Majors, Jonathan (1989- )

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    Jonathan Majors Is Cast in First Movie Role Since Assault Conviction

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    Mr. Majors, who was sentenced to a year of domestic violence programming and was dropped by Marvel, is set to star in the independent thriller “Merciless.”Jonathan Majors will lead a feature film for the first time since he was found guilty of assaulting and harassing his girlfriend, a conviction that doomed a lucrative contract with Marvel Studios and imperiled his status as one of the fastest-rising stars in Hollywood.Mr. Majors, who starred in “Creed III” and “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” last year, has been cast in “Merciless,” a supernatural thriller about a C.I.A. interrogator out for revenge. The movie will be directed by Martin Villeneuve and produced by Christopher Tuffin, an executive producer of the films “Sound of Freedom” and “Peppermint.”Mr. Tuffin said he believed in second chances and had decided to work with Mr. Majors because he was a “generational talent.”“We live in a culture that treats people as disposable, on both sides,” he said. “I believe that this matter has been adjudicated in the courts and he has a right to go back to his career.”A representative for Mr. Majors declined to comment.Mr. Majors was convicted of a reckless assault misdemeanor and a harassment violation in December, months after an altercation inside an S.U.V. that his girlfriend Grace Jabbari said turned violent. He was acquitted of two other charges that required prosecutors to prove he had acted with intent.A judge sentenced Mr. Majors to 52 weeks of domestic violence programming.In court testimony, Ms. Jabbari said she and Mr. Majors had gotten into an argument in Manhattan while they were dating. She said that he had twisted her arm and that she subsequently felt “a really hard blow across my head.” Mr. Majors did not testify but through his lawyer and in an interview on “Good Morning America,” he disputed Ms. Jabbari’s account and denied assaulting her.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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      Jonathan Majors Accused of Assault and Defamation in Lawsuit by Ex-Girlfriend

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      Grace Jabbari alleges several instances of violence by Majors, the former Marvel movie star. Majors’s lawyer said he was preparing a countersuit.The actor Jonathan Majors on Tuesday was accused of assault and defamation in a lawsuit filed by a former girlfriend, Grace Jabbari. The court documents include more details of Mr. Majors’s alleged conduct in the relationship at the heart of the criminal trial that ended in his conviction in December.The civil suit, filed in the Southern District of New York by Ms. Jabbari, a dancer and movement coach who dated Mr. Majors for two years beginning in 2021, accused Mr. Majors of having been violent toward her in New York, Los Angeles and London, including in one instance that left her with a head injury. The filing also accused Mr. Majors of repeatedly making threats to kill her and said he had “consistently engaged in an escalating pattern of abusive behavior towards women since as early as 2013.”On the accusation of defamation, the court documents said that Mr. Majors, 34, a former Marvel movie star, “implemented an extensive media campaign smearing” Ms. Jabbari. He called her “a liar at every turn,” the suit said, “and very specifically claimed that he has never put his hands on a woman, with the goal of convincing the world that Grace is not a victim of domestic abuse.”A lawyer for Mr. Majors, Priya Chaudhry, said she was not surprised by the suit, and that “Mr. Majors is preparing counterclaims against Ms. Jabbari.” News of the lawsuit was first reported by Rolling Stone.Brittany Henderson, a lawyer for Ms. Jabbari, said in a statement that “it takes true bravery to hold someone with this level of power and acclaim accountable.”Ms Henderson added: “We strongly believe that through this action, truth and transparency will bring Grace the justice that she deserves.”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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      Jonathan Majors Had History of Abuse in Relationships, Women Say

