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      in Television

      What’s on TV This Week: the Oscars and the State of the Union

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      ABC airs the awards show for all things film. President Biden addresses the nation across the major networks.For TV viewers like me who still haven’t cut the cord, here is a selection of cable and network shows, movies and specials broadcasting Monday through Sunday, March 4-10. Details and times are subject to change.MondaySO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE 9 p.m. on Fox. This dance competition show is back for its 18th season, with a twist. This year, it’s not just about performing choreography (like the dance that lives rent-free in my head) but about setting up contestants for careers in dance. In addition to their usual lessons, they will complete challenges that prepare them for dancing in a music video, performing at a football halftime show or starring on Broadway. Jojo Siwa, Allison Holker and Maksim Chmerkovskiy return as judges.TuesdayALERT: MISSING PERSONS UNIT 9 p.m. on Fox. Procedural dramas are like reality shows — there is a seemingly infinite variety of niches, and I can’t get enough. If you’ve already cycled through “Law & Order,” “NCIS,” “Chicago P.D.,” then you can start this new series. Set at the Philadelphia Police Department’s Missing Persons Unit, and presented in the style of “Criminal Minds,” each episode follows the team as it investigates a disappearance through an entire story arc.A work of art featured in the documentary “A Revolution on Canvas.”Courtesy of HBOREVOLUTION ON CANVAS 9 p.m. on HBO. Nikzad Nodjoumi, known as “Nicky,” was exiled from Iran because of his art criticizing the government there. Now his daughter, Sara Nodjoumi, has directed and produced a documentary that investigates the disappearance of hundreds of her father’s paintings that were deemed treasonous and aims to locate them.DECISION 2024: SUPER TUESDAY 10 p.m. on NBC. And just like that, another four years have passed, and it is again Super Tuesday. Sixteen states hold their primaries on this day, as the election process moves one giant step closer to cementing the major parties’ nominees. NBC is hosting a panel of journalists and experts to break down the results live and provide analysis.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Kate Winslet on ‘The Regime’ and Resilience In Hollywood

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      Kate Winslet was standing in front of a microphone, breathing hard. Sometimes she did it fast; sometimes she slowed it down. Sometimes the breathing sounded anxious; other times, it was clearly the gasping of someone who was winded. Before beginning a new take, Winslet stood stock still, hands opening and closing at her sides; she looked like a gymnast about to bound into a floor routine. Every breath seemed high-stakes, even though she was well into a long day of recording in a dim, windowless studio in London. Listen to this article, read by Kirsten PotterOpen this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.Winslet was adding grace notes to scenes of herself in “The Regime,” a dark satire created by Will Tracy, a writer and producer on “Succession,” that began airing on Max in early March. Winslet plays Elena Vernham, a dictator ruling precariously over an imaginary Central European country, and she was in the studio rerecording (as is common practice) lines that needed improving, including snippets of Elena’s propaganda: “Even if the protests happening in Westgate were real, which they are not” and “He’s still out there, working with the global elite to destroy everything we’ve built.” Sometimes Winslet laughed out loud after delivering a line, and sometimes she fell completely silent, absorbed in watching a scene of herself with her new recording looped in. “God, she’s such an awful, awful cow,” she said at one point, sounding appalled but also a little awed. The part of Elena, a despot on the verge of a nervous breakdown, is a departure for Winslet, who has chosen, over the course of her career, a wide range of characters who have in common an intrinsic power. Elena is erratic and grasping, with a facade of strength that covers up a sinkhole of oozing insecurity. Winslet gave a lot of thought to how Elena would sound: She chose a high, tight voice, the sound of someone disconnected from the feelings that reside deep in the body. Elena has the slightest of speech impediments, a strange move she makes with her mouth, a hand that flies to her cheek when she is under real stress — those tells are her answer to King Richard’s hump, the body politic deformed. Onscreen, as Elena, Winslet is coifed and practically corseted into form-fitting skirt suits, with lacquered fake nails. The day she was recording, in early January, Winslet might have been any woman at the office: blond hair, a hint of roots starting to show, jeans of no particular timely style that she occasionally tugged up from the waist, a black V-neck sweater she occasionally pulled down at the hem. It’s only when you look directly at her, face to face, that you see the extraordinary — the dark blue eyes, the beauty marks (not one, but two), the elaborately curved mouth.As Winslet recorded, Stephen Frears, one of the show’s two directors, guided Winslet with considerable understatement from his seat across the room: a half-nod here, a thumbs-up there. “Was that all right, Stephen?” Winslet called over after one take; she peered over in his direction, expectant, obedient, professional. Frears, who directed “The Queen” and “Dangerous Liaisons,” among others, was silent, with his eyes closed, his head back. Winslet and a few members of the production team waited for his approval. As the moment stretched on, it seemed that Frears was not deep in thought but deep in sleep. Winslet appeared to register a brief moment of surprise, then smiled and moved on — all right, no problem. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      The ‘Dune’ Popcorn Bucket and the Golden Age of Movie Merch

