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      in Movies

      Ian McKellen Has Clapped Back at Critics. Now He’s Playing One.

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      In the new film “The Critic,” he plays the titular acid-tongued reviewer in 1930s Britain, who is terrified of being outed as gay.In Anand Tucker’s new film “The Critic,” Ian McKellen plays Jimmy Erskine, a closeted reviewer in 1930s Britain who covers theater with equal measures of wit and acid. “Despite her crimes against the theater, she was sensationally gorgeous when drunk,” Jimmy writes of a young actress portrayed by Gemma Arterton.Naturally, McKellen luxuriates in such lines. When the screenwriter Patrick Marber (“Notes on a Scandal,” “Closer”) sent the actor the script, he said, “‘This is the best part I’ve ever written for anybody,’” McKellen recalled. “Well, I didn’t want to appear to be rude by not doing it.”At 85, the actor is not slowing down, and continues to test himself by playing unlikely roles (just four years ago he was a rather mature Hamlet in London) and collaborating with directors like Robert Icke. Only a recent accident temporarily set the actor off course: In June he fell off the stage during a fight scene in “Player Kings,” Icke’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Henry IV” diptych, in which McKellen played John Falstaff.“The Critic,” which comes to theaters Friday, was shot over five weeks. “The budget was very small for what we were trying to achieve, Ian was 83, it was really hard,” Tucker, the film’s director, said. “But he was just on it — and he’s in almost everything.”McKellen with Gemma Arterton, who plays Nina Land, a young actress who is often panned in Jimmy Erskine’s reviews.Sean Gleason/Greenwich EntertainmentThis could also describe McKellen’s decades-spanning career: He has been in almost every kind of production — fantasy blockbusters like the “Lord of the Rings” films, onstage in plays by Shakespeare and Beckett and in drag as the dame in the beloved British holiday tradition known as pantomime.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

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      Hollywood Is Heading for Broadway (and Off). Here’s a Cheat Sheet.

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      New York’s stages have long drawn talent from Hollywood, but this is shaping up to be an exceptionally starry season. Why? Producers have determined that limited-run plays with celebrities are more likely than new musicals to make money. And some musicals are also hoping big names will help at the box office. Here’s a sampling of stars onstage this season.This Fall★ ON BROADWAY ★Mia Farrowin ‘The Roommate’Farrow, who made her stage debut when she was 18 and had a breakout role in the 1968 film “Rosemary’s Baby,” thought she was happily retired until she read the script for this Jen Silverman comedy about two women with not much in common other than their living quarters. Now, at 79, she’s returning to the stage, opposite the three-time Tony winner Patti LuPone, for what she says may be the last time. Now running at the Booth.★ ON BROADWAY ★Robert Downey Jr.in ‘McNeal’One of Hollywood’s most successful stars, Downey has a bevy of superhero movies under his belt (he played Iron Man) and an Oscar for “Oppenheimer” (he was the antagonist, Lewis Strauss). He’s making his Broadway debut in a new Ayad Akhtar play, portraying a famous novelist with a potentially problematic interest in A.I. Now running at the Vivian Beaumont.Clockwise from top left: Nicole Scherzinger, Katie Holmes, Jim Parsons, Adam Driver and Mia Farrow (center).Photographs via Associated Press; Getty Images; Reuters★ ON BROADWAY ★Daniel Dae Kimin ‘Yellow Face’Talk about meta! This is David Henry Hwang’s play about a play about a musical, sort of. Kim, known for “Lost” and the rebooted “Hawaii Five-0,” portrays a playwright named DHH (get it?) who mistakenly casts a white actor as an Asian character in a Broadway flop inspired by his own protests against the casting of a white actor as a Eurasian character in “Miss Saigon.” Previews begin Sept. 13 at the Todd Haimes.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

