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      ‘Siberia’ Review: Beast of the Northern Wilds

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      Abel Ferrara’s latest psychodrama sends an ever-intense Willem Dafoe into the Arctic wilderness on a visionary reckoning with his memories and sense of self.Everybody’s got a plan until a bear wallops them. That happens to Clint (Willem Dafoe) in “Siberia,” Abel Ferrara’s latest psychodrama, which is equally set in the snowy Arctic wilds and the desolate reaches of an unquiet mind. This bracingly pure dream journey starts with Clint as a frontier bartender in a cabin, serving the odd hunter or babushka, and follows him on a dog-driven sled chase through memories and visions.The bear attack comes in an unforgettable smash cut, shattering Clint’s apparent plan to hide from the world. But unlike Ferrara’s most infamous creations — the bad lieutenants, the kings of New York—Clint’s transgressions don’t seem to be spectacular. That doesn’t stop him from ruminations and self-pity — over past relationships, an Eisenhower-era father (also played by Dafoe), or losing touch with a sense of soul. (Not to mention living with the world’s legacy of atrocity, which Ferrara invokes briefly and nightmarishly.) Also: mystics!Dafoe, a close collaborator with Ferrara, brings the intensity and nakedness (not just physical) necessary for the film’s trip. I can’t think of other actors at his level who could keep a sense of true north in a nonlinear story like this, from bear scene to sex scene to earnest confrontations, amid quotations from St. Augustine and Nietzsche.Visually, Ferrara sends him on eerie flights through day-for-night wilderness and into vertiginous caverns and sanctums (haunted by wistful musical motifs composed by Joe Delia). The film (co-written by Ferrara and Christ Zois) ends enigmatically, as dreams do. That refusal to stage an orderly conclusion or redemption might be the boldest thing about the movie.SiberiaRated R for the stuff that (some) dreams are made of, such as strong sexual content and disturbing violence. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Jagame Thandhiram’ Review: Scheme, Slaughter, Repeat

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      A Tamil gangster gets recruited to work for a British tycoon in this bloody crime drama.An intrepid gangster maneuvers between rival crime lords in the glossy drama “Jagame Thandhiram.” The movie (on Netflix) follows Suruli (Dhanush), whose merciless killing sprees earn him an invitation to serve under a wealthy British megalomaniac. Seduced by a big payday in pounds, Suruli uproots his life from Madurai to London and assures his new boss, Peter (James Cosmo), that no task is too vile.Gore abounds, but the methods of violence vary flamboyantly. We see men and one woman killed by guns, slashing, a car explosion and a shovel to the head — all within the first 15 minutes. The story grows more compelling when Suruli learns that his London assignments will center on Peter’s foe, the Tamil crime lord Sivadoss (Joju George). Simultaneously, Suruli’s developing romance with the local singer Attilla (Aishwarya Lekshmi) helps to balance out the endless shootouts.The director Karthik Subbaraj, who also wrote the screenplay, elevates the usual crime antics by drawing attention to language, and how it can be used as a weapon or a unifier. Suruli and Peter rely on a translator to communicate, though often tone alone — or “yes or no” ultimatums — are what carry meaning. Conversely, Suruli’s encounters with Sivadoss’s gang hinge on the nuances of their shared Tamil language and culture.Yet for the most part, bloody action dominates. A subplot concerning immigration law is vastly oversimplified, and Suruli’s arc to becoming a semi-good guy seems dubious in the wake of his unrelenting recklessness and brutality. Some moments feel fresh, but the movie’s patterns are familiar: scheme, slaughter, repeat.Jagame ThandhiramNot rated. In Tamil, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 37 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame’ at 25: ‘The Most R-Rated G You Will Ever See’

