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    A ‘Taxi Driver’ Remake: Why Arthur Jafa Recast the Scorsese Ending

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    The artist has gone back to his filmmaking roots, re-examining what he sees as racial undertones in Martin Scorsese’s classic 1976 movie.Call it a return to his roots. The artist Arthur Jafa began his career as a cinematographer, working with his then-wife, Julie Dash, on the acclaimed “Daughters of the Dust” (1991) and with Spike Lee on “Crooklyn” (1994), before garnering art world fame, including a Golden Lion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, for “Love is the Message, The Message is Death,” a snapshot of Black life in the United States created from collaged video footage. Jafa’s practice has embraced film and video, sculpture, installation, and even painting.His newest film, which goes on view Thursday at Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea, has a provocative conceit: Jafa has remade the shockingly violent climax of a classic of American cinema — Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” (1976) — in which the main character Travis Bickle, played by Robert De Niro, storms into a seedy Times Square brothel and kills everyone in sight in order to save Iris, a child prostitute played by Jodie Foster, then 12 years old.In the original movie — what Jafa calls the “redacted version” — these characters, including Iris’s pimp Sport (played by Harvey Keitel), were white. That never felt right to Jafa. When he discovered that the film’s celebrated screenwriter, Paul Schrader, had intended Sport to be African American, he decided to “restore” the movie by introducing Black actors, except for De Niro and Foster. In the 73-minute-long film, titled “******” — or as the artist pronounces it, “Redacted” — we see this recut version of the bloody climax over and over, each time slightly but crucially different. The result is extraordinary — both technically and conceptually — and brings to the surface the racist animus long accepted as underpinning Bickle’s barely contained rage. (Quentin Tarantino also criticized the decision to change the character to white in his 2022 book, “Cinema Speculation.”)Arthur Jafa cast a replacement actor, right, as the pimp in “Taxi Driver,” originally played by Harvey Keitel, then skillfully wove in the new footage and rerecorded the voices. via Arthur Jafa and Gladstone GallerySchrader, who is still making movies at 77, said in a recent telephone conversation that the change to his original vision was the right call. “Someone at Columbia Pictures said to Marty, ‘we’re going to have a riot in the theater if we cast Sport as Black,’ and I realized they were completely right.”“I think it would have been a much more vile and revolting film if his hatred was directed completely at people of color,” he added. “You can’t make something that is so off the meter that it can’t be seen or that people simply can’t bear watching.” (Martin Scorsese did not return several calls seeking his comment.)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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      What Will Be Nominated for Oscars Next Week, and What Won’t?

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      While “Oppenheimer,” “Barbie” and “Killers of the Flower Moon” are likely to do well, the directors race is hardly set and other categories are open, too.When it comes to predicting the Oscars, you ultimately have to go with your gut … and mine is in a state of agita.That’s what happens when there are simply too many good movies and great performances to all make the cut: Even the hypothetical snubs I’m about to dole out have me tied up in knots.Which names can you expect to hear on Tuesday, when the Oscar nominations are announced? Here is what I project will be nominated in the top six Oscar categories, based on industry chatter, key laurels from the Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards, and the nominations bestowed by the Screen Actors Guild, Producers Guild of America and Directors Guild of America. Well, all of those things, and my poor, tormented gut.Best PictureLet’s start with the safest bets. “Oppenheimer,” “Barbie” and “Killers of the Flower Moon” scored top nominations from the producers, directors and actors guilds last week and I expect each film to earn double-digit Oscar nominations. “The Holdovers” and “Poor Things” are secure, too: Though they didn’t make it into SAG’s best-ensemble race, both films boast lead actors who’ve won the Golden Globe and Critics Choice Award. If this were an old-school race, these would be the five nominees.But there are five more slots to fill, and I project the next three will go to “Past Lives” and “American Fiction,” passion picks with distinct points of view, as well as “Maestro,” the sort of ambitious biopic that Oscar voters are typically in the tank for. I’m also betting that the French courtroom drama “Anatomy of a Fall” and the German-language Holocaust drama “The Zone of Interest” find favor with the academy’s increasingly international voting body. (Even the Producers Guild, which so often favors big studio movies over global cinema, found room to nominate that pair.)There are still a few dark horses that hope to push their way into this lineup, like “The Color Purple,” “May December,” “Society of the Snow” and “Origin.” But I suspect these 10 are locked and loaded.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?  More

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      What to Read After Watching ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’

