Aurelia Butler

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    Lily Gladstone in the Spotlight at the Kering Women in Motion Dinner

    The juror found herself at the center of the Kering Women in Motion dinner, a year after she was a little-known guest for “Killers of the Flower Moon.”At the Cannes Film Festival, much is made of the standing ovation. Every round of applause earns breathless headlines, with outlets racing to report which movie received the most prolonged cheers.But sometimes at Cannes, where you sit is just as important as when you leap to your feet.This is something Lily Gladstone found out Sunday night at Kering’s annual Women in Motion dinner, a star-studded bash that drew the likes of Michelle Yeoh, Julianne Moore, Isabelle Huppert and the jury president, Greta Gerwig. As one of Gerwig’s fellow jurors, Gladstone will help decide the winner of the Palme d’Or. It’s a prestigious position that also represents a full-circle moment for the actress, whose profile was turbocharged last year when “Killers of the Flower Moon” debuted at Cannes.The day after that premiere last May, Gladstone found herself at the Women in Motion dinner. At one point, she made her way to the party’s center table to greet her co-star Leonardo DiCaprio and perched next to him on an empty chair reserved for the festival’s president, Iris Knobloch.Recounting the story to me on Sunday, Gladstone grinned. “Iris and I were just laughing about that, that she had to kick me out of her chair last year and now I’m sitting next to her,” she said. In fact, this year Gladstone had been assigned what could be considered the party’s most prestigious spot, the chair between Knobloch and the Cannes artistic director, Thierry Frémaux.“I’m the Leo this year!” Gladstone said, chuckling. “I’m totally in his seat.”At this point in the festival, Gladstone and her fellow jurors have seen almost half the films in competition. “Last year, I only had to be concerned with one film,” Gladstone said. “This year, it’s 22.” And her jury experience comes after several months spent on the awards circuit for “Killers of the Flower Moon,” which earned her a best actress Oscar nomination.But though Gladstone’s dance card is full — she’ll soon star in “The Memory Police,” a sci-fi film scripted by Charlie Kaufman, as well as a remake of Ang Lee’s “The Wedding Banquet” that will co-star Bowen Yang — she said that taking time out for Cannes has recharged her artistic battery.“I’m ready to get back to work and shift that gear, and immersing yourself in other people’s creativity is a great way to kick-start it again for yourself,” she said. “So I’m enjoying the hell out of it.” More

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    Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons and Willem Dafoe on Yorgos Lanthimos’s New Film

    In the new Yorgos Lanthimos film “Kinds of Kindness,” a character played by Emma Stone recounts a dream in which she was the denizen of a bizarre world. “There, dogs were in charge,” she murmurs. “People were animals, animals were people.” But being brought to heel by their canine masters wasn’t as bad as it sounds, she says: “I must admit, they treated us pretty well.”Compared with how the human beings treat each other in “Kinds of Kindness,” a dark new comedy that just premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and is in theaters June 21, the dogs would surely be an improvement.Comprised of three separate stories with the cast members recurring in different roles, “Kinds of Kindness” begins with the tale of Robert (Jesse Plemons), a corporate underling whose every interaction in life — including what to eat, how to speak or even who to marry — is controlled by a boss (Willem Dafoe) whose decisions send poor Robert into a tailspin. The second story follows Daniel (Plemons again), who becomes convinced that his wife (Stone) is not who she claims to be and coaxes her into insane tasks to prove herself.And in the third sequence, cult members played by Stone and Plemons search for a woman able to wake the dead, though the whims of their guru (Dafoe) dictate that this mysterious woman also be a certain height and weight and have an identical twin. (Even when it comes to awesome supernatural powers, there are dealbreakers.)Dafaoe and Stone worked on Lanthimos’s “Poor Things” together, for which she won the best actress Oscar. “I still don’t know what that was,” Stone said. “That was cuckoo bananas.”Sam Hellmann for The New York TimesOn Saturday afternoon in a hotel here in Cannes, I met with Stone, Plemons and Dafoe to try to make sense of this triptych. According to the actors, Lanthimos isn’t keen to give too much away. “Yorgos says he likes it when people have different takes on the movie,” Dafoe said. “I think that’s the strength of it.”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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    What We Lose When ChatGPT Sounds Like Scarlett Johansson

