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      Academy Museum to Highlight Hollywood’s Jewish History After All

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      The museum was criticized earlier for failing to acknowledge the contributions of the Jewish pioneers who helped establish the American film studio system.Having initially drawn criticism for failing to acknowledge the formative role that Jewish immigrants like Samuel Goldwyn and Louis B. Mayer played in creating Hollywood and the film industry, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on Thursday announced the details of a new permanent exhibition that will spotlight their contributions.The show, called “Hollywoodland,” is scheduled to open May 19, the museum said in its news release, and will spotlight “the impact of the predominately Jewish filmmakers whose establishment of the American film studio system transformed Los Angeles into a global epicenter of cinema.”When the museum opened in 2021, it made a point of highlighting the contributions of women, artists of color and people from other backgrounds, but there was barely a mention of the Jewish immigrants who were central to founding the Hollywood studio system — titans like Harry and Jack Warner, Adolph Zukor, Goldwyn and Mayer.The omission, coming at a time of growing concerns about antisemitism, drew complaints from Jewish leaders and concern from the museum’s supporters, many of whom saw it as example of Hollywood’s strained relationship with its Jewish history. Striving to assimilate, Hollywood’s founders feared being identified as Jews.The museum’s permanent exhibition about Jewish contributions is called “Hollywoodland.” via Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and SciencesVarious publications called out the affront, like The Forward, which ran a piece headlined “Jews built Hollywood. So why is their history erased from the Academy’s new museum?”The museum said then that it had always intended to open a temporary exhibit devoted to the subject, but in response to the backlash it decided to make a permanent gallery, and it consulted rabbis and Jewish scholars on what should be included.“We learned,” Bill Kramer, the chief executive of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences who was then the museum’s director, said in an interview. “We took a lot of the information from the conversations that we’ve had and grew from that.“The show will be organized in three distinct parts: “Studio Origins,” which explores the founding of Hollywood’s original eight major film studios and their studio heads; “Los Angeles: From Film Frontier to Industry Town, 1902-1929,” which traces how the city evolved alongside the movie industry; and “From the Shtetl to the Studio: The Jewish Story of Hollywood,” a short-form documentary — narrated by Ben Mankiewicz, the TCM host and author — that looks at the Jewish immigrants and first-generation Jewish Americans who built the Hollywood studio system.The exhibition was organized by Dara Jaffe, an associate curator, with help from Gary Dauphin, a former associate curator of digital presentations, and Josue L. Lopez, a research assistant. Neal Gabler, the author and film critic who wrote “An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood,” served as an adviser.“They were the ones who established this system,” Jaffe said of the pioneering Jewish filmmakers. “They were drawn to this industry because they were restricted from so many others.” More

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      ‘Dawn of the Dead’ at 45: A Zombie Love Affair That Never Died

