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      The Best Movies and TV Shows Coming to Netflix in May

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      Here are the most promising new and returning titles for U.S. subscribers this month, including a new season of “Stranger Things.”Every month, Netflix adds movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for some of May’s most promising new titles. (Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)‘Clark’Starts streaming: May 5The maverick Swedish filmmaker and music video director Jonas Akerlund (“Spun,” “Lords of Chaos”) brings his visual panache and his affection for incorrigible rogues to the six-part biographical drama “Clark.” The series is based loosely on the life of Clark Olofsson, the man credited with inspiring the term “Stockholm syndrome” after he bonded with his hostages during a bank robbery. Akerlund uses zippy editing, varied color schemes and dynamic camera moves to emphasize the rush Olofsson got from theft, assault and drug trafficking. Bill Skarsgard (“It”) plays the title character, capturing both his puckish charm and his terrifying willingness to hurt and deceive people.‘Along for the Ride’Starts streaming: May 6Based on a Sarah Dessen young adult novel, “Along for the Ride” follows a socially awkward high school graduate named Auden (Emma Pasarow) who spends the summer before college living with her father and stepmom at the beach. There, she meets a mysterious and brooding boy, Eli (Belmont Cameli), who like her suffers from insomnia and shares her interests in reading and wandering along the shore. The writer-director Sofia Alvarez works this teen romance plot into a larger story about Auden’s efforts to escape the shadow of her domineering mother (Andie MacDowell) and learn how to take more chances.‘The Lincoln Lawyer’ Season 1Starts streaming: May 13Next to the detective Harry Bosch, the scrappy defense attorney Mickey Haller is the crime novelist Michael Connelly’s greatest creation: a champion of the innocent who empathizes with his clients in part because he, himself, is often just a few bad breaks away from calamity. Matthew McConaughey played Haller in a well-received 2011 film, “The Lincoln Lawyer,” based on Connelly’s first book about the character. Season 1 of this new TV series is based on the novel “The Brass Verdict,” and it hews a bit closer to the source material — beginning with the casting of the Mexican actor Manuel Garcia-Rulfo to play a man who is described as half-Mexican in the original stories. In this first set of episodes, the lawyer inherits a colleague’s practice. While working mostly out of his flashy car, Haller has to prepare a new celebrity client’s murder defense in under a week.‘Senior Year’Starts streaming: May 13Rebel Wilson stars in this high school comedy, which like her 2019 film “Isn’t It Romantic?,” repurposes the conventions of a popular movie genre. In “Senior Year,” Wilson plays Stephanie Conway, who has been in a coma since 2002, when she was the captain of her school’s cheerleading squad. In her mind, no time has passed, so Stephanie decides to re-enroll and get her degree — although she soon finds that because so much has changed about adolescent cliques and pop culture over the past 20 years, she is now more misfit than teen queen. Directed by the TV sitcom veteran Alex Hardcastle, “Senior Year” is a fish-out-of-water story about a woman coming to terms with her past and her future.‘Stranger Things’ Season 4, Volume 1Starts streaming: May 27When last we left the “Stranger Things” crew, the adventurous Hawkins, Ind., teenagers and their perpetually worried parents and guardians had survived a huge escalation of the inter-dimensional war against their tiny town. Season 3 of this nostalgia-steeped science-fiction adventure ended with several characters leaving town after the Soviet Union exacerbated a crisis involving the alternate reality known as “the Upside Down.” The pandemic-delayed Season 4 — arriving three years after Season 3 but advancing the plot only six months — will move into the second half of the 1980s. This season’s episodes will be lengthier and larger in scale (they’ll also drop in two parts, the second landing on July 1) as the show’s creators, Matt and Ross Duffer, start bringing the scattered pieces of their story together in preparation for a big Season 5 finish.Also arriving:May 4“The Circle” Season 4“El Marginal” Season 5“Meltdown: Three Mile Island”“Summertime” Season 3May 5“The Pentaverate”“Wild Babies” Season 1May 6“Marmaduke”“The Sound of Magic” Season 1“The Takedown”“Welcome to Eden” Season 1May 10“Outlander” Season 5May 11“42 Days of Darkness” Season 1“Operation Mincemeat”“Our Father”May 12“Savage Beauty” Season 1May 13“Bling Empire” Season 2May 14“Borrego”May 16“Vampire in the Garden” Season 1May 17“The Future Diary” Season 2May 18“Cyber Hell: Exposing an Internet Horror”May 19“A Perfect Pairing”“The Photographer: Murder in Pinamar”May 20“Love, Death + Robots” Season 3May 23“Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045” Season 2May 25“Somebody Feed Phil” Season 5 More

