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      The Johnny Depp vs. Amber Heard Libel Case Is in the Jury’s Hands

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      After closing arguments, the judge asked a jury in Virginia to decide a defamation trial that focused as much on domestic abuse as damaged reputations.After 23 days of testimony that painted conflicting pictures of a tumultuous Hollywood marriage, lawyers for Johnny Depp and Amber Heard delivered their closing arguments on Friday, seeking to persuade the jury that their client had been the person who was abused and defamed.Mr. Depp’s lawyers asserted that their movie star client had been falsely disparaged in a Washington Post op-ed in which Ms. Heard referred to herself as a “public figure representing domestic abuse.”The accusations of spousal abuse that she was referencing, the lawyers argued, had ruined Mr. Depp’s life.“We ask you to give Mr. Depp his life back by telling the world that Mr. Depp is not the abuser Ms. Heard said he is,” a lawyer for Mr. Depp, Camille Vasquez, said, “and hold Ms. Heard accountable for her lies.”Ms. Heard’s lawyers countered that not only were the accusations and the op-ed entirely true, but during legal proceedings in 2020, the actress was unfairly maligned when a lawyer, who represented Mr. Depp at the time, called her abuse accusations a hoax.“In Mr. Depp’s world, you don’t leave Mr. Depp, and if you do, he will start a campaign of global humiliation against you,” argued a lawyer for Ms. Heard, Ben Rottenborn.Now, the case is in the hands of seven jurors who deliberated until Friday evening and left the Fairfax County Circuit Court with instructions to return on Tuesday.The trial has drawn widespread attention because the proceedings have been both televised and livestreamed through a pair of cameras in the courtroom, a rarity in Virginia. On one YouTube channel streaming the proceedings, called Law & Crime Network, more than one million users were reported to be watching.There has been stiff competition to fill the public seats in the courtroom, with observers — most of them fans of Mr. Depp — lining up in the middle of the night to secure a spot. On Friday morning, about 150 people waited in line to get into the courtroom, with hundreds more lining a nearby road, some of them dressed as Mr. Depp’s movie characters.Peyton Elmendorf, a 27-year-old Depp fan, said that when she first heard about Ms. Heard’s accusations, she had misgivings about defending the actor given the #MeToo movement. But now, after hearing other of the actor’s romantic partners speak positively about him, she said she felt confident voicing her support.Our Coverage of the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard TrialA trial between the formerly married actors has become a fierce battleground over the truth about their relationship. What to Know: Johnny Depp and Amber Heard are suing each other with competing defamation claims, amid mutual accusations of domestic abuse.Stan Culture in the Courtroom: The closely watched trial is a case study in what happens when complex claims are filtered through the lenses of extreme fandom. TikTok’s Hate Machine: The online commentary about the trial quickly turned into an internet-wide smear campaign against Ms. Heard. Dressing to Suggest: Both litigants appeared notably sober in their fashion choices. That is no coincidental thing.“I knew he didn’t do it,” she said.Outnumbered outside the courthouse, but unpersuaded, Dan Kim, 26, quietly held a sign nearby that said “I stand with Amber.” He called it “crystal clear” that Mr. Depp had abused Ms. Heard.Supporters of Mr. Depp outside the courthouse on Friday.Craig Hudson/Associated PressUltimately, the jury must consider the veracity and reputational impact of a narrow set of statements. But the six-week trial has encompassed testimony about a vast array of alleged incidents from Mr. Depp and Ms. Heard’s marriage.Ms. Heard has accused Mr. Depp of repeated physical abuse that she said often coincided with drug and alcohol use and began with his accusing her of infidelity. She has also alleged several instances of sexual assault — including an accusation that he assaulted her with a bottle in Australia in 2015.Amber Heard, talking to one of her lawyers during the proceedings on Friday.Pool Photo via Steve Helber/ReutersMr. Depp has denied ever hitting or sexually assaulting Ms. Heard and has portrayed her as the aggressor in the relationship, recalling violence from her throughout their relationship, as well as angry tirades and demeaning name-calling. Ms. Heard has denied hitting Mr. Depp except in defense of herself or her sister.Testimony about the incidents often involved sensational details: disputed affairs with celebrities, graffiti written in blood and a missing chunk of Mr. Depp’s finger that forced the fifth “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie to pause production.In laying out the highlights of their evidence, Mr. Depp’s lawyers reminded the jury of witnesses who said they did not see injuries on Ms. Heard around the times she reported having them, showed a photo of him with a “shiner” that he said she gave him and replayed audio of arguments between the estranged couple in which Ms. Heard admits to having hit Mr. Depp. In one audio clip, Ms. Heard can be heard saying, “I did start a physical fight,” challenging her claim that she only hit Mr. Depp as a defense. (Ms. Heard testified that in those instances, she hit him in response to his own aggression.)His team also pointed to instances where there were no medical records or photographs to corroborate her allegations of abuse.“The ‘mountain of evidence’ that Mr. Depp abused Ms. Heard is simply not there,” Ms. Vasquez argued. “What we have is a mountain of unproven allegations that are wild, over the top and implausible.”Ms. Heard’s lawyers described witnesses who said she had told them about the abuse. Mr. Rottenborn played a video of Mr. Depp angrily slamming kitchen cabinets and showed jurors a text in which the actor told Ms. Heard’s father he had gone “too far in our fight.” He then showed the jury a photo of Ms. Heard with a red mark on her face after, she said, Mr. Depp hurled a phone at her. Elaine Charlson Bredehoft, another of her lawyers, reminded the jury about a forensic psychologist who testified to reviewing a therapist’s notes — which were not entered into evidence — that reflect contemporaneous reports from Ms. Heard where she complained of sexual abuse.“A ruling against Amber here sends a message that no matter what you do, as an abuse victim, you always have to do more,” Mr. Rottenborn said. “No matter what you document, you always have to document more. No matter whom you tell, you always have to tell more people.”Johnny Depp’s Libel Case Against Amber HeardCard 1 of 6In the courtroom. More

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      James Wong Howe: A Gutsy Cinematographer Finally Gets His Due

