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      With ‘Imaginary’ and ‘Lisa Frankenstein,’ Defending PG-13 Horror

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      Not everyone needs a scary movie that goes to the darkest extremes. Here’s why milder horror films can still pack a punch.It’s nothing new to say that the scariest beasts are those left to the imagination: In the darkened corners of a room, on the ocean floor, in the vacuum of space — terror tends to lurk in the periphery, where it taunts us with what we don’t (or worse, can’t) know. There’s one unfairly maligned horror-movie feature that, when used wisely, can aid with such artful restraint: the humble PG-13 rating.Since many horror nerds predicate their identity on being able to enjoy content that is too depraved for the general public, they tend to look down on the PG-13 scary movie, viewing it as watered-down or wimpy. These fans can tend to turn genre viewing into a sort of contest in which the one who can stomach (or even delight in) the most deviant content wins: You can’t call yourself a real horror fan unless you’ve seen “Salò”/“Cannibal Holocaust”/all three sequences of “The Human Centipede.”Yes, it may be that one of the most powerful things the genre can do is subvert social norms, and it’s difficult to push boundaries when you’re pitching to a broader or younger audience. But it’s not impossible. Sam Raimi’s “Drag Me to Hell,” for instance, about a cursed loan officer, contains Raimi’s over-the-top camp sensibility, yet reels in some of his signature gore. It opts for softer gross-outs like bugs and vomit instead of heavy blood and guts, but it doesn’t sacrifice impact. I once saw a screening of it at MoMA that played like a metal show, with the film’s sound blasting from the speakers and squeals of delight jumping from the audience with each increasingly demented sequence.A scene with Pyper Braun from “Imaginary,” a new Blumhouse PG-13 film.Parrish Lewis/LionsgateThe genre is a great tool for more than just provocation, though. The latest PG-13 horror from Blumhouse, “Imaginary” (in theaters March 8), experiments with just how little you can show while still provoking fear with the first teaser for the film, which prompts audience members to close their eyes and imagine visuals to accompany audio cues. The full film plays with the perception of things that are seen but not heard, or heard but not seen — a figure just at the corner of a frame, a child responding to the directions of a sinister imaginary friend that only she can see.Gore Verbinski’s “The Ring” (2002), about a haunted videotape, is regarded as one of the best PG-13 horror films, and its most explicit image comes in the first 20 minutes. The rest of the movie relies on atmosphere to create tension, and does so stunningly; the soft static hum of an analog television, a fly plucked gently by its wings to bring it from inside a screen to outside of it. Even the film’s signature ghost is defined by what’s hidden: her long, dark hair pulled forward to shield her face.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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      Criticism of Israel at Berlin Film Festival Stirs Antisemitism Debate

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      The backlash to some winners’ speeches at the festival shows how polarized and fraught Germany’s culture scene has become.When Yuval Abraham and Basel Adra walked onstage at the Berlin International Film Festival on Saturday night, they had come to talk about more than movies.Abraham and Adra, an Israeli and Palestinian filmmaking team, had just won the festival’s award for best documentary for “No Other Land,” a movie about Palestinian resistance to Israeli campaigns in the occupied territories. It was “very hard,” Adra said, to celebrate the award “when there are tens of thousands of my people being slaughtered and massacred by Israel in Gaza.”He called upon German lawmakers to “stop sending weapons to Israel,” before Abraham called for a cease-fire and an end to Israel’s occupation.The audience, which included the culture minister of Germany, Claudia Roth, applauded loudly, and there were whistles and cheers in the hall.In the days since, Abraham and Adra’s speeches have become the latest flashpoint in a long-running debate in Germany around whether public statements by filmmakers, musicians and other artists should be described as antisemitic if they don’t line up with Germany’s official stance on Israel.Scores of German journalists and politicians have denounced the speeches. On Sunday, Kai Wegner, the mayor of Berlin, said in posts on X that the filmmakers’ statements were filled with “intolerable relativization,” because they left out any mention of Hamas.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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      ‘Mary Poppins’ Gets New Age Rating in Britain for Racist Language

