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      Richard Donner, Director of ‘Superman’ and ‘Lethal Weapon’ Films, Dies at 91

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      The Bronx-born Mr. Donner was in his late 40s when he made his first megahit, about the Man of Steel, but others soon followed, including “The Goonies” and “Scrooged.”Richard Donner, the tough, single-minded but playful film director who made Christopher Reeve’s Superman fly, Mel Gibson’s deranged detective lethal and the young stars of “The Goonies” pirate-adorable, died on Monday. He was 91. His production company and his wife and producing partner, Lauren Shuler Donner, confirmed the death with Hollywood trade publications. They did not say where he died or give the cause.Mr. Donner was in his late 40s when he made his first blockbuster, “Superman,” reviving a comic-book hero who hadn’t been seen onscreen since the 1950s television series “Adventures of Superman.” The film opened in 1978, introducing Mr. Reeve, a relative unknown at the time, as the Man of Steel and some state-of-the-art special effects.“If the audience didn’t believe he was flying, I didn’t have a movie,” Mr. Donner told Variety in 1997.That megahit was followed by “Inside Moves” (1980), a drama about a man crippled in a failed suicide attempt (Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times that Mr. Donner had directed it “with a surprising gentleness”); “The Toy” (1982), with Richard Pryor, whose character finds himself hired to be the plaything of a spoiled rich child; “The Goonies” (1987), about misfit children on a treasure hunt; the first of four “Lethal Weapon” movies (also 1987), starring Mr. Gibson and Danny Glover; and “Scrooged” (1988), an irreverent comic take on Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol,” starring Bill Murray.Christopher Reeve in “Superman.” “If the audience didn’t believe he was flying, I didn’t have a movie,” Mr. Donner said.Warner Brothers, via ReutersMr. Donner attributed the surprise success of “Lethal Weapon” to his clean depiction of violence.“I like to turn my head away in suspense, not in disgust,” he said in a 1987 interview with The Times. “Sure, there were a lot of deaths, but they died like they died in westerns. They were shot with bullets; they weren’t dismembered.”He even admitted to having stolen some fight moves from a western: “Red River” (1948), which starred John Wayne.Mr. Donner always said he had been hired for “Goonies” because Steven Spielberg, who produced the movie, had told him, “You’re a bigger kid than I am.” But working with actual kids (including Sean Astin at 14 and Josh Brolin, barely 17) was a mixed blessing. “The annoying thing was the lack of discipline,” Mr. Donner told Yahoo Entertainment in 2015. “And that was also what was great, because it meant that they weren’t professionals. What came out of them was instinct.”In a statement on Monday, Mr. Spielberg said: “Dick had such a powerful command of his movies, and was so gifted across so many genres. Being in his circle was akin to hanging out with your favorite coach, smartest professor, fiercest motivator, most endearing friend, staunchest ally, and — of course — the greatest Goonie of all. He was all kid. All heart. All the time.”A scene from “The Goonies.” Mr. Donner said he had been hired for “Goonies” because Steven Spielberg had told him, “You’re a bigger kid than I am.” Warner Bros.Richard Donald Schwartzberg was born on April 24, 1930, in the Bronx, the younger of two children of Fred and Hattie (Horowitz) Schwartzberg. His father was a Russian Jewish immigrant who worked in his father’s furniture business; his mother, a daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, worked as a secretary before having children.Richard became fascinated by film when he and his sister would go to their grandfather’s movie theater in Brooklyn. But he had no specific career ambitions, Mr. Donner said in a 2006 Archive of American Television video interview. He grew up in the Bronx and in Mount Vernon, N.Y., and joined the Navy in his