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      The hilariously suggestive misfire is a reminder of the days when too-weird-to-be-true film mementos could be found in every kitchen cupboard.When I first encountered an image of the popcorn bucket that AMC Theaters is selling to promote Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune: Part Two,” I stared at it for a beat trying to process what I was looking at. The item is supposed to represent a giant sandworm, the beasts that slither under the desert planet Arrakis. On top of the normal container sits a lid that depicts the cylindrical body of the creature emerging from the ground. The opening where you are ostensibly supposed to reach in to snatch some kernels is fashioned like the worm’s maw with its many tendril-like teeth, here rendered in plastic. The bucket is intricately designed, but appears, well, especially anatomical — to put it politely — and somewhat difficult to use to actually get treats into your mouth.The “Dune” popcorn bucket has become a genuine mini phenomenon. The film’s cast and crew have been asked to comment on it, and Villeneuve even told The Times, charmingly, “When I saw it, I went, ‘Hoooooly smokes.’” There was a “Saturday Night Live” sketch that rhymed “bucket” with a phrase that is unprintable here. Yet, the more I followed talk of the bucket, the more I wanted to possess it. (And no, not for the reasons you’re thinking. Get your mind out of the gutter, please.) As a fan of movies and their ephemera, I began to feel as though I needed to have this piece of hilariously suggestive memorabilia in my home.The bucket, both in its sheer strangeness and in the way it has become a cultural moment, reminded me of an earlier era of collectibles — of tie-ins like those McDonald’s “Batman Forever” mugs with badly drawn versions of Jim Carrey’s Riddler that seemed to be a mainstay in 1990s cupboards. But it also is reminiscent of the too-weird-to-be-true marketing misadventures of yore, things that are so unintentionally off-putting that they are also sort of amazing. See the Jar Jar Binks lollipop in which the Gungan alien’s mouth opens to reveal a candy tongue that you are supposed to suck. Ew, to say the least.In some ways the “Dune” bucket is “ingenious,” said Griffin Newman, an actor and merchandise obsessive, because it inspires people to go to movie theaters to buy it. Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesThere’s even a history of this with “Dune” itself. When David Lynch’s 1984 version of the Frank Herbert epic was released, you could buy a sandworm action figure that, once again, looked unnervingly phallic. (There’s one on eBay if you’re willing to shell out.)Not all of my nostalgia is for the unsavory. The recent frenzy reminded me of the things I used to covet when I was a wee fan starting to fixate on film. My main obsession was Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, so when Burger King released a line of light-up goblets with the visages of characters like Aragorn and Arwen etched on their sides, I knew I needed them. (I had other “LOTR”-themed glassware as well, including mugs that revealed the inscription on the Ring of Power when you filled them with hot liquid. Pretty sure those are still in my parents’ house.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Adam Sandler’s ‘Spaceman’ Has an Identity Crisis, Like Many Space Movies

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      With the release of Adam Sandler’s odd, middling and expensive new Netflix film, a look at space movie misfires of the past and how history repeats itself.Not long into “Spaceman,” Adam Sandler’s new somber sci-fi space movie on Netflix, it becomes quite clear that it’s struggling to channel something greater, something better, something already respected.Sandler’s character, a Czech cosmonaut named Jakub, has spent many months alone in a ship investigating a mysterious purple cloud — alone except for an alien arachnid called Hanus (voiced by Paul Dano). Hanus speaks to Jakub — about fear, guilt, pain and the origins of the universe — in a soothing yet stilted tone, evoking the voice of HAL 9000, the conflicted A.I. entity in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” from 1968.The central themes in “Spaceman,” loneliness and disconnection, are fundamental in many cerebral space movies including “2001,” but perhaps more so in Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 Soviet space drama, “Solaris,” about a small crew of scientists who come mentally undone. “Spaceman” also has some “Gravity,” some “Interstellar,” some “First Man,” some “Ad Astra,” the New York Times film critic Alissa Wilkinson wrote in her review.Many middling sci-fi space movies have faced such fates: measured not by what they are but by what they wished they were. Often these films have the potential to be brilliant. “Spaceman” was directed by Johan Renck, who won two Emmys in 2019 for his work on the HBO mini-series “Chernobyl”; Sandler, while a comedian, has soared in complex dramatic roles, notably in “Uncut Gems” and “Punch-Drunk Love”; Jakub’s wife is played by Carey Mulligan, who is up for a best actress Oscar this month for “Maestro.”What is toughest to forgive, though, is that “Spaceman” commits the biggest movie no-no of all: It’s boring. “It is not fun-bad,” Wilkinson writes. “It is maudlin-bad, belabored-bad and also pretty boring-bad.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      In ‘Oppenheimer’ and ‘The Zone of Interest,’ We Hear What We Are

