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      ‘Tótem’ Review: The Girl Who Sees Too Much

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      In Lila Avilés’s second feature, a 7-year-old girl begins to grasp the severity of her father’s illness while birthday preparations are underway at home.There are worlds inside worlds in “Tótem,” a soulful drama populated by an array of creatures, some with two legs and sad smiles, others with feathers, fur and shells. Set largely in a rambling house on a single momentous day, it focuses on a serious-eyed girl, Sol, who serves as the story’s luminous celestial body. You see much of what she sees, the warmth and disorder. Yet because Sol is just 7, you also see what it means to be a child in that messy reality known as adulthood.The Mexican writer-director Lila Avilés plunges into the mess the minute Sol (Naíma Sentíes), wearing a red clown nose and a floppy rainbow-colored wig, arrives at her grandfather’s house. There, amid the homey clutter of a house that actually looks lived in rather than art directed, two of her aunts are busily, and none too efficiently, prepping an evening birthday party for Sol’s gravely ill father, Tona (Mateo García Elizondo). As people and animals exit and enter the story — a raptor portentously flies overhead early on, part of a menagerie that includes bugs, dogs and a goldfish in a plastic bag — one aunt bakes a cake as the other dyes her hair.Avilés soon maps the house’s labyrinthine sprawl, swiftly building a tangible sense of place with precise, well-worn details and quick-sketch character portraits. “Totem” is a coming into consciousness story about a child navigating realms — human and animal, spiritual and material — that exist around her like overlapping concentric circles. Yet even as the story’s focus sharpens, what matters here are the characters: their emotions and worried words, how they hold it together and fall apart, their individual habits and shared habitat. (Avilés’s 2019 feature debut “The Chambermaid,” set in a hotel, is about another ecosystem.)Sol serves as a narrative through line in the movie, which opens with a kind of prelude set in a single-room public bathroom. She’s parked on the toilet, and she and her mother, Lucia (Iazua Larios), are chatting and laughing. Lucia tells Sol to finish (“push it out”), encouragement that amusingly evokes Freud’s theory about the anal-retentive stage. Whether Avilés herself is pushing, as it were, a Freudian take or not, the scene works as a run-up to what follows. Sol’s childhood reality is expectedly circumscribed, its limits expressed by the boxy aspect ratio and the closely attentive, hovering camerawork. Her reality is also changing, as becomes painfully clear by the contrast between her mother and her fast-fading father.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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      ‘Sometimes I Think About Dying’ Review: Life, in Drab Gray

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      Daisy Ridley stars as an office worker who’s just going through the motions.Fran thinks about dying, but not gruesomely. Her mental tableaux of death look as if they were staged by the artist Gregory Crewdson. Sometimes her body is draped dramatically over driftwood on a serene beach or posed in a foggy forest on a soft green bed of moss. She imagines standing alone in a nondescript finished office basement as a giant snake slithers by. She imagines death, essentially, as peace in the midst of ever-changing nature.Her reality is less beautifully hued. By day, Fran (Daisy Ridley) dons drab business casual and works in the sort of space that makes the environs of “The Office” seem like a magical wonderland. A small group of people perform clerical tasks to keep the local port in their tiny Pacific Northwest town running smoothly, and spend most of their time on crushingly banal chatter. Why is this cruise ship docked in such a way that it blocks the views of the mountains? Where are the mugs?By night, Fran’s life isn’t much more interesting, but at least she’s in control of it. She goes home, pours a glass of wine and takes a long, restorative sip, then reheats some kind of insipid patty and eats it with a side of cottage cheese. Sudoku, brush teeth, bed, repeat. It feels like she’s starring in her own one-woman play, one where all other people are background noise — her mother’s phone call goes to voice mail — and nobody is watching.“Sometimes I Think About Dying,” directed by Rachel Lambert, comes by its theatricality naturally; it’s based, in part, on the play “Killers” by Kevin Armento. (The other credited writers are Stefanie Abel Horowitz and Katy Wright-Mead, the latter of whose credits include “Boardwalk Empire” and “The Knick.”) The play entwined the tale of a young woman who thinks about dying with a secondary story about a young woman obsessed with killing, and though I haven’t seen it, I assume that means its themes were very different. But onscreen, “Sometimes I Think About Dying” can do what it could never do as easily onstage: We float in and out of Fran’s mind, entering her mood, her lethargy, her fixations on the back of people’s heads or their mouths while they speak. We start to become a little bit Fran.Perhaps the best term for Fran’s persistent mood is acedia, that feeling of not caring much about anything, especially one’s position in the world. (Ancient monks called it the “noonday demon.”) It’s often equated with depression, but there’s a particular torpor provoked by a soul-sucking office that can bring it on. Many a new college graduate has discovered, quickly, that a 9-to-5 job can become unbearable even if the work itself is simple, pleasant and well-paid. Something about the prospect of everlasting sameness can sap the will to live.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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      Hillary Clinton on ‘Barbie’ Snubs: You’re ‘More Than Kenough’