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      Now that the Scorsese epic is on demand, you can catch up with the drama from home, then go down a rabbit hole with our guides.“Killers of the Flower Moon,” Martin Scorsese’s telling of the terrible history of the killings of at least 60 Osage people in the 1920s by white neighbors who coveted their oil money, has been part of the film conversation since it was first unveiled at the Cannes Film Festival in May. This month, New York Times critics named it their top movie of 2023. Now that it’s available on demand (and is expected to reach streaming later this month), here’s a guide to what to read about the drama:The HistoryThe film is based on David Grann’s 2017 nonfiction best seller of the same title, which examined both the horrifying murder plot and the birth of the F.B.I. The Times said of the book, “It will sear your soul.” Here’s the review.The movie largely jettisons Grann’s F.B.I. angle and focuses on the wealthy Osage woman Mollie Kyle (played by Lily Gladstone); her white husband, Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio); and his uncle, William King Hale (Robert De Niro), the ringleader of the conspiracy. Here’s a rundown of the facts behind the drama.The ProductionInitially the film was going to follow the book more closely and track an F.B.I. agent as he investigated the mystery. But “I think Marty and I just looked at each other and we felt there was no soul to it,” DiCaprio told our columnist Kyle Buchanan. So they started over again. Here’s what the stars and director had to say.In the wedding scene, Mollie wears what looks to be a soldier’s uniform with a tall hat as her bridal outfit. In fact, the look was based on military dress and hewed closely to Osage tradition, according to designers and members of the tribe. Here’s a closer look at the costumes.The film is stocked with cameos from musicians like Jason Isbell, comedians like Tatanka Means and even a filmmaker (we won’t give it away here). Find out who’s who in the cast.The ReactionThe Times’s chief film critic, Manohla Dargis, called the film a “heartbreaking masterpiece” and “a true-crime epic that Scorsese — with grace, sorrow and sublime filmmaking clarity — has turned into a requiem for the country.” Here’s the review.The Times’s two film critics both named “Killers of the Flower Moon” the best film of 2023. “Manifest Destiny makes a hell of a gangster movie,” Dargis wrote. And Alissa Wilkinson wrote that Scorsese proceeds “from the firm belief that guilt is generational, just like grief.” Here are their Top 10 lists.DiCaprio’s Burkhart is unlike any Scorsese protagonist because, well, he’s dumb as rocks. And that changes the film in a fundamental way. Here’s a critic’s notebook explaining why.Scorsese has long been identified with ornately edited, violent set pieces. In “The Irishman” and now “Killers,” those flourishes have given way to blunt truth, argues one writer. Learn how Scorsese has rethought violence. More

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      Martin Scorsese’s Unwise Guys

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      From Travis Bickle to the protagonist of “Killers of the Flower Moon,” the director has excelled at depicting a certain kind of male antihero.If “Men Without Women” seems painfully apt as a title for Ernest Hemingway’s fiction, the equivalent for Martin Scorsese’s work might be “Men Failing Women.” From “Who’s That Knocking at My Door” to “Killers of the Flower Moon,” for more than 50 years, his movies have been a dismal and heartbreaking primer on what not to do when you love someone. His male protagonists continue to fail their significant others even when given multiple chances to reverse that pattern: a paradigm even more fraught if the protagonist is a white dimwit and his wife a long-suffering Osage. In his welcome to the audience before “Killers” begins, Scorsese confides that his film is deeply personal, and it is, not just because he has always had a keen sense of social injustice but also because of its obsession with the jaw-dropping gap between the man his protagonist wants to be and the man he is. Which helps explain an aspect of the movie that has most puzzled some reviewers: If it is about what happened to the Osage, then why are we spending so much time with a white schnook?Maybe because the self-deluded sinner who wants to repent but refuses to change has been Scorsese’s most persistent and agonized subject. At their most dysfunctional, those figures are so terrifying that they’ve become cultural totems of toxic masculinity — Travis Bickle! Jake La Motta! — as their rage at their inadequacies lacerates everything, including, of course, the women closest to them.Even at their best, Scorsese’s protagonists never want to face certain hard facts, and in their pursuit of a good time, they’re masters of what “Animal House” memorialized as a “really futile and stupid gesture.” It figures that they’re often hoods or hustlers, either with a pool cue or hedge fund. And happily for us, Scorsese has never been able to resist the energy they bring to a movie. “Goodfellas” is peerless at viscerally rendering the appeal of the gangster’s freewheeling heartlessness, and when “Killers” comes closest to that energy — when the two male leads frantically argue over the pea-brained implementation of a murder they’ve arranged — the result is the movie’s most high-spirited comic moment. What we’re confronting in these movies is self-absorption without understanding: the self as an incomprehensible