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In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series each Friday. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.The assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is a tipping point for African-American Vietnam War soldiers in this scene from Spike Lee’s latest film, “Da 5 Bloods” (streaming on Netflix). Following a group of veterans who travel back to Vietnam in search of a fallen soldier’s remains (and possibly buried treasure), the movie has a lot on its mind.This sequence flashes back to a moment during the war when the Bloods learned from a radio broadcast of King’s death. The scene is intercut with archival footage of King’s funeral and the uprisings that ensued in multiple American cities. Narrating the sequence, Lee discusses basing it on stories he heard about the vehement response black soldiers in Vietnam had to the news and about how retaliation was considered. He also notes the parallels between that period and the current moment of protest over the killing of George Floyd.Read the Critic’s Pick review of “Da 5 Bloods.”Read an interview with a star of the film, Delroy Lindo.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

My name is Spike Lee, and I’m the director of “Da 5 Bloods.” “This is the voice of Vietnam.” That character you see is Hanoi Hannah, and that’s a real life character. She was the voice of Radio Hanoi during the Vietnam War, and like Axis Sally and Tokyo Rose in World War II, their job was to play music that the American soldiers wanted to listen to. And in between the music, they would start with propaganda. And so this scene is when our five bloods are told over the radio two days after the fact that Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated. And this scene is skillfully intercut with archival footage of many of those over 122 cities that were aflame— black folks enraged. We also deal with how the armed forces, the National Guard were sent out to quell the uprising— I’m not going to use the word riot. I use the word uprising. “Negroes are only 11% of the US populations, but among troops here in Vietnam, you are 32%.” I remember that day when Dr. King was assassinated. I was 11 years old, and also the Vietnam War was the first war that was televised into American homes. A little known story is that, when the bloods, the black soldiers in Vietnam heard that Dr. King had been assassinated, when they heard their brothers and sisters were burning down over 122 cities, they were very, you might say, hot. “Be safe.” There almost was a civil war in Vietnam, where black soldiers were getting ready to take up arms, and they would not be shooting at the Viet Cong. “We need to kill some crackers.” I had four screenings of this film for black and Puerto Rican Vietnam vets that they were there. Each one of them confirmed this happened. Thank god it didn’t. “I’m as mad as everybody. All us bloods got a right to be, but we bloods don’t let nobody use our rage against us. We control our rage.” But it was about to— to be the jump off for those black soldiers. “Stand down! That’s an order!” Knowing they’re fighting an immoral war, knowing they have nothing against the Viet Cong. “You’re gonna have to kill me.” But also knowing their brothers and sisters are fighting for their justice, and that’s what this film is about— how we, as descendants of slaves, have fought for this country from day one. The first person that died for this country in a war— the American Revolutionary War— was a black man, Crispus Attucks at the Boston Massacre. So you can make the case that we’ve been more patriotic than anybody. And even today, we’re still being shot down, choked to death, and people are marching all over the world, seeing the gruesome 8 plus minutes of our king, king Floyd’s life. And Black Lives do matter. Black Lives have to matter. That’s what this scene is about. More

The iO theater, a mainstay of Chicago’s comedy scene and part of the foundation of modern improvisation, is closing permanently, its owner said.“This pandemic has made the financial struggle too difficult and I can’t even see the light at the end of the tunnel at this point,” Charna Halpern wrote in an email that was posted on her Facebook page on Wednesday. “Over my 40 years, I have met many struggles to keep going and I did it to keep a place for my community to have stage time. But at this point in my life, I can’t continue the struggle to stay open.”On Thursday, Halpern, who created the theater with Del Close, architects of a style of comedy that influenced Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, the filmmaker Adam McKay (“The Big Short”) and legions more, confirmed that she was not planning to reopen iO after the pandemic subsides.On top of the closure of the theater’s four performance spaces during the coronavirus quarantine, Halpern said, she couldn’t afford the taxes. “The county is continuing to make us pay property tax,” she said in an interview over email. “The mantra from the city is ‘We are in this together’ but the county mantra is ‘You’re in this alone.’”After developing their improv tenets for decades, Halpern and Close opened iO (then called the ImprovOlympic) in 1995 as a permanent space for a style of performance that prized in-the-moment, supportive honesty and a codified three-beat comedic structure. This vision helped inform comedy troupes and artists ranging from the Upright Citizens Brigade to many stars of “Saturday Night Live.” While Close, who died in 1999, was considered the patriarch of improv, Halpern was, by many accounts, the foremother who helped it grow.Her tenure was not without its rocky moments; in 2016, female students accused an artistic director at the theater’s Los Angeles outpost of harassment. Halpern’s initial response did not sit well with them, though she later fired the director and created new avenues to report abuse. More recently, performers of color signed a petition demanding changes to make the theater more inclusive and to decentralize decision making. Halpern responded on June 10, apologizing and saying that she would work to meet their demands.But in that note, too, Halpern, 68, suggested that the theater was in danger of closing. “The future of iO is fragile,” she wrote then. More

