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      ‘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

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      ‘Home Alone,’ ‘Fame,’ and Apollo 13’ Join National Film Registry

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      These movies, along with “Bamboozled” and “Home Alone,” are among 25 selected by the Librarian of Congress.It was a year for the underdogs.Two films that initially received mixed receptions but that later came to be considered groundbreaking in their own way — Spike Lee’s satire of blackface in cinema, “Bamboozled” (2000), and Tim Burton’s stop-motion animated Disney musical “The Nightmare Before Christmas” (1993) — are among the motion pictures that have been selected for preservation this year in the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry.Also being added are “Apollo 13” (1995), the Ron Howard space drama about the quest to save American astronauts after the failed 1970 lunar landing, and “Twelve Years a Slave” (2013), the Steve McQueen-helmed narrative that won three Academy Awards, including best picture.The library on Wednesday announced all 25 films, dating from 1921 to 2013, that are being honored this year for their historical, cultural or aesthetic significance. Movies are chosen by the Librarian of Congress, in consultation with other experts.The library also allows the public to make nominations at its website, and this year people nominated more than 6,800 films. Titles that were among the most submitted, and that have now been added to the list, include Chris Columbus’s holiday comedy “Home Alone” (1990), which vaulted Macaulay Culkin to stardom as a plucky youngster who uses his creativity to foil two bungling burglars; and “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” (1991), the James Cameron sci-fi sequel that became a landmark study in the use of CGI special effects.Two documentaries selected concern battles for representation. The Oscar-winning “Helen Keller in Her Story” (1954), by Nancy Hamilton, follows its subject, who was deaf and blind, from her childhood frustration to global success as an author, lecturer and activist for the rights of women and disabled people. “We’re Alive” (1974) chronicles six months of roundtables at the California Institution for Women that drew attention to inhumane prison conditions. The conversations were led by three U.C.L.A. graduate students, Michie Gleason, Christine Lesiak and Kathy Levitt.The experiences of Asian Americans are also centered in several new selections: “Cruisin’ J-Town” (1975), Duane Kubo’s documentary about jazz musicians in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo; the Bohulano Family home movies about a Filipino American community in Stockton, Calif. from the 1950s through the 1970s; and “Maya Lin: A Strong, Clear Vision” (1994), Freida Lee Mock’s Oscar-winning documentary about the designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the National Mall.Three films that experimented with new forms and techniques were also selected: “The Lighted Field” (1987), Andrew Noren’s silent avant-garde masterwork that traffics in sensual shadow-play; “Queen of Diamonds” (1991), a drama by Nina Menkes, filmed in Las Vegas, that contrasts the noise and neon of the city with the quiet, lonely lives of its residents; and “The Lady and the Tramp” (1955), the Disney animated romance between a spoiled cocker spaniel and a mutt, which was praised for its fuller character development and distinguished by its use of a wide-screen CinemaScope format.The lineup also recognizes the debut features of several award-winning filmmakers: Martin Ritt’s noir drama “Edge of the City” (1957), which stars Sidney Poitier as a dockworker whose friendship with a white co-worker (John Cassavetes) aggravates a racist union leader; Gina Prince-Bythewood’s “Love & Basketball” (2000), a romantic sports drama that follows a boy and girl as they pursue basketball careers from childhood; and “¡Alambrista!” (1977), a small-budget film by Robert Young — often shot with a shaky, hand-held camera — that follows a farmer who enters the United States from Mexico undocumented, seeking work to support his family, which incorporates elements of guerrilla and activist filmmaking.Finally, New Yorkers — or those who love New York — will find a lot to like on the list this year: Choices for a Manhattan-set adventure include “Fame” (1980), Alan Parker’s teen musical drama about the High School of Performing Arts; “Desperately Seeking Susan” (1985), Susan Seidelman’s wackball of a film that follows an unhappy New Jersey housewife (Rosanna Arquette) down a rabbit hole of personal ads and mistaken identity; and “The Wedding Banquet” (1993), Ang Lee’s comedy about a gay Taiwanese man in New York who marries a Chinese woman to appease his parents back home (high jinks ensue when they decide to pay the “couple” a visit).The Library of Congress said in a statement that these additions bring to 875 the number of titles on the registry created to preserve the nation’s film heritage.” Eligible movies must be at least 10 years old. Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress, made the choices after consulting with members of the National Film Preservation Board and others. Some registry films are also available online in the National Screening Room.A television special, featuring several of these titles and a conversation between Hayden and Jacqueline Stewart, the film historian who directs the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, will be shown Dec. 14 on TCM.Below are the 25 new additions to the National Film Registry:1. “A Movie Trip Through Filmland” (1921)2. “Dinner at Eight” (1933)3. Bohulano Family film collection (1950s-70s)4. “Helen Keller in Her Story” (1954)5. “Lady and the Tramp” (1955)6. “Edge of the City” (1957)7. “We’re Alive” (1974)8. “Cruisin’ J-Town” (1975)9. “¡Alambrista!” (1977)10. “Passing Through” (1977)11. “Fame” (1980)12. “Desperately Seeking Susan” (1985)13. “The Lighted Field” (1987)14. “Matewan” (1987)15. “Home Alone” (1990)16. “Queen of Diamonds” (1991)17. “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” (1991)18. “The Nightmare Before Christmas” (1993)19. “The Wedding Banquet” (1993)20. “Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision” (1994)21. “Apollo 13” (1995)22. “Bamboozled” (2000)23. “Love & Basketball” (2000)24. “Twelve Years a Slave” (2013)25. “20 Feet From Stardom” (2013) More

