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      ‘Home Team’ Review: Fumblecore

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      Kevin James plays the complicated N.F.L. coach Sean Payton in an uncomplicated Netflix family flick.Last week, the N.F.L. head coach Sean Payton — the most successful coach in the New Orleans Saints’ franchise history — both announced his retirement and, for the extra point, had a cameo in a slapstick family flick about the time when the league suspended Payton for his role in a bounty program that gave cash bonuses to players who made opponents leave the field on a stretcher.“Home Team,” directed by the filmmaking brothers Charles and Daniel Kinnane, plays Payton’s punishment as a sincere tragedy. The comic actor Kevin James, as Payton, stares at his sunken eyes in a mirror. Violins swell. There’s an inspirational tickling of piano. Cut to the cornfields of Argyle, Texas, among which Payton will seek redemption by leading his estranged 12-year-old son’s (Tait Blum) ragtag peewee team to a championship.This actually happened, more or less. But “Home Team” is a product of Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison Productions, so the facts have been rejiggered by the screenwriters Chris Titone and Keith Blum to fit the Sandman’s formula: Our hero is a seething screw-up, and everyone else is even worse. It’s yet another comedy of indignities — sorry, make that inanities. Payton’s players puke on the field, his hotel clerk (Jared Sandler) steals all the bagels at the breakfast buffet and his moronic assistant (Gary Valentine) passes out drunk on the bus. Blondes are dumb. Fat people love pizza. And, in a fascinatingly meanspirited subplot that merits its own behind-the-scenes saga, Payton’s ex-wife (Jackie Sandler) has married a loser (Rob Schneider) who eats vegan ice cream, does yoga to get in touch with his feelings and whines that football teaches the wrong lessons about “violence and conflict resolution.” Hey, hippie! A grown man showing emotion is a 15-yard penalty.Home TeamRated PG for kiddie cussing and quasi-comic alcoholism. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘The Exiles’ and ‘Nanny’ Win Top Prizes at Sundance

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      The horror/drama “Nanny” from the first-time feature filmmaker Nikyatu Jusu nabbed the U.S. Grand Jury prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, which was primarily virtual for the second year in a row. The film about a Senegalese nanny working for a privileged family in New York City generated strong reviews and is still looking for distribution.“The Exiles,” about three exiled dissidents from the Tiananmen Square massacre in China, won the Grand Jury prize for U.S. documentary. “Utama,” a Bolivian character portrait, nabbed the top award for world dramatic film, while the Indian documentary “All That Breathes” took the world documentary Grand Jury Prize.Anna Diop in “Nanny,” one of the standouts in this year’s lineup.via Sundance Institute“Cha Cha Real Smooth” nabbed the Audience Award in the U.S. dramatic competition just days after it sealed a $15 million distribution deal with Apple — the biggest sale of the festival. The crowd-pleaser was written, directed by and stars Cooper Raiff in his sophomore effort. Dakota Johnson also stars.In the documentary space, the surprise screening of “Navalny,” which CNN and HBO Max will release later this year, won both the audience prize in the U.S. documentary competition and the Festival Favorite award. The film tracks the aftermath of the poisoning of Alexei Navalny, the Russian opposition leader and one of Vladimir Putin’s harshest critics. Directed by Daniel Roher, “Navalny” debuted to rave reviews and brought additional attention to the dissident who has been jailed in a Russian prison for over a year.In his speech after winning the audience prize, Roher said he hoped the film would help people “learn about the courage it takes to bring down an authoritarian regime.”Other audience awards went to “Girl Picture” (World Cinema Dramatic), “The Territory” (World Cinema Documentary) and “Framing Agnes” (Next).“Today’s awards represent the determination of visionary individuals, whose dynamic work will continue to change the culture,” said Joana Vicente, the chief executive of the Sundance Institute.The festival made a last-minute decision to go virtual because of concerns over the highly contagious Omicron variant, and the awards were announced in a two-hour string of tweets, which included speeches from each of the winners.“Whether you watched from home or one of our seven satellite screens,” said the festival director, Tabitha Jackson, “this year’s festival expressed a powerful convergence; we were present, together, as a community connected through the work.”In addition to Apple’s purchase of “Cha Cha,” other high-profile sales included two by Searchlight Pictures: the horror film “Fresh” from the director Mimi Cave and “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” starring Emma Thompson as a repressed widow who hires a sex worker. Both films will bypass theaters and debut on Hulu in the U.S.Sony Pictures Classics picked up “Living,” the remake of the Akira Kurosawa film “Ikiru” starring Bill Nighy as a civil servant who discovers he has a fatal illness; and IFC Films will release “Resurrection,” starring Rebecca Hall, in theaters before it debuts on the streaming service Shudder. More

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      Sundance Canceled? Don’t Tell These Partygoers.

