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    At the Ruhrtriennale, Searching for the Sublime Among the Ruins

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    In the abandoned industrial sites that serve as the festival’s venues, our critic witnessed beauty struggling to be born: fitfully, clumsily and sometimes stunningly.“I Want Absolute Beauty,” the title of the opening production for this year’s Ruhrtriennale, sounds like a mission statement of sorts.The event, one of Germany’s major arts festivals, lights up the former industrial sites that dot the Ruhr region, in the country’s northwest — though hulking power plants and abandoned steelworks aren’t where you necessarily expect to find beauty. Then again, this 22-year-old festival has always been about letting audiences encounter the sublime among the ruins. Everywhere I turned during the Ruhrtriennale’s opening weekend, I witnessed beauty struggling — fitfully, clumsily and sometimes stunningly — to be born.This summer, the Ruhrtriennale welcomes a new artistic leader, the acclaimed Belgian theater director Ivo van Hove. His three-season tenure kicked off on Friday night with “I Want Absolute Beauty,” a staged cycle of songs by the English singer-songwriter P.J. Harvey that van Hove has created for the German actress Sandra Hüller, presented at the Jahrhunderthalle, a former power station in the city of Bochum.Hüller, best-known for her Academy Award-nominated performance in “Anatomy of a Fall,” gives gutsy and full-throated renditions of 26 of Harvey’s songs accompanied by a four-person band. It’s a heroic performance over an intermission-less hour and a half. Van Hove doesn’t impose a narrative, in the style of jukebox musicals, but a journey of sorts can be followed through the titles (“Dorset” — “London” — “New York”) that appear on a screen where both live and prerecorded video is projected throughout the evening.The stage area is covered in dirt, and dancers twirl, writhe and gyrate around Hüller. The choreography, by the collective (La)Horde, is earthy and elemental, sometimes joyous and liberating, but often menacing and with hints of sexual violence. Hüller is always front and center, her voice tough but with an edge of fragility. Sometimes she joins the dancers in their primeval thrashing. The results can be exhilarating but are just as often exasperating. Despite the high caliber of the performances, it’s easy to lose interest. Occasionally there’s an earsplitting crescendo or blinding flood light to jolt us back to attention.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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      At a Festival Amid Industrial Ruins, Ivo van Hove Takes Charge

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      For the Belgian director’s first edition as leader of the Ruhrtriennale, abandoned sites are “the starting point and the end point,” he says.The calling card of the Ruhrtriennale Festival of the Arts is to present shows in former industrial sites, like power stations or coal plants, among cities in the Ruhr region of northwestern Germany. For the theater-maker Ivo van Hove, who is presenting his first season as the festival’s artistic director, this is churning up feelings of déjà vu.“I was 20 years old at a time in Belgium when theater was the most old-fashioned thing you could imagine,” van Hove, 65, said. “My generation made a real change and we did that by, for instance, not playing in theaters. My first production was in an abandoned laundry. We played for 30 people and we had 30 actors onstage.”The scale is much larger at the Ruhrtriennale, but at least van Hove had staged five productions at the festival before taking the helm, so he is familiar with the artistic parameters.One of them is paying attention to musical theater, which can take on vastly different forms in Europe compared with English-speaking countries. According to Krystian Lada, a Polish director who helped van Hove put together the slate, the Ruhrtriennale is known for presenting “a new vision of music theater” in Germany, where so-called high and low cultures are often rigidly separated. Lada’s own entry in the 2024 festival, “Abendzauber,” combines works by Bruckner and Björk.Van Hove’s “I Want Absolute Beauty,” which kicks off the festival on Friday, revolves around the “Anatomy of a Fall” and “The Zone of Interest” star Sandra Hüller (whom he had directed in Eugene O’Neill’s play “Strange Interlude” in 2013) performing a song cycle pulled from P.J. Harvey’s back catalog. (Van Hove’s take on musical theater, or any theater for that matter, is often divisive: A recent review in The New York Times called his musical adaptation of the film “Opening Night,” with new songs by Rufus Wainwright, “a travesty.”)Other offerings of note at the festival include “Legende,” the dissident Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov’s take on the filmmaker Sergei Parajanov’s work; Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s new dance piece “Y”; and Philip Venables and Ted Huffman’s music-theater work “The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions.”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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      How to Watch the Oscars: Date, Time and Streaming

