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      It’s Hollywood Barbie’s Moment (and She’s Bringing Her Friends)

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      For 62 years, Barbie has been the hardest-working woman in the toy aisle, using a dizzying array of outfits and accessories — and, lately, changing body shapes and skin tones — while gliding from one career to the next. Astrophysicist Barbie. Ballerina Barbie. Chicken Farmer Barbie. Firefighter Barbie.But she has never pulled off the ultimate transformation: Barbie, live-action movie star.Time and again, her corporate overlords at Mattel have teamed with Hollywood studios to make a big-budget film in hopes of forging a new revenue stream while giving Barbie new relevance. Time and again, nothing has emerged, in part because Mattel has tried to micromanage the creative process, alienating filmmakers. (You want Barbie to do what?) Financial turbulence and executive turnover at Mattel haven’t helped.A similar situation has played out with other Mattel brands, including Hot Wheels, American Girl and Masters of the Universe — a humiliation given the success that other toy companies have had in Hollywood, which loves nothing more than a movie concept with a built-in fan base.The inventive “Lego Movie” took in nearly $500 million at the global box office in 2014 for Warner Bros. and the Lego Group, resulting in a sequel and two spinoffs. Paramount Pictures and Hasbro have turned the Transformers action-figure line into a $5 billion big-screen franchise over the last 14 years; a seventh installment is on the way and will undoubtedly deliver the same halo for Hasbro as the previous films, driving up the company’s stock price and turbocharging demand for Transformers toys.With money like that on the line, Mattel has clung to its Hollywood dream. “There is ‘Fast and Furious 9’ and Hot Wheels zero,” said Ynon Kreiz, Mattel’s newish chief executive, referring to Universal’s hot-rod film franchise, which has taken in $6.3 billion worldwide since 2001. “That is going to change.”There are signals — 13 of them — that Mattel is not playing around this time.Margot Robbie will star in “Barbie,” a live-action movie directed by Greta Gerwig.Pool photo by Chris PizzelloUnder Mr. Kreiz, who has overseen a stunning financial turnaround at the company since becoming its fourth chief executive in four years in 2018, Mattel has moved to turn its toys into full-fledged entertainment brands. It now has 13 films in the works with various studio partners, including “Barbie,” a live-action adventure starring Margot Robbie (“I, Tonya”) and directed by the Oscar-nominated Greta Gerwig (“Lady Bird”). Ms. Robbie, who is also one of the producers, described the big-budget film in an email as being “for both the fans and the skeptics,” a theatrical endeavor that will be “really entertaining but also completely surprising.”The script, by Ms. Gerwig and Noah Baumbach (“Marriage Story”), even pokes fun at Barbie and Ken, her plastic paramour.As in, what happened to their genitals?“I’m excited about this movie because it’s emotional and touches your heart and honors the legacy while reflecting our current society and culture — and doesn’t feel designed to sell toys,” said Toby Emmerich, chairman of the Warner Bros. Pictures Group, where “Barbie” is pointed toward a 2023 theatrical release.The dozen other films in Mattel’s pipeline include a live-action Hot Wheels spectacle; a horror film based on the fortunetelling Magic 8 Ball; a wide-audience Thomas the Tank Engine movie that combines animation and live action; and, in partnership with Sony Pictures Entertainment, a big-screen Masters of the Universe adventure about the cosmos that includes He-Man and his superheroic sister, She-Ra.Mattel also has 17 television series in production, including “Masters of the Universe: Revelation,” which arrives on Netflix on July 23.NetflixMattel, Universal and Vin Diesel are collaborating on a live-action movie based on Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots, a tabletop game introduced in 1966. Lena Dunham (HBO’s “Girls”) is directing and writing a live-action family comedy based on Mattel’s Polly Pocket line of micro-dolls. Lily Collins (“Emily in Paris”) will play the title role and produce; Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer is the distribution and financing partner.“Young women need smart, playful films that speak to them without condescension,” Ms. Dunham said.Mattel has also announced movies based on View-Master, American Girl and Uno, the ubiquitous card game. (If you think an Uno movie sounds like a satirical headline from The Onion, consider this: There are non-Mattel movies in development in Hollywood that are based on Play-Doh and Peeps, the Easter candy.)All or some or none of Mattel’s movie projects could connect with audiences — if they come to fruition at all. That is the nature of the Hollywood casino.