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      A retrospective at the Museum of the Moving Image looks at a career filled with sublime images made at a time of strong anti-Asian sentiment in Hollywood.The Chinese American cinematographer James Wong Howe was an industrious, peripatetic youngster. In modern parlance, he was a hustler, but so was everyone in the early, exploratory years of cinema, when the fledgling film industry churned out dozens of titles every week. During the 1910s, the silent film directors who won acclaim — like D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille — seemed to rise through shrewd business acumen, false confidence and good luck.Wong Howe had all of those things, but he was gutsier — he had to be. It was clear in the boundless, reckless innovation of his work; his reputation as a supreme perfectionist; and his success and respected status in an industry that saw virtually no place for artists of Asian descent. James Wong Howe was defiance personified.His decades-long career, which spanned the silent era, Hollywood’s golden age and the New Hollywood renaissance of the 1960s and ’70s, was emblematic of a creative spirit that persisted despite changing fashions, industry upheavals and discriminatory practices. He revolutionized the way films communicated visually, developing new techniques that could convey feelings without the need for words or even performers — like the expressionistic use of wide-angle and fish-eye lenses in John Frankenheimer’s body-swapping science-fiction drama, “Seconds” (1966); or one of the earliest aerial shots in the final moments of Joshua Logan’s Technicolor romantic comedy “Picnic” (1955).Rock Hudson in “Seconds,” which Wong Howe shot in part using wide-angle and fish-eye lenses.Paramount Pictures/Photofest via MoMIThese and other examples of Wong Howe’s photographic prowess can be seen in a continuing series dedicated to his work that runs through June 26 at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens.James Wong Howe was born Wong Tung Jim in Kwantung, China, in 1899. In the early 1900s, he was whisked away to Pasco, Wash., by his entrepreneurial father. There, he experienced racism, learned to box and began tinkering with cameras before his father’s death, in 1914, set off a period of drifting. Not unlike Charlie Chaplin’s classic character the Tramp, Wong Howe was a game outsider stumbling from misadventure to misadventure. He went to Oregon, San Francisco, and then Los Angeles, where the 18-year-old Jimmie Howe eventually finagled a job on the janitorial staff of Lasky Studios.DeMille took a liking to Jimmie; he was amused by the young man’s floral shirts, the contrast between his small stature and the outsize cigars he smoked on set. Wong Howe was not passive; he seemed to take the matter of his skin color as a challenge. In his free time, he began familiarizing himself with the studio’s equipment and practiced taking pictures with a still camera. Soon, he was promoted to assistant cameraman.No one at the time was what we might today consider a bona fide camera expert. People learned on the job, improvised and experimented with the new technologies, so the crew members who distinguished themselves were the ones who found creative solutions to the problems that arose on set. This was Wong Howe’s forte and the source of his first big break. The actress Mary Miles Minter, impressed by Wong Howe’s still portraits of her, insisted he shoot her next film. He had devised a solution that could keep her blue eyes from turning white on camera, a problem caused by the blue-sensitive orthochromatic film used at the time. From then on, his reputation as a formidable cameraman was assured.Wong Howe, left, on the set of “The Glory Guys” (1965). His career ran from silents to the New Hollywood renaissance.United Artists/Photofest, via MoMIWong Howe wasn’t the only Asian artist hanging out on the studio back lots. There was the Japanese-born actor Sessue Hayakawa. Hollywood’s onscreen enforcement of anti-miscegenation laws restricted him to playing forbidden-lover roles or sadistic Svengali types, but his popularity among white women viewers made him a bankable presence. Then there was the Chinese American actress Anna May Wong, a go-to supporting performer as the film industry began to mount bigger, more spectacular productions in “exotic” settings. Wong Howe, in fact, would shoot her in one of her first major roles, as the Indigenous princess Tiger Lily in Herbert Brenon’s “Peter Pan.”But renewed anti-Asian sentiment and the Production Code of the 1930s, which put a chokehold on the depiction of interracial relationships, further diminished the industry’s willingness to work with performers of Asian descent. Wong Howe initially floundered during this period, but his work — particularly his penchant for dramatic, high-contrast lighting, which earned him the nickname “Low-key Howe” — spoke for itself. His split-screen shot allows Ronald Colman’s Major Rassendyll to speak directly to his doppelgänger in John Cromwell’s “The Prisoner of Zenda,” (1937), and the fight scenes he filmed in Busby Berkeley’s “They Made Me a Criminal” (1939) are so visceral you can almost feel the boxing gloves jabbing.Though he was adored by the press — what a novelty that an Asian man could be so talented and so full of personality — and respected by his collaborators, Wong Howe was often scorned by the white crew members under his command. He dealt with laws and prejudices that relegated him to second-class citizenship all of his life. During World War II, he wore a button that read “I am Chinese” to ward off harassment should anyone think he was Japanese. Though he had been living in the United States for nearly four decades, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 prohibited him from gaining citizenship; without it, he was forced to turn down exciting creative opportunities, like joining John Ford’s wartime documentary crew.Wong Howe’s split-screen shot allowed Ronald Colman’s Major Rassendyll to speak directly to his doppelganger in “The Prisoner of Zenda” (1937).Warner Bros.Most devastating perhaps was his marriage to the novelist Sanora Babb; the couple tied the knot in Paris in 1937, but California’s anti-miscegenation laws and the studios’ morality clause prevented them from going public until decades later. For his suspected association with Hollywood Communists, he was put on the “graylist” by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee; Wong Howe kept out of politics for the most part, but it didn’t help that China had become a Communist state.Still, he carried on during the precarious ’40s, working with Fritz Lang on the provocative war thriller “Hangmen Also Die!,” and capturing Ida Lupino in all her shades of ambition and vulnerability in Vincent Sherman’s pitch-black melodrama “The Hard Way.”Wong Howe’s images are sublime, his expressive interplay of light and shadow summoning moral conflicts out of thin air. He re-envisioned New York with a bleak, otherworldly flair with “Sweet Smell of Success,” Alexander Mackendrick’s 1957 drama about a vicious newspaperman, a work that many consider to be Wong Howe’s chef d’oeuvre. He coated interior-set walls in oil to give them a surreal shimmer, and used long-focus lenses to make buildings look clustered together, emphasizing a sense of claustrophobic delirium.Walter Brennan in “Hangmen Also Die!” (1943), which Wong Howe shot for the director Fritz Lang.Cohen Media GroupThere are few individuals whose work so comparably ushered in cinema’s transition from mere dime-ticket spectacle to art form. Still, Wong Howe was hungry. Since the 1920s, he had wanted to direct, and though he was given the opportunity in the form of commissioned documentaries and “B” movies, his real ambitions were too often denied. There was a project about rickshaw pullers in China, as well as a script he wrote with Babb about San Francisco’s Chinatown, but both ideas were ultimately dropped for lack of financing. If you can catch only one screening at the Museum of the Moving Image, make it Wong Howe’s sole directorial feature, “Go, Man, Go!” (1954), which stars a fresh-faced Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee in a drama about the Harlem Globetrotters. It is a bare-bones production, but the grit and spirit of something even greater was just beneath the surface, like Wong Howe himself.Wong Howe didn’t deny his Chinese roots. For a time, he ran a popular Chinese eatery that was frequented by Marlene Dietrich, Mickey Rooney and Tyrone Power. And in his final years, he took to wearing traditional Chinese clothes. In Todd Rainsberger’s 1981 study of the cinematographer, it becomes clear that Wong Howe, who died in 1976, longed to create a more expansive portrait of Americanness, one that felt true to him, if not his employers. He was one of the great American cinematographers and a two-time Oscar winner, but he wanted more because he knew he deserved it. Such was his defiance.“How It’s Done: The Cinema of James Wong Howe” runs through June 26 at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens. For more information, go to movingimage.us. More