teens.His first real attraction to show business came with a summer job parking cars and doing errands at a summer theater. Because his father wanted him to study business, he enrolled in night school at New York University but dropped out after two years.He had some luck landing acting jobs in commercials and finally won a tiny part on the 1950-51 anthology series “Somerset Maugham TV Theater.” The episode’s director, Martin Ritt (who went on to a successful career directing movies like “Hud,” “Sounder” and “Norma Rae”), didn’t care for the young man’s attitude and offered a suggestion. “You can’t take direction,” he said. “You should be a director.”Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in “Lethal Weapon 2.” Mr. Donner attributed the surprise success of the first “Lethal Weapon” to his clean depiction of violence.Warner Bros, via Everett CollectionMr. Donner (he took his stage name from the infamous Donner Pass massacre, observing its centennial at the time, and because Donner sounded like his middle name) continued to do commercials and helped found a commercial production company, which he and his partner later sold to Filmways. He got his big chance to direct prime-time series TV in 1960, with an episode of the western “Wanted: Dead or Alive,” starring Steve McQueen.From the start he brushed elbows with stars. The golden-age-of-Hollywood star Claudette Colbert was in one of his first assignments, a 1960 episode of “Zane Grey Theater.” One of the six “Twilight Zone” episodes he directed was “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” in which William Shatner played a terrified airline passenger who sees a gremlin on the wing outside his window. Neither of Mr. Donner’s first two tries at film made a big splash, but he directed big names: Charles Bronson in “X-15,” a 1961 drama about a test pilot, and Sammy Davis Jr. and Peter Lawford in “Salt and Pepper,” a 1968 comedy crime thriller.The first Richard Donner movie that received headline attention was “The Omen” (1976), about a cold-eyed little boy who is secretly the Antichrist. Vincent Canby, unimpressed, described Mr. Donner in The Times as “a television director who has a superb way of dismissing any small detail that might give some semblance of conviction to the proceedings.” But “The Omen” became the year’s fifth-highest-grossing film; soon its director was offered “Superman,” which did even better financially. It was beaten at the box office in 1978 only by “Grease.”Mr. Donner directed Mr. Gibson in two high-profile films in the 1990s: “Maverick” (1994), a comic western with Jodie Foster; and “Conspiracy Theory” (1997), an action thriller about a paranoid cabdriver, with Julia Roberts. In the early ’90s he produced and directed episodes of HBO’s “Tales From the Crypt.”The last “Lethal Weapon” movie was in 1998. Mr. Donner’s last film, “16 Blocks,” was a 2006 crime drama starring Bruce Willis.Mr. Donner in 2017, when he was honored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.Valerie Macon/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesHe met Ms. Shuler when she hired him for the 1985 fantasy “Ladyhawke”; they married in 1986. The couple eventually chose not to work together because it affected their relationship, Mr. Donner said. “I’m a 200-pound gorilla,” he explained. “She’s a 300-pound gorilla.”But their production company, the Donners’ Company, founded in 1993, has been behind lucrative hits like “Deadpool,” “The Wolverine” and the “X-Men” franchise. (Complete information on his survivors was not immediately available.)Like Alfred Hitchcock, Mr. Donner enjoyed making silent cameo appearances in his own projects; he was, among other things, a riverboat card dealer in “Maverick,” a police officer in “The Goonies” and a passer-by in “Superman.”But asked in the Archive of American Television interview how he wanted to be remembered, he was unassuming. “As a good guy who lived a long life and had a good time and always had that lady behind him pushing him,” he said. His only boast: “I’m pretty good at meeting a schedule and a budget.” More

