Aurelia Butler

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    ‘The Empire’ Review: Star Tangled

    In Bruno Dumont’s sci-fi farce, an alien conflict disrupts a sleepy French village.Reveling in galactic absurdity, “The Empire,” the latest from the fiercely unconventional French filmmaker Bruno Dumont, plunks us down in a fishing village in Northern France to witness an extraterrestrial war for control of humankind.What that looks like, however, is less a space opera than a banal, metaphysical farce — a “Star Wars” parody of increasing daftness and diminishing fun. As two alien races known as One and Zero vie for mastery over a handful of unexceptional locals, Dumont’s screenplay stirs simplistic notions of good and evil into a plot that goes nowhere except — literally — down its own black hole.Until then, we are distracted by two minimally clothed young women: Line (Lyna Khoudri), part demon and all pout, who prefers to sunbathe in the nude; and Jane (Anamaria Vartolomei) a beautiful, bikini-clad alien princess. (One gets the impression Dumont is not unfamiliar with the oeuvre of Russ Meyer.) Both women are inexplicably turned on by the perpetually surly Jony (Brandon Vlieghe), an evil Zero and father to a satanic toddler who must be killed before puberty — a stage that, parents will agree, can turn even human offspring demonic.This sci-fi twaddle, soothingly framed by rolling sand dunes and a slash of crystal coastline (dreamily photographed by David Chambille), eventually tests our patience. Lightsaber tomfoolery and Lynchian interludes — like a bizarre musical scene featuring a clownish alien leader (Fabrice Luchini) and a writhing, callipygian dancer — embellish Dumont’s awkward merger of the terrestrial and the star-bound. The church-versus-state symbolism in the design of the rival mother ships, however, is a cool touch.With a little tweaking, “The Empire” could have been an amusing interspecies love triangle, as the Zero attempt to weaponize our “natural turpitudes.” Though, given the quantities of tongue involved in each libidinous encounter, I’d expect dehydration to be a far greater threat than an alien invasion.The EmpireNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Mickey 17’ Review: Bong Joon Ho’s Latest Dystopian Romp

    In Bong Joon Ho’s latest dystopian romp, Robert Pattinson plays a hapless underdog whose work aboard a spaceship requires him to die, over and over.The world is at once scarily familiar and thoroughly, enjoyably loony tunes in “Mickey 17,” the latest Bong Joon Ho freakout. Bong is the South Korean filmmaker best known for “Parasite,” a ferocious 2019 comedy about class relations that spares no one, including viewers whose laughs eventually turn into gasps of visceral horror. Few filmmakers can shift moods and tones as smoothly as Bong, or have such a commensurately supple way with genre. You never know what to expect in one of his movies other than the unexpected, although it’s a good guess that, at one point, something monstrous will show up.Opening in 2054, “Mickey 17” takes place in an uneasily recognizable future that holds a cracked mirror to the present. It’s a very funny yet utterly serious story about ostensible winners and losers and about how, when money-grubbing push comes to power-hungry shove, heroes have it tough. That is the case with the title schlimazel, Mickey, a guy with a confused smile and a kick-me sign on his back. Played with soulful haplessness by Robert Pattinson, Mickey is a nice, not especially sharp guy who, having signed up with a space expedition, is in the wrong place at the wrong time for foolish reasons. He’s to blame, sort of.Bong wrote the screenplay, adapting it from Edward Ashton’s 2022 science-fiction novel “Mickey7.” The science in the movie is fairly minimal as such futuristic stories go; it includes a souped-up printer that Mickey becomes intimately familiar with during his wiggy adventures in inner and outer space. Following a disastrous business venture, he and his feckless friend, Timo (Steven Yeun), have fled Earth to work on a spaceship run by Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), a congressman turned megalomaniacal cult leader whose acolytes like red hats. Marshall and his wife, a scary slinkstress, Ylfa (Toni Collette), plan on colonizing what he believes is an uninhabited new world, a snowy white “planet of purity.”By the time you have entirely grasped what Marshall and Ylfa are up to, who and what they are, the ship is on the planet, and Mickey has died — 16 times, to be exact — in his role as the ship’s “Expendable.” Used to test viruses and other threats, Mickey undergoes brutal trials, and ends up dying on the job only to be reprinted in externally identical form. As with any software update, there are bugs, along with routine mishaps. When the movie opens, Mickey 17 has just plunged into a planet crevasse. Timo, who’s zipping nearby, isn’t interested in rescuing Mickey, who is, after all, disposable. All Timo wants to know is, What’s it like to die?It’s a question that others on the ship like to ask Mickey, which adds to the melancholia that hangs over this movie even during its bounciest, most carnivalesque moments. As he does, Bong takes a while to fully show his hand. Instead, working swiftly, he introduces this future with characteristic visual flair, flashes of beauty, spasms of comically couched violence and a palpable warmth that attenuates the more abject turns. He also gives Mickey a shipboard romance with Nasha (a lovely Naomi Ackie), a security agent who becomes his protector, an affair that heats up the story. Nasha is normal, just and true, and she helps humanize Mickey. Bong often plays Mickey’s deaths for laughs, but he wants you to feel them.And you do feel them, at times deeply, amid the flashbacks, pratfalls, peppy edits, roving camerawork and the images of one after another Mickey being dumped like garbage. These scenes can be rightly grim, yet they have a queasily amusing kick because of Bong’s lightness of touch and Mickey’s deadpan fatalism. One of Bong’s undersung strengths is that he’s great with actors, and the work that he and Pattinson do with the character’s voice and silent-clown physicality is crucial to pulling off the movie’s tonal expansiveness. Mickeys come and go, but the one you come to know best is No. 17. He has a distinct nasal whine (shades of Adam Sandler) that, as humor gives way to anguish, becomes a clarion call for decency.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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    ‘Eephus’ Review: One Last Game

