Aurelia Butler

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    ‘Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse’ Review: Graphic Doom

    In this straightforward documentary, the acclaimed cartoonist reflects on his Holocaust memoir, “Maus,” and other masterworks of subversion.A conventional documentary about a distinctly unorthodox figure, “Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse” has a lot going for it, mostly its title subject and his circle of cool pals and champions. Intimate if oddly unrevealing, it offers an overview of Spiegelman’s life, times and inspirations, charting how a Queens kid created “Maus: A Survivor’s Tale,” his 1986 graphic novel about the Holocaust. “Maus” and its equally lauded second installment are such an important cultural touchstone that the Pulitzer Prize board awarded it a special citation in 1992. It’s so powerful that it has been banned in some American school districts.Those schools, Spiegelman suggested in a 2023 interview, apparently wanted “a kinder, gentler, fuzzier Holocaust” to teach children. The interviewer, from PEN America, assured readers that Spiegelman was “darkly” joking, and maybe he was. Then again, perhaps it is the Holocaust that some want to jettison from minds and curriculums: Anne Frank’s “The Diary of a Young Girl” has also been banned in American schools. Whatever the case, the framing of Spiegelman’s comments brings to mind some of the telling anxiety — about taste, history, propriety, ostensibly highbrow art and low — that at times runs through commentary on “Maus” and “Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began” (1991).“Making a Holocaust comic book with Jews as mice and Germans as cats would probably strike most people as flippant, if not appalling,” a reviewer for The New York Times wrote of the first book on its release, quickly and instructively adding that it’s “the opposite of flippant and appalling.” Writing about “Maus II,” another Times reviewer began his appraisal by reassuring readers of this installment’s cultural legitimacy and seriousness. “Art Spiegelman doesn’t draw comics,” the reviewer began, asserting that the book resists labels.Well, yes but no: “Maus” is, among other things, an illustrated masterpiece. (It’s since been published as a single edition, “The Complete Maus.”) It’s a history, a biography and an autobiographical howl as well as a milestone in the history of comics and a foundational American work about the Holocaust. It traces alternating story lines. One involves Spiegelman’s life, including his difficult relationship with his father, Vladek, and the painful death of his mother, Anja. The other story line tracks the family’s life in Europe before World War II, continues through the horrors his parents endured, the liberation of the death camps, an interlude in Sweden (where Artie was born) and a new, at times excruciating life in America.Directed by Molly Bernstein and Philip Dolin, “Disaster Is My Muse” covers some of that same material, if more prosaically. Using a mix of archival and originally shot material, it wends between the past and the present to chart Spiegelman’s life, giving you a sense of both the man and the artist though without satisfying depth. His story begins in 1948, the year he was born, but more truly seems to have started when he was a boy in New York and accompanying his mother on errands. In a drugstore, he spied a copy of “Inside Mad,” a collection of Mad magazine work that featured a grotesque cartoon of a hyena-like woman by Basil Wolverton in the style of a Life magazine glamour girl. It was, Spiegelman says, “the cover that launched a thousand misbegotten thoughts and brains,” his obviously included.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 Monkey’ Review: A Stephen King Story Adapted Into a Gory Farce

