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      When the Oscars Were Held Amid Another Divisive War

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      Three days before the 2003 ceremony, the United States invaded Iraq. Despite pleas to delay the awards, the academy went ahead with what became a politics-suffused evening.On March 23, 2003, as the rest of the world watched televised images of captives and corpses identified as American soldiers, limos carrying high-fashion-clad celebrities rolled up outside what was then known as the Kodak Theater in Los Angeles.The United States had invaded Iraq just three days before, and, until that morning, there was still the possibility that the Oscars wouldn’t go on.As A-listers like Nicole Kidman, Halle Berry and Steve Martin — the host — were herded through metal detectors amid a large law enforcement presence, a few blocks away, police officers holding clubs faced off with demonstrators trying to get closer to the theater (none did).This year, another war is in the headlines as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences mounts another Oscars. So far, almost no one has spoken out at precursor awards shows, but it was very different in 2003.“It felt weird to dress up and go to this thing while our fellow Americans were all overseas about to get involved in something that was very dangerous,” the director Chris Sanders recalled in a recent interview. Sanders was nominated that year for best animated feature film for directing “Lilo & Stitch.”Newly minted winners like Adrien Brody and Nicole Kidman, front left, joined past winners onstage in 2003. Kevork Djansezian/Associated PressWe 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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      ‘Space: The Longest Goodbye’ Review

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      This documentary by Ido Mizrahy examines the psychological challenges of space exploration for astronauts and their loved ones as scientists consider whether humans could reach Mars.In “Space: The Longest Goodbye,” scientists researching the problems of long-term space exploration go where movies have gone before. Sending astronauts into hibernation to conserve scarce resources? Pairing them with an artificially intelligent entity that can act as a pal and sounding board? Screenwriters have tried these things already, with results probably best kept in fiction.But such gambits may offer real solutions for getting humans to Mars. And they are gambits that this fitfully intriguing, sometimes wide-eyed documentary, directed by Ido Mizrahy, takes seriously.“Soft, squishy humans are completely unfathomable to engineers,” says Jack Stuster, an anthropologist who asked residents of the International Space Station to keep journals. One of the principal interviewees is Al Holland, a psychologist who assembled a unit at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to provide support for astronauts. He discusses his experience in 2010 consulting on the Chilean mine disaster, which had striking parallels with the isolation of space life.We also hear from Kayla Barron, a submarine warfare officer who decided to go to space, and her husband, who stayed behind; as a military couple, they were used to living separately, but this posed a different challenge. And we see clips of personal video chats that the astronaut Cady Coleman held with her husband and son back on Earth, through a system that sometimes didn’t work. “It’s hard for me to really realize how hard it was for a little kid to just have to be so very patient,” she recalls in the documentary.On Mars missions, distance will make similar real-time communication impossible, which means that astronauts won’t even have that kind of intermittent contact. “Space: The Longest Goodbye” leaves open the question of whether anyone could get to the red planet with his or her sanity intact.Space: The Longest GoodbyeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘High & Low — John Galliano’ Review: Designing a Comeback

