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      Is ‘May December’ the Most Fun Film at Cannes?

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      The movie stars Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore as cravenly self-interested women. Its director, Todd Haynes, is relieved that festival audiences are laughing.At the Cannes Film Festival premiere of “May December” this week, something happened in the first few minutes that put director Todd Haynes at ease. It took place at the end of the movie’s second scene, as Gracie (Julianne Moore) gets ready for a family barbecue that will be attended by Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), a famous actress who is preparing to play Gracie in a film.As Gracie crosses her kitchen and opens her fridge, Haynes zooms in on Moore and plays a dramatic music cue. The viewer is on high alert: Something significant is about to happen! Instead, Moore announces mildly, to no one in particular, “I don’t think we have enough hot dogs.” And the Cannes audience burst out laughing.That’s exactly the reaction Haynes was hoping for. Though plenty of viewers will read “May December” in a straightforward way, the subject matter is so juicy that Haynes more than welcomes a playful interpretation.“I was encouraged that the audience felt permission to enjoy the film,” he told me over coffee, “and appreciate it at the same time.”Haynes may be understating things: “May December” is the most fun movie that’s played at Cannes this year, a well-reviewed entertainment that fest-goers have been quoting nonstop since its premiere. There is a whiff of tabloid scandal at its core, since Gracie is loosely based on Mary Kay Letourneau, the teacher convicted in 1997 of raping her sixth-grade student Vili Fualaau, whose baby she gave birth to in jail and whom she later married. Gracie and her husband, Joe (Charles Melton), have a similar back story, but when Elizabeth travels to their Savannah, Ga., home to shadow them for a week, they present her with a picture-perfect image of long-married domestic bliss.Still, the strength of their union is predicated on never truly revisiting its origin, and as Elizabeth pokes, prods and asks invasive questions, theirs is a marriage under siege. Gracie will do whatever she has to in order to keep her family together, but Elizabeth is just as determined to crack her facade, and as both women face off in a series of electric encounters, the self-interest that motivates them is often so craven that you can’t help but laugh.“As we were cutting it, it felt funnier than I really knew even reading or shooting the movie,” Haynes said. “We didn’t play it for laughs — it just has a sardonic wit about it.”“I was encouraged that the audience felt permission to enjoy the film,” Todd Haynes said of “May December.”Gonzalo Fuentes/ReutersDoes Haynes agree with the critics who’ve called the film campy? “That was never, ever a term I applied to the script or style of shooting,” he said, though he understood why writers might be tempted to use the word: “‘Camp’ is maybe a too catchall term these days for an excited state of reading things, where you’re encouraged to read something against itself at times. And that’s exactly what I hoped would happen, especially with a sense of pleasure involved, and amusement.”In the festival’s biggest bidding war, Netflix prevailed with an $11 million price that should presage a major awards campaign for Portman, who makes Elizabeth’s fully committed insincerity so compelling.“She was so invigorated and excited — like mischievously so — to play with the expectations that people would bring to the movie,” Haynes said. “At first you think Elizabeth will be our comfortable way in to this sordid back story, and then you start to really re-examine who she is and feel that she is not a reliable narrator.”The film could also be an awards breakout moment for Melton, whose Joe comes to the fore in the final act as he movingly scrutinizes the life path he was locked into as the boy at the center of a tabloid scandal. “We were so lucky to find him for this,” Haynes said of the actor, previously best known for “Riverdale.” (Between Melton and the “Elvis” star Austin Butler — last year’s Croisette breakout — the CW-to-Cannes pipeline has become a real thing.)Haynes has been juggling his duties on “May December” with a career retrospective in Paris that has highlighted films like “Carol,” “Far From Heaven” and “Safe” (the latter two also starring Moore), and he has welcomed each as a distraction from the other. “One has to filter it a bit just to survive it all, and it’s heady looking back at my whole creative life and history,” he said. “I would be in pools of tears otherwise.”The retrospective will soon end with a screening of “May December,” and that feels fitting: This is the most mainstream film Haynes has yet made, but it’s still packed with thematic layers, and Haynes welcomes any interpretation you’ve got, be it serious or funny.“If there’s a thinking process that runs parallel to watching the movie, that’s superb,” he said. More

