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What to Watch: Music DocumentariesDavid RenardVibing and streaming 🎧[embedded content]‘Amazing Grace’ (2018)“This thing has got dozens of Grade-A, laugh-out-loud, dry-your-eyes, stand-up-and-scream images,” Wesley Morris wrote in The Times about this look at the recording of Aretha Franklin’s biggest-selling album.Where to watch More

In 1966, a pouty-mouthed Udo Kier made his movie debut in a zippy short called “Road to Saint Tropez,” playing a gigolo who has a fling with an older woman. Their day at Baie des Anges is a romp, but by the time they get to the film’s title beach town, he breaks her heart.This summer, Kier is again in a movie that was shot by the water. But it’s nowhere near the French Riviera, and he’s no lady killer.In “Swan Song,” a new movie from the writer-director Todd Stephens, Kier plays Mr. Pat, a flamboyant former hairdresser languishing in a grim nursing home outside Sandusky, Ohio, a working-class city on the Lake Erie shore. With the promise of money, he hitchhikes into town to fulfill the wish of his recently deceased ex-client Rita (Linda Evans): that he style her corpse’s hair and makeup for her open-casket funeral.While roaming Sandusky, Mr. Pat crosses paths with Dee Dee, a protégée turned rival (Jennifer Coolidge), and Dustin, Rita’s gay grandson (Michael Urie). But here’s the thing: Rita is a “demanding Republican monster,” as Mr. Pat sasses, and he’s torn over whether to “make a dead bitch look human.”When it came to the role, Kier said he “had no fear whatsoever,” a tombstone-worthy way to describe his own career, which has been defined by unreserved performances as outré characters for renegade directors.“I was looking forward to making the movie because I don’t ever want to say: I can’t do that,” he said. “I would go as far as to say it was like a dream project for me.”Kier as a retired hairdresser in the film. He said he “had no fear whatsoever” about the role.Chris Stephens/Magnolia Pictures“Swan Song,” now in theaters and on demand starting Aug. 13, completes Stephens’s indie Ohio Trilogy, which began with writing “Edge of Seventeen” (1998) and co-writing and directing “Gypsy 83” (2001), stories of Gen X gay boys itching to leave Sandusky for New York. With Mr. Pat, the trilogy shifts its spotlight to an older gay man who built a life in Ohio.Stephens said he spent more than a year trying to cast the right actor to play a Stonewall-generation peacock who favors fancy fedoras and mint-green leisure suiting. Then a casting director brought up Kier.“I hadn’t thought of him because he’s German,” said Stephens, who based the character on Pat Pitsenbarger, a hairdresser and drag performer he encountered as a teenager exploring his own sexuality in Sandusky’s gay circles in the ’80s. “I had always thought of him in villain roles. But on the other hand, he’s so amazingly fabulous. Mr. Pat had big blue eyes like Udo. As soon as I met him, I knew he was Mr. Pat.”Over five decades as an actor, Kier has put those ice-blue eyes to provocative use as a vampire for Paul Morrissey (“Blood for Dracula” in 1974), a psychiatrist for Dario Argento (“Suspiria” in 1977), a john for Gus Van Sant (“My Own Private Idaho” in 1991), and a demon and a baby for Lars von Trier (“The Kingdom” series in the ’90s). He was Madonna’s dungeon companion in her 1992 book “Sex.”Still to come for the prolific actor are the dark comedy “My Neighbor, Adolf,” in which he plays a man suspected of being Hitler, and a recurring role in the second season of the Amazon Prime series “Hunters,” about Nazi hunters.With “Swan Song,” Kier scored a rarity for an actor at 76: a juicy leading role. Over the phone from his home in Palm Springs, Calif., Kier took the conversation in multitudes of directions. These are edited excerpts.How does it feel to have a leading role?In all the films I did, from “Blade” to “Shadow of the Vampire,” I always had — I hate that word supporting — I had smaller roles. This is the first time after “Dracula” and “[Flesh for] Frankenstein” that I played the lead. I’ve always wanted to play a villain in a James Bond film, but somehow that didn’t happen.Kier opposite Dalila Di Lazzaro in “Flesh for Frankenstein” Compagnia Cinematografica ChampionTell me about shooting with Linda Evans.In Germany, they called “Dallas” and “Dynasty” street cleaners because when they were on television, nobody was in the street. [Laughs] I first met her in a restaurant the night before we were going to shoot, and she was so normal. I was surprised because she wanted to rehearse and rehearse and rehearse. I liked that.When we were shooting, we were real. There was no acting. I learned over the years that the good actors are the nicest people. It’s only the insecure who complain all the time. Linda is one of the nicest.How much did Sandusky influence your making of the film?Everything was wonderful, easy. The main street became for me like the studio at Paramount. I wanted to make the movie as chronologically as possible. Since we started in the retirement home, I slept there alone without a camera and got a feeling for the corridors and for the bathrooms. Then I had an apartment in Sandusky.Was there a gay man from your past who inspired your performance?There were many. There were still friends of the real Pat around, and they told me how he’d hold his cigarette. There were also little things over my life that I have seen in clubs or privately, how people, when they sit down, put one leg over the other just so. But I also wanted to go away from clichés. I did not want to say, “Yes, girl.”Do you identify anywhere under the L.G.B.T.Q. umbrella?When I was a young man in Germany, if two men lived together and the neighbors could hear erotic noises, they would call the police and the people would be arrested. I think it’s wonderful what has been achieved everywhere, especially in America.