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      This documentary tracks what happened after the British designer was caught on camera voicing racist and antisemitic hate speech.By the time the documentary “High & Low: John Galliano” enters its second hour, you have learned a little about its titular subject’s life. You’ve seen him at work and at play, and you’ve also watched his 2011 drunken antisemitic rant — “I love Hitler” — which was captured on video. You’ve learned about his childhood in England, his time studying fashion in school, his habit of indulging to excess. Mostly, you have witnessed the unfolding of one of the most exalted careers in high fashion, a decades-long spectacle filled with sensational designs, leggy beauties and air kisses, all set to the drone of millions upon millions of dollars in annual sales.An hour into this fabulousness, I scribbled: “don’t see how this explains his hateful comments.” When the second and final hour ended, I had learned that Galliano’s father could be violent toward his son and that the designer’s career had been stressful; though, of course, many people with bad parents and hard jobs don’t spew hate, even in the grip of serious addiction. In truth, I didn’t need an explanation. I just wanted something — even a glimmer — that shed light on why on three occasions in 2010 and 2011, he had voiced virulent prejudice. I also wondered what he said when he wasn’t on camera, a question this movie never broaches.The director Kevin Macdonald asks Galliano questions in “High & Low,” but the answers are largely self-serving and unsatisfying in a movie that, for the most part, plays like yet another installment in a highly publicized redemption narrative. In the main, it is a familiar portrait, one that Macdonald has assembled using archival and original material, including far too many clips from Abel Gance’s 1927 epic “Napoléon,” a Galliano fixation. He started his label in the mid-1980s, was named the designer at Givenchy the next decade and moved to Dior in 1996, a trajectory from punk upstart to acclaimed visionary and international brand that paralleled the steep rise in the global stakes of the luxury fashion industry.As interviewees chatter and declaim, Macdonald regularly cuts to runway imagery, which is certainly more enjoyable than enduring Galliano’s prejudices. The clothes invariably pop. The shapes, lines, colors and textures are as wildly divergent as are the designer’s sometimes eyebrow-raising ideas and influences, like his “Empress Josephine Meets Lolita” collection in 1992 and the Dior show in 2000 inspired by Paris’s unhoused people. There’s a surfeit of beauty, though the visual quality of the archival material is suboptimal until the shift to digital. Disappointingly, there are few specifics about the money and especially the labor — Galliano’s or that of the technicians who help realize his vision — needed to make these clothes.Galliano’s fall happened swiftly. On Feb. 25, 2011, Dior suspended him after an incident at a Paris cafe initially described as a drunken tussle. “There was never the slightest comment of a racist or antisemitic connotation,” his lawyer, Stéphane Zerbib, told The New York Times at that point. Then the video surfaced in which Galliano railed at patrons, claiming to love Hitler and saying, “people like you would be dead today” and “your mothers, your forefathers” would be “gassed.” On March 1, Dior fired him. That September, a French tribunal convicted him in connection with two incidents, including another cafe rant in which he employed hate speech aimed at Asian and Jewish people. He was given a suspended fine.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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      ‘A Revolution on Canvas’ Review: The Personal, the Political and the Painting

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      A documentary about lost artwork intimately involves one of its directors.Midway through “A Revolution on Canvas,” one of the documentary’s directors, Sara Nodjoumi, receives a warning from a friend. She and her father, the painter Nikzad Nodjoumi (commonly known as Nicky) have been trying to discover if his paintings — left behind at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art when he fled Iran in 1980 — are still in the basement archives of the museum. By video chat, a friend counsels caution. “It’s just a film,” he says. “You don’t want to risk your life.”That’s not hyperbole. An element of danger hangs over “A Revolution on Canvas,” which Sara directed with her husband, Till Schauder. The film’s goal is to locate Sara’s father’s paintings and, hopefully, bring the work to the United States, where father and daughter both live. But the political situation that drove her father away from his homeland and from his protest paintings puts their quest, and anyone who helps them in it, in danger.Nicky Nodjoumi moved to New York in the 1960s, arriving after the artist Nahid Hagigat, whom he’d met as a student in Tehran and who would become his wife. Yet Nicky returned to Tehran in the late 1970s, feeling a pull to criticize the reign of the Shah through his art. It’s remarkable work, blending pop art techniques, classical Persian painting, illustration and a bold vision for criticizing not just the Shah but all kinds of ideologies. Seeing his art — which is sprinkled liberally throughout the film — makes it clear why he was a figure of danger in Iran.A few stories battle for attention in “A Revolution on Canvas”: Sara’s family history, Iran’s political history and the search for Nicky’s lost paintings. The braiding of these can be bumpy, and a little frustrating. It’s not always clear why we’re jumping from one strand to the next.Yet each strand on its own is fascinating. The film ably explains the history of midcentury Iran before the revolution through the stories of Sara’s parents, and in particular her father’s solo show at the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art just after the Iranian revolution. The threats he and the museum received were the impetus for his return to New York, without his paintings. He and Hagigat split up years later, but their time together was filled with activism, child-rearing and art.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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      Robert M. Young, Filmmaker Who Indulged His Wanderlust, Dies at 99