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      The film festival went virtual again this year. But that didn’t stop some veteran attendees from having a good time in Park City anyway.When the Sundance Film Festival announced that it was canceling all in-person events because of the pandemic two weeks before it began, festival goers could be forgiven for thinking the party was over.There would be no screenings at the Egyptian Theater in Park City, Utah. No swag lounges along Main Street. No celebrity sightings at the Tao Park City pop-up club.But that didn’t stop Rebecca Fielding, 34, who handles client engagement for an interior design firm in Manhattan, from boarding her flight. When she arrived last weekend, she spent the day at a spa before hobnobbing at a Main Street club with hundreds of inebriated people dancing on banquettes and bumping into each other on the dance floor.“This is so fun,” she said, making her way to join them. “So many people are here.”Sundance may have gone virtual this year (screenings through Jan. 30 have moved online), but many film buffs and hangers-on still made the pilgrimage to Park City. Despite the lack of official events, they found ways to party, schmooze and even watch movies.“This has been bigger than in past years,” said Jennifer 8. Lee, 45, a documentary film producer from New York City who has organized housing and activities for hundreds of film lovers during Sundance since 2007. “I was surprised by how many people were still willing to come. We even got extra people after the festival was canceled.”Signs for Sundance were still on display on Main Street in Park City, Utah.Lindsay D’Addato for The New York TimesThrough her film-buff group, Goodside, she had arranged for 80 to 100 people to stay across 12 houses in Park City; the guests had paid up to $500 a night for a room. (While Ms. Lee’s group allowed guests to buy out each others’ reservations, many hotel rooms and Airbnbs were nonrefundable or only eligible for a partial refund or credit when Sundance was canceled. Most airlines only offered flight credit.)Last Saturday night, Ms. Lee held a screening for the one of the festival’s most talked-about films — Lena Dunham’s “Sharp Stick,” a comedy about a 26-year-old babysitter in Los Angeles who loses her virginity to her employer — at her six-bedroom mountainside rental house on Woodside Avenue, a couple blocks from town.About 20 people piled onto couches and the floor, drinking cocktails and snacking on homemade dumplings and curried popcorn, while the film was projected on a screen that one of the guests had brought. To minimize risk, all guests had to take a Covid test.“There is enough critical mass that we can do our own events,” said Ms. Lee, a former reporter for The New York Times. Following the screening, there was a group discussion of the movie.Other houses took turns showing films and hosting dinner parties. “We are probably screening five movies a day across the houses,” Ms. Lee said.After the screenings, the action moved to restaurants and bars around town. At Courchevel Bistro, patrons in fur vests and leather pants dined on baked Brie and elk. At No Name Saloon Bar & Grill, a rowdy sports bar nearby, servers wore “Sundance 2022” shirts and served tequila shots to packs of guys in flannel shirts and cowboy boots.There seemed to be few of the celebrity-filled parties usually held during Sundance to promote films, fashion labels and other publicity-starved brands.A celebration at the new Vintage Room at the St. Regis Deer ValleyLindsay D’Addato for The New York Times“Without the festival, we just had to get more creative in finding ways to entertain them,” said Lucien Alwyn Campbell, a V.I.P. concierge for hire in Park City who estimates that 40 percent of his Sundance clients still made the journey this year. “There were four groups who went snowmobiling. We staged seven dinner parties last night with private chefs for clients who rented homes.”He also held house parties. “Usually, people go to the Tao pop-up during Sundance,” Mr. Campbell, 37, said, “but we obviously didn’t have it this year, so we had to create late-night places for people to dance.”Local bars and clubs, however, remained open and were, in fact, easier to patronize since there were no invitation-only parties to crash. Downstairs, a popular club on Main Street, had a special lineup of DJs and V.I.P. tables for as little as $100 for four.On Saturday night, DJ Spider played a mix of hip-hop and house music to a packed dance floor. By 10:30 p.m., the line to get in was 15 people deep; most of them appeared to be in their 20s and 30s, and many wore Canada Goose parkas and cowboy hats. Maskless partygoers crammed the small dance floor until the 2 a.m. closing time.