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      Gregory Allen Howard, Screenwriter of ‘Remember the Titans,’ Dies at 70

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      After the success of the movie, he established a brand for writing Hollywood movies about inspiring episodes in Black history.Gregory Allen Howard, who wrote the scripts of several Hollywood movies about inspiring episodes in Black history, most famously “Remember the Titans,” died on Friday in Miami. He was a day shy of his 71st birthday.His death, at a hospital, was caused by heart failure, his spokesman, Jeff Sanderson, said.“Remember the Titans” (2000) has joined the list of American films that find social significance in sports triumphs. Denzel Washington stars as Herman Boone, a Black coach leading a high school football team during its first season after racial integration. With the help of a white assistant, played by Will Patton, along with Black and white high school players who become devoted to each other, Mr. Boone launches the team on a glorious season, culminating in the state championship.The movie was an immediate sensation, premiering at the Rose Bowl and the White House. President Bill Clinton led people involved with the production in a school chant. Just a year later, The New York Times was calling it “one of the most successful sports films of all time” and a leading exemplar of “a genre that could be called the macho weepie.”On Nov. 4, 2008, after Barack Obama ended his presidential victory speech in Chicago with the words “May God bless America,” he was answered by the swelling, uplifting horns of the “Remember the Titans” instrumental theme.Mr. Howard was the prime force behind the movie. After moving to Alexandria, Va., he found himself struck by a prevailing atmosphere of racial harmony there. When he asked around about its source, he was continually told about the football team of T.C. Williams High School, which became integrated in 1971 and went on that year to win the state championship. He began buying life rights, including those of the real Herman Boone, and working on a screenplay.Mr. Howard at the premiere of “Harriet” in 2019. He said he had spent 25 years fighting to make the movie.Leon Bennett/WireImage, via Getty ImagesIn a review, the Times film critic A.O. Scott described “Remember the Titans” as “corny,” adding that it was “unabashedly, even generously so.” The movie is widely reported to have earned more than $100 million worldwide over its roughly $30 million budget.Mr. Howard continued working in the vein of inspirational Black history. He wrote the story for “Ali,” which had four other screenwriters. It premiered in 2001 and starred Will Smith as Muhammad Ali. In a review in The Times, Elvis Mitchell called “Ali” a “near great movie.” But despite hype, it lost money at the box office. Beginning in 1994, Mr. Howard tried to get a movie made out of a screenplay he wrote on the life of Harriet Tubman. In 2019, A.O. Scott described the final product, “Harriet,” as “accessible, emotionally direct and artfully simplified.”In an essay for The Los Angeles Times that year, Mr. Howard described the release of the film as the culmination of an “epic 25-year journey.” He said that he could not list “the number of doors slammed in my face, the number of passes, the number of unreturned phone calls, canceled meetings, abandonments, racist rejections, the number of producing partners who bailed.”But over time the movie industry became more interested in a Tubman biopic, he continued: “#OscarsSoWhite, DiversityHollywood and the other pushes and protests for inclusion and diverse storytelling had moved the needle: The climate had changed,” he wrote.Michael Bentt, left, and Will Smith in the movie “Ali.” Mr. Howard wrote the story for the film.Peter Brandt/Getty ImagesGregory Allen Howard was born on Jan. 28, 1952, in Norfolk, Va. He was raised by his mother, Narcissus (Cole) Henley, and his stepfather, Lenard Henley, a chief petty officer in the Navy. (His father was Lowry Howard.)From the time he was 5 to 15, his family moved 10 times, finally settling in Vallejo, Calif. In 1974, he graduated from Princeton with a bachelor’s degree in American history. In later years, he frequently referred to his studies in college as inspiring the historical subject matter of his screenplays.After briefly working on Wall Street, Mr. Howard moved to Los Angeles and tried to become a screenwriter. He did not have much success and moved to Alexandria, wondering if a change in scenery might help while also contemplating giving up and studying to become a teacher.“When you hear no that much, you just begin to think, ‘I guess they’re right,’” he told The Times in 2000.After being inspired by the story of T.C. Williams High School, he pitched “every financing entity in the movie business,” he told The Times, until the producer Jerry Bruckheimer finally took on the project.In the mid-2010s, Mr. Howard’s website reflected a sense that his career had stalled. “The sad truth is it’s almost impossible to get movies made,” he wrote. “It’s a miracle that I’ve been involved in two, ‘Ali’ and ‘Titans.’”But by 2020, things had changed, with “Harriet” released the previous year and Mr. Howard working on several new projects also related to African American history and culture, he told The Washington Post.Mr. Howard is survived by a half sister, Lynette Henley, and a half brother, Michael Henley. Herman Boone died in 2019.Mr. Howard, who was an offensive lineman on his own high school varsity football team, attributed the success of “Remember the Titans” to the popularity of the sport and the place it holds in the memories of American men.“You’re talking about millions of guys,” he told The Times in 2001. “It’s a bonding experience like you can’t believe, and for a lot of men it was the last time they were important or heroic. It touches a nerve of a time when I was last innocent.” More

