Aurelia Butler

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    Popcast (Deluxe): A Word With Action Bronson

    Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTubeThis week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the culture show hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, includes a rapid-fire questionnaire answered by the rapper Action Bronson, whose new album, “Johann Sebastian Bachlava The Doctor,” is out now. Topics covered include:The music of his childhoodParenting and his children’s tasteLearning to navigate successStress reliefHis lighthearted gourmand side and go-to ordersConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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    Taylor Swift Returns to Stage for Eras Tour in London

    Fans at Wembley Stadium said they trusted British security officials to keep them safe and cheered loudly when the pop star came onstage.When Taylor Swift canceled three concerts in Vienna last week after officials there foiled a terrorist plot, Swifties soon expressed fears about the pop star’s next shows, in London.Would Swift go ahead with the concerts at Wembley Stadium? Given that the pop star once said her “biggest fear” was a terrorist attack at one of her shows, some fans had doubts. Was it even safe to attend?When Swift did not comment on the thwarted attack in Vienna or the upcoming London gigs, fan anxieties only grew.Yet when the singer took the stage on Thursday evening, worry gave way to excitement at the chance to see Swift perform during the European leg of her globe-spanning Eras Tour. As Swift walked onstage singing “It’s been a long time coming” — a refrain from her track “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince” — the sold-out crowd cheered deliriously.She then launched into “Cruel Summer.”In the end, despite the interest in the Austrian plot, Swift did not refer to it even obliquely at the London show. Instead, she played an almost identical gig to the others on her Eras Tour, a joyous three-hour-plus spectacle featuring hits, costume changes and, at one point, a fake moss-covered wood cabin. For most of the concert, the 90,000 fans sang along to every word, including when she was joined by Ed Sheeran for an acoustic medley.In interviews before the show, more than a dozen fans, including many from the United States, all said they felt safe attending the event. Kyle Foster — wearing a Kansas City Chiefs jersey like Swift’s partner, Travis Kelce — said he had flown from North Carolina with his partner and two daughters for the show.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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    Gena Rowlands Shows Her True Power in ‘A Woman Under the Influence’

    In “A Woman Under the Influence,” her gloriously, terrifyingly imperfect Mabel was emblematic of the actress’s work, especially with John Cassavetes.Midway through “A Woman Under the Influence” (1974) — one of a number of astonishing films starring Gena Rowlands, who died Wednesday, and directed by her husband John Cassavetes — the distance between you and what’s onscreen abruptly vanishes. It’s the kind of moment that true movie believers know and yearn for, that transporting instance when your world seems to melt away and you’re one with the film. It can be revelatory; at times, as with Rowlands’s performance here, it can also be excruciatingly, viscerally painful.Rowlands is playing Mabel, an exuberantly alive woman of great sensitivities whose husband, Nicky (Peter Falk), loves her deeply but doesn’t understand her. They’re home and he has just yelled at her in front of some colleagues, who’ve fled. Now, as this husband and wife look at each other across their dining-room table, they struggle to push past the rancor and hurt. But Mabel is struggling harder because her purchase on everyday life has begun to badly slip, bewildering them both. Her love for Nicky and their children feels boundless, and it radiates off her like a fever, but Mabel is headed for a breakdown.Working with Cassavetes, Rowlands was helping find a new way to make American cinema.Faces InternationalAs the two begin working it out, Cassavetes cuts between them, framing each in isolating close-up. At first, Nicky looks at her with a faint, inscrutable smile that Mabel doesn’t return. Instead, she stares at him and holds up a thumb, as if she were getting ready to hitch a ride out, then she begins a strange pantomime. She screws her face into a scowl, waves her arms, mimes some words. Rowland had an incredibly expressive, near-elastic face and equally extraordinary control of it, and the quicksilver shifts she uses here are unexpected and destabilizing; you want to keep watching Mabel but aren’t sure you can.Within seconds, Nicky and Mabel are talking again and revisiting or, really, relitigating what just happened. “Wacko!” he yells. “I like your friends,” she answers, her voice rising. As Mabel keeps talking, Rowlands widens her eyes but she also shifts the character’s focus inward. Suddenly, Mabel isn’t looking at Nicky and she isn’t exactly talking to him, either. Instead, as Mabel animatedly continues, her gestures and expressions growing more exaggerated, she no longer seems present. She’s somewhere else and then just as abruptly she returns to the here and now, and everything shifts again. Mabel looks at Nicky, her face open and soft. “Tell me what you want me to — how you want me to be,” she says. “I can be that. I can be anything.”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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    Burning Man Has Sold Out Since 2011. Why Not This Year?

