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      Rosmarie Trapp of the ‘Sound of Music’ Family Dies at 93

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      She was the last surviving daughter of the baron and the would-be nun depicted in the stage musical and 1965 film.Rosmarie Trapp, a member of the singing family made famous by the stage musical and film “The Sound of Music” and the last surviving daughter of Baron Georg Johannes von Trapp, the family patriarch, died on May 13 at a nursing home in Morrisville, Vt. She was 93.The Trapp Family Lodge, the family business in Stowe, Vt., announced her death on Tuesday.Ms. Trapp (who dropped the “von” from her name years ago) was the daughter of Georg and Maria Augusta (Kutschera) von Trapp, the would-be nun who became a governess with the family and ultimately married the baron.Rosmarie is not depicted in “The Sound of Music,” which focused on the seven children Georg von Trapp had with his first wife, although she was in fact almost 10 when the family fled Austria in 1938 after that country came under Nazi rule. Among the many liberties “The Sound of Music” took with the family’s story was the timeline — Georg and Maria actually married in 1927, not a decade later.In any case, Rosmarie did travel and perform with the Trapp Family Singers for years and was a presence at the lodge in Stowe, where she would hold singalongs for the guests. She acknowledged, though, that it took her some time to embrace the fame that the musical thrust upon her after it debuted on Broadway in 1959, beginning a three-year run, and then was adapted into a 1965 movie, which won the best picture Oscar.“I used to think I was a museum,” she told The Chicago Tribune in 1997, when she was evangelizing on behalf of the Community of the Crucified One, a Pennsylvania-based church, “but I can’t escape it.”“Now I’m using it as a tool,” she added. “I’m not a victim of it anymore.”Some of the children of Baron Georg von Trapp singing during a Mass in his honor in 1997 in Stowe, Vt., where the family runs a lodge. From left, Maria von Trapp, Eleonore Campbell, Werner von Trapp, Rosmarie Trapp and Agathe von TrappAssociated PressRosmarie Barbara von Trapp was born on Feb. 8, 1929, in Aigen, a village outside Salzburg, Austria. The family began singing publicly in the 1930s in Europe, but the baron had no interest in cooperating with Hitler once the Nazis took control, and so the family left Austria, taking a train to Italy. (The “Sound of Music” depiction of the departure was fictionalized.)The family gave its first New York concert, at Town Hall, in December 1938 and soon settled in the United States, first in Pennsylvania, then in Vermont.“We chose America because it was the furthest away from Hitler,” Ms. Trapp told The Palm Beach Post of Florida in 2007, when she spoke to students from the musical theater program and Holocaust studies classes at William T. Dwyer High School in Palm Beach Gardens.The family singing group continued to perform into the 1950s. Late in the decade, Ms. Trapp and other family members went to New Guinea to do missionary work for several years. Ms. Trapp’s father died in 1947, and her mother died in 1987.Ms. Trapp’s brother, Johannes von Trapp, is the last living member of the original family singers and her only immediate survivor.The Trapp Family Singers repertory, of course, included none of the songs later composed by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II for “The Sound of Music,” but when Ms. Trapp gave talks like the one at the Florida high school, she would gladly take requests for a number or two from the musical. What did she think of the film?“It was a nice movie,” she told The Post in 2007. “But it wasn’t like my life.” More

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      Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Masterpiece of Existential Angst

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      His moody 2004 film, ‘Distant,’ about an unemployed factory worker in Istanbul, has been revived for a short run at Film Forum in Manhattan.The miracle of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “Distant” is that it is continually absorbing, even when not much is happening — which is most of the time. A photographer before he became the dean of Turkish filmmakers, Ceylan is a master of existential angst and transfigured dailiness whose movies invite contemplation.Revived for a week at Film Forum in a new digital restoration, “Distant” — which opened in the United States in 2004, having won the second-highest prize at Cannes — looks even better than I remembered.The brief precredit sequence is emblematic of Ceylan’s style. A tiny figure trudges across a snowy field in what feels like real time, accompanied by ambient sounds. This is followed by a slow pan to the road, slightly in advance of the vehicle that will take him to Istanbul. Immanence is all.An unemployed factory worker, Yusuf (Mehmet Emin Toprak) arrives in the city with vague hopes of shipping out to sea. While shambolically looking for a job, he stays with his older cousin Mahmut (Muzaffer Özdemir), a commercial photographer with abandoned artistic aspirations. (If Mahmut might be the director’s unflattering self-portrait, Yusuf was played by Ceylan’s actual cousin, tragically killed in a car crash before the movie’s release.)Sufficiently affluent to indulge his alienation, Mahmut has a decent apartment in a nice neighborhood, but his emotions are as frozen as the snow that blanket the city. “Distant” often feels directed by the weather. (Ceylan’s next film, about a marital breakup in which he co-starred with his wife, was titled “Climates.”)Each frustrated in his own way, the cousins can barely relate. Yusuf is a bit of a bumpkin. Mahmut is a grouch who spends most evenings sacked out in front of his TV (switching from a Tarkovsky movie to — when Yusuf leaves the room — porn). Mahmut’s immobility is parodied by the sticky tape he puts down nightly in hopes of trapping the mouse that lives in his kitchen.Although his mood of rapt sadness is his own, Ceylan has affinities to Michelangelo Antonioni (feel for bourgeois estrangement), Yasujiro Ozu (exquisite, unshowy compositions), Robert Bresson (precise use of sound) and even Jacques Tati (deadpan humor).Pervaded with a sense of apprehension, “Distant” seems to promise a crime — not least because Yusuf has a practice of following women in the street. In one mordant joke, he trails a woman into a park, inadvertently makes eye contact with another lurker, then hastily conceals himself when the woman’s date shows up.The transgression finally comes from an act of omission, rather commission, so mean and petty as to seem earthshaking. As the fate of the mouse suggests, Ceylan has a feel for understated symbols. The New York Times critic Elvis Mitchell, although generally unenthusiastic (“almost like a droll take on ‘The Odd Couple’”), did acknowledge that “Distant” required a second viewing “to work its spell.”In the final scene, Mahmut sits alone by the harbor, smoking a cigarette from a pack Yusuf left behind. His anguish is palpable. There’s no particular reason to feel sorry for this guy except he’s human and alone.DistantMay 20-26 at Film Forum in Manhattan; filmforum.org. More

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      Tom Cruise on ‘Top Gun: Maverick' and Doing His Own Stunts

