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    ‘Wildcat’ Review: Seeing Flannery O’Connor Through Her Stories

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    Ethan Hawke teams up with his daughter, Maya Hawke, for an unconventional and somewhat muddled portrait of a singular author.Bedridden and anguished, the writer Flannery O’Connor is visited by a priest (Liam Neeson in a cameo) in “Wildcat,” starring Maya Hawke. Tormented by spiritual agony and the systemic lupus that would kill her at 39, O’Connor, a lifelong Catholic, beseeches him: “I long for grace,” she cries. “I see it, I know it’s there, but I can’t touch it.”There’s the seed of a good film in this scene, but the filmmakers can’t quite latch onto it. These intriguing wisps of ideas — about O’Connor’s struggle with faith and purpose — never coalesce into a coherent portrait in the movie (directed by Maya Hawke’s father, Ethan), which is presented as being based on O’Connor’s short stories.The film is meant to animate her life through her work, with its observations about religion, violence and society’s hypocrisy, but that adventurous conceit can’t be fulfilled without some elements of a biopic. What we are left with is a movie that flits between incidents from the life of this National Book Award-winner, writing on the family farm in Georgia, among other places, and a distracted supercut of her particular, and often darkly comic, brand of Southern Gothic fiction. Half-sketched and sometimes hard to follow, the stories glimpsed here ultimately fail to produce a fully legible or consistently engaging arc of what must be a roiling inner world.Maya Hawke’s performance, in turn, is muddled; she can be strong as O’Connor, but in the fictional pieces, her portrayals are often reduced to clumsy caricatures. The period re-creation is striking and helps generate occasionally spellbinding imagery, but the enduring sense of the film is of a family project that is by turns frustrating and briefly enlightening.WildcatNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Paul Giamatti, Bradley Cooper, Da’Vine Joy Randolph and More Celebrities at the National Board of Review gala

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      The stars were among the 17 honorees at the annual National Board of Review gala, as awards season ramps up.On a not-at-all red carpet inside Cipriani 42nd Street in Midtown Manhattan on Thursday night, Da’Vine Joy Randolph was glowing.“The fact that these people actually even seen my work is just mind-blowing,” said the actress, a star of “The Holdovers,” who was being honored with the National Board of Review’s best supporting actress prize at its annual film awards gala, just days after she had won her first Golden Globe on Sunday for her role in the film.A few feet away on the gray carpet was Celine Song, who came to accept the prize for best directorial debut for “Past Lives.” She was sporting a tuxedo jacket, a long skirt and a bow tie.“Because the movie is so personal, any time somebody connects to the film, I always feel less lonely; I feel very seen and understood and embraced,” said Ms. Song, who based the romantic film partly on her own experience with a childhood friend.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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      Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ and Its Insight Into Grief, Family and Gender

