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    Watch Glen Powell and Adria Arjona Fight and Flirt in ‘Hit Man’

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    The director Richard Linklater narrates a pivotal sequence from his rom-com thriller.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.The following includes spoilers for “Hit Man.”Actions speak louder, and more flirtatiously, than words in this key sequence from “Hit Man,” the rom-com thriller from Richard Linklater now streaming on Netflix.During the movie’s screenings at film festivals last year, this particular scene had audiences erupting with applause for the feat that it pulls off. It’s “kind of a performance within a performance within a performance,” Linklater says in his narration.At this point in the movie, the lead character, Gary Johnson (Glen Powell), is at a turning point. He has been working undercover with the New Orleans Police Department as a hit man named Ron. In that role, he developed a secret romantic relationship with a woman who initially tried to solicit Ron for his services. Her name is Madison (Adria Arjona) and she was going to hire Ron to kill her abrasive husband, but Ron talks her out of it.Madison’s husband later ends up dead, and the police think that Madison is the killer. One of the officers, Jasper (Austin Amelio) has seen Gary and Madison together in public and has suspicions about what’s going on with the two. He decides to put a wire on Gary and send him to talk with Madison in the hopes of creating an entrapment scenario. But to save Madison (and himself), Gary thinks fast and comes up with a way to warn Madison that they are under surveillance.He types out information to her through his Notes app on his phone and directs her through what to say, and not say, in their conversation, in an exchange that is both sexy and flirty, while also being a tense high-wire act.“It’s fun to see your hero, the guy you’re invested in, kind of figure his way out of a really sticky, tight situation that I don’t think any of us would be quick enough to find a way out of,” Linklater says.“It’s a dance, and it’s just fun to see them figure it out as they go.”Read the “Hit Man” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      Adria Arjona on ‘Hit Man’ and How the Production Surprised Her

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      The actress, who stars with Glen Powell, said that with the contract-killer movie, her ideas were finally valued in a writer’s room.Editor’s note: Spoilers ahead.Adria Arjona doesn’t like doing what she’s told.The co-star of the new Netflix romantic action comedy “Hit Man,” Arjona accompanied her father, the Guatemalan Mexican singer-songwriter Ricardo Arjona, on tour from the time she was young. It was a musical mentorship opportunity, so she ended up deciding early on: Music was out.He also made her read the poems of Pablo Neruda and the work of Gabriel García Márquez, so naturally, she said, all she wanted to do was listen to ’N Sync.“I do everything backwards,” Arjona, 32, said on a recent weekday morning over sparkling water at the Whitby Bar in Midtown Manhattan. “That’s just my personality — I just listen to my intuition. It’s not like I’m doing it on purpose or trying to be rebellious.”In “Hit Man,” directed by Richard Linklater, Arjona is Madison Masters, a desperate housewife who tries to hire a hit man, played by Glen Powell, unaware he’s a police operative. The rapturously reviewed movie is the latest entry in a 12-year-long acting career that has suddenly become white hot.She broke out in 2022 as the mechanic Bix Caleen in the streaming “Star Wars” series “Andor,” playing Cassian Andor’s fearless friend. (Season 2 of the Disney+ series, which she’s finished filming, is expected next year.) She also appeared as the betrothed daughter in the 2022 reboot of “Father of the Bride,” after roles in “Pacific Rim: Uprising” and Season 2 of “True Detective.”Arjona with Glen Powell in “Hit Man,” the Netflix action romantic comedy.Brian Roedel/NetflixWe 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 True Story Behind Glen Powell’s Character in ‘Hit Man’

