Aurelia Butler

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    Gints Zilbalodis Discusses ‘Flow’ and the Movie’s Oscar Nominations

    “We beat James Cameron!” the filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis said with a shy smile during a recent video interview. “Flow,” his second animated feature, is now one of the highest grossing films ever in his native Latvia, surpassing even Cameron’s “Avatar” franchise at the local box office.Latvia has a population of roughly 1.8 million people, and “Flow” has sold more than 255,000 admissions since it was first released in August 2024. The film is still playing in Latvian theaters.“We still have sold-out screenings in week 23 now,” Zilbalodis, 30, said.A critical and commercial success, Zilbalodis’s computer-animated, dialogue-free film follows a group of animals helping each other survive a flood. It received two Oscar nominations last month, for best animated feature and best international feature, and is the first Latvian production nominated for any Academy Award.A scene from “Flow,” which is nominated for two Academy Awards.Sideshow/Janus FilmsZilbalodis also recently won Latvia’s first Golden Globe, beating out two major American studio contenders, “The Wild Robot” and “Inside Out 2,” in the animated feature category. That “Flow” is an independent production largely financed with public funding and conceived on free, open-source software called Blender, makes the victory feel even more of a feat.And the director’s Baltic homeland is not being subtle about their joy over this triumph. The Golden Globe was exhibited for a week at the Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga, the country’s capital, guarded by two cat statues, in an allusion to the movie’s protagonist, a dark gray feline.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 Lost Silent Film About Lincoln Was Unearthed by an Intern

    “The Heart of Lincoln,” a 1922 movie directed by the pioneering filmmaker Francis Ford, was found at a stock-footage library on Long Island.No intern task is too small. Not getting coffee, not running errands and certainly not rummaging through piles of old films only to dig up a long-lost piece of history.When Dan Martin was asked to sort through dozens of old film cans, some of which were rusted shut, at Historic Films Archive, a stock-footage library on Long Island, he was happy to do the unglamorous work. He described the company’s climate-controlled storage vault as a “dark, concrete basement” flush with films.“This is the sort of thing that you go to school for as a film preservation student,” said Martin, 26, who is studying at Toronto Metropolitan University.Standing in the vault during the final week of his internship last August, Martin could have picked his next stack of films from any number of shelves. The one he happened to select included a remarkable discovery: five film cans containing 16-millimeter film of “The Heart of Lincoln,” a 1922 picture that was one of more than 7,000 silent films considered lost by the Library of Congress.“The Heart of Lincoln,” directed by and starring Francis Ford, was among roughly 10,000 films donated about 20 years ago from a university in the Midwest, said Joe Lauro, the owner of Historic Films Archive. “Most of the films from that collection were educational films that were shown in classrooms,” he said. Those films were typically discarded by the institutions when they became worn out.It is the second Lincoln film by Ford — a pioneer in early Hollywood and the older brother of John Ford, the Oscar-winning director — that has been found in recent years. In 2010, a copy of his “When Lincoln Paid” (1913) was discovered by a contractor during a demolition of a New Hampshire barn.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 Adrien Brody Defend His Art in ‘The Brutalist’

    The director Brady Corbet narrates a scene from his film, which is nominated for 10 Academy Awards.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.An architect defends his work to concerned financiers in this scene from “The Brutalist.”In the period drama, Adrien Brody stars as the Jewish Hungarian architect László Tóth, who has been commissioned to design a community center in Pennsylvania. During this sequence, László is walking a group of community advocates and financiers through the construction site. One of those people is Jim Simpson (Michael Epp), a local architect concerned more about the ballooning costs of the project than the vision of it.Narrating the sequence, Corbet said that they shot the scene in a granite quarry outside of Budapest “because we couldn’t afford to build a set.”The conversation in the scene becomes heated, and builds up to a moment where László essentially tells Jim that everything ugly in the world is Jim’s fault. The one-take sequence has a single establishing cutaway shot.Corbet said that he prefers to shoot his scenes in one take because, “that sunlight-in-a-box feeling that you have, that you’ve captured this ephemeral thing, it only occurs in sequence takes.”Read the “Brutalist” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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    Chubby Checker, Phish and Outkast Among Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Nominees

