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      Why Japanese Oscar Contender ‘Black Box Diaries’ Isn’t Being Shown in Japan

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      Shiori Ito’s searing indictment of Japan’s justice system in handling sexual assault cases is nominated for best documentary feature at Sunday’s Academy Awards.A film by a Japanese woman about her search for justice from uncooperative authorities after she reported being raped is a contender at Sunday’s Academy Awards. Yet, despite being the first full-length documentary made by a Japanese director ever nominated for an Oscar, the movie cannot be seen in her home country.In the film, “Black Box Diaries,” the journalist Shiori Ito tells the story of what happened to her after she reported being raped at a hotel by a prominent television journalist and the ordeal she says she experienced with Japan’s justice system.The film, which is up for best documentary feature, premiered in January 2024 at the Sundance Film Festival. It was released in U.S. theaters in October and can currently be seen or is slated to be shown in over 30 countries. However, those do not include Japan.The Japanese subsidiary of a major streaming service declined to distribute the film in early 2024, the filmmakers said, and theaters have so far displayed little interest in showing it. The prospects for the film’s release grew even murkier in October when Ms. Ito’s former lawyers and other previous supporters, including fellow journalists, spoke up against her, saying she had used footage without the consent of people in it.Ms. Ito with the producers of “Black Box Diaries,” Hannah Aqvilin and Eric Nyari, at the Oscars nominees dinner in Los Angeles on Tuesday.Frazer Harrison/Getty ImagesThis is not the first time that Japan has balked at showing unflattering films that were well received in Hollywood. “The Cove,” a documentary about a dolphin hunt in the town of Taiji, and “Unbroken,” a feature film about cruel treatment of Allied prisoners during World War II, both opened at least a year after their U.S. premieres. “The Cove,” which was made by an American director, won the Oscar for best documentary feature in 2010.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      I’m Obsessed With the Italo Disco Song in ‘The Brutalist’

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      Get ready for the Oscars with a deep dive into the duo behind the track, La Bionda, and others.The brothers of La Bionda.Angelo Deligio/Mondadori, via Getty ImagesDear listeners,The Oscars are this Sunday, and my personal pick for best picture is Brady Corbet’s gloriously ambitious, utterly unpredictable epic “The Brutalist.” Corbet and his co-writer, Mona Fastvold, take some wild risks in the movie, and while I don’t think every one of them connects, I’m still awed by the film’s vision and scope. One risk that “The Brutalist” definitely pulls off, though, is the unforgettable, out-of-nowhere song that plays over the closing credits: “One for You, One for Me,” the ecstatic 1978 disco hit by the Italian duo La Bionda.I was certainly not expecting a three-and-a-half-hour drama about an architect who survived the Holocaust to send audiences dancing out of the theater — but the surprising and strangely satisfying La Bionda needle drop is in keeping with the film’s spirit of subverting convention. “It’s quite cheeky,” Fastvold said of the song choice in an interview with USA Today. “I really enjoy leaving the audience with that jolt of energy.”I confess I wasn’t familiar with this song, or La Bionda, before seeing the movie last month, but the first thing I did upon exiting the theater was Google “what is the disco song at the end of ‘The Brutalist’?” The answer led me down a rabbit hole of musical discovery — one that I’m sharing with you on today’s playlist. (I didn’t believe La Bionda could possibly have a song as catchy and transcendently ridiculous as “One for You, One for Me,” and then I heard “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” their retrofuturistic 1980 hit about a sexy alien.)La Bionda were a duo of Sicilian brothers, Carmelo and Michelangelo, who in the late 1970s pioneered a sound that would later come to be called Italo disco: think glistening synths, four-on-the-floor percussion and semi-absurdist lyrics. Italo disco’s production sound and overall sense of theatricality influenced a lot of later new wave artists, and every decade or so a new generation of music fans seems to discover its charms and make it subculturally cool again. But, as Michelangelo clarified in a recent interview with Vulture, he and Carmelo (who died in 2022) weren’t consciously making “Italo disco,” a term he considers an afterthought “to put a label on the shelves.”Regardless of how you classify them, La Bionda are worthy of rediscovery — especially if you like your dance music fun, over-the-top and magnificently gauche. Enjoy this brief introduction to their sound, featuring some of their biggest hits (both as La Bionda and D.D. Sound), alongside music they produced for another Italian pop duo, Righeira.And if you’re looking for something with a bit more grandeur, I highly recommend Daniel Blumberg’s excellent original motion picture soundtrack for “The Brutalist,” which I’ll also be rooting for on Sunday night in the best original score category.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why ‘Emilia Pérez,’ a Film About Mexico, Flopped in Mexico

