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      in Television

      Studios Are Loosening Their Reluctance to Send Old Shows Back to Netflix

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      When building their own streaming companies, many entertainment studios ended lucrative licensing deals with Netflix. But they missed the money too much.For years, entertainment company executives happily licensed classic movies and television shows to Netflix. Both sides enjoyed the spoils: Netflix received popular content like “Friends” and Disney’s “Moana,” which satisfied its ever-growing subscriber base, and it sent bags of cash back to the companies.But around five years ago, executives realized they were “selling nuclear weapons technology” to a powerful rival, as Disney’s chief executive, Robert A. Iger, put it. Studios needed those same beloved movies and shows for the streaming services they were building from scratch, and fueling Netflix’s rise was only hurting them. The content spigots were, in large part, turned off.Then the harsh realities of streaming began to emerge.Confronting sizable debt burdens and the fact that most streaming services still don’t make money, studios like Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery have begun to soften their do-not-sell-to-Netflix stances. The companies are still holding back their most popular content — movies from the Disney-owned Star Wars and Marvel universes and blockbuster original series like HBO’s “Game of Thrones” aren’t going anywhere — but dozens of other films like “Dune” and “Prometheus” and series like “Young Sheldon” are being sent to the streaming behemoth in return for much-needed cash. And Netflix is once again benefiting.Ted Sarandos, one of Netflix’s co-chief executives, said at an investor conference last week that the “availability to license has opened up a lot more than it was in the past,” arguing that the studios’ earlier decision to hold back content was “unnatural.”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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      in Television

      Cord Jefferson on ‘American Fiction’

