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      in Television

      ‘The Many Saints of Newark’ Review: The Best Really Is Over

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      In the movie prequel to “The Sopranos,” Tony returns as a child who learns to navigate his families on a difficult road to mob power.Tony Soprano, the mob boss in “The Sopranos,” was many things: husband, father, animal lover, lady-killer, sociopathic capitalist, pop-culture sensation. Americans like their villains on the soft side, and Tony famously suffered from inner turmoil, manifested in panic attacks, to go with the blood on his hands. A mobster in therapy — with a sexy female shrink, no less — generated bountiful narrative tension, as did his overlapping gangland and extended families. All told, Tony was a perfect distillation of two great American passions: self-improvement and getting away with murder.Created by David Chase, “The Sopranos” faded to enigmatic black in 2007, though it endures, including on HBO, its original home for six seasons. As a rule, we use the present tense when writing about fiction: Characters exist in the eternal now, or that’s the idea. But the death of James Gandolfini, who played Tony, complicates this because he and the show were interchangeable. With his lucid, quicksilver expressivity and a hulking, powerfully threatening physicality, Gandolfini made flesh Tony’s internal struggle, filling a potential cartoon with soul and, by extension, giving greater depth to the show. His absence is why I think of his signature character in the past tense.It’s also a reason the movie spinoff “The Many Saints of Newark,” a busy, unnecessary, disappointingly ordinary origin story, doesn’t work. The movie certainly has pedigree. It was written by Chase with Lawrence Konner, who wrote a few episodes of “The Sopranos,” and directed by Alan Taylor, another series veteran. Jumping between time periods, it tracks the sentimental education (moral and emotional) of the young Tony, who in 1967 is an 11-year-old pipsqueak played by William Ludwig. After a lot of introductions and plot developments, the story jumps to Tony at 16, now played by Gandolfini’s son, Michael, who bears a striking resemblance to his father.The movie means to show how and why the child became the man we never see but who casts a deep shadow. Following along with this evolutionary journey will be easier for those who watched “The Sopranos,” week after week, for 86 episodes of detailed, intimate, explanatory character development. Whatever your familiarity with the series, you may soon find yourself wondering why the filmmakers decided the way to fill in Tony’s past was to delve into his early relationship with a dreary, clichéd surrogate father rather than, say, his monstrous mother, Livia (immortalized in the show by Nancy Marchand and played here by Vera Farmiga with a prodigious prosthetic nose).Tony’s symbolic dad in “Saints” is Dickie Moltisanti (Alessandro Nivola, who can’t hold the center), a midlevel mob guy and father to the adult Tony’s mentee, Christopher, the drug-addled distant cousin and screw-up played by Michael Imperioli. Dickie never appeared onscreen in “The Sopranos,” but in the movie he takes on crucial twinned roles as Tony’s champion and as a progenitor of the violent, emotionally addled mobster Tony later becomes. It’s never clear why Dickie has a soft spot for the kid, other than it gives Tony a narratively convenient, relatively benign replacement for his more floridly violent, often absent dad. Mostly Dickie is a new toy that the filmmakers can play with.Too bad he’s right off the shelf. An amalgam of wiseguy clichés wrapped in a period-appropriate package, Dickie enters a crowded field of movie mob guys who are rarely as interesting as their makers believe. He has all the prerequisites, from the slick car to the sleek suits, and comes burdened with the usual work and women problems. Some of these headaches produce tension and promising interest, most notably Dickie’s relationship with a restless Black employee, Harold McBrayer (a nuanced, bristling Leslie Odom Jr.), whose discontent is mirrored, or is meant to be, by unrest that is based on what happened in Newark in 1967 after the arrest of a Black man.Both Harold’s prominence and the relatively few racist slurs dropped here are an index of the different cultural climates in which the movie and the show opened. Mobsters are going to mobster (bada-bing), but the language they use and the barbarisms they commit have been attenuated. And while the movie tries to engage race, its efforts are wan, cautious. By contrast, the women remain pretty much the same nagging wives, dutiful daughters and hot girlfriends, a.k.a. goomahs (bada-boom). The most important of these is a beauty, Giuseppina (Michela De Rossi), who’s brought from Italy by Dickie’s father (Ray Liotta) to be his wife; mostly, she’s around to flash booty and stir up Oedipal trouble.Movie spinoffs can be tough to pull off. Nothing felt at stake when I watched, oh, the first “Brady Bunch” movie, but its source material wasn’t a critical fetish, something that inspired excited discussions on masculinity, the latest golden age of television and the effect on the industry. “The Sopranos,” though, was too good, too memorable, and its hold on the popular imagination remains unshakable. It still casts a spell, and the movie knows it, which is why it sticks to the tired template of a boy’s own story rather than taking a radical turn, like revisiting Tony’s world from Giuseppina’s or Livia’s or Harold’s points of view. In the end, the best thing about “The Many Saints of Newark” is that it makes you think about “The Sopranos,” but that’s also the worst thing about it.The Many Saints of NewarkRated R for Mafia violence. Running time: 2 hours. In theaters and on HBO Max. More

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      A Specialist in Short and Lethal Movie Thrillers Jumps to TV