“I’ve always wanted to play a villain in a James Bond film, but somehow that didn’t happen,” Kier said.Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesYou’ve worked with some true gay auteurs, including Fassbinder. What’s your favorite memory of him?I met Fassbinder when he was 15, and I was 16, in Cologne in a working-class bar with a mix of truck drivers and secretaries. I went to London to work and learn English. One day I bought a magazine with his face on it calling him a genius and an alcoholic, and I thought, that’s Rainer from the bar.When I went back to Germany, he offered me a role in “The Stationmaster’s Wife” and that was our first work together. We made a lot of movies together. We also lived together. Somewhere it says that we had an affair, but that’s a lie. He was the only director who captured how Germany was after the war.Is there a film of yours people might not know about but you wish they’d discover?I did “House of Boys,” a very important film for the gay community. It’s set [in 1984] in a nightclub in Amsterdam, which my character runs. The boys are there doing stripping, and I come out like Marlene Dietrich. The film is important because AIDS was coming, and nobody knew what AIDS was. I think it’s something people should see.In “Swan Song” and in real life, there’s a generational divide between older gay men who remember the worst years of AIDS and younger men who don’t.Cookie Mueller, my good friend, died of AIDS. I also lost many friends in Germany. In front of the camera, I had that in mind.Have you thought about what you’d like to look like when you die?[Laughs] I don’t care. I guess if someone said that I had seven hours to live, I would have a party with wonderful drinks. After seven hours, I would jump in my pool and not move anymore. People would say, “He’s so good! Look at how long he can hold his breath!”The problem would be if I was 85 and I had no more hair. I would find somebody to polish the top of my head. More

Hideaki Anno is concluding the story of Shinji Ikari and company in a film due on Amazon this month but says, “There might come a time when I meet them again.”Finally.Hideaki Anno’s “Evangelion: 3.0 + 1.0: Thrice Upon a Time,” which begins streaming on Amazon Prime on Aug. 13, is the film that anime fans have awaited for 25 years. The fourth and final theatrical feature in the “rebuild” of his landmark 1995-96 television series, “Neon Genesis Evangelion,” brings the epic adventure to a definitive conclusion.A compelling, complex work that mixes mecha battles with apocalyptic Christian symbols, Jewish mysticism and teenage angst, “Evangelion” (pronounced eh-van-GEH-lee-on, with a hard G) ranks among the most widely discussed TV series in anime history. Its influence is extensive and includes Japanese animated fantasies and Guillermo del Toro’s 2013 sci-fi adventure “Pacific Rim.” And fans continue to debate its significance, subtext and details.“My influence on other creators isn’t something I think about when I’m working on a film,” Anno told me in an interview. “I decide what to make based on what I’m best suited for and what interests me most at the time. The ‘Evangelion’ project repeatedly came up, so I made the new theatrical movies. I don’t think that kind of opportunity will occur again.”In the series, which takes place in the not-too-distant future, humanity is locked in a mortal struggle with bizarre, staggeringly powerful creatures known as Angels. The only effective weapons against them are the Evangelions or Evas, gigantic cyborgs guided by psychic teenagers. The hero is Shinji Ikari, an alienated 14-year-old who is drafted by his brutal father to pilot the Eva 01.“Evangelion: 3.0 + 1.0: Thrice Upon a Time” concludes the saga begun in 1995.Hideaki Anno/Khara, via Amazon Prime VideoDespite its popularity, “Evangelion” never had a satisfactory ending. The original series failed to resolve the intricate plot, with its theological and ontological overtones. Shortly before “Evangelion” aired, Anno wrote that he had created it after four years of severe depression when he was “a wreck, unable to do anything” and that “the story has not yet ended in my mind.”“I don’t know what will become of Shinji or (the other characters), or where they will go,” he wrote.Anno was clearly not satisfied, as he continued to look for a conclusion, recutting the last episodes and reworking them in the feature “Death & Rebirth” (1997) and again in the second 1997 feature “The End of Evangelion.”In 2002, Anno announced plans for a four-feature “rebuild,” a reimagining of the story, unconstrained by the financial and technological limits he had originally faced. “Evangelion: 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone” (2007) was a flamboyant retelling of the first six television episodes. “Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance” (2009) and “Evangelion: 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo” (2012) took the characters and story in completely new directions. Nine years later, “Thrice Upon a Time” brings the saga to a surprisingly upbeat conclusion.Speaking from Tokyo via Zoom and a translator, Anno said, “For the rebuild series, I intended the first ‘Evangelion’ movie to be similar to the TV series, the second would gradually change the story, and third and fourth would be totally different. From the first, I didn’t intend to do the same thing as the TV series.”