The Fabelmans (Movie)

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    ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ Leads BAFTA Nominees

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    The German-language movie received 14 nods and will compete for best film against the likes of “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and “The Banshees of Inisherin.”“All Quiet on the Western Front,” a German-language movie set on the battlefields of World War I, emerged on Thursday as the surprise front-runner for this year’s British Academy Film Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Oscars.“All Quiet,” a Netflix-backed movie about the futility of war, secured 14 nominations for the awards, commonly known as the BAFTAs. Those included best film, where it is up against four higher-profile titles including “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” a sci-fi adventure starring Michelle Yeoh as a laundromat owner who traverses universes; and “The Banshees of Inisherin,” Martin McDonagh’s dark comedy about two friends who fall out while living on a small island, both of which received a total of 10 nominations.Also competing for the main BAFTA prize is Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis” biopic and “Tár,” Todd Field’s drama starring Cate Blanchett as a conductor accused of sexual harassment.On its release in Britain, critics gave the Edward Berger-directed “All Quiet” rave reviews. Kevin Maher, writing in The Times of London, said that the movie was “more visceral, more spectacular and certainly more harrowing” than any previous adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel of the same title. “See it on the biggest screen possible. Then watch it again on Netflix,” Mr. Maher added.American critics were less effusive. Ben Kenigsberg, reviewing the movie for The New York Times, said that it “aims to pummel you with ceaseless brutality, and it’s hard not to be rattled by that.”Steven Spielberg Gets Personal in ‘The Fabelmans’The director’s latest movie, starring Michelle Williams, focuses on Sammy Fabelman, a budding filmmaker who is a lot like Spielberg himself.Review: “The Fabelmans” is “wonderful in both large and small ways, even if Spielberg can’t help but soften the rougher, potentially lacerating edges,” our critic writes.Michelle Williams: With her portrayal of Mitzi, Sammy’s mother, the actress moves from minor-key naturalism to more stylized performances.Judd Hirsch: The actor has been singled out for his rousing performance in the film. It’s the latest chapter in a career full of anecdotes.Making ‘The Fabelmans’: In working on this semi-autobiographical movie, Spielberg confronted painful family secrets and what it means to be Jewish in America today.The 14 nods for “All Quiet” is the highest number of BAFTA nominations for a movie not in the English language, tied with Ang Lee’s 2000 action film “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” according to BAFTA officials.Michelle Yeoh, left, and Jing Li in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” directed by Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert.Allyson Riggs/A24Most of the nominations for “All Quiet” are in technical categories. But Berger also secured a best director nomination. He will compete for that award against the directors of “Banshees of Inisherin” (McDonagh), “Tár”(Field) and “Everything Everywhere All At Once” (Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert). Park Chan-wook, the director of “Decision to Leave,” about a policeman who falls in love with a suspect, also secured a best director nod, as did Gina Prince-Bythewood for “The Woman King,” about the women soldiers of the precolonial Kingdom of Dahomey in West Africa. Prince-Bythewood is the only female director among the nominees.There was one upset among the best director nominees: Steven Spielberg didn’t get a nod for “The Fabelmans,” his semi-autobiographical tale of a budding filmmaker coping with a fractious home life, which won him best director at last week’s Golden Globes.The BAFTA nominations, which were announced in a YouTube broadcast, have long been seen as a bellwether for the Oscars because there is overlap between their voting bodies. Nominations for this year’s Academy Awards are scheduled to be unveiled on Tuesday and “All Quiet on the Western Front” has been tipped as a potential nominee in the best picture category.In recent years, the BAFTA organizers has made efforts to widen the diversity of nominees, including requiring voters to watch a variety of movies before they can make their selections.Last year, that led to several unexpected nominees in the best acting categories, many from low-budget British movies. But there are fewer upsets this year. The best actress nominees include Blanchett for “Tár,” Viola Davis for “The Woman King,” Yeoh for “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and Emma Thompson for her role in “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” in which she plays a widow who hires a prostitute.They will compete for that prize against Danielle Deadwyler for her role as Emmett Till’s mother in “Till” and Ana de Armas for “Blonde,” in which she plays Marilyn Monroe.The best actor category sees Austin Butler, the Golden Globe-winning star of “Elvis,” up against Colin Farrell, for his role in “The Banshees of Inisherin,” and Brendan Fraser, for his transformation into an obese, grief-stricken writing instructor in “The Whale.” Also nominated are the rising Irish star Paul Mescal, for his role as a young father taking his daughter on holiday in “Aftersun,” Daryl McCormack, for playing the prostitute in “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande,” and Bill Nighy, for “Living,” about a bureaucrat given a life-changing medical diagnosis.Whether the nominations for “All Quiet” translate into trophies will be revealed on Feb. 19, when the BAFTA winners are scheduled to be announced in a ceremony at the Royal Festival Hall in London. 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      ‘A Man Called Otto’ Surpasses Expectations at the Box Office

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      Ticket sales totaled $15 million over the holiday weekend, fueled by older audiences in the middle of the country.A nearly extinct species of theatrical movie — a conventional drama aimed at older ticket buyers in the middle of the country — sent a reminder to Hollywood over the weekend: If you build it (properly), they will come.“A Man Called Otto,” starring Tom Hanks as a cranky widower, will collect roughly $15 million over the four-day holiday weekend in the United States, for a total of $21 million since opening in limited release on Dec. 20, according to Comscore. That kind of sturdy debut has recently escaped pedigreed dramas like “Babylon,” “She Said,” “Amsterdam,” “Till” and “The Fabelmans,” leading to worries about the viability of dramas in theaters.For the most part, these films have been aimed at audiences on the coasts. “A Man Called Otto,” however, was marketed toward heartland audiences. Crowds came out in places like Detroit, Minneapolis, Denver and Salt Lake City, box office analysts said. None of the top 75 theaters for the film were located in Los Angeles or New York, which is very unusual.Ticket sales were “particularly vibrant in small-town theaters,” according to Sony Pictures Entertainment, which released the PG-13 film. About 60 percent of ticket buyers were female, and 46 percent of attendees were over the age of 55, Sony said. “A Man Called Otto” received warm reviews (68 percent positive, according to Rotten Tomatoes), with the obviousness of the plot the primary complaint. But ticket buyers loved it, as evidenced by a 96 percent positive audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes.“The audience for original adult films will absolutely return to theaters, if we don’t forget them,” Tom Rothman, the chairman of the Sony Motion Picture Group, said in an email. “And if you are able to strike a chord in Middle America, it can be especially strong.” “A Man Called Otto” took in 50 percent more than the $10 million that analysts predicted going into the weekend.“A Man Called Otto” cost about $50 million to make (not including marketing expenses), with financing shared by TSG Entertainment and SF Studios, a Swedish film and television company. A remake of a Swedish film and based on a best-selling novel called “A Man Called Ove,” it is the heartstring-tugging story of a depressed widower who finds himself in an unusual friendship with a new neighbor. Hanks co-stars with Mariana Treviño and a cat named Smeagol. The movie was directed by Marc Forster, who is known for “Finding Neverland” and “Quantum of Solace.”The top movies at the North American box office over the weekend were wide-release holdovers. In first place, “Avatar: The Way of Water” (Disney) collected about $38.5 million between Friday and Monday, for a five-week total of $563 million ($1.9 billion worldwide). “M3gan,” a horror comedy from Universal, ranked second, with estimated ticket sales of $21.2 million, for a two-week total of $60 million ($91 million worldwide). More

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      Producers Guild Awards Nominate Several Blockbusters and Omit Films by Women

