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    How Mia Threapleton Created Her Deadpan Nun in ‘The Phoenician Scheme’

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    When Mia Threapleton learned that Wes Anderson wanted her to star in his next film, she did what any normal person would: She asked her agent to call the casting director back to make sure there had been no mistake, and then found a quiet spot on the train she was riding in, curled up and sobbed.“I couldn’t believe it,” the 24-year-old British actress said. In Anderson’s latest, “The Phoenician Scheme,” Threapleton plays Sister Liesl, a nun who is estranged from her father, the eccentric businessman Zsa-zsa (Benicio Del Toro). He wants to reconnect and make her his heir.Chic in a white sleeveless top, her long blond hair falling in loose waves around piercing blue eyes, Threapleton was preparing to head to the Cannes Film Festival, where “The Phoenician Scheme” premiered this month. The movie is by far her most prominent role to date — not that you would recognize her in it even if she were a familiar face.“It was a lot,” she said of the I-did-my-makeup-in-a-closet-and-cut-my-hair-with-garden-shears look: blunt brunette bob, garish turquoise eye shadow, bold red lip. But she trusted Anderson because she had long admired his work. She grew up with the director’s stop-motion “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” and his coming-of-age romance, “Moonrise Kingdom,” is a personal favorite.“I remember watching it and thinking, ‘I’d love to be able to do that,’ so then having this opportunity to do that was such a surreal experience,” said Threapleton, who, unlike Sister Liesl, laughs readily and occasionally breaks into a smile that plays up the likeness to her mother, the actress Kate Winslet.Threapleton as Sister Liesl in “The Phoenician Scheme.”TPS Productions/Focus FeaturesWe 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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      ‘The Phoenician Scheme’ Review: Benicio Del Toro Plans to Save His Soul

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      Wes Anderson returns with another intricately designed film, and an inquiry into the meaning of goodness.With his diorama-like compositions and tales of longing — usually for a loving family — Wes Anderson has taken audiences most everywhere on the planet: Asia and Europe, New York City and the American southwest, a fox’s hole and an island inhabited by dogs. With “The Phoenician Scheme” he globetrots again, zigging and zagging about, but he adds an unusual place to the list: heaven.Or, more accurately, the pearly gates that stand just outside of heaven, guarding the way lest the unworthy sneak in. These scenes are really snippets, rendered in black and white. In them, we repeatedly glimpse the weapons dealer and generally shady business tycoon Anatole Korda, a.k.a. Zsa-zsa (Benicio Del Toro, who is perfect) standing on some clouds before a robed assembly of what the film bills as the “biblical troupe,” among whom are F. Murray Abraham, Willem Dafoe, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Hope Davis and Bill Murray, who, delightfully, plays God.That all of these screen luminaries apparently just popped to Anderson’s set for a day to film a tiny scene is indicative of where the auteur stands at this point in his 31-year career. Still boyish in appearance, he’s just turned 56, with a bevy of awards under his belt. He’s synonymous with his intricate aesthetic, which is perhaps one of the most recognizable in cinema. It’s turned him into a brand, with social media creators and critics alike drawn to examining and imitating him. He curated a show at Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum in 2018, and as “The Phoenician Scheme” was premiering at the Cannes Film Festival, he was simultaneously the subject of a show at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris.He’s also built a career on an ever-expanding universe of returning collaborators and players. While some, like Murray, have been around for a long time, Del Toro is still relatively new to the fold, with “The Phoenician Scheme” only his second Anderson outing (he had a role as a seductive criminal in “The French Dispatch”). He plays the cold and aloof Korda who, upon surviving his sixth assassination attempt, finally admits he needs to appoint an heir to his business and vast fortune. He has nine sons who live in a dormitory across the street from his house — Korda is not a very good dad — but he also has an estranged daughter, Liesl (Mia Threapleton, all deadpan chain-smoking charm), who is on the verge of taking her vows at the convent. Liesl’s moral sense is as upstanding as her father’s is utilitarian, and when he lays out his plan to her, she senses she might be able to do some good even if she doesn’t trust him.So she convinces him to take the slightly higher ethical ground toward his big, well, scheme — the details of which are laid out so rapidly, and so sketchily, that it’s pretty clear Anderson doesn’t care if we really catch on to what Korda wants to do. Despite its title, this is not a movie about a plan, but about the man with that plan and, most important, his soul.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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      Cannes Film Festival 2025: What to Watch From This Year’s Star-Packed Lineup