“My influence on other creators isn’t something I think about when I’m working on a film,” Anno said.Hideaki Anno/Khara, via Amazon Prime VideoThese four films showcase Anno’s skill at using new computer-graphic technology to create more powerful iterations of his original visions. In the TV series, when troops attacked the Angel Ramiel, it destroyed the humans and their weapons in a series of unremarkable explosions; in “You Are (Not) Alone,” the audience can almost feel the heat when the Angel reduces the tanks and missiles to glowing slag.In the rebuild, Anno also delves deeper into the fragile psyche of his flawed, traumatized hero and the eccentric personalities around him. When Anno described his approach to the characters, he spoke with an intensity that crossed linguistic boundaries.“In animation, nothing is real. But I wanted to bring more of a sense of reality into this made-up world — I wanted to make the characters more human,” he explained. “There’s a gap between what people say in real life and what they truly mean. In animation, unless the characters are intentionally lying, they always say what they mean. I wanted to reverse that: When the characters in ‘Evangelion’ speak, they don’t necessarily say what they mean. I wanted to add this human behavior to animation.”“People feel Shinji is an unusual hero,” he continued. “I think that’s due to the sense of reality I brought, drawing on my experience and knowledge. But Shinji and the other characters are not just a reflection of me; they include elements of the personalities of all the artists on the creative team.”The hero, Shinji Ikari, in the television production.Khara/Project Eva“Neon Genesis Evangelion” is among the most influential anime series ever.Khara/Project EvaThe original “Evangelion” was a huge hit that helped reverse a slump in the Japanese animation industry: When the final episode was broadcast in March 1996, more than 10 percent of all televisions in Japan were tuned to it. “Evangelion” remains popular, with hundreds of millions of dollars in sales of videos and related merchandise. The newer features continued that success: “Thrice Upon a Time” opened in Japan on March 3 and played for more than 135 days in theaters there, earning more than 10.22 billion yen (about $93 million) — despite the pandemic.Reflecting on that continued popularity, Anno said, “As a creator, I want to make things that are entertaining but have depth. I didn’t want our show to be some escape-from-reality type of entertainment, I wanted people who watched it to feel encouragement to live their own lives.”Anno is shifting to live action for his next project. In April, the Toei Company announced he would direct “Shin Kamen Rider,” part of the 50th anniversary celebration of that popular superhero franchise. It’s planned for release in March 2023.When asked how it felt to bid farewell to “Evangelion” after more than 25 years, Anno concluded, “I don’t feel a need to see Shinji and the other characters any time soon. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to see them ever again: There might come a time when I meet them again.” More

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association revised its bylaws to expand its leadership, diversify its membership and ban gifts.Following months of criticism that led to the cancellation of next year’s Golden Globe Awards telecast by NBC, the group that hands out the awards, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, announced Thursday that it was instituting a series of reforms.The group, a nonprofit, adopted a new set of bylaws that are aimed at revamping its leadership, increasing and diversifying its membership and stabilizing it to ensure the future of the lucrative awards program.The association, a relatively small group of roughly 85 journalists who vote on the Golden Globes, has long been scrutinized over questions about its ethics, finances and journalistic credentials. But this year, following a Los Angeles Times investigation, a lawsuit and a growing outcry from the movie and television industries, NBC canceled the 2022awards telecast, making swift changes necessary for the organization’s survival.The group said Thursday that the membership vote in favor of the new bylaws was quite a bit higher than the two thirds required.The rules call for expanding the group’s board of directors to include people from outside the organization. The association will also bring on a new chief executive as well as heads of finance, human resources and a chief diversity officer.The reforms also cleared away several of the barriers to membership the group had long had in place. For years, critics said that the association’s membership application process was opaque, biased and generally meant to keep most people out. But the association said it would now allow any journalist who would like to join to apply, and that new members will be selected by a credentials committee that will be comprised mainly of nonmembers.All existing members — some of whom have had their journalistic credentials questioned over the years — will need to reapply to remain, the organization said. All members will be required to sign a new code of conduct, and will not be allowed to accept promotional materials or gifts from people associated with movies and television programs.