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      For one critic, every encounter with this Shakespeare play deepens her understanding of its insights into grief, family and gender.A few weeks ago two friends and I were talking about our obsessions. One had been sleepless all week, playing the new Zelda video game with few breaks. The other revealed that she was deep into Taylor Swift. I said I had so many fandoms that I didn’t know if I could name a favorite.My Swiftie friend quickly set me straight. “We already know your main fandom,” she said. “Hamlet.”It’s true. If you look at my bookshelves, the art on my walls, even the art on my skin, you’ll find anime references and mythological figures, lines from Eliot and Chekhov and illustrations from Borges and Gorey stories. But none of these interests enjoys a prominence as great as the one afforded “Hamlet” in my home — and on my body, where the majority of my tattoos, by far, are inspired by the play.My friends know well that I’ve seen numerous productions of the work, recite Hamlet’s monologues to myself, even put Kenneth Branagh or Laurence Olivier’s “Hamlet” on in the background as I clean my apartment. For me, the text’s themes — about death, duality, gender, family — deepen each time I read, see or hear “Hamlet,” and as I grow older, new insights are revealed about the characters and the language.I first read “Hamlet” in high school, as an artsy poetry-writing teenager who found death a fascinating, albeit abstract, concept. I imagined the young prince — witty, privileged yet tortured, and forever trapped in his own head — as kin. He was less a lofty figure of English literature than the emo kid I crushed on, abandoning his math homework to read Dante’s “Inferno” as angsty pop punk played in the background.When I watched Michael Almereyda’s 2000 “Hamlet” film soon after, it did little to disabuse me of this notion. Taking place in New York City, with Ethan Hawke playing a hipster film student who’s heir to the “Denmark Corporation,” this “Hamlet” was contemporary, rife with irony. Watching Hamlet offer the great existential query of “to be or not to be” while strolling the “action movie” aisles of a Blockbuster store, I learned that even tragedy can contain a hearty dose of comedy.When I reread the play for a class on Shakespeare’s tragedies a few years later, I became fixated on one line in particular: “The rest is silence.” With these four words, Hamlet’s last ones in the play, the prince is acknowledging his final breath, but also perhaps breaking the fourth wall, announcing the end of the play like Prospero at the end of “The Tempest.” Or maybe Hamlet is offering us the line in consolation: After five acts of musing on death, he can assure us that death is simple, and it’s quiet. This line is now tattooed on my right arm.In Branagh’s 1996 “Hamlet” film, an unabridged adaptation that paired inspired direction with refined performances and respect for the text, Branagh wheezes out the words, his eyes glassy and staring into the distance. “Silence” lands after a pause, as though he’s listening to the deafening silence of all of humanity that’s preceded him.Clockwise from top left: Laurence Olivier as Hamlet in the 1948 film, Ethan Hawke in the 2000 film, Kenneth Branagh in his 1996 film, Ato Blankson-Wood (with Solea Pfeiffer as Ophelia) in the 2023 Shakespeare in the Park production, Ruth Negga in the 2020 production at St. Ann’s Workshop, and Billy Eugene Jones, left, and Marcel Spears in 2022 Public Theater production of “Fat Ham.”From Olivier’s fervent philosophizing Dane in the 1948 film to David Tennant’s lithe, boyish interpretation in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2008 production, there’s a reason that Prince Hamlet remains one of the most coveted roles an actor, especially a young man of a certain age and celebrity, can take on. “Hamlet” is, after all, a man’s play.In Hawke’s “Hamlet” and Mel Gibson’s visceral, sensually charged 1990 “Hamlet” I first realized how often directors use the female characters