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      In the Weeds of ‘In the Heights’

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      The film adaptation of the Tony-winning musical “In the Heights” was released this month, one of the first blockbuster movies to arrive after more than a year of pandemic shutdowns. The original musical was the breakthrough for Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote its music and lyrics and went on to gain global fame with “Hamilton.”The film opened to successful box office numbers, but also spawned several critical conversations, particularly about the lack of Afro-Latino representation among the film’s lead actors, and the ways in which it failed to capture the full mosaic of the actual neighborhood of Washington Heights.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Miranda’s evolutionary approach to the musical theater lineage, how the film left certain elements of the musical on the cutting room floor and the critical blowback brought on by the film’s casting choices.Guests:Sandra Garcia, a Styles reporter for The New York TimesIsabelia Herrera, an arts critic fellow for The New York Times’s Culture deskLena Wilson, a film critic who has written for The New York Times, Slate and others More

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      Five Action Movies to Stream Now

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      From flicks about vengeful gangsters to sagas of postapocalyptic survival, this month’s picks include films from around the globe.For action movie fans looking for new thrills to watch at home, there are a lot of car chases, explosions and fights (knife, sword and fist) to sift through. We’re helping to make the choice easier by providing some streaming highlights. More

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      With ‘In the Heights,’ Jimmy Smits Sings a Little but Gave It a Lot