“Three months ago, we made a promise to commit to transformational change and with this vote we kept the last and most significant promise in reimagining the H.F.P.A. and our role in the industry,” Ali Sar, the group’s current board president, said in a statement. “All of these promised reforms can serve as industry benchmarks and allow us to once again partner meaningfully with Hollywood moving forward.”Over the last several months, the association has gotten input on how it should change from various stakeholders, and the reforms announced on Thursday did not include some of the bolder proposals put forth, such as creating a spinoff, for-profit Golden Globes company.It also did not set specific targets for enlarging its membership or diversifying its ranks, though officials have said they aim to increase membership by at least 50 percent. (The group has come under fire for one particular finding of The Los Angeles Times report: That although the group has more than 80 members, none of them are Black.)Some of the association’s most important business partners reacted positively to the changes that were announced.In a statement, NBC said it was “encouraged by the passage of the amended bylaws” and called it “a positive step forward” that “signals the H.F.P.A.’s willingness to do the work necessary for meaningful change.”The statement did not discuss the status of a 2023 Golden Globes telecast.Dick Clark Productions, the decades-long producer of the Golden Globes, similarly said it applauded the adoption of the new bylaws, calling the policy revisions “important” and expressing optimism about next steps.“We look forward to seeing continued urgency, dedication and positive change,” the production company said, “in order to create a more diverse, equitable, inclusive and transparent future.”Brooks Barnes contributed reporting. More

He more or less stumbled into a career as an actor, but it proved to be a long and prolific one, on film, on television and especially on the stage.Arthur French, a prolific and acclaimed (if relatively unsung) actor who was a founding member of the Negro Ensemble Company, died on July 24 in Manhattan. He was 89.His death, in a hospital, was announced by his son, the playwright Arthur W. French III, in a post on Facebook.Mr. French more or less stumbled into his theatrical career. After abandoning early plans to become a preacher, he aspired to be a disc jockey, but when he showed up at the D.J. school he had hoped to attend, he found that it had closed after bribery investigations began into the radio payola scandal of the late 1950s.Fortunately, the Dramatic Workshop, where Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler taught, was located in the same building, and Mr. French signed up for classes. He was coached by the actress Peggy Feury; he caught the attention of Maxwell Glanville’s American Negro Theater; and his career as a supporting actor was born.Mr. French made his professional debut Off Broadway in “Raisin’ Hell in the Son,” a spoof of Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun,” at the Provincetown Playhouse in 1962. Three years later he appeared in Douglas Turner Ward’s “Day of Absence,” which spawned the Negro Ensemble Company. He first appeared on Broadway in Melvin Van Peebles’s musical “Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death” in 1971.“That’s when I decided to quit my Social Service job,” he said in a recent interview with the arts journal Gallery & Studio. He had been working days as a clerk with New York City’s welfare department.Mr. French appeared in Broadway revivals of “The Iceman Cometh” (1973), “Death of a Salesman” (1975) and “You Can’t Take It With You” (1983). His films included Spike Lee’s “Malcolm X” (1992) and “Crooklyn” (1994). Among his many television appearances were three episodes of “Law & Order,” two of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” and one of “Law & Order: Criminal Intent.”Reviewers often called attention to his sonorous voice and the civility of his performances; his notices in The New York Times were consistently positive. Reviewing his portrayal of Bynum, a “conjure man,” in a 1996 revival of August Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” at the Henry Street Settlement, Vincent Canby called it “a variation on the seer, sometimes the idiot savant, who turns up with regularity in Mr. Wilson’s work but never as fully realized as the character is here.”When Mr. French was seen in “Checkmates” at the same theater that year, Lawrence Van Gelder wrote in The Times, “The real treats are Ruby Dee and Arthur French as the Coopers, gifted old pros who tickle the funny bone and touch the heart.”He occasionally directed, most recently a 2010 production of Steve Carter’s 1990 play “Pecong,” a retelling of the Medea story set in the Caribbean, at the Off Off Broadway National Black Theater.Mr. French taught at the HB Studio in New York. He received an Obie Award for sustained excellence of performance in 1997 and a Lucille Lortel Award for his supporting role in August Wilson’s “Two Trains Running” in 2007. In 2015, he was awarded a Paul Robeson Citation from the Actors’ Equity Association and the Actor’s Equity Foundation for his “dedication to freedom of expression and respect for human dignity.”Mr. French, right, with Frankie Faison in the Signature Theater Company’s 2006 production of August Wilson’s “Two Trains Running.” Mr. French won a Lucille Lortel Award for his performance.