Movies

Subterms

    More stories

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Riz Ahmed Toast South Asians at Pre-Oscars Party

      by

      South Asians in Hollywood celebrate their achievements this year.BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — The dirty secret about film industry parties is that they’re rarely fun. Hardly anyone feels like they’re in with the in-crowd. There’s a lot of posturing, peacocking and busying oneself with one’s phone.The opposite was true at a party to celebrate the achievements of South Asians in this year’s Oscars race on Wednesday night.Three weeks ago, Maneesh K. Goyal, a New York restaurateur, was talking with Anjula Acharia, who is Priyanka Chopra Jonas’s manager, and Shruti Ganguly, a film producer. “We realized there were 10 Oscar nominees of South Asian descent this year,” Mr. Goyal said. “My immediate response: ‘We should throw a party.’”Ms. Chopra Jonas signed on as a host, and so did Mindy Kaling, Kumail Nanjiani and Bela Bajaria, the head of global TV at Netflix. The United Talent Agency offered its Beverly Hills offices.“I wasn’t sure if we’d be in a conference room, or something,” said Richa Moorjani, a star of “Never Have I Ever,” who wore an embroidered blazer and matching pants by a Dubai label named OTT.The party was held at the United Talent Agency offices in Beverly Hills.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesJanina GavankarKrista Schlueter for The New York TimesPoorna Jagannathan, center, and Radhika Jones, right.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesNo beige carpeting here: Around 5 p.m., guests filtered into an airy courtyard with a gazebo decked out in gold streamers. They were proud to be in one another’s presence. “To have this depth of talent, to have enough nominees to throw a party, this was not the case five years ago,” Ms. Bajaria said. “It’s not just writers, directors and on-screen talent. There are agents, assistants and executives” — like herself — “who have green-light authority.”As Ms. Bajaria surveyed the crowd of 125, the actress Poorna Jagannathan sidled over and grabbed her arm. “Have you seen the new Indian Barbie?” Ms. Jagannathan said, referring to the limited-edition doll released for Women’s History Month, and who Ms. Jagannathan thinks Ms. Bajaria looks like (“I’m not so sure about that,” Ms. Bajaria said).Who needs plastic when real world role models abound? At the bar: Radhika Jones, the Vanity Fair editor, in a Falguni & Shane Peacock dress, and Noora Raj Brown, Goop’s head of communications. By the step-and-repeat: Janina Gavankar, of “The Morning Show,” in a fuchsia crop top and trousers, and the comedian Lilly Singh, in a suit with fringe cuffs.Under the streamers: Aziz Ansari, the comedian and actor who recently released a Netflix special; Manish Dayal, who stars in the medical drama “The Resident”; and Riz Ahmed, the actor and rapper, who is up for two Oscars this year, for the short film “The Long Goodbye” and the animated feature “Flee.”Riz Ahmed gave a speech.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesLilly Singh and Jay Sean, right.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesThe aloo tikki station.Krista Schlueter for The New York Times“It’s really emboldening when you’re surrounded by people who share your experience,” Mr. Ahmed said, addressing the party as pink streaked the sky.Collaborations were discussed. (“Make business plans,” Ms. Chopra Jonas said.) Trade secrets were disclosed. (“If you need an Indian outfit, Kynah is a one-stop shop,” Ms. Moorjani said.)Although the party officially ended at 8, dozens of guests lingered for another hour, even though the aloo tikki station and bar had closed.“A lot of us grew up trying to hide our racial identity and culture,” said the actor Adrian Dev (“Westworld”), who wore a navy blue sherwani. “Now I’m the exact opposite.” More

    • 138 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      Watch Ryan Reynolds Meet His Past Self in ‘The Adam Project’

      by

      The director Shawn Levy narrates a sequence from the film, which also features Walker Scobell.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.The central idea behind the Netflix sci-fi adventure “The Adam Project” is presented in this comical, yet tender, living room scene.The 12-year-old Adam (Walker Scobell) is questioning a strange man (Ryan Reynolds) he has found in the shed behind his house. They have the same mannerisms, the man knows the kid’s dog’s name (Hawking) and they’re both wearing the same watch. Could it be they are past and future versions of each other?“I wanted this scene to not only lay out the premise of the movie,” said the director Shawn Levy, “but to do so in a way that would essentially establish a pact with the audience as far as tone, that this movie would have a somewhat fluid, blended tone that vacillates between comedy and poignancy.”In the sequence, Scobell must mimic Reynold’s mannerisms. Levy said it came easy for the young actor, who is making his screen debut.“When we cast Walker, we knew we had found this revelation who had never done anything, and we knew the kid was smart and authentic and talented,” Levy said. “What we didn’t know is that he had been watching the ‘Deadpool’ movies since he was 7, so he shows up on set and he gets to co-star with his hero, whose rhythms and inflections he has literally ingested for half of his very young life. So we never needed to teach Walker how to say and do things the ‘Ryan Reynolds way.’ He already knew how.”Read the “Adam Project” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      Peter Bogdanovich Had a Vision for This Film. Now It’s Finally Being Seen.

