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    Patrick Wilson on ‘Insidious: The Red Door’ and ‘The Conjuring’

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    When Patrick Wilson was first approached about reprising the role of Josh Lambert — the patriarch of a family terrorized by ghouls in James Wan’s haunted-house chiller, “Insidious” (2010) — he was unenthusiastic.“Another sequel? I thought, ‘Oh boy, what new ground is there to even cover?’ I’m good. I’ve got my other horror franchise,” Wilson said.The “other” franchise refers to “The Conjuring,” also conceived by Wan, which began as a 2013 paranormal horror tale that led to a separate universe of sequels and prequels in which Wilson plays one half of a team of married demonologists. Between “The Conjuring” and the first two “Insidious” movies, Wilson has established himself as a bona fide scream king. Still, he’s a classically trained actor who has starred in big-budget superhero movies (“Watchmen,” “Aquaman”), indie dramas (“Little Children”) and musical theater productions (“Oklahoma!”). The prospect of a new “Insidious” didn’t seem all that exciting.Then, Wilson was asked if he’d consider directing it, too. That got his attention.Wilson on set with Ty Simpkins, who plays his son in “Insidious: The Red Door.” The two also worked together on “Little Children.”Boris Martin/Screen Gems and SonyWilson starring in the latest “Insidious.” He initially wasn’t interested in the sequel, especially because he also has the “Conjuring” franchise.Nicole Rivelli/Screen Gems/Sony“I’d been trying to direct a movie since 2015,” Wilson told me over coffee at a West Village bistro. “TV didn’t appeal to me. And I’m not the kind of guy who wants to make a tiny indie that nobody sees just to prove that I can do it. I want my movie to play well in theaters, so to have this half-a-billion-dollar franchise supported by a studio come my way — that’s rare for a first-time director.”“Insidious: The Red Door,” the fifth movie to fly under the “Insidious” banner, wisely skips over the lackluster third and fourth installments and returns to the events of “Insidious: Chapter 2” (2013). After nearly ax-murdering his entire family, Jack Torrance-style, Josh retakes control of his body from a psycho-biddy demon, and — with the help of a mind-scrubbing hypnotist — completely represses all memory of his possession. The Lamberts are free and the credits roll.“No offense, but that’s not how you deal with a problem,” Wilson chuckled.“The Red Door” confronts the trauma of that earlier film from the perspective of a father-son relationship. Ten years later, Josh has separated from his wife, Renai (Rose Byrne), and is the quintessential absent dad, haunted by a past he can’t articulate. In “Insidious,” it’s revealed that the couple’s eldest child, Dalton (Ty Simpkins), has inherited his father’s ability to astral project, which renders him vulnerable to the ghosts hanging out in a netherworld called the Further. Dalton, too, had his memory erased. Now, the prickly teenager rejects his father, though he’s stuck with him on the drive to his first year of art school.I asked Wilson if his sons — one is heading to college soon — send him curt one-word texts. “Nah, we have a great relationship,” said Wilson, who since 2005 has been married to the actress Dagmara Dominczyk (Karolina in “Succession”).“I’m not the kind of guy who wants to make a tiny indie that nobody sees just to prove that I can do it,” Wilson said of directing. “I want my movie to play well in theaters.”Victor Llorente for The New York TimesWilson accepted the offer to direct “The Red Door” under the condition that it would “make sense with my life.” In practical terms, this meant shooting near his home in Montclair, N.J. (“It was almost like a regular job, coming back to the family after work,” he said.) But he was also keen for his debut to reflect him as a person.Before shooting the Roland Emmerich disaster flick “Moonfall” (2022) and the forthcoming “Aquaman” sequel, Wilson sat down with the screenwriter Scott Teems (“Halloween Kills”) and, essentially, bared his soul. Teems took these raw materials and shaped them into a story about inherited trauma and artistic vulnerability — with jump scares and creepy-crawlies, of course.The film marks a return to form for the “Insidious” franchise, recapturing the original’s pretentiousless thrills and fun-house charms, approaching the Lamberts’ grim history with the silliness and sincerity of throwback horror from the ’80s or ’90s.