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      Brian Goldner, Hasbro Executive With Hollywood Vision, Dies at 58

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      He turned a traditional maker of toys and games into an entertainment company with its own TV and movie studio.Brian Goldner, who transformed Hasbro, a traditional maker of toys and games, by rethinking its many brands as properties that could become films, television series and online games, died on Monday at his home in Barrington, R.I. He was 58.Hasbro announced the death but did not give a cause. Mr. Goldner received a diagnosis of prostate cancer in 2014 and took a leave of absence from the company the day before he died.Mr. Goldner, who was named Hasbro’s president in 2008, oversaw a company whose brands include My Little Pony, Monopoly, Dungeons & Dragons, Power Rangers and Nerf.One of his most notable successes was persuading Hollywood executives that Hasbro toys and action figures like Transformers and G.I. Joe were as film-worthy as Batman or Spider-Man.“We had relegated these brands to an experience that was limited to the playroom floor or the kitchen table,” Mr. Goldner told The New York Times in 2009. What he envisioned for the company was something more expansive.The Transformers — toy robots that can turn into vehicles or beasts, which Hasbro introduced in 1984 — were adapted into six big-budget movies that have grossed about $5 billion worldwide since the release of “Transformers” in 2007. Mr. Goldner was an executive producer on all those films and a producer on two G.I. Joe movies.Since 2007, Optimus Prime and the other Transformers, which began life as Hasbro action figures, have starred in six big-budget movies that have grossed about $5 billion worldwide.HasbroTo coincide with the opening of “Transformers: Age of Extinction” (2014), the fourth film in the franchise, he challenged his design team to recapture the toys’ original magic by making them less complex so that they could transform with the push of a button rather than in a dozen steps.“We’ve made incredibly sophisticated robots, but it can be like a 1,000-piece puzzle,” he told The Times in 2014.For much of his time at the company, which is based in Pawtucket, R.I., Mr. Goldner espoused a brand blueprint that reimagined Hasbro as a play and entertainment company.“He came into a traditional toy company that was making stuff, and he believed we weren’t in the business of making things but in the business of storytelling,” Rich Stoddart, the interim chief executive of Hasbro, said in a phone interview.But, he added, Mr. Goldner encountered some skepticism with his plans.“Some people said, ‘Yeah, yeah, it sounds nice,’” Mr. Stoddart said, but Mr. Goldner had to keep pushing to bring his vision to reality. “He didn’t waver, because he believed to his toes that it was the right strategy.”Mr. Goldner’s effort to tell stories using Hasbro brands went even further in 2019 with the $3.8 billion acquisition of Entertainment One, a Canadian production studio that is also known by the shorthand name eOne. At the time, it was producing the popular children’s series “Peppa Pig” and “PJ Masks.”The purchase of eOne gave Hasbro the ability to produce its own programming, rather than make it only in partnership with Hollywood studios, which it had done with its Transformers and G.I. Joe movies as well as with its movie “Battleship” (2012). The film was part of an ultimately failed deal with Universal Pictures that was to have included movies based on the games Monopoly and Candy Land.“What we’ve found is that as all of the big studios have streaming services, they are increasingly holding on to their own I.P.,” Mr. Goldner told CNBC this year, referring to intellectual property. “Therefore, it gives us the opportunity as an independent to go out and present world-class, powerful brand I.P. to these streaming services like Netflix, Apple, Amazon and several others who used to have access to other people’s content and are now looking for great brands.”Mr. Goldner, left, and Adam Goldman, the president of Paramount Pictures, at the premiere of the movie “G.I. Joe: Retaliation” in Los Angeles in 2013.Kevin Winter/Getty ImagesBetween 2022 and 2023, he added, eOne would produce two to three movies and three or four streamed programs every year.Among the projects in development are Power Rangers and Dungeons & Dragons films and TV series based on Transformers and the board games Risk and Clue. The animated film “My Little Pony: A New Generation,” based on that Hasbro line of toys, had its premiere on Netflix last month.Eric Handler, an analyst at the equity trading firm MKM Partners, said by phone that Mr. Goldner had taken “the Disney approach to creating a virtuous circle and monetizing brands beyond the toy aisle.”He added: “Toys are still the core of Hasbro’s business, at least for now. But Brian recognized that you can do so much more with its brands and build them across franchises that cut across toys, consumer product licensing, movies, TV shows and theme park attractions.”Under Mr. Goldner, Hasbro also became a toy and game licensee for the Walt Disney Company’s Marvel universe of characters, including Iron Man and Spider-Man, and continued its licensing of “Star Wars” characters, which began in the 1970s.Brian David Goldner was born on April 21, 1963, in Huntington, N.Y., on Long Island. His mother, Marjorie (Meyer) Goldner, was an investment adviser. His father, Norman, worked at Eaton, a power management company.After graduating from Dartmouth College in 1985 with a bachelor’s degree in government, Mr. Goldner was hired as a marketing assistant at a health care company. He then worked at the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, where he rose to director in charge of entertainment before leaving to become an executive vice president of Bandai America, a subsidiary of a Japanese toy company.He became chief operating office of Bandai but left in 2000 to join Hasbro as executive vice president and chief operating officer of its Tiger Electronics subsidiary, which makes the Furby robotic toy and many other products. He climbed quickly, becoming Hasbro’s chief operating officer in 2006. The success of the first “Transformers” movie helped lead to Mr. Goldner’s appointment in 2008 as president and chief executive. He was named chairman in 2015.He is survived by his wife, Barbara (Genick) Goldner; their daughter, Brooke Goldner; his mother; and a brother, Bradford. A son, Brandon, died of a heroin overdose in 2015.In 2018, Hasbro acquired the Power Rangers television and toy brand (originally the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers) from the billionaire Haim Saban for $522 million. For Mr. Goldner, it was a reunion: He had worked with Mr. Saban when Bandai had been the Power Rangers’ global master toy licensee.“From time to time,” Mr. Saban said when the acquisition was announced, “Brian would say to me, ‘So when are you coming to Hasbro?’”It took a while, but Mr. Goldner finally added the Power Rangers to Hasbro’s ever-widening constellation of merchandising, television and movies. More