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      ‘Avatar: The Way of Water,” “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” and “Top Gun: Maverick” made the cut. “The Woman King” and “Women Talking” were snubbed.After a hectic few days of guild nominations and awards shows, the Producers Guild of America announced the 10 nominees for its best feature film award on Thursday, and this list may be the most consequential yet when it comes to predicting the strongest Oscar contenders: Over the last four years, only three movies made it into the Oscars’ best-picture lineup without first being nominated for the PGAs.Here is the producers’ list of feature-film nominees:“Avatar: The Way of Water”“The Banshees of Inisherin”“Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”“Elvis”“Everything Everywhere All at Once”“The Fabelmans”“Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery”“Tár”“Top Gun: Maverick”“The Whale”The producers guild has historically been inclined toward blockbuster product, and this list includes several big-screen success stories, including three of the highest-grossing films of 2022 — “Top Gun: Maverick,” “Avatar: The Way of Water” and “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” — and two other box-office hits, “Elvis” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”But the exclusion of epic-scaled projects like the glitzy “Babylon” and Gina Prince-Bythewood’s action drama “The Woman King” may doom those films’ chances at making the Oscars’ best-picture lineup: When academy voters replace a PGA pick with one of their own choices, they typically substitute an indie or international film instead.Another notable snub was the Sarah Polley-directed drama “Women Talking,” which debuted at the fall film festivals with plenty of buzz but has struggled since its theatrical bow during the crowded Christmas holiday. None of the films on the PGA list were directed by women, and if “Women Talking,” “The Woman King” and Charlotte Wells’s acclaimed “Aftersun” fail to make the Oscars best-picture list, it will be the first time the category has excluded female filmmakers in four years.Only three films earned nominations from the producers, directors and actors guild this week: Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical “The Fabelmans,” the sci-fi hit “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” and the dark feuding-friends comedy “The Banshees of Inisherin.” That trio should be considered the strongest Oscar contenders as voting for the Academy Awards begins Thursday.The winners will be announced in a ceremony on Feb. 25. Here is the rest of the Producers Guild list:FilmAnimated Feature“Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio”“Marcel the Shell with Shoes On”“Minions: The Rise of Gru”“Puss in Boots: The Last Wish”“Turning Red”Documentary“All That Breathes”“Descendant”“Fire of Love”“Navalny”“Nothing Compares”“Retrograde”“The Territory”TelevisionEpisodic Drama“Andor”“Better Call Saul”“Ozark”“Severance”“The White Lotus”Episodic Comedy“Abbott Elementary”“Barry”“The Bear”“Hacks”“Only Murders in the Building”Limited Anthology Series“Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story”“The Dropout”“Inventing Anna”“Obi-Wan Kenobi”“Pam & Tommy”Television Movie“Fire Island”“Hocus Pocus 2”“Pinocchio”“Prey”“Weird: The Al Yankovic Story”Nonfiction Television“30 for 30”“60 Minutes”“George Carlin’s American Dream”“Lucy and Desi”“Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy”Live, Variety, Sketch, Standup and Talk Show“The Daily Show With Trevor Noah”“Jimmy Kimmel Live!”“Last Week Tonight With John Oliver”“The Late Show With Stephen Colbert”“Saturday Night Live”Game and Competition Television“The Amazing Race”“Lizzo’s Watch Out for the Big Grrrls”“RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars”“Top Chef”“The Voice”Sports Program“Formula 1: Drive to Survive”“Hard Knocks: Training Camp with the Detroit Lions”“Legacy: The True Story of the LA Lakers”“McEnroe”“Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Come Off”Children’s Program“Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock”“Green Eggs and Ham”“Sesame Street”“Snoopy Presents: It’s the Small Things, Charlie Brown”“Waffles + Mochi’s Restaurant”Short-Form Program“Better Call Saul: Filmmaker Training”“Love, Death + Robots”“Only Murders in the Building: One Killer Question”“Sesame Street’s #ComingTogether Word of the Day Series”“Tales of the Jedi” More

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      The Golden Globes Are Back. Will the Celebrities Be?

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      Stars gathered on Sunday night at Cipriani 42nd Street, with its towering marble columns and soaring ceiling, for the National Board of Review’s annual film awards gala, where they were toasted for their work in some of last year’s buzziest films. But it was another awards show later in the week that was on everyone’s mind.The Golden Globes — which NBC refused to air last year after an investigation by The Los Angeles Times documented financial and ethical lapses at the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and revealed that it had no Black members — are returning on Tuesday night, after the foreign press association outlined its plans for reform. And the question now is which of the nominees will show up.“I’m intrigued as to how it’s going to go,” said the director Martin McDonagh, whose Irish drama “The Banshees of Inisherin” was nominated for a pack-leading eight Globes, and who said he planned to attend. “I have some thoughts on it that, if I get up there, I might express. I think it’s the start of a process that hopefully is trending in the right direction.”“We’ll be there to support our film,” Joseph Kosinski, the director of “Top Gun: Maverick,” said as he gestured to the film’s cinematographer, Claudio Miranda, who was standing beside him. The film is up for two Globes, including best drama. And, Mr. Kosinski added, “it’ll be nice to see some old friends.”Daniel Craig and Janelle Monáe.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesColin Farrell and Ron Howard.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesDanielle Deadwyler won a Gotham Award for outstanding lead performance for her role as Emmett Till’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, in “Till,” but she wasn’t nominated for a Golden Globe. She said that she didn’t plan to watch the show live — “I don’t have a TV,” she said bluntly — but that she would probably Google the winners afterward.But she does have her eye on another potential nomination this year — an Academy Award for best actress — and she had a suggestion for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which organizes the annual Oscars ceremony.“Mixed-gender categories,” she said. “I’m here for it. Because what does that mean for nonbinary people? Why is there a point to choose?“We should smash them in,” she added.From left: Martin McDonagh, Danielle Deadwyler and Chinonye Chukwu.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesIn an era of declining awards show viewership — just 6.9 million people watched the Globes broadcast in 2021, a record low, compared with the 91.6 million who watched that year’s Super Bowl on CBS — it’s reasonable to question how much the Globes, or any awards, ultimately matter.“It means that more people are seeing the film,” Mr. McDonagh said. “Being in the conversation helps all that.”“I think it’s significant to recognize people,” Ms. Deadwyler said. “But they always make it seem like a race. It would be great if it could just be recognized in the same way that the Nobel Prizes are — just say, ‘Oh, hey, this person has done something significant to society.’”There were plenty of honors handed out at Sunday night’s National Board of Review ceremony — 18 in all, including best actor and actress awards for Colin Farrell (“The Banshees of Inisherin”) and Michelle Yeoh (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”) — a traditionally boozy and irreverent gathering that is not televised, and for which the winners are announced in advance.Michelle Yeoh and Jenny Slate. Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesThere was also plenty of mingling in the banquet hall and around the three open bars before the dinner portion of the evening — fish and cucumber salad — kicked off. Ms. Deadwyler, the “Till” director Chinonye Chukwu and Janelle Monáe, who won best supporting actress for her role in “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery,” posed for a group photo. Sheila McCarthy threw an arm around a grinning Jessie Buckley, her “Women Talking” co-star. The actress Ariana DeBose, in a black velvet pantsuit, hugged a grinning Steven Spielberg, whom she presented with a best director award for “The Fabelmans” later that evening.And when it was time for the speeches — the “Morning Joe” co-anchor Willie Geist served as host — the stars, freed from the broadcast time constraints of the Oscars or the bleep censors of national television, delivered remarks that often approached the 10-minute mark. The speeches were occasionally sprinkled with profanity but were largely used to thank dozens of members of casts, crews and creative teams.But there were a few notable moments amid the long list of credits.Gabriel LaBelle and Paul Dano.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesDanny Ramirez, Joseph Kosinski, Jerry Bruckheimer and David Ellison.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesA visibly emotional Gabriel LaBelle was honored for breakthrough performance for his star turn in “The Fabelmans” as a character based on the young Mr. Spielberg. Mr. LaBelle, reading from a folded sheet of paper he pulled from his pocket, spoke for around seven minutes as he thanked Mr. Spielberg for trusting him with “well, your life.”“I feel like I owe you my firstborn child or something,” he said.The wide-eyed 20-year-old actor also thanked his father — who was in attendance — for, among other notable contributions, “tying my tie.”Mr. Farrell, who accepted the best supporting actor award on behalf of his absent “Banshees of Inisherin” co-star, Brendan Gleeson, shared the story of meeting Mr. Gleeson for the first time, in a room at the Chelsea Hotel. Mr. Farrell had been sober for a year and a half, and Mr. Gleeson offered him “a drink” — which turned out to be the choice of a bottle of still or sparkling water from his fridge.“And I thought, ‘Aww, that’s a man that’ll take care of you,’” said Mr. Farrell, who accepted his own award, for best actor, around an hour later.Sheila McCarthy and Jessie Buckley. Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesDaniel Craig also made a surprise appearance to honor Ms. Monáe, his “Glass Onion” co-star, when she accepted her best supporting actress award. He noted that “her commitment to her art, craft and delicious fabulousness is awe-inspiring.”After a standing ovation for Mr. Spielberg — as the evening neared its fifth hour — the event finally wound down shortly after 11 p.m., when the cast and creative team of “Top Gun: Maverick” accepted the award for best film.“It’s honoring the cast and crew who have worked so hard,” Mr. Kosinski, the director, had said on the carpet earlier in the evening. “That’s why awards have value.”Quick Question is a collection of dispatches from red carpets, gala dinners and other events that coax celebrities out of hiding. More

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      Will These Be the 10 Best Picture Oscar Nominees?

