Aurelia Butler

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    ‘Dandelion’ Review: The Notes in Between

    KiKi Layne stars as a struggling musician who meets a rakish Scottish singer (Thomas Doherty) while on the road.Nicole Riegel’s “Dandelion” is a lyrical film in a couple of senses. It’s about a pivotal stretch of time for a Midwestern musician named Dandelion (KiKi Layne), whose experiences will probably inform the lyrics she will write and sing. And it’s filmed in an artful way that tunes into her sensations and feelings — not just at moments of outright drama, but also the many notes in between.The movie begins in Cincinnati, where Dandelion has a standing gig at a cavernous hotel bar, playing background music for the gabby patrons. Then she goes home and works more, as the caretaker of her ailing mother, Jean (Melanie Nicholls-King).After they have an especially nasty argument, Dandelion drives off, all the way to an open-mic contest in South Dakota. There she meets a rakish Scottish singer, Casey (Thomas Doherty), who brings her into his circle of jamming friends and also flirts madly. (The song credits include Bryce and Aaron Dessner of the National.)You may think you’ve heard this song before — two musicians tumble into love and duets — but maybe not quite like Riegel arranges it. Their time together — nature walks, motorcycle rides, cuddling — really does feel like time they spend together, rather than some perfectly staged romantic vision. Moments between them can be warm, silent, awkward or serene. Riegel and the cinematographer, Lauren Guiteras, use the camera like a vessel for Dandelion’s sense memories.The cleareyed movie also nails how one can initially overlook a lover’s deception. In the end, “Dandelion” feels like one artist’s emotional prequel, leaving us wishing for even more.DandelionRated R for sexuality, nudity and sharp language. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘The Convert’ Review: The British Are Coming

    Guy Pearce plays a minister who arrives in New Zealand and finds his allegiances change in this antipodean western set in the 19th century.Near the start of “The Convert,” a minister named Thomas Munro (Guy Pearce) delivers a benediction aboard a ship. Some men, he says, would flinch if they knew just how vast the Earth is. “The Convert,” naturally, charts the course of Munro’s own education in the wide world. It is 1830, and he is on the Tasman Sea bound for New Zealand. The leaders of an emerging British town have paid for him to be brought there to run a church. But once he arrives and encounters the local Maori — and sees the murderous indifference with which the British treat them — his allegiances change.In a welcome twist, “The Convert,” directed by Lee Tamahori, does not patronizingly tell the story of a violent colonizer who begins to sympathize with an uncomplicated, passive Indigenous population. Much of the drama concerns conflict among the Maori themselves. That their dialogue is sometimes subtitled and sometimes not is indicative of the movie’s — and maybe the screenwriters’ — tentative perspective.Not long after first going ashore, Munro finds himself bargaining with Akatarewa (Lawrence Makoare), a violent chief, to save the life of a young woman, Rangimai (Tioreore Ngatai-Melbourne). Along with Charlotte (Jacqueline McKenzie), a white widow who previously lived among the Maori, Rangimai becomes one of Munro’s conduits to Maori customs, and eventually a key to his efforts to secure Indigenous unity against British encroachment.There is more plot — the framing of a grocer for a coldblooded killing; a perfunctory romance; a bloody climactic battle — but the real star of this Kiwi western is the setting. The lush forests and stark, black sand beaches, shot in locations near those used in “The Piano,” help make “The Convert” more than a message movie.The ConvertNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 59 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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    At 75, the Aldeburgh Festival Is Bigger Than Benjamin Britten

    When the composer Benjamin Britten died in 1976, it wasn’t clear how the public would remember him.There was Britten the rooted composer, firmly set in his native Suffolk, England, and the Aldeburgh Festival with his life partner, the tenor Peter Pears; Britten the establishment composer, friendly with the “Queen Mum,” the creator of “Gloriana” and the first composer to receive a peerage; and Britten the immediate composer, whose belief in art’s purposefulness meant he consciously avoided what he called writing for posterity.Others, however, were committed to the posterity of Britten’s work on his behalf. Rosamund Strode, a Britten assistant since 1964, became the founding archivist of the Britten Pears Foundation, and set the guidelines for one of the most comprehensive composer archives in existence.What, though, of his festival?The Aldeburgh Festival program from 1948.via Aldeburgh FestivalPeter Pears, left, and Britten.George Roger, via Aldeburgh Festival“Understandably, particularly after Britten’s death, and later after Pears’s death, there were people who wanted to properly protect what they felt were the sacred flames, because they were nervous of whether this thing was going to carry on after the two founders of this organization,” Roger Wright, the departing chief executive of Britten Pears Arts, said in an interview. Those people “needn’t have worried,” he added, “but there were bumpy times, and it’s very easy to forget that.”In the end, the Aldeburgh Festival, which recently celebrated its 75th edition, has produced many more editions without Britten than with him.The festival has gained a reputation for consistency, with well-attended, well-reviewed and richly programmed seasons. This year was no exception, including a new production of the church parable “Curlew River” alongside “Sumidigawa,” the Noh play that inspired it. (The show was filmed for a future BBC broadcast.)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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    Cigarettes After Sex and Gen Z’s Passion for Dream-Pop