as stand-ins for fatalistic, taboo love. (Which is why I also savor gender-crossed Hamlets, whether in the form of the theater pioneer Sarah Bernhardt in 1899 or Ruth Negga in 2020.) Queen Gertrude is either stupid, selfish or promiscuous, blinded by her untamed lust. Many productions opt for a physical staging of Act III, Scene 4, when Hamlet accosts his mother in her bedchamber. Hawke’s Hamlet grabs his mother in a black robe, then presses her against a set of closet doors. Gibson’s deranged Hamlet also fights and clutches at Gertrude, as did Andrew Scott’s in the 2017 London production by Robert Icke. Thomas Ostermeier’s wild “Hamlet” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last year emphasized Gertrude’s sexuality to an extreme, having her slink and shimmy as though overwhelmed with sexual energy. The text implies that a woman too free with her affections digs her own grave.That includes, of course, Hamlet’s eternally damned love interest, Ophelia (memorialized on my right forearm with a skull and pansy). I used to dismiss her as a frail female stereotype, and have craved a production or adaptation that could give this character agency — any kind of agency — within the space of her grieving, her madness and her death.Kenny Leon’s otherwise underwhelming “Hamlet” at the Delacorte this summer did just that. Solea Pfeiffer played an Ophelia who matched Hamlet in wit and sass, who spoke with a knowingness and rage that lifted the character from her 17th-century home into the present.This duality in Ophelia — between sincerity and performance, raving madness and clear, articulated rage — is welcome. It’s a duality that many directors literalize in their productions overall, some using mirrors as nods to Hamlet’s constant reflections at the expense of action, others turning to hint at the divide between presentation and truth.But as much as “Hamlet” can serve as a character study, for me the story extends far beyond a production’s conceptualization of a lost prince with a splintered ego. This is a story that begins and ends with grief.I have a tattoo for Hamlet and his dear, departed father — a jeweled sword piercing a cracked skull in a crown. Having lost my dad almost a decade ago, I’m familiar with the feeling of being haunted by a father who may not be a literal king but perhaps just a patriarch taking the same cheap shots from the afterlife, like Pap in James Ijames’s “Fat Ham.” In the play, a Black, queer take on “Hamlet” in conversation with Shakespeare’s original text, Hamlet is not just tied to his father through a sense of filial obligation but also through guilt, regret, shame. In Pap I saw my own father’s flaws — the spite, the prejudice, the toxic masculinity. It made me wonder how much of Hamlet’s grief is for his father, and how much for the stability his father symbolized.Lately I’ve been listening with more regularity to Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” monologue, that great conference with death that feels as germane to the English language — our rhetoric, our poetry, our elocution, our linguistic imagination — as soil to the Earth. In the span of about a week this summer, I lost a grandmother, and a dear friend shared that his cancer had returned. Having buried both her parents in the past two years, my mother has been talking more about funeral arrangements and where our family would like to spend our post-mortem days. I, on the other hand, take less stock in the expensive ceremonies and planning around death. I don’t plan to make a show of my finale; like Hamlet, I wonder what it will even mean — in that everlasting sleep, who knows what dreams will come?I didn’t fall in love with “Hamlet” because of its action and intrigue; I love the play because it lets me reconnect with the spaces where death has brushed my life. “Hamlet” helps me sit with my own existential fears, all packaged in words of wit and elegance. Because I’m convinced now that if you let Shakespeare in, his voice becomes the one bellowing from the backstage of your life. More

