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      Tom Brady Continues a Long History of Athletes in Sports Movies

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      With Tom Brady appearing in the comedy “80 for Brady,” a look at other sports figures who have made their way to the big screen.When is a famous athlete not a famous athlete? When they’re appearing as themselves in a Hollywood movie — then they’re a movie star. Or are they? Despite more than a century of sports legends appearing in films, very few have brought the stardust of their exploits on the field to the very different arena of the big screen. The latest to try is the football godhead Tom Brady.Not only does the ex-New England Patriot/current Tampa Bay Buccaneer (who recently announced his retirement) appear as himself in the new comedy “80 For Brady,” but the mythos surrounding him forms the basis of the plot, with four senior Patriots fans — played by Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Rita Moreno and Sally Field — road-tripping to the 2017 Super Bowl in Houston. Brady appears in the final scenes, getting pep-talked by Tomlin’s character, and let’s just say that he should probably hold onto his day job. But audiences aren’t really expecting the 45-year-old quarterback to suddenly reveal his inner Christian Bale. They just want — well, what do they want? What’s the appeal of a jock out of water?The movies have been wrestling with this conundrum from the start, when Thomas Edison filmed an 1894 match between the boxers Mike Leonard and Jack Cushing and sold it to the public on Kinetoscope at 10 cents a round. The silent era, once it got going, was a heyday for sports stars onscreen, both since it gave audiences a chance to see their heroes up close, and because the lack of dialogue obviated any need for trained acting.The Detroit Tigers slugger Ty Cobb appeared in a 1917 drama called “Somewhere in Georgia,” now lost, that cast him as a baseball-playing bank clerk who rescues his girl from kidnappers and wins the big game. The Bambino himself, Babe Ruth of the New York Yankees, starred as a fictionalized small-town Babe in the 1920 film “Headin’ Home.” Available on YouTube, that century-old film is amusingly of its time and Ruth is an amiably persuasive screen presence — a movie star.Jackie Robinson, second from right, in “The Jackie Robinson Story.”Jewel Pictures/Getty ImagesWith the coming of sound in the mid-1920s, athletes reverted to being found objects onscreen, making cameos and called upon to speak one or two lines to show that they were, in fact, human. Even those Olympians who carved out bona fide screen careers — the swimmers Johnny Weissmuller (“Tarzan”) and Esther Williams, the skater Sonja Henie — weren’t taken seriously as actors. More typical was the 1952 Spencer Tracy-Katherine Hepburn comedy “Pat and Mike,” which brought on a raft of real-life names to give its sports-centric story line background credibility: the tennis stars Gussie Moran and Don Budge; the golfers Babe Didrikson Zaharias and Helen Dettweiler. None of them were called upon to do any dialogue heavy lifting.The exception here is “The Jackie Robinson Story,” a 1950 feature that cast the Brooklyn Dodger as himself in a dramatically softened version of how he broke the color barrier in professional baseball. Robinson is clearly an amateur actor but is believable even in fictionalized romantic scenes involving his co-star, a very young Ruby Dee. The performance is really the first to tease out a fundamental difference between two types of stardom — sports and film — that continues to play out on screens today when players like Brady ascend the stage.The difference lies in the minds and expectations of spectators, and it’s the difference between endeavor and imposture. Simply put, we love to watch athletes do and we love to watch actors be. When actors play sports stars — Will Smith as Muhammad Ali (“Ali,” 2001), Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig (“The Pride of the Yankees,” 1942), Saniyya Sidney and Demi Singleton as Venus and Serena Williams (“King Richard,” 2021) — we appreciate the skill and charisma of the performance and we buy in for the duration of the show, but we know it’s not the real thing. With star athletes, “the real thing” is paramount — the knowledge that their accomplishments are happening in actual time and space and thanks to finely-honed reflexes. An acting performance is a product of thought, but if an athlete thinks too hard about what they do, it can give them the yips.Jim Brown, far left, with Donald Sutherland, far right, and other cast members in “The Dirty Dozen.”MGMIn a sense, then, asking a sports legend to deliver a convincing movie performance is like asking a horse to moo. The surprise is that some can do it at all. Back to the timeline: With the breakdown of the studio star system in the 1960s and the coming of the civil rights era, athlete involvement in films began to change. Figures previously considered outsiders now had an in: The Cleveland Browns running back Jim Brown was having so much fun