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      Sasha Stone, an Original Oscars Blogger, Takes on Hollywood

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      Sasha Stone, who has been covering awards season since the ’90s, has recast herself as a voice against what she perceives as the industry’s liberal status quo.Earlier this month Sasha Stone watched the Oscars alone at her home in a town outside Los Angeles. For someone who has spent more than two decades as one of the premier chroniclers of awards season, it was a notably unglamorous way to take in the ceremony. But she was thrilled that “Anora,” the frantic story of a New York stripper’s romance with a young Russian man, took top honors as part of a historic haul.Stone believed the film had the virtue of not pushing a partisan agenda, which has become one of the top criteria for her when judging a movie. When she made her name as an Oscars blogger, Stone believes she fit neatly into the Hollywood status quo and the brand of liberalism it represented — often onscreen. She says now she sees the error of her old ways, even if she continues to understand the old ways better than conservatives who were never part of that world.“Here is where I run into problems with the right,” Stone said in an interview the day after the ceremony. “They’re never going to give any credit to the Oscars or Hollywood. I knew the script was going to be, ‘The Oscars suck,’ and I was going to have to stand apart from that.”Stone’s advice to the right: Take the win. And after some Monday-morning carping, it collectively did. The ceremony drew praise from conservatives for its largely apolitical content (just one brief comment about President Trump by the host, Conan O’Brien) and for Kieran Culkin’s acceptance speech, in which he publicly asked his wife for more kids — “relatable to any middle-American,” said a Daily Caller writer.Mikey Madison in the Oscar-winning “Anora,” a favorite of Stone’s. NeonStone, 60, is that increasingly familiar figure in conservative life: an apostate from the mainstream, in recovery from her earlier liberalism. During the 2010s, as popular culture appeared to be moving to the left, she had been out in front, celebrating pathbreaking Oscar winners like “Moonlight” and “Parasite.” She also publicly supported Democrats including Hillary Clinton and Joseph R. Biden Jr.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Inside the Controversy Surrounding Disney’s ‘Snow White’ Remake

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      Disney knew that remaking “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” as a live-action musical would be treacherous.But the studio was feeling cocky.It was 2019, and Disney was minting money at the box office by “reimagining” animated classics like “Aladdin,” “Beauty and the Beast” and “The Jungle Book” as movies with real actors. The remakes also made bedrock characters like Cinderella newly relevant. Heroines defined by ideas from another era — be pretty, and things might work out! — were empowered. Casting emphasized diversity.Why not tackle Snow White?Over the decades, Disney had tried to modernize her story — to make her more than a damsel in distress, one prized as “the fairest of them all” because of her “white as snow” skin. Twice, starting in the early 2000s, screenwriters had been unable to crack it, at least not to the satisfaction of an image-conscious Disney.“Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” which premiered in 1937, posed other remake challenges, including how to sensitively handle Happy, Sneezy, Sleepy, Dopey, Bashful, Grumpy and Doc. (One stalled Disney reboot had reimagined the dwarfs as kung fu fighters in China.)Still, Disney executives were determined to figure it out. They had some new ideas. More important, the remake gravy train needed to keep running.“It’s going to be amazing, another big win,” Bob Chapek, then Disney’s chief executive, said of a live-action “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” at a 2022 fan convention.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      In Wes Anderson’s World, It’s All About the Details

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      When Wes Anderson was just starting out and wanted to reshoot some scenes for his 1996 debut “Bottle Rocket,” the rookie director got a shock. Columbia Pictures had sent all the movie’s props off to a store, which had then sold them for next to nothing.So when he made his next movie, “Rushmore” (1998), Anderson decided the same thing would never happen again. He put everything into an S.U.V. when the shoot was over, then drove the hoard away to look after it himself.That decision ended up helping not just Anderson himself. Over the past two-and-a-half years, curators at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris and the Design Museum in London trawled Anderson’s storage facility in Kent, England — which contains thousands of items from his movies — to compile a museum retrospective of the director’s work.The show opened at the Cinémathèque Française this week, where it runs though July 27. It will transfer, expanded, to the Design Museum in the fall.Max Fischer’s Academy uniform from “Rushmore.”The fur coat worn by Margot Tenenbaum in “The Royal Tenenbaums.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How ‘Severance’ Uses Old Tricks to Make Its Office Hell

