Strathairn, David

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    Which Sundance Movies Could Follow ‘CODA’ to the Oscars?

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    Jonathan Majors in “Magazine Dreams” and Teyana Taylor in “A Thousand and One,” among others, could make the journey from Park City to the Dolby Theater.Over the past few decades, the Sundance Film Festival has premiered Oscar winners like “Manchester by the Sea,” “Call Me by Your Name” and “Minari,” but it wasn’t until last March — when the crowd-pleasing “CODA” won best picture — that a Sundance movie went the distance and claimed the top Academy Award.It may be a little while before Sundance pulls off that feat again, as the Oscar nominations announced last week featured no movies from the festival in the best-picture race; indeed, the only 2022 Sundance film to make a dent in the top six Oscar categories was the British drama “Living,” which earned a best-actor nod for Bill Nighy. But could the movies that just premiered at the 2023 edition of the festival, which concluded on Sunday, help recover some of Sundance’s award-season mojo?The program certainly offered a fair amount of best-actor contenders who could follow in Nighy’s footsteps. Foremost among them is Jonathan Majors. The up-and-coming actor already has a crowded 2023: He’ll soon be seen facing off against Michael B. Jordan in “Creed III” and playing the supervillain Kang in Marvel properties like “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” and “Loki.” And that slate just got even stronger with the Sundance premiere of “Magazine Dreams,” a troubled-loner drama in which Majors plays an amateur bodybuilder on the brink of snapping. Had the film been released a few months ago, Majors would have made this year’s thin best-actor lineup for sure, but the right studio buyer could take advantage of his newfound Marvel momentum to muscle this formidable performance into the next race.The Projectionist Chronicles the Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Meet the Newer, Bolder Michelle Williams: Why she made the surprising choice to skip the supporting actress category and run for best actress.Best-Actress Battle Royal: A banner crop of leading ladies like Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.‘Glass Onion’ and Rian Johnson: The director explains why he sold the “Knives Out” franchise to Netflix, and how he feels about its theatrical test.A Supporting-Actress Underdog: In “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” don’t discount the pivotal presence of Stephanie Hsu.Other best-actor candidates that could come from the current Sundance crop include Gael Garcia Bernal, who could earn his first nomination for playing a gay luchador in the appealing “Cassandro,” and David Strathairn, who toplines the modest, humane “A Little Prayer,” about a father deciding whether to meddle in his son’s extramarital affair. One point in Strathairn’s favor is that his film will be released by Sony Pictures Classics, which has managed to land a well-liked veteran in the best-actor lineup three of the last four years (Nighy for “Living,” Anthony Hopkins for “The Father” and Antonio Banderas for “Pain and Glory”).The top Sundance jury prize went to A.V. Rockwell’s “A Thousand and One,” which could earn best-actress attention for Teyana Taylor, who plays a defiant ex-con resorting to desperate measures to keep custody of her son. (Still, the film’s planned March release from Focus Features will require some end-of-year reminders for forgetful voters.) Also buzzed about was Greta Lee, who could be in contention for A24’s “Past Lives,” about a Korean American woman reunited with her former lover; the film was so rapturously received that a best-picture push could be in the cards.Will any of the year’s biggest-selling films crash the Oscars race? Netflix spent $20 million to acquire the well-reviewed “Fair Play,” which pits the “Bridgerton” star Phoebe Dynevor against the “Solo: A Star Wars Story” actor Alden Ehrenreich as co-workers whose affair curdles once she gets promoted. It’s not the kind of starry auteur project that usually gets a big end-of-the-year campaign from Netflix, but if this battle of the sexes becomes a zeitgeisty hit, the streamer may give it a shot. Apple TV+ paid $20 million for the musical comedy “Flora and Son,” from the “Once” director John Carney, while Searchlight shelled out more than $7 million for the Ben Platt vehicle “Theater Camp.” At the very least, these two comedies feature delightful original-song contenders.Sundance films could make the biggest splash is in the best-documentary race: All but one of this year’s Oscar-nominated documentaries first debuted at the January festival, and even if you stripped Sundance of its star-driven narrative films, the strength of its docs would still preserve its status as a top-tier world festival.This year, the most-talked-about docs were the award winners “Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project,” about a storied Black poet; the Alzheimer’s drama “The Eternal Memory”; “Beyond Utopia,” which features compelling hidden-camera footage of North Koreans trying to defect; and “20 Days in Mariupol,” about the Russian siege of a Ukrainian port city. More

