Movies

In “Onward,” the latest animated feature from Pixar, two elf brothers cast a magic spell that half-succeeds: They bring their dead father back to life, but only from the waist down, as a pair of sentient pants and shoes.At the box office this weekend, the movie was met with similarly mixed success.“Onward” opened to an estimated $40 million in domestic ticket sales Friday through Sunday, more than enough for first place, but it’s relatively weak for a Pixar movie. For comparison, Pixar’s “Inside Out” opened to roughly $98 million in domestic sales in June 2015, adjusting for inflation. The studio released “Onward” unusually early in the year; it typically puts out movies around summer or during the holiday season.The plot of “Onward” revolves around the brothers’ quest to fully reincarnate their father. (The siblings are voiced by Tom Holland and Chris Pratt.) The quest takes them on a tour through their universe, which is populated by fantasy creatures (like elves and dragons) who have largely given up magic in favor of technology. (Octavia Spencer voices a manticore who runs a restaurant; Julia Louis-Dreyfus voices the boys’ mother.)“Onward,” directed by Dan Scanlon (“Monsters University”), holds an 86 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but that good reception is modest by Pixar standards: The studio’s past three movies (“Toy Story 4,” “Incredibles 2” and “Coco”) all have Rotten Tomatoes scores of 94 or above. In his review for The New York Times, Ben Kenigsberg wrote that the movie’s central journey “plays as disappointingly routine, a checklist of mechanically foreshadowed heart-to-hearts and lessons learned, leavened by the occasional offbeat sight gag.”[Read our critic’s review of “Onward.”]Second place went to Universal’s “The Invisible Man,” a rethink of the H.G. Wells horror story that led the box office last weekend and sold an additional estimated $15.2 million in tickets this weekend. “The Invisible Man,” which stars Elisabeth Moss, has now made around $52.7 million total on domestic screens — a strong success given that the movie cost just $8 million to make.The only newcomer in the top five this weekend besides “Onward” was “The Way Back” (Warner Bros.), a sports drama starring Ben Affleck that opened to a solid estimated $8.5 million and landed in third place. Paramount’s “Sonic the Hedgehog” took fourth with an estimated $8 million in sales according to Comscore, which compiles box office data. “The Call of the Wild” (20th Century Studios) rounded out the top five, with an estimated $7 million in domestic sales. More

Over her nearly 40-year career, Vanessa Williams has proved herself to be a master of reinvention. In 1983, she made history as the first African-American woman to be crowned Miss America, and later that decade she became a chart-topping musician with multiple platinum albums and a slew of Grammy nominations. From there, she moved on to theater, television and film acting — appearing most memorably as the witch in the 2002 Broadway revival of the musical “Into the Woods” and as the scheming magazine director Wilhelmina Slater in the TV series “Ugly Betty” — and in more recent years, she has co-written a memoir and introduced a fashion line. Now 56, the actress is embarking on yet another stage project: starring in a new production of the musical comedy “City of Angels,” which is currently in previews at the Garrick Theater in London.So it seems fitting that for the latest installment of the video series “Read T a Poem,” which arrives two days ahead of International Women’s Day, Williams chose to honor a pioneering Renaissance woman of an earlier generation: the poet, author and civil rights activist Maya Angelou. Though Angelou, born in St. Louis in 1928, was best known for her poems and memoirs, she was also a prolific screenwriter, cookbook author, actor, dancer, film director, composer, calypso singer and pop-cultural star. She won a Tony (for her role as Elizabeth Keckley, a former slave and a seamstress and confidante to the first lady Mary Todd Lincoln, in the 1973 Broadway play “Look Away”), an Emmy (for her supporting role in the 1977 TV mini-series “Roots”) and several Grammys for her spoken-word albums. Though, above all, it is her poetry that endures.Williams’s selection, “Phenomenal Woman,” was published in 1978, first in Cosmopolitan and later that year in the collection “And Still I Rise.” In it, Angelou proclaims, in simple, declarative verse, her physical and spiritual allure as a black woman. In her later years, Angelou made a recording of herself reading the poem — her famous husky drawl measured and stately — but here, Williams animates Angelou’s words with a charismatic recitation that is all her own. More