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      In Indigenous Communities, a Divided Reaction to ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’

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      The filmmakers’ attention to detail draws praise, but the question of perspective and who gets to tell the story is also at issue.After watching “Killers of the Flower Moon” at a July screening in Tulsa, Okla., Dana Bear emerged from the theater with a complicated mix of emotions.Bear, who is an Osage artist and birth worker, felt the horror of witnessing the murders of her people onscreen. But she also felt a sense of deep relief: For years, Bear had told stories of those murders to her children — tales of poisoned relatives and sleepless nights and charred homes — bearing the burden of that tragic history and passing it on to the next generation.“Now, we don’t have to carry these stories anymore,” she said. “Now, the whole world knows what happened to us.”Bear is one of many Indigenous people who came away deeply affected by Martin Scorsese’s searing film, based on the 1920s Reign of Terror in Oklahoma, when dozens of oil-rich Osage were killed by their white neighbors. The murders were part of a wide conspiracy led by William Hale, played in the film by Robert De Niro. Those he enlisted included his nephew Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), a World War I veteran who married Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), a wealthy Osage woman.The film, which garnered seven Golden Globes nominations on Monday, has divided Indigenous viewers: In a dozen interviews, many of them, particularly members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma, welcomed the movie, applauding Scorsese for his meticulous portrayal of Osage culture and noting the ways the critically acclaimed drama has broadened awareness of the killings. But other Indigenous viewers said the movie was told from a white man’s perspective and lacked sufficient context about the U.S. government’s complicity in the murders.An oil strike in “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Some critics say the movie fails to deal with the role the federal government played in the Reign of Terror. AppleTV+“It still felt to me like it was a story about the white men,” said Tim Landes, who is Cherokee and an editor for TulsaPeople magazine. “It was still framed around the criminals who did the bad deeds.” He said he wished the movie had been created by an Indigenous artist.“There are numerous Indigenous filmmakers, especially in Oklahoma, who are just anxiously awaiting their shot,” he said.There seems to be broad agreement in Indigenous circles that the drama succeeded in accurately portraying the culture and language of the Osage people. Scorsese and his production team took great pains to incorporate Osage feedback into the movie, community members said. In 2019, several years into the making of the movie, Scorsese and his crew met with more than 200 Osage people, discussing tribe members’ concerns about the movie and asking them questions about their lives.“My position always was let’s make sure we’re not going to be stereotyped as Hollywood always does,” said Geoffrey Standing Bear, principal chief of the Osage Nation. “Let’s make sure our story to be told by us as much as possible. And we did a good job of that. This was a movie where you hear the Osage language. You hear the sounds of our music.”In an email to The New York Times, Scorsese said, “We felt a great responsibility to get the story right and this is extremely sensitive territory for the Osage.”Dozens of oil-rich Osage were killed by their white neighbors in the 1920s.The movie was filmed in Osage County and Washington County, Okla., and throughout production, Scorsese and his team worked with Osage experts on clothing, language, art and more. Many Osage people also acted as extras.“The way that they were able to consult and really fold in the community gave it its authenticity,” said Addie Roanhorse, who worked in the film’s art department and is a direct descendant of Henry Roan. (Played by William Belleau, he is depicted in the film as having “melancholy” and is killed by one of Hale’s henchmen.)Scorsese, Gladstone and DiCaprio attended many tribal ceremonies to learn more about their traditions, said Gigi Sieke, an Osage member who appears as an extra in the final scene. She remembers the production team going to her grandfather’s 100-year-old house to measure his table and examine the antiques he owned. When she first watched the movie, she was amazed by how closely the film mirrored the customs of her people, from the way they prayed to the minutiae of their clothing.Still, it was often painful to watch the film. Dana Bear said she was depressed for a month after the screening, saddened by the reality of how Osage members had been brutally treated.Growing up, Bear remembered, she saw an elderly man, known to her as “Cowboy,” at grocery stores or gas stations in Fairfax, Okla. It was not until watching the movie that it dawned on her that he was the son of Ernest and Mollie Burkhart.“It’s not the distant past,” she said. “My grandma lived through that. A lot of families left during that time out of fear and you can look around and see where those families left.”While many of the Indigenous people interviewed approved of the film, others said it failed to reckon with the ways the murders had been enabled by the federal government’s systematic oppression of Indigenous people.The film could have included greater context about how the murders were not isolated events but part of a broader history of colonization, said Elizabeth Rule, a Chickasaw Nation member and a professor of critical race, gender and culture studies at American University.“Violence against Indigenous people unfolded in a systematic way across additional communities in different parts of the country,” she said.The movie also shied away from the federal government’s history of capturing Native American land through the allotment system, making it easier for the properties to be transferred to white men, said Robert Warrior, an Osage professor of American literature and culture at the University of Kansas.“It’s not the distant past,” Dana Bear said. “My grandma lived through that.”AppleTV+Other critics say that the film centered the perspective of white men rather than that of Mollie and other Osage people, and that the story could have been better told by an Indigenous filmmaker.“It would take an Osage to tell the story from the Osage perspective,” said Joel Robinson, an Osage member from Kentucky who wrote a viral review of the movie on Letterboxd. “Someone who has never had to come at it from a place of learning and discovery. Someone who has had it embedded in them.”The fault lies with an entertainment industry that continues to elevate white people’s creative choice over those of Indigenous filmmakers, he said. “In the current Hollywood system, there’s no shot that the studio would come in and be like, ‘Oh you’re Osage, do you want to make this movie? Here’s $200 million,’” he said, referring to the reported budget of the film.Scorsese took issue with the contention that “Killers” elevates a white man’s point of view over an Indigenous one. “I can’t really agree that the story is told primarily from a white man’s perspective,” Scorsese said. “I wanted to create a kind of panoramic perspective. There are many interwoven characters and strands in the story. The majority of the white characters are swindlers, thieves and murderers. That includes Ernest and Bill, of course. I think the picture really isn’t from their ‘perspective.’”But Jeremy Charles, a Cherokee filmmaker, said the movie reminded him how much progress was still needed to improve Indigenous representation in cinema.“We’re telling these kinds of stories predominantly through a white colonizer lens is the main issue,” he said. “What I’ve been working on and what many Indigenous filmmakers have been working on is getting more stories told from an Indigenous perspective into the mainstream.”“The world,” he said, “is hungry for our stories.” More

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      ‘May December’ Shows Provocative Sex Is Back. Are We Ready for It?

