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      Why ‘The Jinx’ Owes Its Existence to a Bizarre Movie About Robert Durst

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      Film can be influential in strange ways. The HBO series and follow-up wouldn’t have been made if a killer hadn’t taken a liking to a fictional portrayal.Years ago, while doing my civic duty in a Brooklyn courthouse, I was amused to be asked during jury selection if I watched “The Wire.” The lawyer explained that people’s understanding of what constituted evidence, guilt and crime were often tilted by the kind of media they watched. I did watch “The Wire.” I was dismissed.That experience came to mind while viewing “The Jinx: Part Two,” the follow-up series to Andrew Jarecki’s hit HBO original that’s largely responsible for the general public’s awareness of the real estate heir and convicted murderer Robert Durst. In the 2015 finale of “The Jinx,” Durst infamously said on a hot mic — seemingly by accident — that he’d murdered his best friend, Susan Berman; his wife, Kathie McCormack Durst, who had disappeared; and his neighbor Morris Black.The most recent episode of the new show focuses on Berman and a prosecutor’s argument that she helped Durst cover up Kathie’s death by posing as the dead woman on a phone call. The prosecution said Durst killed Berman in 2000 to keep the secret from getting out.Durst’s defense attorney, David Chesnoff, says on-camera that he was “salivating” because he believed they had “a tremendous reasonable doubt argument.” That is not surprising. What’s interesting is the tack he took.Chesnoff is shown in court thunderously defending Durst to the jury, saying that the theory that Berman posed as Kathie Durst “was spun from whole cloth.” He adds, “It began in part as the result of a fictional movie that Jarecki made.” Fictional, he emphasizes twice more, and really leans into that angle, bringing it up several more times, including on a slide that reads, “The evidence will show that the prosecution’s case is based on speculation, a flawed investigation, and their work with Hollywood producers.”If you don’t really know, or remember, what Chesnoff is talking about, the episode doesn’t make it all that clear. What he’s pointing to is “All Good Things,” Jarecki’s 2010 drama about a real estate heir named David Marks (Ryan Gosling), whose wife, Katie (Kirsten Dunst), mysteriously disappears. Marks is obviously modeled on Robert Durst, and Katie on Kathie. Berman’s stand-in, Deborah Lehrman, is played by Lily Rabe. As Chesnoff talks in the “Jinx” episode, red carpet footage from the “All Good Things” premiere briefly appears, as do clips of Lehrman posing as Katie and making a call from a pay phone.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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      Anya Taylor-Joy Went Through the Wringer for ‘Furiosa’

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      There’s nothing normal about making a “Mad Max” movie, and Anya Taylor-Joy knew that when she signed on to star in “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” the newest film in George Miller’s long-running action series.“I wanted to be changed,” she said. “I wanted to be put in a situation in extremis where I would have no choice but to grow. And I got it.”Trials by fire don’t burn much hotter than the conflagration that consumed “Mad Max: Fury Road” (2015), the most recent film in the franchise, which was one of the most infamously difficult productions in Hollywood history. In the works for nearly two decades, the movie was shut down several times by studio executives, who feared they were producing a big-budget boondoggle. And the constant clashes between Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron, two of its stars, in the remote Namibian desert required outside intervention.Despite all of those headwinds, “Fury Road” was hailed upon its release as one of the greatest action films ever made; it would go on to win six Oscars and net a spot on many critics’ best-of-the-decade lists. Its success paved the way for the prequel “Furiosa,” in theaters May 24, which casts the 28-year-old Taylor-Joy as a younger version of Theron’s iconic warrior woman.Plucked from her idyllic home by bandits, Furiosa grows up shuttled between two captors, the gabby psychopath Dementus (Chris Hemsworth) and the hulking warlord Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme). Furiosa faces constant danger on both sides, and she strives to survive long enough to escape, keen to exact revenge on those who have taken everything from her.Though Theron still casts a long shadow, Taylor-Joy stakes her claim on the role with a formidable ferocity: Under the grease that Furiosa smears on her face like war paint, the actress’s distinctive wide-set eyes blaze bright with righteous anger. To make Furiosa her own, she allowed herself to be put through an emotional and physical wringer for six and a half months. How did she feel in late 2022, when she finally wrapped the arduous production?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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      Roger Corman, Producer of Low-Budget Horror Films, Dies at 98

