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      Kevin Costner Will Not Return to ‘Yellowstone’

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      The actor and director is turning his attention to his ambitious film series about post-Civil War America.It’s official: Kevin Costner will not be returning to television’s hit neo-western “Yellowstone” for its final episodes or for any future “Yellowstone” offshoot, ending speculation about his involvement with one of TV’s biggest hits in recent years.In a video posted to social media on Thursday evening, Costner said that after a year-and-a-half working on his upcoming multi-film epic “Horizon” and thinking about “Yellowstone,” which he called a “beloved series that I love that I know you love,” he realized that he would not be able to continue. The second half of Season 5, the show’s last, is set to debut on Nov. 10.“It was something that really changed me,” Costner said about “Yellowstone,” which premiered on Paramount Network in 2018 and became an instant and durable standout. It was TV’s highest-rated drama of the 2021-22 TV season, and its Season 4 finale was the most-watched scripted prime-time telecast in 2022, Variety reported.“I just wanted to let you know that I won’t be returning,” Costner, 69, continued, telling fans that he has loved the relationship they have been able to develop. “I’ll see you at the movies,” he added.A representative for Costner did not immediately reply to a request for further comment on Friday.The announcement comes after will-he-or-won’t-he rumors about whether Costner would continue in the role of the ruthless Montana rancher John Dutton, which earned Costner a Golden Globe for acting in 2023. Tensions between Costner and the show’s creative team had been reported for more than a year — to the point that it was largely expected that Costner would not be involved in the conclusion of “Yellowstone.”In an emailed statement on Friday, a representative for Paramount Network said that those at the network wished him the best with the film series and that they had hoped that they would continue working with him. “Unfortunately,” the statement read, “we could not find a window that worked for him, all the other talent and our production needs in order to move forward together.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Conan O’Brien Doesn’t Matter

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      After hosting talk shows for nearly three decades, Conan O’Brien has come to believe that longevity is overrated. The first time he made this point to me was in April at a restaurant in New York, when he proposed that all statues and monuments should be made with durable soap that dissolves in seven years. One month later, in his office in Los Angeles, down the hall from his podcast studio, he went further, declaring himself anti-graveyard.Asked if this means he wants to be cremated, O’Brien responded: “I want to be left in a ditch and found by a jogger.” Taking up space in a cemetery seems selfish to him. “I say this in a positive way,” he added, leaning forward and shifting to a less jokey tone. “We don’t matter.”Since leaving late-night television in 2021, Conan O’Brien, 61, has become more reflective about life (and death), given to philosophical flights of fancy that he compulsively alternates with comic tangents. O’Brien famously champions the intersection between smart and stupid, but in conversation, what stands out is how quickly he moves between light and heavy. In one of several interviews, I asked him if he was happier now than when he was on television and his response was to question happiness itself. “At best it’s a fleeting moment after a rainstorm when the sun’s coming out,” he said. “Being contented comes in little moments, here and there.”The only thing trickier than being a late-night talk show host is being a former one. Some relapse (Jon Stewart). A few vanish (Johnny Carson, Craig Kilborn). Most enter a more modest era (David Letterman, Jay Leno). Since he started writing for “Saturday Night Live” in the 1980s, Conan O’Brien has built one of the most consequential careers in comedy. And while his late-night tenure is beloved by comedy nerds, helping define a sensibility for a generation of comedians like Bill Hader, Eric André and Nikki Glaser, his postshow work may turn out to be more impressive.It helps that his brand of joyfully goofy absurdity ages well. Stewart may have repeatedly beaten him out for Emmys during the George W. Bush years, but jokes about the Iraq War have a shorter shelf life than the masturbating bear, a recurring character on O’Brien’s late-night show that is exactly what it sounds like. His reputation has grown as new generations have discovered his work online.The other reason O’Brien has done well since leaving “Conan,” his final late-night show (after “Late Night” and “The Tonight Show”), is that he’s always been excited by and open to experimentation. “I enjoyed playing with that form,” he said of the talk show. “The stuff I’m really interested in, there’s so many opportunities to do it now. ‘Hot Ones’ is proof.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      It’s the Summer of Powell and Pressburger in New York

