Aurelia Butler

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    Phyllis Dalton, Oscar-Winning Costume Designer for Historical Epics, Dies at 99

    Phyllis Dalton, a British costume designer whose unflinching attention to detail earned her Oscars for “Doctor Zhivago” and “Henry V” and acclaim for her emotive, striking costumes in “Lawrence of Arabia,” died on Jan. 9 at her home in Somerset, England. She was 99.The death was confirmed by her stepson, James Barton.Ms. Dalton’s keen eye was most apparent in period dramas and historical epics. She was known for her subtlety, crafting clothing that blended seamlessly into each film’s era.“Anyone can make a smart frock,” she said in a brochure that was handed out during a 2012 British Academy of Film and Television Arts tribute to her. “It’s much more difficult to make people from the past who are wearing ordinary clothes look real.”Phyllis Margaret Dalton was born on Oct. 16, 1925, in Chiswick, a suburb of London, to William John Tysoe Dalton, who worked for the Great Western Railway, and Elizabeth Marion (Mason) Dalton, who worked at a bank. Phyllis began studying costume design at Ealing Art College at 13 and later became a code breaker in the Women’s Royal Naval Service at the facility at Bletchley Park, a role she once said she considered “unbelievably boring.”One of Ms. Dalton’s earliest stints in wardrobe was on the 1950 crime melodrama “Eye Witness.” She honed her skills working on costumes for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1956 remake of “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” Robert Rossen’s “Island in the Sun” (1957) and Carol Reed’s “Our Man in Havana” (1959). In the 1960s, she completed two of her most renowned designs three years apart, dressing entire armies for “Lawrence of Arabia” (1962) and “Doctor Zhivago” (1965).After 50 years of experience on more than 40 feature films, including “The Princess Bride” (1987), she earned her last credit on Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of “Much Ado About Nothing” in 1993.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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    Sundance Film Festival 2025: Standout Movies, Moments and Performances

    The movies and performances most likely to make an impact in the year ahead, including an ode to 1970s New York and Josh O’Connor going full cowboy.Just as the Sundance Film Festival is in flux, likely soon to leave its longtime home of Park City, Utah, so too is the state of film — and indie film in particular. Yet the industry and its most ardent fans still came to the mountains for America’s most important event in independent cinema to schmooze, ski and see lots of movies, hoping to find this year’s “A Real Pain,” the breakout hit from last year’s slate. Sometimes it can feel like you’re wading through too much muddy snow to find the bright spots, and the 2025 festival, which ended on Sunday, definitely felt less shiny than in years past. But below are some standout moments that might influence the year ahead in culture.Eva Victor in “Sorry, Baby.”Mia Cioffi Henry/Courtesy of Sundance Institute1. One new name to know: Eva VictorThere’s a particular kind of Sundance movie that centers on a young woman who perseveres with wry humor and grit despite something terrible happening to her. Often, it takes place on a college campus. This year’s exemplar was “Sorry, Baby,” which was among the funniest, saddest and most exciting films of the week. Victor, 30, first found success in the Brooklyn comedy scene, but this is her feature directorial debut. She also wrote and stars in the tender project (alongside Naomi Ackie and Lucas Hedges).Rebecca Hall and Ben Whishaw in “Peter Hujar’s Day.”Courtesy of Ira Sachs2. Queer cinema is still ascendant (but still very male)Indie film has always been a genre through which teenagers who feel like outsiders learn to discover themselves, but this year’s roster felt especially crowded with L.G.T.B.Q. projects. Although the three with the most buzz were — for better or, mostly, for worse — about handsome white men: “Twinless,” in which two guys (one straight, one gay) meet in a bereavement group for people who’ve lost their siblings; “Plainclothes,” featuring Tom Blythe and Russell Tovey as a duo (one a closeted cop, one his target) grappling with temptation and intimacy; and “Peter Hujar’s Day,” Ira Sachs’s ode to 1970s-era New York, following the titular photographer (Ben Whishaw) as he narrates his quotidian schedule to his friend the writer Linda Rosencrantz (Rebecca Hall), based on Rosencrantz’s 2022 book of the same name.Josh O’Connor and Lily LaTorre in ”Rebuilding.”Jesse Hope/Courtesy of Sundance InstituteWe 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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    Marianne Faithfull Was an Unforgettable Style Paragon