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      Now that critics’ laurels and box office results are in, the race for the top honor is clearer. But there’s still room for an outside contender to slip in.Earlier this week, I got a text from a harried colleague. “I’m not ready for Oscar season,” she wrote.I blinked for a second before responding. Ready? This season has been going for months!Of course, I took her point: January ramps things up considerably, since we’re about to get televised awards shows (the Golden Globes on Tuesday followed by the Critics Choice Awards the following Sunday), nominations from the acting, directing and producing guilds, and then the all-important Oscar nominations, which will be announced Jan. 24.But we can already make an educated guess about the titles we’ll hear that day, since your Projectionist has spent the last few months weighing valuable factors like voter buzz, box office battles, laurels from critics groups, below-the-line Oscar shortlists, and influential citations like the Gothams and the American Film Institute Awards. With all that in mind, I’ve arrived at a list of 10 movies that I think currently have the greatest shot at making the best picture lineup.Still, this is an unusual year when even the strongest movies come with significant debits, which means there’s still room for big-budget entertainments (like “Babylon,” “Nope,” “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” and “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”), foreign-language films (including “RRR,” “Decision to Leave” and “All Quiet on the Western Front”), and indie films with strong performances (like “The Whale,” “Till,” “She Said” and “Aftersun”) to pull through. At this time last year, “CODA” looked like a middle-of-the-road contender, but a few consequential weeks later, it won enough hearts to clinch the best picture Oscar.So consider these 10 films to merely be the starting lineup, ranked in descending order according to their certainty.Steven Spielberg Gets Personal in ‘The Fabelmans’The director’s latest movie, starring Michelle Williams, focuses on Sammy Fabelman, a budding filmmaker who is a lot like Spielberg himself.Review: “The Fabelmans” is “wonderful in both large and small ways, even if Spielberg can’t help but soften the rougher, potentially lacerating edges,” our critic writes.Michelle Williams: With her portrayal of Mitzi, Sammy’s mother, the actress moves from minor-key naturalism to more stylized performances.Judd Hirsch: The actor has been singled out for his rousing performance in the film. It’s the latest chapter in a career full of anecdotes.Making ‘The Fabelmans’: In working on this semi-autobiographical movie, Spielberg confronted painful family secrets and what it means to be Jewish in America today.‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’Ke Huy Quan and Michelle Yeoh in “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”Allyson Riggs/A24After making a film with sci-fi trappings and outlandish dildo fight scenes, the directors of “Everything Everywhere” never expected it to become an awards-season sensation. Still, if you look under the hood, this movie has everything Oscar voters typically spark to: It’s a critically acclaimed box office hit with a veteran star in a showcase role (Michelle Yeoh), a wildly rootable actor making his long-awaited comeback (Ke Huy Quan), and an original, inventive story that concludes with a series of heartwarming scenes. The only downside (and it could prove to be a potent one) is that many older voters just can’t get past the aforementioned sci-fi trappings and dildo fight scenes, and the film’s appeal is therefore lost on them. Will the passion of the academy’s younger and hipper voters be enough to make up that shortfall and push “Everything Everywhere” to the top?‘The Fabelmans’Though we may think of Steven Spielberg as an Oscar staple, it’s been more than two decades since he won his last statuette, for “Saving Private Ryan” (1998). If voters consider the most successful director of all time to be overdue for another little gold man, they might think it fitting to reward him for “The Fabelmans,” the most personal project he’s ever made. This semi-autobiographical family drama was hobbled by headlines about its meager box office take, but it’s hardly the only prestige drama to struggle in theaters this year. And once the nominations are sorted, the film should fare very well on the preferential ballot for best picture, which favors consensus crowd-pleasers.‘The Banshees of Inisherin’Could nearly half of the 20 acting nominations be sewn up by just two movies? If “Everything Everywhere” overperforms, Yeoh, Quan, and supporting actresses Stephanie Hsu and Jamie Lee Curtis could all be nominated. Ditto Martin McDonagh’s “The Banshees of Inisherin,” which I think has an even better shot at earning nominations for all four of its principal actors: leading man Colin Farrell and his supporting co-stars Brendan Gleeson, Barry Keoghan and Kerry Condon. (Sadly, Jenny the donkey was not eligible last time I checked.) And though McDonagh failed to make it into the best director lineup for his last film, “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” the stunningly photographed vistas of “Inisherin” ought to put him over the top this time.‘Tár’Don’t be fooled by the recent best picture wins for simple-pleasure dramedies like “CODA” and “Green Book”: There is still a significant bloc of highbrow voters within the academy, and I suspect “Tár” will serve as their standard-bearer. Todd Field’s ruthlessly contemporary drama about a disgraced conductor has already entranced critics: The New York Film Critics Circle and Los Angeles Film Critics Association both awarded Cate Blanchett’s lead performance and voted “Tár” the best film of the year (though the West Coast group split the difference on the latter, claiming a tie between “Tár” and “Everything Everywhere”). Field made the best picture lineup back in 2002 for his first film, “In the Bedroom,” and voters will be pleased to see that their early bet on him has more than paid off.‘Avatar: The Way of Water’From left, Tsireya (Bailey Bass), Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña), Neteyam (Jamie Flatters), Lo’ak (Britain Dalton) and Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) in “Avatar: The Way of Water.”20th Century StudiosJames Cameron’s first “Avatar” was presumed to be the runner-up in 2010’s best picture race, which ultimately crowned his ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow’s military drama “The Hurt Locker.” Can “The Way of Water” succeed where the first film failed? I don’t think it’s got much of a chance at actually winning best picture, since Cameron has often said that the franchise is mapped out over five movies, and voters will probably wait until the far-off denouement to decide the ultimate worth of the series, as they did with the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. Still, a long list of nominations is all but certain, since the movie is both a blockbuster triumph and a dazzling auteurist work that only Cameron could have pulled off.‘Elvis’It’s been 21 years since director Baz Luhrmann scored an Oscar breakthrough with the musical “Moulin Rouge” — which was nominated for eight Oscars and won two — and I expect he’ll be welcomed back in a big way for this glittery biopic of the iconic singer, played by surefire best actor nominee Austin Butler. One of the year’s only adult dramas to succeed in theaters, “Elvis” plays as though “Bohemian Rhapsody” were executed with actual panache, and Luhrmann’s maximalist aesthetic could even push him into the best director lineup, since that branch goes gaga for technical audacity.‘Top Gun: Maverick’If a well-reviewed action sequel becomes the biggest movie of the year and helps bolster struggling theaters, shouldn’t that be enough to cram it into the best picture race? Well, that argument didn’t get “Spider-Man: No Way Home” into last year’s lineup, but domestic box office champ “Top Gun: Maverick” is already off to a better start, picking up best film nominations from the Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards that eluded Marvel’s web-slinger. But is this Tom Cruise star vehicle actually about something, or is it just a high-flying entertainment? Oscar voters tend to turn their nose up at action sequels — the only one nominated for best picture in the last 15 years was George Miller’s astonishing “Mad Max: Fury Road” — and the next phase of this awards campaign will have to convince them that there’s more to “Top Gun: Maverick” than meets the eye.‘Triangle of Sadness’After “Parasite” won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival nearly four years ago, the upstart film studio Neon successfully leveraged the movie’s international appeal and turned it into an awards-season darling. Can the studio pull off the same feat for Ruben Ostlund’s social satire “Triangle of Sadness,” which also took the Palme and similarly mines class warfare for big laughs and shocking set pieces? It helps that this cruise-ship comedy has a secret weapon in supporting-actress contender Dolly de Leon, who plays a maid-turned-despot: At a time when most contenders are still wary of ascribing too much weight to the controversial Golden Globes, the Filipina actress has drawn headlines for discussing how much the Globe nomination means to her, and many Oscar voters will be eager to extend her awards-season moment.‘Women Talking’Judith Ivey, left, and Claire Foy in “Women Talking.” Michael Gibson/Orion PicturesAfter a big fall-festival launch, Sarah Polley’s well-reviewed Mennonite drama may have waited a little too long to come out in theaters: It was swallowed in limited release over the Christmas weekend, and will have a rough go expanding into new locations until the Oscar nominations are announced. Still, Polley is a respected actress-turned-director, the ensemble is filled with awards-friendly ringers like Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley and Frances McDormand, and the film’s bracing conversations about gender and sexual assault make a strong case for its relevance.‘The Woman King’Gina Prince-Bythewood’s well-mounted action epic about female warriors in 19th-century Africa has an Oscar-winning star in Viola Davis and a lot of handsome tech elements, though I’m concerned that it didn’t manage to make the Oscar shortlists for its superlative costume design and hair and makeup. (At least Terence Blanchard’s thundering score made the cut in its category.) Next week’s Producers Guild nominations could foretell the film’s ultimate fate, since that group likes to recognize rousing theatrical successes and “The Woman King,” which earned a worldwide gross nearly double its $50 million budget, will almost certainly show up there if it’s got the mettle to impress awards voters. More