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      How the New ‘Little Mermaid’ Goes Back ‘Under the Sea’

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      The director Rob Marshall discusses his take on the musical number featuring Daveed Diggs as Sebastian and Halle Bailey as Ariel.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.When the director Rob Marshall took a journey “down where it’s wetter,” he decided to bring a dance company with him.The beloved musical number “Under the Sea” has received a makeover in the new version of “The Little Mermaid,” this time featuring one live performer (Halle Bailey as Ariel) and a host of exotic computer-generated dancing sea creatures flanking her.Narrating the scene, Marshall called it “the most challenging musical sequence I’ve ever created.” He had to figure out how to introduce dance into the scene and make it “feel organic.”To pull it off, he “took a page out of Walt Disney’s playbook.” Disney worked with the Ballets Russes to bring animated sequences to life in “Fantasia.” And here, Marshall worked with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, bringing its members to London to execute the choreography of the scene. Then, CG animators used the company’s dance as a template to animate the movement of the sea creatures.Read the “Little Mermaid” review.Read an interview with Halle Bailey.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      Predawn Picket Lines Help Writers Disrupt Studio Productions

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      Workers from other unions have shown solidarity with the strikers, catching entertainment companies off guard.At 5 a.m. on a recent weekday, a lone figure paced back and forth outside the main entrance to the Fox Studios lot in Los Angeles. Peter Chiarelli, a screenwriter, was walking the picket line.He held a sign reading “Thank You 399,” a message to the local branch of the Teamsters union, whose members he hoped would turn their trucks around instead of crossing his personal picket line to enter the lot, where Hulu was filming the series “Interior Chinatown.”“It’s passive-aggressive,” Mr. Chiarelli, who wrote the films “Crazy Rich Asians” and “The Proposal,” said of his sentiment — sincere if the Teamsters turned back and sarcastic if they entered.Since the Hollywood writers’ strike began on May 2, Mr. Chiarelli and others like him have been waking before dawn to try to disrupt productions whose scripts had already been finished.“We need to shut down the pipeline,” he said of the shows in production.The practice, which was not used to any real effect when the writers last went on strike in 2007, initially caught some studio executives off guard. And many of them — as well as plenty of people in the Writers Guild of America, the union that represents the writers — have been surprised that it has had some success.Mr. Chiarelli, taking a picture of a truck entering Fox Studios, hopes his presence will make Teamster drivers turn around.J. Emilio Flores for The New York TimesShowtime paused production on the sixth season of “The Chi” after writers gathered for two straight days outside the gates of the Chicago studio where it was filming. Apple TV’s “Loot” shut down after writers picketed a Los Angeles mansion where filming was taking place. The show’s star, Maya Rudolph, retreated to her trailer and was unwilling to return to set.Over 20 writers trekked from Los Angeles to Santa Clarita, Calif., to picket the FX drama “The Old Man,” starring Jeff Bridges. The overnight action kept Teamsters trucks inside the Blue Cloud Movie Ranch, Mr. Chiarelli said, and crews had difficulty working. The show soon suspended production.A Lionsgate comedy starring Keanu Reeves and Seth Rogen, with Aziz Ansari making his debut as a movie director, shut down last week after just two and a half days of filming in locations around Los Angeles after loud, shouting writers picketed all three of its sets.