Aurelia Butler

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    ‘Compensation’ Review: Still Rebellious

    Finally getting a theatrical run, Zeinabu irene Davis’s 1999 film about two Black couples in Chicago in two different eras earns its landmark status.As a word, “Compensation” evokes labor. In the director Zeinabu irene Davis’s beautifully woven drama of the same name, work does get its close-ups. But it is the loves, labors and vulnerabilities two couples in two different eras experience that make this black-and-white film from 1999 such an elegant and presciently inventive work.Michelle A. Banks, a pioneering deaf theater actor, portrays both Malindy, a dressmaker in 1910, and Malaika, an aspiring graphic designer in the 1990s. John Earl Jelks (“Exhibiting Forgiveness”) plays Arthur, a migrant up from Mississippi, and Nico, a children’s librarian in contemporary Chicago.Each couple meets sweet on the shore of Lake Michigan. (Scenes were shot at Indiana Dunes National Park.) With a fishing rod strapped to his back, a mandolin in his hand and a straw hat atop his head, Arthur looks like a folk troubadour as he heads toward Malindy and her young friend Tildy (Nirvana Cobb) napping nearby. He asks Malindy if she wants some of the fish he’s caught. After trying to make herself understood by signing, Malindy writes on a chalkboard that she can’t hear. Arthur looks at the sign and tells her sheepishly he can’t read. It’s an impossibly poignant moment in a film about the intersections of the deaf and the hearing worlds, the Black middle and working classes, but also the educated and the soon-to-be-educated.For Nico and Malaika’s encounter, the film leans on a bit of rom-com charm. (“Compensation” was written by Marc Arthur Chéry, the director’s frequent collaborator and spouse.) Looking serious, Malaika moves through tai chi forms, Nico jogs by, smiles, stops, jogs back, beaming. She is not impressed as playful thought-bubble intertitles make plain.Davis uses the form of early silent movies to evocative and economic effect. How do you shoot a period picture on a tight budget? Imbue rich archival stills with the sounds of life — babies gurgling, horses clomping, train whistles sounding. Add a beguiling musical score while you’re at it. Scenes of the early 1900s are buoyed by the composer-pianist Reginald R. Robinson’s ragtime notes; the late ’90s by Atiba Y. Jali’s percussive, African-centered grooves. (The movie is open captioned.)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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    Souleymane Cissé, Celebrated Malian Filmmaker, Dies at 84

    He won multiple awards during his 50-year career, including the jury prize at the Cannes Film Festival, and spent his life championing African cinema.Souleymane Cissé, an award-winning writer and director who became the first Black African filmmaker to win the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, died on Wednesday in Bamako, Mali. He was 84.His death was confirmed by François Margolin, a French film producer and a close friend of Mr. Cissé’s.Mr. Cissé had just appeared at a news conference on Wednesday morning to present two prizes ahead of the Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou, known as Fespaco, where he had been set to head the jury.After the news conference — where he was “talking and joking” — Mr. Cissé went to take a nap and didn’t wake up, Mr. Margolin said.Mr. Cissé was catapulted to worldwide fame with the release in 1987 of “Yeelen” (“Light” in his native Bambara). The film won the jury prize at Cannes and was nominated as the best foreign film in the 1989 Spirit Awards. The director Martin Scorsese called the film “one of the great revelatory experiences of my moviegoing life.”Mr. Cissé had been energetic until the end of his life, Mr. Margolin said, working and traveling around the world.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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    Drake’s Tentative Comeback, Plus: New Music From the Weeknd and More

    Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTubeLast week saw the release of “Some Sexy Songs 4 U,” the collaborative album from Drake and the Toronto R&B singer and songwriter PartyNextDoor, a longtime collaborator. For the most part, the sound is a vintage one for Drake, feeling something like a retreat to a comfort zone: moody heartbreak soul bathed in self-loathing and suspicion.It’s an album that, from a distance, appears to exist in a space totally parallel to the dominant narrative of his last year, which is the toxic and very popular beef he’s had with Kendrick Lamar, which seemed to culminate this month with Lamar’s five Grammy wins for “Not Like Us,” followed by his performance of the song at the Super Bowl halftime show.But there are a handful of songs on this new album that suggest Drake is already looking at musical pathways forward, or away, from that bumpy stretch.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Drake’s post-Kendrick predicament and the ways he might move on. Plus: a host of promising new albums that have brightened up the beginning of the year from artists like the Weeknd, Central Cee, Oklou, Skaiwater and OsamaSon.Guest:Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica.Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. More

