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      The Campy Masculine Pleasures of Gerard Butler and ‘Kandahar’

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      The action-flick Everyman limps nobly on in “Kandahar.”Midway through Gerard Butler’s new movie, “Kandahar,” is maybe the coolest sequence I have ever seen in a Gerard Butler movie. It’s the middle of the night in the middle of a desert, and Butler’s C.I.A.-operative character is racing with his Afghan translator to a distant extraction point. Because they are trying to avoid Pakistani, Iranian and Taliban bad guys who are pursuing them, their lights are off, and Butler’s character is wearing a pair of very stupid-looking infrared goggles. Suddenly there is a sound, one we only learn is a helicopter when those loopy goggles alight on it. The lengthy firefight that ensues is mostly just flashes in the darkness with occasional infrared — a beautiful tableau, like a Vija Celmins painting, that feels weird to enjoy only if you look too closely.Butler’s movies are best when you don’t look too closely. This is already the second one gifted to us this year. I say “gifted” because it truly is a gift, in 2023, to receive such films — throwbacks not only to late-1980s action movies but to their stars, actors like Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson. In a market saturated by superheroes, Butler has been making nostalgic, midbudget action films so steadily, for so long, that he has perfected his own formula. A middle-aged Everyman (made of “bourbon and poor choices,” per his character in one series), often with military training, goes rogue against a system that is failing to protect his family or his translator or the president. These movies may be, like much of their genre, unseasonably macho, riddled with casual brutality and kind of misogynistic; they have also been accused of varying degrees of racism, jingoism and xenophobia. But their appeal is broader than you might think. Butler’s main concern is not necessarily ideological. He’s interested in nobility, loyalty, courage and strength — qualities that, in Hollywood, often manifest in martial form. And it’s through this faithful portrayal of a rumpled-but-honorable masculinity, in rotating all-American settings, that a Scottish dude has become a kind of heartland hero.His breakthrough was “300,” Zack Snyder’s live-action adaptation of Frank Miller’s own graphic retelling of the 480 B.C. Battle of Thermopylae, in which a meager Greek army fought to the death against a Persian onslaught. This 2006 movie birthed not only the archetypal Butler action hero, his Spartan King Leonidas, but also the type of film that would contain him. “300” had the velveteen look of a Caravaggio, but all the depth of a soup can. It leaned into religious and mythic iconography — Leonidas succumbs, at the end, surrounded by his soldiers, riddled with arrows like some mash-up of St. Sebastian and the Sistine Chapel’s “The Last Judgment.” Butler, in baby bangs and sprayed-on abs and a brogue reminiscent of Tony Curtis in “Spartacus,” sold the display like a pro. No matter how savage he got, there was always some puckish humanity flickering across his face — like the scene in “Point Break” in which Keanu Reeves catches a glimpse of Patrick Swayze’s gentle eyes behind his mask and doesn’t shoot.Butler has been making nostalgic, midbudget action films so steadily, for so long, that he has perfected his own formula.Images and themes from “300” recur across Butler’s films. There’s loyalty to the homeland and its defenders, the passing of “respect and honor” from father to son, soft homophobia toward “philosophers and boy-lovers” by half-naked alpha males, stoicism, nurturing women, “no mercy” conflicts with foreigners, heroic sacrifice, David-and-Goliath battles. “I’m just a law-abiding citizen — I’m just a regular guy,” Butler says in “Law-Abiding Citizen,” which came out three years after “300.” In that one, an engineer named Clyde Shelton sees his wife and daughter killed in front of him, but the biggest wound comes from the justice system, via a prosecutor played by Jamie Foxx. Clyde responds with a bit of a killing spree, pledging to bring the whole “diseased corrupt temple” down on the lawyer’s head — “It’s gonna be biblical.”It’s the trilogy of “Olympus Has Fallen,” “London Has Fallen” and “Angel Has Fallen,” with their combined box office of $522 million, that consolidated Butler’s brand as the kind of modest action star who has largely gone missing from theaters. In these movies, the Secret Service agent Mike Banning, growing increasingly broken down over time, protects the president from various disposable terrorists. He runs on steaks, and later on painkillers, and always ends up battered, emerging into the light propping up a commander in chief who says something like: “They came to desecrate our way of life. To foul our beliefs. Trample our freedom. And in this, not only did they fail, they granted us the greatest gift — a chance at our rebirth.”If this sounds as if it springs from a conservative imagination, well, the franchise’s multicultural goons and deep-state conspiracies would certainly be familiar to that audience. But while Butler is the kind of guy who gets invited to the Pentagon to promote a thriller about Navy SEALs, his stance on these films is more rough and ready. Facing criticism for “London Has Fallen,” he argued at the premiere that “It’s about us winning” and “It’s based on heroism and the good guys kicking ass.” This generalized machismo maintains its appeal even when his films veer more mainstream — dropping the jingoism for “Angel Has Fallen” or, in 2017’s “Geostorm,” taking a cuckoo disaster-movie ride. In 2018’s “Den of Thieves,” where the masculinity is just dense enough to dilute the toxicity, he plays a leather-clad cop who swigs Pepto like whiskey and works to bring down some ex-Marines who aim to rob the Federal Reserve. In “Greenland,” he’s another engineer in another disaster, racing to get his family to a bunker (and refusing, in individualist American fashion, to help his neighbors). This January’s “Plane” was positively communist by comparison, with the tagline “survive together or die alone.” In that one, he’s a commercial pilot with an Air Force background whose jet crashes on a Filipino island held by separatists. There remain the obvious conservative themes — untrustworthy superiors, renegade saviors, barbaric foreigners — but it’s perfect all-audiences Butler, a propulsive popcorn flick with a righteous core.Maybe it’s inevitable that the same guy who keeps revolting onscreen would do the same off it. Butler hasn’t appeared on a mainstream magazine cover since 2018. He seems to have smarted a little when, in a January interview, Inverse called him “the King of the B-movie” to his face. He knows he has a large audience, but I wonder if he knows quite how much good will he has accumulated. In “Kandahar,” he plays an undercover operative exposed by a leak “bigger than Snowden and WikiLeaks combined,” in a script packed with “free world” jokes and aphorisms like “you have to return home to know what you are fighting for.” But I genuinely felt chills at the ending, a lachrymose montage in which the blue-eyed soul of Tom Rhodes’s “Low Tide” plays over shots of Butler and his translator, finally safe, intercut with sentimental scenes of their loved ones. It’s cheap, but there’s a good heart in there, and that’s hard to come by these days.Source photographs: Open Road Films; Focus Features; Lionsgate; FilmDistrict. More