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      CANNES, France — It has been 30 years since Tom Cruise attended the Cannes Film Festival, and it’s evident the festival would like to make up for lost time. Perhaps that’s why, in advance of a conversation with the actor billed as a “Rendezvous with Tom Cruise” — which was itself happening in advance of the evening premiere of Cruise’s sequel “Top Gun: Maverick” — the festival played a nearly 15-minute-long clip reel of Cruise’s filmography, hyperbolically scored to Richard Strauss’s “Also sprach Zarathustra.” As the actor and audience watched from their seats, the reel touched on Cruise the action star, Cruise the dramatic thespian and Cruise the romantic, though the latter section, which featured him pitching woo at a bevy of leading ladies, notably left out Cruise’s ex-wife and three-time co-star Nicole Kidman.“It’s wild seeing this reel,” Cruise said after taking the stage. “It’s like your life in ten minutes — very trippy.” Cruise was speaking in front of a mostly unmasked crowd in the Salle Claude Debussy, which included hundreds of journalists and a team from Cruise’s agent, CAA. “After everything we’ve been through, it’s such a privilege to see your faces,” he said. He noted that “Top Gun: Maverick” had been held for two years because of the pandemic, though he refused to show it on a streaming service in the meantime. “Not gonna happen!” Cruise said to applause. The 59-year-old star is insistent that his movies receive a lengthy theatrical window, a mandate that has sometimes put him in conflict with studio heads, who are eager to fill their streaming services with star-driven content. And in an era where big names like Leonardo DiCaprio and Sandra Bullock have no problem appearing in films for Netflix, Cruise remains a rare holdout.“There’s a very specific way to make a movie for cinema, and I make movies for the big screen,” said Cruise. “I know where they go after that and that’s fine.” He said he even called theater owners during the pandemic to reassure them: “Just know we are making ‘Mission: Impossible.’ ‘Top Gun’ is coming out.”Cruise is a discursive speaker who will leap out of one anecdote before it’s done to land in another, then another. (Perhaps that would make for an esoteric set piece in one of his action films?) But it was striking how often he returned to his formative experience shooting the 1981 movie “Taps,” in which he acted opposite George C. Scott and found himself fascinated by the way the filmmaking worked. Cruise said that while shooting, he thought, “Please, if I could just do this for the rest of my life, I will never take it for granted.”And in the absence of any challenging questions from his interlocutor, the French journalist Didier Allouch — who was mostly content to burble blandishments like “You’re absolutely extraordinary” to his interview subject — Cruise had the freedom to basically spin his own narrative of being a determined student of cinema and his fellow man. (And “Taps,” of course.)“I was the kind of kid who always wrote goals on the wall of what kind of movies I liked or what I wanted my life to be, and I worked toward those goals,” Cruise said.Though the conversation increasingly leaned toward bland generalities — “I’m interested in people, cultures, and adventure,” Cruise said more than once — it did provide one major laugh line when Allouch asked why he was so determined to do his own stunts in the “Mission: Impossible” movies, which will soon be receiving seventh and eighth installments shot back-to-back. “No one asked Gene Kelly ‘Why do you dance?’” replied the star. More

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      Cannes Film Festival Impacted by the War in Ukraine

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      The war in Ukraine is casting a long shadow over this year’s Cannes Film Festival. On Tuesday, Volodymyr Zelensky, the country’s president, addressed the event’s opening ceremony, with stirring rhetoric and Charlie Chaplin quotes.But the conflict had already had an impact on the festival long before Zelensky’s appearance. Within days of Russia’s invasion, in February, some of Ukraine’s leading movie directors and producers called on film festivals worldwide to boycott Russians, as a sign of support. Cannes said in a statement in March that it would no longer “welcome official Russian delegations, nor accept the presence of anyone linked to the Russian government,” but added that it would not ban Russian directors.There is one major Russian director at this year’s event: Kirill Serebrennikov, who is competing for the Palme d’Or with “Tchaikovsky’s Wife.” The Cannes press office told The Hollywood Reporter it had approved “only a few” Russian media outlets to cover the event, and that all of those outlets opposed the war. It was unclear, however, if any state news outlets had requested accreditation, and the festival did not respond to emailed questions.Two movies by Ukrainian directors are on the festival’s program: Maksim Nakonechnyi’s “Butterfly Vision” and Sergei Loznitsa’s “The Natural History of Destruction.” But even those choices might stir controversy. In March, the Ukrainian Film Academy expelled Loznitsa, because he did not support its call to boycott Russian movies.A scene from Sergei Loznitsa’s “The Natural History of Destruction.”Progress FilmRita Burkovska in “Butterfly Vision.”
      “When I hear calls to ban Russian films, I think of my Russian friends — decent and honorable people,” Loznitsa told The New York Times in March. “We cannot judge people by their passports,” he added: “They are victims of this war, just like we are.” More

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      The 50 Best Movies on HBO Max Right Now

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      In addition to new Warner and HBO films, the streamer has a treasure trove of Golden Age classics, indie flicks and foreign films. Start with these.When HBO Max debuted in May 2020, subscribers rightfully expected (and got) the formidable catalog of prestige television associated with the HBO brand. But, if anything, its movie library draws from a much deeper well. WarnerMedia, which owns HBO, is a huge conglomerate, and its premiere streaming service comprises decades of titles from Warner Bros., Turner Classic Movies and Studio Ghibli, as well as new work produced directly for HBO Max.That means a lot of large-scale fantasy series like Harry Potter and “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy, and selections from the DC extended universe. HBO Max is also an education in Golden Age Hollywood classics and in independent and foreign auteurs like Federico Fellini, Satyajit Ray and John Cassavetes. The list below is an effort to recommend a diverse range of movies — old and new, foreign and domestic, all-ages and adults-only — that cross genres and cultures while appealing to casual and serious movie-watchers alike. (Note: Streaming services sometimes remove titles of change starting dates without notice.)Here are our lists of the best movies and TV shows on Netflix, the best movies on Amazon Prime Video and the best of everything on Hulu and Disney+.Keir Dullea in a scene from “2001: A Space Odyssey.”Warner Bros. Pictures‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (1968)From its “dawn of man” sequence to its cosmic exploration of the future, this science-fiction classic from Stanley Kubrick traces mankind’s evolutionary and technological leaps, as well the conflicts that inspire and are inspired by them. Still astonishing in its mammoth ambition and philosophical scope, “2001: A Space Odyssey” turns a mission to Jupiter, guided by the sinister supercomputer HAL 9000, into a journey for the mind and the eye. The New York Times critic Renata Adler complained about its “uncompromising slowness” at the time, but the film has aged well to say the least. (Also by Kubrick: “A Clockwork Orange,” “Full Metal Jacket,” “The Shining.”)Watch it on HBO MaxEl Hedi ben Salem and Brigitte