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      Watch Ryan Gosling Perform His Own Stunt in ‘The Fall Guy’

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      The director David Leitch narrates a sequence from the film featuring Gosling and Emily Blunt.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.Spicy margaritas, bad decisions and one big stunt make up this sequence from “The Fall Guy.”Ryan Gosling stars as a stuntman named Colt Seavers alongside Emily Blunt as a cinematographer, Jody Moreno. In this flashback, the two have a flirty conversation over the radio about having a drink after work as Colt prepares for a stunt on set.For the scene, which involves Gosling’s character falling several stories inside a building, the “Fall Guy” director David Leitch said they opted to create the moment practically and have Gosling perform the stunt himself.This meant hooking the actor to a rig called a descender, used to drop a stunt performer off a building, and then a mechanism provides deceleration for the final 10 feet.Read the “Fall Guy” review.Learn about the filmmakers’ campaign for an Oscar for stunts.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      The ‘Fall Guy’ Filmmakers Have a Cause: Give Stunts an Oscar

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      The academy is keeping mum about the prospect, but the movie is part of a renewed push for a new Academy Award first considered more than 30 years ago.The life of stuntmen and women is never glamorous. The job is to take the fall, endure the pain, break the bone, then walk away — unsung, battered and bruised. They usually move on to the next gig without ever seeing the finished product. They rarely get invited to the movie premiere. Oscars? Forget about it.That narrative seems to be changing with the new action-comedy-romance “The Fall Guy,” the loose film adaptation of the 1980s television show that opens Friday. The movie, directed by the former stuntman David Leitch, stars Ryan Gosling as Colt Seavers, a down-on-his-luck stuntman who returns to set after a nasty accident to solve the mystery of a missing leading man (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and, more important, to get the girl (played by Emily Blunt).The director David Leitch and producer Kelly McCormick said they wanted to give stunt performers their due.Suzanne Cordeiro/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesNot only does the film give the best portrayal of the life of a stuntman since Burt Reynolds starred in the 1978 action comedy “Hooper,” directed by another ex-stuntman, Hal Needham, but so much of the promotional efforts have placed the stunt crew front and center, including the newly minted world-record holder Logan Holladay (he rolled a retrofitted Jeep Grand Cherokee eight and a half times) and the high-fall virtuoso Troy Lindsay Brown. They and two others served as Gosling’s doubles in the film.At the Berlin premiere, the team broke through a brick wall with another double, Ben Jenkin, riding on the hood of a truck. In London, Holladay wheelied in on a motorcycle and Jenkin crashed through some breakable glass.And on Tuesday at the Los Angeles premiere, Brown tumbled from a 45-foot-high scissor lift onto a blowup mattress and Justin Eaton, another Gosling stunt double, engaged in a three-way fistfight with all of the performers breaking through another sheet of faux glass. Then Jenkin flipped from the balcony of the Dolby Theater onto the stage moments before Gosling took the mic to declare, “This movie is just a giant campaign to get stunts an Oscar.”Gosling joked, “This movie is just a giant campaign to get stunts an Oscar.”87 NorthIndeed, putting the stunt performers on the very stage where the Oscars are held is all part of deliberate efforts by Leitch, his producing partner and wife, Kelly McCormick, and the marketers at Universal to give these action pros their due. “It’s an important part of why we made this,” Leitch said in an interview. “We wanted to humanize these people. It really does hurt. And yet, we don’t really know what they feel because they’re not supposed to be seen.”They may become more visible if the couple have their way. The push for an Oscar category is not the subtle subtext of “The Fall Guy”; it is the text. There’s even a moment in the movie when Gosling’s Seavers is asked if stunt performers receive Oscars for their work. “Stunts?” he replies. “No,” then raises his glass to the “unsung heroes.”