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      Contains spoilers about past episodes but not the Season 2 finale.In “Severance,” the Apple TV+ series about a shadowy company where some employees have their consciousness split into two parts, with the “innie” doing all the work and the “outie” remembering none of it, the office is sparse and lifeless.The show reinforces that theme with its cinematography and production design. Here are some of the ways “Severance” invokes and inverts classic film tricks to create its corporate hell.IsolationRepetition Removes IndividualityFrom the earliest days of moving images, filmmakers have used the rigid geometry of desks and cubicles and dense repetition to create images of people together, yet isolated, trapped and stripped of identity by corporate bosses.Films like “The Apartment,” from 1960 (below, top left), and even Pixar’s 2004 animated movie “The Incredibles” (top right) use these repetitive shots to suggest a corporate mass that takes away individual identities to instead create “company men,” said Jill Levinson, a professor at Babson College and the author of “The American Success Myth on Film.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Misericordia’ Review: Danger Always Hides in the Bushes

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      The French director Alain Guiraudie’s latest film, a bent kind of murder mystery, presents life at its basest and gamiest.In “Misericordia,” a rakish youngish guy named Jérémie drives back to a French village for the funeral of his old boss, a baker, who has kicked the bucket at 62. And the instant the widow lets Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) into the living room, he and the baker’s adult son, Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), a mushroom forager, share the sort of charged eye contact that tells you “Yup, these two definitely did it.” We don’t know when or how far things went. Something happened, though. But because “Misericordia” (Latin for “mercy”) has wafted from the cauldron of the writer and director Alain Guiraudie, it’s possible I’m wrong.Ambiguity? Mixed motives? Casual lawlessness? These are his considerable strengths. “Misericordia” culminates in kink, killing and some gloriously literal deus ex machina. So maybe what I’m experiencing as an erotic charge is caution. But again: it’s Guiraudie, the man who brought us the 2014 murder-at-the-gay-nude-beach sensation “Stranger by the Lake” and a bedroom farce (“Nobody’s Hero,” 2023) whose component parts included racism, terrorism, sex work, domestic violence, paranoia, jogging and vaping. The caution is erotic.His movies, meanwhile, prove absorbingly absurdist, this new one especially. It’s got its own rhythm. If Guiraudie isn’t mocking the way we’ve been trained to receive stories, films, people, then he’s at least disrupting the usual patterns. Retraining us to see anew, to suspend expectation and abandon comfort, the way that John Waters and Mike Leigh, Aki Kaurismaki, Hal Hartley and the other oddball live-action cartoonists have. It’s risky, but something thrilling and often true usually comes of it.Guiraudie presents life at its basest and gamiest. So I trust my instincts about Jérémie and Vincent. I know hunger when I see it. And “Misericordia” is dotted with hungry eyes. Jérémie stays the night at the widow’s. The room she offers is the one Vincent grew up in, maybe the room where It Happened. Jérémie and Vincent even make the bed together. But rekindling’s not on the program. Regression, maybe. The bed all made, Vincent — who’s pushing 40, is bald, and has a lisp and a cleft lip — suggests playing some Yahtzee, like they used to. Jérémie declines.From there, reunion curdles into disunion. And the homecoming movie you might have been wanting becomes the funkier tale of a sociopath who opts to overstay his welcome. Jérémie doesn’t get up to much: the occasional drive around town, a walk in the forest, some horseplay with Vincent on the forest floor where he should be foraging for mushrooms. What does he want? The late baker’s clothes, for one thing; his shoes, too. The widow, Martine (Catherine Frot), seems super OK with that. She doesn’t even appear to mind the probability that Jérémie’s list of infatuations likely included her husband. They flip through a photo album together and admire how good the dead man looked in a Speedo. (They’re not wrong.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘O’Dessa’ Review: One Song to Save Them All

