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The floor creaks, the music turns ominous and an uneasy quiet sets in. Then BAM! It’s the classic jump scare. This staple of horror movies, when done well, is instantly memorable. With Times film writers, filmmakers and stars weighing in, we ranked the 25 jump scares that still get us every time. WARNINGThis article contains […] More
The actor plays a cardinal who expresses doubts about his faith and the church in this drama from the director Edward Berger.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 selection of a new pope is at the center of “Conclave,” the latest drama from the director Edward Berger (“All Quiet on the Western Front”). But while the setting is reverent, the movie finds its narrative propulsion in what its characters try to hide or, in this scene, what they surprisingly decide to express.Ralph Fiennes plays Cardinal Lawrence, the dean of the College of Cardinals, the group that will elect a new pope. The character has operated on the sidelines for much of his time in the church, but something bolder happens here. He addresses the cardinals in a homily that starts formally and ends with personal expressions of doubt.Narrating the scene, Berger said that it sets up Lawrence “as a character to be reckoned with. He delivers this speech that comes from his heart, and other cardinals, especially the ones with ambition to become the next pope, suddenly fear that there’s a new contender in the room.”Read the “Conclave” review.Read about the making of the film.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More
A new drama by Edward Berger draws the audience inside this largely hidden tradition. How accurate is it?When a pope dies, cardinals younger than 80 gather at the Vatican to elect his successor in what is known as a conclave. Recent papal elections have offered glimpses of this highly secretive process by allowing television cameras to capture some of the pomp and prayers leading up to the voting.But the world is left hanging the moment a Vatican official solemnly proclaims, “Extra omnes,” Latin for “all out,” and shoos everyone else from the Sistine Chapel before dramatically shutting its immense wooden doors so that the cardinals can begin selecting the next pope.Edward Berger’s new drama, “Conclave,” which opens Friday, catapults audiences back inside the Sistine Chapel for a cinematically rare, if fictionalized, peek at the confidential electoral proceedings of the Roman Catholic Church.“Ancient rituals clashing with modernity,” Berger said, describing the film in a video interview.The film stars Ralph Fiennes as Lawrence, dean of the College of Cardinals, who in the film is responsible for leading the papal election, and Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Lucian Msamati and Sergio Castellitto as papal contenders. They are not based on real people but are instead amalgams of contrasting blocs within the church, traditionalist and progressive, that loosely define existing currents. “It’s all politics in the end,” said Robert Harris, who wrote the 2016 novel on which Peter Straughan based his screenplay.“Conclave” is hardly the first film to involve a papal election, and church-based mystery-thrillers, like Dan Brown’s “Angels & Demons” or Raymond Khoury’s “The Last Templar,” have regularly made best-seller lists.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
She helped make films like “Sleepless in Seattle” and “Contact.” She also wrote widely about the industry, for The Times and other publications.Lynda Obst, a New York journalist turned Hollywood producer who promoted women in films like “Sleepless in Seattle” and “Contact” while writing incisive dispatches from Tinseltown for outlets like The Atlantic and The New York Times, died on Tuesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 74.Her brother Rick Rosen said the cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.Known for her booming, raspy laugh and her startling candor, Ms. Obst was a colorful character even by the standards of a colorful industry.Even more unusual for Hollywood, she was at times an outspoken critic of the movie industry, especially its treatment of women.As a producer, she excelled at both frothy romantic comedies and serious science fiction dramas. She helped shepherd Nora Ephron’s seminal “Sleepless in Seattle” as an executive producer in 1993 and the box-office hit “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days” as a producer in 2003. But she also produced Robert Zemeckis’s “Contact” in 1997 and Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” in 2014.She was an advocate for stories focused on women, and often made by women, at a time when there weren’t many. She pushed, for example, for Jodie Foster to star as an astronomer in “Contact” when it was unusual for a major science fiction movie to have a female lead. An acolyte and admirer of Ms. Ephron, she produced her directorial debut, “This Is My Life” (1992).Ms. Obst excelled at both frothy romantic comedies and serious science fiction dramas. She was an executive producer of the hit Nora Ephron comedy “Sleepless in Seattle” (1993), which starred Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, seen here with Ross Malinger.TriStar PicturesWe 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
His literary career traced the arc of his country’s modern political journey in stories about ordinary citizens facing repression and arbitrary government.Antonio Skármeta, a Chilean novelist, screenplay writer, playwright and television presenter who captured his country’s affections with warmhearted tales of its suffering and redemption through dictatorship and democracy, died on Oct. 15 at his home in Santiago. He was 83.His death, after a long struggle with cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, was announced by President Gabriel Boric Font of Chile on his X account.Mr. Boric paid tribute to the leading role Mr. Skármeta played in his country’s cultural life. He praised Mr. Skármeta “for the life you lived,” adding: “For the stories, the novels and the theater. For the political commitment. For the book show that expanded the boundaries of literature.”Mr. Skármeta’s literary career traced the arc of Chile’s modern political journey in lightly ironic stories that depicted the strategies of ordinary citizens faced with repression and arbitrary government.He lived that journey himself — as an activist supporting the leftist government of Salvador Allende in 1970; as a political exile in Argentina and in Germany after the 1973 coup d’état that inaugurated Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s brutal 15-year military dictatorship; as host of a popular television program about literature (the “book show” Mr. Boric mentioned) in the 1990s, after democracy returned to Chile; and as his country’s ambassador in Berlin from 2000 to 2003.His best-known work, the 1985 novel “Ardiente Pacienca” (“Burning Patience”) — the story of a postal worker who befriends Chile’s national poet Pablo Neruda and used the friendship to woo a young local woman — illustrated a method Skármeta typically used: weaving real-life figures and disasters with fictional characters who must cope with them, often with bumbling but very human ineptitude.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