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      In Bid to Boost Peacock, Universal Sending 3 Movies Straight to Streaming

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      The move is not only an attempt to attract subscribers but an acknowledgment that releasing some films theatrically has become more of a gamble.Donna Langley, the head of Universal’s Motion Picture Entertainment Group, stepped on the stage at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas last week and reaffirmed her commitment to movie theaters.“Theatrical will always be the cornerstone of our business,” she told the crowd of theater owners gathered for the annual CinemaCon industry convention, adding, “Cheers to that.”It was not just lip service. With more than 25 films set for release in 2022, Universal has at least 10 more than any other major Hollywood studio. It will release a combination of blockbusters (“Jurassic World Dominion”), family fare (“Minions: The Rise of Gru”) and original bets (Jordan Peele’s “Nope” and “Beast,” starring Idris Elba), operating on the premise that a movie’s value begins with its debut in theaters.Yet on Monday, as part of a presentation for advertisers, Kelly Campbell, the president of NBCUniversal’s streaming service Peacock, will announce that three new movies produced by Universal Pictures will head straight to the streaming service when they debut in 2023.They include a biopic about LeBron James based on his memoir, “Shooting Stars”; a remake of John Woo’s 1989 crime drama “The Killer,” starring Omar Sy; and “Praise This,” a music-competition feature set in the world of youth choir.For Peacock, which last week announced that it ended the first quarter of the year with more than 13 million paid subscribers and 28 million monthly active accounts in the United States, representing a growth of 4 million users, the additional film content is crucial to its strategy. It needs to find a way to compete with the bigger services like Netflix, Disney+ and HBO Max, at a time when streaming subscriber numbers seem to be plateauing.Ms. Langley greenlit all three pictures, and had to make the calls to tell the filmmakers about the change in distribution strategy.“I think everybody sort of woke up and smelled the coffee during the pandemic and recognized that not all movies are created equal,” Ms. Langley said in an interview, adding that the filmmakers were still interested in partnering with the studio, even if it meant going straight to Peacock. “It’s a big deal for Peacock to have these movies. They are events for them. And we got yeses, so I think it was a satisfying rationale.”“Theatrical will always be the cornerstone of our business,” Donna Langley, the head of Universal’s Motion Picture Entertainment Group, told theater owners last week.Valerie Macon/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe three movies also reflect the type of audience Peacock seems to be attracting so far: younger and more diverse than those who gravitate toward the other legacy businesses run by Comcast, Peacock’s parent company.“What you’ll see with these films is that they are broadly appealing, but also track towards that young, diverse audience that represents the streaming audience of today, the generation of consumers who are choosing streaming as their primary source of entertainment,” Ms. Campbell said in an interview.Despite lagging behind some of its streaming competitors, Peacock has experienced success this year. February was a high point, when viewers could see the 2022 Winter Olympics, the Super Bowl, the simultaneous release of the Jennifer Lopez-starring film “Marry Me” in theaters and on the service, and the debut of “Bel-Air,” a dramatic reimagining of the 1990s hit television series “The Prince of Bel-Air” that starred Will Smith. (Season two is in development.)“Retention on our service after airing all of this special content in such a concentrated period of time was well above our expectation,” Brian Roberts, the chief executive of Comcast, said in an earnings call last week. “We have seen a 25 percent increase in hours of engagement year-over-year.”When the pandemic upended the theater business, Universal Pictures experimented with a variety of distribution methods for its movies. There was the purely theatrical like “Fast 9: The Fast Saga,” which earned $173 million when it was released last summer when coronavirus cases were lower. And there was “Sing 2,” which earned over $160 million domestically after being released in December, before going to premium video-on-demand just 17 days after its debut in theaters. The company has also experimented with simultaneous release, debuting “Halloween Kills” and the sequel to “Boss Baby” in theaters and on Peacock during the height of the pandemic. The company will do so again in two weeks with the remake of the Stephen King horror film “Firestarter.”“There’s no one size fits all,” Ms. Langley said. “It really is about looking at the individual movies on the one hand and then also at our growth engine Peacock, and doing what’s best in any given moment, depending on what’s going on in the marketplace. I’m hopeful that this stabilizes over time as the theatrical landscape stabilizes. But until then, we do have this optionality.”Like every other studio executive, Ms. Langley is involved in the complicated calculus of determining what movies fit where in a world where the theatrical box office is down 45 percent from what it was in 2019. It is “a box office that is in decline,” Ms. Langley said, with theatergoing expected to still be down at least 15 percent from its prepandemic level in 2023.In speaking specifically to the three films she chose to put straight on Peacock, she described them as “movies we love that a decade ago would have been no-brainers” to make and release in theaters.But audiences have more choice now about when and where they watch films, and it can be more difficult to convince them that a film is worth seeing in a theater.“We still want to make these movies because we believe in the stories, we believe in the storytellers and we think that these are great pieces of entertainment,” she said. “We have the ability to be able to avail ourselves of our streaming platform. And we think that they are events, actually, to be released into the home, very specifically for the Peacock audience.”Peacock is buying the films from Universal Pictures, a portion of the $3 billion it intends to spend on content in 2022, ramping up to $5 billion in the next couple of years.Ms. Langley says that while 2023 will feature three straight-to-Peacock films, she hopes release seven to 10 films that way in the coming years, films that will all be developed and produced by the same Universal creative team that is behind the “Jurassic Park” and “Fast and Furious” franchises.“Peacock’s future depends on having good content and our future depends on having flexibility in our distribution models,” Ms. Langley said. “So our agendas, ultimately, are aligned. So, yes, there’s debate about any one particular title or something they might want that we can’t deliver or vice versa but that’s the stuff of working inside a big corporation.” More

