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    Nora Aunor, Singer-Actress Called ‘the Superstar’ in Philippines, Dies at 71

    And her fans were called Noranians for their devotion to a performer who had enthralled her country — onscreen and on the concert stage — since she was a teenager.Nora Aunor, a powerful Filipina actress and singer who for nearly 60 years captivated audiences — her devoted fans were called Noranians — earning the nickname “the Superstar,” died on April 16 in the city of Pasig, near Manila. She was 71.Her death, in a hospital, was announced by her family. The cause was acute respiratory failure after an angioplasty, according to news media reports.“Over the decades, she built a career that shaped the very soul of our culture,” her son Ian de Leon said at a news conference.Ms. Aunor was known widely for her petite stature, expressive eyes, which could convey a breadth of emotions, and a somewhat darker skin than was commonplace in Filipino show business when she was starting out.Movie stars in the country then were “usually mixed race, with prominent Spanish or Caucasian and American looks, some of whom were children of American G.I.s,” said José B. Capino, the author of “Martial Law Melodrama” (2020), about the visionary Filipino director Lino Brocka.Ms. Aunor’s movie career began in the 1960s with teeny-bopper films and romcoms but graduated to serious fare like “Bona,” a 1980 drama directed by Mr. Brocka in which she portrayed the title character, a middle-class teenager obsessed with a handsome, narcissistic bit player in movies.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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    Joe Louis Walker, Free-Ranging Blues Explorer, Is Dead at 75

    A product of the San Francisco rock crucible of the 1960s, he fashioned his own brand of the blues, blending gospel, soul, rock and other genres.Joe Louis Walker, a blues master and musical omnivore whose snarling guitar work, gritty vocals and introspective songwriting earned him the praise of Herbie Hancock, Mick Jagger and many others over a six-decade career, died on April 30 in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. He was 75.His wife, Robin Poritzky-Walker, said his death, in a hospital, was from a cardiac-related illness.Mr. Walker recorded more than 30 albums for a variety of labels, starting with “Cold Is the Night” in 1986. He toured extensively and was a staple of blues festivals around the world. He won the Blues Music Award (formerly the W.C. Handy Award) multiple times and was nominated for a Grammy Award for his 2015 album, “Everybody Wants a Piece.” He was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2013.Mr. Walker was nominated for a Grammy Award for his 2015 album, “Everybody Wants a Piece.”ProvogueAlong the way he traded riffs with blues powerhouses like B.B. King, Buddy Guy and Otis Rush.The keyboard innovator Herbie Hancock deemed him “a singular force” with a “remarkable gift for instantly electrifying a room.” Mick Jagger called him “a magnificent guitar player and singer.” The jazz pianist and composer Chick Corea playfully anointed him “the Chick Corea of blues.”Critics, too, felt Mr. Walker’s power. “His voice is weather-beaten but ready for more; his guitar solos are fast, wiry and incisive,” Jon Pareles wrote in a 1989 review in The New York Times, “often starting out with impetuous squiggles before moaning with bluesy despair.”Mr. Walker in performance in 1995. One reviewer called him “a fluttering blues guitarist” whose “lines seem blown by the wind.”Simon Ritter/Redferns, via Getty ImagesWe 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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    Morris, Alligator of ‘Happy Gilmore’ Fame, Dies at 80 (or More)

    The 640-pound, 11-foot gator memorably played a golf-ball-stealing, hand-chomping terror in the 1996 Adam Sandler film.Morris, an alligator who appeared in numerous films and television shows, most notably in the movie “Happy Gilmore,” died on Monday in Mosca, Colo. He was at least 80.The cause was old age, according to the Colorado Gator Farm, which announced his death.“His exact age was unknown, but he was nine feet long in 1975, and by his growth rate and tooth loss, we can estimate his age at over 80 years,” the farm said.“He started acting strange about a week ago; he wasn’t lunging at us and he wasn’t taking food,” Jay Young, the farm’s operator, said in a video accompanying the announcement. Tearfully stroking the gator’s head, he said, “I know it’s strange to people that we get so attached.”Morris was 10 feet 11 inches long and weighed 640 pounds at the time of his death.He was discovered in Los Angeles, but not at Schwab’s Pharmacy like so many actors of yore. Rather, he was found in a backyard, where he was being kept as an illegal pet. His acting career began in 1975 and ended in 2006, when he retired to the farm.His most memorable onscreen role came in the rollicking 1996 comedy “Happy Gilmore,” with Adam Sandler in the title role as a failed hockey player who becomes an unlikely sensation on the professional golf circuit.Morris’s big scene comes when he grabs a golf ball, leading Happy to confront him with an iron. Happy notices that the gator has one eye, recognizing it as the same one that had bitten off the hand of his mentor, Chubbs, played by Carl Weathers. (“Damned alligator just popped up, cut me down in my prime,” Chubbs says in one of the film’s many beloved quotes.)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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    ‘Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning’ Review: Tom Cruise Defies All

