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      in Movies

      Demi Moore and the Subversive Politics of the Naked Body

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      By the end of the 1990s, after years of giving her all to Hollywood and baring most of her all, too, Demi Moore began her fade-out. She had been a major film star that decade, complete with huge hits, humbling flops, famous friends, a celebrity marriage and headline-making magazine covers. Like all stars, she put in the work and sold the merch, herself included. And, like a lot of female stars, she made movies with male filmmakers who turned her into a spectacle of desire, a spectacle that she partly sought ownership of via her body.You see a lot of her body in Moore’s latest movie, “The Substance,” from the French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat. (It opens Sept. 20.) It’s a body-horror freakout that satirically takes aim at the commodification of women, and Moore is ferociously memorable in it as an actress who’s fired when she hits 50. It’s a performance that’s strong enough that you stop thinking about the fact that she’s naked in a lot of the scenes, strong enough to make you stop wondering what her exercise regime is or what work, if any, she’s had done. By the end, I admired how she had risen above the material; I also hoped she has better movies in her future.She deserves them. Her performance in “The Substance” is a gaudy, physically demonstrative role that requires her to convey a range of outsize states that dovetail with the movie’s excesses, from her character’s plasticky on-camera smiles to her private despair and boiling rage. Like some of Moore’s best-known movies, “The Substance” also requires her to shed her clothing. Even after decades of watching her perform in states of undress, it is startling to see Moore, now 61, stand naked before a mirror as the camera slowly travels across her body. There’s a near-clinical quality to how she looks at herself and, I think, a touch of defiance.Demi Moore as an actress coping with issues of aging in Hollywood in “The Substance.”MubiThe 1980s weren’t a welcoming period for women in the mainstream movie industry, yet Moore gradually succeeded in making a name for herself in between hanging with her pals in the Brat Pack and appearing in mediocre films (“St. Elmo’s Fire”) and flat-out rotten ones (“About Last Night,” ugh). Her big break came with “Ghost” (1990), a dreamy, sad romance in which she plays a dewy-eyed artist whose lover (Patrick Swayze) is murdered. Moore looked “terminally wistful much of the time” in the film, as Janet Maslin observed in The New York Times. Yet Moore also “combines toughness and delicacy most attractively,” which nicely expresses her gift for characters who often seem compelled to safeguard their vulnerabilities.“Ghost” was the top-grossing movie of the year, racked up more than a half a billion dollars at the global box office and catapulted Moore into true stardom. She followed this by starring in, as well as producing, “Mortal Thoughts” (1991), a deliciously nasty noirish drama about two working-class Jersey friends (Moore and Glenne Headly) who cover up the murder of one of their husbands, played with relish and persuasive vulgarity by Moore’s husband at the time, Bruce Willis. One of her finest movies, it gave her a chance to express her range partly because she was working with a real filmmaker, Alan Rudolph. In contrast to many of her earlier directors, he didn’t treat Moore like a sex puppet but instead helped her create a nuanced, teasingly elusive woman.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 Theater

      Julianna Margulies on ‘Left on Tenth’: ‘This Is the Play I’ve Been Waiting For’

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      It was a meet-cute right out of a New York City rom-com.The actress Julianna Margulies was walking her dog near Fifth Avenue and 10th Street when a woman with her own dog stopped to ask if she was who she thought she was.“I love your book,” she said of Margulies’s 2021 memoir, “Sunshine Girl,” which follows her rather strange childhood and beyond, up through her time on “ER” and “The Good Wife.”The woman pulled down her face mask: “I’m Delia Ephron.” She, too, had written a memoir, “Left on Tenth,” about life, death and taking a chance on love for a second time, and it was coming out soon. Could she drop off an advance copy?“I plotzed because I’ve just always loved her writing,” Margulies said.While taking refuge from the heat last month, Margulies recounted this scene with Ephron, which happened a few years ago, over an iced cappuccino in the lobby of the Marlton Hotel in Greenwich Village.Then in January, Margulies went on, she received an email out of the blue from Ephron, saying she had turned “Left on Tenth” into a play — and she wanted Margulies for the lead.“So she emailed it,” Margulies said, “and I sat down, read it cover-to-cover within an hour, just raced through it, sobbed, laughed, emailed her right back, and I said, ‘This is the play I’ve been waiting for.’”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 ‘Matlock,’ Kathy Bates Takes One Last Case

