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    ‘We Will Dance Again’ Review: Remembering Oct. 7

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    In this documentary by Yariv Mozer, Israelis who attended the Nova music festival near the Gaza border describe how they survived the attack last year.“We Will Dance Again” reconstructs the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7 from the perspectives of attendees of the Nova music festival. At least 360 people were killed at the event that was near the border with Gaza, according to Israeli authorities. Directed by Yariv Mozer, this documentary opens with an acknowledgment of the fraught subject matter. “The human cost of the Hamas massacre in Israel and the war that followed in Gaza has been catastrophic for both Israelis and Palestinians,” the text says. Citing death tolls from both sides of the conflict, it adds, “This film cannot tell everyone’s story.”That caveat also hints at why assessing “We Will Dance Again” as a movie is so difficult. Impassioned viewers will undoubtedly have their own opinions, and it would be disingenuous to say that a film released in advance of the attack’s anniversary — and in the middle of an active war — could somehow be seen apart from the divisive politics surrounding the region.Through phone videos, interviews with festivalgoers and, eventually, footage attributed to Hamas fighters, “We Will Dance Again” assembles a timeline of how the attack was experienced at the festival, where people had gathered to attend a multiday rave. Some remember spotting rocket fire as the sun rose on the morning of Oct. 7. “Wow, Lali, there’s fireworks!” one interviewee, Liel Shitrit, known as Lali, quotes a friend as saying. “They really went all out this year!” Soon after, over images of streaks in the sky, we hear an off-camera voice speculate that “the drugs are kicking in.”But the interviewees explain how the reality of the situation became clear. As the film’s narrative unfolds, we hear from witnesses like Noa Beer, who recounts a harrowing escape by car and a call to the police, who she says didn’t yet understand the situation. Elinor Gambarian, a single mother, hid inside a refrigerator.Two of the interviewees, Eitan Halley and Ziv Abud, recall a grenade attack on a roadside shelter where they had taken refuge; both commend efforts by Aner Shapira, who was killed, to toss back grenades before they exploded. Halley says he saw Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who was taken hostage by Hamas and whose body was later recovered, in the immediate aftermath of the blast.While the fluid editing of such disparate source material is impressive, some of Mozer’s aesthetic choices tend to cheapen the testimonies. (The rave-like electronic scoring as Shitrit describes looking for circling birds to see where gunfire was coming from seems particularly unnecessary.) But if the shock of that day’s violence has faded after a year, “We Will Dance Again” aims to keep it visible, and to memorialize it viscerally.We Will Dance AgainNot rated. In Hebrew, English and Arabic, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Watch on Paramount+. More

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      Kelsey Grammer Analyzes 40 Years of Frasier: ‘I Have Nothing to Regret’

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      Kelsey Grammer likes his raw meat cut very fine. On a recent afternoon, at the restaurant of a Midtown hotel, he requested that his steak tartare be put through the grinder twice. He wanted it, he said, like velvet. The tartare, topped with its quail egg, was presented roughly chopped. “I’ll deal with it,” Grammer said uncomplainingly.Frasier Crane would never. On and off for 40 years on several different sitcoms, Grammer, 69, has played Frasier, a dyed-in-the-cashmere-wool snob and psychiatrist about town. The character is indelibly associated with Grammer. He can’t shake him, though Grammer mostly sees this as a boon.“It’s wonderful to spend your lifetime entertaining people,” he said.In 1984, Grammer, a stage actor who had studied at Juilliard, was cast on the sitcom “Cheers” as Frasier Crane, a love interest for Shelley Long’s waitress character, Diane Chambers. He stayed with the show until it ended in 1993.That same year, Grammer starred in a spinoff, “Frasier,” which saw the character move from Boston back to Seattle, where he lived with his father (John Mahoney) and brother (David Hyde Pierce). Grammer was often a tabloid fixture in those days, with an erratic personal life. Much married, he would eventually father seven children with four different women. He was arrested for drug possession and for driving under the influence. He now believes his chaotic behavior was a response to the trauma of his early life — in separate incidents, both his father and his sister were murdered.The revived “Frasier,” which premiered last year on Paramount+, has included other past characters like Frasier’s ex-wife Lilith, played by Bebe Neuwirth.Chris Haston/Paramount+But he stuck with the show until the 2004 finale. After that, Grammer moved on to other projects, but none lasted very long. And then in 2023, a “Frasier” reboot returned Frasier to Boston, reuniting him with his son, Freddy (Jack Cutmore-Scott), and his best friend, Alan (Nicholas Lyndhurst). The second season premiered Thursday on Paramount+.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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      ‘Mafia Spies’ Recounts the C.I.A. Plot to Kill Castro

