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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

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      Kevin Spacey Facing Sexual Assault Charges in Britain

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      British prosecutors said that they had authorized criminal charges against Mr. Spacey, 62, for four counts of sexual assault. He cannot be formally charged unless he enters England or Wales. LONDON — The British authorities have authorized criminal charges against Kevin Spacey on four counts of sexual assault against three men, the country’s Crown Prosecution Service announced in a news release on Thursday.Rosemary Ainslie, head of the service’s special crime division, said in the release that the service had also authorized one charge against Mr. Spacey, 62, of “causing a person to engage in penetrative sexual activity without consent.”The authorization of charges followed a review of the evidence collected by London’s police force. Mr. Spacey cannot be formally charged unless he enters England or Wales, a spokesman for the service said in a telephone interview. The spokesman declined to comment on whether the service would pursue extradition proceedings if that did not occur. The news release said the charges concerned three complainants. The incidents dated from March 2005, August 2008 and April 2013, it added — a time when Mr. Spacey was artistic director of the Old Vic theater in London. All the incidents occurred in London, except one from 2013, which occurred in Gloucestershire, England. The Metropolitan Police said that one of the men was now “in his 40s” and that the other two were now in their 30s, but did not provide their exact ages.Representatives for Mr. Spacey did not immediately respond to requests for comment.The first person to publicly accuse Mr. Spacey of sexual misconduct was the actor Anthony Rapp, who said in 2017 that Mr. Spacey had made unwanted sexual advances toward him in the 1980s, when he was 14 years old.Soon after that a former television anchor came forward to accuse Mr. Spacey of sexually assaulting her son, and then 20 people who worked with Mr. Spacey at the Old Vic theater in London, where he was artistic director for 11 years, accused him of inappropriate behavior. The theater commissioned an independent investigation, which Mr. Spacey did not take part in, and issued a report that concluded that “his stardom and status at the Old Vic may have prevented people, and in particular junior staff or young actors, from feeling that they could speak up or raise a hand for help.”The report said that the theater had not been able to independently verify the allegations. But some actors and members of the staff did go public. One actor, Roberto Cavazos, wrote on Facebook that he “had a couple of nasty encounters with Spacey that were close to being called harassment” at the theater. “It seems that it only took a male under 30 to make Mr. Spacey feel free to touch us,” Mr. Cavazos wrote.The Old Vic said in a statement that it could not comment on ongoing criminal proceedings. In 2018, Mr. Spacey was charged with the sexual assault of the television anchor’s 18-year-old son in Nantucket, Mass. Prosecutors dropped the case when the accuser invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to continue testifying.A massage therapist sued Mr. Spacey in California in 2019, accusing him of groping and trying to kiss him before offering him oral sex during a massage. The accuser died unexpectedly ahead of the trial and the case was dismissed when his estate dropped the lawsuit.Mr. Spacey is a two-time Academy Award winner. He won the best actor Oscar in 2000 for his work in “American Beauty,” and in 1996 he won best supporting actor for “The Usual Suspects.” He was also a prominent stage actor, winning a Tony Award in 1991 as a featured actor in “Lost in Yonkers,” and he was the host of the Tony Awards in 2017. But he had a rapid fall from grace after the accusations by Mr. Rapp, who has an ongoing lawsuit against him, which were followed by more accusations. After Mr. Rapp’s allegations were first published in BuzzFeed, Mr. Spacey released a statement saying that he did not recall the episode but apologized for what he said “would have been deeply inappropriate drunken behavior.” In court papers, Mr. Spacey denied Mr. Rapp’s allegations that when Mr. Rapp was underage, Mr. Spacey had grabbed his buttocks and lifted him onto a bed.Mr. Spacey appeared in federal court in Manhattan on Thursday for a hearing about the proper venue for Mr. Rapp’s lawsuit. As he left the courthouse, Mr. Spacey declined to acknowledge reporters’ questions about the developments in Britain, according to The New York Post. Mr. Spacey leaving the federal courthouse in Manhattan on Thursday, where there was a hearing about a civil lawsuit he is facing.John Minchillo/Associated PressTV and film producers started dropping Mr. Spacey from projects after Mr. Rapp went public and more allegations followed, including from the Netflix political drama “House of Cards,” which finished its run without the actor. But more recently, he has found roles in smaller films, including an Italian feature and an American thriller.In January, Croatian newspapers reported that Mr. Spacey was shooting a movie in the country in which he played Franjo Tudjman, the onetime Communist general who led Croatia to independence. This month, Deadline reported that he had signed up for a historical drama called “1242 — Gateway to the West” scheduled to start shooting in Hungary and Mongolia in October. The movie would tell the story of one of Genghis Khan’s grandsons. It was being sold at the Cannes Film Festival, Deadline added. His new American thriller was also being sold at Cannes, according to Rolling Stone.Alex Marshall More

