Category: cinema

It’s hard to mint a new movie star these days, which is why people in Hollywood were so high on Jonathan Majors. Cerebral and charismatic with the muscular build of an action hero, the 34-year-old actor had risen quickly from acclaimed indies to big blockbusters. This was supposed to be the year that would turn him into an A-lister, aided by the massive releases of “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” and “Creed III,” as well as an Oscar contender, the prestige drama “Magazine Dreams.”

Instead, Majors has flamed out in spectacular fashion. Charged in March with attacking his girlfriend at the time, Grace Jabbari, Majors was convicted on Monday of reckless assault and harassment; sentencing is scheduled for Feb. 6. (He was acquitted on two further counts that involved acting with intent.)

Just after the verdict was read, Marvel Studios announced it would no longer continue with the actor, who had been cast as the supervillain Kang and was set to recur as that character in a number of the studio’s properties, including the next two mega-budget “Avengers” movies. It’s further confirmation that this Hollywood up-and-comer has now become a persona non grata. Searchlight Pictures had already removed “Magazine Dreams,” in which Majors played a steroid-addled bodybuilder, from its year-end release calendar, though many who saw the intense drama during its Sundance Film Festival premiere in January had predicted that it could earn Majors his first Oscar nomination.

Few actors had been set up for superstardom as securely as Majors, and it’s hard to recall an ascent and fall as swift. Shortly after graduating from the Yale school of drama, Majors landed a breakout role in the acclaimed “The Last Black Man in San Francisco” (2019) as a sensitive playwright struggling to make art in his increasingly gentrified city. Dubbed a “mournful heartbreaker” by the Times critic Manohla Dargis in her review of the film, Majors quickly leaped to the top of casting directors’ wish lists: Here was a brand-new character actor, capable of eccentric and compelling choices, with plenty of leading-man upside.

Higher-profile projects followed the next year, as Majors starred in the HBO supernatural drama “Lovecraft Country,” which earned him an Emmy nomination, and appeared in the ensemble of Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods.” In October 2020, Marvel Studios brought the actor on board to play Kang, a multiversal threat whose many variants would torment the leads of “Ant-Man” and the Disney+ series “Loki” before battling every other superhero in a big-screen two-parter, “Avengers: The Kang Dynasty” (set for 2026) and “Avengers: Secret Wars” (2027).

With that powerful co-sign, Majors’s future seemed assured: He would spend several years starring in Hollywood’s biggest comic-book blockbusters while continuing to establish his bona fides as a dramatic actor in films like the western “The Harder They Fall” (2021) and the war drama “Devotion” (2022). Though he had not yet become a household name, Majors now had so much momentum that his presence could get a movie made, and he became attached to high-profile projects like “48 Hours in Vegas,” a Lionsgate comedy about bad-boy basketball player Dennis Rodman, and Amazon’s “Da Understudy,” which was set to reunite Majors with his “Da 5 Bloods” director, Lee.

Fellow actors were eager to welcome him to the A-list. In March, when I spoke to Michael B. Jordan, the director-star of “Creed III,” he said that Majors’s ascent was “only a matter of time.” Majors arrived to that interview late, toting a portable speaker playing Kanye West’s “Real Friends,” and predicted that “Creed III” would be the first of many collaborations with Jordan. “De Niro and Pacino,” he said, setting his sights high.

Those dreams are now dashed: Though Majors may still find work in independent films, as some stars with checkered pasts have managed, the major studios that were once so eager to sign him are now certain to look elsewhere.

“Oh my God! You’re the girl from ‘The Polar Express,’” a tourist yelled at Nia Wilkerson.

Dressed in a pink nightgown, Ms. Wilkerson was dancing in front of the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center in Midtown Manhattan for a TikTok video.

Over the course of the next two hours on Monday afternoon, dozens more people stopped and stared. Many of them filmed her from afar or asked to take selfies with her.

“Wait, are you really the girl from the movie?” a passer-by asked.

The answer to that question is no. Ms. Wilkerson, a senior at St. John’s University in Queens, was 3 years old in 2004, when “The Polar Express” was released.

The movie, a box office hit directed by Robert Zemeckis that was based on a children’s book by Chris Van Allsburg, has long drawn criticism because of its brand of motion-capture animation, which gives its characters an eerie, zombified look.