“It’s baked into the film,” the screenwriter Drew Pearce said in an interview from his home office. “There are not that many members of the crew who can break their back by going into work that day. The idea that they wouldn’t be acknowledged but me sitting in here on a laptop is, obviously, doesn’t seem just in any way.”The hit television show “The Fall Guy” ran for five seasons in the early 1980s, and its epic action, including truck jumps and high-elevation falls, proved to be a source of inspiration for the many Gen Xers who now dominate the stunt community. It even inspired those who didn’t make it into that world but found their way to Hollywood, like Pearce (who, as a child, concocted a stuntman course in his backyard only to discover his crippling fear of heights) and another of the film’s producers, Guymon Casady.Casady first convinced the TV show’s creator, Glen A. Larson, to license the property to him some 20 years ago, only for it to languish in the studio development process, as various iterations, including one with Dwayne Johnson and another with Nicolas Cage, fell apart. In 2019, Casady tried again, reviving the project with Leitch, who was fresh off his success on “Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw” and about to start “Bullet Train.” Leitch had begun his career as Brad Pitt’s stunt double and worked as a director and producer on the “John Wick” series.“The big idea from the very beginning was to make a movie where we were honoring the stunt craft,” Casady said. “That was an important idea for David, obviously, given his background, but we thought it was also a really unique character.”Yet, Leitch and company’s efforts are not new.Stuntman-turned-second-unit-director Jack Gill joined the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences in 1991, determined to get himself and his colleagues recognized. The academy told him it would take three to five years of hard work to add the category. Cut to 2024, and Gill, who has no affiliation with “Fall Guy,” is still holding out hope that this happens in his lifetime. The new movie has made him optimistic.“It is a great representation of what a stunt person actually has to put up with and what they go through,” he said in an interview from a set in Phuket, Thailand. “I think a lot of the academy members that vote on whether we get an Oscar category are still a little bit in the dark about what we do. I don’t think they realize that most of the action is designed by us. It’s not designed by the writer or the director.”Jack Gill, with his wife, the actress Morgan Brittany, in his stuntman days. He has been pushing for an Oscar for the profession since 1991.Parker/Hulton Archive Via Getty Images/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesTo drive that point home, Chris O’Hara, who orchestrated the action on “The Fall Guy,” is now the first professional to earn the title stunt designer — a new designation approved by the Screen Actors Guild and the Directors Guild of America — that establishes a benchmark for the work of a stunt coordinator and better aligns O’Hara’s work with other department heads on sets, including production and costume designers.O’Hara grew up in the business with Leitch, worked on “John Wick,” and served as his second-unit director and stunt coordinator on “Hobbs & Shaw.” For years he was content to stay in the shadows.“We knew what we did,” he said. “We weren’t out there to get recognition, accolades and attaboys.”But that changed when he started seeing his peers in visual effects ascend the Oscar stage. “They are amazing people at their craft, and visual effects are an essential part of filmmaking,” he said, but he pointed out that most of the effects being recognized involved action sequences with stunt performers. “I just think we need to be included. We are part of the film industry. We are part of cinema.”There are currently 101 stunt performers in the academy. They are part of the Production and Technology branch, which includes colorists, script supervisors and line producers, among others. Unlike other branches, which each have three governors to lobby on their behalf, this branch is headed by one.Yet Gill, Leitch and McCormick are encouraged by the progress the academy has made, including its decision to laud stunt work at the Oscars in March with a tribute that Gosling and Blunt introduced and that Leitch and McCormick produced.“I personally think that tribute is a huge step forward,” McCormick said. “If they didn’t want to recognize the stunt industry, they easily could have filled those two minutes with something else.”Gill is hopeful that the progress achieved by casting directors — who landed their own Oscar category beginning with the 2026 Academy Awards — can be replicated for stunt performers. Yet the academy is remaining mum on if or when this will happen. Its president, Janet Yang, attended the Los Angeles premiere of “The Fall Guy” on Tuesday, but a representative declined to comment on the status of a potential new Oscar.“Here I am, 33 years later, and we’re closer now because of the casting category,” Gill said. “They opened the door to the fact that, yes, we can create new branches and we can create new categories, which before they had told me was virtually impossible.”He added, “We’re trying to follow in their footsteps and jump right in behind them. With ‘Fall Guy’ coming out, I think we’ve got a good shot at it.” More