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      The British filmmaking team were maestros of Technicolor and so much more. If you don’t know their work, your favorite directors do.Toward the end of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s “Black Narcissus” (1947), set at a convent high in the Himalayas, the crazed Sister Ruth sneaks up behind her perceived nemesis, Sister Clodagh, who is ringing the convent’s cliffside bell, and gives her a good shove.The scene, a classic in the Powell-Pressburger canon, is remarkable for many reasons. For one, the mountains are an illusion, conjured with paintings on glass and matte work at Pinewood Studios near London. “Wind, the altitude, the beauty of the setting — it must all be under our control,” Powell recalled explaining to his collaborators.For another, the whole sequence was filmed to a precomposed score. Shooting action to music fascinated Powell. He and his filmmaking partner, Pressburger, would refine the technique in “The Red Shoes” (1948) and in the filmed opera “The Tales of Hoffmann” (1951). In the new documentary “Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger,” Martin Scorsese says that repeated childhood viewings of “Hoffmann” taught him “pretty much everything I know about the relation of camera to music.”A scene from “The Tales of Hoffmann,” a Powell-Pressburger collaboration.Rialto Pictures/StudiocanalScorsese is hardly alone in feeling that Powell and Pressburger, the greatest British filmmakers this side of Alfred Hitchcock, left a profound mark on his way of thinking about movies. Francis Ford Coppola’s forthcoming “Megalopolis” pays tribute, too, by lifting an exchange from “The Red Shoes.” For those who already are or who long to be similarly entranced, Powell and Pressburger are blanketing New York this summer.For five weeks beginning Friday, the Museum of Modern Art is screening “Cinema Unbound,” the most comprehensive Powell-Pressburger retrospective ever mounted in the city. Scorsese will introduce “Black Narcissus” on Friday, while his longtime editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, who was married to Powell until his death in 1990, will introduce a preview of “Made in England” on Saturday. That film, which features Scorsese as an onscreen guide, opens July 12. And Film Forum is giving a run to “The Small Back Room,” the noir that followed “The Red Shoes,” starting June 28.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      15 Donald Sutherland Movies to Stream: ‘Hunger Games,’ ‘M*A*S*H’ and More

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      Whether in the lead or a supporting role, the actor’s immense talent and range were apparent in six decades of performances.A lithe and seductively charming actor who worked consistently for more than six decades in Hollywood, often as a leading man, Donald Sutherland died on Thursday at 88. As a thinking man’s sex symbol whose versatility made him equally persuasive in irreverent comedies and heart-rending dramas, Sutherland worked with major directors across multiple eras, including Robert Altman, Federico Fellini and Clint Eastwood and looked comfortable in both modern dress and period garb. His unusual height — he was 6-foot-4 — and sonorous voice gave Sutherland an authoritative gait, but he was given more toward gentle-giant sensitivity than masculine swagger. Narrowing his great performances down to 15 films is no easy task — there’s at least another 15 where these came from — but this selection of streamable titles is a testament to his immense talent and range.1970‘M*A*S*H’Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Fandango at Home, Google Play and YouTube.Kicking off a decade in which counterculture rebellion would seep into American studio movies — and a decade in which, not unrelatedly, Sutherland would become a big star — Robert Altman’s irreverent comedy about a medical unit during the Korean War doubled as a stealth commentary on the then-ongoing quagmire in Vietnam. Sutherland and Elliott Gould embody the film’s coarse iconoclasm and soul as two skilled combat surgeons who fill the downtime between harrowing emergencies with pranks, sarcastic quips and a fair bit of womanizing, often at the expense of the head nurse (Sally Kellerman). A hit in theaters, “M*A*S*H” was a popular long-running TV comedy, but the film remains significantly pricklier.1970‘Alex in Wonderland’Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Fandango at Home, Google Play and YouTube.The central joke of Paul Mazursky’s clever riff on Fellini’s “8 ½” is that “Alex in Wonderland” was only the second film Mazursky had directed, following “Bob & Ted & Carol & Alice,” and thus he had not nearly the mileage Fellini had accumulated when his onscreen alter ego suffers a nervous breakdown after eight films and major international success. Here, Sutherland has the comic humility to play Mazursky’s hyper-neurotic surrogate, who is rendered nearly catatonic in his panic over his future in Hollywood and whether he should shift to a more commercial direction. It’s an unusual role for Sutherland, whose gravitas makes him more naturally assured, but he’s counterbalanced nicely by Ellen Burstyn as his wife, who manages his ego while exerting a subtle influence over his decision-making.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Copa 71’ Documentary Shows Hidden History of Women’s World Cup