shooting “The Dirty Dozen” in 1966 that when the Browns owner Art Modell told him to report back to practice, Brown announced his retirement from football.An above-the-title action star by the late 1960s, Brown had a taboo-busting interracial sex scene with Raquel Welch in “100 Rifles” (1969), and he paved the way for other N.F.L. emigrants like Rosey Grier, O.J. Simpson, the blaxploitation star Fred Williamson, Joe Namath, and Alex Karras of the Detroit Lions, who rose from playing Mongo in “Blazing Saddles” (1974) to starring in his own successful 1980s sitcom (“Webster”).Many of these athlete-actors weren’t playing themselves — and yet, in a sense, they were: The hoops star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was cast as a co-pilot in the madcap comedy “Airplane!” (1980), but the joke was that no one else in the movie pretended he was anyone but Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. The award for juggling identities probably goes to Muhammad Ali, who played himself in his own 1977 biopic, “The Greatest,” and two years later played a slave-turned-U.S. senator in the historical TV drama “Freedom Road.” Neither performance was award-worthy in the traditional sense, yet both are engaging and assured — exactly what you’d expect from a man who’d long since proved himself a genius at creating a persona. Ali was an actor from the get-go, and his talent was much bigger than the boxing ring.Gina Carano, left, with Channing Tatum in “Haywire.”Claudette Barius/Relativity MediaIt’s in his mold that today’s sports stars work their mojo onscreen, tacking between appearing as themselves and more serio-comic versions of themselves in films, commercials and on “Saturday Night Live.” Given the business branding now built into pro sports and the endless close-ups of cable news and social media, an athlete with any measure of renown develops a persona — a public version of who they are — or has it developed for them by a management team or, more dangerously, by the public.As a result, filmed performances are more nuanced, more self-aware — more professional: Michael Jordan as a live-action cartoon among the Warner Bros. menagerie in “Space Jam” (1996), Lawrence Taylor doling out steam room advice to Jamie Foxx in “Any Given Sunday” (1999), Mike Tyson playing a comically scary version of his scary self in “The Hangover” (2009). Two more recent high-water marks of N.B.A. thespianism are LeBron James’s thoroughly charming supporting turn in the 2015 Amy Schumer romantic comedy “Trainwreck” and Kevin Garnett’s appearance in the Safdie brothers’ gritty drama “Uncut Gems” (2019) — basketball players “playing themselves” while bringing a subtle understanding of what that means on the stage of modern fame.Indeed, the line between professional sports and professional entertainers may finally be said to have been obliterated when an M.M.A. fighter like Gina Carano can land a lead in a Steven Soderbergh movie (“Haywire,” 2011) and the cartoon theater of professional wrestling can give us pop culture’s biggest movie star of the moment, Dwayne Johnson, a.k.a. The Rock. Next to them, Tom Brady in “80 for Brady” is a throwback to an earlier and gentler day, when athletes excelled at playing — and not so much at playing themselves. More

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      How Much to See a Movie at AMC? It Will Soon Depend Where You Sit.

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      By the end of 2023, the movie theater chain will offer tickets at three different price tiers, with middle seats costing the most. You’ll pay less if you like the front row.Some middle seats at AMC movie theaters will be more expensive than others as part of the company’s new ticket-pricing strategy, announced this week.AMC Entertainment, the world’s largest cinema chain, said in a news release on Monday that this new pricing system, known as Sightline at AMC, would be in place at all of its United States theaters by the end of the year.The seats in the front row of the theater will be the least expensive and seats in the middle of the theater will be the most expensive, the company said. However, new prices will not affect showings before 4 p.m. or tickets sold at a special discount on Tuesdays, AMC said.AMC’s executive vice president and chief marketing officer, Eliot Hamlisch, said in the news release that the tiered system “more closely aligns” with the reserved seats and pricing models of other types of ticketed events, such as sporting events and concerts.Mr. Hamlisch said that the change would give people “more control over their experience.”Critics of the new system, including the actor Elijah Wood, have said it would give wealthy people an unfair advantage.