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      The French director Julien Leclercq’s action movies are known for their ruthless economy. His new Netflix thriller, “Ganglands,” tests his approach across six episodes.Mehdi, the cool, collected thief at the heart of the French Netflix series “Ganglands,” is haunted by his brother’s death. Guilt drives Mehdi’s decisions as he becomes embroiled in a violent dispute among rival drug traffickers.And yet we know nothing about that lost sibling. The show doesn’t dwell on how he died. There are no convenient explanations or evocative flashbacks.“We did write those scenes, but we thought we shouldn’t underestimate viewers,” said Julien Leclercq, the series’s director and co-creator, speaking in French on a recent video call from Paris. “It’s not a bad thing to leave a back story to the imagination, to not always explain.”And this is why his movies have one of the lowest B.M.I.s in the action business: He cuts the flab. Since his debut, the 2007 sci-fi thriller “Chrysalis” (running time: 1 hour 34 minutes), he has built a reputation as a director of efficient, no-nonsense rides. Even when he lands international names, like Jean-Claude Van Damme in the 2019 film “The Bouncer” (also 1:34) or Olga Kurylenko in the 2021 Netflix film “Sentinelle” (good to go at 1:20), Leclercq resists the temptation to give them more dialogue, more exposition or more fights.The question was, could Leclercq’s formula work across the four and a half hours of “Ganglands,” which premiered on Netflix last week?Sami Bouajila, whose turn as Mehdi in the series was his fourth outing with the director, didn’t need convincing.Sami Bouajila, who has worked with Leclerqc several times before, plays a cool, collected thief in “Ganglands.” Sofie Gheysens/Netflix “It was love at first sight — we were on the same wavelength, we had the same approach,” said Bouajila, a popular big-screen leading man in France whose performance in the film “A Son” earned him the 2021 César Award for best actor.“We both love these silent, upstanding characters, a little rough around the edges, and I love his aesthetics,” he added. “Julien’s trademark is his artistic direction — there’s a rhythm, there’s a sound, and there’s silence. There are moods and feelings but the characters have a hard time expressing them, so they act upon them.”This “show, don’t tell” approach may be one reason Leclercq’s austere style, somewhere between Jean-Pierre Melville and Clint Eastwood, needs little translation: There are few subtitles to discourage those allergic to them. His films have performed so well internationally for Netflix that the company, which had historically only licensed Leclercq’s movies for streaming, signed on as the primary distributor for his 2020 feature, “Earth and Blood” (1:20).Leclercq’s work can feel like a single locomotive speeding ahead on straight rails — the entire plot of “Earth and Blood” boils down to an extended showdown between a sawmill owner and dealers looking for a stolen stash. With its expanded parameters, however, the “Ganglands” engine can pull a few more cars.As usual, the core of the story is simple: Shaïnez (Sofia Lesaffre) is abducted after she and her girlfriend, Liana (Tracy Gotoas), impulsively steal drugs from the wrong guy, and only Shaïnez’s uncle, Mehdi, can help set her free. But now there is room for the human foibles and interpersonal dynamics — and even hints at back stories — that Leclercq usually dispenses with.Tracy Gotoas, left, and Sofia Lesaffre play lovers who get into deep trouble after stealing drugs from the wrong guy. Caroline Dubois/Netflix “We quickly latched on the idea of a family tragedy, very much in a Greek tragedy mold, which is what links all the characters,” said Hamid Hlioua the show’s co-creator and co-writer, adding that adding this angle was also a way to avoid simply diluting a movie. “We wanted to focus on tension, action and family.”“Ganglands” certainly operates on a larger scale than is typical for Leclercq. But Netflix trusted that he could be just as efficient over six episodes instead of tightly coiled in an hour and a half, and approached him with the idea. The director was interested in the challenge.“I think all filmmakers today have fantasies of tackling a series,” said Leclercq, 42, a burly, loquacious man sporting tattooed knuckles. “For viewers, they are really exciting. I’ve watched ‘True Detective’ five times, ‘Breaking Bad’ three times.”Still, Leclercq and Hlioua were conscious that bloat would be a constant threat. “Very often when there are eight episodes you feel that you could get rid of one or two,” Hlioua said. “So we wanted to grab the viewer from the start and not let go until the last episode.”In French, the series has the same title, “Braqueurs,” as a Leclercq movie from 2015, known in the United States as “The Crew” (1:21). In both, Bouajila, 55, plays the stone-faced, charismatic leader of a thieving ring, but they are not the same characters and the story lines are unrelated.“We tried to amplify every aspect,” Leclercq said. “‘The Crew’ was set in a Parisian suburb and involved kilos of coke. Now we’re in Brussels and in the port of Antwerp, which is a hub for drugs coming from South America, and we’re not dealing with kilos anymore, but with tons. The bad guys are more powerful.”“It’s not a bad thing to leave a back story to the imagination, to not always explain,” Leclercq said.Elliott Verdier for The New York TimesIn his feature work, keeping the productions lean has been a key to maintaining the crispness of his pacing and aesthetic. He recalled shuddering when Van Damme turned up with a whole team in tow for “The Bouncer.”“I said to myself — and he knows that, I told him — that he was going to be a pain in the butt, his world was going to be a pain in the butt, his entourage was going to be a pain in the butt, and I could mess up the movie if he doesn’t listen to me,” Leclercq said.He took Van Damme aside and asked him to let go of all those showbiz accouterments; it worked.“In the middle of the shoot he told me, ‘I’ve learned to love making movies again — I was a star, now I want to be an actor,’ ” Leclercq said. “That was the greatest compliment he could have given me.” (Van Damme is, indeed, extraordinary.)Leclercq’s attitude toward celebrity entourages hasn’t changed. But the fact that there was room for some occasional chitchat in the script allowed for some humor — absent from Leclercq’s features, perhaps because it eats up precious seconds. This is particularly obvious in the scenes between Mehdi and Liana, a rookie criminal who is three decades his junior and as chatty as he is taciturn.“I’m a big fan of the Luc Besson movie ‘Léon: The Professional,’ so we dreamed about a duo like that, with a generational clash, a culture clash,” Leclercq said.It helped that the real-life relationship between Bouajila and Gotoas reflected a similar dynamic, minus bullets.“I’m at the start of my career, he’s been around for 30 years or something,” Gotoas said. “Liana is learning, and I was, too: I’d be checking out how he’d position himself with respect to the camera, how he modulated his performance.”For his next project, Leclercq is stretching once more by leaving behind the shootouts that have served him so well. He is in preproduction on a biopic of the French Formula 1 champion Alain Prost, with a focus on his rivalry with Ayrton Senna in the 1980s and early ’90s.Cars are one of Leclercq’s great passions, he explained. If “Ganglands” is renewed, perhaps he can make room for a few chases. More

