Aurelia Butler

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    Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Megalopolis’ Debut at Cannes: What to Know

    After its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, we can answer your many questions, though some details still puzzle us.“Megalopolis,” the first film from the director Francis Ford Coppola in 13 years, premiered Thursday at the Cannes Film Festival. Self-financed by Coppola, the $120 million passion project has earned headlines about a reportedly chaotic shoot, allegations of misconduct and questions about the film’s commercial prospects.But what exactly are we dealing with here? Now that I’ve seen “Megalopolis,” let me try to answer the questions you might be asking.What is “Megalopolis” about?Any attempt to sum up “Megalopolis” will impose more narrative onto this movie than it actually contains, but here goes. Adam Driver plays Cesar Catalina, a visionary architect who dares to ask: What if a major city looked like an Iris Van Herpen dress? Like so many great men in movies, he is Haunted by Visions of a Dead Wife, but still finds himself falling for Julia (Nathalie Emmanuel), the daughter of Franklyn Cicero (Giancarlo Esposito), mayor of the city that is sometimes called New Rome but that resembles New York.Cicero, who despises Catalina for his reckless idealism, is one of many characters trying to bring the architect to heel. Other rivals include Clodio (Shia LaBeouf), a party boy turned politician, and Wow Platinum (Aubrey Plaza), a financial reporter determined to bed or plot against every powerful man in her orbit.Wait, her name is Wow Platinum?Yes, you read that correctly.What exactly is the tone of this movie?Despite the big budget, huge sets and scenes soaked in special effects, “Megalopolis” finds Coppola in the same experimental-filmmaker mode he employed for his two most recent movies, the indies “Tetro” (2009) and “Twixt” (2011). Few scenes are shot or edited in a conventional manner: Coppola employs split screen, projection techniques and artsy montage at will, and the pacing of any given sequence can change on a whim.Sometimes, that anything-could-happen approach is beguiling: Midway through the Cannes press screening, a spotlight shone on a man in the front of the theater who asked questions that Driver’s Caesar would answer onscreen. At other times, though, it feels like the filmmaker is just throwing things at the wall and hoping that something will stick.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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    After Outcry, Concertgebouw Will Allow Jerusalem Quartet to Perform

    The Dutch concert hall reversed course after facing criticism for canceling performances by the Israeli ensemble because of security concerns.The Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, one of the world’s most prestigious concert halls, said Thursday that it would allow the Jerusalem Quartet to perform, two days after it had canceled the ensemble’s concerts amid security concerns related to threatened protests.The Concertgebouw said in a statement that the Jerusalem Quartet would be allowed to perform on Saturday after all, with expanded security measures and a more robust police presence. The ensemble had originally been scheduled to perform on Thursday and Saturday, but the Concertgebouw canceled the engagement, saying it could not ensure the safety of audience members, musicians and employees because of the threat of protests related to the Israel-Gaza war. The cancellation prompted an outcry from musicians.Simon Reinink, general manager of the Concertgebouw, said in an interview that the hall had reversed course after securing commitments from the police.“Now we have enough confidence to go ahead with it,” he said. “It has everything to do with security. We were forced to crack the dilemma of security on the one hand and freedom on the other.”Reinink defended the hall’s handling of the situation, saying that the cancellation “had nothing to do with antisemitism.”“We fight and we fought we like hell to keep these concerts,” he added.The Jerusalem Quartet said in a statement that it had been “moved to tears by the outpouring of support worldwide from musicians of all profiles, from internationally famous names to anonymous amateurs.”“Every single voice has uplifted us,” it said. “It is overwhelming to experience this extraordinary community help remind the world of humanitarian values and artistic expression which underlie everything we do and believe in.”The controversy was the latest example of the Israel-Hamas war’s impact on the performing arts. Since the start of the war, cultural institutions have faced heavy scrutiny over artists, programming and funding.The Concertgebouw’s decision to cancel the concerts drew criticism from leading artists. A group of prominent musicians, including the conductor Simon Rattle, the pianist Martha Argerich and the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter published a statement on Thursday condemning the hall, saying it was capitulating to protesters.“It is not the Jerusalem String Quartet’s performances that put our freedom in danger, but those who threaten public order unless their demands are met,” the musicians wrote. “Surrendering to those threats is not only an act of weakness, but a clear signal that we are not willing or prepared to defend our democratic values and our way of life.”Reinink said that the decision to call off the concerts was made in part because of recent pro-Palestinian demonstrations at the University of Amsterdam that had turned violent.“That was, for us, the game changer,” he said. “The risk was simply too high. As long as the police could not guarantee that they could handle this situation, we made the decision it was not a good idea to go ahead.” More