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      Humans have spent much of history coming up with novel ways to exterminate one another, but the defining feature of modern violence is its technologization. With a chilling practicality, systems and tools designed to enhance productivity can also separate the killers from the killing, stifling pesky human impulses like empathy and conscience. But a bomb has only one purpose. So does a concentration camp.Both “Oppenheimer” and “The Zone of Interest” tangle with the psychology involved in creating highly efficient killing machines. Choosing to center on people who make and deploy lethal tools at roughly the same historical moment — an era of unprecedented technological advancement — the filmmakers faced a challenge. Viscerally depicting the psychic gulf between methods of massacre and their creators is not simple in a medium like film. Cinema tends to enforce closeness between us and the characters; we see the wrinkles in their skin, understand them as humans, feel their emotions and project our own onto them. To portray cognitive dissonance requires something unexpected.The solution, for both of these movies, lay in the second most powerful tool available to filmmakers: sound. Not the music, but the knocks and steps and whizzes and shrieks. Generally we’re used to the sound in a film supporting the images. In both “Zone” and “Oppenheimer,” though, sound plays against image in a way that draws attention to itself, disconcerting the audience. Both films are up for Academy Awards in multiple categories, including best picture, which means their nominations for sound design are easy to overlook. But the way each uses sound is striking. It’s engineered as an unsettling agent, a means to carry moral weight from the screen to the audience on a level that approaches the subconscious.THE DIRECTOR OF “OPPENHEIMER,” Christopher Nolan, has long played around with sound in his films, which are often very loud and propelled by an intense, driving score. (Watching one of his films can feel at times as if you’re immersed in one very, very long montage.) Nolan also prefers not to rerecord actors’ dialogue, leaving them mixed into the sound as they were recorded during the performance, which can make them a little hard to hear. He knows, and he doesn’t mind.“Oppenheimer,” with sound design by the frequent Nolan collaborator Richard King, is no different. Most of the three-hour movie, about the creation of the atomic bomb, is guys in suits, talking about fission and geopolitics and other brainy matters over a pulsating score by Ludwig Goransson. But right around the two-hour mark, something startling occurs.If you’ve seen the film, you know the moment. The scientists of the Manhattan Project and select military officials have gathered in the New Mexico desert for the Trinity test, the first trial detonation of a nuclear bomb. It is the wee hours of July 16, 1945. If the test goes well, two more bombs will be deployed in mere weeks to kill hundreds of thousands of Japanese — and, the scientists hope, end the war.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Robert M. Young, Filmmaker Who Indulged His Wanderlust, Dies at 99

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      The subjects of his documentaries included Indigenous peoples, civil rights sit-ins and the war in Angola. His narrative films included “Extremities” and “The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez.”Robert M. Young, an eclectic director whose documentary subjects included civil rights lunch counter sit-ins and sharks, and whose feature films included one about a Mexican American farmer who kills a Texas lawman and one about a woman who takes revenge on her attacker, died on Feb. 6 in Los Angeles. He was 99.The death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his son Andrew.In an interview with the Directors Guild of America in 2005, Mr. Young recalled what attracted him to filmmaking.“I wanted to be in life,” he said. “I wanted to be having adventures, I wanted to be living in the world.”He more than fulfilled that ambition.In the 1950s, he created educational films with two partners, most notably “Secrets of the Reef” (1956), an underwater documentary made at Marineland Studios in Florida and at a reef near the Bahamas that portrayed the life cycles of octopuses, sea horses, lobsters, jellyfish and manta rays.Mr. Young, center, working on the 1956 documentary “Secrets Of The Reef,” which portrayed the life cycles of octopuses, sea horses, lobsters, jellyfish and manta rays.Everette CollectionIn 1960, he was hired by NBC News for its new documentary series, “White Paper.” That year he directed “Sit-In,” about the Black college students whose protests led to the desegregation of lunch counters in downtown Nashville. The next year he worked on a report about the Angolan war for independence against Portugal, for which he walked hundreds of miles with Angolan rebels. The Portuguese government was unhappy with the report.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      How an Argument Resonates in ‘Anatomy of a Fall’

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      The director Justine Triet narrates a sequence from her film, which is nominated for best picture. Triet is also nominated for best director.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.A couple has an argument that escalates in this scene from “Anatomy of a Fall,” the drama from Justine Triet that won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2023, then went on to receive five Oscar nominations this year, including best picture.In the film, the couple’s fight begins as audio that is presented in court where Sandra (Sandra Hüller) is on trial for the death of her husband, Samuel (Samuel Theis).Then, Triet makes the choice to show visuals of the fight, rather than only providing us the sound. We move from the courtroom into this domestic scene in the kitchen. Narrating the sequence, she explained that “sound has the power to give the perfect illusion of the present,” so she wanted to add visuals to give a more complete picture of the fractures between these two people.Triet decided to shoot the scene with two cameras, “not to lose any of their energy,” she said. And she wanted to the scene to take place during daylight, with the sun shining through a window.“Often, very dramatic, intimate scenes are used to being filmed at night, as if intimacy were separate from the rest of life,” she said. “And here, I choose the opposite. And the contrast between light and violence is even stronger for me.”Read the “Anatomy of a Fall” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More