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      Meet the ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Cast

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      From trying not to vomit in flight to oiling up for a beach scene, the actors playing pilots got a crash course in the Tom Cruise school of action filmmaking.Thirty-six years after Iceman, Hollywood and Cougar took to the skies in “Top Gun,” a new team of colorfully nicknamed characters are suiting up in “Top Gun: Maverick.”This time, the aviators are recent graduates of the Navy’s elite fighter school, a.k.a. Top Gun, and they’re tasked with a near-impossible mission overseen by Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, the brash pilot played by Tom Cruise. Flying alongside Rooster, the son of the original film’s ill-fated Goose, are Hangman, Phoenix, Bob, Coyote, Fanboy and Payback, who must help destroy a foreign enemy’s uranium plant and get out alive. (Though the characters all have actual names, they’re introduced by their aviator call signs, and that’s how they’re known.)The intensive tutelage began offscreen: Cruise monitored the actors’ progress during a grueling five-month training program that culminated in the cast shooting their own action sequences from the back of real F/A-18 jets flown by Navy fighter pilots.Here’s a peek at the new generation of actors behind the call signs.Glen PowellThe actor initially auditioned for the role that went to Miles Teller.Scott Garfield/Paramount PicturesAge: 33“Maverick” role: HangmanWhere you’ve seen him before: “Set It Up,” “Hidden Figures,” “Scream Queens”‘Top Gun’: The Return of MaverickTom Cruise takes to the air once more in “Top Gun: Maverick,” the long-awaited sequel to a much-loved ’80s action blockbuster.Review: The central question posed by the movie has less to do with the need for combat pilots in the age of drones than with the relevance of movie stars, our critic writes.Tom Cruise: At a time when superheroes dominate the box office, the film industry is betting on the daredevil actor to bring grown-ups back to theaters.A New Class: Thirty-six years after Iceman, Hollywood and Cougar, a new team of colorfully nicknamed characters have suited up for the sequel.Filming Challenges: The aerial feats on show in “Top Gun: Maverick” look like the result of digital wizardry. They aren’t.Powell originally auditioned to play Rooster (then called Rascal) but lost out to Miles Teller. Then, when Powell was offered the role that would become Hangman, he turned it down for fear it would be a copy-and-paste take on Val Kilmer’s antagonistic Iceman in the 1986 film. Cruise persuaded Powell to sign on, and they worked together to make the character distinctly Powell’s own. Still, the cocky, confrontational pilot shares more than a few traits with Iceman — as does Powell with Kilmer. When Powell moved out of the San Diego hotel where he had stayed during filming, he bumped into Kilmer, who had just arrived to shoot his scene. “The last things that I moved out of my room were protein powder, weights and tequila,” Powell said. “I’m literally wheeling them on a luggage cart into the elevator, and as the doors are about to close, Val steps in. He looks at me. Then he looks at the luggage cart. And he just started dying laughing. He’s like, ‘This is ‘Top Gun’ right here.’”Monica BarbaroThough the actress could change her character’s call sign, she had good reason to stick with it.Scott Garfield/Paramount PicturesAge: 32“Maverick” role: PhoenixWhere you’ve seen her before: “The Good Cop,” “Chicago Justice,” “UnREAL”The military did not allow women to fly in combat until 1993, and in the first “Top Gun,” all of the Navy fighter pilot characters were men. Barbaro’s role in the sequel is a reflection of the service’s inclusive shift, and her filmed flights were all handled by female Navy fighter pilots. “When I found out I got the part, I was like, ‘Mom, I got it! And guess what? I get to play a pilot. I’m not a love interest!’” the Northern California native said. “We used the women that we got to fly with as role models for how we designed the character.” And while the actors were allowed to change their characters’ call signs, it quickly became clear during the cast’s downtime together that “Phoenix” was a good fit for Barbaro: “Let’s just say, we had one pretty wild night, and the next morning they were surprised that I arose from the ashes.”Greg Tarzan DavisHe was a schoolteacher not long before turning to acting.Scott Garfield/Paramount PicturesAge: 28“Maverick” role: CoyoteWhere you’ve seen him before: “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Good Trouble,” “Chicago P.D.”Not long before landing “Maverick,” Davis was an elementary schoolteacher in his home state of Louisiana. “I’m a big believer in following your dreams. I would preach that to my students,” Davis said. “But I realized I wasn’t doing that — because my dream was to be an actor. So I decided to give it a shot.” In a role reversal, Davis, who has gone by Tarzan since his own “wild” youth, said he felt like a kid throughout production, enthralled by the aviation toys and tasked with learning new things. While “Maverick” was in postproduction, he got a call from Christopher McQuarrie, the writer-director of “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One”; the frequent Cruise collaborator was asking him to join the cast, no audition required. “I put the phone on mute and jumped up and down and screamed,” Davis said. “That was my first offer, and having an offer is an actor’s dream.”Lewis PullmanThe back story for his character’s call sign didn’t make it into the movie.Scott Garfield/Paramount PicturesAge: 29“Maverick” role: BobWhere you’ve seen him before: “Outer Range,” “Bad Times at the El Royale,” “Catch-22”Of all the call signs, Pullman’s “Bob” (also his character’s first name) is the most mysteriously straightforward. “Bob is reclusive and quiet and a hard nut to crack,” Pullman said. “One of the original drafts had this moment where he kind of earned his stripes, and Hangman says, ‘I think I know what Bob stands for: Big Ol’ Balls.’ They didn’t end up using that, but it gave me a reference for Bob’s trajectory. He starts out as this unassuming guy, who then finds his strength.” Pullman needed strength of his own when Cruise walked into the first table read. Despite being the son of the actor Bill Pullman, Lewis was star-struck. “Tom basically ripped through the doors. His motorcycle in the background. He’s got his helmet on. The sun is glistening. He takes his helmet off, and his hair is perfect,” he said. “Tom is like Cary Grant and Buzz Aldrin and Buster Keaton and Evel Knievel all woven into one man.”Jay EllisAs a boy, the actor saw the original “Top Gun” with his father on an Air Force base.Scott Garfield/Paramount PicturesAge: 40“Maverick” role: PaybackWhere you’ve seen him before: “Insecure,” “Escape Room,” “The Game”Ellis distinctly recalls the day his father, who was then a mechanic in the Air Force, took him to see the first “Top Gun” in a theater on base in Austin, Texas. “I remember just looking up at the screen thinking, ‘I want to do that. Whatever those guys are up there doing, I want to be a part of that somehow,’” he said. Rather than enlist, Ellis became an actor. Fast forward three decades, and he found himself shooting “Maverick” and paying homage to the original’s beach volleyball scene with a game of beach football as the camera panned over the cast’s glistening muscles for a sun-dappled montage. “We probably went through five different types of oil because the makeup team was trying to figure out what wouldn’t soak into everyone’s skin so quickly,” Ellis said. “We started out with baby oil, then we moved on to argan oil, coconut oil, avocado oil. We switched to glycerin at one point. They were spraying us down with Evian bottles. It made for a very slippery game.”Danny RamirezHe thought he wouldn’t have to worry about his fear of flying. He was wrong.Paramount PicturesAge: 29“Maverick” role: FanboyWhere you’ve seen him before: “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” “On My Block,” “Assassination Nation”Before signing on, the actors had to check a box attesting they weren’t afraid of flying. “I lied,” Ramirez said with a laugh. “I was like, What’s the worst that could happen? It’s a Tom Cruise movie, that means he’ll be the one doing the stunts.” Without his usual commercial-flight routine of wine and noise-canceling headphones, Ramirez found himself struggling not to vomit as his F/A-18 rolled and dove through the air. The actors each had their own tricks to cope with motion sickness: Davis relied on Dramamine. Pullman preferred a preflight diet of rice and fresh ginger. For Ramirez, slowly building tolerance in incrementally smaller and faster planes was key. Adding to the degree of difficulty: They not only had to deliver their lines, but also set up the shots and adjust the cameras themselves once in the air. “I was like, ‘Are we going to get some kind of camera operator credit or what?’” he said. “Having to line up another jet going 500 miles an hour to stay within the frame was an experience I’m probably never going to have again.” More

