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      ‘Those Who Wish Me Dead’ Review: A Desperate Scramble to Survive

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      This thriller starring Angelina Jolie takes its time but doesn’t waste any time.I’m not sure I believed the plot for a minute of “Those Who Wish Me Dead,” but as a means of pitting righteous characters against implacable assassins in a succession of abrupt, pitiless, life-or-death confrontations, the story has a terse effectiveness. The film, based on the 2014 novel by Michael Koryta, has been brought to the screen by the writer-director Taylor Sheridan. Although he isn’t the sole screenwriter here, the film paints in the bold, primal strokes of his scripts for “Sicario” and “Hell or High Water” without getting bogged down in the sloggy self-seriousness of his previous directorial feature, “Wind River.”The movie takes its time, but it also doesn’t waste time. The main pair do not meet until almost 40 minutes in. Until then, “Those Who Wish Me Dead” patiently juggles different narrative lines. One, initially the least interesting, involves Hannah (Angelina Jolie), a daredevil smoke jumper who has had a barely veiled death wish ever since her poor judgment of forest fire winds led to the deaths of three children. (Only a movie would so quickly entrust another boy to her care, to offer a chance at redemption.) In an indication of how “Those Who Wish Me Dead” never asks to be judged on plausibility, the film twice puts Hannah in the path of lightning strikes. There is an almost comic casualness to the way she dumps antiseptic on each new wound.The movie also tracks Connor (Finn Little), the precocious son of a Florida forensic accountant, Owen (Jake Weber). Owen has discovered something that could get both of them killed. The nature of the discovery is the film’s MacGuffin — all we know is that governors and congressmen would be implicated by its disclosure, and that they are scared enough that the government (or someone government-adjacent) has hired two fixers (Aidan Gillen and Nicholas Hoult) to kill anyone with the information. (Tyler Perry, who makes a deferred entrance and appears in only one scene, plays their boss.)The hit men are introduced faking a gas line explosion to murder a district attorney; they have few qualms about killing bystanders. They are also skilled investigators who deduce that Owen and Connor have run to Montana, where Owen’s former brother-in-law, Ethan (Jon Bernthal), and Ethan’s pregnant wife, Allison (Medina Senghore), run, yup, a survival school, and where Connor will eventually meet Hannah. It’s emblematic of Sheridan’s efficiency that when Ethan the uncle and Connor the nephew finally connect, the movie doesn’t pause to have them say hello.All of this is elemental stuff, a battle between unmitigated darkness (in the form of the fast-thinking killers) and total virtue, as Hannah and Connor struggle to reach safety, then retreat, then run again, all while outwitting a forest fire that Gillen’s character has set to the distract the locals. New Mexico plays Montana, and not being familiar with the terrain, I was convinced by that. Accurate or not, the landscape gives as sensational a performance as any of the actors.Those Who Wish Me DeadRated R. Cruel and especially upsetting violence. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters and on HBO Max. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More

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      ‘Los Hermanos/The Brothers’ Review: A Long-Deferred Duet

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      In this documentary, two musician siblings — one who lives in Cuba, the other in the United States — get a chance to tour together.A moving documentary with generous amounts of music, “Los Hermanos/The Brothers” follows two musician siblings from Havana whose personal closeness is at odds with the geopolitics that keep them apart. Ilmar Gavilán, a violinist, left at 14 to study in Moscow and later immigrated to the United States. Aldo López-Gavilán, his younger brother, a pianist and composer, mostly stayed in Cuba, apart from conservatory training in London. Until December 2014, when President Obama announced a restoration of American relations with Cuba, the brothers — the sons of professional musicians — had few opportunities to perform together, or even to see each other.Directed by Marcia Jarmel and Ken Schneider, the documentary follows the brothers separately and as a pair from 2016 to 2018, as they visit their respective homes and travel the United States on a musical tour. The film shows how their differing backgrounds have shaped their musical styles and their attitudes. Aldo talks about the lack of good pianos in Cuba. Ilmar explains how the embargo prevented Aldo from having their mother’s piano there repaired by Steinway in the United States. When Ilmar visits Cuba, Aldo praises the government stores while Ilmar teases him about how infrequently the rations allow him to obtain a chicken. In Detroit, Ilmar laments the visible inequality.The film might have done more to explain the logistics of the brothers’ border hassles, and there are a few occasions when the year of filming could be clarified. But the electrifying musical collaborations — in addition to the poignant sibling performances, Joshua Bell performs Aldo’s music with Aldo at Lincoln Center — more than make up for those quibbles.Los Hermanos/The BrothersNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. In theaters and on virtual cinemas. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More