Ms. Wilkerson, 22, said that ever since she was an elementary school student in Woodbridge, Va., people had been telling her she looks like Hero Girl, a character in the film who is also known as Holly. Later, a high school crush pointed out the resemblance.

“That was heartbreaking,” she joked.

Since then, Ms. Wilkerson, who stands five foot tall, has come to embrace her digital doppelgänger. This is the fourth holiday season she has spent making TikTok videos in the guise of Hero Girl. Each year, her popularity has grown. She now has nearly a 250,000 followers.

Ms. Wilkerson said she got the idea after seeing another woman on TikTok cosplaying as the character. “But she didn’t really look like her,” she said.

In “The Polar Express,” Holly wears pigtails and a patterned pink nightgown. Ms. Wilkerson goes with a variation on the look for her TikToks.

“It’s a seasonal gig,” she said, adding that she was recently swarmed by people in Elmo costumes while making a video in Times Square.

Accompanying her on Monday were several of her St. John’s classmates, who acted as her unpaid film crew. “My friendship is my payment,” Ms. Wilkerson joked, adding she had bought the group food at the campus dining hall during the weeks of filming.

She used to suffer from social anxiety, she said, but her TikTok alter ego has helped her overcome it. “No one in New York cares,” she said. “I would never do this anywhere else.”

Ms. Wilkerson, who is studying television and film at St. John’s, has found ways to profit from her 15 minutes of seasonal fame. She participates in TikTok’s creator fund, a program that the company uses to pays certain people who make videos for the platform, she said. Musicians have reached out to her about making videos, she added. Her rate is about $250 per video, she said. Outside of the holiday season, she makes videos on other topics, but her views drop off precipitously.

While most of the feedback has been positive, Ms. Wilkerson said she no longer read the replies to her videos, after having seen too many racist comments. Still, there have been upsides to her social media fame, like a recent collaboration with @jerseyyjoe, a popular TikTok creator known for his dance moves who sometimes makes videos dressed as Hero Boy from “The Polar Express.”

After an afternoon of shooting, Ms. Wilkerson and her friends discussed their upcoming final exams while waiting for an F train on a subway station platform. Ms. Wilkerson mentioned an earlier subway video, during which she had accidentally kicked a passenger.

After boarding a rush-hour train car, they wriggled into formation to film another TikTok. One of Ms. Wilkerson’s friends, Amanda Gopie, 20, pointed at a sign that read: “Don’t be someone’s subway story. Courtesy counts.”

“That’s you,” Ms. Gopie said, to laughs from the others in the group.

As the F train rolled toward Queens, Ms. Wilkerson and her friends recorded themselves singing “When Christmas Comes to Town,” a song from “The Polar Express.”

“The best time of the year, when everyone comes home,” Ms. Wilkerson began.

As her friends joined in to form a shaky chorus, a few riders perked their heads up in recognition. One told the singers to work on their pitch. The group decided they’d try another take.

In the British comedy “Extras,” Kate Winslet, who appears as a version of herself, is playing as a nun in a film about the Holocaust. When commended for using her platform to bring attention to the atrocities, she replies callously, “I’m not doing it for that. I mean, I don’t think we really need another film about the Holocaust, do we?” She explains that she took the role because if you do a movie about the Holocaust, you’re “guaranteed an Oscar.”

The fictional Winslet’s perspective on movies about the Holocaust, though obviously a joke in the context of that 2005 episode, has become something of a prevailing opinion. Since Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” (1993) won best picture and six other Academy Awards nearly 30 years ago, Holocaust films from “Life Is Beautiful” (1998) to “Jojo Rabbit” (2019) have been seen as Oscar bait. Well intentioned or not, they are considered the kind of cinema you should but don’t necessarily want to see, meant to tug at heartstrings and win their creators prizes.

In fact, Winslet herself proved that theory correct when she won the best actress Oscar in 2009 for “The Reader,” in which she played a woman who served as an SS guard at Auschwitz. At the ceremony, the host, Hugh Jackman, built a musical moment around the fact that he hadn’t seen “The Reader,” a gag that got a roar of knowing laughter from the audience: Movies about the Holocaust are important, yes, but skippable.