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      The actor denied physical abuse. Separately, he said he wasn’t told of accusations of misbehavior on the set of “Lovecraft Country.”Since the actor Jonathan Majors was found guilty in December of assaulting and harassing a girlfriend, he has maintained his innocence and his hope of reviving a once-skyrocketing career that disintegrated in the wake of his conviction. In a televised interview last month, he said that he had “never struck a woman.”But in pretrial statements to the prosecution in that assault case and, separately, in interviews with The New York Times, another former girlfriend, Emma Duncan, accused him of emotionally and physically abusing her — choking her, throwing her around and bruising her. A third, Maura Hooper, also said that he had emotionally abused her.Speaking publicly for the first time, Ms. Duncan and Ms. Hooper, actresses who dated Mr. Majors before he shot to fame as the supervillain Kang in Marvel projects, described him as a controlling, threatening figure who isolated them from friends and career pursuits. “You lose your sense of worth,” Ms. Duncan said.And in interviews with former colleagues, The Times found that Mr. Majors had a history of volatility on the set of the HBO series “Lovecraft Country” that included confrontations with female co-workers that led them to complain to the network.On Thursday afternoon, a lawyer for Mr. Majors, Priya Chaudhry, said that Mr. Majors had not physically abused Ms. Duncan. She described the relationships with both women as “toxic” and said that Mr. Majors was taking responsibility for his role in them. She added that “countless” women in the entertainment industry “can attest to his professionalism.”This article is based on interviews with 20 people, including some who requested anonymity for fear of career repercussions, and on statements submitted to the prosecution in the December case, in which Mr. Majors was found guilty of harassment and misdemeanor assault of Grace Jabbari, a former girlfriend. He is scheduled to be sentenced in April, though his lawyers asked on Tuesday that the judge throw out the jury’s guilty verdict.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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      Jonathan Majors Says He Was ‘Shocked’ by Assault Conviction

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      Mr. Majors spoke on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” his first interview since being convicted of misdemeanor assault and harassment for attacking his girlfriend in a car.Jonathan Majors, an ascending Hollywood star whose career was upended when he was found guilty last month of assault and harassment for attacking his girlfriend, said in an interview broadcast on Monday that he was “absolutely shocked” by the verdict.In the interview, portions of which were shown on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Mr. Majors, 34, said that the episode had been “very hard” and “confusing in many ways.”“I’m standing there and the verdict comes down. I say, ‘How is that possible based off the evidence, based off the prosecution’s evidence, let alone our evidence? How is that possible?’” he told Linsey Davis of ABC News.A six-person jury in Manhattan convicted Mr. Majors last month on misdemeanor assault and harassment charges for an altercation with Grace Jabbari, who was then his girlfriend, as they rode in a hired S.U.V. in March.Shortly after the verdict was announced, Marvel Studios parted ways with the actor, clouding the prospects of his once promising acting career. Marvel Studios had previously intended to build several films around the character Mr. Majors played in “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.” (Both Marvel and ABC, which ran the interview, are owned by Disney.)Mr. Majors’s sentencing is scheduled for Feb. 6.During a whirlwind two-week trial, the courtroom heard Ms. Jabbari describe the altercation that left her ear bloody and finger fractured. She said that Mr. Majors had received a flirty text from another woman, and that she had grabbed his phone out of his hand. First, she said, he tried to pry her fingers away; then he twisted her hand and her arm.“Next,” she said, “I felt like a really hard blow across my head.”Eventually, she said, Mr. Majors asked the driver to stop the vehicle. Video that jurors watched showed Mr. Majors jumping out, followed by Ms. Jabbari. He turned around, picked her up and placed her back in the car, appearing to push her back in when she tried to get out.Mr. Majors did not testify during the trial. But in the interview broadcast on Monday, he continued to dispute Ms. Jabbari’s account of the altercation and said that he did not know how she suffered the cut behind her ear and fractured finger.“I wish to God I knew,” he said.In a statement, Brittany Henderson, a lawyer for Ms. Jabbari, said that Mr. Majors “continues to take no accountability for his actions.”“His denigration of our jury system is not dissimilar from the above-the-law attitude that he has maintained throughout this legal process,” Ms. Henderson said in the statement. “The timing of these new statements demonstrates a clear lack of remorse for the actions for which he was found guilty and should make the sentencing decisions fairly easy for the Court.”Mr. Majors first gained attention in 2019 with the independent film “The Last Black Man in San Francisco” and quickly expanded into blockbuster movies, delivering acclaimed performances in “Creed III” and “Quantumania.” He also starred in “Magazine Dreams,” about a troubled aspiring bodybuilder — a film acquired by Searchlight Pictures, a Disney subsidiary. But the movie, originally scheduled to be released this fall, was removed from the studio’s calendar last year amid the actor’s legal troubles.Asked if he thinks he will work again in Hollywood, Mr. Majors said, “Heck yeah, I do. I pray I do,” in the interview. “But it’s God’s plan and God’s timing.” More

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      Jonathan Majors’s Accuser Is Arrested but Won’t Face Prosecution

