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      When Jewish Artists Wrestle With Antisemitism

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      In this unsettling moment, comedians, filmmakers, playwrights and others have been struggling against a long-ingrained American response to look away.Antisemitism has such a long, violent history that it seems absurd to claim it’s getting worse. Compared with when? And yet, there’s something about our current moment that feels different.Consider a recent Sunday. I woke up to news reports that two men were arrested at Penn Station with weapons, a swastika armband and a social media history of threats to attack a synagogue. After taking a shower, I opened my dresser to find my Kyrie Irving T-shirt. The Brooklyn Net was returning to the N.B.A. that evening after being suspended for tweeting a link to a documentary that cast doubt on the Holocaust.I didn’t expect getting dressed in the morning to turn into a test of loyalties between my favorite basketball team and my murdered ancestors, but here we are.That night, when I arrived at Barclays Center, scores of people belonging to what the Southern Poverty Law Center labels a hate group were handing out pamphlets with the blaring headline “The Truth About Antisemitism.” I opened Twitter and saw Elon Musk was making fun of the Anti-Defamation League and Ye was tweeting again. He had kicked off the recent cycle of discourse by leveling violent threats against Jews.Quantifying antisemitism right now by numbers of hate crimes is useful, but doesn’t capture the peculiar anguish and human complexities of its day-to-day pervasiveness. That’s a job better suited to artists, and more than any year in memory, some of our most accomplished ones have taken up the challenge, from the biggest names in comedy (Dave Chappelle, Amy Schumer) to the most celebrated storytellers in theater and film, like Tom Stoppard and Steven Spielberg. What resonates most in this impressive body of work are the Jewish artists exploring the challenge of antisemitism, and while they started these projects years ago, their hard-earned pessimism now seems uncomfortably prophetic.The thorniest recent work on these issues was the “Saturday Night Live” monologue by Dave Chappelle. He poked fun at Ye and Irving while speaking to the antisemitic idea of a Jewish conspiracy in Hollywood. In between myriad jokes, he shrugged off this stereotype as an understandable thought best not verbalized. One of the maddening traps of modern antisemitism is that it takes a source of pride — Jewish success in the arts, the rare field where we were welcome — and makes it seem sinister. This old tactic got a new hearing.There are a lot of Jews in Hollywood, Chappelle observed mischievously, before undercutting the comment with a joke that called the trope that they control show business “a delusion.” Unlike the blunt social media posts of Ye and Irving, this set was a work of art, elusive and layered, displaying finesse and paradox. It’s a prickly kind of funny with corkscrew punch lines that tickled the mind and bothered the conscience. (“If they’re Black then it’s a gang, if they’re Italian it’s a mob, but if they’re Jewish it’s a coincidence and you should never speak about it.”)Dave Chappelle on “Saturday Night Live.” His monologue was a prickly kind of funny that bothered the conscience.Will Heath/NBCArt can be formally beautiful and morally ugly. Despite what you have heard, good comedy can be built on lies as easily as on the truth. This is what makes Chappelle’s set so slippery: His storytelling and gravitas are so magnetic that you can miss how far he goes in making the old slur of a Jewish conspiracy seem reasonable. He whitewashed Irving’s tolerance for Holocaust denial with one good line. With another, he says you can’t “blame Black people” for Jewish pain, erecting a straw man with deftness. To suggest, as he does, that it’s dangerous for him to say “the Jews” is tiresome hyperbole.For as much controversy as this set provoked, it was also predictable. How often have we seen Chappelle bring up celebrity transgression, and then defend, mitigate and complicate it, while inviting us to admire the feat? This is his move. There’s no wondering where he will come down on the latest scandal. We know.Antisemitism in AmericaAntisemitism is one of the longest-standing forms of prejudice, and those who monitor it say it is now on the rise across the country.Perilous Times: With online threats and incidents of harassment and violence rising nationwide, this fall has become increasingly worrisome for American Jews.Donald Trump: The former president had dinner with Nick Fuentes, a prominent antisemite, at Mar-a-Lago, causing some of Mr. Trump’s Jewish allies to speak out.Kanye West: The rapper and designer, who now goes by Ye, has been widely condemned for recent antisemitic comments. The fallout across industries has been swift.Kyrie Irving: The Nets lifted their suspension of the basketball player, who offered “deep apologies” for posting a link to an antisemitic film. His behavior appalled and frightened many of his Jewish fans.EARLIER THIS YEAR, I wrote about the Jewish tendency to turn antisemitism into comedy. But there’s another coping mechanism that we like to talk about less: looking the other way. When asked about Chappelle’s monologue, Jerry Seinfeld diplomatically told The Hollywood Reporter that “the subject matter calls for more conversation.” When asked about it as a guest on “The Late Show,” Jon Stewart only became earnest when he pleaded for free speech. What’s striking about these responses from star comics is that they