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      in Movies

      ‘Poor Things’ Choreographer Uses Dance to Tell the Story

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      Constanza Macras, founder of the Berlin dance company DorkyPark, uses “dance as a function, as a language,” in her work, be it for the stage or the screen.“I have become the thing I hated, the grasping succubus of a lover,” sulks Duncan Wedderburn, the charming rake played by Mark Ruffalo in a scene set in a belle epoque Lisbon restaurant midway through Yorgos Lanthimos’s “Poor Things,” which is nominated for 11 awards at Sunday’s EE British Academy Film Awards, known as the BAFTAs.Bella Baxter, the film’s heroine played by Emma Stone, doesn’t seem to hear him. She is captivated by the rhythmic thump-thump-thump of the orchestra serenading the dinner guests. As if possessed, she follows the beat to the dance floor, where she lets loose with a joyous, primitive and sublimely wacky dance that has become one of the year’s defining screen moments.For Constanza Macras, the film’s choreographer, that scene was about more than just having fun. “It’s a moment that defines the relationship,” explained Macras, 53, who hails from Argentina and is based in Berlin.Macras noted that “what is great about Yorgos is that dance is a ‘pivot moment’ in his movies.”Schore Mehrdju“It’s the moment that she starts to go free from Duncan,” Macras said of Stone’s character — a woman reanimated with the brain of her unborn infant. Duncan has whisked her on a trip around the world in the hopes of debauching her.Instead, the Lothario finds that he can’t keep up with her in the bedroom or, as the scene under discussion reveals, on the dance floor. When Duncan leaps to his feet as well, he tries to save the situation and assert his control. “He’s trying to constrain her, he’s trying to show her how to dance normally,” Macras said.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

      Jaime King Is On a Journey

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      Jaime King had been feeling that something was off. “There’s this strange, volatile energy,” the actress, director and model said on a recent Saturday. She perched on the hearth of a fireplace at her home in Los Angeles, knees to her chest, gaze flitting between the fire and the view beyond a sliding-glass door. “If I’m not looking at you, it’s because I’m listening,” she said to a reporter.“I was nervous earlier, and then I was like, shaky, and then I was like, whoa, what is this vibration?”The premiere of her latest film, “Lights Out,” in which she plays a morally corrupt police officer, might have had something to do with her apprehension. Ms. King, a self-described introvert, was about to embark on a promotional blitz that would take her from the hillsides of Hollywood to the scrum of New York.“Socially speaking, I don’t really go a lot of places,” she said. “Once in a blue moon, I’ll go to the Bungalows,” meaning San Vicente Bungalows, the members-only club that has replaced the Soho House as L.A.’s premier venue for people of means. Besides that, “I’ve been keeping my circle very tight.”As a teenage model for labels like Christian Dior and Chanel, Ms. King, now 44, graced the covers of magazines, including a 1996 cover story for The New York Times Magazine called “James Is a Girl,” by Jennifer Egan and photographed by Nan Goldin.Ms. King choosing a card from Angie Banicki, a publicist turned tarot reader. “I’m used to doing readings where I have to bring the other person into it,” said Ms. Banicki. “But I came in, and the portal was open.”Damien Maloney for The New York TimesWe 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

      At the Berlin Film Festival, Tension Onscreen and Behind the Scenes

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      The final edition overseen by a pair of once celebrated festival directors starts Thursday. Their successor will face financial headwinds and political hurdles.When Mariëtte Rissenbeek and Carlo Chatrian took over the Berlin International Film Festival in 2019, many hoped it would mark a new beginning for the festival, one of the most important in world cinema and the largest by audience numbers.Under its previous leadership, some argued, the event had grown bloated and unglamorous compared with competitors like Cannes and Venice. They hoped the pair would reinvigorate the Berlinale, as the festival is known, by streamlining its offerings and attracting more high-profile movies.Five years later, the directors are departing under a cloud of controversy, and many will be debating their legacy at this year’s edition, which begins on Thursday.Rissenbeek, who oversees the Berlinale’s finances, announced last March that she would be retiring after this year’s festival. And in the summer, Germany’s culture minister, Claudia Roth, said that the festival would return to the leadership of a single figure, eliminating Chatrian’s position as artistic director.That decision spurred pushback: Over 400 filmmakers and artists, including the directors Martin Scorsese and Claire Denis, signed an open letter in September praising Chatrian and calling his dismissal “harmful, unprofessional and immoral.” Others have argued that Chatrian’s removal was justified, and that the pair never fulfilled their early promise.In December, Roth announced that Tricia Tuttle, an American who has previously helmed the London Film Festival, would take over the Berlinale after this year’s edition. She will inherit a sprawling program as well as financial challenges and a perilous political backdrop.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

