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      Donald Sutherland, ‘M*A*S*H’ and ‘Hunger Games’ Star, Dies at 88

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      Donald Sutherland, whose ability to both charm and unsettle, both reassure and repulse, was amply displayed in scores of film roles as diverse as a laid-back battlefield surgeon in “M*A*S*H,” a ruthless Nazi spy in “Eye of the Needle,” a soulful father in “Ordinary People” and a strutting fascist in “1900,” died on Thursday in Miami. He was 88.His son Kiefer Sutherland, the actor, announced the death on social media. CAA, the talent agency that represented Mr. Sutherland, said he had died in a hospital after an unspecified “long illness.” He had a home in Miami.With his long face, droopy eyes, protruding ears and wolfish smile, the 6-foot-4 Mr. Sutherland was never anyone’s idea of a movie heartthrob. He often recalled that while growing up in eastern Canada, he once asked his mother if he was good-looking, only to be told, “No, but your face has a lot of character.” He recounted how he was once rejected for a film role by a producer who said: “This part calls for a guy-next-door type. You don’t look like you’ve lived next door to anyone.”Yet across six decades, starting in the early 1960s, he appeared in nearly 200 films and television shows — some years he was in as many as half a dozen movies. “Klute,” “Six Degrees of Separation” and a 1978 remake of “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers” were just a few of his other showcases.And he continued to work well into his last years, becoming familiar to younger audiences through roles in multiple installments of “The Hunger Games” franchise, alongside Brad Pitt in the space drama “Ad Astra” (2019) and as the title character in the Stephen King-inspired horror film “Mr. Harrigan’s Phone” (2022).Mr. Sutherland’s chameleonlike ability to be endearing in one role, menacing in another and just plain odd in yet a third appealed to directors, among them Federico Fellini, Robert Altman, Bernardo Bertolucci and Oliver Stone.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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      Donald Sutherland Didn’t Disappear Into Roles, and That Was a Good Thing

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      The actor understood the range of human feeling, but he came of age when movies distrusted institutions, and that suspicion was part of his arsenal.In a 2014 interview in GQ, the actor Donald Sutherland recalled that a movie producer told him he wasn’t getting a role he’d auditioned for because “we’ve always thought of this as a guy-next-door sort of character, and we don’t think you look like you’ve ever lived next door to anybody.”It’s true: In film and TV roles that stretched over 60 years, Sutherland, who died Thursday at 88, never radiated the sense that he was some random guy you might cross paths with at the grocery store. If you did, you’d remember him, maybe a little uneasily. With a long face, piercing blue eyes, perpetually curled upper lip and arched, wary eyebrows, he had the look of someone who knew something important — a useful characteristic in a career that often involved movies about paranoia and dark secrets. His voice could clear a range from excitedly high to a menacing bass that would make you feel like ducking for cover.As an actor, he could do it all. His turn as the titular private detective opposite Jane Fonda in Alan Pakula’s 1971 “Klute” rides a tricky knife’s edge — is he a good guy? Does that term have a meaning in this case? There’s his role as a slowly more horrified scientist in Philip Kaufman’s 1978 “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” and his movie-stealing monologue as Mr. X in Oliver Stone’s 1991 “J.F.K.,” loaded with the urgency of obsession. Even when playing a goofball — the womanizing prankster surgeon Hawkeye Pierce in Robert Altman’s 1970 “M*A*S*H,” for instance, or Vernon L. Pinkley in Robert Aldrich’s 1967 “The Dirty Dozen” — his loping, laconic figure stood out against the background, someone who knew a little better than he let on.Sutherland worked constantly and, unlike some actors of his generation, never really seemed like he belonged to a single era. He’d already been at it for more than 40 years when he showed up in Joe Wright’s 2005 “Pride and Prejudice,” in what seemed like a minor part: Mr. Bennet, put-upon father to five daughters in yet another adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel. In the book, he’s sardonic and contemptuous of all but his oldest two daughters, Jane and Lizzy; the reader doesn’t walk away with particularly warm feelings about him.But Sutherland’s version of Mr. Bennet was a revelation, without being a deviation. In a scene granting Lizzy (Keira Knightley) his blessing to marry her beloved Mr. Darcy, tears sparkle in his eyes, which radiate both love and, crucially, respect for his headstrong daughter. Suddenly this father was not just a character, but a person — a man who can see his daughter’s future in a moment and is almost as overcome as she is.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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      ‘Green Border’ Review: Migrants’ Elusive Race for Freedom

