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      ‘Mogul Mowgli’ Review: Rapping for Dear Life

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      Riz Ahmed plays a hip-hop artist who faces illness and identity crises in Bassam Tariq’s electrifying new film.We first meet Zaheen, whose rap moniker is Zed, onstage at a club in New York. Wiry and wired, with a whispery intensity and a quick sense of humor — and played by Riz Ahmed with everything he has — Zed is on the verge of a career breakthrough after years of almost-stardom. He’s also about to break up with his girlfriend, Bina (Aiysha Hart), and face an illness that will precipitate a wrenching identity crisis.But before all that, if you listen to the verses he spits, it’s clear that the puzzles and paradoxes of identity are the wellsprings of his art. A London-bred son of immigrants from Pakistan, he writes seething, witty rhymes about the complicated history of the skin he lives in. He’s a British citizen descended from colonial subjects; a Muslim who is skeptical of piety and tradition; a man of the 21st century burdened by an earlier era’s legacy of partition, displacement and war.Nothing about Zed is simple, and he revels in his own complexity. “Mogul Mowgli,” Bassam Tariq’s astute, compact fictional feature debut, is a portrait of the artist as a son, brother and patient. Not that he’s summed up by such roles, or any others. “Only a few fit those words, so I’m repping for the rest of us,” he raps.Ahmed, who wrote those lyrics (and collaborated with Tariq on the screenplay) reps the character faithfully. Zed’s illness makes “Mogul Mowgli” a companion of sorts to “Sound of Metal,” in which Ahmed played a drummer facing the existential crisis of hearing loss. An autoimmune disease, arriving midway through this movie, quickly renders Zed unable to walk or stand without assistance. Stuck in a hospital bed, he is thrown back into a difficult relationship with his father (the superb Alyy Khan) and into a series of reveries.These unnerving episodes — existing somewhere between dream and memory, fantasy and hallucination — evoke moments from Zed’s childhood and also some of the traumas of South Asian history. One recurrent figure is a wildly dancing man, his face obscured by garlands of flowers. He is identified as Toba Tek Singh, a Punjabi place name that is also the title of a short story (by Saadat Hasan Manto) about the absurdity and tragedy of the 1947 partition of British India into India and Pakistan. Rather than explain the reference, Tariq and Ahmed let Toba Tek Singh stand as a kind of avatar and warning for Zed, who does what he can to master the madness of his circumstances.The film moves briskly though the phases of his predicament. He squabbles with his manager (Anjana Vasan), deals with an obnoxious fan, and endures the admiration of a younger rap acolyte known as RPG (Nabhaan Rizwan), a fool with facial tattoos and wisdom that would make Ali G proud. (“There’s no Drake without Whoopi Goldberg. No Nelson Mandela without apartheid.”)With the director of photography (Annika Summerson) and the sound designer (Paul Davies), Tariq stitches domestic drama, satire and magical realism into a tissue of moods and meanings, held together by the shattering credibility of Ahmed’s performance. In his work, Zed tries to bring coherence to the baffling anarchy of experience. “Mogul Mowgli” accomplishes just that.Mogul MowgliNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Yakuza Princess’ Review: Crime, Amnesia and Ancient Swords

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      This mayhem-filled film from Brazil has no higher function beyond its beheadings.You know this movie isn’t kidding around from its opening scene. Set in Osaka “20 years ago,” the blue-tinted sequence depicts a solemn ceremony broken up by bloody gun assassinations, culminating with a young boy taking a bullet in the back of his neck. So when I say “isn’t kidding around,” what I mean is “wants to impress you with the crass opportunism of its violence.”Based on a graphic novel, “Yakuza Princess” is not a Japanese film; it’s a Brazilian one. The director is Vicente Amorim and the graphic novel, called “Samurai Shiro,” is by Danilo Beyruth. Much of the action takes place in São Paulo, which has one of the largest Japanese expatriate communities in the world. The Japanese pop musician Masumi (who never appears at all comfortable in her role) plays Akemi, who is newly 21 in that Brazilian city and living an ordinary life.At the same time, in Osaka, the Yakuza soldier Takeshi (Tsuyoshi Ihara) is on a hunt that involves him blowing people’s brains out. Back in São Paulo, a hospitalized amnesiac white man breaks out of his medical situation, taking a very shiny (and noisy) ancient sword with him. (The character is played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers, his face scarred up like Karloff’s version of Frankenstein’s monster.)It seems inevitable that this group must somehow form a family. OK, not that, but yes, their paths intersect because — of course — Akemi was the sole survivor of that opening massacre. And Takeshi was somehow related and … well, it’s all pretty complicated and not terribly relevant, because fraught chases, frantic fights and various beheadings are really what the movie is all about.The cynical pro forma luridness “Yakuza Princess” grinds out suggests that sensationalist cinema, or at least its most ostensibly mainstream iteration, is currently depleted of resources.Yakuza PrincessRated R for oodles and oodles of violence. Running time: 1 hour 51 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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      Coming to Terms With the Legacy of Rick James