spectacle. Leonardo DiCaprio’s Ernest Burkhart seems flummoxed by his actions every step of the way, given how much he is sure he loves Lily Gladstone’s Mollie. He tells his uncle that he loves money and women, and Mollie’s a dream combination of both, given her oil wealth. At first his courting goes nowhere, but eventually she is won over — DiCaprio is DiCaprio, after all, even if he does spend the movie in a permanent frown, and she’s also drawn to his honesty when he wryly confesses his own laziness and greed — and the question for the audience becomes why she isn’t acting on his transparent duplicity. One reason might involve the sheer scale of his treachery — he’s betraying her as a part of a conspiracy to murder her entire family, including her, as well as any number of others — but another might be how much when in love we work to deny what we know in the name of faith or hope. After her sister is murdered, Mollie’s voice-over reveals that she keeps her fears at bay by closing her heart and keeping what’s good there. She knows not to trust corrupt doctors with her insulin, but she can’t bring herself to acknowledge Ernest’s role in what is happening. She confides to her priest that she’s afraid to eat in her own house, but when he asks who might want to harm her, she remains silent. When she is discovered at death’s door by F.B.I. agents, even in her extremity she asks, “Where’s my husband?” And if Mollie is the angel on Ernest’s shoulder, his uncle William Hale (Robert De Niro) is the devil: playing on Ernest’s humiliation by reminding him that she’s making things harder on him and informing him that she had another husband she has kept secret (as if Hale is aware that a reliable trigger of abusiveness in a Scorsese movie is the murderousness of male jealousy) and finally appearing at Mollie’s bedside so much like the Angel of Death that in her delirium, she asks if he’s real.But this passion play is Ernest’s. Because he insists that he loves Mollie, he therefore would never want to hurt her, and therefore can’t be doing so. As Rob Corddry of “The Daily Show” put it on the subject of Abu Ghraib: “Just because torturing prisoners is something we did, doesn’t mean it’s something we would do.” Which is where the movie’s race politics becomes so brutal as well: Mollie is, after all, not white, and as such even easier to disregard. As his uncle’s plotting gets ever more destructive, Ernest begins to grope his way toward opting out — he hesitates, at least, about contacting the thug tasked with blowing up his sister-in-law’s house with her in it — and the subsequent long shot of the devastation he confronts afterward works nicely as a figure for his inner life. By administering the insulin he has poisoned, he can simultaneously enact his love and eradicate the problem she poses to his sense of himself as not an awful man. In the same way, he caves to his uncle’s demand that he sign the insurance policy on his own life; he knows what it implies but resolves to act as though he doesn’t. Like so many of Scorsese’s sinners, he wants to do penance, and so drinks the drug he has been adding to Mollie’s insulin, while the fires of hell apparently burn outside (fields set afire, also the work of Uncle Hale).Jesse Plemons’s F.B.I. agent Tom White, the main figure of rectitude, finally says to Ernest, “You’re a good man, Ernest, and you love your wife and children.” He continues, “I don’t think this is how your life was meant to turn out,” and reminds him that his uncle has done nothing except make him do bad things and take advantage of him because of his disposition, that last noun reminding us of both his flaws and his agency. After he finally testifies, in Mollie’s presence, to most of what he has done, in the movie’s most excruciating scene, the couple are given time in a room, and DiCaprio and Gladstone are spectacularly good at what direness can pass between a married couple even if they love each other. She waits for him to come clean, and he won’t. She asks if he has told her the whole truth. He answers he has. She has to keep pressing — What did he give her, in her insulin? What was in the shots? — and though he is demolished by her pain and his guilt, he won’t confess. Her face hardens, and she leaves. Scorsese’s movies have persistently left their protagonists in this semi-disingenuous state of sitting clueless amid the rubble. From Jimmy Doyle to Ace Rothstein to Howard Hughes, however much they intermittently adore their women, they find themselves gaping at the pain they’ve caused as if through the wrong end of a telescope. Their regard, when they feel it, is intense, but in the male-dominated world of striving they inhabit, that regard evaporates periodically, and they’re baffled if not enraged to be called on that. They’re indemnified by their knowledge of who they meant to be, and that ideal self becomes the version they stridently defend. Just because torturing prisoners is something we did … The last time we see Ernest, he’s still pitching between self-pity and self-awareness. He is in that same maddening state in which “Raging Bull” left Jake La Motta, who at one point manages to figure it out: “I’ve done a lot of bad things, Joey. Maybe it’s comin’ back to me.” Source photographs for illustration above: Apple TV+; Getty Images.Jim Shepard has written eight novels, including most recently “Phase Six” and “The Book of Aron,” which won the PEN/New England Award for fiction and the Clark Fiction Prize. He teaches at Williams College. More

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      Popcast (Deluxe): Britney Spears Tells … Some?