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      The subjects of his documentaries included Indigenous peoples, civil rights sit-ins and the war in Angola. His narrative films included “Extremities” and “The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez.”Robert M. Young, an eclectic director whose documentary subjects included civil rights lunch counter sit-ins and sharks, and whose feature films included one about a Mexican American farmer who kills a Texas lawman and one about a woman who takes revenge on her attacker, died on Feb. 6 in Los Angeles. He was 99.The death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his son Andrew.In an interview with the Directors Guild of America in 2005, Mr. Young recalled what attracted him to filmmaking.“I wanted to be in life,” he said. “I wanted to be having adventures, I wanted to be living in the world.”He more than fulfilled that ambition.In the 1950s, he created educational films with two partners, most notably “Secrets of the Reef” (1956), an underwater documentary made at Marineland Studios in Florida and at a reef near the Bahamas that portrayed the life cycles of octopuses, sea horses, lobsters, jellyfish and manta rays.Mr. Young, center, working on the 1956 documentary “Secrets Of The Reef,” which portrayed the life cycles of octopuses, sea horses, lobsters, jellyfish and manta rays.Everette CollectionIn 1960, he was hired by NBC News for its new documentary series, “White Paper.” That year he directed “Sit-In,” about the Black college students whose protests led to the desegregation of lunch counters in downtown Nashville. The next year he worked on a report about the Angolan war for independence against Portugal, for which he walked hundreds of miles with Angolan rebels. The Portuguese government was unhappy with the report.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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      ‘Jodorowsky’s Dune’ Documentary Chronicles the Movie Adaptation That Never Happened

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      ‘Jodorowsky’s Dune’ chronicles a director’s determination to film his vision of the saga, one that would have included Mick Jagger and Gloria Swanson.This week sees the release of “Dune: Part Two,” the second installment in Denis Villeneuve’s eye-popping adaptation of the 1965 Frank Herbert novel. “Dune” was also adapted in 1984, by David Lynch, who hated his version (or the cut that made it to theaters, anyhow) so much that he disavowed it.Perhaps you’ve seen the Lynch version, which I find kind of charming in its flawed state. (Nobody should be that sweaty on the planet Arrakis.) But if you’re heading to “Dune: Part Two” this weekend, you owe it to yourself to be acquainted with another “Dune” adaptation that doesn’t technically exist and, somehow, is also larger than life.I’m speaking of the “Dune” we glimpse in Frank Pavich’s 2014 documentary “Jodorowsky’s Dune” (streaming on Max). It chronicles the “Dune” adaptation that never happened, the bright dream of the avant-garde filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky (who did make “El Topo” and “The Holy Mountain”).“Jodorowsky’s Dune” is a chronicle of a man — to mix my literary allusions — on a quixotic quest for his personal white whale. Jodorowsky was hired in 1974 to direct the adaptation, and his vision was gargantuan. Over the next several years, he worked with the producer Michel Seydoux (grand-uncle of actress Léa Seydoux, who appears in “Dune: Part Two”) to wrangle artists, musicians and actors for the project. Pink Floyd was set to record some of the music. He wanted Salvador Dalí to play the emperor. (Dalí asked for $100,000 per hour on set; I’d wager Christopher Walken, the emperor in the new film, did not quite reach those heights.) Jodorowsky also wanted Gloria Swanson, Mick Jagger, Udo Kier, David Carradine, Orson Welles and more to star. Jodorowsky cast his 12-year-old son to play Paul Atreides, the role filled in this version by Timothée Chalamet. To judge by his screenplay, the film would have lasted 14 hours.All of this is wild, but what makes the documentary so fascinating is the storyboards, which Jodorowsky created with the artist Jean (Moebius) Giraud — 3,000 images that covered the entire film and are just as psychedelic as you might expect. The production ran out of money and Jodorowsky’s vision never came to fruition. Eventually the film rights lapsed and were scooped up by Dino De Laurentiis, who, after his own long and winding road, hired Lynch.The documentary is almost certainly the only cinematic version of Jodorowsky’s “Dune” we’ll ever see. Through interviews with a bevy of people who were involved or who admired what it might have been, the documentary makes the case, pretty compellingly, that even the nonexistent movie had an outsize influence on science fiction. And the film is a great peek into how miraculous it is that any movie ever gets made — a fitting frame of mind to enter before seeing Villeneuve’s epic. More

