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      ‘Gran Turismo’ Review: Once Upon a Pair of Sticks

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      A popular racing video game series gets turned into an underdog sports drama in this big-screen adaptation.Since the late 1990s, the Gran Turismo racing games for PlayStation have brought in billions of dollars, rivaling the box-office bounties of some movie franchises. It was only a matter of time before a movie offshoot arrived, following in the tracks of other live-action adaptations of PlayStation games, including last year’s “Uncharted.” “Gran Turismo” the movie tells the true (but unlikely) story of Jann Mardenborough, a Gran Turismo maven who became a professional racer of actual cars on actual tracks.Mardenborough’s leap from pixels to asphalt was an effective advertisement for Gran Turismo as more than a game, but his transition wasn’t all smooth. In the director Neill Blomkamp’s dutiful telling, Jann (Archie Madekwe), a teenager from Cardiff, Wales, faces doubters and steep learning curves to go with the racetrack curves. His underdog story — can this digital driver make it in the real world? — doubles as an old-fashioned tale of a young man proving his worth to his family and other skeptics.Madekwe’s Jann is so unassuming that every step in his journey comes as a pleasant surprise. After Jann’s father (Djimon Hounsou) says there’s no future in gaming and brings Jann to his job at a rail yard, Jann goes off and wins a contest held by Nissan to recruit promising Gran Turismo players. (His mother, played by Geri Halliwell Horner, is a bit more encouraging.) He earns a spot in the company’s racing academy, which is overseen by a hard-nosed engineer, Jack (David Harbour), and an unctuous marketer, Danny (Orlando Bloom). Once again Jann exceeds expectations and beats out a more TV-ready competitor for the chance to race professionally.The movie begins to resemble the levels in a video game, as Jann enters races worldwide to clinch his contract with Nissan. He finally beats an obnoxious front-runner (Josha Stradowski) in Dubai and celebrates in Tokyo, but he flips his car on his next race (as the real Mardenborough did in 2015, though the film adjusts the chronology). Like many sports movies, there’s no shortage of training and competition — the perpetual buildup. A finale comes at Le Mans, the annual 24-hour race.Blomkamp’s handling of the track scenes lacks a compelling physicality, or (if you’ll pardon the term) drive — the editing and camerawork could each use a sharper sense of rhythm and velocity. That might not matter so much if it were paired with a strong screenplay, but the platitudinous script here lacks flair (though Jann does have the likable quirk of listening to Enya or Kenny G to chill out before races). Madekwe conveys a youthful vulnerability and an appealing air of quiet doggedness, even if he’s mild-mannered as a performer here. The movie doesn’t need to achieve the same levels of sensation as a wildly popular racing simulator, but it should convey excitement and dynamism in its own cinematic way. When the novelty of watching a gamer become a driver wears off, we’re left with an adequate racing drama in a medium built for so much more.Gran TurismoRated PG-13 for intense action and some strong language. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. In theaters. More

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      The Old West Is New Again

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      When Navied Mahdavian, a cartoonist, and his wife, Emelie, a filmmaker, moved from San Francisco to Mackay, Idaho (population 473), they fixated on their new hometown’s theater. Or, rather, the ghost of a theater.A red and white marquee for the Mackay Main Theater dominated part of Main Street, and Mr. and Ms. Mahdavian, who had moved in pursuit of a cheaper and less frantic way of life, resolved with other community members to reopen the cinema, which had been defunct for years.Before the big reopening, one longtime town resident seemed less than enthusiastic about the plan, Mr. Mahdavian recalled, accusing the theater boosters of trying to import an “artsy-fartsy, social-justice-warrior” sensibility to the Idaho mountains.“We’re actually showing a western,” Mr. Mahdavian said.To which the resident replied: “John Wayne?”Instead, the Mahdavians chose “Damsel,” a new-age western from 2018 featuring a heroine played by Mia Wasikowska, a wimpy male character and a masturbation scene. It didn’t go over all that well.“We probably should’ve anticipated that the reaction in town would be mixed,” said Mr. Mahdavian, 38, who has chronicled his move to a rural area in the forthcoming book “This Country.”By taking an active interest in the West of the American imagination — and the ever-evolving notions about what a western story can, or should, be — the Mahdavians are part of a larger movement.