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      ‘Last Night in Soho’ Review: Dream Girls

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      Two young women from different eras form a psychic bond in Edgar Wright’s sumptuous and surprising horror movie.Early in Edgar Wright’s “Last Night in Soho,” there’s a rapturous sequence showing Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie), a fashion student recently arrived in London, experiencing what seems to be a vivid dream. Entranced by a gorgeous young singer named Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy, a vision in pink chiffon and blonde bouffant), Eloise finds her on a busy street where Sean Connery in “Thunderball” blazes from a gigantic marquee. As the two women enter a glamorous nightclub and Cilla Black’s aching 1964 hit, “You’re My World,” throbs on the soundtrack, they become mirror images and their stories irrevocably fuse.Nothing in Wright’s previous work quite prepared me for “Last Night in Soho,” its easy seductiveness and spikes of sophistication. Dissolving the border between present and past, fact and fantasy, the director (aided by the euphoric talents of the cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung) has produced some of the most dazzling imagery of his career. This is also his first film with a female lead — he’s best known for buddy comedies like “Shaun of the Dead” (2004) and “Hot Fuzz” (2007) — a choice that lends an authentic shiver to a story anchored in male sexual violence and swinging London’s seedy underbelly.As Eloise’s psychic connection to Sandie starts to overwhelm her daily life — given welcome flashes of normalcy by Michael Ajao as a supportive suitor — the plot (of which it’s best to say as little as possible) drastically darkens. The movie, though, remains luminous: Streets gleam and shadows pulse, the amber light from doorways spilling like whiskey over Eloise’s nighttime adventures. What we’re watching is a gorgeous horror movie, its surface sleekness roughened by three legendary British actors: Diana Rigg, in one of her final roles, as Eloise’s landlady; Rita Tushingham, as her grandmother; and Terence Stamp. Our first clear look at Stamp, pausing in the door frame of a dubious establishment to carefully adjust his overcoat, is a master class in minimalist menace. His mysterious character might be woefully underwritten, but I would take minutes with Stamp over hours with Chalamet any day of the week.Though unable to sustain the patient assuredness of its first act, “Last Night in Soho” delivers almost as many pleasures as apparitions. The editing is dizzying, the music divine as Wright reaches across time to show what the big city can do to a young woman’s dreams. This gives the movie an undercurrent of wistfulness that feels exactly right, as when Eloise tells Stamp’s character that her mother is dead. “Most of them are,” he replies, before walking away.Last Night in SohoRated R for sleazy men, spurting blood and ghosts galore. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Only the Animals’ Review: A Missing Woman, a Cruel World

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      When an outsider disappears from a remote region in France, she leaves a mystery and a lot of messy complications in her wake.What would movies do without troublesome women — the cruel, the cold, the difficult, the dispensable? That’s one of the takeaways of “Only the Animals,” a cynical French puzzler from the director Dominik Moll about a woman who goes missing. Her disappearance stirs up the usual interest; that she’s white and wealthy helps. There’s a police investigation and news reports and plenty of pain and suffering, but the many tears the movie vigorously pumps aren’t necessarily spilled over her.The setup is fairly simple; what ensues is more complicated. (Moll and Gilles Marchand wrote the script, adapting it from a novel by Colin Niel.) When an empty S.U.V. is found on a desolate country road, the police open an investigation and begin looking for its driver, Evelyne (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), who’s been staying in a nearby vacation home. As the search continues, leads are pursued and locals interviewed. The kink here is that the story doesn’t focus on the inquiry or even Evelyne, but on five characters who have somehow contributed to her disappearance and are directly or very tangentially in her orbit. Some know her intimately; others don’t know her at all.The movie follows these five in titled chapters that assume their respective points of view and dip into their