Aurelia Butler

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    Ian McKellen Has Clapped Back at Critics. Now He’s Playing One.

    In the new film “The Critic,” he plays the titular acid-tongued reviewer in 1930s Britain, who is terrified of being outed as gay.In Anand Tucker’s new film “The Critic,” Ian McKellen plays Jimmy Erskine, a closeted reviewer in 1930s Britain who covers theater with equal measures of wit and acid. “Despite her crimes against the theater, she was sensationally gorgeous when drunk,” Jimmy writes of a young actress portrayed by Gemma Arterton.Naturally, McKellen luxuriates in such lines. When the screenwriter Patrick Marber (“Notes on a Scandal,” “Closer”) sent the actor the script, he said, “‘This is the best part I’ve ever written for anybody,’” McKellen recalled. “Well, I didn’t want to appear to be rude by not doing it.”At 85, the actor is not slowing down, and continues to test himself by playing unlikely roles (just four years ago he was a rather mature Hamlet in London) and collaborating with directors like Robert Icke. Only a recent accident temporarily set the actor off course: In June he fell off the stage during a fight scene in “Player Kings,” Icke’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Henry IV” diptych, in which McKellen played John Falstaff.“The Critic,” which comes to theaters Friday, was shot over five weeks. “The budget was very small for what we were trying to achieve, Ian was 83, it was really hard,” Tucker, the film’s director, said. “But he was just on it — and he’s in almost everything.”McKellen with Gemma Arterton, who plays Nina Land, a young actress who is often panned in Jimmy Erskine’s reviews.Sean Gleason/Greenwich EntertainmentThis could also describe McKellen’s decades-spanning career: He has been in almost every kind of production — fantasy blockbusters like the “Lord of the Rings” films, onstage in plays by Shakespeare and Beckett and in drag as the dame in the beloved British holiday tradition known as pantomime.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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    Can a Film Say Something New About the U.S.-Mexico Border Crisis?

    “Borderland: The Line Within” takes a surprisingly multidisciplinary approach fueled by both personal history and government data.Some of the devastating information presented in the new film “Borderland: The Line Within” (in theaters) is familiar from recent documentaries. Filmmakers concerned with the humanitarian crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border understand how the camera can draw attention to what news reports and punditry miss: the human cost of government policies and law enforcement practices. Putting faces on abstract numbers activates empathy in a way no speech ever really can.“Borderland: The Line Within” examines this terrain a little differently. The director Pamela Yates does focus on individuals — two in particular. The first is Kaxh Mura’l, a Mayan man whom Yates knew from a previous documentary set in Guatemala. As the film opens, Mura’l is receiving death threats for his environmental activism there. If he can make it to the United States, he will qualify for legal asylum. But as the film shows, he struggles to be permitted due to obstructive border enforcement practices. His is a Kafka-esque tale with urgent and crucial stakes.The other subject is Gabriela Castañeda, an undocumented immigrant and mother whose status as a Dreamer under the DACA program was suddenly revoked. Castañeda is certain that the move is related to her activism on behalf of the Border Network for Human Rights. If she were detained, it would mean leaving her children alone.Seeing Mura’l and Castañeda’s stories unfold is powerful and often infuriating. But what really bolsters the film’s argument are the other figures in the documentary. In one sequence, hidden cameras capture immigration enforcement agents destroying gallons of water left in the desert by humanitarian groups like No More Deaths. Videos can’t show us everything, but the image of smiling agents kicking jugs and pouring out water certainly adds new dimensions.Yet what I found most fascinating in “Borderland” was, oddly enough, the more scientific part. Three participants in the film — Manan Ahmed, Alex Gil and Roopika Risam — are digital humanists at Columbia University, meaning they use data to inform their scholarly work in the humanities. All three have personal histories that intersect with U.S. immigration. Together, they use government data to spot patterns in public spending that tell a story about where, and how, taxpayer money is spent at the border. Their models also trace the flow of money toward politicians on all sides of the issue and directly connect to how immigration policy is made.Woven into the personal narratives, the data visualizations — and the scholars’ explanation of why they matter — make the message land even harder. If video footage provides a damning perspective, this data offers an expansive one, allowing “Borderland” to explore the crisis as both individual and systemic. The issue is bigger than any one person. “Borderland” comes at it from more than one direction, and is more effective for it. More

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    Pedro Almodóvar, Master of Mystifying Films, Wrote a Book He Can’t Classify