    OpenAI has good reason to aim for a bot voice à la the one in “Her.” But that film was about relationships. What does this real-world turn say about us?When Spike Jonze’s romance “Her” was released in 2013, it sounded both like a joke — a man falls in love with his computer — and a fantasy. The iPhone was about six years old. Siri, the mildly reliable virtual assistant for that phone, came along a few years later. You could converse in a limited way with Siri, whose default female-coded voice had the timbre and tone of a self-assured middle-aged hotel concierge. She did not laugh; she did not giggle; she did not tell spontaneous jokes, only Easter egg-style gags written into her code by cheeky engineers. Siri was not your friend. She certainly wasn’t your girlfriend.So Samantha, the A.I. assistant with whom the sad-sack divorcé Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) fell in love in “Her,” felt like a futuristic revelation. Voiced by Scarlett Johansson, Samantha was similar to Siri, if Siri liked you and wanted you to like her back. She was programmed to mold herself around the individual user’s preferences, interests and ideas. She was witty, and sweet and quite literally tireless. In theory, everyone in “Her” was using their own version of Samantha, presumably with different names and voices. But the movie — which I love — was less the tale of a near-future society, and more the coming-of-age story of one man. Theodore found the strength to return to life in a brief, beautiful relationship with a woman who fit his needs perfectly and healed his wounds.It was thus a tad jarring to hear the voice of the virtual assistant in last week’s announcement of the newest version of ChatGPT, probably the best known artificial intelligence engine in the very real world of 2024. Among other things, the new iteration, dubbed ChatGPT-4o, can interact verbally with the user and respond to images shown to it through the device’s camera. Those who watched the live demo from OpenAI, the company that makes ChatGPT, were quick to note that she sounded a whole lot like Samantha — which is to say, like Johansson.Mira Murati, OpenAI’s chief technology officer, told The Verge that the resemblance was incidental, and that ChatGPT’s nascent speech capabilities have used this voice for a while. But once you hear it, you can’t unhear it.Those who watched the live demo from OpenAI, the company that makes ChatGPT, were quick to note that she sounded like Samantha.Warner Bros. PicturesFurthermore, OpenAI founder and chief executive Sam Altman has professed his love of “Her” in the past. Following the announcement, he posted the word “her” to his X account. And on his blog post about the news, he wrote, “It feels like A.I. from the movies; and it’s still a bit surprising to me that it’s real. Getting to human-level response times and expressiveness turns out to be a big change.”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 (Very Brief) Return of Gastr del Sol

    In the ’90s, the duo of Jim O’Rourke and David Grubbs made quiet, intricate music amid a loud rock underground. A new compilation brought them back together.In late January 2016, Akinobu Oda — a Japanese restaurateur and concert promoter — taped a red-and-black handbill demanding “Don’t disturb!!!” to the window of his vegan dive in Tokyo. The reason? The American art-rock band Gastr del Sol was dining inside.It had been 18 years since the duo split. During the late 1990s, David Grubbs and Jim O’Rourke enjoyed an intense and prolific partnership, working together in multiple groups and running the audacious label Dexter’s Cigar. But they hadn’t seen each other since 2002, communicating only through sporadic emails. In Tokyo, they were finally face to face.“Our breakup was hard, because what had started as a very easy collaboration wasn’t easy anymore,” Grubbs, 56, said during a recent video interview from his Brooklyn apartment, where he was surrounded on one side by rows of records and on the other by decorative plates and vases. “I wasn’t sure how it would be, but we were there for hours after the restaurant closed.”That summit became the first move in a long path to “We Have Dozens of Titles,” a three-LP boxed set due Friday that includes the first previously unheard music from Gastr del Sol in a quarter-century. It is the end of the vault, and there will be no reunion shows or sessions.Still, with its out-of-print obscurities and several unreleased live recordings, the compilation reaffirms just how unusual the music that Grubbs and O’Rourke made during their five-year run still is. Though their music began with two carefully intertwined acoustic guitars, it stretched to encompass orchestral fantasias, electronic abstraction and collage sensibilities imported from the avant-garde. Grubbs’s image-rich writing felt poetic and detached. In an era of plangent indie rock, they were the studied, intricate eccentrics.Jim O’Rourke said he craved artistic freedom outside of Gastr del Sol: “I didn’t like my life being constrained by one thing.”Manfred RahsWe 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 Apologizes After Video Shows Him Assaulting Cassie