“Every generation is going to interpret differently what it sees in the West,” said Richard Aquila, a historian and author of “The Sagebrush Trail.”Photo Illustration by Kim Hoeckele for The New York TimesCowboys ride in and out of popular culture every few years, propelled by a hunger for stories that are wild, tumultuous and unvarnished. Now, as western style spreads across fashion and entertainment once more, that spirit of reinvention is being applied to reinvent the western itself, inflecting an old genre with new viewpoints.Two cultural stars of the summer, Beyoncé and Barbie, have invoked western tropes. Beyoncé wore a disco cowboy hat tilted over her face and sat atop a silver horse in portraits promoting her Renaissance World Tour, the imagery reminiscent of an extraterrestrial cowgirl. Re-creations of the hat, for fans trying to mimic the look, have sold for over $100 on Etsy. “Barbie,” which has climbed to more than $1 billion at the box office, included a lengthy sequence of Margot Robbie venturing deep into the Wild West of Los Angeles while wearing a white cowboy hat, a pink bandanna and a western-cut pink ensemble. And Taylor Swift may no longer wear western gear in public, as she did early in her career, but there were plenty of cowboy boots and cowboy hats to be seen among her fans headed to the Eras Tour shows this summer.History rhymes, fusty fashions turn trendy and cult classics become newly beloved — so it’s no surprise that cowboys keep cycling back into the popular imagination.“There’s a longstanding tradition in American history of looking West,” said Andrew Patrick Nelson, a historian of American cinema and culture at University of Utah. “Part of the appeal is the idea you can live a more authentic, exciting and rugged life.”Coming out of a period of pandemic malaise, millions of people have gone that-a-way — in their clothing choices, social media posts, and selections of TV shows and movies. In fashion, high-end brands, including Prada, unveiled spring collections comprising get-ups that smacked of the Old West. On TikTok, thousands of women have posted videos of themselves modeling outfits billed as “coastal cowgirl” — linen shirts, boots, hats and well-worn denim shorts. The #CoastalCowgirl hashtag has racked up tens of thousands of views.“Glam western is probably the No. 1 trending thing in fashion right now,” said Taylor Johnson, 36, who owns the concert wear boutique Hazel & Olive.The silver cowboy hat worn by Beyoncé in promotional images for her Renaissance tour was a fashion inspiration for fans on their way to one of the singer’s concerts in New Jersey this summer.Amir Hamja/The New York TimesTaylor Swift fans, outside the MetLife Stadium in New Jersey in May.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesBarbie, played by Margot Robbie, went full cowgirl as she explored the world beyond Barbie Land in “Barbie.”Warner Bros. PicturesBrunello Cucinelli, the fashion designer, said the “ease and sportiness” of western style lent itself to perennial cycles of popularity. “As a younger man, I watched many Sergio Leone movies and listened to Johnny Cash,” Mr. Cucinelli said in an email interview. “While visiting America for the first time, I remember vividly my trips to Texas and how men dressed with their tapered jackets and those great belts with large buckles.”“Yellowstone,” the soapy “red state” rancher television series, was ranked by Nielsen as the top scripted program last year. In interviews, several TikTok users said their #CoastalCowgirl posts represented their efforts to mimic Beth Dutton, the ruthless main daughter of the show played by Kelly Reilly.Kimberly Johnson, 39, a stay-at-home mother in Delaware, said the series offered a reprieve from the Covid-era divorce drama of her own life. When she saw the #CoastalCowgirl trend, she said the thought that crossed her mind was: “Now I have an excuse to dress like I’m from ‘Yellowstone’!”“Yellowstone,” which is filmed and based in Montana, pumped some $700 million in tourism spending into the state’s economy, on top of $72 million in production spending from Paramount, according to a study from the University of Montana (which was sponsored by the Media Coalition of Montana and Paramount). Nearly 20 percent of visitors to the state in 2021 attributed their travel in part to watching the series, in what economists called “‘Yellowstone’-induced” tourism.Jordan Calhoun, a writer in New York who edits the how-to site Lifehacker, was one of the fans who went West because of the show. He said his affection for the series came about in the early weeks of the coronavirus pandemic, when he was locked down in his Harlem apartment and felt the need for a landscape that looked different from what he was seeing out his window. He longed for rows of pines, big stretches of sky. And he wanted to experience the Dutton family’s way of life.“I don’t know how to fix a fence or ride a horse or grow crops,” Mr. Calhoun, 38, said. “Self-reliance, or country living, is something that got really appealing during the pandemic.”Jordan Calhoun, a writer and editor who lives in New York, went West because of his love for “Yellowstone.”Jordan CalhounHe spent five days on a Colorado ranch in 2022. Although the trip confirmed for him that it wasn’t what he wanted full time, it taught Mr. Calhoun, who is Black, that the western landscapes he loved on TV were something he could go and enjoy. That was a realization far afield from what he had felt watching westerns when he was growing up.