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      In Todd Haynes’s newest film, “May December,” Joe Yoo (Charles Melton) is a 30-something man in a marriage with an unconventional back story. He met his wife, Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore), the summer after seventh grade — but she was 36 at the time. She went to prison, but they stayed together, and the two eventually married and had three children. The couple are being shadowed by a famous actress, Elizabeth Berry (Natalie Portman), who will be portraying Gracie in a movie about the first years of their relationship. As Elizabeth enmeshes herself in their world, Joe opens himself up to her, and one evening, after she invites him to her hotel room, Elizabeth initiates a tentative kiss. “You’re so young,” she says. “Believe me, you could start over.” The two have sex, and we watch Joe thrusting briefly from a bird’s-eye view — a position of surveillance rather than intimacy. Listen to This ArticleOpen this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.It’s an explicit sex scene, but it is not wholly sexy. Elizabeth and Joe have two distinct sets of feelings and perspectives, and the film’s visual approach captures this sense of dissonance. There’s something concrete, even thrilling, about the fleshly realism of Joe’s slight paunch and the texture of their labored breathing, something beautiful and tragic about the way their interlocking fantasies converge and decouple. It’s an encounter thick with layers of lust, pleasure, self-deception and disappointment. Though the sex is consensual, the viewer’s experience of it is uneasy. It slips from steamy to disconcerting to alienating in a way that, though not uncommon in lived experience, has become less familiar on the screen. After it’s over, Elizabeth presses him on his relationship with Gracie. Joe draws back, wounded: For him, the sex was a way of regaining some of the agency he lost in entering a relationship with an adult as a child. In his eyes, Elizabeth is suggesting that he has no agency at all. We’re observing the discordant, syncopated elements a single sexual encounter can encompass. Over the last several years, the matter of onscreen sex in the movies has been a continuing source of anxiety for audiences, critics and filmmakers who feel that desire has been shunted offscreen in favor of more chaste fare. In a 2021 interview, the director Paul Verhoeven lamented “a movement toward Puritanism” in Hollywood. Over the summer, buzz around Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” hinged in part on the fact that it was the director’s first film to feature either sex or nudity. As some on X dissected the extent to which Florence Pugh appeared naked onscreen, a repost of an anti-porn TikToker’s reaction to those scenes (“Have a plan and talk about it before you go,” she advised potential viewers who might feel “triggered”) caused a stir among some commentators, who saw it as proof that viewing audiences were caught up in an anti-sex fervor. Whether or not there has actually been a widespread puritanical shift, the portrayal of sex has certainly been complicated by heightened scrutiny in the wake of the MeToo movement.That cultural moment inspired films that, today, read as artifacts of their time: stories of girlbossed Fox News personalities standing up to misogynist superiors, tragic narratives of sexual violence and recovery, journalism procedurals about the birth of the movement itself. These films reinforced a newly prevailing narrative that sex and systemic injustice often go hand in hand and promised just resolutions wherein abusers and harassers were exposed and punished. Emerald Fennell’s 2020 directorial debut, “Promising Young Woman,” crystallized both tendencies: After protagonist Cassie’s (Carey Mulligan) friend Nina is sexually assaulted during medical school, leading her to commit suicide, she feigns intoxication in bars so she can ensnare would-be assailants. She graduates to enacting her revenge on those she holds responsible for Nina’s death, but the film glosses over some of her crueler stunts. Things end tidily with Cassie’s engineering her own murder at the hands of Nina’s rapist and his subsequent arrest. The film had a slick social-justice message but elided the complex public discourse around accountability in favor of crowd-pleasing turns.“May December” is part of a wave of movies and television shows that cut against this impulse to use sex as a warning or a cudgel and attempts to bring back sex as sex — as something titillating, seductive, gratifying, provocative and, at base, erotic. This year there are raucous throwbacks to raunchy comedies like “Bottoms” and “No Hard Feelings,” sexual bildungsromans like “Poor Things” and HBO’s lurid “The Idol” and a film adaptation of “Cat Person,” a New Yorker short story that went viral in the first months of MeToo, to name just a few. These films want to depict sex in a broadly appealing way while retaining an awareness of recent shifts in the cultural conversation.“Bottoms,” for example, resituates the teenage sex comedy in the world of queer adolescent girls. “The Idol” utilizes the recent cultural redemption of maligned women celebrities like Britney Spears as the staging ground for the comeback of its own troubled pop star. Fennell’s new film, “Saltburn” and Chloe Domont’s “Fair Play” serve up salacious scenes alongside social critique, underlining the role of sex in gender- and class-based power struggles. “May December” examines the long aftermath of sexual abuse and the way it can haunt desire decades later. Lily-Rose Depp in “The Idol.”Eddy Chen/HBOThe influence of MeToo, which forced a re-evaluation of sexual mores throughout our culture, is unmistakably present. But these films push beyond, asking what it means to treat sexual relations as a phenomenon that is related to, but distinct from, power. In her book “The Right to Sex,” the philosopher Amia Srinivasan asked whether a focus on issues of consent obscured a deeper consideration of the weird forms that sexual desire can take. To Srinivasan, desire itself is shaped by the conditions of power and is potentially complicit in its perpetuation: To prefer thin white bodies over brown or disabled ones, to take one example, can be a matter of intimate personal preference at the same time as it reflects the influence of the societal norms that shape us. Sexual desire encompasses desires for power, belonging, advantage and disruption that we would not typically think of as erotic. “For better or worse, we must find a way to take sex on its own terms,” Srinivasan writes. “On its own terms” means sex that matters in multiple senses, that has sensual weight but does not ignore how politics lends it some of that weight. This new crop of movies is wrestling with what that could look like, interrogating inherited desires and struggling to reinvent them for a new moment. They don’t all succeed, but the failures are revealing.In “Saltburn,” Barry Keoghan plays Oliver Quick, a poor Oxford student whose peers make fun of him for his “Oxfam” clothes and awkward affect. When the aristocratic Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi) takes pity on him, Oliver’s