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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘Succession’ Finale and Starry Rom-Coms

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      The HBO hit wraps up its series run, and Amy Schumer’s “Trainwreck” airs.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, May 22-28. Details and times are subject to change.MondayHE’S JUST NOT THAT INTO YOU (2009) 8:30 p.m. on E! This movie, adapted from a book with the same title by Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo, has an extremely star-studded cast: Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Aniston, Ben Affleck and Scarlett Johansson, to name a few. The movie follows a group of friends and couples in their 20s and 30s who are all trying to navigate the trials and tribulations that come with relationships.TuesdayAmy Schumer and Bill Hader in “Trainwreck.”Universal PicturesTRAINWRECK (2015) 7:30 p.m. on Freeform. The comedian Amy Schumer wrote and stars in this film about a woman who is (as the title suggests) an emotional train wreck when she meets the super successful and put-together sports doctor Aaron Conners, played by Bill Hader. While the movie has its hilarious moments, the heartfelt love story that revolves around Schumer’s character’s commitment to taking care of her sick father is the part worth investing in. “Schumer is at her strongest when she insists that women aren’t distressed damsels but — as they toddle, walk and race in the highest of heels, the tightest of skirts, the sexiest, mightiest of poses — the absolute agents of their lives and desires,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The New York Times.WednesdaySURVIVOR 8 p.m. on CBS. The stakes are especially high as the accelerated, 26-day version of this longstanding reality show is wrapping up its season this week. One of the final three contestants left standing will compete to be crowned as the “Sole Survivor,” which will be followed by an after show, hosted by Jeff Probst.VANDERPUMP RULES 9 p.m. on Bravo. In case you’ve missed the drama surrounding the latest season of this Los Angeles reality show, the tl;dr version is that two of its stars, Tom Sandoval and Ariana Madix, split after Sandoval had an affair with another co-star Raquel Leviss. Madix has already spilled lots of tea about her situation on Bravo and even in The Times, but the reunion airing this week will get even more in depth on the scandal and other drama from the season.ThursdayTHE SEVEN YEAR ITCH (1955) 8 p.m. on TCM. In this classic, Richard Sherman (Tom Ewell) ships his wife and son away to Maine for the summer. Meanwhile in Manhattan, a woman (played by Marilyn Monroe) moves in upstairs from Richard, and he feels tempted to act on his feelings of desire.FridayOrna Guralnik, center, in “Couples Therapy.”ShowtimeCOUPLES THERAPY 8 p.m. on Showtime. On the season finale of this docu-series following the therapist Orna Guralnik and her clients, some couples reach their breaking point while others use the skills they’ve learned all season to improve the quality of their relationships.GREAT PERFORMANCES: ANYTHING GOES 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). The Tony Award winners Sutton Foster and Robert Lindsay perform in this recorded performance of the Cole Porter musical “Anything Goes” in London’s West End. The show is about a romance aboard the SS American, with the mood set by sailors singing and dancing on the deck.THE SECRETS OF HILLSONG 10 p.m. on FX. This four-part docu-series (which wraps up on Friday) is an investigation by Vanity Fair reporters Alex French and Dan Adler as they reveal the scandals that have plagued the now infamous megachurch as well as the people involved in it. The show features interviews with former pastors Carl and Laura Lentz who were publicly ousted from the church as well as congregants who still support the church.SaturdayPatrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey in “Dirty Dancing.”Lionsgate Home entertainment, via Associated PressDIRTY DANCING (1987) 9:30 p.m. on CMT. It’s been decades since this film came out, and still nobody puts Baby in the corner! The story follows Frances ‘Baby’ Houseman (played by Jennifer Grey) while she vacations with her family at a Catskills resort during the summer of 1963. There, Baby meets Johnny Castle (Patrick Swayze), who enlists her as his dance partner — and naturally, they fall in love. Come for the romance, stay for the iconic lift during “I’ve Had the Time of My Life.”SARAH SILVERMAN: SOMEONE YOU LOVE 10 p.m. on HBO. In her first filmed HBO special since 2013, the comedian Sarah Silverman performs live from the Wilbur Theater in Boston, with plenty of jokes centered around her being a New England native.SundaySUCCESSION 9 p.m. on HBO. Every episode this season since the patriarch Logan Roy died has been its own flavor of chaos — there has been back stabbing, party crashing and plenty of wordy threatening, but it is as uncertain as ever who will take over Waystar Royco. As its creator, Jesse Armstrong, said in an interview with The New Yorker, the title of the show is a promise. So this finale will answer the question: Who is going to be the person in charge? It could be Kendall, Roman or Shiv — or a dark horse like Tom or Greg (or an even darker one, Connor).BARRY 10:30 p.m. on HBO. This is the fourth and final installment of this show starring Bill Hader as Barry, a contract killer. This season has focused on Barry behind bars, reflecting on everything he has done and facing the consequences of his actions. All that we really know about the ending is that it probably won’t be as happy as the characters wish it would be. More