“While we won’t discuss the specifics of our strategy, we’re applying pressure on the companies by disrupting production wherever it takes place,” a Writers Guild of America spokesman said in a statement.Eric Haywood, a veteran writer who is on the union’s negotiating committee, put it more plainly. “If your movie or TV show is still shooting and we haven’t shut it down yet, sit tight,” he wrote on social media last weekend. “We’ll get around to you.”A representative for the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of the studios, declined to comment.Both sides have privately said a much greater sense of solidarity among unions than during the last writers’ strike has made it harder for workers from other unions to cross picket lines. Productions are also more geographically widespread than they were 15 years ago. In addition to fortified Los Angeles soundstages, writers have picketed locations in the New Jersey suburbs, New York’s Westchester County and Chicago. And social media has provided a way to alert writers to quickly get to specific picket lines.Each day, the writers send out calls for “rapid response teams” when they learn about a production’s call time and location.“Breaking: they’re shooting on Sunday … we’re picketing on Sunday,” a writer posted on Twitter, asking people to get together immediately in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn to disrupt a production. “Please amplify.”“I think everybody is getting behind us because they see that if we all stick together, we can make some real achievements,” said Mike Royce (“One Day at a Time”), who has joined Mr. Chiarelli in his some of his predawn pickets.“The Old Man,” starring Jeff Bridges, is one of several productions that stopped filming because of picketing by writers.Prashant Gupta/FXThe writers have disrupted other events as well. Netflix canceled a major in-person presentation for advertisers in New York amid concerns about demonstrations. The streaming company also canceled an appearance by Ted Sarandos, one of its co-chief executives, who was to be honored at the prestigious PEN America Literary Gala. A Boston University commencement address by David Zaslav, the chief executive of Warner Bros. Discovery, was interrupted by boos and chants of “Pay your writers!” from demonstrators and students.While the makeshift picket lines have disrupted individual productions, it’s not clear that they’ve had much effect on the strike itself. Negotiations haven’t resumed since they broke down on May 1, and the industry is bracing for the possibility that the strike could last for months.The writers contend that their wages have stagnated even though the major Hollywood studios have invested billions of dollars in recent years to build out their streaming services. The guild has described the dispute in stark terms, saying the “survival of writing as a profession is at stake.”But production shutdowns are affecting not only the studios. Crews and other workers — like drivers, set designers, caterers — lose paychecks. And if the shutdowns accumulate and more people are unable to work, some wonder whether the writers will begin to erode the current good will from other workers.Lindsay Dougherty is the lead organizer of Local 399, the Teamsters’ Los Angeles division, which represents more than 6,000 movie workers, from the truck drivers the writers are trying to turn away to casting directors, location managers and animal trainers. A second-generation Teamster, Ms. Dougherty is one of the union’s few female leaders. Her copious tattoos, including one of the former Teamster leader Jimmy Hoffa, and her frequently profane speech have made her a bit of a celebrity to the writers during the strike.And she said the solidarity with the writers remained strong.“I think collectively, we’re all on the same page in that streaming has dramatically changed the industry,” Ms. Dougherty said in an interview. “And these tech companies that we’re bargaining with, during the last writers’ strike — Amazon, Apple, Netflix — they weren’t even part of the conversation.”Asked if the Teamsters were tipping off the writers about the timing and location of productions, she demurred.“The Writers Guild is getting tips from all sorts of different places — whether it’s members that are working on the crew, or from film permits, they obviously have social media groups and emails set up to send tips and information,” she said.In the meantime, Mr. Chiarelli keeps pacing outside Fox Studios each day, hoping he can turn some trucks around. Some days he gets results. On a recent morning he was joined by several other writers, and five trucks turned away, he said. During an overnight picket at Fox, a trailer carrying fake police cars destined for the shoot turned tail at 2 a.m.Other days, the picket line is much more sparse, especially if a tip takes a group to a different location.He and Mr. Royce talked fondly about their second day out in the darkness. It was pouring rain when two large trucks pulled into the turn lane, blinkers on, ready to enter the lot. Then they saw the writers. The trucks pulled to the side of the road, waited about 10 minutes, then turned around.They “blew past the entrance, honked their horns and waved at us,” Mr. Royce said. “It was thrilling.”Added Mr. Chiarelli, “I’ve been chasing that high ever since.” More

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      Quentin Tarantino Teases Final Movie at Cannes Film Festival

