Aurelia Butler

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    What Was Your Personal Song of the Summer?

    We want to know your seasonal anthem, for a future Amplifier playlist.In a recent edition of The Amplifier newsletter, Lindsay Zoladz shared her picks for this year’s Song of the Summer, including seasonal smashes like Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso,” Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” and Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us.”But the song that defined your summer doesn’t have to be a contemporary hit. Maybe it was an old song you discovered — or rediscovered — that captured an experience you were going through. Maybe it was a newer song that didn’t crack the Top 40. Or maybe it was a familiar classic that provided a perfect soundtrack for a vacation, a sunny stroll or a day at the beach when the summer, briefly, felt endless.If you’d like to share your song and your story with us, fill out the form below. We may publish your response in an upcoming newsletter. We won’t publish any part of your submission without reaching out and hearing back from you first.What was your personal song of the summer?We want to know your seasonal anthem, for a future Amplifier playlist. More

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    10 Unforgettable Songs From 1999 Movies

    Listen to tracks by the Chicks, Aimee Mann, Blink-182 and more linked to moments in a monumentally interesting — and busy — year of cinema.Julia Roberts offering a hint of what happens in “Runaway Bride.”Paramount PicturesDear listeners,For the past few weeks, my colleagues in The Times’s movies section have been running a highly entertaining series called “Class of 1999,” celebrating the 25th anniversary of a monumentally interesting — and busy — year of cinema.At the box office, the final year of the millennium truly had it all: era-defining horror (“The Sixth Sense,” “The Blair Witch Project”), boundary-pushing comedy (“Being John Malkovich,” “Election”), enduring art-house favorites (“Eyes Wide Shut,” “Magnolia”) and fodder for future dorm-room posters (“Fight Club,” “The Matrix”). It was, as Wesley Morris puts it in a delightful new essay summing up what some have called the “Best. Movie. Year. Ever.,” a time of “range, volume, abundance, deluge.” It was the year of both “The Phantom Menace” and “The Spy Who Shagged Me.” Of Americans “Pie” and “Beauty.” But, most importantly for our purposes, it had a killer soundtrack.Today’s playlist is a sonic tribute to the movies of 1999, culled entirely from soundtracks released that year. It’s got some names you’ll still recognize (Madonna, Blink-182, the Chicks) and some (Imperial Teen, Harvey Danger) that remain time-stamped in the late ’90s.I wanted to limit myself to songs released in 1999, which means that a few of the year’s most memorable musical moments (the Pixies song forever linked with the end of “Fight Club,” the Eurodance anthem that plays during the startling conclusion of Claire Denis’s masterpiece “Beau Travail”) must go unmentioned, except for the mentioning I just did there. I’ve also omitted a few of the most obvious and overplayed choices: I do not think I need to remind you of Sixpence None the Richer’s swoony “She’s All That” theme “Kiss Me,” or of that end-of-the-Willennium indulgence “Wild Wild West.”Still, I hope this playlist makes you feel like Austin Powers in reverse, aurally transported back to the brink of Y2K. Naturally, it’s oozing with nostalgia, but I think you may actually be surprised at how many of these tracks still hold up 25 years later.Also! Since we already determined last week what the song(s) of the summer are, I want to hear what your personal song of the summer was. Maybe it was an old song that you discovered (or rediscovered), or a newer song that provided the perfect soundtrack to your season. Here is a submission form where you can share your pick with me. We may use your response in an upcoming edition of The Amplifier.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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    Nicole Kidman Bares Everything in the Sexy Drama ‘Babygirl’

