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A new four-part documentary series by Ken Burns paints a sweeping portrait of a man whose life intersected with many of modern America’s most profound changes.One day in the mid-1990s, Ken Burns had a cold while he was in Los Angeles to raise money for his next documentary. He ducked into a coffee shop for some hot tea, and after paying, one of the 20th century’s most ardent historians turned from the counter and locked eyes with perhaps its most towering icon. Muhammad Ali was sitting in a booth nearby. The two men stared at each other silently for longer than most strangers would — celebrities or not.“There’s was almost no movement on both of us except that kind of opening, that love that happens when you just feel unashamed and unembarrassed by the persistent gaze,” Burns said recently. “This wordless conversation; I have the script in my head, I heard his voice in my mind. But it was just without going over and shaking hands, of course, not asking for an autograph or anything like that.”By that point, Ali was in the clutches of Parkinson’s disease — hence the silence from a man who for many decades couldn’t stop talking: about his own beauty and skill, about how ugly and untalented his opponents were, about the injustice Black people across America had faced for hundreds of years.Nearly three decades later, Burns; his oldest daughter, Sarah; and her husband, David McMahon, have stitched together a sweeping portrait of Ali’s impact from more than 40 years of footage and photographs. “Muhammad Ali,” a four-part documentary series that premieres Sept. 19 on PBS, follows the arc of a man whose life intersected with many of modern America’s most profound changes — and who was also not as widely revered in his prime as he is now.David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker and author of “King of the World,” a 1998 biography of Ali, said “it was very clear that a lot of America found him dangerous, threatening to the way people were ‘supposed’ to behave — much less Black people.”“He won people over because he was right about the war,” Remnick continued. “He won people over because as an athlete, he proved himself over and over again to be not only beautiful to watch, but unbelievably courageous. So his athleticism and his superiority as an athlete couldn’t just couldn’t be denied, even when he lost.”In 1978, Ali beat Leon Spinks to win the heavyweight championship for the third time.Michael GaffneyThere has been no shortage of documentaries or biographies about Ali in the last few decades. For the filmmakers, the idea took root in 2014, when their friend Jonathan Eig was working on a book about Ali. (“Ali: A Life,” published in 2017.) Eig’s research led him to believe that a comprehensive film representation of Ali’s life had not been done before, and that the Burnses were the perfect team to do it.McMahon said it took only a few archival clips to convince them of the potential power of a wide-ranging Ali documentary. “There were so many possibilities to tie together all these threads that were kind of out there,” he said. “You’d see documentaries that had been about a single chapter in his life or a single fight, or books covering only a portion of his life.”The more the filmmakers dug into Ali’s life, Sarah Burns said, the more they realized “just how much there was to this story.”“Not just the boxing, obviously,” she said, “but his relationships with Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad, his family life, his marriages, his draft resistance and his courage and being willing to go to jail for his convictions, and also his battle with Parkinson’s — you know, his later life, his post-boxing life.” That “really hadn’t,” she added, “been explored in as much detail.”The new series traces a path from the young Cassius Clay in Jim Crow-era Louisville to the complicated, at times self-contradictory adult who won the heavyweight title three times and faced down the U.S. government over his refusal to fight in Vietnam. The filmmakers show him as not only a dominant heavyweight during his peak fighting years but also a figure of no small impact on society. Here is “The Greatest” clowning with the Beatles; standing at a podium with Malcolm X; embracing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; calling another Black fighter an “Uncle Tom” for refusing to acknowledge his name change, as a leering Howard Cosell tells the cameras to “keep shooting” the ensuing scuffle; and finally declaring publicly — at risk to his career and endorsements — that he was a Muslim.Ali had relationships with many other prominent 20th century figures, including Malcolm X.ZUMA Press, Inc./Alamy Live NewsAli’s rise to stardom coincided with a period of intense cultural change in the United States, and his connection to the Civil Rights and antiwar movements is critical in distinguishing Ali the man from Ali the boxer, McMahon said — and in recognizing his impact on American audiences.“You can’t understand his refusal to be inducted into the U.S. Army without understanding his faith, without understanding the meaning of Elijah Muhammad in his life,” he said, referring to the mercurial and sometimes caustic leader of the Nation of Islam, with whom Ali had a close relationship. “We hadn’t really seen that explained. There were also perspectives that hadn’t been heard; we thought, ‘Who out there could tell us more about his faith?’”Eig, the biographer, shared a huge trove of contacts with the filmmakers, and they started their initial interviews in 2016, a week after Ali died. Dozens of writers, friends and boxing ambassadors participated: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Larry Holmes, Jesse Jackson, the novelist Walter Mosley, the ESPN writer Howard Bryant, the boxing promoter Don King. Over the next several years, the filmmakers unearthed more than 15,000 photographs and dug up footage that had not been seen publicly. A production company that had shot the “Thrilla in Manila,” Ali’s third and final bout with Joe Frazier, in the Philippines, had folded before the film could be used. Their footage was buried in a Pennsylvania archive.“This woman pulled these boxes out and said, ‘They say “Ali” on them — I don’t know what they are,’” McMahon said. “This is Technicolor, it’s 16-millimeter, shot from the apron [of the ring] — it just pops. And you see the fight in ways that had never been seen before.”Ali’s relationship with Frazier, who as a young fighter had been one of Ali’s fans, is one of the thornier aspects of the documentary. Ali’s treatment of him before their fights was quite cruel, employing some of the language of “racist white people,” as one commentator in the series says, to denigrate Frazier (who never forgave him). It’s part of the complex picture of Ali that the series provides: a people’s champion who could be petty; a devout Muslim who was a serial philanderer; an idealist who made a lot of people angry with his refusal to conform to public expectations.Bryant, the ESPN writer, said he didn’t think “people understand why this story is so heroic and so important and so unique.”“We just seem to think that every person out there, if they protest something, if they say something, if they face some sort of sanction, we put them in the same category as Muhammad Ali or Jackie Robinson,” he continued. “And it’s just such nonsense.”