Movies

The man nervously practices in front of his dog how he is going to tell his parents he is gay.“Just look them in the eyes and say, ‘Mom, Dad, I’m — this is my boyfriend, Manuel,’” Greg says, holding a framed photo of himself with his boyfriend Manuel.That’s a scene from “Out,” the new short film from Pixar Animation Studios that introduces the studio’s first gay main character. The film debuted on Friday on Disney Plus, the new streaming platform dedicated to movies and shows from Disney, Pixar, the “Star Wars” franchise, National Geographic and Marvel.“Out,” a nine-minute animated film, is one of seven from Pixar’s SparkShorts program, which seeks “to discover new storytellers, explore new storytelling techniques and experiment with new production workflows,” Jim Morris, the president of Pixar, said on the studio’s website.“These films are unlike anything we’ve ever done at Pixar, providing an opportunity to unlock the potential of individual artists and their inventive filmmaking approaches on a smaller scale than our normal fare,” he said.“Out” introduces viewers to Greg as he gets ready to move to an unnamed city with Manuel.“On an average day, Greg’s life is filled with family, love and a rambunctious little dog — but despite all of this, Greg has a secret,” reads the film’s description.The secret? Greg is not out to his parents.When his parents surprise him on moving day, he gets some help from his dog Jim. In a magical turn of events worthy of “The Shaggy Dog” (1959), Greg and Jim temporarily switch bodies. In doing so, Greg learns the importance of being true to himself.Glaad, the L.G.B.T. advocacy organization, applauded the film’s gay narrative.“Over the past few years, L.G.B.T.Q. characters and stories have become common in the kids and family entertainment space with little controversy, but with large celebration from L.G.B.T.Q. families with children who have longed to see themselves represented,” Jeremy Blacklow, director of entertainment media at Glaad, said on Sunday. “By centering on a young gay man, ‘Out’ just raised the bar for inclusion in kids and family programming.”Kimberly A. Taylor, an associate professor of marketing and logistics at Florida International University in Miami, said that Disney and Pixar recognize that “representation matters” on the big and small screens.“To see oneself, one’s community, onscreen helps one to feel valued and validated and gives an expanded sense of what’s possible,” she said on Sunday. “And on Disney-Pixar’s part, it’s also just good business. They obviously recognize that their audience, or potential audience, includes the L.G.B.T.Q. community, just as it includes people of all genders, races, ethnicities, religions and so on.”Disney and Pixar have made strides in diversity and inclusiveness in some of their biggest franchises over the years.In March, the actor Lena Waithe voiced Officer Spector, a secondary character who is referred to as a lesbian, in the animated film “Onward.” As a result, the movie was banned in some Middle Eastern countries.In last year’s “Toy Story 4,” viewers saw two mothers dropping off and picking up their daughter from a day care center in the background.Donald Glover, who played Lando Calrissian in the “Star Wars” franchise movie “Solo,” said in an interview with HuffPost that his resistance leader character was pansexual although that did not figure into the plot. In the 2019 Marvel movie “Avengers: Endgame,” there was a brief appearance by a gay character.And in the 2017 live-action remake of “Beauty and the Beast,” LeFou, Gaston’s sidekick played by Josh Gad, was presented as gay.In December, a brief kiss between two female characters was removed from screenings of “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” in Singapore. Disney removed the kiss to preserve the film’s PG-13 rating in that country, according to reports. More

Theaters closed in March because of the pandemic, and studios delayed the release of several much-anticipated films till the fall or even 2021. So you’d think there might not be much to recommend so far this year. But our chief critics, Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott, are having none of that: they are championing several movies that hit theaters before the shutdown or were released online afterward. If you’re looking for new movies that will challenge you, here are their picks.Both critics recommend …‘Beanpole’[embedded content]The story: Set in Leningrad just after World War II, the freakishly tall nurse of the title tends to wounded soldiers in a hospital. But Beanpole fought in the war as well, and struggles, alongside her friend Masha, to overcome traumas of her own.What we said: “This is only the second feature from the sensationally talented Russian director Kantemir Balagov (who was born in 1991), and it’s a gut punch,” Manohla Dargis wrote. “It’s also a brilliantly told, deeply moving story about love — in all its manifestations, perversity and obstinacy.”Read: The full review.Watch the movie: Stream it on Mubi; rent or buy it on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes or Vudu.A.O. Scott recommends …1. ‘The Half of It’The story: A riff on “Cyrano de