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      ‘No One Gets Out Alive’ Review: Seeking Shelter, Finding Terror

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      In this horror movie on Netflix, an immigrant in Cleveland moves into a sinister boardinghouse.When Ambar (Cristina Rodlo) arrives in Cleveland after being smuggled into the United States, she needs a place to stay that won’t ask questions. So she turns to an all-female boardinghouse with the basic amenities: apparitions. Flickering lights. A live-in landlord and the creepy, bulked-up brother he neglected to mention. Strange sounds emanating from the plumbing.“No One Gets Out Alive,” directed by Santiago Menghini, is now circling the drain on Netflix, where few will watch it intentionally and those who never find it won’t be missing much. Even seeing it, in a literal sense, is difficult: The imagery crosses the line that separates “atmospherically dark” from “murk.”Directed by Santiago Menghini, whose background in visual effects has not helped him mount convincing ones here, the movie grafts standard horror-movie tropes onto a portrait of the struggles of undocumented immigrants in America. Ambar, who has a grueling job as a garment worker and is desperate to cobble together money for a fake I.D., has no nowhere to go but a haunted house.Still, the movie has not bothered to connect its ideas. While explanations in horror are overrated, not one but two prologues — the first styled as 8-millimeter footage shot in Mexico in 1963, the second depicting the demise of a pre-Ambar boarder — go unaddressed in any meaningful way. Nor does the movie provide more than a cursory reason for why what it implies are ancient Meso-American rituals are being practiced in a Cleveland basement.No One Gets Out AliveRated R. Violence and gore. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      The Newest Bond Movie, 'No Time to Die' Is Here. This Is What Critics Are Saying.

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      After a star-studded premiere in London, this much-delayed Bond film is drawing mostly positive early reviews.The latest James Bond adventure, “No Time to Die,” was supposed to hit theaters in April 2020. The pandemic hit instead, and the film’s release was postponed more than once. But on Tuesday the 25th installment in the franchise had a splashy world premiere in London.On hand were 007 himself, Daniel Craig; his co-stars Léa Seydoux (as Madeleine Swann, the love interest), Ana de Armas, Lashana Lynch and Rami Malek; the filmmakerCary Joji Fukunaga, the first American to direct a Bond film; and Billie Eilish, who wrote the title song. Also in attendance were Prince William with Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge; and Prince Charles with Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall; along with the film’s producers, Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson.Just as important, critics finally got a look at the movie, which will reach multiplexes on Oct. 8. Here is a roundup of what they’re saying:A Callback to Dr. No: “Craig’s final film as the diva of British intelligence is an epic barnstormer, with the script from Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, with Phoebe Waller-Bridge delivering pathos, action, drama, camp comedy (Bond will call M ‘darling’ in moments of tetchiness), heartbreak, macabre horror, and outrageously silly old-fashioned action in a movie which calls to mind the world of Dr. No on his island. Director Cary Fukunaga delivers it with terrific panache, and the film also shows us a romantic Bond, an uxorious Bond, a Bond who is unafraid of showing his feelings, like the old softie he’s turned out to be.” — Peter Bradshaw, The GuardianUnafraid of Risks: Craig “invests the role with more emotion, power and style in a movie that not only marks a milestone as the 25th time around but also one not afraid to take some twists, turns and, yes, risks in a long-delayed entertainment that sees James Bond not only out to save the world from evil forces again but perhaps, in these Covid times, the theatrical exhibition business itself.” — Pete Hammond, Deadline.comToo Much Time to Die: “In terms of Bond staples, the movie does deliver some impressive chases and action sequences, with Ana de Armas (Craig’s ‘Knives Out’ co-star) adding another dose of female empowerment during a mission that takes Bond to Cuba. Still, ‘No Time to Die’ feels as if it’s working too hard to provide Craig a send-off worthy of all the hype associated with it — an excess that might be summed up as simply, finally, by taking too much time to reach the finish.” — Brian Lowry, CNNAn Improvement Over “Spectre”: Fukunaga “gives the film a visceral immediacy that’s quite different from the previous outings — and script contributions from Phoebe Waller-Bridge have certainly beefed up the female characters, with Craig’s ‘Knives Out’ co-star Ana de Armas brilliant as a newly qualified C.I.A. agent he encounters in Cuba and Seydoux’s character given the sort of complex arc and no-nonsense attitude that was sorely lacking in ‘Spectre.’” — Alistair Harkness, The ScotsmanThe Key Is Craig: “More traditional 007 fans may wish for the action to move forward with more pace — at 163 minutes, this is the longest Bond in the canon — and each set-piece has certain hermetic quality, like a stand-alone episode, such as that pre-credit sequence in Matera, or the visit to Cuba in which Ana de Armas shines as agent Paloma. What holds it all together is Craig, given some longer speeches and passages of performance the like of which I can’t recall a Bond previously delivering.” — Jason Solomons, The WrapA More Emotional Bond: “Craig’s maturity shows in his emotions. He’s still confident and aggressive, but erratic and quick to anger. He’s never been more vulnerable — nor, really, has the character — than he is here. He’s also accompanied by three very different Bond girls: Alongside Madeleine, who becomes a therapist, there’s MI6 agent Nomi, Lashana Lynch, and Ana de Armas as a C.I.A. agent who’s ‘had three weeks training.’ All three are terrific and bring out varied shades in brooding Craig.” — Johnny Oleksinski, The New York Post More