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      Agnieszka Holland focuses on the Polish-Belarusian border as a Syrian family tries to make it to the European Union.The fury that radiates off Agnieszka Holland’s “Green Border” is so intense that you can almost feel it encasing you in its heat. A brutal, deeply affecting drama set against the migrant crisis in Europe, it is the latest from this great Polish director, a filmmaker whose eclectic résumé includes several films about the Holocaust, a romance starring the young Leonardo DiCaprio as Arthur Rimbaud and episodes of the HBO series “The Wire” and “Treme.” One of the pleasures of Holland’s work is that you never know exactly what to expect; all that is certain is that it will always be worth watching and that, for her, art is a moral imperative.A fiction firmly rooted in fact, “Green Border” dramatizes the crisis through different players — migrants, guards and activists — converged in and around the border of Poland and Belarus. There, in the so-called exclusion zone, an area that’s off-limits to most, migrants largely from the Middle East and from Africa try to enter the European Union via Poland. In this haunted, contested, dangerously swampy slice of land, men, women and children, families and friends, struggle to traverse national boundaries while evading and at times enduring violence from armed patrols.Divided into numbered sections, the movie opens on a crowded plane (it seems to be from Turkey) where the discreet, hovering camera pans across different passengers, their faces masked and unmasked, anxious and introspective. The camera soon settles on a tense Syrian husband and wife, Bashir and Amina (Jalal Altawil and Dalia Naous), who are traveling with his father (Mohamad Al Rashi as Grandpa) and the couple’s three children. When their eldest, a sweet preadolescent boy named Nur (Taim Ajjan), asks the woman seated between him and the window if they can trade places so he can take in the view, this small circle opens. Enter Leila (Behi Djanati Atai), a middle-aged Afghan gutsily making the journey alone.It’s crucial to Holland’s convictions, I think, that the first plane passengers you see aren’t actually members of this little group. Holland doesn’t go in for overexplanation in her movies. Rather, during this one’s brief, minimalist title sequence — it opens with an inviting aerial view of a lushly green forest that soon turns black and white as “Green Border” materializes onscreen — the words “October 2021 Europe” appear, followed by “1. The Family.” (The black-and-white palette remains, which fits this Manichaean world even as it points to the past.) As the movie then cuts from one passenger to the next, from young to old and from adult to child, it soon seems evident that, for Holland, the freighted word family isn’t limited to a chosen few.Holland sets a brisk pace in “Green Border” that begins rapidly accelerating once the plane touches down. After it lands — the flight attendants hand out roses to the passengers, welcoming them to Belarus — Bashir’s family piles into a van that his brother in Sweden has hired. The family plans to join him; for her part, Leila, who hops in too, is hoping to stay in Poland. All the travel plans have been arranged in advance; routes have been charted, drivers hired, bags packed, cash spent. A great deal more money will pass from hand to hand by the end of “Green Border,” a movie in which each life carries a steep price tag.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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      ‘Thelma’ Review: Granny Get Your Gun

