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      Nine Ned Beatty Movies and Shows to Stream

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      This prolific actor may not have been the star of these pictures but he brought a depth that made his time onscreen count.Ned Beatty, who died on Sunday at 83, was the quintessential character actor. He looked like a regular guy, not a movie star, so he didn’t play leading roles — he played supporting characters, best friends, background figures and bureaucrats. He did so in 165 films and television shows before retiring quietly in 2013, and he always understood the assignment; some projects were great, others less so, but Beatty always shone Here are a few of his highlights, and where you can watch them. More

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      Hollywood Take on Christchurch Massacre Provokes Anger in New Zealand

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      Members of the Muslim community denounced as “white saviorism” the director’s decision to focus on the response by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.AUCKLAND, New Zealand — A planned Hollywood film about the Christchurch mosque massacre has drawn a sharp backlash in New Zealand, with Muslims denouncing the director’s decision to focus not on the community’s pain and resilience, but instead on the response by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.More than 60,000 people have signed a petition calling for the movie to be shut down. Ms. Ardern released a statement distancing herself from the film, which she said she had not been consulted on. The mayor of Christchurch said that the movie’s crews would not be welcome in her city, and one New Zealand producer dropped out of the production on Monday.Some Muslims said the film, as proposed, would exploit their trauma and engage in “white saviorism” by making Ms. Ardern the central character.“It’s really intensely hurtful,” said Guled Mire, a Fulbright scholar at Cornell University who is a member of New Zealand’s Muslim community. He added that he and others had learned of the movie only through social media. “The grief is still very raw for a lot of the victims, their families and for the community as a whole.”The film, announced on Thursday, is called “They Are Us,” taking its title from Ms. Ardern’s comments about the Muslim community after the 2019 shootings at two mosques, in which more than 50 people died. It would star the Australian actress Rose Byrne as a grieving Ms. Ardern.The film’s director, the New Zealand screenwriter Andrew Niccol, told Deadline that “the film addresses our common humanity, which is why I think it will speak to people around the world.” He added, “It is an example of how we should respond when there’s an attack on our fellow human beings.”While Ms. Ardern has been praised globally for her compassionate response to the massacre, Muslims in New Zealand said the movie’s focus on her was part of a long pattern in Hollywood of marginalizing minority populations.“It was quite shocking to see that, in 2021, we are still making these films which you would probably see in the 1920s or ’30s in Hollywood, where white saviors go into the desert,” said Ghazaleh Golbakhsh, an Iranian-New Zealand writer, academic and filmmaker. “It all kind of harks back to this kind of colonialist and Orientalist fantasy.”Jacinda Ardern, the prime minister of New Zealand, released a statement distancing herself from the movie.Nick Perry/Associated PressThough reports in the American news media suggested that the Muslim community had consulted on the film, multiple members said that they did not know of anyone who had been involved in the project.“The issue is that the film is about Jacinda Ardern, but it’s not her story to tell,” said Adibah Khan, a spokeswoman for New Zealand’s National Islamic Youth Association, which organized the petition. “It’s the story of the victims and their victim community, and the truth is, they haven’t been consulted at all.”Mohamed Mostafa, whose father was killed in the attacks, said he felt taken advantage of by the film project. “Someone’s trying to exploit my pain and agony and suffering — and for what benefit?” he said.He added that white saviorism was a false narrative. “There’s no saviors here, because we have 51 victims in the story,” he said. “If we had a savior, we wouldn’t have any victims.”Ms. Golbakhsh compared the proposed movie to “Green Book,” the Oscar-winning film that was dismissed by its detractors as a “racial reconciliation fantasy.”“It is kind of encouraging the idea that anyone nonwhite is either too weak, or not as interesting, and therefore just kind of pushes them to the background, as not a three-dimensional character,” she said.A report from the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative released last week found that Muslims, who make up nearly a quarter of the global population, represented less than 2 percent of speaking characters in top-grossing films made between 2017 and 2019. Nearly 20 percent of the Muslim characters who did appear were killed by the end of the film, often in a violent death.“I sincerely hope that this project gets canceled and we don’t ever hear about it ever again,” Mr. Mostafa said. “When we’re ready to tell the story, we might do it, one day. And it’s going to be our story to tell.” More

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      Ned Beatty, Actor Known for ‘Network’ and ‘Deliverance,’ Dies at 83

