Subterms
After 15 months of darkness, live music returned. In New York, Foo Fighters reopened Madison Square Garden.Photograph by Tim Barber for The New York TimesOur Favorite Arts Photos of 2021These are the pictures that defined an unpredictable year across the worlds of art, music, dance and performance.Laura O’Neill More
In this anime feature, a lonely boy strikes up a friendship with a trash creature and searches for stars in a polluted sky.The anime feature “Poupelle of Chimney Town,” the first directorial film from Yusuke Hirota, takes place in a metropolis where the sky is always dark from smoke. The residents are policed by cloaked officials called inquisitors, who make it their business to suppress dissenters, particularly civilians who propose that there might be a world beyond the nearby ocean or the blotted-out firmament.In this dystopia, animated in a way that suggests a steampunk Chutes and Ladders, Lubicchi (voiced by Antonio Raul Corbo), a lonely boy who works as a chimney sweep, makes his first friend: a garbage man — that is, a creature made out of trash — whom he names Poupelle (Tony Hale). (The name is similar to “poubelle,” which is French for trash can.) Poupelle’s origins are murky, but in a pre-title sequence, he appears to arrive from the stars, where Lubicchi’s father (Stephen Root), who disappeared, always urged his son to look.Adapted by Akihiro Nishino from his picture book of the same name, the story evokes familiar touchstones: “The Wizard of Oz” (in Poupelle’s Scarecrow-like headwear and the climactic deployment of a hot-air balloon); “E.T.” (boy-alien friendship); and “WALL-E” (the landfill aesthetic). The allegory is semi-coherent but intriguing. Effectively, this movie asks what would happen if the existence of a self-devaluing currency caused radical libertarians to create Big Brother to protect people from a central bank.Trying to get a read on the film — while admiring its palette and off-kilter character details (Lubicchi has an odd vampire overbite) — keeps “Poupelle” fun for a while. But the film ultimately shies away from its most disturbing ideas, falling back on a comforting sentimentality.Poupelle of Chimney TownRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More
This dreamy thriller follows an academic with a mysterious past who heads to a beach vacation on the Greek islands.Draped in a pall of melancholy that more than fulfills the promise of its title, “The Lost Daughter” — Maggie Gyllenhaal’s seductive first feature as director — is a movie filled with portents. These start to surface almost immediately as Leda (Olivia Colman), a gifted professor of comparative literature, begins a Greek island vacation, laden with books and scholarly intentions.It’s not simply the bowl of moldy fruit that mars her charming beachside rental, or the moaning foghorn and flashing lighthouse lantern that Lyle (Ed Harris), the apartment’s caretaker, assures her will only be occasional annoyances. That guarantee proves not to apply to the large and rowdy American family who one day invade Leda’s idyllic beach and whose heavily pregnant matriarch, Callie (Dagmara Dominczyk), asks her to move her chair. Leda refuses, and there is a brief, tense standoff; for the first time, we sense something steely and resolute in Leda, who until now has appeared politely agreeable. We don’t know who Leda is, but we are suddenly all in on finding out.Adapted by Gyllenhaal from Elena Ferrante’s 2006 novel of the same name, “The Lost Daughter” is a sophisticated, elusively plotted psychological thriller. Drip by drip, a vague sense of menace builds as Leda is drawn to Nina (Dakota Johnson), Callie’s daughter-in-law and the unhappy mother of a fractious little girl.“They’re bad people,” Will (Paul Mescal), the friendly Irish student working the beach bar, warns. Yet watching Nina struggle with her child, Leda’s eyes fill with tears as she recalls her own frustrations as a young mother of two small daughters, now grown. In a series of beautifully shaped flashback scenes, we see the young Leda (brilliantly played by Jessie Buckley) try to work while wrestling with the unending demands of her children and the obliviousness of her unhelpful husband (Jack Farthing). A brief, miraculous escape to an academic conference reveals both the heft of her intellect and the overpowering sexiness of its recognition by a charismatic colleague (entertainingly played by Gyllenhaal’s husband, Peter Sarsgaard).Yet only a superficial reading of “The Lost Daughter” would describe it as a meditation on the twin tugs of children and career. It is, instead, a dark and deeply disturbing exploration of something much more raw, and even radical: the notion that motherhood can plunder the self in irreparable ways.“Children are a crushing responsibility,” Leda tells Callie at one point, Colman’s steady gaze and adjectival emphasis only heightening her character’s allure. In its sly sultriness and emotional intricacy, the movie weaves an atmosphere of unnerving mystery. This is crucially reinforced by Hélène Louvart’s delectable close-ups as she lingers, for instance, on Nina’s appraising glances at Leda, as if sizing up the older woman as a possible ally. But for what?Though Gyllenhaal can at times lean a little heavily on the sinister signifiers — a worm sliding from a doll’s mouth, an errant pine cone crashing into Leda’s back — she is never thematically distracted, emphasizing how women alone are often presumed lonely (by men like the gently intrusive Lyle), or irrelevant (by women like Callie, smugly buttressed by her swollen belly and swarming menfolk). At the same time the movie, as if absorbing Leda’s ambiguities, has an uncertain quality that thickens the suspense. So when Leda does something childish and inexplicable, the possibility of the act also being dangerous feels much more real.Equal parts troubling and affecting, Leda epitomizes a type of woman whose needs are rarely addressed in American mainstream movies. We can dislike her, but we are never permitted to revile her. The film’s empathetic gaze and Colman’s spiky, heartbreaking performance — watch her glow in a lovely dinner scene as she shares intimate memories with Will — tether us to her side. In any case, Leda doesn’t need our condemnation; she’s harboring more than enough of her own.The Lost DaughterRated R for joyful adultery and depressing parenting. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. Watch on Netflix. More
