Aurelia Butler

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    Jerry Butler, Singer Known as the Iceman, Dies at 85

    Jerry Butler, the graceful singer and songwriter who served as the first leader of the Impressions before launching a long, hit-heavy solo career, died on Thursday at his home in Chicago. He was 85.His death was confirmed by his assistant, who said that Mr. Butler had Parkinson’s disease.Mr. Butler’s resounding baritone voice, though gritty in timbre, was animated by gentility and charm; he approached a lyric with an almost courtly level of sensitivity. His poise explained, in part, how he came to be known as the Iceman.Mr. Butler scored his first hit in 1958 with “For Your Precious Love,” a song he recorded with the Impressions and wrote with two other members of the group. It reached No. 11 on Billboard’s pop chart. Its lyrics stressed perseverance and loyalty, themes Mr. Butler would revisit throughout his career.Immediately after leaving the group in 1960, he reached the Billboard Top 10 with “He Will Break Your Heart,” which he wrote with his bandmate Curtis Mayfield and Calvin Carter. The song proved durable: A reworked version by Tony Orlando and Dawn, “He Don’t Love You (Like I Love You),” would become a No. 1 hit more than a decade later.Mr. Butler’s version of “Moon River,” the Henry Mancini-Johnny Mercer song from the movie “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” climbed to No. 11 on the pop chart in 1961. The next year, his interpretation of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “Make It Easy on Yourself” reached No. 20.Two years later, he reached the Top 10 again with “Let It Be Me,” a duet with Betty Everett. It performed even better than the Everly Brothers’ version, widely considered a classic: The Butler-Everett version reached No. 5, two points higher than the Everlys had reached in 1960.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 Playlist Packed With Crossword Clues

    Sia! Abba! ELO! Let us help you solve some puzzles with this compilation of songs by crossword-famous musicians.Sia, pictured without cheap thrills.Kevin Winter/BBMA2020, via Getty ImagesDear listeners,In 2012, shortly after the death of the legendary blues musician Etta James, the writer Matt Gaffney provided a somewhat unconventional eulogy on the website Slate, remembering James as “a woman whose handy, four-letter first name has gotten us out of many tough corners and spared us countless painful rewrites.”Gaffney is a crossword puzzle writer, and in this article he amusingly defined a specific type of renown: James was a perfect example of someone who was “crossword-famous.”If you do enough crossword puzzles (as I certainly do; shout out to my esteemed colleagues in The New York Times Games department for enabling my habit), you start to see certain names over and over. (Brian) Eno. (Yoko) Ono. And yes, Etta (James). Why these and not others? Gaffney explained, “short groupings of common letters are the lifeblood of crosswords, and you’ll need a lot of them if you want to make things work. For that reason, crossword-famous names are likely to be three, four or five letters long, with as many 1-point Scrabble letters as possible.”Today’s playlist is a compilation of songs by crossword-famous musicians. You’ll hear the aforementioned Eno, Ono and Etta, as well as a few more recent entrants into the pantheon of crossword fame: Sia, Adele and Ariana Grande. A certain Guthrie is also on this playlist, though avid crossword solvers know that the most famous folk singer with that last name is not necessarily the most crossword-famous.If you’re new to the art of solving crossword puzzles, I hope today’s playlist gives you some pointers — along with some enjoyable tunes. And if you’re more of an advanced puzzler who doesn’t pay much attention to popular music, this playlist should teach you a thing or two. Grab a pencil (or if you’re feeling especially confident, a pen), load up today’s New York Times crossword and press play.I feel like I win when I lose,LindsayWe 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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    At the Berlin Film Festival, Anxious Movies for Dark Times