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicThis week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the weekly culture roundup show on YouTube hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, includes segments on:“The Woman in Me,” the new memoir by Britney Spears, which is the first major creative project she’s released since she was freed two years ago from the conservatorship that governed her life and career“Killers of the Flower Moon,” the new Martin Scorsese film — starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro and Lily Gladstone — about the tragedies that befell the Osage Nation in the 1920s, as members of the community were targeted for their oil inheritance money and rightsNew songs from Mustafa and Corbin, Lil Tracy & Black Kray Snack of the weekConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      Can the Tribeca Festival Make Audio Appealing?

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      The Tribeca Festival and audio artists each have something the other wants. Can they make it work?When Winnie and Alex Kemp submitted their first original fiction podcast “The Imperfection” to the 2021 Tribeca Festival, they set their expectations near the curb.The couple, co-founders of the podcast studio Wolf at the Door, believed in the project. Making the nine-episode series — a surrealist caper about two impaired friends whose psychiatrist goes missing — had been a nearly yearlong labor of love, but early signals from the market had been humbling. An agent the couple hired to find distribution for the show had come back empty-handed, and emails to 200 journalists generated just one reply — a rejection.At the Tribeca Festival, which dropped the word “film” from its name that year and expanded its focus on video games, virtual reality, music and audio, “The Imperfection” received a warmer reception. It was among the inaugural slate of 12 officially selected podcasts to premiere at the festival.Being chosen by Tribeca meant “The Imperfection” was featured with the other festival selections on the Apple Podcasts and Audible home pages, helping it reach the top 20 of Apple Podcasts’ fiction chart. The show was later nominated for best podcast of the year and best fiction writing at The Ambie awards, the industry’s answer to the Oscars. And the Kemps got new representation with the Creative Artists Agency; last year, they sold the television rights to the show, and they will co-write the pilot script.“It was a huge boon to us helping our first show get found,” Winnie Kemp said. “There are so many shows out there; the hardest thing to figure out is, ‘How do I cut through the noise?’”Winnie and Alex Kemp submitted their original fiction podcast “The Imperfection” to the 2021 Tribeca Festival.n/aThough it has never equaled the most prestigious galas of the film world, the Tribeca Festival, which began last Wednesday and will feature audio selections this week, has emerged as a uniquely appealing showcase for podcast creators. The demand for credible curatorial organizations is high in podcast land, where an explosion of titles — over two million have been created since the start of 2020, according to the database Listen Notes — has made it hard to break out even as overall listenership has increased.While other festivals exist specifically for audio storytelling, and some documentary festivals include podcast selections, Tribeca’s history — it was founded in 2002 by Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal and Craig Hatkoff — and association with Hollywood talent have made it an instant player in the audio community.“This is the next frontier of interesting, creative, independent storytelling — so much so that discoverability has been a challenge for audiences,” said Cara Cusumano, the director and vice president of programming at the Tribeca Festival. “That’s our forte; there was a place for us to play a role in this ecosystem and deliver an experience that you won’t find anywhere else.”This year, 16 podcasts are competing for various awards in fiction and nonfiction categories. The selections include Alissa Escarce, Nellie Gilles and Joe Richman’s “The Unmarked Graveyard,” a documentary series about the anonymous dead of New York’s Hart Island cemetery; Georgie Aldaco’s “These Were Humans,” a sketch comedy series that imagines the artifacts of an extinct human race; and Glynnis MacNicol, Emily Marinoff and Jo Piazza’s “Wilder,” a nonfiction series about the life and legacy of the “Little House on the Prairie” author Laura Ingalls Wilder.The festival will also host live tapings and premieres of several podcasts that are not in competition, including “Pod Save America,” Crooked Media’s popular political talk show; “Just Jack & Will,” the actors Sean Hayes and Eric McCormack’s new “Will & Grace” rewatch podcast and “You Feeling This?” an Los Angeles-centric fiction anthology from James Kim.Davy Gardner, the curator of audio storytelling at Tribeca, said the festival aims to demonstrate that podcasts deserve a comparable level of “cultural recognition” to films.