      by

      “She’s Funny That Way” wasn’t exactly the movie he set out to make, but the director’s cut was feared lost. How it came to be shown at MoMA is a complicated saga.Cash from a dentist’s office. Urns with ashes. A set of Chuck Close holograms. These are some of the items that Eric Eisenberg, 54, said he had found in storage lockers. A self-described “full-time eBayer,” Eisenberg makes a living buying lockers in arrears at auction and then selling the goods online. In one such purchase, he came across a tape of a movie called “Squirrels to the Nuts” and added it to his eBay listings.James Kenney, a 51-year-old English lecturer at City University of New York, is a lifelong fan of Peter Bogdanovich and had a habit of looking up the filmmaker’s work on eBay. He wasn’t originally searching for a tape, but after he found Eisenberg’s listing in 2020 — and another Bogdanovich expert deepened his suspicion that it might be something special — he recalled bargaining down the price to $100.It was, most likely, the only screenable copy of Bogdanovich’s preferred cut of what turned out to be the final fiction feature of the director, who died at 82 in January. It’s a version that had been feared lost and will play for the first time publicly at the Museum of Modern Art beginning on Monday.How the movie evolved from a cut that satisfied Bogdanovich, director of “The Last Picture Show” and “What’s Up, Doc?,” to a release that he was, by most accounts, resigned to — and how the tape of the earlier version came up for sale online — is a complicated saga.At MoMA, moviegoers won’t see a completely polished movie; what’s on the tape wasn’t color-corrected and lacked a final sound mix and official credits. But Louise Stratten, who wrote the movie with Bogdanovich and was one of its producers, called it “the rough version of the director’s cut,” with all the scenes in place and no trims to be made. In the months before he died, Bogdanovich had been working on putting out a fully finished version of the cut that was on the tape, said Stratten, who was married to the director from 1988 to 2001. She said it will be available soon for home viewing.Remembering Peter BogdanovichThe filmmaker, who became one of Hollywood’s most celebrated directors in the ‘70s before a public fall from grace, died Jan. 6, 2022.Obituary: Peter Bogdanovich was hailed for his ability to coax nuanced performances, and for the bittersweet luminosity of movies that conjured a bygone past.Streaming Guide: The director loved the world of classic Hollywood so much that it’s as if he never left it. Here are nine of his film highlights.‘She Is Funny That Way’: Bogdanovich’s last movie didn’t turn out exactly as he hoped. How the  director’s preferred cut landed at MoMA is a complicated saga.From the Archives: Read our original reviews of Bogdanovich’s most acclaimed films: “The Last Picture Show” and “Paper Moon.”By the time “Squirrels” premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2014, it was called “She’s Funny That Way.” That version ran around 20 minutes shorter than the MoMA cut with a substantially different structure: It was told in flashback as a former prostitute turned movie star (Imogen Poots) recounts her story to a reporter (Illeana Douglas); it culminated in a cameo from Quentin Tarantino. The cast also featured Owen Wilson as a philandering stage and film director, Kathryn Hahn as his actress wife and Jennifer Aniston as a therapist with a flagrant lack of empathy. Noah Baumbach and Wes Anderson served as executive producers.“She’s Funny That Way” opened theatrically in the United States in August 2015 to a muted response. “There’s barely a whiz-bang punchline or smoothly executed setup to be found in a movie that longs to be a sparkling bedroom comedy and winds up a tortured, fizz-free farce,” Jeannette Catsoulis wrote in her review for The New York Times.But the “Squirrels” cut, assembled earlier, does not have that framing device with Douglas, which was the product of a reshoot. The humor is drier, the pace is more leisurely and characters like a judge played by Austin Pendleton have more screen time. How a private eye (George Morfogen) is connected to a playwright (Will Forte) is established earlier in the movie, allowing for a bigger comic payoff when all the principals finally converge at a restaurant. The ending is completely different. As Kenney noted in a blog post about his discovery, this version emerges clearly as a successor to other Bogdanovich pictures like “They All Laughed” (1981), another bittersweet ensemble comedy in which characters with intimate connections keep bumping into one another across New York.Peter Bogdanovich arriving for the 2015 premiere of the film.Frazer Harrison/Getty ImagesBut at a preview screening in New York in 2013, the response wasn’t as good as anyone had hoped. “We got some feedback about people thinking it was old-fashioned, and that a lot of parts of it were unbelievable in terms of characters being at the same restaurant at the same time — things you’ve kind of just got to go with,” said Pax Wassermann, the original editor, who is married to Bogdanovich’s daughter Alexandra.Wassermann also recalled a producer’s anxiety over Aniston’s late entrance, almost 30 minutes in. Bogdanovich and Wassermann worked on the film in New York, but when the production set up a parallel editing bay in Los Angeles, with the editor Nick Moore (“Love Actually”) taking a pass at the movie, Wassermann quit, he said, so that Bogdanovich could be present for the editing on the West Coast and not feel pressured to stay with his son-in-law.Moore, who spent several weeks on the edit before leaving for another commitment, recalled working with Bogdanovich as a “lovely time” and didn’t have any sense of a tumultuous production. “It was as difficult as they always are,” he said, “but it wasn’t monstrous.” Of Bogdanovich, he said: “I don’t remember him ever being distressed at all. Honestly, there were fireworks at times, but I always got the impression that he enjoyed that. He loved fighting for what he wanted.”Peter Tonguette, an occasional contributor to The Times who is the author of “Picturing Peter Bogdanovich,” which features extensive interviews with the director, corresponded with the filmmaker throughout the making of the movie and viewed 10 cuts in all. He characterized what happened during the editing as a “committee approach” in which Bogdanovich chose to “try to be part of that committee,” participating in the reshooting and reshaping process even if he regretted the changes.It had been many years since Bogdanovich, who also made documentaries, had a fiction film in theaters that he wrote and directed, Tonguette pointed out. “Peter had gone to war with studios before,” he said, “and I think he felt it had really hurt him in the industry.” Tonguette recalled that Bogdanovich forwarded him a detailed note he had written proposing changes as late as May 2014, as proof that he was committed to improving even a watered-down film at a granular level. “A compromised hit is better than no hit at all, so he wasn’t going to go against the movie,” even though it wasn’t the movie he wrote and shot, Tonguette said.Kenney said it was clear when he watched the “Squirrels” cut that it was different from the start — and better. “Whether it’s a four-star film or a three-star film, it’s a four-star talent working at full caliber,” he said.Stratten remembered getting a positive response from the “She’s Funny That Way” audience at Venice, but added, “Every time we would watch it together, we would just say, well, there’s a better movie there.” The recovered “Squirrels” cut, she said, is “the movie we intended to make.”She and Bogdanovich suspected the tape had come from the editing bay in New York, before the changes in Los Angeles. Harbor Picture Company in SoHo, where editing took place, is indeed listed on the tape label. It is also, by Eisenberg’s estimate, “about 150 yards” from the Manhattan Mini Storage where he bought the locker. (He remembered walking over.)Several messages left at Harbor and emails to company representatives went unreturned.“It sounds kind of like a comedy within a comedy,” Stratten said. “It almost sounds like it’s a part of the movie.”Even before Kenney got a digital copy of the tape to Bogdanovich in November 2020, Stratten said, they had been trying to find out what materials still existed. “It’s incredible that this happened while Peter was alive, because Peter and I wanted to do a director’s cut, and then this fell into our laps as if it was just a huge gift,” she said. More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      Oscars 2022 Predictions: Who Will Win Best Picture, Actor and Actress?