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      Mr. Beatty’s career spanned more than four decades and more than 150 roles in movies such as “Superman,” “All the President’s Men,” “Rudy” and “Back to School.”Ned Beatty, who during a prolific acting career that spanned more than four decades earned an Oscar nomination for his role in “Network” and gave a cringe-inducing performance as a weekend outdoorsman assaulted by backwoods brutes in “Deliverance,” died on Sunday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 83.His death was confirmed by Deborah Miller, Mr. Beatty’s manager, who did not immediately provide details on the cause. Complete information on his survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Beatty appeared in more than 150 movies and television projects over the course of his career, frequently cast in supporting roles. While the beefy actor was not known as a leading man of the screen, he became associated with some of Hollywood’s most enduring films.His credits include “All the President’s Men” (1976), “Superman” (1978), “Rudy” (1993) and “Back to School” (1986).On television, Mr. Beatty played Stanley Bolander, the detective known as “Big Man,” on “Homicide: Life on the Street,” appearing on the television series from 1993 to 1995. He also played Ed Conner, the father of John Goodman’s character Dan Conner, on “Roseanne.”In 1976, Mr. Beatty was cast by Sidney Lumet and Paddy Chayefsky in “Network,” the critically acclaimed satire about a television network’s struggling ratings and a tube-obsessed nation. His character, Arthur Jensen, gave a memorable monologue in the movie, earning Mr. Beatty an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor.In the scene, Mr. Beatty, playing the mustachioed network boss, summons the character Howard Beale, the anchorman played by Peter Finch, into the corporate boardroom and draws the curtains. With the camera trained on Mr. Beatty, who was standing at the opposite end of a conference table lined with banker lamps, he unleashed a ferocious soliloquy. Mr. Beale had a lot to learn about the ways of the corporate world, Mr. Beatty’s character sermonized.“And you have meddled with the primeval forces of nature, Mr. Beale,” Mr. Beatty said, his voice roaring. “And you will atone.”Mr. Beatty then modulated his delivery.“Am I getting through to you?” he said in a normal speaking voice.In “Mad as Hell: The Making of ‘Network’ and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies,” a 2014 book written by Dave Itzkoff, a culture reporter for The New York Times, Mr. Beatty said that he had been intimidated by the length of the speech, but excited by the character and the film.To get the filmmakers to commit to giving him the role, Mr. Beatty said, he told them that he had another movie offer for more money.“I was lying like a snake,” Mr. Beatty said. “I think they liked the fact that I was at least trying to be sly. I was doing something that maybe might be in their lexicon.”Mr. Beatty made his film debut in “Deliverance,” the 1972 big screen adaptation of James Dickey’s novel about four friends whose canoeing trip in rural Georgia turns calamitous. Stripped down to white underpants, his character, Bobby, is forced to “squeal like a pig” by a hillbilly before he is raped.The line would go down in movie infamy.“‘Squeal like a pig.’ How many times has that been shouted, said or whispered to me, since then?” Mr. Beatty wrote in a 1989 opinion piece for The New York Times.Mr. Beatty did not distance himself from the scene.“I suppose when someone (invariably a man) shouts this at me I am supposed to duck my head and look embarrassed at being recognized as the actor who suffered this ignominy,” he wrote. “But I feel only pride about being a part of this story, which the director John Boorman turned into a film classic. I think Bill McKinney (who portrayed the attacker) and I played the ‘rape’ scene about as well as it could be played.”Ned Beatty and Jon Voight in “Deliverance” (1972), in which Mr. Beatty made his feature film debut.Warner Bros., via PhotofestBorn on July 6, 1937, in Louisville, Ky., Mr. Beatty spent much of the early part of his acting career in regional theater, including eight years at the Arena Stage in Washington. In a 2003 interview, he told The Times that he averaged 13 to 15 shows per year onstage at the start of his career and spent as many as 300 days performing.In 2003, Mr. Beatty starred as Big Daddy in the Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams’s “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” appearing with Jason Patric and Ashley Judd. He was reprising his performance in the role of the Southern plantation owner, for which he had been nominated for an Olivier Award as part of the revival’s original London production.Candidly assessing his co-stars, Mr. Beatty said that Broadway had come to rely too heavily on celebrities, thrusting them into challenging roles they did not have the acting chops to handle.“In theater you want to go from here to there, you want it to be about something,” Mr. Beatty said. “Stage actors learn how to do that. Film actors often don’t even think about it. They do what the director wants them to do, and they never inform their performance with — call it what you wish — through-line, objective.”In “Superman” in 1978, Mr. Beatty played Otis, the bumbling toady of the villain Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman), a role that he reprised in “Superman II” in 1980.In 1986, he was cast in a comedic role as the gushing and unscrupulous Dean Martin of the fictional Grand Lakes University in “Back to School,” offering admission to Thornton Melon, the big and tall clothing tycoon (Rodney Dangerfield), in exchange for donating a building. The head of the business school in the film objected to the quid pro quo.“But I’d just like to say, in all fairness to Mr. Melon here, it was a really big check,” Mr. Beatty’s character retorted.Mr. Beatty delivered another memorable performance in a small role as Daniel Ruettiger, the blue-collar father in “Rudy,” the 1993 movie about a University of Notre Dame walk-on football player who makes the team. As the father enters the stadium for the first time, he is overcome by the moment.“This is the most beautiful sight these eyes have ever seen,” Mr. Beatty said. More

