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      Kristen Stewart at the Sundance Film Festival

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      She stars in two of the festival’s most discussed films so far: “Love Me,” opposite Steven Yeun, and “Love Lies Bleeding,” with Katy O’Brian.Ever since Parker Posey was dubbed the queen of Sundance in the late ’90s, festival-watchers have been eager to pass that title on each year to whichever actress proves most ubiquitous.This year, the tiara goes to Kristen Stewart, who I expect would wear it with Chanel and Converse. The 33-year-old actress stars in two of the fest’s most discussed movies: “Love Me,” a postapocalyptic story about a buoy that falls in love with a satellite, and “Love Lies Bleeding,” an ultraviolent thriller that casts her as a gym employee engaged in a dangerous affair with an ambitious bodybuilder (Katy O’Brian).Aside from the fact that these two love stories feature Stewart in her go-for-broke, just-have-fun-with-it era, “Love Me” and “Love Lies Bleeding” couldn’t have less in common, which makes them a delightfully whiplash-inducing demonstration of what Stewart is capable of. Here are some of the things I’ve watched her do over the last few days, whether onscreen or off:inject a love interest’s rear end with steroids, as foreplaycheerily extol the virtues of Blue Apron quesadillasdispose of corpses (multiple times)sing the theme song to “Friends” (multiple times)catfish Steven Yeunsink to the bottom of the ocean for fear of being rejectedpage through the book “Macho Sluts”choose her Sim avatardigressively describe “Love Me” at a post-premiere Q. and A. as “such a cool way into all of our stories. Like, it could be a relationship movie but also self-love, but not in the way that word … just make new words for that. When you’re like ‘no’ or you’re like, ‘hey, I identified a thing and I think I enjoy that,’ but then, like, seconds later it’s a different thing and you don’t have to feel bad about that or feel like, ‘Ooh, I didn’t know myself, maybe I’m different.’ Like, no. It’s like” — she snapped twice — “yeah. And now I’m, like, trying to be with a person? Yeah. It’s like this is the most honest relationship movie slash people movie.”realize she has just served an endearing amount of word salad and then mutter, “Wow. Wow. That was really … thank God I’m here!” More

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      Leave the Poor Princess Alone

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      There she is in her pink suit, pearl earrings and feathered shag.There she is with her upcast eyes, unknowable sorrow and perfect sympathy.There she is, that candle in the wind someone keeps relighting.Though killed in a car crash in 1997, Diana, Princess of Wales, turns up everywhere today, in plays, on television, in movies and even musicals. She’s entertainment gold: the perfect combo of stardom, tragedy and unanswerability.Which makes her, like a Dickens novel, public domain.In the last two years alone, I’ve spent more time with her than I did in the 36 she was alive. I saw her in a play called “Casey and Diana,” produced by the Stratford Festival in Ontario and now available to stream on Stratfest@Home. She was a spectral presence Off Broadway in “Dodi & Diana,” a marital drama that hijacked her story to lend oomph to its own.The 2021 film “Spencer,” which I rewatched on Hulu over New Year’s, did much the same thing, trying to wring some ichor of glamour out of her corpse. On television, “The Crown” hung the breathless first half of its final season on the buildup to the crash, blithely making stuff up where the record is thin. (Netflix justified it as “fictional dramatization.”) And what can one say about “Diana, the Musical,” which had a brief run on Broadway in 2021 (but an ongoing one on Netflix), except that it, too, died in a disaster?Reader, I cried at them all. (The musical because it was so bad.) I am thus part of the problem of her exploitation, seeking out more Diana content when there’s little left to say. Doing so establishes a kind of contract with the culture: In return for feeding my “feelings” about a celebrity, the culture has my proxy to do so however it pleases.But what right do I or any of us have to feelings about Diana in the first place? Quite profoundly we did not know her, any more than most of us knew pop-biography grab bags like Elvis Presley, Judy Garland, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Leonard Bernstein, all of them falsified, fudged or “interpreted” in recent movies. History is not the point in such efforts, it is the impediment.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?  More

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      The Legal Question at the Center of the Alec Baldwin Criminal Case

