Aurelia Butler

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    ‘Brick’ Review: No Way Out?

    In the overly constructed thriller from Germany, tenants are trapped in apartment building by a mysterious bulwark.“Brick” is built almost entirely of hints and twists. Even so, it feels spoiler-free to share that Liv, an architect who is trapped in an apartment building in Hamburg, Germany, concludes that the material composing the barricades is neither carbon fiber nor liquid granite.Liv (Ruby O. Fee) attempts to escape the apartment building with her video game-designing spouse, Tim (Matthias Schweighöfer). Tim is haunted by flashbacks of a family tragedy, one that provides the movie its iffy metaphorical mortar and moral. Hint: Like the building, Tim’s emotions are also entombed.The pair may be at an impasse, but skills-wise, they are well-suited for the task at hand. The couple are joined by Marvin (an amusing Frederick Lau) and Ana (Salber Lee Williams), who are drug-imbibing lovebirds, as well as the cagey veteran Oswalt (Axel Werner) and his bright granddaughter, Lea (Sira-Anna Faal). They also meet an outlier set on not escaping: Yuri (Murathan Muslu).But what, exactly, is the mysterious bulwark that transforms from a mosaic of smooth black bricks to undulating metal and back again? Does it have anything to do with the inky plume billowing near the harbor? Or is it, as Marvin frets, some sort of diabolical game ginned up by their short-term “super-host”? Or maybe it’s a high-tech fortress keeping them safe from a Deep State catastrophe, as Yuri fervidly claims. The writer and director Philip Koch teases these ideas up to the final image.Make sure to watch this thriller in its original German. Dubbed into English, it goes from mildly diverting to landing like a ton of, well ….BrickNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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    In Des Moines, Big Operas and Big Ambitions Fill a Tiny Theater

    Richard Wagner may be the opera composer most associated with epic grandeur: huge orchestras, huger sets. I never imagined I’d hear a full performance of one of his works while sitting just a few feet from the singers.But Des Moines Metro Opera, a four-week summer festival founded in 1973 and running this year through July 20, has made a specialty of squeezing pieces usually done in front of thousands into a startlingly intimate space. The company’s 476-seat theater wraps the stage around the pit and juts deep into the audience, drawing even the last row into the action.At the opening of Wagner’s “The Flying Dutchman” in the last week of June, the bass-baritone Ryan McKinny could brood in a murmur as the endlessly wandering captain of the title, while the choruses of raucous sailors were ear-shakingly visceral. It registered when the subtlest Mona Lisa smile crossed the face of Julie Adams as Senta, whose romantic obsession leads her to sacrifice everything for the Dutchman. Try that at the Met.Miye Bishop as the Dragonfly in “The Cunning Little Vixen,” with high-definition LED video by the designer and filmmaker Oyoram.Kathryn Gamble for The New York Times“When you first get here, it’s a little intimidating,” said the mezzo-soprano Sun-Ly Pierce, a Des Moines regular in recent years. “There’s no hiding, or even trying to. Everything is in hyper detail. Everything is in close-up.”The effect would be striking enough in Mozart or chamber opera. But the company has made a habit of putting on big, challenging works of a sort rarely if ever done in theaters so small: “Salome,” “Elektra,” “Pelléas et Mélisande,” “Billy Budd,” “Peter Grimes” and “Wozzeck,” with modest adjustments to some orchestrations, given a pit that fits about 65 musicians.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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    ‘Rosa la Rose: Fille Publique’ Review: Lady Liberty of the Streets

    A new restoration of a 1986 drama by the filmmaker Paul Vecchiali melds a candy-colored vision of the world’s oldest profession with a grim take on neoliberalism.Halfway through Paul Vecchiali’s “Rosa la Rose, Fille Publique,” you might think you’re in a lush musical.The luminous Rosa (Marianne Basler), a prostitute, springs around the streets of Paris’s Les Halles district in a blue dress and cherry-red earrings, cheerily taking on new johns — sometimes in pairs — as a Greek chorus-like duo of elder call girls bemoan their own shrinking clientele. But after a first act that ends with a giddy dance number and a tableau vivant restaging of “The Last Supper,” Rosa’s rose-colored glasses come off. It’s her 20th birthday and her life may not be so charmed as it seems.Released in France in 1986 and now showing in a new restoration, “Rosa la Rose” was made by a filmmaker attentive to the queer and feminist rallying cries at the time.His breakout film, “The Strangler,” depicted prostitutes in solidarity, tough and practical. In “Rosa,” the mood is initially jovial, with Rosa enacting her sexual freedom in a startlingly natural way — neither willfully provocative nor limned with secret shame. Vecchiali’s camera elegantly glides around her stamping grounds, showing her close-knit network of clients, co-workers, and pimps with carnivalesque panache.But as the debonair pimp Gilbert (Jean Sorel) reminds her, a job is a job. Gilbert isn’t her boyfriend; he’s her boss. And the teenager who follows her around like a puppy isn’t in love with her; he’s just aroused. Rosa’s disenchantment with the ways of her world gestures at the harsh austerity policies of then-president François Mitterrand. Ultimately, Vecchiali tempers a romantic vision of the world’s oldest profession with hard truths about women’s agency under the auspices of the free market: “public” goods like Rosa are destined to be depleted.Rosa la Rose: Fille PubliqueNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Little, Big, and Far’ Review: Dwelling in the Cosmos

