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      Rita Moreno and Ariana DeBose on 'West Side Story

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      “Hello, birthday queen,” Ariana DeBose said, greeting her “West Side Story” castmate Rita Moreno, newly and notably aged 90.It was Sunday afternoon, and DeBose, 30, was in bed at her home on the Upper East Side, propped up on pillows, her rescue cats, Isadora Duncan and Frederick Douglass, occasionally parading through the Zoom call. Moreno was across the country, at home in Berkeley, Calif., camera-ready above the waist in a red sweater and mega-jewelry, but stealthily in pink pajamas and fluffy slipper socks below. How were her many birthday celebrations? “I’m happy to report that they’re endless,” she said. “I do feel queenly and royal.”Moreno, who arrived in New York from Puerto Rico in 1936, famously won an Oscar — the first Latina to do so — for playing Anita in the 1961 “West Side Story.” DeBose, who grew up in North Carolina and describes herself as Afro-Latina, is earning critical raves and awards chatter as Anita in Steven Spielberg’s new version, which also features Moreno in the newly created role of Valentina, a shopkeeper.In a video interview, they spoke about identity, fighting stereotypes and getting notes from Stephen Sondheim, the original lyricist. They both dropped an expletive or two; songs and admiration spilled forth. “I just know this movie is going to make it into the Oscars in many ways,” Moreno said. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Moreno in the original 1961 film.Silver Screen Collection/Getty ImagesDeBose in the new Steven Spielberg version.Niko Tavernise/20th Century StudiosAriana, you’ve said your own identity was important in what you brought to the role. How did you discuss that with the creative team?DeBOSE It was one of the first things I brought up. My first audition. I didn’t know Steven was going to be there, and I decided to just do what I needed to do, to represent myself well and what I could offer. Toward the end, he asked if there was anything else he needed to know, and I was like, if you’re not interested in exploring the Afro-Latin identity, and finding ways to incorporate it or talk about that, you probably shouldn’t hire me. I didn’t want to feel like I was just checking a box for them, you know. It is a real lived experience, and it’s not something we talk about often. In fact, it wasn’t until my adulthood that I really was able to clock that you can be Black and Puerto Rican — and my mother is white. You can be all of those things. And I’m queer, so there’s a lot going on there. I was very adamant that we should either explore it, or you shouldn’t go down the path with me.Steven, when we were filming, was like, does this actually feel authentic to you? And if not, we should change it. I could answer from my perspective, of course, but I didn’t grow up in 1957. They brought folks to speak to us who lived in San Juan Hill during this time. There was an Irish gang member, Puerto Ricans who were living on the blocks at the time. Rita and I didn’t really talk about the character a lot, but I found hearing about her lived experiences really helpful.DeBose brought up the issue of Afro-Latina identity in her first audition with Steven Spielberg: “I didn’t want to feel like I was just checking a box for them.”Erik Carter for The New York TimesDid you talk about the legacy of playing Anita?MORENO I didn’t. There was a very conscious reason. I knew what a delicate position Ariana was in. I wanted her to be absolutely sure that I didn’t impose anything on her. So as a good hostess, I decided to keep some of those thoughts to myself..css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-1kpebx{margin:0 auto;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-1kpebx{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1kpebx{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-1gtxqqv{margin-bottom:0;}.css-1g3vlj0{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-1g3vlj0{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-1g3vlj0 strong{font-weight:600;}.css-1g3vlj0 em{font-style:italic;}.css-1g3vlj0{margin-bottom:0;margin-top:0.25rem;}.css-19zsuqr{display:block;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}She knew the enormity of it. I could see she was a very bright young woman, and there wasn’t a whole lot that I could tell her that would be helpful other than self-serving for myself. I tried very, very hard to help put her at ease and to be as fair as I could with respect to any envy I might have felt — and by the way, I did. I mean, I’d be brain-dead if I didn’t.Ariana, you’ve said you a mini panic attack when you first met Rita on the shoot. How did you recover?DeBOSE I’m still recovering. I actually, in my own naïveté, hadn’t clocked that I was going to be in the same room with her. And then the moment came, and I was like, oh, God.MORENO She was like a little deer in the headlights. I decided to take her to lunch, and then realized how nervous she was. I thought, I really have to do my best to help her relax. What I said was, be your own Anita. Not knowing her well at the time, I didn’t realize that she could only be her own Anita.What’s your response to critics who say the movie shouldn’t be revived at all because it brings up stereotypes, or it’s not of our era in terms of its origin?MORENO It does not bring up stereotypes. That’s bull [expletive], pure and unadulterated bull [expletive].The first time I saw the movie I was so overcome. I started to cry at the mambo at the gym [scene]. I was sitting next to my daughter, and she said, “Mom, why are you crying? This is so joyous.” I said, because Steven got it right. Those shots were incredible, and he got the spirit of what the musical