Aurelia Butler

More stories

  • 138 Shares143 Views

    in Movies

    ‘Tatami’ Review: A Bitter Fight, Both on and Off the Mat

    A flinty Iranian judoka competing in the World Judo Championships is menaced by her government in this absorbing political thriller.In the beginning of “Tatami,” Leila (Arienne Mandi), a flinty Iranian judoka competing in the World Judo Championships, looks unstoppable. A gold medal seems within reach, which would be a first for Iran in the tournament’s history.Unfortunately for Leila, hers isn’t a feel-good underdog story — more like a Kafkaesque nightmare. Winning gold is negligible to her authoritarian government; it’s more concerned with her obedience.Directed by Guy Nattiv and Zar Amir (a rare collaboration between an Israeli and an Iranian filmmaker), “Tatami” draws inspiration from the real-life experiences of Iranian athletes who were punished or forced to seek asylum abroad after refusing to wear a hijab during their international sporting events. We see Leila defiantly release her black mane of hair on several occasions — as in flashbacks to her life in Tehran in which she’s in bed with her husband or partying at an underground club.But it’s not Leila’s hijab that’s the problem: Midway through the tournament, Leila’s coach, Maryam (Amir, an Iranian exile herself), gets a call from the Iranian authorities demanding that Leila fake an injury and drop out immediately to avoid competing against an Israeli athlete. (Iran doesn’t recognize Israel, and forbids its athletes from competition with Israeli athletes.)The script is annoyingly fuzzy on these details, brushing knotty geopolitics aside for a more straightforward story about the oppression of Iranian women and the menacing, absurd ways in which they’re policed. We see plenty of Leila’s scuffles on the mat, shot stylishly in velvety black and white, but the meat of the conflict happens on the sidelines and in the corridors of the stadium. That is where Leila (who refuses to to stop competing) and Maryam lock horns; the Iranian government’s cronies appear dressed as plain-clothed spectators; and the tournament’s organizers struggle to decide how best to protect Leila.The mounting tensions of these moving parts — and steely performances by Mandi and Amir — make for an engrossing thriller fueled by female rage.TatamiNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

  • 88 Shares119 Views

    in Movies

    ‘Deep Cover’ Review: Fighting Crime With Improv

    Three hapless comics, played by Orlando Bloom, Bryce Dallas Howard and Nick Mohammed, infiltrate the criminal underworld.The movie opens with a furious cops-and-robbers car chase through London that eventually draws in a helicopter. Flying low, the chopper zips past a busy brokerage floor where Hugh (Nick Mohammed), a weary drone, watches it in awe and terror. In a relatively short amount of time he’ll be drawn into an underworld that will place him in between lines of fire from opposite sides of the law.In “Deep Cover,” directed by Tom Kingsley, Hugh determines to boost his social confidence by taking a course in improv comedy run by Kat (Bryce Dallas Howard), whose chipper exterior barely masks her befuddlement at how she wound up in her position. Orlando Bloom plays Marlon, who wants to hone the extemporizing “skills” that his TV-ad-booking agent wished he would bury. The three are soon scouted by Sean Bean’s hard-bitten cop Billings, who enlists them to run a small sting.The gang get so carried away trying to entrap a low-level dealer that they wind up being taken for major players, and infiltrating a network overseen by a relatively amiable Paddy Considine and a typically no-nonsense Ian McShane. The plot convolutions test the trio’s survival skills — and their improv chops.Nowadays crime comedies don’t so much toggle between horror and hilarity as try to intermingle them: One example is a scene in which a corpse needs to be chopped up and disposed of, and poor Hugh is handed the chain saw. Humor is also derived from the fact that the crew is frequently called upon to ingest various intoxicants, legal and taboo. The ensemble is packed with seasoned acting professionals across the board, who more than sell their drunk scenes and deliver more than a few laughs on their way to redemption.Deep CoverRated R for language, corpse dismemberment, other violence, crime in general. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. Watch on Prime Video. More