seem to be more interested in calling for debate than engaging in it.Then again, I get it. I’ve stayed quiet when peers wrote things that seemed, if not indifferent to Jewish pain, then at least to be applying double standards to it. I gave them the benefit of the doubt or concluded that a call-out would be counterproductive. But saying nothing in the face of such moments exacts its own cost. It eats at you. Several Jewish artists have been making work that explores such decisions with a skeptical eye.In “The Patient,” a sly, suspenseful FX series from Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg, creators of “The Americans,” a therapist played by Steve Carell awakens to find himself chained to the bed of a serial killer looking for help with his mental health. The title is a reference to this maniac as well as the way his therapist responds.The killer says he was looking for a therapist who is Jewish, a specific request that goes uncommented on. Small moments tip you off to a tolerated culture of antisemitism. In a flashback, the therapist, Alan, spots a swastika on a poster and, instead of making a fuss, keeps walking.Steve Carell as a therapist and Domhnall Gleeson as a serial killer in “The Patient,” which raises the urgent question of how to fight back.Suzanne Tenner/FXNow he has no such option. Imprisoned by a captor who wants something from him, he is faced with the urgent question of how to fight back. He chooses to use his skills in mental health to help his oppressor get better. The deeper he gets in dialogue, though, the more uncomfortable Alan grows, especially after he teaches the murderer the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, and then sees it being used to mourn his latest victims.In many ways, the relationship at the center of “The Patient” is a metaphor for both the lengths Jews will go to extend empathy toward their oppressors and for the existential toll that takes. Playing a man wracked by guilt, grief and doubt, Carell is extremely subtle illustrating how accommodation can be justified and yet wear you down. We also see scenes in his head of him talking to a shrink (David Alan Grier) who asks why he doesn’t fight back, attack the killer. To which Alan replies: “I’m using what I have.” Grier, a figment of his imagination, flashes a look that suggests he doesn’t believe that.Similarly, “The Fabelmans” and “Armageddon Time,” two personal movies by Jewish directors dramatizing their own childhoods, grapple with the question of what weapons Jews have. In both, sensitive boys facing antisemitism at school struggle with how to stand up for themselves.“The Fabelmans” isn’t a movie about being Jewish so much as it is suffused with Jewishness. But when its young protagonist, Sammy Fabelman, moves to California in the 1960s, he’s confronted with Aryan boys who mock his religion and with gentile girls intrigued by it. He happily prays with one girl but puts up a fight with the bullies, who at first seem like the cartoon villains from early Spielberg movies. The most dramatic way Sammy pushes back is by putting his antagonists in a movie. After filming his classmates on a trip to the beach, the footage, shown to the whole school, makes one bully look ridiculous and another glamorous, bigger than life. Oddly, being romanticized by the Jewish kid he beat up rattles the bully more than any insult. His discontent in the face of this attention is the most baffling section in the movie, one that has the ring of a point being made. But what is the point?Is the antisemite feeling shame? If so, Spielberg is working hard to extend empathy. But this exchange also rattles Sammy. When the bigot demands to know why Sammy made him look like a star, the response sounds pained and unsure: “Maybe I did it to make the movie better?”It’s a shockingly unsentimental moment to find in a Spielberg movie, one in which the young version of himself learns that pleasing the crowd might require turning an antisemite into the hero. No one loves the movies more than Spielberg, and in this intimate, morally probing film, he shows how they can move, inspire and reveal the truth. But in these more hardheaded scenes, he also makes it clear that their impact can be unpredictable, and like comedy, they can deceive just as deftly.Chloe East as a classmate intrigued by the religion of the Steven Spielberg stand-in, played by Gabriel LaBelle.Merie Weismiller Wallace/Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment, via Associated PressIn “Armageddon Time,” a humbler, realistic and affectingly bleak portrait of the struggles of a young Jewish kid, James Gray digs into his 1980s Queens upbringing in the story of an 11-year-old boy named Paul Graff whose grandfather is the son of a refugee who fled pogroms in Europe. The patriarch tells him that changing his name (from Grasserstein) will help him in life. This same man urges him to speak up when other students make racist comments to a peer. These are the competing messages he grows up with: assimilate or fight back.A friendship with a Black classmate also makes clear to Paul how not all inequities are the same, that his privilege protects him in a way that other minority groups don’t experience. In a time when Black and Jewish communities are pitted against each other by entertainers like Ye and others, this movie feels exceedingly topical and depressing. It painfully dramatizes how antisemitism can lead Jews to overlook other injustices, protect your tribe and harden your heart to the plight of others.As with Spielberg’s movie, the new play by Tom Stoppard, “Leopoldstadt,” is being described as his most personal as well as a reckoning