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      A Woman Sleeping With Her Stepson? This Director Knows It May Shock.

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      The French filmmaker Catherine Breillat has been exploring relationships between girls and older men since the 1970s. Her latest, “Last Summer,” flips the script.When the French director Catherine Breillat was 40, her then-husband and the father of her first child ended their relationship to be with a much younger woman. Soon after, Breillat started dating a man 12 years her junior.“Men want to repudiate their wives of a certain age by saying they couldn’t be loved by anyone anymore,” Breillat said in a recent video interview via an interpreter. “But for me that’s not true. I want to tell other women there’s no cause for despair.” In “Last Summer,” which comes to theaters Friday, she probes at this realization through an incendiary premise.Since the 1970s, the lauded director, now 75, has repeatedly focused her unflinching gaze on the troubled sexual awakenings of girls, often in the uncaring hands of older men, but in “Last Summer,” that dynamic is inverted: A middled-aged lawyer, Anne (Léa Drucker), risks her career and marriage by having a clandestine affair with her 17-year-old stepson, Théo (Samuel Kircher).In “Last Summer,” Anne, played by Léa Drucker, risks her career, and her marriage to Pierre, played by Olivier Rabourdin, by having an affair with her stepson Théo.via Sideshow and Janus FilmsThe film, Breillat’s first in a decade, joins several recent movies concerned with the power dynamics of heterosexual couples in which the woman is older, including the lighter Anne Hathaway-vehicle “The Idea of You” and Todd Haynes’s divisive “May December.” (Haynes’s movie was inspired by the true story of a teacher who started a relationship with one of her students.)According to Breillat, this wave of films reflects a simple reality. “It’s the truth,” she said: “Young people are attracted to older women.”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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      Three Great Documentaries to Stream

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      This month’s picks look at a summer in Paris, a summer at the Olympics and the heat of the erotic thriller.The proliferation of documentaries on streaming services makes it difficult to choose what to watch. Each month, we’ll choose three nonfiction films — classics, overlooked recent docs and more — that will reward your time.‘Chronicle of a Summer’ (1961)Stream it on the Criterion Channel.What better way to celebrate the summer than with a summer-set documentary essential to the proliferation of the term “cinema-vérité,” one of the major concepts in nonfiction filmmaking? Except that cinema-vérité as presented in “Chronicle of a Summer,” the pioneering work from the anthropologist Jean Rouch and the sociologist Edgar Morin, means something different from what it has come to connote today. “Chronicle of a Summer” doesn’t belong to the “direct cinema” school associated with filmmakers like the Maysles Brothers (“Grey Gardens”), who sought, with varying degrees of success, not to involve themselves in the action while the camera was rolling, or with Frederick Wiseman’s filmmaking methods. (Although Wiseman never asks questions, he always resists labels like “cinema-vérité” or “observational cinema”; he prefers the term “movies.”)In “Chronicle of a Summer,” the filmmakers are on-camera presences. At the start, Rouch asks whether it is possible to record as natural a conversation as they might get without a camera present. In an early section of the film, Marceline, who assists the filmmakers in addition to serving as one of their subjects, approaches Parisians and asks about their lives, opening with the simple query, “Are you happy?” (Gordon Quinn, a founder of the Chicago documentary production company Kartemquin Films, would recycle this line of questioning in his 1968 film directed with Gerald Temaner, “Inquiring Nuns.”)Eventually, “Chronicle of a Summer” settles on a group of major characters, who are shown interacting with one another. The movie also periodically diverges from its interrogative mode to follow their lives. After Angelo, who works in a Renault factory, describes the monotony of his routine (when not working, he says, “The rest of the time, you spend sleeping, and you sleep so that you can work”), “Chronicle of a Summer” shows an alarm clock ringing and Angelo waking up and going to the factory. Onscreen, Morin himself introduces Angelo to Landry, a student from the Ivory Coast whose insights open a window on racism in France and colonial attitudes in Africa. Other figures we get to know include Mary Lou, who speaks openly of her apparent depression (for her, cinema-vérité becomes something akin to cinema-therapy), and Marceline, a Holocaust survivor who wrenchingly shares memories of her father.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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      Gena Rowlands Has Alzheimer’s Decades After ‘The Notebook’

