Aurelia Butler

More stories

  • 50 Shares189 Views

    in Movies

    ‘Brothers’ Review: Two-Bit Criminals

    Moke (Josh Brolin) is a reformed thief who gets roped into one last job with his twin brother, Jady (Peter Dinklage).For a road-trip buddy comedy, a greater crime than being unfunny is perhaps, amid all of the shenanigans, being dull. That is partly the feeling one is left with in the R-rated movie “Brothers,” which, even with an A-list cast, seems to move on autopilot through all of its pit stops.There’s the slapstick violence; there’s a sexually excited orangutan named Samuel; there’s Glenn Close as a two-bit criminal scaring a naked Josh Brolin off a motel balcony. But one is ultimately left with the prevailing feeling that this comedy, directed by Max Barbakow, is not particularly bad, but rather just fine.In a one-last-job setup, Moke (Brolin), a reformed thief trying to go straight, teams up with his twin brother, Jady (Peter Dinklage), to track down a stash of valuable jewels. Family issues between the brothers get in the way, and then get complicated when their long-lost mother (Close) comes into the picture.Their road-movie antics all play out with little comic imagination, making for a disappointing answer to the invigorating originality of Barbakow’s last comedy, “Palm Springs.” Brolin and Dinklage might seem like a magnetic pair of bickering twins — and they are what is keeping this ship from sinking — but mostly it’s dismaying to see such strong dramatic actors stifled in such a sedate comedy.The same can be said of the entire cast, which includes Marisa Tomei as a kooky lover and Brendan Fraser as the villain on their heels. The silver lining is seeing Fraser in a comedic role, showing flashes of that easy charisma from his blockbuster days.BrothersRated R for language, sexual content and drug use. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. Watch on Amazon Prime Video. More

  • 175 Shares159 Views

    in Music

    Liam Payne Tributes Pour in From Charlie Puth, the Backstreet Boys and Other Musicians

    Hours after news broke that Payne had fallen from a hotel balcony in Buenos Aires, his fans and collaborators shared their shock and grief.The pop world on Thursday was struggling to come to terms with the passing of Liam Payne, 31, who rose to fame as a member of the British boy band One Direction. Payne died on Wednesday after falling from the balcony of a hotel in Argentina.Fans gathered outside the hotel in Buenos Aires where Payne had been staying to mourn his death, including by singing One Direction hits, while on social media many posted tributes and memories.Some of pop music’s biggest stars did the same. Charlie Puth, the pop singer and songwriter, posted on Instagram, that he was “in shock” at the news. Payne was “one of the first major artists I got to work with. I cannot believe he is gone,” Puth added.Payne in Dubai in 2023.Jeff Spicer/Getty Images for Atlantis The Royal“Words cannot express the emotions we are collectively feeling right now,” the Backstreet Boys wrote on X, adding “our hearts go out to Liam’s family, friends and Directioners around the world.”“Life is short and fragile,” the German DJ Zedd, who released the song “Get Low” with Payne in 2017, wrote on social media. “RIP Liam … I can’t believe this is real …”The reaction was especially strong in Britain, where Payne built his career. Among those to express condolences on social media were his childhood school and West Bromwich Albion, the soccer team Payne supported.Payne first auditioned on the British talent show “The X Factor” as a solo artist in 2008, but found success when he returned in 2010, even though the group placed third in the show. Simon Cowell, the music executive and television personality, created One Direction by bringing Payne together with Harry Styles, Niall Horan, Zayn Malik and Louis Tomlinson. In 2011, One Direction’s debut single, “What Makes You Beautiful,” hit No. 4 on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart. The band released five albums and became one of the defining boy bands of the early 2010s. In 2015, One Direction announced it would take a break from performing together, and the group officially split up a year later.As of Thursday morning, none of Payne’s former bandmates had issued public reactions to the news of his death, and their representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A representative for Cowell also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.But on Instagram, Styles’s mother, Anne Twist, posted a picture of a broken heart emoji, with the caption “Just a boy …” More