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      Helmut Berger, Actor Known for His Work With Visconti, Dies at 78

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      He first made his mark in “The Damned” as a character one critic said personified “the outright perversion” of Nazism. He went on to have a long career, mostly in Europe.Helmut Berger, a handsome Austrian movie star who was best known for appearing in three feature films by the Italian neorealist director Luchino Visconti, his lover for a dozen years, died on Thursday at his home in Salzburg. He was 78.His death was announced by his agent, Helmut Werner, who did not give a cause.“Many years ago,” Mr. Werner said in a statement, “Helmut Berger told me, ‘I have lived three lives. And in four languages! Je ne regrette rien.’”Mr. Berger was studying Italian in Perugia in 1964 when a friend introduced him to Mr. Visconti, who was on location directing a film that starred Claudia Cardinale.“I was there watching, I was fascinated,” he told the website Europe of Cultures in 1988. “I wanted to see how they shot a film.”They began a relationship soon after that, personal as well as professional. Mr. Visconti cast Mr. Berger in “The Damned” (1969), the story of a German steel family, inspired by the Krupps, in the early years of the Third Reich. As Martin, the grandson of the family’s patriarch, Mr. Berger imitates Marlene Dietrich in full costume during a party for his grandfather, which ends with word of a fire at the Reichstag. Martin later molests younger relatives and rapes his mother (Ingrid Thulin).Ann Guarino, reviewing the movie for The Daily News of New York, said Mr. Berger personified the “outright perversion” of Nazism. Vincent Canby of The New York Times wrote that Mr. Berger “gives, I think, the performance of the year.” He was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for most promising male newcomer.Mr. Berger said that working with Mr. Visconti was like being onstage.“You don’t do 10-minute, five-minute takes but whole scenes, sometimes 20 minutes long,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1970. “He uses three cameras so you never know which one is on you. You get really into it, the whole atmosphere. He doesn’t limit you, he wants you to be free.”Mr. Berger appeared in two more feature films directed by Mr. Visconti: “Ludwig” (1973), in which he played the mad 19th-century king of Bavaria, for which he won a David di Donatello Award, the Italian equivalent of the Oscar; and “Conversation Piece” (1974), which starred Burt Lancaster as an art historian living quietly in Rome whose life is changed by several people, including a pushy marchesa and her gigolo lover, played by Mr. Berger.Mr. Canby had a radically different assessment of Mr. Berger’s work this time, calling him “a lightweight” who “can function no more than as an ideogram for decadence.”By then, Mr. Berger and Mr. Visconti had been living together for some time.“During the 12 years with Luchino Visconti, I was faithful,” he told Gala magazine in 2012.“But were you dating model Marisa Berenson at the time?” the magazine’s interviewer asked.“Of course, I’m bisexual,” he said. “This is not a problem.”Mr. Berger fell into a deep depression after Mr. Visconti’s death in 1976.“At first I drank a lot, gluckgluckgluck, and then the pills came,” he told Gala. “My housekeeper wasn’t supposed to come until 5 p.m. but happened to drop by at 10 a.m. and saved me.”Mr. Berger on the set of Luchino Visconti’s “The Damned” (1969).Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesHelmut Berger was born Helmut Steinberger on May 29, 1944, in Bad Ischl, Austria. His parents, Hedwig and Franz Steinberger, ran a hotel.Fleeing his father, who he said was brutal to him, Helmut moved first to England and then to Italy, where he made his film debut in “The Witches” (1967), an anthology movie consisting of five stories, each made by a different director. He played a hotel page in the segment directed by Mr. Visconti.After a few other films, including “The Damned,” Mr. Berger was cast in the title role of Massimo Dallamano’s “Dorian Gray” (1970), which billed itself as a “modern allegory” based on Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray” set in sexy present-day London. He was one of a reported 500 actors who auditioned.Mr. Berger “gives a trance-like performance, looking simply beautiful — if you like the type,” Ms. Guarino wrote.He continued to work, mostly in Europe, until a few years ago. He notably played the sickly son of a rich Jewish family facing Fascism in Italy in Vittorio De Sica’s “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis” (1970), which won the Oscar for best foreign-language film, and the playboy who seduces Elizabeth Taylor’s character after she undergoes cosmetic surgery in “Ash Wednesday” (1973).He also portrayed the millionaire boyfriend of Fallon Carrington (Pamela Sue Martin) on “Dynasty,” the prime-time soap, in a story arc from 1983 to 1984, and the Vatican’s chief accountant, who tries to swindle Michael Corleone, in “The Godfather III” (1990).Information about survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Berger was known for his jet-setting lifestyle, for being photographed by Andy Warhol, for being linked to women like Bianca Jagger, and for being called “the most beautiful man in the world” in the German media.But when Gala interviewed him after the publication of the book “Helmut Berger: A Life in Pictures,” he said he was no longer seeking his earlier life’s social hustle and bustle.“I’ve experienced everything,” he said. “I don’t feel like Helmut Berger, either; I’m not him. It’s a stage name. My name is Helmut Steinberger. And that’s what I’ll be until I’m dead.” More

