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      Joseph Wambaugh, Author With a Cop’s-Eye View, Is Dead at 88

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      In novels like “The Glitter Dome” and nonfiction works like “The Onion Field,” he took a harsh, unglamorous look at the realities of law enforcement.Joseph Wambaugh, the master storyteller of police dramas, whose books, films and television tales powerfully caught the hard psychic realities of lonely street cops and flawed detectives trapped in a seedy world of greed and senseless brutality, died on Friday at his home in Rancho Mirage, Calif. He was 88. The cause was esophageal cancer, said Janene Gant, a longtime family friend.In “The Glitter Dome,” Officers Gibson Hand and Buckmore Phipps consider it a joy “to kill people and do other good police work.” In “The Black Marble,” Sgt. Natalie Zimmerman and Sgt. A.M. Valnikov are in love, but it can’t last. In “The Onion Field,” his first work of nonfiction, Mr. Wambaugh wrote of what happened to Officer Karl Hettinger when his partner was slain by thugs: He suffered impotence, nightmares and suicidal thoughts, and his body shrunk.Mr. Wambaugh was blunt about the hidden costs of the job: broken marriages, nervous breakdowns, suicides.Before Mr. Wambaugh’s era as a writer, which began in 1971, police dramas like the television series “Dragnet” were implausible stories about clean-cut heroes doing good. He shattered the mold with portraits of officers as complex, profane, violent and fallible, sliding quickly from rookie illusions of idealism into the streetwise cynicism of veterans, who might have feared death but who feared their own emotions even more.Readers discovered an intimacy with Wambaugh’s cops, taking in the gallows humor, the boredom and sudden dangers; being privy to a partner’s bigotry and cruelty, but tagging along for the action and a share of the fatalism about the job — the inevitability of a murder, a rape or a child molested tonight — and then moving on to another sunset shift out of Hollywood Station.Mr. Wambaugh in 1972, the year after his first novel, “The New Centurions,” was published. He wrote it on the job while working as a police officer.Jill Krementz, all rights reservedWe 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 Royal Tenenbaums” Introduced Gene Hackman to a New Generation

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      His performance in Wes Anderson’s “The Royal Tenenbaums” introduced Hackman to a new generation, and his presence helped define the film.When the director Wes Anderson and the actors Anjelica Huston, Bill Murray and Gwyneth Paltrow took the stage in 2011 for a panel celebrating the 10th anniversary of Anderson’s “The Royal Tenenbaums,” there was no need for small talk before addressing the elephant in the room.“So, no Gene Hackman?” began the director Noah Baumbach, the panel’s co-moderator, introducing an apparently genuine nervousness into the discussion.Hackman, who was found dead on Wednesday afternoon with his wife at their home in Santa Fe, N.M., at the age of 95, loomed over “The Royal Tenenbaums” in every possible sense.Within the film, of course, he is the paterfamilias — he is Royal Tenenbaum, “the displaced patriarch,” as Hackman put it in an on-set interview — of the remarkable, scattered family at the center of Anderson’s third film, the one that took him from art houses to the mainstream.That 2011 panel dived into Hackman’s presence, particularly an off-camera gruffness, that distinguished him from the whimsy typical of Anderson’s work. Here was the avatar of 1970s grit and paranoia — who had won an Oscar playing the bad-boy narcotics detective Popeye Doyle in “The French Connection” — dropped into a very different type of cinematic vision, from a very different generation.The tone throughout the panel, particularly from Anderson, was respectful and appreciative. But it was clear that Hackman stood out on set. At the time of filming “The Royal Tenenbaums,” Hackman was already considering a retirement that just a few years later he announced and stuck to, Anderson said. None of the panelists had been in touch with Hackman during the intervening years, they said. And they all remembered him being terse with Anderson.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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      Why ‘Emilia Pérez,’ a Film About Mexico, Flopped in Mexico

