Holland, Andre (1979- )

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    ‘Exhibiting Forgiveness’ Review: A Fraught Reunion

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    For his first film, the artist Titus Kaphar delivers an unsentimental and autobiographical gem.For the cover of Time magazine’s issue about the 2020 death of George Floyd, Titus Kaphar painted a pained Black mother hugging an infant to her chest. Where the child should have been, there was a white space. The artist titled a similar painting — a Black mother carries the vacant silhouette of a toddler on her hips — “Contour of Loss.” Those blanks mark a terrible absence, making emptiness feel present. In “Exhibiting Forgiveness,” Kaphar’s autobiographical film debut, the artist again focuses on rending absence — and seeks to fill it fully.André Holland gives a deeply attuned performance as Tarrell, an ascendant artist whose childhood traumas torment him, and make his most cherished relationships difficult. Bedeviled by nightmares, he awakes in a panic to his concerned wife, Aisha (Andra Day), lying beside him in their midcentury home, in their tree-lined neighborhood, with their vintage black-and-chrome Mercedes parked outside.This isn’t a catalog of materialism so much as evidence of a household constructed to withstand emotional chaos. Tarrell may be haunted, but the house is a haven, infused with familial affection — especially Tarrell’s love for his young son. Still, those panic attacks demand redress.During a visit to help move his mother, Joyce (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), Tarrell comes face-to-face with the cause of those roiling dreams: his father, La’Ron (John Earl Jelks).Kaphar smartly introduces this troubled character. Before he re-enters Tarrell’s life, we see him hustling work outside a liquor store. He appears derelict and haggard, but when a violent robbery occurs inside, La’Ron, despite his shaky physical state, comes to the rescue. We might be inclined to have sympathy for him.But when La’Ron arrives battered to his brother’s home, we get our first inkling of the hurt he’s caused so many people. Regardless, Joyce engineers a fractious father-son reunion. She has her reasons. But Tarrell’s not having it. And no — it doesn’t matter that La’Ron has now found God.Kaphar begins “Exhibiting Forgiveness” with a quote by James Baldwin about the biological bond between fathers and sons, but Tarrell’s half brother, Quentin (Matthew Elam), also provides a telling key to the family’s varied truths of absolution and absolving: “This ain’t about him — it’s about Mama.”Forgiveness may not be about making nice. Filling in a painful gap may not lead to tidy reconciliation. Still, something true will appear. Kaphar may be new to feature filmmaking, but that’s some grown wisdom.Exhibiting ForgivenessRated R for language and brief drug material. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Television

      In ‘The Big Cigar,’ a Black Panther Stars in a Fake Movie

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      This new series is based on the unlikely true story of a Hollywood producer who used a bogus film production to help Huey Newton flee to Cuba in 1974.When the movie producer Bert Schneider met the Black Panther Party leader Huey P. Newton, he swooned.Schneider, who had helped revolutionize the movie industry (and made a lot of money) as a producer of films like “Easy Rider,” wanted to shake up things off the screen as well. He saw Newton, who had already done a prison stint for the killing of a police officer — Newton denied that he shot the officer, and the conviction was eventually overturned — as the real deal, a star on the front lines of the actual revolution.Their unlikely partnership is now the heart of the new limited series “The Big Cigar,” premiering April 17 on Apple TV+. It’s a caper about how Newton (played by André Holland) fled to Cuba in 1974 after he was arrested and charged with the murder of a prostitute (also a crime he claimed he didn’t commit). Schneider (Alessandro Nivola) ponied up cash and logistical assistance, including a fake film production, to help Newton escape.Holland and Alessandro Nivola, as Bert Schneider, in “The Big Cigar,” which is based on a true story.Brendan Adam-Zwelling/Apple TV+“Cigar” tells a wild tale with shootouts and chases and a couple of strange bedfellows: a Black revolutionary on the run and a well-coiffed Hollywood power player looking to bankroll him. Even as it takes some liberties with the facts, the series reflects the ties that existed between some counterculture entertainment figures and radical organizations of the ’60s and ’70s.“We didn’t see it as a story of Hollywood patting itself on the back,” Jim Hecht, the writer and an executive producer, said in a video interview. “There was a time when people actually did put their bodies on the line and do things for a cause that they believed in. They took personal risks to do things that were political.”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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      in Movies