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      How did the ratings board overlook songs filled with lust and damnation? “Maybe we bamboozled them with gargoyles,” one filmmaker said.They know exactly what they got away with.“That’s the most R-rated G you will ever see in your life,” said Tab Murphy, a screenwriter of Disney’s animated “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” which was released 25 years ago this month.“Thousands of dollars must have changed hands somewhere, I’m sure,” joked Gary Trousdale, who directed the film with Kirk Wise.However it came about, a ratings board made up of parents decided that a film with a musical number about lust and hellfire and a plot that involves the threat of genocide against Gypsies was appropriate for a general audience.Maybe the reason had to do with the studio: Nearly all of Disney’s hand-drawn animated movies had been rated G up to that point. Maybe it was the marketing, which presented “Hunchback” as a complete departure from the dark Victor Hugo novel on which it was based, reframing it as a carnival with the tagline “Join the party!” Maybe the higher-ups at Disney exerted pressure, convinced a PG rating would hurt the box office take. (“It was a G rating or bust,” Wise said.)But the fact that what is arguably Disney’s darkest animated movie earned a rating on par with “Cinderella” reflects the subjectivity of the rating system — and how much parents’ tastes have changed over the years.“PG today is the equivalent of what G was in the 1990s,” Wise said.Trousdale added, “Nowadays, you can’t even smoke in a G film.”But one scene in particular defies explanation.“That ‘Hellfire’ sequence?” Murphy said, referring to the Stephen Schwartz-Alan Menken song sung by Judge Claude Frollo about his conflict between piety and lust for Esmeralda. “Come on, man. Come on.”Talking gargoyles were added to lighten the story.DisneyMURPHY HAD LONG WANTED to adapt the 1831 Gothic story of Esmeralda, a beautiful Roma girl who captures the hearts of several Parisian men, including Quasimodo, a bell-ringer with a severe hunchback whom Hugo describes as “hideous” and “a devil of a man.”But then he realized what he’d gotten himself into.“I was like, ‘Oh, God, I don’t want to write a singing, dancing, watered-down film that turns this amazing piece of world literature into a typical Disney movie,’” he said.But, he said, it was to the credit of Walt Disney Company executives at the time, Roy E. Disney and Michael D. Eisner, that they took a hands-off approach.“I was never told to stay away from this or that or you can’t do this,” he said. “They were like, ‘You write the story you want to tell, and let us worry about our brand.’”Of course, the Hugo novel, in which many major characters die at the end, was “too depressing” for a Disney film. So Murphy had to get creative.He decided the story would focus on the colorful fantasy world Quasimodo imagines while stuck in his bell tower. There’d be a festival. Talking gargoyles. A hero to root for.Instead of Quasimodo (voiced by Tom Hulce) being whipped on the pillory, he’s pelted with vegetables and humiliated at the Feast of Fools. Hugo’s troubled archdeacon, Claude Frollo (Tony Jay), became an evil magistrate. Disney did not want to take on the church, Trousdale said. Unlike in the novel, Esmeralda (Demi Moore) is saved by Quasimodo and the dashing Phoebus (Kevin Kline), the rebel captain of the guards. All three live happily ever after instead of dying, as both Quasimodo and Esmeralda do in the book.But, Wise said, there was always one looming issue they had to deal with: Frollo’s lust for Esmeralda.The screenwriters had to figure out how to deal with Frollo’s lust for Esmeralda. Disney“We knew that was going to be a really delicate topic,” he said. “But we also knew we had to tell that story, because it’s key to the central love rectangle.”At first, Murphy tried to tackle it in words.“I’d originally written a monologue for that scene that was filled with lots of subtext showing that his anger was all about his forbidden lust for her,” Murphy said. “But then Stephen and Alan said, ‘We think that can be a great song.’”Six months later, a small package from Schwartz, who wrote the lyrics, and Menken, who composed the score, arrived at the Walt Disney Studios in Burbank, Calif. Inside was a cassette with a new song.Murphy, Trousdale, Wise and Don Hahn, the film’s producer, gathered in an office, popped the tape into a cassette player and pressed play — and realized what they were hearing.In a crashing percussive number, Frollo, backed by a choir chanting in Latin, agonizes over his lust and his religious faith and his hatred of the Roma.“This burning desire,” he sings in the film, rubbing her scarf sensuously against his face, “is turning me to sin.” (Schwartz sang the part on the demo.)“I swear to God, everyone’s jaw slowly started to drop open,” Murphy said. “At the end of it, Kirk reached over, clicked off the cassette player, sat back, crossed his arms, and said, ‘Well, that’s never going to make it into the movie.’ And it did!”Initially the filmmakers imagined Frollo’s lust would be subtext. Instead he wound up singing about his “burning desire.”DisneyTHOUGH IT WAS NEVER STATED EXPLICITLY, Wise said a G rating was the expectation.“The studio felt anything above a G would threaten the film’s box office,” he said. “This was before ‘Shrek,’ or movies that made a PG rating in animation commonplace.”A G-rated film, according to the Motion Picture Association of America system, which was introduced in 1968, “contains nothing in theme, language, nudity, sex, violence or other matters that, in the view of the Rating Board, would offend parents whose younger children view the motion picture.” Some snippets of language, it says, “may go beyond polite conversation but they are common everyday expressions.”“We never thought we’d get away with the term ‘hellfire,’” Trousdale said.The first cut of “Hunchback” indeed didn’t pass muster for a G — but it wasn’t the use of the word “hell” or “damnation” that the board took issue with.It was the sound effects.In the “Hellfire” number, imagined as a nightmarish, hallucinogenic sequence, Frollo is tormented by hooded, red-robed figures that reflect his slipping grip on reality.“This burning desire,” he sings, gazing at a dancing Esmeralda figure in his fireplace, “is turning me to sin.”The ratings board was uncomfortable with the word “sin,” Trousdale said. But the sequence was already animated, and the soundtrack recorded, so they couldn’t change the lyric.Then Hahn came up with a solution: Make the “Whoosh!” when the hooded judges rush up from the floor a little louder so it would drown out the “sin.” It worked, Trousdale said.The sound effects seemed to trouble the ratings board more than the language in the “Hellfire” sequence.DisneyBut what ultimately got the film its G rating, Wise said, was a change so tiny that “you’ll never believe this.”In the scene where Frollo sneaks up behind Esmeralda and sniffs her hair, the ratings board thought the sniff was “too suggestive,” he said.“They were like, ‘Could you lower the volume of that?’” he said. “And we did, and it got the G rating.”NEITHER THE POSTERS nor the trailers hinted at the darker themes.“There was definitely a huuuuuge effort to emphasize the lighthearted aspects of ‘Hunchback,’” Menken said, laughing.The film’s tagline? “Join the party!”“Maybe that was the right campaign for the studio to get people in the theater,” Hahn said. “But I’m sure I wouldn’t do that today — I think there’s a truth-in-advertising responsibility that perhaps we overlooked back then.”When the film, which cost $70 million to make before marketing, opened on June 21, 1996, it was a bit of a disappointment at the box office, grossing about $100.1 million domestically. Trousdale said they did get some pushback from parents’ groups about the G rating.“They were saying ‘You tricked us; you deceived us,’” he said. “The marketing was all the happy stuff and ‘Come to the Feast of Fools; it’s a party!’ with talking gargoyles, confetti and pies in the face. And then that wasn’t the film, and people were really pissed off.”Parents’ groups complained that the marketing emphasis on talking gargoyles and other fun elements was misleading.DisneyTom Zigo, a spokesman for the Classification and Rating Administration, which administers the rating system, said that he could not speak about the specifics of the “Hunchback” G, but that it was “very possible” that a movie rated 25 years ago would receive a different rating today.Hahn, Menken, Murphy, Trousdale and Wise all agreed there would be no chance of the film getting a G rating today — or even, Murphy suggested, being made at all.“Disney was willing to take some chances in that movie that I don’t think they’d take today,” he said. “That’s a PG-13 in my book.”Yet the movie has stood the test of time — Frollo, Wise noted, feels like a “very contemporary” villain in the #MeToo era — and remains a favorite among young adults who rewatch and discover references they missed the first time around.“I’ve read posts on fan pages from a few fans in their mid-20s and 30s who were pretty young when they saw this,” Trousdale said. “They’re like, ‘Yeah, this just messed me up when I saw it as a kid, but I still love it.’”Menken said “Hellfire” pushed the envelope more in terms of what Disney does than any song he’s ever written.“Maybe, in retrospect, ‘Hunchback’ was a bridge too far,” he said. “But God, am I glad they took that bridge too far.” More

