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      A New Podcast Rekindles a Box-Office Bomb

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      Julie Salamon, the author of a 1991 book about the filming of “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” returns to Hollywood history — and her own.One day last December, Julie Salamon was sorting through stacks of old plastic boxes at a storage unit in Lower Manhattan. Salamon, 68, is a journalist, author and self-described pack rat. The boxes were accidental galleries in the museum of a life’s work, filled with relics — notebooks, clippings, photos and tapes — accumulated for the dozen books Salamon has published since 1988.Salamon had come looking for a box that contained material from her second book, “The Devil’s Candy,” published in 1991. She had recently agreed to adapt the book — a celebrated account of the making of the infamous box-office flop “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” based on Tom Wolfe’s sweeping social satire of 1980s New York — for the second season of “The Plot Thickens,” a Hollywood history podcast from Turner Classic Movies.Salamon was hoping to find a trove of mini cassette tapes, recorded on set over the entire course of the film’s production. Audio from the tapes contained unusually candid interviews with the director, Brian De Palma, his crew and the film’s stars — Tom Hanks, Bruce Willis, Melanie Griffith and Morgan Freeman — and would be a crucial component of the podcast.Melanie Griffith and Tom Hanks were two of the big names cast for the film adaption of “Bonfire of the Vanities.”Warner Bros.But when Salamon eventually found the “Devil’s Candy” box, the tapes weren’t there. Distraught, she returned to her apartment in SoHo and resumed searching. It was there, a couple of frantic days later, that she found several zip-lock freezer bags full of mini cassette tapes in the back of a large home office cabinet. The bags hadn’t been opened for 30 years.Making the podcast, which recently ended its seven-episode run, was a late-career twist for Salamon, affording her the rare opportunity to revisit the story of a lifetime three decades later. But, as the author knew better than anyone, adaptations are never simple — at least not when “The Bonfire of the Vanities” is involved.“Putting this podcast together gave me an extra appreciation for Brian’s dilemma,” Salamon said. “At first you don’t have any idea what you’re doing, but then you just start doing it.”When it arrived on bookshelves in 1991, “The Devil’s Candy” stunned Hollywood. It painted a vivid and well-sourced portrait of an industry few outsiders had seen up close. (Or would see today — armies of studio and personal publicists keep journalists from getting too far close.) Salamon, then a film critic for The Wall Street Journal (she later worked for The New York Times), had befriended De Palma, who, by the late 1980s, had made hits like “Carrie,” “Scarface” and “The Untouchables” but was in something of a career slump. With his participation, her book portrayed the world of big-budget studio filmmaking as a high-stakes battle, in which three mercurial factions — the artists, the executives and the audience — are ever at odds with themselves and each other.At the center of the story was what remains one of the most notorious train wrecks in movie history. “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” as written by Wolfe, was a kaleidoscopic account of greed and cynicism in the “Me Decade,” filled with characters who were easy to hate and hard to look away from. The book became an instant best seller and media sensation in 1987, making it all but inevitable that someone would try to turn it into a movie. But its sharp edges didn’t survive in Hollywood. Warner Bros. preemptively defanged the story’s central character, a slithering bond trader and self-proclaimed “Master of the Universe” named Sherman McCoy, by casting Hanks, recently of “Big.” Its memorably pitiless ending also got the ax. In its place was an invented scene, in which Freeman, playing a judge, delivers a discordant moral sermon.Behind the scenes, the project was plagued from the start. Its biggest initial cheerleader, a powerful producer named Peter Guber, left the studio before production began. That set the stage for a showdown between De Palma, a withdrawn and exacting visionary, and executives at Warner Bros., who were anxious to protect a bloated $50 million investment. De Palma, who was uninterested in oversight, shut executives out of key aspects of the production. The executives fired back — at one point, they threatened to hold him personally liable for cost overruns.No one who worked on the film — not even Salamon, who observed the shoot and sat in on meetings — recognized it as a creative failure until it was screened for test audiences. By then it was too late. Critics savaged “Bonfire” — “gross, unfunny” and “wildly uneven,” declared this newspaper — and moviegoers shunned it. It made less than $16 million at the box office.The podcast version of “The Devil’s Candy” maintains the basic narrative of the book but adds new layers. The most potent is the audio, rescued from Salamon’s freezer bags. Throughout the series, retrospective narration gives way to contemporaneous recordings that capture events as they happened. The recordings also transform written characters into living, breathing people. Everything you need to know about the particular breed of difficult movie star Bruce Willis was in 1990 — ever-present bodyguard, rude to assistants — is there in the snotty tone he uses in his interviews with Salamon.