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      Sylvia Syms, Versatile British Actress, Is Dead at 89

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      In a career that began in the 1950s, she had roles that ranged from the lead in the movie “Teenage Bad Girl” to Margaret Thatcher and the Queen Mother.Sylvia Syms, a British actress whose many roles in a career of more than 60 years included Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the Queen Mother, died on Friday in London. She was 89.Her death, at Denville Hall, a retirement home for actors and entertainers, was announced by her family.Sylvia May Laura Syms was born in London on Jan. 6, 1934, to Edwin and Daisy (Hale) Syms. She was educated at convent schools and at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and began her acting career onstage in the George Bernard Shaw play “The Apple Cart” in 1953.She became a stalwart of the British cinema soon after she played the title role in the 1956 movie “Teenage Bad Girl.” Among the many films in which she appeared in the late 1950s were the World War II adventure “Ice Cold in Alex” (1958), starring John Mills, in which she played an army nurse, and “Expresso Bongo” (1959), a satire of the music business. In that movie she portrayed the stripper girlfriend of a sleazy talent manager played by Laurence Harvey.In 1961 she was the wife of a closeted lawyer played by Dirk Bogarde — a role several other actresses had turned down — in the thriller “Victim,” the first British film to deal openly with homosexuality.Ms. Syms never achieved the level of stardom that some had predicted for her. One reason is that she rarely worked in Hollywood (although she did have a prominent role in Blake Edwards’s 1974 Cold War drama “The Tamarind Seed”). Another, according to The Daily Telegraph, is that her ability to disappear into the roles she played kept her from being, in her words, “instantly recognizable as me.” But she remained busy well into her 80s.Her notable later roles included Margaret Thatcher — in the 1991 television film “Thatcher: The Final Days” and later on both TV and stage in “Margaret Thatcher: Half the Picture” — and Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother in Stephen Frears’s Academy Award-winning 2006 film “The Queen.” In that movie Helen Mirren played her daughter, Queen Elizabeth II.The next year, Ms. Syms was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire by the real Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace.From 2007 to 2010, Ms. Syms had a recurring role as a dressmaker on the long-running BBC soap opera “EastEnders.” Her last role was in an episode of the historical drama series “Gentleman Jack,” a BBC-HBO co-production, in 2019.Ms. Syms’ marriage to Alan Edney ended in divorce in 1989 after 33 years. She is survived by her daughter, the actress Beatie Edney, and her son, Ben Edney.The Associated Press contributed reporting. More

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      ‘A Thousand and One’ and Nikki Giovanni Documentary Win at Sundance Film Festival