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      The Emmy-winning writer and former journalist drew on personal experience for his feature debut, a layered sendup of race and hypocrisy in the book and film worlds.Before he read “Erasure,” Percival Everett’s satirical novel about Black representation in the publishing industry, Cord Jefferson had never really thought of himself as a movie director. He had hoped to direct for television — his writing credits include several episodes of “Master of None,” “The Good Place” and HBO’s “Watchmen,” for which he shared an Emmy in 2020 — but even that seemed like a stretch.“I thought they might let me direct something that I helped write or create,” he said in a recent interview. “And even then it would be like Episode 4 of 10, not the pilot or the finale.”Things changed in December 2020, when Jefferson, 41, picked up “Erasure” and became enchanted. The book, published in 2001, is the story of Thelonius Ellison, known as Monk, a disillusioned Black intellectual whose mocking attempt at writing a stereotypical “ghetto novel” becomes a straightforward best seller.“Twenty pages in, I knew I had to write a film adaptation,” Jefferson said. “By the time I finished the book, I knew I had to direct it.” “American Fiction,” his take on the novel — and feature film debut as both a writer and director — is in theaters Friday. It stars Jeffrey Wright as Monk, Issa Rae as a rival novelist and Tracee Ellis Ross and Sterling K. Brown as Monk’s siblings. In September, it won the top prize at the Toronto International Film Festival, a precursor for an Academy Awards nomination for best picture for the past 11 years.Over lunch in the NoHo neighborhood of Manhattan, Jefferson, a former journalist and editor at Gawker, discussed his personal connection to Everett’s story, his adoration of the writer-director Nicole Holofcener and shedding tears in a pitch meeting. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.What was it about the book that spoke to you?There was so much. The most obvious is just the conversation that it’s having about the expectations of a Black artist in this country, what people want or think that Black art should be. That was a huge part of my life when I was still working in journalism. I wrote this article called “The Racism Beat,” which is very much about the expectation that Black journalists are just there to write about the bad things that happen to Black people and racism and violence.But besides that, there are three siblings in the book, and I have two older siblings. And there’s an ailing parent in the book, and my mother passed of cancer in 2016, after two years of struggling. One of the siblings in the book is charged with caring for the parent because the other two are off doing their own thing, and that was the dynamic with us. My oldest brother shouldered that responsibility. He went about it stoically and never complained or anything, but I had this residual guilt over not being there.From big things to small things, there was just all of this stuff that felt like it was speaking to me directly. I went to a college in Virginia called William & Mary, and there’s a reference to William & Mary in the novel. Nobody ever talks about William & Mary in pop culture! It just felt like somebody had written a gift specifically for me, like, “I made this for you.”The parts about the expectations facing Black artists, did they match your own experience when you arrived in Hollywood?Oh, definitely. I thought I was going to get there and it would be like, “Oh yeah, there’s a world of opportunity and we’re just going to write about whatever. The Black experience in America now includes everything, all the way up to being the president of the United States.” But there’s genres for “prestige Black projects”: slave overcoming adversity and escaping, Black civil rights activist overcoming white racism, inner-city gangland stuff, poverty and broken homes.I’ll tell you a true story of something that happened to a friend that exemplifies this perfectly. She went into a meeting at this production company and they’re like, “What are you interested in writing?” She says, “I’m interested in romantic comedies, like ‘When Harry Met Sally,’ ‘Sleepless in Seattle,’ classic, generational, Nora Ephron comedies. I would also love to write a ’90s-style erotic thriller.” They’re like, “All right, great. We’ll come back to you later with some ideas.” About three hours later, they call her and say, “We’ve got this story about a blind slave who, thanks to a wealthy white benefactor, learns to play the piano and becomes a piano prodigy. Are you interested in this?”Wow.They see a Black person and they can’t see past that. I think there’s a lot of people who say, “Well, why would we hire you to write a rom-com? Why would we hire you to write an erotic thriller?” There’s an inability to think of us as having our own passions and our own complex existence outside of this very limited window of what they allow us to say about our lives. These are things that people of color have been talking about for a very long time. To me, the real spiritual ancestor for this project would be “Hollywood Shuffle” [Robert Townsend’s satire of Black representation in Hollywood, released in 1987].That was a real foundational text for me when I was a kid. I loved that movie. I probably saw it before I was 10. It opened my eyes to this idea that you can talk about these things that are very serious but also have fun with them, that not only is it OK to laugh, you need to laugh because otherwise you’ll just be miserable all the time. It blew my mind wide open.From left, Sterling K. Brown, Jeffrey Wright and Erika Alexander in “American Fiction.” The movie won the top prize at the Toronto International Film Festival.Claire Folger/Orion PicturesIt’s funny because the two references I kept thinking about while watching your movie were “Hollywood Shuffle” and Nicole Holofcener, which is a cool combination.Dude, love Nicole Holofcener. She’s a genius. I’m so happy you said that. To me, that’s the greatest compliment. I love her so much. I saw “Friends With Money” [2006] when it first came out, and I was just blown away. She’s a huge influence on me. She has such a subtle, deft hand with class dynamics. And I love her character work. I’m forgetting the one with Gandolfini and Julia Louis-Dreyfus …“Enough Said.”Yeah. I just feel like she has an attention to detail when it comes to how human beings actually interact and live their lives. What I set out to make with this movie was something that felt a little bit like life. To me, even in the most miserable times, I’ve always found ways to laugh and enjoy myself and time with my family and friends. There are all these things that buoy your spirits. I think it’s a disservice to the human experience to not reflect that. And that’s something Nicole Holofcener does really well. I think Noah Baumbach does, also. Spike Lee, Bong Joon Ho. All people who’ve inspired me over the years.I wanted to ask you about something that happens toward the end of the film, which is this really interesting conversation between Monk and Sintara (Issa Rae) that raises the question of whether his distaste for her novel masks a distaste for a certain kind of Black person. In your mind, what do you think Monk’s relationship is with other Black people?Something Jeffrey and I talked about the first time we met and that we agreed on instantly was we didn’t want this movie to be some Talented Tenth, respectability politics [expletive]. We didn’t want it to feel like we were finger wagging and saying, “This is the right way to be Black, and all you other people are doing it wrong.” Both of us knew the movie could not be that. So that scene was important because we didn’t want people to come away being like, “Oh, well, she’s the villain and he’s the hero.” There are no villains or heroes.What I really like about that scene is I don’t really know who I agree with, ultimately. They both make interesting points. But I will say that when she says that line, “Potential is what people see when they think what’s in front of them isn’t good enough,” I think it’s the first time we see Monk confronted with the idea that he might be a little self-loathing, that he might have an internal problem with his Blackness. It’s one of the first times that we see him really get clammed up.Do you think it’s directing now for you? Or will you go back to writing television?I’m working on four different movies right now and I want to keep writing and directing movies, but I also want to do TV. I published a short story last year, and I’d love to do more of that. I’m about 60 percent done with a stage play. I just want to keep making stuff. When T Street [a producer of “American Fiction”] told me that they were greenlighting the movie, I started crying in the meeting. I had been told no for so long. I’d worked on all these things that just sort of went nowhere. It starts to break your heart eventually. You wonder, “Is this ever going to happen for me? Or is this just going to be a thing that I wanted to do my whole life?” The fact that I was able to crack the door a little bit to make this. … I feel incredibly honored. More