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      Meet the Newer, Bolder Michelle Williams

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      With “The Fabelmans,” the Oscar-nominated actress moves from minor-key naturalism to more stylized performances: “I wanted to make work that an audience member had to deal with.”“I’ve been working as hard as I know how to make myself ready for a moment when I would meet a role like this,” Michelle Williams said of her performance as Mitzi in “The Fabelmans.”Sinna Nasseri for The New York Times“You’re really organized,” I said to Michelle Williams.“I’m a Virgo,” she replied.On a rainy, late-November afternoon, Williams sat opposite me in a Brooklyn cafe, beaming with the kind of pleasure you can only get from plotting your day out to perfection. As we spoke, her three children were all occupied and accounted for: Her teenage daughter Matilda was at school, her toddler Hart was napping, and her newborn wouldn’t need to be fed for the next hour and a half.For all those things to come together at the same time was nothing short of a mothering miracle, and though her husband, the director Thomas Kail, was out of town, her own mother had come to New York to pitch in with the kids, freeing Williams to arrive at the cafe with the wide-eyed, can-hardly-believe-it expression of someone who had just pulled off a heist.“This is the perfect guilt-free time because nobody needs me,” Williams said, though she noted it isn’t easy to meet the demands of a press tour while breastfeeding: “I’m on somebody else’s timeline, because I’m the food.”Still, she’s doing all she can to promote “The Fabelmans,” a semi-autobiographical family drama from Steven Spielberg where the 42-year-old actress plays Mitzi, a character Spielberg based on his own mother. Though her dreams of being a concert pianist were put aside to raise her family, Mitzi treats child-rearing as a brand-new creative playground: One day, she’ll pack the kids into the car to go chase a tornado, while another time, she’ll impulsively buy a monkey as a family pet.People might look at the eccentric character and think she’s too much, but Mitzi looks at her life and knows it’s not enough. She’s married to dutiful, dull Burt (Paul Dano) but pines for his best friend (Seth Rogen), a transgression her budding-filmmaker son Sammy only cottons onto when he puts Mitzi in front of his lens. You sense that Spielberg, too, is using Williams as a vessel to better understand his late mother: The director has rarely seemed so wowed by a leading lady, shooting Williams with the same awe Sammy exhibits when he films his mother in the grips of an artistic reverie.Williams has already picked up nominations from the Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards for her live-wire performance. “I’ve been working as hard as I know how to make myself ready for a moment when I would meet a role like this,” she said. At the Gotham Awards, where she picked up a tribute award in November, Williams drew a line all the way back to her work on the teen soap “Dawson’s Creek,” which she starred in at age 16 alongside actors James Van Der Beek and Katie Holmes.Michelle Williams at the Long Island Bar in Brooklyn.Sinna Nasseri for The New York Times“She seemed so different from the other kids, a creature unto herself even then,” said the actress Mary Beth Peil, who played Williams’s grandmother on the show. “Working with her then, her honesty was almost painful. That’s one of the main things I learned from her, that the camera can see honesty. It’s at the root of every breath she takes.”What motivated her to pursue an acting career at such a young age? “It was like a stand-in for selfhood,” Williams said, “like maybe I could get regard for a woman that I was playing and that would somehow transfer to me, this person that I didn’t really know how to inhabit yet.” As she grew older and won parts in Off Broadway plays or indie films like “The Station Agent,” it felt to her “like I was given a little morsel, and I would tuck it away,” she said. “I collected them and strung them along, and then they started adding up.”With her Oscar-nominated roles in “Brokeback Mountain,” “Blue Valentine” and “Manchester by the Sea,” as well as the naturalistic films she has made with the director Kelly Reichardt (their next collaboration, “Showing Up,” comes out this year), Williams established herself as a top-tier actress capable of unvarnished authenticity. But she is keen to experiment in a more heightened register, as she did in 2011 playing Marilyn Monroe in “My Week With Marilyn” and in 2019 with her Emmy-winning role as the dancer Gwen Verdon in the FX series “Fosse/Verdon.”The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Best-Actress Battle Royal: A banner crop of leading ladies, including Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett, rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.Golden Globe Nominations: Here are some of the most eyebrow-raising snubs and surprises from this year’s list of nominees.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.In an email, Spielberg, who wrote “The Fabelmans” with Tony Kushner, said, “She has a secret energy that poured from her when she played Gwen Verdon. That went a long way into making her my first choice to play Mitzi.”To hear Williams tell it, that shift to bigger, more stylized performances took a concerted effort; in person, she’s much more contained, with a presence as close-cropped as the pixie haircut she often favors. “It’s good for me to live like that for periods of time because it’s not my natural place,” Williams said, smiling as she recalled how much bigger she had to become to inhabit Mitzi Fabelman. “It’s the most wonderful thing to borrow.”Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.Seth Rogen, Paul Dano and Michelle Williams in a scene from “The Fabelmans.”Universal Pictures and Amblin EntertainmentOften, when you watch these kinds of autobiographical coming-of-age movies, the moms get short shrift. But in “The Fabelmans,” the mother-son dynamic feels like the central story.I couldn’t believe it when I started turning pages in this script. My husband was in the room with me, and I kept saying, “It’s just getting better.” Very often when you have a script, you have a great scene and you think, “Oh, that’s going to be splashy.” And this was just page after page of that, just this undulating, gorgeous aliveness. When I finished, I said to my husband, “It’s a feast. They made her a feast.”It took me a long time to wrap my head around the material because the words and ideas are classic Kushner, through the lens of Steven Spielberg. So it’s filmic and it’s theatrical, which is something that really interests me and I’ve been purposefully concentrating on since I started doing theater again. I prep a lot before a movie, and there was so much to grab hold of. It felt more akin to making a mini-series because the material was so rich.What was the furthest reach for you when it came to playing a big character like Mitzi?In the first part of my career, I was doing sitcoms, TV commercials, soap operas, and I started seeing this other style called naturalism. I wanted that for me, but I had to learn what that was and how to inhabit it, and when I felt like I had arrived at that place that I had yearned to belong in — like with Kelly Reichardt, and every indie movie that I made until I was 30 — the next place that I wanted to go was into something that was more expressionist. That felt like a much further distance to cross.I felt like the journey in my 20s was to finding an authentic way to center myself so that I felt natural inside of my own skin and could offer that to other women that I was playing, but then I wanted to shed that skin completely and be able to find entirely new ways of relating to characters that didn’t always bring me along, that didn’t bind me to just myself for the rest of my working life. That required breaking myself down and then rebuilding myself in somebody else’s image, and making bigger choices.“The journey in my twenties was to finding an authentic way to center myself so that I felt natural inside of my own skin and could offer that to other women that I was playing,” Williams said, “but then I wanted to shed that skin completely and be able to find entirely new ways of relating to characters that didn’t always bring me along.”Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesWhat do you think drew you toward these more stylized characters?I think one of the things that I realized about naturalism — and it’s still a place that I live, I just made my fourth movie with Kelly Reichardt — is that I also wanted to make work that left a mark and that wasn’t open to projection. I wanted to make work that an audience member had to deal with, where there was less interpretation on their part because the interpretation was really my work. I feel like Mitzi belongs there, and Gwen and Marilyn belong there, and the work that I’ve done in theater belongs there. But it took a lot of learning and a lot of mistakes along the way to be comfortable leaving my own skin.I wonder if that spectrum between naturalism and stylization hasn’t been with you since the beginning. Even with something like “Dawson’s Creek,” you were given pages and pages of very dense, stylized dialogue and you had to find a way to make it sound natural.So much dialogue, oh my God. Twelve pages a day, really verbose. And yeah, the situations and scenarios that you’re working through on “Dawson’s Creek” are a little heightened.But I think people appreciate that you don’t disavow that show, and that you actually made a point of drawing a line back to “Dawson’s Creek” in your Gothams speech.Maybe there’s a connection between firstness and lastness, so I’m constantly reconnecting with my time on “Dawson’s Creek” because every project that I end somehow recalls that to me. But it was an incredible kind of training because you’re also learning these really fundamental things, like how to have a conversation with somebody where you’re looking them in the eye but some part of you is also scanning downward to hit your mark. It’s that kind of technical stuff that seems sort of silly and small that still comes in handy for me.And it’s also kind of funny that on that show, Dawson was so obsessed with Spielberg, and now here you are playing Spielberg’s mom.Oh, it’s so weird! I know. It’s so weird.From left, James Van Der Beek, Michelle Williams, Katie Holmes and Joshua Jackson in a “Dawson’s Creek” episode that aired in 1999. “I’m constantly reconnecting with my time on ‘Dawson’s Creek,’” Williams said.Columbia TriStar Television, via Everett CollectionHow did you feel the day before you started shooting “The Fabelmans”?It felt like when the race is about to begin and you’re on the starting block and your feet are itching and you’re in this state of readiness. It was that kind of high.What had you so excited about inhabiting Mitzi?First of all, it feels good to be her. She was filled with music, so there was an emotional vibration running through her body at all times. I think about the scale of the piano, and that was her range: That’s how low she can go and that’s how high she can hit, so to contain all of that in you for a period of time is thrilling. And it’s the way that she approached so many things as, “Won’t this be so much fun? Won’t this make such an excellent memory for my family?” There was creativity in every aspect of her life, from how she played with the children to how she dressed herself and cut her hair. She was an artist in every fingertip.Tell me about her hair, because that helmet bob is a striking look.The hair was the first thing that we talked about. She was so acutely aware of what looked smashing on her — she wore those Peter Pan collars her entire life and they suited her so beautifully — and that curving haircut was her signature. When you look at pictures of her, they look like film stills, because she looks like a character. She was her own creation, and her entire life and her children’s lives were works of art. Ultimately, that’s what still gives me the chills as a mother of three. I can’t think of a better thing to aspire to.Do you feel the same? Are you creating lives for your children that are like works of art?It’s my aspiration. We’ll see when they’re all grown up how I did.Spielberg ends the movie shortly after Mitzi leaves her husband for another man, but what did you know about the rest of his mother’s life that helped inform how you thought of Mitzi?Later in life, she and Steven’s father had a reconnection and spent their final years together. It’s overlapping love stories, which is ultimately why the story is heartbreaking, because this love hadn’t disappeared between these two people — it had changed and turned into something else. There was still enough love in their relationship to hold a family, but in your one and only life, it still wasn’t enough to make her stay. The bravery of that decision to me! And so I never encountered her as being selfish, or unhinged. I thought this is a woman who is living so truthfully, so expressively and so bravely, and then giving that gift to each of her children because they saw her do it.Many pundits thought you were a lock to win the supporting-actress Oscar for this role, but instead, you chose to be campaigned as a lead in a very competitive awards race.I think that was a conversation that was happening outside of the core group that made this movie, and I don’t really know why there was a disparity. Although I haven’t seen the movie, the scenes that I read, the scenes that I prepped, the scenes that we shot, the scenes that I’m told are still in the movie, are akin to me with experiences that I have had playing roles considered lead. So for myself, or for anybody involved in the movie, I think we were all in unspoken agreement.“She has a secret energy that poured from her when she played Gwen Verdon,” Steven Spielberg, the director of “The Fabelmans,” said. “That went a long way into making her my first choice to play Mitzi.”Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesYou still haven’t seen “The Fabelmans”?I’m not able to watch my own work. I think the last thing I saw was “Meek’s Cutoff” in a theater with my daughter, so it’s been about a decade.How come?When I’m working on something, I feel so completely inside of it, and when I switch to an audience member, it alters my experience — and the experience is ultimately what I’m in it for. I can’t seem to go back and forth between the two ways to be involved in storytelling, even though I would like to be strong enough and capable of watching myself, figuring out what I would like to technically adjust and then applying it to the next time. I’ve tried to do that, but I’m getting internal bounce-back. I’m happier and maybe healthier just staying in my personal experience of playing these women.Did that make the end of filming “The Fabelmans” more fraught, because it was the last experience you’d really have with the character?On our last day, I grieved like somebody had actually died. I shocked myself by how grief-stricken I was to say goodbye to the woman that I had inhabited and the relationships that I had with these other characters. I still miss being her and having that spirit coursing through mine, so it’s nice to remember her and the urgency of that period of filming. When you’re making something, you feel like the whole world is available material — everything is tingling and anything is possible — and then, once the filming is over, you go back to breakfast tables. Which I clearly love, because I keep doubling down on kids.You seem to throw yourself into that part of your life with equal relish.It’s kind of a great way to live, to careen between these two realities of this incredibly full-on work experience and then this incredibly domestic life. I enjoy the extremity of both, but something else this experience has given me is the reminder to try and synthesize both sides of my brain.In my real life, I’m very practical, I’m very organized. I’m always making lists and feeling great if I check them off, and my work life is a place where I let all of that go and I allow myself to live unbound from time and order and right and wrong. I want to give myself more of that in my everyday life. It doesn’t have to be so linear, and Mitzi is my best reminder for that: Once she knew what she wanted, she wasted no time taking that for herself. It’s how we should all live, don’t you think? More

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      ‘The Fabelmans’ Is Judd Hirsch’s Latest Great Story

