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      ‘We’re All Going to the World’s Fair’ Review: Is It Horror, or Just Ennui?

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      In Jane Schoenbrun’s first feature, a teenager finds terror and distraction in a multiplayer online game.Way back in the 1965, Susan Sontag observed that “we live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror.” Still true, but with the added wrinkle that nowadays it can be hard to distinguish banality from terror.“We’re All Going to the World’s Fair,” the debut narrative feature from Jane Schoenbrun, exploits the overlap between tedium and fright, and locates both in the everyday dystopian realm of the internet. Part of a sturdy genre of web-based horror, the movie turns the familiar rituals and hacks of online life into a source of dread.A bored teenager named Casey (Anna Cobb) seeks diversion in a scary multiplayer game — a “creepypasta” — called the World’s Fair Challenge. After an initiation ritual that involves daubing blood on the screen of her laptop, she contributes videos to a growing body of lore purporting to document the game’s sinister consequences. People claim to lose feeling in their bodies, to find themselves turning into inanimate objects, to gradually and irreversibly lose their grip on reality.How terrifying is that? It’s hard to say, since for many of us the slackness, anxiety and dissociation of the World’s Fair Challenge is just another name for Tuesday.Rather than jolt you with gimmicky scares in the manner of the“Paranormal Activity” movies (an explicit point of reference for Casey and her fellow fairgoers), Schoenbrun goes for quiet, spooky effects, accompanied by a glum score by Alex G (for Giannascoli). The film also resists ostentatious found-footage gimmickry. While a lot of what’s onscreen is video collected by Casey’s devices, there are also moments when the camera — the cinematographer is Daniel Patrick Carbone — explores off-line moods and realities.Not that we learn much about Casey. She lives in a town that looks like it might be somewhere in the Northeastern U.S. — patchy snow on the ground, battered strip malls off the highway, tree-covered hills in the distance — with her father, who is heard but not seen. He keeps an assault rifle in the barn, where there is also a video projector. Casey watches ASMR videos when she has trouble sleeping.Most of what might count as her real life — school, work, friends — is either nonexistent or none of our business. Cobb, making her first appearance in a film, has a knack for simultaneously soliciting and deflecting curiosity about Casey’s inner life. Is she a troubled adolescent putting her mental health and physical safety at risk, or a canny role-player using her wide eyes and soft features to construct an avatar of vulnerability?She isn’t entirely alone. Sometime after starting in on the Challenge, she receives messages from a player named JLB (Michael J. Rogers), whose avi is an unnerving hand-drawn figure with sunken eyes. The camera follows him offline too, into a mostly empty modern mansion that seems worlds away from Casey’s attic bedroom.His presence in the movie has the effect of dialing up both the terror and the banality, and creating a certain amount of suspense about which will win out in the end. In the tradition of internet science fiction, “World’s Fair” teases the boundary between the actual and the virtual, though in a frame of mind that is quietly ruminative rather than wildly speculative. This isn’t “The Matrix” or a fantasy of sentient A.I. It’s a slice of drab, everyday 21st-century Americana and a daydream of something more intense.We’re All Going to the World’s FairNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Mississippi Masala’: A Love Story Among the Displaced

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      In Mira Nair’s sweet, sexy film from 1991, an Indian American woman falls for a Black cleaner played charmingly, as ever, by Denzel Washington.Mira Nair’s “Mississippi Masala” begins with a bit of family history that is also a history lesson — the expulsion of Uganda’s sizable South Asian population, ordered from the country by the military strongman Idi Amin in 1972.A prize winner at the 1991 Venice Film Festival, still fresh and newly relevant, “Mississippi Masala” has been restored for a run at the IFC Center in Manhattan, starting Friday.After a vivid prologue, the movie jumps ahead 18 years to pick up on its displaced central family, resettled in Greenwood, Miss. Jay (Roshan Seth), a barrister in Uganda, manages a hot-sheet motel while his wife, Kinnu (Sharmila Tagore, the star of Satyajit Ray’s “Devi,” among other films), runs the adjacent liquor store.Jay still dreams of Uganda; Kinnu is more resigned to exile. Their daughter, Meena (Sarita Choudhury), who cleans rooms at the motel, is beyond that — so robustly American she could stand in for the Statue of Liberty, albeit Liberty in chains. “I’m 24 years old, and I’m still here — stuck