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      ‘My First Film’ Review: Arriving Where You Started

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      Zia Anger’s movie about her first movie is full of nested layers, but mostly it’s a meditation on how, and why, we create.A cursor appears on a blank screen, blinking, waiting. And then text appears: “This probably shouldn’t be a film … but it is.”A purposefully ironic admission for a movie called “My First Film,” but a great way to set the tone for what follows. In 2018, the filmmaker Zia Anger sat before an audience at a Brooklyn venue, pulling up video clips on her computer from a project entitled “Always All Ways, Anne Marie” that she’d shot and then abandoned years earlier, combining them with spoken and typed words. The presentation morphed into a live performance that Anger toured called “My First Film,” which then further evolved into a digital performance during a pandemic-locked world.I’d seen various iterations of “My First Film,” but the new feature film version, also directed by Anger (and written with Billy Feldman), still came as a surprise to me. It’s as personal and experimental as the live presentations, but mixes fiction (or perhaps autofiction) into the recipe, producing something that looks and acts a little more like a traditional movie. “My First Film” stars Odessa Young as Vita, a Zia stand-in, who is telling us the story of the making of her first film, also entitled “Always All Ways, Anne Marie.” The screenplay of that movie was about a young woman caring for her ailing father. She gets pregnant and leaves home in search of her mother, who had abandoned her.The “Always All Ways, Anne Marie” story is a version of Vita’s reality, just as Vita’s story is a version of Anger’s. But it’s also different, and Vita wonders aloud, in a way that feels appropriate to a 25-year-old first-time filmmaker with dreams of artistic authenticity, about whether it still gets at her emotional truth. Vita wasn’t abandoned by her mother — in fact, she had two mothers, and they raised her together, and she felt loved and supported throughout her childhood. Various other pieces of Vita’s real life refract through “Always All Ways, Anne Marie,” while her narration about drama on set and off give the story of “My First Film” shape.Everything in “My First Film” doubles back on itself, which can make it feel repetitive at times. If you’ve never been a young person harboring dreams of creative genius, it might start to feel a little forced, a little twee. Even if you have, impatience lurks.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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      Michael Keaton Michael Keaton Michael Keaton

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      There’s a scene in the upcoming indie dramedy “Goodrich” where Michael Keaton’s character, a Los Angeles art dealer lost in the weeds of a late-midlife crisis, agrees to attend a breath workshop to win over a New Age-y prospective client. As setups go, it’s something of a soft target: a fish-out-of-water Boomer, drowning in California woo-woo.But the actor, his face a small hurricane of hope and anxiety, does more than find his “higher vibration.” He bobs and weaves and tries some kind of freestyle tai chi; he bats at a swarm of invisible bees and unleashes a primal scream (more like a strangled yelp, really). This is the Keaton that the “Goodrich” writer-director Hallie Meyers-Shyer envisioned when she conceived the screenplay.“I wrote it 100 percent with him in mind,” she said, “to the point where if he had said no, I would have buried it and myself in the backyard.”And it’s the same sense of unpredictability, a certain wild-card gleam, that has compelled the filmmaker Tim Burton to cast Keaton in five movies over nearly four decades, including, most recently, “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.” “When you just look at Michael in ‘Beetlejuice’ or even ‘Batman,’ he has this sort of look in his eye,” Burton said. “That’s why I wanted him to be Batman, because you just look at him and go, ‘This is a guy who would dress up like a bat.’ You know what I mean? There’s something behind the eyes that’s just very intelligent, funny and dangerous and kind of crazy.”Winona Ryder and Michael Keaton, who both starred in the original “Beetlejuice” movie, return for “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.”Warner Bros.The Keaton who settled into the corner booth of a hushed midtown Manhattan hotel lounge on a late-August morning didn’t seem like much of a maniac. Dressed in the dapper cool-dad uniform of fine-gauge knitwear and fitted slacks, he was still whippet-slim at 72 (he turned 73 on Thursday), and so soft-spoken in person that it was sometimes a strain to hear him over the cappuccino machine.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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      Watching Movies Like It’s 1999