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      The docuseries tells the bizarre but true story of the C.I.A.’s various schemes to use the mob to assassinate the leader of Cuba.The stories have swirled around for years, often in the form of feverish conspiracy theories. The major players should ring familiar by now: John F. Kennedy. Fidel Castro. The C.I.A. The mob. Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie “JFK” raised the delirium to operatic heights; Don DeLillo’s 1988 novel “Libra” gave it a jolt of postmodern cool.But “Mafia Spies,” the new docuseries now streaming on Paramount+, takes a different tack. Based on Thomas Maier’s nonfiction book of the same name, it lays out the true story of how the C.I.A. collaborated with the mafia to plot the assassination of Castro. Much of this is documented in files about the assassination of John F. Kennedy that were released in batches by the National Archives in 2017 and 2018, and which Maier used as the basis of his book.Maier — who is also a producer on the series — and the showrunners, Tom Donahue and Ilan Arboleda, turn the archive data into a narrative that prompts one double take after another and is often intentionally funny. But however improbable some of it seems, the guiding premise is that it all really happened. One goal of the show is to debunk the many conspiracy theories that swirl around this era of history.“If we had relied on conspiracy theories, you just wouldn’t believe it,” Donahue, who also directed the series, said in a video interview alongside Arboleda. “As they say, the truth is stranger than fiction.”The six episodes of “Mafia Spies” feature a labyrinth of plots and a sprawling cast of mobsters, spies, politicians, revolutionaries and entertainers. But the big picture is actually pretty simple.The C.I.A., led at the time by Allen Dulles, wanted to eliminate the new Cuban prime minister Fidel Castro — or, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower put it, he wanted Castro “sawed off,” according to the historian Stephen Kinzer, who is featured in the series. Through a “cutout” (or middle man), Robert Maheu, a businessman and lawyer, the C.I.A. enlisted organized crime leaders, chiefly the Chicago Outfit’s Sam Giancana and John Roselli, to assassinate Castro. (The mafia had its own reasons for wanting Castro dead: After he seized power in 1959, Havana’s casinos were no longer a cash-cow haven for them.)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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      ‘Evil’ Review: Is It Satan, or Is It Us? It’s Time to Find Out.

