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      Gina Lollobrigida, Movie Star and Sex Symbol, Is Dead at 95

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      She began her career in her native Italy and, although she achieved fame in America worked more often in Europe. She later had a second career as an artist and filmmaker.Gina Lollobrigida, the Italian movie actress who became one of the post-World War II era’s first major European sex symbols, died on Monday in Rome. She was 95.The death was confirmed by her agent, Paola Comin. Ms. Lollobrigida had already appeared in more than two dozen European films when she made her first English-language movie: John Huston’s 1953 camp drama, “Beat the Devil,” in which she played Humphrey Bogart’s wife and partner in crime. That film, and the attention she garnered in “Fanfan la Tulipe,” an Italian-French period comedy released in the United States the same year, were enough to put her on the cover of Time magazine in 1954.She went on to unqualified American movie stardom, exuding a wholesome lustiness in a handful of high-profile films. She starred in “Trapeze” (1956) with Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis; “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” (1956), as Esmeralda, Quasimodo’s beloved beauty (Anthony Quinn played Quasimodo); “Solomon and Sheba” (1959), a biblical epic with Yul Brynner; “Come September” (1961), a romantic comedy with Rock Hudson; and “Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell” (1968), a comedy about an unwed mother.Throughout her career, however, she continued to make many more European films than American ones. She starred with the continent’s leading men, including Jean-Paul Belmondo, Marcello Mastroianni, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Yves Montand.A 1955 film, “La Donna Più Bella del Mondo” (“The Most Beautiful Woman in the World” — a term some in Hollywood came to use about Ms. Lollobrigida herself), released in the United States as “Beautiful but Dangerous,” brought Ms. Lollobrigida her first major acting award: the David di Donatello, Italy’s equivalent of the Oscar. She won the Donatello twice more, for “Venere Imperial” (1962), in a tie with Silvana Mangano, and for “Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell,” in a tie with Monica Vitti.Ms. Lollobrigida with Burt Lancaster, left, and Tony Curtis in the 1956 film “Trapeze.”Associated PressMs. Lollobrigida was always considered more a sex symbol than a serious actress — at least by the American press — but she was also nominated for a BAFTA award as best foreign actress in “Pane, Amore e Fantasia” (1953). She received Golden Globe nominations for “Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell” in 1969 and for a recurring role on the prime-time television soap “Falcon Crest” in 1985.After two decades in front of the camera, she embarked on a multifaceted second career as artist and filmmaker. She published her first book of photographs, “Italia Mia,” in 1973. “Believe it or not, she takes good pictures and isn’t just trading on her name,” Gene Thornton of The New York Times wrote.Ms. Lollobrigida greeted the crowd at the Cannes Film Festival in 1965.Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesShe wrote, directed and produced “Ritratto di Fidel,” a documentary based on her exclusive interview with Fidel Castro, the Communist leader of Cuba, which was shown at the 1975 Berlin film festival. She was also a sculptor, and an exhibition of 38 of her bronze pieces was presented at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, among other venues, in 2003.Ms. Lollobrigida was awarded the French Legion of Honor in 1993. She ran unsuccessfully for the European Parliament in 1999.Liugina Lollobrigida was born on July 4, 1927, in Subiaco, Italy, east of Rome. She was one of four daughters of Giovanni Lollobrigida, a furniture maker, and Giuseppina (Mercuri) Lollobrigida. In her teens she studied art. But after she was discovered by a movie director, Mario Costa, she began appearing in small roles in 1946.By 1949 she was a star, billed second in “La Sposa Non Può Attendere” (“The Bride Can’t Wait”). The next year she appeared in “Miss Italia,” inspired by her real-life experience: She had come in third in the 1947 Miss Italy pageant. (The winner, Lucia Bosé, and the first runner-up, Gianna Maria Canale, also went on to movie careers.)Ms. Lollobrigida in New York in 2010. After two decades in front of the camera, she embarked on a multifaceted second career as artist and filmmaker.Keith Bedford for The New York TimesAfter her film career wound down in the early 1970s, Ms. Lollobrigida appeared on television in Europe and the United States, including the “Falcon Crest” episodes and an American television movie, “Deceptions” (1985), in which she played an excitable duchess entertaining in Venice. Her last feature film appearance was in “XXL” (1997), a French comedy that also starred Gérard Depardieu, about a Jewish family in the garment trade.She married Milko Skofic, a Yugoslavian-born physician who became her manager, in 1949. The couple separated in 1966 and divorced in 1971. Their son, Milko Jr., survives her, along with a grandson.In 2006 she announced plans to marry Javier Rigau y Rafols, a 45-year-old Spanish businessman. But she canceled the wedding less than two months later, reportedly because of overwhelming press attention.Ms. Lollobrigida broke a thigh bone in a fall last year and had surgery to repair it in September. She said she was able to walk again soon afterward.Ms. Lollobrigida was often outspoken in interviews. In 1969 she suggested that women pretended to be stupid in front of men. She claimed to have no beauty secrets and to do no exercise other than dancing, and to have no objections to being seen as a sex object and being told that she had a beautiful body. “Why should I be offended?” she said in a 1995 interview with The New York Times. “It’s not an insult.”Yet she had grown philosophical with age. “Success is something that goes up and down,” she said in the same interview. “I was hungry, I was rich, the life changed again, and now I’m not rich, but I still have my mind.”Alex Marshall and Elisabetta Povoledo contributed reporting. More

