Aurelia Butler

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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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    ‘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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    ‘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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    ‘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

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    How Levi’s Turned a Beyoncé Song Into an Ad Campaign

    The denim brand was looking for ways to sell more apparel to women, and the megastar gave them a natural spokeswoman thanks to a song on “Cowboy Carter.”Kenny Mitchell, the chief marketing officer at Levi Strauss & Co., knew his team needed to move fast after Beyoncé released the track list for her album “Cowboy Carter” in March. Out of the 27 songs listed, one provided the denim brand’s marketing department with a huge opportunity: “Levii’s Jeans.”While in Paris to celebrate his wife’s 50th birthday, Mr. Mitchell was communicating across time zones with his team back at the company’s San Francisco headquarters to figure out how they could capitalize on the moment. When the songs dropped that week, Levi’s had landed on adding an extra I to the brand’s Instagram name, as Beyoncé had with her song.Still, Mr. Mitchell thought the brand could go further.“Once that album came out, it was obviously a moment where we said, Hey, maybe we can start to have some conversations about whether a deeper partnership makes sense,” Mr. Mitchell said.Soon after, Levi’s reached out to Beyoncé and her team. The two camps had already worked together on various campaigns and creative projects over the years. She had worn their jeans when she was a member of Destiny’s Child in the early 2000s, making Levi’s one of the first brands to collaborate with the group, and she continued to incorporate the brand in her solo career..What soon became apparent for executives at Levi’s after the release of “Cowboy Carter” was that Beyoncé could be the key to achieving one of the company’s top strategies: convincing more women to shop the brand.A third of Levi’s shoppers are women. The plan, executives say, is to bump that to 50 percent.Levi’s has tried several strategies over the years to appeal to women, including a line called Lady Levi’s.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesWe 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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    Orla Gartland Melds Honesty, Hooks and Noise

    On her second album, the internet-native Irish songwriter makes a complicated relationship sound “squonky.”The Irish songwriter Orla Gartland refuses to oversimplify romance on her new album, “Everybody Needs a Hero.”“Pop music for me can be a little too black-and-white sometimes,” she said in a video interview from her home studio in London. “Lyrically, a love song or a breakup song can be really straightforward. But that’s not my experience. The line is never that straight. You know, it’s sticky and meandering. It’s a lot of, like, ‘I love you … but.’”Gartland, 29, has been her own pop cottage industry for most of her life. Raised in Dublin, she started playing Irish traditional music on fiddle when she was 5 and moved on to learn guitar, keyboard and drums. She has also mastered the crucial 21st-century skill of video self-branding, creating a constant stream of content.Gartland started posting songs to YouTube — covers and then originals — in 2009, and she released her first official single in 2012. “There’s something so naïve in my early videos,” she said. “I get very nostalgic about that era of the internet, because I do think that no one had really made a career on the internet yet.”She called that moment “really pure and good-natured, like people were putting up things because they were so alive to a community. I remember putting songs up and being absolutely fascinated by the fact that I could play a song and upload it from my bedroom in Dublin, and then someone from the Philippines could comment five minutes later.”With her debut album, “Woman on the Internet” in 2021, Gartland finally claimed credit as a producer or co-producer on her songs.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesWe 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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    A 400-Acre Movie Ranch Outside Los Angeles Is Listed for $35 Million

    Sable Ranch, about 30 miles north of Hollywood, includes an Old West movie set. It has been used for productions like “American Horror Story” and “Oppenheimer.”When Frank Vacek arrived at Sable Ranch in the 1970s, with its chaparral-covered hills bounded by the mountains of the Angeles National Forest, he instantly saw a California dream.Mr. Vacek, who with his wife had fled the Nazis in Czechoslovakia three decades earlier, rewrote his fortunes by opening a successful camera shop in downtown Los Angeles in the 1950s. But 30 miles north at Sable Ranch, where cattle grazed amid oak trees, he pictured an even grander second act for his life. He bought the ranch and the property next to it and built an Old West movie set on its land, bringing Hollywood — with its gun shows, cowboys and insatiable appetite for entertainment — to his doorstep.The Sand Fire ripped through the ranch in 2016, but its Old West film set has been rebuilt.Cristian CruzioHalf a century later, Sable Ranch, in Santa Clarita, has served as movie set for productions including “Robin Hood: Men in Tights,” “American Horror Story” and “Oppenheimer.” Its 400 acres have stood in for so many cinematic backdrops that they have morphed into Hollywood iconography. And now, for $35 million, the ranch is hitting the market.“The amount of history that is here, and the amount of movies and TV shows and commercials that have been made here, really is phenomenal,” said Derek Hunt, the owner of Sable Ranch. Mr. Hunt is Mr. Vacek’s grandson; he grew up on the property and formally inherited it in 2020. In 2008, Mr. Hunt began rallying the City of Santa Clarita to create the Movie Ranch Overlay Zone, a special designation for feature-film and television production that streamlines permitting and lowers costs.The Movie Ranch Overlay Zone was set up in 2011. Sable Ranch sits within it as well as within the Thirty Mile Zone, also known as the TMZ, a sector within 30 miles of downtown Los Angeles where the labor costs for film crews are lower.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