    A gruesome horror comedy adapted from a Stephen King story mixes nihilism, fatherhood and carnage.Few things are creepier than a creepy toy, especially the kind that has those cold, dead fake eyes. They seem to harbor ill will, perhaps put there by some evil person or spirit, and look like they want to rip your guts out. Thus malevolent dolls stalk horror directors’ nightmares, from Chucky to Annabelle to M3gan. How lucky we are that they pass those torments along to us.Well, here comes another one. The menacing toy of “The Monkey” is right there in the title — more specifically, it’s a medium-sized circus monkey who, when wound up via a key in the back, beats his little drum and stares at the winder unblinkingly. As a fun addition, though, as the monkey plays, someone in the general vicinity dies gruesomely. Very gruesomely.The deaths are so grisly and sudden and weird that they end up being hilarious, like some demented mash-up of “Final Destination” and “Looney Tunes.” Indeed, “The Monkey” is a comedy, and possibly a satirical one. The titular killer is brought home from some travels by a pilot named Petey (Adam Scott) who skipped town soon after, leaving his twin sons to be raised by Lois (Tatiana Maslany), their mother. The boys, Bill and Hal (both played by Christian Convery), discover the monkey while rooting through a closet full of junk. They turn the crank. Death.Twenty-five years later, Hal (Theo James) is estranged from Bill and has his own son, named Petey, but only sees him once a year. Fearing that anyone he’s too close to will somehow become the monkey’s victim, Hal leads a lonely life. But you cannot outrun a curse like that one.Much of “The Monkey” hinges on James’s performance as older Hal, whom the people around him treat as a complete loser but who is likely the only one with a brain. It’s kind of a sustained joke, helped along by the fact that James looks like, well, a very handsome movie star, whereas everyone else in this town seems to have been left in the oven a little too long. Thus, while James’s performance is relatively unremarkable until near the end, it works: He’s just a guy who’s trying to live quietly, but life, and death, have other plans.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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    At Kennedy Center, Trump Inherits a Tough Job: Fund-Raising

    For the arts institution, which receives only a small portion of its budget from federal funding, the perennial challenge is to raise additional revenue through ticket sales and private donations.In just one week, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington has been completely transformed.President Trump purged the center’s board of all Biden appointees and installed himself as chairman, ousting the financier David M. Rubenstein, the center’s largest donor. The new board fired Deborah F. Rutter, the center’s president for more than a decade. At least three other top staff members were dismissed.Performers have dropped out in protest amid fears that Mr. Trump’s call to rid the center of “woke” influences, drag shows and “anti-American propaganda” will result in a reshaping of programming too narrowly aligned with the president’s own tastes.This concern — that the center’s tradition of pluralism, free expression and classical art forms is in jeopardy — has dominated conversation about its future. But just as relevant, experts say, are questions about its financial stability.Though the abrupt takeover by the new administration might suggest the center is an arts adjunct of the federal government, it is actually a semi-independent nonprofit.It operates under the Smithsonian Institution as a public-private partnership, and only a small portion of its $268 million budget — about $43 million, or 16 percent — comes from the federal government. That subsidy is not spent on programming but is earmarked for operations, maintenance and repairs of the property, which is federally owned.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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    Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Files to Dismiss Sex-Trafficking Charge Due to ‘Racist Origins’

    The music mogul’s lawyers filed a motion to dismiss a sex-trafficking charge, saying that the law involved has “racist origins.”Lawyers for Sean Combs filed a motion on Tuesday night seeking the dismissal of one of the sex trafficking charges he is facing, arguing that the hip-hop mogul is being unfairly prosecuted based on his race.Mr. Combs, who has pleaded not guilty to the charges against him and is awaiting trial in a Brooklyn jail, was indicted on federal racketeering and sex trafficking charges — the most serious of which carries a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years in prison.His lawyers’ filing focuses on a lesser sex trafficking charge, which stems from a federal law known as the Mann Act. The law makes it illegal to transport a person “with intent that such individual engage in prostitution.”Mr. Combs’s lawyers contend that the law has “racist origins” and that it is being deployed against a “prominent Black man” for allegedly using an escort service to transport male escorts across state lines to have sex with his girlfriends.“The use of escorts, male or female, is common and indeed widely accepted in American culture today,” they write. To emphasize what it depicted as the noncriminal nature of the conduct, the filing notes that the chief executive of the escort service that Mr. Combs is said to have used has been interviewed in the media and was featured in a Showtime reality series.The lawyers questioned whether any white person had been charged under the law based on similar allegations.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 Met Opera Announces Its 2025-26 Season

