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    Paul Giamatti, Bradley Cooper, Da’Vine Joy Randolph and More Celebrities at the National Board of Review gala

    The stars were among the 17 honorees at the annual National Board of Review gala, as awards season ramps up.On a not-at-all red carpet inside Cipriani 42nd Street in Midtown Manhattan on Thursday night, Da’Vine Joy Randolph was glowing.“The fact that these people actually even seen my work is just mind-blowing,” said the actress, a star of “The Holdovers,” who was being honored with the National Board of Review’s best supporting actress prize at its annual film awards gala, just days after she had won her first Golden Globe on Sunday for her role in the film.A few feet away on the gray carpet was Celine Song, who came to accept the prize for best directorial debut for “Past Lives.” She was sporting a tuxedo jacket, a long skirt and a bow tie.“Because the movie is so personal, any time somebody connects to the film, I always feel less lonely; I feel very seen and understood and embraced,” said Ms. Song, who based the romantic film partly on her own experience with a childhood friend.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

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    Teo Yoo and John Magaro on ‘Past Lives’ and Inyeon

    It’s fitting, maybe, that the male leads of the continent-spanning “Past Lives” had to do their joint interview from different countries. John Magaro hopped on the video call from Budapest, where he was filming a new project, while Teo Yoo joined from Los Angeles, where he had traveled to attend November’s starry Art+Film Gala at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.“It was quite overwhelming for me,” Yoo told us, still reeling from the party. “You try to look nice and be present, and not freak out when you shake hands with Keanu Reeves and Pedro Pascal.”Both men, who are in their 40s, felt fortunate to still be celebrating “Past Lives.” The movie has come on strong at the start of awards season, earning the top prize at November’s Gotham Awards and a strong haul of five Golden Globe nominations this week, including a key one for best drama. Directed by Celine Song, the film stars Greta Lee as Nora, a Korean immigrant living in New York whose marriage to good-natured Arthur (Magaro) is tested by a visit from her childhood sweetheart, Hae Sung (Yoo).It’s the most delicate of love triangles, because Nora can’t simply choose one or the other: Hae Sung is her Korean past and Arthur is her American present, and she must hold space for both in order to feel complete. Still, the carefully calibrated performances from Yoo and Magaro have had audiences swooning. (The Times critic Alissa Wilkinson called the men “magnificent.”) As each gazes at Nora, wondering if she will return his love, the accumulation of all their loaded glances is almost certain to break your heart.Greta Lee with Magaro and Yoo in the film. “Each and every one of us were, at one moment in time, working in that neighborhood as struggling actors,” Yoo said. A24“I don’t think I’ve ever been a part of something quite like this,” Magaro said. “To continue to be in the conversation of films, especially at this time of the year when such enormous things are coming out with a lot more power behind them, it’s been really nice. It’s one of those little films that could.”Much is made in “Past Lives” about inyeon, the Korean concept of destiny, and Yoo referred to it frequently when describing the film’s long tail. For the actor, who grew up in Cologne, Germany, and now works primarily in South Korea, “Past Lives” has been a major breakthrough since its Sundance Film Festival debut in January.“Oh my God, I was a mess,” Yoo said, recalling how he felt after the premiere there. “But I want to put John on the spot. John, have you seen it with an audience yet?”Not yet, Magaro admitted: The movie is simply too special to him. “If it’s a film that I don’t have so much invested in, I’m more inclined to watch it with an audience,” he said. “But because we all left a big piece of ourselves on the screen for this one, it’s just been hard for me to have the courage.”Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.“I knew people would make it, like, ‘me vs. Teo,’ but that’s not what the film is about,” Magaro said.Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesWhat sort of reactions did you get when the film came out this summer?JOHN MAGARO I knew people would make it, like, “me vs. Teo,” but that’s not what the film is about. This is not “Twilight,” this is not Edward and Jacob. If I’m being honest about it, it bothered me that some audience members have turned it into that kind of movie, but it’s been really nice to see the people who are really seeing the deeper message of what Celine was trying to do. This is much more than just a story of unrequited love — it’s about something that’s deep and cosmic.YOO I think it also depends on the amount of life experience an audience member has had and what they can perceive. Maybe they will come back to the film at some point and they will say, “Oh my God, I hadn’t seen that other layer.”MAGARO The heart of the story is her coming to terms with who she is and choosing herself instead of being defined by either of the two men. It’s the idea of standing on your own two legs and being able to have one foot in the past and one foot in the present, and still being OK with that. I think that’s a lovely notion.What did your wives think of the movie?MAGARO My wife is Korean American, too, so she saw a lot of parallels between her own life and her own family story. She isn’t an immigrant herself, but her folks came here in their university days and she was first-generation. There is a piece of her that is still back in Korea and there’s a piece of her that is part of whatever this American experience is, so she felt very connected to the story and pretty emotional about it.YOO My wife already thinks of it as a modern classic. She thinks it’s going to be one of those movies that people are going to talk about throughout the future.What was going on in your lives when the script for “Past Lives” came to you?YOO I was in the middle of shooting a reality TV show in South Korea.MAGARO What?YOO Yeah. It was during Covid, and I was on a small island with a few celebrities on a cooking show. It was for newlyweds who didn’t have a chance during the pandemic to go on their honeymoon, so