Aurelia Butler

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    in Music

    The Met Opera Announces Its 2025-26 Season

    Our critics choose highlights from a lineup that includes six new productions and modern works by Mason Bates, Kaija Saariaho and Gabriela Lena Frank.The Metropolitan Opera, which has championed contemporary opera in recent years as it works to attract new audiences, announced on Wednesday that it would bring three modern titles to its stage in the 2025-26 season.The company will open the season in September with the New York City premiere of Mason Bates’s “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” an opera based on the 2000 novel of that name by Michael Chabon, which was first heard at Indiana University last fall. The lineup also includes local premieres of Kaija Saariaho’s final opera, “Innocence,” from 2021, and Gabriela Lena Frank’s first opera, “El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego,” from 2022.There will be new stagings of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” directed by Yuval Sharon, in his company debut; Bellini’s “I Puritani,” for the annual New Year’s Eve gala; and Bellini’s “La Sonnambula,” directed by the star tenor Rolando Villazón and featuring the soprano Nadine Sierra. Among the dozen revivals planned for the season are Bizet’s “Carmen,” Strauss’s “Arabella” and Giordano’s “Andrea Chénier.”Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, will conduct the new productions of “The Amazing Adventures,” “El Último Sueño” and “Tristan.”The company’s embrace of contemporary opera, which its leaders have said is necessary to overcome serious financial pressures, with the belief that newer works sell better than the classics, has had mixed results. Attendance has averaged about 70 percent of capacity so far this season, compared with 73 percent at the same point last season. (Still, the Met said that it expected to reach an average of 75 percent capacity by the end of the season.)“It’s impossible to predict hits,” said Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager. “On the other hand, if we don’t promote new works, then we’re saying goodbye to the art form.”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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    in Movies

    ‘Pedro Páramo,’ ‘Let’s Start a Cult’ and More Streaming Gems

    Two releases from last year — one an inventive literary adaptation, the other a wild, gross-out comedy — are among this month’s streaming recommendations.‘Pedro Páramo’ (2024)Stream it on Netflix.This adaptation of Juan Rulfo’s 1955 novel is the feature directorial debut of Rodrigo Prieto, who, via his collaborations with Spike Lee, Oliver Stone, Greta Gerwig and (frequently) Martin Scorsese, has become one of the best cinematographers of our time. It is, unsurprisingly, a beautifully photographed movie (Prieto and Nico Aguilar share cinematography credit), filled with astonishing compositions and a surplus of mood. The narrative is haunted by ghosts, dreams and memories. The dialogue is alternately wry and poetic, trafficking in a deadpan magical realism, involving its bustling cast of colorful characters in a circular story, with events revisited via shifting perspectives and time frames. It doesn’t all land, as the picture’s loose ends and shaggy running time occasionally get away from the filmmaker. But if it’s messy, it’s also mesmerizing, and marks Prieto as a talent to keep watching, wherever he may go.‘Fall’ (2022)Stream it on Hulu.So many of today’s thrillers are convoluted, franchise-servicing affairs that this one is worth praising for its simplicity and efficiency: There is a narrative, yes, but it boils down to tracking two young women as they climb to the top of a 2,000-foot TV tower, and are then stranded there, with no obvious way down. The screenplay (by the director, Scott Mann, and Jonathan Frank) works through every possible situation and variation, mining the loaded scenario for maximum scares, thrills and pathos. But the performances ultimately have to carry the show, and the newcomers Grace Caroline Currey and Virginia Gardner are charismatic and sympathetic — even when doing the dumbest things — while Jeffrey Dean Morgan lends gravitas as Currey’s concerned dad.‘Joe’ (2014)Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.David Gordon Green narrates a sequence from his film featuring Nicolas Cage and Tye Sheridan.Roadside AttractionsWe 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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    “No Other Land” Is the Oscar-Nominated Film That No Studio Will Touch