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      Five Horror Films to Stream Now

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      The month’s picks include a contagion film, an ’80s throwback, an unnerving tale of siblings, a faux documentary and a slow-burn thriller.Halloween is around the corner and already I’m up to my eye sockets in horror, whether it’s the marquee monster “Halloween Kills” or the daredevil Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, which runs through Oct. 21. So to maximize your movie-watching hours this witching season, three of this month’s picks clock in at no longer than 90 minutes. You’re welcome, boo.‘Hall’Rent or buy on Amazon.This taut Canadian horror-thriller, about hotel guests attacked by a deadly virus, never mentions Covid. But — and maybe this is the fate of contagion films now — it’s hard to read a movie about viral spread that turns people into gasping ghouls as being about anything else.The film opens on Naomi (Yumiko Shaku), a pregnant woman on the run from her husband in Japan, sitting in a hotel hallway with other people gulping for air. She crosses paths with Val (Carolina Bartczak), a mom whose plan to take her daughter and escape her abusive husband gets a little easier when he turns into a weak, wheezing monster. Turns out it’s no conspiracy theory: The outbreak has sinister origins.I don’t want to say more, because in just 79 minutes the director Francesco Giannini, in his solo feature debut, fronts his film with strong central female characters and packs it with ferocious twists.It’s too early to tell to what extent coronavirus horror movies will influence horror. “Hall” and the demonic Zoom-call picture “Host” — the scariest movie ever, according to a new study — makes me think it will. The jury’s out on “Corona Zombies.”‘Censor’Stream it on Hulu.You don’t need to remember the 1980s to appreciate Prano Bailey-Bond’s creeping-dread drama, her feature debut about the Video Nasties scare in Britain. The honest-to-God moral panic swept the country, leading to the banning of 72 films.Enid (Niamh Algar) spends her days watching extreme movies, not for pleasure but for the British government. She’s a censor and it’s the 1980s, which means it’s her job under a Thatcher-era law to cut or ban films she considers beyond the pale.But an emotionally taxing job isn’t a great fit for Enid, who’s struggling to cope with the disappearance of her sister, Nina (Amelie Child Villiers), when they were kids. Enid thinks Nina is still alive, a conviction that gains traction when Enid sees an actress in a movie who could pass for her grown sister. As fact, fiction and her horror movie assignments collide, Enid’s grasp on reality takes a bloody, surreal turn.The film is an 84-minute jackpot of VHS-age style, from Annika Summerson’s gritty cinematography to Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch’s pulsing score. Even better, as an eerie exploration of a woman’s emotional unraveling, it’s a story of heartfelt substance.‘Woe’Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.Charlie (Adam Halferty) just wants the world outside his house — his dead father’s house, actually — to go away. He ignores his sister, Betty (Jessie Rabideau), when she shows up at the front door with her fiancé, Benjamin (Ryan Kattner) and a plan to sell their father’s old Crown Victoria, the one in which he took his life.But Charlie does pay attention to the strange letters slipped under his door that lead him to his Uncle Pete (James Russo), who Charlie thought was dead. Even weirder is Pete’s message to his nephew: “This thing is going to destroy you just like it did your father.”What does it mean to let go of grief, and what if grief won’t let you go? What if grief is a monstrous figure in a black robe who watches you with red eyes? Those are the questions that in 85 weird minutes consume Matthew Goodhue’s deeply unnerving movie about siblings and memory. This is compact, intense and affecting horror storytelling. Too bad the bumbling Benjamin elbows his way to the front of the finale.‘The Medium’Stream it on Shudder.The horror faux-documentary has fallen out of favor since the found-footage golden age of the ’90s. That’s a shame, because a fictional scary story told through the conventions of nonfiction filmmaking can be, like “Hell House LLC,” extra terrifying.Here to fill that gap is this spooky Thai film directed by Banjong Pisanthanakun. It follows a film crew traveling to a rural village to document Nim (Sawanee Utoomma), a female shaman whose body hosts a good spirit worshiped by locals.The crew members start by shooting beautiful scenes of religious ceremonies, but things take a dark turn when they catch Nim’s niece Mink (Narilya Gulmongkolpech) attacking people and spontaneously bleeding. That’s when Nim realizes the source of her niece’s extreme behavior isn’t defiance. It’s demonic.This is a film that simmers, a welcome relief from the tendency to go big with stories that fuse religious belief, family bonds and the supernatural. At over two hours, it eventually overstays its welcome, finishing with excessive chaos. But the final scene, just an interview with Nim, is chilling.‘The Secret of Sinchanee’Rent or buy it on Vudu.When police find Will (Emmett Spriggs) hiding at his grandfather’s house the morning after his mother and sister are murdered, it’s clear something terrible also happened to the terrified young boy. Why did Will look into the police-station security camera and say “spirit of death” in Mohican? And who was the Native American man accompanying him through the snowy woods that night?Fast forward and the grown Will (the writer-director Steven Grayhm) returns to his childhood home after his father’s death. When homicide detectives (Nate Boyer and Tamara Austin) come to town to look into a series of murders, Will’s past starts to manifest itself in ways no human investigator stands a chance of conquering.Despite a title that makes it sound like the Hardy Boys are on the case, Grayhm’s feature debut is a slow-burn thriller that deftly weaves issues of mental illness and family traumas into a cautionary tale set on sacred land. Logan Fulton, the director of photography, makes rural Massachusetts look simultaneously like a winter wonderland and a hellscape. More

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      Haile Gerima Is Having a Hollywood Moment. It’s Left Him Conflicted.