we were providing this extra special experience for them, and I was cooking my butt off every day for two weeks.MAGARO I got the script right before the pandemic. My wife was pregnant at the time, and we had just moved into our new place in Brooklyn. I remember loving the script and wanting to be a part of it, but then Covid hit and it was gone. That summer, there were some rumblings that it was coming back but they were going much younger. I think they had cast Teo’s role, and it was a younger guy. Then that all broke down and they needed old people to do it, so they called the nursing home and we came out.YOO I remember Celine saying the initial idea for the film was conceived when she was 29, so she thought she needed to write it for 20-year-olds. And as the film progressed, she turned 30, and then became early 30s, so then she needed to revise it — she matured, and the characters needed to mature. So in this way, we met, and this is how inyeon comes into play.“To be an East Asian actor and not have to lean against tropes like martial arts and comedy, but to be a romantic lead and be accepted as that with the power of my talent?” Yoo said. “That’s really something to me.”It’s funny that the film was conceived prepandemic because so much of it feels even more relatable now, like the frequent video calls between Nora and Hae Sung.MAGARO That’s one of those inyeon things Teo was talking about. If this movie came out before Covid, would it have resonated as much? I mean, look at what we’re doing right now on Zoom. The whole idea of me being in this part of the world and you being in the other part of the world is so much more universal.How did the two of you get to know each other?MAGARO We were kept apart until the scene where the two characters actually meet. We were really lucky to have a crew of people who were able to facilitate Celine’s wish, so that night when we finally did meet, we got to share this real experience that made it into the movie. But after that, we went back and hung out in our trailers for a while. We had a drink, we had a toast and we got to break the ice a little bit.YOO It was a relief, after all the pent-up stress.MAGARO Yeah, because Celine wanted Greta to talk about him to me, and about me to him. That night, we got to hang out and let our hair down.YOO On my end, I feel like there was an unspoken bond of trust. I’d never met you, but just seeing your body of work and the person you are, I knew that the moment that we would meet and work together, there will be something of a shared brotherhood.And all that lent an electric charge to the bar scene you have together.MAGARO That’s one of my favorite scenes that I’ve ever done, actually. First of all, it was our chance to finally share a moment. All this mythology had been built up around each other, and we got to sit there in the bar and talk man to man and play a scene that was written so beautifully, showing these men who were not combative men. Although they’re both jealous, they could temper that.YOO Yeah, I always talk about it in terms of vulnerability. I’ve watched a few of those YouTube reactions to the movie, and I see those faces that they make: “Ooh, awkward.” And I’m like, yeah, that’s exactly the sweet spot, that vulnerability, because it gives way to human beings who are able to get hurt a little more, but that also gives human beings kind of a passage to get loved a little more. That vulnerability is a space that is a bit more needed nowadays, and I feel people are seeking that out and thirsting for that.How did you feel when you wrapped the film?YOO First of all, there was a tremendous sigh of relief. I felt this heavy burden was lifted off my shoulders because I’m not at all a person like Hae Sung: I don’t live with a lot of repressed emotions, so it was really, really hard to live in that bubble for those seven, eight weeks. But there was a scene we shot in St. Mark’s Place and one moment in between takes where we didn’t go back into our trailers. We were cherishing the moment because each and every one of us were, at one moment in time, working in that neighborhood as struggling actors and bartending somewhere around the corner. And now we were all leading actors with our names tagged to the back of our chairs in an A24 film in the middle of New York City.Teo, you came to New York as a young man to study acting but didn’t see opportunities there to play characters you could relate to. How does it feel to come back and star in a film like this?YOO It feels like a dream come true, who am I kidding? To be an East Asian actor and not have to lean against tropes like martial arts and comedy, but to be a romantic lead and be accepted as that with the power of my talent? That’s really something to me. I’m really, really lucky, and I don’t take it lightly.How close is your current path to the one you imagined you’d be walking?MAGARO Not this at all. I think a similarity between me and Teo is that you’re from Cologne, I’m from Ohio — we’re from places where this didn’t really exist. I went to school, I stumbled ass-backwards into agents in New York, and I thought maybe I’ll work in regional theater or something like that because the idea of film was so alien to me. I try to keep a level head because it’s weird to work with people who you had posters on your wall of, you know?YOO Totally.MAGARO And when you get to work on films like this, it’s surreal. You are part of this magic that you grew up loving and not knowing how to reach. And even for a moment, you get to peek in and touch it and taste it. I’m getting emotional, actually, saying this. It’s beyond words, but no, I never expected this.YOO Me neither. I mean, in a faint way, in the distance maybe you dream about it and you hope for it. But initially, after my studies in New York, I thought I would be a street performer in Europe, to be honest with you. I really thought I would be performing in parks for children, doing juggling acts. My wife helped me to set my mind into a different trajectory to go to Korea and then get cast in film and television, but I had my mind set on something like a nomad lifestyle.I guess that’s where we all are coming from: If the industrialized world wouldn’t have had invented the magic of light and cinema, we would still be on the back of a carriage going from town to town, from village to village, gathering people around and telling stories. Now, we just do it in a more heightened and luxurious way. More

