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“Hi. My name is Sam Hargrave, director of ‘Extraction.’ So at this point, we’re in the middle of what we would term a oner. It’s a long continuous shot that we came up with, a way to do that kind of a unique chase scene. And we’re escaping with Chris Hemsworth, who plays Tyler Rake, and Rudhraksh Jaiswal who plays that Ovi.” “Alright, kid, you trust me?” “No.” “Good.” “This jump— and at that moment, we had a stitch. So we could infuse our actors into the action and then use the doubles for the dangerous part. And for that jump, I was actually on a wire leaping behind our stunt doubles. And coming down those stairs, that’s me running backwards with a camera, trying to keep our actors in frame, keep up with their speed, not fall on my butt. We work our way through this whole series of hallways. And when we enter this room, we actually, on that door kick, we moved to another location. So that’s a different day of shooting, different time.” “Stay on my shoulder, all right?” “And this fight here, we’ve got Randeep Hooda and Chris Hemsworth going at it. They spent weeks rehearsing together. Because the beauty of this is it looks sloppy. It looks like they’re struggling for their lives. And it looks messy. But that comes from hours of rehearsal so they could put the acting into this. So again, here, we build in a hidden cut where we can put the doubles in. And as you see, the camera goes down with them. Again, that’s me on a wire, jumping over a balcony, and gliding down with them. And for that, we kind of set that all up. We built the balcony. It didn’t exist. We parked the truck in the right place. And the stunt team rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed to get the timing of that right and the distancing. And it was really challenging to kind of keep both actors in frame for that fall just because the nature of the jump. I mean, I’m on a wire, trying to jump with a camera, keep them in frame. And then when we land in the streets, what we thought would be really fun was to have the actors interacting with the environment, the vehicles passing by. This is just a day in the life of for these people. But these guys are locked in a life and death struggle with knives. And yet, life goes on. You know, this is busy street. People are watching like they’ve gone to the cinema. And you know, again, this hours of rehearsal with these two actors so that we could have the intensity that we needed. And then a little shock value here.” [GRUNTING] [CAR SCREECHES] “The thing that was interesting about this moment is, and what we tried to do to make kind of a unique perspective, was do what people aren’t expecting, which you take out your hero. Just take him out of the fight. And then focus on the bad guy. And we just thought it was fun, a different way to kind of follow action was to leave your hero out of it. So you’re thinking, wait, what happened to Rake? Is he going to come back? And you know, leave people wanting more.” More

An action thriller powered by brute force rather than ideas or style, “Extraction” stars Chris Hemsworth as Tyler Rake, a mercenary dispatched to Dhaka, Bangladesh, to retrieve the kidnapped son of a crime lord (the Bollywood stalwart Pankaj Tripathi) from a competing gang. After a perfunctory setup — the criminals are all in cahoots with the cops, and the kingpin is up to his own manipulative tricks — the film gets right down to business, serving up a relentless barrage of blood, bullets and blown-up cars.“Extraction” (streaming on Netflix) is the debut feature by Sam Hargrave, who’s worked as a stunt coordinator on several Marvel movies. Although not a superhero film, it shares the genre’s familiar muddled morality: Tyler is painted as a stereotypical good bad guy, tortured by personal tragedy and redeemed by his mission, even as he kills and maims some teenage minions in the process. Randeep Hooda plays his foil, a kingpin deputy whose ruthlessly efficient violence is inflected by its own, corny undercurrent of paternal pathos. David Harbour also appears briefly, adding to the film’s lineup of tortured machos.[embedded content]The fight scenes are plastic and glossy. Hargrave mistakes gore for cool and technical prowess for choreography, deploying overlong one-take shots that look like “Call of Duty” outtakes. He does commit to the location, though, creating a properly global thriller with a fine ensemble cast. Much of the dialogue is in Hindi and Bengali, and the Bollywood actors — particularly Hooda, as well as Priyanshu Painyuli as a swaggering mob boss — lift the dull proceedings, delivering their lines with a hint of melodrama. They’re a tease for how fun this movie could have been if it weren’t so somber.ExtractionRated R for gratuitous gore and violence. In English, Hindi and Bengali, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