    “No Other Land,” about the destruction of a village in the occupied West Bank, is one of the year’s most acclaimed films. Still, U.S. studios are unwilling to distribute it.No documentary this season has been more talked about or acclaimed than “No Other Land,” which chronicles the besieged community of Masafer Yatta in the occupied West Bank as Israeli forces demolish residents’ homes and expel families from the land they have lived in for generations, claiming the area is needed for a military training ground.Directed by the Palestinian filmmakers Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal alongside the Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, “No Other Land” has received critical acclaim and collected many honors on the festival circuit. After winning the best documentary award at its Berlin International Film Festival premiere last February, the film also earned the same prize at the Gotham Awards and from major critics’ groups in New York and Los Angeles. Just weeks ago, it received an Oscar nomination.Still, no American studio has been willing to pick up this hot-button film, even though distributors typically spend this time of year eagerly boasting about their Oscar-nomination tallies.“I still think it’s possible, but we’ll have to see,” Abraham told me last week. “It’s clear that there are political reasons at play here that are affecting it. I’m hoping that at a certain point the demand for the film will become so clear and indisputable that there will be a distributor with the kind of courage to take it on and show it to the audience.”In the meantime, the directors have embarked on a self-distribution plan that has put “No Other Land” into 23 U.S. theaters; on the back of strong box office, it will continue to roll out into additional cities over the coming weeks.Adra and Abraham are not just part of the film’s directing team, but its two primary subjects. The 28-year-old Adra was raised in Masafer Yatta and has been documenting the forced expulsion since he was a teenager. Over the course of the film, he builds a strong but tense bond with Abraham, who lives in Jerusalem but travels frequently to Masafer Yatta to write about the situation there for an Israeli audience.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 ‘Companion’ and ‘Novocaine,’ Jack Quaid Makes Comedy Painless

    Jack Quaid can guess what people must think of him: Entitled. Overconfident. A jerk, no doubt about it.“Who I am comes with a certain expectation,” he said over breakfast — black coffee, fruit plates — on a Thursday in late January.Quaid, 32, is the son of the actors Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan. (That DNA is strong. You can see his father when he smiles, his mother when he squints.) He grew up in Santa Monica, Calif., grabbing snacks from the craft services table on his parents’ sets and attending a private school with a common room where he could screen his camcorder movies. (An early magnum opus: “Bicycle Cops.”) Which is all to say that Quaid grew up with privilege, and he knows what privilege, unexamined and unacknowledged, can do to a person. He can turn that arrogance on for auditions, which explains why his first role was as a villain in “The Hunger Games” and why he can now be seen as a very bad boyfriend in the thriller “Companion” (in theaters).But the real Quaid is earnestly, acutely, even painfully aware of his privilege. In rooms where people don’t know him, he finds himself, he said, “apologizing for existing.” He isn’t jealous of his parents. (Please, he has been to therapy.) He loves his parents. He loves the life they have given him. “But there’s definitely a need to prove myself,” he said. “There is a little bit of something with identity and thinking, do I have any value outside of them?” As he said this, the divot in his forehead, which deepens when he’s stressed or concerned, had become a crevasse. “Not to say I’m complaining,” he added.Jack Quaid, the son of the actors Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan, is earnestly aware of his privilege.Hannah Edelman for The New York TimesOver the last several years, Quaid has proved himself. And as the star of two movies out this winter, his value as a leading man is confirmed. He is beautifully smarmy in “Companion,” a romantic thriller with a sci-fi twist. (Avoid the trailer if you don’t want that twist unfurled.) And he is a sweetheart of an accidental action hero in the punchy thriller “Novocaine,” due March 14, in which he plays a timid assistant bank manager with a congenital inability to feel pain. (Quaid’s own pain threshold: “Not high!”) He is also currently wrapping the fifth and final season of “The Boys,” Amazon’s body fluid-soaked antisuperhero show. He leads the cast as Hughie, a normal-ish guy in an enthusiastically abnormal world. And he has two other movies in postproduction, the thriller “Neighborhood Watch” and the action comedy “Heads of State.”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 New Documentary Uncovers One of Pop’s Tragic Mysteries: Q Lazzarus