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      ‘Enfant Terrible’ Review: I Can Sleep When I’m Dead

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      The packed biographical film “Enfant Terrible” races to keep up with the blazing life of the filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder.Oskar Roehler’s “Enfant Terrible” runs through an impressively packed compendium of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s life and works — the brilliance, the sadism, the compassion and the leopard-print suiting.Roehler begins with Fassbinder upending Munich’s Action Theatre in his early 20s, and his fearless artistic talent suggests a force of nature unleashed upon an unsuspecting world. An account of milestones from the director’s 40-plus features follows, from “Love Is Colder Than Death” to the Cannes breakthrough of “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul” to the narcotic dream of “Querelle.” He holds rapt a circle of collaborators and lovers, but his sadistic habits and drug jags (he died in 1982 at 37) made it like being friends with a tornado.Famous Fassbinder players include the actor Kurt Raab (Hary Prinz), and El Hedi ben Salem (Erdal Yildiz), the male lead of “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul” and a lover; not all appear by name (Frida-Lovisa Hamann’s rising star, “Martha,” seems to be Hanna Schygulla). Oliver Masucci (“Dark”) presides as the slovenly genius himself, and I like him when he’s screaming and copulating but I still wanted more. (Fanboy quibble: the actor flaunts a potbelly but he’s nearly half a foot taller than Fassbinder.)Roehler shoots “Enfant Terrible” on stage-like studio sets, working through certain stylistic elements from certain Fassbinder films. The look adds to an affectionate tribute that’s more than a Hollywood-style “greatest hits,” partly just because of Fassbinder’s loving embrace of queer and working-class experience. But the film feels both hermetic and declarative, and it’s folly to constantly remind a viewer of Fassbinder’s impossible-to-replicate alchemy of color, lighting, angles and passion.Enfant TerribleNot rated. In German, French and English, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hour 14 minutes. In select theaters and on virtual cinemas. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More

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      ‘Oxygen’ Review: The Thrill of Claustrophobia

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      Trapped in a cryogenic chamber with oxygen levels dwindling, a woman must learn how to team up with the machine in order to escape.Since shocking his way into popular culture with the 2003 lesbian exploitation slasher “High Tension,” the horror director Alexandre Aja has led grand, English-language productions: remakes of “The Hills Have Eyes” and “Maniac,” as well as the bombastic horror-comedy “Piranha 3D.”“Oxygen,” filmed during summer 2020 at the height of the coronavirus pandemic and now streaming on Netflix, is Aja’s return to French-language cinema. It also shows how much better the director can do with a sparse script (written by Christie LeBlanc).The film takes place almost entirely within a cryogenic chamber slightly larger than a coffin. The film follows a woman (Mélanie Laurent) after a malfunction jolts her out of hypersleep. Trapped and with oxygen levels dwindling, she must learn how to team up with the machine, controlled by a sinister-yet-pleasant A.I. named Milo (Mathieu Amalric), in order to escape.The premise is simple, but this twist-filled script by LeBlanc gives Laurent ample opportunity to shine. Because of its limited setting, the film hangs on Laurent’s acting ability, and she gamely vaults between elation, terror and determination. Aja maintains tension throughout, using horror conventions — and a few cheap jump scares — to routinely shock the audience back to attention. Though “Oxygen” is more thriller than horror, these manipulations keep the film taut, even as its script bends credulity.The film’s opening is immediately gripping, sending viewers into a claustrophobic nightmare. When the protagonist is jarred awake, she must fight her way through a protective sac. Introduced by the sound of a beating heart and images of deformed lab rats, the first shots of Laurent’s face promise something monstrous underneath. Her features are elongated by red lights and her shallow breaths sound more animal than human. When Laurent’s face becomes visible, her fingers break through the cocoon like the chestbursters of “Alien.” The effect is uncanny, disorienting viewers and immediately aligning them with the film’s addled lead.“Oxygen” is a film defined by its lack of space, and its art and animation departments have expertly constructed a cryochamber that is both visually pleasing and appropriately creepy. The A.I. Milo is rendered as a Siri-like circle of pulsating waves, occasionally offering up other interfaces for Laurent to navigate. As Milo’s voice, Almaric matches the cool, detached energy of his surroundings, while simultaneously winning trust as his captor’s only ally. The two even share a few wry exchanges, lending humor to an otherwise dour narrative.“Oxygen” is the rare genre film that is tight enough to actually succeed on streaming. It will make you put your phone on the other side of the living room for a little while longer — or at least make you grateful you have a whole room to cross.OxygenNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      Norman Lloyd, Veteran Hollywood Hyphenate, Is Dead at 106