with his Jewish identity, which in his case he didn’t understand until middle age. It’s also one of his worst plays: intellectually thin, overly familiar, blandly generic. If the way you tell the audience it’s the 1920s is by a woman dancing the Charleston, you’ve become too comfortable with cliché. And yet, this sprawling portrait of a half century in the life of a Jewish family from Vienna is drawing sold-out crowds of weeping audiences.I suspect the reason is the timely and heavy-handed portrait of Jewish complacency and denial. We see this most nakedly in the stand-in for the playwright, a comic writer born Leopold Rosenbaum who now goes by Leonard Chamberlin (a name that evokes the prime minister famous for appeasement). In 1955, Chamberlin is glibly naïve about the Holocaust, a patriotic fool set up for tears when remembering the horrors of the Nazis. The play ends with a roll call of the dead. Of course, the audience cries.TWO THINGS STAND OUT about these dramas, whether onscreen or onstage: The first is that none of the Jewish protagonists are exactly triumphant in the face of antisemitism. Therapy, the movies, assimilation — nothing saves them. These characters are ambivalent, morally compromised or far worse. When it comes to their ability to protest an antisemitic culture, pessimism reigns.The second is how much these works look to the past, exploring the current moment through a historical lens. (That includes Bess Wohl’s play “Camp Siegfried,” a drama about a 1938 Nazi youth camp on Long Island whose themes are clearly meant to echo with today.) Even the contemporary “The Patient” borrows its most blunt power from flashbacks to the moral simplicity of concentration camps. Looking at history can be a useful way to understand the present, but it can also be a way to evade it. One wonders what Stoppard would come up with if he dramatized the more subtle Jewish denial of the cultural world he came up in, where he flourished as a playwright whose religion never seemed to come up. Or how Spielberg or Gray would capture the conflicts of Jewish life now.As usual, comics are the artists taking the earliest and most direct approaches. David Baddiel, a British comic, is receiving glowing reviews this month for a BBC documentary version of his book “Jews Don’t Count” that castigates the double standards applied to prejudice against Jews in progressive spaces today. Marc Maron’s next special, which recently taped in New York, begins a series of jokes on the increased prominence of conspiracies about Jews by saying that in this polarized country, antisemitism is one thing that brings everyone together. At the Kennedy Center Honors, Sacha Baron Cohen, in character as the antisemite Borat, skewered Ye and sang a brief parody version of U2’s “With or Without You,” switching the lyrics to “With or Without Jews.”Amy Schumer is one of the few sketch comics to dig into antisemitism today, lampooning the tentativeness our culture has for calling it out in the new season of “Inside Amy Schumer.” She imagines a workplace harassment seminar where everyone is hypersensitive to all kinds of slights except antisemitic ones. It’s a premise that not only counters the trope of a Jewish conspiracy but also taps into the paranoia of being gaslit by an entire culture. It hints at what a Jewish “Get Out” could look like.Part of the resilience of antisemitism is its resistance to critique. Jewish artists are obviously not going to end the lie that they control show business by making more movies, plays, TV shows or sketches about it. But they can illuminate its impact and capture the complex damage it does to the psyche. That matters. For a certain kind of Jew, art can be its own religion. And one lesson we keep learning and forgetting is that the greatest art is much better at portraying conflicted minds than changing them. More

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      Highbrow Films Aimed at Winning Oscars Are Losing Audiences

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      The kind of critically praised dramas that often dominate the awards season are falling flat at the box office, failing to justify the money it takes to make them.A year ago, Hollywood watched in despair as Oscar-oriented films like “Licorice Pizza” and “Nightmare Alley” flatlined at the box office. The day seemed to have finally arrived when prestige films were no longer viable in theaters and streaming had forever altered cinema.But studios held out hope, deciding that November 2022 would give a more accurate reading of the marketplace. By then, the coronavirus would not be such a complicating factor. This fall would be a “last stand,” as some put it, a chance to show that more than superheroes and sequels could succeed.It has been carnage.One after another, films for grown-ups have failed to find an audience big enough to justify their cost. “Armageddon Time” cost roughly $30 million to make and market and collected $1.9 million at the North American box office. “Tár” cost at least $35 million, including marketing; ticket sales total $5.3 million. Universal spent around $55 million to make and market “She Said,” which also took in $5.3 million. “Devotion” cost well over $100 million and has generated $14 million in ticket sales.Even a charmer from the box office king, Steven Spielberg, has gotten off to a humdrum start. “The Fabelmans,” based on Mr. Spielberg’s adolescence, has collected $5.7 million in four weeks of limited play. Its budget was $40 million, not including marketing.What is going on?The problem is not quality: Reviews have been exceptional. Rather, “people have grown comfortable watching these movies at home,” said David A. Gross, a film consultant who publishes a newsletter on box office numbers.