Aurelia Butler

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    ‘The Parenting’ Review: Meet the Poltergeist

    A family getaway turns ghastly when a demon is awakened in this juvenile, meanspirited horror-comedy.“The Parenting,” a raunchy, gross-out horror-comedy directed by Craig Johnson, has plenty of toilet humor and gay jokes stuffed into its tedious running time, few of them clever or funny. Its best bit is in the setup: After a family is killed at home in the early 1980s, the house sits empty until the present day, when it is converted into an Airbnb that the young couple Josh (Brandon Flynn) and Rohan (Nik Dodani) rent for a weekend getaway. “This place is a mansion,” Rohan enthuses, about what in the ’80s was an ordinary suburban household. The punchline is that in this economy, no one can afford to buy even a haunted house anymore. Yes, there’s a 400-year-old poltergeist terrorizing inhabitants. But it would sure beat renting.The boys have secured this spacious if malevolent abode as an occasion to introduce each other to their parents, who are played by television royalty: Lisa Kudrow, Dean Norris, Edie Falco and Brian Cox. Some early water-and-oil mingling feels like a tepid riff on “Meet the Parents,” but when the demonic intrigue ramps up, the tone shifts to full-blown slapstick lunacy, with heads spinning “Exorcist”-style, family members projectile vomiting, and in a meanspirited fashion, more than one Pomeranian getting brutally butchered. The cast is game — especially Cox, who gets to do some over-the-top Linda Blair mugging — but the script, by a “Saturday Night Live” writer, Kent Sublette, is puerile and abrasive, lacking the wit of “Evil Dead” (an obvious influence) and the brio of “Scary Movie.”The ParentingRated R Rated R for crude humor, strong language, violence and some mild drug use. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Watch on Max. More

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    ‘The Actor’ Review: No Direction Home

    André Holland plays an actor with amnesia in this wonderfully surreal and poignant mystery.As a teenager, I had a recurring dream of visiting my grandmother, only to find her gone, and everything — her street, her rowhouse — looking just a little bit off. Confused, I would sit down on her front step and think, “This is just a dream. I’ll sit here until I wake up.”That sense of being trapped in a dimension partway between the real and the unreal, the familiar and the strange, is the disorienting force of Duke Johnson’s “The Actor.” Adapting the Donald E. Westlake novel, “Memory” — written in the 1960s and published posthumously in 2010 — Johnson and Stephen Cooney have shaped an unsettling, sorrowful journey from damage to a kind of deliverance. However, the man taking that journey, a theater actor named Paul Cole (André Holland), might disagree.A “Twilight Zone”-style voice-over sets a spooky tone and underscores the movie’s committed theatricality. After being caught in flagrante by a furious husband, Paul lands in the hospital with a head injury and without the ability to remember. Stranded in small-town Ohio in the 1950s, knowing only that he has an apartment in New York City, Paul finds a job in a local tannery, a room in a boardinghouse and begins to save for a bus ticket home. Before he can do that, he meets the lovely Edna (a wonderful Gemma Chan) and begins to fall in love — if that’s even possible when your meetings can vanish like missing frames on a roll of film.The notion of life being edited without your knowledge or consent lends “The Actor” a sadness and surreality that the cinematographer, Joe Passarelli, takes to heart. His smudged, smoky images cast a veil of nostalgia over Paul’s plight as he returns to Manhattan and learns from friends that he may not have been a very nice person. Yet, if you can’t remember, does it matter? Do you cobble together a self from others’ memories of you, or do you ditch the past and start over?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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    Interview: Tori Amos on Her Children’s Book and Her Reading Life