LOS ANGELES — In recent weeks, a tentative timeline for reopening America’s movie theaters began to take shape. It involved pushing to get 75 percent of the country’s 5,548 cinemas selling tickets again this summer, enough to justify the wide release of two potential blockbusters: Christopher Nolan’s mind-bending “Tenet,” scheduled for July 17, and Disney’s mega-budget “Mulan,” set for July 24.That one-two punch would be enough to draw moviegoers back into theaters that had been closed because of the coronavirus pandemic, multiplex operators believed, allowing Hollywood to salvage part of the blockbuster season and, perhaps, revive a pastime that has taken on symbolic importance for the American economy.But some politicians want their popcorn now.Some Republican governors are urging cinemas to reopen sooner rather than later, despite business and public health realities that make an abrupt relighting of marquees impractical, if not impossible. To help restart Georgia’s economy, Gov. Brian Kemp wants theaters to reopen starting Monday. Tennessee, where Regal Cinemas is based, plans to allow most businesses to reopen at the end of next week. South Carolina and Ohio are also restarting their economies. Texas and Florida are itching to do the same.But movie theaters are worried about opening up too early. They don’t want to be lumped in with meatpacking plants and senior centers as hot spots for the virus. Already struggling financially, theaters fear that a too-soon return could stigmatize them as dangerous places to congregate. And with new movies from Hollywood not set to debut until the middle of July — at the earliest — opening too soon would only make operators spend money before they could truly recoup costs from patrons.“Hell no, we’re not opening on Monday,” Chris Escobar, who owns the 485-seat Plaza Theater in Atlanta, said by phone. “When we do, it will not be because of political pressure. It will be because leading public health experts say our lives are no longer at risk.”He added: “I want to be back in business right this second. But we’ve got to be smart about it. What happens if we open too soon and contribute to an outbreak? Traced to the Plaza Theater! You know what that would do to my business? I wouldn’t have one.”Aubrey Stone, the chief executive of the Georgia Theater Company, which operates more than 200 screens in Georgia, South Carolina, Florida and Virginia, also said he will not open on Monday. More realistic would be a July start, should the virus comply.“We are not going to reopen until our partners in distribution will be supplying us with a consistent supply of new films,” Mr. Stone wrote in an email. More

He was accused of having been a central figure in one of the largest art world scandals of recent times, but little has been heard from José Carlos Bergantiños Diaz, who the authorities say helped orchestrate the sale of $80 million in phony works.Now in his first in-depth interview, Mr. Bergantiños Diaz, a fugitive living in Spain, has acknowledged to a documentary filmmaker that he discovered Pei-Shen Qian, the painter from Queens whose ability to mimic the work of Modernist masters fooled much of the art world.But he denied assigning him that task or of being involved in the scheme to sell dozens of the counterfeit paintings, made by Mr. Qian in his Queens garage, as the work of artists like Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock.He laid blame instead on his former girlfriend, the Long Island art dealer Glafira Rosales, who sold many of the phony works through the auspices of Knoedler & Company, then one of the city’s oldest sellers of fine art, and a respected one.“I was never ambitious; Glafira was the ambitious one,” Mr. Bergantiños Diaz, 64, told the filmmaker Barry Avrich, whose documentary, “Made You Look,” just aired on Canadian TV. “She loved fancy clothes and fancy parties.”Ms. Rosales, 63, who pleaded guilty to nine counts of conspiracy, fraud and other crimes in 2013, told the authorities that Mr. Bergantiños Diaz used threats and abuse to coerce her into continuing with the scheme.They arrested and charged him with wire fraud and money laundering as well as conspiring to defraud the Internal Revenue Service and other crimes in 2014, but have been unable to extradite him from Spain.As the film depicts, the scandal rocked the art world, called into question the ability of experts to determine what works are authentic and led to Knoedler’s closure after 165 years in business.Speaking from Spain, Mr. Bergantiños Diaz said he had made a mistake in trusting Ms. Rosales and that she had lied when she accused him of mistreating her.“I forgive her and she is the mother of my daughter and I wish her the best,” he told the filmmaker.Mr. Avrich, who said he has plans for a limited theatrical release of the documentary in New York and Britain in the fall, said he interviewed Mr. Bergantiños Diaz in Lugo, the art dealer’s hometown in the northwest part of the country. Mr. Bergantiños Diaz told the filmmaker that he met Ms. Rosales in Mexico and they moved to New York where, impressed by the high prices that art could fetch, they established a gallery in Chelsea.At one point, he describes placing colleagues in an auction room to help bid up the price of a work he was selling.But it was Ms. Rosales, he said, who had ambitions to be a big player in the art world.The marketing of the fake paintings beginning in the mid-1990s led not only to the criminal case, but also to lawsuits by several collectors who had bought the phony works.Among the most astonishing elements of the scheme was that the painter, Mr. Qian, was able to master the styles of a diverse array of famous painters to the point that acknowledged experts and sophisticated collectors did not notice they were frauds.The federal authorities said it was Mr. Bergantiños Diaz