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      A multimedia Culture desk series, “Class of 1999,” revisits a group of mold-breaking, star-studded films released that year.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.A sci-fi film whose climactic choice — red pill or blue pill? — has become so famous that it’s a meme. A found-footage style documentary horror film that achieved cult-classic status. A “Star Wars,” a “Toy Story” and two Tom Cruise movies.The year was 1999, and it was blessed with an abundance of cinematic riches. So many, in fact, that “The Blair Witch Project,” one of the top-earning indie films ever, was just the fifth-highest grossing film at the U.S. box office three weeks after its release.“It definitely was an epic year,” said Stephanie Goodman, the film editor for The New York Times. She led a team of more than a dozen writers, editors and designers who produced “Class of 1999,” a monthlong series celebrating the 25th anniversary of what many would argue is the greatest year in movie history.The multimedia project, which includes features, profiles and critical essays, not only explores directors’ innovation and risk-taking in 1999, but how their films were, at times, chillingly prophetic about the cultural, social and political themes of today.There’s a look at how the opening scene in “The Matrix” proved remarkably prescient; an essay on how “Blair Witch” foreshadowed the age of misinformation; a profile of Haley Joel Osment, who was 11 when he starred in “The Sixth Sense”; an article about the vulnerability of Tom Cruise; a playlist from the year’s top films; a reflection on reviewing movies in 1999; and a roundup of favorite films from the year, as selected by writers and critics. (Readers were invited to share their picks, too.)“A lot of people who worked on it had a strong connection to the movies,” said Ms. Goodman, who in 1999 was a copy editor at The Los Angeles Times. “That’s one thing that made the year special, in addition to the fact that just about every major filmmaker of the past 25 years was working that year.”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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      Pedro Almodóvar, Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton on ‘The Room Next Door’

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      The director’s first English-language feature inspires talk of beauty, hope and more collaborations.At Monday night’s Venice after-party for “The Room Next Door,” Pedro Almodóvar beamed at his leading ladies as they beamed back.I’m not just speaking of the affection shared between Julianne Moore, Tilda Swinton and their director, though it was tangible. I’m talking about the actual beams of light that bounced off the women’s sequined gowns and back at their besotted director as we huddled in a room to discuss the Spanish director’s first feature film in English, a long-held goal that allowed him to cast two big Hollywood stars.“They are not actors now, they are like monuments,” Almodóvar said. Certainly, that’s how Moore and Swinton are presented on the poster for the film, which arranges their famous faces in profile as though they were massive mountain ranges.“Big peaks,” joked Moore.“Big sparkly peaks,” Swinton added, nodding to their dresses. “We can only wear sequins for the rest of our lives.”Adapted from the novel “What Are You Going Through” by Sigrid Nunez, “The Room Next Door” casts Moore as Ingrid, a successful author who hears that her former colleague Martha (Swinton) is in the hospital with inoperable cervical cancer. They reunite, swap catch-up stories and once again become fast friends, but Martha has a weighty request to make.With her experimental treatments failing and another taxing round of chemotherapy to come, Martha has booked a vacation house in upstate New York and bought a drug off the dark web. Might Ingrid be willing to accompany her on the trip, knowing that at some point, her friend will kill herself in the room next door?Though Almodóvar is fairly fluent in English, he had long been wary of shooting a feature film in the language. (Even as we spoke, he kept a translator close by for moments when his second language failed him.) Two recent shorts made in English — the gay western “Strange Way of Life” and the extended Swinton monologue “The Human Voice” — convinced Almodóvar to finally write his first feature-length screenplay in the language.But Almodóvar’s films have aesthetic pleasures that go beyond words, and “The Room Next Door” offers so much to look at — whether it’s a lavender sweater, an olive couch or a precisely chosen shade of burgundy lipstick — that is as satisfying as any line of dialogue. A sequence where the two women ransack Martha’s apartment reveals pulled drawers filled with the most beguiling knickknacks, and the upstate vacation house where much of the movie takes place is an architectural stunner. (Like Martha, I’d die to live there, too.)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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      Joaquin Phoenix and the Big Question at the ‘Joker: Folie à Deux’ Premiere

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      At the Venice Film Festival with his co-star, Lady Gaga, would the actor answer questions about dropping out of a Todd Haynes movie?Joaquin Phoenix has never been eager to face the press. The 49-year-old actor grants few interviews, speaks with great reluctance about his process, and once walked out on a journalist when asked whether his film “Joker” might inspire copycat violence.Knowing all that, you could already expect tension at the Venice news conference for “Joker: Folie à Deux,” a sequel to the 2019 hit that has Phoenix reprising the comic-book role that won him the Oscar. Still, this meeting with the media was expected to be particularly fraught as Phoenix has not done any press since August, when he dropped out of a film from the director Todd Haynes just days before it was supposed to shoot, scuttling the production and exposing the star to potential legal action.Hollywood has been buzzing about Phoenix’s murky motivations for weeks, not least because the project — a sexually explicit gay romance co-starring the “Top Gun: Maverick” actor Danny Ramirez — was based on an original idea by Phoenix, who brought the project to Haynes and co-wrote it with the “May December” director.Would Phoenix be willing to shed any light on the situation while in Venice or would he skip the news conference entirely, as “Don’t Worry Darling” star Florence Pugh did two years ago amid rumors of a feud with that film’s director, Olivia Wilde? While waiting for the conference to begin on Wednesday afternoon, journalists placed bets on whether Phoenix would bail twice.They were surprised, then, when Phoenix bounded into the room smiling, followed by his director, Todd Phillips, and co-star Lady Gaga. “First of all, hi everyone!” he told the press. “It’s nice to see you.”Phoenix remained upbeat and unexpectedly willing to answer questions until several minutes into the news conference, when a journalist asked whether he would share his reason for leaving the Haynes film. The actor began to answer, then paused, thinking it over.“If I do, I would just be sharing my opinion from my perspective, and the other creatives aren’t here to share their piece,” Phoenix said, referring to Haynes and his partners.He continued: “It doesn’t feel like that would be right. I don’t think that would be helpful, so I just don’t think I will.”Then he added brightly, “Thank you!”Since Phoenix dropped out of the Haynes film, it’s been reported that the actor often gets cold feet and nearly bailed on making the first “Joker.” Phillips implied as much when he talked about how he convinced Phoenix to star in a sequel. “If we were really going to do it, it had to scare him in the way the first one did,” Phillips said.The director admitted to his own nerves in bringing “Folie à Deux” to Venice, since the first film won the festival’s prestigious Golden Lion. “It’s easier to come in as the insurgent instead of the incumbent,” Phillips 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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      James Darren, Actor, Singer and ‘Gidget’ Heartthrob, Dies at 88

