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    M. Emmet Walsh, ‘Blade Runner’ and ‘Knives Out’ Actor, Dies at 88

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    His roles in films like “Knives Out” and “Blade Runner” were sometimes big, sometimes small. But he invariably made a strong impression.M. Emmet Walsh, a paunchy and prolific character actor who was called “the poet of sleaze” by the critic Roger Ebert for his naturalistic portrayals of repellent lowlifes and miscreants, died on Tuesday in St. Albans, a small city in northern Vermont. He was 88. His death, in a hospital, was announced by his manager, Sandy Joseph.The most enduring praise Mr. Walsh received also came from Mr. Ebert: He coined the Stanton-Walsh Rule, which asserted that “no movie featuring either Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh in a supporting role can be altogether bad.”In “Straight Time,” a 1978 film featuring both Mr. Stanton and Mr. Walsh, Mr. Walsh played a patronizing parole officer to Dustin Hoffman’s teetering ex-con. Mr. Walsh’s performance caught the eye of two brothers who aspired to be auteurs and were writing their first feature-film script.The unknown Joel and Ethan Coen wrote the pivotal character of a detective in “Blood Simple” for Mr. Walsh. To their surprise, and despite offering little more in compensation than a per diem stipend, he accepted the role.A performance by Mr. Walsh in “Straight Time” led to a role in “Blood Simple” (1984), the first feature film by Joel and Ethan Coen.River Road Productions/Circle — Sunset Boulevard, via Corbis, via Getty ImagesReviewing “Blood Simple” for The New York Times in 1984, Janet Maslin said that Mr. Walsh had captured “a mischievousness that is perfect for the role.” Writing in Salon on the occasion of the release of Janus Films’ digital restoration in 2016, Andrew O’Hehir praised Mr. Walsh’s portrayal of a “sleazy, giggly and profoundly disturbing private detective.”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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      How Joel Coen Made ‘The Tragedy of Macbeth’

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      When your whole filmmaking career has been one of unexpected twists and turns, how do you surprise yourself? Adapt a Shakespeare play.You make enough movies about people chasing after things — outlaws, money, a kidnapped baby — and eventually someone comes chasing after you. In Joel Coen’s case, his pursuer was William Shakespeare.As Coen put it recently, “Shakespeare is unavoidable.” He gave a resigned chuckle and added, “For better or worse.”In a filmmaking career of nearly 40 years, Coen has chronicled a spectrum of well-spoken criminals and enlightened dudes in stories inflected with varying amounts of brutality and absurdity. He has directed 18 features and written several others with his brother, Ethan.Having built a filmography characterized by unexpected twists and turns, Joel Coen has himself taken what may seem like a surprising pivot away from that body of work. His latest film, “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” is a shadowy and phantasmagoric rendition of the Shakespeare play, presented in black and white.The movie, released theatrically in December and on Apple TV+ earlier this month, stars Denzel Washington as the murderous nobleman of the title and Frances McDormand as his scheming spouse, Lady Macbeth. It has already received numerous postseason plaudits and is considered a strong contender for Academy Award nominations; reviewing the film for The New York Times, A.O. Scott called it a “crackling, dagger-sharp screen adaptation.”Coen is a dedicated theatergoer and an avid reader, though not one with any special knowledge of or affinity for Shakespeare. “I came to it as an amateur,” he said. “I’m still an amateur.”But look closer at “Macbeth,” and there are aspects of the play that make it fitting and perhaps inevitable subject matter for Coen. “It’s a murder story,” he said. “In a way, it’s even a horror story.”Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand in the film. Washington said Coen told him to avoid “stick-up-the-butt Shakespearean acting.” Alison Rosa/Apple and A24This somber tale may have proved an ideal escape for the director, coming at an unfamiliar juncture when Ethan had decided to take a break from film. Just when Joel was seeking new approaches to his cinematic craft as a solo director, his inspiration emerged from a foundational text of English literature.“It was a deliberate choice to do something I had not done,” Coen said. “It was an opportunity to go out of the wheelhouse that I’d been in before. It’s something that demanded I do that.”Coen, 67, was speaking earlier this month in a video interview from California. His demeanor suggested a mixture of Harold Ramis and Larry David; he could be avuncular and witty, but also defensive and averse to self-mythologizing.A kind of interplay between high and low, serious and preposterous, foul and fair would seem to be omnipresent in the Coen brothers’ filmography, which has won them four Oscars, but Joel is not necessarily inclined to consider the through lines in their work.He acknowledged that he and Ethan had made some quirky films over the years but said that “it was a mistake to think that any of it is planned.”He added, “There’s never been any real design or architecture to what we’ve done.”But even that absence of strategy was upended after their 2018 western anthology, “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs,” when Ethan decided to focus on other endeavors.Joel said that their partnership was flexible enough to accommodate this kind of disruption.