Movies

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Everything Went Fine’ Review: To Be or Not to Be?

      by

      This French drama about a woman whose father wants a medically assisted death is both bracingly unsentimental and a touch inert.The latest film from the prolific French director François Ozon, “Everything Went Fine” is a drama about assisted suicide that wears tragedy lightly. Understated almost to a fault, the film pitches its tone somewhere among the looming sorrow, gentle comedy and bureaucratic tedium that death, especially when planned, can entail. If the result is bracingly unsentimental, it’s also a touch inert — a little too poised to compel emotionally.Adapted from a 2013 memoir by the French writer Emmanuèle Bernheim, “Everything Went Fine” traces the resentments and fears that unfurl around Emmanuèle (Sophie Marceau) when her 80-something father, André (André Dussollier), asks her to help him end his life after he’s partially paralyzed by a stroke. She finds herself caught amid competing responsibilities: to a father who was often cruel to her, as we see in flashbacks; to her mother (Charlotte Rampling), sick herself and seemingly indifferent to her estranged husband’s plight; to a man from André’s past whose fraught relationship with the patriarch emerges in a late revelation; and, above all, to herself.The caprices of the characters pose repeated threats to Emmanuèle and André’s heist-like plan of getting him to Switzerland, where medically assisted death is legal. Dussollier is formidable, vacillating between desperation and entitlement, but there’s a repressed quality to the movie — and to Marceau’s performance — that mutes the emotions, sanding down conflicts to pat exchanges. Where “Everything Went Fine” opens up into thornier (and richer) territory is in the practical intricacies of euthanasia. When Emmanuèle tells André that the entire process will cost him 10,000 euros, he asks, glibly, “I wonder how poor people do it?”“They wait to die,” she coolly replies.Everything Went FineNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      Cannes Film Festival 2023 Lineup Includes Wes Anderson and Todd Haynes Movies

      by

      Over 50 movies will be screened at the event, including Johnny Depp’s first major film since a defamation trial and Martin Scorsese’s latest epic.Movies by Wes Anderson, Todd Haynes and Ken Loach will compete for the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the event’s organizers announced during a news conference on Thursday.Also in the running for the festival’s top prize will be films by the returning winners Wim Wenders, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Nanni Moretti.But Martin Scorsese will not compete at the festival, which opens May 16 and runs through May 27. Instead, his eagerly anticipated movie “Killers of the Flower Moon,” which stars Leonardo DiCaprio and is about the murder of Osage Indians in 1920s Oklahoma, will appear out of competition. Thierry Frémaux, Cannes’s artistic director, said during Thursday’s news conference that the festival wanted “Killers of the Flower Moon” to play in competition, but Scorsese had turned him down.The Wes Anderson picture in competition is “Asteroid City,” about a space cadet convention that is interrupted by aliens; Todd Haynes will show “May December” a love story about a young man and his older employer, starring Julianne Moore.Ken Loach, whose movies focused on working-class life in Britain have twice won the Palme d’Or, will present “The Old Oak,” about Syrian refugees arriving in an economically depressed English mining town.A jury led by the Swedish director Ruben Ostlund will choose the winner. Ostlund won last year’s Palme d’Or for “Triangle of Sadness,” a satire of the international superrich; he also took the 2017 award for “The Square,” a sendup of the art world.Of the 19 titles in competition, five are directed by women, including the Cannes veterans Jessica Hausner and Alice Rohrwacher, and Ramata-Toulaye Sy, a French-Senegalese newcomer.Many of the highest profile titles at this year’s event will be shown out of competition. The festival will open with “Jeanne du Barry,” a period drama about a poor woman who becomes a lover of King Louis XV of France. It stars Johnny Depp in his first major role since he won a defamation trial against his ex-wife Amber Heard.Other high-profile movies scheduled to premiere at Cannes’s 76th edition include “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” directed by James Mangold — the final movie in the Harrison Ford adventure series about a globe-trotting archaeology professor — and Pedro Almodóvar’s “Strange Way of Life,” the Spanish director’s second movie in English. Starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal, that movie is a short western about a reunion between two hit men.Wim Wenders, the German director who won the 1984 Palme d’Or for “Paris, Texas,” has two films in the official selection. In the main competition, he will show “Perfect Days,” which Frémaux said was about a janitor in Japan who drives between jobs listening to rock music. Out of competition, Wenders will show a 3-D documentary about Anselm Kiefer, one of Germany’s most revered artists.Frémaux said that over 2,000 movies were submitted for the festival, although only 52 made Thursday’s selection. Of those, one other notable title is Steve McQueen’s “Occupied City,” about Amsterdam under the Nazis. Frémaux said that McQueen, the director of “12 Years a Slave” and “Widows,” had made a “very radical” film that was several hours long. But, Frémaux added, watching it, “you won’t fall asleep.” More