“The best kind of horror movie makes you feel unsafe,” Michael Koresky, the co-founder of the Museum of Moving Image’s house publication, Reverse Shot, wrote in an email. Koresky is a fan of the “Insidious” movies, explaining that watching the original was like “a breath of fresh air amid the fetid field of reactionary early-21st-century horror, which had become reliant on gruesome torture. Every time a face appeared after a shock cut, I remember feeling played like a piano — thrillingly so.”Wilson wasn’t an especially big fan of the genre when he first signed on to “Insidious.” He considers himself a generalist. “I grew up with Indiana Jones and ‘Star Wars,’” said Wilson, who just turned 50, adding that his taste in film was shaped by outings to the multiplexes around Tampa Bay, Fla., where he was raised with his two older brothers.“I was into horror movies that transcended genre — ‘Salem’s Lot,’ ‘Jaws.’” His eyes widened: “‘Poltergeist.’ I remember when I was a kid, our house was robbed. Absolutely no connection to the ‘Poltergeist,’ but the way my brain processed that event, the terror I felt when we got home and realized our house had been invaded, my memory embedded the two things together.”For “The Red Door,” Wilson knew he wanted Dalton to be an artist, invoking the horror archetype of the gloomy kid drawing morbid images in crayon — only Dalton, at 18, has decided to make a career out of it. “Going to any kind of arts school is spiritually taxing,” Wilson said, recalling his years in Carnegie Mellon University’s acting conservatory. Under the tutelage of a demanding professor (Hiam Abbass from “Succession”), Dalton is encouraged to dig into his inner life to fuel his work, which teases the Further’s fiends out of hiding.Wilson routinely travels to Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh to lead acting workshops. “I’ve always been comfortable with instructing others,” he said, explaining that he may not be a “film school guy” but he does know a thing or two about how the camera creates images.Wilson is a classically trained performer who leads acting workshops at his alma mater, Carnegie Mellon University. Victor Llorente for The New York Times“I’m always conscious of my relationship to the camera when I act — what is the lens size? How is it moving? I made my actors watch themselves because what you feel and what the audience sees can be different things.”Josh, terrified that he’s perpetuating the mistakes of his own father, tries desperately to find the cause for his instability. In one eerie sequence, he gets an M.R.I. When he’s in the machine, the lights cut off, and the camera approximates the patient’s woozy point of view — total vulnerability, meaning something’s just around the corner.Set primarily on a college campus, the film also pokes fun at the fragility of men who try incredibly hard to seem, well, masculine — like the toxic fraternity brothers floating in Dalton’s orbit. Wilson’s own statuesque appearance — I told him I still think of him as the “prom king,” the name given to him by the lusty neighborhood mothers in “Little Children” — might seem to group him with this lot. With “The Red Door,” Wilson made a point to engage with the cultural conversation about masculinity. Being a father to two sons means he’s constantly thinking about what it means to promote a healthy identity for young men.“Men have a hard time sharing how they feel, me included,” Ty Simpkins wrote in an email. He and Wilson have something of a longstanding father-son bond: Simpkins’s first role was as the prom king’s jester-hat-wearing toddler in “Little Children,” and Wilson “even shared a beer with me on my 21st birthday,” Simpkins added.Wilson perked up when I asked him about his love of rock music, another personal touch he weaves into his directing debut. Listen closely and you’ll hear him singing over the end credits to the heavy-metal stylings of the Swedish band Ghost. Wilson seemed giddy to join the small ranks of directors who sing songs in their own movies. He cited John Carpenter and “Big Trouble in Little China” as an inspiration.When Mike Nichols cast him in “Angels in America,” Wilson said the director talked to him about Paul Newman’s career. “Being a movie star is hard, he told me. You go where it takes you. To enjoy doing one of the opportunities given to you — that’s a privilege.” More