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      For the Documentarian Alice Diop, Only Fiction Could Do Justice to a Tragedy

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      “Saint Omer” borrows details from a case of infanticide in France, which the director found raised profound but very personal issues.When the French director Alice Diop attended the trial of Fabienne Kabou, a woman who left her 15-month-old daughter on a beach to drown, she wasn’t intending to make a movie. She felt an “unusual identification” with the person at the center of the 2016 case, she said in a recent interview, who like her was a Black woman of Senegalese descent with a mixed race child. She believed there was a “nearly mythological dimension” to the tragedy.As the proceedings unfolded, however, Diop realized she wasn’t the only woman who had been drawn to the town of Saint-Omer in the north of France to observe Kabou. Looking around her during the defense’s closing arguments, Diop saw others in tears. “The story was bringing everybody back to profound and very personal issues,” Diop said through an interpreter during an interview in New York last week. She continued, “The conviction that I was going to do a film about it came from that very moment.”Her experiences sitting in that courtroom have morphed into “Saint Omer,” the documentarian’s first venture into narrative features. Upon premiering at the Venice Film Festival last year, it was awarded the distinction of best debut film and the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize, essentially second place at the prestigious event. It is now shortlisted for the Academy Award for international feature. Diop is the first Black woman to direct a film France has submitted for Oscar consideration.“Saint Omer” adds a fictional superstructure to Kabou’s case, with the novelist Rama (Kayije Kagame) providing the audience’s window into the trial of Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda). The details of the case remain the same: Like Kabou, Coly does not deny killing her daughter, born in secret and the result of a relationship with an older white man, but describes a descent into madness brought on by “sorcery.”Though Rama is ostensibly there to conduct research for her next book, a riff on Medea, watching Laurence provokes her to contemplate her nascent pregnancy as well as her strained relationship with her own mother. Diop shifts between an intimate portrayal of Rama’s silent moments alone with her thoughts and her changing body, and Laurence’s harrowing testimony rendered in long, unbroken shots that force the audience to both sit with disturbing information and consider this woman’s humanity.To Diop, training the camera on a complex Black woman for that length of time was a “political act,” she said, adding, “It was also a way to show a Black woman in a way that I had never seen shown before.”The film has a raft of heavyweight fans. In his Critic’s Pick review for The Times, A.O. Scott called “Saint Omer” an “intellectually charged, emotionally wrenching story about the inability of storytelling — literary, legal or cinematic — to do justice to the violence and strangeness of human experience.”Guslagie Malanda plays a woman who has killed her baby in “Saint Omer.”SuperThe director Céline Sciamma (“Portrait of a Lady on Fire”) compared the experience of watching “Saint Omer” to what it must have been like in 1975 to watch Chantal Akerman’s “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles,” recently named the best film of all time in the Sight and Sound poll. “One finds oneself in front of a cinema poem — Alice’s language, in the history of the language of cinema to which it belongs, but also in her own history, is dangerous and radiant,” Sciamma said via email.Diop, 43, came to filmmaking after studying colonial history at the Sorbonne, where she recognized her desire to unpack French society and the lingering effects of colonialism from her perspective as the daughter of Senegalese immigrants. She could have chosen other ways to explore the subject, but, to her, cinema held the most power.That calling is evident, for instance, in “We (Nous),” her 2022 documentary. It’s made up of a series of unconnected vignettes capturing a diverse array of life in the Paris suburbs, and also includes archival footage of Diop’s own family and her reminiscences. Though “Saint Omer” is her first foray into fiction, she sees it as a “continuation and extension” of the rest of her oeuvre.As Diop was observing Kabou’s trial, she started to keep a diary recording what was said, which would eventually become the framework of the screenplay she wrote alongside her editor, Amrita David, and the novelist Marie NDiaye. Diop’s note-taking was both a result of her instincts as a documentarian and a coping mechanism.