This film, based on Robert Harris’s 2016 thriller of the same title, centers on a British cardinal (a sensational Ralph Fiennes), and a campaign for a new pope.There are no Kamala Harris or Donald Trump bumper stickers embellishing the vans that occasionally zip through “Conclave.” The current presidential race is the far greater, more consequential nail-biter, yet there’s still much riding on the contest in this sly, sleek election potboiler about the selection of a new Catholic pope. With pomp and circumstance, miles of scarlet cloth and first-rate scene-stealers, the movie snakes through the marbled corridors of Vatican City, pauses in bedchambers as cold as mausoleums and tunnels into the deepest secrets of the human heart. It’s quite the journey, and as unpersuasive as it is entertaining.Vatican stories are Hollywood catnip; see, or maybe don’t, the Dan Brown adaptations (“The Da Vinci Code,” etc.) featuring a worried-looking Tom Hanks racing through conspiratorial thickets. It’s easy to see the attractions of the minuscule city-state, beyond the untold masterpieces crowding it. The movies love stories about shadowy — to outsiders, at any rate — patriarchal, deeply hierarchical, unimaginably wealthy organizations with strict codes of conduct and tremendous power. That may sound a lot like a thumbnail portrait of the Mafia, but it also describes Hollywood. And what the movies especially love are lightly cynical, self-flattering and finally myth-stoking stories that, like this one, evoke the industry itself.“Conclave,” based on Robert Harris’s 2016 Vatican intrigue of the same title, centers on a British cardinal, Lawrence (a sensational Ralph Fiennes). A cleric of uncertain faith if unwavering convictions about everything else, Lawrence has droopingly sad eyes and refined sensitivities, and serves as the dean of the College of Cardinals, the group charged with selecting the pope, who’s just died. Lawrence is on the move when the story opens, hurrying through dark streets and into a brisk drama filled with whispering, scurrying men, one of whom who will be anointed as the new earthly head of the Catholic Church. There are women, too, though mostly there’s Isabella Rossellini, giving great side-eye as Sister Agnes.The cardinals keep whispering and scurrying as the story quickly revs up. Lawrence has been enduring a personal crisis — Harris calls it “some kind of spiritual insomnia” — and had asked the pope (Bruno Novelli) if he could leave Rome for a religious retreat. The pope denied him, telling Lawrence that while some are chosen to be shepherds, others need to manage the farm. With the pope dead, the reluctant Lawrence steps up and begins managing, a duty that involves herding scores of cardinals through the intricacies of the conclave, Latin for a room that can be locked. First, everyone needs to be sequestered until the announcement of “Habemus papam” (“We have a pope”), but until then, it’s every cardinal for himself.The story coalesces around the lead candidates, a nicely balanced group of sincere, stealthy and smooth operators who soon circle Lawrence, their silver tongues wagging and hands wringing as they make their moves. The director Edward Berger and his team (the casting directors very much included) have stuffed the movie with a Daumier-esque collection of smooth and bearded, guarded and open faces. The juicy main cast includes Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Lucian Msamati and a wonderful Sergio Castellitto, who plays a wolfish smiler who fulminates about the church’s liberal faction and yearns for the days of Latin Masses. The story could have used more of him and much more of his ominous rage.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
In the end, Ms. Robbie got what she wanted, signing a deal with Warner Bros.In the latest Hollywood movie bidding war, the battle between a theatrical and a streaming release could not have been more stark.And in this case, theaters won out.The project is an adaptation of Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights,” seen through the warped mind of Emerald Fennell, the writer and director whose previous projects, “Promising Young Woman” and last year’s “Saltburn,” were viral, transgressive hits. The film will star Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw and Jacob Elordi from “Saltburn” as the rageful Heathcliff. Based on Ms. Fennell’s past work, the R-rated film promises to be sexy, gothic and excessively modern.Netflix was willing to pay $150 million to have it.But Ms. Robbie, who is producing the film with her husband, Tom Ackerley, and their business partner Josey McNamara, wanted to maintain her track record of making movies for traditional studios that put them into theaters. Think “Barbie 2.0” with less pink and much more sex.Ms. Robbie’s company and its partner, MRC, an independent studio, have instead been won over by Warner Bros., the studio said on Thursday. The company offered them around $80 million plus a significant marketing commitment, according to a person with knowledge of the decision. (It helps that her company, LuckyChap, also has a multiyear first-look deal with the studio.)“From the moment we were introduced to Emerald’s vision for the film, and with an incredible cast led by Margot and Jacob, we were instantly committed to forging a partnership with this team to ensure the movie was brought to theaters around the world,” Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy, co-chairs of Warner Bros. Motion Picture Group, said in a statement.The decision to go with Warner Bros. is a blow to Netflix. Getting the film would have been viewed as a feather in the cap of the company’s new film chief, Dan Lin.Yet Mr. Lin found himself up against the same restrictions as his predecessor: his boss’s reluctance to take films to theaters to appease filmmakers, most of whom want their films to debut on the big screen before heading to a streaming service.Ted Sarandos, a co-chief executive of Netflix, restated his uninterest in theatrical releases just last week during his earnings call. “I’m just going to reiterate we are in the subscription entertainment business,” he said before adding, “I’m sure that we can continue to pierce the zeitgeist and have those moments in the culture, even when those moments begin on Netflix.”Ms. Robbie is one of the few A-list stars who have not starred in a film released by a streaming service. The actress, who headlined “Barbie” and produced it, has seen her power in Hollywood only rise on the back that film, which was the highest-grossing film of 2023. “Wuthering Heights” will be her next film, and production is set to begin in the first quarter of next year. More