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      A look back at George A. Romero’s film, one of the most influential horror movies of all time, as it gets a theatrical revival.“I like the zombies,” George A. Romero said in 1977, in one of the many conversations with various publications collected in the book “George A. Romero: Interviews.” “You have to be sympathetic with the creatures because they ain’t doin’ nothin’. They’re like sharks: They can’t help behaving the way they do.” Romero had good reason to like the zombies — they gave him a career, and a legacy. He memorably dramatized the exploits of the undead in the 1968 chiller “Night of the Living Dead,” the first of six films in his “dead” cycle (which continued through his final film, “Survival of the Dead” in 2010). The second of those films, “Dawn of the Dead,” was released in the United States 45 years ago this month, an anniversary marked by revival screenings at theaters and drive-ins around the country (including the New York outposts of the Alamo Drafthouse and both locations of the Nitehawk Cinema). It remains one of the most influential (and profitable) horror films of all time, prompting a slew of imitators here and abroad, as well as a hit 2004 remake that led to another zombie boom (still underway, via “The Walking Dead” and its endless spinoffs).As identifiable as he would become with genre movies, Romero — a Pittsburgh-based filmmaker who funded his projects by producing industrial films and commercials — went through what he called “a paranoid phase of not wanting to be a horror moviemaker” after the success of his first zombie feature. But, “gradually, as I became comfortable with what ‘Night of the Living Dead’ was, and with what my reputation was, I finally got the idea” for a “Living Dead” sequel.The fuse for the production was lit by the Italian horror filmmaker Dario Argento (“Suspiria”). “He was a fan of ‘Night of the Living Dead’ and knew that I was contemplating doing Part II,” Romero explained in 1982. “We showed him the script and he offered half the budget up front in exchange for the non-English language world.” It would be Romero’s largest budget to date; he secured the rest from private investors stateside.What really sparked Romero’s imagination, however, was the location. He was friends with Mark Mason, one of the owners of the Monroeville Mall, east of Pittsburgh — then one of the largest shopping centers in the country. It would make for a perfect expansion of the isolated farmhouse location in the first film, a place where his heroes could hunker down with supplies to wait out, or fight off, the zombie apocalypse; Romero worked out a deal to shoot overnight, starting when the mall closed at 11 p.m. and stopping when cleaning crews (and cardiac patients on therapeutic mall walks) arrived at 7 a.m.A scene from “Dawn of the Dead.”New Amsterdam Entertainment“I wrote a treatment and it was very heavy, ponderous, possessing roughly the same attitude as ‘Night of the Living Dead’,” he said. “But then I realized that the place itself, the mall, was too funny to serve for a nightmare experience.” And thus, “Dawn of the Dead” became a consumerist satire, with zombies shuffling mindlessly through the mall and up the down escalators as bland Muzak blares through the shopping center’s loudspeakers. (They came there, one of the survivors surmises, because of the “memory … of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.”)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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      Cannes Festival Unveils 2024 Lineup, Including a Francis Ford Coppola Film

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      Organizers on Thursday announced a lineup that also features new films from Yorgos Lanthimos, David Cronenberg and Paul Schrader.Movies directed by Francis Ford Coppola, David Cronenberg and Yorgos Lanthimos will compete for the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the event’s organizers announced in a news conference on Thursday.New films by Jacques Audiard, Paul Schrader and Andrea Arnold will also appear in competition at this year’s event, the festival’s 77th edition, which opens May 14 and runs through May 25.The most eagerly anticipated film on the lineup is likely to be Coppola’s “Megalopolis” — the director’s first movie in over 10 years.During Thursday’s news conference, Thierry Frémaux, Cannes’s artistic director, revealed little about that movie’s plot, but Coppola, the director of “The Godfather” trilogy and “Apocalypse Now,” has been talking about his desire to make it for decades. In 2001, Coppola told the The New York Times that “Megalopolis” was “about the future” and “a guy who wants to build a utopian society in the middle of Manhattan.”Coppola, 85, has already won the Palme d’Or twice: in 1974 for “The Conversation,” and, in 1979, for “Apocalypse Now” (a prize that was shared with Volker Schlöndorff’s “The Tin Drum”).The Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos will present “Kinds of Kindness,” starring Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe, who also worked together on Lanthimos’s most recent release, “Poor Things.” David Cronenberg, the Canadian horror movie director, will premiere “The Shrouds,” about a widower who builds a machine to connect with the dead.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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      ‘Omen’ Review: Life in a Different Space-Time Continuum