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    Golden Globes 2024 Snubs and Surprises: ‘Past Lives,’ Taylor Swift and More

    The Korean American drama from Celine Song got four nominations, while Swift’s concert film got one. “The Color Purple” was overlooked for best musical.The nominations for the 81st Golden Globes, announced Monday morning, brought good tidings for box-office titans “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer,” though some of the other contenders hoping to break through were dealt an early setback.This year, any discussion of Golden Globe snubs and surprises ought to start with the show itself, since this once-snubbed awards ceremony has engineered a surprising comeback.NBC dropped the 2022 edition of the show after a host of scandals involving the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the group that voted for the Golden Globes, prompted an A-list boycott. Pilloried for its lack of Black members, the H.F.P.A. resolved to clean up its act and diversify its membership. And the 2023 ceremony, hosted by Jerrod Carmichael, managed to attract a respectable guest list. (Though the eventual Oscar winner Brendan Fraser, who accused the former H.F.P.A. head Philip Berk of groping him in 2003, was a notable no-show. Berk denied the accusation.)In June, the H.F.P.A. was formally dissolved when the Golden Globes brand was bought by Eldridge Industries and Dick Clark Productions (which is part of Penske Media, owner of many Hollywood trade publications), and the remaining voting body was further reshuffled. Once an eccentric, cloistered membership of about 85 voters, it has swelled to about 300 even as some of its longest-serving and more problematic voters were expelled. 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

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    ‘Past Lives’ Review: Longing for a Future