Bergerac,” the movie stars Leah Lewis as high schooler Ellie Chu, an outsider several times over in her small town: she’s an Asian-American lesbian who’s also a gifted writer. She unexpectedly bonds with a star football player (Daniel Diemer) who has a crush on the same girl she does.What we said: The film, directed by Alice Wu, “transcends the limitations that frequently serve as obstacles to ingenuity in young adult movies,” Kyle Turner wrote. “By exploring issues of race and queerness with emotional complexity, it treats teenagers with the sophistication they deserve.”Read: The full review.Stream it: On Netflix.2. ‘Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint’The story: The Swedish abstract painter Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) was a trailblazer whose reputation was eclipsed by that of male artists. But in 2018 a career survey that stopped at museums including the Guggenheim tried to rectify that, and so does this documentary by Halina Dyrschka.What we said: “‘Beyond the Visible’ bristles with the excitement of discovery and also with the impatience that recognition has taken so long,” A.O. Scott wrote. “It refreshes the eyes and the mind.”Read: The full review.Watch the movie: Via Kino Marquee, a video on demand service that benefits local theaters.3. ‘The Traitor’The story: Tommaso Buscetta was a real-life member of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra who turned on his partners in crime in the 1980s, ultimately testifying in open court. In Marco Bellocchio’s feature, he’s played by Pierfrancesco Favino as a not entirely admirable figure out for revenge.What we said: “Bellocchio’s approach to the story is at once coolly objective — the movie is part biopic, part courtroom procedural — and almost feverishly intense,” Scott wrote. “He has a historian’s analytical detachment, a novelist’s compassion for his characters and a citizen’s outrage at the cruelty and corruption that have festered in his country for so long.”Read: The full review.Watch the movie: Rent or buy it on Amazon, FandangoNow, Google Play, iTunes or Vudu.4. ‘Beastie Boys Story’The story: Spike Jonze directs a cinematic version of the 2018 “Beastie Boys Book,” the tale of how Ad-Rock, Mike D and MCA morphed from punk rockers into best-selling rappers.What we said: The film “has its own kind of beauty, even if the aesthetic is more dad rock than hip-hop,” Scott wrote, adding, “It’s a jaunt down memory lane and also a moving and generous elegy.”Read: The full review.Stream it: On Apple TV Plus.Manohla Dargis recommends …1. ‘Bacurau’The story: In near-future Brazil, a small town mourns the death of a matriarch. Then the town disappears from the map. The filmmakers Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles mix elements from westerns and science fiction to create a wholly new story.What we said: “An exhilarating fusion of high and low, the movie takes a shopworn premise — townsfolk facing a violent threat — and bats it around until it all goes ka-boom,” Dargis wrote.Read: The full review.Watch the movie: It’s available to rent in virtual screening rooms that benefit individual theaters, or on FandangoNow, Google Play, iTunes or Vudu.2. ‘Sorry We Missed You’The story: Ricky Turner drives for a delivery company dropping off packages ordered online (the title refers to the note he leaves for absent owners), and his wife, Abby, works for a subcontractor providing home health care in Ken Loach’s moving British drama about the gig economy.What we said: Loach is “almost without peer as a filmmaker formidably committed to exposing the sins of our wages,” Wesley Morris wrote, adding, “He knows you’re unlikely to cancel anything. But he damn sure wants you to think long and hard about that next one-click buy.”Read: The full review.Watch the movie: Via Zeitgeist Films, which offers a list of online options.3. ‘The Invisible Man’The story: After Cecilia (Elisabeth Moss) flees the abusive tech-pioneer Adrian, he turns up dead. But her troubles aren’t over: when she finds herself being menaced by an unseen presence, she becomes convinced it’s Adrian, only no one believes her.What we said: The director, Leigh Whannell, “does a lot that’s smart here, including the way he uses bodies in rooms,” Dargis wrote, adding, “Moss’s full-bore performance — anchored by her extraordinarily supple face — gives the movie its emotional stakes.”Read: The full review.Watch the movie: Rent or buy it on Amazon, FandangoNow, Google Play, iTunes or Vudu.4. ‘Crip Camp’The story: An upstate New York summer camp welcomed disabled children at a time when they had few rights or champions. Some of those campers would go on to become leaders in the 1970s movement for accessibility, as chronicled in this documentary by Nicole Newnham and Jim LeBrecht, a former camper himself.What we said: “Ultimately, ‘Crip Camp’ has a universal message: Inspirations that begin in youth can lead to radical, world-changing results,” Ben Kenigsberg wrote.Read: The full review.Stream it: On Netflix. More