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      He had hundreds of horror, science fiction and crime films to his credit. He also helped start the careers of Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and many others.Roger Corman, who for decades dominated the world of B movies as the producer or director of countless proudly low-budget horror, science fiction and crime films, died on Thursday at his home in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 98. His death was confirmed in a statement by his family posted late Saturday on his official Instagram page.Mr. Corman produced more than 300 films and directed roughly 50 of them, including cult classics like “A Bucket of Blood” (1959), “The Masque of the Red Death” (1964), “The Wild Angels” (1966) and the original “The Little Shop of Horrors” (1960), which he shot for $35,000 in two days on a set left over from somebody else’s movie.When he got tired of directing, he opened the door to Hollywood for talented young protégés like Francis Ford Coppola (“Dementia 13”), Martin Scorsese (“Boxcar Bertha”), Jonathan Demme (“Caged Heat”), Peter Bogdanovich (“Targets”) and Ron Howard (“Grand Theft Auto”).Mr. Corman “was able to nurture other talent in a way that was never envious or difficult but always generous,” Mr. Scorsese said of him. “He once said: ‘Martin, what you have to get is a very good first reel, because people want to know what’s going on. Then you need a very good last reel, because people want to hear how it all turns out. Everything else doesn’t really matter.’ Probably the best sense I have ever heard about the movies.”Among the others Mr. Corman nurtured was Jack Nicholson, who was 21 when Mr. Corman gave him his first movie role, the lead in “The Cry Baby Killer” (1958), and 23 when he had a small part as a masochistic dental patient in “The Little Shop of Horrors.” Before he went on to stardom, Mr. Nicholson acted in eight Corman movies and wrote three of them, including “The Trip,” an uncautionary tale about LSD.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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      Jeannie Epper, Groundbreaking Stunt Double on ‘Wonder Woman,’ Dies at 83

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      Her first stunt was riding a horse bareback down a cliff when she was 9. She went on to soar on the hit TV series “Wonder Woman” and in many other places.Jeannie Epper had at least 100 screen roles, maybe even 150 — no one is quite sure. But because she was a stunt double, galloping on horseback, crashing cars and kicking down doors for the stars of films and television shows, hers was not a household name.In her heyday, however, Ms. Epper was ubiquitous. She hurtled through the air most weeks as Lynda Carter’s stunt double on the hit television series “Wonder Woman” and mimed Ms. Carter’s leggy lope. She tumbled through a scrum of mud and rocks as Kathleen Turner’s double in the 1984 comedy-adventure film “Romancing the Stone,” which also starred Michael Douglas. She threw punches for Linda Evans in one of her many ballyhooed cat fights with Joan Collins on the frothy long-running 1980s nighttime soap opera “Dynasty.”And, in what she often said was her favorite stunt — or gag, to use the industry term — Ms. Epper skidded a Corvette into a 180-degree turn as Shirley MacLaine’s character in “Terms of Endearment” (1983), neatly hurling Jack Nicholson’s double into the Gulf of Mexico.Ms. Epper, whose bruising career spanned 70 years, died on Sunday at her home in Simi Valley, Calif. She was 83.Her daughter, Eurlyne Epper, confirmed the death. She said her mother had been ill for some time and caught an infection during a recent hospital visit.Ms. Epper, second from the left, in 1960, next to her husband at the time, Richard Spaethe, and their son, Richard. Her brother Tony and her sister Stephanie, also stunt performers, are sitting next to her on the fence. Another stuntman, Dick Hock, stands next to them with his wife, Margo, and their son, Johnnie.Los Angeles Examiner/USC Libraries — Corbis, via Getty ImagesWe 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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      Cannes: Coralie Fargeat Doesn’t Shy Away From Gore in Her Films

