Aurelia Butler

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    Why the Year’s Best Performances Are From Actresses Who Say Very Little

    Films like “Conclave” and “Bird” provide a stark contrast to the recent succession of films about women finding their voices.IN A TENSE moment midway through Edward Berger’s recent movie “Conclave,” a pulpy thriller about the process of selecting a new pope, Isabella Rossellini, playing a nun named Sister Agnes, enters a room full of cardinals from around the world. A series of uncovered secrets and shifting alliances have turned this initially serene council into a rat’s nest of backstabbing, grandstanding, explaining, interrupting men. After asking permission to speak, Sister Agnes discreetly delivers a piece of information that will upend the papal election and expose some of the most powerful figures in the Roman Catholic Church to public, career-ending humiliation. Her short speech concluded, she bobs at the waist ever so slightly, giving a tiny curtsy whose performance of feminine deference is a put-down in itself. For the rest of the film, Sister Agnes never says another word.Her sly protest recalls another time when a quietly rebellious woman confounded a council of would-be holy men: Renée Jeanne Falconetti in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 classic “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” long considered one of the towering performances of cinema history. Shot almost entirely in tight close-up, Falconetti’s Joan is doubly mute: first, of course, because the film itself is silent but, more pointedly, because the sparse script, based on records of Joan’s 1431 trial, puts nearly all the words in the mouths of her captors. As her male inquisitors grill her about the angelic visions that she claims have told her to dress in men’s clothing and lead the French army into battle, it’s Joan’s refusal to answer or even acknowledge their questions that most enrages them. When one questioner quizzes her about the length of the Archangel Michael’s hair, Joan’s wry response — “Why would he have cut it?” — is a forerunner of Sister Agnes’s ironic bob: a gesture of malicious compliance that serves to expose the hypocrisy of her inquisitors.For much of film history, women spoke less than men simply because their characters were seldom the story’s focus. The “strong, silent type” of westerns and detective stories was made strong by his silence, while female characters were typically weakened by theirs. When women in classic Hollywood films stepped outside the role of helpmeet, it was to personify the so-called mouthy dame (a type that, at its best, includes Barbara Stanwyck’s Sugarpuss O’Shea in 1941’s “Ball of Fire” and Bette Davis’s Margo Channing in 1950’s “All About Eve”). But however sparkling, brash or bitchy their banter, for decades dialogue written for female characters — often by male screenwriters — existed mainly to establish the fact that a woman was, for some reason, talking.“Women Talking,” the 2022 film by the writer-director Sarah Polley, won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay, a category befitting both its title and its subject: A movie about a Mennonite community of horrifically abused women claiming the right to speak, whose every frame overflows with expressive, persuasive, angry and anguished language, was recognized specifically for its words. That acknowledgment provided some catharsis in the wake of countless #MeToo scandals. But in the years since, along with a spate of acclaimed movies about women finding their voices (2022’s “Everything Everywhere All at Once”; last year’s “Poor Things” and “Barbie”), a new space has opened up onscreen for women pointedly not talking. Several films released this year — including Nora Fingscheidt’s “The Outrun,” Erica Tremblay’s “Fancy Dance” and Andrea Arnold’s “Bird” — have featured performances by female protagonists whose silence is neither a mark of trauma nor a state of oppression to be overcome but a deliberate strategy, whether for the purposes of introspection, self-preservation or self-discovery.Nobuyoshi Araki’s “Erotos” (1993).© Nobuyoshi Araki, courtesy of Taka Ishii GalleryWe 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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    Should I Sit Through the Movie’s Closing Credits?

