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      ‘The Addams Family 2’ Review: Wednesday Goes West

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      America’s creepiest family takes a road trip in this animated sequel, though their antics are far more kooky than spooky.In 2019, the Addams family returned to the big screen for the first time since the 1990s, this time in animated form. The macabre clan, directly styled after Charles Addams’s original New Yorker cartoon characters and voiced by a star-studded cast, railed against normalcy and blew up a lot of stuff. Now, in a new sequel, they’re taking that show on the road. Like it’s predecessor, “The Addams Family 2” is more kooky than spooky, offering much more to young children than it may to the adults accompanying them.This newest iteration opens at a science fair; Wednesday (Chloë Grace Moretz) has figured out how to implant her pet octopus’s intelligence into her dopey Uncle Fester (Nick Kroll). Though she captures the attention of the wealthy genius Cyrus Strange (Bill Hader), she merely earns a participation award, and her resulting melancholy makes her withdraw further from her parents.In an attempt to bond with their teenagers, Gomez (Oscar Isaac) and Morticia (Charlize Theron) take the family on a road trip to Death Valley, but their cross-country antics are waylaid when a pushy stranger (Wallace Shawn) insists Wednesday may have been switched at birth.The filmmakers (the “Addams Family” and “Sausage Party” directors Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernon) are smart to focus on Wednesday for most of this plot. She is the wittiest character, and it’s difficult to imagine an actor better suited to voice her than Moretz. But where it could lean into the typically bone-dry Addams family humor, this film more often relies on poop jokes, explosions and the musical talents of Snoop Dogg. It’s sure to entertain little ones, but parents may find themselves itching for something more impish.The Addams Family 2Rated PG. Running time: 1 hour 33 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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      ‘Mayday’ Review: Misandry Is the Most Dangerous Game

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      A group of female insurgents hunt down weary men in this halfhearted, half-feminist fantasy from Karen Cinorre.The dreamy but indistinct fantasy “Mayday” finds its Alice-before-Wonderland in Ana (Grace Van Patten), a server who is terrorized by her superiors and adored by her kitchen colleagues. Ana finds her proverbial rabbit hole when a voice calls from the oven. She crawls after it and lands in an unknown sea.In this alternate universe, Ana is washed ashore and taken in by a female insurgency run by the charismatic Marsha (Mia Goth). Men are absent from the island’s makeshift society, and Marsha explains that men have been consumed by a forever war beyond their shores. To hear Marsha tell it, men are prone to assault any girl who crosses their path, and Marsha’s vagabond crew picks off the fellows they can snare. They act as sirens over their radio system, drawing soldiers to their deaths at sea. On land, they prefer sniper fire, and a skeptical Ana is to be their latest sharpshooter.It should be a bold premise, but there is a curious contrast in this film between the richly defined images and the story’s ethical indeterminacy. Visually, the writer and director Karen Cinorre is sure-footed, impressing with steampunk production design and sun-dappled cinematography. But narratively, her movie waffles, refusing to generate plausible rationales for Marsha’s girlboss-ish militancy.Marsha insinuates, commandeers and oversimplifies from the moment she is introduced. Her peach-fuzzed targets are too immediately identifiable as lambs rather than wolves. The movie undermines its characters’ principles, and without sincere justification for their warped actions, all dramatic tension dissipates. For a film about misandrist revolutionaries, “Mayday” lacks the courage of its convictions — it sets up boogeymen as targets only to shoot them point blank, in broad daylight.MaydayNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 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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      ‘Stop and Go’ Review: Pandemic Aside, Girls Just Want to Have Fun