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      The director Coralie Fargeat’s films don’t shy away from violence and gore, including her latest which is vying for the top prize at Cannes.The movies of Coralie Fargeat are not for the fainthearted: Blood and gore play an absolutely central role.There was so much of it in her body-horror movie “Revenge” (2017) — her first full-length feature — that, on set in Morocco, extra quantities of fake blood had to be constantly prepared using ingredients shipped over from France.Fargeat’s new title “The Substance” — starring Margaret Qualley, Demi Moore and Dennis Quaid — promises to be no less violent and is one of 22 contenders for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, which begins on Tuesday.Fargeat, who was born in Paris, took up filmmaking from a very young age, making little movies of her toys, and developed a passion for genre movies thanks to her grandfather, who let the 12- or 13-year-old Coralie watch films her parents considered too violent: the “Rambo” series, “RoboCop” and “The Fly.”Later, while finishing her university studies at Sciences Po in Paris, she noticed a film shoot in the university courtyard one day and asked the assistant director for an internship. She interned on the set of his next movie, and spent the next two years doing other internships to learn the ropes.Releasing a number of critically acclaimed shorts, she presented “Revenge” at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2017 and got plenty of attention.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      At Cannes, Un Certain Regard Offers a Different Perspective

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      While not receiving the same attention as the main competition, the sidebar is where you often glimpse the future of cinema.The British filmmaker Molly Manning Walker was on vacation in Rome on May 26, 2023, when her phone rang. A week earlier, her feature debut “How to Have Sex” had premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Now, festival organizers were calling because her movie, about a group of 16-year-old girls who spend a debauched booze and sex-soaked summer vacation on the Greek island of Crete, had won a prize that would be announced at that evening’s closing ceremony back on the Côte d’Azur.“I had to drive to the nearest airport really quickly and get on the next plane and I ran in three minutes after the film had been announced,” Manning Walker, 30, recalled in a recent phone interview.She wasn’t exaggerating. She did, in fact, bolt into the cinema wearing a lime green T-shirt and black tennis shorts. “What the hell is going on?” she asked the audience in disbelief. The answer was that “How to Have Sex” had won the top award in Un Certain Regard, the sidebar section at the festival that is known for recognizing films by new and emerging directors.While the starry main competition at Cannes — which begins on Tuesday, and this year features new work by David Cronenberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Yorgos Lanthimos and other established filmmakers — attracts most of the media’s attention, Un Certain Regard, which translates to “a certain look,” is where one can most reliably glimpse where world cinema is headed. In the words of Thierry Frémaux, Cannes’s artistic director, “U.C.R. discovers and celebrates the new generation and expands the frontiers of cinema.”Last year, Molly Manning Walker rushed back from Rome to Cannes to accept the prize for her feature debut, “How to Have Sex.”Ammar Abd Rabbo/Abaca/Sipa, via Associated PressIn an email interview, Frémaux, who heads the viewing committee that selects the films that screen at the festival, said that Un Certain Regard’s purpose was “to bring out new trends, new paths, new countries of cinema. It’s a selection that favors young filmmakers, especially female directors, and prepares the emergence of future generations.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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      Cannes Film Festival: More From India Than Just Bollywood

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      This year’s edition of the annual film festival features a prominent presence of Indian stories and storytellers that celebrates the country’s independent cinema.For the first time in 30 years at the Cannes Film Festival, an Indian film will compete for the Palme d’Or in the main competition, alongside new movies from Francis Ford Coppola, Yorgos Lanthimos and Andrea Arnold.The dry spell might come as a surprise for a country with film industries in multiple regions producing hundreds of films per year, including international sensations like last year’s Oscar-nominated “RRR.”But the inclusion of “All We Imagine as Light,” directed by Payal Kapadia, reflects a growing recognition of the independent cinema made in the shadow of the country’s mainstream hits.Thierry Frémaux, the artistic director of Cannes, noted the new generations of filmmakers in India when he announced the lineup in April. These movies offer what the critic Namrata Joshi calls “a young, probing, and provoking gaze at Indian reality.” Indian publications have celebrated the country’s prominent presence at the festival, whose inaugural edition in 1946 included a film from India, Chetan Anand’s “Neecha Nagar,” in its grand prize category.“All We Imagine as Light” joins a generally notable selection of Indian stories and storytellers across this year’s edition, which begins on Tuesday. Santosh Sivan will be the first Indian filmmaker to receive the Pierre Angénieux prize for career achievement in cinematography, and in the Un Certain Regard competition, Sandhya Suri’s “Santosh” follows a widow who takes on her husband’s policeman post.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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      What Ethan Hawke’s ‘Wildcat’ Gets Right About Flannery O’Connor

