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    ‘Holy Beasts’ Review: Cinematic Dreams Within Dreams

    Geraldine Chaplin offers a commanding performance in this sleek tropical thriller.The meta thriller “Holy Beasts” follows a group of artists who gather in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, to complete the unfinished project of their friend, the filmmaker Jean-Louis Jorge, who was murdered in 2000. This is a sleek, intellectual homage within a homage, a fictional consideration of what it means to continue the legacy of a real artist who has been lost.The story follows Vera (Geraldine Chaplin), a former star who has taken on the role of director. She is flanked by Victor (Jaime Pina), her potentially shady producer, and Henry (Udo Kier), her mysterious choreographer. On her set, Vera acts as the guardian of Jorge’s memory, the interlocutor for his ghostly presence. But Vera’s task becomes complicated as members of her cast turn up dead, and her tropical setting pushes the production toward catastrophe.For inspiration, the characters watch clips of Jorge’s films. Through those excerpts, the directors, Israel Cárdenas and Laura Amelia Guzmán, show how Jorge mixed kitsch and melodrama to create a vibrant cinematic style. Elements of Jorge’s methods are visible here — the natural setting, the gaudy costumes, the beauty of young dancers — but the lens holds a different perspective. Here, the camera holds back, observing the drama in long, static takes filmed from a distance.It is a credit to both the intelligence of the filmmakers and to Chaplin’s commanding performance that the movie effectively encourages its audience to consider the same questions that haunt Vera: Does this image capture the spirit that animated Jorge’s work? A theremin score weaves its way through the soundtrack, a spectral reminder that what sounds like a human voice might only be an electric facsimile.Holy BeastsNot rated. In Spanish and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Watch on Film Movement Plus. More

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    ‘Night of the Kings,’ ‘Lucky’ and More Streaming Gems