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      This trite Covid-19-era comedy follows a pair of kooky sisters on a cross-country mission to save their grandmother from a nursing home overrun with cases.Frankly, a “Covid-era comedy” reads like a threat to this critic, though maybe others will get more mileage out of social distancing gags circa March 2020, when the mere thought of public spaces sent shivers down the spine. The pandemic is hardly behind us, yet “Stop and Go,” starring and written by Whitney Call and Mallory Everton, formerly of the sketch comedy show Studio C, feels awfully outdated. Many of us may have doused our things in comical amounts of disinfectant and flown into frenzies by mere throat tickles, but the relatability factor is redundant at this point.The girls, at the very least, just want to have fun. Jamie (Call) and Blake (Everton) are motor-mouthed sisters whose lives are upended by lockdown, though the bleakness of that reality is never really apparent save for the occasional groaning mention of “people dying out there.”The girls’ grandmother, who lives in a nursing home overrun by Covid cases, is one such potential victim, prompting a cross-country rescue mission. It’s a race against time: the quicker they can get to Nana, the lower the chance of infection. Then there’s a third sister who doesn’t quite take the pandemic as seriously as she should — she’s on a cruise when Jamie and Blake first give her a ring, and she intends to take Nana in herself when she gets back, adding another layer of urgency.Directed by Everton and Stephen Meek, “Stop and Go” joins the ever-expanding genre of female buddy comedies that posits women can be weird, manic, and messy, too. (See: “Broad City,” “Booksmart” or “Never Goin’ Back”). Everton and Call are charming enough, and Everton is a particularly magnetic physical performer, but their high jinks — from a ridiculous saga involving one of Jamie’s students and a pair of mice to a pit stop at a dog breeder’s pad — are hit-and-miss. But mostly miss.Stop and GoNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 20 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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      ‘Old Henry’ Review: Can’t Keep Him Down on the Farm

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      Starring Tim Blake Nelson, the film tips its hat to classic westerns, even if it gets caught in their shadows.“Old Henry” makes a solid, honorable go of proving once again that the foursquare western isn’t dead, though in paying homage to its forebears, it inevitably stands in their very long shadows.While the basic standoff scenario is tautly limited in time and place, it’s hard to imagine Budd Boetticher, who made seven fantastically economical westerns with Randolph Scott, burning nearly 40 minutes bringing the opposing sides together. Tim Blake Nelson plays the title part, a farmer who keeps his past shrouded from his son (Gavin Lewis). When Henry brings home Curry (Scott Haze), a wounded man he finds with a satchel of cash nearby, three other men, led by Ketchum (Stephen Dorff), turn up at the farm to collect him.Ketchum and Curry both say they represent the law, and a quietly effective scene finds the wily Henry, feeding Curry at night, trying to trip him up with questions. It takes a few scenes before the performances begin to crackle — Nelson, perhaps the actor most suited for westerns, initially comes across as self-conscious, not to mention dwarfed by an exceptionally wide-brimmed hat — but a sense of lived-in characters does take hold.The writer-director Potsy Ponciroli sometimes gets too ripe in giving the dialogue a stylized twang, and the plot burdens itself with iconography it can’t support. (Even the choice of aspect ratio — rare, ultrawide 2.66:1 — suggests a kind of overreach.) Ponciroli also cheats a bit with perspective. Still, he’s learned a lesson better-illustrated in various classics of Howard Hawks and Clint Eastwood: The deliberate pacing pays off in a satisfyingly volatile climax.Old HenryNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Guilty’ Review: Dial R for Redemption

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      Jake Gyllenhaal plays an imploding 911 operator in this riveting remake.Whether you favor Gustav Moller’s 2018 Danish drama, “The Guilty,” or the Netflix remake of the same name will depend on whether you prefer your thrillers acoustic or electric, chilly or hot-wired. It will also hinge on your answer to the question, How many close-ups of Jake Gyllenhaal are too many?Embellishing Moller’s jangly psychological study with Los Angeles color, the director Antoine Fuqua and his screenwriter Nic Pizzolatto have amped the original film’s energy a smidge and marginally widened its perspective. The plot’s relentlessly clambering tension, though largely identical to the original, is catnip to Gyllenhaal, into whose tortured eyes and sweating pores the camera happily descends. As Joe Baylor, a