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      For a new documentary, the director and the star’s daughter examine both his pioneering work and his misogyny, as well as a sexual-assault conviction.It’s no question that Rick James is a legend for helping bring “punk-funk” to the mainstream with classics like “Mary Jane” and “Super Freak”; for breaking down the color barrier in rock ’n’ roll; and for confronting the whiteness of MTV in the ’80s. But how do you reckon with the man who is just as famous for committing sexual assault and perpetuating misogyny in the music industry? To Sacha Jenkins, director of the fascinating new documentary, “Bitchin’: The Sound and Fury of Rick James,” the answer is complicated.“I think it’s undeniable that he was a brilliant, genius musician and artist, and I think it’s undeniable that he had demons, and it’s undeniable that he did some really horrible, unsavory things,” Jenkins said on a recent video call from Martha’s Vineyard. “So, how do you reconcile the two?”Jenkins talks about his work on the film with the same analytical approach he took to James’s life, allowing audiences to draw their own conclusions about the person behind the larger-than-life image. There is certainly a plethora of biographical information for viewers to take into account in his documentary, debuting Friday on Showtime. “I just wanted to provide folks the tools to make their own decisions,” he added.Jenkins traces James’s story chronologically, from the outspoken musician’s childhood home in 1960s Buffalo, which the singer describes as having, “nice hills, ghetto, rats this big,” stretching out his arms in an archival interview seen in the film.“Bitchin’” details how James began selling drugs there, and how he was in and out of jail several times as a teenager until he joined the military. By 18, he had already experienced the trauma of being sexually abused as a child, getting “whoopings” from his mother and witnessing his father beating her.“I guess you can say, in a way, I was an abused child,” James recalls matter-of-factly in an interview. “But I had a lot of love in my family.”The director Sacha Jenkins, left, with James’s brother, Carmen Sims, center, and Gregory Cromwell, who worked security for James.Christine Shaw, via Mass AppealIt’s fair to suggest that James, who died at 56 in 2004, was already contending with demons he never truly confronted. Even his daughter, Ty James, who is interviewed in the documentary and is a producer, wasn’t privy to the details of his adolescent trauma. “It floated around a little bit, but it wasn’t something that I was totally abreast of,” she said on a separate video call.The world watched those demons play out in personal and professional affairs that were frustrating, toxic and, ultimately, devastating. In essence, he wanted freedom to be a devil-may-care rock star like Mick Jagger — with just as much access to drugs and women. After all, early in his career he performed with Levon Helm (before the Band), and formed the Mynah Birds with the rockers Nick St. Nicholas (who would go on to Steppenwolf) and Neil Young. Later, James battled Motown, because the label wanted to place him in the doo-wop genre, and white-owned networks like MTV because they refused to play music by Black artists.“We’re being sat in the back of the bus, television-style,” he tells a reporter. “This isn’t ‘The Wizard of Oz.’ There are Black people here, and we make music. Don’t we exist?”He had the loud, unapologetic flair of a Black man who grew up powerless, getting beat up by white kids on the block, and who proved revolutionary in another white space: the music industry. In 1981, he called out law enforcement brutality in the song “Mr. Policeman.” “I’m very vocal about injustice,” he says in archival footage. “I’ve never been one to bite my tongue and I never will.”So, in some ways, James was a hero. Even Jenkins, a musician himself, relates to him. “I was someone who liked rock ’n’ roll, hip-hop, skateboarding — a broad range of things. And I was sort of an oddball,” recalled the director, known for “Wu-Tang Clan: Of Mics and Men” and “Word Is Bond.” He continued, “But today, you can have rappers who are influenced by heavy metal, and no one’s going to say, ‘You’re a white boy or you’re a sellout.’ Rick was an early proponent of that.”But the empowerment he gained from his success also granted him excess and entitlement he’d never experienced growing up. “You mix all of those early learnings with an environment where no one tells you no, that math adds up to a bad equation,” Jenkins continued.This “bad equation” included, by the singer’s own estimate, a $6,000-to-$8,000 weekly cocaine addiction, a parade of women in and out of his home — some of whom, the film claims, he videotaped performing sexual acts at parties. “Daddy had his share of women, that’s for sure,” Ty James says in the film.She first met her father when she was 13 and she and her brother were sent to stay with him. She remembers “walking over naked girls at 7 in the morning.”James battled MTV when it refused to play music by Black artists.Mark Weiss, via ShowtimeTy James didn’t meet her father until she was sent to live with him at 13. ShowtimeThis was indicative of the era when rock stars hosting orgies in their mansions or using drugs on tour buses were normalized — even popularized. Jenkins argues that contextualizing the time period is just as critical to examining the musician’s legacy. “You can judge Rick James by today’s metrics, or you can try to be realistic about the times he was living in and what he was doing,” he said.By maintaining a bad-boy image, James and many others “would probably stand out like a sore thumb and be ostracized” today, Gail Mitchell, executive director of R&B and hip-hop at Billboard magazine, says in the film. Offstage, the budding musician Roxanne Shante recalls how he took her under his wing but also how he referred to a woman he was living with as “Bitch” so many times that Shante thought that was the woman’s name.Still, the songs he wrote and produced for female acts like Teena Marie and the Mary Jane Girls highlighted a surprising consciousness. “I knew I could write for girls,” James says in the film. “It was easy for me to write for them. I’ve been such an asshole to them that I could kind of reverse and know how they feel.”But in 1991, he was arrested for holding a 24-year-old woman hostage, tying her up, forcing her to perform sex acts and burning her with a crack cocaine pipe. James served five years in prison.To omit that period when considering his legacy is to avoid the whole truth and his humanity — both good and bad. That’s something even Ty James, a self-professed “daddy’s girl,” had to face before agreeing to be a part of “Bitchin’.”