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      Stream These 8 Titles Before They Leave Netflix This Month

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyStream These 8 Titles Before They Leave Netflix This MonthAfter the end-of-year bloodletting, the losses are a little lighter in January. But there are still some great gems worth catching.Jan. 6, 2021Updated 10:57 a.m. ETThis month’s rundown of Netflix exits is lighter than usual — maybe because they seemed to drop half their library last month — but it’s full of little gems, including a double Oscar winner, a gripping limited series, and essential works from Paul Thomas Anderson and the Coen Brothers. Oh, and a comedy about a man who befriends a farting corpse.Catch these 8 titles before they leave by the end of January. (Dates indicate the final day a title is available.)From left, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Pixie Davies, Joel Dawson, Nathanael Saleh and Emily Blunt in “Mary Poppins Returns.”Credit…Jay Maidment/Disney Pictures‘Mary Poppins Returns’ (Jan. 8)Cooking up a sequel to one of the greatest Disney features, 54 years after the fact, may have been an impossible goal to begin with; it’s certainly fair to say that Rob Marshall’s 2018 follow-up to “Mary Poppins” does not measure up to its 1964 predecessor. But it does offer genuine pleasures: poignant work by Emily Mortimer and Ben Whishaw as the grown-up Jane and Michael Banks; juicily animated supporting turns from Colin Firth and Meryl Streep; a handful of toe-tapping tunes; and most of all, a sharp-tongued, twinkly-eyed performance by Emily Blunt as Mary Poppins, gamely capturing much of the matter-of-fact magic of Julie Andrews’s original characterization.Stream it here.‘The Master’ (Jan. 14)One of Paul Thomas Anderson’s most prickly and challenging pictures (and that’s saying something), this 2012 drama prompted plenty of prerelease hand-wringing, as Anderson reportedly drew the inspiration for his script from the Church of Scientology and the biography of its founder, L. Ron Hubbard. But this is no mere exposé. Anderson’s story of an alcoholic drifter and World War II veteran (Joaquin Phoenix) who stumbles into the circle of a religious leader (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a complicated examination of blowhard masculinity, male bonding and cults of personality, bolstered by Anderson’s detailed period direction and the performances of two titans at the peak of their powers.Stream it here.Michael Stuhlbarg in the Coen brothers film “A Serious Man,” based on the biblical Book of Job.Credit…Focus Features/EPA‘A Serious Man’ (Jan. 15)The Coen Brothers followed up one of their broadest comedies (“Burn After Reading,” from 2008) with one of their strangest, a retelling of the Book of Job set in their home turf of Minnesota, circa 1967. The peerless character actor Michael Stuhlbarg gets a rare leading role as Professor Larry Gopnik, whose personal and professional life falls into such a shambles that he begins to question his Jewish faith. Darkly funny yet endlessly thought-provoking, “A Serious Man” has the Coens using Gopnik as a vessel to examine their own views on faith and humanity. And while they land on nothing so simple as “answers,” their journey and insights are strangely exhilarating.Stream it here.‘Dallas Buyers Club’ (Jan. 15)Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto won Academy Awards for best actor and best supporting actor for this 2013 drama from the director Jean-Marc Vallée, loosely inspired by a true story. McConaughey stars as Ron Woodruff, an H.I.V. positive Texan in the mid-1980s who funneled his frustration over limited AIDS treatments into action, smuggling experimental drugs into the country while the F.D.A. battled him for his efforts. “Dallas Buyers Club” occasionally falls into the traps of simplification and boilerplate storytelling that plague so many biopics, but Vallée’s direction is vivid and vibrant, and the performances are touchingly humane.Stream it here.‘Waco’: Limited Series (Jan. 15)We’re reaching a point, in the combined (and often intertwined) arcs of nostalgia and re-evaluation, in which it seems that every major news event of the 1990s has received the movie, mini-series or documentary treatment. This 2018 effort revisits the 1993 standoff at the Waco, Tex., compound of the Branch Davidian sect, in six episodes drawn from the memoirs of the Davidian survivor David Thibodeau and the F.B.I. hostage negotiator Gary Noesner. Even at that expanded length, the series sometimes pulls its punches, missing opportunities to connect these events to the fierce anti-government movements of ensuing decades. But the performers are not to be missed — particularly the reliably intense Michael Shannon as Noesner, and a shockingly effective Taylor Kitsch as the sect leader David Koresh, a role miles removed from his matinee idol work on “Friday Night Lights.”Stream it here.‘Swiss Army Man’ (Jan. 29)If there’s one thing you can say about modern movies, it’s that they tend to play it safe — every movie seems like a reflection of every other movie, and before you know it, your only entertainment options are a superhero flick, a “Star Wars” series, and a gritty “reboot” of a terrible show from the 1980s. So hats off to Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan, who wrote and directed this 2016 story of a desperate man (Paul Dano), trapped on a desert island, who befriends a washed-up corpse (Daniel Radcliffe) and makes ingenious use of the dead man’s post-mortem flatulence. Maybe it’s off-the-charts bizarre, maybe it’s tasteless, but you’ve got to admit: You’ve never seen anything quite like it.Stream it here.Tracy Morgan and Chris Rock in the American 2010 version of “Death at a Funeral.”Credit…Phil Bray/Screen Gems‘Death at a Funeral’ (Jan. 31)This 2010 comedy, directed by Neil LaBute, was a bit of a head-scratcher — a remake of the British film of the same title from only three years previous, merely shifting the setting of the events to America and the race of its central characters from white to Black. (Peter Dinklage plays the same role in both versions.) Chris Rock, as both star and producer, assembles an enviable collection of his comic contemporaries (including Martin Lawrence, Tracy Morgan, Regina Hall, Loretta Devine, Zoe Saldana and Kevin Hart), with the beloved elders Danny Glover, Keith David and Ron Glass joining ringers Luke Wilson and James Marsden to round out the ensemble.Stream it here.‘Pineapple Express’ (Jan. 31)The “Freaks and Geeks” co-stars Seth Rogen and James Franco took their considerable odd-couple chemistry to the big screen for the first time in this 2008 hit from the director David Gordon Green. The sharp script, penned by Rogen and his writing partner Evan Goldberg, mixes its laid-back Cheech & Chong-style “stoner comedy” with the fast-paced shoot-em-up action of ’80s adventures like “Beverly Hills Cop,” a tonal mismatch that could have easily failed. But it landed, thanks to the easygoing charisma of its leads — and the masterly scene-stealing of Danny McBride, in his breakthrough role.Stream it here.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘Bridgerton’ Takes On Race. But Its Core Is Escapism.

