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      ‘Silent Night’ Review: On the First Day of Christmas, Kill.

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      John Woo’s latest is as violent and merciless a revenge thriller as you can imagine.It’s a widely-held proposition that great artists mellow as they age. That hasn’t held true in filmmaking. Robert Bresson ended his career in his 80s with two of his most fevered and angry works, “The Devil Probably” and “L’’Argent.” Martin Scorsese, now 81, put out the tortured and indignant “Killers of the Flower Moon” this year. And now the inspired action filmmaker, John Woo, 77, delivers the merciless revenge shoot-em-up, “Silent Night.”Woo’s pictures have always operated on the “pure cinema” principle. Simply put, he prefers showing to telling. And what he shows are emotional extremes and their violent fallout. For this picture he put his prodigious staging, shooting and cutting skills to a test that won’t surprise his fans: The movie is practically free of dialogue. Joel Kinnaman plays Brian, a father living near California gang turf, driven mad by grief after seeing his young child killed by a stray bullet fired during a battle. In his initial maniacal reaction, he’s shot in the throat by a drug dealer with slashes of black tattooed on one side of his face.The attack happens around Christmas, and once Brian emerges from a monthslong drinking binge, he shapes up, takes up arms, and marks the next Christmas on his calendar: “Kill them all.” And so it goes. Car chases, motorcycle chases, stabbings, shootings, bone-breaking. Even without the talking (Catarina Sandino Moreno, as Brian’s beleaguered wife, mutters “OK” once or twice), there’s a lot of sound and fury and it works: This is suspenseful and cathartic, and even the schmaltzy stuff is so distinctly John Woo that it’s welcome.Silent NightRated R for, well, violence. No language, though! Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Eileen’ Review: Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway Thrill in Adaptation

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      Thomasin McKenzie and Anne Hathaway star in a period thriller that brings cathartic nastiness to a cold New England Christmas.Exceptions exist, of course, but protagonists in mainstream movies labeled feminist tend to fall along two lines. One is the endearing woman who has to break out of the cage she hadn’t even known she was in (think the girlbossing of “Barbie,” more or less). The other is the hot mess rom-com heroine, who is, as advertised, both super hot and an agent of abject chaos, her life and habits and relationships in perpetual ruins.The pleasure of “Eileen” is that its titular protagonist is all of these and none of them: repellent, bitter, repressed and in search of liberation that arrives in a decidedly unsexy manner. In some ways the story is familiar — small-town girl with a terrible life yearns to break free, and meets someone who represents that freedom — but it’s all filtered through a dirty mirror, a noir with shmutz rubbed onto the lens. Eileen’s unpleasantness is also her appeal; this girl certainly is no boss, she’s incapable of rousing speeches, and she’s never going to mutate into a heroine. She is, in other words, familiar.The movie she’s in is a psychosexual thriller, kind of. Ottessa Moshfegh, along with Luke Goebel, adapted Moshfegh’s 2015 novel into a screenplay that’s relatively faithful to the original, but with a few key twists that ensure tension for viewers who’ve read the book. Yet the outlines remain the same: It is the early 1960s, and Eileen Dunlop (Thomasin McKenzie) lives with her alcoholic ex-cop father in some gray, nameless New England town. Eileen’s clerical job at the local boys’ correctional center is stultifying and upsetting, or it would be if Eileen, who is in her mid-20s, could muster the ability to be upset anymore. (“Everyone’s kinda angry here — it’s Massachusetts,” she tells someone.)One day right before Christmas, the new prison counselor turns up, a pulled-together platinum blonde named Rebecca (Anne Hathaway) who seems to have floated in from another dimension. She’s educated, she jokes with the staff and she dresses in a way that emphasizes her curves. Rebecca is comfortable in the world in a way Eileen finds magnetizing. Swiftly, Rebecca becomes her center of gravity, the encapsulation of her dreams. It’s the sort of infatuation a teenager might develop, somewhere between wanting a person and wanting to be a person, but with Rebecca around, Eileen’s bloodless life is injected with sudden fire, and danger, too.McKenzie’s accent is a bit wobblier than Hathaway’s, but once you’re over that hump, the pair are thrilling together. McKenzie plays Eileen as a wide-eyed girl in arrested development who might have been an ingénue if she’d ever had a moment to sparkle. Instead her flat affect, which on someone else might be mysterious and intriguing, turns her invisible. Eileen’s own father tells her, in a moment of uneasily companionable boozy candor, that there are people in the world who live like they’re “in a movie,” the “ones making moves,” but that Eileen is the other kind of person: “Easy. Take a penny, leave a penny. That’s you, Eileen. You’re