“Familiarity with a toy or character is a start, but no movie makes it without clever character and story development,” said David A. Gross, who runs Franchise Entertainment Research, a movie consultancy.Toys have a surprisingly strong track record as film fodder. Other hits include the 2016 animated musical “Trolls,” based on the wild-haired dolls, and “Ouija,” which cost $5 million to make in 2014 and collected $104 million worldwide. (Pixar did not base “Toy Story” on a toy, but it has populated the franchise with classics, including Barbie.) But the genre has also had wipeouts, notably “Battleship,” which Universal and Hasbro based on the board game and cost more than $300 million to make and market. It arrived to $25 million in North American ticket sales in 2012.The head of Mattel Films, Robbie Brenner, right, with Mr. Kreiz and Richard Dickson, Mattel’s president and chief operating officer.Rozette Rago for The New York Times“UglyDolls,” adapted from a line of plush toys, was a smaller-scale box office disaster for STX Films in 2019. Mattel itself got bruised in 2016 when “Max Steel,” a modestly budgeted film based on an action figure, arrived to near-empty theaters. It received a zero percent positive score on Rotten Tomatoes, the review-aggregation site.“Unless you can make something that feels really sticky and really interesting and really authentic, there’s no point in doing it,” said Robbie Brenner, who heads Mattel Films, which was created in 2018. (Mattel’s previous movie division, Playground Productions, was started in 2013 and folded in 2016.)Ms. Brenner said she had approached all of Mattel’s properties with the same question: “How do we flip it on its side a little bit while still respecting the integrity of the brand?”Mr. Kreiz said he was not interested in making thinly disguised toy commercials. In a shift from the Mattel of the past, “we want to give our filmmaking partners creative freedom and enable them to do things that are unconventional and exciting,” he said. “Focus on making great content and the rest will follow.”He added, however, that Mattel did not “sign a deal and disappear.”The message appears to be resonating in Hollywood, allowing Mattel to attract A-plus talent. The “Barbie” team is one example. Tom Hanks has agreed to star in and produce an adaptation of Major Matt Mason, an astronaut action figure introduced by Mattel in 1966; Akiva Goldsman, the Oscar-winning writer of “A Beautiful Mind,” is working on the screenplay. Marc Forster (“World War Z”) is directing and producing that “Thomas & Friends” movie. And Daniel Kaluuya, who won an Oscar in April for his role in “Judas and the Black Messiah,” is involved with a Mattel film project based on Barney, the interminably perky purple dinosaur.Even Ms. Brenner has a sophisticated film pedigree. She produced the AIDS-medication drama “Dallas Buyers Club,” which received six Oscar nominations in 2014, including one for best picture. (It won three: actor, supporting actor, and makeup and hairstyling.) Before that, she was a senior executive at 20th Century Fox and Miramax.“Barbie DreamHouse Adventures” is already steaming on Netflix.MattelMattel’s momentum in Hollywood has resulted, in part, from a turnaround at the company as a whole. Mattel has fixed many of its core problems, making it less risk averse, according to Richard Dickson, Mattel’s president and chief operating officer.“Five years ago, the foundations that our brands were sitting on were not strong enough,” Mr. Dickson said.When Mr. Kreiz arrived in April 2018, the toymaker was reeling from gut punches, some self-inflicted. It had lost Disney’s lucrative princesses toy license to Hasbro. A crucial retail partner, Toys “R” Us, had evaporated in a cloud of bankruptcy. Millennial parents had turned on Barbie, dismissing her as vapid and noninclusive. And some of Mattel’s other stars — American Girl, the glam Monster High crew — were adrift, unsure of how to compete for the attention of a generation of iPad-wielding children.Total revenue plunged to $4.5 billion in 2018, from $6.5 billion in 2013, and a profit of more than $900 million in 2013 became a loss of $533 million.Mr. Kreiz stabilized Mattel by restructuring its supply chain and reducing costs by $1 billion over three years, in part by closing factories and laying off more than 2,000 nonmanufacturing employees. At the same time, a long-gestating modernization plan for Barbie began to pay off in a major way. She now comes with roughly 150 different body shapes, skin tones and hairstyles; Wheelchair Barbie was such a runaway success last year that Wheelchair Ken recently arrived.In 2020, with parents looking for ways to entertain children at home during the pandemic, Mattel sold more than 100 Barbie dolls a minute, Mr. Dickson said. (Juli Lennett, toy industry adviser for NPD Group, backed him up.)Revenue totaled $4.6 billion last year, and Mattel posted a profit of $127 million. In the first quarter of 2021, sales increased 47 percent from a year earlier, the company’s highest growth rate in at least 25 years. Mattel’s stock price has climbed 52 percent since Mr. Kreiz took over.Mattel, based in El Segundo, Calif., is now turning to the next phase of Mr. Kreiz’s growth plan. With a vast catalog of intellectual property, Mattel wants to become more like Marvel, which started as a comics company and transformed into a Hollywood superpower.“In the mid- to long term, we must become a player in film, television, digital gaming, live events, consumer products, music and digital media,” Mr. Kreiz said.And by player he means player. Mattel has a long history in direct-to-DVD animated movies, for instance, but its television division, run by Fred Soulie, is working to capitalize on the streaming boom. The company has a long-term deal to make one or two Barbie cartoons for Netflix annually. “Masters of the Universe: Revelation,” an animated series from the filmmaker Kevin Smith (“Clerks”), arrives on Netflix on July 23.In total, Mr. Soulie has 18 shows in production, including a revamped “Thomas & Friends” and a new incarnation of “Monster High.” An additional 24 are in development.“We’ve been planting a lot of seeds,” Mr. Soulie said, “and we’re about to see the results.” More