here,” she tells her uncomprehending parents.Luckily, Meena is also a reckless driver. Early on she rear-ends the van belonging to a carpet-cleaning business run by straight-arrow but cool Demetrius (Denzel Washington). It is “the first in a series of collisions,” the New York Times critic Vincent Canby noted in his favorable review, between her world and his.As its title suggests, “Mississippi Masala” is a movie of continuous juxtaposition. The first is a cut from Uganda’s verdant paradise to a Piggly Wiggly’s consumer cornucopia in America. Another follows a flashback to the family’s hilltop villa in Uganda with the mock plantations of wealthy Greenwood. Nair came out of documentary filmmaking, and thanks to Ed Lachman’s vibrant cinematography, “Mississippi Masala” the landscapes are also characters.There’s a documentary aspect to the cast as well. Choudhury, a neophyte who grew up in Jamaica where her father was a biologist, is playing a version of herself (at one point she wears a Bob Marley T-shirt). She was so close to the part that, despite the movie’s success, it took her some time to start an acting career. (Most recently, she was featured in the “Sex and the City” reboot, “And Just Like That.”) Washington, a decade older, already awarded an Oscar for best supporting actor, can be seen as guiding her through the film.Hoping the avoid a lawsuit, the wealthier Indians seek to make common cause with Greenwood’s Black population. Meena’s connection is more profound. “You’re like us,” Demetrius’s younger brother tells her. “You’ve never been to India. We’ve never been to Africa.” Meena and Demetrius are both cleaners and correspondingly low-caste. Both must escape family obligations and transcend tribal prejudices. A stolen weekend in Biloxi and a motel room fight sets the phone lines buzzing, involves the Chamber of Commerce and an arraignment before a judge.The pop iconography of chain restaurants, motels and gas stations (as well as Hindu shrines) is characteristic of 1980s independent films. But Nair’s storybook ending is more ’90s, recalling the post-Cold War golden age when it seemed that American notions of “freedom” and self-invention reigned supreme.Mississippi MasalaOpens Friday at IFC Center, Manhattan, ifccenter.com More

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      ‘Father Stu’ Review: Screwball Salvation

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      Mark Wahlberg throws himself into the real-life story of an oddball priest in Rosalind Ross’s debut feature.Mark Wahlberg dials himself up to 11 in “Father Stu,” a never-say-die story of religious redemption and all-American hustle. Wahlberg’s career is full of characters who totally believe in their own game, and here, he throws himself into the oddball role of Stuart Long — a Montana boxer turned beloved priest who developed a degenerative muscle disease and died at 50.Three movies’ worth of underdog hooks fuel Wahlberg as the story winds him up and watches him go. Stu boxes until his jaw cries uncle; heads to Hollywood to be a star; converts to Catholicism to woo a devout woman (Teresa Ruiz as Carmen); nearly dies in a projectile motorcycle crash; and enters the seminary to become a priest. As if that wasn’t enough drama, Mel Gibson and Jacki Weaver play his trash-talking, separated parents.Rosalind Ross, a writer directing her debut feature, and Wahlberg buck the expectations of the religious-salvation story by mostly keeping it light and barely taking a breath, with an extra nudge from a country-heavy soundtrack. (It’s no surprise that Wahlberg previously tried to develop Long’s story with David O. Russell, the director of the screwball existential comedy “I Heart Huckabees.”)Stu’s travails feed into his salty homilies about getting closer to God, delivered with Wahlberg’s usual bluffness. That doesn’t automatically translate into a religious experience, and watching the movie can feel like a two-hour hearty handshake. But judging from the audience member at a preview screening who sang along with the credits song, it’s all part of the movie’s appeal.Father StuRated R for salty irreverence throughout. Running time: 2 hour 4 minutes. In theaters. More

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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘The First Lady’ and ‘Abbott Elementary’

