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    A New Kelly Reichardt Movie? These Actors Keep Showing Up

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    The director Kelly Reichardt has developed something of a troupe of performers who are eager to work with her time and time again. A few of them appear in her latest film, “Showing Up.”In her new film “Showing Up,” the director Kelly Reichardt reunites for the fourth time with the actress Michelle Williams, who plays Lizzy, a stressed-out sculptor, in the Portland-set art world comedy. In previous Reichardt films Williams has portrayed a drifter looking for her lost dog (“Wendy and Lucy”), a beleaguered and dehydrated pioneer (“Meek’s Cutoff”) and a Montana woman trying to acquire sandstone for her new house (“Certain Women”). At this point, Reichardt and Williams’s collaboration is one of the most fruitful in the realm of indie cinema.“She has extreme depth perception,” Williams said of Reichardt in a phone interview. “She can see where my sight stops, so I do what I can and I add what I can, but I really am trusting her to take me to the new place, to the next frontier.”But Williams is not alone in being drawn to Reichardt. “Showing Up,” now in theaters, also marks the second time Reichardt has enlisted John Magaro, last of her acclaimed 2020 feature “First Cow,” and the third time she’s brought on James Le Gros, who has shown up in her 2013 eco-thriller “Night Moves” and also in the 2016 omnibus “Certain Women.” In “Showing Up,” Magaro plays the mentally ill brother of Williams’s character, while Le Gros plays a teacher at the art school where she works.Williams and James Le Gros in “Certain Women.”Sony PicturesIn the nearly three decades since her first feature “River of Grass,” Reichardt has developed something of a troupe of actors who are eager to work with her time and time again. In addition to the repeat performers from “Showing Up,” others have made multiple Reichardt films, among them Larry Fessenden, Will Oldham and Will Patton.“There’s no requirement to come back,” Magaro said. “A lot of these people go on and make a lot more money doing other jobs.” But the actor said that there was a reason people return. “At the heart of it is Kelly and that team and that camaraderie and that family atmosphere she creates.”Reichardt works with small budgets and often in and around Portland, Ore., telling intimate stories that often focus on outsiders and the minutiae of life, whether she’s making a movie set in a fur trapping community in the 19th century or at an art school in the present. “Showing Up” is arguably her lightest film yet, a funny exploration of the quotidian struggles of being an artist.The director’s resources have grown since she made “Wendy and Lucy” (2008) — her first collaboration with Williams — but not by much. Reichardt remembered the actress, who had recently received her first Oscar nomination, sitting on an apple box on the side of the road during the filming of “Wendy.” “We had nothing,” Reichardt said. She also explained that, on “Night Moves,” Eisenberg and Dakota Fanning helped push a car out of a ditch and lugged equipment around with the rest of the crew.“You really need to be the kind of person who wants to pitch in and who doesn’t mind that there aren’t walls between people and that you might be asked to drive yourself to work,” Williams said. Over the years Reichardt has recruited big name stars including Jesse Eisenberg, Kristen Stewart and Laura Dern, but she has said that “plenty of people” still say no to her. Acting in a Reichardt movie is not for everyone, she herself admitted.“I have a great rejection letter from Chris Cooper,” she said. “He just wrote, ‘I don’t want to live through this.’” (A representative for Chris Cooper did not have a comment.)Reichardt does not begrudge that response. “People are smart, like Michelle is down for it and is really game and you have to have people that are up for this kind of filmmaking,” she said, adding, “otherwise they’ll be very unhappy.”Dakota Fanning and Jesse Eisenberg in “Night Moves.”CinedigmThe lack of hierarchy on Reichardt’s sets also manifests onscreen, in some of Reichardt’s artistic choices. Patton recalled throwing away his ego on “Meek’s Cutoff,” about a group of pioneers in the arid Oregon desert under the guidance of a bloviating leader (Bruce Greenwood). “At a certain point you say, ‘OK, maybe you see me in a distance walking up a hill for this whole movie,” he said. “That’s kind of wonderful in a way.”That said, it was a wide shot in “Meek’s” that first made Magaro take notice of Reichardt as a filmmaker. The “brave” choice made him want to seek out more of her work.In addition to “brave,” Reichardt was described in interviews for this piece as a “genius” (by Williams), a “rascal” (by Hong Chau, who makes her Reichardt debut in “Showing Up”), and scary, of all adjectives, by Le Gros. “She scares me a little bit,” he said. “I don’t want to get her on my bad side.” When asked to explain why the small-in-stature Reichardt scares him, Le Gros said, “Any room that she’s in, she’s the toughest one there.”André Benjamin with Chau in “Showing Up.”Allyson Riggs/A24Reichardt knows what she wants and she is relentless in her pursuit of that. “She’s very decisive and uncompromising and she has a vision in her head and nothing is going to stop her from getting that on the screen whether that’s hail storms or oxen or 120-degree heat,” Williams said. But rather than Reichardt’s vision being restrictive, it’s actually liberating, according to Williams. “You can trust her to the ends of the Earth because of the filmmaker that she is,” the actress added.Reichardt, for her part, doesn’t think about actors when writing her films, which she often pens alongside Jon Raymond, who co-wrote “Showing Up.” When it came to Lizzy, an exhausted artist preparing for a show, what first made Reichardt consider Williams for the role was a photo of the sculptor Lee Bontecou.There’s no rehearsal on a Reichardt film, but Reichardt does provide her actors with reference materials before they arrive on set. Chau recalled the casting director Gayle Keller arriving at her house with a box of books and art supplies Reichardt wanted her to have before portraying Lizzy’s landlord Jo, a fellow artist with a slightly haughty demeanor.Beyond reading, there is also often an experiential element to preparing for a Reichardt film. The cast of “Meek’s Cutoff” went to a “pioneer camp,” while Magaro ventured into the wilderness with his “First Cow” co-star, Orion Lee, and a survivalist who gave them roadkill-skinning lessons. In the case of “Showing Up,” Chau shadowed the artist Michelle Segre, while Williams observed Cynthia Lahti, who provided the delicate statues of women that Lizzy makes.“I feel like that’s what it is with getting to work on films like ‘Showing Up’ or getting to work with Kelly Reichardt is what you do offset is just as important or if not more important than what you are doing on set,” Chau said.Williams has now been traveling to Portland to make films with Reichardt for 15 years and considers it a “homecoming.” She has even considered moving there full time. Williams remembered that way back when she was joining “Wendy and Lucy,” Reichardt told her, “I can’t promise you much but on set we’ll have good coffee and good sandwiches.” To Williams, that sounded great.Now they have some more amenities but the spirit of their work remains the same. “As these movies have gotten a little bit bigger and have gotten more attention, we still carry this incredible intimacy,” Williams said.And others want to come along. “I hope I get to join her little troupe of actors,” Chau said. “I will always show up to whatever Kelly does if she invites me.” More