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesArthur Wellesley French Jr. was born on Nov. 6, 1931, in Harlem to immigrants from Saint Vincent and the Grenadines in the Caribbean. His father, a former seaman, died young; Arthur himself survived a bout with asthma. His mother, Ursilla Idonia (Ollivierre) French, was a garment workers’ union organizer, and Arthur helped her earn extra money by embroidering material she took home.His mother encouraged him to take music lessons, which led to a piano recital at Carnegie Hall. He attended Morris High School in the Bronx before transferring to the Bronx High School of Science; after graduating, he attended Brooklyn College.In 1961, he married the singer Antoinette Williams. She died before him. In addition to their son, he is survived by a daughter, Antonia Willow French, and two grandchildren.In the Gallery & Studio interview, Mr. French was asked what he had learned about himself during his 50-year career.“I like the world of fantasy,” he replied. “And my father told me, ‘Learn something so well that you won’t have to lift up anything heavier than a pencil.’” More

Netflix in the United States is losing dozens of titles this month. These are the best among them.There’s a little something for everyone in this month’s selection of titles leaving Netflix in the United States, including indie dramedies, family features and crime pictures, as well as the best of the recent James Bond flicks. Check out these 12 titles before they disappear. (Dates reflect the final day a title is available.)‘Nightcrawler’ (Aug. 9)The screenwriter Dan Gilroy made his directorial debut with this disturbing 2014 thriller. Inspired by the work of Weegee, the influential photographer of New York City street scenes of the 1940s, Gilroy penned the story of a contemporary news videographer (played to chilling perfection by Jake Gyllenhaal) whose pursuit of grisly crime scene footage takes him into morally dubious territory. Rene Russo is in top form as a news director who doesn’t quite realize how dangerous her employee is, while Gyllenhaal does some of his finest acting, unnervingly personifying the slippery slope from ambitious go-getter to out-and-out sociopath.Stream it here.‘Safety Not Guaranteed’ (Aug. 12)Before they were tapped to reboot the “Jurassic Park” franchise, the director Colin Trevorrow and the screenwriter Derek Connolly crafted a much smaller-scale fusion of science fiction and human drama. Aubrey Plaza stars as a young journalism intern who responds to a classified listing for a time-traveling partner, figuring the delusional man behind the ad (Mark Duplass) could make for an entertaining profile. But her cynicism slowly dissolves in the face of his earnestness — and her observations of the strange activities that are fueling his paranoia. The filmmakers find just the right tonal mixture of character comedy, low-rent sci-fi and genuine warmth, while Plaza and Duplass create unexpectedly convincing chemistry.Stream it here.Michael Keaton as the fast-food entrepreneur Ray Kroc in “The Founder.”The Weinstein Company‘The Founder’ (Aug. 20)Michael Keaton is phenomenal in this biographical portrait of the McDonald’s mastermind Ray Kroc, using his trademark quicksilver wit and endless charisma at the service of a character who is slowly and counterintuitively revealed to be a bit of a snake. His Kroc is a rather desperate hustler, envisioning himself as a Horatio Alger protagonist just one step away from his big break, which he finally finds in the efficient, assembly-line burger stand of brothers Maurice and Richard McDonald (John Carroll Lynch and Nick Offerman, both excellent). But his dreams for the chain are bigger than its creators’, a bump in the typical rise-to-success narrative, which creates fascinating and fruitful thematic tension.Stream it here.‘Casino Royale’ (Aug. 30)The James Bond franchise had hit a bumpy stretch in the mid-2000s, as audiences turned away from the increasingly silly shenanigans of adventures like “Die Another Day” for the grittier superspy stylings of the “Bourne” movies. So the Bond producers brought back the director Martin Campbell — who had previously rescued the series from obsolescence with the 1995 jump-start “Goldeneye” — to reboot Bond with an origin story. Daniel Craig made his first appearance in the role, complementing the character’s signature debonair charisma and offhand wit with genuine danger and darkness, while Eva Green impresses as the woman who made Bond do what he seldom would again: fall in love.Stream it here.‘Stranger Than Fiction’ (Aug. 30)Will Ferrell revealed he was capable of more than dumb-guy slapstick with his leading role in this clever comedy-drama from the director Marc Forster (“Monster’s Ball”). Emma Thompson stars as a superstar novelist who finds herself struggling to complete her latest tome; it seems her protagonist (played with naïve, wistful charm by Ferrell) has, somehow, become aware of his fictional status and of the death his creator has planned for him. It’s an ingenious premise, but it’s no mere intellectual exercise. The screenwriter Zach Helm explores the rich emotional implications of the scenario, forging an unlikely but affecting relationship between Ferrell and a marvelous Maggie Gyllenhaal.Stream it here.