building on the edge of Beverly Hills. Collins, an actress whose career has ranged from the sublime (“Land of the Pharaohs”) to the ridiculous (“Empire of the Ants”) to the sublimely ridiculous (“Dynasty”), wore white slacks, an aquamarine blouse and white espadrilles. A pink diamond the size of a strawberry weighted one finger; her hair had been teased toward the heavens. How many synthetic zebras had died for those nearby pillows? That pouf? So many.As for the smoldering, well, it was 85 degrees out. Wouldn’t anyone?Collins, 88, had invited me over — plying me with coffee, water, an assortment of deluxe cookies — to talk about “This Is Joan Collins,” a documentary that ran on the BBC on New Year’s Day and arrives Tuesday on BritBox.What did it mean to look back on her life for the project? “I’m not very analytical,” she said languorously. “I just do a thing. I just get on with it.”For the film, Collins gave the producers access to her archives and home movies. She otherwise discounts her contribution. “I said, ‘Just don’t put in too many of the nude bits,’” she said. But she narrates the film, with much of what she says adapted from her memoirs. “Here I am,” she purrs in the opening moments, “after seven decades in the business, to tell you a thing or two about how to survive the perils of the profession and what it really feels like to get what you want.”Collins was born in 1933, the eldest child of a dance teacher and a talent agent. As a child, she lived through the Blitz in London — the bombings, evacuations, dislocations — which has made her impatient with what she perceives as whining.“I have to say, every time I read about an actor today, they’ve all been abused or had terrible childhoods,” she said. “I had a great childhood, other than the war.”At 17, she signed with a British film studio. She doesn’t believe she was glamorous. Not then. But the press disagreed and she recalled some of the nicknames she was given: Britain’s bad girl, coffee bar vixen, the torrid baggage. She was typecast accordingly.At first, it bothered her, she said, “then I shrugged and just got on with it.”“I was a very innocent girl,” Collins said. “But I had dark hair and green eyes and I suppose they said that I smoldered.”Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesAt 21, Fox made her a contract player and she came to California. She had already separated from her first husband, Maxwell Reed, an actor who had raped her on their first date. As she wrote in her first memoir, “Past Imperfect: An Autobiography,” and reiterates in the documentary, most of the men she encountered in the business were predatory.She remembered being chased around a house in Palm Springs, a pass made in a car. Then she stopped remembering. “It’s all nasty memories that I don’t wish to relive,” she said. “It happened. It happened to girls all the time.”How did she survive it? She shrugged and got on with it. “A lot of the time, I would just laugh in their faces,” she said.In these early years, she developed a reputation for promiscuity, which wasn’t entirely deserved, even as it became part of her fame. (A 2015 auction of her belongings included not only love letters, but also her headboard.) “I did have a lot of boyfriends, but sequentially,” she said. “And I would sleep with some of them. Not at the same time. I think that I was ahead of my time, because women didn’t do that.”At 30, she married the actor and songwriter Anthony Newley and had two children. When her relationship with Newley ended, she married the music executive Ron Kass and had a daughter. Later, there was a fourth marriage, to the Swedish singer Peter Holm. (“The only one I didn’t understand was the Swede,” she said. “That was such a total mistake.”) She now lives with her fifth husband, the theatrical producer Percy Gibson. He was the one who brought the water and took away the cookies.She left the business after she married Newley and she struggled to return to it. The documentary includes clips of a particular low point, the real estate investors vs. mutant insects B movie “The Empire of the Ants” (1977). How did she handle schlocky material? “You do the best you can,” she said. “You learn your lines, you hit your marks and you get on with it.”Only rarely could she escape typecasting, but she shrugged that off, too, recounting a conversation she had with the actor John Gielgud, in which he told her that because she could never escape her physicality, she could never play an ugly woman. “That was true for a certain amount of years,” she said.She believes that good looks can be a deterrent when it comes to quality roles: “Which the young actresses of today realize, which is why most of them try to look as ordinary as possible.”In the late 1970s, she made a comeback with two soft-core films — “The Stud” and “The Bitch” — adapted from novels by her sister Jackie Collins. This exposure led to her most famous role, Alexis in Aaron Spelling’s nighttime soap “Dynasty.”Despite well-publicized on-set struggles, and the producers’ petty reaction to her demands for equal pay, she remains proud of “Dynasty.” Much of the memorabilia hung throughout her apartment dates from that era. “It was glamorous,” she said. “It was about very, very rich people, most of them good looking.” She compared it to the current hit “Succession,” though she remarked that on “Succession” they wear shabbier clothes.