“The Fabelmans,” directed by Steven Spielberg, has gotten off to a slow start at the box office.Merie Weismiller Wallace/Universal Pictures and Amblin EntertainmentEver since Oscar-oriented films began showing up on streaming services in the late 2010s, Hollywood has worried that such movies would someday vanish from multiplexes. The diminishing importance of big screens was accentuated in March, when, for the first time, a streaming film, “CODA” from Apple TV+, won the Academy Award for best picture. ‘Tár’: A Timely Backstage DramaCate Blanchett plays a world-famous conductor who is embroiled in a #MeToo drama in the latest film by the director Todd Field.Review: “We don’t care about Lydia Tár because she’s an artist; we care about her because she’s art,” our critic writes about the film’s protagonist.An Elusive Subject: Blanchett has stayed one step ahead of audiences by constantly staying in motion. In “Tár,” she is as inscrutable as ever.Back Into the Limelight: The film marks Field’s return to directing, 16 years after “In the Bedroom” and “Little Children” made waves.The Song of the Fall?: A 120-year-old symphony by the composer Gustav Mahler is finding new life with unlikely listeners after a star turn in the film.This is about more than money: Hollywood sees the shift as an affront to its identity. Film power players have long clung to the fantasy that the cultural world revolves around them, as if it were 1940. But that delusion is hard to sustain when their lone measuring stick — bodies in seats — reveals that the masses can’t be bothered to come watch the films that they prize most. Hollywood equates this with cultural irrelevancy.Sure, a core crowd of cinephiles is still turning out. “Till,” focused on Mamie Till-Mobley, whose son, Emmett Till, was murdered in Mississippi in 1955, has collected $8.9 million in the United States and Canada. That’s not nothing for an emotionally challenging film. “The Banshees of Inisherin,” a dark comedy with heavily accented dialogue, has also brought in $8 million, with overseas ticket buyers contributing an additional $20 million.“While it is clear the theatrical specialty market hasn’t fully rebounded, we’ve seen ‘The Banshees of Inisherin’ continue to perform strongly and drive conversation among moviegoers,” Searchlight Pictures said in a statement. “We firmly believe there’s a place in theaters for films that can offer audiences a broad range of cinematic experiences.”Still, crossover attention is almost always the goal, as underlined by how much film companies are spending on some of these productions. “Till,” for instance, cost at least $33 million to make and market.And remember: Theaters keep roughly half of any ticket revenue.The hope is for results more in line with “The Woman King.” Starring Viola Davis as the leader of an all-female group of African warriors, “The Woman King” collected nearly $70 million at domestic theaters ($92 million worldwide). It cost $50 million to produce and tens of millions more to market.“The Woman King,” starring Viola Davis, is one of the few Oscar-oriented films this year that has struck a box office chord, bringing in about $70 million.Ilze Kitshoff/Sony PicturesOscar-oriented dramas rarely become blockbusters. Even so, these movies used to do quite well at the box office. The World War I film “1917” generated $159 million in North America in 2019 and $385 million worldwide. In 2010, “Black Swan,” starring Natalie Portman as a demented ballerina, collected $107 million ($329 million worldwide).Most studios either declined to comment for this article or provided anodyne statements about being proud of the prestige dramas they have recently released, regardless of ticket sales.The unwillingness to engage publicly on the matter may reflect the annual awards race. Having a contender labeled a box office misfire is not great for vote gathering. (Oscar nominations will be announced on Jan. 24.) Or it may be because, behind the scenes, studios still seem to be grasping for answers.Ask 10 different specialty film executives to explain the box office and you will get 10 different answers. There have been too many dramas in theaters lately, resulting in cannibalization; there have been too few, leaving audiences to look for options on streaming services. Everyone has been busy watching the World Cup on television. No, it’s television dramas like “The Crown” that have undercut these films.Some are still blaming the coronavirus. But that doesn’t hold water. While initially reluctant to return to theaters, older audiences, for the most part, have come to see theaters as a virus-safe activity, according to box office analysts, citing surveys. Nearly 60 percent of “Woman King” ticket buyers were over the age of 35, according to Sony Pictures Entertainment.Hollywood considers anyone over 35 to be “old,” and this is who typically comes to see dramas.Maybe it is more nuanced? Older audiences are back, one longtime studio executive suggested, but sophisticated older audiences are not — in part because some of their favorite art house theaters have closed and they don’t want to mix with the multiplex masses. (He was serious. “Too many people, too likely to encounter a sticky floor.”)Grim dramas have struggled, but sparkly ones have succeeded. “Elvis,” starring Austin Butler, took in $151 million in North America.Warner Bros.Others see a problem with the content. Most of the movies that are struggling at the box office are downbeat, coming at a time when audiences want escape. Consider the successful spring release of the rollicking “Everything, Everywhere All at Once,” which collected $70 million in North America. Baz Luhrmann’s bedazzled “Elvis” delivered $151 million in domestic ticket sales. .