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      His role as a surfer in that trendsetting hit movie led to success on television shows like “The Time Tunnel” and “T.J. Hooker,” and on the pop charts.James Darren, an actor and singer whose starring role as a California surfer in the “Gidget” movies made him one of the most popular heartthrobs of the late 1950s and early ’60s, died on Monday in Los Angeles. He was 88.His son Jim Moret said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was congestive heart failure.Mr. Darren, a Philadelphia native who didn’t surf and wasn’t even a particularly strong swimmer, had been a contract player with Columbia Pictures when he was cast as an aspiring surf bum in “Gidget,” which also starred Sandra Dee in the title role and Cliff Robertson as the Big Kahuna, the leader of a surfing gang.Released in 1959, the movie told the story of a high school girl who befriends that gang in Malibu and develops a crush on Mr. Darren’s character, Moondoggie. It was a hit, and it became one of the first signs of the surfing craze that would soon include the music of the Beach Boys and the “Beach Party” films.Mr. Darren and Sandra Dee in a scene from “Gidget,” the 1959 movie that made him a star.Columbia Pictures, via Getty ImagesMr. Darren went on to play the character in two more “Gidget” films, “Gidget Goes Hawaiian” (with Deborah Walley in the title role) and “Gidget Goes to Rome” (with Cindy Carol); land a role in the acclaimed 1961 World War II drama “The Guns of Navarone”; carve out a long career in prime-time television, including a starring role on the 1966-67 time-travel series “The Time Tunnel”; and release a number of singles and albums, first as a purveyor of lightweight pop tunes and later as a lounge singer whose repertoire consisted mostly of standards.Before he was cast as Moondoggie, a character with a prominent singing role, Mr. Darren had never sung professionally. At first the studio considered having him lip-sync to someone else’s voice.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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      in Television

      New Movies and TV Shows Coming to Netflix in September: ‘The Perfect Couple’ and More