“For me, the tapes really add a richness that wasn’t possible otherwise,” Salamon said. “I like to think I’m not a bad writer, but there’s no way that you can write anything that’s as moving as just hearing a person tell their story.”The film version of “Bonfire of the Vanities” bombed at the box office, making less than $16 million.xxxSalamon adapted “The Devil’s Candy” in close partnership with the narrative podcast company Campside Media, which co-produced this season of “The Plot Thickens” with TCM. She needed to break down her 420-page book into seven 40-minute podcast episodes.Natalia Winkelman, 28, a producer at Campside (and a freelance film critic for The Times), was a kind of doula and confidant for Salamon, guiding her through the monthslong process of translating her reporting into podcast scripts. Though Salamon’s career as an author spanned fiction, memoir and children’s literature, she had no experience writing for the ear, a distinct form with unique qualities and constraints.“Clauses don’t work so well in audio, you have to be more direct and conversational,” said Winkelman. “I think there was a bit of a learning curve for Julie at first, but once the two of us got into the recording studio things started to click really fast. If I gave her a note — That’s sounding a little read-y — she would come back with something way better than what I could have come up with.”Salamon also wanted to build on the book by adding new reporting and interviews. Many of the more emotionally compelling moments of the podcast stem from the transitions between then and now, record and memory. One of several indelible figures from the book whom Salamon reinterviews is Eric Schwab, a second-unit director on “Bonfire” and protégé of De Palma’s, who was poised for a breakout career before the movie bombed.“So many people who worked on the film were at a turning point in their careers,” said Angela Carone, the director of podcasts at TCM who edited the season with Salamon. “We get to tell their full stories on the podcast in a way that isn’t in the book.”Not everyone who cooperated with the book returned for the podcast. None of the film’s stars sat for new interviews (TCM said the recordings were legally Salamon’s property and that it notified those whose voices are used in the show). Nor did De Palma, though Salamon said the two remain good friends. (Through a representative, the director and the stars also declined to speak for this story.)The likable Hanks was miscast as Sherman McCoy, a slithering bond trader and self-proclaimed “Master of the Universe.”Warner Bros.In the stars’ absence, the podcast becomes more systemic in its outlook. It shows us the idealistic and overworked strivers — the assistant who dreams of becoming a producer, the location scout guzzling aspirin for breakfast — who collect small victories amid the chaos and terror of the film set.Some of what Salamon documented 30 years ago looks different through a modern lens. The fifth episode zeros in on several women who have invariably more precarious positions on the film than those of their male peers. In that episode, a present-day Aimee Morris — who was a 22-year-old production assistant on “Bonfire” — angrily recalls shooting a scene that doesn’t appear in the novel with the actress Beth Broderick. In the scene, Broderick’s character photocopies her naked crotch; filming it required Broderick, who was then De Palma’s girlfriend, to spend nine hours repeatedly taking off her underwear and climbing up and down a Xerox machine.“It just made me sick to my stomach,” Morris says in the episode. The scene “had nothing to do with anything. It’s just disgusting. It’s just misogynistic.”Salamon, who wrote critically of the Xerox scene in her book, said revisiting it with Morris made her frame the anecdote more pointedly this time around.“It just made me realize how much garbage women just accepted back in the day that we rightfully won’t anymore,” she said.For Salamon, working on the podcast was a strange and emotional experience, forcing her to reflect not only on her characters’ journeys but her own.Working on the podcast was a strange and emotional experience for Salamon, forcing her to reflect not only on her characters’ journeys but her own.Winnie Au for The New York TimesWhen she first considered what would become “The Devil’s Candy,” in 1989, she was a frustrated novelist working full time at The Journal while carrying her first child. The book became an instant classic of its genre (it’s still regularly taught in film schools) and changed the trajectory of her life.“To hear those voices transported me back to that moment,” Salamon said, describing what it was like to listen to the tapes for the first time. “I was starting a new life and becoming a young mother and transitioning into a new profession that I loved. It was overwhelming. I was on an adventure.” More

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      There’s Always Been More to Kirsten Dunst

