The Cavaliers dominated the early portion of the game but squandered their advantage by turning the ball over four times. UVA’s defense kept the game close into the fourth quarter but was ultimately worn down by Maryland.

After the Cavaliers went three-and-out on the opening possession of the second half, Edwards hit Kaden Prather in the corner of the end zone for a 26-yard touchdown that made it 14-13 with 10:55 to go in the third quarter, and Maryland (2-1) led the rest of the way.

Felton entered the game as the leading receiver in the FBS, and he’ll be back at or near the top of the charts Sunday. Edwards steadied himself after an uneven first half and found Felton on some of the game’s biggest momentum-generating plays.

Maryland coach Mike Locksley didn’t waver as Edwards struggled, leaving him in the game and getting rewarded for that decision with a touchdown drive to end the first half that sparked the Terps (2-1).

Virginia (2-1) entered the red zone four times in the first half but had just 13 points to show for it, and the Cavaliers would come to regret not capitalizing.

One was a tough-luck turnover, when quarterback Anthony Colandrea had the ball kicked out of his hand by an offensive lineman who was lying on the ground, facing the other direction.

Colandrea was intercepted in the second half before a fumble by receiver Malachi Fields was recovered by Maryland’s Quashon Fuller.

By then, Maryland had used a significant time-of-possession edge to start imposing its will on Virginia, and a fourth-and-1 conversion in the red zone led to a touchdown that sealed the victory.

Virginia went 3 for 15 on third downs, continuing a trend that has been building throughout the early portion of the season. The Cavaliers are now 9 of 40 this season on third down.

The takeaway

Maryland: After squandering a late lead to Michigan State, the Terps got right, and doing so against a historic rival doesn’t hurt. Maryland has now won 14 consecutive nonconference games. Only Georgia (24) has a longer streak.

Virginia: Everything that went right in the first two weeks went wrong Saturday. Turnover issues are the headliner, but the Cavaliers lost their edge as the game went on and were unable to capitalize on early opportunities.

Up next

Maryland: Hosts Villanova on Saturday at noon.

Virginia: Visits Coastal Carolina on Saturday at 2 p.m.

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.

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.

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.

“There’s no way to predict a specific date, but I think that’s a reasonable target,” he said before the team’s final preseason game.

The team’s contractual obligations at Commanders Field end in 2027, but the Commanders can continue playing there indefinitely.

Harris and his ownership group are hopeful the site currently occupied by RFK Stadium, in downtown Washington, will be under consideration, but the federal government must first sign off on transferring the land to the District of Columbia.

The U.S. House of Representatives has given its approval, but the Senate has not. Harris said he is hopeful the Senate will act during the lame-duck session after November elections, noting that when a new administration takes over, “it’s very hard to predict” what will happen.

Harris also said he is hopeful to bring the NFL draft to the region in 2027, ideally taking place on the National Mall between the U.S. Capitol and Lincoln Memorial.

The team is working with the NFL and the National Park Service to make that a reality.

“Think about the idea of having — and I’m not breaking news here, it’s not done yet — but think about a draft on the Mall, and how exciting that would be, for the city of Washington, for the NFL,” Harris said. “Everyone sees that, and obviously there’s a lot of complexity to it with the Park Service … but I believe it will happen, and it’s a question of when.”

___

AP NFL: https://apnews.com/hub/nfl

He’s a funny kind of kind-of star. Tatum has learned to command the screen in the right role, working around his technical limitations, mostly to do with his voice. But coming off the strained, overblown romantic comedy “Fly Me to the Moon,” where he could barely get through his rapid-fire banter without gasping for air before the punchline, his performance in “Blink Twice” is pretty astonishing.

Is it because he’s playing a bad guy? No spoiler there; it’s in the movie’s trailers. Antagonists can free an actor, or at least vary an actor’s diet of solemn or sardonic good guys. Often, though, actors see villainy, even complicated villainy, as a license to overkill.

Not here. Tatum’s turn in “Blink Twice” is like the movie itself: crafty, rich, strange and, even when it wobbles a bit, destabilizing in ways guaranteed to lead to a less-than-stellar audience exit poll CinemaScore on opening weekend. More interestingly, it’s a bracing directorial debut for co-writer Zoë Kravitz. It’s also one of the few recent American thrillers with something on its mind, and the wiles to tap into something inside an organically realized nightmare scenario.