At the end of every Cannes Film Festival, juries of cinematic eminences deliver verdicts on the films in competition. The name of the top prize has changed over time — from Palme d’Or to Grand Prix and back again — but the winners include a roster of modern classics.This year’s prizes would have been announced on Saturday, but the festival was canceled because of the pandemic. Instead, our chief critics, Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott, have selected some of their favorites, and a few that don’t shine quite so brightly.Bravo!‘Rome Open City’Directed by Roberto Rossellini, 1946Stream it here.When Cannes started up after World War II, it gave out 11 Grand Prizes, a gesture of encouragement to the art form and its practitioners. Among them was Roberto Rossellini, who was a veteran of the Italian film industry under Mussolini and who contributed a rough epic celebrating the struggles of the anti-fascist resistance.Shot in Rome shortly after the end of the German occupation, “Rome Open City” was an early, decisive example of neorealism. It used scavenged film stock, real-life locations and a cast that included many nonprofessional actors (as well as the great Anna Magnani), Part thriller, part documentary, part manifesto, it’s striking not only for its blunt depiction of political violence but also for its warmth, humor and unstinting humanism. (A.O. Scott)‘The Third Man’Carol Reed, 1949Stream it here.“The Third Man” hangs on a slippery mystery named Harry Lime, memorably played by a scarcely seen Orson Welles. Crammed with sinister shadows, shady characters and skewed angles, it takes place in the rubble-strewn, postwar Vienna, opening right after Lime has ostensibly died. Graham Greene scribbled the story’s opening on an envelope — “I had paid my last farewell to Harry a week ago, when his coffin was lowered into the frozen February ground.” The British director Carol Reed took plenty of tips from Welles, who wrote his own dialogue for this masterpiece. (Manohla Dargis)‘La Dolce Vita’Federico Fellini, 1960Stream it here.Of course a movie in which photographers pursue movie stars, movie stars misbehave in public and journalists flit from party to party pretending that what they’re doing is work would triumph in Cannes. Of all the festival’s prizewinners over the years, this one may be closest to the spirit of Cannes itself, at least as it sometimes appears from the outside. Critics have continued to debate the meaning of “La Dolce Vita” — satire or tragedy? diagnosis or symptom? masterpiece or folly? — and Fellini himself was always coy about his intentions. But there is still nothing to equal the experience of following Marcello Mastroianni through an inferno of romantic failure and a purgatory of ethical compromise that is also a movie lover’s paradise. (A.O.S.)‘The Leopard’Luchino Visconti, 1963Stream it here.In the 1960s and ’70s, international casting was something of an Italian specialty, as filmmakers conjured ensembles of movie stars to light up the screen and have their voices dubbed in postproduction. For his opulent, operatic, three-hour adaptation of Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s novel, Visconti brought together the French heartthrob Alain Delon (the star of Visconti’s earlier “Rocco and His Brothers”), the Italian diva Claudia Cardinale and the mighty Burt Lancaster. Their polyglot charisma, rather than detracting from the realism of this drama set in mid-19th-century Sicily, somehow deepens its historical resonance. The ambivalence that accompanies change has rarely felt so piercing. (A.O.S.)The Umbrellas of CherbourgJacques Demy, 1964Stream it here.When Geneviève (Catherine Deneuve) tells her sweetheart, “I love you,” in Jacques Demy’s musical “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” she doesn’t simply deliver the line — she sings it. And because Guy (Nino Castelnuovo) is a garage mechanic, she adds, “You smell like gasoline.” To which he replies, liltingly, “It’s a perfume like any other.” It’s a funny and sweet note in a film that seduces you with its charm, popping palette and Michel Legrand’s sublime score. Yet what both delights and destroys me each time I watch it, raising goose bumps on my arms, is its unembarrassed emotional sincerity. “People only die of love in the movies,” someone sings — and sometimes other people’s hearts break while watching them, too. (M.D.)The ConversationFrancis Ford Coppola, 1974Stream it here.“The Conversation” tends to be classified as a mystery thriller but it’s also an era-appropriate horror freakout, as a terrifying gurgle of blood underscores. In his New York Times review, Vincent Canby hit on the spookiness when he called its protagonist — an emotionally locked-down surveillance expert played by a brilliant Gene Hackman — “the uptight Watergate era’s equivalent of the mad doctors in old-fashioned Vincent Price films.” Written, produced and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, “The Conversation” won top honors at the festival in May 1974, the same month that the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to begin hearings into the Watergate cover-up. (M.D.)