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      The romantic shenanigans are the stuff of Hollywood, but the film’s fake contract killer is based on a real man profiled in a Texas Monthly article.“Hit men don’t really exist!” an exasperated undercover pretend assassin says in Netflix’s new romantic action comedy, “Hit Man.” But the very existence of the film, which is loosely based on a seemingly strait-laced community college instructor who moonlighted as a fake assassin for the Houston police, proves just how much they fascinate us.Though plenty of officers have worn wires and impersonated hit men in murder-for-hire investigations, the film’s inspiration, Gary Johnson, was the “Laurence Olivier of the field,” according to a 2001 Texas Monthly article by Skip Hollandsworth. Over a decades-long career, relying on a bevy of accents and a penchant for being a sympathetic listener, Johnson, who died in 2022, managed to ensnare more than 60 people who tried to hire him.That’s just the kind of character that’s catnip for a leading-man-in-the-making like Glen Powell, who plays a version of Johnson in “Hit Man.” Of course, the actor and his director Richard Linklater, who wrote the script together, added a few Hollywood touches, including a rom-com plot involving the fictional Johnson and a woman (Adria Arjona) hoping to hire him to kill her husband.But some of the movie’s most outlandish plot elements — like the teenager who tries to pay Johnson partly in Atari computer games — did really happen. Here’s the story behind the movie and a look at hit men in real life.Who was Gary Johnson, whose life inspired the film?To his neighbors, he was a mild-mannered, middle-aged man who lived alone with two cats and worked in human resources at a company downtown, as he told them. (The baggy jorts and love of birding are Hollywood inventions.)In reality, Johnson, who spent a year as a military policeman in Vietnam, was an investigator for the district attorney’s office in Houston. On the side, he taught classes in human sexuality and general psychology two nights a week at a local community college. (The film switches it up, making Powell’s character a professor working for the police on the side and relocating the action to New Orleans.)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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      Richard Linklater on ‘Hit Man’ and the Killer Inside Us All

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      Richard Linklater’s latest movie, “Hit Man,” is a bit of a departure for the director, who has made some of the most acclaimed and influential indie films of the last 30-plus years. The movie, which stars the ascendant Glen Powell, is about a mild-mannered college professor who has a side gig with the New Orleans Police Department, setting up stings by posing as different hit men. It’s a tight, stylish and sexy thriller, with some twisted romance added in, from a filmmaker better known for the ambling rhythms and gently existential tone of beloved classics like “Dazed and Confused,” “Boyhood” and “Before Sunrise” (not to mention his great comedy “School of Rock,” which exists in a category of its own).Listen to the Conversation With Richard LinklaterDavid Marchese talks to the acclaimed director about his new film “Hit Man” and life’s big questions.But alongside its pop charms, “Hit Man” still manages to sneak in a provocative exploration of one of Linklater’s pet themes: the nature and malleability of personal identity. It’s also, as so many of the 63-year-old’s films are, a movie that understands the pure cinematic pleasure of watching smart, inquisitive people converse — exploring ideas and philosophies, making one another laugh, testing one another.It’s the talking that made me fall in love with Linklater’s films, which he almost always writes or co-writes. (He co-wrote “Hit Man” with Powell.) The way his vivid, relatable characters discuss the big questions, with so much soul and hang-looseness, free from any highfalutin airs, has long been something of a north star for me as a movie lover and as a talker. The searching, openhearted discussions in Linklater films are the kind of conversations most meaningful to me in my own life and work. I don’t want to make too big a deal of it, but I can see a pretty clear line from adolescent me sitting around watching all the chatty oddballs in “Waking Life” and “Slacker” to middle-aged me, here and now, speaking with Richard Linklater — who, surprise surprise, sounds a lot like a character from one of his movies.I’m curious how you think about your identity at 63 years old. Do you feel as if it’s fixed? Do you still have formative experiences? It’s the kind of thing I’ve thought a lot about my entire life: What could transform me? I was probably more in the camp of we’re fixed, give or take whatever little percentage around the edges. So I was interested in this notion lately that, oh, you can change, the personality isn’t fixed. That seems current: this notion of self and identity, gender. I sort of like that it’s all on the table, that everybody’s thinking you kind of are who you say you are. To me, that’s interesting.Do you have a lot of different identities? Probably as many as anybody else.What are the different ones? Well, if you get me on a Ping-Pong table — my third rail is athletics. I feel this little rush of competitiveness, which I really don’t have in the world of art at all — or my life even. I’m the guy looking at the world through glass. I was always the guy in the corner thinking about everything. I’m an introvert who gets put in extroverted situations occasionally, and I can play that role. But roles I currently play? I don’t know. It’s nice to care less about it as you get older. More

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      The Best Films of 2024, So Far