    The experimental director Jem Cohen’s latest is an uncategorizable film about astronomers and humanity and love and the stars.Around halfway through Victor Hugo’s novel “Les Misérables,” the omniscient narrator is musing on the ways that the tiniest and grandest building blocks of life in our cosmos intersect. “Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins,” he writes. “Which of the two possesses the larger field of vision?”Good question. In Jem Cohen’s uncategorizable film “Little, Big, and Far,” an astronomer named Karl (Franz Schwartz) remarks that he was surprised as a child to learn that the stars were millions of miles apart, something he tells us while we’re seeing images of the night sky. From his point of view perched on Earth, those stars seemed crowded together, keeping one another company, all connected. This leads him to ruminate on how human relationships can contain vast distances, even when our bodies are in relative physical proximity. For instance, there’s the distance that’s grown between him and his wife of 40 years, Eleanor (Leslie Thornton), who’s also an astronomer, and who seems to be drifting away.That sense of echoes between celestial bodies, our bodies and the tiniest parts of the world — the ways things like uncertainty and harmony and connection and memory are embedded in the natural world, as well as the more metaphysical one — is the theme of “Little, Big, and Far.” But I am not quite sure how to tell you what the film is, other than achingly beautiful. Those who’ve seen Cohen’s previous films, including “Museum Hours,” will have a sense of what they’re in for; I’ve seen “Big, Little and Far” described as an “epistolary essayistic docu-fiction hybrid,” which is accurate but not all that illuminating.Epistolary, because most of the dialogue in the film is in the form of letters between Karl and a younger colleague, Sarah (Jessica Sarah Rinland), who is forming a relationship with Mateo (Mario Silva), also an astronomer. Karl and Sarah share their thoughts about their work, their relationships, their lives and the things that draw them to the stars. Often we’re hearing their letters while seeing images of a giant telescope, people on a town square, traffic whizzing by on the highway, the natural world, the lights in the night sky. We hear a little from Eleanor, too, who speaks about watching an eclipse from a mall parking lot and being just as fascinated by the way the other observers, mostly strangers to one another, form a little community for the moment.During this rumination and many others, most images we are seeing are of real people going about their real lives, whether it’s riding the light rail in Vienna or sitting on a folding chair and watching a solar eclipse. In one stretch of the film, Sarah’s voice reflects on whether museums, as she puts it, must be “places not only of knowledge, but of mourning” in an era in which species are disappearing from Earth at fearsome rates. As we listen, we watch people milling about a natural-history museum, looking at the displays, seemingly unaware of the presence of a camera.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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    Henry Mount Charles, Whose Castle Was a Mecca for Rock, Dies at 74

    To preserve his Irish manor, he staged concerts on its grounds, drawing the likes of U2, Bob Dylan, Madonna and the Rolling Stones as well as tens of thousands of fans.In 1976, Henry Mount Charles was 25 and living happily in London when his father summoned him home to Ireland to save the family castle from bankruptcy.Taking over the property, Slane Castle, with its vast expenses and minimal income, Lord Mount Charles first opened a restaurant there, the ancestral home of his aristocratic family. Then he contemplated the possibilities of the front lawn: a natural amphitheater sloping down to the Boyne River.He hit on the idea of open-air rock concerts. The first, in 1981, featured a young Irish band named U2. The next year, the Rolling Stones played for 70,000 ecstatic fans, and Mick Jagger stayed for dinner.Slane Castle in County Meath, north of Dublin.Julien Behal/PA Images, via Getty ImagesSlane Castle went through a decade-long restoration after a devastating fire in 1991.Nomos Productions, via Failte IrelandSlane Castle, some 35 miles north of Dublin, in County Meath, became internationally known as a rock destination. Bruce Springsteen, Guns N’ Roses, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Queen, Madonna, Foo Fighters, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Bryan Adams, Eminem, 50 Cent, R.E.M. and Oasis all performed there, while V.I.P. concertgoers wandered in an out of the owner’s 18th-century hilltop Georgian pile, resembling Downton Abbey.Lord Mount Charles, an Anglo-Irish peer turned rock ’n’ roll promoter, died on June 18 in a hospital in Dublin at 74. His family said the cause was cancer.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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    ‘Ne Zha 2,’ Blockbuster Chinese Animated Film, Will Get English Version

