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      ‘Love After Love’ Review: Elegance Without a Center

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      Ann Hui’s World War II-era film is lovely to look at but lacks emotional depth and resonance.Early on in “Love After Love,” the director Ann Hui introduces the viewer to an astonishing shade of green, an emerald lushness that radiates from the foliage surrounding a Hong Kong mansion on the eve of World War II. If only the rest of the overlong feature were so memorable.“Love After Love” is Hui’s 30th film, and an adaptation of a short story by the novelist Eileen Chang, whose fiction she has now used in three films. Hui, who rose to prominence as a director of the Hong Kong New Wave in the 1980s, has been less well-known in the West.This film is a sufficient showcase for Hui’s craftsmanship, but it lacks the emotional depth or resonance that its composed visuals, lofty setting, and melodramatic stakes would portend.The film, streaming now on Mubi, shows sympathy for its young protagonist Ge Weilong (Sandra Ma), who comes from Shanghai to live and work for her cold, aristocratic Aunt Liang (Faye Yu) in Hong Kong while pursuing an education. Attending the banquets and high-society functions of Hong Kong’s international upper class, her aunt’s social circle, Weilong unwittingly finds herself under the gaze of George (Eddie Peng), a former lover of her aunt’s with an outsize Don Juan persona.What could make for a captivating story involving a transgressive love triangle is, even on a micro level, ineffective. Interactions between characters feel hollow, no matter how well-lit or well-cast the scenes are, with a passionless non-ending that has little of substance to say about the period or its social morés. Nevertheless, the bright spots in “Love After Love” may encourage viewers to seek out more robust works in Hui’s cherished oeuvre.Love After LoveNot rated. In Mandarin, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 24 minutes. Watch on Mubi. More

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      ‘Alice’ Review: American Slavery and Black Power Collide

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      This time-bending thriller about a woman who escapes from slavery in 1973, starring Keke Palmer and Common, is a vapid historical romp.In “Alice,” a coming-of-age revenge thriller from the writer-director Krystin Ver Linden, the eponymous main character (Keke Palmer, “Akeelah and the Bee,” “Hustlers”) successfully flees an abusive enslaver (Jonny Lee Miller) only to discover the year is actually 1973. Yes, 1973, and she and her fellow “domestics” have been trapped in a century-old bubble on a Georgia plantation, where not much has changed since Emancipation.The events that the movie says it is inspired by reportedly date back to the 1960s, but Ver Linden pushes the clock forward to the Blaxploitation era so that she can achieve her fait accompli: After reading a stack of encyclopedias provided by her savior and sidekick, Frank (Common), and taking marching orders from Pam Grier in “Coffy,” Alice morphs into an Afro-sporting Black Power heroine ready to free her kin back on the plantation and exact revenge on her white captors.Ver Linden wants us to view Alice as an empowered freedom fighter. Instead she lands as a caricature of one, as the film never really metabolizes or unpacks its conceit: the bonkers time-traveling predicament of its protagonist.Instead we’re made to sit through a microwave-dinner version of Black history — from slavery to civil rights to the Black Power movement — all while Palmer’s character shouts inadvertently comedic one-liners at her white enslavers like, “I don’t give a damn about your life!” Aside from the steadying cinematography (Alex Disenhof) and a few moments when Palmer leans into the more subtle aspects of her range, “Alice” takes the historic struggles for Black freedom in America and exploits them in the most vapid ways possible.AliceRated R for racial slurs, violence, torture and sexual assault. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Panama’ Review: Welcome to the Jungle, We Lack Fun and Games

