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      ‘Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone’ at 20: The Film That Started It All

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      Two decades after the film’s release, Daniel Radcliffe and the director, Chris Columbus, take us inside four key scenes.“Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” ruined Daniel Radcliffe’s expectations for what is normal on a film set.The Great Hall, where he shot many of the scenes from the first of eight films based on the J.K. Rowling series, was a phantasmagoria of detail. Platters of real lamb chops, roasted potatoes and puddings sat alongside 400 hand-lettered menus and — for at least one scene — hundreds of real, glowing candles. The hall set took 30 people a little over four months to construct.“I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of sets I’ve been on since in my career that are of that scale,” Radcliffe said in a video interview from his New York apartment in October.Directed by Chris Columbus, the story of a boy who, upon turning 11, discovers he’s a wizard and goes off to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry opened Nov. 16, 2001, and went on to gross more than $1 billion worldwide.When Radcliffe and the young actors who played his friends, Rupert Grint (Ron Weasley) and Emma Watson (Hermione Granger), were making the film, they weren’t just pretending to have the time of their lives — they were, Columbus said.“That’s why we shot with three or four cameras — if one of the kids looked into the camera or smiled like they couldn’t believe their good fortune, I had something else to cut to,” he said in a phone conversation on a walk near his home in Malibu in September.That joy was in large part thanks, Radcliffe said, to Columbus’s infectious passion for his work.“Chris approaches set in the correct way, in my opinion, which is the attitude that we are the luckiest people in the world to get to do this for a living,” he said.Columbus wasn’t initially sure he wanted to do a film about wizards, but after his daughter Eleanor (who has a cameo as Susan Bones) kept bugging him to read the books, he finally cracked open the first installment and read all 223 pages in a day.“I thought, ‘I have to make a movie out of this,’” he said.But when he called his agent to set up a meeting with Warner Bros., “She said, ‘Yeah, you and about 30 other directors,’” Columbus said.So he came up with a strategy: He asked for the last meeting slot with studio executives and spent about 10 days writing a script from the director’s point of view.“I think the most impressive thing about that to them was that I did something for free,” he said, laughing. “No one in Hollywood does anything for free.”Some six weeks later, he learned the job was his — with one condition: He had to fly to Scotland to meet Rowling.“I sat there for two and a half hours, talking nonstop, explaining my vision for the movie,” he said. “And she said, ‘That’s exactly the same way I see it.’”He also got her to go to bat for him on one major casting decision: his Harry. He loved Radcliffe from the moment the actor read for the part — “He was phenomenal,” Columbus said — but the studio wasn’t so sure.“Finally, I called Jo, and I said, ‘Will you look at this kid?’” he said. When she pronounced him “the perfect Harry Potter,” Columbus recalled, the studio went along.Radcliffe, now 32, said that while he does not consider his performance in the film brilliant acting, he’s no longer embarrassed by some of the scenes the way he was in his late teens.“Now I’m able to look back and go, ‘OK, you were a kid, it’s fine,’” he said, laughing. “It’s still a lovely memory.”In separate interviews, Radcliffe and Columbus recalled what it took to shoot four key scenes. Here are edited excerpts from our conversations.The Great HallThe children in this Great Hall scene are distracted from their food, which turned out to be a good thing.Warner Bros.Creating the main gathering place at Hogwarts, where the students eat all their meals at House tables, was a mammoth undertaking.COLUMBUS When the actors walk into the Great Hall for the first time, what you see on their faces is the genuine reaction to seeing this incredible set for the first time.RADCLIFFE It never really lost that power.COLUMBUS The production designer Stuart Craig and [the set decorator] Stephenie McMillan had such an incredible eye for detail. I opened up one of the menus, and realized they’d handwritten all 400 on parchment paper. I thought, “Oh my God, this is the real deal.” I’ve since never had such extraordinary production design.But there were a few hiccups.COLUMBUS The food came in — an American Thanksgiving feast — and it was meant to last for eight to 10 hours. I came back the next day, and it was still the same food! By Day 3, I can only say the scent of the Great Hall was getting a little funky.There was also a mishap.COLUMBUS When all the kids file into the Great Hall for the first time, we see hundreds of floating candles in the air. And then something horrible happened — the flames of the candles started to burn through the clear string holding them and started to drop! We had to get everybody out of the set — and then we shot it two more times, telling ourselves, “We’re just going to add C.G.I. candles.”RADCLIFFE We scattered! I’m sure Chris was more stressed out by it, but as a kid, you’re like, “This is really funny.”Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      ‘Night Raiders’ Review: A Future That Resembles the Past