    The final day on a small town baseball field is the setting for a funny, elegiac feature directorial debut.This is by no means a rule, but anecdotally, there’s something about the sport of baseball that seems to attract hardcore cinephiles. Perhaps it’s because watching baseball, like watching a movie, is more or less the act of observing time pass. (And eating popcorn, or hot dogs.) Perhaps it’s because the sweeping arc of the baseball season, cut nearly into daily chunks by virtue of the number of games in a regular season, lends itself to slow-developing drama, a gradual tension build that echoes across eras and can twist itself into new shapes at any time. Also, a baseball player can have a longer career than athletes playing many other major American sports; with the greats, it’s easy to start writing some kind of epic biopic in your head.I was raised a Red Sox fan (which I now bravely admit in the hometown New York paper, and pray for mercy). I came of age just as the team finally beat the so-called Curse of the Bambino. In those moments, it felt as if we’d reached the peak of some majestically rising action — that we were all players, somehow, in the grand story.All this to say: “Eephus,” the feature directorial debut from Carson Lund, is a movie made just for me, and maybe for you as well. It’s set in the small town of Douglas, Mass., about half an hour’s drive south of Worcester and an hour from central Boston. It’s October, some time in the 1990s. The trees are hitting their peak colorful beauty, and baseball season is coming to an end.But this is not a film about the Sox, nor is it, at least on its face, about anything epic at all. In fact, that MLB team barely comes up at all, though Bill Lee, a.k.a. “Spaceman,” the famous left-handed pitcher who played for Boston in the 1970s, portrays a minor character in the movie. Instead, the drama centers on two recreational baseball teams who’ve met up at Soldier’s Field for the very last game this diamond will see.In a sly twist on genre convention — the small town folk trying to save a beloved public space because some terrible mean rich guy is going to build a mall on it, or something — the reason Soldier’s Field is going away is that they’re building a school on it. A public school. Its proximity to people’s homes will make life easier for every parent in this town. How dare they, right?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 Stylish Celebrities Who Ruled the Red Carpet This Awards Season: Cynthia Erivo, Timothée Chalamet and More

