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    How Steven Soderbergh and Ed Solomon Straightened Out ‘Full Circle’

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    Their gripping new crime thriller for Max is loaded with twists and layers. But it is actually much simpler than what they originally conceived.The first time the director Steven Soderbergh and the screenwriter Ed Solomon worked together was on the murder mystery “Mosaic” (2017), which could be watched as a choose-your-own-adventure-style story using a smartphone app or as a six-episode HBO mini-series.“Mosaic” drew mixed reviews, but the two men learned a lot doing it. For their next collaboration — what eventually became the six-part series “Full Circle,” debuting Thursday on Max — they envisioned another show that would have two distinct, separately shot versions: one told in classic, linear fashion and another that would present the same events told from different perspectives and whose meaning changes depending on which path the viewer chooses.The idea was greenlighted in 2021, and Solomon started writing two versions that would tell the same story differently. Then last spring, reality hit.“When I got the schedule and I saw the number of days and the page count of just the linear, I was like, ‘This is physically impossible,’” Soderbergh said in a recent joint interview with Solomon. He added: “I had visions of ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ — that this was going to become a legendary folly.”Soderbergh decided to jettison the branching version. But then he had to tell Solomon, who had already written 175 pages of it in addition to the six linear episodes.“That was not a lunch that I was looking forward to,” Soderbergh said. It turned out, though, that Solomon already agreed with him. “It was just too much,” he said.There are few better ways to spend an afternoon than talking about film and television with these two men, who love making and watching stories. Soderberg’s résumé careens among blockbusters (“Ocean’s Eleven,” “Magic Mike”), daring oddities (“The Girlfriend Experience”) and the odd Liberace biopic (“Behind the Candelabra”). Solomon’s often has comic undertones, with films including “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” and “Men in Black.”Together, their efforts have had a decidedly noirish bent — sandwiched between their two series is the 1950s crime feature “No Sudden Move” (2021), for HBO Max. The premise of “Full Circle” follows suit, inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s suspenseful 1963 film “High and Low”: What if there were a kidnapping but the wrong child was taken?Even without branching, the story delivers plenty of twists and layers, toggling between two families in an unlikely entanglement: One is the Manhattan family of a celebrity chef played by Dennis Quaid (with Claire Danes as his shot-calling daughter and Timothy Olyphant as his son-in-law with a mysterious past); the other, led by a criminal matriarch (CCH Pounder), is rooted in a Guyanese community in Queens. In the middle stands a rogue Postal Service inspector played by Zazie Beetz (“Atlanta”).Timothy Olyphant and Claire Danes, right (with Lisa Janae), play a wealthy Manhattan couple who become entangled in a botched kidnapping of their son.Sarah Shatz/MaxCCH Pounder (with Phaldut Sharma) plays a crime boss based in Queens; she has mysterious historical links to the wealthy Manhattan family. Sarah Shatz/MaxSoderbergh and Solomon’s methods and history of close collaboration helped them turn on a dime and adapt the show as they went along.“Scenes were being rewritten, lines were being thrown in while we were doing it,” Phaldut Sharma, a Britain-based actor who plays Pounder’s right-hand man, said in a recent video call. “It was my first my first experience of doing a job in America and I thought this must be the norm, but members of the crew told me this is not really the way it normally goes.”Soderbergh, 60, and Solomon, 62, sat down for a lengthy chat at Soderbergh’s office, in the TriBeCa neighborhood of Lower Manhattan. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Steven works famously fast, editing himself at the end of every day on a shoot. How does the writer factor in?ED SOLOMON Most weekends we would meet, usually on a Sunday. I would get a text: “Are you around?” Which meant “I’m going to be in the office for the afternoon.” [Laughs.] And we would just talk through: “Where’s this going? And what does that mean for what we’ve got?” We were constantly reassessing — the writing continues as the shooting starts, and it continues as the editing is happening. I really appreciate how fluid you are with that.STEVEN SODERBERGH It has to swing both ways. I can’t say to Ed, “Rethink this,” or, “Rejigger that,” without looking at my own work and going, “I’m throwing out stuff that I worked hard on trying to figure out and shooting.”SOLOMON Sometimes the show outgrows your original idea, which is part of what’s exciting.