one of them.”So Rebecca, whom Eileen’s father would probably term a “dame” (or maybe a “hussy”), comes like a bolt from the frigid blue, though more sophisticated eyes than Eileen’s can detect some kind of performativity in her self-presentation. She is, after all, a female Harvard graduate (not, she emphasizes, Radcliffe) in early ’60s New England. She’s been educated with men and now works in a prison for boys and seems perfectly comfortable taunting men in a dive bar. She’s developed a kind of bombshell casing, for reasons unknown but easy to guess at. Hathaway’s performance is pure Hollywood siren wrapped in a wool skirt suit. What she is hiding, her motivations — that’s all opaque, and despite a veneer of vulnerability, there’s something just a little seedy about her.These sorts of women, off-putting and maddeningly erratic, tied to the physical in a way that makes others uneasy, are familiar territory for Moshfegh. She’s perhaps best known for her 2018 novel “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” about a young woman who in response to grief develops an addiction to sleeping pills and their accompanying twilight state. In Moshfegh’s imagination, emotional states are signaled by bodily obsessions viewed with disapproval in polite society. For Eileen, this manifests in compulsive behavior: masturbating while spying on a couple in a car, only to stuff snow down her tights to stifle the impulse, or chewing candies and spitting them back out by the bowlful, in an attempt to control her body size. (In the novel, she’s also scatologically fixated, downing laxatives and frequently commenting on fecal matters; the film, perhaps necessarily, carves this part away.)But the story is also a perfect pairing for its director, William Oldroyd, whose previous film, the 2017 thriller “Lady Macbeth,” introduced Florence Pugh to the world. Oldroyd’s cold but keen eye for women pushed to the edge of a nervous breakdown by boorish, violent men meets rich ground here. Not just Eileen, but Rebecca and several other female characters are not good or angelic women, and yet they’ve clearly bent themselves to fit molds made by men. The film’s titles, its grain, its shots that bathe Rebecca and Eileen in glowy red lights and deep shadows — it’s all meant to evoke the period, but also an era where women like these fit in like a wrong-handed glove.All of this adds up to discomfort and a bitter aftertaste. Unlike this year’s big movies about women breaking free from oppressive circumstances — the aforementioned “Barbie,” the forthcoming “Poor Things,” among others — it is not obvious that Eileen is destined to find a fuller, richer life free from the confines of patriarchy. She may not be the kind of person who really can. She is, in fact, rather ordinary, not — to return to her father’s statement — the kind of person who’s in a movie, who makes decisions and does things.Except, of course, she’s the lead of her own movie now. Refusing to make Eileen into a girlboss or a heroine or even an example is what makes the whole thing so delicious, so cathartic, so strangely realistic, even if the viewer is left a little horrified. “Eileen” is a mean movie, but I intend that as a compliment: There’s no lesson here, no revelation, no good vibes to wander away with. Spiky and cold, it’s a bitter holiday treat.EileenRated R. A whole lot of nasty business. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Godzilla Minus One’ Review: Bigmouth Strikes Again

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      Japan’s famous monster franchise returns with an appetite for destruction but also a notably sober outlook.You have to like Godzilla’s style. Confident, with an almost stately groove to his step — and why not? With “Godzilla Minus One,” the giant prehistoric lizard is heading toward the 70th anniversary of his Toho studio franchise. Once again, Japan emerges from World War II only to face this atomic colossus, whose appetite for destruction remains unabated and a reliable spectacle.In a prelude, Godzilla makes landfall during the war on an island where a kamikaze pilot, Koichi (Ryunosuke Kamiki), has just detoured to desert. Koichi survives the monster’s attacks, becoming a ball of guilt and shame. He resettles in Tokyo’s rubble with a stranger, Noriko (Minami Hamabe), who’s caring for someone else’s baby.They’re a nuclear family, as it were, but remain unmarried, simply co-survivors. Koichi’s camaraderie with crew members on a mine cleanup ship lightens the mood, but soon Godzilla rears his leathery head again with attacks on ships, streets and the people unfortunate enough to be there.Less vengeful or bored than just a phenomenon, Godzilla stomps and chomps away, spiky, dead-eyed, his hide rough as cooled magma. Signature moves include the snap-and-toss (grabbing and flinging a human or train-car aside) and his blue ray (not the high-resolution disc but rather an explosive thermonuclear beam). The writer-director, Takashi Yamazaki, integrates crowds and effects with a sure hand, and endows the violence with a dour air.The mood suits as citizens band together and decry Japan’s wartime disregard for life. The heroic arc is creaky, but despite the chintzy clichés about Godzilla movies, this one keeps bringing blockbuster brio to heel with a sometimes heavy heart.Godzilla Minus OneRated PG-13 for monster mash. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘May December’ Review: She’ll Be Your Mirror

