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      ‘The Girl and the Spider’ Review: Where Did I Put That Thing?

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      The twin brothers Ramon and Silvan Zürcher have created a wonderfully discombobulating feature about an apartment move.With “The Girl and the Spider,” the Swiss filmmakers Ramon and Silvan Zürcher, the identical twins behind the exceptional debut “The Strange Little Cat,” have made their second feature in a row that invites viewers to get lost in an apartment — or in this case, more than one.Set over two days, “The Girl and the Spider,” in its simplest outlines, tells the story of how Mara (Henriette Confurius) helps Lisa (Liliane Amuat), her roommate, move into a place of her own. We spend time in the new apartment and meet others assisting with chores, then return to the old place (and some friends’ apartment on a lower floor) for a farewell party that night. Everybody wakes up the next day burned out. By sunset, Mara and Lisa’s friendship will have entered a new phase.But a synopsis could barely describe how thoroughly the Zürchers — the credits list Ramon as director but call it “a film by” both of them — have confounded a sense of the ordinary. It’s not just that certain behavior seems off. (Mara professes to “lie without batting an eyelid.”) The shooting and editing are wildly unconventional.Entrances go unestablished. Shots fixate on odd details. Cuts react to offscreen noises and dialogue. (The clamorous sound design is as offbeat as the visuals.) Flashbacks and flights of fancy arrive out of the blue. The 1980s French hit “Voyage Voyage” — heard in bits on piano, then in pop form, then on piano again — becomes a disorienting motif.The movie opens with a shot of a floor plan that Mara has made for Lisa (she notes that a malfunction briefly scrambled the PDF), and the Zürchers in effect ask viewers to map their way through a tangle of spaces and relationships, with flirtations and suspicions peeking through the corners. The film demands and rewards repeat viewings; it’s different, and more entrancing, every time.The Girl and the SpiderNot rated. In German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Nehemiah Persoff, Actor With a Familiar Face (and Voice), Dies at 102

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      His most prominent roles included three tenderly caring parents, but he was most associated with the dapper gangsters he portrayed in the movies and on television.Nehemiah Persoff, a ubiquitous character actor whose gravelly voice and knack for conveying an air of menace magnified his portrayals of a bevy of sinister types, most notably a half-dozen Prohibition-era gangsters, died on Tuesday in San Luis Obispo, Calif. He was 102. The cause was heart failure, his grandson, Joey Persoff, said.For decades Mr. Persoff was one of most recognizable faces on television, by face if not by name; he was seen on hundreds of shows, beginning in the late 1940s. He usually played a supporting character, sometimes kindly, sometimes malevolent, but, given his gift for dialect, frequently with an undefined foreign accent.He appeared on such durable series of the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s as “Gunsmoke,” “The Twilight Zone,” “Route 66,” “Gilligan’s Island,” “Mission: Impossible,” “Hawaii Five-O” and “Columbo,” and he continued into the 1990s, with parts on “Law & Order” and “Chicago Hope.”Mr. Persoff, a native of Jerusalem who emigrated to the United States when he was 9, was in real life an amiable father of four who was married to the same woman for seven decades, and who in retirement became an accomplished painter.His most prominent roles included three tenderly caring parents: a Jewish refugee escaping the Nazis and hoping to reunite with his daughter in Havana in the 1976 film “Voyage of the Damned”; the father of an Orthodox Jewish girl in early-20th-century Poland who poses as a boy so that she can study in a yeshiva, in Barbra Streisand’s “Yentl” (1983); and the voice of the father of Fievel Mousekewitz, the Russian Jewish mouse who emigrates to the United States to escape marauding cats, in the 1986 animated feature “An American Tail” and its sequels.Yet he was most associated with the dapper gangsters he portrayed in the movies and on television. He was the underworld boss Johnny Torrio in the 1959 film “Al Capone,” which starred Rod Steiger in the title role. In the TV series “The Untouchables,” he played two different real-life gangsters: Jake Guzik, the financial brains of Capone’s bootleg liquor gang, in a few episodes, and Waxey Gordon, New York’s king of illicit beer, in a 1960 episode in which he gleefully aimed a Tommy gun into a competitor’s barrels.His most memorable supporting role may have been his outsize parody of a mobster, Little Bonaparte, in the classic Billy Wilder comedy “Some Like It Hot” (1959). Two of his lines from that movie are often quoted by film buffs.In one, addressing a mob gathering disguised as an opera lovers’ convention, he says: “In the last fiscal year we made a hundred an’ twelve million dollars before taxes … only we didn’t pay no taxes!”And after a hit man pops out of a huge birthday cake and machine-guns another mobster, played by George Raft, and his entourage, Mr. Persoff tells an inquiring detective, “There was something in that cake that didn’t agree with ’em.”Mr. Persoff as the real-life mobster Jake Guzik in a 1962 episode of the TV series “The Untouchables.” He portrayed the gangster Waxey Gordon in another episode.Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty ImagesMr. Persoff once said he loved working on “The Untouchables” because he could lock horns with Elliot Ness, the federal agent played with righteous hauteur by Robert Stack.