disgraced L.A.P.D. officer temporarily assigned to an emergency call center, the actor builds to an all-caps-plus-exclamation-point performance; that he does so without losing his grip — on us or the character — is some kind of miracle.When we meet him, Joe is already approaching his last nerve. As flaring wildfires and other emergencies fill the huge screens that overlook the operators on duty, he’s in the bathroom, gasping through an asthma attack. Back at his desk, he rudely swats away the callers he deems less than emergent, curtly processing the rest. It’s the eve of his disciplinary hearing for the unspecified offense that has landed him in this purgatory, and his resentment and boredom are obvious.Then a woman calls, in what initially appears to be a wrong number as she’s addressing a child, and we can see Joe’s on-the-job instincts click into gear. His face and body suddenly alert, he questions her and deduces that she is being kidnapped and that her abductor is armed. What follows is a taut cat-and-mouse, conducted entirely by telephone, as Joe, instead of following protocol and handing off to other agencies, frantically attempts to solve the crime himself. Only later, as we glean more about his personal life, do we suspect his investment in this woman’s safety might be something more than professional.Thanks to a vibrant voice cast that includes Riley Keough, Peter Sarsgaard and Ethan Hawke, “The Guilty” helps us to visualize its unexpectedly shocking offscreen twists and turns. Maz Makhani’s cinematography is glossily seductive, finding ever new angles to ogle Joe at his computer, while Marcelo Zarvos’s canny musical score resists thrusting itself into every verbal hiatus. When Joe sucks on his inhaler, we hear every wheeze.Essentially a one-man show, “The Guilty” necessarily vibrates to the rhythms of its lead. As the original Joe, Jakob Cedergren was cooler and more physically restrained, perfectly in tune with his movie’s stripped-down aesthetic. In Gyllenhaal’s hands — and feet and everything in between — “The Guilty” becomes a more combustible portrait of mental breakdown. Joe, losing his grip on everything that matters, needs to find this woman before it’s too late. He desperately needs a save.The GuiltyRated R for bad words and horrible pictures in your head. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      For Al Franken, a Comeback Attempt Goes Through Comedy Clubs

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      Onstage, the ex-senator and “S.N.L.” star doesn’t exactly address his fall from grace. But he doesn’t not address it either. Asked if he’ll run again, he is noncommittal.It was a fairly typical night at the Comedy Cellar’s Village Underground with a procession of young comics telling jokes about bickering couples, body issues and unglamorous sex. After Matteo Lane finished his set with a story about sleeping with a porn star, the curveball came: The host introduced “the only performer on the lineup who was a United States senator.”Then Al Franken, 70, bespectacled and wearing a button-down shirt, slowly walked onstage. He looked back toward Lane, took a considered pause and in mock outrage exclaimed: “He stole my act!”Franken has been opening with that joke a lot lately as he’s been refining material in basement rooms around town in preparation for a national stand-up tour. It’s his way of addressing how much he sticks out in his return to comedy, following a Senate career that ended with his resignation after multiple women accused him of sexual misconduct, including unwanted kissing. New York comics generally don’t do impressions of the Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, of Iowa, or earnestly explain the reasons they remain Democrats. And yet, the four times I have seen Franken perform over the past month, he has consistently gotten laughs or even killed. The only time he really lost a crowd was after midnight when the fury of a rant about the Republican Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, (involving a dispute about an assault weapons ban) crowded out the punch lines. Franken’s set went long, around 50 minutes, and a couple of comics who followed needled him. “I would have killed myself if it wasn’t for his gun legislation,” Nimesh Patel joked.In Franken’s new material, he explains how as a politician, he was often implored by his staff to not be funny. It only leads to trouble. His act presents a less censored Franken, one that includes a story of him inside the Senate cloakroom telling a joke about oral sex with Willie Nelson — with Franken deftly imitating the New York Senator Chuck Schumer and former Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill, both