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      ‘A Chiara’ Review: A Mobster’s Daughter Dares to Ask Questions

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      In Jonas Carpignano’s intense and observant new film, a teenager in southern Italy confronts the truth about her family.Chiara is 15, the middle daughter in what seems — to her and to us, at least at first — like an ordinary middle-class family.She goes to school and to the gym, watches television and gets into pillow fights with her sisters, Giulia (Grecia Rotolo), who is turning 18, and Giorgia (Giorgia Rotolo), who seems to be around 8 or 9. With her friends, Chiara (Swamy Rotolo) hangs out in their designated spot along the sea wall in their southern Italian hometown, vaping, scrolling through Instagram and chasing off other girls who dare to encroach on her territory.But at Giulia’s birthday party — a bustling, multigenerational blowout in a local restaurant, with toasts from uncles and cousins and platters of prosciutto — things start to change. Or maybe what changes is how Chiara sees things. “A Chiara,” Jonas Carpignano’s bristling and observant film, is closely tethered to her point of view. We know only as much as she does, and her risky insistence on knowing the truth is what drives the story through harrowing suspense and potential heartbreak.At the party, Chiara notices the quiet, tense conversations her father, Claudio (Claudio Rotolo), has with other men. Her quiet suspicions — captured in darting camera movements and staccato editing — are amplified by a series of dramatic events. Claudio disappears into the night. The carabinieri pay a visit. One of the family’s cars bursts into flames on the street in front of their house. And Chiara discovers a hidden opening in the living room wall that leads to an underground bunker.All of this engenders an especially intense adolescent identity crisis. Claudio is part of the ’Ndrangheta, the ruthless Calabrian analog of the Sicilian Mafia and the Neapolitan Camorra. He’s not a boss, he explains later, but he’s a hard worker and what wiseguys in American mob movies might call a good earner, involved in the international drug trade. He’s notorious enough to be mentioned in news broadcasts. At one point, Chiara is surprised to hear father referred to by an underworld alias, evidence of an identity that has been kept secret from her.The adult women in the family — Giulia and the girls’ mother, Carmela (Carmela Fumo) — opt for silence and strategic ignorance. The less they know, the less they say, the safer they will be. Chiara rebels against that arrangement, for reasons she might not entirely understand. She sets out to find her father, pesters her older cousin Antonio (Antonio Rotolo Uno), who works with Claudio, for information, and acts out in other ways that trouble the established order in her household and beyond it.She’s a complicated character in a complicated situation, and “A Chiara,” while telling her story in a powerful, direct, compact manner — most of the action unfolds in just a few days and nights — does justice to that complexity. In this, it resembles Carpignano’s previous features, “Mediterranea” and “A Ciambra,” which are also set in the Gioia Tauro, a rough coastal town on the edge of Reggio Calabria, the regional capital. Like those films, this one has been cast with local, nonprofessional actors. The people who play Chiara, her siblings, their parents and other relatives are members of an actual family, like the extended Roma clan at the center of “A Ciambra.”This technique has a long history in cinema, from Robert Bresson and the Italian neorealists to the Dardenne Brothers and Abbas Kiarostami more recently. Often the use of untrained performers lends an aura of documentary credibility to fictional stories, as well as an enigmatic element of opacity. Real people know how to behave, but not necessarily how to act. Carpignano, though, seems to have an ability to identify and cultivate natural actors. Swamy Rotolo, in particular, conveys the quicksilver movements of Chiara’s thoughts and moods with the kind of subtlety and specificity that seasoned methodizers might envy.In the neorealist tradition, “A Chiara” is a slice-of-life drama built around an idea and animated by a profound moral quandary. Chiara loves her family, but her drive to understand its true circumstances might cause her to lose it. She is caught between the sticky, sometimes lethal ties of blood and the impersonal, rational benevolence of the state. A social worker explains to her that women who defy the codes of the ’Ndrangheta are sometimes killed and offers the possibility of escape.Would that be freedom, or a devastating loss? A similar choice confronted Pio, the young Roma protagonist of “A Ciambra.” Carpignano, infinitely sympathetic to these young people and studiously unsentimental about their prospects, doesn’t put a thumb on the scales. You feel the weight of Chiara’s dilemma, the cost of the knowledge she demands, and the heroism of her willingness to pay it.A ChiaraRated R. The life of crime. In Italian, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Tsugua Diaries’ Review: Finding Togetherness in a Pandemic

