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    In These CGI-Heavy Movies, There’s Not an Explosion in Sight

    Though blockbusters are synonymous with computer imagery, dramas and art-house films rely extensively on tech magic, too. Don’t be fooled by the naturalism.A woman crosses a bustling street at night. Cars pass noisily. A streetcar cruises by. Behind her, we see twinkling streetlights, a cinema marquee, towering neon signs. It rained earlier; the roads are still wet. It’s Mexico City in the early 1970s, and it feels vibrantly alive.This is a scene in “Roma” (2018), Alfonso Cuarón’s naturalistic, semi-autobiographical black-and-white drama based on the life of the housekeeper who helped raise him as a child. It’s also, less obviously, a dazzling showcase of visual effects.The huge movie theater in the background is entirely CGI. So is the streetcar, and many of the other vehicles, as well as most of the buildings, signs, facades, lights and pedestrians. Even the reflections visible in the puddles on the road were created on a computer. Though it’s been designed to be completely inconspicuous and convincing, Aaron Weintraub, the head of creative operations at the visual effects studio MPC, describes this moment as “one of our flagship shots.”What comes to mind when you think of visual effects, or VFX? For most people, it’s fantasy and science fiction: aliens in spaceships, superheroes zooming across imaginary lands. And while it’s certainly true that big-budget genre films and summer blockbusters are rife with computer-generated imagery, VFX studios like MPC estimate that about half the work they produce is made to be invisible. For every “Kraven the Hunter” or “Argylle,” there’s a “Ferrari,” “Maestro” or “Killers of the Flower Moon,” movies with sophisticated visual effects that the filmmakers hope you’ll never realize was an effect at all.“When people talk about VFX, it’s the obvious stuff — the explosions, the laser beams, the science-fiction stuff,” Weintraub said. “But there’s a whole world of work being done that’s transparent to the audience, and no one is supposed to know.” He likened it to the work of film and TV costume designers. What attracts attention and wins Oscars, he said, are “lavish period costumes and fancy superhero suits,” but in fact, “you have a costume designer on every film who makes normal clothes that normal people wear, and no one talks about them.”In “Nightmare Alley,” the digital effects include the addition of flames, above, and the deletion of a line of dialogue. Searchlight PicturesWe 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 American Society of Magical Negroes’ Review

    Kobi Libii’s satirical comedy, starring Justice Smith, tries to explore the trope but leans too hard on the conventions of superhero tales and rom-coms.Kobi Libii’s satirical comedy, “The American Society of Magical Negroes,” opens in an art gallery where people are milling about. A young Black man tries to walk through the crowd, constantly apologizing and sidestepping the gallery-goers. He acts as if he feels in the way and out of place. But as we learn when he arrives at his own yarn installation, he’s one of the artists whose work is for sale.The scene says a lot with a little, hitting comic beats but ending deflatedly thanks to the art dealer’s ruthless reaction to this diffidence. Yet the behavior of the young artist, Aren (the enormously talented Justice Smith), is exactly what catches the eye of a bartender at the show, Roger (David Alan Grier), who hides a secret identity. Cue the title of the film, which turns the movie trope of the “Magical Negro” character into a mission statement: Roger belongs to an elite group tasked with eliminating discomfort for white people and making them feel better about themselves.Roger recruits Aren, and within moments, they’re helping white people leap their anxieties in a single bound. Libii’s premise rests on the rationale that “the happier they are, the safer we are,” as Roger puts it. When he and Aren pacify a disgruntled white cop by helping him get into a nightclub, it seems clear that the stakes involve the threat of racial violence, though these ideas prove to be a challenge to explore in a film that leans into romantic comedy.Aren’s big assignment is to go undercover at a tech company and build up a co-worker, Jason (Drew Tarver), who’s feeling down for a couple of reasons. He’s hit a dead end at work, and he’s sweet on his superior, Lizzie (An-Li Bogan), but barely seems to know it. Aren must help Jason realize his dreams while suppressing his own: Aren and Lizzie have already flirted, quite promisingly, in an early meet-cute scene.Libii’s story underlines the self-negation involved in the trope of the title and ridicules the expectations and constraints forced upon Black people in myriad ways. The American Society of Magical Negroes has a hideout where Aren and other agents are trained on scenarios that echo the selfless-helper plots of “The Green Mile” and “The Legend of Bagger Vance.”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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    AMC Theaters, Looking for Movies, Turns to Blumhouse

