Movies

Even those of us who have devoted tens of thousands of hours to watching films have blind spots — important pathways of cinema history that we’ve never ventured down, or, perhaps even more embarrassingly, major movies whose greatness we’ve never quite grasped. But being shut in is the perfect time to open doors. So here is a new column, focusing on gateway movies. If you’re unfamiliar with an essential director, I will recommend the ideal place to start. If you’ve always felt a particular type of movie was not for you, the goal is to change that.Let’s start with wide-open spaces and a genre that has repeatedly been written off for dead: the western, which undoubtedly lives on in revisionist variations (“Unforgiven,” “Deadwood”) and the most enduring of all parodies, “Blazing Saddles.” When people say they hate westerns, I always think they’re imagining something like “Bonanza” or a movie like “Shane.” Without too much disrespect to “Shane,” the best westerns are rarely so clear-cut in their delineations of right and wrong. They deal in moral gray areas; they take place when society is still establishing basic laws and codes of honor.The cycle of westerns that the director Budd Boetticher made with the actor Randolph Scott from 1956 to 1960 are a great entry point.They are brisk (all run fewer than 80 minutes), they are master classes in tight screenwriting and suspense, and, while they can be watched in any order, they illustrate how westerns’ meaning often lies in theme and variation.Cinephiles argue over whether the cycle’s official count should include all seven Boetticher-Scott collaborations or just six (excluding “Westbound,” a 1959 dud that Boetticher had signed on for in a hurry). All but their final movie are available on major services.“Seven Men From Now” (1956): Rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play and iTunes.“The Tall T” (1957): Rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes and Vudu.“Decision at Sundown” (1957): Stream it on Tubi.“Buchanan Rides Alone” (1958): Rent on Google Play, iTunes and Vudu; also available to buy on those services as well as Amazon.“Ride Lonesome” (1959): Streaming on Flix Fling, or available to buy or rent on that service as well as Amazon, Google Play, iTunes and Vudu.“Westbound” (1959): Buy or rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes and Vudu.“Comanche Station” (1960): Not available yet.Tough to the bone, Boetticher’s films were B movies in their day. They are not the most poetic westerns (for that, see “My Darling Clementine” or nearly any other John Ford outing). But they may be the most archetypal, and watching them in close succession takes you almost over the range of the genre, from a portrait of a righteous lawman to the darker corners of revisionism. (Though most famous for westerns, Boetticher also directed superb noirs like “The Killer Is Loose.”)One key to the movies is simply to observe the outwardly stoic Scott, whose accent and attitudes vary from picture to picture. In “Seven Men From Now,” he plays a former sheriff tracking the men who murdered his wife, killed at a job she took only because he refused to work as a deputy. Just two movies later, Scott’s cause is less clearly righteous in “Decision at Sundown,” which signals that something is amiss with the leading man by introducing him with a stubble-covered face. The movie takes the power of vengeance away from Scott’s character, a swaggering cuckold named Bart Allison, and gives it to the residents of Sundown, who have their own reasons for running the villain (John Carroll) out of town.As with all of Boetticher’s films, it is hard not to marvel at the economy of the storytelling, which in “Decision” follows a large ensemble over a single day (a day that, yes, ends in a sundown). The depiction of the self-deluded townsfolk has a faintly Eugene O’Neill-like bleakness. A saloonkeeper sums up the atmosphere: “If you’d been tending bar as long as I have, you wouldn’t expect so much out of the human race.”“Ride Lonesome,” with the sweeping, wide-screen vistas of CinemaScope, has the feel of a culmination. Scott is Ben Brigade, a remorseless bounty hunter and (again) a dead-wife avenger, but this time an abandoned frontier homemaker (Karen Steele) pushes him to question whether his latest bounty ought to be hanged. Narratively, the movie follows a strategy introduced in “Seven Men From Now,” having Scott’s character team up with a natural enemy (the gold-chasing Lee Marvin in “Seven Men”; Pernell Roberts and James Coburn as amnesty-seeking outlaws in “Ride Lonesome”) for a common cause, postponing an inevitable showdown. Even with the men in constant motion, the film plays like a feature-length standoff.The plots, typically scripted by Burt Kennedy or Charles Lang (“The Tall T” comes from a story by Elmore Leonard), are almost Socratic in the way they layer on complications. As others have suggested, Boetticher’s westerns are also unusually claustrophobic. The have a habit of isolating characters in campsites, stables, jail cells and clearings, inverting the possibility of escape and travel