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      in Theater

      Ice Spice, Brian Jordan Alvarez and More Breakout Stars of 2023

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      These eight performers and artists broke away from the pack this year, delighting us and making us think.Gutsy and offbeat, with an abundance of heart. The stars who rose to the top in 2023 shared a similar mentality: do it their own way and go full tilt without sacrificing emotion or authenticity. Here are eight artists who shook up their scenes and resonated with fans.TelevisionBella RamseyAs the TV landscape continues to fracture, one new show emerged as a bona fide phenomenon: “The Last of Us,” HBO’s stunningly heartfelt zombie apocalypse thriller. Given that its source material was a beloved, acclaimed 2013 video game that has sold over 20 million copies, the bar was extraordinarily high. The show’s debut season delivered, in large part because of the synergy between the duo at its center: Pedro Pascal as Joel and Bella Ramsey as Ellie, two characters who find themselves on a cross-country quest, dodging reanimated corpses to (hopefully) save the world.Ramsey, 20, who was born and raised in central England, offered a layered, tenacious, haunting performance as a teenager who is coming-of-age while being humanity’s possible last hope. They have been a working actor since they signed on to “Game of Thrones” at age 11, as the scene-stealing giant slayer Lyanna Mormont, and went on to have celebrated turns in the BBC/HBO adaptation of “His Dark Materials” and Lena Dunham’s 2022 period comedy, “Catherine Called Birdy.”For “The Last of Us,” Ramsey nailed a specific combination of contradictions — funny and quirky, but violent and rough — that Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, its creators, were looking for. “There are few people better between the words ‘action’ and ‘cut,’” Mazin told The New York Times.Ramsey’s performance earned them an Emmy nomination, for outstanding lead actress in a drama, joining the likes of established stars such as Keri Russell and Elisabeth Moss. “It’s only recently that I’ve accepted I am Ellie, and I can do it, and I am a good actor,” Ramsey told us.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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      in Movies

      ‘The Family Plan’ Review: Who’s Your Daddy?

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      Mark Wahlberg plays a husband and father hiding a secret identity in this breezy, entertaining action-comedy.“The Family Plan” has a familiar premise: A seemingly ordinary family man with a clandestine identity is hiding a violent past. It’s been done as farce, in “True Lies,” and as drama, in “A History of Violence,” in both instances to rousing effect. “Family Plan,” starring Mark Wahlberg as the dissembling patriarch, plays it for laughs, using his deception and its unraveling as a springboard for screwball comedy.It takes the form of an action picaresque, when Wahlberg’s Dan, a former hit man using an alias, whisks his unwitting family on a cross-country road trip, trying to evade the approaching assassins who’ve exposed his suburban ruse. Dan, his wife (Michelle Monaghan), their bickering teenagers (Zoe Colletti and Van Crosby) and their 10-month-old baby cruise from Buffalo to Vegas in their minivan, flailing through high-speed getaways and shootouts along the way.This is pretty routine material, but it’s been realized with charm and enthusiasm: The director, Simon Cellan Jones, maintains a good handle on the comic-thriller tone and shoots the action with wit and creativity, finding clever ways to integrate the diapers and BabyBjörns of fatherhood into the brisk, “John Wick”-style fight scenes. (Highlights include a whisper-quiet car chase set to Enya’s “Only Time” and some grocery store kung fu involving an infant.)Wahlberg is more charismatic than he’s been onscreen in nearly a decade, and his chemistry with Monaghan is the foundation of a plausible marriage — they keep the domestic aspect grounded, even as the assassin stuff gets a touch ludicrous. The great Ciaran Hinds is the villain, appearing to enjoy himself as much as everybody else. He, too, understood the assignment: Have fun.The Family PlanRated PG-13. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. Watch on Apple TV+. More

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      ‘The Zone of Interest’ Review: A Hollow Holocaust

