NEW YORK (AP) — James Earl Jones, who overcame racial prejudice and a severe stutter to become a celebrated icon of stage and screen — eventually lending his deep, commanding voice to CNN, “The Lion King” and Darth Vader — has died. He was 93.

His agent, Barry McPherson, confirmed Jones died Monday morning at home in New York’s Hudson Valley region. The cause was not immediately clear.

The pioneering Jones, who in 1965 became one of the first African American actors in a continuing role on a daytime drama (“As the World Turns”) and worked deep into his 80s, won two Emmys, a Golden Globe, two Tony Awards, a Grammy, the National Medal of Arts and the Kennedy Center Honors. He was also given an honorary Oscar and a special Tony for lifetime achievement. In 2022, a Broadway theater was renamed in his honor.

He cut an elegant figure late in life, with a wry sense of humor and a ferocious work habit. In 2015, he arrived at rehearsals for a Broadway run of “The Gin Game” having already memorized the play and with notebooks filled with comments from the creative team. He said he was always in service of the work.

“The need to storytell has always been with us,” he told The Associated Press then. “I think it first happened around campfires when the man came home and told his family he got the bear, the bear didn’t get him.”

Jones created such memorable film roles as the reclusive writer coaxed back into the spotlight in “Field of Dreams,” the boxer Jack Johnson in the stage and screen hit “The Great White Hope,” the writer Alex Haley in “Roots: The Next Generation” and a South African minister in “Cry, the Beloved Country.”

He was also a sought-after voice actor, expressing the villainy of Darth Vader (“No, I am your father,” commonly misremembered as “Luke, I am your father”), as well as the benign dignity of King Mufasa in both the 1994 and 2019 versions of Disney’s “The Lion King” and announcing “This is CNN” during station breaks. He won a 1977 Grammy for his performance on the “Great American Documents” audiobook.

“If you were an actor or aspired to be an actor, if you pounded the pavement in these streets looking for jobs, one of the standards we always had was to be a James Earl Jones,” Samuel L. Jackson once said.

Some of his other films include “Dr. Strangelove,” “The Greatest” (with Muhammad Ali), “Conan the Barbarian,” “Three Fugitives” and playing an admiral in three blockbuster Tom Clancy adaptations — “The Hunt for Red October,” “Patriot Games” and “Clear and Present Danger.” In a rare romantic comedy, “Claudine,” Jones had an onscreen love affair with Diahann Carroll.

LeVar Burton, who starred alongside Jones in the TV movie “Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones,” paid tribute on X, writing, “There will never be another of his particular combination of graces.”

Jones made his Broadway debut in 1958’s “Sunrise At Campobello” and would win his two Tony Awards for “The Great White Hope” (1969) and “Fences” (1987). He also was nominated for “On Golden Pond” (2005) and “Gore Vidal’s The Best Man” (2012). He was celebrated for his command of Shakespeare and Athol Fugard alike. More recent Broadway appearances include “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” “Driving Miss Daisy,” “The Iceman Cometh,” and “You Can’t Take It With You.”

As a rising stage and television actor, he performed with the New York Shakespeare Festival Theater in “Othello,” “Macbeth” and “King Lear” and in off-Broadway plays.

Jones was born by the light of an oil lamp in a shack in Arkabutla, Mississippi, on Jan. 17, 1931. His father, Robert Earl Jones, had deserted his wife before the baby’s arrival to pursue life as a boxer and, later, an actor.

When Jones was 6, his mother took him to her parents’ farm near Manistee, Michigan. His grandparents adopted the boy and raised him.

“A world ended for me, the safe world of childhood,” Jones wrote in his autobiography, “Voices and Silences.” “The move from Mississippi to Michigan was supposed to be a glorious event. For me it was a heartbreak, and not long after, I began to stutter.”

Too embarrassed to speak, he remained virtually mute for years, communicating with teachers and fellow students with handwritten notes. A sympathetic high school teacher, Donald Crouch, learned that the boy wrote poetry, and demanded that Jones read one of his poems aloud in class. He did so faultlessly.

Teacher and student worked together to restore the boy’s normal speech. “I could not get enough of speaking, debating, orating — acting,” he recalled in his book.

At the University of Michigan, he failed a pre-med exam and switched to drama, also playing four seasons of basketball. He served in the Army from 1953 to 1955.

In New York, he moved in with his father and enrolled with the American Theater Wing program for young actors. Father and son waxed floors to support themselves while looking for acting jobs.

True stardom came suddenly in 1970 with “The Great White Hope.” Howard Sackler’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway play depicted the struggles of Jack Johnson, the first Black heavyweight boxing champion, amid the racism of early 20th-century America. In 1972, Jones repeated his role in the movie version and was nominated for an Academy Award as best actor.

Jones’ two wives were also actors. He married Julienne Marie Hendricks in 1967. After their divorce, he married Cecilia Hart, best known for her role as Stacey Erickson in the CBS police drama “Paris,” in 1982. (She died in 2016.) They had a son, Flynn Earl, born in 1983.

In 2022, the Cort Theatre on Broadway was renamed after Jones, with a ceremony that included Norm Lewis singing “Go the Distance,” Brian Stokes Mitchell singing “Make Them Hear You” and words from Mayor Eric Adams, Samuel L. Jackson and LaTanya Richardson Jackson.

“You can’t think of an artist that has served America more,” director Kenny Leon told the AP. “It’s like it seems like a small act, but it’s a huge action. It’s something we can look up and see that’s tangible.”

Citing his stutter as one of the reasons he wasn’t a political activist, Jones nonetheless hoped his art could change minds.