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      Milton Moses Ginsberg, Unconventional Filmmaker, Dies at 85

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      His movies about a psychiatrist’s disintegration and a werewolf working in the White House bombed. But they both drew favorable attention many years later.Milton Moses Ginsberg, who directed two ambitious but eccentric films before falling into obscurity, one about the meltdown of a psychiatrist and the other about a press aide in a Nixon-like administration who becomes a murderous werewolf, died on May 23 in his apartment in Manhattan. He was 85.The cause was cancer, said his wife, Nina Ginsberg.Mr. Ginsberg, a film editor determined to make his own movies, wrote and directed “Coming Apart” (1969), a raw black-and-white film that used a single, almost entirely static camera to document the loveless trysts and psychological disintegration of a psychiatrist, played by Rip Torn, who surreptitiously records his encounters with a camera inside a mirrored box.“Coming Apart” received mixed reviews, at best. But the one that devastated Mr. Ginsberg was from The Village Voice’s Andrew Sarris, who wrote that “if everybody in the cast had refused to strip for action or inaction, ‘Coming Apart’ would have crumbled commercially into a half-baked amateur movie incapable of selling enough tickets to fill a phone booth.”Mr. Ginsberg blamed that review for the film’s box-office failure.“That was it,” he told The New York Times in 1998, adding: “I had done everything I wanted to do. And nothing happened.”Rip Torn in Mr. Ginsberg’s “Coming Apart.” The film received mixed reviews at best and failed at the box office when it was released in 1969. Mr. Ginsberg’s disappointment was eased somewhat when the Museum of Modern Art screened “Coming Apart” in 1998. Kino InternationalHe followed “Coming Apart” in 1973 with another low-budget film: “The Werewolf of Washington,” a campy political parody inspired by the classic horror film “The Wolf Man” (1941), which terrified Mr. Ginsberg as a boy, and by President Richard M. Nixon, who terrified him as a man.In Mr. Ginsberg’s film, released more than a year into the Watergate scandal, Dean Stockwell plays an assistant press secretary who turns into a werewolf at inopportune moments, like when he’s bowling with the president, and murders characters based on Katharine Graham, the publisher of The Washington Post, and Martha Mitchell, the outspoken wife of Attorney General John N. Mitchell.“The film isn’t advertised as a documentary,” the syndicated columnist Nicholas von Hoffman wrote, “but when you think about what’s been going on around this town, you couldn’t tell it from the plot.”In 1975, after Mr. Ginsberg received a diagnosis of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, he fell into a depression that lifted only after he met and married Nina Posnansky, a painter, in 1983. She and his brother, Arthur, survive him.After the commercial failure of his feature films, Mr. Ginsberg returned to film editing. He worked on various projects, including the Oscar-winning documentaries “Down and Out in America” (1986), about unemployed and homeless people left behind in the economy, which was directed by the actress Lee Grant, and “The Personals” (1998), about a group of older people in a theater group.He was in limbo, he wrote in Film Comment in 1999, for having made “Coming Apart,” which he wryly called “murder on an audience.”“So if oblivion is what you crave, for both yourself and your movie, follow me!” he added.Mr. Ginsberg never made another feature, but in recent years he finished several short video essays, among them “Kron: Along the Avenue of Time” (2011), a phantasmagorical exploration of his life taken through a microscopic journey into intricate watch movements.Mr. Ginsberg in his Manhattan apartment in 1998. “If oblivion is what you crave, for both yourself and your movie,” he wrote in the magazine Film Comment in 1999, “follow me!” Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMilton Moses Ginsberg was born on Sept. 22, 1935, in the Bronx. His father, Elias, was a cutter in the garment district, and his mother, Fannie (Weis) Ginsberg, was a homemaker.After graduating from the Bronx High School of Science, Mr. Ginsberg received a bachelor’s degree in literature from Columbia University. Italian films like Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” (1960) inspired him to make movies, but in the 1960s he worked instead as a film editor at NBC News, held a production job with the documentarians Albert and David Maysles, and was an assistant at “Candid Camera,” the popular television series that used concealed cameras to capture people in various situations, which he said influenced the furtive recording of the psychiatrist’s guests in “Coming Apart.”Mr. Ginsberg’s disappointment at the response to his features was eased somewhat when the Museum of Modern Art screened “Coming Apart” in 1998. But he was too pained by its reception nearly 30 years before to watch it; he did not enter the theater until it ended, when he spoke to the audience. MoMA has shown it a few times since.“It was like nothing I’d ever seen,” Laurence Kardish, the former longtime senior curator of MoMA’s film department, who had seen “Coming Apart” during its original release, said by phone. “It was very explicit and very raw and struck me as an essential New York film, showing a New Yorker’s enthusiasm for self-examination.”When “Coming Apart” was released on video in 2000, an article in The Chicago Tribune called it “stylistically audacious.” And in 2011, the Brooklyn Academy of Music screened both of Mr. Ginsberg’s films. After its associate curator, Jacob Perlin, moved to Metrograph, the repertory theater on the Lower East Side, where he is now the artistic and programming director, he held a 50th-anniversary screening of “Coming Apart” in 2019. Restorations of both of Mr. Ginsberg’s movies have been completed by the film company Kino Lorber.The belated acceptance of his films offered some redemption to Mr. Ginsberg.“In 2011, Milton said that he’s had two afterlives,” Mr. Perlin, who became friends with Mr. Ginsberg, said by phone. “When MoMA showed ‘Coming Apart,’ and 2011, when I showed both his films.” More