    • 113 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      ‘One True Loves’ Review: A Romance Lost at Sea

      by

      A film adaptation of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s novel has potential for drama, but it stumbles on stock melodrama.A woman stands on a dock, staring out at the sea through a set of binoculars, hoping for the impossible and refusing to accept the inevitable. “Emma, it’s your third day out here,” her sister tells her desperately. “I’m going to stay out here, as long as it takes,” Emma responds.It’s hard not to see these early moments of overwritten, stock melodrama in “One True Loves,” the ham-fisted film adaptation of the Taylor Jenkins Reid novel, as something like scenes in a comedy sketch. Emma (Phillipa Soo) has lost her husband (Luke Bracey) — he was her high school sweetheart — in a helicopter crash, a fact she reluctantly accepts. Slowly, she moves on with her life, eventually reconnecting with an old best friend (Simu Liu) and becoming engaged.But when her husband returns, back from the dead after surviving on an island for four years, the film homes in on her struggle to choose her one true love. Because of its poor pacing, and awkward sequencing and editing, however, the movie clumsily sets up this romance-pulp plot in its first half. Basic storytelling components are also ignored, as if entire scenes are missing, so that “One True Loves,” directed by Andy Fickman, stumbles even as a piece of Hallmark sappiness.There is potential for some meaty drama — in its best moments the film reads like a “Cast Away” spinoff, stretching out the rainy scene climax when Tom Hanks returns to his wife and is met with the cold, cleareyed truth that life has moved on without him. These late glimmers, though, are mostly drowned out. The Marvel superstar Liu and Soo, who is Broadway royalty, may seem suddenly exposed for a lack of innate star power here, but in a film like this, they’ve really just been left stranded on their own island.One True LovesRated PG-13 for some suggestive material and language. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman’ Review: This Giant Frog Needs Your Help

      by

      An enigmatic adaptation of a short story collection by Haruki Murakami, this animated film is set shortly after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan.The composer and painter Pierre Földes makes his feature film directorial debut with “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman,” an animated adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s short story collection of the same name. Following Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Oscar-winning film “Drive My Car” — also based on an amalgamation of Murakami works — Földes’s effort skews more faithfully to the author’s inscrutable style, combining surrealist narratives with a pensive tone that can be hard to pin down. Adding to the opaqueness is an animation style similar to rotoscoping, where the characters’ movements are based on those of live actors; while beautiful and striking at times, the uncanny depiction of the film’s human subjects may alienate some viewers.“Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman” takes place shortly after the 2011 Japan earthquake and tsunami and is centered on the salesmen Komaru (voiced by Ryan Bommarito in the English-language dub) and Katagiri (Marcelo Arroyo), each of whom finds himself in a crisis. Komaru is mourning his separation from his wife, Kyoko (Shoshana Wilder), who spent hours watching televised news coverage of the disaster before walking out on him. We learn through flashbacks that the two got together under peculiar circumstances. Katagari, meanwhile, has an absurd meeting with an anthropomorphic frog named Frog (voiced by Földes), who tasks him with saving the city from a second impending earthquake caused by a giant earthworm.Despite its original, unusual premise, “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman” can’t shake the sense that it is multiple short stories stitched together, and the elusive nature of Murakami’s dialogue and characterizations does it no favors. It works well as a visual companion for fans of the author’s work, and as a flawed enigma for everyone else.Blind Willow, Sleeping WomanNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 100 Shares159 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Mafia Mamma’ Review: An Offer You Can Refuse