numbers were about.DeBOSE And that’s why we retell classics. That’s what makes them classic, the ability to be retold and reimagined. You give things historical context so that you can better understand the text, to make it tangible.MORENO That’s where Tony Kushner [the screenwriter] comes in. He brought in the social elements of something that wasn’t even addressed in the original. That doesn’t make that first effort lesser. It’s still an iconic film. But on the other hand, it is astonishing to me how unfleshed-out the [original] characters were. I don’t think that was deliberate. I think it’s how they [the original creators] saw it. What was it like having Sondheim around?DeBOSE He was present, but I actually didn’t have much one-on-one interaction with him. They sent notes through Steven Spielberg — SS2, as he fondly proclaimed himself. Sondheim was SS1, and Spielberg was SS2. So either Jeanine [Tesori, the supervising vocal producer] or SS2 would come in, and we would chat, and then we’d go again, and we’d continue going until SS1 was happy.He talked about color. I remember when we were recording the Anita section of the [“Tonight”] Quintet, he was like, listen to that [imitating spiraling music]. That’s the color you’re going for, and then let the vocal fly.MORENO And that’s [singing], “Anita’s going to get her kicks, tonight …”DeBOSE Yes. The last half of it, he was like, go for something completely different. He talked with many of us just about being confident: Own your vocal. Which, I’ll be honest, was never really my issue — being confident. It was just finding the right thing because this vocal can go in a lot of different directions. What color am I singing here? I believe I went for magenta.Moreno said she broke down crying when shooting Anita’s attack in the original film: “The wounds never really go away.”Erik Carter for The New York TimesThe scene when Anita goes to Valentina’s shop and is attacked by the Jets is one of the most emotional in the film. It is obviously so dark, and so many different themes come up — gender, race, class. How did you talk about or prepare for it?DeBOSE There was a rehearsal day, and we had an intimacy coordinator there.MORENO What the hell is that? I’ve never heard of this before. It’s fascinating to me.DeBOSE A person who makes sure that we’re all comfortable with what’s going on.MORENO It means you don’t touch certain places?DeBOSE Exactly. You don’t touch certain parts of the body unless it’s agreed upon. She was really helpful because the Jet boys were so nervous about having to do this. We’d been working together for so long at that point — there was real love amongst us, and they were all very afraid of hurting me. I was like, I’m fine. Remember, I’m not Ariana, I’m Anita right now. But I was very grateful for that rehearsal because it just set boundaries for all of us. It ended up being a really safe psychological experience. Granted, that experience has not left me. I don’t watch that scene when I’m viewing the film. I can hear it, but actually physically watching it, it makes me sick a little.MORENO Oh, that’s heartbreaking.DeBOSE It’s very intense because you have so many bodies on top of you with the impetus to hurt you, and even though it’s a simulated thing, your body doesn’t actually know the difference.MORENO And you know what? It isn’t just your body. Your brain and your heart — because that’s what made me end up in just hysterical tears when I was doing the scene, and they had to stop shooting because I couldn’t stop crying. The wounds never really go away.DeBOSE I think because it’s a musical, people don’t realize, sometimes, the depth of the material. And this character, whether it’s Rita’s incarnation or my incarnation, this [expletive] gets real. The amount of grief and the assault on her person, it’s hard to watch. It’s even harder to perform.I have tremendous respect for anyone who has played this role because you don’t actually understand until you’re in it — and out of it — just how far you have to go to create a moment with this particular woman. MORENO She’s so charming; she’s funny. She has opinions that she’s not afraid to voice. All of that fools you. You still have to play the wounds and the insults.DeBOSE And if it’s not making you uncomfortable as a viewer, I would say you need to go analyze some things in yourself.What do you feel you learned from playing Anita and from what she represents?MORENO For me, it was a revelation because I realized midway through the [first] film, that I actually found my role model at the age of something like 28, and it was Anita. I had never played a Hispanic woman who had that kind of dignity and the sense of self-respect, and fearless in terms of expressing what she needed to express.DeBOSE She’s taught me a lot about forgiveness. You take things personally in this industry, but it’s a healthier path to choose to forgive. And it’s not an easy path. I mean, me? I would have knocked the [expletive] out of Maria. That is the one moment in the piece, whether it’s onstage or film — I don’t know if that’s actually what would happen in the world. Because it’s very hard to make that choice when you are in that moment of grief.MORENO It’s not only forgiveness, as expressing how important a part love plays in one’s life. “When love comes so strong, there is no right or wrong.”DeBOSE That line — that’s what the whole moment’s about. No matter what happens, you can be so angry at someone and still love them very deeply. The love doesn’t die. It may transform. It may shift shapes. But there’s always love.Moreno and DeBose didn’t discuss Anita’s legacy but both found inspiration in the role.Erik Carter for The New York Times More

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      I Watched ‘Encanto’ With My Dad. It Brought Him Back Home.