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      This new documentary unearths footage from a World Cup event that even veteran players didn’t know about. It’s both exhilarating and infuriating.“Copa 71” begins with Brandi Chastain, the two-time Olympic gold medalist and legendary U.S. women’s soccer player, gawking at a screen. “This is unbelievable,” she says, looking at what the filmmaker has just handed her: footage of a stadium filled with people cheering at an old tournament. At first, she thinks it’s a men’s event. Then, as the players file out, she realizes the athletes are women. “Why didn’t I know about this?” Chastain asks in consternation. “It makes me very happy, and quite infuriated.”That’s a neat encapsulation of the effects of watching “Copa 71” (in theaters and on demand), directed by Rachel Ramsay and James Erskine. The film tells the story of the all-but-forgotten 1971 Women’s World Cup, held in Mexico City and Guadalajara, which was recorded beautifully on film that went unseen for half a century.The tournament was actually the second such event organized by the Federation of Independent European Female Football; the first was held a year earlier, in Italy. But those details matter less than the context. At the time, soccer (or football, as most of the film’s participants of course call it) was still considered a sport for men, and women who played it were subject to a rich variety of snide and suspicious comments. Aside from the cultural pressures, FIFA, the governing body for what was only men’s soccer at the time, was on a mission to block women from taking part in international football in any organized fashion. In the film’s view, FIFA’s move was as much about retaining power as about the sport itself.All of this is laid out in “Copa 71,” with the help of a few historians and a number of athletes who played in the international tournaments. Their recollections, juxtaposed with images of a huge arena filled with cheering fans of all ages and genders, make this feel like a sports documentary from an alternate universe — especially because it would take 20 more years for FIFA to finally authorize women’s soccer for international play.The 1970s tournaments took place in a time of increasing worldwide activism for women’s rights. While the tournaments were obviously part of that movement, the players didn’t see themselves necessarily as activists. They just wanted to play. And this confounded observers, often men, who couldn’t conceive of women just wanting to do something regardless of men’s involvement or opinions.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Donald Sutherland, ‘M*A*S*H’ and ‘Hunger Games’ Star, Dies at 88

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      Donald Sutherland, whose ability to both charm and unsettle, both reassure and repulse, was amply displayed in scores of film roles as diverse as a laid-back battlefield surgeon in “M*A*S*H,” a ruthless Nazi spy in “Eye of the Needle,” a soulful father in “Ordinary People” and a strutting fascist in “1900,” died on Thursday in Miami. He was 88.His son Kiefer Sutherland, the actor, announced the death on social media. CAA, the talent agency that represented Mr. Sutherland, said he had died in a hospital after an unspecified “long illness.” He had a home in Miami.With his long face, droopy eyes, protruding ears and wolfish smile, the 6-foot-4 Mr. Sutherland was never anyone’s idea of a movie heartthrob. He often recalled that while growing up in eastern Canada, he once asked his mother if he was good-looking, only to be told, “No, but your face has a lot of character.” He recounted how he was once rejected for a film role by a producer who said: “This part calls for a guy-next-door type. You don’t look like you’ve lived next door to anyone.”Yet across six decades, starting in the early 1960s, he appeared in nearly 200 films and television shows — some years he was in as many as half a dozen movies. “Klute,” “Six Degrees of Separation” and a 1978 remake of “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers” were just a few of his other showcases.And he continued to work well into his last years, becoming familiar to younger audiences through roles in multiple installments of “The Hunger Games” franchise, alongside Brad Pitt in the space drama “Ad Astra” (2019) and as the title character in the Stephen King-inspired horror film “Mr. Harrigan’s Phone” (2022).Mr. Sutherland’s chameleonlike ability to be endearing in one role, menacing in another and just plain odd in yet a third appealed to directors, among them Federico Fellini, Robert Altman, Bernardo Bertolucci and Oliver Stone.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Donald Sutherland Didn’t Disappear Into Roles, and That Was a Good Thing