    Pedro Almodóvar is widely considered Spain’s greatest living filmmaker, but he sees himself as a writer first — a “fabulist,” in his telling. His extravagant plots took twists that were hard to predict or even pin down. The tale of two men who form a bond looking over two comatose women in “Talk to Her.” The story of a plastic surgeon who operates on a captive man, changing him to a woman against his will in “The Skin I Live In.”Of his more than 20 feature films, Almodóvar wrote or co-wrote nearly all of them. He had probably spent more days at a writing desk than on a set.As it turned out, he had been writing many other things, too — short stories, diary entries, a few unclassifiable essays — nearly the entire time he was making films. The tales sat in several mysterious blue folders, collected by his assistant Lola García over the course of the director’s many moves to different apartments in Madrid. In 2022, at the urging of the Spanish literary editor Jaume Bonfill, Almodóvar had a look at what had been saved over the years.“It was like seeing a dimension of Pedro that I didn’t know,” said Bonfill, adding that the manuscripts they sorted through contained writings the director had composed as a teenager as well as items Almodóvar had seemingly written decades later. The collection, “The Last Dream,” will be published in English on Sept. 24 by HarperVia.“The Last Dream” is due out Sept. 24 in the United States.HarperVia, via Associated PressJust what this collection is exactly is as much of a mystery as the folders were. Was this a memoir? (One piece was a journal entry written a couple of years back.) Was it fiction — or sketches of ideas that could be fiction — unfinished stories the director never turned into a film? (There is a tale about Count Dracula joining a monastery in Spain.) Much like with his films, Almodóvar feels little need to clarify his output into any defined genre.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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    ‘Gladiator II’ Delivers Friends, Romans and Sharks

    How the Colosseum, filled with water and stocked with predators, becomes the scene of epic naval combat in Ridley Scott’s sequel.When “Gladiator” was released in 2000, fans and critics applauded its visual effects and production design, from the towering Colosseum to the detailed costumes and prowling tigers.More than two decades later, the architects of that film reassembled for a daunting task: building a sequel that captured what people loved about the first film’s visuals, while also finding fresh ways to surprise viewers.“Gladiator II” (in theaters Nov. 22) includes familiar elements — tightly choreographed sword fighting and lofty speeches about the Roman Empire — but it adds combat scenes in the Colosseum that include a rhino in one sequence and sharks in another.“It’s epic, beyond epic,” said Arthur Max, the production designer who, along with the director Ridley Scott and the producer Douglas Wick, is part of the brain trust behind the two films. “Everything we did on the first one was amplified to a much greater size and scale.”Much of the movie’s production design draws on meticulous research, with Max traveling to the Museum of the Roman Ships of Fiumicino, to conservation laboratories in Pompeii and to museums in Athens, among other locations. They also examined models of warships at the British Museum in London and studied illustrations from military history books.But the film also takes some creative license, since many of the images and scenes sprang from Scott’s imagination. Eschewing a computer for pen and paper, Scott would often envision scenes and then draw them out for his team to re-create onscreen.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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    ‘Uglies’ Review: Beauty Is a Beast

    Joey King plays a teenager in a dystopian world where cosmetic surgery seems to be the cure for inequality.“Uglies,” based on the young adult book series by Scott Westerfeld, presents a cheekily vapid solution to world peace: At age 16, everyone is surgically enhanced to be pretty, thus eradicating inequality and conflict.Here, pretty has a template — imagine the uncanny valley of Instagram face with shiny eyes and full cheeks. Pre-operation, the teenager Tally Youngblood (Joey King) initially can’t wait to be made over. As she chirps, “Becoming moldy and crinkly? That goes against everything we’ve been taught!”The original book in the series was first optioned in 2006, at the dawn of the dystopian young adult craze, but the genre has mildewed in the years since — and the book’s early fans are now old enough to bemoan their own wrinkles.Still, one might counter that in the years in between, cosmetic transformations became an openly acknowledged right of passage for a class of celebutante influencers — a reality that may have occurred to the screenwriters Jacob Forman, Vanessa Taylor and Whit Anderson and the director Joseph McGinty Nichol, known as McG. (One could easily imagine Kris Jenner as an adviser to Laverne Cox’s imperious Dr. Cable, the leader of the lovelies.) To help woo the current generation of 11-year-olds, McG has concocted a fantastical, glossily repellent digital landscape that glows with neon and constant fireworks, causing the film to feel at once too sincere and too artificial.King plays Tally with more conviction than the movie deserves, alongside Keith Powers and Chase Stokes as her crushes and Brianne Tju as a punkish hoverboarder who yearns to join an anti-surgery agrarian conclave whose members reach self-actualization by reading Thoreau’s “Walden.” Though viewers can’t help but notice that the rebels are also naturally telegenic.UgliesRated PG-13 for some violence and action, and brief strong language. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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    Screamin’ Scott Simon, Longtime Sha Na Na Keyboardist, Dies at 75

