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      Steven Spielberg Gets Personal in ‘The Fabelmans’

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      Over more than 50 years, Steven Spielberg has directed movies about every subject under the sun. Sharks, dinosaurs, extraterrestrials both friendly and not, pirates, spies, soldiers and heroes both historical and imaginary. Not many filmmakers can match his range. But one subject Spielberg has avoided is himself.Until now. “The Fabelmans” is a disarmingly, at times painfully intimate movie about a family closely modeled on the Spielbergs. It’s a portrait of the auteur as a young man that also tells the story of an unraveling marriage. Sammy Fabelman, played as a teenager by Gabriel LaBelle, is the only son and oldest child of Mitzi (Michelle Williams) and Burt (Paul Dano), who move from New Jersey to Arizona and then Northern California in the 1950s and ’60s. As Sammy discovers his cinematic vocation — shooting movies at home, at school and with his Boy Scout troop — he witnesses Mitzi’s deepening unhappiness and Burt’s inability to deal with it.Written with Tony Kushner, his collaborator on “Munich,” “Lincoln” and “West Side Story,” “The Fabelmans,” which opens in theaters this weekend, takes Spielberg into uncharted narrative territory. I spoke with him this month via video call about his journey into his own past, and also about the present and future state of the movies. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.“The Fabelmans” tells a story you’ve obviously lived with for a very long time. I was curious about what made it finally rise to the surface.The impetus to actually get serious about telling it on film didn’t seriously occur to me until the pandemic.When the pandemic first hit, some of my kids flew in from the East Coast, and they all took up residence in their old bedrooms and Kate [Capshaw, his wife] and I got a lot of our family back. It was very disconcerting not to go into work. Directing is a social occupation, and I’m very used to interacting with people every single day. I was not really acclimating to the Zoom world very well.I had a lot of time on my hands. I used to get in my car and drive for hours — all around Los Angeles, up Pacific Coast Highway, over to Calabasas, over near Twentynine Palms. And that gave me more time to think about what was happening in the world.I started thinking, what’s the one story I haven’t told that I’d be really mad at myself if I don’t? It was always the same answer every time: the story of my formative years growing up between 7 and 18.From left, Gabriel LaBelle, Michelle Williams, Paul Dano, Keeley Karsten, Sophia Kopera and Julia Butters as the Fabelmans, fictional versions of the Spielbergs. Merie Weismiller Wallace/Universal Pictures and Amblin EntertainmentYou’ve dealt with families before. You’ve dealt with a childhood in the suburbs before, with divorce, but never literally from your own experience. Was it hard to go there?“Close Encounters” was about a father’s voluntary separation from the family to pursue a dream at the expense of losing his family. “E.T.” was a story of a kid who needed to fill the hole that a separation had dug out of his life, and he just happened to fill it metaphorically with this little squishy guy from outer space.This story was no longer going to be about metaphor. It was going to be about lived experiences, and what was difficult was facing the fact that I might really tell the story. In theory, it was easy to talk to Tony Kushner about, would you collaborate with me in trying to arrange all these interesting disparate experiences into a movie narrative?When we started writing this — Tony in New York, me in L.A. on Zoom — it started to become real, something that was tactile and triggering in all of these memories. It did become very difficult.It’s hard to hold someone’s hand over Zoom, but Tony did a good job in giving me the kind of comfort I needed when we were tapping into moments in my life, secrets between myself and my mother that I was never ever, ever going to talk about. Neither in a written autobiography, which I’ve never done, or on film. But we got into those tender trenches.You’ve dealt with Jewish themes and topics before, certainly in “Schindler’s List” and “Munich,” but this is the first time you’re going into a specifically Jewish American experience.I didn’t experience antisemitism growing up in Arizona, but I had a major experience with it completing high school in Northern California.Friends would always call me by my last name. So, the sound of Jewishness always rang in my ear when my friends would call across the hallway, “Hey Spielberg,” and I was very self-conscious about that.Being Jewish in America is not the same as being Jewish in Hollywood. Being Jewish in Hollywood is like wanting to be in the popular circle and immediately being accepted as I have been in that circle, by a lot of diversity but also by a lot of people who in fact are Jewish. But when I was making those little 8-millimeter movies in school, at first my friends thought it was kind of weird.It was sort of unprecedented. Nobody had cameras except a Japanese 8-millimeter camera that parents usually controlled, and they were only used for family home movies and things like that. But I was basically weaponizing my social life with a camera to curry favor with these athletic, popular kids who eventually all wanted to be in my movies.In a way, the camera was a social passport for me. I was passionate about telling stories, but I was also passionate about belonging to something that I hadn’t been invited to belong to ever before. So, making these little movies was like a magic pill in a way.His co-writer, Tony Kushner, gave the director the “comfort I needed when we were tapping into moments in my life, secrets between myself and my mother that I was never ever, ever going to talk about.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesAntisemitism is a specter in this movie that to some extent is chased away, which reflects the feeling of a lot of Jewish Americans in that time — a kind of optimism about their prospects in America. That hits a little differently in the present, when there seems to be a resurgence of antisemitism in some of its most toxic forms.Antisemitism is only coming back because it’s being encouraged to come back. It’s not coming back because it ebbs and flows over the decades, but there has been an invitation to a toxic dance based on antisemitism being part of an ideology of separation and racism and Islamophobia and xenophobia, and it’s come barreling back. A lot of people who probably never had much of an antisemitic thought but did feel toward people of color — they felt differently, let’s say, than my sisters and I were ever raised to believe or feel, and suddenly antisemitism becomes part of the package. It’s been weaponized and it’s been encouraged more and more since 2015 or ’16.I was struck by what you said about the camera as a way of belonging. For Sammy Fabelman, the camera is his way to get closer to people and to be included, but it’s also what separates him from people because he’s in the position of the observer.I’m not going to spoil plot developments for readers, but there’s a very important truth about his parents’ marriage that Sammy discovers because of what he sees through the camera. I don’t know if that’s really what happened or if it’s a metaphor for how cinema works.No. It really happened. That was one of the toughest things, I think, that I had to sit down and decide to expose, because it was the most powerful secret my mom and I shared since my discovery when I was 16. Sixteen years old is too young to realize that my parents are people, and also, the struggle not to hold that against them.I’m also struck by the way it was discovered, because one thing that I’ve always thought about you as a filmmaker is that you convey a lot of emotional and psychological information by means other than dialogue — through body language or facial expressions or the unspoken energy passing through the scene. What’s remarkable about this film is it shows you doing that by accident, or maybe instinctively.I think it was probably instinctively because as my wife always says, there are no accidents. She said, you know, you couch that in a joke, but there are no jokes.That’s very Freudian.The thing is, I was always in control of the movies I was making even as a 12-year-old kid. I was in control of all my films until this moment where I discovered I had no control over the information that was pulverizing for a 16-year-old kid. It’s something I’ll never forget, and it’s something my mom and I talked about for decades afterward.Do you think that made you want to reassert control over what you were doing, over the stories, over the images?Exactly. And maybe even make those images happy and friendly. I’ve not been in therapy. I went to my father’s psychiatrist to try to get a letter that I was crazy, so I wouldn’t have to fight in Vietnam. That was the only time I ever went to an analyst. By the way, it turned out he was very pro-Vietnam and would never write me the letter, and I wasted two months, three days a week, while I was going to college.So movies, and my relationship with Kate and my kids and my closest friends and with the stories I choose to tell, that has probably been as therapeutic as anything I could have done in Freudian or Jungian therapy.Was it different to be working with actors who are playing people very close to you and a version of you?I’m trying to phrase this in a way that will make sense to you. When I tried to cast “The Fabelmans” like every other movie — with the best actors I could find that fit the role — I realized that wasn’t going to work, that there was going to have to be more about the familiar and less about the accomplished. Meaning, I was looking for great actors, but I needed actors that had already, in other films, struck me as similes for my mom and dad, and obviously, with less objectivity, struck me as similar to myself. As much as we can ever judge ourselves to really go out and find somebody like us.So it became much, much harder, and I needed to know them in a different way. I needed to already have felt, oh, something about her reminds me of Mom and there’s something about him that reminds me of Dad. So, that limited the playing field. I considered a lot of actors, but my eventual choice came down to actors that were great like Paul Dano and Michelle Williams. Two of the finest actors I’ve ever worked with.After more than 50 years, this is the director’s most personal film yet. Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesWere there particular performances of Paul’s and Michelle’s that struck you?My favorite performance up to that point of Michelle Williams was “Blue Valentine,” but the most forthright performance, more different than anything she ever done before, was when she played Gwen Verdon in “Fosse/Verdon.” I realized, Oh my God, she can really step far away from everything I’ve ever seen her do to completely reinvent herself through a character, and that gave me tremendous encouragement.There’s also the fact that Mitzi herself is a performer, a musician and dancer, and that part of her personality is very important and poignant in the film.She was a performing artist, but she was also, as a mother, a performing artist of a mother. Just to give you a little insight: She was so much more peer than parent that my three sisters even from a very young age refused to call her Mom or Mommy and only called her Lee, her first name. I’m the only one that called her Mom or Mama. And that’s because she wanted to be part of the gang and wasn’t necessarily interested in being the truant officer of the family or the responsible caregiver. She wanted us to look at her like one of us.That I think comes through in the movie and there is also just the temperamental contrast between Mitzi and Burt. The movie is partly about their discovery and their son’s discovery that they’re fundamentally mismatched.My dad, like me, couldn’t sing on key, but he loved classical music and he appreciated her artistry as a pianist and a classical music lover. Their mutual love was classical music.I remember being dragged to [Philadelphia Orchestra] concerts. I didn’t understand classical music as a kid. It was scary. It was intimidating, and it was way too loud. My mom and dad were in heaven sitting together with me in the middle. Often they would hold hands across my lap, and Mom and Dad would get tears in their eyes, but that’s where it stopped. My dad’s side of the brain beyond that was science. My mom’s side of the brain beyond that was performing art.This is a movie about movies and also a movie about the history of movies: it begins with Cecil B. DeMille and ends with John Ford. The way I read that, because I’m a film critic, is that you’re tracing the tradition of moviemaking that you’re a part of.I see the showman in myself that was C.B. DeMille, but I’ve always loved John Ford’s compositions. I’ve both studied and been very aware of his compositions. Ford was a hero of mine, and I got such great instruction from him, which he sort of made more of a bollocking than anything else. But I didn’t come out of that saying, Oh my God, he scared me to death. I came out of that so inspired.I was only about 16 when I met him, and I didn’t know anything about his reputation, how surly and ornery he was and how he ate young studio executives for breakfast. That only came later when people began writing more about him. I felt I really escaped that office with my life.I was watching that and thinking a lot about the current uncertain state of movies and that experience of being overwhelmed by something on the big screen — that’s the primal moment in this movie and may not be something that future generations will have.Yes, but there’s been stages throughout history where we’ve seen how Hollywood has countered the impact of losing a great market share of the audience to TV. In the early ’50s they invented CinemaScope and then 3-D [became popular].They had something on NBC called “Saturday Night at the Movies” [beginning in 1961] and you didn’t have to go out to a movie on Saturday night. You could stay home and watch television because NBC was designing films especially for audiences that didn’t want to leave the house. This is nothing new.The pandemic created an opportunity for streaming platforms to raise their subscriptions to record-breaking levels and also throw some of my best filmmaker friends under the bus as their movies were unceremoniously not given theatrical releases. They were paid off and the films were suddenly relegated to, in this case, HBO Max. The case I’m talking about. And then everything started to change.I think older audiences were relieved that they didn’t have to step on sticky popcorn. But I really believe those same older audiences, once they got into the theater, the magic of being in a social situation with a bunch of strangers is a tonic.Those audiences, I believe, left the theater if the movie was good and said aren’t you glad we went out tonight to see this picture? So, it’s up to the movies to be good enough to get all the audiences to say that to each other when the lights come back up.Spielberg would like to see streaming services give movies a longer theatrical run. That said, if he were making “The Post” today, he’d consider Apple or Netflix just so he could reach more viewers.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesI wonder about what kinds of movies people will go out to see vs. what they prefer to stay home to watch and how the industry in whatever shape it’s in figures that out.The industry is trying to figure that out right now. I found it encouraging that “Elvis” broke $100 million at the domestic box office. A lot of older people went to see that film, and that gave me hope that people were starting to come back to the movies as the pandemic becomes an endemic. I think movies are going to come back. I really do.Certainly, there’s no question that the big sequels and movies from Marvel and DC and Pixar and some of the animated movies and horror films still have a place in society. And hopefully comedies come back, because you can’t laugh as hard at home as you can in an audience.I don’t watch a lot of my movies with audiences, but my wife said you have to watch “The Fabelmans” at Toronto. We can sit in the back row, but you have to watch once, and it was a great experience. I was terrified, but the movie plays to a big audience of 2,000 people, and in the funny parts, it played like a big comedy.I think there has to be a concerted effort on the part of movie directors to demand that the streaming services footing the bill for most of these films give their movies a chance to be exhibited theatrically and not just in four theaters to qualify for awards. It’s going to have to come from all of us — the WGA [the Writers Guild], the DGA [the Directors Guild] and eventually the academy.When you’re first starting out, and a streaming service gives you a chance to direct your first movie, of course the streaming service is going to call the shot, but I don’t know anybody that wouldn’t like their movies to be shown on a big screen. I don’t know anyone that would say, no, I’d rather it be shown on an iPad or in a living room.Certain movies are perfectly suitable to the iPad or the living room. So the decision that executives and executives like myself at Amblin Partners have to make is: Do we consign this movie to a streaming service or this other movie to a four- or six-week theatrical window? Those are decisions that I am making based on my other job, which is running a small film company.That sounds like something fairly new, given especially that theatrical seems to be, and already was, I think, before the pandemic, dominated by franchises, tentpoles, by the movies that exhibitors know will make money for them. It just seems a narrower slot to get these kinds of non-I.P. movies into theaters.Yeah. We don’t want these chains to file Chapter 11. We want theaters to stay open. By the same token, and speaking very honestly, I made “The Post” [about the Pentagon Papers] as a political statement about our times by reflecting the Nixon administration, and we thought that was an important reflection for a lot of people to understand what was happening to our country.I don’t know if I had been given that script post-pandemic whether I would have preferred to have made that film for Apple or Netflix and gone out to millions of people. Because the film had something to say to millions of people, and we were never going to get those millions of people into enough theaters to make that kind of difference. Things have changed enough to get me to say that to you.A number of films that I think were wonderful works of cinema seem to have their moment and then vanish into the algorithm.We started amassing libraries [of films on home video] the same way we would amass LPs as I did as a kid. My film collection vastly outnumbered my LP collection.But today, it’s all in the cloud, and we don’t have the shelf space anymore to put our beloved movies as part of the cultural heritage that inspired us to become better people, to find values that movies can communicate often faster than your parents can. What I miss is the hard copy. I miss the antiquity that I can hold in my hand and put into a player, but I’m an old-fashioned guy.I’m 75 years old. I know what it’s like to possess something that I adored. I know what it’s like to possess the LP of [the score for] “Lawrence of Arabia” and then years later to have the actual DVD of it. I treasure that. More