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      ‘Last Summer’ Review: Growing Pains

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      Sunny days turn to sweaty nights on the Mediterranean coast in this Turkish coming-of-age film that follows a teenage boy who pines for his older sister’s best friend.The film “Last Summer” plays like an extended montage advertising the arresting views and clear Mediterranean waters of southern Turkey. Like a migratory fish, the teenage Deniz (Fatih Sahin) is lucky to spend summers on this divine coastline beaching, discoing and bronzing in the seaside town where his family has a cottage. This gauzy coming-of-age movie (on Netflix) is set during the summer of 1997, as Deniz tags along with his cool older sister, Ebru (Aslihan Malbora), while nursing puppy love for her teasing bestie, Asli (Ece Cesmioglu).The director Ozan Aciktan is interested in exploring how Deniz’s crush on Asli, a flirtatious young woman, reflects his yearning for what he sees as the confidence and thrills of adulthood. When he accompanies Asli and her friends to a high cliff, Deniz shows off by jumping off into the sea. Although he survives the plunge, the gash he gets on his foot is a sign that while growing up is exhilarating, it is not without pain.The film’s attention to Deniz’s growing pains is useful as Asli, a lovely but hazy character, meets a charming older man, and Deniz’s shy longing takes a jealous turn. Tension builds over sunny days and sweaty nights. But upon reaching its climax, the movie fails to fulfill. Asli’s feelings seem to change on a whim, and Deniz suffers no consequences for his mistakes. For all the beauty of its dazzling vacation setting, “Last Summer” coasts, but not toward any satisfying destination.Last SummerNot rated. In Turkish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      The Schlock-Horror Drive-In That Rose From the Grave

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      Many drive-in theaters got a boost during the pandemic. But the scene at the Mahoning Drive-In in rural Pennsylvania is something else entirely.It was about 2 a.m. on a Sunday when the gross-out horror-comedy “Class of Nuke ’Em High” started playing at the Mahoning Drive-In. This was the last screening at TromaDance, an annual showcase of low-budget horror and sex comedies produced by the Queens-based Troma movie studio. Earlier that evening, about 600 cars had piled into the drive-in in Lehighton, Pa., but by 2 a.m., only the die-hards remained. Kevin Schmidt, an extra in the film, was among them.He had driven to the Mahoning from Summit, N.J., and hadn’t seen the movie projected on screen since it was first shown in Jersey City in December 1986. “This is the only time I can justify driving 100 miles to see a movie,” Mr. Schmidt said much earlier in the evening.By the time the evening was over, it had been another success for the Mahoning, a 72-year-old drive-in theater that was left for dead just seven years ago. And while the pandemic has helped spur a small-scale revival of the drive-in, it doesn’t quite explain what’s going on at this theater in rural Pennsylvania an hour south of Scranton.“There’s a feeling of excitement that I get every time I drive past the Mahoning’s sign and see the huge screen get closer and closer,” said Andrew Ramallo, who drove from his home in Rego Park, Queens. His car was one of dozens with out-of-state plates. In fact, he has made the 100-plus-mile drive from New York to Lehighton a half-dozen times since 2019. “Like visiting an old friend,” he said, “there’s an overwhelming sense of familiarity.”Robert Humanick, an assistant projectionist, loading a film into one of the theater’s original projectors.Amanda Mustard for The New York TimesThe Mahoning is not the only successful drive-in theater in the area. There’s the Delsea in Vineland, in southern New Jersey, and the Hi-Way in Coxsackie, in upstate New York, but they mostly screen new movies that are also showing at indoor theaters. A few New York City drive-ins screen older movies, including the Skyline in Greenpoint and the Bel Aire Diner in Astoria. But the movies they show can probably be streamed at home. And they don’t have a devoted audience willing to travel hundreds of miles to see them.Movie screenings at the Mahoning Drive-In often feel like events. Films are shown in double and triple features, sandwiched between older (and often bizarre) movie trailers. You might take in “Escape From New York” and “Invasion U.S.A.,” which play after vintage church advertisements (“Worship at the church of your choice”) or an anti-cable-TV screed (“Don’t let pay TV be the monster in your living room”). It is, in the