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      This film possesses both the whimsy and fearlessness of a student project and the technical prowess of a veteran’s opus.The Tsugua in “The Tsugua Diaries” is the month of August spelled backward. And for good reason: The co-directors Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes tell the film’s story in reverse chronological order starting on Day 21. But instead of presenting a stream of reverse motion shots — think Christopher Nolan’s “Memento” or Lee Chang Dong’s “Peppermint Candy”— the filmmakers let the days themselves unfold chronologically. Shot on 16-millimeter, the movie plays like a series of stand-alone shorts, all buttressed by splashes of light and sharp editing choices. The result: a work that possesses both the whimsy and fearlessness of a student project and the technical vibrancy of a veteran’s opus.Set on a farm in an unnamed Portuguese seaside town, the movie plods at first as we watch the trio of friends — Crista (Crista Alfaiate), Carloto (Carloto Cotta) and João (João Nunes Monteiro) build a butterfly house. It’s not until the fourth wall is broken, a third of the way in, does the film find its wings.But “The Tsugua Diaries” doesn’t just break the fourth wall, it demolishes it. The film expands to become a story that includes the crew, producers, screenwriters, directors and even the cooks.Shot well into the coronavirus pandemic that has shaken up what is normal, Fazendeiro and Gomes, a couple directing together for the first time, are not interested in pretending nothing has changed, even when it comes to maintaining proverbial movie magic. Rather, the aim here is that the entire filmmaking team functions as one cinematic organism where individual instincts add up to a truly collective work. And remarkably, it succeeds, demonstrating how to transmute the constraints of pandemic-era moviemaking into a film with humor and, during a time marred by isolation, a sense of real togetherness.The Tsugua DiariesNot rated. In Portuguese and Romanian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Zero Contact’ Review: A Token of the Times

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      Rick Dugdale’s thriller, shot over Zoom early in the pandemic, stars Anthony Hopkins as an eccentric tech genius. It was previously released as an NFT.It seems that innovation is everything to the director Rick Dugdale. In May 2020, while many people were still learning to bake sourdough, Dugdale began to shoot the techno-thriller “Zero Contact” over Zoom. Last year, the director released the movie, a modestly amusing flick, as a nonfungible token, or NFT. “Zero Contact” stars Anthony Hopkins as Finley Hart, an enigmatic engineer and genius whose death is reported in the opening credits. Hart leaves behind hours of recorded video logs filled with twisty, seemingly half-improvised monologues, which give the impression that his tongue can’t keep up with his brain.While Hart was alive, he spent decades developing teleportation technology. Bad things will happen if the machine he left behind implodes. The conceit is to make this familiar ticking-time-bomb plot take place on computer screens. An unseen spy watches Hart’s estranged son (Chris Brochu) and feisty former employees panic during an emergency virtual meeting, and taps into their cellphone and security cameras. Every few seconds, the image glitches, apparently for added realism.Hopkins’s character is a routine riff on the aloof tycoon. “I lost touch with my humanity,” he quips, “boohoo.”There’s a vicarious pleasure to be found in watching Hopkins, the octogenarian actor, getting the hang of technology that allows him to film himself without the usual hovering crew. Indeed, the behind-the-scenes footage that plays over the movie’s end credits is as engaging as its plot. “Who’s that on the left?” Hopkins asks, pointing at a corner of his video-call frame. Told that it’s the screenwriter Cam Cannon, Hopkins beams. “Hey, I’m sorry,” he says, “I hope I didn’t take too much liberty with your writing!”Zero ContactRated R for a grisly moment of violence. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Fanny: The Right to Rock’ Review: Still Kicking

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      Started by two Filipino American sisters in California, the influential band is claiming its rightful rank in rock ’n’ roll history.Jean and June Millington, Filipino American sisters and lifelong bandmates best known for their 1970s rock band Fanny, have over 50 years of history in the music industry to reflect on in the documentary “Fanny: The Right To Rock.”When Fanny was signed to a recording contract in 1970, there was no one in rock music quite like them. Though the group’s lineup has had several iterations, all its members have been women, and two — June Millington and the drummer Alice de Buhr — are lesbians. Their musical chops earned them gigs at venues like Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles, where they won the respect of musicians like David Bowie, Bonnie Raitt, Alice Bag and Cherie Currie of the Runaways.The group disbanded in 1975, but three original members — the sisters June and Jean (Millington) Adamian, and Brie Darling — reunited for an album, “Fanny Walked the Earth,” released in 2018. The thought of the group’s struggles brings a smile to Jean’s face in the movie. “We dealt with the prejudice against girls and feminism, and June says, now we’re bucking ageism!”The director Bobbi Jo Hart decided to show the group’s story through a combination of archival footage and present-day interviews with band members and their famous fans. The film’s most novel sequences come when Hart joins the band for recording sessions for their 2018 album, and finds that even if the voices warble a bit more than they did in the screaming days of youth, Fanny’s sound remains heavy. But the conventional vérité footage doesn’t add new depth to the guitar licks and improvisations, the signals of musicianship that make Fanny feel artistically vital as white-haired rockers. What the movie showcases best from its subjects, then, is the humor and ease of women who have survived a lifetime of setbacks and strife. Fanny has already proven itself — what’s left is for us to enjoy its growing catalog.Fanny: The Right to RockNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Review: ‘There Are No Saints.’ Neither Are There New Plots.