inherent in the genre. But that is another way of saying that these films bring out the versatility of westerns. They are the opposite of wagon train movies.You will occasionally have to put up with cringe-worthy racial attitudes. The depiction of Native Americans as horse-eating, husband-killing savages doesn’t sit well in modern eyes, and the name of Henry Silva’s character in “The Tall T” is so offensive it cannot be printed.But Boetticher also won credit for his progressivism, which can be seen in the misleadingly titled “Buchanan Rides Alone,” which finds Scott, as a roving West Texan named Tom Buchanan, forging a friendship with a Mexican man, Juan (Manuel Rojas), whose father is widely regarded as a populist benefactor in Mexico. But Juan — and initially, Buchanan — is scheduled to hang for murder in a corrupt border town, run by a self-dealing family whose members include the sheriff and the judge.If the central question of a western is how we live together in a fair society, then Boetticher’s movies play like a continuing, ever-deepening argument. More

One builds a lot of relationships over a career covering nearly six decades, and the playwright Terrence McNally, who died of coronavirus complications on Tuesday, could count on an extraordinary number of them. Many of these bonds were distinguished by an enduring loyalty, and they ranged widely in the American performing-arts scene — McNally wrote plays, books for musicals, opera librettos and screenplays. Below are reminiscences from his collaborators and peers. Some were collected by email, others by telephone; they have been edited for length and clarity.Chita RiveraStarred in the McNally musicals “The Rink,” “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” “Chita Rivera: The Dancer’s Life” and “The Visit”Terrence would not like for us to be this sad, but I don’t care how much he’d like to, he has no control over us [chuckles].I know for a fact that I wouldn’t be the person I am today without the words and the love of Terrence. It’s the Terrences who bring out the individuality in the artist, and the imagination, and remind you that you are bigger than what you appear to be.I remember him always upstage right in the back. As we rehearsed, he created. John [Kander] and Freddy [Ebb] and whoever was directing would ask for something and they would get it right away! It was as fresh as it could be, and funny if it had to be. And it was always right.Lin-Manuel MirandaAuthor, composer and actor, “Hamilton”Terrence and I first met at the Broadway opening of “In The Heights,” and I couldn’t believe he was there. The librettist for “Ragtime” and “Kiss of the Spider Woman” came to see our work, a new show by a largely novice creative team, and he could not have been more supportive. This was the playwright who elevated my heroes Rita [Moreno] and Chita [Rivera], writing amazing roles for both in “The Ritz” and “Kiss of the Spider Woman.” A few years later, thanks to Terrence’s beautifully crafted libretto, I experienced one of the most dizzying, heartbreaking highs I’ve ever had in a theater witnessing Chita Rivera’s transcendent performance in “The Visit.”Joyce DiDonatoStarred in the McNally operas “Great Scott” and “Dead Man Walking”The first thing I felt compelled to do when I heard the news was to put on Callas and cry along with her voice, as I know Terrence did so many times in his life. Somehow connecting through her voice, I felt still connected to him.Lynne MeadowArtistic director, Manhattan Theater ClubWhen we did “It’s Only a Play” [in 1986], he was so nervous before the critics were coming. I said, “It doesn’t matter what they say.” And he said, “It does, of course it matters what they say.” So I told him, “To me it doesn’t: I will do your next play.” That was a moment that changed his life, my life and the artistic life of Manhattan Theater Club, because up to 1999 we produced a brand-new play by Terrence McNally virtually every year. In that period he was both prolific and very daring: He knew he didn’t have to repeat himself.Lynn AhrensLyricist for McNally-penned musicals “Ragtime,” “A Man of No Importance” and “Anastasia”He was a stickler for every word he wrote, every comma, every period. He would occasionally lecture the cast: “If I write a comma, you pause. If I write a period, you stop. I don’t want you to pause when there is no comma.”What made Terrence’s voice distinctive was his authenticity: His very being went into every character. And he wanted every project to be great, mature, profound, serious at its heart — even “Anastasia,” which was based on an animated movie. He wanted to explore the history, to tell a more grown-up story.Stephen FlahertyComposer, “Ragtime,” “A Man of No Importance” and “Anastasia”He would never give us something saying “Song goes here.” He would write a scene up to the point where you would feel a song could happen and then he would write a beautiful long monologue to suggest what the character was feeling, in language that would help bring his ideas across. When we read his first treatment for “Ragtime,” he had a scene for Mother, who