But maybe the notion of the Holocaust movie is changing. This year in particular, three films seek to challenge the idea of what it can and should be. All of them turn an analytical eye on their subject matter, linking the horrors of the past to the present, in that way making the subject feel as upsettingly resonant as ever.

In “The Zone of Interest” (opening Friday), the British director Jonathan Glazer very loosely adapts a Martin Amis novel to offer a portrait of daily life for Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), the commandant of Auschwitz; his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller); and their children. Nearly plotless, it barely goes inside the camp, instead focusing on the visually idyllic world the couple have created for their family all while Höss plans the extermination of the Jews imprisoned next door. After Hedwig ushers her husband off to work — a man in the striped uniform of Auschwitz prisoners is holding the reins of Rudolf’s horse — she coos to her baby, “Would you like to smell a rose?” It’s certainly more pleasant than smelling burning bodies.

Just when you think “The Zone of Interest” might be too unbearable with its unrepentant focus on evil, Glazer shifts to the perspective of a Polish girl and her act of kindness. He films the girl, based on a real person, in thermal imaging so she’s nearly obscured as she leaves fruit for the prisoners, and her gesture is scored to the dissonant notes of Mica Levi’s score, which sounds like a droning voice. That little bit of hope feels distant and distinctly uninspirational.

Glazer operates from the notion that we, the audience, can imagine what is happening inside the walls of Auschwitz. We can envision the shaved heads and gas chambers; we don’t need to see the Hösses’ brutality to know what they have inflicted. It’s almost a shatteringly nonviolent film, and yet the implication of that violence is more potent than anything he could stage. You’re left to reckon with what it means to go about your day when there’s smoke in the air from bodies being incinerated.

“The Zone of Interest” feels in many ways like a companion piece to “Occupied City,” the documentary from Steve McQueen and the writer Bianca Stigter, due Dec. 25. (Sitting through the film’s four-hour, 22-minute run time would make for an intense holiday, to say the least.)

Like “The Zone of Interest,” “Occupied City” consciously removes emotion from its narrative, which is based on Stigter’s book “Atlas of an Occupied City: Amsterdam 1940-1945.” Over its extended, and sometimes grueling, run time, we travel through the streets of Amsterdam as a narrator (Melanie Hyams) explains what happened during the Nazi occupation at each address we visit.

Independently the stories are fascinating — mini sagas of perseverance, resistance and cruelty that could each serve as the basis for their own films — but Hyams delivers them dispassionately. Though I tried taking notes, by the end of the film I had trouble remembering every detail I wished to. It all became overwhelming and started to blend together as I tried to take in the history as well as the new images McQueen offers of a range of events: from Covid lockdown to a pro-Palestinian protest to the ugly blackface traditions of Christmastime in that city.

Glazer’s and McQueen’s films are numbing in different ways: In “The Zone of Interest,” you become inured to the casual ways in which its protagonists thrive next to untold suffering, while “Occupied City” tests patience with its length and sprawl. The documentary shows how memory is so easily lost in a place, and how demolishing a building can also demolish a legacy of trauma or heroism. The voice-over finally pauses for the finale, which follows a boy’s bar mitzvah preparations, the only time in “Occupied City” that current Jewish life is explicitly depicted, a reminder that the Jews of Amsterdam have not been entirely erased despite the Nazis’ intentions.

“Zone” also eventually time-travels to the modern day. In its final moments, Glazer captures footage of the museum and memorial that now stands at Auschwitz. But he doesn’t focus on reverent tourists. Instead, we see employees sweeping the floors of the gas chambers and polishing the glass that holds the mountains of victims’ shoes. It’s extremely moving but also routine. One kind of daily life has merged into another, this one dedicated to preserving the memory of the people Rudolf and Hedwig Höss were complicit in killing.

This conversation between then and now can also be found in Ava DuVernay’s latest, “Origin” (in theaters), a drama based on Isabel Wilkerson’s nonfiction best seller “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.” DuVernay follows Wilkerson, played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, as she researches what will become her book. She compares the treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany to that of Black people in America and the Dalits in India, concluding that ultimately it is all the result of caste systems, with hateful groups learning subjugation from one another.

