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      Brian Goldner, Hasbro Executive With Hollywood Vision, Dies at 58

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      He turned a traditional maker of toys and games into an entertainment company with its own TV and movie studio.Brian Goldner, who transformed Hasbro, a traditional maker of toys and games, by rethinking its many brands as properties that could become films, television series and online games, died on Monday at his home in Barrington, R.I. He was 58.Hasbro announced the death but did not give a cause. Mr. Goldner received a diagnosis of prostate cancer in 2014 and took a leave of absence from the company the day before he died.Mr. Goldner, who was named Hasbro’s president in 2008, oversaw a company whose brands include My Little Pony, Monopoly, Dungeons & Dragons, Power Rangers and Nerf.One of his most notable successes was persuading Hollywood executives that Hasbro toys and action figures like Transformers and G.I. Joe were as film-worthy as Batman or Spider-Man.“We had relegated these brands to an experience that was limited to the playroom floor or the kitchen table,” Mr. Goldner told The New York Times in 2009. What he envisioned for the company was something more expansive.The Transformers — toy robots that can turn into vehicles or beasts, which Hasbro introduced in 1984 — were adapted into six big-budget movies that have grossed about $5 billion worldwide since the release of “Transformers” in 2007. Mr. Goldner was an executive producer on all those films and a producer on two G.I. Joe movies.Since 2007, Optimus Prime and the other Transformers, which began life as Hasbro action figures, have starred in six big-budget movies that have grossed about $5 billion worldwide.HasbroTo coincide with the opening of “Transformers: Age of Extinction” (2014), the fourth film in the franchise, he challenged his design team to recapture the toys’ original magic by making them less complex so that they could transform with the push of a button rather than in a dozen steps.“We’ve made incredibly sophisticated robots, but it can be like a 1,000-piece puzzle,” he told The Times in 2014.For much of his time at the company, which is based in Pawtucket, R.I., Mr. Goldner espoused a brand blueprint that reimagined Hasbro as a play and entertainment company.“He came into a traditional toy company that was making stuff, and he believed we weren’t in the business of making things but in the business of storytelling,” Rich Stoddart, the interim chief executive of Hasbro, said in a phone interview.But, he added, Mr. Goldner encountered some skepticism with his plans.“Some people said, ‘Yeah, yeah, it sounds nice,’” Mr. Stoddart said, but Mr. Goldner had to keep pushing to bring his vision to reality. “He didn’t waver, because he believed to his toes that it was the right strategy.”Mr. Goldner’s effort to tell stories using Hasbro brands went even further in 2019 with the $3.8 billion acquisition of Entertainment One, a Canadian production studio that is also known by the shorthand name eOne. At the time, it was producing the popular children’s series “Peppa Pig” and “PJ Masks.”The purchase of eOne gave Hasbro the ability to produce its own programming, rather than make it only in partnership with Hollywood studios, which it had done with its Transformers and G.I. Joe movies as well as with its movie “Battleship” (2012). The film was part of an ultimately failed deal with Universal Pictures that was to have included movies based on the games Monopoly and Candy Land.“What we’ve found is that as all of the big studios have streaming services, they are increasingly holding on to their own I.P.,” Mr. Goldner told CNBC this year, referring to intellectual property. “Therefore, it gives us the opportunity as an independent to go out and present world-class, powerful brand I.P. to these streaming services like Netflix, Apple, Amazon and several others who used to have access to other people’s content and are now looking for great brands.”Mr. Goldner, left, and Adam Goldman, the president of Paramount Pictures, at the premiere of the movie “G.I. Joe: Retaliation” in Los Angeles in 2013.Kevin Winter/Getty ImagesBetween 2022 and 2023, he added, eOne would produce two to three movies and three or four streamed programs every year.Among the projects in development are Power Rangers and Dungeons & Dragons films and TV series based on Transformers and the board games Risk and Clue. The animated film “My Little Pony: A New Generation,” based on that Hasbro line of toys, had its premiere on Netflix last month.Eric Handler, an analyst at the equity trading firm MKM Partners, said by phone that Mr. Goldner had taken “the Disney approach to creating a virtuous circle and monetizing brands beyond the toy aisle.”He added: “Toys are still the core of Hasbro’s business, at least for now. But Brian recognized that you can do so much more with its brands and build them across franchises that cut across toys, consumer product licensing, movies, TV shows and theme park attractions.”Under Mr. Goldner, Hasbro also became a toy and game licensee for the Walt Disney Company’s Marvel universe of characters, including Iron Man and Spider-Man, and continued its licensing of “Star Wars” characters, which began in the 1970s.Brian David Goldner was born on April 21, 1963, in Huntington, N.Y., on Long Island. His mother, Marjorie (Meyer) Goldner, was an investment adviser. His father, Norman, worked at Eaton, a power management company.After graduating from Dartmouth College in 1985 with a bachelor’s degree in government, Mr. Goldner was hired as a marketing assistant at a health care company. He then worked at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, where he rose to director in charge of entertainment before leaving to become an executive vice president of Bandai America, a subsidiary of a Japanese toy company.He became chief operating office of Bandai but left in 2000 to join Hasbro as executive vice president and chief operating officer of its Tiger Electronics subsidiary, which makes the Furby robotic toy and many other products. He climbed quickly, becoming Hasbro’s chief operating officer in 2006. The success of the first “Transformers” movie helped lead to Mr. Goldner’s appointment in 2008 as president and chief executive. He was named chairman in 2015.He is survived by his wife, Barbara (Genick) Goldner; their daughter, Brooke Goldner; his mother; and a brother, Bradford. A son, Brandon, died of a heroin overdose in 2015.In 2018, Hasbro acquired the Power Rangers television and toy brand (originally the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers) from the billionaire Haim Saban for $522 million. For Mr. Goldner, it was a reunion: He had worked with Mr. Saban when Bandai had been the Power Rangers’ global master toy licensee.“From time to time,” Mr. Saban said when the acquisition was announced, “Brian would say to me, ‘So when are you coming to Hasbro?’”It took a while, but Mr. Goldner finally added the Power Rangers to Hasbro’s ever-widening constellation of merchandising, television and movies. More