    The star is taking chances again in this look at a woman reconciling her sexual fantasies. The movie was the talk of the Venice Film Festival.Though Nicole Kidman used to be one of cinema’s greatest risk-takers, in recent years, she’s become streaming TV’s safest bet. The 57-year-old star is now a fixture of beach-read limited series like “Big Little Lies” and “Nine Perfect Strangers,” “The Undoing” and “The Perfect Couple.” They’re widely watched and keep Kidman bankable, even if you might miss the actress who used to give her all to the auteurist likes of Jonathan Glazer, Yorgos Lanthimos and Lars von Trier.That’s what makes “Babygirl” so bracing. This A24 film, which premiered Friday at the Venice Film Festival, is exactly what Kidman has shied away from in recent years, a daring indie that re-establishes her as one of our most fearless actresses. Everyone who’s watched this spiky, sexy film in Venice wants to talk about it, and it should start no end of delicious debate when A24 releases it in theaters this Christmas.Written and directed by Halina Reijn, “Babygirl” opens on Kidman faking an orgasm. She’s playing Romy, a hard-charging chief executive who seems to have it all: success, two spirited daughters, and a handsome husband (Antonio Banderas) who dotes on her by day and makes tender love to her at night. But is that the kind of sex she really wants? As soon as her husband finishes and falls asleep, Romy darts into another room, pulls up some S&M porn on her laptop and brings herself to a real climax.Though her tech company innovates in the field of automation, Romy yearns to break free of her own smoothly running routine. That’s why she’s so intrigued by the office intern Samuel (Harris Dickinson), who often makes demands of her — some vaguely flirtatious — when their power differential is supposed to be the other way around. They first meet outside their office building when a rapt Romy watches him soothe a wild dog just by talking to it, though he’ll later claim that he simply fed the mutt a cookie.“Do you always have cookies on you?” she asks him.They lock eyes and he teases her: “Yeah, you want one?”It isn’t long before Romy is stuffing Samuel’s tie in her mouth and lapping milk off a saucer when he orders her to, though the abandon that ought to distinguish their S&M affair is only offered in fits and starts. Romy is too wracked with guilt to fully commit to their wild acts, not simply because she’s stepping out on her husband but because she can’t reconcile the power dynamic of her fantasies with the bows-to-no-one role model she’s publicly considered to be.Though Kidman has made sexually explicit films like “Eyes Wide Shut,” she still considered the intimate scenes in “Babygirl” a step further than what she’s used to, telling Vanity Fair, “This is something you do and hide in your home videos.” At the Venice news conference for the film on Friday afternoon, she said the thought of presenting it to audiences terrified 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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    Eminem and LL Cool J Duel in Speedy Raps, and 9 More New Songs

    Hear tracks by Sophie featuring Bibi Bourelly, Kim Deal, Tommy Richman and more.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.LL Cool J featuring Eminem, ‘Murdergram Deux’LL Cool J, 56, and Eminem, 51, show off old-school, high-speed, crisply articulated rhyme technique in “Murdergram Deux,” nominally a sequel to “Murdergram” from LL Cool J’s 1990 album “Mama Said Knock You Out.” It’s all boasts, threats, wordplay and similes — “’bout to finish you like polyurethane,” Eminem raps — set to a jaunty, changeable track produced by Eminem and none other than Q-Tip. Eminem has the slightly higher syllable count, while LL Cool J gets the last word, a cheerful callback to his commercial peak. JON PARELESSophie featuring Bibi Bourelly, ‘Exhilarate’The hyperpop visionary Sophie had mapped out a full album before she died in an accident in 2021; “Sophie,” completed by her brother and other collaborators, is due in September. “Exhilarate” takes the conventions of a big-room trance anthem — four chords, sumptuously reverberating synthesizer tones, a stately underlying beat — and warps them from the bottom up. Bibi Bourelly sings euphoric layered harmonies, proclaiming, “Got my foot on the gas/And I won’t stop for no one.” But the drumbeat leaves spaces instead of thumping four on the floor, while bass tones wriggle and melt and the midrange gets zapped with buzzy tones. The track’s entire last minute is a slow-motion collapse into entropy and silence. PARELESKim Deal, ‘Crystal Breath’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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    Basel Will Host Eurovision Song Contest (Unless Its Taxpayers Revolt)