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      Grace Jabbari, who accused the actor of assaulting her in a car, was herself arrested on a countercomplaint.A woman who has accused the actor Jonathan Majors of assaulting her in a car in Manhattan in March was arrested late Wednesday on a countercomplaint he filed against her, claiming to be the true victim in the altercation, the police said.The woman, Grace Jabbari, was charged with misdemeanor counts of assault and criminal mischief and released with a desk appearance ticket that requires her to appear in court at a later date, the police said.The arrest occurred even though the Manhattan district attorney’s office said in a court filing this month that it had told lawyers for Ms. Jabbari and Mr. Majors in September that the office “would decline to prosecute” her “if she were arrested.” The filing did not explain what was behind the decision not to prosecute.A lawyer for Ms. Jabbari did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Mr. Majors has pleaded not guilty to misdemeanor assault and harassment charges arising from the March episode. Ms. Jabbari’s surrender came the same day a Manhattan judge set a Nov. 29 trial date after rejecting the actor’s bid to dismiss the charges.Mr. Majors, a 34-year-old Yale graduate, was a rising Hollywood star when the altercation with Ms. Jabbari, his former girlfriend, occurred. Performances in vehicles like the HBO series “Lovecraft Country,” the film “Creed III” and the gritty drama “Magazine Dreams” had marked him as a potential Oscar contender, and his character Kang, from “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” was emerging as a linchpin of Disney’s Marvel franchise.The fallout from his arrest was swift. The U.S. Army pulled two recruiting commercials featuring him, with a spokeswoman explaining that “prudence dictates that we pause our ads until the investigation into these allegations is complete.”His movie career is effectively on hold. In part because of the continuing actors’ strike, Disney does not need to make a decision about his future involvement in the Marvel films until next year. “Magazine Dreams,” which stars Mr. Majors as a troubled bodybuilder and which generated buzz at the Sundance Film Festival, remains on Disney’s theatrical calendar for December, with the company’s art-house division, Searchlight Pictures, as the distributor.In light of Mr. Majors’s legal problems, theater owners expect Disney to push the film into next year, with an announcement coming as soon as this week. A Searchlight spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.In their filing this month, prosecutors said the episode at issue, on March 25, began when Mr. Majors and Ms. Jabbari, 30, were using a car service to go from Brooklyn to their Manhattan home.During the ride, the filing says, Ms. Jabbari saw a message on Mr. Majors’s phone that said, “Wish I was kissing you right now.” She grabbed the phone to see who had sent the message, the filing says.Mr. Majors, the filing says, began to grab the right side of Ms. Jabbari’s body and to pry her middle finger off the phone. He then grabbed her arm and hand, twisted her forearm and struck her right ear, cutting it, the filing says. Grabbing his phone, he left the car, the filing says.When Ms. Jabbari tried to get out, according to the filing, Mr. Majors picked her up and threw her back inside. In addition to the cut on her ear, the filing says, Ms. Jabbari sustained a broken finger, bruises on her body and a bump on her head.In April, after Mr. Majors had been charged, his lawyer, Priya Chaudhry, wrote to a judge that Ms. Jabbari’s version of events was a “complete lie” and that Ms. Jabbari had been the aggressor, hitting and scratching Mr. Majors.Ms. Jabbari, Ms. Chaudhry wrote, had then gone out clubbing, had passed out in a closet at home and had woken up to find the injuries to her finger and ear. Two months later, Mr. Majors filed the countercomplaint against Ms. Jabbari accusing her of assault, The police subsequently developed sufficient evidence to support the charges on which she was arrested. He faces up to a year in jail if convicted.Among the other notable details in the prosecutors’ filing was the mention of a “police report prepared by the London Metropolitan Police” as a piece of potential evidence in the case, as well as the prosecutors’ efforts to obtain “medical records from London related to an incident that occurred in September 2022.” The filing does not indicate who was involved in the incident.The filing also questions the veracity of a witness statement provided by the defense. In the purportedly firsthand statement, the filing says, the witness said that he saw Ms. Jabbari slap and “tussle with” Mr. Majors and that Mr. Majors had “gently” placed Ms. Jabbari in the car.When prosecutors presented the statement to the witness, the filing says, he said that he had not written or approved it, that he had not previously known it existed and that the statements attributed to him were false.Ms. Chaudhry did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.Brooks Barnes More

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      ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania’ Review: Splat