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      Oscar Isaac, Ethan Hawke and Joel Edgerton on Paul Schrader Films

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      Joel Edgerton, Oscar Isaac and Ethan Hawke explain how they worked with the writer-director, known for solitary characters grappling with sin and redemption.The writer-director Paul Schrader has a metaphor he likes to use with his leading men.In his view, actors tend to think of themselves as trees in the wind fighting to stay upright when they perform. But Schrader tells his stars, “Get that image out of your head and replace it with the image of a cliff on a seacoast. And you’re there and the waves are pounding against you. They are going to come and they are going to hit you and then they are going to go away.” In this metaphor the waves can be day players sharing a scene or plot points in a narrative. But no matter what crashes against them, these men must remain stoic, hardened against the world.Joel Edgerton heard a version of this from Schrader in their first conversation about “Master Gardener,” which opened Friday. The drama is the final installment in Schrader’s recent and lauded “Man in a Room” trilogy, which began in 2017 with “First Reformed,” starring Ethan Hawke, and includes “The Card Counter” (2021), starring Oscar Isaac.“I think I probably got the same speech that Ethan got and the same speech that Oscar got,” Edgerton said, explaining, “It wasn’t the place for an actor to explore their bag of tricks and create flourish within character but rather reduce themselves to sort of a conduit of stillness to everything moving and swirling around them.”And, indeed, Isaac and Hawke both have their own descriptions of similar dialogues with Schrader. In interviews, the actors who played these proverbial men in rooms explained what it was like to inhabit tortured but oddly serene personas in works that grapple with typical Shrader questions of sin and redemption.“Master Gardener” casts Edgerton as Narvel Roth, a horticulturist who harbors a disturbing secret: He’s a former white nationalist in witness protection. Underneath his turtleneck and overalls, his body is covered in racist tattoos. In “The Card Counter,” Isaac is William Tell, a proficient gambler who was once an Abu Ghraib torturer. And in “First Reformed,” Hawke is the Rev. Ernst Toller, a holy man filled with despair over climate change.Oscar Isaac in “The Card Counter.” Though Schrader specializes in bleak tales, “he’s not a nihilist,” the actor said. Courtesy Of Focus Features/Focus Features, via Associated PressAll three write in journals, and their entries, offering windows into their preoccupations, are delivered in voice-over narration. These beats are part of the language of a Schrader movie. “It’s like his version of a sonnet,” Isaac said. “He has his forms that he likes to use to explore different things.”In these films Schrader echoes both the French filmmaker Robert Bresson, with deliberate references to “Pickpocket” and “Diary of a Country Priest,” and himself. Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) scribbled in one of these notebooks in Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” (1976), which Schrader wrote. So did Willem Dafoe’s drug dealer in “Light Sleeper” (1992), which Schrader wrote and directed.“Even when you’re shooting it, you’re aware there’s a meta thing happening where you realize like, right, this is like Travis Bickle, this is like Willem,” Hawke said. “You feel like, right, I’m part of this lineage of this human being’s work.”It’s work that Hawke is happy Schrader, now 76, is continuing. “I had the feeling that when we finished ‘First Reformed’ — he never said this to me, it was just a feeling — that he might not make another movie,” Hawke said.When Hawke saw “The Card Counter,” he said, he was proud of Schrader for “going back to war.”Schrader didn’t set out to write a trilogy, and only after someone suggested it as such did he acknowledge that’s what he was doing. All three movies concern troubled men reaching for forgiveness and transcendence, and all three trade in metaphors. “‘First Reformed’ really is not about global warming and ‘Card Counter’ is not about gambling and this one really isn’t about racism or gardening,” he said over coffee at the senior-living apartment complex in Hudson Yards where he now lives. “It’s about evolution of the soul of these people who are locked off in their rooms and can’t reach out and touch anyone.”These dramas not only ask their stars to wrestle with the misdeeds and troubles of their characters, but also require them to operate within Schrader’s precise style. He said he cast performers both on instinct and on a sense of whether they can “hold the mystery.”“There were several very important conversations that happened really early on about the value of withholding, a willingness to ask the audience to work with us, to not tap dance and try to entertain them, to not reveal too much, to invite mystery,” Hawke said, explaining that there is a freedom in that direction.Ethan Hawke as a troubled pastor in “First Reformed.” The actor said he and Schrader had “several very important conversations that happened really early on about the value of withholding.”A24At the same time, there is difficulty in achieving the stillness that Schrader asks. “In some ways it was like being asked to go to work with a straitjacket on,” Edgerton said. “But I didn’t feel like that was too daunting a proposition. My feeling always is that the director is captain, and if you go to work with someone, you put yourself in their capable hands.”Recognizing the internality Schrader was asking him to portray, Isaac recruited one of his teachers from Juilliard, Moni Yakim, and did mask work. “I was like, well, my face is going to literally be a mask, so how can I tell the story just through the body and through energy,” Isaac said.And then there’s the writing. Schrader asked each actor to copy out his character’s journal in his own hand. Isaac believed that William would write in cursive, so he took a penmanship course. For Edgerton the task was in line with his usual approach: “I always want my own handwriting to be my own handwriting” onscreen, he said, even before “Master Gardener.” All described the process as meditative, in a way.“You know in Acting 101 they tell you to write your character’s biography, try to write a journal in character,” Hawke said. “Those are very challenging exercises to do that help find the voice of the character and help integrate yourself with the person. For me it was literally delivered to me in a box with an assignment of what to do, so I loved it.”Isaac noted that Schrader, for all of his hard edges and tough themes, has a soft side as well. While “Master Gardener” ends in a different way, a number of Schrader’s films, including “The Card Counter” and “Light Sleeper,” conclude with the hero in prison reaching out to a woman he loves. “He believes in the truth and purity of what love is and what love can do,” Isaac said. “So no matter how dark and grueling things can get, he has that spark in him, too. He’s not a nihilist.”Edgerton has not yet had the opportunity to discuss his time in Schraderland with Hawke or Isaac, but the latter two have swapped stories. Schrader pulled out his phone to show me a photo he received of them alongside another one of his actors, Dafoe, huddled together with middle fingers raised. He suggested it should accompany this article.Hawke and Isaac worked together on a Marvel Cinematic Universe television show, “Moon Knight,” but Isaac, in conversation, thought of another potential franchise. “It’s an incredible badge of honor to be part of Paul Schrader’s extended universe, the PCU,” he said, laughing. “It’d be one hell of a convention of all those characters coming together. We could do a team movie. I’m going to pitch him on that.” More