    Her haunting song “Goodbye Horses” had a star turn in “The Silence of the Lambs,” but the enigmatic artist behind it seemingly vanished for decades after.For years, it was one of pop music’s most persistent mysteries: Whatever happened to Q Lazzarus? And furthermore: Who was she in the first place?Most listeners who had heard of the genre-bending artist — if they’d heard of her at all — encountered her song “Goodbye Horses” in Jonathan Demme’s 1991 blockbuster “The Silence of the Lambs” as the backdrop to the scene where the serial killer Buffalo Bill applies makeup and poses strikingly nude. The creepy new wave track, with its minor-key, sci-fi synths and androgynous vocals, harmonized impeccably with the scene’s ominous visuals.“Goodbye Horses” was the only single Q Lazzarus officially released on a physical format while she was alive, but it came with an incredible story: Demme had encountered the musician at her day job — as a taxi driver — and fell in love with the music she played during the ride. But after her song’s star turn in his film, Q Lazzarus’s career stalled, and by the mid-90s, she had seemingly vanished entirely.Some fans and journalists made efforts to track down this enigmatic voice over the years, but the filmmaker who ended up telling her story in the new documentary “Goodbye Horses: The Many Lives of Q Lazzarus” met the artist born Diane Luckey the same way Demme did: in her cab.“Getting into her car was a completely coincidental or fated, as Q and I both felt, meeting,” Eva Aridjis Fuentes, the movie’s director, said in an interview. The two sang along to Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold”; Aridjis Fuentes thought the woman behind the wheel looked familiar, and asked if she’d ever seen Q Lazzarus. They formed a friendship that resulted in Aridjis Fuentes’s film, which opens in a handful of cities including London, Los Angeles and New York next month, with a streaming release expected to follow. On Friday, the Brooklyn record label Sacred Bones will release its soundtrack — effectively the first full-length Q Lazzarus release.“We’re doing this documentary to let you know what went wrong and what happened,” Luckey says in the film. “The truth” about why she disappeared: “Because I had 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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    ASAP Rocky Found Not Guilty of Shooting Former Friend in Assault Trial

    The rapper had faced two felony counts of assault with a firearm in connection with a 2021 altercation in Los Angeles.The rapper Rakim Mayers, also known as ASAP Rocky, jumped into the courtroom gallery to hug his wife, Rihanna, after the jury found him not guilty of shooting a former collaborator.Daniel Cole/ReutersASAP Rocky, the Grammy nominated hip-hop artist, was found not guilty on Tuesday of shooting a former collaborator. The jury deliberated for nearly three hours in a case that threatened to derail his career.Rocky, 36, born Rakim Mayers, faced two felony counts of assault with a deadly weapon, stemming from an altercation with his one-time friend, Terell Ephron, known as ASAP Relli, near a Hollywood hotel in 2021.Rocky dived into the gallery to hug family including Rihanna, the singer, businesswoman, and mother of his two young sons, and embraced his lawyer, Joe Tacopina, after the verdict was read.“Thank y’all for saving my life,” he told jurors.The trial hinged on jurors’ assessment of the gun used in the incident, which prosecutors said was a semiautomatic firearm and witnesses for the defense testified was instead a prop gun acquired at the filming of a music video. No gun was presented as evidence in the trial and Rocky did not take the stand in his defense. He faced up to 24 years in prison if convicted of both counts.Rocky faced trial at a time when he had several notable projects in the works. He is scheduled to be one of the headliners of the Los Angeles stop of the Rolling Loud festival in March, and was announced as one of the celebrity chairs for the Met Gala, to be held in May. He also stars alongside Denzel Washington in a Spike Lee-directed movie scheduled to open in summer.John Lewin, a deputy district attorney for Los Angeles County, had asked the jury not to be swayed by the court appearances of Rihanna, who was a frequent presence during the 13-day trial and attended the start of closing arguments last week with the pair’s two young sons.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 Soundtrack to a Fabulous Memoir Crackling With Music