words of Mr. Schmidt, “a special place.”Fans lining up last month to meet Mr. Kaufman at TromaDance, a festival featuring the Troma studio’s  movies, Amanda Mustard for The New York TimesThe Mahoning Drive-In opened in 1949, part of a wave of drive-ins that became popular in America after World War II, first with parents and their young children, and then with teenagers who sought unchaperoned privacy. “Most teenagers didn’t have many places that they could go to be alone,” said John Irving Bloom, a drive-in historian. “The drive-in was one of those places.”Mr. Bloom is the author of 11 books, including “Profoundly Disturbing: Shocking Movies That Changed History,” but he is better known as the redneck TV character Joe Bob Briggs, host of the popular horror movie showcase program “The Last Drive-In” (on AMC’s Shudder streaming service). Mr. Bloom’s show will shoot a live episode on July 17 at the Mahoning Drive-In. The movies he’ll present, as always, will be a surprise.According to Mr. Bloom, drive-in attendance started to decline when multiplex theaters proliferated across the country. In the 1970s, many drive-ins survived by showing pornography, and by the 1980s, he said, most drive-in theater owners had sold their land to big-box stores like Walmart.The Mahoning never went out of business. But by 2014, attendance was sometimes as low as 10 cars per show. An industrywide shift from film to digital projectors left the drive-in’s owners with a dire choice: either spend $50,000 for a new digital projector, which would allow the theater to show the latest movie studio releases, or stop showing new movies altogether. Many owners would have either begrudgingly put up the money or folded outright — but Jeff Mattox, the drive-in’s longtime projectionist, did something weirder. He bought the place and decided not to change a thing.Mark Nelson, the Mahoning’s general manager: “I wanted to be a part of this wild, wacky thing.”Amanda Mustard for The New York TimesMuch of the open-air theater’s equipment hasn’t changed since he arrived in 2001. Mr. Mattox estimated that he has had to replace only one gear in the theater’s film projectors, which date back to 1949. Replacing those old workhorses with digital projectors would change the Mahoning Drive-In’s fundamental character. “It would have ruined the whole drive-in look,” he said.His conviction was infectious.Two of the drive-in’s enthusiastic volunteer employees, Virgil Cardamone and Matt McClanahan, provided Mr. Mattox with a solution: abandon the new movies and exclusively screen older cult and genre movies, all shown on film prints rather than digital projectors.Mr. Mattox was initially skeptical. Netflix was well on its way to domination, and a number of competitors were also launching apps. Who would come to a drive-in to see a movie they could stream at home? But he put his faith in keeping things retro.It’s not just a drive-in but a social event.Amanda Mustard for The New York TimesThe Mahoning Drive-In’s programming was only fitfully successful throughout its first two seasons, but word soon spread about themed programs like “Bite Night” — a Steven Spielberg double feature of “Jaws” and “Jurassic Park.” After that, the drive-in’s thousand-car lot began to fill up on a regular basis. The nearby Mahoning Inn motel started filling up with movie fans on weekends.Since then, programming has become more eclectic thanks to the suggestions of Harry Guerro, a film collector from New Jersey who has lent the drive-in many features, shorts and trailer reels from his considerable collection.Mr. Guerro, a founding member of the Philadelphia film programmers group Exhumed Films, suggested themed showings, like Zombie Fest and Camp Blood, which have gone on to be the Mahoning Drive-In’s most successful recurring events.Though it’s the party atmosphere that gives the Mahoning its unique character, Mr. Guerro said he felt emboldened by its thriving fan base. He hopes to experiment more soon by showing more than just older horror movies, which he says are unquestionably the Mahoning Drive-In’s biggest draw.Strictly speaking, he isn’t even an employee. But he’s nonetheless invested. “I mostly want to give people the opportunity to experience or re-experience films that I love on the big screen with an audience of like-minded individuals.”The concession stand sells popcorn and vinyl records. The drive-in’s owner has bet on keeping things retro.Amanda Mustard for The New York TimesMr. Guerro is not the only one working with the Mahoning Drive-In who lives out of state. The theater’s manager, Mark Nelson, regularly commutes about two and a half hours from Dobbs Ferry, just north of New York City. He started volunteering at the drive-in 2015 and is now a paid employee. “I wanted to be a part of this wild, wacky thing,” Mr. Nelson said. “The staff were best friends, and the customers were just as crazy for films as the people working there.”John Demmer, a carpenter from Nutley, N.J., works at the Mahoning Drive-In with his wife, Cindy, albeit as unpaid volunteers. The two, who are both 54, have built elaborate costumes, props and sets for customers and celebrity guests to take photos in since last year. They work closely with an amateur set designer named J.T. Mills who has volunteered at the Mahoning since 2018.At this year’s TromaDance, the Demmers sat in lawn chairs next to a newly renovated drive-in speaker that Mr. Demmer found and repaired while antiquing in Detroit. They fondly recalled their first visit to the Mahoning Drive-In last year, when they dressed up as Willy Wonka and Veruca Salt for the annual opening-night double feature, “The Wizard of Oz” and “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.”A moment from the recent Troma take on Shakespeare.Amanda Mustard for The New York TimesTo celebrate their 35th anniversary, the Demmers visited the Mahoning Drive-In to rewatch “The Thing.” It was the first movie they had seen as a couple.