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      ‘The Contestant’ on Hulu Offers a Glimpse of Reality TV Ethics

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      The documentary tells the strange story of a groundbreaking 1998 Japanese TV show but doesn’t go far enough in its examination.So imagine this. It’s 1998. You want to be a comedian, and you’re desperate for work. You strike out for the big city and start going to auditions. Then, to your utter joy, you’re cast on a reality show.When you show up to set, though, things get weird. You’re ordered to remove all your clothing and you’re handed a stack of blank postcards and a pen. The goal is to use them to enter magazine contests — lots of them — and win prizes. Once the prize value totals a certain amount, you’ve won. What have you won? Well … you’ll see.This is a real thing that happened to Tomoaki Hamatsu, known as Nasubi: He was selected by Toshio Tsuchiya, a Japanese reality TV producer, to do just that on a nationally broadcast TV show. (If the story sounds familiar, it’s because it was the basis for a popular “This American Life” episode.) If you can believe it, Nasubi’s story gets weirder from there, and is now the subject of Clair Titley’s new documentary, “The Contestant” (available on Hulu).The film was made with the participation of a number of figures involved in the original production, including Tsuchiya and Nasubi. It retells the story using interviews and a great deal of footage from the actual show, which underlines how innovative it was. Nasubi’s life inside the room was broadcast before voyeuristic webcams were common, and it began running the same year that “The Truman Show,” with its oddly similar plot, was released.“The Contestant” is worth watching for the strangeness of the story. I found it curiously underdeveloped as a documentary, though. It’s been more than 25 years since Nasubi’s ordeal, years in which questions of exploitation and ethics in reality TV — surrounding everything from Bravo’s “Real Housewives” empire to “The Jinx” and a whole lot more — have been, if not at all solved, at least explored at length, relitigated every time news surfaces about the manipulation of subjects or the truth behind the scenes. (“UnReal,” a scripted drama based on the machinations on a “Bachelor”-like show, is a revealing way to dig into those questions. It’s available on most major platforms.)The big question isn’t why arguably unscrupulous reality TV keeps getting made, because we know the answer. The bigger question is why we keep watching it, and what kind of human qualms and compunctions we have to push aside to indulge. “The Contestant” has at its fingertips a rich text for exploring our current reality landscape, not to mention our fascination with social media meltdowns. But it doesn’t really go there, preferring instead to reassure us that Nasubi is OK.But the film’s failure to dig into its story further doesn’t mean we can’t — and “The Contestant” is a great starting point for conversations like these. That’s why it’s worth watching and thinking about. Because it’s not just a crazy story: It’s an important one in our media-saturated, always-on, can’t-look-away age. More

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      What to Know about ‘Unfrosted’ and the Real History of Pop-Tarts

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      In his directorial debut, Jerry Seinfeld tackles the history of the fruit-filled pastries … kind of. Here’s the real origin story, along with a bonus quiz.First, there was the Flamin’ Hot Cheetos biopic (complete with an Oscar-nominated song). Then came “Tetris”; “Air,” about Nike Air Jordan sneakers; “BlackBerry”; and “Barbie.”It is, in other words, a golden age for product-origin-story movies.The latest is “Unfrosted: The Pop-Tarts Story,” a satirical history that Jerry Seinfeld has expanded from his stand-up act. The film, which he directed and stars in alongside Jim Gaffigan, Hugh Grant and Amy Schumer, arrives Friday on Netflix. Unlike its predecessors, it’s not really concerned with actual events. Here’s what to know about the true history of the Pop-Tart — and what the movie gets right and wrong.But first, how did Kellogg’s and Post both end up with headquarters in Battle Creek, Mich.?You would think ground zero in the Breakfast Wars of