Tatum’s character is clouded by a recent, vaguely specified scandal, and “Blink Twice” begins with this man in apology and image-repair mode, having redirected some of his wealth to philanthropic galas and good causes. He has also bought a small private island somewhere, apparently in the Caribbean. There he spends time with close friends, eating stunningly photogenic meals, drinking wines costly enough to tilt the stock market this way or that. Also, he still does some drugs, as he did more carelessly, we hear, in the old days. Now, as Slater King tells one of his guests, it’s “with intention.”

The guest is a newbie, a knockout and agog at her good fortune. She’s the real star of “Blink Twice”: Naomi Ackie, the excellent English actress, playing Frida, a somewhat directionless Los Angeles cocktail waitress who works for a catering firm with her roommate, played by the invaluable supporting ringer Alia Shawkat. At a gala honoring King, the ladies decide the crash the party they’re supposed to be working and it works. King invites them to join his posse for a jaunt down to the island.

The screenplay by Kravitz and E.T. Feigenbaum pretends to be a straight-line narrative, but there’s something afoot, and it’s messing with Frida’s senses and sense of time. Something in the food? In the flowers picked from the nearby jungle, by the perpetually nearby local “help”? The louche male guests, played by Christian Slater and Haley Joel Osment, to name two, dart between conviviality and connivance, while the women — led by Adria Arjona, terrific as the longtime veteran of a babes-in-“Survivor”-land reality series — get high, get drunk, and run around as if being pursued by wolves.

Where this scenario goes next has its payoffs, and a drawback or two. “Blink Twice” lands on a gratifyingly bloody note, and with near-miraculous skill, director Kravitz manages some tonal change-ups beautifully, thanks to the razor-sharp editing of Kathryn J. Schubert and an ever-surprising sound design from Jon Flores, folding nicely in with Chanda Dancy’s score. The visual design of the picture, very big on blood reds and geometric carve-ups of this corner of paradise, feels like a single idea, fully expressed. If the resolution to “Blink Twice” won’t satisfy everyone, well, there it is.

Watching the film, certain probable influences come to mind, including Jordan Peele’s work, especially the great scene in “Get Out” with Betty Gabriel as the smiling, freaked-out housekeeper. The private-island premise recalls the late Jeffrey Epstein’s real estate holdings along with his crimes. The mind games and aggressively art-directed evocations of untrustworthy paradise, meanwhile, may link back for some viewers to lesser works such as “Don’t Worry Darling.”

Even if you get ahead of the story here, or resist the daring lurches in tone, “Blink Twice” marks a formidable directorial debut. As an actor (not onscreen here), Kravitz is so effortless, you rarely detect any overt planning or determination in her performances. Her movie’s a different case: a precise visual telling of a tale heading somewhere awful, but also cathartic. There is wit here, and expert supporting turns (Geena Davis is on the money as the billionaire’s assistant who has seen too much). Ackie is exceptional. And as dead-eyed schemer hiding behind a veneer of gentle contrition, Tatum has rarely seemed more alive and engaged on screen.

“Blink Twice” — 3.5 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for strong violent content, sexual assault, drug use and language throughout, and some sexual references)

Running time: 1:42

How to watch: Premieres in theaters Aug. 22

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

“Familiar” is relative here. The setting and story of the real-life three-man hip hop sensation Kneecap in Northern Ireland’s West Belfast doesn’t court a lot of immediate comparisons — though bits of “8 Mile,” “Straight Outta Compton” and the kinetic visual zap of “Trainspotting” inform writer-director Rich Peppiatt’s feature. In 2017, five years before the Gaelic language was recognized legally in the North of Ireland, Kneecap’s Mo Chara and Móglaí Bap, along with DJ Próvaí, unleashed a torrent of anti-British, anti-colonialist, pro-drug and pro-hedonism-in-general lyrics in unsuspecting venues, largely in that historically disallowed Irish tongue.

The backdrop of “Kneecap,” inevitably, is the Emerald Isle’s political warfare and Belfast’s “Troubles” (ridiculous word, considering the size of the troubles) in particular. The movie’s freely but creatively fictionalized version of events addresses the usual somber Belfast clichés in its opening seconds, jamming newsreel snippets of bombed buildings and exploding cars into a one-off quickie, just to get it out of the way. Director Peppiatt manages a shrewd balancing act throughout “Kneecap,” treating much of it for dark humor and exuberant myth-making while playing the human stakes realistically when it counts.

