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      P. Adams Sitney, Leading Scholar of Avant-Garde Film, Dies at 80

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      He championed works of cinema that were destined never to have a commercial breakthrough — which, to him, was the whole point.P. Adams Sitney, who pioneered the study of avant-garde film, helping to focus attention on a rarefied corner of American filmmaking, died on June 8 at his home in Matunuck, R.I. He was 80.His daughter Sky Sitney said the cause was cancer.In books and magazine articles, and at Anthology Film Archives in New York City, which he helped found, and Princeton University, where he taught film history and other subjects in the humanities for over 35 years, Mr. Sitney championed a type of film that is largely unknown to the cinema-going public, but which forms a distinctive part of the American artistic canon.His passion was mostly short films that had nothing to do with narrative or characters and everything to do with light, images, objects and dreams. His book “Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde,” which has gone through three editions since first being published in 1974, is still regarded as the leading study of the genre.Mr. Sitney’s “Visionary Film,” originally published in 1974, is still regarded as the leading study of the genre.Oxford University PressHe championed the work of avant-garde pioneers like Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Gregory Markopoulos, Jonas Mekas and Peter Kubelka, several of whom helped him found Anthology Film Archives, the East Village bastion of avant-garde cinema, in 1970. He saw their films as pure experiments toward achieving one of cinema’s true vocations: the mirror of the dream state.“Fragmentation brought the imagery to the brink of stasis, so that after some hours hovering around that threshold, the image of a couple walking into a Japanese garden had the breathtaking effect of the reinvention of cinematic movement,” he wrote of an episode in Mr. Markopoulos’s 80-hour, 22-part 1991 epic, “Eniaios.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Gailard Sartain, Character Actor and ‘Hee Haw’ Regular, Dies at 81

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      Though best known for comedy, he also played serious roles, including a sinister sheriff in “Mississippi Burning.” The director Alan Rudolph cast him in nine films.Gailard Sartain, a character actor who moved easily between comedy, as a cast member on the variety series “Hee Haw”; music, as the Big Bopper singing “Chantilly Lace” in “The Buddy Holly Story”; and drama, as a racist sheriff in “Mississippi Burning,” died on Thursday at his home in Tulsa, Okla. He was 81.His wife, Mary Jo (Regier) Sartain, confirmed the death but did not specify a cause.Mr. Sartain spent 20 years on “Hee Haw,” the country equivalent of “Laugh-In,” hosted by Buck Owens and Roy Clark, which combined cornpone sketches with music. The characters he played included a bumbling store employee, a chef at a truck stop and Officer Bull Moose. At the same time, he also developed a movie career that began with “Nashville” (1975), Robert Altman’s improvisational drama set against the background of the country music industry.In that film, Mr. Sartain played a man at an airport lunch counter talking to Keenan Wynn. “I just said, ‘Ask Keenan what he’s doing in Nashville,’ and he did,” Alan Rudolph, the assistant director of the film, said in an interview. But Mr. Rudolph saw something special in Mr. Sartain and went on to cast him in nine films he directed over the next two decades, including “Roadie” (1980) and “Endangered Species” (1982).“I only wish I could have fit him into another nine,” he said. “Gailard had a certain silly magic about him. Most of my films are serious and comedic at the same time. In ‘Roadie,’ he was opposite Meat Loaf, as beer truck drivers, and that was about 700 pounds in the front of a beer truck. That should be funny.”One of Mr. Sartain’s most notable roles was in “Mississippi Burning” (1988), Alan Parker’s film about the F.B.I.’s investigation into the murders in 1964 of the civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, who were buried in an earthen dam. Mr. Sartain played Ray Stuckey, a county sheriff whose deputy was among the Ku Klux Klansmen who killed the men.Mr. Sartain played a racist Southern sheriff in the 1988 movie “Mississippi Burning.” “Nobody likes to be typecast as a barefooted hillbilly,” he said, “so when I had the opportunity to do other roles, I happily did it.”Orion PicturesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why the Salary for Dakota Johnson’s Character in ‘Materialists’ Is Such a Game-Changer

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      By making the number explicit, Celine Song’s new film reflects modern dating realities in a way rom-coms rarely have before.Almost everyone who sees “Materialists,” the writer-director Celine Song’s new spin on the old romantic comedy formula, seems to want to talk about one number: $80,000. That’s how much Lucy (Dakota Johnson) says she makes in her job as a matchmaker. She brings it up to goad Harry (Pedro Pascal) into revealing his own salary, but he will only say that he makes “more” — which, as a finance guy working in private equity and owner of a $12 million bachelor pad, he certainly does.The viewer conversations are over whether Lucy’s salary is realistic for her lifestyle: she wears relatively nice clothing, and lives alone in what appears to be a peaceful and brightly lit apartment, though we don’t see much of the interior. The film’s production designer revealed in an interview that her home is a teeny-tiny studio on the edge of the affluent Brooklyn Heights neighborhood, with a rent that Lucy probably shouldn’t be paying relative to her salary. Yet this matches her character’s single-minded aspiration: to be surrounded by wealth.We could debate whether the rest of her lifestyle, like her clothing, is realistic on her salary; I tend to think it could be, but in a Carrie Bradshaw, leveraged-to-the-hilt way. After all, we live in a world where direct-to-consumer brands sell decent silk slip dresses, and everyone’s thrifting or renting outfits — not to mention that anything looks good on Dakota Johnson.Knowing the character’s salary, viewers have debated her lifestyle choices.Atsushi Nishijima/A24But the fact we’re even debating that specific number is remarkable, and hints at what makes “Materialists” feel so very 2025. At my screening, the salary detail provoked a collective gasp that briefly sucked the air out of the room. It wasn’t even the amount, really: It was the fact that someone had said a number at all.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Jaws’ Is a Masterpiece, but ‘Jaws 2’ Deserves a Legacy, Too