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      Other prizes go to “Scrapper,” about a British girl and her estranged father, and “The Eternal Memory,” about a Chilean couple coping with Alzheimer’s.A mother-son drama and a documentary about the pioneering poet Nikki Giovanni won grand jury prizes at the Sundance Film Festival on Friday.Taking the top honor in the U.S. dramatic competition, “A Thousand and One,” the debut feature of A.V. Rockwell, stars the singer and dancer Teyana Taylor as an ex-con who kidnaps her boy from foster care. The festival jury — made up of Jeremy O. Harris, Eliza Hittman and Marlee Matlin — described it as “work that is real, full of pain, and fearless in its rigorous commitment to emotional truth born of oppressive circumstances.”The U.S. nonfiction award went to “Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project,” from the directors Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson. The jury (W. Kamau Bell, Ramona Diaz and Carla Gutierrez) described Giovanni, now 79, as “a singular, unapologetic voice,” and said the film’s “strong directorial vision illuminates the joy and the raw reality of the Black experience.”In the world cinema dramatic competition, the top award was given to the British film “Scrapper,” Charlotte Regan’s tale of a smart 12-year-old (Lola Campbell) on her own after the death of her mother and the return of a father (Harris Dickinson of “Triangle of Sadness”) she barely knows. “A charming and empathetic film full of integrity and life,” the jurors Shozo Ichiyama, Annemarie Jacir and Funa Maduka wrote, adding, “‘Scrapper’ is a poignant study on grief.”The Chilean documentary “The Eternal Memory” took the world cinema nonfiction prize. Directed by Maite Alberdi (“The Mole Agent”), the film follows a husband and wife as they deal with his Alzheimer’s diagnosis. Augusto Góngora is a well-known Chilean TV presenter, and his wife, Paulina Urrutia, an actress-director who once served as the country’s culture minister, is now caring for him. “This film opened our hearts by bringing us closer to the meaning of life and death,” the jurors Karim Amer, Petra Costa and Alexander Nanau wrote.The Festival Favorite Award, voted on by audiences, went to Christopher Zalla’s “Radical,” starring Eugenio Derbez as an elementary school teacher along the U.S. border. Other Audience Awards went to the documentaries “Beyond Utopia” (from Madeleine Gavin, about North Koreans trying to defect); “20 Days in Mariupol” (Mstyslav Chernov’s account of being trapped with other Ukrainian journalists during the Russian invasion); and “Kokomo City” (D. Smith’s look at Black transgender sex workers).Two films about Iranians abroad also won over audiences: “The Persian Version,” Maryam Keshavarz’s comedy-drama set amid a family reunion in New York, and “Shayda,” Noora Niasari’s drama about a mother and her abusive husband in Australia.The festival concludes Sunday. More

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      ‘Close’ Director Lukas Dhont: Film’s Master Storyteller of Youth

