Aurelia Butler

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    ‘Mad About the Boy: The Noël Coward Story’ Review: In Blithe Spirits

    A brisk documentary by Barnaby Thompson counters that the tuxedo-wearing playwright hid his insecurities under a platinum-plated veneer.When Ian Fleming asked him to play the villainous Dr. No in the first 007 movie, Noël Coward, one of the defining theatrical talents of the 20th century, fired off this telegram: “No, no, no, a thousand times no!”“Mad About the Boy: The Noël Coward Story,” a brisk documentary by Barnaby Thompson, counters that Coward was closer to Broadway’s James Bond, a dashing Brit as cool and dry as a martini. As proof, the film opens with the pop star Adam Lambert reworking Coward’s titular 1932 song into a groove that pairs divinely with a collage of Coward modeling tuxedos — and would go just as well with a montage of Daniel Craig.Coward’s suave persona was itself a character he played to perfection (and exhaustion) on and offstage. Born into relative poverty, he became a self-educated sophisticate who hid his insecurities and then-criminalized homosexuality under a platinum-plated veneer.That’s as much psychology as Thompson is willing to indulge. Coward wasn’t one for pity, and neither is the film. Instead, it glides on to name-check his staggering résumé — “Private Lives,” “Design for Living,” “Cavalcade,” “Easy Virtue,” “Brief Encounter” — and parade its wonderful archival footage: travelogues of Coward cradling tiny snakes and home movies with his early boyfriend and business manager, Jack Wilson.The documentary’s biggest challenge is shaping Coward’s biography into a satisfying roller coaster of highs and lows. During Coward’s years in Jamaica, the narrator (Alan Cumming) regales us with the time Queen Elizabeth II detoured 80 miles to enjoy his beachfront vodka-and-beef bullion shooters; Cumming has scarcely finished the tale before he’s made to intone that Coward, a future knight, was “destined to die forgotten in exile.” Whenever things risk getting personal, you can practically hear Coward repurpose a threat from “Blithe Spirit,” his smash hit about a disgruntled ghost: Stop fawning on me or I shall break something.Mad About the Boy: The Noël Coward StoryNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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    ‘Terrifier 3’ Review: Still Clowning Around

    The deaths remain grisly, but the pacing uneven in this new installment in Damien Leone’s horror franchise.Nobody is pushing horror boundaries quite like the writer-director Damien Leone. Eight years ago, his killer clown film “Terrifier” had gorehounds buzzing. Its 2022 sequel unexpectedly broke into the mainstream and to date has earned over $15 million, a huge haul for a blood-drenched exploitation slasher.Leone’s new “Terrifier” film sags under its predecessors’ trappings: a bloated running time, an unfocused script, uneven pacing. But when Leone steps on the gas with Art the Clown — the franchise’s signature psycho-butcher, fiendishly played again by David Howard Thornton — he gets a jump on Santa, delivering an extreme and gruesome early Christmas gift.“Terrifier 3” picks up five years after the previous film but at Christmas, and Art is a killing machine in a Santa Claus suit. (It helps to have seen the first two films.) Art has a new monstrous female accomplice, Victoria (Samantha Scaffidi), who aids Art in inventively torturing and killing his victims, including death by intubated rodent tunnel.Back are the ferocious final girl Sienna (Lauren LaVera) and her now college-aged brother, Jonathan (Elliott Fullam), who join new characters in fights to end Art’s unquenchable bloodthirst. Christien Tinsley, the prosthetics and makeup effects creator, is a ruthless master of decapitations and glistening viscera.Devastated stomachs are badges of honor for “Terrifier” fans, and the great gut buster here comes when Art bombs a mall Santa meet-and-greet — a scene that makes “Silent Night, Deadly Night,” the once shocking evil St. Nick slasher, look like “Miracle on 34th Street.”Terrifier 3Not rated. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes. In theaters. More

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    With a ‘Ring,’ the Dallas Symphony Becomes a Wagner Destination