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      A mother joins a group of vigilantes to help free her daughter from a state-run academy in this feature from Danis Goulet.“Night Raiders” imagines a dystopian world where Indigenous people have been displaced from their land and ghettoized in reserves, while their children are forcibly enrolled in residential schools that brainwash them into forgetting their language and culture. That these are aspects of the actual history of Indigenous communities in North America, and not merely futuristic fictions, is the ingenious and damning conceit of Danis Goulet’s debut feature.“Night Raiders” follows Niska (Elle-Maija Tailfeathers), who’s managed to keep her 11-year-old daughter, Waseese (Brooklyn Letexier-Hart), close to her by living hidden in the woods. When a series of accidents forces them into the city — a squalid slum where packets of food are airdropped to impoverished residents — Niska is forced to give up an injured Waseese to the state. But soon, a torn-up Niska stumbles upon a Cree vigilante community that’s been waiting for a prophesied “guardian” to arrive and help free their children.Goulet’s sleek, lo-fi world-building — decrepit gray cityscapes; fields covered with smoke-spewing factories — is more compelling than her storytelling, which grows increasingly predictable as Niska and the vigilantes plan a raid on Waseese’s academy. Yet the film’s use of clichés can also be thrillingly subversive at times, reminding us of the ways in which genre-movie templates borrow from the history of colonization but obscure the plight of its real victims. A final showdown between the Cree fighters and SWAT-style soldiers recalls westerns, though the stakes are reversed here: The colonizers are not the heroes, but the bad guys.Night RaidersNot rated. In Cree and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘They Say Nothing Stays the Same’ Review: Crossing a Modern River

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      Two events disturb the placid surfaces of a boatman’s world: the building of a nearby bridge, and his discovery of a young woman floating in the water.Directed by the actor Joe Odagiri, “They Say Nothing Stays the Same” is a postcard-pretty film about a boatman in Meiji-era Japan. For years, Toichi (Akira Emoto) has ferried people back and forth on a river amid unspoiled beauty. A large part of the film’s appeal comes from that natural splendor and the lives Toichi glimpses while making one trip after another.Two events disturb the placid surfaces of Toichi’s world: the construction of a nearby bridge, and his discovery of a young woman (Ririka Kawashima) floating in the water. One development underlines Toichi’s haplessness, the other his decency, when the woman turns out to be alive and in need of care. Otherwise, the movie floats along pleasantly enough for much of its 137 minutes, with nice period detail, such as a scene with a colorful band of troubadours.But monotony sets in, beyond Toichi’s routine. Too often Odagiri can’t resist adding one more shot to a montage, or one more vignette. He doesn’t quite reduce Toichi to being a noble mascot for the film’s nostalgic setting (shot by Christopher Doyle), but anyone to do with the bridge (or modernity in general) tends to be portrayed as vulgar or destructive.The landscape can go only so far in expressing Toichi’s mind-set, and the movie turns hokey when it dramatizes Toichi’s inner thoughts: a repeated voice-over of insults that torment him, for example, or two hectic sequences that resemble something out of a zombie movie. When he finally, awkwardly, voices his insecurities at length, his particular twist on humility defies expectations but comes too late.They Say Nothing Stays the SameNot rated. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 17 minutes. In theaters and on virtual cinemas, and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Julia’ Review: She Changed Your Life and Your Utensil Drawer

