Aurelia Butler

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    ‘The Critic’ Review: Dangerous Liaisons

    Ian McKellen stars a drama critic in 1930s London who has much higher standards for the theater than for his own professional ethics.Anyone who works in the arts can be forgiven for casting a critic as a villain. But a reviewer who dangles potential praise as leverage in a blackmail scheme? That’s going a step too far.Jimmy Erskine (Ian McKellen), the title character of “The Critic,” set in London in 1934, considers himself an erudite wit who holds the city’s drama scene to high standards. In reality, he is a fiendish egoist who tears down gifted performers for his own amusement. The movie, directed by Anand Tucker, is based on “Curtain Call,” a novel by the former film reviewer Anthony Quinn, whose purported inspiration for the character was James Agate, who held the stage beat at London’s Sunday Times for years.The screenwriter Patrick Marber (“Closer”) brings a typically nasty edge to the proceedings. After an encounter between Jimmy and the police threatens his position at the Chronicle, Jimmy hatches a plot that involves Nina Land (Gemma Arterton), a rising actress, and David Brooke (Mark Strong), who has inherited the paper from his father and is said to dislike Jimmy’s “proclivities.” (Jimmy barely conceals his sexual orientation; in addition to cruising the park at night, he has a live-in secretary, Tom, played by Alfred Enoch, who accompanies him in public.)Visually, “The Critic” is polished enough, despite some splashes of apparent digital lacquer. But Marber hasn’t supplied an incontrovertible motive to bind Nina to Jimmy. And there is something arguably troubling about the way McKellen’s character has been conceived. The subtext seems to be that Jimmy’s familiarity with operating in the shadows and having his liaisons genteelly wielded against him has given him a special aptitude for extortion. But as a gay man in an era when Britain criminalized homosexual activity, he would, one assumes, be far more likely to be a victim of blackmail than its perpetrator.The CriticRated R for murder and meanspirited reviews. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘The 4:30 Movie’ Review: Kevin Smith Comes of Age

    The writer-director Kevin Smith looks back fondly on his New Jersey childhood in this semi-autobiographical coming-of-age comedy.“The 4:30 Movie,” a nostalgic period comedy about teenage cinephiles coming of age in small-town New Jersey, is alternately juvenile and sentimental. It’s an awkward tonal balance familiar from the writer-director Kevin Smith’s early features, including “Mallrats” and the ’90s cult classic “Clerks.”But with its soft lighting and almost obsessive fondness for its mid-80s production design, this is clearly Smith working in a different register — more sincere and personal, as befits what he’s described as his “secret origin story.”The jokes range from old-school, foul-mouthed patter (lots of stuff about “second base” and various euphemisms for masturbation) to throwback cultural signifiers (including “The Brady Bunch,” Van Halen and Hands Across America), delivered by Austin Zajur, Reed Northrup and Nicholas Cirillo with capable if largely unamusing adolescent brio.You can tell Smith has put more effort into this movie than both his trite studio cash-ins (“Cop Out”) and his dashed-off experiments (“Yoga Hosers”), trying earnestly to account for how he fell in love with cinema and became a filmmaker. It’s like “The Fabelmans” if Steven Spielberg had grown up to make bad movies.The script is loaded with droll, audience-flattering nods to the future, where characters confidently insist things that viewers know make them sound stupid, like “no one will ever pay to see a Batman movie” or “the Mets will never win the World Series.” This is the cheapest type of joke you can make in a period comedy, and “The 4:30 Movie” makes it constantly. Effort goes only so far, and “The 4:30 Movie” doesn’t surpass Smith’s usual limitations.The 4:30 MovieRated R for strong language, mild violence, some sexuality and lewd humor. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Speak No Evil’ Review: He Seemed So Nice

