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      Angel Studios Turns to Viewers of Faith to Greenlight Movies

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      The company behind “Sound of Freedom” follows an unusual strategy that relies on an army of subscribers to its streaming platform.When “Sound of Freedom,” a $14.5 million indie film about child trafficking based on the life of a Homeland Security agent, stormed the box office to become an unlikely $250 million hit, practically nobody saw its runaway success coming.Except Neal Harmon.Harmon is the chief executive of Angel Studios, a self-described “values-based distribution company,” that he founded in 2013 in Provo, Utah, with his brothers Daniel, Jeffrey and Jordan as well as their cousin Benton. Even before a rave review from Ted Cruz and a private screening held by Donald J. Trump, the reception for “Sound of Freedom” was effectively preordained, Neal explained in a recent interview, because the studio’s million-member Angel Guild had endorsed the film before the company decided to acquire the distribution rights.Jim Caviezel in “Sound of Freedom,” the breakout hit that went on to earn $250 million at the box office.Angel Studios“We definitely knew it was going to be successful because of the guild’s reaction,” Neal said. “We knew it was going to be really well received.”Most distributors rely on the instincts of a programming team, which typically attends festivals and watches screeners like a prospector sifting for gold. Angel’s model defers to the subscribers of its streaming platform, which has grown to become one of the most-downloaded apps on the Apple TV store, occasionally surpassing Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video.In addition to a library of original content, the Angel app features short-form concept videos for potential movies or TV shows. Subscribers, or guild members, answer short surveys about the videos, and based on the results, Angel decides whether to greenlight projects. Subscriber fees are funneled back into the films and shows in production, essentially turning Angel’s system into a wide-scale crowdfunding model.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Film at Lincoln Center Chooses Daniel Battsek as Next President

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      At the production company Film4 he was instrumental in financing British movies. In New York, his goal is to attract a younger, more diverse audience.Film at Lincoln Center, the nonprofit organization that programs the New York Film Festival, has named the British movie executive Daniel Battsek its next president.From 2016 until early 2024, Battsek, 66, was chairman of the British production company Film4, overseeing the financing of “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” (2017) and “The Banshees of Inisherin” (2022), among other releases.Battsek will succeed Lesli Klainberg, who had led Film at Lincoln Center since 2014 before stepping down last year.In an interview, Battsek, who will take over in May, said the centrality of film in the New York City cultural landscape had always appealed to him.“In many other cities, including London, film is much further down the culture ladder than it is here,” said Battsek, who was based in New York as president of Miramax Films before joining Film4. “I love that cinema is seen as being on a level with opera and ballet and theater.”Battsek’s appointment comes amid an industrywide downturn as movie theaters struggle to attract an audience that has yet to return to prepandemic numbers and are increasingly contending with competition from streaming services.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Is Yoko Ono Finally Getting Her Moment?

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      A new biography and film about Yoko Ono offer more opportunities to assess her contributions to culture. Two pop music critics debate if they’re worthy of their subject.LINDSAY ZOLADZ Are we living through a Yokossance? Though the 92-year-old conceptual artist, musician and Beatle widow Yoko Ono has spent much of the past decade far from the public eye dealing with health issues, each year seems to bring a new opportunity to reassess her contributions to culture.In the 2020s alone, there has been a tribute album, a small shelf’s worth of biographies and, just last year, a blockbuster, career-spanning show of her artwork at London’s Tate Modern. (That retrospective, “Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind,” comes to Chicago in October.) All of that followed Peter Jackson’s long-awaited 2021 Beatles documentary “Get Back,” which reignited debates about Ono’s influence on the band she was unfairly accused of “breaking up.”David Sheff, a longtime friend of Ono’s who is best known for writing a memoir about his son’s struggles with addiction, “Beautiful Boy” (Ono gave him permission to title it after a John Lennon song), argues strongly against that assumption in his new biography, “Yoko.” He even takes it a step further, proposing that “it’s possible that the band stayed together longer than they would have because of Yoko,” since she gave Lennon several years of relative groundedness during which the Beatles made “Let It Be” and “Abbey Road.” “During the writing and recording of those albums, John had a foot out the door,” Sheff writes. “If he hadn’t had Yoko, the other foot might have followed sooner than it did.”We get extended glimpses of Ono and Lennon a few years later in “One to One: John & Yoko,” Kevin Macdonald’s forthcoming documentary that focuses on a well-told chapter of their story, their time living in New York City in the early 1970s.“Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind,” on display in Germany last September. The retrospective comes to Chicago in October.Martin Meissner/Associated PressI’m curious, Jon: Did either Sheff’s biography or Macdonald’s film add anything to your understanding of Ono? I’m also thinking of an essay that our colleague Amanda Hess wrote in 2021 about Ono’s transfixing presence in “Get Back.” She said she had observed the slow evolution of Ono from “a cultural villain” into “a kind of folk hero.” Do you think that shift is now fully complete?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘A Minecraft Movie’ Arrives as a Surprise Box Office Smash