“Bob Stack was so nose-in-the-air stuck up, he was so correct and superior, so aristocratic, that without any effort on my part it brought out the rebel in me,” he told the magazine Cinema Retro. “It struck a vein of anger in me, anger which in my mind is such an important part of what makes a gangster.”Nehemiah Persoff was born in Jerusalem on Aug. 2, 1919, during the years when the territory was transitioning from Ottoman rule to a British mandate. His father, Shmuel, a silversmith, jeweler and art teacher, decided that his prospects would improve in America and emigrated on his own. After six years he brought over his wife, Puah (Holman) Persoff, a homemaker, and his three sons and two daughters.It was the start of the Depression, and the family lived in a cold-water flat in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, though they eventually moved to the Bronx.Nehemiah attended the Hebrew Technical Institute to study the electrician’s trade, and his first job was as a signal maintenance worker on the old IND subway line. It paid him $38 a week, more than his father earned.His introduction to acting happened by chance: He was asked to perform a walk-on in a play that was the highlight of a Zionist organization’s function. The experience planted a notion, and after completing three years in the stateside Army, he took a leave from subway work and began studying acting.Mr. Persoff was among the first students at the Actors Studio, where his teachers were Elia Kazan and Lee Strasberg, proponents of method acting. His fellow students included Julie Harris, Martin Balsam, Cloris Leachman and Kim Hunter.His first bit part was in the 1948 film noir “Naked City,” but it was another small part that brought him to widespread attention: He was the silent cabdriver in the memorable taxi scene in “On the Waterfront” (1954). His face appears briefly after one of film lore’s most famous conversations, when Marlon Brando tells Rod Steiger: “I could’ve had class, I could’ve been a contender. I could’ve been a somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am.”Mr. Persoff was usually cast in small supporting parts, but he often turned them into gems of characterization. One was Leo, the crooked accountant, in Humphrey Bogart’s last picture, “The Harder They Fall” (1956). He coolly tells a furious Bogart that out of the $1 million gate for a championship fight, the story’s overmatched boxer will receive $49.07.In 1951, Mr. Persoff married Thia Persov, a distant relation who had been a nurse with the Palmach, a Zionist military group, during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. She died of cancer last year. In addition to his grandson, Mr. Persoff is survived by three sons, Jeffrey, Dan and Perry; a daughter, Dahlia; and four granddaughters. He lived in the town of Cambria on the central Californian coast.In Barbra Streisand’s “Yentl” (1983), Mr. Persofff played the father of an Orthodox Jewish girl (Ms. Streisand) who poses as a boy so that she can study in a yeshiva.United Archives GmbH / Alamy Stock PhotoWhile acting in Hollywood, Mr. Persoff kept his hand in live theater. In 1959, he starred on Broadway as the newspaper editor and essayist Harry Golden in a short-lived adaptation of Mr. Golden’s folksy book “Only in America.” It was the last of his more than a dozen Broadway appearances.In California, he starred as a cantankerous socialist in his 80s in the Herb Gardner comedy “I’m Not Rappaport” and as the milkman Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof.” And for almost two decades he appeared as Tevye’s creator, the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, in a one-man show for which Mr. Persoff adapted five of the writer’s fables.In 1975, he was awarded the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for his supporting role in “The Dybbuk” at the Mark Taper Forum.When high blood pressure and other health problems forced him to reduce his workload, Mr. Persoff took up painting, studying in Los Angeles and producing watercolors that have been exhibited in galleries in Northern California. He kept painting until the last week of his life. In 2021 he published a memoir, “The Many of Faces of Nehemiah.”Beyond dialects and accents, he had a telling philosophy about acting. “If I’m playing a good guy, I’ll try to show that he has some bad in him,” he once said. “If I’m playing a bad guy, I’ll give him some dignity and love.”Alex Traub contributed reporting. More

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      One Last Takeaway From ‘The Slap’: Leave Black Women’s Hair Alone

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      Lost in the Oscars fray is the hurt inflicted when a group is denigrated for a laugh. Chris Rock, who has examined this issue in a documentary, should have known better.While the Slap Heard Round the World has been vigorously debated and dissected since Will Smith confronted Chris Rock at the Oscars, there was more to the incident than its abrupt physicality.Rock’s joke, and Jada Pinkett Smith’s resulting eyeroll, echoed even more thunderously for Black women. Her glare encapsulated the fatigue and frustration that so many of us deal with in the complex daily feat of simply wearing our hair as we like. That Chris Rock would point to a Black woman’s hair for a joke left me breathless, and I wasn’t alone.