“You don’t just sit in a car and watch the movie,” Mr. Demmer said. “You actually become part of the entertainment. You could argue that seeing the movie is secondary to being there with your friends.” Mrs. Demmer agreed and said she was looking forward to the upcoming Joe Bob Briggs screenings — a “major recognition” for the drive-in and its staff.There was such a high demand for “Joe Bob’s Jamboree,” in fact, Mr. Mattox said, that Ticket Leap, the Mahoning Drive-In’s online vendor, crashed soon after tickets for the event were released. Two of the event’s four evenings sold out immediately after the website was restored.When Mr. Bloom shows up as Joe Bob Briggs at the Mahoning Drive-In this month, it will be his first visit, but he already understands the outdoor theater’s appeal. “It’s partly nostalgia, but it’s also partly because people now live on the internet,” he said. “They make friends on the internet, but they never meet these friends. So now people go to the drive-in to meet people that they already know.” More

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      Clare Peploe, Film Director Who Jumbled Genres, Dies at 79

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      She contributed to the movies of her husband, Bernardo Bertolucci, but occasionally made her own, including “Triumph of Love.”Clare Peploe, a director and screenwriter who liked to merge genres in her own films, and who also made significant contributions to some of the movies of her husband, the celebrated filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci, died on June 24 in Rome. She was 79.The cause was cancer, said Alessandra Bracaglia, her assistant.As a director, Ms. Peploe made a quick impact with her first effort, a comic short called “Couples and Robbers,” about newlyweds who commit a robbery, which she wrote with Ernie Eban; it was nominated for the short-subject Oscar in 1981.“In this comedy-thriller she has demonstrated that in her very first film she is a talent to be reckoned with,” Richard Roud wrote in The Guardian Weekly when the film played at the Berlin Film Festival in 1982. “The casting and direction of actors is superb. If someone doesn’t finance a feature film by her, it will be a great shame.”Ms. Peploe, though, found financing to be a struggle, especially since her films defied easy categorization, and when she did set a project in motion, she worked at a deliberate pace. As a result, her oeuvre was limited. Her first feature, “High Season,” wasn’t released until 1987, and there would be only two others, “Rough Magic” in 1995 and “Triumph of Love” in 2001.She had a knack for attracting well-known actors to her projects. “High Season,” a comic indictment of gauche tourists, starred Jacqueline Bisset, Irene Papas and Kenneth Branagh, among others. “Rough Magic” featured Bridget Fonda as a magician’s assistant on the run in Mexico and Russell Crowe as a man hired to track her down.“Triumph of Love,” her most well-received feature, was her take on an 18th-century stage comedy by Pierre de Marivaux and had a cast that included Mira Sorvino, Ben Kingsley, Fiona Shaw and Rachael Stirling.Mira Sorvino and Jay Rodan in a scene from “Triumph of Love,” Ms. Peploe’s most well-received feature.Sundance ChannelAll these films were hard to pigeonhole. “High Season” was both a commentary on what tourism does to an ancient Greek village and a “Midsummer Night’s Dream”-style romantic fantasy. “Rough Magic,” The Independent of Britain said, “veers from Saturday morning serial-style thrills to Buñuelian surrealism to light noir, with dashes of Nicholas Ray and Howard Hawks here and there.”“Clare Peploe’s films as director are distinguished by an uncommon combination of madcap narrative intricacy, sophisticated battles of the sexes, picturesque locations and artistic self-consciousness,” Susan Felleman, a professor of art history and film and media studies at the University of South Carolina’s School of Visual Art and Design, said by email. “They’re screwball comedies for the art-house set.”When she wasn’t directing films, Ms. Peploe was sometimes writing them. Her first film credit was as one of several screenwriters on Michelangelo Antonioni’s film about rebellious American youths, “Zabriskie Point” (1970), although she played down her contribution, describing her role as “the umpteenth assistant” on the film.“I wasn’t really a writer on it, I was a researcher on it,” she said. (She was useful because she was fluent in English.) She shared screenwriting credit on Mr. Bertolucci’s films “Luna” in 1979 and “Besieged” in 1998.When she was directing, though, she generally banned her famous husband from the set.