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      What’s So Frightening About Identical Twins?

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      “The Silent Twins,” a new film starring Letitia Wright and Tamara Lawrance, sets out to show the complexity of twinship onscreen.Growing up in England and Wales in the 1970s, the identical twins June and Jennifer Gibbons spoke to each other all the time. They chattered and laughed, and whispered. They were prolific readers and wrote stories that showed great creative promise. They had ambitions to become famous authors.But throughout their childhood, they had experienced racist bullying at school, which became particularly bad in Haverfordwest, where they and their brother were the only Black students. They became selectively mute, a condition generally caused by severe anxiety. Eventually, they rarely spoke to anyone but each other.Later in their teenage years, this behavior, alongside incidents of petty theft and arson, would ultimately lead them to Broadmoor, one of the most notorious psychiatric hospitals in Britain, for nearly 12 years.Only one of them truly left the institution — Jennifer died of inflammation of the heart on the day of their release, at 29.Marjorie Wallace, the investigative journalist who first reported on the story of the twins in the 1980s and campaigned for their release from Broadmoor, wrote about them in her 1986 book, “The Silent Twins.”“I loved their sense of humor,” Wallace said. “Very ironic, very perceptive. They saw the funny side of everything, as well as the tragic.” She first met the twins when she was working as a journalist for The Sunday Times. Although they didn’t engage with her at first, she convinced them to speak to her by reading their writings: from Jennifer, for example, a novel titled “Discomania,” and from June, a novel titled “The Pepsi- Cola Addict,” alongside diaries and other texts.Wallace quickly realized that June and Jennifer had incredibly rich, complex worlds under the surface of their silence. “It’s a bit like deep-sea diving,” she said. “And you suddenly come across this Technicolor world that they wrote.”Over the years, June and Jennifer’s story has been used to sustain ongoing narratives about the dangers of twins that are often seen in films and on television. Think of the creepy twins in “The Shining,” for example, or a recent Netflix hit, “Echoes” (which presents its lead twin characters, who swap lives once a year unbeknown to their family and friends, as borderline psychopathic), where tropes of fascination, intrigue, fetish and horror abound.Leah Mondesir Simmons and Eva-Arianna Baxter in “The Silent Twins.”Jakub Kijowski/Focus Features“The Silent Twins,” a new movie about June and Jennifer starring Letitia Wright (“Black Panther”) and Tamara Lawrance (“Kindred”) as the teenage and adult twins, aims to buck this trend.Directed by Agnieszka Smoczynska (“The Lure”), the film hopes to capture the rich, tragic palette of the twins’ lives. It makes clever use of stop motion animation and original music inspired by their writings.“I wanted to tell this from their point of view, from the inside,” Smoczynska said. “And just to introduce them as beautiful, sensitive, very funny, intelligent sisters.” She was drawn to the story having grown up among a “constellation” of her mother’s sisters in Poland.“Their story has many, many layers; for me, it’s one of the most beautiful love stories, because it’s very dynamic,” she added. “And it ends with the act of love. That’s what June said after Jennifer died. That her sister sacrificed herself for her and freed her.”She spent weeks reading and discussing Wallace’s book and the sisters’ diaries, novels and poetry, alongside the cast and crew. “That’s why this movie is not only one genre,” Smoczynska said. “You have both psychological drama and fantastical elements because the same was in their writings. They were very complex in terms of form, and their descriptions.” Now, some of the twins’ novels and other writings are set to be professionally published for the first time.Wallace said it was a calculated choice to work with Andrea Seigel, who wrote the screenplay, and Smoczynska, who she felt would do justice to her reporting. “There have been many, many people who have come to me with synopses and scripts,” Wallace said. “One of them was about two white girls in Mississippi who were drug addicts and went to crazy raves.” Wallace worked as a consultant and co-producer on the film and is still close with June, who Wallace says gave her blessing to the film but is intent on living a private life.While Wallace said the new film is “not entirely maybe what I would have done” (she wrote the screenplay for the original BBC adaptation of her book in 1986), she described Wright and Lawrance’s portrayal of June and Jennifer as “remarkable.” “At some points in watching the film, I honestly thought I was back in Broadmoor,” she said, ‌highlighting a phrase June used while imagining that institution: “My sister and I, as vulnerable as flowers in hell.”Alongside reframing June and Jennifer’s lives and paying tribute to their acts of creativity, Wallace hopes that the film will have an impact on the portrayal of twins on film and TV in general.Lisa and Louise Burns in the 1980 film “The Shining,” directed by Stanley Kubrick.Warner Bros. Entertainment“If you look at the old movies, and in fact, any current movies, they either make twins out as evil killers or freaks,” said Wallace. “Or they make them comic, or they use their identical image to be able to manipulate and play havoc.”