# Behind the 'Maestro' drama is a raft of theater stars supporting the story of Leonard Bernstein
By **MARK KENNEDY**
December 18, 2023. 12:56 PM EST

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**NEW YORK (AP)** - Leonard Bernstein was a towering figure on Broadway. So it seems only fitting that the new film darma of him leans on the Great White Way to get the story right.

Bradley Cooper's movie "Maestro" is studded with theater stars - 29 of the 38 principal cast members have a background in the theater, including Gideon Glick, Michael Urie, Greg Hildreth, Nick Blaemire, Ryan Steele, Zachary Booth and Gaby Diaz.

Look closely and you'll find actor-turned-director Scott Ellis playing Bernstein's manager, Harry Kraut, and rising stage star Jordan Dobson - whose credits include "Bad Cinderella," "Hadestown" and, significantly, "West Side Story" - playing a young conductor.

Casting director Shayna Markowitz said she didn't necessarily set out to land theater pros but it came naturally when she was trying to populate Bernstein's world authentically.

"There's kind of this amazing synergy between casting theater actors to portray people of the theater world and of Lenny's world," Markowitz said. "I just feel like we got really lucky with just these wonderful New York actors that are here and that wanted to be a part of this."

Markowitz worked with Cooper on telling the story of a conductor, composer, pianist who helped create such musical theater classic as "West Side Story," "Candide," "On the Town" and "Wonderful Town." Cooper stars alongside Carey Mulligan as Bernstein's wife.

Some selections seem inspired, like the casting of dancer Ricky Ubeda by choreographer Justin Peck. In 2015, "So You Think You Can Dance" winner Ubeda made his Broadway debut when joining the ensemble of a revival of "On the Town" and in "Maestro" he can be seen in a dream sequence of, yes, "On the Town."

But perhaps the best Easter egg is a scene in the movie when the cast is rehearsing "Candide" with Cooper conducting. Actor June Gable approaches Mulligan's character to ask a question. Eagle-eyed viewers will recognize that's the same Gable who was nominated for a Tony Award in the mid-1970s for "Candide."

"She knew Lenny Bernstein and so was having a full-on, out-of-body experience being in that scene with Bradley," said Markowitz. "She was like, 'It was crazy. I was crying. It was as if he was there.' So that was a cool moment."

Casting directors like Markowitz use a service that alerts talent agents and managers about upcoming roles and she will makes up her own lists of actors she thinks would be perfect, which she did for "Maestro."

"Every director works a little differently. Every project is obviously different and the needs are different. I adapt to how the filmmaker likes to work," said Markowitz. "I think you want to find the very best actors who are most suited for the roles. That never changes."

Glick, who has appeared on Broadway in "Spring Awakening," "Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark" and was Tony-nominated for "To Kill a Mockingbird," auditioned on tape for the role of Tommy Cothran, music director at a radio station in San Francisco and a lover of Bernstein.

"Bradley created a very loose and immersive environment that was very, very playful and it sort of reminded me of that stage in the rehearsal process when you're doing a play or a musical where you're not being result oriented and you're just exploring and taking chances," said Glick. "I think you can feel that in the film."

Some parts in "Maestro" are very small roles - just a few seconds of film needing a day's work - but have deep significance for the theater community, like the legendary songwriting team of Betty Comden and Adolph Green - played in "Maestro" by Mallory Portnoy and Nick Blaemire.

"Actors sign on to do projects or audition for projects because they want to be a part of it. And so they understood the significance of both of those parts," Markowitz said. "Some actors just want to be a part of it no matter what and no matter how."

Ellis, a multiple Tony Award-nominated director, was coaxed back to acting by Cooper, a friend and colleague who had worked together onstage, most notably on "The Elephant Man" on Broadway.

Cooper thought his warm and loving relationship with Ellis could infuse the onscreen relationship he wanted to show between Bernstein and his manager.

"It was so relaxed and an incredible experience and something way out of my comfort zone," said Ellis, who estimated he last acted 30 years ago.

"I'm sitting there in a dressing room surrounded by these incredible actors who, as a director, I would go, 'God, I'd love to work with you on a piece.' But, all of a sudden, I realize, 'No, I'm just one of them.'"

In many ways, "Maestro" is the latest artistic watering hole for Broadway veterans, joining "Law & Order," "Glee," "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel," "The Good Fight," "The Gilded Age," "Fosse/Verdon," "Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist," "Only Murders in the Building" and "Smash."

Markowitz, who works across film and TV and who has cast "Dash & Lily," "Ocean's Eight," winning the inaugural BAFTA Award for best casting in 2020 for "Joker," said "Maestro" is special.

"This is a once-in-a-lifetime milestone film for sure," she said. "I feel so lucky to have had this experience, and I'm so happy with how people are receiving it as this really special thing, because it's it's very special to me."


# Movie Review: 'The Color Purple' is a stirring big-screen musical powered by its spectacular cast
By **JAKE COYLE**
December 21, 2023. 2:40 PM EST

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Exuberant performances from a cast led by Fantasia Barrino, Taraji P. Henson and Danielle Brooks breathe life into Blitz Bazawule's stirring "The Color Purple," adapted from the Tony-winning Broadway production.

Alice Walker 's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1982 novel, which Steven Spielberg turned into the 1985 film, may be an unlikely book for such bright adaptations. Walker's novel, told through Celie's letters penned to God, is harrowingly bleak in its tale of trauma, poverty, abuse and rape. Much of Walker's "The Color Purple" doesn't scream song and dance.

But the emotional triumphs of Walker's novel and its soul-stirring tribute to the power of Black women lend themselves to the kind of maximalist spectacle of Bazawule's razzle-dazzle adaptation. The tragedy found in "The Color Purple" makes its final release all the more rousing.

It can still be an awkward mix, and, like Spielberg's movie, not all of the tonal changes work in this version of "The Color Purple." But the payoff is immense, as are the thrilling performances at the movie's center.

Barrino, who in 2007 took over the role on Broadway, plays Celie with a raw soulfulness. In the film's opening scenes, she's picked by Mister ( Colman Domingo ) to be his wife, though her role at his messy, ramshackle home is much closer to servant.

Life with Mister, who regularly beats her, is a nightmare. That Domingo is able play such a loathsome, cruel character and yet still find subtle notes of woundedness and ultimately redemption in Mister is a testament to his dynamism as an actor. The roots of Mister's barbarism are traced to his own brutal father (Louis Gossett Jr.), one of the numerous ways in which "The Color Purple" contemplates cycles of abuse and inherited pain.

Celie, separated from her beloved sister Nettie (Halle Bailey), has little to look forward to. But after years go by, signs of possibility begin entering the orbit of her savage rural corner of early 20th century Georgia.

First there's Sofia ( Brooks ), the wife of Mister's more sensitive son Harpo (Corey Hawkins), who builds a juke joint on a pier above a swamp. Brooks, reprising the role she played in the 2015 stage revival, is a revelation as the strong-willed, admirably reckless Sofia. Her forceful and funny entry (and her thundering song "Hell No!") announce a female empowerment Celie hasn't ever dared to imagine.

Bazawule's film, penned by playwright Marcus Gardley, wavers most in the balance of its first half. The musical scenes, with kinetic choreography from Fatima Robinson, perhaps come too fast and furious, distracting from our connection with the meek Celie. The numbers are richly conceived - the juke joint (part of the excellent production design of Paul Denham Austerberry) is pierced with light shining through wooden planks. But some flights of fancy, like one number in which Celie is transported onto a giant turntable, make for a herky-jerky flow. The jumbled book-to-movie-to-musical-to-movie-musical path of "The Color Purple" sometimes shows.

But the film takes off when Shug ( Henson ) makes her show-stopping entrance. Shug, a glamorous singer who breezes in and out of their country lives, is whom Mister most pines for - and whom Celie has great affection for, as well.

Henson, outfitted sumptuously by costumer Francine Jamison-Tanchuck, gives "The Color Purple" a vivid, movie-star splash. Celie and Shug's romance has often been downplayed - it was almost totally absent Spielberg's film. This version, while still falling short, does a little better thanks to their tender duet "What About Love?"

In this lengthy and star-packed musical (Ciara, Jon Batiste, H.E.R. and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor are just some of the cameos), there are more dramatic ups and downs to go. But the movie builds irresistibly toward the hard-earned emancipation of Celie, and Barrino's climactic, impassioned performance of "I'm Here."

Bazawule, the Ghana-born filmmaker, has made one previous feature ("The Burial of Kojo"). But he also performs as the hip-hop artist Blitz the Ambassador and directed Beyoncé's "Black Is King" visual album. And his adroitness in capturing musical performance is easy to see in "The Color Purple," produced by a trio of heavyweights from the first film: Oprah Winfrey, Spielberg and Quincy Jones.

But it's the movie's own power trio of Barrino, Brooks and Henson that makes "The Color Purple" one of the most moving big-screen musicals in recent years. Each in their own way transforms suffering into exhilarating portraits of survival and strength.

"The Color Purple," a Warner Bros. release, is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for mature thematic content, sexual content, violence and language. Running time: 140 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.


# Descendants fight to maintain historic Black communities. Keeping their legacy alive is complicated
By **SHARON JOHNSON**
December 21, 2023. 3:25 PM EST

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**DAUFUSKIE ISLAND, S.C. (AP)** - Sallie Ann Robinson proudly stands in the front yard of her grandmother's South Carolina home. The sixth-generation native of Daufuskie Island, a once-thriving Gullah community, remembers relatives hosting meals and imparting life lessons on the next generation.

"I was born in this very house, as many generations of family have been as well," said Robinson, a chef and tour guide. "I was raised here. These woods was our playgrounds."

Long dirt roads were once occupied by a bustling community that had its own bartering system and a lucrative oyster industry.

"There were at one point over a thousand people living on this island," Robinson said. Now, she and several cousins are the only ones of Gullah descent who remain.

Historic Black communities like Daufuskie Island are dying, and descendants like Robinson are attempting to salvage what's left of a quickly fading history.

"The towns are the authentic source or sources of much of our culture, our history, our physical expression of place," said Everett Fly, a landscape architect who uncovered more than 1,800 Black historic settlements through his research.