“When Black women’s hair is mocked by comedians like Rock, he ushers in the everyday forms of microaggressive hatred against Black women that normalized blatant discrimination,” Ralina Joseph, a professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, and the director of the Center for Communication, Difference and Equity, said in an email interview.Black women’s hair has been the object of scrutiny, derision and ridicule in American society since it’s been growing out of our heads. Thanks to standards of beauty that for too long excluded us, we are arguably the largest demographic in the country whose hair is continually policed. Court cases document fights against school districts and corporations trying to govern how we can wear our hair. A segment of people who don’t live with it, in all its iterations of textures and lengths, somehow wants to dictate how and when it’s pretty, professional or unkempt.Distaste for Black hair seeps into our everyday lives: Just last month, the House of Representatives passed the CROWN Act, banning discrimination against natural hair in hiring, public housing placement and public access accommodations. Let that sink in: Exclusionary actions stemming from disdain toward our hairstyles are so pervasive, they require legislation.Nowadays, visibility and a touch of glamorization in mainstream media (I’m lookin’ at you, Beyoncé), have fostered a growing fascination with our manes — a double-edged sword. Bosses scrutinize or give it a shout-out, strangers try to paw or photograph it, friends and frenemies praise or judge it — even Tinder prospects weigh in on it.Academic studies have outlined how strongly the identity of many Black women is tied to their hair. Not having the type of hair that’s affirmed and considered “womanly” in the culture at large can dent one’s sense of self. And feeling that what’s considered a key part of womanhood needs altering to be accepted, especially from childhood, makes it hard to see one’s image as positive.The Altercation Between Will Smith and Chris RockThe Incident: The Oscars were derailed when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock, who made a joke about Mr. Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith.His Speech: Moments after the onstage altercation, Mr. Smith won the Oscar for best actor. Here’s what he said in his acceptance speech.The Aftermath: Mr. Smith, who the academy said refused to leave following the incident, apologized to Mr. Rock the next day after the academy denounced his actions.A Triumph Tempered: Mr. Smith owned Serena and Venus Williams’s story in “King Richard.” Then he stole their moment at the Oscars.What Is Alopecia?: Ms. Smith’s hair loss condition played a major role in the incident.Since it’s hard to separate our image from our hair, poking fun at a Black hair style is an easy way to get a laugh while devaluing Black women. Witness Jamie Foxx lampooning us as Wanda on “In Living Color” and Martin Lawrence as Sheneneh. It’s incomprehensible that a Black comic would reach for it in such a high-profile setting as the Oscars — especially a man so closely associated with a film about Black women’s hair struggles.Not only did Rock produce and narrate the 2009 documentary “Good Hair,” which brought Black hair culture to the big screen, but he created it with his own daughters in mind. In the opening, he recounts how one of his girls asked him, “Daddy, how come I don’t have good hair?” Onscreen, he speaks to a range of women, including celebrities like Raven-Symoné, who explain that when they relaxed their hair, the goal was also about making society comfortable with them.Chris Rock in “Good Hair,” a documentary he narrated and produced.Roadside AttractionsWhile the film could have delved further into how Black women have thrived in a beauty culture (including a hair-care industry) that has rarely included them, it illuminated our struggle to audiences that may not have known one existed. It’s hard to understand how he could help bring that gem of a film to life and yet take a swipe at a Black woman’s hair. Did he so quickly forget the lessons of that film, which seemed to recognize how American society “otherizes” us and our tresses?Or, worse still, did the lessons never matter? Rock has a history of dogging not just Black women, but the entire Black community, or as Joseph calls it, “in-group punching down.”“Despite a brief ‘Good Hair’ moment. where he celebrated (and mocked) Black women, his punching down has also been broadly anti-Black woman,” she noted.Through his career, Rock has demonstrated a penchant for belittling and mischaracterizing Black women, from his ex-wife to female romantic partners in general. In a 1997 episode of “The Chris Rock Show,” he skewered Black women’s need to join the Million Woman March to his guest — Jada Pinkett Smith, a march participant.There’s another sensitive aspect to Rock’s dig at Pinkett Smith. In interviews and on her Facebook series “Red Table Talk,” she has chronicled her painful ordeal with alopecia, a condition that disproportionately affects Black women. She initially concealed her hair loss under wigs. That she decided to shave her head and reveal the reason was to be commended, not jabbed at. To be clear: Whether Rock knew of her condition or not, the joke wasn’t hurtful only because Pinkett Smith deals with alopecia (an affliction to which “Good Hair” even devotes special attention). The insult added an extra layer of hurt, especially because Black women can be harsh on ourselves about hair, amid social pressures and Eurocentric beauty standards that we’ve internalized, often to an extreme degree.Generations of Black American women recall weekend afternoons spent watching an iron comb glow like molten lava on the stove burner. We waited for our mothers to wield the hot comb like a weapon, ready to press our thicket of coils into submission to make us more culturally palatable. Even at a young age, I wondered who I was supposed to be impressing.When I was deemed old enough, I “leveled up” to chemical straighteners that would frequently blister my scalp — all for a flouncy bob I detested. “Beauty is pain,” my hairdresser would chirp as she kneaded the chemical cream into my roots and I winced. In my mid-20s, I decided beauty wasn’t worth that pain, so I chopped off most of my hair and have since maintained a very short, natural style.