bleak, economically fragile lives. It opens with Alice (Laure Calamy, one of the delights in the French television show “Call My Agent!”), who knows next nothing about Evelyne other than what’s appeared on the news. Like everyone in this movie, Alice is largely defined by her problems, which in her case includes too many disagreeable men in her life. Calamy’s restless physicality and emotional transparency do a lot for the character, and when Alice enters a room, she jolts it awake even if she hasn’t a clue about what’s happening in it. You miss that energy when she’s not onscreen.The movie’s other most recognizably human figure is Marion (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), a young, doll-faced waitress whose relationship with Evelyne helps bring the missing woman into focus. This chapter isn’t altogether credible, and Marion’s naïveté is more narratively expedient than persuasive, but her raw desires and vulnerability are a relief from the movie’s free-ranging cruelties, petty and otherwise. The remaining chapters focus on men who together paint a grim, at times pathological picture of masculinity that the movie doesn’t engage with or doesn’t recognize. The first has profound psychological issues; the second is a violent fantasist; and the third is a desperate con artist.Telling a story through multiple perspectives is a familiar strategy: “Citizen Kane” builds on different narrative points of view, as does “Rashomon” and the recently released “The Last Duel.” Divergent voices and memories can be meaningfully deployed; they can also just be fun or showy or banal. Much depends on how and why they’re marshaled in a story, whether they create consensus or conflict, and how they work with the timeline. In “Kane,” the sweep of the title character’s life emerges piecemeal through the reminiscences of some who knew him; in “Rashomon,” the same event is recounted by characters (the dead included) who put their own spin on what occurred.In “Only the Animals,” by contrast, the multiple viewpoints are just a clever, self-satisfied device to deliver stale goods and familiar ugliness with a soupçon of glib class politics. As the cipher at its center — sacrificial lamb or guilty bourgeois, you decide! — the charismatic Bruni Tedeschi makes a predictably solid impression, which is impressive given the vaporousness of her role. The movie doesn’t deserve the actress, but its attitude toward her character is instructive. That’s particularly true in the chapter in which Evelyne is brutally assaulted, an attack that Moll lingers on long enough, getting close enough for you to see both her terror and the movie’s contempt for this woman.Only the AnimalsNot rated. In French and Nouchi, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Antlers’ Review: Buck Wild

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      An environmental parable is tucked inside this gloomy film about a creature that terrorizes a small Oregon town.“Antlers,” a moody muddle by Scott Cooper (“Hostiles”), attempts to do for the wendigo, a man-eating, steroidal, elk-like creature from Algonquin folklore, what “Jaws” did for the great white shark: pare a beast to its protuberances and set it loose on an economically-anxious hamlet where basic human well-being is a luxury.The setting is a small Oregon coal mining town that looks funereal even before the wendigo stacks up spines like discarded toothpicks. The mine has shuttered, but promises to reopen. In the interim, its abandoned shaft is an irresistible temptation for two destructive forces fated to collide: Frank Weaver (Scott Haze), a local meth maker who cooks in the darkness, and the wendigo, Mother Earth’s vengeful protector. (The film’s go-green ideology appears only in the opening crawl before becoming as forgotten as a T-shirt from Earth Day 1994.)A cannibal who symbolizes mankind’s appetite for greed and plunder couldn’t be more relevant. In execution, however, “Antlers” isn’t much interested in expanding on its folkloric myth. The wendigo stalks the movie like just another rattle-throat corpse-grinder that yowls and stomps and does its darnedest to trample a path for a sequel. The script, co-written by Cooper, C. Henry Chaisson and Nick Antosca (“Channel Zero”), dwells instead on the miseries of Frank’s oldest son, Lucas (a promising Jeremy T. Thomas), a 12-year-old grappling with the complete destruction of his already fragile home life. Lucas’s English teacher, Julia (Keri Russell), notices that the starved child is scribbling disturbed drawings that demand more attention than the stretched-thin principal (Amy Madigan) is