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      The polarizing movie is up for 13 Academy Awards on Sunday. But in Mexico, it has been widely criticized for its depiction of the country.“Emilia Pérez,” the movie about a transgender Mexican cartel leader who reconciles with her past, enters the Academy Awards on Sunday with 13 nominations, the most of any film this year. It is also the most nods ever for any non-English language film. The film has already won several accolades, including best comedy or musical at the Golden Globe Awards.In Mexico, the reception has been exactly the opposite.It has been widely criticized for its depiction of the country, the minimization of the cartel violence that has ravaged so many and the few Mexicans involved in its production.Comments about Spanish by its French writer-director, Jacques Audiard, which some saw as denigrating the language, and by its lead, Karla Sofía Gascón, about Islam and George Floyd, stoked the discontent in Mexico and made matters worse.“Emilia Pérez” wasn’t released in Mexican theaters until Jan. 23 — five months after its debut in France and two months after its U.S. release. In Mexico, theaters showing the film have been largely empty. Some unhappy moviegoers have even demanded refunds.An online Mexican short film parodying the French roots of “Emilia Pérez,” on the other hand, was a hit. “Emilia Pérez” has been the fodder of many social media memes. And it has been denounced by the families of victims of violence in Mexico.“It has become a real disaster,” said Francisco Peredo Castro, a film expert and a history and communications professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why These Oscars Mean So Much to Brazil

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      The best picture and best actress nominations for “I’m Still Here” have inspired national pride in a country whose culture has long been overlooked.The streets of Rio de Janeiro have been littered with Fernanda Torres imitators.They drink beer, clutch plastic Oscars and deliver the impromptu acceptance speeches that they hope their idol, the Brazilian actress Fernanda Torres, will give on Sunday night at the Academy Awards.“It’s the peak of fame in Brazil: to become a costume of Carnival,” Ms. Torres said at a film festival in California this month, referring to her many impersonators during pre-Carnival celebrations over the past several weeks.Ms. Torres was already widely famous in Brazil, but now she has become the nation’s star of the moment for achieving something that has long eluded most of her peers and predecessors here: international recognition.Since winning a Golden Globe for best actress last month, she has been on an international Oscars campaign for “I’m Still Here,” the Brazilian film about a mother of five navigating the disappearance of her husband during Brazil’s military dictatorship.Ms. Torres is nominated for best actress while the film is up for best international feature and — in the first such nomination for a Brazilian movie — best picture.Breno Consentino, 21, dresses up as “Fernanda’s Oscar” during a street party in Rio de Janeiro. The year’s hottest Carnival costume in Brazil is Fernanda Torres, who is nominated for an Oscar for best actress.Maria Magdalena Arrellaga for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Oscars 2025: There’s Something Weird About the Best Picture Nominees