    Marianne Faithfull, who died on Thursday at 78, “seemed to touch all the moments,” helping define the look of the 1960s with an influence that is still seen today.She was a figure out of fiction, right down to her Jane Austen name. The daughter of a baroness and a British major (a spy during World War II), Marianne Faithfull — who died this week at 78 — was discovered by the Rolling Stones’ manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, at a record release party in the 1960s while still in her teens. “My first move was to get a Rolling Stone as a boyfriend,” she was often quoted as having said. “I slept with three and decided the lead singer was the best bet.”The bet paid off for both parties. Mick Jagger and Ms. Faithfull dated from 1966-70 and during that time she recorded a series of pop songs, most memorably “As Tears Go By.” Mr. Jagger wrote imperishable Stones hits like “Wild Horses” under the direct inspiration of Ms. Faithfull — lovely, feckless, druggie and unfettered. She was “a wonderful friend,” Mr. Jagger wrote on Instagram this week, “a beautiful singer and a great actress.”She was also a style paragon from the outset.“She seemed to touch all the moments, from Mod to rich hippie to bad girl and punk, corsets to leather to the nun outfit she wore when she performed with Bowie,” the designer Anna Sui said this week by phone. “She was there, through all those periods — performing, participating in events, acting and singing and also in the tabloids, very much in the eyes of anybody loving those periods.”Ms. Faithfull was introduced to much of the world through her relationship with Mick Jagger, but her style and talent made her fame last.PA Images, via Getty ImagesA British journalist once described Ms. Faithfull, in the late 1960s, as “the flowing-haired, miniskirted, convention-knocking epitome” of a “drug generation” that her elders were challenged to understand. What more accurately she epitomized was a spirit of bohemian laissez-faire better located in class than any particular era.Cultured, if not conventionally educated, Ms. Faithfull was as offhand about her looks as only a natural beauty could afford to be. And she was as indifferent to the strait-jacketing conventions of the bourgeoisie as those of her background (she spent her early years in an upscale commune her father founded in Oxfordshire) often are.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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    Best Movies and Shows Streaming in February: ‘The White Lotus,’ ‘Yellowjackets’ and More

    The third seasons of “Yellowjackets” and “The White Lotus” arrive, along with “Clean Slate” and “Win or Lose.”Every month, streaming services add movies and TV shows to their libraries. Here are our picks for some of February’s most promising new titles. (Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)New to Amazon Prime Video‘Clean Slate’ Season 1Starts streaming: Feb. 6One of the last projects that Norman Lear worked on before he died in 2023 at age 101, this dramedy follows in the Lear tradition of shows that tackle controversial social issues with frank honesty and snappy humor. George Wallace plays Harry, a carwash owner in Alabama owner whose cheery outlook on life is tested when the child he knew as Desmond, who has been estranged for decades, comes back as Desiree. Laverne Cox (also a co-producer and co-writer on the series with Wallace and the co-creator Dan Ewen) plays Desiree, who comes home looking for some closure with the family and friends in her small town.Also arriving:Feb. 6“Invincible” Season 3Feb. 7“Newtopia” Season 1Feb. 13“My Fault: London”Feb. 20“Reacher” Season 3Feb. 27“House of David”Haley Louise Jones and Şafak Sengul in “Berlin ER.”Apple TV+New to Apple TV+‘Berlin ER’Starts streaming: Feb. 26If telephiles haven’t gotten enough of a vintage “ER” fix from HBO Max’s excellent recent medical drama “The Pitt,” Apple TV+ may fill the need with its latest foreign import. The simply titled “Berlin ER” stars Haley Louise Jones as Dr. Parker, an accomplished young physician who for personal reasons decides to challenge herself by taking over the emergency department in an understaffed, underfunded hospital in one of the German capital’s roughest neighborhoods. The show offers all of the visceral, fast-paced thrills that genre fans have come expect — with lots of gory injuries and life-threatening diseases, treated in seconds under appalling conditions — while also depicting one woman’s attempt to earn the respect of her cynical staff.Also arriving:Feb. 5“Love You to Death”Feb. 14“Goldie” Season 1“The Gorge”Feb. 21“Onside: Major League Soccer”“Surface” Season 2We 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 Sundance Film Festival, a Sense of Uprooting Onscreen and Off