    In this horror remake, James McAvoy plays an aggressively friendly British stranger who extends a dubious invitation to an American couple. Suckers!Given the travel horror stories that fill the news — cruise-ship contagion, passengers trying to open plane doors mid-flight — the movies have some serious competition when it comes to fear mongering. Yet filmmakers keep trying to top reality with familiar stories about the terrors that await you when you venture into the world. Characters keep heading down dark roads. They visit weird hotels and isolated cabins (come on!), invite creeps into their homes and enter those of people they scarcely know (as if!). These travelers don’t ask for trouble; they beg for it.The first time that Louise (Mackenzie Davis) and Ben (Scoot McNairy), an American couple, really notice Paddy (an exhaustingly over-the-top James McAvoy), he’s taking a splashy leap in a pool. They’re on vacation in Tuscany and having a good time, and meeting new people is fun (unless you’re in a horror movie, that is). Paddy seems excitable, a bit over-eager — for attention, certainly — but he and his wife, Ciara (Aisling Franciosi), are friendly, attractive and British, so they’re easy to talk to. Like Louise and Ben, they have a boy, Ant (Dan Hough), so they must be nice. They’re like us, you can almost hear Louise and Ben thinking.For reasons that never make any sense — rationality is often in short supply in horror cinema — it isn’t long before Louise and Ben take up Paddy and Ciara’s invitation to visit them at their house in the English countryside. First, though, the writer-director James Watkins stirs up some marital tension for Ben and Louise, who have moved to London, upturning their lives. (Davis and McNairy starred in the great AMC show “Halt and Catch Fire,” and are persuasively cozy together.) She seems to be just fine, but Ben is unhappily unemployed, a divide that Watkins also uses to feed the story’s themes, chiefly masculinity and middle-class norms.Red alarms have already begun blinking by the time that Louise and Ben and their 11-year-old daughter, Agnes (Alix West Lefler), an anxious child who self-soothes with a stuffed bunny, pull up to Paddy and Ciara’s house one portentously dark night. Once inside, the alarms start flashing faster. Louise tries to put on a good game face, but she’s visibly put off by the house, an uncomfortable, ramshackle warren of cluttered rooms with low ceilings that boxes them in. Soon, Paddy is slaughtering a goose (uh-oh) and pushing a forkful of cooked bird at Louise — a vegetarian — and the atmosphere has appreciably soured. Things only get worse because they have to.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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    ‘My Old Ass’ Review: If She Could Turn Back Time

    A buoyant comedy with a big heart follows a teen girl who meets her older self the summer before college.That summer before college can be strange, a moment suspended between life stages, and Elliott (Maisy Stella) is right in the thick of it. She’s turning 18 in the tiny picturesque community in Muskoka, Ontario, where her family has farmed cranberries for generations. She has a janky little motorboat, two best friends and a massive crush on the girl behind the counter at the local coffee shop. And she’s looking forward to heading to Toronto in a few short weeks to start the next chapter of her life.Sounds familiar. You might even relate. But “My Old Ass,” written and directed by Megan Park, does not go in expected coming-of-age directions. It’s as much about reframing middle-aged regrets as it is a story about youth, love and possibility — and thus the emotional heft it wields is two-pronged.Elliott belongs to a newish and very welcome variety of teen girl movie protagonist. For decades, these characters were mostly siloed into vapid types, the better for us, I guess, to “understand” them: Goths, cheerleaders, ditzes, bookish wallflowers, cool girls, bullies. Elliott, on the other hand, is funny, capable and comfortable in her own skin. She can drive a tractor and steer a boat, and also forgets to show up for her own birthday dinner with her family. She is very thoroughly 18, with as strong a sense of self as you can really have at that age, while also being kind of a jerk at times to her parents and brothers. She loves them. She just finds them kind of annoying, though she’s not above apologizing for her behavior.Elliott’s characteristics aren’t markers of being a Strong Female Lead so much as just an actual teen girl, the kind you probably know, or maybe were. I found myself thinking of various characters played by stellar young actresses in recent films: Haley Lu Richardson in “The Edge of Seventeen,” Emilia Jones in “Coda,” Lily Collias in “Good One,” Saoirse Ronan in “Lady Bird.”With this complexity in mind, it makes sense that on Elliott’s 18th birthday, she and her friends Ro (Kerrice Brooks) and Ruthie (Maddie Ziegler) decide, with age-appropriate recklessness, that it’s time to have a transcendent experience. They obtain psychedelic mushrooms and head to a little wooded island to camp out and experience their trips, whatever they might be like. Elliott is at first disappointed that the shrooms don’t seem to have any effect on her, but then the unimaginable occurs: Her older self suddenly appears at the campfire. (You see now where the film’s title comes from.) Elliott at age 39 (Aubrey Plaza) is a Ph.D. student and, perhaps relatedly, more cynical than she was as a teenager. But she seems delighted to meet her younger self, and offers a load of advice, including warnings to stay away from someone named Chad who might turn up soon. And though the mushrooms wear off, the connection between younger and older self outlasts the drugs’ effect, to both Elliotts’ surprise.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 Song That Connects Jackson Browne, Nico and Margot Tenenbaum

