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      Watch Ariana Grande Swing From a Chandelier in ‘Wicked’

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      The director Jon M. Chu narrates the musical scene, also featuring Cynthia Erivo, where Grande performs the song “Popular.”In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.The song “Popular” from “Wicked” has secured a firm place in pop culture in the 21 years since the show opened on Broadway. So how to make the song fresh for the film adaptation?This was one of the major challenges for the film’s director, Jon M. Chu. His formula was a little practical effects, a little razzmatazz and a whole lot of Ariana Grande.The scene has Glinda (Grande) working to improve the image and perception of her roommate, Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo). In the process, Glinda’s suitcases almost come to life as pop-up closets that she raids for her task.“In each of these devices,” Chu said in his narration, “even though they seem simple, there’s grown men in small spaces pulling it open and shutting it. And the engineering in each took months and months to design right.”The other element involves the timing of Grande’s singing, and the way she works the pink peignoir she’s wearing (designed by Paul Tazewell). She swings on a chandelier in it and slides across the wood floor in it as well, singing live on set throughout.“Ari is just a master of comedy,” Chu said. “You can see it in all her moves, and how she interacts when she acts with Cynthia Erivo. When you actually listen to it, too, her beats and her pauses are just masterful.”Read the “Wicked” review.Read a tearful interview with its stars.Read an interview with the director.Read about the costume design.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      How ‘September 5’ Recreates a Historic News Broadcast

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      The drama chronicles the 1972 Munich Olympics attack from ABC Sports’ point of view, a perspective that resonates today. But the film arrives at a fraught time.“They’re all gone.”When the sports broadcaster Jim McKay announced the deaths of 11 Israeli Olympic team members taken hostage by the Palestinian militant group Black September at the 1972 Summer Games in Munich, it was a sentence freighted with emotion and instantly became a part of broadcast history.In the new film “September 5,” there is no actor playing McKay, who instead “plays” himself through archival footage woven throughout the drama, which focuses almost entirely on the ABC Sports control room as it retells the saga that unfolded that day.As the dramatized ABC Sports team pivots from the Olympics to breaking news, the real footage unspools on actual monitors from the era: “September 5” features a painstakingly recreated control room with 1970s technology restored to working order.The broadcasters weren’t the focus when the director, Tim Fehlbaum, and his team started their research in 2020, poring over police files and archival collections. But the ethical issues remain, more than half a century later. Fehlbaum said getting the details right was important.“The technology obviously has changed,” he said. “Maybe the bigger questions are still the same.”The 1972 Olympics have been covered multiple times on the big screen before, in movies like Steven Spielberg’s “Munich” (2005) and the documentary “One Day in September” (2000). The episode had long intrigued Fehlbaum, a Swiss director who went to film school in Munich and worked on many student films shot at the former Olympic Village.But it was only after talking to people who were in Munich at the time that they found their protagonist in Geoffrey Mason. In 1972 he was a young producer for ABC Sports thrust into a position of responsibility shortly after hearing gunshots in the distance. Mason had to weigh guidance from his superiors — the “Wide World of Sports” creator Roone Arledge (played by Peter Sarsgaard) and the longtime producer Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin) — and quickly come up with answers to difficult ethical questions like how to respond to potential graphic violence on a live broadcast watched by millions.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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      Thanksgiving Streaming Recommendations for Every Mood

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      Whether you’re with hanging out with children or adults, want to laugh or tuck into an adventure, here are some specific selections to stream.“What do you all want to watch?”This question has torpedoed many get-togethers, leaving the poor soul wielding the remote at a Thanksgiving gathering to search and scroll through seemingly infinite streaming options until everyone is cross-eyed and over it. Let’s skip that part, shall we? Here are a handful of picks that might fit the bill for some common holiday dynamics.Family Friendly, but Not CornyAlex Honnold climbs El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. His feat was captured in the 2018 documentary “Free Solo.”Jimmy Chin/National GeographicDocumentary with the little ones: “Tiger” (Disney+)There is no shortage of stunning nature documentaries, but this 2024 Disneynature film from the director Mark Linfield (“Planet Earth”) goes beyond the usual script to tell a poignant family tale. Narrated by Priyanka Chopra Jonas and filmed over the course of 1,500 days, we follow a tigress named Ambar in the forests of India as she protects her cubs from predators and adverse weather while on a perpetual quest to feed them and herself.Documentary with the teenagers: “Free Solo” (Disney+)This 2018 film that follows Alex Honnold on his free solo ascent of El Capitan, a vertical rock formation in Yosemite National Park, won the Oscar for best documentary for good reason. Not only will his feat shake your understanding of what is humanly possible, but how it was captured on film (Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin directed) is just as gripping. Watch this on the biggest television you have. It’s worth it.Feature with the little ones: “Elemental” (Disney+)If you’ve already seen “Inside Out 2,” try this 2023 Pixar comedy set in Element City, where characters are divided into four strata: water, earth, air and fire, all magnificently rendered, creating a dazzling animated experience. The plot looks thoughtfully at family ties while telling a story of cross-cultural romantic love and self-actualization.Feature with the teenagers: “Spirited Away” (Max)It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly 25 years since the release of this now revered Oscar-winning fantasy anime from the celebrated Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki. It re-entered the zeitgeist this year with Billie Eilish’s track “Chihiro,” named after the film’s main character, a girl who slips into another realm, where she becomes trapped. The hand-drawn animation is transporting, and the coming-of-age themes will open the door for some deeper reflection.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 Seed of the Sacred Fig’ Review: When the World Is a Prison

