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    My Life With Uncle Vanya, the Self-Pitying Sad Sack We Can’t Quit

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    What is it about Chekhov’s melancholy inaction hero that makes him, and the play he stars in, so meaningful at all ages?Why can’t we ever get enough of Uncle Vanya?What is it about Anton Chekhov’s incessantly complaining, self-pitying sad sack that makes him return anew to the theater more than any other dramatic protagonist maybe short of Hamlet, that other great melancholy inaction hero?The question has grown more pressing in the last two years, since there have been four new revivals of “Uncle Vanya” in New York alone and another starring Hugh Bonneville that finished an acclaimed run at Shakespeare Theater in Washington earlier this month.Last year, the playwright Jon Robin Baitz argued that the play was in vogue partly because it was a “study of post-Covid paralysis.” But “Uncle Vanya” is always in fashion. I have seen 15 different versions in the last three decades, and I have come to believe that its enduring popularity is because of its flexibility.In the one-man show “Vanya,” Andrew Scott plays the title character as a man stuck in arrested development.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe old argument about whether “Uncle Vanya” — which follows a series of emotional disasters that occur on a Russian country estate run by Vanya and his niece, Sonya — is a comedy or a tragedy misses the point. There’s no one right way to perform it. I’ve seen it done funny and gloomy, cerebral and physical, small scale and broadly theatrical. What’s most remarkable about the play is how it can sustain so many different approaches and still move audiences.Look at the actors who have played the title character in the past year. There’s a world of difference between Andrew Scott, the star of the series “Ripley,” and the comedian Steve Carell; between the defeated, passive man played by the Tony-winning theater director David Cromer and the aggressively cranky Bob Laine from the Brooklyn adaptation by the “Dimes Square” playwright Matthew Gasda.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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      ‘Black Bag’ Review: Blanchett v. Fassbender

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      The actors play a glamorous couple of spies in this latest sleek collaboration from the director Steven Soderbergh and the screenwriter David Koepp.“Black Bag” is the third movie written by David Koepp and directed by Steven Soderbergh that’s been released since 2022, and it’s a banger. It’s also sleek, witty and lean to the bone, a fizzy, engaging puzzler about beautiful spies doing the sort of extraordinary things that the rest of us only read about in novels and — if we’re lucky — watch onscreen. It’s nonsense, but the kind of glorious grown-up nonsense that critics like to say they (as in Hollywood) no longer make. That’s true to a great extent despite exceptions like Koepp and Soderbergh, even if they’re too playfully unorthodox to be prototypically Hollywood.The filmmakers’ latest duet stars Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender as Kathryn and George. Cozily and happily married, the couple lives in austere luxury in a townhouse in London, where they keep long, eventful hours working for a British intelligence agency, the (real) Government Communications Headquarters. As spies go, the two certainly look and speak their roles, or at least the fictional versions of them: They’re cunning, suave and as enigmatic as the title suggests. Unlike their famed counterpart James Bond (he’s at MI6), though, they put in serious face time at the office. Inside a glass tower, they watch and are watched in turn, tracking enemies and sometimes eliminating them.The setup involves an explosively dangerous threat in the form of malware called Severus, presumably named after the despotic Roman emperor. There appears to be a mole in the agency, and George is among a select few trying to identify the culprit. He has a list of five possible candidates, all of whom work in the agency’s power ranks. Among the suspects is — ta-da! — Kathryn. Because this isn’t a problem that George can take to a marriage counselor — even if one of the main characters is an agency shrink — he does what he’s trained to do: He spies on her. It gets tricky. It also gets funny and predictably violent, with some of the sharpest, nastiest scenes unfolding across a family dining-room table.Koepp and Soderbergh are virtuosos of genre, and “Black Bag” is right in their wheelhouse. Each has made a range of films (Koepp also directs), and they last collaborated on the ghost story “Presence,” which came out earlier this year. If the two excel at thrillers, it’s partly because, I imagine, high-stakes intrigues give filmmakers room to push norms to extremes and even ditch them. Koepp and Soderbergh’s “KIMI” (2022) is another tight genre piece that embraces and detonates conventions. Its myriad influences include films about trapped women as well as claustrophobic paranoid thrillers from the 1970s like “The Conversation” and “Three Days of the Condor,” reference points that also inform “Black Bag.”To judge from George’s chic glasses and turtlenecks, the filmmakers revisited some older Michael Caine movies, too. Fassbender doesn’t have Caine’s charms, and he’s less persuasive as a romantic foil. “Black Bag” has its share of intentionally outlandish moments, some giddily funny (there are more ticklish moments than thrills), but among the less convincing plot points is George and Kathryn’s oft-stated devotion to each other. Onscreen, Fassbender and especially Blanchett have an otherworldly quality that makes them reliably interesting to watch, but it’s one that can feel like a membrane separating them from more ordinary souls. They both draw you to them, but, unlike, say, Brad Pitt, they don’t necessarily invite you in.Whether these nagging doubts about George and Kathryn’s relationship are intentional, they work in a movie that teases you with secrets and weapons, border-crossing and misdirection, and is filled out with a note-perfect supporting cast that includes Regé-Jean Page, Naomie Harris, Tom Burke and Marisa Abela. Even as the story heats up and starts to get crowded, George remains the intrigue’s central question mark. He prowls into the movie like Henry Hill strolling into the nightclub in the famously long take in “Goodfellas,” a scene that slyly suggests that George isn’t to be trusted. He may be hot for Kathryn, but there’s something “bloodless and inhuman” about him, too, as Le Carré wrote of his famous spy, George Smiley.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