In case the Omicron spike has scrapped your plans, these binge watches, live broadcasts and double features will bring the party to you.With the annual New Year’s Eve celebration in Times Square scaled back due to the spread of Omicron, and other big party plans in doubt, an at-home celebration with friends and a remote might be a more popular way to ring in 2022 than we had all imagined.Live television will be flush with celebrity-driven countdowns. The biggie is “Dick Clark’s Primetime New Year’s Rockin’ Eve With Ryan Seacrest 2022” broadcast from Times Square on ABC, the special’s 50th anniversary. Performers include Journey in Times Square, Billy Porter in New Orleans and Big Boi in Los Angeles, among others. New this year is the first Spanish-language countdown with Daddy Yankee, which will take place in Puerto Rico.Other live specials include “Miley’s New Year’s Eve Party Hosted by Miley Cyrus and Pete Davidson,” broadcast from Miami starting at 10:30 p.m. on NBC, with performances by Brandi Carlile and Billie Joe Armstrong; and the return of Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen as the hosts of “CNN’s New Year’s Eve Live,” starting at 8 p.m.If you want to make a day of it, here are some streaming options on the fun, uplifting side — no matter how you define that — to stay entertained until it’s time to say goodbye to 2021.A Good-Time BingeChristina Applegate, left, and Linda Cardellini, in “Dead to Me” on Netflix.Saeed Adyani/Netflix, via Associated PressDon’t be fooled by the downer-sounding name: “Dead to Me,” an Emmy-nominated Netflix comedy, now in its second season, will make you laugh even as tears streak your face.It helps if your tastes run toward the darker side of funny, since the show is about Jen (Christina Applegate), a hotheaded mom, and Judy (Linda Cardellini), a free-spirited artist, who meet at a grief support group and strike up an oddball but deep friendship that’s threatened by a devastating secret Judy harbors. Applegate is especially good as she navigates pitch-black humor and heartbreaking sorrow.You won’t get through all 20 half-hour episodes in a day, but chances are good you’ll be hooked to keep watching in 2022, when a third season is expected.Be a DragIf “RuPaul’s Drag Race” is getting tired to you, two other drag queen competition shows will quench your thirst for elegance, sass and wigs to here.Lip-syncing, the dollar-generating go-to of drag queens everywhere, is off the menu on the Paramount+ show “Queen of the Universe.” Here, queens from around the world battle by actually singing for the judges, who include Vanessa Williams and the “Drag Race” winner Trixie Mattel.For a more wicked competition, Shudder offers “The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula,” a horror-themed drag competition. The looks are as glamorous as they are macabre, and with names like “Exorsisters” and “Nosferatu Beach Party,” the competitions are fiendishly camp.Count DownFor the past few years, my partner and I have enjoyed a New Year’s Eve tradition that makes us feel like dinosaurs: We compile a YouTube playlist of music videos for the year’s Top 20 songs, according to Billboard’s Hot 100 list, and watch with cocktails in hand. Every year I’ve maybe heard of one or two songs; my personal soundtrack hasn’t left ’80s New Wave.This year, I’ve seen Lil Nas X’s video for “Montero (Call Me By Your Name)” — it’s hard to miss — but I’m looking forward to watching Dua Lipa’s “Levitating,” the top song.Double FeaturesJean-Michel Basquiat in “Downtown 81,” streaming on Criterion Collection.Zeitgeist FilmsFour highlights from the Criterion Channel’s “New York Stories,” a collection of 40 films set in the five boroughs, would make for a terrific night of thematic watching.Start with a pair of films about roaming New York. “Little Fugitive” (1953) is a scrappy fable about a boy who leaves home to spend the day exploring Coney Island. “Downtown 81,” shot in the early ’80s but released in 2000, stars Jean-Michel Basquiat as an artist wandering the streets of Lower Manhattan, where he meets some legends of early ’80s New York. Yes, that’s Debbie Harry as a fairy princess.Or try two films that ponder what it means to be young and in search of yourself. In “Brother to Brother” (2004), Anthony Mackie’s character develops a friendship with a fellow Black gay artist whose life was shaped by the Harlem Renaissance. In Noah Baumbach’s dry comedy “Frances Ha” (2013), Greta Gerwig plays a young dancer struggling with ambition, friendship and elusive happiness, Manhattan-style.A Family Watch“Lego Masters” is a family-friendly reality TV competition, streaming on Hulu, in which teams of two are asked to create artistically fantastic and architecturally demanding Lego structures.Kids will get a kick out of how Lego are transformed into wearable hats, cuddly animals and smash-em-up vehicles. Adults, especially those who grew up as Lego builders, will appreciate the engineering skill required for structures to withstand heavy winds and even tremors. Expect heart-pounding, creative fun no matter the episode, especially with the charming goofball Will Arnett as host.Be NostalgicHead to IMDb TV to watch “All in the Family,” the CBS sitcom that ran from 1971 to ’79. When Archie, Edith and their Queens neighbors argue over race, feminism and politics, the rancor sounds ripped from today’s headlines. Season 2 has several very funny episodes, including “Sammy’s Visit,” in which Sammy Davis Jr. memorably gives Archie a smooch.For a darker day of retro television, tune into Decades for a three-day “Twilight Zone” marathon starting on New Year’s Eve. Friday’s schedule features two of the series’s best episodes: “The After Hours,” about a woman wandering through an eerie department store, and “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” about a neighborhood that turns paranoid amid a possible alien invasion.Laugh and ScreamAlan Tudyk, left, and Tyler Labine in “Tucker & Dale vs. Evil.”Magnet ReleasingAs a horror movie fan, I spent a lot of time during the pandemic catching up on scary comedies, a genre that’s hard to get right. When a movie strikes the right balance of funny and frightful, it’s worth a watch — especially for the horror-averse.Several great horror comedies are available for free on Tubi. Two of my favorites are “Saturday the 14th” (1981), a cheese-ball spoof of old-school monster movies that’s good for older kids (rated PG) and the easily-distracted (a speedy 76 minutes); and “Tucker & Dale vs. Evil” (2011), a slapstick splatter comedy about two yokels, a group of meddlesome college kids and a very bloody-funny misunderstanding. More
Maggie Gyllenhaal has never shied away from difficult roles. The actress has been pushing boundaries for years with performances of complicated characters like an assistant playing sadomasochistic games with her boss (“Secretary”), the daughter of an arms dealer caught up in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (“The Honorable Woman”) and a sex worker in 1970s New York (“The Deuce”).But it’s the job of director and screenwriter of “The Lost Daughter,” an adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s novel of the same title, that may be her riskiest role yet.The film, set on a sun-drenched Greek island, stars Olivia Colman as Leda, a middle-aged literature professor on a solo working vacation who gets entangled with a young mother, Nina, played by Dakota Johnson. As she becomes more involved with Nina and her sprawling family, Leda’s past and the decisions she made as a younger woman seep into the present, with strange and at times deeply disturbing results.Like the novel, the film (which begins streaming Dec. 31 on Netflix) confronts complicated questions that women face at different stages of their lives. At its center is the intensely fraught push and pull of motherhood, but it also touches on ambition, sacrifice, aging and art.Already, the film, which won best screenplay at the Venice Film Festival, has attracted awards-season attention, including a raft of nominations from critics’ groups and others. Last month the film won four Gotham Awards, including best feature. Over a long lunch in the West Village, Gyllenhaal — dressed in various shades of appropriately Aegean blue — talked about being a female director today, taboos around motherhood and what it means to translate Ferrante to film. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.Dakota Johnson, left, and Olivia Colman in “The Lost Daughter.”Yannis Drakoulidis/NetflixWhat drew you to Ferrante?I started with the Neapolitan novels. She was talking about things I had almost never heard expressed before. Oh my God, this woman is so messed up, and then within 10 seconds of that, thinking I really relate to her, and so am I so messed up or is this something that many people feel but that we’re not talking about? I found it ultimately both disturbing but also really comforting because if someone else has written it down, you think, oh, I’m not alone in what I thought was a secret anxiety or terror, or even the other side of the spectrum, the intensity of joy and connection.Then I read “The Lost Daughter” and I thought, what if instead of all of us having that experience of feeling alone in our rooms, what if I could create a situation where it was communal, where these things were actually spoken out loud?The film shows the joy of being a mother but also the frustrations. Why do you think it’s so rare to see that tension onscreen?I think it’s a combination of two things. Partly there hasn’t been a lot of space for women to express themselves, so an honest feminine expression is unusual. But there’s also a kind of cultural agreement not to talk about these things because we all have mothers. We’re all like, I don’t want my mother to have been ambivalent.I just tried to be as honest as I possibly could be. This is about normalizing a massive spectrum of feelings. I think especially for young Leda and for Nina, their desire — their massive intellectual desire, artistic desire, physical desire — it’s bigger than what they’ve been told they’re allowed to have or need, and I definitely relate to that.The scenes with the young children are so powerful. How did they relate to your own relationship with your children?Bianca, one of the daughters of young Leda, she’s like a mind matched for her mother. My children are like that, too. They are the most beautiful challenge to me. Like, wow. I can’t believe you understood that and saw that.Movies don’t often explore the frustrations of motherhood, Gyllenhaal said, because “we’re all like, I don’t want my mother to have been ambivalent.”Daniel Arnold for The New York TimesThe film can be seen in many ways as a horror film. Was that a choice?I wanted it to be a thriller. The book is not really a thriller, but I amped that up because I thought it would ultimately give me more artistic freedom. I wanted to even dare myself to move it into horror, a horror movie about the internal workings of her mind. She’s not bad, she’s like you. And I liked the idea of having a classic structure to hang my hat on. I have found in the past that I get the most freedom of expression as an actress when there is really clear structure.I’m not sure I’ll do that next time. I was on the jury at Cannes this year, probably two or three weeks after I finished my final