Aurelia Butler

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    ‘Peak Season’ Review: Continental Divides

    In this modest second feature, a disillusioned business-school graduate, taking a breather in high-altitude Wyoming, meets a rugged fly-fishing instructor.Unimpeachable when it comes to scenery, “Peak Season,” the second feature from Steven Kanter and Henry Loevner, takes place in Jackson Hole, Wyo., where one of the protagonists, Loren (Derrick DeBlasis), lives out of his car and works an assortment of jobs: dishwasher, landscaper, fly-fishing instructor.He is scheduled to give a lesson to Amy (Claudia Restrepo) and her fiancé, Max (Ben Coleman), well-heeled New Yorkers who are staying at Max’s uncle’s luxe, barely used pad. But work prevents Max from going along, and apparently from paying even a modicum of attention to Amy; eventually it takes him away from Wyoming all together. And as Amy, who has soured on her career as a management consultant, spends time with Loren over the rest of her trip, she begins to warm to the freedom of his lifestyle and the blissed-out vibes of the area.She remains cleareyed, though. (When one of Loren’s friends considers moving to Grand Rapids, Mich., and Loren argues against it, she takes the friend’s side.) And “Peak Season” isn’t quite the simple-minded story of a city slicker who finds peace in the countryside that it initially appears to be.It also isn’t really a romance, although the chemistry between Restrepo and DeBlasis makes that prospect irresistible for a while. Kanter and Loevner also feint in that direction by stacking the deck against the unfailingly obnoxious Max, who can’t extract his head from his laptop and who opts for CrossFit over Grand Teton. But a lovely ending makes up for the filmmakers’ giving this triangle one blunt side.Peak SeasonNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Kneecap’ Review: Beats Over Belfast

    Members of the pioneering Irish-language rap group play versions of themselves in a gleefully chaotic film that casts them as tall-tale heroes.Hip-hop draws much of its power from the self-mythologizing impulses of its artists, and “Kneecap” most definitely heeds this call. In this gleefully chaotic quasi-biopic, the members of the hip-hop group of the film’s title are tall-tale heroes, the children of I.R.A. freedom fighters continuing the battle for Irish independence by other means: the reclamation of the Irish language, once actively suppressed, and only recently recognized by the United Kingdom as an official language in Northern Ireland.That might not sound like a very punk endeavor, but the film — based on the pioneers of Irish-language rap who broke out in 2017, and written and directed by Rich Peppiatt — makes a solid case, connecting the struggles of Irish speakers to American civil rights and Palestinian resistance movements.The gonzo dramedy is set in Belfast and stars the real-life band members as lightly fictionalized versions of themselves: Naoise (Naoise O Caireallain) and Liam Og (Liam Og O Hannaidh) are petty drug dealers and aspiring rappers. JJ (JJ O Dochartaigh) is a high school Irish teacher who happens upon a notebook of lyrics belonging to Liam and offers to produce the two younger men’s music in his garage. Wearing a balaclava knitted with the colors of the Irish flag, JJ becomes D.J. Provai by night, and the trio drink, smoke and snort up a storm before each increasingly packed show.These drug-addled antics give the film its snappy, surreal sense of humor, which clicks only half the time. Its lodestar in this regard is “Trainspotting,” though “Kneecap” feels forced by comparison. Good thing the Kneecap boys are genuinely unhinged and amusingly louche. They bring a nerve that offsets the film’s cringe attempts at badassery.There’s also a lackluster story line involving Naoise’s father, Arlo (Michael Fassbender), a Bobby Sands-like political leader who has lived in the shadows since faking his own death a decade earlier. Otherwise, we dip in and out of mini-intrigues that build out a portrait of life in Belfast — Liam falls for a Protestant girl (Jessica Reynolds), the crew is terrorized by a group of antidrug mobsters. The film, as a result, feels wildly uneven, though it cruises on the strength of its underdog narrative and its weird, sordid touches.KneecapRated R for sex scenes, profanity, drug use and violent archival footage. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Harold and the Purple Crayon’ Review: He’s a Big Kid Now

