Aurelia Butler

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    Lawyers for a Sean Combs Accuser Ask to Withdraw From Her Case

    A dispute between Adria English, who has accused Mr. Combs of sexual misconduct, and her lawyers is the latest twist in the civil litigation the music mogul is facing.Lawyers for a woman who accused Sean Combs of plying her with drugs at his famous White Parties and commanding her to have sex with guests are seeking to withdraw from representing her, writing in court papers that she had displayed “undermining behavior and questionable antics.”The plaintiff, Adria English, sued Mr. Combs in July, alleging that as an employee who worked at the parties in the Hamptons and Miami in the mid-to-late 2000s, she had been “groomed” into being sex trafficked and had been given ecstasy-laced liquor.The lawsuit is one of a dozen sexual misconduct suits that have been filed against Mr. Combs over the past year. He is also facing a federal criminal case and was indicted last month on charges of sex trafficking, racketeering conspiracy and transportation to engage in prostitution. He has pleaded not guilty.In their court filing, lawyers for Ms. English, Ariel Mitchell-Kidd and Steven A. Metcalf, told a judge in federal court in Manhattan that “irreconcilable differences” had developed with their client.“As a result of a fundamental disagreement between Attorneys and Plaintiff regarding almost every aspect of the litigation,” the filing says, “including settlement demands, causes of actions in the pleadings and Plaintiff’s undermining behavior and questionable antics an irreconcilable conflict and tension has developed between Plaintiff and Attorneys.”Ms. Mitchell-Kidd said in a text message response to questions on Thursday, “I never lost faith in her case, just in her.”“Her case is great,” she added. “My issue was with her undermining my work and going behind my back doing things incongruent to advancing her case.”In a phone interview on Thursday, Ms. English — who reported her claims to the police in Miami Beach, Fla., after filing her lawsuit — said she was seeking new counsel. She said she had clashed with Ms. Mitchell-Kidd repeatedly, including over a demand from the lawyer that Ms. English not speak to the media.“I’m the client; you work for me,” Ms. English said to describe her perspective.Mr. Combs, who is currently detained in a Brooklyn jail after a judge ordered him held until trial, has denied sexually assaulting or sex trafficking anyone. In a statement on Wednesday, his representatives called Ms. English’s claims “fabricated.”“As we’ve said from the start, anyone can file a lawsuit without proof — and this case is a clear example of that,” the statement said. “Adria English escalated things by filing false police reports and making baseless claims, using high-profile events as a backdrop to harm innocent people.”Mr. Combs’s legal team has been defending him against a mounting pile of lawsuits since the indictment was brought in September and lawyers in Texas have said they are preparing suits on behalf of multiple accusers who have reached out to them with accounts of misconduct. More

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    ‘Blink’ Review: The Last Things They May See

    In this travel documentary, two parents take their children on a spectacular world tour before a rare genetic condition may cause blindness.“Blink” is almost shameless in its earnest simplicity: Two parents decide to take their family to see the world after finding out that three of their four children have a rare genetic condition that can lead to impaired vision. Tears may flow for you, too, in what could (positively) be called a weepie travel documentary from Edmund Stenson and Daniel Roher, who worked together on the Academy Award-winning film “Navalny.”Edith Lemay and Sébastien Pelletier wish for their children to store up visual memories for the future, even as night-vision problems have already set on. Accompanied by the film team for 76 days of their yearlong trip, the close-knit clan from Montreal fly and hike and hot-air-balloon and camel ride through Egypt, Thailand, Namibia and Nepal, among other places, including a fraught cable car ride in Ecuador.For Stenson and Roher, their film is also about a fear of loss more generally, as well as about growing up and leaving things behind, the fleeting nature of experience and parental anxieties around care and control. Detractors can cry “tourism” — the rock formations in White Desert National Park in Egypt are transporting — but “Blink” keeps escaping any pat framing to tap into a deeper ache.That’s accomplished by doing more with less when it comes to parental musings and kids saying the darnedest things. The directors also aren’t afraid to kick the 84-minute movie into a trot now and again. Life comes at you fast, after all, and “Blink” reminds us to look at each day as if it might be the last.BlinkRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Daaaaaalí!’ Review: Keeping It Surreal