Mira in “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul.”Peter Gauhe‘Ali: Fear Eats the Soul’ (1974)Doing his own audacious twist on Douglas Sirk’s “All That Heaven Allows,” a heartbreaking romance about a wealthy widow’s affair with a humble gardener, Rainer Werner Fassbinder offers a much odder couple, attempting to bridge the gulfs of age and race. The mismatched pair here are a Moroccan laborer (El Hedi ben Salem) in his 40s and a German house cleaner over two decades his senior (Brigitte Mira), and Fassbinder uses their relationship to expose the societal forces that both unite and divide them. Our critic Vincent Canby praised “the careful detail” with which Fassbinder dramatizes the couple’s ostracism. (Also by Fassbinder: “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant,” “Fox and his Friends,” “The Marriage of Maria Braun”)Watch it on HBO Max‘An Angel at My Table’ (1991)Before her international breakthrough, “The Piano,” the director Jane Campion carved this television mini-series into an impassioned 158-minute portrait of the New Zealand author Janet Frame, based on her three autobiographical novels. With different actors playing Frame at three stages of her life — most notably Kerry Fox as the adult Janet — the film celebrates her resilience under the terrible hardships of poverty and a long stint in a mental institution. Her writing was her escape and her salvation. Vincent Canby admired how film “records the world as Janet sees it, sometimes beautiful and as often frightening.” (Also by Campion: “Sweetie.”)Watch it on HBO MaxA scene from the Gillo Pontecorvo film “The Battle of Algiers.”Rialto Pictures‘The Battle of Algiers’ (1967)Gillo Pontecorvo’s scrupulous depiction of insurgent and anti-terrorist tactics in the Algerian War of Independence proved so persuasive in its newsreel style that it required a disclaimer to let audiences know it was a work of fiction. Though hugely controversial in Europe for its treatment of the Algerian resistance and French torture tactics, “The Battle of Algiers” is such a cleareyed and accomplished vision of modern warfare that it has been studied by the Pentagon. Bosley Crowther called it “an uncommonly dynamic picture.”Watch it on HBO MaxDeborah Kerr in a scene from the Powell/Pressburger film “Black Narcissus.”Universal Pictures‘Black Narcissus’ (1947)Shot with a Technicolor vividness that pops with sensuality, this simmering melodrama from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger is a rapturous exploration of forbidden pleasure. Deborah Kerr stars as the well-meaning mother superior of a convent in the Himalayas, where the nuns try to expand a former pleasure palace into a school and hospital. But as she struggles to hold the convent together, she and the other nuns can’t help but be swept up by the wildness of the place. The critic Thomas M. Pryor called it “a work of rare pictorial beauty.” (Also by Powell and Pressburger: “49th Parallel,” “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp,” “The Red Shoes.”)Watch it on HBO MaxDan Hedaya, left, and E. Emmet Walsh in Coen Brothers’ debut, “Blood Simple.”USA Films‘Blood Simple’ (1985)With their uncommonly assured neo-noir debut, Joel and Ethan Coen set the tone for a brilliant career that has frequently touched on amateur criminality and its tragicomic consequences. Nodding to James M. Cain’s “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” the film is about a bar owner (Dan Hedaya) who hires a shady contract killer (M. Emmet Walsh) after he learns of an affair between his wife (Frances McDormand) and his bartender (John Getz). The result is a riveting, slow-motion disaster. The critic Janet Maslin praised the film for its “black humor, abundant originality and brilliant visual style.” (Also by the Coens: “No Country for Old Men”)Watch it on HBO Max‘Brief Encounter’ (1946)The director David Lean may be better known for epics like “Lawrence of Arabia” and “Doctor Zhivago,” but he was equally skilled in rendering the intimate emotions at play in modest productions like “Brief Encounter,” which saves most of the waterworks for the dingy refreshment room off a railway. Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard star as married people who fall in love inadvertently while nursing their platonic friendship every Thursday at a Milford train station. The sad inevitability of their relationship makes it no less romantic. Bosley Crowther called it “extremely poignant.” (Also by Lean: “Blithe Spirit,” “Great Expectations,” “Summertime.”)Watch it on HBO MaxFrom left, Albert Brooks, Holly Hunter and William Hurt in a scene from “Broadcast News.”20th Century Fox/Alamy‘Broadcast News’ (1987)Through his incisive, hilarious comedy-drama about TV journalism, the writer-director James L. Brooks exposes sins of ethics and taste that seem quaint by today’s diminished standards, but the richness of his characters stands the test of time. The friendship between a high-strung producer (Holly Hunter) and a star reporter (Albert Brooks) frays when she takes a romantic interest in a handsome anchorman (William Hurt) who represents everything about news they despise. The critic Vincent Canby admired how Brooks “has so balanced the movie that no one performance can run off with it.”Watch it on HBO MaxStacey Dash and Alicia Silverstone in “Clueless.”Paramount Pictures‘Clueless’ (1995)Amy Heckerling’s bright, ingenious twist on Jane Austen’s “Emma” imagines the 19th century matchmaker as a Beverly Hills rich girl whose Cupid-like machinations lead to her own romantic makeover. Pulling off mid-90s fashion and Heckerling’s mock-teen slang with equal aplomb, Alicia Silverstone stars as a popular girl who tries to hook up a new kid (Brittany Murphy) with a good-looking “Baldwin” in her social group. Critic Janet Maslin called it “a candy-colored, brightly satirical showcase” for Silverstone’s “decidedly visual talents.”Watch it on HBO MaxTom Sizemore, left, and Denzel Washington in a scene from “Devil in a Blue Dress.”D. Stevens/TriStar Pictures‘Devil in a Blue Dress’ (1995)Based on the first of Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins mysteries, this luxuriant and twisty neo-noir evokes “Chinatown” in exploring the racial fault-lines of post-World War II Los Angeles. Denzel Washington flashes effortless movie-star charisma as Rawlins, a nascent gumshoe hired to find a missing white woman known for frequenting juke joints. As his trigger-happy friend, Don Cheadle gives an electric, scene-stealing supporting performance that set the course of his career. Janet Maslin called it “an unusually vibrant film noir.”Watch it on HBO MaxHidetoshi Nishijima, left, and Toko Miura in a scene from “Drive My Car.”Bitters End‘Drive My Car’ (2021)A three-hour Japanese drama from a small independent distributor wasn’t the most likely candidate for a best picture nomination. But this multilayered treatment of grief, relationships and creativity from Ryusuke Hamaguchi, based on a story by Haruki Murakami, is a special piece of work. Hidetoshi Nishijima stars as a sought-after theater director who agrees to stage a version of “Uncle Vanya” in Hiroshima and further agrees to the company’s directive that he allow a driver (Toko Miura) to escort him to the venue and back. A.O. Scott called the film “a story about grief, love and work as well as the soul-sustaining, life-shaping power of art.”Watch it on HBO MaxTimothée Chalamet and Rebecca Ferguson in “Dune.”Chia Bella James/Warner Bros.