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      The director, an eminence of American and African indie cinema, is being recognized by the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures and Netflix. But he has long rejected the industry.Haile Gerima doesn’t hold back when it comes to his thoughts on Hollywood. The power games of movie producers and distributors are “anti-cinema,” he put it recently. The three-act structure is akin to “fascism” — it “numbs, makes stories toothless.” And Hollywood cinema is like the “hydrogen bomb.”For decades, Gerima, the 75-year-old Ethiopian filmmaker, has blazed a trail outside of the Hollywood system, building a legacy that looms large over American and African independent cinema.But as he spoke with me recently on a video call from his studio in Washington, D.C., Gerima found himself at an unexpected juncture: He was about to travel to Los Angeles, where he would receive the inaugural Vantage Award at the opening gala of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, which is also screening a retrospective of his work this month. A new 4K restoration of his 1993 classic, “Sankofa,” debuted on Netflix last month.After 50 years, Hollywood has finally come calling. “I’m going with a lump in my throat,” Gerima said with his typical candor. “This is an industry I have no relationship with, no trust in, no desire to be a part of.”Gerima tends to speak directly and without euphemism, his words propelled by the force of his conviction. The filmmaker has been at loggerheads with the American film industry since the 1970s, when he was a student at the University of California, Los Angeles. There, he was part of what came to be known as the L.A. Rebellion — a loose collective of African and African American filmmakers, including Charles Burnett (“Killer of Sheep”), Julie Dash (“Daughters of the Dust”), Larry Clark (“Tamu”) and others, who challenged the mainstream cinematic idiom.Gerima’s first project in film school was a short commercial called “Death of Tarzan.” An exorcism of Hollywood’s colonial fantasies, it provoked a response from a classmate that Gerima still remembers fondly: “Thank you, Gerima, for killing that diaper-wearing imperialist!”The eight features he has since directed bristle with the same impulse for liberation, employing nonlinear narratives and jagged audiovisual experiments to paint rousing portraits of Black and Pan-African resistance. In a phone interview, Burnett described Gerima’s work as coursing with emotion: “People have plots and things, but he has energy, real energy. That’s what characterizes his films.”The stark, black-and-white “Bush Mama” (1975) charts the radicalization of a woman in Los Angeles as she navigates poverty and the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of welfare. “Ashes and Embers” (1982) — which opens with the protagonist driving into Los Angeles with dreams of Hollywood before being abruptly stopped by the police — traces the gradual disillusionment of a Black Vietnam War veteran. In “Sankofa,” one of Gerima’s most acclaimed films, an African American model is transported back in time to a plantation, where she’s caught up in a slave rebellion. Other films, like “Harvest: 3,000 Years” (1976) and “Teza” (2008), explore the political history of Gerima’s native Ethiopia.Nick Medley and  Alexandra Duah in “Sankofa,” which has been restored and is now available on Netflix.Mypheduh FilmsFor the filmmaker and his wife and producing partner, Shirikiana Aina, these visions of fierce Black independence are as much a matter of life as art. Most of Gerima’s movies have been produced and distributed by the couple’s company, Mypheduh Films, which derives its name from an ancient Ethiopian word meaning “protector of culture.” Mypheduh’s offices are housed in Sankofa, a bookstore and Pan-African cultural center across the street from Howard University, where Gerima taught filmmaking for over 40 years. This little pocket of Washington is Gerima’s empire — or his “liberated territory,” as he likes to call it.“When I think of Haile’s cinema, I think of the cinema of the maroon,” Aboubakar Sanogo, a friend of Gerima’s and a scholar of African cinema at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, said in an interview, invoking a term for runaway slaves who formed their own independent settlements. “It’s very much a cinema of freedom. Hollywood is the plantation from which he has escaped.”If Gerima is now ready to dance with the academy (which, incidentally, has never awarded a best director Oscar to a Black filmmaker), it’s because of the involvement of a kindred soul: Ava DuVernay.The “Selma” filmmaker, who co-chaired the Academy Museum’s opening gala, has been the driving force behind the Haile-ssance of 2021. Array, DuVernay’s distribution and advocacy collective, spearheaded the restoration of “Sankofa.” The company also rereleased “Ashes and Embers” on Netflix in 2016, in addition to distributing “Residue,” the debut feature by Gerima’s son Merawi, last year.Speaking by phone, DuVernay said that in collaborating with Gerima, she felt she had come full circle: Years ago, she modeled Array on the example set by Gerima and Aina’s grass-roots distribution initiatives.“I was very influenced by this idea that your film is an extension of you, and it does not have to be given away to someone else to share with the world,” DuVernay said. “The self-determination of self-distribution, that was a radical idea to me. I didn’t have to go around begging studios — I could make my film and be in conversation with an audience independently.”It was a strategy Gerima and Aina forged during the initial release of “Sankofa.” The film gives galvanizing form to an idea that courses through all of Gerima’s work: that Africans are not the victims of history, but its heroes. “I always felt that slavery is not about brutal white people,” he said. “Slavery is about Black Africans refusing to be slaves. The consequences of that cannot be the dominant aspect of a film; otherwise, you participate in creating Hollywood victims.”But getting this film — born of unprecedented co-productions with Ghana, Burkina Faso and other African countries — seen by Black audiences in America required its own kind of fearless independence. When a well-received premiere at the 1993 Berlin International Film Festival did not lead to any American distribution deals, Gerima and Aina did what they knew best: They turned to their community.Gerima’s ideas about self-distribution influenced Ava DuVernay and other filmmakers. Michael Tyrone Delaney for The New York TimesThey rented a local cinema in Washington, and held screenings and meetings to spread the word. The response was overwhelming: The theater was packed for 11 weeks, and soon they were raising money for a second print to show in Baltimore, where it ran for 21 weeks. As community and cultural groups started reaching out from Illinois, Kansas, Arkansas, California and elsewhere, Gerima and Aina slowly established what they call the “Sankofa family.”