      In ‘The Seagull,’ Cate Blanchett Outshines a Director’s Tired Tropes

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      Thanks to Blanchett’s charismatic turn as a fading actress, this new Chekhov adaptation in London hangs together in spite of Thomas Ostermeier’s antics.It is all too easy to be cynical when movie stars turn to theater — not least because, of late, they haven’t always been very good at it. In recent weeks, London’s stages have played host to several slightly iffy productions of classic plays featuring big-name screen actors: Sigourney Weaver in “The Tempest,” Rami Malek in “Oedipus,” and Brie Larson in “Elektra.” So when Cate Blanchett rolled into town for a new adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” at the Barbican Theater, a little trepidation could be forgiven.But Blanchett is different. Though she is best known for her film work, the Australian actress has graced the stage to acclaim throughout her career, playing lead roles in “Hedda Gabler” and “A Streetcar Named Desire.” And she is no stranger to Chekhov, having starred in the Sydney Theater Company’s “Uncle Vanya,” and the same company’s 2017 adaptation of “Platonov,” called “The Present.” She met her husband, the playwright Andrew Upton, while performing in a 1997 production of “The Seagull.”In this modern dress production of “The Seagull,” adapted by Duncan Macmillan and Thomas Ostermeier (“Who Killed My Father,” “Returning to Reims”), Blanchett plays Irina Arkadina, a famous older actress whose pathological self-obsession alienates her son, Konstantin Treplev (Kodi Smit-McPhee), to the point of despair. He’s a young writer struggling to find his voice, and disaffected with the risk-averse banality of the artistic mainstream. (“We need new voices, new perspectives, new forms!”)Arkadina’s lover, Alexander Trigorin (Tom Burke), is a successful author of middlebrow fiction who represents everything Konstantin wants to tear down. So when the older man effortlessly seduces Konstantin’s sweetheart, the aspiring actress Nina Zarechnaya (Emma Corrin), the blow is doubly crushing.Chekhov conceived Arkadina as a “foolish, mendacious, self-admiring egoist,” and Blanchett realizes this vision with exuberant brio from the moment she first appears onstage. Her Arkadina, wearing a purple jumpsuit and large sunglasses, channels the vapid can-do spirit of an online wellness influencer; inordinately proud of her well-preserved appearance, she tap dances and does splits to show off her litheness. She’s the life of the party — her diva-level prancing recalls Joanna Lumley’s Patsy in “Absolutely Fabulous” — but emotionally she’s withholding. When Konstantin puts on an avant-garde play, she dismisses it as “indulgent, adolescent crap.” Even in rare moments of tenderness her language is glib, cooingly manipulative. (“Poor little crumpet!”)Tom Burke, left, as Trigorin and Emma Corrin as Nina in this new adaptation of “The Seagull” at the Barbican in London.Marc BrennerWe 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