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    Review: Lise Davidsen Achieves Strauss’s Ideal in ‘Salome’

    Strauss had seemingly impossible standards for a soprano in “Salome.” But Davidsen, making her role debut in Paris, is exactly what he intended.Richard Strauss’s criteria for the ideal interpreter of his opera “Salome” have haunted the piece for the better part of a century: a “16-year-old princess with the voice of Isolde.”As oxymorons go, it’s the operatic equivalent to Noam Chomsky’s famous syntactic puzzle “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” Clear, simple, impossible. And yet here is the 37-year-old Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen, in the middle of her role debut as Salome in Paris, launching her voice like a rocket that opens into a parachute in the cavern of the Opéra Bastille.With a teenager’s sly mockery of her parents and a blooming sexual awakening, Davidsen’s young Judean princess, seen on Wednesday, gradually matured in color and volume. But when she reached the determined outburst of “Gib mir den Kopf des Jochanaan!” (“Give me the head of John the Baptist!”), her top voice detonated with a force that sent shock waves of youthful, shimmery sound reverberating equally in all directions. She stepped into her 16-year-old Isolde, and held the audience rapt for 20 more minutes of epiphanic sumptuousness.I had never made the connection between Salome’s final scene and Isolde’s climactic Liebestod in Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde.” Usually, they don’t sound alike. Opera fans sometimes reach for Strauss’s one-liner to describe a soprano with some mix of the role’s beauty, lyricism, youth and power, but there is an implicit compromise, a sense that “this is as close as it gets.” As Davidsen unleashed huge arcs of exalting tone, though, her voice was soft and heavy like thickly piled velvet; she reveled in Salome’s obsessive love to music of apotheosizing grandeur and purified her desire of its murderous origins.This revival of Lydia Steier’s disturbingly powerful production gave Davidsen a profound context to explore her interpretation. Steier’s militarized hellscape felt both primitive and postapocalyptic. Violent orgies, stripped of ritual, set the stage for gleeful sadism and recreational murder. King Herod (Gerhard Siegel, a seasoned Wagnerian with technical security and confident point) is styled as a depraved chieftain in black lace, soiled robes and a feathered headdress, and he presides over a ruling class that delights in bludgeoning and asphyxiating sex slaves. Their crimes are visible through a large glass window high above the stage. The Dance of the Seven Veils is a scene of rape. It would all be crass, if it weren’t for the craft of the staging’s detailed movement choreography.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 Strangers: Chapter 1’ Review: Crowded House

    A reboot of the 2008 home invasion film “The Strangers” brings back masked assailants and brutal violence but leaves originality behind.The key to a terrific scary home invasion horror movie is not just how domesticity gets breached but why. It’s great to have a determined aggressor, sympathetic victims and a brutal invasion that’s contained and sustained. But to what end?Yet some of the best home invasion films — “Funny Games,” “Them” — don’t supply easy answers. “The Strangers,” Bryan Bertino’s terrifying 2008 thriller starring Liv Tyler and Scott Speedman as a couple under siege, didn’t either. It kept the invaders’ motives and their identities mysterious, amping up the devil-you-don’t-know terrors with a sense of randomness that was despairing. The premise and execution were simple. The payoff was a gut punch.On its face, “The Strangers: Chapter 1,” the first of three new films in a “Strangers” reboot from the director Renny Harlin (“A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master”), checks all the same boxes. But the hapless script — written by Alan R. Cohen and Alan Freedland and based on the original — offers nothing fresh in a tiring 91 minutes, and nothing daring to justify a new “Strangers” film, let alone a new series, especially when Bertino’s formidable film is streaming on Max.This new tale begins with Maya (Madelaine Petsch) and her boyfriend, Ryan (Froy Gutierrez), taking a fifth anniversary road trip through the Pacific Northwest. When their car breaks down in a rural Oregon town, they meet a seen-it-before who’s who of horror movie yokeldom: unsmiling boys, sweaty bumpkin mechanics, a diner waitress whose eyes scream “run, if you know what’s good.”As Maya and Ryan wait for their car to be fixed, they decide to spend the night at a secluded rental cabin. Under darkness there’s a knock at the door and, true to the home invasion formula, our leading sweethearts get terrorized until dawn inside the cabin and through the woods by a trio of assailants with big weapons and indefinite end goals. They have face coverings too, making menace out of the same blank-faced creepiness the villains embodied in the original film and its 2018 sequel.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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    Portishead’s Beth Gibbons Returns Solo, Doleful Yet Determined

