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      In a Biopic of Robbie Williams, the Star Is a CGI Monkey.

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      The director Michael Gracey hopes Americans will finally get the British hitmaker, who’s depicted warts, fur and all in “Better Man,” debuting at the Telluride Film Festival.Dance, monkey, dance. Sing, monkey, sing. The British pop star Robbie Williams has always felt like a performing monkey. He has described himself that way when remembering eras of his life: his days as a young boy, trying to prove to his father that he had the “It factor” required to become a star; when he was a teenager and landed his dream job as the fifth member of the boy band Take That; and finally as an adult trying to start a solo career.Recent biopics of the band Queen and Elton John have proved that audiences are willing to taking a fantastical ride through pop-stars’ common trajectories of rise and fall and rise again. But will they be so amenable when the protagonist is played by a computer-generated monkey?Yes, you read that correctly. In the coming musical biopic “Better Man,” the character of Robbie Williams is a chimp, though everyone else around him is human. It’s a leap that the director Michael Gracey, best known for the smash “The Greatest Showman,” is betting moviegoers will take, even those in the United States where Williams is hardly a name despite his international stardom.The monkey, said Gracey, “was the thing for me that clicked, and it was also the thing that made the film near impossible to finance.”His plan was to rely on the magicians at Weta FX (“Avatar: The Way of Water”) in New Zealand to design a computer-generated monkey, something similar to the process that turned Andy Serkis into Caesar in the “Planet of the Apes” franchise. For “Better Man,” the stage actor Jonno Davies wore the gray motion-capture suit for the entire production and was then rendered into simian form. For the chimp’s face, the eyes of the actual pop star were used.This approach not only doubled the budget of the movie, but also seemed just too far afield for most backers. Multiple times, Gracey said, “I would sit down with financiers. They would say, ‘Director of “The Greatest Showman,” Robbie Williams. I couldn’t be more excited about this. How much do you think?’ And I would say, ‘Well, there’s just one thing: Robbie in the film is being portrayed by a monkey.’ And they would say, ‘Oh, yes, in some dream sequence, or he looks at his reflection and he sees himself as a monkey.’ I said, ‘No, no, no, the entire film.’ Their faces would just drop and they would say, ‘OK, well, this is the end of the meeting.’”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Telluride Film Festival Embraces a Political Lineup

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      The films partly reflect the business realities of Hollywood, which is still grappling with the aftereffects of the writers’ and actors’ strikes last year.As luck would have it, the documentary filmmaker Matt Tyrnauer was recording a conversation with James Carville, the longtime political analyst and subject of Mr. Tyrnauer’s new movie, in May 2023 when a national poll revealed that likely voters favored former President Donald J. Trump over President Biden by seven percentage points.“It knocked me right off my horse,” Mr. Carville said in the film. That moment set in motion his contentious 18-month campaign to encourage Mr. Biden to drop out of the race.“I was old. I knew a little bit about what the job entailed, and I had a platform,” Mr. Carville, 79, said in a recent interview. “I felt like I didn’t have another choice.”Mr. Tyrnauer didn’t have much of a choice, either: He needed to change his film, initially about Mr. Carville’s 30-year career as a very public political consultant, into a more immediate chronicle of Mr. Carville’s effort to alter the course of the presidential election and Mr. Biden’s decision to drop out of the race.On Friday, the final result — “Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid!” — will debut at the Telluride Film Festival. It is one of 15 documentary films, many about current events, at the Labor Day weekend festival, a four-day confab in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado that caters to Hollywood’s cognoscenti and is often a harbinger for the fall awards season.Others include “Zurawski v Texas,” from the directors Maisie Crow and Abbie Perrault, which tracks the efforts of Molly Duane, a lawyer with the Center for Reproductive Rights, to fight a Texas law that limits health care options for pregnant women. (The lead plaintiff in the case, Amanda Zurawski, and her husband, Josh, appeared onstage at the Democratic National Convention last week to share their story.) “Separated,” from the famed director Errol Morris (“The Fog of War”), examines the U.S. border family-separation policy enacted by the Trump administration. “No Other Land,” a joint project by a Palestinian activist and an Israeli journalist, details daily life for a West Bank village under Israeli occupation.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Rudy Franchi, Who Put Movies at the Center of a Technicolor Life, Dies at 85