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      In his long career as an actor, producer and director, he worked with some of the best-known names in show business, even if his own was barely recognized.He was the young actor who moved the audience as Cinna the poet in Orson Welles’s 1937 theatrical production of “Julius Caesar.”He was the chilly fascist sympathizer who kept audiences on the edge of their seats as he dangled from the Statue of Liberty in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1942 film “Saboteur.”And he was the kindly Dr. Auschlander on the popular 1980s hospital drama “St. Elsewhere.”His face was recognizable to generations of people. But his name? Well, just consider this: When a filmmaker decided to make a documentary about him, he ended up titling it “Who Is Norman Lloyd?”Mr. Lloyd, who died on Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles at 106, carved out a successful career over seven decades as an actor, producer and director, working with some of the best-known names in the business — even if his own was barely recognized.His death was confirmed by the producer Dean Hargrove, a longtime friend.In addition to acting under Welles and Hitchcock, Mr. Lloyd worked with Charlie Chaplin, Bertolt Brecht, John Houseman and Jean Renoir. He became good friends with Hitchcock and a frequent tennis partner of Chaplin’s. And he had stories to tell about all of them.“He is a fount of stage and movie lore, full of juice at the age of 93,” The New Yorker wrote when “Who Is Norman Lloyd?” was released in 2007.When Mr. Lloyd spoke, he did so with the sort of delivery that suggested an upper-crust upbringing and impeccable schooling. As it happened, he was born in Jersey City, N.J., on Nov. 8, 1914, and the only social climbing his family did was to move to Brooklyn. The aristocratic voice came later, when it was suggested that he take elocution lessons to erase his accent.“He sounds like he was born in London,” a friend, Peter Bart, the editorial director at Variety, once said. “It’s not an affectation. It’s just the way he sounds.”Mr. Lloyd began performing when he was very young, appearing before ladies’ clubs, he told The Star-Ledger of Newark in 2007. “‘Father, Get the Hammer. There’s a Fly on Baby’s Head’ — that was my big number,” he recalled dryly. “So you can imagine what that act was like.”But the young man was set on an actor’s path, and eventually he began working under Welles at the Mercury Theater in New York. The pay was poor, but it was the Depression, and he was better off than many of the people who crammed the theater in search of a cheap diversion. Mr. Lloyd’s performance as Cinna, in a version of “Julius Caesar” that Welles set in Mussolini’s Italy, brought him acclaim.“By many accounts, the most electrifying moment in ‘Caesar’ was the brief scene in which Cinna the Poet is mistaken for one of the conspirators and is set upon by the mob,” Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker in 2015 in an article about Welles.When Welles moved to Los Angeles in 1940 to make films, the young Mr. Lloyd went with him.Welles’s first movie project fell through, however, and Mr. Lloyd, who was expecting a baby with his wife, Peggy, a fellow performer, decided to look for work elsewhere. Welles’s next project went better: It was “Citizen Kane.”But while Mr. Lloyd missed a chance to have a role in that classic film, he did manage to get cast by Hitchcock in “Saboteur.” His role was a big one: Fry, a fifth columnist bent on attacking American targets during World War II.At the film’s climax, he topples over the edge of the Statue of Liberty’s torch and dangles as the film’s hero (Robert Cummings) tries to pull him to safety by his sleeve. (If a spoiler can be forgiven after all these years, Fry’s fate is less like that of Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint as they perch on Mount Rushmore in another Hitchcock film, “North by Northwest,” than that of King Kong on the Empire State Building.)Other roles followed, including in Hitchcock’s “Spellbound” (1945), Chaplin’s “Limelight” (1952) and Jean Renoir’s Hollywood movie “The Southerner” (1945). But Mr. Lloyd gradually began to turn to producing and directing.During the Hollywood blacklist period, his work dried up because of his past associations with leftist performers. He credited Hitchcock with reviving his career by insisting that he be allowed to hire Mr. Lloyd to produce and direct episodes of his television shows, “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.”Mr. Lloyd took whatever work he could get until almost the end of his life. He had roles in an episode of “Modern Family” in 2010 and in the 2015 Judd Apatow movie “Trainwreck.” He also continued to spend a lot of time on the tennis court.Mr. Lloyd “still plays tennis and still follows the serve to the net, which is daunting,” Mr. Bart said in an interview when his friend was well into his 90s.In 2014, the year he turned 100, the Los Angeles City Council proclaimed Nov. 8, his birthday, “Norman Lloyd Day.”Peggy Lloyd, who was born Margaret Hirsdansky and who was married to Mr. Lloyd for 75 years, died in 2011. She and Mr. Lloyd had met when they co-starred in a play called “Crime,” directed by Elia Kazan.Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.Matthew Sussman, who directed the documentary about Mr. Lloyd, said its title came late in the game, as he was telling acquaintances what he was working on.“That would be the question,” he said, “almost every time: ‘Who is Norman Lloyd?’”Neil Vigdor contributed reporting. More

