Aurelia Butler

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    ‘My Dead Friend Zoe’ Review: On the Battlefield and at Home

    A young Army veteran struggles with her memories and guilt in this heartfelt independent drama.I’m not sure how much attention to ascribe to this, but given that Zoe is Greek for “life,” the title of “My Dead Friend Zoe” feels a bit wry. Directed by Kyle Hausmann-Stokes from a screenplay he wrote with A.J. Bermudez, it’s a competently performed drama about an Army veteran named Merit (Sonequa Martin-Green) who fought in the Afghanistan War and must come to terms with both the loss of her friend Zoe (Natalie Morales) and the burden of taking care of her grandfather (Ed Harris), whose Alzheimer’s disease is rapidly advancing.Some of that would probably qualify as a spoiler if it wasn’t for the title of the film, which sounds a little sardonic, a little jokey, when in fact there’s nothing sardonic or jokey about this film at all. It is achingly sincere, a tribute to two soldiers with whom Hausmann-Stokes, an Army veteran, served in Iraq.If anything’s sardonic about the film, it’s Zoe, who has never met a joke she didn’t want to crack. Merit and Zoe spend a lot of their deployment time together, and at the start of the movie, they’re debating what they’ll do after this tour of duty ends. Merit is planning to go to college; Zoe, who seems a bit lost in life, resents Merit’s plans — college, she says, is for “rich kids and snowflakes” — and is thinking about re-enlisting.Most of that we encounter in flashbacks. In the present, Merit is living a small life, working in a warehouse and spending a lot of her free time running, a way to shake off memories of Zoe. But Zoe shows up anyhow, at least in Merit’s mind — especially during group therapy, led by Dr. Cole (Morgan Freeman). But when her mother calls and asks her to look after her grandfather, who is himself a Vietnam veteran, Merit is forced into a closer confrontation with her memories, the version of Zoe in her mind and the feelings that’s she’s been trying to escape.Most of the filmmaking in “My Dead Friend Zoe” feels workmanlike, proficient and straightforward in its storytelling — a promising feature debut for Hausmann-Stokes. The film’s best feature is its performances from a uniformly excellent cast, including Harris being gruffly pensive, Morales at her energetic best and Utkarsh Ambudkar as Alex, the funny local guy with whom Merit strikes up a friendship, or maybe something more. Martin-Green is tasked with carrying the story, and she does it, evoking real emotion as she processes the feelings she’s stuffed down.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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    Billy Hart Has One Foot in Jazz’s Past and the Other in Its Future

    Onstage at Smoke in late January, the all-star septet the Cookers were surging into high gear. The catalyst: their drummer, Billy Hart, who stirred up rhythmic eddies and punched out stinging cymbal accents while fixing the saxophonist Azar Lawrence with an eager, heat-of-battle grin.On “Just,” a new album by Hart’s own long-running quartet, out Friday, he reveals some of that intensity in a more understated guise, playing alongside vanguard musicians a quarter century or more younger — the saxophonist Mark Turner, the pianist Ethan Iverson and the bassist Ben Street — and pulling off what has become, across his six-decade-plus career, a trademark Billy Hart feat: sounding effortlessly and perpetually contemporary.“He’s a continual, consummate student of the music,” Turner said of Hart, 84, in a phone interview. While Hart’s style draws on the many eras in which he has been active, he continued, “he hasn’t changed his language into something that is based in a period.”The bassist Buster Williams has worked with Hart since the early ’60s, first meeting him on a gig with the vocalist Betty Carter and later aligning with him in many other contexts, including the Mwandishi band, Herbie Hancock’s trailblazing electric-jazz sextet of the early ’70s. “He’s got that fresh understanding of things,” Williams said in a phone interview. “His vision is always looking forward.”Could the young Billy Hart, growing up in Washington, D.C., have envisioned such a long and thriving career? “Of course not,” he said with an incredulous laugh.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesOutside the jazz world, Hart is largely unknown. But within the genre — where peers and fans refer to him as Jabali, or “rock,” one of the Swahili monikers bestowed on the members of the Mwandishi band by their associate James Mtume — his esteem is near-universal, a status reflected in a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master designation and his staggeringly broad discography, encompassing more than 600 albums.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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    Ready for Their Close-Ups at the Oscar Nominees Dinner

