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      ‘Manodrome’ Review: The Manosphere Gets a Crude Awakening

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      An unemployed dad-to-be is seduced by a misogynist group who call themselves “the guys” in this sensationalizing drama starring Jesse Eisenberg.The word “Manodrome,” the title of a new film starring Jesse Eisenberg, is a riff on the “manosphere” — a catchall term for misogynist online communities including so-called incels and men’s rights activists. If your first instinct, like mine, is to snicker, know that this self-important drama is devoid of humor.Directed by John Trengove, the film tracks the seduction of an unemployed worker turned Uber driver, Eisenberg’s Ralphie, by a group of women-hating men, which sets off a violent downward spiral that is, at the very least, not boring.A gym rat, Ralphie pumps iron to make up for the fact that he doesn’t feel very manly. He’s broke, and he’s expecting a baby with his girlfriend Sal (Odessa Young), with whom he lives in a teeny-tiny apartment in Syracuse, N.Y.Sal isn’t particularly excited about starting a family, but Ralphie seems to think fatherhood will save him — if only the system wasn’t working against him. In other words, he’s easy bait.Ralphie’s workout pal Jason (Philip Ettinger) steps in, and introduces him to “the guys”: a diverse gang of bachelors who bunk together in a country mansion owned by the group’s leader and bankroller, Dan (Adrien Brody). They offer a sense of community and material perks, emboldening Ralphie to act out against Sal and unleash his inner alpha.Eisenberg — beefed up in this role and stripped of the cocky, motormouth bravado he’s known for — plays the edgy Ralphie like a ticking time bomb of pent-up feeling. Though the script, which relies heavily on pseudo-psychology, doesn’t leave room for much mystery. Ralphie is self-loathing, intensely homophobic, and was made fun of as a kid for being chubby — connect the dots and you’ll be able to anticipate half of the film’s twists (and there are surplus twists).Crude and sensationalizing, “Manodrome” is like an amalgam of all the headlines you’ve read about the kinds of men who succumb to warped ideologies.ManodromeRated R for sex, domestic abuse, gun violence and cultlike activity. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Journey to Bethlehem’ Review: No Room at the Inn? Try the Multiplex

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      It’s no “Home Alone” or “Jesus Christ Superstar,” but it does have Antonio Banderas as a song-slinging Herod and Lecrae as a quavering Angel Gabriel.Christmas announces its coming earlier every year. We haven’t even hit Thanksgiving and here is this peculiar Nativity movie for, um, someone’s whole family, directed and co-written by Adam Anders. Anders, making his feature debut here, is a former “Glee” writer and music producer, and his co-writer, Peter Barsocchini, is a veteran of “High School Musical.” While their treatment of the ancient world is informed, to say the least, by their prior work, the scenario also feels like Hallmark pulped through a Disney strainer.For instance, the future Jesus-mom, Mary (Fiona Palomo), bridles at her arranged marriage, and actually says, “What about my dream of becoming a teacher, like my father?” She is talked down by girlfriends on a shopping trek who sing, “Mary, Mary, Mary, Mary/It’s good for you.”The familiar story line is festooned with “kicky” touches, like a meet-cute between Mary and Joseph (Milo Manheim) at a fruit market, and the angel Gabriel (the rapper and singer Lecrae) struggling with stage fright before making his presentation to the Blessed Virgin. Later, in a dream, two Josephs ponder the pregnancy issue, with the anti-Mary manifestation singing “Don’t make concessions/for her transgressions.”Antonio Banderas appears as Judea’s King Herod, dead set on making sure the newborn (other) King doesn’t stick around for long.“Did he lose a bet?” one may wonder, seeing Banderas in this role. Apparently not; he clearly relishes playing a singing and dancing villain. In his introductory number, he croons about how, yes, it’s good to be king.“Mine is the kingdom/mine is the power,” he belts out. And Joel Smallbone, as his scheming son Antipater, sidles up beside him to harmonize on “mine is the glory.”The magic of movies does depend on a certain suspension of disbelief, but “Journey” tests the viewer beyond rational credulity, even as it persists in asserting the reality of its existence.Call it a Christmas anti-miracle?Journey to BethlehemRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Killer’ Review: He’s a Deadly Bore

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      Michael Fassbender stars as a loquaciously dull hit man in David Fincher’s latest film about bloody exploits.David Fincher can’t get enough of that murderous stuff — his filmography bleedeth over with miscreants (“Alien 3”), home invaders (“Panic Room”) and multiple maniacs (“Seven,” “Zodiac,” “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” “Gone Girl”). During one of his periodic breaks from painting the big screen red, Fincher served as a producer and director on the Netflix show “Mindhunter,” another of his visually impeccable, morgue-cold creep-outs. This one was about F.B.I. agents profiling serial killers like Edmund Kemper, a ghoul whose silkily insinuating manner resonated more deeply than the show, which ended after two seasons.“Mindhunter” was easier to admire than to love, which is habitually true of Fincher’s work and was certainly true of his last movie, “Mank,” an Old Hollywood exhumation about powerful people who kill dreams and souls. In Hobbesian terms, life in a Fincher film tends to be solitary and poor, nasty and brutish, if not necessarily short. That’s the case again in his most recent movie, “The Killer,” about a nameless hit man — played by Michael Fassbender — a chatty loner first seen waiting for a victim to show up. In time, the mark appears, the Killer shoots but misses, and spends the remainder of the story trying to clean up the mess.“The Killer” is based on a French comic book with the same title written by Alexis Nolent (who goes by Matz) and illustrated by Luc Jacamon. The protagonist is an outwardly ordinary-looking hit man who’s as physically unassuming as he is inevitably nihilistic: Other people are awful, the world is hopeless, “we’re living on a pile of corpses,” etc. He quotes Christ and Kazantzakis, pals around with kindred villains, regularly has sex with balloon-breasted ladies but also spends a lot of time alone, which means the comic panels overflow with his loathing and insipid thoughts. What makes him ostensibly interesting isn’t his job or body count; what’s intriguing, at least before your eyes finally glaze over, is that he’s dull.The idea of an anti-Bond type with an illegal license to kill is, yes, an idea, one that flickers weakly on the page amid a mass of genre clichés. What’s most distinctive about the comic is the contrast between its protagonist and Jacamon’s cinematic illustrations, with their rich hues, canted angles and interplay between realism and expressionism. You keep reading only to keep looking. Fincher’s visual approach in the movie is relatively muted by contrast. He bathes the screen with sulfurous yellow, throws in a few showy shots — an unblinking eye seen through a gun scope — and, as he likes to do, goes dark and then darker, as in one extended fight sequence that’s so dimly lit it sometimes hovers on the threshold of visibility.Written by Andrew Kevin Walker (“Seven”), the movie ditches a lot of the comic’s gasbag observations, shaves