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      ‘Grace and Grit’ Review: You Transcend Me

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      This mawkish adaptation of the philosopher Ken Wilber’s book wraps tragedy in sugar and New Age sap.If you can make it through the first ten minutes of “Grace and Grit” without groaning, then your tolerance for New Age folderols, saccharin voice-overs and seraphic gazes is higher than mine.Based on the American philosopher Ken Wilber’s 1991 memoir of the same name, this first feature from Sebastian Siegel (who also wrote the script) transforms a real-life tragedy — the death of Wilber’s wife, Treya, from metastatic cancer — into an insufferable movie. Encumbered by the recurring narration of both partners (played by Stuart Townsend and Mena Suvari), the story winds through their five-year journey from first meeting to a deathbed scene so interminable it virtually demands its own trailer.That initial encounter, though, is a doozy, showing the pair so mutually overwhelmed they can’t wait to rush home and start journaling. Most of the action unfolds post-diagnosis, as the two travel from San Francisco to Lake Tahoe to Germany in search of ever-more-grueling fringe therapies. There’s some depression, and a little fighting, all of it wrapped in a smushy blanket of dreams and portents, floaty music and florid dialogue.“I’m just not crazy about his writing,” Treya’s mother (Frances Fisher) opines about her future son-in-law, proving there’s no project Fisher can’t elevate, however briefly. Equally welcome is Mariel Hemingway’s batty turn as an energy therapist who believes that all cancer is caused by a virus and, in common with the movie’s general tone, that Wilber’s amazingness is inarguable.“I have a body, but I am not my body,” the guru himself gently reminds his suffering spouse. I would have whacked him right in the aphorism.Grace and GritRated R for harsh words and hubristic psychobabble. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, FandangoNow and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Under the Stadium Lights’ Review: Friday Night, Lite

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      Some sports movies build to inspirational speeches; this one treats platitudes as the main event.A clunky high school football movie inspired by the 2009 season of the Abilene Eagles (of Abilene, Texas), “Under the Stadium Lights” appears aimed at audiences who already know the outcome, the rivalries and the highlights. Occasional clips of the original games are presented with so little context they seem designed to jog memories rather than advance the drama.Some sports movies build to inspirational speeches; “Under the Stadium Lights” treats platitudes as the main event. The character of Chad Mitchell (Milo Gibson, a son of Mel), a police officer and the team’s chaplain — and off camera, a producer on the movie and an author of the book it’s based on — invites the players to “talk about the stuff that” they “can’t talk about at home,” a device that ensures a steady stream of outpourings for the director, Todd Randall, to cut to.A few characters get enough screen time to register, like Ronnell Sims (Carter Redwood), the quarterback, and his cousin Herschel Sims (Acoryé White), a running back, who both have parents who aren’t always there. Augustine Barrientes (Germain Arroyo), a linebacker known as Boo, resists joining a gang, while the selfless Chad learns to make time for his family. Despite prominent billing, Laurence Fishburne has only a peripheral role as a barbecue joint proprietor who watches the climactic game from a hospital bed.The hokiest lines go to Coach Warren (Glenn Morshower), who, seizing a metaphor, tells Chad why he thinks that trucks have bigger windshields than rearview mirrors: to keep people focused on the present and not the past. “If we keep our thoughts in the windshield of life,” he says, “we’re going to do just fine.”Under the Stadium LightsRated PG-13. Talk of drug dealing and drug use. Running time: 1 hour 49 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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      ‘The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It’ Review: Church, Meet State