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      The former presidential candidate joined the chorus of disappointment in the omission of Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie from the best director and best actress Oscar categories.It was hard for fans of last year’s blockbuster film “Barbie” to ignore the twist of fate on Tuesday when Greta Gerwig, the movie’s director, and Margot Robbie, its titular star, were shut out of the best director and best actress Oscar categories. It could have quite literally been a plot point in the movie, which serves as a lesson on the patriarchal structures that shape our institutions and our ways of thinking.On Wednesday, Hillary Clinton joined the conversation by posting a message to Gerwig and Robbie on social media. “Greta & Margot, while it can sting to win the box office but not take home the gold, your millions of fans love you,” Clinton wrote. “You’re both so much more than Kenough,” she added, referencing a phrase that shows up on Ken’s sweatshirt in the film.Perhaps the message couldn’t have come from a more appropriate public figure than Clinton, a former secretary of state who, of course, lost the presidential election in 2016 to Donald Trump despite winning the popular vote.She was just one of many to share their dismay about Gerwig and Robbie being snubbed while the film itself earned eight nominations — including for best picture; for best actor, for Ryan Gosling, who plays Ken; and for best supporting actress, for America Ferrera.On Tuesday, after the nominations were read, Gosling issued a lengthy statement expressing his disappointment: “No recognition would be possible for anyone on the film without their talent, grit and genius,” he wrote. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Ferrera called their work “phenomenal” and said that they both “deserve to be acknowledged for the history they made, for the ground they broke, for the beautiful artistry.”Billie Jean King, the tennis champion who won equal pay for women at the 1973 U.S. Open, posted on Wednesday that she was “really upset about #Barbie being snubbed, especially in the Best Director category.”“The movie is absolutely brilliant,” King wrote, “and Greta Gerwig is a genius.” More

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      ‘Barbie’ Is Adapted? Let’s Fix the Oscar Screenplay Categories.

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      In the midst of the squabbles about actors and directors, there’s always at least one screenplay to debate when Oscar nominations are announced. Last year, in fact, there were two, and I regularly get collared by people wondering: What in the world were “Glass Onion” and “Top Gun: Maverick” doing in the best adapted screenplay bucket? Adapted from what? Was there some secret book about fighter pilots or tech mogul whodunits they’d missed?Nope. There’s also no previous story about a Barbie who starts thinking about death and sets out on an existential journey. But that didn’t keep the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the industry organization that gives out the Oscars, from kicking “Barbie” into the adapted category.Judd Apatow declared the reclassification of “Barbie,” the biggest movie of 2023 any way you slice it, “insulting” to its writers, Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach. Moving “Barbie” from the best original screenplay category — where it was the probable winner over films like “The Holdovers” and “Past Lives” — to adapted changed its Oscar chances. Now, alongside a slate that includes the juggernaut “Oppenheimer,” it’s a horse race. I don’t know what’s going to win.The academy posts some of its Oscar rules publicly, but not the ones that distinguish original screenplays from adapted ones. The Writers Guild of America, the union to which Hollywood’s scripters belong, does. And for the most part, judging from Oscar history, they’re in sync. Sequels, remakes and screenplays based on underlying material (including nonfiction, like a biography, that contains a narrative) are considered “nonoriginal,” and in awards contexts are usually classed as adaptations. Original screenplays either are not based on material (generally as stipulated in the writer’s contract), or they’re based on a nonfiction book that doesn’t have a narrative, like a study of sailing ships in the 19th century.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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      Why Greta Gerwig Was Snubbed for a Best Director Nomination