    As it searches for a new home beyond Park City, Utah, the film festival showcases a neo-western, a promising comedic debut and two unsettling documentaries.If a festival can be summed up in one word, then the word for this year’s Sundance Film Festival is weird. That was the adjective that drifted through my mind as I circled in and out of screenings, chatted with other attendees and scanned local headlines. Weird could apply to some of the selections in the event, which ends Sunday. But it wasn’t so much the lineup that struck many of us, it was the festival, the pre-eminent American showcase for U.S. independent cinema and beyond. The vibe felt off, we murmured, the energy muted.For good reason, too. The fires in Los Angeles County were still burning when Sundance opened on Jan. 23. Park City, Utah, is a long way from the Hollywood sign, but Sundance and the mainstream industry have always been codependents, and when the mainstream feels unsettled, you can feel the anxiety in the air. Making matters worse is that the conflagration in California is just the latest crisis facing the movie world, which continues to grapple with the aftershocks of the pandemic and back-to-back strikes, along with its self-inflicted wounds.Adding to this Great Movieland Unsettlement is Sundance’s search for a new home. Last year, the festival announced that it was exploring alternatives to Park City, where it has been held for decades. Among the stated reasons is that the event has outgrown the resort town, which has a population of just over 8,200 and an infrastructure that remains ill-equipped to handle such a large annual inundation. Every year, tens of thousands of movie lovers swarm into Park City, straining resources and local patience. Now, after a search, Sundance has settled on three alternatives: Cincinnati; Boulder, Colo.; and Salt Lake City, where the festival already screens movies, with some events remaining in Park City.Questions about where Sundance will land percolated throughout this year’s event, which features the usual great and good, bad and blah selections. Among the standouts is Geeta Gandbhir’s documentary “The Perfect Neighbor,” which tracks how friction between a white woman and her multiracial neighbors in Florida turned progressively heated and then horrifyingly lethal. Consisting largely of imagery culled from police body cameras and interrogation interviews, it offers up a horrifying look at everyday racial animus and stand-your-ground laws. It also underscores, as the white woman makes one 911 call after another, that there’s nothing funny about the prejudices and pathologies of a so-called Karen.“The Alabama Solution,” a documentary by Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman, looks at the state’s notoriously deficient prison system.Sundance Institute, via Associated PressWe 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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    Karla Sofía Gascón, ‘Emilia Pérez’ Star, Apologizes for Posts on Muslims, George Floyd and China

    The Oscar-nominated actress, who plays a cartel leader in “Emilia Pérez,” was criticized for derogatory comments about Muslims, George Floyd and China.Karla Sofía Gascón, the star of the movie musical “Emilia Pérez” and the first openly transgender actor to be nominated for an Academy Award, apologized on Thursday after social media posts she wrote denigrating Muslims, George Floyd and China were resurfaced.“I want to acknowledge the conversation around my past social media posts that have caused hurt,” Gascón, 52, said in a statement provided by Netflix, the distributor of “Emilia Pérez.” “As someone in a marginalized community, I know this suffering all too well and I am deeply sorry to those I have caused pain. All my life I have fought for a better world. I believe light will always triumph over darkness.”In one of the posts on X, which were published in Spanish and shared in screenshots by the journalist Sarah Hagi, Gascón wrote that Islam was “becoming a hotbed of infection for humanity that urgently needs to be cured.” In another, she wrote that “the religion is INCOMPATIBLE with Western values.”Gascón also described Floyd as a “drug-addicted con artist” in a 2020 post criticizing people who were protesting his deadly arrest by police officers. Later that year, during the coronavirus pandemic, she wrote that “the Chinese vaccine, in addition to the mandatory chip, comes with two spring rolls.”She deleted her account on Friday.Gascón, who came out as a trans woman in 2016, was born in Spain and was a star of Mexican telenovelas before landing the title role in “Emilia Pérez,” in which she plays a cartel leader who goes into hiding after a gender transition. The movie leads the pack with 13 Oscar nominations, including for best picture. More