“It’s not like when we first got together, we planned on working together for 40 years,” he said. “It just kind of happened that way. When we said, ‘Let’s do some other stuff separately for a little while,’ it’s not like there’s any plan for how long and what that would mean.”Joel said that making a movie without Ethan was like “having one eye put out” but added that there was “probably something healthy in taking a break.”At the very least, it gave Joel the space to contemplate alien terrain like “Macbeth.” This was a thought he’d been kicking around since at least 2016, when McDormand, his wife and frequent collaborator, asked him about directing a production of the play, in which she had starred for Berkeley Repertory Theater.Directing “Macbeth” for the stage did not appeal to Coen — “I don’t think I’d know what to do,” he said — but as a film, he saw its potential to allow him “to retreat from a lot of the ways I’d been working before.”“I wanted to go as far as I could away from realism and more towards a theatrical presentation,” he said. “I was trying to strip things away and reduce things to a theatrical essence, but still have it be cinema.”Coen and McDormand on the set. She is a producer on the film. The director explained, “I’ve always worked with members of the family.”Alison Rosa/Apple and A24On a visual level, that meant leaning into the ambiguities of Shakespeare’s play, avoiding depictions that would provide too much specificity about when or where things are taking place.“There is nothing certain about this movie, nothing sure about where it’s set,” said Bruno Delbonnel, the film’s cinematographer, who also worked with the Coens on “Buster Scruggs” and “Inside Llewyn Davis.”“We were creating this world where you never know if you’re looking up or down,” Delbonnel said. “You never know if it’s night or day.”That also meant digging down to find an essential Coen-ness in “Macbeth.” Carter Burwell, who has composed the scores for almost all the Coens’ films since their 1984 debut, “Blood Simple,” said that their movies are consistently concerned with “the pathos of people desperately trying to impose meaning on this life, this meaningless universe.”The stories they have told — including “The Tragedy of Macbeth” — put the viewer “in the position of seeing everything that’s going on and the poor characters being helpless,” Burwell said. “The characters think they’re smart, they think they’re on top of things. And we can see that, in fact, they’re just flailing helplessly.”Unlike, say, the brothers’ 2010 take on “True Grit” — when he deliberately did not watch the 1969 version — Joel Coen immersed himself in influences on “Macbeth”: He considered cinematic adaptations by Orson Welles and Roman Polanski, as well as Akira Kurosawa’s “Throne of Blood,” which transposes the drama to feudal Japan. He looked at films from Carl Dreyer, Masaki Kobayashi and F.W. Murnau, and read up on Edward Gordon Craig, the early 20th-century stage designer.And when paring down “Macbeth” to under two hours, Coen didn’t hesitate to unsheathe his sword, citing Welles’s 1948 version as a gold standard of sorts. “That’s a wacky movie,” Coen said. “Welles had no problem rearranging, cutting and inventing with Shakespeare. It was kind of liberating. You look at that and go, well, all right, he’s doing it.”McDormand, who has won three Oscars for her performances and a fourth as a producer of “Nomadland,” joined “Macbeth” as its leading lady and as a producer, for self-evident reasons. “I’ve always worked with members of the family,” Coen said.He had few words about the exit of Scott Rudin, who had produced Coen films like “No Country for Old Men” and “True Grit,” and who left this project and several others following a series of news media reports about his abusive behavior. “It’s a whole other discussion,” Coen said. “I don’t know what else to say.”Coen and Delbonnel spent several months designing the aesthetic of their “Macbeth” and planning the shots for when filming took place in Los Angeles. Delbonnel said that Coen brought him in much earlier and more extensively than in movies Joel had directed with Ethan.But in a fundamental way, Delbonnel said, Joel was no different than on previous films: “Sometimes he’ll ask you a question and say, ‘What do you think if we do that?’” Delbonnel said. “But then there’s a moment where he decides, OK, that’s what we’re going to do. And he knows exactly where it’s going.”Coen consulting with the cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel on a scene involving Kathryn Hunter. Nothing is certain in the film, not even where it’s set, Delbonnel said.Alison Rosa/Apple and A24Not that there was much hesitation in casting Washington, a two-time Academy Award winner, as the title character. Washington said he was just as eager for the role, as he’d never worked with either Coen but considered himself a fan of their “dangerous” films.“You’ll laugh or you’ll see somebody get their head blown off, possibly at the same time,” Washington said. “‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’ is one of my favorite movies. I don’t even know why. It’s just so weird.”Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      This Movie Season, It’s a Black-and-White Boom

