By Gina Prince-ByTheWood | Nov. 29, 2016 | 1:36
Step into the world of "L.A. Noir" through a series of nine groundbreaking virtual-reality films starring the year’s best actors — and you, the viewer.
Kristen Stewart: Great Performers | 360 VR Video | The New York Times
You are the DYING LOVER who got caught in her crossfire.
Step inside the suspenseful world of film noir in a series of short virtual-reality films, and see what its like to be in a scene with the year’s best actors.
L.A. Noir The Full Cast: Great Performers | 360 VR Video | The New York Times | 20161209
Step inside the suspenseful world of film noir in a series of short virtual-reality films, and see what its like to be in a scene with the year’s best actors. Produced by The New York Times Magazine and MILK(vr) | Scenes of ‘Great Performers: L.A. Noir’
The Year’s Most Captivating Film Performances by Wesley Morris and A.O. Scott | 20161208
(Below are the excerpts on Kristen, click the link above for full article
MORRIS: Huppert is among the last of a dying breed of psychological star. That kind of acting has tended to be closely associated with the Europeans and the Method people, but is it nuts to watch Kristen Stewart work and think: She could be Huppert’s daughter?
SCOTT: No more nuts than my own hunch, which is that Kristen Stewart is the new Robert De Niro. Back in the ’70s and ’80s, De Niro’s reputation as the best actor in American movies rested on his ability to vanish completely into each role, to effect a physical and psychological transformation so total that you could barely recognize him from one movie to the next. Some of what he did was a matter of what you might call technical extremism: learning Sicilian dialect for “The Godfather Part II,” pushing his body from sinewy fighting trim to has-been bloatedness in “Raging Bull.” Stewart hasn’t quite done that yet, but she burrows as deeply as De Niro ever has into the interiors of her characters, arranging her expressions, her carriage, her vocal inflections — even, it can seem, her height and bone structure — accordingly.
You could say that, having been made, perhaps reluctantly, into a movie star by the “Twilight” movies, she has lately reinvented herself as the character actor she might have always preferred to be. Apart from her lead performance in Olivier Assayas’s “Personal Shopper,” she has been an ensemble player in 2016, with roles in Woody Allen’s “Cafe Society,” Kelly Reichardt’s “Certain Women” and Ang Lee’s “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk.” But the fact that she’s the most interesting person in all of those movies suggests that her movie-star charisma is still intact. She’s just using it in subtle and occasionally subversive ways.
MORRIS: I think Kristen Stewart is just about the best American movie actress we have. Her bad romance with movie stardom has served her well, because early exposure to its toxins might have fortified her resistance to mere fame. Unlike with, say, Ben Affleck, there’s no tension or ambivalence between her being an actor and her being a star. She appears to have rejected the latter to insist upon the value of the former. Lots of people can have it both ways, but it’s a balance that takes a while to achieve. Look at how long it took for Meryl Streep and Leonardo DiCaprio, whose allergy to overnight godliness foreshadowed Stewart’s. In the meantime, it’s fascinating to watch her flirt with stardom in the films she takes and the women she plays.
Wesley Morris is a critic at large for The New York Times and a staff writer for the magazine.
A.O. Scott is a chief film critic at The New York Times and the author of “Better Living Through Criticism.”
A version of this article appears in print on December 11, 2016, on Page MM52 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: 16 Actors.
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2016 Great Performers L. A. Noir
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