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      The sequel had a tough act to follow, but it still delivered a terrifying monster movie with grand sequences, a sweeping score and an indelible tagline.As a child, I collected so many shark jaws that my mom disappeared them all one day while I was at school because my room allegedly smelled “fishy.” I suspect it was my general fixation on the beasts that didn’t pass the sniff test.When I first saw “Jaws” at age 8 — more than a decade after its 1975 release — it exploded my already shark-obsessed young mind. I should have been more scared, but instead I was captivated. When I saw “Jaws 2,” not long after, it spawned another great love of mine: monster movies, with all of their suspense, horror, surrealism and spectacle.The original, which was directed by Steven Spielberg, is of course a monster movie, too — probably the best monster movie ever made — but it was also a masterpiece that changed cinema. But “Jaws 2,” released in 1978, was not trying to be anything but a monster movie. On that score, it’s a horrifying success and a feat in its own right — a sequel that delivers more of everything I want (which explains why I rewatch it every summer): more shark, more shark attacks, more screaming teens.Roy Scheider reprised his role from the original.Universal PicturesThe film takes us back to Amity Island four years after the events of the first movie, with some of the same cast members returning. Roy Scheider is Martin Brody, the beleaguered police chief who once again is fighting to protect the seaside town from another killer great white. Scheider plays him with full-tilt, man-on-a-mission madness. Lorraine Gary is Martin’s wife, Ellen, and is more present in the sequel, offering crucial balance to her frenetic, spiraling husband. And Murray Hamilton is Mayor Larry Vaughn. How the mayor kept his job perhaps requires more suspension of disbelief than the fact that another shark is terrorizing the same community.Unlike the first film, which is known for perfectly executing the slow-burn buildup to its monster reveal, the sequel gives us the creature immediately after the opening credits, when it swoops in on two scuba divers photographing a shipwreck.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Bear,’ Plus 3 Things to Watch on TV This Week

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      The Hulu original series returns for its fourth season, and a new crime drama from Dennis Lehane airs.Between streaming and cable, there is a seemingly endless variety of things to watch. Here is a selection of TV shows and specials that are airing or streaming this week, June 23-29. Details and times are subject to change.If you can’t take the heat …“The Bear” — FX’s hotly anticipated kitchen drama — airs its fourth season this week. The first season, which aired in 2022, had a familiar premise of the prodigal son returning home: Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto (Jeremy Allen White), who was climbing the culinary career ladder, goes back to Chicago to take over the family’s sandwich shop after a sudden tragedy. Much of the drama takes place in the kitchen, where Carmy, like Hamlet in a pair of Birkenstock Tokios, navigates his grief while managing competing pressures. In subsequent seasons, “The Bear” has included cameos by such real-life Michelin-starred chefs as René Redzepi and Thomas Keller.“The Bear” is about the pursuit of greatness, however fleeting, but it doesn’t play into the myth of the individual genius either. Much of the show’s success is owed to the fleshed-out portraits of an ensemble of characters — Liza Colón-Zayas and Ayo Edebiri have both picked up Emmys for their roles — whose abilities and dreams are as real as those of the show’s tortured frontman. Season three ended with a cliffhanger involving a consequential review for Carmy’s new fine-dining restaurant. Tune in for more of the show’s choreographed mania. Streaming Wednesday on Hulu.A point of originIn fire forensics, the “point of origin” is the term for where things ignited. For the Apple TV+ original series “Smoke,” that was the podcast, “Firebug,” about a real-life arsonist who tried to use his crimes as fodder for a novel, and then got caught. “Smoke” will run for nine episodes and center on the fraught partnership between an arson investigator (Taron Egerton) and a detective (Jurnee Smollett) as they try to catch two serial arsonists on the loose. A game of cat and mouse ensues, set to the melancholic crooning of Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke, who wrote the series’s theme song, “Dialing In.” “Smoke” was created by the novelist cum TV writer Dennis Lehane, who is also an executive producer. Fans of Lehane’s books “Mystic River” and “Shutter Island” may appreciate the show’s slow-burning drama (forgive the pun). Streaming Friday on Apple TV+.Redemption arcsWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Vote for Your 10 Best Movies of the Century

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      <!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–>In the space below, please list up to 10 titles that you consider to be the best films released since Jan. 1, 2000. Each movie should be feature length and released commercially. If you need a starting point, we have compiled our critics’ favorites from the last 25 years on one handy […] More

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      Pedro Almodóvar, Sofia Coppola and 117 Other Famous Names Share Their Top Movies of the Century.

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      <!–> [!–> <!–> –><!–> –>and 73 more ballots from the over 500 voters who determined our list of the century’s best movies<!–> –> 100 Best Movies And more ballots from … actors  Naomi Ackie, Uzo Aduba, Casey Affleck, Joel Kim Booster, Daniel Brühl, Jemaine Clement, Richard Gadd, Tony Hale, William Jackson Harper, Naomie Harris, Sally […] More