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      ‘Vortex’ Review: A Split Screen and a Shared Fate

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      Gaspar Noé’s new film chronicles the decline of an elderly couple in remorseless, mesmerizing detail.According to Philip Roth, “Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre.” Affirming that grim insight, Gaspar Noé’s “Vortex” is a relentless chronicle of carnage. From opening scenes that include a vintage video of the eternally young Françoise Hardy singing “Mon amie la rose” — a minor-key meditation on the passage of time and the decay of youth — it’s obvious that there is only one way that this story of an elderly Parisian couple will end.Maybe that’s true of all stories. Plenty of movies set their characters on a path to the grave. But very few chart the course with such exquisite, excruciating attention to the minor indignities and existential terrors along the way. “Vortex” is not without intimations of grace and episodes of tenderness, but it also refuses any gesture of consolation. “Grandma and Grandpa have a new home,” a young boy remarks as his grandparents’ ashes are sealed into a wall of tombs. “It’s not a home,” his father corrects him. “Homes are for the living.”The home that the deceased shared, an apartment near the Stalingrad metro station in Paris, is a vivid presence throughout the film, most of which takes place within its book-stuffed rooms and narrow corridors. The husband and wife, whose names are never uttered — she is played by Françoise Lebrun, he by Dario Argento — have clearly been here for a long time. The art on the walls and the volumes stacked on every surface, even in the bathroom, testify to lives of political radicalism and intellectual engagement.She is a psychiatrist. He is a writer, working (in longhand and on a manual typewriter) on a book about cinema and dreams. Infirmity has taken a toll on both of them. He has heart trouble and survived a stroke a few years earlier. She seems to have Alzheimer’s, though the diagnosis remains unspoken. “It’s a very well-known disease,” her husband says. “Everyone knows how it goes.”In the abstract, maybe — and also in movies like “The Father,” “Still Alice” and “Amour,” a Paris-set tragedy that “Vortex” very much resembles — but Noé is less interested in clinical details than in sensations and states of consciousness. A prominent avatar of what’s sometimes called the New French Extremity, he has specialized in immersive spectacles of shock, cruelty and disorientation. His films (“Irreversible,” “Enter the Void” and “Climax,” among others) don’t merely traffic in explicit images of sex, violence, sexual violence and drug-induced frenzy. They push at the boundaries of audience experience and defy conventions of cinematic space and time, trying not to represent reality but rather to supplant it.“Every movie is a dream,” the husband in “Vortex” muses, and his elaborations on the idea might serve as a running commentary on the movie he’s in. (He also likes to quote Edgar Allan Poe, who asked, “Is all that we see or seem/But a dream within a dream?”) Argento, a venerable Italian horror auteur, speaks with some authority on the matter, since, like Noé, he is an uncompromising creator of cinematic nightmares. This one is all the more unsettling for being grounded in the mundane.After a brief prologue that consists of a scene of the couple sipping wine on their terrace and that luminous Françoise Hardy clip, the screen splits into two squares with rounded corners and a narrow gutter in the middle. Sometimes, when the husband and wife are together, the images overlap, presenting slightly different angles on the same action. More often, each spouse occupies a separate frame, and they move in counterpoint through familiar routines and periods of panic and confusion, a technique that emphasizes their isolation from each other even in their most intimate moments.When their son, Stéphane (Alex Lutz), comes to visit, alone or with their young grandson (Kylian Dheret), the rhythms become both calmer and more chaotic. Stéphane tries to be a reassuring, reasonable presence in his parents’ lives, but his own history of mental illness and drug addiction makes this difficult. Mom’s unpredictability and Dad’s stubbornness don’t help.Argento and Lebrun, who improvised most of their dialogue, are terrifyingly real — so much so that Lebrun has said that some viewers assumed she actually had Alzheimer’s. Argento speaks in fluent but heavily accented French, sometimes pausing and fumbling to find the right word. Lebrun uncannily conveys the sense of having lost her grip on language itself, pushing breath through her lips to summon words that never arrive. At other times, though, she is possessed of an almost maniacal clarity and sense of purpose. At one point, she energetically tidies up her husband’s desk, tearing up his newly written manuscript pages and trying to flush them down the toilet.Lebrun and Argento in the film. Her character seems to have Alzheimer’s, and infirmity has taken a toll on the couple.Utopia“You’re killing me,” he says when that happens. Now and then, she expresses a wish to die, but what is striking and finally heartbreaking is how alive they both are right until the end. They fight to hold onto the life they have made, refusing to consider moving into a care facility and leaving behind the stuff that has accumulated around them.All those books, papers, videocassettes and pictures aren’t just set decoration. They are, in a profound sense, what the movie is about, and what — in contemplating the deaths of two fictional characters — it is specifically mourning. What the couple represents is a culture, a sensibility, a romantic, idealistic set of aspirations and commitments that flourished in the decades of their youth and young adulthood.Lebrun and Argento, as Noé takes care to document in the opening titles, were born in the first half of the 1940s and came of age amid the turmoil and promise of postwar Europe. Both participated in the cultural flowering of that era — Lebrun starred in “The Mother and the Whore,” Jean Eustache’s post-1968 masterpiece; highlights of Argento’s extensive filmography include “Deep Red” (1976) and “Suspiria” (1977) — and carry some of its aura with them. But among the comforts “Vortex” refuses is the bittersweet balm of nostalgia. It’s a blunt reckoning with the inevitability of loss, including the loss of memory. We dream for a while, and then we sleep.VortexNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Los Conductos’ Review: Lost Souls Above Medellín