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      A former child star and ingénue, she has come into her own as a chronicler of despair. Will “The Power of the Dog” cap her career reinvention?The main things Kirsten Dunst wanted out of her trip to Italy were to sleep soundly on the plane and to drink a Bellini upon arrival. She would have considered anything else to be a bonus and, as it turned out, those bonuses were considerable.Dunst had gone to Italy for the Venice Film Festival, where she was premiering “The Power of the Dog,” a new Netflix movie directed by Jane Campion that features one of the 39-year-old actress’s best performances. She arrived on the last day of August, after months at home raising a newborn baby and a year before that stuck at home because, well, duh.So you can imagine how Dunst felt when she got off the plane, boarded a boat at sunset and sped toward her hotel with the lights of Venice twinkling on the horizon. As she took it all in, Dunst began to well up: A full day of air travel, four sleepless months of child-rearing and the most beautiful city you ever saw can do that to a person.The next 48 hours were a whirlwind. Dunst tried to overcome her jet lag and hung out at the hotel pool, where she sipped Bellinis with her brother and watched elderly, moneyed Italians swan about. The next day, Dunst donned an Armani Privé gown that made her feel bulletproof and accompanied Campion and the film’s lead, Benedict Cumberbatch, to the premiere at the Sala Grande.After the film ended, the audience gave “The Power of the Dog” a several-minute standing ovation, and Campion and her cast sported big grins. Things couldn’t have gone better. Was Dunst thrilled?“I was so high on the experience,” she told me afterward, “with crippling exhaustion inside.”Even when she’s smiling, Dunst can suggest something much more complicated going on beneath the surface. That gift serves her well in “The Power of the Dog,” based on the novel by Thomas Savage and starring Cumberbatch as Phil, a sadistic ranch owner in 1925 Montana. For all their lives, Phil has kept his younger brother, George (Jesse Plemons), under his thumb, but when George meets and impulsively marries the melancholy Rose (Dunst), Phil resents the intrusion of this woman and sets out to destroy her.Thus, a trap is set for poor Rose: George adores his new bride and encourages her to open up, but anything Rose exposes of herself is a point of vulnerability that Phil can use against her. Even as Rose turns to alcohol to cope with Phil’s domineering ways, we hear her mutter, “He’s just a man.” But the way Dunst delivers the line, as though she barely believes what she’s saying, suggests that Rose knows all too well the evil that men can do.In “The Power of the Dog,” Rose is reduced to questioning whether she has any worth at all. “I feel like that’s a part of a young Kirsten that I had to rehash again,” Dunst said.Kirsty Griffin/Netflix“The Power of the Dog” is the first feature Campion has made in more than a decade and is shaping up to be the director’s most acclaimed film since “The Piano” (1993), but it also serves as the latest example of one of Hollywood’s most remarkable career reinventions: After years of being called upon to project blond, sunny sweetness, Kirsten Dunst has somehow become one of our foremost chroniclers of finely etched despair.Think of “Melancholia,” in which Dunst’s depression reaches apocalyptic levels even before the world comes to a violent end; of the way her punch lines pack a bitter sting in the deceptively rom-com-shaped “Bachelorette”; or of Sofia Coppola’s “The Beguiled,” with Dunst nursing a loneliness so private that it feels like an intrusion just to behold her. Even in her TV work, on “Fargo” and “On Becoming a God in Central Florida,” Dunst takes characters with high comedic upside and makes sure they are always operating from a place of real, bone-deep disappointment. She’s felt those things before, and she makes you feel it, too.“She’s got depth: She knows it, she’s seen it,” Campion told me. “What I find so incredible is that she’s so in the emotion of the moment. She brings you to empathy immediately.”I asked Dunst how she manages to do that, and she thought about the question for a while.“I’m not afraid to share my pain,” she finally said. “I don’t have any walls up when it comes to sharing those parts of myself. And it’s my job to share all that stuff.”A FEW DAYS before Dunst flew to Italy, I visited her ranch-style Los Angeles home, where she answered the front door with her blond hair tucked behind her ears and a substantially sized baby on her arm.“This is the newest guy, the Big Kahuna,” she said, introducing me to her four-month-old, 18-pound son, James Robert. “He’s an angel, but he’s a hungry angel. And a heavy angel.”James is her second child with Plemons, her co-star in “The Power of the Dog”; the two actors met in 2015, when they were fatefully cast as husband and wife in the second season of “Fargo.” For the last few months, Plemons had been away filming the Martin Scorsese drama “Killers of the Flower Moon,” and Dunst had mostly handled wake-up duties by herself. “I’m so tired, I haven’t slept through the night in four months,” she said as we moved to the backyard. “I’ve developed an eye twitch, too.” Dunst let out a little chuckle. “Yeah, I’m in a really special place.”Of her work in Hollywood, Dunst said: “I’ve done a lot, and I like the movies that I’ve been in. That’s a really big accomplishment, I think.”Erik Carter for The New York TimesDunst has a one-to-one connection with the audience that proves just as direct with whomever she’s speaking to in real life. In conversation, she is candid and matter of fact, like the sort of friend who’d level with you if you were wearing something hideous. It’s been more than a year and a half since she last acted, and she’s honest about the allure of all that down time: “There’s