Democrats, as they dissect the joke. Franken’s delivery is a Minnesota mosey with a bristling energy hinting at unspoken feelings and future ambition.On the street after the Cellar show, Franken and I discussed Norm Macdonald, who had died earlier that day. Franken mentioned that when he was on “Saturday Night Live,” Macdonald had beat him out for the Weekend Update anchor job, then recalled how the NBC executive Don Ohlmeyer supposedly fired Macdonald for making jokes about O.J. Simpson, Ohlmeyer’s friend. Franken quipped: “Got to give credit to Ohlmeyer for sticking by a friend.”It’s a funny joke, but as often happens with Franken these days, it can’t help but evoke his own scandal. After all, many of Franken’s colleagues did not stick by him in the wake of the accusations. After a photo of Franken pantomiming groping a conservative talk radio host on a U.S.O. tour was released, many Democratic senators called for him to step down, and he did, denying the allegations in a resignation speech. Since then, many (but not all) Democrats have seen that reaction as a rush to judgment, including nine senators who had called for him to resign now saying they regret doing so. Some politicians who stood by their calls for him to resign, like Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, have faced a backlash.Franken only recently began explicitly mentioning the fallout onstage, but glancingly, with a bit involving a masked ventriloquist’s dummy named Petey who wants to talk about how he was treated by his Democratic colleagues. Without giving away the twist, the conversation gets sidetracked.Is the comedy tour a way to rehabilitate his political career? Franken said, with a laugh, “I’m not sure this is the best way to do that.”Todd Heisler/The New York TimesAt an Upper West Side diner, Franken didn’t want to go into details, calling it a “no-win,” but said it hasn’t changed his politics. “Part of the irony of all this is I was maybe the most proactive member of the Senate on sexual harassment and sexual assault,” he said.As for his old co-workers: “I have forgiven the ones who have apologized to me,” he said, tersely.Outside the diner, a man approached and told him that he looked more handsome in person and then said in a pointed way that seemed beyond politics: “I’m in your camp.”At a few of the New York shows, there was a certain tension in the room before he got onstage, and a curiosity over how warmly he would be received. Franken said he was never anxious about it. “People like me,” he said, in a cadence that couldn’t help but evoke his character Stuart Smalley, the 12-step aficionado he portrayed on “Saturday Night Live.” After I pointed this out, Franken burst into an impression of the cheerfully cardiganed character: “I’m fun to be with.”Franken — who moves effortlessly from inside-showbiz yarns to political ones — is less deadpan offstage than on, with a slightly quicker delivery, puncturing many sentences with a booming laugh that sounds like a baritone quack.Long before he was a politician, Franken, who moved from Washington to New York in January to be near his grandchildren, was something of a comedy prodigy — performing at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles in a double act with Tom Davis while still in college, and going to work as a writer for the original cast of “Saturday Night Live.” He then pioneered a no-holds-barred style of liberal comedy with best-selling books like “Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations.” Franken still delights in skewering the right-wing media entertainment complex amid dissections of public policy, which he does regularly on a titular new podcast that welcomes a starry list of politicians, journalists and entertainers. In his show, he says, “The leading cause of death in this country is Tucker Carlson.”Franken says he is returning to comedy because it’s a “part of him,” and his conversation is filled with references to friends in the business. He said he went to the Cellar after speaking with Chris Rock and Louis C.K. But it’s hard to escape the impression that politics animate Franken more than comedy. He said he loved campaigning and being a senator, and for someone as well-known as he is, his act includes an awful lot of résumé highlights (like casting the deciding vote for the Affordable Care Act) coddled in a layer of irony that knows you can get laughs by playing the jerk. “You’re welcome” is a recurring punchline.His act presents a less-censored Franken. Todd Heisler/The New York TimesThere are moments onstage that have elements of a stump speech, and it makes you wonder if this is all a prelude to another run. When asked, Franken shifted from casual comic