“I realized early on, from people like Athol Fugard, that you cannot change anybody’s mind, no matter what you do,” he told the AP. “As a preacher, as a scholar, you cannot change their mind. But you can change the way they feel.”

___

Mark Kennedy is at http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits

Ron Howard, 70, said during an interview with Deadline at the Toronto International Film Festival that politics wasn’t discussed that often while the move was being made.

“Well, we didn’t talk a lot of politics when we were making the movie because I was interested in his upbringing and that survival tale. That’s what we mostly focused on,” Howard said, adding “based on the conversations that we had during that time, I just have to say I’m very surprised and disappointed by much of the rhetoric that I’m reading and hearing. People do change, and I assume that’s the case. Well, it’s on record.

Howard said at that time, in 2020, Vance “was not involved in politics or claimed to be particularly interested. So that was then. I think the important thing is to recognize what’s going on today and to vote.”

One year later, Vance ran for the Ohio U.S. Senate seat vacated by Rob Portman. After being endorsed by Donald Trump, he went on to win the 2022 election, defeating Tim Ryan.

In another interview with Variety in Toronto, Howard added he’s “been surprised and concerned by a lot of the rhetoric” from the Trump-Vance campaign.

“There’s no version of me voting for Donald Trump to be president again, whoever the vice president was,” he said.

Glenn Close who starred in the movie as Vance’s grandmother spoke to Variety last month during the premiere of her movie “The Deliverance” and slammed Vance for flip-flopping on Trump.

“You only hope that people in our government have a moral backbone and that they don’t say one thing and then say something that’s 150 degrees different,” she said.

Content from The National Desk is provided by Sinclair, the parent company of FOX45 News.

There’s a lot more Keaton in the 36-years-later reboot “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” which pays off in terms of a great and versatile star’s screen time. But holy cats, is this movie disappointing! I mean really not good enough! Some people, Burton fans many of them, slag off Burton projects like the live-action “Dumbo” or the feature “Dark Shadows.”  While many disagree, given the wide but generally admiring critical response to “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” in its world premiere last week at the 81st Venice International Film Festival, this one, for me, ranks right down there with “Dumbo.” It is not enough to make a swole version of the first “Beetlejuice,” at somewhere around 14 times the original’s $15 million product budget. With the effects upgrades and joyless bombast taking over, did the comedy ever have a chance?

Now the mother of teenage Astrid (Jenna Ortega), ghost-friendly Lydia hosts a successful reality/talk show produced by her smarmy fiancee (Justin Theroux). The show is a haunted-house affair, featuring standoffs between supernatural and super-normal inhabitants of the same domiciles, with Lydia acting as “psychic mediator.” The tragic death of Lydia’s father leaves Astrid bereft and also skeptical: If mom’s TV shtick is genuine, why can’t she make afterlife contact with Astrid’s grandfather?

When Beetlejuice enters the story, he’s still smitten with Lydia. Beyond that, his ex-wife Delores (Monica Bellucci), determined to exact revenge on her dirty dog of a former husband, goes about sucking the souls out of humans who get in her way. There’s more to the screenplay by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, including Astrid meeting a sweet fellow outsider (Arthur Conti), and Willem Dafoe’s deceased but lively detective — an actor who played a detective when he was alive, so why stop now?

Burton’s design teams remain among the finest commercial film creatives working, and there are some visual ideas and images in “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” that hit that elusive sweet spot between the macabre and the wittily macabre only a Burton movie can manage. When Keaton sails into a flashback reverie about how he and Delores met and then broke up, it’s depicted in the operatically intense style of an Italian gallo horror melodrama. Elsewhere we get bits of the cramped “Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” German Expressionism in the scenic design, which is amusing. More clinically impressive than amusing: the sight of Bellucci’s formerly dismembered Delores reattaching her own limbs with a staple gun.

What’s missing is not simply surprise, or the pleasurable shock of a new kind of ghost comedy. It’s the near-complete absence of verbal wit, all the more frustrating since Keaton is ready to play, and he’s hardly alone. The legendarily gifted Catherine O’Hara returns as Lydia’s stepmother Delia, as haughty as ever. But we keep waiting for the jokes to land — to do their job, in other words. Without a fresh take on familiar material, director Burton makes do with his own detours and let’s-try-this-for-a-while segments, including a torturous musical sequence backed by the song “MacArthur Park” that goes on approximately forever. Then there’s a “Soul Train” riff, which feels way, way off, taste-wise and big-ending-dance-party wise.

It can’t hold a candle, in other words, to the happy ending of the first “Beetlejuice,” which found human and otherworld cohabitants of the same old house on the hill living in peace and harmony, with Harry Belafonte’s rendition of the Calypso classic “Jump in the Line” providing the backbeat. I’m sure this sequel will do well enough. But it’s a helluva comedown, and seeing “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” in a huge opening-night crowd at the Venice festival, I didn’t hear much in the way of actual laughter, proving that a couple of hundred million can buy you almost anything. Almost.

“Beetle Beetlejuice” — 1.5 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG-13 (for violent content, macabre and bloody images, strong language, some suggestive material and brief drug use)

Running time: 1:44

How to watch: Premieres in theaters Sept. 5

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

NEW YORK (AP) — Three weeks after the U.S. presidential election in November, Ridley Scott will present his latest big-screen opus. “Gladiator II” returns the prodigious filmmaker to ancient Rome for a story about a power, the survival of Rome and the fate of democracy.

“Hopefully,” Scott says, “it will be a good omen.”

This fall, Hollywood will be trying — with everything from swaggering historical epics like “Gladiator II” to the high-seas adventure of “Moana 2” — to capture the nation’s attention at a time when much of it will be directed at the polls.