Scholars define a historic Black community or town as a settlement founded by formerly enslaved people, usually between the late 19th- and early 20th-century. The enclaves often had their own churches, schools, stores and economic systems.

Fly and other researchers estimate there are fewer than 30 incorporated historic Black towns left in the United States, a fraction of more than 1,200 at the peak between the 1880s and 1915.

"The ones that do remain are extremely rare. They're extremely important," Fly said.

The eradication of these neighborhoods can be traced back to their creation when white supremacists terrorized Black people, destroying whole blocks of homes and businesses or driving them out of town, as seen with the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921 and the Rosewood, Florida, massacre in 1923.

But in more recent times, the dwindling of Black strongholds is due in part to the culmination of amended ordinances, uneven tax rates, home devaluations, and political challenges that leave communities vulnerable to developers and rampant gentrification.

"Something as simple as, they change or they rezone areas," said Elizabeth Clark-Lewis, the director of the public history program at Howard University. "People with political power can make determinations that will ring the death bell for these towns."

"We've seen gated areas, golf courses and planned unit developments directly linked to increasing the taxes and displacement of native Gullah-Geechees throughout the coast," said Marquetta Goodwine, known as Queen Quet, the leader of the Gullah-Geechee nation.

On St. Helena Island in South Carolina, massive banners dot driveways and sidewalks reading "Protect the culture, protect the history, protect the land."

The governing Beaufort County council blocked a golf course on Gullah-Geechee land after the developer, Elvio Tropeano, requested to remove the 503-acre (204-hectare) plot from a zoning district on the island. The zoning district bans gated communities and resorts in locations considered culturally significant. Tropeano has since filed two legal actions against the county to appeal the decision, and is now considering building homes on the property.

A local group, Community Coalition Action Network, supports the plan to build a golf course on the unoccupied land. Co-founder Tade' Oyeilumi said she was originally against it; then she went to a listening session.

"When I heard Mr. Tropeano speak about the development and what he wanted to do with the development, the purpose of the development and how that was going to contribute to the community that we live in, I was blown away," Oyeilumi said.

She fears the housing plan that the developer is now considering will instead have jarring results.

"It's going to change the infrastructure to our community. It's going to bring in that gentrification factor that people are saying they don't want, faster. The golf course, on the other hand, minimizes that," Oyeilumi said.

Residents of Hogg Hummock, a tiny Gullah-Geechee community on Sapelo Island in Georgia, filed a lawsuit in October to halt a zoning law they say will raise taxes, forcing them to sell their homes. McIntosh County commissioners voted in September to double the size of houses allowed in the community, also known as Hog Hammock - a move locals believe will draw in wealthy outsiders who want to build vacation getaways. Only a few dozen Black residents still live in the enclave of modest homes along dirt roads.

"My ancestors were forced to work on that land, and then they fought for the right to have that land," said 23-year-old Keara Skates, a descendant who spent her last birthday speaking against the zoning law alongside state legislators in Atlanta, the state capital. "Sapelo Island has historically never seen the level of growth that's being proposed. Where does that leave the descendants?"

McIntosh County Commission Chairman David Stevens said the community's landscape is changing because some native owners have sold their property.

"I don't need anybody to lecture me on the culture of Sapelo Island," Stevens said, adding: "If you don't want these outsiders, if you don't want these new homes being built ... don't sell your land."

Research by Brookings Institution fellow Andre Perry finds that homes in majority Black neighborhoods are appraised at significantly lower values than homes in neighborhoods where Black people are the minority. Perry says that developers can buy these homes at lower costs and sell them for a much higher price.

"A lot of people will call that a major tool of gentrification," said Perry. "The people who live in those areas may be priced out ultimately, and then the companies or individuals who purchase those properties get profit as a result."

Attorney Rukaiyah Adams runs a nonprofit called "Rebuild Albina" based in Portland, Oregon. The organization aims to educate, invest and restore homeownership to Black people in an area that used to be a thriving Black neighborhood.

"We cannot continue to extract and exploit to the breaking point," said Adams. "We're trying to create a new model for what that might look like, how we might live together."

In Florida, one of the first incorporated self-governing Black municipalities in the U.S. was Eatonville, established in 1887. Located just 24 miles (39 kilometers) north of Disney World, the key challenge for present-day residents is the Orange County Public School Board, which owns 100 acres (40 hectares) of property in the middle of town.

The land was once home to Robert Hungerford Normal and Industrial School, established in 1897 as a school for Black children. In 1951, it was sold to Orange County Public Schools.

In March, a private developer interested in building commercial, office and residential units on the land terminated a sales contract with the district after protest from residents.

The school system said in a statement in March that it wouldn't consider any further bids for the land. The Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community has sued the school district to safeguard the land for educational purposes.

"There are four things that have kept Eatonville: its faith, its family, its education and its civic pride," said NY Nathiri, a third-generation Eatonville resident and founder of the association.

Nathiri smiles as she reminisces about her idyllic childhood and her family's history in the town - from her grandfather moving there at the beginning of the Great Depression, to her aunts' close relationship with author Zora Neale Hurston.

Descendants of the community work to boost its economy and preserve the local heritage and culture, put on display at the town's annual ZORA! Festival.

"As long as you know your story, you know how to tell your story, and you are welcoming to people, they are going to spend money with you," said Nathiri.

Back on Daufuskie Island, Robinson is working to restore 10 empty homes that used to be filled with her extended family. Her biggest challenge is finding people to help her write grants to help fund the restoration of her community.

"I'm not asking people to go out of pocket. I'll just say help me understand the other methods of getting funds that are out there for you," said Robinson.

Down the street from her grandmother's house, Robinson walks through Mary Field Cemetery where many of her relatives are buried and remembers what's possible.

"There goes my baby sister, my cousin Marvin. This is my great-grandfather," Robinson said while pointing at headstones nestled between tall grass. "If something looked impossible, it wasn't. They didn't live like that. If it could be done, they made a way."


# These kids want to go to school. The main obstacle? Paperwork
By **BIANCA VÁZQUEZ TONESS**
December 19, 2023. 1:16 AM EST

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**ATLANTA (AP)** - It's unclear to Tameka how - or even when - her children became unenrolled from Atlanta Public Schools. But it was traumatic when, in fall 2021, they figured out it had happened.

After more than a year of some form of pandemic online learning, students were all required to come back to school in person. Tameka was deeply afraid of COVID-19 and skeptical the schools could keep her kids safe from what she called "the corona." One morning, in a test run, she sent two kids to school.

Her oldest daughter, then in seventh grade, and her second youngest, a boy entering first grade, boarded their respective buses. She had yet to register the youngest girl, who was entering kindergarten. And her older son, a boy with Down syndrome, stayed home because she wasn't sure he could consistently wear masks.

After a few hours, the elementary school called: Come pick up your son, they told her. He was no longer enrolled, they said.

Around lunchtime, the middle school called: Come get your daughter, they told her. She doesn't have a class schedule.

Tameka's children - all four of them - have been home ever since.

## PARENTS MUST PROVE RESIDENCY, REPEATEDLY
Thousands of students went missing from American classrooms during the pandemic. For some who have tried to return, a serious problem has presented itself. A corrosive combination of onerous re-enrollment requirements, arcane paperwork and the everyday obstacles of poverty - a nonworking phone, a missing backpack, the loss of a car - is in many cases preventing those children from going back.

"One of the biggest problems that we have is kids that are missing and chronic absenteeism," says Pamela Herd, a Georgetown University public policy professor. She studies how burdensome paperwork and processes often prevent poor people from accessing health benefits. "I'm really taken aback that a district would set forth a series of policies that make it actually quite difficult to enroll your child."

In Atlanta, where Tameka lives, parents must present at least eight documents to enroll their children - twice as many as parents in New York City or Los Angeles. One of the documents - a complicated certificate evaluating a child's dental health, vision, hearing and nutrition - is required by the state. Most of the others are Atlanta's doing, including students' Social Security cards and an affidavit declaring residency that has to be notarized.

The district asks for proof of residency for existing students every year at some schools, and also before beginning sixth and ninth grades, to prevent students from attending schools outside of their neighborhoods or communities. The policy also allows the district to request proof the student still lives in the attendance zone after an extended absence or many tardy arrivals. Without that proof, families say their children have been disenrolled.

"They make it so damned hard," says Kimberly Dukes, an Atlanta parent who co-founded an organization to help families advocate for their children.

During the pandemic, she and her children became homeless and moved in with her brother. She struggled to convince her children's school they really lived with him. Soon, she heard from other caregivers having similar problems. Last year, she estimates she helped 20 to 30 families re-enroll their children in Atlanta Public Schools.

The school district pushed back against this characterization of the enrollment process. "When parents inform APS that they are unable to provide updated proof of residence, protocols are in place to support families," Atlanta communications director Seth Coleman wrote by email. Homeless families are not required to provide documentation, he said.

Tameka's kids have essentially been out of school since COVID hit in March 2020. She and her kids have had a consistent place to live, but nearly everything else in their lives collapsed during the pandemic. (Tameka is her middle name. The Associated Press is withholding her full name because Tameka, 33, runs the risk of jail time or losing custody of her children since they are not in school.)

## ECHOES OF A PARTNER'S DEATH
Tameka's longtime partner, who was father to her children, died of a heart attack in May 2020 as COVID gripped the country.

His death left her overwhelmed and penniless. Tameka never graduated from high school and has worked occasionally as a security guard or a housecleaner for hotels. She has never gotten a driver's license. But her partner worked construction and had a car. "When he was around, we never went without," she says.

Suddenly, she had four young children to care for by herself, with only government cash assistance to live on.

Schools had closed to prevent the spread of the virus, and the kids were home with her all the time. Remote learning didn't hold their attention. Their home internet didn't support the three children being online simultaneously, and there wasn't enough space in their two-bedroom apartment for the kids to have a quiet place to learn.

Because she had to watch them, she couldn't work. The job losses put her family even further below the median income for a Black family in Atlanta - $28,105. (The median annual income for a white family in the city limits is $83,722.)

When Tameka's children didn't return to school, she also worried about the wrong kind of attention from the state's child welfare department. According to Tameka, staff visited her in spring 2021 after receiving calls from the school complaining her children were not attending online classes.