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      The animated Disney movie is set in Colombia, where my father is from — a place he rarely talks about. Would he fall for the film?The first time I saw the teaser trailer for Disney’s “Encanto” — an animated musical set in Colombia — two feelings flooded me. First came a surge of excitement for what it could be. Then, almost instantly, a shift to the defensive. “They’d better not mess this up,” I thought.After “Narcos” hit Netflix in August 2015, glossing drug lords, the Medellín cartel and cocaine with a sheen of glamour, couples dressed for Halloween as Pablo Escobar and his wife, María Henao. Escobar’s mug shot and mustache were plastered onto canvas tote bags. Introducing myself as Colombian American became tinged with perceived intrigue — before “Narcos,” my peers may not have immediately associated Colombia with drug violence. Now, the country was a curiosity.But “Encanto” was a chance for a new generation to view Colombia in a fresh light.In October, I watched an early screening of “Encanto” for an article I was working on. Not long into the film — as towering wax palm trees filled the screen — my eyes glazed with tears. The filmmakers hadn’t messed it up. Directors Jared Bush and Byron Howard, it turns out, had a close relationship with the Colombian filmmakers Juan Rendon and Natalie Osma, with whom they traveled on a research trip to Colombia. A group of Latino Disney Animation employees called Familia shared their experiences and perspectives to help shape the film. Charise Castro Smith, who wrote the screenplay with Bush and is a co-director, is Cuban American.The movie captivated me, as someone who had grown up with my heritage held an arm’s length away from me. I knew where my father’s family came from — I had visited Colombia — but I always itched to know more. But what about my dad, who left home behind to build a new one?“Encanto” means “enchantment” or “spell” in Spanish, and the movie lives up to its name: Years ago, Alma Madrigal fled her home while escaping armed conflict. She saved her three infant children, Julieta, Pepa and Bruno, but lost her husband, Pedro. Devastated, Alma clung to the candle she was using to light her way, which became enchanted. Its magic imbues each member of the Madrigal family with a fantastical gift when they come of age — except for Julieta’s youngest daughter, Mirabel.Julieta can heal physical ailments with the food she cooks (often arepas de queso or buñuelos). Pepa’s moods influence the weather, and Bruno sees visions of the future. Isabela, one of Julieta’s two older daughters, makes flowers bloom; Luisa, her sister, has superhuman strength. Pepa’s three children each have a power, like talking to animals. And our protagonist, Mirabel? Well, she never got a gift.For me, as the only cousin in my family born outside of Colombia — and the only one not raised speaking Spanish — that resonated.My father, Francisco Zornosa, is from Cali; he emigrated to the United States when he was around my age, at 25. He was born a year after a five-decade-long armed conflict began in Colombia and grew up amid warfare between leftist guerrilla groups, right-wing paramilitaries and government forces. It’s an aspect of his childhood we’ve never really talked about.Laura Zornosa, left, and her father, Francisco, at the Castillo San Felipe de Barajas in Cartagena.Laura ZornosaI had just started college in 2016 when the peace agreement between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) was signed. Growing up, I was fascinated by the mysterious land where my dad was from, where my grandmother, aunt, uncle and cousins lived. But with my fair skin, red hair and mangled Spanish, I would stand out like a sore American thumb. It was deemed too dangerous for me to visit.Once the peace agreement was signed, though, my incessant wheedling began. Finally, my father caved: We embarked on a tour of his homeland. We stayed with my grandmother in Cali, nestled comfortably between the mountains. We drank in the sun in Cartagena, on the Caribbean coast. And we hiked through Cocora Valley in the Zona Cafetera, where the wax palm trees stretched impossibly tall, through the mist toward the sky.Walking out of the screening, I knew I had to show “Encanto” to my dad. “Look!” I wanted to tell him. “I recognize these trees! That animal! This pastry!” I wanted to hold up a shiny piece of him — of both of us — to be proud of.On Thanksgiving weekend, I dragged him to a theater. Maybe 20 minutes in, his glasses came off and the tissues came out. I had only ever seen him cry once, when his father died.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      This Monster's Not Eager, but His Coach Is Ready to Rumble

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      Steve is being pressed into service as a wrestler in training, but if he had a choice he’d prefer a rumba to a rumble.The lackluster computer-animated movie “Rumble” hinges on what should be a boisterous high concept: Colossal monsters, living peacefully among people, compete as pro wrestlers. Armed with human trainers and cheered by fiery hometown fans, these fantastical creatures ascend to sports superstardom.The story takes place in a wrestling-obsessed town called Stoker, where the tenacious teenager Winnie (voiced by Geraldine Viswanathan) vows to fill the void left by her late father, a renowned coach, and his title-holding titan, Rayburn. Seeking a new contender to represent the town, she sees promise in the pudgy, horned Steve (Will Arnett), an amateur who’s built his career on losing fixed matches. He also happens to be Rayburn’s son.Cycling through daddy issues, lazy quips and training montages, Winnie and Steve rev up to reclaim the glory of their fathers. But while their goal is clear enough, the director, Hamish Grieve, leaves their identities only half formed. Spunk and moxie define Winnie, yet for a central character, her thoughts, feelings and interests beyond motivating her desultory new pal are not. And once Steve reveals that his true passion isn’t wrestling but salsa dancing, it’s a wonder he doesn’t give up the Goliath game and join a dance troupe instead.For such a tactile aesthetic, the visual jokes are few, and of the movie’s WWE references, a fleeting voice cameo of Michael Buffer as an announcer is the only one that resonates. Low on inspiration and creative juice, “Rumble” would like to bring down the house but hardly causes a tremor.RumbleRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. Watch on Paramount+. More