Already, Hollywood has played a co-starring role in the election. The Democratic Convention in August was packed with stars like Oprah Winfrey. Republican vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, was first introduced to many by the 2020 big-screen adaptation of his “Hillbilly Elegy.” And it was George Clooney, who this month stars in the Apple Studios film “Wolfs” alongside Brad Pitt, who was one of the most prominent voices to urge President Joe Biden to step down from the race.

Hollywood, famously progressive, has always had to strike a balance between the liberal leanings of the majority of its creatives with the big-tent demands of pop culture. In recent years, that’s grown increasingly tricky.

At the same time, the movie industry, after several years hobbled by pandemic and strikes, is striving to recapture its all-audiences populism — and all the billions that can come with it. Disney chief Robert A. Iger last year signaled the need “to entertain first,” adding “it’s not about messages.”

This past summer, Disney led Hollywood out of a box-office slump with a pair of billion-earners in “Inside Out 2” and “Deadpool vs. Wolverine.” Ticket sales for the summer rose to $3.7 billion, according to Comscore — less than the traditional $4 billion benchmark but significantly better than initially feared after a painfully slow start.

One of the fall’s likeliest candidates to continue the trend is “Moana 2.” Dwayne Johnson, who returns as the voice of Maui, earlier this year said he wouldn’t endorse a candidate in the election out of concern for the division it would cause.

Like many of the films opening this fall, “Moana 2” (opening Nov. 27), as a story about a strong female protagonist and a celebration of Pacific Islander culture, could resonate very differently, depending on the outcome of the election.

“If it resonates for people in a different way, I can’t control that,” says Dana Ledoux Miller, who directed “Moana 2” with David Derrick Jr. and Jason Hand. “I’m so excited about what this story is and what it means to be a person in a community who wants something more for the world they live in and for the future. We’ll see what happens, but the movie is what it is.”

Movies this year have largely only approached political themes from a distance. “Civil War,” by Alex Garland, imagined the U.S. in all-out warfare. “War Game,” directed by Tony Gerber and Jesse Moss, gathered real political figures for an insurrection simulation.

But “The Apprentice ” will offer the movie version of an October surprise. The film, the release of which was announced just last week, stars Sebastian Stan as a young Donald Trump under the tutelage of Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong). The Trump campaign has called it “election interference by Hollywood elites.” Its director, Ali Abbasi, argues filmmakers have a responsibility to face current politics head-on.

“I’ve been hearing a lot: Let’s make a movie about the Second World War or the Civil War — just go back in time,” says Abbasi. “They say a Civil War movie is a good metaphor for the way our society is now. I’m like: Our society is extremely exciting, complex, complicated, has huge problems and opportunities. Why not address them? We have a (expletive) responsibility.”

As usual this fall, studios will trot out a new wave of awards contenders. Unlike last year, when Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” came into the season the clear favorite, no such frontrunner has yet emerged. At the Venice, Telluride, Toronto and New York film festivals, notable premieres include Todd Phillips’ anticipated sequel “Joker: Folie à Deux,” Edward Berger’s “Conclave,” Marielle Heller’s “Nightbitch,” Malcolm Washington’s “The Piano Lesson,” Steve McQueen’s “Blitz” and LaMell Ross’s “Nickel Boys.”

Standouts from earlier festivals will also mix in, like Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or-winning “Anora” and Jacques Audiard’s “Emilia Pérez.” But, at least for now, the Oscar race appears wide open.

“Emilia Pérez,” about a Mexican drug lord who transitions into a woman, is just one of the many musicals landing in theaters. Some studios have recently run from the label of “musical”; last December’s “Wonka” wasn’t advertised as such. But this fall, no matter what’s happening on the news, it won’t be hard to find song and dance on the big screen.

That includes “Joker: Folie à Deux,” “Moana 2” and the two-part adaptation of the Broadway show “Wicked!” — not to mention biopics on Robbie Williams (“Better Man”) and Bob Dylan (“A Complete Unknown,” with Timothée Chalamet).

“Wicked” director Jon M. Chu and producer Marc Platt were confident enough in their film, starring Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande, that they opted to split it into two. (Part two will release in November 2025.) “Wicked,” opening Nov. 22, will open against “Gladiator II” in the fall’s most “Barbeheimer” -like weekend matchup.

“I love at this time, at this moment, we can root for all movies, all the time,” says Chu. “It’s getting to tell people: Come to the movies. Everyone come.”

In “Wicked,” which imagines the story behind the opposing witches of “The Wizard of Oz,” Platt sees a story with plenty of relevance to the current political climate.

“It’s a significant election for both of us,” says Platt. “But our story aspires to be about the distance people travel to connect with each other, about seeing the other as not the other, about living in a world where sometimes the truth is not real.”

Some films are taking some novel approaches to storytelling. Morgan Neville’s “Piece by Piece” tells Pharrell Williams’ story with Lego bricks. Robert Zemeckis’ “Here,” starring Tom Hanks, has the appearance of a film shot in one take. In “Better Man,” Williams is portrayed by computer-generated monkey.

In festival screenings of Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis,” midway through the movie a man has walked on stage and addressed a question to the screen. Coppola, who financed the film himself, spent years steadily building “Megalopolis,” a future-set epic about a visionary (Adam Driver). In cynical times, it’s brashly optimistic, even utopian.

“You never turn on CNN or open the newspaper to: ‘Human Being Is an Unbelievable Genius.’ But it’s true. How can you deny it?” Coppola said after the film’s premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. “Think of what we can do. A hundred years ago they said man will never fly. Now we’re zooming around. So I ask myself: Why is it that no one dare say how great we are? There’s no problem that we’re facing that we’re not ingenious enough to solve.”