    On Tuesday night, over 100 Oscar nominees gathered at the Academy Museum in Los Angeles for a class photo in the David Geffen Theater.Demi Moore, left, who starred in “The Substance,” and Cynthia Erivo, center, who starred in “Wicked,” are both vying for a best actress Oscar. Zoe Saldaña, right, is nominated in the best supporting actress category for her role in “Emilia Pérez.” In the upper left corner of the group, seated two rows above Timothée Chalamet, Ralph Fiennes clasped his hands and looked deep in thought, as though he were still pondering matters of papal importance in “Conclave.” Grouped together in the front row, the Oscar-nominated actresses Zoe Saldaña, Mikey Madison, Monica Barbaro, Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande formed a power quintet. “Everyone say ‘Oscar nominee!’” Erivo crowed as the flashbulbs went off.Ariana Grande is competing for a best supporting actress award for her role in “Wicked.”Still, with so many A-list filmmakers in the frame, there was bound to be someone who asked for another take. Here, it was the “Dune: Part Two” auteur Denis Villeneuve, who noted that the best director nominee James Mangold (“A Complete Unknown”) had the misfortune of arriving in the theater just after the class photo had been snapped.Jeremy Strong is nominated in the best supporting actor category for his role in “The Apprentice.”“Can we take a picture again?” asked Villeneuve.Sebastian Stan is competing for a best actor Oscar for his turn in “The Apprentice.”Academy president Janet Yang granted his wish, though she noted good-naturedly, “No more stragglers.”Isabella Rossellini is a best supporting actress nominee for her performance in “Conclave.”Typically, the nominees would have gathered earlier this month for the annual Oscar nominees luncheon, an event that was canceled this year as the academy reshuffled its schedule because of the Los Angeles wildfires. In its place, the nominees were invited to a cocktail hour and dinner held just days before this Sunday’s Oscar ceremony.Mikey Madison is up for a best actress award for her role in “Anora.” Over cocktails before the class photos were taken, the “Sing Sing” star Colman Domingo chatted with the “Nickel Boys” director RaMell Ross, while Grande hugged the journalist Tracy Gilchrist, who had conducted the widely memed “holding space” interview with her and Erivo. Nearby, the “Substance” director Coralie Fargeat was engaged in a deep conversation with Jane Fonda, who had inspired the character played by Demi Moore in the film.Demi Moore is a best actress nominee for her turn in “The Substance.”With Oscar voting long concluded, the night’s schmoozing felt more fraternal than frantic. There were no winners and losers, nor campaigns to still be waged. Instead, there was free-flowing champagne and conversation, and best of all, none of it had to fit into an acceptance speech or commercial break.Timothée Chalamet is nominated in the best actor category for “A Complete Unknown.”Ralph Fiennes is vying for a best actor award for his performance in “Conclave.”Cynthia Erivo is nominated in the best actress category for her role in “Wicked.”Sean Baker is a best director nominee for his film “Anora.”Monica Barbaro is nominated in the best supporting actress category for “A Complete Unknown.”Diane Warren is nominated for the original song “The Journey” from the film “The Six Triple Eight.” Adrien Brody is up for a best actor award for his performance in “The Brutalist.”The director Denis Villeneuve, whose film “Dune: Part Two” is up for best picture. More

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    2025 New York International Children’s Film Festival