a part of me that’s like, I’ve done this for so long. When can I just relax?”Then again, there’s not much time for relaxation when you’re raising two young children. As we talked, Dunst’s older son, the 3-year-old Ennis, stomped into the backyard. “Hi, Bubba,” Dunst cooed sweetly. “Oh no, are you mad?” Ennis was pouting: He didn’t want to go to swim class because the instructor had made him put his head underwater. Dunst turned to me, raising an eyebrow. “This is what doing an interview at home is like,” she said.By the time she was Ennis’s age, Dunst — born in Point Pleasant, N.J., to a medical services executive and a flight attendant — began modeling. And by 8, she had appeared in “The Bonfire of the Vanities” and a short film directed by Woody Allen. “I clearly had something old inside of me that was a little bit more than your average commercial kid,” she said.At 10, that old soul helped her land the breakthrough role of a precocious bloodsucker in “Interview With the Vampire,” but afterward, while living in the Oakwood apartments in Los Angeles — an enclave of furnished units populated mostly by child actors and their stage parents — another little girl confronted her by the pool and announced that according to her agent, she’d be the next Kirsten Dunst.“I had the wherewithal to be like, This is nuts,” Dunst said. And over the next several years, even as she booked high-profile movies like “Little Women,” “Jumanji” and “Bring It On,” Dunst was determined to hold onto a normal life, a normal school experience, and normal friends. “I always felt it was lame to be into yourself,” she said. “I probably underplayed myself more in high school because I never wanted anyone to pick on me.”But nothing about Hollywood is normal, and if you’ve been working there since you were a child, it’s bound to worm into you in ways that can prove hard to untangle.In her mid-20s, as she came off three “Spider-Man” films, Dunst had begun to feel hollow. Though she had found an important collaborator in the director Sofia Coppola, who explored subversive strands in Dunst’s blonde-ingénue image with “The Virgin Suicides” and “Marie Antoinette,” movie shoots that really satisfied her were few and far between. Acting no longer brought her joy; too often, her life’s work had become a technical enterprise she felt no real connection to.In 2008, after checking into the Cirque Lodge rehab facility to treat her depression, Dunst came to some surprising realizations about the way being a child performer had affected her grown-up personality.“For a long time, I never got angry with anybody,” she said. “I just swallowed a lot down. When you’re on set, it’s performative, it’s pleasing. At a certain point, you’ve got to get angry, and I think that eventually builds up in someone. You can’t survive like that. Your body stops you.”That’s why, after entering her 30s and working for the last few years with the acting teacher Greta Seacat, Dunst has found a cathartic new connection with her work: She wants to take all the messy things that people bottle up and let us see them in her performances.“That’s what acting should be,” she said. “Those are the performances I love, that are the most revealing about human beings and the hardest things we go through in life.”It’s what she wanted to bring to Rose in “The Power of the Dog,” who is so gaslit by Phil that eventually, she can no longer tell if she has any worth at all. “I feel like that’s a part of a young Kirsten that I had to rehash again,” she said. “And that isn’t a place I really want to live in, but for the role, you have to.”Dunst would avoid Cumberbatch on the New Zealand set and often stayed silent in the hours before shooting. “It’s hard for Rose to vocalize,” she said. “I wouldn’t talk to anybody, just so that the first thing I uttered out of my mouth felt nervous and weird and gave me a sense of being a fish out of water.”But Dunst isn’t the sort of actor who likes to take that stuff home with her, especially since that home included her co-star. “Jesse and I were lucky we were doing a movie together,” she said. “We had each other through this whole thing, to laugh with, to bitch with.” And for an actress who’s so committed to chronicling a character’s low moments, it was important not to overthink the things that would be better if they were simply felt.“It’s nice to get older because you just care less about what people think of you,” she said. “I don’t have fear in my acting, and it’s the most freeing thing. That kind of happened after my first kid: You have this attitude where you’ll just lay all your chips on the table, because what’s the point of not?”That said, there remains a nagging sense that her recent accomplishments may have flown under the radar. Even Coppola thinks so, writing in an email: “She’s the top actress of her age (of course she’s my favorite!) but I do think she isn’t as recognized as she should be.”This may change with “The Power of the Dog,” which has been widely tipped to earn Dunst her first Oscar nomination. But whether that comes to pass, the actress told me she is finally at peace with her place in Hollywood.