able to give.Julia has her own history of abuse, conveyed through cryptic flashbacks and Russell’s flatlined frown. The film’s smartest insights come from observing how maltreated children bear their secrets. At the same time, Julia’s brother (Jesse Plemons), the local sheriff, is saddled with speculating that the disemboweled victims were done in by “a bear or cougar or something,” inanities made worse by Cooper’s apparent affection for ponderous dialogue delivery that makes every character speak as though they’re hand-whittling each word.The film’s self-seriousness is as oppressive as its setting’s monotonous fog. The cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister shoots handsomely, making Boschian ghouls of men in bug-eyed gas masks, yet it gets frustrating that neither he nor Cooper allow anyone to turn on more than one lamp. Despite Julia’s classroom lectures about the purpose of fiction — on Goldilocks: “Is there a moral or lesson in that story?” — “Antlers” itself is merely a jumbled presentation of awful things, the bones of a good idea with none of the meat.AntlersRated R for blood and guts and emotional bludgeoning. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Bulletproof’ Review: Americans and Their Guns

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      This documentary shows a nightmarish vision of the consumer industry that has sprung up around school shootings.The documentary “Bulletproof” begins as the sound of gunfire echoes through the halls of Woodside Middle School, in Missouri. The live shots are so startling to hear, it takes a moment to make visual sense of the stationary, impeccably lit and composed frames. Teachers barricade doors with tables and desks, but their classrooms hold no students. Volunteers in yellow vests roam the halls. Gradually, it becomes clear that the shots were fired as part of an elaborate drill staged by adults. They are attempting to rehearse their response to a school shooter.Some participants play dead on the door, felled by imaginary bullets. Tourniquets are applied to imaginary wounds. But when the demonstrator role-playing as a shooter knocks at a door, his gun is real.It’s a dreamlike opening sequence, one that uses vérité observation to present an alarmed and alarming vision of safety. The accomplishment of the director Todd Chandler is that he continues to find settings that demonstrate this same eerie divide between the desire for security, and the extreme measures being taken by schools to achieve impregnability.He follows teachers into shooting ranges, where educators are trained to kill. School administrators justify the expenditures they have made for high security camera systems and show off their military grade weaponry. These subjects speak of the need for protection in schools, but what this admirably hands-off film shows is how the feelings of anxiety that have surrounded school shootings have been monetized and translated into demand for consumer products. It is a nightmarish vision — the military industrial complex deployed in the halls where children ought to roam.BulletproofNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. In theaters and on virtual cinemas. More

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      ‘Attica’ Review: Reflections on a Riot

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      The Showtime documentary, directed by Stanley Nelson, looks back on the 1971 prison uprising with the benefit of 50 years’ hindsight.“Attica,” a documentary from Stanley Nelson, is hardly the first screen attempt to deal with the Attica prison riot of 1971, when inmates took control of part of the penitentiary and, holding hostages, demanded better living conditions before authorities violently subdued them on the fifth day. The presence of TV cameras at the time helped keep the events in the national news, and a blistering 1974 documentary by Cinda Firestone looked back on the uprising almost contemporaneously, with sympathy for the reformist perspective and outrage at the bloodshed perpetrated by officials.But Nelson’s film, and the many former Attica prisoners interviewed for it, has the benefit of 50 years’ hindsight. By going day by day through the riot, it suggests just how differently things might have ended and how close the inmates came to winning most of what they asked for. Then, in the film’s telling, the death of the corrections officer William E. Quinn signaled that all bets were off.Nelson’s straightforward approach, which alternates talking heads (who also include reporters, mediators called in by the prisoners as observers and a daughter of Quinn’s) with archival material, doesn’t always make for pulse-quickening viewing. But there is a fascination in hearing about the logistics of the riot and just how surreal events were for the prisoners. One inmate recalls another saying that he hadn’t been outside after dark in 22 years.The dry presentation is also deceptive: It builds to a powerful final half-hour that makes the case that the brutality used in ending the riot was excessive, criminal and racist — a show of force closer to revenge.AtticaNot rated. Running time: 2 hours. In theaters now, and on Showtime platforms beginning Nov. 6. More