“Full Circle” relies more on detail than on back stories — Quaid’s character, Chef Jeff, has a ponytail that speaks volumes about his personality. Was there a deliberate effort to be lean?SODERBERGH There can be a tendency to spoon-feed the viewer about the back story of the characters before you’ve even really gotten into the story. That’s something that I resist as a viewer, and it’s something that I’ve tried to resist as a filmmaker. Most things that I see, both movies and television, are too long. My motto is, if it can be pulled out and it still works, it should be pulled out. I want this thing to be all marrow as much as possible.Dennis Quaid plays a celebrity chef whose empire has some unsavory ties.Sarah Shatz/MaxThe loose, sometimes shaggy atmosphere recalls the noir movies of the 1970s. Were they part of your influences?SODERBERGH I’m after a sort of discovered precision. I want the construction of something that’s been considered, but I want it to feel like it’s happening right in front of me for the first time. I was looking at “The French Connection,” the Sidney Lumet cop films from the ’70s, because I did want that kind of feeling.What draws you to noir?SODERBERGH It’s just a very cinematic form of storytelling. The conflicts are clear, they’re interesting. They inevitably lead to some burst of violence, either physical or emotional, because the pressure builds up in the clash between people’s dreams and desires, and reality, and shifting loyalties, mistrust, all of these things. It’s a very sexy genre to work in as a director.SOLOMON When people are hiding their truth from others, and then the circumstances pressurize them and they’re trying harder and harder to keep that from coming out — to me that’s an exciting place to write from.SODERBERGH Genre is just a great and efficient delivery system for ideas. It’s built to have a sort of superficial narrative layer and then this subterranean thematic space that you can put anything you’re interested in, and that’s what makes it fun.Zack Ryan’s score is interestingly jarring. Why did you set a gritty thriller to such lush music?SOLOMON We talked about Douglas Sirk at the very beginning.SODERBERGH I like the juxtaposition of that visual aesthetic and the sonic aesthetic of a ’50s melodrama. I didn’t want a hip, trendy score — I wanted something very classical and emotional. Which is not typical for me, to be this in your face or in your ears with the music, trying to enhance the emotional state of the character you’re watching.SOLOMON I never told you this: I had a theory that the score was doing the work that the original branching narrative was going to do, which was all about inner life and people’s emotional experience, while this other crime story was going on.It’s always a risk when form and content don’t gel.SODERBERGH I’ve seen extremely skilled filmmakers whose style is so developed and so detailed, you can feel the intelligence and the work. It exposes the fact that the script they’ve shot isn’t as good at its job as they are at their job. Your talent has to match your ambition — you need both, but if they’re out of whack, it’s not going to happen for you. I’ve seen talented people who are not ambitious enough. We see many more people who are more ambitious than they are talented. The universe eventually tends to catch up with them.Too much back story is “something that I resist as a viewer,” said Soderbergh (right, with Solomon, middle, and Olyphant). “And it’s something that I’ve tried to resist as a filmmaker.” Sarah ShatzDo you feel the writers’ strike is making people think harder about how movies and TV are made? Are you reflecting on the way you create?SODERBERGH It’s something I think about a lot. My entire career has been a test of my ability to improve and optimize my work process, which is about getting to the best version of something as quickly as possible with the least amount of drama and ego. I don’t feel that the work we’re doing is necessarily important with a capital I, but it’s also not meaningless. I want to be in that space of taking it as seriously as it needs to be taken to be good. Because if you take it too seriously, it tips over into indulgence, and that’s not what I want.SOLOMON I think art made by human beings has a feel that cannot be replicated. The problem is, the people making decisions on the highest level that are all about bottom line and “How can I get rid of as many human beings as possible?” don’t have the ability to judge what is good art and not good art. My fear is, if we don’t draw a line in the sand now, we’re going to continue to a place where a lot of people are out of work.What keeps you on your toes?SODERBERGH I need a pocket of fear to keep me alert.Where was that pocket on “Full Circle”?SODERBERGH The complexity of the story, of the schedule. You need that sense that this could go sideways if I don’t execute at the best of my ability. You’ve got to find this balance of being self-critical without being paralyzed. You have to make decisions but you’ve also got to be willing to say to yourself: “That can be better. It has to be better.”SOLOMON I want to be a better writer on the other end of it. I want to know that I will have learned a lot about myself, about this project. I will push myself to a degree that when I come out the other end of it, I’m moving forward, I’ve learned stuff. More

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      Timothy Olyphant Is Back for a New Chapter of ‘Justified’