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      Five Horror Films to Stream Now

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      The month’s picks include a contagion film, an ’80s throwback, an unnerving tale of siblings, a faux documentary and a slow-burn thriller.Halloween is around the corner and already I’m up to my eye sockets in horror, whether it’s the marquee monster “Halloween Kills” or the daredevil Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, which runs through Oct. 21. So to maximize your movie-watching hours this witching season, three of this month’s picks clock in at no longer than 90 minutes. You’re welcome, boo.‘Hall’Rent or buy on Amazon.This taut Canadian horror-thriller, about hotel guests attacked by a deadly virus, never mentions Covid. But — and maybe this is the fate of contagion films now — it’s hard to read a movie about viral spread that turns people into gasping ghouls as being about anything else.The film opens on Naomi (Yumiko Shaku), a pregnant woman on the run from her husband in Japan, sitting in a hotel hallway with other people gulping for air. She crosses paths with Val (Carolina Bartczak), a mom whose plan to take her daughter and escape her abusive husband gets a little easier when he turns into a weak, wheezing monster. Turns out it’s no conspiracy theory: The outbreak has sinister origins.I don’t want to say more, because in just 79 minutes the director Francesco Giannini, in his solo feature debut, fronts his film with strong central female characters and packs it with ferocious twists.It’s too early to tell to what extent coronavirus horror movies will influence horror. “Hall” and the demonic Zoom-call picture “Host” — the scariest movie ever, according to a new study — makes me think it will. The jury’s out on “Corona Zombies.”‘Censor’Stream it on Hulu.You don’t need to remember the 1980s to appreciate Prano Bailey-Bond’s creeping-dread drama, her feature debut about the Video Nasties scare in Britain. The honest-to-God moral panic swept the country, leading to the banning of 72 films.Enid (Niamh Algar) spends her days watching extreme movies, not for pleasure but for the British government. She’s a censor and it’s the 1980s, which means it’s her job under a Thatcher-era law to cut or ban films she considers beyond the pale.But an emotionally taxing job isn’t a great fit for Enid, who’s struggling to cope with the disappearance of her sister, Nina (Amelie Child Villiers), when they were kids. Enid thinks Nina is still alive, a conviction that gains traction when Enid sees an actress in a movie who could pass for her grown sister. As fact, fiction and her horror movie assignments collide, Enid’s grasp on reality takes a bloody, surreal turn.The film is an 84-minute jackpot of VHS-age style, from Annika Summerson’s gritty cinematography to Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch’s pulsing score. Even better, as an eerie exploration of a woman’s emotional unraveling, it’s a story of heartfelt substance.‘Woe’Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.Charlie (Adam Halferty) just wants the world outside his house — his dead father’s house, actually — to go away. He ignores his sister, Betty (Jessie Rabideau), when she shows up at the front door with her fiancé, Benjamin (Ryan Kattner) and a plan to sell their father’s old Crown Victoria, the one in which he took his life.But Charlie does pay attention to the strange letters slipped under his door that lead him to his Uncle Pete (James Russo), who Charlie thought was dead. Even weirder is Pete’s message to his nephew: “This thing is going to destroy you just like it did your father.”What does it mean to let go of grief, and what if grief won’t let you go? What if grief is a monstrous figure in a black robe who watches you with red eyes? Those are the questions that in 85 weird minutes consume Matthew Goodhue’s deeply unnerving movie about siblings and memory. This is compact, intense and affecting horror storytelling. Too bad the bumbling Benjamin elbows his way to the front of the finale.‘The Medium’Stream it on Shudder.The horror faux-documentary has fallen out of favor since the found-footage golden age of the ’90s. That’s a shame, because a fictional scary story told through the conventions of nonfiction filmmaking can be, like “Hell House LLC,” extra terrifying.Here to fill that gap is this spooky Thai film directed by Banjong Pisanthanakun. It follows a film crew traveling to a rural village to document Nim (Sawanee Utoomma), a female shaman whose body hosts a good spirit worshiped by locals.The crew members start by shooting beautiful scenes of religious ceremonies, but things take a dark turn when they catch Nim’s niece Mink (Narilya Gulmongkolpech) attacking people and spontaneously bleeding. That’s when Nim realizes the source of her niece’s extreme behavior isn’t defiance. It’s demonic.This is a film that simmers, a welcome relief from the tendency to go big with stories that fuse religious belief, family bonds and the supernatural. At over two hours, it eventually overstays its welcome, finishing with excessive chaos. But the final scene, just an interview with Nim, is chilling.‘The Secret of Sinchanee’Rent or buy it on Vudu.When police find Will (Emmett Spriggs) hiding at his grandfather’s house the morning after his mother and sister are murdered, it’s clear something terrible also happened to the terrified young boy. Why did Will look into the police-station security camera and say “spirit of death” in Mohican? And who was the Native American man accompanying him through the snowy woods that night?Fast forward and the grown Will (the writer-director Steven Grayhm) returns to his childhood home after his father’s death. When homicide detectives (Nate Boyer and Tamara Austin) come to town to look into a series of murders, Will’s past starts to manifest itself in ways no human investigator stands a chance of conquering.Despite a title that makes it sound like the Hardy Boys are on the case, Grayhm’s feature debut is a slow-burn thriller that deftly weaves issues of mental illness and family traumas into a cautionary tale set on sacred land. Logan Fulton, the director of photography, makes rural Massachusetts look simultaneously like a winter wonderland and a hellscape. More

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      Dave Chappelle Isn’t Canceled. He Just Likes to Talk About It.

