Aurelia Butler

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    Lil Wayne Gets Earnest With Bono, and 9 More New Songs

    Hear tracks by Sabrina Carpenter, Ethel Cain, Sudan Archives and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes) and at Apple Music here, and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.Lil Wayne featuring Bono, ‘The Days’“I ain’t gettin’ younger, but I’m gettin’ better,” Lil Wayne declares in “The Days,” a rock anthem about survival and seizing the moment: “If my days are numbered, treat every day like Day One.” None other than Bono shares the song, starting and ending it and singing about “the days that tell you what life is for,” while the production emulates U2’s grand marches. Elsewhere on his new album, “Tha Carter VI,” Lil Wayne offers his usual punchlines and free associations; here, he’s unabashedly earnest.Water From Your Eyes, ‘Life Signs’The Brooklyn duo Water From Your Eyes revels in musical jump cuts and not-quite-sequiturs. “I am coming apart / I’m becoming together, true to form,” Rachel Brown sings in “Life Signs” from an album due in August. Nate Amos’s guitars leap from wiry, hopscotching math-rock lines to brute-force distortion and back; Brown deadpans through monotone verses, but offers a wistful melody in the chorus. By the end of the song, somehow it all makes sense.Sabrina Carpenter, ‘Manchild’Sabrina Carpenter lightheartedly and brutally dissects what might be called a himbo in “Manchild.” In a track that starts as synth-pop and ends up as country-rock, she mock-appreciates how “your brain just ain’t there” with a guy who can’t charge a phone, much less satisfy her. “I like my men all incompetent,” she claims, barely suppressing a giggle.Addison Rae, ‘Fame Is a Gun’Who could be better than Addison Rae, the TikTok sensation turned pop songwriter, to sing about craving attention, achieving the “glamorous life” and dealing with all the parasocial fallout? “I live for the appeal,” she sings, adding, “It never was enough / I always wanted more.” Yet she also realizes, “I’m your dream girl, but you’re not my type.” The production cycles through its three chords with an insistent pulse that hints at the pressure to keep generating more content.Sudan Archives, ‘Dead’Sudan Archives — the songwriter, violinist and producer Brittney Parks — powers through an identity crisis with the shape-shifting, maximalist, ultimately unstoppable track “Dead.” She asks “Where my old self at?” and “Where my new self at?” and teases “Did you miss me?” and “Do you miss me?” In four minutes, the song morphs among quasi-orchestral string arrangements, spacey electronics and walloping dance beats, then merges them all in a triumphant closing stomp.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’s Ex-Girlfriend Will Continue Testimony About Unwanted Sex

    Testifying under a pseudonym, “Jane,” the woman has described “hotel nights” involving drugs and encounters with escorts that she told the mogul she did not want to continue.The 18th day of testimony in the federal trial of Sean Combs will continue on Friday with a woman who described the encounters she had with a succession of men at the music mogul’s direction as a “Pandora’s box” of unwanted sex.The woman, who is testifying under the pseudonym “Jane,” is the second witness put forward by prosecutors as a victim of sex trafficking by Mr. Combs, who also faces charges of racketeering conspiracy and transportation to engage in prostitution. Mr. Combs, 55, has pleaded not guilty to all charges, and his lawyers have strongly denied that any of his sexual arrangements were nonconsensual.The first of those witnesses, Casandra Ventura — the singer known as Cassie, who was in an off-and-on relationship with Mr. Combs for 11 years — has played a prominent role in Mr. Combs’s legal troubles over the last year and a half. Her bombshell lawsuit, filed in November 2023, led to the government’s investigation, and a leaked hotel security video showing Mr. Combs brutally assaulting her has been a key piece of evidence, shown to jurors repeatedly since the trial began four weeks ago.Before Jane took the stand on Thursday afternoon — under strict conditions from the court to protect her privacy — little had been known about her. In filings before the trial began, prosecutors referred to her in filings only as “Victim-2,” saying that the “financial losses, dependency and social isolation” she experienced during her relationship with Mr. Combs from 2021 to 2024 “made her more vulnerable to his coercion.”At the start of her testimony, she described herself as a single mother who was earning her living through social media promotions when she met Mr. Combs in 2020 on a trip to Florida. They began flirting, and gave each other nicknames: She was Bert and he was Ernie, after the “Sesame Street” characters. By early 2021, she said, they were in a passionate, intimate relationship (though Mr. Combs was clear that he was seeing other women at the same time).What she says happened next parallels parts of Ms. Ventura’s testimony. Mr. Combs brought Jane to a Miami hotel suite where she said she saw “assistants” setting up with lights and beverages, and draping bedsheets over the furniture. Mr. Combs invited a male escort to the room and gave the two detailed sexual directions, she testified, while the famed music producer watched and masturbated.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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    Watch Ana de Armas Fight Using Kitchen Utensils in ‘Ballerina’