“When Black women’s hair features as the butt of jokes, the very real and myriad forms of multiple marginalization against Black women is erased and even justified,” Joseph noted. “It hurts.”Even though the jokes at the expense of us and our hair predate Rock, we don’t need him to lead the way in turning up the savagery of the practice, let alone on Hollywood’s biggest evening.Like the director Jane Campion’s misstep a couple weeks ago at another awards show (which, sadly, also involved the Williams sisters, one of the focuses of the Will Smith film “King Richard”), this takedown of a Black woman stings even more for having been unleashed by someone who should know better — in Rock’s case, as a Black father of daughters; in Campion’s, as a woman who’s also probably dealt with sexist professional slights. But the result each time was the same: Black women were expected to smile and take the stab.In one sense, the entire Oscars to-do, and its flurry of embarrassment and apologies, could have been avoided by choosing not to drag a Black woman down by her hair. Yet for too many and for too long, it has felt irresistible not to mess with it, mess with us.So to anyone who ever feels the urge to mock, I’ll reframe Will Smith’s warning at the show: Keep the mention of Black women’s hair out of your mouth. More

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      Ann Sarnoff, Warner Bros. Chief, Is Set to Leave

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      LOS ANGELES — Ann Sarnoff, the chief executive of the WarnerMedia Studios and Networks Group, will leave the company, with an announcement coming as soon as this week, three people briefed on the matter said.Ms. Sarnoff, who declined to comment, was chosen to lead Warner Bros. in 2019 despite limited Hollywood experience, becoming the first woman to hold the role. She is departing as WarnerMedia, a division of AT&T, is set to complete a merger with Discovery. Ms. Sarnoff’s boss, Jason Kilar, who has been chief executive of WarnerMedia since 2020, announced his exit on Tuesday.Like Mr. Kilar, Ms. Sarnoff found herself without a seat in the game of musical chairs that accompanies the merging of competing companies, said the people briefed on the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential information. The Warner Bros. Discovery management structure is still unknown, but David Zaslav, the chief executive of Discovery, who will run the new company, is expected to take over at least some of Ms. Sarnoff’s portfolio. She has had a dozen direct reports.Her job has involved oversight of HBO and HBO Max; the Warner Bros. movie and television studio; several cable channels, including TBS and TNT; and a large consumer products division. Breaking down the siloed nature of some of those units has been one of Ms. Sarnoff’s accomplishments.After news of her departure became public, Mr. Zaslav said in an email that Ms. Sarnoff had been “a passionate and committed steward,” leading “with integrity, focus and hard work in bringing WarnerMedia’s businesses, brands and work force closer together.” In an email of his own, Mr. Kilar called Ms. Sarnoff a “first-tier human being” and “the definition of a selfless leader.”Ms. Sarnoff’s job security has been the subject of Hollywood gossip for months, with agents and Warner-affiliated producers insisting that she was on her way out and some members of her team insisting the opposite. That kind of speculation can be deadly in show business, with whispers congealing into conventional wisdom, often resulting in an irrecoverable position of weakness in the view of Hollywood’s creative community.To be fair, Ms. Sarnoff, whip smart and affable, never got the opportunity to really do her job. The pandemic shut down the entertainment business roughly seven months after she started. AT&T, which hired her, decided to spin off WarnerMedia last May.Before joining WarnerMedia, Ms. Sarnoff held leadership roles at Nickelodeon, the Women’s National Basketball Association, Dow Jones and BBC America. More

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      ‘RRR’ Review: A Hero (or Two) Shall Rise

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      Scenes of glorious excess make the screen hum with energy in S.S. Rajamouli’s action epic set in British colonial India.It’s not long in “RRR” before a tiger and a wolf collide midair during a brawl with one of the film’s two musclebound heroes. Scenes of glorious excess make the screen hum with energy in the latest feature from S.S. Rajamouli, the director of the “Baahubali” blockbusters.Set in 1920s India before independence, “RRR” pairs two of the country’s biggest stars, N.T. Rama Rao Jr. (known as “Jr. NTR”) and Ram Charan, as superfriends from either side of a bloody colonial divide. A goofily gallant Jr. NTR plays Bheem, a warrior from the Gond tribe, while Charan smolders as Ram, a fearsome police officer who is underestimated by his white superiors. (The characters are inspired by two rebel heroes from the era, Komaram Bheem and Alluri Sitarama Raju.)Bheem journeys to Delhi to rescue a Gond girl enslaved by the British governor and his wife, a couple of sadists. Ram has orders to identify and capture Bheem by going undercover with revolutionaries. Instead, the men unwittingly make fast friends when they save a child stranded on a river that’s