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      In Todd Haynes’s latest, Natalie Portman is an actress studying the real-life model for her character, (Julianne Moore), a woman with a tabloid back story.Much of Todd Haynes’s sly, unnerving “May December” takes place in and around a picture-perfect home, that favorite movieland setting for American dreams turned nightmares. This one comes wrapped in a dappled, hazy light that blunts hard lines and brightens every face, so much so that characters sometimes look lit from within. Even the evening has an inviting velvetiness, as if all of life’s shadows have been banished. In characteristic Haynes fashion, though, nothing is as it first seems in this shimmering Gothic, including the light that becomes more like a queasy, suffocating miasma.“May December” is the story of two women and their worlds of lies. They meet when a TV actress, Elizabeth (Natalie Portman), visits Gracie (Julianne Moore), the inspiration for her next role. Gracie lives in a large waterfront house in Savannah with her husband, Joe (Charles Melton), their teenage twins and two Irish setters. They have another kid in college, jobs they seem to enjoy and a complicated history that’s summed up by the box Elizabeth finds at their front door, and which Gracie opens with a shrug of familiarity. It’s feces, she explains coolly, and this isn’t the first such package.That box is a blunt metaphor for the ugliness at the core of “May December” — years ago, Gracie became tabloid fodder after she was caught having sex with Joe when he was in seventh grade — a setup that Haynes brilliantly complicates with his three knockout leads, great narrative dexterity and shocks of destabilizing humor that ease you into the story. The first time I watched the movie, I almost clapped my hand over my mouth during one absurd moment, unsure if I was supposed to be laughing this hard. Of course I was: Haynes is having fun, at least for a while, partly to play with our expectations about where the movie is headed.A progenitor of the New Queer Cinema movement of the early 1990s, Haynes likes to dig into that space between the world that exists (or we believe exists) and the world of appearances. He’s a virtuoso of paradoxes. That partly explains why he’s drawn to the woman’s film, with its focus on ordinary life, its domestic spaces, moral quandaries, political dimensions and tears. These films evoke what the critic Molly Haskell once described as “wet, wasted afternoons” and reveal what lies “beneath the sunny-side-up philosophy congealed in the happy ending.” She might as well have been talking about this movie.Written by Samy Burch — it’s her first produced screenplay — “May December” is a woman’s picture in a distinctly Haynesian key. As he has in some of his earlier films (“Far From Heaven,” “Carol”), Haynes at once embraces and toys with genre conventions. He uses beautiful images (and people), bursts of lush music, pointed metaphors and floods of feeling to provide the familiar pleasures of a well-told, absorbing narrative film, even as he picks it apart at the seams. This can create an uneasy dissonance, and there are instances when it seems as if you’re watching two overlaid movies: the original and its critique, a doubling that works nicely in “May December,” which soon becomes a labyrinthine hall of mirrors.Gracie’s character is loosely based on Mary Kay Letourneau, a teacher who in 1997 was arrested for having sex with one of her sixth-grade students, abuse that started when he was 12. She pleaded guilty to child rape and eventually served time in prison, where she gave birth to their first two children. (They later married.) The case generated a predictable tsunami of grotesque media slavering and found putatively serious journalists referring (and continuing to refer) to the sexual assault as a “tryst” and “forbidden love,” language that prettied up the crime as a passionate romance.Gracie rationalizes her relationship with Joe on her own terms, which emerge as Elizabeth gathers intel. As Elizabeth plays detective — she scans old tabloids, interviews family and friends — she helpfully establishes the back story. Gracie isn’t a teacher, and she and Joe met in a pet store, a seemingly incidental detail that takes on poignantly metaphoric resonance as the story unfolds. At one point, Elizabeth also accompanies Gracie and her daughter Mary (Elizabeth Yu) on a shopping trip. When the girl tries on a sleeveless dress, Gracie tells Mary she’s “brave” for baring her arms and not caring about “unrealistic beauty standards.” Mary looks crushed, Gracie oblivious and Elizabeth a bit stunned but oh-so fascinated.At this stage in her process, Elizabeth has begun to imitate Gracie’s gestures and expressions, a turn that Haynes expresses in the tricky shot that opens the shopping scene. As Mary tries on dresses, the women sit side-by-side facing the camera, two mirrors flanking them like drawn curtains. Because of the angles of the mirror, Elizabeth looks as if she’s seated between Gracie and Gracie’s reflection. It