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      The musical about a nanny with magical powers had been classified for all audiences since 1964, but the British Board of Film Classification has issued new guidance.The rating for “Mary Poppins,” the beloved children’s musical about a nanny with magical powers that was released 60 years ago, has been raised to PG in Britain because of the use of “discriminatory language,” the British Board of Film Classification said.The rating change follows a wave of recontextualizing and reclassifying of films from bygone eras for modern audiences amid shifting cultural norms and mores.“Mary Poppins” includes two uses of an offensive racial slur to describe an Indigenous group in South Africa. It is first heard when Admiral Boom asks Michael, a child, if he is going on an adventure to defeat said group. Admiral Boom repeats the slur during a chimney sweeps dance sequence when he shouts that he is being attacked. The dancing figures he spots in the distance are not Black Africans, but white dancers with blackened faces from soot.The film was originally rated “U,” for Universal, upon its release in 1964, and again in 2013 for a theatrical release, the B.B.F.C. said in a statement. When it was resubmitted in February for another theatrical release, it was reclassified as PG.PG is the second-least severe of six ratings in Britain. The strictest is 18, which prohibits anyone under that age from renting, buying or seeing the film in movie theaters.“We understand from our racism and discrimination research, and recent classification guidelines research, that a key concern for people, parents in particular, is the potential to expose children to discriminatory language” or behavior which they may find distressing or repeat without realizing the potential offense, a spokeswoman for the board said in a statement.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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      What if Mom’s Not to Blame?

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      In a recent crop of films and television shows, grown men are obsessed with their mothers — even if they’re not the monsters audiences expect them to be.IN ANY DISCUSSION of the enduring cultural madness surrounding the subject of mothers and sons, it would probably be natural to start with Sigmund Freud. But let’s treat as a given all the ways in which he blazed a trail for decades of mother bashing and jump one century forward, so that we can examine the philosophy of a different scholar of male frailty and its relationship to unresolved maternal trauma. “Boy, I love meeting people’s moms,” Ted Lasso says in a 2021 episode of the character’s namesake Apple TV+ series. “It’s like reading an instruction manual as to why they’re nuts.”Listen to this article, read by Ron ButlerOpen this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.It’s a funny line, it’s a brutal line, it’s an unfair line — and it’s also an exquisite setup for a big reveal that wouldn’t air until two years later, during the show’s third season, when, for the first time, we meet Ted’s mother and finally learn (or think we do) just where his own blind spots, irrationalities and insufficiencies come from. It’s an “aha!” moment of a kind in which television and movies have long specialized: If you’re seeking the deepest understanding of why any man is the way he is and can’t be anything more, different or better, there’s someone you have to meet. And it’s all her fault.The tortured dynamic of mothers and sons in popular culture has always been its own peculiar thing. Mother-daughter narratives have as profuse a tradition, but with a key difference: In those stories, no matter how complex the interplay of competition and control and selfishness and sacrifice and ego, there’s the base line belief that a relationship is supposed to exist into adulthood. Mothers and sons, though? Not so much. As movies and television have often had it, theirs is a bond that, if both parties are healthy, is meant to reach some kind of tacit endpoint that results in male independence and maternal letting go. If a grown man and his mother are still somehow at each other’s throats or in each other’s business, that’s pathology. Whether played for laughs, tears or shrieks, it’s almost always treated as a sign of dysfunction. Over decades, the pop-psychology conversation about mothers and sons has evolved from a fixation on all the ways in which the former can ruin the latter to more nuanced fretfulness about toxic masculinity and the difficulty of raising proud boys who don’t become Proud Boys or turn horrible in any of the other ways the world encourages them to be. But when that talk turns toward mothers, the verdict, as reflected in movies and television, has never moved all that far beyond “You’re doing it wrong.”Armen Nahapetian (left) and Zoe Lister-Jones in 2023’s “Beau Is Afraid.”Courtesy of A24That may, at long last, be changing. The past year has brought an exceptionally varied and thematically rich crop of movies exploring men and their — to use the proper scientific term — mommy issues. They range from the extremely dark comedies “Beau Is Afraid” and “Saltburn” to the more heartfelt and sincere “All of Us Strangers” to the coming-of-age period piece “The Holdovers” to the singular mash-up of character study and tabloid scandal excavation that is “May December.” The movies all showcase mothers and sons; many of them seek to untangle relationships knotted and gnarled by neediness, selfishness or cruelty. By the end of most of them, blood is on the floor, and the collateral damage is steep. But as different as their approaches are, what these films have in common is a questing, thoughtful desire not simply to return to an old trope but to complicate, undermine or even explode it. That said, old tropes die hard, and this one — the hapless son who’s been emotionally mangled by a monster mother — has been entrenched in movies and television for close to 75 years. Freud himself may not have been around to watch them emerge but, by the 1950s, references to psychiatry and analysis were ubiquitous in movies and on TV comedies and talk shows, and mothers, in the cultural parlance of that era, were a necessary evil — something for healthy and well-adjusted men to get past and get over. Men who couldn’t, or worse, didn’t want to, were portrayed as marionettes tied to and practically strangled by their mothers’ apron strings. They were labeled neurotic, and often implicitly labeled homosexual — an accusation that couldn’t then be made overtly in entertainment but could definitely be winked at. Doting mothers, not to mention distant or domineering or strong or fragile ones (for mothers, there was no winning path except quiet self-sacrifice), could make their sons timid, unstable, sexually dysfunctional, effeminate, perverse or outright mad. It became a kind of cruel, knowing joke: Think of Robert Walker’s simpering, coy, mommy-obsessed murderer in Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train” (1951) or Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates, whose macabre credo “A boy’s best friend is his mother,” earnestly stated to Mommy stand-in Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), is the closest thing “Psycho” (1960) has to a punchline. Or in a more benign mode, consider the hanging-on-to-heterosexuality-by-a-thread beta male that Tony Randall used to play in all those Doris Day-Rock Hudson movies. “I’ve been talking to this psychiatrist about my mother for two years now,” his character says in “Pillow Talk” (1959), adding, “It’s perfectly healthy. He dislikes her as much as I do!”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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      Chris Gauthier, ‘Once Upon a Time’ and Hallmark Movies Actor, Dies at 48