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      Bill Murray Speaks About Misconduct Allegations

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      “I did something I thought was funny, and it wasn’t taken that way,” he said in a television interview on Saturday.The actor Bill Murray said that a movie in which he was set to star was suspended because an attempt at humor had been taken amiss by a female co-star, addressing publicly for the first time an episode that has gotten widespread attention.“I did something I thought was funny, and it wasn’t taken that way,” Murray said in an interview on Saturday with CNBC’s Becky Quick, during coverage of Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholders’ meeting.Murray, who is 71, labeled the episode a “difference of opinion” and did not apologize. While limiting his discussion of what happened to generalities and without going into detail, he spoke contritely about unwittingly “insensitive” behavior.“I’ve been doing not much else but thinking about it for the last week or two,” he said. “The world’s different than it was when I was a little kid. What I always thought was funny as a little kid isn’t necessarily the same as what’s funny now.”The movie, “Being Mortal,” based on a 2014 book of the same title by the writer and surgeon Atul Gawande, is being made by Searchlight Pictures, which Murray said is conducting an investigation into the episode.Murray was the movie’s intended lead, and it was also to star Aziz Ansari, who had been directing it and who wrote the script. Seth Rogen and Keke Palmer had also been cast in the film.The episode involving Murray happened on April 15. Production was halted that day, someone working on the movie told The New York Times on the condition of anonymity, because details of the matter were being kept confidential.Murray did not name the female colleague who had objected to his behavior, but he said the two of them were in touch and that he felt optimistic about resolving the issue.“We like each other’s work, and we like each other, I think,” he said. “What would make me the happiest would be to put my boots on and for both of us to go back into work.”Searchlight sent the cast and crew a letter, a copy of which was obtained by The Times, that attributed the suspension of filming to a complaint but did not identify its nature or who made it. The person working on the movie said the cause was an allegation of “inappropriate behavior.”Murray is known for playing gruff but lovable characters in blockbuster comedies like “Caddyshack” and “Ghostbusters,” and he is a member of a troupe of actors associated with the director Wes Anderson, having been the lead in Anderson’s 2004 film, “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.”The suspension of the filming of “Being Mortal” has brought attention to past criticisms of Murray’s on-set behavior.The actress Lucy Liu has described Murray insulting her during the filming of “Charlie’s Angels” (2000), and the actor Richard Dreyfuss has said Murray threw an ashtray at him when they worked on “What About Bob?”(1991).In a 2014 interview with Rolling Stone, Anderson said Murray developed strong chemistry with a range of fellow actors.In the CNBC interview, Murray said, “If we can’t really get along and trust each other, there’s no point in going further working together.” But, he added, “I think that’s a sad puppy that can’t learn anymore. I don’t want to be that sad dog, and I have no intention of it.” More

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      Catherine Spaak, Darling of Italian Cinema in the ’60s, Dies at 77

