Aurelia Butler

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    ‘The Shrouds’ Review: For Cronenberg, Grief Is an Obsession

    The director’s latest stars Vincent Cassel as an entrepreneur who mourns the death of his wife by inventing technology that surveils her entombed body.In David Cronenberg’s latest film, “The Shrouds,” the lines between life and death, emotion and pathology, biology and technology, become blurred. Even the movie’s tone lands in a liminal space where gravitas slips into comedy — I couldn’t help but snicker when someone tells the main character, “Karsh, don’t crash!”A dry macabre humor has long run through Cronenberg’s work, and the uncertainty behind some of his intentions here creates thought-provoking ambiguity. Since an important source of inspiration was the death of Cronenberg’s wife from cancer, in 2017, are we really supposed to find this funny? I would argue, yes — among other details in keeping with the Canadian director’s approach, a woman is revealed to find conspiracy theories sexually arousing — but there is still enough doubt to mess with viewers’ heads.The aforementioned Karsh (an understated Vincent Cassel, in his third Cronenberg movie after “A Dangerous Method” and the terrific “Eastern Promises”) is a Tesla-driving Toronto entrepreneur. His business, GraveTech, involves burying the dead in shrouds that transmit images to screen-embedded headstones. At his cemetery, you can, in effect, watch a livestream of a decomposing body. (This is not so far-fetched, considering recent developments in both wearable technology and invasive voyeurism.)Karsh is personally invested in this corpse cam because his wife, Becca (Diane Kruger), died of cancer four years earlier. She is buried in one of his shrouds, and he can check on her decay’s progress.This we all learn in a surreal introductory scene in which Karsh explains GraveTech to a lunch date, Myrna (Jennifer Dale), at a restaurant overlooking his wired-up cemetery. He even shows her Becca’s feed, which might not beat brandy as a digestif.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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    ‘Queens of Drama’ Review: A Half-Century Feud

    Alexis Langlois’s musical romance is an unruly story of a love-hate relationship between two ambitious musicians.In the French musical romance “Queens of Drama,” the offices of the Starlet Factory brim with hopefuls warming up for a singing competition show when the punk rocker Billie Kohler (Gio Ventura) struts in. Aching for pop stardom herself, Mimi Madamour (Louiza Aura), all curls and doe-eyed warmth, remarks to Billie that they are each wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with an image of an edgy 1980s singer.What looked to be a moment of an insta-crush turns into a snarky exchange, ending with each petulantly sticking a tongue out at the other. In “Queens of Drama,” these soon-to-be tumultuous lovers meet more contemptuous than cute.The year of that encounter is 2005. But the director Alexis Langlois’s unruly, ideas-freighted romance actually begins in 2055 as Mimi’s No. 1 fan, SteevyShady (Bilal Hassani), recounts the couple’s vexed love story. “This is not about me,” Steevy, a video influencer, says with flair. But of course it is. And it’s SteevyShady’s role in the extended flashback that turns the queer romance into a meta-ride in pop-culture obsession, with nods to every letter in the L.G.B.T.Q.+ rainbow, and considerations both fond and disparaging of punk and pop music.With playful visual flourishes, a willfully garish palette and winks galore (including one to the French feminist writer Monique Wittig), Langlois’s debut has stylistic ambition for days. But it’s not as genre-fluent as “Love Lies Bleeding” and “I Saw the TV Glow,” or as swoon inducing as its volatile couple deserves.Queens of DramaNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘The President’s Wife’ Review: Would Madame Get Your Vote?

    Catherine Deneuve plays the former French first lady Bernadette Chirac in this puckish, highly fictionalized biopic with a pop-feminist edge.From 1995 to 2007, the conservative (if politically capricious) Jacques Chirac was the president of France. But, “The President’s Wife” isn’t all that interested in Chirac, played as a clueless yet charismatic charlatan by Michel Vuillermoz. The first lady, Bernadette Chirac, gets the spotlight, with the French film icon Catherine Deneuve bringing glamour and droll gusto to the part.Spanning the years of Chirac’s presidency, this low-key comedy by Léa Domenach tracks the evolution of Bernadette’s public image from scorned spouse in kitschy-colored skirt suits to beloved girl-boss in modern Chanel threads. A Greek chorus of church singers and a disclaimer in the opening title cards tell us that this quasi-biopic is highly fictionalized. No, Bernadette didn’t secretly meet with rival politicians in confessional booths or frequent nightclubs with pop stars to rally fund-raising for her children’s hospital charity.The film takes creative leaps in scenes like these as part of its puckish approach to mythmaking. Though other seemingly absurd moments are ripped straight from the TV news archives, such as her visit with Hillary Clinton to a primary school in central France (Deneuve is transposed onto footage of that real-life encounter with the help of green-screen tech).Belittled by rivals and family members alike — including her daughter Claude (Sara Giraudeau), who is one of her father’s advisers — Bernadette teams up with her chief of staff, Bernard Niquet (Denis Podalydès), to revamp her political career. The duo’s scheming and easy rapport make up much of the film’s brisk humor, which at times can be a bit too culturally specific to resonate fully with non-French viewers. And while Deneuve brings a wonderful blend of neuroses and feigned indifference to her character, the film’s pop-feminist through line dulls the comedy, creating a more conventionally celebratory portrait.The President’s WifeNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘The Legend of Ochi’ Review: The Great, Familiar Adventure