“Name me another athlete where the full weight of the United States government came down on one person. I’m not talking about the N.F.L. saying you can’t play when you’re already a millionaire. Colin Kaepernick obviously sacrificed and lost some things. It’s not the same thing. It’s not even close.”For two of Ali’s daughters, Rasheda Ali (from his second marriage, to Khalilah Ali, born Belinda Boyd) and Hana Ali (from his third, to Veronica Porche), the new documentary is an honest look at the father they knew mainly while he was under the weight of Parkinson’s. The film opens with a shot of him sitting with his oldest child, Maryum, encouraging her to look out the window so he can steal a bite of her food. The footage brought Rasheda to tears.Belinda Boyd became Ali’s second wife and changed her name to Khalilah Ali. Thomas Hoepker/Magnum Photos“I’ve never seen the family footage — and even the photos!” Rasheda said. “I was like, ‘Wow, where did you get that?’”“He was always making jokes and he was fun,” she added. “That’s the Muhammad Ali people don’t really see regularly.”Hana, who said that anyone other than the Burns would have been making “just another documentary about my father,” also noted that the more intimate footage helped fill in some of the nuances about him.“It’s so hard when you live a life like my father’s, where you’re so accessible, and so photographed, and his story’s been told so many times,” Hana said. “Honestly, I’ve seen so many documentaries about our father, and even just watching the beginning of this one, already, it was just different — it felt more personable.”The series comes to a close as Ali has become, as Ken Burns described it, “the most beloved person on the planet.” The footage of his trembling surprise appearance at the 1996 Olympics, in Atlanta, is a crucial piece of Ali’s lasting image and mythology. But as Burns put it, “mythology is a mask.”Bryant, who argued that Ali changed the relationship between athletes and fans, was more direct about the boxer’s evolving public image in those later years.Ali in Manhattan in 1968. Despite his popularity as a boxer, Ali angered many people with his refusal to conform to public expectations.Anthony Camerano/Associated Press“People hated his guts, and white people didn’t love him until he couldn’t talk,” Bryant said. “There were people — Black and white — who still called him Cassius Clay; there were people who still did not want to give him his due. And there were people who still held a lot against him.”“Then he couldn’t talk, and suddenly he belonged to everybody,” he said.Ken Burns suggested that this public redemption was akin to “a funeral where people are talking really nicely about other people.”“And you go, ‘Why can’t we do this in the rest of our lives?’” he said. “The funeral isn’t for the person who’s dead — the funeral is for the people who are left behind, and we’re always modeling the best, most human behavior. And yet, we don’t seem to be able to bring it to our own lives.”He quoted one of the journalists in the documentary, Dave Kindred, who said that in death, Ali “can’t hurt us anymore; he can’t make us mad anymore.”“He could no longer anger us, he could no longer make it difficult for us, to force us back on our own feelings, our own beliefs, our own prejudices, Burns said. Then there’s this room to forgive and perhaps exalt.”“It’s a long process with him,” he added. “And it’s so interesting that a great deal of that positive progress is from defeat.” More

In new musicals about Princess Diana, Cary Grant and Michael Jackson actors get a chance to embody icons while spotlighting their individual talents.Just before the pandemic I ambivalently attended a performance of “Tina: The Tina Turner Musical.” I knew some Tina Turner songs, and I was vaguely aware of her marriage to the abusive Ike Turner. I was only barely acquainted with her global celebrity, and skeptical about the depth a biographical jukebox musical could offer.Though I had qualms about the show — particularly the depictions of violence — I left the theater feeling ebullient. I sneaked out near the end of what turned out to be essentially a postshow concert, but I hung on to the image of Adrienne Warren, as Turner, onstage.What resonated with me was her spectacular star power — what most people would call presence. This is always what draws me in to Broadway productions about iconic figures: how an actor’s impersonation can also be a way to showcase their own star quality.Whether or not the show can live up to the legend, however, is often a different story.With the resurrection of Broadway this fall will come another handful of impersonations to test the hypothesis. Starting Nov. 2, we will see Jeanna de Waal as the Princess of Wales in “Diana,” who, thanks to her style, charisma and, ultimately, tragic death, became a mythic figure.Diana is once again front and center in the cultural conversation, whether in “The Crown”; as a shadow figure in the royal drama between Buckingham Palace and Prince Harry and Meghan Markle; or in the forthcoming biopic “Spencer,” with Kristen Stewart in the title role. (Naomi Watts played the part too, in the 2013 film “Diana.”)Starting Nov. 2, Jeanna de Waal, above with Roe Hartrampf as Prince Charles, will star as the Princess of Wales in “Diana” at the  Longacre Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn the musical’s initial run at La Jolla Playhouse, critics noted how de Waal nailed Diana’s coquettishness, though the character’s ballads (music and lyrics by the Tony Award winners David Bryan and Joe DiPietro) do lean toward an unrestrained earnestness. And despite de Waal’s performance, the show was criticized for zipping so quickly through so many moments of a shortened life that the emotional impact was dulled.Will “Diana” capture the audience’s hearts on Broadway? And what impact will the Netflix recording of the show, which will be available for streaming before the theatrical opening, have on the prospects of the live production? As someone who’s been eating up “The Crown” (especially Emma Corrin’s performance as the princess), I look forward to finding out.Also in November, Lincoln Center Theater’s “Flying Over Sunset” will bring the beloved Hollywood leading man Cary Grant to life in the tap-dancing person of Tony Yazbeck.The musical, with a score by Tom Kitt and Michael Korie, imagines Grant; the playwright and politician Clare Boothe Luce; and the novelist Aldous Huxley sharing an acid trip in 1950s California. (All three were public about experimenting with L.S.D., but their cosmic connection is a product of the writer-director James Lapine’s script.)“He was one of the most famous Hollywood movie stars of all time,” Yazbeck said of Grant in a video preview for the show. “When you get offered this, you have to rise to that level, but also put your own stamp on it.”He seems poised to pull it off, and turning Grant (a child acrobat) into a former tap dancer plays to his strengths. Yazbeck already exudes charm; a well-pressed suit, a classic side sweep and the chance to dance should allow him to do more than imitate the beloved film star.From left, Tony Yazbeck as Cary Grant, Harry Hadden-Paton as Aldous Huxley and Carmen Cusack as Clare Boothe Luce in “Flying Over Sunset.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThen it’s Michael Jackson’s turn.