Aurelia Butler

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    ‘Rez Ball’ Review: Warriors on the Court

    This inspirational sports movie follows a high school basketball team in New Mexico with deep Native American heritage.The sports drama “Rez Ball” rapidly shows the tough road ahead for the Chuska Warriors, a New Mexico high school basketball team. When Jimmy (Kauchani Bratt) and Nataanii (Kusem Goodwind) hang out, a bleak Nataanii is mourning the deaths of his mother and sister. When he doesn’t show up for a game, word comes of his death by suicide.Yet “Rez Ball,” which is directed by Sydney Freeland and written by Freeland and Sterlin Harjo, doesn’t dwell on the tragedy. Jimmy misses his buddy, but he’s also fighting resentment about his naysaying mother and insecurity about stepping up as a star player. Rather than milk the sadness of Nataanii’s death, the plot about Native American athletes shooting for the state championship gathers its momentum from their teamwork and persistence.The team’s relatively mild coach, Heather (Jessica Matten), who is Native American, inspires her players with the use of Navajo-language play signals and instills discipline with a sheepherding team-building exercise. Her Warriors rack up wins, falter, then muster enough hustle to compete on a state level. The movie tends to race through actual game play — though the actors at least can handle the ball — and so the film’s strength lies more in the players’ easy rapport and the New Mexico location shooting.The fictional tale is inspired by the book “Canyon Dreams: A Basketball Season on the Navajo Nation” by Michael Powell, a former New York Times reporter, but Freeland and Harjo also drew on their experiences. It’s less a slam-dunk nail-biter than a matter of can-do self-determination, or as Jimmy’s friends say: stoodis (“let’s do this”).Rez BallRated PG-13 for thematic elements including suicide and some teenage smack-talking. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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    ‘Lee’ Review: A Remarkable Life at War

    Kate Winslet embodies the tenacity of the photographer Lee Miller, who documented World War II for British Vogue.“Lee,” starring Kate Winslet as the photographer Lee Miller, is smartly trained on a span of 10 years: from 1938 until shortly after World War II.Miller’s biography sounds nearly apocryphal. Born in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., she was a model for Vogue, a student of the artist Man Ray (and his muse), and a fashion photographer whose work often reflected her own Surrealist sensibilities. Miller documented the war for British Vogue — then under the editorship of the English journalist Audrey Withers (Andrea Riseborough) — often in the company of the Life photographer David Scherman (Andy Samberg).It would be hard for any narrative feature film to capture the many facets of the photographer responsible for some of the most indelible images of World War II. Winslet embodies those dimensions — as well as Miller’s propulsive drive — often with an askance look, a whetted remark, a resolve both stubborn and practical.Alexander Skarsgard portrays Miller’s British husband, Roland Penrose. The two meet prickly, if teasingly so, at a gathering in the South of France that also includes French Vogue’s Solange d’Ayen (Marion Cotillard) and her husband, Jean (Patrick Mille), and the Surrealists Nusch and Paul Éluard (Noémie Merlant and Vincent Colombe). Some of these friends appear again at the war’s end; Cotillard is especially devastating as d’Ayen.The movie begins with a framing device: Miller being interviewed by a journalist in her farmhouse in 1977, which allows her to tell her story. The director Ellen Kuras uses Miller’s actual photos and recreates a number of her more piercing images throughout the film — as a tribute, but also as a call to head to the archive. “Lee” feeds the desire to seek out more of her images. Winslet’s performance demands that we consider the force behind the camera.LeeRated R for disturbing images, language and nudity. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Sleep’ Review: Bumps in the Night