“I said, ‘You know what? I’m totally OK with that because my dad did his time for the things he got in trouble for,’” she said. “It goes to show that nobody’s perfect, especially dealing with the type of demons he dealt with. I’d already lived through it. Coming to terms with that was the hardest part.”As Jenkins said, every Rick James fan has wrestled with these contradictions at some point, including the director. “He processed his flaws in a way that created songs that still stand the test of time,” he reflected. “He made music reflective of his life experiences — being a Black man of a certain class in America. Is it misogynist? Sure. But has misogyny gone away suddenly? Has racism gone away suddenly? I don’t think so.” More

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      The Best Movies and TV Shows Coming to Amazon, HBO, Hulu and More in September

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      Every month, streaming services add movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our favorites for September.Every month, streaming services add movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for some of September’s most promising new titles. (Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)New to Amazon Prime VideoBilly Bob Thornton in “Goliath.”Greg Lewis/Amazon Prime Video‘Goliath’ Season 4Starts streaming: Sept. 24Billy Bob Thornton says goodbye to one of the best characters of his career with the fourth and final season of “Goliath,” a California legal drama inspired by film noir. Thornton has spent three seasons playing Billy McBride, a formerly high-powered and high-living lawyer who crashed hard and has since been trying to redeem himself, one seemingly unwinnable case at a time. For this last run of episodes, Billy finds himself in San Francisco, fighting his mental, physical and emotional frailties while helping a big-time law firm earn a potential billion-dollar settlement against some opioid-peddling pharmaceutical companies. Once again, an ace supporting cast (including the series regular Nina Arianda and the newcomers Bruce Dern, Jena Malone, J.K. Simmons and Elias Koteas) works magnificently to deliver a moody and complex mystery with juicy twists.Also arriving:Sept. 3“Cinderella”Sept. 10“LuLaRich”“Pretty Hard Cases”“The Voyeurs”Sept. 17“Do, Re & Mi”“Everyone’s Talking About Jamie”“The Mad Women’s Ball”New to Apple TV+Jared Harris in a scene from “Foundation.”Helen Sloan/Apple TV+‘Come From Away’Starts streaming: Sept. 10Two national tragedies — the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the COVID-19 pandemic — play a role in this recording of the Tony-winning musical “Come From Away,” shot in a Broadway theater earlier this year in front of a specially selected live audience of emergency responders, health care workers and 9/11 survivors. The show is a tuneful and impressionistic document of a true story from that day, describing the moments of kindness and connection that happened when the friendly Canadian small town of Gander, in Newfoundland, took care of over 7,000 passengers from planes diverted to its airport. Both an imaginative piece of journalism and an emotional recollection of a difficult time, “Come From Away” is a cathartic entertainment, tempering heartbreak with hope.‘Foundation’ Season 1Starts streaming: Sept. 24One of the most influential science-fiction franchises of all time, Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” is as relevant today as it was when the original trilogy of books was written in the 1940s and ’50s. The long-in-development, flashy-looking TV version embraces the modern parallels. Jared Harris plays the brilliant mathematician Hari Seldon, who has crunched the numbers and has determined that the millennia-old galactic empire is due for an irreversible collapse in a few centuries, leading to 30,000 years of chaos. But that chaos could be reduced to a mere 1,000 years if society took immediate steps to preserve its knowledge and culture. The show’s creators, David S. Goyer and Josh Friedman, tell a story that spans multiple planets and decades but is ultimately about how ordinary human weaknesses and fears sometimes keep us from realizing our grandest ambitions.Also arriving:Sept. 17“The Morning Show” Season 2New to Disney+From left, Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman, Peyton Elizabeth Lee and Mapuana Makia in a scene from “Doogie Kamealoha, M.D.”Karen Neal/Disney‘Doogie Kamealoha, M.D.’ Season 1Starts streaming: Sept. 8This remake of the ’90s family dramedy “Doogie Howser, M.D.” moves the action from Los Angeles to Hawaii and changes the protagonist from a teenage boy to a teenage girl (played by the Disney Channel favorite Peyton Elizabeth Lee). But the premise remains the same: What if a child genius finished college and medical school early and became a licensed doctor by age 16? Like the original, this new “Doogie” is a coming-of-age story about a precocious kid, who discovers that knowing a lot about how to fix human bodies hasn’t wholly prepared her for the more adult problems of romantic heartbreak and workplace woes.Also arriving:Sept. 1“Dug Days” Season 1Sept. 3“Happier Than Ever: A Love Letter to Los Angeles”Sept. 22“Star Wars: Visions” Season 1New to HBO MaxOscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain in the HBO remake of the Ingmar Bergman series “Scenes From a Marriage.”Jojo