    After footage surfaced of Mr. Combs striking, kicking and dragging Cassie, he apologized on social media, saying that “my behavior on that video is inexcusable.”Two days after CNN published video footage showing him striking, kicking and dragging his former girlfriend, Sean Combs posted a video on social media on Sunday calling his behavior “inexcusable.”The footage that surfaced on Friday showed Mr. Combs, the hip-hop mogul known as Puff Daddy and Diddy, kicking and dragging his former girlfriend, Casandra Ventura, known as Cassie, in 2016.Last year Ms. Ventura filed and then quickly settled a lawsuit against Mr. Combs accusing him of years of physical and sexual abuse. The footage shown Friday, which appeared to come from security cameras, was consistent with some of the allegations in her lawsuit, which accused Mr. Combs of assaulting her at an InterContinental Hotel in Los Angeles in 2016 as she tried to leave.“It’s so difficult to reflect on the darkest times in your life, but sometimes you got to do that,” Mr. Combs said in his apology video, which he posted to Instagram. “I hit rock bottom — but I make no excuses. My behavior on that video is inexcusable. I take full responsibility for my actions in that video. I’m disgusted. I was disgusted then when I did it. I’m disgusted now.”A lawyer for Mr. Combs had previously denied the allegations in Ms. Ventura’s lawsuit. In a statement following the suit, which was filed in November, the lawyer said that Combs “vehemently denies these offensive and outrageous allegations.” The next day, Mr. Combs said, “We have decided to resolve this matter amicably.”In her lawsuit, Ms. Ventura accused Mr. Combs of forcing her to have sex with male prostitutes in front of him in encounters that he called “freak offs,” which she said he instructed her to arrange. Her court filing said that the 2016 assault took place after a freak off during which she said Mr. Combs “became extremely intoxicated and punched Ms. Ventura in the face, giving her a black eye.” Ms. Ventura tried to leave the hotel room after Mr. Combs fell asleep, the lawsuit said, but he awoke and began screaming, following her down the hallway and picking up glass vases and throwing them at her.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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    Review: The Tragic Story of ‘An American Soldier’ Comes Home

    An opera about Danny Chen, an Army private who died by suicide after experiencing racist hazing while serving, was performed in New York, his hometown.Thirteen years have passed since Danny Chen, an Army private from New York, killed himself while serving in Afghanistan after experiencing brutal hazing and racist taunts from fellow soldiers. “An American Soldier,” the opera based on his story, has been seen in Washington, D.C., and St. Louis.But when the work had its run in Missouri, in 2018, Huang Ruo, its composer, and David Henry Hwang, its librettist, promised Private Chen’s family that they would try to bring it home to the city where he was born and raised. This week, they succeeded, as “An American Soldier” was produced at the Perelman Performing Arts Center at the World Trade Center — just a mile or so from Chinatown, where Private Chen grew up and where a stretch of Elizabeth Street was renamed Private Danny Chen Way in 2014.In Chay Yew’s clearheaded production, with an excellent cast, the touching opera had little trouble making its impact at the performance on Saturday evening. Huang and Hwang’s piece is a straightforward Chinese American family drama, but one with obvious, shameful resonances about the treatment of Asian people and other minorities in this country, and the limits on American ideals of the embrace of difference and easy assimilation.The piece opens on the court-martial of a brutal sergeant who was Private Chen’s chief antagonist. It then alternates between the courtroom and the chronological unfolding of Private Chen’s story, from the first glimmers of his idea to join the Army — an effort to prove that he was a “real American” — through the camaraderie of basic training, his endurance of racism at his next post and his nightmarish treatment once he reaches Afghanistan. His mother is a tender presence in her scenes at home with her beloved son, and a figure of fury and hurt during the court-martial, which resulted in the sergeant’s being found not guilty of the most serious charges.The version of “An American Soldier” that premiered at Washington National Opera in 2014 was a single act of just an hour. By 2018, at Opera Theater of Saint Louis, the piece had added an act and doubled in length, delving more deeply into Private Chen’s life beyond the account of the sergeant’s trial. With some tweaks, this is the work that was performed at the Perelman Center, in a version it commissioned with Boston Lyric Opera.Whether calmly undulating under an impassioned duet or anxiously sputtering as the plot darkens, Huang’s music tends to simmer out of the spotlight, allowing the storytelling to come to the fore. But there are some idiosyncratic touches in the score, like the almost ritualistic percussion hovering under some passages and the fractured trumpet — a kind of stifled fanfare — near the end, when there is an ironic choral paean to the American motto “E pluribus unum” (“Out of many, one”).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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    Phil Wiggins, Virtuoso of the Blues Harmonica, Dies at 69