‘Chinatown’ (Aug. 31)The neo-noir films of the 1970s, and particularly the era’s plethora of private eye movies, took advantage of the temperature of the times; in a decade where distrust of authority and institutions was at an all-time high, it’s not surprising the unshakable moral ethos of the dedicated detective were again in vogue. Few films reanimated the golden age of noir as expertly as Roman Polanski’s 1974 best picture nominee, which also took full advantage of the shifts in tolerance of adult subject matter to include the kinds of plot twists earlier films could only hint at. That tension, coupled with the beauty of John A. Alonzo’s cinematography and the stellar performances of Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway and John Huston, resulted in one of the finest films of the decade.Stream it here.Reese Witherspoon in “Election.”Paramount Pictures‘Election’ (Aug. 31)Reese Witherspoon turned what could have been a one-dimensional caricature into one of the most iconic performances of her era in this whip-smart satire of small-town life, political ambition and middle-age malaise from the co-writer and director Alexander Payne (“Sideways”). Witherspoon stars as Tracy Flick, a zealous high school student whose election to class president seems a foregone conclusion until the student government supervisor (Matthew Broderick) decides the front-runner could use a little competition. Broderick’s casting is a masterstroke, allowing the viewer to reimagine Ferris Bueller as a feckless school administrator, while Payne and his co-writer, Jim Taylor (adapting the novel by Tom Perrotta), nimbly weave a tale that plays both as small-scale drama and big-picture allegory.Stream it here.‘The Girl Next Door’ (Aug. 31)The brief, “American Pie”-prompted return of the teen sex comedy was coming to an end by the time this entry from Luke Greenfield hit theaters, to middling box office and missed reviews, in 2004. But it found an enthusiastic audience on home video and streaming services, drawn less to its ludicrous plot — in which a high school senior falls for his sexy new neighbor only to discover she’s hiding from a past in adult films — than to the genuine sweetness at its center. Elisha Cuthbert and Emile Hirsch convey a bond that goes beyond mere physical chemistry; their characters seem genuinely to like and care about each other, and the strength of that bond gives the film an unexpected emotional spine.Stream it here.‘Hot Rod’ (Aug. 31)The Lonely Island comedy trio — composed of Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone — made the leap from viral videos to the big screen with this 2007 comedy. Samberg stars as Rod Kimble, who fancies himself as the second coming of Evel Knievel but is closer to the victims on “America’s Funniest Home Videos”; the movie chronicles his attempts to become a big-deal daredevil, primarily as a means of taunting his toxic stepfather (a game Ian McShane). The semi-surrealist approach of the Lonely Islanders puts this one a cut above the typical dimwitted ’00s comedy, as does the supporting cast, which also includes Sissy Spacek, Isla Fisher, Danny McBride and Bill Hader.Stream it here.‘Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events’ (Aug. 31)Over the course of three seasons, Netflix turned Daniel Handler’s series of children’s novels into one of their most entertaining series, a blackly comic tale of villainy and perseverance. But the Snicket novels had been adapted once before, in this 2004 film from the director Brad Silberling (“Casper”), with Jim Carrey as the dastardly Count Olaf. Neither version detracts from the other; the film and the series work in concert, creating a similarly stylized world with a correspondingly delicious sense of dark humor.Stream it here.Miss Piggy and Kermit in the 2011 film “The Muppets.”Scott Garfield/Walt Disney Pictures‘The Muppets’ (Aug. 31)The Muppet movie franchise was in a pretty sorry state when it was brought back to joyful life in this 2011 feature from the director James Bobin and the screenwriters Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller (who got the gig when their previous film, the decidedly adult-oriented romantic comedy “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” included an uproarious puppet musical sequence). Segel also stars as a likable small-town guy whose visit to Hollywood with his fiancé (Amy Adams) and decidedly Muppet-like little brother results in an emergency reunion of the long-disbanded “Muppet Show” gang. Bobin, Segel and Stoller put together all the right pieces — winking humor, catchy tunes, a parade of cheerful guest stars — to create the best Muppet movie in decades.Stream it here.‘Road to Perdition’ (Aug. 31)Tom Hanks found a rare opportunity to explore his darker side in this 2002 adaptation of the graphic novel by Max Allan Collins (itself inspired by the classic manga “Lone Wolf and Cub”). Hanks stars as Michael Sullivan Sr., a Depression-era enforcer for the Irish Mob who must flee his Illinois home with his 12-year-old son when he crosses the erratic son (Daniel Craig) of his longtime boss and father figure (an Oscar-nominated Paul Newman, in one of his final roles). The director Sam Mendes re-teams with his “American Beauty” cinematographer Conrad L. Hall to create a picture that’s both gorgeous and melancholy, pushing past the surface pleasures of its period genre setting with timeless themes of family, morality and mortality.Stream it here.Also leaving: “The Big Lebowski,” “The Departed,” “Nacho Libre,” “The Manchurian Candidate (2004),” “The Social Network,” “Superbad,” “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” (all Aug. 31). More