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      Pedro Almodóvar Makes a Gay Western With Pedro Pascal and Ethan Hawke

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      In “Strange Way of Life,” the director’s short western, Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal play a lawman and a cowboy looking back on a passionate affair.The gunslinger in green locks eyes with the sheriff.“Don’t look at me like that,” says the sheriff, squinting.“How do you want me to look at you?” replies the gunslinger, flirting.It wouldn’t be a western without a fraught standoff, but when Pedro Almodóvar is behind the camera, the glances are even more loaded than the pistols. In “Strange Way of Life,” a new short film that will premiere at the Cannes Film Festival on Wednesday, Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal star as a lawman and a cowboy who reunite 25 years after having a passionate affair. But will their old magic be rekindled, or are both men concealing ulterior motives for the meeting?In many ways, the project is a swerve for Almodóvar: The 73-year-old auteur, typically known for Spanish-language movies about modern women living in beautiful apartments, has cast two English-speaking actors in a short that is set in the dusty Wild West. But Almodóvar, who was courted two decades ago to direct the gay western “Brokeback Mountain” and turned it down, sees his new project on a continuum with that 2005 film, which was ultimately directed by Ang Lee, who went on to win best director.“In ‘Brokeback Mountain,’ Jake Gyllenhaal’s character says to Heath Ledger’s character that they should go away and work on a ranch,” Almodóvar said on a video call. “Heath says, ‘What would two men do in the West, working on a ranch?’ In many ways, I feel my film gives answer to that.”Pedro Almodóvar, center, working with Hawke and Pascal on set. “In many ways, I feel my film gives answer to” a scene in “Brokeback Mountain,” the director said.Iglesias M/El Deseo and Sony Pictures ClassicsAlmodóvar wrote a few pages of the centerpiece scene three years ago, then put it out of his mind. “Sometimes I just write for the pleasure of writing,” he said. “I didn’t have any purpose for it.” But inspiration struck when Anthony Vaccarello, the creative director of the fashion label Saint Laurent, mentioned that he had just produced a short film for Gaspar Noé. Almodóvar remembered the sequence with the two pistoleros, added a scene-setting prologue and a guns-out aftermath, and offered Vaccarrello the screenplay for the 31-minute “Strange Way of Life.”“Of course, it could have become a feature-length film,” he said. “But I do think it was the perfect duration for the story I want to tell.” And after making the short film “The Human Voice” in 2020 with Tilda Swinton, Almodóvar hoped to continue casting English-speaking stars. “I never wanted to do it in Spanish,” Almodóvar said. “Even though we have our own western type, the spaghetti western, I wanted to make it a classic western.”Almodóvar soon reached out to Pascal, whose star was beginning to rise with the series “The Mandalorian” and “The Last of Us.” The 48-year-old actor was eager to sign on; he had watched his first Almodóvar film, “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” (1988), with his family as a young teenager.“I remember it feeling like going to a new amusement park,” Pascal said in an email. “An entire world of color and play and a kind of naughty rebelión was introduced to my experience.”His co-star was just as gung-ho. “I felt really honored to be an American actor that was getting to work with him,” Hawke said by phone. “A lot of times when you’re making mainstream American movies, there’s this third entity in the room, which is you want the movie to sell — you just feel it from people behind the monitor. And what’s so wonderful about working with Almodóvar is that you feel there is nobody you need to make happy but Pedro Almodóvar.”The short went into production last summer in Almería, Spain, on the outdoor sets where Sergio Leone once shot his classic 1964-66 trilogy of spaghetti westerns starring Clint Eastwood. “The passing of time, 50 years of it, had given authenticity to the place,” Almodóvar said. And in addition to producing the project, Vaccarello doubled as its costume designer, a crucial post on an Almodóvar film.The film was shot in Almería, Spain, on the same outdoor sets where Sergio Leone shot his Man With No Name trilogy.Iglesias M/El Deseo and Sony Pictures Classics“There’s some directors I’ve worked with who are wonderful directors, but they’re just not that interested in costume — it’s just, ‘Yeah, whatever you want to wear is fine,” Hawke said. “Whereas Almodóvar would spend weeks deciding what shade of green the wall is behind you or what color gray your jacket is and what fabric it’s made out of.”Though Almodóvar’s films are also notable for what happens when those clothes come off, “Strange Way of Life” is surprisingly discreet, fading to black when Hawke and Pascal move in for an embrace.“The sexual tension in my film happens around the gazes, so from the very beginning, I decided I wasn’t going to show the entirety of the sexual scene,” Almodóvar said. “They’re way more naked in the conversation they have after.”It’s that conversation that made Almodóvar want to shoot the film in the first place: After making “Pain and Glory” (2019), which starred Antonio Banderas as a thinly veiled version of his director, Almodóvar has found himself increasingly drawn to stories about middle-aged gay men looking back at their lives.“I do think this is partly a reflection of my own age, that I’ve decided to tell stories about older men,” Almodóvar said. “If I had written these stories when I was 25 years old, I probably would have written a story about two 25-year-old cowboys.”The shoot wasn’t easy, Hawke admitted: The production had to battle a record heat wave over 15 days in the desert, “and it’s very difficult to think about nuanced ideas when all your body wants to do is go to sleep or find some air conditioning,” he said. But as the project drew to a close, he was able to step back and take it all in.“All of a sudden I wrapped and realized that I was in the desert in Spain on an old Sergio Leone set, and Almodóvar was hugging me, thanking me, and I just thought about how much I love the movies and what a unique challenge this was and how much I keep wanting to hunt these kinds of experiences out,” Hawke said. “I felt somehow better for having done it, and I don’t know how to say it other than that.” More