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      An earlier airtime and an unusual presenter approach are among the changes at this year’s ceremony.Watching the Oscars doesn’t usually require an instruction manual.But this year, to make sure you catch the goodness of Ryan Gosling performing “I’m Just Ken” — in what we can only hope will be a faux fur coat — there are two crucial steps you must take.One: Be in your preferred watching position — popcorn popped, possibly in a “Dune” bucket, Snuggie on — an hour earlier on Sunday. In a break from the traditional 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific start, this year’s ceremony is scheduled to kick off at 7 p.m., an effort by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to stick to prime-time hours.And two: When we say 7 p.m., we mean what-was-until-2-a.m.-on-Sunday 6 p.m., because — that’s right — daylight saving time is here once again. Don’t forget to set your clocks — if you still have clocks — forward an hour.You may have heard that “Oppenheimer,” with a pack-leading 13 nominations, is a lock to win best picture. This is accurate. But even if we’re certain how the night will end, the getting there is the fun part. Here’s everything you need to know.What time does the show start and where can I watch?In a perk for those who like going to bed early, this year’s show begins at 7 p.m. Eastern, 4 p.m. Pacific, at the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles. Sunday is also the start of daylight saving time, so remember to set your clocks an hour forward before you go to bed on Saturday night.On TV, ABC is the official broadcaster. Online, you can watch the show live on the ABC app, which is free to download, or at abc.com, though you’ll need to sign in using the credentials from your cable provider. There are also a number of live TV streaming services that offer access to ABC, including Hulu + Live TV, YouTube TV, AT&T TV and FuboTV, which all require subscriptions.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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      How an Argument Resonates in ‘Anatomy of a Fall’

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      The director Justine Triet narrates a sequence from her film, which is nominated for best picture. Triet is also nominated for best director.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.A couple has an argument that escalates in this scene from “Anatomy of a Fall,” the drama from Justine Triet that won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2023, then went on to receive five Oscar nominations this year, including best picture.In the film, the couple’s fight begins as audio that is presented in court where Sandra (Sandra Hüller) is on trial for the death of her husband, Samuel (Samuel Theis).Then, Triet makes the choice to show visuals of the fight, rather than only providing us the sound. We move from the courtroom into this domestic scene in the kitchen. Narrating the sequence, she explained that “sound has the power to give the perfect illusion of the present,” so she wanted to add visuals to give a more complete picture of the fractures between these two people.Triet decided to shoot the scene with two cameras, “not to lose any of their energy,” she said. And she wanted to the scene to take place during daylight, with the sun shining through a window.“Often, very dramatic, intimate scenes are used to being filmed at night, as if intimacy were separate from the rest of life,” she said. “And here, I choose the opposite. And the contrast between light and violence is even stronger for me.”Read the “Anatomy of a Fall” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      Sandra Hüller, Uneasy in the Spotlight