    Our critics choose highlights from a lineup that includes six new productions and modern works by Mason Bates, Kaija Saariaho and Gabriela Lena Frank.The Metropolitan Opera, which has championed contemporary opera in recent years as it works to attract new audiences, announced on Wednesday that it would bring three modern titles to its stage in the 2025-26 season.The company will open the season in September with the New York City premiere of Mason Bates’s “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” an opera based on the 2000 novel of that name by Michael Chabon, which was first heard at Indiana University last fall. The lineup also includes local premieres of Kaija Saariaho’s final opera, “Innocence,” from 2021, and Gabriela Lena Frank’s first opera, “El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego,” from 2022.There will be new stagings of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde,” directed by Yuval Sharon, in his company debut; Bellini’s “I Puritani,” for the annual New Year’s Eve gala; and Bellini’s “La Sonnambula,” directed by the star tenor Rolando Villazón and featuring the soprano Nadine Sierra. Among the dozen revivals planned for the season are Bizet’s “Carmen,” Strauss’s “Arabella” and Giordano’s “Andrea Chénier.”Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s music director, will conduct the new productions of “The Amazing Adventures,” “El Último Sueño” and “Tristan.”The company’s embrace of contemporary opera, which its leaders have said is necessary to overcome serious financial pressures, with the belief that newer works sell better than the classics, has had mixed results. Attendance has averaged about 70 percent of capacity so far this season, compared with 73 percent at the same point last season. (Still, the Met said that it expected to reach an average of 75 percent capacity by the end of the season.)“It’s impossible to predict hits,” said Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager. “On the other hand, if we don’t promote new works, then we’re saying goodbye to the art form.”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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    ‘Pedro Páramo,’ ‘Let’s Start a Cult’ and More Streaming Gems

    Two releases from last year — one an inventive literary adaptation, the other a wild, gross-out comedy — are among this month’s streaming recommendations.‘Pedro Páramo’ (2024)Stream it on Netflix.This adaptation of Juan Rulfo’s 1955 novel is the feature directorial debut of Rodrigo Prieto, who, via his collaborations with Spike Lee, Oliver Stone, Greta Gerwig and (frequently) Martin Scorsese, has become one of the best cinematographers of our time. It is, unsurprisingly, a beautifully photographed movie (Prieto and Nico Aguilar share cinematography credit), filled with astonishing compositions and a surplus of mood. The narrative is haunted by ghosts, dreams and memories. The dialogue is alternately wry and poetic, trafficking in a deadpan magical realism, involving its bustling cast of colorful characters in a circular story, with events revisited via shifting perspectives and time frames. It doesn’t all land, as the picture’s loose ends and shaggy running time occasionally get away from the filmmaker. But if it’s messy, it’s also mesmerizing, and marks Prieto as a talent to keep watching, wherever he may go.‘Fall’ (2022)Stream it on Hulu.So many of today’s thrillers are convoluted, franchise-servicing affairs that this one is worth praising for its simplicity and efficiency: There is a narrative, yes, but it boils down to tracking two young women as they climb to the top of a 2,000-foot TV tower, and are then stranded there, with no obvious way down. The screenplay (by the director, Scott Mann, and Jonathan Frank) works through every possible situation and variation, mining the loaded scenario for maximum scares, thrills and pathos. But the performances ultimately have to carry the show, and the newcomers Grace Caroline Currey and Virginia Gardner are charismatic and sympathetic — even when doing the dumbest things — while Jeffrey Dean Morgan lends gravitas as Currey’s concerned dad.‘Joe’ (2014)Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.David Gordon Green narrates a sequence from his film featuring Nicolas Cage and Tye Sheridan.Roadside AttractionsWe 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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    “No Other Land” Is the Oscar-Nominated Film That No Studio Will Touch