Bap’s offstage name is Naoise Ó Cairealláin; he plays himself in “Kneecap,” as does his best mate and fellow rapper Liam Óg Ó Hannaidh, aka Mo Chara. They’re easy, engaging screen performers. A tick or two up from there, so is the music teacher and Irish-language activist JJ Ó Dochartaigh, aka DJ Próvaí, likewise as himself. There’s a lot to juggle narratively within the film’s brisk, roughhouse 100 or so minutes, including a subplot dealing with Bap’s fugitive father, wanted for various IRA-implicated car bombings and played by Michael Fassbender.

This is all recent, roiling history, since Kneecap and its international popularity with dissident-loving, screw-the-establishment-backing millions worldwide became a thing a mere three years before COVID. (Kneecap’s next Chicago concert date, heading toward a sellout, is Sept. 27 at Concord Music Hall.) There’s a well-judged amount of rehearsal and concert footage in the film, with impish English-language subtitles darting here and there mid-song, with more conventional subtitling for dialogue scenes.

If “Kneecap” has a somewhat pushy sense of broad comedy or, in the final third, some predictable dramatic beats, its visual invention wins the day, because it’s so comfortably allied with the songs of protest and release. It moves like a streak, without a speck of solemnity, even when it’s focusing on the beauty of the language — whether describing sex, “stealing 20 from yer Da” for cocaine, or drug dealing (which these guys did). Or the more searching, poetic aspects of lives lived under siege.

You can enjoy “Kneecap” without thinking about the politics that made Belfast what it is, and isn’t, today. But that’s not really the way to watch anything so innately, inescapably political.

“Kneecap” — 3 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for pervasive drug content and language, sexual content/nudity and some violence)

Running time: 1:45

How to watch: Now in theaters

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

Colman Domingo? Not one of those actors. An Oscar nominee last year for his full-bodied turn as civil rights leader Bayard Rustin in “Rustin,” and star of the very fine new film “Sing Sing,” Domingo could get by, probably, on his basso profondo speaking voice alone. But he doesn’t. He’s doing too much beyond it to make you believe who he’s playing, in moments of anguish, joy, volatility or stillness.

Take 2020, that lousy first COVID year. After many years of doing August Wilson’s plays all over the country, Domingo took on the role of Cutler, the easy-does-it session musician working alongside Chadwick Boseman and Viola Davis in the Netflix adaptation of “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” That same year, in the jaw-dropper of a road trip odyssey “Zola,” Domingo anchored the craziness as the shape-shifting sex trafficker with more shades to his persona than most actors could manage convincingly in an entire career.

In “Sing Sing” the Philadelphia native plays John “Divine G” Whitfield, the real-life, self-described jailhouse lawyer who provided an early spark for New York State’s Rehabilitation Through the Arts prison program. While wrongly incarcerated, Whitfield performed Shakespeare and wrote his own plays in between advocating for other men up for parole and some — like himself  — facing decades more of the life they’re living.

“Sing Sing” follows Whitfield and several other RTA drama participants, many of whom are played in director/co-writer Greg Kwedar’s film by their real-life equivalents. In a role nearly as large as Domingo’s, Clarence Maclin portrays a version of himself, and holds his own, affectingly. Much of the story concerns the rehearsal and performance of an original time-traveling fantasy featuring Hamlet, Freddy Krueger, cowboys and pirates. Meanwhile Whitfield mounts his case for his own exoneration, based on evidence that has come to light. But that light is dimming.

Among other skills, the actor playing Whitfield has mastered something elusive and genuinely rare: bringing an audience into the quiet whirrrrrrr of a character’s thought processes. If you trust the stillness, he told me, and you’re a little lucky, you can quit acting and simply be. And if everybody could do that, then the entire contemporary roster of screen actors would be up there with Colman Domingo.

Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Q: First, before I forget: It was great to catch up with your one-man show “A Boy and His Soul” by way of Vimeo.

A: Oh, cool! Thanks! Wow, man. That was 2009. I was a bit more limber then. I was moving non-stop in that show.

Q: A kinetic experience, even when you’re not dancing, just to watch it. In “Sing Sing,” Divine G certainly has his explosive moments, but there’s a lot of the character doing very little, showing very little, hiding his cards more.