“They were our airport in every state,” Gerima said. “Underclass Black people put this movie on the map of the world.”Now, nearly 30 years later, a pristine restoration of “Sankofa” is streaming on Netflix in multiple countries. There’s something poetic about the movie introducing new audiences to Gerima’s legacy: Its title derives from a Ghanaian term that translates loosely to “retrieving the past while going toward the future.”The phrase was on my mind as I spoke with Gerima. He was in his editing “cave,” as he described it, and a picture of his father was on the computer screen behind him, the image zoomed into the man’s ear, as if he were listening in. A writer of political plays, Gerima’s father figures prominently in “Black Lions, Roman Wolves,” a documentary about the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 that the filmmaker has been editing throughout the pandemic. Gerima said it’s been stuck in postproduction because of “surrealistic” negotiations with Istituto Luce Cinecittà, Italy’s state-owned film company, over newsreel footage from the war.He recalled that when he premiered “Adwa” — his documentary about the 1896 victory of Ethiopian forces against Italian invaders — at the Venice Film Festival in 1999, the press had criticized Istituto Luce for not participating in the production. “So they wrote me a letter saying, ‘In your next film, we will participate.’ But every time a bureaucrat changes, the policy changes. And I have to start the A-B-C-D of everything again.”It is experiences like these that make him wary of institutional support. “I don’t trust eruptive social discourse,” he said. “The well-meaning people at the Academy Museum — what happens when they are not there anymore? Who comes in? And what happens to the inclusiveness idea, then? This is the anxiety I have.”Aina, who joined us for the tail end of our interview, seemed more cautiously optimistic as she spoke of the museum’s Vantage Award. “I hope that it means that our work can get a little easier,” she said simply. “We just want to be able to have the capacity to make our movies, and to leave something in place that future filmmakers can incorporate into their new visions.” More

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      The Velvet Underground Meets Its Match in Todd Haynes

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      In the director’s hands, music subjects are as much about their cultural moment as about their sound — a good description of the band led by Lou Reed.Todd Haynes said his music-related films are really about how “the artist, or the genre of music, changes things or reflects changes in the culture.”By Mark Sommerfeld For The New York TimesTodd Haynes’s new documentary, “The Velvet Underground,” summons that band’s essence by being a feast for … the eyes. The screen is almost constantly split into self-contained images that are in conversation with each other, at times creating a dizzying sensory overload. Some of the most striking scenes use images shot by Andy Warhol, who was a crucial presence in the band’s life and art.“We licensed two and a half hours of moving images for a two-hour-long movie,” Haynes said, laughing, “and I think 45 minutes of that is probably Warhol movies alone.”Evoking a sound world by relying heavily on visuals might feel counterintuitive, but Haynes, 60, has never followed the predictable path. His 1991 feature debut, “Poison,” was a linchpin of that era’s New Queer Cinema movement, and since then he has maintained a stubbornly independent streak, from the prescient psychological horror of “Safe” (1995) to the lush lesbian romanticism of “Carol” (2015).Haynes’s queering is particularly effective in music-centric movies, a field that has often been dominated by a straight-male point of view.He burst on the scene in 1987 with the 43-minute-long biopic “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story,” which was cast with dolls. In 2007 he made “I’m Not There,” with six actors, including Cate Blanchett, playing Bob Dylan, or at least versions of Dylan. Even Haynes’s contribution to the HBO omnibus “Six by Sondheim” (2013) departed from convention: Whereas an older female performer usually handles the “Follies” number “I’m Still Here,” he had the former Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker croon it to a dimly lit cabaret full of women, a neat reversal of the male gaze.“The kinds of subjects I want to make films about are not just because it’s music I love,” Haynes said. “They’re about cultural moments where the artist, or the genre of music, changes things or reflects changes in the culture. Or they set up an example of a unique — and usually in my mind radical — experiment where the artist succeeds in playing around with notions of identity through music and through performance.”The Velvet Underground members John Cale, left, Sterling Morrison and Lou Reed in a scene from the documentary.  