on fire. (As one does.)But their missions get inevitably entangled, and Rajamouli (who collaborated on the story with his screenwriter father, Vijayendra Prasad), stirs in an aw-shucks courtship between Bheem and the governor’s not-racist niece (Olivia Morris).Ram Charan in “RRR.”DVV EntertainmentRajamouli shoots the film’s action with hallucinogenic fervor, supercharging scenes with a shimmering brand of extended slow-motion and C.G.I. that feels less “generated” than unleashed. Here-to-there plot filler in “RRR” is instantly forgiven with each wild set-piece: Ram furiously tunneling through a hundred-strong mob outside his garrison, or the rumbling dance-off (the “Naatu Naatu” musical number) where Bheem and Ram giddily exhaust the British cads and delight the ladies.The rousing anticolonialist battle royal concludes with one final fist-pump: an end-credit song celebrating political figures from across India.RRRRated PG-13 for violent sequences, some intense language and general mayhem. With subtitles. Running time: 3 hours 7 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Cole Sprouse on Finding a Healthy Balance in Hollywood

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      The former child actor wanted to leave showbiz. Now, the “Moonshot” and “Riverdale” star is finding he can act and tend his photography career as well.“I hope you don’t mind, I’m going to be scarfing down this chicken wrap at the same time we talk,” Cole Sprouse politely informs me as he sits in the kitchen wearing a fuzzy, baby blue sweater. The wrap in question is already halfway to his mouth.Sprouse is used to multitasking.He and his twin brother, Dylan, began their professional acting careers when they were infants and worked steadily throughout their childhoods, sharing prominent roles on “Grace Under Fire” and in the Adam Sandler film “Big Daddy.” Cole went on to play Ross’s son on “Friends” before reteaming with Dylan in the Disney Channel sitcom “The Suite Life of Zack and Cody” (Cole played the brainy Cody). The tween hit led to a spinoff series, TV movie — and mega kid stardom for the twins. By age 18, they’d effectively burned out.But after graduating from New York University with a degree in archaeology, Cole Sprouse fulfilled a promise he’d made to his manager to give one more round of TV auditions a go before quitting the industry for good. He booked the role of the brooding outcast Jughead Jones on the CW drama “Riverdale” and was sucked in again.“I started acting when I was so young that I hadn’t actually attempted, as an adult, to think about if I really enjoyed performance,” Sprouse said in a recent video call from Vancouver, British Columbia, where he’s currently filming the seventh season of “Riverdale.” He continued, “When I returned, I reminded myself that I do very much love the art of acting. But I still have a very complicated relationship to celebrity culture.”He’s learned to guard his private life. Rare public comments about his relationships past (namely, with his “Riverdale” co-star Lili Reinhart) and present (the model Ari Fournier) are scrutinized by fans and widely recounted by entertainment outlets. He started a secondary Instagram account devoted solely to sharing the photos he takes of strangers while they’re trying to sneakily snap photos of him. “It was an attempt to go, ‘Hey, I actually have agency in the situation, too,’” he explained. “It helped me a lot.”Sprouse with Lili Reinhart and KJ Apa in “Riverdale.”Michael Courtney/The CWHis latest role is the lead in the HBO Max rom-com “Moonshot” — not to be confused with the unrelated 2022 releases “Moon Knight” and “Moonfall.” In the near future, where robots run coffee shops and Mars is being colonized, Sprouse plays Walt, a hapless college student who hitches a ride on a Mars-bound rocket alongside Sophie (Lana Condor) in an attempt to reach another girl on Mars he thinks could be the One.Intermittently puffing on a vape pen after finishing the chicken wrap, Sprouse spoke about billionaires, the effects of childhood fame and turning 30.These are edited excerpts from our conversation.“Moonshot” is a futuristic take on a conventional romantic comedy. Are you a rom–com fan?I have my favorites, and they’re all over the map. I’m a huge “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” fan, for example. And though there’s a heavy romantic element throughout it, most people would just call that a comedy — and yet, by all genre boundaries, it is a rom-com.I think for so long romantic comedies were put down as “chick flicks,” something lowbrow that only a female audience would care about. Male-centric entries like “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” made some people rethink that notion.The general trend with the arts always starts with a large female fan base really falling in love with something. In a lot of cases, we see the female audience braving the territory first, and then everyone follows. Ultimately, with “Moonshot,” we set out to make a movie that didn’t really take itself super seriously, that we had a lot of lighthearted fun on, and we were able to weave an old married couple dynamic into Lana and I’s relationship.Opposite Lana Condor in “Moonshot.”Warner Bros.The film also throws some solid punches at the billionaire space race: Zach Braff’s Elon Musk-esque character admits he could have used his fortune to solve world hunger dozens of times over, but went to Mars instead. How do you feel about the current space cowboy endeavors of people like Musk and Jeff Bezos?Oh, I think it’s tremendously masturbatory. It’s a ridiculous thing. When I was studying archaeology, we used to have this conversation about the resurrection of the mammoth. The conversation