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      The Singular Charm of Parker Posey

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      One January morning, I arrived at the East Village studio of a “sound facilitator,” prepared to heal. The facilitator introduced himself as Gary. He led me past a refrigerator cloaked in an Indian tapestry and into an emptied living room, where I found Parker Posey perched cross-legged on a mat, facing a row of gongs. She appeared cozy and at ease, as if she had known the gongs for many years. Posey had invited me there to experience a sound bath, a New Age therapy that she first tried in Thailand, where she filmed the third season of the HBO anthology series “The White Lotus.” During a sound bath (according to Gary’s website), various chimes and bowls are played in an intentional therapeutic sequence; the treatment may uplift the spirit, release stuck energies and rouse engagement with the surrounding environment. Or it may not, but Gary seemed nice anyway.I joined Posey on the floor. The room filled with sounds that resembled the wait music for a planetarium. Gary then advised us that we were approaching the first full moon of the year, which he called “the wolf moon.” Posey turned to face me with spooked eyes, her mouth pulled into an arc of wry expectation. Then she stretched her legs high in the air, laid flat on the mat, and piled a sweater atop her face.Ninety minutes later, the two of us burst onto the street as if from a saloon door. When I arrived at the appointment, we were both wearing flowy black pants and black sweaters, and I was pleased I had guessed the correct attire for our encounter. But by the time we left, she had applied her Parker Posey costume over the base layer: earrings like glass shards, a pearl hair clip in the shape of a vine-picked berry, a slippery high-necked plaid overshirt, a prismatic silk scarf and a pair of round rose-tinted glasses. We walked in woozy circles around the village. Occasionally she produced her phone and waved its digital map in front of us as if it were a homing device. Whatever had happened up in Gary’s studio — brain-wave entrainment, or maybe just a permission structure for taking a film-length nap — my spirit was in fact uplifted, and Posey was engaged with her surrounding environment.To walk alongside Posey is to be reminded that a New York City sidewalk is a habitat still teeming with life. “Ha ha ha HA,” she said as we closed in on a poodle in a little sweater. “Yeah, I speak poodle!” she trilled to another. Manhattan’s pedestrians typically navigate its steroidal landscape in a dissociative state, but with Posey, every poodle is acknowledged, every commotion registered. A car drove up beside us and stopped at a light, blasting an accordion-forward Latin track. “I love this song!” she screamed to its occupants, craning her head toward the open window. Once she squatted on the sidewalk to greet a familiar dog, then crept over to retie both of my sneakers in double knots. “That was so fun, tying your shoelaces,” she said as she sprang up. “I’m a little mommy.”In the coming weeks, whenever I told anyone that I was profiling Parker Posey, they invariably had a story about her impish appearance in their own life. A journalist colleague said that as she reported to work on Sept. 12, 2001, Posey drifted past her, roller-skating through Lower Manhattan. Seemingly everyone below 14th Street has had a pleasant encounter with her at a dog run. Walton Goggins, Posey’s friend and co-star in “The White Lotus,” told me that when he first met her, at a friend’s barbecue in the Catskills, he felt instantly drawn into her world. “She has this fairylike quality about her,” he said. “She’s a person capable of doing what Emerson said so long ago — to see the miraculous in the common. And she uses phrases like, Isn’t that a gas?” Natasha Rothwell, who plays the weary spa manager, Belinda, on “The White Lotus,” said in an email that when Posey first approached her on set, Posey said she had lost her wallet and had just said a prayer to Saint Anthony, before asking Rothwell if she wanted to be her neighbor at the hotel. “She then gave me a hug and seemed to float away.”Parker Posey with Sarah Catherine Hook and Sam Nivola in the current season of the HBO series “The White Lotus.”Fabio Lovino/HBOWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      SAG Awards: Complete List of Winners