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Theater

      Kit Connor and Rachel Zegler Are Star Crossed in Central Park

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      On a morning in mid-August, a breeze stirred Central Park’s midsummer leaves. Children skipped, dogs lolloped, a bunny peeked out from a hedge near the Great Lawn while a nearby saxophone ruined “Isn’t She Lovely.” It was a very nice day to fall in love.The actors Kit Connor and Rachel Zegler were there, hiking up to Belvedere Castle and then down to the Shakespeare Garden. Connor, 20, and Zegler, 23, don’t plan to fall in love. But the next day, at rehearsal, in Brooklyn they would discover how to make the characters they play fall desperately, terribly in love.As the stars of the “Romeo + Juliet” that opens on Broadway on Oct. 24, they will die for love, they will die for each other, eight times a week. Both are making their Broadway debuts and both have the not exactly enviable task of making a 16th-century play with (apologies for centuries-old spoilers) a famously grim ending feel breath-catchingly new and vital.Daunting? Not at all.“It should be fun,” Connor said, not without some anxiety. Zegler gave him a sardonic look. “It will be fun,” he said. Connor, a British star of the Netflix teen romance “Heartstopper,” and Zegler, an American who made a thrilling film debut in Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story,” had never met until March, shortly after they each agreed to star in the revival, dreamed up by the Tony-winning director Sam Gold, with music by Jack Antonoff. They had been offered the roles separately, without the benefit of a chemistry read. That spring day, Gold brought them to Circle in the Square Theater, where previews will start Sept. 26, then bought them cups of coffee at the Cosmic Diner.Kit Connor, right, on the Netflix series “Heartstopper” opposite Joe Locke.Teddy Cavendish/NetflixWe 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

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Television

      Super Emmy: Is the Time Now Right for This Former Disaster?

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      Fifty years ago, the Emmy Awards implemented a change deemed such a disaster it was quickly eliminated.For the 1974 ceremony, the Television Academy created a “Super Emmy” that pitted winners in the comedy and drama balloting against each other. For example, the “M*A*S*H” star Alan Alda took home two trophies that year: one for best comedy actor and a second in a head-to-head showdown with Telly Savalas, who had already won the drama lead acting award for “Kojak.”The stated goal was to streamline the televised ceremony — the category honors were given out before the telecast and only the Super Emmys were awarded on air. But Alda and his fellow winner Mary Tyler Moore joined critics like John J. O’Connor of The New York Times in panning the stunt, and organizers retreated.Yet a half-century and a reshaped television environment later, the Super Emmy, that strange visitor from the 1970s, might be one of those once-bad ideas whose time has finally come.Not that the Emmys are looking to prolong the show, which will air Sunday on ABC. Unlike the Oscars, TV’s most prestigious award remains pretty rigidly held to its allotted time, so adding a category would likely require pushing another out of the main broadcast.But a Super Emmy would do more than merely add a “Highlander”-style bolt of excitement — “There can be only one!” — to a generally predictable telecast. It would also acknowledge the blurring of lines in TV’s categorical designations, which often makes it hard to differentiate between drama, comedy and limited series.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

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      James Earl Jones, Actor Whose Voice Could Menace or Melt, Dies at 93

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      James Earl Jones, a stuttering farm child who became a voice of rolling thunder as one of America’s most versatile actors in a stage, film and television career that plumbed race relations, Shakespeare’s rhapsodic tragedies and the faceless menace of Darth Vader, died on Monday at his home in Dutchess County, N.Y. He was 93.The office of his agent, Barry McPherson, confirmed the death in a statement.From destitute days working in a diner and living in a $19-a-month cold-water flat, Mr. Jones climbed to Broadway and Hollywood stardom with talent, drive and remarkable vocal cords. He was abandoned as a child by his parents, raised by a racist grandmother and mute for years in his stutterer’s shame, but he learned to speak again with a herculean will. All had much to do with his success.So did plays by Howard Sackler and August Wilson that let a young actor explore racial hatred in the national experience; television soap operas that boldly cast a Black man as a doctor in the 1960s; and a decision by George Lucas, the creator of “Star Wars,” to put an anonymous, rumbling African American voice behind the grotesque mask of the galactic villain Vader.Mr. Jones in 1979 as the author Alex Haley on “Roots: The Next Generation.”Warner Brothers Television, via Everett CollectionThe rest was accomplished by Mr. Jones himself: a prodigious body of work that encompassed scores of plays, nearly 90 television network dramas and episodic series, and some 120 movies. They included his voice work, much of it uncredited, in the original “Star Wars” trilogy, in the credited voice-over of Mufasa in “The Lion King,” Disney’s 1994 animated musical film, and in his reprise of the role in Jon Favreau’s computer-animated remake in 2019.Mr. Jones was no matinee idol, like Cary Grant or Denzel Washington. But his bulky Everyman suited many characters, and his range of forcefulness and subtlety was often compared to Morgan Freeman’s. Nor was he a singer; yet his voice, though not nearly as powerful, was sometimes likened to that of the great Paul Robeson. Mr. Jones collected Tonys, Golden Globes, Emmys, Kennedy Center honors and an honorary Academy Award.