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      The latest installment in the Marvel franchise never takes flight despite its hard-working cast, led by Paul Rudd and a new villain played by Jonathan Majors.Busy, noisy and thoroughly uninspired, “Ant Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” is the latest, though doubtless not the last, installment in a Marvel franchise that took unsteady flight in 2015. Simply titled “Ant-Man,” that first movie was two hours of nonsense and branding, and disappointing enough to suggest that the character would be more farm-team material than A-lister. Given Marvel’s own superpowers, though, the movie turned out to be a hit, ensuring that the buggy guy would dart around for a while. Three years later, the agreeably buoyant sequel “Ant-Man and the Wasp” followed, and was an even greater success.“Quantumania” will most likely vacuum up yet more cash, partly because there’s not much else shiny and new in theaters now, never mind that this movie isn’t especially new or shiny. A hash of recycled ideas and schtick, it borrows from Frank Herbert’s “Dune,” the “Star Wars” cycle and Marvel’s own annals and largely serves as a launching pad for a new villain, Kang (Jonathan Majors). Once again, after some perfunctory table-setting, Ant-Man a.k.a. Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) and his brainiac romantic partner, Hope Van Dyne a.k.a. the Wasp (Evangeline Lilly), suit up, flying high and zipping low to save their family and the world amid quips, the usual obstacles and household drama. (Kathryn Newton plays the Ant kid.)Directed by Peyton Reed from Jeff Loveness’s barely-there script (the first movies each had multiple writers), “Quantumania” bops along innocuously at first, buoyed by the charm and professionalism of its performers and by your narrative expectations. Something is going to happen. After some jokey blather and reintroductions (hello again, Michael Douglas), it does, and once again Ant-Man et al. are sucked into the so-called Quantum Realm, a woo-woo alternative universe filled with swirls of color and looming threats. It’s there that Hope’s mother, Janet (Michelle Pfeiffer), as you’re laboriously reminded, spent many enigmatic years and where, after the some narrative delay, the mysteries of that adventure are revealed.The Realm features darkly ominous hues, fractal shapes, biomorphic organisms, streams of fire and strange beings, including Bill Murray, as a lord, who briefly drifts in on the vapors of his celebrity and flirts with Pfeiffer before drifting out to cash his paycheck. Murray notwithstanding, there are enough attractions to keep your eyes engaged, and the creature design is fairly witty. It isn’t pretty; the palette runs toward dun and dull red with slashes of marine blue. But it is diverting to see how movies realize alternative realities, and at least some of the C.G.I. wizards here — who do yeoman’s work in movies like “Quantumania” — seem to have spent time studying the deep-space images captured by the Hubble Telescope.As is too often the case in the franchise realm, far less attention has been paid to the story. None of what transpires is surprising, which puts the burden on the actors. Rudd is fine. A professional cutie-pie, he is a reliably anodyne presence, a human warm blanket. Good-looking but not dangerously so, he has easy charm and a signature crinkly smile that telegraphs that he isn’t worried, so you shouldn’t be, either. Mostly, he excels at playing a durable Hollywood type — the ordinary guy who proves extraordinary — a character that flatters half the audience and will never go out of style as long as men run Hollywood.Pfeiffer, Majors and Douglas (as Hope’s equally big-brained dad) are the truer stars of this show, and each brings something valuable to the mix. (Lilly’s character now feels like an afterthought.) For the most part, Majors strikes important poses while glowering imperiously. But he brings some complicated, wounded intensity to his role, and while his sotto-voce delivery sometimes edges into near-parodic Shakespearean overstatement, he effortlessly holds your attention, as do the sublimely chill Douglas and Pfeiffer. Douglas has even less to work with than Pfeiffer, who turns out to be the movie’s M.V.P., but they’re both wonderful to watch even when doing nothing much at all, which of course is its own kind of superpower.Ant-Man and the Wasp: QuantumaniaRated PG-13 for comic-book violence. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Which Sundance Movies Could Follow ‘CODA’ to the Oscars?