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      in Movies

      Leslie Phillips, Comic Actor Who Sorted Wizards, Dies at 98

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      He made a name for himself in British satires, then late in his career reached a different audience as the voice of the Sorting Hat in the Harry Potter movies.Leslie Phillips, a British actor who in a career that began before World War II played numerous comic roles, then reached new generations of filmgoers when he provided the voice of the Sorting Hat in the Harry Potter films, died on Monday at his home in London. He was 98.His agent, Jonathan Lloyd, confirmed the death.Mr. Phillips began acting as a teenager, supporting his family after his father died in his 40s. His fledgling career was interrupted by military service at the end of World War II, but in the mid-1940s he resumed it, although at first mostly in “the murkiest, rat-infested old playhouses and music halls in the North of England,” as he put it in his autobiography, “Hello” (2006).He eventually began to have success on radio, most notably on the long-running comedy show “The Navy Lark,” and he went from bit roles in films and on television to larger ones. He drew good notices for his performance in the Gene Kelly film “Les Girls” in 1957.Mr. Phillips, right, drew good reviews for his performance in the 1957 movie “Les Girls” with, from left, Jacques Bergerac and Gene Kelly.via Everett CollectionWhen he returned to England from Hollywood after that film, he told The Daily Telegraph in 2010, “I had a whole load of scripts to choose from.”“I went against my agent and said I’d do ‘Carry On Nurse,’” he added — an early entry in what became a series of popular, quickly made film comedies that over the next decades satirized the military, the medical profession, British history and even the soft-core “Emmanuelle” movies.Mr. Phillips also appeared in “Carry On Teacher” (1959) and “Carry On Constable” (1960), but he wasn’t really part of the ensemble of actors who were the core of those movies. Years later, though, in 2010, he was the presenter for “Carry On Forever!,” a BBC Radio 2 look back at the franchise.He turned up in another satirical film series, in “Doctor in Love,” in 1960 and “Doctor in Trouble” in 1970. By 1978, The Evening Post of Reading could say that Mr. Phillips “has been one of Britain’s best known and loved actors for more than 40 years,” and his career was barely half over.He worked regularly in British television after that, including recurring roles on “Chancer,” “The House of Windsor” and other series in the 1990s. He continued to appear in film comedies but also turned up in dramas, including “Out of Africa” (1985) and “The Jackal” (1997).Mr. Phillips worked on the stage as well, and though he was known for comedic catchphrases — his distinctive delivery of “Well, hello!” and “Ding dong!” were famous from the movies — he sometimes felt compelled to point out that he had a wider range.“I’ve done all the classics,” he said in the 2010 interview. “I’ve been to Stratford.”He certainly put serious actorly thought into what may have been the performance experienced by more filmgoers than any of his others: his voice work as the Sorting Hat, the all-knowing headwear that sorted new students at the Hogwarts wizarding school into their houses in the Harry Potter films, which began in 2001 with “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” directed by Chris Columbus.“I worked only with the director and was given a great deal of time to get the voice right,” he told the NewsQuest Media Group in 2002. “It is quite a moment in the movie, it was a very important role to get right.”He reprised the role in several of the sequels.Leslie Samuel Phillips was born on April 20, 1924, in the Tottenham area of London to Fred and Cecilia Phillips.“I grew up surrounded by illness,” he told The Daily Mail of London in 1999, and his father, who worked for the gas board, died when Leslie was young. His mother, hoping the boy could generate some income, sent him to a stage school, and by age 14 he was going on national tours.“Always people in the cast became my uncles and aunts,” he said. “I learned a lot. They encouraged me to read and taught me all the things I hadn’t done at home or school. It was as much an education as a job.”After the war he married Penelope Bartley, an actress, and they had four children before divorcing in 1965. She later died in a fire. His second wife, Angela Scoular, also an actress, died by suicide in 2011. His survivors include his third wife, Zara Carr.In the mid-1980s Mr. Phillips’s 92-year-old mother was left seriously injured in a mugging; he said the attackers had beat her unconscious because she wouldn’t give up her handbag, which contained some family mementos. She died after several months in the hospital.“It was the biggest tragedy of my life,” he told The Daily Mail in 1993. “Horrific. I used to go into hospital to visit her and then go walking round the streets, looking for a boy wearing the yellow sweatshirt she’d described to the police.”If his personal life was full of dark episodes, his career continued to give him satisfaction.“I seem to have a very overall appeal,” he said in 2002, the year after he had been in both the first Harry Potter movie and “Lara Croft: Tomb Raider,” another movie aimed at a youthful audience. “I get the most wonderful letters from elderly people who follow my career, and then I get an enormous amount of letters from young people.” More