    The English-language version will feature the voice of Michelle Yeoh and be released in the United States in August.An English-language version of the Chinese movie “Ne Zha 2,” which has surpassed “Inside Out 2” as the highest-grossing animated feature of all time, will be released in the United States next month.“Ne Zha 2,” which is based loosely on Chinese mythology and a famous 16th-century novel, has made $2.2 billion at the global box office, including $20 million in the United States and Canada, according to A24, which is distributing the English version. That is more than any other animated film when not accounting for inflation; “Inside Out 2” made $1.7 billion last year.The English version will open on Aug. 22 and feature the voice of Michelle Yeoh, the first Asian star to win best actress at the Academy Awards for her role in “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”Yeoh will voice Nezha’s mother. The movie will also feature Aleks Le, Crystal Lee and Vincent Rodriguez III.In the original “Ne Zha,” which earned $726 million worldwide when it was released in 2019, Nezha is born as the reincarnation of a demon with supernatural powers who is destined to live only three years. He fights back against his fate and saves his village.In the sequel, written and directed by Yu Yang, Nezha challenges the political order and authority governing gods and demons, fighting the Dragon King of Four Seas and other creatures.The sequel was released in China in January and quickly became a smash hit, earning more than $1 billion in ticket sales in less than two weeks. “Ne Zha 2” was the first non-Hollywood film to reach that milestone.Yeoh, who also plays Madame Morrible in the “Wicked” movies, said in a statement that she was honored to be part of “Ne Zha 2,” calling it a “landmark in Chinese animation and a powerful reminder of how universal our stories can be.”“I can’t wait for everyone to experience the wonder, heart, spectacular artistry and magic of this film on the big screen,” she said.The success of “Ne Zha 2” has been good news for the Chinese film industry, which was struggling with poor ticket sales amid a weakening economy. The recent films to break through in China have not been the typical Hollywood blockbuster, but domestic features with patriotic themes or those that showcase traditional Chinese culture or folklore. More

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    Danielle Deadwyler on ’40 Acres and Balancing Brutality and Family

    The star plays a stoic matriarch raising a militant brood to protect their land and each other against cannibals in R.T. Thorne’s new horror indie.Onscreen, the actress Danielle Deadwyler has become known for expressing with her eyes what words rarely do. She can appear at once steely and heartbroken, fierce and fragile.She has used this ability to great effect in the HBO Max dystopian drama “Station Eleven”; in Jeymes Samuel’s 2021 western, “The Harder They Fall”; and in Chinonye Chukwu’s 2022 historical drama, “Till,” in which she played the doting mother of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old whose gruesome murder in Mississippi in 1955 helped spark the civil rights movement.Now, Deadwyler, 43, is applying her skill to R.T. Thorne’s first feature, the horror indie “40 Acres,” which is set in the near future. She plays a mother and former soldier, Hailey Freeman, who, alongside her partner, an Indigenous man named Galen (Michael Greyeyes), is preparing her brood for the harsh truths of their famine-decimated postapocalyptic life. They must fight threats from all sides, the scariest of which are bands of ferocious cannibals.The family tries to balance survivalist reality, including grisly encounters, with serene farm life. Days are spent training the four children to be warriors while also honoring their heritage and their land, finding surprising joy in the small things. In his critic’s pick review for The Times, Robert Daniels wrote that “Deadwyler’s forceful energy fills the frame” and that she “lends power and humor to this lovingly stern mother.”Hailey and her family are the descendants of African American farmers who settled in Canada after the Civil War, when the United States failed to fulfill Gen. William T. Sherman’s promise of 40 acres of land for Black Americans freed from enslavement.“It’s a unique family — R.T. said he hadn’t seen Black and Indigenous families together onscreen,” Deadwyler told me in a video interview in June. “I hadn’t either, like this.”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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    Gilberto Gil Steps Away From the Stage, Vowing ‘My Music Will Continue’

    At 83, the lauded Brazilian singer and songwriter whose career in music and politics has encompassed six decades is on a farewell tour.Gilberto Gil had been living in exile for a month when he first saw Bob Dylan take the stage.That was in August 1969, when Gil, who is now a revered international figure with a 60-year career behind him, had just turned 27. The military dictatorship in Brazil had “invited” him to leave the country after an arrest on charges of “inciting youth to rebel” during a show in Rio de Janeiro, among other accusations. Forced to flee, Gil chose London — a meeting point for musician and artist expats, with its vibrant cultural scene and artistic freedom — as his new home.He arrived just in time for the Isle of Wight Festival and knew he couldn’t miss his chance to see Dylan play his first show since a motorcycle accident had nearly taken his life.“It’s that passivity, almost,” Gil said in a recent interview. “That calmness he has onstage, without many exuberant gestures. That’s what I wanted to soak up and apply to my own performance.”And through the years, whether his image was as an inciter of youth or an insightful philosopher, he did. Even as Gil stood onstage in São Paulo this April on his farewell tour, it was the eloquence of his words and the memories his music evoked that captivated 40,000 fans.A chorus of voices accompanied Gil as he guided concertgoers through the many genres of his career — samba, baião, jazz, reggae, rock and international pop, among them. An innovator with a knack for preserving his country’s classic styles while building on them, Gil has used both his music and his voice to help fellow Brazilians feel pride in where they come from and hope in where they’re going. In addition to releasing dozens of albums, he has worked in politics since 1987 and served as Brazil’s Minister of Culture from 2003 to 2008.Gil, now 83, admits that it’s time to slow down. He doesn’t shy away from talk about aging: It’s just another change in a life of metamorphosis. And the name he gave his final stadium tour — Tempo Rei (which translates to Time Is King), borrowed from his 1984 song about the passage of time, the brevity of life and the necessity of transformation — alludes to just that.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