“MJ the Musical,” with direction and choreography by Christopher Wheeldon and a book by Lynn Nottage, begins performances on Dec. 6.Like “Diana” and “Flying Over Sunset,” it was delayed by the pandemic. But this show faced further upheaval when Ephraim Sykes, the Tony-nominated star of “Ain’t Too Proud,” dropped out of the title role.The producers still promise 25 hits from the King of Pop, and you have to expect we’ll see that cherry red “Thriller” jacket and bedazzled glove. But now it’s up to the largely unknown Myles Frost to bring to life that instantly recognizable voice and dance genius.The musical as biography is a challenging form. How do you pair pop hits from an existing catalog to significant events in a life without undercutting the drama or underselling the songs?Michael Jackson’s life, of course, poses its own set of challenges. What will the script make of allegations of abuse on the part of this megastar, which dented his reputation without dulling the affection for his music?And will the qualities that make Myles Frost special be able to shine through when he is playing Michael Jackson? For “MJ” to succeed, the performer’s individual flair shouldn’t be swamped by the icon’s.There is no shortage of screen biopics — two about Aretha Franklin came out this year alone. But they don’t entice me the way the stage equivalents do.Adrienne Warren as Tina Turner in “Tina – The Tina Turner Musical” at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater in 2019.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe stage feels more upfront about its masquerade. No matter how accurately an actor playing Michael Jackson may moonwalk while singing “Billie Jean,” the very immediacy of your interaction with him in, say, a sold-out show on a Saturday night, forces you to sit in the uncanny valley: This isn’t the Michael you know, of course, but the real-time likeness — and unlikeness — both showcase the celebrity and reveal the talents of the performer.What emerges is a hybrid, an approximation of a person that takes into account the public image — the legend and mythos — reflected through the prism of an actor’s experience, understanding and, finally, ability.Here’s another way to think about it: I accompanied a friend to a locksmith kiosk recently where we were informed in advance that the keys being copied wouldn’t look exactly like the originals.When I consider the impersonators coming this fall, I think of her new set of keys — perfectly imperfect clones. Their look is different, their shape is different, but the mechanics still work. It’s all about the job well done. More

The veteran character may have been featured in Coen brothers movies, but for a small western, he’s the one who is working hard to get it seen.VENICE — The first time Tim Blake Nelson went to the Venice Film Festival was three years ago, as one of the featured players in the western anthology “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. As Nelson soon learned, trailing those filmmakers around Venice can open an endless number of doors.“Traveling to a film festival with the Coens is a completely different experience than traveling with any other movie,” said Nelson, whose breakout role came in “O Brother, Where Art Thou,” also directed by the Coen brothers. “It’s like being associated with Picasso or Matisse.”This year, Nelson is at Venice to support “Old Henry,” a western he’s starring in. It’s a much smaller movie than “Buster Scruggs” — Nelson has even described “Old Henry” as a “micro western” — and it comes from Potsy Ponciroli, a young filmmaker who’s still earning his spurs. That means Nelson is shouldering a lot more responsibility than he did during his first trip to the festival.“We’re on a completely different stratum,” Nelson said. “I think this might be one of the lowest-budget movies ever to premiere in Venice! This is a very small movie, and it’s kind of extraordinary that we’re here next to ‘Dune.’”But modesty works in the movie’s favor: “Old Henry” is a solid-as-a-rock western that, as it goes on, gently suggests it’s about more than you’d anticipated. In a rare leading role, Nelson plays Henry, a widowed farmer living on a small patch of land in the Oklahoma territory. It’s 1906, and Henry’s teenage son, Wyatt (Gavin Lewis), is anxious to seek adventure, leave the farm, and wrest himself from the grip of his overprotective father.But adventure finds them instead when Henry and Wyatt happen upon a nearly dead cowboy and his pouch full of cash. When Henry brings both back to his farm, it isn’t long before a sinister gunslinger (Stephen Dorff) comes sniffing around for that bounty. And in the standoff that follows, maybe father and son will come to learn more about each other than either was expecting.“As an actor who’s 57 years old and has been doing this a long time, there’s something incredibly exciting about being associated with a younger filmmaker who’s created something very special,” Nelson said Monday night at da Ivo, a Venice restaurant that had been recommended to him by his “O Brother” co-star George Clooney, who held his bachelor party there.For a supporting player like Nelson, who recently appeared in HBO’s “Watchmen,” leading roles like the one in “Old Henry” are few and far between. Still, Nelson is humble about the promotion. If anything, it just means he’s taking on more responsibility to get the film seen.“It’s tricky because when you’re a character actor who’s been in a lot of movies, people tend to inflate your value,” said Nelson. “They think, ‘Oh, if he’s in my movie, then I can get financing or critical attention.’ They’re actually wrong, because there are a lot of character actors out there. I always say that I’m not some sort of magic bullet.”And though the films at Venice are dominated by stars like Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya and Penélope Cruz, who can earn headlines simply for what they wear on the red carpet, Nelson harbors no such illusions.“I’m wearing an outfit picked out by my wife,” Nelson told me, tugging at the lapel of his black jacket. “Because I forgot to pack two blazers, we actually bought this jacket today, two blocks away from here.”So, yes, Tim Blake Nelson is headlining a movie at one of the most glamorous film festivals on earth, but no, he does not return to his room at the Hotel Excelsior to find a free Tom Ford tuxedo sent over by a stylist.“I wish!” he said, laughing. “That’d be great. But you know, I don’t say this disingenuously: Nobody’s ever sent me any suits. And there were no offers for this. None.”Nelson grinned. “I’m not complaining,” he said. “It’s just, we’re a bit of a minnow.” More

Whether he was doing his own stunts in action films or being nonchalant in literary adaptations, the actor was magnetic.One word often comes up when reading about Jean-Paul Belmondo: cool. The French actor, who died on Monday at 88, never appeared to try hard, bringing a nonchalant effortlessness to all his roles. Belmondo did not look like a typical leading man — The New York Times described him as “hypnotically ugly” in 1961 — but he had charm and the unbothered casualness that the French call “désinvolture.”This son of artists had a taste for boxing, and swiftly eschewed being pigeonholed — he appeared in a high-minded literary adaptation one minute, performed his own stunts in a feisty caper the next. Through the 1960s and early ’70s, he alternated between art-house fare and quality commercial productions, then focused squarely on the latter, which might explain his often adversarial relationship with the French cinema establishment. When his performance in Claude Lelouch’s “Itinerary of a Spoiled Child” earned him a nomination for best actor at the 1989 César Awards, for example, he encouraged voters not to pick him; he won anyway and did not attend the ceremony.Luckily, a representative sample of Belmondo’s films is available for streaming. Here are 10 of them, in chronological order.