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      The thriller about choosing a new pope took home the top film prize, while Demi Moore and Timothée Chalamet won individual honors.The papal thriller “Conclave” won the top prize at the 31st Screen Actors Guild Awards on Sunday night, thwarting a guild sweep by “Anora,” which had previously scored big wins earlier this month at ceremonies thrown by the producers, directors and writers guilds.The last three winners of SAG’s top prize — “Oppenheimer,” “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” and “CODA” — all went on to win best picture at the Oscars. Some of those had been season-long sweepers, unlike “Conclave,” which can boast only one other best-picture award, from the BAFTAs. Still, the win indicates that the Oscar race remains fluid leading up to the March 2 ceremony.SAG’s lead-actor race produced an upset victory, too, as “A Complete Unknown” star Timothée Chalamet finally nabbed a prize for his portrayal of Bob Dylan; the award had gone all season to Adrien Brody (“The Brutalist”). “I’m really in pursuit of greatness,” Chalamet said when accepting his award. “I know people don’t usually talk like that, but I want to be one of the greats,” he added.Over the last three years, every individual acting winner at SAG has gone on to repeat at the Oscars except last year’s SAG winner Lily Gladstone (“Killers of the Flower Moon”), who lost the best-actress Oscar to Emma Stone (“Poor Things”).This year’s best-actress battle is even more competitive, with “The Substance” lead Demi Moore and the “Anora” actress Mikey Madison trading industry prizes all season. And although the Golden Globe winner Fernanda Torres (“I’m Still Here”) was not nominated at the SAG Awards, she has nevertheless mounted a late surge with many Oscar voters I’ve spoken to, who have just gotten around to watching her movie.At the SAG Awards, it was Moore who triumphed. As she did at the Golden Globes in January, she gave a galvanizing speech that she dedicated to “that little girl who didn’t believe in herself.” As she grew emotional, Moore closed with, “The words are kind of beyond me. So I’m just going to have to say thank you.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Carlos Diegues, Filmmaker Who Celebrated Brazil’s Diversity, Dies at 84

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      Seeking to shed the gauzy influence of Hollywood and focus on Brazil’s ethnic richness and troubled history, he helped forge a new path for his country’s cinema.Carlos Diegues, a film director who celebrated Brazil’s ethnic richness and its social turbulence, helping to forge a new path for cinema in his country, died on Feb. 14 in Rio de Janeiro. He was 84.His death, in a hospital, was announced by the Brazilian Academy of Letters, of which he was a member. The academy said the cause was complications of surgery. The Rio newspaper O Globo, for which Mr. Diegues wrote a column, reported that he had suffered “cardiocirculatory complications” before the surgery.Mr. Diegues, who was known as Cacá, was a founder of Cinema Novo, the modern school of Brazilian cinema that combined Italian Neo-Realism, documentary style and uniquely Latin American fantasy. He focused on hitherto marginal groups — Afro-Brazilians, the poor, disoriented provincials in an urbanizing Brazil — and was the first Brazilian director to employ Black actors as protagonists, in “Ganga Zumba,” (1963), a narrative of enslavement and revolt that was an early cinematic foray into Brazil’s history of racial violence.The often lyrical results, expressed over the course of 60 years in dozens of features and documentaries, charmed audiences in his own country and abroad, though critics sometimes reproached him for loose screenplays and rough-edged camera work.José Wilker, left, and Principe Nabor in “Bye Bye Brazil” (1979). Mr. Diegues’s international breakthrough, it was nominated for a Palme d’Or at Cannes.Ademir Silva/LC Barreto Productions, via New Yorker FilmsMr. Diegues’s international breakthrough film, “Bye Bye Brazil” (1979), nominated for a Palme d’Or at Cannes, is considered the apotheosis of his dramatic visual style and of his preoccupation with those on the margins of Brazilian society. It follows a feckless group of rascally street performers through the outback, documenting a vanishing Brazil where citizens in remote towns are beguiled by fake falling snowflakes — actually shredded coconut — and hypnotized, literally, by a rare communal television set.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Olga James, a Star of ‘Carmen Jones’ and ‘Mr. Wonderful,’ Dies at 95