      ‘Bleeding Love’ Review: Ewan and Clara McGregor, on the Road

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      Ewan McGregor plays father to his real-life daughter Clara McGregor in this indie road-trip movie that’s also a meandering journey to healing.This week’s Valentine blues arrive courtesy of “Bleeding Love,” a father-daughter story about love, lies and family trauma starring a real father-daughter duo. The dramatic duet opens with the nameless father (Ewan McGregor) already behind the wheel of his pickup truck with his nameless, angrily sullen daughter (Clara McGregor) riding shotgun. They’re on a highway headed toward Santa Fe, N.M., though it soon becomes evident that they’re also on the road to reconciliation — that byway many indie-film families travel in order to heal.Sincere and grindingly predictable, this particular journey mixes tears and reams of dialogue, accusations and confessions with the usual roadside attractions, including a convenience store, a quirky motel and some lightly offbeat American types. The daughter has a serious addiction problem that she won’t acknowledge despite the hospital wristband she’s wearing and the booze and pills she pilfers. Her dad has heavy issues, too, as well as a new family, and after years of being estranged from the daughter, he is unsure how to close the divide between them. So, they drive and they talk while stealing glances at each other. The miles rack up.Written by Ruby Caster and directed by Emma Westenberg, “Bleeding Love” drifts and lurches for a wearying 102 minutes. This is Westenberg’s feature directing debut (she’s also made commercials and music videos), and she handles the material with generic professionalism. She and her director of photography, Christopher Ripley, give the movie a pretty, diffused visual glow that, like the script, helps soften anything that could seem too unpleasant or potentially off-putting. The movie could use some roughness, particularly given the lifetime of heartache and grievances that the daughter voices amid cigarette drags.There are moments when Ewan McGregor’s performance — with its glints of hurt and anger — points to a tougher, truer, more nuanced movie than the one you’re watching. Clara McGregor generally has to go bigger and louder than her father, and she’s fine, though whenever her character threatens to become gnarly, the movie retreats, as if someone were worried at giving offense. It’s too bad, especially because it’s hard to see why this movie was made other than to expand Clara McGregor’s résumé. (She helped write the story with Caster and Vera Bulder, as served as a producer.) I genuinely wish her well, and better material.Bleeding LoveNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      in Music

      Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez, the Diva of ‘Diva,’ Dies at 75

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      A soprano who rose from South Philadelphia to the opera houses of Europe, she was memorably seen and heard in a 1981 film considered a paragon of cinematic style.Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez, a South Philadelphia-bred soprano who sang in the opera houses of Europe and gained even more fame for playing the title role in the style-soaked 1981 French thriller “Diva,” died on Feb. 2 at her home in Lexington, Ky. She was 75.Her daughter and only immediate survivor, Sheena M. Fernandez, said the cause was cancer.Trained at the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia and later at the Juilliard School in New York City, Ms. Fernandez made her mark in the 1970s as Bess in the Houston Grand Opera’s international traveling production of Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess.” The tour took her to Europe, where she caught the eye of Rolf Liebermann, the impresario known for reviving the Paris Opera. He offered her a two-year contract.It was in a 1980 performance as Musetta in “La Bohème” alongside Plácido Domingo and Kiri Te Kanawa that she caught the attention of the French director Jean-Jacques Beineix, who was looking for a figure radiant enough to serve as the diva at the heart of his forthcoming film.“Diva” was considered a high-water mark in the movement known as the cinéma du look, a high-sheen school of French film often centered on stylish, disaffected youth in the France of the 1980s and ’90s. A film with all the saturated color and gloss of a 1980s music video, it was an art-house hit that became a cult favorite for the initiated.The story revolves around a young opera fan named Jules (played by Frédéric Andréi) who grows so infatuated with an American opera star named Cynthia Hawkins that he surreptitiously tapes one of her performances — despite her well-known decree that none of her work be recorded, since it would capture only a part of the power and immediacy of her grandeur.Ms. Fernandez in “Diva” with Frédéric Andréi, who played an infatuated fan.Rialto PicturesWe 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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      ‘Madame Web’ Review: Dakota Johnson Can’t Save This Spidey Spinoff

