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In the show’s sophomore outing, it was truly anyone’s guess who the hell was going to die.

Movies, Series & Docs

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The actor’s performance as a lonely, obese man has earned Oscar buzz, but many in the fat-acceptance movement are anticipating the movie with dread.

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The idea of what a documentary is has shifted according to what has—and hasn’t—been possible during the past hundred years. But the artistic preoccupations of their creators have not changed radically in that time.

Movies, Series & Docs

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Why so many directors want to work with Hollywood’s most unconventional lead.

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Earlier this year, the Criterion Collection, which is “dedicated to gathering the greatest films from around the world,” released a restored version of “The Breakfast Club,” a film written and directed by John Hughes that I acted in, more than three decades ago. For this edition, I participated in an interview about the movie, as did other people close to the production. I don’t make a habit of revisiting films I’ve made, but this was not the first time I’d returned to this one: a few years back, I watched it with my daughter, who was ten at the time. We recorded a conversation about it for the radio show “This American Life.” I’ll be the first to admit that ten is far too young for a viewing of “The Breakfast Club,” a movie about five high-school students who befriend one other during a Saturday detention session, with plenty of cursing, sex talk, and a now-famous scene of the students smoking pot. But my daughter insisted that her friends had already seen it, and she said she didn’t want to watch it for the first time in front of other people. A writer-director friend assured me that kids tend to filter out what they don’t understand, and I figured that it would be better if I were there to answer the uncomfortable questions. So I relented, thinking perhaps that it would make for a sweet if unconventional mother-daughter bonding moment.

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The new Paul Thomas Anderson film, “Phantom Thread,” is about many things: clothing, sewing, driving, the risk of love, the exercise of power, and, above all, breakfast. “I can’t begin my day with a confrontation.” So says Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis), a celebrated fashion designer, who lives and works in a tranquil London square, and who despises any threat to that tranquillity. It is morning, and his sister Cyril (Lesley Manville), who helps to run the business, is at the breakfast table, as is a plate of iced buns, which he disdains, and an elegant young woman named Johanna (Camilla Rutherford). For her, likewise, he appears to have lost his appetite. Breakfast No. 2. Reynolds drives to the coast and arrives, famished, at a hotel restaurant. A waitress named Alma (Vicky Krieps) takes his order, which goes on forever, like the end credits of a Marvel movie. Welsh rabbit with a poached egg; bacon, scones, butter, cream, jam; a pot of Lapsang souchong. Pause. “And some sausages,” he adds. Only Day-Lewis could make a list of foodstuffs sound like the Ten Commandments. Alma blushes easily, yet there is no twitch of shyness; she bears herself with confidence, and, when Reynolds asks if she will dine with him that night, she accepts. Thus does she enter the sanctum, or the gentlemanly minefield, of his life.

Movies, Series & Docs