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      In Netflix’s “The Closer,” he returns to views about transgender people that drew anger in his last special. With his popularity partly built on courting outrage, it’s no surprise he’s doubling down.The first time Dave Chappelle wanted to quit a TV show, he didn’t do it. After shooting the pilot of his soon-to-be-forgotten 1996 ABC sitcom, “Buddies,” an amiable comedy about an interracial friendship, the network fired his co-star Jim Breuer, which led Chappelle to tell his manager he wanted to quit.He was talked out of it, and the show got poor reviews and was canceled after five episodes. When I interviewed one of the co-creators, Matt Williams, several years ago for an e-book about Chappelle, he told me he wished he had built more conflict between the leads. “Then you could capitalize on the charisma of Chappelle,” he said. “But he was different then. He was impish. He was playful, innocent. No danger.”As controversy boils over Chappelle’s latest special, “The Closer,” I have been thinking about what lessons he might have learned from this early failure. At Comedy Central, he famously did quit and returned with a new mystique. In his current incarnation, he leans hard into conflict, and part of his enduring popularity is his ability to manufacture a sense of danger.In his last special, “Sticks and Stones,” Chappelle took aim at the audience and cancel culture, made many jokes about transgender people and defended Kevin Hart, who had lost the job of hosting the Oscars because of protests over old homophobic tweets. Chappelle earned backlash, negative reviews and the sympathies of the right-wing media, which has become invested in issues of comedy and free speech in the Trump era.OK, so what did Dave Chappelle do for his next act? Take aim at cancel culture, mock trans people and bring up the same trans friend he mentioned in the last special. By the time he defends Hart again (even if losing the Oscars was the worst injustice known to man, does it deserve two specials’ worth of protest?), you might be feeling a sense of déjà vu.A few days before “The Closer” premiered, Chappelle predicted he would be canceled; a few days later, he appeared at the Hollywood Bowl at the premiere of his new documentary and talked again about being canceled. The fact that no one thinks Dave Chappelle will be canceled, whatever that means to you, is beside the point.This rollout was a performance of danger. Of course, what is dangerous is an open question. “The Closer” courts outrage with dopey attacks on #MeToo, and jokes linking Asian people to Covid, but mostly with the subject he has been fixated on for years: transgender people.When Jaclyn Moore, a showrunner for the Netflix series “Dear White People,” announced she would no longer work with the company while it produces “dangerously transphobic content,” the statement was a reference to the numbers of hate crimes against transgender people and the statistics about mental health and suicide.There is a tendency these days to quickly conflate language and violence in discussions about controversial art, especially comedy. A punchline, even an offensive one, is not the same as a punch. And yet, it’s hard to imagine that anyone who has attended middle school (or seen a Martin Scorsese film) would not understand that jokes can contribute to a culture of bullying and abuse.In defending Chappelle, Ted Sarandos, the co-chief executive of Netflix, waded into the issue of the consequences of cruel jokes by arguing that he doesn’t believe there is a relationship between art and harm. It’s a rickety platform to stand on when your company consistently puts out work that hopes to raise awareness, increase representation or move the culture. If art can do good for the world, then isn’t it possible the reverse could be true?The fallout from “The Closer” is in some ways the most interesting thing about the special. A group of trans employees has planned a walkout on Wednesday to protest. And anger within Netflix led to a rare and fascinating leak of internal viewing numbers, revealing just how little we understand success in the era of minimal transparency by entertainment companies. According to Bloomberg, based on Netflix’s measurement of efficiency, which balances a show’s reach with its price tag, Bo Burnham’s “Inside” (which earned the comic $3.9 million) performed significantly better than “The Closer” (which cost $24.1 million).Chappelle remains a gifted yarn-spinner who shifts from gravitas to irreverence as deftly as anyone. But judged purely by originality and construction of jokes, he’s a star in decline. There are some startlingly hack jokes, like a well-worn one about Mike Pence’s sexuality, and others about pedophilia and Covid that badly need the shock of offensiveness to make an impact.Why has he been so fixated on transgender people for so many years now? It may be that he believes deeply that gender is a fact. Maybe he passionately wants to let us know he’s “Team TERF,” as he says in “The Closer” — an acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminist. Neither of those points come with punch lines. It could also be that he sees pushing these hot buttons as the easiest way to make a big fuss.One of the major developments in comedy over the past decade has been the rise of comics animated by opposition to left-wing dogma and cancel culture. I have seen struggling comics boost their careers by pivoting right — or, more precisely, anti-left. There’s no question that there is a market for it. While he has lost some fans, Chappelle is a hero to this group now. In middle age, Chappelle acts less like a comic and more like a pundit. He’s far more comfortable than most of his peers in going long stretches without jokes. His recent monologues about George Floyd and the way streaming services have not compensated him for showing his sketch show were both righteous and largely without humor.In 2006, after he left “Chappelle’s Show,” which made better arguments that jokes should be able to punch in any direction than anything he says in these specials, he proclaimed in an interview, “I feel like I’m going to be some kind of parable.” Then he said he was going to be either a legend or a tragic story.Give Chappelle credit for this: In a climate in which people seem to get more excited about culture wars than culture, he has figured out a way to be both.Still, I suspect the long-term impact of the last few specials will not flatter his reputation. Comedy moves fast. And right now, there are more funny transgender stand-ups getting hours ready at comedy shows in the city than ever before. The legacy of “The Closer” might be less in the jokes it makes than in the ones it inspires. More

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      Haile Gerima Is Having a Hollywood Moment. It’s Left Him Conflicted.