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      Jonathan Glazer has made a hollow, self-aggrandizing art-film exercise set in Auschwitz during the Holocaust.What is the point of “The Zone of Interest”? I’ve seen Jonathan Glazer’s movie twice, and each time I’ve returned to this question, something that I rarely feel compelled to ask. Movies exist because someone needs or wants to make art, tell a story, drive home a point, defend a cause, expose a wrong or simply make money. All that is clear from what’s onscreen is Glazer has made a hollow, self-aggrandizing art-film exercise set in Auschwitz during the Holocaust.Written and directed by Glazer, the movie is loosely based on the 2014 novel by Martin Amis with the same title. Heavily researched — Amis lists numerous resources in the emotional afterward — the book is narrated by three men, including a fictionalized character based on Rudolf Höss, the S.S. commandant who for several years ran Auschwitz. There, he oversaw a factory of torture and death in which, per the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, an estimated 1.1 million men, women and children were murdered, the vast majority Jews.In adapting the novel, Glazer has jettisoned much of Amis’s novel, most of its characters, plotlines and inventive, at times near-hysteric, language and tone. What Glazer has retained is the novel’s intimate juxtaposition between the horrors of the extermination camp and the everyday lives of its non-inmate characters. Unlike Amis, however, who routinely invokes and at times describes the barbarism inside the camp — with its “daily berm of corpses,” as he writes — Glazer significantly and pointedly keeps these horrors at an oblique remove.Instead, Glazer focuses on the day-to-day routine of the camp’s commandant and his family, using their real names. Together with their five children and a smattering of servants, Rudolf and Hedwig Höss — played by the relatively undemonstrative Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller — live in a nondescript, somewhat austere, predictably orderly multistory house. There’s a spacious garden with a small wading pool, beehives, a sprawling greenhouse and beds of flowers tended by camp prisoners. A tall wall topped with barbed wire borders the garden; through the wire, the tops of numerous death camp buildings dot the view.The proximity of their home and these buildings is a jolt, and based on fact. The real Höss family, like their fictional counterparts, lived in the Auschwitz complex, a swath some 15 square miles in size that housed different camps in an area called the Interessengebiet or “interest zone.” The house was tucked near a corner of the oldest camp, Auschwitz I, which had prisoner barracks, gallows, a gas chamber and crematory. After Höss was arrested in 1946, he wrote that “my family had it good in Auschwitz, every wish that my wife or my children had was fulfilled.” The children ran free and his wife had “her flower paradise.” He was hanged at Auschwitz in 1947, not far from where the family had lived.The time frame in Glazer’s adaptation is vague, though primarily seems to take place in 1943 before the real Höss was transferred to another camp. The movie opens on a black screen accompanied by some music, a foreboding overture that gives way to a pacific scene at a river with a group of people in bathing suits. Eventually, they dress and motor off. Much of the rest of the movie takes place at the Höss family home, where Glazer’s carefully framed, often fixed cameras record the children playing while the parents chat and sometimes argue. You see Rudolf going off to work in the camp while Hedwig oversees the house. At one point, you also watch a prisoner quietly spreading ash on the garden as a soil amendment.In “The Zone of Interest,” Glazer deploys a number of art-film conventions, including narrative ellipses and long uninterrupted takes. Throughout, characters are kept at a remove (as if they are being surveilled) and filmed mostly in medium or long shots; I only remember one grim close-up of a face. There are bursts of music (by Mica Levi), one bit features unnerving yelping and whooping, though not a conventional soundtrack. For the most part, the intricately layered audio foregrounds everyday conversations and chatter over a low, persistent machinelike hum, a droning that is regularly punctuated by train sounds, muffled gunfire and indecipherable yelling and screaming. It sounds like the engine of death.The overall effect of Glazer’s approach to this material is at first deeply unsettling, in large part because — as ordinary life ticks on — you worry that he will take you into the extermination rooms. Instead, he continues focusing on the Hösses’ everyday life without obvious editorializing (or outrage), swells of emotion-coaxing music or the usual mainstream cinematic prompts. The camerawork — save for a few traveling shots that underline the closeness of the house to the interior of the camp — is smooth and discreet. It’s demonstrably unshowy. It’s all very matter of fact, whether Hedwig is showing a visitor around the garden or Rudolph is with some suited executives discussing plans to expand the camp.In stressing the quotidian aspect and placid texture of the family’s life, Glazer emphasizes just how commonplace this world is, a mundanity that invokes what Hannah Arendt, in writing about the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the organizers of the Holocaust, famously called the “banality of evil.” Rudolf and Hedwig give the appearance of a conventional bourgeois married couple (however creepy). When he gets a promotion that requires them to move, she resists. Every so often, though, fissures crack the surface of this calm as when Hedwig tries on a fur coat that’s been confiscated from a prisoner; she shuts herself in a room first, which suggests that she’s hiding and, by extension, knows she’s doing something wrong.There are other disturbances, too, like the clouds of dark smoke and the screams that one of the children hears and which discomfort him. More dramatically, Glazer inserts several eerie black-and-white scenes of a girl or young woman placing apples around the camp at night, presumably for prisoners. (Later, you learn that she’s an outsider.) These interludes are radically distinct in look and tone from the rest of the movie: They were shot with a thermal imaging camera and are accompanied by violent music. They also show the only instances of kindness and resistance in the entire movie. Yet what is most striking about these sections isn’t the singularity of this woman’s actions but their stylistic bravura, their wow factor.“The Zone of Interest” is a blunt, obvious movie. In scene after scene, Glazer underscores the blandness of these characters’ lives without resorting to exegesis, weeping violins and faces or, instructively, a heroic figure like Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who helped save hundreds of Jews and is the title character in Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film “Schindler’s List.” Spielberg’s film has been criticized for, among other things, focusing on a non-Jewish hero, a focus that speaks both to most filmmakers’ inability to honestly engage with the Holocaust — in its full, numbing, routinized barbarism — and to mainstream cinema’s compulsive desire for happy endings or at least some reassurances in the face of the abyss.Glazer peers into the abyss but wisely doesn’t attempt to “explain” the Holocaust. Notably Rudolf and Hedwig don’t spew Nazi ideology; they embody it, which is foundational to the movie’s conceit. Deeply self-interested, they enjoy their power. They are, the movie suggests, representative of the millions of ordinary Germans — and, yes, perhaps anyone, anywhere — who chatted over breakfast while their neighbors were slaughtered. As Hedwig reminds Rudolf in one scene, they have the life they’ve always dreamed of. They are villains, full stop. And like so many other movies, mainstream or not, this one is fascinated with its villains, far more than it is with their victims, whose suffering here is largely reduced to room tone.In “The Zone of Interest,” Glazer doesn’t simply tell a story; in his use of art-film conventions he provides a specific frame through which to watch it. This is clearly part of its attraction as is the breathing space his approach creates: it is scary, but not too.These conventions can create a sense of intellectual distance and serve as a critique, or that’s the idea. They also announce (fairly or not) a filmmaker’s aesthetic bona fides, seriousness, sophistication and familiarity with a comparatively rarefied cinematic tradition. They signal that the film you’re watching is different from popular ones made for a mass audience. These conventions are markers of distinction, of quality, which flatter filmmakers and viewers alike, and which finally seem to me to be the biggest point of this vacuous movie.Zone of InterestRated PG-13 for references to the mass death. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Alphaville’: A Film That Feels Brand-New