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      The actress stars as a clairvoyant in the latest entry to the Spider-Man franchise, using her charm to rise above this flat, predictable movie.The only real bummer about “Madame Web,” the latest installment in the Spider-Man chronicles, isn’t that it’s bad, but that it never achieves memorably terrible status. The story is absurd, the dialogue snort-out-loud risible, the fights uninspired. Even so, there are glimmers of wit and competency. And then there’s its star, Dakota Johnson, who has a fascinating, seemingly natural ability to appear wholly detached from the nonsense swirling around her. Most actors at least try to sell the shoddy goods; Johnson serenely floats above it all.A misterioso clairvoyant, Madame Web is a secondary Spider-Man character who met the web-weaver in the comics in 1980 while regally parked on a life-support system shaped like a round-bottom flask. Blind and plagued by a debilitating autoimmune disease, she had a standard super-type get-up — a black unitard veined with lines that converge in a web — that was offset by a white-and-black hairdo that suggested she shared a stylist with Peter Parker’s editor J. Jonah Jameson. She entered with “a smell of ozone and disinfectant and age,” the classy intro explained, and with “a voice that crackles like ancient parchment.”Johnson’s Cassandra Webb — Cassie for short — is far younger and seems more like a patchouli and cannabis kind of gal, despite the frenetic wheel skills she displays in her job as a New York paramedic. Her powers haven’t yet emerged when, after a preamble in the Peruvian Amazon, she is speeding through the city in 2003. As with many superheroes, Cassie has a tragic back story and so on, a generic burden that Johnson’s palpably awkward charm humanizes. If the actress at times seems understandably baffled by the movie she’s in, it’s because she hasn’t been smoothed into plastic perfection by the star-making machinery. Johnson seems too real for the phoniness thrown at her, which is her own super power.The British director S.J. Clarkson has multiple TV credits on her résumé, including a few episodes of the Netflix series “Jessica Jones,” about the hard boozing, fighting and fornicating superhero. Johnson’s Cassie is sadder and more naturally offbeat than Jones, and like most big-screen superheroes, Cassie doesn’t seem to be getting any noncombative action. Yet she too doesn’t fit easily in Normal World. One of the better scenes in “Madame Web” happens at a baby shower, where Cassie inadvertently wipes the smiles off the faces of a roomful of women by talking about her dead mother. It’s squirmy, funny filler: the guest of honor is Mary Parker (Emma Roberts), Spidey’s soon-to-be mom, who chats with his future uncle, Ben (Adam Scott).Clarkson shares screenwriter credit with Claire Parker as well as with the writing team of Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless, whose collaborations include a string of critically maligned box-office fantasies: “Dracula Untold,” “Gods of Egypt,” “The Last Witch Hunter” and “Morbius.” (That’s entertainment!)“Madame Web” hits the prerequisite genre marks, more or less, as Cassie starts developing her second-sight skills and begins shuffling into the near future and back. One of the character’s more attractive attributes is that her powers are mental rather than physical, which seems to have flummoxed the filmmakers. The movie never coheres narratively, tonally or, really, any way; one problem is the people behind it don’t know what to do with a woman who thinks her way out of trouble.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