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      How Lip-Syncing Got Real

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      Not long ago, lip-syncing was the domain of subversive drag queens, or pop stars that the media saw as talentless. Now it’s how scrappy amateurs get famous.Sally ThurerFor several weeks, Netflix has been insisting that I watch its gender-swapped remake of the ’90s teen romantic comedy “She’s All That.” This version — naturally, “He’s All That” — stars Tanner Buchanan as the high school outcast who needs to be whipped into prom-king shape and Addison Rae as the popular girl who does the whipping. It is Rae’s first movie, but she is ubiquitous on TikTok, where her central mode of performance is breezily dancing and lip-syncing to clips of rap songs and ephemeral bits of internet video. When I finally relented and cued up Netflix, I realized that I’d never heard her actual voice.It’s not a good movie. The bubbly charm that vaulted Rae from her Louisiana bedroom to TikTok fame fizzles on a studio set. As the resuscitated plot wheezes through its paces, Rae seems to be struggling to keep up. But the meta story interested me. Rae’s trajectory recalls the arc of “Singin’ in the Rain,” the classic musical about a silent-film star who stumbles in the jump to talkies. In that movie, the star masks her horrible voice by lip-syncing to a sweet-sounding actress hiding behind the curtain. The difference is that Addison Rae became famous by overtly co-opting other people’s sounds. And it is her world, TikTok, that represents the thrilling emerging medium.Acting as if you are singing when you are not singing — lip-syncing has been an object of American popular fascination for a century. Not too long ago, it could even prompt a pop-cultural panic. Framed as a weapon of talentless pop stars and their cynical handlers, it came to represent the height of crass media manipulation. But now the opposite feels true: Lip-syncing has been refashioned as a tool of the appealingly scrappy amateur. Addison Rae can don a crop top, perkily mouth along to a lyric about Percocet and be anointed Hollywood’s new girl next door.

      @addisonre HES ALL THAT NETFLIX FRIDAY ♬ original sound – Tristen🧃 How did we get here? Lip-syncing was so ubiquitous in early musicals that in 1952, “Singin’ in the Rain” relied on it even as it critiqued it: Debbie Reynolds, playing the actress who sings for the star, was herself partially dubbed with the voice of the unheralded singer Betty Noyes. But while films were using lip-syncing to build pitch-perfect Hollywood numbers, drag performers were doing it out of sly necessity. As Tom Fitzgerald and Lorenzo Marquez detail in “Legendary Children,” their cultural history of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” drag shows were criminalized in early 20th-century America, and evading harassment meant performing at underground clubs and house parties where live music was often out of reach. While movie musicals hoped their lip-syncing created a naturalistic illusion, drag leaned into the artifice, building a commentary on the source material by challenging its gender norms.In mainstream spaces, that artifice has been eyed with suspicion, wrapped up not just in homophobia but also a fear of technology, which might threaten to reprogram the essence of human culture itself. As the Christian Science Monitor asked in 1990, “Is advancing technology leading us into a musical world where nothing is ‘real’?” Occasionally, that tension builds into a culture-wide authenticity crisis.In the early ’90s, the German pop duo Milli Vanilli scandalized the record industry by lip-syncing to uncredited studio singers, Pavarotti was sued for lip-syncing to himself at an Italian concert, and state lawmakers introduced a flurry of bills attempting to regulate dubbing. The pattern repeated itself in 2004, when Ashlee Simpson was pilloried for her lip-sync fail on “Saturday Night Live,” an online petition begged Britney Spears to actually sing on tour, and Elton John said that lip-syncing artists “should be shot.” Finally, in 2013, the controversy reached the Capitol, as journalists grilled Beyoncé about singing with a prerecorded track at Barack Obama’s second inauguration. This time, when she explained that she was a perfectionist using an approved industry tactic, the press actually applauded.Lip-syncing has since swept American culture both high and low. “RuPaul’s Drag Race” busted drag performance out of gay clubs and cabarets and into America’s living rooms. Along the way, it made campy spectacle into a mainstream vehicle for telling personal truths, and fashioned drag queens into, as my colleague Shane O’Neill has put it, the cultural avatars of being yourself. (So successful was the show that it was swiftly co-opted into heterosexual cringe, via the celebrity reality competition “Lip Sync Battle.”)It is now perfectly acceptable for pop stars to lip-sync in live performances, as long as they supply a fantastical enough show in return. This spring, lip-syncing even ascended to the opera: In Opera Philadelphia’s short film “The Island We Made,” the “Drag Race” winner