Whilden/HBO‘Scenes From a Marriage’Starts streaming: Sept. 12Based on the acclaimed 1973 TV mini-series from Ingmar Bergman, “Scenes From a Marriage” stars Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac as a seemingly content upper-middle-class couple whose relationship begins to splinter when the circumstances in their lives prompt them to scrutinize what they have. Written by the playwright Amy Herzog and the writer-producer-director Hagai Levi (best-known for the original Israeli version of the show that became HBO’s “In Treatment”), this new “Scenes” follows the arc of Bergman’s original story while taking into account what has changed in the past 50 years of gender dynamics. Chastain and Isaac anchor the series, playing a husband and wife who still love and appreciate each other but who have outgrown their old expectations.Also arriving:Sept. 2“Adventure Time: Distant Lands — Wizard City”Sept. 10“Malignant”Sept. 15“A la Calle”Sept. 17“Cry Macho”Sept. 23“Ahir Shah: Dots”“Doom Patrol” Season 3Sept. 26“Nuclear Family”Sept. 30“The Way Down”New to HuluKayvan Novak as Nandor in a scene from Season 3 of “What We Do in the Shadows.”Russ Martin/FX‘What We Do in the Shadows’ Season 3Starts streaming: Sept. 3This hilarious horror mockumentary had a great run last year, with the cast and writers expanding on the show’s initial concept: a Staten Island version of the 2014 New Zealand movie about bickering vampire roommates. “What We Do in the Shadows” is still an episodic sitcom, with each chapter telling its own story. But the larger arc that started to develop in Season 2 continues in Season 3 as this band of slacker bloodsuckers and their shrewd human assistant Guillermo (Harvey Guillén) find themselves presented with new opportunities. Although the characters have richer back stories now — filled with bizarre, centuries-old grudges — this show’s primary asset is still its performances, as some very funny actors react with deadpan irritation at the paranormal craziness surrounding them.‘Y: The Last Man’ Season 1Starts streaming: Sept. 13For over a decade, the Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra comic book series “Y: The Last Man” has been in development for a screen adaptation — first for the movies and then for TV. There’s a good reason the project’s producers have been so persistent: “Y” has an irresistibly juicy premise, depicting a society where an apocalyptic event has killed every mammal with a Y chromosome on Earth except for one. The comics are also filled with memorable characters and thrilling plot twists. This version retains both the grabby story and the fascinatingly eclectic cast — including the title hero, Yorick Brown (Ben Schnetzer). But the series’s head writer, Eliza Clark, has also updated the original’s exploration of gender roles.Also arriving:Sept. 2“Trolls: TrollsTopia” Season 4Sept. 3“The D’Amelio Show” Season 1Sept. 8“Wu-Tang: An American Saga” Season 2Sept. 10“The Killing of Two Lovers”Sept. 16“The Premise” Season 1“Riders of Justice”“Stalker”Sept. 29“Minor Premise”New to PeacockFrom left, Sumalee Montano, Ashley Zukerman and Rick Gonzalez in a scene from “Dan Brown’s the Lost Symbol.”Rafy/Peacock‘Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol’Starts streaming: Sept. 16“The Lost Symbol” is the third novel in Dan Brown’s popular series of books about Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor who specializes in symbology and classical art — and who often ends up using his know-how to help the authorities crack the secret codes underlying international conspiracies. Tom Hanks has played Langdon in the movie versions of Brown’s stories. Ashley Zukerman has taken on the role for a TV adaptation that is meant to serve as an entry point for newcomers. As with the books and the films, this version is a complicated tale of good versus evil, featuring a lot of scenes of smart folks solving ancient puzzles in dark and dangerous chambers.Also arriving:Sept. 2“A.P. Bio” Season 4 More

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      Ed Asner, Emmy-Winning Star of ‘Lou Grant’ and ‘Up,’ Dies at 91

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      Best known as the gruff newsman he first played on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” he was also a busy character actor and a political activist.Ed Asner, the burly character actor who won seven Emmy Awards — five of them for playing the same character, the gruff but lovable newsman Lou Grant, introduced on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” — and later starred in film hits like “Up” and “Elf” — died on Sunday at his home in Tarzana, Calif. He was 91.His death was confirmed by his family via Twitter. No cause was specified.Mr. Asner also served as president of the Screen Actors Guild from 1981 to 1985 and was active in political causes both within and beyond the entertainment industry. The issues he supported over the years included unionism (in particular the air traffic controllers’ strike of 1981) and animal rights; those he protested against included the American military presence in El Salvador.Mr. Asner was 40 when he was approached for the role of Lou Grant, the irascible but idealistic head of the fictional WJM television newsroom in Minneapolis and the boss of Ms. Moore’s Mary Richards. His place in television comedy history was secured when, during the first episode, he told Ms. Moore, an eager young job seeker, “You’ve got spunk,” then paused and added, “I hate spunk.”“The Mary Tyler Moore Show” ran on CBS from 1970 to 1977, and Mr. Asner was nominated for the Emmy for best supporting actor in a comedy series every year. He won in 1971, 1972 and 1975. He went on to win twice for best lead actor, in 1978 and 1980, for the spinoff “Lou Grant,” making him the first performer to have received Emmys for playing the same character in both a comedy and a drama series.