    Celine Song’s film debut, starring Greta Lee, follows two childhood friends who share a wistful kind of love across two decades and two continents.“Past Lives” is a wistful what-if story about two people, the children they were and the adults they become. The movie follows them through the years and across assorted reunions, separations and continents as well as milestones momentous and ordinary. It’s a tale of friendship, love, regret and what it means to truly live here and now. In a sense it is a time-travel movie, because even as the two characters keep moving forward, they remain inexorably tethered to the past, which means it’s also a story about everyday life.“Past Lives” centers on Nora (played as an adult by a terrific and subtle Greta Lee) and a boy named Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), though mostly it’s about her. The two first meet as schoolmates in their home city, Seoul. They’re charming — they’re children — and close. “He’s manly,” Nora, then called Na Young, tells her amused mother. “I will probably marry him.” Soon after the movie opens, the kids are walking home shoulder-to-shoulder, her eyes downcast. He’s received higher marks at school, which, in a portent of her later-life ambition, has upset her. Hae Sung comforts her because he’s a nice boy; he will become a nice man, but by then she will be long gone.This is the filmmaking debut of the Korean-Canadian-American playwright Celine Song (“Endlings”), who also wrote the script. Its narrative shape is fairly familiar: It opens in the present and then flashes back 24 years to when Nora was a girl in pigtails whose family was about to immigrate to Canada. In unfussy, naturalistic scenes and with onscreen text that marks the passage of time, Song follows Nora and Hae Sung as they go their different ways and reunite online a dozen years later as young adults. After a brief virtual reunion, they part ways. Another 12 years pass and they reconnect a second time.The movie’s modesty — its intimacy, human scale, humble locations and lack of visual oomph — is one of its strengths. The characters live in homes that are pleasant yet ordinary, the kind that you can imagine hanging out in, the kind you want to hang out in. There are few big, look-at-me details, though you might notice a poster for Jacques Rivette’s 1974 classic “Céline and Julie Go Boating” in Nora’s father’s home office in Seoul. Without making too much of this cinephile allusion, there’s a moment in the Rivette that does seem germane: “Your future is behind you,” one character says to another, which could serve as a tagline for this movie.Song draws you into her characters’ worlds seamlessly. As “Past Lives” develops, she toggles between Nora and Hae Sung at home and out and about, lightly sketching in how their everyday lives have developed. Even so, Nora — and Lee’s delicately calibrated performance — remains the movie’s gravitational center. By the time Nora is in her 20s, she is living in New York and has become a playwright. On a whim, she looks up Hae Sung on Facebook and discovers that he’s still in South Korea and has also searched for her. The two are soon regularly video chatting until Nora decides she needs to commit to her life in New York.These scenes of Nora and Hae Sung reconnecting are pleasant, partly because Lee and Yoo are both nice to spend time with. But as the days give way to one night after another, this interlude can also feel drifty and even a little innocuous, almost like filler. That’s partly because although Yoo is awfully nice to look at, and while Song continues to add in details about Hae Sung’s life in South Korea, the character never takes deep root in the story the way that Nora does. For much of it, he is effectively a ghostly figure, a beautiful specter on a laptop screen whose open face hides very little, including Hae Sung’s vulnerability and yearning.All this feels as specific, intentional and meaningful as the sight of different lovers embracing all around Nora and Hae Sung when, another 12 years later, they finally reconnect in person in New York. By then, each has settled into their respective lives, have separate histories, have made different memories. They have distinct personalities and ways of taking up space, and each has had a serious relationship, Nora’s with her husband, Arthur (John Magaro, wonderful). Like Hae Sung, Arthur has a sweet, transparent face that hides little, including the hurt that Nora sometimes causes him, one difference being that he actually lives with her.It’s important to Song’s overall design that one of the most crucial and extended sequences in “Past Lives” takes place not long after Nora breaks off with Hae Sung when they’re young adults. She’s rocked by their encounter, but she is soon en route to a writers retreat, an emblem of the horizons first glimpsed in her girlhood. Here, for the only time in the movie, Song lingers over a physical space, in this case a handsome, sunlit country house, a home. Nora lingers too in these rooms, and shortly after she settles in, another writer — Arthur — follows. Song stages and shoots his arrival from Nora’s room, the camera pointing through the open window as she lies asleep in her bed. She misses Arthur’s entrance, but soon after, Nora emerges from her room, awake in a present that — for the first time — feels like the future.Past LivesRated PG-13. In English and Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters. More