would always devolve into two camps: the camp that really wanted to see the mammoth walk the earth again. And the camp that was going, “Hey, we have active species that are currently going extinct. If we put the resources you are talking about putting into the already extinct mammoth and shift that focus to the present, we could do way more good.” I feel like this conversation about space cowboys is very similar. I’m in the camp where I go, let’s focus on the present. We have an active space that we are living in that is currently decaying. We need to shift focus and resources to here.So, no chance you’re booking a commercial ticket on a rocket any time soon.No, I’m already such a paranoid freak when it comes to flying. I couldn’t imagine what my control-freak nature would do when we started taking off. I would be a nervous wreck.People like to talk about former child stars in this dichotomy of either they spiral out of control or, somehow, “come out OK.” Do you think it’s possible for anyone to actually come through that experience unscathed?My brother and I used to get quite a bit of, “Oh, you made it out! Oh, you’re unscathed!” No. The young women on the channel we were on [Disney Channel] were so heavily sexualized from such an earlier age than my brother and I that there’s absolutely no way that we could compare our experiences. And every single person going through that trauma has a unique experience. When we talk about child stars going nuts, what we’re not actually talking about is how fame is a trauma. So I’m violently defensive against people who mock some of the young women who were on the channel when I was younger because I don’t feel like it adequately comprehends the humanity of that experience and what it takes to recover. And, to be quite honest, as I have now gone through a second big round of this fame game as an adult, I’ve noticed the same psychological effects that fame yields upon a group of young adults as I did when I was a child. I just think people have an easier time hiding it when they’re older.The Sprouse twins on “The Suite Life of Zack and Cody.”Joel Warren/Disney ChannelAfter it was announced that “Riverdale” had been renewed for a seventh season, a lot of memes popped up imagining your reaction when you heard the news. The general internet consensus seemed to be that you were completely distraught to have to do another season. Is that accurate?[Laughs] It’s not completely accurate. One, because I’ve just assumed we’re going to see the finality of our [seven-season] contracts. Two, I think the internet assumes — because of how insane our show is — that we’re probably doing a bit worse than we actually are. It’s easy to forget that people love the show. And I do think it’s going to be much more appreciated in 10 years than it is right now. It would be pretty pompous of me to say that another season of financial stability is not something that would be appealing. Though I’m not going to lie. The memes do make me laugh.You’ve built a side career as a professional photographer, mainly in fashion. What is it about that medium that made you want to pursue it?When I was in school, I was traveling a lot for archaeology, so I always had my camera and I was taking almost anthropological-type photos of the people I was meeting, the culture I was surrounded by. And then, just by being in New York City, I got wrapped up in fashion work and built a portfolio. That was my main source of revenue until “Riverdale” Season 2.You’re turning 30 in August. Does this decade feel like the start of a new chapter?Definitely. ​​I feel like my ducks are in a row better than they’ve ever been. We’re also seeing the conclusion of a program I’ve spent the majority of my 20s on, so there is this world of possibilities that lies before me at the end of this production that I find incredibly appealing and intoxicating. And, I hate to break it to everybody, but I’m not the only 30 year old playing a teen on television.You made it to college in “Moonshot.” You’re starting to age up.Just stringing them along, slowly but surely. In an ideal world, when “Riverdale” finishes, I would love to be doing one to two movies a year and photography the rest of the time. And the logical intersection of those two worlds will eventually be directing.We’re living in a time of extreme nostalgia for the ’90s and 2000s. Is there any chance you’d go full circle and do a “Suite Life” reboot?I don’t think I’ll ever return to that. Not that I have a problem with other people doing the reboots thing. I’m just a big believer that if something is beautiful in the past, you should let it stay beautiful. To bring it into the future feels a bit like reheating a really good, fresh meal in the microwave. It would be hard to be in my 30s and go [in a deep growl], “Zack and Cody are back, man!” More

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      What’s on TV This Week: A Pair of New Docs, and ‘Killing Eve’