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      .css-14ehajx{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:500;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.4375rem;max-width:600px;margin-left:0px;width:100%;border:1px solid #dfdfdf;padding:9px 18px 24px 18px;width:calc(100% – 40px);background-image:url(‘data:image/svg+xml,%3Csvg%20width%3D%2219%22%20height%3D%2217%22%20viewBox%3D%220%200%2019%2017%22%20fill%3D%22none%22%20xmlns%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2F2000%2Fsvg%22%3E%0A%3Cpath%20id%3D%22Vector%22%20d%3D%22M13.2271%2017L7.66331%2012.5661H1.42971C1.05056%2012.5661%200.686942%2012.4151%200.418844%2012.1464C0.150746%2011.8777%200.00013055%2011.5133%200.00013055%2011.1333V1.45216C-0.00242853%201.26238%200.0326583%201.07398%200.103355%200.897906C0.174051%200.72183%200.278947%200.561586%200.411951%200.42648C0.544956%200.291375%200.703417%200.1841%200.878133%200.110887C1.05285%200.0376746%201.24034%20-1.73249e-05%201.42971%205.97386e-09H17.5704C17.9496%205.97386e-09%2018.3132%200.150955%2018.5813%200.419657C18.8494%200.68836%2019%201.0528%2019%201.4328V11.1139C19%2011.4939%2018.8494%2011.8583%2018.5813%2012.127C18.3132%2012.3957%2017.9496%2012.5467%2017.5704%2012.5467H13.285L13.2271%2017ZM1.42971%201.21014C1.37079%201.21014%201.31428%201.2336%201.27262%201.27535C1.23095%201.31711%201.20754%201.37375%201.20754%201.4328V11.1139C1.20754%2011.1729%201.23095%2011.2296%201.27262%2011.2713C1.31428%2011.3131%201.37079%2011.3366%201.42971%2011.3366H8.05934L12.01%2014.4926V11.3366H17.5125C17.5714%2011.3366%2017.6279%2011.3131%2017.6696%2011.2713C17.7112%2011.2296%2017.7346%2011.1729%2017.7346%2011.1139V1.4328C17.7346%201.37375%2017.7112%201.31711%2017.6696%201.27535C17.6279%201.2336%2017.5714%201.21014%2017.5125%201.21014H1.42971Z%22%20fill%3D%22%23121212%22%2F%3E%0A%3C%2Fsvg%3E’);background-repeat:no-repeat;background-position:calc(100% – 20px) 20px;}@media (min-width:630px){.css-14ehajx{margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;box-sizing:border-box;}}@media (min-width:1440px){.css-14ehajx{max-width:600px;width:600px;margin-left:calc((100% – 600px) / 2);}}.css-7b274f{margin-left:45px;}.css-raoif9{font-size:0.875rem;line-height:1.25rem;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;margin-bottom:16px;word-break:break-word;}.css-raoif9 a{color:#326891;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}.css-k02trr{font-weight:700;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}.css-2f9c0w{list-style:none;margin:0;-webkit-box-flex:1;-webkit-flex-grow:1;-ms-flex-positive:1;flex-grow:1;font-size:0.875rem;line-height:1.0625rem;}.css-nmiwmx{color:#888;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}.css-fg7rxm{margin:0;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;}.css-1ebkpg2{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;display:block;font-size:0.875rem;line-height:1.0625rem;}.css-1ebkpg2:afer{content:’ ‘;position:absolute;top:0;right:0;left:0;bottom:0;}.css-1ebkpg2:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}.css-1ebkpg2:hover .css-dvomd1{-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;}.css-85qk5p .css-1ebkpg2{margin:21px 0 0 16px;}.css-ept3uu{display:inline-block;margin-right:10px;overflow:hidden;object-fit:cover;border-radius:50%;height:34px;width:34px;}span.css-ept3uu{background:#ccc;color:#fff;display:inline-block;font-size:1rem;text-align:center;text-transform:uppercase;line-height:2.25rem;}.placeholder .css-ept3uu{background:#ccc;}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