    A taut and thrilling thriller about sleep issues is also a clever drama about early marriage.Apnea, insomnia, sleep hygiene, sleep aids, sleep tricks: It’s all science but feels like sorcery. Even the most rational person can begin to suspect, three weeks into sleepwalking spells or 3 a.m. wakefulness, that some curse has been placed upon them, and the only cure is some mystical spell. It’s the stuff of horror, and the director Jason Yu harnesses it deftly for his debut feature, “Sleep,” a neatly constructed thriller about the sort of insanity that slumber issues can visit on even the most harmonious household.The household here is made up of the newlyweds Hyun-su (Lee Sun-kyun) and Soo-jin (Jung Yu-mi), who is heavily pregnant. They live in a modest apartment with Pepper, their fluffy and beady-eyed white Pomeranian. On their living room wall hangs a plaque proclaiming a cheerfully optimistic notion: “Together we can overcome anything.” This sentiment, we understand, is about to face a great challenge.First it’s Hyun-su’s sleep disturbances. He scratches his face bloody in the night — a problem, since he’s an actor who is in the middle of shooting a minor part in a TV show. He sleepwalks, and sleep-eats. When Soo-jin observes him in the night, she realizes he is gorging himself on weird and gross food — raw meat and eggs — and she starts to worry, with mounting fright, for Pepper’s safety. Hyun-su seems to not be himself at night. What is he capable of?The couple consult a doctor and take precautionary measures, but Hyun-su’s sleep activities are taking their toll on Soo-jin, who sleeps less and less, especially once the baby arrives. He offers to stay in a hotel for a while; she is convinced they need to be together: As the plaque says, they can only overcome anything together. At the same time, Soo-jin’s superstitious mother tries to talk them into less orthodox cures, and Soo-jin, red-eyed and nearly delirious from constant, wakeful vigilance starts to wonder if her mother has a point.Yu’s direction is confident, and he manages to convey how a little apartment can transform from domestic comfort by day to claustrophobic agony by night. His restraint throughout keeps us guessing. We really don’t know what’s plaguing Hyun-su. Is it nerves, or a neurological disorder, or some dark and shadowy force? Soo-jin doesn’t know either, and it scares her on several levels. But when Soo-jin’s state of mind deteriorates, Hyun-su becomes just as worried about his wife, who, after all, just gave birth, and wouldn’t be sleeping well no matter what.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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    ‘Saturday Night’ Review: Live TV at Its Mildest

    When it debuted 50 years ago, “S.N.L.” was chaotic, rangy, even offensive. But nothing’s wild or crazy in Jason Reitman’s fictional reimagining of its first episode.Movies about tectonic cultural shifts tend to be too neat and tidy, too frictionless. “Saturday Night,” the director Jason Reitman’s fictional reimagining of the debut of “Saturday Night Live,” is a nice, safe movie about a revolution. Busily plotted and sporadically funny, it is a backstage look at the night a gang of comics whom most of the world had never heard of began taking over TVs across the country. It was a comedy home invasion on a national scale, and it was glorious (when it didn’t suck).The movie, written by Reitman and Gil Kenan, has a straightforward conceit. It opens at on Oct. 11, 1975, the night that the show, then called “NBC’s Saturday Night,” is scheduled to debut. (The name was changed in 1977.) In just 90 minutes — ticktock — the show will go live if the performers, writers, crew, network suits and some guy named Lorne can get it together in time. A lot of money, reputations and possibly bright futures are riding on the show, but with its deadline looming, it still seems underbaked and, from some vantage points, overly abstract.To convey that premiere and what it portended, Reitman both sticks to the historical record and embellishes it, building momentum by zeroing in on some mini-crisis amid rapid edits, swish pans and rushing bodies. Everything and everyone at 30 Rockefeller Plaza runs too fast or seems immobilized, with characters either in frenetic motion or huddling in pools of flop sweat. As the minutes pass, Reitman periodically cuts to a clock onscreen or someone calls out the time; at one point, a set designer, Leo Yoshimura (Abraham Hsu), slowly begins installing bricks on the stage of Studio 8H, each brick an emblem of the show’s parts sliding into place.In a (real) 1975 news release, NBC called the show “a new concept in late-night programming.” The network wanted a replacement for weekend reruns of “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson,” and this venture was going to be a comedy show with sketches, musical guests, short films and the Muppets. But it was unclear what it was, maybe even to those behind the scenes. That much seems obvious when an NBC executive, Dick Ebersol (Cooper Hoffman), asks the show’s creator-producer, Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle), if he knows what it is. The straight-faced Lorne responds with an amusing, self-aggrandizing analogy involving Edison, the lightbulb and electricity. Who are you in this metaphor, the baffled exec asks.Lorne doesn’t answer, but the movie does by making him its focus. The character is less interesting than his surroundings — he’s more a blurry place holder than a fully realized personality — but whether here or there, Lorne is the center of this storm. He’s the hub, the visionary, the guy who can see past the chaos. Sure, there’s his wife, the writer Rosie Shuster (a tart Rachel Sennott); the host, George Carlin (Matthew Rhys); and a creepy suit, Dave Tebet (Willem Dafoe, in by far the funniest turn). But the star is Lorne because even genius apparently needs a boss.So, hi Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith), Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt), Jane Curtin (Kim Matula), Laraine Newman (Emily Fairn), Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O’Brien), Garrett Morris (Lamorne Morris, no relation) and John Belushi (Matt Wood). It’s nice to see them, so it’s too bad that only a few of the actors playing the main cast — and only the men — manage to register. That’s the case even when Reitman gestures at the show’s gender problems, as in a peek at a still-funny sketch about female construction workers learning how to harass a guy in short shorts. It’s Dan’s squirmy embarrassment, and how he then wags his rump, that makes it work.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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    ‘Apartment 7A’ Review: All Devil, Few Details