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      Mohammad Rasoulof’s powerful drama about the authoritarian Iranian government breaks a fourth wall, with consequences.The ubiquity of smartphones capable of filming anything, anywhere, has been a blessing and a curse to autocratic governments. On the one hand, protests and nascent revolutions can be filmed and broadcast, seen around the world, making the authoritarian’s attempt to quash dissent much more onerous.But there’s a shadow side. Autocrats can compel obedience by means of overt force, but it’s much more canny — and more insidious — to turn everyone into individual agents of surveillance. Thinking your office might be wiretapped is bad enough, but knowing whatever you do might be filmed by your snitch neighbor, or sibling, is a powerful motivator to fall into line even in the private sphere. And those phones? They’re perfect little monitoring machines.This possibility is a basic fact of 21st-century life, and Mohammad Rasoulof makes powerful use of it in his drama “The Seed of the Sacred Fig.” Titles before the film begins announce that it was made in secret, because “when there is no way, a way must be made.” In the past, Rasoulof’s films have resulted in travel bans and prison sentences in his native country of Iran, where he’s run afoul of strict censorship laws. When “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” was announced as a selection at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the Iranian government interrogated the cast and crew, subjecting them to travel bans. On May 8, less than a week before the start of the festival, Rasoulof was sentenced to flogging and eight years in prison. He and several of the film’s crew fled their country for Europe, and he remains in exile.It’s not hard to see why the film seemed so dangerous. It puts a frame around inconvenient truths. The main drama concerns a family of four: Iman (Missagh Zareh), his wife, Najmeh (Soheila Golestani), and their two daughters, 21-year-old Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and her teenage sister, Sana (Setareh Maleki). Iman has recently been made an investigating judge in Tehran’s revolutionary court, a position of prestige, and Najmeh is overjoyed. Iman aspires to do his job justly.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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      ‘Moana 2’ Review: It Doesn’t Rock the Boat

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      In this benign sequel, the Disney princess continues her seafaring ways and remains admirably uninterested in finding a prince.“Moana,” Disney’s breezy foray into Polynesian myth and culture, was released almost exactly eight years ago. Anyone remember what was going on that month? Amid an election, a reckoning and political anxiety, Moana’s anthems about voyaging beyond the confines of her coral reef (the tropical version of a glass ceiling) to save her people from environmental disaster rang out with special feeling.That resonance doesn’t really carry over into “Moana 2,” a sequel that seems to abide by the “if it ain’t broke” rule. Directed by David G. Derrick Jr., Jason Hand, Dana Ledoux Miller, the movie charts a parallel course to its predecessor, following Moana (voiced by Auliʻi Cravalho) as she leaves home on an odyssey with her island’s future at stake. Along the way, she meets up with Maui (Dwayne Johnson), the burly, smug demigod still prone to jaunty jibes — he often calls Moana “Curly” — and corny metatextual commentary written, presumably, for the benefit of the millennial and Gen-X adults in the room. (“That’ll make sense in 2,000 years,” he quips, after using the term “butt dial.”)Coming off a successful restoration of the hydrosphere’s ecological balance, Moana, now a practiced voyager, begins the sequel by expressing an upgraded objective: establish contact with inhabitants of nearby islands. Soon enough, she receives a vision from her ancestors on the very topic, encouraging her to take an arduous journey across the ocean. Upon her dad’s urging, Moana assembles a small and somewhat haphazard way-finding crew, including a crotchety agriculturalist (David Fane), an excitable marine engineer (Rose Matafeo) and a muscled communications expert (Hualalai Chung). This jumble of new faces often feels like a waste of screen space, especially when the ocean, a wonderful animistic motif, is perfectly capable of buoying Moana on her travels.The group’s destination is Motufetu, an island that once served as a hub for disparate Pacific Islanders before Nalo, an evil storm god, sank it beneath the ocean. To bring back Motufetu and restore social harmony, humans need to find the land and step foot upon it. Onscreen, the details of this fabricated, composite mythology get a little murky. But squint your eyes against the specifics, and the odyssey tends to deliver a mood that fluctuates along a scale of benign to bright.The musical numbers, from Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear (picking up the reins from the original movie’s Lin-Manuel Miranda), as well as Opetaia Foa‘i and Mark Mancina, are competently written and arranged (save for one painful rap sequence). The big anthem is “Beyond,” a corollary to “How Far I’ll Go” that has Moana rehashing the pull to go out exploring, just a tad farther than last time. The song is a reminder that Moana is a member of the new and improved Disney kingdom, in which heroines reach happily ever after through personal growth, coming-of-age and finding themselves. Notably, and perhaps admirably, there remains no prince to Moana’s princess, although she does retain her animal sidekicks of rooster and pig.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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      Danielle Deadwyler Goes Deep in “The Piano Lesson”