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      Mel Gibson drops in from time to time in this predictable throwback thriller from Mark Neveldine.There is absolutely no need to brush up on geopolitics for Mark Neveldine’s macho thriller “Panama,” which might be a blessing: This over-plotted yet utterly predictable throwback is set in the waning days of Manuel Noriega’s presidency, when sorting out the C.I.A.’s allegiances in Central America was trickier than playing three-card monte. The movie is more interested in resurrecting the spirit of action flicks from the late 1980s, a time when men were brutes, women were pawns or eye candy, and declarative assertions passed for dialogue. “Nothing more rock ‘n’ roll,” Mel Gibson’s Stark whoops here, “than taking out the bad guys for the red, white and blue!”Gibson is only onscreen for a few scenes, abiding by the current career playbook used by actors of his generation who like an easy paycheck. The heavy lifting (and glowering, and killing) is done by Cole Hauser’s Becker, a dour Marine who, when not gunning people down, spends his time drinking on his wife’s grave. Once enlisted by Gibson’s character to acquire a Soviet helicopter for the Contras, Becker discovers to his grim satisfaction that he and the rebel fighters share a bottomless hunger for revenge — an appetite for destruction, one might say, particularly if that one person were the Contra leader in this movie who, while playing air guitar on a rifle, screams, “Welcome to the jungle!”“Panama” should be more fun, given that Neveldine was a writer and director of the giddily moronic “Crank” films, which he made alongside Brian Taylor. (This movie was written by William Barber and Daniel Adams.) But it’s mostly a lot of manic editing and caffeinated camerawork, each trying and failing to juice some excitement out of Hauser’s dull performance. There is a slow-motion shot of a snow leopard, sound-tracked by hair metal. It is delivered without a lick of ironic wit.PanamaRated R for brutal fracas and repeated references to rape. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Google Play, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘The Outfit’ Review: The Violent Measure of a Man

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      In this gangster exercise set in 1956 Chicago, Mark Rylance plays a tailor who has very large scissors and some sharp moves.The gangsters in “The Outfit” have plenty of tough moves, but none of these guys hold the screen like Mark Rylance when he just stands or stares — or sews. His character, Leonard, is a bespoke tailor who once worked on Savile Row and now practices his trade in an unassuming shop in Chicago. There, he snips and stitches with a bowed head and delicate, precisely articulated movements that express the beauty and grace of Rylance’s art.Sometimes, all you need in a movie is a great actor — well, almost all. Certainly Rylance’s presence enriches “The Outfit,” a moderately amusing gangster flick that doesn’t make a great deal of sense. It’s a nostalgia-infused genre exercise set in 1956 that centers on Leonard, who, having left London after the war, now makes suits for a clientele that includes underworld types, some of whom use his shop for business. Day after day, he works in his somber, claustrophobic store while dodgy types parade in and out, dropping envelopes in a locked box. Like the box, Leonard is a mystery that the movie teases out one hint at a time.Leonard takes longer to open, although the box’s contents are central to the puzzle that also involves a clandestine recording, a secret romance, rampaging rival crews and the larger mysterious criminal enterprise that gives the movie its title. There’s also Leonard’s employee, Mabel (Zoey Deutch), one of two women in the mix; Nikki Amuka-Bird also pops in as a glamorous villain. For the most part, Mabel is around to greet the customers and brighten up the store’s gloomy interior: She smiles at one villain (Dylan O’Brien), gives the cold shoulder to another (Johnny Flynn) and so on.The director Graham Moore and his screenwriting partner, Johnathan McClain, move their limited pieces around, spill the requisite blood and modestly complicate the proceedings. The story is self-aware, chatty and thin; it plays out as an extended cat-and-mouse, though who’s who in this particular duet shifts over time, if not all that surprisingly. Mostly, the movie seems like it was concocted by a couple of cinephiles who wanted to play with genre for genre’s sake. And why not? That’s as fine a reason as any to dust off some fedoras and hire actors of varying abilities for some retro American gangster cosplay on a British soundstage.