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      in Movies

      There’s a New Kind of Woman Onscreen, Thanks to Women Behind the Camera

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      Movies contain a multitude of bodies in different sizes, colors and muscle tones, bodies that are trim, bulky, parched, surgically altered. Talking about them, though, especially women’s bodies, can be understandably fraught. For some observers, writing about them is unnecessary and objectifying, even if a lot of other people — politicians, activists, influencers, Supreme Court justices — can’t stop talking about them. “We’re always talking about the feminine condition and the role of women,” the filmmaker Agnès Varda once said. “But I want to talk about the woman’s body, about our bodies.” I want to talk about them, too.That’s because some of the most memorable movies that I’ve seen lately are from female filmmakers who are also clearly thinking about women’s bodies and helping expand what kinds of women we are seeing onscreen. One such movie I keep returning to is Gia Coppola’s “The Last Showgirl,” a recently released drama set on the frayed edges of Las Vegas. In a scene that keeps playing in my head, a cocktail waitress, Annette — played by a soulful Jamie Lee Curtis — climbs atop a small platform in the casino where she works and begins dancing. As slot machines ping around her, she slowly gyrates to the 1980s hit “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” Annette looks like she’s in her own world. She looks glorious.Curtis, who’s 66, has said the scene shows the “degradation of women at the end of their lives,” adding, that “nobody cares.” Scarcely any casino patrons glance at Annette as she dances, true. But I did care, and I suspect I wasn’t alone. I get it, though; older women can feel invisible — I do. Yet here Curtis, who’s bathed in beautifully diffused light during the scene, the camera pointed up in seeming adulation, is mesmerizing as she shimmies and dips into a squat, her thighs tense and strong. I adored watching Curtis play Annette, and I think Coppola wants us to love this character as much as she clearly does. That is also glorious.Playing the cocktail waitress Annette, Jamie Lee Curtis is mesmerizing as she shimmies and dips in a scene from “The Last Showgirl.”Roadside Attractions“The Last Showgirl” touches on mothering, friendships, the commodification of beauty and the role that women play, willingly or not, in their own objectification. It explores how identity is partly created, sustained and jeopardized by the gaze of others, and what it means when women gaze — at others, at themselves — which puts the film in dialogue with recent movies like “Babygirl,” “Nightbitch” and “The Substance,” which received five Oscar nominations. The protagonist of “Showgirl” is Annette’s friend, Shelly (Pamela Anderson) a dancer whose revue is shuttering. Clouded with worry, Shelly — like Anderson, the character is 57 — is anxious about her future and sense of self. Who is she, after all, if no one looks at her?Anderson likes to be makeup free; away from work, so does her character. Shelly loves being a showgirl — “feeling beautiful, that is powerful” — but when she puts on her costume, she’s cosplaying an old-fashioned ideal of femininity. Onstage, she plays a fantasy. When she’s offstage, Shelly is a person with a life, everyday concerns and friends, mostly women, who look at one another with gazes that find common cause. Coppola sees the world of “The Last Showgirl” as a metaphor for the America dream, one in which commodified bodies come with expiration dates. It is also an emblem for women in film, who have long fought against their perceived disposability and continue to find common cause in female-driven work.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 Movies