“People like to call it ‘escape,’ but that’s not actually what it is,” Jeanine Basinger, the film scholar, said. “It’s entertainment. It can be a serious topic, by the way. But when films are too introspective, as many of these Oscar ones now are, the audience gets forgotten about.“Give us a laugh or two in there! When I think about going out to see misery and degradation and racism and all the other things that are wrong with our lives, I’m too depressed to put on my coat,” continued Ms. Basinger, whose latest book, “Hollywood: The Oral History,” co-written with Sam Wasson, arrived last month.Some studio executives insist that box office totals are an outdated way of assessing whether a film will generate a financial return. Focus Features, for instance, has evolved its business model in the last two years. The company’s films, which include “Tár” and “Armageddon Time,” are now made available for video-on-demand rental — for a premium price — after as little as three weeks in theaters. (Before, theaters got an exclusive window of about 90 days.) The money generated by premium in-home rentals is substantial, Focus has said, although it has declined to provide financial information to support that assertion.Some films, like “Armageddon Time,” now become available for digital rental after they spend just three weeks in theaters.Anne Joyce/Focus FeaturesThe worry in Hollywood is that such efforts will still fall short — that the conglomerates that own specialty film studios will decide there is not enough return on prestige films in theaters to continue releasing them that way. Disney owns Searchlight. Comcast owns Focus. Amazon owns United Artists. The chief executives of these companies like being invited to the Oscars. But they like profit even more.“The good news is we’ve now got a very large streaming business that we can go ahead and redirect that content toward those channels,” Bob Chapek, Disney’s former chief executive, said at a public event on Nov. 8, referring to prestige films. (Robert A. Iger, who has since returned to run Disney, may feel differently.)Others continue to advocate patience. Mr. Gross pointed out that “The Fabelmans” will roll into more theaters over the next month, hoping to capitalize on awards buzz — it is a front-runner for the 2023 best picture Oscar — and the end-of-year holidays. Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon,” a drug-and-sex induced fever dream about early Hollywood, is scheduled for wide release on Dec. 23.“I think movies are going to come back,” Mr. Spielberg recently told The New York Times. “I really do.”Steven Spielberg, on the set of his production “The Fabelmans.” Merie Weismiller Wallace/Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment More

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      Jerrod Carmichael to Host Golden Globes as Broadcast Returns From Scandal

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      The tarnished ceremony will air on NBC in January after questions were raised about the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s diversity and ethics.The stand-up comedian Jerrod Carmichael will serve as host of the Golden Globes next month, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association announced Thursday. It’s the first time the tarnished film and television awards ceremony will be broadcast since a 2021 scandal over the ethics and diversity of the H.F.P.A., the group behind the Globes.Carmichael may be best known for his critically acclaimed HBO stand-up special “Rothaniel,” in which he came out as gay. He also was the star of an NBC sitcom, “The Carmichael Show,” that ran from 2015 to 2017.The Globes are trying to re-establish themselves as a must-watch evening. While the awards were never an indication of Oscar voters’ mind-set, the ceremony did provide studios and stars a high-profile opportunity to campaign before the Academy Awards. Or at least that was the case until 2021, when investigations by The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times revealed the nonprofit group’s lack of diversity (at the time it had no Black members) as well as members’ high compensation.NBC canceled the show later that year, and a much-reduced version of the ceremony was held last January. It was not broadcast; instead, at a Beverly Hilton ballroom where no stars were present, the winners were announced and then tweeted out.Since the articles appeared, the H.F.P.A. has taken steps to include more journalists of color and to tighten its ethics rules. This year, the group sold the Golden Globes to a private company, Eldridge Industries, owned by Todd Boehly, that also bought Dick Clark Productions, producer of the ceremony. In September, NBC said it would air the 2023 show in a one-year test.It remains to be seen who will show up for the ceremony, which once was known as an off-the-cuff affair. Brendan Fraser, the star of “The Whale” and a strong contender this awards season, has said he will not attend if nominated. In 2018, he said he had been groped in 2003 by a then-member of the H.F.P.A., who denied the allegation.The nominations for the Golden Globes will be announced Monday, and the telecast is set for Jan. 10. More

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      ‘Something From Tiffany’s’ Review: Put a Ring on It