“The Outfit” basically consists of characters moving in, out and through the store’s two main rooms, spatial limitations that can feel stagy and be tricky to manage. This is Moore’s feature directing debut (he wrote “The Imitation Game”) but, working with the director of photography Dick Pope, he handles the space thoughtfully. With a muted palette, shifts in the depth of field and complementary staging and camera moves, Moore and Pope map the store’s (and story’s) geography from different vantage points. And, in sync with Rylance’s finely calibrated performance, they insure Leonard remains the visual axis.Rylance put on a fright wig to play William Kunstler in “The Trial of the Chicago 7” and wore Mr. Ed-size choppers for his role as the eccentric zillionaire in “Don’t Look Up.” But he’s a master of restraint and he doesn’t need accessories to hold you as he proved with his mesmerizing turn in Steven Spielberg’s Cold War drama “Bridge of Spies.” Rylance’s role here isn’t as rich, but one of the attractions of “The Outfit” is that it allows him to etch his character in pockets of filigreed solitude. Leonard’s focused yet effortless meticulousness when he works — how his hands smooth the fabric and control his enormous shears — define this man more than any line of dialogue. You also get to see Rylance engaging with a worthy foil.That would be Simon Russell Beale, who plays Roy, a gangland boss. Roy enters about midway through the movie. By then, bullets have been fired and blood has splashed across the floor, developments that are nowhere as ominous or tense as watching Leonard and Roy have a polite little talk in the back. Beale has the more overtly showy role. But like Rylance, he builds his characters through meticulously orchestrated moderation — vocal and physical — that faint smile by smile, hushed word by word, shifts the very particles in the air. Together, Rylance and Beale create a little world and a movie within a movie that’s worth watching.The OutfitRated R for gun violence and language. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Deep Water’ Review: Love and Loathing in New Orleans

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      An unhappy husband raises suspicions when his wife’s lovers begin to disappear.Two decades have passed since Adrian Lyne made “Unfaithful,” maybe his best film, though not his best known. (That would be his 1987 sizzler, “Fatal Attraction.”) A slickly accomplished purveyor of the erotic thriller, Lyne doesn’t make love stories so much as lust stories — specifically, the way an incorrigible sexual appetite can rip a life apart.On paper, then, he seems the perfect choice to direct “Deep Water,” an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1957 novel about a dangerously sick suburban marriage. Vic (Ben Affleck) is retired, enjoying his tech-derived fortune by mountain biking and raising snails. (Glistening gastropod close-ups suggest this hobby has some ominous narrative purpose; let me know if you find one.) Vic’s gorgeous wife, Melinda (Ana de Armas) — rarely seen without a glass in one hand and a lover in the other — favors little black dresses that shrug off as easily as her sobriety. Vic might be tortured by her flagrant infidelities, but how can you stay mad at a woman who gets topless just to wash the dishes?Filmed in New Orleans and soaked in boozy parties where Melinda’s public humiliations of her husband earn the pity of Vic’s friends, “Deep Water” (a French version was released in 1981) is a ridiculous murder mystery that could have worked much better as a study of sexual masochism. (The marriage has no heat, yet there’s sly relish in Melinda’s cruelty and a psychological puzzle in Vic’s pained stoicism.) Alternatively, had the story been set in the 1950s of Highsmith’s novel, when divorce was more stigmatized and alcohol the favored alternative, Vic’s forbearance — not to mention all those parties — might have made more sense.As it is, Affleck is left with little to play but a sorry, perpetually glum cuckold. When the movie opens, a previous lover of Melinda’s has mysteriously disappeared. “I killed him,” Vic tells the dimwitted replacement (Brendan C. Miller), and we wonder if he’s capable of joking. And as Melinda’s flings — including a cheesy pianist who woos her by playing “The Lady Is a Tramp” — continue to vanish, a local writer (Tracy Letts) grows suspicious. Even Vic’s 6-year-old daughter (a delightful Grace Jenkins) looks at him askance.None of this is ever less than preposterous. Though heaven knows I’m grateful for any grown-up movie these days, “Deep Water” is in many ways a baffling return for Lyne, whose advertiser’s eye for the allure of an image is repeatedly undercut by Zach Helm and Sam Levinson’s messy, often mystifying screenplay. Eigil Bryld’s caressing camera is fully up to any task his director sets him, but the movie appears chopped into misaligned chunks and dangling loose ends, its scenes spat out as randomly as bingo balls.Originally intended for theatrical release, “Deep Water” has landed on Hulu, possibly because of nervousness over its themes. Yet there’s surprisingly little sex, and what there is has none of the vividness and tactility Lyne is known for. Like Vic’s snails, who must be starved before they can be consumed, “Deep Water” feels like a movie that’s had everything of interest well and truly sucked out.Deep WaterRated R for bored fellatio and passionate murders. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      Jane Campion and the Perils of the Backhanded Compliment