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      ‘Showing Up’ Review: Making Art in All Its Everyday Glory

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      In their latest movie together, Michelle Williams and Kelly Reichardt paint a portrait of an artist who’s a real and wonderful piece of work.The stubbornly independent filmmaker Kelly Reichardt makes small-scale movies rooted in specific worlds, both inner and outer; nearly all take place in Oregon, where she’s long lived and worked. She traveled back in time for her last movie, “First Cow,” a moving chronicle of love, land and capitalism set in the Oregon Territory in the 19th century. Reichardt is back on more familiar ground in her latest, “Showing Up,” a wonderful slice of life that’s set in present-day Portland and is about something that she knows intimately: making art.The movies love tortured artists, inflamed geniuses who thunder against the establishment, aesthetic conventions, their historical epochs, God or just the nearest warm body. No one rages or slashes a canvas in “Showing Up,” though a few characters do raise their voices. At one point, its stubbornly independent hero, Lizzy — a sculptor played by a revelatory, notably de-glammed Michelle Williams — leaves an angry message on a colleague’s voice mail, an expletive-laced tirade that she ends with a comical bleat: “Have a great night.”It’s a gently funny and true moment in a gently funny and true movie that perfectly captures Lizzy’s complicated interiority. By the time she makes that call, you know a great deal about her. You know that she makes sculptures in her home studio and works at an art school, though what she does there remains unclear. What’s more crucial is that over the course of this delicate, detailed movie you become familiar with the petulantly downward slope of Lizzy’s mouth, the welcoming disorder of her apartment, the tender care that she takes with her art. You also know that she rarely smiles and scarcely ever says please or thank you.Written by Reichardt and Jon Raymond, “Showing Up” is a portrait of an individual but the film is universal in the sense that it’s about a woman living in the concrete here and now. Reichardt is interested in abstract ideas and everyday intangibles, but her filmmaking is precisely grounded in the material world, and so is Lizzy. If she has aesthetic principles, for instance, she doesn’t voice them. Reichardt, though, speaks volumes about art and the artistic process in this movie, which focuses on Lizzy as she prepares for a fast-approaching exhibit — a quietly fraught few days filled with painstaking creative labor as well as testy and comic interactions.When “Showing Up” opens, Lizzy is putting the finishing touches on the textured, small-scaled figurative sculptures that she molds from clay and then paints before having them fired in a kiln at the school. (The kiln operator is played by André Benjamin, making the charming most out of a modest role.) The figures are of women captured in well-defined poses, with some mounted with rods on wood bases. Several of these little women are erect, and others are recumbent; one stands on her head while a few look like they’ve been captured in mid-leap. A figurine with downcast eyes and a tiny, private smile looks a bit like Reichardt.As Lizzy works on her sculptures, their shape, details and distinct personalities emerge as do she and this wispy story. Things happen in Reichardt’s movies — minor, fleeting and profound things, just like in life. Story can seem both too grand and too impoverished a word to describe the personal, richly inhabited and realistic worlds she creates from faces and bodies, poses and gestures, rituals and habits, and her very specific grasp on time and place. But of course there’s always a story in how human beings navigate one another and sometimes try to bridge — and hide out in — that bristling, ineffable space between us.That space swells and contracts, by turns narrowing and expanding until it seems as vast and impassable as the Grand Canyon. Lizzy doesn’t make it easy to bridge; it’s instructive that she’s more openly affectionate with her cat than with her mother (Maryann Plunkett), who’s her boss at the school, or with her gruff father (a lovely Judd Hirsch). Yet while Lizzy works on her art in solitude (the cat comes and goes), she’s rarely alone for long, and the movie is filled with people, a vivid, eccentric and amusing collection that includes Jo (an essential Hong Chau), a vivacious artist who’s Lizzy’s landlord and the recipient of her angry phone call.Lizzy has reason to be irritated at Jo, who’s taking her time with fixing her broken water heater. But Jo is more than carelessly inattentive. A jolt of energy with a pickup truck and long, sweeping hair, Jo is sexy and popular, the very picture of the hip, hot artist and the apparent polar opposite of Lizzy, with her bob and frumpy look. Jo too is readying a new exhibit, but her gallery is bigger than Lizzy’s and her show more prestigious: It will have a catalog! The women get under each other’s skin, but like everyone else in Lizzy’s life — her family, her colleagues, the art students, her cat and a pigeon who swoops in and stays awhile — Jo sustains her.For Lizzy, making art is an act of self-creation, but it is also and always an act of communion, a way of being in the world and with other people. That makes “Showing Up” a somewhat reflexive self-portrait, one that owes much to Reichardt and Williams’s beautifully synced collaboration. This is the fourth movie that they’ve done together (their first was “Wendy and Lucy”), and it’s a joy to witness how perfectly aligned their work has become. Together, Reichardt and Williams — with little dialogue and boundless generosity — lucidly articulate everything that Lizzy will never say and need not say, opening a window on the world and turning this wondrous, determined, gloriously grumpy woman into a sublime work of art.Showing UpRated R for language. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. 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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      Inside the Oscars’ Best-Actress Battle Royale