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      He brought French classics to New York, published a film magazine, worked as a Hollywood publicist and (as seen on “Antiques Roadshow”) thrived selling vintage posters and kitsch.Rudy Franchi, who during a kaleidoscopic life brought French films to New York City, indulged in trysts with Hollywood stars as a publicist, operated one of the country’s largest vintage movie poster businesses and appraised ephemera — most memorably, a lunch menu from the Titanic — on PBS’s “Antiques Roadshow,” died on Aug. 6 in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 85.The cause of his death, at a nursing home, was lung cancer that had metastasized, his family said.Mr. Franchi’s life was highbrow, lowbrow and sometimes surreal.Along with movie posters, his store, the Nostalgia Factory, dealt in kitsch — Mickey Mouse watches, British cookie tins, StarKist “Charlie the Tuna” piggy banks. His career included a stint at a tabloid newspaper fabricating stories, like one that claimed that President John F. Kennedy was living secretly (though comatose) on an island after his assassination.“Rudy was definitely a character,” Grey Smith, a longtime vintage poster appraiser and dealer, said in an interview. “He was fascinating to be around because he had all of these crazy stories, and he could really talk about anything.”Mr. Franchi was not a gadfly, per se, but he was the sort of person whose name was familiar in the letters-to-the-editor departments of newspapers, especially The New York Times. It published six of the many missives he sent in on topics like the foreign exchange rates of American Express traveler’s checks, a critique of Playbill magazine and a brief history of neon signs.In a 2010 episode of “Antiques Roadshow,” Mr. Franchi appraised a grizzly bear skin that its owner said had once belonged to Bette Davis. The Washington Post, via Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Crow’ Review: Resurrected and It Feels So Bad

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      Hoping to skate by off moody vibes, this revamp of “The Crow” comic book series seems derived from a flattened, Hot Topic image of the hero.In the long and winding road it took to finally get to “The Crow” — with some 15 years of recasts, rewrites, and director switches — the one constant that has remained is that this version would not be a remake of the 1994 film of the same name. It would, the mantra went, instead be a reimagining of the original comic book series by James O’Barr about a man, resurrected from the dead, enacting vengeance on the small-time gangsters who killed him and his fiancée.It’s a sensible distinction to make for any movie revamp, but here is a particularly important and likely futile disclaimer to evade existing in the shadow not only of a cult classic, but also of a tragic and storied legacy — the accidental on-set death of its star, Brandon Lee — that shrouded and ultimately fueled the original film’s beloved status. “The Crow” of 2024 was never meant to be, couldn’t ever be, a version of that movie, a grittily stylized, rough-edged gothic melodrama whose pain and grief was so deeply absorbed by fans because those very things bled beyond the frame.That, of course, is fine and all. But ultimately what this version, directed by Rupert Sanders, is spiritually derived from is neither the film nor the comic, but rather the flattened popular image that the film produced — a Hot Topic-style version of alternative consciousness.“Do you think angsty teens would build shrines to us?” Shelly (FKA twigs) asks Eric (Bill Skarsgard) about their love story, the film’s central romance, whose edgy sensitivity is packaged with as much real feeling as a perfume ad starring Machine Gun Kelly and Megan Fox. You might think of Shelly’s line as a kind of wink at how Lee’s image became a beacon for brooding cynicism for an entire generation.But the real punchline is that the film itself is the embodiment of that kind of hollow emo teen worship, throwing vague echoes of “Joker,” “John Wick” and “Constantine” into a laundry machine and hoping faded shades of black eyeliner remain.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What ‘It Ends With Us’ Gets Wrong (and Right) About Domestic Abuse