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      North Korea Executes People for Watching K-Pop, Rights Group Says

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      At least seven people have been put to death in the past decade for watching or distributing K-pop videos, as the North cracks down on what its leader calls a “vicious cancer.”SEOUL — North Korea has publicly executed at least seven people in the past decade for watching or distributing K-pop videos from South Korea, as it cracks down on what its leader, Kim Jong-un, calls a “vicious cancer,” according to a human rights report released on Wednesday.​The group, ​ Transitional Justice Working Group, which is based in Seoul, interviewed 683 North Korean defectors since 2015 to help map places in the North where people were ​killed and buried​ in state-sanctioned public executions​. In its latest report, the group said it had documented 23 such executions under Mr. Kim’s government.Since taking power a decade ago, Mr. Kim has attacked South Korean entertainment — songs, movies and TV dramas — which, he says, corrupts North Koreans’ minds. Under a law adopted last December, those who distribute South Korean entertainment can face the death penalty. One tactic of Mr. Kim’s clampdown has been to create an atmosphere of terror by publicly executing people found guilty of watching or circulating the banned content.It remains impossible to find out the true scale of public executions in the isolated totalitarian state. But Transitional Justice Working Group focused on executions that have taken place since Mr. Kim ascended and on those that have occurred in Hyesan, a North Korean city and a major trading hub on the border with China.The North Korean town of Hyesan, near the border with China, is a gateway to smuggle in South Korean entertainment stored on USB sticks.Damir Sagolj/ReutersThousands of North Korean defectors to South Korea have lived in or have passed through Hyesan. The city of 200,000 people is the main gateway for outside information, including South Korean entertainment stored on computer memory sticks and bootlegged across the border from China. As such, Hyesan has become a focus in Mr. Kim’s efforts to stop the infiltration of K-pop.Of the seven executions for watching or distributing South Korean videos, all but one took place in Hyesan, the report says. The six in Hyesan occurred between 2012 and 2014. Citizens were mobilized to watch the grisly scenes, where officials called the condemned social evil before they each were put to death by a total of nine shots fired by three soldiers.“The families of those being executed were often forced to watch the execution,” the report said.Mr. Kim rules North Korea with the help of a personality cult and a state propaganda machine that controls nearly every aspect of life in the North. All radios and television sets are set to receive government broadcasts only. People are blocked from using the global internet. But some North Koreans still manage to secretly watch South Korea’s movies and TV dramas. As the North’s economy has floundered amid the pandemic and international sanctions, defections to the South have continued.North Korean defectors filling bottles with rice and USB sticks to toss into the sea toward their former homeland.Ed Jones/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe number of defectors arriving in South Korea has dropped sharply in recent years, however, so gathering fresh information on the North has become harder. Mr. Kim’s government has also further tightened border restrictions amid the pandemic.But Daily NK, a Seoul-based website that gathers news from clandestine sources in the North, reported that a villager and an army officer were publicly executed this year in towns deeper inland for distributing or possessing South Korean entertainment.And a few secretly filmed video clippings of public trials and executions have been smuggled out of North Korea. In footage shown on the South Korean TV station Channel A last year, a North Korean student was brought before a huge throng of people, including fellow students, and was condemned for possessing a USB stick that held “a movie and 75 songs from South Korea.”Shin Eun-ha told Channel A of a public execution she and her classmates had been made to watch from the front row when she was in second grade in North Korea. “The prisoner could hardly walk and had to be dragged out,” she said, adding, “I was so terrified that I could not dare look at a soldier in uniform for six months afterward.”Though Mr. Kim has described South Korean entertainment as a “vicious cancer,” North Koreans were able to watch the popular girl band Red Velvet and other South Korean stars who flew to Pyongyang in 2018 for two performances.Korea Pool via APMr. Kim has at times tried to appear more flexible toward outside culture​, allowing state television ​to play the theme song from “Rocky” and to show ​Mickey and Minnie Mouse characters ​onstage. He even invited South Korean K-pop stars to the capital, Pyongyang, in 2018, when he was engaged in summit diplomacy with President Moon Jae-in of South Korea. But at home, he has also escalated his crackdown on K-pop, especially after his talks with President Donald J. Trump collapsed in 2019 and the North’s economy has deteriorated in recent years.Amid growing international scrutiny of North Korea’s human rights abuses, the government appears to have taken steps to prevent information about its public executions from being leaked to the outside world.It no longer appears to execute prisoners at market places, moving the sites farther away from the border with China or town centers, and inspecting spectators more closely to prevent them from filming the executions, Transitional Justice Working Group said.Mr. Kim has also tried to create a public image as a benevolent leader by occasionally pardoning people condemned to death, especially when the size of an assembled crowd at a public trial is large, the group said.But K-pop seems to be an enemy that Mr. Kim cannot ignore.North Korea repeatedly lashes out against what it describes as an invasion of “anti-socialist and nonsocialist” influences from the South. It cracks down on South Korean slang spreading among its youths, including “oppa,” which became internationally known through Psy’s “Gangnam Style” song and video.The North’s state media has also warned that if left unchecked, K-pop’s influence would make North Korea “crumble like a damp wall.” More

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      ‘The Hand of God’ Review: A Portrait of the Cineaste as a Young Man