    Fabio Luisi, a seasoned “Ring” conductor, will lead Wagner’s four-opera epic over a week in concert, breaking new ground for American orchestras.Richard Wagner conceived his four-opera “Ring” as a Gesamtkunstwerk: a marriage of poetry and music, for voices and orchestra, with coordinated sets, costumes and action. It’s a huge, expensive challenge even for top opera companies, calling for powerful singers, an accomplished conductor and orchestra, and a stage director and designer who can enliven a convoluted epic of family dysfunction, greed, destruction and rebirth.How much of Wagner’s impact remains if you subtract scenery and costumes, and most of the action — with neither water nor fire, sword nor spear, celestial palace nor subterranean smithy?Those questions will be put to the test by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, which is alone in the American classical music and opera scene this season by presenting a complete “Ring,” over four evenings at the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center beginning on Sunday.At the podium will be Fabio Luisi, the orchestra’s music director since 2020, who led the “Ring” at the Metropolitan Opera a dozen years ago. In Dallas, he began to roll out the cycle last spring, presenting “Das Rheingold” and “Die Walküre”; “Siegfried” and “Götterdämmerung” followed earlier this month, semi-staged by Alberto Triola, who collaborated with Luisi and the Dallas symphony on “Salome” and “Eugene Onegin.”A concert staging of the “Ring,” Luisi said in a video interview from his home near Zurich, does not compromise the work.“In Wagner’s time the acting was extremely reduced,” he said. “We cannot compare the acting in the ’60s and ’70s of the 19th century with acting now. Even after the war, in Bayreuth, the stagings by Wieland Wagner were pretty much static.”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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    ‘We Live in Time’ Review: Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield’s Weepie

    Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield star in this weepie romance that tries to be modern by unfolding over three intersecting timelines.Time doesn’t stand still in “We Live in Time,” a shamelessly old-fashioned weepie about love and heartache; it jitters and jumps, restlessly shifting back and forth. Set in contemporary Britain, the story follows Almut (Florence Pugh) and Tobias (Andrew Garfield) over a half-decade or so as their relationship develops around familiar milestones. They fall into bed and then into love, move in together and have a child, all while celebrating triumphs and weathering tragedies. As the years pass, they grow older, naturally, but their story is somewhat more complicated than most only because it unfolds out of chronological order.It’s a clever conceit that suggests how we experience the passage of time and, in the more successful interludes, conveys how the past, present and future inform one another. Early on, Almut whips up some eggs before waking Tobias in a sun-drenched bedroom in their picture-perfect country home. In a following sequence — which turns out to be set years before — he jolts awake in their darkened London flat and checks on the heavily pregnant Almut. Each awakening is connected by the couple’s love and ministering tenderness; intentionally or not, the scenes also signal that this movie has a real thing for eggs, fertilized and not.Written by Nick Payne and directed by John Crowley, “We Live in Time” is set during three time periods — one lasts several years, another six months and the third about a day — that have been minced and mixed together. The transitions between the different times are blunt and, at first, they’re a touch disorienting because they don’t come with the usual prompts; there are no rapidly turning calendar pages or characters mistily announcing, “I remember ….” Instead, the filmmakers keep you grounded in the separate eras partly through Tobias and Almut’s changing hairstyles, as well as through the birth of their daughter, Ella (Grace Delaney), who grows from a topic of discussion into a charming little kid.Even as the filmmakers shuffle the couple’s different epochs around in a nonlinear fashion, time demands its due, as it must. As Almut and Tobias settle in for the long haul, more than just their hair changes. Almut, who quickly proves the richer character, undergoes significant transformations, including professionally as she goes from cooking in a small restaurant to presiding over a large staff in her own Michelin-starred place. Fairly early on, she and Tobias also receive the grim news from a doctor that her ovarian cancer has returned. It’s a jolt; it is the first indication that she’s been ill, and it’s also clear that the bad news will keep on coming.For the most part, Pugh and Garfield are pleasantly watchable, and they fit together persuasively enough to convey their characters’ mutual attraction. That’s the case even if Almut is more convincingly fleshed out than Tobias, who, as the story continues, can seem like both an obstacle and an appendage to this complicated woman. Almut doesn’t just give birth and fall gravely ill — which is already a lot for any one character — she’s far more professionally engaged than Tobias, who’s as bland as his job (for a cereal company) sounds. It’s an underwritten, reactive role that, particularly as Almut’s health crisis worsens, finds Garfield too often leaning on his talent for flooding his big, beseeching eyes with tears.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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    ‘Piece by Piece’ Review: Pharrell Williams’s Life, in Legos