“I believe that by writing it I was creating a distance with the subject of this matter that was so corrosive, so difficult,” she said, sitting in the empty Film at Lincoln Center amphitheater as “Saint Omer” played on one of the theater’s screens, her expertly tailored tan coat complementing the room’s orange seats.The longer Diop spent writing down what Kabou said, the more precise her notes became. “The film started to be born within my notes,” she said. But she didn’t want the film to be a straight recounting of events, and realized in the writing process that she needed another character whose reaction to Laurence could highlight the themes of maternal ambivalence she wanted to explore.The notes Diop took during the actual trial became the screenplay for “Saint Omer.”Evelyn Freja for The New York TimesRama is not autobiographical, Diop said, a point reiterated by Kagame, the actress who portrays her. “Alice always had this cautionary warning before everything, saying, ‘Rama is not me,’” Kagame said through an interpreter during a video call. Equally, Kagame added, “Of course, I think any artist is always putting so much of themselves in their creation. Rama is her and yet it is not her so that we can all project ourselves in Rama.” Indeed, Diop said that Rama’s gaze did allow her to “process lots of very deep personal things.”Though Diop said that fiction was the best form for “Saint Omer,” despite its real-life influences, she did approach the casting process with her documentary work in mind. “I was not looking for actresses that could perform the part,” she said. “I was looking for someone that would be the part as much as possible.”For Malanda, who had not acted in seven years before the role came to her, becoming Laurence took its toll. She explained in a video call that she had nightmares for a full year, and that the effects of playing a woman responsible for the death of her child still linger. “The story is in my body forever,” she said. “This may be the most weird but also the most true empathy.”Malanda felt supported during the production process, she said, but isolated by the fact her character spends the movie standing trial. Diop and the first assistant director told Malanda she was “possessed” during filming, Malanda said, adding, “I think it’s true.”That specter of the tragedy lingered on set, especially given that Diop filmed in the actual Saint-Omer courtroom where Kabou’s trial took place. In that space, reality and fiction blended.“She did everything she could to place everyone in that same emotional situation, as if we had been in the actual trials,” Kagame said. This setting added verisimilitude, but also made the experience emotionally charged. “It was very strange, but I felt that I started a sort of collective haunted situation,” Diop said.During filming, the majority-female crew went through what Diop described as group “collective psychotherapy” as they individually reflected on their own bonds with their mothers and children. Though Diop is reluctant to say too much about how the experience of “Saint Omer” changed her views on the subject, because she wants audiences to come to their own conclusions, she did experience a shift.“There is no doubt that the process of going through this film is something that healed me,” she said, “that helped me put lights on certain things, that helped me repair some wounds.” More

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      in Television

      What’s on TV This Week: ‘Independent Lens’ and ‘Night Court’

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      A documentary about racial reparations in the United States airs on PBS. And NBC reboots the 1980s and ’90s sitcom “Night Court.”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, Jan. 16-22. Details and times are subject to change.MondayINDEPENDENT LENS: THE BIG PAYBACK (2023) 10 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). In 2021, Evanston, Ill., became the first American city to approve a compensation program intended to address historical racism and discrimination, a significant step for proponents of racial reparations, an issue that has long been frozen by political concerns. This documentary looks at how the measure passed, paying particular attention to a former alderman, Robin Rue Simmons, who was a primary architect of it, and to its place in the context of the larger conversations about race in the country.JUDAS AND THE BLACK MESSIAH (2021) 9:30 p.m. on TNT. Daniel Kaluuya won an Oscar for his portrayal of Fred Hampton, the Illinois Black Panther Party leader who was killed in an infamous 1969 police raid, in this drama. Directed by Shaka King, the film is told from the perspective of William O’Neal (Lakeith Stanfield), an informant who helped the F.B.I. orchestrate Hampton’s killing. The result is a “tense, methodical historical drama,” A.O. Scott said in his review for The New York Times. “The script,” Scott wrote, “by King and Will Berson, is layered with ethical snares and ideological paradoxes, and while King’s fast-paced direction doesn’t spare the suspense, it also makes room for sorrow, anger and even a measure of exhilaration.”TuesdayMelissa Rauch and John Larroquette in “Night Court.”Jordin Althaus/NBCNIGHT COURT 8 p.m. on NBC. Melissa Rauch (“The Big Bang Theory”) picks up the gavel once held by the actor Harry Anderson in this reboot of “Night Court,” the 1980s and early ’90s NBC sitcom that followed a young judge, Harry Stone (Anderson), working the night shift in a Manhattan municipal court. The new version of the show casts Rauch as Stone’s daughter, Abby, who lands in her father’s old gig (the latest example of a nepo baby?) and has to contend with a cast of bizarro characters. One of them is Dan Fielding, a now-former prosecutor played by John Larroquette, reprising his role from the original series.WednesdayDIRTY OLD CARS 10:03 p.m. on History. Car enthusiasts and neat freaks alike might take some pleasure in this new series, which follows a group of vehicle restorers who bring moldy, rusted-out old cars back to life. (It’s more “Revive My Ride” than “Pimp My Ride.”) The first episode includes a pair of classic American cars: a 1981 