    At the Berlin International Film Festival, the onscreen mood was downbeat, but the program still held some gems.The skies are typically gray and gloomy at the Berlin International Film Festival, but this year’s edition, which runs through Sunday, began with snow for days. The wintry weather gave the event — known as the Berlinale — a magical glow at first, but it wasn’t enough to keep the demons at bay. Looming over the festival were anxieties over the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine, as well as the upcoming German elections. The films also radiated an air of shame, despair and powerlessness, asking: How to trust ourselves to make the world better when we’ve already screwed up so spectacularly?Tom Tykwer’s visually dazzling, but comically misguided liberal drama, “The Light,” opened the event last week, submitting festivalgoers to 162 minutes of angst and attrition (and one too many “Bohemian Rhapsody” needle drops) about a German family spiritually cleansed by their Syrian housekeeper.For many of us on the ground, however, the first real epic-of-interest was the “Parasite” director Bong Joon Ho’s science-fiction caper “Mickey 17” — a film that induces nervous laughter about society’s abysmal moral standards. In this high-concept action movie with a zany dark heart, labor exploitation hits a new low when workers, or at least their physical forms, become literally disposable. Robert Pattinson stars as one such “expendable,” a dopey spaceman whose co-workers treat him like a lab-rat, knowing that his body can be reprinted.A scene from “Mickey 17.”BerlinaleBong’s bids at timeliness are staler than usual. (Mark Ruffalo plays a grandstanding demagogue whose followers wear red caps.) But the film’s dull political edge doesn’t diminish the joy ride’s momentum, nor the flashes of genuine weirdness that keep us guessing. If, god willing, superhero movies are destined to go the way of the dodo, “Mickey 17” is a reminder that directors like Bong keep the dream of the blockbuster alive.President Trump’s ramped-up campaign of mass deportations infiltrated my viewing of Michel Franco’s “Dreams,” a competition entry that filled me with much ambivalence, but also moved and infuriated me. This intentionally provocative psychodrama by one of Mexico’s most divisive directors sees Jessica Chastain as a tightly wound philanthropist from San Francisco who has a tempestuous relationship with an undocumented ballet dancer from Mexico — whom we first see, like the survivor at the end of a brutal horror film, emerging from a van full of smuggled migrants.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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    Seong-Jin Cho Tackles a Ravel Piano Marathon in New York

    Performing in New York, Seong-Jin Cho presented a marathon survey of Ravel’s solo piano works and appeared in Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto.A skilled musician can play pretty much anything. But notes on the page of a score are just a starting point. Beyond that, what makes an artist well suited to a specific sound or style? Age? Personality? Experience?These are complicated, elusive questions that loomed over the young pianist Seong-Jin Cho’s recent appearances in New York. Earlier this month, he played a marathon of Ravel’s complete solo piano works at Carnegie Hall, and on Thursday he joined the New York Philharmonic at David Geffen Hall as the soloist in Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto. (The program continues through Saturday.)If these concerts share anything, it’s sheer athleticism. The Ravel survey makes for a three-hour evening of intense focus and finger work; the Prokofiev concerto probably crams the same amount of notes into about 35 minutes.The similarities end there, though. And it’s in the differences that Cho revealed the state of his artistry at 30, a decade on from his career-making first prize at the International Chopin Piano Competition.There was a remarkable difference, too, between his readings of the Ravel works in concert and his recording of the same material, released on Deutsche Grammophon last month to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth. (A related album of his, of Ravel’s two piano concertos with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, came out on Friday.) His interpretations of these wide-ranging pieces were freer and more expressive at Carnegie; it would be interesting to hear Cho revisit them again.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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    Watch Austin Butler in Battle in ‘Dune: Part Two’

    The director Denis Villeneuve narrates a sequence from his film, which is nominated for five Academy Awards, including best picture.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune: Part Two,” much like the first film, is loaded with ambitious sequences. But one of the stark visual standouts is this battle scene in the Harkonnen arena, where Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler), for his birthday celebration, is pitted against a group of enslaved men.The sequence is rendered in heightened black andwhite. Narrating the scene, Villeneuve said he wanted to create a specific kind of atmosphere for the planet Giedi Prime, in which the Harkonnen have destroyed a lot of their natural resources. He said, “As my cinematographer, Greig Fraser, and I were brainstorming together how to bring an alien sunlight that would be black and white to the screen, Greig had the idea to test infrared.”The filmmaker said that infrared is usually blocked from cameras because it is considered noise. But in this case, they “modified the cameras to let only that wavelength come through.” The result is the atmosphere Villeneuve said he was dreaming of, one in which “we see almost through skin. The eyes become piercing like insects.”Read the “Dune: Part Two” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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    Five Free Movies to Stream Now