“Coming through,” said a young server in a tight black ensemble, screaming over the song “I’m Too Sexy” as she fought her way through the crowd with bottles of tequila.In part because it was so last-minute, this year’s cancellation of Sundance did not seem to hurt local businesses as much as it did the previous year, said Brooks Kirchheimer, president-elect of the Park City Chamber of Commerce. “This has actually been great for Park City,” he said. “Usually people come to town and just sit in a movie theater for eight days. Now these people are seeing Park City in a different light. They are doing different activities.”Would-be Sundance attendees actually hit the slopes this year.Lindsay D’Addato for The New York TimesThat includes skiing.Many visitors talked about how they actually had time to hit the slopes this year, and how nice it was to take advantage of Park City’s terrific skiing and its lift along Main Street.“I’ve been coming on and off to Sundance since 2001,” said Elisa Briles, 47, a communications manager for a San Francisco tech company. “This is the first time I’ve ever focus on skiing during Sundance. Usually I am too busy going to movies and parties.”Ms. Briles was taking an afternoon break at a bar at the St. Regis Deer Valley near the Vintage Room, a large, greenhouse-like lounge that opened last month atop Deer Valley. On that Friday afternoon, the lounge was packed with would-be festival goers dressed in metallic snowsuits and furry boots, guzzling Champagne and oysters.“I wouldn’t say it feels like a movie festival here, but it definitely feels like a really fun ski weekend,” Ms. Briles said. “I’m still with my friends. We are still meeting really cool people.” More

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      Sundance Film Festival: ‘Nanny’ Leads a Parade of Scares

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      When a character took a severed human leg out of a fridge in the horror movie “Fresh,” I laughed then hit pause. I had that luxury because, like everyone else this year, I didn’t have to fly to Utah for the Sundance Film Festival but attended this impressively sanguineous edition at home. So I just fast-forwarded to the leg chopper’s grisly comeuppance. As to the movie, it will do fine without my love: It’s already racked up positive reviews and will be released on Hulu, which is owned by Disney because, well, sometimes dreams really do come true.That human shank was part of a colorful parade of body parts on display at this year’s Sundance, which included a veritable charnel house of severed limbs, decapitated heads and disemboweled guts. The specter of the horror maestro David Cronenberg haunts “Resurrection,” a not entirely successful creepfest with an excellent Rebecca Hall, while other movies owed a conspicuous debt to Jordan Peele’s 2017 Sundance hit “Get Out,” notably “Master” (about a Black student and professor at a white-dominated college) and “Emergency,” an entertaining nail-biter about three friends trapped in a white nightmare.A scene from the comedy-turned-thriller “Emergency.”via Sundance InstituteI didn’t love “Fresh,” which uses a captivity freakout to dubious feminist ends, though I may have enjoyed it with more company. Watching horror movies alone isn’t the same as being in a theater filled with other people, including at Sundance. There, the audience tends to be already super-amped-up and excited just to be in the room, seeing a movie for the first time and often with the filmmakers in attendance. The hothouse atmosphere of festivals can be misleading and turn mediocrities into events, certainly, but the noisy clamor of such hype is always outweighed by the joys of experiencing discoveries and revelations with others.This is the second year that Sundance has been forced to jettison its in-person plans because of the pandemic. The festival had instituted sound vax and mask protocols, and the Utah county where Sundance takes place has a higher vaccination rate than either New York or Los Angeles. But Utah also had the third-highest rate of Covid-19 infections in the country as of Monday, as The Salt Lake Tribune recently reported. And, frankly, given how often I had returned home from Sundance with a bad cold or the flu (including a whopper of a mystery bug that flattened me in 2020), I didn’t bother to book another overpriced condo.Rebecca Hall in “Resurrection,” a creepfest with a debt to David Cronenberg.Wyatt Garfield, via Sundance InstituteInstead, I moved into my living room, hooked my laptop to my TV and streamed from the festival’s easy-to-use website. In between movies, I texted some of the same colleagues I hang out with at Sundance when we’re in Park City. In 2020, we had shared our love for “Time,” Garrett Bradley’s documentary about a family’s struggle with the American prison system. (I sat out the festival’s 2021 edition.) This year, we again traded must-sees and must-avoids. “I told you how awful it is,” my friend chided me about “You’ll Never Be Alone,” a shocker about a witch. She had, sigh. We also kept returning to a favorite: “Wow Nanny,” she texted. Oh, yes.A standout in this year’s U.S. dramatic