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      “I like to think there’s been some growth.”This was the actor Timothy Olyphant in New York last month, musing on the trajectory of his career from a TriBeCa sidewalk. He was referring specifically to the task of resurrecting past roles, which he first did a few years ago in the 2019 movie revival of “Deadwood.”Now comes “Justified: City Primeval,” an eight-episode limited series premiering on July 18, on FX. It features Olyphant returning to what is arguably his signature character, Raylan Givens, the Stetson-sporting deputy U.S. Marshal who anchored the Kentucky crime drama “Justified” for six seasons.The new show follows Raylan to Detroit for a fish-out-of-water adventure with a murderous baddie (Boyd Holbrook) and a sharp-elbowed but alluring lawyer, played by Aunjanue Ellis. The creators describe it as the existential evolution of a character, invented by the crime fiction grandmaster Elmore Leonard, who is starting to realize that he can’t chase killers forever and that he is running out of chances to connect with his teenage daughter.“It’s a mature, grown-up version of the show that we did,” said Michael Dinner, who created the limited series with Dave Andron. Both are former writers and executive producers on “Justified,” which ended its run on FX in 2015.The creators and Olyphant, who is also an executive producer on “City Primeval,” hope to bring back Raylan for at least one more series after this one. But first, they are going to find out if people are still interested in the character or “Justified” without the original show’s evocative backwoods setting and colorful criminals, played by the likes of Walton Goggins and Margo Martindale.“Justified: City Primeval” moves the action from Kentucky to Detroit, where Olyphant’s character, Raylan, joins a sharp-elbowed lawyer played by Aunjanue Ellis.Chuck Hodes/FXOlyphant (left, with Claire Danes and Dennis Quaid) plays a man who marries into the family of a celebrity chef in the Max series “Full Circle,” directed by Steven Soderbergh.Sarah Shatz/Max“With all due respect to our original cast, who I loved, adored and miss, it was really a fun experience being with all these new cast members but still feeling like we were doing our show,” Olyphant said. “This feels right in the sweet spot, but I don’t know, it could be a total failure.”If he didn’t seem particularly bothered by the possibility of tainting the legacy of his most famous creation, this is partly an effect of his affect. In conversation Olyphant is easygoing and quick-witted, qualities he brings to his work that also belie another of his defining traits: a simmering intensity.That combination proved perfect for the darkly comic, morally murky world of “Justified.” Olyphant’s performance in the series shifted his previously hit-and-miss career into a higher gear, which in turn has made his future prospects less dependent on the success of the “Justified” revival.As it happened, Olyphant was in New York for a screening of a different twisty crime thriller: “Full Circle,” in which he plays a Manhattanite with secrets who has married into the wealthy family of a celebrity chef, played by Dennis Quaid. (Other stars include Claire Danes, Jharrel Jerome and CCH Pounder.) Premiering Thursday on Max, the gripping six-episode serial revolves around a botched kidnapping with international repercussions.“Full Circle” was directed by Steven Soderbergh, the latest on a list of talented people with whom Olyphant long wanted to work and now has. Others include Quentin Tarantino, who cast Olyphant as the 1960s TV cowboy James Stacy in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” (2019), and David O. Russell, who hired him to play a disfigured thug in “Amsterdam” (2022). Kenneth Lonergan made him the center of his acclaimed play “Hold On to Me Darling” (2016).“You can throw Larry David on the list,” Olyphant said, referring to his appearance as a smarmy groom in “Curb Your Enthusiasm” in 2020. “I don’t know how long I’ll keep doing this, but I’ll show up every day for that guy.”There was also a brief run as a “Star Wars” lawman in “The Mandalorian” and “The Book of Boba Fett,” and a longer one as a Mormon U.S. Marshal in “Fargo.” He played a zombie’s husband in the horror comedy “Santa Clarita Diet” and himself in two different sitcoms: “The Good Place” and “The Grinder.” Earlier this year he had a memorable turn as a grizzled tour manager with terrible hair in “Daisy Jones & the Six.”Soderbergh, who said he had wanted for years to cast Olyphant, called him “the best example of an experienced professional, in that he can give you anything that you want.”“That is the best thing I can say about somebody,” he added.The afternoon after the “Full Circle” screening, Olyphant reclined in a metal chair outside a TriBeCa cafe and marveled at the company he is keeping these days.“I had a blast working with the writers,” Olyphant said of the “Justified” revival. “They picked up where we left off except for this time, there wasn’t anyone throwing things.”Philip Cheung for The New York Times“Being with Steven Soderbergh last night watching something that he’s made that I’m a part of, it just means the world,” he said. “I don’t know why it took me so long to get there, but it’s really nice to be there now.”Now 55, Olyphant retains an athlete’s physique — he had just come from swimming at Asphalt Green in Battery Park — but his hair has gone mostly gray. As he has revived old roles, he has entered a new phase of his life: His three children with Alexis Knief, his wife of over 30 years, are now grown, and one has followed her father not just into show business but also into the world of “Justified.” Vivian Olyphant plays Raylan’s daughter, Willa, in the revival. “Nepotism, you can’t beat it,” he cracked.Olyphant wasn’t sure he wanted to reprise his “Deadwood” role as Sheriff Seth Bullock. (Bullock got a promotion for the movie, adding yet another marshal to Olyphant’s résumé.) Once on set, however, he realized how much the show meant to him. It also gave him a final opportunity to work with David Milch, one of television’s greatest writers, whom Olyphant deeply admires. (Milch has since entered an assisted-living facility for Alzheimer’s care.)