“The movie theater is and always has been a sacred democratic space for all, and this new initiative by @AMCTheatres would essentially penalize people for lower income and reward for higher income,” Mr. Wood wrote on Twitter.Under the new system, the most common seats available, the Standard Sightline tickets, would be priced as traditional movie tickets, AMC said.If you’re willing to crane your neck to see the screen, you’ll be able to pay less to sit in the “Value Sightline” seats in the front row. Some accessible seating for people with disabilities will also be priced in the value tier. To access the value tier prices, people must register with the AMC loyalty program, which includes one free membership tier.The seats in the middle of the theater will become “Preferred Sightline” tickets. The extra cost of these tickets will be waived for members of AMC’s top-tier loyalty program, A-List.A map outlining seating options will be available when buying tickets online, through the company’s app and at the box office, the company said in its announcement.AMC did not specify what the price differences would be for each ticket or whether prices would be consistent across cities and films.In New York City, the price differences were about to take effect at some locations later this week. At AMC’s 34th Street location in Manhattan, tickets were listed under the new pricing system for Friday’s showings of films, including “Magic Mike’s Last Dance” and a 25th anniversary screening of “Titanic.”For the 6:45 p.m. showing of “Magic Mike’s Last Dance,” the front row seats, a space for a person in a wheelchair and a seat for the companion of someone in a wheelchair were described as “Value Sightline” seats and colored blue on the seating map.A key for the map explained that the value tickets were $2 off and that the preferred seats were $1 extra. Those were the five middle seats in each of the four back rows of the theater with gold-colored icons. Discounts for children and older moviegoers remain in effect.The “Standard Sightline” tickets for this showing included the two to three seats on either side of the preferred seats, the second-row seats and the six other seats made available for people in wheelchairs and their companions.Movie theaters have been experimenting with new tactics to boost ticket sales in response to two decades of weakening attendance, shutdowns during the first years of the coronavirus pandemic and the widening availability of digital streaming of first-run movies.In September, Cineworld, the London-based company that operates Regal Cinemas in the United States, filed for bankruptcy.Cineworld is the second-largest theater chain in the world behind AMC, and the company’s chief executive, Mooky Greidinger, said in the bankruptcy filing that “the pandemic was an incredibly difficult time for our business.”AMC said that by the end of the year, its new pricing system would be in place at all of the company’s theaters in the United States. AMC has about 950 theaters and 10,500 screens worldwide. More

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      ‘They Wait in the Dark’ Review: If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Your Mother

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      A terrified woman finds her childhood home contains more than bad memories in this loopy horror movie.Made with just a handful of actors and a thimbleful of cash, Patrick Rea’s “They Wait in the Dark” is a gruesome ghost story that plays with our expectations. Filmed in 2021, the movie gathers four mothers — one murdered, two murderous, plus the rageful spirit of a fourth — into a twisted tale of abuse and revenge.The delightfully baroque script, also by Rea, isn’t the most lucid, but it is economical. When we meet Amy (Sarah McGuire) and her adopted eight-year-old son, Adrian (Patrick McGee), they are on the run. Hollow-eyed and haunted, Amy is carrying a burner phone and nursing an unhealed knife wound in her ribs. Having survived an abusive mother, Amy is now fleeing her partner, Judith (Laurie Catherine Winkel), who — as a catcalling trucker learns to his peril — might be even more unhinged.From its succinct opening to its exclamation-point finale, “Dark” delivers a tight, demented look at toxic parenting. With admirable speed, the movie installs Amy and Adrian in a creaky farmhouse in rural Kansas, furnishes her with an empathetic friend (Paige Maria) and introduces an initially invisible supernatural presence. Yet it isn’t the home’s frightful history — or even Judith’s remorseless approach — that concerns us so much as Amy’s darkening moods and growing volatility.More tingly than terrifying (and more than a smidge off-the-wall), “Dark” has a cheeky boldness. Rea, a prolific independent filmmaker, deploys the gore judiciously and his actors are above reproach. As we watch Amy slowly decompensate, trapped between her boarded-up windows and creepy basement, it’s unclear whether her most urgent threat will come from without or within.They Wait in the DarkNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. Rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      Home-Cooked Spaghetti Dinners and a Glam Photo Shoot: Eight Unusual Oscar Bids