Nat Finkelstein/Apple TV+The Velvet Underground, the wildly influential 1960s-70s quartet led by Lou Reed, is a perfect illustration of that confluence. The problem is that unlike, say, the Beatles, the band did not leave much footage behind. Haynes turned that handicap into an artistic asset by zooming out instead of in. “I immediately made a decision that I wanted to focus on the time and place in New York City,” he said.The musicians had all been drawn into Warhol’s orbit early on, so Haynes talked to insightful members of the artist’s circle, like the actress Mary Woronov and the critic Amy Taubin. Tellingly, one of the most compelling witnesses is Jonas Mekas, the curator and experimental filmmaker who was interviewed shortly before his death in 2019.Haynes said that with his music-related projects, “I’m always trying to find the cinematic parallels or stylistic traditions that are relevant either to the time or to the spirit, the ethos of the music. And in this documentary I had handed to me, basically on a platter, this avant-garde cinema, which is so intrinsically bound up in the story of the Velvet Underground.”This approach has been a hallmark of Haynes’s music work. “He’s not looking at different mediums as separate entities but trying to integrate them together and create this synthesis of music and art and philosophy,” said Michael Stipe, the former R.E.M. frontman who was an executive producer on “Velvet Goldmine,” Haynes’s 1998 feature about the glam-rock scene. “Because at the end of the day, really, he’s a philosopher,” Stipe continued.The Velvet Underground’s John Cale — who participated in the movie along with his bandmate Maureen Tucker — was familiar with the director’s work, and trusted the band’s legacy would be in the right hands. “I knew if anyone could pull together the historical artifacts and make them come to life, it was Todd,” Cale said in an email. “His ability to pull emotion from stills and ephemera is further testament to his true understanding of who we were and what we wanted to leave in this world.” (The band’s third surviving member, Doug Yule, declined to take part in the film.)Cale’s reference to emotion touches on an important Haynes trait. In interviews, the director speaks in heady, paragraph-long sentences, which might suggest an abstract, perhaps detached body of work. But his formally rigorous films are roiled by tempestuous feelings and emotions. If “Superstar” — which cannot be shown commercially because of a cease-and-desist order by the music rights’ holders — has a cult following, it is not because of its gimmick but because it is so unexpectedly affecting.On that project, “I was thinking about how to make a film that would follow narrative conventions so closely that an audience would find itself caught up emotionally,” Haynes said. “But it wouldn’t be because an actor is doing those things — it would be a doll.”Jonathan Rhys Meyers in “Velvet Goldmine,” one of several music-centric films Haynes has made.Peter Mountain/Miramax FilmsHe has explored the formation (and transformation) of identity in his music-related work, but also fandom and its attendant heightened expectations. Haynes has always been very conscious of such hopes — especially when they are based on gender and sexuality, an area in which rock has been simultaneously groundbreaking and retrograde.Maybe that’s why the musicians in Haynes’s movies draw heated responses from real-life viewers and other characters. The Carpenters were still widely derided as milquetoast soft rock for girls and housewives when “Superstar” came out, and the film helped lead a critical reappraisal of the duo in the early 1990s. Admiration and rejection partly based on the scrambling of gender roles feature prominently in “Velvet Goldmine” via the knotty relationship involving a journalist and a pair of flamboyant rockers — one inspired by David Bowie and the other an amalgam of Iggy Pop and Lou Reed.It would be hard to find a more complicated figure than Reed, who left the Velvet Underground in 1970 and embarked on the fruitful solo career evoked in “Velvet Goldmine.” He was the kind of wildly creative, mercurial figure who is catnip to documentarians, and he is everywhere in the new film: a voice, either singing or heard in interviews; an unsmiling face staring us down; at times a presence felt more than seen.And yet even after those two hours, Reed, who died in 2013, remains an enigma, much like the Velvet Underground itself. Haynes did not call on critics or historians to venture theories or explain the band’s importance, and the closest we come to a musicological analysis is delivered by the eccentric Velvets protégé Jonathan Richman.Haynes said this was all by design. “There’s generations of people who could tell you how great the Velvet Underground are, how meaningful they were to my career as a musician or my career as an artist or whatever,” Haynes said. “But I thought, ‘Where do you stop? I don’t want a movie that tells you how great the band is: I want a movie that shows you how great they are, and then you figure that out.’” More

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      ‘Bergman Island’ Review: Love Among the Cinephiles

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      In Mia Hansen-Love’s new film, Vicky Krieps and Tim Roth play filmmakers on the rocks in the Baltic Sea.“This is your landscape, Bergman. It corresponds to your innermost imaginings of forms, proportions, colors, horizons, sounds, silences, lights and reflections.” That is Ingmar Bergman, in his memoir “The Magic Lantern,” rhapsodizing on his “secret love,” the island of Faro in the Baltic Sea. Starting in 1960 with “Through a Glass Darkly,” he shot many of his films on Faro and died there in 2007.In “Bergman Island,” Mia Hansen-Love’s slippery and enchanting new movie, Faro, an austere and forbidding presence in much of Bergman’s work, is revealed as a pilgrimage spot for cinephiles and an appealing seaside destination for less obsessive travelers. Visitors can browse in the gift shop and the library, watch movies in Bergman’s personal screening room, or pile into a bus for the guided “Bergman Safari” (an actual annual event). They can also swim, drink, play Ludo and shop for sheepskins.Chris (Vicky Krieps) and Tony (Tim Roth) do some of those things, but they’ve come to Faro mostly to work. Filmmakers with screenplays at various stages of completion, they install themselves in the cottage where some of “Scenes From a Marriage” was filmed. The caretaker who shows them around cheerfully describes it as “the movie that caused millions of people to divorce.” (I wonder if the recent HBO remake will have the same impact.)An unmarried couple with a young daughter (she is staying with a grandmother while her parents are in Sweden), Chris and Tony have perhaps unwittingly arrived at a crisis in their relationship. They are affectionate and easy with each other, but the combination of Chris’s restlessness and Tony’s complacency suggests that things are not quite right between them.In Bergman’s films, love is a volatile element, as often as not a catalyst for emotional anguish and psychological disintegration. A man and a woman in a movie with his