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      Major documentaries about Benjamin Franklin and Tony Hawk are on PBS and HBO. And “Killing Eve” airs its final episode.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 4-10. Details and times are subject to change.MondayBENJAMIN FRANKLIN 8 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). In the last half-century, Ken Burns has become among the most prominent chroniclers of American history — so maybe it was only a matter of time before his attention panned to Ben Franklin. This two-part, four-hour documentary from Burns looks at Franklin’s life and legacy. The first installment, subtitled “Join or Die,” focuses on the years of 1706 to 1774. Part 2, “An American,” covers 1775 through 1790, the year of Franklin’s death; it will air at 8 p.m. on Tuesday.JOHN AND THE HOLE (2021) 8 p.m. on Showtime Showcase. Michael C. Hall is probably best known for starring in the serial-killer drama “Dexter,” which was revived last year. But in the eerie, surreal drama “John and the Hole,” it is Hall’s character who gets put in the ground. He plays the father of John (Charlie Shotwell), a 13-year-old who traps his family in a large hole in the forest. (John’s mother is played by Jennifer Ehle; Taissa Farmiga plays John’s older sister.) In her review for The New York Times, Jeannette Catsoulis praised the “excellent” cast, but wrote that the underlying ideas of the story aren’t given the same attention as the eerie atmosphere. “Chilly, enigmatic and more than a little spooky, ‘John and the Hole’ patrols the porous border between child and adult with more style than depth,” she wrote.TuesdayTony Hawk in a scene from “Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off.”HBO Documentary FilmsTONY HAWK: UNTIL THE WHEELS FALL OFF (2022) 9 p.m. HBO. At the Academy Awards, Tony Hawk, Kelly Slater and Shaun White introduced a tribute to 60 years of James Bond movies by saying that no one Bond actor could possibly be considered the greatest of all time, before reconsidering. Hawk said: “Well, I don’t know about that,” there are a few athletes who you know are clearly the greatest in their field.” That the line got a laugh — more than two decades after Hawk made history by landing the aerial trick known as the 900 at the 1999 X-Games — speaks to how much Hawk remains synonymous with professional skateboarding. This documentary from the photographer and director Sam Jones gives a deep look at Hawk’s life and career. It pays particular attention to the challenges that came with his fame.WednesdayTHE KARDASHIANS — A ROBIN ROBERTS SPECIAL 8 p.m. on ABC. The “Good Morning America” anchor Robin Roberts takes a late shift for this prime-time interview with the famous sisters Kim, Khloé and Kourtney Kardashian and their mother, Kris Jenner.ThursdayDR. WHO AND THE DALEKS (1966) 10:15 p.m. on TCM. Here’s a curiosity: A vintage, noncanonical “Dr. Who” film with Peter Cushing in the title role. Shot in Technicolor by Amicus Productions, a British studio known for low-budget science fiction and horror movies, the movie imagines Dr. Who as an older human scientist who, in his efforts to invent a time machine, accidentally transports himself and a few companions (including two granddaughters) to another planet, where they get mixed up in a battle of good versus evil.FridayA BLACK LADY SKETCH SHOW 11 p.m. on HBO. Puppets, cannibalism and a “funeral ball” with a dance floor are some of the things teased in a recent trailer for the new, third season of Robin Thede’s successful sketch comedy show, which debuts Friday. Like the previous two seasons, Season 3 has a stacked lineup of guests, including Wanda Sykes, Jay Pharoah and Ava DuVernay.SaturdayJoaquin Phoenix and Woody Norman in “C’Mon C’Mon.”A24 FilmsC’MON C’MON (2021) 8 p.m. on Showtime 2. Joaquin Phoenix plays an uncle who steps in to parent his nephew in this black-and-white drama from Mike Mills (“20th Century Women”). Johnny (Phoenix) is a single radio journalist with no children. When his sister, Viv (Gaby Hoffmann), asks him to take care of her 9-year-old, Jesse (Woody Norman), so she can deal with a family crisis, Johnny takes Jesse on a cross-country road trip. In her review for The Times, Manohla Dargis wrote that the movie can’t quite carry the emotional weight that it tries to, but she praised Mills’s ability to create believable, recognizable people and places. “Although he always lavishes conspicuous attention on the visual scheme of his movies — everything is very precise, very arranged — his gift is for the seductive sense of intimacy among characters,” she wrote, “which quickly turns actors into people you care about.”SundaySandra Oh, left, and Jodie Comer in “Killing Eve.”Anika Molnar/BBC AmericaKILLING EVE 8 p.m. on BBC America. The fourth and final season of this dark and funny spy thriller ends on Sunday night, bringing to a close the layered relationship between the former MI6 agent Eve (Sandra Oh) and the assassin she has long pined for, Villanelle (Jodie Comer). When Oh and Comer spoke to The Times recently, they naturally had only vague discussions about the ending (“we were together on set,” Comer said), but went deeper in their discussion of the relationship between Eve and Villanelle — which is itself ambiguous. “A lot of people describe this as a ‘cat and mouse,’ and I understand that within the first season,” Oh said. But, she added, “for me, the show is really exploring the female psyche and how these two female characters need one another.”ROADRUNNER: A FILM ABOUT ANTHONY BOURDAIN (2021) 9 p.m. on CNN. The documentarian Morgan Neville (“Won’t You Be My Neighbor”) looks at the life, career and death of Anthony Bourdain, the chef turned writer and TV host. The movie presents two overlapping sides of Bourdain: It celebrates his idiosyncratic energy, curiosity and charisma while also examining the struggles that led to his death by suicide in 2018. “In many ways, his strengths were his weaknesses, too,” Neville said in a 2021 interview with The Times. “His deep romanticism, his wanderlust, his profound curiosity and seeking, were his strengths, but also things that really kept him unrooted and unable to kind of sit back and enjoy things.” More

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      Michelle Materre, Champion of Black Independent Film, Dies at 67