“I just feel like, You’ve worked long enough and hard enough, and it’s OK if people don’t like you,” she said. “I’ve done a lot, and I like the movies that I’ve been in. That’s a really big accomplishment, I think, to be able to like something you’ve been in. I don’t know if people feel that way very often.”HOURS AFTER THE Venice premiere of “The Power of the Dog,” Dunst, Campion and Cumberbatch flew to Colorado to tout their movie at the Telluride Film Festival. After that, she flew home to Los Angeles and went back to being a full-time mother.The day after she returned, we caught up on a video call. “When I stepped in the front door, I was like, This never happened,” she said. “That’s how it felt: I’m home again, and back to the reality of vomit on my shirt.”The Big Kahuna had slept in her bed the previous night and each of his little loving kicks administered something of a reality check. “You go from, ‘Woo, glamour, I’m getting my hair and makeup done,’ to ‘I haven’t brushed my teeth yet,’” she said. “Back to my grungy lifestyle!”As we spoke, Dunst was drinking from a coffee cup emblazoned with an illustration of the character Plemons played in “Fargo.” Her husband was returning home the next week, though not long after, the whole family would be packing up to head to Texas, where Plemons will spend several months shooting a limited series for HBO.Dunst calculated a mother’s mental math out loud: “I guess we’re going to have to drive to the airport, because we’ve got two car seats. Do we take a car seat on the plane? Do we ship one to Texas?” She rubbed her eyes. “The logistics of just car seats are stressing me out.”She studied my thumbnail in the call. “Where are you right now?” she then asked. I said that I was still in Italy at the festival, which delighted her. It was a little scrap, offered through a little screen, of the place where she’d had a whirlwind adventure.“Enjoy Venice,” Dunst said with a sigh, then a smile. “Have a Bellini for me.” More

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      ‘Malignant’ Review: Womb for Improvement

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      James Wan’s horror throwback follows a young woman with a mysterious connection to a brutal killer.The acting in “Malignant” might be on the hokey side, but who goes to a James Wan movie for the performances? What we want is gore and goose bumps, and in that regard, “Malignant” doesn’t entirely disappoint. Even if we have to wait until roughly 17 minutes before the finale to experience peak splatter.Until then, this gloomy psycho-horror follows poor, pregnant Madison (Annabelle Wallis), survivor of multiple miscarriages and spousal beatings. Madison has a complicated psychiatric past and a mysterious companion-stalker who may want to protect her, or possibly kill her. All we see initially is a scuttling lump with the posture of Quasimodo and the grooming of Cousin Itt; and after he invades Madison’s home — leaving her minus a baby, a partner and most of her wits — she’s horrified to discover she has a psychic connection to her attacker. When he kills, she can see every slice of his golden dagger, and so can we.Set in Seattle and filmed in and around Los Angeles, “Malignant” is replete with familiar genre tropes: the cavernous, shadowy homes with creaky doors and unreliable latches; the crumbly psychiatric hospital clinging to the edge of a cliff, where Madison’s childhood records lurk — you guessed it — in the spidery basement. Staticky, menacing voices croak from old radios and Michael Burgess’s camera beckons us into underground tunnels and clambers up walls on the heels of the villain and his victims.None of this is especially scary, but, if you’re patient, Wan delivers the kind of hilariously sick climax that only a sadist would spoil. Or envisage.MalignantRated R for gaping wounds and weaponized electricity. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. In theaters and on HBO Max. More

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      ‘25th Hour’: The Best 9/11 Movie Was Always About New York

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      While other directors edited out the twin towers from movies at the time, Spike Lee worked the tragedy into a story originally about other things.When Spike Lee came under fire last month for including 9/11 conspiracy theorists in his HBO documentary series “NYC Epicenters 9/11-2021½,” historians and others expressed disappointment that Lee had seemed to give credibility to long-debunked claims. (He subsequently edited them out.) But for those of us who’ve followed Lee’s career, and its intersection with that seminal New York event of 20 years ago, the initial decision was especially baffling — as Lee also directed what many consider the quintessential film about post-9/11 New York City.“25th Hour” is not a “9/11 movie,” at least not in the way that “United 93” or “World Trade Center” are. In fact, the attacks were not part of the David Benioff screenplay that Lee signed on to direct, nor were they part of Benioff’s original novel (which was published in January 2001). But Lee is an intuitive filmmaker, open to improvisation and adjustments — and, as “NYC Epicenters” reminds us, he is a documentarian who saw his city in a moment of mourning, melancholy and transition, and wanted to capture it.Most of Hollywood did not feel the same. In the weeks following the attacks, feature films with terrorism plotlines, including the Barry Sonnenfeld comedy “Big Trouble” and the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle “Collateral Damage,” were delayed and drastically re-edited. Films still in production, like “Men in Black II” and “Lilo & Stitch,” were rewritten to remove echoes of 9/11. Skyline shots with the World Trade Center were edited out of the not-yet-released “Kissing Jessica Stein,” “Igby Goes Down,” “People I Know” and “Spider-Man,” and