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      ‘Remember This’ Review: A Stark Portrait of Resilience

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      This film, featuring a captivating performance from David Strathairn as the Polish resistance fighter Jan Karski, is a straightforward adaptation of the play of the same name.Last fall, David Strathairn captivated Brooklyn theatergoers with his solo performance in “Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski,” depicting the Polish resistance fighter’s harrowing journey through exile during World War II. Originally produced by Theater for a New Audience as part of the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown University, “Remember This” took inspiration from the documentaries in which the real-life Karski appeared — 1985’s “Shoah” and 2010’s “The Karski Report” — along with Karski’s own writings and lectures from his decades as a Georgetown professor. The result was a stark, minimalist set in which Strathairn recreated the horrors that Karski, who died in 2000 at age 86, endured using nothing more than a table, two chairs and a suit jacket.The film version of “Remember This,” opening this Friday at the Quad Cinema, in Manhattan, adapts the stage play with little change in its presentation. Derek Goldman returns as director alongside Jeff Hutchens, and Strathairn is once again a one-man tour de force. Now with the benefit of editing, his transitions between the devastating and triumphant scenes of Karski’s life are punctuated with camera tilts upward into dramatic lighting cues, allowing for subtle cuts in what still resembles a one-take performance.Despite this, “Remember This” is, quite literally, a filmed play, and Goldman and Hutchens don’t make any attempts to define or elevate itself outside the confines of the stage. That can start to feel claustrophobic at 90 minutes long, but perhaps the directors saw that as a necessary trade-off, as Karski’s numerous and poignant monologues performed to the camera — on the nature of evil, on Holocaust denial, on how one chooses to retell the truth — would have felt out of stylistically place in a cinematic version. As it is, they’re the element most likely to be remembered.Remember ThisNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Remember This’ Review: Finding Strength Amid Moral Failure

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      David Strathairn is remarkable in a solo show about Jan Karski, who was profoundly changed by what he witnessed during World War II.There are catastrophes so terrible that the mind struggles to comprehend them. Here is Jan Karski’s description of his visit in 1942 to a Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, during which he saw dead bodies lining the streets and starving women nursing their babies from sunken breasts: “This is not a world,” he observed. “It is not humanity.” But this was humanity. And Karski, an agent of the Polish government in exile during World War II, was tasked with reporting it.Theater for a New Audience’s “Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski,” originally produced by the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown University, is a dignified and affecting solo show. Starring a masterly David Strathairn, and adapted from Karski’s own words by Clark Young and Derek Goldman, it brings Karski’s recollections to anguished life. With limited instruments — lights, sound, a table, two chairs, a single suit —the play evokes not only the contours of Karski’s own eventful biography, but also the horrors and privations of the war, with a particular emphasis on the failure of Allied governments to acknowledge and intervene in the murder of Europe’s Jews.A Catholic diplomat recruited by the Polish underground, Karski reported on the changes the Nazis had wrought, entering first the ghetto, and then a transport camp. “I become a tape recorder. A camera,” Strathairn’s Karski says. Later, he elaborates: “I understand my mission. I am not supposed to have any feelings. I am a camera.”The forerunners to “Remember This” are not necessarily or essentially theatrical. (Though Victor Klemperer’s “I Will Bear Witness,” which played Classic Stage Company two decades ago, is a kind of antecedent.) The more significant influence seems to be documentary film. Karski was featured in two documentaries by Claude Lanzmann, “Shoah” (1985) and “The Karski Report” (2010), though Goldman, the laboratory’s artistic director and the director here, also drew on other documents, including Karski’s 1944 memoir and a 1994 biography. Here there is frequent underscoring — the sound design and original compositions are by Roc Lee — which gives the show a cinematic feel, emphasized by Zach Blane’s evocative lighting.Strathairn delivers an expert and unshowy performance as Jan Karski, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhatever its form, “Remember This” serves as a remarkable showcase for Strathairn, who moves fluidly among characters and time periods. He