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      It’s entirely probable that scandal, gossip, politics and a general sense of “never heard of it before” have obscured something obvious and important about this year’s 10 best picture Oscar nominees. They’re weird — every single one. They take weird forms. The people in them do weird stuff. They induce weirdness in you.Demi Moore jabs herself with a goop known as “The Substance,” and out of her split-open back climbs Margaret Qualley, who refuses to obey the goop’s rules and proceeds to ruin their life. I paid to see this movie in a packed theater on a Saturday afternoon, where we laughed, screamed and almost threw up.Believe it or not, that movie’s a fairy tale, a funny one. So’s “Anora.” Here, the would-be princess is a Brooklyn stripper who marries a Russian nitwit whose oligarch father dispatches a goon squad to procure an annulment. If I told you “The Brutalist” ran for more than three hours and pitted a recent Holocaust survivor against his moneybags employer, maybe you’d ask which Oscar lab cooked this thing up. Then I’d have to tell you that the scale of this thing is so strangely intimate, so redolently personal, that it feels as much eavesdropped on as its premise sounds familiarly epic.A sugarless Brazilian dictatorship melodrama (“I’m Still Here”) is up against a sugar-encrusted American dictatorship musical (“Wicked”). “Conclave,” the pick-a-pope nail-biter, relies on so much shanking that it feels like a prison movie and features more cafeteria grandstanding than “Mean Girls.” For a spell, the front-runner had been “Emilia Pérez,” a musical fairy tale whose songs flout rhythm and melody, and whose Mexican cartel overlord mistakes her transness for sainthood. Then its star’s bigoted old tweets and some harsh comments by its mighty French director (about Mexicans and the Spanish they speak) turned the Oscar race into “Conclave.”Stellan Skarsgard plays the vindictive Baron Harkonnen in “Dune: Part Two,” a pretty weird blockbuster.Niko Tavernise/Warner Bros.Then, there’s “Dune: Part Two,” a movie so expensive looking, so smoothly, tastefully, artfully done that it’s easy to remain passive in the face of all that’s weird about it. But look! It’s Stellan Skarsgard, plumped, pursy and a-vape, as a baron whose kink, in part, arises from stadium-size gladiatoring. When this series is complete, many hours will have been spent watching Timothée Chalamet as the Chosen One amid a war over seasoning. It’s “Lawry’s of Arabia,” “Lost in Spice.” The race delivers double-feature Chalamet. In “A Complete Unknown,” he boldly reimagines Bob Dylan as a figure of tremendous petulance. Otherwise, it might be the most conventional thing you could hope to see about a once-in-a-lifetime weirdo; and that counts as kind of weird.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Oscar Nominees Makeup Got Real in 2025: “The Substance,” “Wicked” and More

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      This year’s Oscar nominees for makeup and hairstyling, for movies such as “The Substance,” “Wicked” and “A Different Man,” showcased prosthetics and special effects.Actors may deliver impassioned speeches about achieving their “childhood dreams,” but we don’t often hear about how those sculpting wounds with clay and bubbling skin with latex are fulfilling their lifelong fantasies.“Teenager treats” is how Pierre Olivier Persin, the special effects designer nominated for an Oscar for makeup and hairstyling for “The Substance,” described his work on the film, which involved two full-body prosthetics and countless other pieces and puppets. Mike Marino, the makeup designer for Sebastian Stan in “A Different Man,” nominated in the same category, described his childhood bedroom as a sort of cabinet of curiosities, filled with “jars of experiments and screaming Siamese twins.”It’s a particularly exciting year for makeup and hairstyling nominees: buckets of blood and pus-filled injections in “The Substance”; face tumors sloughing off like jelly in “A Different Man”; green witches and blue horses in “Wicked”; a vampire shriveling away in “Nosferatu”; and a menacing drug lord created with facial prosthetics in “Emilia Pérez.”“She wanted to see her hands. She wanted to get that reaction” from the other cast members, said Frances Hannon, the hair and makeup designer for “Wicked” about Cynthia Erivo, who played the green-skinned witch Elphaba in the film and has been vocal about her preference to be physically painted rather than having the hue added in postproduction.Universal Pictures, via Associated PressWhile in years past the category has sometimes leaned toward honoring the subtle transformations of delicately coifed period hairstyles, these nominees reflect a year that relied heavily on the use of makeup to create practical special effects.Once upon a time, most special effects were achieved with makeup. Think “An American Werewolf in London” (1981), “The Fly” (1986), “Beetlejuice” (1988): All the various monsters, mutations and marvels in these films were largely created with latex, foam and human hands. Then, in the early 2000s, studios became more reliant on computers to digitally generate these effects.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In Zoe Saldaña, a Choreographer Finds His Dream Dancer