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    ‘The Quiet Ones’ Review: Getting Swindled in Copenhagen

    Inspired by a real heist, this Danish thriller has more moving parts than it can keep track of.The Danish heist thriller “The Quiet Ones” centers on a big score that involves using garbage trucks to block the major roads in Copenhagen to buy the thieves enough time to raid a cash-handling firm. The many moving parts get the better of the filmmakers.The director, Frederik Louis Hviid, opens the movie with a display of self-defeating virtuosity: a robbery filmed in a single take entirely from the inside of an armored van. (That vantage point stops making sense once the drivers exit the vehicle, but Hviid doesn’t seem like the kind of filmmaker to cut away from a showboating shot for the sake of narrative logic.)One year later, Slimani (Reda Kateb), the man responsible for the van robbery, recruits Kasper (Gustav Giese) to game out the break-in at the cash-handling firm. Kasper is a family man and a boxer, and his competitive streak inspires him to maximize the take. Slimani is a hardened criminal made less menacing by Kateb’s faltering rhythms in English, the gang’s lingua franca. The bulk of “The Quiet Ones” is set in 2008, occasioning a lot of dubiously relevant references to the financial crisis.The heist takes up more than 20 minutes of screen time, but Hviid — who has to juggle the robbers at the firm, the garbage truck drivers, the police and a security guard (Amanda Collin) — makes a hash of the competing perspectives. The road-blocking gambit is barely shown, and Collin’s character, fleshed out specifically for this moment, is forgotten for much of the sequence.The theft that inspired the movie has been called one of the biggest in Denmark’s history. It deserved a sleeker film.The Quiet OnesNot rated. In Danish, English and Swedish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Old Guy’ Review: The Veteran and the Rookie

    Christoph Waltz plays an aging hit man begrudgingly training his replacement in Simon West’s stale action movie.“Old Guy” is billed as an action movie but it is actually more of a fantasy film. It imagines a world in which an aging hit man kills his targets without consequence before retreating to nightclubs where scads of beautiful young women compete to accompany him home.Presumably Danny Dolinski (Christoph Waltz) has been enjoying such a lifestyle for decades. But when the movie begins, his bosses consider his contract killing career to be approaching its natural conclusion because of the joint pain afflicting his trigger finger. Dolinski would prefer to stay in the game, but Opal, the director of The Company (Ann Akinjirin) insists that he serve as a mentor to Wihlborg (Cooper Hoffman), a promising, and youthful, assassin.So begins a familiar story of the veteran and the rookie, updated to include snide observations about Gen-Z style trends. Between this odd couple, Wihlborg is designed as sympathetic — he is given an arbitrary back story in foster care — but Dolinski is clearly meant as our hero, joined by a damsel in a low-cut dress (Lucy Liu). The director Simon West strains to frame Dolinski as a witty cad whose embittered demeanor (and murderous vocation) belie a sturdy moral code.Beyond the stale plot and groaners that make up the dialogue, “Old Guy” suffers from haphazard pacing, as if every third scene was cut out in postproduction. Watching, one wonders who this movie is for — even within the target demographic stated in the title.Old GuyRated R for guys shooting guns. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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    ‘Millers in Marriage’ Review: Squall in the Family

    Three siblings navigate midlife crises in Edward Burns’s glossy look at marriages in transition.Rich people have problems too, is one takeaway from “Millers in Marriage,” the 14th feature from the writer and director Edward Burns. A roundelay of discontent, disappointment and disappearing dreams, this smoothly executed, coolly controlled relationship drama observes three siblings on the wrong side of 50 and, clearly, the right side of the property market.All are artists of one sort or another, and all reside in homes that appear ripped from the pages of Architectural Digest. Andy (Burns), a glumly separated painter, is torn between his attraction to a straight-shooting, happily divorced Englishwoman (a perfect Minnie Driver) and the renewed attentions of his volatile wife (Morena Baccarin). His sister Maggie (Julianna Margulies) is a novelist whose facility at churning out high-society beach reads isn’t helping her husband (a dour Campbell Scott) dislodge his writer’s block. The third sibling, Eve (a warm and engaging Gretchen Mol), a onetime rock musician, is deeply regretting the abandonment of her career to have babies with her former manager (Patrick Wilson), now a perpetually sozzled grouch.Who better, then, to pry Eve loose than a rangy, rakish music journalist (Benjamin Bratt) whose game includes unironic hat-wearing and — like a dispiriting number of men in his age bracket — the unembarrassed deployment of Stephen Stills lyrics?Cutting elegantly back and forth among the siblings, “Millers in Marriage” is a sincere, sometimes trite attempt to address midlife drift and late-marriage frustrations, its empty nests gaping beneath gleaming countertops and gauzy photography. Its characters may be stressed out, but its rhythms are leisurely, the skill of the actors mostly countering the weaknesses in the script. For Burns, though, the difficulty may be getting audiences to invest in the unhappiness of people who wake up each morning in square footage like this.Millers in MarriageRated R for alcoholism, adultery and enviable curb appeal. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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    ‘Ex-Husbands’ Review: Three Unweddings and a Funeral