About 20 minutes into “Babyteeth,” Milla — the teenager at the center of this wafting, prettily shot story — shows up bald, the long hair that a boy once praised now gone. There’s no explanation though for her newly shaved head and from the testy conversation that she has with her mother and the mention of “support” it’s obvious that Milla has become ill. As signaled by the unicorn adorning her T-shirt nothing about Milla is meant to be ordinary, something this movie tries very hard to convey.Directed by Shannon Murphy from a script that Rita Kalnejais adapted from her play of the same title, “Babyteeth” is such a fragile, earnest and inoffensive thing that I almost feel bad for not liking it more. It’s a coming-of-age story in a gently if overly studied eccentric key that follows Milla (Eliza Scanlen) as she finds love and grapples with her parents. Her mother and father are played by the nicely matched Essie Davis and Ben Mendelsohn, who show you the wear and tear of a shared life, both the pain and the adoration. The movie could have used more of them.[embedded content]Milla meets her guy, the improbably named Moses (a charismatic Toby Wallace) shortly after the movie begins. He compliments her, and then hits her up for money. An anxious-to-please stray who always looks like he just woke up in a rubbish heap, Moses has perpetually red knuckles and a conspicuous drug habit. At first, he seems to hang around Milla so he can steal her meds. But he proves to be a prince in greasy threads, a sad-boy fantasy who proves as pure-hearted as Milla, or rather as the story needs him to be. And so, nestled by the caressing cinematography, they float into love.With her director of photography, Andrew Commis, Murphy creates a visually cohesive world filled with lambent images that almost but not quite feel as if they had been caught on the fly. She’s attentive to color, light and texture, as is evident from the shots of a child waiting alone, a bee struggling in a pool. These pinpricks of beauty are appealing but because Murphy is trying hard to avoid obviousness they soon feel like swirling dust motes. The movie has texture but no depth, tears but no snot. Who are these people, I kept wondering. What’s ailing Milla? Does Moses ever shower?Scanlen can be appealingly vibrant and spiky, as she showed with her performance as a feral baby doll in the HBO series “Sharp Objects.” (She also played Beth in the recent “Little Women.”) But in “Babyteeth,” Murphy has solicited a largely recessive turn from the actress, whose masklike face often remains locked in neutral. Time and again, you look for some feeling to break through and help anchor Murphy’s expressionism, with its narrative ellipses and colored lights. Instead, as the attractive first hour gives way to the repetitive second, it just drifts and drifts and, alas, so does your attention.BabyteethNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. Rent or buy on iTunes, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