    If fashion is a game, they were playing to win.The ultimate honor during awards season is to take home a statue. But the glut of ceremonies and related events between January and March has long offered celebrities another way to distinguish themselves: by their clothing choices.For A-listers, red carpets are as much a venue for self expression as they are an arena for landing brand deals, invitations to fashion weeks and the covers of not-yet-extinct print magazines. For viewers, they can offer a peek at the trends of tomorrow. And for many people, whether they are walking or watching, red carpets are also just a lot of fun.The eight stars on this list seemed to have a firm grasp of all of those points, based on the ways they navigated the many red carpets that they graced. Some used the carpets to play muse to particular designers, while others used them to challenge beauty stigmas. All, needless to say, turned countless heads while doing it.Zoe SaldañaMore looks →In Saint Laurent at the Academy Awards in March.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York TimesIn Saint Laurent at the Vanity Fair Oscar party in March.Danny Moloshok/ReutersIn Saint Laurent at the Screen Actors Guild Awards in February.Robyn Beck/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesIn Saint Laurent at the EE British Academy Film Awards in February.Andy Rain/EPA, via ShutterstockIn Saint Laurent at the Golden Globes in January.Caroline Brehman/EPA, via ShutterstockThe “Emilia Pérez” actress received a staggering amount of trophies, winning best supporting actress awards at the the Golden Globes, the Critics Choice Awards, the British Academy Film Awards, the Screen Actors Guild Awards and the Academy Awards. She had an equally strong style showing: Ms. Saldaña, who has worked with the stylist Petra Flannery, wore a number of layered, ruffled and sculptural creations by Saint Laurent, whose top designer, Anthony Vaccarello, was among the “Emilia Pérez” producers.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 Do You Preserve a Vanishing Music Scene?

    Five recent books collect photographs, memories and ephemera from the hardcore band Agnostic Front, the mysterious dance artist Aphex Twin, the rap collective Odd Future and more.Memories fade. Documentation disappears. Scenes vanish.When you’re busy creating a world, you don’t always think about how to preserve it for history. So old fliers and magazines get brittle and crumble, photos get lost, publications go out of business and websites get deleted. It falls to archivists — sometimes from a scene itself, and sometimes an avid follower — to fight that slipperiness. Each of these worthy and memorable books is the product of such work. What’s most startling is that the worlds they rescue are of the surprisingly recent past. Which means that even in this age of hyperdocumentation and rapid technological advancement, evanescence is always a threat.Roger Miret with Todd Huber, ‘Agnostic Front — With Time: The Roger Miret Archives’Roger Miret and Todd Huber; via American Made KustomThe early years of Agnostic Front, the scene-shaping New York hardcore band, were chaos incarnate: a Lower East Side life of ramshackle apartments, rumbles on the street and birthing an explosive, aggravated, pugnacious new sound. Somehow, amid all this, the frontman Roger Miret — who was picked to join the band thanks to his ferocious behavior in the pit — managed to hold on to everything. “Agnostic Front — With Time: The Roger Miret Archives” is part photo essay, and part documentation of ephemera primarily from the band’s tumultuous breakout period from 1982-86.There are oodles of fliers from bills shared with Reagan Youth, Murphy’s Law, Suicidal Tendencies, Youth of Today and more. Some were scrawled by hand and some pasted pastiche-style; some featured illustrated skinheads in suspenders, tight pants and stomper boots; and some memorably gory ones were mailed in from an Oxnard, Calif., illustrator named Chuy.Miret’s collection also includes margarine-yellow T-shirts, test presses of the band’s earliest recordings and show announcements from the Village Voice listings pages. And brief personal recollections from Miret and his bandmates capture the mayhem of the time: getting shows shut down by the police, then slapping stickers on their cars; and assembling copies of the debut Agnostic Front EP by hand, cutting covers from a large roll one by one and gluing them to order after shows.‘Liquid Sky’via Emperor Go!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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    Hackers Stole $635,000 in Taylor Swift Ticket Scheme, Queens D.A. Says

    Two people stand accused of taking hundreds of tickets from StubHub to redirect them to others who resold them, prosecutors said.Two people accused of stealing and reselling more than 900 tickets to the Taylor Swift Eras Tour and other marquee events are facing criminal charges for their role in the scheme, New York prosecutors said.Several people were involved in hacking into the computer system of the online ticket-sales platform StubHub starting in the summer of 2022, the Queens district attorney, Melinda Katz, said in a news release on Monday. They then resold the tickets on the same platform for a profit, which added up to $635,000.Tyrone Rose, 20, of Kingston, Jamaica, and Shamara P. Simmons, 31, of the New York City neighborhood of Jamaica, Queens, were arrested and arraigned on Feb. 27 in Criminal Court in Queens. The lawyers listed for them in court documents did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Mr. Rose and Ms. Simmons were both charged with second-degree grand larceny, first-degree computer tampering, fourth-degree conspiracy and fourth-degree computer tampering.Mr. Rose worked for an outsourcing company in Kingston, Sutherland Global Services, which was contracted by StubHub, according to the criminal complaint.Mr. Rose and a co-worker, who has not been arrested or publicly identified, used their access to part of StubHub’s ticketing system to find a way into a secure part of the network that they were not authorized to use, where information about ticket orders was stored.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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    Joan Didion Knew the Stories We’d Tell About the Manson Murders