    The French absurdist director Quentin Dupieux did not make a biopic of Salvador Dalí — he adopted the Surrealist painter’s approach to deliver a particularly loopy tale.Quentin Dupieux’s new film opens with a shot recreating the Salvador Dalí painting “Necrophilic Fountain Flowing From a Grand Piano.” This is as straightforward as the nonsensical “Daaaaaalí!” ever gets, which is the least we can expect from Dupieux, a master of absurdist humor, engaging with the Surrealist artist.Judith (Anaïs Demoustier) is a young, fairly inexperienced journalist sent out to interview the Spanish iconoclast, who is in his 80s. Or is he? Time is as elastic as the melting clocks Dalí once painted: Here he is portrayed by several actors of various ages including Édouard Baer, Jonathan Cohen and Pio Marmaï. They take on the role seemingly randomly (often one starts a scene and another finishes it) in the loopy — in every sense of the word — movie.Set to a jaunty acoustic score by Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter, “Daaaaaalí!” feels like a dispatch from Dalí’s mind (and that of his old accomplice Luis Buñuel). The film follows a dream logic with scant interest in anything linear. The chronology is askew, frames are played backward; an extended joke becomes the equivalent of a set of infinitely nesting Russian dolls.Dupieux captures Dalí’s self-promoting genius but the constant trickery eventually becomes a little tiresome. The filmmaker cranks out movies with rare velocity: His previous opus, “Yannick,” came out in April in the United States, and a new one was released in May in his native France. At least we won’t have to wait long to see how he will make up for this frustrating stylistic exercise.Daaaaaalí!Not rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 17 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘White Bird’ Review: After ‘Wonder,’ a Bully Moves On

    A boy starts a new school and gets a history lesson from his grandmother, played by Helen Mirren.The world of children’s literature is more complicated than many of us might be aware of. The 2012 novel “Wonder,” by R.J. Palacio, for instance, has spawned several sequels or spinoffs to date. “Wonder” itself, about Auggie, a young boy living with Treacher Collins syndrome, and the unfortunate concomitant bullying by his peers, was made into a pretty decent picture in 2017. “White Bird,” a possibly unexpected origin story, is adapted from a 2019 graphic novel of the same name about the family of one of Auggie’s antagonists in “Wonder.”Yes, you read that correctly. “White Bird” opens with Julian, a newcomer, in the cafeteria of an elite school, torn between the urge to be kind to an outcast student and the desire to sit with the snooty “cool” kids. Julian is here because he was expelled from his last school, for having bullied Auggie. On returning from his first day, he finds his parents are not home. His grandmother (Helen Mirren) from Paris, however, is visiting, and she sits him down for a story.Of her girlhood in France during the Nazi occupation, how she was hidden by a kindly boy named Julien, and their eventual fates. The director, Marc Forster, sets the period action in Movie France, a France whose language is English — English that is spoken by some actors with a French accent, and by others in a British accent. Period detail is conveyed by way of smoothed-out production design and cinematography.One could argue that Forster and company calibrate their anodyne effects to make a Holocaust narrative that’s palatable for younger viewers. But what mostly resonates is a particularly lachrymose brand of show-business hedging.White BirdRated PG-13 for some strong violence and language. Running time: 2 hours. In theaters. More

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    ‘It’s What’s Inside’ Review: I Gotta Be You

    A limp body-swapping comedy doesn’t really know what makes its subgenre so funny.There’s only one really good reason to make a body-swap movie. Yes, OK, thematically they’re meant to teach us to be more empathetic and think about living in someone else’s shoes, blah, blah, blah. But a body-swap movie has one true purpose, and that’s to make us laugh at someone acting like someone else. “Freaky Friday”: a mom and her daughter switch places, and it’s funny. “13 Going on 30”: a teen girl ends up in the body of a mean, gorgeous magazine editor, and it’s funny. “Big”: a boy is in a man’s body, and it makes us laugh. “Jumanji”: four teens end up in the bodies of a beefcake, his sidekick, a dork and a hot lady, and it’s hilarious.“It’s What’s Inside” is trying to be hysterical, too, but with less amusing results. The premise of Greg Jardin’s comedy is relatively promising: Seven 20-something friends from college converge on a beautiful estate that belongs to one of them, who is getting married the next day. They’re going to have one last night of partying before the wedding. Two are a couple who’ve been fighting; one of the guys is carrying a torch for one of the girls; another of the girls, the blonde, has become an influencer; the others also have their own lives now.Then an eighth friend shows up, a guy nobody’s heard from in a long time — not since a terrible and unfortunate event years earlier at a college party. He’s bearing a weird box containing a strange device that, it turns out, can cause them to trade bodies. He proposes a Mafia-style party game, using the box, and things go off the rails really fast.“It’s What’s Inside” feels a little reminiscent of the much better “Bodies Bodies Bodies” (2022), a horror-comedy about a bunch of intoxicated, very online youths in a rambling house playing a crazy party game. But where that one zigged and zagged, “It’s What’s Inside” plods straightforwardly. Even the twists feel obvious and not all that interesting, more the fulfillment of plot points seeded early on rather than startling turns of fortune.The lumpiness is baffling, to be honest. This concept has promise. Some of the fault is in the casting; while half of the actors give performances that are fun and quirky, the others feel as though they’re reading lines, and not particularly well. A little of it is also in a self-consciously showy filmmaking style (weird lighting, fast cutting, freeze-framing) that doesn’t add anything to the film. At times, it distracts, or maybe subtracts.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 Outrun’ Review: From Rock Bottom to Recovery

