Aurelia Butler

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    ‘Humane’ Review: An Ethical Crisis and a Dinner Party

    Caitlin Cronenberg’s debut feature is set in a dystopian world that’s alarmingly believable.“Humane” is a thought experiment sprung to bloody life, a cross between the trolley problem and dystopian extinction nightmares. Set in the very near future, it tries to tackle a cascade of ethical questions. Who counts as valuable? What does it mean to be good? If humans wreck the earth, what will we do to survive? Do we even deserve it?Those are gargantuan questions, enough to power several graduate-level philosophy courses. But “Humane” wraps them in admirably small-scale trappings: a family drama with immensely high stakes. Just after widespread ecological collapse, every country on earth has shut its borders and has committed to reducing its population within one year. In Canada, the target reduction is 20 percent, and to coax people into joining the effort, the government’s Department of Citizen Strategy has come up with language as euphemistic as its name. People who agree to be euthanized are “enlisting” in the “war.” Posters declare that “Enlistment = Opportunity,” because the families of those who enlist receive a substantial payout, enabling higher education or homeownership.The volunteers tend to be older people, but they’re not the only ones being euthanized. It doesn’t take much to realize who else might be willing: prison inmates facing long sentences, terminally ill people, financially disadvantaged parents, undocumented immigrants whose families are promised a fast track to citizenship. But people haven’t been enlisting fast enough to reach the threshold. On TV news, some are beginning to discuss “conscription.”“Humane,” directed by Caitlin Cronenberg (a daughter of the celebrated horror auteur David Cronenberg) in her feature debut, builds this world at a satisfyingly rapid speed, raising stakes so quickly that you’re left breathless as the implications sink in. (That also means some of the logical leaps — like how you’d get the whole world to agree to these measures — fade into the background, and that’s fine.) 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 Feeling’ Review: Fifty Shades of Apathy

    In the sex comedy “The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed,” Joanna Arnow keeps her scenes short and her expressions flat.Joanna Arnow’s attention-grabbing debut “The Feeling That the Time for Doing Something Has Passed” has been described as a sadomasochistic sex comedy, but it’s hard to laugh.Arnow, who wrote, directed and stars in this sometimes-riveting, sometimes-dull study of demoralization, plays a dour 30-something New Yorker who spends her days getting pushed around by her boss (Armand Reiser). At night, she submits to the sexual commands of her various male masters, whom she meets online. The joke is that her days and nights aren’t that different.And then the joke is on the audience when Arnow introduces us to six men in 30 minutes before we realize that we don’t yet know her character’s name. (It’s Ann.)The film is structured by Ann’s partners, whose names appear in tidy white font on a black screen. They’re nearly always dressed; she’s almost always naked (though one partner, played by Parish Bradley, commands her to wear bunny ears and a pig nose). It’d be one thing if Ann enjoyed the sex. But from the snapshots we see, these encounters seem mostly humiliating and joyless. When obeying an order to touch herself in view of drivers on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, she just looks bored.Arnow keeps her scenes short and her expressions flat. These glimpses of her character’s life could be stand-alone comic book panels. Together, they’re a mosaic of stagnation.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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    ‘Boy Kills World’ Review: A Wide-Eyed Assassin

    Beefed up and bloodied, Bill Skarsgard goes mano a mano against disposable hordes in this dystopian action flick.At least give it up for the stunt crew on “Boy Kills World,” a boneheaded action movie that gives some exceedingly fit performers — its hard-body star Bill Skarsgard very much included — a chance to flaunt their physical skills. To judge from all the grunting, the straining muscles and cascading sweat, Skarsgard, along with a few of his nimble co-stars and an army of stunt performers, puts in serious work to try to make the relentless bashing and smashing, flailing and dying look good. Too bad the filmmakers were incapable of doing the same.Set in a discount dystopian hellscape, the story centers on, ta-da, Boy (Skarsgard), a saucer-eyed dynamo with an uninteresting back story who can neither hear nor talk. Once upon a time, for reasons that are laboriously teased out, he landed in the jungle, where he was taken under wing by a punishing caretaker, the Shaman. This cat is played with a lot of grimacing by the Indonesian martial-arts phenom Yayan Ruhian, of the “Raid” movies. Ruhian also shows up in “John Wick: Chapter 3 — Parabellum,” which isn’t good, yet is still better than “Boy Kills World” because it was made by people who know how to showcase stunt fighting.“Boy Kills World,” by contrast, consistently undermines its stunts with frustratingly clumsy filmmaking. Again and again, the frantic camera goes overly close when it should go wide — turning bodies into a chaotic jumble of parts — and the choppy over-editing makes matters worse. I’m not sure what the director Moritz Mohr thought he was doing here. (Sam Raimi is one of the producers.) It’s also unclear why anyone even bothered to concoct a story for Boy, because the only point of this ridiculousness is to watch Skarsgard flex his sculpted arms and take a great deal of brutal punishment so that he can dole out more. Rinse, repeat.The story involves, yup, a revenge mission that the filmmakers fuss with by toggling between the past and present but that mostly finds Boy hunting a cartoon despot (Famke Janssen) and her minions (Jessica Rothe, Michelle Dockery, Brett Gelman). Andrew Koji also shows up as a sidekick for Boy, whom Skarsgard plays as a guileless killing machine. As he did in “It,” the actor makes shrewd use of the whites of his eyes, turning them into attention-grabbing beacons. That’s understandable given that another actor (H. Jon Benjamin, of “Bob’s Burgers”) provides Boy’s internal voice using a putatively humorous tough-guy drone. This gimmick gets old fast, as does the movie, even as its hero and ideas remain underbaked.Boy Kills WorldRated R for action movie fighting and killing. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters. More