was watching her husband go on an expedition to the North Pole. She says, “Goodbye, my love, God bless you, and I suppose bless America, too.” I thought, “Isn’t that a song?”John GuarePlaywright, “Six Degrees of Separation”Our paths started crossing in the mid ’60s when we met at New Dramatists. Terrence, wonder of wonders, had already had two shows on Broadway — “The Lady of the Camellias” and “And Things That Go Bump in the Night.” And he was still in his mid-20s! But once you met him, you couldn’t be jealous. He was of such good cheer and generosity, you realized we were all in this together.Stephen SondheimComposer and lyricistI’ll miss him theatrically and I’ll miss him personally.Audra McDonaldStarred in McNally’s “Master Class,” “Ragtime,” “Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune”We first met when I was doing “Carousel.” He took me out for a grilled cheese sandwich across the street from Lincoln Center, to talk about “Master Class” and to know me. So that would have been 1994. Not only did I do three shows with him, plus workshops and one-off benefits, but he would become a very dear friend. He was at both of my weddings. He knew my children. Considering how long he had been in the business and how much he had done, I never knew anyone less jaded. He was so wide-eyed and he was still so enchanted by the theater and actors and the process. And that, many times, would not only inspire me but shame me. Seriously, I’d look at him and be, “Oh come on!”Larry KramerActivist and author, “The Normal Heart”Terrence was an old and dear friend and neighbor. We had many a gossipy lunch together. He was having his lung cancer out at the same time I was having my liver transplant. We would chat from hospital to hospital. He was always lovingly pestering me for taking so long finishing my book “The American People.” It is truly amazing to me that through all his infirmities he remained so productive.Joe MantelloDirector, McNally’s “Love! Valour! Compassion!,” “Corpus Christi,” and “Dead Man Walking”Terrence and Tom [Kirdahy] live down the road in the house that inspired “Love! Valour! Compassion!” I wandered over in the late afternoon yesterday to sit quietly in the backyard and watch the sunset — as Terrence and I had done so many times before. I recalled some of the opening lines, the first of our many happy collaborations:I love my house. I like to fill it with my friends.Over the years, we’ve become more like a family.It makes me happy to have us all together in our home.Pure Terrence. More

Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia’s horror thriller “The Platform” has been a regular fixture on Netflix’s daily Top 10 since it hit the streaming service last Friday, and no wonder: with its generous helpings of cannibalism, suicide, starvation, blood, guts and feces, how could it not be a crowd-pleaser? A gnarly mash-up of midnight movie and social commentary, the picture is overly overt but undeniably effective, delivering genre jolts and broad messaging in equal measure.David Desola and Pedro Rivero’s screenplay focuses on a brutal experiment in social conditioning and blunt Darwinism. In a vast, vertical prison, each floor consists of a single, small room, inhabited by two cellmates. In the middle of each room, down the center of the building, is a giant hole where a descending meal platform — a kind of mass dumbwaiter — stops once a day, for the briefest interval. It is loaded with food and drink at the beginning of its descent, and “if everyone ate only what they needed,” an administrator explains, “the food would reach the lowest levels.” But this is a 200-story prison, so if those on the higher floors stuff their faces (and they all do), things can get more than a little desperate down below.[embedded content]Into this sky-high hellscape comes Goreng (Ivan Massagué), not a prisoner but a volunteer, who has signed on for six months as a guinea pig in exchange for an accredited diploma. But he’s horrified by the notion of the platform, and the violence it precipitates; “It’s fairer to ration out the food,” he reasons with his cellmate, who snarls, “Are you a communist?”As political allegories go, “The Platform” ranks somewhere between “Animal Farm” and a late-period “South Park” episode on the subtlety scale. Yet timing and circumstances have rendered its directness, the outright obviousness of its metaphors and messaging, into its greatest strength. When Netflix acquired the picture at last fall’s Toronto International Film Festival and set its spring streaming date, they couldn’t have imagined the kind of cultural nihilism it would tap into. But it does; this is a grim, bleak nightmare, where the only escape hinges on the conscious decision to help, value and share with one’s fellow man. If ever there were a movie of our moment, this is it.The PlatformNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. More