    The director Len Wiseman narrates an action sequence from “From the World of John Wick: Ballerina.”In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.In one scene in “From the World of John Wick: Ballerina,” there may be too many assassins in the kitchen.The film’s title character, the trained killer Eve (Ana de Armas), has made her way to an alpine village in Austria as part of a mission to root out a cult. But violent townspeople keep getting in her way. In a restaurant, Eve encounters a cook who aims to do more with her knife than julienne.What follows is a brisk action scene in which kitchen utensils are wielded violently and plates are smashed frantically.Narrating the scene, the director Len Wiseman said that during rehearsal, the goal was to “explore and use everything in a diner that could be used as a possible weapon.”That included pans, a meat tenderizer and a pile of plates that became the centerpiece of the sequence, as the two performers are seen in an overhead shot smashing dishes over each other’s heads.“This was one of the hardest things to do,” Wiseman said during an interview in New York, “because the plates are breakaway plates. They have one job. They break.” This meant that the actors had to be really careful picking up the plates, but also had to make the action look forceful.In the end, Wiseman and his team just wanted to have a little fun with this sequence. “What I was going for,” he said, “is let’s have this one be violent, but also make people laugh.”Read the “Ballerina” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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    Watch Five Highlights From the Met Opera Season

    There were some great shows at the Metropolitan Opera this season. I went three times to a vividly grim new production of Strauss’s “Salome” and to a revival of his sprawling “Die Frau Ohne Schatten,” and I would have happily returned to either one.But overall the season, which ends on Saturday with a final performance of John Adams’s “Antony and Cleopatra,” had considerably more misses than hits.Lately, the company has given more resources to contemporary work. That’s an admirable endeavor — and a risky one, both financially and creatively. This season the Met presented four recent operas, none of them box office home runs or truly satisfying artistically.“Antony and Cleopatra” had passages of Adams’s enigmatic melancholy, but the piece slogged under reams of dense Shakespearean verse. “Grounded,” by Jeanine Tesori and George Brant, which opened the season in September, starred a potent Emily D’Angelo as a drone operator, but couldn’t rise above a thin score. Osvaldo Golijov and David Henry Hwang’s “Ainadamar,” its music raucously eclectic, struggled to make its dreamlike account of Federico García Lorca’s death into compelling drama.Best of the bunch was “Moby-Dick,” by Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer, a bit bland musically but at least clear and convincingly moody. The tenor Brandon Jovanovich’s world-weary Ahab, stalking the stage with a belted-on peg leg, has stayed with me.So too has the pairing of a volatile Julia Bullock and Gerald Finley, the embodiment of weathered authority, as Adams’s Cleopatra and Antony. Among other strong performances, Ben Bliss and Golda Schultz, the two leads in a revival of a scruffy staging of Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte,” sang with melting poise.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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    Everything Millennial Is Cool Again

