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      in Theater

      The Wicked Witch of the West: A Heroine for Our Time

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      “Wicked,” which arrives to the big screen this fall, redeems the villain who is barely a character in L. Frank Baum’s classic novel.“And what, you may ask, are the reasons why?” Ray Bradbury asked in his foreword for the Kansas Centennial edition of L. Frank Baum’s classic novel. “‘The Wizard of Oz’ will never die?”More than 20 years after the musical “Wicked” became a Broadway megahit, the first part of big-screen adaptation, starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, will arrive this fall. The second film comes out next year. It might be time to pose a related question: Why won’t the Wicked Witch of the West ever die?The character has grown in stature since she first appeared as the villain in just one chapter of Baum’s novel nearly 125 years ago. Every subsequent adaptation has made her more visible, more memorable and — in a twist — more heroic. Much like the Land of Oz’s symbolic meaning as a stand-in for the United States, her fate reflects our nation’s continuing debates about race, gender and who is and isn’t considered American.Narratively, her evolution has been striking. Barely present in Baum’s book as an enemy of Dorothy, the young Kansan on a journey through Oz, the witch emerged as a formidable green-faced foe made famous by the white actress Margaret Hamilton in MGM’s 1939 movie classic, “The Wizard of Oz.” In the 1970s, Mabel King played her as the cruel factory owner Evillene in the all-Black Broadway and movie versions of “The Wiz.” Her showstopping number, “No Bad News,” stole the spotlight from Dorothy and Glinda, the Good Witch. Two decades later, her transformation was complete when Gregory Maguire depicted her as the sympathetic, misunderstood, magically powerful, though still green-hued Elphaba in his 1995 novel, “Wicked.” That’s the version in the Broadway musical and now the forthcoming two-part film.Credited with writing the first great American fairy tale, Baum began Dorothy’s turn-of-the-century tour in the frontier state of Kansas. Though Baum was neither born nor lived there, his general interest in the region was reflected in his move from upstate New York to Aberdeen, a Dakota Territory town, in 1886. After opening a novelty store there, he started a newspaper, The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, in which he wrote editorials that ranged from advocating women’s suffrage to calling for the complete extermination of Indigenous communities.Margaret Hamilton, left, made an indelible witch opposite Judy Garland in the 1939 classic “The Wizard of Oz.”MGMWe 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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      39 Movies to See This Fall: ‘Joker’ Sequel, Bob Dylan Biopic and More

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      From the “Joker” sequel and Timothée Chalamet’s Bob Dylan biopic to a handful of festival darlings, it’s a jam-packed season. Plan accordingly.From an outsize Francis Ford Coppola passion project to a “Joker” follow-up that multiplies the madness by two, the fall movie calendar is going big. Reducing it to a select list of noteworthy titles was a daunting task. Alongside major releases, including sequels to “Gladiator” and “Moana,” we’ve included a large number of films that earned acclaim at this year’s festivals. Many other titles haven’t yet settled on release dates. (All dates and platforms are subject to change.)September‘A DIFFERENT MAN’ Sebastian Stan won best lead performance at the Berlin Film Festival for his turn as an actor with a facial disfigurement. As he pines for a new neighbor (Renate Reinsve), a playwright, he undergoes an experimental treatment. Aaron Schimberg directed this offbeat comedy, featuring Adam Pearson as the Stan character’s rival. (Sept. 20; in theaters)‘THE SUBSTANCE’ In what would make an excellent Sept. 20 double feature with “A Different Man,” Demi Moore plays an aging actress reduced to fitness guru-dom who undergoes an experimental treatment of her own. A mysterious injection will divide her into, essentially, two people. Margaret Qualley plays her counterpart. Coralie Fargeat, who wrote and directed, won the screenplay prize at Cannes. (Sept. 20; in theaters)‘WOLFS’ George Clooney and Brad Pitt mastered the art of smooth teamwork over three “Ocean’s” movies, but in this action comedy, their characters — two fixers who wind up on the same job — are initially at loggerheads. Amy Ryan also stars. Jon Watts (“Spider-Man: No Way Home”) wrote and directed. (Sept. 20 in theaters, Sept. 27 on Apple TV+)‘LEE’ The celebrated photojournalist Lee Miller got a shoutout in “Civil War” earlier this year. Now she gets a biopic, with Kate Winslet in the role. Josh O’Connor, Andrea Riseborough and Andy Samberg co-star. Ellen Kuras, best known for her work as a cinematographer, directed. (Sept. 27; in theaters)‘MEGALOPOLIS’ Francis Ford Coppola’s first feature since 2011 is a project he’s been talking up for more than 40 years. In an amalgam of contemporary New York and ancient Rome, Adam Driver plays an urban-planning visionary who at various points evokes Robert Moses, Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark and Coppola himself. (Sept. 27; in theaters)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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      At the Movies, the Apocalypse Has Already Arrived

