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      Charles Brandt, Whose Book Inspired ‘The Irishman,’ Dies at 82

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      “I Heard You Paint Houses,” his true-crime best seller about the death of Jimmy Hoffa, was brought to the screen by Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro.Charles Brandt, a former homicide prosecutor whose 2004 true-crime best seller, “I Heard You Paint Houses,” was adapted by Martin Scorsese into “The Irishman,” starring Robert De Niro as the Mafia hit man who killed the ex-Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa, died on Oct. 22 in Wilmington, Del. He was 82.The death, at a hospice facility, was confirmed by his brother-in-law, Gary Goldsmith, who did not specify a cause.Mr. Brandt’s book purported to solve the mystery of Mr. Hoffa’s disappearance and presumed death in 1975. He identified Hoffa’s killer as Frank Sheeran, a World War II veteran and truck driver who had been recruited into the underworld by the Mafia boss Russell Bufalino.Mr. Sheeran did some enforcement work for Mr. Bufalino, who introduced him to Mr. Hoffa, who said to Mr. Sheeran, “I heard you paint houses.” That was apparently mob slang for killing people — with the word “paint” meaning blood.In a series of interviews over five years, Mr. Sheeran told Mr. Brandt that he had been ordered to kill Mr. Hoffa, who had just been released from prison and was trying to regain power in the underworld.Mr. Sheeran recalled luring him to a house in Detroit for a supposed meeting with organized crime figures.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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      Looking for the Next Streaming Cult Classic? Try Arrow.

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      Horror is well-represented on this service, which makes it an ideal spooky season addition to your streaming menu.Over the past several months, we’ve examined and recommended several streaming services for the discriminating movie lover — sites and apps for those whose tastes run toward titles a bit more esoteric than the likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. Our latest entry spotlights a terrific subscription streamer for genre film fans.The subscription streaming service Arrow has its roots in a boutique physical media distributor much beloved by cinephiles: Arrow Video, established in England in 2009 as an offshoot of the theatrical distributor Arrow Films. The company quickly established itself as a favorite among genre film fans, offering painstaking restorations of long-neglected horror and cult titles on discs packed with copious bonus features; they were one of the reasons so many American collectors invested in all-region disc players, before the company expanded to the U.S. market in 2015.Arrow was one of several companies to enter the subscription streaming space during Covid lockdown, with their platform launching in October 2020. Their initial offerings numbered around 400 titles; they’ve since doubled that number, bolstering their library with short films, documentaries and curated “Selects” collections from name-brand directors like Roger Avary, Eli Roth and Edgar Wright.Horror is unsurprisingly well-represented on Arrow, which makes it an ideal spooky season addition to your streaming menu; the scary movie offerings are so plentiful that one can even deep-dive into subgenres like slashers, giallo, J-horror, zombie movies and once-banned “video nasties.” But there’s more than mere horror in the catalog, which also features offbeat Westerns, science fiction, yakuza crime epics, martial arts movies galore and cult movies of all stripes and decades. Acclaimed directors such as George A. Romero, Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci get well-deserved spotlights, along with lesser-known (to the general public, at least) auteurs like William Grefé and Seijun Suzuki.Arrow’s interface is smooth and easy to use, and the pricing is agreeably reasonable: $6.99 per month or $69.99 for the year, with a current promotion (code: SHOCKTOBER24) cutting 50 percent of the price for the first month. Its offerings are certainly specialized; this is not a Netflix replacement. But viewers with a fondness for the esoteric (and we know you’re out there) will be hard-pressed to find more quality bang for their streaming buck.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 Theater