takes a beat to read the image and figure out why there are two Gracies, although as Elizabeth slips into character, suddenly there are three.Moore and Portman’s synced performances give the movie much of its weird comedy. Elizabeth guides you into the story, and you’re tagging along when she pulls up to her Savannah digs and later to Gracie and Joe’s home. Portman gives Elizabeth the studied agreeability of someone who has to work to present a friendly front, an effort that will be familiar to anyone who’s ever interviewed a bored film star. Elizabeth is quick to smile, but Portman shows you the character’s brittle affect, so that you see the flickers of hesitation in her eyes and twitches around her mouth. Mostly, you see that Elizabeth isn’t a very good actress. (Presumably that’s why when she tries out Gracie’s lisping voice, she evokes Madeline Kahn.)Gracie doesn’t need to put up a false front because her existence is nothing but a fully committed, melodramatically rich performance that Moore supplely delivers with alternating eerie calm and impressive histrionic mewling and caterwauling. Gracie has embraced her roles as a loving wife and doting mother, and seems to be living in a profound state of denial about what these roles have cost her husband and children, a lack of understanding (and remorse) that establishes the story’s inaugural moral crisis. It’s not at all clear, at first, if Gracie is lying to herself, blissfully self-unaware or just another garden-variety sociopath playing at the American dream, uncertainty that gives the story a frisson of mystery.Gracie and Elizabeth dominate the first half of “May December.” Then, almost imperceptibly, the focus shifts to Joe, and the story grows ever more serious, heavy and very, very sad. Moore and Portman are tremendous, but it’s Melton’s anguished performance that gives the movie its slow-building emotional power. A stunted man-child with a hulking, ponderous body, Joe too has multiple roles as a father and husband, an object of desire and exoticized other. Yet none fit as persuasively, and he’s most at ease in the scenes of him with the Monarch butterflies he raises in little cages. It’s a sweet pastime and a potentially blunt metaphor, one that Haynes handles with enormous, moving delicacy, never more so than when these beautiful creatures emerge from their chrysalises and Joe tenderly watches them take flight.May DecemberRated R for references to the sexual abuse of minors and some adult nudity. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘The Sweet East’ Review: All-American Girl

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      Starring Talia Ryder and Simon Rex, this shape-shifting satire about modern American subcultures is a curious, and occasionally delightful, object if you can handle its flippant treatment of taboos.“The Sweet East,” a shape-shifting satire about modern American subcultures, is a curious — occasionally delightful — object. Its doe-eyed leading lady, Lillian (Talia Ryder), is like the reincarnation of her ostensible namesake, the silent film star Lillian Gish. Both are blank canvasses filled out by different kinds of American dreams. Not the gooey, aspirational sort, but the delusional kind that makes you question humanity’s worth even though you can’t look away.Echoing Gish’s most well-known role, as the victimized naïf in D.W. Griffith’s infamous Ku Klux Klan epic “The Birth of a Nation” (1915), this Lillian consorts with white supremacists, too — if only for a spell before she moves on to the next part.Treating taboos with the flippancy of an eye-rolling teenager, “The Sweet East” tracks the high schooler Lillian’s journeys around the northeastern seaboard. The film is directed by the veteran cinematographer Sean Price Williams (“Good Time”), who shot the film as well and employs grainy B-movie aesthetics.Mileage is sure to vary on the film’s picaresque antics. Lillian falls in with what Williams and the screenwriter Nick Pinkerton see as the most mockable crews: brain-fried anarchists in Washington, D.C.; a sexually repressed Muslim brotherhood in rural Vermont; navel-gazing filmmakers (Ayo Edebiri and Jeremy O. Harris) in the Big Apple. This latter group casts Lillian as the star in their upcoming period movie about the construction of the Erie Canal, which features a meta heartthrob-du-jour played by Jacob Elordi.Pinkerton’s cheeky script flattens when it’s up against the crust-punk radicals and the jihadists; and at its strongest when skewering a neo-Nazi intellectual (Simon Rex) angling to make Lillian his child bride. This weirdly eloquent figure is played marvelously by Rex, who hits the right balance between sincerity and absurdity that other parts of the film sometimes bungle. Maybe it’s low hanging fruit that the white supremacist character is the best comic fodder, but the film’s trolling is stranger and more esoterically inclined than its selection of political punching bags would seem to warrant.The Sweet EastNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Family Switch’ Review: Out of Body Experiences for Everyone