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      In “Joker: Folie à Deux,” “Megalopolis” and more, the sense of an isolated and fearful humanity pervades this season’s films.The apocalypse started earlier this year.Back in March, “Dune: Part Two” picked up the story of Paul Atreides, set 10,000 years after a war with artificial-intelligence beings nearly obliterated humanity. The “Dune” saga suggests history is cyclical, even if the details rearrange themselves. Paul’s world once again teeters on the brink, though the characters don’t know just how close to the edge they are. No matter. The precarity is plenty palpable.Hollywood has sustained a long love affair with tales of apocalypse — look no further than the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s obsession with the end of the world. But frequently, the storytelling fits a familiar template. Humanity faces some great threat: aliens, viruses, zombies, meteors, nuclear devices, megalomaniac villains in shadowy lairs. Governments are incapable of dealing with the threat. Only some hero (a retired cop, a retired soldier, a retired superhero) can save the day. He does, and we all cheer.The “Dune” saga feels different, though, and not just because Paul Atreides is not your typical popcorn-movie messiah. This world is darker; the fate of humanity is not guaranteed. The biggest threat to life is not a single clear menace, but a mysterious confluence of factors that nobody, not even the most savvy of characters, quite understands.Here apocalypse moves away from the meaning we usually ascribe to it — mass destruction, curtains on humanity and so on — and toward its older meaning. The English word “apocalypse” comes from the Greek “apokalypsis,” which means revelation. It’s a moment of unveiling, of the hidden things becoming clear. The curtain blows aside briefly and reality becomes lucid. Apocalypse is not always world-historical. Our lives are full of personal apocalypses; our nations experience them repeatedly, often in times of great distress. We learn who we are, what we stand for and what really matters in apocalyptic times. What comes next might be dystopian, or utopian. Most likely, it will be a bit of both.So perhaps it’s unsurprising that cinematic apocalypse, so visible everywhere, has been diversifying. (After all, the movie business is itself fast reaching an apocalyptic moment.) In March, the best picture Oscar went to “Oppenheimer,” a movie about how we arrive at moments of apocalypse. Soon after, “Civil War” — a movie set in a country in the midst of disintegrating — kicked up arguments about its politics. But its real insight was that habitually looking at trauma has changed the characters’ relationship to humanity itself, an apocalyptic realization if there ever was one.“Megalopolis,” with Adam Driver and Nathalie Emmanuel, explores the difference between expedient relationships and those that endure.LionsgateWe 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 Interview’: Demi Moore Is Done With the Male Gaze