Chevrolet Camaro and a 1972 Ford Maverick.ThursdayFrom left, Stephanie Hsu, Michelle Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan in “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”A24EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE ALL AT ONCE (2022) 4:30 p.m. on Showtime. “An exuberant swirl of genre anarchy” is a label A.O. Scott used to describe “Everything Everywhere All at Once” in his review for The Times. That swirl turned out to be a potent mix: Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s universe-bopping tale of a laundromat owner (Michelle Yeoh) fighting evil in a multiverse has turned into an awards-season heavy hitter. Yeoh and Ke Huy Quan, one of her co-stars, won Golden Globes last week for their performances in the film. And it’s set to be a wonderfully weird presence in the Oscars discussion.FridayGAME THEORY WITH BOMANI JONES 11 p.m. on HBO. The sharp sports commentator Bomani Jones returns for a second season of his HBO series. The show mixes commentary, comedy and reporting — it’s something like a “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver” for sports. The first season included episodes about nepotism among N.F.L. coaches, the draw of historically Black colleges and universities for many sports recruits, and the N.F.L. draft.GLASS (2019) 5 p.m. on FXM. The filmmaker (and twist-maker) M. Night Shyamalan is set to return to theaters early next month with a new movie, “Knock at the Cabin.” For a refresher on Shyamalan’s style, consider revisiting “Glass,” which brings together characters from two of his previous movies — “Unbreakable” (2000) and “Split” (2016) — for a superhero story with horror trappings.SaturdayRUNNING ON EMPTY (1988) 5:45 p.m. on TCM. Judd Hirsch, the veteran stage and screen actor, leaned into a juicy supporting role recently in Steven Spielberg’s “The Fabelmans,” in which he plays an oddball great-uncle who briefly shows up and injects some idiosyncratic, chaotic energy into the titular family’s home life. Hirsch played a father dealing with a different kind of familial chaos in this 1988 drama directed by Sidney Lumet. The plot centers on Arthur (Hirsch) and Annie (Christine Lahti), a husband and wife who for years have been on the run from the F.B.I. because of their involvement with extreme antiwar activities during the Vietnam War. Their children, Danny (River Phoenix) and Harry (Jonas Abry), have been brought up to play along with the fugitive life — until Danny, the elder sibling, starts to wrestle with a desire to break free of it. In her review of the film for The Times, the critic Janet Maslin wrote that the screenplay is uneven, but that “the actors are often so good that they’re able to be real and touching even when the material sounds strained.”SundaySissy Spacek in “Carrie.”United ArtistsCARRIE (1976) and CHRISTINE (1983) 4:45 and 7 p.m. on AMC. Cars and teenagers. These are two things that can be frightening and bewildering — especially when mixed — both in our own world and in Stephen King’s fictional ones. And both factor heavily into these two King adaptations. Up first, Brian De Palma’s take on King’s debut novel, “Carrie,” about a bullied 16-year-old (Sissy Spacek) who learns she has supernatural powers and uses them for revenge. Next, John Carpenter’s adaptation of King’s “Christine,” which follows another socially challenged teenager, Arnie (Keith Gordon), who buys a psychotic car. More

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      in Theater

      Edie Landau, Film Producer Who Was Ahead of Her Time, Dies at 95

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      She and her husband invented a model for faithfully adapting acclaimed literature, illuminating an alternate path for independent cinema.Edie Landau, who in the 1970s and ’80s was one of the few women producing films, working outside the studio system with her husband, Ely Landau, to offer unconventional movies to a mass audience, died on Dec. 24 at her home in the Century City section of Los Angeles. She was 95.The death was confirmed by her son, Jon.In the 1980s and ’90s, thanks to figures like Jim Jarmusch, Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson, indie film was associated in the public imagination with writer-directors too young and eccentric for the studio system. In the years before that period, the Landaus produced artistically ambitious indie movies that followed a different model, adapting great works of literature into movies for the big and small screen.Their focus was plays. In the 1970s, the Landaus started the American Film Theater, which invited viewers to subscribe to regular screenings of movie versions of works by Eugène Ionesco, Bertolt Brecht, Edward Albee and others.There had long been movies based on great plays like “A Streetcar Named Desire” that fully translated theater into the idiom of cinema. But the American Film Theater tried something different, faithfully abiding by the plays’ texts in simple, inexpensive productions.The Landaus produced more than a dozen films, often featuring eminent figures in surprising roles. In 1973, the tough-guy movie star Lee Marvin appeared in a film version of Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh.” The next year, in an unusual turn as a film director, Harold Pinter oversaw the adaptation of Simon Gray’s “Butley.”Zero Mostel and Karen Black in the 1974 movie adaptation of the Eugène Ionesco play “Rhinoceros,” one of the first productions of the Landaus’ American Film Theater.Looking back at the project in The New York Times in 2003, the film historian and critic Richard Schickel described it as a “noble experiment,” with some productions that were “close to God-awful” and others that ascended to “masterful movie making.”Ms. Landau frequently acted as a minder of budgets and an organizer on set, but over time she took on an increasingly creative role in her partnership with her husband, particularly after he had a stroke in the 1980s.She took the lead in putting together “Mr. Halpern and Mr. Johnson” (1983), an original HBO drama starring Laurence Olivier and Jackie Gleason. She developed a relationship with the writer Chaim Potok and shepherded his 1967 novel “The Chosen” into movie form in 1981 and into a musical adaptation for the stage in 1987.