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      Even Pickles the dog gets to trade places in this movie directed by McG, but there are no revelations or bursts of originality here.In a holiday-themed twist on “Freaky Friday,” Jennifer Garner and Ed Helms star as out-of-touch parents who suddenly find themselves occupying the bodies of their teenage children (Emma Myers and Brady Noon), and vice versa, in the Christmas comedy “Family Switch.”Jess and Bill Walker bring the whole over-scheduled family — their daughter, CC, is in the running for the U.S. national soccer team, and Wyatt, their older son, is a science prodigy who’s interviewing for Yale — to the Griffith Observatory to witness a rare planetary alignment.A chance encounter with a fortune teller (Rita Moreno, hamming it up) during the celestial event combines with a cosmic energy conversion so powerful that it zaps the Walkers into a triple body swap: Jess with CC, Bill with Wyatt, and their toddler, Miles, with Pickles, the French bulldog. They break the observatory telescope in the process, and fixing it, which will take a week, is the only way to reverse the spell.On top of CC’s soccer tryouts and Wyatt’s college interview, Jess is prepping for a major presentation on the job at an architecture firm, and Bill is set to perform with his cover band (Rivers Cuomo, Patrick Wilson and Brian Bell cameo as his bandmates) at the school holiday concert. Predictable antics ensue as the Walkers try and fail to excel in each other’s roles, and they soon realize that the telescope isn’t all that needs fixing.Loosely based on the picture book “Bedtime for Mommy” by Amy Krouse Rosenthal, “Family Switch” carries a surprisingly raunchy streak given its source material. But seeing that it’s directed by McG (“Charlie’s Angels,” “The Babysitter”), the gross-out humor shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. The real nail in the coffin is the film’s messaging about the power of family, which is about as tacked-on and stilted as they come — hardly a shock in light of the rest of the Netflix holiday movie lineup.Family SwitchRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Mistress America,’ ‘Tramps’ and More Streaming Gems

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      A pair of charming Gotham-based character comedies are among the highlights of this month’s under-the-radar streaming recommendations.‘Mistress America’ (2015)Stream it on Max.“Barbie” is the current commercial and critical triumph of the screenwriting (and real-life) partners Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, and “Frances Ha” is their origin story. But comparatively little ink is spilled these days on their middle feature (which Baumbach directed), a delightfully funny comedy that turns the tropes of the college coming-of-age movie and the Manic Pixie Dream Girl on their heads. Lola Kirke stars as Tracy, a college freshman new to New York City who gets a whirlwind introduction to the city via her soon-to-be-stepsister Brooke (Gerwig). Gerwig and Baumbach’s wise screenplay delicately dramatizes how Brooke first seems like Tracy’s platonic ideal of the young urban woman, then slowly reveals herself as messy in a multitude of ways. Gerwig’s multilayered performance is one of her best, while Baumbach orchestrates the picture’s shifts from character drama to door-slamming farce with bouncy ease.‘Tramps’ (2017)Stream it on Netflix.Adam Leon is a New York filmmaker of the old school; like his contemporaries, the Safdie brothers, he’s working in the Cassavetes mold, telling ground-level stories about hustlers and grinders who can take whatever the city throws at them (though not without some complaint). He followed up his acclaimed feature debut “Gimme the Loot” with this scrappy, playful story of two strangers (Callum Turner and Grace Van Patten) on a seemingly simple criminal errand who screw it up and have to make it right. Turner and Van Patten’s chemistry is off the charts, the supporting cast is entertaining (particularly the comedian Mike Birbiglia as a perpetually harried middleman), and Leon’s direction is economical and enchanting.‘X’ (2022)Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.The gifted genre director Ti West writes and directs this giddy, gory cross between “Boogie Nights” and “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” in which a group of DIY filmmakers and exotic dancers trek out to the backwoods of the Lone Star state to make a low-budget porn movie. Little do they know, the older couple in the nearby farmhouse are a bit more spry — and murderous — than they might imagine. West’s script and direction are marvelously film-literate, filling the frame and soundtrack with sly in-jokes and references, and his cast is delightfully game; the “Wednesday” star Jenna Ortega is a sublime scream queen, Brittany Snow revels in the opportunity to send up her typical persona and Mia Goth is pitch-perfect as both the final girl and (under heavy makeup) another key player. It’s not for all tastes, but if you’d like a little sex and violence on your holiday viewing menu, both are in plentiful supply here.