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      Zoey Deutsch shines in a story of an epic Christmas gift mix-up.Romantic comedies rarely go wrong when they include some combination of mishaps, mistakes and mix-ups — all those fateful accidents that bring together strangers and glorify the wonder of cosmic serendipity. A really piquant imbroglio is rom-com gold: see “The Shop Around the Corner” (adversarial co-workers unwittingly strike up a romance by mail), “I Love You Again” (a husband on the verge of divorce gets amnesia and attempts to re-woo his own wife), “While You Were Sleeping” (a train fare collector is embroiled in family drama after being confused for a comatose commuter’s fiancée), or any number of other classics of the genre.“Something from Tiffany’s” doesn’t quite have the Lubitsch touch. But it does boast a very charming premise, built around a truly ludicrous misunderstanding that I found impossible to resist. Gary (Ray Nicholson) buys his girlfriend, Rachel (Zoey Deutch), a pair of earrings for Christmas. Ethan (Kendrick Sampson) buys Vanessa (Shay Mitchell), his girlfriend, an engagement ring. After Gary is hit by a car outside Tiffany & Company, Ethan comes to his aid, and the two unknowingly swap gifts. When Rachel opens the ring on Christmas morning, she wrongly assumes that Gary is trying to propose to her. Gary doesn’t remember much about the night of the accident, so when he sees the ring, he thinks that maybe he is.It’s a winning setup, and the director, Daryl Wein, escalates the action shrewdly, with clever rom-com engineering. Rachel and Ethan are thrown together as a result of the accident and the resulting confusion of gifts, and they quickly sense a mutual rapport that might be more than mere attraction. Deutch and Sampson have an abundance of screen chemistry, and Wein lets it simmer, holding on glances as it builds slowly to a last-act boil. With her wry grin and screwball banter, Deutch is especially delightful, bounding through the cavalcade of holiday mix-ups with the buoyant verve of a bona fide romantic lead.Something From Tiffany’sRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. Watch on Amazon Prime Video. More

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      ‘Loudmouth’ Review: Portrait of Al Sharpton as a Young Man

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      A stirring new biographical documentary about the Rev. Al Sharpton revisits a racially divided New York City and offers a critique of the news media then and now.In the sympathetic documentary “Loudmouth,” the Rev. Al Sharpton recounts the time Coretta Scott King admonished him for his rhetorical excesses. The film’s writer-director, Josh Alexander, cuts between the Sharpton of now — svelte, measured — and, using archival footage, the young man he was in the 1980s: rotund, passionate and plying his skills as a preacher to harness the anger and grief of those African Americans gathered at churches, rallies and marches in a time of heightened racial violence.“Loudmouth” is equal parts time capsule, media critique and authorized biography. Each of those examinations has its own flaws but also offers insights into the man, the moment (the current one but more pointedly New York City of the 1980s and ’90s) and the news media.Thirty years ago, Sharpton’s dramatic tactics earned him (along with the lawyers Alton Maddox and C. Vernon Mason, who was later disbarred) incendiary headlines and a warm seat on the daytime talk circuit. For Sharpton, who sees himself in the tradition of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Scott King’s chiding invited a reconsideration of that lightning rod approach. Another epiphany came after he was stabbed in 1991 in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, while preparing to protest the sentences in the case of Yusuf Hawkins, the Black 16-year-old who was and shot and killed by a white mob in the neighborhood two years earlier.One of the documentary’s most salient cautions might be that members of the news media were (and often remain) unwilling to cop to their biases. Sharpton has spent a lifetime calling the storytellers out for their slant — and schooling us to do the same. As straightforward as it appears, “Loudmouth” also invites an engaged but necessarily judicious scrutiny.LoudmouthNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 3 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘One Fine Morning’ Review: The Moments That Make Up a Rich Life

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      Mia Hansen-Love directs Léa Seydoux in a delicate look at a mother, daughter and lover whose quotidian existence is instantly recognizable yet sublime.Sandra, the French single mother at the center of “One Fine Morning,” is always in motion, striding here and there, racing up and down, circling back and forth, and always with an intensity of purpose. With her head held high and her clear, unwavering gaze, a dowdy backpack strapped to her back, she doesn’t resemble one of pop culture’s fantasy gamines. She looks like the woman she is: a mother, daughter, friend, lover and worker who, in order to keep going, needs to maintain a steady course even when buffeted by strong winds.Sandra is an appealing, sympathetic character, a rich mix of complexity and familiarity that the director Mia Hansen-Love — and her star, the great Léa Seydoux — subtly reveal in fragments. Much happens in the story, often quietly. Yet while the movie occasionally surprises, what distinguishes it, giving it unexpected force, are less the kind of life-altering events that are generally regarded as milestones. Instead what matters here is the delicacy with which Hansen-Love puts those events into play with modest moments, how she reveals