    Billy Idol, the Black Crowes and Maná will also appear on the ballot for the first time, alongside Oasis, Joe Cocker, Mariah Carey and others.Outkast, Phish, Chubby Checker, Billy Idol, the Black Crowes and the Mexican band Maná are among the first-time nominees for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.This year’s ballot, announced by the hall on Wednesday, will also include Oasis, Joe Cocker, Mariah Carey, Cyndi Lauper, the White Stripes, Bad Company and Soundgarden, as well as Joy Division and New Order, the band that members of Joy Division formed after the death of its lead singer, Ian Curtis.As in recent years, the latest nominees represent a mix of eras and subgenres. Those include boldface rock ’n’ roll names from the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s (Cocker, Idol), punk and alternative heroes (Joy Division, Soundgarden, the White Stripes), arena-filling giants (Oasis, Phish), a hip-hop act (Outkast) and a nod to the world outside mainstream Anglo-American pop (Maná).Given the intense pressure the Rock Hall has faced in recent years to correct its poor record of admitting women to the pantheon, the inclusion of just two female performers — Carey and Lauper, neither of them new to the ballot — may bring yet more scrutiny to the institution despite its promises to reform.For longtime Rock Hall watchers, the biggest news this year may be Checker. His song “The Twist” — a cover of a B-side originally released by Hank Ballard and the Midnighters — was a global phenomenon in the early 1960s, and it stands as one of the biggest hits in the history of the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. But until now, Checker, 83, has been ignored by the Rock Hall, despite years — decades, even — of complaints from his fans and protests by Checker himself. (Ballard, who died in 2003, was inducted into the hall in 1990.)In 2001, Checker took out a full-page ad in Billboard magazine calling on the Rock Hall — along with nominators of the Nobel Prizes — to recognize him for the song that, he said, became “the biggest dance of the century.”“I want my flowers while I’m alive,” he wrote. “I can’t smell them when I’m dead.”In 2018, the Rock Hall included “The Twist” in a new honor, a list of singles that shaped rock ’n’ roll.Artists become eligible for nomination 25 years after the release of their first recording. The nominations are voted on by more than 1,000 music historians, industry professionals and inducted artists.The winning nominees are to be announced in April, and this year’s induction ceremony will be held in Los Angeles in the fall. More

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    Where the Oscar Race Stands After ‘Emilia Pérez’ Controversy

    “Emilia Pérez” is hobbled, “Anora” is revitalized and plenty remains up in the air ahead of the March 2 awards ceremony.Sometimes, the period after the Oscar nominations can feel like a snooze. There may be a notable snub that’s worth discussing for a few days, but things eventually settle down and people begin to behave themselves as they head into the final stretch of the season.This hasn’t been that.The last two weeks in particular have been some of the most tumultuous in recent memory, thanks in large part to the controversy involving old tweets made by one of the “Emilia Pérez” stars, Karla Sofía Gascón. The initially defiant actress went rogue to defend herself, keeping her scandal in the headlines during several crucial voting periods. Now, a film that led the field with 13 Oscar nominations has been hobbled.After all of that turbulence, where do things stand? Here are five narratives now emerging from the season that I plan to keep an eye on.‘Anora’ ascendant“Anora,” starring Mark Eydelshteyn, left, and Mikey Madison, has momentum as the race enters its final weeks.Neon, via Associated PressAs this year began, the awards-season aspirations of “Anora” appeared to stall out. The Sean Baker-directed comedy went winless at the Golden Globes on Jan. 5, and that failure-to-launch feeling lingered over the next few weeks when the Critics Choice Awards, where “Anora” hoped to score anew, were postponed from Jan. 12 to Feb. 7 because of the Los Angeles wildfires.What a difference a weekend makes. On Friday, “Anora” picked up a best-picture prize at that delayed Critics Choice ceremony, and scored top honors the next night at separate shows held by the Directors Guild of America and the Producers Guild of America. Any movie that triumphs with both of those guilds has to be considered the best-picture front-runner, even though five years ago, “1917” conquered at the PGA and DGA awards and still lost the top Oscar to “Parasite.”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 Turn as Trump Made Sebastian Stan an Unlikely Oscar Nominee