“I watched ‘Young Guns’ a thousand times,” he said. “There wasn’t much of me in it.”But as much as it is a place on the map, the West is also an idea, one that changes over time. And amid the latest round of fascination with cowboy culture, the western, a staple film genre since the early days of cinema, is being reimagined for a growing audience.From 2000 to 2009, Hollywood made 23 movies categorized as westerns, according to Comscore, which compiles box office data. That number shot up to 42 from 2010 to 2019. Some of these new films feature Black cowboys, Native American protagonists, queer heroes and damsels far from distress. Some are directed by female filmmakers, like Jane Campion, whose 2021 movie “The Power of the Dog,” which features a most likely closeted rancher, received more Academy Award nominations than any other film last year.Alaina Roberts, an American historian who wrote “I’ve Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land,” was raised with all the classic images of what a western film looked like: Davy Crockett wrestling a bear, John Wayne squinting through the Texas dust. Her mother loved those films.But when Dr. Roberts started her own career as a scholar, those weren’t the visions of the West that captured her imagination. Instead, she wanted to research stories of her own Black family members, who were enslaved by the Chickasaw and Choctaw tribes in what is now Ardmore, Okla. She also grew fascinated by the Buffalo Soldiers, all-Black regiments who policed the plains.“We shouldn’t be afraid of complexity,” said Ms. Roberts, 32, who consulted on the recent documentary series “The Real Wild West,” which focuses on Black and Hispanic cowboys, Buffalo Soldiers, Native leaders and women on the plains. “It doesn’t mean we’re trying to rewrite history.”TV shows and movies including “Yellowstone,” “The Harder They Fall,” “Bitterbrush,” and “The Power of the Dog” are reshaping the cowboy image.Top: Paramount Network, Netflix; Bottom: Magnolia Pictures, NetflixThe list of movies, TV shows and documentaries taking on these more tangled western tales keeps growing. There’s “The Harder They Fall,” a 2021 film from the director Jeymes Samuel about Black outlaws, sharpshooters, horse riders and frontier townspeople. The director Kelly Reichardt has put her stamp on the genre in two films: “Meek’s Cutoff,” which is centered on pioneer women played by Michelle Williams, Shirley Henderson and Zoe Kazan, who realize that a Native American man they meet on the Oregon Trail is more trustworthy than their white guide; and “First Cow,” about a pair of misfits, played by Orion Lee and John Magaro, trying to make a go of it in mid-19th-century Oregon. There’s also Chloé Zhao’s “The Rider,” a rodeo story about the Lakota Sioux tribe.Ms. Mahdavian, 41, who moved with her husband from San Francisco to rural Idaho, is another filmmaker who has trained her camera on the West. Her 2022 documentary, “Bitterbrush,” follows female cattle ranchers near her new home. “I don’t have an agenda to kill the western,” she said. “I find myself drawn to telling stories that feel true to a certain type of lived experience.”Western films have tended to reflect the experience of the people who produced them and the ideas in the air at the time of their production, film historians say. The westerns of the World War II era, for example, fulfilled a hunger for clear-cut messages. Some see “Stagecoach,” the 1939 John Wayne classic, as a parable for the New Deal: A group of Americans (a whiskey salesman, a drunken doctor) have to work together to prevail over what’s lurking around them.Then came the 1960s, when social changes raised questions about the old order, driving a desire for new types of anti-establishment western heroes, like Clint Eastwood’s antihero “Man With No Name” character, or the jovial outlaws played by Paul Newman and Robert Redford in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”“It’s almost like a Rorschach inkblot test,” Richard Aquila, 76, a historian and author of “The Sagebrush Trail” said. “Every generation is going to interpret differently what it sees in the West.”John Wayne, the quintessential western actor, in the 1939 film “Stagecoach.”Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesFor die-hard lovers of western films and novels, the periodic resurgence of the genre is invigorating because it sends new fans toward old classics. W.F. Strong, a professor of communications and culture at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, delights in hearing from young readers who have recently discovered Larry McMurtry’s 1985 novel “Lonesome Dove,” which follows a group of lovably bone-headed cowpokes from their tiny hometown, Lonesome Dove, to the plains of Montana.Mr. Strong, 68, said he particularly loved how Mr. McMurtry, who died in 2021, was able to capture the lives of ordinary Americans in the novel. “He was writing about my people — and I didn’t realize you could do that as an author,” he recalled. “When I was young, I thought you had to be writing about glamorous things far away, like England.”For many people, including those taking part in the #cowgirl memes on social media, that’s part of the appeal — the idea that the western experience seems within reach, that wide-open plains are closer than they appear. Kyra Smolkin, a content creator in Los Angeles who has been posting her cowgirl-themed fashions on TikTok, said she grew up in Toronto “romanticizing small towns and ranches.”