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      Weekend ticket sales totaled $163 million, Warner Bros. said, more than double the expected amount, ending a Hollywood dry spell.There are no fail-safe formulas in Hollywood, but this one comes close:Take an established yet underexploited (or musty) cultural property — preferably one that stirs strong feelings of nostalgia among young adults — and add stars playing to type, abundant visual effects and a savvy marketing campaign that makes core fans feel appreciated.It’s difficult to pull off, but Legendary Entertainment has done it repeatedly. The most recent example came over the weekend with “A Minecraft Movie,” which was made in partnership with Warner Bros. The film sold an astounding $163 million in tickets in North America from Friday through Sunday, according to Warner Bros., which distributed the film in addition to co-producing it. (On Sunday, analysts had estimated $157 million for the weekend.)Before release, citing advance ticket sales and surveys that track consumer interest, analysts had projected a domestic opening weekend of closer to $80 million. “It’s an absolute blast to see moviegoers around the world coming together to celebrate their love for Minecraft,” Mike De Luca and Pam Abdy, co-chairs of the Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group, said in a statement.“A Minecraft Movie,” a PG-rated comedic fantasy starring Jack Black and Jason Momoa and based on the 2009 block-building video game, also scored overseas, where it took in an additional $151 million.The film cost $150 million to make, not including global marketing costs. Warner Bros. covered 75 percent of the budget. Legendary, which is independently owned, shouldered the balance. Reviews were mixed.Hollywood in general, and Warner Bros. in particular, badly needed a hit. Box office revenue in the United States and Canada fell 11 percent in the first three months of this year compared with the same period in 2024, in part because of major flops like “Snow White” (Disney) and “Mickey 17” (Warner Bros.). There were also other underperformers, including a pair of low-budget duds from the once-unstoppable Blumhouse horror studio.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At 30, ‘A Goofy Movie’ Has Made a Serious Impact

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      The 30-year-old animated Disney film has fans across generations. Now, a documentary looks back at its legacy.“If we listen to each other’s heart / We’ll find we’re never too far apart,” sang the fictional pop star Powerline (voiced by Tevin Campbell) during a 2017 screening of “A Goofy Movie” at El Capitan Theater in Hollywood.The ecstatic reaction from those in attendance confirmed to Kevin Lima that the first movie he ever directed, originally released on April 7, 1995, had indeed amassed an adoring fandom.“I sat amongst an audience who was singing along, repeating back dialogue with the characters onscreen, dancing in their seats,” Lima recalled during a recent video interview from his home in Mill Valley, Calif.“A Goofy Movie” observes the often hilarious, and at times thorny relationship between Goofy (voiced by Bill Farmer), the lanky anthropomorphic dog from Disney’s classic cartoons, and his teenage son, Max (Jason Marsden), as they go on a road trip that will bring them closer.A scene from “A Goofy Movie,” which follows a father-son road trip.Buena Vista PicturesUnlike most Disney films made during that time, this heartfelt father-son adventure was a contemporary story entrenched in the 1990s via its upbeat pop music and the characters’ wardrobes. Lima described it as “an animated film that feels like a John Hughes movie.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Last Five Years’ Review: Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren Star in a Muddy Revival

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      Nick Jonas and Adrienne Warren star in a muddy revival of Jason Robert Brown’s still-scathing musical.Leave aside its seriousness, its intimacy, its wit. Leave aside, too, its relative obscurity, despite being frequently performed. (Without really trying, I’ve seen it six times, including the 2014 film.) Even apart from any of that, “The Last Five Years,” by Jason Robert Brown, is still the ur-nerdical — nerdical being a term I made up to describe shows, like “Fun Home,” “The Band’s Visit” and “Kimberly Akimbo,” that are too good to stay in the very small theater-geek niche they arose from. Turns out they can speak, and sing, to anyone.What really makes “The Last Five Years,” which debuted Off Broadway in 2002, look like the father of that family of choice, is its baroque structure. Doubling down (and doing a backflip) on reverse-chronology narratives like the ones in “Betrayal” and “Merrily We Roll Along,” it presents the story of Jamie Wellerstein, a suddenly successful young novelist, and Cathy Hiatt, a slowly sinking young actor, in two timelines. Jamie’s moves forward, from the day he falls headlong for Cathy to the day, five years later, he resentfully leaves her. Cathy’s moves backward, from despair over Jamie’s betrayal to exhilaration over the first stirrings of his love.The structure is no mere appliqué, decorating the surface of the show like a doodle. It is how “The Last Five Years” expresses its truth. One arc always going up, one down, there’s sadness waiting whenever there’s joy and joy whenever there’s sadness. Seen alternately in separate scenes, the lovers never touch, let alone share Brown’s pyrotechnical songs, except halfway through, on the day they marry. Whether the story has a happy ending thus depends on how you look at it.Instead of staying out of each other’s scenes, the actors in this production are often thrown together: one singing, one reacting to the song in mime.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut in the show’s first Broadway incarnation, starring the resplendent Adrienne Warren and an underpowered Nick Jonas, the structure (along with the balance) has been compromised. The production, which opened on Sunday at the Hudson Theater, muddies the show’s temporal ironies and flattens its emotional topography. Its meaning and thus its impact are short-circuited.With material so precision-made, it takes just one mistake to do big damage. Instead of keeping the characters out of each other’s scenes as Brown’s libretto indicates, the director, Whitney White, often throws them together: one singing, one reacting to the song in mime. They make faces, make contact and even make out. As a result — follow me with a protractor if you must — each inhabits the other’s arc, thus disturbing their own. The individual timelines no longer track.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Upper West Side Theater Is Sold After Governor Allocates $3.5 Million

