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      James Earl Jones Movies: From Darth Vader in ‘Star Wars’ to Mufasa in ‘Lion King’

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      A look at standout movies featuring the actor, who died on Monday at the age of 93.James Earl Jones died on Monday at the age of 93. Like his contemporary Sidney Poitier, Jones helped change the perception of Black actors in Hollywood, creating indelible movie and TV characters who defied the prevailing stereotypes.Born in Mississippi and raised in Michigan, Jones spent much of his early career in New York, working in theater, TV and radio, where he trained his deep, booming voice. Because of his rich vocal tones and authoritative air, the actor was in high demand throughout his professional life, as both a narrator and as someone who could bring a sense of seriousness to supporting parts.The 12 movies below predominantly showcase Jones’s voice and his skills as a character actor. But the few leading roles show that if he had been given the same kind of opportunities as Poitier, Jones might have been just as big a star.‘Dr. Strangelove’ (1964)Rent on Apple TV or Amazon.Not many actors have the good fortune to make their big-screen debut in one of the greatest films of all time. Jones only appears in a handful of scenes in Stanley Kubrick’s grim nuclear war comedy “Dr. Strangelove,” but he does a lot with those few minutes, playing a bombardier whose consummate professionalism leads him to follow the orders of any crackpot commander or incompetent politician who barks in his ear.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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      Demi Moore and the Subversive Politics of the Naked Body

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      By the end of the 1990s, after years of giving her all to Hollywood and baring most of her all, too, Demi Moore began her fade-out. She had been a major film star that decade, complete with huge hits, humbling flops, famous friends, a celebrity marriage and headline-making magazine covers. Like all stars, she put in the work and sold the merch, herself included. And, like a lot of female stars, she made movies with male filmmakers who turned her into a spectacle of desire, a spectacle that she partly sought ownership of via her body.You see a lot of her body in Moore’s latest movie, “The Substance,” from the French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat. (It opens Sept. 20.) It’s a body-horror freakout that satirically takes aim at the commodification of women, and Moore is ferociously memorable in it as an actress who’s fired when she hits 50. It’s a performance that’s strong enough that you stop thinking about the fact that she’s naked in a lot of the scenes, strong enough to make you stop wondering what her exercise regime is or what work, if any, she’s had done. By the end, I admired how she had risen above the material; I also hoped she has better movies in her future.She deserves them. Her performance in “The Substance” is a gaudy, physically demonstrative role that requires her to convey a range of outsize states that dovetail with the movie’s excesses, from her character’s plasticky on-camera smiles to her private despair and boiling rage. Like some of Moore’s best-known movies, “The Substance” also requires her to shed her clothing. Even after decades of watching her perform in states of undress, it is startling to see Moore, now 61, stand naked before a mirror as the camera slowly travels across her body. There’s a near-clinical quality to how she looks at herself and, I think, a touch of defiance.Demi Moore as an actress coping with issues of aging in Hollywood in “The Substance.”MubiThe 1980s weren’t a welcoming period for women in the mainstream movie industry, yet Moore gradually succeeded in making a name for herself in between hanging with her pals in the Brat Pack and appearing in mediocre films (“St. Elmo’s Fire”) and flat-out rotten ones (“About Last Night,” ugh). Her big break came with “Ghost” (1990), a dreamy, sad romance in which she plays a dewy-eyed artist whose lover (Patrick Swayze) is murdered. Moore looked “terminally wistful much of the time” in the film, as Janet Maslin observed in The New York Times. Yet Moore also “combines toughness and delicacy most attractively,” which nicely expresses her gift for characters who often seem compelled to safeguard their vulnerabilities.“Ghost” was the top-grossing movie of the year, racked up more than a half a billion dollars at the global box office and catapulted Moore into true stardom. She followed this by starring in, as well as producing, “Mortal Thoughts” (1991), a deliciously nasty noirish drama about two working-class Jersey friends (Moore and Glenne Headly) who cover up the murder of one of their husbands, played with relish and persuasive vulgarity by Moore’s husband at the time, Bruce Willis. One of her finest movies, it gave her a chance to express her range partly because she was working with a real filmmaker, Alan Rudolph. In contrast to many of her earlier directors, he didn’t treat Moore like a sex puppet but instead helped her create a nuanced, teasingly elusive woman.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What’s on TV This Week: Lots of Awards Shows and the Presidential Debate