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      In the third “Conjuring” movie, Ed and Lorraine Warren tirelessly work to convince a court of law — thus, the audience — that Satanism exists.“The Conjuring” movies offer a fascinating peek into the American psyche. Based on the lives of the Northeastern paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, the franchise demands viewers invest in a worldview ruled by Christian dogma, where Godly good must battle satanic evil. “The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It” is by far the most well-constructed, terrifying entry in the franchise, but its plot relies all too heavily on that same bizarre evangelism.“The Devil Made Me Do It,” helmed by the “Curse of La Llorona” director Michael Chaves, opens on a slickly stylized exorcism. Heavy fog introduces a series of imposing, angular shots as Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) work to free an 8-year-old boy from demonic possession. Top-notch sound mixing and a booming score keep this sequence taut, even exhilarating, as the demon slips from its child host to the unsuspecting Arne Johnson (Ruairi O’Connor). In an even more chilling series of scenes, a possessed Arne later stabs his landlord to death. It is then up to the Warrens to prove that Arne is not guilty by reason of satanic curse.As with “The Conjuring” and “The Conjuring 2,” the film is based on the Warrens’ real-life escapades, and the couple did attempt with Johnson’s lawyer to mount a possession defense. But the film conveniently attributes Johnson’s first-degree manslaughter (rather than murder) conviction and meager five-year prison stay to the Warrens’ efforts, despite the court dismissing their claims for real. It also heavily implies that Lorraine Warren, armed with heavenly psychic powers, is a more skilled investigator than the police, and preaches marital devotion as the ultimate Godly weapon. (The latter is a staple of the franchise.)“The Devil Made Me Do It” is an excellently spooky work of fiction. It would be even better if it privileged ghoulishness over gospel.The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do ItRated R for child contortions and a blood shower. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters and on HBO Max. More

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      Jerome Hellman, Producer of ‘Midnight Cowboy,’ Dies at 92

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      His movie producing career consisted of just seven films, but they earned him six Academy Awards, three for “Midnight Cowboy” and three for “Coming Home.”Jerome Hellman, who produced “Midnight Cowboy” (1969), the only X-rated film ever to win the best picture Academy Award, and who went on to solidify his reputation with other tough-minded dramas, like the Oscar-winning “Coming Home,” died on May 26 at his home in South Egremont, Mass., in the Berkshires. He was 92.The death was confirmed by his wife, Elizabeth Empleton Hellman.Almost no one at the 1970 Academy Awards ceremony expected “Midnight Cowboy” to win. The movie was the gritty urban story of Joe Buck (Jon Voight), a young, handsome, naïve and not particularly bright Texan who decides to start a new life in New York City as a male hustler catering to wealthy older women, and Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), a grubby Bronx con man with a debilitating limp who becomes Joe’s unlikely ally.Shot with an initial budget of only $1 million, the movie included straightforward but far from pornographic depictions of straight and gay sex, prostitution and gang rape. The film’s rating was later upgraded to R.Vincent Canby’s review in The New York Times seemed hesitant to overpraise the film, which was based on James Leo Herlihy’s 1965 novel of the same name. It was “tough and good in important ways,” Mr. Canby wrote, “slick, brutal (but not brutalizing)” and “ultimately a moving experience.”Mr. Hellman didn’t even bother to write an acceptance speech.