    Girls prevailing against the odds is one theme that has surfaced among the 13 features and 79 short films in this year’s festival in New York.A teenager rescues and defends an infant creature whose species the surrounding adults have condemned as vicious and predatory. Another adolescent battles injury and other hurdles in a quest for basketball stardom. A small child in Mexico contracts polio but finds solace in the world of art. And an 11-year-old Kurdish immigrant arrives in Berlin, ultimately relying on soccer talent to feel at home again.These young people, protagonists in works that will be shown in the 2025 New York International Children’s Film Festival, are all fierce, fearless and — perhaps most striking — female. This year’s festival, which begins a three-weekend run in Manhattan on Friday, includes 13 features and 79 short films, many of them proudly celebrating girls and women.Although the slate doesn’t neglect films about boys, among them tales of time-traveling brothers and a boatbuilding father-son team, the choices exalt girl power more than any of the festival’s selections in recent memory.“A lot of these stories of strong girls and women are true-to-life stories,” Maria-Christina Villaseñor, the festival’s programming director, said in an interview. She referred to two films that have their initial festival showings this weekend (every feature has two screening dates): Erica Tanamachi’s live-action documentary “Home Court” follows the Cambodian American basketball player Ashley Chea from her California preparatory school to her freshman year at Princeton, while the animated “Hola, Frida,” by André Kadi and Karine Vézina, draws on the early years of the artist Frida Kahlo.“Obviously, the story of Frida Kahlo is a story that a lot of people feel like they’re familiar with, but telling it from the perspective of her child self is really interesting,” Villaseñor said.Delivering unusual fare that young viewers might otherwise miss — short films, offbeat independent cinema, subtitled foreign movies — is a hallmark of the festival, now in its 29th year and one of the largest and broadest of its kind. (It also operates classroom programs and a national touring film slate.) And unlike many film fairs for children, the New York festival, which offers program tickets starting at $17 (a full-festival pass is $135), includes multiple screenings for teenagers and even college students, who can see some of their peers’ work in a showcase on March 15.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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    Who Makes the Red Carpet? Steve.

    On a recent weekday morning in La Mirada, a suburb outside Los Angeles, Steve Olive, 58, walked among hundreds of carpet rolls in red, green and lavender in a white, sun-drenched, 36,000-square-foot warehouse.Laid out on the floor was a 150-foot stretch of rug, delivered by truck from Georgia a few days before, in the custom shade of Academy Red that is only available for the Oscars.Mr. Olive himself may not be famous, but celebrities have strolled the plush craftsmanship of his carpet for nearly three decades.His company, Event Carpet Pros, has supplied carpets for the Oscars, Golden Globes, Grammys and Emmys, as well as for Disney, Marvel and Warner Bros. movie premieres and the Super Bowl.And, at a moment when carpets have moved beyond the classic red and become splashier and more intricate, his handiwork has become more prominent. He has crafted custom designs like a shimmering, sunlit pool carpet for the 2023 “Barbie” world premiere and a green-and-black ectoplasm drip carpet for the “Ghostbusters” world premiere in 2016 that took a month to create.“I haven’t come across anything that we couldn’t do,” Mr. Olive, who founded the company with his brother-in-law, Walter Clyne, in 1992, said in an interview.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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    Drake Postpones 4 Australia and New Zealand Tour Dates

    Dates for Brisbane, Sydney and Auckland were postponed for a “scheduling conflict,” representatives for the rapper said. The tour coincided with the release of his latest album.Drake, whose new album topped the Billboard 200 chart this week after Kendrick Lamar had made him a punchline at the Super Bowl halftime show, has canceled four tour dates in Australia and New Zealand because of a “scheduling conflict,” representatives for the rapper said on Wednesday.It was not immediately clear what the conflict was, but Drake’s team said it would work to reschedule the dates along with adding additional shows.“We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience,” Drake’s representatives said in a statement. “Drake and the entire team have had an incredible time doing these shows and are excited to return soon. We look forward to sharing the rescheduled dates with you as soon as possible.”The Anita Max Win Tour kicked off this month in Perth, Australia, and was scheduled to have 16 shows across major cities in the country and New Zealand.But Drake canceled a March 4 show in Brisbane, a March 7 show in Sydney and two shows in mid-March in Auckland, New Zealand.The tour coincided with the release of his latest album, “Some Sexy Songs 4 U,” a collaboration with PartyNextDoor, a longtime Drake associate. The album debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 this week.It was the first new album since his much-publicized beef with Lamar, whose diss track “Not Like Us” accused Drake of pedophilia. Drake sued Universal Music Group for defamation for releasing and promoting the song. His lawsuit called the allegations in the song false and accused the label of valuing “corporate greed over the safety and well-being of its artists.”But the song has continued to grow. This month Lamar won five Grammy Awards for the song, including song and record of the year, and performed it to a huge global audience at the Super Bowl halftime show.Joe Coscarelli More