The social workers interviewed the children, inspected their home and looked for signs of neglect and abuse. They said they'd be back to set her up with resources to help her with parenting. For more than two years, she says, "they never came back."

When the kids missed 10 straight days of school that fall, the district removed them from its rolls, citing a state regulation. Tameka now had to re-enroll them.

Suddenly, another tragedy of her partner's death became painfully obvious. He was carrying all the family's important documents in his backpack when he suffered his heart attack. The hospital that received him said it passed along the backpack and other possessions to another family member, Tameka says. But it was never found.

The backpack contained the children's birth certificates and her own, plus Medicaid cards and Social Security cards. Slowly, she has tried to replace the missing documents. First, she got new birth certificates for the children, which required traveling downtown.

After asking for new Medicaid cards for over a year, she finally received them for two of her children. She says she needs them to take her children to the doctor for the health verifications and immunizations required to enroll. It's possible her family's cards have been held up by a backlog in Georgia's Medicaid office since the state agency incorrectly disenrolled thousands of residents.

When she called for a doctor's appointment in October, the office said the soonest they could see her children was December.

"That's too late," she said. "Half the school year will be over by then."

She also needs to show the school her own identification, Social Security cards, and a new lease, plus the notarized residency affidavit.

She shakes her head. "It's a lot."

## CALLS FROM THE SCHOOL - TO A DISCONNECTED PHONE
Some of the enrollment requirements have exceptions buried deep in school board documents. But Tameka says no one from the district has offered her guidance.

Contact logs provided by the district show social workers from three schools have sent four emails and called the family 19 times since the pandemic closed classrooms in 2020. Most of those calls went to voicemail or didn't go through because the phone was disconnected. Records show Tameka rarely called back.

The only face-to-face meeting was in October 2021, when Tameka sent her kids on the bus, only to learn they weren't enrolled. A school social worker summarized the encounter: "Discussed students' attendance history, the impact it has on the student and barriers. Per mom student lost father in May 2020 and only other barrier is uniforms."

The social worker said the school would take care of the uniforms. "Mom given enrollment paperwork," the entry ends.

The school's logs don't record any further attempts to contact Tameka.

"Our Student Services Team went above and beyond to help this family and these children," wrote Coleman, the district spokesperson.

Inconsistent cell phone access isn't uncommon among low-income Americans. Many have phones, as Tameka's family does, but when they break or run out of prepaid minutes, communication with the phones becomes impossible.

So in some cities, even at the height of the pandemic, social workers, teachers and administrators checked on families in person when they were unresponsive or children had gone missing from online learning. In Atlanta, Coleman said, the district avoided in-person contact because of the coronavirus.

Tameka says she's unaware of any outreach from Atlanta schools. She currently lacks a working phone with a cell plan, and she's spent long stretches over the last three years without one. An Associated Press reporter has had to visit the family in person to communicate.

The logs provided by Atlanta Public Schools show only one attempt to visit the family in person, in spring 2021. A staff member went to the family's home to discuss poor attendance in online classes by the son with Down syndrome. No one was home, and the logs don't mention further attempts.

The details of what the district has done to track down and re-enroll Tameka's children, especially her son with Down syndrome, matter. Federal laws require the state and district to identify, locate and evaluate all children with disabilities until they turn 21.

One government agency has been able to reach Tameka. A new social worker from the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services, the same agency that came years earlier, made another visit to her home in October.

The department offered to organize a ride for her and her children to visit the doctor. But without an appointment, Tameka didn't see the point.

The social worker also shared a helpful tip: Tameka can enroll her children with most of the paperwork, and then she would have 30 days to get the immunizations. But she should act fast, the social worker urged, or the department might have to take action against her for "educational neglect."

## RESIDENCY CRACKDOWN WORKS AGAINST PARENTS
To many observers, Tameka's troubles stem from Atlanta's rapid gentrification. The city, known for its Black professional class, also boasts the country's largest wealth disparity between Black and white families.

"It looks good from the curb, but when you get inside you see that Black and brown people are worse off economically than in West Virginia - and no one wants to talk about it," says Frank Brown, who heads Communities in Schools of Atlanta, an organization that runs dropout-prevention programs in Atlanta Public Schools.

Atlanta's school board passed many of its enrollment policies and procedures back in 2008, after years of gentrification and a building boom consolidated upper-income and mostly white residents in the northern half of the city. The schools in those neighborhoods complained of "overcrowding," while the schools in the majority Black southern half of the city couldn't fill all of their seats.

The board cracked down on "residency fraud" to prevent parents living in other parts of town from sending their children to schools located in those neighborhoods.

"This was about balancing the number of students in schools," says Tiffany Fick, director of school quality and advocacy for Equity in Education, a policy organization in Atlanta. "But it was also about race and class."

Communities such as St. Louis, the Massachusetts town of Everett and Tupelo, Mississippi, have adopted similar policies, including tip lines to report neighbors who might be sending their children to schools outside of their enrollment zones.

But the Atlanta metro area seems to be a hotbed, despite the policies' disruption of children's educations. In January, neighboring Fulton County disenrolled nearly 400 students from one of its high schools after auditing residency documents after Christmas vacation.

The policies were designed to prevent children from attending schools outside of their neighborhood. But according to Dukes and other advocates, the increased bureaucracy has also made it difficult for the poor to attend their assigned schools - especially after the pandemic hit families with even more economic stress.

## OTHER ATLANTA PARENTS, SIMILAR BATTLES
The Associated Press spoke to five additional Atlanta public school mothers who struggled with the re-enrollment process. Their children were withdrawn from school because their leases had expired or were month to month, or their child lacked vaccinations.

Candace, the mother of a seventh grader with autism, couldn't get her son a vaccination appointment when schools first allowed students to return in person in spring 2021. There were too many other families seeking shots at that time, and she didn't have reliable transportation to go further afield. The boy, then in fourth grade, missed a cumulative five months.

"He wasn't in school, and no one cared," said Candace, who asked AP not to use her last name because she worries about losing custody of her child since he missed so much school. She eventually re-enrolled him with the help of Dukes, the parent advocate.

Many parents who have struggled with the enrollment policies have had difficulty persuading schools to accept their proof of residency. Adding an extra burden to those who don't own their homes, Atlanta's policy allows principals to ask for additional evidence from renters.

Shawndrea Gay was told by her children's school, which is located in an upper-income neighborhood, that her month-to-month lease was insufficient. Twice, investigators came to her studio apartment to verify that the family lived there. "They looked in the fridge to make sure there was food," she says. "It was no joke."

Then, in summer 2022, the school unenrolled her children because their lease had expired. With Dukes' help, Gay was able to get them back in school before classes started.

Tameka hasn't reached out for help returning her kids to school. She doesn't feel comfortable asking and doesn't trust the school system, especially after they called the child welfare department. "I don't like people knowing my business," she says. "I'm a private person."

On a typical school day, Tameka's four children - now 14, 12, 9 and 8 - sleep late and stay inside watching television or playing video games. Only the youngest - the girl who's never been to school - has much interest in the outside world, Tameka says.

The girl often plays kickball or runs outside with other kids in their low-income subdivision. But during the week, she has to wait for them to come home from school at around 3 p.m.

The little girl should be in second grade, learning to master chapter books, spell, and add and subtract numbers up to 100. She has had to settle for "playing school" with her three older siblings. She practices her letters and writes her name. She runs through pre-kindergarten counting exercises on a phone.

But even at 8, she understands it's not the real thing.

"I want to go to school," she says, "and see what it's like."


# In Mexico, piñatas are not just child's play. They're a 400-year-old tradition
By **FABIOLA SÁNCHEZ**
December 23, 2023. 12:04 AM EST

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**ACOLMAN, Mexico (AP)** - María de Lourdes Ortiz Zacarías swiftly cuts hundreds of strips of newsprint and colored crepe paper needed to make a piñata, soothed by Norteño music on the radio while measuring pieces by feel.

"The measurement is already in my fingers," Ortiz Zacarías says with a laugh.

She has been doing this since she was a child, in the family-run business alongside her late mother, who learned the craft from her father. Piñatas haven't been displaced by more modern customs, and her family has been making a living off them into its fourth generation.

Ortiz Zacarías calls it "my legacy, handed down by my parents and grandparents."

Business is steady all year, mainly with birthday parties, but it really picks up around Christmas. That's because piñatas are interwoven with Christian traditions in Mexico.

There are countless designs these days, based on everything from Disney characters to political figures. But the most traditional style of piñata is a sphere with seven spiky cones, which has a religious origin.

Each cone represents one of the seven deadly sins: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride. Hitting the paper-mache globe with a stick is a symbolic blow against sin, with the added advantage of releasing the candy within.

Piñatas weren't originally filled with candy, nor made mainly of paper. Grandparents in Mexico can remember a time a few decades ago when piñatas were clay pots covered with paper and filled with hunks of sugar cane, fruits and peanuts. The treats were received quite gladly, though falling pieces of the clay pot posed a bit of a hazard.
Traditional Christmas "piñatas" that will be filled with fruit and candy are displayed at a small family-run business in Acolman just north of Mexico City, Wednesday, Dec. 13, 2023. This style of piñata has a religious origin, with each cone representing one of the seven deadly sins, and hitting the globe with a stick is a symbolic blow against sin. (AP Photo/Fernando Llano)

But the tradition goes back even further. Some say piñatas can be traced back to China, where paper-making originated.

In Mexico, they were apparently brought by the Spanish conquerors, but may also replicate pre-Hispanic traditions.

Spanish chronicler Juan de Grijalva wrote that piñatas were used by Augustine monks in the early 1500s at a convent in the town of Acolman, just north of Mexico City. The monks received written permission from Pope Sixtus V for holding a year-end Mass as part of the celebration of the birth of Christ.

But the Indigenous population already celebrated a holiday around the same time to honor the god of war, Huitzilopochtli. And they used something similar to piñatas in those rites.

The pre-Hispanic rite involved filling clay jars with precious cocoa seeds - the stuff from which chocolate is made - and then ceremonially breaking the jars.

"This was the meeting of two worlds," said Walther Boelsterly, director of Mexico City's Museum of Popular Art. "The piñata and the celebration were used as a mechanism to convert the native populations to Catholicism."

