Aurelia Butler

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    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

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    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

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    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

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    ‘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

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    ‘Anora’ Review: A Pretty Woman From Brooklyn

    Mikey Madison gives a career-making performance in a Palme d’Or-winning film about the romance between a sex worker and a rich scion.Sometimes a movie actually earns the old cliché of a “star-making turn,” and I’m here to say that Sean Baker’s “Anora” is this year’s star maker. I’ve seen it twice, and both times I left the theater on a high, exhilarated by the performances, the rhythm, the emotional shape of it. The only question that remains — and it’s a great one to have to ask — is exactly whose star “Anora” will make.One obvious (and obviously correct) answer is Mikey Madison, who plays the titular character. Madison is no newcomer; she played Sadie, a Manson family member, in Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood”; and Pamela Adlon’s oldest daughter, Max, on the terrific FX show “Better Things.”Madison has always been good, an ingénue with extraordinarily expressive features who can play bratty and naïve at the same time. But this role requires her to go for broke, with elements of slapstick, romance, comedy and tragedy, along with dancing in skimpy or nonexistent clothing and throwing a couple of powerful punches. Playing Anora called for both an emotionally rich inner life and a breathtakingly kinetic physicality, all poured into a character about whom people form opinions the moment they meet her. And at every moment, Madison is mesmerizing.The movie is also a star maker for Baker, whose earlier films, like “The Florida Project” and “Red Rocket,” have earned accolades and devoted audiences. With “Anora,” though, he has leveled up. (The film won the coveted Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in May.)Baker is known for making movies about people on society’s margins, frequently sex workers. But this film, which Baker directed, wrote and edited, is steadier and more confident than his previous work. In some ways “Anora” has the most in common with Baker’s 2015 film, “Tangerine,” a screwball comedy about transgender sex workers in Los Angeles, shot on iPhones. But it also feels like a significant evolution in his style, and makes me excited to see what he does next.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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    Randy Newman Is at His Best When America Is at Its Worst

    His movie songs are filled with memorable melodies; his own albums with unsavory characters. One of the most astute cultural observers is the subject of a new book.Around the summer of 1966, a song on the radio recorded by the Italian American pop crooner Julius La Rosa caught Bob Dylan’s ear: a forlorn, impressionistic ballad called “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today,” penned by a 22-year-old publishing company staff writer from Los Angeles named Randy Newman.“Randy’s song was so mysterious,” Dylan recalled. “I never heard a song like that before; it was so cynical.” Newman’s own rendition later stood out to him for “the sadness in Randy’s voice. Sadness and cynicism, it’s a strange combination but Randy always manages to pull it off.”Dylan’s testimonial is one of many in “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country: The Biography of Randy Newman,” by the former Los Angeles Times pop critic Robert Hilburn (out Oct. 22).“It’s an honor to have Dylan say something nice about me,” Newman said during a recent phone interview. Though he’s received plenty of accolades — including six Grammys, three Emmys and two Oscars, as well as induction into the Rock & Roll and Songwriters Hall of Fame — Newman, now 80, admitted, “what I really wanted was to have the respect from fellow workers in the field. That Bob or Paul Simon, Jackson Browne, Don Henley, Linda Ronstadt, that those people liked what I did mattered to me — maybe an inordinate amount.”While Newman has never enjoyed the broad commercial success of his peers, his work has on occasion clicked with the culture. His somewhat controversial 1977 satire “Short People” was a bona fide hit that gave him his only gold album, “Little Criminals”; “I Love L.A.,” a wry celebration of his hometown from 1983, became an unlikely anthem for the city’s sports teams; the earnest “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” from Pixar’s 1995 movie “Toy Story,” soundtracked millions of childhoods.In truth, far more people have heard the 20-plus film scores Newman has composed since the early ’80s than any of his singer-songwriter records. “It’s sort of a funny hand to be dealt,” he said.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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    Liam Payne, 31, Former One Direction Singer, Dies in Fall in Argentina

    Payne, who was one of the group’s standout singers, fell from the third floor of a hotel in Buenos Aires, emergency services officials said.Liam Payne, who rose to fame as a singer and songwriter for the British group One Direction, one of the best-selling boy bands of all time, died after falling from the third floor of a hotel in Buenos Aires on Wednesday. He was 31.His death was confirmed by Alberto Crescenti, the director of emergency services in Buenos Aires. The circumstances of the fall were unclear.One Direction burst onto the scene in 2011 when the group’s debut single, “What Makes You Beautiful,” hit No. 4 on Billboard’s Hot 100. Five of its other songs reached the chart’s Top 10, including “Story of My Life,” “Drag Me Down” and “Live While We’re Young.”The group, which had 29 total hits on Billboard’s Hot 100, would go on to release five albums and become one of the definitive boy bands of the 2010s, largely by eschewing the sleek precision and polish of an earlier generation of pop vocal groups.One Direction announced in 2015 that it was taking a break from performing as an ensemble, and each of the artists has since invested most of their time in their solo careers. “It’s just a break 🙂 we’re not going anywhere !!,” Louis Tomlinson, one of the band’s members, posted on Twitter at the 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

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    Ananda Lewis, Former MTV V.J., Says She Has Stage 4 Breast Cancer

    Lewis, the host of the 1990s MTV show “Hot Zone,” tried to fight her illness without undergoing a double mastectomy. She says she is responding well after resuming treatment.The former MTV V.J. Ananda Lewis said in a CNN round-table discussion that was posted online on Tuesday that her breast cancer, which she first learned she had in 2019, metastasized last year and had reached Stage 4.In a phone interview with The New York Times on Wednesday, Lewis, 51, said that she had since resumed treatment and was feeling much better. “I’ve turned it around really beautifully,” she said.Lewis first became recognizable in the 1990s as a host of “Teen Summit,” a long-running weekly live show on BET that aimed to speak to Black teenagers about current issues (Lewis interviewed Hillary Clinton, who was then the first lady, on the program in 1996). She went on to host “Hot Zone,” an MTV show in which she interviewed stars and gave style advice. The Times, in a 1999 profile, described her as one of MTV’s most popular stars and “the hip-hop generation’s reigning It Girl.”Stage 4 breast cancer means that the cancer cells have spread beyond the breast, often traveling to the bones, the lungs and the liver. It can be treated with tools like chemotherapy and hormone therapy, but it is considered incurable. Breast cancer is the second most common cancer among women in the United States and a leading cause of death from cancer among women globally.In the round-table — with the CNN correspondent Stephanie Elam, Lewis’s best friend since they met at Howard University in the 1990s, and the CNN anchor Sara Sidner, who had a double mastectomy this year after learning that she had Stage 3 breast cancer — Lewis said that she had decided not to get a double mastectomy despite her doctors’ recommendation in early 2019, when she first discovered the lump and learned she had Stage 3 breast cancer.She sought conventional care after receiving the initial diagnosis, speaking to “the right and best oncologists, the breast surgeons,” she said on Wednesday. As she told Elam, “I decided to keep my tumor and try to work it out of my body a different way.”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