    A 1980s throwback movie about a teenager who sets out on a journey with a mysterious being.There was a pleasing kind of weirdness and danger to a lot of children’s entertainment in the 1980s. Extraterrestrials and fantastical creatures populated the waking dreamscapes of children in those movies, teaching them lessons and helping them to find the courage to face more pedestrian real-life monsters. And because effects hadn’t gotten all digital, even the best of those nonhuman creatures often felt a little janky, like souped-up versions of puppets you might create out of the random bits of craft supplies from your grandma’s closet.It’s very clear that “The Legend of Ochi,” Isaiah Saxon’s debut feature as a writer and director, is an elaborately designed and very effective nostalgia piece for the movies of that time, starting from the title design, which renders each letter in a kind of glowing orange yellow. The movies you’ll think of while you’re watching it are the ones that stuck with you most: For me, “The Neverending Story” and “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial.” Here the creatures are a little more smoothed out, but the Frank Oz influence is obvious.Those creatures are the Ochi, which look like a cross between tree monkeys and Yoda. In the world of this movie, they are secluded creatures that live in the woods, keeping away from human civilization. The people of Carpathia fear them, hunt them and teach their children to do the same. One man, Maxim (Willem Dafoe), trains the local boys — including the orphaned Petro (Finn Wolfhard), whom he’s adopted as his own son — in the best ways to find and kill the Ochi.But Maxim won’t allow his own daughter, Yuri (Helena Zengel), to join in, for reasons that have a lot more to do with him than with her. Angry and disaffected, Yuri seethes mostly alone, and longs to talk to her mother, who left the family a long time ago. It doesn’t help that Petro idolizes Maxim and is rude to Yuri in front of the other boys. Then, one night, Yuri discovers a baby Ochi who seems lost and injured. Determined to return the creature to its home, she sets off on a great adventure, with Maxim soon hot on her trail.It is not hard to spot the derivative nature of this plot, with all its classic ’80s movie elements: the creatures the humans would rather kill than understand; the divorced parents; the disaffected young person; the hero’s journey. I don’t mean that in a bad way, though: “The Legend of Ochi” is designed to pay tribute to a kind of movie that rarely gets made anymore, even though the success of the similarly derivative Netflix show “Stranger Things” suggests that there’s an appetite for it. Echoing tropes of that era is one way to remind us of what we used to see down at the multiplex.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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    ‘Invention’ Review: Patent Pensive

    In this strange experimental feature from Courtney Stephens and Callie Hernandez, a grieving daughter investigates the mysterious gadget her father left behind.“Invention” is the sort of D.I.Y. project that’s tough not to admire, even if its aims remain stubbornly private. This strange, personal movie is a mind meld between the experimental filmmaker Courtney Stephens (“Terra Femme”) and the actress Callie Hernandez (“Alien: Covenant”). Stephens is credited as director, while the two share a “film by” credit.Hernandez plays a barely disguised version of herself, “Carrie Fernandez,” who has just lost her father and is now contending with the logistics. The father character, inspired by Hernandez’s own dad, trained as a doctor but later turned to hawking crackpot treatments. He also had a “different” way of handling personal finances, an executor (James N. Kienitz Wilkins) tactfully reminds Carrie. For a start, he conducted business under multiple names.Carrie’s father has bequeathed her the patent for an “electromagnetic healing device,” a contraption that we’re told the Food and Drug Administration has left in legal limbo. Much of “Invention” consists of scenes between Carrie and her father’s associates as she weighs whether the machine was legit — and what to do about it even if it was. “Did you ever use it?” she asks one of the investors (Tony Torn). “Ah, no,” he replies. “I got a stent.”Video clips of Hernandez’s real father pitching treatments on TV and theorizing on how “cells are like your cellphone” are interspersed throughout. The dialogue and the imagery allude to transcendental writers. (“Invention” was shot on 16-millimeter film in Massachusetts.) Periodically, Stephens will cut to moments in which she and the actors break the fourth wall. Whether these meta elements should mean much to those who weren’t involved may be beside the point. “Invention” is committed to finding its own wavelength.InventionNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 12 minutes. In theaters. More