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s Notebook‘Bridgerton’ Takes On Race. But Its Core Is Escapism.The Netflix hit departs from the homogeneous casting of most period drama, imagining an 18th-century Britain with Black royalty and aristocrats.Adjoa Andoh and Regé-Jean Page confer in an episode of the Netflix series “Bridgerton.”Credit…Liam Danniel/NetflixJan. 5, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ET“We were two separate societies divided by color until a king fell in love with one of us,” the quick-witted Lady Danbury (Adjoa Andoh) tells her protégé, the Duke of Hastings. “Look at everything it is doing for us, allowing us to become.” She insists, “Love, Your Grace, conquers all.”Appearing in the fourth episode of “Bridgerton,” the first series produced by Shonda Rhimes as part of her powerhouse Netflix deal, this conversation between the show’s main Black characters is the first explicit mention of race in a story that revolves around the duke, a Black man named Simon Basset (Regé-Jean Page), and his passionate courtship of Daphne (Phoebe Dynevor), the eldest daughter in the wealthy, white and titled Bridgerton family.The show’s casting diversity is its most immediately striking quality, not just in Black aristocratic characters like the duke and Lady Danbury, but also in the entrepreneurial Madame Genevieve Delacroix (Kathryn Drysdale) and the working-class couple Will and Alice Mondrich (Martins Imhangbe and Emma Naomi). All of them are central to the complicated social caste system that make up the show’s version of early 1800s London.“Bridgerton” is not Rhimes’s first dalliance with a multiracial cast in a British period drama. In 2017, she produced “Still Star-Crossed” on ABC, a story that began after the deaths of Romeo and Juliet and focused on their cousins Benvolio Montague and Rosaline Capulet, who were forced to marry in order to heal the family rift. Though Benvolio and Rosaline are intentionally cast as a interracial couple, race was neither a point of contention nor grist for social commentary. Instead, viewers were asked to suspend our contemporary racial perceptions in order to accept the colorblind Verona of the past. (This strategy, among others, was largely unsuccessful — “Still Star-Crossed” was canceled after only one season.)“Bridgerton” is set in an early 19th century Britain ruled by Queen Charlotte, who is portrayed by Golda Rosheuvel.Credit…Liam Daniel/NetflixIn contrast, the characters of “Bridgerton” never seem to forget their blackness but instead understand it as one of the many facets of their identity, while still thriving in Regency society. The show’s success proves that people of color do not have to be erased or exist solely as victims of racism in order for a British costume drama to flourish.Chris Van Dusen, the “Bridgerton” showrunner, was a writer on Rhimes’s “Grey’s Anatomy” before going on to be a co-executive producer on “Scandal,” a show that both recognized but did not entirely revolve around the interracial tensions of Olivia Pope’s romantic relationships. Applying that same approach to his adaptations of Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton novels, Van Dusen places us in an early 19th century Britain ruled by a Black woman, Queen Charlotte (Golda Rosheuvel).“It made me wonder what that could have looked like,” Van Dusen told The New York Times in a recent feature about the show. “Could she have used her power to elevate other people of color in society? Could she have given them titles and lands and dukedoms?”Such a move pushes back against the racial homogeneity of hit period dramas like “Downton Abbey,” which that show’s executive producer, Gareth Neame insisted was necessary for historical accuracy. “It’s not a multicultural time,” he said in a 2014 interview with Vulture. “We can’t suddenly start populating the show with people from all sorts of ethnicities. It wouldn’t be correct.”“Bridgerton” provides a blueprint for British period shows in which Black characters can thrive within the melodramatic story lines, extravagant costumes and bucolic beauty that make such series so appealing, without having to be servants or enslaved. This could in turn create openings for gifted performers who have avoided them in the past.“I can’t do ‘Downton Abbey,’ can’t be in ‘Victoria,’ can’t be in ‘Call the Midwife,’” the actress Thandie Newton told the Sunday Times of London in 2017. “Well, I could, but I don’t want to play someone who’s being racially abused.” She went on, “There just seems to be a desire for stuff about the royal family, stuff from the past, which is understandable, but it just makes it slim pickings for people of color.”For all its innovations, “Bridgerton” has its own blind spots. I found it strange that it is only the Black characters who speak about race, a creative decision that risks reinforcing the very white privilege it seeks to undercut by enabling its white characters to be free of racial identity.Stephanie Levi-John plays a Black woman in Tudor England in “The Spanish Princess.”Credit…Nick Briggs/Starz, via Associated PressWhen Lady Danbury expresses her optimistic belief in the power of love, the duke is more circumspect, countering that Black progress is fragile and dependent on the whims of whichever white king is in charge. But to actually see narrative evidence of this precariousness, you have to turn to other recent British period dramas that featured integral Black characters, like “The Spanish Princess” and “Sanditon.”Taking place in Tudor England, “The Spanish Princess” on Starz features Stephanie Levi-John as a Black woman named Lina who came to England as Catherine of Aragon’s lady-in-waiting. Based on an actual historical figure, the show thoughtfully fictionalized her struggle between her loyalty to Catherine and her love for her Moorish husband, Oviedo, and their twin boys as xenophobia rises throughout the kingdom, and Catherine’s marriage to King Henry VIII unravels.The series is set in the 16th century during a historical epoch in which slavery and race were not inextricably linked to each other. Here, Lina’s brown skin merely indicates her foreignness rather than marks her oppression, giving us insight into how such differences were interpreted and experienced before anti-Black racism was codified in Europe (and the Americas) as a result of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.By the time we reach the early 19th-century world of PBS’s “Sanditon,” however, the long arm of the slave trade has reached the British seaside resort of the title. Adapted by Andrew Davies from an unfinished novel by Jane Austen, “Sanditon” expands the story of Miss Georgiana Lambe, Austen’s first Black character. Described briefly (and offensively) in the manuscript as a “mulatto” born to a white slaveholding father and enslaved Black mother in the British colony of Antigua, Georgiana in the series is an heiress, played by Crystal