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      2024 New York International Children’s Film Festival Preview

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      A range of films, many of them animated, some hilarious, some serious, bubble up at this year’s festival in New York, where kids can vote for awards.One of the cinematic highlights of the 2024 New York International Children’s Film Festival could be described, at least partly, as a wild-goose chase. Or, more precisely, a domestic-hen chase.That animated feature, “Chicken for Linda!,” follows a guilt-stricken single mother trying to buy the main ingredient of her daughter’s favorite dish. But since grocers are on strike in their French city, the desperate mother steals a live hen. The bird flees from her car’s trunk to a watermelon truck to the space behind an armoire, with adults and children, including the high-spirited young daughter, Linda, in hot pursuit.A simple farce? Not exactly. The film, by Chiara Malta and Sébastien Laudenbach, also includes time shifts, a singing ghost, an exploration of memory and multiple references to death — that of Louis XVI and Linda’s beloved father, as well as the chicken’s potential demise. Done in loose, almost abstract animation, the movie, which is billed as the festival’s “centerpiece spotlight,” is about as far as an audience can get from typical commercial children’s fare.It is also exactly the kind of unusual work to expect at the festival, which begins on Saturday and continues on weekends through March 17 with a slate of 18 feature presentations and more than 70 short films. About three-quarters of those titles are animated.“I think when you see live action, you’re very enraptured with someone else’s story,” Maria-Christina Villaseñor, the festival’s programming director, said in an interview. But with animation, she added, “you’re very excited also about your own, because I think you’re paying attention to the medium, you’re paying attention to the way that artists are using different techniques and different storytelling approaches. That really forefronts the idea of creativity and possibility.”Villaseñor and Nina Guralnick, the festival’s executive director, did not set out to focus on animation this year, but found that those films were often the most interesting. Ever since the festival’s founding in 1997, it has shown its audience — cinemagoers as young as 3 and as old as 18 — work that they’re unlikely to see anywhere else, including features that have previously been shown almost exclusively at festivals for adults.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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      ‘As We Speak’: Rap Music on Trial’ Review: Weaponizing Lyrics in Court

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      Lyrics that contain references to violence have been used as legal evidence, a practice this documentary by J.M. Harper condemns as unfair and prejudicial.Imagine music that you wrote being held against you in a criminal proceeding. In the documentary “As We Speak: Rap Music on Trial,” the Bronx-born rapper Kemba travels around the country and to Britain, interviewing artists and legal experts about how that has been more than a theoretical possibility for rappers.Mac Phipps, for instance, was convicted of manslaughter and spent more than two decades in prison, even though another man had confessed to the crime. (He was released in 2021.) In an interview with Kemba, he describes how references to violence in his lyrics were used at his trial, despite what he suggests was inadequate context. (One line cited concerned his father, a Vietnam veteran.)Elsewhere in this documentary, directed by J.M. Harper, the academic Adam Dunbar explains a set of studies he conducted. Participants were asked to judge lyrics from the same song: Some were told they were rap lyrics, others were told they were country and still others were told they were heavy metal. The group that believed the words were rap lyrics labeled the songwriter as having a greater criminal propensity. When the artist manager Chace Infinite argues that rap is taken more literally than other music, the movie cuts to clips of Johnny Cash and Freddie Mercury. Would a jury have accorded legal weight to Cash’s claim, in song, to have “shot a man in Reno just to watch him die”?Kemba situates the association of rap with crime in a historical context of censorship of Black music. In another thread, “As We Speak” imagines Kemba himself on trial, with his writing being used against him in a criminal court. The staged material is a bit heavy-handed, but “As We Speak” makes a powerful case for the necessity of being free to make art, and for public awareness that art rarely qualifies as legal evidence.As We Speak: Rap Music on TrialNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. Watch on Paramount+. More