    The theater chain and the entertainment company are teaming up for a five-day festival of old horror films in 40 cities, compensating for a lack of new films.For five days starting on March 29, people who buy tickets to certain movies at certain AMC Theaters will see video messages starring … Jason Blum?It’s a long way from Nicole Kidman, whose breathy “We come to this place for magic” branding spot has become legend. But Mr. Blum, a horror film producer, has been working to build his entertainment company, Blumhouse, into more of a consumer-facing brand. The goal is to create an association between its name and everything scary, sort of like Marvel and superheroes. That, in turn, could make Blumhouse more valuable as an acquisition target in the years ahead.AMC and Blumhouse, which has made more than 200 horror movies and shows, are teaming up for what they are calling the Halfway to Halloween Film Festival. (It’s more like 40 percent of the way.) Previously released Blumhouse horror movies, including “Split,” “Ouija: Origin of Evil,” “The Purge,” “The Invisible Man” and “Insidious,” which will have its 13th anniversary on April 1, will be on offer in 100 AMC theaters in 40 cities.Mr. Blum, 55, will introduce each film with a tailored message, offering an anecdote about the production or a tidbit of trivia. James Wan, who directed “Insidious,” will appear in a video, as will Mike Flanagan, who directed “Ouija: Origin of Evil.” Ticket buyers will also see elaborate ads known as sizzle reels for Blumhouse, which will promote the event through its social media channels.“Horror has always attracted misfits, me included, and participating in events like this allows me to celebrate that,” Mr. Blum said, before referring to one of the company’s signature films. “I like taking risks on stories that other people find too risky — like ‘Get Out’ — and having a brand allows me to do that.”Anya Taylor-Joy in “Split,” which took in $278 million in 2017.Universal/BlumhouseWe 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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    Down the Rabbit Hole in Search of a Few Frames of Irish American History

    The silent film “The Callahans and the Murphys” was pulled after an uproar over stereotyping. What happened next tantalized one fan of old movies.One moment I am sprawled on a couch in my New Jersey home, lost in another classic old movie. The next, I am falling through the floorboards and tumbling like Alice into the wondrous unknown, only to land in a bunkerlike government structure built into the side of a Virginia mountain.Yes, I had gone down a rabbit hole, down into the black-hole past. As I plummeted, I learned about “lost” movies, an unlikely box office star, a secure facility where national memories are stored — and a silent film whose comic Irish stereotypes once caused uproars in theaters.Follow me down, why don’t you?My descent began as I watched “Dinner at Eight,” a 1933 classic featuring several early MGM luminaries, including Marie Dressler, a stout actor in her early 60s whose impeccable timing and weary resilience had made her the biggest star in Hollywood. Depression-era audiences adored her, sensing that she, too, knew hard times. And she did.Wanting to know more about Dressler, I opened my laptop and down the hole I went. I learned that Dressler’s success had come after decades of triumph and travail. By 1927 she was nearly broke and considering a housekeeping job when a dear friend, the celebrated screenwriter Frances Marion, offered Dressler a lead role in her next picture: “The Callahans and the Murphys,” a silent comedy so controversial, I read, that it was yanked from circulation and is now considered lost.Wait. What?I am a first-generation Irish American who is fairly steeped in the reflections of me and mine in popular culture — from the simian Irish caricatures of Thomas Nast to Christopher’s nightmare in “The Sopranos” that hell is an Irish bar called the Emerald Piper. But my ignorance of “The Callahans and the Murphys” sent me deeper into the well of curiosity.The plot, I learned from news accounts and MGM records, centered on two tenement Irish families in a place called Goat Alley, where, a title card explained, “a courteous gentleman always takes off his hat before striking a lady.” Mrs. Callahan (Dressler) and Mrs. Murphy (Polly Moran) are quarreling friends with large, commingling broods; the Callahans’ daughter is dating Murphy’s bootlegger son. There are fleas and chamber pots and thumbed noses and a St. Patrick’s Day picnic that — hold on to your shillelagh! — devolves into a drunken brawl.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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    Once You Watch an Ernie Gehr Film, You’ll Never See the World the Same Way