    Harold is an adult on a quest in this tale based on the beloved children’s book by Crockett Johnson.People have been threatening to make a movie out of the beloved children’s book “Harold and the Purple Crayon” for decades. When a visionary director like Spike Jonze was attached to a live-action screen adaptation of Crockett Johnson’s volume, the movie did sound more promising than threatening. (Jonze later left the project.)In any event, they’ve done it, and now “they” — the writers David Guion and Michael Handelman, and the director Carlos Saldanha — have gone and changed Harold from a cute baby into a cutesy adult. Or rather a child in adult form, played by Zachary Levi, whose Harold has two notes: a plucky grin and a furrowed brow.First, a narrated and animated prologue walks us through how the movie will shrug off the book. Then, the movie plods around awkwardly, trying to leech whatever charm it can from the remaining elements of the original (like that crayon): In Harold’s real-world quest for his “old man” — whose narration is cut off abruptly in the prologue — the old man does, indeed, turn out to be Johnson. (Johnson died in 1975 and his estate presumably and implausibly cooperated with this venture.) Along the way, Harold meets a family in need. There’s a standard-issue single mom (Zooey Deschanel, whose visible exhaustion here is actually a little too credible) and her boy, Mel (Benjamin Bottani), whose life is in need of wonder.This wonder will arrive through a tool of “pure imagination” (they really say that!). That is, Harold’s purple crayon, whose concoctions add some not-insubstantial visual interest to the proceedings. One scene in a department store, in which an actual puma and a too-functional kid’s helicopter ride contribute some anarchic slapstick, is a keeper. But it might have been better still as contrived by Terry Gilliam. Or Edgar Wright. Or Spike Jonze.Harold and the Purple CrayonRated PG for mild action and thematic elements. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Coup!’ Review: Pandemonium in a Pandemic — No, Not That One

    In this obvious satire set amid the 1918 influenza, a wealthy, muckraking reporter hires a new chef who disrupts the estate’s hierarchy.The cook, a thief, a wife and her lover — in “Coup!,” these familiar players rub shoulders not in an elite eatery, but in a seaside manor.The film, written and directed by Austin Stark and Joseph Schuman, is an energetic satire of pandemic-era bourgeois hypocrisy. Its supposed innovation, though, is to set its quarantine-based rogueries a century before Covid, when another pandemic — the 1918 influenza — spurred familiar waves of business closures, resource shortages and desperate fears of contagion.It is amid these disasters that we meet the liberal journalist Jay (Billy Magnussen), his wife, Julie (Sarah Gadon), and their two children. The family is sheltering from the disease on their island estate, where domestic personnel tend to the cooking, cleaning and nannying. The help treasure their siloed haven, until Floyd Monk (Peter Sarsgaard), a new chef from the mainland, suggests that the staff deserve better working conditions.The movie seeks to pit Jay — a narcissist pretending to report from the ravaged mainland while being cosseted by staff — against Monk, a blue-collar worker. “Coup!” exaggerates the men’s difference by making Monk a swashbuckler (his dangly earrings evoke Captain Jack Sparrow) and Jay a pacifist, vegetarian and out-and-out drip.As Monk lifts the veil enshrouding the estate’s hierarchy, he also emasculates Jay in the eyes of the household. This implication that virility trumps effeteness is, amid an otherwise straightforward comedy, an uncomfortably regressive way to tell the story of how people vie for power in hard times.Coup!Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters. More

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    A Dreamlike Collaboration From Milton Nascimento and Esperanza Spalding

    Milton Nascimento, a musical deity in Brazil, collaborates with the bassist, vocalist and producer Esperanza Spalding on an album that contemplates age’s effect on art.In 1955, Milton Nascimento was 13, learning to sing and, devastatingly to him, hitting puberty.“When I began to see my voice deepening, I said, ‘I don’t want to sing anymore,’” Nascimento, one of Brazil’s most important musical figures, recalled last week in an interview. “Because men don’t have heart.”He was crying, he said, when a smooth, soulful croon came from the radio. It was Ray Charles singing “Stella by Starlight.” “After I heard that, I said, ‘Now I can sing.’”Over the next six decades blossomed one of music’s great voices, an ethereal force that spanned octaves with emotion and verve, gliding seamlessly between a velvety baritone and a celestial falsetto.Nascimento’s unique sound and ascent to the highest notes helped influence a generation of artists. In an interview, Paul Simon called his voice “silky magic.” Philip Bailey, a singer in Earth, Wind & Fire, compared it to “a beautiful Brazilian beach.” Sting described it as “truth in beauty.”In Brazil, where Nascimento’s voice led singalong anthems and emotional ballads, the nation settled upon an even grander metaphor: “the voice of God.”Nascimento has long been one of the biggest acts in Brazil, while also influencing musicians around the world.Larissa Zaidan for The New York TimesWe 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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    Taylor Swift Gets the Museum Treatment

