To watch “A Quiet Place: Day One” is to recalibrate your senses — not to the alien horror movie you know is in store but rather, to the intimate human drama it hangs onto, long after a lesser film would have given up. Among its lovely images, there’s the distant New York skyline seen beyond a Queens cemetery, a sight familiar to anyone who’s ever driven into town. There are the resigned glances of terminal patients in hospice. Mostly, we take in the exquisite face of Lupita Nyong’o as Sam, a young person in the prime of life stricken with cancer, who carries the unfairness of her situation just below the surface.

Sirens and fighter-jet shrieks ease their way into the sound mix, as they must in any prequel to 2018’s civilization-ending “A Quiet Place” and 2020’s more-of-the-same “A Quiet Place Part II.” But even as smoke and white ash fill the air (best to leave those Sept. 11 memories at home) and pissed-off creatures rampage like cattle down the city’s glass and steel canyons, there’s an unusual commitment to the darker fringes of postapocalyptic moviemaking. It’s less “Furiosa” and more “The Road.”

Sam is already prepared to die, lending the film an impressively bleak tone and sparing us the rote machinations of hardy-band-of-survivors plotting. All she wants to do is walk — very quietly — approximately 120 blocks north from Chinatown to Harlem, where she can scarf the last slices of pizza from Patsy’s before such delicacies become ancient history.

It’s a refreshing, near-radical concept to build a studio film around, and as Sam sets off, a tote bag on her arm and her black-and-white support cat Frodo beside her, you may be reminded of that other woman-and-feline survival story, “Alien,” stripped to the bone. (One also wonders, glumly, how NYC’s thousands of dogs fared with these tetchy sound-averse invaders.)

The person pulling all this off is director-screenwriter Michael Sarnoski, last seen evincing a recognizably human performance from Nicolas Cage as a crumpled, broken chef in “Pig,” which was also about facing a kind of personal catastrophe. (He’s now made two of the most downbeat foodie films in a row.) Sarnoski, who wrote the story with original creator John Krasinski, does fine enough by the James Cameron-like action sequences that probably were mandated by the powers that be: chase sequences in flooded subway tunnels — yuck — and abandoned landmarks.

But he’s stronger on personal moments, such as the finest take of Djimon Hounsou’s career, consumed in spiraling guilt and choking back a scream after accidentally killing someone for panicking too loud. There’s also a business-suited Brit (Joseph Quinn, last seen shredding to Metallica in “Stranger Things”) who only wants to join Sam on her pizza quest. With a minimum of words, we somehow understand that he’s devoted way too much of his time on the planet to not connecting with other human beings, and he may only get this one day to make up for it.

You can take or leave a subplot about Sam’s writing career and thwarted dreams. For this viewer, there’s more poetry in her stopping at an abandoned bookstore, as we all would do, picking up a used paperback (fittingly, Octavia E. Butler’s 1987 sci-fi novel “Dawn,” which you sense she has read) and sniffing the pages: a history captured in a scent. She too is savoring humanity’s last vestiges. This is a film that seems to know a lot about future psychology. May we never know such mournfulness outside of an ambitious summer blockbuster.

Published 29 June 2024, 01:17 IST

Martin Mull, the comedic actor best known for his roles in “Clue,” “Roseanne,” “Arrested Development” and “Sabrina the Teenage Witch,” died Thursday. He was 80.

His daughter, TV writer and producer Maggie Mull, shared the news on Instagram.

“He was known for excelling at every creative discipline imaginable and also for doing Red Roof Inn commercials,” she wrote. “He would find that joke funny. He was never not funny. My dad will be deeply missed by his wife and daughter, by his friends and coworkers, by fellow artists and comedians and musicians, and — the sign of a truly exceptional person — by many, many dogs.”

Mull, who was also a singer-songwriter, rose to fame in the 1970s on Norman Lear’s satirical soap opera “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” and its spinoffs, “Fernwood 2 Night” and “America 2-Night.”

The dry-witted comic played Colonel Mustard in the 1985 comedy “Clue” and Teri Garr’s boss in 1983’s “Mr. Mom.” He was Roseanne’s boss, Leon Carp, on her titular sitcom, private detective Gene Parmesan on “Arrested Development” and “Sabrina the Teenage Witch’s” nosy Principal Kraft, in addition to voicing characters on animated shows, including “American Dad!” and “The Simpsons.”

The actor appeared in more than 200 Los Angeles Times articles across four decades. most recently in December. Following the death of Lear, a Times roundup of seven essential Lear shows noted Mull’s contributions to the oddball gallery of characters in “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.”

Here’s a sampling of headlines from Mull’s life as actor and as painter. A full Times appreciation is forthcoming.