Dousing us alternately in treacle and ice water, Jonathan Jakubowicz’s World War II drama, “Resistance,” strains to find a cohesive tone. Outlining the true story of how the young Marcel Marceau, the renowned French actor and mime, helped Jewish orphans survive Nazi-occupied France, the movie aims to wrestle uplift from tragedy.While Marceau (played by a miscast Jesse Eisenberg) might be the movie’s most novel hook, he’s also one of its least compelling characters. Watched disapprovingly by his father, a Jewish butcher, Marceau (born Marcel Mangel) would rather perform in Strasbourg’s cabaret clubs than chop meat. But when his politically active cousin (Geza Rohrig) persuades him to help care for a group of orphans rescued from Germany, his childlike clowning is a big hit with his traumatized charges.[embedded content]The problem is that Marceau’s whimsical attempts to entertain the children dilute the growing atmosphere of menace on which the story depends. This is most damaging when the action moves to the south of France and we’re introduced more thoroughly to the smoothly sadistic Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie (Matthias Schweighöfer). We’ve already seen this debonair devil gleefully pummel patrons of a gay club in Berlin; now he’s being serenaded by children singing “Ave Maria” while he coldly slaughters captives in the empty swimming pool of the aptly named Hotel Terminus in Lyon.These shifts from sugary to shocking are jarring. Yet though Barbie’s operatic violence leans perilously close to parody, Schweighöfer’s urbane-monster routine is wickedly diverting. Much more so than watching our halfhearted hero moon over his gentle crush, Emma (an affecting Clémence Poésy), or teach the orphans to hide by climbing trees. An encounter on a train between the two men — Marceau, now a member of the French resistance, is evacuating children to the Alps — owes the entirety of its suspense to Schweighöfer’s flickering changes of expression. He would have been superb in silent movies.Bracketed by weirdly redundant scenes of Marceau being celebrated by General George S. Patton (Ed Harris) and his troops, “Resistance” feels disjointed and dated. Lukewarm romantic subplots play like cursory afterthoughts, inserted to pander to audience expectations, and supporting characters are confusingly ill-defined and disconnected from one another. There is no doubt that Marceau’s wartime exploits — he was also a gifted forger who would go on to work with U.S. intelligence services — deserve a biopic. This one, though, is too uncomfortably torn between his comic talents and the horrors against which they were deployed.ResistanceRated R for multiple atrocities. Running time: 2 hours. Rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play, YouTube and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

Jesse Eisenberg and Imogen Poots play Tom and Gemma, a young couple looking for a home. Gemma’s a schoolteacher and Tom a landscaper, so they’re not getting too fancy. They look into a suburban housing development called Yonder.The agent for the place is a guy named Martin, who wears a white short-sleeve shirt and black tie and has a pale complexion and slicked-back hair. Put him in formal wear and he could pass for one of the Overlook guests near the end of “The Shining.” When Gemma asks where Yonder is, he replies, “Near enough. And far enough. Just the right distance.”[embedded content]“Watch out, you two — you’re about to enter an allegory!!!” one may shout at the screen at this point. And Tom, sensing something is amiss, lies to Martin that while they’d love to follow him out to the place, the couple has no car. Gemma corrects him. And so they enter a large tract of land with identical houses, all painted wilting-shamrock green. The interiors of each house are similarly bland, conformist. It gives Tom and Gemma the creeps, understandably, and they try to drive out. They soon find they’re trapped in a maze. One that looks, from the rooftop of one of the identical houses, endless. And as Tom soon discovers, burning one of said houses down (in the hopes of, among other things, signaling the outside world for help) doesn’t get them anywhere.Poots and Eisenberg, who first appeared together a decade ago in Brian Koppelman’s “Solitary Man,” remain an appealing onscreen couple. Which is good, because for long stretches they are the only people in the movie. Just when you’re wondering when another being might intrude on their anxiety, one does: a baby. One who grows into possibly the most relentlessly creepy child to ever blight a marriage, or a cinema screen.Directed by Lorcan Finnegan, from a script by Garret Shanley, “Vivarium” depicts Gemma and Tom becoming increasingly unglued, tormented by a tidy little boy who can speak in each of their voices. He has other irritating traits, too.The movie expands upon its echoes of the classic TV series “The Prisoner” with admirable purposefulness. And its commitment to the inexorable horrors of its story line is actually surprising. (The sci-fi angle of the story is suggested by its title.) There’s a consistent inventiveness — and grim humor — to this treatment of a seemingly well-worn theme.VivariumRated R for themes, language, a brief nightmare sexual depiction. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. Rent or buy on iTunes, Google Play, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