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      Kathy Bates was ready to quit. A movie shoot had soured (no, she won’t specify the movie) and she found herself alone, on her sofa in Los Angeles, sobbing. Bates, who won an Oscar for “Misery” and Emmys for “American Horror Story” and “Two and a Half Men,” has always taken her work to heart in an all-consuming way.“It becomes my life,” she said. “Sometimes I get jealous of having this talent. Because I can’t hold it back, and I just want my life.” She had given herself over to this part, and the gift had been ignored. The next day, she called her agents and told them she wanted to retire.A few weeks later, in January of this year, her agents sent her a script. It was for a procedural, which she hadn’t been looking for, and it was a reboot of a series that hadn’t especially moved her the first time: “Matlock,” a drama about a folksy attorney with a virtuosic legal mind and a wardrobe of seersucker suits. It endures in the cultural memory mostly as a punchline about shows old people like to watch.Still she began to read the script. And she kept reading. The protagonist, a woman who feels that age had rendered her invisible, was brilliant, canny, out for justice, and Bates has always had a strong sense of fairness. She feels the injustices of her career and her early life acutely, and the idea of playing a woman out to right wrongs called to her.So she paused her retirement. And “Matlock,” which debuts on CBS on Sept. 22 and will stream on Paramount+, became the unlikely vessel into which Bates, 76, can pour her talent, her vigor and surprisingly, given the shallowness of a typical procedural, all of her pain.“Everything I’ve prayed for, worked for, clawed my way up for, I am suddenly able to be asked to use all of it,” she said. “And it’s exhausting.”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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      Aaron Pierre: From Action Prince to Lion King

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      The British actor stars as an ex-Marine in the new Netflix thriller “Rebel Ridge” and as the titular cat in the upcoming “Mufasa: The Lion King.”Aaron Pierre was an unsure British teenager when he took his first acting gig: a narrator in a secondary-school production of “Moby Dick.” The school didn’t have a dedicated drama program and produced a play once every three years; Pierre had focused on athletics before giving the stage a try.As he recalled during a recent video call from his apartment in Los Angeles, his adolescent mind was thinking, “What’s going to happen to me walking through the halls if I do this play?”The show turned out to be painless. He went out, hit his mark at the corner of stage left and looked at the audience as he said his few lines. “I remember getting backstage and just being like, ‘That was amazing,’” Pierre said.The roles have grown a bit larger. Pierre, 30, played the hard-luck soldier Cassio in a 2018 production of “Othello” at the Globe Theater. The film and TV director Barry Jenkins saw him and was impressed enough to reach out to the actor on Twitter. That led to Pierre’s role as the yearning and enslaved Caesar in Jenkins’s mini-series “The Underground Railroad.”Since then, Pierre has played an ill-fated rapper in M. Night Shyamalan’s thriller “Old” (2021) and Malcolm X in the anthology series “Genius: MLK/X.” He currently has another major role, in “Rebel Ridge” (streaming on Netflix), directed by Jeremy Saulnier (“Green Room”); Pierre plays Terry Richmond, an ex-Marine who faces off against civil forfeiture and a corrupt police force. In December, he voices the digitally animated lead of “Mufasa: The Lion King,” reuniting with both Jenkins and the actor Kelvin Harrison Jr., who played the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in “Genius.”Pierre didn’t appear to be too caught up in the anticipation. “I don’t take myself seriously, but I do take my craft extremely seriously,” he said.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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      Venice Film Festival Looks: Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt And More