      by

      Toni Collette has no chance of saving this jumble of Mob clichés and female empowerment.Sweet Tony Soprano, “Mafia Mamma” is bad. And not just disappointingly bad, in the way of late-career James Cameron, or irritatingly puerile, like virtually anything featuring Roberto Benigni. No, “Mafia Mamma” is so wincingly awful it makes you question the professional bona fides of everyone who had a hand in greenlighting its existence.This probably sounds harsh. But, as someone who has long respected the work of the film’s director, Catherine Hardwicke — whose abilities were evident from the get-go with “Thirteen” (2003) and, five years later, the first and best entry in the “Twilight” troop — I was jarred. A clodhopping farce interrupted by seizures of cartoonish violence, Hardwicke’s latest outing posits that the best distraction from an empty nest and a cheating spouse is to dash to Italy and join the Cosa Nostra.At least, that’s what Kristin (Toni Collette), a self-effacing California housewife, does when she’s summoned to the Roman funeral of her estranged grandfather, a Mafia don, and learns that she is his designated replacement. Having recently waved her son off to college and surprised her no-count husband in flagrante, Kristin was hoping for — to paraphrase the sage advice of her best friend, played by a delightfully spicy Sophia Nomvete — an eat-pray-fornicate adventure. The first would be easy; the less said about the last, the better.Trite, charmless and entirely without grace, “Mafia Mamma” weaves a wearying string of Mob chestnuts into a shallow empowerment narrative. Initially enshrining Kristin’s doormat personality — before leaving for Italy, she prepares a selection of Tupperware meals for her faithless husband — the screenplay (by Michael J. Feldman and Debbie Jhoon) soon has her lusting after an airport pickup (Giulio Corso) and attempting coitus with the oily boss of a rival family (Eduardo Scarpetta). Surviving multiple assassination attempts apparently does wonders for the libido.Vacillating mainly between randy-tourist energy and “Eek! Blood!” reaction shots, Collette — despite a proven gift for comedy — must serve as the sole load-bearing wall in a house of cards. Mouth and eyes agape, Kristin spends much of the movie gasping variations on “Oh my god!,” whether it’s to note the untimely expiration of a prospective lover or to salute a particularly generous plate of pasta. Filmed in Italy with a mostly Italian cast (including Monica Bellucci as a slinky consiglieri), the story stumbles from one tired setup, one ludicrous shootout, one hackneyed line to another. Worse, the filmmakers see no limit to the number of times a flatlining joke can be resuscitated, with running gags on the Godfather movies and the synchronized spitting of Kristin’s cohort whenever her family’s enemies are named.Warmly photographed by Patrick Murguia, “Mafia Mamma” opens in the aftermath of a slaughter and closes in the vicinity of a courtroom scene of surpassing looniness. By that point, I was surprised only that no one had thought to slide a horse’s head between Kristin’s sheets; maybe the writers had no more oh-my-gods left to give.Mafia MammaRated R for a violation to the anus and insults to the intelligence. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 88 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      Hollywoods Newest Stars? Nike, BlackBerry and Cheetos.