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      in Television

      D.I.Y. Sci-Fi: A Talk With Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead

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      The filmmaking and acting team discuss their latest low-budget science fiction movie, “Something in the Dirt,” and their work on the Marvel Disney+ series “Moon Knight.”The writing-directing-acting duo Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead’s latest film, the science fiction satire “Something in the Dirt,” follows John (Moorhead) and Levi (Benson), neighboring tenants in a ramshackle Los Angeles apartment complex. After observing inexplicable supernatural phenomena in Levi’s flat, they attempt to capture the event on camera for personal gain, but meet disaster instead.Since releasing their feature debut, “Resolution” (2013), Benson and Moorhead have made movies their way, exercising full creative control over their malleable, genre-fluid aesthetic. Referred to in reviews as their “most personal” movie after its Sundance premiere, “Something in the Dirt” (in theaters) is a distillation of their sensibilities, striking a lopsided contrast with their directing contributions to the Marvel Disney+ series “Moon Knight,” an atypically weird superhero show involving dissociative identity disorder, Egyptian gods and Oscar Isaac.In an interview via Zoom, the two discussed nuances in personal filmmaking, the line between virtue and villainy, and how directing for an entertainment giant crystallized their filmmaking identities. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.“Something in the Dirt” is about two guys making a movie. Did the way that you make movies and collaborate wind up echoing in the story?Justin Benson: What’s strange is our dynamic and our filmmaking process and our relationship couldn’t be more different than John and Levi’s. Obviously we’ve seen it described as “their most personal film.” There is probably some truth to that, but you’ve got to get into this oddly precise definition of “personal,” because it’s the farthest thing from autobiographical. The characters were intentionally constructed to be wildly different from who we are.Explore the Marvel Cinematic UniverseThe popular franchise of superhero films and TV series continues to expand.‘She-Hulk: Attorney at Law’: Tatiana Maslany described the giant, green character making her television debut on Disney+ as “weirdly, the closest thing to my own experience I’ve done ever.”‘Black Panther: Wakanda Forever’: The trailer for the long-awaited sequel was unveiled at Comic-Con International in San Diego. The film will be released on Nov. 11.‘Thor: Love and Thunder’: The fourth “Thor” movie in 11 years, directed by Taika Waititi, embraces wholesale self-parody and is sillier than any of its predecessors.‘Ms. Marvel’: This Disney+ series introduces a new character: Kamala Khan, a Muslim high schooler in Jersey City who is mysteriously granted superpowers.Aaron Moorhead: For the most part we were interested in these characters because we were exploring stuff we don’t believe. That’s not just in our films. That’s our free time, our conversations. The stuff that’s interesting feels a little dangerous. It’s on a razor’s edge of being mockable, but still can hold resonance in our minds and hearts.Benson: The only similarity between Aaron and I and John and Levi is we spend a lot of time talking about science fiction. But that’s the point. The huge difference for us is that John and Levi are quick to believe, and we never believe in anything.Moorhead and Benson in “Something in the Dirt.”XYZ/Rustic FilmsJohn and Levi trade stories with each other that either are not true or are dubious. It feels like there’s a bit of you in that dynamic. Was it gratifying to play that in this fictional, very fractured environment?Benson: There’s a cut line from the movie — Levi accuses John of being a liar, and John says, “You lie more than anyone I’ve ever met!” They lie in different ways. Levi works at a bar and wants to put his best foot forward. He’s probably got half a dozen different stories, and once you run out of them, you end up with this sad, lonely soul. John lies for other reasons, but the way they lie was part of fleshing them out as real human beings.Moorhead: We were dedicated to this idea of: you sympathize with one character and suspect the other is a villain, and then it slowly swaps through the movie, and by the end, you realize they’re both flawed human beings, neither villain nor hero. Neither of us ever believed the characters we were playing were bad people, but while we were performing, we believed in the virtue of what they were doing. There’s a part of me deep down that says it isn’t villainous if you’re virtuous, but you don’t know if you’re virtuous or not. You just hope you are.Benson: The different ways John and Levi lie connects them to us as creators, hopefully as characters with humanity. You hope that in the way science fiction operates, people don’t think you’re lying, that they understand it’s science fiction storytelling — that people don’t think you’re expressing a viewpoint one would call a lie.Moorhead: It was part of the conception of this movie to examine your own relationship with pop culture and what you put out in the world. Sometimes lies enter the zeitgeist in a way you didn’t intend. What exactly is the responsibility of the person who’s creating these things whole cloth? It is terrifying as a filmmaker to think someone might actually believe that what you are showing them is real.“Something in the Dirt” premiered at Sundance. “Moon Knight” premiered in March. This isn’t a knock against “Moon Knight,” but it comparatively feels impersonal because it’s a Marvel production. There’s a big leap from your movies “Spring” and “The Endless” to Marvel. Did that personal quality remain intact in that framework?Moorhead: When we faced a decade of being completely unemployable, we walked into every single studio pitch room on every single project, pitched our hearts out and wouldn’t be able to make it happen. We now realize that was for the better, because our alternative was to make a personal independent film. That solidified in our own minds, but also in the minds of what you call the industry, what exactly we’re doing. Now, when people ask us if we want to do something, it’s in that niche — not broadly horror, broadly sci-fi. There’s mystery afoot, and something dark and cosmic about it.It isn’t that we have to erase our personality and work within the machine. What [Marvel] wanted from us was our voice. It comes out mostly in the visuals, because scripts are separate from direction, but we put a lot of ourselves into it. But your thesis is definitely correct. There’s by definition nothing more personal than an independent film.Benson: [“Moon Knight”] has given us opportunities to work with collaborators we wouldn’t otherwise, which has expanded our creative worlds. These opportunities have also given us time on set in a compressed period that’s been like a second film school in some ways — though being a filmmaker is continuously being in film school, because every day is never planned for, really.Moorhead: The greatest terror we both hold is losing our curiosity and ability to grow. It can happen, and it can sneak up on you. If you only ever make your own films, you might start to repeat yourself because you think you’ve got a bunch of great ideas, but they’re all the same idea. We only want to make stuff that expresses ourselves purely. Right now, doing something big and doing something indie, they feed each other very nicely. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Incredible but True’ Review: Track to the Future

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      A suburban couple makes a life-altering discovery in the basement of their new home in this delightfully odd comedy.However you respond to the wacky oeuvre of the French filmmaker Quentin Dupieux, its loopy originality is cheering. Through a string of out-there movies featuring killer tires, monstrous insects and cursed outerwear, he has remained committed to exposing the sadness behind much of human silliness. Whatever his subject, it’s never solely about the goof.He has also typically been blessed with actors skilled at selling dotty setups with deadpan ease. In “Incredible but True,” he has the stellar support of Alain Chabat and Léa Drucker (currently starring in the marvelous Epix series “War of the Worlds”), who play Alain and Marie, a fondly becalmed couple who impulsively purchase a suburban home. On the urging of their excitable real estate agent (Stéphane Pezerat), the couple investigates a trapdoor in the basement which conceals a strange tunnel. Where — and to when — the tunnel leads will upend their lives and rearrange their destinies.Coming in at a tight and talky 74 minutes, “Incredible but True” is a sweetly absurd time-travel comedy that coats its lunacy in a touching poignancy. While Alain, as unwavering as his puff of silvery hair, manages a stressful work client and the hypermasculine posturing of his boastful boss, Gérard (Benoît Magimel), Marie becomes dismayingly obsessed with the tunnel’s wonders. Her bizarre behavior — like the droll adventures of Gérard’s recently installed, Bluetooth-enabled electronic penis — has a desperate quality: In this movie, the diminutions of aging are rarely out of mind.For Alain, though, happiness means simply surviving middle age without the assistance of a temporal blip or an iPenis. Even one with three speeds.Incredible but TrueNot rated. In French and Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 14 minutes. Watch on Arrow. More