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      Cannes Film Festival 2023 Lineup Includes Wes Anderson and Todd Haynes Movies

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      Over 50 movies will be screened at the event, including Johnny Depp’s first major film since a defamation trial and Martin Scorsese’s latest epic.Movies by Wes Anderson, Todd Haynes and Ken Loach will compete for the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the event’s organizers announced during a news conference on Thursday.Also in the running for the festival’s top prize will be films by the returning winners Wim Wenders, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Nanni Moretti.But Martin Scorsese will not compete at the festival, which opens May 16 and runs through May 27. Instead, his eagerly anticipated movie “Killers of the Flower Moon,” which stars Leonardo DiCaprio and is about the murder of Osage Indians in 1920s Oklahoma, will appear out of competition. Thierry Frémaux, Cannes’s artistic director, said during Thursday’s news conference that the festival wanted “Killers of the Flower Moon” to play in competition, but Scorsese had turned him down.The Wes Anderson picture in competition is “Asteroid City,” about a space cadet convention that is interrupted by aliens; Todd Haynes will show “May December” a love story about a young man and his older employer, starring Julianne Moore.Ken Loach, whose movies focused on working-class life in Britain have twice won the Palme d’Or, will present “The Old Oak,” about Syrian refugees arriving in an economically depressed English mining town.A jury led by the Swedish director Ruben Ostlund will choose the winner. Ostlund won last year’s Palme d’Or for “Triangle of Sadness,” a satire of the international superrich; he also took the 2017 award for “The Square,” a sendup of the art world.Of the 19 titles in competition, five are directed by women, including the Cannes veterans Jessica Hausner and Alice Rohrwacher, and Ramata-Toulaye Sy, a French-Senegalese newcomer.Many of the highest profile titles at this year’s event will be shown out of competition. The festival will open with “Jeanne du Barry,” a period drama about a poor woman who becomes a lover of King Louis XV of France. It stars Johnny Depp in his first major role since he won a defamation trial against his ex-wife Amber Heard.Other high-profile movies scheduled to premiere at Cannes’s 76th edition include “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” directed by James Mangold — the final movie in the Harrison Ford adventure series about a globe-trotting archaeology professor — and Pedro Almodóvar’s “Strange Way of Life,” the Spanish director’s second movie in English. Starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal, that movie is a short western about a reunion between two hit men.Wim Wenders, the German director who won the 1984 Palme d’Or for “Paris, Texas,” has two films in the official selection. In the main competition, he will show “Perfect Days,” which Frémaux said was about a janitor in Japan who drives between jobs listening to rock music. Out of competition, Wenders will show a 3-D documentary about Anselm Kiefer, one of Germany’s most revered artists.Frémaux said that over 2,000 movies were submitted for the festival, although only 52 made Thursday’s selection. Of those, one other notable title is Steve McQueen’s “Occupied City,” about Amsterdam under the Nazis. Frémaux said that McQueen, the director of “12 Years a Slave” and “Widows,” had made a “very radical” film that was several hours long. But, Frémaux added, watching it, “you won’t fall asleep.” More

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      ‘Raymond & Ray’ Review: Oh, Brother

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      Ewan McGregor and Ethan Hawke struggle to dig themselves out of this dreary drama about damaged siblings reckoning with their father’s death.A movie that spends much of its time at a funeral home, a morgue and a grave site is unlikely to be a bundle of fun, but “Raymond & Ray” is a humdinger of hopelessness. Only the efforts of Ewan McGregor and, especially, Ethan Hawke, as the estranged half brothers of the title, save this doleful drama from sinking entirely into bathos.En route to bury the father they both loathed, the siblings strain to reconnect. Raymond (McGregor) is a sad-sack businessman on the precipice of his third divorce; Ray (Hawke) is a recovering addict and reclusive trumpet player. Both are deeply damaged, scrubbed of self-confidence and shying from emotional connection. Imagine their shock when conversations with their father’s circle of friends reveal a man they barely recognize from the womanizing abuser who raised them.These bones of a nuanced, even moving story are soon boiled into a watery stock of familial surprises and tragicomic setups. Some of these feel wearyingly forced, like the father leaving behind a spirited ex-lover (Maribel Verdú) and a wry nurse (Sophie Okonedo), each of whom connects with one of the brothers. Along with Vondie Curtis Hall, as the father’s snazzy pastor, Verdú and Okonedo bring warmth and life to the movie, yet their characters are little more than convenient romantic props and vectors of healing and wisdom — narrative devices to nudge the brothers forward.Written and directed by Rodrigo García, “Raymond & Ray” is a funeral-as-exorcism movie, as inert as the image of the detested parent, sprawled naked in his coffin — a man so carelessly cruel he gave both brothers the same name.Raymond & RayRated R for one nude woman and two broken men. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Watch on Apple TV+. More