    Browne wrote “These Days” at 16. Now 75, he and some famous admirers reflect on his unexpected mainstay: “If a song is worth anything, it’s about the life of the listener.”When he was 16, Jack Browne sat down at his parents’ kitchen table in Fullerton, Calif., and started picking out a tune on an old Kay guitar.It was the fall of 1964, and the fledgling songwriter and high school junior — inspired by books, records and his own suburban disaffection — began weaving together an existential number about loss and regret called “These Days.”It would be a year until he finished the song, nearly a decade before he recorded it properly. By the time Jackson Browne, as he would be known professionally, cut it for his 1973 album “For Everyman” — which will be reissued on Sept. 20 — it had already been done in two distinct, definitive versions: the first by the German chanteuse and Velvet Underground collaborator Nico, then later by the Southern rocker Gregg Allman.“These Days” has proved a remarkably durable composition, reinterpreted by Cher, St. Vincent, Glen Campbell, Miley Cyrus, Paul Westerberg and Drake, to name a handful. It inspired Wes Anderson’s 2001 film “The Royal Tenenbaums,” and more recently has become the unlikely soundtrack to a series of TikTok trends.While Browne has had bigger hits as an artist (“Doctor My Eyes,” “Running on Empty”) and as a writer (Eagles’ “Take It Easy”), “These Days” has rambled through the decades, morphing musically, changing lyrically and taking on added layers of meaning. “In that regard, it’s sort of like a folk song,” Browne said on a late August afternoon, sitting in the control room of his Santa Monica recording studio, Groove Masters.“I come from folk music, that was my school,” continued Browne, somehow still boyish and bright-eyed at 75. “You’d learn several versions of the same song and adapt the parts of it that you liked and it’d become something else. That’s what’s happened with ‘These Days.’”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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    MTV Video Music Awards: 7 Memorable Moments

    Taylor Swift set a record and Chappell Roan, Sabrina Carpenter and Katy Perry delivered noteworthy performances as the show struck a balance between past and present.Wednesday night’s MTV Video Music Awards marked the show’s 40th anniversary, and much of the festivities strived for déjà vu by honoring memorable performances and moments from shows past. Montages of “V.M.A. flashbacks” like Michael Jackson heartily kissing Lisa Marie Presley, Madonna writhing through “Like a Virgin,” and Eminem storming the building with a regiment of bleached look-alikes peppered the telecast.This year’s show paid homage to those events too, sometimes explicitly. Eminem, for instance, opened the show performing his latest single, “Houdini,” alongside an army costumed to look like him, with dark beards underneath blond wigs that referenced the old days. The host Megan Thee Stallion donned an outfit that nodded to the silky green top Britney Spears wore in 2001 to perform “I’m a Slave 4 U,” and sported a yellow boa constrictor to boot — though Megan’s genuine discomfort with the creature worked to comedic effect.The V.M.A.s are forever looking to inaugurate new stars to take up the mantle of the classic music-video era icons. This year’s class, including Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan, Tyla and Rauw Alejandro stood out amid the throwback references. Katy Perry bridged the gap between eras, and Taylor Swift did what she does best at award shows — dance zealously to other artists and collect hardware. Here are the highlights.Shawn Mendes returned to the stage with new music.The last time Shawn Mendes was on the V.M.A. stage, it was 2021 and he was performing “Summer of Love” with Tainy. He’d last released an album, “Wonder,” in 2020 but later postponed a 2022 tour to focus on his mental health.Wednesday Mendes returned to the stage to perform an acoustic and stripped-down new single, “Nobody Knows,” from his upcoming album “Shawn,” expected to release in October. Fans on social media speculated that the song contained a reference to his ex-girlfriend and fellow V.M.A. performer, Camila Cabello. In the song, Mendes sings, “When the bottle is open, anything can happen/flying too close to the sun”; Cabello’s Instagram bio reads, “long, thick black hair turned white from flying too close to the sun.” — SHIVANI GONZALEZWe 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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    5 Essential Frankie Beverly and Maze Songs, Including ‘Before I Let Go’