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      This trippy ensemble drama set in Kinshasa explores Congolese society through magical realism.Halfway through “Omen,” a trippy ensemble drama set in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Tshala (Eliane Umuhire) tries to reason with Alice (Lucie Debay), the white fiancé of her big brother Koffi (Marc Zinga). Alice, who lives with Koffi in Belgium, is justifiably overwhelmed: Her future in-laws refuse to acknowledge her existence, and, after Koffi accidentally bleeds from his nose onto an infant relative, he is nailed into a wooden mask as punishment.“We’re in a different space-time continuum,” Tshala explains.The director, Bajoli (a multidisciplinary artist and rapper whose name means “sorcerer” in Swahili), runs with this idea: that Congolese society, highly superstitious as it is, operates on another — frenzied, magical, gender-bending — wavelength.The film fills out this wild world by navigating four loosely connected stories. There’s Koffi, who receives a bitter homecoming. Tshala is in a polyamorous relationship. Mujila (Yves-Marina Gnahoua), a menacing matriarch, is upended by her husband’s death. Finally, there’s Paco (Marcel Otete Kabeya), an orphan who leads a gang of tutu-wearing street kids — this thread, the most chaotic of the four, plays like a Grimms’ fairy tale about shantytown residents.To say “Omen” is ambitious feels like an understatement. The film begins with a mystical interlude in which a woman pours her breast milk into a river, and sustains this vivid symbolism throughout, making details with natural explanations (a birthmark, a seizure) take on an otherworldly heft.In its best moments, a quiet element of absurdity grounds the spectacle. We sense the fatigue and — because family is inescapable — weirdly amused resignation, such as when Tshala, giving a goblin’s smirk, assuages Alice. Otherwise, the film’s frenetic world-building eventually becomes numbing, in part because the uneven human dramas — each one offers a vague message about marginalization — lose momentum in all the commotion.OmenNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Food, Inc. 2’ Review: Pollan and Schlosser Return

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      Directed by Robert Kenner and Melissa Robledo, the sequel about food production in the U.S. is, in some ways, a more hopeful film.How many gory details about groceries can any moviegoer digest? The 2009 documentary “Food, Inc.” drew on the muckraking of Michael Pollan (“The Omnivore’s Dilemma”) and Eric Schlosser (“Fast Food Nation”) to reveal major problems with industrialized food production. The system, it argued, may keep supermarkets well-stocked, but most people have scant insight into how that food is made — and what it does to our health.“Food, Inc. 2,” directed by Robert Kenner and Melissa Robledo, doesn’t merely regurgitate those ideas, although it begins by describing how the last few years have shown the risks of letting a small number of mega-suppliers dominate the market. The baby formula shortage? Cramped meatpacking plants that became Covid-19 hot spots? An industry less prone to gigantism might have avoided those horrors.In some ways, the sequel is a more hopeful film. Pollan, who, along with Schlosser, is among the producers, notes the proliferation of farmers’ markets and grass-fed beef since the last movie’s release. (The credits list separate articles that the authors wrote in 2020 as inspiration.) “Food, Inc. 2” is also wonkier than the original: Its proposed solutions don’t simply boil down to finding better sources, but also enforcing antitrust policy, supporting fair-labor practices and finding new ways to return to time-tested farming methods.Pollan visits sites where meat alternatives are manufactured and explains how those products present their own trade-offs. Elsewhere, experts testify to how foods can confuse our brains’ reward systems and how U.S. companies, faced with a food supply that provides more calories than anyone needs, have an incentive to make consumers eat more. You might devour less after watching “Food, Inc. 2,” and what you eat will probably be healthier.Food, Inc. 2Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. Rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘Arcadian’ Review: Take Two as Needed for Postapocalyptic Pain