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      After ‘F9,’ We Watched the Ninth Movies of Other Franchises. Oof.

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      There’s a reason most series don’t run so long. But amid the dreck (cough — “Jason Goes to Hell” — cough), we found a few that held up.I’m not sure anyone imagined, when watching “The Fast and the Furious” in the summer of 2001, that a modest flick about street-racing car thieves in Southern California might one day yield eight sequels. It’s not so much that this material didn’t warrant a return trip as that almost no material gets returned to so many times.But what about those rare movie series that make it that far? In honor of “F9,” I watched the ninth installments of some other franchises. As you might expect, the quality varies wildly, from painfully derivative to astonishingly fresh.‘Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday’ (1993)Of course, the subtitle is a misnomer: “Jason Goes to Hell” was far from the final “Friday the 13th” movie; for one, it was succeeded in 2001 by “Jason X,” which was set in outer space. Part 9 starts with Jason Voorhees being blasted to bits by a SWAT team, but naturally getting blown up doesn’t prevent him from continuing to wreak carnage on the denizens of Crystal Lake. Possessing another human body with his evil spirit, he extravagantly stabs, crushes and impales attractive teenage victims in various states of undress. It’s a brutally violent and luridly graphic slasher, although not a particularly frightening one, that culminates in a bewildering last-second cameo by Freddy Krueger’s glove.‘Ernest in the Army’ (1998)Ernest P. Worrell, the cartoonish buffoon immortalized by Jim Varney, started his career in a long-running series of popular television commercials, promoting Sprite and Chex cereal, among other products, with his signature catchphrase: “Know what I mean, Vern?” He went on to star in several hit movies, including “Ernest Goes to Camp” (1987) and “Ernest Scared Stupid” (1991), but by the late ’90s, the schtick had hit a point of diminishing returns, to put it mildly. “Ernest in the Army,” the ninth Ernest feature, is a direct-to-video farce in which the eponymous hero enlists in the Reserves and is shipped out to Karifistan, a fictional country in the Middle East that provides much of the film’s absurdly racist humor. Varney died two years later, ending the franchise here.‘Son of the Pink Panther’ (1993)Blake Edwards, creator of the original “Pink Panther” (1964) and one of the greatest American comedy directors of all time, was still making excellent comedies as recently as the late 1980s, like the uproarious “Skin Deep” (1989). “Son of the Pink Panther,” his final feature, feels like the work of a different filmmaker entirely. A limp, superfluous movie arriving a decade after the dismal “Curse of the Pink Panther” (1983), it starred Roberto Benigni as the illegitimate adult son of Inspector Clouseau, and was of course similarly blithe and bumbling. Benigni is funny; the material isn’t. The one bright spot is the original score — the last by the great Henry Mancini.‘Hellraiser: Revelations’ (2011)Many of the “Hellraiser” sequels are bad. “Hellraiser: Revelations” doesn’t even try to be good. The ninth film in the grisly supernatural horror franchise was made strictly to satisfy a condition in the studio’s contract with the series’s creator, Clive Barker, that a new installment be released every few years, lest the studio relinquish its rights to the franchise. The script was written in a matter of days and the movie slapped together in a couple of weeks. Doug Bradley, who starred as the villain Pinhead in all eight of the previous iterations, declined to participate. “If they claim it’s from the mind of Clive Barker, it’s a lie,” Barker tweeted during production.‘American Pie Presents: Girls’ Rules’ (2020)The original “American Pie” (1999) has three true sequels — “American Pie 2” (2001), “American Wedding” (2003) and “American Reunion” (2012) — following the same characters. But the franchise has also spawned a series of spinoffs made in a similar spirit of raunchy jubilance, including “Band Camp” (2005) and “The Naked Mile” (2006). The ninth and latest, “Girls’ Rules,” is a gender-swapped riff on the first film. It follows four young women who resolve to find romantic satisfaction before the night of their high school prom. What charm it has is thanks to its charismatic leads — particularly Lizze Broadway as Stephanie Stifler, cousin to Seann William Scott’s memorable supporting character from the original series.‘Adventures of Zatoichi’ (1964)Shintaro Katsu starred as the blind masseur and Edo-era swordsman Zatoichi in no fewer than 26 features between 1962 and 1989, sometimes making as many as four in a single year. The quality of each installment is remarkably high, considering just how many there are, and the ninth, “Adventures of Zatoichi,” is no exception: The dramatic swordplay, political intrigue and upbeat physical comedy that are the hallmarks of the series are on grand display, as Zatoichi dispatches the usual processions of villainous samurai with gratifying flair. And if you just can’t get enough Zatoichi, Katsu later reprised the role for television — and made more than 100 “Zatoichi” episodes.‘Star Trek: Insurrection’ (1998)The ninth “Star Trek” picture is also the third oriented around the cast of “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” whose small-screen voyages on the Starship Enterprise are some of the most beloved by “Trek” fans. Starring the inimitable Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard, paragon of interstellar virtue and decency, and directed by Jonathan Frakes, who also plays the handsome ladies’ man William Riker, the movie feels a bit like a feature-length episode of the show. After the blockbuster action of the previous installment, “Star Trek: First Contact,” that TV-movie quality is fairly refreshing, and Stewart and the cast, as always, are a pleasure to watch. It also compares very favorably against the next film in the series, “Star Trek: Nemesis” (2002), about which the less said, the better. More

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      Watch These 11 Titles Before They Leave Netflix This Month