    • 150 Shares189 Views

      in Theater

      Dating Woes? Nina Conti Has the Answer, or at Least Some Jokes

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      In “The Dating Show,” the British comedian and ventriloquist initiates close encounters of the potentially romantic kind. Laughs will definitely ensue.Meaningful, long-lasting connections can take a while to form, but when Nina Conti met her future partner-in-crime, she knew they were simpatico right away.“It was one of those moments where I felt very grounded as soon as I saw his face,” Conti, a British performer and writer, said in a video conversation. “It was the chemistry between my personality and something so cozy about him. You can put him in a handbag, no problem.”It might be worth mentioning that the face in question belongs to Monkey, the puppet that has been Conti’s main scene partner for most of her nearly 25 years as a ventriloquist.“You can actually project anything onto that face,” she said. “Wisdom is what I choose to project onto it. When I look at him, I expect him to say something wise that might get me out of a tight pinch. But it’s weird because onstage it’s kind of the opposite: He’s throwing me in the [expletive] all the time, and I’m clambering to apologize and keep up.”Creating and sustaining personal relationships seems to matter to Conti, who inherited the dummy collection of her lover and mentor, the theater maker Ken Campbell, after he died in 2008. (She explored that grief-stricken time in the 2012 documentary “Her Master’s Voice,” which also follows her to a ventriloquist convention in Kentucky.) Now, close encounters of the potentially romantic kind are at the center of “The Dating Show,” which Conti is performing at SoHo Playhouse through March 2.Monkey, however, is not her main collaborator in that piece — the audience is.“I expect him to say something wise that might get me out of a tight pinch,” Conti said of Monkey. “Onstage, it’s kind of the opposite: He’s throwing me in the [expletive] all the time, and I’m clambering to apologize and keep up.”Charlotte Hadden for The New York TimesWe 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

      ‘Bob Marley: One Love’ Review: Mostly Positive Vibes

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      This patchy biopic lauds the Marley of dormitory posters, a snapshot of a lifestyle hero who is always the coolest guy in the room.Bob Marley was an enigma, a fascinatingly flawed idealist as most interesting figures are. Born into poverty in Nine Mile, Jamaica, the young Marley had weak singing pipes but a stubborn drive to be heard. He forged himself into the voice of his island and beyond, belting reggae anthems that have become hymnals to the world’s downtrodden, as well as anyone who likes a good groove. He died in 1981 at the age of 36 before he had to witness his legacy undergo a tough cross-examination. Did Marley’s generosity to strangers balance out his dismissal of women? Did his own painful childhood pardon him for being a distant father? Did his sincere proclamations of peace and unity accomplish anything — and is it fair of us to expect that they should?Such grappling is justified, although it wouldn’t be pleasant for anyone. Reinaldo Marcus Green’s patchy and unsatisfying biopic “Bob Marley: One Love” doesn’t even try. It lauds the Marley of dormitory posters, a snapshot of a lifestyle hero who is always the coolest guy in the room. At most, the movie takes his image from flat to lenticular. If you never got to see Marley move, Kingsley Ben-Adir is a fine simulacrum.The problem is the script, credited to Terence Winter, Frank E. Flowers, Zach Baylin and Green. Smartly, the writers avoid the standard birth-to-grave template to focus on two years in London, where Marley, a pacifist, survived a surge in election-year violence, even when gunmen shot up his house, injuring him and three others. But the film doesn’t have much to say about his time in exile. Was Marley feeling betrayed by his country? Was he homesick? How was he handling his ascension to international superstardom? When Marley and his buddies from the Wailers (who are presented as a doting throng, not as individuals) check out the Clash, we can’t even tell if they’re having fun. (For the curious, the real Marley vibed with punk rock, saying, “Punks are outcasts from society. So are the Rastas.”)Occasionally, we see random flashbacks. The best involve Marley’s relationship with Rita, his wife and backup singer, who is played as a teen by Nia Ashi and in adulthood by a compelling Lashana Lynch, before their outside dalliances reroute their marriage into what’s portrayed onscreen as a chaste, tender loyalty. The rest are missed opportunities for insight into the man.According to personal accounts in Roger Steffen’s first-rate biography “So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley,” the singer’s mother was uncomfortable that her son was half-white and, when she remarried, made the boy sleep underneath the house apart from her new family; here, she’s merely a blurry figure cradling young Marley to her bosom.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