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      Born in France, she moved to Italy as a teenager and began a long acting career, which extended to Hollywood in the movie “Hotel.”Catherine Spaak, a French-born actress who made her name crossing genres in Italian, French and occasionally American films, acting alongside stars like Jane Fonda and Rod Taylor, died on April 17 in Rome. She was 77.Her son, Gabriele Guidi, confirmed her death.Born outside Paris, Ms. Spaak went to Italy as a teenager and began a long film career there. Her first major role in a feature film was as a 17-year-old student who has an affair with a middle-aged man in “Sweet Deceptions,” from 1960 (originally “Dolci Inganni”).Four years later she appeared as a Parisian shopgirl in “La Ronde,” a French drama about marital infidelity directed by Roger Vadim, in which she acted alongside Ms. Fonda (who went on to marry Mr. Vadim). The film, a remake of Max Ophuls’ 1950 version based on an 1897 Arthur Schnitzler play, was released and dubbed in the United States as “Circle of Love.”Ms. Spaak became an onscreen sex symbol as a young actress, winning the attention of many international magazines, including Playboy. With her long, straight hair and blunt-cut bangs, she also became something of a style-setter in the 1960s.Her first film role in the United States came in “Hotel” (1967), an adaptation of the Arthur Hailey novel, starring Mr. Taylor. She played the mistress of an investor (Kevin McCarthy) who wants to buy a landmark New Orleans hotel. Variety called her performance “charming and sexy.”In 1968 she had top billing, alongside Jean-Louis Trintignant, in “The Libertine” (originally “La Matriarca”) playing “a restless young widow” who “skips in and out of various sexual encounters,” as Howard Thompson wrote in an unenthusiastic review in The New York Times.She had another leading role in 1971, in Dario Argento’s murder mystery thriller “The Cat O’Nine Tails,” performing alongside Karl Malden and the television star James Franciscus. In 1975 she took on a different genre playing a prostitute in “Take a Hard Ride,” an Italian-American “spaghetti western” that also starred Jim Brown and Lee Van Cleef.Ms. Spaak pursued a parallel singing career in the 1960s and ’70s, recording a handful of albums. She was often likened to the French chanteuse Françoise Hardy, some of whose songs Ms. Spaak covered.Later in her career she hosted a popular Italian talk show called “Harem.”Catherine Spaak was born on April 3, 1945, in Boulogne-Billancourt, in the Paris area, to Charles Spaak, a screenwriter, and Claudie Clèves, an actress. After moving to Italy as a teenager, she remained there for the rest of her life and became a naturalized citizen.She was married four times. Her first husband was the Italian actor and producer Fabrizio Capucci; her second, Johnny Dorelli, was also an actor, and he and Ms. Spaak recorded music together, including the album “Promesse … Promesse …” (1970). She later married Daniel Rey, an architect, and, in 2013, Vladimiro Tuselli.In addition to Mr. Guidi, she is survived by a daughter, Sabrina Capucci, and her sister, Agnes Spaak. More

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      Watch These 12 Titles Before They Leave Netflix in May