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      The event is packed with high-profile English-language movies, including the new “Mission: Impossible” and a Jennifer Lawrence-Robert Pattinson drama.The 78th edition of the Cannes Film Festival begins Tuesday, and this lineup is particularly star-packed. Which titles could follow in the path of last year’s big breakouts like “Anora” and “The Substance”? Here are the stories we have our eye on this year.It’s a Hollywood-heavy lineup.Though Cannes is traditionally known for showcasing the best in global cinema, the lineup is packed with so many high-profile English-language films that it could be mistaken for a festival in Hollywood.The biggest premieres include “Die My Love,” which pairs Jennifer Lawrence and Robert Pattinson as a couple in a crumbling marriage; the new Spike Lee film, “Highest 2 Lowest,” with Denzel Washington; and Wes Anderson’s caper “The Phoenician Scheme,” with Benicio Del Toro leading an ensemble that includes Michael Cera, Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hanks and Riz Ahmed.There’s also the romantic drama “The History of Sound,” with Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor; Richard Linklater’s “Nouvelle Vague,” a tribute to the French new wave; and “Eddington” from Ari Aster (“Midsommar,” “Hereditary”), with an A-list cast featuring Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone and Austin Butler. And if that weren’t Hollywood-heavy enough, Tom Cruise will debut his final “Mission: Impossible” movie on the festival’s second day.Actors are making their directorial debuts.Kristen Stewart, Scarlett Johansson and Harris Dickinson are all Cannes mainstays, but for this year’s fest, the three actors are instead stepping behind the camera for their feature directing debuts. And lest you assume they’re making vanity projects, all three declined starring roles in their own movies.Stewart’s long-in-the-works “The Chronology of Water” will bow first, starring Imogen Poots as a young woman struggling with issues of addiction and sexuality. Next up is “Urchin,” from the “Babygirl” breakout Dickinson, about a London drifter (Frank Dillane) struggling to find his place in society. And the second week of the festival will debut Johansson’s “Eleanor the Great,” a comedy starring June Squibb.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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      Cannes Film Festival Announces Lineup, Including Scarlett Johansson and Wes Anderson

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      A sidebar to the competition will feature Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut.Movies directed by Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater and Ari Aster are among 19 films that will compete for the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the event’s organizers announced at a news conference on Thursday.The festival’s 78th edition, which opens May 13 and runs through May 24, will also feature the premiere of “Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning,” the eighth movie in the action series starring Tom Cruise, playing in an out-of-competition spot.Linklater’s movie, “Nouvelle Vague,” is about the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 classic “Breathless,” a seminal picture in the French New Wave film movement.Richard Linklater at the Berlin Film Festival in February. His “Nouvelle Vague,” playing in competition at Cannes, is about the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 classic “Breathless.”Christopher Neundorf/EPA, via ShutterstockOther movies by American directors appearing in competition are Anderson’s “The Phoenician Scheme,” starring Benicio Del Toro as an eccentric businessman; Aster’s “Eddington,” starring Joaquin Phoenix and Emma Stone, and focused on a small-town election; and Kelly Reichardt’s “The Mastermind,” about an art heist.Julia Ducournau, whose movie “Titane” won the Palme d’Or in 2021, will return to the competition with “Alpha”; and Joachim Trier, who directed “The Worst Person in the World,” a breakout hit that same year, will present a new film, “Sentimental Value.”In recent years, the Cannes competition has premiered a host of movies that have gone on to dominate award season. Last year’s lineup included Jacques Audiard’s “Emilia Pérez,” Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance” and Sean Baker’s “Anora” — the last of which won the Palme d’Or and this year’s Academy Award for best picture.A jury led by the French actor Juliette Binoche will announce the winner at a ceremony on May 24.Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut, which will feature in the competition’s sidebar, is called “Eleanor the Great.”Mario Anzuoni/ReutersOutside the main competition, the sidebar section, known as Un Certain Regard, features the directorial debuts of two prominent actors: Scarlett Johansson’s “Eleanor the Great,” in which a woman in her 90s moves to New York and tries to start life afresh; and Harris Dickinson’s “Urchin,” a drama about a homeless person.Aside from the main competition and Un Certain Regard, the festival also has special screenings, out-of-competition slots and a section called Cannes Premiere. Some notable movies playing in those categories include “Private View,” directed by Rebecca Zlotowski and starring Jodie Foster in her first French-language role for over two decades; “Stories of Surrender,” based on Bono’s acclaimed one-man stage show; and “The Disappearance of Josef Mengele,” by the Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov.The honorary Palme d’Or, given each year to acknowledge a contribution to cinema, will go to Robert De Niro. The actor performed the lead in two past Palme d’Or winners: Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver,” which won the main prize in 1976; and Roland Joffé’s “The Mission,” which triumphed in 1986. More