mix. Looking at some really, really interesting films, I realized, oh, you can do whatever you want if you’re following something truthful and I don’t think I knew that.What was the hardest part about adapting?I found that adapting actually used a similar muscle to the one that I have used as an actress in terms of taking a text, whether it’s excellent or has got problems, and figuring out the essence of this piece of material. There are some things that are literal, but they’re so strange. Like the line, “I’m an unnatural mother.” That’s just 100 percent Ferrante, a straight lift, but a lot of people told me, take that line out. I also really did do what [Ferrante permitted] and changed many, many things but I really believe that the script and the film are really in conversation with the book.Leda is a writer, and showing her ambition in her early years is a big part of the movie. Did you see “Bergman Island” this year? Both movies wrestle with the question of whether you can fully be a woman and an artist at the same time.I do believe there’s such a thing as women’s writing and women’s filmmaking. There are really interesting feminist women who do not agree with me. I think that when women express themselves honestly, it looks differently than when men express themselves honestly. This is really dangerous to talk about. When I am let loose, given a little bit of money and space to tell the story I want to tell, it’s about motherhood. It is about the domestic, and it does include a lot of scenes in the kitchen. Can stories about the domestic really be seen as high art? Because to me it’s an opera. I do not come from women whose apron strings were tied to the kitchen. My mom is a professional person [Naomi Foner Gyllenhaal is a screenwriter and director], my grandmother was a pediatrician in the ’40s and my great-aunt was a lawyer. I’m educated and I’ve got a professional life, and yet my identification as a mother is a massive part of me.What was it like to work with Olivia Colman?Olivia really didn’t like to talk about much. I wonder, actually, if it’s because it was relatively recently that she got power as an actress, if she feels similarly to the way I feel as an actress, which is it’s very rare that somebody values my ideas. They will say they do, but people are irritated by actresses with a lot of ideas. I’m not an idiot, and so I mostly keep them to myself. I remember asking Olivia if she likes to rehearse, and she said, I don’t, actually, and I totally relate to that.Gyllenhaal on the set of “The Lost Daughter.” She said that as an actress, she found it “very rare that somebody values my ideas.”Yannis Drakoulidis/NetflixWho inspires you as a director?Fellini and Lucrecia Martel, who is also not ever literal. I love Claire Denis, I’ve talked a lot about Jane Campion, and David Lynch. And then I didn’t really work with him, but I did a weeklong reading of a play with Mike Nichols. He loved his actors, and he taught me. I remember reading [in the recent biography “Mike Nichols: A Life”] about him saying, I’m so sorry if you don’t want to shoot “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” in black and white. Then you should find another director. I’m going to leave. There were a couple of times with this film where I had to say this is wrong. We were going to shoot in New Jersey, but that was wrong. I’m like, I don’t know what to tell you.The theme of translation is obviously important to the characters. Leda translates Italian literature, but also, you’re translating Ferrante. What does the role of translator mean to you?There’s this little section in Rachel Cusk’s book “Kudos,” which I’ve pulled up a few times because I’ve been thinking about adaptation in general. Here is the quote: “I translated it carefully and with great caution as if it were something fragile that I might mistakenly break or kill.” I loved that. She’s saying when I read your book something was communicated to me that was so valuable that I had never heard spoken out loud before that electrified me, that made me understand something about myself, and I had to hold this idea in my hands and carefully bring it over to the other side. More
The Dee Rees drama made waves but studios largely returned to business as usual. A new crop of filmmakers sees signs of hope.At the shimmering pink Catnip Lounge, a Brooklyn teenager, Alike, stands face to face with a dancer sliding head first down a pole. The pleasure manifesto “My Neck, My Back” from the rapper Khia booms from the speakers. Transfixed by the power of her desire, Alike discovers a physical place outside herself that can hold it. Finally.This is the bold opening of “Pariah,” the coming-of-age drama from the writer-director Dee Rees. Ten years ago it premiered to critical acclaim, first at the Sundance Film Festival, then in theaters with a limited release that December, a herculean effort for an independent film starring a then unknown Adepero Oduye as Alike (pronounced ah-LEE-kay) and made on a shoestring budget of less than $500,000.“Pariah” (available to stream on HBO Max) was the first movie about a Black queer woman to be released in theaters nationwide by a Hollywood studio. As Nelson George wrote in The Times in 2011, “No film made by a Black lesbian about being a Black lesbian has ever received the kind of attention showered on Ms. Rees’s film.” At the same time, George pointed out, “Pariah” was also part of a crop of films that pushed the boundaries of “what ‘Black film’ can be.” How Hollywood responded, then and now, has been telling.Rees tells Alike’s story with an uncompromising specificity that has etched its place in great American cinema. (This year the movie was added to the Criterion Collection.) This unflinching sensibility harks back to the New Queer Cinema of the 1990s. By opening with the unfettered eroticism of the lesbian club and showing us scenes — like Alike’s awkwardly endearing dildo try-on — without explanation