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      He played coy about the forthcoming “The Movie Critic” in a wide-ranging chat but may have dropped one major hint.Before introducing one of his favorite movies at the Cannes Film Festival on Thursday, Quentin Tarantino had this instruction for the audience.“If you want to scream at a shotgun blast, scream at a shotgun blast,” he said, imploring the viewers to be as “un-French” as possible in their reactions. “Let’s bring a little bit of American grindhouse here at Cannes!”That’s how he set up the 1977 revenge flick “Rolling Thunder” — a movie so foundational to Tarantino, with its third act of cathartic, gun-blast violence, that it’s rumored he will restage it in some fashion for his forthcoming final film, “The Movie Critic.” At least, that’s according to a co-writer of “Rolling Thunder,” Paul Schrader, who revealed that tantalizing tidbit in a recent interview with IndieWire. Though Tarantino himself has said very little about “The Movie Critic,” his film selection on Thursday may have confirmed Schrader’s tease.In the hourlong chat that followed the screening, Tarantino, 60, mostly discussed titles mentioned in his recent book of essays, “Cinema Speculation.” (He was at the festival to give a talk but wanted to present a film as well.)He began with an extended riff on “Rolling Thunder,” which stars William Devane as a Vietnam veteran pursuing the criminals who killed his family: Tarantino noted that though he loves the film, Schrader felt it departed too much from his original script.“He doesn’t recognize the movie any more than I recognize Oliver Stone’s version of ‘Natural Born Killers,’” Tarantino said, citing one of the few films he wrote but didn’t direct. Tarantino has disavowed Stone’s take on his material, but he said that Johnny Cash once told him that he was a big fan of the 1994 film, which starred Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis.“I didn’t tell him he was wrong,” Tarantino said.What is it about films like “Rolling Thunder” that he responds to? “Look, I like violent movies,” Tarantino said. “Some people like musicals, some people like slapstick comedy, I like violent movies. I think it’s a very cinematic thing to do.”Asked if he had ever watched a film where the violence wasn’t justified, Tarantino at first appeared so stumped that the audience chuckled. Eventually, he cited “Patriot Games,” the 1992 Harrison Ford thriller. Tarantino initially found the villain’s motivations so relatable, he said, that he rebelled when the character took a late swerve into psychopathic violence: “Just the fact that the villain was this much understandable, that was too much as far as the filmmakers were concerned. So they had to make him crazy. That’s what I got morally offended by.”When it comes to depictions of violence, Tarantino said there was only one line he wasn’t willing to cross. “I have this big thing about killing animals in movies,” he said to applause. “But I mean insects, too! Unless I’m paying to see some weird bizarro documentary, I’m not paying to see real death. Part of the way this all works is that it’s make-believe — that’s why I can stand by the violent scenes.”Tarantino has said his forthcoming 10th film will be his last (owing to his belief that directors have a finite amount of good films in them and ought to quit while they’re ahead), and that he hopes that more books like “Cinema Speculation” will follow once he hangs up his director’s cap. Is that why he has made a movie critic the title character of his final feature?“Well, that’s a long story,” he said at the end of his chat. “I can’t tell you guys until you see the movie!”Still, he offered a tease: “I’m tempted to do some of the character’s monologues right now,” he said. “You guys would get a kick out of it. Maybe if there was less video cameras.” More

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      ‘You Hurt My Feelings’ Review: She Can’t Handle the Truth

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      The director Nicole Holofcener’s characters are known for their brazen honesty. But it’s dishonesty that drives her new film, starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus.I love a complete sentence for a title. Even better: a complete-sentence title that also describes a filmmaker’s chief concern. “You Hurt My Feelings” sums up the Nicole Holofcener experience: funny in its wounded bluntness.It’s the seventh comedy she’s written and directed since 1996. With more emotional harmony and generosity than her other films, it takes the same stock of ways we can bruise each other, partners, strangers, kids. Her characters — comfortable New Yorkers and Angelenos — tend to lash out; their preferred approach to honesty is brazenness. The