    Find something off the beaten path to fill those summer nights at home.It’s not just summer blockbuster season at the reopened multiplexes; the streamers are going big as well, with mega-productions like “The Tomorrow War” and “Fear Street” dominating ad space and home pages. But if those aren’t your cup of tea, no worries — we’ve got a handful of American indies, foreign flicks and thoughtful documentaries to fill your summer nights.‘Big Bad Wolves’ (2014)Stream it on Amazon.The Netflix movie “Gunpowder Milkshake” isn’t solely of interest because of its all-star cast; it’s also the first feature film in seven years from the director Navot Papushado, whose previous picture was this gruesomely effective thriller, co-written and co-directed with Aharon Keshales. When a child is kidnapped and murdered in horrifying fashion, the victim’s father and a renegade cop separately conspire to kidnap the lead suspect and torture him for information; all three men end up in an isolated cabin, where Papushado and Keshales ingeniously use, and twist, our preconceived notions of good, bad and evil. Wildly unpredictable and darkly funny, though not for the weak of stomach.‘Life of Crime’ (2014)Stream it on Netflix.With every passing year, it seems more certain that “Jackie Brown” is the finest film of Quentin Tarantino’s career — yet with all of that residual and mounting good will, audiences still haven’t discovered this breezy crime comedy, which amounts to a “Jackie” prequel. Adapted from Elmore Leonard’s 1978 novel “The Switch,” “Life of Crime” introduces the characters of Ordell Robbie, Louis Gara and Melanie Ralston (here played by Yasiin Bey, John Hawkes and Isla Fisher) as they get themselves mixed up in a plot to kidnap a rich socialite (Jennifer Aniston). Daniel Schechter directs with a deft, light touch, and his screenplay nicely captures the offhand humor and sprung storytelling rhythms of Leonard’s novels.‘Night of the Kings’ (2020)Stream it on Hulu.“This is your first time here?” Blackbeard asks the new inmate Roman, who nods; “here” is the notorious La Maca prison of the Ivory Coast, and the early scenes of Philippe Lacôte’s electrifying drama offer up plenty of disturbing details of life inside. But realism soon gives way to ritual, as Blackbeard — the Dangôro, or inmate king — anoints young Roman to tell stories to the prison’s population during that night’s red moon. Roman (played with an appropriate mixture of fear and intensity by Koné Bakary) is terrified by this makeshift state and its tough crowd, but he works through that fear, and as he gains his confidence, his voice becomes more forceful, and his stories come to vivid, often majestic life.‘Sword of Trust’ (2019)Stream it on Netflix.The director Lynn Shelton’s final feature film was this shambling, loose-limbed, slightly melancholy and thoroughly enjoyable ensemble comedy, which is about as charming as any film about a Confederate sword can be. That sword has just been left to Cynthia (Jillian Bell) by her grandfather, who insisted it was proof that the Confederacy won the war; Marc Maron co-stars as a pawnshop owner who discovers that, nonsensical back story or not, the sword is worth quite a bit of money, and a rather nervous road trip to a potential seller ensues. As was her custom, Shelton fills the film with telling and poignant character moments, and Maron does his finest acting to date.‘Frances Ferguson’ (2019)Stream it on Amazon.The Austin-based filmmaker Bob Byington has, over the last decade, honed a specific and unmistakable style — his films are short, funny, self-aware, unapologetically peculiar and unfailingly wry. His latest is the story of a small-town schoolteacher (Kaley Wheless) who becomes embroiled in a sex scandal, less motivated by lust than boredom and marital unhappiness (the loathing with which she and her husband regard each other is one of the film’s best running jokes). Wheless, who also co-wrote the story, is a real find, her arid-dry line readings a good match for Byington’s sardonic wit. And the narrator, Nick Offerman, just about steals the picture with searching voice-overs like, “Every story has a miscreant. A rapscallion. A … scallywag? I may need a thesaurus to go on.”‘They Came Together’ (2014)Stream it on Hulu and Amazon.It’s been 21 years since the runaway success of “Scary Movie” both brought back the spoof film — which had floundered since the glory days of Mel Brooks and the “Airplane” team Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker — and hastened its conclusion, as the film’s various sequels, spinoffs and alumni projects all but buried the form in witless, laughless exercises in pop culture shout-outs. The sole oasis in the desert of dumb is David Wain’s uproariously funny sendup of twinkly romantic comedies, featuring Amy Poehler and Paul Rudd in a “You’ve Got Mail” riff as competing candy merchants in New York City, which feels (all together now) “like another character” in their story.‘Lucky’ (2017)Stream it on HBO Max.Few film actors have enjoyed a send-off as affectionate as Harry Dean Stanton, the inimitable and prolific character actor (with over 200 credits to his name) whose penultimate film role was also one of his few leads. He plays the title character, a 90-year-old firecracker and curmudgeon who knows his end is near, but isn’t going out quietly. The director John Carroll Lynch is a distinguished character actor himself — he played Frances McDormand’s husband in “Fargo” and the lead suspect in “Zodiac” — and he handles his leading man with affection and respect, surrounding him with a handful of friends and previous collaborators, including David Lynch, Tom Skerritt and Ed Begley Jr.‘Let the Sunshine In’ (2018)Stream it on Hulu.Though the director Claire Denis and the actor Juliette Binoche are two of the most fascinating forces in French cinema, they had never worked together before this character-driven drama. It’s an ideal collaboration, however, spotlighting their unique gifts and take-no-prisoners attitudes in their work. Binoche is in top form as a Parisian artist seeking happiness, but not via the usual cinematic solution of a male partner — though there are partners, many of them, and the various ways in which they fail her provide both rich comic situations and wise emotional resonance.‘Beats, Rhymes and Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest’ (2011)Stream it on Amazon.The actor Michael Rapaport — best known for his fast-talking turns in films like “True Romance” and “Bamboozled” — proved himself an accomplished documentarian with this loving yet candid tribute to the groundbreaking ’90s rap group A Tribe Called Quest. Much of the picture is an evocative music history, of the trends and sounds of their original era, which the filmmaker affectionately captures. But it gets into trickier waters in documenting their reunion for the “Rock the Bells” tours, capturing long-simmering resentments and ugly conflicts, becoming something of a “Let It Be” for hip-hop heads.‘Becoming Mike Nichols’ (2016)Stream it on HBO Max.According to Mark Harris’s recent (and excellent) biography “Mike Nichols: A Life,” the venerated stage and screen director would, in his later years, spend a fair amount of rehearsal time telling stories of the good old days. One gets a taste of that in this documentary, which features his final interviews (conducted in the summer of 2014) on the stage of the John Golden Theater, where he and Elaine May performed their Broadway show. Focusing on his early years — it ends with his Oscar win for “The Graduate” — the film offers a brief yet informative snapshot of his directorial approach and philosophies. But it’s most valuable as a personality portrait; he’s sharp as a tack and endlessly funny, his comic timing and personal anecdotes honed and refined over years of storytelling. More