name on it are unlikely to find much peace. But Hansen-Love, though she is interested in the gloomy Swede and his legacy, is hardly in his thrall, and Chris and Tony don’t live in anything like the state of metaphysical extremity that so often afflicts Bergman characters.Chris is a passionate movie lover who is nonetheless skeptical of the power of the medium, and “Bergman Island” explores her ambivalence in a playful, critical spirit. She is bothered by the fact that Bergman, the father of nine children with six women, pursued his art at the expense of his family obligations. No woman would have been able to get away with that, she says, a complaint that is met with the usual shrugs, jokes and condescension from Tony and their dinner companions.She acknowledges the difference between art and life, but nonetheless wishes for a measure of “coherence” between them. The possibility of such a thing becomes more than just a theoretical question in the second half of “Bergman Island,” when the as-yet-unmade film that Chris is still struggling to write takes over the screen.That movie-within-the-movie, also set on Faro, involves a young woman — also a filmmaker — named Amy (Mia Wasikowska), who travels to the island for the wedding of a friend and encounters Joseph (Anders Danielsen Lie), the great love of her life. The two of them met as teenagers and all these years later, even though they are committed to other people, find that they just can’t quit each other.Their passionate, guilty romance — and Amy’s blondness — tilt the story closer to Bergman territory than Chris and Tony’s passive-aggressive courtesies, but the more obvious cinematic reference lies closer to home. Chris’s film is in effect a sequel to Hansen-Love’s “Goodbye First Love,” which followed adolescent lovers into young adulthood.The connection between the movie Chris dreams up and the one she’s in seems both elusive and obvious, as do the possible autobiographical implications of “Bergman Island.” Can it be entirely coincidental that Amy is a near-anagram of Mia, the name shared by Wasikowska and Hansen-Love? Is Tony a stand-in for Olivier Assayas, the French filmmaker with whom Hansen-Love has a child? Are we approaching Bergman’s landscape of doubling and collapsing identities from a different angle?But there are also intriguing hints that Chris and Tony’s story may itself be a kind of film-within-the-film, this one conjured out of Tony’s imagination. When Chris asks about his project, he answers that it’s about the unspoken meanings that circulate through the daily life of a couple, a description that fits the first half of “Bergman Island” almost too neatly. He also explains, during a Q.-and-A. session after a screening of one of his movies, that he tends to identify with his female characters. Does this make Chris his alter ego?To her credit, Hansen-Love doesn’t turn “Bergman Island” into a self-conscious philosophical puzzle. It unspools with an easy, fresh-air naturalism against a picturesque backdrop that doesn’t necessarily conform to anyone’s innermost imaginings. The mood, underscored by Robin Williamson’s sprightly music, is mainly comical, and the artists — Tony and Chris, at least — seem more playful than tormented, even at difficult moments.That may be because they both understand the paradox that “Bergman Island” so brilliantly enacts. It’s a movie that isn’t quite sure whether it wants to be one, or which one it wants to be. Which makes it feel like more than just a movie.Bergman IslandRated R. Cries and whispers. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Halloween Kills’ Review: There Will Be (Copious Amounts of) Blood

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      The newest installment of the “Halloween” franchise, starring Jamie Lee Curtis, is a murderous mess that substitutes corpses for characters.After a dozen movies — and a 13th on the horizon — the once-monstrous Michael Myers shuffles into theaters this weekend as exhausted as the 43-year-old franchise that indulges his blood lust. “Halloween Kills,” the middle film of a reboot trilogy started in 2018 by the director David Gordon Green, is an indolent, narratively impoverished mess that substitutes corpses for characters and slogans for dialogue.What Green appears to be killing here is time. While his previous installment cannily reimagined Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), the plucky babysitter who bested Myers in John Carpenter’s original film, as a trauma-toughened grandmother, this latest exhumation turns her into a virtual bystander. We find her, mere minutes after the ending of the last chapter, bleeding profusely in the back of a truck, barreling away from her burning home and believing her nemesis vanquished once and for all.“Let it burn!” she screams at the firefighters, perhaps aware that the body count of emergency workers is about to soar. Thereafter, she will mostly languish in a hospital bed in the hapless burgh of Haddonfield, Ill., while her daughter and granddaughter (Judy Greer and Andi Matichak) are left to hold the bag — or, in this case, pitchfork — when Myers, inevitably, returns.Plagued by idiotic pronouncements (“He is an apex predator!”) and moronic behavior (doors are left unlocked, an unloaded gun is brandished), “Halloween Kills” plays at times like an exceptionally gory comedy routine. (I dare you not to laugh out loud when one character bemoans the rising number of slayings by declaring, “This was a safe place and now it’s not anymore!”) And if Haddonfield seems significantly more diverse this time out, it’s to no apparent purpose other than to vary the appearances and sexual orientations of its victims. That’s a shame, because the only characters I missed when the picture was over were the gay partners planning a pleasant evening with Mary Jane and “Minnie and Moskowitz” (1971). I hope they already knew the ending.Clumsy flashbacks to the original plot soothe the uninitiated, and characters we barely remember are reintroduced to take their chances among those being creatively killed off. Leading these is Anthony Michael Hall as a grown-up Tommy Doyle, the child Laurie was babysitting on Halloween, 1978, now running a support group for survivors of that night’s mayhem. In mere minutes, Tommy harangues his group into an angry posse, rounding up nondescript townspeople to hunt Myers down. As the mob congregates — mystifyingly — at the hospital, Laurie is prompted to stumble briefly out of bed, stab herself with a painkiller-filled syringe and yowl like a banshee. Contract fulfilled, Ms. Curtis!As for possibly our most resurrected cinematic psycho (played once again by James Jude Courtney), he seems a little sadder behind his rapidly decomposing mask. The success of any “Halloween” retread depends fundamentally on its ability to telegraph the mad magnetism between Myers and Laurie — a tether that’s trampled by this picture’s amorphous gang of vigilantes, repeatedly yelling “Evil dies tonight!” In light of the coming attractions, I can reliably predict that it does not.Halloween KillsRated R. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters and on Peacock. More