Piñatas are also used in Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Chile, Peru, Puerto Rico and Venezuela, mainly at children's parties.

The piñata hasn't stood still. Popular figures this year range from Barbie to Spider-Man. Ortiz Zacarías' family makes some new designs most of the year, but around Christmas they return to the seven-pointed style, because of its longstanding association with the holiday.

The family started their business in Acolman, where Ortiz Zacarías' mother, Romana Zacarías Camacho, was known as "the queen of the piñatas" before her death.

Ortiz Zacarías' 18-year-old son, Jairo Alberto Hernández Ortiz, is the fourth generation to take up the centuriesold craft.

"This is a family tradition that has a lot of sentimental value for me," he said.


# Illegal crossings surge in remote areas as Congress and the White House weigh major asylum limits
By **ELLIOT SPAGAT**
December 19, 2023. 5:10 PM EST

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**LUKEVILLE, Ariz. (AP)** - Hundreds of dates are written on concrete-filled steel columns erected along the U.S. border with Mexico to memorialize when the Border Patrol has repaired illicit openings in the would-be barriers. Yet no sooner are fixes made than another column is sawed, torched and chiseled for large groups of migrants to enter, usually with no agents in sight.

The breaches stretch about 30 miles (48 kilometers) on a washboard gravel road west of Lukeville, an Arizona desert town that consists of an official border crossing, restaurant and duty-free shop. The repair dates are mostly since spring, when the flat desert region dotted with saguaro cactus became the busiest corridor for illegal crossings.

A Border Patrol tour in Arizona for news organizations, including The Associated Press, showed improvements in custody conditions and processing times, but flows are overwhelming. The huge spike in migrants and resulting chaos at various border locations have increased frustration with the Biden administration's immigration policies and put pressure on Congress to reach a deal on asylum. The numbers have nudged the White House and some congressional Democrats to consider major limits to asylum as part of a deal for Ukraine aid.

As Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas left closed-door talks with congressional leaders Friday, dozens of migrants from Senegal, Guinea and Mexico walked along the Arizona border wall built during Donald Trump's presidency, looking to surrender to agents. A Mexican woman walked briskly with her two daughters and five grandchildren, ages 2 to 7, after being dropped off by a bus in Mexico and instructed by guides.

"They told us where to go; to go straight," said Alicia Santay, of Guatemala, who waited in a Border Patrol tent in Lukeville for initial processing. Santay, 22, and her 16-year-old sister hoped to join their father in New York.

The dates when wall breaches were fixed are often bunched together, written in white letters against rust-colored steel. One cluster showed five dates from April 12 to Oct. 3. On Friday, agents drove looking for openings and found one on a column that was repaired twice - on Oct. 31 and again Dec. 5.

Smuggling organizations remove a few inches from the bottom of 30-foot (9.1-meter) steel poles, which agents say can take as little as a half-hour. Columns sway back and forth, like a cantilever swing, creating ample space for large groups to walk through. Welders often attach metal bars horizontally across several columns to prevent swinging, but there are plenty of other places to saw.

Agents say it takes up to an hour to drive from Lukeville along the gravel road to discover breaches - a large chunk of time when tending to so many migrants in custody.

"Our officers and agents are responding to large groups of migrants, which means that some of our agents aren't on the line, not really monitoring for some of those cuts," said Troy Miller, U.S. Customs and Border Protection's acting commissioner. "If we don't have anybody to respond, then you're going to see what you're seeing."

The number of daily arrivals is "unprecedented," Miller said, with illegal crossings topping 10,000 some days across the border in December. On Monday, CBP suspended cross-border rail traffic in the Texas cities of Eagle Pass and El Paso in response to migrants riding freight trains through Mexico, hopping off just before entering the U.S. The Lukeville border crossing is closed, as is a pedestrian entry in San Diego, so that more officials can be assigned to the migrant influx.

Arrests for illegal crossings topped 2 million for the first time each of the U.S. government's last two budget years, reflecting technological changes that have increased global mobility and a host of ills prompting people to leave their homes, including wealth inequality, natural disasters, political repression and organized crime.

Miller said solutions go well beyond CBP, which includes the Border Patrol, to other agencies whose responsibilities include long-term detention and asylum screenings. On cuts in the wall, Miller said Mexican authorities "need to step up."

Arrests in the Border Patrol's Tucson sector, which includes Lukeville, topped all nine sectors on the Mexican border from May to October, except June, according to the latest public figures. It is a throwback to the early 2000s before traffic shifted to Texas, but the demographics are much different.

Arrests of people in families neared 72,000 in the Tucson sector from Oct. 1 through Dec. 9, more than nine times the same period last year. That's a big change from when almost all migrants were adult men. Arrests of non-Mexicans topped 75,000, nearly quadruple the number from a year ago and more than half of all sector arrests.

Senegalese people accounted for more than 9,000 arrests in Tucson from Oct. 1 to Dec. 9, while arrests of people from Guinea and India each topped 4,000. Agents have encountered migrants from about four dozen Eastern hemisphere countries.

Agents who pick up migrants near the wall drive them to Lukeville to have photos taken on a mobile phone that starts their processing. They drive about 45 minutes to a station in Ajo that was built to detain 100 people but housed 325 on Friday. Some are bused to other Border Patrol sectors but most are sent to Tucson, about two hours away.

At a sprawl of white tents near Tucson International Airport that was built for about 1,000 people, some migrants are flown to the Texas border for processing. Others are released within two days, as mandated by a court order in the Tucson sector. CBP policy limits detention to 72 hours.

Most are released with notices to appear in immigration courts, which are backlogged with more than 3 million cases. Some are detained longer by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The tents are a far cry from 2021 in Donna, Texas, where more than 4,000 migrants, largely unaccompanied children, were held in a space designed for 250 under COVID-19 restrictions. Some stayed for weeks, relying on sleeping pads and foil blankets. In 2019, investigators found 900 people crammed in a cell for 125 in El Paso, with detainees standing on toilets for room to breathe. They wore soiled clothing for days or weeks.

Discussions in Congress may produce the most significant immigration legislation since 1996. Potential changes include more mandatory detention and broader use of a rule to raise thresholds for initial asylum screenings. While the higher screening standard has been applied to tens of thousands of migrants since May after entering the country illegally, they are not used in the Border Patrol's Tucson sector due to extraordinarily high flows.


# Movie Review: Clooney's 'Boys in the Boat' is an underdog saga that's both stirring and a tad stodgy
By **JOCELYN NOVECK**
December 21, 2023. 5:57 PM EST

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Director George Clooney both begins and ends "The Boys in the Boat" on a sun-dappled lake. It's a seductive sight, calm and soothing, and aptly reflects the ethos of a film that often feels like one has walked into an oil painting: well-crafted, lovely to look at, and rather old-fashioned.

Telling the true-life story of the University of Washington rowing team, a scrappy group that - incredibly - reached the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Clooney has gone for stirring and a bit stodgy, pleasing and a bit predictable. Given the craft involved, this is hardly a fatal flaw. And yet, when Joel Edgerton's coach character surveys his team at one point and remarks, "We need an edge, Tom," we think: Ah, yes. A little edge here would be nice.

In place of edge, we do get moments of beauty, especially when the boys get into those boats. Rowing is, though, the last thing on the mind of Joe Rantz (Callum Turner), a homeless college student, when we first meet him.

We're in 1936 Seattle, deep into the Great Depression. Rantz is trying to learn engineering, but can barely afford to stay afloat, and we're not talking, for now, about a body of water. Abandoned by his father at 14, he can't even afford to eat lunch at the university cafeteria, slipping out to a soup kitchen. At the bursar's office, they give him two weeks to pay his bill.

A fellow student says the crew team is holding tryouts. The prospect holds little interest for Joe until he learns it comes with a paycheck and a cheap room. The only problem: only eight of the hundreds who try out will make the team.

But like every substantial obstacle in this film, this one is quickly overcome: Joe and his friend are accepted. This delights the one other person in Joe's life: Joyce (a sweet and heartfelt Hadley Robinson), who sits behind him in class, nudges him when he's about to fall asleep, and starts to fall in love with him. This is not too hard - the blond and athletic Joe is, as his friend says of Joyce earlier, "a looker" - though not much of a talker.

But there's hardly time for chitchat anyway. Days are filled with practice, practice, practice. Their rowing coach, Al Ulbrickson, is also a man of few words, let alone praise, and even fewer smiles, but Edgerton imbues him with a gruffness that doesn't mask the heart underneath (yes, a common convention in sports dramas). Too often, though, the screenplay by Mark L. Smith (based on the nonfiction book by Daniel James Brown) leaves him with little to do but raise his binoculars momentously, or utter lines like: "We're going to go in there and do it until we get it right!"

The junior varsity Huskies are the quintessential underdogs in every way. And so nobody expects much when they get to their first big test, against Cal Berkeley. "Let's show them what's in this boat!" says the energetic coxswain, Bobby (Luke Slattery), whose job is to steer the boat, coordinate the rowers and, at key moments, urge them to greatness.

We're guided along by radio commentary: "Washington is struggling to keep pace. Washington is surging! Washington is going to do it!" We know the team will defy expectations and pass each big test, because if they didn't, their story would end, but Clooney and team make it pretty exciting just the same. The crowd scenes, with fans in period garb in hues of brown, are lovely.

Next up is a much more difficult test, along the Hudson River in Poughkeepsie, New York, where the winner will claim the right to compete in the Olympics. Ulbrickson makes the debated call to send these boys - the university's junior boat - to the event. Before they leave, however, Joe's focus is disrupted by a disturbing meetup with a figure from his past.

But not much is made of this meeting, and though Joe gets briefly exiled from the team - he dared to tell his coach, "I don't care" - he is soon standing tall again, after a heart-to-heart with an older, wiser figure (Peter Guinness) who gives just the pep talk he needs. Right in time for an epic showdown presented as something of a class struggle - "old money versus no money at all," announces the colorful radio announcer.

There is one more setback before this team of underdogs can make it to Berlin, and its resolution is one of the more moving moments in the script. And then, finally, they arrive in Nazi Germany, to the swastikas and the banners and patriotic crowds urging on the German team, with Adolf Hitler in the stands.