‘L’Enfant’ (‘The Child’)Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2005Stream it here.The Dardenne brothers, steadfast in their commitment to depicting working-class life in the industrial towns of French-speaking Belgium, have become fixtures of the Cannes awards ceremonies. Their first Palme d’Or, for “Rosetta” in 1999, caused a bit of an outcry, especially among Hollywood players who were expecting more love from the jury. When “L’Enfant” won six years later, there was hardly a whisper of complaint. A fable about money, commitment and the difficulty of behaving decently in a world defined by Darwinian competition and consumerist distraction, the film is simple, suspenseful and shattering. It’s anchored by Jérémie Renier’s sly, naturalistic performance as a young man who doesn’t know that his flight from responsibility is also a journey toward grace. (A.O.S.)‘Shoplifters’Hirokazu Kore-eda, 2018Stream it here.One of the pleasures of attending Cannes is watching movies before they’re repeatedly fed into the media hopper. I saw Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “Shoplifters” — a delicate, devastating family story — at the 2018 edition. It was a great year, with “Burning” and “Happy as Lazzaro” among the other critical favorites in the main competition. The jury headed by Cate Blanchett awarded the Palme to “Shoplifters,” making Kore-eda the first Japanese director to win the award in more than two decades. (M.D.)Boo!‘Wild at Heart’David Lynch, 1990‘Barton Fink’Joel and Ethan Coen, 1991Three of my favorite filmmakers; two of their worst films. Don’t @ me. (A.O.S.)‘Blue Is the Warmest Color’Abdellatif Kechiche, 2013Nearly universally adored at Cannes, Abdellatif Kechiche’s “Blue Is the Warmest Color” may not be the worst movie to play at the festival (it’s had a lot of competition). Even so, I deeply dislike it, turned off by its dribbling camerawork and self-indulgently slack storytelling. Mostly, I object to how it slobbers over its female lovers, turning them into the kind of exploitative spectacle that has long defined the representation of women and limited their role in the art. (P. S. I love “Barton Fink.”) (M.D.) More

This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.Joel M. Reed loved gore and sex, and his fans loved him for it.Mr. Reed, the director of one of the most notorious exploitation films, “Blood Sucking Freaks” (1976), died of the novel coronavirus on April 14 in a hospital in Queens, his brother Elliott Reed said. He was 86 and had lived in Manhattan.John Bloom, a writer who uses the pseudonym Joe Bob Briggs as a self-styled “Drive-In Movie Critic,” eulogized Mr. Reed last month on the podcast “The Movies That Made Me” as “one of the strangest filmmakers, who made some of the most disturbing films in history.”“Blood Sucking Freaks,” the most disturbing of them all, became a cult hit.The film came out under that title in 1976 but had previously been released as “Sardu: Master of the Screaming Virgins” and “The Incredible Torture Show.” The movie tells the story, such as it is, of Master Sardu, who runs a theater in which the performers are subjected to realistic-seeming scenes of torture. What the theatergoers are not aware of, however, is that the actors are actually kidnapping victims, and that their torments are real.The film, which has been referred to as a horror comedy, shows nudity, sexual mutilation and more: A skull is crushed in a vise. There are amputations. Brains are sucked through a straw.The low-budget horror movie studio and distributor Troma Entertainment bought the film, re-edited it to restore footage that Mr. Reed had cut to get it an R rating, and changed the name to “Blood Sucking Freaks.” (It’s sometimes referred to as “Bloodsucking Freaks.”)Troma’s co-founder, Lloyd Kaufman, would later say, “I may have possibly secured my place in hell by just watching it.”In an interview, Mr. Kaufman said the movie “was, on a certain level, hilarious, in the context of Grand Guignol.” But “it’s very misogynistic,” he added. “Today, we would not have anything to do with it.”The film was picketed by the group “Women Against Pornography,” according to the book “A Companion to the Horror Film,” edited by Harry M. Benshoff. A reviewer on the website Efilmcritic.com wrote, “There is absolutely nothing that is remotely defensible about ‘Bloodsucking Freaks.’” However, the reviewer added, “There is something oddly intoxicating about a film that is so dedicated to being as offensive as possible to as wide a demographic as possible.”Joel Melvin Reed was born on Dec. 29, 1933, in Brooklyn to Albert and Gertrude (Harris) Reed. His father was a record salesman. In addition to his brother Elliott, Mr. Reed’s survivors include another brother, Michael.Mr. Reed graduated from high school and served in the Army in Korea. After his military service he worked in public relations, but found himself drawn to filmmaking. His early work included soft-core pornography and a movie called “Blood Bath,” which Mr. Reed described as “a contemporary, episodic occult‐horror adventure.” He also acted in a number of films, including “Dead Eye” (2011).His brother Elliott recalled that at the time “Blood Sucking Freaks” came out, their mother had already died, but he recalled that their father “got a kick out of this, of his being successful in this avant-garde way.”Alain Delaquérière contributed research. More