leaps onto a table at one point and off it at others. Throughout, he manages to communicate both Karski’s extraordinary moral strength and his passionate reactions to what he sees. Because Karski has feelings. He is, as Strathairn depicts him, much more than a camera or a stylus — he is a man profoundly changed by what he witnesses.Strathairn delivers an expert performance, but it is also an unshowy one, never calling attention to itself at the expense of the content. This restraint renders “Remember This” perhaps most affecting and effective in the tension between the coolness and expertise of its form and the hot horror of its subject. It is in the space between these poles that the particular evil of the Holocaust is conveyed and understood, that unimaginable suffering is imagined. Allied leaders — Franklin D. Roosevelt, Anthony Eden — wouldn’t be convinced of the truth, despite Karski’s efforts. But we in the audience are, which grants us a squirmy moral superiority, even as the show asks us, gently, to examine what we are doing in our own lives to oppose hate.This is most likely the lesson the title refers to. And Strathairn’s Karski articulates it this way: “There is no such thing as good nations, bad nations. Each individual has infinite capacity to do good, and infinite capacity to do evil. We have a choice.”Karski, who became a celebrated professor at Georgetown and received, posthumously, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, died in 2000, which means that he lived long enough to see Holocaust minimization and outright denial come back into vogue. But this doesn’t seem to have worried him. “These voices are weak,” he says in the play. “They have no future. As I tell my students, we have a future because we are speaking the truth.”But truth seems to have become an increasingly fungible concept. Faced with our current culture of misinformation, disinformation and propaganda, I wonder what particular advice Karski might have for us now. How would he have recorded this?Remember This: The Lesson of Jan KarskiThrough Oct. 9 at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center, Brooklyn; tfana.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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      Opening Old Wounds as the Man Who Warned About the Holocaust

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      In the solo play “Remember This,” David Strathairn portrays Jan Karski, a witness to the Nazi genocide during World War II.The actor David Strathairn would rather you didn’t read this. He has his reasons.They’re not so much specific to his Off Broadway project — “Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski,” the solo play he’s starring in for Theater for a New Audience — as they are rooted in the general principle of preserving some mystery for audience members who haven’t yet seen a show. He prefers to keep his art pristine.“If you have the facts before you have the emotive experience, it’s a different process,” Strathairn, 73, was saying the other day in a dressing room at the Polonsky Shakespeare Center in Brooklyn, where “Remember This” is in previews.By the time he made that point, he had been speaking for nearly an hour — about Karski, a member of the Polish Underground during World War II who warned the Allies to no avail of the Holocaust in progress, and about the play, in whose successive iterations Strathairn has portrayed Karski since 2014.Did Strathairn, then, take exception to his interview about the show even as he was giving it?“Kind of yeah,” he said, smiling behind his face mask and meaning it anyway. “I kind of do. Just, objectively speaking, I find that it diminishes the magic of the experience if they know too much coming in. They have preconceptions.”Strathairn — whose most cherished credits include the films “Nightmare Alley,” “Nomadland,” “Lincoln” and “Good Night, and Good Luck,” for which he received a best actor Academy Award nomination — also takes issue with critics who, as he put it, “lay the patient out on the table and you see every organ, every tumor.”Which doesn’t mean that Strathairn, who is currently on movie screens in an Atticus Finch-style role in “Where the Crawdads Sing” and was last seen on Broadway in 2012 opposite Jessica Chastain in “The Heiress,” is broadly anti-journalism.“There are things in the world that absolutely need to be outed, revealed, that need that transparency,” he said. “I don’t think the creative arts does.”So, a warning: Facts ahead. There’s zero chance, though, of this article spoiling everything about “Remember This,” let alone everything about Karski. There simply isn’t the space.Even if there were, Karski himself — who died in 2000 and was posthumously awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama in 2012 — knew how abstract a thing can seem when it is imparted as a story, and how unignorably potent when it is experienced firsthand.Strathairn, left, with the play’s writers, Derek Goldman, center, and Clark Young during rehearsals for Theater for a New Audience’s production of “Remember This: The Lesson of Jan Karski.”Emon Hassan for The New York TimesHours into “Shoah,” Claude Lanzmann’s colossal 1985 documentary about the Holocaust, an urbane, silver-haired man sits before the camera in suit and tie, gathering his courage to tell a story. This is Karski. He takes a breath.