    Didion’s influential account of the era, “The White Album,” captures the ripples of terror provoked by the 1969 murders.Few true crime villains dominate American imaginations as fiercely as Charles Manson and his “family” of lost youths. The story has everything: a wild-eyed mastermind who was also a failed rocker; a coterie of emaciated, beautiful women; the death of a gorgeous pregnant actress and her friends; strange links to the Beatles; a feeling that this murder was either random, or an indication that hell had broken loose on earth.Plus, the public has always had the nagging sense that there was more to the story than anyone was letting on. It was just too Satanic-seeming. Too weird.So no wonder the 1969 murders have been an ongoing source of fascination. In just the past few years, Quentin Tarantino’s film “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” Ryan Murphy’s “American Horror Story: Cult” and Emma Cline’s novel “The Girls” have become bona fide hits by reimagining the murders. Manson has turned up as a character in shows like “Aquarius,” “Mindhunter” and “Charlie Says.” The journalist Tom O’Neill’s gobsmacking book “Chaos: Charles Manson, the C.I.A. and the Secret History of the Sixties,” from 2019, chronicled the author’s decades-long investigation into the case, with results that upend most of what we think we know. And now it’s a Netflix documentary from the director Errol Morris.A still from “Chaos: The Manson Murders,” a Netflix documentary by Errol Morris.NetflixSomehow, this case keeps surprising us. But one person who regarded it without shock — as if it was the inevitable conclusion of a panicked era — was Joan Didion, who was living and working in Hollywood when the murders occurred. In her 1978 essay “The White Album,” regarded as a seminal account of the era, she writes about the ripples of terror the murders provoked. “These early reports were garbled and contradictory,” with differ­ent numbers of victims and explanations of what happened, Didion writes. “I remember all of the day’s misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised.”Reality was barely tangible in the summer of 1969, with its highs and lows, its muddled impressions and half-understood head­lines. Cause and effect seemed to be breaking apart. In some respects this was simply the inevitable result of a country becoming saturated in images because they had a screen at home. A movie theater was a place to go if you wanted to see a whole story, beginning to end. But a TV you could turn on and off, and you never knew what would be there when you turned it on again. You might see images from My Lai, the funeral of a slain politician, pop versions of cowboys on “Gunsmoke” or “Bonanza,” smil­ing tap dancers on a variety show, some comedian or singer from your youth in a different setting than you remembered. It mirrored the neurons of a disturbed mind, firing at random.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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    Review: With ‘Fidelio,’ the Met Opera Does What It Does Best

    The Met, a magnet for star singers, flexed its muscles to stack the cast of Beethoven’s only opera, with Lise Davidsen in the title role.Opera houses tend to have their specialties. They might be havens for adventurous directors or unusual repertoire, for grand spectacles or Baroque chamber dramas. The Metropolitan Opera, at its finest, is a destination for voices.The Met is a glamorously storied house with a welcoming audience and undeniable prestige. It hasn’t always been quick to cast today’s rising singers, but when it does, it holds on to them, sometimes even bending its repertory to match theirs.And occasionally, the Met will gather its favorites in a single opera, assembling a vocal all-star team. This is what the company does best, and it can be thrilling to witness, as in the revival of Beethoven’s “Fidelio” that opened on Tuesday.This “Fidelio” isn’t just excellently sung, including by the Met’s sensitive chorus: Jürgen Flimm’s fresh-as-ever staging from 2000 is also led with clarity, drive and insight by the conductor Susanna Mälkki. It’s just a pity that the revival is so brief, with only four more performances through March 15.These performances will also be the last of the season for the soprano Lise Davidsen. With a remarkably luminous sound in Wagner and Strauss roles, she has been a pillar of the Met’s recent casting. But she announced in January that she was pregnant with twins and would take a break from singing after “Fidelio.” (She is set to be back at the Met next year to star in “Tristan und Isolde.”)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