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      Jonathan Majors in “Magazine Dreams” and Teyana Taylor in “A Thousand and One,” among others, could make the journey from Park City to the Dolby Theater.Over the past few decades, the Sundance Film Festival has premiered Oscar winners like “Manchester by the Sea,” “Call Me by Your Name” and “Minari,” but it wasn’t until last March — when the crowd-pleasing “CODA” won best picture — that a Sundance movie went the distance and claimed the top Academy Award.It may be a little while before Sundance pulls off that feat again, as the Oscar nominations announced last week featured no movies from the festival in the best-picture race; indeed, the only 2022 Sundance film to make a dent in the top six Oscar categories was the British drama “Living,” which earned a best-actor nod for Bill Nighy. But could the movies that just premiered at the 2023 edition of the festival, which concluded on Sunday, help recover some of Sundance’s award-season mojo?The program certainly offered a fair amount of best-actor contenders who could follow in Nighy’s footsteps. Foremost among them is Jonathan Majors. The up-and-coming actor already has a crowded 2023: He’ll soon be seen facing off against Michael B. Jordan in “Creed III” and playing the supervillain Kang in Marvel properties like “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” and “Loki.” And that slate just got even stronger with the Sundance premiere of “Magazine Dreams,” a troubled-loner drama in which Majors plays an amateur bodybuilder on the brink of snapping. Had the film been released a few months ago, Majors would have made this year’s thin best-actor lineup for sure, but the right studio buyer could take advantage of his newfound Marvel momentum to muscle this formidable performance into the next race.The Projectionist Chronicles the Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Meet the Newer, Bolder Michelle Williams: Why she made the surprising choice to skip the supporting actress category and run for best actress.Best-Actress Battle Royal: A banner crop of leading ladies like Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.‘Glass Onion’ and Rian Johnson: The director explains why he sold the “Knives Out” franchise to Netflix, and how he feels about its theatrical test.A Supporting-Actress Underdog: In “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” don’t discount the pivotal presence of Stephanie Hsu.Other best-actor candidates that could come from the current Sundance crop include Gael Garcia Bernal, who could earn his first nomination for playing a gay luchador in the appealing “Cassandro,” and David Strathairn, who toplines the modest, humane “A Little Prayer,” about a father deciding whether to meddle in his son’s extramarital affair. One point in Strathairn’s favor is that his film will be released by Sony Pictures Classics, which has managed to land a well-liked veteran in the best-actor lineup three of the last four years (Nighy for “Living,” Anthony Hopkins for “The Father” and Antonio Banderas for “Pain and Glory”).The top Sundance jury prize went to A.V. Rockwell’s “A Thousand and One,” which could earn best-actress attention for Teyana Taylor, who plays a defiant ex-con resorting to desperate measures to keep custody of her son. (Still, the film’s planned March release from Focus Features will require some end-of-year reminders for forgetful voters.) Also buzzed about was Greta Lee, who could be in contention for A24’s “Past Lives,” about a Korean American woman reunited with her former lover; the film was so rapturously received that a best-picture push could be in the cards.Will any of the year’s biggest-selling films crash the Oscars race? Netflix spent $20 million to acquire the well-reviewed “Fair Play,” which pits the “Bridgerton” star Phoebe Dynevor against the “Solo: A Star Wars Story” actor Alden Ehrenreich as co-workers whose affair curdles once she gets promoted. It’s not the kind of starry auteur project that usually gets a big end-of-the-year campaign from Netflix, but if this battle of the sexes becomes a zeitgeisty hit, the streamer may give it a shot. Apple TV+ paid $20 million for the musical comedy “Flora and Son,” from the “Once” director John Carney, while Searchlight shelled out more than $7 million for the Ben Platt vehicle “Theater Camp.” At the very least, these two comedies feature delightful original-song contenders.Sundance films could make the biggest splash is in the best-documentary race: All but one of this year’s Oscar-nominated documentaries first debuted at the January festival, and even if you stripped Sundance of its star-driven narrative films, the strength of its docs would still preserve its status as a top-tier world festival.This year, the most-talked-about docs were the award winners “Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project,” about a storied Black poet; the Alzheimer’s drama “The Eternal Memory”; “Beyond Utopia,” which features compelling hidden-camera footage of North Koreans trying to defect; and “20 Days in Mariupol,” about the Russian siege of a Ukrainian port city. More

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      Sundance Unveils 2023 Film Festival Lineup