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      The campaign on behalf of Andrea Riseborough is the latest to provoke controversy, but it’s hardly the most memorable.When the actress Andrea Riseborough wrapped a 19-day shoot on the microbudget indie “To Leslie” in Los Angeles during the height of the pandemic, her hopes probably extended to positive reviews from critics and indie film enthusiasts.But now, after a social media campaign on her behalf by some famous friends, among them Gwyneth Paltrow, Edward Norton and Sarah Paulson, she’s been nominated for an Oscar for best actress — an honor she can keep, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences ruled Tuesday after reviewing the unorthodox lobbying on her behalf.While the regulations around campaigning have become ever murkier in the age of social media, the Riseborough campaign was hardly the first to stretch the rules, which forbid, among other things, mentioning competitors or their films directly or calling academy members personally.Here are eight memorable bids for a statuette that went rogue.1961Chill Wills, ‘The Alamo’After Chill Wills was nominated for best supporting actor for his role as Davy Crockett’s buddy Beekeeper in “The Alamo,” he hired the veteran publicist W.S. “Bow-Wow” Wojciechowicz to run his campaign. Wojciechowicz submitted an ad to Variety with a photo of the film’s cast and text that read, “We of the ‘Alamo’ cast are praying harder — than the real Texans prayed for their lives in the Alamo — for Chill Wills to win the Oscar as best supporting actor.”Variety refused to run it, and John Wayne, the film’s director and star, took out his own ad rebuking Wills that said neither he nor his production company were in any way involved in the effort. (“I am sure his intentions are not as bad as his taste,” Wayne wrote of Wills, who later blamed Wojciechowicz.) After this fiasco — Wills lost to Peter Ustinov for “Spartacus” — it became rare for actors to run their own campaigns, which have since mostly been the purview of studios and teams of publicists.Interviews With the Oscar NomineesKerry Condon: An ardent animal lover, the supporting actress Oscar nominee for “The Banshees of Inisherin” said that she channeled grief from her dog’s death into her performance.Michelle Yeoh: The “Everything Everywhere All at Once” star, nominated for best actress, said she was “bursting with joy” but “a little sad” that previous Asian actresses hadn’t been recognized.Angela Bassett: The actress nearly missed the announcement because of troubles with her TV. She tuned in just in time to find out that she was nominated for her supporting role in “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.”Austin Butler: In discussing his best actor nomination, the “Elvis” star said that he wished Lisa Marie Presley, who died on Jan. 12, had been able to celebrate the moment with him.1974Candy Clark, ‘American Graffiti’Candy Clark with Charles Martin Smith in “American Graffiti.”Universal PicturesThe nostalgic coming-of-age feature “American Graffiti” included some future big names like Ron Howard, Richard Dreyfuss and Harrison Ford among its ensemble cast, but Candy Clark, then a little-known actress, was the only one to embark on an Oscar campaign. She paid $1,700 to take out a series of quarter-page ads in The Hollywood Reporter and Variety — a strategy that paid off when she was the only member of the film’s cast to be nominated, for best supporting actress. (She lost to a 10-year-old Tatum O’Neal for “Paper Moon.”)1975Liv Ullmann, ‘Scenes From a Marriage’The Norwegian actress Liv Ullmann delivered a standout performance in Ingmar Bergman’s domestic drama “Scenes From a Marriage,” but a potential nomination was tripped up by a technicality that The New York Times likened to a situation “one usually encounters at obscure border stations in Central Asia.” Because a television cut of “Scenes From a Marriage” had premiered on Swedish TV in 1973 — the year before its American theatrical release — it was deemed ineligible for the Oscars thanks to an academy rule that prohibited the film’s being shown on television during the year before its theatrical release.Three of that year’s eventual best actress nominees — Ellen Burstyn (who went on to win), Diahann Carroll and Gena Rowlands — took up Ullmann’s cause, even signing an open letter supporting her right to compete, but the academy stood firm. (Ullmann, now 84, did receive an honorary award from the academy last year.)1986Margaret Avery, ‘The Color Purple’Margaret Avery with Bennet Guillory in “The Color Purple.”Warner Bros.After being nominated for best supporting actress for “The Color Purple,” Margaret Avery used $1,160 of her own money to pay for a Variety ad promoting her performance. Intended to suggest the voice of her character, Shug Avery, it read: “Well God, I guess the time has come fo’ the Academy voters to decide whether I is one of the best supporting actresses this year or not! Either way, thank you, Lord for the opportunity.” Avery was criticized for the ad, which did not reflect the way her character actually spoke in the film. (She lost to Anjelica Huston for “Prizzi’s Honor.”)1988Sally Kirkland, ‘Anna’Sally Kirkland took a letter-writing fiend approach in an effort to score a best actress nomination for her role as a once-famous