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      How the Golden Globes Went From Laughingstock to Power Player

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      The group that was once assailed by the F.C.C. steadily gained influence in Hollywood over the years until scrutiny of its practices and lack of diversity led NBC to say it would not air its show in 2022.LOS ANGELES — The Golden Globes were created by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association in 1944 and quickly developed a reputation as unserious and slippery. More

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      Hollywood Has a New Way to Dramatize Addiction

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      Recent films dive into the profound grief experienced by so many families. What do they still get wrong?The first words in the film trailer, spoken over ominous piano, come from a doctor with a grim prognosis. “I’m going to level with you, Molly,” he says. “Opioids have a 97 percent relapse rate.” This is an exaggeration, but it has its effect on Molly and her mother, Deb. Deb is a deer in headlights, eyes wrinkled from years of worryand mistrust. Molly looks like Kurt Cobain in zombie makeup: unbuttoned flannel, skeletal frame, sunken eyes, bleached hair, pallid complexion. “You have gone through this 15 times,” the doctor says, and then there’s a fast cut to Molly in a twin bed, twitching in the fetal position, withdrawing from opioids.Next comes the premise. There is a monthly injection, the doctor explains, that “essentially makes you immune to getting high,” locking the brain’s opioid receptors behind a chemical cage not even heroin can penetrate. But there’s a catch. Before getting this injection of naltrexone, Molly must remain opioid-free for a week; otherwise, it could precipitate a severe sickness. Molly dreads this trial: “Four more days? Seriously?” We see a series of tense vignettes between mother and daughter, with Molly, played by Mila Kunis, screaming at Deb, played by Glenn Close: “I’m so sorry that my drug addiction is so incredibly difficult on you!”According to the C.D.C.’s provisional data, more than 90,000 Americans died from drug overdoses between October 2019 and September 2020, the highest rate ever recorded. Dramas about the addictions behind that number may not be fun to watch, but they do feel necessary, given the profound real-world grief they represent. Statistics make us aware of a crisis; art can help us metabolize it.And yet: When this trailer for Hollywood’s newest addiction drama — Kunis and Close in “Four Good Days” — emerged, and my Twitter feed lit up with commentary, most of it was biting. “There are a lot of bad movies about addiction, and this one seems ready to blow them all out of the water,” tweeted an emergency-​medicine physician in Ohio. “I watched this on mute and my god … the camera angles and lighting are every addiction movie cliché ever,” another advocate replied.That was Twitter. In the YouTube comments, I found a parallel universe. “The trailer had me in tears, spot on if you or anyone you love has dealt with any type of addiction,” one commenter wrote. “Them first 4 days are literally the worst,” another said. “This is such a good concept.” Hollywood has produced many vivid tales of druggy debauchery, especially about heroin. In the 1990s, “The Basketball Diaries” and “Trainspotting” showed audiences characters who injected heroin in the seedy underworlds of New York and Glasgow. In the 1970s, you had stories like “The Panic in Needle Park,” in which Al Pacino plays a Manhattan heroin user who falls in love with an innocent young woman and gets her addicted too.Today, many films about drugs have a different vibe. They take place not in cities but in upscale suburbs or in rural areas, and they tell their stories not from the perspective of drug users but of their terrified loved ones. Like “Ben Is Back,” “Beautiful