“It’s extraordinary that I haven’t really seen a film about twins which has represented the complexity and the depth of the love, the hate, the way of finding your own identity when you’re looking in the mirror all the time to see an identical person there,” she said. “Until now, maybe, with this current movie.”Joe Garrity, a filmmaker (and twin), said Wallace’s book was a “really foundational” text for him in learning about the range of twin relationships. His award-winning 2016 short film, “Twinsburg” tells the story of a pair of twins attending the (very real) annual Twins Day Festival in Twinsburg, Ohio, and grapples with the idea that, though they were raised to be inseparable, they have fundamental differences.“The more we can have depictions that examine those internalized identities that are given to us from others, the better,” he added. “The more people will feel seen and heard, even non-twins.”Lawrance and Wright, who are producers on “The Silent Twins,” became incredibly close during the course of the filming, staying up all night talking and planning their scenes, and even moving in next door to each other. Lawrance felt deep empathy for the sisters and said she knows what it’s like to feel voiceless because of her race and gender. “I can’t speak for everyone, but for me, as a Black woman, there have been many times in which I have felt isolated within an institution that was so much bigger than me.”For Wright, who was brought onto the project first and already knew of June and Jennifer’s story, she said it was important that she and Lawrance had creative control behind the scenes as the only Black women on the production team.The director “understood early on that she doesn’t have all the answers, she’s not a Black woman, so she was willing to listen, she was willing to learn from me and Tamara,” Wright said in an interview. “And immediately I told her, if I’m going to join this project, whoever’s going to play my twin, we have to have a seat at the table, we have to be executive producers or producers: pick one. We have to have a say because this is our story.”Lawrance and Wright worked intensively with movement and voice coaches to attempt to replicate the sisters’ behavior and appearance onscreen, despite looking nothing alike. They also spent a lot of time considering the differences in their characters. Wright views June as a “caged bird,” with the maturity to understand that the twins’ way of life couldn’t last forever, but had deep love and loyalty toward her sister.Lawrance thinks that Jennifer was more insecure than June, which made her slightly more obsessive. “Watching the documentary and reading the book, I really felt for Jennifer, because I felt like media coverage of the past depicts her as the evil twin,” she said. “The one that is possessing June.”Looking back, Lawrance saw how their differences came between them. “In her diaries, she writes, ‘I’ve got this scar on my nose. My sister is so beautiful.’ The admiration of the other was extreme, but also her finding her intolerable was also very extreme. There’s this amazing quote in her diary, where she says: ‘Cain killed Abel. No twin should forget that.’”Phil Garrity, left, and Joe Garrity in the film “Twinsburg,” directed by Joe Garrity.Drew DorseyJust as the stories of twins in mythology stretch back thousands of years, that film and TV will continue to be fascinated with twins is inevitable: Coming movies featuring twins include the horror “Goodnight Mommy,” and a comedy musical inspired by “The Parent Trap.” Could “The Silent Twins” have a small but lasting impact on their portrayal?Smoczynska reflected that after a screening, a mother came up to her, very moved, and said that she had gained a much greater understanding of her twins.“This is the reason why you make the movies,” Smoczynska said. “So that somebody can find himself or herself and understand life, and heal.” More

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      ‘Do Revenge’ Review: Strangers on a Text Chain