The filmmaker Olivier Assayas has worked in such a wide range of modes over the past 12 years — family dramas, an epic biographical treatment, a horror film of sorts, a coming-of-age movie — that one might think there’s no predominant theme that yokes them together.Nevertheless, a common thread is visible. Many of his pictures show an intense interest in the construction, or reconstruction, of the self, and its relation to the notion of freedom. The title character of “Carlos” broods and preens over his determination to be a revolutionary outlaw hero. The lost heroine of “Personal Shopper,” besides being stuck in a job she hates, is also profoundly unnerved over what her life means without the brother with whom she believed she shared a psychic link. The post-adolescent hero of “Something in the Air” grapples with his relation to radicalism. And so on.[embedded content]Assayas’s latest picture, “Wasp Network” (streaming on Netflix), looks like his most conventional work, but it also pushes this theme to a dizzying, eventually exhilarating, extreme. Based on the nonfiction book “The Last Soldiers of the Cold War” by Fernando Morais, it opens in 1990 with René González, played by the physically formidable Edgar Ramírez (also the title role in “Carlos”), stealing a plane he normally pilots for sky divers and flying it from Cuba to Miami.Now a defector, who has left behind his wife, Olga, and a young daughter, he is almost immediately paraded out for a news conference. In perfect English — born in Chicago, he is already an American citizen — René vehemently proclaims, “I had already said goodbye to Cuba years ago.” Describing conditions there, he seethes, “Everything is short … even the sugar is from Russia.”Back home, Olga, played with quiet strength by Penélope Cruz, works in a monstrous-looking tannery and for a while refuses to answer René’s letters. René allies himself with an anti-Castro activist group and flies out to rescue Cuban refugees trying to get to the United States on rafts.A little later, Juan Pablo Roque (Wagner Moura, the Brazilian star of the “Elite Squad” films, who can shift from boyish to sinister in the space of a single frame) dons snorkeling gear and swims from Caimanera to Guantánamo Bay, where he defects. The military men there welcome him with a meal from McDonald’s. More overtly macho than René, Juan Pablo, once in Miami, woos and weds a charming innocent, Ana Margarita (Ana de Armas, superb), and starts sporting a Rolex, which he ought not be able to afford.Who are these guys, really? About an hour in, the movie travels back four years to Cuba and introduces a character played by Gael García Bernal, who, in conversation with government officials, says he’s spent six months “studying my role.” From this point on, it’s best not to reveal too much, because the surprises here are more than story points — they deepen the film’s fundamental questions.Behind all of it is a historical fact that’s not often discussed in the United States: that during Fidel Castro’s regime, the Cubans still loyal to him saw the privations of daily life not as material issues in and of themselves, but rather as part of a continuing struggle. The revolution was not accomplished, it was ongoing.There are times in which “Wasp Network” feels like a John le Carré tale drenched in Miami sun, or even a serious-minded “Top Gun” variant. But it’s also a provocative demonstration of how strange life can get when the political and the personal intertwine like roots of a mammoth tree.Wasp NetworkNot rated. In English, Spanish and Russian, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 3 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

This exercise in opportunistic fear-mongering disguised as a thriller begins with shots from airport security cameras, arranged to let the audience see something that whoever’s monitoring those feeds would not. That is, the shady movements of a couple of men: one possibly of Arab descent, the other appearing to be a vintage European “football hooligan.”Directed by Patrick Vollrath from a script he wrote with Senad Halilbasic, “7500” — which is streaming on Amazon Prime — then settles into the cockpit of its title flight, of a German airline. Its co-pilot, Travis, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, is American, and his girlfriend, Gökce (Aylin Tezel), with whom he has a child, happens to be the flight attendant on this outing.[embedded content]If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to be locked in a cockpit while rabid hijackers bang on its door with a fire extinguisher, this movie really delivers. The door-banging motif is interrupted by one or another horrific bloody incident, and supplanted in the last half-hour by a hijacker screaming himself hoarse.The hijackers are Islamic terrorists. One imagines the brainstorming leading up to this decision: “Stands to reason.” “Maybe, but isn’t it obvious, lazy, and offensive?” “Nah.”And of course these bad guys happen upon Gökce, who tries to bargain with them, suggesting a kinship when she reveals to them that she’s Turkish. This situation is supposed to present Travis with a searing ethical dilemma, but mainly demonstrates it’s never a great idea to date a colleague.One thing Vollrath does well is create a credibly claustrophobia-inducing atmosphere. Then again, when you restrict your camera to the inside of a cockpit, you’d have to be pretty incompetent not to.7500Rated R. Door-banging, screaming, horrific bloody incidents. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. Watch on Amazon Prime. More