“It was a given that ‘The Chosen’ was to be a musical from the very beginning, ever since Edie Landau approached me with the idea two and a half years ago,” Mr. Potok told The Times in 1987.Richard F. Shepard of The Times praised the movie version for recreating 1940s Brooklyn “with such fidelity that the tree-lined quiet streets of Williamsburg and the particular Jewish life on them seem to have emerged intact from a just-opened time capsule.”A scene from the 1981 film version of the Chaim Potok novel “The Chosen,” produced by the Landaus.Analysis FilmEdythe Rudolph was born on July 15, 1927, in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. Her father, Harry, was a minor-league baseball umpire who later worked as a projectionist at Manhattan movie theaters owned by Edie and Ely. Her mother, Rose (Zatcoff) Rudolph, was an office clerk.After graduating from Wilkes University with a bachelor’s degree in education in the late 1940s, Edie moved to New York City. She worked as an assistant at radio and television production companies, hoping to move up the corporate ladder. While working at the television distribution company National Telefilm Associates, she met Ely Landau, one of the company’s founders. They married in 1959.That year, WNTA, a New York television station owned by National Telefilm, began airing “Play of the Week,” an anthology series that anticipated the American Film Theater. Ms. Landau worked her way up to become executive vice president of National Telefilm and oversaw some of its original programming, including “Play of the Week.”The Landaus’ children followed them into careers behind the scenes in the performing arts. Alongside the director James Cameron, their son Jon produced “Titanic” (1997), “Avatar” (2009) and the recently released “Avatar: The Way of Water.” Their daughter Tina Landau is a prominent theater director. And their daughter Kathy Landau is executive director of the Manhattan arts organization Symphony Space.Jon recalled how being able to work on the movie adaptation of “The Chosen” launched his own producing career, and how his parents invited the producer Hillard Elkins to a performance of a play written by Tina and performed at her high school, which led to its staging in a professional Los Angeles theater.Mr. Landau credited his mother with those breakthroughs. “She was the one who would make things happen,” he said.Ms. Landau was often the only woman in a room full of men wearing suits. The men in this undated photo include her husband, seated second from left.via Jon LandauMs. Landau’s first marriage, to Harold Rein, ended in divorce. Ely Landau died in 1993. Ms. Landau’s children survive her, along with a stepson, Les Landau; four grandchildren; two step-grandchildren; and two step-great-grandchildren.Photographs from her days as a film producer reveal that Ms. Landau was often the only woman in a room full of men wearing suits.She hit back at what she plainly called “discrimination of women” in 1958, when she filed a formal complaint against United Airlines for not permitting her to board a Chicago-to-New York “executive flight” — a cocktail-and-steak journey designed for men only. Ms. Landau — who later earned a law degree from the University of West Los Angeles just for fun — told the airline that she was an executive, too.The incident turned out to be a harbinger of repeated protests that finally led to scrapping the flights in 1970.After retiring, Ms. Landau wrote poetry. One concise work was titled “That Was Then, This Is Now”: “Please remember that I was once a major executive, not just a house wife,/So please trust me now to be C.E.O. … of my own life.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘Saint Omer’ Review: The Trials of Motherhood

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      A real-life case of infanticide is the basis of Alice Diop’s rigorous and wrenching courtroom drama.“Saint Omer,” Alice Diop’s first nondocumentary feature, is a courtroom drama and also an unusual kind of true-crime chronicle.In 2016, Fabienne Kabou appeared in a provincial French court, charged with killing her daughter, who was a little more than a year old. Diop, who attended Kabou’s trial, has turned the case and her own fascination with it into an intellectually charged, emotionally wrenching story about the inability of storytelling — literary, legal or cinematic — to do justice to the violence and strangeness of human experience.The actions of Laurence Coly — the character modeled after Kabou, played by Guslagie Malanda with the tragic, piercing dignity of a Racine heroine — are not in doubt. On the stand, she admits to traveling by train from Paris with her 15-month-old daughter, Elise, to the seaside town of Berck-sur-Mer, where she left the child asleep on the beach to be carried away by the tide. The job of the judge and jury in Saint Omer, the small city in northern France where the trial takes place, is to figure out why Laurence killed Elise and to pass sentence on her.To put it in terms more consistent with the exalted language of the proceedings, the court seeks to comprehend what seems to be a profoundly irrational crime within the rigorous light of reason. The compassionate judge (Valérie