‘Breathless’Stream it on the Criterion Channel and HBO Max.This film, released in the United States in 1961, launched the careers of Belmondo and the director Jean-Luc Godard, and remains a formally thrilling pop-noir touchstone of the French new wave. Belmondo had a lower profile than his co-star, Jean Seberg, but his punk charisma burns the screen. A cigarette permanently dangling from his lips, he ambles along with the insolence of youth, his insouciant yet focused energy matching the jazzy, finger-snapping soundtrack. Many actors would have faded next to the vibrant modernity of Godard’s filmmaking; Belmondo fed on it.‘Le Doulos’Stream it on Plex TV; rent or buy it on iTunes.For many years, Belmondo’s rival as France’s sexy male lead was Alain Delon, whose tightly wound composure was a perfect fit for the director Jean-Pierre Melville’s cerebral, stylish movies. Yet Belmondo’s collaboration with the master filmmaker was just as fruitful. “Le Doulos,” from 1962, is Melville’s first great noir, and Belmondo is all contained brutality in it. A slightly raised eyebrow, the quirk of a mouth almost make you want to sympathize with his Silien, but menace is always there, the sense that this guy could shoot you at any time.‘That Man From Rio’Rent or buy on most major platforms.One of Belmondo’s frequent collaborators was Philippe de Broca, the director of fleet-footed, witty films. In this 1964 hit, his character travels all the way to Brazil to save his abducted girlfriend. The combination of comedy, adventure and romance is a perfect fit for Belmondo, and the wonderfully piquant Françoise Dorléac was among his best screen partners — their spiky screen chemistry is wonderful to behold.You can make it a double bill with de Broca’s zany Hong Kong-set “Up to His Ears,” from 1965, in which the actor plays a suicidal millionaire who decides life is worth living when mysterious henchmen try to kill him. Ursula Andress, with whom Belmondo then began a relationship, plays a fetching ethnologist earning spare change as an exotic dancer. Ah, the 1960s. …‘Pierrot le Fou’Rent or buy on most major platforms.In 1965, Godard gave Belmondo another superb role as an out-of-sorts man who escapes from his hohum life with Anna Karina (who wouldn’t?). This is one of Belmondo’s finest performances because he allows a poignant vulnerability to show, instead of hiding it behind a cocksure confidence. In a lovely scene, he and Karina speak-sing while dance-walking, and the craggy-faced young man with the squashed nose is pure poetry.‘Mississippi Mermaid’Stream it on Amazon.As the trailer to this 1969 film put it, “suddenly you realize two things: You’re in love, and you’re in danger.” Belmondo was cast against type as a man obsessed with — and manipulated by — a scheming Catherine Deneuve in François Truffaut’s adaptation of a William Irish novel. Alas the movie tanked, maybe because audiences were not ready to see Belmondo so blinded by passion that he came across as passive. “Mississippi Mermaid” was more subtle than that, though, and is worth rediscovering.‘Borsalino’Rent or buy it on Amazon and iTunes.Belmondo and Delon: the yin and yang of French cinema, muscular warmth versus icy distance. The pair had already appeared in “Is Paris Burning?” in 1966, but they were just two in a whole bunch of international marquee names. Four years later, they headlined a 1930s-set story as two Marseille gangsters who forge an alliance till death do them part. (Real life was more complicated, as Belmondo took Delon to court over who would be listed first in the credits.) Helmed by the genre craftsman Jacques Deray (“La Piscine”), “Borsalino” endures thanks to its ridiculously charismatic leads, with Belmondo as the very definition of raffish.‘The Scoundrel’Rent or buy it on Amazon and YouTube.Confusingly, this 1971 de Broca movie has different English titles, including the clunky literal translation “The Married Couple of the Year Two” and the fairly descriptive “The Scoundrel” and “Swashbuckler” — guess who that describes? No matter: This is a sterling example of a certain kind of period, well-made entertainment that has long been popular in France. The film is a high-spirited screwball comedy of marriage set during the French Revolution, in which Belmondo and Marlène Jobert (Eva Green’s mother) prove their love by constantly bickering. Both are marvelously at ease in that register, and Belmondo gets to indulge in stunt work, too.‘Stavisky …’Stream it on Kanopy.On the surface, Belmondo plays to type — albeit a rich criminal rather than a lowlife — in this 1974 film based on the true story of Alexandre Stavisky, a shady financier and swindler who became the linchpin of a huge scandal that rocked France in 1934. But the role and the performance are not cookie-cutter period biopic, because this is from the cerebral director Alain Resnais. “Stavisky …” emphasized mood over action (a fantastic score by Stephen Sondheim helped) and toyed with chronology, but its idiosyncratic approach to genre did not sell. Belmondo proceeded to turn his back on artier fare and unabashedly dedicated himself to selling the most tickets possible.‘The Professional’Rent or buy on most major platforms.In the late 1970s and the mid ’80s, Belmondo ruled the French box office with a string of action movies. Some of them had a comic bent, others were tough-guy noirs. This Georges Lautner smash from 1981 squarely belongs to the second type, with our star playing a leather-jacketed secret agent embroiled in a plot involving French interests in Africa. The best part of the movie is the face-off between Belmondo and his foil, terrifically portrayed by Robert Hossein (the two often worked together at the theater, with Hossein directing). Bonus: One of Ennio Morricone’s best scores of the 1980s.‘Half a Chance’Rent or buy on most major platforms.Belmondo and Delon joined forces again for this 1998 comic thriller in which Vanessa Paradis tries to find out which of them is her father. (Sound familiar?) The director Patrice Leconte (“Monsieur Hire”) enjoys playing with his aging male stars’ images: Belmondo gets to climb from a moving convertible to a helicopter, for example. His face an epic landscape of creases and furrows, he is simply irresistible as an extroverted, rambunctious fast-talker, and makes a meal out of the most innocuous scraps of dialogue. More

In Pablo Larraín’s unsettling film, Mariana Di Girolamo stars as a dancer who finds freedom through reggaeton dance.Ema is the oddest of things: a dancer with a passion for setting things on fire. In “Ema,” Pablo Larraín’s film, the title character has a particular look, too: bleached hair slicked back so severely that it appears to be shellacked to her head. That hairstyle, hard and impenetrable, is like a coat of armor, which makes sense. Ema is made of ice. Until she dances.Set in the coastal city of Valparaíso in Chile, “Ema,” now in theaters and on Amazon and other digital platforms starting Sept. 14, tells the story of a couple, an older choreographer and a younger dancer — Gastón (Gael García Bernal) and Ema (Mariana Di Girolamo) — who adopted but then abandoned a Colombian boy named Polo. The reason they give up the boy turns out to have something to do with fire; he’s fond of it. It’s not hard to draw conclusions about who might have encouraged him.Ema is a member of her husband’s experimental dance company, and it’s no secret that she has lost interest in it — and in him. Her obsession is reggaeton and its dance, which she relishes for its aggressive sensuality; outside of the dance studio with her friends, her body is electric as she lets her limbs fly and her hips shake. Gastón is not impressed. To him, reggaeton is music to listen to in prison, “to