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    Zendaya, Luca Guadagnino, Josh O’Connor and Mike Faist on ‘Challengers’

    Can trash talk be a love language?It is in the world of Luca Guadagnino’s new film “Challengers,” which pits two best-friend tennis players, Patrick (Josh O’Connor) and Art (Mike Faist), against each other in a bid to win the heart of the superstar Tashi Duncan (Zendaya). What begins as innocent teasing becomes more charged once an injury cuts short Tashi’s career: Forced to pivot to coaching, she weds Art and goads him to demolish her former lover Patrick on the court, though both men continue to nurse their own hidden agendas.“I find them all really likable and charming — and terrible also,” Zendaya said with a grin. The complicated adult stakes of “Challengers” offer a new pursuit for this 27-year-old actress, who shot to fame as a teenager on the Disney Channel and is now best known for her Emmy-winning role on HBO’s “Euphoria” and the big-budget movie franchises “Spider-Man” and “Dune.” Though she is aware that “Challengers” will test her box-office draw as a solo star, she didn’t overthink her decision to make the movie, which comes out in theaters on Friday.“I wanted to do it because it’s brilliant,” she said. “It’s not like I sat in my room and had this master board: ‘OK, this is how I’m going to make my big transition for my first lead theatrical role.’”Last week at a Beverly Hills hotel, I met Zendaya, her co-stars O’Connor (“The Crown”) and Faist (“West Side Story”), and Guadagnino for an hour of freewheeling conversation about “Challengers” and the pressure of forging a life and career in the public eye. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.“The triangle is not just two people after one,” Luca Guadagnino, the director of “Challengers,” said, “but the corners touch together all the time.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesThis movie poses a lot of questions about ambition and drive. Zendaya, has your relationship to your own ambition changed over time?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 SFMOMA, Music is More than Just Sound

    This article is part of our Museums special section about how institutions are striving to offer their visitors more to see, do and feel.The flute music was, you know, good flute music. But for the hushed audience at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s kickoff event in February of its “Art of Noise” exhibition, the breathy scales constituted only part of the experience.The colorful outfit belonging to the flutist (who was André 3000, by the way) was the experience, too. The crisp speakers were the experience, the smoke machine was the experience. And the two lasers passing through a glass of water balanced atop a traffic cone center stage — André 3000 has a growing interest in traffic cones, he had announced earlier — was the experience.Music is music. But music is also the stuff surrounding the music.From May 4 through Aug. 18, SFMOMA will illustrate this truism with an exhibition of visual and technological artifacts, plucked from music’s low orbit. “Art of Noise” comprises more than 800 pieces — among them early listening devices, cutting-edge speakers and iconic album covers — loosely grouped under the heading of design. Four more sound installations generate some artful noise all their own. But the show’s true subject might be our very relationship to music.Mathieu Lehanneur’s music player Power of Love, 2009 at SFMOMA.Mathieu Lehanneur; Photo by Don RossBeethoven’s Fifth Symphony, “The White Album,” Coltrane live at Birdland: On their own, these are but air molecules vibrating across our eardrums. Music becomes sacred partly through the material culture it inspires.And just as music shapes design — think jazz album cover versus metal album cover — design also codes how we hear music. In an old Xeroxed flyer for a punk show was information on how to absorb those songs; in an iconic ad for Maxell cassette tapes lurked signals about the spirit of rock.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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    Video Shows Crash That Injured Crew Members of ‘The Pickup’