“Dynasty” ended more than three decades ago. Collins hasn’t had a great role since. She thinks she knows why. “Casting directors say, ‘Oh, no, we can’t use Joan Collins in this vixen, bitch part, because it’s too obvious.’ And ‘Oh, no, we can’t have her in this other role. She can only do vixen bitches.’”Collins has struggled to escape typecasting in her career, but shrugged it off. Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesStill, she has gone on, describing her glamorous life in columns for the British weekly magazine The Spectator, where Boris Johnson was once her boss. “Jolly, very funny, great buffoon,” was how she described him, acknowledging that buffoon was perhaps the wrong word.“He never cut a word of my diaries,” she added.Collins hasn’t changed much. (Even her look has altered very little, though she claims to have tried Botox only once: “I screamed and left the surgery.”) And she’s not sure if the entertainment industry has either. “I’m not having men making passes at me, so I don’t know,” she said. “But I think probably.” Still, in the wake of the #MeToo movement, she seemed worried mostly about the men.“Sadly, I think that now young men are suffering from being labeled toxically masculine,” she said, “because of this rise of anti-maleness.”And yet, she identifies as a feminist. “I believe that women are equal to men in every single way,” she said. “Except physical strength. People say you didn’t burn your bra, you wear lipstick. So what? I’m very proud of being a woman.” She added that she hates being called an actor, preferring actress.“What’s wrong with actress?” she said. “What’s wrong with mother? What’s wrong with woman? Girl? I don’t like having that word taken away.” (Had anyone tried?)This was about an hour into the conversation, just before I was ushered out of the apartment just as warmly as I had been welcomed in — a photographer had arrived, Collins had smoldering to do. But first I had to ask her about that opening line of the documentary: What does it really feel like to get what you want?She wakes up every morning and thanks “God or whoever it is,” she said. “I mean, I’m very lucky.”Then she added, with something that may have been a wink, “But you make your own luck sometimes, right?” More

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      ‘Moon Knight’ Review: Marvel, Oscar Isaac and Identity Issues

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      Oscar Isaac multitasks in a Marvel series about a superhero who answers to an ancient Egyptian god and struggles with dissociative identity disorder.The hero of the new Marvel Comics series, “Moon Knight,” has a superior costume. It’s a cool, bullet-absorbing white suit with a billowing cape and eyeholes that shine like milky spotlights. It makes him look like a luminescent Batman. And he refuses to wear it.His wife, who has an abundance of common sense and very little patience, yells at him: “Summon the suit! Summon the suit!” But he just dithers or pouts or stares at her blankly while the bad guys close in.There could be a lot of things behind this costume avoidance, including a general move in Marvel’s television shows away from superhero business-as-usual and toward something with a little more, if you’ll excuse the phrase, psychological realism.With “Moon Knight,” which premieres Wednesday on Disney+, it also has to do with concept and casting. The show features a relatively minor Marvel hero, created in the 1970s, whose defining character trait is what is now known as dissociative identity disorder. In the four episodes (of six) available for review, he is most often Steven Grant, a mild-mannered clerk at the British Museum gift shop, and occasionally Marc Spector, a deadly former mercenary and earthly avatar of a justice-seeking Egyptian god.They are, of course, opposite halves of a symbolic whole: brains and brawn, peace and war. But the show generates most of its drama and humor, and a number of its visual effects, from their inability to coexist. Visible to one another as reflections, they bicker and trade insults, Steven abhorring Marc’s violence (even when violent action is called for) and Marc ruing what he sees as Steven’s weakness.Explore the Marvel Cinematic UniverseThe popular franchise of superhero films and television series continues to expand. ‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’: The web slinger is back with the latest installment of the “Spider-Man” series.