    Costumes and memorabilia from the pop star’s personal archive are now on display at the V&A museum in London.“Disappointed Love,” painted in 1821 by the Irish artist Francis Danby, is a scene of eternal teenage wistfulness, its visual codes as readable now as they were back then. A young girl sits by a river, tearful and heartbroken, her head in her hands, her white dress pooling around her legs. In the water, pages of a torn letter float among the waterlilies. By her side are props of femininity: a straw bonnet, a bright red shawl and a miniature portrait of the man who wronged her.The work hangs in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, in a red-walled gallery tightly packed with Georgian and Victorian paintings. As of recently, Danby’s weeping beauty has a new neighbor: a ruffled cream Zimmerman dress worn by Taylor Swift in the music video for “Willow,” from her 2020 album “Evermore.”The gown is one of more than a dozen items from Ms. Swift’s personal archive featured in installations across the V&A galleries. Danby’s painting is “so her vibe,” the curator Kate Bailey said of Ms. Swift, gesturing to the lovesick girl and her assortment of trinkets — “the dress, the scarf.”It was not yet noon on a muggy July day in London, and yet Ms. Bailey, a senior curator in the V&A theater and performance department, had already clocked more than 8,000 steps on her iPhone pedometer as she rushed about the museum overseeing the Taylor Swift installation. The V&A galleries, spread across multiple floors, stretch seven miles. (The exhibition, “Taylor Swift: Songbook Trail,” will be open to the public through Sept. 8.)“Whose idea was it to put a trail around the whole museum?” Ms. Bailey asked as she arrived, cheerful and panting, in the gilded Norfolk House Music Room. The V&A acquired the room in 1938, when Norfolk House was demolished, and reassembled it in its entirety, panel by panel, in 2000.Ms. Swift’s “Speak Now” blasted from speakers, and her iridescent tulle ball gown, worn on the back cover of the album, was encased on a mannequin in a vitrine in the center of the room, like a ballerina in a giant music box.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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    Meshell Ndegeocello Could Have Had Stardom but Chose Music Instead

    A good musician’s relationship with the past is tricky. You want to move forward without entirely forsaking what you’ve already done. You don’t want it defining you when so much future defining lies ahead. It’s a dilemma Meshell Ndegeocello was thinking through at her dining room table in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, on a recent afternoon.Ndegeocello happens to be much more than merely a good musician. She’s been playing professionally since the early 1990s and, at 55, is about to release her 14th album, a collection of songs that excites her. The past — the repertoire, the old stuff, the hits — can start to feel like “karaoke of myself,” she said, even if that’s never what it’s been like for us folks in the audience. Take her performances earlier this year at the Blue Note, the essential Greenwich Village jazz club.Over the course of a month, she and the six assiduous, deliriously skilled musicians in her band turned a rush-hour subway car of a venue into their hearth. To fuel these shows, Ndegeocello could have reached into three decades of her own music, an eclectic body of work whose spine is funk — she’s all but synonymous with the bass — and guided by her insinuating baritone. Yet on one January night, her ensemble’s layered mantras and lacquered grooves were the fruit of a long-gestating project built around the existential straits of being Black in America that now comprise this new album, “No More Water: The Gospel of James Baldwin.”“No one does anything alone,” she said. “There are artists like Prince and Stevie Wonder who can do that all themselves. I just like band experience.”Andre D. Wagner for The New York TimesThe room swayed and rhythmically nodded as rapt, reverent congregants. More than halfway through: a change-up. A jewel from the Ndegeocello trove, “I’m Diggin’ You (Like an Old Soul Record),” off her 31-year-old debut album, “Plantation Lullabies.” The song had essentially been reconsidered, infused with the solemnity and rumination befitting the rest of the set. But the women at the table inches behind mine flipped out with the gratitude of recognition. They were at a party and had run into an old friend who kicked things up a notch. (“It’s her birthday!” one of the women exclaimed to me, about her pal.)That moment at the Blue Note came back to me watching Ndegeocello and her band rehearse one afternoon last month at her studio in Long Island City, in Queens. They were getting ready for an NPR Tiny Desk concert. Ndegeocello had planned to stock it with selections from “No More Water,” which arrives on Friday. (Its release coincides with Baldwin’s centennial.) Running through the set list, she mentioned “Outside Your Door,” a quiet-storm slow burn from “Plantation Lullabies” that a casual Ndegeocellist might be expecting. Then she reconsidered, wary of NPR’s request that she perform a hit.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