the 1960s might be somewhere most people could locate on a map. But Battle Creek, Mich., was home to the Battle Creek Sanitarium, known for its water and fresh air treatments, and managed by Will Keith Kellogg and his brother, John Harvey Kellogg. W.K. Kellogg developed a method of creating crunchy pieces of processed grain for his patients (read: Corn Flakes), and one of those patients, C.W. Post, would go on to start his own company in 1895 selling several foods that were veeeery similar to those at the sanitarium.W.K. Kellogg noticed Post profiting from his recipes and established his own firm in 1906, the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company. Within three years, it was cranking out more than 100,000 boxes of Corn Flakes a day, and, thanks to the success of Kellogg, Post and many other cereal companies, Battle Creek became known as the Cereal City. Who were the real Edsel Kellogg III and Marjorie Merriweather Post?Melissa McCarthy, Seinfeld and Jim Gaffigan in “Unfrosted.”Columbus 81 ProductionsThe bumbling chief executive of Kellogg’s, played by Gaffigan, is fictional (thank goodness). On the other hand, Marjorie Merriweather Post — the General Foods owner whom Schumer portrays as a turban-wearing caricature — was one of the first female chief executives and, for most of her life, considered the wealthiest woman in America. (Today she may be best known for building Mar-a-Lago, now Donald J. Trump’s base.)Did Post really come up with a toaster-prepared breakfast pastry first?Yes. In the 1960s, Post, then the biggest competitor to Kellogg’s, invented a process of partly dehydrating food and wrapping it in foil to keep it fresh; no refrigeration required. The process was initially used for dog food, but it also allowed fruit filling in, say, a toaster-prepared breakfast pastry to stay both moist and bacteria-free. (And yes, it was actually Post’s idea, not one ripped off from a Kellogg’s employee via a hidden vacuum cam.)Was the Post product really called Country Squares?Unfortunately, yes. The name was later changed to its current Toast’em Pop Ups, but is that really much better?How did Country Squares and Pop-Tarts end up hitting shelves the same year?Post jumped the gun and unveiled Country Squares to the press in February 1964, four months before they were ready to sell, allowing Kellogg’s time to frantically rustle up its own, much-better-named version.Did Bob Cabana really create the Pop-Tart?Nope, the “Unfrosted” flack (played by Seinfeld) is fictional. The man who helped create Pop-Tarts was a manager named William Post (yes, really), who died in February at 96.Gaffigan, left, Seinfeld, Fred Armisen and McCarthy with boxes of the film’s version of Pop-Tarts with an early (made-up) name.Columbus 81 ProductionsWhat was an actual rejected name for the Pop-Tart?The ones in the film — Fruit-Magoos, Heat ’Em Up and Eat ’Em Ups, Oblong Nibblers, Trat Pops — are made up. But the real rejected name — Fruit Scones — wasn’t much catchier. The final name, coined by a Kellogg’s executive, William LaMothe, was inspired by Pop Art, the contemporary cultural movement.Were Pop-Tarts really an overnight hit?Yes, but the first shipment to stores sold out in two weeks, not 60 seconds, as in “Unfrosted.” Kellogg’s apologized, in advertisements, but this only increased demand. (They were restocked before long.)Were the first flavors really unfrosted?Yes. The original flavors — all unfrosted — were Apple Currant Jelly, Strawberry, Blueberry and Brown Sugar-Cinnamon. The first frosted ones — Dutch Apple, Concord Grape, Raspberry and Brown Sugar-Cinnamon — didn’t hit the market until 1967. (William Post came up with the idea, disproving skeptics who believed the icing would melt in the toaster.) The next year, sprinkles were added to some of the frosted ones.Did Kellogg’s really advertise Pop-Tarts without a mascot?It did, though the decision didn’t set off a Hugh Grant-led mascot rebellion, as in “Unfrosted.” Kellogg’s rectified the omission in 1971, introducing Milton the Toaster. (The little guy didn’t make it out of the 1970s.)Which of these flavors are real?The past few decades have been a smorgasbord of Pop-Tart flavors, some very short-lived. Can you spot the four real flavors here?Chocolate PeppermintFroot LoopsGuava MangoHarry Potter Special Edition: Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans, PopcornMaple BaconTwizzlersAnswer: Chocolate Peppermint, Froot Loops, Guava Mango and Maple Bacon Pop-Tarts have all been on shelves at some point. The Harry Potter Bertie Bott’s Popcorn and Twizzlers flavors remain the stuff of our fever dreams. More

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      Sofia Coppola’s Latest Release? A Lip Balm With Augustinus Bader.