a sequence of that superhero trapping a helicopter in a web between the twin towers — the centerpiece of a popular teaser trailer — was deleted as well.Most controversially, some filmmakers chose to leave their skyline shots intact, but to erase the Twin Towers with digital effects. And thus the World Trade Center was wiped from “Serendipity,” “Stuart Little 2,” “Mr. Deeds,” and Ben Stiller’s “Zoolander,” which hit screens less than three weeks after the attacks. The director’s publicist explained at the time that he made the last-minute decision to remove the towers because the film was an escapist comedy and seeing the buildings “would defeat that purpose.”Spike Lee disagreed. “You could not even show an image of the World Trade Center. “I said, we’re not doing that.” With filming on “25th Hour” planned for the following winter, Lee set about weaving 9/11 “into the fabric” of the existing story, as his star, Edward Norton, explained on the audio commentary: “It was like looking at it through the angle of another story, but the melancholy that the city was full of in that year afterward. I feel like the impact of 9/11 emotionally is all through this movie.”Spike Lee added a shot of the “Tribute in Light” installation after reading about it. Touchstone Pictures“25th Hour” is the story of Monty Brogan (Norton), a white-collar drug dealer whom we meet on the last day before he is to report for a seven-year incarceration. That night, he hits the town with his childhood pals (Philip Seymour Hoffman and Barry Pepper) and his live-in girlfriend (Rosario Dawson), ostensibly for one last blowout, but also in an attempt to come to terms with the choices — and thus, mistakes — he’s made in his life.So the explicit references to the tragedy are minimal. There is the opening credit sequence, featuring the “Tribute in Light” art installation, in which 88 searchlights combined to create two beams representing the fallen towers (Lee said he filmed it the very night he read about it in The Times); accompanied by Terence Blanchard’s moving musical score, these images say far more about the tragedy than any news footage or expositional dialogue could. Occasionally, ephemera of that autumn — American flags, makeshift memorials, wanted posters of Osama bin Laden — pop up in the background.One scene, lifted almost verbatim from the novel, finds Monty delivering a lengthy, angry, profanity-laden monologue into a mirror, meticulously insulting New Yorkers of every imaginable race, religion and class (before landing on his family, his friends and finally himself). Bin Laden and Al Qaeda were added to the list of his targets.Most poignantly, Lee relocated a scene between Hoffman and Pepper to an apartment overlooking ground zero, and placed the actors in front of a large window to view workers sifting for human remains. “New York Times says the air’s bad down here,” Hoffman notes; Pepper disparages the paper (“I read The Post”) and insists, “E.P.A. says it’s fine.” (The federal agency was later revealed to have misled the public.)In one scene, characters look out over workers at ground zero.Touchstone PicturesSome of the film’s initial critics found these additions to be an intrusion — A.O. Scott deemed them “obtrusive” and “a little jarring.” But as the years have passed, the value of what Lee was capturing has become clear. On the film’s fifth anniversary, the film critic Mick LaSalle called it “as much an urban historical document as Rossellini’s ‘Open City,’ filmed in the immediate aftermath of the Nazi occupation of Rome.”But Lee didn’t just capture the way New York looked in those uncertain, shellshocked months after 9/11. His film captured how the city felt, the strange quiet that fell over the streets, the overwhelming melancholy that embedded itself in our collective DNA. “25th Hour” was not the story of those attacks, but it was a story about one way of life coming to an end, and another, far less certain one looming on the horizon.“We were very careful how we were going to portray Sept. 11 because we know it’s still very painful and that it will always be very painful for those who lost people,” Lee said upon its release in December 2002. “But at the same time, we couldn’t stick our heads in the sand and pretend like it never happened.” And that instinct, that insistence on documenting the city we lived in rather than the city we imagined, is what makes Spike Lee one of New York’s essential filmmakers.Jason Bailey is the author of the forthcoming book “Fun City Cinema: New York and the Movies That Made It,” a history of the city and movies about it. He is also the host of the “Fun City Cinema” podcast. More

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      ‘Come From Away’ Review: Looking for Light in Somber Times