competition, “Nanny” was another one of the selections that I deeply regretted not seeing with an audience, for both its visceral shocks and its lush beauty. In this case, I would have stayed put in my seat, just as I did at home, where pesky domestic distractions can make paying attention a struggle, especially when a movie isn’t strong enough to fully hold you. That was never a problem with “Nanny,” which kept me rapt from the start with its visuals and mysteries, its emotional depths and the tight control that the writer-director Nikyatu Jusu maintains on her material.Set in New York, the story centers on Aisha (the excellent Anna Diop), a Senegalese immigrant who’s recently accepted a nanny position. Her new workplace, a luxurious sprawl as sterile as a magazine layout, sets off immediate alarm bells, as do the overeager smiles and obsessive instructions of her tightly wound white employer, Amy (Michelle Monaghan). The setup recalls that of “Black Girl,” the Senegalese auteur Ousmane Sembène’s 1966 classic film about the horrors of postcolonialism. It’s an obvious aesthetic and political touchstone for Jusu, who nevertheless quickly and confidently spins off in her own direction.Like a number of other selections in this year’s festival, “Nanny” is a horror movie with a profound difference; unlike too many other filmmakers, Jusu never becomes boxed in by genre. Instead, horror-film conventions are part of an expansive tool kit that includes narrative ellipses, an expressionistic use of bold color and figures from African folklore, including a trickster in spider form and a water spirit called Mami Wata. Here, clichés like the oppressive house, controlling employer and vulnerable heroine prove far more complex than they appear, having been skillfully reimagined for this anguished, haunted story.Women in peril are familiar screen figures, but this year there was some honest variety in the kinds of directors putting knives to throats. At one point — in between streaming, smiling, grimacing, weeping and occasionally eww-ing at all the blood and guts — I realized that I hadn’t bothered to count the number of women and people of color in this year’s program. I was seeing enough fictional stories and documentaries with a range of different types of people that I hadn’t started compulsively profiling the filmmakers. Yes, there were a few Sundance reliables, the eternally cute and kooky white children of Indiewood, but not enough to trigger you about the old days when the festival was clogged with Tarantino clones.The drama “Call Jane” was one of two Sundance films about the Jane Collective, a group that helped women in Chicago obtain safe abortions.Wilson Webb, via Sundance InstituteThe auteurist touchstone at Sundance these days is Jordan Peele, whose radical use of the genre continues to feel relevant to the traumas of contemporary life. The preponderance of frightful tales in this program is obviously a matter of availability, cinematic copycatting and curatorial discretion. Given all the onscreen evisceration this year, I would imagine that the festival director Tabitha Jackson and the director of programming Kim Yutani have strong stomachs and senses of humor. That they’re also feminists surely, if gratifyingly, goes without saying and may help explain why there are three movies in the slate about abortion.The two I saw — the well-acted drama “Call Jane” and the solid, informative documentary “The Janes” — aren’t horror movies in the usual sense, but like more conventional examples of the genre, they also turn on the body, and specifically the female body, in peril. Each movie revisits the Jane Collective, a group of women and some men who from 1968 to 1973 helped women in Chicago obtain safe abortions before the procedure was a Constitutional right. And while the image of one member (Elizabeth Banks) in “Call Jane” learning how to administer abortions by practicing on pumpkins may not have been a Halloween joke, I laughed anyway.On a conspicuous, quantifiable level, this year’s program reaffirms that a genuine diversity of filmmakers also yields a welcome cinematic multiplicity. It can be easy to think of representation as an abstraction, as a political cudgel, a tedious rallying cry, a bore. Again and again this year, the sight of all these bodies, particularly of women — including Emma Thompson letting it all hang out beautifully in the gentle comedy “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” — was a reminder that these representations aren’t boxes that were ticked off. They are the embodied truths, pleasures and terrors of women and people of color who, having long served as canvases for fantasies of otherness, have seized control of their own images. More

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      Carol Speed, Vixen of the Blaxploitation Era, Dies at 76