    For the eighth installment of this stunt-spectacular franchise, the star returns to fight off A.I. planetary domination, the bends, gravity and maybe mortality itself.For nearly three decades, Tom Cruise has been running, soaring, slugging and white-knuckling it through the “Mission: Impossible” series. It’s been fun, on and off, but it’s no wonder he looks so beaten up on the poster for the latest edition, “The Final Reckoning.” Cruise — who turns 63 this year — long seemed impervious to ordinary time, with a boyishness that lasted well into middle age. His early stardom had already granted him a kind of immortality. Yet as the lines on his face discreetly deepened, and he kept pushing himself to lunatic extremes in this series, it seemed as if he were challenging physical death itself.Cruise is at it again in “The Final Reckoning” — the enjoyably unhinged follow-up to “Dead Reckoning Part One” (2023) — plunging into deep waters, hanging off an airborne plane and insistently defying the odds as well as his own mortality. It’s unclear why the title changed between the two parts. It might have been a marketing decision; dead is a bummer, of course, and the word implied that Cruise’s Ethan Hunt, an American operative extraordinaire, was heading toward the sort of bleak sign-off that capped Daniel Craig’s run as James Bond. Whatever the case, the change suits Cruise’s Ethan, whose abilities have grown so progressively super since the series began in 1996 they seem quasi-mystical.“Dead Reckoning” ended with Ethan and his team trying to stop an artificial intelligence called the Entity that’s set on destroying Earth. (Why? Why not?) The A.I.’s plan is the ultimate power grab, although it also seems like overkill, given that humanity is already hurtling toward self-destruction. But the Entity’s exceedingly possible mission keeps everyone busy, including Ethan’s right-hand whizzes, Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg), along with his love interest, Grace (Hayley Atwell), and the giddily anarchic one-woman wrecking machine Paris (Pom Klementieff). Mostly, though, the Entity’s annihilating designs mean that Ethan has to step up his game from superhero to global redeemer.So, once more, Ethan et. al. go unto the breach as they try to stop the Entity, which has thrown the world into chaos, inspired a doomsday cult and is trying to seize the world’s nukes — the usual. One of the dividends of the better big-studio productions is that they tend to be crowded with talented performers who can keep a straight face when delivering nonsense and sometimes bring feeling to the proceedings. So, as the clock runs down, characters enter and exit, including Angela Bassett’s tight-jawed American president and an army of appealing supporting players: Tramell Tillman, Janet McTeer, Shea Whigham, Holt McCallany, Nick Offerman and Hannah Waddingham.This is the fourth “Mission: Impossible” movie directed by Christopher McQuarrie, who keeps the machinery well-oiled and smoothly running, even when cutting among multiple lines of action. (He shares screenwriting credit with Erik Jendresen.) Shrewdly, he often uses a similar approach when the pace slows and characters convene to explain what’s going on and why (mainly to us), cutting from one person to another, as each delivers a helpful sentence or two. This conversational turn-taking livens up all the information-heavy explanations and helps feed the forward momentum. None of it makes any sense, of course, no matter how sincerely the actors say their lines, yet everything flows.Logic isn’t the reason movies like this exist or why we go to them, and one of the sustaining pleasures of the “Mission: Impossible” series has been its commitment to its own outrageousness. Cruise’s stunts have always been among the most outlandish and most memorable attractions in the series, which was spun off from the 1960s television show of the same title. He stepped into the role by escaping a wall of water and descending spiderlike into a luminously white, high-security vault, hanging by an unnervingly thin rope. The entire thing popped with cool stunts, striking locations, exotic doings and the sheer spectacle of Cruise’s intense physical performance.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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    Cassie Says of Sean Combs Abuse: ‘You Treat Me Like You’re Ike Turner’