“I don’t know what I was so afraid of,” he said. “It was quite moving for everybody involved.”But Olyphant always figured he would play Raylan again. “It seemed like the kind of character that could age well,” he said.The new series updates Leonard’s 1980 novel “City Primeval: High Noon in Detroit,” one of his most beloved books. As Raylan joins the Detroit police in a case that encompasses a string of murders, a psychopathic aspiring singer, Albanian gangsters, corrupt cops and a crooked judge, he is frequently the odd man out in his own show.“I think they wanted that collision, which is why they sent him to one of the Blackest cities in the country,” said Ellis, who plays a defense attorney at the heart of the story. Other stars include Victor Williams, Vondie Curtis-Hall and Marin Ireland.During the original run of “Justified,” Olyphant was known as an occasionally demanding Leonard purist, insisting that the show stay true to the author’s dry wit and sneaky emotional complexity. That hasn’t changed — Ellis said Olyphant carried around a tattered copy of “City Primeval” on set “like it was the Bible” — though Olyphant suggested that the terms of engagement had evolved.“I had a blast working with the writers,” he said. “They picked up where we left off except for this time, there wasn’t anyone throwing things. They were all used to my [expletive].” (Dinner, who also directed multiple episodes, said that “he was a great collaborator.”)“The game has gotten simpler,” Olyphant said of his acting career. “I realize it’s all kind of a joke, just getting away with it.”Philip Cheung for The New York TimesAll productions have highs and lows, but this show’s were more extreme than most. In the plus column, Olyphant called working with his daughter, who studies acting at the New School in New York, “one of the greatest experiences of my adult life.”“So special and challenging, walking that line between trying to get a scene and trying to be a parent,” he said. (“He definitely did give a lot of notes,” Vivian, 20, said. “But in between takes, we would have a lot of fun.”)Less great: the night when the show, shot mostly in Chicago, was filming in a park and the cast and crew found themselves in the middle of an actual shootout. They all dove for cover as two cars tore down the street toward and past them, trading sprays of automatic gunfire.“You could hear the bullets kicking off the back bumper of the front car: tink, tink, tink,” Olyphant recalled. No one in the production was injured, but everyone was left shaken.“My heart goes out to the people that live in those neighborhoods because that is just not any way to live,” he said.So does Raylan age well? Is there growth? Viewers will have to draw their own conclusions.“The road in front of him is a lot shorter than the road behind,” Dinner said. “We get him into a place by the end of the story where he makes some decisions about his life.”Olyphant’s road is getting shorter, too, but the trade-off is that “the game has gotten simpler,” he said. “I realize it’s all kind of a joke, just getting away with it.” His co-stars say that whatever his penchant for downplaying the job, his enthusiasm for it is apparent.“He’s obviously very experienced now,” Danes said. “But there’s still that sense of giddiness and searching, which is wonderful.”Olyphant in turn takes inspiration from those with even more experience, from their example that growth can be its own reward. Co-stars like Quaid, he said, “seem to be having even more fun than I’m having.”“So if they’ll have me and keep inviting me to the dance,” he said, “I think I’ll keep showing up.” More

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      in Theater

      ‘The Fears’ Review: Group Therapy Was Never More Triggering

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      For the fragile souls in this new play, presented by Steven Soderbergh, a Buddhist group that once offered them solace loses its way.