or apology, Rees followed in the footsteps of a group of filmmakers who refused to sanitize images of queer life to appease straight audiences. Think Cheryl Dunye’s “The Watermelon Woman” (1996), the first narrative feature film about an out Black lesbian protagonist made by an out Black lesbian. Cheryl Dunye directed herself and Guinevere Turner, left, in “The Watermelon Woman.”First Run Features“Pariah” began making waves in 2007 when Rees released the short that would become the basis for the 2011 feature. Kebo Drew of the San Francisco film training nonprofit Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project remembers the reaction in her community of friends and colleagues. “The Blackness was just saturated, coming from the roots,” Drew recalled.After hearing word-of-mouth about the short, a screening at Outfest in Los Angeles touched the filmmaker Angela Robinson. “I felt like it was kind of opening a door that I hoped would stay open,” said Robinson. “It was such a personal story and a singular vision.”The writer-director Numa Perrier credits Rees and “Pariah” as an inspiration for her 2019 film “Jezebel.” She remembered, “The softness of how vulnerable that coming-of-age story was, I hadn’t seen that before.”Yet this fresh perspective did not lead Hollywood to greenlight more films about Black lesbians. There have been supporting characters like the passionate teacher Ms. Rain (Paula Patton) in “Precious” (2009) and the serene boxing coach Buddhakan (Sheila Atim) in Halle Berry’s directorial debut this year, “Bruised.” But over the last 10 years, not a single feature focused on Black lesbians has made it through mainstream pipelines.At the same time L.G.B.T. characters overall have become far more visible on the big and small screens. Yet according to a University of Southern California report looking at the top 100 films of 2019 (the most recent year for which figures were available), nearly 80 percent of all such characters were male-identified and 77 percent were white. The report doesn’t provide statistics on queer women of color, as a group distinct from the category “female-identified.”“It’s almost like the stars have to align before we get another Black lesbian movie,” Drew said. “But that’s a structural issue. So there has to be a more systematic approach for encouraging stories.”So “Pariah” was singular not just in its self-assurance, but in whose story it told, too: Alike and her best friend, Laura (Pernell Walker), two Black, gay and masculine-of-center best friends from working-class neighborhoods in Brooklyn circa the early 2000s. Through the refuge of their friendship, they carve out space to be themselves.Sara Foster, left, Meagan Good, Devon Aoki and Jill Ritchie in “D.E.B.S.”Bruce Birmelin/Samuel Goldwyn FilmsAt a “Pariah” screening at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2018, Rees told the audience, “There shouldn’t be two or three or 10. To me there should be like 200.” She added, “There’s room for so many more stories.” (Rees declined a request to be interviewed for this article.)When Black lesbian stories, and the filmmakers with the lived experience to tell them, are shut out of the larger film world, the result is systemic erasure that is by definition hard to measure.About 100 feature films have been directed by Black women since 1922, almost a third of whom are lesbians, the researcher and filmmaker Yvonne Welbon wrote in the 2018 anthology “Sisters in the Life: A History of Out African American Lesbian Media-Making.”But the work of Black lesbian filmmakers has almost exclusively been made outside the Hollywood system and often not seen outside the film festival circuit, academia or grassroots distribution networks. Rees’s predecessors — filmmakers like Dunye, Michelle Parkerson (“A Litany for Survival”) and others — didn’t have assurances that a larger audience would even see their work; they simply made films that mattered to them, stories they wanted to see that didn’t yet exist in a film world that barely acknowledged their existence.That “Pariah” earned distribution, made back its budget and even received a glowing shout-out from Meryl Streep during her acceptance speech for “The Iron Lady” at the 2012 Golden Globes, was all monumental, even if the film didn’t garner much attention inside Hollywood.This is something the filmmaker Tina Mabry well understands, having tried, and failed, to get a theatrical release for her critically acclaimed debut feature, “Mississippi Damned,” a few years before “Pariah” came out. After seeing the short version of “Pariah,” Mabry asked Rees for an introduction to the film’s then up-and-coming cinematographer Bradford Young and hired him to shoot “Mississippi Damned.”Tessa Thompson in “Mississippi Damned.” The director, Tina Mabry, turned to the cinematographer Bradford Young after seeing his work on the “Pariah” short.Array ReleasingA coming-of-age tale starring Tessa Thompson and based on Mabry’s experience growing up in a Black working-class family in Tupelo, Miss., the movie won awards on the festival circuit, and aired on cable. Mabry said that she was told repeatedly that the movie was too similar to “Precious” and that “the market can’t handle two Black dramas.” For some distributors that focus on L.G.B.T. audiences, the movie was also perceived as not being gay enough despite a Black lesbian main character.