‘All My Puny Sorrows’ (2022)Stream it on Hulu.Alison Pill is one of those actors who should, by all rights, be a major star — she’s charismatic and credible in every role, and can execute comedy and drama with equal aplomb — but rarely gets a role that properly showcases her considerable skills. She gets one in Michael McGowan’s adaptation of a Miriam Toews novel, as Yoli, a writer whose sister Elf (Sarah Gadon) is a famous concert pianist. Elf has also recently attempted to end her own life, not for the first time and, per her assurances, not for the last; she wants her sister’s help traveling to Switzerland for an assisted suicide. It’s not the cheeriest topic for a motion picture, and the cinematography and Canadian settings are properly dour. But Pill and Gadon are excellent, vividly conveying a familial bond of warmth, empathy and exasperation in equal doses.‘The Zero Theorem’ (2014)Stream it on Peacock.Terry Gilliam’s later work hasn’t met with the same critical or commercial adoration as earlier efforts like “The Fisher King” and “12 Monkeys.” But his customary visual inventiveness and narrative ingenuity are on full display in this futuristic tale of a computer operator (Christoph Waltz) enlisted to mathematically prove the nothingness of existence. The cast is loaded with familiar faces (including Matt Damon, Lucas Hedges, Tilda Swinton and David Thewlis) but Gilliam is, as ever, the real star here, loading his frames with outdated technology and dystopian signifiers, crafting a world that’s both familiar and foreign, fascinating and terrifying.‘Love to Love You, Donna Summer’ (2023)Stream it on Max.Roger Ross Williams opens his bio-documentary of the “Queen of Disco” with the original vocal tracks of the title song, which are aggressively and unapologetically sexual, and reminds us of what a revelation her sound was at that particular moment (in the music industry, and in our culture in general). “Love to Love You” spends a fair amount of its running time in that kind of micro-exploration of her biggest hits, and how she built them. But Williams is more interested in her enigmatic inner life (Brooklyn Sudano, one of Summers’s daughters and the film’s co-director, can only describe her as “complicated”). Drawing on home video footage, archival interviews and audio recordings, Williams and Sudano attempt to not only encapsulate Summers’s life but understand it — a much more difficult task.‘Wham!’ (2023)Stream it on Netflix.The documentary filmmaker Chris Smith (“American Movie”) adopts a similar approach to his portrait of the English ’80s hit machine, mostly eschewing contemporary talking head interviews in favor of an archive-heavy approach, primarily to give equal voice and weight to the memories of George Michael. The music is fizzy and the videos retain their period kitsch, but Smith stays firmly centered on the friendship between Michael and his bandmate Andrew Ridgeley — specifically, what becoming international superstars did to that friendship. “Wham!” moves at lightning speed while telling their story with impressive depth, particularly Michael’s difficulties balancing his sexuality with the image he had to present in that wildly homophobic era. It’s an irresistible doc, cheery and charming and warmly affectionate toward its subjects. More

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      Emma Stone and Yorgos Lanthimos on ‘Poor Things’

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      It’s one thing to cry while performing. Emma Stone can do that. What she doesn’t want to do, and what she found herself doing anyway, is to cry in the middle of an interview.“I’m such an actor, what is wrong with me?” she said, her eyes welling up with tears.It was mid-November in Los Angeles and we were out to lunch with Yorgos Lanthimos, the Greek director with whom Stone has made the cockeyed comedies “The Favourite” and now “Poor Things,” which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in September and is tipped to be a major Oscar contender when it’s released Dec. 8. Based on the novel by Alasdair Gray, “Poor Things” casts Stone as Bella Baxter, who may have the cinematic year’s most outrageous origin story: Trapped in an unhappy marriage, she throws herself off a bridge and is resurrected by a mad scientist (Willem Dafoe) who swaps her brain for that of her unborn baby.Stone gets plenty of comic mileage out of playing this full-grown woman with the mind of a child, but Bella’s eventual arc is breathtaking: As she gains sentience, embarks on a sexual and political awakening, and strives toward independence, Bella must navigate the hapless suitors (played by the likes of Mark Ruffalo and Ramy Youssef) who are drawn to her maverick spirit but also seek to possess her. This is a character who has meant more to Stone than most — “I just love her so much,” she told me — though she tried to laugh off how talking about “Poor Things” sometimes moved her to tears.