  • 113 Shares119 Views

    in Movies

    ‘Echo Valley’ Review: Mother Knows Best, Daughter Does Worst

    A stellar cast led by Julianne Moore is unable to breathe life into this unsuccessful blend of maternal drama and crime caper.Julianne Moore has the perfect face for pain: pale-skinned, fragile and with eyes that turn easily liquid. That’s fortunate, because Kate Garretson, Moore’s character in the gloomily uninvolving thriller “Echo Valley,” is dealing with so much misery she can barely get out of bed. Her wife has recently died, her horse farm is losing money, and her testy ex-husband (a single-scene cameo from Kyle MacLachlan) is tired of bailing her out.That’s more than enough distress for any one character, but “Echo Valley” is just getting started. Enter Kate’s daughter, Claire (Sydney Sweeney), a scheming addict with an abusive boyfriend and multiple failed attempts at rehab. Claire is demanding money to solve a problem with her skeevy dealer (played, with calculating charisma, by Domhnall Gleeson), and Kate, a chronic enabler, seems eager to auction a kidney to help. Whenever these two are together, you want to shake one and throttle the other.After a terrified Claire shows up one night, bloodstained and with a body stashed in her back seat, what began as a promising study of grief and emotional isolation sinks swiftly into a seamy crime caper. Touching scenes of Kate replaying her wife’s saved phone messages alternate with shrieking bouts of mother-daughter dysfunction, and warm moments between Kate and her best friend (the always stellar Fiona Shaw) give way to increasingly preposterous plot developments.Battling downpours and an abundance of nighttime shadows, the cinematographer Benjamin Kracun adds a classy, coppery richness where he can. But “Echo Valley,” directed by Michael Pearce (whose 2018 feature debut, “Beast,” mingled equally dissonant themes with far greater dexterity), is ultimately undone by Brad Ingelsby’s distracted script. The most relatable being onscreen is the family dog, whose baffled expression at one point I am certain mirrored my own.Echo ValleyRated R for a needle in the neck and a corpse in the car. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. Watch on Apple TV+. More

  • 138 Shares151 Views

    in Music

    Turning VHS Tapes of Gay Men’s Choruses Into a Powerful Celebration

    Matthew Leifheit’s “No Time at All,” culled from recordings made at the height of the AIDS crisis, plays through speakers nestled in the New York City AIDS Memorial.On a recent sunny morning in Lower Manhattan, Matthew Leifheit heard applause.It wasn’t for a live performance, but for many old ones — the source material for “No Time at All,” his sound installation that continues through June 30 at the New York City AIDS Memorial in the West Village.Culled from 53 VHS tapes, the piece is a continuous mix of music and songs performed by gay men’s choruses from 1985 to 1995, complete with the distortions and degradations that occur when magnetic tape ages and deteriorates.The piece runs 65 minutes, followed by 10 minutes of silence, a quieting that tells as much of a story as the golden baritones. There are seven “recitals,” as Leifheit calls them, that play every day through June from speakers nestled within the memorial’s 18-foot white steel canopy.Leifheit, 37, said he deliberately included music from concerts that took place in the middle of the darkest early years of the AIDS crisis before the use of highly active antiretroviral treatments (HAART) in the United States. It was a decade, he said during an interview at the memorial, when many gay chorus members “were reckoning with what they were going through, through music.”Leifheit said the project’s title refers to how the passage of time might feel to people who remember going to so many funerals — and to the haste with which AIDS killed many of the men whose anonymous voices carry through the memorial.Documenting the loss, and musical joys, of those early AIDS years was his artistic attempt to “dramatize the absence” and honor chorus members who “are still with us and thriving.”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

  • 88 Shares119 Views

    in Movies

    ‘Will’ Review: Heartache and Hope in Harlem

    In Jessie Maple’s restored 1981 drama, the first feature-length film by a Black woman, a heroin addict mentors a young boy and tries to find his footing.In the 1981 drama “Will” — directed by Jessie Maple — Will (Obaka Adedunyo) is trying to gut out heroin withdrawal. Gripping his stomach, the onetime all-American basketball player is sweat soaked, his sleep punctuated with flashbacks to his time on the court. When his wife, Jean (Loretta Devine, in her film debut), returns to their apartment in Harlem and finds Will struggling, she asks why he’s so set on getting clean without help. “Nobody turned me onto this” but me, he says angrily. “And I’ve got to kick it myself, even if it kills me.”Will’s theory of going it alone changes when he takes a mentoring shine to Little Brother (Robert Dean) who, at 12, is already drawn to drugs. Will brings Little Brother into his and Jean’s home and also starts to coach a girls basketball team. He attends a local meeting run by a self-assured espouser of positive thinking. Things are looking up for him.“Will,” the first independent feature-length film by an African American woman, was listed on the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry in 2024. (A year after the drama debuted, the playwright Kathleen Collins’ semi autobiographical drama “Losing Ground” was released.) The recent 4K restorations of these films by Black female filmmakers have added depth to cinema’s historical record and offered tantalizing threads to tug for archivists and scholars.With its rough-hewed realism, “Will” is remarkable not so much for its craft as for its philosophical depth in portraying the tensions between a struggling individual and his community, which can be both supportive and enabling. Where there’s a Will, there’s a way? With its balance of heartache and hope, the film suggests there could be.WillNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. In theaters. More