‘Hawkeye’: Jeremy Renner returns to the role of Clint Barton, the wisecracking marksman of the Avengers, in the Disney+ mini-series.‘Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings’: The superhero originated in comics filled with racist stereotypes. The movie knocked them down.‘Eternals’: The two-and-a-half-hour epic introduces nearly a dozen new characters, hopping back and forth through time.As they try to stop a sanctimonious bad guy from resurrecting a rival Egyptian deity, enduring chases, desert treks and crunchingly violent battles, they grudgingly trade off possession of their shared body. The show’s favored move is for Steven to give in just in time for Marc to save both them and their archaeologist wife, Layla El-Faouly. But it takes the direst circumstances for the suit to be summoned, turning the human protagonist into the magically powered Moon Knight.And that’s where the casting comes in: reflecting Marvel’s ability to attract top-flight talent, Steven and Marc are played by Oscar Isaac, and who wants to wrap Oscar Isaac in C.G.I. mummy bandages, no matter how nifty they look?There are a lot of issues swimming around in “Moon Knight,” including its treatment of ancient Egyptian culture, its presentation of its Middle Eastern milieu and its depiction of its hero’s mental health issues. But as a drama, it’s built entirely around the Isaac vs. Isaac cage match, which supplies fair to middling action and sentiment and consistently satisfying laughs.The hero’s highly symbolic identities are visible to one another as reflections.Marvel StudiosIt’s characteristic of the Marvel Disney+ shows that the ability of the performers exceeds the inventiveness of the crew — writers and directors seem to be hired for competence rather than distinctive vision. Jeremy Slater (“The Umbrella Academy”), the show’s creator, and its director, Mohamed Diab (the Egyptian features “Cairo 678” and “Clash”), are only fitfully successful at combining psychological drama, “Raiders of the Lost Ark” desert adventure and superhero origin story.A little more flair would help paper over the cracks; as it is, events and relationships aren’t easy to parse and characters’ actions (especially Steven’s) can be inconsistent. It probably didn’t help that nine writers are credited on the six episodes.You also could wonder how much focus was spent on navigating the hazards of orientalism and ableism present in the original material. The credits include consultants for Egyptology, Judaism and mental health as well as three general consultants from a company that promises on its website to “flag potential concerns and provide advice on how to avoid or mitigate risk.” (No Islam consultant is listed; the focus on ancient Egypt mitigates the risk of dealing with the country’s predominant contemporary religion.)We don’t know what the consultants’ input was. But onscreen, presenting Cairo in a new light (in interviews, Diab has said this was a priority) seems to consist of making it look like every other world capital. A scene featuring Gaspard Ulliel, who died in January, uses what appears to be an Arab form of jousting as background exoticism; when the characters venture into ancient monuments and archaeological sites, the dangers they face are of a familiar silver-screen variety.None of that increases the viewer’s pleasure, but it doesn’t necessarily diminish it, either, and you can always focus on Isaac’s nervous fidgeting, shy stubbornness and dodgy accent in his scenes as Steven. (Convinced of his Britishness, Steven refers to Marc as “the little American man living inside me.”)And Isaac has heavyweight support: Ethan Hawke plays Harrow, the villain, and F. Murray Abraham is the voice of the god, Khonshu, an arrogant and self-righteous loudmouth who appears to his avatar as a disjointed skeleton topped by a floating ibis skull.The show’s best moments belong to Abraham, who delivers helpful advice like “Kill him! Break his windpipe!” in hilariously stentorian tones. But the character we like best is the highly capable Layla, who gets to be the action star while Steven and Marc snipe at each other; May Calamawy, who plays the rebellious sister in “Ramy,” gives Layla an appealingly irritated insouciance.The makers of the show are not unaware of the “Raiders” comparison — Steven watches a movie called “Tomb Buster” whose title is rendered in the same sloping style. And while it’s unfair to wish that every desert or jungle adventure could be directed by Steven Spielberg (or Robert Zemeckis, or J.J. Abrams), “Moon Knight” won’t stop you from doing so. More