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      Demi Moore’s new movie, “The Substance,” which opens Sept. 20, is a dark comedy about the horrors of getting older as a woman in Hollywood. But it’s also a literal body-horror film — the basic premise is that Moore’s character, an aging actress-turned-celebrity-fitness-instructor named Elisabeth Sparkle, takes a strange elixir (the substance) that allows her to create a younger, more perfect version of herself. And you see that creation in bloody, visceral detail. The movie kind of grossed me out, to be honest, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it afterward. And it was fascinating to see Moore, who has been open about her own struggles with her body image and has lived most of her life in the public eye, play this role.Listen to the Conversation With Demi MooreThe actress discusses how her relationship to her body and fame has changed after decades in the public eye.Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Amazon | iHeart | NYT Audio AppI’ve been mesmerized by Moore for decades, starting in 1985 with “St. Elmo’s Fire,” when her husky voice and bold onscreen persona — in this instance, a kind of wildness that made her seem both alluring and destructive — first broke through. There was a period when it felt as if every movie Moore starred in was an event — “Ghost,” “A Few Good Men,” “G.I. Jane,” “Striptease,” “Indecent Proposal.” She eventually became the highest-paid actress in Hollywood, and also an early advocate for pay equity in the industry, long before the issue was part of the national discourse.But even though Moore was such a visible celebrity of my teenage and early adult years, I never felt I knew much about her until reading her revealing 2019 memoir, “Inside Out,” which opens at the lowest point in her life, with the end of her marriage to Ashton Kutcher and her relapse into alcoholism. Moore’s struggles started early as the child of a mentally ill, alcoholic mother. But much of the book is about the extreme lengths she went to during her prime Hollywood days to control her body through disordered eating and exercise. Now in her 60s and a grandmother, Moore tells me she has finally grown comfortable in her own skin and, with “The Substance” and this stage of her career, is hoping to upend expectations about what it means to be an aging woman in an industry that both embraced and judged her harshly. (And a note: I asked Moore how her former husband Bruce Willis, who’s living with frontotemporal dementia, is doing, and she said he’s stable and OK, all things considered.)Why did you sign on to star in a movie about a woman who’s aging in Hollywood and at war with her own body? It felt very meta watching you do this. Why it was easy for me to step in and do this is because I don’t feel I am her. This is a woman who has no family — she’s dedicated her entire life to her career, and when that’s taken, what does she have? And so, in a way, I had enough separation from her, and at the same time, a deep, internal connection to the pain that she was experiencing, the rejection that she felt. I knew it would be challenging, but potentially a really important exploration of the issue.Tell me what you understand the issue to be. That it’s not about what’s being done to us — it’s what we do to ourselves. It’s the violence we have against ourselves. The lack of love and self-acceptance, and that within the story, we have this male perspective of the idealized woman that I feel we as women have bought into. More

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      Margaret Qualley Is Getting the Hang of Being a Movie Star

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      Margaret Qualley could finally breathe again.“I’ve been working a lot,” she said over iced tea at Clark’s, a Brooklyn Heights diner near where she lives with her husband, the music producer Jack Antonoff. “I’m relishing these little lull moments.”Qualley, 29, has more than earned a break. After making a striking debut 10 years ago in the HBO series “The Leftovers,” she appeared in “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” followed by Emmy-nominated performances in “Fosse/Verdon” and the Netflix mini-series “Maid.” In the past year, she starred in “Poor Things,” “Drive-Away Dolls” and “Kinds of Kindness,” and when we met, she had just returned from shooting three back-to-back movies — Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s “Honey Don’t!,” John Patton Ford’s “Huntington” and Richard Linklater’s “Blue Moon.”Moviegoers will next see her in “The Substance,” a film that is somehow a departure from all of the above and one she acknowledged was uniquely challenging. Directed by Coralie Fargeat and slated for release on Sept. 20, it is a body-horror blood bath in which Demi Moore plays Elisabeth Sparkle, an actress who, attempting to recapture her fading youth, injects herself with a mysterious serum.“I’m just trying to move through life like water in a river,” Margaret Qualley said, “and stay agile and move around the rocks.”Thea Traff for The New York TimesThe result is Sue, played by Qualley, a younger, taller, “perfect” woman who emerges fully formed from Elisabeth’s body. The two of them must trade places every week, with the one who’s off-duty kept nourished by IV bags of potions. But soon enough, Sue develops a taste for her brand-new world and doesn’t want to be put on ice when it’s her turn to hibernate.Qualley was in Panama, shooting Claire Denis’s “Stars at Noon,” when she read the script, and was drawn to the prospect of playing a character who seemed “really far from me,” she said.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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      Coppola Sues After Report Said He Tried to Kiss ‘Megalopolis’ Extras