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      The director, an eminence of American and African indie cinema, is being recognized by the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures and Netflix. But he has long rejected the industry.Haile Gerima doesn’t hold back when it comes to his thoughts on Hollywood. The power games of movie producers and distributors are “anti-cinema,” he put it recently. The three-act structure is akin to “fascism” — it “numbs, makes stories toothless.” And Hollywood cinema is like the “hydrogen bomb.”For decades, Gerima, the 75-year-old Ethiopian filmmaker, has blazed a trail outside of the Hollywood system, building a legacy that looms large over American and African independent cinema.But as he spoke with me recently on a video call from his studio in Washington, D.C., Gerima found himself at an unexpected juncture: He was about to travel to Los Angeles, where he would receive the inaugural Vantage Award at the opening gala of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, which is also screening a retrospective of his work this month. A new 4K restoration of his 1993 classic, “Sankofa,” debuted on Netflix last month.After 50 years, Hollywood has finally come calling. “I’m going with a lump in my throat,” Gerima said with his typical candor. “This is an industry I have no relationship with, no trust in, no desire to be a part of.”Gerima tends to speak directly and without euphemism, his words propelled by the force of his conviction. The filmmaker has been at loggerheads with the American film industry since the 1970s, when he was a student at the University of California, Los Angeles. There, he was part of what came to be known as the L.A. Rebellion — a loose collective of African and African American filmmakers, including Charles Burnett (“Killer of Sheep”), Julie Dash (“Daughters of the Dust”), Larry Clark (“Tamu”) and others, who challenged the mainstream cinematic idiom.Gerima’s first project in film school was a short commercial called “Death of Tarzan.” An exorcism of Hollywood’s colonial fantasies, it provoked a response from a classmate that Gerima still remembers fondly: “Thank you, Gerima, for killing that diaper-wearing imperialist!”The eight features he has since directed bristle with the same impulse for liberation, employing nonlinear narratives and jagged audiovisual experiments to paint rousing portraits of Black and Pan-African resistance. In a phone interview, Burnett described Gerima’s work as coursing with emotion: “People have plots and things, but he has energy, real energy. That’s what characterizes his films.”The stark, black-and-white “Bush Mama” (1975) charts the radicalization of a woman in Los Angeles as she navigates poverty and the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of welfare. “Ashes and Embers” (1982) — which opens with the protagonist driving into Los Angeles with dreams of Hollywood before being abruptly stopped by the police — traces the gradual disillusionment of a Black Vietnam War veteran. In “Sankofa,” one of Gerima’s most acclaimed films, an African American model is transported back in time to a plantation, where she’s caught up in a slave rebellion. Other films, like “Harvest: 3,000 Years” (1976) and “Teza” (2008), explore the political history of Gerima’s native Ethiopia.Nick Medley and  Alexandra Duah in “Sankofa,” which has been restored and is now available on Netflix.Mypheduh FilmsFor the filmmaker and his wife and producing partner, Shirikiana Aina, these visions of fierce Black independence are as much a matter of life as art. Most of Gerima’s movies have been produced and distributed by the couple’s company, Mypheduh Films, which derives its name from an ancient Ethiopian word meaning “protector of culture.” Mypheduh’s offices are housed in Sankofa, a bookstore and Pan-African cultural center across the street from Howard University, where Gerima taught filmmaking for over 40 years. This little pocket of Washington is Gerima’s empire — or his “liberated territory,” as he likes to call it.“When I think of Haile’s cinema, I think of the cinema of the maroon,” Aboubakar Sanogo, a friend of Gerima’s and a scholar of African cinema at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, said in an interview, invoking a term for runaway slaves who formed their own independent settlements. “It’s very much a cinema of freedom. Hollywood is the plantation from which he has escaped.”If Gerima is now ready to dance with the academy (which, incidentally, has never awarded a best director Oscar to a Black filmmaker), it’s because of the involvement of a kindred soul: Ava DuVernay.The “Selma” filmmaker, who co-chaired the Academy Museum’s opening gala, has been the driving force behind the Haile-ssance of 2021. Array, DuVernay’s distribution and advocacy collective, spearheaded the restoration of “Sankofa.” The company also rereleased “Ashes and Embers” on Netflix in 2016, in addition to distributing “Residue,” the debut feature by Gerima’s son Merawi, last year.Speaking by phone, DuVernay said that in collaborating with Gerima, she felt she had come full circle: Years ago, she modeled Array on the example set by Gerima and Aina’s grass-roots distribution initiatives.“I was very influenced by this idea that your film is an extension of you, and it does not have to be given away to someone else to share with the world,” DuVernay said. “The self-determination of self-distribution, that was a radical idea to me. I didn’t have to go around begging studios — I could make my film and be in conversation with an audience independently.”It was a strategy Gerima and Aina forged during the initial release of “Sankofa.” The film gives galvanizing form to an idea that courses through all of Gerima’s work: that Africans are not the victims of history, but its heroes. “I always felt that slavery is not about brutal white people,” he said. “Slavery is about Black Africans refusing to be slaves. The consequences of that cannot be the dominant aspect of a film; otherwise, you participate in creating Hollywood victims.”But getting this film — born of unprecedented co-productions with Ghana, Burkina Faso and other African countries — seen by Black audiences in America required its own kind of fearless independence. When a well-received premiere at the 1993 Berlin International Film Festival did not lead to any American distribution deals, Gerima and Aina did what they knew best: They turned to their community.Gerima’s ideas about self-distribution influenced Ava DuVernay and other filmmakers. Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesThey rented a local cinema in Washington, and held screenings and meetings to spread the word. The response was overwhelming: The theater was packed for 11 weeks, and soon they were raising money for a second print to show in Baltimore, where it ran for 21 weeks. As community and cultural groups started reaching out from Illinois, Kansas, Arkansas, California and elsewhere, Gerima and Aina slowly established what they call the “Sankofa family.”“They were our airport in every state,” Gerima said. “Underclass Black people put this movie on the map of the world.”Now, nearly 30 years later, a pristine restoration of “Sankofa” is streaming on Netflix in multiple countries. There’s something poetic about the movie introducing new audiences to Gerima’s legacy: Its title derives from a Ghanaian term that translates loosely to “retrieving the past while going toward the future.”The phrase was on my mind as I spoke with Gerima. He was in his editing “cave,” as he described it, and a picture of his father was on the computer screen behind him, the image zoomed into the man’s ear, as if he were listening in. A writer of political plays, Gerima’s father figures prominently in “Black Lions, Roman Wolves,” a documentary about the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 that the filmmaker has been editing throughout the pandemic. Gerima said it’s been stuck in postproduction because of “surrealistic” negotiations with Istituto Luce Cinecittà, Italy’s state-owned film company, over newsreel footage from the war.He recalled that when he premiered “Adwa” — his documentary about the 1896 victory of Ethiopian forces against Italian invaders — at the Venice Film Festival in 1999, the press had criticized Istituto Luce for not participating in the production. “So they wrote me a letter saying, ‘In your next film, we will participate.’ But every time a bureaucrat changes, the policy changes. And I have to start the A-B-C-D of everything again.”It is experiences like these that make him wary of institutional support. “I don’t trust eruptive social discourse,” he said. “The well-meaning people at the Academy Museum — what happens when they are not there anymore? Who comes in? And what happens to the inclusiveness idea, then? This is the anxiety I have.”Aina, who joined us for the tail end of our interview, seemed more cautiously optimistic as she spoke of the museum’s Vantage Award. “I hope that it means that our work can get a little easier,” she said simply. “We just want to be able to have the capacity to make our movies, and to leave something in place that future filmmakers can incorporate into their new visions.” More

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      The Velvet Underground Meets Its Match in Todd Haynes

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      In the director’s hands, music subjects are as much about their cultural moment as about their sound — a good description of the band led by Lou Reed.Todd Haynes said his music-related films are really about how “the artist, or the genre of music, changes things or reflects changes in the culture.”By Mark Sommerfeld For The New York TimesTodd Haynes’s new documentary, “The Velvet Underground,” summons that band’s essence by being a feast for … the eyes. The screen is almost constantly split into self-contained images that are in conversation with each other, at times creating a dizzying sensory overload. Some of the most striking scenes use images shot by Andy Warhol, who was a crucial presence in the band’s life and art.“We licensed two and a half hours of moving images for a two-hour-long movie,” Haynes said, laughing, “and I think 45 minutes of that is probably Warhol movies alone.”Evoking a sound world by relying heavily on visuals might feel counterintuitive, but Haynes, 60, has never followed the predictable path. His 1991 feature debut, “Poison,” was a linchpin of that era’s New Queer Cinema movement, and since then he has maintained a stubbornly independent streak, from the prescient psychological horror of “Safe” (1995) to the lush lesbian romanticism of “Carol” (2015).Haynes’s queering is particularly effective in music-centric movies, a field that has often been dominated by a straight-male point of view.He burst on the scene in 1987 with the 43-minute-long biopic “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story,” which was cast with dolls. In 2007 he made “I’m Not There,” with six actors, including Cate Blanchett, playing Bob Dylan, or at least versions of Dylan. Even Haynes’s contribution to the HBO omnibus “Six by Sondheim” (2013) departed from convention: Whereas an older female performer usually handles the “Follies” number “I’m Still Here,” he had the former Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker croon it to a dimly lit cabaret full of women, a neat reversal of the male gaze.“The kinds of subjects I want to make films about are not just because it’s music I love,” Haynes said. “They’re about cultural moments where the artist, or the genre of music, changes things or reflects changes in the culture. Or they set up an example of a unique — and usually in my mind radical — experiment where the artist succeeds in playing around with notions of identity through music and through performance.”The Velvet Underground members John Cale, left, Sterling Morrison and Lou Reed in a scene from the documentary.  