    JNCO Jeans, big hair, “Sex and the City” and recession pop: Peak Millennial is back and the era’s trends are taking on a new life.They trolled us for being old when we hit our 30s, old-fashioned for remembering a time before email and for being “cringe” as we kept wearing our skinny jeans and ankle socks.Oh, how the tables have turned.Gen Z and younger generations are picking up where we, their (slightly) older counterparts, left off in the 2000s.The Gen Z girlies are watching “Sex and the City” and living their best Carrie Bradshaw lifestyles. Those Facebook albums of blurry photos of a night out? They’re back, repackaged as an Instagram “photo dump.” Ditto for big hair and wired headphones.“I do like seeing how a younger generation interprets an older trend when it comes back around,” said Erin Miller, 35, a TikTok creator and self-proclaimed 1990s and 2000s historian. She wasn’t surprised that many trends loved by millennials were making a comeback. “Does it remind me of my age? Yes.”But that’s not to say everything is the same. Millennials (typically those born from the early 1980s to the late ’90s) had infomercials and mail-order. Gen Z and Alpha have TikTok makeup tutorials and fast fashion. Bradshaw’s cosmopolitan has been exchanged for an Aperol spritz.Members of generations Z and Alpha are putting their own mark on once-ubiquitous phenomena, and according to Ms. Miller, they’re the winners: “I think they are doing it better.”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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    In ‘The Phoenician Scheme,’ Real Masterpieces Get a Starring Role

    Paintings by Magritte and others were borrowed for “The Phoenician Scheme.” Safeguarding them amid the hot lights and chaos of a film set was challenging.At the end of Wes Anderson’s new caper, “The Phoenician Scheme,” there are some unusual credits. In addition to the cast and crew, the artworks featured in the film are listed, complete with ownership details. That’s because the pieces onscreen are not reproductions. They are in fact the actual masterpieces from Pierre-Auguste Renoir, René Magritte and other well-known artists.In the past, Anderson has faked a Kandinsky and a Klimt. Here he went for the real thing.“We have a character who’s a collector, who’s a possessor; he wants to own things, and we thought because it’s sort of art and commerce mixed together this time we should try to have the real thing,” Anderson said via a voice note.What he ended up with was impressive. The fictional collection of the businessman Zsa-zsa Korda, played by Benicio Del Toro, includes Renoir’s “Enfant Assis en Robe Bleue,” which was once owned by Greta Garbo, and Magritte’s “The Equator.” There is also a selection of works from the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Germany that includes pieces from the 17th century.“The Equator” by René Magritte sits on the mantle behind the film’s cast and director, Wes Anderson, third from right.TPS Productions/Focus FeaturesGetting a collector or an art institution to hand over a painting worth millions of dollars to a film production isn’t an easy task, and the negotiations fell mostly to Jasper Sharp, a curator who had worked with Anderson and his wife, Juman Malouf, on their 2018 exhibition at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, where Sharp is based.“A film set has vast amounts of light, heat, no climate control, very lax security, people running everywhere with booms and lights and props,” Sharp said in a video interview. “The walls that it will be hung on are made of plywood sometimes. There are less desirable places to hang art, but this was certainly a challenging environment in terms of me trying to persuade someone that they maybe want to lend an object.”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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    ‘Tyler Perry’s Straw’ Review: The Accidental Bank Robber

    A single mom in Atlanta (Taraji P. Henson) is having a very, very, very bad day.In “Tyler Perry’s Straw,” Janiyah (Taraji P. Henson), a single mom in Atlanta, is having a very, very, very bad day. Her morning was already ragged when the writer-director piles onto her woes a demeaning landlord, a bullying boss, a distant school administrator, a line of disgruntled grocery customers and a road-raging, off-duty police officer. Did we mention that Janiyah winds up in the wrong office at the wrong time in the wrong state of mind?As detectives arrive to a bloody crime scene at the grocery store where she clerks, Janiyah is across the parking lot at her bank, trying to cash her paycheck. Only she doesn’t have identification, and the teller is being a stickler. Soon, Janiyah is waving a gun, something is flashing red in her daughter’s see-through backpack and she has made hostages of the bank employees and a handful of aging customers. Sherri Shepherd portrays Nicole, the branch manager who tries to diffuse the situation, having amped it by telling the police that Janiyah has a bomb.Teyana Taylor (“A Thousand and One”) brings fierce focus to a deteriorating situation as Detective Kay Raymond. The security footage at the grocery store didn’t lie, but Detective Raymond intuits something more has sent Janiyah to the desperate standoff. She steps in as a negotiator.Perry, an unapologetic purveyor of melodrama, mercilessly teases the tension. Will Janiyah hurt the hostages? Will the authorities make a sad situation worse? The ending is perhaps too twisting for its own good. But Henson — so deeply committed to her character’s emotional cratering — still makes us care.StrawNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More