Aurelia Butler

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    ‘Despicable Me 4’ Review: This Time They’re Superheroes

    The crew is back, but this time around they need to lie low. Sort of.If one wonders how a franchise on its sixth film in under 15 years (counting spinoffs) could still have any good ideas, one solution, apparently, is to simply throw all ideas at the screen. That’s the approach taken in “Despicable Me 4,” the latest, messily passable iteration of the deliriously successful franchise that follows the adventures of the reformed supervillain Gru.This one, helmed by the animated franchise’s longtime director and producer Chris Renaud, is a stream of mostly high-octane B-plots: Members of Gru’s family are struggling to adjust to life in witness protection after a new villain (Will Ferrell) becomes hellbent on revenge; Gru reluctantly mentors his teenage neighbor, who aspires to villainy; the Minions become lab-grown superheroes; and so on.As the movie noisily stretches itself out in too many directions, it largely sheds any meaningful charm or heart and struggles to cohere around a central story with actual stakes. It extends on a problem in the franchise that began with the third film, which relied more on gimmicky narrative and visual pyrotechnics and empty slapstick to keep things afloat. (What’s better than one Gru? Two!)There’s still occasional fun to be had and a budget that’s clearly put to use, but we’re mostly here, it seems, to keep the Minion cash cow chugging along. In all of the chaos, you may find your mind drifting off to the better, simpler days of the first film that set off the enterprise, when it was just a story of a bad guy gone good, but a genuine story nonetheless.Despicable Me 4Rated PG for Minion-related violence. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Seven Samurai’: Masterless Warriors in a Cinematic Masterpiece

    Akira Kurosawa’s epic has always been known for its action-film artistry, but there is emotional heft and nuance as well.Few movies have been more influential than “Seven Samurai,” an existential action film directed by Akira Kurosawa that, at longer than three hours, seemingly muscled its way into existence.“Seven Samurai,” made in Japan in the early 1950s, was by far the most expensive film then made in the country. And it required the longest shoot, in part because the exhausted director needed hospitalization. Trimmed by nearly one-third, it was introduced to the world at the 1954 Venice International Film Festival, sharing the Silver Lion award with three other movies.The abridged version opened in the United States in 1956 as “The Magnificent Seven,” a title soon to be appropriated by Hollywood. The full version did not arrive until 1982.Rarely screened since, Kurosawa’s masterpiece is showing — complete with intermission — for two weeks at Film Forum in a new 4K restoration. Its power is undiminished.The U.S. occupation of Japan ended only months before Kurosawa and his team began planning a film that, however ambiguously, would reassert Japan’s martial spirit. Production of “Seven Samurai” coincided with an equally elemental movie, allegorizing Japan’s nuclear martyrdom, “Godzilla” — both at the same studio, Toho.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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    Niclas Larsson, Film Director, Waits for Success in New York’s Garment District

    The film director grew up in Sweden with a love of American movies. Now he would like you to see his surreal debut, “Mother, Couch,” in a theater.If old age is not for snowflakes — well, try directing a 90-minute feature film about old age in the iPhone era, as Niclas Larsson has done.Mr. Larsson, 33, greeted me on a recent morning into his 15th-floor terraced apartment in a former button factory in Manhattan, looking eerily like his dog, a blond lurcher named Ted, the way many owners do. He had settled here, the garment district of Midtown Manhattan, after rejecting “hipper” quarters in Brooklyn and the financial district.A native Swede with a deep appreciation of Americana, he was offering strong black coffee and strong opinions on where his new movie, “Mother, Couch,” should be seen, like the Angelika theater downtown, where it opens on Friday, and the Nuart in Los Angeles.“Hollywood is like, What’s going on?” Mr. Larsson said, considering the summer box office, which has thus far been a faint shadow of last year’s Barbenheimer. “No one knows what’s going on. But I want to give the nerds the option of going to the theater. It’s made for a theater. It’s shot on 35 — it’s all the film nerdy things in there.”“You know what also about a theater that we forget is the God perspective of people telling us a story,” he went on. “People forget — the big shadow plays they did around the fires in the Stone Age? They did them large, because it’s important.”“Mother, Couch,” based on “Mamma i soffa,” a 2020 Swedish novel by Jerker Virdborg, and shot to some local excitement in Charlotte, N.C., indeed takes on large themes, including mortality, parenthood and that Gen Z bugaboo, capitalism.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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    5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Wayne Shorter