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      Rowlands, 94, played an older woman with dementia in the 2004 movie directed by her son, Nick Cassavetes.Gena Rowlands has Alzheimer’s disease, a late-life challenge for the Oscar-nominated actor who captivated Hollywood in the 1970s with her performance in “A Woman Under the Influence” and later portrayed a character with dementia in “The Notebook.”Rowlands’s son, Nick Cassavetes, the director of “The Notebook,” revealed the diagnosis in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, telling the magazine that she had been living with the disease for five years.“She’s in full dementia,” he said. “And it’s so crazy — we lived it, she acted it, and now it’s on us.”A former theater and television actress, Rowlands, 94, made 10 films across four decades with John Cassavetes, the independent film pioneer who was also her husband. She was nominated for the Academy Award for best actress for two of them: “A Woman Under the Influence” (1974), in which she plays a wife and mother who cracks under the burden of domestic harmony, and “Gloria” (1980), about a woman who helps a young boy escape the mob.When Rowlands received an honorary lifetime achievement Oscar in 2015, Laura Linney praised her as an actor who “smashed and destroyed the female stereotype of her time.”“Her work declares: You want to see a modern woman? Here is a modern woman,” Linney said.In 2004, a new generation of filmgoers came to know Rowlands for her portrayal of the older version of Allie in the romance drama “The Notebook.” (Rachel McAdams played the character in her younger years.)Rowlands’s tearful performance in a pivotal scene moved audiences and critics alike. Jessica Winter of The Village Voice credited Rowlands with “locating the terror and desolation wrought by the cruel betrayals of a failing mind.”In an interview with O magazine published the year “The Notebook” was released, Rowlands said her own mother had experienced Alzheimer’s.“I went through that with my mother, and if Nick hadn’t directed the film, I don’t think I would have gone for it — it’s just too hard,” she said.After “The Notebook,” Rowlands made several more appearances in films and television shows, including in “The Skeleton Key” and the detective series “Monk.” Her last appearance in a feature film was in 2014, when she played a retiree who befriends her gay dance instructor in “Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks.” More

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      Jonathan Majors Is Cast in First Movie Role Since Assault Conviction

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      Mr. Majors, who was sentenced to a year of domestic violence programming and was dropped by Marvel, is set to star in the independent thriller “Merciless.”Jonathan Majors will lead a feature film for the first time since he was found guilty of assaulting and harassing his girlfriend, a conviction that doomed a lucrative contract with Marvel Studios and imperiled his status as one of the fastest-rising stars in Hollywood.Mr. Majors, who starred in “Creed III” and “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” last year, has been cast in “Merciless,” a supernatural thriller about a C.I.A. interrogator out for revenge. The movie will be directed by Martin Villeneuve and produced by Christopher Tuffin, an executive producer of the films “Sound of Freedom” and “Peppermint.”Mr. Tuffin said he believed in second chances and had decided to work with Mr. Majors because he was a “generational talent.”“We live in a culture that treats people as disposable, on both sides,” he said. “I believe that this matter has been adjudicated in the courts and he has a right to go back to his career.”A representative for Mr. Majors declined to comment.Mr. Majors was convicted of a reckless assault misdemeanor and a harassment violation in December, months after an altercation inside an S.U.V. that his girlfriend Grace Jabbari said turned violent. He was acquitted of two other charges that required prosecutors to prove he had acted with intent.A judge sentenced Mr. Majors to 52 weeks of domestic violence programming.In court testimony, Ms. Jabbari said she and Mr. Majors had gotten into an argument in Manhattan while they were dating. She said that he had twisted her arm and that she subsequently felt “a really hard blow across my head.” Mr. Majors did not testify but through his lawyer and in an interview on “Good Morning America,” he disputed Ms. Jabbari’s account and denied assaulting her.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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      ‘White Chicks’ at 20: Comedy Beyond the Pale

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      The Wayans brothers’ subversive comedy is smarter than you remember.When the oversexed basketball player Latrell Spencer (Terry Crews) turns to his date to sing Vanessa Carlton’s “A Thousand Miles,” he does so to prove his total love of all things white. Spencer is the stereotypical embodiment of the lascivious muscular Black man intent on procuring a white woman to prove his own masculinity. “Once you go Black, you’re gonna need a wheelchair,” he says. And yet, despite the broadness of his carnal desires, his performativity is the comedic soul to the director Keenen Ivory Wayans’s astute racial passing satire “White Chicks.”A gender-bending film (streaming on Hulu) that wields whiteface to interrogate the appropriation of Black culture into affluent, gendered white spaces, the film, upon initial release, was critically reviled. Roger Ebert named it the seventh worst movie of 2004. “Who was it made for? Who will it play to,” he asked. In the two decades since, however, its spiky critique of white privilege has revealed itself to be far more incisive than its lowbrow humor would indicate.Best summarized as “Some Like It Hot” meets “The Simple Life,” “White Chicks” follows Kevin Copeland (Shawn Wayans) and Marcus Copeland (Marlon Wayans), two bumbling F.B.I. agents nearing termination. Tasked with protecting two wealthy white women — the shallow Brittany Wilson (Maitland Ward) and her sister, the idiotic Tiffany (Anne Dudek) — from kidnappers, the detectives find trouble when a car crash injures the two women, leaving them unwilling to attend a fashion event in the Hamptons. To save their jobs, Kevin and Marcus pose as the sisters by dressing in skirts and heels, wigs, makeup, prosthetics. And the “white” voices they adopt become their tools.While blackface has minstrel roots, whiteface arises from a different impulse. Often employed in comedies, the practice enables Black people to pass as white, putting them in proximity to the believed benefits and privileges the skin tone provides. In works like the Whoopi Goldberg corporate satire film “The Associate” or the Eddie Murphy “White Like Me” sketch on “Saturday Night Live,” the practice not only gives the infiltrator a financial and social advantage, it allows the racial passer to upset the perceived stability of racial identity.In “White Chicks,” the identity switch works in similar fashion with the added twist of a gender swap. When Kevin and Marcus become Brittany and Tiffany, they’re given the privileges of white femininity. In an early scene, set in the Hamptons, a concierge asks for a credit card to hold the room. Kevin and Marcus, stuck with their own debit cards, threaten to throw a “bitch fit” if the hotel doesn’t allow them to check-in. After a tantrum, they’re allowed in their rooms.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 Promised Land,’ ‘Biosphere’ and More Streaming Gems