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      Veterans like Nicole Holofcener and Ira Sachs and first-timer filmmakers like Randall Park made the cut, as did films about Ukraine.Nothing has been easy for the Sundance Film Festival. It’s been thwarted by pandemic complications, management upheaval and a business that is undergoing an identity crisis. But the confab will finally return to the snowy mining town of Park City, Utah, in January for the first time in three years with a slate of films it hopes will announce to both Hollywood and the rest of the world that independent filmmaking is back.Culled from a record 4,061 feature submissions, Sundance 2023, set to begin Jan. 19, will be filled with veteran filmmakers and those just starting out, subjects big and small, and a host of urgent topics. Stalwarts like Nicole Holofcener and Ira Sachs are returning to their roots with new films, while studios will unveil their fare.A24 is premiering “All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt,” from the director Raven Jackson and producers Barry Jenkins and Adele Romanski, among others. Searchlight is screening “Rye Lane” from Raine Allen-Miller. Amazon has “Cassandro,” the documentarian Roger Ross Williams’s first foray into fiction filmmaking, and Focus Features is showing A.V. Rockwell’s “A Thousand and One” in the U.S. dramatic competition.Brooke Shields (Disney), Judy Blume (Amazon), Michael J. Fox (Apple) Willie Nelson and Little Richard are all getting the documentary treatment, while subjects like the Ukrainian war and films both by and about Iranian women are being explored via multiple entries in multiple genres.“A lot of the filmmakers are looking at relationships: family, work, institutions — things we often look to for stability in unstable times,” said John Nein, Sundance’s senior programmer and director of strategic initiatives. “In the program, there is a reflection of an age of anxiety in terms of the relationships we have with traditional institutions. There are all these ways of exploring just how tenuous those relationships can be.”The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.An Indie Hit’s Campaign: How do you make “Everything Everywhere All at Once” an Oscar contender? Throw a party for tastemakers.Jennifer Lawrence:  The Oscar winner may win more accolades with her performance in “Causeway,” but she’s focused on living a nonstar life.Indeed, Daisy Ridley plays a woman obsessed with her mortality in one of several films opening the festival, “Sometimes I Think About Dying”; Jonathan Majors stars as an amateur bodybuilder struggling to find human connection in “Magazine Dreams”; and Susanna Fogel directs Emilia Jones and Nicholas Braun in “Cat Person,” based on the popular New Yorker short story by Kristen Roupenian.With anxiety comes antiheroes, who abound in films this year, the programmers say. These include Randall Park’s directorial debut, “Shortcomings,” about a cynical 20-something (Justin H. Min of “After Yang”) who traverses the country with two buddies looking for the ideal connection, and Sachs’s “Passages,” which challenges audiences with the terrible decisions made by the lead character (played by Franz Rogowski). Holofcener, who often traffics in the world of anxiety, has reteamed with Julia Louis-Dreyfus for “You Hurt My Feelings,” the story of a novelist whose long marriage is upended when she overhears her husband (Tobias Menzies) giving his honest reaction to her latest book. It also hails from A24.Among documentaries, the filmmaker Luke Lorentzen follows an aspiring hospital chaplain on a yearlong residency in “A Still Small Voice,” which the director of programming Kim Yutani called “one of the more fascinating journeys I saw this year.”It’s all happening at a time of transition for Sundance. The institute’s chief executive, Joana Vicente, only joined the group in September 2021, a few months before the festival was rocked for the second year in a row by Covid-19 and was forced to shift in January to a virtual format in light of the rise of the Omicron variant. Five months later, the festival director Tabitha Jackson announced her departure after just two years at the helm. She has since been replaced by the former New York Film Festival executive director Eugene Hernandez, who stepped into the role in November but will not oversee the event until 2024, the organization’s 40th anniversary.“It was less than ideal,” Vicente said. “But I actually look at these past two years as incredibly successful festivals where we launched incredible films, some of which went on to win the Academy Awards,” she said, referring to “CODA,” the 2022 best picture winner. “We reached audiences in ways that we had not reached before, people who could not afford to come to Sundance, who thought Sundance maybe was not for them: film lovers, film students were able to connect and to discover these films.”Sundance’s virtual platform allowed patrons from all around the country to access films that previously had been available only to those who trekked to the snowy mountain town of Park City. The 2022 festival received some 818,000 unique visitors to its online portal during its 10-day run. For 2023, of the 101 features screening at the festival, 75 percent will be made available to view remotely.“We’re definitely prioritizing the in-person experience,” Vicente added. “But we are also continuing to build on what digital affords us in terms of reach and accessibility.”Similar to 2022, when Sundance screened films on a pressing news topic — a documentary and a feature film on the pre-Roe underground abortion network the Jane Collective — this year, the programmers added three films made by Iranian women and two that chronicle the conflict in Ukraine, ripped-from-the-headlines subjects that are likely to prompt heady conversations.In the U.S. dramatic competition, “The Persian Version” tells the screenwriter-director-producer Maryam Keshavarz’s story about a large Iranian American family that gathers for the patriarch’s heart transplant, only to have a family secret uncovered. “Shayda,” produced by Cate Blanchett’s company Dirty Films, is Noora Niasari’s feature debut about an Iranian mother who finds refuge in an Australian women’s shelter with her daughter when her estranged husband returns. And “Joonam,” competing in the U.S. documentary competition, tracks director Sierra Urich’s investigation into her mother and grandmother’s complicated pasts and her own fractured Iranian identity.In the world documentary competition, Mstyslav Chernov’s “20 Days in Mariupol,” from “Frontline” and the Associated Press, chronicles a team of Ukrainian journalists trapped in the besieged town and their struggle to document the atrocities. “Iron Butterflies,” from the director Roman Liubyi, investigates the 2014 downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in eastern Ukraine, killing 298 people. Three men with ties to Russian security services were convicted of murder by a Dutch court, but they are unlikely to be arrested.“The excitement I have around this program is significant,” Yutani said. “I think the offerings take a viewer on a complete roller coaster. There are a lot of films that are going to really strike people in a personal way and touch them. I also think there are some real thrills. So I encourage people who are coming to the festival to take chances.” More