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      “Passing,” “The Tragedy of Macbeth” and “Belfast” are just a few of the movies that forgo color for a more classical approach.Do not adjust that dial. Over the coming months, whether you’re watching new films on a streaming service or at the multiplex, more than a few of those movies are likely to be in black and white.Films as varied as “The French Dispatch” and “Being the Ricardos” employ several black-and-white sequences, while “Passing,” “Belfast” and “The Tragedy of Macbeth” are shot almost entirely without color. These are all period movies that use the old-fashioned format to evoke a bygone era, but even “C’mon C’mon,” which takes place in contemporary times and has Joaquin Phoenix as a radio journalist crisscrossing the country with his nephew, was filmed in monochrome.Is this all a coincidence, or a natural next step after recent black-and-white stunners like “Roma” and “Cold War”? To understand why everyone is going grayscale, we talked to the cinematographers behind three of the season’s most striking black-and-white features.‘The Tragedy of Macbeth’Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand set against the film’s austere atmosphere.A24For his new spin on Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” the director Joel Coen wanted to strip the play down to its barest essence. The result is a fast and ruthless reimagining leached of all color, shot not in wide-screen but in a claustrophobic 4:3 aspect ratio rarely used since the 1950s.“It’s meant to bring theatricality, and to lose temporality,” the cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel said. “It’s not about the 1700s, and it’s not about Scotland, either. We’re giving an abstraction, but a very creative one.”For Delbonnel, the creative limitations of black-and-white proved intoxicating. “I pushed the envelope even more,” Delbonnel said. “I said we shouldn’t have any furniture, and we pushed this very far: There is only one bed and a couple of tables, and there is no practical light.”All that austerity makes a striking visual impression, but Delbonnel said it was simply in service of the play’s language. The same creative rules applied to the actors Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand, who could tackle their roles as Shakespeare’s most fearsome power couple in the most unadorned fashion.As Delbonnel put it, “You say, ‘Denzel, this is the room. There is no place to sit because there is no chair. There is no glass, so you can’t drink. There is nothing you can do, so it’s all about your body language and the way you deliver the lines.’”Still, don’t get the wrong impression: Though this “Macbeth” was made in the spirit of minimalism, Delbonnel often brought in the boldest lights he could muster.“The whole movie is lit with theater light, like you’d see at a Beyoncé concert, which has very, very hard shadows,” he said. “In color, it would be unbearable, but in black-and-white, it looks amazing.”‘Passing’Negga, left, and Tessa Thompson are framed in a boxy aspect ratio for “Passing.”NetflixWhile he shot Rebecca Hall’s “Passing,” the cinematographer Eduard Grau was so committed to the film’s monochrome aesthetic that he took all the color off his iPhone, too..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-m80ywj header{margin-bottom:5px;}.css-m80ywj header h4{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:500;font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.5625rem;margin-bottom:0;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-m80ywj header h4{font-size:1.5625rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}“Even when I was taking photos, they would be in black and white,” Grau said. “You do things like that to see the world without color, to train your brain to forget about that green or pink wall and only look at the level of brightness or darkness.”Based on the 1929 novel by Nella Larsen, “Passing” is about two light-skinned Black women: Irene (Tessa Thompson), a well-respected but restless doctor’s wife, and Clare (Ruth Negga), her childhood friend who has been passing for white. A chance meeting in a hotel tearoom reunites the two after years spent apart, and Grau chose to flood that initial encounter with a striking amount of white light.“This is the brightest I’ve ever done a scene in my life,” Grau said. “You don’t see that a lot, especially in dramas, to have such a bright scene without a lot of detail in the whites. It also came from the fact that we didn’t want to clearly show to the audience at first whether our characters were white or Black or mixed race. Everything is so bright that it’s difficult to tell.”Like “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” “Passing” is filmed not just in black and white but also in a boxy aspect ratio that recalls some of Hollywood’s earliest feature films. (It may also remind the viewer how limited those movies were when it came to race, a thorny topic that the color scheme of “Passing” serves as a meta comment on.)Grau couldn’t have foreseen similarities with other current films when he made “Passing,” but he said he welcomed this winter’s bounty of black-and-white stories.