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      On a recent Sunday morning in West Hollywood, the actress Danielle Deadwyler wore all white, clad in a pristine Tory Burch dress.“You know what white represents?” she said. “Spiritually, it’s rebirth: You get baptized, you put on a white robe, and you allow yourself to be witnessed in a certain way and to be changed. I think I’m in the midst of all of that.”Did she have a sense of where that change would take her?“Hell no,” Deadwyler said. “But I’m open.”Certainly, she appears headed in the right direction. After supporting roles in “The Harder They Fall” and “Station Eleven” established her as an actress to watch, Deadwyler’s career breakthrough came two years ago with the film “Till,” about the 1955 Mississippi murder that helped catalyze the civil-rights movement. For her deeply felt performance as Mamie Till, whose 14-year-old son Emmett was slain by white supremacists, Deadwyler won leading honors from the NAACP Awards, Gotham Awards and National Board of Review.She’s every bit as powerful in Netflix’s “The Piano Lesson,” which premiered on the streamer last week and is once again earning the 42-year-old actress awards buzz. Based on the play by August Wilson, “The Piano Lesson” casts Deadwyler as Berniece, a widowed mother at odds with her brother, Boy Willie (John David Washington), in post-Depression-era Pittsburgh. Both siblings must contend with generational trauma that’s wrapped up in the fate of their family piano: Though Boy Willie wants to sell it to buy land, Berniece insists the piano should stay put, since it serves as a totemic reminder of what their enslaved ancestors have been through.Danielle Deadwyler stars as Berniece in “The Piano Lesson,” an adaptation of August Wilson’s play.As Berniece deals with Boy Willie, rebuffs the preacher Avery (Corey Hawkins), who seeks to court her, and shares a surprising, erotically charged moment with her brother’s friend Lymon (Ray Fisher), Deadwyler feels compellingly real in the role. “I’ve never felt like I was watching Danielle in this, I never thought of her outside the role,” said Denzel Washington, who produced the film. Unlike other actors who are determined to show their work, Deadwyler simply embodies the character, Washington said: “If you can dissect it, then they’re probably not very good, right? It’s what you get from it that’s proof of what they’re doing — it’s what you feel.”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 Theater

      ‘Wicked’ and the Merchandising Juggernaut That Eclipses ‘Barbie’

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      The new movie’s tie-ins are the logical endpoint for a Broadway show that always intended to be huge. The “Wicked” product line ranges from Mattel versions of Glinda and Elphaba, far left, to tumblers and Crocs, all sticking to the green-and-pink color scheme of the show and film.Mattel; Stanley; CrocsIt started with the dolls.As a longtime fan of “Wicked” who grew up collecting Barbies, I was immediately intrigued by the Mattel creations resembling Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo in the movie version of the Broadway musical. They were perfectly rendered in likeness and even sang snippets of “Popular” and “Defying Gravity.” I’ll admit, I coveted them.But that was just the beginning of the “Wicked” merchandise. Soon my Instagram and X feeds were inundated with pink and green collaborations. Some made sense in the context of both the movie and the stars. Why, of course Grande’s R.E.M. Beauty brand would feature a line of “Wicked”-inspired goods. She might as well promote both her performance and her entrepreneurial venture at the same time.Other “Wicked” products ranged from the functional to the positively ridiculous, but they all contributed to the sense that “Wicked” was absolutely everywhere, making it perhaps one of the most marketed movies in recent memory, surpassing even the hot pink inundation of “Barbie” last year.I discovered many of these via the X account Wicked News Hub, which posts every tiny update about the film and its promotional path. It is run by a lawyer in Manchester, England, who started it out of a love of all things Grande. (He asked to keep the identity behind the account private.) “Although I expected a lot of collaborations, from tracking ‘Wicked’ news over the years, even I was surprised by the incredible amount of collaborations and goodies,” he wrote in an email.There are “Wicked” versions of the TikTok-popular Stanley Cups, which according to some reports caused pandemonium when they were released in Target. They seem like your standard drinking vessel, but the film promotion capitalized on the fervor. There are “Wicked”-themed Crocs. (The Glinda ones have heels.) There are “Wicked” clothing lines for the Gap, H&M, Bloomingdale’s and Forever 21. You can buy “Wicked” Legos and “Wicked” Monopoly. There are even “Wicked” hair dryers. (The Mattel dolls weathered a minor controversy when the packaging accidentally bore the URL for a porn site, not the movie.)Starbucks has an enormous “Wicked” line that includes bedazzled tumblers and two themed drinks: Glinda’s Pink Potion and Elphaba’s Cold Brew. While getting a boring plain latte, I sampled the Elphaba, assuming the Glinda would hurt my teeth. It was minty.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