      What It Means to Make Art About Nazis Now

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      And is the culture telling the right stories about them, at a time when it’s never felt more urgent?A MAN IN a tie and suspenders smokes a cigar thoughtfully, its ash end hot orange in an otherwise cool blue shot. Its fiery pock is the most lurid thing we see in Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest,” even though there’s a crematorium next door.“The Zone of Interest,” winner of the 2024 Academy Award for best international feature, imagines the domestic life of the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife (Sandra Hüller), who for a time lived mere yards from the ovens built to burn the bodies of hundreds of Jews a day. The screenplay might have been ghostwritten by Hannah Arendt, so banal is its portrait of evil. Höss fishes with his children, worries about a promotion, enjoys his garden, conducts an affair. We see no victims, nor, other than that cigar, any flame: just a pretty, smoky glow from the furnaces at night.It’s not as if the movie’s intentions could be misread. Without depicting horror itself, Glazer, who is Jewish, wants to show how easily middle-class values like diligence and ambition were adapted by Nazis to horrible ends. But in avoiding what the cartoonist Art Spiegelman, in response to Roberto Benigni’s 1997 movie “Life Is Beautiful,” called Holokitsch — the sentimental exploitation of victims’ suffering to dredge up drama — “The Zone of Interest” approaches it anyway, only now from the other direction, drawing its aesthetic power from detachment instead of engagement.Is that better?Tear-jerking as they may have been, works like “Life Is Beautiful,” the 1979 mini-series “Holocaust” and Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” (1993) had no trouble plainly acknowledging the murder of six million, which “The Zone of Interest” does only obliquely. If, as the German philosopher Theodor Adorno asserted in 1951, it became “barbaric” to write poetry after Auschwitz, it also, for many, became barbaric not to. What else can artists do with atrocity but make art from it?At the same time, and especially in our time, they are faced with a paradox. The appalling resurgence of antisemitism has made it more important than ever to remind the world of the great crime against the Jews. Yet the names and symbols of Adolf Hitler’s regime — and of Hitler himself, the big rhetorical nesting doll that contains the rest — have been emptied of real meaning by years of overuse as sitcom punch lines (the Soup Nazi from “Seinfeld” nearly three decades ago) and zingers for politicians (Donald Trump called out Joe Biden’s “Gestapo administration” in May). To try to reinvest these ideas with awfulness is to risk aesthetic failure. Not to try is to risk the moral kind.Still, the “Sieg Heil” salutes, SS lightning bolts and swastikas keep coming, even if in most contexts their omnipresence has rendered them not just objectionable but trite. In political discourse, Nazi name-calling almost always diminishes the unique evil of the originals. The words themselves, like amulets, may even burnish the twisted self-respect of those who trade in them. JD Vance, who in 2016 wrote that Trump might be “America’s Hitler,” has had a convenient change of heart, but it’s not clear that Trump minded anyway. That he might just as easily have been called America’s Idi Amin or Joseph Stalin emphasizes the emptiness of the insult.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