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      Which Cannes Films Have the Best Oscar Odds?

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      Movies from Park Chan-wook, Lukas Dhont and Hirokazu Kore-eda could be what academy voters are looking for. But don’t count out “Top Gun: Maverick.”CANNES, France — Last year at the Cannes Film Festival, there was one question on everybody’s lips: “What’s the next ‘Parasite’?” You can see why people wondered, since that Bong Joon Ho film had used its Palme d’Or win to jump-start a historic Oscar campaign.But if last year’s festival had an heir to “Parasite,” it proved to be a very unlikely one.Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s talky drama “Drive My Car” didn’t win the Palme d’Or (it settled for a best-screenplay honor) and wasn’t anyone’s idea of the biggest contender coming out of Cannes. Still, after year-end critics’ groups went for it in a major way, “Drive My Car” picked up huge Oscar nominations for picture, directing and adapted screenplay in addition to one for best international film, the category it won.So as this year’s Cannes nears its end with no one film standing head and shoulders above the rest, I think that rather than searching for the next “Parasite,” it would be wiser to ask: What’s the next “Drive My Car”? In other words, which movie from this year’s Cannes crop could keep on building buzz and capitalize on the academy’s growing international user base to snag major Oscar nominations?I see three notable contenders. Foremost among them is “Close,” which is hotly tipped to pick up a major award at the fest on Saturday. It’s the second feature from the Belgian director Lukas Dhont, and it follows two 13-year-old boys as their intense friendship begins to unravel. Some crucial reviews in Variety and IndieWire have been notably mixed, calling out one of the film’s melodramatic plot twists, but Oscar voters have never minded melodrama — in fact, they often crave it, and the most ardent fans of “Close” consider it to be the four-hankie entry of the festival. A24 bought the film on the eve of its premiere, so expect a robust fall push.The South Korean director Park Chan-wook deserved Oscar notice for his twisty 2016 masterpiece “The Handmaiden,” and though his new Cannes film “Decision to Leave” isn’t quite on that level, it’s still a well-directed affair that could see plenty of awards attention. A Hitchcockian romantic thriller, “Decision to Leave” stars Park Hae-il as a detective investigating a murdered man’s widow (Tang Wei) who, in her own femme fatale way, seems to welcome the stakeout. After the explicit sex scenes of “The Handmaiden,” it’s surprising how chaste the director’s follow-up is, but that may actually work to the movie’s favor with older Oscar voters.Our Coverage of the Cannes Film Festival 2022The Cannes Film Festival returns with its typical glitz, glamour and red-carpet looks, and with nearly 50 movies projected for the event.Politics and Grace: In Cannes, politics and polemics are always part of the movie mix. But there is still room for scenes of lyrical beauty.Oscar Odds: Which movie from the Cannes crop could capitalize on the academy’s growing international user base to snag major nominations? There are three top contenders.David Cronenberg: The body-horror auteur shared some thoughts on aging and his new film “Crimes of the Future,” which premiered at the festival.‘Elvis’: Baz Luhrmann brought the King to Cannes with a hyperventilated, fitfully entertaining and thoroughly deranged biopic.Ask a Cameraman: The festival is known for its elongated standing ovations. One of the men tasked with filming them explained what it takes to capture those moments.Hirokazu Kore-eda scored the Palme d’Or in 2018 for his sensitive drama “Shoplifters,” which went on to compete for the international-film Oscar; though it lost to the Netflix-funded juggernaut “Roma,” I suspect a film like “Shoplifters” would play better today and contend for more nominations across different categories. Keep an eye on Kore-eda’s “Broker,” then: This affectionate character study stars “Parasite” lead Song Kang Ho as one of two good-natured criminals who try to sell an abandoned baby. At times, the movie is so sweet that it verges on gooey, but I doubt the “CODA” wing of the academy will complain.Some other Cannes entries could pop up throughout awards season, including “Armageddon Time,” from the director James Gray, about a middle-class Jewish family whose progressive attitudes mask a willingness to climb a few rungs at the expense of those less privileged. Gray is well-liked in France and may pick up a trophy here, but Oscar voters have yet to break for him in any significant way. Stars Anne Hathaway, Jeremy Strong, and Anthony Hopkins will at least attract attention.Vicky Krieps should already have one Oscar nomination under her belt for “Phantom Thread”: since she was snubbed then, perhaps voters could make it up to her for “Corsage,” in which she’s fun and spiky as the Empress Elisabeth of Austria. I’d also be pleased if critics’ groups rally behind Léa Seydoux as a single mother attempting a tricky romance in Mia Hansen-Love’s “One Fine Morning,” my favorite entry of the festival.Seydoux is also quite good in David Cronenberg’s “Crimes of the Future,” where she stars opposite Viggo Mortensen and Kristen Stewart, but the film may prove too out-there for awards voters; ditto “Triangle of Sadness,” from “The Square” director Ruben Ostlund, though that class comedy does provide some of the most gonzo gross-out sequences of the year and contains a memorable supporting turn from Woody Harrelson.Léa Seydoux and Viggo Mortensen in “Crimes of the Future.”Nikos Nikolopoulos/NeonWhat about the expensive Hollywood movies that premiered at Cannes? “Elvis” hails from the director Baz Luhrmann, who managed an Oscar breakthrough with “Moulin Rouge” but whose last film, “The Great Gatsby,” earned nominations only for its costumes and production design. The glittery “Elvis” seems likely to continue that trend: Reviews have been polarizing, and though up-and-comer Austin Butler impresses as Elvis Presley, young hunks usually face an uphill battle in the lead-actor category. (And the less said about the misbegotten supporting performance from Tom Hanks as