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      Viola Davis, Michelle Pfeiffer and Gillian Anderson star in a new series about first ladies in the White House. And “Abbott Elementary” airs its season finale.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, April 11-17. Details and times are subject to change.Monday2022 CMT MUSIC AWARDS 8 p.m. on CBS. The country-pop singer Kelsea Ballerini and the actor Anthony Mackie will host this year’s CMT Music Awards ceremony, which will be broadcast live from the Nashville Municipal Auditorium in Tennessee, about a 10-minute walk from the honky-tonk bars of Broadway. The singer Kane Brown has the most nominations of the night, with four. Ballerini, Mickey Guyton, Breland and Cody Johnson are also among the most-nominated acts. The lineup of performers includes Brown, Guyton with Black Pumas, Miranda Lambert, Little Big Town, Maren Morris with Ryan Hurd, and Jason Aldean with Bryan Adams.INDEPENDENT LENS: JIM ALLISON: BREAKTHROUGH (2019) 10 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). When James P. Allison and Tasuku Honjo were awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in medicine, a statement from the Nobel committee said it all: The two researchers’ breakthrough work, which used the body’s immune system to attack cancer, amounted to “an entirely new principle for cancer therapy.” This documentary from Bill Haney (“The Price of Sugar”) is a profile of Allison, looking at the life that led him toward his groundbreaking research — in part, the loss of family members to cancer — and the challenges he faced moving his unconventional ideas forward. In his review for The New York Times, Ben Kenigsberg wrote that the documentary itself lacks the kind of innovative touch that it celebrates in its subject, but still “does a solid job of explaining the barriers — justified skepticism, professional groupthink, the high cost of long-term research — that Allison faced in proving that a new kind of treatment could work.”TuesdayQuinta Brunson in “Abbott Elementary.”Temma Hankin/ABCABBOTT ELEMENTARY 9 p.m. on ABC. The first season of Quinta Brunson’s sitcom ends on Tuesday night with an episode about a school field trip to a zoo. The show stars Brunson as a teacher in a Philadelphia public elementary school whose staff members are as passionate as they are wacky — and it has been a very big hit this season. In a recent article, The Times’s chief television critic, James Poniewozik, called it the best sitcom of the season. It’s “not a year’s supply of pencils,” he wrote. “But it is something else significant: Sustained attention for a profession that, however much lip service we pay it, usually gets lost among TV’s stable of doctors, lawyers and police.”WednesdayChristopher Rivera and Brooklynn Prince in “The Florida Project.”A24THE FLORIDA PROJECT (2017) 5:20 p.m. on Showtime Showcase. After offering an idiosyncratic, shot-on-an-iPhone slice of Los Angeles in “Tangerine” (2015), the writer-director Sean Baker crossed the country to tell a story about a trio of children who live near Disney World in a ramshackle, sherbet-colored motel called the Magic Castle. This is the setting of “The Florida Project,” a drama centered on a 6-year-old girl, Moonee (Brooklynn Prince), who has summertime adventures even as she and the adults around her grapple with the stresses and desperation of poverty. The result is a movie that “is honest about the limits of benevolence, and about the wishful thinking that can cloud our understanding of the world,” A.O. Scott said in his review for The Times. “Its final scenes,” he wrote, “are devastating, and also marvelously ambiguous, full of wonder, fury and cleareyed self-criticism.”ThursdayTHE TIME MACHINE (1960) 8 p.m. on TCM. H.G. Wells’s formative 1895 novella “The Time Machine” was one of the first books to imagine a device that would allow people to hop through time. This 1960 film adaptation starts its story in the same Victorian time period that the original book came out. Watching its protagonist (played by Rod Taylor) feels especially surreal when the viewer is in 2022.FridayA scene from “Chamber Music Society Returns.”Chamber Music Society of Lincoln CenterCHAMBER MUSIC SOCIETY RETURNS 10 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). This two-part documentary looks at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s efforts to come back fully from a pandemic hiatus. It covers the challenges of bringing live performances back to Alice Tully Hall and the planning of a multicity tour that must allow for the uncertainty of the era. Part 1, which debuted last week, is now available to stream on PBS.org and the PBS app; Part 2 will air on Friday night.SaturdayFANTASTIC BEASTS AND WHERE TO FIND THEM (2016) and FANTASTIC BEASTS: THE CRIMES OF GRINDELWALD (2018) 7:55 p.m. and 10:53 p.m. on USA Network. The third movie in the “Harry Potter” spinoff series “Fantastic Beasts” — subtitled “The Secrets of Dumbledore” — hits U.S. theaters this week. These first two entries weren’t particularly well received, but for families who want to brush up on the lore, this double feature offers a refresher. And for those seeing the new movie, it offers an interesting opportunity to judge two takes on one character: The titular evil wizard in “Crimes of Grindelwald” was played by Johnny Depp, who has been replaced by Mads Mikkelsen in the new movie.SundayTHE FIRST LADY 9 p.m. on Showtime. In truth, the singular “lady” in the title of this new drama series is a little misleading: There are three of them. The show layers the stories of a trio of first ladies of the United States — Michelle Obama, Betty Ford and Eleanor Roosevelt — comparing and contrasting their experiences navigating the White House during different eras of American political life, but contending with many common expectations. It has three heavy-hitting performers in Viola Davis (as Obama), Michelle Pfeiffer (Ford) and Gillian Anderson (Roosevelt). More