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      The veteran actor has been singled out for his rousing performance in Steven Spielberg’s drama. It’s the latest chapter in a long career full of anecdotes.“Have we met before?” Judd Hirsch asked enthusiastically as he strode into a French bistro last month. “I’ve met everybody before. Maybe we met when you were a baby and I said, ‘I’ll see you when you’re older.’”When you invite Hirsch, the veteran actor and raconteur, on a lunch date, you’re going to hear stories on top of stories — stories you knew you wanted and stories you didn’t know you were going to get.The instant he took his seat, Hirsch spun a tale about the afternoon’s dining spot, Boucherie West Village, whose building once housed the Off Broadway theater where he co-starred in the original 1979 production of “Talley’s Folly” by Lanford Wilson.As the actor told it, an agent affiliated with the play wanted to replace Hirsch because his role in the hit sitcom “Taxi” was going to conflict with a planned Broadway transfer for “Talley’s Folly.”Instead, Hirsch helped bring the play to the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, where he performed it that summer and fall during his downtime from “Taxi.” The following winter, Hirsch said proudly, “I came back and did it on Broadway, and it won the Pulitzer Prize.”Riding on similar waves of showbiz know-how and sheer bravado, Hirsch can currently be seen barnstorming his way through a crucial portion of “The Fabelmans,” the director Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical coming-of-age drama.Hirsch has only a few minutes of screen time, playing Boris, the cantankerous great-uncle of its adolescent protagonist, Sammy Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle). But the 87-year-old actor makes every frame count as he delivers a galvanic speech to the young Spielberg stand-in, exhorting him to commit to his artistic aspirations while warning that they will be in perpetual conflict with the needs of his family.Hirsch opposite Gabriel LaBelle in “The Fabelmans.” He’s not on the screen for long but he makes every frame count.Merie Weismiller Wallace/Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment, via Associated PressHirsch’s unexpectedly intense performance in “The Fabelmans” — the latest in a decades-long career spanning stage, screen and a 1972 commercial for JCPenney polyester slacks — would seem to be a testament to his endurance in a singularly fickle industry.But while he is happy for the plum opportunity in a prestigious year-end film, Hirsch could not quite point to any particular reason he should be enjoying another moment in the spotlight right now.The Projectionist Chronicles a New Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Golden Globe Nominations: Here are some of the most eyebrow-raising snubs and surprises from this year’s list of nominees.Gotham Awards: At the first official show of the season, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” won big.Governors Awards: Stars like Jamie Lee Curtis and Brendan Fraser worked a room full of academy voters at the event, which is considered a barometer of film industry enthusiasm.Rian Johnson:  The “Glass Onion” director explains the streaming plan for his “Knives Out” franchise.“I have no idea why I get any part that somebody else can play,” he said. “Or why I don’t get one when I do want to play it. But I’m old enough to know that’s OK.”Approval is always nice, but Hirsch suggested that an actor’s temperament was forged in far more frequent instances of rejection. When you don’t land a role, he explained, “you can say, ‘What the hell did they see in me that made them turn me down?’ Or you can say, ‘They don’t know what the hell they’re missing.’”Though he’s long split his time between Los Angeles and New York, Hirsch was born and raised in New York, and didn’t expect much for himself after studying acting at HB Studio in the early 1960s. “I never thought I’d play anything more than a construction worker, criminal or some schlubby guy,” he said.Instead he went on to play a variety of prominent roles on television (“Taxi,” “Dear John,” “Numbers”), in film (“Ordinary People,” “Independence Day,” “Uncut Gems”) and onstage (“I’m Not Rappaport”).Presently, when Hirsch wasn’t kibitzing playfully with a waiter (“You don’t mind if I don’t speak French?” the actor said, looking over his menu. “I could say some of those words with a French accent”), he was just as fond of sharing anecdotes from an era when he wasn’t well established.There was, for instance, the fateful introduction he received while visiting Universal to audition for a TV movie in the early 1970s.Hirsch has been an awards contender before. He was up for an Oscar, an Emmy and a Tony for work he did in 1980, and didn’t win any of the prizes.Daniel Arnold for The New York TimesA woman working there began to show him around to other people in the office: “This is so-and-so,” Hirsch recounted. “And this is so-and-so. This is Mr. Spielberg, and he’s sitting behind a desk, and on his desk is ‘Jaws,’ which I had no idea was anything. And she said” — his voice dropped to a stage whisper — “‘He’s going to be very big.’”“He would not have known of me,” Hirsch said of the fleeting encounter. “Look at all the Spielberg movies since — and I’m not in any of them.”But their trajectories intersected again a half-century later on “The Fabelmans.” The dramatist Tony Kushner (“Angels in America”), who wrote the screenplay with Spielberg, said that the Boris character was based on an actual member of the director’s extended family.The real-life Uncle Boris “had worked in some animal handling in the early days of Hollywood and he had been in the circus,” said Kushner, who has collaborated with Spielberg on “Munich,” “Lincoln” and “West Side Story.” Kushner added that the actual Boris “had lived a wild, itinerant life, and that had made him a fearsome figure to his sister, and to his nieces and nephews.”The scene written for the fictional Boris was intended to impart a lesson about the cost of pursuing an artistic life, Kushner said: “Art has a power that one only imagines one controls. When you access it, if you’re really practicing it, it’s going to take you to the truth. And the truth is sometimes going to be very dangerous.”Hirsch, who was cast after a video conversation with Spielberg, said his preparation was far less weighty.“He said you can play it with an accent or not,” Hirsch recalled. “After I read it, I said, what schmuck would not? He’s going to have to like it this way because I’m not going to do it any other way.”Hirsch said he could channel the frantic passion of the film’s Boris, who feels frustrated that his message is not reaching young Sammy. But the actor said there was only one moment he was “truly scared to do,” when the scene required him to get physical with LaBelle.“I line the kid up against the wall and I say, ‘Look at me — look at me,’” Hirsch said. “After all that, I want him to see what I had to go through.”LaBelle said he encouraged Hirsch to “beat the [expletive] out of me.”“The moment where he pinches my face, I was like, ‘No, no, hurt me. Come on, let’s do it,’” LaBelle recalled.He added, “It’s not like I’m hanging on the side of a plane. I’m just getting my face pinched.”Whether his “Fabelmans” performance garners any attention for a year-end film award, Hirsch noted that he had been down this road before.Hirsch said the only “Fabelmans” scene that gave him pause was one requiring him to get physical with LaBelle. But the younger actor wasn’t fazed. “I was like, ‘No, no, hurt me,’” LaBelle said.Daniel Arnold for The New York TimesHe pointed out that for work he did in 1980 alone, he was nominated for an Oscar (for “Ordinary People”), an Emmy (“Taxi”) and a Tony (“Talley’s Folly”) — and won none of them. Though Hirsch didn’t mention this, he did go on to win Emmys for “Taxi” in 1981 and 1983.Hirsch said he was actually relieved he didn’t win for “Ordinary People,” in which he played a psychiatrist treating a traumatized teenager (Timothy Hutton). Both men were nominated as supporting actors, and Hirsch suggested that Hutton — who ultimately won — was more deserving of the honor.“I said, what’s the worst thing that could happen to me?” Hirsch explained. “I win this damn thing and then have to look at him and make excuse, excuse, excuse — ‘They made a terrible mistake, it should have been you.’”After a server asked him if he would like some black coffee (“That’s the usual color, isn’t it?” Hirsch replied without missing a beat), the actor resumed delving into his trove of stories from projects that did not earn him any trophies or recognition.He spoke of his performance in the 1978 drama “King of the Gypsies,” in which his character is shot by Eric Roberts and falls out an apartment window to his death.“So I said who’s going to do that?” Hirsch recalled. “They said, ‘You.’ I said, ‘OK.’ I arrive at the set and there’s one of those enormous air mattresses in the street.”Hirsch said he filmed three takes of his fatal fall, but while the finished sequence in the movie shows him taking gunfire and toppling out the window, the part where his character lands on a car was performed by a stuntman.“Luckily I didn’t have to hit a car,” he said. “Otherwise, you and I would not be talking here.” More