Dréville), the skeptical prosecutor (Robert Cantarella) and the openhearted defense attorney (Aurélia Petit) cite principles of psychology, ethics and anthropology as well as law.Laurence herself, a former philosophy student who names Descartes and Wittgenstein as influences, to some extent shares in the magistrates’ spirit of inquiry, treating her own motives as if they posed an especially vexing problem of interpretation. Her account of the events leading up to Elise’s death is lucid and thorough, if sometimes contradictory, and she delivers it in measured, formal, grammatically flawless French. She also insists that the killing was the result not of her own depravity or instability, but the work of sorcerers and demons.Laurence’s performance, if we can call it that, has a profound, unsettling effect on Rama (Kayije Kagame), a novelist and literary scholar who is attending the trial to gather material for a book. Like Laurence, Rama is a woman from an African background who has sought entry into the French educational elite. We first see her lecturing in a university classroom, parsing the emotional and moral meanings of a passage from Marguerite Duras’s “Hiroshima Mon Amour.” Unlike Laurence, whose academic aspirations ended in frustration, Rama’s career is blossoming. Her latest book is selling well, and her publisher is eager for the next one.The Projectionist Chronicles a New 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.Jostling for Best Picture: Weighing voter buzz, box office results and more, here’s an educated guess about the likely nominees for best picture.But something — some kind of recognition or revelation — takes place in the courtroom that shakes Rama’s understanding of who she is. To say that she identifies with Laurence would be to flatten the nuances of Diop’s observant dramatic technique, and to simplify Kagame’s seething, quiet performance. Still, the parallels between Rama and Laurence are hard to miss, for the audience as well as for Rama.Rama is in the early stages of a pregnancy that she has kept secret from her mother. Laurence’s mother, Odile (Salimata Kamate) — who knew nothing of Elise’s existence, and whom Rama meets during the trial — figures it out over lunch, after scolding Rama for ordering too much food. She treats Rama, one of the only other Black women in the courtroom, as a confidante and a substitute daughter, to whom she can brag about Laurence’s erudition and elegance. She buys every newspaper with a story about the case, as if she were the proud parent of a spelling-bee champion.Odile was, we can infer, a dominant, difficult presence in her daughter’s life. She has that in common with Rama’s mother, who appears in flashbacks (played by Adama Diallo Tamba) as a remote, sorrowful, nearly silent figure. Now, plagued by ill health and crippling fatigue, she is “a broken woman,” at least according to Rama’s partner, Adrien (Thomas de Pourquery). He is a musician who provides another almost-parallel between Rama’s life and Laurence’s. Like Elise’s father, a sculptor named Luc (Xavier Maly), Adrien is a white French artist, though he is more sympathetic (and much younger) than his counterpart.Race — which is to say France’s history as a colonial power, and the uncertain present-day status of immigrants from its former colonies — is both one of the film’s themes and a part of its atmosphere. The French ideals of republican universalism, implicit in the language and rituals of the red-robed judge and the black-robed lawyers, are entangled in prejudice and custom. One of Laurence’s professors wonders why an African woman would be interested in Wittgenstein, a long-dead Austrian thinker. “Why not something closer to her own culture?”Kayije Kagame, left, as Rama, and Salimata Kamate as Odile in a scene from the film.SuperThat arrogant, insolent question ricochets toward Rama, who starts the movie contemplating Duras and later watches Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Medea,” a rendering of Euripides starring Maria Callas. What is her relationship to those European works? And what, conversely, is Africa to her, or to Laurence?These are hard questions, and Diop faces them with ardent, open-minded curiosity, resisting any obvious pronouncements about identity, individuality or universal values. Her main characters aren’t the embodiment of social problems or political failures, but both women undergo an emotional ordeal that is also a crisis of meaning, an existential conundrum that defies description, or even naming.According to Wittgenstein, “whereof we cannot speak, thereof must we be silent,” and though “Saint Omer” is a film saturated in discourse, its silences are where its deepest insight resides. The pain that connects Rama and Laurence is like a secret language, an untranslatable grammar of alienation and loss. We read it in their faces.Saint OmerNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 2 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Movies

      ‘House Party’ Review: A Rager Gone South