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      At 31, Lukas Dhont already has two art-house hits to his name. The Belgian director’s latest film, “Close,” shows his skill at eliciting intense performances from young actors.As a child growing up in Dikkelvenne, a quiet, quaint village near the city of Ghent, Belgium, the movie director Lukas Dhont often felt like an outsider. Other boys saw him as too feminine and mocked his interest in dance, except one named Félicien, with whom he shared a close friendship. But as the two approached puberty, Dhont felt social pressures pulling them apart.“In that moment, that tenderness started to become looked at through the lens of sexuality,” Dhont, now 31, said in a recent interview. “People were divided into groups and boxes, and we were confronted with the idea of labels.” As they became fearful of being ostracized, their friendship evaporated, and Dhont, who is gay, was fiercely bullied for the rest of his school days.That experience as a young person struggling with expectations around gender and sexuality has shaped both of Dhont’s acclaimed feature films: “Girl,” his 2018 movie about a transgender ballerina, and “Close,” a devastating portrait of a friendship between two young boys in the Belgian countryside, which won the Grand Prix award, the equivalent to second place, at the Cannes Film Festival last year.From left: Gustav De Waele and Eden Dambrine in a scene from “Close,” and Victor Polster in a scene from “Girl.”A24; Netflix“Close” is being distributed by A24 in the United States and is being released in theaters on Friday. It further establishes Dhont as a phenom of global art house cinema and one of its most observant chroniclers of adolescence. And it cements his reputation as a filmmaker who is exceptionally skilled at eliciting intensely emotional performances from young, often untrained actors.Dhont, who employs loose scripts and encourages his actors to improvise dialogue, said his method resembled that “of a choreographer, introducing movements.” He said his relatively open approach allowed young actors “to bring so much of themselves” to the films. “I create characters for them to hide in,” he said. “They are like co-authors.”That strategy helped him to coax out two astonishing central performances for “Close,” a slow-burn drama about two 13-year-old boys named Léo and Rémi (played by newcomers Eden Dambrine and Gustav De Waele) whose close bond elicits scrutiny when classmates suspect they are a couple. After a skittish Léo begins distancing himself from Rémi, a series of slights build to tragedy.The Projectionist Chronicles the Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Meet the Newer, Bolder Michelle Williams: Why she made the surprising choice to skip the supporting actress category and run for best actress.Best-Actress Battle Royal: A banner crop of leading ladies like Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.‘Glass Onion’ and Rian Johnson: The director explains why he sold the “Knives Out” franchise to Netflix, and how he feels about its theatrical test.A Supporting-Actress Underdog: In “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” don’t discount the pivotal presence of Stephanie Hsu.Dambrine, a French student at a dance academy in Belgium, had never acted before Dhont spotted him on a train in 2018 and approached him about auditioning for the lead role in “Close.” Dhont explained that he when he saw the then-11-year-old, he was struck by his “angelic and androgynous” features and “very big eyes.”Eden Dambrine in a scene from “Close.” Dambrine was a student at a dance academy when Dhont approached him on a train and asked him to audition for the movie.A24In a video call, Dambrine, who is now 15, explained that it had been a “boyhood dream” to act in a movie, and that he had gotten the impression that acting could be fun from watching the blooper reels from “Avengers” films. (He added that when he called his mother to tell her that a stranger had approached him about starring in a movie, she had responded: “Get off the train! Get off the train!”)His mother ultimately accompanied him throughout the shoot, which lasted two months, in Belgium and the Netherlands. Among other challenges, the film required Dambrine to act out several intensely emotional moments in long, silent close-up. After he nailed a scene, in the first take, in which his character has a breakdown in a doctor’s office, much of the crew began weeping, Dhont recalled.Dambrine’s mother, whose name is France, said Dhont’s talent for working with young actors was partly a function of his youth. “He is not that far from being a teen,” she said, adding that Dhont’s emphasis on fostering bonds between crew and cast members before shooting, and his openness to improvisation, allowed her son to feel comfortable so he could focus on the emotional elements of his performance.She also noted that Dhont and Dambrine shared the experience of having been raised by single mothers “who had to figure out how to raise their kids.” The director, she said, “has a lot of empathy.”“When you’re young, you want to belong to a group, but there are people for whom that doesn’t work,” Dhont said. Kevin Faingnaert for The New York TimesDhont recalled that he had first become interested in film as a child, amid his parents’ divorce, when his mother returned home one night from seeing “Titanic,” James Cameron’s 1997 blockbuster. “My mom had been gloomy, and seeing her come back, telling me how beautiful it was,” he said, “I became obsessed with the film, and the feeling that a film could change someone.”His interest in making movies was bolstered at age 12, when an incident led him to give up his childhood dream of being a dancer. Dhont said that after performing a dance to the song “Fighter,” by Christina Aguilera, at a school talent show, his classmates mocked him even more mercilessly. “I felt so ashamed that I told myself I will not dance publicly anymore,” he recalled.Shortly after graduating from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, in Ghent, where he studied film, he began making his first feature, “Girl,” at age 26. Partly inspired by Dhont’s own youthful experiences and the true story of Nora Monsecour, a transgender ballerina, the film won several awards, including the Caméra d’Or, at Cannes, but also drew a backlash from transgender people.Some were angered by the casting in the lead role of Victor Polster, a male actor who won an acting award at Cannes for his performance, while others argued that a climactic incident of self-inflicted violence in the film was exploitative. Writing in the Hollywood Reporter, the trans critic Oliver Whitney argued that “Girl” invited “the audience to react with disgust” at the main character’s body.“I just create characters for them to hide in,” Dhont said of the actors he works with. “They are like co-authors.”Kevin Faingnaert for The New York TimesThe blowback to the movie, Dhont said, was “emotionally challenging.” He added that “now, if I made a film with a trans character as the lead, I would make it differently,” but declined to get into the specifics of what he would change. “I can’t go back in time,” he said.Dhont said that his films thus far had been about the period in a person’s youth when they are “confronted with society for the first time” and “performing types of identities or stereotypes of identities.”“When you’re young, you want to belong to a group, but there are people for whom that doesn’t work,” Dhont said. “My films are about showing the world from that perspective.” More

