Aurelia Butler

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    ‘Bonjour Tristesse’ Review: Goodbye Girlhood

    Durga Chew-Bose boldly reimagines a work once adapted by Otto Preminger in her beguiling first film set on the French Riviera.“She is imagining what she looks like to us as practice for when she wants to be seen,” a woman remarks early in “Bonjour Tristesse” of the teenage Cécile (Lily McInerny), whose mischievous experiment in womanhood is the subject of Durga Chew-Bose’s beguiling first film.Adapted from Françoise Sagan’s 1954 novel, “Bonjour Tristesse” dips into a well once tapped by the prolific director Otto Preminger — a bold choice for a first-time filmmaker. But Chew-Bose makes a convincing case for the remake by showing, like Cécile, a keen awareness of how to direct a gaze.The film follows Cécile, a teenager from the United States, over a summer on the French Riviera with her roguish father, Raymond (Claes Bang), and Elsa (Naïlia Harzoune), his summer fling. Lazing seaside, Cécile enjoys the couple’s company, but the serene scene frays upon the arrival of Anne (Chloë Sevigny), a refined family friend who undermines our protagonist’s status as the apple of daddy’s eye.While Jean Seberg once imbued Cécile with girlish petulance, McInerny gives the role an electric charge of ambivalence. We see our protagonist study Elsa and Anne’s womanly powers with a blend of longing and trepidation. Here, more so than in Preminger’s adaptation, the absence of Cécile’s mother is made to feel tangible.Chew-Bose directs her camera to elegantly glance off bodies, fabrics and seawater. She individualizes her characters through habits and gestures, like the different ways each woman eats her morning apple. A work of image and mood, “Bonjour Tristesse” captures the mythopoetic wonder of an adolescent summer, and the effect is trancelike.Bonjour TristesseRated R for budding female sexuality. In French and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Another Simple Favor’ Review: Big Hats and Big Intrigue

    The sequel to the deranged 2018 comedy finds Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick feuding in the Italian sun.When “A Simple Favor” came out in 2018, I fell headlong in love. It was just so unhinged, and so self-aware — not the sort of comedy you’d expect from two Hollywood actresses as bankable as Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick, or a filmmaker as mainstream as Paul Feig, who directed the genre-upending “Bridesmaids” in 2011. “A Simple Favor” felt like a melodramatic French psychosexual confection that had suddenly become sentient and started making fun of itself.You’ll have to go back and remind yourself of the plot before you see the sequel, “Another Simple Favor,” for which Lively, Kendrick and Feig have all returned. It won’t make any sense if you don’t, though it barely makes sense even if you do. Here’s the basic cheat sheet, spoilers obviously included: In the first film, Stephanie Smothers (Kendrick), a widow and a mommy vlogger, becomes embroiled in the life of her young son’s friend’s mother, the glamorous Emily Nelson (Lively). Emily is married to an English professor named Sean (Henry Golding). In the course of the film, sordid secrets are revealed and murders happen, and Stephanie and Sean hook up when they think Emily is dead, and it’s all very bonkers, though the most bonkers part is probably Emily’s amazing pantsuits. (If you know, you know.)The most pertinent detail to recall going into this new film (besides that other kinda-sorta incestuous liaison from Stephanie’s past) is that Emily is the assumed identity of a woman named Hope. Furthermore, Hope is a triplet; her sisters were named Faith (who’s dead now) and Charity (who died shortly after they were born). Don’t forget that. OK. Deep breath.“Another Simple Favor” escapes the pedestrian upscale suburban setting of its predecessor, flying (via private plane, naturally) to Capri, Italy, though not until after we learn that Stephanie has pivoted to true crime vlogging and writing, and Emily has figured out how to get out of her prison sentence, and is marrying a glamorous and rich Italian. Naturally she wants Stephanie, her bosom frenemy, to be her maid of honor. So off to the island they go, where things go extremely sideways.No one is more regretful than me to announce that “Another Simple Favor” is not as bananas as the first film. It was inevitable. The element of surprise is gone, for one thing: “A Simple Favor” was just so plain weird, so far afield of the vibe most people were expecting — what is this psychotic and vaguely erotic movie, and does it know how demented it is? — that the whole thing wound up feeling fresh. You had to lock into its vibe to appreciate it, but in the right frame of mind, it was a pleasure.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Electra’ Review: Not Exactly a Unicorn