    The desert arts festival returns this month after two consecutive years of challenging weather, including mud that stranded attendees, and a Covid-19 hiatus.Burning Man, the Nevada desert festival that routinely sells out tickets, is set to return this month, and ticket sales have slumped for the first time in years.It’s too soon to pin down what has caused the ticket sales shift, but factors most likely include two consecutive years of extreme weather, economic conditions and the organization of the Burning Man community. Here’s what to know.Tickets usually sell out for the desert festival.This year’s festival begins Aug. 25 and ends on Sept. 2, bringing tens of thousands of people to the Nevada desert to create a temporary community called Black Rock City, about 120 miles northeast of Reno.The festival began in 1986 on a San Francisco beach when people gathered to burn a wooden figure on the summer solstice. It moved to the desert in 1990 and sold out for the first time in 2011, and has continued to sell out, often quickly, every year since. Festival organizers had to cap attendance that year and stopped official ticket sales in early August, though last-minute tickets were usually still available on the resale market.The official ticket sale is done in segments, and this year, people can still buy a $575 ticket from the sale tier that opened on July 31. Tickets are also available for $225 for people with limited income. The Reno Gazette-Journal reported on this change earlier this month.Marian Goodell, the chief executive of the Burning Man Project, the nonprofit that organizes the festival, said in an interview on Wednesday that organizers expected this year’s Black Rock City population, which includes guests and staff, to be in the low 70,000s. Last year, the population was 74,126.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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    ‘Red Island’ Review: Madagascar Is Shifting Beneath Their Feet

    Robin Campillo relies on the power of suggestion to sketch life in this former French colony, filtering it obliquely through a young white boy’s eyes.The striking rusty color that gives Madagascar the nickname the “great red island” comes from the rich iron content in its soil. The drama “Red Island” — about a white French boy from a military family living there in the early 1970s — suggests that a fair amount of blood has seeped into the earth, too. The boy is just 10 but he grasps more than other kids might because his experiences are filtered through the life of the French filmmaker Robin Campillo.The boy, Thomas (Charlie Vauselle, sweet and saucer-eyed), lives in a pleasant, airy house with plenty of room and a red-dirt backyard. There, tucked in a corner, he shuts himself up in a large wooden crate reading comics featuring Fantômette, a plucky female superhero whose adventures routinely come to life in his imagination. When he isn’t immersed in his comics, Thomas bikes around, gets into harmless trouble and observes his modest world, especially its people. He’s particularly attentive to his loving homemaker mother, Colette (a very good Nadia Tereszkiewicz), and his father, Robert (Quim Gutiérrez), an army officer.A drama about a child, his family, a social set, their adopted home and the larger world, “Red Island” is by turns seductively sultry and frustratingly elliptical, with a structure that brings to mind matryoshka dolls, those colorful nesting figurines of differing sizes. For the most part, Campillo introduces these nesting elements just fine; it’s integrating them that proves difficult. As befits his autobiographical subject, he fills in the details of Thomas’s worldview, a limited vantage that’s manifested by the crate he hides in. Those limits are also evident in the awkwardness with which Campillo tries to do justice to history and to Madagascar, which solidified its independence from France a decade before the story opens. There’s a dreamy innocence about Thomas that never meshes with the movie’s very adult, historical backdrop.“Red Island” is a coming-of-age story in which not all that much happens to the protagonist even as everything around him changes. You can sense that Thomas’s home life will soon take a turn by the naturalistic conversations that he overhears as well as some of the fraught scenes he witnesses. Campillo, who directed the very fine drama “BPM (Beats Per Minute),” about young AIDS activists in the early 1990s, has a talent for catching the charged energy and the friction that a room of people can produce when they’re thrown together in close quarters. Here, when some drunken officers and their wives dance in the family’s home, bodies pressing in toward one another, the circuitry of desiring and resentful looks is electric.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 Good Half’ Review: Only Half Good