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      Why I Love Erotic Thrillers

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      They are best consumed as escapist fantasies about a mythic figure I myself could never embody: the femme fatale.I can trace my fascination with erotic thrillers back to the 1998 Neve Campbell and Denise Richards vehicle “Wild Things.” My father and I watched it together at his suggestion (there was never much censorship in my bohemian Manhattan childhood home), and as a burgeoning teen cinephile I was enchanted by its polished, artful sleaze. The plot concerns Campbell (brunette, surly, poor) and Richards (blonde, popular, wealthy), who accuse their high-school guidance counselor of abuse. Soon, the story becomes a thicket of convoluted double crosses, and nothing is what it originally seemed. By the time the end credits rolled and revealed Campbell as the film’s criminal mastermind, I was ready to cheer. Like many of the most captivating women in these films, Campbell’s character is an outsider who uses others’ underestimation of her abilities to her advantage. Fooled by her lower-class status, her enemies think she lacks savvy, but she is in fact a cunning strategist who uses her sexuality to outwit them.In other words, she’s a femme fatale — a trope that goes back over half a century. Noirs like “Double Indemnity” and “The Postman Always Rings Twice” established her as an archetype in the mid-20th century, but the erotic thrillers of the ’80s and ’90s made explicit her wielding of sexuality as a tool for getting what she wants. Whether she’s in an old-school hard-boiled detective story or an early-’90s erotic thriller, the femme fatale is a magician, fooling the men onscreen and the audience alike.It’s easy to write off erotic thrillers as sexist schlock — which they might be — but there’s more to them than meets the eye.The erotic thriller came to prominence in the prosperous Reagan era, which was politically conservative yet culturally trashy. These films fruitfully explored this contradiction, and by the ’90s, they were certified box-office gold. They distilled the excesses and anxieties of yuppie culture into psychosexually messy yet stylized commercial products, before fizzling out in the aughts. Building on the moody, femme-fatale-filled world of classic ’40s and ’50s film noir, the erotic thriller was always gloriously excessive, with a laser-sharp focus on beautiful women doing bad things. In films like “Basic Instinct,” “Fatal Attraction,” “Body Heat” and “The Last Seduction,” the calculated performance of self-assured femininity inspires fear, arousal and awe in equal measure.It’s easy to write off erotic thrillers as sexist schlock — which they might be — but there’s more to them than meets the eye. Consider the spaces of lurid glamour in which they unfold: gaudy dens of iniquity shot in chiaroscuro lighting, filled with dense cigarette smoke and revelers enjoying cocaine as if it were Champagne. These are images of hyperbolic sensuality where pleasure approaches vulgarity. The femme fatale’s acts of deception mirror these environments, presenting images of desire in a way that’s as likely to make us feel queasy as aroused (in “Fatal Attraction,” for example, Glenn Close’s character boils a pet bunny to exact vengeance on a lover who has spurned her). In this context, the sexually frank crime novelist and murder suspect Catherine Tramell from “Basic Instinct” (played by Sharon Stone) is an immoral figure whose self-possession and allure make for exciting viewing precisely because she is immoral, and whose qualities I nevertheless desire for myself.In these spaces of questionable morality, the femme fatale’s sex appeal gives her the upper hand. She’s always a target in rooms filled with men who want to leer at her. She knows this, and turns it to her advantage. While the erotic thrills are obviously meant to be found in her self-revelation, what seems more thrilling to me is how she works this trap. She’s a magician who can misdirect her audience with a quip and the raise of a perfectly sculpted brow. A femme fatale always knows how to use the erotics of the erotic thriller. When Catherine Tramell intimidates her male interrogators with candid discussion of her sex life and famously uncrosses her legs to reveal she’s not wearing underwear, the moment is so self-conscious in its studied sexiness that it becomes bizarre. Who would ever do such a thing in real life? But the men onscreen are so enthralled by her that she can do whatever she wants. It’s a fantasy of weaponized femininity in a misogynist world, and