Aurelia Butler

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    Angel Studios Turns to Viewers of Faith to Greenlight Movies

    The company behind “Sound of Freedom” follows an unusual strategy that relies on an army of subscribers to its streaming platform.When “Sound of Freedom,” a $14.5 million indie film about child trafficking based on the life of a Homeland Security agent, stormed the box office to become an unlikely $250 million hit, practically nobody saw its runaway success coming.Except Neal Harmon.Harmon is the chief executive of Angel Studios, a self-described “values-based distribution company,” that he founded in 2013 in Provo, Utah, with his brothers Daniel, Jeffrey and Jordan as well as their cousin Benton. Even before a rave review from Ted Cruz and a private screening held by Donald J. Trump, the reception for “Sound of Freedom” was effectively preordained, Neal explained in a recent interview, because the studio’s million-member Angel Guild had endorsed the film before the company decided to acquire the distribution rights.Jim Caviezel in “Sound of Freedom,” the breakout hit that went on to earn $250 million at the box office.Angel Studios“We definitely knew it was going to be successful because of the guild’s reaction,” Neal said. “We knew it was going to be really well received.”Most distributors rely on the instincts of a programming team, which typically attends festivals and watches screeners like a prospector sifting for gold. Angel’s model defers to the subscribers of its streaming platform, which has grown to become one of the most-downloaded apps on the Apple TV store, occasionally surpassing Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video.In addition to a library of original content, the Angel app features short-form concept videos for potential movies or TV shows. Subscribers, or guild members, answer short surveys about the videos, and based on the results, Angel decides whether to greenlight projects. Subscriber fees are funneled back into the films and shows in production, essentially turning Angel’s system into a wide-scale crowdfunding model.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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    Trumpeters. Friends. Rivals. 60 Years Ago, the Pair Made Jazz History.

    “There was a bar right there,” a Crown Heights, Brooklyn, resident named James said in early March, pointing to the deli at 835 Nostrand Avenue, at the intersection with President Street. “Long time ago, though.”Sixty years ago, the Black social club that once occupied that corner hosted a jazz concert that is so storied, it has a title: the Night of the Cookers. Of the dozens of performances that the trumpet star Freddie Hubbard led in the mid-1960s, his two nights at La Marchal on April 9 and 10 featuring his friend and chief rival, Lee Morgan, are heralded as arguably the most celebrated jazz gig in the borough’s history.“That was one of the records that made me say, ‘You gotta go find your own thing,’” the trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard said in a phone interview, referring to the recordings from the gig that were first released on LP in 1966. “They both had great sounds on their instruments, but they were very different.”The Night of the Cookers was a night of tension. Hubbard and Morgan, both born in 1938, were the hottest trumpet players in the business as they turned 27, though each was at his own crossroads. Hubbard, always ambitious, was securing his future as a bandleader; Morgan was struggling with addiction while watching the improbable rise of his hit record, “The Sidewinder,” on the pop charts.An engineer named Orville O’Brien was rolling tape as the bandstand filled with heavyweights including James Spaulding on alto saxophone and flute, the pianist Harold Mabern Jr., the bassist Larry Ridley, the drummer Pete LaRoca and another special guest, Big Black, on congas. Well-dressed Brooklynites, including musicians like the trumpeter Kenny Dorham, filled the spot to capacity. A crowd of standees hovered near the bar.“When anybody mentions Night of the Cookers, I can see it as if I was there again,” said the trumpeter Eddie Henderson, who sat in the front row both nights. “I was at their feet, looking up at Freddie and Lee, and I was screaming and yelling. When I hear that record, I can hear 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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    Getting Loud With Sleigh Bells and Beyond

    Hear songs from the duo’s latest album, “Bunky Becky Birthday Boy,” plus predecessors and protégés.Sleigh Bells onstage in 2012.Phil Sears for The New York TimesDear listeners,Jon Pareles here, sitting in while Lindsay is on book leave. This week cranks The Amplifier all the way up — and then further into overload.Sleigh Bells, the duo of Alexis Krauss and Derek Miller, have just released their sixth album, “Bunky Becky Birthday Boy.” Like the rest of their catalog, the new album is a recombinant bash, slamming together selected elements of loud and louder styles — punk, metal, grunge, hip-hop, electro, glam, garage-rock — with the suddenness of digital edits. Along with their sonic impact, Sleigh Bells songs also deal in emotional extremes, jumping between jubilation and sorrow, exhilaration and despair, deep loneliness and shout-along community.With their first singles in 2009, Sleigh Bells presaged the studio-tweaked, genre-hopping, whiz-bang mash-ups of hyperpop — ideas and strategies that, more than a decade later, are often taken for granted. The juxtapositions are startling; they also hold decades of allusions. This playlist mingles Sleigh Bells songs with what might be the band’s influences and protégés — some roots and offshoots, and all pure guesswork.Feel like dynamite,JonListen along while you read.1. Sleigh Bells: “Infinity Guitars”“Infinity Guitars,” from Sleigh Bells’ 2010 debut album, “Treats,” sets out the band’s sound in the rawest lo-fi. Krauss might be singing about toxic masculinity in the terse lyrics she shouts: “Street wars, straight men / Cowboys, Indians.” Everything is pushed into distortion: guitars, vocals, percussion, stereo handclaps. But with some wordless ahs, Krauss also offers just enough melody to hint at playfulness.▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTubeWe 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 at Lincoln Center Chooses Daniel Battsek as Next President