“Lou Grant” (1977-82) itself was an unusual case, a drama series developed around a sitcom character. In the show, Mr. Grant returned to his first love, editing a big-city newspaper, and the scripts tackled serious issues that included, in the first season alone, domestic abuse, gang rivalries, neo-Nazi groups, nursing-home scandals and cults.In between playing Lou Grant, Mr. Asner also won Emmys for his appearances in the 1976 mini-series “Rich Man, Poor Man,” as Nick Nolte’s bitter immigrant father, and the groundbreaking, lavishly lauded 1977 mini-series “Roots,” in which he played a slave-ship captain with scruples. He also won five Golden Globes, one for “Rich Man, Poor Man” and two each for the two series in which he played Lou Grant.In more recent years he had been seen in guest roles on television series like “The Good Wife,” “The Middle,” “Grace and Frankie,” “Hot in Cleveland” and “Cobra Kai,” and as recurring characters on “The Practice” and “ER.” In television movies, he played the billionaire Warren Buffett (in “Too Big to Fail,” 2011) and Pope John XXIII (in a 2002 movie by that name).Edward David Asner was born on Nov. 15, 1929, in Kansas City, Mo., and grew up in Kansas City, Kan. He was the youngest of five children of Orthodox Jewish immigrants, Morris David Asner, a junkyard owner from Poland, and Lizzie (Seliger) Asner, from Russia.As a boy, Mr. Asner became interested in dramatics and worked on a school radio program. After high school he was accepted at the University of Chicago, but dropped out after a year and a half to work at odd jobs — taxi driver, encyclopedia salesman, metal finisher at an auto plant — while he tried to build an acting career..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-m80ywj header{margin-bottom:5px;}.css-m80ywj header h4{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:500;font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.5625rem;margin-bottom:0;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-m80ywj header h4{font-size:1.5625rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}.css-1gp0zvr{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;margin-bottom:25px;}In 1951 he was drafted into the Army and sent to France. Mustered out in 1953, he returned to Chicago to work with the Playwrights Theater Club and the Compass Players, a precursor of the Second City comedy troupe. But he soon moved to New York, where he found work onstage (a small part in “The Threepenny Opera” at the Theater de Lys in Greenwich Village and a short-lived Broadway play, “Face of a Hero,” starring Jack Lemmon) and in a handful of television shows.Moving to California in 1961, he found the acting jobs more lucrative, and was cast in a short-lived CBS political drama, “Slattery’s People,” starring Richard Crenna. He made a point of largely avoiding comedy — out of fear, he said in a 2002 appearance at Vanderbilt University, and because “in those days you got discovered by doing the drama shows as a guest star.” But he agreed to audition for “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” because, as he said in an Archive of American Television interview, Lou Grant “was the best character I’d ever been asked to do” in either television or film.Mr. Asner as Lou Grant with Mary Tyler Moore in a scene from “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” He won three Emmys for his portrayal on the show, and two more when the character moved to his own dramatic series.CBSLou was a hard-drinking, straight-shooting, short-tempered journalist who had tender emotions but did not plan to show them; a strong aura of professional and personal integrity; a fear that he had outlived his era; and “a great common core of honor,” as Mr. Asner told Robert S. Alley and Irby B. Brown, the authors of “Love Is All Around: The Making of ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show.’”In the post-Lou Grant era, Mr. Asner worked on both screen and stage. He returned to Broadway in 1989 to play the pugnacious Harry Brock opposite Madeline Kahn in a revival of “Born Yesterday.” His last Broadway play was “Grace” (2012), a tale of gospel-themed motels and murder, in which he played an exterminator.He provided the voice of the lead character in the Oscar-winning animated movie “Up” (2009), about an elderly widower who flies to South America by attaching roughly a zillion colorful balloons to his house. Manohla Dargis’s review in The New York Times, which praised Mr. Asner and the supporting characters — including a portly stowaway scout and several talking dogs — called it “filmmaking at its purest.”Mr. Asner also played a levelheaded Santa Claus in the Will Ferrell comedy “Elf” (2003), about a tall human raised by North Pole elves, which has become a Christmas-season classic. (It was Santa’s fault, really; the human baby crawled into his giant bag of gifts one busy Christmas Eve.) The Chicago Sun-Times critic Roger Ebert called the film “one of those rare Christmas comedies that has a heart, a brain and a wicked sense of humor.”He was a former F.B.I. man in Oliver Stone’s 1991 film “JFK,” he did voice work for several animated series and he starred briefly in several more prime-time series. They included “Off the Rack” (1984), as Eileen Brennan’s business partner; “The Trials of Rosie O’Neill” (1991), with Sharon Gless; “Thunder Alley” (1994), a sitcom in which he played a retired stock car racer; and “Center of the Universe” (2004), as John Goodman’s intrusive father.Mr. Asner continued working late in life, appearing on “The Good Wife” in 2015 with Julianna Margulies.Jeff Neumann/CBS One of his last film appearances was as a New York psychologist in “The Garden Left Behind” (2019), a drama about a young Mexican transgender woman that won a SXSW Film Festival audience award. That year he also appeared on several television series, including five episodes of “Dead to Me,” a Netflix drama about grief.Mr. Asner married Nancy Sykes in 1959, and they had three children. They divorced in 1988. Ten years later he married Cindy Gilmore, a producer; they separated in 2007 but did not divorce until 2015. He is survived by two daughters, Liza and Katie Asner; two sons, Charles and Matthew, and 10 grandchildren.In a 1999 interview, Mr. Asner looked back fondly on his long-running series. “To me, the best performances come from those milieus where you create the family,” he said. “Of bolstering each other, of love for each other’s work, of trying to help each other, of trying to get the best out of each other. And I believe it pays off.”Jack Kadden contributed reporting. More