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      Forget the men: A banner crop of leading ladies, including Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett, rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.Clockwise from top left, Margot Robbie in “Babylon”; Michelle Yeoh in “Everything Everywhere All at Once”; Danielle Deadwyler in “Till”; Cate Blanchett in “Tár”; Michelle Williams in “The Fabelmans”; and Viola Davis in “The Woman King.”Scott Garfield/Paramount Pictures; A24; Lynsey Weatherspoon/Orion Pictures; Focus Features; Merie Weismiller Wallace/Universal Pictures, via Amblin Entertainment; Sony PicturesBy their very nature, awards shows are designed to exclude, barring all but a few from the glory of earning a nomination.Still, this year’s race for the best-actress Oscar is so stacked with contenders that I’m ready to comb the academy bylaws for a workaround. Are five slots really enough to honor a field this formidable? Couldn’t we swipe a few more from the wan best-actor category, at least?The truth is, even 10 slots would barely scratch the surface of what the best-actress race has to offer. Many of the season’s most acclaimed films, like “Tár” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” have given career-best signature roles to their leading ladies, though only one woman can collect the Oscar. Meanwhile, a vast array of up-and-comers, actresses playing against type and underdogs worth a second look will be vying simply to make the final five. Here are the women contending in this season’s most exciting category.The Front-runnersIn the fictional world of “Tár,” the conniving conductor played by Cate Blanchett has been showered with an absurd amount of awards. By the end of this season, Blanchett herself may keep pace with her character.The two-time Oscar winner’s bravura performance — she learned German, orchestra conducting and piano for the role — has netted the most notable prizes so far: In addition to nominations from the Golden Globes, Critics Choice Awards, Independent Spirit Awards and Gotham Awards, Blanchett won the Volpi Cup for best actress at the Venice Film Festival and a pair of leading trophies from the New York Film Critics Circle and Los Angeles Film Critics Association. The last time Blanchett triumphed with the critics groups on both coasts, she was well on her way to winning her second Oscar, for “Blue Jasmine.”If she wins her third, the 53-year-old would be the youngest woman ever to reach that milestone. (Meryl Streep, Frances McDormand and Ingrid Bergman are the only other actresses to have won three Oscars each for their performances, while Katharine Hepburn holds the record with four.) But those laurels could also count against Blanchett in a race where her strongest competitor has never even been nominated and is angling for a historic win.Michelle Yeoh came close to snagging a supporting-actress nomination for “Crazy Rich Asians” (2018), but this time, she’s undeniable: The 60-year-old’s leading role in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” as an ordinary woman who becomes the multiverse’s last hope, should earn Yeoh her first Oscar nod.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.The role shows off everything Yeoh is capable of — including her athleticism, precise character work and sense of humor — and she has teared up in interviews while discussing how rarely a movie like that is offered to an Asian actress. In a recent awards round table, Yeoh told the other actresses, “I honestly look at all of you with such envy because you get an opportunity to try all the different roles, but we only get that opportunity maybe once in a long, long time.” Indeed, no Asian woman has ever won best actress, and after 94 ceremonies, the only winner of color in the category remains Halle Berry for “Monster’s Ball.”Can Yeoh pull off a landmark victory? It may help that she has a more sympathetic character arc: While Blanchett’s Lydia Tár compels and confounds in equal measure, Yeoh’s Evelyn Wang learns to drop her guard and let love in. But the competition in this category is fierce, and Blanchett isn’t the only heavyweight she’ll be contending with.For playing a character based on Steven Spielberg’s mother in “The Fabelmans,” Michelle Williams is likely to score her fifth Oscar nomination, which puts her behind Glenn Close and Amy Adams as the three living actresses who’ve been nominated the most times without having won. That gives Williams a potent “she’s due” narrative that could siphon votes from both Blanchett and Yeoh; it helps, too, that she gives her all to the part, playing a vivacious woman whose spirit couldn’t be contained by her marriage.The “Till” star Danielle Deadwyler won the first lead-performance trophy of the season at last month’s Gotham Awards, and she’ll need that momentum to overcome striking snubs from the Independent Spirits and Golden Globes. Still, her emotionally precise performance as the mother of Emmett Till has Oscar-friendly heft, since voters often gravitate toward an actor playing a historical figure.It’s rarer that Oscar voters make room for an action heroine in the best-actress category: Though Sigourney Weaver earned a nomination for “Aliens,” Charlize Theron found no traction for “Mad Max: Fury Road.” But there’s more to what Viola Davis does in “The Woman King” than just wielding a spear. Her fierce warrior is weary and her battle yells pack a cathartic punch. If the movie can make it into the best-picture lineup, Davis should be swept in.Damien Chazelle’s debauched Hollywood dramedy “Babylon” has earned wildly mixed reviews, but the director helmed two Oscar-winning performances — Emma Stone in “La La Land” and J.K. Simmons in “Whiplash” — and that pedigree has pushed Margot Robbie into contention for her role as a fledgling actress convinced of her own star quality. Nominations for “I, Tonya” and “Bombshell” prove that voters like Robbie in ambitious-striver mode, though the movie is stuffed so full of characters that she can’t quite dominate the proceedings like some of her best-actress competition.Oscar voters might consider an ingénue like Ana de Armas for her performance as Marilyn Monroe in “Blonde.” NetflixThe Women Waiting in the WingsCan two Oscar favorites overcome muted streaming launches in a year when theatrical contenders reign supreme? “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” hands Emma Thompson a sexually frank showcase role that had Oscar pundits buzzing at January’s Sundance Film Festival, but the film’s quiet June debut on Hulu drew fewer headlines. And despite a best-picture win this year for “CODA,” Apple TV+ still struggles to get all those “Ted Lasso” and “Severance” viewers to watch exclusive movies like “Causeway,” though the film features a strong, back-to-basics lead performance from Jennifer Lawrence.At least “Blonde” managed a streaming debut that got people talking, though the punishing Netflix drama about Marilyn Monroe had some awfully loud detractors. Can its star, Ana de Armas, rise above those pans? She managed a Golden Globe nomination, at least, and Oscar voters love to single out a rising ingénue, but the film will prove a tough sit in a year with plenty of better-received options.In the first hour of “Empire of Light,” Olivia Colman plays a movie-theater worker who opens herself up to an appealing romance, but in the second, the character goes off her meds and the movie goes off the rails. Even if those two halves don’t quite cohere, Colman definitely gets some big moments to play, and the actress has so quickly become an Oscar mainstay (over the last four years, she has been nominated three times and won once) that she should be considered a perennial option for the final five.Rooney Mara is spirited and sensitive in “Women Talking,” but the studio’s decision to campaign her as a lead actress is tenuous: In this ensemble drama about conflicted Mennonite women, Mara has scarcely more screen time than Claire Foy or Jessie Buckley, who are being positioned as supporting-actress contenders. Then again, Mara is no stranger to category high jinks: Six years ago, she was nominated as a supporting actress for “Carol,” even though she was clearly playing that film’s protagonist.Keke Palmer won a New York Film Critics Circle award for supporting actress for “Nope” even if it really was a lead performance. Universal PicturesThe Dark-Horse ContendersIf social media memes could be counted as accolades, Mia Goth would surely give Blanchett’s haul a run for her money: The young actress’s work in “Pearl,” in which she plays a farm girl who’d kill for stardom, has Twitter awash in Goth GIFs. Ti West’s technicolor horror drama isn’t the sort of thing that Oscar voters usually go for, but Goth is fearsomely committed, knocking out a tour de force, eight-minute monologue that’s topped only by a sustained closing shot of the actress smiling until she cries. At the very least, it’d make for one memorable Oscar clip.I hope that as the membership of the academy grows ever more international, more powerhouse performances will be recognized in languages other than English. In Park Chan-wook’s South Korean noir “Decision to Leave,” Tang Wei is a terrific femme fatale, while Léa Seydoux delivers her finest work as a single mother in the French drama “One Fine Morning.” And Oscar voters who regret snubbing Vicky Krieps for “Phantom Thread” could make it up to her by checking out the royal drama “Corsage,” in which she plays Empress Elisabeth of Austria with beguiling irreverence.Comedic actresses are too often undervalued by Oscar voters, but Aubrey Plaza spent 2022 proving she was capable of much more: Fans of her breakout performance in HBO’s “The White Lotus” should check out her dark, edgy work in the drama “Emily the Criminal,” which earned nominations from the Gothams and Indie Spirits. And “Nope,” which topped our critic A.O. Scott’s list of the best films of the year, boasts a charismatic star turn by Keke Palmer that recently earned a win from the New York Film Critics Circle, even if the group had to pretend she gave a supporting performance to get her out of the way of Blanchett’s leading win. Normally, I’d discourage that kind of category fraud, but in this crowded year, I sympathize with the desire to bend some rules. More

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      Gotham Awards: ‘Everything Everywhere’ and Adam Sandler Grab Spotlight

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      The film’s Ke Huy Quan also won the supporting-performance trophy at the season’s first big ceremony, where honoree Adam Sandler brought down the house.The hit sci-fi comedy “Everything Everywhere All at Once” earned top honors at the Gotham Awards on Monday night, taking the ceremony’s best-feature prize as well as a supporting-performance trophy for the actor Ke Huy Quan.“This time last year, all I was hoping for was just a job,” said an emotional Quan, who starred in “The Goonies” and “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” as a child actor but then found work hard to come by. “Just when I think it can’t get any better, it does.”The Gothams are the first big show of awards season, handing out prizes before the Screen Actors Guild and the Oscars have even announced their nominees. Though the winners are chosen by a jury made up of only a handful of film insiders, the Gothams can still provide momentum and a clutch of positive headlines for the contenders who triumph there.One such victory came for lead performance. Since the Gothams have adopted gender-neutral acting categories, three significant contenders for the best-actress Oscar — Cate Blanchett (“Tár”), Michelle Yeoh (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”) and Danielle Deadwyler (“Till”) — faced off against “The Whale” star Brendan Fraser, the presumptive front-runner for the best-actor Oscar. And in that star-packed battle royale, Deadwyler, a rising actress, prevailed for her performance as Mamie Till-Mobley, who becomes an activist following the racially motivated murder of her son, Emmett Till, in 1955.That will help Deadwyler earn more eyes for her movie, though she was absent from the ceremony, as was Steven Spielberg. He had been booked to present an honorary award to his “Fabelmans” star Michelle Williams but was forced to cancel after contracting Covid. Williams, another significant best-actress contender, took the stage to deliver a moving tribute to Mary Beth Peil, who played her grandmother on “Dawson’s Creek,” the teen drama in which Williams got her start.Inside the World of ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’In this mind-expanding, idiosyncratic take on the superhero film, a laundromat owner is the focus of a grand, multiversal showdown.Review: Our film critic called “Everything Everywhere All at Once” an exuberant swirl of genre anarchy.The Protagonist: Over the years, Michelle Yeoh has built her image as a combat expert. For this movie, she drew on her emotional reserves.A Lovelorn Romantic: A child star in the 1980s, Ke Huy Quan returns to acting as the husband of Yeoh’s character, a role blending action and drama.The Costume Designer: Shirley Kurata, who defined the look of the movie, has a signature style that mixes vintage, high-end designers and an intense color wheel.Aiming for the Oscars: At a screening meant to reposition the indie hit as an awards contender, actors and directors marveled at the way their quirky film has struck a chord.“Whenever something good happens in my life, I can draw a straight line” back to Peil, said Williams, who credited the older actress with patiently teaching her lessons about the craft when Williams was still finding her way. “I wasn’t an artist or a mother, I wasn’t even a high school graduate,” Williams said. “But I was Mary Beth’s girl, and that made me a somebody.”As an Oscar predictor, the Gotham Awards can be spotty: “Nomadland” kicked off its juggernaut run by winning the Gothams’ best-feature prize for 2020, though the Gothams victor for 2021, “The Lost Daughter,” didn’t manage to crack the Oscars’ best-picture lineup. And since the Gothams restrict eligibility to films made in the United States for less than $35 million, the ceremony spotlights a narrower slice of films than the Oscars do.Still, it’s a great barometer for industry enthusiasm: At last year’s Gothams, the winning “CODA” star Troy Kotsur delivered such a well-received acceptance speech that future victories, including the Oscar, seemed almost assured. This year, enthusiasm was high for “Everything Everywhere,” directed by Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan, which earned big cheers for its best-feature win but even bigger cheers for the endearing Quan, who plays Michelle Yeoh’s husband in the film and could be poised for a Kotsur-like sweep of the televised awards shows.