‘Dune’ (2021)With its combination of grade-scale world building, thrilling space adventure and hallucinogenic imagery, Frank Herbert’s classic science-fiction novel, “Dune,” has a unique allure that’s difficult to translate to the screen. Yet Denis Villeneuve’s attempt miraculously cracks the code, preserving the language and politics of the novel while following Paul (Timothée Chalamet), a gifted young man thrust into a galactic battle over the desert planet Arrakis and a precious resource called “the spice.” Our critic Manohla Dargis called it “a starry, sumptuous take on the novel’s first half.”Watch it on HBO MaxJames Gandolfini and Julia Louis-Dreyfus in “Enough Said,” released a few months after Gandolfini’s death.Fox Searchlight Pictures‘Enough Said’ (2013)Released widely just a few months after James Gandolfini’s death, this funny, mature romantic comedy from Nicole Holofcener proved that the charisma Gandolfini brought to the lead role in “The Sopranos” didn’t always have to be dark. As a divorced empty nester who starts dating a masseuse (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) in the same situation, Gandolfini carries himself with gentle good humor as Holofcener throws their relationship for a screwball loop. A.O. Scott called it “line for line, scene for scene,” one of the “best-written American film comedies in recent memory.”Watch it on HBO MaxJack Nance in David Lynch’s cult classic “Eraserhead.”AFI‘Eraserhead’ (1977)Before upending film and television with genre-expanding work like “Blue Velvet” and “Twin Peaks,” David Lynch burst onto the scene with this Midnight Movie classic, an experimental feature that turns domestic anxiety into surrealist science fiction. In Lynch’s black-and-white, creepily industrialized setting, a man with an outsized shock of curly hair (Jack Nance) tries to come to terms with his changing family, which now includes a mutant newborn. The critic Tom Buckley called it “interminable,” but Lynch’s reputation (and this film’s) has grown immensely in the years since it was released. (Also by Lynch: “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.”)Watch it on HBO MaxJoel McCrea in “Foreign Correspondent.”United Artists‘Foreign Correspondent’ (1940)Though rarely cited among established Alfred Hitchcock classics like “North by Northwest,” “Vertigo” and “Psycho,” “Foreign Correspondent” is every bit as masterly, a subtle and generously entertaining piece of wartime intrigue made for and about fraught times. Joel McCrea plays a bored city desk reporter in New York who gets all the action he can handle as a foreign correspondent in Europe, but the assignment soon embeds him in a treacherous web of shifty diplomats and Nazi spies. The Times critic Bosley Crowther raved that the film “should be the particular favorite of a great many wonder-eyed folk.” (Also by Hitchcock: “The 39 Steps,” “The Lady Vanishes,” North by Northwest”)Watch it on HBO MaxWarner Bros.‘Goodfellas’ (1990)Based on Nicholas Pileggi’s “Wiseguy,” a biography about the gangster turned informant Henry Hill, this electrifying epic from Martin Scorsese evokes the seductions of organized lawlessness before the consequences come down like a hammer. In contrast to “The Godfather,” which focused on the head of a New York family, “Goodfellas” settles on low- to midlevel gangsters, tracking the rise and fall of Hill (Ray Liotta) and his cohorts, played by Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, as they’re undone by their own criminal excesses. Vincent Canby called the film “breathless and brilliant.” (Also by Scorsese: “The Aviator,” “The Departed,” “Mean Streets.”)Watch it on HBO MaxToni Servillo in a scene from Paolo Sorrentino’s “The Great Beauty.”Gianni Fiorito/Janus Films‘The Great Beauty’ (2013)Perhaps the brashest of the new wave of Italian filmmakers, Paolo Sorrentino all but declares himself Federico Fellini’s heir apparent with this spectacularly decadent experience, which evokes Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita.” In fact, Toni Servillo could be an older version of Marcello Mastroianni in that film, a 65-year-old journalist whose lavish birthday party reminds him of the emptiness of a lifetime schmoozing among the elites. As with Fellini’s film, the formlessness of the evening allows for maximum spontaneity. Our critic Manohla Dargis called it “deliciously alive.”Watch it on HBO MaxWarner Home Video‘Gremlins 2: The New Batch’ (1990)When Joe Dante’s family-friendly horror-comedy “Gremlins” was a huge hit in 1984, the studio gave Dante creative carte blanche to do whatever he wanted with the sequel. He basically treated the offer like an oversized gremlin. Channeling the manic pop energy of Frank Tashlin and Tex Avery, “Gremlins 2: The New Batch” uses the opening of a high-tech skyscraper to unleash chaos, with dozens of nasty creatures gumming up the works. Janet Maslin wanted to “add this to the very short list of sequels that neatly surpass their predecessors.” (Also by Dante: “Gremlins,” “Looney Tunes: Back in Action.”)Watch it on HBO Max‘Harlan County USA’ (1977)This landmark labor documentary by Barbara Kopple brought cameras into coal country in 1973, covering the herculean efforts of 180 miners in southeast Kentucky to sustain a strike against the Duke Power Company. As the strike wears on, Kopple captures the rising tensions and violence between the two parties, with the company bringing in replacement workers and armed strikebreakers to intimidate their employees. More than once, even Kopple’s safety is put in serious jeopardy. The critic Richard Eder called it “a brilliantly detailed report from one side of a battle.”Watch it on HBO MaxDaniel Radcliffe in “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.”Murray Close/Warner Bros. Pictures‘Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban’ (2004)After the first two Harry Potter movies dutifully established the wizarding world of J.K. Rowling onscreen, the director Alfonso Cuarón took the franchise to a more mature and fantastical level, better suiting a hero who is getting older and facing greater obstacles. This time, Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) and his Hogwarts friends, Hermione (Emma Watson) and Ron (Rupert Grint), square off against one of the evil Voldemort’s aides, a vicious prison escapee named Sirius Black (Gary Oldman). A.O. Scott called it the first Harry Potter adaptation “that actually looks and feels like a movie, rather than a staged reading with special effects.” (Also: The entire Harry Potter collection.)Watch it on HBO MaxWilliam Gates, left, as seen in the documentary “Hoop Dreams.”Fine Line Features‘Hoop Dreams’ (1994)For four years, the director Steve James and his crew followed two gifted Chicago high school basketball players as they pursued a long-shot ambition to make it to the N.B.A. and lift their families out of poverty. “Hoop Dreams” is about the impossible burden they’ve chosen to carry, one in which an errant free throw or a tweaked knee can have serious real-life consequences. The critic Caryn James called it a “fascinating, suspenseful film [that] turns the endless revision of the American dream into high drama.”Watch it on HBO MaxTakashi Shimura in a scene from “Ikiru.”Janus Films‘Ikiru’ (1952)In the lead-up to his epic “Seven Samurai,” the director Akira Kurosawa tried his hand at this intimate, heartbreaking work about a man whose imminent death finally teaches him about how best to live. Takashi Shimura stars as a faceless bureaucrat who gets a terminal cancer diagnosis near the end of his 30-year career and struggles to figure out what to do with the time he has left. Bosley Crowther called it “a varied and detailed illustration of middle-class life in contemporary Japan.” (Also by Kurosawa: “The Hidden Fortress,” “Rashomon,” “Seven Samurai,” “Throne of Blood,” “Yojimbo.”)Watch it on HBO MaxSidney Poitier in a scene from “In the Heat of the