Czech actress in the small indie “Anna.” Kirkland not only personally wrote letters to academy voters, she also financed her own ad campaign — the film had no budget to do so — and spoke to any and every journalist who asked. Her persistence paid off with a nomination, though she eventually lost to Cher for “Moonstruck.”1991Diane Ladd, ‘Wild at Heart’After she was nominated for David Lynch’s “Wild at Heart,” Diane Ladd — Laura Dern’s mother — decided that the way to voters’ hearts was through a home-cooked spaghetti dinner. She embarked on a one-woman blitz that involved not only writing personalized letters to voters, but also inviting 20 academy members to a screening of her film, accompanied by a spaghetti dinner that she prepared herself. She might have wanted to spend more time perfecting that spaghetti recipe, though — she lost to Whoopi Goldberg, who won for “Ghost.”2011Melissa Leo, ‘The Fighter’Melissa Leo, fourth from right, in a scene from “The Fighter.”Jojo Whilden/Paramount PicturesUnlike other nominees who took matters into their own hands, Melissa Leo was considered the front-runner when she began her campaign to secure a best supporting actress win for the boxing drama “The Fighter.” But she took out her now-infamous “Consider” ads anyway, she told Deadline in 2011, because she was frustrated at not being able to land magazine covers as a 50-year-old woman. The ads, which showed off her glamorous side as she leaned forward in a low-cut black evening gown, presented a stark contrast to the gritty, blue-collar mother and fight manager she played in the film (which was not even mentioned in the ad). There’s no way to say for sure if the strategy helped her chances, but it certainly didn’t hurt — she beat out her co-star Amy Adams, as well as Helena Bonham Carter of “The King’s Speech,” to claim the Oscar.2013Ann Dowd, ‘Compliance’Ann Dowd received stellar reviews for the Craig Zobel thriller “Compliance,” a flop of an indie with such a tiny budget that Dowd was paid just $100 per day for her role. But she believed in her performance, and after raising $13,000 by dipping into her bank account, borrowing money from friends and colleagues and maxing out her credit cards, she mailed DVDs to academy members and placed ads in trade publications in an effort to secure a best supporting actress nomination. While the Oscar recognition proved elusive — Anne Hathaway won that year for “Les Misérables” — the media coverage of her efforts may have helped put her on the radar of directors. (And now she has an Emmy for “The Handmaid’s Tale.”) More

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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘The 7 Toughest Days on Earth’ and Super Bowl LVII

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      A new adventure series is on National Geographic, the Super Bowl airs on Fox, and President Biden delivers his second State of the Union address.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, Feb. 6-12. Details and times are subject to change.MondayMartinique Lewis in “Black Travel Across America.”Victoria Donfor/National Geographic for DisneyBLACK TRAVEL ACROSS AMERICA 10 p.m. on National Geographic. Beginning in 1936, Victor Hugo Green, a Harlem-based postal worker, published an annual “Green Book” series for three decades. Serving as a travel guidebook for Black Americans in a time of segregation and racial strife (and in 2018 lending its title to the Oscar-winning movie), the book provided a list of hotels, restaurants and service stations from Connecticut to California where Black American patrons would not only be served, but be safe. In this documentary, the travel consultant Martinique Lewis embarks on a coast-to-coast road trip to visit historic “Green Book” locations and speak to local experts about the businesses that acted as safe havens.TuesdaySTATE OF THE UNION 2023 9 p.m. on ABC, CBS, Fox, HBO and NBC. President Biden’s second State of the Union speech will be his first appearance before a Republican-led House of Representatives. “He looks forward to speaking with Republicans, Democrats and the country about how we can work together to continue building an economy that works from the bottom up and the middle out, keep boosting our competitiveness in the world, keep the American people safe and bring the country together,” Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said in a statement.THE 7 TOUGHEST DAYS ON EARTH 10 p.m. on National Geographic. This unscripted adventure series follows Dwayne Fields, an adventurer and explorer known for being the first Black British citizen to reach the North Pole, as he works to keep himself and a small film crew alive for seven days in some of the most extreme environments on earth, during their deadliest times of year. From the glaciers of Kyrgyzstan to the deserts of Oman, Fields must guide his crew through the elements to a specified extraction point. Their journey begins in Tuesday’s premiere in the forests of Gabon.WednesdayGina Rodriguez in “Not Dead Yet.”Eric McCandless/ABCNOT DEAD YET 8:30 p.m. on