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      An operatic soprano, she had high-profile roles on film and stage in the 1950s. But after that, she mostly spent her career away from the limelight.Olga James, an actress and operatic soprano whose career highlights occurred nearly back to back in the mid-1950s — as Harry Belafonte’s jilted girlfriend in the all-Black musical film “Carmen Jones” and as Sammy Davis Jr.’s love interest in the Broadway show “Mr. Wonderful” — died on Jan. 25 in Los Angeles. She was 95.Her death, in an assisted living facility, was confirmed by her niece Janet Adderley.Ms. James had performed with an opera company in France and in a popular musical revue in Atlantic City, N.J., when her manager, Abe Saperstein — the basketball impresario behind the Harlem Globetrotters — landed her an audition in 1954 for “Carmen Jones,” the movie version of Oscar Hammerstein II’s hit 1943 Broadway update of Georges Bizet’s opera “Carmen.” The opera is set in 1820s Spain; the setting of the film, like that of the Broadway musical, is the American South during World War II.Auditioning for the role of Cindy Lou, whose boyfriend, Joe (played by Mr. Belafonte), a soldier headed for flight school, is seduced by Carmen (Dorothy Dandridge), a worker in a parachute factory, Ms. James sang an aria at the Alvin Theater (now the Neil Simon Theater) for Otto Preminger, the film’s imperious director.“It wasn’t a stretch for me,” she was quoted as saying in “Otto Preminger: The Man Who Would Be King” (2007), by Foster Hirsch. “I was that character, a country-looking girl. I was just a little ingénue.”Ms. James with Harry Belafonte in a publicity photo for “Carmen Jones.” She did her own singing; his singing voice and Dorothy Dandridge’s were dubbed because they could not sing in an operatic range.20th Century Fox, via Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesShe won the role. “Carmen Jones” would be her first movie — and her last.Of the film’s three lead performers, only Ms. James did her own singing; Mr. Belafonte’s and Ms. Dandridge’s songs were dubbed because they could not sing in an operatic range.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At the Berlin Film Festival, Anxious Movies for Dark Times

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      At the Berlin International Film Festival, the onscreen mood was downbeat, but the program still held some gems.The skies are typically gray and gloomy at the Berlin International Film Festival, but this year’s edition, which runs through Sunday, began with snow for days. The wintry weather gave the event — known as the Berlinale — a magical glow at first, but it wasn’t enough to keep the demons at bay. Looming over the festival were anxieties over the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine, as well as the upcoming German elections. The films also radiated an air of shame, despair and powerlessness, asking: How to trust ourselves to make the world better when we’ve already screwed up so spectacularly?Tom Tykwer’s visually dazzling, but comically misguided liberal drama, “The Light,” opened the event last week, submitting festivalgoers to 162 minutes of angst and attrition (and one too many “Bohemian Rhapsody” needle drops) about a German family spiritually cleansed by their Syrian housekeeper.For many of us on the ground, however, the first real epic-of-interest was the “Parasite” director Bong Joon Ho’s science-fiction caper “Mickey 17” — a film that induces nervous laughter about society’s abysmal moral standards. In this high-concept action movie with a zany dark heart, labor exploitation hits a new low when workers, or at least their physical forms, become literally disposable. Robert Pattinson stars as one such “expendable,” a dopey spaceman whose co-workers treat him like a lab-rat, knowing that his body can be reprinted.A scene from “Mickey 17.”BerlinaleBong’s bids at timeliness are staler than usual. (Mark Ruffalo plays a grandstanding demagogue whose followers wear red caps.) But the film’s dull political edge doesn’t diminish the joy ride’s momentum, nor the flashes of genuine weirdness that keep us guessing. If, god willing, superhero movies are destined to go the way of the dodo, “Mickey 17” is a reminder that directors like Bong keep the dream of the blockbuster alive.President Trump’s ramped-up campaign of mass deportations infiltrated my viewing of Michel Franco’s “Dreams,” a competition entry that filled me with much ambivalence, but also moved and infuriated me. This intentionally provocative psychodrama by one of Mexico’s most divisive directors sees Jessica Chastain as a tightly wound philanthropist from San Francisco who has a tempestuous relationship with an undocumented ballet dancer from Mexico — whom we first see, like the survivor at the end of a brutal horror film, emerging from a van full of smuggled migrants.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Watch Austin Butler in Battle in ‘Dune: Part Two’