Night.”Keystone/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images‘In the Heat of the Night’ (1967)Released in the midst of the civil rights movement, this best picture winner from Norman Jewison muscled its way into the conversation with a police drama about racial hostilities and prejudices in the Deep South. In a career-defining role, Sidney Poitier stars as a Philadelphia police detective who is mistakenly collared for murder in small-town Mississippi, then asked by the local police chief (Rod Steiger) to help solve the case. Bosley Crowther found “the juxtaposition of resentments between whites and blacks” in the film to be “vividly and forcefully illustrated.”Watch it on HBO MaxMaggie Cheung and Tony Leung in a scene from “In the Mood for Love.”The Criterion Collection‘In the Mood for Love’ (2001)Few films are as ravishingly beautiful as Wong Kar-wai’s intoxicating film about Hong Kong in the early to mid-60s, starring Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, two screen icons at the peak of their powers. Leung and Cheung play lonely-hearts who form a special kinship because of their spouses’ neglect, but they’re reluctant to follow through on the intense romantic longing they feel for each other. Wong’s story of unrequited love in a changing city earned him the best reviews of his career, including one from the critic Elvis Mitchell, who called the film “a sweet kiss blown to a time long since over.” (Also by Wong: “Happy Together.”)Watch it on HBO MaxKurt Cobain, as seen in the documentary “Montage of Heck.”The End of Music LLC‘Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck’ (2015)When Kurt Cobain died, he left behind a treasure trove of footage from his childhood, along with expansive musical archives and live performances with Nirvana. In Brett Morgen, the montage maestro who co-directed “The Kids Stays in the Picture” and directed the day-in-the-life 30 For 30 documentary “June 17th, 1994,” Courtney Love found the perfect filmmaker to approach with the material. “Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck” is a sad, raucous, play-it-loud music documentary that ties the source of Cobain’s creative genius to the lifelong vulnerabilities that led to his early death. Our critic Mike Hale called it “both an artful mosaic and a hammering barrage.”Watch it on HBO Max‘La Notte’ (1962)The year after his international breakthrough, “L’Avventura,” beguiled and mystified audiences, Michelangelo Antonioni brought the same theme of alienation to the city with “La Notte,” which turns Milan into a hauntingly beautiful and empty place. Set within a 24-hour time frame, the film stars Marcello Mastroianni and Jeanne Moreau as an unhappily married couple who go out for a rare night on the town and have their relationship tested. Bosley Crowther wrote that “the subtle attunement of one’s mood” will largely determine how much viewers will connect with the film. (Also by Antonioni: “L’Avventura,” “Red Desert.”)Watch it on HBO MaxKenny G, as seen in the documentary “Listening to Kenny G.”HBO‘Listening to Kenny G’ (2021)Call it elevator music. Call it sonic wallpaper. Call it whatever you like, but the fact is that Kenny G is the most popular jazz musician of his time, a solo saxophonist who has sold over 75 million records and dominated the adult contemporary scene. “Listening to Kenny G” takes a step back and examines this unique cultural phenomenon from every perspective, including that of fans, critics and the indefatigable man himself, who keeps finding new ways to stay in the conversation. The critic Glenn Kenny found that “the link between what makes Kenny G a star and what makes him annoying is spot on.”Watch it on HBO MaxElijah Wood in “The Fellowship of the Ring.”New Line Cinema‘The Fellowship of the Ring’ (2001)The more films and TV shows attempt to mimic the world-building majesty of Peter Jackson’s fantasy epic, the better his three-part adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy looks. “The Fellowship of the Ring” has the unenviable task of setting the table for adventures to come, but it establishes the scope and characters of Middle-Earth with thrilling verve, starting with Frodo (Elijah Wood), a humble hobbit asked to destroy a ring of corrosive power. Elvis Mitchell praised Jackson’s “heroic job in tackling perhaps the most intimidating nerd/academic fantasy classic ever.” (Also in the trilogy: “The Two Towers,” “The Return of the King.”)Watch it on HBO MaxOmar Epps and Sanaa Lathan in “Love and Basketball.”Sidney Baldwin/New Line Cinema‘Love & Basketball’ (2000)Gina Prince-Bythewood’s sexy, heartfelt romantic drama stood out among the abundant rom-coms of its time for the sincerity and complexity of its two main characters, whose hoop dreams lead them in and out of each other’s lives. Omar Epps and Sanaa Lathan star as childhood sweethearts who bond over a passion for basketball (and trash-talking) but follow rocky paths through the professional game — and through a relationship that suffers from the same patches of instability. Elvis Mitchell appreciated its “enchanting, lived-in homeyness.”Watch it on HBO MaxDenzel Washington in the title role of Spike Lee’s “Malcolm X.”Warner Bros.‘Malcolm X’ (1992)Three years after “Do the Right Thing,” the director Spike Lee was expected to ignite controversy again with his adaptation of “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” but the film turned out to be a studio biopic of the first order, arguing for the humanity and vision of a civil rights figure whose activism was forged by life experience. Denzel Washington gives a towering performance as Malcolm, who survived a misspent youth, became a Muslim and grew into a leader. Vincent Canby called it “an ambitious, tough, seriously considered biographical film.” (Also by Lee: “4 Little Girls,” “He Got Game,” “Inside Man,” “When the Levees Broke”)Watch it on HBO MaxEugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara in “A Mighty Wind.”Suzanne Tenner/Warner Bros.‘A Mighty Wind’ (2003)In their follow-up to “Waiting for Guffman” and “Best in Show,” the director Christopher Guest and his first-rate troupe of improvisatory performers returned with a folk music parody that is notable for its disarming sweetness, despite the many digs at granola culture. The death of a beloved producer brings the acts he discovered together for a reunion concert, including The Folksmen (Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer) and the estranged Mitch & Mickey (Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara). A.O. Scott wrote that the cast is “capable of being funny in so many different ways.” (Also by Guest: “Best in Show.”)Watch it on HBO MaxBenicio Del Toro, left, and Don Cheadle in “No Sudden Move.”Claudette Barius/Warner Bros. Pictures‘No Sudden Move’ (2021)Over two decades after his superior Elmore Leonard adaptation “Out of Sight,” the director Steven Soderbergh headed back to Detroit for another witty, suspenseful, star-packed thriller, set deeper in the city’s racially fraught past. Don Cheadle, Benicio Del Toro and Kieran Culkin star as mismatched henchmen hired to hold a businessman’s family hostage while he attempts, as subtly as possible, to steal documents for them at work. A.O. Scott called it “a tight and twisty against-the-clock crime caper.” (Also by Soderbergh: “Beyond the Candelabra,” “Magic Mike,” “Ocean’s Eleven.”)Watch it on HBO MaxBen Whishaw voices the amiable bear in “Paddington 2.”Warner Bros.