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      He doesn’t have a musical theater background, so he worked hard to make one line — “Good morning, Usnavi” — ring out. Now that’s how he’s being greeted.Why shouldn’t your morning stop at a bodega be worthy of a break-into-song moment? That’s the winning way “In the Heights” introduces Jimmy Smits’s character: He strolls into the corner store run by Usnavi (Anthony Ramos) to pick up his café con leche while cheerfully crooning, “Good mooorning, Usnavi!” In a musical filled with all sorts of twisty wordplay from the lyricist Lin-Manuel Miranda, somehow this simple line is the most sublime — and hey, who knew the Emmy-winning actor from “N.Y.P.D. Blue” and “L.A. Law” could carry a tune?Directed by Jon M. Chu, the screen adaptation of the Broadway show casts Smits in the supporting role of Kevin Rosario, a car-service owner who’s determined to put his wavering daughter, Nina (Leslie Grace), through an expensive college education. But is that his dream and not hers? The characters have an awfully complicated clash that Smits was eager to take on, but first he had to make it through “Good morning, Usnavi,” the line that loomed above all others. Last month over Zoom, Smits told me just how much went into that brief moment.These are edited excerpts from our conversation.Are you prepared to have people singing “Good morning, Usnavi,” to you for the rest of your life? Have people already started?I’m actually OK with that! On the family text thread that my kids and everybody’s on, that’s the way they’ll say hi now: Instead of, “Hey tio” or “Yo pops,” they’ll go, “Good morning, Usnavi.”That’s your very first line in the movie. I would imagine there was a lot of pressure to nail that moment in cast read-throughs, since people don’t really know you as a singing actor.That’s when you get, “Have you been in a musical before? I didn’t know you sang.” And I don’t! I don’t sang with the S-A-N-G. There’s some people in that cast, they can sang — I just tried to hold my own. All I know is that when I got through those first couple of lines, everybody was smiling. There were no people looking down at the scripts.Still, you’ve done a little bit of in-character singing before in episodes of “N.Y.P.D. Blue” and “The West Wing.” And I know you did a cameo on “Cop Rock” back in the day, but I couldn’t find out whether they made you sing or not.You’re embarrassing the hell out of me. No, I didn’t sing on that.Jimmy, you appeared on “Cop Rock” and you didn’t sing? What’s the point?That’s exactly right. Oh, man! Even on this, I had six lines that were musical, and I had four different vocal coaches. Warner Bros. was telling my agents like, “Really? Does he have to have two vocal coaches on each coast?” Yeah, because I wanted to be on point as much as possible!And even though it’s just a few sung lines, they do convey a lot.I appreciate you saying that because even with the three lines that are in that song, we did this whole character-based, psychological approach. It’s a switch-up from the rhymes that are happening, and it’s more your traditional thing. Originally I was like, “I’m going to make this count, and I want it to be big!” And they were like, “No, no, no. Let’s talk about the character and what’s going on there.” It was part of the exact same things that I had to do with the back-and-forth dramatic scenes in the family.Smits grew up in Brooklyn, but from age 10 to 12, he lived in Puerto Rico: “Everything that I am now as an adult relates to that experience.”Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesWhat did you do on set to get yourself into that musical mode?I like to use music a lot, especially when I’m in prep for something, and I was playing my boy Carlos Gómez [who originated the role onstage]. I was playing “Inutil” over and over again, which is the song he sings from the Broadway version. So Carlos, he was with me the whole time.And he does a pretty great “Good morning, Usnavi,” too.Pretty great? It’s incredible!Do you remember when you first met Lin-Manuel Miranda?There was a friend of mine who worked at the Drama Book Shop who told me, “There’s these kids from Wesleyan doing stuff in the basement here. Jimmy, they’re the real deal.” And then a couple years later, I was at 37 Arts