“Oftentimes, it is in independent films where actors who otherwise wouldn’t get a chance find their opportunities,” said Quan, who had spent decades behind the camera until “Everything Everywhere” revived his career. “I was that actor.”Earlier in the show, held at Cipriani Wall Street, honorary awards were given out to “The Woman King” director Gina Prince-Bythewood and to the actor Adam Sandler, who brought the house down with a self-deprecating speech that he claimed had been written by his teenage daughters.But the most thoughtful comment came from the writer-director Todd Field, who picked up a best-screenplay prize for “Tár” and used his acceptance speech to take aim at the entire notion of awards shows.“‘Best.’ We all know that word is a cartoonish absolute with no place in any conversation about creative endeavors,” Field said. “But we campaign for it, we show up for it, we pray for it, if only so the thing we made will be seen and heard and not forgotten in this noisy world.” More

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      In Toronto, Films by Women About Women, but That’s Where the Similarities End

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      The Toronto International Film Festival returns to business mostly as usual with throngs of excited attendees and some of the year’s most anticipated new movies.Each year, filmgoers of all persuasions, casual viewers and true believers both, descend on the Toronto International Film Festival to sample and to gorge. Cannes has the red carpet, Telluride has Oscar contenders and Sundance has the next big thing, maybe. Toronto has bulk. It’s stuffed with movies of every type, size, style and ambition. Some are destined for immortality and others will enter the Oscar marathon that has already begun. Still other titles will languish on streaming platforms; some of these will deserve better fates.The festival, which ends Sunday, returned to full capacity this month after two years of severely limited in-person screenings. With mask mandates and other restrictions lifted, the crowds in theaters felt close to prepandemic levels, though not at their crushing worst. The throngs outside its main locations were marginally thinner, too, though they surged like tidal waves for the flashiest guests, notably Taylor Swift (accompanying her suitably titled 10-minute “All Too Well: The Short Film”) and Harry Styles (one of the stars of the gay period romance “My Policeman”).“Harry, Harry, Harry!” I heard one afternoon, as I rushed to a screening, past men and women racing toward a scrum of security personnel and parked black S.U.V.s. If Swift and Styles start making more movies and in-person appearances, theatrical distribution might have a chance to recover. Toronto may not do glamour all that well, but over the years it has transformed into an essential industry destination partly by “eventizing” itself, creating an 11-day spectacle for attendees and gawkers alike while serving as a launchpad for new movies like “The Woman King,” which opens Friday.Viola Davis in Gina Prince-Bythewood’s “The Woman King.”Ilze Kitshoff/Sony PicturesToronto skims a lot of cream from other festivals, giving audiences early peeks at the major titles that will be much discussed in coming months. And while journalists can often preview these offerings back home, it’s a singular experience seeing new movies with packed audiences, witnessing how jokes land and surprises shock. One movie that’s guaranteed to play extremely well is Laura Poitras’s elegantly structured documentary about the photographer Nan Goldin, “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” which just won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival. A personal-meets-the-political portrait that goes deep on Goldin’s opium-epidemic activism, it left the audience audibly moved; the distributor should hand out tissues with every ticket.Spotify should ready itself for an uptick in streaming of Louis Armstrong’s music. One highlight of my festival week was the documentary “Louis Armstrong’s Black & Blues,” which was directed by Sacha Jenkins, son of the filmmaker Horace B. Jenkins. (Apple has the documentary, but Sacha Jenkins said before one screening that it would also open in theaters.) Drawing on Armstrong’s vast personal archive — including reels of his taped musings — the movie builds beautifully into a portrait of a genius as well as the country that he graced and that didn’t give him the love he deserved. The music is of course brilliant, though some critics wanted more musicology to go with it.The audience I saw “Louis Armstrong” with seemed thrilled. The hothouse environment of festivals can be wildly misleading simply because people are so pumped to be in attendance, which can make widely reported metrics like the duration of standing ovations meaningless (boos are far more instructive). But watching a movie with other festivalgoers invariably heats up and enlivens a room, creates an electric vibe, though it helps when directors introduce their work. Steven Spielberg did just that for the premiere of “The Fabelmans,” a wistful coming-of-age story about a young film lover who grows up to become, well, you know.Paul Dano, left, Mateo Zoryan Francis-DeFord and Michelle Williams in “The Fabelmans,” about Steven Spielberg’s coming-of-age.Merie Weismiller Wallace/Universal Pictures and Amblin EntertainmentWritten by Spielberg and his frequent collaborator, Tony Kushner, the story tracks the awakening, cinematic and otherwise, of the young Sammy (played as a teenager by Gabriel LaBelle). The kid is the least interesting part of the movie, which perhaps sounds funny and even insulting but makes sense given that it’s about someone who grows up to make larger-than-life (Spielbergian!) fantasies. The father is played by Paul Dano, who seems to have borrowed Michael Stuhlbarg’s voice for the role, but the movie is anchored by Michelle Williams’s sensitive performance as the mother, Mitzi. Williams’s affecting intensity gives the movie regular shocking jolts of passion, attenuating its otherwise overly easy, overly familiar flow.