Movies

Shirley Knight, who in a long film, television and stage career earned two Oscar nominations while still in her 20s, won a Tony Award in 1975 and later garnered three Emmy Awards, died on Wednesday in San Marcos, Texas. She was 83.She was at the home of her daughter Kaitlin Hopkins when she died, Ms. Hopkins confirmed. She did not specify a cause.Ms. Knight’s first Emmy came in 1988 for a guest appearance on “Thirtysomething.” She won two more in 1995, one for a guest role on “NYPD Blue” and one for “Indictment: The McMartin Trial,” an HBO docudrama in which she played the administrator of a preschool where abuse was alleged to have taken place.She had scores of television credits, in 1960s shows like “The Outer Limits,” “The Fugitive” and “The Virginian,” and in later series like “Murder, She Wrote,” “Matlock” and “Ally McBeal.”The many films on her résumé include Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Rain People” (1969), in which she played (alongside James Caan and Robert Duvall) a pregnant Long Island housewife who takes off on a cross-country odyssey of self-discovery.Ms. Knight was most recently on Broadway in 1997 opposite Rip Torn in Horton Foote’s “The Young Man From Atlanta,” which Ben Brantley, in his review in The New York Times, called “one of the season’s happier surprises.“A lot of this has to do with the galvanic presence of Ms. Knight and Mr. Torn,” Mr. Brantley wrote. “Both actors, who flared brightly among the constellation of young Method-steeped stars who emerged in the 1950s and ’60s, have been seen only infrequently on New York stages of late. And it’s as if they have somehow been storing up and nurturing both the force and the finesse that this production requires.”Shirley Enola Knight was born on July 5, 1936, in Goessel, Kan. Her father, Noel, was in the oil business, and her mother, Virginia (Webster) Knight, was a homemaker. She did her first film work well before she was in the acting business — as an extra in the 1955 film “Picnic,” which was shot near her hometown. Ms. Knight’s earliest show-business aspiration was to be a singer, perhaps in opera. While a junior at Wichita State University, she decided that some acting skills might help advance that goal. So, answering an advertisement in Theater Arts Magazine, she bought herself a six-week course at the Pasadena Playhouse in California.There she discovered an ability to cry on cue, which she employed during a stage production. A scout for the Kurt Frings Agency, an important Hollywood concern at the time, was impressed, and she was hired as a contract player at Warner Bros., leading to television roles in the late 1950s.After some months she was told to go see Delbert Mann, who was directing a film, “The Dark at the Top of the Stairs,” that called for a teenage girl, a part the young-looking Ms. Knight could still play, though she was in her 20s.“I got the job,” she said in a 2014 talk at the Screen Actors Guild Foundation, “and I guess I was OK, because they nominated me for an Oscar.”The nomination was for best actress in a supporting role. The statuette went to a different Shirley — Shirley Jones — for “Elmer Gantry.”Two years later Ms. Knight was nominated again in the same category, for her performance in “Sweet Bird of Youth,” based on a Tennessee Williams play. (Patty Duke won for “The Miracle Worker.”)Paul Newman, Geraldine Page and other stars of “Sweet Bird,” Ms. Knight said, “seemed to know something that I didn’t know.” They urged her to go to New York and study with Lee Strasberg; on their recommendation she was accepted into his Actors Studio.That training led to her Broadway debut in 1964 in a production of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” directed by Mr. Strasberg. She played Irina; Ms. Page and Kim Stanley portrayed the other two sisters.Ms. Knight had two more Broadway credits in the 1960s. Then, in 1975, came her Tony-winning turn in “Kennedy’s Children,” a play featuring six characters in a bar who, speaking only in monologues, conjure the 1960s. Ms. Knight’s character, a would-be sexpot named Carla, envisions herself as a successor to Marilyn Monroe.“Miss Knight,” Kevin Kelly wrote in The Boston Globe, “as the most beautiful of Kennedy’s children, the generation spawned symbolically by the late president, is startling in her analysis that she, like 50 million other beautiful girls, are nothing but images manufactured by the media, prepackaged beauties, soulless and skidding after empty dreams.”The highlights of Ms. Knight’s film career included “Dutchman” (1966), based on an Amiri Baraka play about a confrontation with racial overtones between an unstable white woman and a black man. Among her favorite projects, she said, was “The Lie,” a 1973 television movie, written by Ingmar Bergman, about a troubled marriage.Ms. Knight married the producer Eugene Persson in 1959; they divorced in 1969. Her second husband, the writer John R. Hopkins, died in 1998. In addition to her daughter Ms. Hopkins, from her first marriage, she is survived by another daughter, Sophie Jacks, from her second marriage, and a stepdaughter, Justine Hopkins.Although she was best known for serious roles, Ms. Knight turned up in comedies as well, including “Paul Blart: Mall Cop” (2009) and its sequel (2015). And then there was “Grandma’s Boy” (2006), which, in a 2014 interview with Digital Journal, she described as “ridiculously naughty.” It apparently has a following among young males.“I forgot about it because it’s about 10 years old,” she said. “So what happens is, I’m walking down the street in New York and kids of, let’s say, 12, 13, 15, 18, film me on their machines. They hold up their iPhones and say, ‘I got you! I got you!’” More