    What inspires the Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter? Her first picture book, “Tori and the Muses,” offers an answer. In an email interview, she shared how her gently rebellious mother made her a reader. SCOTT HELLERWhat books are on your night stand?“Medicine Cards: The Discovery of Power Through the Ways of Animals,” by Jamie Sams and David Carson. It’s an interactive book and card set where you can pull a card and read about the healing properties that each animal embodies as it relates to mind, body and spirit. Jamie Sams was of Indigenous heritage, and I feel like some of it was passed down to her as a gift she has channeled for us all.How do you organize your books?Let’s put it this way: Being a librarian is a fantasy of mine. In my album “Tales of a Librarian,” I’m dressed in different imagined librarian costumes, and in the liner notes the tracks are organized by the Dewey Decimal System. My own little libraries don’t have a system, but I have dreams of one! What kind of reader were you as a child?My reading was all inspired by my mother, Mary. My father, a pastor, believed that she was reading me Bible stories. But what she was doing, and I’m convinced this was her rebellion — her Methodist minister’s wife rebellion, because it was difficult to rebel, especially as a minister’s wife in the late ’60s if you wanted to stay married and accepted by the parishioners and society at large — was reading to me from the collection of Edgar Allan Poe’s works. What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift?“Growing Up,” by Russell Baker, which I got a few years ago from my friend Mary Ellen Bobb. I’d never heard of Baker and I couldn’t put the book down. The way he could tell the story of his life made me feel like I knew everybody in it by the time I finished. I grew up in Baltimore and he put the city in a different light for me: more like a shining city on a hill.What’s the last great book you read?I’m rereading “Landmarks,” by Robert Macfarlane. The way this man writes about landscapes, particularly in the U.K., makes the wild tracks and the sea roads come alive.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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    Ahead of World Tour, Blackpink’s Members Venture Out On Their Own

    On new solo releases, Jennie, Jisoo, Lisa and Rosé each face a choice: double-down or retreat from their roles in the smash K-pop girl group.As K-pop supergroups go, Blackpink was — remains? — a supernova. In the late 2010s, it released a series of EPs and singles that emphasized maximalism and pandemonium. Its songs were huge, and pugnacious, and rowdy — a bit of a rejoinder to some of the delicate girl groups that preceded it, and a bit of a taunt about just how much mayhem a pop hit could contain.Blackpink was also utterly modern — though functionally split between its true singers, Rosé and Jisoo, and its rappers, Lisa and Jennie, there was a surprising amount of vocal versatility across all the group members. Their flexibility kept the group’s music nimble and unpredictable — ideas arrived at warp speed, and departed almost as quickly.After a few years, though, Blackpink’s chaos began to rattle and rankle a bit — its hugeness in sound, and also in global success, threatened to topple the empire.And so there was a hiatus, albeit a brief one, that’s now ending with the release of solo projects by all four members, in advance of a reunion tour that begins in July. (Reunions aren’t what they used to be — the group last toured in 2023.)In theory, the albums should be an opportunity to underscore what each of the four does best, and an opportunity to expand on the roles they played in the group — and sometimes the new releases do. But more often, holding the albums side by side tells a story about record label ambitions and the more legible parts of K-pop’s genre cross-pollination more so than the artistic ambitions of each member.Lisa and Jennie, most responsible for Blackpink’s signature attitude, are reckoning with similar pressures on their new albums, both of which nod to the sound that made the group erupt while attempting to chisel out a path forward.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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    A Ravel Work Premieres at the New York Phil After Nearly 125 Years

    A prelude and dance by the French master recently surfaced in a Paris library. Gustavo Dudamel and the New York Philharmonic will give the world premiere.The conductor Gustavo Dudamel has premiered dozens of pieces in his career.But the score that he was giddily studying on a recent afternoon at Lincoln Center was different: a nearly 125-year-old piece by the French composer Maurice Ravel that had only recently surfaced in a Paris library.“Imagine more than 100 years later discovering a small, beautiful jewel,” Dudamel, the incoming music and artistic director of the New York Philharmonic, said in an interview at David Geffen Hall. “It’s precious.”On Thursday, Dudamel and the Philharmonic will give the world premiere of the five-minute piece as part of a program celebrating the 150th birthday of Ravel, one of the leading composers of the 20th century, whose works include “Boléro,” “Le Tombeau de Couperin” and “La Valse.”The newly found piece, “Sémiramis: Prélude et Danse,” was written sometime between 1900 and 1902, when Ravel was in his late 20s and sparring with administrators at the Paris Conservatory, where he studied piano and composition.The work, from an unfinished cantata about the Babylonian queen Semiramis, reveals a young musician still honing his voice and looking to others, like the Russian composer Rimsky-Korsakov, for inspiration. “Sémiramis” lacks some of the lush textures and rich harmonies for which Ravel would become known — he was a master of blending French impressionism, Spanish melodies, baroque, jazz and other music — though there are hints of his unconventional style.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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    With ‘Él,’ Buñuel Turns His Gaze to Male Pathology