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      “Barbie” scored a best-picture nomination and scooped up eight nods overall. Several factors could have led to Gerwig’s omission.In her own world, Barbie can accomplish just about anything. But in the real world, “Barbie” was dealt a significant setback Tuesday morning: Though Greta Gerwig’s colorful comedy skewering the patriarchy was the biggest blockbuster of last year and set a record for the highest-grossing movie ever directed by a woman, Gerwig failed to receive an Oscar nomination for best director.The snub had many in Hollywood scratching their heads, since the 40-year-old filmmaker had earned best director nominations from the Golden Globes and Directors Guild of America for “Barbie” and had picked up an Oscar nod for her solo debut, “Lady Bird,” just six years ago.Ryan Gosling, Ken to Margot Robbie’s Barbie, criticized the academy’s vote even as he himself received an Oscar nomination. “No recognition would be possible for anyone on the film without their talent, grit and genius,” he said in a statement, referring to both Gerwig and Robbie, who missed out on a best actress nod. “To say that I’m disappointed that they are not nominated in their respective categories would be an understatement.”Does the matter come down to simple sexism? Certainly, if it were not for the presence of Justine Triet, the “Anatomy of a Fall” filmmaker, among the directing nominees, the academy would have a lot more explaining to do. Oscar voters have long been accused of ascribing more importance to male-led stories, a bias the academy has tried to rectify in recent years by diversifying its ranks. Still, comedies often struggle to win favor with the Oscars, and a female-led comedy has even more hurdles to overcome, as Robbie found.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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      Jeffrey Wright on His Oscar Nomination for ‘American Fiction’

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      Jeffrey Wright had taken precautionary measures as he awaited news of the Oscar nominations for best actor on Tuesday morning in Brooklyn.“I didn’t have screens on beyond my phone, which I kept an eye on,” the “American Fiction” star said. “I was afraid that I might do damage to one of the screens if the news were different. So I just let the phone tell me what had happened and it started to light up and it seemed that the news was good.”Indeed, Wright received his first best actor nomination for his portrayal of Thelonious Ellison, an author whose works no one reads until, in a moment of fury, he composes a story overflowing with Black clichés under a pseudonym, and it becomes a best seller. The performance has already earned him Critics Choice, Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild nominations.Did he really think he might not hear his name?“One never knows,” he said. Still, “I’m really proud of this film and the work that all of us put into it. We thought while we were making it that we might be onto something good and something interesting and topical, but also buoyant. We thought we might be making a special film, and it seems that audiences who have taken it in have appreciated the story in the ways that we did.”In a video interview, Wright spoke about his character, known as Monk, as a dream role, and why the film’s Oscar nominations — including best picture; adapted screenplay for its director, Cord Jefferson; supporting actor for Sterling K. Brown; and original score for Laura Karpman — matter.Will he do anything special to mark this milestone?“Yeah, I’m going to celebrate by driving my daughter back to college in a few hours,” he said, chuckling. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.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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      Lily Gladstone on Her History-Making Oscar Nomination