The comedy “Banana Split” hits the ground running with a montage that recaps a two-year high school relationship. While most of the movie doesn’t run on fast-forward, it never quite loses its snap. The plot centers on April (Hannah Marks), who, while still reeling from her breakup with Nick (Dylan Sprouse), discovers that he has found a new girlfriend, Clara (Liana Liberato), who has just moved to Los Angeles.Then April and Clara meet at a booze-soaked party, and Clara is not at all the heartless, gorgeous threat April imagined when she stalked her on Instagram. In fact, she is a ton of fun. Soon she and April are as close as two friends can be, screwball-bantering in perfect synchronization and even brushing their teeth side by side, all the while agreeing never to mention Nick (whom Clara continues to see) and postponing the inevitable day when he will find out that they know each other.[embedded content]That April is between her senior year of high school and first year of college makes the movie’s wide-eyed perspective — who knew that sometimes people you fear meeting can turn out to be cool? — somewhat forgivable. Marks, one of the two screenwriters, has given herself a plum role, and “Banana Split” is the sort of movie that gets a lot of individual scenes and exchanges right, even if the big picture is pretty bogus. On paper, April is confused and awkward, but not for one minute does any teenager in this movie come across as being at a loss for words or less than fully self-assured.“Banana Split,” which will be available Friday on demand and on streaming services in lieu of theaters, is the feature directing debut of the indie-film cinematographer Benjamin Kasulke, who adds enough flash to distract from the generic milieu. The palette is candy colored and the screen is filled with text messages; the fleet cutting suits April and Clara’s breezy dialogue. Is “Banana Split” an empty indulgence or a comfortingly familiar confection? Probably both.Banana SplitRated R for dating shenanigans. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. Rent or buy on iTunes, Google Play, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay-TV operators. More

A horror movie of sorts, Deborah Kampmeier’s “Tape” is a bludgeoning feminist tract, a grim P.S.A. about casting-couch predation and female subjugation. Leaden with references to rape culture and objectification — as well as the entertainment miscreants Roman Polanski and Bill Cosby — the script is suffocatingly, almost comically, on the nose. “Tape,” in short, is a terrible movie about appalling behavior.That behavior isn’t confined to the movie’s villain, a charismatic casting director named Lux (Tarek Bishara). It’s also displayed by the putative heroine, Rosa (Annarosa Mudd), whom we meet in her bathroom as she shaves her head, pierces her tongue and slices her wrists. She’s not trying to kill herself: She’s expressing sisterhood with the violated Lavinia in Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus,” whose gory image is plastered over the film’s opening credits. Rosa, too, has been raped, Lux was her attacker, and now she plans to expose his crimes.[embedded content]Attired in an all-black, beret-and-sunglasses get-up that screams “beatnik avenger,” Rosa, toting hidden recording equipment, heads to an audition where Lux is zooming in on Pearl (Isabelle Fuhrman), a textbook victim. Young, naïve and hopeful, Pearl is already bulimic and heartbreakingly biddable.“I’ll do whatever it takes,” she tells someone during a sobbing telephone call, lamenting the difficulty of securing an acting job. Outside her window — and for most of the movie — Rosa lurks and listens, later spying on Pearl and Lux via a tablet as he expertly coerces the ingénue into performing a sex scene. However important the themes, watching one character watch others feels punishingly oppressive. As does the clichéd environment of harassment that Kampmeier (who specializes in queasy examinations of female sexual vulnerability) constructs around them. For Rosa, a walk down a New York City street is a gantlet of catcalling workmen and displays of girlie magazines.Arriving with the full weight of #MeToo supplying both artistic anchor and critical shield, “Tape,” based on actual events, merges masochism and exorcism into a portrait of deep psychological pain. Plaintive female vocals adorn the soundtrack, and Valentina Caniglia’s clean, precise images pull light into dark corners. Strong performances do little to illuminate characters whose actions — especially in the cathartic restaurant finale — can feel strenuously contrived: It’s hard to care about people who are viewed solely through the lens of abuse, mere vehicles for a lecture on gender power imbalance. As a result, neither Rosa’s emotional agony nor Lux’s despicable sins achieve the resonance they deserve and which the filmmakers clearly intend.TapeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. Buy tickets to a virtual screening on tapevirtualpremiere.com. More