ABC. Adapted from the book “Confessions of a Forty-Something ____ Up” by Alexandra Potter comes a new series from the creators of “This Is Us” and “The Real O’Neals.” Starring the Golden Globe Award-winning actress Gina Rodriguez (“Jane the Virgin”) as Nell Stevens, a broke obituary writer who can communicate with the dead, the series follows Nell as she works to find herself and restart the life and career she left a decade ago.ThursdayTHE KING AND I (1956) 8 p.m. on TCM. This Oscar-winning musical film tells the timeless story of an English governess named Anna (Deborah Kerr) who travels to modern-day Thailand as a tutor for the 15 children of the King of Siam (Yul Brynner). Adapted from the Tony-winning 1951 musical of the same name, based on the 1944 novel “Anna and the King of Siam” by Margaret Landon (which in turn was inspired by the memoirs written by Anna Leonowens, a teacher to the children of King Mongkut in the 1860s), the film is beloved for its award-winning score and exploration of cultural differences. In a 1996 column for The New York Times, Margo Jefferson described the story as a “seductive and spectacular artifact” that was “based on facts and fictions about the Orient and the British Empire a century earlier; an extravaganza in which East meets West, a monarchy meets a matriarchy and operatic melodrama meets ethnic vaudeville.”FridayBen Affleck and Rosamund Pike in “Gone Girl.”Merrick Morton/20th Century FoxGONE GIRL (2014) 10:15 p.m. on HBOSGe. Based on the 2012 best seller by Gillian Flynn, who also wrote the screenplay, “Gone Girl” follows the alternating narratives of the husband and wife Nick (Ben Affleck) and Amy Dunne (Rosamund Pike), as an investigation mounts once Amy is discovered missing and Nick becomes a suspect in her disappearance. The Times critic Manohla Dargis described the film as “a ghastly vision” in her review of the movie. “At its strongest,” she added, “‘Gone Girl’ plays like a queasily, at times gleefully, funny horror movie about a modern marriage.”SaturdayA SOLDIER’S STORY (1984) and SERGEANT RUTLEDGE (1960) 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. on TCM. This week’s selection for Turner Classic Movies’ Black History Month Saturdays features two films that focus on the Black experience in the Army. First is the Academy Award-nominated “A Soldier’s Story,” which Lawrence van Gelder described in his 1984 review for The Times as mixing “mystery, history, sociology and inquiry into the psychopathology of hatred and the poison of accommodation to injustice.” Based on Charles Fuller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Soldier’s Play,” a loose adaptation of Herman Melville’s novella “Billy Budd,” the film is set in rural Louisiana during World War II and tells the story of Capt. Richard Davenport (Howard Rollins Jr.), a JAG officer who has been called in to investigate the murder of Vernon Waters (Adolph Caesar), a sergeant in an all-Black Army unit. “Sergeant Rutledge” continues this exploration of themes of racial prejudice and justice. Set in the Southwest in the post‐Civil War years, it follows Braxton Rutledge (Woody Strode), a sergeant in one of four all-Black units, as he is tried in the rape and killing of a white girl and the slaying of her father, his commanding officer. Directed by the four-time Oscar-winning director John Ford, “Sergeant Rutledge” represents a shift in the racial consciousness of Ford’s work.SundayPUPPY BOWL XIX 2 p.m. on Animal Planet. Returning for its 19th year, Animal Planet’s Puppy Bowl is a call-to-adoption television event that highlights the work of a range of animal rescues and shelters while adoptable puppies “compete” in a series of games. This year’s Puppy Bowl will feature over 120 puppies from 67 shelters, some of whom viewers will learn about in more depth over the course of the three-hour special (in addition to a number of featured kittens during “Kitty Halftime”).SUPER BOWL LVII 6:30 p.m. on Fox. Fox Sports presents its live coverage from State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz., as the AFC champions, the Kansas City Chiefs, play the NFC champions, the Philadelphia Eagles, in a battle for the ultimate title. This year’s game is notable for being the first Super Bowl to feature two Black quarterbacks, and the first time a set of brothers will be competing against one another. The 2023 game also pits Andy Reid, the head coach for Kansas City, against Philadelphia, for which Reid was head coach from 1999 to 2012. More

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      Melinda Dillon, 2-Time Oscar Nominee, Is Dead at 83