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      Two high school girls with grudges form a bond to get back at those who wronged them.“Do Revenge,” directed by Jennifer Kaytin Robinson, is a playful, sharp-fanged satire that feels like the ’90s teen comedy hammered into modern emojis: crown, knife, fire, winky face. Drea Torres (Camila Mendes) is the Machiavellian queen of her pastel plaid-clad prep school. But the day after the ambitious scholarship student is coronated as one of Teen Vogue’s ideal teens — an extravagant bash that slaps her face on balloons, cupcakes and topiaries — Drea is dethroned when her nude video is posted online.Drea’s ex-boyfriend Max (Austin Abrams) claims innocence and preserves his popularity by founding an allyship group called the Cis Hetero Men Championing Female Identifying Students League. She isn’t buying his act. Yet, in this performative modern era, as penned by Robinson and Celeste Ballard, Drea’s legitimate rage cannot be legitimately unleashed without risk of expulsion, scholastic and social.To expose Max’s hypocrisy, Drea enlists a timid outcast named Eleanor (Maya Hawke) to swap their revenge targets in a character assassination plot that riffs from mean girl icon Patricia Highsmith’s novel “Strangers on a Train.” (Highsmith goes uncited; the girls prefer the wrathful enthusiasm of Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction,” here called “Glennergy.”)The script has an ear for youth speak, a diction of hyper-compliments (Eleanor refers to Drea as her “revenge mommy”) and dizzying, dissembling accusations of bullying. While the tension collapses in the disappointingly tame last act — the film would rather cast the “Cruel Intentions” star Sarah Michelle Gellar as its school principal than be so cruel itself — Robinson convinces the audience to share her giddy delight at pairing last generation’s high school flick aesthetics with this generation’s ethical anguish, particularly in the soundtrack’s needle-drops where Courtney Love and Le Tigre mosh alongside Olivia Rodrigo and Billie Eilish.Do RevengeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      The Eight Film Festival Movies That Got the Biggest Awards Boost

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      “Women Talking,” women fighting, a pair of Brendans and more: After Toronto, Venice and Telluride, here are the titles and performances in the conversation.Who are the front-runners, the dark horses and the long shots? After major film festivals in Venice, Telluride and Toronto, where most of the year’s remaining prestige films have screened, the awards season has finally begun to come into focus.There are still a few significant contenders yet to debut, like Damien Chazelle’s glitzy Hollywood drama “Babylon,” and the industry is buzzing that Apple will soon announce a year-end release for its big-budget slavery drama, “Emancipation,” even though the film’s leading man, Will Smith, was banned from attending the Oscars for the next decade. And some tantalizing questions from these festivals still linger, like whether “Glass Onion,” the rollicking sequel to “Knives Out,” can score the best-picture nomination that the first film missed out on.But in the meantime, here are the eight films that came out of the fall festivals with the biggest awards-season pop.‘The Whale’There are few things Oscar voters prefer more than a transformational role and a comeback narrative, and this season, Brendan Fraser’s got both. In Darren Aronofsky’s new drama, Fraser wears a prosthetic bodysuit to transform into a 600-pound shut-in named Charlie, who attempts to reconnect with his angry daughter (Sadie Sink) as his health falters. Interest is high in the 53-year-old actor’s return to the limelight, and every time a clip hit social media of the emotional Fraser soaking up applause in Venice and Toronto, a young generation raised on his heroics in “The Mummy” reliably made those videos go viral. Though some festival pundits have taken issue with the film’s depiction of an obese protagonist, awards voters will still be wowed by Fraser’s work, making him this year’s prohibitive best-actor favorite.‘The Fabelmans’Steven Spielberg’s new film about his own coming-of-age was warmly received in Toronto, where Michelle Williams won best-in-show notices as Mitzi, the theatrical mother of the movie’s young Spielberg stand-in. Expect the actress to pick up her fifth Oscar nomination and, if she is run as a supporting performer, her first win. Even before its festival debut, awards watchers thought Spielberg’s film would land at the top of their best-picture prediction lists, but the film isn’t juggernaut-shaped — it’s lighter, more intimate and an appealing ramble in a way that people might not have anticipated. That may mean that the field is still open for a best-picture favorite to emerge, or perhaps “The Fabelmans” could sneak its way there in the end without earning the resentment accrued by an early-season front-runner.‘The Woman King’ and the Art of WarViola Davis leads a strong cast into battle in Gina Prince-Bythewood’s action epic inspired by real women warriors.Review:  “‘The Woman King’ is a sweeping entertainment, but it’s also a story of unwavering resistance in front of and behind the camera,” our critic writes.Viola Davis: As our reporter visited her on the set, Davis spoke about how powerful it was to watch Black women transform into warriors.Director Q&A: In an interview with The Times, Prince-Bythewood explained how she went about tackling what would be, logistically, her biggest film yet.Anatomy of a Scene: Prince-Bythewood had the actors perform their own stunts in the film. In some cases, that meant pulling off flips to the dirt as well as wrestling scenes.