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      The filmed version of this Broadway musical lands on Apple TV+ to deliver hope and kindness.The capture of the Broadway musical “Come From Away” that is now streaming on Apple TV+ is almost impossible to hate. Unless, that is, you have an aversion to traditional Irish music and nice people.The first permeates the score, a tribute to the cultural heritage of Newfoundland where the show is set — and where the second find themselves. The ensemble, many from the original Broadway cast, deftly toggles between portraying passengers aboard planes diverted into the Gander airport on Sept. 11, 2001, and the kindly Canadians who welcomed them to their isolated province on the Atlantic coast.Hatched by the Canadian team of Irene Sankoff and David Hein and inspired by real people, “Come From Away” describes, in a series of vignettes, the surreal few days experienced by the stranded visitors and their hosts. Both were shellshocked by the situation and somewhat befuddled by each other, yet they made the most of the circumstances in a demonstration of tolerance and human decency.You would have to be green and hate Christmas to wish ill on this story. At the same time, the show does not elicit passionate feelings of any kind: It is … nice.Certainly, there is a double emotion involved in this Apple release: It coincides with the 20th anniversary of 9/11, and was filmed in front of an invited audience at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater back in May, when all the other Broadway theaters remained shuttered. Christopher Ashley, whose work on the stage version earned him the 2017 Tony Award for best direction of a musical, acquits himself well in the transition to video. But this amiable production’s temperature never rises above lukewarm: good sentiments are, unfortunately, difficult to dramatize, an issue compounded by a score that can feel like aural wallpaper.The best songs, which rely less on Celtic clichés, surface toward the end, including Jenn Colella’s belted ballad “Me and the Sky” and the rousing number “Somewhere in the Middle of Nowhere.” It’s a fine send-off to folks we feel we got to know, at least a little.Come From AwayNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. Watch on Apple TV+. More

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      ‘Azor’ Review: A World on Fire, Discreetly

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      In this low-key shocker set in Argentina in 1980, a Swiss banker travels through a world that he doesn’t seem to know is ablaze.Tendrils of menace creep through the unnerving drama “Azor,” snaking through every room and scene. It’s 1980 and a Swiss private banker and his wife are traveling through Argentina, taking in the sights while he tries to clean up a mess left by a missing colleague. Danger is everywhere — people have disappeared, are disappearing — though you wouldn’t necessarily know it from the mansions they visit, where the Swiss interlopers exchange pleasantries with the Buenos Aires elite, some of whom voice vague warnings. Others just smile knowingly, betraying their loyalties.A harrowing vision of evil from the inside, the movie tracks the banker, Yvan (Fabrizio Rongione), as he journeys through Argentina several years after armed forces overthrew the government of President Isabel Martínez de Perón. For most of Yvan’s clients, life seems to go on as before, with little to disrupt their cosseted indolence. With the junta ruling the country, the wealthy, murmuring about nothing much, sip drinks by their pools, tended by fleets of servants. Again and again, Yvan apologizes for the behavior of his missing colleague, René Keys (seen briefly in the opening), a confounding figure intensely disliked by some yet beloved by others.Written and directed by Andreas Fontana, making a formally precise, tonally perfect feature debut, “Azor” is a low-key shocker. It has you in its cool grip from the opening shot of a shambolic-looking Keys standing in suit and tie before a flat, blurred backdrop of jungle greenery. As the camera holds on him, he seems more ill at ease and his laughing smiles give way to unexplained agitation. He suddenly looks like a man searching for an exit. As the story unfolds, this perturbation suffuses the movie. It shapes every gesture, sidelong glance and oblique comment, turning an outwardly routine business trip into a mystery unlocked only through Keys.With its swampy air of unease and the figure of the enigmatic missing man, the key to the story as it were, “Azor” vaguely evokes films like Carol Reed’s “The Third Man” (written by Graham Greene), though without the narrative pulse and concerns or Hollywood glamour of that cloak-and-dagger thriller. (The name Keys recalls that of Edward G. Robinson’s claims adjuster, Keyes, in “Double Indemnity.”) Certainly “Azor” has a smattering of suspense-film essentials: hushed conversations, clouds of cigarette smoke, heavily armed soldiers. For his part, the colorless Yvan, with his stiff politesse and old-world firm, presents the very picture of a useful patsy.Fontana, who is Swiss but has lived in Argentina, takes a sideways, insistently oblique approach to intrigue. Rather than stuffing the movie with incidents, with clever turns and sexy characters, empty moralizing and political grandstanding, he has whittled it to the bone. There are no louche, swaggering spies in “Azor,” no dashing heroes, no swoony villains and very little of what could pass for Hollywood-style action. There is instead a lot of seemingly innocuous small talk, the kind often tucked in amid a movie’s narrative leaps forward. There’s chatter about Swiss schools, fine hotels, family castles, the good old days — all of which helps maintain the veneer of normalcy.Terrible things happen. Yet, for the most part, Yvan’s clients, with their money, landed estates and thoroughbreds seem largely indifferent to the evil informing their lives. The land, of course, was stolen long ago, though no one, Fontana included, puts it like that. Instead, when a sympathetic client (Juan Trench) takes Yvan and his wife, Ines (Stéphanie Cléau), on a ride, he speaks about a stand of trees planted by his great-grandfather. The client’s father