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      Wes Anderson’s Dream of France, and the Paris I Remember

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      With “The French Dispatch,” the director’s latest, yet another American artist falls under the country’s spell. The Times’s Paris bureau chief recalls when the same thing happened to him.PARIS — At the premiere on Sunday before the release of his latest movie, “The French Dispatch,” Wes Anderson stood onstage in a rumpled, brownish suit and told the crowd packed into a Champs-Élysées theater, “I have a French air about me.” He had, he said, “spent my whole life feeling I am in a French movie.”Now this artful Texan and sometime Parisian with a tousled Left-Bank look has made a film so French that not a Gallic cliché is omitted. The trees are pollarded, the shutters are largely drawn, the police tend toward Inspector Clouseau look-alikes. The streets of the fictional town of Ennui-sur-Blasé — roughly translated as Boredom-on-the-World-Weary — are dotted with rats beneath steeply pitched zinc roofs, and, of course, the talk is of love and art and gastronomic pleasure.Ennui (a word that conveys a peculiarly French sense of tedium mixed with spleen) is home to The French Dispatch, an English-language magazine whose avowed inspiration is The New Yorker. In Anderson’s telling, the fictional publication existed between 1925 and 1975 under the editorship of a certain Arthur Howitzer, Jr., who keeps as close an eye on his journalists’ expense reports as on any redundant phrase in their copy. Howitzer is loosely modeled on Harold Ross and William Shawn, the co-founder and longtime editor of the magazine that “The French Dispatch” relocates from Manhattan.The movie, however, is scarcely about journalism, apart from the occasional musing of a reporter named Lucinda Krementz (played by Frances McDormand and inspired by Mavis Gallant and Lillian Ross) who covers a mock-up of the May 1968 student uprising. “I should maintain journalistic neutrality,” she says. “If it exists.”Rather, Anderson’s nostalgia-laced film is about an old subject: the American writer in Paris. It evokes how French sensuality and style and beauty and surly realism — so completely distinct from can-do American optimism and the functional drabness of Main Street U.S.A. — can facilitate artistic reinvention and afford the space to dream.I arrived in Paris in 1975, just as The French Dispatch was ending its life, and later began work for a fortnightly American magazine called The Paris Metro, whose brief but passionate life extended from 1976 to 1978. The tone was more Village Voice than The French Dispatch, and it was a thrilling way to start in journalism. I explored the redevelopment of the Les Halles wholesale food market — then a gaping hole in the center of the city — and wrote about a suburban warehouse disco that was drawing a chic crowd all the way from St. Germain-des-Prés.The whiff of garlic, sauvignon blanc and Gauloises was still strong on the early-morning subway and there was still a horse butcher on every other block. At The Paris Metro, we all thought we were living a charmed life, however straitened our individual circumstances might be. Heck, Parisians, whatever their sophistication, needed tough, raw American journalism to see their city and culture anew. The magazine was a popular success that might have benefited from Howitzer’s attention to expense accounts.I discovered that, despite appearances, I was born an outsider. France was liberating, just as the movies of Godard, Renoir, Truffaut and Varda clearly were for Anderson. They were guides to unimagined possibility, so different in pacing and theme and structure from much of Hollywood.