“Now I go back 35 years,” he begins, a strong Polish accent flavoring his words. But almost instantly his poise crumbles, and he begins to weep; the memories he is being asked to tap are too excruciating.“No. I don’t go back,” Karski says. As the camera watches, he flees the room.To Strathairn, who saw the nine-hour-plus “Shoah” in a single stretch when it was first released, that “microscopic moment” in the movie is “the portal into 35 years of silence.” In the theater’s dressing room, glasses perched atop his head, he traced a timeline of Karski’s life on the tabletop — events that, in Strathairn’s mind, are all contained somehow in that brief, tormented bit of film.At the start of the timeline, Karski’s childhood, when his Roman Catholic mother taught him to tell her when he saw “bad Catholic boys” throwing dead rats at Jews, so she could do something about it. Next his late 20s, in German-occupied Poland, when Jewish leaders sneaked him into the Warsaw Ghetto and a German concentration camp, so that he could tell the world what he’d seen happening there. Then the many postwar years when, having written a book about his experiences, he no longer spoke of them, even as he taught for decades in Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. Last, the chapter that began in the late 1970s, when Lanzmann convinced him that it was his responsibility to bear witness again for “Shoah” — which, after that initial loss of nerve, Karski did, and kept doing elsewhere.“Remember This,” which opens on Thursday in Brooklyn and is scheduled to run through Oct. 9, was created as a multicharacter piece at Georgetown for a centennial celebration in 2014 of Karski’s birth. Written by Derek Goldman, the artistic director of the university’s Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics, and one of his former students, Clark Young, who graduated in 2009, it was initially titled “My Report to the World,” a phrase borrowed from the subtitle of Karski’s best-selling 1944 war memoir, “Story of a Secret State.”That book and E. Thomas Wood’s 1994 biography, “Karski: How One Man Tried to Stop the Holocaust,” were among the source materials for “Remember This,” alongside “Shoah” and other oral histories. The playwrights’ research also drew on the memories of people who knew Karski at Georgetown — and, in one case, Young said, at a local dentist’s office.In its ensemble form, the play traveled to Warsaw in 2014, and New York in 2015. Reshaped into a solo piece, it went to London in early 2020, and last year to Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington and Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Goldman, who directs the play, said that its current form allows Karski to stir “the moral conscience” as he talks to his students — that is, the audience — about his life and what he saw of the Holocaust.“Karski, I think, was that kind of teacher, who wanted to offer students access to the most elemental questions, because he had been grappling with them his whole life,” Goldman said. “‘How is this possible?’ ‘What does it mean to know?’ ‘What is a nation and what is a government if it can turn away from this?’”Goldman, 52, and Young, 35, both spoke of the failure that Karski felt when his eyewitness account of the Nazi slaughter, which he delivered in person to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, among numerous influential others, did not stop the Holocaust.“In many ways,” Young said, “I see him as someone who internalized a sense of failure that wasn’t his to hold. He was holding failures of nation states and individuals in power.”If that terrible sense of a vital mission not accomplished was part of Karski’s trauma, Strathairn observed that we can only speculate about the reasons for his decades of silence.“He never said why,” Strathairn said, and turned contemplative as he noted older generations’ sometimes overwhelming impulse to shield the younger from pain.“Do we impart horror upon our children? Or do we want to protect them?” he asked. “In many ways, we protect them from things that are part of life. We protect them from seeing us dying. We protect them from our grief, and we protect them from our fears. We don’t want to burden them with those things. And is that in service of their maturation, or is it not?“For me,” he continued, “that’s a teeter-totter. ‘I don’t want to talk about the war.’ ‘I don’t want my kid to think that the world is horrible and people did this to each other.’ ‘No, I’m going to stay on the sunny side of the street.’ Or do we prepare the next generation for the possibilities? Do we give them the awareness that this could happen again? In order to prevent that, you have to know what it was.”Onstage as Jan Karski, opening old wounds for his students to see, he is telling them what it was: barbarity. More

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      ‘Nightmare Alley’ Review: Seeing Is Believing. (Suckers!)