“The distribution model failed us. The people did not,” Mabry said. She also gives a nod to Ava DuVernay, who eventually got the film released on Netflix in 2015 through the film distribution arm she founded, Array. That year Mabry also got her first television directing job (“Queen Sugar,” another DuVernay assist) and Mabry — much like Rees after “Pariah” was released — has worked steadily in Hollywood ever since.Indeed, there are signs of potential change. Mabry said she currently has feature film projects in development at four Hollywood studios, some of which center on Black queer women protagonists, although none of them are a done deal yet.Back when Robinson made her first feature, “D.E.B.S.,” a 2004 lesbian teen spy movie that has since become a cult classic, “there was still the attitude in town that if you played a lesbian, it could ruin your career,” she remembered.After Nina Jacobson, then a Disney studio executive, saw “D.E.B.S.” at the Sundance Film Festival, she hired Robinson to direct “Herbie Reloaded,” starring Lindsay Lohan. With ticket sales of $144 million, Robinson became the first Black woman director to draw at least $100 million at the box office. But despite her gratitude to Jacobson and the crew, the experience left her feeling isolated.“It was me and 200 white men,” Robinson said.That was when she pivoted to cable, accepting an offer from the showrunner Ilene Chaiken to direct episodes of the third season of “The L Word,” the groundbreaking show about the lives of high-powered lesbians in Los Angeles. Robinson hasn’t made another studio-backed film since. (Her 2017 feature “Professor Marston & the Wonder Women” was an indie.)But now, more than 15 years later, she has an all-female action movie in the works at Warner Bros., and her desire to cast women of color in the leads was met not with pushback, but enthusiasm, she said.“Warner Bros. called back and they were like, ‘Yes, we think you should make it more women of color and more queer,” Robinson said. “You have no idea how many years I have been waiting for somebody to say that.”And Robinson is more hopeful than ever. She has a lucrative television production deal with Warner Bros. and several other projects in the pipeline, including a DC Comics series, “Madame X,” and a film remake of “The Hunger.”“It’s always a tenuous time, but things have changed. I don’t feel like I have to Trojan-horse it anymore,” Robinson said, adding that it seems as if “I can just walk in the front door and say, ‘This is what I want to do.’ And I feel like there’s a lot of opportunity to do it.” More
The turnover is a little lighter this month for U.S. subscribers, but there are still a bunch of great movies and TV shows worth catching.A new year is upon us, and with a scary new coronavirus variant spreading, it once again seems like a good idea to stay home — kind of like the last two years. As such, this month’s list of movies and shows leaving Netflix in the United States should come in especially handy; you can check out literary adaptations, crime movies, existential dramas, family fare and more. (Dates reflect the final day a title is available.)‘Snowpiercer’ (Jan. 1)Before his astonishing four-Oscar haul for “Parasite,” the director Bong Joon Ho displayed his proficiency for fusing class commentary with genre cinema in this thrilling adaptation of the French graphic novel “La Transperceneige.” The story is set in a post-apocalyptic snowscape, in which the last members of the human race are on a train ride that never ends. But they are separated by class and caste; Chris Evans stars as the passenger who leads a rebellion among his fellow lower-class passengers in the back of the train. The action is gripping, the performances are eccentric, and the messaging is as pointed as ever.Stream it here.‘Episodes’: Seasons 1-5 (Jan. 5)The rotten batting average of the stars of “Friends” and their post-“Friends” TV shows began right out of the gate, with Matt LeBlanc’s (mercifully) short-lived spinoff series “Joey.” So there’s perhaps some karmic justice in seeing LeBlanc wind up on arguably the best of the alumni series — and starring as himself, no less, a sly spoof on his persona as a pretty boy goof-off, with a dose of self-important actor arrogance thrown in. (He was nominated for four Emmys for the role.) A British-American coproduction, the series benefits from its dual perspective; it has the cynical bite of the best British comedies while showcasing the insiders’ knowledge of its American creators, David Crane and Jeffrey Klarik (“Frasier”).Stream it here.‘A Ghost Story’ (Jan. 6)The writer and director David Lowery (who recently earned raves for “The Green Knight”) turns the connotations of his film’s title inside out, since a “ghost story” doesn’t have to be a horror story. Here, it’s quietly tragic, the tale of a young and happy married couple (Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara) who are starting their lives in their first shared home when he dies unexpectedly. But he cannot move on; he “haunts” their house in a simple, cartoonish “ghost” costume of a bedsheet, first observing his widowed wife in her unguarded grief, and then those who take on the home after. Mara is devastating, painting a portrait of loss that’s at times painful to watch, and Lowery’s keen ear for vernacular speech and eye for detail have rarely been so gracefully showcased.Stream it here.‘The Lorax’ (Jan. 6)If you talk to a parent of young children, you will likely not hear much affection for Illumination Studios, the purveyors of some of the laziest, sloppiest and most obnoxious children’s entertainment around. (“Sing 2,” in theaters now! New Minions movie next summer!) The studio’s two best films are most likely its adaptations of Dr. Seuss books — unsurprising, as his texts provide such fertile material for animators. This 2012 animated take on Seuss’s 1971 environmental fable gets a big boost from Danny DeVito’s robust vocal performance as the title character; this is an actor whose voice was built for cartoons, and he makes his Lorax into a showstopping creation.Stream it here.