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      Oscar Isaac, Ethan Hawke and Joel Edgerton on Paul Schrader Films

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      Joel Edgerton, Oscar Isaac and Ethan Hawke explain how they worked with the writer-director, known for solitary characters grappling with sin and redemption.The writer-director Paul Schrader has a metaphor he likes to use with his leading men.In his view, actors tend to think of themselves as trees in the wind fighting to stay upright when they perform. But Schrader tells his stars, “Get that image out of your head and replace it with the image of a cliff on a seacoast. And you’re there and the waves are pounding against you. They are going to come and they are going to hit you and then they are going to go away.” In this metaphor the waves can be day players sharing a scene or plot points in a narrative. But no matter what crashes against them, these men must remain stoic, hardened against the world.Joel Edgerton heard a version of this from Schrader in their first conversation about “Master Gardener,” which opened Friday. The drama is the final installment in Schrader’s recent and lauded “Man in a Room” trilogy, which began in 2017 with “First Reformed,” starring Ethan Hawke, and includes “The Card Counter” (2021), starring Oscar Isaac.“I think I probably got the same speech that Ethan got and the same speech that Oscar got,” Edgerton said, explaining, “It wasn’t the place for an actor to explore their bag of tricks and create flourish within character but rather reduce themselves to sort of a conduit of stillness to everything moving and swirling around them.”And, indeed, Isaac and Hawke both have their own descriptions of similar dialogues with Schrader. In interviews, the actors who played these proverbial men in rooms explained what it was like to inhabit tortured but oddly serene personas in works that grapple with typical Shrader questions of sin and redemption.“Master Gardener” casts Edgerton as Narvel Roth, a horticulturist who harbors a disturbing secret: He’s a former white nationalist in witness protection. Underneath his turtleneck and overalls, his body is covered in racist tattoos. In “The Card Counter,” Isaac is William Tell, a proficient gambler who was once an Abu Ghraib torturer. And in “First Reformed,” Hawke is the Rev. Ernst Toller, a holy man filled with despair over climate change.Oscar Isaac in “The Card Counter.” Though Schrader specializes in bleak tales, “he’s not a nihilist,” the actor said. Courtesy Of Focus Features/Focus Features, via Associated PressAll three write in journals, and their entries, offering windows into their preoccupations, are delivered in voice-over narration. These beats are part of the language of a Schrader movie. “It’s like his version of a sonnet,” Isaac said. “He has his forms that he likes to use to explore different things.”In these films Schrader echoes both the French filmmaker Robert Bresson, with deliberate references to “Pickpocket” and “Diary of a Country Priest,” and himself. Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) scribbled in one of these notebooks in Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” (1976), which Schrader wrote. So did Willem Dafoe’s drug dealer in “Light Sleeper” (1992), which Schrader wrote and directed.“Even when you’re shooting it, you’re aware there’s a meta thing happening where you realize like, right, this is like Travis Bickle, this is like Willem,” Hawke said. “You feel like, right, I’m part of this lineage of this human being’s work.”It’s work that Hawke is happy Schrader, now 76, is continuing. “I had the feeling that when we finished ‘First Reformed’ — he never said this to me, it was just a feeling — that he might not make another movie,” Hawke said.When Hawke saw “The Card Counter,” he said, he was proud of Schrader for “going back to war.”Schrader didn’t set out to write a trilogy, and only after someone suggested it as such did he acknowledge that’s what he was doing. All three movies concern troubled men reaching for forgiveness and transcendence, and all three trade in metaphors. “‘First Reformed’ really is not about global warming and ‘Card Counter’ is not about gambling and this one really isn’t about racism or gardening,” he said over coffee at the senior-living apartment complex in Hudson Yards where he now lives. “It’s about evolution of the soul of these people who are locked off in their rooms and can’t reach out and touch anyone.”These dramas not only ask their stars to wrestle with the misdeeds and troubles of their characters, but also require them to operate within Schrader’s precise style. He said he cast performers both on instinct and on a sense of whether they can “hold the mystery.”“There were several very important conversations that happened really early on about the value of withholding, a willingness to ask the audience to work with us, to not tap dance and try to entertain them, to not reveal too much, to invite mystery,” Hawke said, explaining that there is a freedom in that direction.Ethan Hawke as a troubled pastor in “First Reformed.” The actor said he and Schrader had “several very important conversations that happened really early on about the value of withholding.”A24At the same time, there is difficulty in achieving the stillness that Schrader asks. “In some ways it was like being asked to go to work with a straitjacket on,” Edgerton said. “But I didn’t feel like that was too daunting a proposition. My feeling always is that the director is captain, and if you go to work with someone, you put yourself in their capable hands.”Recognizing the internality Schrader was asking him to portray, Isaac recruited one of his teachers from Juilliard, Moni Yakim, and did mask work. “I was like, well, my face is going to literally be a mask, so how can I tell the story just through the body and through energy,” Isaac said.And then there’s the writing. Schrader asked each actor to copy out his character’s journal in his own hand. Isaac believed that William would write in cursive, so he took a penmanship course. For Edgerton the task was in line with his usual approach: “I always want my own handwriting to be my own handwriting” onscreen, he said, even before “Master Gardener.” All described the process as meditative, in a way.“You know in Acting 101 they tell you to write your character’s biography, try to write a journal in character,” Hawke said. “Those are very challenging exercises to do that help find the voice of the character and help integrate yourself with the person. For me it was literally delivered to me in a box with an assignment of what to do, so I loved it.”Isaac noted that Schrader, for all of his hard edges and tough themes, has a soft side as well. While “Master Gardener” ends in a different way, a number of Schrader’s films, including “The Card Counter” and “Light Sleeper,” conclude with the hero in prison reaching out to a woman he loves. “He believes in the truth and purity of what love is and what love can do,” Isaac said. “So no matter how dark and grueling things can get, he has that spark in him, too. He’s not a nihilist.”Edgerton has not yet had the opportunity to discuss his time in Schraderland with Hawke or Isaac, but the latter two have swapped stories. Schrader pulled out his phone to show me a photo he received of them alongside another one of his actors, Dafoe, huddled together with middle fingers raised. He suggested it should accompany this article.Hawke and Isaac worked together on a Marvel Cinematic Universe television show, “Moon Knight,” but Isaac, in conversation, thought of another potential franchise. “It’s an incredible badge of honor to be part of Paul Schrader’s extended universe, the PCU,” he said, laughing. “It’d be one hell of a convention of all those characters coming together. We could do a team movie. I’m going to pitch him on that.” More