the plot to the bone, folds in some pop-culture yuks (the Killer uses sitcom aliases) and takes a jab at WeWork. Fassbender’s character still prattles on a lot, mostly in voice-over, both when he’s on the job and off, but much of what he says is repetitive and on occasion near-affirmational. “Forbid empathy,” he murmurs. “Trust no one.” On occasion, he sounds as if he’s trying to convince himself or just settle his mind so he can focus on the violent task at hand; at other times, he sounds as if he’s dispensing avuncular advice to students of slaughter: “This is what it takes if you want to succeed.”One problem with the movie is that without the Killer’s anti-humanist rants, his historical references and political entanglements, there isn’t much left other than Fincher’s virtuosity, Fassbender’s tamped-down charisma and the thorny pleasures of watching evil people commit evil with great finesse. What this Killer has are a lover (Sophie Charlotte), who’s merely a plot contrivance, a luxe beachfront house and a storage unit kitted out with the tools of his trade (guns, passports). What he doesn’t have is much of a personality or a code, a way of being that complicates the violence, as in the films of Jean-Pierre Melville and his admirers. So what is the Killer? Mostly, it seems, he is a way for Fincher to kill time.After the first job in the movie goes bad, the Killer finds that he’s now a target, which adds a bit of tension and mystery as he dodges threats amid the bang-bangs — the gunfire is more polyrhythmic than the metronomic editing — and the splashy entrances and exits from the other generic types: the Lawyer (Charles Parnell), the Client (Arliss Howard), the Expert (Tilda Swinton), the Brute (Sala Baker). Throughout, Fassbender holds the center with his lissome, controlled physicality and near-unmodulated voice. The character is boring and so is this movie, but like the supremely skilled Fincher, who can’t help but make images that hold your gaze even as your mind wanders, Fassbender does keep you watching.The KillerRated R for ultraviolence. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      SAG-AFTRA and Hollywood Studios Agree to Deal to End Actors’ Strike

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      The agreement all but ends one of the longest labor crises in the history of the entertainment industry. Union members still have to approve the deal.One of the longest labor crises in Hollywood history is finally coming to an end.SAG-AFTRA, the union representing tens of thousands of actors, reached a tentative deal for a new contract with entertainment companies on Wednesday, clearing the way for the $134 billion American movie and television business to swing back into motion.Hollywood’s assembly lines have been at a near-standstill since May because of a pair of strikes by writers and actors, resulting in financial pain for studios and for many of the two million Americans — makeup artists, set builders, location scouts, chauffeurs, casting directors — who work in jobs directly or indirectly related to making TV shows and films.Upset about streaming-service pay and fearful of fast-developing artificial intelligence technology, actors joined screenwriters on picket lines in July. The writers had walked out in May over similar concerns. It was the first time since 1960, when Ronald Reagan was the head of the actors’ union and Marilyn Monroe was still starring in films, that actors and writers were both on strike.The Writers Guild of America, which represents 11,500 screenwriters, reached a tentative agreement with studios on Sept. 24 and ended its 148-day strike on Sept. 27. In the coming days, SAG-AFTRA members will vote on whether to accept their union’s deal, which includes hefty gains, like increases in compensation for streaming shows and films, better health care funding, concessions from studios on self-taped auditions, and guarantees that studios will not use artificial intelligence to create digital replicas of their likenesses without payment or approval.SAG-AFTRA, however, failed to receive a percentage of streaming service revenue. It had proposed a 2 percent share — later dropped to 1 percent, before a pivot to a per-subscriber fee. Fran Drescher, the union’s president, had made the demand a priority, but companies like Netflix balked, calling it “a bridge too far.”Instead, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of entertainment companies, proposed a new residual for streaming programs based on performance metrics, which the union, after making some adjustments, agreed to take.At 118 days, it was the longest movie and television strike in the union’s 90-year history. SAG-AFTRA said in a terse statement that its negotiating committee had voted unanimously to approve the tentative deal, which will proceed to the union’s national board on Friday for “review and consideration.”It added, “Further details will be released following that meeting.”Shaan Sharma, a member of the union’s negotiating committee, said he had mixed emotions about the tentative deal, though he declined to go into specifics because the SAG-AFTRA board still needed to review it.“They say a negotiation is when both sides are unhappy because you can’t get everything you want on either side,” he said, adding, “You can be happy for the deal overall, but you can feel a sense of loss for something that you didn’t get that you thought was important.”Ms. Drescher, who had been active on social media during the strike, didn’t immediately post anything on Wednesday evening. She and other SAG-AFTRA officials had come under severe pressure from agents, crew member unions and even some of her own members, including George Clooney and Ben Affleck, to wrap up what had started to feel like an interminable negotiation.“I’m relieved,” Kevin Zegers, an actor most recently seen in the ABC show “The Rookie: Feds,” said in an interview after the union’s announcement. “If it didn’t end today, there would have been riots.”The studio alliance said in a statement that the tentative agreement “represents a new paradigm,” giving SAG-AFTRA “the biggest contract-on-contract gains in the history of the union.”There is uncertainty over what a poststrike Hollywood will look like. But one thing is certain: There will be fewer jobs for actors and writers in the coming years, undercutting the wins that unions achieved at the bargaining table.Even before the strikes, entertainment companies were cutting back on the number of television shows they ordered, a result of severe pressure from Wall Street to turn money-losing streaming services into profitable businesses. Analysts expect companies to make up for the pair of pricey new labor contracts by reducing costs elsewhere, including by making fewer shows and canceling first-look deals.The actors, like the writers, said the streaming era had negatively affected their working conditions and compensation.Jenna Schoenefeld for The New York TimesFor the moment, however, the agreements with actors and writers represent a capitulation by Hollywood’s biggest companies, which started the bargaining process with an expectation that the unions, especially SAG-AFTRA, would be relatively compliant. Early in the talks, for instance, the studio alliance — Netflix, Disney, NBCUniversal, Apple, Amazon, Sony, Paramount, Warner Bros. — refused to negotiate on multiple union proposals. “Rejected our proposal, refused to make a counter” became a rallying cry among the striking workers.As the studio alliance tried to limit any gains, the companies cited business challenges, including the rapid decline of cable television and continued streaming losses. Disney, struggling with $4 billion in streaming losses in 2022, eliminated 7,000 jobs in the spring.But the alliance underestimated the pent-up anger pulsating among the studios’ own workers. Writers and actors called the moment “existential,” arguing that the streaming era had deteriorated the working conditions and compensation for rank-and-file members of their professions so much that they could no longer make a living. The companies brushed such comments aside as union bluster and Hollywood dramatics. They found out the workers were serious.With the strikes dragging into the fall and the financial pain on both sides mounting, the studio alliance reluctantly switched from trying to limit gains to figuring out how to get Hollywood’s creative assembly lines running again — even if that meant bending to the will of the unions.