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      Michelle and Robert King’s macabre comedy about the possibility of demonic possession and the certainty of evil begins its final season.Season 3 of “Evil” ended on a typically funny but creepy, outlandish yet somehow understated note. With moments to go in the final episode, Kristen Bouchard, the show’s demon-investigating psychologist, found out that one of her eggs had been fertilized by the sperm of a possible demon. The last thing we saw was her dumbfounded face.Coming into Thursday’s premiere of the show’s fourth and final season on Paramount+, she and we have had nearly two years to think about how to respond. Kristen’s choice? To laugh, like an only slightly crazy person. “I giggle at the thought of you waking up at 3 a.m.,” she tells her nemesis and baby daddy, Leland Townsend, “because the Antichrist needs changing.”Like just about everything in “Evil,” her riposte works on both the human and the supernatural planes. (All babies can seem like the Antichrist, after all.) This is appropriate given that, with 14 episodes to go, the show’s central characters remain conflicted about whether the weird stuff they experience is a product of the devil or of human malevolence amplified by their own overactive imaginations.Their indecisiveness goes to the heart of the show, whose fundamental message is that supernatural evil abets, hides behind and jealously competes with everyday human evil. It’s a continuum. You can’t have one without the other.On the basis of the season’s first four episodes, “Evil” remains one of the smarter, more entertaining and more stylishly produced shows out there, and it continues to carry the hallmarks of its creators and showrunners, Michelle and Robert King.The music cues are refreshingly offbeat; a character whispers the “Green Acres” theme during a nighttime stakeout in a corn field, and the show reprises its fondness for the novelty songs of Roger Miller. There is the somewhat self-conscious engagement with and critique of digital technology, as characters try to blame social media or rogue hackers for what look like demonic possessions.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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      Michael Emerson Still Reigns as TV’s King of Creepy

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      The actor has played unsettling men on shows like “Lost” and “Fallout.” In the new season of “Evil,” he might be raising the Antichrist.On one wall of the actor Michael Emerson’s Manhattan apartment hangs a large self portrait he drew about 40 years ago. In the intentionally distorted image, Emerson peers out menacingly from behind his circular glasses. His wife, the actor Carrie Preston, thinks it serves as a fitting summation of his career.“You know, Carrie brought this up recently saying, ‘There’s the template for so much of what you have done as an actor,’” he said. “For me it was just a laugh. It’s still the same mix of having fun and yet being a little, what’s the word, terrifying.”It’s true: If you want someone to be creepy on television, you call Michael Emerson. The 69-year-old actor had his breakout role in 2000 playing a serial killer in “The Practice,” a performance so memorably distressing it won him a guest actor Emmy. He went on to unsettle viewers for years as the unpredictable Ben Linus in “Lost,” and as the computer wizard Harold Finch on “Person of Interest.” This year he showed up for one episode of the Prime Video series “Fallout,” from the “Person of Interest” creator Jonathan Nolan, as a quietly menacing scientist. They aren’t all bad guys, but you’re never quite sure.Emerson is currently inhabiting his most ghoulish role yet, in the aptly named Paramount+ show “Evil,” returning for its fourth and final season on May 23. Emerson plays Leland Townsend, a demonic emissary who constantly torments the heroes, a group of investigators played by Mike Colter, Katja Herbers and Aasif Mandvi. This trio works for the Roman Catholic Church to determine whether various strange goings-on are the result of satanic forces or more mundane phenomena. Leland’s main goal is to promote the forces of darkness by any means possible.In Emerson’s hands, Leland is a captivating, often frightening agent of chaos who is surprisingly goofy for someone who is OK with child murder. In the new season, he is raising his biological son — he nefariously arranged the baby’s conception earlier in the series — and believes the child is the Antichrist.“I don’t know anyone that does unsettling better than Michael Emerson,” Michelle King, who created “Evil” with her husband, Robert, said in a video interview.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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      ¡Vámonos! Dora Is Back for a New Round of Exploring