“I have stolen many things from your cinema,” Anderson told the Paris audience at the premiere.Theft may be a tribute, just as cultural difference may be a stimulant. The French phrase “Bof, c’est normal” — “bof” is an untranslatable French verbal shrug — fascinated me, so, at The Paris Metro, I wrote about the French reluctance to be shocked by any human antics, all waved away as “normal.” A short story called “A Slit Skirt” about a vagrant exploring the underside of Paris found its way into print but is probably best forgotten. Still, it reflected a young man’s urge to create, with Paris as the perfect backdrop.If good cheap food and wine were everywhere in those late ’70s days, beauty also overflowed: the wide bright sky on the banks of the Seine, the low-slung bridges with their subtle fulcrums, the golden domes and verdigris statuary, the streets that beckoned and the boulevards that summoned, the overflowing markets and the islands pointing their prows at the river. Paris seemed unreasonably generous.This French generosity is alluded to in “The French Dispatch” with a wistful longing by Roebuck Wright (played by Jeffrey Wright and loosely modeled on James Baldwin and A.J. Liebling), who appears in the fourth and last of the short episodes that make up the movie. He started, as he tells Howitzer, in “fires and murders,” but has moved on to the intrigues of gastronomy. He embarks on an investigation of the table of the chief of the municipal police, whose chef, Mr. Nescaffier (Steve Park), has earned a certain renown with his Blasé city park pigeon hash, among other delicacies.Journalism can be lonely, but Wright describes how invariably, on some French street, he would find “a table set for me” with its bottle of wine — “my solitary feast, my comrade.” France has modernized, of course, but it has also resisted the brand-obsessed homogenization of Anglophone countries. The comfort of that table, and the solicitous service tended to it, remain something accessible across France, as distinct as the unctuous yet mineral perfection of a Gillardeau oyster.Nescaffier, the chef, is poisoned as the police chief tries to free his kidnapped son. On his recovery, in a wonderful scene, he describes with rapture the flavor of the toxic salts in the radishes — milky, peppery, spicy, not entirely unpleasant. “A new flavor! A rare thing at my age!” he explains, with corpses strewn about.Whether the highly stylized, risibly mannered goings-on in Ennui-sur-Blasé are a mocking pastiche of what Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, James Baldwin and countless others found in the movable feast of France, or a Francophile director’s loving paean to that tradition, is one of those riddles that Anderson likes to play with. “I offer the film to France with admiration and respect and a little envy,” he said. Perhaps that was a clue.France clearly has an emotional hold on the director. It was the French epicure Brillat-Savarin who noted: “I have drawn the following inference, that the limits of pleasure are as yet neither known nor fixed.” In food, as in love. When, in the second story of the movie, the imprisoned painter Moses Rosenthaler (played by Benicio del Toro) makes love to his prison guard and model, identified only as Simone (Léa Seydoux), he murmurs to her “I love you.”“I don’t love you,” she says.“Already?”That French realism never goes away.I was reminded of the scene in Godard’s “La Chinoise,” in which two young Maoist revolutionaries — these are students with real heft and serious beliefs — are also lovers. A scene consists of the young man saying “Je t’aime” and the young woman saying “Je ne t’aime plus.” Some things just sound better in French, but, OK, if you insist on a translation: “I love you,” “I no longer love you.”Yes, Anderson has stolen things, but immersed in the cornucopia of France, how could he or any other American artist do otherwise? More

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      Gun Handed to Alec Baldwin Was Not Thoroughly Checked, Affidavit Says

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      The bullet that killed the cinematographer on the film “Rust” has been recovered, the Santa Fe County Sheriff said, and investigators believe there were more live rounds on the set.SANTA FE, N.M. — Before he handed a revolver that he had declared “cold” to the actor Alec Baldwin on the set of the film “Rust” last week, Dave Halls, an assistant director on the film, told a detective he should have inspected each round in each chamber, according to an affidavit that was released Wednesday. But he did not.