“This is the weather … and we’re just in it,” says Maia, the facilitator of a Buddhist trauma group at the center of Emma Sheanshang’s new play, “The Fears.” She’s talking about the mood in the room — a small, underwhelming one with mismatched office chairs set around a low wooden table — where she and six others regularly meet to talk through storms of rage, sorrow and panic. Or at least try to: interpersonal conflicts, clashing neuroses and a falling domino effect of triggers cause more breakdowns than breakthroughs, until even the group’s philosophical foundation starts to fall apart.From the first scene of this intriguing but lacking play, presented by the filmmaker Steven Soderbergh at the Pershing Square Signature Center, we get a clear window into the characters’ personalities. Dan Algrant’s direction is precise and telling, particularly in the entrances. Thea (Kerry Bishé), the newbie, drifts in skeptically. Rosa (Natalie Woolams-Torres), a stickler for rules, bustles in authoritatively. Fiz (Mehran Khaghani, comical even as a gay stereotype) bursts in with a declarative flourish, while the measured Suzanne (Robyn Peterson), always at odds with Fiz, strolls by demurely. Maia (Maddie Corman), overdressed in multiple layers, flutters in like a light breeze, and Mark (a stiff Carl Hendrick Louis) arrives late, flustered and eager. Katie (a painfully fragile Jess Gabor), a young goth, rushes in last, and withdraws into herself.Each person’s trauma is either explicitly spelled out, or hinted at through their individual triggers, which help explain, for example, why Fiz’s sister is a touchy subject, or why Thea has an encyclopedic knowledge of every traumatic event the world has endured.Sheanshang’s depiction of spiritualism has a satirical bite, with Maia’s performative shows of empathy — purrs and “mms” of affirmation — and the group members’ rigorous policing of one another’s responses, which is more about control than about support. But sometimes it seems as if “The Fears” is targeting Buddhism rather than the derivative school of thought — developed by a revered yet unseen male figure — practiced by the group. And the use of the characters’ quirks as punch lines verges on cruel (especially because several were victims of childhood sexual abuse) and undercuts the show’s emotional resonance.And so much of the story is about these characters trying to build a safe space within the room, within their practice, in order to find comfort in themselves. But the world keeps barging in (thanks to Jane Shaw’s stunning sound design): construction noise and shouting strangers seep in from outside the window, and there’s the sound of people chatting elsewhere in the Buddhist center.“The Fears” opts for a pat ending, and never makes a clear judgment on whether these broken souls can save one another or whether they are ultimately on their own. The questions at the center of its conceit remain unanswered: Are we all doomed to lives in which we barely manage our fears but instead let them rule us? Or is fear what draws out the most precious parts of ourselves?The FearsThrough July 9 at the Signature Theater, Manhattan; thefearsplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

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      in Movies

      Magic Mike Is Just Trying to Pay the Bills

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      Forget getting ahead in America. The stripper at the heart of the film trilogy is working frantically not to lose his shirt.The first thing you learn about Mike Lane, played by Channing Tatum and otherwise known as Magic Mike, in the new movie “Magic Mike’s Last Dance” is that his dream has died. The Covid-19 pandemic destroyed his custom furniture business, his raison d’être beyond stripping in the first two movies. Now Mike is working for a catering service, serving drinks to wealthy people who donate to causes they don’t even care to learn about.The “Magic Mike” movies are about impeccable abs, female pleasure, male friendship and the power of a great lap dance. But just beneath all the joy of gyrating hips lurks economic anxiety. “Magic Mike” has always been about money, and not just the dollar bills that are slipped into G-strings.With “Last Dance,” opening Friday, Tatum, the director Steven Soderbergh, the writer Reid Carolin and their collaborators have created a trilogy that’s sneakily about the last decade or so in American instability. What started as a (mostly) realistic portrait of stripper life in the wake of the Great Recession has evolved into a fantasy for the days of Covid-related financial strife, in which Mike is rescued from his economic travails by a rich almost-divorcée (Salma Hayek Pinault) who sees his talent and whisks him away to London to direct a show.Maxandra and Mike (Salma Hayek Pinault and Tatum) each have financial worries in the new film.Claudette Barius/Warner Bros.Sure, it’s a lot of rom-com escapism, but it also has real-world resonance. Mike saw the one thing he worked for crumble. Now he gets a way out, and the kind of happy ending for which many long. Even then, the specter of monetary worries still lingers.When the first “Magic Mike” arrived in 2012, the story was irresistible: With his movie career heading into overdrive, Tatum was starring in a film based on his own pre-Hollywood experiences as a dancer in a male revue. The movie, set in Tampa, Fla., drew audiences looking for “hot boys,” but the story within was more melancholy than the squeal-inducing imagery of ripped dudes in goofy, barely there costumes suggested.As Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The Times, the film “is also very much an inquiry into capitalism and its woes.” In The Atlantic, Alyssa Rosenberg argued that the dancers “reveal the naked truth about the recession.” She explained, “These strippers are marginally employed men trying to move up the economic ladder in a state with the second-highest foreclosure rate in the country.”The Return of ‘Magic Mike’The seductive stripper saga is back with “Magic Mike’s Last Dance,” directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Channing Tatum.