    With “Lives Outgrown,” her first album of her own songs in 22 years, the pensive voice of the trip-hop group confronts maturity and mortality.“All trying but can’t escape/All going to nowhere,” Beth Gibbons sings in “Floating on a Moment” from her new album, “Lives Outgrown.” It’s an acknowledgment of mortality, of limitations, of inevitable endings. It’s also an insight that can be grim or oddly comforting. Gibbons leans tentatively toward comfort; as the song ends, children sing, “All going to nowhere” while minor chords give way to major ones and Gibbons concludes, “All we have is here and now.”For three decades, Gibbons, 59, has made herself a voice of melancholy yearning and shattered hopes. With Portishead in the 1990s and 2000s, and on her own very occasional solo projects, she has sung about alienation, grief, doubt, loneliness, fear, betrayal and tormented love. Now, on “Lives Outgrown,” Gibbons has matured without becoming complacent. “The burden of life just won’t leave us alone,” she sings in “Burden of Life.”Portishead’s two 1990s studio albums, “Dummy” (1994) and “Portishead” (1997), were foundations of trip-hop. They deployed atmospheric samples to conjure a foreboding netherworld, where Gibbons’s vocals could sound anxious, jazzy, witchy or utterly bereft. Portishead’s return in 2008, “Third,” was uncompromising, dissonant and volatile, bristling against the ways trip-hop had been smoothed into background music during the group’s hiatus.In between, Gibbons collaborated on an album with Paul Webb, a.k.a Rustin Man, the bassist of Talk Talk. “Out of Season,” released in 2002, placed her voice in more naturalistic settings, with studio bands and orchestral arrangements. “Lives Outgrown,” 22 years later, is its latter-day sequel.The album was assembled gradually over the last 10 years, while Gibbons occasionally resurfaced with other projects: composing film scores, performing Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 (Symphony of Sorrowful Songs) with the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, collaborating with Kendrick Lamar on “Mother I Sober.”Produced by Gibbons and James Ford (of Simian Mobile Disco), “Lives Outgrown” relies on hand-played instruments, but it often juxtaposes them in surreal ways. Ford alone plays a huge assortment — guitars, dulcimer, keyboards, woodwinds, brasses, even musical saw — while the drummer Lee Harris (from Talk Talk), who shares some songwriting credits, uses all sorts of found percussion, including boxes and kitchenware. For the first time in her catalog, Gibbons allowed herself to layer on backup vocals, which materialize like a ghostly sisterhood.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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    ‘Film Geek’ Review: A Cinephile’s Guide to New York

    The director Richard Shepard details his lifelong obsession with movies in this enthusiastic video essay.Richard Shepard, the director of the black comedies “Dom Hemingway” and “The Matador,” is a lifelong cinephile with a voracious appetite for movies.“Film Geek,” a feature-length video essay composed primarily of footage of films that Shepard saw growing up in the 1970s in New York City, delves deep into his obsession. In a voice-over, he recounts his childhood, when he was “addicted to movies, to watching them, to making them.” He is enthusiastic, and the movie aspires to make that enthusiasm infectious.I appreciate Shepard’s affection: I also grew up loving movies, and I found his wistful reminiscences of being awed by “Jaws” and “Star Wars” relatable. But Shepard’s level of self-regard can be stultifying. For minutes at a time, he simply rattles off the titles of various movies that he saw as a child. I appreciate that seeing “Rocky” made a strong impression on him. I did not need to know that he lost his virginity in the apartment building where John G. Avildsen, the director of “Rocky,” once lived.“Film Geek” has been compared to Thom Andersen’s great documentary from 2003, “Los Angeles Plays Itself,” and on the level of montage, they share a superficial resemblance: “Film Geek,” like Andersen’s essay film, is brisk and well edited.But “Los Angeles Plays Itself” is also a thoughtful and incisive work of film criticism, whereas Shepard describes movies in clichés, when he describes movies at all. More often he is talking about himself, a subject of interest to far fewer viewers.Film GeekNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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    Hong Sang-soo’s Film ‘In Our Day” Meditates on the Spice of Life