    Saoirse Ronan gives another stunning performance in a story about an alcoholic in search of healing.Saoirse Ronan has made it apparent that she is one of the greatest actresses of her generation. Nominated for four Oscars before she was out of her mid-20s, the Irish actress is the sort of performer whose presence in a movie is sufficient reason to see it. She chooses her projects carefully, often movies about complex women, and throws her whole self into them, with unforgettable results.But how she does what she does is harder to pin down. Ronan does not rely on showy exaggeration or wild swings for her craft. Her most acclaimed roles — in “Atonement,” “Brooklyn,” “Lady Bird” and “Little Women” — all feel, at least from the outside, as if they tap into some part of her real self. All four are intelligent and perceptive and plucky and just a little innocent, in need of some hard-knock wisdom. Yet they’re all indelible, and all very different from one another: girls and women for whom life is a good, hard mystery to be lived and then understood.I think Ronan’s great ability lies in giving us the sense that her characters’ minds are always working, something that can only really be communicated through the eyes and nearly imperceptible facial expressions, flashes of anger and happiness and passion and pain. (And a lot of impishness; cheeky Ronan is always a delight.)One might reasonably have expected “The Outrun,” in which Ronan plays a recovering addict desperately hanging onto sobriety, to be a more conventionally brash or hyperbolic role than usual, the kind designed for awards attention. Woman out of control, woman on the road to healing — you know the type. But Ronan is no ordinary actress, and she makes “The Outrun,” which occasionally veers near overdone territory, into a thing of beauty and hard-won joy.The director Nora Fingscheidt wrote the screenplay for “The Outrun” with Amy Liptrot, based on Liptrot’s 2016 memoir. In the film, Liptrot has been transformed into Rona, a 29-year-old woman who, when we first meet her, has a black eye, having been nearly defeated by life. She’s from a tiny village in the Orkney Islands, which lie off the northern coast of Scotland. Rona went to London to earn a graduate degree in biology, where she met friends and a man (Paapa Essiedu) she loved. But a latent propensity for addiction turned into a full-blown alcoholic spiral, and she wrecked her life completely.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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    ‘Intercepted’ Review: The Awful Intimacy of the War in Ukraine

    In leaked phone calls home, Russian soldiers grapple with the war they’re waging. This new documentary sets the calls’ swagger and anguish against images of the invasion’s devastation.The voices of the offscreen Russian soldiers and their acquaintances in the powerful Ukraine-set documentary “Intercepted” are matter-of-fact, swaggering and anguished. “I tell you, they live better than us here,” a soldier tells a woman back home. “Right, look how the West supports them,” she says.Sometime later, another soldier explains to a different woman, “We were given the order to kill everyone we see” to protect Russia’s miliary positions. “I’m telling you, I’ve already seen a forest full of corpses, more than a cemetery.” He adds, “I said that I won’t kill anyone.”Not long after Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and Russian troops started flooding into the country, their communications began leaking out, at times with dire consequences. Ham-radio operators and open-source groups began capturing unencrypted battlefield radio transmissions among Russian forces on the ground. Ukraine also intercepted more prosaic phone calls that Russian soldiers made to their families and friends, to their wives and mothers and children. The soldiers talked about how they were doing, what they’d seen, what their orders were and even disclosed their locations; some spoke about whom they had killed.You hear a number of these phone calls in “Intercepted,” which was directed by the Ukrainian-Canadian filmmaker Oksana Karpovych. In a director’s statement for the movie, Karpovych explains that she was working in Ukraine as a producer for the news network Al Jazeera when the invasion began. After the intercepted calls were publicly released, she and a crew of four — including her cinematographer, the British photographer Christopher Nunn — traveled across Ukraine gathering images of devastation, which she has juxtaposed with calls intercepted between March and November 2022. The result is a haunting, often jolting depiction of the profound toll that the war has exerted on soldiers and civilians alike.“Intercepted” is at once subtle and blunt. It opens on three children — one on a swing — next to an otherwise empty country road that stretches down the middle of the shot. It’s an outwardly ordinary, pacific tableaux. There are chalk marks scrawled on the road, a couple of bikes resting on the grass and a woman lingering off to the side. The trees are lush and green, and there are no obvious signs of war. At one point, a car in the distance slowly crosses the road. Karpovych then cuts to a closer shot of the kids, which allows you to see their faces more fully; I think that she wants you to remember them as you watch.That first country street leads to many more. The movie starts in the north and moves south and then west, a route that Karpovych has explained in interviews is meant to suggest the trajectory of the invasion. Using a mixture of vivid, precisely framed moving and still images, she takes you across the war-ravaged country. You travel down dirt and paved roads, some flanked by incinerated military vehicles, and into heavily bombed villages and cities. She also recurrently brings you into people’s homes, including some that look like they were hastily abandoned. In one, a carton of eggs still rests on a kitchen table amid a jumble of crockery, suggestive of an unfinished breakfast. In another house, a woman sweeps up shattered glass.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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    As Taylor Swift and Others Revive Cassettes, Fans Look for Tape Decks