    The producer and musician gets the biographical documentary treatment — with an unexpected twist.Credit where it’s due: In a sea of formulaic biographical documentaries about musicians, “Piece by Piece,” about the life of the hitmaker and entrepreneur Pharrell Williams, stands out boldly. Not because it doesn’t follow the usual narrative formula. It absolutely does: humble beginnings, rocket toward stardom, crash and then, inevitably, resurrection. That’s all so standard to the genre that it’s practically calcified.No, “Piece by Piece” pops because everyone — including Williams and the film’s director, Morgan Neville — is played by animated Legos.This choice, which was Williams’s idea, comes off less gimmicky than it sounds. Legos have proven to be remarkably versatile utility players in the past decade. They’ve performed as Ninjas and Batman and themselves ever since “The Lego Movie” (2014) opened and became both a staggering commercial hit and an instant classic. The movie was clever and inventive, but the choice of toy worked, too: Legos are recognizable, beloved and, most important, endlessly open to reinterpretation. There’s no reason not to mingle your Lego Hogwarts set with your Lego Star Wars set in the shadow of your Lego Eiffel Tower alongside your little cousin’s Duplo trucks, and that’s the fun of them — the potential for chaos and imagination.For “Piece by Piece,” the Legos are taking on a new challenge: playing real people. Animated feature-length documentaries have become more common in recent years — “Waltz With Bashir” (2008) and “Flee” (2021) are two significant examples — but here the animation is aggressively nonrealistic, on purpose. The subjects, which include Gwen Stefani, Jay-Z, Justin Timberlake and Daft Punk, show up rendered as cylinder-headed, block-bodied minifigures, Lego parlance for the people-shaped pieces. Minifigure Williams and Minifigure Neville sit across from each other, chatting about the movie and Williams’s life. The voices are real — Neville interviewed the plethora of collaborators and artists that Williams has worked for and with — but we only ever see their Lego versions, with some distinguishing facial hair or outfit.The playfulness fits Williams’s aesthetic, which ranges from producing beats and albums for that dizzying array of artists to recording his own megahit “Happy” to collaborating on lines of streetwear, fragrances, eyeglasses, sneakers and skin care. He’s clearly bursting with ideas all the time, and that’s the narrative of the film: This is a man who never stops dreaming of ways to remix the world. It’s his playground, his sandbox. Legos fit right in.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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    ‘Bad Genius’ Review: Cheating the System

    This remake of a hit Thai film about college admissions, starring Callina Liang, adds an element of racial politics to its heist story.At dinner at the home of one of her wealthy white classmates, Lynn (Callina Liang), a high-achieving Asian American high school student, finds out why she’s really there. Her classmate’s parents want her to help their son get into Columbia University, in whatever way is necessary. It’s quite the loaded setup in “Bad Genius,” a film that arrives a year after affirmative action in college admissions ended via a lawsuit in which, some argued, Asian Americans were used to advance a white conservative agenda.That thorny element of racial politics is the bold new ingredient in a remake of a hit Thai movie from 2017. This version, directed by J.C. Lee, is otherwise faithful to the original, following Lynn, a scholarship student at a prestigious high school who resorts to running a cheating ring to pay for college. For her big score, she enlists the help of Bank (Jabari Banks), a scholarship student whose parents are Nigerian immigrants.In practice, “Bad Genius” doesn’t actually have the political bite to back its bark. For all of its declarations meant to be scathing indictments of a rigged system, it is glaringly resistant to ever saying the word “white.” Nor does its young cast have the dramatic poise to elevate the script. Benedict Wong, as Lynn’s father, is an underused bright spot.Despite the film’s aims at spiky commentary, the class rebellion mostly serves as the thin wrapping to, at best, a middling heist movie that loses some of the punchy tension of the original’s getaway sequences. At its worst, it’s no more than a teenage soap opera.Bad GeniusNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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    Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong Say ‘The Apprentice’ Is a ‘Human Tragedy’

    It’s natural to feel nervous before presenting your movie at a major film festival. But in late August, when the director Ali Abbasi boarded a flight to the Telluride Film Festival, he wasn’t even sure if his new movie “The Apprentice” — a fictionalized look at the Machiavellian bond between the young Donald J. Trump (Sebastian Stan) and the lawyer and fixer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) — would be permitted to play there at all.“It was really crazy what happened, and I spared Jeremy and Sebastian some of it, but it is a demoralizing feeling,” Abbasi admitted during a recent video call with his two stars. The former president had been threatening legal action against “The Apprentice” since its May debut at the Cannes Film Festival, which chilled distributor interest in the movie for months and made it a controversial prospect for any subsequent festival willing to show it.“If a movie comes out and people think it’s bad or it’s flawed, you can deal with that,” Abbasi said. “But when it goes into a safe box indefinitely, that was heavy.”In the end, Trump failed to follow through on his threats, Telluride played the movie without incident and “The Apprentice” ultimately found a distributor in Briarcliff Entertainment, which will release the film on Friday. Still, Strong was perturbed by how many major studios were unwilling to take on the film and potentially incur the presidential candidate’s wrath.“You think that things could be banned in North Korea or Russia or certain places, but you don’t think that will ever happen here,” Strong said. “It’s a real dark harbinger that it even nearly happened.”Written by Gabriel Sherman, “The Apprentice” begins with Trump in his 20s as he toils under his real-estate magnate father and aspires to become a momentous figure in his own right. Still, Trump’s ambition exceeds his ability until he meets the savvy Cohn, who takes the young man under his wing and imparts ruthless rules for success that will eventually launch Trump onto the highest stage imaginable.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