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      In the mid-70s, thanks to two beloved B movies, she had a moment in the spotlight and enjoyed celebrity status in the Black press.Carol Speed, the leading lady of the cult blaxploitation films “The Mack” and “Abby,” who used her sex appeal for poignant drama in one and campy horror in the other, died on Jan. 14 in Muskogee, Okla. She was 76.Her family announced her death in a statement published online. It did not specify the cause.A button-nosed Californian, Ms. Speed became a B-movie headliner in the 1970s playing a demon and a prostitute. For those roles, her fresh-faced prettiness provided a dramatic contrast, making it all the more striking for her to portray a character in the throes of lurid desire or enmeshed in a melancholy plight.The blaxploitation genre — a burst of low-budget movies in the 1970s that starred Black actors and dealt with gritty urban themes — often featured female characters who were forced against their will into danger and squalor. But it also accorded them powers unusual for women in mainstream Hollywood movies of the time. Like blaxploitation’s most famous actress, Pam Grier, Ms. Speed fit that mold.In the horror film “Abby” (1974), she played the title character, a middle-class marriage counselor in Louisville, Ky., who dotes on her husband and sings in the choir of the church where he preaches — until she is possessed by an ancient Nigerian devil known as Eshu. It was the sort of movie where the resident exorcist wears bell bottoms and a luxurious mustache, and where Satan’s playing field lies under a disco ball.Ms. Speed’s smile caused her to scrunch up her face, a seemingly sweet gesture that she turned into a twisted instrument for expressions of lust and violent glee. During one sequence, she toggled back and forth between embodying a distraught loving wife and a demon with super strength.A few months after it was released on Christmas Day, The New York Times called “Abby” among the most financially successful B movies of its time. Yet following a lawsuit from Warner Bros. that accused it of stealing the plot of “The Exorcist” (1973), the movie was pulled from theaters. In the years to come, viewing “Abby” became a rare and sought-after opportunity for fans.Ms. Speed, left, with Terry Carter and Juanita Moore in a scene from “Abby.”Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesMs. Speed appeared in several other blaxploitation movies, most notably “The Mack” (1973), a classic of the genre in which she played the girlfriend and head prostitute of the pimp protagonist (played by Max Julien, who died this month). In the 1970s, Ms. Speed also acted in other low-budget movies and on TV shows, including “Julia” and “Sanford and Son.”“Seems like everywhere I turn I’m getting one offer or another,” she told Jet magazine in 1973.Ms. Speed made frequent appearances in the Black press of that era as a quotable and photogenic celebrity. She was among the “Bachelorettes ’72” featured in Ebony, and she was on the July 1976 cover of Jet, which said she “often has been characterized as a sex symbol.” A photograph of her at a 1975 charity tennis tournament appeared in Jet alongside pictures of Bill Cosby and Aretha Franklin at the same event. Her semi-autobiographical 1980 novel, “Inside Black Hollywood,” was “scandalous” and became “the talk of the town,” according to Jet.Carol Ann Bennett Stewart was born on March 14, 1945, in Bakersfield, Calif., to Cora Valrie Stewart and Freddie Lee Stewart. At San Jose City College, she staged a popular production of “The Bronx Is Next,” Sonia Sanchez’s play about Black revolutionaries. She soon received a scholarship to study at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco.Her career started at a casino in Reno, Nev., where she worked as a backup singer to the pop star Bobbie Gentry.Ms. Speed’s real life had its share of blaxploitation-style drama. While she was filming “The Mack,” her boyfriend was fatally shot in Berkeley, Calif. Around that time, she was struggling to afford her home in Hollywood Hills, trying to support her son, Mark Speed, and throwing another man out of her house. He left, but he took many of her possessions with him — even her bedspread.Then Ms. Speed was cast in the movie for which she would become best known. “Abby took me out of California into a new adventure,” she said in an interview published on a website devoted to William Girdler, the director of “Abby.”“Abby” was among the most financially successful B movies of its time. But following a lawsuit from Warner Bros. that accused it of stealing the plot of “The Exorcist,” it was pulled from theaters. LMPC via Getty ImagesShe is survived by a sister, Barbara Morrison, and a grandson.During the filming of “Abby,” Ms. Speed said, multiple tornadoes tore through Louisville, and a mansion where the cast had attended a lavish party was destroyed. When Ms. Speed appeared on set in her demonic get-up, the generator started malfunctioning.Perhaps she inhabited her role too well. Her colleagues were rattled, Ms. Speed said, adding, “The crew had almost started to believe that I was possessed by the powerful sex-crazed Eshu.” More