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      No amount of star power can truly outshine the beauty of La Serenissima, the ancient republic better known as the city of Venice. But the Venice Film Festival, with its parade of A-listers arriving for movie premieres in water taxis, comes close.Typically held not long after the fall couture shows in Paris, the Venice Film Festival benefits, in pure fashion terms, from being a showcase of the newest garments from some designers. How these elaborate, often form-fitting, confections are transferred so rapidly from Parisian runways to Venetian red carpets hardly matters to looky-loos with their eyes perennially pressed to the glass of fashion.This year’s festival, running from Aug. 28 until Saturday, has not just been an exhibition for new designs, but also of vintage pieces. Some looked as fresh as ever. Garments old and new are among these 15 looks, which will be hard to forget for reasons good and bad (but mostly good).Taylor Russell: Most Modern Retro!Louisa Gouliamaki/ReutersThe actress radiated an icy elegance in a Loewe gown reminiscent of the creations of Jean Louis, a designer who had the lock on high glamour during the golden age of Hollywood studios.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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      Michael Keaton Michael Keaton Michael Keaton

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      There’s a scene in the upcoming indie dramedy “Goodrich” where Michael Keaton’s character, a Los Angeles art dealer lost in the weeds of a late-midlife crisis, agrees to attend a breath workshop to win over a New Age-y prospective client. As setups go, it’s something of a soft target: a fish-out-of-water Boomer, drowning in California woo-woo.But the actor, his face a small hurricane of hope and anxiety, does more than find his “higher vibration.” He bobs and weaves and tries some kind of freestyle tai chi; he bats at a swarm of invisible bees and unleashes a primal scream (more like a strangled yelp, really). This is the Keaton that the “Goodrich” writer-director Hallie Meyers-Shyer envisioned when she conceived the screenplay.“I wrote it 100 percent with him in mind,” she said, “to the point where if he had said no, I would have buried it and myself in the backyard.”And it’s the same sense of unpredictability, a certain wild-card gleam, that has compelled the filmmaker Tim Burton to cast Keaton in five movies over nearly four decades, including, most recently, “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.” “When you just look at Michael in ‘Beetlejuice’ or even ‘Batman,’ he has this sort of look in his eye,” Burton said. “That’s why I wanted him to be Batman, because you just look at him and go, ‘This is a guy who would dress up like a bat.’ You know what I mean? There’s something behind the eyes that’s just very intelligent, funny and dangerous and kind of crazy.”Winona Ryder and Michael Keaton, who both starred in the original “Beetlejuice” movie, return for “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.”Warner Bros.The Keaton who settled into the corner booth of a hushed midtown Manhattan hotel lounge on a late-August morning didn’t seem like much of a maniac. Dressed in the dapper cool-dad uniform of fine-gauge knitwear and fitted slacks, he was still whippet-slim at 72 (he turned 73 on Thursday), and so soft-spoken in person that it was sometimes a strain to hear him over the cappuccino machine.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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      Pedro Almodóvar, Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton on ‘The Room Next Door’