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      The Academy Award-nominated actress discovers her inner dancer in “Emilia Pérez” with the help of the choreographer Damien Jalet.Zoe Saldaña is an actress, but buried inside her is a highly trained dancer. This has always been obvious to me; the film “Emilia Pérez” has made it clear to the world. Finally, Saldaña — a devoted ballet student through her childhood and teenage years — can be recognized for the force that she is: an extraordinary mover.All actors use their bodies, but Saldaña has long been on another plane. She doesn’t just interpret characters, she moves through them with such salient physicality that her body often has as much to say as the dialogue she speaks. Even in the TV series “Lioness,” in which she plays a fierce Central Intelligence Agency officer, her body guides her like a coiled spring — a taut, muscular vessel of strength and sensitivity.In Jacques Audiard’s “Emilia Pérez,” with choreography by Damien Jalet, Saldaña’s dancing is front and center. And it is a meaningful part of why her portrayal of Rita, a Mexican lawyer helping a cartel boss with gender confirmation surgery, earned an Academy Award nomination.Jalet should have been nominated, too, but there are no Oscars for choreography. Yet his contribution is immeasurable. The story of “Emilia Pérez” is unorthodox enough; even more unconventional is the way it unfolds through music and dance. The songs’ merit is questionable; they employ, at times, employ the worst kind of Broadway-musical talk-singing. But Jalet’s choreography — sometimes invisibly, sometimes clearly — grounds the film.In “Emilia Pérez,” dance is the pathway for Saldaña’s character to become more outspoken, more comfortable in her body.Shanna Besson/PAGE 114 — WHY NOT PRODUCTIONS — PATHÉ FILMS — FRANCE 2 CINÉMA 2024.Jalet has a partner in Saldaña whose speed and exactness in gestural vocabulary electrify scenes without falling into the sketchy territory of mime. In a film about physical transformation, dance is the pathway for Saldaña’s character to become more outspoken, more comfortable in her skin. And dance has accomplished another transformation for Saldaña, the actress, by opening eyes to her range and radiance. Her precision is stunning.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Guide to the Documentary Oscar Nominees

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      A quick guide to the nominated films and why you should watch them.Since the best documentary feature category was first established at the Oscars in 1942, the nominees have been like a snapshot of the year: wars and social concerns, heroes and headlines. This year is no exception. On paper, each of the five nominees look as if they’re ripped from the headlines, chosen for some metric like “urgency” or “timeliness.”But these are no ordinary documentaries. In the past decade, the Academy has gotten much better about nominating nonfiction films that stretch and push at their boundaries, challenging audiences in how they convey their subject matter. Most opt to confront world events through intensely personal stories, and all of them carefully show why their individual stories have far-reaching implications.So, as the 2025 Oscars are upon us, here’s a quick guide to the nominated films and why you should watch them.With “Black Box Diaries” (streaming on Paramount+ with Showtime), the director Shitori Ito takes a courageously personal approach to her biting critique of the handling of sexual assault cases in Japan. In 2017, Ito held a news conference to announce allegations that a prominent Japanese journalist had raped her. In the documentary, she chronicles the fallout of that accusation. The film is both intimate and enraging. As Manohla Dargis wrote in her review, it’s “a tense and tangled crime story, one in which Ito is at once the victim, lead investigator, dogged prosecutor and crusading reporter.”My colleagues and I have written about “No Other Land” (in select theaters) a lot during the past year. It’s probably the most acclaimed documentary of the year, centering on the lives of families who have witnessed their homes, in the occupied West Bank region of Masafer Yatta, be demolished over and over again. Despite its obviously timely story and a directorial team of two Palestinian and two Israeli filmmakers, it hasn’t been able to secure a distribution deal in the United States, which is why it isn’t available to stream here. If you can see it in a theater, don’t overlook how well it’s made, mixing home video archives, journalistic footage and conversations between the filmmakers to powerful effect.“Porcelain War” (in select theaters) has picked up a raft of awards from guilds and critics this season. It, too, looks through the lens of the personal to tell an urgent story — this one about the war in Ukraine. The film centers on Slava Leontyev, who directed the film with Brendan Bellomo, and who is a ceramist as well as a member of a Ukrainian special forces unit. Art and warfare blend in the film, which melds GoPro footage from the battlefield with looks at Leontyev’s work, finally landing on a hopeful note about the value of beauty in darkness.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More