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      A ton of movies and TV shows are disappearing for U.S. Netflix subscribers next month. These are the ones worth catching before they’re gone.The erotic thriller, that bygone artifact of ’80s and ’90s sexual expression (and repression) is all the rage again — well, at least nostalgia for it is — and two prime examples of the form are leaving Netflix in the United States at the end of the month, so get them while you can. Also departing the service in May: two family favorites, a musical extravaganza, two beloved series and much, much more. (Dates reflect the final day a title is available.)‘Eye in the Sky’ (May 12)When this tightly wound political thriller hit theaters in 2015, it felt like a high-minded showcase for a handful of terrific actors (Helen Mirren, Alan Rickman, Aaron Paul) but not much more. Now it feels like a quintessential cinematic artifact of the Obama era, a thoughtful and knotty examination of the moral dilemma of drone warfare — and of 21st century military conflict in general. Mirren and Paul spar spiritedly as a no-nonsense colonel and the drone pilot who must execute her orders; Rickman, in one of his final performances, brings shading and nuance to his work as a military middle man.Stream it here.‘Chloe’ (May 31)Amanda Seyfried is earning (deserved) praise for her astonishing work in “The Dropout,” but those in the know have been watching her shine for years, even in less-acclaimed films like this 2009 erotic thriller. She stars as the title character, a call girl hired by a suspicious wife (Julianne Moore) to entrap her husband (Liam Neeson), which gets complicated when the wife and would-be mistress begin an affair of their own. If the cast sounds high-caliber for such a story, that’s because the film is directed by the acclaimed Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan (“The Sweet Hereafter”), who gives the story’s mind games and psychological ramifications as much attention as the breathy sexual encounters.Stream it here.‘Closer’ (May 31)In 1971, the director Mike Nichols scored one of his greatest critical and commercial successes with “Carnal Knowledge,” a savagely funny and brutally candid account of the war between the sexes, as seen through the broken relationships of two men and two women. In 2004, near the end of his career, Nichols revisited the subject matter with a similar cast makeup, adapting the play “Closer” by Patrick Marber into a tough four-hander of sexual desire and emotional betrayal. Jude Law, Clive Owen, Natalie Portman and Julia Roberts craft some of their best screen acting to date, playing a full range of ruthlessness, cruelty, sensitivity and brokenness. It’s a challenging movie, but a great one.Stream it here.‘The Devil’s Advocate’ (May 31)This mash-up of Grisham-esque legal thriller and “Rosemary’s Baby”-style occult horror from Taylor Hackford was met mostly with snickers upon its 1997 release, as critics complained it was too ornate, too over-the-top, too much. But in these timid times, it feels like a welcome balm, a reminder of a time when mainstream studio movies were willing to just go for it, good taste be damned (pardon the pun). Keanu Reeves, sporting a less-than-convincing Southern accent, plays a hotshot young lawyer recruited (rather aggressively) by a top New York law firm led by Al Pacino as “John Milton,” and yes, the rest of the reveals are about as subtle. Pacino chews on the scenery with the ravenous appetite of a starving man, but the performance of note here is that of Charlize Theron, then still an up-and-comer, with an unexpectedly subtle turn as the young lawyer’s increasingly disturbed wife.Stream it here.‘The Disaster Artist’ (May 31)Bad movies have attracted ironic (and unironic) cult followings for decades, but few have attracted the fascination given to “The Room,” the bizarre psychosexual drama from the enigmatic writer-director-star Tommy Wiseau that plays less like a low-budget film than like a dispatch from another planet, filled with creatures who talk and act almost like actual humans. Greg Sestero, the film’s co-star, turned that strange experience into a memoir, which was then adapted into this hilarious chronicle of cinematic incompetence. James Franco directs and stars as Wiseau, his work focusing on — and blurring the line between — badness and brilliance; Dave Franco is charismatic and sympathetic as Sestero, while an all-star supporting cast (including Alison Brie, Zac Efron, Ari Graynor, Seth Rogen and Jacki Weaver) brightens up the edges.Stream it here.‘Downton Abbey’: Seasons 1-6 (May 31)Sometimes Netflix is there for you in your time of need, and sometimes they yank away entertainment at exactly the moment it’s most necessary. Such is the case with the lapse of the full run of “Downton Abbey” barely two weeks after the release of “Downton Abbey: A New Era,” the latest feature film follow-up, to theaters. That means it’s time to begin that catch-up binge and to reacquaint yourself with the Crawley family and their various servants, interlopers and guests. The show’s origins lay in the creator Julian Fellowes’s Oscar-winning screenplay for Robert Altman’s “Gosford Park,” which found drama in the contrast between British aristocracy and those that serve them. He followed those contrasts and connections through six seasons with sharp wit and penetrating commentary.Stream it here.