    A lackluster prequel to the 1968 horror classic “Rosemary’s Baby” doesn’t have much to add.“Apartment 7A” is a prequel, of sorts, to “Rosemary’s Baby,” still one of the most chilling films ever made about losing agency over your own body. The 1968 horror classic takes place in the fictional Bramford, a rambling apartment building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side that seems to have been colonized by a coven of devil worshipers. Early in that film, Guy and Rosemary Woodhouse (John Cassavetes and Mia Farrow), a young couple new to the building, meet a troubled woman in the laundry room. Her name is Terry Gionoffrio. “Apartment 7A” is her story.In the prequel, Terry (played by the reliably good Julia Garner) is a mousy Nebraskan who moved to New York with stars in her eyes. She’s a dancer who’s dying to see her name in lights above a Broadway marquee, just like millions of young people before her. When we meet her, she’s getting her first big break, which unfortunately for her translates to an actual break — of her ankle, that is, onstage. The accident both sidelines her dancing for a while and earns her a reputation around town as “the girl who fell.”A few months later, desperate to be cast in something, she’s back on the circuit. She flubs her audition for the flashy new show from the Broadway producer Alan Marchand (Jim Sturgess). In a last-ditch shooting of her shot, she heads to the Bramford, where Marchand lives. Things don’t go as expected with him. But she happens to meet Roman and Minnie Castevet (Kevin McNally and Dianne Wiest), a weird but generous older couple who just so happen to have an empty spare apartment that she can stay in if she wants. Just till she gets back on her feet.At this point, you can sketch the rough outlines of what will happen next. That’s particularly true if you’ve seen “Rosemary’s Baby,” because the two films are strangely similar, a fact that makes this one feel self-defeating. Most of the audience for “Apartment 7A” will, presumably, be familiar with the older film’s plot. As characters from that film are introduced, we already know how their stories will end, and the screenplay (written by Natalie Erika James, Christian White and Skylar James) holds few additional surprises.That’s the main problem with “Apartment 7A,” though Natalie Erika James directs competently enough. It’s passably spooky, sure. But all interesting prequels have something in common: They shed new light on their predecessors that expands, illuminates or complicates them in some way. “Apartment 7A” feels like a predictable retread.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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    Lhasa’s Music Captivated Audiences Everywhere but Here