the sublime in the in-between spaces of ordinary existence.A widow, Sandra lives in a bright, modestly cramped Paris apartment with her cheerful young daughter, Linn (Camille Leban Martins). Much of Sandra’s time — her many comings and goings — involves her family, though mostly her father, Georg (an affecting Pascal Greggory). A philosopher, Georg has been diagnosed with Benson’s syndrome, a degenerative ailment that’s robbing him of his memory and sight. The movie opens with Sandra visiting her father, whose condition is so dire that she needs to guide him on how to let her inside. “Where is the …” he says, his voice trailing off. “The key?” she asks. “In the lock,” she continues from one side of a shut door that now feels like a wrenching divide.The story is simple and its telling generally restrained even as Sandra’s life begins to take a turn for the progressively more complicated. There are arguments and spilled tears, but Hansen-Love’s touch here is insistently discreet and light, which remains true even as the narrative begins to unobtrusively divide into separate tracks. One involves Sandra’s anguished relationship with Georg, while the other centers on a love affair that she begins with an old friend, Clément (Melvil Poupaud). Each relationship pushes and pulls at Sandra, who’s saying a slow goodbye to one love even as she’s finding a new one.Like Hansen-Love’s direction, Seydoux’s performance has a calm, understated quality that helps gives the movie a natural, comfortable flow. Sandra, who works as a translator, is almost always moving somewhere or toward something — her father, her daughter, her job — and because Hansen-Love likes medium and long shots, your attention tends to be concentrated on Sandra, her body and movements. You see her, but you specifically see her in the world, at her home, on the job, though mostly amid her family, friends and colleagues. You see, in other words, all the many pieces that make up a life.One of the pleasures of “One Fine Morning” is how it sneaks up on you emotionally. The scenes between Sandra and her father are expectedly poignant, true. Yet what makes them resonate is how Sandra resolutely maintains her focus and composure even in the face of mounting catastrophe, how she tries to help Georg navigate his rapidly fading world. She patiently helps him recover his lost words, holding it together even as his condition worsens and the family decides to move him into a nursing home. Despite some low-key family tension, most generated by her carelessly self-involved mother (an amusing Nicole Garcia), Sandra seems so unflappable that you sense (worry) that a part of her has shut down.The movie builds incrementally through scenes of varying dramatic and emotional intensity, some of which might seem like atmospheric filler (or just filler) in a different movie but here deepen the story. Again and again, Hansen-Love returns to the subject of memory, to the past and the ebb and flow of time. In one sequence, Sandra serves as a translator for an audience of American World War II veterans, mirror images of her father and grandmother, whom she later visits. When Sandra asks how she is, carefully taking a fragile, translucent arm, the older woman haltingly replies, “It’s a bit difficult at times … living.”In her pursuit of uninflected naturalism, Hansen-Love has sometimes been a more interesting than wholly successful filmmaker (her second feature, “The Father of My Children,” is lovely), but “One Fine Morning” is beautifully balanced, persuasive and moving. Much of what occurs is familiar, including Sandra’s affair, which Hansen-Love makes specific and different simply by where she lays the stress and how. The story’s ellipses and graceful structure are certainly admirable, but what elevates “One Fine Morning” is the texture of Sandra’s emotions, the revelation of her character, the hunger of her embrace, the wildness of her mouth, the stillness of her sated body, and the love that she gives and will movingly embrace once more.One Fine MorningRated R for some partial female nudity. In French, English and German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘2/Duo’ Review: Relationship Rituals

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      This spare Japanese drama from 1997 gets a belated New York release.Regular film festival attendees might recognize the name of the Japanese director Nobuhiro Suwa (“H Story” and “A Perfect Couple”). But his 1997 feature, “2/Duo,” is only now receiving a New York release; it’s showing in tandem with a series at Metrograph on “Japanese indies from the punk years.” But little about “2/Duo” is particularly punk.Rather, the film is a spare relationship drama centered on a volatile couple, Kei (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and Yu (Eri Yu). Kei is a nonentity of a screen actor. (Near the beginning, he is shown practicing incidental dialogue before being informed that his scene has been cut.) Yu works at a clothing boutique. After Kei proposes, in a manner so abrupt that Yu thinks he’s rehearsing lines, their innocuous conversations increasingly turn into arguments.Given Kei’s profession, Suwa suggests there might be a performative aspect to the bickering. (Kei has a habit of phoning Yu, who asks where he is; he always says he doesn’t know.) As the film observes them in lengthy shots — occasionally interrupted by cuts to black — with Kei’s unmotivated outbursts sometimes breaking up interactions that drag or stall, their behavior looks suspiciously like the result of actors’ improvisation.It is not surprising to learn that a script was tossed and the performers developed their own lines. Similar techniques yielded brilliance from John Cassavetes, Jacques Rivette and Mike Leigh. But here they mostly result in characters who don’t appear fully realized. Whatever makes Kei and Yu tick, to the extent that the collaborative process ever fleshed it out, does not come across onscreen.2/DuoNot rated. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Empire of Light’ Review: They Found It at the Movies