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      Lily Gladstone shed a few tears when she heard Jack Quaid read her name in the best actress Oscars category on Tuesday morning. “I didn’t expect that I would cry the way that I did,” she said. But it was nothing compared with the reaction of her parents.“It definitely turned on the waterworks,” said Gladstone, who stars as Mollie Burkhart, an Osage woman whose white husband is part of a murderous conspiracy in the Martin Scorsese epic “Killers of the Flower Moon.” She was calling from Pawhuska, Okla., shortly after watching the Oscar nominations announcement on FaceTime with her parents.After all, it’s not every day that you’re nominated for your first Oscar — or that you become the first Native American person to be nominated for a competitive acting Academy Award.“It’s something that I wasn’t sure I would see in my career, in my lifetime,” said Gladstone, 37, who has Blackfeet and Nez Percé heritage. “I hope that it just means that people start caring more and learning more about these histories.”Gladstone isn’t the first Indigenous artist up for best actress — Keisha Castle-Hughes (“Whale Rider,” 2003) and Yalitza Aparicio (“Roma,” 2018) were also nominated in the same category — but she is the first from the United States. The folk singer Buffy Sainte-Marie is considered the first Indigenous person to win an Oscar (for best song, “Up Where We Belong” from “An Officer and a Gentleman” in 1983), but her heritage has recently been disputed. And in 2019, Wes Studi, who is Cherokee American, was given an honorary Oscar for “his indelible film portrayals and for his steadfast support of the Native American community.”Gladstone has had a busy month: On Jan. 7, she became the first Indigenous person to win a Golden Globe for best actress, delivering a powerful speech in which she spoke a few lines in the Blackfeet language. She also picked up a best actress win from the New York Film Critics Circle, as well as nominations from the Critics Choice Awards and the Screen Actors Guild.“I’m hopeful because of the way things are trending now: We’re telling our own stories, or we have a really heavy hand in shaping how stories about us are told,” she said.“Killers,” based on the nonfiction book by David Grann, was reconceived early on to focus on the relationship between Mollie and her husband, Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio), who conspires with his uncle (Robert De Niro) to kill her relatives in a bid to seize her family’s oil-rich Oklahoma land.Gladstone in the film opposite Leonardo DiCaprio. Apple TV+Since the film was released in October, critics have singled out Gladstone. Anthony Lane, writing in The New Yorker, heralded her as “unmistakably the movie’s most compelling presence.” Gladstone grew up acting in plays staged by a traveling children’s theater on the Blackfeet reservation in northwestern Montana. She landed a breakthrough role in Kelly Reichardt’s 2016 indie, “Certain Women,” that raised her profile considerably, but “Killers,” with its reported $200 million budget and A-list cast, vaulted her into hyperspace.In a 15-minute interview, Gladstone shared what she hoped her nomination portends for the industry, how she first became interested in studying the Blackfeet language, and what people who discovered her in “Killers of the Flower Moon” should watch her in next. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Congratulations!Thank you. It was great every time the film got a nod, but the one that really got me was Robbie Robertson [for best original score for “Killers of the Flower Moon”]. Getting to watch that nomination come in with my dad was really special, because my dad introduced me to Robbie Robertson as a musician, which was the whole reason I even knew who Martin Scorsese was as a filmmaker. My dad told me about their friendship and, as a 10-year-old, I remember him saying, “You know, one day he’s going to make his Indian movie because of his friendship with Robbie.” So it was cool to remind him of that. Seeing how touched my folks were — that was everything.What has it been like to receive such copious recognition from the industry after years of struggling to find parts that weren’t insulting or exploitative?It’s time that Native characters based upon living incredible women like Mollie Kyle be given the heart of these films. “Killers of the Flower Moon” was an opportunity to restore a place onscreen for Native women that history has excluded us from. So to have Mollie and her sisters and her mother and her community be characters that, just by being who they are onscreen, are changing people’s stereotypes and contextualizing moments in history that maybe make the present make a little bit more sense — it’s long overdue.You had the chance to speak with Mollie Burkhart’s granddaughter, Margie. What was something she shared about Mollie that surprised you or that you incorporated into the character?What a caring mother she was. Margie shared that when her dad, Cowboy, would have chronic ear infections and earaches, Mollie would blow tobacco smoke in his ears, which is something a lot of elders do back home where I’m raised, too. And Margie herself is so smart and grounded, and loving. At our first meeting, her body language, her intonation and the way I could see thoughts turning over in her head went into how I shaped Mollie. Her observational wry humor, the intelligence, the ability to read what’s going on in the room, the warmth all stood out. I know that those things are inherited from family, so I feel like the biggest clues to who Mollie would have been is the way that she’s echoed in her grandchildren.You spoke a few lines in the language of your people, the Blackfeet tribe, after your historic win at the Golden Globes. When and how did you become interested in studying Blackfeet?Growing up on my reservation, I picked it up. I’m not fluent. One of the first sentences we learn how to construct is how to introduce yourself to a group of people. You say your Blackfeet name, and then you also tell everybody where you’re from, which people you come from, which is what I did at the Globes. I wouldn’t have been up on that stage if it weren’t for how early in my life my community identified my gift and my love for acting. Performing and telling stories has always been synonymous with my very name; I’ve always been encouraged to do this, in whatever form it takes. There were a lot of years where acting was a means of teaching and teaching about our history, specifically, the Native American boarding school experience.After my speech at the Globes, it was moving to see the response from Blackfeet people on TikTok and Facebook. One family had recorded their little girl, who is learning Blackfeet along with English, and when she heard me speaking, she started talking back in Blackfeet to the screen, and then when I was done speaking, she went, “Soōkaapii,” which means “It’s good.” Like, “That was good.” That just broke my heart wide open.Do you have any favorites among the nominated films?I’m ecstatic to see the love for “American Fiction.” And to see Danielle Brooks hold it down for the entirety of “The Color Purple” — she’s unbelievable. And Sandra [Hüller’s] work, oh my God. And then people I’ve been watching for years — being in conversations, in rooms alongside Annette Bening has been mind-blowing and so touching. I’m stoked for everybody.Though “Killers’ was your breakout role, you have a film, TV and theater résumé that spans more than a decade. Any recommendations for what people should watch you in next?Definitely stream “Reservation Dogs” — and not just my episodes! It’s an incredible, incredible series; each episode is so full, so funny, so heartbreaking. There’s a reason that it’s been named the best show by so many publications. “The Unknown Country” is another one that shows the way the performances of the incredible Indigenous actors in “Killers of the Flower Moon” have helped shift paradigm and break stereotypes for people.And then, I can’t share it yet, but sometime in the not-too-distant future, people will be able to see “Fancy Dance,” which is the absolute best film to watch in tandem with “Killers of the Flower Moon.” It’s the same land, the same issues, exactly 100 years later, and how they’ve manifested into the modern age. It’s an incredible love story between an aunt and her niece and a display of matrilineal resilience and love and survival. I’m so excited that people will be able to access it soon.Fans have said they want to see you in a Marvel role. What is your dream role?I have to acknowledge my little, cute, roly-poly, chunky 5-year-old self who wanted nothing more in the world than to be an Ewok. We’re in the age of C.G.I., so I think if Ewoks are brought back, it has to be handcrafted the way it was in the late ’70s, early ’80s. So, if not an Ewok, something to do with their preservation as an incredible little group of — I guess you can call them people. More