“He advised he should have checked all of them, but didn’t,” according to an affidavit, which was signed by Detective Alexandria Hancock of the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s office.It turned out that the gun was not “cold.” The revolver, a .45 Long Colt, contained a live round, Sheriff Adan Mendoza of Santa Fe County said at a news conference Wednesday. The gun went off as Mr. Baldwin rehearsed a scene on Thursday, killing the film’s cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, 42, and wounding its director, Joel Souza, 48.The sheriff said that the “lead projectile” that Mr. Baldwin had fired from the gun had been recovered from the director’s shoulder, and said that it was apparently the same round that had killed Ms. Hutchins. Asked if it was an actual bullet that had been fired — and not a blank — he said, “We would consider it a live round, a bullet, live, because it did fire from the weapon and obviously caused the death of Ms. Hutchins and injured Mr. Souza.”“We also believe that we have the spent shell casing from the bullet that was fired from the gun,” he said.Sheriff Mendoza said that investigators believe they recovered more live rounds on the film’s set at Bonanza Creek Ranch, and that they would be sending some of the ammunition they seized to the F.B.I. crime lab for analysis. “We have recovered what we believe to be possible additional live rounds on set,” he said.It was still unclear why there was any live ammunition on the set — it is generally forbidden on film sets — and how a live round came to be in the gun that Mr. Baldwin was handed.The Santa Fe County Sheriff Adan Mendoza and the District Attorney Mary Carmack-Altwies arrived for a news conference about the investigation into the shooting.Nick Layman/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe Santa Fe County district attorney, Mary Carmack-Altwies, said at the news conference that the inquiry was continuing, and that criminal charges were still possible. “If the facts and evidence and law support charges, then I will initiate prosecution at that time,” she said.The film’s armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, told a detective that “no live ammo is ever kept on set,” according to the affidavit. Ms. Gutierrez-Reed, 24, who had only recently begun working as a lead armorer, told a detective that on the day of the shooting, she had checked dummy rounds — which contain no gunpowder and are used to resemble bullets on camera — and ensured they were not “hot,” according to the affidavit.Just before the shooting the crew took a break for lunch, she told the detective, and the ammunition was left out on a cart on the set.The shooting took place in the set of a church. Jae C. Hong/Associated PressDescribing the safety protocols on the set, Mr. Halls said that Ms. Gutierrez-Reed typically opened guns for him to inspect. “I check the barrel for obstructions, most of the time there is no live fire, she (Hannah) opens the hatch and spins the drum, and I say ‘cold gun on set,’” he said in an interview with Detective Hancock, according to the affidavit. It was not clear precisely what he meant by the term “live fire.”.css-m80ywj header{margin-bottom:5px;}.css-m80ywj header h4{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:500;font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.5625rem;margin-bottom:0;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-m80ywj header h4{font-size:1.5625rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}Mr. Halls said that when Ms. Gutierrez-Reed showed him the gun before they continued the rehearsal, he only remembered seeing three rounds. He could not recall if she had “spun the drum,” according to the affidavit.After the shooting, Mr. Halls said, he picked up the gun from a pew inside the church and took it to Ms. Gutierrez-Reed. When she opened it, he said, according to the affidavit, he could see “at least four dummy casings with the holes on the side, and one without the hole. He advised this did not have the cap on it and was just the casing.” Dummy rounds are sometimes identified by a pierced hole on the side.Sheriff Mendoza said about 500 rounds of ammunition had been recovered from the set, including a mixture of blanks, dummy rounds and what the sheriff’s department believes to be live ammunition.In recent days there has been increasing scrutiny of Mr. Halls and Ms. Gutierrez-Reed, since they handled the gun before it went off.Mr. Halls, an industry veteran who has worked on films including “Fargo” and “The Matrix Reloaded,” has been the subject of various complaints over the years about safety, and was fired from the movie “Freedom’s Path” in 2019 after a gun unexpectedly discharged, causing a minor injury to a crew member. There were at least two accidental gun discharges on the set of “Rust” before