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      Boots, Map, Swiper and Backpack all return too, in a new “Dora” that includes a lot more Latin music and Spanish language.Barbie isn’t the only childhood heroine experiencing a renaissance. Yet unlike the doll of last year’s blockbuster movie, the next pop-culture star who’s about to re-emerge isn’t a statuesque blonde in stiletto heels. She’s a pint-size Latina with sturdy sneakers and a trusty backpack.Welcome back, Dora.Nickelodeon, the network that in 2000 introduced “Dora the Explorer,” the groundbreaking bilingual animated show about the adventures of a 7-year-old Hispanic girl, is now rebooting that hit series, which over eight seasons aired in more than 150 countries, winning multiple awards and inspiring two TV spinoffs and a feature-length film.The new show’s catalyst “wasn’t necessarily that the first series was over,” Valerie Walsh Valdes, a creator and executive producer of “Dora,” said in a video interview. (“Dora the Explorer” continues to stream on various outlets, including YouTube.) “It was, ‘OK, how are we extending it, how are we going to grow her? And what’s the next iteration?’”On Friday, Paramount+ will release a full season of 26 streaming episodes of the new show, which is titled simply “Dora” and which will also air internationally on the Nick Jr. channel. (Select episodes will be on YouTube as well.) An accompanying podcast, “Dora’s Recipe for Adventure,” will expand the little girl’s exploits into the culinary sphere.The 2024 “Dora” combines old and new. The series retains all the core characters — Dora; her sidekick, the monkey Boots; her talking tools, Backpack and Map; and her antagonist, the thieving fox Swiper — while featuring them for the first time in computer-generated animation. The show still focuses on expeditions that teach problem-solving strategies and social skills, but Map now has some high-tech capabilities. Dora and Boots continue to embark on missions to find lost objects or aid friends in a magical rainforest, but the quests are faster-paced: Each “Dora” episode is now an 11-minute story. And, significantly, the series will incorporate a greater breadth of Latin music and more Spanish language for Dora.Ten-year-old Diana Zermeño voices Dora in the new show, while Kathleen Herles, who played her in the original “Dora the Explorer” series, has returned to voice Dora’s mother.Paramount+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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      Ewan McGregor and Mary Elizabeth Winstead Check In to ‘A Gentleman in Moscow’

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      The first time that Ewan McGregor and Mary Elizabeth Winstead shot a scene together, they were in a bathtub, mostly naked. McGregor, in a maximally unflattering wig, was sticking his gut out as far as it would go.“You were just trying to be as grotesque as you could be,” Winstead said affectionately.This was on a recent afternoon in the chilly basement of a midtown hotel where McGregor and Winstead perched on a love seat, his jacket over his shoulders, his hand on her knee. They met in 2017, on the set of the third season of “Fargo,” co-starring as Ray Stussy, a hapless parole officer, and Nikki Swango, his grifter sweetheart. (McGregor also played Emmit Stussy, Ray’s twin.) Two years later, in 2019, they filmed “Birds of Prey” but did not share scenes. They are also both participants in the “Star Wars” franchise — McGregor in the ’90s and ’00s films and the more recent “Obi-Wan Kenobi” series, Winstead in “Ahsoka” — though again they did not share scenes. In 2021, Winstead gave birth to their son. The next year, they married.Now, they have reunited onscreen for “A Gentleman in Moscow,” which premiered Friday on Paramount+ and debuts Sunday on Showtime. An adaptation of Amor Towles’s novel, it stars McGregor as Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, a mustached aristocrat sentenced to house arrest in a luxury hotel in the years following the Russian Revolution. Winstead appears as Anna Urbanova, an actress and the count’s sometimes girlfriend. Somehow, in the confines of the hotel, they make a life.McGregor plays a Russian count imprisoned in a luxury hotel and Winstead an actress who becomes his companion.Ben Blackall/Paramount+ with ShowtimeIn an hourlong conversation, in a hotel somewhat more modest than Moscow’s Metropol, they discussed claustrophobia, facial hair and the benefits and detriments of working with a spouse. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.How did you get involved with “A Gentleman in Moscow”?EWAN MCGREGOR It came to me first. I loved the grand nature of the drama, the love and loss and romance. I feel like it’s rarer and rarer to get a chance to play that stuff. At the heart of it, it’s about a man who’s learning to be a husband and learning to be a dad and crawling out of his ideas of the aristocratic way of life to find who he really is.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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      ‘As We Speak’: Rap Music on Trial’ Review: Weaponizing Lyrics in Court