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      The polarizing movie is up for 13 Academy Awards on Sunday. But in Mexico, it has been widely criticized for its depiction of the country.“Emilia Pérez,” the movie about a transgender Mexican cartel leader who reconciles with her past, enters the Academy Awards on Sunday with 13 nominations, the most of any film this year. It is also the most nods ever for any non-English language film. The film has already won several accolades, including best comedy or musical at the Golden Globe Awards.In Mexico, the reception has been exactly the opposite.It has been widely criticized for its depiction of the country, the minimization of the cartel violence that has ravaged so many and the few Mexicans involved in its production.Comments about Spanish by its French writer-director, Jacques Audiard, which some saw as denigrating the language, and by its lead, Karla Sofía Gascón, about Islam and George Floyd, stoked the discontent in Mexico and made matters worse.“Emilia Pérez” wasn’t released in Mexican theaters until Jan. 23 — five months after its debut in France and two months after its U.S. release. In Mexico, theaters showing the film have been largely empty. Some unhappy moviegoers have even demanded refunds.An online Mexican short film parodying the French roots of “Emilia Pérez,” on the other hand, was a hit. “Emilia Pérez” has been the fodder of many social media memes. And it has been denounced by the families of victims of violence in Mexico.“It has become a real disaster,” said Francisco Peredo Castro, a film expert and a history and communications professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.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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      Why These Oscars Mean So Much to Brazil

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      The best picture and best actress nominations for “I’m Still Here” have inspired national pride in a country whose culture has long been overlooked.The streets of Rio de Janeiro have been littered with Fernanda Torres imitators.They drink beer, clutch plastic Oscars and deliver the impromptu acceptance speeches that they hope their idol, the Brazilian actress Fernanda Torres, will give on Sunday night at the Academy Awards.“It’s the peak of fame in Brazil: to become a costume of Carnival,” Ms. Torres said at a film festival in California this month, referring to her many impersonators during pre-Carnival celebrations over the past several weeks.Ms. Torres was already widely famous in Brazil, but now she has become the nation’s star of the moment for achieving something that has long eluded most of her peers and predecessors here: international recognition.Since winning a Golden Globe for best actress last month, she has been on an international Oscars campaign for “I’m Still Here,” the Brazilian film about a mother of five navigating the disappearance of her husband during Brazil’s military dictatorship.Ms. Torres is nominated for best actress while the film is up for best international feature and — in the first such nomination for a Brazilian movie — best picture.Breno Consentino, 21, dresses up as “Fernanda’s Oscar” during a street party in Rio de Janeiro. The year’s hottest Carnival costume in Brazil is Fernanda Torres, who is nominated for an Oscar for best actress.Maria Magdalena Arrellaga for The New York TimesWe 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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      Oscars 2025: There’s Something Weird About the Best Picture Nominees

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      It’s entirely probable that scandal, gossip, politics and a general sense of “never heard of it before” have obscured something obvious and important about this year’s 10 best picture Oscar nominees. They’re weird — every single one. They take weird forms. The people in them do weird stuff. They induce weirdness in you.Demi Moore jabs herself with a goop known as “The Substance,” and out of her split-open back climbs Margaret Qualley, who refuses to obey the goop’s rules and proceeds to ruin their life. I paid to see this movie in a packed theater on a Saturday afternoon, where we laughed, screamed and almost threw up.Believe it or not, that movie’s a fairy tale, a funny one. So’s “Anora.” Here, the would-be princess is a Brooklyn stripper who marries a Russian nitwit whose oligarch father dispatches a goon squad to procure an annulment. If I told you “The Brutalist” ran for more than three hours and pitted a recent Holocaust survivor against his moneybags employer, maybe you’d ask which Oscar lab cooked this thing up. Then I’d have to tell you that the scale of this thing is so strangely intimate, so redolently personal, that it feels as much eavesdropped on as its premise sounds familiarly epic.A sugarless Brazilian dictatorship melodrama (“I’m Still Here”) is up against a sugar-encrusted American dictatorship musical (“Wicked”). “Conclave,” the pick-a-pope nail-biter, relies on so much shanking that it feels like a prison movie and features more cafeteria grandstanding than “Mean Girls.” For a spell, the front-runner had been “Emilia Pérez,” a musical fairy tale whose songs flout rhythm and melody, and whose Mexican cartel overlord mistakes her transness for sainthood. Then its star’s bigoted old tweets and some harsh comments by its mighty French director (about Mexicans and the Spanish they speak) turned the Oscar race into “Conclave.”Stellan Skarsgard plays the vindictive Baron Harkonnen in “Dune: Part Two,” a pretty weird blockbuster.Niko Tavernise/Warner Bros.Then, there’s “Dune: Part Two,” a movie so expensive looking, so smoothly, tastefully, artfully done that it’s easy to remain passive in the face of all that’s weird about it. But look! It’s Stellan Skarsgard, plumped, pursy and a-vape, as a baron whose kink, in part, arises from stadium-size gladiatoring. When this series is complete, many hours will have been spent watching Timothée Chalamet as the Chosen One amid a war over seasoning. It’s “Lawry’s of Arabia,” “Lost in Spice.” The race delivers double-feature Chalamet. In “A Complete Unknown,” he boldly reimagines Bob Dylan as a figure of tremendous petulance. Otherwise, it might be the most conventional thing you could hope to see about a once-in-a-lifetime weirdo; and that counts as kind of weird.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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      Oscar Nominees Makeup Got Real in 2025: “The Substance,” “Wicked” and More

