Aurelia Butler

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    Melissa George Brings Cinematic Glamour to a 17th-Century French Manor

    FROM A DISTANCE, Visan, France, resembles a Provençal village like any other, charming but unassuming: a crop of pale stone buildings on a hilltop surrounded by vineyards. During the medieval period, however, the region was the seat of powerful dignitaries, including the Dauphin of Viennois, a count whose family owned the village’s now-ruined castle. In 1349, Humbert II — the last dauphin before the title was transferred to the French crown — burdened with debt and without a male heir, ceded his remaining land to the king. Five years earlier, in a similar exchange with the pope, who then led the Catholic church from the nearby city of Avignon, he had offered up Visan. The village became part of the papacy’s wealthy enclave, remaining so until the French Revolution; its historic center is still lined with the commanding houses built for nobles and members of the papal court.The actress gives a tour of her home in Provence, which she’s filled with delicate details like floral furniture and a pink marble sink.Gautier BillotteThe most stately of these is a five-story, 17th-century mansion overlooking the town’s central fountain. Arranged in a U shape around a small internal courtyard shaded by cypress and lime trees, it has an elegant stone facade with rows of arched windows reaching up toward a thick terra-cotta tile roof. Since 2020, it has been a retreat for a transplant of a different kind: the Australian actress Melissa George, 48, who moved to Paris from New York with her sons Raphael, now 10, and Solal, 8, in 2016. Working with the Peruvian-born, Paris-based interior architect Diego Delgado-Elias, 44, she has restored the building’s splendor, transforming the 6,500-square-foot residence into an elegant but comfortable eight-bedroom home perfectly suited to someone who, as she does, lives to entertain.In the library, painted in Farrow & Ball’s Cinder Rose, a pair of vintage fringed slipper chairs and a sconce from Barracuda Interiors.Clément VayssieresEVERYONE TALKED ABOUT ‘the actress’ in the village,” George says of the initial interest in her and her plans for the house. She was widely assumed to be American, in part because of her roles in such U.S. television dramas as “In Treatment” and “Grey’s Anatomy.” But many of her neighbors have since become her friends: In the summer, the village children often cool off in her pool and, most nights, there are wine tastings in someone’s cellar. “We have a little club called Les Perchés, which means ‘the eccentrics,’” she says.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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    Man Found Guilty in Shooting Death of Rapper Young Dolph

    The man, Justin Johnson, was sentenced to life in prison on Thursday for the fatal 2021 shooting of Young Dolph, who was gunned down outside a Memphis cookie shop in broad daylight.A man was found guilty on Thursday and sentenced to life in prison in the 2021 shooting death of Young Dolph, an emerging Memphis rapper who was regarded as one of hip-hop’s most promising artists.The man, Justin Johnson, was accused of shooting Young Dolph, 36, outside a cookie shop in the rapper’s hometown, Memphis, in November 2021. The Associated Press reported that a co-defendant in the case had testified that Young Dolph’s killing was tied to a battle between rival record labels.After just four hours of deliberation, a jury found Mr. Johnson guilty of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit first-degree murder and of being a felon in possession of a firearm, the Shelby County District Attorney’s Office said in a news release.In a statement, Steve Mulroy, the district attorney of Shelby County, said the case had generated “extra public interest because Young Dolph was a prominent and beloved member of the community.”“We will continue to fight hard to make sure that all of those responsible for his death are brought to justice,” Mr. Mulroy said.Justin Johnson in court in Memphis on Thursday.Pool photo by Mark WeberWe 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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    Nick Gravenites, Mainstay of the San Francisco Rock Scene, Dies at 85