fortunes change. Soon he’s spending a summer at Saltburn, the Catton family’s estate. Felix’s sister, Venetia, lusts after him, while his parents approach him as if he is an alien species. Farleigh, Felix’s queer Black American cousin, a fellow dependent, tries unsuccessfully to get Oliver ejected from Saltburn. Oliver has a trump card, though: When he joins the younger family members in a field for nude sunbathing, he reveals his own sizable member, making himself an object of desire and sexual power. The movie brims with erotic excess as Oliver seduces his hosts one by one. “Saltburn” is a jumbled, cockeyed update of many genres and stories (“The Talented Mr. Ripley” comes readily to mind), but the genre it’s most interested in revising is the 1980s and ’90s erotic thriller. This tendency to adapt older genres is common among this year’s sex-obsessed films — unsurprising, given that genre itself is a way of revisiting and amending inherited ideas. The erotic thriller was practically invented to hold together audiences’s ugly, contradictory feelings about sex, bringing the craving for erotic encounter into conflict with the looming specter of AIDs and the perceived threat of empowered women. This year’s films find their contradictions among contemporary social issues while embracing more inclusive understandings of desire. Thus even though Fennell is again considering sex as domination — this time a queer weapon of class war — she also wants audiences to think of Oliver’s seductions as sexy. Alison Oliver as Venetia in “Saltburn”Amazon Studios“Saltburn” deprioritizes the social message of “Promising Young Woman” in favor of tantalizing images. At one point, Oliver propositions Venetia after catching her beneath his window in a see-through nightgown. She protests on account of her period, but Oliver goes ahead and sticks his head under her gown. “It’s lucky for you I’m a vampire,” he quips. Oliver’s sexual aggression is treated as a tool that breaks down barriers of breeding and wealth, a sign of personal strength and cunning. Venetia’s period and Oliver’s transgression against her demurral (along with, perhaps, the disingenuous nature of that refusal) also accentuates the act’s erotic charge — a familiar formula for titillation. In another scene, Oliver forces himself onto Farleigh, who protests and then accepts his enemy’s advances. It’s sex as a disturbing assertion of power over a foe, but it’s also meant to be thrilling for each of the characters and, we assume, the audience.Oliver’s sexual coercions clash with the film’s crude attempts to refashion the erotic thriller as queer, feminist and class-conscious. Fennell doesn’t seem interested in whether these acts are morally acceptable. Instead, by depicting Oliver’s victims as privileged brats, she gives us permission to take pleasure in his misdeeds. In place of any serious engagement with the strange ways that class, consent, violation and the erotic are messily entangled, Fennell turns to the thriller as a kind of escape hatch. Oliver’s schemes allow her and her protagonist to indulge in dark seduction while evading its repercussions.This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the erotic thriller, which if anything is obsessed with sex’s consequences and how desire and vulnerability go hand in hand. A similar misunderstanding happens in “Fair Play.” Phoebe Dynevor and Alden Ehrenreich star as Emily and Luke, two financial analysts at a hedge fund who are in a relationship they must hide from their colleagues. Their relationship is robust — they have period sex (there it is again!) in a restroom at a wedding before Luke proposes marriage — but things sour when Emily is promoted to a position of authority over Luke, who grows jealous. Their sex life cools. As Emily embraces her male colleagues’ chauvinistic work culture and flaunts her new wealth, Luke takes on beta male tendencies, like spending his time and money on a business self-help course. Emily’s promotion plays on his gender-related insecurities, uncovering the misogynist assumptions lurking below their relationship’s surface. They never have a real conversation about what’s going on. Instead, straddling a reluctant Luke, Emily insists that they need to have sex. The performance of a healthy heterosexual order seems more urgent to these characters than grappling with the dissonances between them or the confusing presence of sexist gender norms within their relationship.Though the premiere of “Fair Play” at Sundance earlier this year was heralded by some press and critics as a contemporary take on the erotic thriller, the little sex it features illustrates underlying conditions rather than posing questions that need to be negotiated or explored. The first sequence leaps from an interrupted quickie to a marriage proposal to a shot of the postcoital couple — less an erotic encounter than a relationship-goals checklist. The second happens during a nightmarish engagement party thrown by Emily’s oblivious family. After a furious shouting match, Emily and Luke begin to have angry sex, but when she tells him to stop, he doesn’t. Rather than staying with the choice the characters have made and exploring the frustrated intimacy that might have motivated it, Luke rapes Emily because, the film seems to say, violence is the only domain in which men can still have the upper hand. We find ourselves in familiar territory: Sex cannot be separated from the malignancy of the social structures that surround it. “Fair Play” is capable of striking more provocative notes. After Luke assaults her, Emily finds a morally discordant way to reconcile her trauma with the demands of the workplace. She goes to her boss and disingenuously explains Luke’s disruptive office behavior as the culmination of a long period of stalking. This scene puts questions of gender-based violence in queasy juxtaposition with professional ambition. Rather than resting there, though, the movie ends on a shallow note of empowerment: When Emily returns to her apartment and finds Luke waiting for her, she picks up a knife and forces him to apologize for raping her. The ending frames Emily as a victim, asking the audience to take satisfaction in a ready-made trope when the outcome is much more fraught.Julianne Moore and Charles Melton in “May December.”Photo illustration by Chantal JahchanFennell and Domont have produced interesting failures that illustrate the inherent difficulty of returning sex to the screen: Older forms can’t always give shape to the strange eddies that sex inserts into the flow of our lives. This problem animates Todd Haynes’s “May December.” Haynes’s approach suggests that rehabbing the erotic will require a formal invention more rigorous — and far weirder — than what Domont and Fennell attempt. When we meet Joe and Gracie and Elizabeth (the film is set in 2015, a couple years before MeToo), most see Joe as Gracie’s victim, but for her purposes, Elizabeth is more concerned with what motivated Gracie’s choice and how the couple see themselves. Gracie, whose outward presentation of white feminine fragility and naïveté enables the control she exerts over her mixed-race family, fiercely resists Elizabeth’s attempts to understand her. Joe, on the