the fatal shooting, according to three former members of the film’s crew. Mr. Halls didn’t respond to several attempts to reach him.Ms. Gutierrez-Reed, who also goes by Hannah Reed and Hannah Gutierrez, said on a podcast posted last month that she had just finished filming her first movie as head armorer in another western called “The Old Way,” starring Clint Howard and Nicolas Cage, that is set for release next year. “I was really nervous about it at first, and I almost didn’t take the job because I wasn’t sure if I was ready, but doing it, it went really smoothly,” Ms. Gutierrez-Reed said of that movie in the podcast, “Voices of the West.” She is the daughter of Thell Reed, a shooting expert and a consultant to the movie industry.Ms. Gutierrez-Reed told the detective that at the start of the lunch break, the firearms were secured inside a safe on a “prop truck.” During that time, she said that some ammunition was left on a cart, where it was “not secured,” and some was kept in the truck, according to the affidavit, which was filed in Santa Fe County Magistrate Court and was being used to ask for a search warrant for the “prop truck.”After lunch, the film’s prop master, Sarah Zachry, took the firearms from the safe and handed them to Ms. Gutierrez-Reed, the armorer, according to Ms. Gutierrez-Reed’s account to the detective.“She advised there are only a few people that have access and the combination to the safe,” the affidavit said.Over the last few days, questions have been raised about how the fatal shooting could have occurred if safety protocols had been followed properly.“I think there was some complacency on this set,” Sheriff Mendoza said. “Any time firearms are involved, safety is paramount.”Simon Romero reported from Santa Fe, Julia Jacobs from New York and Graham Bowley from Toronto. Matt Stevens contributed reporting. More

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      There’s No Dave Chappelle or Hannah Gadsby Without Mort Sahl

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      Before Sahl, who died at 94 on Tuesday, intellectual arguments and controversial stances were off-limits to stand-ups seeking mass acceptance.The first time Mort Sahl appeared in this paper, the theater critic Brooks Atkinson referred to him as a “saloon talker,” because that’s more or less what comics were in the 1950s. They still are, of course. But now they are also philosophers, political sages, conspiracy-mongers, grumps, rebels and outcasts. And no one deserves more credit for the expansion of their portfolio than Mort Sahl.When news broke Tuesday that he had died at the age of 94, a common reaction was, wait, Mort Sahl was still alive? Call it a cautionary tale for living long enough to be forgotten.Before there even were comedy clubs, Mort Sahl gained acclaim for turning the news of the day into punch lines, pioneering the now expansive branch of political comedy. Lenny Bruce, his contemporary, died young, and while Bruce’s reputation ballooned in death, Sahl raced past his prime by the mid-1960s and was wildly out of fashion the following decade. When he tried a comeback on Broadway in 1987, the same year Jackie Mason resuscitated his career there, The Village Voice’s Laurie Stone delivered a bruising eulogy for Sahl: “He’s become irrelevant.”Unlike Mel Brooks or Bob Newhart, other legends from his era, Sahl, often ungenerous to his colleagues, was too abrasive to ever be widely loved. Chris Rock once said that “Carrot Top is better than Mort Sahl.”But Sahl has his champions, none more consistently effusive than Woody Allen. “He was an original genius who revolutionized the medium,” he has said. “He made the country listen to jokes that required them to think.”To be sure, some of this talk is overblown (including occasionally by Sahl). Redd Foxx put out a comedy album years before he did. Sahl did not invent topical comedy about issues in the news (see Rogers, Will), and some of these arguments rest on a narrow definition of political. Sahl made a big deal out of how radical it was for him not to wear a tuxedo onstage, but for Timmie Rogers, a Black comic who started in the 1940s, it was just as meaningful to put one on.The best case for the legacy of Sahl was his style and delivery. He represented a clean break from the borscht belt past, a rejection of shtick and canned punch lines. Sahl moved stand-up out of the era of joke books and into one in which material was not only original and specific to a performer but also a reflection of a distinct personality.Sahl’s self-mythologizing and controversial takes predated Dave Chappelle. Lester