‘Magic Mike’: Our critic called the original 2012 film “an inquiry into capitalism and its woes, which means that, like them, it’s also about movies.”‘Magic Mike XXL’: The 2015 sequel faced the challenge of managing enlarged expectations while remaining true to the authenticity of the original.Gay Audience: There was nothing explicitly gay about the plot, but gay men flocked to “Magic Mike” in large numbers after its debut. Here is what some viewers said.A Classic Movie Dance: In “Magic Mike XXL,” Richie, played by Joe Manganiello, performs a prop-heavy routine with just the right touch of desperation and awkward vulnerability.The deeper concerns of “Magic Mike” shouldn’t have been a surprise. Soderbergh is known for flitting among genres, but whether he’s making sleek heist movies, uncomfortably real thrillers or dramas based on actual events, he’s always interested in power structures and how they affect the people in his lens.Though the Great Recession was technically over by the time “Magic Mike” was released, you can feel its aftermath coursing through the screenplay. In the most devastating scene, Mike is refused a bank loan to open a furniture business because of his low credit score. The loan officer (Betsy Brandt) tells him, “We do offer relief programs for our qualified distressed candidates.” His flirty demeanor drops. “I read the papers,” he replies. “The only thing that’s distressed is y’all.”But it’s not just that one moment: The feeling of trying to understand a system that has failed you permeates the movie. Dallas, the slick M.C. portrayed by Matthew McConaughey, says that he would not send his hypothetical child to school. Instead he would make the kid watch Jim Cramer’s “Mad Money” all day and “get him into Ameritrade.” It’s a grim-sounding attempt to win a game that’s not worth playing.A bank loan is just out of reach for Magic Mike in the first film.Warner Bros.By “Magic Mike XXL” (2015), directed by Soderbergh’s frequent assistant director, Gregory Jacobs, the economy had bounced back and Mike’s furniture company, if not thriving, was up and running. He couldn’t pay for health insurance for his one employee, but he was doing what he loved — other than dancing, that is. His passion for the latter draws him back to his pals from the Xquisite club, who are planning a road trip to Myrtle Beach for a male stripper convention as one final hurrah before they leave the life behind.The question of what these guys will do once that one night is over hovers over the action. Tito (Adam Rodriguez), for instance, wants to make artisanal frozen yogurt but will end up slinging snow cones at a mall. Still, the movie — which is the most outright fun of the bunch — has a twinkly-eyed Obama-era optimism. It ends with the crew watching July Fourth fireworks as the DJ Khaled song “All I Do Is Win” plays.The purportedly final movie of the saga opens with a British-accented voice-over that treats Mike as an anthropological subject to be explored. Dance, it says, could not save Mike’s furniture company from the effects of the pandemic, thus forcing him to return to service work in Florida.Later, we learn that the disembodied voice belongs to the awkward teen daughter of Maxandra, Hayek Pinault’s character, writing a novel about Mike that includes some intellectual posturing about the history of dance. Still, her dialogue speaks to that underlying interest that has always been a part of this franchise: Mike is representative of an Everyman’s struggle to stay afloat.In those initial minutes the audience is made to feel his exhaustion as he returns to the kind of odd jobs he thought he had left behind. The independence that he had as a small-business owner is gone, and he is now forced to respond as stuck-up lackeys bark orders at him. At a party he is helping cater, he is recognized by a woman named Kim (Caitlin Gerard), who turns out to be a screaming college student he danced for in the first movie. Now she’s a successful lawyer, and he’s behind a bar, his past something for her to titter about as she walks away. Their dynamic has shifted. Kim tells Maxandra about Mike’s former profession, and Maxandra, in need of a release, offers him an obscene amount of cash for one dance.Through the sensuous choreography, their chemistry is undeniable, and when she coaxes him to travel overseas with her for a mysterious project, he goes along with the proposition, having nothing to lose. In fact, the one time we see his buddies from the first two films, they are on a video call and Mike owes them money. Max, meanwhile, is also negotiating her relationship to her wealth, which could disappear in a flash with her breakup. Mike is her knight in shining armor, helping her get revenge on her wayward spouse, but she is also his, rescuing him from pandemic depression.It would be easy to look at “Last Dance” as just that: a love story set against the backdrop of a production that looks a lot like the “Magic Mike Live” stage shows that Tatum, Soderbergh and Carolin have taken out on tour in the real world. And it is. But it’s also the creators’ version of a conclusion to Mike’s journey that offers him a respite from the troubles that plague a working-class striver like him. Yes, it’s a bit magical, but, after all, this is “Magic Mike.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘Magic Mike’s Last Dance’ Review: Stripping Down to Bare Essentials