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      The actor was told the gun he was rehearsing with on the “Rust” set, which fired and killed the cinematographer, held no live ammunition. Can he be found guilty of manslaughter?Now that a grand jury has indicted Alec Baldwin on a charge of involuntary manslaughter for the fatal shooting of a cinematographer on the set of the film “Rust” in New Mexico in 2021, the contours of the looming legal battle are coming into focus.If the case reaches trial, the challenge prosecutors face will be convincing a jury that Mr. Baldwin was guilty of either the negligent use of a firearm or of acting with “total disregard or indifference for the safety of others” — even though investigators found he was told on the day of the shooting that the gun he was rehearsing with contained no live rounds, and even though the film set was not supposed to have any live ammunition at all.The challenge Mr. Baldwin’s defense team faces will be to explain why the gun fired. Mr. Baldwin has maintained all along that he did not pull the trigger that day as he rehearsed a scene in which he draws a revolver, saying that the gun discharged after he pulled the hammer back and released it. A forensic report commissioned by the prosecution determined that he must have pulled the trigger for the gun to go off, a finding that contributed to its decision to revive the criminal case against Mr. Baldwin.Legal experts were divided on the merits of reviving the case, noting that traditional gun safety rules — such as never pointing a functional gun toward someone — do not always apply on film sets, and that investigators found he had been assured by the film’s safety crew that the gun did not contain live ammunition.“The notion that you never point a gun at someone would sort of undo westerns for the past 100 years,” said Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge.The outcome of the case at trial — the State of New Mexico vs. Alexander (Alec) Rae Baldwin — would hinge on how jurors view two key questions: Should Mr. Baldwin have known of the danger involved in his actions that day? And, using a term of art in criminal law, did he act with a “willful disregard for the safety of others”?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?  More

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      Sundance Film Festival Kicks Off With Jodie Foster, Robert Downey Jr, and More

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      At the opening night gala for the film festival, celebrating its 40th edition, actors and filmmakers reflected on what kept them coming back.On Thursday night, the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, which is celebrating its 40th edition this year, was bustling. Banners hung on snowy Main Street, Leon Bridges was performing at a new music venue and the Eccles Theatre was packed for one of the opening films: “Freaky Tales.”And around 7 p.m., some 500 guests shuttled to a convention center about 20 minutes away in Kamas, Utah, for the festival’s Opening Night Gala, hosted by the Sundance Institute. The organization, which puts on the festival and has the mission of supporting independent filmmakers, held this type of fund-raising event for the first time last year.The Sundance Institute brought together a crowd of people, which included film industry players like Christopher Nolan, who found early success through the festival. They filed into a cocktail reception, spread across two floors.The dress code, listed as “upscale mountain chic,” led to ensembles ranging from boxy sweaters to velvet suits. Guests discussed the film lineups, ate dates wrapped with bacon and drank espresso martinis. Nearby, actors and actresses posed for photographers and dredged up old festival memories.Sundance has become known for propelling little-known films and filmmakers into the spotlight. “The Blair Witch Project” (1999), “American Psycho” (2000), “Napoleon Dynamite” (2004) and “CODA” (2021) all emerged from Park City.Jodie Foster remembered the festival in the 1980s. “I was on the jury for the year of ‘Sex, Lies, and Videotape,’ which was a big year,” she said, referring to Steven Soderbergh’s 1989 film.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?  More

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      Menachem Daum, Filmmaker Who Explored the World of Hasidim, Dies at 77

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      His acclaimed documentary “A Life Apart” presented a complex portrait of a religious group usually depicted as somber and impenetrable.Menachem Daum, a filmmaker who co-produced a groundbreaking 1997 documentary that illuminated the cloistered world of America’s Hasidim, died on Jan. 7 in a hospital near his home in Borough Park, Brooklyn. He was 77.His death was confirmed by Eva Fogelman, a friend and the author of a book about Christian rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust. She said Mr. Daum had been treated for congestive heart failure.What made the documentary, “A Life Apart: Hasidism in America,” so striking was Mr. Daum’s ability to get people who scorn movies and television sets to sit on camera for revealing interviews, allowing him to chronicle their mores and rituals. The resulting film offered a complex portrait of a religious group usually depicted as somber and impenetrable; here it offered scenes of Hasidim joyfully dancing.That achievement was not a given. Mr. Daum, though ultra-Orthodox, was not Hasidic himself. And although he had earlier made a film about caregivers for the aged, he was scarcely a seasoned filmmaker.But he was well versed in the Torah, the Talmud and the intricacies of Orthodox Jewish observance. He spoke Yiddish — the Hasidic lingua franca — and lived in a Hasidic neighborhood. He teamed with an experienced filmmaker, Oren Rudavsky, the son of a Reform rabbi, to produce and direct the documentary.The Hasidic movement was founded in the 18th century in Eastern Europe by a rabbi known as the Baal Shem Tov, who felt that Judaism had overemphasized intellectual qualities to the detriment of spiritual fervor and sincerity.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?  More