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      Mr. Gauthier appeared in dozens of television shows and films, including “Freddy vs. Jason” and “Watchmen.”Chris Gauthier, a prolific actor known for his roles in the television shows “Once Upon a Time” and “Eureka,” died on Friday. He was 48.Tristar Appearances/Event Horizon Talent, which represented Mr. Gauthier, said in a statement that he died “after a brief illness.” His representatives did not say where he died.Mr. Gauthier, who was born in Britain and grew up in Canada, had roles in more than 20 movies, including “Freddy vs. Jason” in 2003 and “Watchmen” in 2009. He also appeared in dozens of television shows, including “Smallville,” “Charmed” and “A Series of Unfortunate Events,” according to IMDb, and in several short films.He was best known for playing William Smee in “Once Upon A Time,” a series that blended real life and fantasy in the fictional town of Storybrooke, Maine, where storybook characters live, trapped by an evil queen. Mr. Gauthier appeared in 14 episodes as Smee, who is based on the “Peter Pan” character Mr. Smee, Captain Hook’s first mate.Mr. Gauthier also played Vincent, a cafe owner, on the science fiction TV series “Eureka.” He appeared in 67 episodes of that show, from the pilot episode and through Season 5, according to IMDb.In an interview in 2021, Mr. Gauthier said that he started acting in school plays and that he acted in amateur and professional theater during high school.“I was always a ham, trying to be a funny guy,” he said.Chris Gauthier was born on Jan. 27, 1976, in Luton, England. He said in an interview in 2020 that he moved to Canada when he was 5 and grew up in a small town in British Columbia.“There wasn’t a lot going on there in terms of film and television,” he said. “So for me, it was about just the love of acting. It wasn’t about money. It wasn’t about anything but the sheer love of acting.”His acting career onscreen began in 2000, when he appeared in an episode of the TV series “Cold Squad.” His first two film credits were in 2002 for small roles in “40 Days and 40 Nights” and “Insomnia.”His television roles were largely limited to appearances in one or a few episodes until “Eureka” premiered in 2006. The show takes place in the fictional Pacific Northwest town of Eureka, where many of the world’s brightest minds live in an odd collective that produces technological inventions the rest of the world does not know about.Among his more recent credits, Mr. Gauthier had appeared in seven episodes of the western drama “Joe Pickett.”Information about his survivors was not immediately available.He said in the 2021 interview, his partner encouraged him to move to Vancouver to pursue an acting career in television and film.“I wasn’t super-duper motivated because I was happy doing plays,” he said of the move. “But I was like ‘OK,’ and it worked out.” More

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      ‘Oppenheimer’ Wins Producers Guild Award. Is the Best-Picture Oscar Next?