other hand, seems to be an open book. As he re-examines his relationship through an outsider’s gaze, long-suppressed questions and dissatisfactions come to the surface.Like “Saltburn,” sexual desire saturates “May December,” though not always in the ways we expect. In one scene, we see Gracie teaching Elizabeth how to apply her favorite makeup, patting the lipstick onto Elizabeth’s open mouth with her fingertip while the two discuss their mothers. In another, Joe sits alone in front of the TV at night, watching a videotaped face-wash commercial featuring Elizabeth on a loop. As she splashes water on her face, rivulets drip endlessly from her eyelashes and open mouth. The camera zooms in each time before cutting to Joe’s rapt gaze. The interplay of the two images is like a dialogue between lovers — the formation of a relation, or fantasy of a relation, in real time. We can’t know why Joe has chosen this image at this moment, what is going through his mind, but we feel the emergence of a consequential desire that will encourage him to question all the other desires that his life with Gracie has stunted.Haynes is interested in the way the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves buckle under the weight of retrospection and how central the erotic is to that process. The title gestures toward one of the grand cultural narratives that Gracie and Joe use to understand their relationship. Seen through the eyes of a public that has rejected that narrative, though, Gracie’s attempts to frame their relationship as a meet-cute story are chilling. “You know Joe’s been with more women than I have men,” she tries to explain to Elizabeth at one point. Joe tries to tell Elizabeth the same story, beginning with how different he was from other kids his age. “She saw me,” he says, insisting, “I wanted it.” But the insistence rings false. He is hunky yet has the hunch of an older man mingled with a boy’s soft, awkward bulk — a body in arrested development indicating a static mind. The film’s score and script collude to resist psychological revelations about the characters. The score combines original compositions and an adapted score from the 1971 period drama “The Go-Between,” laying melodramatic music over scenes that contradict their emotional sway. As the movie introduces us to Gracie and Joe’s family, we peer in on a seemingly normal family anticipating a celebrity’s arrival. Then Gracie opens the fridge door to retrieve wieners for a barbecue. Ominous chords sound, and the score’s effect is bizarre, almost comic. What does Gracie feel here? What are we meant to feel, and what are these feelings’ objects? It’s a moment of misdirection, an analogue for the complex, prickly reticence of Elizabeth and Gracie, two characters who refuse vulnerability and self-revelation at every step, but also for the way that we, as spectators of the sexual lives of others (and sometimes our own) rely on defunct tropes that have nothing to do with our own direct experience. If, upon opening the fridge door in anticipation of Elizabeth’s invasion, Gracie sees herself as the besieged heroine of a romantic melodrama, the score pushes us into feeling that way as well. Eventually the score comes to seem like a tool of manipulation similar to the ones Gracie wields against Joe and Elizabeth.Abuse is at the very center of “May December,” but it is not the only force at work: Joe is bound by a genuine love for and attachment to his children and wife, but he grapples with the contradictions of his situation and is not simply their product. Gracie, in turn, is not only an abuser but a complicated, opaque figure of barbed frailty. The film offers up narratives that might unlock her motivations: child sexual abuse and a subsequent early marriage to an older man — but they cannot fully illuminate Gracie’s desire or her behavior. “May December” is more concerned with repercussions, and perhaps its biggest accomplishment is the way it dwells in the afterlife of abuse with keen attention to emotional weather. In one scene, Joe smokes weed with his son — his first time getting high. He gets caught in a spasm of unacknowledged grief. “Bad things, they happen,” he warns. “And we do bad things also. And we have to think about those things. If we try not to think about it, there’s this. …” He trails off. Where “Saltburn” and “Fair Play” dismiss sex’s complications in spectacular ways, “May December” stays with the difficulty, avoiding the glib treatment of harm as something that can be resolved through either punishment or self-empowerment. For Joe, Gracie and even Elizabeth, desires of the past haunt their presents, trapping them in harmful situations from which they might never recover — the stakes are scarier than anything Fennell and Domont can conceive. But perhaps most important, as we think through what sexual desire means in complicated times, Haynes’s view of sexuality is multidimensional, taking it seriously as a force that unmakes and remakes us. If there is hope for Joe, a chance for him to make a life of his own, then it is due in part to his ability to desire something new, something other than what he has been handed.Source photographs for photo illustrations above from Netflix.Alexandra Kleeman is a novelist and Guggenheim Fellow and the author, most recently, of “Something New Under the Sun.” Her last essay for the magazine explored this year’s television adaptation of David Cronenberg’s “Dead Ringers” and the radical way it depicted birthing onscreen. More

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      Golden Globes 2024 Snubs and Surprises: ‘Past Lives,’ Taylor Swift and More

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      The Korean American drama from Celine Song got four nominations, while Swift’s concert film got one. “The Color Purple” was overlooked for best musical.The nominations for the 81st Golden Globes, announced Monday morning, brought good tidings for box-office titans “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer,” though some of the other contenders hoping to break through were dealt an early setback.This year, any discussion of Golden Globe snubs and surprises ought to start with the show itself, since this once-snubbed awards ceremony has engineered a surprising comeback.NBC dropped the 2022 edition of the show after a host of scandals involving the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the group that voted for the Golden Globes, prompted an A-list boycott. Pilloried for its lack of Black members, the H.F.P.A. resolved to clean up its act and diversify its membership. And the 2023 ceremony, hosted by Jerrod Carmichael, managed to attract a respectable guest list. (Though the eventual Oscar winner Brendan Fraser, who accused the former H.F.P.A. head Philip Berk of groping him in 2003, was a notable no-show. Berk denied the accusation.)In June, the H.F.P.A. was formally dissolved when the Golden Globes brand was bought by Eldridge Industries and Dick Clark Productions (which is part of Penske Media, owner of many Hollywood trade publications), and the remaining voting body was further reshuffled. Once an eccentric, cloistered membership of about 85 voters, it has swelled to about 300 even as some of its longest-serving and more problematic voters were expelled. 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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      Golden Globes to Announce 2024 Nominations