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      Those familiar with her menagerie of grotesques, her views of Southern society, her tortured faith and inner contradictions will get what his film is doing.Nobody’s ever really known what to do with Mary Flannery O’Connor. They didn’t know when she was alive, and they haven’t known since she died in 1964, at 39, after years of battling through lupus to write her nervy, weird stories about Southerners, sin, religion and the God to whom she prayed so fervently. Her mother, Regina, with whom O’Connor lived for the last third of her life in Milledgeville, Ga., once asked her daughter’s publisher, Robert Giroux, if he couldn’t “get Flannery to write about nice people.” He couldn’t. Not that he would try.O’Connor in 1959 on the steps of her home in Milledgeville, Ga. She’s a patron saint to writers who explore the fault lines between religion and belief, transgression and salvation.Floyd Edwin Jillson/ Atlanta Journal- Constitution Via Associated PressThe screen adaptations of O’Connor’s work have not quite captured her essence either, though some attempts have been more successful than others. A telling instance comes in “The Life You Save,” a 1957 TV adaptation of her short story “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” starring Gene Kelly in his first small-screen role. He plays Tom T. Shiftlet, a one-armed vagrant who talks a woman into taking him on as her handyman, then marries her mute, deaf daughter, Lucynell. Tom and Lucynell drive off toward their honeymoon and then, at a diner, as Lucynell naps on the counter, Tom makes his getaway. In the story, Tom picks up a hitchhiker, who insults him before leaping out of the car, and Tom just keeps driving away. In the TV version, however — presumably to avoid offending viewers’ delicate sensibilities — Tom has a change of heart, returning to the diner to retrieve Lucynell after all.That kind of moment would never have made it into an O’Connor story. She saw the episode, and “the best I can say for it is that conceivably it could have been worse,” she said. “Just conceivably.” (It paid for a new refrigerator for her and Regina.) She was not interested in writing tales of cheap redemption, or those that dramatize a change of heart that brings about a pasted-on happy ending, even if they’d have sold a lot better. Her stories are full of darker things, the “action of grace in territory held largely by the devil,” as she put it. A traveling Bible salesman steals a dour intellectual woman’s false leg. A young man berates his mother for her backward views on race until she has a stroke. A family on the way to a vacation is murdered by a roving serial killer. A pious woman beats the hell out of her reprobate husband after he gets a giant tattoo of Jesus on his back.“Wise Blood,” John Huston’s 1979 adaptation of O’Connor’s 1952 novel of the same name, comes much closer to her uncomfortable tales of uncomfortable grace. The book was adapted by Benedict and Michael Fitzgerald, sons of Robert and Sally Fitzgerald, close friends of O’Connor (she lived with them for a while, and they edited “Mystery and Manners,” her 1969 collection of lectures and essays). “Wise Blood” is the story of a somewhat unhinged veteran named Hazel Motes (Brad Dourif), the grandson of a traveling preacher, who returns to his Tennessee home and tries to spread an antireligious gospel, only to discover he can’t quite get away from God. The Fitzgeralds chose Huston to direct in part because he, like Motes, was an avowed atheist, and they thought that’s what O’Connor would have wanted: a director who wasn’t afraid to skewer the pieties of her native South. But on the last day of shooting, Huston turned to Benedict Fitzgerald and said, “I’ve been had.” He realized he hadn’t managed to tell an atheist’s story at all. He’d told O’Connor’s story, and that meant it was soaked in hideous divine grace.Brad Dourif as a somewhat unhinged veteran trying to spread an antireligious gospel in “Wise Blood.”Anthea FilmWe 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