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      ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ Premieres at Cannes

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      Martin Scorsese directed this harrowing and deeply American true-crime drama set in the 1920s. Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro and Lily Gladstone star. On Saturday, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” Martin Scorsese’s harrowing epic about one of America’s favorite pastimes — mass murder — had its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, screening out of competition. It’s Scorsese’s first movie at the event since his nightmarish screwball “After Hours” was presented in 1986, winning him best director. For this edition, he walked the red carpet with the two stars who have defined the contrasting halves of his career: Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio.Adapted from David Grann’s nonfiction best seller of the same title — the screenplay was written by Scorsese and Eric Roth — the movie recounts the murders of multiple oil-rich members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma during the 1920s. Grann’s book is subtitled “The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI,” while the movie primarily focuses on what was happening on the ground in Oklahoma. The name of the young bureau chief, J. Edgar Hoover, comes up but largely evokes the agency’s future, its authority, scandals and that time DiCaprio played a closeted leader in Clint Eastwood’s “J. Edgar” (2011).“Killers of the Flower Moon” is shocking, at times crushingly sorrowful, a true-crime mystery that in its bone-chilling details can make it feel closer to a horror movie. And while it focuses on a series of murders committed in the 1920s, Scorsese is, emphatically, also telling a larger story about power, Native Americans and the United States. A crucial part of that story took place in the 1870s, when the American government forced the Osage to leave Kansas and relocate in the Southwest. Another chapter was written several decades later when oil was discovered on Osage land in present-day Oklahoma.When DiCaprio’s Ernest Burkhart arrives by train at the Osage boomtown of Fairfax, oil derricks crowd the bright green plains as far as the eye can see. Still wearing his dun-colored doughboy uniform from the recently ended war, Ernest has come to live with his uncle, William Hale (Robert DeNiro), along with a clutch of other relatives, including his brother (Scott Shepherd). A cattleman with owlish glasses and a pinched smile, the real Hale had nurtured such close relations with the local Native American population that he was revered, Grann writes, “as King of the Osage Hills.”With crisp efficiency, soaring cameras and just enough history to ground the narrative, Scorsese plunges you right into the region’s tumult, which is abuzz with new money that some are spending and others are trying to steal. The Osage owned the mineral rights to their land, which had some of the largest oil deposits in the country, and they leased it to prospectors. In the early 20th century, Grann writes, every person on the tribal roll began receiving payouts. The Osage became fantastically wealthy, and in 1923, he adds, “the tribe took in more than $30 million, the equivalent today of more than $400 million.”“Killers of the Flower Moon” is organized around Ernest’s relationship with both Hale and a young Osage woman, Mollie (Lily Gladstone), whom he meets while taxiing townspeople around. Much like Fairfax, where luxury autos race down the dirt main road amid shrieking people and terrified horses, Ernest is soon hopped up, frenetic, all wild smiles and gushing enthusiasm. He keeps on jumping — it’s as if he’s gotten a contact high from the wealth — though his energy changes after he meets Mollie. They marry and have children, finding refuge with each other as the dead Osage start to pile up.Gladstone and DiCaprio fit persuasively even if their characters have contrasting vibes, temperaments and physicalities. When she’s out and about, this pacific, reserved woman turns her face into an impassive mask and wraps a long traditional blanket around her, effectively cocooning her body with it. With her beauty, stillness and sly Mona Lisa smile, Mollie exerts a great gravitational force on Ernest and the viewer alike; you’re both quickly smitten. DiCaprio will earn most of the attention, but without Gladstone, the movie wouldn’t have the same slow-building, soul-heavy emotional impact. Ernest is a fascinating, thorny character, especially in the age of Marvel Manichaeism, and he’s rived by contradictions that he scarcely seems aware of. DiCaprio’s performance is initially characterized by Ernest’s eagerness to please Hale — there’s comedy and pathos in his mugging and flop sweat — but grows quieter, more interior and delicately complex as the mystery deepens. It’s instructive that Ernest is frowning the first time you see him, an expression that takes on greater significance when you realize that DiCaprio is mirroring De Niro’s famed grimace, a choice that draws a visual line between the characters and the men who have been Scorsese’s twin cinematic lodestars.I’ll have more to say about “Killers of the Flower Moon” when it opens in American theaters on October. More