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      New owners have beefed up the voting pool in an effort to move the prizes past scandals of recent years.To many, the Golden Globe Awards are a perfect example of Hollywood’s two faces.In public, the entertainment capital plays along: It’s an honor just to be nominated, giggle tee-hee, this event is an absolute delight.In private, smiles drop and eyes roll: The prizes are not seen as meaningful markers of artistic excellence, but there is no way around them. From a business perspective, the Globes represent a crucial marketing opportunity for winter films and TV shows.The nominations for the 81st ceremony, which will be televised by CBS on Jan. 7, will be announced on Monday morning by Cedric the Entertainer and Wilmer Valderrama.The Golden Globes have long been positioned as an important campaign stop for Oscar hopefuls. Nomination voting for the 96th Academy Awards begins on Jan. 11.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’s on TV This Week: Christmas Specials and a ‘Vanderpump Rules’ Recap

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      Several networks present holiday-themed specials, and Bravo airs “A Decade of Rumors and Lies,” hosted by Lisa Vanderpump.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, Dec. 11-17. Details and times are subject to change.MondayBIG BROTHER REINDEER GAMES 8 p.m. on CBS. I honestly can’t think of another time where a reality show dedicated a season to creating a holiday vibe. On this spinoff of the long-running competition show, nine previous contestants will come back to play six episodes of holiday-themed games, and the winner will walk away with a $100,000 stocking stuffer — it doesn’t get much more holly and jolly than that.BARRY MANILOW’S A VERY BARRY CHRISTMAS 10 p.m. on NBC. Manilow will be joined by a 24-piece band to perform his greatest hits and a couple of holiday songs at the Westgate Las Vegas Resort & Casino, where Manilow regularly performs. Rumor has it that Santa will make an appearance — as long as he can pull himself away from the roulette table at the Bellagio.TuesdayFrom left: Tom Schwartz, Lisa Vanderpump, Ariana Madix and Tom Sandoval in a 2022 episode of “Vanderpump Rules.”Nicole Weingart/BravoVANDERPUMP RULES: A DECADE OF RUMORS AND LIES 10:15 p.m. on Bravo. It is hard to believe that these restaurant employees have been providing endless drama and entertainment for an entire decade. Ahead of the premiere of the 11th season in January, Lisa Vanderpump (the reason we are all here) narrates this special, which looks back at some of the previous seasons’ best moments.WednesdayCMT PRESENTS: A CODY JOHNSON CHRISTMAS 9 p.m. on CMT. Christmas is headed to Texas this week: Cody Johnson is joined by his family on this special to discuss holiday memories and traditions. He will also perform some classic holiday songs with a country flair.ThursdayTHE CLIP SHOW: HOLIDAY EDITION 8 p.m. on NBC. There’s nothing that can bond a family together quite like laughing at people getting humiliated on TV. Matt Iseman and Akbar Gbajabiamila host this show that is a bit like “American’s Funniest Home Videos,” but all the mishaps have to do with ice- and snow-related accidents or awkward presents being given and received.FridayNATIONAL CHRISTMAS TREE LIGHTING 8 p.m. on CBS. It was December of 1923 when President Calvin Coolidge held a celebration outside of the White House with a decorated Christmas tree and a performance from the U.S. Marine Band. The tradition carries on 100 years later with performances from Darren Criss, Dionne Warwick and St. Vincent, to name a few.SaturdayWill Ferrell, left, in “Elf.”Alan Markfield/New Line ProductionsELF (2003) 7 p.m. on AMC. Be warned, you should have waffles, maple syrup and marshmallows on hand while watching this movie because it has been known to induce that craving (or, if you don’t have a problematic sweet tooth, it might just turn you off those things). Will Ferrell stars as Buddy, the human who thought his whole life that he was an elf. He ventures to New York City to find his real dad, but on the way gets some tough reality checks and somehow charms a very sweet and blond Zooey Deschanel.DIE HARD (1988) 9 p.m. on MTV. It is officially that time of the year for the annual fight with your weird uncle about whether or not “Die Hard” is a Christmas movie. In the film, John McClane (Bruce Willis) goes to a holiday party to try to reconnect with his estranged wife (Bonnie Bedelia). During the party, terrorists take over the building and hold everyone hostage — and John has to spring into action. It does take place on Christmas Eve, and there wouldn’t have been a plot if there weren’t an office holiday party, so my vote is that it is a Christmas movie. (But I also watch “Love Actually” and “The Holiday” all year long, so I don’t know if my opinion should be trusted.)SundayWILLIE NELSON’S 90TH BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION 8 p.m. on CBS. Recorded at the Hollywood Bowl in April 2023, this celebration of Willie Nelson’s 90th birthday will finally be broadcast to let those of us who couldn’t make it to the live show join in. The event is hosted by Jennifer Garner, Chelsea Handler, Woody Harrelson, Ethan Hawke, Helen Mirren and Owen Wilson. Nelson performs along with Sheryl Crow, Snoop Dogg, Norah Jones and the Chicks.Matt Bomer, left, and Jonathan Bailey in “Fellow Travelers.”Ben Mark Holzberg/ShowtimeFELLOW TRAVELERS 9 p.m. on Showtime. This is the new show of the fall that I’m surprised that we aren’t all talking about. The story is, at its core, a love story between Hawkins Fuller (Matt Bomer) and Tim Laughlin (Jonathan Bailey). But on the side, it is also a political thriller that dives into the policies and public narratives that were affecting gay communities throughout the second half of the 20th century. The story jumps back and forth in time, from the 1980s, when Tim is sick and is reconnecting with Hawkins, to a different past decade every episode, to explain the intricacies of their relationship. More

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      Ava DuVernay and Other Directors Rethink Holocaust Films