      Teri Garr’s Life in Pictures

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      Teri Garr, who died on Tuesday at 79, will be remembered for her strong comedic chops and for her ability to act with her eyes, displaying a wide range of emotions.In 1983, she earned an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress for her performance in “Tootsie” opposite Dustin Hoffman. That movie, like many others on Garr’s résumé, showed that she could command attention alongside her male counterparts. If her best-known roles could had a common thread, it was the erratic behavior of the men in her characters’ lives.Offscreen, Garr faced hurdles related to her health and was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1999, after more than a decade of symptoms. She eventually became a spokeswoman for research into the disease, making appearances in her wheelchair.Here are some snapshots from her life and career.Stanley Bielecki Movie Collection/Getty ImagesIn “Young Frankenstein” (1974), Garr played a beautiful but ditsy German lab assistant.CBS, via Getty ImagesGarr and Frankie Avalon in 1965.CBS, via Getty ImagesGarr’s eyes were perhaps one of her most recognizable features as an actress. They could show pain, sympathy, vulnerability and intrigue.Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection, via Getty ImagesAmy Irving, Carrie Fisher and Garr in 1977.Paul Drinkwater/NBCU Photo Bank, via NBCUniversal, via Getty ImagesA regular on the talk show circuit, Garr was a favorite guest of both David Letterman and Johnny Carson.Columbia Pictures/Getty ImagesGarr as Ronnie Neary in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977), directed by Steven Spielberg.ShutterstockGarr, with Jackie Gleason in “The Sting II,” hailed from a show-business family. Her father was a vaudevillian.Columbia Pictures, via AlamyBy the mid-1960s, Garr had appeared in four Elvis Presley movies. She eventually took on more serious roles, earning an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress for her performance as Sandy Lester in “Tootsie” (1982).Sherwood ProductionsEntertainment Pictures, via AlamyIn a departure from her ditsy roles, Garr played an overconfident ad-agency workaholic opposite Michael Keaton in “Mr. Mom” (1983).Alan Singer/NBCU Photo Bank, via NBCUniversal, via Getty ImagesGarr’s comedic chops made her stand out against a crowded backdrop of Hollywood actresses during the 1970s and ’80s. She hosted “Saturday Night Live” three times.ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content, via Getty ImagesMichael Westmore, Garr and Zoltan Elek at the Academy Awards in 1986.Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic, Inc., via Getty ImagesGarr married John O’Neil in 1993 and later welcomed a daughter, Molly O’Neil.Getty ImagesGarr played Phoebe Abbott in three episodes of “Friends” over the show’s third and fourth seasons.Rusty Russell/Getty ImagesWhile making films, Garr noticed troubling physical symptoms and was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1999. She later became a spokeswoman for M.S. research and support.Valerie Macon/Getty ImagesGarr with Leonard Maltin, Mel Brooks and Cloris Leachman. More

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      in Movies

      Teri Garr, Comic Actress in ‘Young Frankenstein’ and ‘Tootsie,’ Dies at 79

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      An Oscar nominee for her role in “Tootsie,” she was also a favorite guest of David Letterman and Johnny Carson and a three-time host of “Saturday Night Live.”Teri Garr, the alternately shy and sassy blond actress whose little-girl voice, deadpan comic timing, expressive eyes and cinematic bravery in the face of seemingly crazy male characters made her a star of 1970s and ’80s movies and earned her an Oscar nomination for her role in “Tootsie,” died on Tuesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 79.Her publicist, Heidi Schaeffer, said the cause was complications of multiple sclerosis.Ms. Garr received that diagnosis in 1999, after 16 years of symptoms and medical research; she made her condition public in 2002. In late 2006, she had a ruptured brain aneurysm and was in a coma for a week, but she was eventually able to regain the ability to walk and talk.Onscreen, Ms. Garr’s outstanding features were her eyes, which could seem simultaneously pained, baffled, sympathetic, vulnerable, intrigued and determined, whether she was registering a grand new discovery or holding back tears. If her best-known roles had a common thread, it was the erratic behavior of the men in her characters’ lives.Ms. Garr and Dustin Hoffman in “Tootsie” (1982). She was nominated for an Oscar for her performance as the neglected friend-turned-lover of an actor played by Mr. Hoffman.Moviestore Collection Ltd/Alamy Stock PhotoIn “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” she initially went into denial when her husband (Richard Dreyfuss) became obsessed with U.F.O.s, but promptly abandoned him, taking the children, when he built, in their family room, a mountain of garbage, fencing and backyard soil.In “Oh, God!,” Ms. Garr was supportive when her husband (John Denver), a California supermarket manager, told everyone that he was hanging out with God incarnate (George Burns). In “Tootsie,” for which she earned a 1983 Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress, she whined eloquently as the neglected friend-turned-lover of an actor (Dustin Hoffman) who was behaving strangely. It turned out he had been posing as a woman to get better acting jobs.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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      Teri Garr Found the Soul in Memorable Ditsy Blondes