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      A former cult member tries to restore his life.A couple of times in this short and occasionally exhilarating feature from Colombia, its director, Camilo Restrepo, contrives striking visual juxtapositions. His camera closes in on a dead man’s white shirt, soaked in blood, and focuses on the bullet hole in both the shirt and the man’s chest. It then cuts to a bright red motorcycle fuel tank and a gasoline nozzle going into it. The dark circular hood of a ceiling security camera is replaced by the sight of a gray balloon expanding while being filled with helium.What these connections add up to is … enigmatic. Shot on 16-millimeter film stock that seems as rich in specks and cracks as it is in color, “Los Conductos” takes a long way around in telling its story, one of loneliness, defiance and intractable yearning. Luis Felipe Lozano, an itinerant laborer and nonactor whom Restrepo met in 2013, plays Pinky, a character whose life is based on Lozano’s own. Circuitously, Pinky speaks in voice-over about falling in with a group of people “united by a sense of loss we felt in the world.” But for almost half of the movie, we see him alone. He gazes at Medellín from high ground; he steals a motorcycle; he wields a gun.It is only late in the movie that we piece together his involvement with a cult, and his subsequent desire to seek revenge against its leader, referred to as Father. Father seems, on closer scrutiny, to be nothing more than a ringleader of thieves; in one shot, he holds a messy ball of copper wire, obviously ripped out of stolen electronics.Like “Days of the Whale” (2020), Restrepo’s movie shows us a Medellín that’s far from action-movie drug cartel clichés. Out of Pinky’s marginalized life, Restrepo conjures a lush but nevertheless desolate cinematic atmosphere.Los ConductosNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Africa’ Review: Aging and its Discontents

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      In Oren Gerner’s semi-fictional portrait of his family, a father grapples with retirement, poor health and a growing sense of obsolescence.In Oren Gerner’s “Africa,” a son observes as his father tries, futilely, to deny the inexorable advance of old age. Based on the real-life experiences of Gerner’s family and friends in the Israeli community settlement of Nirit, and starring the director’s parents and relatives as themselves, this docu-fictional drama finds Meir, Gerner’s 68-year-old father, at a painful crossroads.Meir is a reluctant retiree whose fragile pride is shattered when he loses his post as the organizer of the town’s annual ceremony to a group of teens. Bristling against a sense of obsolescence, he throws himself into building a bed for his grandson, undeterred by a heart condition that has rendered him frail.Enacting quotidian situations from their everyday lives, Meir and his therapist wife, Maya, offer quiet, unshowy performances — if you can call them that. Even when the writing is a bit forced — as in some brusque exchanges between Meir and his grandchildren, which underline generational differences rather pointedly — the old man conveys a genuine desperation. At times his wounded masculinity borders on the pathetic, particularly when he bickers with Maya, who exudes the infinite patience that only comes with a long, loving companionship.These unfiltered moments are occasionally undercut by Gerner’s tendency for broad-strokes affectation. The film’s title is one such unfounded flourish, drawn from the home videos of a family trip to Namibia, which Gerner weaves arbitrarily through the film. As for the Gerners’ own locale, the film never delves into cultural context, even when Meir discusses his time as a soldier or comments that he shares a birthday with his nation. The result is a bittersweet family portrait that, though relatable, lacks the specificity that makes for truly universal cinema.AfricaNot rated. In Hebrew, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Hatching’ Review: The Best-Laid Plans

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      Scrambling creature feature with psycho-horror, this inventive oddity brings tween anxieties to monstrous life.Painted in gumdrop colors and faux good cheer, Hanna Bergholm’s “Hatching,” set in a leafy Finnish suburb, is a nightmare of puberty and poor parenting. Suffering from both is Tinja (a wonderful Siiri Solalinna), a 12-year-old gymnast and resentful collaborator in the manufactured perfection of “Lovely Everyday Life,” a relentlessly upbeat video blog maintained by her controlling, unnamed mother (Sophia Heikkila).When a frantic crow interrupts an afternoon’s filming — and destroys the family’s screamingly pink-patterned living-room — Mother reacts by swiftly snapping its neck. This sharp swerve from serene to shocking will recur throughout the film as Tinja, a milky mist gathering ominously behind her, finds an abandoned egg in the dead bird’s nest and hides it in her bedroom. It will grow startlingly large, finally hatching, tellingly, at the touch of her tears.What emerges is a freakish, gooey-feathered monstrosity, its pleading eyes and spindly legs in comical contrast to its ferociously-toothed beak. The disgusting creature’s devotion to Tinja, however, fills an emotional void in the needy girl, seeming to intuit — and, eventually, act on — her deepest anxieties. In the process, the beast becomes the physical manifestation of Tinja’s suppressed fury, an evil twin determined to bloodily erase every obstacle in the girl’s path to happiness.A sometimes uneasy merger of monster movie and psychological horror — with a dollop of social-media satire — this inventive first feature mines tween confusion (there are nods to both bulimia and menstruation) for grotesque fun. The film’s humor, however, doesn’t dilute the essential sadness at its core: that of a lonely girl so lacking a source of love that she’s forced to create her own.HatchingNot rated. In Finnish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Reconsidering the Spice Girls: How Manufactured Girl Power Became Real

