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    In ‘Bring Her Back,’ Sally Hawkins Takes Horror to Heart

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    In a rare interview, the actress discusses tackling a difficult, sensitive and often dastardly role in the latest offering from Danny and Michael Philippou.The actress Sally Hawkins has a to-die-for pedigree. She’s been nominated twice for Academy Awards, once as a creature’s lady love in Guillermo del Toro’s “The Shape of Water” and again for Woody Allen’s “Blue Jasmine,” in which she played a depressed working-class woman opposite Cate Blanchett. Her British stage credits include plays by Shakespeare, Chekhov and García Lorca, and on Broadway, Shaw.“Bring Her Back,” Hawkins’s latest film (in theaters) is also a plum project. It’s from the prestige art-house distributor A24, and it’s the second feature by Danny and Michael Philippou, the twin Australian YouTubers-turned-directors who became Hollywood famous after their possession drama “Talk to Me” became one of A24’s biggest hits in 2023.But “Bring Her Back” is also a malign and at times shockingly gruesome horror movie; critics have noted its “restlessly mounting anguish” and have called it the “feel-bad movie of the year.” It remains to be seen if genre-averse fans who know Hawkins from her acclaimed work, including appearances in two “Paddington” films, will turn out for a movie that has a scene between a young boy and a giant kitchen knife that even gorehounds may have a hard time stomaching.To hear Hawkins explain it, she said yes to the film precisely because of its weight — or rather, lack of it.“There’s no fat on it. It’s muscular,” she said last month during a phone call from London. “The writing just hits hard, and you know it comes from a place of real understanding.”Hawkins with Jonah Wren Phillips in “Bring Her Back.”Ingvar Kenne/A24We 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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      Why Everyone Is Still Talking About ‘Paddington 2’

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      With the third movie now in theaters, let’s look at how the 2018 film became a sleeper hit, thanks to Hugh Grant’s villain and its showstopping end credits.“Paddington 2 is the greatest film ever made,” one user posted on X in 2022.This tweet was not ironic.In the seven years since its release in January 2018, the film about a marmalade-loving bear’s quest to find the perfect gift for his beloved aunt has become an internet phenomenon, spawning memes, think pieces and an endorsement from Nicolas Cage. For a time, it was the best-reviewed film ever on the aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes.“A very eclectic group of people respond to it in the way that they do,” David Heyman, a producer on “Paddington 2” and its 2015 predecessor, “Paddington,” said in a recent phone conversation from his home in London. The Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, for example, confessed to Heyman he was a fan.Now with the third feature-length installment in the franchise, “Paddington in Peru,” in theaters — and already having passed the $100 million milestone at the international box office — it is hard to imagine that when “Paddington 2” first arrived in theaters stateside, it was only a modest box office success. Since its DVD and streaming releases, a devoted community of online fans has sprung up around it, evangelizing about the outsider bear who brought joy to their lives.“There’s humor in it for adults; there’s humor for children,” said Heyman, who grew up reading the Paddington books, written by the British author Michael Bond. “It never feels patronizing or like it’s talking down to its audience. It has a big, beating heart.”All three films are based on the children’s books about the duffle-coated, hard-staring bear, first published in 1958. In the first movie, Paddington emigrates from Peru to London in a story inspired by the World War II rescue operation that brought nearly 10,000 children from Nazi-occupied Europe to England. The second film, directed by Paul King, who wrote the script with Simon Farnaby, is an action adventure with stunning set sequences, following Paddington through a court trial, a prison escape and a daring pursuit by train.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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      ‘The Lost King’ Review: A Royal Obsession

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      Sally Hawkins lights a fire under this droll dramedy about the search for the final resting place of Richard III.Sally Hawkins is a gift, to directors and audiences alike. When she smiles, it’s a face-splitting beam, so contagious that we would likely love her even if she were playing a murderer. And while her character in “The Lost King” is firmly tethered to a dead man, she didn’t kill him: She’s trying to dig him up.As Philippa Langley, the single mother from Edinburgh who, in 2012, spearheaded the successful search for the grave of King Richard III, Hawkins lends wings to this otherwise languid dramatic comedy. In a transformative moment, Philippa attends a production of Shakespeare’s “Richard III” and becomes mesmerized by the handsome actor playing the King (Harry Lloyd). This could easily have read as romantic attraction; but as Zac Nicholson’s camera zooms in on Hawkins’s wonderfully unguarded features, we see instead the stirring of a mission, one that will upend her life and alter history: to find Richard’s grave and disprove his reputation as a hunchbacked nephew-killer and unworthy usurper.That’s a tall order for a dissatisfied woman who suffers from chronic illness and whose ex-husband (played by Steve Coogan, who wrote the screenplay with Jeff Pope) is only marginally more tolerant than her co-workers. Yet Philippa, small and sensitive and herself a little lost, feels an affinity with the maligned monarch, gobbling up history books and finding common cause with the Richard III Society, whose members have long wondered if Richard’s twisted mind and body were fictions concocted by the Tudors and corroborated by Shakespeare. Let’s find out!Coogan and Pope, working once again with the director Stephen Frears (the alliance that brought us the unexpectedly moving “Philomena” in 2013), have shaped Philippa’s story into an easily digestible underdog tale. Vulnerable yet adamant, Philippa bulldozes bureaucrats and scientists into supporting her plan to excavate the parking lot where she believes the King is buried. She’s an immovable force, a battering ram of niceness, and Frears (now 81, and with a stunningly varied back catalog) is beguiled by the wonder of her tenacity and intuition. Her occasional chats with Richard’s ghost might be a sugar cube too far; but the movie’s sweetness is cut with enough acid — including subversive digs at academic pomposity and rampant sexism — that it never becomes cloying.Though raising serious questions about the way history is written, and by whom, “The Lost King” isn’t a polemic, or even a biopic. It’s a quietly droll detective story, a warm portrait of a woman who lost her health and found her purpose, exhuming her self-respect along with Richard’s bones. Those quibbling about factual liberties may be missing the point: This is a movie that’s less about rehabilitating a monarch than reinvigorating a life.The Lost KingRated PG-13 for a few cheeky words. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. More