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      A B-movie that took a decade to get to the screen follows a well-worn trail of cross-border revenge.“There Are No Saints” is an odd case. Directed by Alfonso Pineda Ulloa, from a screenplay by Paul Schrader, the movie entered preproduction in the fall of 2012, under the title “The Jesuit” and finished shooting the following year. It’s been gathering dust on a studio shelf ever since. The delay has lent the project an air of mystery amplified by the involvement of Schrader, who has been enjoying one of the most fertile periods of his career.Nearly a decade later, the final product is here, and it is neither a colossal train wreck nor a misunderstood masterpiece. Rather it’s a bland, unoriginal action thriller about an entirely predictable quest for revenge. When a local drug kingpin, Vincent (Neal McDonough), kidnaps the son of a reformed hitman known as the Jesuit (José María Yazpik), the father must steal across the border into Mexico in pursuit. On the way he lays gruesome waste to hordes of gun-toting cartel heavies in various neon-lit bars and strip clubs.It can be difficult to take genre movies that are this clichéd seriously, and doubly so when they insist on regurgitating tropes in a humorless register. The director, Ulloa, tries to mask the derivative story by embellishing the violence, cutting to closeups of flesh wounds and bullet holes as a distraction from the routine plot and hardboiled dialogue — he seems to be aiming for stark and gritty, but his tough-talking assassins, crime lords and arms dealers bring the whole thing closer to unintentional camp.But I more often found myself thinking of “Detective Crashmore,” the uproarious action-film spoof on Tim Robinson’s “I Think You Should Leave.” Winkingly described as “a cosmic gumbo” that combines “the action of the 90s … with the exploitation films of the 70s, but with modern touches,” it’s a dead-on (if completely accidental) imitation of “There Are No Saints.” But frankly, “Crashmore” was a lot more fun.There Are No SaintsRated R for language, sexuality and extreme graphic violence. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Google Play, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Playlist’ Review: A Broken Record of Trials

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      In this brisk comedy set in Paris, an aspiring cartoonist stumbles through a series of romantic, professional and medical misadventures.Taking cues from shambolic big-city indies like “Frances Ha,” “Playlist,” the debut feature by the French graphic novelist and illustrator Nine Antico, is a brisk comedy about a chaotic woman in her late twenties who can’t seem to catch a break.Oddly enough, it is the second French import of 2022 to capture the love lives of young Parisians using a monochrome palette. Jacques Audiard’s tripartite romance, “Paris, 13th District” was released in April, and it, too, draws from the world of animation — the film was based on stories by the cartoonist Adrian Tomine.“Playlist,” instead, takes a mocking look at France’s comic book industry. Sophie (a charismatic Sara Forestier) is a wannabe cartoonist who lands a secretarial gig at an elite publishing firm run by self-proclaimed jerk Jean-Luc (Grégoire Colin). It’s better than her job as a waitress — no more dealing with the flaky cook, her sometimes-boyfriend — but the opportunity doesn’t exactly put her art on the map.With each new man Sophie encounters, a scribbled text appears with his name. It’s an annoyingly quirky indicator of the connection between her lovelorn fixations and her creative processes.A music lover (the corny-yearning soundtrack is heavy on American folk musician Daniel Johnston), Sophie also deals with an abortion, a bed bug infestation, an intimidating roommate and a hematoma that stops a hookup dead in its tracks.The film’s adrift-and-artsy-girl hangups don’t make for a terribly original premise, but the script by Antico (with the collaboration of Marc Syrigas) is peppered with amusing zingers and absurd, yet relatable situations. (“I take my pasta seriously,” exclaims Jean-Luc when Sophie procures the wrong brand of Parmesan.) There are no particularly moving insights, and it falls short of a proper character study, but “Playlist” does intrigue with its droll individual parts — if not the sum of them.PlaylistNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. In theaters. More