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      Directed by Calmatic, “House Party” reboots the 1990 Kid ’n Play cult comedy with the help of LeBron James.The dilemma of the modern-day movie reboot, particularly in Hollywood’s current I.P. gold-rush era, might be called the “super size me” problem. If you’re going to redo it, why not go bigger, make it more star-studded, and add a little meta wink? After all, what is actually being reconfigured is, for better or worse, not necessarily the soul or story of the original, but the cultural commodity it has become.There are plenty of arguments to be had about which films succeed or fail within this equation. But falling prey to remake bloat is particularly curious and perhaps tragic for a film like “House Party,” the uneven, halfway-fun remake of the 1990 comedy of the same name.Unlike many rebooted films, the original “House Party” has always felt delightfully small. With a simple premise — teenagers trying to throw a big bash while their parents are away — it was an effortlessly fun comedy with genuine heart (save for the dated and homophobic bits toward the end), anchored by the easy charm of its rap duo stars, Kid ’n Play. While it spawned a trilogy, it was never a box-office juggernaut, and is now enjoyed as a cult classic whose success helped ignite a Black independent film renaissance.To say, though, that this new “House Party” has failed in recapturing this essence would not be entirely fair. In some ways, the film, helmed by the music video director Calmatic, is two movies, its first half mostly understanding where the charisma lies in a comedy like this. Set in Los Angeles, the film opens with a montage of the city that is such a thoroughly nostalgic throwback to the world of ’90s Black comedies that it feels ripped straight from “Friday.”Kevin (Jacob Latimore), struggling to pay his toddler daughter’s school tuition, finds himself without options when he and his best friend, Damon (Tosin Cole), lose their jobs as house cleaners. Finishing up their last gig, they realize they’re cleaning the house of LeBron James himself, and cook up a plan to cash in with a huge party there.Much of this buildup is a good-enough romp. There are throwbacks to the 1990 film: a dance battle featuring Tinashe that automatically falls short compared with the iconic original scene; a villain trio that is arguably more entertaining than the Full Force bullies in the first two films; and, of course, a cameo from Kid ’n Play themselves. Yet it is baffling why the film doesn’t use the original stars more creatively; instead, they occupy one blink-and-you’ll-miss-it slot in the endless parade of empty cameos and absurdist camp comedy that makes up the movie’s second half.You might also call this the LeBron problem: After the dreaded “Space Jam: A New Legacy,” this is the second ’90s reboot that the superstar, moving into entertainment during his Los Angeles tenure, has produced, starred in and treated as a gilded fun house where celebrities and characters are all just commercial properties popping in for a cheap thrill. Like any rager gone south, the buzz is fun early on, until it’s suddenly too much, the house is overrun, and the room starts spinning.House PartyRated R for pervasive language, drug use, sexual material and some violence. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Dog Gone’ Review: He Let the Dog Out

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      In this Netflix family movie, based on a true story, a yellow Lab disappears on the Appalachian Trail, and Rob Lowe is tasked with finding him.“Dog Gone,” a family flick that offers as much nutrition as a rubber bone, follows the true-life misadventures of a yellow Lab named Gonker in the 1990s. Adopted by a bohemian college senior, Fielding Marshall (Johnny Berchtold), whose irresponsibility is telegraphed by a wardrobe of tie-dye shirts and an accusation that he reeks of patchouli, the pup spends his youth lapping from beer bongs before he’s haplessly unleashed on the Appalachian Trail and disappears.The dramatic conceit is that this is a tale about two lost souls: the slacker, who begrudgingly comes to respect his uptight father (Rob Lowe) as they walk the trail handing out missing-dog fliers, and the dog, whom the veteran director Stephen Herek (“Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure”) films tiptoeing through the woods under rumbling storm clouds. Give the dog a wig of blond ringlets and he could do a passable lampoon of Lillian Gish.Nick Santora’s screenplay is a loose adaptation of the author Pauls Toutonghi’s nonfiction account of the 1998 search. (Toutonghi married into the Marshall family, making Gonker his pet-in-law.) The film makes an unconvincing attempt to update its quest to the present. Fielding and his ’90s peers are reconfigured into anticapitalist mouthpieces for Gen Z; his mother (Kimberly Williams-Paisley) endures a patronizing arc about learning to use the internet while suffering clumsy flashbacks to her childhood Akita.Even viewers with a tolerance for this kind of saccharine cinema — oversaturated green grass, slow-motion sprinting, kindly biker gangs, and a fleeting bar squabble in which the nastiest insult is “Idiot!” — will likely say their favorite part is the end credits, which feature photos of the cast and crew members with their own dogs (and, yes, three cats).Dog GoneNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      How the Creators of ‘M3gan’ Designed the Doll’s Costumes

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      The titular star of the horror film “M3gan,” released last week, had to try on several outfits before finding a signature look.A doll’s clothes can be as memorable as any worn by a human, especially if that doll has a taste for blood.Talky Tina, the demonic toy made famous by “The Twilight Zone,” had her plaid dress with a dainty lace-trimmed collar. Annabelle, the sinister doll that first appeared in “The Conjuring,” has her white gown with leg-of-mutton sleeves. And even those who have not seen “Child’s Play” (or its sequels) probably know of Chucky and his blue overalls.The titular star of the horror film “M3gan” stands to be another murderous doll recognized for a killer outfit. Not least because M3gan, whose name is pronounced like Megan, for most of the film wears a striped, silk twill scarf tied in a pussy bow — a sartorial choice that tends to elicit strong reactions.M3gan, which stands for Model 3 Generative Android, is a life-size artificially intelligent doll designed to provide companionship and emotional support — until a programming glitch turns her into a Terminator-esque killing machine. There are parts of the film where the doll is played by a high-tech puppet, but in most scenes, M3gan is played by the actress Amie Donald, 12, wearing a mask.M3gan, who has wide eyes with long dark lashes and dirty blonde hair that falls below her shoulders, wears the pussy-bow scarf with an inverted-pleat shift dress layered over a striped long-sleeve shirt, white stockings and shiny black Mary Janes. Gerard Johnstone, the director of “M3gan,” described the doll as having clothes that evoke the mod fashion of the 1960s and “long, flowing hair” like the “Mod Squad” actress Peggy Lipton.