‘Tár’It’s been 16 years since Todd Field last directed a film, but expect his third feature, “Tár,” to hit the Oscar-nominated heights of his predecessors, “In the Bedroom” and “Little Children.” It will certainly be one of the year’s most talked-about movies: The story touches on hot-button topics like cancel culture and #MeToo as it follows a famed conductor (Cate Blanchett) whose career begins to crumble when her past catches up with her. Blanchett earned career-best raves at Venice for the role — and taught herself German, piano and conducting to boot — so a third Oscar is well within reach. Still, a strong year for best-actress contenders will make Blanchett’s battle a fierce one.‘The Banshees of Inisherin’Five years after “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” earned Oscars for Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell, the writer-director Martin McDonagh is back with a dark comedy whose cast could run the table, too. Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson are longtime friends whose relationship is severed in the most baffling way, and Farrell’s constant attempts to mend the rift push their petty grievances into the realm of tragedy. Both men are wonderful and will probably earn their first Oscar nominations, but if voters really flip for the film — and I suspect they will — then the supporting performers Kerry Condon (as Farrell’s sister) and Barry Keoghan (as a cockeyed friend) will be in the mix as well.‘Women Talking’This Sarah Polley-directed drama about Mennonite women in crisis was Telluride’s most significant world premiere this year, and in that Colorado enclave, which regularly draws a large contingent of Oscar voters, “Women Talking” did quite well. With a sprawling ensemble cast that includes awards favorites Rooney Mara, Jessie Buckley and Claire Foy — as well as three-time best-actress winner McDormand in a small role — “Women Talking” should nab several nominations, even though some of the male viewers I spoke to after the film’s Toronto screening proved surprisingly resistant to the film’s feature-long debate about sexual violence.‘The Woman King’Forget “Women Talking,” how about women fighting? This old-fashioned action epic from the director Gina Prince-Bythewood played through the roof in Toronto and stars Viola Davis as the leader of the Agojie, an all-female group of warriors defending their kingdom in 1820s West Africa. Davis is an Oscar winner (with three more nominations, too) who called “The Woman King” her magnum opus while introducing the film, and a performance this passionate and athletic should be in contention all season. But a notable box-office haul will be crucial to the film’s fate (it opens Friday), since even bigger action films like “Avatar: The Way of Water” and “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” are due at year’s end and will be following Oscar-nominated predecessors.‘All the Beauty and the Bloodshed’The expansion of the best picture race to 10 nominees has made room for all sorts of previously snubbed movies, from Marvel spectaculars to Pixar tentpoles. But when will a documentary be nominated for best picture? Laura Poitras’s new film, “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” beat all fiction narratives at Venice to take the Golden Lion, the fest’s top award, and this portrait of photographer Nan Goldin as she protests the wealthy Sackler family’s role in the opioid crisis will be distributed by Neon, the company that managed an Oscar first with the Korean-language best picture winner “Parasite.” At the very least, “All the Beauty” will be a strong contender for the documentary Oscar that Poitras won for her 2014 film about Edward Snowden, “Citizenfour.”‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’This A24 film from the directing team Daniels opened way back in March, but you’d hardly know that based on the major festival tributes to its star, Michelle Yeoh, in both Toronto and Venice. A flag was planted in both places: This indie hit has now entered its awards-campaign phase, and since the fall festivals didn’t produce major front-runners in the picture and directing categories, expect “Everything Everywhere,” to gun for recognition in both races as well as the supporting actor category (where Ke Huy Quan could be this year’s Troy Kotsur), original screenplay and more. Yeoh’s best-actress nomination is almost certain, though she’ll face plenty of competition from Blanchett. Both women were handed dazzling signature roles this year, and their race should be the season’s most exciting. More

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      ‘God’s Country’ Review: A Solitary Woman Isn’t Left Alone for Long