Elvis’s manager, the better.)The last time George Miller was at Cannes, he premiered “Mad Max: Fury Road,” which went on to earn 10 Oscar nominations (including picture and director) and ultimately picked up six statuettes. Action movies rarely fare that well with Oscar, but Miller broke the mold, and he’s made something else unique with “Three Thousand Years of Longing,” his new film about a djinn (Idris Elba), a scholar (Tilda Swinton) and the unique love that blooms between them. It’s got drama, fantasy, romance, comedy … and you’ll either thrill to all of that, or find it a bit overstuffed. The tech elements of the film deserve notice, but other categories could be a long shot.And then there’s “Top Gun: Maverick,” which launched on the Croisette with a flyby from fighter jets and an opaque conversation with star Tom Cruise. This long-in-the-making sequel is earning stellar reviews and it’s expertly directed. If the academy really wants to push well-done blockbuster material into the best picture race, this could be the summer’s strongest hope. “Drive My Fighter Jet,” anyone? More

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      Big Mess on Campus: Making ‘Emergency’

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      A talk with the director Carey Williams and the screenwriter KD Dávila about their college dark comedy streaming on Amazon.Comedies about wild times in high school and college have long scattered the movie landscape like red cups on a frat house porch. The antics of “Animal House” in the late 1970s gave way to a string of zany ‘80s movies like “Porky’s,” “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” and “Revenge of the Nerds.” The ’90s brought “American Pie” and “Can’t Hardly Wait.” But historically, often either missing, put to the sidelines or made the punch lines in these films, were characters of color.Spike Lee’s “School Daze” (1988) was a rare exception of one that focused on a nonwhite cast. But the college comedy “Emergency” (streaming on Amazon), hopes to add something fresh to the genre, making race, and the perceptions that come from being a person of color in certain environments, a central plot point. Its lead characters experience a wild night, but not in the way they would have hoped.The film stars Donald Elise Watkins and RJ Cyler as two buddies who want to become the first Black men on their campus to complete a college party circuit called the legendary tour. But plans go south when they find a young white woman passed out in their house. They must try to figure out, with their other roommate (Sebastian Chacon) what to do, because for three men of color, calling the cops in this situation is a risky option.The makers of “Emergency” understand this tricky calculus. The film was written by KD Dávila, who is Mexican American, and directed by Carey Williams, who is Black. Their feature emerged from their 2018 short, which won prizes at the South by Southwest and Sundance film festivals. In a video interview, the two discussed building humor out of an intense situation, and how British comedies came to be an influence on the film.Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.The director Carey Williams and the screenwriter KD Dávila on the set of “Emergency.”Quantrell ColbertWere there specific elements you wanted to reference from the high school and college comedy genre for this film?KD DÁVILA On the writing side, definitely. In many ways, it was an opportunity to subvert a lot of those tropes. I think we all grew up watching things like “Superbad” and “Booksmart” and everything. But it always struck me as funny how the stakes in those movies are emotional, primarily. They’re never very high. And so this movie was an opportunity to take a lot of things very seriously.Our characters wish that they were in one of those party comedies, like they wish they were going to be in “Superbad” or something, but they ended up in a kind of a thriller instead.What do you think is at the heart of the film?DÁVILA We wanted to do a movie that was about perception and the burden that people of color have of having to anticipate how you’re being perceived at all times. And that’s where a lot of the humor and the drama comes from in the movie: that they have to keep anticipating how they’re being perceived at any given moment.How did you work at striking that tonal balance between comedy and drama here?CAREY WILLIAMS For me, the film was always really like a love story about these two guys and their friendship. And so that was the entry point into balancing the tone of this film through the course of this night. In focusing on this friendship, the humor was going to come from how they interacted with each other, about their differing world views of how to handle the situation.Did you have film references in your mind when making this?WILLIAMS I purposely tried not to watch anything that I felt like would be held in conversation with this film because I didn’t want to be influenced in that way. I did feel the essence of Spike Lee’s work in my mind when making this. But I wanted it to feel not like a college comedy movie. I wanted to have it feel very authored, cinematically. Movies that feature young Black people don’t get that cinematic treatment as much as they should in this world, especially the college comedy. But you know, it’s funny because after I made the movie, I keep thinking about “Y Tu Mamá También” as something I feel like this movie has synergy with. But I don’t think I was thinking about that when I made the movie.DÁVILA When I hit college, I started watching a ton of British comedies. And I think that British comedies operate almost like horror thrillers. Like it’s like the horror of being embarrassed or something. And you are always thinking of how this looks. And so I think that watching so many just British comedies influenced this movie a lot, which sounds probably very strange considering the subject matter of the film and what it ended up being.What is your favorite high school or college comedy?WILLIAMS “Weird Science.” That movie’s ridiculous, but I’ve watched it so many times.DÁVILA This is not a high school or college comedy, but it’s definitely a late-bloomer coming-of-age story: “Shaun of the Dead.” I love it so much. It works on so many levels. More