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      She was a Broadway star at 23 and then quit acting, but later re-emerged in films like “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “A Christmas Story.”Melinda Dillon, who shot to Broadway stardom at 23, withdrew from acting after a mental breakdown, and then, in her late 30s, staged a comeback, receiving best supporting actress Oscar nominations for her roles in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “Absence of Malice,” died on Jan. 9. She was 83.Her death, which was announced by a cremation service, came to public notice in recent days. The announcement did not specify the cause or location of her death.Ms. Dillon was best known for playing mothers coping with grave or silly problems in popular movies of the 1970s and ’80s. In “Close Encounters,” the enduring Steven Spielberg hit from 1977, she played an artist and single mother living on a rural farm who watches her son get abducted by aliens.She played more explicitly archetypal mothers in “Harry and the Hendersons” (1987), a family comedy about having Bigfoot as your pet, and “A Christmas Story” (1983), a series of vignettes depicting an all-American Christmas in midcentury Indiana.The latter film, long a classic of the holiday season on television, inspired a 2020 tribute in The New York Times, which hailed Ms. Dillon’s character, a frazzled Everymom, as a “damn hero.”In “Absence of Malice” (1981), Ms. Dillon played against maternal type as a Catholic woman who must admit to having an abortion.Her star turn of that era came late for an actress — in Ms. Dillon’s late 30s and 40s — and it constituted an unexpected re-emergence, following a crisis that seemed to halt her promising career.Ms. Dillon in the 1983 film “A Christmas Story” with, clockwise from left, Peter Billingsley, Ian Petrella and Darren McGavin.PictureLux, via AlamyMelinda Ruth Clardy was born in Hope, Ark., on Oct. 13, 1939. Her father, Floyd, worked as a traveling salesman, and her mother, Noreen, was a volunteer at a U.S. Army hospital. Noreen fell in love with Wilbur Dillon, a wounded veteran, and Melinda’s parents divorced when she was 5.She took her stepfather’s surname and had the peripatetic upbringing of a child of the military, living for a while in Germany. She left home at 16 and soon began pursuing an acting career.She moved to New York City in 1962, fresh out of acting school. In just a matter of weeks, she landed one of four parts in the Broadway debut of Edward Albee’s play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”She played Honey, the wife in a young couple invited to the home of an older couple for a drink. The premiere, on Oct. 13, fell on her 23rd birthday.“Critics unanimously hailed her performance as superb,” The Daily News announced in a profile published that month that described Ms. Dillon’s “overnight rise from obscurity to stardom.”Her agent, Peter Witt, told The News, “What has happened to her is a one in a million shot paying off the first time out in the theater.”In a 2014 New York Times review of a recording of the play’s original cast, the theater critic Charles Isherwood called the production “one of the seminal theatrical events of the 20th century” and said the actors’ performances, including Ms. Dillon’s, “still feel fresh, fierce and definitive.”But as time went on, the pressure bore down on Ms. Dillon. Sometimes she would perform in a three-hour matinee in the afternoon, then study acting with Lee Strasberg for two hours, and then do another three-hour performance in the evening. Talking to sophisticated, powerful people in the New York theater world terrified her.Ms. Dillon in 1998. After suffering a breakdown, she said: “I had had the American dream — to go to New York and study with Lee Strasberg. I guess I just wasn’t prepared for it all to happen so quickly.”CBS, via Getty ImagesAfter nine months, she left the play and checked into the mental ward of Gracie Square Hospital in New York, where she found herself feeling suicidal.“I had had the American dream — to go to New York and study with Lee Strasberg,” she told The New York Times in 1976. “I guess I just wasn’t prepared for it all to happen so quickly.”After her release from the hospital, she took a few acting roles but then sought safe harbor in marriage, to the actor Richard Libertini, and in motherhood, raising their son, also named Richard.But she did not find contentment in life away from the spotlight. By the mid-1970s, she was single and being cast in multiple major Hollywood productions, including “Slap Shot,” a 1977 film starring Paul Newman.“I spent 10 and a half hours naked in bed with Paul and absolutely loved it,” she told People magazine in 1978.After the apex of her Hollywood career, she continued acting, and into the 21st century she occasionally made appearances on television shows like “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.”Information about her survivors was not immediately available.Ms. Dillon sang in the choir of a Methodist church as an adult, and she threw herself into film roles as mothers. But she came to reject what she had once sought in the life of a traditional suburban housewife.“I left home so early that when I found somebody who wanted to take care of me, I just stopped everything; I could have soared ahead — I really know that — and I chose not to,” she told The Times. In marriage, “I got buried alive,” she continued. “That’s what got me to act again.” More

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      in Theater