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      In a scene from the 1997 film “Spice World,” the Spice Girls are rehearsing for the movie’s climactic performance at the Royal Albert Hall. Dressed in their signature looks, they sway their way through one of their hits, “Say You’ll Be There,” playfully poking each other and bopping along as they perform the R&B-infused track.“That was absolutely perfect,” the music director declares when they finish, “without being actually any good.” The Girls kind of agree, and kind of don’t care.It is a fleeting, self-deprecating punchline in the movie but one that encapsulates how the pop group has been perceived ever since it zig-a-zig-ah-ed its way onto the music scene in the mid-1990s. To a mostly young and female audience drawn to their messaging of self-empowerment, individuality and friendship, the Spice Girls were absolutely perfect. But to critics and commentators who wrote them off as “duds,” “manufactured” phonies and “shrill” bimbos, they were not actually any good.Twenty-five years after the release of the film, as some of the band’s most fervent fans have themselves grown up to be pop titans, the role of the Spice Girls in music history is still being rewritten.To be sure, criticism of the Spice Girls — most notably, that they were a superficial, manufactured, disposable pop confection — was not unique to them. Many pop acts, including the Beatles, the Monkees and Abba, initially encountered the same derision. But from the beginning of their ascent to superstardom, the fact that the five Girls — Victoria Adams (now Beckham), a.k.a. Posh Spice; Melanie Brown, a.k.a. Scary Spice; Emma Bunton, a.k.a. Baby Spice; Melanie Chisholm, a.k.a. Sporty Spice; and Geri Halliwell (now Horner), a.k.a. Ginger Spice — were outspoken young women seemed to bring an added layer of skepticism.Perhaps nothing illustrates the conundrum of the Spice Girls more starkly than the reception to “Spice World,” their madcap mockumentary, which earned more than $70 million worldwide but received memorably withering reviews. Desson Howe in The Washington Post said it was “about as awful and shamelessly pandering as a fanzine movie could dare to be.” In The Orlando Sentinel, the critic Jay Boyar described the movie as akin to “being kicked to death by a pack of wild Barbies.” Roger Ebert compared it very unfavorably to the film that inspired it, “A Hard Day’s Night,” writing, “The huge difference, of course, is that the Beatles were talented while, let’s face it, the Spice Girls could be duplicated by any five women under the age of 30 standing in line at Dunkin’ Donuts.”Horner, Brown, Beckham, Bunton and Chisholm arriving — aboard a double-decker bus — at a 1998 screening of their film “Spice World” in New York.Henny Ray Abrams/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhat’s become clear in the decades since the film’s release is that these five particular women could not, in fact, be duplicated. While all-female groups — from the Supremes to Destiny’s Child — have long been a celebrated part of pop music, Posh, Scary, Baby, Sporty and Ginger offered a specific combination of self-expression and brazen ambition that inspired a generation of artists. Contemporary performers such as Sam Smith, Little Mix and Haim have all been effusive in their praise for the Spice Girls.“I remember hearing ‘Wannabe’ on the radio and immediately falling in love with it,” the singer Rita Ora, who performed the Girls’ hit “Wannabe” in a 2018 appearance on “Lip Sync Battle,” said in a recent email. “To see women uplifting women who were doing it just as good as the guys, if not better, was incredibly inspiring as a young girl.”“They probably inspired me to pick up a hairbrush when I was like five and sing into it,” the British pop star Charli XCX, who remixed “Wannabe” for her 2019 single “Spicy,” has said of the group.The Spice Girls inspired a generation of fans that, decades later, still identify as a Scary or a Baby. Tens of thousands of fans came to Wembley Stadium in London for the group’s 2019 reunion tour.Alexander Coggin for The New York TimesThe 15-time Grammy Award-winning artist Adele is also an avowed Spice Girls superfan. When the group announced its 2019 reunion tour, she shared a photo on Instagram of herself as a young girl, the wall behind her plastered with Spice Girls posters and photos.On an episode of “The Late Late Show with James Corden,” as part of the segment “Carpool Karaoke,” Adele enthusiastically declared her love for the band. “It was genuine,” she insisted of her admiration, to an incredulous Corden. “It was a huge moment in my life when they came out — it was ‘girl power’ and these five ordinary girls who just did so well.”At their peak, the Spice Girls were a global sensation, and they remain, to this day, the most successful girl group of all time: Their first single, “Wannabe,” released in 1996, was a No. 1 hit in 37 countries, and their debut album, “Spice,” is still one of the best-selling albums by any female group. And even the Girls themselves are still coming to terms with just how much their brief stint at the apex of pop music affected a generation of fans and other artists.