‘Free Willy’ (May 31)Everything was bigger in the ’90s, so while family entertainment of yore gave us countless stories of boys and their dogs, this 1993 hit from Simon Wincer told the story of a boy and his orca. Jason James Richter stars as an orphan boy headed down the wrong life path, whose probation period cleaning up graffiti at an amusement park leads him to strike up an unconventional friendship with the title character, a captive whale, whom he soon decides he should release into the wild. Lori Petty and Michael Madsen are likable as the stern (but swayable) grown-ups.Stream it here.‘Hairspray’ (May 31)The cult filmmaker John Waters made an unexpected (and unexpectedly successful) play for mainstream respectability with his 1988 film “Hairspray,” a PG-rated nostalgia comedy that was so family-friendly it was adapted into a Broadway musical comedy. And then it made its way back to the movies for the 2007 adaptation of the Broadway show, directed with theatrical flair by the choreographer-turned-director Adam Shankman. The musical numbers are inventively staged, the conventions of the form are slyly sabotaged, and the performances are top-notch — particularly John Travolta as the mother of the lead character, Tracy Turnblad (the terrific Nikki Blonsky), and Christopher Walken in fine, tender form as her father.Stream it here.‘Happy Endings’: Seasons 1-3 (May 31)It’s easy to get overly nostalgic for the good old days of network television, but you have to give them this: Networks were willing to give great but underseen sitcoms like “Seinfeld” and “Cheers” the time to build and find their audiences, resulting in record-high ratings. This uproariously funny and quietly inventive series (2011-13), by contrast, struggled mightily, barely surviving from season to season before getting the unceremonious boot after three seasons. This ensemble comedy, in which six friends (and sometimes lovers, and sometimes enemies) struggle to weather the storms of adulthood, is like a cross between “Friends,” “Seinfeld,” and the early, good years of “How I Met Your Mother.” And if it ended too soon, at least we got what we got.Stream it here.‘Happy Feet’ (May 31)George Miller has one of the more fascinating dual filmographies in all of cinema. On one hand, he created and directed the four “Mad Max” films, fiercely visceral and unapologetically violent action epics for a decidedly adult audience. On the other, he has given us some of the most enjoyable family movies of the ’90s and beyond, including the “Babe” films and this enchanting animated musical comedy, which was nominated for best animated feature Oscar and spawned a 2011 sequel. Elijah Wood voices the leading role of Mumble, an emperor penguin unable to attract a mate with his song, who decides instead to take up tap dancing. Hugh Jackman, Nicole Kidman, Brittany Murphy and Robin Williams are among the impressive voice cast.Stream it here.‘Wild Things’ (May 31)The impressive 1990s run of erotic thrillers was nearly at its end when the director John McNaughton (“Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer”) directed this 1998 entry into the subgenre, which gleefully revels in the sordidness of its story while also slyly winking at its conventions — he has his sleazy cake and eats it too. Denise Richards became a star via her hubba-hubba turn as a rich bad girl who accuses a teacher (Matt Dillon) of assault, a charge echoed by a tough young woman from the wrong side of the tracks (Neve Campbell, turning her “Scream” image inside out). But that’s just the setup; the clever script is filled with reverses, reveals and double-crosses, resulting in a trashy delight that is equal parts Hitchcock and Cinemax After Dark.Stream it here.‘Zoolander’ (May 31)Ben Stiller co-writes, directs and stars in this giddily goofy 2001 comedy as Derek Zoolander, a delightfully dim male model who is pulled into a hilariously convoluted story of spies, political assassination and fashion industry exploitation. Owen Wilson is his rival, a fellow male model who becomes his unlikely partner; Will Ferrell is the dastardly villain of the tale, and he does not underplay the role. Stiller’s influences aren’t subtle (he’s shouting out everything from Bond to the Pink Panther), but his unique directorial style and inside knowledge of celebrity culture makes “Zoolander” a surprisingly pointed social commentary that’s also very stupid and very funny.Stream it here.Also leaving: “The Blind Side,” “I Know What You Did Last Summer,” “Stardust,” “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” and “Top Gun” (all May 31). More