“It was all macho, tough-guy stuff from the companies for a while,” said Jason E. Squire, professor emeritus at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. “But that certainly did change.”There had previously been 15 years of labor peace in Hollywood.“The executives of these companies didn’t need to worry about labor very much — they worried about other things,” Chris Keyser, a chair of the Writers Guild negotiating committee, said in an interview after the writers’ strike concluded. “They worried about Wall Street and their free cash flow, and all of that.”Mr. Keyser continued: “They could say to their labor executives, ‘Do the same thing you’ve been doing year after year. Just take care of that, because labor costs are not going to be a problem.’ Suddenly, that wasn’t true anymore.” As a result of the strikes, studios are widely expected to overhaul their approach to union negotiations, which in many ways dates to the 1980s.Writers Guild leaders called their deal “exceptional” and “transformative,” noting the creation of viewership-based streaming bonuses and a sharp increase in royalty payments for overseas viewing on streaming services. Film writers received guaranteed payment for a second draft of screenplays, something the union had tried but failed to secure for at least two decades.The Writers Guild said the contract included enhancements worth roughly $233 million annually. When bargaining started in the spring, the guild proposed $429 million in enhancements, while studios countered with $86 million, according to the guild.For an industry upended by the streaming revolution, which the pandemic sped up, the tentative accord takes a meaningful step toward stabilization. About $10 billion in TV and film production has been on hold, according to ProdPro, a production tracking service. That amounts to 176 shows and films.The fallout has been significant, both inside and outside the industry. California’s economy alone has lost more than $5 billion, according to Gov. Gavin Newsom. Because the actors’ union prohibited its members from participating in promotional campaigns for already-finished work, studios pulled movies like “Dune: Part Two” from the fall release schedule, forgoing as much as $1.6 billion in worldwide ticket sales, according to David A. Gross, a film consultant.With labor harmony restored, the coming weeks should be chaotic. Studio executives and producers will begin a mad scramble to secure soundstages, stars, insurance, writers and crew members so productions can start running again as quickly as possible. Because of the end-of-year holidays, some projects may not restart until January.Both sides will have to go through the arduous process of working together again after a searing six-month standoff. The strikes tore at the fabric of the clubby entertainment world, with actors’ union leaders describing executives as “land barons of a medieval time,” and writers and actors still fuming that it took studio executives months, not weeks, to reach a deal.Workers and businesses caught in the crossfire were idled, potentially leaving bitter feelings toward both sides.And it appears that Hollywood executives will now have to contend with a resurgent labor force, mirroring many other American businesses. In recent weeks, production workers at Walt Disney Animation voted to unionize, as did visual-effects workers at Marvel.Contracts with powerful unions that represent Hollywood crews will expire in June and July, and negotiations are expected to be fractious.“It seemed apparent early on that we were part of a trend in American society where labor was beginning to flex its muscles — where unions were beginning to reassert their power,” said Mr. Keyser, the Writers Guild official.Brooks Barnes More

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      A Mixed Mood as Hollywood Strikes Finally End

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      Celebratory feelings are competing with resentment over the work stoppage and worries about the business era that is coming.It should be a rapturous time in Hollywood.Writers have been back at their keyboards for a month, having negotiated a strike-ending deal so favorable that it seemed to leave even them a bit gobsmacked. On Wednesday, the actors’ union said it had negotiated a tentative contract of its own, all but ending its 118-day strike and clearing a path for the film and television business to roar back to life for the first time since May.Champagne for everyone!Instead, the mood in the entertainment capital is decidedly mixed, as celebratory feelings compete with resentment over the work stoppage and worries about the business era that is coming.“People are excited — thrilled — to be getting back to work,” said Jon Liebman, co-chief executive of Brillstein Entertainment Partners, a venerable Hollywood management firm. “But they are also mindful of some sobering challenges that lie ahead.”Analysts estimate that higher labor expenses will add 10 percent to the cost of making a show, and studios are expected to compensate by cutting back on production.“Companies are not going to increase their budgets accordingly,” said Jason E. Squire, editor of “The Movie Business Book” and host of a companion podcast. “They will compensate by making less. The end.”Hulu, for instance, expects the number of new shows it makes in 2024 to fall by about a third from 2022.The Directors Guild of America also has a new contract that guarantees raises. And two more union contracts, both covering crews, come due in the next few months. Studios will either have to pay up or risk another shutdown. “READY for our contract fight next year,” Lindsay Dougherty, lead organizer for Teamsters Local 399, recently said on X, formerly known as Twitter. Her branch represents more than 6,000 Hollywood workers, including truck drivers, location managers and casting directors.Even before the strikes, Hollywood was swinging from boom times to austerity. Peak TV, the glut of new programming that helped define the streaming era, ended last year as Wall Street began pressuring streaming services to put a priority on profit over subscriber growth. TV networks and streaming platforms ordered 40 percent fewer adult scripted series in the second half of 2022 than they did in the same period in 2019, according to Ampere Analysis, a research firm.Put another way, 599 adult scripted series were made last year. Some analysts predict that, by 2025, the annual number will be closer to 400, a roughly one-third decline. Even the most modest series employs hundreds of people, including agents, managers, publicists and stylists, who in turn fuel the broader economy.