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      New Era Begins at Warner Bros., Back Toward Its Entertainment Roots

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      With a new owner, the 99-year-old movie studio appears headed back to its traditional sweet spot as an entertainment company. But the business of Hollywood is no longer the same.LOS ANGELES — By 2018, almost every golden-age Hollywood studio had been conquered by outside forces.Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had been tossed between disruptive owners for decades, never to fully recover. Columbia Pictures was sold to Coca-Cola in 1982 and then offloaded to Sony in 1989. Universal had weathered five outside takeovers in the span of 21 years. Paramount Pictures had been strip mined for cash by an ailing Sumner Redstone.Warner Bros. alone stood as Hollywood’s citadel, a beige-walled protectorate of filmmakers run by executives with institutional Hollywood knowledge.Then AT&T drove into town.The Texas phone giant took over Warner Bros. in June 2018 as part of a bid to “bring a fresh approach to how the media and entertainment company works,” as Randall L. Stephenson, then AT&T’s chief executive, put it at the time. As it set about building a Netflix-style streaming service, AT&T slashed and burned through the Warner Bros. ranks and installed leaders with little Hollywood experience. They cut costs, surprised stars with abrupt distribution decisions and pushed Warner to start behaving as more of a technology company and less of an entertainment one: It’s the future!“The telephone people had no understanding of Hollywood — and no passion for movies,” Robert A. Daly, who ran Warner Bros. in the 1980s and ’90s, said on Friday. “It’s the same mistake outsiders always make. It’s show business, show business, show business. They always forget that.”On Friday, AT&T handed off Warner Bros. to Discovery Inc. as part of a $43 billion merger.The 99-year-old movie studio, home to Harry Potter, Batman and Bugs Bunny, will now head in a different direction — back toward its traditional sweet spot as an entertainment company, or at least Hollywood’s newest mogul has vowed. David Zaslav, Discovery’s chief executive, will run the new corporation, which is called, with no small amount of symbolism, Warner Bros. Discovery.Already, Mr. Zaslav has vanquished tech leaders brought in by AT&T, including Jason Kilar, who made his name at Hulu and Amazon, and Andy Forssell, who came up through Oracle and Hulu. Also departing is Ann Sarnoff, who AT&T hired to run Warner Bros. in 2019 despite limited Hollywood experience. During her tenure, Ms. Sarnoff reworked the Warner Bros. shield logo, dropping the gold trim in favor of AT&T blue. On Friday, Mr. Zaslav restored the gold.Some Hollywood players never changed their acid position on Ms. Sarnoff — she’s not one of us — with film folk sniping about her delay in relocating to Los Angeles from New York. (With the pandemic ebbing, she bought Matt Damon’s old house in November, spending roughly $18 million.)Ann Sarnoff was hired to run Warner Bros. in 2019 despite limited Hollywood experience. She is leaving the post.JC Olivera/Getty Images for National Hispanic Media CoalitionIn contrast, Mr. Zaslav is already deep into a lavish restoration of Woodland, an estate in Beverly Hills where Robert Evans, the show business legend, lived for decades. Mr. Evans was known for orchestrating a creative rebirth at Paramount in the 1960s and ’70s, delivering era-defining triumphs like “The Godfather” and “Chinatown.”“Success is about creative talent, in front of the screen, and behind the screen, and fighting and fighting to create a culture that supports that creative vision,” Mr. Zaslav said when announcing the takeover. For much of the past year, he has rhapsodized about the studio’s rich legacy, repeatedly paying tribute to Jack, Harry, Sam and Albert Warner, “the brothers who started it all.”On Friday, Mr. Zaslav talked about his aspirations to “dream big and dream bold” in an email sent to his new employees. “Hallelujah,” one Warner Bros. manager said in a text message afterward. Another executive at the studio, speaking by phone, said she was going on a “wild” shopping spree to celebrate, adding, “Hollywood is back, baby.”Others were not so sure. Mr. Zaslav qualifies as an entertainment insider, having run Discovery, a cable television behemoth, for 15 years and working at NBCUniversal before that. But he has little film experience. The merger also comes with breathtaking debt — some $55 billion — that will have to be paid down, even as content costs rise. Mr. Zaslav will need to make difficult decisions about how to allocate resources. How much money should be spent on movie