  • 138 Shares109 Views

    in Music

    The Greats: Florence Welch, Lorna Simpson, Jonathan Anderson and Theaster Gates

    O winged Lady,Like a birdYou scavenge the land.Like a charging stormYou charge,Like a roaring stormYou roar,You thunder in thunder,Snort in rampaging winds.Your feet are continually restless.Carrying your harp of sighs,You breathe out the music of mourning. — from “Hymn to Inanna” by Enheduanna,translated from the Sumerian by Jane Hirshfield PROPHETESS ONE RISKS ANGERING the gods […] More

  • 125 Shares119 Views

    in Movies

    Mikey Madison Finds Common Ground With Her Character in ‘Anora’

    Mikey Madison, by her own admission, cries a lot — whether she’s happy or sad, that’s how she expresses herself.During our conversation at a Midtown Manhattan restaurant, the star of the Palme d’Or-winning “Anora” told me a number of stories that involved weeping. She cried on the way home from a horseback-riding competition when she was a teenager and realized she would have to choose between life as an equestrian or an actor. (She was too single-minded to do both.) She cried after every single acting class in the early days of her career. She cried after her first Russian language session in preparation for this latest role.But when she was living in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Brighton Beach to shoot “Anora,” Sean Baker’s film about a tough-as-nails sex worker who impulsively marries a Russian oligarch’s son, she found that the tears didn’t come easily. “I was, like, holding it in in a way that I hadn’t done before,” she recalled. “And I was like, ‘Am I numb? What’s happening here?’” She ultimately realized it was something different: the title character, known as Ani, was taking hold of her in a way that had never happened in her career. She had heard fellow actors talk about that kind of thing, but had never related to it before.Mikey Madison with Mark Eydelshteyn in “Anora,” which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes.NeonIt makes sense that Ani would exert a certain power over Madison because “Anora” is a monumental film in the 25-year-old’s career. Though she had memorable parts in the movies “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” (2019) and “Scream” (2022) and a crucial role on “Better Things,” the critically acclaimed FX series, “Anora” raises her to a new echelon in Hollywood. Almost as soon as the film premiered at Cannes, Madison was given the “star is born” treatment and declared a potential Oscar nominee. When “Anora” hit the Telluride Film Festival a few months later, a producer told Variety, “I need to work with Mikey Madison ASAP.”The film begins one night at her strip club gig, when her boss instructs her to talk to a patron, Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), who asked for a Russian-speaking girl. Turns out he’s wildly rich, and their whirlwind romance leads to a quickie marriage. But when his parents learn of it and send heavies to arrange their annulment, Ani refuses to go quietly. She fights off men twice her size with piercing screams and shockingly powerful kicks. For all that ferociousness, Madison also conveys how Ani’s thick skin is a form of self-defense against a world that rewards those, like Ivan, with easy access to money and finds new ways to punish those who don’t. Over the course of the action, you watch exhaustion seep into her face, which once glowed with the possibility of a fairy-tale ending.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 Shares149 Views

    in Music

    The Exquisite Fragility of Mark Andre’s Music

    Andre’s family history is one of precarity and mutability. His works, vulnerable and intricate, aren’t so different.In 2007, Pierre Boulez was conducting a performance of Mark Andre’s “…auf…II” in Amsterdam when a phone rang. The interruption broke the spell of the score’s opening, in which stabbing harmonies activate a mysterious echo. Boulez stopped the orchestra, went backstage for a few minutes, then started the music again.Boulez’s response speaks to the exquisite fragility of the music by Andre, 60, who has earned a reputation as one of Europe’s most original composers. His pieces are like spider webs: Close attention reveals their intricate beauty, while a careless gesture can destroy their effect.His newest composition, a work for piano and electronics titled “…selig ist…,” will be premiered by Pierre-Laurent Aimard at the Donaueschingen Festival in Germany on Oct. 19. (The concert will also be livestreamed.) The piece lasts about 50 minutes and is ferociously difficult. It’s also full of sounds that can easily be obscured by a ringtone.Five or six years ago, Aimard, a contemporary music virtuoso, began pursuing a collaboration with Andre; this new work is their first world premiere together.“After having listened a lot to his music I thought, ‘This is the person I would like to dedicate some of my forces and time to,’” Aimard said in a phone interview. “Because it seemed to me that the profoundness of his creation, his deep spirituality, the extremely subtle acoustical world which he works with, and the high discipline in his handwork were what I was looking for at this moment.”The fragility of Andre’s music can be traced to his family’s background in Alsace, a region that changed hands between France and Germany many times.Robert Rieger for The New York TimesWe 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