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      Channing Tatum returns as Florida’s favorite male exotic dancer, romancing a restless socialite played by Salma Hayek Pinault.“What does a woman want?” Sigmund Freud famously confessed that he had spent most of his career flummoxed by that question. In the 21st century it seems that the director Steven Soderbergh, the screenwriter Reid Carolin and the heterodox psychoanalytic theorist Channing Tatum have come up with an answer that Freud would never have dreamed of: Magic Mike.In “Magic Mike’s Last Dance,” the final chapter in a trilogy about lust, ambition and abdominal fitness in the modern age, Mike is focused on the desires of one woman in particular, a wealthy Londoner named Maxandra Mendoza. But the sources of Mike’s appeal — a heart as big as his trapezius, resolve as firm as his glutes, a character as sturdy as his quadriceps — haven’t changed.More than a decade has passed since the first movie, “Magic Mike” (2012), which was followed by “Magic Mike XXL” (directed by Gregory Jacobs) in 2015. Mike Lane, middle-aging gracefully, still resides in South Florida, but he isn’t quite where he had dreamed of being in life. A narrator (who will turn out to be an important character) informs us that Mike has lost his beloved furniture business. He also seems to have hung up his backless chaps and his fake police uniform and traded in stripping for bartending at fancy charity events.At one of these, he meets Maxandra — she goes by Max, and is played with regal insouciance by Salma Hayek Pinault — who discovers his background in expressive dance and hires him for a private performance. They settle on a price and establish boundaries that are promptly transgressed. She says she’s not hiring him for sex, and when they have sex anyway he declines payment. The ethical and other ambiguities raised by this encounter are potentially interesting, but the movie mostly has other matters on its mind.Each of the “Magic Mike” films has explored the nexus of sex, art and money from a different angle. “Magic Mike” was about how, in a precarious labor market, a gig worker might wrest dignity and autonomy from conditions rife with exploitation. “XXL” emphasized the extravagant pleasure of selling oneself as a high-end commodity and the aesthetic fulfillment of satisfying a customer. “Last Dance” is about the relationship between artist and patron, and also about something that can’t be reduced to libidinal or economic transactions.In other words, it’s a love story. Which makes things a little awkward, for Max and Mike and for the movie itself. Mike’s vocation as a stripper had been to embody a male object of female fantasy — or, given Tatum, Carolin and Soderbergh’s joint authorship, a male idea of what women long for. He and his fellow dancers perfected a choreography of swagger and surrender, an enactment of conquest that encoded submission as the highest form of gallantry.In “Last Dance,” the dance sequences that don’t involve Mike uphold that tradition, even as, offstage, Mike evolves into a different kind of fantasy object. He isn’t just supposed to be a camped-up embodiment of the perfect man, but the real thing.After jetting over to London, where Mike is installed in a guest room, he and Max embark on a tricky creative collaboration. Max’s faithless husband (a briefly encountered Alan Cox) owns a historic theater, and Max hires Mike to direct a sexed-up version of a stodgy costume drama, turning it into a rousing spectacle of masculine hotness and feminist empowerment. Which means hiring a lot of strippers.Those dudes do their jobs competently, though London may not be the first city that comes to mind when you think of rippling, glistening hunks of well-muscled man meat. And it’s only when Tatum himself takes the stage, to splash and writhe with Kylie Shea, that the heat and humidity rise to appropriately Floridian levels.A stage production in London only heats up when Tatum takes to the stage himself, with Kylie Shea.Warner Bros.Like its predecessors, “Last Dance” never forgets that it’s a musical at heart. Soderbergh, also serving as cinematographer and editor (under his customary pseudonyms, Peter Andrews and Mary Ann Bernard), keeps our eye on the bodies in motion. The dance numbers, choreographed by Alison Faulk and Luke Broadlick, feel a bit tame this time around, but the movie still pays ample respect to the terpsichorean craft practiced by Tatum and the hard-working members of Mike’s ensemble.As a romance, though, it demonstrates flat feet and balky rhythm. There are a handful of comic secondary characters, vaguely embodying familiar varieties of Britishness — a repressed city bureaucrat (Vicki Pepperdine); a grouchy manservant (Ayub Khan Din); a sharp-tongued adolescent (the excellent Jemelia George) — but Max and Mike inhabit a thinly imagined, flatly rendered world.Hayek Pinault and Tatum have a tantalizing chemistry, but the script doesn’t always help them activate it. All of the drama comes from Max, whose whims and mood swings sometimes complement and sometimes clash with Mike’s steady good humor. His easy, endless charm may, finally, get in the way. This man is so affable, so grounded, so gentlemanly that he achieves a kind of blank passivity. His chivalry begins to feel like a way of refusing emotional connection, a suit of armor that he neglected to take off when he shed his other costumes.What does Mike want? It’s probably the wrong question. And maybe the answer is exactly what a woman doesn’t want to know.Magic Mike’s Last DanceRated R. Adult entertainment. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘No Sudden Move’ Review: Don’t Forget the Motor City