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      in Theater

      When Jewish Artists Wrestle With Antisemitism

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      In this unsettling moment, comedians, filmmakers, playwrights and others have been struggling against a long-ingrained American response to look away.Antisemitism has such a long, violent history that it seems absurd to claim it’s getting worse. Compared with when? And yet, there’s something about our current moment that feels different.Consider a recent Sunday. I woke up to news reports that two men were arrested at Penn Station with weapons, a swastika armband and a social media history of threats to attack a synagogue. After taking a shower, I opened my dresser to find my Kyrie Irving T-shirt. The Brooklyn Net was returning to the N.B.A. that evening after being suspended for tweeting a link to a documentary that cast doubt on the Holocaust.I didn’t expect getting dressed in the morning to turn into a test of loyalties between my favorite basketball team and my murdered ancestors, but here we are.That night, when I arrived at Barclays Center, scores of people belonging to what the Southern Poverty Law Center labels a hate group were handing out pamphlets with the blaring headline “The Truth About Antisemitism.” I opened Twitter and saw Elon Musk was making fun of the Anti-Defamation League and Ye was tweeting again. He had kicked off the recent cycle of discourse by leveling violent threats against Jews.Quantifying antisemitism right now by numbers of hate crimes is useful, but doesn’t capture the peculiar anguish and human complexities of its day-to-day pervasiveness. That’s a job better suited to artists, and more than any year in memory, some of our most accomplished ones have taken up the challenge, from the biggest names in comedy (Dave Chappelle, Amy Schumer) to the most celebrated storytellers in theater and film, like Tom Stoppard and Steven Spielberg. What resonates most in this impressive body of work are the Jewish artists exploring the challenge of antisemitism, and while they started these projects years ago, their hard-earned pessimism now seems uncomfortably prophetic.The thorniest recent work on these issues was the “Saturday Night Live” monologue by Dave Chappelle. He poked fun at Ye and Irving while speaking to the antisemitic idea of a Jewish conspiracy in Hollywood. In between myriad jokes, he shrugged off this stereotype as an understandable thought best not verbalized. One of the maddening traps of modern antisemitism is that it takes a source of pride — Jewish success in the arts, the rare field where we were welcome — and makes it seem sinister. This old tactic got a new hearing.There are a lot of Jews in Hollywood, Chappelle observed mischievously, before undercutting the comment with a joke that called the trope that they control show business “a delusion.” Unlike the blunt social media posts of Ye and Irving, this set was a work of art, elusive and layered, displaying finesse and paradox. It’s a prickly kind of funny with corkscrew punch lines that tickled the mind and bothered the conscience. (“If they’re Black then it’s a gang, if they’re Italian it’s a mob, but if they’re Jewish it’s a coincidence and you should never speak about it.”)Dave Chappelle on “Saturday Night Live.” His monologue was a prickly kind of funny that bothered the conscience.Will Heath/NBCArt can be formally beautiful and morally ugly. Despite what you have heard, good comedy can be built on lies as easily as on the truth. This is what makes Chappelle’s set so slippery: His storytelling and gravitas are so magnetic that you can miss how far he goes in making the old slur of a Jewish conspiracy seem reasonable. He whitewashed Irving’s tolerance for Holocaust denial with one good line. With another, he says you can’t “blame Black people” for Jewish pain, erecting a straw man with deftness. To suggest, as he does, that it’s dangerous for him to say “the Jews” is tiresome hyperbole.For as much controversy as this set provoked, it was also predictable. How often have we seen Chappelle bring up celebrity transgression, and then defend, mitigate and complicate it, while inviting us to admire the feat? This is his move. There’s no wondering where he will come down on the latest scandal. We know.Antisemitism in AmericaAntisemitism is one of the longest-standing forms of prejudice, and those who monitor it say it is now on the rise across the country.Perilous Times: With online threats and incidents of harassment and violence rising nationwide, this fall has become increasingly worrisome for American Jews.Donald Trump: The former president had dinner with Nick Fuentes, a prominent antisemite, at Mar-a-Lago, causing some of Mr. Trump’s Jewish allies to speak out.Kanye West: The rapper and designer, who now goes by Ye, has been widely condemned for recent antisemitic comments. The fallout across industries has been swift.Kyrie Irving: The Nets lifted their suspension of the basketball player, who offered “deep apologies” for posting a link to an antisemitic film. His behavior appalled and frightened many of his Jewish fans.EARLIER THIS YEAR, I wrote about the Jewish tendency to turn antisemitism into comedy. But there’s another coping mechanism that we like to talk about less: looking the other way. When asked about Chappelle’s monologue, Jerry Seinfeld diplomatically told The Hollywood Reporter that “the subject matter calls for more conversation.” When asked about it as a guest on “The Late Show,” Jon Stewart only became earnest when he pleaded for free speech. What’s striking about these responses from star comics is that they seem to be more interested in calling for debate than engaging in it.Then again, I get it. I’ve stayed quiet when peers wrote things that seemed, if not indifferent to Jewish pain, then at least to be applying double standards to it. I gave them the benefit of the doubt or concluded that a call-out would be counterproductive. But saying nothing in the face of such moments exacts its own cost. It eats at you. Several Jewish artists have been making work that explores such decisions with a skeptical eye.In “The Patient,” a sly, suspenseful FX series from Joel Fields and Joe Weisberg, creators of “The Americans,” a therapist played by Steve Carell awakens to find himself chained to the bed of a serial killer looking for help with his mental health. The title is a reference to this maniac as well as the way his therapist responds.The killer says he was looking for a therapist who is Jewish, a specific request that goes uncommented on. Small moments tip you off to a tolerated culture of antisemitism. In a flashback, the therapist, Alan, spots a swastika on a poster and, instead of making a fuss, keeps walking.Steve Carell as a therapist and Domhnall Gleeson as a serial killer in “The Patient,” which raises the urgent question of how to fight back.Suzanne Tenner/FXNow he has no such option. Imprisoned by a captor who wants something from him, he is faced with the urgent question of how to fight back. He chooses to use his skills in mental health to help his oppressor get better. The deeper he gets in dialogue, though, the more uncomfortable Alan grows, especially after he teaches the murderer the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, and then sees it being used to mourn his latest victims.In many ways, the relationship at the center of “The Patient” is a metaphor for both the lengths Jews will go to extend empathy toward their oppressors and for the existential toll that takes. Playing a man wracked by guilt, grief and doubt, Carell is extremely subtle illustrating how accommodation can be justified and yet wear you down. We also see scenes in his head of him talking to a shrink (David Alan Grier) who asks why he doesn’t fight back, attack the killer. To which Alan replies: “I’m using what I have.” Grier, a figment of his imagination, flashes a look that suggests he doesn’t believe that.Similarly, “The Fabelmans” and “Armageddon Time,” two personal movies by Jewish directors dramatizing their own childhoods, grapple with the question of what weapons Jews have. In both, sensitive boys facing antisemitism at school struggle with how to stand up for themselves.“The Fabelmans” isn’t a movie about being Jewish so much as it is suffused with Jewishness. But when its young protagonist, Sammy Fabelman, moves to California in the 1960s, he’s confronted with Aryan boys who mock his religion and with gentile girls intrigued by it. He happily prays with one girl but puts up a fight with the bullies, who at first seem like the cartoon villains from early Spielberg movies. The most dramatic way Sammy pushes back is by putting his antagonists in a movie. After filming his classmates on a trip to the beach, the footage, shown to the whole school, makes one bully look ridiculous and another glamorous, bigger than life. Oddly, being romanticized by the Jewish kid he beat up rattles the bully more than any insult. His discontent in the face of this attention is the most baffling section in the movie, one that has the ring of a point being made. But what is the point?Is the antisemite feeling shame? If so, Spielberg is working hard to extend empathy. But this exchange also rattles Sammy. When the bigot demands to know why Sammy made him look like a star, the response sounds pained and unsure: “Maybe I did it to make the movie better?”It’s a shockingly unsentimental moment to find in a Spielberg movie, one in which the young version of himself learns that pleasing the crowd might require turning an antisemite into the hero. No one loves the movies more than Spielberg, and in this intimate, morally probing film, he shows how they can move, inspire and reveal the truth. But in these more hardheaded scenes, he also makes it clear that their impact can be unpredictable, and like comedy, they can deceive just as deftly.Chloe East as a classmate intrigued by the religion of the Steven Spielberg stand-in, played by Gabriel LaBelle.Merie Weismiller Wallace/Universal Pictures and Amblin Entertainment, via Associated PressIn “Armageddon Time,” a humbler, realistic and affectingly bleak portrait of the struggles of a young Jewish kid, James Gray digs into his 1980s Queens upbringing in the story of an 11-year-old boy named Paul Graff whose grandfather is the son of a refugee who fled pogroms in Europe. The patriarch tells him that changing his name (from Grasserstein) will help him in life. This same man urges him to speak up when other students make racist comments to a peer. These are the competing messages he grows up with: assimilate or fight back.A friendship with a Black classmate also makes clear to Paul how not all inequities are the same, that his privilege protects him in a way that other minority groups don’t experience. In a time when Black and Jewish communities are pitted against each other by entertainers like Ye and others, this movie feels exceedingly topical and depressing. It painfully dramatizes how antisemitism can lead Jews to overlook other injustices, protect your tribe and harden your heart to the plight of others.As with Spielberg’s movie, the new play by Tom Stoppard, “Leopoldstadt,” is being described as his most personal as well as a reckoning with his Jewish identity, which in his case he didn’t understand until middle age. It’s also one of his worst plays: intellectually thin, overly familiar, blandly generic. If the way you tell the audience it’s the 1920s is by a woman dancing the Charleston, you’ve become too comfortable with cliché. And yet, this sprawling portrait of a half century in the life of a Jewish family from Vienna is drawing sold-out crowds of weeping audiences.I suspect the reason is the timely and heavy-handed portrait of Jewish complacency and denial. We see this most nakedly in the stand-in for the playwright, a comic writer born Leopold Rosenbaum who now goes by Leonard Chamberlin (a name that evokes the prime minister famous for appeasement). In 1955, Chamberlin is glibly naïve about the Holocaust, a patriotic fool set up for tears when remembering the horrors of the Nazis. The play ends with a roll call of the dead. Of course, the audience cries.TWO THINGS STAND OUT about these dramas, whether onscreen or onstage: The first is that none of the Jewish protagonists are exactly triumphant in the face of antisemitism. Therapy, the movies, assimilation — nothing saves them. These characters are ambivalent, morally compromised or far worse. When it comes to their ability to protest an antisemitic culture, pessimism reigns.The second is how much these works look to the past, exploring the current moment through a historical lens. (That includes Bess Wohl’s play “Camp Siegfried,” a drama about a 1938 Nazi youth camp on Long Island whose themes are clearly meant to echo with today.) Even the contemporary “The Patient” borrows its most blunt power from flashbacks to the moral simplicity of concentration camps. Looking at history can be a useful way to understand the present, but it can also be a way to evade it. One wonders what Stoppard would come up with if he dramatized the more subtle Jewish denial of the cultural world he came up in, where he flourished as a playwright whose religion never seemed to come up. Or how Spielberg or Gray would capture the conflicts of Jewish life now.As usual, comics are the artists taking the earliest and most direct approaches. David Baddiel, a British comic, is receiving glowing reviews this month for a BBC documentary version of his book “Jews Don’t Count” that castigates the double standards applied to prejudice against Jews in progressive spaces today. Marc Maron’s next special, which recently taped in New York, begins a series of jokes on the increased prominence of conspiracies about Jews by saying that in this polarized country, antisemitism is one thing that brings everyone together. At the Kennedy Center Honors, Sacha Baron Cohen, in character as the antisemite Borat, skewered Ye and sang a brief parody version of U2’s “With or Without You,” switching the lyrics to “With or Without Jews.”Amy Schumer is one of the few sketch comics to dig into antisemitism today, lampooning the tentativeness our culture has for calling it out in the new season of “Inside Amy Schumer.” She imagines a workplace harassment seminar where everyone is hypersensitive to all kinds of slights except antisemitic ones. It’s a premise that not only counters the trope of a Jewish conspiracy but also taps into the paranoia of being gaslit by an entire culture. It hints at what a Jewish “Get Out” could look like.Part of the resilience of antisemitism is its resistance to critique. Jewish artists are obviously not going to end the lie that they control show business by making more movies, plays, TV shows or sketches about it. But they can illuminate its impact and capture the complex damage it does to the psyche. That matters. For a certain kind of Jew, art can be its own religion. And one lesson we keep learning and forgetting is that the greatest art is much better at portraying conflicted minds than changing them. More

