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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

The director Matthew Heineman has an uncanny ability to get his camera into difficult places. For his Oscar-nominated documentary “Cartel Land,” he embedded himself with armed vigilante groups fighting the Mexican drug cartels. For “City of Ghosts,” he filmed a group of Syrian journalists in Raqqa who risked their lives to expose ISIS atrocities.His cameras have been just as intrepid for the Showtime documentary series, “The Trade,” which returns Friday for its second season. People often ask Heineman how he gets such intimate access, he said Monday over afternoon coffee. But the access is the essence of the job; he wouldn’t bother without it.The challenge now may be accessing people’s living rooms. Season 1 tackled the opioid crisis, which for all its horrors is not especially polarizing. But Season 2 goes deep into the dangers facing Central American migrants — a subject about which many Americans appear to have made up their minds.“I think the first priority with this show,” he said, “as with anything I’ve ever done, is to try to take an issue that people think they understand, that’s often plastered across the headlines, and to try to humanize it. To try to put a human face to it.”In conversation, Heineman eschews political talk — his job, he says, is to “to show and not tell” with as much nuance as possible. To that end, he and the series’s showrunner, Pagan Harleman, went broad, sending journalists all over the map, north and south of the border.One team embedded with Border Patrol officers and Homeland Security agents in McAllen, Tex. Another tracked investigations into Naasón Joaquín García, who has been charged with running a child pornography and sex trafficking operation from his Mexico-based global megachurch.Another group, led by the Emmy-winning journalist Monica Villamizar, followed a young woman named Magda and her family on their long journey from Honduras to the U.S. border — much of it atop a freight train — after Magda’s husband was murdered.“I clicked with the family, and we started just by trying to be with them through the really hard time, the funeral,” Villamizar said by phone. “And then we just spent time with them and realized that Magda was in real danger.”Villamizar and the others spent more than a year and half following leads and earning trust. That kind of long-term investment in a single project, she said, was something she had never been able to make before. But the attachments she formed also made the project tougher.“To be honest, it was very hard — it was painful in a psychological way,” she said. But in the end, she added, “I was very happy to be able to given this opportunity because as a Hispanic reporter working in the U.S., I always thought the immigration was something that I really wanted to take an in depth look at.”In a cafe in midtown Manhattan, Heineman discussed the scope of the four-part Season 2 and the challenges of doing justice to such a complex subject. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Some viewers will be more willing to see the opioid crisis in humanitarian terms than they do the migrant crisis. What’s missing from the discussion of migrant issues that you try to get at in this series?For one, the migrant crisis and anything involving the border between us and Mexico has been highly politicized. What I’ve tried to do in all my projects is make something that’s apolitical. I believe it’s the job of a documentary to create discussion, to create debate. You can’t just preach to the choir. You have to, hopefully, allow both sides to come to the table and be understood.That’s one answer. The other is: I think that over the last couple years, when people talk about the migrant crisis, it is so often relegated to the border and to legislation in Washington, and the humanity is lost in the discussion. So I feel like that was our job — to bring back the humanity into the debate.What are some parallels you see between the two crises?We are tied to Mexico and Central America whether we like it or not. People for decades have immigrated, have been smuggled from Central America — frankly, from around the world — through Mexico into the U.S. This is not something created by our current political climate; this is something that’s been going on for a very, very long time. It’s part of the ecosystem of our country.But crossing the border used to be much safer. It used to be run by mom-and-pop shops, often family-owned, literally, even a decade ago. Now almost everything that goes across the border, whether it’s drugs or humans, is controlled by the cartel. Now you’re a commodity. You are out in the middle of the desert in the middle of the night with people with guns and masks, and that’s not necessarily a position you want to be in.Are there elements that will surprise people who take the more liberal-minded position in the immigration debate?You’re trying to make me say political things, and I hate talking about politics. I think that every person who works in law enforcement isn’t evil. We follow Homeland Security personnel, we follow Border Patrol personnel attempting to fight human smuggling, human trafficking. We’re also trying to humanize their perspective and where they’re coming from. One of our characters [a Homeland Security investigator] is of Mexican heritage, and he deeply empathizes with the people coming northward. I feel like it’s my job to try to break preconceived notions of who people are or their motivations for doing what they do.Still, the politics are fraught. Did your relationships with law enforcement require a lot of trust-building?Absolutely. We knew that law enforcement would be a big part of the story; we had a lot of connections that we built in Season 