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      In the Weeds of ‘In the Heights’

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      The film adaptation of the Tony-winning musical “In the Heights” was released this month, one of the first blockbuster movies to arrive after more than a year of pandemic shutdowns. The original musical was the breakthrough for Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote its music and lyrics and went on to gain global fame with “Hamilton.”The film opened to successful box office numbers, but also spawned several critical conversations, particularly about the lack of Afro-Latino representation among the film’s lead actors, and the ways in which it failed to capture the full mosaic of the actual neighborhood of Washington Heights.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Miranda’s evolutionary approach to the musical theater lineage, how the film left certain elements of the musical on the cutting room floor and the critical blowback brought on by the film’s casting choices.Guests:Sandra Garcia, a Styles reporter for The New York TimesIsabelia Herrera, an arts critic fellow for The New York Times’s Culture deskLena Wilson, a film critic who has written for The New York Times, Slate and others More

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      Five Action Movies to Stream Now

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      From flicks about vengeful gangsters to sagas of postapocalyptic survival, this month’s picks include films from around the globe.For action movie fans looking for new thrills to watch at home, there are a lot of car chases, explosions and fights (knife, sword and fist) to sift through. We’re helping to make the choice easier by providing some streaming highlights. More

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      Eva Sereny, Who Photographed Film Stars at Work, Dies at 86