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      An invigorating new documentary looks back on Julia Child and her influence on how Americans cook and eat.According to this movie, if you own a garlic press, you probably have Julia Child to thank for it. The opening scenes of “Julia,” a lively documentary directed by Julie Cohen and Betsy West, paint a dire picture of suburban American home cooking in the post-World War II era: frozen entrees and Jell-O molds and Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam — an ethos that put convenience ahead of delectability.With the double-whammy of an unlikely best-selling cookbook and a series that helped put public television on the map, Child changed all that.Her story has been told, in fictionalized form, in the charming Nora Ephron film “Julie & Julia.” That 2009 picture commemorates Child’s impact on food culture through a parallel story, also fact based, of a blogger, Julie, making the recipes in “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” which Child wrote with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholie.This documentary is a conventional one, replete with archival footage and talking heads. Child, born in Pasadena, escaped an affluent and conservative upbringing by serving in World War II. Her husband, Paul Child, was both helpmeet and soul mate, supporting her when she enrolled in the exalted Cordon Bleu cooking school on the G.I. Bill — the only woman in her class.Their marriage here is presented as an ideal stew of sex, food and intellectual compatibility. Among the many still photos here chronicling their love is a nude portrait of Julia, something you probably never thought you’d see.The movie doesn’t shy away from Child’s personal shortcomings, touching on a casual homophobia she renounced when the AIDS crisis hit, pouring her energies into raising money to fight the disease. “Julia” is an apt tribute to a life well-lived and well-fed.JuliaRated PG-13 for salty language and one artful nude. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Paper & Glue’ Review: A Sequel of Sorts to ‘Faces Places’

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      JR, plying his art of making and displaying gigantic portraits, carries on, this time without the inimitable Agnès Varda.In “Paper & Glue,” a young Hispanic man stands in the yard of a sprawling prison in Tehachapi, Calif., talking about taking part in a photographic project by the French artist JR.With a group of fellow prisoners, he posed for and then helped paste up the impressive result of their work, which spanned the expanse of the yard. Drone footage shows the men looking up out of a huge group portrait to meet the gaze of the eye in the sky. After helping dismantle the temporary display, the prisoner says with a hint of melancholy, “The process is what matters.”This handsome documentary confirms that sentiment repeatedly as the artist-director recounts two decades of his travels. In 2017, JR was half of the delightful tag-team of “Faces Places,” the Oscar-nominated documentary he and the groundbreaking director Agnès Varda made in the French countryside. “Paper & Glue,” while not as tender a romp, is a sequel in spirit. Faces and their places continue to matter. JR’s always-on sunglasses remain a coy trademark (after all, his own work relies on people showing their faces), but it’s clear strangers respond to him. The incarcerated men laugh at his stories. The women of Morro da Providência, a favela outside Rio de Janeiro, make introductions that ease his entry into their community. The French filmmaker Ladj Ly looks to him to help with a school for budding artists in a Paris suburb. A young mother in Tecate, Mexico, allows him to snap photos of her infant. In 2017, an enormous image the baby’s beatific face towers above the fence at the United States border with Mexico. Her thoughts about JR’s work are so celebratory yet nuanced, she could be his gallerist.Paper & GlueNot rated. In English, Portuguese, French and Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Uppercase Print’ Review: Between the Lines

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      Radu Jude’s rousing, form-bending new feature rails at the power of propaganda to suffocate people’s freedoms.“Uppercase Print” opens with a fragment of a quote from the philosopher Michel Foucault: “the resonance I feel when I happen to encounter these small lives reduced to ashes in the few sentences that struck them down.” The film, a rousing, form-bending new feature by the Romanian auteur Radu Jude, rails at the tyrannical potential of language — particularly when backed by government power — to suffocate people’s freedoms.The movie braids together two accounts of life under the dictatorial regime of Nicolae Ceausescu: a filmed play about the 1981 investigation of a teenager who graffitied slogans about democracy and workers’ rights in the city of Botosani; and advertisements, educational programs and newsreel footage from state-sanctioned Romanian television of the same era.A queasy sense of party-line artifice haunts both the theatrical performance and the TV footage, which the film’s archival opening telegraphs strikingly. Three well-dressed presenters praise Ceausescu’s Romania enthusiastically, until a teleprompter malfunction renders them awkward and speechless. Without its scripted cues, they have no idea what to say.The play, originally written for the stage in 2013 by Gianina Carbunariu, repurposes text from the files of Romania’s Communist-era secret police. Actors read these lines with deadpan intonation, making vivid the dehumanizing effects of bureaucratic jargon. “Reforming the objective” is a dry euphemism for the repression of dissidents; “youth protection” is code for surveillance.Jude’s genius lies in his ability to turn these words against themselves — to render them absurd through canny juxtapositions of text and image, documentary and fiction. And if the film draws on the past, it’s as a warning for the present: A closing exchange about Ceausescu-era phone-tapping slyly references Cambridge Analytica.Uppercase PrintNot rated. In Romanian, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 8 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Love Is Love Is Love’ Review:Aging Too Gracefully