new movie embraces more constructive impulses. It’s dishonesty that interests her here, the mild kind that one character calls, in his defense, “white lies” — what you tell a person because the truth would just be a whole thing.The white liar is Don (Tobias Menzies). For two years, he’s been reading draft after draft of a novel his wife, Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), has been working on and telling her how good they are. The movie’s about what happens after she overhears him, at a Manhattan sporting goods store, telling her sister’s husband, Mark (Arian Moayed), that, actually, he doesn’t like the book, but the truth would kill her. He’s not wrong. She’s a weepy wreck for two scenes with the sister, Sarah (Michaela Watkins), convinced that now she’ll never be able to trust Don. But Holofcener is drawn more to the process of healing than she is to the wielding of hurt.Twenty minutes pass before that sporting goods store encounter. By that point the movie’s already shown us what Beth’s and Don’s lives are like, together and apart. They’ve got the sort of sturdy, affectionate, unselfconsciously idiosyncratic bond that means they’d just as soon share an ice cream cone as a bed. One thing that’s probably kept the marriage firm has been saying “I love this” and “it’s great,” when it’s not. White lies are like Advil for certain relationships; they keep the inflammation down. In the aftermath of Don’s bombshell, up go her quills. She starts sleeping on the sofa, ignoring him and distancing herself, and he’s confused. Then one evening, in front of Sarah and Mark and a sad bowl of underdressed salad, she tells him that she heard what he said. Then the movie does what too few American marriage comedies do: adjudicate the disappointment. It becomes about the truths that flow from that unburdening.Holofcener makes the smart decision to put Beth and Don in the constructive honesty business. She teaches writing to adults. He’s a therapist. I don’t think either of them loves what they do, but it looks like they make a good living at it. We get to watch her respond to her four students’ story ideas and, in one case, to an actual piece, and to observe him with a handful of patients. Holofcener’s films are fleet. Rarely do they exceed the 92-minute mark. But their social resonance springs from a marvel of proficiency.Every relationship Holofcener gives us — and just about every scene — explores some type of candor, some act of leveling: between Don and Beth; Beth and Sarah; Beth and Don and their foggy 23-year-old son (Owen Teague); Beth and her agent (LaTanya Richardson Jackson); Beth, Sarah and their mother (Jeannie Berlin), a widower who lives under her daughters’ skin; a pair of married lesbians with whom a tipsy Beth instigates an argument; Sarah, who appears to be an interior decorator, and the particularly particular client displeased with her taste in lighting. Plus everything with the students, the patients and Mark, whose acting career is in neutral. I didn’t mention Beth’s pretty successful memoir about her (verbally) abusive father, whose title you need to hear stumble out of Louis-Dreyfus’s mouth. But Holofcener could have used it for just about any one of her movies.Her targets, themes and tropes haven’t changed. It’s still narcissism and personal vanity (Don wants an eye job). It’s still the emotional disturbances of moneyed, dissatisfied liberals who need Black people and the poor to make sense of themselves as successfully good white folks. (Beth and Sarah do complacent volunteer work at a church’s surprisingly stingy clothing giveaway.) No American director’s more committed to exposing the smugness and self-aggrandizement of bourgeois urbanites.The cantankerous, obnoxious and cruel characters are still here, too. Most of them are just sitting on Don’s couch. The harshest of them is a couple played by (the actually married) David Cross and Amber Tamblyn. These two hate each other, and they squirt Don with their bile. Now, in a Holofcener film, we can study intense marital dysfunction from the compartmental vantage of a mental health professional, somebody who in his personal life uses a completely different approach to communicating with his wife. Menzies’ good-natured neutrality here perfectly serves both Don the shrink and Don the husband.Holofcener continues, nonetheless, to be more interested in character than in great acting. That makes sense since she needs her casts to approximate some version of us or people we recognize. Which is to say that everybody here is life-size. Louis-Dreyfus knows how to find real pathos in a hurry. She’s a pro at putting across Holofcener’s casually cranky snobbery (about new coffee shops, clean menus and $19,000 benches). Beth’s in the middle of saying something racist about the weed shop where her son works