We'll avoid the spoiler, but suffice it to say that the finale does pretty much what it needs to. No, there is not much "edge" here, but Clooney and team prove that sometimes, slow and steady - or should we say, pretty and pleasing - can still win some races.

"The Boys in the Boat," a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures release, has been rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association "for language and smoking." Running time: 124 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.


# Movie Review: A transformed Zac Efron gives his all in tragic, true-life wrestling tale 'Iron Claw'
By **JOCELYN NOVECK**
December 20, 2023. 6:14 PM EST

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It doesn't take long to understand the level of commitment Zac Efron brings to "The Iron Claw" as Texas wrestling brother Kevin Von Erich. Just one look at the taut mass of muscle and sinew he's become for the role will do the trick.

It's also clear from the get-go how invested writer-director Sean Durkin was in telling the true-life tale of the Von Erich family wrestling dynasty, which - shockingly, to those of us unfamiliar with the story - suffered a set of tragic losses almost too staggering to imagine. It's hardly a spoiler alert to say that Kevin, by 35, was the only surviving brother of an original six. (He is now 66). Indeed, so devastating is the story that Durkin felt the need to excise brother Chris, one of three lost to suicide, from this retelling entirely.

Durkin has said he was a committed wrestling fan from his childhood in England, where he scoured magazines to learn more about the exploits of the Von Erichs, who made their name in the colorful, high-flying, entertainment-heavy wrestling world of the '70s and early '80s. And from that affection stems perhaps both the strength and weakness of "The Iron Claw." It's a film that tells its stunning tale with heart and conviction, yet seems somehow reticent about pointing a truly critical finger at either the brutality of a sport that broke this family, or the man who seemed to give his sons no choice in the matter: family patriarch Fritz Von Erich.

It is with Fritz that we begin. In a 1950s-era prologue rendered in black-and-white, the eventual patriarch and promoter (an excellent Holt McCallany) is in the ring himself, displaying his famed "Iron Claw" maneuver: a punishing two-handed grip on a doomed opponent's skull, crushing it like a vice.

Waiting in the parking lot is Fritz's wife, Doris (Maura Tierney) and their young kids. Doris is shocked that Fritz has acquired a spiffy new car to attach to their trailer, something they can't afford, but he tells her it's all part of the persona he's building: You need to be the toughest and the strongest, and then nothing will be able to hurt you.

Flash forward to 1979, and Fritz has passed the dream of becoming heavyweight champion onto his remaining sons. (One of them has died at a young age in a terrible accident.) Kevin is doing his best to be the son who gets there first. Among his exploits in the ring, Kevin climbs up on top of the ropes to attack from the air, leaping onto an opponent. These fight scenes are vivid and exciting, although if you're like me, eventually you'll be shouting at the screen, begging for it all to stop, lest one more son get hurt.

But at the kitchen table, there's never talk of stopping. Fritz tells Kevin, David and Mike that they all need to work harder to win that coveted championship belt. Mike, the youngest, is interested in music, but Fritz doesn't care. Privately, Kevin seeks out his mother and asks her to intervene on Mike's behalf. But Doris relies only on her faith; this wrestling business is between the men, she says. (It is horrifying to watch her, powerless, as the sadness multiplies.)

Who will achieve Dad's dream first? Will it be David, who's a great talker and taunter in the ring? Or Kevin, who possesses great physical strength but is awkward and unable to master the art of self-promotion? Suddenly, brother Kerry, a discus thrower with Olympic hopes, enters the scene. When President Jimmy Carter declares the United States won't be sending a team to Moscow in 1980, Fritz decrees that Kerry (Jeremy Allen White) will join his brothers in the ring.

There are a few lovely scenes of the brothers bonding, playing football, doing what brothers do. But the pace of the film, with its wrestling sequences and successive tragedies, doesn't allow for much relationship development. An exception is Kevin's relationship with Pam (a lovely and soulful Lily James), who woos the shy Kevin and eventually marries him, their wedding a brief joyful moment (with an infectious family line-dancing scene).

But tragedy is not far off. For those unfamiliar with the Von Erich tale, we won't reveal more plot here, other than to say that loss does not soften Fritz. At one funeral, he orders his grieving sons to remove their sunglasses, then forbids them to cry.

Efron, with his rock-hard physique and '70s mullet, turns in some of the most affecting work of his career. White, too, is excellent if more inscrutable as Kerry, initially the golden boy until his own brush with disaster sends him into a downward spiral. Harris Dickinson as David and a heartbreaking Stanley Simons as Mike round out the strong ensemble. But the film does not spend a lot of time on the emotional tissue that connects the brothers, who seem more bound by loyalty and mutual hardship than anything else.

The film's emotional ending brings well-earned tears, thanks to Efron's delicate portrayal. But when we're informed by means of an epilogue that the Von Erich family in 2009 was admitted to the WWE Hall of Fame, it's hard not to consider a question that the film doesn't seem to be attacking head-on: Was any of this worth it?

"The Iron Claw," an A24 release, has been Rated R by the Motion Picture Association "for language, suicide, some sexuality and drug use. Running time: 130 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.


# Movie Review: Ghosts and longing and love in 'All of Us Strangers'
By **LINDSEY BAHR**
December 20, 2023. 5:27 PM EST

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Andrew Scott plays a writer trying to write something about his dead parents in Andrew Haigh's transcendent drama "All of Us Strangers." His parents' death is not recent - they died when he was 12. Not that one ever really gets over that kind of loss. But we meet Adam at a moment where he is not just thinking about them but visiting them in his childhood home, where they are preparing for Christmas. Just in case it wasn't sad enough already.

"All of Us Strangers" will probably make you cry. Maybe even weep. And while there are some twists along the way, it never feels emotionally manipulative or unearned. In fact, it's a rather authentic and cathartic experience - a deeply felt journey of acceptance, love and forgiveness.

The most calculated flex of the movie is actually just in casting Scott, also known as "the hot priest" from "Fleabag," opposite Paul Mescal, "the hot guy from 'Normal People'" (and the sad, but still hot, dad from "Aftersun"). It's the kind of pairing that seems designed to make the internet explode.

Thankfully, they have the kind of talent and chemistry that makes you immediately forget the memes and just submit to their delicate romance, which grows and runs parallel to Adam's increasingly vulnerable visits home.

Adam and Harry seem to be the only residents of a luxury high-rise in London, the kind that was built before units were sold and now it feels a little desolate and even haunted, not unlike them. Adam has to practically force himself out of his apartment one night when the fire alarm rings.

Their first meeting is not a cute one. Harry shows up at Adam's door, bottle of booze in hand. He's very drunk and trying, poorly, to hide his sadness as he essentially offers himself up. Adam declines, but they soon get another, more sober chance to connect and start that beautiful, awkward dance of getting to know one another. Haigh films their growing intimacy tenderly and you root for them to save one another, so to speak.

This relationship is compelling in and of itself, but it also gives Adam a chance to talk about what he couldn't talk about with his parents (Dad is Jamie Bell and Mum is Claire Foy) when they were alive. It was, as the styling and musical cues makes unambiguous, the 1980s in the suburbs. Loving as they were, they were also products of their time and more fearful of social stigmas and AIDS than the consequences of not fully accepting their son for who he is.

In one particularly devastating conversation, Dad apologizes to Adam for not coming into his room when he was crying. One could see this making a good double feature with "The Iron Claw," in films that make the undeniable case for fathers being more affectionate with their sons in very different ways.

It's quite the Christmas tearjerker but also provides moments of levity and joy and fun, with both Mum and Dad and Harry. The most authentically sad stories aren't exclusively sad, after all. Haigh dares audiences to meet "All of Us Strangers" on its own astral plane as we whiplash between past and present in a dreamy 35mm haze of nightclubs and '80s sweaters.

Things aren't wrapped up in a sitcom bow, either. These wounds are still very much open, but perhaps now more likely to turn to scars than to fester.

"All of Us Strangers," a Searchlight Pictures release in select theaters Friday, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for "language, some drug use and sexual content." Running time: 105 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.


# Movie Review: A helicopter father flies his duck family south in 'Migration'
By **JAKE COYLE**
December 20, 2023. 12:02 PM EST

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Illumination, maker of "Despicable Me," "Sing" and "The Super Mario Bros. Movie," has built its animation empire by mostly staying close to a child-like outlook. Illumination's in-house mascots, the Minions, are basically themselves careening toddlers.

But the studio's latest, "Migration," carries a faintly more parental perspective. Its central character is a father duck, Mack Mallard (Kumail Nanjiani), whose fears and paranoia have kept his feathered family rooted to a small New England pond. But after much cajoling from his wife (Elizabeth Banks) and two ducklings (Caspar Jennings, Tresi Gazal), Mack and company take flight for their first winter migration south to Jamaica.

"Migration" is vividly animated with warm cartoon tones that would do Daffy proud. But it never quite spreads its wings. Stories of overly cautious moms or dads turned adventurers are not exactly fresh material, even if it is atypical that a helicopter parent like Mack can actually fly.

Written by "White Lotus" creator Mike White, "Migration" - a family road trip movie sans the road - mostly comes off as a gentle suggestion to take that Caribbean vacation you've been putting off. White, having mocked lavish trips to Hawaii and Italy on his HBO series, has less satire for the Mallards' excursion to Jamaica - though the journey to get there is certainly perilous.

Once the family sets off, with Uncle Dan (Danny DeVito) in tow, their stops include a fearful night with a bug-eyed heron (Carol Kane) who makes them a bed in a frying pan; a New York encounter with a flock of pigeons and their tough-talking leader (Awkwafina); a parrot (Keegan-Michael Key) caged by a chef who specializes in duck à l'orange; and a cult-like farm where ducks are being ominously well treated.

These are not, you may be thinking, the most salient dangers that await most winged creatures making their way south. Loss of sanctuary or fluctuating climate are no issues here, though the duck à l'orange chef, who has his own helicopter, proves to be a surprisingly regular threat.