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      Family of Slain ‘Rust’ Cinematographer Weighs Wrongful-Death Lawsuit

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      Lawyers for the family of Halyna Hutchins, the cinematographer fatally shot by Alec Baldwin on the set of the movie “Rust” last year, filed a petition this week to appoint a representative for Hutchins’s estate who will consider whether to file a wrongful-death lawsuit.Ms. Hutchins was killed when the old-fashioned revolver Mr. Baldwin was practicing with on the film set in New Mexico, which he had been told did not contain live ammunition, fired a live bullet, hitting her and the movie’s director, Joel Souza, who survived.According to the petition, which was filed in state court in New Mexico on Wednesday, lawyers for Ms. Hutchins’s widower and son asked the court to appoint Kristina Martinez, a lawyer in Santa Fe, to represent the cinematographer’s estate “solely for the purpose of investigating and pursuing a lawsuit under the New Mexico Wrongful Death Act.” The court filing did not specify who would be named as a defendant should a lawsuit be filed.Ms. Hutchins’s widower, Matthew Hutchins, and her 9-year-old son both support the petition to name a representative of Ms. Hutchins’s estate, the filing said.Randi McGinn, a lawyer representing the Hutchinses, said the process of appointing a representative was specific to a state law in New Mexico. Under the statute, any money granted in the lawsuit would be split between Mr. Hutchins and his son, she said.Ms. Hutchins, who was 42 and originally from Ukraine, was an up-and-coming cinematographer whom friends described as talented, spirited and deeply committed to her work.In the aftermath of the deadly shooting on Oct. 21, several members of the film’s crew have filed lawsuits against Mr. Baldwin and others associated with the production. Mr. Baldwin, who was starring in the western and was also a producer on it, asserted in a television interview that he was not responsible for the fatal shooting and said that he had not pulled the trigger, suggesting that the gun could have gone off after he pulled back the hammer. His lawyers filed a motion on Monday calling for a lawsuit filed against him by the film’s script supervisor, Mamie Mitchell, to be dismissed.Officials in New Mexico are still examining how a live bullet got on set and then into the gun that Mr. Baldwin was practicing with and whether anyone should be held criminally responsible. More

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      Kamau Bell: Bill Cosby Is Key to Understanding America

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      When W. Kamau Bell was growing up, Bill Cosby was the “wallpaper of Black America” and an inspiration, Bell said in a recent interview. Bell’s new documentary, “We Need to Talk About Cosby,” surveys the star’s long career and cultural impact, as well as the accusations of sexual assault that culminated in his conviction, on three counts of aggravated indecent assault, in 2018. Cosby was freed from prison in June 2021 after an appeals court ruled that his due process rights had been violated.The four-part documentary — which premieres on Showtime on Sunday — consists of clips from his shows and standup act, conversations with women who accused Cosby and a parade of other interviewees who try to process the Cosby story and his legacy.As a comedian and host of shows like CNN’s “United Shades of America,” Bell said he has become known as a guy who is willing to have difficult conversations. But the one about Cosby was tougher than most, generating criticism from both sides: Some Cosby accusers didn’t talk to him because they didn’t want to be part of a project that includes Cosby’s achievements. At the same time, Bell said, he has been accused of tearing down a Black role model when he could be examining white transgressors instead.Last week, Cosby criticized the project through his spokesman, Andrew Wyatt, who added that Cosby continues to deny all allegations against him. Wyatt also praised Cosby’s work in the entertainment industry. “Mr. Cosby has spent more than 50 years standing with the excluded,” he said in a statement.As a reporter who covered Bill Cosby’s trials for The New York Times, I am familiar with the accusations against him. But the documentary sets those accusations in a deep context of American culture and Cosby’s career.Recently I spoke to Bell by video call about making the series, and about his belief that Cosby’s story is a story about America. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Hi Kamau. How are you doing?