“I probably only said 10 words” after Elizabeth Taylor handed him the trophy, Mr. Hellman told The Los Angeles Times in 2005. “It must have been the shortest speech in the history of the Oscars.”Mr. Hellman’s entire movie producing career consisted of seven films, but they earned him six Academy Awards, not to mention an additional 11 nominations. Three Oscars were for “Midnight Cowboy”; John Schlesinger also won as best director and Waldo Salt for best adapted screenplay.The other three — for best actor, best actress and best original screenplay — were for “Coming Home” (1978), an ambitious drama directed by Hal Ashby. Mr. Voight and Jane Fonda starred in the film, he as a paraplegic Vietnam War veteran with a social conscience, and she as a military wife who becomes his lover while her conservative straight-by-the-book husband is deployed in the same war.Jon Voight, left, and Dustin Hoffman in a scene from the 1969 film “Midnight Cowboy,” the only X-rated film ever to win the best picture Oscar.United ArtistsBetween those two successes, “The Day of the Locust” (1975), also directed by Mr. Schlesinger, was another story altogether. Based on Nathanael West’s novel, set on the fringes of 1930s Hollywood, it was a depressing tale of a seductive but tainted promised land where some people came to fail and some to die. William Atherton, Donald Sutherland and Karen Black starred, respectively, as an Ivy League designer, a sexually repressed accountant and an untalented starlet.Many critics found the film off-putting, and it did not do well at the box office. Pauline Kael of The New Yorker said it had “no emotional center.” Although Roger Ebert of The Chicago Sun-Times loved Mr. Sutherland’s performance, he found most of the characters too clearly doomed to care about.But Mr. Canby wrote in The Times that the film was “in many ways remarkable,” declaring its subject a metaphor for the decline of Western civilization and “second-rateness as a way of life.”Judith Crist, then the acclaimed founding movie critic for New York magazine, praised “The Day of the Locust” in a full-page review. “So brilliant is” this film, she began, “so dazzling and harrowing its impact, so impotent are the superlatives it evokes” that you almost want to avoid looking at it directly, like a solar eclipse. She concluded, “To call it the finest film of the past several years is to belittle it.”The National Board of Review named it one of the year’s 10 best films.Jerome Hellman was born on Sept. 4, 1928, in Manhattan, the second child of Abraham J. Hellman, a Romanian-born insurance broker, and Ethel (Greenstein) Hellman. After high school, he served two years in the Marine Corps, then began his working life as a messenger in the New York office of Ashley-Steiner, a talent agency.He rose through the ranks and founded his own agency in 1957, before he was 30. But he sold that business in 1963 and became a full-time movie producer, beginning with George Roy Hill’s comedy “The World of Henry Orient” (1964). Peter Sellers played the title role, a New York concert pianist who is trying to initiate an affair with a married woman but is being stalked by two adoring adolescent girls. The film was both well reviewed and a hit.His other films as producer were Irvin Kershner’s “A Fine Madness” (1966), starring Sean Connery as a poet with writer’s block, and “Promises in the Dark” (1979), starring Marsha Mason as a doctor treating a teenage cancer patient. It was the only film that Mr. Hellman ever directed, and only because Mr. Schlesinger, who was scheduled to do so, had dropped out.Mr. Hellman’s last film was “The Mosquito Coast” (1986), directed by Peter Weir from Paul Theroux’s novel about an inventor who moves to a tropical island with his family, tries to create a utopia and fails. Harrison Ford starred.Mr. Hellman in 2009. At one point he described his earlier films as “unique, different, fraught with risk, problematical.”Neilson Barnard/Getty ImagesMr. Hellman was married to Joanne Fox from 1957 to 1966 and to Nancy Ellison, a photographer, from 1973 to 1991. In addition to his third wife, a film promoter whom he married in 2001, his survivors include a son, J.R.; a daughter, Jenny Hellman; and a grandson.Authors and commentators considered Mr. Hellman a driving force in the creation of what some called the New Hollywood of the 1970s, where power shifted from big-studio committees to independent filmmakers with purpose. But the era didn’t last long. In 1982, in an interview with The New York Times, he described the films he had made up to that point as “unique, different, fraught with risk, problematical.”“People just can’t believe that after the success of ‘Coming Home,’ I couldn’t just do what I wanted,” Mr. Hellman observed. But the studios, he said, were now run by business types who needed every film to be a blockbuster.“All that my success has won me is the luxury of immediate access to top executives,” he said. More