“Tribeca is giving these creators the full red-carpet treatment,” he said. “This is its own art form and we want to help elevate it and push it forward.”Film festivals have long been the envy of audio artists. In the early 1990s, Sundance helped create a vogue for independent and art-house films that blossomed into a booming market. Filmmakers who entered the festival with few resources and no name recognition could exit it with the backing of a major studio and a burgeoning career.No similar infrastructure exists for independent podcasters. As major funders like Spotify and Amazon have consolidated around easy-to-monetize true-crime documentaries and celebrity interview shows — a trend that has intensified amid industrywide economic woes and a series of layoffs — many artists have struggled to find support for less obviously commercial work.“If you don’t have a promotional budget or aren’t attached to a big network it’s really hard to find an audience,” said Bianca Giaever, whose memoiristic podcast “Constellation Prize” was featured by the Tribeca Festival in 2021. (She is also a former producer of the Times’ podcast “The Daily”). “It’s a vicious cycle, because then less of that work gets made.” Bianca Giaever’s memoiristic podcast “Constellation Prize” was featured by the Tribeca Festival in 2021.n/aOf course, even award-winning films at the biggest festivals don’t always become hits. And podcast creators at Tribeca have to compete for audiences and prospective business partners accustomed to filling their schedules with movie premieres.Johanna Zorn, who co-founded the long-running Third Coast International Audio Festival and presented audio work at multiple documentary film festivals in the 2010s, said the payoff sometimes fell short of the promise.“We went to some fabulous film festivals and we were happy to be there,” she said. “But did they help us get real press coverage? Get us into a room with people who could lead us to the next thing? Give us something that we could really build on? Not so much.”To cast the podcast selections in an optimal light, Gardner and his colleagues have had to learn how to exhibit an art form not customarily experienced in a communal setting. They have planned around a dozen events at theaters and other venues around Manhattan that will pair excerpts from featured work with live discussions or supplementary video.One thing they won’t include? Quiet rooms with only an audio track and an empty stage.“I’ve tried it,” Gardner said wearily. “It’s incredibly awkward.” More

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      ‘About My Father’ Review: Robert De Niro in Dad Mode Again

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      The comedian Sebastian Maniscalco enlists his “Irishman” colleague in this labored comedy, where gags fall flat.The stand-up comedian Sebastian Maniscalco first worked with Robert De Niro in Martin Scorsese’s 2019 crime drama “The Irishman.” Maniscalco played the erratic real-life gangster Joey Gallo; De Niro’s character, Frank Sheeran, kills him in the movie. Scorsese has a near-uncanny knack for effectively using professional funnymen in serious roles — Jerry Lewis in “The King of Comedy” and Don Rickles in “Casino” to cite but two — and Maniscalco acquitted himself well in his small part.The point we are obliged to get to is this: Maniscalco has now enlisted De Niro to act in “About My Father,” a romantic comedy largely derived from the comedian’s own life. How largely? Well, Maniscalco plays a character named Sebastian Maniscalco. He’s engaged to his ideal woman, Ellie (Leslie Bibb, who’s charming here), and has finally been invited to her very rich family’s Fourth of July weekend. In short order, Sebastian’s father, Salvo, is invited too. Salvo is an Italian immigrant from Sicily who runs a beauty salon, has a fierce work ethic, is dead cheap and severely opinionated, and has several other traits that make for engaging stand-up comedy and cinematic character work.De Niro is reliable in his comedic mode. Here, with his hand gestures and the frequent monosyllabic exclamations of exasperation, the actor’s Salvo sometimes resembles a kinder, gentler version of his Jake LaMotta in “Raging Bull.” The supporting players David Rasche and Kim Cattrall as the future in-laws provide good comic foils for De Niro.Alas, in less than an hour and a half of running time (the director Laura Terruso does orchestrate the proceedings with a palpable sense of dispatch), the movie demonstrates how quickly “amiable and inconsequential” can shift to “hackneyed and labored.” A sickly poultry improvisation gag involving a peacock falls flat, and the speed bump to the happy ending is right out of the Hallmark Movie Scriptwriter’s Handbook.About My FatherIn theaters. Rated PG-13 for language, partial nudity, improvised-poultry humor. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ Premieres at Cannes