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      Speculative science fiction, period drama and sly thrillers are among this month’s off-the-beaten-path recommendations from your subscription streamers.‘The Promised Land’ (2023)Stream it on Hulu.Mads Mikkelsen stars in this epic period drama as Capt. Ludvig Kahlen, described as “a presumptuous soldier in a flea-ridden uniform” — and that’s what they say to his face. The sneers and humiliation he is subjected to by the ruling class of mid-18th-century Denmark give the picture its juice; the potent narrative is as much a pointed class commentary as a historical drama, as the poor but dedicated Kahlen tries to build a workable manor out of a barren slab of heath, and discovers that his idealistic notions of honor and hard work won’t get him much of anywhere with these aristocrats. Chief among them is Simon Bennebjerg’s De Schinkel, the most loathsome movie villain in many a moon. And the director Nikolaj Arcel builds up a furious head of steam on the way to an utterly satisfying conclusion.‘A Simple Favor’ (2018)Stream it on Netflix.Paul Feig made his name directing such movies as “Bridesmaids” and “Spy,” uproarious comic gems that provided career-best showcases for their female stars. He shines a similarly flattering spotlight on Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively here, though with a surprising genre shift, eschewing the broad comedy of his earlier work for this stylish, semi-Sapphic neo-noir thriller. Kendrick is a typical suburban mom who finds herself dazzled by (and quietly attracted to) Lively’s sophisticated outlier; their children are schoolmates, but they may as well be from different planets. The twists and turns of Jessica Sharzer’s screenplay (from the Darcey Bell novel) are compelling, but Kendrick and Lively’s swoony relationship, and its spiky playfulness, are what make “A Simple Favor” sing.‘Dean’ (2017)Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.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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      Do You Recognize This Film (and Book) From a Movie Still?

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      Can you identify a book title just by looking at a photo from its film adaptation? (Or maybe if you had just a little hint?) That’s the challenge in this week’s installment of Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about books and stories that have gone on to find new life in the form of movies, television shows, theatrical productions and other formats.Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the books and their screen adaptations. More

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      The Animosity Tour and Other Promotional Movie Campaigns We Love

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      For Jennifer Lopez, Sterling K. Brown, Dakota Johnson and others, the standard publicity push isn’t so standard anymore.In the 1999 rom-com “Notting Hill,” the sheepish bookseller played by Hugh Grant goes to a hotel expecting a date with the megawatt star played by Julia Roberts. He is surprised to find he has arrived at a press junket and looks adorably flustered as he’s shuffled from room to room, pretending to be a reporter from Horse & Hound to interview the stars of her space movie.The sequence is a handy introduction to this strange custom of film publicity: actors sitting in sterile suites for a parade of brief interviews. But these days that almost seems quaint. The press tour has taken on a life of its own, with stars like Dakota Johnson, Jennifer Lopez and Zendaya making news for the tour itself with quippy sound bites, inscrutable looks and fashion moments.It can be grueling for celebrities. Lupita Nyong’o recently described junkets as a “torture technique” in an interview with Glamour. But these cycles can be more entertaining than the movies themselves. Grant’s bookseller would be baffled to learn that you can categorize the tours as follows:The Animosity TourFlorence Pugh was pointedly not at the Venice Film Festival news conference for “Don’t Worry Darling” in 2022.Jacopo Raule/Getty ImagesThe promotion stops for nothing, not even cast members who appear to hate being in one another’s company. This seemed to be the case during the cycle for “Atlas,” Netflix’s new sci-fi flick starring Jennifer Lopez and Sterling K. Brown.During joint interviews, Brown seemed unable to help himself from making fun of Lopez. In one viral moment, he feigned surprise when she said she was Puerto Rican, before repeating her comfort meal of “rice and beans and like, you know, chicken” in overemphasized Spanish.In another moment, he jumped in and helped her out when her own Spanish failed her. After supplying the right word, he did a little dance. That clip prompted social-media users to wonder what J. Lo did to Brown. During these interactions Lopez looked perturbed, leaving plenty of room for observers to jump to conclusions.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