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      This year’s Oscar nominees for makeup and hairstyling, for movies such as “The Substance,” “Wicked” and “A Different Man,” showcased prosthetics and special effects.Actors may deliver impassioned speeches about achieving their “childhood dreams,” but we don’t often hear about how those sculpting wounds with clay and bubbling skin with latex are fulfilling their lifelong fantasies.“Teenager treats” is how Pierre Olivier Persin, the special effects designer nominated for an Oscar for makeup and hairstyling for “The Substance,” described his work on the film, which involved two full-body prosthetics and countless other pieces and puppets. Mike Marino, the makeup designer for Sebastian Stan in “A Different Man,” nominated in the same category, described his childhood bedroom as a sort of cabinet of curiosities, filled with “jars of experiments and screaming Siamese twins.”It’s a particularly exciting year for makeup and hairstyling nominees: buckets of blood and pus-filled injections in “The Substance”; face tumors sloughing off like jelly in “A Different Man”; green witches and blue horses in “Wicked”; a vampire shriveling away in “Nosferatu”; and a menacing drug lord created with facial prosthetics in “Emilia Pérez.”“She wanted to see her hands. She wanted to get that reaction” from the other cast members, said Frances Hannon, the hair and makeup designer for “Wicked” about Cynthia Erivo, who played the green-skinned witch Elphaba in the film and has been vocal about her preference to be physically painted rather than having the hue added in postproduction.Universal Pictures, via Associated PressWhile in years past the category has sometimes leaned toward honoring the subtle transformations of delicately coifed period hairstyles, these nominees reflect a year that relied heavily on the use of makeup to create practical special effects.Once upon a time, most special effects were achieved with makeup. Think “An American Werewolf in London” (1981), “The Fly” (1986), “Beetlejuice” (1988): All the various monsters, mutations and marvels in these films were largely created with latex, foam and human hands. Then, in the early 2000s, studios became more reliant on computers to digitally generate these effects.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 Search Warrant Affidavit in Gene Hackman Death Inquiry

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      other image(s) documented on any media, photography and/or videography
      equipment, photography and/or videography accessories and/or devises apparently
      used to facilitate photography and/or videography.
      7. Clothing belonging or worn by Eugene “Gene” Allen Hackman or Betsy Arakawa.
      8. Photographs of the residence, including the interior and exterior.
      9. Latent and/or visible print(s), including but not limited to fingerprint(s) and
      footwear impression(s).
      10. Material(s) apparently used and/or intended for use in administering aid and/or
      assistance to injured people.
      11. Any weapon(s), tool(s) and/or instrument(s) capable of causing sharp force trauma
      to the human body. Document(s) that establish or tend to establish ownership,
      possession, use, transfer and/or the right to ownership, possession, use and/or
      transfer of the herein-described item(s), to be seized.
      12. Any weapon(s), tool(s) and/or instrument(s) capable of causing blunt force trauma
      to the human body. Document(s) that establish or tend to establish ownership,
      possession, use, transfer and/or the right to ownership, possession, use and/or
      transfer of the herein-described item(s), to be seized.
      13. Any item(s) and/or material(s) that have what appear to be impression(s), mark(s),
      and/or defect(s) on said item(s) and/or material(s).
      14. Any record documented in any media, which appears to be a password, personal
      identification number, item(s) and/or information used to access and/or facilitate
      access of said item(s), to be searched.
      15. Biological fluids, to include DNA, blood, or trace evidence.
      16. Telephones and/or cellular telephones.
      17. In order to ensure that a complete and thorough investigation, investigators may be required
      to examine the entire, above-mentioned premises, including, but not limited to, the
      examination of furniture, walls, plumbing equipment, or gas lines in or around the
      residence.
      AND THAT THE FACTS TENDING TO ESTABLISH THE FOREGOING GROUNDS
      FOR THE ISSUANCE OF A SEARCH WARRANT ARE AS FOLLOWS:
      Affiant, Detective Roy Arndt, is a full-time, certified peace officer in the State of New
      Mexico who has attended the Mexico Law Enforcement Academy. He is currently
      commissioned and salaried by the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office, where he serves as a
      Detective in the Criminal Investigations Division. Affiant has conducted numerous
      criminal investigations that led to the arrest and conviction of person(s) and currently has
      over 15 years of law enforcement experience.
      The facts set forth in this affidavit are based upon Affiant’s personal observations,
      training and experience, and information obtained from other law enforcement officers
      and civilian witnesses. This affidavit is made for the sole purpose of demonstrating
      probable cause for the issuance of the requested warrant and does not purport to set forth
      all Affiant’s knowledge of, or investigation into, this matter. All times depicted in this
      writing are approximate.
      STATEMENT OF FACTS KNOWN TO AFFIANT:
      At approximately 1:43 p.m. on Wednesday, February 26th, 2025, Santa Fe Regional Emergency
      Communications Center (RECC) received a call for service regarding a reporting party (RP)
      locating two (2) deceased individuals inside the residence of 1425 Old Sunset Trail, Santa Fe,
      New Mexico 87501.
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      Gene Hackman’s Smile Could Give You Shivers