      Timothée Chalamet Should Win an Oscar for His Oscar Campaign

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      Lobbying the public to attract the votes of the academy is an odd practice — but you can’t say Chalamet hasn’t excelled at it.Democracy is broken, they say. The wants of the electorate are contradictory and rooted in base emotions rather than rational thought. Viable alternatives are nonexistent, so we treat the ensuing insanity as a spectator sport, posting impotently as the world burns. I could be talking about electoral politics, but in this instance I am actually talking about Oscar campaigns.We as individuals do not cast the ballots that determine the year’s best actor or finest cinematographer or most evocative sound design. That privilege falls to a shadowy elite, who decide these things based on their personal aesthetic judgments — but also, it turns out, based on larger narratives that all of us get to judge, narratives about who has achieved true stardom or whose moment has come. It’s a strange arrangement: The public has no official say, and yet our collective gut-check vibes appear to influence the result just the same. Hence the Oscar campaign, which aims not just to persuade academy voters that a given contender deserves their support, but also to create a good story around it — and, ideally, a culture-wide consensus that the nominee’s victory is nearly inevitable.The 2025 race has been weirder than most. Three campaigns stand out — one weirdly funny, one weirdly disastrous and one weirdly endearing. The funny one involved the movie adaptation of the Broadway musical “Wicked.” An endless promotional push surrounded the film’s November release, and a clear bid for Oscar recognition followed, but the highlight of the whole thing was its strangest moment: a journalist solemnly informing the two lead actresses, Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, that fans of the film were “holding space” for the lyrics of the breakout song “Defying Gravity.” Erivo was visibly moved by this news; Grande then reached out to hold Erivo’s pointer finger. Both women appeared to be on the verge of tears. The moment was so eerie and absurd that it was rehashed online for weeks. Maybe it helped: Each woman did ultimately secure an Oscar nomination.The disaster involved “Emilia Pérez,” the polarizing Spanish-language French musical crime film about a transgender Mexican cartel leader. For a moment, this looked like the film to beat: It won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and garnered 13 Oscar nominations, including best picture, best director and best actress. But it was quickly subsumed by a series of controversies. There was criticism, from L.G.B.T.Q. advocates, that the film was “a step backward for trans representation”; there was negative coverage from the Mexican press about how the country was portrayed. Most devastating, there were unearthed social media posts by the film’s star, Karla Sofía Gascón, disparaging George Floyd and Islam, among other hot-button topics — most likely torpedoing the chances of the first openly transgender actor nominated for an Oscar.Then there was the third offensive, the one credited with “making Oscar campaigning fun again.” Timothée Chalamet claimed a best-actor nomination, his second, for his lead role in the Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown” — a film he’s quite good in, especially when he evokes Dylan’s unique blend of mumbly insouciance and magnetic star power. His status as a favorite slipped after he lost out on early awards. But his campaign has been something else: not just fun, but a genuine masterpiece of self-promotion.It has scored so many hits, across so many platforms, that it’s helpful to break them into categories. In October, when Chalamet showed up to a Timothée Chalamet look-alike contest (and later posed with the winner at the Golden Globes), it made for the kind of charming general-interest story that would be shared widely on Facebook. When he appeared in a video with the internet personality Nardwuar and talked about how “I rip Milk Duds” at the movies: That one serviced a slightly different segment, the “extremely online.” Elsewhere he would give special attention to the niche demographic of “Bob Dylan nerds,” to which I personally belong. On Instagram, he posted a video of himself listening to the 1980s outtake “Blind Willie McTell.” Even more specific was a reference to Dylan’s bizarre, bewigged appearance at the 2003 Sundance premiere of his own Dylan movie, “Masked and Anonymous” — Chalamet copied that wardrobe at the New York premiere of “A Complete Unknown,” a gesture that only the most committed Dylanologists would fully appreciate.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

      At France’s Oldest Theater, Things Change, but They Also Stay the Same

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      A new leader for the Comédie-Française, Clément Hervieu-Léger, is an insider who looks set to keep the venerable Paris company on a steady course.Later this year, the actor and director Clément Hervieu-Léger will assume one of the most influential positions in French theater: general administrator of the Comédie-Française, the country’s oldest active company. France’s culture ministry announced the appointment last week.For now, however, Hervieu-Léger, 47, remains a player in the company’s acting ensemble, and through June 1, he is starring in a production of Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” that he also directed. Onstage on Sunday, Hervieu-Léger blended in discreetly as Trofimov, an aging student who hovers around the play’s central landowning family. (It took me a minute even to recognize him.)The venerable Comédie-Française was founded in 1680, when a troupe begun decades earlier by the playwright Molière merged with a rival institution. With Hervieu-Léger’s appointment, it has opted — as so often — for continuity. Since 2001, every general administrator has come from the company’s ranks. Éric Ruf, who holds the position until this summer, had over two decades of experience as a Comédie-Française actor before his appointment in 2014.His successor has followed a remarkably similar path. A lithe, elegant performer, Hervieu-Léger was hired by the troupe in 2005 and has since been seen in a vast repertoire of plays, including Molière comedies and Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America.”In 2018, he joined the ranks of the “sociétaires,” or “shareholders,” a core group of company members who own stakes in the Comédie-Française, make up the board and oversee the theater’s operations. All must abide by the company’s motto: “Simul et singulis,” which means, “Together and individual.”Hervieu-Léger, left, as Trofimov in “The Cherry Orchard.”Vincent Pontet, coll. Comédie-FrançaiseWe 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 Movies

      Jane Fonda’s SAG Awards Speech: ‘Empathy Is Not Weak or Woke’

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      While some stars have been less politically outspoken this awards season, she issued a call to action as she accepted a lifetime achievement award from the Screen Actors Guild.Jane Fonda, who has been politically outspoken since the Vietnam War era, urged people “to resist successfully what is coming at us” as she accepted a lifetime achievement award Sunday night during the Screen Actors Guild Awards.“Make no mistake, empathy is not weak or woke,” said Fonda, 87. “And by the way, woke just means you give a damn about other people.”She never explicitly mentioned President Trump or his administration, but she seemed to allude to them as she warned of bad things to come.“A whole lot of people are going to be really hurt by what is happening, what is coming our way,” Fonda said. “Even if they are of a different political persuasion, we need to call upon our empathy and not judge but listen from our hearts and welcome them into our tent. Because we are going to need a big tent to resist successfully what is coming at us.”Fonda, a two-time Academy Award winner, has long been known for political activism, particularly her support for the civil rights movement and Indigenous rights and for her opposition to the Vietnam War. A 1972 visit to North Vietnam led some critics to call her “Hanoi Jane”; she has since apologized to soldiers and veterans for being photographed there on an antiaircraft gun. In more recent years, she has fought to draw attention to the climate crisis.In her acceptance speech, she expressed her strong support for unions and noted that when she was starting out in the late 1950s, some leading Hollywood figures had been prominently resisting McCarthyism. She also said that she believes Americans are currently facing the same kinds of challenges that have been captured in historical documentaries about social movements, including apartheid, the civil rights movement and the Stonewall Rebellion.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 Movies