    At the production company Film4 he was instrumental in financing British movies. In New York, his goal is to attract a younger, more diverse audience.Film at Lincoln Center, the nonprofit organization that programs the New York Film Festival, has named the British movie executive Daniel Battsek its next president.From 2016 until early 2024, Battsek, 66, was chairman of the British production company Film4, overseeing the financing of “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” (2017) and “The Banshees of Inisherin” (2022), among other releases.Battsek will succeed Lesli Klainberg, who had led Film at Lincoln Center since 2014 before stepping down last year.In an interview, Battsek, who will take over in May, said the centrality of film in the New York City cultural landscape had always appealed to him.“In many other cities, including London, film is much further down the culture ladder than it is here,” said Battsek, who was based in New York as president of Miramax Films before joining Film4. “I love that cinema is seen as being on a level with opera and ballet and theater.”Battsek’s appointment comes amid an industrywide downturn as movie theaters struggle to attract an audience that has yet to return to prepandemic numbers and are increasingly contending with competition from streaming services.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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    Madonna and Elton John End Their Decades-Old Feud

    They made peace backstage at “Saturday Night Live.” You’d be forgiven for forgetting that their decades-old dispute had remained unresolved.Kendrick Lamar and Drake. Taylor Swift and Kanye West. Liam and Noel Gallagher of Oasis.Elton John and Madonna?In the annals of celebrity feuds, the one between these two music industry titans does not rank particularly high. In fact, you’d be forgiven for forgetting that they had a dispute decades ago that remained unresolved.Until this weekend, that is, when they made up backstage at “Saturday Night Live.” The two effusively announced the reconciliation on social media.“We Finally Buried the Hatchet!!!” Madonna wrote on Monday in a long Instagram post that was accompanied by a photograph of the two musicians with their arms around each other.She described the moment of forgiveness, writing that she had found out that John was scheduled to be the musical guest on “Saturday Night Live” alongside Brandi Carlile, and decided to confront him backstage.“When I met him, the first thing out of his mouth was, ‘Forgive Me’ and the wall between us fell down,” she wrote. Within minutes, she added, they were hugging.“Thank you for forgiving me and my big mouth,” John wrote in the replies of her post, adding, “I’m not proud of what I said.”He posted the same photo on his Instagram story, with the caption “a healing moment.”The tender moment warmed fans’ hearts — and left some saying, “Remind me what this was about again?”The two were vague on the details of their dispute. Madonna said only, “Over the decades it hurt me to know that someone I admired so much shared his dislike of me publicly as an artist.”The acrimony started in the early 2000s, when John made a series of critical comments about Madonna. In 2002, he called “Die Another Day,” her theme song for the James Bond film of the same name, the “worst Bond tune ever.”At the Q Awards, the now defunct British music awards, in 2004, while accepting the classic songwriter award, he questioned Madonna’s nomination for best live act, saying, “Since when has lip-syncing been live?” Madonna’s representative said at the time that she did not lip-sync.In 2012, when the two were competing for best original song at the Golden Globes, John said that Madonna didn’t stand a chance of beating him. After she won, she said she hoped that he would continue speaking to her for the next couple of years.That year, John told an Australian reporter that Madonna’s career was over and called her a “nightmare.”It’s unclear what changed between then and this weekend. But in her post on Monday, Madonna suggested that a musical partnership might be in the works.John told her that he had written a song for her and wanted to collaborate, she said. More

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    Pierre Boulez at 100: What Is His Legacy Today?