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    In ‘Xiao Wu,’ a Wandering Pickpocket in the People’s China

    Jia Zhangke’s debut feature, released in the United States in 1999 and newly restored, follows a nowhere man around his nowhere city in China.Made for a pittance with nonprofessional actors, officially unapproved in China and first shown in the United States in 1999, Jia Zhangke’s debut feature “Xiao Wu” depicted a deadbeat Chinese protagonist and a backwater milieu few Westerners had ever seen.That movie, revived by Film at Lincoln Center in a new 4K restoration, is both downbeat and transcendent.“Xiao Wu” is set in Jia’s hometown in central China, Fenyang. The title character is an aimless, alienated pickpocket — described in a New York Times review as “a nondescript young man in a shabby city who practices his trade without remorse, compassion or evident fear although he is known to the police.” Some critics were reminded of Robert Bresson, whose 1959 “Pickpocket” is a masterpiece of elliptical cinema.Observational, mainly in medium shot and almost plotless, “Xiao Wu” has a documentary quality. The titular character, played by Wang Hongwei, is introduced while waiting for a bus; once aboard, he beats the fare with the smirking claim he is a policeman, then casually picks the pocket of the passenger beside him.An unlikely tough guy — indeed, something of a loser with thick Woody Allen glasses and a cigarette-lighter that plays a few bars of “Für Elise” — Xiao Wu has his act down. The world, however, is changing. As local TV welcomes “the return of Hong Kong,” sleepy, half-urbanized Fenyang has begun to offer the fruits of the free market — karaoke, beauty salons, cheap sound systems.News reaches Xiao Wu that his former partner in crime, now a legitimate businessman trafficking in hostess bars and wholesale cigarettes, is about to marry. Xiao Wu is pointedly uninvited to the wedding and constitutionally unable to move on from his criminal life. The pickpocket is less a product of the new China than an antisocial element who fails to modernize. Asked by the karaoke hostess, Mei-Mei, whom he ambivalently courts, what he does for a living, he tells her that he’s “a craftsman who earns his money with his hands.”Mei-Mei is sufficiently impressed to encourage him to buy a beeper so she can alert him when she’s free. Xiao Wu buys her a ring as well. And each purchase, in its way, promotes his undoing. (Technology is part of the movie’s subtext. Anticipating Jia’s use of science fiction elements in his later, naturalistic films, TV subtly mediates crucial aspects of Xiao Wu’s life.)Remarkable for a movie made entirely with nonactors, “Xiao Wu” thrives on extended scenes of personal interaction — Xiao Wu with his former friend, his parents, the police and, mainly, the diffidently wooed Mei-Mei. Significantly, his single moment of liberation occurs when he finds himself alone in an empty public bath. In the film’s final scenes, society prevails. Xiao Wu himself becomes an object lesson, another commodity in the marketplace, contemplated by the crowd as a pop song asks, “Who is the hero?”As can happen with first films, “Xiao Wu” has a purity unique in its maker’s oeuvre. But it is also an auspicious beginning to one of the most impressive careers in 21st century cinema.Xiao WuJuly 23-Aug. 5 at Film at Lincoln Center, Manhattan; filmlinc.org. More

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    Is ‘Loki’ a True Marvel Variant? Or Just a Fun Experiment?