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      The tinted balm was inspired by products that the filmmaker confected as a girl to achieve the “berry-stained lips” of a character in a Roman Polanski movie.As a girl, Sofia Coppola liked to melt down her lipsticks, mixing colors and consistencies to make a tint that conformed to her aesthetic ideal.She was after the look of Tess, the titular character in Roman Polanski’s 1979 film adaptation of the novel “Tess of the d’Urbervilles,” portrayed by Nastassja Kinski. In one scene, Ms. Coppola recalled, the character was nibbling on strawberries “that left her with perfectly berry-stained lips.”That tint, it turns out, is the cosmetic expression of a subtlety that has long been Ms. Coppola’s hallmark as a filmmaker, writer and director. From an early age, she brought her coolly observant, hyper-feminine sensibility to movies like “The Virgin Suicides,” her first film, released in 1999, “Lost in Translation,” “Marie Antoinette” and, most recently, “Priscilla,” Ms. Coppola’s adaptation of Priscilla Presley’s memoir, “Elvis and Me.”The style of her work is all of a piece, Ms. Coppola, 52, said on Monday in a phone interview; her taste, for the most part, is genteelly uncompromising. “I’m making a world,” she stressed, “that I want to look at and share.”With each of her projects, Ms. Coppola, the daughter of the Hollywood titan Francis Ford Coppola and the late artist and filmmaker Eleanor Coppola, aims to create a sense of intimacy. Her low key, insistently gauzy aesthetic can be seen in her films’ costumes and interiors — and now, of all things, in a series of tinted lip balms.The balm is offered in three tints — pink, coral and berry — that Ms. Coppola said suit her complexion.Melodie McDanielMs. Coppola produced the new line in collaboration with Augustinus Bader, a popular skin care brand that she uses. Some months ago, she approached its eponymous founder — a German doctor and professor whose clinic in Leipzig caters to wealthy clients seeking to delay the effects of aging — asking if he would introduce a bit of color to his lip balm. To her surprise, he agreed.The Augustinus Bader x Sofia Coppola lip balm that they developed, priced at $43, is offered in pink, coral and an earthy shade of plum: tints akin to those Ms. Coppola confected in her childhood bedroom.Those colors suit Ms. Coppola’s complexion, she said, explaining that she prefers using subtle makeup to enhance her full lips and aquiline features. She likes the way she looks even more, she added, “when the lighting is right.”Ms. Coppola’s passions for beauty and fashion run deep, and have been informed by her stint as an intern at Chanel in Paris in the 1980s, as well as by her presence in the front rows at fashion shows of New York designers like Anna Sui and her friend Marc Jacobs in the ’90s and early 2000s.She also founded a clothing brand, Milk Fed, in the mid ’90s, that was known for kiddie-proportioned, slogan-bearing T- shirts, jackets and dresses. Today, the label is produced and sold in Japan, but vintage original items, coveted by a new generation of Ms. Coppola’s acolytes, can go for hundreds of dollars on eBay.No stranger to collaboration, Ms. Coppola directed a commercial promoting Mr. Jacobs’s Daisy Dream fragrance in 2014, and last year she teamed with Barrie, a Scottish knitwear label owned by Chanel, on a collection of cashmere sweaters, jumpsuits, pants and blazers.She feels no need to justify such projects. “They are an extension of what I do in films,” she said.“I love collaboration,” Ms. Coppola added with conviction. “But in the end, you get what you want.” More

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      ‘Unfrosted: The Pop-Tarts Story’ Review: A Sweet Jerry Seinfeld Comedy

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      Starring Jerry Seinfeld in his feature directing debut, “Unfrosted: The Pop-Tarts Story” is the only corporate saga whose main ingredient is high-fructose sarcasm.Pop-Tarts were invented over four hectic months in 1964. Jerry Seinfeld has been developing jokes about them for over 10 years, first in his stand-up act, and now as a full-fledged, fully ridiculous feature comedy targeted to the audience’s sweet-and-salty dopamine receptors. “Unfrosted,” directed by Seinfeld with a script by him and longtime collaborators Spike Feresten, Andy Robin and Barry Marder, gives the comic his first-ever live action leading film role as Bob Cabana, a fictional cereal flack who revolutionizes the breakfast industry. (William Post, the real-life person who helped create Pop-Tarts, died in February at the age of 96.) Cinema has endured branded biopics on everything from Air Jordans to the BlackBerry to Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. This is the only corporate saga whose main ingredient is high-fructose sarcasm.Should we care about the history of the Pop-Tart? Seinfeld postures that the Kellogg’s launch of a mylar-wrapped, shelf-stable, heatable pastry is a technological innovation on the