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      Lance Kerwin, ‘James at 15’ and ‘Salem’s Lot’ Star, Dies at 62

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      “James,” which followed the adventures of a sandy-haired teenager who moves with his family to Boston from Oregon, made him a teenage idol.Lance Kerwin, a former child actor who played the title role in the 1970s coming-of-age drama “James at 15” and a vampire hunter in a mini-series based on the Stephen King novel “Salem’s Lot,” died on Tuesday at his home in San Clemente, Calif. He was 62.His death was confirmed by his daughter Savanah Kerwin, who said that a cause had not been determined and that the family was awaiting the results of an autopsy.In 1977, when Mr. Kerwin was 16, he was cast in a television movie, “James at 15,” that served as the pilot episode for the NBC series of the same name. The show, which ran for 21 episodes, followed the adolescent adventures of a sandy-haired budding photographer, James Hunter, who has moved with his family to Boston from Oregon.The show tackled serious themes like sex, alcoholism and pregnancy. It also made Mr. Kerwin a teenage idol.Writing in The Washington Post a few weeks into the show’s run, the critic Tom Shales said that while “James at 15” was “not perfect, not revolutionary, not always deliriously urgent,” it was “still the most respectable new entertainment series of the season.”“And if it romanticizes adolescence through the weekly trials and triumphs of its teenage hero,” he continued, “at least it does so in more ambitious, inquisitive and authentic ways than the average TV teeny-bop.”The show ran into trouble with NBC’s censors over a script that called for James to lose his virginity, to a Swedish exchange student, on his 16th birthday (when the program would be retitled “James at 16”). The network objected to the script’s use of the word “responsible” as a euphemism for birth control, and agreed to air the episode only “if the boy suffers for it and is somehow punished,” the novelist Dan Wakefield, the show’s creator, told The New York Times in 1978.The disagreement led to Mr. Wakefield’s resignation before the episode was broadcast, on Feb. 9, 1978. “James at 16” was canceled in May of that year.Lance Michael Kerwin was born on Nov. 6, 1960, in Newport Beach, Calif., to Don and Lois Kerwin. When he was growing up, he told The Times in 1982, he was so addicted to television that he could not read when he reached the fourth grade.After his parents divorced, his mother and stepfather “unplugged the television,” he said.“Every day after school I would come home and read out loud with my mother and stepfather — stories, plays and scripts that they would bring home from work,” he said.In addition to his daughter Savanah, Mr. Kerwin’s survivors include his wife, Yvonne Kerwin, and four other children: Fox, Terah, Kailani and Justus. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Kerwin’s acting career began in the early 1970s with small roles on popular TV shows like “Little House on the Prairie,” “Gunsmoke” and “Wonder Woman.” From 1974 to 1976, he appeared in five installments of “ABC Afterschool Special,” the daytime educational anthology series aimed at young people.Mr. Kerwin in 2022. After dealing with a drug problem for many years, he helped run a rehabilitation program and was a youth pastor.AFF/AlamyIn 1979, he starred in the mini-series adaptation of “Salem’s Lot.” The series followed a novelist who returns to his New England hometown to write a book and encounters vampires who have invaded the town. Mr. Kerwin played Mark Petrie, a teenager who helps the author stop the vampires.Mr. Kerwin continued acting through the 1980s and into 1990s. He appeared in the 1985 science fiction movie “Enemy Mine” and the 1995 thriller “Outbreak,” about a deadly plague.By the time he was making “Outbreak,” Mr. Kerwin “was actively struggling with sobriety,” Savanah Kerwin said, which may have played a role in his decision to walk away from acting.In 2010, Mr. Kerwin pleaded guilty to a charge of second-degree theft for falsifying documents to obtain state medical assistance and food stamps in Hawaii, The Associated Press reported. He was sentenced to five years of probation and was ordered to perform 300 hours of community service.“I’ve been struggling with the sin of drug use for a long time,” Mr. Kerwin told The Los Angeles Daily News in 1999, in an interview conducted while he was in a rehabilitation center in Perris, Calif. “I’ve gotten in years of abstinence. The last time I found myself turning to drugs again, I came here to restore my walk with the Lord.”Later, his daughter said, he helped run the rehabilitation program U-Turn for Christ and was a youth pastor there for several years.“He was constantly trying to help people who were struggling to find God or become sober,” she said. “That was his focus for the rest of his life.”Sheelagh McNeill More