    The latest Disney+ superhero show embraced chaos in its storytelling. Is Marvel willing to do the same within its ever expanding universe of films and TV shows?One thing Marvel knows how to do is expand a story. Think back to the nascent days of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the early ’00s. The so-called Phase 1 was about building out the superhero roster with individual film narratives that would dovetail into a big crossover movie: “The Avengers.” A decade and a half later, the crossovers are old hat, the Easter eggs are expected, and a spate of new movies and TV shows continue to provide an influx of stories and characters that branch off into their own universes. More

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    Carol Easton, Biographer of Arts Figures, Dies at 87

    Curious about creativity, she chronicled the lives of Agnes de Mille, Jacqueline du Pré, Samuel Goldwyn and Stan Kenton.Carol Easton, whose curiosity about creativity inspired her to write biographies of four prominent figures in the arts — Stan Kenton, Samuel Goldwyn, Jacqueline du Pré and Agnes de Mille — died on June 17 at her home in Venice, Calif. She was 87. More

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    ‘Space Jam,’ My Dad and Me

    A writer adored the basketball-Looney Tunes mash-up as a boy. Watching the movie again after his father died, he felt the movie resonate in a surprisingly deeper way.When I was 10, I thought the coolest person in the world was Michael Jordan. The second-coolest person in the world was my dad. He played in an amateur men’s soccer league; I preferred basketball, so MJ got the edge. Like a lot of kids who grew up in the ’90s, I revered the seemingly unbeatable Chicago Bulls, and I was devastated when, on Oct. 6, 1993, Jordan announced that he would be retiring from the NBA to play minor-league baseball with the Birmingham Barons. I liked baseball even less than I liked soccer.Jordan’s triumphant return to basketball in March 1995 was a moment of intense relief and exhilaration for me; and when the Bulls won their fourth championship, in the summer of 1996, my enthusiasm for Jordan reached a fever pitch. So when “Space Jam” debuted that autumn, I could not have been more excited. Michael Jordan teaming up with Bugs Bunny and the Looney Tunes in a feature film about a high-stakes basketball game? It was as if they had scanned my brain and made a movie of my innermost fantasies. I begged my dad to take me to see it, and the minute it was over, I begged him to take me to see it again.He was not especially impressed with “Space Jam,” but it was everything I dreamed it would be. First, it was hilarious. The Nerdlucks, a cabal of short, wormlike aliens who smack one another around like the Three Stooges, had me in stitches; my friends and I impersonated their screechy, helium-pitched voices for months, to gales of approving schoolyard laughter. Jordan’s bumbling, nebbish assistant Stan — played by Wayne Knight, whom I knew as the guy who gets smeared by a dilophosaurus in “Jurassic Park,” another childhood favorite — was hysterically funny. And of course the Looney Tunes cracked me up. When the Tasmanian Devil spins around a basketball court and cleans it single-handedly in a matter of seconds, declaring it “lemony fresh” — that seemed like the funniest thing I had ever heard in my life.Jordan with the Looney Tunes in 1996 — a young basketball fan’s dream lineup.Warner Bros.What I loved most about “Space Jam” was the candid glimpse it seemed to offer of Jordan’s life off the court. I had seen him in action, and in interviews as well as in commercials. But “Space Jam” showed me a family side of Jordan. Here was the star talking to his wife. Here was Jordan watching TV with his kids. And here was a flashback of a young Jordan, shooting hoops in the backyard, talking about his hopes and aspirations with his own dad.His father, played by Thom Barry, has only a small role in “Space Jam”: He appears in the first scene of the movie, watching his son drop bucket after bucket in the moonlight. “Do you think if I get good enough, I can go to college?” asks the young Michael, played by Brandon Hammond. “You get good enough, you can do anything you want to,” the elder Jordan replies. Mike starts rattling off his dreams: “I want to go to North Carolina … I want to play on the championship team … then I want to play in the NBA.”His dad takes the ball and says it’s time for bed. But Michael has one more dream to mention. “Once I’ve done all that,” Michael says, beaming up at his father, “I want to play baseball — just like you, Dad.”In April 2020, as the coronavirus was sending most of the world into lockdown, my dad died suddenly in his home late one night of a heart attack. He was 58. He’d been in immaculate health. We were extremely close, and spoke or texted every day. I was shattered.Around the same time, ESPN began to air “The Last Dance,” the network’s 10-part documentary series about Jordan and the ’90s Chicago Bulls. I watched the show in the weeks following my dad’s death as a distraction from my grief. But I was not prepared for the revelations of the seventh episode, which deals with the death of Jordan’s father, James R. Jordan, at the hands of carjackers in 1993. I was struck by certain similarities: how close Michael had been to his father, how much he relied on him as a mentor and a friend. James Jordan died a week shy of 57.A young Jordan (Brandon Hammond) and his father (Thom Barry) came to mean a great deal years later.Warner Bros.After that episode, I put on “Space Jam.” Again, I was looking for distraction; again, I was floored by grief. That opening scene with young Michael and his father, such a beautiful testament to a parent’s influence, now seemed completely overwhelming. Three years after his death, Jordan Sr. had been resurrected onscreen for a heartfelt tribute. And what’s more, Jordan had invoked his father as the reason he was pursuing baseball — a career move most people had dismissed as ridiculous.When Jordan announced his retirement, back in 1993, he told the gathered reporters that, although he was sad to leave the sport behind, he was glad his father had been alive to see his last game of basketball. The same line appears in “Space Jam,” in a restaging of the retirement news conference, and in light of the earlier scene with Jordan’s dad, the moment has a special emphasis.At the time, pundits could not fathom why someone as gifted as Jordan would give up his place at the top of one sport just to start at the bottom in an entirely different one. Jordan used “Space Jam” in part to explain his decision, to explain that while it looked as if he was following a whim, he was actually following his father. In light of my own loss, it seemed to me that Jordan was pouring his heart out. Watching last year — nearly 25 years later — I was profoundly moved.“Space Jam” was not really as candid about Michael Jordan’s home life as I believed when I was 10 and as “The Last Dance” made clear. Understandably, “Space Jam” did not touch on Jordan’s sometimes reckless gambling, nor on his embattled relationship with the media nor his weariness with the demands of fame. But the movie does contain some sincere and deep-seated wisdom about loss, which I was only able to see once I was in mourning myself.It’s about looking up to somebody and wanting to follow in his footsteps. To do right by him. To reflect back the love that person selflessly showed you. And although it might seem strange to say of a movie about Michael Jordan playing basketball with Bugs Bunny, seeing that truth in “Space Jam” after all these years helped me deal with the pain of what I’d lost. More