    A mainstay of the rock ’n’ roll nostalgia band, he also wrote the lyrics to “Sandy,” a song heard in the hit film “Grease.”Screamin’ Scott Simon, who as the dynamic keyboardist for the rock ’n’ roll revival act Sha Na Na regularly paid homage to Jerry Lee Lewis with electrifying versions of “Great Balls of Fire” and “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” — and who also played a vital behind-the-scenes role as the band’s managing partner — died on Sept. 5 in Ojai, Calif. He was 75.His daughter Nina Simon said he died of sinus cancer while in hospice care.Mr. Simon joined Sha Na Na in 1970, a year after the group was formed, and stayed until the group’s final performance, shortly before the coronavirus lockdown in 2020.As both a pianist and a singer, he brought his own theatricality to a group dedicated to turning doo-wop and early rock ’n’ roll songs into dramatic versions of the originals.Wearing brightly colored shirts festooned with images of piano keys and musical notes, he played the piano on “Great Balls of Fire” partly from his knees, sometimes from his bench and occasionally with his feet. He sang the Bobby Darin hit “Splish Splash” in a bathtub, wearing a sleeveless T-shirt, boxer shorts and a towel while plinking a toy piano.Mr. Simon (standing, second from left) with the other members of Sha Na Na in an undated publicity photo. He joined the band in 1970 and remained for 50 years.via PhotofestDuring the group’s accelerated version of Danny and the Juniors’ “At the Hop,” he never stopped jumping or doing the twist as he sang.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 Combs’s Legal Team Takes His Case to TikTok

    As the music mogul faces civil lawsuits alleging sexual misconduct, one of his lawyers is defending him — in the court of social media.The typical playbook for a defense lawyer representing a celebrity facing damaging accusations often features a sharply worded denial, promises to eventually reveal all at trial, and perhaps a strategically placed tabloid pushback story.But lawyers defending the music mogul Sean Combs against a cascade of civil sexual misconduct claims have opened up a new strategic front: TikTok.On Tuesday, the singer Dawn Richard filed a new lawsuit against Mr. Combs, accusing him of threatening and groping her. Mr. Combs’s representatives responded with a somewhat traditional statement that called the lawsuit a “series of false claims” brought “in the hopes of trying to get a payday.”Then Teny Geragos hit TikTok. “All right, here we go again, Diddy sued by a former bandmate; I’m his lawyer and here’s why you should care,” Ms. Geragos, a member of the Combs defense team, said in a TikTok posted on Wednesday.Employing a popular format in which a creator speaks in front of various screenshots that help illustrate a point, Ms. Geragos walked viewers through several examples of Ms. Richard, who performed with the groups Danity Kane and Diddy — Dirty Money, expressing support for Mr. Combs. She pointed — literally — to friendly text messages between the plaintiff and defendant in 2020 discussing a possible future collaboration and played a clip from a video interview in which Ms. Richard spoke positively about her time working with Mr. Combs. One of the mogul’s sons, Justin Combs, shared the video to his Instagram.“We want to be able to respond to allegations where people are forming opinions,” Ms. Geragos said in an interview, noting that she is in her 30s and has grown up around social media. “I see where all of the misinformation spreads. I see it happening on people’s phones and in short one-minute clips.”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 Killer’s Game’ Review: Catch Him if You Can

    An assassin (Dave Bautista) meets his match (Sofia Boutella), but a diagnosis sets off an absurd chain of events in this rom-com action movie.“The Killer’s Game” begins with an atypical boy-meets-girl scenario. The high-end assassin Joe Flood, played by the bullet-headed Dave Bautista, spies his future love, the modern dancer Maize (Sofia Boutella), as he interrupts one of her performances in an ornate hall in Budapest. The interruption is a violent one: He shoots one of the spectators, and while Joe has the discretion to use a silencer, his prey’s bodyguards get a little loud. In the ensuing melee, Joe winds up in possession of Maize’s cellphone.On returning it, Maize offers Joe a dinner for his troubles. Here we learn that Joe, while brazen and prolific in the art of homicide, is a little awkward with the ladies. As he and Maize become a match, there’s trouble in paradise.Joe is plagued by headaches, and on learning that he has an incurable condition, he asks his own people — the colorful, loosely affiliated union of assassins — to take him out. (He receives his assignments, and his money, from his wise old handler, who is played by Ben Kingsley.)J.J. Perry (“Day Shift”), a stunt performer and coordinator who’s worked on the “John Wick” franchise, directs this rom-com action movie, whose conceits borrow from the “Wick” franchise rather heavily.While those conceits work well enough in movies starring Keanu Reeves, here they fall flat. The action choreography is better than passable, although Perry adds grindhouse-movie levels of gore and dismemberment in a dubious effort to up the thrill quotient.The Killer’s GameRated R for lots and lots and lots of violence. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters. More