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      Martin Scorsese directed this harrowing and deeply American true-crime drama set in the 1920s. Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro and Lily Gladstone star. On Saturday, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” Martin Scorsese’s harrowing epic about one of America’s favorite pastimes — mass murder — had its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, screening out of competition. It’s Scorsese’s first movie at the event since his nightmarish screwball “After Hours” was presented in 1986, winning him best director. For this edition, he walked the red carpet with the two stars who have defined the contrasting halves of his career: Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio.Adapted from David Grann’s nonfiction best seller of the same title — the screenplay was written by Scorsese and Eric Roth — the movie recounts the murders of multiple oil-rich members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma during the 1920s. Grann’s book is subtitled “The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI,” while the movie primarily focuses on what was happening on the ground in Oklahoma. The name of the young bureau chief, J. Edgar Hoover, comes up but largely evokes the agency’s future, its authority, scandals and that time DiCaprio played a closeted leader in Clint Eastwood’s “J. Edgar” (2011).“Killers of the Flower Moon” is shocking, at times crushingly sorrowful, a true-crime mystery that in its bone-chilling details can make it feel closer to a horror movie. And while it focuses on a series of murders committed in the 1920s, Scorsese is, emphatically, also telling a larger story about power, Native Americans and the United States. A crucial part of that story took place in the 1870s, when the American government forced the Osage to leave Kansas and relocate in the Southwest. Another chapter was written several decades later when oil was discovered on Osage land in present-day Oklahoma.When DiCaprio’s Ernest Burkhart arrives by train at the Osage boomtown of Fairfax, oil derricks crowd the bright green plains as far as the eye can see. Still wearing his dun-colored doughboy uniform from the recently ended war, Ernest has come to live with his uncle, William Hale (Robert DeNiro), along with a clutch of other relatives, including his brother (Scott Shepherd). A cattleman with owlish glasses and a pinched smile, the real Hale had nurtured such close relations with the local Native American population that he was revered, Grann writes, “as King of the Osage Hills.”With crisp efficiency, soaring cameras and just enough history to ground the narrative, Scorsese plunges you right into the region’s tumult, which is abuzz with new money that some are spending and others are trying to steal. The Osage owned the mineral rights to their land, which had some of the largest oil deposits in the country, and they leased it to prospectors. In the early 20th century, Grann writes, every person on the tribal roll began receiving payouts. The Osage became fantastically wealthy, and in 1923, he adds, “the tribe took in more than $30 million, the equivalent today of more than $400 million.”“Killers of the Flower Moon” is organized around Ernest’s relationship with both Hale and a young Osage woman, Mollie (Lily Gladstone), whom he meets while taxiing townspeople around. Much like Fairfax, where luxury autos race down the dirt main road amid shrieking people and terrified horses, Ernest is soon hopped up, frenetic, all wild smiles and gushing enthusiasm. He keeps on jumping — it’s as if he’s gotten a contact high from the wealth — though his energy changes after he meets Mollie. They marry and have children, finding refuge with each other as the dead Osage start to pile up.Gladstone and DiCaprio fit persuasively even if their characters have contrasting vibes, temperaments and physicalities. When she’s out and about, this pacific, reserved woman turns her face into an impassive mask and wraps a long traditional blanket around her, effectively cocooning her body with it. With her beauty, stillness and sly Mona Lisa smile, Mollie exerts a great gravitational force on Ernest and the viewer alike; you’re both quickly smitten. DiCaprio will earn most of the attention, but without Gladstone, the movie wouldn’t have the same slow-building, soul-heavy emotional impact. Ernest is a fascinating, thorny character, especially in the age of Marvel Manichaeism, and he’s rived by contradictions that he scarcely seems aware of. DiCaprio’s performance is initially characterized by Ernest’s eagerness to please Hale — there’s comedy and pathos in his mugging and flop sweat — but grows quieter, more interior and delicately complex as the mystery deepens. It’s instructive that Ernest is frowning the first time you see him, an expression that takes on greater significance when you realize that DiCaprio is mirroring De Niro’s famed grimace, a choice that draws a visual line between the characters and the men who have been Scorsese’s twin cinematic lodestars.I’ll have more to say about “Killers of the Flower Moon” when it opens in American theaters on October. More

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      Ralph Macchio Will Always Be ‘The Karate Kid.’ He’s Finally Fine With That.