scale of the space race and the Manhattan Project. One pivotal move comes when Cabana hires Donna Stankowski (Melissa McCarthy) away from NASA’s beakers of Tang. As the launch date nears, the cinematographer William Pope shoots close-ups of scorching toaster springs with the drama of a roiling booster rocket.The film is as estranged from the facts as Pop-Tarts are from genuine fruit. Still, it’s true that Battle Creek, Mich. — “cereal’s Silicon Valley,” Seinfeld once cracked — was ground zero of a Cold War rivalry between Kellogg’s and General Foods to sell a breakfast that broke free from the need for a bowl and spoon. Here, the General Foods’ owner Marjorie Post (Amy Schumer), once the richest woman in America, swans about in jewel-toned turbans and jets off to Moscow to enlist Nikita Khrushchev (Dean Norris) in her cause. At the same time, the dimwitted head of Kellogg’s (Jim Gaffigan) allows his company to align with President John F. Kennedy (Bill Burr), Chef Boy Ardee (Bobby Moynihan), the celebrity fitness guru Jack LaLanne (James Marsden), and the early computer Univac who acts up in ways that recall Bing’s sexually charged A.I. chatbot. Things take an even darker turn with the entrance of a vengeful milkman (Christian Slater) and a threatening figure named El Sucre (Felix Solis) who’s aware that millions of dollars hinge on access to his addictive white powder.As junk food goes, “Unfrosted” is delightful with a sprinkle of morbidity. Building on last December’s publicity stunt where an anthropomorphic Pop-Tart cooked and served itself to the Kansas State Wildcats, we’re here treated to a funeral where the deceased is given Full Cereal Honors. I will spoil nothing except to say Snap, Crackle and Pop have a ceremonial duty.The jokes spill forth so fast that there’s no time for the shtick to get soggy. Yet, the film also crams its running time with goofy detours, like a subplot where the voice of Tony the Tiger (Hugh Grant, once again seizing any opportunity to wear a fatuous cravat) leads his fellow mascots in a rebellion. Despite all these famous faces splashing into the frame, the scene stealer is the child actor Eleanor Sweeney making her debut as an opinionated taste tester. She’s g-r-r-reat.UnfrostedRated PG-13 for some suggestive references and language. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Evil Does Not Exist’ Review: Nature vs. Nurture

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      Ryusuke Hamaguchi follows up his sublime drama “Drive My Car” with a parable about a rural Japanese village and the resort developer eyeing its land.Late in “Evil Does Not Exist,” a man who lives in a rural hamlet an easy drive from Tokyo cuts right to the movie’s haunting urgency. He’s talking to two representatives of a company that’s planning to build a resort in the area that will cover a deer trail. When one suggests that maybe the deer will go elsewhere, the local man asks, “Where would they go?” It’s a seemingly simple question that distills this soulful movie’s searching exploration of individualism, community and the devastating costs of reducing nature to a commodity.“Evil Does Not Exist” is the latest from the Japanese filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi, who’s best known for his sublime drama “Drive My Car.” This new movie is more modestly scaled than that one (it’s also far shorter) and more outward-directed, yet similar in sensibility and its discreet touch. It traces what happens when two Tokyo outsiders descend on a pastoral area where the spring water is so pure a local noodle shop uses it in its food preparation. The reps’ company intends to build a so-called glamping resort where tourists can comfortably experience the area’s natural beauty, a wildness that their very patronage will help destroy.The story unfolds gradually over a series of days, though perhaps weeks, and takes place largely in and around the hamlet. There, the local man, Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), a self-described jack-of-all trades, lives with his daughter, Hana (Ryo Nishikawa), in a house nestled amid mature trees. Together, they like to walk in the woods as she guesses whether that tree is a pine and this one a larch, while he carefully warns her away from sharp thorns. A photograph on their piano of Hana in the arms of a woman suggests why melancholy seems to envelop both child and father, although much about their past life remains obscure.Hamaguchi eases into the story, letting its particulars surface gradually as Eiko Ishibashi’s plaintive, progressively elegiac score works into your system. The company’s plans for a glamping site give the movie its narrative through line as well as dramatic friction, which first emerges during a meeting between residents and the company reps, Mayuzumi (Ayaka Shibutani) and her brash counterpart, Takahashi (Ryuji Kosaka). The company — its absurd name is Playmode — wants to take advantage of Covid subsidies for its new venture. During the meeting, it emerges that the site’s septic