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      Paolo Sorrentino’s autobiographical drama about growing up in Naples is sensual, sad and occasionally sublime.What good are movies? According to one line of thinking cited in “The Hand of God,” they are useless except as a “distraction from reality,” something we need because “reality is lousy.”No argument here! I should note that those opinions are attributed to none other than Federico Fellini. It’s the mid-1980s, and he has come to Naples to cast his next film. We don’t see him onscreen, but his words reach the ears of Fabio Schisa (Filippo Scotti), the skinny, watchful teenager at the center of this coming-of-age story.It’s also the story of how a young filmmaker wrests his vocation from a reality that is by turns ridiculous, enchanted, bewildering and tragic. Lousy? Perhaps, but also for Paolo Sorrentino, the writer and director, a treasury of material to work with and through. Sorrentino — who in his previous features (“Il Divo,” “The Great Beauty”) and television series (“The Young Pope,” “The New Pope”) has swooped like a curious, keen-eyed bird through the social, political and sexual thickets of modern Italy — has now turned his attention to his own past.There are precedents, both in Italian cinema and in the work of some of Sorrentino’s contemporaries. “The Hand of God” keeps company with recent memoirish movies like Alfonso Cuarón’s “Roma,” Kenneth Branagh’s “Belfast” and Joanna Hogg’s two-part “Souvenir.” To keep it Fellini: If “The Great Beauty,” an Oscar winner in 2014, can be called Sorrentino’s “La Dolce Vita,” then this is his “Amarcord.”But every autobiographical film is, almost by definition, a genre unto itself: a layer cake of feeling, memory, imagination and score-settling for which no recipe exists. Fabio — who usually goes by the diminutive nickname Fabietto — never meets Fellini, but late in the movie, he encounters a lesser-known Italian director named Antonio Capuano (Ciro Capano) and begs him for advice. Stripping down for a late-night swim in the Bay of Naples, Capuano harangues his would-be protégé about the importance of courage, independence and originality in the pursuit of cinema. It’s all a bit abstract and rhetorical, or it would be if this particular piece of cinema were not so visibly and palpably full of those qualities.And much else besides. Do movies distract from the lousiness of reality or try to redeem it, alchemizing its awfulness into beauty? “The Hand of God” leans hard into the second possibility, a tendency it shares with Sorrentino’s other work. However sordid, sad or grotesque the raw material — addiction and Mafia violence (“The Consequences of Love”), rock-star middle age (“This Must Be the Place”), Silvio Berlusconi (“Loro”) — he is a compulsive, unabashed aestheticizer.“The Hand of God” begins with a ravishing aerial view of Naples, backlit by sunrise. The next shot is of a noisy, angry nighttime traffic jam, but this too becomes an occasion for delectation, as a beautiful woman steps out of a bus queue to speak with a gray-bearded gentleman in an antique car.The man (Enzo Decaro) may or may not be who he says he is — San Gennaro, the city’s patron saint — but the woman is absolutely Fabietto’s Aunt Patrizia (Luisa Ranieri). Her nephew regards her with an unsteady, adolescent mixture of lust and compassion. The movie shares his sentiments.The extended family they occupy is a noisy, caustic, sometimes violent clan. A genealogical chart is not supplied: The audience is tossed into the domestic scrum like a new spouse or a country cousin, to make sense of things as they happen. We are invited to a sprawling luncheon full of bad manners, brutal teasing and useless advice. Aunt Patrizia stretches out naked on the deck of a boat. A foul-tempered matriarch in a fur coat bites into a ball of mozzarella as if it were the apple in the Garden of Eden.Given this background, how could Fabietto not grow up to make movies? His nuclear family is equally chaotic, though less garishly dysfunctional than some of the collateral branches. His mother, Maria (the wonderful Teresa Saponangelo), is adept at juggling oranges and playing pranks. (One of them involves another Italian cinematic notable, Franco Zeffirelli, whose assistant Maria impersonates on the phone.) Her husband, Saverio (Toni Servillo, a fixture of the Sorrentino cinematic universe), works at the Bank of Naples, though he proudly calls himself a communist. As a matter of ideological principle, he refuses to buy a television with a remote control.Fabietto’s brother, Marchino (Marlon Joubert), is an aspiring actor until an audition with Fellini, who finds his face “too conventional.” Sorrentino shares Fellini’s taste for odd, sometimes grotesque human faces and physiques. His most Felliniesque quality, though, may be his commitment to emotional anarchy. Feelings don’t come in neat packages or move in straight lines. Anguish and amusement are neighbors, sometimes even synonyms. Delight swerves into pain. Sarcasm gives way suddenly to earnest sentiment.The disharmony in the Schisa household is comically banal — an all-but-unseen sister monopolizes the bathroom; an aristocratic landlady bangs on the ceiling with a broom — until Saverio’s infidelity cranks it up to melodrama. And then, almost exactly halfway through the film, something terrible happens, a hammer-blow of fate that transforms the family, Fabietto and “The Hand of God” itself.The title, by the way, refers not to theology but to the history of soccer. When Sorrentino’s Neapolitans are not bickering, gossiping or ogling one another, they are consumed with the question of whether the great Argentine midfielder Diego Maradona will come play for the city’s team. When he does, it seems like a miracle, and glimpses of him on the field or on television are like small eruptions of magic — especially the notorious hand-assisted goal in the 1986 World Cup that Maradona attributed to divine intervention.Fabietto is less a fairy-tale prince than an apprentice sorcerer. Scotti, graceful and alert, is a quiet presence but not a passive one. The shift in Fabietto’s perspective from no-longer-boy to almost-man is the subtlest achievement in a film that isn’t much interested in subtlety.A lot happens to him, some of it what you would expect from a movie about growing up. He makes a new friend (a smuggler named Armando, played with down-to-earth mischief by Biagio Manna). He loses his virginity. His experiences may be, to some degree, conventional, but Sorrentino refuses to treat anything as ordinary. His compositions are lush, sensual and strange. (The images are captured by the cinematographer Daria D’Antonio.) At times, it can seem like too much. At times, it is too much!But I wouldn’t say that this movie is a distraction from reality, any more than I would call it a work of realism. It’s a beautiful tautology: a true-to-life movie about a life made for movies.The Hand of GodRated R. Aunt Patrizia. In Italian, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’ at 20: When Wes Anderson Imagined New York