production and marketing? To what degree should the studio make movies for exclusive release in theaters? Should the focus shift even further toward supplying films to HBO Max, the company’s streaming service?Under Ms. Sarnoff, Warner Bros. slashed its annual theatrical output by nearly half and built a direct-to-streaming assembly line. “The good old days are gone forever,” one Warner-affiliated film producer said on Friday.Hollywood as a whole finds itself in a similar state of mind: optimistic about the future of movies one minute, pessimistic the next. There is evidence that theaters are finally bouncing back from the pandemic. Over the weekend, the PG-rated “Sonic the Hedgehog 2” took in a huge $71 million in North America, the biggest opening total for a Paramount movie since 2014, while “The Batman” (Warner Bros.) added $6.5 million in ticket sales, for a blockbuster domestic total of $359 million since arriving on March 4.At the same time, one of Hollywood’s most bankable directors, Michael Bay, sputtered over the weekend. His crime thriller “Ambulance” (Universal) arrived to just $8.7 million in ticket sales. In another bummer, “Morbius” (Sony) collapsed in its second weekend, collecting $10.2 million in the United States and Canada, a 74 percent decline.Some analysts liken the future of big screens to Broadway — still alive, but relegated to a corner of the culture. “The pandemic caused a phase shift in movie consumption patterns with audiences having moved decisively to preferring streaming services over the theatrical experience for all but the biggest, loudest, PG-13est films,” Doug Creutz, a Cowen analyst, wrote in a March 25 report.The result is a disoriented movie business. Run toward streaming. No, wait — we’ve got to keep theaters alive. Run the other way.Now, run both ways at the same time.The discombobulation at Warner Bros. started in 2016. That is when AT&T announced that it was buying the studio’s parent company, Time Warner, for more than $85 billion. The deal sat in regulatory limbo for 20 excruciating months, limiting the ability of Warner executives to make bold strategic moves. Moreover, Netflix was spending billions during that period to become the preferred home for film directors and marquee television producers. Amazon Prime Video was also making inroads.Mr. Zaslav’s catch-up strategy will soon emerge. To formulate it, he has spent months reaching out to people like Mr. Daly; Sherry Lansing, the retired Paramount superpower; Robert A. Iger, who retired as Disney’s executive chairman in December; and Alan F. Horn, who ran the Warner Bros. Pictures Group from 1999 to 2011 and then led Walt Disney Studios for nearly a decade.Their brain power was undoubtedly invaluable. But meeting with them also sent a clear message to Hollywood: I respect your culture.“The telephone people had no understanding of Hollywood — and no passion for movies,” said Robert A. Daly, who ran Warner Bros. in the 1980s and ’90s.Valerie Macon/WireImage, via Getty Images“For an industry of its substantial size, Hollywood is surprising insular,” Mr. Horn said on Saturday. “The creative community, in particular, needs to feel your respect. Artists need to know that you understand them and will do your absolute best to protect them.”Mr. Horn continued: “David’s willingness to go around town and seek the advice of dozens of people has spoken volumes. It’s how you build trust.”Mr. Zaslav will “work with a passion to rebuild the studio’s relationship with the creative community,” Mr. Daly said. “You’ve got to support the talent,” he added. “It’s a bit like children: Don’t spoil them too much, but make them feel loved.”Mr. Daly then waxed nostalgic about talent relations at Warner Bros. in the past. The studio used to send turkeys to stars at Thanksgiving. “It cost nothing, and it meant the world to them,” he said. There was also the time, in 1992, when Mr. Daly gave free Land Rovers to seven members of the “Lethal Weapon 3” cast and crew. “It cost us $320,000 to buy those Land Rovers, and we were criticized left and right for the expense,” Mr. Daly said. “Do you know what it got us? ‘Lethal Weapon 4,’ which made $285 million.”Mr. Zaslav seems to have taken notes. In February, when Los Angeles hosted the Super Bowl, stars like Charlize Theron and Jamie Foxx and prolific Warner Bros. producers like Greg Berlanti (“Riverdale,” “The Flight Attendant,” “You”) were invited to party in his suite at the new SoFi Stadium. Mr. Zaslav and his key lieutenants bought the suite with the intention of routinely wining and dining talent at football games, concerts and other major events.The stately Warner Bros. complex in Burbank, Calif., is the ancestral home of Humphrey Bogart (“Casablanca”) and Bette Davis (“Now, Voyager”). Mr. Zaslav intends to move into Jack Warner’s old office, a decision based on his stated desire to be near where “the magic happens.” The Warner Bros. administration building is near Soundstage 6, where one of Mr. Zaslav’s favorite movies, “The Maltese Falcon,” was partly filmed.Just one word to the wise, Mr. Zaslav: Don’t park in Clint Eastwood’s spot. He’s had it for more than 50 years and once used a baseball bat to knock out the windows of an interloping car.John Koblin More