“With the strike over, we’re all staring down the barrel of a painful structural adjustment that predates the strike,” Zack Stentz, a screenwriter with credits like “X-Men: First Class” and “Thor,” wrote on X. “A lot of careers and even entire companies are going to go away over the next year.” (He added, on a glass-half-full note: “This is also a time for clever little mammals to survive and even thrive in the new landscape. Your job is to be a clever mammal.”)The streaming profitability problem remains largely unsolved. Netflix and Hulu make money, and Warner Bros. Discovery has said its Max service will turn a profit by the end of the year. But Disney+, Paramount+, Peacock and others continue to lose money. Peacock alone will bleed $2.8 billion in red ink in 2023, Comcast said last month.Most analysts say that there are too many streaming services and that the weakest will ultimately close or merge with bigger competitors.The entertainment industry’s underlying cable television and box office problems also remain dire, in some cases growing worse during the five months it took to restore labor peace.Fewer than 50 million homes will pay for cable or satellite television by 2027, down from 64 million today and 100 million seven years ago, according to PwC, the accounting giant. In July, Disney announced that it was exploring a once-unthinkable sale of a stake in ESPN, the cable giant that has powered much of Disney’s growth over the past two decades. Paramount Global’s once-venerable cable portfolio, centered on Nickelodeon and MTV, has also been pummeled by cord cutting; Paramount shares have dropped nearly 50 percent since May.The film business is also unsettled. Movies now arrive in homes (either through digital stores or on streaming) after as little as 17 days in theaters, compared with about 90 days, which had been the standard for decades.Audiences have finally started to tire of Hollywood’s prevailing movie business strategy — endless sequels, each more bloated than the last — with lackluster results for the seventh “Mission: Impossible” film, the fifth “Indiana Jones” installment and 11th “Fast & Furious” chapter as evidence.Movies now arrive in homes (either through digital stores or on streaming) after as little as 17 days in theaters, compared with the decades-old standard of about 90 days.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesTheaters are not dead, as blockbuster turnout for “Five Nights at Freddy’s,” “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour,” “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” has shown. But ticket-buying data suggests a worrisome trend: People who were going to six to eight movies a year before the pandemic are now going to three or four. Even the most ardent fans of big-screen entertainment are paring back.Cinemas in North America sold about $7.7 billion in tickets this year though October, a 17 percent decline from the same period in 2019.There is more competition for leisure time; TikTok has 150 million users in the United States, a majority of them younger than 30, and the average time spent on the app is growing quickly.Everywhere you look in Hollywood, or so it seems, businesses are trying to cut costs. Citing the strikes and “volatile larger entertainment marketplace,” Anonymous Content, a production and management company, laid off 8 percent of its staff last month. United Talent Agency also trimmed its head count, as did several competing agencies.DreamWorks Animation recently eliminated 4 percent of its work force, while Starz, the premium cable network and streaming service, is reducing head count by 10 percent. Netflix is restructuring its animation division, which is expected to result in layoffs and fewer self-made films.Consider what is happening at Disney, which is widely considered the strongest of the old-line entertainment companies, partly because it is the largest.Before the strikes, Disney had about 150 television shows and a dozen movies in production. But worries about streaming profitability and the decline of cable television have battered Disney’s stock price. Shares have been trading in the $80 range, down from $197 two years ago. Sorting out ESPN’s future is Disney’s first priority, but the company is also selling holdings in India and weighing whether to part with assets like ABC; the Freeform cable channel; and a chain of local broadcast stations.Disney is so vulnerable that the activist investor Nelson Peltz has made it known to The Wall Street Journal that he intends, for the second time in a year, to push for board seats. Disney fended off Mr. Peltz in February, partly by saying it would cut $5.5 billion in costs and eliminate 7,000 jobs. On Wednesday, Disney said that, in the end, it had cut $7.5 billion and more than 8,000 jobs. It added that it would continue to tighten its belt.Phil Cusick, an analyst at J.P. Morgan, said of Disney in a note to clients in late September, “The company plans to make less content and spend less on what it does make.”Nicole Sperling More

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      ‘The Marvels’ and the Back Story

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      The latest superhero installment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is arriving with some baggage. Here’s a look at the rocky lead-up to the release.The long-awaited superhero sequel “The Marvels” is finally reaching multiplexes this weekend, but the tumultuous back story behind the film makes this release something different.The movie, opening Friday and starring Brie Larson as Carol Danvers (a.k.a. Captain Marvel), is facing projections of lower-than-usual ticket sales for Marvel Studios along with chatter about the uncertainty of Larson’s future in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.Box office analysts have predicted an opening weekend haul of $75 million to $80 million, which would be a disappointment for a studio that historically has seen its superhero films regularly debut above the $100 million mark. The release comes in the same year as another shaky Marvel Studios debut, “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” which, with a $476 million worldwide gross after its February premiere, recorded one of the M.C.U.’s worst performances at the box office.“The Marvels” continues the story of “Captain Marvel” (2019), one of the studio’s best-performing titles ($1.1 billion worldwide). That film’s release, though, was positioned favorably between “Avengers: Infinity War” and “Avengers: Endgame,” the gold standards of the superhero era and two of the highest-grossing films of all time (not adjusted for inflation).Directed by Nia DaCosta (“Candyman”), “The Marvels” in particular, appears to be a tough project to break through the fog of so-called superhero fatigue. Promotion around the film has been affected by the SAG-AFTRA strike. Even so, the film is billed as an ensemble movie in which two of its central trio of stars — Teyonah Parris as Monica Rambeau and Iman Vellani as Kamala Khan (or Ms. Marvel, the M.C.U.’s first Muslim superhero) — are, to the wider world, relative unknowns.The film’s release may also be affected by the biases of some fans who are uninterested in a project featuring female superheroes. Earlier this year, when the first trailer for “The Marvels” was released, news reports noted that many fans had appeared to “dislike-bomb” the video: Within hours of its posting on YouTube, the trailer received hundreds of thousands of dislikes along with negative comments about the cast. (The site removed the dislike counter in 2021, though online tools make the number viewable to users.)As for Larson, speculation has swirled over her possible disillusionment with the M.C.U. as a result of the intense and often sexist backlash she has received from audiences. In October, Joanna Robinson, the co-author of “MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios,” claimed that Larson “doesn’t want to play Carol Danvers anymore.” Larson herself addressed the online hate that led to fans review-bombing the original film on RottenTomatoes.com. Many of the negative reviews, which were removed by the site, referred to Larson’s prerelease comments about wanting to ensure greater diversity among journalists covering the movie. When Variety asked last year in a red carpet interview how long she planned to play Danvers, she responded pointedly, “I don’t know. Does anyone want me to do it again?”Additionally, getting “The Marvels” to the finish line required four weeks of reshoots and a premiere date that was pushed back multiple times. Those delays prompted DaCosta to complete postproduction remotely in London while she began work on her next film, a move that has fueled gossip about trouble behind the scenes.DaCosta, though, dismissed the speculation in a recent interview with the YouTuber Jake Hamilton. “Actually at the time that I left to go to London to start prep on my next film, everyone was so clear about what the film was, what we wanted, everyone knew what I wanted,” she said. “So it really wasn’t the dramatic sort of thing that I think people are feeling like it is.”So how is Marvel feeling about its future? Earlier this year, in an interview with the Movie Business Podcast, the studio’s longtime head, Kevin Feige, appeared unfazed about the idea of superhero fatigue, saying that people have been asking about that since his second year on the job. Instead, he emphasized the importance of narrative, saying that if their filmmakers were able to tell the story right, they could make “any type of movies that share two things: the Marvel Studios logo above the title and a seed of an idea from our publishing history.” More

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      ‘How to Have Sex’ Considers Assault Survivors

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      In new films, including “How to Have Sex,” female British directors emphasize the impact of sexual trauma, rather than portraying the act itself.When Molly Manning-Walker was a teenager, her favorite film was Gaspar Noé’s “Irreversible.” In a recent interview, she remembered being impressed by the film’s infamously brutal, nine-minute rape scene, and how “immersive” it was.But now 30, and a director herself, she questions Noé’s approach to that scene. With such graphic — and prolonged — violence onscreen, she said, “you’re almost abusing the audience.” When it came to depicting sexual assault in her debut feature, “How to Have Sex,” which won the Un Certain Regard prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Manning-Walker resolved to do things differently.“How to Have Sex,” which opens in theaters in Britain and Ireland on Nov. 3 and in the United States in February, follows three British teenagers on a party vacation in Greece. Manning-Walker said that, like Tara, the film’s protagonist, she was sexually assaulted when she was 16 (though in a different scenario), and that she wanted the audience to understand what was happening “through Tara’s face and her reaction,” rather than putting the act onscreen.Manning-Walker’s debut is one of several new films directed by British women that offer fresh perspectives on sexual assault by focusing on its varied impacts. Adura Onashile’s “Girl,” which opens in theaters in Britain later this month, asks what happens when women don’t talk about their experiences. And in the documentary “The Taste of Mango,” which recently played at the London Film Festival, Chloe Abrahams discovers her family’s buried history of sexual abuse and domestic violence, which triggers a revelation about herself.These movies arrive as violence toward women and girls continues making headlines in Britain. Recently, the comedian Russell Brand denied accusations of sexual assault from four women. In January, a London police officer admitted to 49 charges of sexual abuse. Around a quarter of women in England and Wales have experienced sexual assault since the age of 16, according to the Office for National Statistics.Déborah Lukumuena as Grace, and Le’Shantey Bonsu as her daughter, Ama, in “Girl.”via Studio SohoIn an interview, Onashile described this climate of violence against women as “an epidemic.” Her film, “Girl,” centers on a young immigrant mother, Grace (Déborah Lukumuena), and her 11 year-old daughter, who live in a Glasgow tower block. Grace’s erratic behavior implies a traumatic past, but Onashile doesn’t make this explicit. As part of her research for the film, Onashile said she learned from social workers that you can spot sexual assault survivors by their body language, which gives the “sense that something is held, and tight, and wound up.” In the film, Lukumuena plays Grace with stooped shoulders and a downcast gaze.Abrahams said that the act of recording her family members gave her the courage to ask difficult questions about long-hidden abuse. With “The Taste of Mango,” she was seeking to heal divisions between her mother, Rozana, in England, and her maternal grandmother, Jean, in Sri Lanka, but along the way she learned that Rozana is suspected to have suffered at the hands of her stepfather.The movie pairs audio of her mother’s testimony with poetic images, including the moon and a road rushing by, glimpsed from a car window. Its meditative pacing was designed to allow the audience “to breathe, and not get sucked down by the heaviness of it,” Abrahams said.But equally, she added, she wanted to show how her mother “finds joy in life” — including in country music and manicures — so Rozana isn’t defined by the things that were done to her.In the documentary “The Taste of Mango,” Chloe Abrahams, right, discovers her own family’s history of sexual abuse and domestic violence.Chloe AbrahamsAll three filmmakers considered the impact of the subject matter on the people making their movies and had support on hand from therapists during production. Manning-Walker, who also works as a cinematographer, recalled filming an assault scene for someone else’s film, in which there was no acknowledgment of the toll it might take on the person behind the camera. On her film, she said, her team could stop filming if they felt uncomfortable, which they did several times.Manning-Walker said she didn’t want the character of Tara, who goes on vacation intending to lose her virginity and flirts her way into an unwanted scenario, to be a helpless victim. At the end of “How to Have Sex,” she picks herself up and carries on. But that doesn’t mean she’s not affected by what happened, Manning-Walker added.Sexual assault “happens everywhere, and in all situations,” she said. By making a film that confronted it, she said she hoped to challenge a culture of shame and silence around a common experience. All three filmmakers described tearful, post-screening encounters with male and female audience members who saw elements of their lives reflected onscreen.After one screening, Manning-Walker recalled, a woman in her 70s had told her that watching “How to Have Sex” had made her reconsider a teenage sexual encounter: “‘I just realized that I’ve been assaulted, from watching your film,’” Manning-Walker remembered the woman saying.There was “a lack of conversation around female pleasure and what sex is for women,” Manning-Walker said, which also meant a lack of education about consent. If people aren’t taught that sex is an act of negotiation, she said, “of course it’s going to go horribly wrong.” More

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      Barbra Streisand Is Ready to Tell All. Pull Up a Seat.