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      In this simmering thriller, Thandiwe Newton plays a professor in rural Montana who confronts two hunters who say they’re just passing through.A woman alone is seldom left alone, especially if she’s young and pretty and content in her solitude. The world presses in no matter how she resists its intrusions; strangers demand her attention, her smiles and time. The sexual connotations are unmistakable and complicated, and they’re intensified when race enters the picture, as it does in the simmering thriller “God’s Country,” a story about a woman who wants to be left in peace and isn’t.It’s clear from the start that Sandra (Thandiwe Newton) likes keeping the world at bay; it’s evident just in the location of her house in rural Montana. A neat-as-a-pin structure with large windows that give her great views, though not much privacy at night, the house is ringed by trees and perched against a majestic mountain range. It’s an idyllic location, far enough from the neighbors — one of her colleagues lives within view — but also near enough to town and to the small college where she teaches.It’s a good life or seems to be, although Sandra’s mother, who lived with her, has recently died. Now Sandra just lives with her dog. She is still very much in mourning — melancholy seems to have settled on her like a heavy blanket, giving her an ineffable sadness that Newton conveys with expressive subtlety — but she seems otherwise OK. She takes runs with her dog, chops wood, goes to work and suffers through meetings without rolling her eyes (too much). She has few friends, really colleagues, but she engages with other people and, you grasp at once, she engages them on her own terms.Her sovereignty is tested when a red pickup truck abruptly appears parked on her property within view of her front windows. She leaves a polite note on the truck, but the pickup continues to materialize, a bright, ugly portent of trouble that soon intensifies. The truck’s owners, two scowling brothers, Nathan and Samuel (Joris Jarsky and Jefferson White), like to hunt in the area and don’t care whose land they trample through. Things escalate quickly. Soon, Sandra and the brothers are squaring off on her property. “I’ve heard about you,” Samuel tells her, moving toward her as Nathan holds him back.The movie is based on James Lee Burke’s “Winter Light,” a terse, moody short story that’s an atmospheric, interestingly ambiguous meditation on masculinity and ethics that turns into a war of self-annihilating will. In adapting the story, the filmmakers — it was directed by Julian Higgins, who wrote the script with Shaye Ogbonna — have made significant changes, notably to the protagonist, who is a white man in the original. They’ve also given Sandra a cumbersome back story that’s meant to illuminate her character and say something about race, but only weighs her down.Higgins has a feel for the poetry of the landscape, and he and his cinematographer, Andrew Wheeler, make effective use of the region’s majestic, sometimes eerie beauty. It’s winter when the story opens and snow blankets the area, creating a soothing hush that can also seem ominous. When Sandra goes running with her dog, her solitude looks inviting yet is foreboding, and not simply because the dog scarcely looks capable of taking down a predator. This country, you know, doesn’t belong only to God.The movie works best when it doesn’t over-explain and instead lets the land and the characters, the wide open spaces and the performances — especially Newton’s meticulously controlled turn — speak for themselves. In the original story, Burke writes of one of the trespassers, “He smiled while he talked, but his eyes did not go with his face.” Newton and some of the other actors (notably Jarksy and Jeremy Bobb as an ineffectual lawman) catch the subtleties of violence in that sentence admirably well. You don’t need to hear the threat to know the violence will soon come.God’s CountryRated R for violence and language. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Silent Twins’ Review: Keeping the World at Bay

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      A beguiling look at the complicated story of the real-life twins June and Jennifer Gibbons, who lived in a mental institution for over a decade.In the 1970s, the sisters June and Jennifer Gibbons were part of the only Black family in their small Welsh town. They experienced racism at school, and were eventually institutionalized for 11 years at a notorious psychiatric hospital in Britain.In “The Silent Twins,” a new movie about the sisters, Letitia Wright plays the docile June and Tamara Lawrance plays Jennifer, the alpha with a penchant for a fight; the actors both embody their characters with nuanced portrayals of mental illness that avoid melodramatic clichés. The actors who play the Gibbons sisters as girls (Leah Mondesir-Simmonds and Eva-Arianna Baxter) follow suit.In the film, the twins don’t speak to their Barbadian immigrant parents, their siblings or their