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      Jane Campion’s comment about Venus and Serena Williams reminded our critic of his own night of ‘botched fanciness’ and racial slights.Something about the way the director Jane Campion went overboard on Sunday to identify with, then insult, Venus and Serena Williams at an awards show brought to mind a night of botched fanciness that happened to me. A couple Fridays ago, I went to see some art: a Faith Ringgold retrospective at the New Museum in the afternoon, with friends; Norm Lewis singing at Carnegie Hall in the evening. (That was a solo trip.) For both, I wore a suit.The Ringgold show requires three floors and includes her 1967 masterpiece “American People Series #20: Die,” a blunt, bloody racial-rampage frieze that would be pure physical comedy about the era’s racial cataclysms were it not for the helpless terror in the faces she’s painted (Black men, women and children; white men, women and children). The scale of the canvas helps. It’s huge. Ringgold has always painted Black women in a range of moods, feelings, conditions, beauty. She gives them faces that feature both personal serenity and indicting alarm.I planted myself in a tight corridor that featured three works at the alarm end of things — the “Slave Rape” trio, from 1972. Each is a warm, sizable canvas of a woman nude and agape, framed by patchwork quilting, a signature of Ringgold. I was taking my time with one called “Slave Rape #2: Run You Might Get Away” — the woman is mid-flight, loosely shrouded by leaves, a big gold ring in each ear — when two strangers (women, white) parked themselves between me and the piece and continued a conversation I had heard them having in an adjacent gallery. They noticed neither me nor the depicted distress nor my engagement with it. I waited more than a minute before waving my hand, a gesture that seemed to irritate them.“Is something wrong?,” one stranger asked.“You’re in my way,” I told her.“Please accept our deepest apologies,” said her friend. If a middle ground exists between sincerity and sarcasm, these two had just planted a flag. But they did move, though not immediately, lest I relish some kind of relocation victory, and kept their talk of real estate and art ownership within earshot.The Faith Ringgold painting “American People Series #20: Die,” from 1967, in an  exhibition at the New Museum.Faith Ringgold/ARS, NY; Simbarashe Cha for The New York TimesAfter a drink with my friends I left for Carnegie Hall. A cab made sense. One pulled up, and the driver (male, brown) took a look at me, then noticed a white woman hailing a taxi up ahead and drifted her way, instead. When I jogged over to ask him what just happened — Is something wrong? — I was given no acknowledgment in the way only a guilty cabby can achieve. I chased the car half a block to photograph a plate number that you’d have to be Weegee to get just right. I’m not Weegee.I’d never been to Carnegie Hall. And I liked the idea that Norm Lewis was going to break me in. He played Olivia Pope’s senator ex on “Scandal” and one of the vets in Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods.” He’s got a luscious, flexible baritone that I’d only ever encountered in recorded concerts on PBS. That night, backed by the New York Pops, he gave Stephen Sondheim, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Marvin Gaye the polished jewel treatment and pumped “Ya Got Trouble” with enough breathless gusto to make you wonder, with all due respect to Hugh Jackman, why the current “Music Man” revival isn’t starring him.As a solo performer, this was Lewis’s first show at Carnegie Hall, too. And people were anxious to see him and their beloved Pops. In a queue in the lobby before the show, one such person (woman, white) was making a point to push past me when I turned to ask if she was all right.“We’re going to will-call,” she said of herself and the gentleman she was with.“Ma’am, I think we all are,” I said.“We’re members. Are you?” she asked.I lied, hoping a yes would stanch her aggression.“Of the Pops?”She had me.“I like Norm Lewis,” I told her.