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      A nonprofit bought the landmark Metro Theater after receiving financial support from Gov. Kathy Hochul, the State Senate and Steven Spielberg’s foundation.A landmark Art Deco movie theater that closed 20 years ago on Manhattan’s Upper West Side was sold to a nonprofit after it received $3.5 million in discretionary grants from Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York.The nonprofit, the Upper West Side Cinema Center, used those funds and $500,000 in grants from the State Senate to complete its $6.9 million purchase of the Metro Theater on Friday. It plans to revitalize the building, on Broadway near West 99th Street, with a five-screen theater, a lobby lounge and a public cafe.Additional fund-raising of $15 million to $25 million is required to construct a new interior, replace the marquee and clean graffiti from the facade, the nonprofit says.“The Upper West Side community deserves another world-class venue for cinema and art, and that’s why I was proud to step in,” Hochul said in a news release.Assemblyman Micah Lasher, a Democrat who took office in January, grew up going to the Metro Theater and fondly remembers seeing “Ali” and “Mr. Holland’s Opus” there with his family.“Its loss for the last 20 years has been not just an eyesore, but a deeply felt scar for the neighborhood,” he said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Interview’: Bill Murray Says He’s Not the Man He Used to Be

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      In Bill Murray’s new movie, “The Friend,” currently in theaters and based on the beautifully bittersweet novel by Sigrid Nunez, he plays Walter, a writer and professor who is best friends with Iris, played by Naomi Watts. Through an upsetting course of events, Iris, who lives in a modest apartment in Manhattan, winds up having to take in Walter’s Great Dane. Not exactly ideal for her or the dog, and not exactly thoughtful of Walter.Witty and charismatic but also self-centered and responsible for real damage, Walter shares much in common with many of Murray’s late-career roles. I often think of the dramatic parts that he has specialized in since the late ’90s (consider the melancholy men of a certain age in “Rushmore,” “Lost in Translation,” “On the Rocks,” “St. Vincent” and so on) as being akin to alternate-world versions of the comedy characters that made him a star. Because Peter Venkman in “Ghostbusters” or Phil Connors in “Groundhog Day,” to pick just two of his most memorable comedic creations, could also be selfish and mean but, in the end, got away with it. Not so with Walter and his ilk. It’s as if Murray’s latter-day characters are suffering the karmic payback owed to his earlier ones.A similar balancing act — between charm and callousness, buoyancy and bad moods — has surfaced in Murray’s offscreen life too. Yes, he is a globe-trotting avatar of joyful surprise, known for his party crashing and playful high jinks, but directors and co-stars like Geena Davis, Lucy Liu, Richard Dreyfuss and Harold Ramis have said Murray was, to put it very mildly, not easy to work with. And in 2022, a female staff member working on the film “Being Mortal” claimed that Murray, who is 74, behaved inappropriately with her on set. She said that he straddled her and kissed her through masks, which they were wearing as part of Covid-19 protocols. The production was shut down, and eventually they reached a settlement.Given all this, Murray, enigmatic and mercurial, is a hard one to figure out. But on a rainy day in late March, at a hotel in downtown Manhattan, I had a chance to try.Listen to the Conversation With Bill MurrayThe actor talks about his new film “The Friend,” his jerky past and what he doesn’t get about himself.Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Amazon | iHeart | NYT Audio AppYou know, at The Times earlier today, your co-star in “The Friend,” the dog, was having his photo taken. He is a striking dog: 150 pounds, a Great Dane. His name is Bing. Bing! He lives in Iowa, and after a nationwide search he was chosen as the dog of the moment. He wasn’t wearing a tight sweater or anything. He was just the most capable dog. More