with my lady, seeing “In the Heights” Off Broadway, and we realized, “Oh, this is the kid that Stu was talking about. This is the new wave.” Next thing I know, he’s spitting rhymes for Barack and Michelle.I remember telling them when they went to Broadway, “Anything you need from me …” He gave me a call one day and said, “We’re going to do the commercial for the show. Could you do the voice-over?” “Come on, man. Yes, I’m there!” During my first meeting with Jon, I actually referenced Michelle Yeoh in terms of “Crazy Rich Asians,” and I was saying, “I want to do what she did for that film. I want to help in any way I can.”You grew up in New York. Could you relate to what these characters are going through?I grew up in Brooklyn, but I lived all over New York, and we moved to Puerto Rico from 10 to 12. I went from listening to Motown and R&B and the Beatles to boom, I’m in Puerto Rico listening to Trio Los Panchos. Everything that I am now as an adult relates to that experience: Where do you fit in? I think all of the moving around has something to do with me doing what I do.Smits in “In the Heights.” He didn’t even get to sing when he appeared in a cameo on “Cop Rock.”Macall Polay/Warner Bros.You had to learn how to play different sides of yourself to different types of people.Absolutely. And in Puerto Rico, it was traumatic because I was the Yankee! But everything that I hold dear to me in terms of culture comes from that time that I can trace back. The speech that Kevin has about shining shoes? I shined shoes in the plaza in Ponce, I know what that was like as a kid and how it resonates. Even when I do Shakespeare and Shaw and Pinter, there are parts of me culturally that make all of those roles unique, but here there are things that I can really relate to because I can channel my tios, my uncles, and my parents and all their expectations and hopes and dreams on a wonderful level.How did your family feel about you becoming an actor?Well, I don’t come from a musical or theatrical kind of background. It’s not like my parents took me to the movies — I wound up doing the bulk of my work on television, and I think it has something to do with the fact that the TV set was the thing that we coalesced around as a family. But they were always very supportive, and I joke around about the fact that they would come see me do something like a Shakespearean play and go, “That was nice. Why does everybody talk like that?”Did you know as a kid that you wanted to do this?I knew pretty early. I went to George Gershwin Junior High School in Brooklyn, and if you did good in school, you could be part of the musical — “Damn Yankees” and “Carousel” and all of that stuff. After that, I went to Thomas Jefferson High School in a not-great neighborhood in East New York, and there happened to be this English literature teacher who I’m still very friendly with and he took us to plays. Seeing Raul Julia and James Earl Jones for the first time, they probably were the most inspirational to me, because I saw the parallels there: “That guy is from the same place Mom is from, and he speaks with an accent!”And then there was another professor who was working at Brooklyn College, Bernie Barrow, who encouraged me. He said, “You’re showing this interest in the classics and you probably could go to L.A. and be the crook of the week on ‘Hill Street Blues,’ but you should think about graduate school and adding some tools to the toolbox.” So he helped me navigate applying to all these schools and I wound up at Cornell, which had a very small, almost monastic M.F.A. program. But for me, that was joy. That was the right thing to do, even when it was 6 a.m. and I was at the ballet bar, wondering if I made the right decision.If you were singing and dancing at Cornell and aspiring to be in those musicals in junior high, then this is something of a full-circle moment for you.Absolutely. This is the whole thing about the business, you’ve got to keep your instrument in tune. When I took all those dance and voice classes, it’s not like it went to the wayside, but I wasn’t using that as much here in L.A. because I was doing television. But I should have still been doing it. I kick myself about that now.See, that’s just more proof that they should have let you sing on “Cop Rock.”Exactly! More