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      A Film Tries to Make a Difference for Domestic Violence Survivors

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      “And So I Stayed” examines how the courts treat women who kill their abusers. The movie played a role in one case that resulted in freedom after a conviction.In 2013, Tanisha Davis, a 26-year-old woman from Rochester, N.Y., was sentenced to 14 years in prison for killing her boyfriend, at whose hands she suffered, she said, nearly seven years of abuse, including choking, death threats and a beating on the night he died. The judge agreed that she was a victim of domestic violence but said her response did not merit leniency. “You handled the situation all wrong,” he told her. “You could have left.”In 2021, because of a new law that allows survivors of domestic violence more nuanced consideration in the courts, the same judge released Davis, thanks in part to a documentary that helped frame her case.It’s not uncommon for documentary projects to have an impact on legal proceedings, once they’ve found an audience and built public attention. But the film that helped Davis, “And So I Stayed,” was not yet released — it wasn’t even finished — when the filmmakers, Natalie Pattillo and Daniel A. Nelson, put together a short video for the court, describing her life.“You could see the strength of the ties she had to her family and the strength of the support she would have” if she were released, said Angela N. Ellis, one of her lawyers. The prosecutor and judge both mentioned watching the footage when they agreed, in March, to set her free.In her eight years in prison, Davis, 34, spoke to her son, now 15, every day. Now that she’s home, “I can just call him in the next room,” she said. “I can’t even explain that joy. I cry happy tears all the time.”For the filmmakers, it was an unexpectedly bright ending to an often heartbreaking and troubling film. “And So I Stayed,” which will have its premiere Saturday at the Brooklyn Film Festival (viewable online through June 13), is personal for Pattillo, who is a survivor herself and whose sister was killed by a boyfriend in 2010. The documentary grew out of her thesis project at Columbia Journalism School, where she met Nelson, her co-director.The filmmaker Natalie Pattillo is a domestic-violence survivor.Gwen Capistran“I didn’t realize how common it was, the gravity of women being incarcerated for defending themselves or their children,” Pattillo said. “Once I found out, I couldn’t stop reporting,” in an effort to show just how misunderstood, and punitive, these cases are within the justice system.The film’s first focus was Kim Dadou Brown, who served 17 years in prison for killing her abusive boyfriend. She became an advocate, traveling to Albany to needle New York lawmakers about the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act, the long-simmering legislation that eventually helped free Davis. Introduced in 2011, it was finally passed in 2019, after Democrats flipped the State Senate.The act is among the few laws in the country that grant judges more leniency in sentencing domestic violence victims who commit crimes against their abusers. It follows a growing, research-backed understanding of the patterns of abusive relationships, and the unique hold they have on people within them.“Leaving is the hardest part,” and the most dangerous, Dadou Brown said. “I thought that all men hit, and so I stayed with mine, so I knew which way the blows would come.”After Dadou Brown, a Rochester native and former health-care worker, was paroled in 2008, she volunteered with survivors and crisscrossed the state for rallies — even when money was tight because her felony status made jobs hard to find, she said. With 17 earrings (one for each year of her incarceration) and her signature false eyelashes, “she’s just a force,” Pattillo said. “It’s pure tenacity. That’s Kim.”Dadou Brown has become a fierce advocate for the Domestic Violence Survivors Justice Act, which was finally passed in 2019.Libby March for The New York TimesWhen the bill passed, there was elation among its supporters and the filmmakers. But they kept their cameras rolling.One case that was considered a surefire test of the act was that of Nicole Addimando, a young mother of two in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., who in 2017 fatally shot Christopher Grover, her live-in boyfriend and the children’s father. The film includes police camera footage of that night, when she was found disoriented and driving around in the wee hours, her 4- and 2-year-olds in the back seat.Her case made national headlines because of the severity of the abuse she said she endured: bites and black eyes; bruises and burns to her body, including while she was pregnant, that were documented by medical professionals; rapes that Grover videotaped and uploaded to a porn site. In the film, a social worker calls it not just assault, but “sexual torture.” In 2020, Addimando was sentenced to 19 years to life for second-degree manslaughter; the judge denied that the survivors justice act was applicable.