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      Through her distribution company and an educational series, Ms. Materre was for decades a tireless advocate for underrepresented filmmakers.Michelle Materre, a distributor and educator who promoted Black women’s voices in film and released influential independent movies by Black creators, died on March 11 in White Plains, N.Y. She was 67.A friend, Kathryn Bowser, said the cause was oral cancer.Ms. Materre was an early proponent of independently released works by Black female directors, beginning at a time when diversity in independent film was far from the forefront of the cultural conversation.Her company, KJM3 Entertainment Group, worked on distribution for major films; one of its first projects was the marketing of Julie Dash’s “Daughters of the Dust.” Widely viewed as a masterpiece of Black independent cinema and said to have been the first feature film by a Black woman to have a wide release, “Daughters of the Dust” was inducted into the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry in 2004.The New York Times critic A.O. Scott wrote in 2020 that “Daughters of the Dust,” which tells the story of Gullah women off the Sea Islands of South Carolina and Georgia in the early 20th century, “has sent ripples of influence through the culture,” inspiring the imagery in Beyoncé’s visual album “Lemonade” and the director Sofia Coppola’s aesthetic. Ava DuVernay, the director of “Selma,” also regularly cites the film as an influence.Ms. Dash, in a remembrance for the International Documentary Association, wrote, “We remain forever grateful for Michelle and team KJM3 for the initial run of ‘Daughters of the Dust’ in 1992; it would not have been a success without them.”From left, Barbara-O Jones, Trula Hoosier and Alva Rogers in Julie Dash’s ‘“Daughters of the Dust,” one of the first films handled by Ms. Materre’s distribution company, KJM3 Entertainment Group.Cohen Media Group/Everett CollectionKJM3 Entertainment was formed in 1992 and released 23 films before it ceased operation in 2001. Another of the company’s most influential distribution efforts was “L’Homme Sur Les Quais” (“The Man by the Shore”) (1993), a drama by Raoul Peck, the Haitian auteur who went on to direct “I Am Not Your Negro,” the 2016 documentary about race in America based on the writings of James Baldwin.Ms. Materre’s passion for bringing unsung masterworks to wider audiences animated her career. In 1999, she started Creatively Speaking, an effort to package short films from underrepresented filmmakers into full-length programs organized thematically. It has grown into a major cultural player, holding regular screenings at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and educational panels about diversity in filmmaking at the New School and elsewhere.“One Way or Another: Black Women’s Cinema, 1970-1991,” which compiled short films into a longer project, was one acclaimed Creatively Speaking project. In 2017, The New Yorker’s Richard Brody called it the most important repertory series of the year.In a 2019 interview for the New School, Ms. Materre said she started Creatively Speaking because she saw a lack of opportunity — a theme throughout her career.“I found that there weren’t very many outlets for filmmakers of color and women filmmakers who hadn’t reached the possibility of making feature films yet,” she said. “They were making short films — all these amazing short films, but nobody was ever seeing them.”Once she began producing these films, she added, “people gravitated towards them like crazy.”In the International Documentary Association tribute, Leslie Fields-Cruz, the executive director of Black Public Media, wrote that Ms. Materre “understood why Black films need special attention when it comes to distribution and engagement.”“There are multiple generations of filmmakers, curators, distributors and media arts administrators,” she wrote, “whose lives and careers have been impacted simply because Michelle took the time to listen and to care.”Ms. Materre, right, with Kathryn Bowser of KJM3 Entertainment, left, and Kay Shaw of the National Black Programming Consortium at the premiere of the film “Follow Me Home” in New York in 1997. Ozier Muhammad/The New York TimesMichelle Angelina Materre was born on May 12, 1954, in Chicago. Her father, Oscar Materre, was a Chicago firefighter and owned a paint business. Her mother, Eloise (Michael) Materre, was a real estate agent.She grew up in Chicago and attended the Chicago Latin School. She then earned a B.S. in education from Boston State College and a master’s in educational media from Boston College.In 1975, she married Jose Masso, a Boston public-school teacher. They divorced in 1977. She married Dennis Burroughs, a production technician, in 1990; that marriage, too, ended in divorce. She is survived by her sisters, Paula and Judi Materre. Ms. Materre’s work at Creatively Speaking was centered in New York City; in addition to distributing films, she often organized panels and screenings of little-seen works like “Charcoal” (2017), the Haitian director Francesca Andre’s short film on colorism and skin lightening practices in the Black community.Ms. Materre consulted on the production and distribution of numerous films and served on the boards of the Black Documentary Collective, New York Women in Film and Television, and other groups promoting underrepresented filmmakers.In 2000 she began teaching at the New School in New York City, where her courses focused on diversity and inclusion in media.In a remembrance for The New School Free Press, Ms. Materre’s colleague Terri Bowles, with whom she taught a course at the New School, wrote, “She radiated a love of media and cinema, immersing her students, colleagues and friends in the vernaculars of the image, its myriad presentations and its critical importance.” More