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      in Television

      What’s on TV This Week: ‘Atlanta’ and ‘Black Panther’

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      The series staring Donald Glover concludes its fourth and final season. And the Marvel blockbuster airs on FX as the sequel premieres in theaters.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, Nov. 7-13. Details and times are subject to change.MondayPUSS IN BOOTS (2011) 6 p.m. on TOON. In this prequel spinoff of the “Shrek” franchise, Puss, the talking cat voiced by Antonio Banderas, is framed for a bank robbery and becomes an outlaw in his own town. He seeks to restore his honor and pay the debt he owes to his hometown by joining forces with Humpty Dumpty (Zach Galifianakis) and Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek) to find the magic beans that lead to valuable golden goose eggs. The film is a “cheerfully chaotic jumble of fairy tale and nursery rhyme characters,” Stephen Holden wrote in his review for The New York Times. A sequel is set to be released on in late December.TuesdayELECTION NIGHT SPECIALS 8 p.m. on ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS. As the polls close on Tuesday, several networks are airing the latest election and voting news in the U.S. midterm elections. Find out what’s at stake in our guide to the midterms, including how state races could have a huge effect on issues like abortion rights and voting.SAY HEY, WILLIE MAYS! (2022) 9 p.m. on HBO. This documentary explores the life of the Major League Baseball legend Willie Mays as he navigated the sport during a time of segregation and racism. The director Nelson George tracks Mays’s experience growing up in Alabama and getting his start playing for the Birmingham Black Barons in the Negro Leagues, as well as his career in the big leagues. The film features interviews with Mays, the baseball greats Barry Bonds and Reggie Jackson and the sports commentator Bob Costas.WednesdayLainey Wilson in October. The performer is up for six nominations at this year’s CMA Awards ceremony, which will take place on Wednesday.Jason Kempin/Getty Images For CmtTHE CMA AWARDS 8 p.m. on ABC. Luke Bryan and Peyton Manning will take the stage live in Nashville to host the 56th annual Country Music Association Awards. This year, first-time nominee Lainey Wilson is up for six awards, including new artist of the year, and Ashley McBryde, Carly Pearce, Chris Stapleton and Shane McAnally are each nominated for five. The evening will feature performances from Carrie Underwood and Katy Perry, among others.HARD KNOCKS IN SEASON: THE ARIZONA CARDINALS 10 p.m. on HBO. This reality sports series is based on the HBO franchise “Hard Knocks,” which documents a different N.F.L. team’s training camp each year. This series instead focuses on a team through its pro season. The second season follows the Arizona Cardinals, led by the quarterback Kyler Murray. The Cardinals have gotten off to a rocky start this season, currently in last place in the N.F.C. West.ICONS UNEARTHED 10 p.m. on VICE. Season 2 of this documentary series focuses on the long-running animated series “The Simpsons.” In the final episode, writers, directors, actors and network executives share stories about how the television show came together and established its place in pop culture.ThursdayBIGGER THAN LIFE (1956) 8 p.m. on TCM. Based on a 1955 article in The New Yorker, the film follows Ed Avery (James Mason), a teacher who is diagnosed with a fatal illness. After his doctor prescribes him cortisone, he is at first believed to have made a recovery. But he then develops an addiction to the drug that leads to his downward spiral.ATLANTA 10 p.m. on FX. This series wraps up with the show’s characters back in Atlanta after spending time in Europe in Season 3. Acclaimed for its acting, storytelling and depictions of modern day Black life, the series follows the rapper Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry), his manager and cousin, Earn (Donald Glover), and their friends Darius (LaKeith Stanfield) and Van (Zazie Beetz).FridayChadwick Boseman in “Black Panther.”Marvel Studios/Disney, via Associated PressBLACK PANTHER (2018) 5 p.m. on FX. Need a refresher before watching the sequel? Catch this blockbuster film on the day of the premiere of “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.” In this movie, T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) becomes the king of Wakanda, the isolated, technologically advanced African nation. As Black Panther, he rallies his allies and fights to keep his people, and their culture, safe. “In its emphasis on Black imagination, creation and liberation, the movie becomes an emblem of a past that was denied and a future that feels very present,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The Times. “And in doing so opens up its world, and yours, beautifully.”SaturdayTHE SNAKE PIT (1948) 8:30 p.m. on TCM. Virginia Cunningham (Olivia de Havilland) wakes up in a mental hospital, with no recollection of how she ended up there and an inability to recognize her husband, Robert (Mark Stevens). The film follows Victoria as she attempts to regain her memory with the help of Dr. Mark Kik (Leo Genn).SundayFrom left: Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon, Kristen Wiig and Leslie Jones in “Ghostbusters.”Sony Pictures Entertainment, via Associated PressGHOSTBUSTERS (2016) 8:30 p.m. on Syfy. In this reboot of the science fiction comedy franchise, a transit worker (Leslie Jones) contacts three paranormal physicists (Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig and Kate McKinnon) after she encountered a ghost in a subway terminal. The four women band together to fight off the ghosts that have invaded New York City. It is “a movie that is a lot of enjoyable, disposable fun,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The Times. “It’s a lot like the old ‘Ghostbusters,’ except that it stars four funny women instead of, you know, four funny men.” More

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      Winter Movies 2022: Here’s What’s Coming Soon to Streaming and Theaters