While Coppola was making his conception of a modern-day Roman epic, Scott was a making the genuine article. During the making of “Gladiator II,” Scott — a self-professed news junkie — continually felt that his film was far from ancient history. Russia’s war in Ukraine unspooled during the film’s making, the director noted.

“You are living during what I call democracy against tyrants, tyranny,” says Scott. “We’re looking in this film as about tyrannical leadership against people who try to rectify that. When is history not about that?”

SANTA FE, N.M. (AP) — A prosecutor asked a New Mexico judge to reconsider the decision to dismiss an involuntary manslaughter charge against Alec Baldwin in the fatal shooting of a cinematographer on the set of a Western movie, according to a court filing made public Wednesday.

Special prosecutor Kari Morrissey said there were insufficient facts to support the July ruling and that Baldwin’s due process rights had not been violated.

State District Court Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer dismissed the case halfway through a trial based on the withholding of evidence by police and prosecutors from the defense in the 2021 shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of the film “Rust.”

The charge against Baldwin was dismissed with prejudice, meaning it can’t be revived once any appeals of the decision are exhausted.

Baldwin, the lead actor and co-producer on “Rust,” was pointing a gun at cinematographer Halyna Hutchins during a rehearsal when it went off, killing her and wounding director Joel Souza. Baldwin has said he pulled back the hammer — but not the trigger — and the revolver fired.

The case-ending evidence was ammunition that was brought into the sheriff’s office in March by a man who said it could be related to Hutchins’ killing. Prosecutors said they deemed the ammunition unrelated and unimportant, while Baldwin’s lawyers alleged that they “buried” it and filed a successful motion to dismiss the case.

In her decision to dismiss the Baldwin case, Marlowe Sommer described “egregious discovery violations constituting misconduct” by law enforcement and prosecutors, as well as false testimony about physical evidence by a witness during the trial.

In the request to reconsider, Morrissey argued again that the undisclosed ammunition was not relevant to the case against Baldwin, which hinged on his responsibility to handle a gun safely under familiar industry guidelines.

“No one on the prosecution team … ever intentionally kept evidence from the defendant, it simply didn’t occur to the prosecution that the rounds were relevant to the case even if they were the same or similar to the live rounds found on the set of ‘Rust,’” Morrissey wrote.

She asserted that defense attorneys knew about the rounds but canceled an opportunity to view them prior to trial.

“This is a smoke screen created by the defense and was intended to sway and confuse the court … and it was successful,” Morrissey wrote.

Baldwin attorney Luke Nikas said a response will be filed with the court, without further comment.

Movie armorer Hannah Gutierrez-Reed is serving an 18-month sentence on a conviction for involuntary manslaughter. She was accused of flouting standard safety protocols and missing multiple opportunities to detect forbidden live ammunition on set. Assistant director and safety coordinator David Halls pleaded no contest to the negligent use of a deadly weapon and was sentenced to six months of unsupervised probation. A no contest plea isn’t an admission of guilt but is treated as such for sentencing purposes.

It hasn’t been officially determined who brought the live rounds that killed Hutchins to the set, though prosecutors allege that Gutierrez-Reed was responsible.

The ammunition that skuttled the case was handed over to a Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office crime scene technician who filed the evidence under an unrelated case number. Three of those rounds resembled live rounds that were collected from the “Rust” set after the fatal shooting.

The mysterious ammunition was dropped off at the sheriff’s office by Troy Teske, of Bullhead City, Arizona, who routinely stored weapons and ammunition for his friend and longtime movie-gun coach Thell Reed — Gutierrez-Reed’s stepfather and mentor as a film-set armorer.

Morrissey asked the judge to order defense attorneys to show when and how they learned of the ammunition provided by Teske, calling the defense motion to dismiss the case “all a ruse.”

Attorneys for Baldwin have said he was unaware that live ammunition had been brought to the film set and that prosecutors hid evidence while trying to establish a link between the live ammo on set and Gutierrez-Reed. They said prosecutors wanted to drive home the argument that Baldwin should have recognized the armorer’s blundering youth and inexperience.

Gutierrez-Reed is seeking the dismissal of her involuntary manslaughter conviction based on the allegations of suppressed evidence that emerged at Baldwin’s trial.

Separately, Gutierrez-Reed has requested a hearing on a proposal to change her plea to guilty in exchange for a deferred sentence on a felony firearms charge pertaining to accusations that she took a gun into a Santa Fe bar weeks before “Rust” began filming.

Under the agreement with prosecutors, Gutierrez-Reed would serve 18 months under supervised probation with the potential for incarceration for probation violations. Terms of probation agreement, if approved, would forbid possession of firearms and the consumption of drugs or alcohol and would require registration in a criminal justice DNA database.

It means imminent best-of-2024 lists destined for pushback (why does everyone anoint the same favorites?), Golden Globes and the Academy Awards. As always, much of what’ll likely fill the ballots will come out of the international film festival noisemakers this time of year, with events in Venice, Italy; Telluride, Colorado; Toronto and New York City sharing many of the same movies in a six-week blur through mid-October. And then there is, you know, “Wicked.”

Here are 10 titles coming our way. Each provokes a question that only time and your opinion of the movies themselves can answer. Release dates are subject to change, like so much in this life.

“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” (Sept. 6 in theaters): Thirty-six years ago, Tim Burton made a scruffy, inventive ghost comedy and created a uniquely macabre playground for one of Michael Keaton’s finest hours (and a halfs). Now, with many times the original’s $15 million budget, comes a sequel featuring ringers from the original ensemble — and, one hopes, a bigger role for Catherine O’Hara — plus newbies Jenna Ortega, Justin Theroux and Willem Dafoe. The question: Can Burton’s more, more, more sequel avoid swamping the material with digital effects?