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      Maybe it’s her grandkids, maybe it’s being 81, but Barbra Streisand is open to new stuff. Take sharing. Well, take sharing herself. “My Name Is Barbra,” her first memoir, is upon us. It’s 970 pages and billows with doubt, anger, ardor, hurt, pride, persuasion, glory and Yiddish. I don’t know that any artist has done more sharing.And yet, last month, after lunch at her home in Malibu, Calif., Streisand shared something else, a treasure she guards almost as much she’s guarded the details of her life. And that’s dessert. There’s a lot in this book — tales of film and television shoots, clashes and bonds with collaborators, a whole chapter on Don Johnson (it’s short) and another called “Politics,” her unwavering preference for big blends of the masculine and the feminine. But food is so ubiquitous that it’s practically a love of Streisand’s life, especially ice cream.So when it’s time for dessert at Streisand’s, despite any choice you’re offered, there’s truly only one option. And that’s McConnell’s Brazilian Coffee ice cream. She writes about it with an orgasmic zeal comparable only, perhaps, to her stated zests for Modigliani and Sondheim. How much does Streisand love Brazilian Coffee? In the book, she’s in the middle of a sad story about a dinner with her buddy Marlon Brando at Quincy Jones’s place, when she interrupts herself to rhapsodize over its flavor and reminisce on the lengths she has gone to get some. So I wanted to have what she’s having.“Okaaayyyy,” Streisand said. She gave her longtime assistant, Renata Buser, a deep, knowing look.“We’ll trade. You give a good review.”Panic, panic, panic. Stammer, stammer, stammer.She was grinning. Buser was smiling.“I love to laugh right now,” said Streisand, who said she’s been in a funk over the state of the planet.Buser agreed: “You really needed a laugh.”But Streisand wasn’t entirely kidding — well, about the good review she was. But not about the ice cream.See, sometimes, they explained, like two girls talking about an ornate but dire piece of cafeteria gossip, there’s a situation with how available it is. (Basically, McConnell’s sometimes takes Brazilian Coffee off the market, leaving Turkish Coffee and sometimes just … “Coffee.”) When she gets her hands on some, she all but password-protects it. “My husband happens to like Turkish Coffee. Thank God,” Streisand says of the actor James Brolin, her spouse of 25 years. “So he doesn’t take my stash.”To be clear: They’re not the same?“Noooo,” Streisand and Buser said together. Streisand was shrugging that “are you serious right now?” shrug: “Turkey is not Brazil.”It goes on like this for another minute until something crucial suddenly occurs to Streisand.“Are you a fan of coffee ice cream?”Crickets …She didn’t have time for this. “We have vanilla.” More kidding. “I’ll give you a scoop — well, how about half a scoop? He’ll have half a scoop. I’ll take the other half.”Eventually, Buser arrives with a bowl, and I get it.If Loro Piana made dessert, this is how it would taste, like money. Buser had lodged Streisand’s demiscoop inside a wafer cone just the way she likes. Mine was gone in about 90 seconds. Streisand, though — she made the eating of this ounce of ice cream a discreet aria of bliss. Little nibbles of cone, then one spin around her mouth. Nibble, nibble, spin. I’ve seen one other person make love to a dessert this way, and she gave birth to me. Otherwise, no one will ever quite have what they’re having.THIS MEMOIR OF STREISAND’S encompasses her girlhood in working-class Brooklyn in the 1940s, her big break on Broadway in “Funny Girl” in 1964, a movie career that made her the biggest actress of the 1970s, her popular albums and top-rated TV specials, the awards, the snubs, her hangups, terrors and passions, her close girlfriends, the men she’s loved and, yes, the foods she might adore more. “My Name Is Barbra” is explanatory and ruminative and enlightening. It’s shake-your-head funny and hand-to-mouth surprising. The lady who wrote it is in touch with herself, loves being herself. Yet she disliked memoir-writing’s ostensible point. “I’ve been through therapy many, many years ago, trying to figure these things out,” she told me. “And I got bored with that. Trying to get things out. I really didn’t want to relive my life.”Streisand in her dressing room when she starred in the 1964 Broadway musical “Funny Girl.”John Orris/The New York TimesWriting the book forced Streisand not only to relive it, but to do the synthesizing between the present and the past. For instance, she frequently reckons with how losing her father at a young age and living for decades with her mother’s glass-half-empty approach to maternity set her up for a journey of approval.Those 970 pages also turn the book into a piece of exercise equipment. Streisand doesn’t like the heft. “I wanted two volumes,” she said. “Who wants to hold a heavy book like that in their hands?”Rick Kot, an executive editor at Viking who oversaw production on the book, told me, “Publishing books in two volumes is difficult just as a commercial venture. And nobody seems to have any issue with how long” Streisand’s is.The bigness of it makes literal the career it contains. Streisand is poring over, pouring out, her life. She’s feeling her way through it, remembering, sometimes Googling as she types. It’s not a book you inhale, per se. (Unless, of course, you’ve got a pressing lunch date with the author.) Nor does it inspire the “five takeaways” treatment that juicy new memoirs by Britney Spears and Jada Pinkett Smith have. Not that there weren’t requests for spicier material. Streisand said that Christine Pittel, her editor, told her “that I had to leave some blood on the page.” So feelings are more deeply plumbed; names are named.And she did do some hemming and hawing. “I was very late in delivering the book,” she said. “I think I was supposed to deliver it in two years.” It took her 10. And as she went, she thought about her legacy. “If you want to read about me in 20 years or 50 years, whatever it is — if there’s still a world — these are my words. These are my thoughts.” She also considered those other Streisand titles, the ones by other people. “Hopefully, you