      by

      A new spate of films stars not people but consumer products.Your standard-issue Hollywood biopics foreground people caught in the wheels of history. We meet titans of industry, genius mathematicians, brave astronauts and dogged journalists. We hear stories of fearless, unyielding figures whose visions changed the world. Some, like presidents and generals, already know their own importance; others still think they’re ordinary. But the stories generally revolve around people and events, showing us how laws were changed, wars won, villains defeated.Lately Hollywood has landed on an effective variant: Hey, remember this old thing?This type of film is not new, precisely, but this spring is staggeringly replete with examples. “AIR,” directed by Ben Affleck, tells the story of Nike’s game-changing sponsorship deal with a rookie Michael Jordan and the world-conquering shoes that emerged from it. “Tetris” does the same for the titular video game, which farsighted 1980s capitalists managed to license from the Soviet state. “BlackBerry” offers a raucous, satirical history of the Canadian tech company whose cellphone went extinct. And then there’s “Flamin’ Hot,” a drama about the former Frito-Lay employee who claims — highly dubiously, according to Los Angeles Times reporting — to be the creator of the addictively spicy red-dusted Cheetos.These movies are not about people or events that changed our scientific or political reality; they are interested in men (and yes, I do mean just men) who changed our consumer reality. The protagonists here are white-collar functionaries who carry leather briefcases to work. They are corporate middle managers and marketers and brand gurus. They scream into phones, scrutinize contracts and sift through webs of licenses and sublicenses. Their world isn’t always depicted as glamorous; “AIR” has Matt Damon don a fat suit to play a schlubby, basketball-obsessed divorcé. But these are stories in which businessmen are the heroes. They are the people who got the job done, if the job was selling millions upon millions of units to grow a major corporation’s market share.Yet it’s not even right to say these brand-o-pics focus on the men. They are, above all, centered on the objects. Movies have told the stories of market-movers before, but Hollywood’s most recent biopics of Steve Jobs were not called “iPhone 1” and “iPhone 2.” Ray Kroc’s franchising of McDonald’s is dramatized in a movie called “The Founder,” not “Big Mac.” It’s in these new movies that the consumer product itself truly becomes the star around which human stories revolve. Their cumulative mood is resolutely frothy: poppy 1980s bops, eight-bit graphics, white-collar sharks gnawing on the geeks. For any child of the era, this is yet another casual stroll down memory lane — one in which, yet again, memory lane is flanked by endless billboards of retro brands. The objects in these films, after all, are not just products; they signify a specific slice of a time, perhaps a specific type of childhood. Like all brands these days, they are signposts we use to navigate the world, orienting ourselves socially, signaling our identities. They are interested in people who make the first thing, and less interested in the fact that, somewhere in the world, a labor force is making millions more.This experience of consumption is precisely what the films promise audiences. In both “BlackBerry” and “AIR,” the executives are consciously trying to tap into questions of consumer desire and identity. “AIR” could even be seen as an origin story for the very concept of brand-as-identity, an innovation it seems to admire. “BlackBerry,” shot in vérité style, is more sour on the idea. Glenn Howerton plays Jim Balsillie, depicted here as the raging id of the company, barking orders at his sales force: “You’re not salesmen anymore,” he says. “You’re male models. I want you at every country club, yacht club, tennis club. Wherever the elite go, you go!” The phone’s function is