“At the time, in the ’90s, we were probably too busy, too young and too exhausted to fully realize what was happening,” Chisholm said in a recent interview with The New York Times. But, she added, “it’s really quite overwhelming, but brilliant, to process that we really did make a difference, in so many people’s lives. It was such a joyful thing to be able to do.”‘R.U. streetwise, outgoing, ambitious and dedicated’Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Renstrom for The New York Times; Photographs by Getty ImagesOf the many criticisms leveled at the Spice Girls, perhaps the most potent was that they were not “real” musicians. This critique has often been used to belittle pop groups. Even the Beatles weren’t spared: When the band first crossed over to the United States in 1964, they were described as “a press agent’s dream combo,” “appallingly unmusical” and “a gigantic put-on.”But this line of criticism carried particular weight in the 1990s in Britain, where male, guitar-forward Britpop bands such as Oasis and Blur, who preached a gospel of authenticity, dominated the music scene.So let’s get something out of the way: Yes, the Spice Girls were manufactured. In 1994, Bob and Chris Herbert, a father-and-son music-management team based in Surrey, England, came up with the idea of creating a female version of Take That, the successful British boy band. The Herberts’ notion of injecting more femininity into the prevailing “lad culture” of ’90s Britain was “the one unarguable stroke of genius in their vision,” the music critic David Sinclair wrote in his book “Wannabe: How the Spice Girls Reinvented Pop Fame.”The Herberts placed an ad in a newspaper: “R.U. 18-23 with the ability to sing/dance R.U. streetwise, outgoing, ambitious and dedicated.” After weeks of auditions, they selected five girls — Brown, Chisholm, Beckham, Horner and Michelle Stephenson (who was replaced a few months later by Bunton) — and moved them into a house in the English town of Maidenhead, paying for their voice coaching, dance lessons, songwriting sessions, media training and demo recording sessions.However, as the Girls worked together, Sinclair explained, they concocted an ambitious vision for their band that clashed with the Herberts’ approach. The Herberts wanted them to stick to the usual lead-singer-with-backup model, while the Girls distributed lines equally among themselves so that no single leader emerged. The Herberts imagined five girls with a uniform look; the Girls wanted to remain distinct.“We didn’t dress similarly in everyday life, and when we tried to do that in a performance, it just didn’t work,” Chisholm said. “Quite early on, quite naturally, we wanted to be individuals, and the management weren’t really feeling that.”Like the Monkees before them — another manufactured band that seized control of its own destiny — the Girls decided they wanted out. So the five of them crammed into Horner’s Fiat Uno and drove off with their master recordings. That bold decision “was a measure of how determined they were,” Sinclair said. It was as though the Herberts had “invented Frankenstein’s monster,” he continued. “They were completely floored by what their creation then did to them.”The Spice Girls were assembled by a management team but took steps to seize control of their destiny.Tim Roney/Getty Images“It was all a bit of an adventure,” Chisholm said. “At that point, we didn’t really have much to lose, so we just went for it. And then the band became a very organic thing. We felt quite unstoppable.”The Girls were already generating enough buzz in the industry — thanks in part to a showcase they had done — that they were in a position to audition new managers. They decided on Simon Fuller, who at that time was managing the Scottish icon Annie Lennox. In March 1995, they met him at his office and started belting out “Wannabe.”“It was quite unusual,” Fuller recalled in a recent interview, “to have these five young girls come bounding in the office with confidence and say, ‘You have to manage us, and we’re not leaving until you agree.’ It was just very contagious, that energy.”From the Girls’ perspective, “it just clicked,” Chisholm said. “When we met him, it felt very much like he got it.”Instead of turning the Girls into clones of one another, as the Herberts had intended, Fuller told them to focus on who they genuinely were and just dial it up. “If you like pink and fluffy and your mum is your best friend, then be pink 24/7, have fluffy on you all the time. If you’re the rowdy northern girl who has no airs and graces, sexy and dominant and noisy, then be that,” Fuller explained. This idea, Fuller revealed in a 2014 BBC documentary, was inspired by Lennox, who, upon meeting the Girls, encouraged them to “ham up” their personalities.The approach fit the Spice Girls perfectly.The band’s “girl power” message, Chisholm said, also gave the group a focus: “At first, we wanted to make music and have fun and travel the world and do all those fun things. But the messaging gave us more motivation. We were expressing ourselves, as young women, in the mid-90s. It was giving fuel to this fire.”Their first single, “Wannabe,” was released in Britain on July 8, 1996, and by the end of that year it hit No. 1 in more than 20 countries. Their debut album, “Spice,” released in November 1996, also went to No. 1 and was shortlisted for the prestigious Mercury Prize, awarded to the best British or Irish album of the year.“It was like, you know, the preparation, the waiting, the frustration,” Chisholm said. “And then ‘Wannabe’ is released and bam — just two years of mayhem.”