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      The director Francis Ford Coppola is seeking at least $15 million in damages from Variety.Francis Ford Coppola, the celebrated director of the “Godfather” movies and “Apocalypse Now,” sued the Hollywood trade magazine Variety and two of its editors for libel this week after it reported that he had behaved unprofessionally on the “Megalopolis” set, including by trying to kiss extras.Coppola, 85, is seeking at least $15 million in damages.The Variety article, which was published in July, said Coppola had pulled women onto his lap and tried to kiss them during the filming of a nightclub sequence. The article included two videos from the set in which the director appears to be trying to hug and kiss extras.The claims echoed those in an article that was published by The Guardian in May. An executive co-producer of the film, which is scheduled to open in theaters this month, told The Guardian that he had heard no complaints of misconduct and that Coppola’s behavior during that sequence was intended to “establish the spirit of the scene.”Libel cases against public figures face a high bar in the United States. People who file such suits must prove not only that a falsehood harmed their reputation, but that the publisher knowingly or recklessly disregarded the truth.“To see our collective efforts tainted by false, reckless and irresponsible reporting is devastating,” Coppola said in a statement on Wednesday, the day his suit was filed in California state court. “No publication, especially a legacy industry outlet, should be enabled to use surreptitious video and unnamed sources in pursuit of their own financial gain.”Coppola sold part of his wine estate to put up $120 million to finance “Megalopolis,” an ambitious and experimental saga about an architect (Adam Driver) who seeks to rebuild a futuristic New York City.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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      6 Movie Trends from the Toronto International Film Festival

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      And other cultural predictions based on movies that played at the Toronto International Film Festival, including Pedro Almodóvar’s latest.After years of pandemic delays and Hollywood strikes, the Toronto International Film Festival, which concludes on Sunday, felt particularly alive this year. Unlike recent years, there was no surefire hit like “Everything Everywhere All at Once” (2022) or “Oppenheimer” (2023) that premiered in the spring or summer, which added excitement and uncertainty going into awards season. Movies both big and small come to the Canadian city to launch Oscars campaigns, build audiences, announce major debuts and, in some cases, woo buyers that’ll release films over the coming months. But it’s also a great place to see how culture at large is shifting, at least as far as Hollywood is concerned. Here’s where we’re headed.1. We’re all in the mood for love again …Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield in “We Live in Time.”Courtesy of TIFFIf the September film season (which also includes major festivals in Venice, Italy, Telluride, Colo., and the upcoming one in New York), has shown something, it’s that many writers and directors are feeling romantic. There’s Sean Baker’s “Anora,” about a sex worker who marries the son of an oligarch, and William Bridges’s “All of You,” which depicts Brett Goldstein (of “Ted Lasso” acclaim) and Imogen Poots as best friends who can’t decide whether to date. Chemistry always wins out, of course, and it’s hard to deny the frisson between Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield in John Crowley’s “We Live in Time,” an indie crowd-pleaser that’s ideal for crying your way through on a rainy Sunday afternoon.2. … Or maybe it’s just lust.Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson in “Babygirl.”Courtesy of TIFFDaniel Craig and Drew Starkey in “Queer.”Yannis DrakoulidisToronto was brimming with romantic tragedies, not comedies; perhaps because of ongoing conversations about non-monogamy and open relationships, there were a lot of affairs onscreen, too. The most successful scripts focused on intense, almost unnamable desire, often between two people who know it can’t last: In Halina Reijn’s “Babygirl,” Nicole Kidman plays a powerful executive who gets into a complicated psychosexual mess with her intern; in Luca Guadagnino’s “Queer,” based on the William S. Burroughs novel (published in 1985), Daniel Craig’s heroin-addled character deals with the hot-and-cold affections of a paramour while traveling through midcentury Mexico City and South America. Both films sizzle, and it’s no coincidence that the actors playing the young objects of these leads’ affections — Harris Dickinson and Drew Starkey, respectively — are proving themselves to be rising talents.3. Another major star? Danielle Deadwyler.Danielle Deadwyler in “The Piano Lesson.”Courtesy of TIFFWe 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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      At Toronto, ‘Dahomey,’ ‘Nightbitch’ and ‘Hard Truths’ Prove Highlights