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      Jean-Luc Godard’s hard-boiled sci-fi movie from 1965 returns in a restored version at IFC Center.Cinephiles of a certain age have a Jean-Luc Godard film that when first seen, blew their minds. Mine was Godard’s low-budget foray into dystopian science fiction, “Alphaville.”Having opened the 1965 New York Film Festival, which called it the “first successful incursion of pop art into the cinema,” “Alphaville” returns in a restored, re-subtitled print at the IFC Center, starting Dec. 15.Call it pop art, meta-noir, sci-fi neorealism or the underground precursor to the overblown, effects-driven superhero movies of the 21st century. “Alphaville” inserted itself into popular cinema by appropriating an existing movie icon, the hard-boiled detective Lemmy Caution, played in seven French thrillers by the frog-faced American actor Eddie Constantine.Thanks to Constantine, “Alphaville” is remarkably close to a “normal” movie (by Godardian standards). And thanks to Godard, Lemmy — one icon among many — lives in a self-aware movie universe. My own eureka moment came when, dispatched to find the German pulp character Harry Dickson (Akim Tamiroff), Lemmy asks him if their colleagues Dick Tracy and Flash Gordon are dead.“Alphaville” is pure pop in the form of gritty vérité — shot on high-speed, black-and-white film almost entirely at night and largely in the then-new Paris business district La Défense. As outrageously callous and bluntly stylized as a comic strip, mayhem is accentuated by Paul Misraki’s start-stop, hyper-melodramatic score, while tough-guy Lemmy quotes Paul Éluard.Inventive and pragmatic, Godard transformed ordinary objects into futuristic gizmos: That a jukebox stands for a spy console, a cigarette lighter receives radio transmissions, an electric fan denotes the supercomputer Alpha 60 and the computer’s flat, guttural croak is that of a man with a prosthetic voice box, is a form of surrealism.Godard was pragmatic in other ways, too. Richard Brody’s biography, “Everything Is Cinema,” suggests that “Alphaville” was designed to get Anna Karina, who divorced the director just before filming began, to say the words “I love you.” She does at the end of the film. Audiences did not. Present at the movie’s premiere, the Village Voice critic Andrew Sarris “felt waves of hatred washing up on the screen.”The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther, also there, noted that Godard’s “excessively cinematic prank,” provoked annoyance when, shifting gears midway through, it became “a tedious tussle with intellectual banalities.” Perhaps, but to paraphrase Umberto Eco’s essay on cult films and “Casablanca,” where two clichés make us laugh, a hundred clichés make a myth — in this case Orpheus and Eurydice. (In “Alphaville,” Cocteau’s version is referred to throughout.)Like “1984” and any number of recent opinion pieces, “Alphaville” equates totalitarianism with the debasement of language and allegiance to the algorithm. That it makes its points audio-visually may be why many artists prized the film. The conceptualist Mel Bochner celebrated “Alphaville” with a photo-text grid published in 1968 in Arts Magazine. Decades later, MoMA PS1 hosted a show of contemporary art inspired by Godard called “Postcards From Alphaville.”Those artworks have dated but the film hasn’t. Digitally restored, “Alphaville” not only looks but feels brand-new. The “intellectual banalities” that bored Crowther are so insistently contemporary that “Alphaville” could have been made in 2023. If by some time-traveling Borgesian twist of fate it were, Godard’s film would have been my candidate for the year’s best.AlphavilleOpens on Friday at the IFC Center in Manhattan; ifccenter.com. More