    Musicians and fans have developed a new taste for an old format, but manufacturers largely stopped making players. Listeners are finding creative (and vintage) solutions.When Taylor Swift released “1989 (Taylor’s Version)” in an array of physical formats last year, Cora Buel knew she had to get the cassette right away. Buel, a 48-year-old based in Daly City, Calif., is a fan of Swift’s music — an affinity she shares with her teenage daughter, who has since bought her mother more tapes as gifts. One main reason? Buel drives a 1998 BMW Z3, and has no other convenient options for on-the-road album playback.“Just get an old car that only plays cassettes,” Buel said, “and you’ll listen every day.”Although Buel might be an extreme proponent of retro design — she works as chief revenue officer at ThredUp, an online consignment store — the cassette’s return is by now almost as unmistakable as the format’s distinctive hiss and warble.Dominant in the United States from the early 1980s until it was overtaken commercially by the compact disc in the early 1990s, the cassette tape has survived as an underground phenomenon, a deliberately anachronistic medium of choice for artists on the noise, avant-garde and low-fi fringes. But tapes began turning up at the trend-chasing retailer Urban Outfitters as long ago as 2015, the same year that digital streaming first overtook download sales. Nearly a decade later, Swift’s latest album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” stands as the top-selling cassette of the year so far, with about 23,000 copies sold through June 30, according to the tracking service Luminate.Sure, cassette sales of Swift’s new album pale beside its performance in even other physical formats, where it boasts sales of 1.1 million copies on CD and another 988,000 on vinyl. But “Tortured Poets” alone is on pace to beat the total annual sales of all albums on cassette for as recently as 2009, when the Luminate precursor Nielsen SoundScan reported a mere 34,000 units shipped. If Spotify killed the iTunes star, and vinyl is increasingly a high-priced luxury item — never mind CDs for the moment — then cassettes could be the cockroaches that outlive them all.As labels look to capitalize on “superfans” who will buy multiple formats, artists releasing new music on cassette this year cross genres and generations. A sampling of musicians embracing the format includes: the pop polymath Charli XCX, the alternative-rock titan Kim Deal, the adventurous South Florida rapper Denzel Curry, the outré Thom Yorke band the Smile, the black-metal group Darkthrone, the pop-rock duo Twenty One Pilots, the meditative electronic producer Tycho, the masked country singer Orville Peck, the folk-pop troubadour Shawn Mendes, the reigning pop wunderkind Billie Eilish, the garage-rocker Ty Segall, the alt-pop eclecticist Remi Wolf and the sultry singer-songwriter Omar Apollo.Though the last new car to be factory-equipped with a cassette deck was reportedly a 2010 Lexus, more than a quarter of light-duty vehicles on the road are at least 15 years old, according to a recent analysis by S&P Global Mobility. Susanna Thomson of the Oakland, Calif., band Sour Widows still listens to cassettes in her 1998 Volvo wagon, which has a tape deck and a CD player. “I-90,” a song on the alternative-rock group’s bittersweet new album, “Revival of a Friend,” includes lyrics about driving down the interstate while singing along repeatedly to a beloved cassette; the tape in question was by the Southern California punk-rock outfit Joyce Manor.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