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      Lyrics that contain references to violence have been used as legal evidence, a practice this documentary by J.M. Harper condemns as unfair and prejudicial.Imagine music that you wrote being held against you in a criminal proceeding. In the documentary “As We Speak: Rap Music on Trial,” the Bronx-born rapper Kemba travels around the country and to Britain, interviewing artists and legal experts about how that has been more than a theoretical possibility for rappers.Mac Phipps, for instance, was convicted of manslaughter and spent more than two decades in prison, even though another man had confessed to the crime. (He was released in 2021.) In an interview with Kemba, he describes how references to violence in his lyrics were used at his trial, despite what he suggests was inadequate context. (One line cited concerned his father, a Vietnam veteran.)Elsewhere in this documentary, directed by J.M. Harper, the academic Adam Dunbar explains a set of studies he conducted. Participants were asked to judge lyrics from the same song: Some were told they were rap lyrics, others were told they were country and still others were told they were heavy metal. The group that believed the words were rap lyrics labeled the songwriter as having a greater criminal propensity. When the artist manager Chace Infinite argues that rap is taken more literally than other music, the movie cuts to clips of Johnny Cash and Freddie Mercury. Would a jury have accorded legal weight to Cash’s claim, in song, to have “shot a man in Reno just to watch him die”?Kemba situates the association of rap with crime in a historical context of censorship of Black music. In another thread, “As We Speak” imagines Kemba himself on trial, with his writing being used against him in a criminal court. The staged material is a bit heavy-handed, but “As We Speak” makes a powerful case for the necessity of being free to make art, and for public awareness that art rarely qualifies as legal evidence.As We Speak: Rap Music on TrialNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. Watch on Paramount+. More

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      Ruth Wilson on the True Horrors of ‘The Woman in the Wall’

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      Her fictional character lives in an unstable reality and may have killed someone. But the history of Ireland’s notorious “Magdalene laundries” is all too real.Ruth Wilson has ducked into a cabin in the French Alps, taking a break from an activity she enjoys when she isn’t acting. “I’ve been skiing this week,” she said last week in a video interview. “It’s been a passion for years. It’s very dangerous. I can go head-down into something.”She said that last part with a smile. Wilson, an English actress known for playing Idris Elba’s psychopathic nemesis in “Luther,” likes going to extremes and working without a net. Last year, at the Young Vic theater in London, she tested her endurance in “The Second Woman,” a 24-hour production in which her character goes through the same breakup scene 100 times, with 100 different scene partners. (Some, like Elba and Toby Jones, were trained actors; most were not.) For her first professional Shakespeare assignment, a 2019 Broadway production of “King Lear,” she played both Cordelia and the king’s Fool (opposite Glenda Jackson’s Lear).Wilson’s latest role, in the limited series “The Woman in the Wall,” is no less daunting. (It premieres on Friday on Paramount+ With Showtime, having debuted in Britain in August.) She plays Lorna, a woman haunted by her years at one of Ireland’s “Magdalene laundries,” at least a dozen of which operated across the country from the 19th century until the last one closed in 1996. Run by Catholic nuns, the mostly for-profit laundries used unmarried, pregnant and otherwise ostracized women for hard, unpaid labor, often after mothers were forcibly separated from their children.Lorna, who is packed off to a fictional laundry at age 15, wants desperately to find her daughter. Like many babies born to unwed Irish mothers like Lorna, she was sold into adoption against her mother’s will. Hundreds of others are buried in unmarked graves.“We’re trying to land on what it must feel like for some of these women from the laundries, for this constant trauma to be coming back,” Wilson (with Frances Tomelty) said.Chris Barr/BBC with Paramount+ and ShowtimeAs the series begins, Lorna, a chronic sleepwalker and outcast, is startled to find a dead body in her home. This happens around the same time a popular priest is found murdered. The six-episode series leans into Lorna’s tortured perception and subjective experience; she is antisocial and unstable but also the target of gaslighting by those in her seaside Irish town who insist that nothing all that bad happened to her when she was young.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?  More