But DuVernay does not shun bald emotionalism the way Glazer, McQueen and Stigter do. In the climactic sequence, which dramatizes Wilkerson’s writing process, the director creates a montage to describe dehumanization that includes images of Black bodies brutalized on a slave ship; Jews being herded into concentration camps; and Dalits cleaning sewage while relegated to work as manual scavengers, their bodies covered in excrement. The scenes are certainly more intentionally tearjerking than anything in “The Zone of Interest” or “Occupied City.”

And yet they all share a refusal to let the Holocaust live solely in the past. This, of course, is true of “Schindler’s List” as well, in which the surviving Jews who were saved by Oskar Schindler, and their relatives, place stones on his grave as the black-and-white picture turns to color. DuVernay, however, seeks to link its legacy to that of other examples of suffering in a way that’s almost academic, citing her sources as Wilkerson did. The other films find power in their remove even as they establish how the Holocaust reverberates among the living.

“The Zone of Interest” is the most radical. It asks you to spend time with the perpetrators of terror, see their human qualities and yet develop no sympathy for them. We’ve seen films about Nazis gaining a heart and learning to see the humanity in a Jewish person before: Taika Waititi’s “Jojo Rabbit” is a glaring recent example, about a little Nazi boy who falls for the Jewish girl hiding in his home. This is not that. Still, I was more profoundly affected by “Zone” than by any piece of art about the Holocaust in recent memory. It had gotten under my skin.

It forces you to consider what happens when you allow these stories to become commonplace, to become rote commercial entertainment, the kind opportunistic actors sign onto to win Oscars. Death becomes background noise, the way it is for the Hösses.

Few filmmakers can claim the same heights of whimsy, artistry and storytelling as writer-director Hayao Miyazaki, whose modern-day fables seem to prove that having one’s head in the clouds isn’t a fault, but a virtue — in more ways than one. From his 1988 breakthrough “My Neighbor Totoro” to his 2001 Oscar-winning animated feature, “Spirited Away,” the sky is one of Miyazaki’s favorite playgrounds, where flight is about more than just elevation; it’s about transcendence.

Characters in flight often traverse physical and spiritual realms. They move between worlds and states of being. And in the case of Miyazaki’s latest, “The Boy and the Heron,” flight even serves as a gateway between life and death.

Flying into Adulthood

Miyazaki’s protagonists are often children or young adults forced to confront the realities of a flawed world. These characters’ moments of awakening often arrive at the tail end of some grand, perhaps even perilous, adventure — and typically while they’re suspended in midair.

“Spirited Away” epitomizes Miyazaki’s body of work, combining folklore and magic with his meticulously hand-drawn illustrations. Its protagonist is Chihiro, a young girl who takes a job at a bathhouse for the spirits in order to save her parents, who’ve been transformed into pigs. Chihiro is at a point of transition: The film starts as her family is in the midst of moving to a new home, and Chihiro herself is at that preteen age where she swings between the fearful naïveté of childhood and the willfulness of adolescence. She’s forced to bear the responsibility of her fantastical circumstances and guide her family back to the human world.

Her moment of revelation occurs as she’s flying through the sky with Haku, a river spirit who can transform into a dragon. Chihiro recalls a childhood memory that reveals Haku’s true name, releasing him from the curse that binds him. The film, like so many of Miyazaki’s others, suggests that the key to maturing, and to becoming the hero of your own story, is retaining the childhood dreams, feelings, thoughts, ideas and memories that bring us back to our most intimate selves. In Miyazaki’s work, flight is not just about traversing distances but also moving through time: childhood to adulthood, past to present and future.

Kiki, the young witch of “Kiki’s Delivery Service,” has a similar in-flight bildungsroman moment as she completes her witch training: When her friend is in mortal danger, she must overcome a bout of insecurity that has left her temporarily unable to fly. Squatting over a borrowed push broom in the street, Kiki gradually summons the power she needs to lift off; the bristles of the broom erupt, a wind lifts her up and she shoots through the sky anew.

Flights to Paradise

One of the most impressive feats of Miyazaki’s films is how organically they espouse the filmmaker’s politics without pandering or proselytizing. Miyazaki is a noted environmentalist and pacifist, and often writes heroes who find themselves caught in conflicts between nature and society. But outside of the wars among gods, animals, mystical creatures and men, Miyazaki almost always promises some kind of paradise to which his heroes must fly.