“What’s cool about cowgirl style is it’s attainable — there’s no barrier to entry,” Ms. Smolkin, 30, said. “I love that there’s an ease to it. It’s easy to make your own.”And for the Mahdavians, the couple who moved from San Francisco to Idaho, there was a thrill to making the western story their own, by setting up a home in the kind of landscape that they had long associated with the movies. They built a house on a small plot of land about a 20-minute drive from Mackay. It is surrounded by snow-capped mountains, and there are no people in sight.They have also gotten past the mixed reception they received for their opening night at the renovated theater on Main Street. They pulled it off by showing “The Quiet Man,” a 1952 western romance starring John Wayne.“We had, like, 70 people come, which for a population of 500 is a lot,” Mr. Mahdavian recalled. “People definitely responded to John Wayne.”First collage: Bettmann/Getty Images (background); Amir Hamja/ The New York Times, Maggie Shannon for The New York Times, Paramount Network, Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images (hats); Paramount Network, Jason Kempin/Getty Images (shirts); Gabriela Campos/Santa Fe New Mexican, via Associated Press, Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York Times, George Frey/EPA, via Shutterstock, Roy Rochlin/Getty Images (boots)Second collage: George Rinhart/Corbis, via Getty Images (background); Amy Sussman/Getty Images (body) More

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      ‘Scrapper’ Review: You’re on Your Own, Kid

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      In Charlotte Regan’s feature-length debut, a girl wise beyond her years reconnects with her father, an immature drifter.Charlotte Regan’s feature-length debut, “Scrapper,” is as whip-smart as the 12-year-old girl at its center. Georgie (played wonderfully by the newcomer Lola Campbell) lives alone in her apartment in London following the death of her mother, and spends her days stealing bicycles for money and playing hooky with her friend Ali (Alin Uzun).Through some clever voice mail trickery, she has convinced the inattentive adults in her life that she is being taken care of by her nonexistent uncle. That all changes when her estranged father, Jason (Harris Dickinson), shows up to the house to assume the role as Georgie’s primary caretaker — but not without some tension.“Scrapper” is tender without falling into sappiness. Regan doesn’t romanticize Georgie’s struggles with poverty, grief and bullying, which are accompanied by the film’s gritty sense of humor. At the same time, the film’s vivid cinematography, by Molly Manning Walker, fills the screen with symmetry and pastel colors; there’s a youthful energy to the way many of the scenes are shot, even as Georgie is trying to haggle her way into a better deal for a stolen bike.Through it all, Campbell and Dickinson portray a father-daughter relationship between a girl wise beyond her years and an immature drifter, meeting in the middle to form a rough-hewed yet sincere connection.ScrapperNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Retribution’ Review: Stay Out of the Car Pool Lane

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      What mastermind keeps convincing Liam Neeson to make these tough-daddy thrillers?For 25 minutes, Nimrod Antal’s “Retribution” is a malevolently fun movie. A workaholic banker named Matt Turner (Liam Neeson) is chauffeuring his malcontent children to school when he answers a ring from an unknown caller who says the family’s luxury S.U.V. is rigged with a bomb. The villain demands obedience — or else.The first command: confiscate the kids’ phones. Talk about an impossible mission. “Are you psycho?” Matt’s teenage son (Jack Champion) snipes, barely looking up from the screen. Alas, as soon as the tykes behave, the tension evaporates.We’re left to wonder what mastermind keeps convincing Neeson to make these tough-daddy thrillers — and when will this genre escape its own tropes of sepia-tinted skies, italicized poster fonts and titles seemingly chosen by plopping a finger onto a page of the Old Testament?Antal and the screenwriter Chris Salmanpour have adapted the 2015 Spanish flick “El Desconocido” with a script that feels rewritten in all caps. In Neeson’s opening sequence — the only instance where we see him standing up — he squeezes in an impressive boxing workout before his boss (Matthew Modine) interrupts to call him both a “credit to capitalism” and something unprintable here. (Matt’s estranged wife, played by Embeth Davidtz, would agree with the latter.)It’s clear why these films need Neeson: He commits to every line like his life actually does depend on it. But gravitas alone can’t salvage the frustrating plot contrivances and ridiculous dialogue that make the characters sound dumber and dumber the more they explain their motivations. If you endure the shenanigans long enough to see the baddie reveal their identity with a preening taunt — “Surprise?” — you might, as I did, holler back, “No!”RetributionRated R for language and violence. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘BS High’ Review: Greed and Football