    The singer, who died on Tuesday at 77, had a smooth, sunny delivery that turned at least one track into a lasting anthem of Black celebrations.The song is a call to action from its opening notes. There’s only a brief stomping riff before Frankie Beverly, the lead singer and songwriter of the soul and funk band Maze, intones “woah-ohhh.” By the time he actually gets to the song’s opening lyrics, “You make me happy,” audiences at barbecues, family reunions, weddings, block parties and musical festivals know they should already be on the dance floor.“Before I Let Go” peaked at No. 13 on Billboard’s R&B chart after its release in 1981, on the band’s fifth album. But in the more than four decades since, the song became a signature for the group and for Beverly, whose warm but impassioned vocals ignite the track and elevate it to a communal release, particularly at Black gatherings.Questlove, during a sit-down in March with Beverly for his podcast, called the song “the national anthem of life,” in part for its ubiquity in Black celebrations. Invoking the nostalgia of home and togetherness through its ebullience and Beverly’s bellowing delivery, the song is often an end-of-the-night anthem: Beverly and Maze used it as a set-ender and the band for many years closed the annual Essence Festival with the jam.Clint Smith, the New York Times best-selling author, poet and journalist, described the energy Mr. Beverly is able to alchemize with his music in a poem from 2015 titled “When Maze and Frankie Beverly Come On in my House.”“A reminder of the playful manifestations of love, how the harmony of guitar & trumpet & bass & sweat & Frankie’s voice can create the sort of levity that ensures love lasts long after the song has stopped,” Mr. Smith wrote.Beyoncé’s cover of “Before I Let Go,” from her 2019 live album “Homecoming,” brought the song to new listeners, and her performance — adding calls to new dance moves for TikTok and Instagram audiences — reveled in its sheer delight.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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    Dave Grohl’s Mystery Baby Offers a Lesson in Crisis Communication

    The timing and content of Dave Grohl’s admission that he had a child outside his marriage was complimented for addressing the issue and relying on short memories.Dave Grohl — the Nirvana drummer and Foo Fighters founder — is as close as America gets to a rock ’n’ roll father figure: funny and family-oriented, beloved by his fans and his fellow musicians and seemingly as steady as the drumbeats that made him famous. His nickname? “The nicest dude in rock.”On Tuesday, however, that reputation took a hit when Mr. Grohl revealed that he was also paternal in a very real, and decidedly less flattering way, with the announcement of the birth of a daughter outside his marriage.“I plan to be a loving and supportive parent to her,” the musician posted on Instagram, adding that he loved his wife and their children. “I am doing everything I can to regain their trust and earn their forgiveness.”The decision by Mr. Grohl to make a pre-emptive announcement may well have been an attempt to control the narrative, something that crisis communications experts said was savvy.“I thought it was clean, smart, simple,” said Melissa Nathan, the chief executive of The Agency Group PR, which specializes in “reputation management.”Molly McPherson, a crisis communications strategist, echoed that sentiment, saying that Mr. Grohl’s post was probably strategically timed, coming on the same day as the highly anticipated debate between Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump.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