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      ‘The Interview’ Podcast: Anne Hathaway

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      This is the debut of The Interview, The New York Times’s new weekly series, featuring in-depth conversations with fascinating people. Each week, David Marchese or Lulu Garcia-Navarro will speak with notable figures in the worlds of culture, politics, business, sports, wellness and beyond. Like the Magazine’s former Talk column, the conversations will appear online and in print, but now you can also listen to them in our new weekly podcast, “The Interview,” which is available wherever you get your podcasts. Below, you’ll find David’s first interview with the actress Anne Hathaway; Lulu’s first interview, with the Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid, is here.Listen to the conversation with Anne HathawayOn the debut of ’The Interview,’ the actress talks to David Marchese about learning to let go of other people’s opinions.On one level, Anne Hathaway’s new movie, “The Idea of You,” which arrives on Prime Video on May 2 and is directed by Michael Showalter, couldn’t be more straightforward. It’s an adaptation of Robinne Lee’s hit romance novel about Solène, a divorced 40-year-old mom played by Hathaway, who winds up in a relationship with a much younger man — a singer in a boy band, played by Nicholas Galitzine. Warmhearted and with unabashed mainstream appeal, the film is a return for the New Jersey-raised actress, who has fruitfully spent much of her time lately playing thornier characters in indie films, to the kinds of charming fish-out-of-water tales that first helped bring her to stardom, like “The Princess Diaries” and “The Devil Wears Prada.” This time, though, instead of being the plucky ingénue thrust into a glamorous, high-pressure situation, Hathaway is playing a character who’s coming into a new world a little less starry-eyed, and with a firmer sense of self.But “The Idea of You” also works on another, more complicated, even self-referential level. It’s a movie about a woman pushing against societal expectations and getting a lot of grief for it, which is something Hathaway, 41, knows about. More than a decade ago, around the time she won an Academy Award for her work in “Les Misérables,” the online commentariat turned on Hathaway for … who knows, exactly? Some strange groupthink kicked in that caused people to pile on her for seeming like an inauthentic striver — or something. Other than as a case study in the inexplicable and random cruelty of the internet, the whole phenomenon, described at the time as Hathahate, makes even less sense now than it did then.Since that time, Hathaway told me when we talked twice last month, she has been learning to let go of other people’s opinions and expectations of her as an actress, a celebrity and a human being. This has made her work even more compelling to watch and made her more guarded as a public figure. “I really like expressing myself through my work,” says Hathaway, who after so many years and so many great performances is still figuring out the best way to play the puzzling real-life part of a famous actress.There are a bunch of things that are intriguing to me about the new movie. One of them is that there are a few of what I took to be Anne Hathaway psychological Easter eggs sprinkled throughout the film. I’ll get to those, but first: You haven’t done a romance in a while. Can you talk to me about why you wanted to do “The Idea of You”? It’s such a softball question, and I can feel my brain complicating it. More

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      Watch Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor Spar Over Churros in ‘Challengers’

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      The director Luca Guadagnino narrates a tense scene between the two characters.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.Churros have never tasted more bitter than in this scene from “Challengers.”In this sequence, which takes place at Stanford, the character Art (Mike Faist), who is attending the university, reconnects with his dear friend Patrick (Josh O’Connor), who has left education to become a tennis pro. Not present in the scene, yet hanging over it, is Tashi (Zendaya), the woman at the center of their complicated triangle.At this moment, Tashi is dating Patrick, but in this scene, Art is trying to throw a wrench into the relationship. The sequence takes place at the university canteen where the two are chatting over churros. Narrating the sequence, the director Luca Guadagnino said that what is playing out is “a game of rivalry sparkling between these two young boys over Tashi, but at the same time, a jealousy that ignites the relationship also because, probably, these two guys are also jealous of one another.”That tension is played out in the way that Guadagnino shoots the sequence, holding on a long two-shot as the friends discuss Tashi, then cutting when Patrick realizes the game of manipulation that Art is playing.“The main guideline in thinking of this movie and the mise en scène was the classic old Hollywood screwball comedy kind of grammar,” Guadagnino said. “Those great movies were all using, in a beautiful way, the stillness of framing to let the performance breathe in all its ambiguities, in all its unspoken conflicts.”Read the “Challengers” review.Read an interview with the stars of the film.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      ‘The Royal Hotel,’ ‘Zola’ and More Streaming Gems