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      A saga of high school football players taken advantage of by a dubious start-up is played for entertainment in this flawed documentary.In August 2021, the high school football powerhouse IMG Academy played a lesser-known team, Bishop Sycamore, in a game broadcast on ESPN. IMG won. The score was 58-0. That lopsided match precipitated a shocking revelation: Bishop Sycamore wasn’t a true high school. The tale is one of greed and grift. But “BS High,” a documentary about the saga, is too taken by the audacity of Roy Johnson, the founder of Bishop Sycamore, to critique his actions.The directors Martin Desmond Roe and Travon Free have gained unfettered access to Johnson to retrace the coach’s founding of a football academy ostensibly intended to help Black athletes succeed. At first, Johnson is depicted as an amusing, comically inept figure dodging unpaid hotel bills, buying groceries at bottom-market prices and concocting cons so egregious there are no laws against them. It’s all done with the goal of turning Bishop Sycamore into a recruitment hub for top-tier colleges.The questions Roe and Free volley at Johnson aren’t used to investigate his misdeeds, but rather played, through sharp cuts, as setups for punch lines. That method wears thin as these young players, in their own interviews, share the broken promises, shattered dreams and physical perils they endured. Ultimately, the film shifts full blame to what Johnson took advantage of: a larger system that exploits young athletes for big money and television ratings. But by repurposing the story in a way that seems geared for pure entertainment, “BS High” can come off as similarly exploitative.BS HighNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch on HBO platforms. More

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      The Thrill of Watching a Film That Isn’t Online Anywhere

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      They are a reminder of the countless histories that don’t exist there — and the work demanded to sustain them.When I was growing up in California, my mother would often describe a film that it was impossible for me to see: the great Carmen de Lavallade dancing to Odetta, dressed all in white like a priestess. She’d seen the footage a long time ago — 1974? — at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts by Lincoln Center in Manhattan, where she was researching the history of modern dance in America. De Lavallade was one of the first Black dancers to enjoy a long career in the theaters of high culture. But it wasn’t her reputation that secured her place in my mother’s memory; it was the spiritual elegance of her gestures. “She was attempting to embrace everything,” my mother told me. Even though we couldn’t watch the film together, she could share it in words — how de Lavallade seemed to gather, in her arms, everything lovely and lost. He’s got the whole world in his hands, Odetta sang, and de Lavallade’s dance made us both believe it — that we wouldn’t be dropped. Her grace was powerful enough to pierce me across the distance and the decades, to make me feel what I had never seen.It was partly this vision of de Lavallade that tempted me, in April, to attend a screening of rare dance films curated by Solange Knowles and her studio, Saint Heron, for a performance series at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Knowles called the series the Eldorado Ballroom, after a legendary music venue in Houston, her hometown. The memory of that other space consecrated her own roving tabernacle of Black performance. There was no program listed online, but given de Lavallade’s pride of place among 20th-century dancers, I suspected I might find her there — if not as my mother described her, then perhaps from some other angle that would help explain her lasting hold on our imaginations. In the dark theater, I was anxious and alert: If she was there, would I recognize her?Most dancers age off camera, leaving us with the iconic image of the body at its athletic apex.The silver screen went black. The title card announced: “A Thin Frost.” Suddenly, there she was — much older than I’d expected to find her, but unmistakable nonetheless, her high cheekbones and supple neck. De Lavallade and two men were facing one another in metal chairs. They stuttered through cryptic gestures and sidelong glances to a soundtrack of unmusical human noises, as if searching for something to say without recourse to the familiar phrases of port-de-bras and arabesque. I looked for signs of the grace my mother had described, but this was not a hymn, and the dancers did not seem willing or able to repair the world. Instead, the world was smashed and scattered, and