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      Your Burning Questions About ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Answered

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      How similar is it to the original? Who’s back? Who’s absent? We have answers.Listen to This ArticleTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.“Top Gun: Maverick” turns and burns its way into theaters this week, landing 36 years after the 1986 original. That’s a lot of time to form a lot of questions about the new film and its relationship to its predecessor — and we’ve got answers.Didn’t this already come out?You would think! Thanks to its complex production, the Covid-19 pandemic and Paramount’s insistence on holding out for a proper theatrical rollout, “Top Gun: Maverick” has set and missed five previous release dates: July 2019, June 2020, Christmas 2020, the 2021 Fourth of July weekend, Thanksgiving of 2021, and then finally, its current Friday berth.How similar are the stories?Very. Both films begin with Maverick (Cruise) engaging in a display of hot-dogging that gets him called on the carpet — but not really, since he’s sent to Top Gun, essentially promoted, by its conclusion. (This time, he’ll instruct a class of hotshot young fliers for a dangerous mission.) The goings-on at the Navy flight school include dogfight exercises, philosophical conflicts and a love story. Plus, a devastating loss is followed by a crisis of conscience before the eventual triumph.The original film’s primary conflict was between Maverick, the cocky risk-taker, and Iceman (Val Kilmer), a by-the-book pilot who finds Maverick’s rule-breaking dangerous. In the sequel, that dynamic is replicated between adrenaline junkie Hangman (Glen Powell) and the more conservative Rooster (Miles Teller), whose tendency to play it safe in the air is rooted in the premature death of his father: Maverick’s old flying buddy Goose (Anthony Edwards).Miles Teller as Rooster.Scott Garfield/Paramount PicturesWho’s back?Only one actor, aside from Cruise, returns: Val Kilmer’s Iceman, now the commander of the Pacific fleet. Teller did not play little Rooster in the original film, but the character was present, bouncing on a bar piano as Maverick and his old man sing and play “Great Balls of Fire”; here, Rooster leads a piano singalong of the same tune, and the director Joseph Kosinski flashes back to that scene (just in case Rooster’s costume, mustache and aviators, identical to Goose’s, aren’t enough of a giveaway).And, as the film critic Alison Wilmore noted, Maverick’s love interest, Penny Benjamin (Jennifer Connelly), while not seen in the first film, was mentioned in an early scene.Who’s noticeably absent?That new love interest means that Kelly McGillis, who played the instructor Charlie Blackwood in the original, does not appear — she’s not even mentioned. Nor does Meg Ryan, whose brief but memorable turn as Goose’s widow was an early career highlight, or Rick Rossovich, who played Iceman’s fly buddy Slider to memorable effect.Do we hear “Danger Zone”?Do we ever. The opening minutes are a painstaking recreation of the same stretch in “Top Gun”: Harold Faltermeyer’s distinctive “bong” and synthesizer score accompany the exact same opening text explaining what Top Gun is and what it does (with one notable alteration: it now notes that the school trains a “handful of men and women”), before we see planes taking off from Navy carriers and roaring into the sky as the score gives way to Kenny Loggins’s pulse-pounding hit “Danger Zone.”The detail of the replication is meticulous, approaching the level of Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot “Psycho” remake. But it turns out to be a head-fake, framing “Maverick” as exactly the kind of empty nostalgia play that it turns out not to be.Jennifer Connelly as Penny, Maverick’s love interest.Paramount PicturesWhat about “Take My Breath Away”?Surprisingly, Berlin’s love ballad (the soundtrack’s other big hit) is nowhere to be found, though Cruise and Connolly’s love scene initially apes some of the compositions of the original scene when it was used. But their foreplay ends quickly for a tasteful cut to the afterglow, as Kosinski seems more interested in (gasp) what they have to say to each other than what they want to do to each other.This is true to the picture’s general approach to romance, replacing the entirely physical attraction of the first film with a solid, complicated relationship between two adults, who’ve lived a life and shared a history. But yes, she rides on the back of his Kawasaki, and her hair looks great blowing in the breeze.How homoerotic is it?Barely, sadly. The guy-on-guy overtones of the original film were so pronounced that they became part of the picture’s lore, articulated by no less a pop culture expert than Quentin Tarantino (in a cameo appearance in the 1994 comedy “Sleep With Me”). But this one mostly plays it straight, so to speak.OK, but is there at least a beach volleyball scene?There is a beach football scene, but it’s comparatively chaste — skin is bared and muscles are flexed, but it feels like the sequence is actually about the game they’re playing, and not, y’know, other stuff.From left, Jay Ellis, Monica Barbaro and Danny Ramirez in the film.Scott Garfield/Paramount PicturesHow propagandistic is it?The original “Top Gun” was such an effective piece of rah-rah flag-waving that Navy recruiting officials notoriously posted up outside screenings to field inquiries from would-be Mavericks. The new film isn’t quite as jingoistic (though it was again made with the full cooperation of the Department of Defense), emphasizing personal over political conflict. But the central mission, to bomb an unnamed enemy’s “unsanctioned uranium plant” that threatens “our allies in the region,” has some troubling historical analogues.Will I like it if I loved the original?Probably. The culture-war inclined may decry the film’s inclusivity (beyond the opening text alteration, the flying crew is more racially and sexually diverse), but “Maverick” checks all the expected boxes: thrilling action, shades and leather jackets aplenty, and Cruise at his coolest.Will I like it if I hated the original?Speaking as part of this demographic: yes. Cruise and the screenwriters make the deliberate (and frankly risky) choice of making Hangman, the character most reminiscent of Maverick in the first film, the most unlikable character in this one. It proves a genuinely thoughtful and effective method of grappling with what “Top Gun” was, what it said and what it represented at that moment in history — and in this one.Audio produced by More