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      After Sandra Hüller learned that two movies she stars in — “Anatomy of a Fall” and “The Zone of Interest” — had been selected for the competition at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, she was a little apprehensive about what it might mean for her anonymity. The German actress has always had a prickly relationship with fame: Aside from her role in the bittersweet 2016 feature “Toni Erdmann,” she has mainly kept a low profile, working in German theater.But what happened next outstripped even her boldest expectations. “Anatomy of a Fall,” a French drama in which Hüller plays a woman accused of murdering her husband, went on to win the Palme d’Or, the festival’s top honor, and “The Zone of Interest,” a Holocaust film, took the Grand Prix, or runner-up prize. The Los Angeles Times crowned her the “queen of Cannes,” and, in a few weeks, she will travel from her home in Leipzig, Germany, to Hollywood for the Oscars, where she is nominated for best actress, for “Anatomy.”This attention has been challenging for Hüller — at times overwhelmingly so — and now she is grappling with what the nomination, and its accompanying scrutiny, means for her and her career. “It means being accepted into a circle of people I wasn’t in before,” she said, in a recent interview in Leipzig. “But I don’t know if it means success, or it will make anything easier.”Sitting in a cafe with her black Weimaraner lying under the table, she was warm but a little guarded as she spoke about her newfound global fame. “I like my life. I like my apartment. I like my everyday routine. There’s no lack of anything that I had to fill. I wasn’t waiting for this to happen,” said Hüller, 45. “But it means that people now believe I can do things that perhaps they didn’t believe I could do before.”Justine Triet, the director of “Anatomy of a Fall,” and Hüller during filming.Neon, via Associated PressShe is nominated for an Oscar for best actress for her performance in the film.Neon, via Associated PressIt was also surprising, she noted, because “Anatomy of a Fall” is not a typical Oscars movie. An ambiguous exploration of language, gender dynamics and toxic relationships, it centers on the question of whether Hüller’s character, a German writer also named Sandra, pushed her husband out a window to his death. The movie culminates in a series of courtroom scenes in which a judge — and the audience — must weigh her potential guilt.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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      ‘Anatomy of a Fall’ Review: Tumbling From the Alps to the Courtroom

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      Did a writer kill her husband? In this cerebral murder trial drama by the director Justine Triet, the audience never has its footing and questions go unanswered.“Anatomy of a Fall,” a cerebral trial drama by the director Justine Triet, opens with a mysterious death in the French Alps. The deceased is an aspiring writer named Samuel (Samuel Theis). The suspect is his more successful wife, Sandra (Sandra Hüller), a novelist who is a lot like her surroundings: stoic, remote and a tad frosty.Did Sandra kill her husband? As the film flows from investigation to tribunal to verdict, it’s only interested in the question — not the answer. Triet and her fellow screenwriter (and real-life partner) Arthur Harari invite a jury to dissect the flaws of a rather average woman. Sandra drinks, but she’s not a drunk. She’s aloof, but not cruel. She needs sex, but she’s hardly the aggressor the prosecutor (Antoine Reinartz) describes.Her most confounding trait is, if you believe her testimony, an ability to nap while Samuel spends his last living hour replaying a cover of 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” at a volume so earsplitting the steel drums could have triggered an avalanche. The closest anyone comes to a motive is when Sandra’s inquisitors suggest that she was annoyed by the song’s misogynist lyrics. Her lawyer (Saadia Bentaïeb) counters: “It was an instrumental version.”All people are unknowable, the film insists, even to themselves. If any of us were forced to defend our incongruities and fibs — the fights we avoid, the compromises that make us quietly seethe — we’d all be convicted of irreconcilable contradictions. (Still a lesser crime than murder.) Sandra just has to confess her inner frictions to a courtroom where her rationalizations hang in the air as goofily as circus balloons.The film doesn’t need to spend two and a half hours intoning that life is an anthology of competing narratives, that every marriage is made of two storytellers. But at least it finds a few ways to drum on the idea, most resonantly through Sandra and Samuel’s books, which draw their inspiration from a blend of biography and fiction (as did the lead in Triet’s last film, “Sibyl,” another author disastrously mining reality). That blur, notes a student (Camille Rutherford) who interviews Sandra for her thesis in the first scene, “makes us want to figure out which is which.” Sandra smiles at the challenge. Later, however, her freedom will hinge on how a jury parses her truth from others’ interpretations.As experts take the stand to insist that their version of events is correct, the cinematographer, Simon Beaufils, switches from a composed style to one that zips and zooms, like an on-the-fly documentarian. Watching a witness parry questions from both the prosecution and defense, the image holds on him while the camera sprints back and forth to keep pace with the arguments lobbing from each side. The whiplash is dizzying.The most important judge in the room is the couple’s preteen son, Daniel (Milo Machado Graner). Partly blind because of an accident that figures into the case, Daniel is uncomfortable becoming a character in the lawyers’ competing narratives. His poor vision is a metaphor for the struggle to see the truth. A more poetic allusion is how the boy teaches himself piano — not by reading sheet music, but by discovering through trial and error which notes sound right. As a bonus, we hear the passage of time in his improvement.Triet’s filmmaking style is deliberate, an unusual approach for a story about ambiguity. She wants the viewer to decide Sandra’s guilt — she even has a minor character say so outright — and so she withholds both the answer and the pleasure of feeling like we can figure out. Even Hüller, the kind of earthy and sincere actor who builds her characters out from the spine, has admitted that she isn’t sure if Sandra did it.In a sense, Triet has mapped a path to nowhere. You can respect her choice intellectually and still walk away grumbling in frustration — or appreciating the humor of this year’s Cannes jury definitively awarding her film the Palme d’Or. I’ve gone back to study some scenes and believe Triet knows what happened on the mountain. But she’s also added feints and discrepancies that go unacknowledged, vexations that exist solely for the audience. These are secrets Triet shares only with us and the dead man. And I suspect she’s taking them to the grave.Anatomy of a FallRated R for language and violent images. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Zone of Interest,’ a Holocaust Drama, Debuts at Cannes