In her new documentary, Lucy Walker looks at California’s apocalyptic fires and finds more than the usual smoke and politics.A few times a year, I pull out our HEPA filter and begin reassuring worried friends and family members that, no, the city of Los Angeles, where I live, isn’t burning — or at least not yet. The air quality here is almost always poor, of course, but I tend to switch on the air filter only when the smoke comes, filling the basin and darkening the sky.“The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself,” Joan Didion wrote in 1967. It was two years after the Watts uprising, but Didion wasn’t writing about race and reckoning, she was creating a poetically apocalyptic image of the city and, by extension, California. Decades later, she returned to the topic, using a phrase — “fire season” — that now feels obsolete. In the age of enduring drought and climate change, the wildfires never seem to go out in the West, where so many burned in July that the smoke reached the East Coast.In “Bring Your Own Brigade,” the director Lucy Walker doesn’t simply look at the fires; she investigates and tries to understand them. It’s a tough, smart, impressive movie, and one of its virtues is that Walker, a British transplant to Los Angeles, doesn’t seem to have figured it all out before she started shooting. She comes across as open, curious and rightly concerned, but her approach — the way she looks and listens, and how she shapes the material — gives the movie the quality of discovery. (She’s also pleasantly free of the boosterism or the smug hostility that characterizes so much coverage of California.)Specific and universal, harrowing and hopeful, “Bring Your Own Brigade” opens on a world in flames. It’s the present day and everywhere — in Australia, Greece, the United States — fires are burning. Ignited by lightning strikes, downed power lines and a long, catastrophic history of human error, fire is swallowing acres by the mile, destroying homes and neighborhoods, and killing every living thing in its path. It’s terrifying and, if you can make it past the movie’s heartbreaking early images, most notably of a piteously singed and whimpering koala, you soon understand that your terror is justified.To tell the story of this global conflagration, Walker has narrowed in on California, turning her sights on a pair of megafires that began burning at opposite ends of the state on Nov. 8, 2018. (There was also a mass shooting that same day.) One started in Malibu, the popular if modestly populated (about 12,000 people) beach city that snakes along 21 miles of the state’s southern coastline and runs adjacent to a major highway; the other, deadlier fire ignited near Paradise, a town in a lushly, alarmingly forested pocket of Northern California and which, at the time, had more than double Malibu’s population.The contrasts between the areas prove instructive, as do their similarities. As Walker explains, Paradise is tucked into a Republican-leaning part of the state (though its county went for Joe Biden), while Malibu sits in reliably blue Los Angeles County. In 2019, the median property value in Paradise was $223,400 (per the website Data USA); in Malibu, it was $2 million, the city’s Gidget-era surf shacks supplanted by mansions ringed with imported palm trees and incongruously bright green lawns. But, as Walker finds, despite their demographic differences, each area has a history of going up in flames.Drawing on both archival and original footage — including some extremely distressing cellphone imagery and 911 calls — Walker is on the ground soon after the infernos erupt, riding shotgun with a fire battalion chief in Southern California and interviewing residents who managed to get out of Paradise alive. She jumps around in time a bit, shifting forward and back as she surveys the terrain, fills in the backdrop and introduces a range of survivors, heroes, scientists and activists. She seeks answers and keeps seeking, building on regional contrasts to create a larger global picture. (Three cinematographers shot the movie and three editors seamlessly pieced it together.)The story Walker tells is deeply troubling and often infuriating, and stretches back past 1542, the year that the Iberian explorer Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo dropped anchor in an inlet now known as the Los Angeles harbor region. He named the area La Bahia de las Fumas, or the Bay of Smokes. For thousands of years, native peoples up and down the West Coast had built campfires, but also used fire to productively manage the land. In the centuries since, fire management has come to mean fire suppression at any cost. The problem is, as Walker methodically details, fire suppression isn’t working: The top six largest California wildfires in the past 89 years have all happened since 2018.That’s bleak, but I’m grateful to Walker for not leaving me feeling entirely hopeless about the future of my home and — because this movie is fundamentally about our planet — yours as well. Climate change is here, there’s no question. But, she argues, we can do much more than curl up in a fetal position. The problem, as always, is people. And when, a year after Paradise burned, residents in a meeting complain about proposed fire codes that may well save their lives in the next conflagration, you may shake your head, aghast. Human beings have a disastrous habit of ignoring our past, but Lucy Walker wants us to know that there’s no ignoring the fires already destroying our future.Bring Your Own BrigadeRated R for upsetting images and audio of people trapped by fire. Running time: 2 hours 7 minutes. In theaters. More