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      Inside the ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Flying Sequences

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      The makers of the “Top Gun” sequel discuss the challenges of filming practical aerial stunts.Before Tom Cruise signed on to star in the original “Top Gun,” he asked to take a test flight in a jet. Cruise wasn’t yet world famous, so when he arrived at the hangar, his long hair still in a ponytail left over from “Legend,” the pilots, according to one of the film’s producers, Jerry Bruckheimer, decided to give this Hollywood hippie the ride of his life. Zipping at 6.5 G’s — more than twice the G-forces some astronauts endure during rocket launches — Cruise felt the blood drain from his head. He vomited in his fighter-pilot mask.He agreed to make the film.Cruise continued to fly so fast, and so frequently, that he learned to squeeze his thighs and abs to stay conscious. His stomach adjusted to the speed. When the director Tony Scott put a camera in the cockpit, Cruise could smile for his close-ups. His castmates weren’t as prepared.“They all threw up and their eyes rolled back in their heads,” Bruckheimer said in a phone interview. The original footage “was just a mess,” he admitted. “We couldn’t use any of it.”“Top Gun” made Cruise a superstar — and the experience of shooting it stuck with him so much, he was convinced he needed to lead a three-month flight course for the cast of “Top Gun: Maverick,” a sequel, now in theaters, that has had 35 years to build up suspense. In the new movie, Cruise’s Capt. Pete Mitchell (known as Maverick) readies a dozen young pilots for a dangerous mission to destroy an underground uranium plant in an enemy land. Behind the scenes, Cruise did roughly the same thing, gradually raising the actors’ aerial tolerance, and confidence, from small prop planes to F-18 fighter jets. “He’s got every kind of pilot’s license that you could possibly imagine — helicopters, jets, whatever,” Bruckheimer said.In essence, “Top Gun: Maverick” is a 450 mile-an-hour flying-heist caper. The mission leaders devise a difficult set of challenges for the pilots: zoom low and quick, vault a steep mountain, spin upside-down, plummet into a basin and survive a near-vertical climb at 9 G’s while dodging missiles.Cruise, a contender for the most daredevil actor since Buster Keaton, was adamant that every stunt be accomplished with practical effects. Each jet had a U.S. Navy pilot at the controls, while its actor spun like a leaf in a windstorm. The deserts and snow-capped peaks in the background are real, and so are many of the performers’ grimaces, squints, gasps and moans.“You can’t fake the forces that are put on your body during combat,” the director Joseph Kosinski said by phone. “You can’t do it on a sound stage, you can’t do it on a blue screen. You can’t do it with visual effects.”From the safety of theater seats, the audience faces its own challenge: unlearning the computer-generated complacency that’s turned modern blockbusters into bedazzled bores. The imagery of the sky and ground spiraling behind the actors’ heads in “Top Gun: Maverick” looks like it must be digital wizardry. It isn’t.Cast and crew members on the set of “Top Gun: Maverick.”Paramount PicturesThe movie’s aerial coordinator, Kevin LaRosa II, and its aerial unit director of photography, Michael FitzMaurice, filmed from above using three aircraft: two types of jets with exterior cameras mounted on wind-resistant gimbals, and a helicopter, which proved best at capturing the speed of actors whizzing by. One specialized jet could film the same scene using two different lens focal lengths to double the footage captured on a single flight. Once LaRosa heard that the long-anticipated sequel was finally going to become a reality, he also developed his own aircraft, a shiny black plane with cameras that can withstand up to 3 G’s.“That had never been done before,” LaRosa said in a video interview. As he flew next to the cast, LaRosa dodged trees while keeping an eye on the monitors to make sure FitzMaurice, controlling the cameras from the back of the plane, had gotten the shot.Kosinski, the director, also spent 15 months working with the Navy to develop and install six cameras in each F-18 cockpit, which meant passing rigorous safety tests and securing the military’s all-clear to remove its own equipment. Luckily, Kosinski said, there were “Top Gun” fans among the commanding officers. “All the admirals that are in charge right now were 21 in 1986, or around there when they signed up,” he said. “They supported us and let us do all this crazy stuff.”Usually, the Navy forbids pilots from flying below 200 feet during training. One of the film’s most staggering images is of Cruise in an F-18 whooshing just 50 feet above the ground, a height roughly equal to its wingspan. The plane flew so close to the earth that it kicked up dust and made the ground cameras shake. The pilot landed, turned to Cruise, and told the superstar that he’d never do that again.The actor Monica Barbaro didn’t know how nervous she should be when she agreed to play the pilot Natasha Trace (nickname: Phoenix).“When I met Joe in my callback, first thing he had me sign a waver saying that I didn’t have a fear of flying,” Barbaro said by phone. “I just got goose bumps. I was so excited.”Monica Barbaro as Natasha Trace (known as Phoenix) in the film.Paramount PicturesEach flight day kicked off with a two-hour briefing for the pilots and film crew to go over every upcoming shot, movement and line of dialogue. Next, that sequence’s actors and pilots would rehearse the maneuvers in a wooden mock-up of the jet cockpit until the motions were ingrained. Then, they took to the sky to film as many takes as possible before the jet, or the performers, ran out of fuel. In the afternoon, they did it again.Soaring above the crew, Barbaro and the rest of the cast took on a Swiss Army knife of skills. Instead of hitting her mark on the ground, she had to hit it in the air. The sun was her spotlight. A pilot’s kneeboard on her lap displayed her script, her movements and her necessary coordinates, plus reminders to check her parachute and shoulder straps, fix her hair and makeup, adjust her flight visor, flip on the bright red switch that controlled the cameras, and note down the time codes. Finally, Barbaro had to do her actual job: act.“Tom just really encouraged everybody, if you are going to throw up, just learn how to do it and move past,” Barbaro said. “We would applaud when anyone threw up, so it became celebrated.” Glen Powell (he plays the hot shot Lt. Jake Seresin, who is called Hangman) even brandished his barf bag while gliding upside-down and flashing a thumbs up.Barbaro held onto her lunch. But after her first dailies, she said, her face appeared so calm, it gave the impression that the clouds whooshing behind her were simply a green screen. Cruise’s training had prepared her too well.She was sent back into the sky for a retake. More