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      Sundance Film Festival: ‘Freaky Nights’ Is the Hot Ticket

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      “Freaky Tales” with Pedro Pascal, Jay Ellis and Normani, gets a raucous premiere as Hollywood turns out in force for the festival.Hello from the Sundance Film Festival in frigid Park City, Utah, where your faithful Projectionist will spend the next week answering important questions like: Are we about to discover the next great filmmaker? Is it possible to look chic in a puffer jacket? And wait, there’s a Neon party tonight? Why didn’t I get an invite?The festival is celebrating its 40th edition this year, but it’s a Hollywood 40, meaning some effective nips and tucks have kept Sundance seeming fresh and vital even as the industry it’s a part of has changed considerably. In the ’90s, every independent filmmaker dreamed of launching their career at this festival as the likes of Quentin Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh had. Now, with the independent-film market in a precarious position, talent comes to Sundance to schmooze and say, “What I’d really like to do is make a limited series.”And hey, the festival programs those now, alongside the documentaries, shorts and narrative films that remain Sundance’s bread and butter. Some movies have premises so outrageous that you could only find them here: In “Love Me,” Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun play a buoy and satellite who fall in love, while “Sasquatch Sunset” casts Jesse Eisenberg and Riley Keough as an unrecognizable pair of Bigfoots and, I’m told, plays things utterly straight.Other movies evoke past Sundance classics. On Thursday, I watched “Ghostlight,” about a troubled family that finds solace by staging Shakespeare: It reminded me of the Sundance hit “CODA,” down to the third-act performance that had audiences weeping. Then I booked it to the documentary “Girls State,” a distaff sequel to Apple TV’s 2020 Sundance pickup “Boys State.” The new one follows hundreds of teenage girls as they try to craft a mock government.The opening night’s hottest ticket was “Freaky Tales,” a gonzo anthology starring Pedro Pascal, Jay Ellis and the pop singer Normani. Directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, who’d previously brought their films “Half Nelson” and “Mississippi Grind” here, “Freaky Tales” follows four interconnected stories set in 1987 Oakland that all tend to climax in outrageously bloody scenes of revenge. Whenever the red stuff spurted, the audience hooted.Though Sundance has introduced a virtual portion to its festival that will be available next week, people remain eager to attend in person. Pascal, one of Hollywood’s most overbooked actors, made the briefest of trips to Park City just so he could attend the raucous “Freaky Tales” premiere. “Ghostlight” directors Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson were even more determined to make it to the festival: Though they were still shooting their film just three months ago, thanks to fleet work from their editors, the two were able to submit a first cut to Sundance in early November, just four days after they’d wrapped.It helped, O’Sullivan said, that she had another ticking clock that demanded quick work: She shot the film while eight months pregnant.“I said we had a hard out,” she joked at the premiere. More

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      ‘American Fiction,’ ‘Origin’ and the Pressures Black Writers Face

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      The movies explore what happens when authors who focus exclusively on racism in their work push back against political and commercial stresses.“We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame,” a young Langston Hughes proclaimed in an essay nearly 100 years ago. “If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter.”Seeking to establish his autonomy as a Black writer, he concluded, “If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.”I thought a lot about Hughes’s landmark 1926 essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” after watching how Ava DuVernay’s “Origin” and Cord Jefferson’s “American Fiction” explore the fates of Black writers who push back against political and publishing pressures to focus exclusively on racism in their works.Like Hughes, the protagonists of these movies — the journalist Isabel Wilkerson and the novelist Thelonious Ellison, known as Monk — strive to write as they please. But, by depicting their characters’ struggles, the films offer refreshing commentaries on the social construction of race and its devastating consequences for those at the bottom of the hierarchy.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?  More