    Many in the Swiss city celebrated the announcement. But after a debate about the cost, a conservative party wants a referendum over whether the public should pay.Basel, a quaint riverside city in northern Switzerland, on Friday won the right to host next year’s Eurovision Song Contest, the high-camp international singing competition.To many Basel residents, the news, which Eurovision’s organizers announced in a release, was a cause for celebration: Next May, the city would have a moment in the international spotlight.Yet some lawmakers in Switzerland had an altogether different reaction. To them, Eurovision is not a fun spectacle; it is a waste of money and “a celebration of evil” that has no place in their country.Members of the Federal Democratic Union of Switzerland, a conservative Christian party, are campaigning for a referendum to stop Basel’s government contributing tens of millions of dollars toward Eurovision’s running costs.Samuel Kullmann, the lawmaker leading the campaign, said that Eurovision had a “cultural agenda” that threatened Christian values. That included, he added, allowing musicians to promote Satanism onstage.At this year’s Eurovision, Kullmann said, entrants included Bambie Thug, a heavy metal act representing Ireland, who sang standing in a pentagram. “People might say it’s metal or Gothic music, but they’re ignoring the obvious,” Kullmann said. “It was a celebration of evil.”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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    ‘Afraid’ Review: John Cho Stars in New AI-Themed Horror Movie

    A family surrenders control of its life to artificial intelligence with predictably dire results — for this movie’s viewers.Curtis and Meredith (John Cho and Katherine Waterston) should have had their spidey senses tingling when their new digital assistant, AIA, dismissed one of its competitors with a breezy “Alexa, that bitch?”Instead, the couple and their three children, all of whom are endowed with a mix of entitlement and shopworn neuroses, give AIA (pronounced Aya, and voiced by Havana Rose Liu) the keys to their lives. The new gizmo is more than convenient, you see — AIA, which sees and hears everything, anticipates then solves everybody’s problems.Watching any movie in which artificial intelligence goes rogue (and there are a lot), it’s hard not to think that humankind is rushing to its doom because we were too lazy to manually turn on a light or pick a song. But before we get to the age of the machine, films like Chris Weitz’s limp techno-thriller “Afraid” are attempting to ring an alarm bell.As AIA takes control of every aspect of its new household — the movie feels as if it’s set five minutes into the future — it quickly becomes obvious that this assistant wants to be the boss. This scenario’s predictability could be forgiven were the movie effective on any level, but it just isn’t, from Cho and Waterston’s wooden performances to jump scares that would not startle Scooby-Doo.Early on, Meredith drops a reference to HAL 9000, the malevolent computer from “2001: A Space Odyssey.” This suggests an awareness of the dangers of ahead, but does she change her behavior? Of course not: Unlike AIA, these humans don’t learn.AfraidRated PG-13 for the occasional bad word. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters. More

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    Stream These 12 Titles Before They Leave Netflix in September