‘Twilight’ (Jan. 15)It’s not hard to make fun of “the Twilight Saga” (five films total, all leaving Netflix mid-month): Plenty of people have, from lazy film critics to hacky stand-up comics to smarmy YouTube hosts. And, to be clear, these are not great works of cinema; the plotting is silly, the tone is all over the place, and performances are uneven. But there are virtues as well: solid filmmaking (especially this first outing, from the “Thirteen” director, Catherine Hardwicke); a rare dramatization of budding female sexuality; and most of all, the power the series’ success gave its stars, Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson, to make whatever weird art movies they wanted afterward. Did you enjoy “The Lighthouse,” “Personal Shopper,” “Spencer,” or “Good Time”? Thank “Twilight.”Stream it here.‘The Bling Ring’ (Jan. 17)This 2013 effort from Sofia Coppola effort plays like a culmination of all of her previous work: the celebrity satire of “Lost in Translation,” the hedonism of “Marie Antoinette” and the California alienation of “Somewhere,” stirred into a soup with the real-life story of four young Hollywood hangers-on who supplemented their party lifestyle by burglarizing the homes of famous people. A lesser filmmaker could have turned this story into a broad, dumb comedy or a stern lecture about the morals of today’s fallen youth. Coppola goes in another direction, capturing the glitz and glamour of this sleek world and its shiny surfaces before exposing the emptiness underneath.Stream it here.‘Cloud Atlas’ (Jan. 31)The writer David Mitchell has been a key collaborator of the Wachowski siblings in recent years, working with them on their Netflix series “Sense8” and co-writing Lana Wachowski’s recent “The Matrix Resurrections.” But they first worked together less directly, co-writing and co-directing (with the “Run Lola Run” filmmaker Tom Tykwer) this 2012 adaptation of Mitchell’s vast novel “Cloud Atlas.” It’s an ambitious piece of work, combining multiple narratives across time and space and placing its main cast (including Tom Hanks, Halle Berry and Hugh Grant) in multiple roles. It doesn’t all work, but it’s such a big swing that it’s hard not to fall under its spell.Stream it here.‘Mystic River’ (Jan. 31)Clint Eastwood was in a rough spot as a filmmaker in the early 2000s after several years of turning forgotten best-sellers like “True Crime” and “Blood Work” into forgettable movies. But he struck gold in 2003 with his adaptation of “Mystic River,” a Boston crime novel by Dennis Lehane, which netted Oscars for Sean Penn and Tim Robbins. They star, along with Kevin Bacon, as friends since childhood who have dealt with a shared trauma in wildly different ways, and “Mystic River” expertly folds together its present-day and flashback timelines to reveal how the pain of the past is never far away.Stream it here.‘Shutter Island’ (Jan. 31)Between their best picture-winning collaboration on “The Departed” and the best picture-nominated “The Wolf of Wall Street,” the director Martin Scorsese and the star Leonardo DiCaprio teamed up for this 2009 thriller — also adapted from a Dennis Lehane novel. It was generally seen as a castoff, a stylistic exercise allowing the filmmaker to play in the moody genre sandbox of the B-movie masters. But there’s a bleakness to the picture, an existential despair, at which those movies only hinted, particularly in the implications of its shattering closing scenes. DiCaprio shines throughout in a performance of increasing complexity; the more we know about this character, the clearer DiCaprio’s achievement becomes.Stream it here. More
Documentaries brought us closer to musicians this year, and it wasn’t always pretty.The pandemic, it seems, sent certain enterprising music lovers into editing rooms. For those still leery of gathering for a live concert, the 2021 consolation prize was not a slew of ephemeral livestreams, but an outpouring of smart, intent music documentaries that weren’t afraid to stretch past two hours long. With screen time begging to be filled, it was the year of the deep dive.Those documentaries included a binge-watch of the Beatles at work in Peter Jackson’s “The Beatles: Get Back”; a visual barrage to conjure musical disruption in Todd Haynes’s “Velvet Underground”; far-reaching commentary atop ecstatic performances from the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival in Questlove’s “Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised)”; and a surprisingly candid chronicle of Billie Eilish’s whirlwind career — at 16, 17 and 18 years old — in R.J. Cutler’s “The World’s a Little Blurry.” The documentaries were about reclaiming and rethinking memory, about unexpected echoes across decades, about transparency and the mysteries of artistic production.They were also a reminder of how scarce hi-fi sound and images were back in the analog era, and how ubiquitous they are now. Half a century ago, the costs of film and tape were not negligible, while posterity was a minor consideration. Experiencing the moment seemed far more important than preserving any record of it. It would be decades before “pics or it didn’t happen.”The Velvet Underground, in its early days, was simultaneously a soundtrack and a canvas for Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, a multimedia club-sized happening that projected images on the band members as they played. Although the Velvets’ social set included plenty of artists and filmmakers, apparently no one got the obvious idea of capturing a full-length performance by the Velvets in their prime. What a remarkable missed opportunity.Haynes’s documentary creatively musters circumstantial evidence instead. There are memories from eyewitnesses (and only eyewitnesses, a relief). And Haynes fills the lack of concert footage with an overload of contemporaneous images, sometimes blinking wildly in a tiled screen that suggests Windows 10 running amok. News, commercials and bits of avant-garde films flicker alongside Warhol’s silent contemplations of band members staring back at the camera. The faces and fragments are there, in a workaround that translates the far-off blur of the 1960s into a 21st-century digital grid.Todd Haynes’s “The Velvet Underground” fills the lack of concert footage with an overload of contemporaneous images.Apple TV+Luckily there was more