Nat Finkelstein/Apple TV+The Velvet Underground, the wildly influential 1960s-70s quartet led by Lou Reed, is a perfect illustration of that confluence. The problem is that unlike, say, the Beatles, the band did not leave much footage behind. Haynes turned that handicap into an artistic asset by zooming out instead of in. “I immediately made a decision that I wanted to focus on the time and place in New York City,” he said.The musicians had all been drawn into Warhol’s orbit early on, so Haynes talked to insightful members of the artist’s circle, like the actress Mary Woronov and the critic Amy Taubin. Tellingly, one of the most compelling witnesses is Jonas Mekas, the curator and experimental filmmaker who was interviewed shortly before his death in 2019.Haynes said that with his music-related projects, “I’m always trying to find the cinematic parallels or stylistic traditions that are relevant either to the time or to the spirit, the ethos of the music. And in this documentary I had handed to me, basically on a platter, this avant-garde cinema, which is so intrinsically bound up in the story of the Velvet Underground.”This approach has been a hallmark of Haynes’s music work. “He’s not looking at different mediums as separate entities but trying to integrate them together and create this synthesis of music and art and philosophy,” said Michael Stipe, the former R.E.M. frontman who was an executive producer on “Velvet Goldmine,” Haynes’s 1998 feature about the glam-rock scene. “Because at the end of the day, really, he’s a philosopher,” Stipe continued.The Velvet Underground’s John Cale — who participated in the movie along with his bandmate Maureen Tucker — was familiar with the director’s work, and trusted the band’s legacy would be in the right hands. “I knew if anyone could pull together the historical artifacts and make them come to life, it was Todd,” Cale said in an email. “His ability to pull emotion from stills and ephemera is further testament to his true understanding of who we were and what we wanted to leave in this world.” (The band’s third surviving member, Doug Yule, declined to take part in the film.)Cale’s reference to emotion touches on an important Haynes trait. In interviews, the director speaks in heady, paragraph-long sentences, which might suggest an abstract, perhaps detached body of work. But his formally rigorous films are roiled by tempestuous feelings and emotions. If “Superstar” — which cannot be shown commercially because of a cease-and-desist order by the music rights’ holders — has a cult following, it is not because of its gimmick but because it is so unexpectedly affecting.On that project, “I was thinking about how to make a film that would follow narrative conventions so closely that an audience would find itself caught up emotionally,” Haynes said. “But it wouldn’t be because an actor is doing those things — it would be a doll.”Jonathan Rhys Meyers in “Velvet Goldmine,” one of several music-centric films Haynes has made.Peter Mountain/Miramax FilmsHe has explored the formation (and transformation) of identity in his music-related work, but also fandom and its attendant heightened expectations. Haynes has always been very conscious of such hopes — especially when they are based on gender and sexuality, an area in which rock has been simultaneously groundbreaking and retrograde.Maybe that’s why the musicians in Haynes’s movies draw heated responses from real-life viewers and other characters. The Carpenters were still widely derided as milquetoast soft rock for girls and housewives when “Superstar” came out, and the film helped lead a critical reappraisal of the duo in the early 1990s. Admiration and rejection partly based on the scrambling of gender roles feature prominently in “Velvet Goldmine” via the knotty relationship involving a journalist and a pair of flamboyant rockers — one inspired by David Bowie and the other an amalgam of Iggy Pop and Lou Reed.It would be hard to find a more complicated figure than Reed, who left the Velvet Underground in 1970 and embarked on the fruitful solo career evoked in “Velvet Goldmine.” He was the kind of wildly creative, mercurial figure who is catnip to documentarians, and he is everywhere in the new film: a voice, either singing or heard in interviews; an unsmiling face staring us down; at times a presence felt more than seen.And yet even after those two hours, Reed, who died in 2013, remains an enigma, much like the Velvet Underground itself. Haynes did not call on critics or historians to venture theories or explain the band’s importance, and the closest we come to a musicological analysis is delivered by the eccentric Velvets protégé Jonathan Richman.Haynes said this was all by design. “There’s generations of people who could tell you how great the Velvet Underground are, how meaningful they were to my career as a musician or my career as an artist or whatever,” Haynes said. “But I thought, ‘Where do you stop? I don’t want a movie that tells you how great the band is: I want a movie that shows you how great they are, and then you figure that out.’” More

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      ‘Bergman Island’ Review: Love Among the Cinephiles