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      ‘Insidious: The Red Door’ Review: The Ghost of Jump Scares Past

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      Patrick Wilson makes his directorial debut with this fifth installment of the horror franchise haunted by a red-faced demon.“Insidious,” whose fifth installment opened Friday, is a second-tier horror franchise — it’s not even the best James Wan franchise starring Patrick Wilson, which would be “The Conjuring” — with a few elite jump scares, including one of the best in the genre. In the original in 2010, Lorraine Lambert (Barbara Hershey) is telling her son, Josh (Wilson), about a horrible dream when a red-faced demon suddenly appears behind his head. It’s a magnificent shock because of the askew blocking, the patient misdirection of the editing and Hershey’s committed performance.In “Insidious: The Red Door,” a grim, workmanlike effort that collapses into woo-woo nonsense, Wilson makes his directorial debut, and demonstrates he grasps the importance of that jump scare, which is sketched in charcoal on paper next to his name in the opening credits. But that reference is also a reminder of what’s missing.The movie begins nine years after the second “Insidious” at the funeral of Lorraine, and its first scare, a nicely oblique if relatively simple one, once again takes place above her son’s head. Josh’s memory has been scrubbed in the previous film but nags at him, and Wilson doesn’t move the camera from his own face inside a car as he goes through an array of emotions while texting his son Dalton (Ty Simpkins). This prickly relationship is at the center of the movie, as dad drives his son to college. They share the family curse, a habit of being visited by evil figures from another realm called the Further (think the Upside Down from “Stranger Things”).As has become cliché, trauma takes center stage, with characters mouthing lines like, “We need to remember even the things that hurt” — which is at least better than pretentious small talk like “Death floods the mind with memory.”The leaden screenplay would be easier to overlook if there were more spooky sequences. Wilson stages one nicely claustrophobic scene inside an M.R.I. machine, but his peekaboo shocks can be a little telegraphed. And while his placid, android handsomeness can hint at the uncanny, making him a magnetic horror actor, there are fewer standout performances than in previous installments of the series, which has been notable for turns by Rose Byrne and Lin Shaye (both of whom show up again, too briefly). “The Red Door” loses energy when it focuses on Simpkins’s Dalton, a blandly brooding artist type who cries while painting, and the grim doings in the Further, whose aesthetic evokes a homemade haunted house in the family garage.“Insidious” is essentially a ghost story, so ending it presents a typical challenge. Unlike with vampires and serial killers, it’s not clear how the apparition threatens to end the chase. The abrupt resolution of this chapter is a letdown, but not as much of one as the return of the red-faced demon, who pops up, unobscured, center frame. The result is not a jump scare so much as a bunny hop.Insidious: The Red DoorRated PG-13 for explicit violins and implicit violence. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Luke Parker Bowles, the Queen Consort’s Nephew, on Life in New Jersey

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      The film and television producer, who works with the British Consulate, is also committed to saving small-town movie theaters in the United States.Last month in New York City, the outpouring of grief over Queen Elizabeth II’s death mostly happened in a handful of English specialty shops and inside many, many apartments. But there was at least one public memorial service, which took place at the Queen Elizabeth II Garden in Lower Manhattan.“Long live the king,” proclaimed Luke Parker Bowles, a film and television producer and one of a few individuals who helped create the garden in 2005 to honor members of Commonwealth nations who died on Sept. 11.As a New Jersey resident and the nephew of Camilla Parker Bowles, Mr. Parker Bowles suddenly finds himself a diplomat, of sorts, for the crown in the metropolitan area. “I do like being an ambassador for her and His Majesty in New York,” he said. “I am the Parker Bowles who is here.”Besides his day job — he works with the British Consulate to promote British talent and owns a film-production company, Odd Sausage — he and Patrick Wilson, the actor, started and now help to run Cinema Lab, an initiative that rescues struggling small-town movie theaters and turns them into sophisticated venues for eating, drinking and taking in the latest blockbuster. The group currently owns five theaters, including several in New Jersey and one in New Canaan, Conn. “These theaters are metaphorically and literally the heart beats of certain towns,” Mr. Parker Bowles said.Mr. Parker Bowles, 44, lives with his wife Daniela Parker Bowles, 47, and their three children in Montclair, where he helps oversee the town’s film festival, scheduled this year for Oct. 21-30.Ahead of the Montclair Film Festival, Mr. Parker Bowles spoke with The New York Times about his work and mission. The following interview has been edited and condensed.What inspired you to move to New York?I was visiting New York City from London for a long weekend with two friends. We went to this club named Spa that was located right next to Union Square. That night P. Diddy jumped onstage and started playing this impromptu performance. I thought this is just how New York is and this happens every night.Some Key Moments in Queen Elizabeth’s ReignCard 1 of 9Becoming queen. More

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      ‘Moonfall’ Review: Out of Orbit

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      Halle Berry and Patrick Wilson save the world from a rogue moon in the latest disaster movie from the director of “Independence Day.”In the disaster movie “Moonfall,” the moon goes out of orbit and starts coiling its way toward Earth, causing environmental disasters and setting the clock on humanity. Scientists calculate ellipses; screenwriters ready their exclamations. “Everything we thought we knew about the nature of the universe has just gone out the window,” a N.A.S.A. official (Halle Berry) proclaims. But for the director Roland Emmerich (“Independence Day,” “The Day After Tomorrow,” “2012”), who treats the planet to potentially life-ending cataclysms with the regularity of dental checkups, it’s not much new under the sun.To learn more, Berry’s character, Jocinda, visits a restricted N.A.S.A. compound, where Donald Sutherland, as the staff deep-secrets keeper, appears to have been waiting, growing his hair long and listening to Mahler with a gun ready. Jocinda will need to team up with Brian (Patrick Wilson), an ex-astronaut who hates her after the fallout from an accident years earlier. Their moonshot to save the world, carried out as a rogue mission while the authorities stupidly ready their nukes, will involve traveling through space without electricity. Their seatmate — a fringe-science guy (John Bradley) whose mantra is “what would Elon do?” — should probably turn off his smartphone.This off-world adventure flirts with the transcendently goofy, but Emmerich spoils it by crosscutting to a useless narrative thread on Earth, where Brian and Jocinda’s sons (Charlie Plummer and Zayn Maloney) have been thrown together to seek safety in Colorado, for reasons that make as little sense as anything else. (Hearing that the planet is on the brink, Michael Peña, as Brian’s ex-wife’s current husband, announces, “We should go to Aspen.”)While geologic shifts have made geography fungible, they aren’t responsible for the shoddy rendering of the New York skyline. And they can’t be blamed for the dialogue, which expresses clichés in unusually direct terms: “You’re putting the fate of the world in the hands of your ex-wife and some has-been astronaut!” Better that than to trust Emmerich for anything beyond incidental fun.MoonfallRated PG-13. Dumb decisions. Running time: 2 hours 4 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Actress Dagmara Dominczyk Burns Bright in ‘Succession’ and 'The Lost Daughter'