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      in Television

      Andre Braugher, ‘Brooklyn Nine-Nine’ and ‘Homicide’ Actor, Dies at 61

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      Mr. Braugher was best known for playing stoic police officers in the two acclaimed television series. He died on Monday after a brief illness, his publicist said.Andre Braugher, an Emmy Award-winning actor best known for playing stoic police officers on the television shows “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” and “Homicide: Life on the Street,” died on Monday. He was 61.His death was confirmed on Tuesday by his longtime publicist Jennifer Allen. She said that Mr. Braugher, who lived in New Jersey, had died after a brief illness. She did not elaborate.Mr. Braugher had a breakout role as an intense cop on “Homicide,” a 1990s Baltimore crime show that chronicled the frustrations of policing a city beset with murders. He spent the last years of his life playing another serious police officer in “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” but in a very different register: The series was a sitcom, and he played his role as a police commander for laughs. He also earned plaudits for his portrayal of an openly gay cop who didn’t play to stereotypes.In between, he showed his range by playing parts as diverse as Shakespeare’s Henry V, a car salesman named Owen Thoreau Jr. and an executive editor of The New York Times grappling with the investigative reporting that would kick off the #MeToo era.“I’ve worked with a lot of wonderful actors,” the former Baltimore Sun journalist David Simon, who wrote the book that “Homicide” was based on years before he created the seminal crime drama “The Wire,” said in a post on social media. “I’ll never work with one better.”Mr. Braugher as Detective Frank Pembleton, right, and James Earl Jones in an episode of “Homicide.”Michael Ginsbury/NBCU Photo Bank, via Getty ImagesAndre Keith Braugher was born in Chicago on July 1, 1962, and grew up on the city’s West Side. His mother, Sally Braugher, worked for the United States Postal Service. His father, Floyd Braugher, was a heavy-equipment operator for the state of Illinois.“We lived in a ghetto,” he told The New York Times in 2014. “I could have pretended I was hard or tough and not a square. I wound up not getting in trouble. I don’t consider myself to be especially wise, but I will say that it’s pretty clear that some people want to get out and some people don’t. I wanted out.”Mr. Braugher attended St. Ignatius College Prep, a prestigious, Jesuit Catholic high school in Chicago, and later earned a scholarship to Stanford University. His father, who wanted his son to be an engineer, was furious when he gravitated to acting instead.“Show me Black actors who are earning a living,” his father told him at the time. “What the hell are you going to do, juggle and travel the country?”After graduating from Stanford with a major in math, Mr. Braugher earned a Masters of Fine Arts from the Juilliard School.One of his first professional acting roles was in “Glory,” an Oscar-winning 1989 film about Black soldiers fighting for the Union during the American Civil War. Its star-studded cast included Matthew Broderick, Morgan Freeman and Denzel Washington.“I’d rather not work than do a part I’m ashamed of,” Mr. Braugher told The Times that year. “I can tell you now that my mother will be proud of me when she sees me in this role.”Mr. Braugher, far left, next to Denzel Washington, in “Glory.” It was one of his first professional acting roles.Everett Collection, via Alamy Mr. Braugher, who insisted on living in New Jersey even though he often worked in California, would go on to star in many other films. Among the highlights were “Get on the Bus” (1996), about a group of Black men traveling to Washington for the Million Man March, and “City of Angels” (1998), about an angel (Nicolas Cage) who falls in love with a doctor (Meg Ryan).One of Mr. Braugher’s last film projects was “She Said” (2022), a drama about New York Times reporters’ efforts to document sexual abuse by the film mogul Harvey Weinstein. Mr. Braugher played Dean Baquet, the newspaper’s executive editor at the time.He also performed Shakespearean roles at the New York Shakespeare Festival and other venues. In 2014, he told The Times that he was saving the play “Pericles, Prince of Tyre,” for later in life.“I’ve never read it because I’d like to see one Shakespeare play that I don’t know what happens,” he said.Ms. Allen said that Mr. Braugher is survived by his wife, the actress Ami Brabson; his sons Michael, Isaiah and John Wesley; his brother, Charles Jennings; and his mother. His father died in 2011.His most recent project, “The Residence,” a miniseries about a murder in the White House, had been scheduled to resume shooting in January after shutting down because of the Writers Guild of America strike, the entertainment site Deadline reported.As Capt. Raymond Holt in “Brooklyn Nine-Nine.”FOX Image Collection, via Getty ImagesMr. Braugher was best known for his acting on acclaimed television series, which included the lead role of an unorthodox physician on the ABC drama “Gideon’s Crossing” (2000-2001) and the car salesman Owen Thoreau Jr. on the TNT series “Men of a Certain Age” (2009-2011). He also starred in the sixth and final season of the Paramount+ legal drama “The Good Fight” (2017-2022).On “Homicide,” a police procedural that ran from 1993 to 1998, Mr. Braugher played Frank Pembleton, a Baltimore homicide detective. It was a breakout role that earned him an Emmy Award in 1998, along with two Television Critics Association Awards in 1997 and 1998 for best actor in a drama series.In 2006, he won an Emmy for outstanding performance by a lead actor in a miniseries for his starring role as a gang leader in “Thief,” an FX miniseries about crime in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.And on “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” a comedy show that aired from 2013 to 2021, Mr. Braugher played Capt. Raymond Holt, a comically stern precinct commander. He received four Emmy nominations and won two Critics Choice Awards for best supporting actor in a comedy series.After the first few episodes of “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” aired, he told The New York Times that he saw parallels between that show and “Homicide.”“I don’t want to go way out on a limb about this, you know what I’m saying, and be challenged about it,” he said. “But I think they’re both workplace comedies. In essence it’s taken 20 years to come full circle, but I think they’re in the same place.”Rebecca Carballo More