    In Hala Matar’s stylish if somewhat vacant drama, flair trumps grief.One doesn’t have to delve too deeply into the name Electra to imagine tragedy’s-a-comin’ in the director Hala Matar’s stylish if somewhat vacant drama of the same name. Electra, after all, had roles in the works of the tragedians Sophocles and Euripides, among others. Here, the so-named beauty appears in flashback and her significance in the shifting relationships between two couples who meet in Rome and repair to a country house is fitfully revealed.When the magazine writer Dylan (Daryl Wein) and his girlfriend and photographer, Lucy (Abigail Cowen), descend upon the rocker Milo (Jack Farthing), there’s subterfuge afoot. As Milo is accosted by an amorous fan at a restaurant, the pair look stunned. But are they really?It turns out the fangirl is Francesca, Milo’s lover (Maria Bakalova giving a surprisingly sympathetic turn). In fleet order, the couples hit it off and Milo invites his chroniclers to Francesca’s family palazzo. But what’s the aim of Dylan and Lucy’s con exactly? Without spoiling things, it has something (but not everything) to do with stealing a painting of a unicorn. Its creator: Electra.From its title sequence — one toggling between typefaces crowding the frame and the hushed scene of a person mopping a vast room — to its languid eying of the palazzo’s suggestive artworks, “Electra” declares its affinity for visual (and sonic) swagger. (Matar makes music videos, as well as films for fashion houses.) The flair is palpable. What’s not convincingly nailed by the film’s moody bravado is the grief propelling its flirtatious and fraught quartet toward presumptive tragedy.ElectraNot rated. In English and Italian with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters. More

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    What the Cult Singer Daniel Johnston Left Behind

    Electric Lady Studios, in Greenwich Village, is a working music museum. The Fender Twin amplifier that the studio’s onetime owner Jimi Hendrix brought to work before his 1970 death remains, as does an electric piano Stevie Wonder used on an astounding run of records. There’s a keyboard Bob Dylan played in Muscle Shoals and several lurid murals by the painter Lance Jost, originals depicting interstellar travel and Aquarian-age sexual exploration.But Lee Foster — the former intern who became the space’s co-owner in 2010, after helping rescue it from financial ruin — keeps his drawings by the singer-songwriter Daniel Johnston in a small safe in the corner of his office, each page bound in plastic in a lime-green three-ring binder.Daniel Johnston’s drawing desk in his Texas home.Several 3D-printed versions of Johnston’s frog character, Jeremiah.The shelves in Daniel Johnston’s kitchen are completely filled with figurines and keepsakes. The house remains largely as he left it before his 2019 death.“It has nothing to do with financial value,” Foster said in his art-lined room last month, as afternoon slipped into evening. “It is so meaningful that, even if it was for that hour or three when he was sitting down to draw, it was all he was thinking about. There’s a little bit of his soul in there.”Soon after Johnston’s death in 2019, at 58, Foster became the unexpected custodian of Johnston’s unexpectedly enormous art archive. His career hamstrung by bipolar disorder and stints in psychiatric hospitals, Johnston first found acclaim as an unguarded and guileless songwriter in the late ’80s with tunes that cut instantly to the emotional quick.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Thunderbolts*’ Review: Florence Pugh and Pals Kick Some Asterisk