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      The Polish actress also stars in “The Lost Daughter,” directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal.Evening Leather? Too leathery. Bahama Mama? Too beachy. Peaches and Cream? Out of season. Sweet Kitty? No.On the Sunday before Christmas, in a windowless basement under a braiding salon in Downtown Brooklyn, the actress and novelist Dagmara Dominczyk searched for the perfect aroma. A candle devotee since her undergraduate days at Carnegie Mellon University (“I burn them morning to night,” she said), she had arrived for a “Sip & Smell Experience”: a free two-hour workshop hosted by Kately’s Candles that she had found on Eventbrite.Upon arriving, Kevin Pierre-Louis, the organizer, seated her on a greige vinyl sofa and presented her with a caddy of about 50 small bottles with hand-printed labels. His assistant handed her a glass of sparkling rosé, which she sipped with care.“I’m a spiller,” she said. “I spill. I stain.”“You’re too pretty,” Mr. Pierre-Louis said. “I don’t see you spilling.”“I’m pretty because I did my makeup,” Ms. Dominczyk, 45, replied.He brought her more bottles and she sniffed them, rejecting most. “Not Mistletoe,” she said. “I used to like candles that smelled like a Christmas tree, now it’s too much.” She reached for another bottle and read the label out loud. “Creamy Nutmeg — that’s what they used to call me in high school,” she said jokingly.Ms. Domińczyk sniffs scents for her candle.OK McCausland for The New York TimesEarthy and elegant, Ms. Dominczyk, the eldest of three daughters, immigrated to the United States from Poland when she was 6. (Her father, active in the trade unions movement, had become a persona non grata.) Encouraged by a friend, she auditioned for the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, where she blossomed as an actress. After graduating from Carnegie Mellon, she booked the female lead in a lush 2002 film adaptation of “The Count of Monte Cristo.”Her career seemed assured.Instead, she spent the next few years staying out, sleeping in, eating Polish food and working only sporadically — a movie here, a television episode there. She dated the actor Patrick Wilson (they briefly overlapped at college), married him the next year, had their first son the year after, and a second son three years later. They live in Montclair, N.J.Work remained occasional. Her body had new curves. When her husband appeared in a 2013 episode of “Girls” as Lena Dunham’s sex interest, some online trolls suggested that a conventionally attractive man like Mr. Wilson would never have a tryst with someone like Ms. Dunham. Ms. Dominczyk snapped back on Twitter, saying: “Funny, his wife is a size 10, muffin top & all, & he does her just fine.”Casting directors — some of whom asked her if she could lose 20 pounds — didn’t know quite what to do with her silky surface, steelier interior and obvious intelligence.That changed in 2018, when she was cast as Karolina Novotney, the unflappable public relations executive on the HBO drama “Succession.” She was quickly upgraded from a recurring role to a series regular.She has asked the producers if Karolina could act out in ways that the Roy siblings do, but they have so far declined. “I want to play,” Ms. Dominczyk said. “I want to have sex with one of the brothers. Or Shiv? I don’t know. But the role is such that Karolina stays in her lane. She’s there to do the job.”Ms. Dominczyk, seen here with Jeremy Strong, plays an unflappable public relations executive in “Succession.”Craig Blankenhorn/HBOShe also stars in “The Lost Daughter,” a film directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal.NetflixMs. Dominczyk can also be seen as a waspish mother-to-be in the much-lauded Netflix film “The Lost Daughter,” directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal. And she has recently wrapped the lead role in the HBO limited series “We Own This City,” in which she plays an F.B.I. agent investigating police corruption. “The more settled I became and the less apologetic for it, the less thinking I had to look a certain way or act a certain way, that was exciting for people,” she said.If she prefers complicated characters, her taste in fragrance skews simpler. “I’m much more of a sweet, cozy, pumpkin pie, fall candle person,” she said.A bottle labeled Dulce de Leche made the cut. And Pumpkin Patch and Pumpkin Rum Cake. Also Smoked Chestnut. (“Chestnut is a very Polish thing,” she said.) And Holiday Basket, though she joked that Mr. Pierre-Louis should have named it Holiday Basket Case. She sniffed the mixture with approval.“I want to down this like a shot,” she said.She brought her choices to the back of the room, where Mr. Pierre-Louis was melting coconut wax and castor oil in a cauldron set over a camping stove. He turned a spigot and the wax pooled into a pineapple shaped mold. Ms. Dominczyk measured out a spoonful of each chosen scent, then added burnt orange coloring and a smattering of dried flower petals.“I don’t cook,” she said. “This is the closest I’ve gotten to cooking all holiday season.”Ms. Dominczyk decorated her candle with flower petals and orange dye.  OK McCausland for The New York TimesMr. Pierre-Louis told her to name her scent and after a moment she settled on Smoked Dag. “That’s also the name of a sausage in Poland,” she said. “Just kidding.”While the wax set, she went back up the creaky wooden stairs and out onto a commercial stretch of Livingston Street to stretch her legs and vape a mint-flavored Juul. Was she ready for the holidays?She reached for her phone and pulled up a picture of her decorations — an orgy of lights, trees and tinsel. “It’s like Christmas vomited all over,” she said happily. That night she would meet friends and family for dinner, then she would help with a Feast of the Seven Fishes and a Christmas dinner that mixed Polish and American traditions.“Last year, we were like, Patrick has been in the family for 15 years — if he wants a Christmas ham, let’s give it to him,” she said, using an expletive.Back in the basement, the wax mostly set, Mr. Pierre-Louis presented her with a pair of scissors so that she could snip the wick. “Like an umbilical cord,” she said.Ms. Dominczyk sniffed, delighted. “Oh my God, it smells so good,” she said. “Bottle it. I don’t even need any commission.” More