    Nick Jonas and Brittany Snow play siblings coordinating funeral logistics for their mom in this drama, a cross between “Terms of Endearment” and a Hallmark movie.“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it,” Joan Didion once wrote. In “The Good Half,” that place is Cleveland, where 20-somethings with names like Renn, Leigh and Zoey frequent karaoke bars and banter about movies.Renn (Nick Jonas) is a struggling writer in Hollywood flying back for his mom’s funeral. He is prone to avoidant behavior, the screenplay, written by Brett Ryland, shows and tells us, and his homecoming is a big deal. On the plane, he meets Zoey (Alexandra Shipp), a ray of sunshine who likes ’90s action movies and quotes “Scarface.”In his fourth narrative feature, the director Robert Schwartzman (brother to Jason) takes us deep into young adult land. Over several days, Renn and his sister Leigh (Brittany Snow) coordinate post-loss logistics while rolling their eyes at Rick (David Arquette), their bellicose step-father. Breaking up the sibling repartee are periodic flashbacks to happier times with Mom (Elisabeth Shue).When, and to which female listener, Renn will confront his demons is the question that drives “The Good Half,” which feels caught between “Terms of Endearment” and a Hallmark movie. Wry gags, like a hoarder priest, butt up against heartfelt exchanges. Snow, as the daughter who always played second fiddle, brings real feeling to her role — suggesting that she may in fact be the good half of this insipid drama.The Good HalfNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘In the Rearview’ Review: Shuttling Ukrainians to Safety

    Maciek Hamela’s documentary offers a compelling perspective on the Russian invasion of Ukraine through the stories of people fleeing the country in a van.Maciek Hamela’s perceptive documentary “In the Rearview” seats us in a van shuttling groups of Ukrainians from conflict areas to safety. That simple viewpoint, along with roadside scenes of pickups and drop-offs, captures the moments when ordinary life ended and the deadly chaos of the Russian invasion began.Filmed in 2022 when Hamela volunteered as an evacuation driver, the van passes checkpoints, burned-out cars and disemboweled buildings while steering clear of mined roads and bombed bridges. But the van presents a safe space where passengers can talk about who and what they left behind, sleep, or just sit in silence.Instead of dwelling on danger, these serial portraits of everyday Ukrainians — sometimes family members neatly dressed for cool weather, carrying the odd belongings or cat — show people who have made their decision to leave but are still processing what that means.Travelers young and old talk about what happened in gripping, brief monologues: a lost husband, a surrogate pregnancy left in the lurch at a clinic, an abandoned cow, or torture at the hands of the enemy. The children look cherubic but sometimes glazed-over; unprompted, one girl reflexively proffers a paper with her identifying information to someone at the front of the van.Many passengers seem to be heading to the Polish border from remote Ukrainian villages. But the van’s familiar interior has a way of underlining how many other millions across history have had to escape military aggression. Hamela’s work as driver and documentarian reflects that reality while offering a spirit of resilience.In the RearviewNot rated. In Ukrainian, Polish, Russian and French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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    ‘The Greatest Surf Movie in the Universe’ Review: Humongously Bad

    A mix of too much lousy animation and too little wave-riding footage.Jeff Spicoli, the surfing-obsessed truant portrayed memorably by Sean Penn in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” (1982), may have been an airhead, but he had a vocabulary. Things he enjoyed were “gnarly” or “humongous.”Today’s real-life surf luminaries don’t speak so colorfully. In “The Greatest Surf Movie in the Universe,” a spectacularly inane comedy, the Association of Surfing Professionals champion Mick Fanning enthuses to an amnesiac colleague: “We used to travel the entire world together having adventures in the ocean and stuff.” Fanning’s voice does the enthusing, we should specify. For most of the picture he is portrayed by an animated doll.In Fanning’s defense, the script is by one of the co-directors, Nick Pollett, whose partner is Vaughn Blakley. The two have a background in surf documentary, but most of this movie is not that. Rather, the dolls — with minimally articulated limbs — are made to embody Fanning and a few other real-life surf stars.These figures (the animation makes the puppetry of Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s “Team America: World Police” look like “Fantastic Mr. Fox”) enact an asinine story of how a vaccine eradicated all memory of surfing, and a mission to bring the activity back. The line “Ten years ago a sport existed, it was called surfing, and you dominated it” — emphasized with an expletive — is repeated more times than anyone would be amused to hear it.With each new surfer discovered — at a reunion whose purpose is, in fact, to make the title film — we see a couple of minutes of actual surf footage. The climax of the movie features the dolls, many of them with faces smeared with brown goo, fighting each other with sex toys. After this, it looks as if a longer segment of surfing is in store. One’s relief then is palpable. But brief. The doll nonsense soon resumes, and then, mercifully, come the end credits.The Greatest Surf Movie in the UniverseNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. In theaters. More