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      A glitzy mystery starring Nicole Kidman arrives early this month; later, a new true-crime series tells the troubling tale of Lyle and Erik Menendez.Every month, Netflix adds movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for some of September’s most promising new titles. (Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)‘The Perfect Couple’Starts streaming: Sept. 5Reminiscent of both “The White Lotus” and “Big Little Lies,” this adaptation of an Elin Hilderbrand novel is part murder mystery and part social satire, covering the secrets and prejudices of two families at a Nantucket wedding. Eve Hewson plays Amelia, a middle-class gal about to marry into a rich and famous clan, led by the pot-smoking patriarch Tag Winbury (Liev Schreiber) and his hyper-judgmental wife, Greer (Nicole Kidman), a best-selling author. When a member of the wedding party turns up dead on the beach, the police interrogate the guests, gradually piecing together a story that involves deceit and old grudges. Directed by the veteran art-house filmmaker Susanne Bier (who also directed the Netflix hit “Bird Box”), “The Perfect Couple” is less about the crime than it is about the delusions and pretensions it exposes.‘Rebel Ridge’Starts streaming: Sept. 6After making a foray into literary adaptation with “Hold the Dark” (2018), the writer-director Jeremy Saulnier gets back to the lean pulp thrills of his critically acclaimed “Blue Ruin” and “Green Room” with his latest movie. “Rebel Ridge” features an original Saulnier script about a military veteran named Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre), who has a run in with some swaggering rural southern cops. The officers seize his money, then conspire to punish him further when Terry pushes back. AnnaSophia Robb plays a court clerk who helps Terry dig into the rot spilling downward from the corrupt local police chief (Don Johnson). Although the film deals with the serious contemporary social issue of civil asset forfeiture, in spirit it has a lot in common with the likes of “Walking Tall,” “First Blood” and other old-school action pictures in which one man takes on a whole town.‘Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story’Starts streaming: Sept. 19In 2022, the producer Ryan Murphy and his frequent creative partner Ian Brennan delivered one of Netflix’s most-watched mini-series with the Emmy-nominated “Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story,” a dramatization of the life and crimes of a notorious serial killer. The next season of their ripped-from-yesterday’s-headlines anthology series pluralizes the title — from “Monster” to “Monsters” — and covers the brothers Lyle (Nicholas Alexander Chavez) and Erik (Cooper Koch) Menendez, who murdered their parents, José (Javier Bardem) and Kitty (Chloë Sevigny), in 1989. The cast also includes Ari Graynor as Leslie Abramson, the attorney who attempted to paint the brothers in court as the victims of an abusive father, and Nathan Lane as Dominick Dunne, the Vanity Fair columnist whose reporting on the trial was filled with gossipy detail about the Menendezes’ upscale Los Angeles lives.‘Twilight of the Gods’ Season 1Starts streaming: Sept. 19Zack Snyder’s latest Netflix project is this adult-oriented animated series, set in the lusty, violent milieu of Norse mythology. When Thor (Pilou Asbaek) disrupts a mortal wedding and instigates a devastating massacre, the bride and groom — the warrior Sigrid (Sylvia Hoeks) and a king named Leif (Stuart Martin) — set out on a mission of revenge. Soon, they and their soldiers find themselves caught up in ancient rivalries, involving the likes of Loki (Paterson Joseph) and Odin (John Noble). Snyder and his “Twilight of the Gods” fellow creators, Eric Carrasco and Jay Oliva, don’t spare the gore or the nudity as they tell a tale that stretches from the underworld to the land of giants, with a Hans Zimmer score to help set a grand, epic tone.‘Nobody Wants This’ Season 1Starts streaming: Sept. 26Based loosely on the personal experiences of its creator, Erin Foster, the romantic comedy “Nobody Wants This” stars Kristen Bell as Joanne, a popular podcaster who riffs on sex and dating alongside her sister Morgan (Justine Lupe). Then Joanne meets Noah (Adam Brody), a sweet and funny rabbi who recently broke up with his longtime girlfriend and has since been fending off a steady stream of his congregants’ daughters and nieces. The show is partly about how an agnostic exhibitionist and an emotionally reserved, deeply religious guy overcome their differences and form bonds, with each other and with their respective sets of friends and family. But it’s also about two middle-aged people searching for some grounding and direction in their hectic lives.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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      Daniel Craig Gets Explicit in Luca Guadagnino’s ‘Queer’

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      At the Venice Film Festival, the star said he embraced the scenes with sexual encounters: ‘If I wasn’t in the movie and saw this movie, I’d want to be in it.’If you know Daniel Craig only as James Bond, “Queer” is liable to throw you for a loop. In this new film from Luca Guadagnino, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Tuesday, Craig, 56, plays a drug addict whose sexual escapades and heroin use are filmed with matter-of-fact candor.But if you knew Craig even before he was pressed into Her Majesty’s Secret Service — when he was still an up-and-coming young actor who appeared in risky, sexually explicit films like “Love Is the Devil” and “The Mother” — then you might guess that “Queer” is much more in line with his sensibilities than some of the big studio fare he’s made recently are. At the film’s Venice news conference, he all but confirmed that hunch.“If I wasn’t in the movie and saw this movie, I’d want to be in it,” Craig told reporters. “It’s the kind of film I want to see, I want to make, I want to be out there. They’re challenging but hopefully incredibly accessible.”Adapted from the novel of the same name by William S. Burroughs, “Queer” follows Lee (Craig), an American expat wasting away in Mexico City. Most of Lee’s waking hours are spent pursuing some sort of high, whether that means drinking to excess in dive bars, cruising any handsome man to cross his path, or shooting up heroin while all alone in his apartment.In his linen suits, Lee lurches through life like a well-attired zombie until he meets Allerton (Drew Starkey), a beguiling young drifter whose sexuality seems up for grabs. Does he like Lee or does he just like being liked? Allerton says awfully little, which only beguiles Lee even more. As the older man’s romantic obsession grows, he entices Allerton to help him search for a drug that can supposedly induce a type of telepathy; if it can be scored, maybe he’ll learn what the object of his affection is really thinking.Written in the early 1950s but not published until 1985, the Burroughs novel is slight and scuzzy. Guadagnino takes a much different approach to the source material, building lavish sets (this Mexico City was erected at Rome’s Cinecittà Studios) and imbuing the story with a sweeping romanticism.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