  • 100 Shares159 Views

    in Movies

    ‘Meeting With Pol Pot’ Review: Snapshots of Totalitarianism

    The director Rithy Panh dramatizes events from 1978, when a group of outsiders was allowed to enter Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.The films of the Cambodian director Rithy Panh, known for his documentaries (“The Missing Picture”), are haunted by his childhood years living under the brutal rule of the Khmer Rouge. “Meeting With Pol Pot,” his new dramatized feature, approaches the topic from the outside looking in.In 1978, the journalist Elizabeth Becker — then a correspondent for The Washington Post, later a reporter and editor at The New York Times — was part of a group of Westerners allowed into Cambodia, which had been sealed off since the Khmer Rouge took power in 1975. “Meeting With Pol Pot,” billed as “freely inspired” by Becker’s 1986 book, “When the War Was Over,” centers on a fictionalized version of that delegation.It begins with three French journalists flying into Cambodia; from the start, when they don’t land where they expected, something is off. Alain (Grégoire Colin), who trumpets his friendship with Pol Pot from their time as student activists in Paris, insists that they are privileged to visit and should follow the rules.The writer Lise (Irène Jacob) and the photojournalist Paul (Cyril Gueï) are more skeptical: Lise wonders where the intellectuals are and why the civilians remain eerily silent. Paul wanders off on his own to get the real story, rather than the show that the regime is clearly putting on.Panh powerfully interweaves real footage of starvation and mass death — sometimes projecting it behind the characters or matching it to Paul’s eyeline. He also brings back the main conceit of “The Missing Picture,” which used clay figurines to depict certain events. What remains hidden is crucial in Panh’s movies. When Alain and Pol Pot have their long-deferred reunion, the dictator’s face is kept in shadow.Meeting With Pol PotNot rated. In French and Cambodian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters. More

  • 100 Shares143 Views

    in Movies

    ‘Materialists’ Review: When Dakota Met Pedro (and Chris)