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      Nicolas Cage defends his family against a paranormal siege in this derivative, low-budget creature feature.An important plot point in “Arcadian,” a domestic postapocalyptic drama bearing a close resemblance to “A Quiet Place,” revolves around medicine: people needing it, others hoarding it and so on. What kind of medicine is it? What is it for? The movie doesn’t say. It comes in an aspirin bottle, and the characters just call it “medicine,” and we have to take it on faith that it’s important.“Arcadian” is fashionably oblique, implying more than it explains. (An improvement over the expository whiteboard in “A Quiet Place,” which offered bullet-form creature data like a PowerPoint presentation.) The story is told in a cursory way: Paul (Nicolas Cage) lives on a remote farm with his teenage sons, Thomas (Maxwell Jenkins) and Joseph (Jaeden Martell). By day they forage and scavenge to survive; at night their fortified home is besieged by feral beasts, which (it is faintly suggested) are the mutated victims of an epidemic that wiped out most of humankind.The director, Benjamin Brewer, uses many tried-and-true tricks to conceal budgetary limitations, obscuring his monsters in shadows or putting them behind doors, banging, to make the movie feel bigger than it is. He builds tension in brief pockets of silence, and when we do see the monsters, they look quite good — sticky and spindly in a tactile way, like the aliens in John Carpenter’s “The Thing.”But a competent director can do only so much with a poor script, and “Arcadian” is littered with shortcuts and screenwriting clichés. It is vague to the point of careless, and often seems to be inventing rules for its monsters as it goes along. We hardly need everything to be detailed. But at the very least, it would have been nice to know more about that medicine.ArcadianRated R for graphic violence and disturbing imagery. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead’ Review: The Laughs Are Alive

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      Wade Allain-Marcus has directed a rollicking update of the 1991 cult favorite.Don’t tell helicopter parents, but the gleefully transgressive flicks that entertained a generation of latchkey wildlings are coming back in style. Wade Allain-Marcus’s rollicking update of the 1991 cult favorite keeps the plot — a 17-year-old slacker named Tanya (Simone Joy Jones) is forced to support her even lazier younger siblings (Donielle Hansley Jr., Ayaamii Sledge and Carter Young) — and amps up the immoral humor. It’s a snappy, gutsy comedy about how kids are spoiled and ignorant, and yet the adult workplace is only passingly more mature.A Black single mother (Patricia Williams) has a nervous breakdown and leaves her four children in the care of an aged tyrant (June Squibb) for the summer. Squibb has played plenty of cackling grannies; even so, Ms. Sturak is her most unhinged. “I watch Madea movies! I know how to discipline you!” she screams, pistol in hand. Those sensitive to slurs will be relieved when she keels over. So are the kids, who ignominiously dispose of the corpse and then realize they need money for food.The rapid-fire script by Chuck Hayward squeezes a joke into every sentence and an economic dig into almost every scene. Tanya is aghast that a rideshare driving shift barely covers a restaurant bill; later, her new boss (Nicole Richie) at a fast-fashion brand shrugs off a rash of factory employee suicides. Even condensing the story, there’s no fixing the ridiculous ending by which point the film is out of gas. But despite being affixed to the guardrails of a reboot, this naughty thrill boasts some boisterous jolts and a charming romance between Tanya and a more emotionally developed boy (Miles Fowler) who inspires her to grow up.Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s DeadRated R for teen drug use, language and some sexual references. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Alex Garland on Making a Film About the Civil War Today

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      Even before his drama was released, the writer-director faced controversy over his vision of a divided America with Texas and California as allies.One of the most haunting moments in Alex Garland’s new drama “Civil War” comes in the form of a question.A soldier, fingering the trigger of his assault rifle, confronts a group of terrified journalists: “What kind of American are you?” he asks.That question, and its underlying impulse to divide and demonize, is at the heart of why Garland made a much-anticipated and already much-debated film about the implosion of the United States. “Civil War,” opening Friday, warns against the dangers of extreme partisanship, Garland said in a recent interview — the horrors that can happen when American citizens, or any other group of people, turn on themselves.“I think civil war is just an extension of a situation,” said Garland, the 53-year-old British director behind “Ex Machina” and “Men.” “That situation is polarization and the lack of limiting forces on polarization.”In the film, America’s divisions have erupted into chaos. Fleets of helicopters patrol the skies and explosions rock major cities as the secessionist Western Forces, including those from Texas and California, advance on the president, a three-term authoritarian who has disbanded the F.B.I. and launched airstrikes on fellow Americans.If polarization is one of the poisons causing this outbreak, Garland sees the work of a free, independent press as one of the antidotes. His film envisions the Fourth Estate as a check on extremism and authoritarianism.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