no longer the point. “When they ask you, don’t say, ‘It’s a phone that does email,’” he says. “It’s not a cellphone — it’s a status symbol.”Writing in Playboy in early 2014, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek mused on our experience of brands and “the mysterious je ne sais quoi that makes Nike sneakers (or Starbucks coffee).” I don’t know whether Ben Affleck ever read that article, but there’s a strange level on which his film repeats, again and again, something Zizek imagined about Nike. If such a company were to outsource production to overseas contractors, design to design firms, advertising to ad agencies and distribution to retailers, what would be left? “Nike would be nothing ‘in itself,’” Zizek wrote. “Nothing other than the pure brand mark ‘Nike,’ an empty sign.” In “AIR,” it is Damon’s character — Sonny Vaccaro, a marketing executive — who finds a new answer. His radical idea is to commit the entire basketball budget to Jordan. Nike, he says, must tap into something deeper, to turn a shoe into a man and a man into a shoe. The vice president of marketing is puzzled: “You want to anthropomorphize a shoe?” The film leaves it to Jordan’s mother, played by Viola Davis, to underline how that’s done: “A shoe is just a shoe,” she says, “until my son steps into it.” “BlackBerry” is caustic, while “AIR” is, ultimately, a feel-good celebration of the brand-identity revolution that changed sports forever. “Tetris” feels more confused. (We watch Henk Rogers become a millionaire by getting the Soviets to license some handheld-gaming rights, but whether Nintendo or someone else gets them feels more meaningful to Rogers than to consumers.) While watching each of the three films, though, I found myself thinking about the words etched on the backs of so many devices: “Designed by Apple in California/Assembled in China.” Each of these stories is interested in the inventors and innovators who create the first thing, and less interested in the fact that, somewhere in the world, a labor force is making millions more. In “AIR,” the only real acknowledgment of this comes from that vice president of marketing, who expresses mild ambivalence about Nike’s factories in Taiwan and South Korea — a confusing gesture in a movie about a company that, in 1998, had its real-life chief executive lament that it had become “synonymous with slave wages, forced overtime and arbitrary abuse.” This year, in Michigan, Times reporting found underage factory workers who said inhaling the dust from producing Flamin’ Hot Cheetos left their lungs stinging. Feelings about this spring’s eruption of brand flicks have been mixed. In The Wall Street Journal, Joe Queenan called this spate of product bios “great news,” expressing hope that “AIR” might open the door for more footwear-origin stories. (Why not Uggs or Birkenstocks?) In the opposite ideological corner, you’ll find Boots Riley, the leftist musician and filmmaker (“Sorry to Bother You”), arguing on Twitter that commodity flicks are Hollywood’s effort to “push back on radicalization of the working class.” It’s certainly possible that these movies expose something vapid about our consumer society — say, our readiness to attach our humanity to empty slogans or to praise “visionaries” whose vision isn’t about fighting injustice or reaching the stars but merely selling us tons of plastic.Still: All these brand films, and all the reviews of them, seem to acknowledge the same point. The day-to-day texture of our lives, they suggest, may be dictated less by brave explorers or crusading lawyers and more by people with office jobs who make products and then make us want to buy them — people whose decisions shape our habits, our choices, our sense of ourselves. The part these films do not yet fully agree on is whether this fact is worth celebrating or deeply depressing.Source photographs: Apple TV+; Amazon Studios; William West/AFP, via Getty Images. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in Television