they were sifting through the pieces.This was the first work performed by Paradigm, a company of dancers over 50 that de Lavallade founded in 1998 alongside her pioneering peers Dudley Williams and Gus Solomons Jr. — both gone now, Solomons just a few weeks ago. They were, as this paper reported, free to be “as idiosyncratic as they wish,” having matured beyond “sheer youthfulness.” Most dancers age off camera, leaving us with the iconic image of the body at its athletic apex, but de Lavallade had refused to stay still. And why should she have? Dance is about movement, not stasis — dramatizing how one moment transforms to become another. I could feel my frozen image of de Lavallade in her so-called prime melt on contact with this film, time’s “thin frost” warming to release the smell of living earth. Somehow my own body loosened in response, so that I became a reflection of the dancers onscreen, each of us seated on either side of a magic mirror.As de Lavallade faded out and the remaining films unspooled, I remained vividly aware of the dancers as real people whose lives go on beyond the final cut. I kept grasping for them as the dissonant scenes swirled past: flashes of silver dunes blown through someone’s saxophone; a slender silhouette writhing inside an amniotic sac of silk. When I went home, I pored over the brochure I’d picked up by the door, eager to pin those shifting shapes to names, dates, material details that would stay in place. Four of the films were available on streaming platforms — Vimeo, YouTube, the Criterion Channel — and I watched them on repeat. But I couldn’t find the footage of de Lavallade anywhere: She had disappeared, again, into the archive.We often let ourselves believe that everything, now, is available to us — that nothing is lost and every experience can be accessed and repeated with the right subscription. But this blinds us to all the material that has not been translated to the new media, that no one is clamoring to see in part because we don’t even know it exists. With dance in particular, film is the only medium capable of “capturing” the form, but dance films that aren’t narrative musicals rarely receive wide circulation or preservation. This is doubly true for dance films created by Black artists who aspire to something more than commercial success. The problem, however, is becoming more universal: Many of us know the feeling of trying to summon an old season of a favorite TV show and coming up empty-handed, as companies unceremoniously disappear beloved works of art and avoid paying royalties to the people who produced the “content.” I fear for a future in which our primary experience of visual culture is a fire hose of viral video clips — GIFs, reels, TikToks — endlessly replicable but utterly forgettable.With the Eldorado Ballroom series, Knowles modeled another form of circulation, directing our attention to the moments that survive not because they’re easy to share, but in spite of great difficulty, because they mattered to someone that much. As I followed de Lavallade’s shadow down a rabbit hole of research, I thought of something Knowles said in a recent interview with Vulture: “That’s our mission, to just create that kind of studying around artists” like her. Some films might escape my grasp, but I’ve been rewarded by discovering, slowly, a dense network of relations among the dancers I’d seen onscreen: They had studied under one another, danced the same roles, passed through the same institutions, crossing conventional boundaries between genres and eras. The lines extend in all directions — how de Lavallade saw her friend Alvin Ailey on their high school gymnastics team and dragged him to her dance class with Lester Horton, who directed the first racially integrated company in the country; how Josephine Baker brought the young de Lavallade to Paris for her European debut. Especially before film, this is how movement was propagated from generation to generation: by hand. I wasn’t dancing — I was digging around online — but I felt as if I’d been handed something I had to sustain, and I liked feeling that my efforts reciprocated the physical intensity I’d seen reproduced in the movie theater.Since I watched “A Thin Frost,” I’ve worried and wondered over how I might hold on to an experience I may never relive. I’ve tried to describe the film by phone to my mother, returning, without repeating, the gift she gave me in childhood. I’ve tried to fill in the world around the film by seeking out interviews de Lavallade recorded later in life. At 83, she told a reporter at The Boston Globe that the structure for her one-woman show, “As I Remember It,” would have to be “Beckett-like.” As with a dancing body, the past has a bewildering vitality, “it jumps around” and makes us sweat through endless rehearsals. No technology can substitute for the human labor — effortful, embodied, attentive — to really make something last. No new god is coming to the rescue. It’s up to us to take the whole world in our hands, and pass it on.Opening illustration: Source photographs by Jack Mitchell/Getty Images; Reg Innell/Toronto Star, via Getty Images. More