    First as half of the duo Cephas and Wiggins and later on his own, he was one of the best-known musicians playing the style known as the Piedmont blues.Phil Wiggins, a harmonica player of such range that he could make his instrument sound like a clarinet one minute, an accordion the next and then an entire percussion section — all in the service of the complex melodies and steady rhythms of the style known as the Piedmont blues — died on May 7 at his home in Takoma Park, Md. He was 69.His daughter Martha Wiggins said the cause was cancer.For much of his career, Mr. Wiggins was best known as half of the duo Cephas and Wiggins, in which he performed and recorded with the guitarist and singer John Cephas. The two were considered one of the country’s top Piedmont blues acts, and they toured regularly at home and abroad for over 30 years, until Mr. Cephas’s death in 2009.The Piedmont blues is distinct from its Delta and Chicago cousins in its relaxed yet complicated melodies and its insistent rhythms. Its influences include gospel, Appalachian folk and early country music.Mr. Cephas played his instrument with the sophisticated fingerpicking typical of Piedmont blues. Mr. Wiggins would wrap all manner of counterpoints around it, then burst out in a solo that could be aggressive or restrained, tight or relaxed.“The harmonica works the same way as your voice,” he told Blues Blast magazine in 2021. “You have an idea in your mind that you want to express, and it just comes out, the same way speaking happens. In a lot of ways, it still feels that intuitive to me, except that, for me, the harmonica works better than my voice!”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 the Cannes Film Festival, Discoveries From Andrea Arnold and Rungano Nyoni

    Though the history-inflected “Furiosa” and “Megalopolis” were the hottest tickets, films by Andrea Arnold and Rungano Nyoni proved to be discoveries.It must say something about the anxious state of the movie world that two of the hottest tickets at this year’s Cannes Film Festival draw inspiration from ancient Rome. In George Miller’s “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” Chris Hemsworth zips around a wasteland like a heavy-metal charioteer, while in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Megalopolis,” Adam Driver plays a guy named Cesar. That each movie offers a vision of a culture in decline seems too on the nose for this festival, where attendees celebrate the art amid nervous chatter about the state of the industry.This year’s festival opened Tuesday under gray skies, as if nature itself were mirroring all the gloom and doom. Yet while the opening-night movie, the unfunny French comedy “The Second Act,” was a dud, the hourlong ceremony that preceded it was unexpectedly touching. The show’s focus on women that night was instructive, and it suggested that Cannes, a festival that has long promoted the cult of the male auteur, is trying to do a better job of righting a historical gender imbalance. Mind you, the number of female filmmakers who get a chance to strut the red carpet remains low: There are only four in the main competition.Louis Garrel, left, and Vincent Lindon in “The Second Act,” from Quentin Dupieux.Chi-Fou-Mi/Arte France CinémaYet things do seem better here, and at least the festival is keen to show its support for women filmmakers. During the ceremony, which was hosted by the French actress Camille Cottin (“Call My Agent”), an emotional Juliette Binoche presented Meryl Streep with an honorary Palme d’Or, and the festival went bonkers over Greta Gerwig. She’s heading this year’s competition jury, which includes two other women filmmakers: the Turkish screenwriter Ebru Ceylan and the Lebanese director Nadine Labaki. When it came time for Gerwig to appear, the festival played a highlight reel of her work and, in giant letters beamed on an even more giant screen, announced that she had “conquered the world in three films.”It was corny, but, reader, I teared up. Among other things, the love for Streep and Gerwig was a break from the drumbeat of bad news about the American movie business. Heading into 2023, Variety had predicted an “extremely bumpy” year for Hollywood; 12 months later, it changed the diagnosis to “rocky” and a conveniently concise headline explained why. “Strikes, Box-Office Bombs and ‘Huge Leadership Vacuum’: Hollywood Says Goodbye to Worst Year in a Generation.” Even Jerry Seinfeld, in an interview with GQ, said “the movie business is over.” I’d already booked my Cannes hotel and flight, so I went anyway.That’s because while the American entertainment business is in the midst of another of its recurrent crises, this hasn’t stopped artists around the world from making movies. The festival as well as several other programs outside the official selection are presenting more than 100 new movies this year from celebrated veterans and untested directors alike, some who may soon dazzle us. In other rooms in and around the Palais — the hulking center where I spend most of my time here sitting in the dark — an estimated 14,000 industry representatives, including buyers and sellers, have some 4,000 finished movies and projects on the table in what is the world’s biggest international film market.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