    For years, it seemed fair to assume that the actor Sebastian Stan could make a career on both sides of Hollywood. There was dabbling in juicy supporting roles — he played the ex-husbands of both Tonya Harding and Pamela Anderson — while comfortably returning to the action-hero part for which he is best known: Bucky Barnes. As the erstwhile sidekick of Captain America, Stan has been a regular in the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies since 2011 (including “Thunderbolts*,” which hits theaters in May). There are surely worse fates than simply maintaining that balance.“There’s a group of actors — I’ll put Colin Farrell in this group as well — that are so handsome that in some sense it works against them,” said Jessica Chastain, Stan’s friend and castmate in “The Martian” and “The 355.”While being too good-looking a movie star may be world’s-smallest-violin territory, a whirlwind year with two standout unconventional performances now has the 42-year-old cast in a very different light. It has also already brought in some leading-man hardware, with more maybe to come.In the surreal comedy “A Different Man,” an actor who has a condition that distorts his facial features has a medical procedure to make himself instead look classically attractive — specifically, to look like Sebastian Stan. Stan’s gutsy subversion of his looks won him the Silver Bear for leading performance at last year’s Berlin International Film Festival and the Golden Globe for acting in a comedy or musical last month.Sebastian Stan, an Oscar nominee for his portrayal of President Trump in “The Apprentice,” called the movie “a fresh lens on him — but also on an American truth that doesn’t always get picked apart in this way.”Caroline Tompkins for The New York TimesThe other movie, “The Apprentice,” is about a showy, morally questionable real estate mogul in 1970s and ’80s New York named Donald J. Trump. Stan plays Trump, his looks this time buried underneath both considerable physical makeup and all the figurative baggage viewers bring to the subject. From the movie’s premiere at the Cannes Film Festival last May, it was unclear if the film would find distribution and open in theaters, let alone be a part of awards season discussion.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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    Jesse Welles, a Folk Musician Who Sings the News, Is Turning the Page

    In a small home recording studio on a Monday afternoon in January, Jesse Welles sat with a guitar on his lap, dressed head-to-toe in black.Welles, a singer-songwriter with a shaggy, dirty-blond mane and a sandpapery voice, has risen to recent prominence posting videos to social media of himself alone in the woods near his home in northwest Arkansas, performing wryly funny, politically engaged folk songs. He’s managed to turn subjects like the war in Gaza, the rise of the weight-loss drug Ozempic and the rapaciousness of United Healthcare’s business model into viral hits on TikTok and Instagram, building an audience of more than 2 million followers on those platforms. But the song he was recording in that basement in East Nashville, “Simple Gifts,” is a different beast.As he delicately plucked his acoustic guitar, he sang its earnest opening lines — “Slouching towards the sky’s extent from the edges of a waste / Was something darker than a hope, something brighter still than fate” — sketching out an imagistic tableau untouched by current events. Welles’s new album, “Middle,” due Feb. 21, is similarly minded.“The only filter placed on it was I wasn’t doing topical songs for this project,” he said. “These are ones that are self-indulgent, or at least I feel like they are at times. I like to do both. They’re two different mediums.”Jesse Welles’s protest songs deftly blend the whimsical with the serious, turning topics like Walmart and the war in Gaza into viral hits on TikTok and Instagram.Eric Ryan Anderson for The New York TimesThe producer, Eddie Spear, rose from behind a mixing board and adjusted the microphone in front of Welles. Most of the songs on “Middle” are recorded with a full band, but for “Simple Gifts” and the album’s title track, the setup was pared down to a solitary microphone. “I’m trying to honor what people are enjoying about Jesse,” said Spear, who has also worked with Zach Bryan and Sierra Ferrell. “We thought getting a really simple capture in this way might tie in where he’s come from and honor this particular period of his career.”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