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      Norman Jewison, Director of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ and ‘Moonstruck,’ Dies at 97

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      His movies — from dramas to comedies and musicals — became magnets for Oscars, but he was best known for socially conscious films, like “In the Heat of the Night.”Norman Jewison, whose broad range as a filmmaker was reflected in the three movies that earned him Academy Award nominations for best director — the socially conscious drama “In the Heat of the Night,” the big-budget musical “Fiddler on the Roof” and the romantic comedy “Moonstruck” — died on Saturday at his home. He was 97.His death was confirmed by a spokesman for the family, Jeff Sanderson. He declined to specify where Mr. Jewison lived, saying that the family requested privacy.Mr. Jewison, whose career began in Canadian television and spanned more than 50 years, was, like his close friend Sidney Lumet and a select few other directors, best known for making films that addressed social issues. The most celebrated of those was “In the Heat of the Night” (1967), one of his earliest features and his first Oscar-winning film.A story of racial tensions in the American South filtered through a murder mystery that brings together a Black Philadelphia detective (Sidney Poitier) and a white Mississippi police chief (Rod Steiger), “In the Heat of the Night” could not have been more timely: It opened weeks after racial violence had erupted in Detroit and Newark. It went on to win five Academy Awards, including best picture and best actor, for Mr. Steiger.Mr. Poitier was among the many actors who had fond memories of working with Mr. Jewison. “He gives his actors room and keeps them as calm as he can, because it’s easier to speak with them when they’re calm,” he told The New York Times in 2011. “A director has to keep the actors on their toes while the camera’s running, but when the scene is done, they should be relaxing, nothing on their minds. There can’t be a constant level of seriousness. And with Norman, there’s always a lot of laughter.”Mr. Jewison lost the best director award for “In the Heat of the Night” to Mike Nichols, who won for “The Graduate,” and he never did win an Oscar for directing. But his films, and the actors in them, garnered many Oscars and 46 nominations.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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      Depardieu Sexual Assault Suit Dropped Over Statute of Limitations

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      Hélène Darras, a French actress, had accused Gérard Depardieu of groping her in 2007 on a movie set. A separate investigation of the actor is proceeding, Paris prosecutors said.A sexual assault lawsuit filed against Gérard Depardieu by a French actress has been dropped because it was past the statute of limitations, prosecutors in Paris said on Monday, but the French actor is still under investigation in a separate case.In the lawsuit that was dropped, the actress Hélène Darras had accused Depardieu of groping her on the set of “Disco,” a comedy released in 2008. Her suit had been filed in September but was made public only last month, shortly before she appeared in a France 2 television documentary alongside three other women who also accused Depardieu of inappropriate comments or sexual misconduct.The documentary, which showed Depardieu making crude sexual and sexist comments during a 2018 trip to North Korea, set off a fierce debate in France that prompted President Emmanuel Macron and dozens of actors, directors and other celebrities to defend Depardieu, splitting the French movie industry.Depardieu, 75, has denied any wrongdoing, and he has not been convicted in connection with any of the accusations against him.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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      What to Expect When the Oscar Nominations Are Announced

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      Big showings by “Oppenheimer,” “Barbie” and “Killers of the Flower Moon” are likely in an especially strong year.The Q. and A.’s and cocktail parties are a wrap. The votes have been cast. And on Tuesday, we’ll find out which movies and artists will have a chance at Academy Awards when the Oscar nominations are announced.It was an unusually strong year for films, meaning that members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had some hard choices to make by the time voting closed last week. As I have written throughout this awards season, this year, there are simply more good movies and great performances than there are awards to honor them. When I came up with predictions, I was tied up in knots trying to narrow down the list. But that also means I have some ideas about the names and titles Zazie Beetz and Jack Quaid will announce when they reveal the nominees at 8:30 a.m. on ABC and Oscars.com. Here’s what to expect:“Barbenheimer”: The juggernaut made up of “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” dominated the box office last summer and has continued to be a force when it comes to prizes. Both films made strong showings last week when the acting, directing and producing guilds released their nominations, and spots for both on the best picture list are all but guaranteed. For the biopic “Oppenheimer,” Christopher Nolan is now the presumed front-runner for a directing nod, and it’s a good bet you’ll see Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey Jr. among the acting nominees. For “Barbie,” the picture is a little less clear in the individual categories. Director Greta Gerwig and star Margot Robbie are likely, but not assured, of spots while Ryan Gosling should be guaranteed a supporting-actor slot.Double-Digit Nominations: I expect “Barbie,” “Oppenheimer” and the historical-crime tale “Killers of the Flower Moon” to each score double-digit nominations. Thanks to the short lists that the academy released last month, we already know that these movies have a good chance of competing in technical categories like score and sound. Still, there’s one race where “Barbie” can’t max out: Though three songs from the film — “I’m Just Ken,” “Dance the Night” and “What Was I Made For?” — all advanced to the short-list phase, only two songs per film are allowed in the final five.“The Holdovers”: Alexander Payne’s dramedy about a history teacher, a cook and a student forced to stay behind at a boarding school over winter break has been coming on strong all awards season long. Paul Giamatti and Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who play the adults on campus, have won key prizes already; look for their names to show up on Tuesday. And besides a likely best picture nod, there could be ones for directing and screenplay as well.Acting categories: The two Golden Globe winners Lily Gladstone (“Killers of the Flower Moon”) and Emma Stone (“Poor Things”) are strong locks for best actress; the question will be who fills out the rest of the category. Besides Giamatti and Murphy for best actor, expect Bradley Cooper (“Maestro”) and Jeffrey Wright (“American Fiction”), leaving just one spot a question mark. In the supporting categories, Robert De Niro (“Killers of the Flower Moon”) will probably join Downey and Gosling, while Jodie Foster (“Nyad”), Emily Blunt (“Oppenheimer”) and Danielle Brooks (“The Color Purple”) will probably line up next to Randolph.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

