Aurelia Butler

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    ‘Lonely Planet’ Review: Laura Dern and Liam Hemsworth Leave Home

    Laura Dern and Liam Hemsworth star in a muddled romance without much to say.One of the odder trends in 2024 cinema has involved romances, some of them steamy, between middle-aged women and much younger men. Anne Hathaway starred in one, Léa Drucker in another, and Nicole Kidman in not one but two more. This plot is hardly new, either in concept — Hollywood history is riddled with older men romancing ingénues — or in this specifically gendered execution, with examples from “The Graduate” to “May December” in the canon.But this year’s bumper crop is noticeable and a little inexplicable. The nature of the tale is fairly consistent: A woman is on a journey of self-understanding, and the liaison is the key to unlocking some ineffable thing she’s lost. The relationship may or may not be fated for long-term success, but it points to double standards about women’s pleasure and also can make for some pretty hot cinema.In this 2024 lineup, “Lonely Planet” is distinctive mostly for being the one starring Laura Dern. Unfortunately, despite its wattage, it pales in comparison to its cousins.Dern plays Katherine Loewe, a novelist of some renown who’s flown to Marrakesh for a chic writers residency. She’s on deadline, but also in the midst of a bad breakup. Flustered and exhausted, she is hoping to find the head space she needs to finally finish her next book.Among the other residency guests is Lily Kemp (Diana Silvers), whose first book made her an instant literary star. She’s uncertain of herself, and still young enough to be star-struck by other writers in attendance, including Katherine. And she’s also still young enough to have brought her boyfriend, Owen (Liam Hemsworth), along with her. (A seasoned writer, presumably, would know enough about the usual residency social scene to leave him back in New York.) But Lily is annoyed that Owen keeps having to leave their room at night to take calls about some deal that he’s making at his private equity firm.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 Sex Trafficking Trial Is Set for May 5

    The music mogul, wearing tan jail clothes at a court hearing, waved and smiled at six of his children and his mother in the gallery.Sean Combs, the embattled music mogul, is scheduled to stand trial next May in New York, a federal judge said at a hearing on Thursday.Judge Arun Subramanian of Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York, who was recently assigned to the case, set May 5 as the start of Mr. Combs’s trial on charges of racketeering conspiracy, sex trafficking and transportation to engage in prostitution.Mr. Combs, 54, has been held in a federal detention center in Brooklyn for the past three weeks after being arrested at a New York hotel and then twice denied bail. He will remain in jail until the trial, pending another appeal that his lawyers filed this week.Mr. Combs was present at the hearing on Thursday. Wearing tan jail clothes, he walked into the courtroom waving and smiling at his family assembled in the gallery, including his mother and six of his children, and he embraced some of his lawyers.The hearing had been set as a routine scheduling matter. But it came one day after Mr. Combs’s lawyers filed a motion in which they accused government agents of leaking footage of Mr. Combs assaulting his former girlfriend Cassie to CNN. Without citing direct evidence, the lawyers theorized in court papers that the Department of Homeland Security, the agency that raided Mr. Combs’s homes in March, had been behind the leak. They said they might ask for the video to be barred as evidence at the trial.Emily A. Johnson, one of the prosecutors, commented briefly at the hearing about the defense’s accusation of leaks, saying, “The government believes the motion is baseless and it is simply a means to exclude a damning piece of evidence.” She said the government would be filing a response to the defense’s motion.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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    ‘The Apprentice’ Review: An Origin Story for Donald J. Trump