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      The remarkable June Squibb plays a vengeful scam victim in this ludicrous action-movie spoof.“Thelma,” a mildly amusing, highly improbable codger comedy, is so typical of a certain kind of Sundance movie — sentimental, quirky, ingratiatingly likable — that it feels instantly familiar. Mostly, the film serves as a showcase for the wonderful June Squibb; but this rightly revered character actor was not the only notable asset that the writer-director, Josh Margolin, was blessed with for his first feature. Parker Posey, Clark Gregg, Malcolm McDowell and the storied Richard Roundtree (who died last year) were all on hand, making it even more disappointing that Margolin couldn’t provide them with a richer, more satisfying script.Instead, we have action-movie silliness that’s barely more plausible than the plot of “Sharknado” (2013). When we meet Thelma (Squibb), a sturdy, nonagenarian widow, she’s navigating a computer screen with the help of her doting grandson, Daniel (Fred Hechinger). Their mutual fondness feels easy and genuine, so when an unknown caller claims that Daniel has been involved in a terrible car accident and needs $10,000 in cash for legal representation, Thelma’s distress and compliance are understandable. Less so is the escalating nonsense that follows as Thelma, learning she has been duped, resolves to track down her scammer and retrieve her money.Off she goes, to the accompaniment of a particularly grating soundtrack, having co-opted a mobility scooter and the reluctant help of its sharp-witted owner, Ben (Roundtree). As the two steal a gun and try to outrun Thelma’s overanxious daughter and stuffy son-in-law (Posey and Gregg), the chase-movie absurdities are punctuated by age-related pauses, like Thelma’s repeated encounters with random strangers she thinks she recognizes. These tiny ellipses, and Ben’s gentle solicitousness, are far more resonant than the thriller-style trickiness — including an actual explosion — that surrounds them.Some of the plot is just unnecessary padding, like Daniel’s girlfriend troubles and slacker mentality, spiking in an odd scene where he hysterically bemoans his own uselessness. Yet Margolin’s empathy for Thelma (he based the story on a scam perpetrated on his own grandmother) lends the film a sweetness and occasional poignancy that help mitigate much of the foolishness. The falterings of memory and balance, the falling-away of friends and social engagements — “Thelma” is at its best when noting the vicissitudes of aging, hammered home in Ben and Thelma’s discovery of an old friend’s extreme deterioration. In that sense, the terrifying tug between personal agency and assisted living is both the film’s sourdough starter and its entire loaf.Movies starring cute children or venerated older actors often coast on the good will of critics and audiences, and “Thelma” currently boasts an astonishing 98 percent rating on the website Rotten Tomatoes. That said, the direction is tight, the two leads are charmers and the supporting cast allows them to shine. It all goes down as easily, and as unremarkably, as warm milk. Let’s just say that this one is not for the lactose intolerant.ThelmaRated PG-13. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Devil’s Bath’ Review: Madwoman in the Cottage

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      This stark psychological horror movie tracks the mental deterioration of an 18th-century peasant woman.“The Devil’s Bath” looks and sounds like your average horror movie — there are perturbing scenes of bodily mutilation, menacingly quiet long shots of stark Austrian woodlands and a young woman, Agnes (Anja Plaschg), who spirals into madness.Yet the cleverness of this psychodrama, by the Austrian directing duo Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala (“The Lodge”), is that it employs the tropes and tools of folk horror without any of that genre’s supernatural flourishes. The film is grounded in a harrowing historical reality, about the terrifying lengths to which women will go to liberate themselves from destructive domestic conditions. Franz and Fiala bring out this reality’s latent horrors through a series of suspense-building strategies.The prologue sets the tone. “As my troubles left me weary of this life, it came to me to commit a murder,” reads the opening title card. We see a nameless woman toss a baby off a waterfall and then turn herself into the authorities, going through these motions with a deadeye roboticism. We’re in the boonies of 18th-century Austria, a land of tall, lonely forests and craggy hillsides. Families live in stone cottages and customs are dictated by severe Roman Catholic doctrines inflected by pagan superstitiousness. In this eerie, rather primitive context, its easy to surmise that the murderess is a witch.When we finally meet Agnes, a devout Catholic, she is initially excited about her marriage to Wolf (David Scheid), a stout, jovial young man who moves his new family into a remote cottage. Things sour quickly: Wolf proves uninterested in physical intimacy with his eager wife (and probably any woman), and Wolf’s cruel, domineering mother (Maria Hofstätter) blames Agnes for their lack of children.Shifting between naturalistic camerawork and static shots of uncanny landscapes and sunless skies, the film zooms in on Agnes’s deteriorating psychological state with minimal dialogue. A mood of desperation sinks in as the film showcases the punishing routines of rural peasant life, best exemplified by fishing scenes in which the slender Agnes struggles to keep up with the other workers. At one point, she’s stuck in a stretch of viscous black muck at the edge of the lake, a palpably distressing image that draws mockery from her mother-in-law, the fishing crew’s organizer.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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      ‘Kinds of Kindness’ Review: Everybody’s Looking for Something