‘Firing on all cylinders’“I don’t want to be emotional,” the South African president Nelson Mandela told reporters when he met the Spice Girls in 1997, “but it’s one of the greatest moments in my life.”Odd Andersen/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWhile the primary fan base for the Spice Girls was young and female, others were not immune to their charms. In 1997, while in South Africa to perform at a charity concert, the band met Prince Charles and Nelson Mandela. Posing for photos outside the presidential residence in Pretoria, Mandela, the South African president, told reporters, “You know, these are my heroines.” (Horner quickly chimed in to affirm that the feeling was mutual.) The group’s extravagant self-expression, coupled with a straightforward message of empowerment, resonated with girls, who saw themselves reflected in the band members’ various personas, spawning a generation of fans who identified as a Sporty or Scary or Posh.“That’s kind of the beauty of the Spice Girls,” Ora said. “Each of them had their own voice and something different to offer.” (Those nicknames, by the way, were not coined by the group but imposed on them by a journalist at the British magazine Top of the Pops. The Girls, true to form, embraced the names.)The group’s theatrics and self-aware sense of kitsch also sparked an enthusiastic following among members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community, which initially took the band by surprise, Chisholm said. “In our heads, it was like, right, we’ve got to do this for the girls! And then we very quickly realized that a huge part of this community was behind us as well,” she recalled. “I think it’s because people can feel lonely if they’re in an environment where they can’t fully be themselves, and the Spice Girls gave them something to belong to.” The band has since become a popular source of inspiration for drag acts and several of the Girls have appeared as guest judges on “RuPaul’s Drag Race.”There was, however, one demographic that resisted them: the music media. “I think they were victims of their own success in the sense that, the more eyes are on you, the more critical people are going to be,” said Joe Stone, an editor at The Guardian who has written about the band.Traditional tastemakers often sniffed at the Girls’ music; one relatively charitable review characterized it as emblematic of “pop’s heart of lightness, a happy place filled not with music of good taste but with music that tastes good — at least to a substantial portion of the planet.” Others dismissed the Spice Girls themselves as Fuller’s pawns, earning him the nickname “Svengali Spice.” And much of the press, particularly the tabloids, picked apart not just the group’s work but their appearance and what they seemed to represent. “People were firing on all cylinders: They couldn’t sing, they couldn’t write music, they weren’t pretty enough, their feminism was hollow,” Stone said.When Beckham appeared on a British talk show eight weeks after she’d given birth, the host, Chris Evans, weighed her to see if she was back to her pre-baby weight. He subjected Horner to the same treatment when she appeared on his show; both women have since spoken about struggling with body image and eating disorders.“There is a real culture here in the U.K. that they really like to drag people down. We celebrate success to a point, and then it’s time to attack — kind of, ‘Don’t get above your station,’” Chisholm said. “But we always felt that the numbers don’t lie. We were breaking records.”Another frequent target of criticism was the group’s message of “girl power,” which was promoted not just in their music but also through their many marketing deals with brands like Pepsi and Chupa Chups lollipops. Activists raised concerns that the band was exploiting feminism for commercial ends. Many commentators were “very conscious of how feminism and pro-women sentiment was manipulated and weaponized, particularly by the media,” said Andi Zeisler, who co-founded the feminist pop culture magazine Bitch in 1996, the same year the Spice Girls made their debut.Against a backdrop of the punk riot grrrl movement and the women-centric Lilith Fair — both of which used music as a platform to advocate specifically feminist political and social changes — “the Spice Girls perhaps felt like a step back,” Zeisler said.But the notion that the Girls’ message was, by virtue of being broadcast commercially, inherently hollow now seems shortsighted. “I think it’s possible to say, on the one hand, the Spice Girls and girl power were this very contrived marketing technique. And that’s true,” Zeisler explained. “But that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t very real for the Girls themselves, or for the audience. I grew up with feminism as an irredeemably dirty word. No one wanted to be associated with it. So just the optics of having a group of women talking about feminism in a different language, making it accessible — that’s really important.”‘That sounds like a hoot’The Girls at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, where they announced their movie, “Spice World.”Dave Hogan/Getty ImagesThe idea of a Spice Girls movie was first floated by Fuller and the band during their early publicity trips to the United States. The movie would be “a parody of ourselves,” Horner explained in a news conference at the Cannes Film Festival. “We are basically taking the mickey out of ourselves.”The Girls shot the movie in the summer of 1997 while also writing and recording their sophomore album, “Spiceworld.” Such was the allure of the band at the time that many renowned actors and musicians readily agreed to take part: The movie’s list of cameos reads like a who’s who of British pop culture, including Roger Moore, Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, Elton John and Elvis Costello (as well as Meat Loaf, an American).Richard E. Grant, who played the band’s manager in the movie, explained his decision to join the cast. “My then 7-year-old daughter, Olivia, was and remains a massive Spice Girls fan and begged me to take the role, so it was a slam dunk decision,” he said.Alan Cumming, whose character spends the film trying to make a behind-the-scenes documentary about the band, was similarly won over. “My agent called and, first of all, he asked me, did I know the Spice Girls? I was like, ‘Well, I am alive,’” he said. “I was really keen — I thought, that sounds like a hoot.”But when “Spice World” came out, it followed the same path as the Spice Girls’ music — commercial success on the one hand and critical derision on the other.