‘Paddington 2’ (2018)It seemed impossible to turn the “Paddington” of Michael Bond’s storybooks into a good movie. And when that happened, it seemed improbable for the sequel to be an improvement. Yet “Paddington 2” is another adorable comic adventure, given an additional boost by memorable supporting turns, most notably from Brendan Gleeson as an ill-tempered prison cook and Hugh Grant as a vain actor turned diabolical villain. The critic Teo Bugbee wrote that the filmmakers “spin good writing and seamless digital effects into Rococo children’s entertainment.”Watch it on HBO MaxKim Wayans, left, and Adepero Oduye in a scene from Dee Rees’s first feature, “Pariah.”Focus Features‘Pariah’ (2011)For her first feature, the writer-director Dee Rees expanded a short film into a sensitive, big-hearted and surprisingly funny coming-of-age drama about a Brooklyn teenager who is as marginalized as the title suggests. Played by Adepero Oduye, Alike is a Black lesbian who steps tentatively into her queer identity while keeping her sexuality a secret from her parents — even though it’s obvious they have their suspicions. The critic Stephen Holden wrote that Oduye “captures the jagged mood swings of late adolescence with a wonderfully spontaneous fluency.”Watch it on HBO Max‘Persona’ (1967)The opening minutes of Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona” shocked international audiences with its experimental imagery, but the remaining minutes are no less audacious in Bergman’s willingness to push his expected dramatic intensity to a new, more abstract realm. Liv Ullmann plays a famed stage actress whose mid-performance breakdown leads first to hospitalization and later to a retreat on the Baltic Sea, where her relationship with a nurse (Bibi Andersson) takes on peculiar dimensions. Bosley Crowther called it a “lovely, moody film which, for all its intense emotionalism, makes some tough intellectual demands.” (Also by Bergman: “Cries and Whispers,” “The Seventh Seal,” “Wild Strawberries.”)Watch it on HBO MaxGreta Scacchi and Tim Robbins in “The Player.”Lorey Sebastian/Fine Line Features‘The Player’ (1992)After a decade of flops in the ’80s, the director Robert Altman burst back on the scene with a Hollywood satire that doubles as an act of revenge. Through the story of Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins), a soulless studio executive who murders a disgruntled screenwriter, Altman had the narrative scaffolding he needed to land jab after jab about an industry that had been unfriendly to him for decades. Vincent Canby hailed “the return of the great gregarious filmmaker whose ‘Nashville’ remains one of the classics of the 1970s.” (Also by Altman: “M*A*S*H” and “Popeye.”)Watch it on HBO MaxKumiko Aso in a scene from “Pulse.”Magnolia Pictures‘Pulse’ (2001)A signature achievement of the Japanese horror boom of the early-to-mid ’00s, this unnerving shocker from Kiyoshi Kurosawa taps into the fears of an increasingly tech-driven world by imagining literal ghosts in the machine. After a friend commits suicide, a group of young people in Tokyo start to believe that digitized spirits are emerging as an unstoppable threat in the real world. The critic Anita Gates called it a “fiercely original, thrillingly creepy” film.Watch it on HBO MaxCharles Aznavour and Michele Mercier in “Shoot the Piano Player.”Janus Films‘Shoot the Piano Player’ (1962)The French new wave was borne out of collective cinephilia, and nothing expressed that movie-crazy spirit quite as infectiously as François Truffaut’s “Shoot the Piano Player,” a dazzling 81-minute mash-up of techniques, references and genres. Charles Aznavour stars as a self-effacing pianist who unwittingly becomes embroiled in the criminal scheme of a noir. In this story, however, the bad guys are bungling gangsters and the femme fatale is a waitress with a heart of gold (Marie Dubois). Bosley Crowther called it “a teasing and frequently amusing (or moving) film.” (Also by Truffaut: “The 400 Blows,” “Jules and Jim,” “The Soft Skin.”)Watch it on HBO MaxA scene from Hayao Miyazaki’s “Spirited Away.”GKIDS‘Spirited Away’ (2002)The Studio Ghibli maestro Hayao Miyazaki never made an animated fantasy as enchanting, complex and visually lush as this beautiful moral tale of a 10-year-old girl who finds her place in a dreamlike world of witches and spirits. After her parents disappear in an abandoned resort, the girl goes looking for them, but as night falls, the main building turns into a spa for the supernatural, where humans like herself are not welcome. Elvis Mitchell praised “the towering, lost dreaminess at the heart of the film.” (Also by Miyazaki: “Kiki’s Delivery Service,” “My Neighbor Totoro,” “Princess Mononoke.”)Watch it on HBO Max‘Stranger Than Paradise’ (1984)It may not look like a revolution, with its static black-and-white camerawork and deadpan sensibility, but Jim Jarmusch’s minimalist comedy set a new course for American independent film, changing how stories are told and who they can be about. Jarmusch wrings humor from the modest premise, about a Brooklyn layabout (John Lurie) who plays reluctant host to his Hungarian cousin (Eszter Balint), a woman whose understanding of the country begins and ends with the Screamin’ Jay Hawkins song “I Put a Spell on You.” Vincent Canby wrote that the film “is something quite special.” (Also by Jarmusch: “Dead Man,” “Down by Law,” “Night on Earth.”)Watch it on HBO MaxA scene from the animated feature “Teen Titans Go! To the Movies.”Warner Bros. Pictures‘Teen Titans Go! To the Movies’ (2018)A big-screen version of a no-frills Cartoon Network show like “Teen Titans Go!” may not sound like a promising proposition. But this inspired film goes all out from the very beginning, when our backbench DC heroes, led by the tiny-hand sidekick Robin, introduce themselves in a Beastie Boys-style rap. Envious of all the better-known superheroes getting their own movies, the Teens are thrilled to get their own offer from Tinseltown, but their quest for fame has a villainous catch. The Times’s Ken Jaworowski called it “giddy with in-jokes, meta-moments and quick asides.”Watch it on HBO MaxTina Turner in 1990, as seen in the documentary “Tina.”HBO Documentary Films‘Tina’ (2021)Though often framed as a triumph-over-adversity story, Tina Turner’s life isn’t so easily packaged; even Turner’s extraordinary durability as an artist cannot chase away the abuse and tragedy in her past. Built around a candid Turner interview, this authorized documentary allows her to lay final claim over a life she struggled to control. It also allows us to marvel again at her mental fortitude and her electric stage presence, which was the one constant over the decades. The critic Glenn Kenny called it “not just a summing up but a kind of farewell.”Watch it on HBO Max‘Tokyo Story’ (1953)The most revered of Yasujiro Ozu’s dramas is also one of the most accessible, a profound statement on the grief and laments of getting older and on the widening generation gaps of a newly westernized Japan. When an elderly couple (Chishu Ryu and Chieko Higashiyama) visit their adult children in Tokyo, the kids barely have time for them, but their dead son’s widow (Setsuko Hara) is a welcoming host. The critic Roger Greenspun wrote that the film “understands that a calm reticence may be the true heroism of ordinary old age.” (Also by Ozu: “Late Autumn,” “Late Spring,” “A Story of Floating Weeds.”)Watch it on HBO MaxNino Castelnuovo and Catherine Deneuve in the musical “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.”Zeigeist Films‘The Umbrellas of Cherbourg’ (1964)Few films have been wiser about love than Jacques Demy’s “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” and none of the other contenders have sung through every word, redefining in glorious terms what could be done with a screen musical. Told in three distinct acts — each in gorgeous primary colors, with unforgettable music by Michel Legrand — the film follows a shop owner’s daughter (Catherine Deneuve) and a