“He makes people nervous,” she told The Independent in 1996.Clare Frances Katherine Peploe was born on Oct. 20, 1941, in Tanga, in northeastern Tanzania. Her father, William, was a British civil servant who became an art dealer and director of the Lefevre Gallery in London, and her mother, Clotilde (Brewster) Peploe, was an artist.She had an exotic early life: growing up and attending schools in Kenya, London, Italy and Paris, picking up several languages and acquiring a worldly outlook. Living in a variety of cultures, she told The Record of New Jersey in 1997, “you learn to see everything — an historical event, a war, a wedding ceremony, whatever — in so many different ways.”Ms. Peploe in 2001 with her husband, the filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci. She made significant contributions to a number of his movies.Pierre-Philippe Marcou/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesShe met Mr. Antonioni in the late 1960s and worked with him on “Zabriskie Point.” She first met Mr. Bertolucci in 1970 at a screening of his film “The Spider’s Stratagem,” and they met several times afterward, bonding over their shared love of Jean-Luc Godard. She served as a second assistant director on “1900,” Mr. Bertolucci’s 1976 drama of class struggle, and before the end of the decade they had married.Ms. Peploe said that, counterintuitively, being associated with her husband didn’t help her with the nuts-and-bolts aspects of her own filmmaking like obtaining financing.“In fact,” she told The Los Angeles Times in 1988, “I recently realized that many of the problems I encountered had to do with being married to him. I naïvely assumed that people didn’t care about that sort of thing and just saw me as being me, but I now see there’s a certain envy you encounter, an attitude of ‘she doesn’t need our help — look who she’s married to.’”Creatively, however, they complemented each other, she said.“Over the years Bernardo often asked me to help him with ideas for his films, and I always surprised myself with the cinematic, Bertolucci-like ideas I’d come up with,” she said. “He had a sort of Svengali effect on me and has been instrumental in helping me come into my own as a filmmaker.”Mr. Bertolucci died in 2018. Ms. Peploe, who lived in Rome, is survived by a brother, Mark Peploe, who shared a screenwriting Oscar with Mr. Bertolucci for the 1987 film “The Last Emperor.” More

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      ‘First Date’ Review: Modern Action Romance Propelled by a ’65 Chrysler

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      The filmmakers Manuel Crosby and Darren Knapp pack their debut, starring Tyson Brown and Shelby Duclos, with oddballs and left turns, but their script has heart.“First Date” is a boy-meets-girl, boy-and-girl-evade-goon-squad action romance from Manuel Crosby and Darren Knapp, a debut filmmaking team putting their faith in Jean-Luc Godard’s maxim that “all you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.” Hey, that cliché sold Quentin Tarantino’s first scripts, and this likable homage moves at a clip, as though the young writer-directors are impatient to introduce themselves to producers beyond their immediate families. Calculated? Absolutely. Yet, “First Date” endears itself to the genre by knowing when to lean into nostalgia (the heroine Kelsey, played by Shelby Duclos, adores surf rock eight-tracks) and when to veer off-course (she’s also a boxer).Kelsey’s fisticuffs come in handy when she makes a date with Mike (Tyson Brown), a wallflower who impulsively buys a busted-up 1965 Chrysler to impress his kitsch-obsessed crush. Mike’s new car is bad luck twice over. Not only was the Chrysler’s previous owner, a drug smuggler (Todd Goble), fatally shot by a gang of violent dimwits determined to get their hands on the keys, but the car itself is bait for two nosy cops (Nicole Berry and Samuel Ademola) certain there’s something suspicious about a Black teenager purchasing a rust bucket. As the deputy says, “That just don’t sound like sober decision making to me.”What follows is a barrage of gunfire, wah-wah guitars and a surprising amount of novelty and heart for a film that can feel as if it’s a road trip through the directors’ inspirations. Crosby, who also shot and helped edit the movie, manages to capture the vibe of David Lynch’s suburban surrealism, albeit hampered by a visibly lower budget. Crosby’s sly camera movements and pacing choices are funnier, however, than the dialogue — which isn’t hard when Mike is so passive, he barely speaks. When will filmmakers realize that there’s little thrill in a bland underdog eventually rising to the occasion if the character wastes much of the running time being flatter than a Kansas freeway? Kelsey, at least, lands a dozen zingers, telling one suitor she’ll see him “the second Tuesday of next week.”The script is so crammed with oddball characters that it threatens to become a clown car. There’s a fast-talking salesman, his strung-out wife and their deranged robot vacuum, which has a mind of its own. Plus the drug smuggler Tony’s bossy best friend, Brett (Josh Fesler); a Porsche-driving jock named, of course, Chet (Brandon Kraus); and a pair of sentimental retirees with their own claim to the Chrysler. It’s too cute by half that the pistol-waving heavies are also in a book club where they bicker over “Of Mice and Men.”Still, even in a film populated with cartoons, the carnage is never played for laughs. “First Date” pauses to give each death emotional weight, and that empathy — more than gags about “Titanic” VHS tapes and winking insertions of the Wilhelm scream — is reason to give Crosby and Knapp the green light to squire us on a second adventure.First DateNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, FandangoNow and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      In Paul Schrader’s ‘Blue Collar,’ the Factory Floor Is Brutal