by the time Jeanne Tripplehorn exclaims of Stone’s character: “She’s evil! She’s brilliant!” I can’t help but wish that I too could be evil and brilliant, working my way into spaces where I shouldn’t be and surprising everyone with that stylish mix of sexiness and cunning that only exists in movies.For me, erotic thrillers are best consumed as escapist fantasies about a mythic figure I myself could never embody: I’m too neurotic to pull off acts of deception, to say nothing of murder, and I’m simply too lazy to commit to looking glamorous every day. Like many women, I say, “I’m sorry” too often, and one thing the femme fatale absolutely never does is apologize.But while I may sometimes wish for a femme fatale’s enviable style and mastery of seduction, I also realize she’s a trope that was largely written by men as an embodiment of fears around powerful women. The erotic thriller’s femme fatale can fit into any number of sexist tropes: She can be a teenage temptress, a home-wrecker, a sexy psycho. The creature of a period that cherished capitalist calculation and the pantsuit, she’s the nightmare version of a strong woman. I cringe at her while recognizing that I’m drawn to her. The thrills she and these films present are not merely sexual. She seduces some viewers — at least this one — into interrogating their assumptions about what a strong femininity can look like.Abbey Bender is a writer whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, Sight & Sound and Artforum. More

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      Will Smith Apologizes to Chris Rock After Academy Condemns His Slap

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      “I was out of line and I was wrong,” said Smith, who hit Rock at the Oscars after the comedian made a joke about his wife. The film organization opened an inquiry into the incident. Will Smith walked onstage and slapped Chris Rock after the comedian made a joke about Mr. Smith’s wife, the actress Jada Pinkett Smith. Mr. Smith then yelled and cursed at Mr. Rock after returning to his seat.Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesLOS ANGELES — Will Smith apologized to the comedian Chris Rock on Monday evening for slapping him during Sunday night’s Oscars telecast after the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which administers the awards, denounced his actions and opened an inquiry into the incident.Mr. Smith, who had pointedly not apologized to Mr. Rock on Sunday night when he accepted the award for best actor, wrote on Instagram Monday evening that “I would like to publicly apologize to you, Chris.”“I was out of line and I was wrong,” he said in the statement. “I am embarrassed and my actions were not indicative of the man I want to be.”His apology came as the academy, a major Hollywood union and others criticized his actions, which stunned viewers around the world and overshadowed the Oscars. “The academy condemns the actions of Mr. Smith at last night’s show,” the film organization said in a statement. “We have officially started a formal review around the incident and will explore further action and consequences in accordance with our bylaws, standards of conduct and California law.”The academy’s statement came after a meeting Monday. A five-page document on standards of conduct that accompanied it spells out behavior the organization deems unacceptable. It prohibits “physical contact that is uninvited and, in the situation, inappropriate and unwelcome, or coercive sexual attention.” Also not allowed is “intimidation, stalking, abusive or threatening behavior, or bullying.”Disciplinary action, according to the bylaws, could include “suspension of membership or expulsion from membership.”The Academy was not known to have expelled a member before 2017, when Harvey Weinstein was removed amid allegations of sexual harassment and rape. Then, in 2018, after adopting a code of conduct for members, the organization expelled Bill Cosby, who had been convicted of sexual assault, and the filmmaker Roman Polanski, who had fled the country years earlier while awaiting sentencing for statutory rape.The Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, the union representing thousands of people who work in film, television and radio, called the incident “unacceptable” but said that it “does not comment on any pending member disciplinary process.”“Violence or physical abuse in the workplace is never appropriate and the union condemns any such conduct,” the union said in a statement Monday. “The incident involving Will Smith and Chris Rock at last night’s Academy Awards was unacceptable.”How to Understand the Altercation Between Will Smith and Chris RockThe Incident: The Oscars were derailed when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock, who made a joke about Mr. Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith.His Speech: Moments after the onstage altercation, Mr. Smith won the Oscar for best actor. Here’s what he said in his acceptance speech.The Aftermath: Mr. Smith apologized to Mr. Rock the next day after the Academy denounced his actions and opened an inquiry into the incident.A Triumph Tempered: Mr. Smith owned Serena and Venus Williams’s story in “King Richard.” Then he stole their moment at the Oscars.What Is Alopecia?: Ms. Smith’s hair loss condition played a major role in the incident.The incident unfolded Sunday night after Mr. Rock made a joke about the buzzed hair of Mr. Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, who has alopecia, a condition that leads to hair loss. Mr. Smith responded by walking onto the stage of the Dolby Theater and slapping Mr. Rock, leaving stunned viewers wondering at first if the blow might have been scripted until Mr. Smith returned to his seat and warned him to stop talking about his wife, using expletives.Jada Pinkett Smith and Will Smith in the audience at the ceremony.Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesBehind the scenes at the Oscars, there were serious discussions about removing Mr. Smith from the theater, according to two industry officials with knowledge of the situation who were granted anonymity to describe internal deliberations. But time was short, because the best actor award, which Mr. Smith was heavily favored to win, was fast approaching, one noted — and stakeholders had varying opinions on how to proceed. There was also concern about further disrupting the live broadcast, the other said.As the show went on, the actor Denzel Washington spoke with Mr. Smith during a commercial break. Not long after that Mr. Smith won best actor. (Mr. Smith said in his speech that Mr. Washington had told him: “At your highest moment, be careful. That’s when the devil comes for you.”) In his onstage remarks, Mr. Smith apologized to the academy and to his fellow nominees — but not to Mr. Rock — and defiantly sought to draw parallels to the character he played in “King Richard,” the father of Venus and Serena Williams.“Richard Williams was a fierce defender of his family,” Mr. Smith said.He received a standing ovation.Mr. Smith said in his statement Monday that he had reacted emotionally because a joke about his wife’s medical condition was “too much for me to bear.” Mr. Smith also apologized to the Academy, the show’s producers, the viewers, the people who worked on “King Richard” and the Williams family.“I deeply regret that my behavior has stained what has been an otherwise gorgeous journey for all of us,” he said. “I am a work in progress.”The incident overshadowed the awards. On ABC’s “Good Morning America,” on Monday George Stephanopoulos described it as “something we have never seen before, something that is very hard to process: Will Smith, walking up onto that stage after Chris Rock told a joke about his wife — simply assaulting Chris Rock.”The powers-that-be at the Oscars had been intent on not repeating last year’s record-low ratings, putting a series of changes in place they had hoped would draw more viewers: installing three comic actresses as hosts, pretaping some awards to try to quicken the pace, introducing a fan-favorite award that viewers could vote on. But the broadcast became must-see television for a reason they did not anticipate.“Welp … I said it wouldn’t be boring #Oscars,” Will Packer, one of the show’s producers, tweeted after the show. He later added: “This was a very painful moment for me. On many levels.”The telecast drew a larger audience than last year’s, but interest remained depressed compared with past years. The awards show attracted 15.4 million viewers on ABC, a 56 percent improvement on the 9.85 million people who watched the 2021 event, according to ABC. Sunday night’s show was still the second least-watched Oscars ever.Comedians, who tell uncomfortable and sometimes offensive jokes for a living, raised concerns about the precedent Smith had set.“Let me tell you something, it’s a very bad practice to walk up onstage and physically assault a comedian,” Kathy Griffin tweeted. “Now we all have to worry about who wants to be the next Will Smith in comedy clubs and theaters.”Jimmy Kimmel, the comedian and talk show host who had been the last person to host the Oscars, said on “The Bill Simmons Podcast” that he felt bad for the show’s hosts; for Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, who won the best documentary feature award Mr. Rock had been presenting, and for Mr. Rock, who he said “certainly didn’t deserve that.”