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      The VMAs, Creative Emmys and Emmy Awards are on the schedule, while ABC is hosting the first debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump.For those who still enjoy a cable subscription, here is a selection of cable and network shows, movies and specials scheduled for this week, Sept. 9-15. Details and times are subject to change.MondayGREASE (1987) 8 p.m. on Paramount. “It turned colder, that’s where it ends,” the characters Danny Zu-ko and Sandy Olsson sing in their duet “Summer Nights,” expressing a sentiment appropriate to that season when summer flings end. Of course, for Danny (John Travolta) and Sandy (Olivia Newton-John) summer evolved into fall, when they serendipitously started the year at the same school, setting the stage for more teenage drama, drag races and lots of hangs at the local diner.TuesdayPRESIDENTIAL DEBATE 9 p.m. on ABC. This debate, between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, will be our first chance to see the candidates one-on-one as they discuss issues and their proposals. Hosted by ABC and moderated by Linsey Davis and David Muir, the debate is intended to be more orderly than the ones in recent election cycles. Trump and Harris (begrudgingly) agreed on a plan to mute the microphone of whoever is not actively speaking.Wednesday2024 VIDEO MUSIC AWARDS 8 p.m. on MTV. After Sabrina Carpenter released an album with songs that fans think are about Shawn Mendes and Camila Cabello, all three will be under one roof and ready to perform at this annual show. Megan Thee Stallion will be on double duty — hosting and performing — and Katy Perry is set to receive the Video Vanguard Award. Think of this ceremony as the rebellious little cousin of the Grammys, featuring lots of fun performances, onstage shenanigans and dance numbers.Seth Meyers on “Late Night With Seth Meyers.”Lloyd Bishop/NBCA CLOSER LOOK WITH SETH MEYERS: PRIMETIME LIVE ELECTION SPECIAL 10 p.m. on NBC. After you’ve taken some time to digest the debate and gotten a bit of a palate cleanser with the VMAs, Seth Meyers is hosting an hourlong special to break down everything we saw in the debate in his typical funny but informative format.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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      Why You May Never See the Documentary on Prince by Ezra Edelman

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      Dig, if you will, a small slice of Ezra Edelman’s nine-hour documentary about Prince — a cursed masterpiece that the public may never be allowed to see.Listen to this article, read by Janina EdwardsIt’s 1984, and Prince is about to release “Purple Rain,” the album that will make him a superstar and push pop music into distant realms we had no idea we were ready for. The sound engineer Peggy McCreary, one of many female engineers he worked with, describes witnessing a flash of genius during the creation of his song “When Doves Cry.” Over a two-day marathon recording session, she and Prince filled the studio with sound — wailing guitars, thrumming keyboards, an overdubbed choir of harmonizing Princes. It was the sort of maximalist stew possible only when someone is (as Prince was) a master of just about every musical instrument ever invented. But something wasn’t right. So at 5 or 6 in the morning, Prince found the solution: He started subtracting. He took out the guitar solo; he took out the keyboard. And then his boldest, most heterodox move: He took out the bass. McCreary remembers him saying, with satisfaction, “Ain’t nobody gonna believe I did that.” He knew what he had. The song became an anthem, a platinum megahit.The next sequence starts to probe the origins of Prince’s genius, how it grew alongside a gnawing desire for recognition. His sister, Tyka Nelson, a woman with owlish eyes and pink and purple streaks in her hair, appears onscreen. She describes the violence in their household growing up. How their musician father’s face changed when he hit their mother. The ire he directed at his son, on whom he bestowed his former stage name, Prince — a gift, but also a burden, a reminder that the demands of supporting his children had caused him to abandon his own musical career. Prince would risk lashings by sneaking over to the piano and plinking away at it — the son already embarked on his life’s work of besting his father, the father giving and withdrawing love, the son doing the same.Cut to Jill Jones, one in a long line of girlfriend-muses whom Prince anointed, styled, encouraged and criticized. Hers is one of the most anguished testimonies in the film, revealing a side of Prince many of his fans would rather not see. Late one night in 1984, she and a friend visited Prince at a hotel. He started kissing the friend, and in a fit of jealousy, Jones slapped him. She says he then looked at her and said, “Bitch, this ain’t no [expletive] movie.” They tussled, and he began to punch her in the face over and over. She wanted to press charges, but his manager told her it would ruin his career. So she backed off. Yet for a time, she still loved him and wanted to be with him, and stayed in his orbit for many more years. Recounting the incident three decades later, she is still furious, still processing the stress of being involved with him.In the next sequence, it’s the evening of the premiere of “Purple Rain,” the movie, which will go on to win the Academy Award for best original song score in 1985. Prince’s tour manager, Alan Leeds, was with him in the back of a limo on the way to the ceremony. He remembers one of Prince’s bodyguards turning to Prince and saying: “This is going to be the biggest day of your life! They say every star in town is there!” And Prince clutched Leeds’s hand, trembling in fear. But then, as Leeds tells it, some switch flipped, and “he caught himself.” Prince’s eyes turned hard. He was back in control. “That was it,” Leeds says. “But for maybe 10 seconds, he completely lost it. And I loved it. Because it showed he was human!” In the next shot, we see Prince emerging from the limo and walking down the red carpet in an iridescent purple trench coat over a creamy ruffled collar, his black curls piled high. He swaggers, twirling a flower, unbothered: a creature of regal remove.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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      ‘Room Next Door’ Claims Top Prize at Venice Film Festival