    A MoMA series shows how the artist pushes the boundaries of cinema in short movies that both delight and baffle.Movies have been around for well over a century, and for roughly half that time, the American filmmaker Ernie Gehr has — playfully, thoughtfully, beautifully — shown us just how far out, exciting and liberating they can be.Gehr makes moving images that open your mind and pleasurably rearrange your thoughts. His movies tend to be short, have sound and, these days, were shot in digital. By conventional standards not a lot happens; they don’t tell stories per se, even if they say a great deal. What interests Gehr is light, energy, shape, color, rhythm, time, space and the medium’s plasticity. He chops the image up, twirls it around, makes it sing. You could call his work abstract, experimental or avant-garde, but a more fitting description is that it’s just, well, cinematic.A contested, oft-abused word, cinematic can be fuzzy shorthand to describe images that look and move the way we think movies look and move (or should). Gehr challenges such thinking, which is exemplified by one of his most significant early works, “Serene Velocity” (1970), a silent color film that doesn’t have a single soul or any camera moves in it. Instead, partly by changing the focal lengths on a zoom lens, Gehr created an illusion of movement in which a precisely centered shot of a college basement hall becomes a trippy, propulsive, at times eyeball-popping inquiry into film form. He’s still challenging conventions just as trippily.On Friday, the one-week series “Ernie Gehr: Mechanical Magic” opens at the Museum of Modern Art. Curated by Francisco Valente, this dynamic sampler includes both newer work and restored rarities that have been arranged into six programs. Gehr, who is 82 and lives in New York, is scheduled to appear at each show. MoMA is a fitting place to check out his movies, which in their formal rigor, aesthetic concerns and sheer visual pow make them ideal counterparts to the abstract and nonfigurative work hanging on the museum’s walls.Gehr started making films in the 1960s after serving in the Army and landing in New York, where he chanced upon the work by the avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage, a titan of the art. Although Gehr ended up going in a different artistic direction, he was excited both by Brakhage’s work and by the very idea that he, too, might make movies. In an era in which most of us have a video camera in our back pocket, it is impossible to overstate just how mind-blowing it once was for many aspiring filmmakers to realize that they didn’t need to be in Hollywood or have stars, crews and astronomical budgets.Instead, if a would-be filmmaker like Gehr was lucky enough to be in New York in the 1960s — then an epicenter of off-Hollywood cine-adventurousness — he could even borrow a camera. That’s exactly what Gehr did after he visited the Millennium Film Workshop, which was then run by the filmmaker Ken Jacobs and lent equipment for free. Gehr soon had a camera in hand that used 8-millimeter film (a precursor to Super-8), a cheaper alternative to 16-millimeter. Lightweight and easy to use, these cameras made making movies on your own entirely doable.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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    The Surprise Ending of ‘Dune,’ the Popcorn Bucket

    What’s in the $24.99 tub, exactly? Lindsay Moyer, a nutritionist, reviews the contents of the movie-snack “vessel.”In the “Dune” movies, a gigantic sandworm can rise from the desert and devour soldiers and military vehicles in its gaping maw. In real life, humans watching movies devour popcorn. These two ideas have been combined to spawn the “Dune” popcorn bucket, a sandworm-shaped tub that is having a cultural moment. The bucket arrives on the heels of other recent popcorn collectibles, like the 16-inch Barbie Corvette snack holder. But is there more to these vessels than meets the eye?Lindsay Moyer thinks about popcorn. She is the senior nutritionist at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group focused on food systems and healthy eating. She sat down with The New York Times to discuss what she sees when she considers “Dune: The Popcorn Bucket.” This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.Have you seen the “Dune” popcorn bucket?I’ve seen photos. I haven’t seen it in real life.First impressions?It looks pretty wild. It looks like it would actually slow you down in terms of eating. It doesn’t seem ideally designed to serve yourself popcorn out of.Because it is shaped like a worm’s mouth?Yeah, because of all the stuff sticking out of it.Do you like popcorn?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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    ‘Irish Wish’ Review: Beware of Getting What You Want