“We love the Pops.”Venus Williams, left, and Serena Williams at the Critics Choice Awards; “King Richard,” a movie about their family, earned a best actor award for Will Smith.Frazer Harrison/Getty ImagesI was thinking about my night out a week later when one of the world’s great filmmakers saluted two of the world’s greatest athletes in an acceptance speech at the Critics Choice Awards. Jane Campion had been given the directing prize for a sneaky-deep ranch drama called “The Power of the Dog.” From the stage, Campion (woman, white) saluted Venus and Serena Williams and announced that she had taken up tennis but her body had told her to stop. In her nervous excitement, Campion was charming. She then took curious note of her plight as a woman in the film industry by informing the Williamses that they’ve got nothing on her. “You are such marvels,” she said, through a grin. “However, you do not play against the guys like I have to.”The Williams sisters were in the room that evening because a smart, tangy movie about their family, “King Richard,” was in the nominations mix, alongside Campion’s. “King Richard” is not about the time in 2001 when a California crowd booed and slurred Venus and Serena and their father, Richard, at a top tennis tournament. It’s not about the many mischaracterizations of their bodies, skills and intent in the press and by their peers. It’s not about the insidiously everlasting confusion of one sister for the other, the sort of thing that, just a few weeks ago, took place on a page of this newspaper. It’s not even about their fight, Venus’s particularly, to get women’s prize money even with men’s “King Richard” is about how the sisters’ parents molded and loved and coached them into the sort of people who can handle sharp backhands and backhanded compliments with the same power and poise.Even though Campion’s errant backhand had flown wide, the room lurched into cheers. Some of the applause came from Serena Williams, who has watched many a shot sail long. I had to desist further thought about the meaning of Campion’s aside. It was too confused. Was this a wish for the establishment of gendered guardrails for directors at award shows or the elimination of such distinctions in sports? Are there no men to be contended with in tennis? The line separating argument from accusation and accusation from self-aggrandizement was murky. I thought instead about the costs of the murk.Sunday afternoon, the Williamses got dressed up to celebrate some art. And somebody stood before them and challenged the validity of their membership, here in Campion’s restricted vision of sisterhood. The next day, Campion gushed an apology. These slips and slights and presumptions have a way of lingering, though. Their underlying truth renders them contrition-proof. I had every intention of keeping my date with Faith and Norm to myself. These incidents aren’t rare in fancyland, and therefore don’t warrant a constant spotlight because standing in its glare is exhausting. But Venus. Her face does something as Campion speaks. A knowing cringe. She and her family came out to soak up more of the praise being lavished on art about their life. They were invitees turned, suddenly, into interlopers, presenting one minute, plunged through a trap door the next. Faith Ringgold would recognize the discomfort. She painted it over and over. Run you might get away. But you probably won’t. More

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      The Secret Sounds That Make Up ‘Dune’

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      Denis Villeneuve and his sound team explain how far they went to achieve an aural experience that would feel somewhat familiar, an unusual approach for sci-fi.Sand in Death Valley was manipulated in different ways for the “Dune” soundscape.“Dune” is in the details, and Denis Villeneuve knows nearly all of them. The French Canadian filmmaker grew up obsessed with Frank Herbert’s seminal sci-fi novel and has spent the last few years of his life adapting that 1965 book into a budding film franchise. The first installment came out in October and the second one will begin shooting later this year, so if there’s anything you want to know about the inner workings of “Dune,” Villeneuve is the man to ask.But last week in Malibu, Calif., as he regarded a blue cereal box with evident amusement, Villeneuve admitted that one key detail had eluded him until now.“I’m learning today there were Rice Krispies in ‘Dune,’” he said.We were at Zuma Beach on the kind of warm March afternoon that New York readers would surely prefer I not dwell on, and Villeneuve’s Oscar-nominated sound editors Mark Mangini and Theo Green were nearby, pouring cereal into the sand. This wasn’t meant to provoke any sea gulls; Mangini and Green wanted to demonstrate the sound-gathering techniques they used to enliven Arrakis, the desert planet where the “Dune” hero Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) discovers his destiny.Theo Green, left, and Mark Mangini, demonstrating their work in Death Valley, were part of the Oscar-nominated sound team on “Dune.”