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      The film, starring Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, is the director Pedro Almodóvar’s English-language debut.“The Room Next Door,” directed by Pedro Almodóvar, was awarded the Golden Lion for best film at the 81st Venice International Film Festival on Saturday by a competition jury led by Isabelle Huppert. In the film, a journalist with cancer (Tilda Swinton) asks an old friend, played by Julianne Moore, to stay with her when she decides to take her own life.“It is my first movie in English, but the spirit is Spanish,” Almodóvar said of his adaptation of “What Are You Going Through,” the 2020 novel by Sigrid Nunez. In accepting the award, the acclaimed auteur spoke of the decision to end one’s life in circumstances of unresolvable pain as a fundamental right.Moore’s vigil with Swinton takes place in a rented house in upstate New York. The small cast features John Turturro as a former lover and Alessandro Nivola as a police investigator. Almodóvar won a lifetime achievement award at the Venice Film Festival in 2019 and, in 2021, opened the event with his film “Parallel Mothers” (for which Penélope Cruz won the best actress prize).The 81st edition of the festival opened with “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” Tim Burton’s sequel to the original 1988 supernatural comedy. Other prominent films included “Maria,” “Queer,” “Babygirl,” “Joker: Folie à Deux,” “Wolfs,” “Cloud,” “April,” “Pavements,” “The Order” and “Horizon: An American Saga — Chapter Two.”Despite sweltering heat, the stars were back in full force in Venice after last year’s actors’ strike. The list of boldface names was remarkable: Nicole Kidman, Joaquin Phoenix, Angelina Jolie, Daniel Craig, Lady Gaga, Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Antonio Banderas, Cate Blanchett, Adrien Brody, Jude Law, Jenna Ortega, Winona Ryder, Kevin Costner, Michael Keaton, Swinton and Moore.The Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize went to “Vermiglio,” an intimate period drama by Maura Delpero set in an Italian mountain village. The Silver Lion for best director went to Brady Corbet for “The Brutalist,” a three-and-a-half-hour drama about a Hungarian Jewish architect in America. Dea Kulumbegashvili won the Special Jury Prize for “April,” an acclaimed film about a Georgian doctor who performs abortions despite a ban on the procedures.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 Interview’: Change Can Be Beautiful. Just Ask Will Ferrell and Harper Steele.