1. But as always, it takes a long time to actually get cameras rolling and to get into the places you want to get into. You can’t just helicopter in and out. You need to spend weeks and weeks, and months and months of time with these characters to develop the rapport, to develop the trust, to become a part of the fabric of their daily lives, so that you can capture real human moments. One of the benefits of long-form documentary filmmaking is that we have the privilege of time. With so many other forms of journalism, you have one day, two days to get a story.How did you find Magda? Did you commit early on to following her and her family, come what may?With Magda, we were filming in San Pedro Sula, in Honduras, when her husband was murdered by MS-13. We had no idea where that story was going to go. Little did we know, it would become this epic journey of escaping the violence that killed her husband, and all the trappings that it comes with — having to deal with smugglers and abandoning friends and family members. Magda’s story is really the through-line for all four episodes.We’re constantly debating and discussing, and nothing we do is scripted, nothing we do is planned. When I was 21 years old, a mentor of mine in the film world said that if you end up with the story you started with, then you weren’t listening along the way. I think that’s good advice for life; I think that’s good advice for filmmaking. Don’t be dogmatic, be open to the story changing. Be open to wonderful accidents of life.So many things could have happened on Magda’s journey. I’m thinking of the scene in Episode 2 when they hop the train, right after we’ve learned how many people die by falling off. To say nothing of all the kidnappings.These are very difficult films to make, but the difficulty pales in comparison to what our subjects go through on a daily basis. I derive so much inspiration and hope from the people we film, who are going through such life-altering circumstances or journeys, or life threatening situations, or overcoming certain things. So yes, this is a show about difficult subject matter. But I think audiences — as did I and everyone who worked on this series — will find enormous hope and inspiration in the perseverance of the human spirit, which just permeates almost every one of our characters. More

International Women’s Day arrives Sunday on the heels of another season of #OscarSoMale and another prize for the director Roman Polanski, who fled the United States in 1978, after he was convicted of unlawful sex with a minor.And yet, there are bright spots. “I went to see ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ yesterday,” said the filmmaker and CalArts film professor Nina Menkes, “and there were trailers for three other films by women. It’s impossible! It’s the first time anything like this has happened in my life.”Menkes is the creator of “Sex and Power: The Visual Language of Oppression,” a lecture and clip show she has been staging at film festivals around the world. In it, she uses scenes ranging from Hitchcock’s 1946 “Notorious” (1946) to Sofia Coppola’s 2003 “Lost in Translation” (with its opening shot of Scarlett Johansson’s barely clad backside) to demonstrate the nuances of objectification, the male gaze and how it’s perpetuated.And not just by men. “I’ve had women students come in and show footage that begins on the woman character’s face,” Menkes said, “then for no apparent reason it cuts down to her low-cut shirt. And goes lower. And then back up. And I’d say, ‘Why did you film that way?’ And there’d be this deer-in-the-headlights look. They were doing what they’d seen a million times. And weren’t even aware of it. Heterosexual male actors are almost never filmed that way.”Right now there’s a surge in cinema made by women — not just “Portrait,” but also recent and forthcoming movies like “Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey,” “The Assistant,” “Lost Girls,” “Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” “Zola” and Menkes’s documentary “Brainwashed.” I spoke to the directors to find out how they have been incorporating Menkes’s lessons into their work.Liz Garbus, ‘Lost Girls’Garbus, a veteran documentarian, is making her narrative feature debut with a drama (due March 13) about the case of unsolved serial killings on Long Island. She tells her story through one victim’s mother, played by Amy Ryan and based on the real-life Mari Gilbert.Given that the dead women were involved in sex work, Garbus said, a male director might have approached things differently. “But the point of view of my protagonist, her subjectivity, informed the shooting almost entirely. In the scenes with her family, we would break her off and put her at a distance, but in terms of her walking into a man’s world — which is everywhere apart from her family — that informed everything.” Mari is never scrutinized by the police, for instance, and their disregard for the killings is read through her. “This is about making women’s voices heard, so it’s ingrained in the entire movie.”The perspective does shift in a sequence involving a retirement party for a detective named Dormer (Gabriel Byrne). “The cops call strippers to the party and there was an opportunity to objectify a lot of beautiful women,” Garbus said. “But that scene is told through his point of view, which involved a growing sense of alienation and disgust with his colleagues. It’s one of the few scenes not anchored by Mari’s perspective, but Dormer is coming to a realization, and is looking at his colleagues in a different way.”Cathy Yan, ‘Harley Quinn: Birds of Prey’In this recent follow-up to “Suicide Squad” focusing on Margot Robbie’s antiheroine Harley Quinn, there’s a moment when a Gotham billionaire (Ewan McGregor) forces a woman to get on a table and strip. “We were pretty