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      Our critics pick nine films that they think are worth your time on this long holiday weekend.Looking for a good movie to pass the time this Memorial Day weekend? The New York Times’s chief film critic, Manohla Dargis, and movie critic, Alissa Wilkinson, have you covered. Here are their top picks for the year so far. All are in theaters or available on demand.‘Hit Man’In theaters; June 7 on Netflix.The story: Glen Powell is a philosophy professor who moonlights for the police in New Orleans when he finds himself undercover posing as a hit man in this Richard Linklater movie. An encounter with Madison (Adria Arjona), a housewife looking to hire him, raises the stakes, comedically and romantically.Alissa Wilkinson’s take: “If I see a movie more delightful than “Hit Man” this year, I’ll be surprised. It’s the kind of romp people are talking about when they say that “they don’t make them like they used to”: It’s romantic, sexy, hilarious, satisfying and a genuine star-clinching turn for Glen Powell, who’s been having a moment for about two years now.” Read the review.‘Civil War’In theaters.Kirsten Dunst plays a war photographer in Alex Garland’s “Civil War.” A24, via 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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      ‘Hit Man’ Review: It’s a Hit, Man

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      Glen Powell stars in one of the year’s funniest, sexiest, most enjoyable movies — and somehow it’s surprisingly deep, too.If I see a movie more delightful than “Hit Man” this year, I’ll be surprised. It’s the kind of romp people are talking about when they say that “they don’t make them like they used to”: It’s romantic, sexy, hilarious, satisfying and a genuine star-clinching turn for Glen Powell, who’s been having a moment for about two years now. It’s got the cheeky verve of a 1940s screwball rom-com in a thoroughly contemporary (and slightly racier) package. I’ve seen it twice, and a huge grin plastered itself across my face both times.That’s why it’s a shame most people will see it at home — Netflix is barely giving it a theatrical release before it hits streaming even though it’s the sort of movie that begs for the experience of collective gut-splitting joy. Oh well. If you can see it in a theater, it’s worth it. If not, then get your friends together, pop some popcorn and settle in for a good old-fashioned movie for grown-ups.The director Richard Linklater and Powell collaborated on the “Hit Man” script, which is loosely based on Skip Hollandsworth’s 2001 Texas Monthly article about Gary Johnson, a faux hit man who actually worked for the Houston Police Department. In the movie version, Gary (Powell) is a mild-mannered philosophy professor in New Orleans with a part-time side gig doing tech work for law enforcement. One day, he is accidentally pulled into pretending to be a hit man in a sting operation, and soon realizes he loves playing the role.Or roles, really: The more Gary gets into it, the more he realizes that each person’s fantasy of a hit man is different, and he starts to dress up, preparing for the part before he meets with the client. (If this movie were solely constructed as a de facto reel demonstrating Powell’s range, it would work just fine.) Then, one day, pretending to be a sexy, confident hit man named Ron, he meets Madison (Adria Arjona, practically glowing from within), a put-upon housewife seeking his services. And everything changes for Gary.A great deal of the enjoyment of “Hit Man” comes from simply witnessing Powell and Arjona’s white-hot chemistry. Seeing Powell transmogrify from nerdy Gary to five o’clock shadow Ron and back again is both hilarious and tantalizing, while Arjona has a big-eyed innocence crossed with wily smarts that keeps everyone, including Gary, guessing. Multiple layers of deception keep the movie from feeling formulaic — you’re always trying to keep track of who thinks what, and why. Eventually, when “Hit Man” morphs into a kind of caper comedy, part of the joy is rooting for characters as they make choices that are, at best, flexibly ethical. In doing so, we get to be naughty too. In a movie starring a philosophy professor, that’s especially funny, a wry joke on us all.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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      Venice Film Festival 2023: What to Watch For