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      How well do we know our friends? Our neighbors? Ourselves? In the new documentary “Will & Harper,” which opens in select theaters on Sept. 13 and will stream on Netflix starting Sept. 27, the superstar comedian Will Ferrell and his best friend and frequent collaborator, Harper Steele, take a New York-to-California road trip together to try to answer those questions.Listen to the Conversation with Will Ferrell and Harper SteeleThe superstar comedian and his best friend and collaborator discuss the journey that deepened their friendship.Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Amazon | iHeart | NYT Audio AppHitting the highway on a quest for meaning is a classic American story, but it hasn’t been told in exactly this fashion before: Steele is a trans woman who came out to her friends, including Ferrell, two years ago. That was after years as a comedy writer, many of them at “Saturday Night Live,” where they both worked and where Steele eventually became a head writer. The two friends explained to me that the show wasn’t always the easiest environment, though they have different reasons for saying so. They also experienced some ups and downs on their cross-country drive, which gave them a chance to talk through what Steele’s transition means for their friendship and to get a clearer sense of how their fellow Americans feel about transgender identity.As you might expect, the film’s soul-searching often comes wrapped in laughs. But given the politicization of trans rights, even situations the duo set up for silly comedy can turn tense. There’s a key scene in the documentary in which Steele and Ferrell stop for what they hope is a goofy eating challenge at a rowdy Texas steakhouse. It does not wind up being goofy.That scene, and this emotionally wide-ranging film, evoked feelings in me that work by Will Ferrell hasn’t before. (And I say that as someone who will happily argue for the deeper resonance of his gloriously idiotic “Step Brothers.”) But as “Will & Harper” the movie and Will and Harper the people attest, change can very often be a good and necessary thing — a funny one too.The hard-hitting first question: How did you become friends? Ferrell: We became friends at “Saturday Night Live.” We were hired in the summer or fall of 1995, and we were all this brand-new group. No one knew each other, and one day Harper and I went to lunch. A very pivotal lunch for me. More

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      Barry Jenkins Takes On ‘Mufasa: The Lion King’

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      By his own rough count, the filmmaker Barry Jenkins has seen the 1994 animated movie “The Lion King” around 155 times, many of those viewings with two young nephews and a well-worn VHS tape.So when he was asked to direct the latest installment of the franchise, “Mufasa: The Lion King,” he was already pretty familiar with the story.Who isn’t? “When anybody takes their baby and holds it up like this” — he paused to raise his arms overhead, cupping his hands as though presenting a small but celebrated cub — “you know it’s ‘The Lion King,’” he said. “There are very few things that have that level of cultural penetration.”Familiarity aside, very few things in Jenkins’s career would seem to point to a big Disney animated feature. The director, 44, broke out in 2016 with “Moonlight,” a small-budget coming-of-age film set in Miami at the height of the crack epidemic. It went on to win three Oscars, including one for best picture that, notoriously, was announced only when a “La La Land” producer realized onstage that the wrong movie (his) had been called. Jenkins followed that up in 2018 with “If Beale Street Could Talk,” a romantic drama based on the 1974 James Baldwin novel about childhood sweethearts confronting a nightmare when the young man is unjustly accused of rape.And then Jenkins directed the 10-episode 2021 mini-series “The Underground Railroad,” an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, which imagines the abolitionist-era network of escape routes as a literal railway system. “In terms of emotional scope and just the practical logistics of filmmaking, that was by far the most massive thing I’d done,” he said.“Mufasa,” at least in terms of its fandom and the accompanying scrutiny, is likely to be even bigger. Disney is planning a December release for the film, which tells the story of how Mufasa grew up and came to power before siring Simba. It will serve as a prequel to three previous “Lion King” iterations: the original movie from 1994, the 2019 remake and the long-running Tony Award-winning musical. “I don’t know if pressure is the right word,” Jenkins said, “but you do go, OK, I have to live up to this standard that was set by these people who made these films before me.”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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      Hundreds of Readers Told Us Their Favorite 1999 Movies. Which Came Out on Top?