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      Plenty to catch up on before a slew of titles leave for U.S. viewers by the end of July. These are the ones most worth seeing.Oscar winners and family favorites lead this month’s parade of titles departing from Netflix in the United States, along with an unnerving indie thriller, an immortal Australian franchise starter, a beloved ’90s rom-com and a controversial Stanley Kubrick classic. (Dates reflect the final day a title is available.)‘The Iron Lady’ (July 5)Meryl Streep picked up her third Academy Award for this 2011 portrait of the former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and it’s a stunning transformation. (The film’s makeup team also won Oscars for their work). But Streep’s performance is no mere impersonation; she digs deep into the complicated personality of the conservative stateswoman and the inconsistencies (some might say hypocrisies) she personified. Abi Morgan’s inventively structured screenplay jettisons the expected cradle-to-grave construction, dramatizing instead her life in a series of flashbacks inspired by both her grief and Alzheimer’s disease. Jim Broadbent is warm and winning as her husband.Stream it here‘The Invitation’ (July 7)What would you do if your good friends — people you have known for years, trusted and loved — joined a cult? How would you react if they welcomed you into their home, sat you down in their living room and began forcibly explaining why you should join, too? That’s the question at the heart of this gripping thriller from the director Karyn Kusama (“Girlfight”), in which a young man (Logan Marshall-Green) is invited to the home of his ex-wife (Tammy Blanchard) for a reunion and dinner party that takes a decidedly dark turn. The thriller elements are sharp, but its provocative central conundrum — How to get through to friends who’ve seemingly lost touch with reality? — has grown only more pointed in the years since its early 2016 release.Stream it herePrincess Tiana (voiced by Anika Noni Rose)and the frog Prince Naveen (Bruno Campos) in “The Princess and the Frog.”Walt Disney Animation Studios‘The Princess and the Frog’ (July 15)Disney’s 49th animated feature was also the first with an African-American “Disney princess” — a long-overdue gesture but a welcome one nevertheless. It wasn’t just a surface alteration; the directors Ron Clements and John Musker adapted the classic children’s fairy tale “The Frog Prince” to New Orleans of the 1920s, taking full advantage of Bayou culture with memorable, ragtime-style songs (by Randy Newman) and delightful updates to the original story. Anika Noni Rose voices Tiana, a waitress and chef whose dream of owning her own restaurant is interrupted by a witch doctor’s spell that turns her — and her perspective suitor, a fun-loving prince — into frogs. Oprah Winfrey, John Goodman, Keith David and Terrence Howard are highlights of the impressive voice cast.Stream it here‘The Croods’ (July 28)One of the last remaining prehistoric families finds their methods of survival — and thus, their entire way of life — challenged in this frisky, funny animated comedy. Nicolas Cage, an actor so operatically expressive that it’s shocking he hasn’t done more animated work, is both amusing and empathetic as the patriarch of the Crood family, who will go to any length to keep his family safe; Emma Stone is a delightful counterpoint as his teenage daughter, who, like most rebellious teens, is just looking to break the boredom. Ryan Reynolds, Catherine Keener and Clark Duke charm in supporting roles, but the scene stealer is Cloris Leachman, hilarious as the family’s fierce grandmother.Stream it here‘Spotlight’ (July 30)The Academy Award winner for best picture of 2015 is an “All the President’s Men”-style chronicle of investigative journalism at its most urgent. Telling the true story of how the team at the Boston Globe unearthed widespread sexual abuse by Catholic priests, the director Tom McCarthy focuses on the nuts and bolts of the journalism — how each isolated tip and victim leads to another, and another, and another. A flawless ensemble cast (including Michael Keaton, John Slattery, Liev Schreiber, Stanley Tucci and the Oscar nominees Mark Ruffalo and Rachel McAdams) runs the full emotional gamut, from skeptical and cautious to fiery and impassioned; the results are gripping, intelligent and powerful.Stream it hereMalcolm McDowell in “A Clockwork Orange.”Warner Bros.