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      The Toasts Are Mimed, but the Kennedy Center Honors Return

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      The pandemic made the ceremony, honoring Debbie Allen, Joan Baez, Garth Brooks, Midori and Dick Van Dyke and airing on TV Sunday, like no other.WASHINGTON — A handful of dignitaries made toasts without glasses in front of thousands of empty plush red seats, before a masked stagehand in white gloves quickly wiped down the microphone and lectern. Actual drinks had to wait for the safety of an outdoor terrace and a distanced reception.A brief photo line was moved from the Kennedy Center’s grand entrance hallway to a wing offstage, where a half dozen photographers stood in front of mementos from previous productions. In an opera house designed to hold more than 2,000 people, roughly 120 masked attendees had their temperatures checked with wrist scans before slipping through a nondescript backstage door to witness a short, scaled-back fragment of the 43rd Kennedy Center Honors.Joan Baez arrived with Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the infectious disease expert. Joshua Roberts/ReutersThe ceremony was delayed, and transformed, but the show went on. Instead of receiving their ribboned medals at the usual ornate dinner at the State Department, this year’s honorees — the violinist Midori, the actor Dick Van Dyke, the country singer Garth Brooks, the singer and activist Joan Baez, and the actress, producer and choreographer Debbie Allen — were given them onstage in the center itself.The ceremony, usually held and televised in December, was moved to May, and split over several days. Then the organizers and producers began stitching together a mixture of recorded at-home tributes and in-person performances across the center to be broadcast on CBS at 8 p.m. on Sunday, June 6.If the Kennedy Center Honors had to be stripped of much of its glamour this month to accommodate rapidly changing coronavirus health guidelines, the subdued ceremony offered a chance for the honorees to help usher in the reopening of the nation’s cultural institutions after a grueling year for the arts.“Coming out of this very dark time of the pandemic, being able to see the arts coming back into our lives again, live, in person,” made the ceremony particularly special, Midori said at a news conference ahead of the ceremony. “This is also encouragement for me, as well as a motivation to be able to continue to connect with others, to collaborate, to create.”And even a reduced capacity, socially-distant honor was still cause for celebration.“I can’t be more thrilled,” Van Dyke, 95, proclaimed to reporters. “How I got here, I don’t know, and I’m not going to ask.”Dick Van Dyke said he was thrilled to get the honor: “How I got here, I don’t know, and I’m not going to ask.” He shared a moment with the violinist Midori. Joshua Roberts/ReutersThe arts industry remains among the most devastated by the pandemic, with the restrictions that kept theaters closed for more than a year to stem the spread of the virus just now beginning to lift in New York, Washington and other artistic centers. For the Kennedy Center, the Honors ceremony serves as the biggest fund-raiser of the year, usually attracting a conglomerate of lawmakers, federal officials, donors and artistic elite for a week of festivities.Compared to the average haul of $6 million to $6.5 million in donations, this year’s ceremony is brought in about $3.5 million, according to organizers. The Kennedy Center faced a partisan backlash in 2020 after receiving $25 million in the $2.2 trillion stimulus law, but still cutting pay for some staff members, including National Symphony Orchestra musicians.Like many awards ceremonies of the pandemic era, the center relied on technology to help accommodate virtual viewers, including a website for donors that streamed some of the segments and tributes, as well as backstage clips from previous ceremonies.Gloria Estefan was the host of the ceremony.Paul Morigi/Getty ImagesGarth Brooks and his wife, Trisha Yearwood.Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesBut the decision to allow a small group of donors, guests and reporters attend the medallion ceremony and a few in-person, outdoor tributes was a tentative return to normalcy at the Kennedy Center campus after officials canceled all performances last year.The center was dotted with remnants of a 2020 season that never was: an art exhibition still on display celebrated the centennial of women’s suffrage in 2020, and there was a display of costumes for operas that were never held.“There was never actually much serious conversation about not doing it — for us, literally for the last 14 months, we’ve really been taking it one day at a time,” said Deborah F. Rutter, the center’s president, in an interview. “This is about artists creating something out of limitations.”But organizers were determined to barrel forward with a small ceremony, however delayed and however limited, to preserve the tradition of honoring a handful of artists for lifetime achievements. Plans repeatedly changed with shifting federal guidance and health guidelines, and top officials, in offering opening remarks, joked about the number of times they conferred with the honorees about how to make the ceremony feasible.Yet the five artists — some of whom had participated in previous ceremonies as part of tributes — appeared moved by not only the recognition of their life’s work, but a far more intimate celebration that allowed them to spend time with each other and their loved ones, instead of being shuttled separately between events.“We’ve been hanging out,” Allen said, calling it a “cohesive, lovely part” of being part of the group. Brooks added that “we got to move at our own pace,” something that allowed him to “leave here as a fan of these people more than a fellow honoree.” (At one point, as Brooks helped him down a staircase, Van Dyke cheerfully hummed the “Bridal Chorus.”)If the pandemic made this a most unusual year for the awards, in at least one area things seemed to return to normal: President Biden held the traditional reception for the honorees at the White House, something former President Donald Trump did not do during his four years in office.Baez said she sang a verse of the civil-rights anthem “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around” in the Oval Office, and she repeated it for reporters, her unmistakable soprano echoing in the empty opera house.“It feels like we’re coming out of a dark tunnel, and there’s the possibility again for arts and culture,” she said. (Baez arrived to the medallion ceremony on the arm of Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, whom she invited after the pair struck up a friendship earlier this year.)Chita Rivera chatted with Debbie Allen and Dick Van Dyke. Joshua Roberts/ReutersThe event also offered the small audience a chance to see the skeleton of the medallion ceremony, hosted by Gloria Estefan, a previous honoree.The crackle of stage directions over a headset momentarily pierced a few bars of pizzicato, as Yo-Yo Ma, the cellist and 2011 honoree, offered a solo performance as the lone in-person tribute for the ceremony.Recorded tributes also meant that the five artists could be surprised along with a televised audience when the show is broadcast. The filmed salutes were slated to include performances from students Midori and Allen have mentored, songs from “Mary Poppins” and “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” for Van Dyke, and renditions of “We Shall Overcome” and “Friends in Low Places” for Baez and Brooks respectively.The honorees emphasized the need to continue investing in the arts as the country begins to move beyond the pandemic, with Allen promising to “keep my hands on the plow with our young people.”Brooks, visibly emotional as he spoke about the medal around his neck, said he had been “looking at it as a finish line” until Midori had reflected on the award as a motivation to continue creating and collaborating with others.“Because of you, it’s a beginning,” he said.Now the Kennedy Center will try to make up for lost time: it aims to produce its 44th ceremony in December for another slate of honorees. That one, officials hope, will be staged before a full-capacity audience. More