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      The season’s gifts include long-awaited sequels to “Black Panther” and “Knives Out” and intriguing originals like “Women Talking” and “The Fabelmans.”This is a select list of films opening by the end of the year. Release dates are subject to change and reflect the latest information as of deadline.FALLING FOR CHRISTMAS A skiing accident results in amnesia (and, presumably, the possibility of a fresh start) for a vain hotel heiress (Lindsay Lohan). (Nov. 10 on Netflix)BAR FIGHT! Following a breakup, a couple (Melissa Fumero and Luka Jones) have to decide which one will be allowed to drink in their favorite bar. With Rachel Bloom. (Nov. 11 in theaters and on demand)BLACK PANTHER: WAKANDA FOREVER After Chadwick Boseman’s death in 2020, Marvel Studios opted not to recast his role, King T’Challa, in this sequel to “Black Panther.” The character is dead in the new film, which concerns how Wakanda moves forward without him. It also stars Angela Bassett, Letitia Wright, Danai Gurira and Lupita Nyong’o. Ryan Coogler returns as director. (Nov. 11 in theaters)A COUPLE In a career that includes more than 40 documentaries, Frederick Wiseman has seldom made features that could qualify as dramatized. But in “A Couple,” the actress Nathalie Boutefeu, who shares screenplay credit with the director, plays Sophia Tolstoy, wife of Leo Tolstoy. The film draws on Sophia’s writings to explore a famous marriage. (Nov. 11 in theaters)THE FABELMANS Through the character of Sammy Fabelman, Steven Spielberg revisits his childhood, his relationship with his mother and father, and the origins of his love of filmmaking in an openly personal feature that was ecstatically received at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. Gabriel LaBelle plays the budding director in his teenage years; Michelle Williams and Paul Dano play his complicated parents. Tony Kushner wrote the screenplay with Spielberg. (Nov. 11 in theaters)From left, Keeley Karsten, Sophia Kopera, Michelle Williams and Gabriel LaBelle are stand-ins for Steven Spielberg’s family in “The Fabelmans.”Universal Pictures and Amblin EntertainmentIN HER HANDS The documentarians Tamana Ayazi and Marcel Mettelsiefen assemble a portrait of Zarifa Ghafari, the mayor of the Afghan city of Maidan Shahr at the time of filming — and, not incidentally, in her 20s and a woman in a country without many women in power. The documentary follows her through American forces’ withdrawal from the country last year. (Nov. 11 in theaters, Nov. 16 on Netflix)IS THAT BLACK ENOUGH FOR YOU?!? Making his documentary-feature directing debut, the former New York Times film critic Elvis Mitchell looks at the revolution in — and legacy of — Black-centered American filmmaking in the late 1960s and ’70s. The interviewees include Harry Belafonte, Laurence Fishburne, Samuel L. Jackson and Whoopi Goldberg. (Nov. 11 on Netflix)MY FATHER’S DRAGON Ruth Stiles Gannett’s 1948 children’s book — about a boy who ventures off to rescue a baby dragon — becomes an animated film directed by Nora Twomey, of the Oscar-nominated “The Breadwinner.” (Nov. 11 on Netflix)NOTHING LASTS FOREVER The documentarian Jason Kohn (“Manda Bala”) presents an exposé of how synthetic diamonds have infiltrated the market for gems, and how the concept of authenticity may be losing whatever meaning it had. (Nov. 11 in theaters)RETROGRADE Matthew Heineman (“Cartel Land”) directed this documentary on the end of the war in Afghanistan. Events are seen from the vantage points of American and Afghan soldiers and through the eyes of civilians. (Nov. 11 in theaters)SAM & KATE The real-life father and son Dustin Hoffman and Jake Hoffman and the real-life mother and daughter Sissy Spacek and Schuyler Fisk play father and son and mother and daughter onscreen. The son and the daughter — the titular Sam and Kate — fall for each other. So do the parents. (Nov. 11 in theaters)SPIRITED Sure, “A Christmas Carol” might seem like a timeless story. But what if it wasn’t? What if Charles Dickens made a mistake by focusing on Scrooge, instead of the ghosts who visit him? The “Greatest Showman” songwriters Benj Pasek and Justin Paul rectify that error in this new musical comedy. Will Ferrell plays the Ghost of Christmas Present and Ryan Reynolds the movie’s Scrooge surrogate, Clint Briggs. Sean Anders directed. (Nov. 11 in theaters, Nov. 18 on Apple TV+)Ryan Reynolds and Will Ferrell give Dickens a twist in “Spirited.”AppleMEMORIES OF MY FATHER Fernando Trueba directed this adaptation of a book by the Colombian novelist Héctor Abad Faciolince, about the author’s father (played by Javier Cámara), a doctor engaged in political activism in the 1970s. (Nov. 16 in theaters)Javier Cámara in “Memories of My Father.”via Cohen Media Group POKER FACE Russell Crowe directs himself as a tech titan who seeks revenge on some old friends he invites to the card table. Liam Hemsworth, RZA and Elsa Pataky also star. (Nov. 16 in theaters, Nov. 22 on demand)THE WONDER When an 11-year-old girl in the Irish Midlands seems to live for months without eating food, a British nurse (Florence Pugh) investigates. Sebastián Lelio (“A Fantastic Woman”) directed this adaptation, set in the 19th century, of a novel by the “Room” author Emma Donoghue. (Nov. 16 on Netflix)BANTÚ MAMA A Frenchwoman becomes a surrogate parent to children in the Dominican Republic after escaping arrest. Ivan Herrera directed. (Nov. 17 in theaters and on Netflix)A CHRISTMAS STORY CHRISTMAS Nearly four decades after “A Christmas Story,” Peter Billingsley reprises his role as Ralphie. The boy who wanted an air rifle for the holiday is now a father himself in this sequel. (Nov. 17 on HBO Max)CHRISTMAS WITH YOU Aimee Garcia plays a pop singer who ends up stranded in a snowstorm at the house of a fan and her single father (Freddie Prinze Jr.). (Nov. 17 on Netflix)BAD AXE That’s Bad Axe, Mich., where the documentarian David Siev’s parents, one a survivor of the Khmer Rouge regime, own a restaurant and must grapple with the economic realities of the pandemic and the protests that convulse the city in the wake of the George Floyd killing. (Nov. 18 in theaters and on demand)A scene from “Bad Axe,” centered on the title Michigan city amid the pandemic and racial justice protests.IFC FilmsBONES AND ALL If you enjoyed the picturesque alfresco dining in Luca Guadagnino’s “Call Me by Your Name,” you might want to excuse yourself from his gory latest film, based on the novel by Camille DeAngelis. Taylor Russell plays a teenage cannibal abandoned by her father (André Holland); Timothée Chalamet is a fellow brooding people-eater who catches her scent. On the road, they navigate a cruel world that spits out people who eat people. With Mark Rylance and a barely recognizable Michael Stuhlbarg. (Nov. 18 in theaters)DISENCHANTED After Giselle (Amy Adams) finds a storybook life in New York in “Enchanted,” many years later the bloom is off the rose. So she and her husband (Patrick Dempsey) move to the suburbs. With Maya Rudolph. Adam Shankman directed. (Nov. 18 on Disney+)In “Disenchanted,” Amy Adams returns as Giselle, the animated heroine trying to navigate live action.DisneyEO The Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski riffs, with a bit of a hallucinatory spin, on Robert Bresson’s French classic “Au Hasard Balthazar” with the tale of an itinerant donkey who along its journeys becomes a passive witness to human cruelty. When Skolimowski shared the jury prize at Cannes, he thanked all six donkeys who played the role. (Nov. 18 in theaters)FLAMING EARS This underground sci-feature feature, receiving a belated release three decades after its completion, takes place in the year 2700 in a city entirely populated by lesbians. There are three directors: Ursula Pürrer, A. Hans Scheirl and Dietmar Schipek. (Nov. 18 in theaters)THE INSPECTION For his first dramatic feature, Elegance Bratton, who has worked as a documentarian and street photographer, wrote and directed this autobiographically inspired film about a gay Black man’s time in basic training in the Marines, and the homophobia in an environment where enlistees expect to be terrorized. Jeremy Pope plays Bratton’s alter ego, with Raúl Castillo as a sympathetic superior, Bokeem Woodbine as a sergeant and Gabrielle Union as the protagonist’s mother. (Nov. 18 in theaters)LOVE, CHARLIE Wolfgang Puck, Emeril Lagasse and Grant Achatz are among the chefs who discuss the influential Chicago restaurateur Charlie Trotter in this documentary. (Nov. 18 in theaters and on demand)Alex Bakri and Juna Suleiman in “Let it Be Morning.”Cohen Media GroupTHE MENU Mark Mylod, a regular director on “Succession,” is at the helm of this class satire, in which a supercilious gourmand (Nicholas Hoult) and his date (Anya Taylor-Joy) travel to an island for an evening of rarefied cuisine. But the chef (Ralph Fiennes) has a gruesome concept in store. (Nov. 18 in theaters)200 METERS A Palestinian construction worker trying to visit his son at an Israeli hospital is refused exit from the West Bank. He resorts to great lengths to go 200 meters. Ameen Nayfeh wrote and directed. (Nov. 18 in theaters, Dec. 6 on demand)THE PEOPLE WE HATE AT THE WEDDING Nuptials become the occasion for an airing of intrafamilial loathing and reconciliation in a comedy that stars Kristen Bell and Ben Platt as siblings and Allison Janney as the matriarch. (Nov. 18 on Amazon)SCROOGE: A CHRISTMAS CAROL This animated musical version of Dickens’s book features the voices of Luke Evans, Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley. The music and lyrics are by Leslie Bricusse (“Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory”), who died last year. (Nov. 18 in theaters, Dec. 2 on Netflix)SHE SAID The New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s book on how they reported their landmark article about sexual harassment by Harvey Weinstein gets a film adaptation. Zoe Kazan plays Kantor and Carey Mulligan plays Twohey as they try to convince women to talk on the record. Maria Schrader directed. (Nov. 18 in theaters)SLUMBERLAND The “Red Sparrow” filmmaker Francis Lawrence directs Jason Momoa as an outlaw in a fairy tale of sorts in which he assists a girl navigating a dream world. (Nov. 18 on Netflix)SR. Robert Downey Jr. pays tribute to his father, the underground filmmaker Robert Downey Sr. (“Putney Swope”), in a candid and personal documentary. Chris Smith directed. (Nov. 18 in theaters, Dec. 2 on Netflix)TAURUS Tim Sutton directs Colson Baker, the rapper better known as Machine Gun Kelly, as a musical artist seeking inspiration and facing problems. Megan Fox also stars. (Nov. 18 in theaters and on demand)THERE THERE Working under pandemic restrictions, Andrew Bujalski (“Support the Girls”) makes a film that consists entirely of conversations; it’s best not to say any more. Lili Taylor and Lennie James play a couple whose post-one-night-stand discourse kicks off the movie; Molly Gordon and Jason Schwartzman appear elsewhere. (Nov. 18 in theaters and on demand)ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED Laura Poitras (an Oscar winner for “Citizenfour”) directed this look at the career of the photographer Nan Goldin, with an emphasis on Goldin’s recent work as an activist to hold the Sackler family, longtime owners of Purdue Pharma, to account for the opioid epidemic. The documentary won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival in September. (Nov. 23 in theaters)Nan Goldin with a roommate in a scene from “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.”Nan GoldinDEVOTION Jonathan Majors stars as Ensign Jesse L. Brown, the first Black aviator in the United States Navy, and Glen Powell — barely out of the skies since “Top Gun: Maverick” — plays Lt. Thomas J. Hudner Jr., his partner on a dangerous mission during the Korean War. J.D. Dillard directed. (Nov. 23 in theaters)GLASS ONION: A KNIVES OUT MYSTERY The detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) receives an invitation to the private island of an eccentric billionaire (Edward Norton), who wants the guests to solve his own murder. And that’s just the start of the writer-director Rian Johnson’s vertiginously clever sequel to “Knives Out” (2019). Janelle Monáe, Kate Hudson and Dave Bautista also star. (Nov. 23 in theaters, Dec. 23 on Netflix)It’s another star-studded “Knives Out” mystery, this time with, from left, Edward Norton, Madelyn Cline, Kathryn Hahn, Dave Bautista, Leslie Odom Jr., Jessica Henwick, Kate Hudson, Janelle Monáe and Daniel Craig.Netflix, via Associated PressLADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER This time, Emma Corrin embodies D.H. Lawrence’s unfulfilled British noblewoman. Jack O’Connell plays the gamekeeper she takes up with. Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre directed. (Nov. 23 in theaters, Dec. 2 on Netflix)NANNY Nikyatu Jusu’s debut feature, the winner of this year’s United States dramatic competition at Sundance, concerns a Senegalese immigrant (Anna Diop) who takes a job as a nanny for a wealthy white family. During the festival, Manohla Dargis wrote that the film kept her “rapt from the start with its visuals and mysteries, its emotional depths and the tight control” maintained by Jusu. (Nov. 23 in theaters, Dec. 16 on Amazon)Anna Diop plays a Senegalese immigrant struggling to adjust to working for a wealthy white American family in “Nanny.”Blumhouse ProductionsSTRANGE WORLD Disney pays tribute to 1950s science fiction movies with an animated feature about the Clade family, a clan of explorers investigating an uncharted region. Jake Gyllenhaal, Dennis Quaid and Gabrielle Union provide some of the Clades’ voices. (Nov. 23 in theaters)THE SWIMMERS Sally El Hosaini directed the opening-night film at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, a dramatization of the story of Yusra and Sarah Mardini, two sisters from Syria who used their skills as swimmers to help lead a boat filled with fellow refugees to safety during their flight from the country. Yusra competed on the Refugee Olympic Team at the 2016 Olympics. (Nov. 23 on Netflix)THE CHRISTMAS CLAPBACK Robin Givens directed this story of three sisters facing a challenge from an influencer in a holiday church cook-off. Nadine Ellis, Porscha Coleman and Candace Maxwell star. (Nov. 24 on BET+)THE NOEL DIARY The diary in question belongs to the dead mother of a successful author (Justin Hartley). But it might also help a stranger (Barrett Doss) he meets. Charles Shyer directed. (Nov. 24 on Netflix)GHISLAINE MAXWELL: FILTHY RICH Picking up from the Netflix documentary series “Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich,” this documentary turns to Maxwell, his convicted co-conspirator, who was found guilty last year of sex trafficking minors. (Nov. 25 on Netflix)GUILLERMO DEL TORO’S PINOCCHIO The “Nightmare Alley” filmmaker, who shares directing credit (if not the title) with the animation director Mark Gustafson, mounts a stop-motion version of the story of the puppet who became a boy. Gregory Mann, Ewan McGregor and Tilda Swinton are in the vocal cast. (Nov. 25 in theaters, Dec. 9 on Netflix)LEONOR WILL NEVER DIE A.O. Scott called this reality-blurring Filipino feature — centered on a retired screenwriter (Sheila Francisco) of action movies — “wonderfully unclassifiable” when it played at the Sundance Film Festival. Martika Ramirez Escobar directed. (Nov. 25 in theaters)Rocky Salumbides in “Leonor Will Never Die,” about a retired Filipino screenwriter who specialized in action movies.Carlos Mauricio/Music Box FilmsTHE SON If the playwright Florian Zeller’s first feature, “The Father,” which won Anthony Hopkins an Oscar, dealt with dementia, the ailment driving the drama in his latest film is depression — specifically, that of a teenager (Zen McGrath), whose condition vexes his father (Hugh Jackman), his father’s partner (Vanessa Kirby) and his mother (Laura Dern). (Nov. 25 in theaters)WHITE NOISE When Noah Baumbach’s screen version of Don DeLillo’s 1985 postmodern novel opened the New York Film Festival in September, A.O. Scott called it a “faithful and energetic adaptation.” Adam Driver plays a pathbreaking professor in the field of “Hitler studies”; Greta Gerwig is his wife, who may be experiencing strange memory lapses. Together with children from other marriages and one from their own, they confront environmental disaster and their fear of mortality against a colorful backdrop of ’80s logos. (Nov. 25 in theaters, Dec. 30 on Netflix)From left, the “White Noise” clan includes Sam Nivola, Adam Driver, May Nivola, Greta Gerwig, Raffey Cassidy, and the youngest, played by Dean and Henry Moore.Wilson Webb/NetflixA HOLLYWOOD CHRISTMAS A director (Jessika Van) realizes her life has turned into a Christmas movie and that she will be forced to run a gantlet of clichés. (Dec. 1 on HBO Max)ROLLING INTO CHRISTMAS The holiday brings together two people who 15 years earlier had a thing for each other and for roller skating. Rhyon Nicole Brown and Donny Carrington star. (Dec. 1 on BET+)CHRISTMAS WITH THE CAMPBELLS Vince Vaughn is among the screenwriters of this comedy, in which a recently dumped girlfriend is pressed into spending the holiday with her ex’s family anyway. Brittany Snow and Justin Long star. (Dec. 2 in theaters and on AMC+)DARBY AND THE DEAD A teenager (Riele Downs) who can communicate with the dead is pressured by a recently departed mean girl (Auli’i Cravalho of “Moana”) to make sure that the dead girl’s 17th-birthday party proceeds, despite her lack of a pulse. (Dec. 2 on Hulu)DIARY OF A WIMPY KID: RODRICK RULES Already adapted into a live-action feature in 2011, the second book in Jeff Kinney’s “Wimpy Kid” franchise gets an animated version. (Dec. 2 on Disney+)EMANCIPATION Will Smith, in a movie filmed before his Oscar win (and that other incident), plays an enslaved man who escapes and has to avoid capture on treacherous Louisiana terrain en route to freedom. Historic photographs of a man known as Whipped Peter, who made it to Baton Rouge and joined the Union Army, inspired the film. (Dec. 2 in theaters, Dec. 9 on Apple TV+)THE ETERNAL DAUGHTER In a loose spinoff of her films “The Souvenir” and “The Souvenir Part II,” Joanna Hogg casts Tilda Swinton in dual roles: as Hogg’s alter ego, the filmmaker Julie (played in the “Souvenir” movies by Swinton’s daughter, Honor Swinton Byrne), and as Julie’s mother (whom Swinton played in the earlier films). Julie struggles to write a screenplay about her mother while they spend time at a vaguely haunted hotel. (Dec. 2 in theaters)FOUR SAMOSAS The comedian Venk Potula plays a jilted boyfriend who tries to purloin his ex’s dowry to foil her wedding. (Dec. 2 in theaters and on demand)FRAMING AGNES Using the story of Agnes, a transgender woman who took part in studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the 1960s, as a jumping-off point, this combination of documentary and dramatization examines how trans history is written. (Dec. 2 in theaters)HUNT The “Squid Game” actor Lee Jung-jae directed this thriller and stars in it as the head of a government agency who, along with the head of another agency (Jung Woo-sung), has to ferret out a mole. (Dec. 2 in theaters and on demand)LOWNDES COUNTY AND THE ROAD TO BLACK POWER The documentarians Sam Pollard (“MLK/FBI”) and Geeta Gandbhir revisit the work done by activists in Lowndes County, Ala., in the 1960s to ensure that the county’s majority-Black population wasn’t denied the right to vote. (Dec. 2 in theaters)2ND CHANCE Turning to documentaries, Ramin Bahrani — nominated for an adapted screenplay Oscar for “The White Tiger” — examines the legacy of Richard Davis, who devised the contemporary version of the bulletproof vest. (Dec. 2 in theaters)SPOILER ALERT Michael Showalter, who mined thematically similar territory in “The Big Sick,” directed this adaptation of Michael Ausiello’s memoir of a longtime relationship altered by a terminal illness. Jim Parsons, Ben Aldridge and Sally Field star. (Dec. 2 in theaters)TANTURA This documentary from Alon Schwartz has been the subject of controversy in Israel. Taking the graduate thesis of an Israeli named Teddy Katz as a jumping-off point, it amasses evidence of a massacre by Israeli soldiers at what was then the Palestinian village of Tantura in 1948. (Dec. 2 in theaters)VIOLENT NIGHT David Harbour stars as Santa Claus, who is fortunately making his rounds when mercenaries attempt a home invasion. (Dec. 2 in theaters)David Harbour is a Santa with skills and John Leguizamo is among his adversaries in “Violent Night.”Universal PicturesWOMEN TALKING While most of the men of a religious colony are briefly away, the women, including many who have been sexually assaulted by the men, debate whether to leave or stay and try to fight. Sarah Polley directed and wrote the screenplay for this starkly shot, ultra-widescreen adaptation of Miriam Toews’s novel. The formidable cast includes Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, Frances McDormand and Ben Whishaw. (Dec. 2 in theaters)In “Women Talking,” the debaters include, from left, Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Judith Ivey, Sheila McCarthy, Michelle McLeod and Jessie Buckley. Michael Gibson/Orion ReleasingBROADWAY RISING This documentary from Amy Rice follows the efforts it took to reopen Broadway theaters in September 2021 after they went dark for a year and a half because of the pandemic. (Dec. 5 in theaters)LOUDMOUTH The life and activism of the Rev. Al Sharpton are explored in a documentary that examines his decades of influence in New York and beyond. (Dec. 9 in theaters)ROALD DAHL’S MATILDA THE MUSICAL The stage musical version of Dahl’s novel gets the screen treatment (with the same director, Matthew Warchus). Alisha Weir plays the title character and Lashana Lynch the warmhearted Miss Honey. Emma Thompson — whose fat suit has already prompted chatter over questions of representation — plays the gorgonlike Miss Trunchbull. (Dec. 9 in theaters, Dec. 25 on Netflix)Emma Thompson takes over as Miss Trunchbull in the film adaptation of the “Matilda” Broadway musical.Dan Smith/NetflixSOMETHING FROM TIFFANY’S “And I said, ‘What about ‘Something From Tiffany’s’?” Zoey Deutch stars in a comedy about an errant engagement ring. Daryl Wein directed. (Dec. 9 on Amazon)THE VOLCANO: RESCUE FROM WHAKAARI Rory Kennedy, the documentarian who earlier this year made a case (or, rather, a movie) against Boeing, memorializes a deadly volcanic eruption that occurred in New Zealand in 2019. (Dec. 9 in theaters, Dec. 16 on Netflix)THE WHALE Brendan Fraser stars in this comeback role as a grieving, shut-in English teacher whose immense weight and refusal to seek medical treatment ensure that he won’t have long to live. But he tries to mend things with his daughter (Sadie Sink) when she unexpectedly turns up. Hong Chau also stars. Darren Aronofsky directed; Samuel D. Hunter wrote the script, based on his play. (Dec. 9 in theaters)THE ALMOND AND THE SEAHORSE The directors Tom Stern and Celyn Jones’s drama follows two couples — one played by Trine Dyrholm and Charlotte Gainsbourg, the other by Jones and Rebel Wilson. One member of each pair has a traumatic brain injury that affects the memory. (Dec. 16 in theaters and on demand)THE APOLOGY Anna Gunn of “Breaking Bad” plays an alcoholic stranded by a winter storm with a former brother-in-law (Linus Roache). (Dec. 16 in theaters, on AMC+ and on Shudder)AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER James Cameron, who tends to do pretty well when he makes sequels (“Aliens,” “Terminator 2: Judgment Day”), returns to Pandora. (Dec. 16 in theaters)I WANNA DANCE WITH SOMEBODY Naomi Ackie stars as Whitney Houston in this biopic of the soaring-voiced pop star. Stanley Tucci plays the architect of her career Clive Davis, who is one of the movie’s producers. Kasi Lemmons directed, from a screenplay by Mr. Biopic, Anthony McCarten (“Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Darkest Hour,” “The Theory of Everything”). (Dec. 21 in theaters)Whitney Houston gets the biopic treatment in “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” starring Naomi Ackie.Sony PicturesPUSS IN BOOTS: THE LAST WISH Antonio Banderas once again lends his voice to the footwear’d feline — not the fairy-tale character, exactly, but a part of the extended “Shrek” cinematic universe. Olivia Colman and Salma Hayek purr alongside him. (Dec. 21 in theaters)BABYLON The writer-director Damien Chazelle returns to Hollywood to imagine various dramas that might have unfolded during the transition to sound. Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie and Diego Calva are among the stars vamping through it. (Dec. 23 in theaters)CORSAGE Technically, in 1878, Empress Elisabeth of Austria (Vicky Krieps) could not have heard “As Tears Go By” with a harp as instrumentation — or, for that matter, been photographed as a movie subject on flexible film. (This was still the era of plates.) But these sorts of anachronisms crop up periodically throughout the director Marie Kreutzer’s interpretation of Elisabeth’s life. (Dec. 23 in theaters)LET IT BE MORNING A Palestinian man returns to the village of his upbringing for a wedding, and he is trapped there, with the rest of the residents, when Israeli forces blockade the area. Eran Kolirin directed this adaptation of a novel by Sayed Kashua. (Dec. 23 in theaters)LIVING The director Oliver Hermanus and the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, serving here as the screenwriter, remake Akira Kurosawa’s “Ikiru” in an idiom not wildly removed from that of Ishiguro’s “The Remains of the Day.” Bill Nighy plays a postwar civil servant in London whose great ambition, after receiving a terminal diagnosis, is to build a playground. Aimee Lou Wood and Tom Burke co-star. (Dec. 23 in theaters)NO BEARS In July, the filmmaker Jafar Panahi was detained by Iranian authorities and ordered to serve a six-year prison sentence after he sought information about the arrest of another filmmaker, Mohammad Rasoulof. Panahi had already been forbidden to leave the country, and in “No Bears,” he plays on that idea, starring as a version of himself: a filmmaker who has traveled to a tight-knit town near the Turkish border so that he can remotely direct a feature being shot in Turkey. (Dec. 23 in theaters)THE PALE BLUE EYE Adapted from the novel by Louis Bayard and set against the backdrop of Edgar Allan Poe’s formative years at West Point, “The Pale Blue Eye” finds the future “Raven” poet in the middle of a mystery. Harry Melling plays Poe, Christian Bale is a detective, and Gillian Anderson and Lucy Boynton co-star. Scott Cooper (“Black Mass”) directed. (Dec. 23 in theaters)A MAN CALLED OTTO Tom Hanks plays a curmudgeon who thaws a bit when he meets a new neighbor. Mariana Treviño also stars. Marc Forster directed this adaptation of the novel “A Man Called Ove.” (Dec. 25 in theaters)BROKER The Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda, who won the Palme d’Or for “Shoplifters” (2018), went to South Korea to make his latest feature. It follows two traffickers who steal infants from safe-haven drop spots and sell them to couples struggling with the official adoption process. But one mother comes back. Song Kang Ho won best actor at Cannes for his portrayal of a trafficker. (Dec. 26 in theaters)ALICE, DARLING Anna Kendrick plays a woman who, during a getaway with friends, realizes to what extent her boyfriend has psychologically abused and restricted her. Mary Nighy directed. (Dec. 30 in theaters)TURN EVERY PAGE Don’t ask Robert A. Caro when he’s going to finish the fifth volume of his Lyndon Johnson biography. Everyone wants to know, including his longtime editor, Robert Gottlieb. The men’s work together from “The Power Broker” on is the subject of this documentary, directed by Gottlieb’s daughter, Lizzie. (Dec. 30 in theaters)Compiled with the assistance of Shivani Gonzalez.The literary lions Robert A. Caro, left, and Robert Gottlieb share the screen in “Turn Every Page.”Sony More