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      Female-centered buddy comedies, rom-coms and Outback thrillers are among the under-the-radar recommendations for your subscription streamers this month.‘The Royal Hotel’ (2023)Stream it on Hulu.Kitty Green’s follow-up to the taut drama “The Assistant” is a feminist riff on the ’70s classic “Wake in Fright,” in which two Canadian tourists who have run out of money in Australia take on a gig as bartenders at a grimy watering hole in the middle of nowhere. “It’s a large mining area,” they’re told, so “you’re going to have to be OK with a little male attention.” For 90 tightly-wound minutes, Green mixes bleary naturalism and baked-in dread, as these modern women are exposed to the handsy, winking Neanderthal clientele, and the bar turns into a ticking time bomb. Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick are empathetic in the leads, while Daniel Henshall is all quiet menace as the establishment’s most boorish regular.‘When You Finish Saving the World’ (2023)Stream it on Netflix.Finn Wolfhard and Julianne Moore in “When You Finish Saving the World.”Karen Kuehn/A24The actor-turned-filmmaker Jesse Eisenberg recently received raves (and an Oscar-friendly fall release date) for his sophomore feature “A Real Pain,” so it’s a fine opportunity to check out his debut film. The “Stranger Things” star Finn Wolfhard is terrific (in, essentially, the Eisenberg role) as a self-important teenage singer-songwriter who tries to get political to impress a girl. Julianne Moore is his mother, a humorless scold whose coldness and impatience are seemingly understandable, as her son is such an insufferable boor. But the more Eisenberg mines the complexity of this toxic relationship, the more we understand and even sympathize with these two difficult people, and lock in on Eisenberg’s exploration of the moral stickiness of trying to do good in a narcissistic world.‘Plan B’ (2020)Stream it on Hulu.From left, Victoria Moroles and Kuhoo Verma in “Plan B.”Brett Roedel/HuluWe 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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      ‘Challengers’ Review: Game, Set, Love Matches

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      Zendaya, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist play friends, lovers and foes on and off the tennis court in Luca Guadagnino’s latest.You can always feel the filmmaker Luca Guadagnino trying to turn you on — he’s a zealous seducer. His movies are sleek divertissements about ravishing people and their often sumptuously rarefied sensibilities and worlds. I tend to like his work, even if it can be overly art-directed and feel too (excuse the verb) curated to stir the soul along with my consumer lust. I am moved when a father tenderly comforts his son in “Call Me by Your Name”; my most vivid memories of “A Bigger Splash” is its striking setting and a dress that Tilda Swinton wears.Guadagnino’s latest, “Challengers,” is about a continually changing love triangle involving two besotted men and a sharp, beautiful woman with killer instincts and personal style. Largely set in the world of professional tennis, it is a fizzy, lightly sexy, enjoyable tease of a movie, and while someone suffers a bad injury and hearts get broken (or at least banged up), for the most part it’s emotionally bloodless. Even so, it’s a welcome break in tone and topic after Guadagnino’s Grand Guignol adventures in “Suspiria,” a take on a Dario Argento horror film, and “Bones and All,” about two pretty cannibals hungrily and moodily adrift.Written by the novelist and playwright Justin Kuritzkes, “Challengers” is fairly straightforward despite its self-consciously tortured narrative timeline. It tracks three tennis prodigies — friends, lovers and foes — across the years through their triumphs and defeats, some shared. When it opens, the troika’s one-time brightest prospect, Tashi (Zendaya), has been retired from playing for a while and is now coaching her husband, Art (Mike Faist), a Grand Slam champ rapidly spiraling downward. In a bid to reset his prospects (he’s a valuable property, for one), he enters a challenger tournament, a kind of minor-league event where lower-ranking professionals compete, including against injured higher-ranking players.That match takes place in New Rochelle, N.Y., an easy drive from Flushing, Queens, and the home of the U.S. Open, which Art has yet to win. It’s while in New Rochelle that he and Tashi dramatically reconnect with Patrick (Josh O’Connor), the errant member of their complicated three-way entanglement. A rich boy who cosplays as poor (well, at least struggling), Patrick met Art when they were children at a tennis academy. By 18, they were tight friends and perhaps something more; the movie coyly leaves just how close to your imagination, even as it fires it up. It’s at that point that they met Tashi, then a fast-rocketing star.Soon after the movie opens in 2019, it jumps to the recent past (“two weeks earlier”) and then starts bouncing around back and forth in time like a ball flying over the net, with the New Rochelle match serving as the story’s frame. (The 2019 date may be a nod to an epic men’s final at Wimbledon that year in which, after nearly five hours, Novak Djokovic beat Roger Federer.) Turning back the clock can be a cheap way to make movies appear more complex than they actually are. Here, though, as the story leaps from past to present — from when Tashi, Art and Patrick were feverishly young to when they were somewhat less young — time begins to blur, underscoring that the passing years haven’t changed much.All three leads in “Challengers” are very appealing, and each brings emotional and psychological nuance to the story, whatever the characters’ current configuration. They’re also just fun to look at, and part of the pleasure of this movie is watching pretty people in states of undress restlessly circling one another, muscles tensed and desiring gazes ricocheting. Guadagnino knows this; he’s in his wheelhouse here, and you can feel his delight in his actors. With the cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, he shows them off beautifully, caressing them in light so that they look lit from within. Even during the fantastically staged and shot — and very sweaty — New Rochelle match, they glow.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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      ‘Nowhere Special’ Review: Old Bonds, New Family