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      Tragic tellings of the Shoah are all too common. The directors of “The Zone of Interest,” “Origin” and “Occupied City” refuse to let it live in the past.In the British comedy “Extras,” Kate Winslet, who appears as a version of herself, is playing as a nun in a film about the Holocaust. When commended for using her platform to bring attention to the atrocities, she replies callously, “I’m not doing it for that. I mean, I don’t think we really need another film about the Holocaust, do we?” She explains that she took the role because if you do a movie about the Holocaust, you’re “guaranteed an Oscar.”The fictional Winslet’s perspective on movies about the Holocaust, though obviously a joke in the context of that 2005 episode, has become something of a prevailing opinion. Since Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” (1993) won best picture and six other Academy Awards nearly 30 years ago, Holocaust films from “Life Is Beautiful” (1998) to “Jojo Rabbit” (2019) have been seen as Oscar bait. Well intentioned or not, they are considered the kind of cinema you should but don’t necessarily want to see, meant to tug at heartstrings and win their creators prizes.In fact, Winslet herself proved that theory correct when she won the best actress Oscar in 2009 for “The Reader,” in which she played a woman who served as an SS guard at Auschwitz. At the ceremony, the host, Hugh Jackman, built a musical moment around the fact that he hadn’t seen “The Reader,” a gag that got a roar of knowing laughter from the audience: Movies about the Holocaust are important, yes, but skippable.But maybe the notion of the Holocaust movie is changing. This year in particular, three films seek to challenge the idea of what it can and should be. All of them turn an analytical eye on their subject matter, linking the horrors of the past to the present, in that way making the subject feel as upsettingly resonant as ever.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 Year of the Mega Sleeve

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      Raglan, fluted, leg o’ mutton, bishop, puffed, balloon — whatever you want to call them, we wore them.When Holly Waddington, the costume designer for “Poor Things,” Yorgos Lanthimos’s much heralded phantasmagorical film about a young women’s psychological and sexual awakening that opened on Friday, began thinking about what her heroine would wear, she said she was thinking “skinny arms and these kind of straight skirts with the big bustle.”The film, which is based on a 1992 book by Alasdair Gray and stars Emma Stone, is set in an unidentified time period that is sort of like the 1880s — if the 1880s took place in an alternate dimension in which time folded in on itself, so the past was also the future. In part, that’s why Ms. Waddington was drawn to a silhouette that was slim on top and exaggerated at the bottom.Also, it’s “quite phallic,” she said, “and that felt right.” Mr. Lanthimos had other ideas.“He said, ‘It’s about the sleeve,’” Ms. Waddington recalled. And so, indeed, it is.Ms. Stone amid a sea of ruffled sleevage.Atsushi Nishijima/Searchlight PicturesPuffed, ruffled and ruched to bulbous extremes, the sleeves worn by Ms. Stone’s character, Bella Baxter, are impossible to ignore. About 15.5-inches wide, they bounce across the screen in every scene like giant hot air balloons or supersize mammaries, bigger than her head, absurd and weirdly alluring, dainty and dominant. They are “vast,” Ms. Waddington said. “Huge.”But monumental as they are, they are also utterly on trend. “There’s something in the air,” Ms. Waddington said. “Yorgos was very tuned into that.” It’s not the marketing tsunami that was Barbie pink; it’s merely one of those cosmic moments when fashion and culture collide.Forget the power shoulder: 2023 was the year of the power sleeve. No matter the exact style — puffed, bishop, fluted, belled, leg o’ mutton, statement, mega, dramatic — all that really mattered was that it was big. Off screen as well as on.We have, said Daniel Roseberry, the creative director of Schiaparelli, “hit peak sleeve.”Sleeves, Sleeves, EverywhereStyle watchers began talking about a sleeve sweep at the end of 2022. “Forget what you knew about the statement sleeve,” the influential Italian boutique Luisa Via Roma proclaimed on its website. “This season, the style is more dramatic and bolder than ever.” The fall ready-to-wear shows were filled with sleeves — brushing the floor at Balenciaga and Rodarte; bowling ball-size at Thom Browne; rounded and sculptural at Schiaparelli.By Oscar time, sleeve mania had migrated onto the red carpet thanks to Florence Pugh, who wore a palatial puff-sleeve Valentino taffeta robe atop shorts; Jessie Buckley, in a Shakespearean-sleeve black-lace gown by Rodarte; and Mindy Kaling, whose white Vera Wang dress had detachable gauntlets-cum-sleeves.Puffed up: Clockwise from top left, Florence Pugh in Valentino; Kendall Jenner in Marc Jacobs; Jessie Buckley in Rodarte; and Michelle Yeoh in Lagerfeld. Nina Westervelt and Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesAt the Met Gala in May, Kendall Jenner wore a sequined Marc Jacobs look in which the designer seemed to have taken all the fabric from what would have been the pants and transferred it to the sleeves. (Also joining the statement sleeve set: Michelle Yeoh, Kate Moss and Cara Delevingne.)Then Vogue put Carey Mulligan on its November cover in a peachy gown from the Louis Vuitton 2024 resort collection that had such complicated sleeves it looked as if she’d stuck her arms elbow-deep into two giant cream puffs. And then came “Poor Things” with what Ms. Waddington called its “commitment to sleeves.”Little wonder that in January, the museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology will kick off its 2024 programming with “Statement Sleeves,” an exhibition of almost 80 pieces from the permanent collection that will focus on how sleeves serve as “signifiers of status, taste and personality,” according to a news release. And though they cycle in and out of fashion, so it has always been.Arms and the WomanBig sleeves have been a part of dress for almost as long as there has been dress. Colleen Hill, the curator of costume and accessories at FIT, who is behind the museum’s sleeves show, said the world’s oldest woven garment — a V-neck linen shirt from the fourth millennium B.C., now in the collection of the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology in London — includes knife-pleated sleeves. During the Renaissance, sleeves were often the most elaborate part of a dress, as well as detachable; grooms often gave sleeves to their new brides.Sleeves became even more prominent in the Elizabethan, Victorian and Edwardian eras. By the 1830s there were so many different sleeve shapes and names, Ms. Hill said, that a woman’s sewing guide from the period stated, in effect, “we’re not going to give you all the styles of sleeves because it is impossible.”Carey Mulligan got big sleeves for her Vogue cover in November. VogueMs. Waddington said that when she was researching these periods for “Poor Things,” she went into fashion archives and discovered sleeves so extreme they were almost unbelievable. “This is the thing that fascinates me about historical dress,” she said. “The shapes are wild.” What looks like science fiction, she added, actually comes from “a 19th-century pattern.”Sleeves got big again in the 1940s thanks to designers like Adrian, the Hollywood couturier whose giant ruffled sleeves were a favorite of a young Joan Crawford and a precursor to the equally giant shoulder pads of World War II. And sleeves made a famous return in the 1980s, thanks in part to Princess Diana and the enormous fairy-tale-on-steroids sleeves of her wedding gown.It’s probably not an accident that the episodes of “The Crown” that focus on Diana, including the recreation of her wedding dress, have coincided with the return of big sleeves. Simon Porte Jacquemus specifically name-checked Diana as the inspiration for his fall 2023 show, which featured inflated sleeves. He said he was obsessed with her “dramatic round puffy sleeves.”