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      His new memoir, “Waxing On,” sees the ’80s star making peace with the role that has brought him back into circulation thanks to “Cobra Kai.”Playing Daniel LaRusso in “The Karate Kid” made Ralph Macchio famous for life. For decades, people have been telling him where they were when they saw the 1984 popcorn flick or how its underdog story affected them.Such all-encompassing fame, however, came with a downside.As he tried to move on in his acting career, he couldn’t quite leave the role behind. Sometimes, he said, he even felt stifled by it, no longer the freewheeling but vulnerable 22-year-old whose character in the movie learned the importance of balance, in life and in martial arts.Nearly four decades later, he has written a memoir, “Waxing On: The Karate Kid and Me,” about the making of the movie, and how it has shaped — and continues to shape — his life.The book is reassuringly free of scandal or self-destructive behavior, but there’s a palpable ambivalence that runs through its 241 pages, though ultimately the tone bends toward optimism.Macchio as Daniel LaRusso in the first film, a hit that spawned two sequels.Columbia Pictures, via Everett CollectionHaving wrapped his fifth season reprising the role in “Cobra Kai,” Netflix’s surprisingly popular sequel series, Macchio seems to have made peace with, and even embraced, what he calls “the wonderful gift.”Looking back, he writes, the original film is “a prime example of when Hollywood gets it all right. It teaches and inspires through pure entertainment.”On a sunny rooftop terrace in Lower Manhattan one recent morning, Macchio — a not at all 60-looking 60, even with his sunglasses off — displayed the natural relatability that has been a hallmark of his career. It’s something he shares with Daniel LaRusso, “the every-kid next door,” he explained, who “had no business winning anything.”Growing up on Long Island, Macchio would watch MGM movie musicals with his mom. Soon enough, he was taking tap-dancing lessons in between Little League games and working Saturdays with his dad. (His brother took more to the family laundromat and pump-truck businesses.)Along with roles in school plays and dance recitals, Macchio started auditioning for commercials, leading to two Bubble Yum spots. After his first movie, “Up the Academy,” and a one-season stint on ABC’s “Eight Is Enough,” he landed the career-changing role of the “lost puppy” Johnny Cade, opposite his fellow teen idols C. Thomas Howell and Matt Dillon, in Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Outsiders.”Back home, Macchio, then 21, got called for another audition. The screenplay was based on an article about a bullied kid who learned martial arts for self-defense. It was set to be directed by John G. Avildsen, who had made the underdog classic “Rocky.”“I recall connecting to the father-and-son elements and heart in the story right off the bat,” Macchio writes of his first reading of the screenplay. But he “found some of the high school story line characters a bit corny and stereotyped.”One other thing bothered him: the title. He thought it sounded ridiculous. “I mean, can you imagine?” he writes. “If I ever did get this part and the movie hit, I would have to carry this label for the rest of my life!”Macchio, right, with C. Thomas Howell in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 film “The Outsiders.”Warner Home VideoTo Robert Mark Kamen, who wrote the movie’s screenplay, Macchio was the natural choice: He mixed a “pugnacious attitude” with emotional vulnerability.“He was sharp. He was smart,” Kamen said in a phone interview. “And if he got in a fight, he had nothing to back it up but being a wise guy. It was exactly who the character was.”Then the ’80s started tilting toward the ’90s. Macchio felt he was aging out of the character, but the character wasn’t aging out of him — at least as far as the entertainment industry was concerned.In 1986, with “The Karate Kid Part II” in theaters and a third movie on the horizon, Macchio got a chance to stretch, as the struggling son of the drug dealer played by Robert De Niro in the Broadway drama “Cuba and His Teddy Bear.”