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      ‘You People’ Review: Guess Who’s Going to Roscoe’s

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      Jonah Hill and Eddie Murphy are among the stars in this prickly-charming generational Netflix comedy, the feature directing debut of Kenya Barris.When Ezra hops in the back seat of Amira’s Mini Cooper, sparks fly. Played with savvy charm by Lauren London, the budding costume designer furiously calls out Jonah Hill’s unhappy broker and fledgling podcaster for his assumption that she, a Black woman, is his rideshare pickup. But their exchange goes from prickly to something warmer and at times winning — which is an apt description of this interracial, interfaith, bigotry-teasing comedy, directed by Kenya Barris and written by Hill and Barris.More than his Wu-Tang Clan tees and her Gucci slides, hip-hop culture is their lingua franca.And these kids are all right-ish, to borrow a suffix Barris made popular with his TV shows “black-ish” and “grown-ish.” Much like the parents who met in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” more than 50 years ago, it’s the elders who prove to be the problem. Julia Louis-Dreyfus and David Duchovny play Shelley and Arnold Cohen of Brentwood; Eddie Murphy and Nia Long are Amira’s pessimistic-at-best parents, Akbar and Fatima Mohammed, of Baldwin Hills.While Duchovny and Long aren’t silent partners here, it’s the former “S.N.L.” castmates Murphy and Louis-Dreyfus who whet the comedy as their characters are poised to scuttle Ezra and Amira’s plans to wed. Shelley by being so effusive in her clumsy embrace of Amira that she becomes exhaustingly offensive. The disapproving Akbar by trying to reveal Ezra as a white opportunist.Hill’s Ezra is, in fact, a fool of sorts. Mo, his cocky partner in podcasting (played by the dynamic comic Sam Jay) tries to keep him real. But Ezra lies to please. He tries too hard. He refers to Malcolm X as “the G.O.AT.” during his first meeting with Amira’s parents at a Roscoe’s Chicken & Waffles (his idea). He wants to be edgy and lovable. And Hill, wearing blond-streaked hair and a lit smile, carries that yearning throughout the film.Hill and London build on a nice vibe. Their characters are playful and frisky, in sync with their eye rolling and mouthing of apologies from across a room. Like the betrothed, viewers recognize the shoals but remain optimistic they can navigate them. And then the movie begins nimbly nudging doubts. Maybe there is no happily ever after here.Between the two of them, insiders Barris and Hill must have Rolodexes that cover the entire industry. There are cameos aplenty. Rhea Perlman offers a few quips as Ezra’s grandmother. Richard Benjamin, Hal Linden and Elliott Gould say wildly inappropriate things after a Yom Kippur service. Anthony Anderson cuts heads at a Crenshaw barbershop. And Mike Epps arrives as Akbar’s knowing brother, E.J.Additionally, Los Angeles gets more than a passing glance. Mark Doering-Powell’s photography hovers from above and cruises at street level, capturing the city in its best light. This L.A. feels decidedly upscale. With its lavish homage to sneakerhead couture and its killer soundtrack (by Bekon), “You People” can be read as either a critique of the commercialization of hip-hop culture or a celebration of its ongoing durability. Or maybe it’s both, which would likely suit Amira and Ezra just fine.You PeopleRated R for language, sexual friskiness and cannabis use. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Kompromat’ Review: Escape From Siberia