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      Greta Gerwig, ‘Barbie’ Director, to Head Cannes Film Festival Jury

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      The director and writer behind “Barbie,” “Little Women” and “Lady Bird” will help pick the winner of next year’s Palme d’Or, the festival’s main prize.This year’s Cannes Film Festival didn’t host the biggest movie of the year — “Barbie” — but the film’s director and co-writer, Greta Gerwig, will have a significant role at next year’s event.Cannes’s organizers announced on Thursday that Gerwig will lead the jury at the 77th edition of the glitzy festival, scheduled to run from May 14-25, a role in which she will help decide the winner of the Palme d’Or, the festival’s top prize.Gerwig will be the first-ever female American director to take the role. And at 40, she will be the second youngest person to be jury president, following Sophia Loren, the Italian actress, who was 31 when she chaired the jury in 1966.Thierry Frémaux, the festival’s artistic director, and Iris Knobloch, its president, called Gerwig the “obvious choice” for the role. The director, writer and actress, they added in a joint statement, “audaciously embodies the renewal of world cinema” and “is also the representative of an era that is breaking down barriers and mixing genres, and thereby elevating the values of intelligence and humanism.”Gerwig, who is also known for movies including “Frances Ha” (which she co-wrote and starred in), “Lady Bird” and “Little Women” (which she both wrote and directed) said in the news release announcing her appointment that she was “stunned and thrilled and humbled” to have been named the jury president.“As a cinephile, Cannes has always been the pinnacle of what the universal language of movies can be,” Gerwig added: “I cannot wait to see what journeys are in store for all of us.”The lineup for next year’s festival is scheduled to be announced in April. More

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      Teo Yoo and John Magaro on ‘Past Lives’ and Inyeon