Sasha Velour appears as a spacey maternal spirit, channeling the singer Eliza Bagg’s voice through her glittery red lips. And this fall, you can take a Zoom lip-syncing course with the performance scholar M.B Boucai, integrating the psychological gesture technique of Michael Chekhov and the mime tradition of Jacques Lecoq.Even as lip-syncing reaches new artistic heights, TikTok has democratized it, encouraging its billion global users to casually sing along. The app accommodates performance styles as disparate as Rae executing basic cheerleading moves and a girl mouthing the Counting Crows’ “Shrek 2” track “Accidentally in Love” over youthful images of the Unabomber. On a crowdsourced app, it makes sense for the central creative feature to have a low barrier to entry. Just as Instagram made everyone a hipster photographer with its vintage filters, TikTok turns its audience into experimental mash-up artists, with self-conscious nods to artifice baked into the experience.Besides, as our experience grows increasingly mediated, we’ve come to appreciate the skills of the people who do the mediating. Much of TikTok’s charm derives from its lo-fi aesthetic, its janky green-screen effects and shaky hand-held shots. There is no longer some suspicious Hollywood power broker pulling the strings. (Or if there is, he has swooped in later, after the TikToker is already internet famous.) The app has taken all of the hallmarks of Hollywood manipulation — dubbing, but also airbrushing and C.G.I. — and put them in the user’s hands, where they have employed them in hypnotic, surprising, occasionally beautiful ways.In the drag tradition, lip-syncing freed the body of the physical demands of singing, cracking open stunning new visual possibilities. Lip-syncing on TikTok is less about testing the limits of the body than exploring the boundaries of the phone. Some of the app’s most interesting content is made by young people broadcasting from under their parents’ roofs, and in a sense they are practicing their own kind of clandestine burlesque, playing with their identities amid nondescript backgrounds The tech may be new, but the performances are as pure as singing into a hairbrush.Addison Rae is not a standout lip-syncer, but that is not the point of her. A drag queen lip-syncs with spectacular effort and razor-sharp precision, but Rae telegraphs the opposite, wearing the practice with a flirtatious lightness and evincing the middling technique of an amateur. Her following on the app (84.6 million) feels unjustified by her skill set, but her approachability is part of the appeal. Perhaps you could be her, if you were born with superior tooth enamel and a preternatural awareness of your most flattering angles. Which is not to say that the actual job of TikTok star is easy: When Rae failed to post for a week in 2020, internet headlines speculated that she was pregnant, or dead.Rae’s earliest TikToks are staged in carpeted rooms featuring bare walls and inert ceiling fans, but as she rose in popularity, her backgrounds grew increasingly glamorous — Hollywood group house, infinity pool, Kardashian inner sanctum. The early frisson of her videos, which played off a girl next door unexpectedly surfing the cultural currents to stardom, has dimmed. Now that the self-reinforcing TikTok algorithm has ensured her hegemony on the app, she is swiftly invading more traditional entertainment spheres. You can find her on YouTube, where she sings the brief yet tedious pop single “Obsessed”; at Sephora, where she sells her branded makeup line; and now on Netflix, which has signed her to a multi-picture deal.Boucai, the Zoom instructor, told me that lip-syncing accesses a transgressive remixing tradition developed among marginalized communities: “It’s a way of being able to perform yourself through what you can’t be — through the impossibility of what you can’t be.” Drag rests on heightening and exposing the contradictions of identity, and the best TikTok material does the same. But the app also serves up a buffet of content that only smooths those contradictions into unnerving new forms.In a piece for Wired documenting the evolution of digital blackface on TikTok, Jason Parham observed that Black culture “works like an accelerant” on the app, driving the popularity of white creators who virtually port Black sounds through their own bodies. Here the casualness of a lip-syncing performance becomes discomfiting: For a white creator, Black culture can be assumed and shrugged off with the ease of a costume change.Speaking of bad makeovers: “He’s All That” should represent Rae’s debut as a fully formed star persona, no longer borrowing other people’s cultural expressions but staking a claim to her own. Instead she looks stilted, vacant, lost. A cleverer remake of “She’s All That” (itself a take on “Pygmalion” and “My Fair Lady”) might have taken a lip-syncing TikTok star and refashioned her into someone who had something to say, maybe with the help of a disciplinarian drag mother. Instead we have Rae, just going through the motions. Through figures like her, lip-syncing has finally become not a scandal, or a triumph, but a bore. More