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      Don Cheadle and Benicio Del Toro star in Steven Soderbergh’s new film, a Detroit-set period thriller with a lot on its mind.On an ordinary Monday morning in Detroit, three masked man show up at a handsome brick house on a tree-lined street. Once inside, two of them hold a mother and her children at gunpoint while their colleague accompanies the man of the house, a midlevel accountant at General Motors, on an urgent errand. It’s the mid-1950s, which means the cars are big and curvy, the men mostly wear hats and neckties, and the women are mostly wives, secretaries or mistresses.Nobody involved — not the intruders or their victims — knows entirely what’s going on. The viewer of “No Sudden Move,” whose comparatively pleasant task is to connect a whole lot of intricately arranged dots, is in good company. The guys who stay behind in the house, Curt (Don Cheadle) and Ronald (Benicio Del Toro), have been hired by an impatient fellow named Mr. Jones (Brendan Fraser) for the supposedly simple job of armed babysitting. Before the morning is over, they learn that other, more elaborate agendas are involved: the petty grudges of organized crime bosses; the voracious ambitions of the automobile industry; the imperatives of American postwar power and prosperity.And also, hovering over all of it, the preoccupations of the director, Steven Soderbergh. In the current phase of his dizzyingly protean career, Soderbergh is both an intrepid genre filmmaker and an impassioned practitioner of the cinema of ideas. “No Sudden Move,” from a script by Ed Solomon (who wrote all three “Bill & Ted” movies), is for the most part a tight and twisty against-the-clock crime caper with an obvious debt to Elmore Leonard (and a family resemblance to Soderbergh’s great Detroit-set thriller “Out of Sight”). It also has things to say — at times a little too speechily — about race, real estate, capitalism and power.Those things are interesting, but maybe not as interesting as the people who say them. The story is about the sometimes lethal pursuit of cash and information, but the film’s single greatest asset is its cast. Curt and Ronald, small-timers who are skilled and smart but also out of their depth, are the focus of the action, which means that you spend a lot of time with Cheadle and Del Toro as they act out a high-stress — and yet low-key — buddy comedy.Ronald, a bit of a drinker and a bit of a racist, moves through the world as if dancing to a sad melody that only he can here. Curt, just out of prison with sorrows of his own, has the quick wit and jumpy intensity of a survivor. Each has fallen afoul of a local crime boss, which is bad for them but lucky for us, since the big shots are played by Ray Liotta and Bill Duke.There’s more, notably David Harbour as the pathetic G.M. accountant and Amy Seimetz as his seething wife. An entire melodrama of marital malaise and sexual secrecy is folded into their scenes, even as “No Sudden Move” suggests a Coen brothers movie with a sincere social conscience in place of the ambient cynicism. Most of the characters are semi-competent players in a game that is rigged against them, and you hope that at least some of them will play their bad hands well enough to break even.The movie itself is nearly flawless in its professionalism, which is both a virtue and a limitation. The costumes (by Marci Rodgers) and production design (by Hannah Beachler) create a museum-quality panorama of the Motor City in its glory years, even as the script points out some of the cracks in the burnished surfaces. The precision and grace of the actors I’ve already named extend all the way through the ensemble — through Jon Hamm (as a skeptical lawman), Frankie Shaw (as a G.M. secretary with skin in the game), Julia Fox (as Ronald’s paramour) — to at least one potential surprise I don’t need to spoil.In keeping with the automotive themes, everything runs like a well-oiled machine, which is also to say that a crucial, hard-to-define element — of soul, of spontaneity, of messiness or inspiration — is missing. The object that sets the plot in motion is a set of highly coveted blueprints, which at one point needs to be torn in half. The schematic for “No Sudden Move” remains perfectly intact, and the thing itself works pretty much according to the specifications. A consumer-rating agency would give it high marks for safety and efficiency, but it never leaves the showroom.No Sudden MoveRated R. Bloodshed and salty talk. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. Watch on HBO Max. More

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      ‘Let Them All Talk’ Review: That Ship Has Sailed

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Let Them All Talk’ Review: That Ship Has SailedMeryl Streep plays an author trying to reconnect with college friends in Steven Soderbergh’s film.Meryl Streep and Lucas Hedges in “Let Them All Talk.”Credit…Peter Andrews/HBO MaxBy More