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      Remembering Ray Liotta in ‘Goodfellas’

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      His performance as Henry Hill includes many touches that weren’t in the script. But the producer didn’t want to cast him originally.There’s a moment early in Martin Scorsese’s 1990 gangster classic “Goodfellas” that always tugs at my heartstrings. Scorsese’s movie is brutal and cleareyed and unsentimental, yes. But Ray Liotta as Henry Hill, the viewer’s docent into the criminal world, injects a note of tenderness that’s all the more effective for coming out of the mouth of a slick sociopath. (The movie is based on the true-crime book “Wiseguy” by Nicholas Pileggi; the real Hill attained some celebrity in the wake of the picture’s release.)It’s during the voice-over when Henry recalls as a boy envying the wiseguys who hung out at the pizza parlor and taxi stand across the street from his home. The guy who runs the pizza joint is Tuddy Cicero, brother of the mob underboss Paulie Cicero, for whom Henry will be working soon. Narrator Henry says the gangster’s full name and pauses. Then, in an exhalation that has low but strong notes of love and nostalgia, he adds, “Tuddy.”Now mind you, Tuddy is eventually revealed to be as ruthless and coldblooded a gangster as they come. It is he who puts the bullet in the back of the head of Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci) at the fraudulent ceremony at which Tommy is to become a “made man.” But here is Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill, clearly still besotted with a childhood idol and the life he shared with the man. Liotta, who died this week at 67, fills Scorsese’s movie with dozens of equally revelatory touches.When I was researching “Made Men: The Story of ‘Goodfellas,’” my 2020 book about the film, I asked about that moment in the movie several times. The pause and the repetition of Tuddy’s name was not in the script drafts I saw. It was Liotta’s own touch. No one I spoke with remembered whether Liotta suggested it during the voice-over recordings or just added it himself. In any event, it works. Maybe too well, for people who believe that depiction is endorsement. In a movie that relentlessly examines the lure and transgressive thrill of amorality, Liotta’s depiction of Hill is the hook that draws the viewer in.If you saw Hill on television or listened to any of his appearances on Howard Stern, you were likely to get the impression that Henry Hill was what your grandmother might call a schnook. While he did commit acts of violence both gang-related and domestic, he wasn’t intimidating. Edward McDonald, the prosecutor who got Hill and family into the witness protection program, and who plays himself in “Goodfellas,” told me that Hill was more a mob court jester than any kind of master criminal.But Scorsese’s movie isn’t just about real-life gangsters — it’s also about how we mythologize them. “Movie stars with muscle” is how Hill characterizes his crew. And Liotta was a perfect Henry, able to turn on a dime from dry charm to deadly rage. In one of the movie’s famed tracking shots, when Henry escorts his future wife, Karen (Lorraine Bracco), into New York’s Copacabana nightclub by way of a side entrance, Liotta concocted all the bits of charming business a guy like Henry would use: tip a doorman here, shout out to a cook there, steer your date by the elbow lightly, act like it’s just what you’re due when the waiter flies out from the wings and sets a personal table at the side of the stage. Liotta got suggestions from Hill himself — and more from audiotapes of Hill speaking with Pileggi. But the research Liotta did into Hill’s world, and the inner work he did, was crucial.The part came at a point when he might have been headed for a career as a character actor. He was unforgettable in Jonathan Demme’s “Something Wild,” as an ex-boyfriend of Melanie Griffith’s whose possessiveness explodes in still-shocking violence. And in “Field of Dreams” he played a reincarnation of the disgraced ballplayer Shoeless Joe Jackson. Sometimes the crinkle in his eye reminded the viewer of the man’s corruption, but his portrayal was mostly of an awe-struck love of the game he could now play forever in a Midwestern cornfield turned ballpark.When “Goodfellas” was announced, more than one of its eventual cast members told me that it was the movie every New York and Los Angeles actor wanted in on. And Liotta was no exception. Everyone liked him for the part save the producer Irwin Winkler. He did not see the actor’s charm. In his book “A Life in Movies,” Winkler recalls Liotta coming to his table at a Santa Monica restaurant and asking for a word. “In a 10-minute conversation he (with charm and confidence) sold me on why he should play Henry Hill,” the producer wrote. When I interviewed Winkler, he said, rather sheepishly, “You heard the story of me not wanting Ray?” I told Winkler I had and said, “I can’t see anyone else doing it.” Winkler responded “Nor can I.”As it happened, I was not able to interview Liotta himself for my book. Early talks with his publicist were promising. It was possible that I could get some time with him when he was in New York promoting “Marriage Story” at the New York Film Festival; then it wasn’t. We were both represented by the same agency; no dice. He was in a film on which a few close friends of mine were crew members. Can’t go there. And as I worked on the book, I heard several accounts of an intense, serious actor who, upon deciding he wasn’t going to do something, kept to that.He had spoken about “Goodfellas” in other interviews, including an oral history that ran in GQ in 2010. The shoot had its challenges: He suffered the death of his mother halfway through and felt at least slightly shut out by male castmates like Robert De Niro and Pesci. Going through De Niro’s papers at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, I came across a thank-you card from Liotta, and inside was a handwritten note: “Bob, Now I can tell you how much of a trip it was to work with you. You’re the best. Hope we can do it again. But I really mean Do it!” Liotta’s eagerness is palpable. The two did work together again, in “Copland.”But “Goodfellas” was irreproducible. Because it did show off his range, and it is a landmark film. Liotta’s signature role is one any actor would hope to be remembered by.Glenn Kenny is a critic and the author of “Made Men: The Story of ‘Goodfellas.’” More