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      in Theater

      Britain’s Friendliest Bear to Hit the Stage in ‘Paddington: The Musical’

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      The star of a long-running book series and two films will hit the stage in a show currently being developed in Britain, producers said.Paddington, the well-traveled bear known for his floppy red hat and love for orange marmalade sandwiches, is taking on yet another venture in 2025: the theater.A stage musical about the friendly bear is in development and is set to open in Britain in 2025, the show’s producers announced on Tuesday. It will be adapted from the book series that made him famous, as well as the two live-action films, “Paddington” and “Paddington 2.”The working title is “Paddington: The Musical,” and it “is currently undergoing a period of development and workshops,” according to a news release.Paddington was first introduced in a book series by Michael Bond that follows the good-natured bear who emigrates from Peru to England and is taken in by the Brown family. Paddington is sweet, curious and prone to mishaps.The first book in the series, “A Bear Called Paddington,” was published in October 1958. More than 35 million copies of Paddington books have been sold worldwide.The live-action feature films, with Ben Whishaw as the voice of Paddington, premiered in Britain in 2014 and 2017. The first film depicts Paddington’s arrival in London and the early stages of his relationship with the Brown family. In the second film, Paddington attempts to get his Aunt Lucy a gift and ends up in prison, where, eventually, there is music, cake and dancing.A third film, “Paddington in Peru,” is set to be released in Britain on Nov. 8, 2024. Its U.S. release date is Jan. 17, 2025.The stage show’s music and lyrics will be written by Tom Fletcher, a founding member of the popular British band McFly and a well-known children’s author. The musical’s book will be by Jessica Swale, whose play “Nell Gwynn” won an Olivier Award for best new comedy in 2016.The musical’s director will be Luke Sheppard, who has worked on “Just for One Day,” “What’s New Pussycat?” and “Rent.”The musical is being produced by Sonia Friedman Productions, Studiocanal and Eliza Lumley Productions on behalf of Universal Music UK. The producers did not provide details on the plot and said the cast would be announced later.“The magic of Paddington is that, through his wide-eyed innocence, he sees the very best in humanity,” Ms. Friedman and Ms. Lumley said in a joint statement, “reminding us that love and kindness can triumph if we open our hearts and minds to one another.” More