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      In Mia Hansen-Love’s new film, Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth play filmmakers on the rocks in the Baltic Sea.“This is your landscape, Bergman. It corresponds to your innermost imaginings of forms, proportions, colors, horizons, sounds, silences, lights and reflections.” That is Ingmar Bergman, in his memoir “The Magic Lantern,” rhapsodizing on his “secret love,” the island of Faro in the Baltic Sea. Starting in 1960 with “Through a Glass Darkly,” he shot many of his films on Faro and died there in 2007.In “Bergman Island,” Mia Hansen-Love’s slippery and enchanting new movie, Faro, an austere and forbidding presence in much of Bergman’s work, is revealed as a pilgrimage spot for cinephiles and an appealing seaside destination for less obsessive travelers. Visitors can browse in the gift shop and the library, watch movies in Bergman’s personal screening room, or pile into a bus for the guided “Bergman Safari” (an actual annual event). They can also swim, drink, play Ludo and shop for sheepskins.Chris (Vicky Krieps) and Tony (Tim Roth) do some of those things, but they’ve come to Faro mostly to work. Filmmakers with screenplays at various stages of completion, they install themselves in the cottage where some of “Scenes From a Marriage” was filmed. The caretaker who shows them around cheerfully describes it as “the movie that caused millions of people to divorce.” (I wonder if the recent HBO remake will have the same impact.)An unmarried couple with a young daughter (she is staying with a grandmother while her parents are in Sweden), Chris and Tony have perhaps unwittingly arrived at a crisis in their relationship. They are affectionate and easy with each other, but the combination of Chris’s restlessness and Tony’s complacency suggests that things are not quite right between them.In Bergman’s films, love is a volatile element, as often as not a catalyst for emotional anguish and psychological disintegration. A man and a woman in a movie with his name on it are unlikely to find much peace. But Hansen-Love, though she is interested in the gloomy Swede and his legacy, is hardly in his thrall, and Chris and Tony don’t live in anything like the state of metaphysical extremity that so often afflicts Bergman characters.Chris is a passionate movie lover who is nonetheless skeptical of the power of the medium, and “Bergman Island” explores her ambivalence in a playful, critical spirit. She is bothered by the fact that Bergman, the father of nine children with six women, pursued his art at the expense of his family obligations. No woman would have been able to get away with that, she says, a complaint that is met with the usual shrugs, jokes and condescension from Tony and their dinner companions.She acknowledges the difference between art and life, but nonetheless wishes for a measure of “coherence” between them. The possibility of such a thing becomes more than just a theoretical question in the second half of “Bergman Island,” when the as-yet-unmade film that Chris is still struggling to write takes over the screen.That movie-within-the-movie, also set on Faro, involves a young woman — also a filmmaker — named Amy (Mia Wasikowska), who travels to the island for the wedding of a friend and encounters Joseph (Anders Danielsen Lie), the great love of her life. The two of them met as teenagers and all these years later, even though they are committed to other people, find that they just can’t quit each other.Their passionate, guilty romance — and Amy’s blondness — tilt the story closer to Bergman territory than Chris and Tony’s passive-aggressive courtesies, but the more obvious cinematic reference lies closer to home. Chris’s film is in effect a sequel to Hansen-Love’s “Goodbye First Love,” which followed adolescent lovers into young adulthood.The connection between the movie Chris dreams up and the one she’s in seems both elusive and obvious, as do the possible autobiographical implications of “Bergman Island.” Can it be entirely coincidental that Amy is a near-anagram of Mia, the name shared by Wasikowska and Hansen-Love? Is Tony a stand-in for Olivier Assayas, the French filmmaker with whom Hansen-Love has a child? Are we approaching Bergman’s landscape of doubling and collapsing identities from a different angle?But there are also intriguing hints that Chris and Tony’s story may itself be a kind of film-within-the-film, this one conjured out of Tony’s imagination. When Chris asks about his project, he answers that it’s about the unspoken meanings that circulate through the daily life of a couple, a description that fits the first half of “Bergman Island” almost too neatly. He also explains, during a Q.-and-A. session after a screening of one of his movies, that he tends to identify with his female characters. Does this make Chris his alter ego?To her credit, Hansen-Love doesn’t turn “Bergman Island” into a self-conscious philosophical puzzle. It unspools with an easy, fresh-air naturalism against a picturesque backdrop that doesn’t necessarily conform to anyone’s innermost imaginings. The mood, underscored by Robin Williamson’s sprightly music, is mainly comical, and the artists — Tony and Chris, at least — seem more playful than tormented, even at difficult moments.That may be because they both understand the paradox that “Bergman Island” so brilliantly enacts. It’s a movie that isn’t quite sure whether it wants to be one, or which one it wants to be. Which makes it feel like more than just a movie.Bergman IslandRated R. Cries and whispers. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Introducing, Selma Blair’ Review: An Actress in Her Second Act

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      A window into the actress’s battle with multiple sclerosis.The documentary “Introducing, Selma Blair” presents a bracingly relatable version of an often all-too-artificial event: a performer navigating the process of reinvention. Change came to the actress Selma Blair involuntarily, when she was diagnosed with the autoimmune disorder multiple sclerosis, a disease that attacks the central nervous system, in August 2018. She went public with her illness with an Instagram post in October of that year.Blair’s initial announcement was candid, detailing the initial apathy she received from medical professionals, and she offered generous thanks to the friends — some famous and some not — who encouraged her to seek help. At the time, Blair, now 49, was best known for her supporting roles in several of the most approachable and entertaining Hollywood movies of the last 20 years. This familiarity lent to her remarkably frank post the quality of reading an update from an old friend.Her