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      ‘Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy’ Review: What We Talk About

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      In three stories, men and women circle one another as they casually and cruelly share intimacies, express desires and voice doubts.The geometry of desire is elegantly plotted in “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy,” a wistful, moving, outwardly unassuming movie. In three segments, men and women circle one another, talking and talking some more. As they exchange glances, confessions and accusations, their cascading words become either bridges or walls. Throughout these effusive roundelays, they yearn — for meaning, former lovers, lost intimacy, an escape.“Fortune and Fantasy” is among the latest talkathons from the Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi, one of the more intriguing filmmakers to emerge in the last decade. If you haven’t heard of him, it isn’t surprising. The American market for foreign-language cinema has always been brutal, even before the pandemic, and his work has received scant theatrical distribution in the United States. But he’s a familiar name on the festival circuit, and both this movie and his superb “Drive My Car” were in the main slate at the recent New York Film Festival. (“Fortune” won a major prize at this year’s Berlin.)If Hamaguchi were another generic French filmmaker, or if he made gore-splattered genre movies or was just more obvious, he might attract greater distributor interest. Though maybe not: The length of some of his work likely presents a hurdle. While “Fortune and Fantasy” runs a crisp two hours, “Drive My Car” is three, and “Happy Hour,” an epic of minimalism, runs more than five. More challenging still, presumably, are his narrative choices and understated visuals, which don’t conform to the current template for American indie cinema with its dramatic problems, moral instruction and enough pictorial prettiness to make the emotional bloodletting go down smoothly.Hamaguchi’s realism is as constructed as that of any Sundance selection, but what distinguishes his work is his attention to ambiguity and to everyday moments, and his general avoidance of dramatic or melodramatic inflection. Things happen, terrible, heartbreaking things, though not necessarily onscreen. Instead, most of what you see has the flavor, rhythm and texture of quotidian life, which makes his artistic choices all the more intriguing and at times almost mysterious. You’re engrossed, but you may wonder why. (Hamaguchi cites John Cassavetes as a strong influence; the imprint of the French New Wave and the South Korean director Hong Sangsoo are also evident.)“Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy” is a perfect entry point into Hamaguchi’s work. Not every episode works equally well or hits as hard, but both times I watched this movie, I found something to admire, consider, argue with and weep over. The three stories are clearly separated with coy or cryptic or plainly descriptive titles. They have separate casts and each takes place in contemporary settings, though one has a modest, somewhat random splash of speculative fiction. Here, as in life, the most blandly familiar spaces — the back seat of a cab, a cluttered office, a living room — serve as unadorned stages for ordinary, existence-defining encounters.All the episodes feature a handful of men and women, but the secondary characters soon peel off — a photo crew disperses, an assistant hustles out of an office — leaving two people who serve as conversational and emotional foils. The middle and longest story (“Door Wide Open”) centers on a woman who’s persuaded, if not entirely convincingly, by her younger male lover to become a honey trap for his loathed former professor. She does, putting on makeup and visiting the professor at his office. Although he insists that the door remain open, danger seeps in anyway, through a probing, teasingly erotic and unexpectedly existential tête-à-tête that changes everyone’s life.Hamaguchi doesn’t move the camera all that much, which makes the moments when he draws attention to his visuals more noticeable, like the punctuating tilt up at a flowering tree that closes the first story. However subtly, he distinctly choreographs each episode, using the camera and staging to underscore eddies of harmony and dissonance, shifting moods and awareness. In some scenes, characters sit side by side in the same shot, which underscores their familiarity; in others, they are isolated in the frame to accentuate their detachment or antagonism. In several crucial instances, characters look directly at the camera, a jolt of intimacy — but now between you and them.Mostly, though, these men and women talk, revealing themselves as they also tease the story’s themes, fortune and fantasy included. They chat, confess, overshare, open up and lash out. In the first story, “Magic (or Something Less Assuring),” a young woman confronts a former boyfriend by sneeringly repeating some blandishments that he’d shared with another lover, wounding him and, in the process, exposing the miserable arc of their failed relationship. There’s more tenderness in the final story, “Once Again,” which beautifully brings the movie to a close through two women with faulty memories who, by opening their hearts to each other, quietly break yours.Wheel of Fortune and FantasyNot rated. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 1 minute. In theaters. More

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      The NY Cat and Dog Film Festivals Return After Pandemic Hiatus