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      Where to Stream 2024 Oscar-Nominated Movies: ‘Oppenheimer,’ ‘Anatomy of a Fall,’ More

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      The nominees for the 96th Academy Awards were announced Tuesday morning and last summer’s “Barbenheimer” phenomenon proved to be a dominant duo once again, with “Oppenheimer” leading the way with 13 nominations and “Barbie” collecting eight. A handful of major awards contenders are still exclusively in theaters, most notably “American Fiction,” “Poor Things” and “The Zone of Interest,” which are all best picture nominees. But the vast majority of titles are currently available to stream or rent on various platforms. Here’s a complete rundown of where to find all the major awards hopefuls.‘Oppenheimer’The writer and director Christopher Nolan narrates the opening sequence from the film.Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures, via Associated PressNominated for: Best picture, director, actor, supporting actor, supporting actress, adapted screenplay, production design, costume design, cinematography, editing, makeup and hairstyling, sound, original score.How to watch: Rent it on Amazon, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu and YouTube.Conjuring the dark wizardry of the Manhattan Project, the director Christopher Nolan turned the Trinity test into a seat-rumbling summer spectacle, placing it at the center of “Oppenheimer” like the nuclear core of 20th-century history. But there’s a disturbing intimacy to the film as well, with Cillian Murphy’s tremulous J. Robert Oppenheimer leading an unstable band of scientists while nearly drowning in uncharted political and ethical waters. In exploring the origins of a technological boogeyman that continues to haunt mankind, Nolan embraces the contradictions of the flawed, brilliant man whose spirit seems to embody it.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