classmates or teachers — they become entrenched in a sometimes real, sometimes imaginary world from which everyone else is barred.The director, Agnieszka Smoczynska (“The Lure”), attempts to draw out June and Jennifer’s taut bond through the use of voice-over of their inner thoughts and stop-motion animations featuring ghastly puppets that depict the fiction the girls write. But these elements come across as abstract puzzles themselves and don’t do much to help the audience make sense of who the girls really are.Why June and Jennifer refuse to talk to other people or why they go on to commit arson as teenagers goes unexamined. As a result, the events of the plot barely register and the girls still feel like strangers by the movie’s conclusion.Yet Smoczynska and her cast still manage to conjure something somatically beguiling, akin to being put in a trance. And artful, too: The desolate gray of winter in Pembrokeshire, Wales, looks arresting and sumptuous in the cinematographer Jakub Kijowski’s arresting frames.Whatever is or isn’t broken about the twins remains a secret, but June and Jennifer’s story is played by Wright and Lawrance with the thoughtful consideration these real-life women deserve.The Silent TwinsRated R for sexual acts and adult language. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Pearl’ Review: A Farmer’s Daughter Moves Up the Food Chain

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      A horror-movie killer gets a surprising origin story in Ti West’s prequel to “X.”If you have seen “X,” Ti West’s ingenious and heartfelt pastiche of ’70s horror and hard-core pornography, you know that Mia Goth plays two roles. (If you haven’t seen it, there are spoilers ahead.) She is Maxine, an aspiring movie star and the designated survivor of a rural killing spree. Disguised by prosthetic makeup, she is also a horny and homicidal farmer’s wife named Pearl, and does a lot of killing.In “Pearl,” which Goth wrote with West, she repeats that role, playing Pearl as a horny and homicidal farmer’s daughter. That’s not the setup for a dirty joke, and this prequel, set in 1918, is less of a dirty movie than “X” aspired to be. There is some sex and plenty of gore, but mostly an atmosphere of feverish, lurid melodrama leavened with winks of knowing humor and held together by Goth’s utterly earnest and wondrously bizarre performance.More than 50 years before the events in “X,” Pearl lives on the same Texas farm, with its creaky yellow house, its cavernous barn, and a hungry alligator in the pond. Her life is an endless cycle of toil and frustration. Her husband, Howard, is away at war, leaving her alone with her parents: a pious, dictatorial German mother (Tandi Wright) and a father (Matthew Sunderland) who has been incapacitated by the flu. Money is scarce, and Pearl escapes by sneaking off to the movies while she’s running errands in town.She dreams of running off to pursue a career in pictures, practicing song-and-dance routines in anticipation of a big break. She also practices what we know from “X” will be one of her later vocations. When a goose wanders into the barn and looks at her funny, she impales it on a pitchfork and feeds it to the alligator. The arc of “Pearl” charts her progress up the food chain, from poultry to human prey.The bloodshed is at least as grisly as the slaughter in “X,” but “Pearl” occupies a different corner of the slasher-movie universe. It isn’t especially suspenseful — the identity of the killer is never in doubt, and her victims don’t elicit much sympathy — but it has a strange, hallucinatory intensity. The emotions and the colors are gaudy and overwrought, the music (by Tyler Bates and Tim Williams) is frenzied and portentous, but the film is too sincere, too tender toward its peculiar heroine, to count as camp.It’s also a bit thin and undercooked, but Goth’s performance transcends its limits. She is by turns childlike, seductive and terrifying. Pearl falls into an affair with the local movie-house projectionist (David Corenswet), who introduces her to French pornography and dazzles her with the promise of a Bohemian life free of small-town constraints. She seethes and simpers around her parents, and tries to be friends with her wholesome blonde sister-in-law (Emma Jenkins-Purro). Through it all, Pearl grapples with stifling social and domestic expectations and with her irrepressible hunger for freedom, fame and erotic release.Goth might remind you at times of Judy Garland in youth, of Shelley Duvall in the ’70s, or of a demonically possessed Raggedy Ann doll, but she has her own fearless and forthright intensity. West wants you to see that Pearl, a monster in the making, is also a heroine for the ages. Goth will make you believe it. Or else.PearlRated R. Stay out of the barn, and the basement. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Marvel Attracts Criticism With Israeli “Captain America” Superhero