    A blues devotee from Chicago, he tasted fame in the late 1960s with the Electric Flag, a band that made its debut at Monterey but proved short-lived.Nick Gravenites, a Chicago-bred blues vocalist and guitarist who rose to prominence during the explosion of psychedelia in San Francisco in the 1960s as a founder of the hard-driving blues-rock band the Electric Flag and as a songwriter for Janis Joplin and others, died on Sept. 18 in Santa Rosa, Calif. He was 85.His son Tim Gravenites said he died in an assisted-living facility, where he was being treated for dementia and diabetes.Mr. Gravenites grew up on the South Side of Chicago, where he was part of a cadre of “white misfit kids,” as he put it on his website, who honed their craft watching Chicago blues masters like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf in local clubs. His colleagues included the singer and harmonica player Paul Butterfield and the guitarists Michael Bloomfield and Elvin Bishop; all four of them would go on to help fuel the white blues-rock boom that began in the 1960s.“Being a ‘bluesman’ is the total blues life,” Mr. Gravenites said in a 2005 interview with Sound Waves, a Connecticut lifestyle magazine. “It has to do with philosophy.”“The life in general doesn’t ask much from you in terms of personality,” he continued. “It doesn’t ask that you be a genius, or a saint.” Many bluesmen, he added, fell far short of sainthood: “They just ask that you be able to play the stuff. That’s all.”Mr. Gravenites sang with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. From left: Mr. Butterfield, Jerome Arnold, Mr. Gravenites, Sam Lay, Elvin Bishop and Mike Bloomfield.David Gahr/Getty ImagesWe 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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    Holy Hollywood! Batman Is the First Superhero With a Walk of Fame Star.

    The caped crusader, who debuted in 1939, joins other illustrious figures — including Adam West, the actor who played him on TV.It is hard to imagine something new happening to Batman after 85 years of adventures in comic books, television and film. But he has a new notch on his utility belt: He has received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.Batman is the first superhero honored on the Walk of Fame, which is administered by the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce. (Mickey Mouse was the first fictional character to receive a star, in 1978.) Batman’s recognition is the 2,790th since the first eight stars were unveiled in 1958.Comic book readers met the Bat-Man (the hyphen was soon dropped) in 1939, when they opened the March 30 issue of Detective Comics. Out of the costume the superhero is the socialite Bruce Wayne. They were also introduced to Police Commissioner Gordon, who would become the hero’s trusted ally and later gained the first name James.Burt Ward, who played Robin on the “Batman” television show of the 1960s, at the Batman ceremony on Thursday.Frazer Harrison/Getty ImagesBatman himself may not have been honored on the Walk of Fame before now, but he’s had ties there. Adam West, who starred in “Batman” on TV from 1966-68, has a star, as does Burt Ward, who played Robin, Batman’s trusted partner. (West received a star in 2012; Ward in 2020.) One of his creators, Bob Kane, was also awarded a star in 2015.Absolute Batman No. 1, which reimagines Batman’s origins, will be out on Oct. 9.DCBatman is also getting a whole new beginning in a new comic book series with Absolute Batman No. 1, from DC. The series, by Scott Snyder and Nick Dragotta, presents a bigger, beefier and more menacing Batman: His chest emblem, for example, detaches to become the top of a battle ax. Holy anger management, Batman! The issue arrives in stores on Oct. 9.There is also currently a “Batman: Caped Crusader” animated series on Amazon, and his most recent live action film, starring Robert Pattinson in 2022, led to the new spinoff series “The Penguin,” on HBO. More

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    ‘Megalopolis’ Review: The Fever Dreams of Francis Ford Coppola