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    The Riddle of Riley Keough

    The “Zola” actress has a knack for inhabiting working-class characters who feel real, even though her own family history is as outrageous as it gets.Most actresses play to you. When they’re thinking or feeling something, you know exactly what that thing is. But Riley Keough is a little more elusive.Whether she’s weighing matters of money and sex in “The Girlfriend Experience” or staring down a romantic rival in “American Honey,” Keough, 32, certainly looks like a star — it helps that she inherited ice-blue eyes and a chin curved like a question mark from her grandfather Elvis Presley — even though her screen presence remains unusually impassive and mysterious. What are Keough’s characters thinking? You can never quite tell.This isn’t a bad thing. Instead, it’s the primary source of her allure: That gap between what you don’t know but want to find out is what’s so beguiling. And then, as you scan Keough’s face for flickers of intention and emotion, you realize you’re leaning in.“She’s one of those actors who so effortlessly lands in the feet of her character that it almost seems like it isn’t acting,” said the director Janicza Bravo, who pursued Keough to play Stefani, an exotic dancer with murky intentions, for her raucous new comedy “Zola.” You’re compelled by Stefani even when you don’t fully trust her, and Bravo knew Keough could play that ambiguity to the hilt.“That morsel, that taste, that juice, that flavor — I wanted that,” Bravo said.In late 2018, the “Zola” script was sent to Keough, and a meeting was set at the starry, storied Chateau Marmont, in Hollywood. Bravo got there first and while she waited, a woman came by her table, said hello and began to hover. The Chateau boasted a high level of celebrity density in its prepandemic heyday but every so often, a civilian still got through. And this one wasn’t leaving.Though Bravo nodded back, she was busy scanning the room for her would-be star. But this normie, this noncelebrity, this interloper kept standing by her table like she expected something.And then she said, “I’m Riley.”Bravo apologized profusely to Keough that day, and now she laughs about it. “I had this idea of what I thought she was going to be like — I believed her to be a larger-than-life person — and what landed in front of me was someone with a good deal of ease,” Bravo said. “I’m maybe dancing around it, but I didn’t expect her to be normal.”Me neither. When I met Keough in mid-June at the home of a friend in Los Angeles, I was struck by her calm, undisturbed energy — something I’ve never sensed in even the most wellness-obsessed stars. With Keough, there is no eagerness to please, no need to impress or to have all eyes on her. You feel that you’re simply talking to and observing a normal person.So how does she hold on to that lack of self-consciousness in Hollywood? “I have an ability that’s really hard in this industry to be kind of like, ‘Meh,’” Keough told me, shrugging. “I don’t take things too seriously.”“Zola,” based on a notorious Twitter thread, is about people who use social media as an advertisement, but Keough prefers using it to puncture her own celebrity: Though she has starred in a few films for the hot studio A24, Keough hopped on her Instagram last year to breezily rattle off all the A24 movies she failed to book, including “Uncut Gems,” “Spring Breakers” and “The Spectacular Now.”Directors of those films messaged Keough to offer apologies, but the rejections hadn’t bothered her much to begin with. “I don’t care if I fail,” she said. “I have this attitude of, ‘Well, then I’ll just do better.’” And besides, there were bigger quandaries to spend that energy on.“I’ve lived my whole life in a sort of existential crisis,” she told me matter-of-factly, tucking strands of auburn hair behind her ear. “The minute I got to Earth, I was like, ‘What am I doing here? Why is everyone just acting like this is normal?’”Of course, Keough’s childhood was far from ordinary: When she was about 5, her mother Lisa Marie Presley split from her musician father, Danny Keough, and married Michael Jackson. One parent provided access to moneyed fortresses like Graceland and Neverland, while the other lived more modestly, in trailer parks with mattresses on the floor.Keough had no qualms about visiting her father; once, she even told him, “When I grow up, I want to be poor like you.” She hadn’t known then how offensive her remark was, but that bifurcated childhood with her brother, Benjamin, would come in handy in her 20s, when Keough pursued work as an actress: She had amassed enough authenticity to play regular people as well as enough privilege to live her life without much worry.And blasé suits her: In movies like “American Honey” and “Logan Lucky,” about hustlers just trying to get by, her characters feel real and lived-in rather than condescended to. Or, as a recent tweet put it, “Riley Keough understands the white working class way better than J.D. Vance.” Was it glib to compare her to the “Hillbilly Elegy” author turned struggling Senate candidate? Perhaps, but the tweet still got more than 1,000 likes: Keough’s brand is strong.Keough as a sex worker opposite Taylour Paige in “Zola.”  