A: Right. Greg (director Greg Kwedar) talked about that. I brought to him this Japanese concept of ma, where everything and nothing is happening at the same time. In my work in cinema, I’m always trying to reach that place where the character work, the building of a character, leads to these moments of everything happening and nothing happening at the same time. In “Sing Sing” you need these moments of breath for the audience. But it’s also a moment of insight into what a character is thinking and feeling.

When I watched the finished film, I realized that at a couple of points I’d gotten on the inside of the character, into his interior life, when he’s trying to process what something means. One time (when Whitfield receives a massive mound of paperwork containing his ruling regarding clemency), when that brick of an envelope lands right in front of him, Greg told me he was going to have the camera up here (gestures to his face). Now, a life-changing moment like that can be played many different ways. Some actors might burst into tears. Some might go into a rage. This character is thinking about what the outcome will mean, for his coming years, for his self-worth. But as an actor I’m not thinking of any of that. I’m just playing the moment. And I needed the room and the time to do it.

Q: Somebody once said the greatest use of a camera is to show us the face of someone changing their mind or coming to a realization about something momentous.

A: Absolutely. It’s one of the most gorgeous things about the movies. This sounds like a name-drop, but I remember auditioning for Steven Spielberg for a film that eventually went away. In the audition he got behind the camera himself, and he told me he loved watching the shifts and transitions in my face. He told me that was a gift that I have. And he gave me a gift just by saying that.

For a long time, when I was primarily a stage actor, I was very performative. Now I’m a little more seasoned, and I feel that, I don’t know, falling back a little, sort of dropping into a role — that’s more like it.

Q: When actors are starting out, what’s behind the kind of performative impulse that might lead to, you know, too much? Is it the fear of being dull?

A: You just want to perform! You want to show, instead of be! This woman I met with last year, she told me: “For a long time you’re in your storytelling season. Then when you get to be about 60 or so, you move into your truth-telling season.” Maybe I moved into my truth-telling season a little early. I’m just trying to tell the truth, and instead of showing, just being. And trusting that an audience will go along with it, down a subtler, more nuanced road.

Q: Can you tell me about the pay equity and ownership stake idea behind the “Sing Sing” production?

A: It sounds so foreign to you, doesn’t it? (laughs)

Q: I mean, it’s un-American, obviously.

A: Right! “What is this thing?” Basically, they came to me with this project and asked to come on as a producer. And they asked for my opinion about how to get it financed. They said, “Well, one (budgetary) model is this: Now that you’re attached we can go out to find a studio to take on the film, in the studio system. Everyone’s paid a certain way, according to how they negotiate their contracts.”

Or, they said, there’s another way, more of a community-based model. We get independent financing, keep the overhead low, and make sure everyone participates. This means everyone above and below the line (production crew as well as major players and writers and such) gets paid the same rate, and you determine the pay on the number of days worked. But every single person participates in the financial outcome. That brings a different work ethic and everyone feels like it’s their film.

So that’s what we did. We kept our budget low, we sold it to A24 at a lovely price (during the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival). Everyone’s participating in the equity pool. And they feel good about it, especially because these men (who play themselves in “Sing Sing”) are giving over a lot of their life story.

Q: Let’s go back to Philadelphia, where you grew up. Can you recall the first film you saw as a kid that you just couldn’t shake?

A: “Carrie.” I was 8 or 9, maybe younger. Usually on Saturdays it was either my older brother or older sister’s turn to babysit me when my mom was working. The Locust movie theater (at 52nd Street and Locust, now closed) was right around the corner. My brother used to take me to every Bruce Lee movie possible, and I was a kid who didn’t like a lot of violence so I was always covering my eyes. My sister took me to horror movies, so she took me to “Carrie.” When that hand comes out of the grave? Please. I’d pass the theater walking to school, and I’d see that poster of Sissy Spacek looking beautiful at the prom in one picture and looking like the blood-covered daughter of Satan in the other. I’d walk by it doing this (hides his eyes). To this day I have never watched “Carrie” again.

Maybe I’m still unpacking some trauma from that one.

Q: With “Sing Sing” and “Ghostlight,” we have two movies this year celebrating the healing properties of art. That’s a tricky theme, I think. In the wrong hands the uplift can get a little …

A: I know what you mean. That fake-y inspirational stuff can feel manufactured. Wide-eyed, but not authentic. I haven’t seen “Ghostlight” but from the trailer it looks very grounded and honest about that idea. You just don’t want to feel like someone’s trying to get one over on you, or force you into a feeling.

Q:  So what’s next?