    Luis Buñuel’s Mexican melodrama about a jealous husband who makes his young wife’s life a living hell opens at Film Forum.A blasphemous black comedy, part noir, part case history, Luis Buñuel’s 1953 Mexican melodrama “Él” amply justifies its inadvertently self-reflexive American release title, “This Strange Passion.”One of the rediscoveries of last year’s Buñuel retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, “Él” opens for a week at Film Forum in a fine new 4K restoration.The initial sequence, filmed in the nave of a 16th-century Mexico City cathedral, is a well-attended Holy Thursday Mass. As the camera lavishes attention on ritual foot-washing, so does the suavely aristocratic Francisco Galván (Arturo de Córdova). Then his gaze strays from the row of bare feet waiting to be washed and kissed by attending priests to a well-shod foot belonging to a well-bred señorita, Gloria (Delia Garcés) — and thus, a mad love is born.Francisco, a wealthy, middle-aged virgin, obsessed with regaining ownership of once-upon-a-time family property, turns the force of his pathology on Gloria. He successfully woos her away from her fiancé and, starting on their wedding night, makes her life a living hell. Oscillating between insane jealousy and abject apologies (but ever aroused by the sight of her feet), he becomes increasingly abusive, mentally and physically. At one point, anticipating the climax of Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” he finagles her to the top of a mission bell tower and, suddenly enraged, tries to throw her off.Throughout, the madman is protected by his wealth, defended by the Catholic Church and even by Gloria’s mother. “Él” has been taken as a parody of machismo, but it is more pointedly an attack on social class, male privilege and the notion of bourgeois respectability. Behind the stone facade of Francisco’s colonial mansion lies a clutter of chandeliers, tchotchkes and Jugendstil-patterned portals. Adapted from a quasi-autobiographical novel by the Spanish writer Mercedes Pinto, “Él” was further informed by the antics of Buñuel’s brother-in-law and, he’s suggested, his own dreams.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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    Eric Bauza Voices Bugs Bunny and More Looney Tunes Greats

    “We all want to be like Bugs, but we’re all really Daffy,” said the voice actor Eric Bauza with a hearty laugh during a recent interview in Los Angeles.For the past five years, the Canadian performer, 45, has played both the clever rabbit and the hyperactive duck. He has won two Children’s & Family Emmy Awards for voicing these pair, as well as other characters, in the series “Looney Tunes Cartoons” and “Bugs Bunny Builders.”“Eh … What’s up, doc?”Over the years he’s also summoned Sylvester, Tweety, Foghorn Leghorn and Elmer Fudd.In the director Peter Browngardt’s “The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie” (in theaters March 14), Bauza voices both Daffy Duck and Porky Pig. Distributed by Ketchup Entertainment, the first fully-animated original feature starring these characters to get a theatrical release is a zany, hand drawn, sci-fi romp in which buddies Daffy and Porky must defeat a malicious alien invader.Sitting in a meeting room at the Garland Hotel in North Hollywood, and wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with Wilma Flintstone (Hanna-Barbera’s “The Flintstones” is among his favorite classic cartoons), Bauza recalled first watching “Looney Tunes” on Saturday mornings growing up in Scarborough, Ontario. The wacky violence and daring humor of those cartoons enticed a young Bauza.As he recounted one of his favorite “Looney Tunes” shorts, “Long-Haired Hare,” in which Bugs Bunny torments an opera singer, Bauza seamlessly shifted into singing in the voice of the famed animated wise guy, “Music hater and a rabbit hater too, apparently,” he recited.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