Anna Kooris/A24The Florida-set “Zola” at first appeared to be cut from that same cloth: Stefani is a Southerner and a sex worker, two types Keough has played plenty of in the past. Still, the actress wanted to use this opportunity to push things a little further. “I didn’t want it to be ‘American Honey,’ this really naturalistic, understated performance,” Keough said. “When you do something well, people want it again and then you kind of get stuck.”Bravo wanted her to go big, too. Adorned in blond cornrows and hoop earrings, Stefani shrieks and cajoles in a blaccent so pronounced that even Iggy Azalea might blush. At first, when Keough was trying to find Stefani’s voice, she would text recordings to Bravo: “And Janicza was always like, ‘More, more.’ I was like, ‘OK, if you say so!’”The movie’s Black heroine, Zola (Taylour Paige), can hardly believe the vibe that Stefani is putting down, and in an era when white appropriation of Black culture has become a hot topic, audiences might find themselves shocked by Stefani, too. “Riley said, ‘Am I going to get canceled for this?’” Bravo recalled. “But what she’s playing only lands if you’re going to the extreme. If you’re at all shying away from what it is, it can look like an apology.”The result is the polar opposite of Keough’s more tamped-down performances: Stefani is outrageous, over the line and gut-bustingly funny, even if Keough can sense that some viewers don’t know what do with her.“People are like, ‘Am I allowed to laugh? Am I a bad person?’” she said. “I love that. I’m a little bit of a troll in my heart, and I think I bring that into my work.” And if you have trouble sussing out Stefani’s intentions as she goads Zola into a road trip that quickly turns dangerous, that’s by design.“You don’t know if the whole thing’s a manipulation, even in her moments of being vulnerable,” Keough said. “That’s why I love playing these characters that would seem like the bad guy. It’s so much more fun to make people have moments with those characters where you’re like, ‘I feel bad for her.’ Or, ‘I’m having fun with her. I’d go with her, too.’”“Zola” premiered in January 2020 at the Sundance Film Festival, and Keough was excited for it to come out that summer: She’s always been kind of a searcher, and if the movie led to new and more interesting work in comedies, maybe those roles would help her to understand herself better. Then the pandemic scuttled those plans, and as Keough was adjusting to months off from work, her younger brother, Benjamin, killed himself in July 2020.What followed was “a year of feeling like I was thrown into the ocean and couldn’t swim,” Keough said. “The first four or five months, I couldn’t get out of bed. I was totally debilitated. I couldn’t talk for two weeks.”Even now, Keough finds the tragedy hard to accept. “It’s very complicated for our minds to put that somewhere because it’s so outrageous,” she said. “If I’m going through a breakup, I know what to do with that and where to file it in my mind, but suicide of your brother? Where do you put that? How does that integrate? It just doesn’t.”After the suicide of her brother, Benjamin, Keough went through “a year of feeling like I was thrown into the ocean and couldn’t swim.”Maggie Shannon for The New York TimesKeough got through it with the help of her friends and her husband, Ben Smith-Petersen, a stuntman, but first she laid down some ground rules: “I wanted to make sure that I was feeling everything and I wasn’t running from anything,” she said. To that end, Keough recently became a death doula. Instead of helping to facilitate a birth, she guides people through the issues that arise during the final portion of their lives.“That’s really what’s helped me, being able to put myself in a position of service,” she said. “If I can help other people, maybe I can find some way to help myself.”And she has lately found things to treasure about her grief, too, though she admits that if someone had told her to expect a silver lining shortly after Benjamin died, she probably would have replied with expletives. “But there’s this sense of the fragility of life and how every moment matters to me now,” Keough said.It’s her new normal, one she’s still getting used to: Maybe you’re never quite certain where Keough stands because until recently, she hadn’t been all that sure herself. It almost couldn’t be helped with a childhood that whiplashed between two extremes. But now, at 32, she’s finally figured something out.“I think growing up, I was always searching for answers,” she said. “Now I know that everything’s inside me. All you can do is surrender and be present for the experience.” More