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      Hollywood Studios Disclose Their Offer on Day 113 of Writers Strike

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      The public disclosure of the Aug. 11 proposal was an unusual step and suggested an attempt to go around union leadership and appeal to rank-and-file members.In an apparent attempt to break a labor stalemate that has helped bring nearly all of Hollywood production to a standstill, the major entertainment studios took the unusual step on Tuesday night of publicly releasing details of their most recent proposal to the union that represents 11,500 striking television and movie writers.The studios are confronting significant decisions about whether to push the release of big-budget films like “Dune: Part Two” into the next year, and whether the network television lineup for the 2023-2024 season can be salvaged or reduced to reality shows and reruns.Shortly before the public release of the proposal, several chief executives at the major Hollywood companies, including David Zaslav, who leads Warner Bros. Discovery, and Robert A. Iger, the Disney kingpin, met with officials at the Writers Guild of America, the writers’ union, to discuss the latest proposal, according to a statement by the union’s negotiating committee. By releasing the proposal, the companies are essentially going around the guild’s negotiating committee and appealing to rank-and-file members — betting that their proposal will look good enough for members to pressure their leaders to make a deal. The writers’ union said that the studios’ offer “failed to sufficiently protect writers from the existential threats that caused us to strike in the first place.” The union described the public release of the companies’ proposal as a “bet that we will turn on each other.” The writers have been on strike for 113 days. The studios and writers resumed negotiations on Aug. 11 for the first time since early May. Since then, there has been optimism within the entertainment industry that the labor disputes might be on a path to resolution.But the public disclosure of the proposal by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of the studios, suggests that negotiations may have again reached an impasse. The studios and writers’ union had generally agreed to adhere to a media blackout while at the bargaining table, and the studio alliance has only occasionally released public statements before the guild.“We have come to the table with an offer that meets the priority concerns the writers have expressed,” Carol Lombardini, the lead negotiator for the alliance, said in a statement that accompanied the details of the latest proposal. “We are deeply committed to ending the strike and are hopeful that the Writers Guild of America will work toward the same resolution.”Hollywood has been effectively shut down since tens of thousands of Hollywood actors joined striking screenwriters on picket lines on July 14. Both the writers and actors have called this moment “existential,” arguing that the streaming era has deteriorated their working conditions as well as their compensation levels.The studios said that their latest proposal offered the “highest wage increase” to writers in more than three decades, as well as an increase in residuals (a type of royalty) that has been a major point of contention. The studios also said that they had offered “landmark protections” against artificial intelligence, and that they vowed to offer some degree of streaming viewership data to the guild, information which had previously been held under lock and key.In the statement, the studios said that they were “committed to reaching an equitable agreement to return the industry to what it does best: creating the TV shows and movies that inspire and entertain audiences worldwide.” More

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      Streaming Movies: ‘Bernie,’ ‘Damsels in Distress’ and More

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      Atypical star vehicles, ensemble indies, high-powered genre pictures and gripping historical documentaries are among the highlights of this month’s offbeat picks.‘Damsels in Distress’ (2012)Stream it on Hulu.Eleven years ago, the “Barbie” mastermind Greta Gerwig was known not as the director behind a billion-dollar blockbuster, but as one of the most charismatic actresses on the indie film scene. Her talents are nicely showcased in this sharp-witted, frequently quotable comedy of manners and satire of campus life. The writer and director is Whit Stillman, who helped define smart, talky ’90s indies with his triple play of “Metropolitan,” “Barcelona” and “The Last Days of Disco”; this, his first feature in 13 years, was a welcome return to form. Gerwig is at her complicated best as Violet, who helps her friends (Megalyn Echikunwoke, Carrie MacLemore and Lio Tipton, all memorable) navigate the unfortunate men of the fictional Seven Oaks College; Adam Brody is likably squirrelly as the campus cad.