forget about the bars you have in front of you.”Their generation gap is apparent as Gastón continues: “It’s a hypnotic rhythm that turns you into a fool. It’s an illusion of freedom.”Moving like a unit: A scene from “Ema,” with choreography by José Vidal.Music Box FilmsIs it? Who is Ema? She gave up her son, but seems to want him back. She’s a seductress who carries — and uses — her body with steely, precise intention. While her inner world is a mystery, it’s clear what reggaeton allows her to feel: free.Dance is the key. But unlike so many films and television series of late, it isn’t a superficial layer tacked onto the story. In “Ema,” Larraín, the director of “Jackie” and the coming “Spencer,” has given dance, or movement, a leading role. It’s also a means to an end that extends beyond conventional choreography: How can dance bring Ema closer to freedom? Whether she is alone or with her friends — a collective body moving as one — her physicality spreads across every scene. And she doesn’t even have to be moving: Her inner vibrations are just as lucid in stillness.Because of that, the film, with its dreamlike score, is something of a dance, too — floating, gliding and then, all of a sudden, turning on a dime. “Ema” is an action film, but not in the conventional sense: The body is the action. And while there is dialogue, words add up to less than the deliberate pacing of each scene and the poetic power of Di Girolamo’s frame.In a magnetic solo at the port, dusky light envelops Di Girolamo’s silhouette as she stands with her back to us and her legs wide apart. Her right arm, bent at the elbow, is raised, her hand in a fist. Rocking her hips, she swings from side to side as her arms open and close. It is hypnotic, but she’s no fool. She’s strong and tenacious; you sense the tension leaving her body through her dance.Di Girolamo in a dance scene at the port in “Ema.”Music Box FilmsAs she picks up the pace, walking with purpose and changing direction, her back undulates and her angled arms carve through the air to an imaginary beat. Moments later, she’s on a carousel ride, but there are echoes of her dance: As she grips her horse’s pole, she sways, dipping from side to side; she’s almost relaxed.Once she stops moving, her expression changes: Her thick brows frame a stony face. She is catlike with the kind of stare that makes you feel invisible; at the same time, she dances as if you were invisible. She’s beyond needing an audience.Di Girolamo is not a trained dancer, though she studied flamenco for a few months as a teenager. Her mother decided she would be better off doing that than being in therapy. “It was literally a therapy for me,” Di Girolamo said in a recent Zoom interview. “It gave me the necessary tools to be empowered and to continue ahead.”But she does love to dance. (Her husband is a D.J.) In “Ema,” she had tools to help her body acclimate to her character: One was the hair, which helped her to see Ema as an energy — like the sun, like fire. “She’s very hypnotic, and in some ways she’s very dangerous or destructive,” Di Girolamo said, “but you also want to be close to her.”“She’s very hypnotic, and in some ways she’s very dangerous or destructive,” Di Girolamo said of Ema, “but you also want to be close to her.”Music Box FilmsThe other was her training. Di Girolamo worked closely with the Chilean choreographer José Vidal, whose company appears in the film. Mónica Valenzuela was also part of the choreographic team, and her focus had more to do with the reggaeton moments. “I think Pablo wanted more of a nasty movement that I wasn’t apparently quite able to find,” Vidal said with a laugh, in an interview. “So she came to add some spice. It’s not like there is phrase one, phrase two — it is a mix of all of the materials.”Vidal’s choreographic approach involved studying Di Girolamo’s mobility: the flexibility of her spine, the range of her arms. He then turned that into a language. “More of a street dance, reggaeton sort of thing,” he said. “But it never came directly from that. My intention was, OK, we’re going arrive there. But we’re going to arrive there coming from an inside place.”The process began with immersive work that helped Di Girolamo to “connect into herself, into her emotions, into her structure,” Vidal said. “How does it feel to move here” — he patted his chest and swayed his shoulders — “and what connects you with each emotion? It was never about making her imitate or repeat something directly.”Vidal on the set. To choreograph for Di Girolamo, he studied her mobility and turned it into a language.via FabulaDi Girolamo also had to blend in with the professional dancers in Vidal’s company. The opening scene features an excerpt from his “Rito de Primavera,” inspired by “The Rite of Spring.” To dance in it, Di Girolamo studied ballet and Pilates. “I don’t have very good posture, so we worked on it,” she said. “I had to understand the limits and the possibilities of my body.”That led her to find Ema’s physicality — her rhythmic, weighted walk and the way she invades space both to intimidate and to get what she wants. “Dance was very important for me to understand how she seduces the other characters,” Di Girolamo said. “It’s the tool she has, and she’s conscious about that tool.”She spent a lot of time on the floor breathing. Vidal called it an initiation into the body, into the movement. In addressing her posture, Vidal focused on opening her chest, which in turn paved the way to showing her tasting freedom, even being vulnerable. There’s a reason the scene at the port feels so fresh and spontaneous.“I remember it was very cold, and Pablo said, ‘Mariana, now you have to improvise a dance scene,’” Di Girolama said. “I was like, what? But I started dancing. I used the same steps of the choreography, but I deconstructed them. I’m not very good at improvisation, but if I have some tools, some things that I know, I can do something with it. I kind of deconstructed the choreography to make a new one.”It wasn’t easy. “I was very nervous,” she said. “It’s like singing. It’s a very personal thing. It’s like a window of our souls.” More

A movie about a female senator navigating a sex scandal felt revolutionary when a writer saw it in 2000. But its stab at feminism feels clumsy now.Why I revisited “The Contender” this summer is neither here nor there because it could have happened at any time, such is the real estate that movie takes up in my brain — meaning I was always revisiting it somewhere in my mind, though it had been more than 20 years since I’d seen it. But this movie has been informing me, vexing me and haunting me since. Beware the movies you watch as you crest the peak of your coming-of-age, at the exact moment when you’re sure you know everything.A reminder, or an introduction: “The Contender,” from 2000, is the story of Senator Laine Hanson, played by Joan Allen, who is up for confirmation as vice president when the playful but supersmart lame duck president (Jeff Bridges) loses the prior V.P. to death and needs to replace him in the final months of his term. The president is determined to put a woman in office, not just because she’s a woman — though, that — but because he does not like the Republicans bullying him into nominating the more centrist Governor Hathaway from Virginia, who recently dived into the Potomac to unsuccessfully save a woman who had careened off a bridge.We meet Senator Hanson when the president calls her on the phone to come in. She is, at that particular moment, on her back on her desk, having sex with her husband, who works for her. They’re both still wearing their