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      Yorgos Lanthimos returns with a twisted fable triptych about dominating and being dominated.You could endlessly pick apart “Kinds of Kindness,” but I don’t recommend it. The closest to a précis you’ll get for the film comes at the start, when the strains of the Eurythmics’ banger “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” ring out over the opening titles. The lyrics repeat the discomfiting notion that:Some of them want to use you.Some of them want to get used by you.Some of them want to abuse you.Some of them want to be abused.Well, who am I to disagree?“Kinds of Kindness” is a return to a certain form of form, if you will, for the director Yorgos Lanthimos, fresh off his warmer, cuddlier films “The Favourite” and “Poor Things.” His earlier movies, “Dogtooth,” “Alps,” “The Killing of a Sacred Deer” and “The Lobster” — all four written with Efthimis Filippou, who was his collaborator on “Kinds” — are less accessible, more deranged, less logical, more disturbing. Which is of course why they’re so polarizing. And so beloved.I expect “Kinds of Kindness” to take its place among that latter group, with its vibrantly, defiantly off-putting stance and sidesplittingly sick sense of humor. It’s a triptych that at first seems slight, then gains meaning the longer you hold its three seemingly disconnected short films in juxtaposition and peer through the overlaps. All three share a cast that includes some returning Lanthimos players, like Margaret Qualley, Willem Dafoe and Emma Stone, who won her second Oscar earlier this year for “Poor Things.” There are newcomers, too: Hong Chau, Mamoudou Athie, Joe Alwyn and especially Jesse Plemons, who won the best actor prize at Cannes for his performance.Plemons is the main character for most of the film. In the first segment, he plays a man whose every move is dictated by his boss (Dafoe), until it isn’t. In the second, Plemons is a cop whose researcher wife (Stone) goes missing on a desert island; when she returns, he’s convinced she’s not actually his wife. And in the third, Plemons and Stone play members of a strange cult (led by Dafoe and Chau) who are desperately seeking a young woman who will become its spiritual leader.It’s all presented with the eerie air of a very dark comedy, the sort where sudden savagery can come crashing through the wall at any second. Violence and cruelty are the drivers of “Kinds of Kindness,” often presented not as the opposite of that kindness but as kindness itself. This strange world calls for delicious off-kilter performances, and the cast — particularly Stone, who’s proven her mettle in this regard, and Plemons — deliver. If you think you know what’s happening in a scene, just wait.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 Exorcism’ Review: Losing Faith

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      Russell Crowe stars as an actor playing an exorcist who’s battling his own demons.“The Exorcism” starts from an instantly compelling premise: On the set of a horror movie about an exorcist, demons lurk. Horror films often tap into ancient fears rooted in myth; this is just a more modern one. As one character tells another, “All kinds of things happen on the sets of devil movies.” Then she names a few examples: “‘The Omen,’ ‘The Exorcist,’ ‘Poltergeist.’” It’s true — over decades, stories of freak accidents and deaths on those sets have grown into the kind of lore that can power its own horror film.That “The Exorcist” is named in this list is a little funny, since the film-within-the-film is clearly just a variant on William Friedkin’s influential 1973 classic. The nested movie is even called “The Georgetown Project,” a reference to the setting of “The Exorcist.” (“The Exorcism,” directed by Joshua John Miller from a screenplay he wrote with M.A. Fortin, seems named to provoke the comparison, too, though that also makes talking about it a little confusing.) What’s more, the first scene in “The Exorcism” reveals that “The Georgetown Project” is about a priest having a crisis of faith who is called to cast a demon out of a teenage girl, and that the house built on the soundstage is a dead ringer for the more famous movie’s set. In other words: In “The