‘A Clockwork Orange’ (July 31)Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 adaptation of the Anthony Burgess novel would become his most controversial film, a dark and disturbing examination of violence (and its glamorization) that refuses to let viewers off the hook. Kubrick’s dynamic direction puts us uncomfortably close to the thrill crimes of its protagonists, a group of youthful hooligans in a vaguely futuristic Britain led by the charismatic Alex (Malcolm McDowell, at the top of his game). The picture’s ultraviolence and pitch-black humor proved so upsetting to viewers that the director took it out of circulation in England for decades; the passage of more than a half century has done little to blunt its force.Stream it here‘Hook’ (July 31)The pitch for this 1991 adventure — Steven Spielberg directing a follow-up to “Peter Pan” with Robin Williams as an adult Peter and Dustin Hoffman as Captain Hook — seemed so irresistible, such a perfect confluence of elements, that when the results were somewhat uneven, critics (and some audiences) dismissed it outright. But talk to anyone who was a child when “Hook” was released, and you’ll hear a different story, about an endlessly rewatched favorite. And children, lest we forget, were the target audience, as evidenced by the film’s eye-popping color palate, youthful supporting cast and firm embrace of the magic of imagination.Stream it here‘Jupiter Ascending’ (July 31)Every single film by the Wachowskis is a big swing, even when they’re crafting such seemingly safe bets as a television adaptation (“Speed Racer”), an adaptation of a best-selling novel (“Cloud Atlas”) or a follow-up to an earlier hit (the “Matrix” sequels). They can’t help but take risks, even when silliness or audience alienation is at stake. And if this big-canvas fantasy adventure isn’t quite a home run — the narrative pieces don’t quite fit together, and the performances are tonally disparate — the sheer ambition of its creators is as overwhelming as ever, and it is refreshing to see big-budget filmmaking that so stubbornly refuses to play by the rules.Stream it here‘Mad Max’ (July 31)Before the massive production of “Fury Road,” or even the rough-and-tumble “The Road Warrior,” the Australian director George Miller introduced the action legend “Mad” Max Rockatansky in this lean, mean slab of “Oz-ploitation” filmmaking. And he introduced a little-known Aussie actor named Mel Gibson in the title role, a police officer in a crumbling society who becomes a bloodthirsty vigilante after a criminal gang attacks his wife and child. A first-time director, Miller was working with a tiny budget and limited resources. But his talent for genre filmmaking was already evident; the metal-crunching car chases are staged with jittery ingenuity, while the emotional beats are brutally effective.Stream it here‘My Best Friend’s Wedding’ (July 31)When Julia Roberts headlined this 1997 romantic comedy, it was framed as a comeback vehicle, implying that she had wandered too far from her bread and butter with appearances in darker fare like “Mary Reilly” and “Michael Collins.” But this was no lightweight rom-com; the director P.J. Hogan (“Muriel’s Wedding”) and the screenwriter Ronald Bass (“Rain Man”) allow Roberts to tinker with her audience’s expectations, complicating their assumed empathy for the actor with her character’s questionable (and even cruel) motives and actions. And Cameron Diaz is brilliantly used as the target of her ire — a character so warm and sunny, we can’t help but wonder whose side we’re really on.Stream it hereFrom left, Emma Stone, Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg and Abigail Breslin in “Zombieland.”Glen Wilson/Columbia Pictures‘Zombieland’ (July 31)In the aftermath of a raging zombie apocalypse, it’s kill or be killed. And the primary pleasure of this double-barreled action comedy is the extent to which the screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick have worked through the logistics of this hellscape, as articulated by the hero (Jesse Eisenberg) and his rules for survival. An introverted college student, he joins forces with Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), a gunslinging cowboy type, and the sisters Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin) on a journey through the chaos. The director Ruben Fleischer keeps the laughs and gore coming at a steady clip, so thoroughly adopting the hip approach of “Ghostbusters” that Bill Murray even shows up to play along.Stream it here More