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      ‘Devotion’ Review: An Airman in Reflection

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      Jonathan Majors stars as the U.S. Navy’s first Black aviator in this drama from J.D. Dillard.“Devotion,” directed by J.D. Dillard, recounts the landmark career of Ensign Jesse L. Brown, the son of a Mississippi sharecropper who became the U.S. Navy’s first Black aviator in 1948, and, two years later, its first Black officer to die in the Korean War. Brown’s wingman, a wealthy white United States Naval Academy graduate named Thomas J. Hudner Jr., risked his own life in an attempt to save Brown, and was subsequently awarded the Medal of Honor.Their story could be simplified into a sentimental tale of colorblind brotherhood. (Adam Makos’s 2015 nonfiction book of the same name cites a 1951 Ebony magazine as guilelessly cheering, “The key to Jesse’s popularity was his assumption that no race problem existed and, as a result, none did.”) Instead, Dillard and the screenwriters Jake Crane and Jonathan A.H. Stewart dig deeper into Brown’s pat quotes to the press, revealing a man who didn’t share his anguish with outsiders — a reticence their Brown, played at a lidded simmer by Jonathan Majors, seems to feel toward the very movie he’s in.The goal is to scrub the symbolism off Brown and restore him to humanity: a 24-year-old striver, husband and father who loathes being singled out as a special case. His odd couple dynamic with the easy-grinning Hudner (Glen Powell) is the steadiest narrative thrust in a film that tends to drift from one set piece to another, much like the military itself in this sliver of years between the end of World War II and the rise of the Cold War era. Here, Brown and Hudner’s squad might be stationed in the Mediterranean to scare off Soviet ships and wake up from an evening spent in Cannes flirting with a teenage Elizabeth Taylor — a true story, modestly embellished — to learn they’re abruptly pivoting to snowy Sinuiju.Dillard’s curiosity about this often-overlooked time of transition adds some shading to stretches that otherwise feel like a “Top Gun” prequel with the sleek jets swapped out for ungainly gull-wing Corsair propeller planes, heavy beasts that resemble a rockhopper penguin slumped over at the end of a saloon. Dillard and the cinematographer, Erik Messerschmidt, allow a scene or two of crowd-pleasing spectacle, say a dogfight with an enemy MIG, or a shot of ocean surf reflected in the steel belly of a skimming aircraft. But despite its emotional score, the film is more interested in unheroic details: insults ignored, insignia easily discarded, platitudes that dissipate in the air. It refuses to build to the kind of operatic weepie Brown himself wouldn’t respect. As an intellectual dismantling of white savior narratives, “Devotion” is smartly done; as an enjoyable heartwarmer to watch with your uncle, it’s stiff when it should soar.Still, Majors — one of our most sincere actors — does sob early and often, particularly in a searing moment in front of a mirror when he stares directly at the lens and spits racist insults at his own reflection as though inuring himself to poison. This choice to keep his pain private becomes a window into how Brown wanted to be viewed in life and death: not as a victim in need of rescue, but as his own man.DevotionRated PG-13 for strong language, smoking and scenes of war. Running time: 2 hours 18 minutes. In theaters. More