      The Singular Charm of Parker Posey

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      One January morning, I arrived at the East Village studio of a “sound facilitator,” prepared to heal. The facilitator introduced himself as Gary. He led me past a refrigerator cloaked in an Indian tapestry and into an emptied living room, where I found Parker Posey perched cross-legged on a mat, facing a row of gongs. She appeared cozy and at ease, as if she had known the gongs for many years. Posey had invited me there to experience a sound bath, a New Age therapy that she first tried in Thailand, where she filmed the third season of the HBO anthology series “The White Lotus.” During a sound bath (according to Gary’s website), various chimes and bowls are played in an intentional therapeutic sequence; the treatment may uplift the spirit, release stuck energies and rouse engagement with the surrounding environment. Or it may not, but Gary seemed nice anyway.I joined Posey on the floor. The room filled with sounds that resembled the wait music for a planetarium. Gary then advised us that we were approaching the first full moon of the year, which he called “the wolf moon.” Posey turned to face me with spooked eyes, her mouth pulled into an arc of wry expectation. Then she stretched her legs high in the air, laid flat on the mat, and piled a sweater atop her face.Ninety minutes later, the two of us burst onto the street as if from a saloon door. When I arrived at the appointment, we were both wearing flowy black pants and black sweaters, and I was pleased I had guessed the correct attire for our encounter. But by the time we left, she had applied her Parker Posey costume over the base layer: earrings like glass shards, a pearl hair clip in the shape of a vine-picked berry, a slippery high-necked plaid overshirt, a prismatic silk scarf and a pair of round rose-tinted glasses. We walked in woozy circles around the village. Occasionally she produced her phone and waved its digital map in front of us as if it were a homing device. Whatever had happened up in Gary’s studio — brain-wave entrainment, or maybe just a permission structure for taking a film-length nap — my spirit was in fact uplifted, and Posey was engaged with her surrounding environment.To walk alongside Posey is to be reminded that a New York City sidewalk is a habitat still teeming with life. “Ha ha ha HA,” she said as we closed in on a poodle in a little sweater. “Yeah, I speak poodle!” she trilled to another. Manhattan’s pedestrians typically navigate its steroidal landscape in a dissociative state, but with Posey, every poodle is acknowledged, every commotion registered. A car drove up beside us and stopped at a light, blasting an accordion-forward Latin track. “I love this song!” she screamed to its occupants, craning her head toward the open window. Once she squatted on the sidewalk to greet a familiar dog, then crept over to retie both of my sneakers in double knots. “That was so fun, tying your shoelaces,” she said as she sprang up. “I’m a little mommy.”In the coming weeks, whenever I told anyone that I was profiling Parker Posey, they invariably had a story about her impish appearance in their own life. A journalist colleague said that as she reported to work on Sept. 12, 2001, Posey drifted past her, roller-skating through Lower Manhattan. Seemingly everyone below 14th Street has had a pleasant encounter with her at a dog run. Walton Goggins, Posey’s friend and co-star in “The White Lotus,” told me that when he first met her, at a friend’s barbecue in the Catskills, he felt instantly drawn into her world. “She has this fairylike quality about her,” he said. “She’s a person capable of doing what Emerson said so long ago — to see the miraculous in the common. And she uses phrases like, Isn’t that a gas?” Natasha Rothwell, who plays the weary spa manager, Belinda, on “The White Lotus,” said in an email that when Posey first approached her on set, Posey said she had lost her wallet and had just said a prayer to Saint Anthony, before asking Rothwell if she wanted to be her neighbor at the hotel. “She then gave me a hug and seemed to float away.”Parker Posey with Sarah Catherine Hook and Sam Nivola in the current season of the HBO series “The White Lotus.”Fabio Lovino/HBOWe 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 Movies