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      How Hong Kong Censors Films to Protect National Security

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      The Asian film capital has cracked down on documentaries and independent productions that it fears could glamorize the pro-democracy movement.HONG KONG — The director of “Far From Home,” a short, intimate film about a family caught in the tumult of the 2019 antigovernment protests in Hong Kong, had hoped to show off her work at a local film festival in June.Then the censors stepped in.They told the director, Mok Kwan-ling, that her film’s title — which in Cantonese could carry a suggestion of cleaning up after a crime — must go. Dialogue expressing sympathy for an arrested protester had to be excised. Scenes of removing items from a room also had to be cut, apparently because they might be construed as concealing evidence.In total, Ms. Mok was ordered to make 14 cuts from the 25-minute film. But she said that doing so would have destroyed the balance she had attempted to forge between the views of protesters and those who opposed them. So she refused, and her film has thus far gone unseen by the public.“It was quite contradictory to a good narrative and a good plot,” she said. “If a person is completely good or completely bad, it’s very boring.”Hong Kong’s world-famous film scene, which nurtured groundbreaking directors like John Woo and Wong Kar-wai, has become the latest form of expression to be censored since Beijing imposed a tough new national security law on the former British colony last year.Mok Kwan-ling, an independent film director, was ordered by the censors to make 14 cuts and to change the name of her film, “Far From Home.”Anthony Kwan for The New York TimesIn March, a local theater pulled the prizewinning protest documentary “Inside the Red Brick Wall,” after a state-run newspaper said it incited hatred of China. At least two Hong Kong directors have decided to not release new films locally. When an earlier film by one of those directors was shown to a private gathering last month, the gathering was raided by the police.Directors say they fear the government will force them to cut their films — and, potentially, put them in prison — if they dismiss demands and show their work.“Under the national security law, Hong Kong is no longer Hong Kong,” said Jevons Au, a director who moved to Canada shortly after the sweeping law was imposed. “Hong Kong is a part of China, and its film industry will finally turn into a part of China’s film industry.”Beyond the national security law, the government plans to toughen its censorship policies to allow it to ban or force cuts to films deemed “contrary to the interests of national security.” Such powers would also be retroactive, meaning the authorities could bar films that were previously approved. People that show such films could face up to three years in prison.“Part of the underlying goal of this law is to intimidate Hong Kong filmmakers, investors, producers, distributors and theaters into internalizing self-censorship,” said Shelly Kraicer, a film researcher specializing in Chinese-language cinema. “There will be a lot of ideas that just aren’t going to become projects and projects that aren’t going to be developed into films.”The new restrictions are unlikely to trouble bigger-budget Hong Kong films, which are increasingly made in collaboration with mainland companies and aimed at the Chinese market. Producers already work to ensure those films comply with mainland censorship. Likewise, distributors and streaming services like Netflix, which is available in Hong Kong but not mainland China, are wary of crossing red lines.“Netflix is a business first,” said Kenny Ng, an expert on film censorship at Hong Kong Baptist University’s Academy of Film. “They show unconventional films, including politically controversial films, but only from a safe distance. I think Netflix has bigger concerns about access to commercial markets, even in mainland China.”Netflix representatives did not reply to requests for comment.Golden Scene, a Hong Kong movie theater, pulled the protest documentary “Inside the Red Brick Wall” after it was attacked by a pro-Beijing newspaper.Anthony Kwan for The New York TimesThe most likely targets of the new rules, which are expected to be approved this fall by Hong Kong’s legislature, are independent documentaries and fictional films that touch on protests and opposition politics.“For those independent filmmakers who really want to do Hong Kong stories in Hong Kong, it will be very challenging,” said Mr. Au, the director who moved to Canada. “They will have a lot of obstacles. It might even be dangerous.”The documentary “Inside the Red Brick Wall” was shot by anonymous filmmakers who followed protesters at Hong Kong Polytechnic University when they were besieged by police for two weeks in 2019. In addition to the film being pulled from the local theater, the Arts Development Council of Hong Kong withdrew a $90,000 grant to Ying E Chi, the independent film collective that released it.The censorship office had initially approved the documentary for audiences over 18, but now some in the film industry believe it could face a retroactive ban.Creators of the fictional film “Ten Years,” which examined the fears of vanishing culture and freedoms that invigorated the resistance to China’s tightening grip on Hong Kong, say it could also be targeted under the new rules. The filmmakers had difficulties finding venues when the movie was released in 2015, but now it might be banned completely, said Mr. Au, who directed one vignette in the five-part film.Kiwi Chow, who also directed part of “Ten Years,” knew that his protest documentary “Revolution of Our Times” had no chance of being approved in Hong Kong. Even its overseas premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in July required special precautions. It was shown on short notice near the end of the festival so Beijing couldn’t pressure the organizers to block it.“I need to do what’s right and not let fear shake my beliefs,” said Kiwi Chow, who directed a documentary on the protests in Hong Kong.Anthony Kwan for The New York TimesMr. Chow sold the film rights to a European distributor and, before he returned to Hong Kong, deleted footage of the film from his own computers out of fear he might be arrested.Some of the subjects of the 152-minute film, including pro-democracy activists such as Benny Tai and Gwyneth Ho, are now in jail. Mr. Chow feared he, too, might be arrested. Friends and family warned him to leave the city, release the film anonymously or change its title. The title is drawn from the slogan “Liberate Hong Kong, Revolution of Our Times,” which the government has described as an illegal call for Hong Kong independence.But Mr. Chow said he ultimately went ahead with the film as he had envisioned it out of a sense of responsibility to the project, its subject and crew.“I need to do what’s right and not let fear shake my beliefs,” he said.While he has yet to face direct retaliation, he said there were signs it could be coming.When he attended a small, private showing of “Beyond the Dream,” a nonpolitical romance that he directed, the police raided the event. Mr. Chow and about 40 people who attended the screening at the office of a pro-democracy district representative were each fined about $645 for violating social distancing rules.“It seems like a warning sign from the regime,” he said. “It’s not very direct. It’s still a question whether the regime has begun its work: Has a case on me been opened?” More

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      in Television

      What’s on TV This Week: ‘Citizen Hearst’ and ‘Saturday Night Live’