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      The film’s vision of the city is at once entirely made up and very real seeming, both dated and contemporary. But the movie couldn’t outrun current events.Wes Anderson’s sprawling comedy-drama “The Royal Tenenbaums,” released 20 years ago this month, tells the story of a family of famed child geniuses, the disappointments and neuroses that define their lives as adults and the estranged father whose (feigned) illness brings them back together, under one roof in Upper Manhattan. It’s Anderson’s only film to date shot entirely in and around New York City, his sole entry in the canon of Gotham cinema, which was so formative to his youth in the Southwest.“I wanted to live in New York when I was young,” Anderson, a Houston native, confessed to The New York Daily News in 2012. “So many books and plays and movies that I love were set in New York. It really gave me an idea of the city before I had even moved here.”But that wording — “an idea of the city” — is telling. Anderson wasn’t seeking the authenticity and verisimilitude of a native New Yorker (a Spike Lee or Martin Scorsese, for example); in fact, though “The Royal Tenenbaums” was shot on location, its settings are unrecognizable, and the places it name-checks leave Gothamites scratching their heads. The bulk of the action takes place in the shambling Tenenbaum home on “Archer Avenue,” though daughter Margot has “a private studio in Mockingbird Heights” and patriarch Royal has spent the past several decades at the “Lindbergh Palace Hotel.” A secondary character teaches at “Brooks College”; others travel via the “Green Line Bus” or the “22nd Avenue Express” train; mention is made of the “City Public Archives,” “Maddox Hill Cemetery,” “Little Tokyo,” “Kobe General Hospital,” “the Valenzuela Bridge” and, in a true feat of city-stretching ingenuity, “the 375th St. Y.”The result is a New York that blurs fact and fiction, a fantasy vision of the city, less reflective of the realities of urban life than the fanciful notions of them ingrained in Anderson’s sensibility. Many an observer has noted the resemblances between the Tenenbaum brood and the Glass family of J.D. Salinger’s short fiction — much of which initially appeared in The New Yorker, a publication whose wry, busy, detailed covers seem no small influence on Anderson’s idiosyncratic visual style. (His most recent film, “The French Dispatch,” takes the influence even further, unspooling like an issue of a New Yorker-style magazine.) Other literary influences from the city abound as well, including the colorful personalities of A.J. Liebling’s profiles, the strained family dynamics of John Cheever’s short stories, and the hotel life of Kay Thompson’s “Eloise” books. In a way, “The Royal Tenenbaums” is the inverse of many New York movies of the 1930s and 1940s — when on-location photography was so rare, and film production so centralized in Hollywood, that ex-New Yorker writers and designers recreated an idealized, fantasy vision of Gotham on backlots and soundstages clear across the country.Anderson was far from a tourist when he made “The Royal Tenenbaums”: after a bumpy migration from Texas to Los Angeles, he moved to Manhattan in 1999 and found it a better fit. (He currently lives in Paris.) Yet he maintained that apotheosized idea of the city, born from those formative years of consuming “Talk of the Town” items and witticisms from Algonquin alumni. “It’s an alternate universe,” the historian Mark Asch writes in his book “New York Movies,” explaining that it’s “familiar yet out of reach, like all the tattered books written by the Tenenbaums and dusty magazines featuring them on the cover.”The picture’s vague sense of geography extends to its historical timeliness. There are no contemporary references of note, and the costumes and cars are not of any specific era. The hotel where Royal first lives and then works feels transplanted from the 1940s (complete with multiple elevator operators), and the neighborhoods seem closer to the city of the ’70s than the 2000s — a bit trashy, decorated by graffiti, prowled by rusted-out gypsy cabs and thoroughbred mice. “Wes wanted it to be Nowheresville, New York, a kind of New York but not New York,” the production designer David Wasco explained to Newsday. He added that while the movie comes off as a valentine to New York, “that was not intentional. We went to the trouble to redesign the license plates and the street signs, which are variations on the old yellow street signs with the camel bump on them. He’s really specific about wanting those things.”The family home was a real residence on Convent Avenue in Hamilton Heights.CompassThe Tenenbaum house on Archer Avenue seems a bit otherworldly as well. Anderson spent months searching for the right location. “It needed to be a New York house that wasn’t stereotypical, and where you’d have a real strong sense of family history,” he told The New York Observer. Obviously, finding the kind of big, shambling, multilevel home he was looking for on the island of Manhattan was a big ask, but they finally found it in Hamilton Heights, specifically at 144th Street and Convent Avenue. Anderson was so in love with the house that he rewrote his script to better accommodate it, though contacting its owner for permission to shoot was, at first, difficult. The feat was ultimately accomplished by leaving a note on the door; the owners had been elusive because they had just purchased the vacant home, and had not yet begun their planned, and extensive, renovations. By the time Anderson and company rented it for six months of prep and shooting — performing many of the structural repairs themselves — the house had paid for itself.Yet for all of Anderson’s effort to place his film in a New York free of modern markers, one pang of recognition was unintended but unavoidable. Son Chas (Ben Stiller) is in the midst of a nervous breakdown following the death of his wife in a plane crash; he’s in a perpetual state of fear and paranoia, particularly about the safety of his sons. “It’s been a rough year, Dad,” he tells his father near the end of the film, following a particularly, terrifyingly close call.For audiences at the New York Film Festival, where “The Royal Tenenbaums” first unspooled in October 2001, Chas’s state of mind seemed undeniably, unnervingly contemporary.Jason Bailey is the author of the new book “Fun City Cinema: New York and the Movies That Made It,” a history of the city and movies about it. More