“One of the most compelling images in the film is when Paul first steps foot onto the planet,” Mangini said. Since the sand on Arrakis is laced with “spice,” a valuable and hallucinogenic substance, the sound designers had to find an audible way to convey that something special was underfoot.By way of explaining it to me, Mangini ground his work boot into the soft patch of sand that he had dusted with Rice Krispies. The sand produced a subtle, beguiling crunch, and Villeneuve broke out into a big smile. Though he’d heard it plenty of times in postproduction, he had no idea what the sound designers had concocted to capture that sound.“One of the things I love about cinema is the cross between NASA kind of technology and gaffer tape,” Villeneuve said. “To use a super-expensive mic to record Rice Krispies — that deeply moves me!”Green using Rice Krispies to explain how a crunch was achieved in “Dune.”“Dune” is full of those clever, secret noises, nearly all of which are derived from real life: Of the 3,200 bespoke sounds created for the movie, only four were made solely with electronic equipment and synthesizers. Green noted that with many science-fiction and fantasy films, there is a tendency to indicate futurism by using sounds that we’ve never heard before.“But it was very much Denis’s vision that this movie should feel every bit as familiar as certain areas of planet Earth,” Green said. “We’re not putting you in a sci-fi movie, we’re putting you in a documentary about people on Arrakis.”Explore the 2022 Academy AwardsThe 94th Academy Awards will be held on March 27 in Los Angeles.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?Best Actress Race: Who will win? There are cases to be made for and against each contender, and no one has an obvious advantage.A Hit: Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “Drive My Car” is the season’s unlikely Oscar smash. The director Bong Joon Ho is happy to discuss its success.  Making History: Troy Kotsur, who stars in “CODA” as a fisherman struggling to relate to his daughter, is the first deaf man to earn an Oscar nomination for acting. ‘Improbable Journey’: “Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom” was filmed on a shoestring budget in a remote Himalayan village. In a first for Bhutan, the movie is now an Oscar nominee.To that end, Green and Mangini made an early expedition into Death Valley to collect natural noises that could be used later for the film’s sonic palette. “When an audience hears acoustic sound, there’s a subconscious box that gets checked that says, this is real,” Mangini said. But within that reality, Mangini isn’t afraid to push things a bit: While working on “Mad Max: Fury Road,” for which he won an Oscar, Mangini mixed the sounds of dying animals into the crash of the movie’s most formidable vehicle.For another “Dune” demonstration, he began to bury a small nub of a microphone in the sand. “This is an underwater microphone, a hydrophone,” Mangini explained. “It’s the sort of thing you’d usually drop in the ocean to record a humpback whale, but we found another way to use it.”In “Dune,” the characters use a staked device called a thumper to rhythmically pound the sand and summon massive sandworms. To get that sound, Mangini and Green buried their hydrophone at different depths in Death Valley, then used a mallet to whack the sand above the buried mic.One sound involved a microphone normally used underwater.A mallet was then used to whack the sand above the mic.“We’d also record it above ground to get the actual sound of the impact,” Mangini said, demonstrating his method for me with a few sharp thwacks into the Zuma Beach sand. “Each one of these hits is the ka-dunk of the thumper, as you see it in the film.”To give the sandworm’s gaping maw some grandeur, Green recorded a friend’s dog as it gnashed its teeth, while Mangini added grumbling whale noises that matched the rhythm of the thumper — gunk, gunk, gunk. And how did they convey the sandworm rushing through the sand, liquefying every particle in its path?“I had this idea of taking a microphone, covering it with a condom and furrowing it under the ground,” Mangini said.