    In this ribald fictional telling of a young Trump’s rise, the man responsible is the lawyer Roy Cohn, played to sleazy perfection by Jeremy Strong.Midway through “The Apprentice,” a gleefully vulgar fictional dramatization of the loves and deals of the young Donald J. Trump, the movie’s look changes. From the start, the images have had the grainy quality that you sometimes see in films from the 1970s, which is when the movie opens. Then suddenly, while Donald — a terrific Sebastian Stan — is giving a TV interview in 1980, faint horizontal lines begin slicing across the image, evoking the flicker in analog video. It’s a sly nod at the future and a brand-new reality: A (television) star is born.“The Apprentice” is arriving in theaters less than a month before the U.S. presidential election, but it would be a strain to call this energetic, queasily funny if finally very bleak portrait an October surprise. The real Trump’s reaction to the movie suggested that it had the makings of a bombshell, though the most shocking parts of the movie have been reported elsewhere. His campaign called it “garbage” the day after its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, and his lawyers sent a cease and desist letter to the filmmakers. Yet the only news here — and, really, the greatest surprise — is how thoroughly this ribald, at times predictably unflattering movie humanizes its protagonist, a classic American striver.In broad strokes, “The Apprentice” recounts a familiar story of individual empowerment and (gilded) bootstraps through Donald, who hungers for the very best, or at least shiniest, that life can offer, be it women, clothing, swank digs or amber waves of hair. Like the hero in a Horatio Alger tale, except with, you know, family money and connections, Donald finds success partly through his association with a slithery lawyer, Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong, fantastic), who was Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s chief counsel during the Senate’s 1950s investigations into Communist influence in the United States. Roy becomes Donald’s mentor, helping him achieve his American dream that here has the makings of a nightmare.The director Ali Abbasi thrusts you right in the scrum, opening on Donald as he navigates the outwardly mean, trash-choked streets of Times Square. It’s 1973, and New York seems to be on the ropes. Parts of the city look like they’ve been bombed, and its rats are on the march. It’s tough out there, even for ambitious go-getters. Yet Donald, who’s in his late 20s and works for the Trump family’s sprawling real-estate business — he knocks on residential tenant doors to personally collect the rent — has grandiose plans to revive the struggling city and make his fortune by giving a hulking, rundown Midtown hotel a classy makeover.Donald’s aspirations for that hotel, the Commodore, become the first in a series of ladder rungs he grasps on his upward climb through the 1970s and into the go-go ’80s. Working from a script by Gabriel Sherman, Abbasi tracks Donald’s high points and low on his transformational journey, which takes him from testy meals in his parents’ Queens home and into Manhattan’s corridors of power, its boardrooms and party dens. Whether in the back seat of a stretch limo or riding along with Roy Cohn in a Rolls, Donald is on the make and on the move. (Sherman wrote “The Loudest Voice in the Room,” a biography of the Fox News executive Roger Ailes; Abbasi’s directing credits include “Holy Spider.”)Donald’s path, as it were, proves grim and glittering by turns, and is lined with shrewd wheedling, outlandish excesses, sketchy characters and anguished family drama. There’s also somewhat of a fork in his road, symbolized by his relationship with Roy and his romance with a feisty, skeptical Czech model, Ivana (an appealing Maria Bakalova). The movie suggests that Ivana is good for Donald and maybe a potential lodestar, but he’s in thrall to Roy and to his father, Fred (an unrecognizable Martin Donovan). A tyrant who berates his grown children at the family dining-room table, especially his eldest son, Freddy (Charlie Carrick), Fred is the father Donald conspicuously fears and whom he trades in for Roy.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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    ‘Separated’ Review: Interrogating a Policy

    The latest documentary from Errol Morris looks at the Trump administration’s practice of taking children from their parents at the southern border.When the great documentarian Errol Morris (“The Thin Blue Line”) has taken on overtly political subjects, he has rarely approached them from a position of express advocacy. His perspective tends to be more philosophical, even cosmic.“American Dharma” (2019) sought to understand what made the former Trump White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon tick. “Standard Operating Procedure” (2008) revolved around the photographs of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and how acts that might look so obviously like torture were in certain cases rationalized as routine. The director’s portraits of former defense secretaries — Robert S. McNamara in “The Fog of War” (2003) and Donald H. Rumsfeld in “The Unknown Known” (2014) — centered on figures who were well out of office, even if, in 2003, McNamara’s reflections on the Vietnam War held up a clear mirror to Rumsfeld and his then-current approach to Iraq.Morris’s “Separated,” on the Trump administration’s practice of taking children from their parents at the southern border, comes closer to a direct intervention. The filmmaker has been open about his desire to have it released before the presidential election, and although it is now playing in theaters, it isn’t set to air on MSNBC until Dec. 7, when its relevance will be reduced. “Why is my movie not being shown on NBC prior to the election?” Morris wrote on X. “It is not a partisan movie. It’s about a policy that was disgusting and should not be allowed to happen again. Make your own inferences.”If “Separated” is likely too straightforward — too much of a conventional issue documentary — to be remembered as one of Morris’s richest films, it is not as if the director has abandoned his sense of profound absurdity. In the film, Jonathan White, who worked for the Office of Refugee Resettlement within the Department of Health and Human Services when family separations began, speaks of a period in 2017 when those actions flew under the public’s radar. “It happened for months before there was any policy to do it,” he says, “and it was going on while my own leadership maintained it wasn’t.”At the Venice Film Festival, Morris highlighted the contradiction: “If the purpose was deterrence, why do it covertly?” he said in August. (There is a hint of Peter Sellers’s Dr. Strangelove in that idea: “The whole point of the doomsday machine is lost if you keep it a secret.”) But White says that “harm to children was part of the point.”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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    ‘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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    in Music

    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