    The actress is the main attraction in Marvel’s latest, about a group of ragtag super-types who join forces to (spoiler alert!) save the world.For “Thunderbolts*,” Marvel has thrown so much stuff into its new branding event — an enigmatic asterisk, a guinea pig, a comic villain, a depressed superhero, nepo babies, veterans of David Simon’s “The Wire” — that some of it was bound to stick. The results are fitfully amusing, sometimes touching and resolutely formulaic. The story zigs and zags between firing guns and dropping bodies, and its tone zips all over the place. What holds it more or less together is a cast that includes Florence Pugh getting her Tom Cruise on, David Harbour playing a boisterous Russian clown and Sebastian Stan winking at Donald J. Trump.Stan, whose last splashy turn was as the young Trump in the biopic “The Apprentice,” is back as Bucky Barnes, who you may know as the Winter Soldier. This movie’s resident cool dude, Bucky is a soulful warrior with a prosthetic metal arm who looks good on a motorcycle and is mostly here to provide franchise continuity. Now in Congress, Bucky is working with Wendell Pierce’s Congressman Gary, to bring down the head of the C.I.A., Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Drefyus, another Marvel returnee). She’s been overseeing a secret program out of a mountain lair worthy of a Bond villain, so, yep, she’s bad news.If you’re not a comic-book devotee and have never heard of the Thunderbolts before they were exhumed for screen service, you aren’t alone. First introduced on the page in 1997, the group has been re-suited up here to be testy, quarrelsome and finally likable antiheroes, redeemable rogues with hard-luck stories and blood-slicked hands. (The body count is high; the gore sanitized.) The most reliably entertaining are the dryly sardonic Yelena Belova (Pugh) and the excitable, histrionic Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian (a showily outsized Harbour). The sister and father of Scarlett Johansson’s Black Widow, they are Soviet-trained toughs so powerful they upstaged that superhero in her titular 2021 flick.There’s always a lot going on in Marvel movies, and the filmmakers here — the screenwriters are Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo, the director is Jack Schreier — pile on twisty plot turns, blowouts, intimate chats and yet more characters. Chris Bauer, a familiar face from “The Wire,” plays a security type, Holt, while Lewis Pullman plays a mysterious newbie, Bob, an addition who isn’t interesting enough for all the screen time he’s given. (His father is the actor Bill Pullman.) Other returning faces include Wyatt Russell (his folks are Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell), who has some notably bleak moments as John Walker. Like Hannah John-Kamen’s Ava Starr/Ghost and the rest, he mostly plays backup for Pugh.This is Pugh’s movie from the start, and that’s a good thing. She’s a vibrantly alive presence, which is useful given that death is so pervasive in Marvel movieland, where heroes, villains and a seemingly infinite number of nameless civilians die — though some irrepressibly, near-miraculously rise again — amid the high jinks and wisecracks. Here, death enters early with Yelena having what seems like a to-be-or-not crisis atop a skyscraper. Speaking in weary, Russian-accented English, her face slightly pinched and the corners of her lips turned down, Yelena is in rough shape. “There’s something wrong with me, an emptiness,” she says as she steps off the ledge and plunges into the void, adding: “Or maybe I’m just bored.”Pugh’s deadpan delivery is disarming, as is the revelation that she did the stunt herself, which involved stepping off the top of the second-tallest building in the world before her character deploys a parachute. There’s no way to tell it’s Pugh from the way the filmmakers handle the scene because, after Yelena steps off, there’s a cut to a long shot of a tiny figure falling next to the tower. I assumed the whole thing was done with CGI and a stunt double. When Tom Cruise scrambled atop the world’s tallest building in “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol” (2011), you knew it was him from the attentive way the scene was staged and shot, which created a visceral sense of peril and further burnished his stardom. If actors risk their lives in a movie as Pugh did, viewers should know it; I only do because of a behind-the-scenes video.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Ted Kotcheff, Director Who Brought Rambo to the Screen, Dies at 94

    His films, including “First Blood” and “Weekend at Bernie’s,” covered a range of genres. He was later an executive producer of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.”Ted Kotcheff, a shape-shifting Canadian director whose films introduced audiences to characters including the troubled Vietnam War hero John Rambo, a dead body named Bernie and the young hustler Duddy Kravitz, died on April 10 in Nuevo Vallarta, Mexico, where he had lived for more than a decade. He was 94.His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his son Thomas Kotcheff.“My filmography is a gumbo,” Mr. Kotcheff wrote in his memoir, “Director’s Cut: My Life in Film” (2017, with Josh Young). “Not being pigeonholed as the guy who makes one style of film has allowed me to traverse every genre.”“My filmography is a gumbo,” Mr. Kotcheff wrote in his memoir, published in 2017.ECW PressMr. Kotcheff was directing television dramas in Britain when he met the novelist Mordecai Richler, a fellow Canadian, in the 1950s. They became friends and ended up sharing an apartment in London, where Mr. Richler wrote “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz” (1959), a novel about an amoral Jewish wheeler-dealer in Montreal who will do whatever he can to rise from poverty to wealth. Mr. Kotcheff vowed to Mr. Richler that one day he would direct a movie version of it.And he did. The film, starring Richard Dreyfuss, was made 15 years later.Richard Dreyfuss in the title role of Mr. Kotcheff’s “The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz” (1974). One critic praised the film’s “abundance of visual and narrative detail.” Paramount, via Getty ImagesVincent Canby, reviewing “Duddy Kravitz” for The New York Times, praised its “abundance of visual and narrative detail,” which he speculated grew out of the “close collaboration between Mr. Richler and Mr. Kotcheff.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’s Path From Harlem to Stardom, and Now Federal Court