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      Films by Mati Diop, Raoul Peck and Mike Leigh, among others, mesh the personal and political in engrossing, insistent ways.Each year at the Toronto International Film Festival, I travel the world virtually, moving through space and time in vivid color and in black and white. On the first day alone of this year’s event, which wraps Sunday, movies took me from Mexico to France, Benin, South Africa, the United States, England and Japan. One gift of an expansive, border-crossing festival like Toronto is that it reminds you there is far more to films than those that come out of that provincial town called Hollywood.It’s been a few rough years in the festival world, which continues to struggle with the aftershocks of the pandemic as well as the back-to-back 2023 actors and writers strikes, which left Toronto and other events with near-empty red carpets. Toronto endured another sizable hit when it lost a longtime major backer (Bell Canada). Since then, the festival has added a fleet of new sponsors and a market for buying and selling movies, a venture backed by major money from the Canadian government. That’s great news for this festival and for the enduring health of the film world, which is sustained and rejuvenated by the kinds of aesthetically adventurous, independently minded movies showcased at Toronto and other festivals.The other welcome news involves the good and the great, the provocative and the divisive movies headed your way in the coming months. Despite the usual grumblings about the program’s offerings (I’ve heard from other programmers that 2024 is a fairly weak year) and a sense that Toronto seems less vital than in the past, this year’s lineup did what it reliably does each fall. It helped restore my faith that however catastrophic the state of the movie industry seems to be, there are always filmmakers making worthy and even transcendent documentaries and narrative fiction. The forecast is often gloomy in movieland, but visionaries like Mati Diop and art-house stalwarts like Mike Leigh and Pedro Almodóvar are keeping the sky from falling.The photographer Ernest Cole in Raoul Peck’s documentary about him. Magnolia PicturesIn 2019, Diop, a Senegalese-French director born in Paris, made history at Cannes with her debut feature, “Atlantics,” when she became the first Black woman in the event’s main competition. (It won the Grand Prix, or second prize.) A dreamily haunting, haunted tale of love and loss, leaving and staying, “Atlantics” centered on a woman whose male true love leaves Senegal for Europe, a project that Diop likened to “the Odyssey of Penelope” when we spoke at Cannes. In her latest, “Dahomey” — which won top honors at the Berlin festival — Diop charts another fraught course, this time by exploring the political and philosophical questions raised when France returned 26 stolen treasures to Benin in 2019.“Dahomey” is a stunning exploration of cultural and artistic patrimony in the wake of colonialism; it’s one of the great movies of the year. (It will be at the New York Film Festival soon.) Running a richly complex, perfect 68 minutes, “Dahomey” opens in Paris and wryly announces its themes with a shot of gaudily colored Eiffel Tower souvenirs of the kind sometimes sold by African street vendors. From there, Diop skips over to the Quai Branly Museum where the treasures — which were looted in 1892 by French troops when Benin was known as Dahomey — are being packed up for their momentous trip home. By the time one of the statues began speaking in bassy, hypnotic voice-over, I was thoroughly hooked.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