    The collision on the set of “The Pickup” is under investigation. Video shows an armored truck and an S.U.V. veering off a road before the truck flips onto the smaller vehicle.A two-vehicle crash that injured several crew members on the set of the movie “The Pickup” is being investigated by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the federal agency said on Wednesday.Amazon MGM Studios said the crash occurred on Saturday but did not provide any details about the injuries. According to two people with direct knowledge of the situation who were not authorized to speak publicly about it, at least a half-dozen people who were inside the vehicles sustained injuries and were transported to a hospital. One person remained hospitalized on Wednesday with a back injury, those people said.They said that none of the actors in the film, which features Eddie Murphy, Keke Palmer and Pete Davidson, were involved in the crash. An OSHA inspection report said it occurred at a small airport outside Atlanta.Video of the crash that was obtained by The New York Times shows an armored truck pulling up alongside an S.U.V. before swerving into it. After the collision, both vehicles veer off the road in tandem and drive onto grass, where the armored truck flips on top of the S.U.V.Both vehicles completely roll over and end up upright but mangled. As a back door of the armored truck swings open, one person inside can be seen lying limp.The video is a cellphone recording of a monitor playing back the footage of the crash.Several crew members of the movie “The Pickup” were injured when two vehicles collided during filming. The crash is under investigation by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.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: John Adams’s ‘El Niño’ Arrives at the Met in Lush Glory

    The opera-oratorio, an alternate Nativity story, featured a flurry of Met debuts, including the director Lileana Blain-Cruz and the conductor Marin Alsop.On Tuesday night, the Metropolitan Opera continued to play a bit of catch-up with the American composer John Adams.As a Minimalist of striking imagination and moral probity, Adams has developed a distinct musical style and point of view that have earned him a firm place in the pantheon of American art music over the past 40 years or so. His operas, though, didn’t make it to the Met stage until 2008, when “Doctor Atomic” had its East Coast premiere. “Nixon in China” followed in 2011 and “The Death of Klinghoffer” in 2014, decades after they were written. These are Adams’s so-called CNN operas, with subject matter ripped from headlines and history books. But “El Niño,” a hybrid opera-oratorio from 2000 that had its Met premiere on Tuesday, is a different animal.Created with the librettist and director Peter Sellars, a frequent collaborator, “El Niño” is an alternative Nativity story, drawing its Spanish, Latin and English texts from the Apocrypha, 20th-century Mexican and South American poetry, a medieval mystery play and, of course, the New Testament. The gospels of James and Pseudo-Matthew, which didn’t make it into the codified Bible, provide some of the most characterful scenes, as when Joseph comes home to find Mary six months pregnant and exclaims irately, “Who did this evil thing in my house and defiled her?”The air of triumph as the curtain came down on Tuesday night owed as much to the piece as to the director Lileana Blain-Cruz’s vibrant and infectiously exultant production. It was almost as inspiring to see as it was to hear Adams’s marvelous work on the Met’s stage.It was an evening of firsts. The trailblazing conductor Marin Alsop made her long overdue Met debut to much applause. The singers Julia Bullock and Davóne Tines and most of the creative team also made their first appearances.Taking a cue from the piece’s Latin flavor, Blain-Cruz trades the Middle Eastern climate of standard biblical depictions for a lushly tropical realm. The set designer Adam Rigg’s storybook framework, with rolling hills and broad-leaved plants that look like cardboard cutouts, achieves grandeur without aloofness. Montana Levi Blanco’s moss-green costumes for the chorus amplify the sense of a thriving natural world, but shocks of hot pink and aquatic blue, particularly in Yi Zhao’s hallucinogenic lighting design for “Shake the Heavens,” recall the iridescent striations of a Mexican serape. The puppet designer James Ortiz’s contributions reach a captivating zenith in the “Christmas Star” finale of Part 1.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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    Cristian Macelaru, Decorated Maestro, to Lead Cincinnati Symphony

    He will begin a four-year term as the orchestra’s music director in the 2025-26 season, succeeding Louis Langrée.The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, which has a history of attracting top conductors, including Fritz Reiner and Leopold Stokowski, announced on Wednesday that its next music director would be Cristian Macelaru, a Romanian-born maestro who has helped champion music education.Macelaru, 44, will begin a four-year term as music director in Cincinnati in the 2025-26 season and become music director designate in September, the ensemble said. Macelaru, who holds prestigious posts in Europe, leading both the Orchestre National de France and the WDR Sinfonieorchester in Cologne, Germany, will succeed the veteran conductor Louis Langrée, the ensemble’s leader since 2013.Macelaru said he felt a sense of possibility with the orchestra and the community.“This was the one orchestra I really wanted to be with in America,” he said in a telephone interview from China, where he was leading a tour with the WDR Sinfonieorchester.Macelaru has often spoken of making classical music accessible to a broader audience, and said he hoped to help expand music education efforts in Cincinnati.“I’m very disappointed when I see so many orchestras and colleagues who feel that the music should speak for itself,” he said. “We have to tell people why this music is so beautiful and how they can discover even more beauty in it. I have done this all my life. And now I feel like I have a platform that is even more evident and more visible to be able to spread this message.”Jonathan Martin, the Cincinnati Symphony’s president and chief executive, said in an interview that the orchestra’s leaders were impressed not only by Macelaru’s conducting talents but also by his desire to help expand the orchestra’s presence in the community.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