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      ‘Candyman’ | Anatomy of a Scene

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      Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera.Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera. More

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      How ‘Candyman’ Star Yahya Abdul-Mateen II Became the Next Big Name

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      The actor’s career has surged thanks to projects like “Aquaman” and “Watchmen.” He’s even become a Warner Bros. favorite. Now on the brink of movie stardom, he’s ready to steer.“What time is it?” Yahya Abdul-Mateen II wondered. “I don’t know. I’ve been in this room …” He trailed off. “It could be any time of day right now.”The bright lights and white backdrop of his windowless room conjured a void from which Abdul-Mateen had been videoconferencing for hours. He was doing remote press for “Candyman,” a new spin on the 1992 horror film with the 35-year-old actor playing Anthony, a painter mesmerized by the urban legend of a hook-handed killer. It’s said that Candyman can be summoned by speaking his name five times into a mirror, but as Anthony goes searching for the killer, he begins to see his own haunted face staring back.Though the film is set in Chicago, Abdul-Mateen was beamed to me from London, where he has spent the last few months shooting a sequel to “Aquaman” (he plays the villainous Black Manta). It was a rare day off from the superhero film, carved out so he could spend time promoting another hopeful franchise-starter. Was Abdul-Mateen tired from working so much? Sure, he told me as he shrugged off his black leather jacket. But he was also used to it.“People tell me, ‘Keep it going, man. If it’s hot, ride the wave,’” he said.Abdul-Mateen has been caught up in a significant swell since 2015, when he graduated from drama school at Yale and promptly booked a showy part as a nightclub owner in the Netflix series “The Get Down.” That role served as a signal flare to Hollywood casting directors: Here was a brand-new, 6-foot-3 hunk with formal training, screen charisma and eyes that can lock onto his scene partner like high beams.Men like that don’t come in droves these days, and Abdul-Mateen found himself entering a seller’s market: After “The Get Down” was canceled, he promptly began nabbing roles in high-profile projects like “Aquaman,” “The Greatest Showman” and “Black Mirror.” Last fall, he won an Emmy for the HBO limited series “Watchmen,” in which he played Doctor Manhattan, a blue, frequently nude superhero inhabiting the body of a Black man; months after that win, he made a strong impression as the Black Panther activist Bobby Seale in Aaron Sorkin’s “The Trial of the Chicago 7.”Abdul-Mateen’s rise has become the sort of thing that everyone wants to get in on, and Warner Bros. is particularly enamored with the actor. In addition to the “Aquaman” sequel, Abdul-Mateen will be seen in December starring opposite Keanu Reeves in the studio’s “The Matrix Resurrections,” and next summer, he films “Furiosa,” the highly anticipated “Mad Max: Fury Road” prequel from the director George Miller.Abdul-Mateen as Black Manta in “Aquaman.” He’s shooting the sequel now.Jasin Boland/Warner BrosThat is the sort of keys-to-the-kingdom access that Warner Bros. has historically reserved for a handful of stars like Clint Eastwood and Ben Affleck, and Abdul-Mateen doesn’t take the studio’s investment for granted. Still, he has recently discovered a brand-new superpower, something he never dared to employ on his path up the summit: saying no.What has he been turning down lately? “Jobs, appearances, meetings, people,” he said. “It’s like ‘no’ is one of my favorite words.” He mulled it over some more: “Sometimes you’ve got to get to zero in order to get back to one, two, three and beyond. You get so far down the line, it’s like, ‘Wait, where did zero go? Where’s the ground?’”Over the past six years, in addition to earning all those jobs, “I’ve been learning life,” he said. “I’ve been learning bills and debt and burying family members — life and death, heartbreak, location, relocation. And having success coincide with all of those things is interesting, because I’m also missing the birth of babies and weddings and things like that.”Sure, it’s great to become a movie star, especially at a time when new ones have proved so difficult to mint. “But I’m also learning that you have to protect yourself,” Abdul-Mateen said. “You have to have balance with all of this.” He scratched his head and put it more bluntly: “Sometimes it’s like, ‘Look, man, I want to get off the wave and create my own.’”THE YOUNGEST OF six children, Abdul-Mateen was born in New Orleans and initially lived in the city’s Magnolia Projects, where the kids would all play outside and the families took care of each other. “A sense of community was such a strong thread throughout my entire life that now sometimes it’s a bit strange to be out doing this by myself,” he said.His family moved around often, and Abdul-Mateen treated it like an adventure even though it meant he went to 13 different schools before he became a teenager. In each new class, whenever the teacher introduced him as Yahya, the other students would burst out laughing at his unusual name. But within a week, he’d have worked to win them all over, a pattern that taught him adaptability.