“Half of the critics, especially the higher-brow ones, they’d already made up their minds before they watched the movie,” Naoko Mori, who played the group’s friend Nicola, said.For years, Chisholm said, she couldn’t bring herself to watch the film. But when her now 13-year-old daughter asked to watch it for her fifth birthday, they put it on and she was delighted. “I just adored it — I mean, it was hilarious,” she said. “We do take the piss out of ourselves and each other all the time.”The movie ended up being one of the band’s final acts as a fivesome. By the time it premiered on Dec. 15, 1997, the Girls and Fuller had already parted ways. A few months later, Horner also abruptly left the band.The rest of the Girls continued to perform as a foursome, including on a 1998 world tour, and released a third album, “Forever,” in 2000. They’ve appeared together in different configurations for various reunion performances, including two tours, over the last two decades. But the particular magic of their ascent had dissipated.The Spice Girls generation comes of ageThe reunited Spice Girls performed a rendition of “Spice Up Your Life” at the closing ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games in London.Hannah Peters/Getty ImagesIn 2012, the organizers of the London Olympics crafted the opening and closing ceremonies to celebrate the best of British culture. There were odes to James Bond, the queen and Mary Poppins, but perhaps no act drew more cheers, and tears, from the crowds than the members of the Spice Girls — all five of them — reunited atop a fleet of tricked-out black cabs as the stadium sang along raucously to their greatest hits.Nearly three decades after their peak, critics have started to reconsider the ways in which the Spice Girls reshaped the pop-music landscape, in Britain and beyond.In 2019, Pitchfork revisited the band’s debut, “Spice,” for a series on significant albums the publication had overlooked. While the outlet still rated the record a 6.8 out of 10, it wrote that “the album was a meticulously crafted pop product, front-loaded with surefire radio hits,” concluding: “‘Spice’ remains an audacious achievement.”As for “Spice World,” the movie is now championed by some as a cult classic, with its campy, self-aware humor entertaining those viewers who can get their hands on a DVD. (The movie is not currently available for streaming.) “I think it’s really funny, and I’m really glad I did it,” Cumming said. “When people ask me for my favorite of all the movies I’ve made, I always answer ‘Spice World.’”Perhaps the most remarkable thing the Spice Girls achieved, however, was their empowerment of a generation of fans. These listeners first encountered them as children and responded positively to the band and what they represented — five women who remained true to what they wanted and how they were going to get it and had a lot of fun together along the way.In an industry teeming with stories of artists — particularly young female ones — being manipulated or taken advantage of, the Spice Girls can now be remembered as a rare example of an all-female band that took a strong hand in charting its own success. “A lot of times, it’s the management that holds all the cards, makes all the money, decides what happens, and the artist that goes away shortchanged if not totally screwed over,” Sinclair said. The Spice Girls, he noted, “actually kept a grip on everything, from Day 1.”Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Renstrom for The New York Times; Photographs by Getty ImagesChisholm and the band have embraced their status as role models, both for women and for the L.G.B.T.Q. community. “It’s so humbling to have the opportunity to give people strength to just be who they are. That should be everybody’s human right,” Chisholm said. “Maybe we’re misfits, maybe we’re oddballs — we’re all different. But we come together, and our unity is our strength.”When, in 2019, the Spice Girls (minus Beckham) reunited for a tour, Adele — the fangirl whose childhood wall was once plastered with Spice Girls posters — visited them on the day of their final performance, at Wembley Stadium.“We went into the bar to see our friends and family after the show,” Chisholm recalled. “Adele had gotten everybody ready, and they all started singing ‘Wannabe’ when we walked in. She was leading the chorus!”It was a powerful, full-circle moment for the band, she said.“There’s so much talent out there, and if the Spice Girls had any part in inspiring and empowering these brilliant artists, then that is only a good thing,” said Chisholm, who is now a solo artist, with a self-titled album out now and a memoir coming later this year.For Ora, the band’s girl-power message has always been “about standing up and advocating for the women around you, because, at the end of the day, we have to look out for each other,” she said. “Who better to teach us that lesson than the Spice Girls?” More

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      Criminal Charges Still Possible in ‘Rust’ Shooting, Sheriff Says