don’t have to look at too many books written about me. You know, whenever I was told about what they said, certain things, I thought, like, who are they talking about?”There are takeaways. But they’re too chronic to qualify as “current.” Mostly, they involve Streisand’s hunger for work and her endless quest to maintain control over it. Singing and acting made her famous. This insistence on perfection made her notorious. Sexism and chauvinism are on display throughout the book. But what becomes apparent is that the woman who has a “directed by” credit on just three films (“Yentl,” “The Prince of Tides” and “The Mirror Has Two Faces”) had been a director from the very start of her career. Here is the book’s grand revelation — for a reader but for the author, too. “I didn’t know about it,” she said, of this proclivity for management, planning, vision, authority and obeying her instincts. “But writing the book, I discovered it. Basically, I was doing that, you know, when I was 19 years old — or even showing my mother how to smoke.”Streisand is unsparing about the treachery she faced at work, collaborating with men. Sydney Chaplin (one of Charlie’s kids) played the original Nick Arnstein during her “Funny Girl” Broadway run; they shared a flirtation that Chaplin wanted to consummate and that Streisand wanted to keep professional. (For one thing, she was married to Elliott Gould.) So, she writes, Chaplin did a number on her. In front of live audiences, he’d lean in to whisper put-downs and profanity. When it came time to shoot “Hello, Dolly!,” Streisand couldn’t understand why her co-star Walter Matthau and their director, Gene Kelly (yes, the Gene Kelly) were so hostile toward her. She confronts Matthau, and he confesses: “You hurt my friend,” meaning Chaplin, his poker buddy. Throughout her career, she’s up against what one surly camera operator, on the set of “The Prince of Tides,” boasts is a boys’ club.That’s the sort of blood that gives this book its power — not the prospect of a bluntly louche Brando and a doting Pierre Trudeau being honest-to-God soul mates, not whatever her byzantine thing with Jon Peters was about. It’s that Barbra Streisand endured a parade of harsh workplaces yet never stopped trying to make the best work. That experience with Chaplin left her with lifelong stage fright. But what if it also helped sharpen her volition to get things — in the studio, on a film set, before a show — exactly, possibly obsessively, right?“When I was younger, I think they had a preconception, you know, because maybe I was aloof or something, because I was a singer but I wanted to be an actress. And then as an actress, I wanted to be a director,” she said to me. “In other words, take another step. Be the actress as well as the singer. To me, it was so much easier to look at the whole. But even when I was an actress, I would care about the whole.” Like that scene in Sydney Pollack’s “The Way We Were,” from 1973, where Streisand touches Robert Redford’s hair while he’s sleeping, a personal choice she made by instinct.Over and over again — with TV specials, live concerts, musical arrangements — she was executing ideas. The execution earned her a permanent reputation. And she knows it. In the book, she tells a story about making some staging suggestions for her 1980 Grammys performance with Neil Diamond and muses, “This kind of incident may be why I’m called ‘difficult.’”Streisand directed and starred in “Yentl” (1983) with Mandy Patinkin and Amy Irving.Hulton Archive/Getty Images“Difficult” is in the work. Streisand’s characters constitute this cocktail of “mercurial” and “determined” with a couple squirts of “feral.” They’re multitaskers, consumed with both busyness and learning how to do something. She was perfect for romantic comedies during second-wave feminism: Her drive drove men nuts. My favorite performance from this ’70s run of hers is in “The Main Event,” a frothy, filthy, solidly funny screwball hit from 1979. She’s in high expressive form and at peak curls, playing Hillary Kramer, a fragrance mogul forced to sell her company after her accountant runs off with all her money. But she discovers a surprise asset: a terrible boxer, Eddie “Kid Natural” Scanlon (Ryan O’Neal), whose career she tries to turn around. The movie, which Howard Zieff directed, sums up the Streisand experience: her tenacity; her outrageous comfort as both a comedic actor and as a version of herself; her exasperation with men who exploit her and count her out.Eddie doesn’t want to work with Hillary and bets that the sight of his battered face will disgust her right out of boxing management. The violence of boxing does send Hillary vomiting during the drive home from one of his fights. What it doesn’t do is deter her. “I hope this taught you a lesson,” says Whitman Mayo, who plays Eddie’s pal and trainer, Percy. “It has,” Streisand says. “Get him in shape.”The two men share a sinking feeling, seemingly typical when it comes to Streisand. “She’s not giving up, Percy,” Eddie says to his trainer, who must concur: “That’s a problem.” People who’ve negotiated with her probably recognize the look of worry and fatigued resignation on O’Neal’s face. He’s going to lose.It’s reasonable to suspect that Tom Rothman, the head of Sony Pictures, knows the feeling. When the company was planning to release an anniversary edition of “The Way We Were” this year, Streisand argued for him to include two scenes that, she was pained to discover, had been omitted from the original. For Rothman, the trouble with granting Streisand her wish was that, as “a filmmaker’s executive,” as he put it in an interview, he didn’t want to change anything without Pollack’s input. But Pollack’s been dead for 15 years. They agreed to release two versions: Pollack’s and, essentially, Streisand’s extended cut.This, she writes, is a triumph of her relentlessness. “The word she uses in the book, that’s 100 percent accurate,” Rothman told me. “She’s relentless.” Her being right about the scenes didn’t matter to his bottom line, which required him to do justice to Pollack’s memory while assuaging Streisand’s worries over creative injustice. “She would say: ‘This is better, this is better! This is why it’s good!’ And I would say: ‘But Sydney Pollack didn’t want it!’”The reason Rothman wanted to land at a happy solution was because of the person he was negotiating with. “Barbra broke a lot of not just artistic boundaries but boundaries for female artists in the movie business, in Hollywood, in terms of taking control of her career,” he said. “I have boundless respect for her.”“If you want to read about me in 20 years or 50 years, whatever it is — if there’s still a world — these are my words,” Streisand said. “These are my thoughts.”Harry Benson/Express, via Getty Images)Streisand’s boundlessness, her capaciousness — the lack of precedent for her whole-enchilada ambitions, the daffiness, the sexiness, the talent, orchestration, passion, originality; her persistence and indefatigability; the outfits; the hair — were a watershed. She was always adapting, if not to what was cool or “current,” per se, then certainly to whom she felt she was at a given moment. “You know me,” she writes, late in the book. “I’m the version queen.”The line is straight from Streisand to Madonna, Janet Jackson, Jennifer Lopez, Queen Latifah, Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift — version queens of different kingdoms. That’s just a list of the obvious people who followed her into showbiz and makes no mention of the less famous folks whom Streisand inspired into a thousand other achievements. She’s “to thine own self be true” in neon. This might be the real Streisand Effect. And now she can take a step back and appreciate it.“That gives me real joy, that I affected some people into doing what they wanted to do,” Streisand said. “That I gave them some sort of courage. Or if they felt different, you know, I was somebody who felt different. That’s a reward for me. That makes me feel great.”THIS HOME OF STREISAND’S has been called a compound. But even with the ocean overlook, it’s too rustic, cozy and deceptively modest for the geologic or ego-logical footprint that “compound” connotes. There’s an active farm and enough rose varieties to hijack a flower show. It’s neither Xanadu nor Neverland Ranch. There’s some reality to Streisand’s place, some soul.This is to say that paintings are everywhere, outside the bathroom, up the main staircase, in the bathroom. There are oils by John Singer Sargent and Thomas Hart Benton, portraits by Ammi Phillips and Mary Cassatt. A wall holds one of Gilbert Stuart’s George Washingtons. She loves Klimt and adores Tamara de Lempicka and Modigliani, adores them with an awe the world reserves for her. Some of the paintings are by Streisand, including a portrait of Sammie, her late Coton de Tulear, whose fur is affixed to the canvas. One, her son, Jason Gould, did.Streisand’s fans know what’s on her property and the labor she personally devoted to realizing it — that there’s a mill with a functioning waterwheel, that she’s dedicated a room to her collection of dolls and that another’s maintained for the display and storage of her stage and screen costumes. They’d know because, in 2010, Streisand put it all in a book called “My Passion for Design.” Nevertheless, people have concluded that Streisand lives at her own personal Grove. They’ll ask: Are you going to see the mall? But there is no mall to see. Nothing’s for sale, nothing is open to the public.Streisand at home in 2018.Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesLess known is how it might feel to stand here, in a living room at Streisand’s house, to gaze over her shoulder at the ocean and stop yourself from saying out loud, “On a clear day you really can see forever.” It’s strange to move from the bulk of her book to the lightness of the woman who wrote it, to the one-of-a-kind incandescence that’s kept her a star. No memoir can quite contain that. An odd effect of that stardom is how that person can start to seem an uncanny sort of familiar. One of the mightiest, most Olympic performers we Americans have ever experienced, is, on a Tuesday at lunchtime — and I mean this from the bottom of my heart — just some lady. The one behind you at a Gelson’s, maybe, who might notice the cottage cheese in your cart and get moony over how creamy it is. (“I love going to the supermarket,” she told me.)After lunch, Streisand was ready to relax and needed to stretch her back, which lately has been acting up. Relaxing meant letting loose her three Cotons de Tulear, dogs as white as snowflakes, whiter in fact, like bleached teeth. It meant retreating to the family room. So off I went down a wallpapered hallway paneled with more framed art and into another section of the house that felt different from the airs of presentation and preservation that typify the rest of the home. The kitchen was here, for one thing. For another, hunched over a round table was James Brolin. Streisand calls him Jim, and Jim was in a T-shirt and sweatpants, cross-referencing information on an iPad with what he was writing on a sheet of paper. He was jotting down film titles to watch later for movie night. They had just had a Scorsese marathon.There’s life all over the property. But here in the family room is where everybody lives, including that portrait of Sammie, which, at the moment, was propped up on the floor because “I don’t have any places to hang anything anymore,” she said. This way she can see it from the sofa while she watches TV. This part of the house seems like the only place where anything gets strewn. “It’s not that orderly,” she told me. “Meaning, I have the things I need around me.” Like her pets, like Jim. “It’s a playroom. We watch TV, we have the dogs on our laps. It’s more disordered.”It felt, in many ways, like a secret, the comfy chaos of this zone feeling preferable to the control on display everywhere else. Streisand seemed at home here because she was. She took a seat and proceeded to ply the dogs, Fanny and Sammie’s lab-bred clones, Scarlet and Violet, with a treat. They looked up at her with expectant patience. I’ve seen scores of dogs anticipate a treat. It’s as if Streisand’s had heard about the bonkers approach of those other dogs and zigged, sitting patiently as Streisand doled a morsel or two to each. Even she seemed impressed. Here is another of stardom’s odd effects. Without us, it’s Tuesday. More