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      In “Bonnie and Clyde” and “Unforgiven,” the actor used his charm to great disarming effect, flashing a smile before abruptly shifting to a sneer.When Clint Eastwood needed a performer who could persuasively go boot-toe to boot-toe with him in his brutal 1992 western “Unforgiven,” he needed an actor who was his towering equal onscreen. Eastwood needed a performer with strange charisma, one who could at once effortlessly draw the audience to his character and repulse it without skipping a beat. This actor didn’t need the audience’s love, and would never ask for it. He instead needed to go deep and dark, playing a villain of such depravity that he inspired the viewer’s own blood lust. Eastwood needed a legend who could send shivers up spines. He needed Gene Hackman.Hackman, whose death at 95 was announced on Thursday, was one of the defining actors of New Hollywood, that roughly decadelong, feverish period of artistic ferment that began with films like “Bonnie and Clyde,” Arthur Penn’s 1967 gangster drama. The era was famously defined by directors who helped rejuvenate the industry but was also known for male stars who didn’t conform to old studio ideals. With their unfixed noses and rough edges, these were men who once would have been largely confined to character roles. The glamorous-looking Warren Beatty played the male lead in “Bonnie and Clyde,” but it was Hackman’s striking supporting turn as Clyde’s brother, Buck, that heralded something new.Hackman holds your gaze the moment that Buck jumps out of a jalopy in “Bonnie and Clyde” into his brother’s arms; Buck is soon in Clyde’s gang, too. Buck is an outsized character, given to flailing and whooping, and Hackman delivers a suitably full-bodied, demonstrative performance that instantly gives you a sense of the character without once edging into scene stealing. His slight whine thickened with a deep-fried accent, Hackman also smiles a great deal as Buck, which humanizes the character so wholly that it lulls you into brief complacency, leaving you unprepared — almost — for the violence that rapidly engulfs him.Hackman, left, and Warren Beatty as thieving brothers in “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967). Screen Archives/Getty ImagesHackman’s smiles were one of his signature moves, and he used them to great disarming effect, deploying them to put other characters (and you) at ease before he abruptly shifted gears. It’s one reason he was such an effective villain. (His restraint as a surveillance expert in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 thriller, “The Conversation,” is one reason the film is so unnerving.) Hackman used smiles to charm and seduce, but also to obfuscate. Some actors let you see the rage boiling in their characters, the throbbing veins of hate. If you made a study of Hackman’s work, you might note that when one of his characters draws you to him with an upward curve of his mouth, something bad might happen soon. You would also divine that, thanks to his superb control, you could never predict when that false front would drop.There’s something sublimely fitting then in the fact that Hackman is dressed as Santa when he appears in his star-making role in William Friedkin’s “The French Connection,” the 1971 thriller that earned him a best actor Oscar. Hackman plays Popeye Doyle, a New York detective helping to bring down a heroin-smuggling outfit. Popeye is undercover in the opener, watching a suspect while ringing Santa’s bell and charming some kids with his patter, a smile peeping out from under his ill-fitting white beard. All of a sudden, Popeye and another cop (Roy Scheider) are chasing the suspect through the city’s derelict, litter-strewn streets. As soon as the detectives tackle the runaway in an empty lot, Popeye begins hitting the guy savagely. “I wanna bust him,” he says repeatedly, blood smeared on his Santa sleeve.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