      by

      In an interesting year with a duel for the top award and some wide-open races, here’s how our expert is marking his ballot.Best PictureEmilia Jones and Troy Kotsur having a moment in “CODA.”Apple TV+, via Associated Press“Belfast”✓“CODA”“Don’t Look Up”“Drive My Car”“Dune”“King Richard”“Licorice Pizza”“Nightmare Alley”“The Power of the Dog”“West Side Story”In a novel twist, this race has become a face-off between the best picture candidate with the most Oscar nominations (“The Power of the Dog,” with 12) and the one tied for the least (“CODA,” with just three). Still, “CODA” has recently surged after key wins with the actors, writers and producers guilds, the sort of bounty that almost always points the way to best picture victory. Though it’s awfully rare for a film to win Hollywood’s top prize without nominations for editing and directing — in fact, it hasn’t happened since 1932’s “Grand Hotel” — “CODA” can bypass those statistical precedents with an appeal that goes straight to the heart. In a year when I think voters are desperate to crown a crowd-pleaser, “CODA” is the clear favorite.Still, “The Power of the Dog” shouldn’t be counted out: Netflix has spent heavily to try to earn the streamer’s first best picture win, and the film’s 12 nominations indicate broad strength across several different branches of the academy. The tricky part is that the Oscars use a preferential ballot, which asks voters to rank the 10 nominees and tends to produce a winner that consistently shows up in the No. 1 and No. 2 slots. That favors a likable consensus choice like “CODA” instead of the more polarizing “Power of the Dog,” which will have to net a whole lot of No. 1 votes to offset the ballots cast by voters who found Campion’s film a little too austere.Best DirectorJane Campion, right, with associate producer Phil Jones, during production.Kirsty Griffin/NetflixKenneth Branagh, “Belfast”Ryusuke Hamaguchi, “Drive My Car”Paul Thomas Anderson, “Licorice Pizza”✓ Jane Campion, “The Power of the Dog”Steven Spielberg, “West Side Story”Campion is the first woman to be nominated for best director twice, and her win could make even more Oscar history, since it would follow Chloé Zhao’s “Nomadland” victory and mark the first time this Oscar has gone to women two years in a row. It’s true that Campion stepped into a controversy of her own making at the Critics Choice Awards, where she compared herself to Venus and Serena Williams but said the tennis superstars had never had to compete against men like Campion had. That diminishment of the sisters’ accomplishments caused an internet furor, but the older-skewing academy rarely pays attention to social-media conflagrations, and Campion remains the prohibitive favorite.Best ActorWill Smith opposite Demi Singleton, left, and Saniyya Sidney in “King Richard.”Warner Bros. Javier Bardem, “Being the Ricardos”Benedict Cumberbatch, “The Power of the Dog”Andrew Garfield, “Tick, Tick … Boom!”✓ Will Smith, “King Richard”Denzel Washington, “The Tragedy of Macbeth”The best actor Oscar rarely goes to young men, and bankable movie stars like Leonardo DiCaprio and Matthew McConaughey were only able to win it once they were on the other side of 40 and had paid an appropriate amount of dues. That’s why Smith is so perfectly situated: His two other nominations, for “Ali” and “The Pursuit of Happyness,” came when he was a superstar in his 30s, and now that he is a lightly grizzled 53-year-old who has proved himself over four decades, the timing is right for his first Academy Award win. All the better that in playing the father of the tennis phenoms Venus and Serena Williams in “King Richard,” Smith has found a character-actor role that he can animate with every ounce of his movie-star charisma.Best ActressJessica Chastain as the Christian broadcaster Tammy Faye Bakker.Fox Searchlight Pictures✓Jessica Chastain, “The Eyes of Tammy Faye”Olivia Colman, “The Lost Daughter”Penélope Cruz, “Parallel Mothers”Nicole Kidman, “Being the Ricardos”Kristen Stewart, “Spencer”Last year’s best actress winner, Frances McDormand, had a leg up on her competition by hailing from the best picture winner, “Nomadland.” This year, none of the best actress nominees come from movies in the best picture race at all, which gives you a sense of just how wide-open this field is. Chastain won the Screen Actors Guild Award for her role as the disgraced evangelist Tammy Faye Bakker, but this could really go to any of the five nominees: Chastain, Stewart and Kidman all gave the kind of transformative biopic performances that Oscar voters love, while Colman and Cruz are critical