Boy” and “Hillbilly Elegy” — some of Hollywood’s other swings at the opioid era — “Four Good Days” is ultimately a family drama about the power, and the limits, of a mother’s love.Close and Kunis’s family dynamic has the kind of raw verisimilitude only talented actors can recreate. But if anything here were to be praised for realism, it wouldn’t be the drama; it would be the boredom. In between scenes both poignant and preachy, Molly languishes in her mother’s suburban home, smoking unenjoyed cigarettes in a plastic chair in the garage. Kicking heroin involves skull-crushing levels of boredom, tired but wide awake, no hope of feeling comfortable; they call it “kicking” because of the way your legs grow cramped and restless. When Molly’s not smoking in the garage, she’s twiddling her thumbs, biding her time.Hollywood still needs to reduce a complex illness into something like a sports movie or boxing match.But a Hollywood movie cannot just be about boredom. It requires a meaty emotional conflict, preferably one that can be resolved in a couple of hours. Deb, for instance, says she blames doctors who overprescribed painkillers for Molly’s addiction, but the audience later learns that she left her family and that Molly grew up in a volatile, loveless home. A daughter’s feeling abandoned by her mother, the mother’s blaming herself for her child’s addiction — here is something we can chew on.The demands of mass-market Hollywood dramas seem almost engineered to prevent honest portrayals of addiction. The films now conceive of it as a medical illness instead of a moral failing, which is positive. But Hollywood still needs to reduce a complex illness into something like a sports movie or boxing match. Molly either wins or loses, gets high or not. Her illness must ultimately be conquered by valiant displays of will. She must survive a cold-turkey withdrawal while her mother, whom she has burned one too many times, musters her last ounces of support and compassion.The harrowing withdrawal, with its days of hellish sweats, is the most obvious aspect of addiction to dramatize: a trial of grit from which the character emerges transformed. Perhaps this is why naltrexone seems to be a favorite among some of America’s drug-court judges, who may view withdrawal as its own form of redemptive punishment. Maintenance treatments are arguably more effective and don’t require patients to be sick for a week, but they do not follow the dramatic path in which a character must reach a gripping, life-altering crisis point. Addiction, however, does not follow defined dramatic arcs. For some, treating it is a repetitive, yearslong process of trial and error. For others, it’s even more anticlimactic, and therapy and medication do the trick. Yes, some do recover after a cathartic breakthrough. But those stories tend not to bring viewers closer to addiction; if anything, they create distance, reducing tangles of human desire into melodrama and pity. You come away thinking, At least I’m not like that.In stories about “Four Good Days,” critics have marveled at how Kunis is “unrecognizable” in her “transformation” into what Hollywood thinks a heroin user looks like. Molly is gaunt, with rotting teeth and scabs dotting her face — a severe case. The film implies that this is her make-or-break shot at recovery, that it all comes down to this one moment. You’re unlikely to see less sensational arcs in today’s Hollywood dramas: say, people who make their progress slowly, who falter, who benefit from harm reduction, who learn that recovery is about more than their own will to endure suffering, whose addiction isn’t even their biggest problem in life. Such stories could surely be interesting ones. But in order to tell them, Hollywood would need to kick a very old habit. Source photographs: Screen grabs from YouTube More

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      ‘Titanic’ Is My Favorite Movie. There, I Said It.