    “He always was a genius,” Herbie Hancock says of his friend and collaborator. Hear a sampling of that genius in these 13 tracks.This month we feature Wayne Shorter, the iconoclastic composer and tenor saxophonist whose work with Art Blakey, Miles Davis, Weather Report and through his own solo discography has influenced generations of like-minded visionaries to push the boundaries of jazz. Since his death in 2023 at 89, it’s felt like he’s still around. That’s because his music always felt so otherworldly and progressive, as if it were beamed in from outer space or somewhere deep into the future.Shorter rose to prominence in the late 1950s and early ’60s as a member of Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, where his husky and complex sound proved a worthy complement to Blakey’s propulsive rhythms. By 1964, Miles came calling: He wanted Shorter to join his quintet — an all-star squad that included Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams — but it was no easy sell. Davis “had even gone as far as telephoning Art Blakey’s backstage dressing areas to speak to the saxophonist,” the author Ian Carr wrote in his definitive Miles Davis biography. As a member of the quintet, Shorter once said, “it wasn’t the bish-bash, sock-’em-dead routine we had with Blakey, with every solo a climax. With Miles, I felt like a cello, I felt viola, I felt liquid, dot-dash … and colors started really coming.”Shorter was thought to be a catalyst for one of Davis’s most fruitful creative periods. “All of us wrote some songs, I wrote a couple of things myself, but the main writer: Wayne,” Hancock told me over the phone recently. “If we were going to go to a recording session, Miles would ask Wayne, ‘Did you bring the book?’ Once in a while, we would play things written by Charlie Parker or Dizzy Gillespie. But most of the things we recorded were written by Wayne.” The quintet broke up in 1968; Shorter worked with Davis until 1970.In 1971, Shorter helped pioneer jazz fusion, releasing the first album by the group Weather Report with the keyboardist Joe Zawinul. The group created a genre-bending style of music that incorporated jazz, rock, funk and improvised electronic arrangements. By the late ’80s and ’90s, Shorter’s output didn’t slow down, but his focus shifted to deeper spiritual enlightenment, which led to a deeper friendship with Hancock, who was also a practicing Buddhist. In recent years, even though they’d been collaborators for several decades, Hancock and Shorter became best friends.“He always was a genius, just an amazing human being,” Hancock said. “Most jazz players are composers, too. But I would say that the majority of us who are still living and were around during the major part of Wayne’s life, if we had to pick someone to be No. 1, I think we all would probably pick Wayne.“Even though I know Wayne passed away,” he continued, “he’s been in my heart for a long time and he’s still there. So in a certain way I don’t see him anymore. But he hasn’t died for me. It’s not gone forever. He’s still there.”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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    ‘This Closeness’ Review: So Near, So Far Away

    An indie comedy set in an Airbnb leans into the ways we distance ourselves from one another.City living presupposes closeness. Even when you’re alone in your apartment, dozens of people are likely to be sitting, cooking, napping, fighting or having sex within feet of you, separated by walls that are usually way too thin. But to live an urban life without getting overstimulated requires developing an artificial sense of distance, the ability to be alone in public, to ignore others while maintaining a sense of alertness. A pair of noise-canceling headphones. A bit of tunnel vision.“This Closeness,” a microbudget indie directed by Kit Zauhar, wittily examines the ways we create and avoid closeness in modern life, both by choice and, especially when we’re young, necessity. The main couple at its center, Tessa (Zauhar) and Ben (Zane Pais), are New Yorkers who’ve rented a room in an Airbnb in Philadelphia so Ben can attend his five-year high school reunion. It’s the kind of Airbnb you get when you can’t or don’t want to spend much money: They’ll have a bedroom to themselves, but share the bathroom and common spaces with a host, a stranger named Adam (Ian Edlund).Sharing space with a stranger isn’t all that weird when you’re a recent college graduate who probably has lived with at least a few randomly selected roommates in the recent past. But viewed objectively, that’s still weird — proximity without closeness, made weirder to Tessa and Ben because their temporary roommate, Adam, is an awkward guy who claims his roommate Ian actually listed the place, but isn’t there at the moment. (It’s one of the film’s inside jokes that Adam is played by Ian Edlund.)What’s going on? Normal 20-something stuff, really: fights and weirdness, tensions over how to split the refrigerator space and how long people take in the bathroom, moderately cruel jokes heard through too-thin walls. There’s also the kind of thoughtlessness you almost have to develop in order to survive proximity — Ben goes out to dinner with old friends and returns with one of them, Lizzy (Jessie Pinnick), in tow. Having been in shared living situations before, I recoiled reflexively at how much noise they made the instant they came through the door.All of “This Closeness” is set in the apartment, as much a smart budgetary choice as a formal one. The claustrophobic feeling is effective; the characters can escape, but we can’t. But in that small, bare apartment they’re having a rich array of interactions, both with the flesh-and-blood humans occupying the same space — Ben and Adam spar, in faux-politeness, over a malfunctioning air-conditioner in Ben and Tessa’s room — and with those outside its walls.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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    San Francisco’s Arts Institutions Are Slowly Building Back