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      Jacques Perrin, French Film Star and Producer, Is Dead at 80

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      He was a heartthrob in the musical “The Young Girls of Rochefort,” a photojournalist in the thriller “Z,” and a world-weary director in the hit “Cinema Paradiso.”Jacques Perrin, a comely and soft-spoken veteran French actor — he didn’t smolder so much as twinkle — who went from starring in musical and dramatic films to directing and producing them, most notably the political thrillers of Costa-Gavras and his own poetic documentaries about the natural world, died on April 21 in Paris. He was 80.His son, Mathieu Simonet, confirmed the death. No cause was given.Mr. Perrin was a lonely and gallant teenager in the Italian melodrama “Girl With a Suitcase” (1961), in which he tries to rescue a down-and-out beauty played by Claudia Cardinale who has been ditched by his lout of an older brother.He was a dreamy sailor in Jacques Demy’s “The Young Girls of Rochefort,” a giddy, candy-colored 1967 French musical (now considered a camp classic) that starred Catherine Deneuve and her sister, Francoise Dorléac, as a pair of twins looking for love and finding it with Mr. Perrin, his hair bleached like straw (and looking rather like a young David Hockney) and Gene Kelly. (Ms. Dorléac died in a car crash shortly after the film was made.)That same year, Mr. Perrin and Natalie Wood appeared as chaste young lovers whose elders urge them to get on with it in “All the Other Girls Do,” an Italian farce.Mr. Perrin with Francoise Dorléac in “The Young Girls Of Rochefort,” a giddy, candy-colored 1967 French musical.Mary Evans/AF Archive/Cinetext Bildarchiv/Everett CollectionMr. Perrin went on to play an opportunistic photojournalist who discovers his conscience in “Z,” a 1969 political thriller by Costa-Gavras, the Greek-born director. Mr. Perrin also produced the movie, a feat of “accounting acrobatics,” as he put it, since no one else would touch the film. (It is about the real-life assassination of a Greek politician.) Altogether, Mr. Perrin appeared in some 100 films, and produced close to 40.To American audiences, however, he was best known for his role in “Cinema Paradiso” (1988). He played Salvatore, a world-weary film director who was once a wide-eyed 8-year-old nicknamed Toto. In flashback, Toto is seen in thrall to the movies he watches at a theater in a small postwar Sicilian village and under the wing of the father figure Alfredo (Philippe Noiret), the philosophical projectionist who slices out the naughty bits — the on-screen kisses — on the orders of the village priest.The final scene was a humdinger: Mr. Perrin, weeping gorgeously in a darkened theater, once more in thrall. Critics were dry-eyed, but audiences were not, and it was a smash hit that won all sorts of awards, including the Oscar for best foreign film and a Golden Globe.Mr. Perrin played a similar role in “The Chorus” (2004), which he also produced, about orphaned boys in a grim boarding school who are rescued by a singing teacher who helps them form a choir. It, too, was a hit, at least in France, inspiring a frenzy of amateur singing, just as “High School Musical” did a few years later in the United States. Mr. Perrin, speaking to The New York Times, described “The Chorus” as “a fragile and precious movie about childhood memories.”Other films were less successful. He produced and starred in “The Roaring Forties,” a 1982 drama about a sailor on a nonstop solo race around the world, based on the real-life adventures of Donald Crowhurst, a British sailor who disappeared while attempting a solo circumnavigation in 1969. Though Julie Christie, an otherwise reliable box-office draw, was his co-star, the film did so poorly — a “shipwreck,” as Le Monde put it — that it took Mr. Perrin 10 years to pay off the debt he accrued while making it.“He worked on what was interesting to him,” Mr. Simonet, who is also an actor, director and producer, and who often collaborated with his father, said in a phone interview. “His purpose was not to make blockbusters, even if some of his films have become blockbusters. He bet his life all the time. He followed his dreams, with no limit.”Jacques André Simonet was born on July 13, 1941, in Paris. His father, Alexandre Simonet, was the manager of La Comédie-Française, Paris’s centuries-old state run theater; his mother, Marie Perrin, was an actress, and Jacques took her last name as his stage name. He left school at 15 and worked as a grocery clerk before studying at the Conservatoire National Supérieur d’Art Dramatique.In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife, Valentine Perrin, who has also produced films; their sons, Maxence and Lancelot; and a sister, Janine Baisadouli. His first marriage, to Chantal Bouillaut, ended in divorce.Mr. Perrin with Eurasian cranes on the set of the documentary “Winged Migration” (2001), described as “a sweeping global tour from a bird’s-eye view.”Patrick Chauvel/Sony Pictures ClassicsMr. Perrin, an ardent environmentalist, made hypnotic films about the natural world. “Microcosmos” (1996), is all about insects. “Oceans” (2009) dives underwater. “Winged Migration” (2001) takes to the skies as it tracks a year in the life of migrating birds, like cranes, storks and geese, as they fly thousands of miles through 40 countries and all seven continents. In The Times, Stephen Holden called it “a sweeping global tour from a bird’s-eye view.”“Winged Migration” was made under extraordinary circumstances over three years, with 14 cinematographers flying with the birds in ultralight aircraft built for that purpose. Balloons, remote control gliders and other devices were also used to film among the birds, half of which were trained at Mr. Perrin’s house in Normandy.These birds were exposed to and imprinted with the aircraft as chicks — as Konrad Lorenz, the Austrian animal zoologist and ornithologist, once famously discovered, chicks will become attached to the first large moving object they encounter — so that once they took flight, the crews could accompany them, like members of the flock.“Birds don’t normally fly beside aircraft, nor can they be trained like circus animals,” Patricia Thomson wrote in American Cinematographer magazine in 2003. “So Perrin began what would become the largest imprinting project ever. Over 1,000 eggs — representing 25 species — were raised by ornithologists and students at a base in Normandy where Perrin also rented an airfield. During incubation and early life, the chicks were exposed to the sound of motor engines and the human voice, then were trained to follow the pilot — first on foot, then in the air. These birds would be the main actors, the heroes of flight. The rest of the footage would involve thousands of wild birds, filmed in their natural environments.”Mr. Perrin wanted moviegoers to feel as the birds did and to feel, as Mr. Simonet said, that they could reach out and touch them.The ultralight aircraft weren’t easy to fly, Mr. Perrin told James Gorman of The Times. Two crashed, leaving the pilot and the cameraman with minor injuries; no winged creatures were hurt.“Sometimes at 10,000 feet a bird would land on a cinematographer’s lap and have to be nudged off with one hand while he held a heavy 35-millimeter film camera in the other,” Mr. Gorman wrote. “One rule was absolute: No filmmakers with vertigo need apply.”The scientific consultants on the film were so moved by the experience of flying with the flocks that when they landed, many burst into tears.“They don’t say so splendid words,” Mr. Perrin told Mr. Gorman. “They cry.” More

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      In Echo of Soviet Era, Russia’s Movie Theaters Turn to Pirate Screenings