It's around then that "Migration" begins to feel more like a wild goose chase. That's not the worst thing for a holiday family movie, though it happens to make "Migration" very comfortably the second-best heron-featuring movie in theaters right now. Hayao Miyazaki's "The Boy and the Heron" is far richer in both its imagination and its menagerie of avian life.

Possibly sensing "Migration" needed a little boost, a "Despicable Me" short is playing along with it: "Mooned," in which the Minions get a taste of zero gravity.

"Migration" is directed by the French filmmaker Benjamin Renner, who crafted the enchanting 2012 film "Ernest and Celestine" with the delicacy of a cherished children's book. That touch is harder to discern in "Migration." (For a truly magical French-made movie on the subject, seek out the 2001 documentary "Winged Migration.")

But considering migration today is a word so often accompanied by crisis, there's pleasant enough diversion in Renner's film. Like Illumination's "The Super Mario Bros. Movie," the movie's most abundant resource is its lush sense of color. Though that's not enough to turn the tide on the long-running duck season, wabbit season debate, the superb plumage of "Migration" makes for fine bird watching.

"Migration," a Universal release in theaters Dec. 22, is rated PG by the Motion Picture Association for action/peril and mild rude humor. Running time: 92 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.


# Movie Review: Auto pioneer Enzo Ferrari gets a solid biopic but it doesn't make the heart race
By **MARK KENNEDY**
December 18, 2023. 1:55 PM EST

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Napoleon Bonaparte. Leonard Bernstein. Willy Wonka. Aquaman - there are a ton of Guy Movie Heroes out there as 2023 ends. And yet up zooms another - in "Ferrari."

Director Michael Mann has put his stylish spotlight on yet one more stoic, brilliant and broken uber-masculine dudes, Enzo Ferrari. The movie is set during a turbulent few months in 1957 when the Italian automaker's private and professional lives threatened to careen out of control.

It's a solid vehicle but it will leave you, well, unmoved.

"Ferrari" has excellent work by Adam Driver as Ferrari, aged up two decades with grey at his temple, sunglasses clamped to his head at all times and a frosty demeanor.

When we meet him, Ferrari is at a crossroads. He needs to ramp up production and sell hundreds of cars a year or risk bankrupting the company that he and his wife, Laura, have built from the ashes of world war.

Enzo and Laura are still recovering from losing a son to muscular dystrophy but she doesn't know that Mr. Ferrari has another family - a girlfriend (Shailene Woodley, great but wrong here) who has given birth to a secret son.

Laura is played by Penélope Cruz, whose grief is profound, her eyes heavy and her gait plodding, possibly overacting. Laura knows her husband is a cad but the rule is he must be home before the maid arrives with the morning coffee. It's a signal that the surfaces of things matter.

The private and public lives of Ferrari will ultimately come to a head with the results of the treacherous 1,000-mile race across Italy, the Mille Miglia. If Ferrari has a good showing - and embarrasses competitor Maserati - he can fill orders and everything is buono. If not, disastro.

Most of Mann's toolkit is here - slick and moody camerawork, a poetic surrounding and heightened use of music, even the car porn of "Miami Vice." But "Ferrari" - despite Mann's leaning on Italian opera - fails to ignite. One scene split between high Mass while simultaneously drivers zip through a track doesn't work no matter how high the volume is pushed.

Part of the problem is Troy Kennedy Martin's script, which tries to have it both ways, a domestic drama and also some kinetic, superb race scenes, with thick metal gears scraping, engines roaring and brave goggle-wearing drivers risking their necks at 130 mph.

Ferrari himself is on the sidelines, barking orders, and so he's lost in the second half, while we're never really invested in the five drivers he has sent out to represent the brand. Distance is a strange part of the movie and viewers will fight to find a heart in the cool elegance.

Driver does the best an actor can to reveal the warmth inside Ferrari, who seems most vulnerable alone in the crypt of his son. Outside, he screams things like "I must have total control" and demands his drivers have "deadly passion."

The movie tends to lose itself - maybe fetishize - Italian artistry: tailored shirts, fountain pens, curving exhaust manifolds, cappuccino cups and the gloriousness of Italy's cobble-street cities.

Over it all hangs loss - sons, brothers and drivers die - so that fresh deaths are almost run-of-the-mill. Ferrari doesn't miss a beat when he loses a key employee; he hires another even before the body is cold. "We all know that death is nearby," he says.

But the viewer is not so callous and a horrific event during the big race unmoors the movie. The end drifts off unresolved and tragically rerouted, it's engine broken. Failure has been snatched from the jaws of victory.

The fact that we know the future of Ferrari - it will produce graceful, expensive roadsters lusted after and insulted in equal turns - takes away some of the jeopardy. It's also hard to root for a rich CEO with a mistress. If anything, this is a movie that will make you hit the gas a little harder coming home.

"Ferrari," a Neon release that drives into theaters on Christmas Day, is rated R for "for some violent content/graphic images, sexual content and language." Running time: 130 minutes. Two stars out of four.


# Movie Review: In harrowing 'Zone of Interest,' the Holocaust's evils are cloaked in mundanities
By **JOCELYN NOVECK**
December 14, 2023. 9:14 AM EST

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It's just a woman trying on a fur coat alone in her room, and sampling a lipstick. It's just a few friends discussing toothpaste orders over coffee in the kitchen. It's just a housewife showing off her new garden and children's pool, or a dad taking his kids fishing in a river.

The crucial context is that these scenes are occurring only a stone wall away from the gas chambers and crematoriums of Auschwitz. And it's their very mundanity that makes them evil - the "banality of evil," to use Hannah Arendt's well-known phrase. In his meticulous and harrowing film "The Zone of Interest," writer-director Jonathan Glazer has found a way to convey evil without ever depicting the horror itself. But though it escapes our eyes, the horror assaults our senses in other, deeper ways.

How does one even begin to depict the Holocaust? The question has challenged filmmakers for eight decades. Attempts to humanize the horror often lose sight of the scale of the genocide. And efforts to do justice to the unimaginable scale can lose sight of the human suffering.

Glazer has chosen a different route. Shooting, incredibly, on location, his entry point is an ordinary German couple trying to build a prosperous life for their family. It just happens to be at Auschwitz. And it just happens to be Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), the notorious real-life former commandant of the camp, and his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller, brilliant in a terribly difficult role).

Höss spends his days overseeing the "processing" of trainloads of people, most sent directly to the gas chambers. Then he comes home, where he and Hedwig eat dinner, celebrate birthdays, read their kids bedtime stories, make plans for a spa holiday.

Or they go on picnics, which is where we begin, on an idyllic afternoon, the Höss family picking berries and sunning themselves. As darkness falls, they head back to their pristine two-story villa on the camp's outskirts (in what the Nazis called the "zone of interest").

It takes a while before we see the telltale signs: the camp watchtower, and later the flames blackening the sky. But we do hear sounds. Awful sounds. Dogs barking. Gunshots. Cries of fear, yelling. And the ugly roar - is it the belching chimney, or the arriving trains, or both? It all melds together, and you can't get it out of your head. (Mica Levi wrote the chilling score.)

Hedwig surely hears all this. And so, we wonder what she's thinking as she takes a nice fur coat into the bedroom and models it in the mirror, finding it to her liking, and ordering her maid to repair the lining.

The subtext, not spelled out: The coat, and lipstick in the pocket, is from a Jewish prisoner, no longer alive. Soon we hear chatter over coffee in the kitchen, about toothpaste. Hedwig has found a diamond hidden in a tube - those prisoners are crafty, she says - and so she is "ordering" more toothpaste, again turning the mundane into the truly hideous.

Nearby, between Rudolf and some visiting businessmen, the chatter is perhaps more consequential, yet just as incongruous. They are discussing a more efficient model of oven - the best mass cremation system money can buy, you might say. The words "burning," "cooling" and "reloading" are heard; the word "murder" is not.

Life continues: An outing with the kids on a tranquil nearby river in a new kayak, Dad's birthday gift, leads to an unexpected unpleasantness. Standing in the river fishing, Höss realizes that human remains are floating by.

Yet Hedwig Höss loves her home. She proudly shows off her growing garden, with its small swimming pool and wooden slide, to her visiting mother, who murmurs supportively: "You've really landed on your feet, my child." Hedwig is proud. Her husband calls her "the Queen of Auschwitz," she notes.

Adapting loosely from the Martin Amis novel of the same name, but choosing a real-life protagonist, Glazer spent years combing through records to piece together the Höss family history, and built his set for their home some 200 yards from where the real one stood.

The meticulousness with which Glazer and production designer Chris Oddy render this home - with its baby blue-colored beds in the kids' room, only feet from putrid camp barracks - is an achievement. Glazer also has set up multiple surveillance-style cameras, tracking different pieces of action, and the effect is that of a documentary, with dialogue that often feels unscripted.

As for what happens over the wall, we see Höss there only once, in tight closeup. Hedwig certainly never crosses over. "They'll have to drag me out of here," she says, when her husband tells her they're being transferred out. And she demands successfully to stay at Auschwitz, with the children. "We're living how we dreamed we would," she says. (Glazer found evidence from a former gardener that such a conversation happened.)

The film ends just as Höss learns - in what amounts to a promotion - that he'll return to Auschwitz to step up the Final Solution with the annihilation of Hungary's Jews, arriving at the rate of 12,000 a day.

And the real-life Höss did return, to implement more mass murder (he was later executed for war crimes), and to his wife, who'd found a way to grow beautiful flowers regardless of what was happening on the very same soil.

Surely few of us can imagine modeling a fur coat ripped from a doomed prisoner. But what Glazer is trying to tell us with such scenes - and also in his jolting final minutes - is that history is full of examples of ordinary, unremarkable people finding ways to block out the suffering of others. And that if we always assume we are so vastly different, we may be losing the chance to learn from the past.

"The Zone of Interest," an A24 release, has been rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association "for thematic material, some suggestive material and smoking." Running time: 105 minutes. Four stars out of four.


# Movie Review: Jeffrey Wright is brilliant in the smart and funny satire 'American Fiction'
By **LINDSEY BAHR**
December 13, 2023. 3:45 PM EST

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Jeffrey Wright's Thelonious "Monk" Ellison is at the end of his rope at the beginning of "American Fiction," a crowd-pleaser that's both funny and smart in its satire of race, media, artists, identity politics and even Hollywood. It opens in theaters this week.