foresight in 1969, when Hal Tulchin had five video cameras rolling at the Harlem Cultural Festival, which later became known as “Black Woodstock.” New York City (and a sponsor, Maxwell House) presented a series of six weekly free concerts at Mount Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park) with a lineup that looks almost miraculous now, including Stevie Wonder, Mahalia Jackson, Nina Simone, B.B. King, Sly and the Family Stone and Mongo Santamaria, just for starters. Tulchin’s crew shot more than 40 hours of footage, capturing the eager faces and righteous fashions of the audience along with performers who were knocking themselves out for an almost entirely Black crowd. Yet nearly all of Tulchin’s material went unseen until Questlove finally assembled “Summer of Soul” from it.The music in “Summer of Soul” moves from peak to peak, with unstoppable rhythms, rawly compelling voices, snappy dance steps and urgent messages. But “Summer of Soul” doesn’t just revel in the performances. Commentary from festivalgoers, performers and observers (including the definitive critic Greg Tate) supply context for a festival that had the Black Panthers as security, and that the city likely supported, in part, to channel energy away from potential street protests after the turbulence of 1968.Questlove’s subtitle and his song choices — B.B. King singing about slavery, Ray Baretto proudly claiming a multiracial America, Nina Simone declaiming “Backlash Blues,” Rev. Jesse Jackson preaching about Martin Luther King Jr.’s murder in 1968, even the Fifth Dimension finding anguish and redemption in “Let the Sunshine In” — make clear that the performers weren’t offering escapism or complacency. After five decades in the archives, “Summer of Soul” is still timely in 2021; it’s anything but quaint. Here’s hoping that far more of the festival footage emerges; bring on the expanded version or the mini-series. A soundtrack album is due in January.The music in “Summer of Soul,” which includes the 5th Dimension, moves from peak to peak, but the film doesn’t just revel in the performances. Searchlight PicturesCameras were filming constantly during the recording sessions for “Let It Be,” when the Beatles set themselves a peculiar, quixotic challenge in January of 1969: to make an album fast, on their own (though they eventually got the invaluable help of Billy Preston on keyboards), on camera and with a live show to follow. It was one more way that the Beatles were a harbinger of things to come, as if they had envisioned our digital era, when bands habitually record video while they work and upload work-in-progress updates for their fans. In the 1960s, recording studios were generally regarded as private work spaces, from which listeners would eventually receive only the (vinyl) finished project. The “Let It Be” sessions represented a new transparency.Its results, in 1970, were the “Let It Be” album, reworked by Phil Spector, and the dour, disjointed 80-minute documentary “Let It Be” by the director Michael Lindsay-Hogg — both of them a letdown after the album “Abbey Road,” which was released in 1969 but recorded after the “Let It Be” sessions. The Beatles had announced their breakup with solo albums.The three-part, eight-hour “Get Back” may well have been closer to what the Beatles hoped to put on film in 1969. It’s a bit overlong; I will never need to see another close-up of toast at breakfast. But in all those hours of filming, Lindsay-Hogg’s cameras took in the iterative, intuitive process of the band constructing Beatles songs: building and whittling down arrangements, playing Mad Libs with syllables of lyrics, recharging itself with oldies and in jokes, having instruments in hand when inspiration struck. Jackson’s definitive sequence — the song “Get Back” emerging as Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr are jamming one morning — merges laddish camaraderie with deep artistic instinct.Cameras were filming constantly during the recording sessions for “Let It Be” in January 1969.Apple Corps“Get Back” newly reveals the situations that the Beatles were juggling even as they pushed themselves toward their self-imposed (and then self-extended) deadline. They moved from the acoustically inhospitable Twickenham film studios to a hastily assembled basement studio at Apple. They seriously mulled over some preposterous locations — an amphitheater in Tripoli? a children’s hospital? — for the impending live show. There was so much tension that George Harrison walked out of the band, only to reconcile and rejoin after a few days. Meanwhile, they faced predatory coverage from British tabloids. It’s a wonder they could concentrate on making music at all.Yet as established stars, the Beatles could work largely within their own protective bubble in 1969. Fast-forward 50 years for “The World’s a Little Blurry,” and Billie Eilish faces some of the same pressures as the Beatles did: songwriting, deadlines, playing live, the press. But she’s also dealing with them as a teenage girl, in an era when there are cameras everywhere — even under her massage table — and the internet multiplies every bit of visibility and every attack vector. “I literally can’t have a bad moment,” she realizes.In “The World’s a Little Blurry,” Eilish performs to huge crowds singing along with every word, sweeps the top awards at the 2019 Grammys and gets a hug from her childhood pop idol, Justin Bieber. But as in her songs — tuneful, whispery and often nightmarish — there’s as much trauma as there is triumph. Eilish also copes with tearing a ligament onstage, her recurring Tourette’s syndrome, a video-screen breakdown when she headlines the Coachella festival, an apathetic boyfriend, inane interviewers, endless meet-and-greets and constant self-questioning about accessibility versus integrity. It’s almost too much information. Still, a few years or a few decades from now, who knows what an expanded version might add? More