conscious not to muddy what the scene was meant to be about, by not offering anything remotely vulnerable or titillating,” Yan said. “There are choices like that which felt very deliberate; we were making sure we were protecting our female actors, even in a scene that was about humiliation.” But she said other choices were more intuitive: “It was less, ‘I’m going to unpack and reject the male gaze of every director who’s come before me’ and more of an unconscious, innate reaction about what feels right.” All the while keeping the camera on her actors’ faces. “That’s where you tell the story,” Yan said. “‘Look up here! I’m talking to you!’”Janicza Bravo, ‘Zola’“Zola,” which recently debuted at the Sundance Film Festival and is set for a summer release, is based on a notorious Twitter thread about a waitress and a stripper on a real-life road trip. It’s told from the server’s perspective, Bravo said, but “takes place inside of sex work. I wanted it the moment I read it. No one was going to protect this narrative like I would.”Bravo said she did her homework: “Most of what was out there that dealt in this space was prescribing to a male audience. By men, for men. I made what I wanted to see. I know what a breast looks like. I have a vagina. I didn’t feel I needed to add more to what is already a strong library of these images.”Eliza Hittman, ‘Never Rarely Sometimes Always’Female filmmakers are working to reclaim their point of view, Hittman argued. She does that in her new drama, opening March 13, by studying the faces of her lead characters: a young Pennsylvania woman (Sidney Flanigan) trying to obtain a legal abortion in New York City with the help of her cousin, Skylar (Talia Ryder). The exception to that focus is a scene in which Skylar is about to roll a bowling ball down an alley and the camera — shifting to the perspective of a guy they’ve met on the bus — follows her longingly. “That’s the one point where the movie plays with the male point of view. You’re supposed to see him watching and desiring.” But that one moment is a long way from some of Menkes’ favorite examples of gratuitous voyeurism, like the naked locker-room romp at the start of “Carrie.”“I do think there is a systematized approach to making a studio film in terms of the expectations of how a film is shot and edited,” Hittman said. “But I do think there’s room within that to control the points of view of the film.”Kitty Green, ‘The Assistant’Green’s film, released in January, was directly inspired by the Weinstein saga. “It’s told from the perspective of the youngest female at a production company, the person with the least amount of power at that company,” she said. Outside the office of a predatory executive (who remains offscreen), the woman (Julia Garner) watches as other women go in and out of his office, but, Green said, “I was very careful not to linger or zoom or do close-ups of their bodies, but rather see them the way a young woman would see them, without leaning into any of those traditional tropes of the male gaze, seeing them as objects and not human beings.”The obvious comparison is with “Bombshell,” the Jay Roach-directed tale of past sexual exploitation at Fox News, but it has been accused by some of being exploitative itself, as in a scene when the camera is trained on a female character hiking up her skirt at the behest of a man. “With something like ‘Bombshell,’ the problem is at the scriptwriting level,” Green said, “where they’ve seized on the most scandalous and sensational aspects of a story and ignored the structures and systems in which these behaviors are embedded. Perhaps they’re blind to it because they’re unwittingly participating in it. As women we’re more aware of the broader points.” Among them: “Just getting rid of Harvey Weinstein isn’t going to fix the problems.” More

For their fifth movie together, the director Peter Berg and the star Mark Wahlberg have gone Netflix light. You could easily picture a future in which they alternate between theatrical releases like “Deepwater Horizon” and “Patriots Day,” and sequels to the breezy “Spenser Confidential.”Indeed, this fleet-footed if disposable action comedy feels like the first installment of a franchise, complete with back story, introduction of sidekicks, and an ending that might as well scream “More to come!”[embedded content]The movie bears almost no resemblance to the Ace Atkins novel “Robert B. Parker’s Wonderland” (a continuation of the Spenser series created by Parker in 1973) that is its nominal inspiration, aside from the Boston location, the main characters’ names and something or other about an abandoned dog-racing track.Here, Spenser is a former cop who spent a few quality years in the clink for assaulting a corrupt superior, something that tells us a couple of things: He’s a decent guy with principles and his continuing good health testifies to his fighting skills — by way of confirmation, we see him casually dispatch burly inmates who attacked him.After his release, Spenser gets dragged into a conspiracy involving dirty policemen, machete-wielding gang members and plans to build a casino on the grounds of the aforementioned track.The perfunctory plot matters less than the scenes depicting Spenser’s relationships with his old buddy Henry (Alan Arkin); his new buddy Hawk (Winston Duke); his former girlfriend Cissy (the comedian Iliza Shlesinger); and his dog, Pearl. Those moments are Berg and Wahlberg at their loosely funny best, clearly enjoying making room for the supporting cast to strut their stuff — Duke is especially winning as a laconic gentle giant working on his MMA moves. The prospect of spending more time with this crew is not a bad one.Spenser ConfidentialRated R for violence, language throughout and sexual content. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. More