“In a way, I feel bad for Will Smith too, because I think he let his emotions get the better of him, and this should have been one of the great nights of his life,” Mr. Kimmel said. “And now it’s not. Was there anyone who didn’t like Will Smith an hour ago in the world? Like no one, right? Now he doesn’t have a single comedian friend — that’s for sure.”Whoopi Goldberg, who is on the academy’s board of governors and has hosted the show several times, said on “The View” on Monday that she did not think Smith’s award would be revoked, citing Mr. Rock’s decision not to press charges.“We’re not going to take that Oscar from him,” she said. “There will be consequences, I’m sure.”Mr. Rock after the incident with Mr. Smith, seated in front of him. Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesThe Los Angeles Police Department said it was aware of what it described as an incident involving “one individual slapping another” at the Oscars. The police said the person involved had “declined to file a police report.”“If the involved party desires a police report at a later date,” the police said, they would move forward and “complete an investigative report.”At least one member of the academy, Marshall Herskovitz, a former president of the Producers Guild of America, called for Mr. Smith to face disciplinary action.Two industry officials said that Mr. Rock’s joke had apparently been ad-libbed.And Bruce Vilanch, a past head writer of Oscars shows who did not work on this year’s, said: “Everything that is in the script is vetted. But if a comedian comes out onstage and ad-libs something, there’s no time to vet. I’m guessing that’s what happened last night. What I’m hearing from everybody is that this was not the material that was rehearsed.”Mr. Rock has teased the Smiths from the Oscars stage before. In 2016, when the Smiths boycotted the awards show because the nominees in the four acting categories were all white, Mr. Rock, that show’s host, joked about it. “Jada says she not coming, protesting,” he said. “I’m like, ain’t she on a TV show? Jada is going to boycott the Oscars — Jada boycotting the Oscars is like me boycotting Rihanna’s panties. I wasn’t invited.”Mr. Smith was not deterred from celebrating his win on Sunday night, dancing at a crowded party after the Oscars while holding his trophy, but he avoided questions about the incident. A publicist for Mr. Rock did not immediately respond to requests for a comment.Jaden Smith, one of the Smiths’ children, tweeted simply: “And That’s How We Do It.”The reaction inside and outside Hollywood ranged widely. In interviews following the show, at after-parties and on social media, Smith’s colleagues variously expressed sadness, confusion, disbelief, anger and, in some cases, empathy. Many deflected or ignored questions about the episode entirely.The actor Mark Hamill called it the ugliest Oscars moment. “Stand-up comics are very adept at handling hecklers,” he wrote on Twitter. “Violent physical assault … not so much. #UgliestOscarMoment_Ever.”One top studio executive, who declined to speak on the record, voiced disappointment in Smith and in the fact that the audience in the theater gave him a standing ovation.And Janai Nelson, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, worried aloud in a tweet that “the way casual violence was normalized tonight by a collective national audience will have consequences that we can’t even fathom in the moment.”Others seemed to defend Mr. Smith. “Many takes on here about Will Smith and Chris Rock, especially from people whose partners are not Black women (mainly white people),” the author Frederick Joseph tweeted. “I don’t care if it’s a joke or not, the amount Black women have to endure — people are tired of it. We have no idea what Jada has gone through.”And the comedian Tiffany Haddish, who starred in the movie “Girls Trip” with Ms. Pinkett Smith, said in an interview with People magazine at an after-party that she appreciated seeing Mr. Smith protect his wife.“Maybe the world might not like how it went down,” Ms. Haddish said, “but for me, it was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen because it made me believe that there are still men out there that love and care about their women, their wives.”Even still, the day after, the prevailing reaction was mostly one of disbelief.“We’re not sure where the fallout will end up,” Ryan Seacrest said Monday on his morning show “Live With Kelly and Ryan.” “It was one of those moments that we couldn’t believe when we saw it.”Sperling reported from Los Angeles. Matt Stevens and Julia Jacobs reported from New York. More

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      Will Smith Attends the 2022 Vanity Fair Oscars Party