“I wanted her to be classy and elegant and unexpected, almost like the toy equivalent of those automotive shows from the ’60s, where the car would appear on the turntable and everyone’s minds would be blown,” Mr. Johnstone said.Three of the possible outfits for M3gan that ended up on the dressing room floor. Universal PicturesThe film’s original script, written by Akela Cooper, only referenced M3gan wearing children’s clothes, Mr. Johnstone said. Putting her in a loose-hanging shift dress was both a stylistic and practical decision.“M3gan has to move quickly and unencumbered. She’s got to run on all fours. She’s going to attack people,” he said. “With the shift dress, I could see the possibilities.”About 25 versions of the dress were produced by the film’s costume and wardrobe department. “They lasted through all of the dancing, all of the killing,” said Daniel Cruden, the film’s costume designer. Lizzy Gardiner, an Oscar-winning costume designer who created M3gan’s main outfit with Mr. Johnstone, said the pussy-bow scarf was also painstakingly reproduced.“We needed so many perfect replicas that each one had to be cut and hand sewn with the stripe in the silk in exactly the same place,” she wrote in an email. “It needed to be fluid without being bouncy. Large but consistent with a young, tiny girl. Doll-like but fashion forward.”While developing M3gan’s wardrobe, many other possible outfits ended up on the dressing room floor. “Initially I wanted her to have a bunch,” Mr. Johnstone said. But by giving her a signature look, “that one costume can be really the focus,” he added. “People could dress up as her for Halloween.”Dressing M3gan in a shift dress was as much a stylistic as a practical decision. “She’s got to run on all fours,” Mr. Johnstone said. “She’s going to attack people.”Universal PicturesWhere did you look for inspiration for M3gan’s clothes?GERARD JOHNSTONE I was on Pinterest every night looking at fashion, trying to figure it out. Originally it was just me and my wife, for a female perspective. I kept going back to the ’60s because of the detailing and the fabrics. Everything was so rich. And Gucci kids’ dresses ended up being a big inspiration. I loved a yellow one with red ribbons that I saw online, but we couldn’t physically get our hands on it.If Gucci was such an inspiration why isn’t M3gan wearing the label?JOHNSTONE I wondered if we could get them on board. But you have to get approval and it takes a long time, especially when you’re making a horror movie, so we went our own way. We hadn’t proved ourselves. The hope now is that it wouldn’t be too hard to get some designers if we do another film.DANIEL CRUDEN If a toy from a film gets licensed and there isn’t clothing approval, it could be seen as replicating for a profit. Even if I’d found a pair of vintage Gucci sunglasses, we’d have put them through clearance to make sure they were OK to use.When viewers see M3gan commit her first murder, she wears a different outfit — a black cloak with gold buttons and a fur collar, black stockings and leather gloves. What inspired that look?JOHNSTONE It was kind of a subversion of Little Red Riding Hood. I also thought of her as a bit like Damien from “The Omen.” The black gloves were a practical consideration because the gloves made the hands feel more robotic. And she’s a doll — she has to have some accessories.The all-black look worn by M3gan when viewers see her commit her first murder “was kind of a subversion of Little Red Riding Hood,” Mr. Johnstone said.Universal PicturesSpeaking of accessories, in another scene M3gan wears a pair of purple sunglasses. Why?JOHNSTONE I really fought for her to have that moment. It felt like it could either be great or ridiculous. I was worried some people might think, “Is this going to diminish the scares?” But once everyone saw her really rocking the look, they started to get on board.CRUDEN We had a real hunt for the sunglasses because we knew they were going to be a statement.JOHNSTONE I wanted Prada.CRUDEN We ended up with a brand called Minista, they came from a children’s boutique in Auckland, New Zealand.From left, M3gan’s equestrian, Audrey Hepburn-inspired and sporty looks designed by Mr. Cruden for a scene that was cut from the film.Universal PicturesWhat are some of the outfits that didn’t make it into the movie?CRUDEN There was a scene that showed different M3gans on a turntable wearing looks I created for her. One was French-inspired, with a black beret, black turtleneck and high-waisted flared silk pants. We had a beach M3gan with a peasant blouse, beach hat and espadrilles. Equestrian M3gan had jodhpurs and riding boots. Sporty M3gan looked like she was ready for tennis.JOHNSTONE Daniel did a very Audrey Hepburn look with a scarf and sunglasses. But the looks were on a dummy M3gan, and she didn’t look alive. If we’d been able to do it with our main M3gan, it would have worked. It was a shame.Interviews with Mr. Johnstone and Mr. Cruden have been edited and condensed. More