Patryk Vega’s lurid opus centers on a particularly imaginative serial killer, and the film’s title gives a couple of clues to connoisseurs of the genre (and Polish history). Breslau is the old name of the city of Wroclaw, which indicates our maniac may look to the past for inspiration. This is reinforced by the reference to pestilence: Could this grandiose exterminator be sending a message?Admittedly, these traits apply to many cinematic psychopaths, who always seem to draw the worst lessons from yesteryear.And frankly, “The Plagues of Breslau” (streaming on Netflix) isn’t all that innovative. Vega doubles down on the grotesque (the first victim was alive when sewn into a bull’s hide, the second was quartered by horses, and so on), which he then counterbalances with a familiar pairing of mismatched cops. The sullen detective Helena Rus (Malgorzata Kozuchowska) has the asymmetrical haircut and standoffish demeanor of a cold-wave keyboardist. Lone wolf, check. To solve the ostentatiously deranged murders hitting Wroclaw, she is teamed up with the equally offbeat profiler Magda Drewniak (Daria Widawska), a nerd in a shapeless hoodie and baggy jeans. Crime-solving savant, check.What makes the movie somewhat interesting is Helena and Magda’s battle against an establishment of lunkheaded chauvinists who take their domination for granted. A pulsating rage at the way society neglects women in particular, its weakest members in general, courses through the movie. More than the displays of flayed flesh, it’s what sticks.The Plagues of BreslauNot rated. In Polish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

Early on in the frenetic thriller “Uncut Gems,” Adam Sandler’s jeweler character shows off a prized piece of merchandise: a diamond-encrusted Furby toy with controllable eyes that dart back and forth.Fans who viewed that creation with more envy than fear are in luck: In an effort to raise money for organizations supporting New York communities during the coronavirus pandemic, A24, the company behind “Uncut Gems” and other art-house favorites, will soon auction off an array of original props — including one of those twinkling Furbys in the Safdie brothers’ movie (those diamonds aren’t real; they’re crystals) and a carved mermaid figurine that plays a significant role in Robert Eggers’s “The Lighthouse.”“It’s nice to see when stuff that’s made for a movie can live on,” Eggers said in a phone interview. “The craftspeople that make these props put a lot of time and effort and love and sweat and tears into creating them, so if it can have another life, that’s great. And it couldn’t be for a better cause.”Auctions will take place in April and May, and will be held online. A24, which is based in New York, will give the proceeds to four local organizations: the FDNY Foundation, which supports the New York City Fire Department; the hunger-relief nonprofit Food Bank for New York City; the public health-care organization NYC Health + Hospitals; and the Queens Community House, which provides services to children and adults throughout Queens.The first auction begins Wednesday at a24auctions.com. Each auction will last 16 days.Other items going on the block include the 33-pound floral dress worn by Florence Pugh for the finale of Ari Aster’s “Midsommar”; a skateboard from Jonah Hill’s “Mid90s”; a shoe-box time capsule from Bo Burnham’s “Eighth Grade”; and the enormous replica lighthouse lens that enthralls the keepers played by Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe in “The Lighthouse.”Asked what the prop lens might be like to own, Eggers replied, it’s “quite beautiful in person, and hypnotic.”But he added a note of caution for the lucky buyer: “It weighs a ton. Literally, I think. Or half a ton.” More

Easter Island is often described as “mysterious” and “mystical.” That outsider perspective is reflected in archival TV segments included in “Eating Up Easter,” a documentary about the very real, terrestrial, socio-economic concerns of the island locally known as Rapa Nui, which sits in the Pacific Ocean, more than 2,000 miles from mainland Chile.While its megalithic moai statues have made Rapa Nui a vacation attraction, this film (now streaming via Music Box) provides a more microcosmic insight from residents, who talk about how tourism and modernization are ruining their ancestral land.[embedded content]The Rapanui director Sergio Mata’u Rapu and his anthropologist wife, Elena, who wrote and co-produced the film, frame “Eating Up Easter” as a letter to their young son — having him has made them think more about the future of the island. But even with the personal elements, the lean feature also feels like an educational program, to a fault. There are too many complicated moving parts stuffed into its short running time, from residence laws to the economic boom brought on by the 1994 film “Rapa Nui,” co-produced by Kevin Costner, which created many jobs but also introduced materialism. Rapa Nui has the highest per capita income in Chile, but the island has been dumped with a nearly unmanageable amount of garbage, mostly from tourists.One of the residents the film focuses on is the outspoken Mama Piru, who had dedicated her life to cleaning up waste. The director sometimes adds voice-over to others’ experiences that feels inauthentic. He weaves autobiographical tidbits because these issues are close to home, but the meta-doc method doesn’t quite work in a film that also strives to be so straightforwardly informative.Eating Up EasterNot rated. In English, Spanish and Rapanui, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 17 minutes. Watch on Music Box StreamLocal. More

Internet killed the video store in the documentary “Circus of Books,” which examines the history of a long-running porn shop and adult goods store in West Hollywood that closed in 2019. When the film begins, Circus of Books is on its last legs. But 30 years ago, it was not only one of the biggest distributors of gay pornography in the area, but also one of largest gay porn producers in the country. Perhaps the most surprising piece of the story was that it was run by Karen and Barry Mason — a straight couple who kept it a secret from their synagogue, friends and family.The documentary (streaming on Netflix) is directed by the couple’s daughter, Rachel, and it promises an inside view of the pair’s double life. But as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that the people who are least equipped to thoroughly profile Karen and Barry are their children. The family business went undiscussed at home for years; even though the curtain has since been drawn, Karen and Barry still compartmentalize. They are strictly business when they discuss their most impossible decisions, even shrugging off the choice — presented as Karen’s to make — to have only Barry face the charges brought against them during the Reagan administration’s crusades against obscenity.[embedded content]But the film blossoms when it focuses on interviews with employees, longtime customers and the stars of the porn the store financed. These members of the community reflect on a bygone era with wit and warmth, and the film supports their memories with golden-lit archival footage of the neighborhood in the 1980s. It also grounds the store in its political history, including the devastation of the AIDS crisis. The remembrances are the movie’s heart — not a family secret, but a community’s pride.Circus of BooksNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More