“The Fabelmans” didn’t set the festival on fire; its restraint and lightly elegiac mood are unlikely to get most pulses racing, even if these qualities serve it extremely well. As he did in his version of “West Side Story,” which was also written by Kushner, Spielberg embraces a kind of poetic realism in “The Fabelmans” that I’m still getting a handle on. He’s looking at his own life through the mist, as you would expect. And while he shows the tears, if not necessarily the snot, Spielberg is also, in his singular way, engaging with some of the corrosive truths about his childhood, particularly with respect to Mitzi. It’s an interesting movie that I look forward to revisiting.Mitzi Fabelman is just one of the many women characters who made this year’s Toronto memorable. Another is Lib Wright, the brisk British nurse played by a strong Florence Pugh in the period drama “The Wonder.” Directed by Sebastián Lelio from Emma Donoghue’s novel, it follows Lib as she journeys to an isolated village in 19th-century rural Ireland, where she’s been employed by some stern local men to observe a girl, Anna (Kíla Lord Cassidy), who’s said not to have eaten in months. Is her fast a miracle, a scam, or something else? Not all of Lelio’s choices work, specifically his decision to call attention to the movie’s artifice (it opens and closes on a soundstage), but its horror and righteous fury are undeniable.Florence Pugh in “The Wonder,” set in 19th-century Ireland.NetflixPart of what made the bounty of all these women characters so pleasurable is that a fair number appear in movies directed by women. In the not-distant past, women often felt boxed in by their subjects, though especially by their modest resources. That’s less the case now, and day after day at Toronto, you could watch all manner of female-driven pictures, from spectacles to chamber pieces. Some women were as recognizable as your own life (if generally more interesting) and others were entirely, engagingly different. For someone who makes a living primarily writing about movies made by men with men and for men, it was especially gratifying.That was the case even when the movies didn’t entirely work or felt off the mark. I can’t vouch for the historical accuracy of “Emily,” a moving, sexually charged drama about Emily Brontë directed by the actress Frances O’Connor. Certainly I never heard about some of the wilder things that this Emily (an excellent Emma Mackey) does throughout her tumultuous, tragically abbreviated, dramatically inflected life. Even so, with its performances, its unabashed romanticism and visual choices — landscapes, textures, gleaming light and bodies — the movie persuasively opens up an artistic consciousness, showing how Brontë became the writer that she did. However fanciful its portrait of the artist as a young woman, it’s very effective.Alice Diop’s electric contemporary drama “Saint Omer” turns on a very different question of truth. Set partly in a French courtroom, it centers on a young writer, Rama (Kayije Kagame), sitting in on the trial of another woman, Laurence (Guslagie Malanda), who’s admitted to drowning her baby. Intellectually galvanizing and emotionally harrowing, the story explores motherhood, race and postcolonial France with control, lucidity and compassion. It’s an extraordinary work that’s all the more impressive because it’s the first fiction feature from Diop, who’s an established documentarian.“Saint Omer” will be on the slate in the forthcoming New York Film Festival and so will “The Eternal Daughter,” from the British filmmaker Joanna Hogg. It too concerns motherhood, though in a different register and to dissimilar ends. It focuses on a relationship between a mother-and-daughter duo, similar characters who are both played with distinct nuance by Tilda Swinton. The story largely takes place at a grand hotel where the two have come for an intimate, progressively more fraught getaway. Over the course of the story, the time frame subtly, at times comically, shifts, as does the relationship, which — like Swinton’s twinned performances — proves devastating. More

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      The Eight Film Festival Movies That Got the Biggest Awards Boost

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      “Women Talking,” women fighting, a pair of Brendans and more: After Toronto, Venice and Telluride, here are the titles and performances in the conversation.Who are the front-runners, the dark horses and the long shots? After major film festivals in Venice, Telluride and Toronto, where most of the year’s remaining prestige films have screened, the awards season has finally begun to come into focus.There are still a few significant contenders yet to debut, like Damien Chazelle’s glitzy Hollywood drama “Babylon,” and the industry is buzzing that Apple will soon announce a year-end release for its big-budget slavery drama, “Emancipation,” even though the film’s leading man, Will Smith, was banned from attending the Oscars for the next decade. And some tantalizing questions from these festivals still linger, like whether “Glass Onion,” the rollicking sequel to “Knives Out,” can score the best-picture nomination that the first film missed out on.But in the meantime, here are the eight films that came out of the fall festivals with the biggest awards-season pop.‘The Whale’There are few things Oscar voters prefer more than a transformational role and a comeback narrative, and this season, Brendan Fraser’s got both. In Darren Aronofsky’s new drama, Fraser wears a prosthetic bodysuit to transform into a 600-pound shut-in named Charlie, who attempts to reconnect with his angry daughter (Sadie Sink) as his health falters. Interest is high in the 53-year-old actor’s return to the limelight, and every time a clip hit social media of the emotional Fraser soaking up applause in Venice and Toronto, a young generation raised on his heroics in “The Mummy” reliably made those videos go viral. Though some festival pundits have taken issue with the film’s depiction of an obese protagonist, awards voters will still be wowed by Fraser’s work, making him this year’s prohibitive best-actor favorite.‘The Fabelmans’Steven Spielberg’s new film about his own coming-of-age was warmly received in Toronto, where Michelle Williams won best-in-show notices as Mitzi, the theatrical mother of the movie’s young Spielberg stand-in. Expect the actress to pick up her fifth Oscar nomination and, if she is run as a supporting performer, her first win. Even before its festival debut, awards watchers thought Spielberg’s film would land at the top of their best-picture prediction lists, but the film isn’t juggernaut-shaped — it’s lighter, more intimate and an appealing ramble in a way that people might not have anticipated. That may mean that the field is still open for a best-picture favorite to emerge, or perhaps “The Fabelmans” could sneak its way there in the end without earning the resentment accrued by an early-season front-runner.‘The Woman King’ and the Art of WarViola Davis leads a strong cast into battle in Gina Prince-Bythewood’s action epic inspired by real women warriors.Review:  “‘The Woman King’ is a sweeping entertainment, but it’s also a story of unwavering resistance in front of and behind the camera,” our critic writes.Viola Davis: As our reporter visited her on the set, Davis spoke about how powerful it was to watch Black women transform into warriors.Director Q&A: In an interview with The Times, Prince-Bythewood explained how she went about tackling what would be, logistically, her biggest film yet.Anatomy of a Scene: Prince-Bythewood had the actors perform their own stunts in the film. In some cases, that meant pulling off flips to the dirt as well as wrestling scenes.