“A sense of community was such a strong thread throughout my entire life that now sometimes it’s a bit strange to be out doing this by myself,” he said.Danny Kasirye for The New York TimesThat came in handy when Abdul-Mateen took an acting class at University of California, Berkeley, where he had gone to study architecture. He found playing different characters to be so much fun that after a short-lived stint as a city planner, he pursued a major swerve and applied to drama school at Yale.Was he good at acting back then? Well, he was good at commanding attention, and that’s not nothing. But a turning point came during Abdul-Mateen’s first year at Yale, when he found himself stymied by the Stephen Adly Guirgis play “The ___________ With the Hat.” He couldn’t understand why his character would brush off a girlfriend’s infidelity, and he stayed up all night until he finally cracked the man’s motivation: Because he loved her, he was able to tell himself a lie.“That’s when I knew that there was something else behind this that I wanted to figure out,” he said. “If I was going to be successful, I couldn’t just think like myself — I had to learn to be empathetic and understanding of other people’s perspectives and lives and outlooks. It would make me a better person, but it would also make me a better actor.”According to his “Candyman” director, Nia DaCosta, that empathy is key to Abdul-Mateen’s appeal. “He is incredibly skilled at imbuing each character he plays with specificity, humanity and a lived-in individuality,” said DaCosta, who praised “his ability to draw you into the life of a character as though he were a new friend or a stranger at a bar you’re dying to get to know.”That’s part of what made “Candyman” such a natural fit for Abdul-Mateen’s first major leading role: The movie is strewn with details that conjure something from his own lived experience. When Anthony is up all night painting, caught in the grip of an artistic revelation, it’s the sort of mania Abdul-Mateen knew from trying to crack Guirgis’s play. And when Anthony looks down and finds his hands smeared in black paint, Abdul-Mateen might have recalled his construction-worker father, whose hands were often covered in grease and motor oil.Abdul-Mateen in his first major leading role, in “Candyman” opposite Vanessa Williams.Universal PicturesThe first “Candyman” grounded its story in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing project, a place that has been long-gentrified by the time DaCosta’s film picks up the tale. That, too, hit home for Abdul-Mateen, whose work as a city planner in the highly gentrified Bay Area gave him even more perspective on the projects he grew up in.“One of the first things that I did when I went to Chicago was to go to Cabrini-Green and put on that community planner hat,” he said. “And for a place that has a history of being as Black as that neighborhood was, that was not what I found. One has to wonder what happened to all of those families, all of those spirits? For every household, there’s a story, but when there’s no one there anymore to tell those stories, then that’s a tragedy.”With the clout he’s beginning to accrue, Abdul-Mateen wants to make sure those stories are told right. He also knows that if he can bring even more of himself to bear on these movies, he can start steering the wave instead of surfing it.Maybe it will help, too, once he feels he has a world to return to. Abdul-Mateen has spent the last few hectic years without a home of his own; even when he secured the keys to a New York apartment in January, he left the next day to film a new movie in Los Angeles. “This has been a very isolating experience,” he said. “I don’t want to do that anymore. I don’t have to do that anymore.”In the future, he plans to take more cues from his “Aquaman” co-star Jason Momoa, who keeps his family and close friends around him on set: “It helps him to stay true to who he is, because he’s not always the one having to speak up and support his own values all the time.” Abdul-Mateen hopes that will help the movies he makes feel more like himself, more like the homes he grew up in, more like the community that raised him in New Orleans.In the meantime, he’ll bring that feeling with him. When I asked Abdul-Mateen if he could name the most New Orleans thing about him, he grinned and spread his legs wide.“The way I take up space,” he said. “Somebody from New Orleans, they sit with their legs from east to west, they’re going to gesture big.” He waved his hands, then looked into the camera and fixed me with those high beams. “I don’t necessarily do that in my everyday life. But when I decide to take up space, nobody can take it from me.” More

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      ‘Together’ Bears Witness to Britain’s Lockdowns

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      The new film, starring Sharon Horgan and James McAvoy, is a tensely funny relationship drama, as well as a chronicle of the first year of the pandemic.LONDON — In “Together,” Sharon Horgan and James McAvoy play a couple in meltdown. And then the pandemic begins.Ten minutes into the film, which debuts in theaters in the United States on Aug. 27, the unnamed female protagonist (Horgan) tells her partner (McAvoy) that he is the worst human alive.“You’ve got the same level of charm as diarrhea in a pint glass,” she says.