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      Its depiction of love-bombing and psychological abuse rings true, experts say, but other oversimplified aspects could send a dangerous message.A person trying to escape an abusive relationship, on average, needs seven attempts to actually leave. Lily Bloom, the protagonist of the new drama “It Ends With Us,” needs only one.In the hit adaptation of the best-selling Colleen Hoover novel, Bloom (Blake Lively) is a young woman who grew up watching her father repeatedly hit her mother and who sees her own marriage to the seemingly perfect neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid (Justin Baldoni, also the film’s director) deteriorate into physical and emotional abuse. When Bloom learns she’s pregnant with Kincaid’s child after a violent night, she decides to get out.Professionals who counsel domestic violence survivors or work on related issues say “It Ends With Us” is an oversimplified depiction of being in and leaving an abusive relationship. But whether it’s a potential tool for advocacy or an unattainable vision of escaping abuse depends on whom you ask.“I think it’s very likely that people are going to come to the movie and see themselves in Lily,” said Pamela Jacobs, the chief executive officer of the nonprofit organization the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence. She said that although “It Ends With Us” had problems, she was surprised by how well it showed abuse overall.The big inaccuracy to professionals is how easily Bloom leaves once she realizes she is being abused. In real life, she would probably have faced stalking, harassment and other escalating pressure tactics, including violence.In “It Ends With Us,” Bloom and her husband peacefully part ways after a single conversation. Jacobs said Bloom’s departure was unrealistically smooth thanks to her financial independence (she owns a flower shop) and unwavering community support, including from her best friend, who is also Kincaid’s sister.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Alien: Romulus’ Solidifies Disney’s Box Office Rebound

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      After struggling in recent years, Hollywood’s biggest movie company has now delivered four hits in a row, dominating the summer with a 42 percent market share.“Alien: Romulus” was on pace to collect at least $40 million at theaters in the United States and Canada over the weekend, a strong total that solidified a turnaround at Disney’s movie division.Disney’s seven movie factories — Marvel, Lucasfilm, Pixar, 20th Century, Searchlight Pictures, Disney Animation and Walt Disney Pictures — began to break down in 2021. They had been pushed too hard to make content for Disney’s streaming service. The pandemic added difficulties, resulting in a string of failures like “Jungle Cruise,” “Strange World,” “Lightyear,” “Haunted Mansion,” “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” “Nightmare Alley,” “The Marvels” and “Wish.”Investors grew increasingly agitated, putting Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive, and Alan Bergman, Disney’s top movie executive, under extreme pressure to deliver improved results. Movies carry unusual weight at the Walt Disney Company, which relies on them for much more than ticket revenue. At Disney, movies also power a vast consumer products division and underpin theme park attractions.It certainly appears that Disney has regained its box office footing. So far this summer (from May 1 to Sunday), Disney films have accounted for 42 percent of total ticket sales in the United States and Canada, according to Box Office Mojo, a film database. Last summer, Disney had about a 27 percent market share.Alan Bergman, co-chairman of Disney Entertainment, oversees seven movie studios, including Marvel and Pixar.Ronda Churchill/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesWith the successful release of “Alien: Romulus” (20th Century), the company has now delivered four consecutive hits. In May, Disney rolled out “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes,” a 20th Century movie that cost about $160 million to make and collected nearly $400 million worldwide. “Inside Out 2” (Pixar) arrived in June and has taken in $1.6 billion worldwide. In July, “Deadpool & Wolverine” (Marvel) set a record for the largest R-rated opening in Hollywood history, and has gone on to sell $1.1 billion in tickets.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Union’ Review: Old Flames and Spy Games