‘Tár’It’s been 16 years since Todd Field last directed a film, but expect his third feature, “Tár,” to hit the Oscar-nominated heights of his predecessors, “In the Bedroom” and “Little Children.” It will certainly be one of the year’s most talked-about movies: The story touches on hot-button topics like cancel culture and #MeToo as it follows a famed conductor (Cate Blanchett) whose career begins to crumble when her past catches up with her. Blanchett earned career-best raves at Venice for the role — and taught herself German, piano and conducting to boot — so a third Oscar is well within reach. Still, a strong year for best-actress contenders will make Blanchett’s battle a fierce one.‘The Banshees of Inisherin’Five years after “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” earned Oscars for Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell, the writer-director Martin McDonagh is back with a dark comedy whose cast could run the table, too. Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson are longtime friends whose relationship is severed in the most baffling way, and Farrell’s constant attempts to mend the rift push their petty grievances into the realm of tragedy. Both men are wonderful and will probably earn their first Oscar nominations, but if voters really flip for the film — and I suspect they will — then the supporting performers Kerry Condon (as Farrell’s sister) and Barry Keoghan (as a cockeyed friend) will be in the mix as well.‘Women Talking’This Sarah Polley-directed drama about Mennonite women in crisis was Telluride’s most significant world premiere this year, and in that Colorado enclave, which regularly draws a large contingent of Oscar voters, “Women Talking” did quite well. With a sprawling ensemble cast that includes awards favorites Rooney Mara, Jessie Buckley and Claire Foy — as well as three-time best-actress winner McDormand in a small role — “Women Talking” should nab several nominations, even though some of the male viewers I spoke to after the film’s Toronto screening proved surprisingly resistant to the film’s feature-long debate about sexual violence.‘The Woman King’Forget “Women Talking,” how about women fighting? This old-fashioned action epic from the director Gina Prince-Bythewood played through the roof in Toronto and stars Viola Davis as the leader of the Agojie, an all-female group of warriors defending their kingdom in 1820s West Africa. Davis is an Oscar winner (with three more nominations, too) who called “The Woman King” her magnum opus while introducing the film, and a performance this passionate and athletic should be in contention all season. But a notable box-office haul will be crucial to the film’s fate (it opens Friday), since even bigger action films like “Avatar: The Way of Water” and “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” are due at year’s end and will be following Oscar-nominated predecessors.‘All the Beauty and the Bloodshed’The expansion of the best picture race to 10 nominees has made room for all sorts of previously snubbed movies, from Marvel spectaculars to Pixar tentpoles. But when will a documentary be nominated for best picture? Laura Poitras’s new film, “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” beat all fiction narratives at Venice to take the Golden Lion, the fest’s top award, and this portrait of photographer Nan Goldin as she protests the wealthy Sackler family’s role in the opioid crisis will be distributed by Neon, the company that managed an Oscar first with the Korean-language best picture winner “Parasite.” At the very least, “All the Beauty” will be a strong contender for the documentary Oscar that Poitras won for her 2014 film about Edward Snowden, “Citizenfour.”‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’This A24 film from the directing team Daniels opened way back in March, but you’d hardly know that based on the major festival tributes to its star, Michelle Yeoh, in both Toronto and Venice. A flag was planted in both places: This indie hit has now entered its awards-campaign phase, and since the fall festivals didn’t produce major front-runners in the picture and directing categories, expect “Everything Everywhere,” to gun for recognition in both races as well as the supporting actor category (where Ke Huy Quan could be this year’s Troy Kotsur), original screenplay and more. Yeoh’s best-actress nomination is almost certain, though she’ll face plenty of competition from Blanchett. Both women were handed dazzling signature roles this year, and their race should be the season’s most exciting. More

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      In ‘The Fabelmans,’ Steven Spielberg Himself Is the Star

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      But it’s Michelle Williams who burns brightest in this film based on Spielberg’s childhood, which just premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival.Steven Spielberg’s “The Fabelmans” is the movie every fall film festival was dying to have, but only Toronto got it. And at the Saturday-night premiere, the collective excitement was making people lose their minds.It wasn’t just the enthusiastic audience, many of whom had come straight from the well-received premiere of the “Knives Out” sequel “Glass Onion.” And it wasn’t just the giddiness of Cameron Bailey, who runs the Toronto International Film Festival, as he introduced the filmmaker for the first time. Even Spielberg himself got carried away in the madness.“I’m so glad I came to Toronto,” he said. Thank you, Steven. Same. #TIFF22 pic.twitter.com/wLAwQW58IW— Cameron Bailey (@cameron_tiff) September 11, 2022
      “I’m really glad we came to Toronto!” exclaimed the 75-year-old director, noting that this would be the first time a film of his had played at a film festival. That claim would appear to sweep away the New York Film Festival showings of “Bridge of Spies” and “Lincoln,” the Cannes premieres of “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” and “The BFG,” and the South by Southwest bow of “Ready Player One,” but hey, sometimes you’ve got to clear the table before you can set it.And at least his lie felt emotionally true, since the stakes were so significant: By landing “The Fabelmans,” Toronto could fortify itself after two pandemic-diminished years, while Spielberg could claim the friendliest possible audience for his most personal film yet.Written by the director and his frequent collaborator Tony Kushner, “The Fabelmans” is an only slightly fictionalized retelling of Spielberg’s own coming-of-age. Sammy Fabelman (played as a teenager by Gabriel LaBelle) is a movie-mad kid who stages increasingly elaborate short films that star his sisters, classmates and semi-supportive parents. His dad, Burt (Paul Dano), is too swept up in his computer-programming job to understand