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      In a memorable year for film, there were recommendations of blockbusters, tender dramas and coming-of-age-tales. But one title stood out from the rest.A quarter-century later, the residual energy of 1999 cinema lingers. The Class of 1999 series — our class project, so to say — took form as a retrospective, sifting through films and moments that inspired a generation at the dawn of a new millennium.It dissected the revolutionary power of “The Matrix” and “The Blair Witch Project,” which manipulated our minds into believing what we saw was real. It examined legacies, in conversation with Haley Joel Osment and the “risky stunts, not risky roles” ethos of Tom Cruise. In essence, the last year of the ’90s had earned itself the title of “the year of uncertainty,” at least according to Wesley Morris.As for myself, I’d define 1999 through the stylistic lens of “SLC Punk,” “American Movie” and “Girl, Interrupted.” (Passionate and a bit misdirected; gritty and a bit manic.) When our film staff writers and critics made their list of favorite films from 1999, we of course had to ask New York Times readers to weigh in on their favorite movie of the year — a question that spawned more than a thousand submissions (almost) overnight.“The Matrix” was mentioned nearly twice as often as any other film. “Fight Club,” “Office Space,” “American Beauty” and “Magnolia” followed suit, in that order. (“American Beauty,” directed by Sam Mendes, won the Oscar for best picture.)Many readers sent us lists, unable to choose just one film, while others gave an elaborate and detailed retelling of a first viewing. Here’s a sampling of what our readers picked, covering everything from teenage escapades to heart-racing thrills to gut-wrenching dramas.‘The Matrix’ Is EverywhereMike Ruddell of New York:By 2024, “The Matrix” is feeling more relevant (and plausible!) by the day, thanks in part to our obsession/tension with breeding ever more capable A.I., our cultural fixation on antihero hackers and leakers, our ongoing destruction of the planet, and our weirdly brat green digital culture. At this point only the phones feel dated.But that’s not what makes this a good movie. “The Matrix” is the best movie of 1999 because of the insanely inventive plot (or conceit?), the thesis-worthy philosophical themes, the kick-ass mishmash of Wing Chun, jujitsu, cyberpunk, shoot-em-up action, and C.G.I. “bullet time” (a term coined thanks to the film), the most “1999” film anyone could possibly think up. As Gen Z would say, “The Matrix” is a vibe.I still get an adrenaline rush from the closing scene when Neo, fresh off his obliteration of the Agents, puts on his shades, looks to the sky, and FLIES.Neeraj Gupta of London:Growing up in India, on a diet of Bollywood movies, “The Matrix” was the first English film that I had watched in a cinema. I distinctly remember being wowed by the plot and coming home to think if all of us are actually living in the Matrix. To this day, I can’t shake that feeling!It is a cult classic with scenes and props etched in my memory, from the long black leather coats to Morpheus’s frame less glasses, and of course Neo’s gravity defying bullet dodge. A movie that made a lasting impact on me.Dylan Feldpausch of Chicago:It epitomizes the alienation of modernity through a (literally and figuratively) subterranean queer lens. I remember watching it as a kid and being inexplicably drawn to its aesthetic, and only as an adult realizing how important it was to me as a nonbinary person — particularly the idea that you can imagine yourself into any identity no matter how inaccessible it may seem to you, and that your power in that identity comes from a strong commitment to your truest self.Paddy Free of Auckland, New Zealand:I was 10 in 1977, the perfect age for “Star Wars.” Walking out of “The Matrix,” I felt the feelings I’d hoped to feel walking into “The Phantom Menace.” 1999’s Great Disappointment and 1999’s Great Redeemer.Drama. Drama. Drama.Kevin Hengehold of Seal Beach, Calif., on “The Sixth Sense”:Not your typical ghost story, and I still watch it whenever I see it on. Fantastic in-depth acting led by Haley Joel Osment along with Toni Collette and Bruce Willis. “I see dead people” is a line that will live on long after I’m gone … and I’m not planning on coming back to watch my wedding video …Katie Robleski of Milwaukee on “Magnolia”:I’m glued to the screen in a dark theater as Aimee Mann’s “Save Me” swells. John C. Reilly quietly delivers his monologue until Melora Walters breaks the fourth wall (and her gut-wrenching pain) with that hopeful smile — cut to black (and to my tears rolling with the credits). Perhaps being 19 made all the difference, but everything about “Magnolia” — Tom Cruise, full cast breaking into song, raining frogs, and 3-hour runtime included — completely changed cinema for me. I miss that era.Zac Oldenburg of San Francisco on “Eyes Wide Shut”:My memories started on a 4:3 aspect ratio DVD, but the film became a revelation once I saw it in a theater. Kidman is alluring on every level, and Cruise gives himself over to Kubrick in a way he has never done again for a director. It’s just an incredible film that sends Kubrick out on a high note.Alex Arroyo of Littleton, Colo. on “Fight Club”:I remember I was in junior high, a group of friends and I going to watch it in theaters. We were so pumped afterward, we just wanted to start our own fight club … we never did though; we were kinda nerds. But the idea of someone being so over all of the daily, typical BS and willing to do something to change it all, gave me hope and kinda made me feel like a badass for watching it.Dana Jacoby of Cotati, Calif., on “American Beauty”: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