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      She captured De Niro, Streep, Eastwood and many others, often in unguarded moments. Working with directors like Fellini and Spielberg inspired her to make movies herself.In 1972, Eva Sereny was in Rome photographing rehearsals for “The Assassination of Trotsky,” starring Richard Burton as the Russian revolutionary, when his wife, Elizabeth Taylor, who was not in the movie, visited the set.One of Ms. Sereny’s shots captured a moment in the celebrated stars’ famously turbulent marriage, which would soon end: the two staring icily at each other, as if they were re-enacting the tensions between their characters in the 1966 film “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”“It was obvious something was going on,” she told The Guardian in 2018. “You could feel it — there was no great love between them. I don’t remember them even noticing the shot, which was taken at a distance from below. If it had been a close-up of their faces, it would have just been two people looking not very nicely at each other. The body language brings it all together.”“You could feel it — there was no great love between them,” Ms. Sereny said of her 1972 photograph of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor on the set of “The Assassination of Trotsky.”Eva Sereny/Iconic ImagesThe Taylor-Burton picture was one of many notable images in Ms. Sereny’s decades-long career as a photographer, principally on hundreds of movie sets around the world. She took portraits, candid shots and publicity photos of stars like Marlon Brando, Meryl Streep, Vanessa Redgrave, Robert De Niro, Jacqueline Bisset, Clint Eastwood, Audrey Hepburn, Sean Connery and Harrison Ford.Ms. Sereny died on May 25 in a hospital near her home in London. She was 86.The cause was complications of a massive stroke, said Carrie Kania, the creative director of Iconic Images, which handles Ms. Sereny’s archive and, with ACC Art Books, published “Through Her Lens: The Stories Behind the Photography of Eva Sereny” in 2018.Ms. Sereny was on location for the first three Indiana Jones films and snapped a widely known portrait of Mr. Ford, who played Jones, and Mr. Connery, who played his father, on the set of “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” (1989). She was on the island of Mykonos for the filming of “The Greek Tycoon” in 1978 when she photographed Anthony Quinn dancing on the edge of the Aegean Sea.And on the set of Bernardo Bertolucci’s erotic drama “Last Tango in Paris” (1972), she overcame Brando’s distrust of photographers and took pictures of him laughing, lighting Mr. Bertolucci’s cigarette and talking to his co-star, Maria Schneider.Ms. Sereny was on the island of Mykonos for the filming of “The Greek Tycoon” in 1978 when she photographed Anthony Quinn dancing on the edge of the Aegean Sea.Eva Sereny/Iconic Images“There was something very considerate about the way he spoke to me,” she said in “Through Her Lens.” She recalled that she told him taking photos in unposed moments produced “the most interesting images,” and that “he sympathized with my take and said, ‘Well, look, all right.’”Eva Olga Martha Sereny was born in Zurich on May 19, 1935, to Hungarian-born parents. Her father, Richard, was a chemist; her mother, also named Eva, was an actress before they married.When her father traveled to England on business soon after the start of World War II, he was unable to return to Switzerland; Eva and her mother joined him in 1940. After the war, Mrs. Sereny opened a flower shop in the Burlington Arcade in London.Ms. Sereny was on location for the first three Indiana Jones films and snapped a widely known portrait of Harrison Ford and Sean Connery as father and son on the set of “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” (1989).Eva Sereny/Iconic ImagesEva’s photography career did not start until well after she moved to Italy when she was 20. There she married Vincio Delleani, an engineer, and had two sons, Riccardo and Alessandro. When her husband was in a car accident in 1966, she thought about a career.“I remember sitting beside him in the hospital thinking, ‘My God, but for a few seconds I would be a widow,’” she told The Guardian. “‘I’ve got to do something. I’m quite artistic, though I can’t draw. What about photography?’”Her husband set up a darkroom in the basement of their house, and she started working with his Rolleiflex camera. A friend of hers, who ran the Italian Olympic committee, asked her to take pictures of young athletes in training. She then took a chance and flew to London, where she pitched her work to The Times of London.Soon after she showed her photos of the athletes to the paper’s picture editor, The Times printed several of them.With help from a film publicist in Rome, Ms. Sereny spent two weeks on the set of Mike Nichols’s “Catch-22” (1970). It was the first of hundreds of movie set assignments, which would lead to the publication of her pictures in outlets like Elle, Paris Match, Marie Claire, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Time and Newsweek over the next 34 years.One of her frequent subjects was Ms. Bisset, whom she photographed first during the filming of Francois Truffaut’s “Day for Night” (1973) and then on the sets of “The Deep” (1977), “Inchon” (1981) and “The Greek Tycoon.”Nick Nolte and Jacqueline Bisset on the set of “The Deep” (1977). “She could be argumentative,” Ms. Bisset said of Ms. Sereny, who photographed her on the set on four movies, “and she could make me laugh.”Eva Sereny/Iconic Images“She was refined in a very feminine way, and enjoyed her work,” Ms. Bisset said by phone. “When we started, she was bossy because I wasn’t doing what she wanted, but we became friends. She could be argumentative and she could make me laugh.“One day, she jolted me when she said, ‘Be sexy,’ and I’d say, ‘What do you mean?’ It was such an impossible command, and I’d ask, ‘What do you want me to do? Be more specific.’”Ms. Sereny’s work on movie sets enabled her to study the technique of directors like Nichols, Truffaut, Bertolucci, Federico Fellini (“Casanova”), Steven Spielberg (“Always” and the Indiana Jones films) and Werner Herzog (“Nosferatu the Vampyre”).In 1984 she directed a film of her own: “The Dress,” a 30-minute short starring Michael Palin, about a man who purchases a dress for his mistress. It won the BAFTA award — the British equivalent of the Oscar — for best short film. A decade later, she directed a feature, “Foreign Student,” about a French exchange student (Marco Hofschneider) at a Virginia university who falls in love with a young Black grammar-school teacher (Robin Givens) in racially sensitive 1956.Reviewing that film for The Chicago Tribune, John Petrakis called it “a deftly handled look at forbidden love that also finds time between kisses to examine cultural differences in this classic fish-out-of-water tale.”Frustrated with the limited opportunities for female directors, especially those who were not young, Ms. Sereny did not make any other films. She retired from photography in 2004.Ms. Sereny and Steven Spielberg in 1984.Eva Sereny/Iconic ImagesMs. Sereny is survived by her sons; her partner, Frank Charnock; and four grandchildren. Her husband died in 2007.In 1973, Ms. Sereny was on the set of “The Last of Sheila,” a murder mystery set on a yacht, and given approval by the director, Herbert Ross, to photograph the cast as it rehearsed. But the sound of her shutter annoyed one of the film’s stars, Raquel Welch, who angrily demanded that Ms. Sereny leave because she had not been informed of her presence.Years later, she was assigned again to photograph Ms. Welch.“I just hoped and prayed she wouldn’t recognize or remember me,” Ms. Sereny said in “Through the Lens.” “Just pretend it never happened!”“From the moment we met again,” she added, “everything was perfect.” More