    The film has ended, but the names of the many people who worked on it are rolling across the screen. Do you stick around?Do you have a question for our culture writers and editors? Ask us here.Q: Is it morally correct to stay seated until the end of the credits in a cinema?I’ve thought about this question my entire adult life! I think a lot of other people have, too. But to answer it, we have to think about what movie credits do, and why they’re there at all.The stayers and the leaversThere are two schools of thought here, both of which, I think, are pretty reasonable.On the one hand are the “stayers.” I used to be one. When my partner and I began seeing movies together, I was often writing about them, and he was working in film production, so we had two good reasons to stick around. We felt it was a way of honoring and celebrating all the people who pitch in to make a movie. Filmmaking is inherently collaborative, more than most arts, and even the office assistants toward the end of the credits sequences (especially the office assistants) deserve acknowledgment for doing a stressful, surprisingly difficult job.And let’s be honest — we also stayed to the end because it was fun to spot our friends’ names in the credits.Over time, though, I’ve become more of a “leaver,” for a few practical reasons. I often see several movies in a day, and I’ve got to get across town for the next one. Sometimes I really need to use the bathroom. And in this era of ultra-budget productions and mega-effects-driven movies, those credits can go on for 10 or 15 minutes, especially when you add in post-credits scenes.This was not always the case. “End credits” weren’t really a common thing in American film until the late 1960s, when a much larger number of people involved in the production began getting credit for their work in the movie itself. Before then, there were usually a few title cards that announced major cast and crew credits. Adding the monkey wranglers and location scouts and drivers and production interns results in longer credits.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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    Charles Dumont, Who Wrote Enduring Melodies for Édith Piaf, Dies at 95

    His dozens of songs included “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien,” a powerful anthem of redemptive love that became one of Piaf’s signature songs.Charles Dumont, who wrote the music for “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien,” the soaring song about sweeping away the past to find love anew that the hallowed but troubled singer Édith Piaf turned into an anthem of French culture, died on Nov. 18 at his home in Paris. He was 95.His death was confirmed by his daughter Sherkane Dumont.Mr. Dumont had a prolific career, writing melodies for the likes of Jacques Brel, Juliette Gréco and Barbra Streisand and music for French television and film. In the 1970s, he embarked on an award-winning career as romantic crooner.Still, it was the roughly 30 songs that he, with the lyricist Michel Vaucaire, wrote for Piaf — the diminutive and radiant chanteuse known as the Little Sparrow — that, by his own admission, defined his career. “My mother gave birth to me, but Édith Piaf brought me into the world,” Mr. Dumont said in a 2015 interview with Agence France-Presse.“Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” (“No, I Regret Nothing”), introduced in 1960, became a definitive song for a definitive French singer, a woman who became not just a global star but also a cultural ambassador for her country.With its martial solemnity, the song had the feel of a patriotic anthem, which gave power and drama to lyrics that express, in blunt and defiant terms, a rejection of past memories, both good and bad, while moving toward a new future.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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    Does the Conductor Klaus Mäkelä Deserve His Meteoric Rise?

    The 28-year-old maestro, entrusted with two storied ensembles, visited Carnegie Hall with the superb Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam.A raucously received performance of Mahler’s First Symphony at Carnegie Hall on Saturday was the latest exclamation point in the conductor Klaus Mäkelä’s meteoric rise. Mäkelä is just 28 and made his Carnegie debut a mere eight months ago with the Orchestre de Paris — one of the two very good ensembles he currently leads.He returned to the hall this week for a two-night stand with the storied Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam — one of the two much-better-than-very-good ensembles he is set to take over in the coming years. (The news came in April that he would also be the next music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.)Chicago and the Concertgebouw are more than excellent groups; they are cultural treasures, whose futures have been placed in the hands of a maestro who was widely unknown six years ago. It is safe to say that no conductor in modern history has been entrusted with so much at such a young age.Does he deserve it? With the physically extroverted Mäkelä bobbing, digging, punching and thwacking them on, the Concertgebouw’s musicians played superbly. By coincidence, the Berlin Philharmonic, another world-class ensemble, had visited Carnegie a few days before, and provided a useful comparison: Berlin’s kaleidoscopically colored, richly muscular force was distinct from the Concertgebouw’s blended and refined (though still sumptuous) elegance.It’s a luxurious sound, with full, liquid winds, discreetly burnished brasses and, best of all, sustained, velvety strings. Those strings had a beautifully restrained showcase joining Lisa Batiashvili in a hushed arrangement of a Bach chorale after her performance of Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2 on Friday. And they were fevered yet lucid in Schoenberg’s “Verklärte Nacht” on Saturday.Yet in some passages of the Schoenberg that were overstated, almost halting, you got a sense of Mäkelä’s shortcomings. He can be so deliberate, so obviously intent on creating precise rhythms and textures bar by bar, that some of the air can come out of the music. It all seems like it should be intense — he certainly looks intense — but you don’t always feel building energy or distinctive character over long spans. It’s a matter of moments over momentum.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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    Alice Brock, Restaurant Owner Made Famous by a Song, Dies at 83