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      Eva Sereny, Who Photographed Film Stars at Work, Dies at 86

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      She captured De Niro, Streep, Eastwood and many others, often in unguarded moments. Working with directors like Fellini and Spielberg inspired her to make movies herself.In 1972, Eva Sereny was in Rome photographing rehearsals for “The Assassination of Trotsky,” starring Richard Burton as the Russian revolutionary, when his wife, Elizabeth Taylor, who was not in the movie, visited the set.One of Ms. Sereny’s shots captured a moment in the celebrated stars’ famously turbulent marriage, which would soon end: the two staring icily at each other, as if they were re-enacting the tensions between their characters in the 1966 film “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”“It was obvious something was going on,” she told The Guardian in 2018. “You could feel it — there was no great love between them. I don’t remember them even noticing the shot, which was taken at a distance from below. If it had been a close-up of their faces, it would have just been two people looking not very nicely at each other. The body language brings it all together.”“You could feel it — there was no great love between them,” Ms. Sereny said of her 1972 photograph of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor on the set of “The Assassination of Trotsky.”Eva Sereny/Iconic ImagesThe Taylor-Burton picture was one of many notable images in Ms. Sereny’s decades-long career as a photographer, principally on hundreds of movie sets around the world. She took portraits, candid shots and publicity photos of stars like Marlon Brando, Meryl Streep, Vanessa Redgrave, Robert De Niro, Jacqueline Bisset, Clint Eastwood, Audrey Hepburn, Sean Connery and Harrison Ford.Ms. Sereny died on May 25 in a hospital near her home in London. She was 86.The cause was complications of a massive stroke, said Carrie Kania, the creative director of Iconic Images, which handles Ms. Sereny’s archive and, with ACC Art Books, published “Through Her Lens: The Stories Behind the Photography of Eva Sereny” in 2018.Ms. Sereny was on location for the first three Indiana Jones films and snapped a widely known portrait of Mr. Ford, who played Jones, and Mr. Connery, who played his father, on the set of “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” (1989). She was on the island of Mykonos for the filming of “The Greek Tycoon” in 1978 when she photographed Anthony Quinn dancing on the edge of the Aegean Sea.And on the set of Bernardo Bertolucci’s erotic drama “Last Tango in Paris” (1972), she overcame Brando’s distrust of photographers and took pictures of him laughing, lighting Mr. Bertolucci’s cigarette and talking to his co-star, Maria Schneider.Ms. Sereny was on the island of Mykonos for the filming of “The Greek Tycoon” in 1978 when she photographed Anthony Quinn dancing on the edge of the Aegean Sea.Eva Sereny/Iconic Images“There was something very considerate about the way he spoke to me,” she said in “Through Her Lens.” She recalled that she told him taking photos in unposed moments produced “the most interesting images,” and that “he sympathized with my take and said, ‘Well, look, all right.’”Eva Olga Martha Sereny was born in Zurich on May 19, 1935, to Hungarian-born parents. Her father, Richard, was a chemist; her mother, also named Eva, was an actress before they married.When her father traveled to England on business soon after the start of World War II, he was unable to return to Switzerland; Eva and her mother joined him in 1940. After the war, Mrs. Sereny opened a flower shop in the Burlington Arcade in London.Ms. Sereny was on location for the first three Indiana Jones films and snapped a widely known portrait of Harrison Ford and Sean Connery as father and son on the set of “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” (1989).Eva Sereny/Iconic ImagesEva’s photography career did not start until well after she moved to Italy when she was 20. There she married Vincio Delleani, an engineer, and had two sons, Riccardo and Alessandro. When her husband was in a car accident in 1966, she thought about a career.“I remember sitting beside him in the hospital thinking, ‘My God, but for a few seconds I would be a widow,’” she told The Guardian. “‘I’ve got to do something. I’m quite artistic, though I can’t draw. What about photography?’”Her husband set up a darkroom in the basement of their house, and she started working with his Rolleiflex camera. A friend of hers, who ran the Italian Olympic committee, asked her to take pictures of young athletes in training. She then took a chance and flew to London, where she pitched her work to The Times of London.Soon after she showed her photos of the athletes to the paper’s picture editor, The Times printed several of them.With help from a film publicist in Rome, Ms. Sereny spent two weeks on the set of Mike Nichols’s “Catch-22” (1970). It was the first of hundreds of movie set assignments, which would lead to the publication of her pictures in outlets like Elle, Paris Match, Marie Claire, Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Time and Newsweek over the next 34 years.One of her frequent subjects was Ms. Bisset, whom she photographed first during the filming of Francois Truffaut’s “Day for Night” (1973) and then on the sets of “The Deep” (1977), “Inchon” (1981) and “The Greek Tycoon.”Nick Nolte and Jacqueline Bisset on the set of “The Deep” (1977). “She could be argumentative,” Ms. Bisset said of Ms. Sereny, who photographed her on the set on four movies, “and she could make me laugh.”Eva Sereny/Iconic Images“She was refined in a very feminine way, and enjoyed her work,” Ms. Bisset said by phone. “When we started, she was bossy because I wasn’t doing what she wanted, but we became friends. She could be argumentative and she could make me laugh.“One day, she jolted me when she said, ‘Be sexy,’ and I’d say, ‘What do you mean?’ It was such an impossible command, and I’d ask, ‘What do you want me to do? Be more specific.’”Ms. Sereny’s work on movie sets enabled her to study the technique of directors like Nichols, Truffaut, Bertolucci, Federico Fellini (“Casanova”), Steven Spielberg (“Always” and the Indiana Jones films) and Werner Herzog (“Nosferatu the Vampyre”).In 1984 she directed a film of her own: “The Dress,” a 30-minute short starring Michael Palin, about a man who purchases a dress for his mistress. It won the BAFTA award — the British equivalent of the Oscar — for best short film. A decade later, she directed a feature, “Foreign Student,” about a French exchange student (Marco Hofschneider) at a Virginia university who falls in love with a young Black grammar-school teacher (Robin Givens) in racially sensitive 1956.Reviewing that film for The Chicago Tribune, John Petrakis called it “a deftly handled look at forbidden love that also finds time between kisses to examine cultural differences in this classic fish-out-of-water tale.”Frustrated with the limited opportunities for female directors, especially those who were not young, Ms. Sereny did not make any other films. She retired from photography in 2004.Ms. Sereny and Steven Spielberg in 1984.Eva Sereny/Iconic ImagesMs. Sereny is survived by her sons; her partner, Frank Charnock; and four grandchildren. Her husband died in 2007.In 1973, Ms. Sereny was on the set of “The Last of Sheila,” a murder mystery set on a yacht, and given approval by the director, Herbert Ross, to photograph the cast as it rehearsed. But the sound of her shutter annoyed one of the film’s stars, Raquel Welch, who angrily demanded that Ms. Sereny leave because she had not been informed of her presence.Years later, she was assigned again to photograph Ms. Welch.“I just hoped and prayed she wouldn’t recognize or remember me,” Ms. Sereny said in “Through the Lens.” “Just pretend it never happened!”“From the moment we met again,” she added, “everything was perfect.” More

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      ‘Rita Moreno’ Documentary Review: An Icon’s Growing Pains