Sammy’s artistic inclinations, but his mother, Mitzi (Michelle Williams), is a free spirit who never got to realize her dreams of working as a pianist and encourages Sammy to follow his bliss.Their mother-son bond is strong, and when Sammy films her dancing on a family trip and later shows her the edited footage, Mitzi beams. “You see me,” she says. But Sammy sometimes sees too much: As he gets older, he notices that Mitzi’s strong bond with her husband’s best friend (Seth Rogen) borders on an emotional affair. And as the family moves from New Jersey to Arizona and then finally to California, the ties that bind begin to fray.I found “The Fabelmans” to be only secondarily Spielberg’s origin story; primarily, it’s a look-at-what-she-can-do Michelle Williams vehicle, and the actress really goes for it, attacking this part like someone who knows she’s been handed her signature role. Based on Spielberg’s late mother, Leah, Mitzi is a dramatic personality, prone to flights of fancy and intense mood swings, and at any given moment, she’ll laugh, cry, sing or pack the kids into the car for an impromptu tornado chase. You love her, but she’s a lot — on this, the viewer and Sammy both agree — and Williams finds exactly the right moments to dial back the bigness and remind you that there is something private and vulnerable at the core of this very outgoing woman.Spielberg told the Toronto crowd that he’d had Williams in mind to play his mom ever since he saw her work in “Blue Valentine” (2010), which earned Williams the second of her four Oscar nominations; if she is campaigned as a supporting actress for “The Fabelmans” (as I suspect she will be, despite her ample screen time), this could very well propel the well-respected 42-year-old to her first win, just a year after Spielberg’s “West Side Story” actress Ariana DeBose topped that same race.Spielberg films always have plenty of Oscar upside, and “The Fabelmans” will be a strong contender in the picture and directing categories (and could even score a nod for Judd Hirsch, who puts in a scene-stealing cameo as Mitzi’s uncle), but the film is gentler, shaggier and more intimate than some of his other awards-season juggernauts, and there’s no need to oversell it at this early date. Even Spielberg, sensing all the hype in the room, sought to downplay speculation that “The Fabelmans” served as any sort of magnum-opus finale.“This is not because I’m going to retire and this is my swan song,” he told Toronto. “Don’t believe any of that!” More

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      Review: Unearthing the Late Curiosities of Tennessee Williams

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      “Hilton Als Presents,” from New York Theater Workshop, features three of the playwright’s overlooked and often disparaged works.Once mortals become immortal, it’s easy to forget how precariously they stumbled through life. That is certainly true of Tennessee Williams, who ensured his place in the pantheon of American playwriting with his early hits “The Glass Menagerie,” “A Streetcar Named Desire” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” but spent his last two decades — after “The Night of the Iguana,” in 1961 — in what Hilton Als calls “a kind of critical purgatory.”But critics at their most vital aren’t a baying wolf pack chasing weakened prey. They’re champions of the overlooked, the underpraised, the misunderstood. In that spirit, Als, a writer for The New Yorker who won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2017, is asking for a reconsideration of some late Williams works.In “Selections From Tennessee Williams,” the second episode of the two-part New York Theater Workshop podcast “Hilton Als Presents,” he plucks excerpts from three plays dismissed in their own time: “In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel,” from 1969; “The Red Devil Battery Sign,” which succumbed in 1975 en route to Broadway; and “Clothes for a Summer Hotel,” Williams’s final Broadway premiere in his lifetime. It opened in 1980 on his 69th birthday and was met with such a pile-on of viciously mocking reviews that it closed after just two weeks.These plays are not exceptional in Williams’s oeuvre as considerations of masculinity, sexuality or the divided self — though, as Als notes, each includes a male artist character.Directed by Als, and with skillful audio production and editing by Alex Barron, the podcast does not always succeed in conveying, with voice and stage directions, what we need to envision.The scene from “The Red Devil Battery Sign,” starring Raúl Castillo as a band leader and Marin Ireland as a sexually rapacious belle, feels too untethered from context to add up to anything. But each of the other plays is memorable for a standout performance and for glimmers of beauty in the text.The longest excerpt, from “In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel,” at first seems an airless exercise: an encounter between a brittle yet lascivious American woman (Nadine Malouf) and the Japanese barman (James Yaegashi) she is harassing. It comes to life only belatedly, with the entrance of Reed Birney as her husband, Mark, an exceedingly drunken painter struggling to maintain his dignity and harness his artistry. It is an utterly lived-in performance, edged with terror and mirth. (John Lahr, in his biography of Williams, calls this play “a fascinating dissection of the perversity of his psyche,” and he is correct.)“In the beginning,” Mark says, his hands shaky, paint all over his suit, “a new style of work can be stronger than you, but you learn to control it. It has to be controlled.”Williams, at that point, was not doing so well at controlling his art, his addictions or his emotional frailty.The other magnetic turn is by Michelle Williams in “Clothes for a Summer Hotel,” which the playwright labeled “a ghost play,” about Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald. As Zelda — a role originated by Geraldine Page on Broadway — Williams evades the traps that lie in wait in Tennessee Williams’s women: the masks and artifices of gender and class that made him famous for writing diva roles, and that often expose those characters to ridicule. Against the odds, Michelle Williams locates a human being.“Are you certain, Scott, that I fit the classification of dreamy young Southern lady?” Zelda asks her husband (played by André Holland). “Damn it, Scott. Sorry, wrong size, it pinches! Can’t wear that shoe, too confining.”Tennessee Williams, too, felt pinched and confined by expectations. He was forever in competition with his younger self.Als’s production doesn’t persuasively argue for these late plays. But it does accomplish what a critic is meant to do when elevation is in order — to urge close examination of something that might otherwise escape our gaze.Perhaps, taking Als’s cue, some brilliant director will see a way.Hilton Als Presents: Selections From Tennessee WilliamsThrough July 31; nytw.org. At anchor.fm/nytw79 and major podcast platforms. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. More