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      ‘The Fabelmans’: What’s Real and What’s Fictional

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      Here’s a guide to how the events of Steven Spielberg’s new semi-autobiographical film compare with what really happened.Steven Spielberg’s new semi-autobiographical film, “The Fabelmans,” hits many standard biopic beats: A Jewish boy, Sammy Fabelman, falls in love with movies after being spellbound by a train crash in the Cecil B. DeMille 1952 circus drama “The Greatest Show on Earth.” After moving with his family to California, he becomes the target of antisemitic bullies in high school. He’s unable to escape the shadow of his brilliant but distant father, wondering if he’ll ever make something of himself.But other events — like when his mother adopts a pet monkey — are a little more out there.Here’s a guide to what’s real and what’s exaggerated.Did Spielberg’s mother fall in love with his father’s best friend?Yes. In the film, Mitzi (Michelle Williams) falls in love with her husband’s best friend, Bennie (Seth Rogen). Her real-life counterpart, Leah Adler, left her husband, Arnold Spielberg, for one of his best friends, a man named Bernie Adler. The Spielbergs divorced in 1966.For years, the director believed that it was his father who’d left his mother. “I figured I could be hurt less than she,” Arnold Spielberg said in the 2017 HBO documentary “Spielberg,” explaining why he and Leah decided he would take the blame. “I still loved her.” Leah and Bernie Adler married in 1967.Did Spielberg find out about the relationship from watching footage he shot on a camping trip?Yes. Spielberg told The New York Times’s co-chief film critic A.O. Scott in a recent interview that the dramatic moment of revelation depicted onscreen really happened. “That was one of the toughest things, I think, that I had to sit down and decide to expose, because it was the most powerful secret my mom and I shared since my discovery when I was 16,” he told Scott.Did his mother bring home a monkey?As hard as this one may be to believe, yes. Before she died at age 97 in 2017, Leah Adler said in the HBO documentary that she had been visiting a pet store in Phoenix when she saw a monkey that was depressed after being separated from its mother. She brought it home in a cage in the back of her Jeep and — just like Mitzi in the film — adopted it as a household pet for her four children.It “was a grand distraction, but it was also a therapeutic companion for my mom, who was really at that time in our lives going through a major depression,” Spielberg told The Hollywood Reporter earlier this month.Was Spielberg’s mother a concert pianist?Yes. She learned to play the piano at age 5 and later studied at the Music Conservatory in Cincinnati. Like Mitzi, she put her career on hold to raise a family.Was Spielberg the only Jewish student at school?While he might not have been the only one, he was definitely one of very few. “I felt like I was the only Jew in high school,” he said in an interview with the publisher Behrman House. “I just simply wanted to deny being Jewish. I was ashamed because I was living on a street where at Christmas, we were the only house with nothing but a porch light on. I so much wanted to be assimilated.”As in “The Fabelmans,” he was bullied by two male classmates after moving to California for his senior year. “I got smacked and kicked around. Two bloody noses. It was horrible,” he told The New York Times in 1993.Did he date a Christian girl in high school who tried to convert him?It’s unclear. Sammy’s girlfriend in the film, Monica Sherwood (Chloe East), tries to convert him in a variety of ways, even once instructing Sammy to try to “inhale” Christ before a passionate make-out session. The Los Angeles Times has said she was based on a girl Spielberg dated in the seventh grade, but the director himself has not mentioned it.Did a teenage Spielberg meet the director John Ford in his office? Did Ford have red lipstick traces all over his face?Most definitely. Spielberg said at the Toronto International Film Festival that the meeting with Ford when he was 15 occurred just as it appears in the film, “word for word, nothing more, nothing less” — including the kiss marks covering Ford’s face and Ford’s lecture about the placement of the horizon in several pictures on his wall.Did he nearly abandon filmmaking at the beginning of his career?Yes, but not because of what happened with his parents: the 16-year-old Spielberg had a crisis of confidence after seeing David Lean’s epic “Lawrence of Arabia.”“When the film was over, I wanted to not be a director anymore,” he said in the HBO documentary, “because the bar was too high.“I had such a profound reaction to the filmmaking, and I went back and saw the film a week later,” he added. “I saw the film a week after that, and I saw the film a week after that, and I realized that there was no going back. This was going to be what I was going to do or I was going to die trying.” More