“It shaped her silhouette in a sensuous way, but still with a poetic and naïve ’80s touch,” he said.What’s in a Sleeve?At first it may have seemed that pandemic lockdowns and the ascension of comfort clothing would kill the big sleeve. But the way that altered reality shrank our interactions to the size of a computer monitor may actually have turbocharged the trend.“We’re so often seen onscreen these days from the waist up, and sleeves are a way to stand out,” Ms. Hill said.Ms. Waddington said much the same, noting that the torso “is what the camera sees most of the time, so the information needs to be happening between the waist and the head.” And how much better when it is conveyed at volume. Or, rather, in volumes.Indeed, Mr. Roseberry said, sleeves “draw the attention upward to the face and the person wearing the garment.”Maximalist sleeves at Thom Browne. Simbarashe Cha for The New York TimesSleeves like a giant circle at Schiaparelli.SchiaparelliSleeves to the floor at Rodarte.Kessler StudioNo matter what, Mr. Lanthimos said, “they really make an impression.” Sleeves are inclusive: They can be worn by myriad bodies in myriad ways and exist at myriad prices. They are theatrical. (Forget talking with your hands; talking with your arms is much more effective.) And they can be resonant of sexuality, safety and strength.That makes sleeves the rare design element that is equally showy and swaddling. Simone Rocha, whose balloon sleeves walk a fine line between childlike and sensuous and have become something of a design signature, said she was drawn to the way “the proportion sculpts around the body almost like a cocoon, creating a sense of security.” Also: big, puffy sleeves are old-fashioned and contemporary at the same time, speaking to history and, she said, “the pragmatic feeling of a work-wear bomber.”Whatever the association, however, the result is universal: “In an upside-down world, emphasizing your physicality in space, taking up room, is a way of asserting yourself,” Mr. Roseberry said. “Of giving yourself importance.”Ms. Waddington agreed. “I think that they’re about empowerment,” she said. Which is, in the end, the hero’s journey of “Poor Things,” and the heart of its emotional appeal.“I feel like I’d quite like to wear big sleeves now,” Ms. Waddington said. More

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      24 Things That Stuck With Us in 2023

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      Films, TV shows, albums, books, art and A.I.-generated SpongeBob performances that reporters, editors and visual journalists in Culture couldn’t stop thinking about this year.Art‘Barkley L. Hendricks: Portraits at the Frick’“October’s Gone…Goodnight,” by Barkley HendricksClark Hodgin for The New York TimesAt the Frick, where Barkley Hendricks’s shimmering ’70s portraits are hanging, posthumously, in the museum’s first solo show by a Black artist, I kept thinking about that Langston Hughes poem: What does happen to a dream deferred? Hendricks didn’t live to see his subjects, with their plentiful Afros and bell-bottom cool, leaping, communing, strolling across the walls of an institution he frequented. But after quietly railing at the omission, I realized the exhibition is actually about Hendricks taking his rightful place — a kind of insistence that a dream, rather than fossilizing, can go on forever. REBECCA THOMASTheater‘The Engagement Party’Given the heaviness of the current news cycle, I was grateful for the respite of Samuel Baum’s confection of a play, “The Engagement Party“ at the Geffen Playhouse. With sharp writing, a first-rate cast and elegant scenery, who says theater isn’t alive and well in Los Angeles? ROBIN POGREBINRap Albums‘Michael’ by Killer MikeIt’s dangerous for an artist to invite André 3000 for a feature, such are his prodigious talent and penchant for outshining anyone on a track. Killer Mike stays with André 3000 on “Scientists & Engineers” and, dare I say, even delivers the better verse, a standout on his well-balanced album, “Michael.” JONATHAN ABRAMSContemporary ArtRagnar Kjartansson at the Louisiana Museum of Modern ArtBefore a trip to Scandinavia, I heard from several people that the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, north of Copenhagen, was their favorite museum in the world. After five hours on the grounds, I understood why. Beyond a robust children’s area and the meditative sculpture gardens, I was transfixed by an exhibition on the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, who uses repetition to examine human emotions, motives and desires. JASON M. BAILEYHip-Hop ReunionsThe DA.I.S.Y. Experience at Webster HallDe La Soul’s pioneering rap peers, including KRS-One, Chuck D, DJ Red Alert, Q-Tip, Common and Queen Latifah, all showed up at Webster Hall in March to buoy the remaining members of the group, Maseo and Posdnuos, as they celebrated the long-awaited streaming release of their catalog, just weeks after the death of Trugoy the Dove. Part catalog retrospective, part homegoing celebration, the night was a warm act of community crystallized, for me, in a single gesture: Late in the night, as Posdnuos rapped onstage, a grinning Busta Rhymes clasped him from behind in a hug I haven’t forgotten since. ELENA BERGERONTV‘Fellow Travelers’Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey in “Fellow Travelers.”Ben Mark Holzberg/Showtime“Fellow Travelers” bounces between the perils of McCarthy era Washington and the advent of AIDS in the 1980s, examining the country through the lens of the relationship between a finely chiseled, roguish diplomat and the naïve, morally tortured younger man who loves him over three decades. Created by Ron Nyswaner and based on a novel by Thomas Mallon (the book makes a perfect companion piece to the show), it is a political thriller/sizzling romance/slice of history worth waiting up for to catch each new episode as it drops. HELEN T. VERONGOSFolk Albums‘The Greater Wings’ by Julie ByrneJulie Byrne’s third album is earthy and otherworldly at once; a mournful, healing dispatch from somewhere between heaven and the dew-glazed grass around a freshly dug grave. “I want to be whole enough to risk again,” she sings, as synthesizer tones and harp strings melt behind her. GABE COHNCultural Juggernaut‘Barbie’Ryan Gosling and Margot Robbie in “Barbie.”Warner Bros. PicturesNo one can say “Barbie” was overlooked in 2023, but was it really among the best? Absolutely. It featured a sharp script, even sharper performances, at least three great songs as well as a brilliantly directed showstopping dance sequence. And in a dumpster fire of a year, it brought joy back to the multiplex. STEPHANIE GOODMANTheater‘Stereophonic’David Adjmi’s play, set almost entirely in a Northern California recording studio in 1976, follows a Fleetwood Mac-inspired band as they lay down tracks for a new album. Sexy, savage and sneakily heartbreaking, it explores the intricacies of communal creation and the sacrifices that art demands and invites. ALEXIS SOLOSKIStreaming K-Drama‘Queenmaker’This South Korean Netflix