“Wolfs” (Sept. 20 in theaters, Sept. 27 on Apple TV+): A botched killing, a couple of rival lone-wolf fixers learning how to get along, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, a little comedy, a little action. Directed by Jon Watts of the recent, pretty zippy “Spider-Man” trilogy, “Wolfs” is going to dink around in multiplexes for a single week before Apple streaming gets it. Clooney and Pitt are not happy about that. The question: Can the fellas and director Watt recapture some of the “Ocean’s 11” magic, wherever people see the results?

“Megalopolis” (Sept. 27 in theaters): Francis Ford Coppola spent $100 million and more on realizing his decades-in-the-oven science fiction fantasy about the clash between art and business, starring Adam Driver as a Howard Roark-flecked architect, Giancarlo Esposito as a corrupt mayor, and a screenful of futuristic imaginings by Coppola and his team. The question: Reviews from the Cannes Film Festival ranged from respectful to not-quite; will the filmmaker’s big gamble find a warmer reception Stateside?

“The Wild Robot” (Sept. 27 in theaters): DreamWorks Animation adapts the Peter Brown bestseller about shipwrecked robot Roz (voiced by Oscar winner Lupita Nyong’o) and her education in caring for an orphaned gosling. The question: Can director Chris Sanders manage something closer to the emotional satisfactions of the “How to Train Your Dragon” trilogy than the “Ice Age” movies?

“Joker: Folie à Deux” (Oct. 4 in theaters): The 2019 “Joker” caught the wave of sinister Trump-era vibes, to the tune of a billion-dollar gross, and Joaquin Phoenix won most every best actor award in existence. The question: Can Lady Gaga’s Harley Quinn-in-training, plus director Todd Phillips’ notions of how to make this sequel its own kind of nightmare musical, lead to another hit — and a better one in the bargain?

“Anora” (Oct. 18 in theaters): Writer-director Sean Baker may not be a globally recognized name, but his filmography deserves that recognition, with such brash, humane portraits in street-level, working-class seriocomedy as “Tangerine” and “The Florida Project.” “Anora,” his latest, concerns a Brooklyn sex worker (Mikey Madison) whose engagement to the son of a Russian oligarch leads to trouble. The question: Can Baker keep the streak going?

“Nickel Boys” (Oct. 25 in theaters): This adaptation of the Colson Whitehead novel, inspired by the horrors of a real-life Florida reform school, has a huge challenge to meet, coming as it does in the wake of director Barry Jenkins’ epically superb Amazon adaptation of the Whitehead novel “The Underground Railroad.” The question: Can director RaMell Ross and his team do the source material justice?

“Here” (Nov. 1 in theaters): Tom Hanks and Robin Wright, de-aged and aging as the century-spanning story requires, star in this adaptation of the 2014 graphic novel. The movie’s the product of director Robert Zemeckis; always an early adopter of cinematic technologies, he’s utilizing this time a generative artificial intelligence toolkit known as Metaphysic Live, allowing (don’t ask me how, at least yet) the actors to be de-aged or face-swapped not in post-production, but on set, in “real” time. The question: Does the AI truly help tell this story? Or in 20 years, will “Here” look the way Zemeckis’ “Polar Express” looks to us now? The trailer’s mighty promising.

“The Piano Lesson” (Nov. 8 in theaters, Netflix on Nov. 22): Set in 1936 Pittsburgh, August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama (his second, after “Fences”) starred John David Washington, Danielle Brooks and Samuel L. Jackson in a recent Broadway revival. Now, with Danielle Deadwyler stepping into the female lead, this story of a family heirloom (the piano of the title) and its deep, urgent historical legacy comes to the screen. The question: One that many stage-to-film translations have to answer — can the source material survive and thrive as a movie with a third of its material cut for time?

“Wicked” (Nov. 22 in theaters): The phenomenally popular Broadway musical, winding in and around the storyline of L. Frank Baum’s “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” brings its prologue tale of female friendship sorely and magically tested to the screen. “In the Heights” director Jon M. Chu and his team are halving this project; “Wicked II,” basically the second act of the stage version, arrives in late 2025. The cast is led by Cynthia Erivo (Elphaba) and Ariana Grande (Glinda). The question: Can the movie keep the “Wicked” phenom flying?

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

Those two films — “The Deliverance” and “The Secret Art of Human Flight — are worth watching during one of the most unreliable times on the movie calendar, Labor Day weekend.

Here’s our roundup.

‘The Deliverance’

Demonic possession movies don’t gain respect since most of ‘em can’t compare to William Friedkin’s 1973 pea-soup-spewing classic “The Exorcist.” The lackluster track record of exorcism movies doesn’t faze Lee Daniels (“Precious”), who takes a gritty “based-on-a-true-story” (an Indiana case doubted by many) and then scares the Beelzebub right out of you, and even makes you crack up a time or two. What fully invests us into the story of bad demon behavior that issues forth from the basement of a new home where Ebony Jackson and her three children live are the performances. Andra Day, in particular, flings herself into a meaty role as alcoholic single momma bear Ebony (dad’s serving in Iraq) who, on occasion, smacks cute young son Dre (Anthony B. Jenkins) around and threatens kids who aren’t nice to hers. Ebony stockpiles one bad decision after another, enough  to warrant repeat visits from a wary Child Protective Services agent (Oscar winner Mo’Nique). Day’s volcanic performance seethes with hair-trigger fury and that’s enough reason to give this guilty pleasure a go. So is the chew-the-scenery performance from a delicious Glenn Close as Ebony’s born-again momma Alberta, who moves into this citified “Amityville” hell house after a cancer diagnosis. “The Deliverance” does jump the shark, but it is undeniably entertaining and powered by terrific over-the-top performances.