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      In a Cold War throwback, some venues are showing bootleg versions after Hollywood studios pulled films from the country. Still, viewer numbers have tanked.Since the invasion of Ukraine, Hollywood’s biggest studios have stopped releasing movies in Russia, and Netflix has ceased service there. But recently, some of the companies’ films have started appearing in Russian movie theaters — illegally.The screenings are reminiscent of the Soviet era, when the only way to see most Western films was to get access to a pirated version. Whereas those movies made their way to Russians in the form of smuggled VHS tapes, today, cinemas in the country have a simpler, faster method: the internet. Numerous websites offer bootleg copies of movies that take minutes to download.Some theaters in Russia are now openly screening pirated movies; others are being more careful, allowing private individuals to rent out spaces to show films, free or for a fee. One group, for example, rented out several screening rooms at a movie theater in Yekaterinburg, then used social media to invite people to buy tickets to watch “The Batman.”Theatergoers can also see “The Batman” in Ivanovo, a city about a five-hour drive from Moscow, in at least one venue. In Makhachkala, capital of the Dagestan region, in the Caucasus, a movie theater is screening “Don’t Look Up”; and in Chita, a city near the border with Mongolia, parents can take their children to watch “Turning Red,” the animated film from Disney and Pixar.Jennifer Lawrence as Kate Dibiasky and Leonardo DiCaprio as Dr. Randall Mindy in “Don’t Look Up.”Niko Tavernise/NetflixIn “Turning Red,” an animated Disney/Pixar feature, a teenager is transformed into a giant red panda.Disney+Robert Pattinson is the star of “The Batman.”Warner Bros.These surreptitious screenings are the latest attempt by movie theaters in Russia to survive after American studios like Disney, Warner Brothers and Paramount left the country in protest. Before the war in Ukraine, movies produced in the United States made up about 70 percent of the Russian film market, according to state media.But despite the attempts to draw viewers, last month, Russians barely went to the movies. Theaters saw ticket sales fall by about half in March, compared with the same period last year, according to the country’s Association of Theater Owners.Artem Komolyatov, 31, a video game producer in Moscow, noticed the shift when he and his wife went on a Friday date to the movies a few weeks ago. With everything that has been going on politically, the two of them wanted to spend a couple of hours in a relaxed environment with other people, Komolyatov said, “watching something together, maybe laughing and crying.”They chose “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” a film from the independent American studio A24, which stopped releasing films in Russia in mid-April.The scene they found when they arrived at the movie theater was bizarre, Komolyatov said. “Besides us, there were three other people,” he said. “We went at 8 p.m. on a weekend. Usually the theater is completely full.”The Cinema Park complex in Moscow on April 12. The poster on the right is for “Uncharted,” with Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg, which came out just before the Ukraine war started.Nikolay Vinokurov/AlamyGiven the dearth of viewers and of content, the Association of Theater Owners predicted that at least half the movie theaters in Russia would go out of business in the next two months.Even if that prognosis is true, history has shown that films will reach audiences with or without legal channels. Decades ago, Soviet citizens gathered in empty office spaces, living rooms and cultural centers to view pirated copies of Western classics like “Rocky,” “The Terminator,” and “9 ½ Weeks” that had made their way behind the Iron Curtain.During the tumultuous years that followed the crumbling of the Soviet Union, piracy continued to be the main access point for Hollywood films in Russia. Movies recorded on VHS tapes that were sold at local markets were often clearly shot on a hand-held camcorder in a movie theater. Continuing a Soviet tradition, the movies were dubbed into Russian with a time delay by voice actors, often just one for all the male characters, and another for the women.Once the first Western-style movie theater opened in 1996 in Moscow, illegal distribution paths began to peter out, according to a study by the Social Science Research Council, a New York-based nonprofit. In the early 2000s, Russians flocked to theaters to see legally distributed global hits like “Avatar” and “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End.” Russia became the ninth-largest foreign box office market, according to the Motion Picture Association.Russia-Ukraine War: Key DevelopmentsCard 1 of 3Biden’s speech. More

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      Watch Alexander Skarsgard Battle the Undead in ‘The Northman’

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      The director Robert Eggers narrates a scene that pits the star against a most unfriendly zombie.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.A quiet moonlit scene turns into a rousing fierce fight with an undead mound dweller in this scene from “The Northman.”Amleth (Alexander Skarsgard), the Northman of the title, is seeking to avenge his father’s death. But he requires a special sword that he must retrieve from a burial mound. He’ll just need to pry the weapon from the hands of the mound dweller buried there. Oh, and fight that undead figure when he is roused.Discussing the scene, the director Robert Eggers said that the barely visible moonlit shots in the film “are almost black and white, to the point where I wonder if my D.P. and I made a mistake,” he said, referring to the director of photography, Eggers’s longtime collaborator Jarin Blaschke. The stark glimmers of these moments are based on time Blaschke spent in remote parts of Africa, far from any light pollution. The images are enhanced by an ashen coloring the costume designer and production designer put on the clothing and set to enhance the visuals.Much of the fight with Skarsgard (6-foot-4) and Ian Whyte (7-foot-1) was shot in a vertically roomy space in long, unbroken takes. It became a way to help audiences be “more immersed in the fight,” he said. “And it’s also easier to follow each beat of the fight as a story.”Read the “Northman” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More