    The buzzy band that makes woozy, sensual music is releasing its third LP and starting an arena tour. It’s part of a wave reviving the fuzzed-out aesthetic of shoegaze.In 2016, a four-year-old track by a struggling Brooklyn band called Cigarettes After Sex blew up on YouTube, and soon the group’s brand of crisp, lovesick minimalism was selling out clubs all over Europe. At a tour stop in Prague, Greg Gonzalez, its leader, saw unticketed fans weeping in the street.“OK, this is bizarre,” Gonzalez remembered thinking. “But that showed me that this is doing what it’s supposed to do. This is music that’s meant for emotional people that are in love. That’s what music did for me. So I thought, that’s what I want my music to do for somebody else.”Eight years later, that pattern has repeated for Cigarettes After Sex, on a far grander scale. Although largely ignored by the mainstream media, the band’s spare, crystalline ballads have again caught fire online — this time on TikTok — racking up almost 10 billion streams around the world. Its third album, “X’s,” will be released on July 12 via the indie label Partisan, and an exhaustive global tour includes sold-out stops at Madison Square Garden as well as the Kia Forum near Los Angeles, and arenas throughout Europe, Asia, the Middle East, South Africa and Australia. By stealth, Cigarettes After Sex has become one of the biggest cult bands in the world.Its success is also a high-water mark in rock’s latest retro revival, for shoegaze and dream-pop — appropriately nebulous terms for a range of music from the 1980s and early ’90s, when groups like My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, Cocteau Twins and Lush cloaked melodies in waves of shimmering guitar or synthesizers, along a sonic scale from gauzy reverie to caustic noise. Long a recurrent strain in indie-pop, the sound has been catapulted by TikTok to a new level of popularity among Gen Z acts like Wisp, Sign Crushes Motorist and Quannnic that are posting millions of streams and dotting festival lineups.Cigarettes After Sex represents one end of this spectrum, with a carefully calibrated, almost cinematic approach: a hushed, dark landscape punctuated by splashes of color from Gonzalez’s guitar, topped by his whisper-soft, almost feminine singing voice. But in an interview in an East Village hotel bar, Gonzalez — who in person speaks in an easy, rapid-fire baritone — said he sees Cigarettes After Sex as fitting more in a tradition of classic, moody love songs, referencing Marvin Gaye, Françoise Hardy and Al Green.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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    ‘Sing Sing’ Review: Divine Interventions

    A deep-tissue turn by Colman Domingo and a breakout performance by Clarence Maclin lift this moving drama about a prison theater program.Spoken by the two key characters in the prison-set drama “Sing Sing,” the word “beloved” is as moving as it is unexpected. It uplifts and gently shatters. It makes a case for the deep respect and deeper amity forged in a theater program set up at the eponymous maximum-security facility.Colman Domingo imbues his character John Whitfield, a.k.a. Divine G, with a steadfast compassion but also the tamped-down frustrations of a man convicted of a crime he says he didn’t commit. And Clarence Maclin — a formerly incarcerated newcomer whose story, along with that of the actual Whitfield, the film is built upon — burrows into his former self in a finessed and fierce performance as Divine Eye, the prison-yard alpha who auditions for Sing Sing’s Rehabilitation Through the Arts theater program. That program is the movie’s other star.The film, directed by Greg Kwedar from a script written with Clint Bentley, orbits the prickly relationship between G, a much-respected member of the R.T.A. ensemble, and Eye. We first meet Eye shaking down a wan mark and conducting his drug business in the prison yard. G and his best friend, Mike Mike (Sean San José in a poignant turn), watch, waiting to gauge Eye’s genuine interest in the acting program. There’s a long wait-list.A published writer, G spends his time away from the rehearsal room in the library or at his typewriter building his clemency appeal or researching the cases of fellow inmates. Eye, possessing a gap-tooth smile he’s slow to reveal, is a psychological pugilist looking for the soft spot to land the hurtful punch.From the jump, Eye challenges G’s standing. He’s the prince of the hard gaze. Nothing sits right with him. He thinks the warm-ups are goofy. (They are until they aren’t.) When a fellow actor crosses behind him during the blocking of a scene, he’s ready to pummel.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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    ‘Longlegs’ Review: Daddy Danger