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      His 1978 debut, which features quick-witted performances by Richard Pryor and Harvey Keitel, now has a short run at Film Forum.The robber baron Jay Gould supposedly bragged that he could hire one half of the working class to kill the other half. That quote, likely apocryphal, is the essence of Paul Schrader’s “Blue Collar,” a harshly garish morality play in which — squeezed between the Scylla of a factory’s exploitative management and the Charybdis of their corrupt union — three autoworkers go rogue.“Blue Collar” has been revived for a week at Film Forum in a 35-millimeter print. It was timely in 1978 and, in its expression of rust-belt alienation, prescient as well.Perhaps because it was Schrader’s first movie as a director, “Blue Collar” communicates the thrill of breaking new ground, albeit showing the influence of Martin Scorsese (for whom, a few years earlier, Schrader wrote “Taxi Driver”). It echoes both the prole-drama “Car Wash” (1976) and the mode’s classic example, “On the Waterfront” (1954).The most daringly uncommercial move in Schrader’s screenplay, co-written with his brother, Leonard Schrader, was constituting his larcenous trio as the so-called “Oreo Gang” — two Black workers, played by Richard Pryor and Yaphet Kotto, and one white, Harvey Keitel. (The reverse would have been conventional Hollywood wisdom.) Schrader’s boldest strategy was to allow each then-hungry actor to believe himself the star. Call it a form of “method” direction. In his history of ’70s film, Peter Biskind describes the set as a “powder keg.”Thus, while Keitel and Kotto smolder with suppressed rage, Pryor (who, like Marlon Brando, rarely gave the same line-reading twice) is incandescent as a quick-minded trickster with a jittery strut and an answer for everything. In his mixed review, the New York Times critic Vincent Canby noted that, for the first time, Pryor had a role utilizing “the wit and fury that distinguishes his straight comedy routines.”Pryor’s improvisations heighten the movie’s dialectic of oppressive reality and imaginary escape. While the factory scenes, shot at a Checker cab plant in Kalamazoo, Mich., have a documentary quality, fantasy is furnished by the Norman Lear TV sitcoms that punctuate the domestic scenes. The movie’s resident realist is the wily president of the union local. Nicknamed Eddie Knuckles, he’s embodied by Harry Bellaver, a veteran (and genuine) working-class actor who, no less than Pryor, gives the impression of conjuring his dialogue on the spot.“Blue Collar” has a few weak bits, notably one where, interrupting Pryor’s critique of “The Jeffersons,” an I.R.S. examiner pays an unexpected house call. And just as the Oreo Gang fail to think through their robbery, the movie glosses over a worse crime that could not have been committed without management collusion. Still, this portrait of frustration is powerfully framed. The opening credits — an assembly-line montage scored to the pounding first chords of the blues song “I’m a Man,” sung with new lyrics by Captain Beefheart — provide a brutal annunciation. And, following a gripping finale, Schrader redeems the cliché of ending on a freeze frame by returning the struggle to the factory floor.Interviewed by the leftist film journal Cineaste, Schrader asserted his apolitical intentions while congratulating himself as having come to “a very specific Marxist conclusion.” Be that as it may, “Blue Collar” is less Marxist than it is Hobbesian, as expressed by Kotto’s indictment of the powers that be: “They’ll do anything to keep you on their line. They pit the lifers against the new boys, the old against the young, the Black against the white — everybody — to keep us in our place.”Collective action is futile.Blue CollarJuly 9-15 at Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, Manhattan; filmforum.org. More

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      ‘The Woman Who Ran’ Review: Conversations With Friends