Details: 2½ stars out of 4; out Aug. 30 on Netflix.

‘1992’

Ariel Vromen’s B-movie thriller rises above its standard heist plot thanks to the actors in it — Tyrese Gibson, Scott Eastwood and the late Ray Liotta — as well as its setting: the post-Rodney-King-verdict L.A. riots. That historical moment plays off in the background as we follow two very different fathers, one a Black man named Mercer (Gibson) who’s recently released from being incarcerated, the other a White man named Lowell (Liotta), who’s intent on stealing metal from a factory where Mercer works. Mercer is trying to protect his son (Christopher A’mmanuel) from getting caught up in the volatile events of that night while Lowell pushes his two sons Riggin (Eastwood) and Dennis (Dylan Arnold) to do dangerous things that will benefit him. A direct and to-the-point screenplay from Sascha Penn and Vromen, and genuine scenes between Gibson and Ammanuem, aid in making “1992” a genre exercise with much more on its mind than you might suspect.

Details: 3 stars; in theaters Aug. 30.

‘You Gotta Believe’

Ever get a lump the size of a baseball in your throat watching an underdog emerge as a hero when the game is on the line? It might seem corny to some that this kind of scene can still make is cry like a baby, but that is the beauty of this baseball movie by director Ty Roberts (“12 Mighty Orphans”) and screenwriter Lane Garrison. Their dramatized true story plays out in 2002 Fort Worth, Texas, recounting how beaten-down attorney and Little League manager Jon Kelly (Greg Kinnear) and even-keeled coach and father Bobby Ratliff (Luke Wilson) took their downright awful Westside Little-League All-Stars team to the Little League World Series — a minor miracle that comes about due to practice, patience and, finally, focus. Just as the players coalesce into something special, Ratliff — a dear friend to all — discovers he has cancer. The amazing thing is “You Gotta Believe” isn’t overly maudlin, even if it occasionally drops the ball in a few scenes. This is a winning family-friendly inspirational drama that celebrates teamwork, friendship and baseball.

Details: 3 stars; in theaters Aug. 30.

‘The Secret Art of Human Flight’

Accurate cinematic portrayals of the various stages of grief are sometimes so grave and depressing that they’re virtually unwatchable. Uber-talented San Francisco filmmaker H.P. Mendoza doesn’t skimp in relating the hardships of getting yourself out of the grief rut when you lose a loved one, but he also shows how there are moments of dark, profound humor. Indeed, Mendoza’s lead character Ben Grady (Grant Rosenmeyer, in a yank-your-heart-out performance) stumbles more than once as he tries to move forward after his wife, his co-author of children’s books, has died. But he needs some help getting there, and that’s when he decides he needs to pursue flight after seeing a questionable guru (a hysterically funny Paul Raci) who becomes his Obi-Wan guide of sorts, to the distress of his neighbors, the cops and his sister and her husband. “The Secret Art of Human Flight” lands at a time — just like “The Supremes at Earl’s All-You Can-Eat” — when we could all use it emotional boos it offers. The bittersweet screenplay from Jesse Orenshein ends on an exquisite note.

Details: 3½ stars; available to rent now on various platforms.

‘Slingshot’

In this tragically flawed and sluggish space thriller, an astronaut named John (Casey Affleck) goes on a laborious mission to Saturn’s moon, Titan, where perhaps a solution for global climate may lie. Getting there, though, presents a real risk to him as well as to Captain Franks (Laurence Fishburne) and another astronaut Nash (Tomer Capone) since they need to use the tricky orbital velocity of Jupiter to slingshot their way to their destination. Director Mikael Håfström does an admirable job of making the ship’s tight quarters hostile and claustrophobic. Good that. Where the film utterly fails is in the blah flashback-told backstory about the tepid earth romance between John and a brainy Zoe (Emily Beecham). Their flaccid connection is a real deal breaker since it’s instrumental to the plot. With a shorter running time, a better final scene and a heated-up romance, “Slingshot” might have had lift-off.

Details: 2 stars; in theaters Aug. 30.

‘Greedy People’

An ensemble of top-notch actors (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Himesh Patel, Simon Rex, Tim Blake Nelson, Lily James, Uzo Aduba) make up for some screenplay slips in director Potsy Ponciroli’s unpredictable, highly entertaining neo-noir. It begins with new-to-a-small-town cop Will (Patel) making a false move that results in the death of a woman (Traci Lords, yes that Traci Lords) in her ritzy home. Will and his swaggering and full-of-himself partner Terry (Gordon-Levitt, landing a good role for a change) discover a bag of loot near her body. Rather than ‘fess up to what happened, they make it look like someone else did the job and then take the money and attempt to run. Screenwriter Mike Vukadinovich packs his tone-shifting plot with numerous interesting characters — including scene-stealing Bay Area native Rex as a living-at-home-with-his-momma masseuse who rubs clients in an extra special way for a few dollars more — along with twists, double crosses and stacks of corpses. It doesn’t always work, but it more often than not hits its target, thanks to the performances and an unexpected ending.

Details: 2½ stars, available to rent.

Contact Randy Myers at soitsrandy@gmail.com.

NEW YORK (AP) — After struggling to drum up interest following its Cannes Film Festival premiere, “The Apprentice,” starring Sebastian Stan as a young Donald Trump, has found a distributor that plans to release the film shortly before the election in November.

Briarcliff Entertainment will release “The Apprentice” on Oct. 11 in U.S. and Canadian theaters, just weeks before Americans cast their ballots on Nov. 5.