when the movie’s least believable incident goes down.Part of me thought I wanted something wilder from Holofcener, comedy that felt like crisis. The way some of her earlier films do; the way it does in the novels of Nell Zink and Patricia Lockwood. But her studies of ego and frailty are closer to Albert Brooks and Larry David: about breaches of etiquette rather then psychological breaks. Still, this feels like a quiet breakthrough for her. She’s put the emotional dynamite away (her steadiest supplier of TNT, Catherine Keener, isn’t here). Instead, this is a work of discipline and structure. It’s a situation comedy in the best, classical sense: These people’s ethical problems are sometimes ours. I’ve been Beth. I’ve been Don. And I had to watch half of what they’re dealing with through my fingers.You Hurt My FeelingsRated R for language (the painfully honest kind). Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Wind & the Reckoning’ Review: A Hawaiian Story of Resistance

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      A docudrama follows a family fighting to stay together and avoid exile to a leprosy colony, but fails to carry an emotional punch.It’s a story as old as the United States itself: American business interests drive white men onto Indigenous lands, where they displace and impose their own rule of law on an otherwise sovereign group of people. The docudrama “The Wind & The Reckoning,” directed by David L. Cunningham, tells the true story of a group of Native Hawaiians who resisted the government-mandated exile implemented to address a leprosy outbreak in Hawaii in the late 1800s. A provisional government, put in place after American businessmen overthrew Queen Lili’uokalani and dissolved the Kingdom of Hawai’i, forced Natives suspected of infection onto the island of Moloka’i. There, marriages were no longer recognized, and thousands died and were buried in unmarked graves.“The Wind & The Reckoning” follows Pi’ilani (Lindsay Marie Anuhea Watson), her husband, Ko’olau (Jason Scott Lee), and their son, Kalei (Kahiau Perreira), as they fight to stay together after the latter two are infected. As Pi’ilani, who never contracts leprosy, says in a voice-over, “No man, no government could break the bonds of marriage and family.”Sadly, the film does not carry the emotional punch that the subject matter warrants. “The Wind & The Reckoning” is centered on gunfights between Ko’olau and the soldiers, and one would have liked to get a sense of the broader world outside of this battle — the people in the leprosy colony, for instance, or the political turmoil of the time. The story feels too self-contained and the characters too one-note, which, despite the merits of the subject, makes it hard to feel immersed in their world.The Wind & the ReckoningNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘We Might as Well Be Dead’ Review: Housing by Neighborhood Watch

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      A single mother fights for her place in a dystopian high rise in this unfocused satire.A housing board rules over a dystopia in the off-kilter satire “We Might as Well Be Dead.” The film follows Anna (Ioana Iacob), a single mother and security guard whose role in her high rise home is to interview and introduce candidates for new housing. The film doesn’t specify what kind of apocalypse has made residency in the high rise so prestigious, but new applicants treat their adjudication as a life or death matter, begging on their hands and knees for sanctuary.Anna wasn’t born in the community she now calls both home and employer. She isn’t a perfect citizen by the board’s standards. She’s a single mother and her daughter, Iris (Pola Geiger), has started to show signs of buckling under the closed society’s pressure, hiding full time in the apartment bathroom. Anna’s tenuous position in the building is threatened further when a neighbor’s dog goes missing, and an atmosphere of paranoia settles over the community. Anna tries to convince her neighbors that the dog’s absence is an accident rather than a conspiracy, but her efforts are met with increasing frenzy, and the mob soon begins to turn on her.The director, Natalia Sinelnikova, draws out a sense of dread through canted angles and harsh lighting. The camera is often placed below the faces of the actors, peering up at them from perspectives that seem off-kilter. When the camera pulls back, the inhabitants of the high rise seem crowded into doorways and long dwindling halls. The images are artfully crafted, but the narrative lacks momentum. The film flirts with themes of surveillance and immigrant anxieties, but its allegoric ambitions are continually thwarted by yet another neighborly grievance.We Might as Well Be DeadNot rated. In German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More