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      The director’s first English-language feature inspires talk of beauty, hope and more collaborations.At Monday night’s Venice after-party for “The Room Next Door,” Pedro Almodóvar beamed at his leading ladies as they beamed back.I’m not just speaking of the affection shared between Julianne Moore, Tilda Swinton and their director, though it was tangible. I’m talking about the actual beams of light that bounced off the women’s sequined gowns and back at their besotted director as we huddled in a room to discuss the Spanish director’s first feature film in English, a long-held goal that allowed him to cast two big Hollywood stars.“They are not actors now, they are like monuments,” Almodóvar said. Certainly, that’s how Moore and Swinton are presented on the poster for the film, which arranges their famous faces in profile as though they were massive mountain ranges.“Big peaks,” joked Moore.“Big sparkly peaks,” Swinton added, nodding to their dresses. “We can only wear sequins for the rest of our lives.”Adapted from the novel “What Are You Going Through” by Sigrid Nunez, “The Room Next Door” casts Moore as Ingrid, a successful author who hears that her former colleague Martha (Swinton) is in the hospital with inoperable cervical cancer. They reunite, swap catch-up stories and once again become fast friends, but Martha has a weighty request to make.With her experimental treatments failing and another taxing round of chemotherapy to come, Martha has booked a vacation house in upstate New York and bought a drug off the dark web. Might Ingrid be willing to accompany her on the trip, knowing that at some point, her friend will kill herself in the room next door?Though Almodóvar is fairly fluent in English, he had long been wary of shooting a feature film in the language. (Even as we spoke, he kept a translator close by for moments when his second language failed him.) Two recent shorts made in English — the gay western “Strange Way of Life” and the extended Swinton monologue “The Human Voice” — convinced Almodóvar to finally write his first feature-length screenplay in the language.But Almodóvar’s films have aesthetic pleasures that go beyond words, and “The Room Next Door” offers so much to look at — whether it’s a lavender sweater, an olive couch or a precisely chosen shade of burgundy lipstick — that is as satisfying as any line of dialogue. A sequence where the two women ransack Martha’s apartment reveals pulled drawers filled with the most beguiling knickknacks, and the upstate vacation house where much of the movie takes place is an architectural stunner. (Like Martha, I’d die to live there, too.)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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      Joaquin Phoenix and the Big Question at the ‘Joker: Folie à Deux’ Premiere

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      At the Venice Film Festival with his co-star, Lady Gaga, would the actor answer questions about dropping out of a Todd Haynes movie?Joaquin Phoenix has never been eager to face the press. The 49-year-old actor grants few interviews, speaks with great reluctance about his process, and once walked out on a journalist when asked whether his film “Joker” might inspire copycat violence.Knowing all that, you could already expect tension at the Venice news conference for “Joker: Folie à Deux,” a sequel to the 2019 hit that has Phoenix reprising the comic-book role that won him the Oscar. Still, this meeting with the media was expected to be particularly fraught as Phoenix has not done any press since August, when he dropped out of a film from the director Todd Haynes just days before it was supposed to shoot, scuttling the production and exposing the star to potential legal action.Hollywood has been buzzing about Phoenix’s murky motivations for weeks, not least because the project — a sexually explicit gay romance co-starring the “Top Gun: Maverick” actor Danny Ramirez — was based on an original idea by Phoenix, who brought the project to Haynes and co-wrote it with the “May December” director.Would Phoenix be willing to shed any light on the situation while in Venice or would he skip the news conference entirely, as “Don’t Worry Darling” star Florence Pugh did two years ago amid rumors of a feud with that film’s director, Olivia Wilde? While waiting for the conference to begin on Wednesday afternoon, journalists placed bets on whether Phoenix would bail twice.They were surprised, then, when Phoenix bounded into the room smiling, followed by his director, Todd Phillips, and co-star Lady Gaga. “First of all, hi everyone!” he told the press. “It’s nice to see you.”Phoenix remained upbeat and unexpectedly willing to answer questions until several minutes into the news conference, when a journalist asked whether he would share his reason for leaving the Haynes film. The actor began to answer, then paused, thinking it over.“If I do, I would just be sharing my opinion from my perspective, and the other creatives aren’t here to share their piece,” Phoenix said, referring to Haynes and his partners.He continued: “It doesn’t feel like that would be right. I don’t think that would be helpful, so I just don’t think I will.”Then he added brightly, “Thank you!”Since Phoenix dropped out of the Haynes film, it’s been reported that the actor often gets cold feet and nearly bailed on making the first “Joker.” Phillips implied as much when he talked about how he convinced Phoenix to star in a sequel. “If we were really going to do it, it had to scare him in the way the first one did,” Phillips said.The director admitted to his own nerves in bringing “Folie à Deux” to Venice, since the first film won the festival’s prestigious Golden Lion. “It’s easier to come in as the insurgent instead of the incumbent,” Phillips said.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