decisions following her public announcement remained consistent with this initial burst of sincerity. Blair continued to publicly document her illness on Instagram. She attended red carpets with a jeweled cane. She offered interviews, permitting journalists to show her disruptions of speech and movement. She was in turn glamorous and clumsy, funny and mournful.The documentary “Introducing, Selma Blair” expands the existing record of Blair’s life into a coherent, feature-length account. The film begins in 2019, after the initial cycle of media attention has passed. The director, Rachel Fleit, follows Blair at home for over a year, her camera watching in vérité style as the actress contemplates the aftermath of her diagnosis and plans ahead for life with a disability.At the start of filming in 2019, Blair was preparing for an experimental medical treatment that would combine chemotherapy and stem cell transplants to repair her immune system. When the procedures begin, the movie follows her into the hospital, incorporating video diaries from Blair in convalescence.The greatest asset of the film is its ability to simulate the intimacy of disclosure, and Blair’s comfort with the camera — her actress-y will to entertain — makes her a uniquely endearing subject. The forthrightness that has become the signature of her public persona is on full display; she treats the camera as if it were a trusted friend.In some of the film’s most touching sequences, Blair allows the filmmakers to watch as she plays with her son, her jolting movements at once a part of the fun, and evidence of her physical state. When he is out of the picture, she shares her worries about how her visible vulnerability might affect her child. She jokes, she weeps, she cries out in pain.The movie does not address all aspects of Blair’s life. There is little discussion of her career, and no mention of how she affords the extravagant home and the medical treatments that have provided her with relief through the worst days of her illness. What this human interest story offers instead is a simple and sympathetic portrait of a captivating character. Curiously, the career supporting actress Selma Blair has never before seemed like such a star.Introducing, Selma BlairNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. Also available on Discovery+ beginning Oct. 21. More

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      ‘Halloween Kills’ Review: There Will Be (Copious Amounts of) Blood

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      The newest installment of the “Halloween” franchise, starring Jamie Lee Curtis, is a murderous mess that substitutes corpses for characters.After a dozen movies — and a 13th on the horizon — the once-monstrous Michael Myers shuffles into theaters this weekend as exhausted as the 43-year-old franchise that indulges his blood lust. “Halloween Kills,” the middle film of a reboot trilogy started in 2018 by the director David Gordon Green, is an indolent, narratively impoverished mess that substitutes corpses for characters and slogans for dialogue.What Green appears to be killing here is time. While his previous installment cannily reimagined Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), the plucky babysitter who bested Myers in John Carpenter’s original film, as a trauma-toughened grandmother, this latest exhumation turns her into a virtual bystander. We find her, mere minutes after the ending of the last chapter, bleeding profusely in the back of a truck, barreling away from her burning home and believing her nemesis vanquished once and for all.“Let it burn!” she screams at the firefighters, perhaps aware that the body count of emergency workers is about to soar. Thereafter, she will mostly languish in a hospital bed in the hapless burgh of Haddonfield, Ill., while her daughter and granddaughter (Judy Greer and Andi Matichak) are left to hold the bag — or, in this case, pitchfork — when Myers, inevitably, returns.Plagued by idiotic pronouncements (“He is an apex predator!”) and moronic behavior (doors are left unlocked, an unloaded gun is brandished), “Halloween Kills” plays at times like an exceptionally gory comedy routine. (I dare you not to laugh out loud when one character bemoans the rising number of slayings by declaring, “This was a safe place and now it’s not anymore!”) And if Haddonfield seems significantly more diverse this time out, it’s to no apparent purpose other than to vary the appearances and sexual orientations of its victims. That’s a shame, because the only characters I missed when the picture was over were the gay partners planning a pleasant evening with Mary Jane and “Minnie and Moskowitz” (1971). I hope they already knew the ending.Clumsy flashbacks to the original plot soothe the uninitiated, and characters we barely remember are reintroduced to take their chances among those being creatively killed off. Leading these is Anthony Michael Hall as a grown-up Tommy Doyle, the child Laurie was babysitting on Halloween, 1978, now running a support group for survivors of that night’s mayhem. In mere minutes, Tommy harangues his group into an angry posse, rounding up nondescript townspeople to hunt Myers down. As the mob congregates — mystifyingly — at the hospital, Laurie is prompted to stumble briefly out of bed, stab herself with a painkiller-filled syringe and yowl like a banshee. Contract fulfilled, Ms. Curtis!As for possibly our most resurrected cinematic psycho (played once again by James Jude Courtney), he seems a little sadder behind his rapidly decomposing mask. The success of any “Halloween” retread depends fundamentally on its ability to telegraph the mad magnetism between Myers and Laurie — a tether that’s trampled by this picture’s amorphous gang of vigilantes, repeatedly yelling “Evil dies tonight!” In light of the coming attractions, I can reliably predict that it does not.Halloween KillsRated R. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters and on Peacock. More