    The Korean director Hong Sang-soo winds together the slenderest strands of two intersecting stories to make a tender film about simple pleasures.In another world there’s a Hong Sang-soo Cinematic Universe, where a rabid fandom celebrates the one or two movies every year featuring a revolving door not of familiar superheroes but of poets, filmmakers and actors, each of them contending with questions of life and love rather than planetary threats. Those elements, of artists in quotidian scenarios, drinking soju and smoking amid everyday conversation, are present in many of the small humanist gems that make up this South Korean auteur’s filmography, and the same goes for his latest, “In Our Day.”The film, as warm and wise as it is simple and languid, follows two separate parties (diptychs are another Hong trademark) across a single afternoon. One involves Sangwon (Kim Min-hee, Hong’s frequent collaborator and offscreen partner), an actress pondering retirement, as she spends the day with her friend and her younger cousin; the other involves Uiju (Ki Joo-bong), an old poet dispensing life lessons in his apartment to two university students, one of whom is filming him for a documentary.The two story lines don’t cross paths, as they often do in Hong’s films; they are united only by the deployment of a culinary hack: mixing hot pepper paste into ramyun. His gochujang-inflected noodles provide a simple pleasure made all the more satisfying in recent days for Uiju, who, on doctor’s orders, is abstaining from drinking and smoking. But he can’t quite resist on either front, reflecting a sentiment from early in the film when Sangwon, offering up treats to a friend’s cat, says, “What’s the point of living, anyway? Eat your fill.”It’s a glimmer of existential wisdom buried in the mundane, if you look at it the right way. Most of the film is made up of these moments. Isn’t life like that, too? To search for or expect more would be to court disappointment. “Don’t look for meaning. That’s cowardice,” Uiju tells a young pupil searching desperately for grand answers. “Just jump in the water. Don’t try knowing it all before jumping, like a coward.”In Our DayNot rated. In Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘IF’ Review: Invisible Friends, but Real Celebrity Cameos

    The film is a slim story about a girl named Bea (Cailey Fleming) who helps a crank named Cal (Ryan Reynolds) play matchmaker. Oh, and Bradley Cooper is a glass of ice water.The big “IF” — as in “imaginary friend” — in John Krasinski’s treacly kids dramedy is a grizzly-sized purple goon who goes by the name Blue. The boy who conjured him was colorblind, he explains. Blue (voiced by Steve Carell) is one of dozens of dreamed-up creatures in Brooklyn who long for their now-grown BFFs to remember they exist.At the Memory Lane Retirement Community underneath Coney Island, there’s also a pink alligator (Maya Rudolph), a superhero dog (Sam Rockwell), a worn teddy (Louis Gossett Jr.), a retro cartoon butterfly (Phoebe Waller-Bridge), a robot (Jon Stewart), an astronaut (George Clooney), a glass of ice water (Bradley Cooper), a gummy bear (Amy Schumer), a unicorn (Emily Blunt), a flower (Matt Damon), a cat in an octopus costume (Blake Lively), a ghost (Matthew Rhys), a soap bubble (Awkwafina), some green slime (Keegan-Michael Key), and an invisible blob who the credits claim is none other than Brad Pitt.What’s more impressive: Krasinski’s imagination or the very real friends in his Rolodex?Most of these characters merely stroll through the frame to say hello, or whine to each other in group therapy. Yet these celebrity cameos take up about as much space as the plot, a gentle, slim story about an unflappable 12-year-old girl named Bea (Cailey Fleming) who helps a crank named Cal (Ryan Reynolds) play matchmaker for the lonely IFs.If — and this is a rhetorical if — you’re still traumatized by the last shot of Bing Bong, the forgotten imaginary friend in Pixar’s “Inside Out,” breathe easy. There’s no existential threat (or narrative tension) about what might happen if the goofy gang remains consigned to oblivion. Palling about with kids again just sounds nice.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