Clarke, whose wealth and exotic beauty make her the most sought after young woman in England’s south coast. Ultimately, I found Georgiana’s rarefied status to be the show’s biggest representational challenge: As I reveled in her splendor, I also found myself forgetting the enslaved labor that created it.Crystal Clarke as Georgiana Lambe in “Sanditon,” a series adapted from an unfinished novel by Jane Austen.Credit…Simon Ridgway/PBSBut racial trauma remains. Despite the attention that she receives, Georgiana is ultimately alienated in England because of her race, an experience that I found more realistic than Marina Thompson’s (Ruby Barker), another biracial debutante who also finds herself alone at court in “Bridgerton.”Other complex portrayals of Britain’s participation in the slave trade can be found in Amma Asante’s standout 2013 movie “Belle,” or in Pippa Bennett-Warner’s character on Hulu’s “Harlots,” who lives as a free but formerly enslaved Black woman in London in the 1780s.I’m also looking forward to the mini-series “The Long Song,” debuting later this month on PBS. Based on Andrea Levy’s novel of the same name, it unfolds at the dawn of emancipation in Jamaica in the 1830s. It is another story of England and the central role its Black subjects played in building its wealth and grandeur under King George and Queen Charlotte’s rule, though we’ll probably see far fewer corsets and society balls.By avoiding both slavery and the fervent British abolition movement that flourished in London in the early 19th century, “Bridgerton” ultimately opts for “Downton” escapism over a nuanced exploration of real-time racial dynamics, mostly relegating such aspects to the story’s past. In flashbacks we learn that the first Duke of Hastings was ruinously consumed by his newfound status, demanding, to the point of verbal abuse, absolute perfection from his wife, who dies in childbirth, and his son, who stutters as a child. (Shades of Papa Pope of “Scandal,” who once admonished his daughter, “You have to be twice as good as them to get half of what they have.”)With more seasons presumably to come, given the show’s popularity, I’m curious how far “Bridgerton” is willing to depart from Quinn’s novels in order to fill in the worlds of its other Black characters, especially Black women like Lady Danbury, Queen Charlotte and Madame Delacroix. They are the show’s most intriguing characters and they remain mostly unexplored — will they eventually be afforded as much complexity as the duke? As Daphne’s entire family?In a society in which gender and sexual mores dominate the actions and attitudes of all its characters, I want to see how these women learned to navigate those same structures differently shaped than everyone else. Because despite Lady Danbury’s beliefs that love conquers everything, I could not help but think that history ends up validating the duke’s skepticism and his sense that Black progress is always a fragile thing.But who knows? Maybe if I knew how Lady Danbury or Queen Charlotte came to be, I’d be so convinced that I’d finally be able to revel in a past that I haven’t quite seen myself in before.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘Cobra Kai’: Strike First. Strike Hard. Come Back for More.

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Cobra Kai’: Strike First. Strike Hard. Come Back for More.In a group interview, Ralph Macchio, William Zabka and Elisabeth Shue discuss their “Karate Kid” bond and the new, reunion-heavy season of the sequel series, “Cobra Kai.”Daniel (Ralph Macchio, left) and Johnny (William Zabka) squared off in the original “Karate Kid” movie. In “Cobra Kai,” they face new adversaries, one of which is time.Credit…Tina Rowden/NetflixJan. 3, 2021, 7:00 a.m. ETThis interview includes spoilers for the new season of “Cobra Kai.”In that first “Karate Kid” movie, the elbow strikes and flying kicks never really pummeled the actors or stuntmen on the receiving end, not even the controversial crane kick that won Ralph Macchio’s Daniel LaRusso the 1984 All-Valley Karate championship. The only blow that actually connected? The right hook that Elisabeth Shue’s high school junior, Ali Mills, throws during the country club scene.“Right on the jaw,” William Zabka, who took the shot, said as Shue laughed in a neighboring Zoom window “She packs a real punch.”So did the movie. A box office smash and a slumber party totem for teens and tweens of the 1980s and beyond, it birthed two immediate sequels, an animated series, a partial reboot starring Hilary Swank and a head-scratcher 2010 remake that shifted the action to China. That crane kick? It had legs.In 2018, Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg (the Harold & Kumar movies) and Josh Heald (“Hot Tub Time Machine”), brought the franchise back to the mat with “Cobra Kai.”A stealth hit for YouTube’s premium service, “Cobra Kai” visited Zabka’s one-time bully Johnny and Macchio’s Daniel in middle age, with Johnny a down-and-out-in-Reseda handyman and Daniel a successful car dealer. Instead of winking pastiche, the series presented surprisingly rich characters and themes — bullying, toxic masculinity, how past choices reverberate — plus some REO Speedwagon needle drops. After Netflix made the first two seasons available in August, roughly 50 million households clicked play on Season 1 in the first four weeks, Netflix reported.For Season 3, Elizabeth Shue reprised her role as Ali, who in the original film stood at the center of Daniel and Johnny’s conflict. Credit…CURTIS BONDS BAKER/NETFLIX Each season revives more and more franchise characters, like the evil sensei John Kreese (Martin Kove) and Johnny’s Cobra Kai mat pack. Ali has appeared occasionally in conversation. “Man, that girl was something,” Johnny says mistily in Season 1. The Season 2 cliffhanger? Ali’s Facebook friend request.Finally, in the latter episodes of Season 3, which premiered Friday on Netflix, Shue’s Ali returns in person, in setups that gesture toward the Golf N’ Stuff and country club scenes from the film.On a recent weekday, Macchio, Shue and Zabka met up again, this time via Zoom, to discuss their shared legacy and who really won that long-ago championship. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Let’s settle this: The crane kick in the 1984 tournament. Was it legal?WILLIAM ZABKA Technically, it was not legal. Am I right, Ralph? You’re not supposed to kick somebody in the head with no pads on in a real tournament.RALPH MACCHIO I would venture to not disagree with that. Although, if you play back the fight. I took one right here [gestures to the side of face] two points back. That was allowed.ZABKA I was given a warning!MACCHIO I didn’t get a warning. It was over.SHUE I heard it [the crane kick] was a made-up move. That it isn’t actually a karate move.ZABKA It is now. Lyoto Machida, he knocked somebody out with that. He’s a karate guy in the U.F.C.MACCHIO YouTube that and you’ll see. Guy walks right into it. But no one took as good of a hit as Mr. Zabka. Listen, if he didn’t take the hit brilliantly, the kick doesn’t work. So we both won.Elisabeth, did they ever let you do any karate?SHUE I did get to play a little bit of soccer. I got to do my back handspring. I tried to put a back handspring into almost every movie I was in in the ’80s. If you look at “Cocktail,” there’s one there, too. I actually did a back handspring and hit Tom [Cruise] in the face. Funny story. Chipped his tooth.To be honest, back then I did feel like, “I want to be doing karate.” It was hard to not be in the middle of that story line. But that would have been absurd.Or not.SHUE I got those punches in. That’s all that matters. As long as I punch a few people in the face and I can do a back handspring, I’m good.That first movie really holds up while so many ’80s teen movies don’t. Why?MACCHIO There’s so much pop culture that surrounds “The Karate Kid”: “Sweep the leg” or catching flies with chopsticks or “Get him a body bag.” That’s all fun and great and adds to the legacy, but the film worked on a human level. Those elements of mentorship, bullying, single parenting — these are all elements that stand the test of time.ZABKA You can watch the movie again from the beginning, knowing exactly how it’s going end. You’ve seen this crane kick a million times, and you’ll still be sucked into the moment. That’s [the director] John Avildsen. And Robert Kamen, who wrote it. We were lucky enough to get to play those characters. The rest is magic.Macchio with Mary Mouser, who plays Daniel’s daughter. Revisiting these characters, he said, has been an emotional experience for him, Shue and Zabka: “This thing has lived with the three of us.”Credit…Bob Mahoney/NetflixThe movie became a huge hit. How much did that determine the arcs of your careers?MACCHIO It affected me in the most profound and positive way, and now I’m reaping the rewards and benefits and privileges of that role. But our town is so tunnel vision-y. By the time “My Cousin Vinny” came around, it was a big challenge. I could not get in the room. And then I did, and I got that part on the drive home. But that’s just part of it, man. I chose to always be creative and during those lean years in the ’90s, to be there for my kids. So it kind of worked out perfectly.ZABKA I was the guy that took that crane kick. You get typecast. You know, “You served up taking the fall, do it in this one and be a bigger jerk.” I had a lot of those come my way. Then I got into filmmaking and made a short film. So it’s all a blessing, and here we are in “Cobra Kai” and it’s all come full circle. I get to play the character that launched all this and turn him inside out and rip him apart and dissect him and put his heart out for the world, and that’s just a thrill.SHUE I had a definite up-and-down journey, just like these guys, coming to terms with how I was birthed into the business as a “girlfriend.” One of the reasons I wasn’t in “Karate Kid II” is I was actually in school. Going back to school was my way of saying, “I’m not going to be defined by this business.” All three of us had this amazingly successful movie and then had to really claim our lives and push ourselves to find the parts that were more complicated, that would challenge us, so we wouldn’t be defined by this one film. I’m really proud of that.So why was this the project that brought you all back?ZABKA I’d worked with Josh Heald on “Hot Tub Time Machine.” And I knew Jon and Hayden. They dropped this bomb on me in a Mexican restaurant. We barely got through a basket of chips when they grabbed Johnny Lawrence out of me and laid everything on the table. I said: “I’m already carrying the torch of the bully for 30 years. Is this going to just expand that? Am I going to end up with the proverbial crane kick at the end of this whole thing? And they’re going to really hate me? Because I don’t want to do that. I want something that’s going to be human.”They said no. I just trusted them. I said: “I’m in. Go get Ralph. Let’s see what happens.”MACCHIO I had said no more than a handful of times to very credible writers and filmmakers and studio people. It always seemed smarter to me to let the legacy stand. These guys came in with a very well-crafted pitch. It sounded smart and fresh. These guys executed brilliant storytelling. And William Zabka, without him delivering on that level, I don’t think the show works.ZABKA Thank you for that, Ralph.MACCHIO Now you owe me one.SHUE The thing that really changed my mind and made me excited about the possibility of being on it was the scene in the bar when you were talking about me and you’re [both] still sort of obsessed with me. It just made me laugh out loud.Then the guys were amazing in terms of creating a way for her to enter the world that would be would be respectful of her growing into a woman, a complicated woman, who didn’t have a perfect life, who was dealing with her own issues.How did it feel to be back together at Golf ‘N’ Stuff and in a replica of that same country club?SHUE I loved it. Ralph and I were talking about how emotional it was to reconnect to this innocent place in your life, and to realize the impact that these actors and this world has had on your life.MACCHIO There’s been that through the entire series for me. With Billy, standing in our first scene together. In the scenes with Mary [Mouser], who plays my daughter, talking about Mr. Miyagi [Daniel’s fatherly sensei in the films, played by Pat Morita in an Oscar-nominated performance]. This thing has lived with the three of us. We’re all connected to this universe.Elisabeth, were you tempted to punch Billy, just for old times?SHUE I punched you in the shoulder a few times.ZABKA When she hands me the stuffed animal at Golf ‘N’ Stuff, she didn’t hand it to me. She thumped it into my chest. She’s so competitive.SHUE I beat you at air hockey.So how many seasons before Ali gets a fight scene?SHUE It would be hilarious. Ali comes back Season 9 to start her own dojo.MACCHIO We’ll be ready for it.ZABKA She had two karate boyfriends in high school. She had to have learned a few things.What is her dojo named?SHUE Ali’s Going to Kick Your Ass.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Vanessa Kirby Has Been Waiting for a Role That Scares Her