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      In this thriller, a French diplomat takes to the road after being falsely imprisoned by Russian authorities.The French thriller “Kompromat” dramatizes the true story of Yoann Barbereau, a Frenchman living abroad in Russia who escaped the country in 2017 after being imprisoned under false charges. In the fictionalized version of events, Mathieu (Gilles Lellouche) works at a French cultural institution in Irkutsk, one of the largest cities in Russian Siberia. In his joie de vivre, Mathieu hosts a ballet as a show of diplomatic good will. But the erotic nature of the ballet runs him afoul of local authorities, including agents in the Russian Federal Security Service, known for continuing the practices of the once dreaded K.G.B.Suddenly, Mathieu is arrested under fabricated accusations of child pornography and abuse. Mathieu is assigned an attorney who negotiates his release from prison into house arrest. Trapped at home, he awaits trial with dwindling hopes of intervention from the French government. Mathieu’s desperation grows, and this thriller takes a turn toward action when he acquires a phone from a friendly contact and takes to the road, staying in safe houses en route to the French embassy in Moscow. But there, Mathieu finds little support for his release, and so he looks again to escape, this time with the European border in mind.The director Jérôme Salle shows interest in the realpolitik of Mathieu’s situation, and his film scopes out the grim safe rooms and fluorescent meeting halls where Russian political schemes and French political failures take place. But Salle’s approach leaves the physical details of Mathieu’s escape foggy. It’s not always clear how long Mathieu spends in hiding, or how he acquires the tools needed to sustain his flight. The politics confound the film’s sense of action; the camera sticks to the diplomats even after the protagonist has escaped from a back door.KompromatNot rated. In French and Russian, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 7 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Remember This’ Review: A Stark Portrait of Resilience

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      This film, featuring a captivating performance from David Strathairn as the Polish resistance fighter Jan Karski, is a straightforward adaptation of the play of the same name.Last fall, David Strathairn captivated Brooklyn theatergoers with his solo performance in “Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski,” depicting the Polish resistance fighter’s harrowing journey through exile during World War II. Originally produced by Theater for a New Audience as part of the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown University, “Remember This” took inspiration from the documentaries in which the real-life Karski appeared — 1985’s “Shoah” and 2010’s “The Karski Report” — along with Karski’s own writings and lectures from his decades as a Georgetown professor. The result was a stark, minimalist set in which Strathairn recreated the horrors that Karski, who died in 2000 at age 86, endured using nothing more than a table, two chairs and a suit jacket.The film version of “Remember This,” opening this Friday at the Quad Cinema, in Manhattan, adapts the stage play with little change in its presentation. Derek Goldman returns as director alongside Jeff Hutchens, and Strathairn is once again a one-man tour de force. Now with the benefit of editing, his transitions between the devastating and triumphant scenes of Karski’s life are punctuated with camera tilts upward into dramatic lighting cues, allowing for subtle cuts in what still resembles a one-take performance.Despite this, “Remember This” is, quite literally, a filmed play, and Goldman and Hutchens don’t make any attempts to define or elevate itself outside the confines of the stage. That can start to feel claustrophobic at 90 minutes long, but perhaps the directors saw that as a necessary trade-off, as Karski’s numerous and poignant monologues performed to the camera — on the nature of evil, on Holocaust denial, on how one chooses to retell the truth — would have felt out of stylistically place in a cinematic version. As it is, they’re the element most likely to be remembered.Remember ThisNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More