“I was not aware of that,” Villeneuve said, trailing off. His sound designers laughed. “We never told Denis about the condom,” Green said.Green and Mangini worked with Villeneuve on his previous film, “Blade Runner 2049,” and the director brought them both on board as soon as he nabbed the rights to Herbert’s novel, instead of waiting until postproduction, as is more customary.Denis Villeneuve brought the sound team on board early so it could have “the proper time to investigate and explore and make mistakes.”“I wanted Theo and Mark to have the proper time to investigate and explore and make mistakes,” Villeneuve said. “It’s something I got really traumatized by with my early movies, where you spend years working on a screenplay, then months shooting and editing it, and then right at the end, the sound guy comes and you barely have enough time.”By hiring his sound designers early and setting them loose, Villeneuve could even take some of their discoveries and weave them into Hans Zimmer’s score, producing a holistic aural experience where the percussive music composition and pervasive sound design can sometimes be mistaken for one another.Our Reviews of the 10 Best-Picture Oscar NomineesCard 1 of 10“Belfast.” More

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      Mandy Patinkin Finds Healing in Refugee Work and Praying With His Dog

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      Right when the actor thought he’d done almost everything, Ken Burns offered him the role of Benjamin Franklin, and, just maybe, held off an early retirement.Mandy Patinkin arrived so long ago in his career — winning a Tony Award for “Evita” and an Emmy for “Chicago Hope” and being the object of adoration and imitation as Inigo Montoya in “The Princess Bride” — that he likes to jest he’s getting ready to leave.“I keep seeing the exit door,” Patinkin, 69, said jovially on a video call from his cabin in the Hudson Valley in New York.In fact, he toyed with retiring after “Homeland” ended in 2020 but discovered during the pandemic that he missed the structure, the learning and even the anxiety of acting.Around that time, Ken Burns came knocking.Burns wanted Patinkin’s sonorous voice for “Benjamin Franklin,” his two-part dissection of the multifaceted, often contradictory founding father: a writer and publisher, a scientist and an inventor, a diplomat and signer of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, a slave owner and, later in life, an abolitionist.“And, all of a sudden, I’m sitting in front of a microphone with some of the world’s greatest historians guiding me through how to speak a language that was somewhat older and from the queen’s England at times,” Patinkin said. When he finally saw the four-hour documentary (premiering on April 4 and 5 on PBS), he was stunned by what he thought he knew about Franklin and didn’t.“I couldn’t get over that I got to be this guy,” he said. “Talk about parts you get to play.”But singing is his first love. And after being stranded without an accompanist during the pandemic, Patinkin — who hears music even in the mundane and can transform a classic into something wondrously unfamiliar — is back to working three hours a day with the pianist Adam Ben-David in preparation for a new concert tour beginning May 25 in Baltimore.“I’ve never been happier,” Patinkin said.In the meantime, he and his wife, the Obie-winning actress and writer Kathryn Grody, keep their creativity alive and their opinions heard through wildly popular social media videos masterminded by their son Gideon.“We have this crazy platform,” Patinkin said, “and he realizes what a gift it is to have a voice like this.”Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. His new grandson I was in tears last night. I’ve got this grandchild in my arms, and I couldn’t believe this family was together after all this time, at this moment in our history, with this new life. In the midst of such cuckoo-ness, my son, Isaac, and daughter-in-law, Lennon, had the courage to bring a child into this world. I can’t imagine something more hopeful.2. Praying with his dog, Becky With the pandemic and all the healing that needs to be done, I thought, “I’ve got to feed this dog twice a day. I’ll say the healing prayer for the whole world.” So I do three Jewish prayers: the Shema first; then the “Mi Shebeirach,” which my dear friend Debbie Friedman made the popular version of for the reform Jewish community; then the blessing over breaking bread. And she knows to sit there. She knows each melody, and she knows when it’s getting close. Then I say, “OK,” and she goes to her bowl.3. Live performance Work-wise, my favorite thing to do is to sing music in concert for people all over the world. I finished a 30-city concert tour the week before the pandemic hit. Then, all of a sudden, we’re locked up. My piano player, Adam Ben-David, and I started