    The director Celine Song follows up her “Past Lives” with a side-eyeing update on the rom-com, starring Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal and Chris Evans.Is heterosexual romance doomed, is the romantic comedy? Those questions swirl with light, teasing provocation in Celine Song’s “Materialists,” a seductive, smartly refreshed addition to an impossibly, perhaps irredeemably old-fashioned genre that was once a Hollywood staple. Set in the New York of today, it stars Dakota Johnson as Lucy, a professional matchmaker who’s all business until her personal life takes a surprising turn — if more to her than to you — when she’s swept into a romance with two different men. One is a broke dreamboat (Chris Evans as John), the other is more of a superyacht (Pedro Pascal as Harry).Theirs is a sexy, sleek triangle, one that starts taking flight during a wedding after-party where Harry and Lucy have been chatting at the singles’ table. A matchmaker, she introduced the bride and the groom, and now is eyeing up Harry as a prospective client, a so-called unicorn (wealthy, full head of hair, tall). Harry, who’s the groom’s brother, is more interested in her. With sly smiles, they playfully wink and coo, lunge and parry. Just as their flirting begins heating up, John — a waiter and, ta-da, her ex — loudly plunks down bottles of Lucy’s favorite drink order: a Coke and a beer. The lines of attack have been established, and it’s on.Romantic comedies are often described as battles of the sexes, a metaphor that suggests that love affairs are effectively wars. Feelings get badly bruised in “Materialists,” and there’s a sobering shock of violence that’s unusual in screen comedies or romances. But for Lucy and her clients, dating isn’t about winners and losers; it’s transactional, a market for buyers and sellers, and a matter of exchange value. Lucy’s clients yearn, have familiar swoony hopes and dreams, but they’re also consumers with shopping lists that include a prospect’s height, weight, hair (or lack thereof) and age. “She’s 40 and fat,” one disgruntled male client tells Lucy early on about a match. “I would never swipe right on a woman like that.”Blunt and effective, that line is as realistic as it is gasp-out-loud ugly. It also an example of how Song can distill an entire ethos into a single, bracingly unsentimental line. (This is her second feature; her first was the wistful “Past Lives.”) What makes the moment land, though, is how Song uses the contempt in the guy’s voice — it stops Lucy in her tracks — to signal that Song isn’t interested in making just another dopey romance. He sounds insulted, angry, and not just at Lucy or his date (Zoë Winters as Sophie). It makes you wonder what he thinks about women, which introduces a shiver of menace that lingers even after Song shifts tones and focus to settle on Lucy’s budding romance with Harry and her feelings for John.That affair and those feelings are warm, true (or true enough) and, at times, delightful; there are, romance fans know, few movie pleasures as agreeable as watching good-looking, talented actors playact love. It’s especially nice to see Johnson in a lead role that makes the most of her gifts. A consistently surprising actress, she is a supremely, sometimes fascinatingly languorous screen presence, one suggestive of Malibu beaches and excellent weed. She’s been in the spotlight since childhood (her parents are Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson) and seems invitingly comfortable in her own skin, without a trace of that detached quality that can encase some beautiful, famous people like a protective membrane. If anything, Johnson seems lightly amused to be the center of attraction, and entirely aware of why she is.It’s instructive then that the first image of Lucy is a reflection of her face in a mirror. She’s doing her makeup and getting ready for work, and looks attentive yet unreadable. Lucy is soon on the move, her ponytail swinging, easing through New York with a purposefulness that dovetails with Song’s filmmaking. In crisp, breezy scenes, with lilting music and some great sound work, Song introduces the matchmaking company where Lucy is a star employee, her killer, off-kilter sales pitch — “you’re looking for a nursing-home partner and a grave buddy” — and the outwardly independent women who flock to her, women who are edging toward 40 (or older) and are as much in Song’s sightlines as Lucy and her romantic foils 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

  • 150 Shares103 Views

    in Movies

    ‘How to Train Your Dragon’ Review: The Return of Hiccup and Toothless

    This live action remake of the 2010 animated film is religiously faithful to the original. The result is exhilarating at times, if somewhat mechanical.About halfway through “How to Train Your Dragon,” Hiccup, the unlikely hero hiding under a mop of teenage hair, hops onto the back of his newfound dragon friend, Toothless, and cautiously goes for their first ride. Soon, they’re soaring; they’re bumped around and perilously tumbling; they’re finding each other midair; and finally they’re shooting off at light speed, twisting impossibly through the craggy rock formations sprouting over the sea.It’s a moment of pure exhilaration, the first instance when you nod and momentarily understand the point of this remake — a live-action mirror of a big sequence from the 2010 animated film that adds visceral weight and big-screen grandeur to the original. By the film’s end, it’s one of the few scenes that genuinely justifies the entire conceit of this reimagining from Dean DeBlois, the franchise’s returning director.To be sure, this new iteration is entertaining, bears a sense of heart and brings a tight script of fantasy and friendship to life. It is, in short, all of the original, only too much so: Most of the good of this “Dragon” come directly from its source material, as DeBlois has almost religiously mimed his original creation without much daring or new dimension beyond mechanically translating it to an IMAX screen. For the faithful to a strong franchise, that is perhaps the best way to do it.This remake of the 2010 film comes just six years after the third and final installment of the animated trilogy, barely a blink of an eye when it comes to developing the nostalgia kick that tends to fuel live-action retreads. And yet, the movie is bringing to life a franchise that, far more than most animated films, has the pure DNA of a real-deal blockbuster: an immersive fantasy epic full of dragon fights and warmongering Vikings.Like its original, the new film begins by introducing us, mid-battle, to Berk, a remote island village that is in a perpetual war with dragons. When Hiccup (Mason Thames), the feckless son of the village chief, Stoic (Gerard Butler, reprising his role in the animated films), wounds a Night Fury, the deadliest of dragons, he develops a bond with the creature. He names him Toothless and comes to find him, and all dragons, to be more skittish dog than aggressive predator, a realization Hiccup struggles to translate to his people as their war turns ever more deadly.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