drama follows Hwang Do-hee (Kim Hee-ae), a former fixer for a corrupt family conglomerate in Seoul who decides to put her might behind the mayoral campaign of a frazzled human-rights lawyer, Oh Kyung-sook (Moon So-ri). Netflix has been investing in K-dramas for a reason. “Queenmaker” presents some delicious commentary on class and entitlement at a time of increasingly visible economic inequality in Korea and in the United States. KATHLEEN MASSARANonfiction‘Status and Culture’“Status and Culture” by W. David Marx I finished W. David Marx’s book “Status and Culture” early in the year, and afterward its point of view about taste and trend cycles felt like it applied to — well, just about everything. If you’re interested in why people (including you!) like the things they like, and why culture in the internet age feels stuck in place, read this. DAVID RENARDAnimated Film‘The Boy and the Heron’We’re lucky to be alive in a time when Hayao Miyazaki is still making hand-drawn animated films. With “The Boy and the Heron,” we have the privilege of following him into another dream world, and there are scenes and sequences so achingly gorgeous they brought me up short. BARBARA CHAIExperimental Theater‘ha ha ha ha ha ha ha’At this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, I saw, at 1:30 in the morning, a clown called Julia Masli try to solve her audience’s problems — everything from feeling too hot to being a hypochondriac. It was madcap, but by the show’s euphoric finish, involving a heartbroken audience member being forced to crowd surf to boost their mood, I’d started thinking Masli was better than any therapist and most other comedians. ALEX MARSHALLSeconds after the Opera Ends‘Dead Man Walking’Ryan McKinny, center, as Joseph De Rocher and above in a video in “Dead Man Walking” at the Metropolitan Opera.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesI still remember the silence during the final moments of the Metropolitan Opera’s production of “Dead Man Walking.” To be in such a huge space with so many people, in utter silence — thinking back, I was relieved no one’s phone had rung. LAURA O’NEILLHorror-Comedy‘M3gan’I’m a sucker for art that reflects my greatest fears — bonus points if doused in satire — maybe because it’s evidence that my anxieties aren’t mine alone or maybe because there’s no better way to exorcise dread than to discuss it. Top of my list is the prospect of humanity being conquered by robots (hence my fixation on, say, the “Terminator” movies and “2001: A Space Odyssey”), and in 2023, artificial intelligence seemed to go from peripheral conversations about a future menace to an imminent threat that industry leaders warned may pose a “risk of extinction.” Enter “M3gan,” about a TikTok-dancing, baby-sitting cyborg that managed to be both extraordinary camp and chilling cautionary tale about what could happen when we outsource human emotional care to humanoids who can’t exactly care at all. MAYA SALAMBroadway Revivals‘Parade’Jason Robert Brown’s “The Last Five Years” is one of my favorite shows, so when I saw his musical “Parade” was returning to Broadway, I knew I had to see it. I didn’t know much about it going in, but I was eager to hear Brown’s wonderfully rhythmic piano phrases live. What I didn’t bank on was a gripping story from the past whose themes still resonate. Micaela Diamond’s powerful singing of “You Don’t Know This Man” was unforgettable — the tragedy with which she imbued every note gave me chills. JENNIFER LEDBURYArtificial IntelligencePlankton SingsA.I.’s depiction in culture this year was almost universally sinister: stealing jobs, spreading misinformation, antagonizing Ethan Hunt. It seems like bad news for humanity, except in one very particular application — generating cover versions of songs sung by cartoon characters. The breakout star of this genre was Plankton from “SpongeBob SquarePants.” He crushes “Even Flow,” he nails “Wake Me Up When September Ends,” but he really shines on “Born to Run.” You’re laughing during the first verse, but by the time he tells Wendy he’ll love her with all the madness in his soul, you really believe. DAVID MALITZOld-School Sci Fi‘2001: A Space Odyssey’In August, I saw “2001: A Space Odyssey,” for just the second time, in 70-millimeter projection at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. Afterward, I texted a friend: “Is it just the greatest movie ever made?” MARC TRACYMagic‘Asi Wind’s Inner Circle’My job as the theater reporter comes with an occupational hazard: Everyone I meet asks me what show they (or their mother-in-law, or their neighbor, or some random co-worker) should go see. And throughout this year, my answer has been Asi Wind, a smooth-talking Israeli American magician who has been holed up in a Greenwich Village church gymnasium, astonishing audiences with close-up card trickery and mind-blowing mind reading. His run at the Gym at Judson is to end in mid-January after 444 performances; catch it if you can. MICHAEL PAULSONPodcasts‘The Diary of a CEO’Steven Bartlett is the host of “The Diary of a CEO.” It is not an exaggeration to say that the “Diary of a CEO” podcast has changed my life this year. The host Steven Bartlett poses engaging questions to some of the world’s finest thought leaders, with answers that can truly transform the way you think and the way you take action; all for free, with invaluable results. MEKADO MURPHYIndie Albums‘The Record’ by boygeniusThe boygenius album “The Record,” the full-length debut of the indie supergroup, landed, for me, like a geyser in a parched landscape. Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus were all singular talents whom I’d loved individually, but the way they rode their vocal harmonies through discord, on lyrics and guitar, lashed with humor and vulnerability — I couldn’t get enough. “I want to you to hear my story,” they sing, “and be a part of it.” Ladies, you got it. MELENA RYZIKOne TV Episode‘Long, Long Time’ From ‘The Last of Us’How did a zombie show based on a video game bring me to tears? Episode 3 of HBO’s “The Last of Us” reveals how love can survive and even thrive in the worst of times. The show’s sudden detour away from the violence and infected masses to focus on the life that Bill and Frank have built together is a poignant reminder of what really matters. ROBIN KAWAKAMI`Theater‘Sad Boys in Harpy Land’Alexandra Tatarsky in her solo show “Sad Boys in Harpy Land” at Playwrights Horizon.Chelcie ParryIn this brilliant, semi-autobiographical solo performance, Alexandra Tatarsky plays “a young Jewish woman who thinks she is a small German boy who thinks he is a tree.” “Sad Boys in Harpy Land” is a demented clown show/unhinged cabaret/deranged improv, but also a fearless exploration of self-loathing that will stick with me for a very. Long. Time. TALA SAFIEFilm‘Past Lives’The closing scene of “Past Lives” is really just two people, standing on the street, waiting for a cab, in silence. But the two people have a long, intertwined history, the cab is coming to whisk one of them away and it is hard to imagine a heavier silence. The goodbye breaks Greta Lee’s character, sums up this subtle, deeply affecting film and has stayed with me all year. MATT STEVENS More