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      in Theater

      Douglas McGrath, Playwright, Filmmaker and Actor, Is Dead at 64

      by

      His one-man Off Broadway show, “Everything’s Fine,” directed by John Lithgow, had opened just weeks ago.Douglas McGrath, a playwright, screenwriter, director and actor who was nominated for an Oscar, an Emmy and a Tony Award, and whose one-man Off Broadway show, “Everything’s Fine,” opened just weeks ago, died on Thursday at his office in Manhattan. He was 64.His death was announced by the show’s producers, Daryl Roth, Tom Werner and John Lithgow. Their representative said the cause was a heart attack.Mr. Lithgow also directed the show, a childhood recollection of Mr. McGrath’s about a middle-school teacher in Texas who gave him an inappropriate amount of attention.“He was a dream to direct,” Mr. Lithgow said on Friday. “None of us had ever worked with someone who was so happy, proud and grateful to be performing his own writing.”Mr. McGrath in his one-man play “Everything’s Fine,” which opened Off Broadway last month to good reviews.Jeremy DanielMr. McGrath had a wide-ranging if under-the-radar career in television, film and theater. In the 1980-81 season, just out of Princeton and still in his early 20s, he was a writer for “Saturday Night Live.” Over the next decade he wrote humor pieces for The New Republic, The New York Times and other publications.By the 1990s he was making inroads in Hollywood. He wrote the screenplay for the 1993 remake of the 1950 romantic comedy “Born Yesterday,” and the next year he and Woody Allen collaborated on the script for Mr. Allen’s “Bullets Over Broadway.” The two shared an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay.In 1996 he adapted the Jane Austen novel “Emma” for the big screen and also directed the film, which starred Gwyneth Paltrow. In 2000 he and Peter Askin shared directing and screenwriting duties on the comedy “Company Man,” in which he also starred, as a schoolteacher who stumbles into a career as a C.I.A. officer.That movie drew some unflattering reviews. But his next, “Nicholas Nickleby” (2002), an adaptation of the Dickens story that he both wrote and directed, was well received. In The Times, A.O. Scott said that Mr. McGrath’s adaptation was rendered “with a scholar’s ear and a showman’s flair.”“The director has produced a colorful, affecting collage of Dickensian moods and motifs,” Mr. Scott wrote, “a movie that elicits an overwhelming desire to plunge into 900 pages of 19th-century prose.”Mr. McGrath, center, on the set of his film “Nicholas Nickleby” (2002), with the cast members Barry Humphries, left, and Alan Cumming.United Artists, via AlamyIn addition to his screenwriting and directing credits (which also included “Infamous,” a 2006 film starring Toby Jones as Truman Capote), Mr. McGrath occasionally took small acting roles in other people’s projects, including several of Mr. Allen’s films. In 2016 he directed “Becoming Mike Nichols,” an HBO documentary about the film director, on which he was also an executive producer. He shared an Emmy nomination with the other producers for outstanding documentary or nonfiction special.Throughout, he continued to work in the theater. In 1996 he wrote and starred in “Political Animal,” a one-man comedy that played at the McGinn/Cazale Theater in Manhattan, in which he played a right-wing presidential candidate.“Beyond the stand-up parody,” Ben Brantley wrote in his review in The Times, “the larger point of ‘Political Animal’ is that it takes a hollow, desperate man to run for president these days.”In 2012 his play “Checkers” — the title refers to a famous 1952 speech by Richard M. Nixon — was seen at the Vineyard Theater in Manhattan, with Anthony LaPaglia as Nixon and Kathryn Erbe as his wife, Pat.Then came Broadway: Mr. McGrath wrote the book for “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical,” which opened in January 2014 and ran for more than five years. His book was nominated for a Tony Award.Last month Mr. Lithgow told The Daily News of New York that Mr. McGrath had sent him “Everything’s Fine” unsolicited, and that he had no intention of directing a play until he read the piece.“It was so play-able,” he said, “I could simply imagine an audience being completely captivated by it.”The show opened in mid-October to good reviews.“It is impossible to overstate Doug’s pure likability,” Mr. Lithgow said on Friday. “In his solo show, he told a long story about his 14th year, and it worked so well because he had retained so much of his sense of boyish discovery.”Ms. Roth, another of the show’s producers, said that Mr. McGrath had been thoroughly enjoying the way audiences were reacting as he unspooled the tale.“The wonderful response from the audience was cathartic, meaningful and joyful to him,” she said by email. “He often told me he was in his ‘happy place’ onstage telling his story.”Mr. McGrath on the set of “Infamous,” his 2006 film about Truman Capote.Van Redin/Warner Independent, via Kobal, via ShutterstockDouglas Geoffrey McGrath was born on Feb. 2, 1958, in Midland, Texas. His father, Raynsford, was an independent oil producer, and his mother, Beatrice (Burchenal) McGrath, worked at Harper’s Bazaar before her marriage.“People often ask me what growing up in West Texas was like,” Mr. McGrath said in “Everything’s Fine.” “I think this sums it up: It’s very hot, it’s very dusty, and it’s very, very windy. It’s like growing up inside a blow dryer full of dirt.”He graduated from Princeton in 1980.“Planning my future,” he wrote in a 2001 essay in The Times, “I had a very clear idea of what I wanted to do, but a very blurry one of how to do it. I knew I wanted to write and perform in my own films in the manner of my idol, Woody Allen. But when I went, that once, to the Career Counseling Center and faced the bulletin board, none of the cards said, ‘Needed: writer-actor-director for major feature, no experience required, must be willing to earn high salary.’”Yet when a friend told him “S.N.L.” was hiring writers, he sent in some sketches and landed an $850-a-week job.“It seemed too good to be true,” he wrote. “It was. My year, 1980, was viewed then and still as the worst year in the show’s history, which is no small achievement when you think of some of the other years.”In a 2016 interview, Mr. McGrath said his disappointment with the way his screenplay for “Born Yesterday” was handled changed the direction of his career.“I remember thinking, well, if I don’t want to spend the rest of my life doing this, meaning watching someone else muck up what I did, there’s only one way around that,” he said. “I have to become a director.”Mr. McGrath, who lived in Manhattan, married Jane Read Martin in 1995. She survives him, as do a son, Henry; a sister, Mary McGrath Abrams; and a brother, Alexander. More