[Laughs.] You’ve covered this story a lot, so I think you probably have some sense of how I’m doing. And then add Black into it.You’ve described to me the trepidation you felt about getting involved in something that had the potential to be “toxic.” What do you mean by that?We reached out to people, and we got so many “no”s so quickly. At the time, he was still in prison, and I thought, Oh maybe we can finally have the productive Bill Cosby conversation. But with every note I got from people who were really doing well in show business, what I’m hearing is, “This is a bad idea.” Not that they would say that outright, but the feeling was, No, I don’t want to touch that. Maybe they didn’t want to touch it with me, but I think generally they don’t want to touch it.Why would they say that?I mean specifically for Black people, whether you were involved indirectly or not, it’s hard to have a productive conversation about Bill Cosby without frustrating some of your audience who still wants to support him, whether they believe he did these things or not..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How did the idea for the documentary come about?The idea came very naturally in a conversation with [Boardwalk Pictures Production]. I liked their work, they liked my work, and we started talking about comedian documentaries. Generally, there are not enough great comedian documentaries, and then through that conversation it was, “Could you do one about a comedian who has fallen?” There are any number to hold up, but Bill Cosby was the one we talked about. And I’ve been thinking about this Bill Cosby conversation for years.What did you hope to achieve?When I started making it, as we say in the doc, he was in prison. It sort of felt like the Bill Cosby story was, in large part, over. So maybe now we can have the conversation, and it’s a conversation I was already having in my head and with other people. Seeing people online trying to have it, the conversation wasn’t happening in a productive way.We have to learn something from this. If we don’t have the conversation, I don’t think we’re going to learn. The guy that I believed he was when I was growing up and when I was a young adult — that guy would want me to learn something from this.So on some level, your example, Bill Cosby, led me to try to figure this out.So what did you figure out?[Kierna Mayo, the former editor in chief of Ebony magazine] said something to the effect of, “Bill Cosby is key to understanding America.” To me, that’s what this is about.There are two runaway forces of oppression in America: One, how we treat nonwhite people. The other is how we have treated women through the history of this country. And if you look at Bill Cosby’s career, you can see things he did that makes this better and makes this worse. I believe there’s a lot to learn there.Kierna Mayo, the former editor in chief of Ebony, is among the interviewees who try to process the Cosby legacy in “We Need to Talk About Cosby.”ShowtimeYou use a timeline device in a powerful way that allows you to talk about the highlights of his career and also locate the timing of the accusations against him.I don’t like when documentaries tell some personal story but they don’t connect to history. Because you want to know what was happening when that happened — that helps give us the sense of why this is even more interesting.It doesn’t make sense to talk about Bill Cosby as if he was a solo man in the world. You have to really see how the boys-will-be-boys culture of Hollywood, specifically in the ’60s, invites a kind of behavior that allows predators to hide.It also lays this timeline of his career, the timeline of America and the timeline of the accusations on top of each other, which helps you see them in a new way.You raise the question about who else knew at the time about the accusations against Cosby, but you don’t come up with many specific answers. Did you try to talk to senior figures in the industry?Yeah. but we didn’t have access to any of those people. And I’m not an investigative journalist, so there’s a point at which I have to accept that I’m here to take all that we know and start to figure out what were the circumstances through which this went down.Ultimately, the bigger thing is it’s clear that the industry overall is not doing a good job, and the people who run the industry are probably still not doing the best job they can do. That’s the bigger issue to me.At times, it seems that the “We” in “We need to talk about Cosby” refers mainly to a Black audience. Are there some complexities of the Cosby case that are particular to Black people?I would say the “We” is those of us who feel connected to Bill Cosby. Now it just so happens that a lot of those people are Black people. But let’s be clear: He was America’s dad, not Black America’s dad. He was universal. Everybody who worked on this, no matter what their race was, if they were of a certain generation, they were like, “Yeah, I watched that show and felt like I was part of that family, too.”Even this interview is complicated: For a lot of people, I will be tearing down a Black man in a white newspaper