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      New films from David Fincher, Sofia Coppola, Ava DuVernay and Michael Mann will make up for the absence of stars kept away by the Hollywood strikes.A year ago, the Venice Film Festival had enough star power to put even celebrity-worshiping Cannes on notice. Highlights were quickly beamed all over the world, including the notorious “Don’t Worry Darling” kickoff that fueled endless speculation about the film’s director, Olivia Wilde, and her stars Florence Pugh and Harry Styles; the news conference where an unexpectedly sagacious Timothée Chalamet predicted imminent societal collapse; and the tearful Brendan Fraser comeback that began on the Lido and culminated in his best actor Oscar win.But without all of those celebrities, can Venice still go viral?The 80th edition of the festival, which begins on Wednesday, will be significantly affected by continuing strikes by the Screen Actors Guild (or SAG-AFTRA) and the Writers Guild of America, since the actors’ union has instructed its members not to do press for any studio movies until the strike against those companies is resolved. That puts Venice in a bind, as it’s regarded as one of the best places for Hollywood to unveil starry awards-season titles. Few major actors will even be permitted to attend this year.The actors’ strike has already cost Venice its original opening-night film, Luca Guadagnino’s sexy tennis romance, “Challengers,” since MGM delayed it from September to spring in the hopes that its lead, Zendaya, will be allowed to promote it several months from now when the strikes might be resolved. (A low-profile Italian film is opening instead.) And I’ve heard of a few more starry fall films that were earmarked for Venice but opted for the Telluride Film Festival instead, since that event is less driven by the photo ops and news conferences that are no longer feasible in Italy.Despite some of those trims, the Venice lineup is still enticing, with an auteur-heavy list featuring directors nearly as famous as their leads. And Venice has proved before that it can adapt to unfavorable limitations: Amid the pandemic in August 2020, the festival opted for a smaller, partly open-air edition that still went on to premiere the eventual winner of the best picture Oscar, “Nomadland.”Emma Stone, left, and Mark Ruffalo in “Poor Things,” from Yorgos Lanthimos. Atsushi Nishijima/Searchlight Pictures, via Associated PressThis year’s program includes two films about assassins-for-hire: David Fincher’s new thriller, “The Killer,” stars Michael Fassbender, while Richard Linklater’s “Hit Man” features the “Top Gun: Maverick” breakout Glen Powell, who also served as a co-writer. I’m curious about the off-kilter comedy “Poor Things,” directed by Yorgos Lanthimos (“The Favourite”) and starring Emma Stone as a sexually curious Frankenstein’s monster. Ditto “Maestro,” Bradley Cooper’s second directorial effort, after “A Star Is Born.” He’s cast himself as the composer Leonard Bernstein, opposite Carey Mulligan as Bernstein’s wife, Felicia, and his decision to wear a prosthetic nose has already set off controversy.Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” was a big hit last year, but what will that story look like through Sofia Coppola’s lens? The “Lost in Translation” and “Marie Antoinette” director puts her spotlight on Elvis Presley’s wife with “Priscilla,” featuring Cailee Spaeny as teen bride Priscilla Presley and the “Euphoria” star Jacob Elordi as the singer. Ava DuVernay has adapted the Isabel Wilkerson book “Caste” for her new film, “Origin,” which stars the Oscar nominee Aunjanue Ellis in an examination of racism and systemic oppression. And though Michael Mann has secured a guild exemption that would allow the cast of “Ferrari” to promote it in Venice, I’m curious whether his new film’s press-shy lead, Adam Driver (as the racer-turned-car-magnate Enzo Ferrari), is willing to do a full-blown media blitz for the movie, which the hot indie studio Neon is releasing in theaters on Christmas Day.Two years after the release of his Oscar-winning breakthrough “Drive My Car,” the director Ryusuke Hamaguchi returns to the festival circuit with “Evil Does Not Exist,” which originated as a dialogue-free short and became a feature-length film about ecological collapse. And two months after releasing his feature-length “Asteroid City,” the director Wes Anderson is opting for something shorter with “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” a 37-minute Roald Dahl adaptation for Netflix.Harmony Korine premiered his biggest film, “Spring Breakers,” at Venice back in 2012, and he’ll return with the mysterious “Aggro Dr1ft,” which stars the rapper Travis Scott and was shot solely using infrared photography. He’s not the only director taking chances: Pablo Larraín, the director of “Jackie” and “Spencer,” has set the divas aside for a moment to make “El Conde,” a black-and-white supernatural fable that reimagines the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet as a bloodsucking vampire.And then there are the chances that Venice itself is taking when it comes to three auteurs: It is premiering “Dogman” from Luc Besson, who was accused of sexual assault but cleared by prosecutors; “The Palace” from Roman Polanski, who was convicted of unlawful sex with a minor but fled before he could be sentenced; and “Coup de Chance” from Woody Allen, who has denied sexual abuse accusations by Dylan Farrow, his adopted daughter.Venice will also serve as an elegy of sorts for the director William Friedkin, who died earlier this month and whose final film, the naval drama “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial,” will premiere posthumously on the Lido. Adapted by Friedkin from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Herman Wouk, it stars Jake Lacy and Kiefer Sutherland. More