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyVanessa Kirby Has Been Waiting for a Role That Scares HerFor her first lead in a film, the actress wanted a character as challenging as many of those she’s played onstage. She found it in Kornel Mundruczo’s “Pieces of a Woman.”“Pieces of a Woman,” which debuts Jan. 7 on Netflix, is the first lead film role for the actress Vanessa Kirby.Credit…Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesDec. 31, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ETLONDON — Vanessa Kirby has never given birth, but after shooting her first lead movie role in “Pieces of a Woman,” she kind of feels like she has.“Whenever I see a pregnant woman now, or someone’s telling me that they’ve just given birth, I smile,” she said in a recent video chat. “I feel with them.”The two full days she spent shooting a searing scene for the film could explain this psychic confusion, as could the thorough way Kirby, 32, immersed herself in the role.In “Pieces of a Woman,” which debuts Jan. 7 on Netflix after a limited theatrical release in December, Kirby plays Martha, a pregnant woman whose home birth goes horribly wrong.This pivotal event at the beginning of the film plays out in a 24-minute, single-take scene that starts with Martha’s first contractions and ends in tragedy. The camera follows Martha, her partner Sean (Shia LaBeouf) and a midwife, Eva (Molly Parker), around the couple’s apartment, condensing the agonies of labor into under half an hour.Credit…Benjamin Loeb/NetflixCredit…Benjamin Loeb/NetflixIn September, the film premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where Kirby won the best actress award, and began to be talked about as an Oscar contender.Kirby said she wanted to portray Martha’s labor as authentically as possible. “That was terrifying, because I didn’t want to let women down,” she added.So she got down to research. Watching many onscreen depictions of birth left Kirby no closer to understanding the experience, she said, since they were so censored and sanitized.“Then I was even more scared, because I realized that I had a responsibility to show birth as it is, not as it’s even edited in documentaries,” Kirby said.She talked to women who had given birth and women who’d had miscarriages, as well as midwives and obstetrician-gynecologists at a London hospital. While she was there, a woman arrived having contractions, and agreed to let Kirby observe the birth.The experience of watching that six hour labor “changed me so profoundly,” Kirby said. “Every second of what was happening to her, I just absorbed.”“It was, I think, probably the best career experience I’ve ever had,” Kirby said of shooting the film.Credit…Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesAnd she began to understand how to play Martha. The woman in the hospital went into a primal, animal-like state, Kirby said. “Her body was taking over and doing it, so that helped me so much for the scene,” she added.Over two days, that long take was shot six times. In a phone interview, the director, Kornel Mundruczo, who also works in theater and opera, said that preparing it was like getting a stunt scene ready: “Lots of planning, but you don’t know what’s actually going to happen.”In the end, each take was different, Kirby said: Martha and Sean’s conversations shifted, the way Martha’s body reacted to the contractions was distinctive each time.“It was, I think, probably the best career experience I’ve ever had,” Kirby said of those two days of shooting. Inspired by the labor she’d observed, she tried to think as little as possible, she said, and not judge what her body was doing in the scene.After a decade of work, “Pieces of a Woman” is Kirby’s first time leading a feature film, and it is a bold and memorable role that shows her flexing her acting muscles. Mundruczo said he needed an actor at Kirby’s exact career point: “Where all of the skills are already there, but the fear is not,” he said. “When you are very established, you are more and more careful.”Left to right: the actress Ellen Burstyn, the director Kornel Mundruczo, and Kirby in a scene from “Pieces of a Woman.” Credit…Philippe Bosse/NetflixKirby has been honing those skills since she was a teenager. She grew up in a wealthy, West London suburb, where she attended a private, all girls’ school and escaped the social pressures of teenage life onstage, in plays and youth drama clubs.“Every time I walked into that space, I suddenly felt not judged at all, I just felt accepted,” Kirby said. “You didn’t have to be anything, or do anything right.”After graduating from college, where she studied English literature, Kirby was accepted to the prestigious London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art in 2009. A few months before term began, though, she was offered three stage roles by David Thacker, a former director-in-residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company, who was then the artistic director of the Octagon Theater in Bolton, a town in northern England.Come to Bolton, he told her, and you will learn more from these roles — which included Helena in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and Ann Deever in “All My Sons” — than you will in three years of drama school. Kirby agreed, and now describes that season as her training.“I learned everything there,” she said. Working with Thacker taught her to trust herself, to find her own way as an actor, rather than waiting for other people to tell her what to do, she said.Kirby has been working steadily ever since, with lead roles in the West End, as well as high profile supporting roles in films and British TV costume dramas. She starred as Princess Margaret in the first two seasons of “The Crown,” a performance that earned her a BAFTA award. Her Margaret fizzes with restless energy, an ideal foil for Claire Foy’s restrained Queen Elizabeth.In 2018’s “Mission Impossible — Fallout,” she played the White Widow, a glamorous black-market broker who carries a knife in her garter, and knows how to use it. She is slated to appear in two further “Mission Impossible” sequels.Credit…Alex Bailey/NetflixCredit…Chiabella James/Paramount PicturesEven as these supporting roles brought her critical praise and awards, Kirby wasn’t in a hurry to find her first onscreen lead role, she said. She’s played many complex characters onstage: women like Rosalind, the fiercely intelligent heroine of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It.” She was holding out for an onscreen lead in whom she could feel some of Rosalind’s “magic,” she said, which made performing “like flying when you step onstage.”