“I’m tired, that’s all it is,” Stone said.In addition to “The Favourite” and “Poor Things,” Lanthimos, 50, and Stone, 35, have collaborated on the short film “Bleat” as well as “And,” a comic anthology due next year. “I obviously have full-blown, very intense trust in him,” she said, “and as an actor, it’s the best feeling ever, because it’s so rare that you feel like whatever you do, you’re protected by your director.”Scenes from a collaboration: Stone in Lanthimos’s “Poor Things,” left, “The Favourite” and “Bleat.”Searchlight Pictures; Lanthimos facilitates that trust with a long rehearsal process that has more in common with improv comedy than you might expect: The actors recite their lines while doing log rolls, walking backward or closing their eyes. “We never rehearse as in, ‘OK, how are you going to do the scene and let’s just act it out,’” Lanthimos said. “It’s more about creating this atmosphere of camaraderie and having fun, getting to know each other so we can be comfortable with ridiculing ourselves.”Some actors forge long-term relationships with auteurs that require sacrificing what has made them into movie stars: To ascend to a more prestigious plane, comedians furrow their brows, beauties cake themselves in dirt and teen idols talk of torturing themselves in the name of their craft. But with Lanthimos, Stone has not had to give up the comic timing and innate empathy that are her greatest gifts as an actor. She instead puts those talents to use in new and daring ways under her director’s unique eye.Still, this fruitful partnership makes for an unusual duo in person: Where Lanthimos is impassive and a man of few words, his leading lady is wide-eyed, warm and eager to connect. Or, as Stone put it, “I’m a girl from Arizona and he’s a guy from Athens. I don’t know how this worked, because our personalities could not be more different, but it’s amazing.”Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.When did the two of you first meet?EMMA STONE It was June of 2015, in a cafe. I was in rehearsals for “La La Land,” and I met him to talk about “The Favourite.” I thought he was going to be really scary and twisted, and he isn’t. It was a very comfortable and easy conversation and we got along right away.You thought he might be a more intimidating presence?STONE Having seen the films that he had made up until that point, yeah.YORGOS LANTHIMOS What a cliché.STONE I was 26! I was but a child. But from then on, we kept in touch and got to know each other a little bit. By the time we were making “The Favourite,” we had a rapport and the beginning of our friendship, and then by the end of shooting it, we started talking about “Poor Things.”Stone says of her “Poor Things” role: “My God, she’s the greatest character I’ll probably ever get to play.”Thea Traff for The New York TimesYorgos, what was going on in your life when you first read “Poor Things”?LANTHIMOS I had just moved to London and started meeting people about English-language projects. It was after “Dogtooth” [2010] was nominated for an Oscar, and people started taking interest.STONE [teasing] Nominated for an Oscar. Everybody was like, “Whoa, this guy’s so great!”LANTHIMOS But when I started showing “Poor Things” to people, it was rejected many times for development.What reason did they give?LANTHIMOS “It’s too weird, too strange.” Back then, there was a notion of, “Oh, we’ll get a European or non-American filmmaker to do something conventional, they’ll just bring their own twist to it.”STONE That still happens.LANTHIMOS So that was quite a disappointment because I was very naïve in meeting people and them saying, “Oh my God, ‘Dogtooth’ is amazing, we want to do things with you.” And then I would produce “The Lobster” [2016] and they would go, “Oh, no, no, we’re not talking about something like this. Don’t you want to do something more normal?”Emma, how did Yorgos pitch this project to you?STONE He gave me sort of the brass-tacks overview of Bella, what she goes through and what the men in her life experience as a response to how she’s evolving. And I was just like, “Sign me up.” My God, she’s the greatest character I’ll probably ever get to play.What is it about this character that’s so beguiling?LANTHIMOS She’s unlike anyone.STONE She’s drinking up the world around her in such a unique and beautiful way that I just dream I could. I find her so inspiring, and living in that every day throughout that whole process was just the greatest gift — it’s the most joy I’ve ever gotten to have as a character. Every person that exists has so much that built them up to what they are in adulthood, and it was interesting to discover that if you strip all that away, all that’s left is joy and curiosity.We meet Bella when she’s not far into her brain swap: Formerly an adult woman named Victoria Blessington, she’s now like a full-grown baby, impulsive and childlike. What was it like to embody that phase?STONE Tough. That was the hardest stage for me, just because that’s where she’s at her most primitive. Acting is inherently embarrassing — this, as a job, is just silly and you can feel really stupid. Thankfully, with Yorgos, it’s much more freeing and I feel confident because we can quickly get to, “I guess this one’s not working, let’s go somewhere else.” Also, I can cry to him if I’m freaking out about something, which I have many times.We’d been working on this for so many years, and to actually commit it to film is always terrifying. I find the first two weeks of filming anything really difficult because you’re still finding your footing and the tone of what it actually is in practice, not just the idea of it. So the first week was really challenging to just give myself over to it and trust the process of it, and I think you felt the same way.LANTHIMOS Yeah.STONE We were talking about it every day, and I was like, “What am I doing?” You