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      ‘Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood’ Review: OK, Boomer

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      Richard Linklater’s new animated film tells the story of the moon landing with some tongue-in-cheek revisionism.There are some people out there who insist that the moon landing never happened. As far as I know, the director Richard Linklater is not among them, but his new movie whimsically proposes its own revisionist account of what NASA was up to in the summer of 1969. Before Neil Armstrong took his giant leap, it seems, a Texas fourth grader named Stan stepped out of the landing module and onto the lunar surface.Stan’s story is narrated by his grown-up self (voiced by Jack Black). It isn’t really a full-blown conspiracy theory, but more what Tom Sawyer might have called a stretcher — the kind of yarn it might be fun to pretend to believe. The full title of the film, which debuts on Netflix this week, is “Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood,” and Stan’s astronaut fabulations are bright threads in a cozy fabric of baby-boomer nostalgia.Plenty of kids dreamed of going to the moon back then. Stan’s imaginary adventures are filtered through animation techniques that are both dreamlike and precise, so that they blend seamlessly into his meticulously rendered suburban reality. (The head of animation is Tommy Pallotta, whose previous collaborations with Linklater include “Waking Life” and “A Scanner Darkly.”) And that’s what the movie is really about: remembering what it was like to be a young American in the ’60s. Black’s voice-over has a wry, can-you-believe-it quality, as if Stan were a dad (or even, at this point, a grandpa) regaling the youngsters with stories about the old days. Or maybe boring them stiff, if they’ve heard this stuff before.But cut the old guy a little slack. “Apollo 10½” may not be working with the freshest material — “The Wonder Years” popped wheelies and played kickball on similar generational turf — but it’s a lively and charming stroll down memory lane all the same. The movie’s strongest appeal might well be to viewers of Stan’s generation, who are likely to appreciate its meticulous sense of detail and its tolerant, easygoing spirit.Stan is the youngest of six children, a “Brady Bunch” configuration of three boys and three girls who live with their parents on the outskirts of Houston. Dad works for NASA — in shipping and receiving — and is a mildly grouchy, slightly eccentric, mostly benevolent patriarch. Mom is harried, sarcastic and efficient, running the household like a bustling small business.Things sure were different back then. There was a lot more cigarette smoking, and a general disregard for the safety of children, who were piled into the backs of pickup trucks, paddled frequently at school, and free to ride bikes without helmets through clouds of DDT. There were fights about who controlled the television and the hi-fi, and plenty of good stuff to watch and listen to even without cable or Spotify: “The Beverly Hillbillies” and the Monkees, to name just two.Of course there was also the Vietnam War, racial conflict and political assassinations. “Apollo 10½” pays some attention to all that, but also notes that, to a 9-year-old boy in the Houston suburbs, the wider world could seem very far away. Unlike the moon, which was suddenly, miraculously in reach.Linklater captures the drama and suspense surrounding the Apollo 11 mission, and also the way it was folded into the patterns of daily life. This isn’t the first time he has used animation layered over live performances, and this digital rotoscoping technique is especially attuned to nuances of gesture and facial expression. The way Stan’s father leans forward while he’s watching the news, the side-eye glances that pass between Stan and his siblings, the weary stoicism of their mother’s posture — it’s all beautifully subtle, and more cinematic than cartoonish.And “Apollo 10½” is more a modest memoir than a whiz-bang space epic. Its view of the past is doggedly rose-colored, with social and emotional rough edges smoothed away by the passage of time and the filmmaker’s genial temperament. The moon landing itself is epochal, transformative, and also just another thing that happened in one boy’s eventful, ordinary life: a small step after all.Apollo 10½: A Space Age ChildhoodRated PG-13. Smoking and other dubious period-appropriate behavior. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters and on Netflix. More