suits; it’s the middle of a workday, after all.As the confirmation hearings proceed, led by a Republican prude, Senator Shelly Runyon (Gary Oldman), the committee digs up something treacherous from Hanson’s past: She, the daughter of a governor, allegedly had group sex as part of her sorority hazing in college. This supposedly took place in front of people, at a party, though photographs show just a body, not a face. Runyon and his committee receive this news with glee, leaking it to a tabloid and bringing up this scandal at every opportunity. The committee will not, Runyon insists, confirm her just because she’s a woman, and he will specifically not confirm her because of the alleged group sex. The viewer is treated to phrases like “sexual McCarthyism” and “ideological rape of all women” and “cancer of affirmative action.”Now, Hanson will neither confirm nor deny the incident. Instead, she insists it’s beneath her dignity to answer questions about her sex life. Not even when she’s asked by the committee, not even when she’s asked by the president’s aides, not even when she is ambushed on cable news. Instead, the movie asks us to consider if a man would ever be asked these questions.Well, I left the theater on fire. It was two years since I had bought the newspaper with the complete Starr Report in it and Could. Not. Believe. How. Dirty. The. New York. Times. Could. Be. I had my first job, an internship at a film company where I was asked by a guy in finance if I was a “full-service intern.” I had watched the President Clinton sex scandal unfold, and I already had the lived experience to wonder what would become of the woman at its center and why people with the greatest amount of power can be rooted for as they decimate the people with the least.All this to say that I remembered this movie as being one of the good guys. I remembered it as educational, as progress — no, I remembered it as a revolution. So imagine how shocking it was to watch it again for the first time in two decades and realize what it actually was.The movie is laced with interactions between men and Hanson that seem either innocuous (“You look beautiful,” the male White House chief of staff tells her before a news conference) or microaggressive (“Is that what you’re going to wear?” the male press secretary asks her before the same event). Larry King expresses surprise when the senator chooses Thomas Jefferson as the historical leader she most admires. “A man?” he asks. Someone says to the president about her, “I’m just watching out for your girl.” In her hearing, Hanson is asked if she would have more children, and if she could still have children, and what should the American people think of a vice president who might go on maternity leave? She answers those questions; she tells them she practices birth control. Those questions are the public’s business, apparently.Are you confused? So was I. Those interactions seem totally, rightfully planted as setups in a movie about the sexist way we talk to women, right? Well, I don’t know! That same movie shows Hanson angrily warning Runyon in a private conversation that “if there’s one thing you don’t want, it’s a woman with her finger on the button who isn’t getting laid.”And, well, what about the fact that just about every woman in this movie is terrible? Governor Hathaway’s wife, upon hearing that he’s been passed over, berates him in a way that makes Lady Macbeth look like Tami Taylor. Even our sainted Senator Hanson, we learn, is married to her best friend’s ex-husband, and there was some overlap — the would-be V.P. is a homewrecker! The men in the movie are far less tinged with complication — Runyon just wants the country to be a Puritan state because he loves righteousness. The president just wants to move the country forward because he loves progress. My question upon rewatching the movie is not only: How did I miss all this? But: How were the good parts of the movie ever enough for me?Those male characters are more fully drawn than Hanson herself — a character whose heroism lies in the fact that she never actually says much. The best way for a woman to proceed, if she wants dignity and success, according to this movie, is to do it quietly.As I waded through the microaggressions and slights without ever understanding for sure if they were intentional — it’s unclear if the movie supposes that it’s wrong to tell women that they look beautiful at work — I remembered that somehow this story was put into a man’s hands (it was written and directed by Rod Lurie) and lauded as a corrective to the Clinton scandal, meaning that it seemed to bolster the idea that a person’s private life is his or her private life.Senator Laine Hanson (Joan Allen, center), flanked by her counsel (Mike Binder, left) and the White House chief of staff, played by Sam Elliott. Gino Mifsud/DreamWorks PicturesI’ve been working in journalism since I left college. I know that work doesn’t age well — that there is a direct one-to-one exchange on how relevant an article is when it’s published to how much you’re not going to brag that you wrote it years later — with lines you wrote just for humor’s sake and questions about a person’s past, body or addictions that you hadn’t had the sense to realize were out of bounds. Or even if they technically weren’t, that you should have avoided them entirely nonetheless out of decency. I wrote articles where I believed I was on the right side of history and it often took seeing them in print, or revisiting them years to later, to realize how horrific my points of view were.But that’s not my main point here; my main point is that I sat watching “The Contender” in 2000, at the age of 24, thinking that if a direct response to the sexism of the moment could land in theaters, that we had reached peak progress as far as feminism was concerned.But what was I cheering? What was that movie really about? Was it about how women are received in the world? Or was it about not being allowed to ask Bill Clinton about his sex life? Wait, was this a pro-Clinton movie in the end?And yet, it was progress — at the time, at least. To hear Hanson say that there were questions you couldn’t ask her, that her life was personal to her, that the world didn’t have the right to judge her for it, that was something I’d never seen before. It left me reeling with possibility. But I didn’t know that one day, I would not be able to discern if its microaggressions were intentional. I didn’t know that one day I would read my own work and realize that stories I had set forth as examples of the way the world moves forward would be offensive in their own right. The point is that if you live long enough, even the most progressive idea will be anachronistic, and you’ll be the jerk who once put it out there. We call that all kinds of bad things today, but, in fact, that’s actually what’s called progress.Back then, I didn’t imagine there was any more progress to be had. I arrived here, in 2021, now finding “The Contender” adorably, offensively retro and wondering if what I think of as subversively progressive now will seem old-fashioned in 20 years. I wondered what I would think of this movie if I were younger and forced to watch it. I’d see how there were no nonwhite characters or sense of intersectionality; I’d watch the central character — the one on the movie poster — do nothing and say almost as much for an hour-and-a-half and I’d turn it off.Progress, it turns out, is not something to arrive at; its most robust presentation is the understanding that you’ll never reach it. No, it’s the understanding that you’ll never reach it and that you cannot