“Lockdown’s going to be hard then,” he responds.The drama, written by Dennis Kelly and directed by Stephen Daldry (“The Hours”), begins on 24 March 2020, the day after Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced Britain’s first coronavirus lockdown. It unfolds, claustrophobically, over the course of a year in the couple’s home, which they share with their young son.As well as taking a wide view of the virus’s deadly impact — captions mark the rising death toll in Britain, from 422 in the first scene to 126,284 in the last — “Together” also zooms in on the disintegration and tentative rebuilding of a relationship. It’s sad, but also scabrously funny — “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” with added hand sanitizer. There’s shouting and crying, reminiscing and makeup sex, panic buying, jostling for vaccines and shocking, visceral grief.Stephen Daldry, top left, directed the film, which was shot over 10 days in London.Peter Mountain/Bleecker StreetHorgan said in a phone interview that the film was, on one level, an exercise in bearing witness, in particular to the “hidden trauma” of those families who lost loved ones in nursing homes. More than 39,000 nursing home residents in England died with the virus between April 2020 and March 2021, according to a study by the Care Quality Commission, a government agency. For many of those people, because of visiting restrictions and staff shortages, it was a lonely death.In “Together,” the mother of Horgan’s character moves into a nursing home at the start of the pandemic. “She’ll be safe there, right?” the daughter says. In the following scene, her mother is on a ventilator.Horgan said she felt “an enormous responsibility” in telling the story of what happened in Britain’s nursing homes. “We were incredibly shocked by it as a country, but the specific experience that families were having — of not being able to say goodbye, of watching loved ones die on FaceTime — people felt like they weren’t seen,” she said. “We wanted people to feel the pain of it.”The drama was filmed in London over 10 days in April this year, and was broadcast here by the BBC in June, in the same week that the government delayed the lifting of restrictions because of a surge in the Delta variant of the virus. As it premieres in the United States, just over half of Americans are fully vaccinated, but the long-term effects of the pandemic — physical, psychological and financial — are still being felt.“I’ve never written anything as immediate as this,” Kelly said in a phone interview. The script required little research, beyond observing day-to-day events, he added: “It’s the one event we’ve all been through.”Perhaps that’s why a number of recent films have tackled the strains of life in a pandemic. “Locked Down,” starring Anne Hathaway and Chiwetel Ejiofor, throws an improbable heist into its story of a bored, bickering couple. “Lock Down Love” and “The End of Us” play out as more straightforward romantic comedies, in which being forced apart or together makes couples reassess. If “Together” stands apart, it is because fury and horror at what is happening in the wider world run in parallel to the central love story.Writing the movie was a cathartic experience, Kelly said. “There are a lot of people out there who are really angry. They lost people, and they know they died alone,” he said. “We still haven’t got anywhere near processing what we’ve been through.”Before Kelly approached Horgan about starring in “Together,” she had little interest in making a lockdown film: She had already turned down scripts based on the pandemic, she said. In the shows she was working on, including the BBC comedy “Motherland” and the second series of Aisling Bea’s “This Way Up,” the current circumstances were more or less glossed over, she added. Then she read “Together.”“I could see it was really important,” Horgan said of the script. “Of course, it’s rooted in Covid. But it transcends that, as a voyeuristic, in-depth X-ray of a relationship.” For that reason, Horgan doesn’t think people will feel fatigued by the events of last year and a half while watching it. “If it was just related to the pandemic, you couldn’t watch an hour-and-a-half of it,” she said.It helped that Horgan and Kelly are old friends. Horgan grew up on a turkey farm in Ireland, but has lived in London since the early 1990s, when she and Kelly met performing in a youth theater production. Years later, they bumped into each other in a pub. Horgan was in her late 20s and working at a job center; Kelly mentioned he’d written a play, called “Brendan’s Visit.” The next day, Horgan called and convinced him to put it on.“She was unbelievably driven,” said Kelly, who went on to win the Tony Award for Best Book with “Matilda the Musical” in 2013. “If it weren’t for Sharon, there’s no way I’d have been a writer.”From left: Tanya Franks, Rebekah Staton and Sharon Horgan in “Pulling.”HuluThe pair started writing together and created “Pulling,” a cult comedy about three 20-something female housemates, which debuted on the BBC in 2006. Watching it now, Horgan’s character, Donna, seems like a godmother to Fleabag from Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s 2016 TV hit, as well as the many chaotic, honest portrayals of womanhood that have followed, but at the time there was no one like her on television.If “Pulling” was based on Horgan’s 20s, “Catastrophe,” the dramedy she co-wrote and starred in with Rob Delaney about a couple who get pregnant after a one-week stand, was based on her 30s: She and her now ex-husband Jeremy Rainbird had been together for six months when she found out she was expecting a daughter.Now, she is working on the third part of her loose trilogy based, as she described it, on the “life cycle of a woman.” It will encompass turning 50, divorce and watching her children grow up, she said.Horgan spent lockdown in London, with her two teenage daughters, who were “like caged animals,” she said. “So as a separated family we had to negotiate that, and make that work,” Horgan said. “It was intense.”The boundaries between her life and work have always been porous, Horgan said. “I don’t think I give too much of myself to my work; my work gives an awful lot to me, if I’m honest,” she said. “I’ve never really given away something incredibly personal that I haven’t felt better for having got it off my chest,” she added.When it came to rehearsing “Together,” in April, Horgan’s own experiences came pouring out.“Everyone was sharing stories, not just about Covid, or lockdown, but about relationships,” she said. “The emotion of it felt within arm’s reach.” More