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      ‘Zeros and Ones’ Review: Plague and Paranoia

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      Abel Ferrara’s lockdown experiment is a spooky political thriller with a double dose of Ethan Hawke.Cryptic to a fault, Abel Ferrara’s “Zeros and Ones” unfolds in a murkiness that’s both literal and ideological. Even its star, Ethan Hawke — speaking to us as himself in two brief scenes that bookend the movie — admits that, initially, he didn’t understand Ferrara’s script. His candor is comforting, and emboldening, encouraging persistence with a story whose destination seems as vague as its characters’ motivations.What’s clear is that the constraints of pandemic filmmaking were catnip to Ferrara, whose jittery camera patrols the deserted nighttime streets of a locked-down Rome alongside J.J. (Hawke), an elite American soldier on a mysterious undercover mission. This requires finding his twin brother, Justin (also Hawke), an imprisoned revolutionary whom we see being questioned and repeatedly tortured.Surveilled by shady foreign agents, J.J. creeps from one furtive encounter to another, constantly filming his progress. Pitiless, grainy close-ups capture him sipping tea with a mother and child — perhaps his brother’s family — in a blank apartment and, later, alongside a mullah in a mosque. A terrorist attack on the city may be imminent, but J.J. is otherwise engaged with a couple of slinky prostitutes (“They’re both negative,” their madam helpfully advertises) and a beautiful Russian woman (played by the director’s partner, Cristina Chiriac) who’s forcing him to have sex at gunpoint. By this juncture, the only thing we know for sure is that Ferrara, bless his guttersnipe soul, is still bracingly, adamantly himself.Steadfastly shouldering this rambling, barely penetrable narrative, Hawke smoothly distinguishes the implacable intensity of J.J. from the delusions of his brother (whose messianic rantings recall Hawke’s startling performance as John Brown in last year’s Showtime drama “The Good Lord Bird.”) Saddled with some of the film’s dippiest dialogue (“You hate trees!,” he screams at his unidentified tormentors), Justin serves as the enfeebled, despairing conscience of a world seemingly abandoned by God and compassion alike.With its prickling, apocalyptic aesthetic and persistent paranoia, this spooky political thriller is all about a mood: conspiratorial, sinister, unsettled. Here, the accessories of pandemic life become even more ominous: A sanitizing team on the subway recalls plague thrillers like “Contagion” (2011), and a suddenly-brandished thermometer pointed at J.J.’s forehead plays like a gun attack. When everyone is wearing a mask, how do we tell the good guys from the bad?Utterly baffling, yet never less than intriguing, “Zeros and Ones” lingers in the mind. Even after you think you’ve brushed it off, its chilly tendrils continue to cling.Zeros and OnesRated R for temptation and torture. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      in Theater