    Jason Swain was on his way home to the Bronx when friends told him that something had happened to his brother at a charity basketball game in Harlem. Nine young people at a City College of New York gymnasium were crushed to death in an overcrowded stairwell. Dirk Swain, 21, was lying on the gym floor with a sheet draped over his body.The promoter of the December 1991 event was a 22-year-old novice music producer named Sean Combs.For more than six years, the Swains and other families pursued wrongful death suits, saying Mr. Combs had oversold the game, and that bad planning and inadequate security had led to the tragedy. By the time their cases were settled, Mr. Combs had skyrocketed from a junior record label employee to global superstardom; the $750,000 that he contributed to the $3.8 million in settlements represented a fraction of his wealth as hip-hop’s newest, flashiest mogul.Mr. Combs never accepted full responsibility for the deaths and, for many people, the stampede faded into history. But not for the families who lost their loved ones.“Every one of those nine people was doing something positive in their life,” Mr. Swain said in an interview.The City College incident was Mr. Combs’s first moment of notoriety, but far from his last. In the ensuing three decades, he has repeatedly faced allegations of violence or serious misconduct. The beating of a rival music executive. Gunshots fired in a nightclub. The threatening of a reality-TV cast member. An assault of a college football coach.If found guilty of all charges, Sean Combs, who has spent the last seven months in a Brooklyn jail, could spend the rest of his life in prison.Willy Sanjuan/Invision, via Associated PressWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Buddy Guy Talks ‘Sinners’ Post-Credits Scene

    The guitarist and singer, who turns 89 in July, discusses his role in Ryan Coogler’s musical horror drama and his promise to Muddy Waters and B.B. King.Buddy Guy would do just about anything for the blues. So when the guitarist and singer got the call for a role in Ryan Coogler’s musical horror period-drama “Sinners,” the answer was an easy yes.Then the nerves kicked in.“Man, I had goose pimples everywhere. I couldn’t hardly sleep that night after shooting and the night before,” Guy, who turns 89 in July, said in a phone interview from his home in Chicago. In his main scene opposite Michael B. Jordan and Hailee Steinfeld, in a bar after the film jumps from the 1930s to the ’90s, he said he almost needed a stiff drink.“I never did drink alcohol until I met Muddy Waters and them, and they said, ‘If you drink a little schoolboy Scotch, Buddy, your nerves would be a little better off.’ And that wasn’t schoolboy Scotch during filming, that was just water, but I hoped they would bring me a shot because I didn’t want them to see me shaking,” he said with a laugh.In the film, which has become a box office and critical smash, and a cultural phenomenon, Guy portrays the older version of Sammie Moore, a blues musician played by Miles Caton in his earlier years. (The plot revolves around the Smokestack twins, both played by Jordan, and their efforts to ward off vampires, who offer Sammie eternal life.) Guy said he hadn’t watched the entire film yet — “I’m afraid to see it because I don’t want to say if I’m bad or good” — but he’s hoping “Sinners” bridges the gap between younger audiences and the blues, and shines a light on the genre’s legacy.“I saw a little clip of the movie and said, ‘Wow, this may help the blues stay alive.’ Some kid who never heard of the blues might wake up and say, ‘I better check that out,’” Guy said. “Blues has been treated like a stepchild ever since the big FM stations came out,” he added. He said he made a promise to Waters and B.B. King “that I would try to keep the blues alive because the blues is the history of all music.”“Sinners” has become a critical smash, a box office hit and a cultural phenomenon.Warner Bros. PicturesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More