The hang-gliding, titular princess in “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind” crash-lands into a vital discovery about the toxic postapocalyptic wasteland in which she lives: Beneath the polluted topsoil layer is a healthy underground that represents a renewed world everyone thought was extinct. Sheeta, the princess of “Castle in the Sky,” also flies off to a brave new world which exists in the form of Laputa, the hidden castle in the clouds. It’s a lost paradise where advanced technology meets nature, and is so far removed from the grounded world that most people believe it’s a myth.

Flying Toward Freedom, Away from War

Both Nausicaä and Sheeta have to fly through airborne battles to reach their utopias, each facing direct gunfire without backing down. They’re not the only ones; in Miyazaki’s movies, warfare often derails his characters’ literal and metaphorical flights of fancy.

“The Wind Rises,” Miyazaki’s historical drama about Japanese aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi, opens with a dream sequence that begins with Jiro happily flying in a birdlike plane with “feathered” wings and ends with his plane destroyed by a menacing warship. This is a recurring theme in the film: Jiro’s dreams are where he builds planes of the future, and where he consults with his hero, the Italian engineer Giovanni Battista Caproni, whose dream-aircrafts are like flying cruise ships, places of leisure and fun.

One of the film’s most evocative images is of a young Jiro imagining planes flying through the starry night sky; he stares up without his glasses but can only see hazy snatches of starlight against the dark backdrop. His imagination compensates for his poor vision, and he sees a stunning landscape stretch above the night sky, which graduates from the smoky blueish-gray of the evening into bright clouds of greens and yellows with splashes of magenta that seem stolen from a sunset. All of the shades blend, billow and balloon upward in a watercolor dreamscape, and a handful of planes fly through, the scene suddenly transposed onto the young Jiro’s awed face.

Flight is a magic reserved for dreamers like Jiro. His aircraft link his world of dreams, where he is free to create whatever he wants for whatever purpose, and his waking world, in which he’s forced to see his designs used for war. Flight means freedom, until humans manipulate it for their own gain.

Marco, the pig pilot of “Porco Rosso,” and Howl, the magician of “Howl’s Moving Castle,” both fly to outpace the wars around them. Marco finds himself constantly hounded by the World War II Italian government for not using his piloting expertise to serve their fascist regime. He lives as a bounty hunter, because it’s the only way he can retain some semblance of freedom as a pilot without sacrificing his ideals. And Howl transforms into a bird at first to escape the calls of war.

In each case there’s a cost: At the end of “The Wind Rises,” Jiro watches his new plane soar through the sky but then immediately sees the destruction it will cause. Marco’s cynicism about humanity from his wartime exploits and early piloting years is what seems to have caused his swine transformation. And every time Howl transforms into a bird he nearly loses his humanity completely.

Flying to the Afterlife

Birds and humans are of the same stock in many of Miyazaki’s films, including his latest, “The Boy and the Heron,” about a boy named Mahito who is lured by a heron to a timeless place between life and death to find his dead mother and his missing stepmother. The heron is actually a shapeshifting man, and the huge talking parakeets and pelicans that Mahito encounters in the other realm are like humans, trying to coexist within two different strata of this otherworldly society.

“The Boy and the Heron” arrives with Miyazaki at 82 years old and is his film that deals most explicitly, and consistently, with the theme of mortality. But the barrier between life and death is no less permeable than those between childhood and adulthood, or dreams and reality, or a world of perdition and a hidden paradise.

Miyazaki’s heroes are born into imperfect worlds where people get sick, die, wage war and cause destruction, but even in the filmmaker’s most cynical renderings of humanity, even when he reminds us of our worst impulses, his films are ultimately dreams of the most hopeful variety — like that classic dream we’ve all had some night or another … the dream of flying. Flying, Miyazaki tells us, is one of the few concrete ways humans can achieve a kind of transcendence, and this transcendence is beautiful. It allows us to see our true selves, our true potential. But he never fails to remind us: What goes up must come down. It’s up to us to determine how we’ll land.

Images via Studio Ghibli/Gkids