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      Newly released evidence shows the leads investigators pursued as they try to learn how a live round got into Alec Baldwin’s gun, which fired, killing the film’s cinematographer.Six months after Alec Baldwin fatally shot a cinematographer on the set of the film “Rust” while practicing with a gun that had been improperly loaded with live ammunition, Santa Fe County Sheriff Adan Mendoza said Tuesday that “I don’t think anybody is off the hook when it comes to criminal charges.”Live ammunition is not supposed to be used on film sets. In an interview on NBC’s “Today” show, Sheriff Mendoza said that no one had admitted to bringing live rounds onto the set of “Rust,” but indicated that he was concerned by evidence suggesting that a member of its crew had expressed interest in using live ammunition while working on a previous film.“There was information from text messages that was concerning, based on the fact that live ammo was spoke about and was possibly used on a prior movie set,” Sheriff Mendoza said in the interview, “and that was just a few months before the ‘Rust’ movie set and production began.”He appeared to be referring to text messages from the “Rust” armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, who was responsible for gun safety on the set, in which she indicated that she had expressed interest in shooting “actual ammunition” last summer when she was working on a Nicolas Cage Western called “The Old Way,” which was filmed in Montana.Ms. Gutierrez-Reed texted Seth Kenney, who provides weapons and ammunition for film productions, in August and asked him whether she could “shoot hot rounds,” according to a summary of the text exchange released this week by investigators.Mr. Kenney texted her back, asking what she meant by “hot round.”“Like a pretty big load of actual ammunition,” Ms. Gutierrez-Reed replied.Mr. Kenney told her to never shoot live ammunition out of guns being used on a film set, texting, “It’s a serious mistake, always ends in tears.”“Good to know,” Ms. Gutierrez-Reed replied, according to the case report. “I’m still gonna shoot mine tho.”The summary of the text exchange was included in a tranche of evidence and investigative reports that was released Monday by the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office. The documents indicated some of the threads that detectives have been following as they try to determine how live ammunition got into the gun Mr. Baldwin was practicing with on Oct. 21 when it discharged, killing the cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins.The Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office released silent footage of Alec Baldwin practicing a scene with a revolver on the set of the Western before accidentally shooting and killing the film’s cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins.The newly released evidence paints a picture of a sometimes chaotic film set, where some crew members had expressed concerns about gun safety and, after Ms. Hutchins’s death, some crew members disparaged others in texts and to investigators.The sheriff’s office said on Monday that it is waiting on several key pieces of evidence that it needs to complete its investigation.Jason Bowles, a lawyer for Ms. Gutierrez-Reed, said in an email that his client’s text messages indicated that she had been asking Mr. Kenney, then a mentor, when she could fire rounds “through a historical weapon to see how it functioned.” He said that she never intended to fire it during production or while on the set.“Hannah has never brought live rounds to any movie set nor has she ever fired them on set,” Mr. Bowles said in the email.Ms. Gutierrez-Reed was 24 and had been working as an armorer for less than a year when she took the “Rust” job, her second as an armorer. The daughter of a well-known Hollywood armorer named Thell Reed, she told detectives that she had been “handling guns her whole life.”Ms. Gutierrez-Reed’s discussion of live ammunition on the Montana film set is not the only thread investigators have been following.Around the same time that Ms. Gutierrez-Reed was on the set of “The Old Way,” her father and Mr. Kenney were in Texas training actors in the Paramount+ Western series “1883,” according to notes from a detective’s interview with Mr. Reed from November. Part of Mr. Reed’s job was training actors with live ammunition in an area away from the set, and he told a detective that the rest of his ammunition ended up being left with Mr. Kenney.One of the questions investigators have focused on is where the ammunition used on “Rust” came from. Mr. Kenney supplied “Rust” with ammunition and about 30 guns, and Ms. Gutierrez-Reed sued Mr. Kenney and his company earlier this year, alleging that the company had in fact supplied the movie with a mixture of dummy rounds and live ammunition.Understand What Happened on the Set of ‘Rust’Card 1 of 6A fatal shooting. More

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      ‘Rust’ Investigators Release Crime Scene Photos, Await Key Evidence

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      The criminal investigation of Alec Baldwin’s fatal shooting of a cinematographer on a film set cannot be completed without key ballistics and other evidence, the Santa Fe County sheriff said.The Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office released silent footage of Alec Baldwin practicing a scene with a revolver on the set of the Western before accidentally shooting and killing the film’s cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins.Six months after Alec Baldwin fatally shot a cinematographer on the set of the movie “Rust,” raising questions about who was culpable and how live ammunition got onto the set, the Santa Fe County sheriff’s office said Monday it still lacked key pieces of evidence, including ballistics analysis, that it said it needed to complete its criminal investigation.The sheriff’s office discussed the wait for evidence as it took the step of releasing a trove of files relating to the “Rust” investigation, including witness interviews; lapel and dash camera footage; crime scene photos; text messages between members of the crew in the days before and after the shooting; and videos of Mr. Baldwin practicing with the gun in the church where the deadly shooting occurred.The office has been investigating the death of the cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, 