    Arlo Guthrie’s antiwar staple “Alice’s Restaurant” was inspired by a Thanksgiving Day visit to her diner in western Massachusetts.Alice Brock, whose eatery in western Massachusetts was immortalized as the place where “you can get anything you want” in Arlo Guthrie’s 1967 antiwar song “Alice’s Restaurant,” died on Thursday in Wellfleet, Mass. — just a week before Thanksgiving, the holiday during which the rambling story at the center of the song takes place. She was 83.Viki Merrick, her caregiver, said she died in a hospice from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.Ever since Mr. Guthrie released the song, officially called “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree,” in 1967, it has been a staple of classic-rock stations every late November, not to mention car trip singalongs on the way to visit family for Thanksgiving dinner.Ms. Brock’s restaurant, the Back Room, does not feature much in the song itself. Over the course of a little more than 18 minutes, Mr. Guthrie — doing more talking than singing — recounts a visit that he and a friend, Rick Robbins, paid to Ms. Brock and her husband, Ray Brock, for Thanksgiving dinner.Ms. Brock with Mr. Guthrie in 1977. They met when she was a school librarian and he was a student.Peter Simon Collection, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, UMass Amherst LibrariesA shaggy-dog story ensues: Mr. Guthrie and Mr. Robbins take some trash to the city dump, but, finding it closed, leave it in a ravine instead. The next morning the police arrest them for littering, and Ms. Brock has to bail them out.That night she cooks them all a big meal, and the following day they appear in court, where the judge fines them $50. Later, Mr. Guthrie is ordered to an Army induction center, where he is able to avoid the draft because of his criminal record.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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    ‘The Interview’: K-Pop Trained Rosé to Be ‘a Perfect Girl.’ Now She’s Trying to Be Herself.

    South Korean pop, known as K-pop, is not just a type of music — it’s a culture, where bold style, perfectly choreographed dance moves and ebullient earworms that draw from pop, hip-hop and traditional Korean music attract a huge and particularly devoted global fan base. The genre’s stars, known as idols, are trained, often for years, by entertainment companies that then place the most promising trainees in groups, write and produce their music and obsessively manage their public images. It’s a system that works for the idols who make it big, but it has also drawn criticism for its grueling methods, which some call exploitative.One of the biggest stars to come out of that system is Rosé. Born Roseanne Park, she trained for four years with one of K-pop’s largest agencies, YG Entertainment, eventually breaking through as part of the girl group Blackpink. Now at age 27, she is striking out on her own with her first full-length solo album, “Rosie,” which comes out on Dec. 6 from Atlantic Records. (The album’s first single, “APT.” a collaboration with Bruno Mars, is a true bop and has made history as the first track by a female K-pop artist to break into the Top 10 on the Billboard Hot 100.) She is still a member of Blackpink, and the group re-signed with YG in 2023. But after years of singing other people’s songs and performing as Rosé, which she described to me as “a character that I really worked hard on as a trainee,” writing her own songs for this solo album has made her think about where she came from and who she is, separate from the system that turned her into a global phenomenon.Listen to the Conversation With RoséThe Blackpink star talks about striking out on her own, away from the system that turned her into a global phenomenon.Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Amazon | iHeart | NYT Audio AppYou’re about to release your first full-length solo album. Can you tell me what you’re feeling? Like I’ve been waiting to release this album for my whole life. I grew up listening to a lot of female artists. I used to relate to them, and they used to really get me through a lot of tough times. And so I would always dream of one day having an album myself. But I never really thought it would be realistic. I remember last year when I first began the whole process of it, I doubted myself a lot.It probably would be surprising to anyone who would look at Rosé, with all your success, with the enormous fan base that you have, to know that you doubted yourself so much. I don’t think I ever learned or trained myself to be vulnerable and open and honest. So that was the part I feared, because it was the opposite of what I was trained to do.You were born in New Zealand to South Korean immigrant parents and then you moved to Australia when you were 8. In 2012, when you were 15, you auditioned for a slot in YG Entertainment’s trainee program, which is basically a boarding school for becoming a K-pop star. It was your dad’s idea, right? Yes. More