    A lot of great movies and TV shows are leaving for U.S. subscribers this month. Watch them while you can.A wide array of terrific titles are leaving Netflix in the United States in September, including three beloved CW comedies, a movie musical classic, a recent family favorite and two of Eddie Murphy’s best. (Dates indicate the final day a title is available.)‘Beverly Hills Cop’ / ‘Beverly Hills Cop II’ (Sept. 3)Stream ‘Beverly Hills Cop’ here and ‘Beverly Hills Cop II’ here.To supplement the July release of the Netflix original “Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F,” the service added the first two outings of the long-running franchise, quintessential examples of the ’80s action-comedy. (They didn’t bother with the much-derided “Beverly Hills Cop III,” to no one’s objection.) The 1984 original introduced Eddie Murphy as Axel Foley, a wisecracking Detroit street cop who invades the tony environs of 90210 to investigate a friend’s murder. The director Martin Brest cleverly mixes hard-hitting action sequences with flashes of character-based comedy, all held aloft by Murphy’s confidence and charisma. The 1987 sequel was directed by the master stylist Tony Scott, so it feels a bit more like a straight-up action picture (albeit a fine one), but Murphy still teases out big laughs where he can find them.‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’: Seasons 1-4 (Sept. 5)Stream it here.The best TV comedies are frequently the outgrowth of a singular sensibility, like Larry David’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Lena Dunham’s “Girls” and Tina Fey’s “30 Rock.” Add to that list this CW series from Rachel Bloom, the star and co-creator, who infuses the formula of the television rom-com with generous volts of manic, theater-kid energy. She stars as Rebecca Bunch, an unhappy Manhattan corporate lawyer who abandons her career to follow an old summer camp crush to California. With its oddball musical numbers, candid depiction of mental illness and winking inversions of romantic conventions, it’s a true, terrific original.‘iZombie’: Seasons 1-5 (Sept. 5)Stream it here.That same year, the CW debuted this wryly funny and thankfully light addition to the seemingly endless canon of undead television entertainment. The charming Rose McIver stars as Liv, a young doctor whose ill-advised ride on a cursed booze cruise turns her into a flesh-eating zombie. She makes the best of it, taking a job at a morgue, where there’s an endless supply of fresh brains — which she soon discovers hold the memories of their deaths, turning the show into an unlikely but enjoyable crime procedural.‘Jane the Virgin’: Seasons 1-5 (Sept. 5)Stream it here.Our CW trifecta concludes with this sparkling and screwy telenovela spoof, which ran on the network from 2014 to 2019. Gina Rodriguez found her breakthrough role as the title character, a waitress and would-be writer who takes a vow of chastity until marriage, then finds herself in a state of near-constant challenge to that vow. Rodriguez is a spark plug, playing Jane with equal emphasis on the heart, mind and libido, while Jennie Snyder Urman, the creator and showrunner, introduces endless and frequently preposterous romantic entanglements without subverting the genuine warmth at the story’s center.‘Bodies Bodies Bodies’ (Sept. 19)Stream it here.The director Halina Reijn assembles a gifted ensemble cast — including Maria Bakalova, Pete Davidson, Lee Pace, Rachel Sennott, Amandla Stenberg and Chase Sui Wonders — in this inspired mash-up of locked-room whodunit and “Spring Breakers”-style party movie. Davidson is a spoiled-rotten trust fund kid who hosts a rager for his friends as they ride out an incoming hurricane, and it’s all fun and games and drunken revelry until guests start turning up dead. Reijn threads a delicate needle here, making her characters flawed but not quite loathsome, and sending up current trends of online activism and halfhearted wokeness without punching down.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 to Know About the Real Story That Inspired ‘The Deliverance’

    A mother in Indiana claimed that she and her three children were bedeviled by shadowy figures and swarms of black flies — and possessed by demons. A Netflix movie tells their story.“I gotta kill all you,” a young boy, limbs twitching in the throes of demon possession, eyes wild, growls at his mother (played by Andra Day) in the new Lee Daniels horror film, “The Deliverance.”This is after he has recently walked backward up a hospital room wall like a demented Spider-Man after being nearly drowned in a bathtub by his older brother, who is also being targeted by a demon.The film, which chronicles the saga of a family beleaguered by dark forces after moving into a new home, claims to have been inspired by real events, but the wall-scaling and demonic possession are Hollywood embellishments, right?Maybe … not?The seemingly supernatural occurrences, which were chronicled by the journalist Marisa Kwiatkowski in a 2014 Indianapolis Star article, “The Exorcisms of Latoya Ammons,” are portrayed much as Ammons originally described them in “The Deliverance,” streaming on Netflix.Also represented onscreen: The swarms of unkillable black flies she claimed began plaguing her, her three children and her mother after they moved into a rental house in Gary, Ind., in 2011 (the film moves the action to Pittsburgh), and the exorcisms performed by a member of the clergy that Ammons credits with ultimately ending her torment.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