      What’s on TV This Week: ‘Below Deck Mediterranean’ and ‘The Bachelor’

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      The Bravo show wraps up its eighth season. Joey Graziadei leads the 28th season of the reality dating show.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Jan. 22-28. Details and times are subject to change.MondayJoey Graziadei on “The Bachelor.”Disney/John FleenorTHE BACHELOR 8 p.m. on ABC. The last few installments of this franchise have been a bit of a headache. (A Hollywood Reporter article raised questions about the Golden Bachelor Gerry Turner’s past; he has called the report “fully fictitious.” Clayton Echard was involved in a paternity battle last year. Then, no couples from “Bachelor in Paradise” kept their engagements.) But having Joey Graziadei as the lead makes me excited for this season. Graziadei, a tennis instructor who was previously on Charity Lawson’s season, is back at the Bachelor mansion and dating 32 women. Jesse Palmer returns as host. BELOW DECK MEDITERRANEAN 9 p.m. on Bravo. This season of the “Below Deck” spinoff has seemingly been going on forever — partly because of a holiday hiatus, but mostly because of the second steward Kyle’s drama — and this week it is finally wrapping up. With Captain Sandy Yawn at the helm of another boat sailing the Mediterranean, this season’s drama included someone on the crew having fake certifications and every person on deck getting sick. We don’t have to wait too long though for a fresh start — the new season of “Below Deck” airs on Feb. 5.TuesdayELECTION NIGHT: THE NEW HAMPSHIRE PRIMARY starting at 8 p.m. on various networks. With the Iowa caucuses done, the New Hampshire primary is up next, with 22 G.O.P. delegates up for grabs. Linsey Davis and David Muir will anchor as results come in live on ABC. On CBS, the anchor and managing editor Norah O’Donnell will anchor live from New Hampshire.WednesdayCHRISSY AND DAVE DINE OUT 10 p.m. on Freeform. If you like food and gossip, this is the show for you. Chrissy Teigen and Dave Chang are eating their way through Los Angeles, inviting famous guests to dinner and gab. On the first episode, they will be at the chef Chris Bianco’s Pizzeria Bianco with Jimmy Kimmel and his wife, the writer-producer Molly McNearney.ThursdayHELL’S KITCHEN 8 p.m. on Fox. The chef Gordon Ramsay is wrapping up the 22nd season of his cooking competition show this week. With winners from past seasons as sous chefs on both competing teams, the fight to become head chef has been intense.U.S. FIGURE SKATING CHAMPIONSHIP starting at 2 p.m. on USA Network. Since the Olympics are coming to Paris this summer, watching the figure skating championships is the best way to pregame. Different programs air all weekend but on Thursday, they start off with the pairs short program at 2 p.m. Then comes the rhythm dance program at 5 p.m. and the women’s short program at 8 p.m.FridayMonica Raymund and James Badge Dale in “Hightown.”Claire Folger/StarzHIGHTOWN 9 p.m. on Starz. This show is back for its third and final season this week. The series began with Jackie Quiñones (Monica Raymund), a National Marine Fisheries Service Agent, going to Cape Cod and struggling to remain sober while trying to address the opioid crisis. The third installment is starting off with Quiñones going back to her partying habits and Detective Ray Abruzzo (James Badge Dale) at the top of his game.SaturdayFrom left: Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson in “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.”Peter Mountain/Warner BrothersHARRY POTTER MARATHON starting at 8 a.m. on Syfy. Though the “Twilight” and “Harry Potter” series came out at different times and have different themes, people often ask which I prefer. So, if you weren’t up for the “Twilight” marathon last weekend, maybe this is your speed. The story follows the young wizard Harry Potter (and Ron and Hermione, of course) through his years at Hogwarts.SHREK I (2001) & SHREK II (2004) starting at 7 p.m. on E! Sometimes when life is overwhelming, it’s gloomy outside and you’ve had a long week, the best cure is a couple of ogres falling in love and starting a life together. This mini marathon has Shrek, Fiona, Donkey, Puss in Boots, the Gingerbread Man and of course, Lord Farquaad. “Like many movies nowadays, ‘Shrek’ is a blistering race through pop culture, and what the movie represents is a way to bring the brash slob comedy of ‘The Simpsons’ and ‘South Park,’ as well as the institutional irreverence of ‘Saturday Night Live,’ to a very young audience,” Elvis Mitchell wrote in his 2001 review of the first film for The New York Times.LIL NAS X: LONG LIVE MONTERO 8 p.m. on HBO. Ever since Justin Bieber’s “Never Say Never,” I have loved a tour documentary. This one follows Lil Nas X on his first solo and headlining tour in 2022. The documentary also touches on his rapid rise to fame after the release of “Old Town Road” and how he has lent his voice to Black and queer spaces.SundayTHE MANY LIVES OF MARTHA STEWART 9 p.m. on CNN. Whether she’s serving prison time for insider trading, hanging out with Snoop Dogg or creating a beautiful tablescape, there is no doubt that Martha Stewart is endlessly fascinating. This original four-part documentary series will use archival footage of Stewart as well as interviews with friends, employees and inmates. More

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      Kristen Stewart at the Sundance Film Festival

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

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      in Theater

      Leave the Poor Princess Alone

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

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

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

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

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