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      Sadie Sink (“Stranger Things”) rules this postapocalyptic musical with a guitar and an attitude.The director Geremy Jasper begins his new musical in such a bombastic manner, complete with a mock-spaghetti western score, that it’s hard not to be at least intrigued. What is this cinematic U.F.O.?We are, we quickly learn, in a postapocalyptic future in which a certain Plutonovich (Murray Bartlett, from “The White Lotus”) rules the airwaves and people’s minds with a reality competition beamed from his Onederworld lair in Satylite City — think “America’s Got Talent” at Thunderdome.Despite the goofy names, these are scary times. A fresh-faced farm girl named O’Dessa Galloway (Sadie Sink, of “Stranger Things”) is informed that “It ain’t safe for a 19-year-old gal with stars in her eyes.” It’s actually even less safe for her parents, who are both summarily dispatched from the story within a few minutes. O’Dessa’s daddy (the singer Pokey LaFarge) was a rambler, so off she goes rambling as well, armed with his guitar. She ends up, naturally, in Satylite City, where she falls for the sweet Euri Dervish (Kelvin Harrison Jr.), a sex worker and cabaret singer whose funky-cool abode has a heart-shaped tub.As he did for his previous film, “Patti Cake$” (2017), which was about an aspiring rapper in New Jersey, Jasper wrote the score with Jason Binnick. Their songs tend to be either emo Americana or power ballads; sometimes the first style builds into the second, as in “Yer Tha One.” And because O’Dessa has a mysterious prophecy to fulfill, she gets one song to rule them all, simply titled “The Song (Love Is All).” It’s worth noting that everyone sings well, sometimes surprisingly so. Sink, in particular, has an unforced elegance that carries even the by-the-numbers numbers.While you might assume Plutonovich is the antagonist, he is overshadowed by the enforcer and pimp Neon Dion (Regina Hall, having a ball), whose severe bangs, dramatic outfits and even more dramatic expressions position her as a villain retrofitted from a 1980s music video.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Locked’ Review: Cramped Quarters

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      This gimmicky thriller starring Bill Skarsgard and Anthony Hopkins sees a petty criminal fall victim to a vigilante’s trap.When we first meet Eddie (Bill Skarsgard), a recently divorced father, he’s begging a mechanic to give him a few more days to pay the bill. No catch. And no car. Desperate, Eddie, breaks into a snazzy sport utility vehicle hoping to pawn whatever valuables he finds.It’s here, inside the vehicle, that most of “Locked” takes place.Directed by David Yarovesky, this gimmicky thriller is an adaptation of the Argentine film “4×4,” set in a big American city where the class divide is stark and petty crimes are aplenty.The S.U.V. is quickly revealed as a trap staged by William (Anthony Hopkins), a deranged vigilante in the vein of the “Saw” franchise’s Jigsaw, who lashes out against those who he thinks have broken the social contract.Hopkins’s Hannibal Lecter credentials — and William’s penchant for classical music — also give him a menacingly refined air that plays off Eddie’s rough exterior, underscoring the film’s clunky rich versus poor through-line.Hopkins spends most of the movie offscreen, speaking to his victim through the car’s speakers and zapping him remotely through devices in the seats. Struggling to find a way out, Eddie at one point shoots a gun at the bulletproof windows, causing a bullet to strike him in the leg. William gleefully observes the younger man deteriorate from the point of view of a surveillance camera, progressively ramping up the sadism.Still, the violent fun and games aren’t quite inventive enough to get past the single setting and its cramped leather seats. The performers hold their ground even if the script simply goes through the motions — the car-as-prison may at first come off like a new jam, and yet you’ve definitely seen it all before.LockedRated R. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Bob Trevino Likes It’ Review: From a Stranger to Found Family

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      Barbie Ferreira shines as a young woman who befriends a stranger with her father’s name in this indie tear-jerker.There are two Bob Trevinos in “Bob Trevino Likes It.” One of them makes Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s character in “Hard Truths” look like parent of the year. The other starts out as a stranger, and grows into found family.The movie, written and directed by Tracie Laymon and based on her own experiences, centers on Lily Trevino (Barbie Ferreira), a lonely 20-something in Kentucky who friends Bob on Facebook. She was hoping to connect with her father (French Stewart), a deadbeat recently gone AWOL. Instead, she and Bob the introvert (John Leguizamo) develop a tender intergenerational bond.Setting aside the datedness of the technology — Lily often posts 2010s-era Facebook statuses littered with hashtags — “Bob Trevino Likes It” is a middling indie tear-jerker. It suffers from an overwritten script chock-full of tropes and artificial dialogue. “You don’t have any tools,” Bob exclaims to Lily at one point, meaning a literal toolbox, but also, you know, a metaphorical, emotional one.Any genuine feeling emanates from Lily. Ferreira pitches herself into the trite story line with enthusiasm, and her verve breathes life into even the most leaden lines. On a handful of occasions, Laymon has her protagonist gaze into the camera in shallow focus with a swirling effect around her head. The moments viscerally convey a feeling of belonging by making use of a considerable asset: Ferreira’s wide open face.Bob Trevino Likes ItRated PG-13 for family crises. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters. More