“I could never find those roles at all onscreen,” she said. So she waited, using her smaller parts as opportunities to observe and learn, asking Anthony Hopkins about his craft when they worked together on the British TV drama “The Dresser,” and watching how generous Rachel McAdams was onset for the film “About Time,” she said.It’s fitting, given Kirby’s theatrical background, that “Pieces of a Woman” started life as a play, written by Kata Weber, Mundruczo’s partner, who drew on the couple’s own experience of losing a child. The play “Pieces of a Woman,” which is set in Poland, consists of only two scenes: the birth, and an explosive dinner with Martha’s family that occurs about halfway through the film adaptation. Its 2018 premiere, directed by Mundruczo at the TR Warszawa theater in Warsaw, was a hit, and the production is still in the company’s repertoire.Around the time Mundruczo turned 40, five years ago, he started wanting a bigger audience for his work, he said, so he switched from working in German, Hungarian and Polish; “Pieces of a Woman” is his first English language film. In adapting the play for the big screen, Mundruczo set it in Boston, he said, because he felt the city’s Irish Catholic culture mirrored Poland’s conservative social landscape.The loss of a pregnancy is rarely featured in onscreen entertainment. Mundruczo said he hopes watching Martha’s experiences will encourage “people to be brave enough to have their own answer for any loss,” he said.Kirby said she found that women who had experienced pregnancy loss were “actually really relieved” to talk about it.Credit…Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesIn recent months, the model Chrissy Teigen and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, (writing in The New York Times), have shared stories of their experiences with pregnancy loss. Kirby said that, while researching for the role before filming, she found that women who had experienced one were “actually really relieved to talk about it,” and appreciated that someone wanted to understand.“Pieces of a Woman” was shot over just 29 days last winter, but Kirby said it took months for her to shake off the experience of playing Martha. “I knew my job was to feel it, to feel what she felt,” she said. Carrying that degree of empathy was “really difficult and disturbing,” she said, but added that the privilege of spending time inside another’s experience is what she loves about her work.Kirby’s next project will see her co-starring as Tallie, one of two farmers’ wives who fall in love in the United States in the 19th-century in “The World To Come,” a meditative drama from the Norwegian filmmaker Mona Fastvold slated for theatrical release next month.And after that? Kirby said she was reading scripts, on the hunt for the next role that will scare her. She’s looking for an “untold story about women,” she said, that will feel as urgent to tell as Martha and Tallie’s did.“What’s that expression?” she said. “Feel the fear, and do it anyway.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      An Oscar Winner Made a Khashoggi Documentary. Streaming Services Didn’t Want It.

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeHoliday TVBest Netflix DocumentariesBryan Fogel is known for his Academy Award-winning documentary film, “Icarus.”Credit…Coley Brown for The New York TimesSkip to contentSkip to site indexAn Oscar Winner Made a Khashoggi Documentary. Streaming Services Didn’t Want It.Bryan Fogel’s examination of the killing of the Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi had trouble finding a home among the companies that can be premier platforms for documentary films.Bryan Fogel is known for his Academy Award-winning documentary film, “Icarus.”Credit…Coley Brown for The New York TimesSupported byContinue reading the main storyDec. 24, 2020Updated 5:58 p.m. ETBryan Fogel’s first documentary, “Icarus,” helped uncover the Russian doping scandal that led to the country’s expulsion from the 2018 Winter Olympics. It also won an Oscar for him and for Netflix, which released the film.For his second project, he chose another subject with global interest: the killing of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi Arabian dissident and Washington Post columnist, and the role that the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, played in it.A film by an Oscar-winning filmmaker would normally garner plenty of attention from streaming services, which have used documentaries and niche movies to attract subscribers and earn awards. Instead, when Mr. Fogel’s film, “The Dissident,” was finally able to find a distributor after eight months, it was with an independent company that had no streaming platform and a much narrower reach.“These global media companies are no longer just thinking, ‘How is this going to play for U.S. audiences?’” Mr. Fogel said. “They are asking: ‘What if I put this film out in Egypt? What happens if I release it in China, Russia, Pakistan, India?’ All these factors are coming into play, and it’s getting in the way of stories like this.”“The Dissident” will now open in 150 to 200 theaters across the country on Christmas Day and then become available for purchase on premium video-on-demand channels on Jan. 8. (Original plans called for an 800-theater release in October, but those were scaled back because of the pandemic.) Internationally, the film will be released in Britain, Australia, Italy, Turkey and other European nations through a network of distributors.It is a far cry from the potential audience it would have been able to reach through a service like Netflix or Amazon Prime Video, and Mr. Fogel said he believed it was also a sign of how these platforms — increasingly powerful in the world of documentary film — were in the business of expanding their subscriber bases, not necessarily turning a spotlight on the excesses of the powerful.For his film, Mr. Fogel interviewed Mr. Khashoggi’s fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, who waited outside the Saudi Arabian Consulate in Istanbul in 2018 while the murder took place; The Washington Post’s publisher, Fred Ryan; and multiple members of the Turkish police force. He secured a 37-page transcript made from a recording of what happened in the room where Mr. Khashoggi was suffocated and dismembered. He also spent a significant amount of time with Omar Abdulaziz, a young dissident in exile in Montreal who had worked with Mr. Khashoggi to combat the way the Saudi Arabian government used Twitter to try to discredit opposing voices and criticism of the kingdom.“The Dissident” landed a coveted spot at the Sundance Film Festival in January. The Hollywood Reporter called it “vigorous, deep and comprehensive,” while Variety said it was “a documentary thriller of staggering relevance.” Hillary Clinton, who was at Sundance for a documentary about her, urged people to see the film, saying in an onstage interview that it does “a chillingly effective job of demonstrating the swarm that social media can be.”Jamal Khashoggi, with glasses, was killed after entering the Saudi Arabian Consulate in Istanbul in 2018.Credit…Briarcliff EntertainmentThe only thing left was for Mr. Fogel to secure a sale to a prominent streaming platform, one that could amplify the film’s findings, as Netflix did with “Icarus.” When “Dissident” finally found a distributor in September, it was the independent company Briarcliff Entertainment.Mr. Fogel said he had made Netflix aware of his film while it was in production and again months later when it was accepted into Sundance. “I expressed to them how excited I was for them to see it,” he said. “I heard nothing back.”