working again about two, three weeks ago.It’s interesting. The concert I put together, called “Diaries,” [reflected] what was going on in our country, with the election and the polarization. Friends would come and went, “Wow, we loved what you had to say, but that’s pretty dark.” So we changed. I went over hundreds of [more upbeat] songs, and I said to Adam, “Let’s put all these songs back in our bones and our bodies and work them together because I need happier stuff.” And that’s what we’ve been doing — welcoming us back to being alive with the music.4. International Rescue Committee They are trying to take myself and my wife and my son Gideon to the Ukraine-Polish border as ambassadors from the I.R.C. to bring attention where attention must be paid. Our initial question was, “What is the Covid situation in Poland?” And then you think of the optics. We’ve been vaccinated and boosted. Essentially what’s there now, you’re well-protected and you won’t die from it. And I thought, “I’m going to wear a mask next to these women and children who have been fleeing for their lives? I’m going to keep a distance from these people when they need to be held and near humanity who cares?” And I finally came, “No. I’ll take my chances because they need people that pay attention. I’m finished being afraid.”5. National Dance Institute We have a place in the country that we love. One day, I believe my son Isaac was 3 or 4, this car drives up and this guy gets out and he comes running down the mountain, and he goes, “Hello, hello, hello! I want to meet Isaac!” And this is Jacques d’Amboise, the true Pied Piper of the world. He grabs Isaac and he says, “You’re going to be a dancer!” We don’t know what he’s talking about. Then Isaac became part of the Tiny Tots [renamed the First Team in 2004], and we became part of Jacques’s life.6. “Benjamin Franklin” by Walter Isaacson and “John Adams” by David McCullough I started reading the Isaacson book again, and I couldn’t get over how much I missed the first time I read it. These guys are just phenomenal history teachers. You know, as you read any book, it’s mentioning all kinds of other books along the way. Isaacson is constantly nodding the head toward McCullough. So I’m three-quarters of the way through McCullough’s book, which I’ve tried to read countless times in the past. And because of this experience, I’m sailing through it.7. “C’mon C’mon” from the director Mike Mills I’m a member of the Academy, so we watch everything, and my favorite movie was “C’mon C’mon” with Joaquin Phoenix. That movie is so great. There’s a kid [Woody Norman] in it who’s just off-the-charts brilliant. And Joaquin is, bar none, my favorite actor of this time. Period. There’s a lot of great ones out there, so that’s saying something because this man is the gift to the arts, and this is one of his most beautiful performances. Run to see it.8. “Lucy and Desi” from Amy Poehler I couldn’t get over what a gorgeous job she did telling that love story — the influence they had on the whole industry, but, really, on the human heart. I got to meet Lucy when I was doing “Evita” in 1979 at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles. There’s a knock on my dressing room door after a performance, and I hear this voice [Patinkin mimics in gibberish a gravelly baritone voice], and I go, “That’s my Aunt Ethel!” And then this woman comes in, and my Aunt Ethel had red hair. So she walks into my dressing room like a bulldozer, talking in that voice. And I go, “Aunt Ethel!” I even think I said, “How’s Uncle Joe?” And at some point it hits me, “Oh my God, you’re not Aunt Ethel. You’re Lucy!”9. Toy trains My father came home when I was 8 years old, and he bought me, supposedly — me, spelled himself — a Lionel toy train, an engine of which I still have. To this day, it runs perfectly, with almost no maintenance whatsoever. Over the years, I built layouts in my basement on a 4-by-8-foot sheet of plywood. Then we got this place in the country and there was an old barn, and we took the upstairs and made it a train room. We slowly built this wonderful layout. My kids were not interested when they were younger, but for Hanukkah or my birthday, they would give an hour in the train room with Dad. That would be their gift to me.10. Quiet The thing I love most these days is quiet and being with my wife, doing nothing and just having her nearby. It’s my greatest pleasure after 44 years of two people that spend some time loving each other and some time killing each other that, after all this time, we can gaze into the face of our grandchild and do it together. That we have each other, and we’ve stuck it out through all the troubles. More