who recruited Mr. Qian to produce the scores of paintings and drawings that were presented as newly discovered works by major artists. They said in court papers that he treated the canvases to make them look old and that some of the proceeds from the sales were wired to bank accounts in Spain controlled by him.In his conversation with the filmmakers, Mr. Bergantiños Diaz described how he met Mr. Qian at the Art Students League, an arts school in New York. “We knew from the school that he was very talented at doing copies of famous artists,” he told the filmmakers.Mr. Bergantiños Diaz bought some of his works. While he insisted Ms. Rosales had the most contact with Mr. Qian, he said that sometimes they made suggestions together about what he should paint.He said Ms. Rosales’s work with the Knoedler Gallery was independent of him, that he never met its director, Ann Freedman, and that he was not aware that Ms. Rosales was selling work made by Mr. Qian as the real thing.“I didn’t know everything she was selling or buying because we were distanced from each other and I have my own networks,” he said, speaking sometimes through a translator.Mr. Avrich, who has made documentaries about the entertainment kingpin Lew R. Wasserman and the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, tracked Mr. Qian down in Shanghai, where Mr. Qian insisted he didn’t know the paintings were being sold to other people. Ms. Freedman said that she, too, was fooled by the paintings she sold at Knoedler and believed they were real until Ms. Rosales confessed.“I was convinced,” she says in the film.According to the documentary, Ms. Rosales was working for a time as a waitress in Brooklyn. Her lawyer, Bryan C. Skarlatos, declined to comment on her behalf.“However,” the lawyer said, “I believe that she may be willing to speak in the coming months and, if so, what she says will be very different from Mr. Diaz’s story.”As for Mr. Bergantiños Diaz, Mr. Avrich said he had no doubt that, as the federal authorities have charged, the art dealer and his former girlfriend worked closely together in the scam.“They were the Bonnie and Clyde of the art world,” Mr. Avrich said.Alain Delaquérière contributed research. More

“Thoroughbreds,” the 2018 debut feature of the playwright Cory Finley, was not to every taste, but for acid wit and gliding camera moves, it could hardly be beat. Finley’s second feature, “Bad Education,” which airs Saturday night on HBO, traffics in a kindred casual misanthropy. The movie offers an agreeably slick account of an early-2000s scandal in which a former superintendent of schools in Roslyn, N.Y., pleaded guilty to stealing $2 million from his district.And like the character played by Hugh Jackman, the superintendent Frank Tassone, “Bad Education” initially keeps its cards close, playing tricks with viewers’ sympathies.Frank, his hair gelled back and his face always wrenched into a grin, goes out of his way to be presentable. He remembers details about students from years earlier or recognizes their siblings. He meets with a parent who pushes for accelerated treatment for her third-grader. He maintains (or at least fakes) an interest in the lives of his teachers. He even welcomes an unscheduled interview with a school newspaper reporter, Rachel (Geraldine Viswanathan), encouraging her to dig deeper on a story about a school construction boondoggle. This, it turns out, is one of his less sharp moves. (The real-life student journalist who helped break the story of the scandal wrote about her experiences for The New York Times.)[embedded content]Part of the strength of “Bad Education” is in showing how easily Frank gets others to sign on to his plans. When it comes to light that a fellow administrator, Pam (Allison Janney), has dipped into the district’s finances to the tune of more than $200,000, Frank is, at first, able to contain the fallout by noting the impact bad press would have. College admissions, property values, a forthcoming budget vote — all would be in jeopardy. For a brief time, Pam looks like the central player in the thefts, rather than one piece of a puzzle.The 2004 New York Magazine article on which the film is based asked whether Roslyn residents allowed themselves to be duped by Tassone. The film, which adheres to the reporting with reasonable fidelity, is, at most, slightly more charitable in its assessment. (Ray Romano, terrific as the school board president, is an island of humanity in the sea of backbiting and self-interest.)Finley didn’t write “Bad Education,” as he did “Thoroughbreds,” and if this film lacks the stylized, pitch-black verbal parries of that movie, he outfits it with similarly precise compositions and a jarring, percussive score. The screenplay, by Mike Makowsky, a student in Roslyn during the scandal, shows an ear for Long Island flavor and class tensions, and even the set decoration is attuned to details. The student journalists’ computer software is spot-on turn-of-the-aughts.But it’s Jackman, whose smile appears increasingly wolfish as the film goes on (and as Frank’s face grows taut with cosmetic surgery), who ultimately owns “Bad Education.” It’s a plum part, sure, but also a deeply unsympathetic one — a chance for the actor to channel his charisma toward dark, mischievous ends.Bad EducationNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. Watch on HBO. More