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    Tim Mohr, DJ and German Translator Who Ghostwrote Paul Stanley’s Memoir, Dies at 55

    An American who had lived abroad, he sought out books by up-and-coming German writers, while ghostwriting memoirs for rock stars like Paul Stanley.Tim Mohr, an American who worked as a disc jockey and freelance writer in Berlin in the 1990s, diving deep into the city’s fervent post-Communist underground, before using his experiences to turn out sensitive, award-winning English translations of works by up-and-coming German writers, died on March 31 at his home in Brooklyn. He was 55.His wife, Erin Clarke, said the cause was pancreatic cancer.Mr. Mohr arrived in Germany in 1992 with a yearlong grant to teach English. He did not speak a word of German, so the program sent him to Berlin, a melting pot of cultures where English was often the second language.He stayed for six years. By day, he worked as a journalist for local English-language magazines, including the Berlin edition of Time Out; at night, he was a D.J. in the city’s ever-expanding club scene.He later remarked that his time spent traveling among Berlin’s many underground subcultures gave him a thorough education in a form of street German that set him up to work as a translator.One of his first major translation projects, in 2008, was “Feuchtgebiete” (“Wetlands”), a sexually explicit coming-of-age novel by Charlotte Roche packed with raunchy, idiomatic slang that only someone with Mr. Mohr’s background could render in English.“I read the book for the eventual U.S. publisher when they were considering buying the rights,” he told The Financial Times in 2012. “And I said to the editor, ‘You know, you’ll be hard pressed to find an academic translator who is as familiar with terminology related to anal sex as a former Berlin club D.J. is.’”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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    Rihanna’s Savage x Fenty Bridal Collection Teases Fans Yet Again

    Savage x Fenty’s new collection is the latest entry on a list of times the singer and her partner, ASAP Rocky, have alluded to being engaged.On Tuesday, Rihanna announced a new bridal collection from her lingerie company, Savage x Fenty, with a retro-style video on Instagram. Wearing a lacy pink lingerie set paired with matching thigh-high stockings and a mini veil, all from the collection, she posed beside a massive wedding cake on top of a table before kicking the cake to the ground.The new collection drew a great deal of attention, at least some of which was because it seemed to allude to a pressing matter for her fervent fan base: Is Rihanna getting married?The collection arrived the same day that ASAP Rocky, her longtime partner, appeared in a Vogue cover story in which he gushed about her. Rumors of an official engagement, or of even a pending wedding, have frequently followed the couple. And for many fans, the visuals of the singer in a veil felt like foreshadowing, most likely egged on by her captioning a photo from the collection with “all you gotta do is say yes.”Representatives for Rihanna and Savage x Fenty did not respond when asked directly if the singer was engaged, but fans took to the comments section of her posts to speculate.“Crying imagining Rihanna’s wedding dress,” Stephanie Tinsley, a 27-year-old filmmaker from Chicago, commented under the singer’s post.“It would be the most fashionable wedding of the decade,” Ms. Tinsley said of the couple, who are known for taking fashion risks.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 Concert Cold War in a Quiet Enclave

    When Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. designed Forest Hills Gardens, he was trying to bring the respite of an English village into the bustle of New York City.A landscape architect and city planner like his father, one of Central Park’s designers, Mr. Olmsted laid out tree-lined alphabetical streets and open spaces in a pocket of Queens about nine miles east of Times Square. In 1909, these were not mere aesthetic choices: Forest Hills Gardens was an import of the English garden city, a turn-of-the-century movement in urban planning rooted in a utopian ethic.Mr. Olmsted planned for the Tudor-style houses to thoughtfully integrate with their manicured landscapes, for winding pathways to promote leisurely strolls and for curved residential streets to discourage vehicles from passing through.He did not plan, however, for the Australian rock band King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. Or for the sold-out shows by the Irish singer Hozier. Or really for anything about the concert venue that was once a storied tennis stadium and is now rattling both windows and nerves in the neighborhood.“It does disrupt the calm,” Mitch Palminteri, a Forest Hills Gardens resident, said at a recent community board meeting. “I don’t want to close my window on a summer night.”Others like what the concerts represent.“Music is about community,” said Joseph Cooney, who lives in adjacent Forest Hills. “We have it in spades in this neighborhood. How can we ever let that go away?”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