Director Ali Abbasi, the Danish Iranian filmmaker, had prioritized getting “The Apprentice” into theaters before voters head to the polls. After larger studios and film distributors opted not to bid on the film, Abbasi complained in early June on X that “for some reason certain power people in your country don’t want you to see it!!!”

Steven Cheung, communications director for the Trump campaign, in a statement Friday called the film’s release “election interference by Hollywood elites right before November.”

“This ‘film’ is pure malicious defamation, should never see the light of day, and doesn’t even deserve a place in the straight-to-DVD section of a bargain bin at a soon-to-be-closed discount movie store, it belongs in a dumpster fire,” Cheung said.

Part of what dampened interest in “The Apprentice” was the potential threat of legal action. After its Cannes premiere in May, Cheung called the movie “pure fiction” and said the Trump team would file a lawsuit “to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers.”

“The Apprentice” chronicles Trump’s rise to power in New York real estate under the tutelage of defense attorney Roy Cohn (played by Jeremy Strong). Late in the movie, Trump is depicted raping his wife, Ivana Trump (played by Maria Bakalova ). In Ivana Trump’s 1990 divorce deposition, she stated that Trump raped her. Trump denied the allegation and Ivana Trump later said she didn’t mean it literally, but rather that she had felt violated.

Abbasi has argued Trump might not dislike the movie.

“I would offer to go and meet him wherever he wants and talk about the context of the movie, have a screening and have a chat afterwards, if that’s interesting to anyone at the Trump campaign,” Abbasi said in May.

Briarcliff Entertainment has released films including the 2022 documentary “Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down” and the Liam Neeson thriller “Memory.” The indie distributor is run by Tom Ortenberg, who at Lionsgate helped released Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” and as chief executive of Open Road backed the best picture Oscar winner “Spotlight.”

Landing on Netflix this week after a limited theatrical release, the supernatural horror thriller largely eschews jump scares in favor of a slow build to an extended exorcism sequence.

That all sounds perfectly appealing — and “The Deliverance” has its strengths, some effective character-driven moments among them — but the ultimate result is a movie that lacks some punch in its first half and, like some other exorcism-based flicks that have come before it, comes across as more ridiculous than dramatically satisfying in its second.

Penned by David Coggeshall (“The Family Plan”) and Elijah Bynum (“Magazine Dreams”), the latest from the director of films including “Monster’s Ball” (2001) and “Lee Daniels’ The Butler” (2013) is inspired by the alleged haunting of the Ammons family in the early 2010s in Gary, Indiana. “The Deliverance” keeps the period but moves the action to Pittsburgh, which is where we meet the fictional Jackson family.

Single mother Ebony Jackson (Andra Day) is doing her best to raise her three kids — teens Nate (Caleb McLaughlin of “Stranger Things”) and Shante (Demi Singleton, “King Richard”) and younger son Andre (Anthony B. Jenkins) — while struggling to make enough money and drinking at least a bit too much. She also has welcomed into their new home — the family’s third in a brief stretch — her mother, Alberta (Glenn Close).

Ebony’s relationship with her mother is complicated, thanks to a not-so-pleasant childhood, even now that Alberta has found Christianity and seemingly has turned her life around for the better. (Alberta sticks out visually at her predominantly Black church, but this is a white woman who has lived her life as part of the Black community.) To complicate matters for the Jacksons, Alberta is undergoing treatment for cancer.

Their lives are further complicated by Andre’s apparent conversations with Trey, someone, the boy says, who lives in a hole in the basement — a basement full of flies that are a source of frustration to Ebony — and sometimes spends time in his closet.

That there is indeed an evil entity at play is baked into a film such as “The Deliverance,” but the movie nonetheless does its obligatory dance, spending significant time suggesting the spirit’s actions — including inflicting physical harm on the children — are the work of Ebony.

Among the highly concerned is determined social worker Cynthia (Mo’Nique, who was so memorable in Daniels’ acclaimed 2009 drama, “Precious”), who is frustrated by the secretive Ebony while genuinely wanting to help her.

Another woman interested in Ebony’s affairs is Bernice (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, “The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat”), who bills herself as an apostle and very much believes that an evil spirit is responsible for the family’s woes — and with good reason. And, for the record, she explains what she is offering is a deliverance, not an exorcism, even if the climactic sequence lying ahead feels extremely exorcism-like.

Though not its selling point, “The Deliverance” is at its most compelling when it works as a portrait of a Black family trying to get by with not enough money and without its male figure present. (Split from Ebony, the children’s father is away in Iraq, we learn.)

That this component of the film works as well as it does is due in part to the solid work from Day, a multi-talented performer who portrayed singer Billie Holiday in Daniels’ previous directorial effort, 2021’s similarly promising but ultimately middling “The United States vs. Billie Holiday.” Day holds your interest throughout the affair as its often-fiery protagonist.

Star Andra Day shines, but Hulu’s ‘The United States vs. Billie Holiday’ can’t find its rhythm | Movie review

The same certainly can be said for veteran actress Close (“Fatal Attraction,” “101 Dalmatians”), who told People magazine she initially had no clue how to play Alberta, with Daniels apparently telling her that “every Black person knows a white woman like this, but not every white person knows a white woman like this.” Close embraces all that comes with the role, including an over-the-top moment or two it asks of her deep into the film’s supernatural section.

Alberta and Ebony’s complex mother-daughter dynamic also is more intriguing than the climactic scenes, as creepy and uncomfortable as some of them are.

Daniels hopes the powers of Christ will compel viewers — or at least, as he says in his director’s statement, that “audiences are jolted into finding their higher power.”

That’s all well and good, but it’s tough, at the end of the day, to recommend “The Deliverance” when we wish parts of it were used to construct a largely different film.

‘The Deliverance’

Where: Netflix.