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      This understated tear-jerker sees a dying single father making future family plans for his toddler son.“Nowhere Special” is an unusual, and unusually understated, parental tear-jerker in which a father prepares for the loss of his young son. The son isn’t going anywhere. But the father, a single dad, is dying, of an unspecified disease, and he’s at first eager, then later a little desperate, to get his boy placed with the right adoptive family.The picture was written and directed by Uberto Pasolini, the Italian-born filmmaker who was the producer of the 1997 crowd-pleaser “The Full Monty.” Although he shares a surname with the acclaimed director Pier Paolo Pasolini, Uberto is in fact a nephew of the neorealist cinema giant Luchino Visconti. Pasolini doesn’t seem directly influenced by his actual relative or his namesake. But his movie does have a style: slow, quiet, measured. It takes its time before bringing the emotional hammer down.Set and shot in Northern Ireland, the film focuses on a window cleaner, John (James Norton), the loving father to a very cute but often sulky 4-year-old, Michael (Daniel Lamont). We never see John at a doctor’s office, but we get a look at his packed medicine cabinet and we see him getting more ashen as the picture goes on. One location he does spend a lot of time in is a child placement agency, whose staffers escort him to speak with approved-to-adopt candidates. There are childless couples, intimidatingly big families and single aspiring parents to consider. John resists putting a “memory box” together for his boy. “I don’t want him to understand death,” he says.After being admonished by a snotty rich client because of slow work, John, taking the adage “you only live once” to heart, eggs the fellow’s house. It’s one of the few moments when the movie deigns to deliver a conventional satisfaction. But the mostly low-key mode of “Nowhere Special” is the right one. Norton is spectacular, but little Lamont delivers one of those uncanny performances that doesn’t seem like acting, and makes you feel for the kid almost as much as his onscreen parent does.Nowhere SpecialNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Infested’ Review: Bugging Out

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      An apartment building in Paris is overrun by murderous arachnids and unsubtle allegory in this fleet and efficient debut feature.There are no fresh ideas in the French creepy-crawler “Infested,” yet this first feature from Sébastien Vanicek scurries forward with such pep and purpose that its shortcomings are easily forgivable. Add a handful of eager young actors, a sociopolitical slam and a claustrophobic location swarming with venomous spiders and you’ll be hunting for the DEET long before the credits roll.Set in a low-income housing block in a Paris suburb, the action — and there’s plenty of it — is led by Kaleb (Théo Christine), an industrious youth who sells black-market sneakers and fusses over his illegal collection of small critters. His latest acquisition is a spider that, unbeknown to Kaleb, was smuggled from a Middle Eastern desert after rendering one of its captors agonizingly kaput. In less time than it takes to say “arachnophobia,” it will escape, reproduce like a bandit and send its deadly progeny scampering into every unsealed nook and cranny. Woe betide anyone not wearing a hoodie.On one level, “Infested” is a well-worn, thoroughly efficient creature feature with sleek effects and pell-mell pacing. While not especially scary, the movie gains traction from a script (by Vanicek and Florent Bernard) that finds ways to add a smidgen of back story to its panicked characters. So as the building becomes a giant, web-draped cocoon, the rapid-fire squabbling among Kaleb, his sister (Lisa Nyarko) and his onetime best friend (Finnegan Oldfield) feels entirely authentic. As do the labyrinthine corridors, the constantly failing lighting (props to Alexandre Jamin’s stuttering photography) and Kaleb’s kindhearted concern for his neighbors.A police lockdown cues social commentary that, while glaringly obvious, is also apt in a movie whose French title translates as “vermin” and whose gun-and-gas-toting authorities may have their own ideas about the term’s definition.InfestedNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. Watch on Shudder. More

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      ‘Unsung Hero’ Review: Music Dedicated to the One They Love

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      In fact, there’s a lot of singing in the clan whose members inspired this movie and who have racked up five Grammy Awards for their Christian recordings.In the faith-based drama “Unsung Hero,” an Australian concert promoter trying to earn a living makes a last-ditch move to Nashville with his wife and six children. Based on an actual family of musicians, it mostly plays as a treacly tribute to the parents of Joel and Luke Smallbone — a.k.a. the Christian pop duo For King & Country — and their sister the singer Rebecca St. James.Viewer beware: Between the uplift and the cringe, this movie may cause whiplash. Joel Smallbone plays his own father, David, who faces financial and reputational ruin after booking a big concert and failing to pack the house. He resettles the family in the United States, but no job materializes. His pep-talking spouse, Helen (Daisy Betts), and their beatific children pull up bootstraps and practically whistle while they work, but it’s not enough.Community, humility, and the power of prayer are the lessons on offer in their story, set in the 1990s, bathed in warm light and interspersed with home video segments. Fellow churchgoers pitch in, and David gets over himself; he secures auditions for his teenage daughter, Rebecca (Kirrilee Berger), who keeps breaking into dulcet song about how everything is beautiful. The outcome of “Unsung Hero,” as written and directed by Richard L. Ramsey and Joel Smallbone, is never in doubt, though the climax has a kicker line that genuinely surprises with its laughable shamelessness.The family business has become a success: Rebecca, Joel and Luke have won five Grammys among them. But despite the fuzzy good intentions, it’s tough to make much of this making-of story.Unsung HeroRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters. More