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      In “Tootsie,” “After Hours” and other films, she played truly unhinged characters while also layering in sadness or drama.In “Tootsie,” Teri Garr perfected the polite way to say you had a bad time at a party. Bidding a friend good night, her character, a struggling actress named Sandy, tells him, “It was a wonderful party, my date left with someone else, I had a lot of fun, do you have any seconal?”She sounds sunny as she’s saying all this and barely takes a breath. It’s a master class in comedic despair.Garr, who died on Tuesday at 79 from complications of multiple sclerosis, turned the neurotic basket case into an art form. On paper a Teri Garr role could be written off as a daffy blonde, but in her hands she gave these women depth and made them entrancingly funny.Garr came from a show business family — her father was a vaudevillian, and she arguably inherited that can-do spirit of performing. Though she had appeared in a number of television shows and films throughout the 1960s, including as a dancer in multiple Elvis flicks, she was introduced to most audiences in Mel Brooks’s “Young Frankenstein” (1974, not currently streaming), playing Inga, the laboratory assistant to Gene Wilder’s Frederick Frankenstein. (Don’t mispronounce it.)Brooks first presents her lying in the back of a hay wagon. She’s beautiful and busty, but immediately lands her first punchline.“Hello,” she says seductively, in her ostensibly Transylvanian accent. “Would you like to have a roll in the hay?” Wilder pauses, taken aback by her apparent forward proposition. She interjects, brightly. “It’s fun!” She starts flinging her body around, singing, “Roll, roll, roll in the hay.” She doesn’t mean the sexual innuendo — or maybe she does.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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      Extra Extra! The End Times, Onscreen

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      Alien invasions, viruses, zombies, meteors, natural or human-caused catastrophes. When the end is nigh in apocalyptic, dystopian, disaster or horror films and television shows, there is often a distinct moment that offers audiences a glimpse of what was known in those last days before civilization was forever changed: the front pages of newspapers.Sometimes the camera lingers on the page, allowing us to read headlines that telegraph the scramble to make sense of unprecedented events. Other times, blink and you’ll miss it.In some instances, these front pages are the last ones printed in the before-times; in others, humanity endures in the end, though it is certainly transformed.The pivotal disaster might have been long past. Or perhaps it’s only the beginning of the end.‘Men in Black’ (1997)Alien threats endanger Earth.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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      Paul Morrissey, Andy Warhol’s Cinematic Collaborator, Dies at 86

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      In films like “Trash” and “Women in Revolt,” he brought movement, character and something resembling a story line to the Warhol film aesthetic.Paul Morrissey, whose loose cinéma-vérité films made with Andy Warhol in the late 1960s and early ’70s captured New York’s demimonde of drug addicts, drag queens and hipsters and turned an unlikely stable of amateur actors into underground stars, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 86.The death, in a hospital, was caused by pneumonia, said Michael Chaiken, his archivist.In films like “Flesh,” “Trash,” “Heat” and “Women in Revolt,” all made on budgets of less than $10,000, Mr. Morrissey brought movement, character and something resembling a story line to the Warhol film aesthetic, which had consisted of pointing a camera at an actor or a building and letting it run for several hours. (Warhol’s “Empire” was a continuous shot of the Empire State Building that lasted eight hours and five minutes.)Relying on a shifting collective of amateur actors, like Joe Dallesandro and Viva; transgender performers, like Jackie Curtis, Holly Woodlawn and Candy Darling; and marginal downtown characters, Mr. Morrissey concocted a distinctive blend of squalor and melodramatic farce that captivated many critics and even, in some instances, translated into box-office success.The scripts, such as they were, were almost entirely ad-libbed. The stars simply portrayed themselves. And the plots defied synopsis.Mr. Morrissey, front, with, from top, Joe Dallesandro, Holly Woodlawn and Jane Forth, in a publicity photo for Mr. Morrissey’s 1970 film “Trash.”Henri Dauman/Jour De Fete Films“Trash,” Mr. Morrissey’s biggest critical and commercial success, followed the trials and tribulations of Mr. Dallesandro playing a heroin-addicted gigolo earnestly, if groggily, trying to support his wife, played by Ms. Woodlawn. “Women in Revolt” took the theme of women’s liberation and grafted it onto a sendup of Hollywood women’s pictures of the 1930s, with Ms. Curtis, Ms. Woodlawn and Ms. Darling striking poses and reflecting on their status in a sexist society.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