A classic frustrated artist, Monk is a professor and an author who writes literary stories that he wants to see in the world. He's not interested in race, or at least the kind of "Black misery porn" stories that seem to be omnipresent, whether it's in the Black history month advertisement on television with images of addicts and slaves, or at a book convention.

The latest hit that has him fuming is a book called "We's Lives In Da Ghetto," written by a comfortably upper middle class Black woman (Issa Rae) who gives interviews about how dismayed she was in her post-college job at a literary agency that she didn't see stories about "her people." But exploitative and demeaning as they are, those are also the ones that get the book deals, that sell, that draw the big crowds at book events, that get the movie deals.

Monk's books, smart as they are, don't - until one drunken night he writes a parody of the kind of Black novel he hates, under a pseudonym, and suddenly becomes a sensation.

Cord Jefferson, in his directorial debut, establishes the movie's tone well right off the bat in scene in which a white girl is offended that Monk has written a certain word, all seven letters of it, on the blackboard.

"With all due respect, Britney, I got over it. I'm pretty sure you can too," he says. When she pushes back, Jefferson cuts to a closeup of Wright growling before a quick cut to Britney's exit. We overhear Monk in the background angrily asking the remaining students if they actually want to talk about the reading.

Monk does not suffer fools and seems incapable of not saying exactly what he feels at any given moment, but he's also rubbed a few too many people the wrong way. A few minutes in, he finds himself on an unwanted mandatory break, in Boston, with his family: Mother Agnes (Leslie Uggams), sister Lisa (Tracee Ellis Ross) and brother Cliff (Sterling K. Brown).

This family is complex and struggling - who isn't - but not in the ways that the novels Monk hates always seem to want Black families to be. Lisa's a family planning doctor trying to recover financially from a divorce and take care of her quickly deteriorating mother. Cliff is also a doctor, a plastic surgeon, discovering after a marriage to a woman that he likes men. They all have lingering trauma from their dead father, worries about money and how they'll afford a care facility for their mom.

Jefferson adapted the story from Percival Everett's "Erasure," which remains relevant 20 years later. It is particularly withering in its send up of white people clamoring for their idea of authentic Black stories, like the literary agent Paula Bateman (Miriam Shor) and the film producer Wiley (a very funny Adam Brody whose character might be a spiritual continuation of his "Thank You For Smoking" assistant). Wiley is currently working on a film called "Plantation Annihilation" in which the ghosts of slaves go on a murderous rampage.

While it's not exactly subtle, it's also not entirely simplistic either - I'm not sure the film ever really reconciles Rae's character in particular, much to the frustration of Monk (and us).

Still, it's hardly a surprise that "American Fiction" won the people's choice prize at the Toronto Film Festival earlier this year. The film is immensely watchable, staged without flash or pretention, that relies on its sharp script and talented and charismatic actors to carry the audience through. Wright is particularly delightful at the center of it all as he navigates a new relationship as well as the consequences of his lie and how far he's willing to go with it.

"American Fiction," an MGM release in theaters Friday and expanding on Dec. 22, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for "language throughout, some drug use, sexual references and brief violence." Running time: 117 minutes. Three stars out of four.


# Review: Timothée Chalamet waltzes through the whimsical 'Wonka' but Roald Dahl's daring is missing
By **JAKE COYLE**
December 13, 2023. 11:52 AM EST

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The original 1971 "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" may have been a delicious dream, lined with trees of gumballs and fields of lollipops. But never has there been a more cautionary tale about the danger of too much of a good thing.

Magical as that Roald Dahl-scripted film was, it remains lodged in our imaginations less for its sugary goodness than the way darkness, satire and even mania ebb around its edges - flowing down that nightmarish watery tunnel and pooling somewhere in the back of Gene Wilder's eyes. Charlie Bucket and Grandpa Joe may bubble with laughter all the way up the ceiling, but there's a spinning metal blade up there.

"Wonka," the latest attempt to revisit Dahl's masterwork, bears no such danger. It's going more for the taste of an Everlasting Gobstopper - an ingenious confection that piles flavor on top of flavor. Tasty though that can be, you miss the daring of Dahl in the more wanly whimsical "Wonka."

The original 1971 "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" may have been a delicious dream, lined with trees of gumballs and fields of lollipops. But never has there been a more cautionary tale about the danger of too much of a good thing.

Magical as that Roald Dahl-scripted film was, it remains lodged in our imaginations less for its sugary goodness than the way darkness, satire and even mania ebb around its edges - flowing down that nightmarish watery tunnel and pooling somewhere in the back of Gene Wilder's eyes. Charlie Bucket and Grandpa Joe may bubble with laughter all the way up the ceiling, but there's a spinning metal blade up there.

"Wonka," the latest attempt to revisit Dahl's masterwork, bears no such danger. It's going more for the taste of an Everlasting Gobstopper - an ingenious confection that piles flavor on top of flavor. Tasty though that can be, you miss the daring of Dahl in the more wanly whimsical "Wonka."

And you might fairly wonder: What's so wrong that? Who doesn't want a cynicism-free, candy-colored charm overload? "Wonka" may be too much of a good thing, but for many (particularly kids) it will surely, well, delight. Even for a movie predicated on retooling IP, "Wonka" comes across as remarkably sincere in its feel-good aspirations.

In the film's opening scenes, Willy (Chalamet) breezes into a frigid, unnamed European-styled city, singing "I've got nothing to offer but my chocolate and a hatful of dreams." He arrives like a too-confident traveling salesman, eager to sell his chocolate to the world.

Immediately fleeced of his few coins, Willy sets down on a bench for the night and pulls a candle out of his hat that he lights with a gentle blow. He's offered a bed for the night at inn. There, the innkeeper Mrs. Scrubit (Olivia Colman) and her henchman Bleacher (Tom Davis) trap needy drifters into years of indentured labor with elaborate contracts.

This Wonka can't read, a twist that I doubt Dahl would have endorsed, given how much, for him, reading and imagination were intertwined. Before Willy has even gotten started, he finds himself imprisoned with a handful of other similarly misfortunate souls, including the young Noodle (a very natural Calah Lane).

But inspired by his late mother (Sally Hawkins, seen in tender childhood flashbacks), Willy isn't much daunted in his dream to open a shop alongside other candy makers in the Galeries Gourmet. He manages to escape repeatedly to dazzle customers with chocolates of exotic ingredients before slipping through manhole covers to make a getaway, like Harry Lime in "The Third Man."

Sensing the potential power of Wonka's enchanting chocolates (some cause levitation), the monopolizing local chocolatiers - Slugworth (Paterson Joseph), Prodnose (Matt Lucas) and Fickelgruber (Mathew Baynton) - band together to squash Willy with the aid of a chocolate-addicted police chief (Keegan-Michael Key), whose waistline expands throughout the film.

That bit, like most others in the film, doesn't quite land despite the good cheer it's delivered with. "Wonka" assembles a wide array of top-notch comic actors - not only Key and Colman but Hugh Grant as an Oompa Loompa; Simon Farnaby (who co-wrote the script with King) as a security guard, mirroring his "Paddington 2" cameo; and Rowan Atkinson as a corrupt priest.

But most of the jokes in "Wonka" are as memorable as its songs. The gag of Grant, the "Paddington 2" MVP, smothered in orange makeup and green hair as a proudly debonair Oompa Loompa, is never quite as clever as the movie thinks it is. (On the press trail for the film, Grant has been 10 times funnier. )

Neil Hannon's songs are generic, but Chalamet sings them well. When a few notes from Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley's "Pure Imagination" float by, they only serve as a reminder to how much better the tunes were in the original.

I may be being too hard on "Wonka." This is an eminently pleasant movie, propped up by its indefatigable good cheer and King's immaculately tidy craftsmanship. The costumes (Lindy Hemming), cinematography (Chung-hoon Chung) and, in particular, the ingenious production design (Nathan Crowley) craft a wonder-filled backdrop. A film doesn't need scenery this good for Chalamet to carry it. His Wonka is simpler and brighter than Wilder's, more a figure of pure optimism, like Paddington.

But we've also had some exemplary Dahl adaptations lately that didn't forget that worlds of imagination come alive when the cruelties of life and of childhood aren't just paid lip service. (Veruca Salt or Mike Teavee, for instance, wouldn't fit anywhere in "Wonka.") I'm thinking of Wes Anderson's inventive Dahl-adapted shorts, released this fall on Netflix, and Matthew Warchus' terrific "Matilda the Musical," from last year. "Wonka" is a more mixed addition: More tailored for kids yet less about childhood.

"Wonka," a Warner Bros. release, is rated PG by the Motion Picture Association for "some violence, mild language and thematic elements." Running time: 116 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.


# Movie Review: In 'Poor Things,' Emma Stone takes an unusual path to enlightenment
By **LINDSEY BAHR**
December 6, 2023. 4:46 PM EST

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It is sickly hilarious to make a movie in which so much consensual sex is had, often so gleefully, that is not the least bit sexy. Though Bella Baxter's insatiable libido might be her guiding light at first in "Poor Things," sexual liberation (or "furious jumping," as she calls it) is only part of this fantastical, anarchic journey to consciousness.

Filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos and his star, Emma Stone, have a good and strange thing going whether she's playing a striving scullery maid who works her way into the favor of Queen Anne, or a re-animated Victorian woman finding independence. Stone helps make his black humor more accessible, and he creates unorthodox opportunities for her to play and stretch. We, the audience, are the benefactors.

"Poor Things" was not a whole cloth invention. It is an adaptation of Alasdair Gray's 1992 novel, done by "The Favourite" screenwriter Tony McNamara whose edges and wit haven't dulled and in fact flourishes outside the cruelty of the previous film. Don't worry, the humor is plenty dark here, but self-actualization looks good on them.

In this depraved and not so subtle fairy tale, men see Bella as a thing to possess and control. Her creator, Dr. Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), a mad scientist with violent scars all over his face from a childhood as test subject for his own father, wants to hide her away from the corrupting influences of the world. His horrified student Max McCandles (Ramy Youssef), enlisted to study Bella, wants her to be his wife. And the dandy attorney Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo) sees a sex doll, someone with the potential to be as wild and adventuresome as him and eschew the conventional stuffiness of their time. Everyone assumes that Bella will not be too much of a problem. And everyone is wrong.