“I felt like we failed her,” said Dadou Brown, who was at the sentencing.The film looks at the case of Nicole Addimando, who was sentenced to 19 years to life for killing her abuser. A judge ruled that the new law didn’t apply to her.Daniel A. NelsonIn the film, Addimando is heard mostly as a voice on the phone from prison; in one call, her mother tries to console her that at least she’s alive, that she escaped the abuse. “I’m still not free,” she replies, weeping.Though there are no nationwide statistics on the number of women incarcerated after defending themselves against abusers, federal research suggests that about half of the women in prison have experienced past physical abuse or sexual violence, a majority from romantic partners. Black women are disproportionately victimized through both intimate partner violence and the justice system: They are the most likely to be killed by a romantic partner and more likely to end up in prison, according to Bernadine Waller, a scholar at Adelphi University.In bringing stories like these to the screen, said Nelson, the filmmaker, the aim was not to dispute who pulled a trigger, but to contextualize those convicted. “The legal system forces you to create the perfect victim,” he said, “and a prosecutor will do everything in their power to characterize a survivor into not fitting into that box.” (In Addimando’s case, the judge said she “reluctantly consented” to the sexual abuse.)Garrard Beeney, a lawyer for Addimando, who is awaiting a decision on her appeal, said the documentary’s examination of the way the judicial system treats survivors is “a necessary, but I also think, not sufficient step,” in changing the process. Police, prosecutors, and judges have to be educated on how to think about domestic violence, he said. “We need that kind of retraining more immediately than a gradual process of understanding.”Dadou Brown being filmed by Julian Lim, center, and Daniel A. Nelson. The film grew out of a thesis project. Natalie Pattillo/Grit PicturesFor Pattillo, who had two of her three children while making the film, some moments felt overwhelmingly raw. “There’s survivor’s guilt, always, when you’re dealing with trauma,” she said, adding, in reference to Addimando, “Why did I get to be OK and not Nikki? Why do her kids not get to be tucked in by her every night?”But it was also “very healing,” she added, “to have a hand in making sure the survivors feel seen and heard and believed through this film.”It originally ended on a dark note, at a vigil for Addimando. Then came the Davis case. The filmmakers were there on the day she was released from Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. Reacclimating to life outside — during a pandemic — is still challenging, Davis said last week. But she wanted her story told as a warning for victims, and a beacon. The filmmakers plan to make the documentary available to those in the legal system — “a tool kit,” Nelson said, on how to employ the new law.Dadou Brown was also at Bedford Hills; she drove Davis’s family there. Her advocacy, Dadou Brown said, had become her life’s calling. “I feel so fortunate to have so many dream-come-true moments,” she said. “Even coming home from prison. My next dream-come-true moment will be bringing Nikki home.” More

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      Baron Davis Directs Now. If There’s a ‘Space Jam 3,’ He Wants In.

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      Baron Davis has long been a showman. During his N.B.A. career, which lasted from 1999 to 2012, Davis was known as one of the flashiest stars in the league. His best-known play was a 2007 playoff dunk for the Golden State Warriors on the Utah Jazz’s Andrei Kirilenko, which was so instantly memorable that Davis didn’t bother arguing the technical foul he received for celebrating too vociferously. That has long been Davis: an over-the-top talent ready to entertain at a moment’s notice. More

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      Four Secrets About ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’

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      As Steven Spielberg’s classic adventure celebrates its 40th anniversary, here are behind-the-scenes stories of dizzy rats, raucous boulders and friendly flies.Eight months after introducing the world to Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia and Chewbacca, George Lucas invited Steven Spielberg and the screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan to his assistant’s home in Los Angeles to pitch a new name for adventure. More

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      ‘In the Heights’ | Anatomy of a Scene

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      Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera.Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera. More