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      Disney Creates a ‘Launchpad’ for Underrepresented Filmmakers

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      This collection of short films streaming on Disney+ shows promise, if the studio can follow through on its support.Can truly radical programming come from Disney? I was skeptical from the moment I heard about “Launchpad” (streaming on Disney+), the studio’s new initiative to support and uplift underrepresented filmmakers. Historically, Disney hasn’t had a strong track record for representation (well, which Hollywood studio has?). In fact, it recently added disclaimers about racist stereotypes in old films from its streaming library, including “Dumbo” and “Peter Pan.” Efforts for inclusivity only really ramped up in the last few years, and even so, they have not been without missteps — the live-action “Beauty and the Beast,” for example, hyped up Josh Gad’s Le Fou as Disney’s first gay character, only to make his queerness insultingly ambiguous and brief. More

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      ‘Changing the Game’ Review: Fighting for the Right to Play

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      Three transgender high schoolers confront the fraught world of student athletics in this documentary that takes a controlled approach.In 2017, Mack Beggs, then 17, won a state girls’ wrestling championship. Mack, a transgender boy from Dallas, had wanted to wrestle in the boys’ division. But in Texas, state policy mandates that students compete according to their sex assigned at birth rather than gender identity. So his options were to wrestle girls or to not wrestle at all.Mack is one of three young athletes profiled in the documentary “Changing the Game,” which offers an earnest look at the way transgender teens around the country are fighting for self-actualization in the fraught world of student athletics.The documentary (streaming on Hulu) illustrates how rules differ from state to state: The skier Sarah Rose Huckman, who lives in New Hampshire, describes a policy that hinges on gender confirmation surgery; whereas at a high school in Connecticut, the runner Andraya Yearwood is able to compete on the team she wants.Outcry over transgender kids in sports manifests as a conservative talking point and in waves of discriminatory bills from Republican lawmakers. But rather than deconstruct the politics, history or parameters of this furor, “Changing the Game” hews closely to Mack, Sarah and Andraya. We see the ways in which bullying and outsized media attention gnaw at these teens, who face the public eye with astounding courage.As it follows its subjects, the documentary takes a conventional and controlled approach. The director Michael Barnett intercuts interviews with competition footage, training montages and slow-motion action shots. Throughout, a synth-heavy score insists on a motivational mood.A frequent right-wing argument is that transgender athletes make sports unfair. The documentary’s best and most challenging through-line shows where this claim falls short — particularly how, for young athletes, building confidence is more important than wins and losses. “Changing the Game” could have gone further, analyzing how fairness in sports is a myth to begin with. But the movie isn’t interested in rewriting the rules; it would rather introduce us to the brave young people who are.Changing the GameNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      Bo Burnham’s ‘Inside’: A Comedy Special and an Inspired Experiment

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      Using cinematic tools other comics overlook, the star (who is also the director, editor and cameraman) trains a glaring spotlight on internet life mid-pandemic.One of the most encouraging developments in comedy over the past decade has been the growing directorial ambition of stand-up specials. It’s folly to duplicate the feel of a live set, so why not fully adjust to the screen and try to make something as visually ambitious as a feature? More