A: I’ll tell you, at 54 years old, that question isn’t as pressing as it used to be (laughs). I’m trying to make space to live, to fill up my soul a little, especially when you give up so much in work like this. When you’re younger you’re always onto the next thing, because you want more and more. But I’ve built up a body of work now. I actually want some breaks. And I want to play in spaces I haven’t played in for a while. I’m doing a limited series for Netflix (“The Four Seasons”) with Tina Fey and Steve Carell. I have “Michael” (the Michael Jackson biopic) coming out next April. I’m playing Joe Jackson. That’s already done. And now I want a little time to catch my breath.

“Sing Sing” opens in Chicago-area theaters Aug. 1.

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

At the July 13 Trump re-election rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, shots rang out, an assassin’s bullet grazed the right ear of former U.S. President Donald Trump and photographers covering the event captured what they could of the chaotic aftermath.

Secret Service agents hustled a stunned Trump onto the outdoor stage floor, shielding him from what might follow. Then, after the “shooter down” transmission, up came the candidate, back on his feet, fist in the air, American flag behind him, clear blue sky above it all. Barely heard over the commotion, he called out “fight!” three times, giving his supporters and the cameras something to remember.

Associated Press photojournalist Evan Vucci’s image of that moment hit the news wires. Within hours, minutes, even, a confluence of political agreement emerged across right, left and center. This photo, that defiance, that flag and that fist in the air could cement the election’s outcome. 

News images made under terrifying circumstances enter the world, and while the photographer may have a hunch about how they’ll be used for political or commercial purposes later, it’s too late. It’s out of the bag. But what transforms some photos into icons — we’ll use that word once, and cautiously, as with any “iconic”-adjacent word — while more complex images from the same, recent, tragic event take a back seat?

What can we find in other photographs made under extreme pressure that day, or other days in our history, Sept. 11, 2001, included, revealing different light and shadows of the same story?

I talked with Tribune senior visual editor Marianne Mather, who, like many newspaper photo editors Saturday, chose Vucci’s Trump rally photo for prominent online and print display. She has worked in Chicago as both photojournalist and photo editor. “When I saw that image,”  she told me, “I knew it could change the course of the election. But that’s out of our hands.”

Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Q: Why that photo above the others?

A: Action, reaction, motion and emotion — those are the four elements you want in a photo. The photos that came out of what happened at the rally have all four. They’re so impactful. But the fist pump into the air is the photo.

Q: Why?

A: It shows so much of what we, as Americans, prize, even with the blood dripping down Trump’s face. He’s down, but he gets up again. As a culture, we value these things. It’s an affirming image. Regardless of how it’ll be used by other people, for whatever purposes, it’s a solid, well-shot news photo.

Q: Is the photo itself inescapably political, do you think?

A: Well, yes and no. The event was inescapably political. It was a Trump rally for re-election, so we’re already in a political arena. As a photo editor, I’m always thinking: If my mother wasn’t there, what would I show her so that she understood what happened? That’s what we’re trying to do. Can images become politicized by others later? Yes. They can, and they will.

Q: Vucci’s photograph relates to another massively popular image: “Raising the Flag at Ground Zero,” taken by Thomas E. Franklin, who was a staff photographer at The Record. Resilience, framed by tragedy.

A: It speaks to what Americans love most about our country, I think. Getting back up in the fight, in the face of adversity. The firefighters, hit so hard that day, raising the flag up. It’s a moment in time, showing what America is made of.

Q: That’s how millions of people seem to be interpreting last weekend’s signature image.

A: Right. When you have a photo capturing a mood or a feeling of much of the entire country, that’s hard to deny. But we do have to remember this: It’s just one moment. There are other moments, captured before and after that one. Anna Monkeymaker’s photo (for Getty) is just remarkable, showing former President Trump as photographed through the legs of a Secret Service man. They’re all over him, trying to protect him. It’s a quieter moment — a behind-the-scenes look that’s pure storytelling. But this photo will never resonate as much with people because it doesn’t show what we love to see.

Q: It’s a really complex and ambiguous image, but it still manages to humanize the person dominating it, from an alarmingly close perspective.

A: I agree. A really great photo. That private moment, what Anna shot, is a quiet image. Evan’s is louder, and people resonate more easily with louder.