    At Pop Montreal, tribute concerts on Sept. 29 and 30 will honor the memory of Lhasa de Sela, the American-born multilingual singer-songwriter.Montreal’s wide-ranging music scene has been one of its calling cards for decades, with border-crossing success stories like the ambitious rock band Arcade Fire, the arty electro-pop artist Grimes and the renowned post-rock modernists Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Yet one of the musicians most beloved there is the spellbinding Lhasa de Sela, who wrote and sang in English, French and Spanish, but remains largely unknown in the United States.She was usually referred to simply as Lhasa, and before she died of breast cancer in 2010 at 37, she became a platinum-selling recording artist in Canada, with genre-busting albums that synthesized Romani music, Mexican rancheras, Portuguese fados, Americana, chansons française and South American ballads, marrying them with mystical, romantic and intensely personal lyrics.In Europe, where Lhasa was a mainstay of the festival circuit, and lived in Marseilles for several years, she became a star on the strength of her intimate performances. But in the United States, where she was born and spent most of her childhood, Lhasa’s multilingual recordings proved too much of a marketing challenge for her American record companies, even after she toured with Sarah McLachlan’s traveling festival, Lilith Fair.Feist, Calexico, Juana Molina, Silvana Estrada and many other stars will perform in the tribute concerts that will cap this year’s Pop Montreal festival on Sept. 29 and 30. Their homage underscores an enduring love affair between a city and an artist who made just three otherworldly albums, including a last, self-titled album, all in English, that she hoped would finally establish her in her home country.Bia Krieger, the Brazilian-born, Montreal-based singer who was a friend of Lhasa’s, said, “Iconic is the right word” to describe her. “There’s a circle of people here that cherish her.”Lhasa is now even woven into the landscape of her old neighborhood, Mile End, which is anchored at its southern end by a huge mural of the singer created by a local artist, Annie Hamel, and, on the north by Parc Lhasa de Sela, a children’s playground the city erected in her memory.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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    NewJeans’s Complaints Against Hybe Brings Scrutiny to K-Pop’s New Releases

    The breakout girl group went public with complaints against its parent company, Hybe, which has just released a new TV series and film about the control it exerts over stars.A huge part of the success of NewJeans — the most creatively promising new K-pop act of the past two years — has been its music videos: stylistically sophisticated, vividly colorful, palpably joyful. Starting with music that deploys top-shelf songwriting buoyed by production savvy about global microtrends, the group developed a singular aesthetic to go with it, drawing equally from high fashion, lived-in nostalgia and contemporary cuteness.So it was striking when, a couple of weeks ago, the group released a video performance unlike any that preceded it. In a live broadcast on a burner YouTube account, the group’s five members — Danielle, Haerin, Hanni, Hyein and Minji — spoke for almost 30 minutes about their dissatisfaction with their parent company, Hybe. They particularly focused on how it had de-emphasized the role of the group’s executive producer, Min Hee-jin, in their work.Here was a group putting its external image and its internal leverage at risk to argue for their creative lives. It is an infrequent scenario at this level in K-pop, a genre and business in which careful choreography — of music, visuals and star behavior — is crucial to the power of the art.This livestream, of course, was as art directed as any of the group’s technicolor music videos. The members dressed largely in black, speaking softly in an anonymous office. Out in the world, NewJeans is vibrant, dynamic and approachably fun; in this clip, which some fans speculated was secretly orchestrated by Min, the members were reduced to spiritless cogs, as if trapped and suffocated by the corporation itself.Min Hee-jin, NewJeans’ executive producer, called a news conference in April to dispute accusations of corporate malfeasance by her employer, Hybe.Chung Sung-Jun/Getty ImagesFor almost as long as K-pop has been a global force, it has been an exemplar of the controversial virtues of top-down control. American pop labels essentially abandoned this mode more than a decade ago, following the boy band and Britney-Christina era. The influence of social media in creating bottom-up hits and stars has all but invalidated the label-knows-best mode of creation. But K-pop’s commitment to that ethic persists, and has made exactitude into an artistic virtue.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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    Popcast: A Word With John Summit

    Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTubeThe dance music superstar John Summit has become one of the scene’s biggest forces in recent years with a big-tent approach to house music that bridges aficionados and weekend warriors.On this week’s Popcast, hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, Summit delves into his rise and the evolution of his career, from spinning at underground semi-legal parties to headlining Madison Square Garden and festivals around the world. Summit discusses his former life as an accountant, his reluctance to take EDM too far into the mainstream and what it’s like being turned away at the door of a nightclub.Connect 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. More