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      With the victory, the Christopher Nolan biopic has swept the guild prizes, a strong predictor of its chances at the Academy Awards.There’s simply no stopping “Oppenheimer.”On Sunday night, the Producers Guild of America gave its top film award to Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster biopic about the father of the atomic bomb, completing a clean sweep of major industry prizes that suggests “Oppenheimer” will cruise to a best-picture victory at the Oscars next month.“We’ve never won this before,” Nolan noted in his acceptance speech, though the PGA had previously nominated his films “Dunkirk,” “Inception” and “The Dark Knight.” Nolan, who produced the film with Emma Thomas, his wife, and Charles Roven, continued, “Every time we found ourselves invited into this room, we felt such support for whatever leaps we’ve taken or whatever risks we’ve taken from a group of people who understand how difficult it is to get anything made.”The PGA Awards are often considered a dry run for the Oscars’ best picture race since the guild shares significant member overlap with the academy and uses the same preferential ballot to pick its winner. (This year the PGA nominees matched exactly the Oscar best-picture list.) Since 2009, when both groups expanded the number of best-film nominees from five, the PGA winner has repeated at the Oscars all but three times.Can “Oppenheimer” be beat? Only one film has ever taken top prizes from the producers, directors and actors guilds, as “Oppenheimer” has done, and still lost the best-picture Oscar, “Apollo 13” (1995). Nolan’s film is far better situated than that one was with two acting wins possible for stars Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey Jr. So the question now isn’t whether “Oppenheimer” will triumph at the Oscars, it’s how many statuettes it will earn before taking the top prize.Elsewhere at the PGA Awards, which were held at the Ray Dolby Ballroom in Hollywood, the documentary prize went to “American Symphony,” while “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” was named the best animated film. The top TV prizes went to season-long sweepers “Succession” (best episodic drama), “The Bear” (best episodic comedy) and “Beef” (best limited series).Here’s the complete list of winners:FilmFeature Film“Oppenheimer”Animated Feature“Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse”Documentary“American Symphony”TelevisionEpisodic Drama“Succession”Episodic Comedy“The Bear”Limited or Anthology Series“Beef”Television Movie or Streamed Movie“Black Mirror: Beyond the Sea”Nonfiction Television“Welcome to Wrexham”Live, Variety, Sketch, Stand-up or Talk Show“Last Week Tonight With John Oliver”Game or Competition Show“RuPaul’s Drag Race”Sports Program“Beckham”Children’s Program“Sesame Street”Short-Form Program“Succession: Controlling the Narrative”New MediaInnovation Award“Body of Mine” More

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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘Shogun’ and ‘The Regime’

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      FX premieres a new show set in Japan in the 1600s. A new mini-series starring Kate Winslet airs on HBO.For those like myself who still haven’t cut the cord, here is a selection of cable and network TV shows, movies and specials that broadcast this week, Feb. 26-March 3. Details and times are subject to change.MondayTHE VOICE 8 p.m. on NBC. The people involved in this singing competition are working overtime — the show is beginning its 25th season though it has only been on the air for 13 years. Niall Horan (the reigning champion and two-time winner) and Gwen Stefani are not returning as judges, but the show is debuting a coaching duo — the singers Dan + Shay. They’ll be joined by the returning judges Chance the Rapper, John Legend and Reba McEntire.TuesdayHiroyuki Sanada in “Shogun.”Katie Yu/FXSHOGUN 10 p.m. on FX. This limited series, based on a novel by James Clavell and a remake of a previous adaptation, takes place in Japan in the 1600s and centers on Lord Yoshii Toranaga as members of the Council of Regents turn against him. Attention shifts when a mysterious European ship turns up on the shore of a small fishing village.WednesdaySURVIVOR 8 p.m. on CBS. This show, 46 seasons in and still going strong, returns with the host Jeff Probst and 18 castaways who are headed to Fiji to compete and survive. Contestants noted that this season might be a departure from the calm and feel-good vibe of the past couple of years — backstabbing, arguments and breakdowns are back, baby!REAL HOUSEWIVES OF BEVERLY HILLS 8 p.m. on Bravo. Two “Housewives” reunions in a row? I am ordering a family-size bag of SkinnyPop and a five-liter box of wine. Andy Cohen, of course, will be moderating. The sneak peek of the reunion shows that the drama starts before the ladies have even sat down on set — as Cohen is seen telling Kyle Richards that Erika Jayne “wants me to eviscerate you.”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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      ‘Dahomey’ Wins Top Prize at Berlin International Film Festival

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      The documentary, directed by Mati Diop, was awarded the Golden Bear.The top prize at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival was given to “Dahomey,” a documentary by the French filmmaker Mati Diop about 26 looted artworks that were returned to Benin from France in 2021.The unconventional feature, narrated in part by the gravelly, imagined voice of one of the artworks, is a playful exploration of the legacy of colonialism and the interplay between history and identity in present-day Benin. It is Diop’s first feature since “Atlantics,” a drama about Senegalese migrants that won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019.In Diop’s acceptance speech for the prize, known as the Golden Bear, she said that “Dahomey” was part of the “collapsing wall of silence” around the need to return artworks looted by colonial powers to their original owners. “We can either get rid of the past as an imprisoning burden,” she said, “or we can take responsibility for it.”This year’s jury was led by the Kenyan Mexican actress Lupita Nyong’o and included the German director Christian Petzold, whose film “Afire” won the runner-up prize at last year’s festival in Berlin, and the Spanish director Albert Serra.Ha Seong-guk and Isabelle Huppert in “A Traveler’s Needs,” directed by Hong Sang-soo.Jeonwonsa Film CompanyThis year’s runner-up prize was presented to “A Traveler’s Needs,” by the prolific Korean filmmaker Hong Sang-soo, who also won awards at three of the last five editions of the event. His typically understated film stars Isabelle Huppert as an eccentric Frenchwoman who has a series of encounters in Seoul.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