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      It’s fitting, maybe, that the male leads of the continent-spanning “Past Lives” had to do their joint interview from different countries. John Magaro hopped on the video call from Budapest, where he was filming a new project, while Teo Yoo joined from Los Angeles, where he had traveled to attend November’s starry Art+Film Gala at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.“It was quite overwhelming for me,” Yoo told us, still reeling from the party. “You try to look nice and be present, and not freak out when you shake hands with Keanu Reeves and Pedro Pascal.”Both men, who are in their 40s, felt fortunate to still be celebrating “Past Lives.” The movie has come on strong at the start of awards season, earning the top prize at November’s Gotham Awards and a strong haul of five Golden Globe nominations this week, including a key one for best drama. Directed by Celine Song, the film stars Greta Lee as Nora, a Korean immigrant living in New York whose marriage to good-natured Arthur (Magaro) is tested by a visit from her childhood sweetheart, Hae Sung (Yoo).It’s the most delicate of love triangles, because Nora can’t simply choose one or the other: Hae Sung is her Korean past and Arthur is her American present, and she must hold space for both in order to feel complete. Still, the carefully calibrated performances from Yoo and Magaro have had audiences swooning. (The Times critic Alissa Wilkinson called the men “magnificent.”) As each gazes at Nora, wondering if she will return his love, the accumulation of all their loaded glances is almost certain to break your heart.Greta Lee with Magaro and Yoo in the film. “Each and every one of us were, at one moment in time, working in that neighborhood as struggling actors,” Yoo said. A24“I don’t think I’ve ever been a part of something quite like this,” Magaro said. “To continue to be in the conversation of films, especially at this time of the year when such enormous things are coming out with a lot more power behind them, it’s been really nice. It’s one of those little films that could.”Much is made in “Past Lives” about inyeon, the Korean concept of destiny, and Yoo referred to it frequently when describing the film’s long tail. For the actor, who grew up in Cologne, Germany, and now works primarily in South Korea, “Past Lives” has been a major breakthrough since its Sundance Film Festival debut in January.“Oh my God, I was a mess,” Yoo said, recalling how he felt after the premiere there. “But I want to put John on the spot. John, have you seen it with an audience yet?”Not yet, Magaro admitted: The movie is simply too special to him. “If it’s a film that I don’t have so much invested in, I’m more inclined to watch it with an audience,” he said. “But because we all left a big piece of ourselves on the screen for this one, it’s just been hard for me to have the courage.”Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.“I knew people would make it, like, ‘me vs. Teo,’ but that’s not what the film is about,” Magaro said.Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesWhat sort of reactions did you get when the film came out this summer?JOHN MAGARO I knew people would make it, like, “me vs. Teo,” but that’s not what the film is about. This is not “Twilight,” this is not Edward and Jacob. If I’m being honest about it, it bothered me that some audience members have turned it into that kind of movie, but it’s been really nice to see the people who are really seeing the deeper message of what Celine was trying to do. This is much more than just a story of unrequited love — it’s about something that’s deep and cosmic.YOO I think it also depends on the amount of life experience an audience member has had and what they can perceive. Maybe they will come back to the film at some point and they will say, “Oh my God, I hadn’t seen that other layer.”MAGARO The heart of the story is her coming to terms with who she is and choosing herself instead of being defined by either of the two men. It’s the idea of standing on your own two legs and being able to have one foot in the past and one foot in the present, and still being OK with that. I think that’s a lovely notion.What did your wives think of the movie?MAGARO My wife is Korean American, too, so she saw a lot of parallels between her own life and her own family story. She isn’t an immigrant herself, but her folks came here in their university days and she was first-generation. There is a piece of her that is still back in Korea and there’s a piece of her that is part of whatever this American experience is, so she felt very connected to the story and pretty emotional about it.YOO My wife already thinks of it as a modern classic. She thinks it’s going to be one of those movies that people are going to talk about throughout the future.What was going on in your lives when the script for “Past Lives” came to you?YOO I was in the middle of shooting a reality TV show in South Korea.MAGARO What?YOO Yeah. It was during Covid, and I was on a small island with a few celebrities on a cooking show. It was for newlyweds who didn’t have a chance during the pandemic to go on their honeymoon, so we were providing this extra special experience for them, and I was cooking my butt off every day for two weeks.MAGARO I got the script right before the pandemic. My wife was pregnant at the time, and we had just moved into our new place in Brooklyn. I remember loving the script and wanting to be a part of it, but then Covid hit and it was gone. That summer, there were some rumblings that it was coming back but they were going much younger. I think they had cast Teo’s role, and it was a younger guy. Then that all broke down and they needed old people to do it, so they called the nursing home and we came out.YOO I remember Celine saying the initial idea for the film was conceived when she was 29, so she thought she needed to write it for 20-year-olds. And as the film progressed, she turned 30, and then became early 30s, so then she needed to revise it — she matured, and the characters needed to mature. So in this way, we met, and this is how inyeon comes into play.