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      Guillermo del Toro’s latest movie tracks the sordid adventures of a carnival grifter played by Bradley Cooper.Festooned with gargoyles, Guillermo del Toro’s “Nightmare Alley” gets its game on in the sleazoid world of 1930s back-road carnivals. There, amid worn tents and garishly painted signs, a psychic reads gullible minds and a contortionist twists like a soft pretzel. The whole thing seems like fertile ground for del Toro, who’s drawn to the stranger, spookier corners of the imagination. So when a carnival barker promises a crowd a good show it is easy to imagine del Toro nodding along as he murmurs, Step right this way, folks.You get why Stan (Bradley Cooper) looks all agog when he wanders in. As a filmmaker, del Toro likes to lay an overflowing table, and there’s a lot to take in at the carnival, like the pickled baby, baptized Cyclops Boy; and a poor soul called the Geek, an ostensible wild man who bites the heads off chickens. It’s icky — that’s the idea. Stan has empty pockets and a mysterious past, and while others might run screaming, he soon joins the show’s roster of creepy and putatively charming charlatans. He proves a natural hustler and, as the story evolves, his grifting grows more sophisticated, lucrative and dangerous.You might have seen Tyrone Power navigating a similarly shadowy setup in the 1947 noir of the same title, directed by Edmund Goulding. Like the earlier movie, del Toro’s is based on a novel by William Lindsay Gresham, a desperate, pitiless book filled with exotic slang and steeped in the soured milk of human unkindness. Written by del Toro and Kim Morgan, the new adaptation hews more faithfully to the novel, partly because it’s not constrained by Hollywood self-censorship. But fealty isn’t always a productive strategy, and while the first film greatly tempers the book’s shocks, it doesn’t sentimentalize the source material, as this one does.Shortly after Stan becomes a carny, he begins cycling through women, beginning with a clairvoyant (Toni Collette) whose broken-down husband (David Strathairn) once had a successful mentalist act. The act uses a code that allows the performers to guess, more or less accurately, the answers to audience questions. It’s a perfect fit for an opportunist, which is a role that nicely suits Cooper, an actor who can let you see his characters’ internal whirring. Stan and another love interest (Rooney Mara) leave the carnival, taking the mentalist act on the nightclub circuit. They make bank and also meet a smooth number (Cate Blanchett) who steps out of a different, less engaging movie.Cooper adds charisma and an anxious backbeat to the story, while the old-timey carnival gives the movie texture and novelty. Part of the queasy appeal of Gresham’s novel is that it vividly brings to life the kind of low-rent carnivals that once entertained audiences with so-called human oddities, people who were often just disabled or marginalized. However exploitative, these shows provided performers with wages and homes, a community like the one immortalized in Tod Browning’s scandalous 1932 film “Freaks,” a favorite of del Toro’s. The attraction to outsider realms like the one immortalized in that film runs deep for del Toro; if nothing else, movie shoots are themselves nomadic tribes of a kind.Whatever his reasons, del Toro adores his monsters, and he’s right at home in the carnival, which he dotes on lovingly. He puts his frequent collaborator Ron Perlman in strongman tights, turns up the amperage on Willem Dafoe’s cadaverous smile and gives Collette time and space to leave an impression. Collette’s scenes with Cooper send out electric sparks, generating heat that briefly takes the chill off Stan and draws you to him. Their scenes also give Cooper a chance to flesh out the character, a mystery that unravels scene by scene. You miss Colette when her character exits, which happens all too fast because Stan has other places to go and more people to cheat.As del Toro peers into the carnival’s corners, he also folds in one of the movie’s recurring motifs: eyes. “Nightmare Alley” turns on the logic of the visible: what Stan sees and doesn’t, what patrons (you included) see and don’t. In the carnival (and in movies), seeing is believing, including in illusions, yet at what cost? Early on, Stan stumbles into an attraction decorated with eyes, an echo of Salvador Dalí’s designs for the Hitchcock film “Spellbound.” Later, when Stan develops his mentalist act, he wears a blindfold decorated with a single eye, evoking the Cyclops Boy. By the time he meets a shrink, Dr. Lilith Ritter (Blanchett), it is obvious that what Stan can never really see is himself.Del Toro is a world builder, but he can have a tough time bringing his creations to life, which is the case here despite the hard work of his fine cast. The carnival is diverting, and del Toro’s fondness for its denizens helps put a human face on these putative freaks. But once he’s finished with the preliminaries, he struggles to make the many striking parts cohere into a living, breathing whole. It’s as if, after opening his cabinet of curiosities, he expected you to continue gazing appreciatively at his collection of wonders alongside him. And while it is a nice display — everything gleams, having been lovingly polished and repolished — it’s also inert, more museological than cinematic.The problem is that this display is in service to a drama that needs narrative tension and modulation to fully work. The scenes with Lilith are particularly crucial in this respect, and also where the movie’s already logy pulse slows to a crawl. It’s no surprise that Blanchett makes quite the spectacle — she doesn’t walk and sit, she slinks and drapes — yet the performance is so mannered and self-consciously indebted to noir sirens of the past that you can almost see the quote marks framing it. In theory, Lilith should be a sharp foil for Stan. But she isn’t a character, she is a cineaste’s nostalgic plaything, and like too much of this movie she is less bathed in del Toro’s love than embalmed in it.Nightmare AlleyRated R for bloody violence. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. In theaters. More