were like, “I don’t know.” We were both figuring out who she was.A scene from “Poor Things.” Stone and Lanthimos have been discussing the film since shooting “The Favourite” (2018).Yorgos Lanthimos/Searchlight PicturesHow does your trust in one another extend to how you filmed Bella’s sexual awakening?STONE It simplifies everything. Whenever there was a scene like that, it was only four people in the room, other than whatever actor might be in there. There was Yorgos and our [director of photography] Robbie Ryan, who looks at me like I am a lamp — he’s seen me naked so many times, it’s so beyond nothing — and then Hayley [Williams, the first assistant director], and Olga [Abramson], our focus puller. That was the room.LANTHIMOS Sometimes not even sound. We would rig mics when we could and we wouldn’t even have a boom operator there. So it’s just very intimate.STONE And also, an amazing intimacy coordinator [Elle McAlpine]. Stupidly, at the beginning, I was like, “It’s fine [without one], I’ve known you for so many years.” And then once it came to actually doing all those scenes, having her there was so wonderful — she really made the energy so calm and professional. But it was weird ultimately to see the movie because doing those scenes was such an intimate experience and then I was like, “Right, that’s in the movie!”But I mean, that’s Bella. She has no shame about her body and her sexuality and who she is, and I am so proud of that aspect of the film.Does it embolden you to stay in that space?STONE Just to stay naked all the time? Yeah. I’m going to be a nudist now, I’m emboldened!I meant Bella’s head space. Do you feel emboldened when you spend so much time in a character free from shame?STONE I wish I could say yes. It has stuck with me in some capacities, and if I could live as Bella, I would love to. It’s really hard when you have your own history to deal with, which seemingly everybody has except for her. But I find her so inspirational in general that I’m always trying to think if I could be a little bit more like her.Yorgos, you acted in the Greek film “Attenberg” earlier in your career, which required you to take part in some sex scenes. Did that give you a unique perspective on directing them?LANTHIMOS For me, that aspect was never an issue. Sex in movies, or nudity — I just never understood the prudishness around it. It always drives me mad how liberal people are about violence and how they allow minors to experience it in any way, and then we’re so prudish about sexuality. To me, what was difficult about being an actor was that there was a lot of waiting around, and that’s why, when I make films, I try to have the least amount of business possible: No lights, no gear, no nothing. Nobody goes anywhere, nobody leaves. There’s no time to smoke a cigarette, because we just keep on going.STONE That’s why you have to switch to vaping.Lanthimos has appeared as an actor in film with sex scenes. “Sex in movies, or nudity — I just never understood the prudishness around it,” he said.Thea Traff for The New York TimesEmma, do you want something different out of your projects now than you did in your 20s?STONE I hope that when it comes to projects or characters that it’ll always be a surprise and slightly scary. But also, how scary can it be? It’s acting, I’m not saving any lives. It’s such a lucky thing to be able to do, so to sit here as an actor and be like, “This was so hard,” is crazy.LANTHIMOS I think about that as well. “Oh, I’m making films, what’s so incredibly difficult about that?” But I do have a horrible time. The stress.STONE He’s really miserable while we’re filming.LANTHIMOS Yeah, it’s insane. It’s immense.And it hasn’t gone away over time?STONE It’s gotten worse.LANTHIMOS You try to rationalize it: “Why are you so upset? This is a movie.” Of course, when you compare it with other things that are happening in the world, it’s ridiculous. But for you, in that moment, it’s everything.STONE Also, a lot of times you’re on location. You’re away from your quote-unquote real life, you’re working so many hours a day, and it’s so consuming.So how did it feel to near the end of an all-consuming project like “Poor Things”?STONE I was a mess. Oh my God, I was devastated. I couldn’t even get through the scenes we were shooting on the last day because I was crying so much.You didn’t want to let go?STONE I wanted to be done because we were exhausted, but I really didn’t want to be done. It was such an important experience to me that it makes me sad now thinking about it.LANTHIMOS The last day was in the studio, and we did her jumping off the bridge.STONE I’m getting teary. I’m sorry, this is so stupid. Bizarre. That last day, I did the jump that Victoria does off the bridge when she’s pregnant, and I was so emotional. You can imagine, if I’m sitting here years later like this!I said to Hayley, our A.D., “Oh my God, this is so sad. I’m shooting a suicide, and it’s the end of the movie after this whole joyful experience.” And she said, “No, this is the birth of Bella.” I was like, “It is the birth of Bella! Because Victoria being gone is the birth of Bella.” It’s so nice to end on that.[Wiping her eyes.] Yeah. Anyway, it was cool. No big deal. Fun movie, we had a good time, it was just a paycheck. More