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Martin Scorsese Narrates a Scene From ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’
The director narrates a “circular ballet” sequence where Leonardo DiCaprio’s character, Ernest Burkhart, is taken in for questioning.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.To tell the sweeping story of the Osage murders of the 1920s in “Killers of the Flower Moon” (nominated for 10 Oscars, including best picture), the director Martin Scorsese opted mostly not to sweep the camera along with the narrative.“Dealing with the landscape and the period, I tended to have more stable images,” he said during a video interview, “images that were almost like old photographs in a way.”But one key moment called for a change. As investigators go to Oklahoma to look into the Osage murders and disappearances, they drill down to a group of individuals they think are involved. And in this scene, the lawmen converge to arrest one person they believe they can get information from, Ernest Burkhart, played by Leonardo DiCaprio.As Ernest sits in a pool hall/barbershop, investigators descend on the space to surround him.“Since the characters are all circling around each other in the movie, and since the circle gets tighter and tighter, my drawing for the shot was simply a circle with an arrow. That was it,” Scorsese said.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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How Kingsley Ben-Adir Became Bob Marley
Despite little outward resemblance, the actor worked for months to get the look, sound and movement right for the new film “Bob Marley: One Love.”Bob Marley, the beloved and singular reggae luminary, was a dreadlocked Rastafarian from Jamaica who sang and played guitar. Kingsley Ben-Adir is a Brit with close-cropped hair who doesn’t sing or play guitar, and stands seven inches taller than Marley did. Despite the lack of external similarities, Ben-Adir was cast as Marley in a new Hollywood biopic, the culmination of a yearlong search for the right actor.“We tried to find someone from Jamaica who could speak the dialect we needed,” said Ziggy Marley, Bob Marley’s oldest son as well as a Grammy-winning musician, and a producer on “Bob Marley: One Love,” which opened in theaters on Feb. 14. But physical verisimilitude, he decided, wasn’t the key to portraying his father: “Kingsley brought an emotional depth that nobody else brought to the auditions, and a magnetism,” he added.The choice of Ben-Adir has been denounced by many Jamaicans, who point out that at least since 1990s films like “Cool Runnings” and “How Stella Got Her Groove Back,” Hollywood has been using non-Jamaican actors with diluted accents. “We were not meant to have agency over our narratives,” Danae Peart wrote in RiddimStyle Magazine, which covers culture in the Black diaspora. She added that Hollywood executives are obsessed with “making everything palatable for the ‘white gaze.’”Reviews for “Bob Marley: One Love” have been almost uniformly negative, but even some of the harshest critics have praised Ben-Adir’s performance. “In a film that mostly sticks to reliable formula, he is one thing to love,” Olly Richards of Empire wrote. Recently, Ben-Adir explained in detail how he made the transformation, despite little outward resemblance to Marley.Landing the RoleZiggy Marley, left, with Ben-Adir on set. “Kingsley brought an emotional depth that nobody else brought to the auditions, and a magnetism,” Marley said.Chiabella James/Paramount Pictures“On the audition tape, I knew that my Jamaican patois was going to be basic and wrong,” Ben-Adir, a lean, alert 37-year-old dressed in a dark Adidas track suit, said during an interview in a Times Square conference room. He chose one scene from among three he’d been sent, and had only two days to prep his audition — not enough time to nail the accent. “Working actors don’t have the luxury of time and space.” He crammed by studying “Live at the Rainbow,” a Marley concert video shot in 1977.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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Life Imitates Art as a ‘Master and Margarita’ Movie Stirs Russia
An American director’s adaptation of the beloved novel is resonating with moviegoers, who may recognize some similarities in its satire of authoritarian rule.By all appearances, the movie adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s cult favorite novel “The Master and Margarita,” in Russian theaters this winter, shouldn’t be thriving in President Vladimir Putin’s wartime Russia.The director is American. One of the stars is German. The celebrated Stalin-era satire, unpublished in its time, is partly a subversive sendup of state tyranny and censorship — forces bedeviling Russia once again today.But the film was on its way to the box office long before Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine and imposed a level of repression on Russia unseen since Soviet times. The state had invested millions in the movie, which had already been shot. Banning a production of Russia’s most famous literary paean to artistic freedom was perhaps too big an irony for even the Kremlin to bear.Its release — after many months of delay — has been one of the most dramatic and charged Russian film debuts in recent memory. The movie refashions the novel as a revenge tragedy about a writer’s struggle under censorship, borrowing from the story of Bulgakov’s own life. The emphasis, for many Russians, has hit close to home. And, for some defenders of Putin, too close.“I had an internal belief that the movie would have to come out somehow,” the director, Michael Lockshin, said in a video interview from his home in California. “I still thought it was a miracle when it did come out. As for the response, it’s hard to expect a response like this.”Michael Lockshin, right, the movie’s director, with Tsyganov during the production of the movie.Mars MediaWe 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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‘Monolith’ Review: Friend of the Pod People