“To be an East Asian actor and not have to lean against tropes like martial arts and comedy, but to be a romantic lead and be accepted as that with the power of my talent?” Yoo said. “That’s really something to me.”It’s funny that the film was conceived prepandemic because so much of it feels even more relatable now, like the frequent video calls between Nora and Hae Sung.MAGARO That’s one of those inyeon things Teo was talking about. If this movie came out before Covid, would it have resonated as much? I mean, look at what we’re doing right now on Zoom. The whole idea of me being in this part of the world and you being in the other part of the world is so much more universal.How did the two of you get to know each other?MAGARO We were kept apart until the scene where the two characters actually meet. We were really lucky to have a crew of people who were able to facilitate Celine’s wish, so that night when we finally did meet, we got to share this real experience that made it into the movie. But after that, we went back and hung out in our trailers for a while. We had a drink, we had a toast and we got to break the ice a little bit.YOO It was a relief, after all the pent-up stress.MAGARO Yeah, because Celine wanted Greta to talk about him to me, and about me to him. That night, we got to hang out and let our hair down.YOO On my end, I feel like there was an unspoken bond of trust. I’d never met you, but just seeing your body of work and the person you are, I knew that the moment that we would meet and work together, there will be something of a shared brotherhood.And all that lent an electric charge to the bar scene you have together.MAGARO That’s one of my favorite scenes that I’ve ever done, actually. First of all, it was our chance to finally share a moment. All this mythology had been built up around each other, and we got to sit there in the bar and talk man to man and play a scene that was written so beautifully, showing these men who were not combative men. Although they’re both jealous, they could temper that.YOO Yeah, I always talk about it in terms of vulnerability. I’ve watched a few of those YouTube reactions to the movie, and I see those faces that they make: “Ooh, awkward.” And I’m like, yeah, that’s exactly the sweet spot, that vulnerability, because it gives way to human beings who are able to get hurt a little more, but that also gives human beings kind of a passage to get loved a little more. That vulnerability is a space that is a bit more needed nowadays, and I feel people are seeking that out and thirsting for that.How did you feel when you wrapped the film?YOO First of all, there was a tremendous sigh of relief. I felt this heavy burden was lifted off my shoulders because I’m not at all a person like Hae Sung: I don’t live with a lot of repressed emotions, so it was really, really hard to live in that bubble for those seven, eight weeks. But there was a scene we shot in St. Mark’s Place and one moment in between takes where we didn’t go back into our trailers. We were cherishing the moment because each and every one of us were, at one moment in time, working in that neighborhood as struggling actors and bartending somewhere around the corner. And now we were all leading actors with our names tagged to the back of our chairs in an A24 film in the middle of New York City.Teo, you came to New York as a young man to study acting but didn’t see opportunities there to play characters you could relate to. How does it feel to come back and star in a film like this?YOO It feels like a dream come true, who am I kidding? To be an East Asian actor and not have to lean against tropes like martial arts and comedy, but to be a romantic lead and be accepted as that with the power of my talent? That’s really something to me. I’m really, really lucky, and I don’t take it lightly.How close is your current path to the one you imagined you’d be walking?MAGARO Not this at all. I think a similarity between me and Teo is that you’re from Cologne, I’m from Ohio — we’re from places where this didn’t really exist. I went to school, I stumbled ass-backwards into agents in New York, and I thought maybe I’ll work in regional theater or something like that because the idea of film was so alien to me. I try to keep a level head because it’s weird to work with people who you had posters on your wall of, you know?YOO Totally.MAGARO And when you get to work on films like this, it’s surreal. You are part of this magic that you grew up loving and not knowing how to reach. And even for a moment, you get to peek in and touch it and taste it. I’m getting emotional, actually, saying this. It’s beyond words, but no, I never expected this.YOO Me neither. I mean, in a faint way, in the distance maybe you dream about it and you hope for it. But initially, after my studies in New York, I thought I would be a street performer in Europe, to be honest with you. I really thought I would be performing in parks for children, doing juggling acts. My wife helped me to set my mind into a different trajectory to go to Korea and then get cast in film and television, but I had my mind set on something like a nomad lifestyle.I guess that’s where we all are coming from: If the industrialized world wouldn’t have had invented the magic of light and cinema, we would still be on the back of a carriage going from town to town, from village to village, gathering people around and telling stories. Now, we just do it in a more heightened and luxurious way. More