      Venice: A Creepy ‘Call Me by Your Name’ Reunion in ‘Bones and All’

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      In this cannibal romance, the director Luca Guadagnino reunites Timothée Chalamet with Michael Stuhlbarg under very different circumstances.VENICE — There is a message that social scientists and environmental watchdogs have been trying to convey in this newspaper for a while. But maybe you haven’t really been listening. Maybe it will take a different messenger to catch your attention.“I think societal collapse is in the air,” Timothée Chalamet said on Friday at the Venice Film Festival.Though you might expect Chalamet to issue a doomy quote like that while promoting “Dune,” in which his character presides over the destruction of an empire, the 26-year-old actor tossed it out during a news conference for “Bones and All,” a new film that reunites him with Luca Guadagnino, the director of Chalamet’s breakout vehicle “Call Me by Your Name.”But then again, discussing “Bones and All” can put a person in a more contemplative frame of mind: Though it’s a romance — Chalamet plays one of two drifters, traveling together across the Midwest in search of belonging — the movie is stark, lonely and more than a bit gory because our two lovers happen to be cannibals.(Maybe now you understand why this meaty film is coming out Thanksgiving week.)Adapted from the novel by Camille DeAngelis, “Bones and All” tracks Maren (“Waves” star Taylor Russell), an 18-year-old who has just transferred to a new high school where she tentatively befriends a classmate and then, somewhat less tentatively, bites down hard on the girl’s finger. Maren’s dad (André Holland) has been dreading this sort of thing, as she’s shown an inclination toward consuming human flesh ever since she was a child. So when her father speeds her out of town and abandons her in the middle of nowhere, Maren must finally seek guidance from her own kind.Fortunately, she can smell fellow cannibals, including Chalamet’s Lee, who she forges a tender romance with, and Mark Rylance, who plays a veteran cannibal with unnerving Harry Dean Stanton energy. There’s even a scene where Maren and Lee run into a cannibal drifter played by Michael Stuhlbarg, who was so sweet in “Call Me by Your Name” and here is something else entirely.“It was a delight, the idea that we could kind of summon Michael to be the perverted father after having been the loving father in ‘Call Me by Your Name,’” Guadagnino said at the news conference. But if people on social media are tempted to draw a link from “Bones and All” to another “Call Me by Your Name” actor — Armie Hammer, whose career fell apart when the star’s cannibalistic fantasies came to light and sexual assault allegations followed — Guadagnino would rather you didn’t.“The relationship between this kind of digital muckraking and our wish to make this movie is nonexistent, and it should be met with a shrug,” Guadagnino told Deadline last week. “I would prefer to talk about what the film has to say, rather than things that have nothing to do with it.”Social media was a hot topic at the film’s news conference: Though the film is set in the 1980s, one journalist felt that the outcast characters in “Bones and All” suffer society’s judgment in a way that could be likened to a modern-day pile-on.“To be young now, or to be young whenever — I can only speak for my generation — is to be intensely judged,” Chalamet said. “It was a relief to play characters that are wrestling with an internal dilemma absent the ability to go on Reddit or Twitter, Instagram or TikTok and figure out where they fit in.”Added his co-star Russell, “The hope is really that you can find your own compass within all of [social media], and that seems like a difficult task now.”Chalamet concurred. “I think it’s tough to be alive now,” he said before issuing his prediction of societal collapse. What made him so certain? “It smells like it,” he said, as Lee or Maren might.But Chalamet wasn’t totally without hope. He said “Bones and All” portrayed that disenfranchisement and tribelessness in a way that could prove helpful now.“Without being pretentious, that’s why hopefully these movies matter,” Chalamet said. “The role of the artist is to shine a light on what’s going on.” More