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      Scenes From Cannes: Vigilant Steve McQueen, Misguided Maïwenn

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      “Occupied City,” a documentary from the “12 Years a Slave” filmmaker, proves ambitious. “Jeanne du Barry,” with Johnny Depp, was an unfortunate kickoff.If you are ever at a festival that’s showing a new movie from the British director Steve McQueen and he happens to be in the theater and you’re tempted to look at your phone, don’t. There’s a chance that McQueen will get out of his seat, cross the aisle and persuade you to redirect your attention to the big screen, which is exactly what he did Wednesday at the Cannes Film Festival when a mystery offender (not me!) fired up a bright little screen during the premiere of his documentary, “Occupied City.”I wanted all my attention on McQueen’s movie, which is being presented out of the main competition. The documentary is heroic in scope and ambition, with a nearly four-and-a-half-hour run time, intermission included. With formal rigor and adamant focus, it maps — street by street, address by address — the catastrophe that befell Amsterdam’s Jewish population in World War II. Narrated with implacable calm by a British actress, Melanie Hyams, it was written by McQueen’s wife, Bianca Stigter, and inspired by her book “Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945.” (Stigter, who’s Dutch, also directed the 2022 documentary “Three Minutes: A Lengthening.”)The last time McQueen, who’s best known for directing “12 Years a Slave,” would have had new work at Cannes was 2020, when the festival was canceled. The pandemic plays a notable role in “Occupied City,” which consists entirely of material of present-day Amsterdam, including images of anti-lockdown protests. The juxtaposition of the voice-over and these protests — with their marching cops and running crowds — initially feels like a provocation, almost as if McQueen were equating the Holocaust with lockdowns. As the movie’s grim accounting continues, though, the juxtaposition only underscores how blissfully privileged these protesters are to be able to gather, love, pray and simply live.The stars and the red carpet dominate the world’s attention during Cannes, but it’s the festival’s unwavering, serious commitment to film art that remains its greatest strength. There are always questionable and seemingly mercenary programming choices, as at any festival, and the halls of the event’s headquarters invariably hum with rumors about back-room deals and quotas. It’s unclear why the organizers — led by the festival’s director, Thierry Frémaux — decided to kick off this year’s event with “Jeanne du Barry,” a particularly unfortunate choice for a festival with a history of bad openers.Johnny Depp and Maïwenn star in “Jeanne du Barry,” a tedious look at the title courtesan.Stephanie Branchu/Why Not ProductionsPresumably Johnny Depp, a heat-seeking target for the armies of paparazzi amassed here, helps explain the movie’s presence. Whatever the case, on Tuesday, some 3,000 festivalgoers — and audiences who saw it simultaneously in cinemas across France — trooped into theaters to watch this bore. Directed by Maïwenn, who also stars, the movie tracks its title character from her pastoral rural childhood to her cosseted, apparently fabulous adulthood as a celebrated Parisian courtesan, fame that eventually led her directly into the bespoke bed of Louis XV.The king is played by a powdered and bewigged Depp, who looks suitably indolent, though perhaps because he’s underused. It isn’t much of a part. The king is mainly there to look gaga at Jeanne, which he does a great deal, though it’s a tough call whether Louis lavishes as much attention on Jeanne as Maïwenn does. Among all the close-ups of Jeanne giggling, Maïwenn folds in some palace intrigue and the briefest nod at the terror to come. Yet while Maïwenn draws attention to her lover’s grandson, the future, ill-fated Louis XVI, his main role is to serve as an ally to Jeanne in the viperous Versailles court.That most of the vipers are women is an index of the movie’s narrow horizons and parochial attitudes. It seeks to celebrate Jeanne, portraying her as a joyously emancipated woman, never mind that her liberation is entirely contingent on pleasuring men. She wears pants, she loves sex, she’s kind to the Black child Louis gives her as a gift! Yet while most everyone at court frowns upon Jeanne, Maïwenn primarily focuses on the torments that the court ladies visit on her, suggesting that the big problem at Versailles in the 18th century was the bitter jealousy of spoiled and uptight women.“Jeanne du Barry” ends before the guillotine makes an appearance, unfortunately. It was an exasperating way to start this year’s festival given how hard women have fought to be taken seriously here. There’s some comfort that “Jeanne” isn’t contending for the Palme d’Or, which would be an embarrassment, but is being presented out of competition. Other titles out of the running include two of the hottest tickets here: Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” and “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” directed by James Mangold. (I’ll have more to say about both after their premieres.)Both the Scorsese and “Indiana Jones” will jolt the festival, which has been fairly sleepy since Depp and company came and went. I liked two competition titles that screened early, “Le Retour,” from the French filmmaker Catherine Corsini, and “Monster,” from the Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda. Both are moving family dramas, with “Le Retour” centered on three Black Frenchwomen during a fraught interlude in Corsica. Like Kore-eda — whose movie is a characteristically poignant drama about an anguished fifth grader — Corsini uses family to reflect on larger issues without losing sight of the characters’ intimate struggles. Both movies appeal to your intellect while drawing tears.“Monster” is a moving family drama from Hirokazu Kore-eda. via Cannes Film FestivalCorsini is one of the seven women with a movie in the 21-title main lineup, which is a very good number. Cannes has always been happy to have young, beautiful women in gowns and high heels ornamenting its red carpet, but it has been far less welcoming to women who also make movies. The Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman, one of the giants of contemporary cinema, had three movies in the official program while she was alive (she died in 2015), none in the main competition. Another titan of the art, Agnès Varda, had nearly a dozen movies at Cannes, but only one was chosen for the main competition: her 1962 film “Cléo From 5 to 7.” At least the festival named one of its theaters after her.Some of the seven women are competing for the first time; a few, like the French director Catherine Breillat — here with “Last Summer” — are returning. Breillat was at Cannes in 2007 with “The Last Mistress,” a raw, exuberant, impolite period piece about women and desire starring Asia Argento. A few years later, in 2018, Argento shook up the festival when, onstage during the closing ceremony, she announced that she had been raped by Harvey Weinstein at the 1997 event. “This festival was his hunting ground,” Argento said, bringing the #MeToo movement to Cannes with a fury. (Argento was later accused of sexually assaulting an underage male actor, which she denied.)Cannes organizers tend to wave off criticism, but whatever their public position toward the complaints lobbed their way, including from many women over many frustrating decades, they clearly pay attention, as suggested by the record number of women in the main competition. This record matters because Cannes does. The festival doesn’t simply command the world’s attention each year; it makes careers, revives reputations, confers status, makes the next deal (or two) possible and serves as a crucial run-up to the Academy Awards. More important, Cannes publicly and very prominently bequeaths rarefied status on filmmakers, a status that has historically been granted to men.This isn’t simply because women like Akerman and Varda have had far fewer opportunities to direct than men. Neither artist needed Cannes’s benediction; they were brilliant filmmakers without its regular love. It’s difficult to quantify how (if) their careers would have been different if they had been in regular contention. But it’s also hard not to think that their careers would have been easier and the money would have flowed more generously in their direction if they’d been routinely programmed alongside the festival’s many beloved male auteurs. Certainly Varda and Akerman would have done right as the head of the jury, a position enjoyed this year by Ruben Ostlund, who’s won the Palme twice. I hope that his choices are better than his movies. More