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      Sterlin Harjo Can Do a Lot More Than ‘Reservation Dogs’

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      The filmmaker directed “Love and Fury,” a Netflix documentary about Native American artists, before his hit Hulu series.Sterlin Harjo has had a year.In August, FX on Hulu released the series “Reservation Dogs,” the acclaimed dark comedy about four Native American teenagers in rural Oklahoma that Harjo created with Taika Waititi. The next month, Harjo presented a prize at the Emmy Awards alongside the show’s four young breakout stars. Two days before I talked to him, “Reservation Dogs” won the Gotham Award for short format breakout series. (Was he expecting it? “I was not. I would have had less wine.”)And to top it off, Netflix this month released “Love and Fury,” Harjo’s second documentary, about Native artists navigating their careers, both in the United States and abroad. What happens, the film asks, when they push Native art into a postcolonial world?The dancer Emily Johnson, as seen in Harjo’s “Love and Fury.”Netflix For roughly a year, Harjo and his crew followed more than 20 artists, few of whom were complete strangers: Members of the band Black Belt Eagle Scout, the recording project of Katherine Paul, sometimes stay with him in Tulsa, Okla., when they are on tour. Tommy Orange, the author of the acclaimed “There There,” asked Harjo to moderate an event he was speaking at. (Harjo then filmed the event for this documentary.)Harjo, of course, is a Native artist, too: The Seminole and Muscogee Creek filmmaker directed three features (“Four Sheets to the Wind,” “Barking Water” and “Mekko”) and a documentary (“This May Be the Last Time”) before brainstorming “Reservation Dogs” over tequilas with Waititi.These artists pass through one another’s orbits constantly, drawing closer and closer together. As he explained on a recent call, Harjo wanted to express that notion himself — but through the lens of community.Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.Why love and fury? How are those two concepts related?As artists, I think collectively we have all of these different experiences and these different types of survival that we come from. And you can take that survival, you can take any sort of oppression, and feel bitter and feel like things are hopeless. Because some of us are displaced, some of us have lost our language, a lot of us have, there’s a lot of abuse in boarding schools, a lot of things that happened throughout history. Not just Western expansion. It was also a lot of things, a lot of U.S. policies, that really did oppress our people.And so you can take that and convert that into feeling bitter and angry. Or you can take that anger and turn it into love and creation. And I think that’s what each of these artists do. All of them are connected to community, all of them have community-driven work. And they take this history and try to make sense of it and express themselves in this way that people can connect to. And I think that that is love.Devery Jacobs, left, and Paulina Alexis in “Reservation Dogs,” which Harjo created with Taika Waititi.Shane Brown/FXThe last film you made was in 2015. Does it feel different this time around, after “Reservation Dogs”?I made this before “Reservation Dogs.” So I was making this very low-budget, and I just really wanted to tell a story that needed to be told. Contemporary Native art has not been looked at and presented in a way that I felt like it should be. There’s such a dated view of what Native art is in the world. I’m friends with all of these artists, and I’ve just known artists forever. It felt like an opportunity to show this world that hasn’t been seen and also help reframe Native art.I wanted it to organically expand. So if I’m filming with one artist and then I meet a couple more artists, I would follow them and go do stuff with them.I’ve done many documentaries where I do the sit-down interview with slow motion B-roll over it, and that’s great. But I wanted to do something different. I purposely didn’t do a lot of sit-down interviews. I was looking at a lot of Les Blank films, specifically, “A Poem Is a Naked Person,” about [the musician-songwriter] Leon Russell. But you watch the film, and it’s really about this time period [the early 1970s].We watched this documentary called “Heartworn Highways” that’s about Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt, Steve Earle, back in the ’70s. It was what it sounds like: It’s a visual document of what was happening. That’s what I wanted to do with this: film people doing their thing.Did you go into this with specific people you knew you were going to follow?Yeah, originally it was [the singer] Micah P. Hinson, [the interdisciplinary artist] Cannupa Hanska Luger, [the painter] Haley Greenfeather English and my friend Penny Pitchlynn, who has the band Labrys. Penny’s tour didn’t happen, so I didn’t end up going with her on tour. She’s still on the film, but [the dancer] Emily Johnson becomes a bigger part of the documentary. And it was really following them, and then organically letting it expand with other people.I wanted to show this community: how everyone’s connected in this Native art world. If you look at “Reservation Dogs,” it’s similar; it’s about a community. I’m really interested in community-driven filmmaking and storytelling.You’ve now made three features and two documentaries. Is there as much room for artistic freedom with documentaries as there is with a feature film?There’s not, but I think it’s just a different way of telling a story; I really like the boundaries that you have with documentary. With “Love and Fury,” I set up these rules [for] each person on the camera, including myself. I said, “Act like you’re the only person in the room getting footage, like it’s 1970 and we only have one camera.” If you don’t get it, no one will.We all shot with zoom lenses. So instead of cutting and reframing, we could zoom in to do close-ups or zoom out for wides. The idea was, act like we’re not editing. So don’t do a fast zoom; let it be fluid so I can keep it in the film. I love working that way because it’s a challenge. And it’s very different from the control you have on a narrative. There’s something in that challenge that I really like as a storyteller.What do you think the documentary itself, and these artists, have to say about endurance?All of these artists have been working for so many years. And we’re in a time period right now, myself included, where people want to pay attention to Native art and Native stories, and there’s talk of inclusion and diversity. I think that they all just kept working, even though there was no money and no way of guaranteeing they would have careers. And the fact that they kept pushing and keep pushing to this day is just a testament to their endurance, but also their people’s endurance. I think that that’s what drives us: our people survived a lot of things, and our endurance in this art world is connected to that. More