“It was all moving pretty fast,” he recalled in the interview. “I just wish I soaked it in a little more. Here I am, toe to toe with De Niro every night.”In a phone interview, De Niro said he admired Macchio’s levelheadedness and work ethic. It was “easy to like him personally, and then also relate to him in what we were doing,” he said. “We had something already to work off.”Macchio with Burt Young, left, and Robert DeNiro in a scene from the play “Cuba and His Teddy Bear.”Martha Swope/The New York Public Library for the Performing ArtsBut behind the scenes, Macchio’s personal frustrations were mounting — moments that are among the book’s most revealing.One night the famed film director Sidney Lumet was in the audience. Backstage after the performance, Lumet said he was planning a film to be called “Running on Empty,” and was interested in him playing “a significant role” in it, Macchio recalls in the book.The problem was that the time Lumet was slated to shoot “Running on Empty” for one studio directly conflicted with the production schedule for “The Karate Kid Part III” at another.“The ‘Running on Empty’ ship was set to sail,” Macchio writes, “and I was consigned back to my original port of call.” (River Phoenix was nominated for an Oscar in the part.)On another night, Warren Beatty was the surprise visitor to Macchio’s dressing room. The young actor shared his frustrations; Beatty counseled him, suggesting he find balance between his commercial successes and his other ambitions. “Don’t look down on those movies,” Macchio writes, recalling what Beatty said. “You need that as much as you want this (meaning the De Niro play).”One bright spot was his being cast in 1992’s “My Cousin Vinny,” alongside Joe Pesci and Marisa Tomei. Macchio’s daughter was born that same year, and his son would arrive three years later.In “Cobra Kai,” Macchio plays a grown Daniel LaRusso, who meets up again with a former nemesis, portrayed by Yuji Okumoto.NetflixStill, he writes of the ’90s, when “planning the growth of our family on Long Island … my career had little to no growth of its own. The future was looming and unknown, and the unknown was daunting to me.”His agents floated the idea of doing a television series, but the development deal only led to a few episodes, never to be aired. Macchio then turned to making short films and writing screenplays.“I would draw from the lessons that I had learned from the Avildsens and Coppolas of the world,” he writes. “I kept myself creatively fulfilled and thriving during those leaner acting years. I was finding the balance in work and family.”Then, in 2018, came “Cobra Kai,” the vision of the creators Jon Hurwitz, Josh Heald and Hayden Schlossberg.Macchio would play Daniel LaRusso once again, except this time he’d be a middle-aged family man, though still open to a rivalry with Johnny Lawrence and the Cobra Kai dojo, albeit one with a bit more complexity this time.Signing Macchio on took some persuading.“I understood where I fit in the construct of ‘Cobra Kai’ and the storytelling,” he said. “If the show bombed and tanked, I’d probably say, you know, I was right. I was worried about that. … But everything happened right.”“The future was looming and unknown, and the unknown was daunting to me,” Macchio writes of his post- “Karate Kid” fortunes. Nearly three decades later came “Cobra Kai.”Tonje Thilesen for The New York TimesThe new series, he said, understands what made “The Karate Kid” such a favorite: “Fathers and sons, bullying, redemption, overcoming the obstacles, finding your way, falling forward, skinning your knees, scraping your hands, getting up, figuring it out.”In the book, Macchio acknowledges that in “Cobra Kai” “the tone at times is different,” but “a common ground it shares with the movie is in its heart.” It’s that kind of emotional openness the screenwriter, Kamen, saw in the actor decades ago. After the interview was over, Macchio stepped into the elevator, heading to the building’s lobby. Others got in as well. One recognized him, and asked for a picture.“I’m just the elevator guy,” he said, with a grin. More