mechanic (Nino Castelnuovo) in Normandy as their union is challenged by war, time and other circumstances. Bosley Crowther called it “a cinematic confection” and didn’t mean it kindly. (Also by Demy: “The Young Girls of Rochefort.”)Watch it on HBO MaxClint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman in a scene from “Unforgiven.”Warner Bros./ENCORE‘Unforgiven’ (1992)Clint Eastwood owes his career to playing sharpshooting heroes in Sergio Leone spaghetti westerns like “A Fistful of Dollars” and Don Siegel action films like “Dirty Harry.” But after decades on the job, he decided the time was right to reflect deeply on the violence his characters had wrought. Eastwood directors and stars in this powerful Oscar-winner as a retired gunslinger reluctantly drawn into a bounty hunt for two men who disfigured a prostitute. Vincent Canby called it “a most entertaining western that pays homage to the great tradition of movie westerns.” (Also by Eastwood: “Gran Torino,” “Mystic River,” “Changeling.”)Watch it on HBO Max‘Weekend’ (1968)A turbulent satire for a turbulent era, Jean-Luc Godard’s “Weekend” uses the greed of a bourgeois couple (Mireille Darc and Jean Yanne) as the starting point for an increasingly surreal and violent road movie that seeks to rattle its audience at every turn. When the couple heads out to the country to collect an inheritance — willing to murder a dying man (and each other), if necessary — their plans are upended in multiple ways, including a series of car crashes. The critic Renata Adler wrote that the film “must be seen for its power, ambition, humor and scenes of really astonishing beauty.” (Also by Godard: “Breathless,” “Masculin Feminin,” “Vivre Sa Vie.”)Watch it on HBO MaxJoan Crawford, left, and Bette Davis in a scene from “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?”Warner Bros.‘What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?’ (1962)Two queens of Golden Age Hollywood melodramas, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, were brought together for another one in Robert Aldrich’s “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?,” but their screen personas are thrown for a noir loop in this scabrous treatment of movie stardom. Davis plays a former child star whose delusions of reviving her career are held in check by her wheelchair-bound sister (Crawford), who plots revenge for the accident that crippled her. Bosley Crowther called the actresses “a couple of formidable freaks.”Watch it on HBO MaxMax (Max Records) with the monster Carol (voiced by James Gandolfini) in “Where the Wild Things Are.”Matt Nettheim/Warner Bros. Pictures‘Where the Wild Things Are’ (2009)Nothing about Maurice Sendak’s spare, beautifully illustrated storybook classic “Where the Wild Things Are” suggested a feature-length adaptation, but the director Spike Jonze and his co-screenwriter, Dave Eggers, expand the material without losing its essence. This is still the simple story of an angry kid (Max Records) who gets sent to his room after a tantrum and sails off to an island populated by creatures who “roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth.” But its emotional spectrum is expanded along with the scale. Manohla Dargis called it “a film that often dazzles during its quietest moments.”Watch it on HBO MaxBruno Ganz in a scene from “Wings of Desire.”Orion Classics‘Wings of Desire’ (1988)For many years, two angels have looked eternally and sympathetically over the citizens of Berlin, but when one (Bruno Ganz) falls in love with a mortal trapeze artist (Solveig Dommartin), he gives up his wings for the wonderful, terrible privilege of being human. This profound art-house hit from Wim Wenders asks whether eternal life is all it’s cut out to be, and Peter Falk, as a version of himself, does valuable work in breaking the somber mood. Janet Maslin called it the director’s “most ambitious effort yet.” (Also by Wenders: “Buena Vista Social Club,” “Paris, Texas.”)Watch it on HBO MaxClockwise from top, Katie Holmes, Tobey Maguire and Michael Douglas in “Wonder Boys.”Frank Connor/Paramount Pictures‘Wonder Boys’ (2000)This shaggy-dog comedy about academia, based on the brisk novel by Michael Chabon, translates effortlessly to the screen, with Michael Douglas ingeniously cast as a Pennsylvania creative writing professor who has been coasting for years on the reputation of his debut book. In the meantime, he gets roped into lives of two admiring students, played by Tobey Maguire and Katie Holmes, and into petty escapades involving a dead dog and a stolen piece of Marilyn Monroe memorabilia. A.O. Scott wrote, not all that admiringly, that “the heart of the novel has been carefully preserved.”Watch it on HBO Max More

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      Cannes Film Festival Gives Forest Whitaker Lifetime Achievement Award

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      The American actor Forest Whitaker received an honorary Palme d’Or lifetime achievement award at the opening ceremony for the 75th edition of the festival on Tuesday.At the ceremony, the festival played clips from some of his of movies — “Bird,” “Ghost Dog,” “The Color of Money,” “Panic Room.” And in the theater, the actor received a standing ovation.The first standing ovation of Cannes! It’s given to Forest Whitaker, here at the opening ceremony to accept an honorary Palme d’Or pic.twitter.com/0Bqc6v3igx— Kyle Buchanan (@kylebuchanan) May 17, 2022
      A familiar face at the festival, Whitaker said in a statement: “It’s always a privilege to return to this beautiful festival to both screen my own work, and to be inspired by many of the world’s greatest artists — and I feel incredibly honored to be celebrated as part of the festival’s momentous 75th anniversary.” More

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      ‘Family Camp’ Review: Born to Be Mild

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      There’s little new in this comedy about parents and kids on a church outing in the wilderness.Dad humor abounds in “Family Camp,” a vanishingly mild comedy that resembles other films about parents and kids bumbling in the wilderness. The lessons about being good to your folks are the same; “family is family,” to quote the absolutely undeniable title of one song in the film. But this summer trip, replete with cabins (or yurts) and goofy activities, is a church outing: the family that prays together, glamps together.Tommy (Tommy Woodard) can’t tear himself away from work and be “present” with his wife, Grace (Leigh-Allyn Baker). They head to camp with their teenage daughter (Cece Kelly) and camera-wielding son (Jacob M. Wade). Tommy gets into a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses rivalry with Eddie (Eddie James), another dad, who rallies his wife, Victoria (Gigi Orsillo), and kids like a motivational team leader. He serves as the eager-beaver counterpart to Tommy’s phoned-in approach to worship.As Eddie, James mugs furiously, while Ackerman’s low-key wisecracks struggle to register, making their long hike in the film’s second half feel even longer. (The two have a following as a podcast and performance duo called “The Skit Guys.”) As for Grace and Victoria, their concerns are phrased in terms of feeling overshadowed or neglected by their husbands. And “Meatballs” this is not: a rude boy’s interest in Tommy and Grace’s daughter ends up getting shut down.The film wasn’t screened for review by critics but it cracked the top 10 in the weekend box office, just behind “The Northman,” which I personally preferred as an outdoor adventure.Family CampRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Nobody Makes Films Like Alex Garland. But He Might Stop Making Them.