favorites from much better-reviewed films. I’m going to play it safe by picking Chastain, but feel free to live dangerously in your own Oscar pool.Best Supporting ActorTroy Kotsur opposite Marlee Matlin as his wife in “CODA.”Apple TV+, via Associated PressCiaran Hinds, “Belfast”✓ Troy Kotsur, “CODA”Jesse Plemons, “The Power of the Dog”J.K. Simmons, “Being the Ricardos”Kodi Smit-McPhee, “The Power of the Dog”Smit-McPhee was recognized by year-end critics’ groups for his performance as Kirsten Dunst’s crafty son in “The Power of the Dog,” but once the televised awards shows began to weigh in, Kotsur cleaned up at SAG, the Indie Spirits and BAFTA. With his warm and funny acceptance speeches at those ceremonies, Kotsur has become this season’s breakout performer, and the Oscars can surely count on him for a winning moment that is both heartfelt and historic, since Kotsur would be the first deaf man to earn an acting Oscar. He is instrumental to the tear-jerking third act of “CODA,” and he has a personal narrative every bit as compelling as what you see on the screen. This is Kotsur’s to lose.Explore the 2022 Academy AwardsThe 94th Academy Awards will be held on March 27 in Los Angeles.Best Actress Race: Who will win? There are cases to be made for and against each contender, and no one has an obvious advantage. Hollywood Legend: Danny Glover will receive an honorary Oscar for his activism. He spoke to The Times about his life in movies and social justice.A Makeover: On Oscar night, you can expect a refreshed, slimmer telecast and a few new awards. But are all of the tweaks a good thing?Return to the Playground: For his Oscar-nominated short film “When We Were Bullies,” Jay Rosenblatt tracked down his fifth-grade classmates.Secret Sounds: Denis Villeneuve and the “Dune” sound team explain how far they went to create an aural experience that felt familiar.Best Supporting ActressAriana DeBose, with David Alvarez, in “West Side Story.”Niko Tavernise/20th Century StudiosJessie Buckley, “The Lost Daughter”✓ Ariana DeBose, “West Side Story”Judi Dench, “Belfast”Kirsten Dunst, “The Power of the Dog”Aunjanue Ellis, “King Richard”It’s Anita’s America, and we’re just living in it. The key supporting role in “West Side Story” has proved to be catnip for Oscar voters across decades: Rita Moreno won the Oscar for her Anita in the 1961 film, and DeBose is well-positioned to repeat for playing the part in Steven Spielberg’s reimagining. Musical performances often do quite well in this category, as previous winners Anne Hathaway (“Les Misérables”) and Jennifer Hudson (“Dreamgirls”) can attest, but if there’s a dark horse in the race, I’d look to Dunst: She’s worked with a lot of academy members who can appreciate the hard-earned awards breakthrough she managed with “The Power of the Dog.”Best Original ScreenplayLeonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence in “Don’t Look Up.”Niko Tavernise/Netflix“Belfast”✓“Don’t Look Up”“King Richard”“Licorice Pizza”“The Worst Person in the World”This is one of the night’s toughest races. Many of my fellow pundits are picking Kenneth Branagh’s “Belfast,” but if it couldn’t win in this category at the BAFTAs despite being a box-office hit in Britain, I don’t expect a sudden reversal from the academy. Besides, Oscar voters tend to take the “original” part of this category very seriously, voting for films that feel sui generis. To my mind, that leaves “Licorice Pizza” (which won the BAFTA), “Don’t Look Up” (which won the WGA Award) and “The Worst Person in the World,” which could earn votes here in a race where it doesn’t face “Drive My Car.” Ultimately, I think that the environmental satire “Don’t Look Up” prevails because of its topical, urgent subject matter.Best Adapted ScreenplayEmilia Jones as the hearing daughter of deaf parents in “CODA.”Apple TV+✓ “CODA”“Drive My Car”“Dune”“The Lost Daughter”“The Power of the Dog”The path to best picture almost always cuts through the screenplay categories, so this race could provide a crucial sneak preview of the night’s ultimate winner, especially because it contains another face-off between “The Power of the Dog” and “CODA.” The latter film won at the Writers Guild, where “The Power of the Dog” wasn’t eligible for a nomination — but at BAFTA, where both films competed, “CODA” still pulled out a victory. If “CODA” (adapted from the French film “La Famille Bélier”) can win over a snobby bunch of British voters, there’s no reason to think it will fall short with the academy.Best Animated FeatureA scene from “Encanto,” with Stephanie Beatriz voicing the central character, Mirabel. Disney✓ “Encanto”“Flee”“Luca”“The Mitchells vs. the Machines”“Raya and the Last Dragon”“The Mitchells vs. the Machines” has won most of the awards doled out by the animation industry, and it shares an innovative elan — as well as the producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller — with “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” which previously triumphed in this category. Still, it will be tough for any film to beat “Encanto,” which has the year’s most viral song, “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” as well as a popular pitchman in the songwriter Lin-Manuel Miranda. The Mitchells may have triumphed in their battle against the Machines, but “Encanto” boasts even heavier artillery.Best Documentary FeatureNina Simone, as seen in “Summer of Soul.”Searchlight Pictures, via Associated Press“Ascension”“Attica”“Flee”✓ “Summer of Soul”“Writing With Fire”This race is filled with worthy contenders, including the animated refugee story “Flee,” which made Oscar history when it was nominated in the documentary, animated and international categories. But “Flee” is up against juggernaut front-runners in all of those races, and here, that No. 1 pick has got to be “Summer of Soul,” the Questlove-directed documentary about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival. Oscar voters often fall for music docs — past winners include “Searching for Sugar Man” and “20 Feet From Stardom” — and the previously lost concert footage of artists like Nina Simone, Stevie Wonder and Mahalia Jackson is catch-your-breath, stomp-your-feet wonderful.Best International FeatureReika Kirishima, left, and Hidetoshi Nishijima in “Drive My Car.”Sideshow and Janus Films“Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom,” Bhutan“Flee,” Denmark“The Hand of God,” Italy✓ “Drive My Car,” Japan“The Worst Person in the World,” NorwayThis should be a no-brainer, since voters gravitate to films in this category that have also made the best picture and best director lineups. (Think “Amour,” “Roma” and “Parasite.”) Therefore, the odds favor “Drive My Car,” Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s insightful three-hour drama about grief and art, which swept the major critics’ groups and kept amassing momentum as awards season continued. Still, I’d keep a watchful eye on the wonderful romantic dramedy “The Worst Person in the World,” which came out awfully late this season and has been winning a healthy share of Hollywood admirers. If enough voters gravitate to that Norwegian film because they think “Drive My Car” is taken care of, Hamaguchi’s breakthrough may run out of gas before reaching its destination.Best CinematographyBenedict Cumberbatch, left, and Kodi Smit-McPhee in “The Power of the Dog.”Kirsty Griffin/Netflix“Dune”“Nightmare Alley”✓“The Power of the Dog”“The Tragedy of Macbeth”“West Side Story”“Dune” won at BAFTA and with the cinematographers guild, and it’s probably the safer choice. But there have been several recent profiles of the “Power of the Dog” cinematographer Ari Wegner, who would become the first woman to win this Oscar. In a squeaker, that’s who I’m picking.Best ScoreZendaya in “Dune,” which has music by Hans Zimmer.Warner Bros. “Don’t Look Up”✓“Dune”“Encanto”“Parallel Mothers“The Power of the Dog”Even more than the powerhouse visuals, the rumbling, uneasy score of “Dune” makes the best case for watching the movie in a theater.Best SongDaniel Craig and Ana de Armas in “No Time to Die,” which is also the title of its nominated song.Nicola Dove/MGM, via Associated Press“Be Alive” (“King Richard”)“Dos Oruguitas” (“Encanto”)“Down to Joy” (“Belfast”)✓“No Time to Die” (“No Time to Die”)“Somehow You Do” (“Four Good Days”)If “Encanto” had submitted “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” instead of “Dos Oruguitas,” or if Beyoncé had done any campaigning for her rousing “King Richard” song, things might be different. But since they didn’t, expect a victory for Billie Eilish and Finneas for “No Time to Die,” the third James Bond theme to win in a row.Best Sound“Dune” is nominated for audible effects like sand crunching. Warner Bros. “Belfast”✓“Dune”“No Time to Die”“The Power of the Dog”“West Side Story”The sounds of “Dune” are designed to hit you in the solar plexus, and they bleed into the score and the edit in all sorts of memorable ways. Plus, the story behind crafting those sounds is fascinating: Who knew it involved Rice Krispies?Our Reviews of the 10 Best-Picture Oscar NomineesCard 1 of 10“Belfast.” More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Infinite Storm’ Review: Climb Every Mountain, Ford Every Extreme