      SAG Awards: Complete List of Winners

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      The thriller about choosing a new pope took home the top film prize, while Demi Moore and Timothée Chalamet won individual honors.The papal thriller “Conclave” won the top prize at the 31st Screen Actors Guild Awards on Sunday night, thwarting a guild sweep by “Anora,” which had previously scored big wins earlier this month at ceremonies thrown by the producers, directors and writers guilds.The last three winners of SAG’s top prize — “Oppenheimer,” “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” and “CODA” — all went on to win best picture at the Oscars. Some of those had been season-long sweepers, unlike “Conclave,” which can boast only one other best-picture award, from the BAFTAs. Still, the win indicates that the Oscar race remains fluid leading up to the March 2 ceremony.SAG’s lead-actor race produced an upset victory, too, as “A Complete Unknown” star Timothée Chalamet finally nabbed a prize for his portrayal of Bob Dylan; the award had gone all season to Adrien Brody (“The Brutalist”). “I’m really in pursuit of greatness,” Chalamet said when accepting his award. “I know people don’t usually talk like that, but I want to be one of the greats,” he added.Over the last three years, every individual acting winner at SAG has gone on to repeat at the Oscars except last year’s SAG winner Lily Gladstone (“Killers of the Flower Moon”), who lost the best-actress Oscar to Emma Stone (“Poor Things”).This year’s best-actress battle is even more competitive, with “The Substance” lead Demi Moore and the “Anora” actress Mikey Madison trading industry prizes all season. And although the Golden Globe winner Fernanda Torres (“I’m Still Here”) was not nominated at the SAG Awards, she has nevertheless mounted a late surge with many Oscar voters I’ve spoken to, who have just gotten around to watching her movie.At the SAG Awards, it was Moore who triumphed. As she did at the Golden Globes in January, she gave a galvanizing speech that she dedicated to “that little girl who didn’t believe in herself.” As she grew emotional, Moore closed with, “The words are kind of beyond me. So I’m just going to have to say thank you.”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 Television

      Lynne Marie Stewart, Miss Yvonne on ‘Pee-wee’s Playhouse,’ Dies at 78

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      She was the “most beautiful woman in Puppetland” in the 1980s children’s show starring Paul Reubens, and more recently had a recurring role in “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.”Lynne Marie Stewart, who played Pee-wee Herman’s perky, bouffant-wigged neighbor, Miss Yvonne, in the 1980s children’s television series “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” and the sweet, timorous mother of one of the main characters in “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” died on Friday in Los Angeles. She was 78.The cause of her death, at her sister’s home, was cancer, said her manager, Bette Smith. Her doctors found a tumor shortly after Ms. Stewart finished filming a movie called “The Dink,” a comedy starring Jake Johnson and Ben Stiller, in December, Ms. Smith said.Ms. Stewart played a variety of characters in a career that spanned six decades, and had nearly 150 credits as a screen, stage and voice actress starting in 1971, according to IMDb, the entertainment database.But she was perhaps best known for her role as Miss Yvonne, or “the most beautiful woman in Puppetland,” in “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” which ran for five seasons on Saturday mornings on CBS.She was a fixture on the show as Pee-wee Herman’s extravagant neighbor with creative hairdos and a chipper personality.With its whimsical and slyly subversive sense of humor, the show swiftly attracted an audience beyond its core demographic of preadolescent children, and Ms. Stewart and other members of its cast embraced its anarchic and surreal spirit of make-believe.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 Shares104 Views

      in Television

      6 Takeaways From Alec and Hilaria Baldwin’s TLC Reality Show

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      The series begins just before he was scheduled to stand trial in the fatal shooting on the set of “Rust.” The reviews have been somewhat uneasy.Reality television producers had been circling Alec and Hilaria Baldwin for years. His Hollywood fame and history of public combustibility, her social media following and their many children and pets were all classic ingredients for a slice-of-life series.Last year, the couple decided to let the cameras in.They did so at perhaps the most precarious time of Alec Baldwin’s life: the month before he was scheduled to stand trial in New Mexico on an involuntary manslaughter charge, in connection with the fatal shooting of a cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, on the set of the movie “Rust” in 2021. The result is a fly-on-the-wall series called “The Baldwins,” which premieres Sunday on TLC, a network whose marquee titles include “90 Day Fiancé” and “Sister Wives.”The first episode of the show has landed a bit uneasily with critics, who view the show as something of a crisis communications project. Here are six takeaways from the episode.The premiere begins just ahead of Alec Baldwin’s manslaughter trial.Alec and Hilaria Baldwin in court during in the “Rust” accidental shooting case. Alec Baldwin faced a charge of involuntary manslaughter.Pool photo by Ross D Franklin/EPA, via ShutterstockThe filming started in June last year, just before Baldwin was scheduled to stand trial in New Mexico. In the first episode, the couple drives their seven children (and six of their eight dogs and cats) from their home in New York City to their home in the Hamptons, where they often spend the summer.The decision to start filming was a risk. In the event that he had been convicted, Baldwin, who was handling a revolver on set when it discharged a live bullet, would have faced a potential maximum prison sentence of 18 months.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