predict why from the moment you’re standing in. In that way, “The Contender” is the essence of progress. So are my dumb old magazine profiles; so is this essay, probably. That’s what progress is. It’s the ability to look at what you loved 20 years ago and regard it with disgust.Some good news is that, in a small pocket of the world that a movie like “The Contender” represents, things are getting better. That you shouldn’t ask a woman about her sex life when she’s up for a job is now something you can greet, with certainty, as an old idea; a woman could be given thousands of words worth of space in a newspaper these days, and she’ll still file with more words than assigned (this is a public apology to my editor).What good news it is to find “The Contender” to be old-fashioned and quaint. In the movie much of the terrible work done both to undermine Hanson and to confirm her because she’s a woman is done in the name of “our daughters.” It turns out that you have to have so many men embracing progress in the name of their daughters (which is good) before they’re berated into pushing for progress because it’s just what you do (which is better).In the end, the movie doesn’t have the courage of its convictions. It allows Hanson to sit with the president on the back lawn of the White House, smoking a cigar the president hands her, as she finally reveals to him what the movie has seemingly promised it wouldn’t resolve: That the story wasn’t true. That she didn’t have sex with those boys; that it was just urban legend. A movie where she doesn’t have to ever answer the question was an idea whose time had not yet come.Here is how “The Contender” finishes: With a rousing speech by the president to Congress — a Congress that loves him so much that each side cheers for almost every word. The president announces that Senator Hanson has withdrawn her name in the interest of making the transition peaceful, but he will not accept the withdrawal. No, the president moves for immediate confirmation, which it’s clear he’s going to get, if everyone could stop cheering for him for a minute. I remembered it as a moving scene. Now, all I could think was that she had withdrawn her name for a reason. This wasn’t what she had wanted at all, but no one asked her because no one really cared. More

The filmmaker and star of “Language Lessons” discusses his teenage education in indie cinema and the screenwriting lessons in “Waiting For Godot.”It was May 2020, two months into lockdown, and Mark Duplass, an avowed workaholic, was getting itchy. So he took up some hobbies, one of which was conversational Spanish lessons with an online institute in Guatemala.Then a good friend, the filmmaker Lynn Shelton, died and Duplass wasn’t in the mood for small talk. Neither, it seemed, was his instructor, and their dialogues began to go deep.“I found it very interesting that this 2D-video chat thing that everyone was starting to complain about and fear was going to be the death of our personal connections was actually bringing us closer,” he said. “I was looking for that feeling of warmth and connection as we were losing it.”Sensing the kernel of a movie in those interactions, he called Natalie Morales, whom he’d known socially and had hired to direct a couple of episodes of his HBO show “Room 104,” and asked if she wanted to collaborate.The result was “Language Lessons,” in which Duplass plays Adam, whose husband surprises him with weekly online Spanish classes. Morales, in her feature directorial debut, is Cariño, his teacher, who becomes a confidant when he throws himself at her like a love bomb. The two built their characters independently and then let them “organically collide,” Duplass said, as each one’s drama played out on the other’s screen.“One of my ways to experience a sense — as someone who is and has been married for 20 years — of falling in love with a new person in your life is to do it through the making of art together,” he said. “I thought this would be such a great way to do this with Natalie, to tell this platonic love story of the two of us.”Duplass’s other onscreen relationship, on “The Morning Show” — as Chip Black, the TV producer to Alex Levy, Jennifer Aniston’s anchor — imploded last season, demoting him to local news as Season 2 begins. “They give me so much creative freedom and respect on that set,” he said. “Working with Jen Aniston has been one of the dreams of my life.”In a video call from his home in Los Angeles, which served as the setting for “Language Lessons,” Duplass discussed cultural touchstones like the New Orleans movie house where he absorbed indie cinema, the Austin music club that taught him about success and the insight he gleaned from reading “Infinite Jest.”These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. The Black Cat Lounge in Austin In 1991, my brother [Jay] went to college at the University of Texas, leaving me home alone without my soul mate and highly depressed. Then I went to visit him in Austin. He took me to the Black Cat Lounge, where there were dollar hot dogs and dollar PBR and these Texas funk-soul bands, and people were dancing and sweating. And I was like, what is happening here in this place? I had my mind absolutely blown.It was when it started to dawn on me that an artist can have a life that is not you’re either the Top 10 on the Billboard Charts or the Top 10 in the box office — or you’re not doing it. These bands were raking in a couple of hundred bucks a night. They were local-ish celebrities. They also had day jobs. And they were successful artists in that way.2. David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” I had made “Cyrus” and “Jeff, Who Lives at Home,” my two studio movies, and they had not lit the world on fire. So I had convinced myself that if you’re going to tell these oddball characters and this level of specificity, it’s never going to be successful. Then I read “Infinite Jest” and was like, “Oh no, you just didn’t do it well enough.” And it gave me comfort. I realized I’m not going to be an auteur like David Foster Wallace. I don’t have that in me. What I do have in me is I’m an incredible collaborator. I’m a great first leg on a relay team.3. Tracy Chapman I was 12 and I was a skater punk with my snarky skater punk friends. We were watching “Saturday Night Live,” enjoying all the chopping broccoli jokes, and Tracy Chapman was the musical guest. She walked on and she played “Fast Car.” All my friends were like, “This sucks,” because we were Metallica fans. I was like, “Yeah, this sucks.” And I went into the bathroom and I sobbed my eyes out. I was like: “Well, I’m different than my friends. This is something else for me.” And that kicked me off into a singer-songwriter journey.4. Neutral Ground Coffee House in New Orleans I was obsessed with the Indigo Girls, obsessed with Shawn Colvin. So from when I was 14 or 15 years old on, I would go to the Neutral Ground Coffee House every Sunday and see their open mic nights. Eventually I worked up my courage to play my original three songs, which — no false modesty — they were terrible. The guy who ran the place, Les Jampole was his name, looked me in the eye afterward and was like, “Hey, Mark, I dig your stuff, man.” And it was everything to me to have someone validate me from the outside. So I kept writing songs, and by the time I was 17, they offered me my own gigs. It was this tiny enclave of confidence-building for me.5. Gus Van Sant’s “My Own Private Idaho” It was how I discovered independent film. I was 14 and I was a big fan of “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.” A big fan of “Stand by Me.” And I’m like: “Keanu Reeves, River Phoenix. Great. This’ll be a funny movie.” I went to go see it without reading anything, and that’s how I ended up at a Gus Van Sant art film.6. Movie Pitchers in New OrleansMovie’s was a second-run art house cinema, and they didn’t card very hard, God bless them. From ’92 to about ’95, when I graduated high school, that’s where I got my independent cinema education. And I could convince some of my friends to come with me because they would serve us pitchers of beer and we’d watch movies in recliners.7. Chris Smith’s “American Movie” I saw this in 1996 in Austin, and it changed my entire approach to filmmaking. I fell in love with [the filmmaker] Mark Borchardt. I couldn’t believe I loved him despite all his flaws. Also, I was struck in this screening that maybe my narrative films could look and feel like docs so they’d give the impression of feeling more natural and real. Odd zooms, out-of-focus moments left in the edit, important moments happening in poorly lit, canted frames. The offhandedness of it all inspired me to bring it to our narrative work in the years to come.8. Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” I saw a production in college that wasn’t very good. But it gave me the courage to focus on a two-hander and know that that could be entertaining, despite what my playwriting and screenwriting teachers were telling me. And you can draw a straight line from that to “Language Lessons.”9. John Irving’s “A Prayer for Owen Meany” I don’t know if it holds up. I think it might be a little corny and a little schmaltzy, but the way it hit me when I was 17 was great because it was the first book where I saw the machinations of a detailed plot working. And I saw it coming before it came. It didn’t ruin it for me, but it made me realize the power of writing and how much I identified as a writer. Multiple plot lines, all converging for a satisfying ending.10. “Rocky II” I used to watch “Rocky II” as a kid because it had two fights in it. They showed you the end of “Rocky” at the beginning of “Rocky II.” I was a little bro who wanted to see as much fighting as possible. But what you forget is that, in between, “Rocky II” is a slow, depressing, late-’70s, Bob Rafelson-style drama about this guy realizing the death of his dream and coming to terms with himself being not what he thought he would be. So that was inadvertently soaking into me the whole time. I look back and I think that was maybe one of the most formative movies for me. As a 6-year-old, I was taking in all of this male ennui, slow withering drama, and I think it had a deep effect on who I am as a creator. More

“The Lost Daughter,” like “The White Lotus” and “Nine Perfect Strangers,” takes its characters on vacation but they’re hardly getting away.VENICE — Are we our best or worst selves when we go on vacation? Sure, these trips are taken with good intentions, but when you’re determined to relax, that determination can look an awful lot like work. Throw in bad weather, a crying child or downed hotel Wi-Fi, and sometimes you arrive back home in a more bedraggled state than when you left.When it comes to chronicling just how easily a vacation can push people to the edge, Hollywood has been racking up a lot of frequent-flier miles lately. The recent spate of film and TV projects about good trips gone bad even led the Vulture film critic Alison Willmore to coin the phrase “resort horror,” a term that could apply not just to M. Night Shyamalan’s “Old,” an actual horror film about rapidly aging beachgoers, but also to HBO’s “The White Lotus” and Hulu’s “Nine Perfect Strangers,” two limited series about punctured privilege in some of the most beautiful getaways on earth.Isn’t that just the way: We’ve been so anxious to leave our homes over the last year and a half, and now Hollywood is telling us that escapism isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.This has all been on my mind after spending the last several days at the Venice Film Festival, a place so gorgeous and glamorous that to lodge even a single complaint (about the festival’s obtuse ticketing system, perhaps) makes you feel something like the whining, entitled bro played by Jake Lacy in “The White Lotus.” But many of the high-profile films here have been dabbling in resort horror, too, like “Sundown,” with Tim Roth vacationing in Acapulco — a colleague dubbed it “The Even-Whiter Lotus” — and especially “The Lost Daughter,” Maggie Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut and the beneficiary of plenty of Oscar chatter.Olivia Colman, left, and Maggie Gyllenhaal in Venice for “The Lost Daughter.”Yara Nardi/ReutersAdapted from the novel by Elena Ferrante, “The Lost Daughter” casts Olivia Colman as Leda, a British professor who’s decided to take a solo trip to Greece. Upon her arrival, Leda is presented with two potential love interests: Ed Harris, the wiry caretaker for her Airbnb, and “Normal People” breakout Paul Mescal as a flirty cabana boy in short shorts. All that, and she’s staying right by a nice, quiet beach. Sounds ideal!And it is, as the setup for resort horror. Fairly soon, things both big and small start to go wrong: The fruit bowl in Leda’s apartment spoils dramatically, a huge, screeching bug appears on the pillow next to her, and a pine cone is hurled at Leda from the heavens as though the Greek gods had finally found a worthy target for their abuse. Even worse, her quiet beach is invaded by a sprawling, squawking family from Queens that will not leave Leda alone.That brood includes young mother Nina (Dakota Johnson, by now a resort-horror veteran thanks to “A Bigger Splash”) and nosy Callie (Dagmara Dominczyk), who can’t understand why Leda, a mother in her 40s, would want to vacation alone. “Children are a crushing responsibility,” replies Leda, and you can tell she wants to say something even worse. By the time she flees the beach with a doll impulsively stolen from Nina’s daughter, it’s clear that Leda has some issues about motherhood that even a solo trip can’t help but trigger.This, too, has been a recurring theme at Venice: In “Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon,” starring Kate Hudson as a stripper mom, and Pedro Almodóvar’s switched-at-birth drama “Parallel Mothers,” female characters get honest about their lack of maternal instincts in a way that still feels all too rare in Hollywood. But none of those films burrow into it quite like “The Lost Daughter,” where we get flashbacks to a young Leda (played by Jessie Buckley) at wits’ end with her two shrieking daughters. Can the film earn a best-sound Oscar nomination simply for making children’s screams sound so torturous?As I watched Colman come undone on the beach, I wondered what’s behind the recent surge in these bad-trip projects, since they don’t seem to be going away anytime soon. (This Ferrante adaptation even arrives not long after we saw a “White Lotus” character reading her books.) Willmore posited that resort horror, with its wide open beaches and exclusive clientele, is easier to shoot in the Covid era; I also just think that rich people in Hollywood go on lots of vacations. They write what they know!And maybe vacation just presents an irresistible collision of expectations vs. reality, or a crucible where days of self-reflection can take a haunting turn. You know that Leda won’t get out of Greece before she confronts her buried back story, and perhaps that’s the true moral of all these resort-horror entries: It’s natural to want to get away from it all, but don’t forget that a vacation requires you to bring your own baggage. More