“The Dissident” features interviews with Mr. Khashoggi’s fiancée, Hatice Cengiz.Credit…Briarcliff EntertainmentReed Hastings, the chief executive of Netflix, was at the film’s Sundance premiere, but the company did not bid on the film. “While disappointed, I wasn’t shocked,” Mr. Fogel said.Netflix declined to comment, though a spokeswoman, Emily Feingold, pointed to a handful of political documentaries the service recently produced, including 2019’s “Edge of Democracy,” about the rise of the authoritarian leader Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.Amazon Studios also declined to bid. Footage of Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, who privately owns The Washington Post, is shown in the film. Amazon did not respond to a request for comment.Fox Searchlight, now owned by Disney, didn’t bid. Neither did the independent distributor Neon, which was behind last year’s Oscar-winning best picture, “Parasite,” and often acquires challenging content.“What I observed was that the desire for corporate profits have left the integrity of America’s film culture weakened,” said Thor Halvorssen, the founder and chief executive of the nonprofit Human Rights Foundation, who financed the film and served as a producer.Documentaries are not normally big box-office draws, so they have traditionally found their audiences in other places. PBS has long been a platform for prominent documentaries, but the rise of streaming has made companies like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu very important to the genre. As those companies have grown, their business needs have changed.Mr. Fogel said Netflix had changed since it distributed “Icarus” in 2017.Credit…Coley Brown for The New York Times“This is unquestionably political,” said Stephen Galloway, dean of Chapman University’s film school. “It’s disappointing, but these are gigantic companies in a death race for survival.”He added: “You think Disney would do anything different with Disney+? Would Apple or any of the megacorporations? They have economic imperatives that are hard to ignore, and they have to balance them with issues of free speech.”“The Dissident” is not the only political documentary that has failed to secure a home on a streaming service. This year, Magnolia Pictures, which has a streaming deal with Disney-owned Hulu, backed out of a deal with the makers of the documentary “The Assassins,” which tells the story of the poisoning of Kim Jong-nam, the half brother of the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.The film’s director, Ryan White, referred to the 2014 hack of Sony Pictures in an interview with Variety, and chalked up the “bumpy road” of U.S. distribution to corporations feeling they “could be hacked in a way that could be devastating to them or their bottom line.”Netflix was eager to have “Icarus” several years ago, buying the film for $5 million after it debuted at Sundance in 2017. “Fogel’s incredible risk-taking has delivered an absorbing real-life thriller that continues to have global reverberations,” Lisa Nishimura, who was Netflix’s vice president of original documentaries, said in a statement at the time.Mr. Fogel wonders if the company would be as excited about that film now.In the film, Omar Abdulaziz, a Saudi dissident, details how he says the kingdom uses social media to silence critics.Credit…Briarcliff Entertainment“When ‘Icarus’ came out, they had 100 million subscribers,” he said. (Netflix currently has 195 million subscribers worldwide.) “And they were in the hunt to get David Fincher to do movies with them, to get Martin Scorsese to do movies with them, to get Alfonso Cuarón to do movies with them. That’s why it was so important that they had a film they could win an award with.”In January 2019, Netflix pulled an episode of the comedian Hasan Minhaj’s series, “Patriot Act,” when he criticized Prince Mohammed after Mr. Khashoggi’s death. Mr. Hastings later defended the move, saying: “We’re not trying to do ‘truth to power.’ We’re trying to entertain.”In November, Netflix signed an eight-picture film deal with the Saudi Arabian studio Telfaz11 to produce movies that it said “will aim for broad appeal across both Arab and global audiences.”The outcome for “The Dissident” has not been ideal, but Mr. Fogel is still hoping that people will see the film.“I love Netflix and considered myself part of the Netflix family after our wonderful experience with ‘Icarus,’” he said. “Sadly, they are not the same company as a few years ago when they passionately stood up to Russia and Putin.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Jerry Harris Pleads Not Guilty in Child-Pornography Case

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyJerry Harris Pleads Not Guilty in Child-Pornography CaseThe 21-year-old fan favorite on the Netflix series “Cheer” pleaded not guilty to multiple felony charges, including soliciting sex from minors.Jerry Harris has been held in Chicago. His trial date has not yet been set.Credit…Jim Spellman/Getty ImagesDec. 24, 2020, 11:15 a.m. ETJerry Harris, the 21-year-old breakout star of the Netflix series “Cheer,” has pleaded not guilty to federal child pornography charges and accusations that he solicited sex from minors.Mr. Harris was arrested by the F.B.I. at his home in Naperville, Ill., on Sept. 17 on a child pornography charge and has remained in custody without bond at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago since.He faces seven charges regarding five minor boys, including four counts of sexual exploitation of children, one count of receiving and attempting to receive child pornography, one count of traveling with the attempt to engage in sexual conduct with a minor and one count of enticement. The acts took place in Florida, Illinois and Texas, according to the indictment.Mr. Harris entered his plea in an arraignment hearing held by telephone to a federal court in Chicago on Dec. 17, according to court records.If he is convicted, the four sexual exploitation counts and the child pornography charge carry a sentence of at least 15 years each in prison, and the enticement charge carries a minimum of 10 years.In a voluntary interview with F.B.I. officials in September, Mr. Harris acknowledged that he had exchanged sexually explicit photos on Snapchat with at least 10 to 15 people he knew were minors, had sex with a 15-year-old at a cheerleading competition in 2019, and paid a 17-year-old to send him naked photos.Mr. Harris’s lawyers had filed a motion for pretrial release in October, arguing that his previously clean record did not merit continued detention and that he would not be a danger to the community. But a judge denied it on Oct. 16.No trial date has been set.Todd Pugh, Mr. Harris’s lawyer, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.“Cheer,” which won an Emmy for outstanding unstructured reality series in September, follows a national champion cheerleading team from Navarro College, a small-town Texas junior college.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom’ Review: All the Blues That’s Fit to Sing