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      Wes Anderson and Richard Linklater to Compete at Cannes Film Festival

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      A sidebar to the competition will feature Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut.Movies directed by Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater and Ari Aster are among 19 films that will compete for the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the event’s organizers announced at a news conference on Thursday.The festival’s 78th edition, which opens May 13 and runs through May 24, will also feature the premiere of “Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning,” the eighth movie in the action series starring Tom Cruise, playing in an out-of-competition spot.Linklater’s movie, “Nouvelle Vague,” is about the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 classic “Breathless,” a seminal picture in the French New Wave film movement.Richard Linklater at the Berlin Film Festival in February. His “Nouvelle Vague,” playing in competition at Cannes, is about the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 classic “Breathless.”Christopher Neundorf/EPA, via ShutterstockOther movies by American directors appearing in competition are Anderson’s “The Phoenician Scheme,” starring Benicio Del Toro as an eccentric businessman; Aster’s “Eddington,” starring Joaquin Phoenix and Emma Stone, and focused on a small-town election; and Kelly Reichardt’s “The Mastermind,” about an art heist.Julia Ducournau, whose movie “Titane” won the Palme d’Or in 2021, will return to the competition with “Alpha”; and Joachim Trier, who directed “The Worst Person in the World,” a breakout hit that same year, will present a new film, “Sentimental Value.”In recent years, the Cannes competition has premiered a host of movies that have gone on to dominate award season. Last year’s lineup included Jacques Audiard’s “Emilia Pérez,” Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance” and Sean Baker’s “Anora” — the last of which won the Palme d’Or and this year’s Academy Award for best picture.A jury led by the French actor Juliette Binoche will announce the winner at a ceremony on May 24.Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut, which will feature in the competition’s sidebar, is called “Eleanor the Great.”Mario Anzuoni/ReutersOutside the main competition, the sidebar section, known as Un Certain Regard, features the directorial debuts of two prominent actors: Scarlett Johansson’s “Eleanor the Great,” in which a woman in her 90s moves to New York and tries to start life afresh; and Harris Dickinson’s “Urchin,” a drama about a homeless person.Aside from the main competition and Un Certain Regard, the festival also has special screenings, out-of-competition slots and a section called Cannes Premiere. Some notable movies playing in those categories include “Private View,” directed by Rebecca Zlotowski and starring Jodie Foster in her first French-language role for over two decades; “Stories of Surrender,” based on Bono’s acclaimed one-man stage show; and “The Disappearance of Josef Mengele,” by the Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov.The honorary Palme d’Or, given each year to acknowledge a contribution to cinema, will go to Robert De Niro. The actor performed the lead in two past Palme d’Or winners: Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver,” which won the main prize in 1976; and Roland Joffé’s “The Mission,” which triumphed in 1986. More

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      In Wes Anderson’s World, It’s All About the Details

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      When Wes Anderson was just starting out and wanted to reshoot some scenes for his 1996 debut “Bottle Rocket,” the rookie director got a shock. Columbia Pictures had sent all the movie’s props off to a store, which had then sold them for next to nothing.So when he made his next movie, “Rushmore” (1998), Anderson decided the same thing would never happen again. He put everything into an S.U.V. when the shoot was over, then drove the hoard away to look after it himself.That decision ended up helping not just Anderson himself. Over the past two-and-a-half years, curators at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris and the Design Museum in London trawled Anderson’s storage facility in Kent, England — which contains thousands of items from his movies — to compile a museum retrospective of the director’s work.The show opened at the Cinémathèque Française this week, where it runs though July 27. It will transfer, expanded, to the Design Museum in the fall.Max Fischer’s Academy uniform from “Rushmore.”The fur coat worn by Margot Tenenbaum in “The Royal Tenenbaums.”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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      Gene Hackman’s Gritty, Grouchy, Old-School Style