Lily Sullivan plays a podcaster investigating a supernatural mystery in this thriller from Matt Vesely.In “Monolith,” a single-setting thriller from the Australian director Matt Vesely, a recently disgraced investigative journalist attempts to salvage her career by accepting an ignoble and humiliating task: starting a podcast. She calls it “Beyond Believable,” and it’s a sort of spooky true-crime show about stranger-than-fiction mysteries — or rather, as she confesses in a moment of frustration, a “clickbait podcast” for listeners with “I.Q. levels below a lobotomized monkey.”It’s a far cry from her broadsheet glory days, but the juicy intrigue of a big scoop proves seductive. When she lands on a story that involves mass hallucinations, bizarre artifacts and (possibly) alien body snatchers, she and her audience become obsessed. How far she will go to pursue that obsession is the driving force of the film.Lily Sullivan plays this unnamed reporter with cagey, harried intensity, and she is more than capable of carrying this one-woman show. (The only other characters are voices on the phone.) Vesely makes good use of the single location — a large, sparely furnished modernist house in the Adelaide Hills of Australia — and he derives much tension from mundane things, such as a murky bathtub and slow-moving automatic curtains. The film is most effective when at its most granular, as Sullivan’s character carefully splices snippets of audio recordings and pores over research materials, scenes strongly reminiscent of Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Blow-Up” and Brian De Palma’s “Blow Out.”But “Monolith” becomes harder to take seriously as the drama escalates, especially when Sullivan, finding herself in danger, charges on with an impassioned plea: “I have to continue this podcast!”MonolithRated R for strong language, frightening situations and some disturbing podcasting. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More
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‘Land of Bad’ Review: Tech Ops in the Jungle
Fighters on the ground, assisted by drone pilots, including Russell Crowe, half a world away — in Las Vegas.From a U.S. military installation in the Sulu Sea — where, a title card tells the viewer, “We are in a war … we just don’t know it” — soldiers board a chopper to execute a “sterilized op” (contemporary lingo for “secret mission”). The soldiers are played by a couple of Hemsworth brothers; a onetime Face of Reebok, Ricky Whittle; and a pumped-up Milo Ventimiglia. Their backup is a couple of drone pilots half a world away, providing lethal firepower from the comfort of Las Vegas.“Land of Bad,” directed by William Eubank from a script he wrote with David Frigerio, is commendable in the abstract for depicting the realities of 21st-century warfare both narratively and thematically: Its settings include a jungle and gnarly underground jails. “At the end of the day,” Whittle’s character says, in the jungle, “when tech fails, it all comes down to one very simple thing — man killing man.” He then welcomes a rookie soldier to “the land of bad.” What the squad subsequently encounters feels like several strains of global terrorism reconfigured into a jingoistic theme park.The former action star Russell Crowe plays Reaper, a drone guy at the other end of the soldiers’ communications devices. He’s not only fighting to keep this squad alive after the mission goes upside down, but to convince indifferent upper brass to pay attention.Moments presumably conceived to create suspense, like Reaper’s stop at a grocery store late in the picture, merely contribute to its longueurs. When Reaper, trying to keep a seemingly stranded soldier’s spirits up, recounts his career trajectory (“The Air Force found my responses to authority were not normal”), he doesn’t sound so much like Tom Cruise’s Maverick in an alternate universe as he does Robert Hayes boring a fellow passenger to death in “Airplane!”Land of BadRated R for language and violence. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters. More
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‘Poor Things’ Choreographer Uses Dance to Tell the Story
Constanza Macras, founder of the Berlin dance company DorkyPark, uses “dance as a function, as a language,” in her work, be it for the stage or the screen.“I have become the thing I hated, the grasping succubus of a lover,” sulks Duncan Wedderburn, the charming rake played by Mark Ruffalo in a scene set in a belle epoque Lisbon restaurant midway through Yorgos Lanthimos’s “Poor Things,” which is nominated for 11 awards at Sunday’s EE British Academy Film Awards, known as the BAFTAs.Bella Baxter, the film’s heroine played by Emma Stone, doesn’t seem to hear him. She is captivated by the rhythmic thump-thump-thump of the orchestra serenading the dinner guests. As if possessed, she follows the beat to the dance floor, where she lets loose with a joyous, primitive and sublimely wacky dance that has become one of the year’s defining screen moments.For Constanza Macras, the film’s choreographer, that scene was about more than just having fun. “It’s a moment that defines the relationship,” explained Macras, 53, who hails from Argentina and is based in Berlin.Macras noted that “what is great about Yorgos is that dance is a ‘pivot moment’ in his movies.”Schore Mehrdju“It’s the moment that she starts to go free from Duncan,” Macras said of Stone’s character — a woman reanimated with the brain of her unborn infant. Duncan has whisked her on a trip around the world in the hopes of debauching her.Instead, the Lothario finds that he can’t keep up with her in the bedroom or, as the scene under discussion reveals, on the dance floor. When Duncan leaps to his feet as well, he tries to save the situation and assert his control. “He’s trying to constrain her, he’s trying to show her how to dance normally,” Macras said.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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Jaime King Is On a Journey
Jaime King had been feeling that something was off. “There’s this strange, volatile energy,” the actress, director and model said on a recent Saturday. She perched on the hearth of a fireplace at her home in Los Angeles, knees to her chest, gaze flitting between the fire and the view beyond a sliding-glass door. “If I’m not looking at you, it’s because I’m listening,” she said to a reporter.“I was nervous earlier, and then I was like, shaky, and then I was like, whoa, what is this vibration?”The premiere of her latest film, “Lights Out,” in which she plays a morally corrupt police officer, might have had something to do with her apprehension. Ms. King, a self-described introvert, was about to embark on a promotional blitz that would take her from the hillsides of Hollywood to the scrum of New York.“Socially speaking, I don’t really go a lot of places,” she said. “Once in a blue moon, I’ll go to the Bungalows,” meaning San Vicente Bungalows, the members-only club that has replaced the Soho House as L.A.’s premier venue for people of means. Besides that, “I’ve been keeping my circle very tight.”As a teenage model for labels like Christian Dior and Chanel, Ms. King, now 44, graced the covers of magazines, including a 1996 cover story for The New York Times Magazine called “James Is a Girl,” by Jennifer Egan and photographed by Nan Goldin.Ms. King choosing a card from Angie Banicki, a publicist turned tarot reader. “I’m used to doing readings where I have to bring the other person into it,” said Ms. Banicki. “But I came in, and the portal was open.”Damien Maloney for The New York TimesWe 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