Cohen/Wireimage via GettyThe only time I saw Mort Sahl perform in person, at the Café Carlyle in 2013, his delivery was herky-jerky and quick, with punch lines about President Barack Obama delivered in asides or interruptions. What stood out most was his attitude: perpetually bemused, cheerfully, without an ounce of anger in his cynical gibes. He gave audiences exactly what they wanted, right down to his outfit, his customary V-neck sweater, once a symbol of grad-school seriousness. He carried a rolled-up newspaper, as much a signature as the cigar was for Groucho Marx.Watching him did make me wonder whether, if you do something long enough, it will inevitably become shtick. The first time Henny Youngman said “Take my wife — please,” was it personal? It’s hard to say, but part of what made Sahl so important is that he became famous doing comedy that anticipated our current scene. He might be the only comic who paved the way for both Hannah Gadsby and Dave Chappelle, to take the rivalry of the moment. Let me explain.Long before Gadsby integrated art history and feminist critique into formally tricky stand-up routines, comedians had to wear their intelligence lightly. To make smart points, you had to play dumb. Sahl adopted the opposite posture, a move that now seems banal after the work of Jon Stewart, Dennis Miller and John Oliver, among others. But a remarkable amount of Sahl’s early press attention focused on the curiosity of an intellectual telling jokes. Variety called him the “darling of the eggheads,” and Bob Hope once teased him as “the favorite comedian of nuclear physicists everywhere.”Along with his digressive style, this made Sahl the patron saint of alt comedy, but he was no niche artist. By 1960, he was a major star, host of the Oscars and the first Grammy Awards, writing jokes for President John F. Kennedy and Frank Sinatra, appearing on the cover of Time magazine. His ascent was fast and short, and his fall just as abrupt. It can be tracked roughly to the assassination of Kennedy.Sahl became fixated on the Warren Commission’s report on the killing, dedicating years of his life, including much stage time, to picking it apart, crankily decrying groupthink and floating alternative theories. Decades before Joe Rogan struck gold by becoming a clearing house for conspiracies, Sahl mined this ground. He hosted a satirical TV show in 1966 that became fixated on Kennedy. As his biographer James Curtis put it, “The comedy had almost given way to outrage.” It sounds familiar.Taking an intellectual approach, as Hannah Gadsby does, wasn’t a comedy strategy until Sahl came along. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOne of Sahl’s stock lines was asking if there were any groups he hadn’t offended. His retrograde ideas about gender and his outright sexism earned backlash. After finding fame as the quintessentially liberal critic, Sahl became a Nixon voter who spoke of Ronald Reagan with affection. His image shifted from professorial sage to middle-American outlaw, putting a cowboy in a silhouette on the cover of his raucous, name-dropping memoir, “Heartland,” which announced with a straight face on the first page: “Here is the pain and the ecstasy of a conscience out of control.” Later he called Lenny Bruce “ignorant” before boasting about the time Marilyn Monroe placed his hand on her breast and said, “’Don’t be afraid, Mr. Sahl.” It’s a trip.You can hear the echoes of the current Chappelle in this book: the self-mythologizing, the sensitivity, the bursts of grandeur. Sahl plays the victim brilliantly, saying he couldn’t sign a single record deal after he took a stand on the Warren Commission. If the term cancel culture was around then, he would have used it.Like so many comics “canceled” today, Sahl kept working, and while he never regained his old stature, he also didn’t retire. I didn’t realize he was still active until a few years ago when someone told me not only was he performing every week at a theater in Mill Valley, Calif., but it was also livestreamed. And sure enough, I looked him up and there he was in his 90s, still bemused, flashing that wolfish grin. It was inspiring and not a little bizarre, like discovering that Fatty Arbuckle was still alive and acting.In the popular narratives of the history of stand-up, Lenny Bruce is often positioned as the founding father, and his fight for free speech is a great romantic story to build on. A biopic called “Mort” just doesn’t have the same ring to it. But look around the comedy scene today, the good, bad and ugly, and this saloon talker seems more relevant than ever. More