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      In Praise of Patrick Wilson, Scream King

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      The classically trained actor has been acclaimed for his work onstage. But in ghost stories like “Insidious” and “The Conjuring,” he’s proven to be a master of horror.Ed Warren is sitting in a musty living room in North London, trying to establish contact with a demon. Behind him sits a little girl, said to be possessed. The demon won’t talk, she insists, unless he faces away and gives him some privacy. With his back to the girl, Ed gets down to business. “Now come on out and talk to us,” he says brightly. More

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      ‘The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It’ Review: Church, Meet State

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      In the third “Conjuring” movie, Ed and Lorraine Warren tirelessly work to convince a court of law — thus, the audience — that Satanism exists.“The Conjuring” movies offer a fascinating peek into the American psyche. Based on the lives of the Northeastern paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, the franchise demands viewers invest in a worldview ruled by Christian dogma, where Godly good must battle satanic evil. “The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It” is by far the most well-constructed, terrifying entry in the franchise, but its plot relies all too heavily on that same bizarre evangelism.“The Devil Made Me Do It,” helmed by the “Curse of La Llorona” director Michael Chaves, opens on a slickly stylized exorcism. Heavy fog introduces a series of imposing, angular shots as Ed (Patrick Wilson) and Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) work to free an 8-year-old boy from demonic possession. Top-notch sound mixing and a booming score keep this sequence taut, even exhilarating, as the demon slips from its child host to the unsuspecting Arne Johnson (Ruairi O’Connor). In an even more chilling series of scenes, a possessed Arne later stabs his landlord to death. It is then up to the Warrens to prove that Arne is not guilty by reason of satanic curse.As with “The Conjuring” and “The Conjuring 2,” the film is based on the Warrens’ real-life escapades, and the couple did attempt with Johnson’s lawyer to mount a possession defense. But the film conveniently attributes Johnson’s first-degree manslaughter (rather than murder) conviction and meager five-year prison stay to the Warrens’ efforts, despite the court dismissing their claims for real. It also heavily implies that Lorraine Warren, armed with heavenly psychic powers, is a more skilled investigator than the police, and preaches marital devotion as the ultimate Godly weapon. (The latter is a staple of the franchise.)“The Devil Made Me Do It” is an excellently spooky work of fiction. It would be even better if it privileged ghoulishness over gospel.The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do ItRated R for child contortions and a blood shower. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters and on HBO Max. More