    Hear songs from Lucy Sante’s “I Heard Her Call My Name” by ESG Public Image Ltd., the Floaters and more.Françoise Hardy holds special meaning for the writer Lucy Sante.Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesDear listeners,I read a lot of books about music. When I’m really enjoying one, sometimes I’ll make a playlist of songs mentioned in its pages to stave off that bittersweet feeling that always comes upon finishing a satisfying read. That way, I can always crawl back into a book’s atmosphere just by pressing play.The book that inspired today’s playlist, the cultural critic Lucy Sante’s “I Heard Her Call My Name,” isn’t about music per se. As its subtitle attests, it is mostly “a memoir of transition,” centered around Sante’s decades of gender dysphoria and her eventual coming out as a trans woman in 2021, in her late 60s. The experience “cracks open the world” for her, as she eloquently puts it.I found it a gorgeously written, admirably honest book, and I’m not alone in that opinion: The New York Times Book Review named “I Heard Her Call My Name” one of the 10 best books of 2024, and in a laudatory review, Dwight Garner wrote of Sante, “Her sharpness and sanity, moodiness and skepticism are the appeal.”But another potent part of the book’s appeal is the way Sante depicts culture — and music in particular — playing a vital role in her lifelong journey to becoming more herself. (That she is such a sharp cultural observer will come as no surprise to anyone who has read any of her other books, like the New York chronicle “Low Life” or the collection “Kill All Your Darlings.”)Eye-opening avant-garde art beckons her to New York as a teenager, and the pulsating sounds of the city — from groundbreaking artists like ESG and Grandmaster Flash — provide a soundtrack to her 20s and 30s. Sante uses music to bring long-gone New York haunts back to life (like a certain bar where the Fall is always on the jukebox) and, eventually, thanks to her childhood idol Françoise Hardy, to arrive at the version of femininity that resonates most deeply with her.If you haven’t read this book yet, I highly recommend it. And if you have, may this playlist bring you back to the distinct atmosphere between its pages.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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    Grant Hill Can Finally Gloat in HBO’s ‘We Beat the Dream Team’

    Hill and the film’s director talked about the time a team of college basketball players beat Michael Jordan, Larry Bird and Magic Johnson — and the effort to bury it.Grant Hill is a seven-time N.B.A. All-Star, Chris Webber a five-timer and Penny Hardaway a four-timer. Allan Houston was selected twice, Jamal Mashburn once.But back in 1992, they were just a bunch of college students playing a scrimmage against the U.S. men’s national basketball team, otherwise known as the Dream Team, which included Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Charles Barkley, Patrick Ewing and six other future Hall of Famers. The odds that Hill and company could topple a squad that went on to destroy every opponent at the Olympics by an average of 44 points seemed vanishingly thin.The HBO documentary “We Beat the Dream Team,” which premiered on Monday and is streaming on Max, recounts the day in June 1992 when that shocker actually happened — when the Select Team, as this collection of youthful sparring partners was called, stunned the game’s biggest players.Bobby Hurley, the Select Team’s point guard, pushed the pace and shredded the Dream Team defense with pinpoint passes. Houston buried threes. Webber was a force inside. Their elders looked complacent and sloppy, turning over the ball and even missing dunks as the game slipped away. The scrimmage lasted about 20 minutes, but the Select Team finished with a solid 62-54 triumph.Because of a rule change made by the International Basketball Federation, the 1992 Barcelona Games were the first Olympics in which N.B.A. players were permitted to play. For the college players, who were a bit resentful because they had hoped to represent the U.S. at the Games, the scrimmage victory was the ultimate vindication. (A few celebrated with perhaps a bit too much trash talk.)But as the documentary makes clear, their victory was essentially buried. The coach of the Olympic team, Chuck Daly, made sure the scoreboard was shut off before reporters came into the gym. No one really talked about it in the media that day. (Daly had allowed only one camera to record the game.)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