    Although attendance remains down from prepandemic levels, the city’s arts groups are having some success getting audiences to return.On a recent clear day, visitors were wandering through the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to gawk at works by Yayoi Kusama and Alexander Calder, and, a few blocks away, making their way through the galleries at the Contemporary Jewish Museum and the Museum of the African Diaspora.That evening, music lovers poured in to Davies Symphony Hall to hear Esa-Pekka Salonen conduct the San Francisco Symphony and into the War Memorial Opera House across the street, where the San Francisco Opera was giving the American premiere of Kaija Saariaho’s “Innocence.”Although attendance at the city’s arts institutions remains down from prepandemic levels — with tourism, hotel occupancy and office attendance yet to fully recover — its cultural ecosystem has been showing signs of inching its way back.Arts organizations around the nation have been struggling to regain audiences since the pandemic, with Broadway attendance about 17 percent lower than before and precipitous declines at many regional theaters, museums, orchestras and opera companies.San Francisco has its own particular challenges: People are returning to work, but the city’s office buildings remain emptier than those in Los Angeles or New York. Fewer people are taking Bay Area Rapid Transit downtown; the number of riders exiting at downtown stations is still down by more than half since 2019.The city and its cultural organizations have been struggling to overcome what Thomas P. Campbell, director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, referred to as the “doom narrative,” the widespread media coverage of the city’s challenges, both real and exaggerated.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 Most Intriguing Animated Films You’ll Never See

    A digital book, “Drawing for Nothing,” highlights some of the best art from canceled animation projects like “Me and My Shadow.”Among fans of canceled animated film projects — and yes, there is such a fandom, and it’s enormous — “Me and My Shadow” is perhaps the most popular cartoon feature that never was.Greenlighted in 2010 by DreamWorks Animation, the film boasted a strong voice cast, including Bill Hader, Kate Hudson and Josh Gad, and a team of some of the industry’s top artists and animators. The filmmakers combined computer-generated and hand-drawn animation to create a lead character whose shadow had a mind and physicality all his own, at a time when few studios, including DreamWorks, were doing hand-drawn at all.“For a long time, whenever I had visitors at DreamWorks, I would pull up sequences from ‘Me and My Shadow’ and other things I was working on, like ‘Kung Fu Panda,’” said Rune Brandt Bennicke, a supervising animator on the film. “Without fail, it was the ‘Me and My Shadow’ stuff where they went, ‘Wow, that was amazing.’”Five years later, production was halted. “The reason we were given for canceling it was that the studio felt that its potential for box office was not what they wanted,” said Bennicke.Since then, however, interest in the phantom film has only grown. Would-be fans scour the internet for concept art and clips, post their own fan art and fan-made trailers, and discuss — and grouse about — what might have been. There are numerous YouTube shorts and supercuts about the film; a short collection of unfinished clips and concept art — titled “The CANCELLED DreamWorks Masterpiece …” — has garnered more than 3.5 million views.Shadow Dan, the timid hero’s outgoing alter ego in “Me and My Shadow,” had a mind and physicality all his own. DreamWorks, via Rune Brandt BennickeWe 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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    Robert Towne, Screenwriter of ‘Chinatown’ and More, Dies at 89

    Celebrated for his mastery of dialogue, he also contributed (though without credit) to the scripts of “Bonnie and Clyde” and “The Godfather.”Robert Towne, whose screenplay for Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown” won an Oscar, and whose work on that and other important films established him as one of the leading screenwriters of the so-called New Hollywood, died on Monday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 89.His publicist, Carri McClure, confirmed his death on Tuesday. She did not cite a cause.Mr. Towne’s Oscar was part of a phenomenal run. He was nominated for best-screenplay Oscars three years in a row; his “Chinatown” win, in 1974, came between nominations for “The Last Detail” and “Shampoo,” both directed by Hal Ashby. He had also worked as an uncredited script doctor on “Bonnie and Clyde” (1967) and “The Godfather” (1972).He was widely regarded as a master at writing dialogue, though he was less gifted at meeting deadlines — he was notorious for delivering long, unshapely scripts way past their due dates. The film historian David Thomson called him “a fascinating contradiction: in many ways idealistic, sentimental and very talented; in others a devout compromiser, a delayer, so insecure that he can sometimes seem devious.”Mr. Towne speaking at the Writers Guild Awards in Los Angeles in 2016.Phillip Faraone/Getty Images North AmericaMr. Towne later directed a few movies, and occasionally appeared onscreen, but he left his most lasting mark as a writer. And although he remained active into the 21st century, his reputation is based largely on the work he did in the 1970s.Beginning in the late 1960s with cutting-edge movies like “Midnight Cowboy” and “Easy Rider” and running through “Raging Bull” in 1980, the New Hollywood was a pinnacle for American directors, who followed the French auteur model of making idiosyncratic, personal movies, and also for talented screenwriters like Mr. Towne and a small army of gifted actors, like Jack Nicholson and Dustin Hoffman, who did not fit the old Hollywood mold.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