‘The Seagull’ (2018)Stream it on Max.Gerwig’s frequent leading lady Saoirse Ronan is one of the many familiar faces in the ensemble cast of this well-crafted adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s theatrical classic. Brian Dennehy, Billy Howle, Elisabeth Moss and Corey Stoll also appear, as residents and visitors of a picturesque country estate outside Moscow, though Annette Bening shines brightest in the showcase role of Irina Arkadina, the comically vain and heartbreakingly complicated diva of the Russian stage. The director Michael Mayer works a bit to hard to jazz up the text with showy camera movements and excessive coverage, but those momentary distractions can’t detract from the fine acting on display here.‘Non-Stop’ (2014)Stream it on Netflix.Liam Neeson’s third act as a hero of pulpy action pictures has seen its ups (“The Grey”) and its downs (the “Taken” sequel of your choosing), but this tightly-wound potboiler is one of the genuine highlights. He stars as Bill Marks, an ex-cop-turned-air-marshal battling a mysterious killer who’s bumping off the passengers — one every twenty minutes — of an international flight. The director Jaume Collet-Serra takes the right approach to this somewhat silly premise, crafting the picture as a cross between Agatha Christie, “Airport” and “Speed,” and the ensemble cast (which includes Michelle Dockery, Scoot McNairy, Julianne Moore, Lupita Nyong’o, Linus Roache and Shea Whigham) helps keep this wild flight on course.‘Drug War’ (2013)Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.The celebrated Hong Kong action auteur Johnnie To (“Election,” “Triad Election,” “Breaking News”) brought his decades of film craft to bear in this fast-paced, furiously entertaining crime epic. There are characters galore and subplots aplenty (as is To’s custom), but the underlying premise is simple: a bad guy (Louis Koo’s ruthless drug kingpin), a good guy (Sun Honglei’s dedicated undercover cop) and a pursuit. To’s breathless set pieces are as relentless as ever, but the picture is about more than mere action; he gives dimension to what could have been cartoon characters, and surveys the human consequences of the titular conflict.‘Bernie’ (2012)Stream it on Hulu.The true story of how a beloved East Texas mortician murdered a wealthy widow could’ve made for a probing character study (or, perhaps, a tacky Netflix true crime docuseries). Instead, the director and co-writer Richard Linklater achieves a delicate and precise mixture of dark comedy and small-town portraiture, thanks in no small part to a cast that includes Jack Black (Linklater’s “School of Rock” star) as the mortician, Matthew McConaughey (Linklater’s “Dazed and Confused” star) as the district attorney who prosecutes him and the great Shirley MacLaine as the victim, a characterization she pitches somewhere between Ouiser from “Steel Magnolias” and Beelzebub.‘A Hologram for the King’ (2016)Stream it on Max.Tom Hanks movies were still an event in 2016, yet few paid much attention to this light yet lofty adaptation of Dave Eggers’s novel. Perhaps it was just a bit too odd, too steeped in the hands-off style and indie sensibility of its director Tom Tykwer (“Run Lola Run”), but it’s an undiscovered gem of Hanks’s late period. He stars as Alan Clay, a recently divorced and undeniably desperate American consultant in Saudi Arabia for what is intended to be a brief sales pitch to the Saudi government. But days pass as he waits for his audience with the Saudi king, resulting in an unexpectedly effective combination of insightful character study and “Waiting for Godot”-inspired absurdism.‘Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story’ (2017)Stream it on Netflix.Few film stars of the 1930s were as shimmeringly seductive as the Viennese vamp first called Hedy Kiesler, and first known for her then-shocking in-the-buff turn in the 1933 Czech import “Ecstasy.” But this is no mere tale of Old Hollywood stardom. Lamarr lived an eventful and exciting life, of sin and scandal and, most notably, invention — particularly her development of a communication system that formed the foundation of modern Wi-Fi, GPS, and Bluetooth. She was a woman more dynamic and complex than any of the characters she played, and Alexandra Dean’s documentary tells her story with excitement, verve and plentiful (not to mention well-earned) sympathy.‘Radio Unnameable’ (2012)Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.For decades, Bob Fass was a comforting voice for nocturnal New Yorkers — the overnight host on WBAI-FM, an early developer and practitioner of “free-form radio,” opening his phone lines and airwaves to an assortment of searching callers and outlaw entertainers. Paul Lovelace and Jessica Wolfson’s affectionate documentary tells the story of Foss’s show and his life (to the limited extent that they were separate at all), via a riveting collection of archival audio recordings, photographs, films and memories, from his early searching days to the loosely organized and occasionally out-of-control gatherings of what he called his “cabal” of loyal listeners. On Fass’s show, insomniacs and night workers and eccentrics found not only a megaphone, but a community; Lovelace and Wolfson’s film gently draws the line to contemporary high-tech counterparts, while still longing for the idealism and possibility of the past. More