      Screen Time: A Film Star Captivates, and a Writer Is Surveilled

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      David Greenspan gives a wild ride of a performance in “On Set With Theda Bara,” and marionettes star in Vaclav Havel’s play “Audience.”The performance space at the Brick, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is already veiled in haze when the audience arrives. A long table draped in black runs down the center of the room, lit by sconces and hanging lamps, their soft glow reflected in mirrored walls at either end.There’s a ghostly, expectant feel to it all, as if we’ve entered an alternate plane where specters might be summoned. You wouldn’t be surprised if a séance broke out. Somewhere in the middle of the swirling phantasmagoria that is the play “On Set With Theda Bara,” indeed one will.A certain channeling of spirits, though, begins as soon as the performance does. The actor David Greenspan takes his place at the head of the table, with the audience seated on either side, and becomes the glamorous silent-film star Theda Bara, or a version of her. Identity is slippery in this play, as it was for the actress, who started out as Theodosia Goodman from Ohio but was marketed by Hollywood, under her screen name, as an exoticized Arab.Obsession with her is the gossamer string that binds Theda to the other characters in this campy, comic solo show: Detective Finale, a gay 21st-century gumshoe looking for his missing child; Ulysses, a movie-theater organist enthralled with Theda ever since one of her films aroused him to distraction at the keyboard; and Iras, Finale’s genderqueer 16-year-old, who would become Theda Bara if only that were possible.“The Theda I want to be is like — transgressive but unproblematic, know what I mean?” Iras says. “Like minus the appropriation and stuff.”Greenspan, a virtuoso of multicharacter solo shows, gives a wild ride of a performance, fleet-footed and mercurial but capable of great stillness, too. Stalking, twirling and dancing through the space, even treading on the tabletop, he is quite something to behold, with Stacey Derosier’s lighting finely calibrated to his every move. (The set is by Frank J. Oliva.)Written by Joey Merlo, directed by Jack Serio and presented by the Exponential Festival, this play collides periods and period styles along with storytelling genres. It’s part noir, part vampire tale; a vampire — a predatory woman — was one of Theda’s most famous roles.Like any decent vampire, Theda is undead: 138 years old, by Iras’s calculation, but still looking — Iras tells her when they meet — just as she always did onscreen. Holed up with Ulysses, Theda watches clips from her old movies on YouTube, which she pronounces, adorably, as YouTubah.“Things are strange here,” Ulysses says, and he could easily be speaking of the play. “Reality seems to move about. You’ll be in one place one minute and in another the next. And it’s not only the place that moves but time as well.”In a whipsaw-changeable show that employs just a single costume (by Avery Reed) and almost zero props, it’s not always clear which character is speaking — and the protean Theda has more than one voice. That periodic smudginess is less bothersome than you’d think, though.Only at the very end does the play turn too murky to work. Until then, Greenspan renders it entirely fascinating.Vit Horejs and Theresa Linnihan in “Audience,” a production by the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theater that is set in a brewery, at La MaMa.Jonathan Slaff“Audience,” a puppet version of an autobiographical Vaclav Havel play at La MaMa, in the East Village, has the opposite trouble: a lively finish, but a glacially paced staging whose intriguing aim is never close to realized.Directed by Vit Horejs, who performs it with Theresa Linnihan, this production by the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theater is set in a brewery, where a playwright works, rolling barrels. A brewmaster-informant chats him up, hoping for scraps of intel.Two large projection screens are suspended over the playing space. (Production design is by Alan Barnes Netherton.) One screen displays live, black-and-white video from multiple cameras aimed at parts of the stage, to suggest the oppression of constant surveillance. The other shows color close-ups of the performance.In Horejs’s English translation, it’s a very talky two-hander, but the marionettes (by Linnihan, Milos Kasal and Jakub “Kuba” Krejci) don’t have moving facial features, which makes for unfortunately static close-ups. The acting, alas, does not captivate, so the spying never feels real enough to make the surveillance images meaningful.There is a smart video prelude to the performance, though: a sleek newsreel (by Suzanna Halsey) that gives a quick and clever Czech history lesson to contextualize the play. Bit of a disappointment, what follows.On Set With Theda BaraThrough Wednesday at the Brick, Brooklyn; theexponentialfestival.org. Running time: 1 hour 5 minutes.AudienceThrough Feb. 19 at La MaMa, Manhattan; lamama.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More