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    Lucy Liu Thinks It’s Important to Make a Mess Sometimes

    “That’s how creative things happen,” said the actress, one of the stars of the holiday film “Red One.”Lucy Liu’s 9-year-old son, Rockwell, hasn’t seen his mother draw blood in “Charlie’s Angels” or “Shazam! Fury of the Gods” and certainly not in “Kill Bill, Vol. 1.”But the only splash of crimson in her latest film, “Red One,” is the suit of Santa Claus, who has been kidnapped from the North Pole. Liu is one of the Christmas movie’s stars, alongside Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans, and plays the head of security for the world’s mythological creatures.“This is the only live-action movie that my son has been able to watch, and he wanted to see it again right afterward,” Liu said on a video call. “I think he forgot that I was actually in it at one point.”When she isn’t shooting or producing (she will next appear in “Presence,” a Steven Soderbergh thriller slated for release in January), Liu can most often be found in her art studio. She tends to lose track of time there — “the whole point of art,” she said. “You just get lost in that world.”Liu, who lives in Manhattan, elaborated on why her library card, spur-of-the-moment theatergoing and riding her bicycle are essential to her well-being. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Transcendental MeditationI put together an art book years ago, and I asked Deepak Chopra if he would write a forward. He did, but he also asked me to come into his office. He wanted to teach me about meditation. And so he gave me a mantra, and it was an important moment for me because I didn’t know that it would make such a big difference.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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    ‘Glicked’ Fans Rejoice in Bloodshed and Broadway Songs

    Swords clashing and blood curdling screams of gladiators emanate from one room. Across the hallway, witches belt out show tunes.That’s the sound of “Glicked.”Last year, moviegoers swarmed to see “Barbenheimer” — the combined name for “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” — when the films opened on the same day. Now, there is a push from the casts and fans of “Gladiator II” and “Wicked” — which both opened across the country on Friday — to recreate that energy for another double feature with a blended name.Isabelle Deveaux and Emma Rabuano skipped out of theater six at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Brooklyn at 2:38 p.m. on Friday, after watching “Gladiator II.”At 6:15 p.m., the pair, both 25, planned to return to the Alamo Drafthouse to see “Wicked.” The crossover, Ms. Deveaux said, “felt so specifically catered to our interests.”Diego Gasca of Los Angeles went with friends to the opening day of “Wicked” at AMC Lincoln Square 13 in Manhattan, but he said that he was not interested in seeing “Gladiator II.”Colin Clark for The New York TimesOn the surface, the two films, which have a combined running time of over five hours, appear vastly different. One is a family friendly musical prequel to “The Wizard of Oz,” while the other is an R-rated epic sequel about murder, war and the Roman Empire. But Ms. Deveaux and Ms. Rabuano see some common ground in the films.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