      What’s on TV This Week: ‘Waco: The Aftermath’ and ‘The Hummingbird Effect’

      by

      A limited drama series from Showtime puts the resurgence of the militia movement into context, and a new slate of programming comes to PBS in celebration of Earth Month.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, April 10-16. Details and times are subject to change.MondayFrom left, Tim Holt, Walter Huston and Humphrey Bogart in “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”Warner Bros., via Everett CollectionTHE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (1948) 8 p.m. on TCM. Adapted from the 1927 novel of the same name by B. Traven, this Golden Globe and Academy Award winning film follows Fred C. Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart) and Bob Curtin (Tim Holt), two drifters living in Mexico, as they team up with a prospector (Walter Huston) and head for the hills of the Sierra Madre in hopes of finding gold. The film not only explores concepts of greed and self-preservation “in a most vivid and exciting action display,” Bosley Crowther wrote in his review for The New York Times, but it is also “a swell adventure film” with “fast and electric” details. Though the movie has been the subject of criticism for its stereotypes of Mexicans, in 1990, the Library of Congress selected “Sierra Madre” for preservation in the National Film Registry.TuesdayROAD WARS 10 p.m. on A&E. This documentary series centered around road rage in the United States is back for a second season, as the show’s film crew gets back on the road to document the accidents, wacky weather events and instances of extreme human behavior that take place on America’s roadways.WednesdayA female green-crowned brilliant hummingbird in “The Hummingbird Effect.”Filipe DeAndradeNATURE: THE HUMMINGBIRD EFFECT 8 p.m. on PBS. In celebration of Earth Month this April, PBS is featuring a new collection of programs, documentaries and specials devoted to the topics of climate change and sustainability. “The Hummingbird Effect,” a new episode in the natural history documentary series “Nature,” is one such special. Set in Costa Rica, the episode explores the tiny birds’ relationship to the flora and fauna around them, and how their existence is vital to the health of the overall environment in which they are a part.NOVA: WEATHERING THE FUTURE 9 p.m. on PBS. This new episode from the documentary series NOVA documents the effects of climate change in the United States. From heat waves and megafires, to intense rainstorms and long-lasting droughts, the documentary focuses on how Americans are adapting and innovating in reaction to extreme weather.ThursdayHEADLINERS WITH RACHEL NICHOLS 10 p.m. on SHOWTIME. Featuring interviews with “players, coaches and front office personnel” in the world of basketball, the show, which is hosted and co-executive produced by the veteran NBA reporter Rachel Nichols, will offer fans a more intimate portrait of the industry, while still establishing an on-site presence during important game days. Nichols previously hosted “The Jump,” a daily basketball show on ESPN, until its cancellation in 2021, when it was reported that Nichols had made disparaging remarks about one of her colleagues.THIS IS MARK ROBER 10 p.m. on DISCOVERY. Produced by Kimmelot and ITV America, this new series offers a behind-the-scenes look of the concepts and processes of some of the most engaging viral videos of the former NASA engineer and YouTube star Mark Rober. He first gained notoriety in 2018, when he posted a video pranking package thieves with an engineered glitter bomb box. Since then, Rober has amassed over 20 million followers on his YouTube channel, where he is known for his intricate engineering experiments, pranks and gadget videos. “This is Mark Rober” is a companion series to “Revengineers,” a prank show executive produced by Rober and Jimmy Kimmel, which premieres next week.FridayDandara Veiga, center, and the ensemble of Ballet HispánicoTeresa WoodNEXT AT THE KENNEDY CENTER: BALLET HISPÁNICO’S DOÑA PERÓN 10 p.m. on PBS. Through movement by the versatile choreographer Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, the dance company Ballet Hispánico paints a portrait of the life of Eva “Evita” Perón — the Argentine actress turned populist first lady. The ballet follows Evita’s ascent from poverty, showcasing her time as a performer and as first lady, and ends with her death from cervical cancer at age 33. In her review for The Times, Siobhan Burke highlights the ballet’s “thoughtful integration of movement” with its “handsome design elements,” adding that “this harmony stands out from the first, saintly image” of the performance.SaturdayKazunari Ninomiya at Saigo in “Letters from Iwo Jima.”Merie W. Wallace/Warner Brothers Pictures and DreamWorks PicturesLETTERS FROM IWO JIMA (2006) 3:30 p.m. on FLIXe. This Golden Globe and Academy-Award winning Japanese-language film portrays the Battle of Iwo Jima — the monthlong battle in 1945 between the Imperial Japanese Army and the United States Marine Corps and Navy that became memorialized through Joe Rosenthal’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima.” Directed and co-produced by Clint Eastwood, it is the companion film to Eastwood’s “Flags of Our Fathers,” which was released two months earlier. “Letters From Iwo Jima” portrays the battle from the perspective of the Japanese soldiers, while its companion depicts the same battle from the American perspective. In the film’s observation of the lives and deaths of Japanese soldiers “it is unapologetically and even humbly true to the durable tenets of the war movie tradition, but it is also utterly original, even radical in its methods and insights,” A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The Times, calling the film “the best Japanese movie of the year.”SundayWACO: THE AFTERMATH 10 p.m. on CMT, PARAMOUNT and SHOWTIME. This five-part limited series looks at the so-called Waco siege, — when federal agents raided the Branch Davidian religious group’s compound northeast of Waco in 1993. At the compound, 75 people were killed, a third of them children. Coinciding with the 30th anniversary of the tragedy, the series puts into context the recent resurgence of the militia movement in the United States through its focus on what happened after the siege: the trials of Branch Davidian members who survived, and the indoctrination of the Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Movies