    In this Griffin Dunne dramedy, a father and his sons face different kinds of relationship troubles at the same time.The Pearce men have lost the knack for marriage in Noah Pritzker’s gentle, grounded dramedy “Ex-Husbands.” Nick Pearce’s upcoming wedding has hit a snag; his dad, Peter, is facing fresh divorce papers; and Peter’s own father abruptly separated from his spouse of many years.Nick’s troubles are especially awkward because his bachelor party is proceeding as scheduled in Tulum, Mexico. Peter is flying there as well to lick his wounds (though his son would rather he didn’t). That sets the family up for revelations about one another, but more affectingly, a mix of small kindnesses.Griffin Dunne effortlessly anchors the film as Peter, a dentist who gets along with everyone and worries over his sons, a.k.a. “the boys.” Nick (James Norton) is depressed to be still waiting tables at 35 years old. His clean-cut younger brother, Mickey (Miles Heizer), has a bewildering fling on the trip and helps hide Nick’s big secret: His fiancée has cold feet.The Pearces and company bum around in Tulum, where Nick can barely write an explanatory letter to his friends and family. Pritzker directs genuine performances and has an ear for conversations with the ring of everyday emotion, like when Peter advises Nick’s friends (“You guys”) to enjoy each other’s company while they can.A death in the family leads to another round of male bonding and reconciliation to life’s disappointments. Even if the film’s wisdom is not earth-shattering, it radiates a kind of paternal salve that lives up to Peter’s best intentions.Ex-HusbandsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 38. minutes. In theaters. More

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    The New ‘Captain America’ Movie Isn’t Great. But Don’t Call Him a D.E.I. Hire.

    Anthony Mackie picks up the shield at a potentially awkward time. But there’s one way Disney can do right by him and the next generation of Marvel stars.“Captain America: Brave New World” is a mediocre-at-best movie, a roughly cobbled together film that pales in comparison to the early days of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s still better than the franchise’s most recent run of disasters, and its strong opening weekend at the box office seems to have restored some momentum to the M.C.U. But the most remarkable part of this film is the irony of how it lands in the political moment: “Brave New World” features a Black iteration of the quintessential American superhero a month into an administration that has made eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion one of its first priorities.In a way, Disney’s timing regarding diversity was always going to be off. For most of the run of one of the highest-grossing media franchises of all time, diversity was an afterthought. For the first decade of the M.C.U., over the course of more than a dozen films, the heroes carrying the franchise — the central protagonists — were exclusively white men, until Chadwick Boseman led “Black Panther” in 2018.So, yeah, Disney started out a little behind.But when it came down to the handoff of the star-spangled shield from the blond-haired and blue-eyed Steve Rogers (played by Chris Evans) to Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie), Disney actually built a steady platform for the M.C.U.’s first Black Captain America to lead his own film.The 2021 Marvel TV series “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” provided the space for Sam to develop into Captain America in earnest, not just as a kind of M.C.U. diversity hire.Sam’s transformation into the Captain could have easily been the M.C.U.’s version of “The Blind Side,” a tale of a Black man’s triumph under the tutelage of the true, original white hero. He also could have been the Uncle Tom Captain, a servile Black man unquestioningly putting his life on the line.But “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier” explored Sam’s reticence in taking on the mantle of Captain America, given how his Blackness so often marginalized him, made him a target or turned him into a stereotype in the eyes of some of his fellow citizens. The show also introduced a Black super soldier named Isaiah Bradley, who received the super serum like Steve Rogers. But Isaiah never became the lauded hero Steve did; he was made a prisoner and a science project, jailed and experimented on for 30 years. He’s a reminder to Sam of what can happen as a Black man in American, no matter his standing, his strength or his title.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