    The director’s latest is a great-man story about an architect, played by Adam Driver, driven by ideals and big plans. It’s a personal statement on an epic scale.Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis” is a bursting-at-the-seams hallucination of a movie — it’s wonderfully out-there. At once a melancholic lament and futuristic fantasy, it invokes different epochs and overflows with entrancing, at times confounding images and ideas that have been playing in my head since I first saw the movie in May at the Cannes Film Festival. There, it was both warmly received and glibly dismissed, a critical divide that’s nothing new for Coppola, a restlessly experimental filmmaker with a long habit of going off-Hollywood.Nothing if not au courant, “Megalopolis” is a vision of a moribund civilization, though also a great-man story about an architect, Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver), who dreams of a better world. An enigmatic genius (he has a Nobel Prize) with an aristocratic mien and a flair for drama, Catilina lives in a city that resembles today’s New York by way of ancient Rome, though it mostly looks like an elaborate soundstage. As familiar as Fifth Avenue and as obscure as the far side of the moon, it is a world that mirrors its real counterpart as a playpen for the wealthy and a prison-house for the destitute. The city haunts Catilina; it also inspires him.What Catilina dreams of is a “perfect school-city,” in which people can achieve their better selves. It’s an exalted aspiration, as seemingly boundless but also as sheltering as the blue sky, and one that invokes a long line of lofty dreamers and master builders. There are predictable obstacles, mostly other people, small-minded types without vision, idealism or maybe just faith. Among these is the mayor, Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), a consummate politician with no patience for fantasies or for Catilina. Their animosity runs through the story, which is narrated by Catilina’s aide, Fundi Romaine (Laurence Fishburne), dense with incident and populated by an array of noble souls and posturing fools.The fools prove better company in “Megalopolis” than most of the upright types, though with their all-too human comedy they’re not always distinguishable. They begin rushing in after the jolting opener, which finds Catilina dressed in inky black and uncertainly climbing out of a window in the crown of the Chrysler Building. Before long, he is standing with one foot firmly planted and the other shakily raised over the edge. He calls out “time stop” and everything — the clouds above, the cars below — freezes, only to restart at his command. He looks like a colossus, though also brings to mind the early-cinema clown Harold Lloyd hanging over a different abyss in “Safety Last!” (a title that could work for this audacious movie).It’s quite the to-be-or-not introduction. Given that filmmakers are in the business of stopping time, Catilina’s entrance also reads as an auteurist mission statement. So it’s a relief when Catilina gets off that precipice, even if Coppola never really does. The filmmaker has a thing for dreamers and their great, big dreams, and it’s easy to see “Megalopolis” — which he mentioned in interviews as early as 1983 — in autobiographical terms. Like Catilina, Coppola has endured and almost been consumed by catastrophic setbacks (most notably with his founding of a film studio that nearly ruined him), only to rise phoenixlike from the ashes. It’s one reason that “Megalopolis” feels like a personal statement on an epic scale.Giancarlo Esposito plays a consummate politician with no patience for the architect’s fantasies.LionsgateWe 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 Wild Robot’ Review: Wonder and Whimsy That Does Compute

    Chris Sanders’s movie about a robotic assistant and the gosling she raises is defined by dazzling visuals and frank ideas about the circle of life.Have you ever thought about the many ways animals show emotion? Consider an inquisitive snout wriggling in the air, tails coiled protectively around cubs and ears perky or drooping depending on mood. For creatures who didn’t evolve to walk upright, wearing one’s heart on one’s sleeve is a considerably more anatomical business.Among the achievements of “The Wild Robot” is a painstaking regard for details like these. Written and directed by Chris Sanders (“How to Train Your Dragon”) and adapted from Peter Brown’s novel, the movie is a dazzling triumph of animation in which you feel the filmmakers’ attention on every frame. In a revivifying turn away from the gag-a-minute, computer-generated extravaganzas clogging up the animated zoological canon, this is a work that cares most about two things: big feelings and great beauty.That’s not to say that its machine is built entirely of new parts. In some ways, this kid-friendly affair about an interspecies found family even leans into its derivative elements. Roz, the bionic hero of “The Wild Robot,” seems designed to evoke the title character in “The Iron Giant,” sharing that monster’s studying eyes and lanky stature. But rather than outer space, she hails from today’s sinister science-fiction analog: the conglomerate Universal Dynamics, which specializes in robotic digital assistants. Think Alexa in hulking metal form.The movie opens as Roz (short for Rozzum Unit 7134) accidentally washes off a cargo ship and ashore a wildlife island, where she swiftly begins scouting for a task that satisfies her serve-at-all-costs programming. After wreaking havoc on some fauna, the robotic assistant (voiced by Lupita Nyong’o) stumbles upon a purpose: raising an orphaned, newborn gosling whose kin she accidentally squashed.Brightbill, as she names him, is on the runty side, and although Roz grows more sociable — at first, she can speak only in a Robotese, which is so stilted it might as well be Middle English — her ward (voiced by Kit Connor, of the Netflix series “Heartstopper”) struggles to master the basics of his pond and sky habitats. Tagging along for the child-rearing is a rascally fox named Fink (Pedro Pascal), who alternates between parenting advice and snide remarks. The impending winter imposes a ticking clock on Brightbill’s training: Should he fail to become airborne before migration time, he will perish in the cold, assuming he’s not eaten first.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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    ‘Killer Heat’ Review: Mediterranean Mischief

    Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a detective running from his past in a murder mystery that is mostly a stiff slog to get through.When it comes to the modern murder mysteries that truly love the genre — the ones that don’t so much subvert but wholeheartedly lean into the familiar tropes of your favorite cheap detective novel — there’s a fine line separating the good and the not-so-good. Not only a properly calibrated twist, but a sense of wit and a legible directorial imagination is what distinguishes, say, your “Knives Out” and “A Haunting in Venice” from a film like “Killer Heat.”The latter, directed by Philippe Lacôte, has the starter elements that might equate to a romp of a detective movie: a hard-drinking private investigator character running from his past, a screenplay based on a short story by the celebrated crime novelist Jo Nesbo. But this film has none of the charm, tension or cinematic energy to elevate those ingredients into a greater sum.It mostly wants to rely instead on brooding, overwrought narration from Nick Bali (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), an American expat detective who has landed on Crete to investigate the death of Leo Vardakis (Richard Madden), a member of a wealthy family that controls the island. Penelope (Shailene Woodley), the wife of Leo’s twin brother, Elias, has secretly hired Nick, suspicious of the actual circumstances that led to Leo’s death from a mysterious rock climbing accident. Soon, relationship secrets, along with Nick’s own personal past of betrayal, come to light.The twists and pedestrian dramatics are a stiff slog to get to, and Gordon-Levitt’s once innate charisma has vanished altogether here; his cheap P.I. outfit itself seems to be wearing him more than the other way around. Perhaps that’s the point “Killer Heat” wants to make about a cynical detective who’s just going through the motions. Yet, inadvertently, that ethos has swallowed the film itself.Killer HeatRated R for language, some sexual content, nudity and violence. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch on Amazon Prime Video. More

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    ‘The Universal Theory’ Review: A Quantum Noir

    A physicist becomes embroiled in a conspiracy throughout this German meta-thriller. Shot in black-and-white, the film pays homage to Hollywood classics.A slippery meta-thriller from Germany, “The Universal Theory” has all of the elements of a classic film noir, but with an uncanny twist.Directed by Timm Kröger, this slick black-and-white movie features a femme fatale, woozy dissolves that stitch together each scene and a booming Bernard Herrmann-esque score by Diego Ramos Rodríguez that never lets up.And, frankly, an annoyingly convoluted plot.The story, drenched in postwar paranoia, centers on Johannes (Jan Bülow), a young physicist attending a quantum mechanics conference in the Swiss Alps. The year is 1962 — though what is time, anyway? That question is at the heart of Johannes’s yet-uncompleted doctoral thesis, in which he attempts to make the claim that the multiverse is real. His grouchy supervisor, Dr. Strathan (Hanns Zischler), is sick of hearing about it; the portly, LSD-loving Dr. Blumberg (Gottfried Breitfuss), whom Dr. Strathan despises, is more enthusiastic.Then there’s Karin (Olivia Ross), a jazz pianist who ensorcels Johannes with her relentless mystique; inexplicably, she knows obscure events from his childhood.The looming white mountains, shot with a sinister edge by Roland Stuprich, seem to be hiding something, and everyone’s caginess around Johannes turns him into something of a detective figure (a state not unrelated to the manic work of writing his thesis).Murdered individuals then start popping up around Johannes. It’s more than enough to make our hero go mad, though the film fails to present this unraveling with enough psychological grit and narrative momentum to make its more unusual surprises feel impactful. Though visually handsome, the film leaves the audience with the sense that, like a grad student, it is still working out its big ideas.The Universal TheoryNot rated. In German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. In theaters. More