      by

      Naomi Watts stars in a true-life drama about a woman who hiked up a mountain alone and returned with some heavy, unexpected cargo.When performers sign on as producers of their movies it can feel like a statement of intent. That’s the case with the true-life drama “Infinite Storm,” starring Naomi Watts as a grieving woman on an unexpected rescue mission. The movie has an appealing, streamlined trajectory: The woman hikes up and down a mountain, pausing to save a lost soul. With this role, Watts is reminding us that she can hold the screen by herself and without saying a word tell you everything you need to know about a character — and all the while looking fantastic.Early on Oct. 17, 2010, a New Hampshire woman named Pam Bales set off on a six-mile hike up Mount Washington, the highest peak in the Northeast. The temperature was expected to hit the high 20s, with winds reaching 80 m.p.h. Bales, though, was a lifelong hiker and a search-and-rescue volunteer. So she stashed extra layers and snow goggles in her pack before heading into an area she called an office and playground. “At 5,000 feet, about three miles in,” she later wrote in Backpacker magazine, “the wind began to pick up around me.”Even for those who enjoy hiking (on level ground in lovely weather, thank you), this sounds like lunacy. The presence of a sympathetic performer like Watts, though, eases doubts even as it deepens the stakes. You’re already on Pam’s side when she wakes up at home in the gray early morning. Alone, she patters around her isolated house, which is filled with homey touches and picturesquely parked near a river. It’s quiet inside, which prompts you to wonder about the children smiling in the framed photographs. Mostly, you settle into the stillness and vibe on the methodical rhythms of Pam’s preparing for what looks like a very serious hike.The world comes into view and increasingly fills the silence. Pam stops by a restaurant, where she exchanges pleasantries with a friend (Denis O’Hare) and fills in some blanks. It’s a brief, outwardly perfunctory interlude: He tells her to be careful and she reminds him that it’s an anniversary of an unspoken event. The scene seeds the ground with questions (what is she commemorating and why?), but mostly seems construed to appease anyone who might be disturbed by all the quiet and a woman alone: She isn’t a nut, the scene reassures you, she has at least one friend and even a rationale for heading into the forbidding wilderness alone.Pam’s trek is the centerpiece of the movie, and it’s a doozy. The director Malgorzata Szumowska sketches in the forbidding lay of the land with sweeping aerial shots of the snowy mountain range that cut Pam down to speck size. Szumowska also shrewdly uses distance to accentuate Pam’s physicality, allowing you to see the character head to toe, just like when Fred Astaire danced. You see the labored exertion in Pam’s — and Watts’s — every step as clearly as the puffs of frigid air she exhales. As her efforts intensify, she warms up and strips off her shirt, revealing her midriff and the steady tensing of her muscled arms and shoulders.Watts is a supremely expressive actress and, like Astaire, a full-body performer. The image of her frolicking on a cliff for the giant ape in “King Kong” was the best part of that movie, and her character’s thrilling emotional workout in “Mulholland Drive” remains vivid. Watts is particularly brilliant at articulating a character’s inner being; she brings out what lies beneath so clearly and persuasively that you can see every thought and emotion fluttering into existence. That serves her character here beautifully, even if Pam’s goggles can get in the way. I could watch an entire movie of Pam — really Watts — going solo up this mountain.That Iron Woman trek takes a turn when the weather does, and Pam finds a man (Billy Howle) crouched in the snow and nearly frozen. She warms him up by stripping off his clothes (good to know!) and then vows to take him to safety. The going is agonizing, at times gripping, and is slowed down only by gauzy, explanatory flashbacks to Pam’s earlier life. These weaken the momentum; they’re also unnecessary. We don’t need to know anything about Pam’s past because her story is already evident in each step and every smile, and in a translucent performance that confirms watching Naomi Watts on this journey is destination enough.Infinite StormRated R for adult language and suicide ideation. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Wood and Water’ Review: The Distances Between Us