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      ‘Rita Moreno’ Documentary Review: An Icon’s Growing Pains

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      This paean to the trailblazing Puerto Rican actress is also a case study in the highs and lows of showbiz for a woman of color.Most documentaries about famous people tend to be exercises in celebrity worship, and “Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It” is no exception. Directed by Mariem Pérez Riera, the film is a portrait filled with dazzling archival footage and shorn of ambiguities and unflattering viewpoints. Yet it is not your average paean because Moreno, a trailblazing Puerto Rican actress whose career spans more than seven decades, is not your average star.The film’s primary talking head among a parade of former collaborators and Latino luminaries — including Lin-Manuel Miranda (co-executive producer), Gloria Estefan and Eva Longoria — Moreno is given full rein of her story, which doubles as a case study in the highs and lows of showbiz for a woman of color.Under studio contract in the 1950s and ’60s, Moreno recounts the painful times she spent playing “illiterate, immoral island girls” and fending off Hollywood executives who demanded sexual favors. In one, likely staged, scene in the documentary, we see Moreno watching the 2018 Christine Blasey Ford testimony in her dressing room on the set of the Netflix series “One Day at a Time.” It’s a clunky way of transitioning to her own experiences with abuse, but nevertheless situates Moreno and her lifelong commitment to social activism along a feminist historical trajectory.After winning a best supporting actress Oscar for “West Side Story” in 1962 (she is one of only two Latina recipients of an acting Academy Award; Lupita Nyong’o, who was born in Mexico, became the second in 2014), Moreno’s career did not skyrocket in the way one might expect. Instead, it expanded across mediums and genres.This documentary credits her turn to comedy, television and stage acting for liberating her from her exotic sexpot persona. It’s almost hard to believe that the radiant Moreno we see in the film — who at 89 continues to epitomize that ineffable and rare quality we call star power — was ever restrained. Though this contrast is precisely what makes her story so enthralling and vital.Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for ItRated PG-13 for mature thematic content, suggestive material and some strong language including a sexual reference. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More