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      When a mission goes pear-shaped, a covert operative (Halle Berry) turns to a secret weapon: her high school boyfriend (Mark Wahlberg).The “Mission: Impossible” series went missing in action this summer, but that’s no reason to settle for Netflix’s “The Union,” a depressing illustration of the wisdom that sometimes you shouldn’t buy — or stream — generic. The movie combines a catalog of elements from the Tom Cruise franchise (supersecret agents, exotic locales, stunts) with a high-concept twist so silly it might as well have been selected by A.I.: What if — hear this out — the lead operatives happened to be former high school sweethearts?“The Union,” directed by Julian Farino, kicks off in Trieste, Italy, with a blatant retread of the first “M:I” installment: The agents are on a mission to retrieve a traitor with a stolen hard drive. Suddenly, violence breaks out, and almost the whole team is killed. A survivor from the group, Roxanne (Halle Berry), pitches her boss, Tom (J.K. Simmons), on who to turn to for help: “If he’s anything like that guy I remember,” she says, “he’s exactly who we need.”“He” is her onetime boyfriend, Mike (Mark Wahlberg), now a construction worker in New Jersey who is hooking up with their seventh-grade English teacher (Dana Delany). Roxanne hasn’t seen him in 25 years when she approaches him in a bar. His credentials are that he is, in Roxanne’s words, “a nobody”: Because of the nature of the pilfered intelligence on the drive, she and Tom need someone who has left virtually no civic footprint.Besides, their spy outfit, the Union — so covert that half the intelligence community doesn’t know it exists and the other half regrets finding out, Roxanne says, as if reciting a tagline — prefers blue-collar guys to Ivy League suits. They are, in theory, way more fun than the C.I.A. (Stephen Campbell Moore appears as a stiff from Langley.) Mike used to be a star athlete and is accustomed to spending all day on a sky-high beam. With that background, shouldn’t a three-and-half-minute training montage suffice?The other Union members are defined largely by their specialties — physical force (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), psychology (Alice Lee), computing (Jackie Earle Haley) — and the movie makes a few feeble feints at fish-out-of-water humor. (Mike may never have left the tristate area before, but does he really not know what side of the road the British drive on?)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Red Island’ Review: Madagascar Is Shifting Beneath Their Feet

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      Robin Campillo relies on the power of suggestion to sketch life in this former French colony, filtering it obliquely through a young white boy’s eyes.The striking rusty color that gives Madagascar the nickname the “great red island” comes from the rich iron content in its soil. The drama “Red Island” — about a white French boy from a military family living there in the early 1970s — suggests that a fair amount of blood has seeped into the earth, too. The boy is just 10 but he grasps more than other kids might because his experiences are filtered through the life of the French filmmaker Robin Campillo.The boy, Thomas (Charlie Vauselle, sweet and saucer-eyed), lives in a pleasant, airy house with plenty of room and a red-dirt backyard. There, tucked in a corner, he shuts himself up in a large wooden crate reading comics featuring Fantômette, a plucky female superhero whose adventures routinely come to life in his imagination. When he isn’t immersed in his comics, Thomas bikes around, gets into harmless trouble and observes his modest world, especially its people. He’s particularly attentive to his loving homemaker mother, Colette (a very good Nadia Tereszkiewicz), and his father, Robert (Quim Gutiérrez), an army officer.A drama about a child, his family, a social set, their adopted home and the larger world, “Red Island” is by turns seductively sultry and frustratingly elliptical, with a structure that brings to mind matryoshka dolls, those colorful nesting figurines of differing sizes. For the most part, Campillo introduces these nesting elements just fine; it’s integrating them that proves difficult. As befits his autobiographical subject, he fills in the details of Thomas’s worldview, a limited vantage that’s manifested by the crate he hides in. Those limits are also evident in the awkwardness with which Campillo tries to do justice to history and to Madagascar, which solidified its independence from France a decade before the story opens. There’s a dreamy innocence about Thomas that never meshes with the movie’s very adult, historical backdrop.“Red Island” is a coming-of-age story in which not all that much happens to the protagonist even as everything around him changes. You can sense that Thomas’s home life will soon take a turn by the naturalistic conversations that he overhears as well as some of the fraught scenes he witnesses. Campillo, who directed the very fine drama “BPM (Beats Per Minute),” about young AIDS activists in the early 1990s, has a talent for catching the charged energy and the friction that a room of people can produce when they’re thrown together in close quarters. Here, when some drunken officers and their wives dance in the family’s home, bodies pressing in toward one another, the circuitry of desiring and resentful looks is electric.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More