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      Rae Allen, Tony Winner and TV Mainstay, Dies at 95

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      In a varied career, she had memorable roles in “Damn Yankees” and on “Seinfeld” and was nominated for three Tonys. She later became a director.Rae Allen, a Tony Award-winning actress who was seen in both the stage and film versions of the hit musical comedy “Damn Yankees,” and whose many television roles included a world-weary unemployment counselor to the jobless George Costanza on “Seinfeld” and Tony Soprano’s aunt on “The Sopranos,” died on Wednesday in Los Angeles. She was 95.Her death, at the Motion Picture & Television Fund retirement home, was confirmed by her niece Betty Cosgrove.Ms. Allen made her Broadway debut in 1948 and her big splash seven years later, when she was cast as the sports reporter Gloria Thorpe in “Damn Yankees, the story of a middle-aged Washington Senators fan who makes a Faustian bargain to become a slugger named Joe Hardy and help his team keep the hated Yankees from winning the pennant. She led a group of nimbly dancing Senators in celebration of Hardy’s beneficial impact on the team with the showstopping song “Shoeless Joe From Hannibal, Mo.” (“Who came along in a puff of smoke? Shoeless Joe from Hannibal, Mo.”)Ms. Allen earned her first Tony Award nomination for that performance, which she reprised in the 1958 movie version, her first film. She received her second Tony nomination in 1965 for Jean Anouilh’s play “Traveller Without Luggage,” and won the Tony six years later, as best featured actress, for Paul Zindel’s “And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little,” in which she played a neighbor in a story about the relationship between three neurotic sisters.“The awful neighbors are also given precisely the right clumsy boorishness by Rae Allen and Bill Macy,” Clive Barnes wrote in his review in The New York Times. He called their scenes “among the most entertaining of the evening.”Her comedic skills were also on display in a memorable two-part episode of “Seinfeld.” She played Lenore Sokol, a deadpan counselor skeptical about George Costanza’s attempts to get an extension on his unemployment benefits, including his claim to have interviewed for a job as a latex salesman for a phony company, Vandelay Industries. She softens when he sees a photograph of her plain-looking daughter on her desk.Ms. Allen and Roberts Blossom in the 1961 Off Broadway production of Edward Albee’s “The Death of Bessie Smith.” Leo Friedman“This is your daughter? George says. “My God! My God! I hope you don’t mind my saying. She is breathtaking.”She asks if he wants her phone number, but after they briefly date, her daughter dumps him because he has no prospects.Ms. Allen later had roles in “A League of Their Own” (1992), as the mother of the baseball players portrayed by Geena Davis and Lori Petty,” and the science-fiction film “Stargate” (1994), as a researcher. She was also seen on TV series including “Brooklyn Bridge” and “Grey’s Anatomy.”In four episodes of “The Sopranos” in 2004, she played Quintina Blundetto, the aunt of Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) and the mother of the mobster Tony Blundetto, played by Steve Buscemi.Steven Schirripa, who played Bobby Baccalieri on “The Sopranos,” wrote in an email that Ms. Allen was “acting royalty” who was “respected by everyone in the cast.”Rae Julia Abruzzo was born on July 3, 1926, in Brooklyn. Her mother, Julia (Riccio) Abruzzo, was a seamstress and hairdresser. Her father, Joseph, was a chauffeur and an opera singer whose brothers performed in vaudeville. At 15, Rae played Buttercup in a production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “H.M.S. Pinafore” in Greenwich Village.After graduating from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1947, Ms. Allen started her Broadway career as a singer in the musical “Where’s Charley?” She followed that with a role in another musical, “Alive and Kicking.” Her next three shows, also musicals, were “Call Me Madam,” “The Pajama Game” and “Damn Yankees,” all directed by the Broadway luminary George Abbott, who became a mentor and father figure.In the 1960s, Ms. Allen was in the Broadway productions of “Oliver!,” “Fiddler on the Roof” and “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.”From left, June Lockhart, Betty Garrett and Ms. Allen in a 2006 episode of “Grey’s Anatomy.”Ron Tom / © ABC /Everett CollectionBy then, her television and film career had begun to take off; in the 1970s, she also started directing. In 1975 she was named director of the Stage West Theater Company in Springfield, Mass., and in 1991 she directed a revival of “And Miss Reardon Drinks a Little” at the Zephyr Theater in Los Angeles.She twice directed productions of “Cyrano de Bergerac” — the first in 1978 at the Long Beach Center Theater, in Long Beach, Calif., starring Stacy Keach, and the second in 2010 at the Ruskin Group Theater in Santa Monica, starring John Colella.Reviewing Ms. Allen’s staging of Ibsen’s “When We Dead Awaken” at Stage West in 1977, Mr. Barnes wrote that it had “speed, conviction and perception.”She also ran acting workshops and was a personal coach. In her 40s, she received bachelor’s and master’s of fine arts degrees in directing from New York University.Ms. Allen’s marriages to John Allen and Herbert Harris ended in divorce. No immediate family members survive. More