      ‘Rumours’ Review: No One Will Save Us

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      Cate Blanchett stars as a lusty, preening stateswomen in a geopolitical satire from the experimental filmmaker Guy Maddin.“It’s better to burn out than to fade away” is both a Neil Young lyric and the quote that encapsulates the ethos of “Rumours,” an extremely funny geopolitical satire from the fertile imagination of Guy Maddin, the Canadian experimental filmmaker who once put Isabella Rossellini into a pair of beer-filled glass legs.There are no prostheses, see-through or otherwise, in “Rumours,” though there are substitute delights: a brain the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, a chatbot designed to ensnare pedophiles and mummified Iron Age corpses. All these creations bedevil the seven fictional heads of state who have convened at an annual G7 summit hosted by Germany, whose randy leader (Cate Blanchett) can’t wait to get it on with her sexy Canadian counterpart (Roy Dupuis). Over a lengthy lunch in a gazebo at a woodsy estate, the seven struggle to draft a joint statement on an unspecified global crisis, unaware that their anodyne musings on peace and prosperity will soon be derailed by mud-splattered mayhem and onanistic zombies.Sporadically ingenious, occasionally chilling and entirely bonkers, “Rumours” sees Maddin (writing and directing with his longtime collaborators Evan and Galen Johnson) abandoning his more familiar black-and-white, silent-film aesthetic for vibrant color. His fondness for soapy melodrama and bawdy humor, though, remains intact. Canada and Germany slip off for some sylvan slap-and-tickle, unnoticed by Canada’s former lover, the uptight United Kingdom (Nikki Amuka-Bird). Back at the table, France (Denis Ménochet) and Japan (Takehiro Hira) are bonding over historical speeches, while Italy (Rolando Ravello) is repenting for having once dressed up as Mussolini. An apparently addled United States (Charles Dance, who remains however resolutely British) just wants a nap.Shot in Hungary, Stefan Ciupek’s richly textured and often surreal images drive a mood that darkens inexorably from goofy to skin-pricklingly ominous. As night falls, the seven find themselves abandoned in the forest with neither cell service nor servants. Unnerved by eerie sounds and a vile wind, they discover that an ancient bog man, which Germany had exhumed, has now caused other oozing carcasses to rise up, some with penises slung around their necks like knobby necklaces. Or maybe they’re just filthy political protesters?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

      For ‘Disclaimer,’ Alfonso Cuarón Updates His Terms and Conditions

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      Cate Blanchett stars in the acclaimed director’s new TV series, a thriller about a woman whose life is upended by a mysterious novel.About a decade ago, the writer-director Alfonso Cuarón was sent an advance copy of Renée Knight’s book “Disclaimer,” a thriller about a woman whose life is upended when she receives a novel by an unknown author that seems to lay bare her secrets. That novel begins with a disclaimer: “Any resemblance to persons living or dead is not a coincidence.”As Cuarón (“Children of Men,” “Y Tu Mamá También”) read, he could picture each scene in his head. This book, he thought, should be a film. There was just one problem.“I didn’t see how the film that I wanted to do could fit into an hour and 45 minutes,” he said.So Cuarón immersed himself in other projects, like “Roma” (2018), which won him a second Oscar for directing. But a few years later, he began to think about “Disclaimer” again, in the context of more expansive films like Ingmar Bergman’s “Fanny and Alexander” or Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in America,” works that clocked in at four or five hours.The market for marathon films is small. But Cuarón knew of an alternative: television. And he was mindful that other auteurs, like David Lynch with “Twin Peaks” and Lars Von Trier with “The Kingdom,” had explored that medium before him.Which is how, after a three-decade film career and five Oscars, Cuarón came to make “Disclaimer,” a seven-episode limited series starring Cate Blanchett, Sacha Baron Cohen and Kevin Kline. The first two episodes premiere on Apple TV+ on Friday, with the rest rolling out weekly afterward.In “Disclaimer,” Blanchett plays an acclaimed journalist and documentarian, and Sacha Baron Cohen plays her husband.Apple TV+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 Shares129 Views

      in Television

      27 TV Shows to Watch This Fall

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      A “WandaVision” spinoff, Colin Farrell in “The Penguin” and Alfonso Cuarón’s “Disclaimer” are among the season’s tantalizing offerings.The fall television season is short on blockbuster titles — a “Star Wars” extension, “Skeleton Crew,” from Disney+, and perhaps HBO’s as-yet-unscheduled “Dune: Prophecy.” But there is plenty that’s of interest, including Alfonso Cuarón’s return to television with “Disclaimer” on Apple TV+, Colin Farrell’s incarnation of the Penguin for HBO and Kathryn Hahn’s reboot of her “WandaVision” character in “Agatha All Along” for Disney+. There will also be new seasons of offbeat but proven comedies like “Bad Sisters” on Apple TV+, “Somebody Somewhere” on HBO and “What We Do in the Shadows,” which, unlike its vampire heroes, will perish after its sixth season on FX. Here are 25 shows to keep an eye out for this fall, in chronological order; all dates are subject to change.September‘THE OLD MAN’ In Season 2 of this melancholy spy thriller, Jeff Bridges and John Lithgow return as former C.I.A. colleagues and improbable action buddies — the two actors’ average age is 76, and Lithgow’s character once hired a hit man to kill Bridges’s. (With 76-year-old Kathy Bates starring in CBS’s “Matlock” reboot, it’s a good season for septuagenarians.) (FX, Sept. 12)‘HOW TO DIE ALONE’ The actress and writer Natasha Rothwell (“Insecure,” “White Lotus”) created and stars in this wistful comedy about a lonely airport worker whose life changes after a near-death experience involving an armoire and crab Rangoon. (Hulu, Sept. 13)Natasha Rothwell plays a lonely airport worker in the comedy “How to Die Alone,” which premieres on Hulu in September.Lindsay Sarazin/Disney‘AGATHA ALL ALONG’ Kathryn Hahn returns to her “WandaVision” character in this Marvel spinoff series. The witch Agatha Harkness, stripped of her powers, hits the road and forms a new coven; the cast includes Joe Locke of “Heartstopper,” Sasheer Zamata, Debra Jo Rupp and Aubrey Plaza. (Disney+, Sept. 18)‘THE PENGUIN’ Colin Farrell covers himself in silicone once again to play the waddling gangster Oswald Cobblepot, a.k.a. the Penguin, a role he first essayed in Matt Reeves’s 2022 film “The Batman.” Reeves is an executive producer of this mini-series, and Lauren LeFranc (“Impulse,” “Chuck”) is writer and showrunner. (HBO, Sept. 19)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