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      After a pandemic-induced hiatus, these celebrations of human-animal bonds are screening in Manhattan and beyond.Two annual cinematic celebrations invariably attract impassioned ticket buyers, even though they lack car chases, explosions, alien invasions or Daniel Craig as a pouty James Bond.What they do have: whiskers, wildness and no small amount of wit.They’re the NY Cat Film Festival and the NY Dog Film Festival, which are returning to Manhattan after a pandemic-induced hiatus. The cat festival, screening at noon on Saturday — Global Cat Day — at the Village East by Angelika theater, comprises 21 short works that run for a total of around 90 minutes. The nearly two-hour dog festival, which arrives at the same theater on Oct. 24, features 20 short films. (Animal lovers outside New York can see the festivals, too: They will tour for several months, both nationwide and in Canada.)“I think it’s the highest-quality year, possibly, for both,” said Tracie Hotchner, an author and radio host in Vermont who founded the dog festival in 2015 and the cat edition two years later. In a telephone interview, she explained that in the early days of lockdown in 2020, “people couldn’t find toilet paper, but they were making beautiful movies.”Not surprisingly, the pandemic is featured in both festivals. In “Will You Be My Quarantine?,” a feline comedy, the actress and director Susku Ekim Kaya shows herself and her pet, Lady Leia, in split screen, engaged in typically obsessive lockdown activities like grooming, TV watching, cellphone scrolling and FaceTime calling. They lead harmonious parallel lives, whereas the feline protagonists of Jasmin Scuteri-Young’s “Quarantine Diary” and Asali Echols’s “House Cats” complain of their owners’ constant presence in human-supplied voice-overs.The dog festival’s subjects, on the other hand, never seem to long for social distancing. “You don’t believe in personal space,” Kyle Scoble says tenderly to Darla, his Labrador retriever-pointer mix, in “The Second Time I Got to Know My Dog,” a documentary that acts as a tribute to how Darla got him through 2020.But cats may have a reason for their apparently aloof attitudes. “If it’s an indoor cat, it’s enduring a perpetual state of lockdown,” Kim Best, a director from Durham, N.C., said in a phone conversation.That observation fuels Best’s “The Great Escape,” in which a cat named Monkey makes concerted attempts to exit the household, even consulting the digital assistant Alexa, which he bats around and meows at. In Best’s other festival entry, “Cat Capitalization,” her pet, Nube, turns to the internet to market his artistic talent, pretentiously thanking — in thought bubbles — mentors like the artists Mark Rothko and Vincent van Gogh. (Nube is missing a bit of one ear.)Best said she aimed for “a satire of not only capitalism but also of academia.”Such humor is very much a theme of the cat festival, in which films like Nevada Caldwell’s “Feline Noir” and Priscilla Dean’s “Catfight at the O’Kay Corral” parody old Hollywood clichés.But while the canine film slate is not without laughs — David Coole’s animated “Go Fetch” is a pointed two-minute revenge comedy — it has far more of the in-depth examinations of the human-animal bond that characterized both festivals previously.“Affection in the Streets,” for instance, a Brazilian documentary by Thiago Köche, captures the lives of Pôrto Alegre’s homeless, who often take better care of their dogs than themselves. The loyal pets also attract concern from passers-by, who frequently ignore the suffering of the animals’ owners.“People who love dogs just look right past the humans,” Hotchner said. “I would love more movies about that, because I think it’s the thing we don’t want to look at.”“The Comfort Dogs” also shows the power of pet ownership. Made by Matthew Salleh and Rose Tucker, an Australian couple who live and work together in Brooklyn, the film is an excerpt from their feature documentary “We Don’t Deserve Dogs.” The segment focuses on the Comfort Dog Project, which provides pets to young people who were forced to become child soldiers in Uganda’s civil war.With the dogs at their side, the former soldiers can share “quite harrowing” experiences, Salleh said in a joint phone call. “The dogs almost become part of the storytelling method itself.”Another documentary, Zach Putnam’s “Nicola,” illustrates how its subject, a yellow Lab from Canine Companions, a service program for people with disabilities, transformed not only the life of the college student who received her. She also delivered a strong lesson in trust and sacrifice to the student who devotedly trained her but ultimately, tearfully, had to give her up.Both festivals, however, remind viewers that these animals need people as much as people need them. Hotchner, who organizes the programs as a labor of love — tickets to each are $20 — always contributes part of each screening’s sales to a related local charity. The cat festival in New York will help support Bideawee’s Feral Cat Initiative, while this year, all dog festival showings will benefit the nonprofits associated with Saving Senior Dogs Week (Oct. 25-31).“There is a growing awareness,” Covid aside, “that senior dogs are delightful to adopt and the most quick to be put to sleep in a shelter,” Hotchner said. In Gary Tellalian’s “Legends of Comedy Share Love for Old Dogs,” you’ll hear this message in a public service announcement from celebrities who are seniors themselves: Carol Burnett, Bob Newhart and Lily Tomlin, along with Carl Reiner, who died last June at 98.The plight of dogs that aren’t cuddly puppies also surfaces in documentaries like “Not Broken: Freedom Ride,” by Krista Dillane, Emma Lao and Dylan Abad, about a long journey to transport 53 rescued dogs from Louisiana to a pet adoption fair in Rhode Island. In “Chino,” another excerpt from “We Don’t Deserve Dogs,” its aging subject, a street mutt in Santiago, Chile, survives simply because concerned residents provide care.“The street dog culture there is completely different,” Tucker said, adding that the animals are a way to “just bring an entire community together” — a goal for these festivals, too.NY Cat Film FestivalOct. 16 at the Village East by Angelika, Manhattan; catfilmfestival.com.NY Dog Film FestivalOct. 24 at the Village East by Angelika, Manhattan; dogfilmfestival.com. More