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      Olivia Colman and Micheal Ward pursue a bittersweet workplace romance in Sam Mendes’s look back at Britain in the early 1980s.“Empire of Light” takes place in and around an old movie palace in a British seaside town. This cinema, which is called the Empire, is more than a mere setting: it’s the movie’s center of gravity, its soul, its governing metaphor and reason for being.In the early 1980s, the Empire has fallen on hard times, rather like the global power evoked by its name. The sun hasn’t quite set, but the upstairs screens are now permanently dark, and a once-sumptuous lounge on the top floor is frequented mainly by pigeons. The public still shows up to buy popcorn and candy, and to see films like “The Blues Brothers,” “Stir Crazy” and “All That Jazz,” but the mood is one of quietly accepted defeat. Even the light looks tired.That light is also beautiful, thanks to the unrivaled cinematographer Roger Deakins, whose images impart a tone of gentle nostalgia. It’s possible to look back fondly on a less-than-golden age, and Sam Mendes (“Revolutionary Road,” “1917”), the writer and director, casts an affectionate gaze on the Empire, its employees, and the drab, sometimes brutal realities of Thatcher-era Britain.“Empire of Light” has a sad story to tell, one that touches on mental illness, sexual exploitation, racist violence and other grim facts of life. But Mendes isn’t a realist in the mode of Mike Leigh or Ken Loach. The period-appropriate British movies that find their way to the Empire’s screens are “Gregory’s Girl” and “Chariots of Fire,” and Mendes borrows some of their sweet, gentle humor and heartfelt humanist charm.Olivia Colman plays Hilary, the Empire’s duty manager, who oversees a motley squad of cinema soldiers. There is a nerdy guy, a post-punk girl and a grumpy projectionist. They are soon joined by Stephen (Micheal Ward), a genial young man whose college plans are on hold.Hilary and her boss, Mr. Ellis (Colin Firth), are carrying on a desultory affair. For her, the rushed encounters in his office are part of a dreary workplace routine, evidence of an ongoing malaise. Things could always be worse, and for Hilary, they have been. She has recently returned to work after spending time in a mental hospital after a breakdown and takes lithium to maintain her equilibrium.Stephen’s arrival jolts her out of her torpor, which is both exciting and risky. He seems more open to experience, more capable of happiness, than anyone else in this grubby little city, and he and Hilary strike up a friendship that turns into more. His encounters with hostile skinheads and bigoted customers open Hilary’s eyes to the pervasiveness of racial prejudice. Together they nurse a wounded pigeon back to health.For a while, their romance unfolds in a quiet, quotidian rhythm that allows you to appreciate Colman and Ward’s fine-grained performances. “What are days?” the poet Philip Larkin asked — he’s a favorite of Hilary’s, along with W.H. Auden — and his answer was both somber and sublime. “Days are where we live.” The daily rituals of work at the Empire, and the pockets of free time that open up within it, add a dimension of understated enchantment, as if a touch of big-screen magic found its way into the break room, the concession stand and the box office.It’s inevitable that the spell will break, and when it does, “Empire of Light” falters. Mendes raises the stakes and accelerates the plot, pushing Hilary and Stephen through a series of crises that weigh the movie down with earnest self-importance. A film that had seemed interested in the lives and feelings of its characters, and in an unlikely but touching relationship between two people at odds with the world around them, turns into a movie with Something to Say.The message is muddled and soft, like a Milk Dud at the bottom of the box, and the movie chews on it for quite a while. “Empire of Light” arrives at its emotional terminus long before it actually ends. Things keep happening, as if Mendes were trying to talk himself and us through ideas that hadn’t been fully worked out. There isn’t really much insight to be gleaned on the subjects of mental illness, racial politics, middle age or work, though an earnest effort is made to show concern about all of them.What “Empire of Light” really wants to be about are the pleasures of ’80s pop music, fine English poetry and, above all, movies. Like everyone else at the Empire, the grumpy projectionist takes a liking to Stephen, and shows him how to work the machinery, eliciting exclamations of wonder from the young man, and also from old-timers in the audience who might remember the vanished sights and sounds of celluloid. The velvet ropes and plush seats, the beam of light and the whirring — it’s all lovely and bittersweet to contemplate.Movies have always been more than a source of comfort: They have the power to disturb, to seduce, to provoke and to enrage. None of that really interests Mendes here, even though the story of Hilary and Stephen might have benefited from a tougher, less sentimental telling.Empire of LightRated R. Sex and violence, just like in the movies. Running time: 1 hour 59 minutes. In theaters. More