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      Idris Elba, a Gamer, Was Keen on Joining ‘Sonic the Hedgehog 2’

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      When Idris Elba takes on a new role — whether it’s fictional like Stringer Bell on “The Wire” or historical like Nelson Mandela in “Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom” — he usually has some degree of reality on which to base his performance.That was not the case with his latest character, a surly red cartoon echidna named Knuckles.As Elba explained in a video interview on Tuesday, “I’ve never met any short, fluffy guys with big fists. I’m sorry, that’s not my experience. Maybe you have, but I haven’t.”To a generation of gamers, Knuckles is best known as the rival of Sonic the Hedgehog, the high-velocity star of the long-running Sega franchise.The hit 2020 film based on the game, with Ben Schwartz voicing Sonic and Jim Carrey as his human nemesis, Dr. Robotnik, successfully translated the video-game series into a movie franchise that blended live action with animation.A sequel, “Sonic the Hedgehog 2,” which Paramount will release on Friday, brings back the characters and conflicts while adding more familiar faces from the games, including Knuckles, a powerful fighter with unlikely physical proportions and a particular grudge against the hero.Elba, whose expansive film résumé includes action (“Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw,” “The Suicide Squad”), animation (“Zootopia”) and even one motion-capture Andrew Lloyd Webber musical (“Cats”), said that getting to play Knuckles was “mind-boggling.”Knuckles, voiced by Idris Elba, in “Sonic the Hedgehog 2.”Paramount Pictures/Sega of AmericaThat’s partly because Elba, 49, is a dedicated fan of video games, and partly because he (like the author of this article) is the father of a 7-year-old son, and he was eager to make some movies they could share as a family.As Elba explained, “You and I remember those first early games and now here we are — our sons are like, ‘Wow, I can see “Sonic 2” with my dad.’ That’s special.”(Even so, when I mentioned that my son and I have also bonded over video games, Elba warned: “Is he into Minecraft and Roblox? Be careful. Be aware. You might lose your child.”)Elba spoke further about his history as a gamer and the range of inspirations for Knuckles, including the actor’s own parents. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.Were you a gamer before you made this film?One hundred percent. I literally have my Switch in my bag. When I started off, I had a Commodore 64 [a 1980s-era home computer]. Dude, that’s how far it goes back for me. And then when I could afford one, I had a Sega Genesis. And I’ve pretty much had every single console since then. I’m a grown man now, but I still play FIFA and driving games.I started out on a Commodore 64, too. It had a reputation for having software that was incredibly easy to pirate.Well, it’s funny you say that. I remember you could take a blank tape and dub a game onto it. And you had to take the tabs off the cassette so you didn’t record over it. [Exaggeratedly serious voice] But of course, all my games were authorized purchases, I bought them all.How did the role of Knuckles first come up for you?I’ve done voices in animation and I like doing things for a younger audience. But when my agent called with this, he didn’t even get to finish his sentence. I was like, yes, absolutely.You have a whole body of work that your 7-year-old son can’t see yet. Was it important that you do something you could share with him?[Laughs] There’s a lot of stuff my kid won’t be able to see until he’s an adult, and then he can judge me. My daughter’s 20, and she’s lived with me doing earlier work like “Finding Dory.” So it is a really satisfying feeling for my son to see me do something, too.“Sonic” is the rare film of Elba’s that his 7-year-old can watch: “It is a really satisfying feeling for my son to see me do something.”Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesWhat did you and the director Jeff Fowler discuss about Knuckles in your first meeting?We did try out some voices to figure out what he might sound like. He looks sort of menacing — [exaggeratedly flexes arms] rarrrr. I actually wanted to try to play him with a squeaky voice. I thought that might be funny. But they didn’t think that was funny and that idea got nixed immediately. [Laughs] But we did try different voices, cadences, accents. Knuckles isn’t a big talker, but when he does speak, he’s very blunt.You recently made the western “The Harder They Fall.” Was a villain like Rufus Buck still in your head when you were figuring out Knuckles?Not “The Harder They Fall,” but my character in the Marvel world, in the “Thor” films, Heimdall, there’s a sense of symmetry between those two voices. Look, I’ve got a deep voice and I could just use my voice as it is. I didn’t consciously want to sound like Heimdall too much. But probably, yeah, they sound exactly the same. [Laughs]It felt like you had a specific idea for where Knuckles came from and how you wanted him to sound. How would you explain it?The first thing that we observed was, he comes from an ancient world — he’s a warrior from his tribe and English is not their first language. He doesn’t have a sense of humor in the same way Sonic does. He’s very dry and matter-of-fact, and he uses English just to get his point across and move on. He hasn’t got time for niceties. We used that construct as a way to start to develop what he sounds like.Have you encountered people in real life who are very focused and intense about their goals, but perhaps need more help in personal situations or don’t fully grasp sarcasm?I work in an industry where there’s a lot of instructions being passed left and right — do this, do that — and often the efficient people are the ones who are like, Hey, let’s just get this done. My parents are West African — they moved from Freetown, Sierra Leone, to London in the early ’70s. So when English isn’t your first language and the culture’s different — the English sense of humor, it goes over a lot of people’s heads — I’ve been witness to that.Growing up in London, did you feel like its culture and customs came more organically to you than to your parents?I was born there, so I didn’t recognize that until I was old enough to understand that English culture was not their culture. I remember feeling that. My mom would say, “Back home in Africa, we do things like this.” And I’d never dare say it, but I used to think, We’re not in Africa — we’re in England. That was the beginning of my understanding of that culture clash. But I’ve been to Africa a few times, and I remember going to Sierra Leone and recognizing all this cultural stuff that I’d seen all my life but didn’t know where it had come from. And there it was, in the origin of my parents. It was fascinating.Do you prefer a voice-only role like Knuckles to your other past performances that have involved motion capture?Not necessarily. Motion capture is such a fascinating art and discipline on its own. In this one, there would be no benefit to having any of my facial features for Knuckles. It wouldn’t make any sense.Knuckles is a visitor from an ancient world, and that reminded Elba of his parents’ experience as immigrants in Britain: “The English sense of humor, it goes over a lot of people’s heads — I’ve been witness to that.”Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesSo you haven’t necessarily soured on it after your experience with “Cats”?Thank you for leaping from hedgehogs to cats. I see what you did. From a performance perspective, it is an incredible experience, being a feline. That’s something I’ve experienced and never have to again. That box has been checked.Paramount has been candid that they’d like to do even more with Knuckles, including another “Sonic” movie and his own TV series. Was that part of the appeal for you?It is now. Honestly, when I got it, I didn’t even know that would be on the table. I thought I was just doing one movie. But now, the fact that I can probably get to play more Knuckles and maybe even spin off into his own world is great.There is another film franchise that people would love to see you participate in, that we’re all waiting expectantly to hear about. Is it still a possibility for you?[Silence]You know which one I mean? The spy with the gun?I’m not sure what you’re talking about.He’s got a famous code name with digits —He’s got digits? Knuckles! Knuckles has digits. No guns.Is it safe to say we won’t be breaking any James Bond news in a conversation about Sonic the Hedgehog?Noooooooo. No. I’m sorry to disappoint.Putting that aside, would it surprise you if, many years from now, the roles you are best known for are, say, Stringer Bell, Nelson Mandela and Knuckles?I think for any actor, the dream is to be able to play different roles and not be pigeonholed, and I feel like I’ve been lucky to have that as a career. But it is interesting. I was on a radio show, and they were like, [booming radio announcer voice] “He’s played Luther. He’s done ‘Beasts of No Nation.’ And now: He’s Knuckles.” It’s like, uh, maybe you could say he’s played a seal in “Finding Dory” and a buffalo in “Zootopia,” he’s played a cat. And now he’s Knuckles. That lineup seems a bit more apt. To go from Nelson Mandela to Knuckles is a bit of a reach. More