Q: You could say the same about a less well-known photograph taken at Ground Zero on 9/11, Lori Grinker’s “The Firemen and the Flag.” In a 2022 episode of the PBS series “The Bigger Picture,”  Fred Ritchin, dean emeritus of the International Center of Photography, says that the best-known Sept. 11 photo, Franklin’s, was “like a victory — ‘We won!’ It’s OK. We’ll be OK.” In Grinker’s photo, the perspective’s higher, gazing down on the firefighters, and you see more of the devastation. Ritchin calls it “a probing interrogation of the event. But not an uplifting image.”

A: Also, the flag’s already raised in that photo, which is truly beautiful. It’s so well-composed. What you don’t get is the action of doing something, the actual raising of the flag, the way Franklin’s photo does. All the symbolic elements of the Sept. 11 photo we remember, the men looking up, the raised faces, the action of doing something about what just happened — all that plays into a photo’s meaning, and impact.

Q: One last question about the images of what happened last weekend. If no one image can tell the whole story, if you’re picking which ones to publish, how do you make the call?

A: It’s a struggle sometimes. When I edited the photos on July 13 I saw the image of the fist raised, and you just knew what would happen if you put it out into the world.

Evan Vucci and (photographer Doug Mills), they got the money shot, and they risked their lives to capture that moment of history. Those show part of the story, of what happened. But there are other photos. I hope people take the time to see those, too, to get a true, well-rounded picture of that day. Before and after the fist-pump.

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

The story marries romance with mystery with carefully mapped skill. In Iceland, early in the pandemic, a widower, Kristófer, is living his comfortable but narrow existence in the village where he runs his restaurant. Plagued with memory loss, ducking his doctor’s entreaties to discuss his latest MRI, Kristofer has come uneasily to terms with some form of dementia clouding his very near future.

With time and lucidity running short, Kristófer embarks on a hunt for emotional treasure. Keeping his grown stepdaughter partly in the loop regarding his plans, he flies to London just as things approach COVID lockdown in search of his first love, Miko, the daughter of a Japanese restaurateur whom young, idealistic Kristófer met in the late 1960s.

The affair, more or less clandestine, ended suddenly back then, with Miko and her father disappearing into a chapter of their private family story unread by Kristófer. What happened? And why? “Touch” sustains steady if diagrammatic interest, toggling between the late ’60s flashbacks and the early 2020s, the latter charting Kristófer’s travels from London to Tokyo to Hiroshima in search of answers.

In the 2022 novel on which the movie is based, Miko first establishes contact with Kristófer. Adapted by director/co-writer Baltasar Kormákur and novelist and fellow Icelandic native Ólafur Jóhann Ólafsson, the film version uses a different, less specific point of narrative departure. The Japanese word kodokushi, translated as “lonely death” or the fear of dying alone, serves as a leitmotif here. Certainly Kristófer, played with serene authority by Egill Ólafsson, knows the weight of that word all too well. He makes it his mission to learn if Miko, if she’s still alive, feels the same weight.

The movie glides along, handsomely. Director Kormákur, best known in America for his action pictures “Contraband” (with Mark Wahlberg) and “2 Guns” (Wahlberg, Denzel Washington and Paula Patton), establishes a mood and rhythm of preordained heartbreak, depicted at a tactful remove. Much of the flashback footage takes place in Miko’s family restaurant in London, among the staff (Masahiro Motoki plays Miko’s widower father). In the ’60s scenes, young Kristófer is played by Palmi Kormákur, the director’s son. He captures the character’s oft-remarked on gentleness. Beyond that, though, he’s somewhat overmatched by his fellow actors, especially Kôki, who bringing a crystalline vibrancy to Miko’s turbulent struggles with her father, and her own desires.

I can’t quite put my finger on what’s missing in “Touch,” and why a well-carpentered, attractively realized film ends up feeling a little superficial. Maybe it’s the material’s hands-off approach to the elder version of Kristófer, whose symptoms of degeneration are barely visible. Maybe it’s the way the culminating scenes (no spoilers here) hit their emotional marks, dutifully, in ways that feel more dramatically tidy than authentically lifelike. Different as they are, we don’t read books or see movies like “The Notebook” or “Touch” for realistic touchstones; they’re romantic fantasies to the bone. I admire this film’s craft. And I would’ve appreciated a messier, inner-life impulse to go with it.

“Touch” — 2.5 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for some sexuality)

Running time: 2:00

How to watch: Premieres in theaters July 12. In Icelandic, Japanese and English with English subtitles.

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.