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      A woman’s heart is a deep ocean of secrets; this is mine.A year ago, I went on a date, and the guy asked me what my favorite movie was. A simple question, but I stammered. His brow furrowed. “Didn’t your profile say that you love movie quotes?” I didn’t want to reveal the truth — not so soon, at least — so I hid behind the Criterion Collection (“ ‘La Strada,’ ‘Rebecca,’ etc.”). Then a scene flashed in my head — a swell of music, an enormous hat: “You can be blasé about some things, Rose, but not about Titanic!” A woman’s heart is a deep ocean of secrets; my secret is that I love “Titanic.” This has been true since I was a 10-year-old in a darkened theater, weeping uncontrollably on my mother’s lap. Like the children onscreen waving farewell to the doomed steamer, I marveled at the grandeur of what was passing before my eyes: a sweeping history lesson and a devastating romance between a first-class passenger named Rose (Kate Winslet) and a below-decks dreamboat named Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio). Until then, my cultural diet had consisted of Rodgers and Hammerstein singalongs and the Disney canon. “Titanic” — rapturous, tragic, real — was an awakening. In just over three hours, the film colored all my notions of grown-up life: love, loss, the female struggle, the unbreakable bond of a string quartet.To my child’s mind, “Titanic” was impossibly vast: It felt as though the movie encompassed the entire mysterious range of human life. It was, unequivocally, the most powerful experience I’d ever had with a work of art — but I was 10. I couldn’t fully understand this feeling of transcendence, so I just kept rewatching. I saw the movie three times when it was released in 1997. The following year, when it came out on VHS — a fat brick of a box set, neatly split into two acts of happy and sad — I routinely popped in the pre-iceberg tape to enjoy with my after-school snack. I began fixating on unlikely features of the film, delighting in its ancillary characters’ banal dialogue: the clueless graybeards (“Freud? Who is he? Is he a passenger?”); the poetry of the bridge (“Take her to sea, Mr. Murdoch. Let’s stretch her legs”); the snobbery of Rose’s mother (“Will the lifeboats be seated according to class? I hope they’re not too crowded”). As I matured, I stopped my regular viewings, but the movie continued playing in my mind. I was a melancholy indoor girl myself, and Rose perfectly articulated my teenage ennui: “the same narrow people, the same mindless chatter.” Even in the face of more complex ideas and challenges — like the travails of gender politics or problems of class — I found myself leaning on its casual wisdom and glossy sentimentality. The film’s unsubtle gender commentary began to feel revolutionary. (“Of course it’s unfair,” the chilly matriarch says while tightening the strings of her daughter’s corset. “We’re women.”) In the late ’90s, everyone I knew adored “Titanic,” but I felt in my heart that my own love affair with it was something special. It was, unequivocally, the most powerful experience I’d ever had with a work of art — but I was 10.Two decades’ worth of late-night jokes and revisionist hot takes, however, have coated my feelings of affection in deep shame. (Just last month, “the iceberg that sank the Titanic” appeared in a bit on “Saturday Night Live,” lamenting, “Why are people still talking about this?”) The older I grew, the more my enduring admiration felt like some sort of clerical error in my development, a box I had accidentally checked on my application to adulthood. I told myself it was just a guilty pleasure. How could it be anything else? Saying “Titanic” is my favorite movie would be like saying my favorite painting is the “Mona Lisa”: It suggests a lack of discernment. But for me, the movie’s broadness is kind of the point. What snarky critics don’t appreciate is that the movie is a meme because it is a masterpiece. The film has become a cultural shorthand, a way of talking about ideas that are bigger than ourselves — mythic themes of hubris, love and tragedy — while also making a joke. (Has any line captured our collective quarantine mood more than that old chestnut, “It’s been 84 years …”?) It also won 11 Oscars. This past January, I decided, for the first time in a decade, to watch the movie from start to finish. When I was young — in my Tape 1 years — I was dazzled by the film’s spectacle. And yes, watching again, I fell for it in all the old ways: Jack’s good looks, Rose’s Edwardian walking suit, the allure of a real party. But as the camera panned over the sleeping elderly Rose, I broke into sobs seeing the pictures of her post-Titanic life — riding horses on the beach, climbing onto a flying machine dressed in Amelia Earheart cosplay, posing in an on-set glamour shot. After a year of great loss, the pathos of that moment hit me differently. Never mind her heart — her life went on. She survived a disaster and ended up living a life so full that the experience became just a memory. It was the message in a bottle I needed, one of many that “Titanic” has sent my way over the years. I imagine I’ll be receiving these messages forever — even as an old lady, warm in her bed.Jessie Heyman is executive editor of Vogue.com. More