      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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      in Movies

      ‘Borderlands’ Review: Shoot First, Ask Questions Never

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      In Eli Roth’s caper movie, based on the best-selling video game franchise, Cate Blanchett plays a bounty hunter who is tasked with finding a tycoon’s daughter.In Eli Roth’s “Borderlands,” a cluttered caper flick based on the best-selling video game series of the same name, Cate Blanchett plays a trigger-happy bounty hunter who keeps killing the other characters midsentence before they can fill in the plot. Shoot first, ask questions never — even though the audience has questions of its own: What caused the delay that’s taken this big-budget movie three years to get released? And is it possible that Roth’s credited co-writer, Joe Crombie, who otherwise has no other screenplays or online presence, might be a pseudonym for someone who doesn’t want their real name on this haphazard script?Like the original first-person shooter game, “Borderlands” is set on a junkyard planet named Pandora that was once a home base for an advanced alien species, but has since been overrun by violent marauders and women with formidable push-up bras. Blanchett’s Lilith was born here and begrudgingly returns under the employ of a tycoon (Edgar Ramírez) who’s hired her to track down his daughter, an unhinged teenager named Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt). To Lilith’s annoyance, her one-woman squad swells with new members: a sassy robot (voiced by Jack Black), an autistic xeno-archaeologist (Jamie Lee Curtis), a mostly mute meathead (Florian Munteanu) and a noble soldier (Kevin Hart). When Hart is playing the straight man, you know you’re watching a film that’s throwing everything at the screen.The style is Chernobyl chic. Anything that can have spikes does have spikes — even the terrain. The scrapheap aesthetic is so maximalist that, at one point, our leads take a joyride in a dumpster. The film itself feels salvaged from the properties it aspires to bowdlerize, chief among them “Star Wars.” Key messages are transmitted as Princess Leia-esque holograms; Black’s robot spouts pessimistic survival statistics; Hart barges onscreen in a gothy Stormtrooper get-up that he immediately discards, sneering, “What a stupid helmet.”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

      Did Cate Blanchett Make a Pro-Palestinian Fashion Statement at Cannes?

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      The actress hasn’t said so, but some internet users think she did. Plus, a bleak week for small fashion brands and wedding dresses for fashion-forward brides.Since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, followers of events known for being fashion spectacles — the Oscars, the Met Gala, Eurovision — have watched them become venues for making sartorial as well as political statements about the conflict.The Cannes Festival in France has not been immune to this trend. Several attendees have used the red carpet on the Croisette to show their support for Israelis or Palestinians during the film festival, with some wearing sashes saying “bring them home,” referring to Israeli hostages taken by Hamas, and others wearing red pins calling for a cease-fire in Gaza.Off the carpet, the model Bella Hadid ate ice cream near the beach in Cannes wearing a dress made of the material used for kaffiyehs, the scarves long seen as a symbol of Palestinians solidarity and identity.But those obvious displays have not generated as much buzz as the dress that the actress Cate Blanchett wore on Monday to the premiere of “The Apprentice,” a docudrama about the early life of former President Donald J. Trump.At first glance the gown — a piece from the designer Haider Ackermann’s one-off spring 2023 couture collection for Jean Paul Gaultier — looked like a simple black dress worn with a pearl necklace across the length of Ms. Blanchett’s bare shoulders.But as she began to walk the carpet, flashes of other colors emerged: The back of the dress was a pink so pale that it appeared white, and the gown had an emerald green interior lining that Ms. Blanchett repeatedly revealed by lifting its train. The dress had been significantly altered since it appeared on the runway, where it had a knee-length hemline, a lime-green back and a lavender lining.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