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      A two-part documentary about William Randolph Hearst debuts on PBS. And “SNL” returns to NBC for its 47th season.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Sept. 27-Oct. 3. Details and times are subject to change.MondayAMERICAN EXPERIENCE: CITIZEN HEARST 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Any onscreen exploration of the life of the 20th-century media mogul William Randolph Hearst has to contend with an inconvenient fact: Orson Welles’s “Citizen Kane” (1941) basically did that, to historically great effect. This two-part documentary on Hearst leans into that inconvenient truth, both nodding at Welles with its title and including a discussion of “Citizen Kane” itself. The focus, though, is on Hearst and his life — from his days at Harvard, where, the film notes, he was known for keeping a pet alligator, to his death in 1951 in Beverly Hills. (If you’d prefer to watch Welles’s take, you can see that on Monday night, too: “Citizen Kane” airs at 8 p.m. on TCM.)TuesdayLA BREA 9 p.m. on NBC. The first episode of this new sci-fi drama begins with a mother and her two children navigating a distinctly terrestrial horror: Los Angeles traffic. But the situation becomes otherworldly quickly when a sinkhole opens up, transporting those that fall into it to a prehistoric world. The family gets broken up; the series follows them as they work to reunite.WednesdayThe filmmaker Alice Guy-Blaché, as seen in “Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché.”Zeitgeist Films and Kino LorberBE NATURAL: THE UNTOLD STORY OF ALICE GUY-BLACHÉ (2019) 9:45 on TCM. The director Pamela B. Green revisits the life and work of the foundational early filmmaker Alice Guy-Blaché in this documentary. Guy-Blaché was born in 1873 in France, and became one of the first people to innovate with the narrative possibilities that film allows — both as a director and producer, and eventually as the head of her own movie company, Solax Studios. Green’s documentary makes a case for Guy-Blaché’s importance while exploring the ways in which she has traditionally been written out of film history. The documentary also includes a fair amount of archival detective work, following Green’s efforts to research Guy-Blaché — the difficulty of which is telling in itself. It’s a “lively and informative” documentary, A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The New York Times. “By the end of ‘Be Natural,’” Scott wrote, “you won’t only have a clear idea of who this remarkable woman was; you may well have acquired a new taste in old movies.”ThursdayCAKE 10 p.m. on FXX. Despite its title, this comedy showcase series is really more a box of semisweet comedy truffles than it is a cake. Each season mixes bite-sized animated and live-action comedy pieces from an array of creators. The fifth season, which debuts on Thursday night, includes TV versions of two cult comic series: Reza Farazmand’s “Poorly Drawn Lines” and Branson Reese’s “Swan Boy.”FridayJeté Laurence in “Pet Sematary.”Kerry Hayes/Paramount PicturesPET SEMATARY (2019) 7 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. on Paramount Network. Stephen King’s 1983 novel of undead, sometimes four-legged, horrors is reincarnated in this modern movie adaptation. Following in the paw prints of both King’s novel and the 1989 film, this version stars Jason Clarke and Amy Seimetz as a husband and wife who move their family to a small town in Maine. In the woods behind their new house, they discover a cemetery with supernatural traits that turn from horrific to alluring and back again. The directors Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer “overload the movie with arbitrary jump scares,” Glenn Kenny wrote in his review for The Times. But, Kenny added, “when they settle into a groove that aligns with the novel’s, the movie delivers great unsettling jolts that approximate the power of King’s vision.” John Lithgow co-stars as the family’s new neighbor.THE KENNEDY CENTER AT 50 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Audra McDonald hosts this tribute to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Filmed earlier this month, the special includes performances from a formidable group of artists including the singer-songwriter Ben Folds, the soprano Renée Fleming, the jazz bass player Christian McBride and the folk quintet the Punch Brothers. Caroline Kennedy is a special guest.SaturdaySATURDAY NIGHT LIVE 11:30 p.m. on NBC. The continued cultural might of “Saturday Night Live” was on display earlier this month at the 73rd Emmy Awards, and not just because “S.N.L.” won the Emmy for best variety sketch series. The show’s reverberations were felt elsewhere during the ceremony. The “S.N.L.” alum Jason Sudeikis’s Apple TV+ show, “Ted Lasso,” was one of the night’s biggest winners. And the “S.N.L.” alum Norm Macdonald, who died on Sept. 14, was the subject of several tributes. Kenan Thompson was nominated in acting categories for both his work on the series and on his own sitcom, “Kenan” — a show that has surely gotten a boost from Thompson’s “S.N.L.” fame. And Bowen Yang’s silver boots were a red carpet show stealer. “S.N.L.” will return for its 47th season this Saturday, hosted by Owen Wilson. Kacey Musgraves is the musical guest.SundayA scene from “Nuclear Family.”HBONUCLEAR FAMILY 10:10 p.m. on HBO. The filmmaker Ry Russo-Young, known for indie movies including “Nobody Walks” (2012) and teen dramas like “The Sun is Also a Star” (2019), takes an autobiographical turn in this three-part documentary series. In “Nuclear Family,” Russo-Young revisits her childhood as the younger daughter of Sandy Russo and Robin Young. Russo-Young was part of the first generation of children raised by openly gay and lesbian parents. In 1991, her mothers were sued by the man who had donated the sperm for Russo-Young’s conception, Thomas Steel, in a case that made national news and resulted in Steel being granted legal standing as Russo-Young’s father. Russo-Young explores that history through home movies, photographs and present-day interviews. “It feels like this is my first film,” Russo-Young said in a recent interview with The Times. “Or all the films I’ve been making in my whole life have led up to this film.” The second of the three parts debuts on Sunday; the first is available now on HBO platforms including HBO Max. More