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      This paean to the trailblazing Puerto Rican actress is also a case study in the highs and lows of showbiz for a woman of color.Most documentaries about famous people tend to be exercises in celebrity worship, and “Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It” is no exception. Directed by Mariem Pérez Riera, the film is a portrait filled with dazzling archival footage and shorn of ambiguities and unflattering viewpoints. Yet it is not your average paean because Moreno, a trailblazing Puerto Rican actress whose career spans more than seven decades, is not your average star.The film’s primary talking head among a parade of former collaborators and Latino luminaries — including Lin-Manuel Miranda (co-executive producer), Gloria Estefan and Eva Longoria — Moreno is given full rein of her story, which doubles as a case study in the highs and lows of showbiz for a woman of color.Under studio contract in the 1950s and ’60s, Moreno recounts the painful times she spent playing “illiterate, immoral island girls” and fending off Hollywood executives who demanded sexual favors. In one, likely staged, scene in the documentary, we see Moreno watching the 2018 Christine Blasey Ford testimony in her dressing room on the set of the Netflix series “One Day at a Time.” It’s a clunky way of transitioning to her own experiences with abuse, but nevertheless situates Moreno and her lifelong commitment to social activism along a feminist historical trajectory.After winning a best supporting actress Oscar for “West Side Story” in 1962 (she is one of only two Latina recipients of an acting Academy Award; Lupita Nyong’o, who was born in Mexico, became the second in 2014), Moreno’s career did not skyrocket in the way one might expect. Instead, it expanded across mediums and genres.This documentary credits her turn to comedy, television and stage acting for liberating her from her exotic sexpot persona. It’s almost hard to believe that the radiant Moreno we see in the film — who at 89 continues to epitomize that ineffable and rare quality we call star power — was ever restrained. Though this contrast is precisely what makes her story so enthralling and vital.Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for ItRated PG-13 for mature thematic content, suggestive material and some strong language including a sexual reference. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Summer of 85’ Review: Denim Embraces and Stolen Kisses

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      A gay teenagers’s fleeting romance goes off the rails in this coming-of-age story from the French director François Ozon.When the moody, baby-faced Alexis (Félix Lefebvre) capsizes while on a solo trek off the coast of Normandy, France, he looks up and sees lightning in the distance accompanied by a grinning, Adonis-like boy named David (Benjamin Voisin), his savior and the embodiment of the coming storm.The two teenagers throw themselves into an intense friendship that quickly blossoms into a passionate affair filled with blissed-out motorbike rides on country roads, denim-padded embraces and stolen kisses between work shifts. Frothy pop tunes by ’80s bands like the Cure and Bananarama place Alexis’s sweltering coastal romance in the realm of starry-eyed nostalgia.The prolific French director François Ozon wants “Summer of 85” to be more than a gay coming-of-age romance in the vein of “Call Me By Your Name.” With an elliptical narrative that jumps back and forth from Alexis’s summer fling to an unspecified future in which he is being interviewed by a suspicious caseworker about the death of David, the film also aims to be pulpy and provocative, teasing the idea that its lovesick protagonist turns homicidal with jealousy. It ultimately stumbles in this balancing act and loses sight of its emotional core, but its efforts remain compelling and delightfully bizarre.Loosely adapted from Aidan Chambers’s young adult novel, “Dance on My Grave,” “Summer of 85” sees adolescent romance as outrageous and suffocating in its hormonal potency, yet also fleeting and illusory.Less a character study than an exercise in genre, the film leaves Alexis’s working-class background and the nuances of his sexual awakening unconsidered and undeveloped. Scenes become increasingly bonkers as the film hurdles toward tragedy. For instance, David’s cool mom (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) cracks after his death and turns into a resentful, wild-eyed psycho-biddy. Alexis teams up with a flirty British au pair who gives him a drag makeover and smuggles him into a morgue. Alexis’s glib narration of the scene unintentionally heightens the absurdity.Yet unlike many recent L.G.B.T.Q. romances that deploy retrograde views on homosexuality as a convenient tool for conflict, “Summer of 85” uses its vibrant throwback aesthetic to situate two gay men in a cultural fantasy typically reserved for straight couples: the date at the carnival that ends in a fistfight with an embittered “ex,” the star-crossed lovers who sneak around and make morbid, lifelong pacts.Toward the end of the film, reflecting on his time with David, Alexis realizes how he has become a character in a fantastic story — a story full of intrigue and drama, yes, but also one that is light and joyous. Too few queer characters, who are often saddled with tragedy, are so capable of moving on.Summer of 85Not rated. In French and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Les Nôtres’ Review: Hidden Suffering in Plain Sight