    “No Other Land,” about the destruction of a village in the occupied West Bank, is one of the year’s most acclaimed films. Still, U.S. studios are unwilling to distribute it.No documentary this season has been more talked about or acclaimed than “No Other Land,” which chronicles the besieged community of Masafer Yatta in the occupied West Bank as Israeli forces demolish residents’ homes and expel families from the land they have lived in for generations, claiming the area is needed for a military training ground.Directed by the Palestinian filmmakers Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal alongside the Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, “No Other Land” has received critical acclaim and collected many honors on the festival circuit. After winning the best documentary award at its Berlin International Film Festival premiere last February, the film also earned the same prize at the Gotham Awards and from major critics’ groups in New York and Los Angeles. Just weeks ago, it received an Oscar nomination.Still, no American studio has been willing to pick up this hot-button film, even though distributors typically spend this time of year eagerly boasting about their Oscar-nomination tallies.“I still think it’s possible, but we’ll have to see,” Abraham told me last week. “It’s clear that there are political reasons at play here that are affecting it. I’m hoping that at a certain point the demand for the film will become so clear and indisputable that there will be a distributor with the kind of courage to take it on and show it to the audience.”In the meantime, the directors have embarked on a self-distribution plan that has put “No Other Land” into 23 U.S. theaters; on the back of strong box office, it will continue to roll out into additional cities over the coming weeks.Adra and Abraham are not just part of the film’s directing team, but its two primary subjects. The 28-year-old Adra was raised in Masafer Yatta and has been documenting the forced expulsion since he was a teenager. Over the course of the film, he builds a strong but tense bond with Abraham, who lives in Jerusalem but travels frequently to Masafer Yatta to write about the situation there for an Israeli audience.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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    With ‘Companion’ and ‘Novocaine,’ Jack Quaid Makes Comedy Painless

    Jack Quaid can guess what people must think of him: Entitled. Overconfident. A jerk, no doubt about it.“Who I am comes with a certain expectation,” he said over breakfast — black coffee, fruit plates — on a Thursday in late January.Quaid, 32, is the son of the actors Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan. (That DNA is strong. You can see his father when he smiles, his mother when he squints.) He grew up in Santa Monica, Calif., grabbing snacks from the craft services table on his parents’ sets and attending a private school with a common room where he could screen his camcorder movies. (An early magnum opus: “Bicycle Cops.”) Which is all to say that Quaid grew up with privilege, and he knows what privilege, unexamined and unacknowledged, can do to a person. He can turn that arrogance on for auditions, which explains why his first role was as a villain in “The Hunger Games” and why he can now be seen as a very bad boyfriend in the thriller “Companion” (in theaters).But the real Quaid is earnestly, acutely, even painfully aware of his privilege. In rooms where people don’t know him, he finds himself, he said, “apologizing for existing.” He isn’t jealous of his parents. (Please, he has been to therapy.) He loves his parents. He loves the life they have given him. “But there’s definitely a need to prove myself,” he said. “There is a little bit of something with identity and thinking, do I have any value outside of them?” As he said this, the divot in his forehead, which deepens when he’s stressed or concerned, had become a crevasse. “Not to say I’m complaining,” he added.Jack Quaid, the son of the actors Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan, is earnestly aware of his privilege.Hannah Edelman for The New York TimesOver the last several years, Quaid has proved himself. And as the star of two movies out this winter, his value as a leading man is confirmed. He is beautifully smarmy in “Companion,” a romantic thriller with a sci-fi twist. (Avoid the trailer if you don’t want that twist unfurled.) And he is a sweetheart of an accidental action hero in the punchy thriller “Novocaine,” due March 14, in which he plays a timid assistant bank manager with a congenital inability to feel pain. (Quaid’s own pain threshold: “Not high!”) He is also currently wrapping the fifth and final season of “The Boys,” Amazon’s body fluid-soaked antisuperhero show. He leads the cast as Hughie, a normal-ish guy in an enthusiastically abnormal world. And he has two other movies in postproduction, the thriller “Neighborhood Watch” and the action comedy “Heads of State.”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