  • 175 Shares169 Views

    in Movies

    Hugh Grant on the ‘Freak-Show Era’ of His Career and Being a Family Man

    Hugh Grant has been suffering from brand confusion since 1994, when his performance in “Four Weddings and a Funeral” established him as a quintessentially British romantic hero of winning charm and diffidence. But his recent run of strange and sometimes creepy characters plays so effectively against type that you begin to suspect you were mistaken about his type all along.He would be the first to say that something darker and more complicated lurks beneath his easy surface.“At school I had a teacher who used to take me aside and say, ‘Who is the real Hugh Grant? Because I think the one we’re seeing might be insincere,’” Grant said as he strolled through Central Park last month. He was comparing himself — or at least his powers of persuasion — to Mr. Reed, the charismatically articulate villain he plays in “Heretic,” a religious-horror movie due in theaters on Nov. 15. “The ability to manipulate and sort of seduce — I might be guilty of that.”At 64, Grant is enjoying what he calls “the freak-show era” of his career, playing an unlikely rogue’s gallery of suave miscreants (“The Undoing,” “A Very English Scandal”), seedy gangsters (“The Gentlemen”), power-hungry tricksters (“Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves”) and self-deluded thespians (“Paddington 2” and “Unfrosted”), not to mention the bumptious little Oompa-Loompa in “Wonka.” That abashed, floppy-haired, benign early version of himself — that was never who he was anyway, he says.“My mistake was that I suddenly got this massive success with ‘Four Weddings’ and I thought, ah, well, if that’s what people love so much, I’ll be that person in real life, too,” he said. “So I used to do interviews where I was Mr. Stuttery Blinky, and it’s my fault that I was then shoved into a box marked ‘Mr. Stuttery Blinky.’ And people were, quite rightly, repelled by it in the end.”Grant had just come from Toronto, where “Heretic” had its premiere. In New York it was a blazingly beautiful day, and he greeted the park like an old friend, passing some of his favorite landmarks: the Delacorte Clock, whose bronze animals were doing their delightful dance to music to mark the hour, and the statue of Balto, the heroic medicine-transporting Siberian husky posing imperiously on his rock not far from the children’s zoo.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

  • 100 Shares149 Views

    in Movies

    ‘Smile 2’ Review: A Bigger and Bloodier Spotlight

    In this sequel, the pop sensation Skye Riley (Naomi Scott) is preparing to begin her comeback tour a year after a brutal car accident.If ordinary women often feel pressured to smile, then imagine how a pop star feels about constantly needing to project poise and affability? This emotional high-wire act is enough to make anyone crumble, even without a malevolent monster preying on her fears and traumas.This is how “Smile 2,” a bigger, bloodier — and more compelling — sequel to “Smile” (2022), raises the stakes: Instead of a humble psychiatrist (played by Sosie Bacon in the original), we get the pop sensation Skye Riley (a splendid Naomi Scott), now sober and preparing to begin her comeback tour a year after a brutal car accident triggered a public meltdown.The curse hasn’t changed: its carriers still undergo spectacular mental breakdowns and kill themselves soon after they see someone else die. There’s no convincing others that these mental collapses are actually caused by an evil entity that warps its victims’ brains — changing their perception of time and reality, and provoking hallucinations of people with creepy smiles — because, well, that’s crazy talk.“Smile” got a lot out of this tension. There may be a gruesome being pulling the ropes, but the battle is still an internal one spiked with paranoia and self-revulsion. The film’s visual flair and sinister conceit were enough to make me ignore its generic trauma angle.“Smile 2,” directed by Parker Finn, is more thematically ambitious than the original, which also allows Finn to stage more satisfyingly ridiculous kills and ramp up its air of delirium. The film addresses ideas about addiction and dependency, stardom and solitude and the loss of control that comes with being chained to your job.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