      Review: ‘Waiting for Godot’ in the Bleakest Zoom Room Ever

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      Ethan Hawke and John Leguizamo star as Beckett’s tragicomic tramps — minus the comic part.Early audiences were baffled by “Waiting for Godot.” Even Peter Hall, who in 1955 directed the first English language production, claimed not to understand it. When actors with access to its author, Samuel Beckett, demanded explanations from him, he usually professed himself helpless to answer.Now, though some of the references have become more obscure with time, it’s hard to imagine anyone not fathoming the play’s gist. Decades of high school lit seminars, let alone the gradual opening of the playgoing class’s eyes to the world’s inequities and terrors, have transformed it from an enigmatic museum piece into an existential tchotchke.But there is more to “Waiting for Godot,” which the New Group has just released as a lugubrious film starring Ethan Hawke and John Leguizamo, than its status as a modern classic suggests. Its portrait of life as a charnel house may be half the story but in this case, it’s the only half.After all, Beckett called “Godot” a tragicomedy, presumably with emphasis on the second part of the word because the first part speaks for itself. The thumbprints of Buster Keaton, and especially Laurel and Hardy, are all over its main characters, the broken-down migrant workers Vladimir and Estragon. (Estragon was first played on Broadway by the great vaudevillian and erstwhile Cowardly Lion Bert Lahr.) The undercard, Pozzo and Lucky, are no comic slouches either; together, the four wanderers, with their long-honed routines and jags of passive-aggressive mayhem, outnumber and upstage the Three Stooges.But of the New Group’s cast, which also includes Tarik Trotter as Pozzo and Wallace Shawn as Lucky, only Leguizamo, as Estragon, could really be considered a clown — and not just because he called himself one in his 2011 one-man show “Ghetto Klown.”A theatrical being to his core, he has the quick-twitch reflexes and papered-over wounds that can make injury funny. The best parts of this “Waiting for Godot” mine that duality, and also Leguizamo’s heritage; when Hawke, as Vladimir, discredits Estragon’s account of being beaten for no cause, we get a new, white-privilege angle on their recurrent miscommunication.Hawke, left, and Leguizamo mask up when approaching the other two tramps in the play.via The New Group Off StageBut even Leguizamo is done in by a production, directed by Scott Elliott, that is almost entirely — and, it would seem, deliberately — humorless. The actors are shot in separate gloomy interiors, and from stationary positions, so as to appear in Stygian Zoom-like frames as if at a virtual meeting of hobbits.And though Beckett did say, in response to a proposed in-the-round production, that “Godot” needed “a very closed box,” I doubt this is what he meant. In any case, a play that famously takes place outdoors, with its sole scenic element a barren tree that for Act II sprouts five leaves, is now mercilessly interiorized, and a relationship that is meant to test the limits of intimacy is unhelpfully kept at arm’s length from the start.To the extent this comments on our pandemic moment, it’s at least intriguing; a lot of thought seems to have gone into Vladimir and Estragon’s decisions to mask up, mostly when they approach Pozzo and Lucky. But this and other contemporary intrusions, including the use of cellphones for texting and black screens when the characters apparently disable their feed, don’t actually illuminate anything, let alone emphasize the play’s humor as they seem to intend. It’s hard to laugh when you can hardly see.That problem encourages a certain degree of overacting, especially from Hawke, as if he were trying to make himself visible from a distance. (He has lovely moments, though.) Trotter, who under the name Black Thought was a co-founder of the hip-hop group the Roots, uses his terrific stage voice to capture Pozzo’s first-act bluster without resorting to flailing, but has a harder time with the humbled version of the character who returns in Act II.At least Drake Bradshaw, in the small role of Godot’s young herald, is sweetly effective in both his appearances. And though Shawn, delivering Lucky’s impossible speech — nine minutes of gibberish — is able to make convincing emotional sense of the moment, the production as a whole doesn’t support his efforts. Vladimir and Estragon check out of the Zoom call for much of the harangue, encouraging us to think we might do so as well.It’s not that you need to be literal with “Waiting for Godot”; it’s anything but a naturalistic drama. I liked the designer Qween Jean’s past-midnight cowboy look for Hawke and Mets cap and tank top pandemic ensemble for Leguizamo. But if Elliott, working with the Academy Award winner John Ridley’s Nō Studios and the Hollywood producer Frank Marshall, has avoided excessive fealty to Beckett’s instructions — the estate approved the socially distanced production — he has not provided anything as coherent to take their place.For one thing, the action is awkwardly staged, even beyond the necessity of executing comedy bits when the actors, if not the characters, are calling in from different locations. (The passing of Lucky’s hat, a clear lift from Laurel and Hardy, is totally botched.) At three hours, the show is also long, even bloated. Most problematically, Vladimir’s and Estragon’s embraces, so necessary to the play’s emotional equilibrium, are about as warm here as octopi suckering up to opposite sides of a glass wall.Far from seeming too modern, though, this “Godot,” especially coming more than a year into the pandemic, seems too passé. Other companies, even no-budget ones like Theater in Quarantine, have long since figured out ways to make an aesthetic out of the limitations of lockdown. Why only now, just as those lockdowns are lifting, is this first-gen take on pandemic play production emerging? About the only expressive use of the medium is in the processing that gives the film the appearance of a dodgy video feed, with freezes and glitches that imitate a poor signal.You could argue that a dodgy feed is exactly the way “Godot” depicts life: as a poor approximation of what it should be. But in Vladimir and Estragon, Beckett also finds poignancy, humor and the last dregs of physical love, where Elliott and company find only horror. If they are right, what kind of pass have we come to, in which even Beckett’s vision is not bleak enough?Waiting for GodotThrough June 30; thenewgroup.org More