When: Aug. 30.

Rated: R for violent content, language throughout and some sexual references.

Runtime: 1 hour, 52 minutes.

Stars (of four): 2.

How “Blink Twice” addresses those subjects, in a script Kravitz developed over seven years with co-writer E.T. Feigenbaum, courts all kinds of spoilers. The spoiler-free description: Naomi Ackie, recent headliner of the Whitney Houston biopic “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” stars as a Los Angeles cocktail waitress invited by a reclusive tech billionaire, played by Channing Tatum, to hang out with his glam, dissolute friends played by Adria Arjona, Christian Slater, Haley Joel Osment and others, at his private tropical island.

Things feel a little off from the beginning for the newbies played by Ackie and Alia Shawkat. As “Blink Twice” unwinds, its risky but rewarding swings between terror and black comedy, between #MeToo allegory and “Get Out” freakout, reveal Kravitz to be a quick study of how a film’s visual personality, its production and sound designs especially, can work on an audience’s subconscious.

Kravitz grew up with perpetual, easygoing celebrity. Her mother is actor Lisa Bonet, best known for “The Cosby Show” and “Angel Heart,” and her father (though they split when Zoë was two) is musician Lenny Kravitz.

When “Blink Twice” was first conceived, two momentously sleazy real-life scandals were on the verge of going unstoppably public: the Harvey Weinstein sexual assault crimes and #MeToo fallout, and the sex trafficking and sexual abuse, involving a long, murky guest list of predators and enablers, that took place on a private Caribbean island owned by the late Jeffrey Epstein. As Kravitz and Feigenbaum revised their script, once Tatum came aboard as star and a producer, the story shifted to accommodate the current era, however indirectly. The movie’s not about that, though, Kravitz told me: “It’s about human beings, and what we do with our power.”

Our following interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Q: We may have to talk in a code a little bit here, but can you discuss some script elements that changed the most with “Blink Twice,” besides the title?

A: Everything changed a decent amount, once the cultural conversation changed and certain situations became public knowledge. We had to rewrite the story in terms of what the characters would know, and have knowledge of, and what behavior would be expected or acceptable. The behavior of Slater’s character and his crew was not as PC, I guess you’d say. (Seven years ago) we were in a world where it was OK to be outwardly misogynistic, when women were possibly less cautious and asking different questions. So we had to update the script to be in the now, which helped us focus it  and dig a little deeper.

Q: If a director works differently with different actors, what was the key here to getting what you wanted from yours? Especially in terms of tone? This is one tricky movie that way.

A: (Laughs) It really is. I don’t know if anyone really knew what I was going for besides me with the tone! But there was a lot of trust there. Sometimes I’d give line readings, which I know is a no-no, but there were times when it was the only way (to steer people away from) the obvious choice.

With Chan, as a producer on the film as well, we had time to develop his character fully, and to understand who he is, where he comes from. We wanted to make him not just an ordinary villainous character. By the time we shot, we were clear on who he was, so we got to play with it and push it further.

Q: And now you’re engaged.

A: We are.

Q: Congratulations. Where did you meet?

A: We met doing this film. I sent him the script six or so years ago, and a year after that, he still wasn’t signed on to the project, and finally he signed on, and we started to work together and talk more and by the time we shot the film we were engaged.

Q: Were there elements, memories of your own life that you ended up using for “Blink Twice”? You’re creating a world here that’s seductive, but with an asterisk.

A: There’s different elements to it. Growing up in spaces like this, there’s something kind of special when you’re a child and not really participating in the grown-up world, you’re just there, a fly on the wall. You’re witnessing power dynamics in a very pure way. I think I’ve always kept that feeling with me, this feeling of watching the games that human beings play. And then one day you realize you’re grown up, and now you’re part of that thing you’re used to just watching. So. I’ve had both perspectives.

As someone who’s been around those kinds of people and places, I could add a little texture and detail to the world we were creating.

Q: The movie has a meticulous design scheme, and you really notice it, since you can go months without seeing any movie of any visual distinction.

A: I love what movies can do with color, and texture. We wanted this one to feel vibrant, and to subvert audience expectations of what a tech billionaire’s property would look like, and to make something beautiful look almost oppressive. A little terrifying. Our production designer (Roberto Bonelli) brought so much to it, and our cinematographer (Adam Newport-Berra) spent a lot of time with me finding our language, how we wanted to shoot things, and to allow ourselves to be playful and bold in our choices. We wanted everything to feel heightened. Like a fairy tale gone wrong.

Q: You hear that, too, in the sound design.

A: I hope so. I always appreciated sound design in movies, but until you actually see and hear a project before and after (the sound design’s finished) you can’t imagine how much sound changes everything. This film needed to be a sensory experience. I wanted to shoot and sound design the scenes not in a realistic way, but in the way we think of memory. When you remember things, you don’t remember them realistically. You remember what you noticed. You remember that day in the park, you remember the sound of the wind, and the crunchiness of the leaves on the ground, or the bubbles in the champagne.

Q: Since the revelations of the Weinstein saga, and the Jeffrey Epstein nightmare, a lot seems to have changed in not a lot of time. On the other hand —

A: The issue I have with focusing on those two particular people is that we’re boiling down this bigger issue, this cultural, societal issue, to two men. These are two men who abused their power. They’re not the only ones.

The reason we put this story on an island was simple: to isolate everybody. That feeling of isolation could be anywhere, in almost any situation. It can be in the back room of a party, it can be on a dark street by yourself, it can be in the back seat of a car. It can be the man following you home, or the guy at the bar, or a family member, a woman, a man, anybody. (The film) isn’t only about rich and powerful men. It’s about human beings, and what we do with our power.

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.