The Gothams will replace the best actress and best actor categories with a single category for “outstanding lead performance.”Should acting prizes be gender neutral? The question has been percolating for years, with zealous arguments for and against.But the biggest ceremonies that honor acting, aware that change would kick a cultural hornet’s nest, have adhered to tradition. Best actor. Best actress.On Thursday, a significant stop on the annual road to the Oscars broke ranks. The Gotham Awards said that, beginning with its November ceremony, prizes for acting would no longer be broken out by gender. The Gothams will replace its best actress and best actor categories with a single category for outstanding lead performance. For the first time, there will be a category for supporting roles: outstanding supporting performance.Each category can have up to 10 nominees, with the field chosen, per custom, by committees of film critics, festival programmers and film curators. Separate juries made up of writers, directors, actors, producers and other film professionals will determine the final recipients, the same as always. The acting categories at the Gothams previously had five nominees.“There are so many talented nonbinary individuals, and it’s not fair to force them into male and female boxes,” said Jeffrey Sharp, the executive director of the Gotham Film and Media Institute in New York. “We have a really proud history of inclusivity. It’s part of our DNA. But it was time for us to evolve, too.”Will other significant ceremonies follow?“We can only speak for ourselves, but we do have a history of leading the conversation,” Mr. Sharp said, referring to the position the Gotham Awards has as the first significant ceremony of Hollywood’s prize-collecting season.The influential Berlin Film Festival went gender neutral with its performance awards in the spring. Although not taken seriously as markers of artistic achievement, the MTV Movie & TV Awards stopped separating acting prizes by gender in 2017, along with MTV’s Video Music Awards. The Grammys did away with the division in 2012.But none of the organizations behind the most prestigious acting awards — Oscars, BAFTAs, Tonys and Emmys — have indicated that they will take the same action. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which manages the Oscars, has perhaps gone the furthest, telling The New York Times in 2019 that, while it planned to keep its current structure in place, it would “continue to be sensitive to the evolving conversation.” The Academy Awards for best actress and best actor were first presented in 1929.The Screen Actors Guild Awards, Independent Spirit Awards and Golden Globes also have male and female acting categories.The debate has roots in older conversations about whether carving out places in a male-dominated field for one group, in this case women, comes at the cost of excluding others.Those seeking change contend that, in addition to forcing nonbinary performers into boxes, gendered categories give the false appearance that prime roles for women are far more prevalent than they actually are.“We should be more afraid of upholding a discriminatory, sexist policy than we are of abolishing it,” the nonbinary actor Asia Kate Dillon, known for their role on Showtime’s “Billions,” wrote in an essay last year. They added, “There are ultimately, two tangible obstacles to abolishing the actress category at awards shows, and they are — to be blunt — money and feelings.”Supporters of gendered categories say that absent such distinctions, men would dominate the nominees and winners. There are also those who swat away potential change as an example of progressive ideology run amok.Mr. Sharp said that the concern about maintaining an equitable mix of nominees when doing away with gendered categories was “valid.”“In terms of the danger of being skewed one way or another, we have great faith in the individuals who make our nominations decisions,” he said, referring to the Gotham Awards’ committee system. (The New York Times is a corporate sponsor of the awards and had no role in the decision about the new categories.)Mr. Sharp noted that his organization’s longtime “breakthrough actor” award, which will be renamed “breakthrough performer,” has always been gender neutral, having been given to stars like Amy Adams (“Junebug”), Elliot Page (“Juno”), Michael B. Jordan (“Fruitvale Station”) and Mya Taylor (“Tangerine”).The most-recent Gotham Awards ceremony took place in January and was staged virtually because of the coronavirus pandemic. Nicole Beharie was named best actress for her performance in “Miss Juneteenth” and Riz Ahmed won the best actor prize for “Sound of Metal.”The Gotham Film and Media Institute (formerly the Independent Filmmaker Project) also said on Thursday that it had created two new television categories: breakthrough nonfiction series and outstanding performance in a new series.Cara Buckley More