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      Inside the 2022 Vanity Fair Oscars Party32 PhotosView Slide Show ›Hunter Abrams for The New York TimesBEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — “In 20 years of coming, this is the most fun I’ve ever had,” Adrien Brody, the Oscar-winning actor, said at Vanity Fair’s annual Oscars party on Sunday. “I had real conversations, about politics, life and art.’’For a change at this annual convening of industry luminaries real conversation was all but unavoidable. The primary reason was the train wreck that was Will Smith slapping Chris Rock onstage.“That moment, I can’t talk about it,” said Amy Schumer, who hosted the Oscars with Wanda Sykes and Regina Hall, after chatting with Larry David just outside the tented dance floor. “It was such a big deal and I’m still processing it, and I have to be so careful,” she added, before turning to a cluster of friends for a lifeline. “Somebody get me to stop talking.”It has been nearly 40 years since Tina Brown, the former Vanity Fair editor, conceived of a party that would steal the thunder from Swifty Lazar’s Oscar wingding. Mr. Lazar not only knew how to rope in the stars, Ms. Brown observed in her published diaries. He also domesticated a “menagerie” that attended on his terms or not at all.Trevor Noah, left, greeted Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith at the Vanity Fair Oscars party.Kevin Mazur/WireImage, via Getty ImagesWhen a celebrity of Mr. Smith’s stature acts out in public, it is more than a source of clucking editorials and viral memes. It’s a threat to the fiction of show-business kumbaya. This year’s Vanity Fair party, then, had something of the air of a celebrity campfire circle. Other Oscar parties — such as one given by Madonna and Guy Oseary — may be more intimate and exclusive, but nothing tops Vanity Fair for sheer boldface volume.And so for a few late-night hours in a series of tents, gardens and outdoor lounges at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, the most famous people on the planet mingled, danced, drank and smoked (weed mostly), and proved what a great leveler celebrity can be. It is a universally established truth in Hollywood that at, a certain level of fame, everyone is your best friend.To reach the sanctum, invited guests had to pass through a series of security checkpoints (negative PCR test results were required) and a blue carpet lined with shouting photographers. Some luminous glow worms, including Billie Eilish, Pedro Almodóvar and Jessica Chastain (wearing an emerald-green Gucci dress that evoked Ariel in “The Little Mermaid”), were then immediately diverted to a private studio where Mark Seliger shot their formal portraits.Riz Ahmed, left, and Aziz Ansari.Kevin Mazur/WireImage, via Getty ImagesOthers processed directly into the actual party, where cameras phones and other recording devices had been strictly forbidden. Surprisingly few people flouted the no-phone rules to capture such theatrical moments as Kathy Hilton dancing with Marjorie Gubelmann, a.k.a. DJ Mad Marj, or Bill Murray wearing a jaunty beret, dancing alone.If they stuck around past midnight, they would have caught Will Smith, seemingly unruffled by the controversy he had just stirred up, accompanied by his wife and children, and shimmying to “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It.”They would also have snagged Serena Williams towering over the crowd in a silver minidress, and Zendaya standing beside a potted palm tree and locked in conversation with Timothée Chalamet, both surrounded by a nimbus of marijuana smoke exhaled by an acquaintance.They would have seen Jason Bateman locked in a bro-hug with Kevin Bacon; Jon Hamm momentarily alone near the men’s room looking forlorn as a pound puppy; Kristen Stewart wafting along in a floor-length black lace dress; and Zoë Kravitz chain smoking Marlboros.They would have caught Sarah Paulson shouting, “Dog! Dog! Dog!,” as she shoved past Kate Hudson and Chris Pine to pet a stranger’s fluffy white pooch.From left: Billie Eilish, Kyra Sedgwick, Kevin Bacon, Rami Malek and Alana Haim.Kevin Mazur/WireImage, via Getty ImagesIn the Before Times, it was customary for the most famous to dutifully work the red carpet and make a glad-handing circuit or two, before slipping out to another, presumably better party.Midnight was the traditional witching hour. This time around the mood was more convivial, and for obvious reasons. Two years of separation has taken its toll on the celebrity herd.“People are genuinely happy to see each other again,” said Georgina Chapman, the fashion designer, as partygoers pressed against each other so tightly on their way to one of the tequila bars that it was easy to forget such a thing as social distancing ever existed.“Of course,” Ms. Chapman added, “next week we’ll all get Covid.’” More