    Few musicians could be the focus of an architectural tour. Pierre Boulez is one of them.In the Fourth Arrondissement of Paris, next to the Centre Pompidou, you’ll find IRCAM, the sound research center that Boulez founded in the 1970s. Not far away, on Place de la Bastille, is an opera house where he suffered one of the few failures of his long career. And on the outskirts of the city, at Parc de la Villette, his Cité de la Musique complex produces concerts, exhibitions and classes, a factory of culture where industrial slaughterhouses once sprawled.The most recent addition to the Cité de la Musique is the Philharmonie de Paris, a concert hall whose main auditorium is named after Boulez. It was completed in 2015, a year before his death, at 90, but he never got to see it. Still, it stands today as a kind of monument to this titan of the past century’s music, a composer, conductor, theorist and a canny political force.Michael Haefliger, a friend and colleague from the Lucerne Festival, called Boulez “the Einstein of music.” The conductor and composer Esa-Pekka Salonen, an inheritor of Boulez’s ethos, described him as “one of the most influential people in music, period.”What exactly, though, is Boulez’s influence?A hundred years after his birth, and nearly a decade since his death, his legacy isn’t necessarily as a composer. Celebrating his centennial at the Philharmonie in March, two performances of his “Rituel in Memoriam Bruno Maderna” were notable mostly for their rarity. His music, like that of his peers from the post-World War II generation of high modernists, like Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luigi Nono, is brilliant but out of fashion, and difficult to program.Benjamin Millepied created a dance for Boulez’s “Rituel in Memoriam Bruno Maderna.”Benjamin Malapris for The New York TimesBenjamin Malapris for The New York TimesTo get a sense of Boulez’s true legacy, look at how “Rituel” was presented. With an accompanying dance by Benjamin Millepied, the evening embraced experimentation, a hallmark of Boulez, a musician who tried to dissolve the boundaries between performers and audience members in the 1970s.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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    Is Yoko Ono Finally Getting Her Moment?

    A new biography and film about Yoko Ono offer more opportunities to assess her contributions to culture. Two pop music critics debate if they’re worthy of their subject.LINDSAY ZOLADZ Are we living through a Yokossance? Though the 92-year-old conceptual artist, musician and Beatle widow Yoko Ono has spent much of the past decade far from the public eye dealing with health issues, each year seems to bring a new opportunity to reassess her contributions to culture.In the 2020s alone, there has been a tribute album, a small shelf’s worth of biographies and, just last year, a blockbuster, career-spanning show of her artwork at London’s Tate Modern. (That retrospective, “Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind,” comes to Chicago in October.) All of that followed Peter Jackson’s long-awaited 2021 Beatles documentary “Get Back,” which reignited debates about Ono’s influence on the band she was unfairly accused of “breaking up.”David Sheff, a longtime friend of Ono’s who is best known for writing a memoir about his son’s struggles with addiction, “Beautiful Boy” (Ono gave him permission to title it after a John Lennon song), argues strongly against that assumption in his new biography, “Yoko.” He even takes it a step further, proposing that “it’s possible that the band stayed together longer than they would have because of Yoko,” since she gave Lennon several years of relative groundedness during which the Beatles made “Let It Be” and “Abbey Road.” “During the writing and recording of those albums, John had a foot out the door,” Sheff writes. “If he hadn’t had Yoko, the other foot might have followed sooner than it did.”We get extended glimpses of Ono and Lennon a few years later in “One to One: John & Yoko,” Kevin Macdonald’s forthcoming documentary that focuses on a well-told chapter of their story, their time living in New York City in the early 1970s.“Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind,” on display in Germany last September. The retrospective comes to Chicago in October.Martin Meissner/Associated PressI’m curious, Jon: Did either Sheff’s biography or Macdonald’s film add anything to your understanding of Ono? I’m also thinking of an essay that our colleague Amanda Hess wrote in 2021 about Ono’s transfixing presence in “Get Back.” She said she had observed the slow evolution of Ono from “a cultural villain” into “a kind of folk hero.” Do you think that shift is now fully complete?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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    Clem Burke, Versatile, Hard-Driving Drummer for Blondie, Dies at 70

    He provided both the explosive percussion on hits like “Call Me” and the laid-back rhythm on the reggae-influenced “The Tide Is High.”Clem Burke, whose energetic, versatile drumming provided the beat for the band Blondie as it churned out post-punk, disco and rock hits in the late 1970s and early ’80s — and then again after the band re-formed in 1997 — died on Sunday. He was 70.In a statement, the band said the cause was cancer. It did not say where he died.Though Blondie is best remembered for its charismatic lead singer, Debbie Harry, Mr. Burke’s relentless percussion was just as important to its success as one of the most popular American rock groups of its era.He can be heard tumbling forth with a rapid disco beat in the intro to “Call Me” (1980), only to switch to a tropical lilt on the reggae-inflected “The Tide Is High” (1980).Like other post-punk bands that slid into the New Wave movement — the Cars, Devo — Blondie was known as much for its image as for its substance. The band’s album covers and press photos often featured Ms. Harry, with her angular face and wispy blonde hair, framed by her four male bandmates, usually in black suits and skinny ties.Mr. Burke stood out with his boyish cheeks and vertiginous mop of hair. But he and the band were about more than their sharp looks: In one survey, Rolling Stone ranked him the 61st greatest drummer of all time.Mr. Burke, second from left, on the cover of Blondie’s debut studio album, released in December 1976.Private Stock RecordsWe 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