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      The disorienting drama from “Under the Skin” director Jonathan Glazer may be in the running for a major prize at the festival.You might not know where you are when “The Zone of Interest” begins, and that’s by design. This new film from the director Jonathan Glazer, which has been hotly tipped for a major prize at the Cannes Film Festival since its premiere Friday night, opens on a bucolic picnic by the lake. Family members chat in German, wander off, attend to children and soak up the sun. And Glazer’s long, wide shots let us settle in, too.Eventually, they go home, and in their nice two-story house, parents Rudolf (Christian Friedel) and Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) retire to separate beds. In the morning, their daily routines begin: Maids prepare breakfast, children scatter, Rudolf dresses for work. But it’s all filmed in such faraway wide shots that it may take you a moment, once Rudolf walks into the front yard, to realize that this man is wearing an SS uniform.From there, you might pick up on more unsettling details. Aren’t the walls that surround Hedwig’s garden topped by barbed wire? Can you barely make out the buildings on the other side, some of which billow smoke? And as the children play, don’t those faint, far-off noises start to sound like gunshots, guard dogs and screams?This family’s life by the lake is only a bucolic idyll if you have blinders on — and to live there, you must — because it soon becomes clear that Rudolf is a Nazi commandant, and the house that Hedwig describes as her dream home abuts Auschwitz.“The Zone of Interest,” adapted from the novel by Martin Amis, is Glazer’s first film in a decade. The British director has only three feature credits to his name, but each one — the raucous “Sexy Beast” (2001), the stunning Nicole Kidman drama “Birth” (2004) and the sci-fi tour de force “Under the Skin” (2014) — is so potent that he has never felt far gone.Still, Glazer has never had a mainstream breakthrough or significant awards push, and I’m curious if it can come with “The Zone of Interest,” which will be distributed by A24 later this year. A Palme d’Or at Cannes would certainly help, but Glazer’s directing ought to attract a lot of attention: He frames the family’s mundane activities in static wide shots, cutting only when someone enters another room, as though they themselves are under eerie surveillance.The Cannes jury might also reward Hüller, whose performance as selfish Hedwig is chilling. As Jews are killed next door, she recalls a trip and asks her husband, “Will you take me to the spa in Italy again? All that pampering.” Anything that happens past the walls of her luxurious garden simply doesn’t exist, or else it offers a mercenary opportunity: She eagerly tries on a confiscated fur coat and tells Rudolf to look for more items stolen from the camp’s prisoners. “Chocolate, if you see it,” she wheedles. “Tiny goodies.”And if the film connects enough to become an awards contender down the road, I hope voters will pay attention to its carefully calibrated sound design. In the early going, there’s a hush, the kind of quiet you can have only if something is notably absent. Later, the sounds that drift from the camp are harder to ignore. Perhaps when “The Zone of Interest” began, we were listening through Hedwig’s ears.As we filed out after the premiere, the man sitting next to me confessed that he only understood 50 percent of the film. But I think the other 50 percent is meant to be felt, and for all of Glazer’s formal precision, he leaves plenty of room for viewers to come to their own conclusions. Does the family’s denial have contemporary parallels? How do the rhythms of work and life mitigate unimaginable horrors? And what did you hear in the hush before you could make out the screams? More