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      The man behind “Men” says of directing, “I don’t particularly enjoy it. It’s something I have to force myself to do.”Alex Garland knows that calling his new film “Men” is a provocative act. “It’s quite interesting that such a short, simple word can be so freighted with massive and entirely subjective meanings,” he said.As a writer and filmmaker, Garland is drawn to subjects that demand discussion: In the twisty robot parable “Ex Machina” (2015) and the Natalie Portman sci-fi drama “Annihilation” (2018), he favored a bold, stark setup that sat at the intersection of a cultural flash point. The tricky “Men” operates in a similar vein, casting Jessie Buckley as Harper, a woman coming to terms with her husband’s death and the blame he levied at her in his final moments.Harper rents a British country house to work through her trauma, but the men of the local village (all of whom are played by the actor Rory Kinnear) insinuate, belittle and wheedle her, too. One of them even stalks her, appearing naked in her front yard, but whom can Harper register a complaint with when all of the men around her — or all men, period — are, deep down, the same guy?I spoke to Garland on a video call this month while he was in the middle of directing “Civil War,” an A24 action epic starring Kirsten Dunst. Garland, who is 51 and British, sounded a bit weary. Before making “Ex Machina,” he only wrote screenplays for other filmmakers to direct — including “28 Days Later,” “Sunshine” and “Dredd.” The more we spoke, the more he questioned whether he wanted to continue directing at all.“I’m tired of feeling like a fraud,” he told me. “I’ve got so many other reasons to feel like a fraud, I don’t need to add to it in a structural way with my job.”Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.In “Men,” Jessie Buckley plays a widow coming to terms with her husband’s death. Kevin Baker/A24Do you read reviews of your films?Sometimes, because there’ll be a set of websites that I go to, and then I will see — with a horrible, sinking feeling — that they’ve reviewed the thing I worked on, and I’d have to be a monk to not read it. I broadly try to keep away from them. The first thing I did in any kind of public forum was write a book, “The Beach.” I was 26 or 27 when it came out and read everything, and I realized that I could get incredibly wounded, that it was really personal. It was a slow stepping back, because it’s now 25 years that I’ve been doing this. I think I’m probably stepping back from all sorts of different things.What else are you stepping back from?I think it is partly a function of getting older: I know less and less people, I have a smaller and smaller circle, and I go out less and less. Everything’s just getting progressively quieter and smaller, I’d say.Your films kind of reflect that attitude. They have very small casts and very circumscribed locations. There isn’t much clutter.That would definitely be fair to say. I find my myself interested in less and less things, but the things I’m interested in, I might go deeper and deeper into. And also, I’m not really a film director, I’m a writer who directs out of convenience.You didn’t expect to have this career as a director?It wasn’t that I had any great urge to direct, it was more born out of anxiety based on writing: I’d find it very agitating if something [in the film] felt totally wrong to me, or something that I felt was important was absent. But I have been thinking that after the film I’m directing at the moment, I should stop and go back to just writing. That might be part of the reversing away from the world — it’s time to get away from it, I think. I’m not temperamentally suited to being a film director.Why is that?It would be more honest, probably, to say I don’t particularly enjoy it. It’s something I have to force myself to do. It’s incredibly sociable, because you are with a large group of people the whole time — and, in my case, having to do a lot of role play. At the end of the day, you feel a bit fraudulent and exhausted.Garland is having second thoughts about directing: “I’m tired of feeling like a fraud.”Olivia Crumm for The New York TimesBecause you have to become sort of a showman?Yeah, exactly. I will find myself standing in front of a group of extras saying, “All right, so what’s happening now is dah, dah, dah,” raising my voice and being encouraging and intense. It just feels incredibly performative. Whenever I watch a chat show, and I see the host engaging in witty banter with a guest, I look at them and think, “What if they’re feeling really depressed right now?” Here’s the requirement for a quip, here’s the requirement to be interested in something you’re not interested in, and inside you’re feeling incredibly bleak and existential. It always makes me shudder — I almost can’t watch those programs because I feel that so strongly. And my version of being a talk-show host is standing on a film set.Still, I would think that you’d want to be on set to supervise the physical realization of your worlds and themes.Oh yeah, but that’s the limit of it. There are many directors where the set is where they need and want to be more than any other place, and as soon as the film is finished, they’re scheming to be in that space again with as short a delay as possible. And that’s just not me.I’ve seen some directors reach old age, and it’s as though they have to keep directing in order to live. Sometimes, there’s another film placed in front of them even before they’ve finished the last one.No question. Immediately, as you said that, I had a Rolodex of names appear in my head, and I was thinking, “That’s exactly who he’s talking about.” But there’s also another kind of director who suddenly stops, people like Peter Weir and Alan Parker. They must have been walking away from something, and maybe they just tired of it.Is this the shortest period of time between you being on two movie sets? You shot “Men” in the middle of last year and started “Civil War” not long after.Yeah, the last day of postproduction on “Men” was 48 hours before the first day of principal photography on “Civil War.” Literally, it was a Saturday and a Monday.I remember speaking to Kirsten Dunst after she was cast in “Civil War,” and she said she was excited that she finally got to play “the boy part” in a movie.I hope she feels happy with the process, but you never know. I don’t think it’s just me that finds it difficult. Film sets are strange places. They’re Calvinist, punishing spaces of abstinence. People work really, really hard — like drop-down exhausted hard — and you see it on everyone’s faces at the end of the day. There can be elements of addiction in that, but it’s like, I’ve got an alarm bell in my head ringing the whole time, thinking, “You need to stop doing this.”Was “Men” that arduous to make?“Men” was really difficult. The subject matter gets into you, and you have to live with it, but it was also difficult on a technical level. We had a very short shoot, and we were trying to get a lot done very quickly. I often worried about Rory particularly, because the last few weeks of the shoot, he’s naked in the middle of the night, and it’s freezing cold. An enormous amount of filmmaking is actually logistics, and it’s like a managerial job. How do you execute this number of things within this many hours? Literally, how do you do it?Rory Kinnear plays all the men in “Men.”Kevin Baker/A24It’s the sort of movie that will leave people arguing about its intent, and about what it’s trying to say. You once told me that with “Ex Machina,” you wanted at least 50 percent of the film to be subject to the viewer’s interpretation.Over the years, I have been consciously putting more and more into the hands of the viewer. There’s probably another element to it, too, if I’m honest, which is that it’s making the viewer complicit. This is another reason to pull back, because there’s a part of me which is really subversive and aggressive and is kind of [messing] with people. At times, I felt with “Men” that I’ve gone so far that it’s borderline delinquent.What kind of reaction have you gotten to the film?I’ve got good friends who I really respect who I’ve shown “Men” to, and their convinced interpretation — “I know what this film is saying, it’s saying this” — is 180 degrees different from what I thought it was.When that happens, does that feel like a successful experiment?No.No?No, it just feels inevitable. When we’re watching a film, we have these responses that on a rational level, we know are subjective, but we treat them as if they’re objective, and that’s just the way it is. I have such distrust in my own responses and other people’s responses as being reliable — they could vary on a day-by-day level. So when I offer something up, I have no expectation that everybody’s going to agree on it. I have a full expectation that people will disagree, and I see it primarily as a reflection on them.What are some of the things your friends said about it?“Who’s the protagonist?” “Is this about what a woman thinks, or is it about what a man thinks?” It’s people’s certainty that I find strangest: “This means this, this means that.” I find myself getting less and less certain about everything.Even your own work?Oh, I have no certainty about that. That’s just a bunch of compulsions. More