tank won’t be large enough to accommodate the number of guests; the locals rightly worry that the waste will flow into the river.The scene, one of the longest in the movie, is emblematic of Hamaguchi’s understated realism, which he builds incrementally. The meeting takes place in a basic community center crowded with residents — some had dinner at Takumi’s home the night before — who sit in chairs facing the reps, who, armed with technology, are parked behind laptops and seated before a projector screen. As the reps play a video explaining “glamorous camping,” there’s a cut to Takumi intently watching the promo. The scene soon shifts to a tracking shot of deer tracks in snow and images of Hana playing in a field as a bird soars above; it’s as if Takumi were thinking of his joyful, distinctly unglamorous daughter. The scene shifts back to the meeting.The site will become “a new tourist hot spot,” Takahashi sums up, badly misreading his audience. “Water always flows downhill,” a village elder says in response, his thin, firm voice rising as he sweeps an arm emphatically downward. “What you do upstream will end up affecting those living downstream,” stating a law of gravity that’s also a passionate, quietly wrenching argument for how to live in the world.Lapidary, word by word, detail by detail, juxtaposition by juxtaposition, “Evil Does Not Exist” beautifully deepens. For the most part, the movie is visually unadorned, simple, direct. Hamaguchi tends to move the camera in line with the characters, for one, though the exceptions carry narrative weight: images of nearby Mount Fuji; a rearview look from inside a car at a fast-disappearing road; and a lovely traveling shot of soaring treetops, their branches framed against the sky. The canopied forest echoes an image in a short film by Masaki Kobayashi, who began directing after World War II; the title of his trilogy, “The Human Condition,” would work for every Hamaguchi movie I’ve seen.I have watched “Evil Does Not Exist” twice, and each time the stealthy power of Hamaguchi’s filmmaking has startled me anew. Some of my reaction has to do with how he uses fragments from everyday life to build a world that is so intimate and recognizable — filled with faces, homes and lives as familiar as your own — that the movie’s artistry almost comes as a shock. The dreamworld of movies often feels at a profound remove from ordinary life, distance that brings its own obvious pleasures. It’s far rarer when a movie, as this one does, speaks to everyday life and to the beauty of a world that we neglect even in the face of its calamitous loss. When Takumi asks “where would they go,” he isn’t just talking about deer.Evil Does Not ExistNot rated. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Slow’ Review: We Don’t Have to Take Our Clothes Off

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      The second feature by the Lithuanian filmmaker Marija Kavtaradze asks what a relationship looks like when you factor out the sex.“Slow,” a relationship drama from Lithuania with a delicate touch, offers an understanding of intimacy that is rare in romance movies.Elena (Greta Grineviciute), a contemporary dancer, meets Dovydas (Kestutis Cicenas), a sign language interpreter, at a class for deaf adolescents — she teaches the steps and he translates her instructions for the students. After the first session, the two 30-somethings begin a modest flirtation that inches toward the physical, but Dovydas pulls out a wild card when Elena invites him to her room: He is asexual.The second feature by Marija Kavtaradze, “Slow” takes this difference as its point of departure. What does a relationship look like when you factor out the sex? It’s clear that Elena has a hard time accepting Dovydas as he is, a frustration that links back to her childhood self-esteem issues.The couple’s journey is predictably bumpy, in part because the film aligns too consistently with Elena’s normative outlook. Dovydas’s sexuality baffles her, and Kavtaradze struggles to justify why the couple makes sense together despite this friction. Scenes meant to illustrate their special chemistry seem plucked out of a run-of-the-mill indie movie (an awkward-but-cute dance; in another scene, eyes locked from across the bar).Grineviciute and Cicenas, however, give depth to a story that becomes stuck on the sorrows of the couple’s discrepancies. Dovydas alternates between sheepish and resolute, making his bouts of jealousy feel organic and vulnerable; Elena — we see in fierce, breathy interludes of her dance rehearsals — wields her physicality and thwarted desires as extensions of her personality.Throughout the film, we see Dovydas enthusiastically performing a kind of sign language karaoke against a vivid blue backdrop; his facial expressions are like a lovesick balladeer. The film makes too little of this intuitive connection between lovers, both adept, in their own ways, at communicating passion by other means.SlowNot rated. In Lithuanian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. More