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      Hong Sangsoo’s latest film is a concise trilogy of awkward visits.“The Woman Who Ran,” Hong Sangsoo’s compact 24th feature — about an hour and a quarter from start to finish — consists of three visits. Gamhee (Kim Minhee, a fixture of the Hong cinematic universe) drops in on an old friend who is divorced, another who is single and a third whose marriage is a source of some awkwardness between them. Gamhee, who has been married for five years, tells each of her hosts that this is the first time she and her husband, who is away on a business trip, have been apart.The fact that she repeats this assertion introduces a sliver of uncertainty into what appears to be a tidy, quiet, symmetrical film. That uneasiness — the sense that everything is perfectly clear and utterly mysterious — is as much a directorial signature of Hong’s as smoking, drinking and sudden zooms in.You might wonder if the vignettes represent chronologically adjacent episodes on a single trip, or if each is an entirely different adventure. The title suggests flight, and it seems possible that Gamhee is running away from home, seeking refuge among women who might understand what she is going through without having to talk about it.The characters speak plainly and obliquely, chatting about food, weather, architecture and other safely banal topics, as well as about love and work. Gamhee eats a delicious home-cooked meal with Youngsoon (Seo Younghwa) and a not-so-good one with Suyoung (Song Seonmi), which she compliments anyway. With Woojin (Kim Saebyuk), who Gamhee meets in a cafe next to a movie theater, she drinks coffee and shares an apple.The apple is one of several motifs — another hallmark of Hong’s style — that loop through the movie, producing a sense of structure in the relative absence of a plot. More than once, an apple is peeled and sliced. More than once, Gamhee watches the interactions of other characters through an entranceway security video.Youngsoon, who lives with a roommate in a rural area, tells Gamhee about a neighbor’s rooster, who harasses the hens, jumping on their backs and pecking at their necks. He’s not trying to mate with them, she explains, “he’s just mean.” The men in “The Woman Who Ran” are like human avatars of that nasty bird, intruding on the leisure and intimacy of women to crow and scratch and ruffle feathers.One guy shows up to complain about the feral cats that Youngsoon and her roommate are in the habit of feeding. Another rings Suyoung’s doorbell to whine about how she humiliated and insulted him after they slept together. To say much about the third gentleman might count as something of a spoiler, though maybe that’s giving him — a former love of Gamhee’s and a writer besotted by his own celebrity — too much credit.Hong, a prolific miniaturist with an unmatched eye and ear for heterosexual romantic disappointment, is often compared to Eric Rohmer, the French writer-director who specialized in fables of wayward desire among the bourgeois-bohemian class. To me, he more closely resembles a short-story writer like Ann Beattie or Alice Munro, assembling an anthology of recognizably similar but always distinct approaches to a carefully selected set of characters and themes.Some of the individual tales may hit the emotions harder or stay in the mind longer, and some viewers may never acquire a taste for his talky, elliptical, melancholy style. For those of us who delight in his elegant explorations of drunkenness, regret, lust and ennui, he isan indispensable comedian of modern manners, good and bad, and his steady (or perhaps compulsive) productivity is a gift. “The Woman Who Ran” is a cinematic sketch, and also the work of a master.The Woman Who RanNot rated. In Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 17 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Scales’ Review: A Sensual Fable With a Feminist Bent

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      From Saudi Arabia, this dystopian tale is heavy on evocative visuals at the expense of a more satisfying story.In a craggy coastal village seemingly isolated from the rest of the world, a group of torch-wielding men prepare for a gruesome ritual: They must sacrifice their daughters to appease the mermaid-like creatures that roam the sea. Despite the pressure to follow community guidelines, so to speak, Muthana (Yagoub Alfarhan) saves his firstborn before she sinks too deep into the black waters.And thus begins the fable-esque story of Hayat (Basima Hajjar), a 12-year-old girl who comes to subvert the fearful, patriarchal customs that dictate the dystopian world of “Scales.” Written and directed by the Saudi Arabian filmmaker Shahad Ameen, this feature debut is aesthetically tantalizing, presented in eerily glistening monochrome. Just as Hayat fends off another round of sacrifice and proves herself by hunting down a sea creature, a scab on her foot grows larger and begins look an awful lot like fish scales. The movie hints at the possibility that the village’s lost girls are transformed into these mystical beings.Ameen prioritizes symbolism teeming with sensory spirit over plot-based narrative, which ultimately renders her attempt at making a political statement too opaque and disjointed to have much of an impact. She gestures at the plight of women in Saudi Arabia, also bound by archaic traditions, but her critique fails to penetrate the surface of this issue.Still, the film’s visual elements — Hayat’s cloud of unruly black hair, the bone-dry rocky cliffs hovering over the village — are palpable, bewilderingly engrossing and complemented by a spine-tingling sound design full of creaks, drips and scratches. By the end, the film feels more mysterious than ever, a frustrating conclusion that may very well be the point.ScalesNot rated. In Arabic, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 14 minutes. In theaters. More