to preprogrammed politician: “I am keeping my options open.”What about running for senator of New York? He repeated, “I am keeping my options open.”After chuckling at this diplomatic answer, I pointed out I’m not used to interviewing politicians. Franken let out another quacking laugh and acted out a scene imagining the ridiculousness of a comic answering a question about a joke with “I am keeping my options open.”It’s worth noting that even in his telling, the first time Franken ran for senator in Minnesota, his original impulse involved a measure of payback. After Senator Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash, his successor, Norm Coleman, called himself a “99 percent improvement” over Wellstone. In his book “Al Franken, Giant of the Senate,” he describes his reaction with a flash of anger, saying he knew someone had to beat Coleman, before adding that his reasons expanded from that “petty place” to one more about helping the people of his state.In the aftermath of his scandal, which Franken described as “traumatic” for him and his family, he has been trying to work through it and rise above, he said. “I think we need more of that. It’s a struggle but I’m getting there. That’s my goal.”In a sympathetic New Yorker article from 2019, Franken said that after losing his job, he started taking medication for depression; mental health is an issue he has long worked on, he said. When I asked about this, the policy wonk, not the comedian, answered. He brought up the first legislation he passed, calling for a study of the impact on giving support dogs to veterans suffering from PTSD. The conversation moved to the gymnast Simone Biles and how she prioritized her mental health at the Olympics. Franken brought up the people who criticized her, appearing to earnestly address Biles’s situation before making a sarcastic pivot subtle enough that it took me a beat to appreciate the subtext. “So odd — people criticize other people out of ignorance,” he said, a hint of a smirk on his face. “I’d never seen that before. I was just shocked.”When asked what he would say to someone who thought this return to comedy was a way to rehabilitate his political career, Franken said: “I’m not sure this is the best way to do that.” He offered another big laugh before getting serious. “I’m doing this because I love doing this.”On Sunday, running his entire show at Union Hall in preparation for a Friday performance in Milwaukee (it’s not often you hear material in Brooklyn about the Republican Senator Ron Johnson), Franken earned a roaring response to his dummy nudging him to talk about leaving the Senate. At one point, a member of the audience yelled: “Run again!”As the crowd cheered, Franken looked momentarily flustered and flattered. He appeared to be contemplating his next move or maybe weighing a joke. But instead, he made eye contact with the man egging him on and said: “I will need your help.” More

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      Daniel Craig and Ruth Negga Will Star in 'Macbeth' on Broadway

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      Ruth Negga will co-star as Lady Macbeth in a production directed by Sam Gold and scheduled to open next April.Daniel Craig is veering from James Bond to Shakespeare.The 53-year-old actor, who has said that his tenure as Bond will come to an end with the release of “No Time to Die,” on Oct. 8, plans to return to Broadway next spring to star in the title role of “Macbeth.”Famous for his film career, especially as the rakish spy, Craig is also an accomplished stage actor.He has starred in two previous Broadway plays, the 2009 production of “A Steady Rain” and a 2013 revival of “Betrayal.” And he played the villainous Iago in a 2016 Off Broadway production of Shakespeare’s “Othello” at New York Theater Workshop, opposite David Oyelowo in the title role. (“Gritty brilliance,” the New York Times critic Ben Brantley wrote of Craig’s performance.)In the “Macbeth” production, Ruth Negga will play his wife, Lady Macbeth. Negga, known for the TV show “Preacher” and the film “Loving,” last year played the title role in “Hamlet” (yes, a woman played Hamlet; Negga had also previously played Ophelia) in an Off Broadway production at St. Ann’s Warehouse.Ruth Negga will play Lady Macbeth.Nina Prommer/EPA, via ShutterstockThe lead producer for the Broadway production will be Barbara Broccoli, who has a long collaboration with Craig: She and her brother produce the Bond films, and they also co-produced “A Steady Rain” and supported the nonprofit “Othello” production.Broccoli said she had been talking with Craig about Macbeth for several years, ever since he expressed an interest in playing the role.