      by

      In this elegant feature debut about modern alienation, the German writer-director Jonas Bak casts his real-life mother as a retired secretary who travels to Hong Kong to visit her estranged son.“It’s really sinking in that time is gone, and it won’t return,” says Anke, a widow and retired church secretary, in reference to the life she led while raising a family. Even in her placid hometown in the Black Forest region of Germany, everything feels distant, rendered unrecognizable to her by the forces of modernization. “A sense of home,” Anke continues. “I don’t have that.”These feelings of alienation — and the kinds of connections that are forged in our increasingly globalized world — are subtly explored in “Wood and Water,” the poignant feature debut by the German writer-director Jonas Bak.Distressed by the three-year absence of her son, Max — whose most recent justification for not visiting are the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, where he lives — Anke takes matters into her own hands. She books a plane ticket, and makes her way to Max’s high-rise apartment. But he’s nowhere to be found.Casting his own mother (Anke Bak) in the leading role, the filmmaker uses elegant, fixed-camera compositions and melancholic long takes, opting for a contemplative mood that summons meaning from what’s left unsaid. With a kind of dissociative, jet lag-induced delirium, the film transitions — somehow fluidly — from the lush woodlands and desolate churches of southern Germany to the flickering lights and modernist textures of Hong Kong in the throes of mass demonstrations.Vulnerable in her solitude yet clearly drawing from an inner source of great strength and curiosity, Anke explores the city on her own: she lunches with a security guard, gets her fortune told, strikes up a conversation with a disembodied voice sleeping in the top bunk of a shared hostel room. Though seemingly insignificant, these fleeting moments prove nourishing.Thankfully, this film never succumbs to the fish-out-of-water narrative of so many travel movies that use international settings as catalysts for self-discovery. Anke’s problems with her son aren’t exactly solved by the film’s end, but a change does occur, and it’s prompted not by the unknowns of a strange land, but by the recognition of a common struggle to adapt and find peace in the face of life’s endless upheavals.Wood and WaterNot rated. In Cantonese, English and German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 19 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 88 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Mothering Sunday’ Review: Sex, Death and Literature

      by

      A fine British cast is featured in this mildly transgressive love story set in the aftermath of World War I.It’s Mother’s Day in 1924, and England is a green and pleasant land of sturdy cars and bicycles, repressed emotions and class divisions. A familiar place, in other words, even — or especially — if your ideas about 20th-century Britain have been shaped by books, movies and prestige television.There’s nothing wrong with that, and there’s nothing egregiously amiss with “Mothering Sunday,” Eva Husson’s adaptation (from a script by Alice Birch) of Graham Swift’s 2016 novel. Pirouetting backward and forward from its highly eventful titular day, the movie samples a buffet of tried-and-true narrative offerings. It’s a love story about the mildly transgressive romance between a servant and a son of the gentry; a chronicle of literary awakening; a reckoning with the awful legacy of World War I and a foreshadowing of the social transformation that was to follow.Living through all of it is Jane Fairchild (Odessa Young), an orphan who works in the household of the Nivens, a kind couple who wear their unhappiness like well-tailored tweed. They are played by Colin Firth and Olivia Colman, who appear in just a handful of scenes and stamp the rest with a seal of highest British quality. So does Glenda Jackson, in even fewer scenes as the famous novelist Jane will grow up to be.First, however, she must cycle off to meet her lover, Paul (Josh O’Connor, Prince Charles in “The Crown”), a privileged fellow whose parents are off at a picnic with the Nivens, who are part of their social circle. The servants are all given the day off, which means they can have sex and then sit around smoking with no clothes on.Paul, who is engaged to a young woman of his own caste, goes off to join the luncheon. Jane then spends a significant portion of the movie wandering naked through the house, gazing at family portraits, studying spines in the library and grabbing a snack in the kitchen. Her reverie, and the audience’s discreet voyeurism, is intercut with scenes that point toward the past and the future. Later, she will marry a philosopher named Donald (Sope Dirisu), whom she meets in a bookshop and encourages her writing, giving her a copy of Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” on one of their dates.Earlier, the war took many of the young men in the area, including Paul’s two brothers and the Nivens’ only son. Mrs. Niven at one point tells Jane that she was lucky to have been “comprehensively bereaved” at a young age, as if that would inoculate her against further loss.But more tragedies lie in store, and they tear at the gauzy fabric of sensuality that Husson has woven. “Mothering Sunday” never conveys the intensity of erotic passion, the ardor of creative ambition or the agony of grief. Even though it is ostensibly about all of those feelings, it handles them with a tastefulness that is hard to distinguish from complacency.Mothering SundayRated R. Naked lunch. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      ‘The Lost City’ Review: Raiders of the 1980s Blockbusters