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      ‘The Zone of Interest,’ a Holocaust Drama, Debuts at Cannes

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      The disorienting drama from “Under the Skin” director Jonathan Glazer may be in the running for a major prize at the festival.You might not know where you are when “The Zone of Interest” begins, and that’s by design. This new film from the director Jonathan Glazer, which has been hotly tipped for a major prize at the Cannes Film Festival since its premiere Friday night, opens on a bucolic picnic by the lake. Family members chat in German, wander off, attend to children and soak up the sun. And Glazer’s long, wide shots let us settle in, too.Eventually, they go home, and in their nice two-story house, parents Rudolf (Christian Friedel) and Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) retire to separate beds. In the morning, their daily routines begin: Maids prepare breakfast, children scatter, Rudolf dresses for work. But it’s all filmed in such faraway wide shots that it may take you a moment, once Rudolf walks into the front yard, to realize that this man is wearing an SS uniform.From there, you might pick up on more unsettling details. Aren’t the walls that surround Hedwig’s garden topped by barbed wire? Can you barely make out the buildings on the other side, some of which billow smoke? And as the children play, don’t those faint, far-off noises start to sound like gunshots, guard dogs and screams?This family’s life by the lake is only a bucolic idyll if you have blinders on — and to live there, you must — because it soon becomes clear that Rudolf is a Nazi commandant, and the house that Hedwig describes as her dream home abuts Auschwitz.“The Zone of Interest,” adapted from the novel by Martin Amis, is Glazer’s first film in a decade. The British director has only three feature credits to his name, but each one — the raucous “Sexy Beast” (2001), the stunning Nicole Kidman drama “Birth” (2004) and the sci-fi tour de force “Under the Skin” (2014) — is so potent that he has never felt far gone.Still, Glazer has never had a mainstream breakthrough or significant awards push, and I’m curious if it can come with “The Zone of Interest,” which will be distributed by A24 later this year. A Palme d’Or at Cannes would certainly help, but Glazer’s directing ought to attract a lot of attention: He frames the family’s mundane activities in static wide shots, cutting only when someone enters another room, as though they themselves are under eerie surveillance.The Cannes jury might also reward Hüller, whose performance as selfish Hedwig is chilling. As Jews are killed next door, she recalls a trip and asks her husband, “Will you take me to the spa in Italy again? All that pampering.” Anything that happens past the walls of her luxurious garden simply doesn’t exist, or else it offers a mercenary opportunity: She eagerly tries on a confiscated fur coat and tells Rudolf to look for more items stolen from the camp’s prisoners. “Chocolate, if you see it,” she wheedles. “Tiny goodies.”And if the film connects enough to become an awards contender down the road, I hope voters will pay attention to its carefully calibrated sound design. In the early going, there’s a hush, the kind of quiet you can have only if something is notably absent. Later, the sounds that drift from the camp are harder to ignore. Perhaps when “The Zone of Interest” began, we were listening through Hedwig’s ears.As we filed out after the premiere, the man sitting next to me confessed that he only understood 50 percent of the film. But I think the other 50 percent is meant to be felt, and for all of Glazer’s formal precision, he leaves plenty of room for viewers to come to their own conclusions. Does the family’s denial have contemporary parallels? How do the rhythms of work and life mitigate unimaginable horrors? And what did you hear in the hush before you could make out the screams? More

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      Ben Kingsley Seeks Out the Performances That Transcend