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    An Early Bob Dylan Recording Hits the Auction Block

    The reel-to-reel tape is from a Gaslight Cafe show in Greenwich Village in 1961, when Dylan was playing to audiences you could count in a glance or two.On Sept. 6, 1961, a little-known 20-year-old calling himself Bob Dylan took the stage at the Gaslight Cafe in Greenwich Village and played a six-song set. More than 60 years later, a reel-to-reel tape of those songs has gone up for auction.Only about 20 people were at the short performance, but it is well known to folk-history fans and Dylanologists partly because it was preserved on tape. Terri Thal, Dylan’s manager at the time, brought a bulky Ampex recorder in a leather case to the show and set it up on a table at stage left.Dylan knew she was going to record, Thal said: “He programmed his set as an audition.”That set, performed more than three decades before the birth of Timothée Chalamet — up for an Oscar this Sunday for his portrayal of Dylan — included “Talkin’ Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues,” “He Was a Friend of Mine” and “Song to Woody,” a reference to Woody Guthrie.The recording became a tool that Thal used to try to persuade out-of-town clubs to book Dylan, who had acquired something of a reputation among the cognoscenti in the Village but wasn’t well known elsewhere.Now, the tape, described by RR Auction in Boston as “Dylan’s earliest demo recording,” is being offered for sale along with other Dylan-related ephemera, including a sequined suit from his 1975 Rolling Thunder tour and a Martin D-41 acoustic guitar he gave to Bob Neuwirth, a musician who was instrumental in assembling the band for that tour.The recording is significant, said Mark Davidson, the senior director of archives and exhibitions at the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Okla., because it documents a performance by someone on the cusp of fame and before he fully developed his own inimitable 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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    Timothée Chalamet’s Very Viral Oscars Season

    The 29-year-old actor has hit the usual stops, but the defining moments of his awards campaign have been distinctly online.Going viral during awards season is not necessarily a good thing. Look no further than the unearthed social media posts of “Emilia Pérez” star Karla Sofía Gascón for the most extreme example of how an actor’s online behavior can sink a film’s chances.But in other cases social media can be a tool for a contender. Timothée Chalamet, a best actor nominee for his portrayal of Bob Dylan in the biopic “A Complete Unknown,” knows this. Leading up to the Christmas release of his film and through the ensuing months on the awards trail, Chalamet has waged a highly amusing, sometimes odd, campaign eschewing the old, staid ways of Hollywood promotion. In addition to some somber interviews about how much Dylan means to him, Chalamet has posted videos of himself dancing, worn kitschy outfits and turned social media feeds into his own personal art project.While Chalamet has appeared on traditional media, he has utilized it in surprising ways where virality seems to be the end goal rather than reaching typical viewers of those programs.What we’re witnessing is perhaps the first Gen Z Oscar campaign. Technically, Chalamet, who was born in 1995, is a millennial, but he’s a child of the internet who understands its weird contours and knows that sometimes a post doesn’t have to make sense to be appealing. This won’t necessarily translate to Oscar gold, but it has certainly been fun to watch it unfold. Here are Chalamet’s greatest hits from this very unusual Oscar run.“College GameDay”The first sign that Chalamet was doing something different with his promotional campaign for “A Complete Unknown” came when he appeared on ESPN’s “College GameDay” in early December. It’s typical for celebrities to show up on the broadcast and join the analysts in predicting which teams are going to win the day’s matchups, but Chalamet, who broke out in art-house indie films, seemed like an odd choice for the gig.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