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      The actor understood the range of human feeling, but he came of age when movies distrusted institutions, and that suspicion was part of his arsenal.In a 2014 interview in GQ, the actor Donald Sutherland recalled that a movie producer told him he wasn’t getting a role he’d auditioned for because “we’ve always thought of this as a guy-next-door sort of character, and we don’t think you look like you’ve ever lived next door to anybody.”It’s true: In film and TV roles that stretched over 60 years, Sutherland, who died Thursday at 88, never radiated the sense that he was some random guy you might cross paths with at the grocery store. If you did, you’d remember him, maybe a little uneasily. With a long face, piercing blue eyes, perpetually curled upper lip and arched, wary eyebrows, he had the look of someone who knew something important — a useful characteristic in a career that often involved movies about paranoia and dark secrets. His voice could clear a range from excitedly high to a menacing bass that would make you feel like ducking for cover.As an actor, he could do it all. His turn as the titular private detective opposite Jane Fonda in Alan Pakula’s 1971 “Klute” rides a tricky knife’s edge — is he a good guy? Does that term have a meaning in this case? There’s his role as a slowly more horrified scientist in Philip Kaufman’s 1978 “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” and his movie-stealing monologue as Mr. X in Oliver Stone’s 1991 “J.F.K.,” loaded with the urgency of obsession. Even when playing a goofball — the womanizing prankster surgeon Hawkeye Pierce in Robert Altman’s 1970 “M*A*S*H,” for instance, or Vernon L. Pinkley in Robert Aldrich’s 1967 “The Dirty Dozen” — his loping, laconic figure stood out against the background, someone who knew a little better than he let on.Sutherland worked constantly and, unlike some actors of his generation, never really seemed like he belonged to a single era. He’d already been at it for more than 40 years when he showed up in Joe Wright’s 2005 “Pride and Prejudice,” in what seemed like a minor part: Mr. Bennet, put-upon father to five daughters in yet another adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel. In the book, he’s sardonic and contemptuous of all but his oldest two daughters, Jane and Lizzy; the reader doesn’t walk away with particularly warm feelings about him.But Sutherland’s version of Mr. Bennet was a revelation, without being a deviation. In a scene granting Lizzy (Keira Knightley) his blessing to marry her beloved Mr. Darcy, tears sparkle in his eyes, which radiate both love and, crucially, respect for his headstrong daughter. Suddenly this father was not just a character, but a person — a man who can see his daughter’s future in a moment and is almost as overcome as she is.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Green Border’ Review: Migrants’ Elusive Race for Freedom

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      Agnieszka Holland focuses on the Polish-Belarusian border as a Syrian family tries to make it to the European Union.The fury that radiates off Agnieszka Holland’s “Green Border” is so intense that you can almost feel it encasing you in its heat. A brutal, deeply affecting drama set against the migrant crisis in Europe, it is the latest from this great Polish director, a filmmaker whose eclectic résumé includes several films about the Holocaust, a romance starring the young Leonardo DiCaprio as Arthur Rimbaud and episodes of the HBO series “The Wire” and “Treme.” One of the pleasures of Holland’s work is that you never know exactly what to expect; all that is certain is that it will always be worth watching and that, for her, art is a moral imperative.A fiction firmly rooted in fact, “Green Border” dramatizes the crisis through different players — migrants, guards and activists — converged in and around the border of Poland and Belarus. There, in the so-called exclusion zone, an area that’s off-limits to most, migrants largely from the Middle East and from Africa try to enter the European Union via Poland. In this haunted, contested, dangerously swampy slice of land, men, women and children, families and friends, struggle to traverse national boundaries while evading and at times enduring violence from armed patrols.Divided into numbered sections, the movie opens on a crowded plane (it seems to be from Turkey) where the discreet, hovering camera pans across different passengers, their faces masked and unmasked, anxious and introspective. The camera soon settles on a tense Syrian husband and wife, Bashir and Amina (Jalal Altawil and Dalia Naous), who are traveling with his father (Mohamad Al Rashi as Grandpa) and the couple’s three children. When their eldest, a sweet preadolescent boy named Nur (Taim Ajjan), asks the woman seated between him and the window if they can trade places so he can take in the view, this small circle opens. Enter Leila (Behi Djanati Atai), a middle-aged Afghan gutsily making the journey alone.It’s crucial to Holland’s convictions, I think, that the first plane passengers you see aren’t actually members of this little group. Holland doesn’t go in for overexplanation in her movies. Rather, during this one’s brief, minimalist title sequence — it opens with an inviting aerial view of a lushly green forest that soon turns black and white as “Green Border” materializes onscreen — the words “October 2021 Europe” appear, followed by “1. The Family.” (The black-and-white palette remains, which fits this Manichaean world even as it points to the past.) As the movie then cuts from one passenger to the next, from young to old and from adult to child, it soon seems evident that, for Holland, the freighted word family isn’t limited to a chosen few.Holland sets a brisk pace in “Green Border” that begins rapidly accelerating once the plane touches down. After it lands — the flight attendants hand out roses to the passengers, welcoming them to Belarus — Bashir’s family piles into a van that his brother in Sweden has hired. The family plans to join him; for her part, Leila, who hops in too, is hoping to stay in Poland. All the travel plans have been arranged in advance; routes have been charted, drivers hired, bags packed, cash spent. A great deal more money will pass from hand to hand by the end of “Green Border,” a movie in which each life carries a steep price tag.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More