called the area the grand boulevards, invoking Haussmann, the 19th-century French official who, in service of Louis Napoleon, remade Paris by razing slums and forcing out the poor. Fontana has landed his blow; the group rides on.Fontana doesn’t bludgeon you with explanations, declare his allegiances (they’re a given) or school you on Argentine history, which nevertheless comes into focus through the small talk and devious, sly looks, most notably in a terrifying scene with a Catholic monsignor (a fantastic Pablo Torre Nilsson). Fontana is asking you to look and to listen, and to really grasp what it means to behave as if the world isn’t on fire. Late in the movie, during a gala filled with laughing attendees, a zombie horde in gowns and black tie, Ines talks to an aristocratic doyenne (Carmen Irionda) about the peculiar dialect of Swiss private banking. One curious phrase means “to pretend you haven’t seen anything,” Ines explains, as she takes leisurely drags on her cigarette. “My husband does it very easily.”AzorNot rated. In French and Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Small Engine Repair’ Review: Of Mechanics and Men

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      John Pollono directs and stars in an adaptation of his play that adds depth to the original text but also struggles in its translation from stage to screen.What happens in Manch-Vegas stays in Manch-Vegas. Just ask the men from “Small Engine Repair,” an adaptation of the play of the same name by the actor and playwright John Pollono. The film, which Pollono also directs, provides more depth than the original but still flounders in the translation from stage to screen.Frank (Pollono) calls together his longtime buds Swaino (Jon Bernthal) and Packie (Shea Whigham), middle-aged natives of Manchester, New Hampshire, who’ve fallen out because of a brawl. When a frat boy named Chad (Spencer House) joins what seems like a normal night of bro-ing, the darker intentions behind the gathering are revealed.Pollono’s film has the same grit as the play, which premiered Off Broadway in 2013. Pollono, Bernthal and Whigham deliver ace performances that humanize these puerile man-children without pardoning them. The dialogue is brutal: crass, racist, homophobic, misogynist. It’s The Testosterone Show. Though the play examined the men’s relationship to women, it lacked women characters; the film thankfully corrects that, introducing Frank’s ex Karen (Jordana Spiro) and daughter Crystal (Ciara Bravo).The film self-consciously cushions the trim content of the play, converting anecdotal moments in the dialogue into flashbacks. These additions more explicitly critique the characters for a 2021 audience with greater sensitivity to depictions of toxic men, but they’re largely distracting, highlighting how the film sits uneasily between the contained world of the play and the larger world the adaptation attempts to build. Ultimately, the story still feels unfinished, and Pollono’s direction falters in the film’s big twist, when it tries to balance horror and humor before its tidy resolution.Small Engine RepairRated R for gutter-mouth trash-talking. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Fire Music’ Review: An Impassioned Case for Free Jazz

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      The beautiful souls that created free jazz — including Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Don Cherry and Carla Bley — light up this new documentary from Tom Surgal.One default reaction to the musical form called “free jazz” — Ornette Coleman’s phrase for this improvised, experimental style of jazz — has long been that it’s “not music.” This concise but cogent documentary directed by Tom Surgal is crammed with exhilarating sounds, moving reminiscences and stimulating arguments that it is not just music, but vital music.Gary Giddins, a critic who’s equally at home explicating Bing Crosby as Cecil Taylor, points out at the film’s beginning that someone playing the blues on a porch can make their phrases 12 bars or 14 bars or whatever at will. In group playing, certain agreements have to be met.One basis of free jazz is to approach ensemble playing without conventional agreements. Hence, Coleman’s practically leaderless double quartet approach on the 1961 “Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation” album. Much consideration is also given here to Coleman’s break with bebop in insisting one could improvise without chords. His playing sounded out of tune to traditional jazz musicians not yet conversant with microtones.This sounds a little dry, but the movie is anything but. Among other highlights are incredibly well-curated archival footage and contemporary interviews that allow the viewer to briefly commune with some beautiful souls, including Coleman, Sam Rivers, John Coltrane, Rashied Ali, Don Cherry, Carla Bley. “Whatever he did was the right thing to do,” Bley, now 85, says of Cherry, who died in 1995.Most of these players are Black, and their innovations in the ’60s had trouble gaining traction in the United States. So they flocked to Paris, and the movie is scrupulous in chronicling how the European movement “free improvisation” grew into something allied with, but distinct from, what the U.S. founders created.As a fan of improvisational music myself, the 88 minutes of this movie constituted a too-short heaven on earth. I’d binge on an expanded series, honestly.Fire MusicNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. In theaters. More