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      in Movies

      Bobby Zarem, ‘Superflack’ and Maker of Stars, Dies at 84

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      As a spirited impresario of public relations, he promoted entertainers, films and the “I Love New York” tourism campaign.Bobby Zarem, the exuberant press agent who fulfilled his childhood fantasies by catching rising stars and promoting them to stellar careers, died early Sunday morning at his home in Savannah, Ga. He was 84.His death was confirmed by Bill Augustin, a longtime colleague, who said the cause was complications of lung cancer.A gregarious and ingratiating Yale graduate, Mr. Zarem lasted barely 18 months on Wall Street before stumbling into a career as an indefatigable show business promoter.A largely affable Barnum, he cannily cultivated a symbiotic bond with reporters, greeted favored guests at his parties by obsequiously dropping to his knees and kissing their hands, and gushed with joyful benevolence one moment only to unleash a vitriolic but lyrical X-rated tirade the next, prompted by a perceived slight or an underling’s lapse.Mr. Zarem’s clients included (in alphabetical order) Alan Alda, Ann-Margret, Woody Allen, Michael Caine, Cher, Michael Douglas, Dustin Hoffman, Sophia Loren, Jack Nicholson, Diana Ross, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone.He publicized the films “Tommy” (by staging a gala party in a Midtown Manhattan subway station) and “Saturday Night Fever” (after stealing stills of the production from the studio, which expected the movie to flop and neglected to distribute photographs of John Travolta), as well as “Rambo,” “Dances With Wolves” and “Pumping Iron,” the 1977 documentary about bodybuilding, which starred Mr. Schwarzenegger. For that film, Mr. Zarem arranged a meeting with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis that helped elevate Mr. Schwarzenegger to global superstardom.Mr. Zarem with Michael Douglas in 2010. Mr. Douglas was one of Mr. Zarem’s many celebrity clients.Dave Allocca/Starpix/ShutterstockHe also played a role in initiating the “I Love New York” tourism campaign — although just how much of a role is unclear; he was one of a number of people who claimed credit for originating the slogan (the logo was designed by Milton Glaser).He was hired by William S. Doyle, the state’s deputy commerce commissioner, and said he recruited the Wells Rich Greene advertising agency to produce a television advertising campaign starring Broadway celebrities.He also promoted his own birthplace, transforming John Behrendt’s true-crime book “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” (1994) into a tourism magnet for Savannah. He helped launch a film festival there in 1998 and retired there in 2010.Judy Klemesrud of The New York Times called him “Super Flack.” Spy magazine characterized him as “preternaturally energetic.” Marion Meade wrote in her biography “The Unruly Life of Woody Allen” (2000) that Mr. Zarem was “fueled by an inexhaustible tank of hot air.”And Hal Erickson, likening him to the fading publicist he inspired who was played by Al Pacino in the film “People I Know,” wrote in his book “Any Resemblance to Actual Persons” (2017) that Mr. Zarem “never worried about getting into heaven as long as he could get his people into print.”Like his theatrical clients, Mr. Zarem could deftly switch roles: from the choleric control freak grappling with the last-minute glitches in staging an event to the chivalrous host greeting every guest like a best friend.He wanted badly to be liked, but he could develop a grudge when he wasn’t.Mr. Zarem feuded venomously with the columnist Liz Smith in the 1980s after he discovered that she was writing a separate syndicated column under a pseudonym, Robin Adams Sloan, that denigrated his clients.In contrast to many of his less gregarious colleagues, Mr. Zarem’s own boldfaced name punctuated gossip columns nearly as frequently as his clients’.But despite his personal visibility, Mr. Zarem insisted in an interview with The New York Times in 2001 that his career “was for a long time hurt because I didn’t promote myself.”“People don’t know half of what I’ve done because I’m not a bragger,” he had told The Times four years earlier. He added, though, that while most of his competitors were “handlers or caterers,” he himself had “elevated publicity to an art form.”He regularly dined at Elaine’s on the Upper East Side (where he said he introduced Mia Farrow to Woody Allen), helped organize an annual Oscar-night gala (“Almost everybody here is somebody,” he said at one event), and, in an era of antiseptic tweets, was known for sending personalized handwritten notes.Endowed with a discerning eye that could identify potential stars, Mr. Zarem delivered on his boyhood dreams.“I sit here now,” he said in an interview with South magazine in 2017, “and I realize that everything I fantasized about became real.”Robert Myron Zarem was born on Sept. 30, 1936, in Savannah, the youngest of three sons in an Orthodox Jewish family. His father, Harry, owned a wholesale shoe company. His mother, Rose (Gold) Zarem, was a pianist.“I’ve had major identity problems all my life because I’m obsessed with meeting stars,” he told The Times in 1997When he was 8, he said, he and a friend cut Sunday-school classes to collect an autograph from the tempestuous actress Tallulah Bankhead, who was staying at a Savannah hotel.They planned and executed an elaborate subterfuge — learning her room number from a bellhop who worked for Bobby’s father; walking up eight flights to avoid the elevator operator; knocking on the door and refusing to be cowed when she shrieked, “Go away! I don’t sign autographs”; and then sneaking in behind a maid’s breakfast cart, prompting Miss Bankhead to lob a newspaper at them.Many years later, as a prominent publicist, he encountered Miss Bankhead and made one more fruitless effort. He was equally unsuccessful. “I still don’t sign autographs,” she said.He would continue to collect them, though. Before his father died of cancer when Bobby was 13, he would accompany him when he came to New York for treatment at a New York hospital. They would stay at the Waldorf Astoria, where Bobby would forage for famous guests.After his father died, he told Hamptons magazine, “I was scared to get close to anybody out of fear that that person, too, would disappear.”Despite a lifelong struggle with attention deficit disorder that made reading demanding, he followed his two older brothers to Phillips Academy in Massachusetts and then to Yale, where he graduated in 1958. (Danny Zarem, a fashion retailer, died in 2013. Dr. Harvey Zarem, a plastic surgeon, died in 2015. No immediate family members survive.)After earning a bachelor’s degree in political science, he worked for the United States Trust Company in New York; served briefly in the Air National Guard; was hired by Columbia Artists Management; and, starting in 1968, discovered his gift as a publicist while working for the producer Joseph E. Levine.In 1969 he went to work for Rogers & Cowan, the public relations firm, where his client roster included Dustin Hoffman. He opened his own agency, Zarem Inc., in 1974.Mr. Zarem, a workaholic, never married and didn’t drink, although he smoked marijuana to relax. He cultivated a devil-may-care style in untucked shirts and New Balance sneakers, but that style belied a fierce temper.The publicist Peggy Siegal, who once worked for him, swore that Mr. Zarem lobbed a typewriter at her when she erred in taking a phone message. (He responded that he wouldn’t have missed at such short range.) Mr. Schwarzenegger recalled in his 2012 memoir, “Total Recall,” that Mr. Zarem “always talked like he was completely confused and the world was coming to an end.”He bemoaned the current state of public relations, he told New York magazine in 2010, because the warp speed of digital media pre-empted what to a pro like him was a fine-tuned battle plan of leaks and exclusive stories.About the state of the art as he practiced it, Mr. Zarem noted, “Nobody knows what a press agent does, and if you’re smart, you keep it that way.”He claimed that he had gained self-awareness after more than three decades of analysis with Dr. Samuel Lowy, a psychiatrist who specialized in interpreting dreams. Mr. Zarem concluded that he promoted other people to magnify his own self-image.“I think that’s why I did what I did,” he told Hamptons magazine. “Not feeling that I had anything to communicate, I felt that if I made the rest of the world accept Dustin Hoffman and Ann-Margret and Cher, and all these people, then I would be accepted.”In retrospect, he said, he saw his role in the “I Love New York” campaign as a breakthrough.“My therapist once told me, ‘Anyone who saved the single greatest metropolis can’t be that screwed up,’” Mr. Zarem said. “For the first time in my life, I don’t feel the need to jump out a window if someone cancels dinner on me. Now I know who and what I am.” More