in front of a white man. And the question is, why isn’t this interview about Harvey Weinstein, or Trump, or other people who have had allegations of sexual assault? Those are the questions that are coming at me now on social media — like, why this man?What do you say to your detractors?I learned long ago you can’t win those battles on social media, so I’m sort of allowing them to happen. I’m going to handle it by talking to you and other outlets, and by making sure I talk to Black press outlets, places where maybe those people will go. But I don’t think there’s any resolving it. If those people watch it, they will learn it is a more nuanced conversation than I think they believe it is.This is another trite thing to say, but we have to be on the right side of history here. Can this be an opportunity for a large percentage of this country to actually work to make the system and structures better, from the highest levels of show business and corporate America, through working-class America, all the way down to how sex education is taught in schools? There are so many levels of this — those of us who want to be on the right side of history have to do the work to rebuild these systems. You ask many times in the documentary, “Who is Bill Cosby now?” Did you come to a conclusion yourself?Somebody who has always taught us about America and is still teaching us about America, even if it’s in ways he does not want to. And it is very important for us to learn all of the lessons of Bill Cosby if we’re actually going to be a better society.Also embedded in that, and it’s hard to say it, but in the greater context: [Cosby is] one of the key figures for Black America and America in the 20th century. And one of the greatest standup comedians of all time. And the creator of one of the best sitcoms of all time. And, throughout a lot of his career, an advocate for Black excellence. But if you want to engage with that, you have to engage with the other stuff.Cosby was released from prison before you finished the documentary. How did his release change things?I didn’t want this, but it gave it a more immediate feel — this is an active situation again. He’s out in the world again, which means all the defenders are out there in the world again and feel emboldened. So it feels both more important to tell this story and scary to tell this story, because people are invested in protecting him.The most valuable conversation to me isn’t the film — it’s the conversation that we all have after we watch the film. No matter what you think about Bill Cosby’s story, it is critical that we create a society that treats survivors of sexual assault better. More

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      ‘The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild’ Review: A Franchise Thaws

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      The latest installment in this animated film series replaces nearly all of its celebrity voice performers with close proxies.Upon beginning “The Ice Age Adventures of Buck Wild,” the sixth feature in the animation franchise that grows woollier by the movie, you sense something amiss. Perhaps it’s the dinosaur paradise serenely preserved beneath alpine glaciers? Can’t be: That particular anachronism has been canon for several “Ice Age” installments.Rather, oddness stems here from the missing cast of celebrity performers, including Ray Romano, who over five movies lent surly gusto to the mammoth Manny, and John Leguizamo, the source of the sloth Sid’s erratic charm. Neither appears in “Buck Wild” (on Disney+), which opts instead for a set of close proxies. Substituting actors in sequels isn’t unheard-of (Robin Williams was notably absent from “The Return of Jafar”), but adults may find themselves absorbed in nit-picking this movie’s voices to gauge their fidelity to the originals — at least it distracts from the dialogue.And there’s a lot of dialogue. Directed by John C. Donkin, “Buck Wild” spotlights the motor-mouthed possum brothers Crash (Vincent Tong) and Eddie (Aaron Harris), who in earlier movies served only as half-witted sidekicks. Seeking adventure, they reunite with the one-eyed weasel Buck (Simon Pegg, the only actor reprising his role) and tag along on his quest to save the subterranean Mesozoic jungle from a despotic Protoceratops (Utkarsh Ambudkar). It’s simpler than it sounds.Reining in the chaos is a sensible zorilla named Zee (Justina Machado) who bails the boys out of trouble while teaching us that courage comes from within. Being detained with this zoological crew could melt one’s brain faster than ice in a heat wave. And where is Scrat, the squirrel whose unwavering pursuit of an acorn is often the franchise’s saving grace? Nearly nonverbal, Scrat wouldn’t even require a locum tenens; of all the movie’s sins, his omission is unforgivable.The Ice Age Adventures of Buck WildRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 21 minutes. Watch on Disney + More