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s pick‘Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom’ Review: All the Blues That’s Fit to SingViola Davis and Chadwick Boseman star in a potent adaptation of August Wilson’s play.Viola Davis stars in “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” August Wilson’s 1984 play about a recording session in Chicago in the 1920s.Credit…David Lee/NetflixDec. 17, 2020Updated 11:26 a.m. ETMa Rainey’s Black BottomNYT Critic’s PickDirected by George C. WolfeDrama, MusicR1h 34mFind TicketsWhen you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn an affiliate commission.“White folks don’t understand about the blues,” says the pioneering singer Ma Rainey, as imagined by August Wilson and incarnated by Viola Davis. “They hear it come out, but they don’t know how it got there. They don’t understand that that’s life’s way of talking.”Albert Murray, the great 20th-century philosopher of the blues, put the matter more abstractly. The art of the music’s practitioners, he wrote, involves “confronting, acknowledging and contending with the infernal absurdities and ever-impending frustrations inherent in the nature of all existence by playing with the possibilities that are also there.”“Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” Wilson’s 1984 play about a recording session in Chicago in the 1920s, both dramatizes and expresses that duality. Absurdities and frustrations abound, and the lethal, soul-crushing shadow of American racism falls across the musicians and their instruments. The specific and manifold evils of Southern Jim Crow repression and Northern economic exploitation are unavoidable. The members of Ma’s band swap stories of lynching, assault and humiliation, and Ma fights with the white owner of the record label (Jonny Coyne). By the end of the play — a swift hour and a half in George C. Wolfe’s screen adaptation — one man is dead and another has seen all his prospects evaporate.[embedded content]But the sense of play and possibility, the joy and discipline of art, are also, emphatically, there. There in Ma’s big voice and smoldering, slow-rolling charisma. There in the tight swing of the players behind her — Cutler (Colman Domingo) on trombone; Toledo (Glynn Turman) on piano; Slow Drag (Michael Potts) on bass; and an ambitious upstart named Levee (Chadwick Boseman) on cornet. There in the voices and personalities of the actors: Turman’s gravelly wit; Domingo’s avuncular baritone; Boseman’s quicksilver; Davis’s brass. And there above all in the singular music of Wilson’s language, a vehicle for the delivery of vernacular poetry as durable and adaptable as the blues itself.This version of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” on Netflix, is part of an ongoing project to bring all of Wilson’s plays — a cycle representing aspects of Black life in the 20th century — to the screen. That makes it, in some ways, definitive by default, part of an archive of preserved performances that will introduce future generations to the playwright’s essential work.From left, Glynn Turman, Chadwick Boseman and Michael Potts are the players behind Viola Davis’s Ma Rainey.Credit…David Lee/NetflixIt’s also definitive because it will be hard, from now on, to imagine a Ma Rainey other than Davis, or a Levee to compare with Boseman. The rest of the cast is first-rate too, but those two carry the play’s meatiest, most complicated theme, and enact its central antagonism. Each character is an ambitious, inventive artist, and their inability to harmonize creates an undertone of tragedy that grows more insistent as the day wears on.Ma, who rolls into the studio late, flanked by her nephew, Sylvester (Dusan Brown), and her young girlfriend, Dussie Mae (Taylour Paige), can seem almost like a caricature of the “difficult” artist. She insists that Sylvester, who stutters, record the spoken introduction to her signature song. She demands three bottles of Coca-Cola (“ice-cold”) before she will sing another note, and continually upbraids her nervous white manager (Jeremy Shamos). But this behavior isn’t the result of ego or whim. It’s the best way she has found of protecting the value of her gift, which once it becomes a commodity — a record — will enrich somebody else. The hard bargain she drives is the best deal she can get.She also represents the old school — an established star who works in a Southern style that Levee thinks is behind the times. Part of the history embedded in the play is the story of the Great Migration of Black Southerners to the industrial cities of the North, and Levee suspects that his fleet, light-fingered approach to the blues will appeal to the tastes of the migrants, and also cross over to white record buyers. He epitomizes a different kind of artistic temperament as well — cocky, impulsive, tilting toward self-destruction. He argues with the other musicians, refusing to listen when they try to talk sense to him. He seduces Dussie Mae, a risky career move to say the least. He’s a young man in a hurry, eager to cash checks before they’ve been written.Of course it’s hard to watch Levee — to marvel at Boseman’s lean and hungry dynamism — without feeling renewed shock and grief at Boseman’s death earlier this year. And though “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” has been around for a long while and will endure in the archive, the algorithm and the collective memory, there is something especially poignant about encountering it now.Not because it’s timely in an obvious or literal way — the argument of Wilson’s oeuvre is that time to reckon with racism is always now, because Black lives have always mattered — but because of some unexpected emotional resonances. Wilson’s text is a study in perseverance, but it’s haunted by loss, and to encounter it at the end of 2020 is to feel the weight of accumulated absences.Some are permanent and tragic, like losing Boseman at just 43. Others are, we hope, temporary. This is a rendering of a work written for the stage that begins with a concert — a sweaty, sensual spectacle of the blues in action. It’s also a movie that you’ll most likely encounter in your living room or on your laptop, further confounding an inevitable identity conundrum. Should we call this theater, cinema or television — or a sometimes graceful, sometimes clumsy hybrid of all three?Maybe the question doesn’t matter, or maybe it will matter more once we regain our critical bearings and the theaters and nightclubs fill up again. But at the moment, “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” is a powerful and pungent reminder of the necessity of art, of its sometimes terrible costs and of the preciousness of the people, living and dead, with whom we share it. “Blues help you get out of bed in the morning,” Ma says. “You get up knowing you ain’t alone.”Ma Rainey’s Black BottomRated R. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. Watch on Netflix.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More