    • 88 Shares169 Views

      in Theater

      James Earl Jones: A Life in Pictures

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      If it seemed at times that James Earl Jones was everywhere, it was perhaps because he really was. Over a 50-year career, Jones — who died on Monday at the age of 93 — acted prolifically on television, in movies and under the spotlight of Broadway stages, one of which is now named after him.An imposing man who stood taller than six feet, Jones was hard to miss. But it was his voice — deep, authoritative, powerful and sometimes menacing — that some fans may most remember. His voice work as Darth Vader in the original “Star Wars” trilogy and as Mufasa in “The Lion King” conveyed his presence to millions without audiences ever seeing him.Here are some snapshots from his life and career.Jones was a guest star on “Sesame Street” in 1970.Afro American Newspapers/Gado, via Getty ImagesJones, with Lauren Bacall, won the Tony for best actor in a play in 1969 for “The Great White Hope.”Bettmann Archive, via Getty ImagesJones with Diana Ross and Michael Jackson at a Broadway opening in 1978.Sonia Moskowitz/Getty ImagesJones and his wife, the actor Cecilia Hart, at the Tony Awards in 1989.Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection, via Getty ImagesJones in his dressing room in 1983.Steve Ringman/San Francisco Chronicle, via Getty ImagesJones with his son, Flynn, and his father, Robert, in 1987.Michael Tighe/Donaldson Collection, via Getty ImagesJones in a Hollywood recording studio in 1991.Edmund Eckstein/Getty ImagesJones and Cicely Tyson in 1991.Ron Galella, Ltd./Ron Galella Collection, via Getty ImagesThe actors would star in a revival of Donald L. Coburn’s “The Gin Game” in 2015.Bruce Glikas/FilmMagicA Broadway theater was named after Jones in 2022.Todd Heisler/The New York Times More

    • 88 Shares99 Views

      in Television

      The Life-Changing Journey of ‘My Brilliant Friend’

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      The four actresses who played Lenù and Lila from adolescence to middle age discuss the end of the HBO series.In the fourth season of “My Brilliant Friend,” premiering Monday on HBO, the childhood friends and fierce rivals Lila and Lenù navigate marriage and divorce, motherhood, loss and middle age.This is the final chapter, catapulting the protagonists from the 1970s to the 21st century against the background of Italy’s upheavals, and is based on “The Story of the Lost Child,” the fourth book in Elena Ferrante’s wildly popular Neapolitan series.Writing in The Times, James Poniewozik called the show “one of the most incisive portraits of a lifelong relationship ever made for TV.” But this final season also ends a production project that started in 2016 and which all of its lead actresses agreed was the most important of their careers.Margherita Mazzucco, 21, played Elena “Lenù” Greco, and Gaia Girace, 20, played Raffaella “Lila” Cerullo, through three seasons — from the characters’ adolescence to their 30s. Neither had acted before they were cast in 2017, but they are both now stopped on the street at home and abroad.For the seasoned actress Irene Maiorino, 39, who plays Lila in Season 4, the show offered a chance to become better known outside Italy. And the already internationally acclaimed Alba Rohrwacher, 45, who narrated the series before being cast as the grown Lenù. Rohrwacher described the role as an “incredible journey” that “can only happen once in a lifetime.”The four women met together for the first time on a recent muggy afternoon in Rome, to discuss passing the baton from one pair of Lenùs and Lilas to the next and whether there were heightened expectations now that Ferrante’s “My Brilliant Friend” had been named the best book of the 21st century in a recent New York Times survey. (They all laughed: They’d heard.)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

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      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