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      in Movies

      Douglas McGrath, Playwright, Filmmaker and Actor, Dies at 64

      by

      His one-man Off Broadway show, “Everything’s Fine,” directed by John Lithgow, had opened just weeks ago.Douglas McGrath, a playwright, screenwriter, director and actor who was nominated for an Oscar, an Emmy and a Tony Award, and whose one-man Off Broadway show, “Everything’s Fine,” opened just weeks ago, died on Thursday at his office in Manhattan. He was 64.His death was announced by the show’s producers, Daryl Roth, Tom Werner and John Lithgow. Their representative said the cause was a heart attack.Mr. Lithgow also directed the show, a childhood recollection of Mr. McGrath’s about a middle-school teacher in Texas who gave him an inappropriate amount of attention.“He was a dream to direct,” Mr. Lithgow said on Friday. “None of us had ever worked with someone who was so happy, proud and grateful to be performing his own writing.”Mr. McGrath in his one-man play “Everything’s Fine,” which opened Off Broadway last month to good reviews.Jeremy DanielMr. McGrath had a wide-ranging if under-the-radar career in television, film and theater. In the 1980-81 season, just out of Princeton and still in his early 20s, he was a writer for “Saturday Night Live.” Over the next decade he wrote humor pieces for The New Republic, The New York Times and other publications.By the 1990s he was making inroads in Hollywood. He wrote the screenplay for the 1993 remake of the 1950 romantic comedy “Born Yesterday,” and the next year he and Woody Allen collaborated on the script for Mr. Allen’s “Bullets Over Broadway.” The two shared an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay.In 1996 he adapted the Jane Austen novel “Emma” for the big screen and also directed the film, which starred Gwyneth Paltrow. In 2000 he and Peter Askin shared directing and screenwriting duties on the comedy “Company Man,” in which he also starred, as a schoolteacher who stumbles into a career as a C.I.A. officer.That movie drew some unflattering reviews. But his next, “Nicholas Nickleby” (2002), an adaptation of the Dickens story that he both wrote and directed, was well received. In The Times, A.O. Scott said that Mr. McGrath’s adaptation was rendered “with a scholar’s ear and a showman’s flair.”“The director has produced a colorful, affecting collage of Dickensian moods and motifs,” Mr. Scott wrote, “a movie that elicits an overwhelming desire to plunge into 900 pages of 19th-century prose.”Mr. McGrath, center, on the set of his film “Nicholas Nickleby” (2002), with the cast members Barry Humphries, left, and Alan Cumming.United Artists, via AlamyIn addition to his screenwriting and directing credits (which also included “Infamous,” a 2006 film starring Toby Jones as Truman Capote), Mr. McGrath occasionally took small acting roles in other people’s projects, including several of Mr. Allen’s films. In 2016 he directed “Becoming Mike Nichols,” an HBO documentary about the film director, on which he was also an executive producer. He shared an Emmy nomination with the other producers for outstanding documentary or nonfiction special.Throughout, he continued to work in the theater. In 1996 he wrote and starred in “Political Animal,” a one-man comedy that played at the McGinn/Cazale Theater in Manhattan, in which he played a right-wing presidential candidate.“Beyond the stand-up parody,” Ben Brantley wrote in his review in The Times, “the larger point of ‘Political Animal’ is that it takes a hollow, desperate man to run for president these days.”In 2012 his play “Checkers” — the title refers to a famous 1952 speech by Richard M. Nixon — was seen at the Vineyard Theater in Manhattan, with Anthony LaPaglia as Nixon and Kathryn Erbe as his wife, Pat.Then came Broadway: Mr. McGrath wrote the book for “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical,” which opened in January 2014 and ran for more than five years. His book was nominated for a Tony Award.Last month Mr. Lithgow told The Daily News of New York that Mr. McGrath had sent him “Everything’s Fine” unsolicited, and that he had no intention of directing a play until he read the piece.“It was so play-able,” he said, “I could simply imagine an audience being completely captivated by it.”The show opened in mid-October to good reviews.“It is impossible to overstate Doug’s pure likability,” Mr. Lithgow said on Friday. “In his solo show, he told a long story about his 14th year, and it worked so well because he had retained so much of his sense of boyish discovery.”Ms. Roth, another of the show’s producers, said that Mr. McGrath had been thoroughly enjoying the way audiences were reacting as he unspooled the tale.“The wonderful response from the audience was cathartic, meaningful and joyful to him,” she said by email. “He often told me he was in his ‘happy place’ onstage telling his story.”Mr. McGrath on the set of “Infamous,” his 2006 film about Truman Capote.Van Redin/Warner Independent, via Kobal, via ShutterstockDouglas Geoffrey McGrath was born on Feb. 2, 1958, in Midland, Texas. His father, Raynsford, was an independent oil producer, and his mother, Beatrice (Burchenal) McGrath, worked at Harper’s Bazaar before her marriage.“People often ask me what growing up in West Texas was like,” Mr. McGrath said in “Everything’s Fine.” “I think this sums it up: It’s very hot, it’s very dusty, and it’s very, very windy. It’s like growing up inside a blow dryer full of dirt.”He graduated from Princeton in 1980.“Planning my future,” he wrote in a 2001 essay in The Times, “I had a very clear idea of what I wanted to do, but a very blurry one of how to do it. I knew I wanted to write and perform in my own films in the manner of my idol, Woody Allen. But when I went, that once, to the Career Counseling Center and faced the bulletin board, none of the cards said, ‘Needed: writer-actor-director for major feature, no experience required, must be willing to earn high salary.’”Yet when a friend told him “S.N.L.” was hiring writers, he sent in some sketches and landed an $850-a-week job.“It seemed too good to be true,” he wrote. “It was. My year, 1980, was viewed then and still as the worst year in the show’s history, which is no small achievement when you think of some of the other years.”In a 2016 interview, Mr. McGrath said his disappointment with the way his screenplay for “Born Yesterday” was handled changed the direction of his career.“I remember thinking, well, if I don’t want to spend the rest of my life doing this, meaning watching someone else muck up what I did, there’s only one way around that,” he said. “I have to become a director.”Mr. McGrath, who lived in Manhattan, married Jane Reed Martin in 1995. She survives him, as do a son, Henry; a sister, Mary McGrath Abrams; and a brother, Alexander. More