      Bill Butler, Cinematographer Best Known for ‘Jaws,’ Dies at 101

      by

      He came up with a mechanism that allowed Steven Spielberg to film underwater. His work on “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” earned him an Oscar nomination.Bill Butler, an Oscar-nominated cinematographer who played a prominent role in the American New Wave movement of the 1970s and whose credits included “Jaws,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and three of the “Rocky” sequels, died on Wednesday. He was 101.His death was announced by the American Society of Cinematographers, which did not say where he died.Mr. Butler worked with a number of directors credited with reimagining American filmmaking in the ’70s, including Steven Spielberg, for whom he was the director of photography on “Jaws,” the 1975 blockbuster about a man-eating great white shark that established Mr. Spielberg’s reputation and changed the way Americans looked at both film and the beach.Open-water shooting posed many challenges on what was a notoriously troubled set.The crew faced problems not only with their malfunctioning mechanical shark but also ‌with seasickness, uncooperative tides‌, random boats sailing into the frame and even sets that sank.From left, Mr. Spielberg, the camera operator Michael Chapman and Mr. Butler on the set of “Jaws.” Mr. Butler designed a submersible camera box and a platform that allowed for shooting both below the water and on its surface.Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesMr. Butler designed a submersible camera box and a platform that allowed for shooting both below the water and on its surface, to convey the viewpoint of a swimmer. The American Society of Cinematographers, which presented Mr. Butler with a lifetime achievement award in 2003, also credited him in 2012 in its magazine, American Cinematographer, with “heroically” saving footage from a camera that went down in the Atlantic Ocean. His calculation: that seawater would be similar to saline-based developing solutions.“We got on an airplane with the film in a bucket of water, took it to New York and developed it,” Mr. Butler recalled in his commentary for a 2012 release of “Jaws” on Blu-ray. “We didn’t lose a foot.”In a statement, Mr. Spielberg praised Mr. Butler’s work on “Jaws.” “Bill’s outlook on life was pragmatic, philosophical and so very patient,” he said, “and I owe him so much for his steadfast and creative contributions to the entire look of ‘Jaws.’”Over his six-decade career, Mr. Butler also shot several noteworthy television dramas, including “Raid on Entebbe” (1976) and “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1984), both of which won him Emmy Awards for outstanding cinematography; “The Thorn Birds” (1983), which earned him an Emmy nomination; and “The Execution of Private Slovik” (1974).For his work on “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (1975), Mr. Butler received an Oscar nomination that he shared with Haskell Wexler, a colleague with whom he had an unusual association: On two of his more influential and well-regarded films — Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Conversation” (1974) was the other — Mr. Butler was brought in as the director of photography only after the mercurial Mr. Wexler had been fired.Mr. Butler with Christopher Walken on the set of the 1988 film “Biloxi Blues.”Universal, via Everett CollectionWilmer Cable Butler was born on April 7, 1921, in Cripple Creek, Colo., and raised in a log cabin. His parents, Wilmer and Verca Butler, were farmers. After graduating from the University of Iowa with a degree in engineering, he started his career in broadcasting at WGN-TV in Chicago, where he was a camera operator for live programs and commercials.His first feature-length film, directed by his WGN colleague William Friedkin, was “The People vs. Paul Crump,” a 1962 documentary about an African American prisoner on death row who claimed his murder confession had been coerced through torture. Though the movie never aired — the contents were deemed too incendiary — it made its way to Otto Kerner, the governor of Illinois, who commuted Mr. Crump’s sentence to life without parole.“When you see the power a little piece of 16-millimeter film will bring to you, you are inspired to go ahead and pursue a career in the field,” Mr. Butler said in 2005 at a career retrospective at the Victoria Film Festival in British Columbia. “And that’s exactly what I did.”He was already 40 by the time he started shooting motion pictures. (“He reinvented himself multiple times,” said Michael G. Moyer, who worked alongside Mr. Butler as chief electrician on “Child’s Play” and other films.) But he immediately went to work for some of the period’s more promising young talents: Mr. Friedkin on “The Bold Men” (1965), Philip Kaufman on “Fearless Frank” (1967), Mr. Coppola on “The Rain People” (1969), and Jack Nicholson on “Drive, He Said” (1971), one of only three films he directed.“I did some work with director Phil Kaufman on the Universal Studios lot as a writer while I was still trying to get into the Los Angeles camera guild,” Mr. Butler said in a 2005 Moviemaker magazine interview. “That’s when I met Steven Spielberg. He had just finished his ‘Night Gallery’ projects. I shot ‘Savage’ and ‘Something Evil,’ a couple of one-hour TV movies, with him.”When work began on “Jaws,” it was Mr. Butler who convinced Mr. Spielberg that he could shoot in the water.“Panavision had just introduced a lightweight, smaller camera,” he recalled. “It was also quiet, so you could use it to cover dialogue. Steven thought it would be too shaky; I didn’t try to press the issue. If he hired me, I could show him when we got to Martha’s Vineyard.”Mr. Butler’s later credits included “The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings” (1976); “The Sting II” (1983);“Graffiti Bridge,” starring and directed by Prince (1990); “Hot Shots!” (1991); and “The Chauffeur” (2008), as well as the TV series “Brooklyn Bridge” (1991). He remained active professionally well into his 80s, working in a variety of genres and often with fledgling directors.“The harder films are usually the big ones that require controlling a lot of people and a lot of cameras, and over a large area or sometimes many locations,” he said at the Victoria Film Festival. “Keeping that organized is something that some cinematographers are not capable of, so they do smaller films.”But smaller films can be just as difficult for them, he added, “because the pressure of a small film means that they may not have the time to properly gather their footage, and that’s another definite pressure that’s equally challenging.”Mr. Butler is survived by his wife, Iris (Schwimmer) Butler, whom he married in 1984, and their daughters, Genevieve and Chelsea Butler, both actresses, as well as three daughters from his marriage to Alma Smith, which ended in divorce: Judy Rawson, Patricia Pekau and Pam Fraser. He is also survived by a number of grandchildren and great-grandchildren.Mr. Butler never attended film school; when he started shooting movies, he said, he bought the manual of the American Society of Cinematographers (“the bible of filmmaking”) and would refer to it whenever he needed. But really, he said in 2005, the way he learned to shoot pictures “was to go directly to the movies and see what somebody else was doing onscreen, and then going out and trying to do it myself. And that was it.”Kirsten Noyes contributed research. More