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    Jay-Z Will Seek Dismissal of Assault Lawsuit His Lawyer Calls a ‘Sham’

    The woman who accused him of raping her in 2000, when she was a minor, acknowledged to NBC that there were inconsistencies in her account, but stood by her claim.Lawyers for Jay-Z plan to ask a judge to toss a lawsuit accusing the rapper of raping a 13-year-old in 2000, pointing to what they described as “glaring inconsistencies” that emerged in an NBC interview of the accuser, who was not named in the suit.In the lawsuit, which was filed last week, the unnamed accuser said that she had been raped by Jay-Z (born Shawn Carter) and Sean Combs at a party at a private residence after the MTV Video Music Awards in Manhattan in 2000. Mr. Carter strongly denied the allegation.NBC News published an interview with the accuser on Friday evening in which she acknowledged inconsistencies in her account, but maintained that her allegation of assault was true.The woman’s lawsuit claimed that after the encounter she was picked up by her father, whom she called from a gas station. But NBC reported that her father, who would have had to drive hours from his home in upstate New York to pick up his daughter following the after-party, did not recall having done so. The father was also unnamed in the report.The plaintiff, who now lives in Alabama, also told NBC that she had spoken to the musician Benji Madden, a member of the band Good Charlotte, at the party after the awards that night. But Mr. Madden, who was not accused of any wrongdoing in her suit, was on tour in the Midwest at the time.Alex Spiro, a lawyer for Mr. Carter, wrote a letter Friday night to U.S. District Court Judge Analisa Torres saying that Mr. Carter intends to file a motion to strike the complaint, citing the NBC report. “The interview outs plaintiff’s allegations for what they are: a sham,” he wrote in the letter.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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    John Eliot Gardiner’s Once and Future Orchestras Duel

    Banished from his ensembles after striking a singer, John Eliot Gardiner has assembled a new group, with the same programming at the same venue.Marten Root, a flutist specializing in historical instruments, has played under the conductor John Eliot Gardiner for over 35 years, and considers him a profoundly intelligent and honest musician.Root, 68, has also had severe enough verbal disagreements with Gardiner, 81, that he twice temporarily quit working with him. The reasons were “incidents which happen if you’re a flute player in an orchestra,” Root said in a video interview. “You’re the top of the score. You’re always in the line of fire.”Both times, he returned. Playing under Gardiner, an eminent performer of Baroque music who has recorded every single Bach cantata, was “no easy job to do,” Root said, “but basically, I decided to go back to the orchestra twice, because it’s musically more than worth it.”In August last year, Gardiner struck the singer William Thomas following a performance of the opera “Les Troyens” in France. Gardiner apologized and announced that he was temporarily withdrawing from all conducting.Now, Gardiner has returned — but not with his old organization, Monteverdi Choir & Orchestras, which didn’t want him back. Instead, Gardiner has just completed a tour with a new ensemble he founded, the Constellation Choir & Orchestra.The two groups almost collided recently, playing nearly identical concerts at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Germany, on Dec. 7 and 14. Heard so closely together, the performances offered an unusual glimpse of what’s ahead for Gardiner’s once and future ensembles. Although the concerts looked similar on paper, they sounded strikingly different.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