Exorcism,” they’re basically making “The Exorcist.”Religious horror — which is to say, horror movies that specifically evoke religious imagery — can be hopelessly hokey, thoughtlessly appropriative, or thoughtful. I’d put “The Exorcist,” one of Hollywood’s best meditations on faith and doubt, in the thoughtful camp, and for the first half-hour of “The Exorcism,” I though it would land there too. It’s about a famous actor named Tony Miller (Russell Crowe, looking sufficiently tortured), whose addictions and grief have recently derailed his career and life. He is given a chance to star as a priest in “The Georgetown Project” by its cranky jerk of a director (Adam Goldberg) after the role is suddenly and violently vacated. Tony thinks it is the salvation he needs.Catholic symbology plays an outsized role in horror — thanks, in no small part, to the influence of “The Exorcist.” Often movies end up grappling with whether the words, rites and sacramental objects of the Catholic church have power of their own, regardless of the beliefs and righteousness of the wielder. “The Exorcism” dips into this inquiry but goes further. In this movie, Catholicism is both the villain and the hero.Tony’s sardonic 16-year-old daughter, Lee (Ryan Simpkins), for instance, shows up at home because she has been suspended from her Catholic boarding school for protesting the principal’s choice to fire her gay guidance counselor. She and Tony have a fraught relationship given Tony’s checkered past, which, we come to realize, has something to do with a horrifying experience from his days as an altar boy.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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      ‘Janet Planet’ Review: A Sticky Summer Full of Small Dramas

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      Annie Baker’s debut feature film is a tiny masterpiece — a perfect coming-of-age story for both a misfit tween and her mother.Kids are supposed to love summer, but I can’t be alone in remembering it as the most vexing season. It’s hot, and there are mosquitoes and spasms of allergic sneezes, and the predictable, sociable structure of the school year vanishes for what feels like an interminable stretch. When Lacy, the 11-year-old in the playwright Annie Baker’s brilliant “Janet Planet,” calls home from camp to tell her mother, Janet, that if she doesn’t come pick her up, she’ll kill herself — I got that, in all its hyperbolic provocation. Sometimes summer is just the worst.But being 11 is also the worst. “You know what’s funny?” Lacy (Zoe Ziegler) asks Janet (Julianne Nicholson) a few weeks later, when she’s been brought back to the home the two share in western Massachusetts: “Every moment of my life is hell.” Janet doesn’t want to laugh, and gently corrects her. But she’s also in the throes of her own turmoil, so she gets it. “I don’t think it will last, though,” Lacy continues, acknowledging with tween stoicism her spells of hell and happiness.Lacy’s life is not hell, no matter her solemn belief. Her mother has built a good life for the two of them, even if it’s invaded at times by friends who need help and boyfriends who Lacy knows are bad news. But every day is long and every occurrence is amplified when you’re Lacy’s age. The genius of “Janet Planet,” Baker’s debut as a feature writer-director, is how flawlessly it renders what it’s like to spend the summer being 11 at your home in the woods, when your mother is your whole world and you wish you could just have her to yourself. You can hear the buzzing bug zapper, feel the sunburn on your skin, scratch your knees on the freshly cut grass and sink into the hazy evening ennui.Baker, who grew up in Amherst, knows the texture of those Massachusetts summers by heart. She also knows the kinds of people who populate the area, sending Janet and Lacy at one point to a midsummer mystical theatrical presentation, complete with larger-than-life puppetry, after which everyone is implored to take home all the extra zucchini the group grew by accident. “Janet Planet” is a tiny masterpiece, and it’s so carefully constructed, so loaded with details and emotions and gentle comedy, that it’s impossible to shake once it gets under your skin.The film is divided into three big sections, centering on three adults who show up in Janet’s life, and thus Lacy’s, in the summer of 1991. First there’s Wayne (Will Patton), Janet’s boyfriend, who was expecting to have the summer alone with her. Later, there’s Regina (Sophie Okonedo), who needs a place to stay after leaving a group that’s part commune, part theater troupe and maybe part cult. Finally, there’s the leader of that group, Avi (Elias Koteas), who takes an interest in Janet and her spiritual development.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