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      In this moody film, a 13-year-old girl in a Quebec town hides her pregnancy, but her trauma deepens as the identity of the father emerges.Jeanne Leblanc’s “Les Nôtres” goes beyond depicting the pain of harboring a terrible secret and into the realm of the numbness that follows. The 13-year-old Magalie (Émilie Bierre) is hiding that she’s pregnant, and when her condition is found out, many in her small Quebec suburb suspect the father to be the boy next door, Manuel (Léon Diconca Pelletier). Gradually the film reveals her connection with another neighbor, Jean-Marc (Paul Doucet), the town’s mayor and an insidious predator.Magalie’s fairly clueless mother (Marianne Farley) is shocked to learn about her daughter, but the film’s strength isn’t the delayed suspense around unraveling the truth. It’s the sense of suffocation that Magalie feels while putting on the agreeable face of a child going about her school days. Leblanc and her cinematographer Tobie Marier Robitaille suffuse the film’s palette with tamped-down colors and send the camera creeping and looming around Magalie.“Les Nôtres” roughly translates to “Our Own,” which might suggest a condemnation of ineffectual communities. But any societal judgment is less notable than the mood (which feels filtered through Magalie) and the sheer ordinariness of the middle-class neighborhood. That extends to the banal manipulator-in-chief, Jean-Marc (so underplayed by Doucet that one nearly expects some twist).Magalie is able to vent some rage at a certain point, but the film’s drama wrestles itself to a standstill (along with leaving some characterization sketchy, like that of a concerned social worker). Yet Leblanc might come closer to the sensation of concealed trauma than movies with more familiar storytelling beats.Les NôtresNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘My Name Is Bulger’ Review: A Boston Saga

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      The documentary tells the tale of two brothers who rose to the top of very different professions: a politician, William, and a mob boss, Whitey.Few family sagas were as ready-made for Hollywood (“The Departed,” “Black Mass”) as the tale of the brothers Bulger: William, a titan of Massachusetts politics and university president, and Whitey, a crime boss and F.B.I. informant.“My Name Is Bulger” seems to attempt to exonerate William of guilt by association, but, almost amusingly, the director, Brendan J. Byrne, can’t resist fleshing out Whitey’s world.A sunny biography of William and his rise in the State Senate is punctuated by the downplaying of his involvement with Whitey by grown children and siblings from the bustling Bulger clan. William does hold the room in clips of breakfast roasts and news conferences, but my mind went blank after one chilling question-and-answer about shakedowns with an affable associate of Whitey’s, Kevin Weeks: “What were they giving you money for?” “For their life!”You can feel the Bulger family’s frustration at how William’s career in public service could be overshadowed by the activities of his brother. But the “nothing to see here” focus gives the homey-feeling film the whiff of a sanctioned production. Interviews with Massachusetts political figures (Michael Dukakis, Bill Weld) and journalists broaden the perspective, though the standout might be Whitey’s former girlfriend Catherine Greig, who went into hiding with him in 1995. (Whitey was caught by federal authorities in 2011, and beaten to death in prison seven years later.)Greig’s loving, tearful delivery suggest another thesis lurking beneath: the unknowability of certain relationships from the outside. That will remain true of William and Whitey Bulger — one living, one dead, but neither telling any tales.My Name Is BulgerNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Watch on Discovery+. More