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    ‘The New Bauhaus’ Review: Rethinking an Approach to Art

    This documentary on the interdisciplinary artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy makes the case that he should be a household name.The documentary “The New Bauhaus” celebrates the legacy of the versatile interdisciplinary artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, perhaps best-known for his photography and photograms, and the legacy of the school he started in Chicago. The film, directed by Alysa Nahmias, makes the case that although Moholy-Nagy’s body of work might seem diffuse because it spanned mediums, he deserves to be remembered as one of the great artists of the 20th century — as important as Picasso or Magritte, says Elizabeth Siegel, the photography curator at the Art Institute of Chicago.The film argues that Moholy-Nagy was more concerned with approach than product; he had his students learn biology, for instance, seeking to give them new ways of looking at the world. He didn’t separate artistic pursuits from commercial interests or economic realities. The movie explains how he turned the rationing of metal during World War II into an opportunity to rethink products. As told here, his influence, and the work of his students, can be seen in advertising, the credits of James Bond films and in the shape of a Dove soap bar.The film features informative commentary from academics and particularly from Moholy-Nagy’s daughter Hattula. One former student, Beatrice Takeuchi, says she found an exhibition on Moholy-Nagy too formalized — that he was at his best messing around. In a sense, she might be referring to this movie, which shares the artist’s biography in a conventional way. But it is a good primer, well illustrated.The New BauhausNot Rated. Running Time: 1 hour 29 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More