It wouldn't be a Lanthimos movie without some immense, irreconcilable discomfort, like using a highly sexualized woman with the mind of a toddler for comedic purposes. But this is hardly the first fairy tale to exploit its heroine for her innocence or naivete. Does it make it better if that's the point? Is it making light of second-degree rape? Is it the film's responsibility to answer to? Or is this the prickly post-film debate that everyone is supposed to be having? That is something only the individual can answer.

Stone moves like a doll who hasn't quite figured out she has joints yet and talks in incomplete, childish sentences. She is not actually mimicking a toddler, it's something weirder and more fantastical than that. In "La La Land" she moved as though walking on air. In "Poor Things," there is a marionette quality.

And Bella evolves quickly. She learns to walk and speak and think and masturbate and dance and read and philosophize about inequalities. It does not ever occur to her to not do, or say, exactly what she pleases in this opera of appetites. And her evolution is appropriately messy, taking her to Portugal, Alexandria and Paris, as she figures out her likes and dislikes. You almost want to see her go up against the mean teens in Barbie. Social mores really are the dullest things.

This story exists in a Victorian dream/nightmare, a vision so stuffed with fantasy it reminded me of "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen." But it is undoubtedly among the year's most sumptuous visual delights with production design by James Price and Shona Heath, and costumes by Holly Waddington. Lanthimos and cinematographer Robbie Ryan again employ the fisheye lens that they used in "The Favourite." It's extra, but at least it makes more sense in this purposely disorienting world.

While it is Stone's movie, all the supporting men are exemplary and unexpected, especially Ruffalo who is so deliriously fun and funny that it's almost criminal that he hasn't been unleashed like this before.

"Poor Things," a Searchlight Pictures release in select theaters Friday and everywhere on Dec. 22, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for "gore, disturbing material, graphic nudity, language and strong sexual content." Running time: 141 minutes.

Three and a half stars out of four.


# Review: Swan song or not, Hayao Miyazaki's 'The Boy and the Heron' is a master surveying his empire
By **JAKE COYLE**
December 5, 2023. 6:39 PM EST

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When Hayao Miyazaki's "The Boy and the Heron" premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, the filmmaker Guillermo del Toro said in his introductory remarks: "We are privileged enough to be living in a time where Mozart is composing symphonies."

You might be tempted to call that hyperbole, but - this being Miyazaki, the legendary anime filmmaker of "Spirited Away," "My Neighbor Totoro" and "Kiki's Delivery Service" - it's closer to fact. The occurrence of a new film from Miyazaki deserves to be treated like the coming of a seldom-seen comet or something rarer still, like a winning New York Jets season.

Ten years ago, Miyazaki released the profoundly personal "The Wind Rises." It was then expected to be his swan song. But the 82-year-old filmmaker - known for his propensity for retiring again and again - soon announced that he would make one more. A decade of anticipation followed. Then, just as "The Boy and the Heron" finally debuted, word came that Miyazaki is pondering yet another movie.

As long as he keeps extending, so does our chance to keep returning to some of the most magical realms of animation. Watching "The Boy and the Heron," which opens nationwide Friday, is like returning to a faintly familiar dreamland. Only, since the only location here is really Miyazaki's boundless imagination, it's less the feeling of stepping back into a recognizable place than it is revisiting a well-remembered sense of discombobulation and wonder.

"The Boy and the Heron," loosely adapted from Genzaburō Yoshino's 1937 novel "How Do You Live?," first feels like a familiar setup for Miyazaki. A young protagonist is harboring an inexpressible grief while traveling to a new home. In the film's indelible, nightmarish opening scenes, a boy's mother dies in a Tokyo hospital fire amid bombing late in World War II. Flames fill the frame.

A year later, the boy, Mahito (voiced by Soma Santoki in the subtitled version I saw) is sent to live in a country estate by his father, who has already found a new wife, Natsuko (Yoshino Kimura). She's also the younger sister of Mahito's deceased mother. The basic framework of the story has personal echoes for Miyazaki. As a three-year-old, he was evacuated with his family to the countryside during the war.

Mahito is miserable in his new home. He doesn't like his stepmother-to-be and the kids at school are unkind. To escape going to school, he gives himself a head wound. Not unlike the 10-year-old Chihiro of "Spirited Away," who's transported into a fantastical world from an abandoned amusement park en route to her family's new home, Mahito finds a portal to a surreal dimension while ambling around the estate's grounds.

He's prodded toward an old tower, built by Mahito's great-uncle, by an ornery gray heron (Masaki Suda) who won't leave him alone. Think of herons and you might picture elegant, long-legged creatures, but this one is more of an annoying pest. It's also a kind of disguise, because a big-nosed man peels back the bird's head like a child momentarily taking off a Hollywood costume. He becomes something of a mischievous guide to Mahito. In Miyazaki films, guardian angels seldom look the part. (The English dub versions includes a voice cast of Christian Bale, Gemma Chan, Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson.)

Once Mahito makes his way into the tower, he lands in a fantasy world that, for its pure vividness, rivals anything Lewis Carroll ever dreamed up. There are armies of giant parakeets who protect a Parakeet King and little balls of sprites called the Waruwaru that float serenely to the sky. Almost like a Miyazaki greatest hits, "The Boy and the Heron" is filled with little fluffy orbs and fantastical oversized creatures, with drips of blood and drops of tears. It is, though, more avian than any previous Miyazaki movie, which tended to lead into wooded forests or watery seas. "The Boy and the Heron" will be, certainly, a hit among psychedelic-loving bird watchers.

But just as in the world above, there is violence and cruelty here, too. (Gird yourself now for the fate of the Waruwaru.) This is less a fantasy to escape to than a parallel world, populated with childlike versions of some of the people in Mahito's life, including his mother. It's a dizzying place that seems just as directly pulled from Miyazaki's subconscious as any other realm he's conjured before. You'll leave "The Boy and the Heron" in disbelief that this, supposedly, is a filmmaker in autumn. It's just as uncompromising a vision, and just as attuned to the experience of childhood.

"The Boy and the Heron" eventually drifts toward an aged, long-haired wizard (voiced by Shōhei Hino) who's spent his years holding this strange world together. As it teeters on the brink of collapse, he offers to bequeath his creation and all its responsibilities to Mahito, who instead decides to return to his own world. It's a parting sentiment from Miyazaki, a great sorcerer himself. Here, Miyazaki makes his peace with seeing his own tower crumble, while imploring his legion of followers: Go and create your own worlds, dream your own dreams.

Whether it's a final goodbye or not, it's among the most poignant partings of recent cinema. It's a grand culmination of both Miyazaki's extraordinary body of work and of a film that gathers, like a flock, or a symphony, so many of his trademark obsessions.

"The Boy and the Heron," a Studio Ghibli release is rated PG-13 by the Motion Picture Association for some violent content/bloody images and smoking. Running time: 124 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.


# Movie Review: 'Leave the World Behind' is a terrific blend of thriller, disaster and satire
By **MARK KENNEDY**
December 5, 2023. 12:57 PM EST

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Imagine that it's close to midnight and there's a knock at the door of your luxurious weekend rental home. A man is standing there, calmly apologizing. He says it's his home and that he and his daughter need your help. He's also dressed immaculately in a tux.

What would you do?

Did the tux make a difference? Would the man's race?

That early scene is when Netflix's "Leave the World Behind" really kicks into gear and never slackens as this terrific, apocalyptic, psychological thriller races to its conclusion, exploring race, affluence and responsibility along the way.

The luxurious home becomes a castle of sorts as the outside world crumbles. The man who says he's the owner tries to explain why he's turned up. "Under the circumstances, we thought you'd understand," he says. But understanding is in short supply here.

Adapted from Rumaan Alam's acclaimed novel, the movie is set against an end-of-days disaster in which technology - Wi-Fi, TV, phones, internet - has gone silent due to a cyberattack and there's been a massive blackout.

Well-to-do Amanda (a tart Julia Roberts) and her Atlantic magazine-quoting husband Clay (a hangdog Ethan Hawke) must work with the even-more-well-off G.H. (a calmly sophisticated Mahershala Ali) and his savvy daughter Ruth, (a superb Myha'la). The racial divide easily swamps their joint class affiliation.

Also along for the disaster are Amanda and Clay's children, a "Friends"-obsessed daughter (a soulful Farrah Mackenzie, who even wears her hair in a "Rachel" 'do) and her older, slightly bratty 16-year-old brother (a brooding Charlie Evans).

It's a story brilliantly adapted and directed by Sam Esmail, showrunner of "Mr. Robot," who has made "Leave the World Behind" into a homage of Alfred Hitchcock, complete with the image of a man trying to outrun a crashing plane and using the master's discordant loud music. Esmail, who manages to make a group of deer appear sinister, even makes a Hitchcockian cameo as a corpse on a beach.

The director paces the deepening dread flawlessly and there are visual delights throughout, like when the family starts off on their adventure with their car exiting at "Point Comfort." The camera often swirls and soars through glass cracks or holes in roofs like an uneasy bird, or parks itself at strange angles.

The mysterious catastrophe - ships beach themselves, driverless cars crash like lemmings - sloughs away any pretense at civility, leaving the adults and children to turn on each other. Amanda, in particular, reveals a dark side and her husband - before the disaster, a can't-we-all-get-along bro - abandons a hysterical survivor by the side of the road. Community is shattered, guns come out and protect-at-all-costs is the motto of the day.

The acting is first rate and it needs to be - this is a drama of manners and secrets, and each sigh or glance reveals so much. We haven't seen a nasty Roberts character in a while and Ali balances sophistication and slyness artfully. Together, they have some of the film's best scenes.

But a warning of sorts: It's best to click play on your remote knowing that the movie is more a satire than a true action-survival movie - the open-ended ending may divide viewers. Click anyway because the journey never drags. And don't be surprised if there's a jump in sales of survival tools this holiday season.

"Leave the World Behind," a Netflix release that starts streaming Friday, is rated R for "some sexual content, brief bloody images, language and drug use." Running time: 141 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.