42, who was shot and killed in New Mexico on Oct. 21 during the rehearsal for a scene that required Mr. Baldwin to draw a replica old-fashioned revolver from a shoulder holster that he had been told contained no live ammunition.The gun went off, discharging a bullet that killed Ms. Hutchins and injured Joel Souza, the film’s director. Since then, the sheriff’s office in Santa Fe has been gathering evidence and investigating the circumstances surrounding the shooting.The files released Monday included new details about the case, including a report of a phone call that one investigator, Detective Alexandria Hancock, had on Nov. 3 with Mr. Baldwin. Mr. Baldwin said that he had pulled the hammer of the gun about three-quarters of the way back and then let the hammer go, at which point the gun discharged, the report said. Mr. Baldwin told Detective Hancock that his finger had been on the trigger but that he did not pull the trigger, it said. Detective Hancock wrote that she tried to explain to him that if his “finger was on the trigger, and if he was pulling the hammer back with his thumb, his index finger may have still had enough pressure on the trigger for him to depress it.” She added that “Alec advised he never tries to pull the trigger on a gun unless they are rolling the camera.”But as it released the new materials, the sheriff’s office said it still lacked important building blocks of its investigation to be able to pass the case to the Santa Fe County district attorney for review.The Santa Fe County sheriff’s office released photos from its investigation of the fatal shooting of the cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of the film “Rust.” Santa Fe County Sheriff’s OfficeSheriff Adan Mendoza said in a statement that “various components of the investigation remain outstanding,” including firearm and ballistic forensics from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, DNA and latent fingerprint analysis, a report from the New Mexico Medical Examiner’s office and the analysis of Mr. Baldwin’s phone data, which was extracted by investigators in Suffolk County, N.Y.“Once these investigative components are provided to the sheriff’s office, we will be able to complete the investigation to forward it to the Santa Fe district attorney for review,” Sheriff Mendoza said in a statement issued by his office.Mary Carmack-Altwies, the Santa Fe County district attorney, said in a statement on Monday that although investigators have sent over a portion of their inquiry to her office, detectives cannot send over a completed investigation until they receive certain reports.“Once we receive the completed investigation and conduct a thorough and deliberate review of all evidence, a criminal charging decision will be made,” Ms. Carmack-Altwies said in the statement.The University of New Mexico, where Ms. Hutchins’s autopsy is being performed, is not yet finished with its report, said a spokesman, Mark Rudi. The shooting took place on the set of a church.via Santa Fe County Sheriff’s OfficeA spokesman for the sheriff’s office, Juan Rios, said that the investigation was not taking longer than normal for what was “a complicated and convoluted case.”He said the office had decided to release the files in bulk because of multiple requests from the media, and from attorneys involved with the case, and because the office wanted to show what was still outstanding. “This is an update,” he said. “We wanted to identify what remains.”The F.B.I.’s national press office declined to comment regarding the time it was taking to complete its firearm and ballistic investigation, and directed inquiries to local law enforcement officials. Mr. Rios said that investigators in Suffolk County had yet to provide the New Mexico investigators with information from Mr. Baldwin’s phone.Understand What Happened on the Set of ‘Rust’Card 1 of 6A fatal shooting. More

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      ‘Luzifer’ Review: Finding the Devil in Everything

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      A son must save his ailing mother in this disturbing, ambitious religious thriller.In Peter Brunner’s “Luzifer,” a mother and her adult son, Maria and Johannes, live isolated from society in a remote alpine cabin. Maria (Susanne Jensen) is a recovering alcoholic who turned to religion to escape her vices, and imparts the lessons of a pious existence onto Johannes (Franz Rogowski), who functions on the developmental level of a child. The two spend their days subsistence farming, or engaged in deep prayer and sacred rituals.When a developer arrives in the area to build a ski lift for tourists, the pastoral life of this family is threatened. Maria receives angry calls about selling her land, but when she refuses, the developers’ tactics become violently aggressive. She falls ill, ostensibly from the emotional turmoil, and Johannes must save her.
      “Luzifer” conjures palpable unease, rattling the nervous system. The cinematographer Peter Flinckenberg renders this world with an icy aura. The entire film feels enveloped in a cold fog, and at times, haunting images, like a mutilated corpse in a nearby lake, flash by. Tim Hecker’s spectral score pierces the drama throughout, immersing us in a disturbing, transfixing universe.This thriller is ambitious, contemplating the sinister and possessive grip of religious fanaticism; the dangers of capitalist greed; the reverberations of Oedipal desire; familial trauma and abuse, among other themes. But its intellectual aspiration produces an ideologically crowded film, where each philosophical meditation struggles to receive the attention and depth it deserves. Perhaps that is the point: Brunner seems to want to leave us with more questions than answers — or at least, compel us to search for the devil in everything.LuziferNot rated. In German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. Watch on Mubi. More