“I’m thrilled that it’s coming after Bond, because, obviously, after 16 years of working with this man, the thought of it all coming to an end has been really difficult to take,” she said. “And so it’s really heartwarming for me that we’re going to be working on something else so soon after the wrapping up of his James Bond cycle.”Broccoli said that she and Craig also thought it was important to stage the play this season, as Broadway seeks to recover after a long shutdown prompted by the coronavirus pandemic.“It’s been a horrendous 18 months for everyone, and live theater has been damaged tremendously,” she said. “He really wants to come back and be on the stage and encourage people to come back to Broadway — it’s important to all of us from a cultural point of view and from a social point of view.”“Macbeth” is scheduled to run for 15 weeks, beginning previews March 29 and opening April 28 at Broadway’s Lyceum Theater. The production is to be directed by Sam Gold, who also directed the Off Broadway “Othello” in which Craig appeared, and who in 2019 directed a Broadway revival of “King Lear.” The production will feature original music by Gaelynn Lea.There have been 47 previous Broadway productions of “Macbeth,” according to the Internet Broadway Database; the most recent was in 2013, starring Ethan Hawke and Anne-Marie Duff.Broccoli is also the lead producer of “Sing Street,” a musical that was scheduled to begin performances on Broadway in March 2020, but never did because of the pandemic. She said she still plans to bring the show to Broadway, but was not ready to say when. “We love the show,” she said, “and we’re trying to figure out the best way to bring it back.” More

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      A Specialist in Short and Lethal Movie Thrillers Jumps to TV

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      The French director Julien Leclercq’s action movies are known for their ruthless economy. His new Netflix thriller, “Ganglands,” tests his approach across six episodes.Mehdi, the cool, collected thief at the heart of the French Netflix series “Ganglands,” is haunted by his brother’s death. Guilt drives Mehdi’s decisions as he becomes embroiled in a violent dispute among rival drug traffickers.And yet we know nothing about that lost sibling. The show doesn’t dwell on how he died. There are no convenient explanations or evocative flashbacks.“We did write those scenes, but we thought we shouldn’t underestimate viewers,” said Julien Leclercq, the series’s director and co-creator, speaking in French on a recent video call from Paris. “It’s not a bad thing to leave a back story to the imagination, to not always explain.”And this is why his movies have one of the lowest B.M.I.s in the action business: He cuts the flab. Since his debut, the 2007 sci-fi thriller “Chrysalis” (running time: 1 hour 34 minutes), he has built a reputation as a director of efficient, no-nonsense rides. Even when he lands international names, like Jean-Claude Van Damme in the 2019 film “The Bouncer” (also 1:34) or Olga Kurylenko in the 2021 Netflix film “Sentinelle” (good to go at 1:20), Leclercq resists the temptation to give them more dialogue, more exposition or more fights.The question was, could Leclercq’s formula work across the four and a half hours of “Ganglands,” which premiered on Netflix last week?Sami Bouajila, whose turn as Mehdi in the series was his fourth outing with the director, didn’t need convincing.Sami Bouajila, who has worked with Leclerqc several times before, plays a cool, collected thief in “Ganglands.” Sofie Gheysens/Netflix “It was love at first sight — we were on the same wavelength, we had the same approach,” said Bouajila, a popular big-screen leading man in France whose performance in the film “A Son” earned him the 2021 César Award for best actor.“We both love these silent, upstanding characters, a little rough around the edges, and I love his aesthetics,” he added. “Julien’s trademark is his artistic direction — there’s a rhythm, there’s a sound, and there’s silence. There are moods and feelings but the characters have a hard time expressing them, so they act upon them.”This “show, don’t tell” approach may be one reason Leclercq’s austere style, somewhere between Jean-Pierre Melville and Clint Eastwood, needs little translation: There are few subtitles to discourage those allergic to them. His films have performed so well internationally for Netflix that the company, which had historically only licensed Leclercq’s movies for streaming, signed on as the primary distributor for his 2020 feature, “Earth and Blood” (1:20).Leclercq’s work can feel like a single locomotive speeding ahead on straight rails — the entire plot of “Earth and Blood” boils down to an extended showdown between a sawmill owner and dealers looking for a stolen stash. With its expanded parameters, however, the “Ganglands” engine can pull a few more cars.As usual, the core of the story is simple: Shaïnez (Sofia Lesaffre) is abducted after she and her girlfriend, Liana (Tracy Gotoas), impulsively steal drugs from the wrong guy, and only Shaïnez’s uncle, Mehdi, can help set her free. But now there is room for the human foibles and interpersonal dynamics — and even hints at back stories — that Leclercq usually dispenses with.Tracy Gotoas, left, and Sofia Lesaffre play lovers who get into deep trouble after stealing drugs from the wrong guy. Caroline Dubois/Netflix “We quickly latched on the idea of a family tragedy, very much in a Greek tragedy mold, which is what links all the characters,” said Hamid Hlioua the show’s co-creator and co-writer, adding that adding this angle was also a way to avoid simply diluting a movie. “We wanted to focus on tension, action and family.”“Ganglands” certainly operates on a larger scale than is typical for Leclercq. But Netflix trusted that he could be just as efficient over six episodes instead of tightly coiled in an hour and a half, and approached him with the idea. The director was interested in the challenge.“I think all filmmakers today have fantasies of tackling a series,” said Leclercq, 42, a burly, loquacious man sporting tattooed knuckles. “For viewers, they are really exciting. I’ve watched ‘True Detective’ five times, ‘Breaking Bad’ three times.”Still, Leclercq and Hlioua were conscious that bloat would be a constant threat. “Very often when there are eight episodes you feel that you could get rid of one or two,” Hlioua said. “So we wanted to grab the viewer from the start and not let go until the last episode.”In French, the series has the same title, “Braqueurs,” as a Leclercq movie from 2015, known in the United States as “The Crew” (1:21). In both, Bouajila, 55, plays the stone-faced, charismatic leader of a thieving ring, but they are not the same characters and the story lines are unrelated.“We tried to amplify every aspect,” Leclercq said. “‘The Crew’ was set in a Parisian suburb and involved kilos of coke. Now we’re in Brussels and in the port of Antwerp, which is a hub for drugs coming from South America, and we’re not dealing with kilos anymore, but with tons. The bad guys are more powerful.”“It’s not a bad thing to leave a back story to the imagination, to not always explain,” Leclercq said.Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesIn his feature work, keeping the productions lean has been a key to maintaining the crispness of his pacing and aesthetic. He recalled shuddering when Van Damme turned up with a whole team in tow for “The Bouncer.”“I said to myself — and he knows that, I told him — that he was going to be a pain in the butt, his world was going to be a pain in the butt, his entourage was going to be a pain in the butt, and I could mess up the movie if he doesn’t listen to me,” Leclercq said.He took Van Damme aside and asked him to let go of all those showbiz accouterments; it worked.“In the middle of the shoot he told me, ‘I’ve learned to love making movies again — I was a star, now I want to be an actor,’ ” Leclercq said. “That was the greatest compliment he could have given me.” (Van Damme is, indeed, extraordinary.)Leclercq’s attitude toward celebrity entourages hasn’t changed. But the fact that there was room for some occasional chitchat in the script allowed for some humor — absent from Leclercq’s features, perhaps because it eats up precious seconds. This is particularly obvious in the scenes between Mehdi and Liana, a rookie criminal who is three decades his junior and as chatty as he is taciturn.“I’m a big fan of the Luc Besson movie ‘Léon: The Professional,’ so we dreamed about a duo like that, with a generational clash, a culture clash,” Leclercq said.It helped that the real-life relationship between Bouajila and Gotoas reflected a similar dynamic, minus bullets.“I’m at the start of my career, he’s been around for 30 years or something,” Gotoas said. “Liana is learning, and I was, too: I’d be checking out how he’d position himself with respect to the camera, how he modulated his performance.”For his next project, Leclercq is stretching once more by leaving behind the shootouts that have served him so well. He is in preproduction on a biopic of the French Formula 1 champion Alain Prost, with a focus on his rivalry with Ayrton Senna in the 1980s and early ’90s.Cars are one of Leclercq’s great passions, he explained. If “Ganglands” is renewed, perhaps he can make room for a few chases. More