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      The studio has angered many Palestinians and their supporters by casting the actress Shira Haas to play Sabra, a mutant Mossad agent, in a “Captain America” movie.JERUSALEM — It was the latest addition to a fantasy world populated by an ever-growing cast of superheroes and villains: Marvel Studios announced this past week that it had cast the Israeli actress Shira Haas to play Sabra, a mutant Israeli police officer-turned-Mossad agent, in the next installment of the “Captain America” franchise.While Jewish Israelis rejoiced at the casting of an actress from Israel as a superhero in a major Hollywood production (“Israeli Pride,” declared the Hebrew news site Maariv), the backlash among Palestinians and their supporters was swift, and #CaptainApartheid soon appeared on social media.Many critics expressed outrage about Sabra’s character and her identity as an Israeli intelligence agent, accusing Marvel of buying into Zionist propaganda; of ignoring, or supporting, Israel’s occupation of territory captured in 1967; and of dehumanizing Palestinians.“By glorifying the Israeli army & police, Marvel is promoting Israel’s violence against Palestinians & enabling the continued oppression of millions of Palestinians living under Israel’s authoritarian military rule,” wrote the Institute for Middle East Understanding, a U.S.-based pro-Palestinian organization, on Twitter.Compounding the anger was the name of the superhero, Sabra, which has different connotations for Israelis and Palestinians. To Israeli Jews, a Sabra can simply be a person born in Israel. But Sabra is also the name of a refugee camp in Lebanon where a Christian militia massacred hundreds of Palestinians while Israeli troops stood by 40 years ago.“The bottom line is that to Palestinians, Marvel having an Israeli superhero whitewashes the occupation,” said Sani Meo, publisher of This Week in Palestine, a magazine about Palestinian issues.Palestinians and their supporters around the world have been posting profusely about “Captain Apartheid,” he said. “Some of it is humorous,” he added, “though the topic is not humorous.”A 1940 sketch by Joe Simon of Captain America with a copy of a Marvel comic from the 1960s at the Library of Congress in Washington.Zach Gibson for The New York TimesMarvel Studios declined to answer detailed questions about the issue or about the company’s intentions in bringing Sabra to the big screen.“While our characters and stories are inspired by the comics,” the studio said in a statement, “they are always freshly imagined for the screen and today’s audience, and the filmmakers are taking a new approach with the character Sabra who was first introduced in the comics over 40 years ago.”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.Whatever its motivations, Marvel has found itself mired in the intractable, century-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict.Israel has been vilified by international human rights groups and by boycott and divestment activists for its policies toward the Palestinians. Some of those organizations equate Israeli policy with apartheid. But the country is also gaining broader acceptance by some Arab governments, such as the United Arab Emirates, that have grown tired of waiting for any resolution of the long conflict.Simmering in the background, fierce disputes still frequently erupt in Israel and in the occupied territories over history, territory and national identity.Last year, those tensions embroiled another Israeli actress, Gal Gadot, who appears as Wonder Woman in a different superhero franchise, when she decried the continuing cycle of violence between Israel and the Palestinians. Critics assailed her for comments in which she defended Israel’s right to exist, even as she expressed support for “our neighbors.”Much of the furor over Marvel’s decision to include Sabra in the new movie, called “Captain America: A New World Order,” centers on the name of the character itself.To Israeli Jews, sabra is the Hebrew name of a cactus bush and its fruit, prickly on the outside and soft and sweet on the inside, which the nation’s founders adopted as the nickname for native-born Israelis.But to Palestinians, the sabra bush, traditionally used to mark the boundaries of village lands, is a symbol of loss and steadfastness (“sabr” is also the Arabic word for “patience”). During the war that accompanied Israel’s creation in 1948, Zionist and Israeli forces destroyed hundreds of Palestinian villages, and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians became refugees after fleeing or being expelled from their homes. But the hardy sabra bushes remained an indelible part of the landscape even after most traces of the villages were erased.Residents of the Sabra camp in Lebanon mourning those who were slain in the 1982 massacre.Jamal/Associated PressCritics have also accused Marvel of being insensitive to the link between the Israeli superhero’s name and that of the refugee camp in Lebanon. Sabra and Shatila are the names of two Palestinian camps in Lebanon where, from Sept. 16 to Sept. 18 in 1982, a Lebanese Christian militia massacred hundreds of residents. Israeli troops had allowed the militia to enter the camps, and Israeli commanders issued no orders to stop the carnage.