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      The Oscar winner, now playing Salvador Dalí in “Dalíland,” talks about “Waiting for Godot,” D.H. Lawrence and the way Britten’s “War Requiem” helps him understand history.Ben Kingsley takes his accolades seriously. Knighted in 2002 for service to the British film industry, he prefers to be addressed as Sir Ben.But even a knight needs his sleep, especially if he’s been spending every waking hour shooting a Marvel series. No matter if it’s the coronation day of King Charles III.“I wasn’t up that early but I did catch some lovely glimpses,” he said, calling from Los Angeles to talk about his latest film, “Dalíland,” out June 9.Kingsley draws on a catalog of absurdist mustaches and sexual predilections to play the Spanish surrealist Salvador Dalí as he prepares for an important exhibition in 1974 while his marriage to Gala — muse, helpmate, tormentor — crumbles.“It was a leap into genius that I found exhilarating and exhausting,” he said. “That sublime tightrope that he walked between caring desperately about what people thought, and yet being utterly indifferent to what they thought — that, I think, was the most challenging to portray.”Kingsley, who soared to fame with his Oscar-winning “Gandhi,” likes to keep his characters varied. His latest projects include “Jules,” out Aug. 11, about a small-town Pennsylvanian who gets close to an extraterrestrial, and the upcoming Disney+ “Wonder Man” series in which he’s reprising Trevor Slattery, his recurring Marvel role.And his cultural necessities change with his mood. “In other words, had you asked me two hours later, the list might have been entirely different,” he said. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1‘The Daughter of Auschwitz’Tova Friedman was 5 when the Red Army liberated the prisoners from Auschwitz, and she has written this remarkable book on her childhood in Auschwitz. I spent a morning with her, and it was profoundly inspiring and humbling to be in her presence. She asked me to write the foreword to her book. My commitment to the memory of the Holocaust has come to me personally by spending such time with Simon Wiesenthal, with Elie Wiesel, with Tova Friedman and other heroic, extraordinary survivors who will, as Elie Wiesel says, tell tales of their history.2Albert CamusI have his collection of essays, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” that was given to me a very long time ago, and parts of it I still struggle to fully comprehend. The language is so dense and brilliant that I get glimpses of his universe and what he has recognized in patterns of human behavior that I, too, recognize as a portrayer. I delve into that collection time after time after time, and every time I read it I have changed. Therefore, the resonance of that passage has also changed.3‘Snake’D.H. Lawrence builds the poem dramatically about how he found a snake sipping out of his water trough and clumsily throws this lump of wood. Then he says, “I think it did not hit him.” Toward the end, there’s that wonderful line, “And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords of life.” I read the poem at Dickie Attenborough’s 80th birthday. As you know, he became Lord Attenborough. And I concluded my reading by saying, “And thank heavens I did not miss my chance.”4World War I History on the PageMany of us who live in peacetime must find the First World War utterly incomprehensible, as do we find other parts of 20th-century history. Sometimes they have to be translated musically, graphically, poetically, dramatically. I’ve read A.J.P. Taylor’s history of the First World War. I have a monumental book at home in Oxfordshire, photographs of the First World War published in 1933, just when Hitler came into power. I’m even thinking about a film of the First World War.5World War I History in MusicBenjamin Britten’s “War Requiem” made that whole horrible period of history, to me, tangible. I somehow — and I can’t put it any other way — I felt it. That, I think, is what the artist does: allows us to feel that which we cannot comprehend. And that is the artist’s great gift, to share that feeling with the tribe.6Nusrat Fateh Ali KhanI saw him live at the Royal Albert Hall years ago, shortly before his tragic death. It was Pavarotti of all people who said the greatest voice in the world is Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s. And it is the most extraordinary voice, the range. Devotional music — that which transcends, that which sings to and about the higher power — it’s performed with energy and magnificence, but it comes from a humble center.7‘Waiting for Godot’I performed it with the late, great Alan Howard and was directed by the late, great Sir Peter Hall, who directed the first appearance of “Godot” ever. So it was a full circle for him. To be in a rehearsal room with that power — Beckett, Hall and Howard — was extraordinary. It was at the Old Vic, and I didn’t want the run to end. There were times onstage where I didn’t know whether I was performing or in a great act of prayer.8Sergei EisensteinI went to a very good English school and by some wonderful stroke of fate, the head of the film society decided to show some Eisenstein films. I was utterly enthralled by the scale of them. I remember [in “Ivan the Terrible”] this endless column of human beings. Now they would say to the actor playing Ivan, “Don’t worry about that, we’ll CGI it.” Which leaves the actor without his counterpart. It’s acting in a vacuum. But some directors think they can capture the same body-chemistry change in the actor as when he’s being pursued by 100,000 people. Look at the Salt March in “Gandhi.” How do you think I felt at the front of it? Extraordinary. I don’t think my sandals touched the ground.9GaudíI wondered whether Dalí would love Gaudí, both being Spanish. I’ve seen Gaudí architecture in Barcelona, and it is remarkable. It’s as if the stone is melting, a little bit like Dalí’s famous melting clock. Gaudí — melting stone, the most beautiful curves, sensual. It’s extraordinary.10‘Never Take No for an Answer’The film is about an Italian orphan called Peppino, who has a donkey called Violetta. The donkey falls very ill and he insists on going to Rome to get permission from the Holy Father, the Pope, to demolish the wall of the St. Francis chapel and let his donkey in to be blessed. I looked almost exactly like the little boy in the film and was hailed in the foyer of the cinema, mistaken for him. It left an indelible impression on me and I decided then and there, “I want to be him. I want to be Peppino.” More