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      ‘Zola’ | Anatomy of a Scene

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

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      Five International Movies to Stream Now

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      Take a cinematic journey around the world with these highlights.This month’s picks include a delirious Mexican jungle thriller, an Indian character study about an aging trucker, a Buenos Aires–set drama about bereavement, a whimsical film about a Chinese tourist in Malaysia and the latest feature by the Filipino “slow cinema” auteur Lav Diaz.‘Tragic Jungle’Stream it on Netflix.Yulene Olaizola’s delirious 1920s–set thriller unfolds in the forested borderlands between Mexico and Belize (formerly British Honduras). Agnes (Indira Andrewin), a beautiful British woman of African origin, escapes a forced marriage with a white landowner, only to be swiftly recaptured by a band of Mexican gum harvesters. Her presence sends the men into a frenzy both sexual and territorial: They raise their guard, taking her as a sign of the nearby presence of British harvesters, while also forcing lewd glances and violent advances upon her.Agnes’s look of frightened alarm slowly turns into a smirk as Olaizola unveils the mythical undercurrent of her tale: Her heroine represents the Xtabay, a succubus-like femme fatale of Mayan legend. Yet despite the film’s whispered voice-over and feverish visions, “Tragic Jungle” draws its power from the petty human — or rather, masculine — follies it lays bare. The men encircling one another in the film’s games of profit are greedy, corruptible foot soldiers of colonialism. They don’t need the Xtabay to lure them into the jungle — just a flash of gold (or of skin) is enough to entice them to jump into the deep.‘Milestone’Stream it on Netflix.A middle-age crisis descends like a downpour on Ghalib (Suvinder Vicky), a long-haul trucker in Delhi. Just as he hits a record of 500,000 kilometers, he develops an ache in his back, is faced with a compensation claim from the family of his recently deceased wife and is tasked with training a newbie who might be his eventual replacement, Pash (Lakshvir Saran). In “Milestone,” the director Ivan Ayr distills Ghalib’s converging existential bumps-in-the-road into a melancholy, magic hour–soaked mood piece. Most of the film’s gorgeous scenes unfold in the pink pre-dawn fog of North India, while a minimalist sound design captures Ghalib’s isolation in a hectic world.“Milestone” is a pinpoint-precise character study, with the camera staying close to Ghalib, but Ayr also colors in the broader plight of India’s transportation workers and their fight against a culture of disposability. The crews responsible for loading cargo into trucks are on strike, but Ghalib is too numbed by grief and pain to see beyond the inconvenience this causes him. But the more time he spends with Pash, the clearer his impending fate becomes. The generational chasm between the two reveals itself in a wry exchange: When Pash asks Ghalib why he returned to India after a spell in Kuwait, Ghalib asks, “Ever heard of Saddam Hussein?” Pash is blank. Even as “Milestone” takes some contrived turns, Vicky’s performance grounds the film, conveying grief and alienation without macho broodiness or overwrought restraint.‘A Family Submerged’Stream it on Ovid.tv.The Buenos Aires–set “A Family Submerged” unfolds in a series of diaphanous, sun-smudged scenes — a fitting visual aesthetic for a film that dwells in the limbo of bereavement. María Alché’s debut feature follows the middle-aged Marcela (Mercedes Morán) as she grapples with the recent death of her sister. Much of the film takes place in her and the sister’s dimly lit apartments, where Marcela sorts through objects loaded with memory.There’s a boisterous, lived-in quality to these indoor scenes. Marcela’s three teenagers laugh and fight and talk over each other; assorted visitors walk in and out. Marcela seems to struggle to keep up with the swirling pace of life around her, and her dazedness slowly gives way to hallucinated conversations with long-gone relatives. At the same time, she succumbs to an affair with a friend of her daughter’s while her husband is away on a business trip.There’s a hint of melodrama in “A Family Submerged” — with its grieving heroine, familial conflicts and adultery — but the film never feels the least bit contrived or even scripted. Alché and her performers (particularly Morán) conjure a talky naturalism that makes you feel like you’ve walked, for a brief spell, into the thicket of someone’s life.‘Three Adventures of Brooke’Stream it on Mubi.Inspired by the ambulatory, serendipity-driven stories of Eric Rohmer and Hong Sang-soo, “Three Adventures of Brooke” plays out a triptych of variations on a couple of days in the summer vacation of Brooke (Xu Fangyi), a Chinese tourist in the Malaysian city of Alor Setar. On the 30th of June — the date is announced via a handwritten title card — Brooke’s bicycle breaks down on a country path. In the first segment, she’s rescued by a local woman her age, with whom she explores touristy locales like a crystal shop and a museum; in the second, Brooke is picked up by three young city-council workers who seek her input for their plans to refurbish and modernize the town; and in the third, she runs into a Frenchman (Rohmer regular Pascal Greggory) at a bicycle repair shop and explores the city with him.These segments are breezy and whimsical, and deceptively minor. Nothing too eventful happens in the film, but every new encounter gently reveals something about the ways in which a place can refract differently through the lenses of familiarity and foreignness. In each episode, Brooke offers slightly varying reasons for her presence in Alor Setar. It’s a recurring red herring that seems to encapsulate one of the film’s central themes: that our desire for mystery and meaning can obscure our view of the simple truths and pleasures of life.‘Genus Pan’Rent it on Projectr.The Filipino filmmaker Lav Diaz is known as a master of “slow cinema”: His longest film clocks in at 11 hours, and even shorter recent works exceed the 3-hour mark. But it’s not just the duration that makes his films “slow.” There’s also an austerity to his style, with genre elements and political critique mixing into narratives that unfold patiently, demanding attention and investment.In “Genus Pan,” the filmmaker’s latest, three miners make their way home through a jungle for the bulk of the film’s 157-minute running time (practically brisk, by Diaz standards). It’s the 1990s, and the men’s often rancorous banter keep returning to their exploitative work conditions. Various bribes and brokerage fees leave them with little income for backbreaking, dangerous work, and local military authorities add to their abuse, intimidating and murdering workers without consequence. The 20-something Andres (Don Melvin Boongaling) rails at these injustices, while the middle-aged Baldo (Nanding Josef) and Paulo (Bart Guingona) seem to have become inured — and even complicit — in the system.The film’s title refers to the monkeys that squawk in the jungle, but also to the primitiveness Diaz unearths in his characters. The miners’ journey home ends in a dark turn that spurs further bloody twists. There’s plenty of violence in the film, but it’s shot in a sardonic, make-believe style (enhanced by the black-and-white palette), as if to maintain the focus on the real tragedy: the depravity and desperation that turns all the men in the film into animals. More