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      Between the idols of Hollywood’s golden age and the media-savvy stars of today, he had an appeal all his own.In the decades separating the suave Cary Grant from the willowy Timothée Chalamet, there was a leading man with a rougher kind of charm.Even in his box-office heyday, Gene Hackman had a receding hairline and a paunch. He could pass for 50 when he was 30. He described himself as a “big lummox kind of person.”His first noteworthy role came alongside Jean Seberg in the 1964 film “Lillith.” Ms. Seberg said she found Mr. Hackman handsome because his face had so much character to it — but she didn’t believe he would go very far in an industry that favored Warren Beatty and other more conventionally attractive men.But changing attitudes demanded a new kind of star, and Mr. Hackman arrived when the sharp-focus cinema of the midcentury years gave way to the grainier palette of the 1970s, a time when the line between hero and antihero was blurring.He was 40 when he had his first leading role, in the drama “I Never Sang for My Father.” The next year he put on a porkpie hat to play the vicious cop Popeye Doyle in “The French Connection,” a performance that won him the first of his two Oscars.Mr. Hackman put on a porkpie hat to play Popeye Doyle in “The French Connection,” a performance that won him the first of his two Oscars.20th Century Fox, via Getty ImagesWe 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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      “The Royal Tenenbaums” Introduced Gene Hackman to a New Generation

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      His performance in Wes Anderson’s “The Royal Tenenbaums” introduced Hackman to a new generation, and his presence helped define the film.When the director Wes Anderson and the actors Anjelica Huston, Bill Murray and Gwyneth Paltrow took the stage in 2011 for a panel celebrating the 10th anniversary of Anderson’s “The Royal Tenenbaums,” there was no need for small talk before addressing the elephant in the room.“So, no Gene Hackman?” began the director Noah Baumbach, the panel’s co-moderator, introducing an apparently genuine nervousness into the discussion.Hackman, who was found dead on Wednesday afternoon with his wife at their home in Santa Fe, N.M., at the age of 95, loomed over “The Royal Tenenbaums” in every possible sense.Within the film, of course, he is the paterfamilias — he is Royal Tenenbaum, “the displaced patriarch,” as Hackman put it in an on-set interview — of the remarkable, scattered family at the center of Anderson’s third film, the one that took him from art houses to the mainstream.That 2011 panel dived into Hackman’s presence, particularly an off-camera gruffness, that distinguished him from the whimsy typical of Anderson’s work. Here was the avatar of 1970s grit and paranoia — who had won an Oscar playing the bad-boy narcotics detective Popeye Doyle in “The French Connection” — dropped into a very different type of cinematic vision, from a very different generation.The tone throughout the panel, particularly from Anderson, was respectful and appreciative. But it was clear that Hackman stood out on set. At the time of filming “The Royal Tenenbaums,” Hackman was already considering a retirement that just a few years later he announced and stuck to, Anderson said. None of the panelists had been in touch with Hackman during the intervening years, they said. And they all remembered him being terse with Anderson.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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      The Song That Connects Jackson Browne, Nico and Margot Tenenbaum

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      Browne wrote “These Days” at 16. Now 75, he and some famous admirers reflect on his unexpected mainstay: “If a song is worth anything, it’s about the life of the listener.”When he was 16, Jack Browne sat down at his parents’ kitchen table in Fullerton, Calif., and started picking out a tune on an old Kay guitar.It was the fall of 1964, and the fledgling songwriter and high school junior — inspired by books, records and his own suburban disaffection — began weaving together an existential number about loss and regret called “These Days.”It would be a year until he finished the song, nearly a decade before he recorded it properly. By the time Jackson Browne, as he would be known professionally, cut it for his 1973 album “For Everyman” — which will be reissued on Sept. 20 — it had already been done in two distinct, definitive versions: the first by the German chanteuse and Velvet Underground collaborator Nico, then later by the Southern rocker Gregg Allman.“These Days” has proved a remarkably durable composition, reinterpreted by Cher, St. Vincent, Glen Campbell, Miley Cyrus, Paul Westerberg and Drake, to name a handful. It inspired Wes Anderson’s 2001 film “The Royal Tenenbaums,” and more recently has become the unlikely soundtrack to a series of TikTok trends.While Browne has had bigger hits as an artist (“Doctor My Eyes,” “Running on Empty”) and as a writer (Eagles’ “Take It Easy”), “These Days” has rambled through the decades, morphing musically, changing lyrically and taking on added layers of meaning. “In that regard, it’s sort of like a folk song,” Browne said on a late August afternoon, sitting in the control room of his Santa Monica recording studio, Groove Masters.“I come from folk music, that was my school,” continued Browne, somehow still boyish and bright-eyed at 75. “You’d learn several versions of the same song and adapt the parts of it that you liked and it’d become something else. That’s what’s happened with ‘These Days.’”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