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      The characters in this idle drama, directed by Eleanor Coppola, seem mostly content. That’s the problem.One of the great comforts in life is the assurance that misery can be interesting. Contentment doesn’t necessarily provide onlookers (or audiences) with the pleasure of great gossip, drama or insight, and the characters in the idle drama “Love Is Love Is Love,” directed by Eleanor Coppola, mostly seem like content, happy people.The film is a collection of three largely unrelated short stories, which are each marked with their own title cards. First there is “Two For Dinner,” in which a filmmaker (Chris Messina) who is on location in Montana meets his wife (Joanne Whalley) for a remote date over video chat. In “Sailing Lesson,” Kathy Baker and Marshall Bell play a long-married couple who rekindle the fantasy of romance by playacting as the kind of people who might set sail for a daytime tryst.The final short story in this modest collection is “Late Lunch,” which is also the longest sequence of the film. In it, Caroline (Maya Kazan) holds a dinner in remembrance of her late mother, attended by all of her mother’s nearest and dearest friends.Coppola, 85, focuses her camera on characters as they reminisce in long monologues, which are clearly relished by the film’s accomplished cast, including dinner guests Cybill Shepherd, Rosanna Arquette and Rita Wilson. The tone and pace of the movie corresponds to these sedentary conversations among people who acknowledge their age, and who have had time to find peace.But the cumulative effect of so much enlightened sitting around is that the movie doesn’t move. There is a lack of action, both visually and emotionally. The characters are never unseated by a revelation. When they speak, it feels like they have waited their turn.Love Is Love Is LoveNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘3212 Un-Redacted’ Review: Trying to Solve a Mission’s Mysteries

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      The documentary looks into the complex circumstances involving four American soldiers who were killed in an ambush in Niger in 2017.For anyone confused about the circumstances in which four American soldiers were killed in an ambush in Niger in 2017, the documentary “3212 Un-Redacted” clearly lays out the geography and complicated timeline. It also suggests that confusion is understandable: The movie argues that the Pentagon’s official investigation, which placed the bulk of the blame on junior-level officers, unfairly characterized the events and went out of its way to protect high-ranking officials.“3212 Un-Redacted,” produced by ABC News with the investigative reporter James Gordon Meek serving as a writer and an onscreen presence, visually plays more like a television special than a feature documentary. It devotes much of its first half-hour to remembering the fallen men — we learn, for instance, about how Sgt. La David T. Johnson rode a single-wheeled bike around the Miami area — and introducing their families, no strangers to military culture, who feel betrayed. “The army let me down,” says Arnold Wright, the father of Staff Sgt. Dustin M. Wright. “They let my son down. And then they lied about it.”Meek is particularly interested in why higher-level officials might have proceeded with the operation, after pushback from the ground; the answer he proposes suggests complex motives that probably couldn’t be fully assessed without more information than is publicly available. But at times, the filmmaking itself could be clearer. Meek indicates that he was first contacted about the project around 2018, but the movie shows footage of an American-Nigerien military meeting in September 2017, the month before the ambush. (A representative for the film says it comes from “Chain of Command,” a series by National Geographic, which isn’t credited until the end.) The lack of labeling only raises questions, slightly marring what otherwise plays like a thorough, outraged exposé.3212 Un-RedactedNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More