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      ‘No. 7 Cherry Lane’ Review: A Heady Daydream in 1967 Hong Kong

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      This nostalgic animated film follows a taboo love triangle.As sumptuous as it is odd, “No. 7 Cherry Lane” is an exercise in harnessing nostalgia for innovation. The first animated film from the director Yonfan is a deeply eccentric chronicle of a forbidden affair in 1960s Hong Kong, as the spirit of Mao Zedong’s anti-imperialist, communist revolution arrives in what was still a British colony. Fan Ziming, a beguiling English literature student, becomes embroiled in a knotty love triangle between Mrs. Yu, a divorced Taiwanese exile and former revolutionary who now deals in luxury goods, and her daughter Meiling, a nubile 18-year-old student taking English lessons from Ziming.At times, “No. 7 Cherry Lane” unfolds as a hallucinatory daydream, flowing with starry-eyed voice-over narration: “Look how the golden years flowed away,” reads the opening title card, as the narrator describes the time as an “era of prosperity amidst simplicity.” The Hong Kong of 1967 is rendered in rich detail through pencil on rice paper, with radiant color blooming onscreen, illustrations of bustling streets and movie theaters constituting the film’s universe. There are cerebral, erudite dialogues about Proust, French art films and classic Chinese literature that drive the liaisons at its center. The animation is often slow-moving — figures shuffle stiffly across the screen as they muse about art and philosophy, a choice that may challenge viewers accustomed to more fluid gestures. But the approach contributes to the film’s thematic commitment to nostalgia and adds a quiet elegance and slow-paced intimacy to each scene.
      Fortunately, “No. 7 Cherry Lane” transcends pure wistfulness or intellectual indulgence. The film embraces a lovely surreal sensibility that bleeds through all of its details: puffs of smoke wafting off a theater screen into the characters’ world; a clowder of cats explaining Hong Kong’s floor-numbering practices; effervescent, jarring synth pop soundtracking the peak of a violent protest. These details seem minor, but they infuse an otherwise heady film with heart and levity. The movie’s bizarre and sexually explicit dream sequences, which include the abduction of a Taoist nun and Ziming being pleasured by a cat, further illustrate the film’s enigmatic quality — but they also prevent it from becoming a simple trip down memory lane. Consider this film a master class in world-building, a bewildering but poignant dream — one that will leave you with plenty of burning questions.No. 7 Cherry LaneNot rated. In Mandarin, Cantonese, French and Shanghainese, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes. Watch on Criterion Channel. More

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      Robert Sacchi, Who Played Bogart Again and Again, Dies at 89