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      National Film Registry Adds 25 New Films, Including 'Return of the Jedi'

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      Those movies, along with “Selena,” “Wall-E” and “A Nightmare on Elm Street” are among 25 selected by the Librarian of Congress.It’s not just Gollum who thinks a certain ring is precious.The first in Peter Jackson’s epic trilogy of films based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels, “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring” (2001), is among the motion pictures that have been chosen for preservation this year on the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry. Also being added are the final installment in another beloved trilogy, “Star Wars: Episode VI — Return of the Jedi,” and the disarmingly sweet Pixar comedy “Wall-E.”On Tuesday, the library plans to make its annual announcement that 25 more films, dating from 1902 to 2008, will be honored for their historical and cultural significance and added to the registry, helping to preserve them for future generations.The selection of “Return of the Jedi” (1983) is the culmination of a yearslong campaign by “Star Wars” fans to add the film to the registry. Hispanic lawmakers and experts earlier this year had also pushed for the inclusion of “Selena,” Gregory Nava’s 1997 biopic of the Tejano singer Selena Quintanilla-Pérez that starred Jennifer Lopez in her first major film role. Supporters hoped that choosing it could serve as an example that would help open more doors for Latinos in movies and television.A group of notable films are also among the selections: “Sounder,” Martin Ritt’s 1972 drama about a family of Black sharecroppers in 1930s Louisiana that earned Cicely Tyson an Oscar nomination for best actress; “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” Wes Craven’s 1984 horror classic that starred Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger; and “Wall-E,” Andrew Stanton’s 2008 Pixar sci-fi film about the last robot left on Earth, which won an Oscar for best animated feature.This year’s class also includes a pair of cult favorites: “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?,” Robert Aldrich’s 1962 thriller about an aging child star (Bette Davis) left to care for her sister (Joan Crawford), and “Pink Flamingos,” John Waters’s 1972 underground comedy starring Divine.The library noted that the lineup includes a number of films by influential directors of color, among them “The Watermelon Woman” (1996), the first feature by Cheryl Dunye, who also starred as a young Black lesbian struggling to make a documentary about a beautiful actress; “Cooley High” (1975), Michael Schultz’s comedy about Black high school seniors in 1960s Chicago; and “Chicana” (1979), Sylvia Morales’s 22-minute documentary tracing the history of Chicana and Mexican women.Three documentaries that address racially motivated violence against people of color have also been selected: “The Murder of Fred Hampton” (1971), Howard Alk and Mike Gray’s look at the leader of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party (Hampton was also the subject of a studio drama this year, “Judas and the Black Messiah”); “Who Killed Vincent Chin?” (1987), Christine Choy and Renee Tajima-Peña’s examination of the fatal beating of a young Chinese American engineer by two white men in Detroit; and “Requiem-29” (1970), David Garcia’s chronicle of a brutal police attack on Chicano protesters in Los Angeles in 1970 that left the journalist Ruben Salazar dead.The lineup also honors several silent films that challenged stereotypes, including the oldest film in this year’s class, “Ringling Brothers Parade Film” (1902), a three-minute recording of a circus parade in Indianapolis that also shows a prosperous northern Black community. “The Flying Ace” (1926) is an aviation romance with an all-Black cast, and “Hellbound Train” (1930), made by the Black evangelical couple James and Eloyce Gist, was played in churches to scare sinners straight.The Library of Congress said in a statement that these additions bring the total number of titles on its registry to 825, chosen “because of their cultural, historic or aesthetic importance to preserve the nation’s film heritage.” Movies must be at least 10 years old to be eligible, and are picked by Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress, after consulting with members of the National Film Preservation Board and other specialists. The library also allows the public to submit nominations at its website. More than 6,100 films were nominated this year, with the highest number of votes going to “Return of the Jedi.”A television special, featuring several of these films and a conversation between Hayden and the film historian Jacqueline Stewart, will be shown Friday on TCM.Here is the complete list of the 25 movies chosen for the National Film Registry:1. “Ringling Brothers Parade Film” (1902)2. “Jubilo” (1919)3. “The Flying Ace” (1926)4. “Hellbound Train” (1930)5. “Flowers and Trees” (1932)6. “Strangers on a Train” (1951)7. “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” (1962)8. “Evergreen” (1965)9. “Requiem-29” (1970)10. “The Murder of Fred Hampton” (1971)11. “Pink Flamingos” (1972)12. “Sounder” (1972)13. “The Long Goodbye” (1973)14. “Cooley High” (1975)15. “Richard Pryor: Live in Concert” (1979)16. “Chicana” (1979)17. “The Wobblies” (1979)18. “Star Wars: Episode VI — Return of the Jedi” (1983)19. “A Nightmare on Elm Street” (1984)20. “Stop Making Sense” (1984)21. “Who Killed Vincent Chin?” (1987)22. “The Watermelon Woman” (1996)23. “Selena” (1997)24. “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring” (2001)25. “Wall-E” (2008) More