    Don’t overlook ad-supported platforms like Tubi, Plex and PlutoTV. They’re surprising repositories for great films like “Gunda” and “Farha.”Maybe Big Tech hasn’t delivered on its disruptive promise for movies after all: We’ve cut our cable cords for price and convenience only to pay just as much (if not more) to jump through hoops and across platforms, with diminishing returns in quality.But there’s always good work being made. This new column, then, is not about free stuff, but about discovery. It’s a curation of good and great films on free, ad-supported platforms like Tubi, Plex and Pluto TV that often fall through the cracks of our numbingly plentiful, overly content-ified entertainment complexes.This inaugural column’s picks take us from a small farm to a cramped Japanese apartment, from a restaurant kitchen to an urgent historical record of memory. These are movies that you can watch, contend with and ponder for free.‘Gunda’ (2020)Stream it on Tubi.An undersung trend in recent movies is the artful animal picture, from “EO” (about a donkey) to “First Cow” (a cow) to “Cow” (you get it). “Gunda” is perhaps the simplest and quietest of them all, but somehow contains a stirring, stealthily profound inquiry into human and animal nature.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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    ‘We Beat the Dream Team’ Puts a Twist on the Sports Movie Formula

    This film tells the story of the college players who defeated the 1992 U.S. men’s basketball team, filled with N.B.A. All-Stars, during a scrimmage before the Olympics.Whether documentary or fiction, the sports movie template is so well-worn — we were underdogs, then we won, and it was amazing — that it’s rare to execute a new twist on the formula. And in some ways, “We Beat the Dream Team” (streaming on Max), directed by Michael Tolajian, follows that recipe. Its title suggests the ultimate underdog story: In June 1992, a group of elite college basketball players was recruited to scrimmage the United States men’s basketball team before the Barcelona Olympics. But on the first day, kind of by accident, the underdogs beat the so-called Dream Team.It was the first year that pro basketball players were permitted to compete at the Olympics, and so that team consisted of a murderer’s row of N.B.A. players: Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Charles Barkley, Scottie Pippen, John Stockton, David Robinson, Patrick Ewing, Karl Malone, Chris Mullin, Clyde Drexler and, of course, Michael Jordan. One solitary college player, Christian Laettner, joined them.“We Beat the Dream Team” focuses on the story told by the other guys. They’re the college students who — as several of them point out repeatedly during the film — would have been the Olympic team, if the eligibility rules hadn’t changed. Instead, as then-college player Grant Hill says, “We were the crash test dummies.” Arriving at the training facility feeling both salty and star-struck, they were ready to hit the court and aware they were specifically there to lose.To tell the story, Tolajian assembled those players, many of whom (including Hill, Chris Webber, Allan Houston and Penny Hardaway) had their own starry N.B.A. careers since that summer over 30 years ago. They are visibly full of fire as they recall the moment. Interviews with the players and coaches are mixed with archival footage from the games to give you the sense of the proceedings, focusing on the day that the younger guys beat their heroes on the court — and what happened next.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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    Like Us, Theo James Is Freaked Out by the Toy in ‘The Monkey’

    In the warped new horror-comedy “The Monkey” (in theaters), Theo James plays Hal and Bill, estranged twin brothers who are besieged by a possessed music-making monkey toy they got under gruesome circumstances when they were boys. Once that little monkey starts a tinny rat-tat-tat on his drum, nobody’s safe.Based on a Stephen King short story, the gory film is the latest project from the writer-director Osgood Perkins, whose macabre filmography includes last year’s “Longlegs.”Earlier this month during a video interview, James said that the toy, which looks like a maniac and is known among collectors as a Jolly Chimp, was one of his frequent scene partners. Distancing himself from the chimp’s unnerving stare was a tough order.“It was creepy enough to the point where, with some of my daughter’s toys in her room, I’m like, is that thing looking at me?” James said, with an uneasy smile that suggested he wasn’t entirely joking.Theo James in “The Monkey.”NeonIf his literally-a-model looks are familiar, it may be because he has appeared across acting disciplines: the “Divergent” films; the second season of “The White Lotus” on HBO; the London stage. Down the road are roles in “The Hole,” a film from the director Kim Jee-Woon — “Misery” meets “Parasite” is how James described it — and the second season of “The Gentlemen,” Guy Ritchie’s Netflix series.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