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      He was a hard-working actor and not merely a doppelgänger. But his claim to fame on film, TV and the stage was that he looked like Bogie.Lon Chaney was immortalized in a 1957 film as the “Man of a Thousand Faces.” Robert Sacchi could capitalize on only one: his conspicuous resemblance to Humphrey Bogart. He played it for all it was worth.That similitude projected him into a circumscribed but lucrative career that included the title role in the 1980 film “The Man With Bogart’s Face” and the part of Bogie himself in touring theatrical companies of Woody Allen’s comedy “Play It Again, Sam.”Mr. Sacchi died on June 23 in a hospital in Sherman Oaks, Calif., his daughter, Trish Sacchi Bertisch said. He was 89.As early as the 1940s, the decade of “The Maltese Falcon,” “Casablanca” and “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” when Mr. Sacchi (pronounced SACK-ee) was attending Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx, friends and neighbors noticed that he was a ringer for Bogart.Still, it would take more than two decades for him to receive notice as the irreverent, snarling and brusque actor’s look-alike. That career began in the early 1970s — first on the road in “Play It Again, Sam,” the story of a man who gets romantic advice from an imaginary Bogart, and then as the title character in “The Man With Bogart’s Face,” a comedy about a private eye named Sam Marlow (his first and last names were shared with detectives Bogart had played) who undergoes plastic surgery to look like Bogart.Adapted from Andrew J. Fenady’s 1977 book of the same name, the movie also featured several performers, including Yvonne De Carlo, Mike Mazurki and George Raft (in his final film), who years earlier had co-starred with Bogart himself.Reviewing “The Man With Bogart’s Face” (also known as “Sam Marlow, Private Eye”) in The New York Times, Tom Buckley wrote that Mr. Sacchi, “who has been doing a Bogart look-alike turn on college campuses, shows considerable acting skill in the title role, although his hopes for future employment in films would seem to be limited.”Humphrey Bogart in a publicity photo for the 1945 movie “Conflict.”Warner Bros., via Getty ImagesRobert Sacchi in a 1981 episode of “Fantasy Island.”Walt Disney Television, via Getty ImagesHe managed nonetheless to find employment as Bogart: in a one-man show called “Bogey’s Back,” in television commercials, in a Phil Collins music video and in a voice-over for an episode of the HBO horror anthology series “Tales From the Crypt” in 1995.Robert Patsy Sacchi was born on March 27, 1932, in Rome and immigrated with his parents, Alberto and Marietta (D’Urbano) Sacchi, to New York when he was a baby. His father was a carpenter.After graduating from high school, he earned a degree in business and finance from Iona College in New Rochelle, N.Y., and a master’s degree from New York University.In addition to his daughter Ms. Bertisch, he is survived by his wife, Angela de Hererra; a son, the producer John Sacchi; six children from an earlier marriage, Robert Sacchi Jr., Barbara Cohen, Felicia Carroll, Maria Tolstonog, Lisa Osborne and Anthony Sacchi; his brother, Mario Sacchi; and three grandchildren.Mr. Sacchi had some success in parts not related to Bogart, including roles in three 1972 films: “The French Sex Murders,” “Pulp” and “Across 110th Street.” He had some non-acting success as well: In the 1980s, he recorded a rap single, “Jungle Queen,” which was a hit in Germany, and he worked on a book with the boxer Willie Pep about slum children who grew up to achieve fame in the ring.Yet he would remain best known for how he looked. His 5-foot-8 frame, brooding eyes, furrowed brow and craggy face cried out for a famous movie line to be rewritten as “Here’s lookin’ at me, kid.”He accepted that it was his face that gained him attention. But as a teenager, at least, he would have chosen a different one.“I mean, I never thought Bogie was too terrific-looking,” Mr. Sacchi once said. “Like most kids at the time, I wanted to look like Gregory Peck.” More

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      ‘The Tomorrow War’ Review: Future Schlock

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      Chris Pratt leaps to 2051 to save our planet from aliens in this hyperventilating sci-fi spectacle.It is never good news when a phalanx of armed, balaclava-wearing dudes falls from the sky in the middle of a World Cup soccer game.“We are you 30 years in the future,” their leader announces to the stunned crowd. “You are our last hope.” Heeding the call is a high school biology teacher named Dan Forester (Chris Pratt). Dan has a doting wife (Betty Gilpin), an adoring young daughter (Ryan Kiera Armstrong) and — because action heroes rarely embark on wholesale slaughter without some unhealed psychological hurt — the requisite estranged father (J.K. Simmons).Dan also believes that his life has a special purpose, and so does “The Tomorrow War,” Chris McKay’s time-travel spectacle in which clichés rain as fast and as furiously as bullets. In 2051, an alien civilization is in the process of gobbling up humanity, requiring a worldwide draft of present-day citizens who will “jump” into the future to join the war effort. This process — which resembles the Rapture, except the destination is hell instead of heaven — dumps the terrified conscripts on a post-apocalyptic Miami beach. From there, Dan and a handful of confreres (including an amusing Sam Richardson and Mary Lynn Rajskub) battle a welter of special effects to reach an undersea laboratory where a military scientist (Yvonne Strahovski) is developing an alien-fighting toxin.Sucking ideas from across the sci-fi spectrum — “Alien,” “Edge of Tomorrow,” “Starship Troopers,” “Jumper,” I could go on — Zach Dean’s screenplay grows more ludicrous by the minute. People are launched into the mayhem without basic training (Richardson’s character can’t even load a gun). And when saving the world requires the assistance of a volcanologist, the sole option is a 12-year-old boy. (Dean does deserve credit, though, for a plot that both hints at global warming and insists scientists will be our salvation.)As for the extraterrestrials, we’re almost an hour in before we see one: Bleached, tentacled and maximally toothy, they’re so exhaustingly aggressive it’s a relief to learn that, like the Creator, they’re only active for six days a week. That’s about as long as this 140-minute assault feels, with its crude dialogue (“We are food, and they are hungry”), overexcited score and characters so formulaic they might as well be cereal-box figurines. “The Tomorrow War” is betting its flash will blind us to its vacuity. And why not? It worked for “Avatar.”The Tomorrow WarRated PG-13 for death, destruction and alien abuse. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. Watch on Amazon. More