“I think it is a coincidence, but this is also about love of film, and they are all true filmmakers,” Grau said. “It’s a strong starting point when a director chooses that, a good indication. Strong, powerful visions from directors make for good movies.”‘Belfast’The new film “Belfast” is about Buddy, played by Jude Hill, a young Irish boy coming of age in the turbulent 1960s.Rob Youngson / Focus FeaturesOver 15 years of shooting movies with the director Kenneth Branagh, the cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos has come to see color as both a blessing and a curse.“Color is so brilliantly descriptive in film, and even the color of someone’s eyes gives you so much information,” Zambarloukos said. “But I often find that when I’m making films with Ken, we’re trying to remove information for the audience and present them with what we want them to see.”Their new film, “Belfast,” about a young Irish boy coming of age in the turbulent 1960s, doesn’t eschew color entirely: It’s bookended by two color montages of modern-day Belfast, and whenever our young protagonist, Buddy, goes to the movies, the films he watches come to life in vivid color.But for the most part, whether Buddy is wooing a girl at school or trying to make sense of the conflict that grips his parents (Jamie Dornan and Caitriona Balfe), “Belfast” is shot in shimmering silvers.“In this case, I think we’re using a strength of black and white, which is not to tell you how a person or place looks but how they feel,” Zambarloukos said. “It has a transcendental quality to be of the past and the present. It’s realistic, but it has a certain magical sense to it as well.”Zambarloukos cut his teeth on the format while shooting Branagh’s long-delayed “Death on the Nile” (due in February), which opens with a 10-minute sequence in black and white. But now, after having filmed all those “Belfast” close-ups without color, he admits it will be hard to go back to reds, yellows and blues.“If I saw the same portrait of a person in color and in black and white, most of the time, I would tell more about that person from black-and-white,” Zambarloukos said. “It doesn’t create anything that isn’t there, but whatever is there is so amplified!” More

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      In-Person New York Film Festival Unveils Lineup

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      Opening with Joel Coen’s “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” the event will include the body horror tale “Titane” and the Harlem Renaissance adaptation “Passing.”The Cannes Palme d’Or winner “Titane,” about a serial killer with rather unorthodox sexual tastes, and the Sundance critical hit “Passing,” an adaptation of the Harlem Renaissance novel by Nella Larsen, are among the highlights of the 59th New York Film Festival, organizers announced on Tuesday.After last year’s virtual edition, screenings will be held in-person with proof of vaccination required, although there will be some outdoor and virtual events. (More details on pandemic protocols will be released in the coming weeks.)As previously announced, “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” Joel Coen’s solo directing debut, will play opening night, Sept. 24. A take on the play by Shakespeare, it stars Denzel Washington in the title role and Frances McDormand, the director’s wife, as Lady Macbeth. The centerpiece of the festival will be “The Power of the Dog,” the first Jane Campion film in more than a decade, and “Parallel Mothers,” from Pedro Almodóvar, will be the closing-night title.The main slate will feature a mix of premieres and highlights from earlier festivals. The body horror tale “Titane” made headlines last month when its director, Julia Ducournau, became only the second woman (after Campion in 1993) to win Cannes’ top prize. Other titles from the French festival heading to New York include “Benedetta,” Paul Verhoeven’s 17th-century lesbian nun potboiler; “The Souvenir Part II,” Joanna Hogg’s follow-up to her 2019 semi-autobiographical drama about a film student in 1980s London; and “The Velvet Underground,” Todd Haynes’s documentary about the band synonymous with Andy Warhol’s New York.From Sundance, “Passing,” directed by the actress Rebecca Hall, who adapted Larsen’s 1929 novel, stars Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga as childhood friends who reconnect from opposite sides of the color line. Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s animated “Flee,” which won the Sundance world cinema documentary prize, focuses on a gay Afghan refugee in Denmark.Other titles of note include Mia Hansen-Love’s “Bergman Island,” starring Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth; the comic-drama “Hit the Road,” from Panah Panahi, son of the Iranian auteur Jafar Panahi; and two films from the Korean director Hong Sangsoo, “In Front of Your Face” and “Introduction.”Passes are on sale now; tickets to individual films will go on sale Sept. 7. Go to filmlinc.org for more details. More