“Social media activists are slamming Marvel over their new Israeli Mossad superhero ‘Sabra,’ whose name is sensitive considering the Sabra and Shatila massacre,” the official Palestinian news agency WAFA wrote on Twitter.The character of Sabra first surfaced in an issue of “The Incredible Hulk” comic book in 1980, wearing a blue cape and white bodysuit featuring a Star of David. That debut was some two years before the massacre in Lebanon.Yossi Klein Halevi, an American Israeli author and senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, a Jerusalem-based research and educational center, said he believed that the filmmakers had not intended to reference the refugee camp when they decided to use the character.Over the course of a long conflict, like the one between the Israelis and the Palestinians, he said, “a kind of cultural paranoia sets in.”“Sometimes, a Marvel movie is just a Marvel movie,” he added.Still, critics point at how, in a 1981 Hulk issue titled “Power and Peril in the Promised Land,” the character of Sabra initially showed little emotion over the death of a Palestinian boy in an explosion, until the Hulk enlightened her about basic human values.Nothing is yet known about the story line of the next “Captain America” movie, which is scheduled for release in 2024, or the scope of Sabra’s debut role.Ms. Haas, left, on the set of the Netflix series “Unorthodox” in Berlin. One Israeli director praised her as “a brilliant actress who is relatable for her beautiful human flaws and not inhuman perfections.”Anika Molnar/Netflix/EPA, via Shutterstock’But Joseph Cedar, a New York-born Israeli director of movies including “Norman” and “Footnote,” praised Marvel’s casting of Ms. Haas, 27.A diminutive actress who has gained international recognition for her roles in the Netflix series “Unorthodox” and “Shtisel,” Ms. Haas survived cancer as a child.“I like the idea that the embodiment of an Israeli superhero is not a tall supermodel, but rather a brilliant actress who is relatable for her beautiful human flaws and not inhuman perfections,” Mr. Cedar said.Einat Wilf, a former Israeli lawmaker and author of “We Should All Be Zionists,” said that Israel was “enjoying a certain cultural moment,” with many of its local television productions finding success on international streaming platforms. “Marvel wants to make money,” she noted, adding that it appeared the studio saw the box office appeal of an Israeli superhero.Ms. Wilf said that she was withholding judgment about Sabra until the release of the movie, noting that superheroes had become more complex characters in recent years, with “a good side, an evil side, a trauma history.”“I am not so sure that an Israeli superhero will necessarily mean a positive portrayal of Israel,” she added.Hiba Yazbek More

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      ‘Drifting Home’ Review: A Sinking Development

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      Two friends visit their old apartment building and make haunting discoveries in this animated film from Hiroyasu Ishida.You never know what you’re getting with real estate: a building could have water damage from sailing through the ocean; could have structural damage from colliding, Titantic-style, with other drifting domiciles; or it could have a spirit-child squatter. This makes for a terrible appraisal but might make for a great fantasy drama.Just not in “Drifting Home,” Hiroyasu Ishida’s animated film on Netflix, which feels utterly lost at sea.The film follows Kosuke and Natsume, sixth graders and longtime friends who were raised together in the same apartment complex, and whose relationship has been tense ever since Kosuke’s grandfather died. Natsume sneaks back to the building where they once lived, which is set to be demolished. When Kosuke and an irrelevant brat pack of peers find her, they’re magically transported to an ocean haunted by ghosts of buildings long past.Though “Drifting Home” delivers a great visual concept (both a public pool and a department store with decaying walls sail by like the ghostly cousins of the Mary Celeste), it doesn’t deliver on the action. The pacing lags and the beats are predictable; the film’s go-to antic is having children repeatedly topple overboard.The emotional battleground between the reticent but traumatized Natsume and the guarded Kosuke is rich territory but feels more procedural than fleshed out, as does the fantastical logic of the world, which lacks coherence. So the underlying metaphor is unclear: Is it how nostalgia is linked to places, or is it an elegy for the actual structures and neighborhoods that have changed? It’s hard to tell with a film whose narrative goes so unattended.Drifting HomeRated PG. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 59 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More