    Lindsay Lohan plays a book editor whose romantic dream comes true in this Netflix rom-com. But then Ed Speleers shows up in a red sports car.Lindsay Lohan’s well-loved early comedies involve her playing characters pretending to be someone else: think of the chaotic swaps of “The Parent Trap” and “Freaky Friday,” or the social climbing of “Mean Girls.”In “Irish Wish,” Lohan takes up another character who’s role-playing in her own life: Maddie, a diligent book editor who suddenly finds herself in another version of the world, where she’s marrying the handsome author she handles.The story doesn’t start that way. The guy, Paul (Alexander Vlahos), originally falls for Maddie’s friend Emma (Elizabeth Tan). Paul and Emma prepare to marry at his family’s manor in County Mayo, Ireland (cue extremely green touristic panoramas). Attending as a guest, Maddie takes a fateful walk and voices her wish that she were the bride instead. Presto — thanks to Saint Brigid, apparently — she wakes up at the manor, engaged to Paul.The movie (directed by Janeen Damian and written by Kirsten Hansen) skips over Maddie savoring the outcome of her wish, and shifts right into charming comedy around her confusion, including having no memory about how she got engaged. Maybe that’s another way of expressing that the match was never going to be a great fit. Paul is a bit of cad, and not even entertainingly awful. But hark, an alternative to this alternate reality appears with James (Ed Speleers of “You”), a photographer she meets by chance who’s forthright, sensitive and the owner of a sweet red sports car.Maddie warms to James’s wisdom, and her wedding plans with Paul begin to unravel. There’s also a worthy subplot about Maddie’s growing independence from her phone-clingy mother (Jane Seymour), but mostly the movie is a determinedly mild addition to the Lindsay Lohan “what-if” universe.Irish WishNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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    In the Oscars Audience, Candid Photos From the Ceremony

    Red carpet photographs are able to convey indelible moments of celebrity magnetism and spectacular glamour. But no step-and-repeat can bottle the crackling anticipation, the eruption of victory, the sting of loss or the quiet exchange between individuals amid a sea of superstars like these candid shots from the audience at Sunday night’s Oscars ceremony.Inside the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles, our photographer captured moments viewers may not have caught otherwise. These images offer a peek at the year’s most celebrated actors and filmmakers interacting with one other, and not the camera, as we usually see them. Whether that be Florence Pugh looking intently at Christopher Nolan as she rests her hand gently on his arm; Messi the Border collie sitting poised and unfazed as a man, who is lying on the floor, claps faux paws in his face; Colman Domingo and Danielle Brooks leaning over a seated Da’Vine Joy Randolph with wowed expressions; or Lily Gladstone, Emma Stone and Ramy Youssef standing inches apart, gripping each other, their faces nearly touching.Clockwise from left: Ted Danson, Paul Giamatti, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Jennifer Lawrence and Cooke Maroney. Randolph won the best supporting actress Oscar for her role as a cafeteria matriarch in “The Holdovers.”Amir Hamja/The New York TimesEmma Stone and her husband, Dave McCary, celebrated her best actress win for her role in “Poor Things,” along with her co-star Mark Ruffalo at right.Greta Gerwig, facing away, and Billie Eilish embraced, with Finneas O’Connell behind them. Eilish and O’Connell collected the trophy for best song for “What Was I Made For?” from “Barbie.”Clockwise from top left: Martin Scorsese; Carey Mulligan; the “Godzilla Minus One” team with their trophies for best visual effects; and Dominic Sessa, a star of “The Holdovers.”Messi the Border collie, a star from “Anatomy of a Fall,” had fake paws held up in front of him to create the illusion that he was clapping.The Gretas (Lee, standing, and Gerwig) held hands.Florence Pugh with her “Oppenheimer” director Christopher Nolan. Their historical drama triumphed on Sunday, winning seven Oscars, including for best picture.Clockwise from top left: Sandra Hüller and Jonathan Glazer, who directed her in “The Zone of Interest”; Cord Jefferson (facing away), director and writer of “American Fiction,” and Jeffrey Wright, its star; Colman Domingo and Zendaya; Christopher Nolan (facing away) and Cillian Murphy.Power players: Steven Spielberg, left, Christopher Nolan and Emma Thomas. Nolan and Thomas, who are married, produced “Oppenheimer,” along with Charles Roven (not pictured).Robert De Niro, far left. Colman Domingo, who was nominated for the titular role in “Rustin,” and Teo Yoo (in front of him), from “Past Lives,” took a selfie.Colman Domingo and Danielle Brooks chatted with Randolph (seated). Emma Stone leaped from her seat, as John Mulaney presented the award for best sound from the stage.Audience Report is a series that looks at people looking. Produced by Jolie Ruben and Amanda Webster. More