    Nicolas Cage plays the cheery evil entity behind multiple murders in this weakly plotted, strongly styled chiller.Any horror movie that opens, as “Longlegs” does, with a quotation from a British glam-rock hit of the 1970s, suggests a filmmaker with, at the very least, an offbeat sensibility. Even so, this latest feature from the abundantly talented writer and director Osgood Perkins is a puzzler: Stuffed to the rafters with serial-killer clichés — coded messages, creepy dolls, satanic symbols, an androgynous maniac — the plot plays like a sampler of many, more coherent precursors. There’s even a minion dressed as a nun.And that’s before we attempt to process Nicolas Cage (who else?) as the titular nut case. His appearances are brief, but resounding — and, as can happen with Cage, waver on the brink of parody. Much like the film itself, righted in part by the magnificently bleak mood and prickling sense of premonition that emerge from Andrés Arochi’s mold-colored images. This man can make a deserted, plastic-draped lair look as ominous as hell’s anteroom.Preparing to enter is Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), a rather green F.B.I. agent on the trail of a serial killer who somehow persuades fathers to slaughter their families and then commit suicide. Coded notes, signed “Longlegs,” are left at the crime scenes and law enforcement is stymied. But Lee, who had a disturbing encounter with Longlegs as a child, appears to have a psychic connection with the monster. So, too, does her mother (Alicia Witt), and the two’s haunted, wary relationship thrums with unspoken secrets.Set in Oregon in the 1990s, “Longlegs” wrestles to maintain its eerily menacing tone. The movie’s echoing spaces — a snowy landscape, Lee’s wondrously gloomy home — and wily performances (especially from Kiernan Shipka as an institutionalized survivor of the killings) are too often undercut by a strangely off-kilter comedy. Much of this resides in Longlegs himself, an apparent victim of botched plastic surgery whom Cage plays as a rhyming-and-singing lunatic beneath a frizzed gray wig. In one amusing scene, as Longlegs enters a hardware store sporting what appear to be slippers and a housedress, he resembles nothing so much as a bizarre amalgam of Buffalo Bill and Tootsie. He should have been a breeze to catch.Scenes like this one (which benefits from a dry cameo by the director’s daughter, Bea Perkins, as a spectacularly unfazed clerk), in common with random moments throughout the movie, have a dottiness that seems intentional and suggests that Perkins might be messing with us. As chilling and stylish as it is, “Longlegs” is a frustrating pleasure. In films like “I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives In the House” (2016) and “The Blackcoats Daughter” (2017), Perkins allowed his gift for ominousness and insinuation to take center stage. Here, we’re never quite sure if his tongue is in his cheek or his hand is on his heart.LonglegsRated R for malevolence, madness and mass murder. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Eno’ Review: Creativity, 52 Billion Billion Ways

    A new documentary about the groundbreaking artist Brian Eno breaks its own ground, too.The key to “Eno” comes near the beginning of the film — at least, the beginning of the first version I saw. The musician Brian Eno, the documentary’s subject, notes that the fun of the kind of art he makes is that it’s a two-way street. “The audience’s brain does the cooking and keeps seeing relationships,” he says.Most movies are made up of juxtapositions of scenes, carefully selected and designed by the editor. But “Eno,” directed by Gary Hustwit, turns that convention on its head. Writ large, it’s a meditation on creativity. But every version of the movie you see is different, generated by a set of rules that dictate some things about the film, while leaving others to chance. (I’ve seen it twice, and maybe half the same material appeared across both films.)Eno, one of the most innovative and celebrated musicians and producers of his generation, has fiddled with randomness in his musical practice for decades, often propelled along by new technologies. He agreed to participate in “Eno” only if it, too, could be an example of what he and others have long called generative art.The word “generative” has become associated with artificial intelligence, but that’s not what’s going on with “Eno.” Instead, the film runs on a code-based decision tree that forks every so often in a new path, created for software named Brain One (an anagram for Brian Eno). Brain One, programmed by the artist Brendan Dawes, generates a new version of the film on the fly every time the algorithm is run. Dawes’s system selects from a database of 30 hours of new interviews with Eno and 500 hours of film from his personal archive and, following a system of rules set down by the filmmakers with code, creating a new film. According to the filmmakers, there are 52 quintillion (that is, 52 billion billion) possible combinations, which means the chances of Brain One generating two exact copies of “Eno” are so small as to be functionally zero.This method is unusual, even unique, among feature-length films. Movies are linear media, designed to begin at the beginning and proceed in an orderly, predictable fashion until the end. The same footage appears in the same order every time you watch.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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    Mary Martin, Who Gave Many Music Stars Their Start, Dies at 85

    Her loyalty to artists and her eye for talent made her a force in a male-dominated business. Among her accomplishments: introducing Bob Dylan to the Band.Mary Martin, a Grammy-winning talent scout, manager and record executive who helped start the careers of a long list of future legends, including Leonard Cohen, Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell — and who introduced Bob Dylan to the Band — died on July 4 in Nashville. She was 85.Mikayla Lewis, a documentary filmmaker and close friend, said she died in a hospice from complications of cancer.Among the musicians whose work exists somewhere between rock, country, folk and Americana, Ms. Martin was a legend in her own right, widely respected for her fierce loyalty to artists and her keen eye for budding talent.“She saw the bumpkin in me, and she also saw something that was going to develop,” Mr. Crowell said in an interview. “She was one of those people who just said, ‘Shut up and let me show you something of the world that you may not have seen.’”Ms. Martin and Rodney Crowell in a scene from “Mary Martin: Music Maven,” a forthcoming documentary. Ms. Martin helped Mr. Crowell get his start. “She saw the bumpkin in me,” he said, “and she also saw something that was gonna develop.”Mikayla Lewis/ “Mary Martin: Music Maven”A chain smoker with a keen love of football, she seemed to know everyone, and she had a knack for being in the right place at the right time.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