      by

      Sandra Bullock, Channing Tatum and a vamping Brad Pitt run around in a romantic adventure that you have seen before and will see again.If you don’t have a few hours to watch the cheerfully dumb comedy “The Lost City,” just stare at the poster. Almost everything you need to know about this nonsensical lark is crammed into the one sheet: the stars, the tropical location, the Bruckheimer-esque fireball. The poster is selling sex and violence and obvious laughs, with Sandra Bullock’s sequined purple onesie doing the heavy comic lifting. And while she and Channing Tatum are the headliners, the studio has hedged its bets by also cramming in a leering goat and a Fabio-ed Brad Pitt.The goat and Pitt are among the high points of the movie, a high-concept romp about a widowed writer, Loretta Sage (Bullock), making a tortuous re-entrance into the world. A successful romance novelist, Loretta writes books featuring a hunky dreamboat and throbbing verbs. For strained reasons, she is kidnapped while on a promo tour with the cover model for her books, Alan (Tatum). He tries to rescue her and soon they’re joking through a jungle adventure featuring a lost treasure, and a deranged rich villain (Daniel Radcliffe) and his minions. Bullets and jokes fly, not always hitting their targets.That’s more or less the movie, which is basically a vehicle for Bullock to play her most enduring role: Sandra Bullock, your supremely likable BFF. Genuine yet packaged, challenged but unsinkable, the Bullock BFF has been a mainstay for decades. She’s endured rough patches, as in “Speed 2,” but has always bounced back, buoyed by a shrewdly deployed, indomitable persona that’s wholesome, sardonic and goofy, though not (usually) insultingly so. Although she can handle a range of genres, she excels at comedy partly because she can play off a wide range of performers: Like all BFFs, she makes a generous double act.That said, it takes a while for Bullock and Tatum to find their groove, in part because he isn’t as comfortable in his lunkhead role as he needs to be. He’s playing a conventional sweet dope, a cliché role he handles fluidly when in Alan’s exaggerated cover-model drag, complete with flowing hair and peekaboo waxed chest. But he is less facile when his character comes off as impossibly stupid, moments he plays by affecting a bit of a Mark Wahlberg whiny singsong. Is it homage, coincidence — who knows? Whatever the case, Tatum seems happier when his character fares better too, allowing him and Bullock to settle into a breezy intimacy.For the most part, “The Lost City” delivers exactly what it promises: A couple of highly polished avatars quipping and hitting their marks while occasionally being upstaged by their second bananas (Da’Vine Joy Randolph included). There are some accommodations to contemporary mores. Tatum bares more skin than Bullock does, flashing his sculpted hindquarters in a scene that, like the movie overall, isn’t as sharp or as funny as it should be. But while Loretta isn’t as helpless as she might have been back in the old studio days, this is still about a man rescuing a woman whose eye makeup never runs even when she does.The director brothers Adam and Aaron Nee handle the many moving parts capably, working from a script they wrote with Oren Uziel and Dana Fox. Everything looks bright and in focus, and there are moments when the physical comedy pops, mostly when Pitt swashbuckles in. It’s clear that someone involved in the making of this movie is a fan of Robert Zemeckis’s 1984 romp “Romancing the Stone,” one of several adventure pastiches made in the wake of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” While “Raiders” transcends its inspirations with wit and Steven Spielberg’s filmmaking and “Romancing” tries hard to do the same, “The Lost City” remains a copy of a copy.It’s too bad that “The Lost City” isn’t more ambitious, because a woman writing her dreams into reality is a potentially rich riff on the Pygmalion and Galatea myth. Like “Romancing the Stone,” “The Lost City” opens with a scene from a book — cue the purple prose and dashing hero — that its novelist heroine is writing. In “The Lost City,” Loretta deletes the scene because it doesn’t work, but she can’t erase the hero. He’s a fantasy but he’s all hers. That’s the appeal of movies like this, which at a minimum understand that some of us hunger for fairy tales, even those that promise the stars and deliver Channing Tatum mooning.The Lost CityRated PG-13 for bloodless violence and partial nudity. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters. More