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      The director Denis Villeneuve narrates a sequence from his film, which is nominated for five Academy Awards, including best picture.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune: Part Two,” much like the first film, is loaded with ambitious sequences. But one of the stark visual standouts is this battle scene in the Harkonnen arena, where Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler), for his birthday celebration, is pitted against a group of enslaved men.The sequence is rendered in heightened black andwhite. Narrating the scene, Villeneuve said he wanted to create a specific kind of atmosphere for the planet Giedi Prime, in which the Harkonnen have destroyed a lot of their natural resources. He said, “As my cinematographer, Greig Fraser, and I were brainstorming together how to bring an alien sunlight that would be black and white to the screen, Greig had the idea to test infrared.”The filmmaker said that infrared is usually blocked from cameras because it is considered noise. But in this case, they “modified the cameras to let only that wavelength come through.” The result is the atmosphere Villeneuve said he was dreaming of, one in which “we see almost through skin. The eyes become piercing like insects.”Read the “Dune: Part Two” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      Five Free Movies to Stream Now

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      Don’t overlook ad-supported platforms like Tubi, Plex and PlutoTV. They’re surprising repositories for great films like “Gunda” and “Farha.”Maybe Big Tech hasn’t delivered on its disruptive promise for movies after all: We’ve cut our cable cords for price and convenience only to pay just as much (if not more) to jump through hoops and across platforms, with diminishing returns in quality.But there’s always good work being made. This new column, then, is not about free stuff, but about discovery. It’s a curation of good and great films on free, ad-supported platforms like Tubi, Plex and Pluto TV that often fall through the cracks of our numbingly plentiful, overly content-ified entertainment complexes.This inaugural column’s picks take us from a small farm to a cramped Japanese apartment, from a restaurant kitchen to an urgent historical record of memory. These are movies that you can watch, contend with and ponder for free.‘Gunda’ (2020)Stream it on Tubi.An undersung trend in recent movies is the artful animal picture, from “EO” (about a donkey) to “First Cow” (a cow) to “Cow” (you get it). “Gunda” is perhaps the simplest and quietest of them all, but somehow contains a stirring, stealthily profound inquiry into human and animal nature.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Like Us, Theo James Is Freaked Out by the Toy in ‘The Monkey’

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      In the warped new horror-comedy “The Monkey” (in theaters), Theo James plays Hal and Bill, estranged twin brothers who are besieged by a possessed music-making monkey toy they got under gruesome circumstances when they were boys. Once that little monkey starts a tinny rat-tat-tat on his drum, nobody’s safe.Based on a Stephen King short story, the gory film is the latest project from the writer-director Osgood Perkins, whose macabre filmography includes last year’s “Longlegs.”Earlier this month during a video interview, James said that the toy, which looks like a maniac and is known among collectors as a Jolly Chimp, was one of his frequent scene partners. Distancing himself from the chimp’s unnerving stare was a tough order.“It was creepy enough to the point where, with some of my daughter’s toys in her room, I’m like, is that thing looking at me?” James said, with an uneasy smile that suggested he wasn’t entirely joking.Theo James in “The Monkey.”NeonIf his literally-a-model looks are familiar, it may be because he has appeared across acting disciplines: the “Divergent” films; the second season of “The White Lotus” on HBO; the London stage. Down the road are roles in “The Hole,” a film from the director Kim Jee-Woon — “Misery” meets “Parasite” is how James described it — and the second season of “The Gentlemen,” Guy Ritchie’s Netflix series.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More