    Casandra Ventura’s second day of testimony included her blunt response to the mogul about his pattern of physical abuse and details of her fear of blackmail.Casandra Ventura, the singer and model known as Cassie, testified on Wednesday in the federal trial of Sean Combs, her former boyfriend and label boss, about living with the fear of going against his wishes — and especially his sexual desires.In her second day of testimony, Ms. Ventura said she went along with the increasingly extreme and frequent “freak-offs” demanded by Mr. Combs because she worried that he would respond with anger or physical violence and follow through on his threats to leak explicit videos of her in degrading sexual encounters.Mr. Combs is accused of sex trafficking, racketeering conspiracy and transportation to engage in prostitution, and the government contends that Ms. Ventura and others had been coerced into participating in freak-offs and other sexual encounters with Mr. Combs. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges, and his lawyers have argued that Ms. Ventura, and other women who are part of the case, were willing participants and that his sexual arrangements were all consensual.Ms. Ventura testified that Mr. Combs would take videos of the freak-offs — marathon sex sessions — that she participated in and that he later threatened to release what she called “blackmail material.”During a 2013 flight from Cannes, France, she testified, Mr. Combs pulled up videos on his laptop of her in freak-offs, which she thought had been deleted. He threatened to release the videos to embarrass her.“I just felt trapped,” she said.During freak-offs, she said, Mr. Combs would grab her, push her down, kick her and hit her on the side of her head. At one point, she texted him, “You treat me like you’re Ike Turner,” referring to Tina Turner’s abusive husband and bandleader.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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    Cannes Reacts to Gérard Depardieu Verdict With Soul-Searching and Shrugs

    The actor, who was found guilty of sexual assault on Tuesday, was a festival stalwart and had brought nearly 30 movies to the event.In the French film industry, there are perhaps no two bigger institutions than the Cannes Film Festival and the movie star Gérard Depardieu. And on the first day of this year’s festival, Depardieu, who won the best actor prize here in 1990, was found guilty of sexual assault.Depardieu’s conviction was seen as a victory for the #MeToo movement in France, which took hold more slowly than in the United States. He was given an 18-month suspended sentence on charges of assaulting two women in 2021 on the set of the movie “Les Volets Verts.”In the seaside sun of Cannes, Depardieu’s conviction was met with serious consideration by some and a nonchalant shrug by others.But whatever their view, everybody was talking about it, including at a news conference on Tuesday to introduce the competition jury to the media. Reporters asked Juliette Binoche, the French actress who leads this year’s jury, about the verdict multiple times.Depardieu’s conviction was a result for the #MeToo movement, she said, which was also having an effect on the inclusion of women in the competition and jury lineup at Cannes. “I think that the festival is increasingly in step with what’s happening today,” Binoche said, adding that in France, “our #MeToo wave took some while to gain strength.”Many in France took a skeptical view of the movement at first. In a 2018 open letter to Le Monde newspaper, Catherine Deneuve and more than 100 other Frenchwomen in the entertainment industry complained that a wave of public accusations was creating a totalitarian climate.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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    Seven Takes on the Lurid Dance of the Seven Veils in Strauss’s ‘Salome’

    “I’m ready,” Salome sings. And then she dances.Her predatory stepfather has promised her anything she wants if she performs for him. She obliges with the alternately wild and delicate Dance of the Seven Veils, one of the most famous numbers in all opera.The Dance of the Seven VeilsChicago Symphony Orchestra; Fritz Reiner, conductor (Sony)A highlight of Strauss’s “Salome,” which the Metropolitan Opera will broadcast live to movie theaters on Saturday, it is also one of the art form’s greatest challenges. Few sopranos capable of singing the daunting role have much experience with dance, let alone with carrying a sensual nine-minute solo.Is it a seduction? A striptease? A cry for help? Performers have taken this intense, lurid scene in many different directions, bringing out undercurrents of sexual awakening and violence. The Met’s new production inverts the traditional portrayal, uncovering the wounded girl beneath the stereotypical femme fatale.Here are (yes) seven memorable versions from the long history of opera’s boldest dance.Silent SalomeAlla Nazimova.Nazimova ProductionsNot quite 20 years after the opera’s 1905 premiere, a silent film version of “Salome” — really an adaptation of the Oscar Wilde play on which the opera is based — embraced the material’s perfumed, verging-on-surreal Orientalism. The actress Alla Nazimova’s Salome is a spoiled, petulant teenager.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 Are the ‘Freak-Offs’ at the Core of the Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Case?

    Casandra Ventura, the mogul’s former girlfriend, has described them as marathon sexual encounters that he directed, involving drugs and hired male prostitutes.The term first came to public awareness in November 2023, when the singer Cassie filed a lawsuit accusing Sean Combs, her onetime boyfriend and record label boss, of years of sexual and physical abuse: “freak-off.”According to the suit by Cassie, who was born Casandra Ventura, this was what Mr. Combs called the highly choreographed sexual encounters that he directed “to engage in a fantasy of his called ‘voyeurism.’” They involved costumes, like masks and lingerie. “Copious amounts of drugs,” including Ecstasy and ketamine. The hiring of male prostitutes. Mr. Combs watching and recording the events on a phone while he masturbated.Freak-offs have become a central part of the government’s case, which charges Mr. Combs with sex trafficking, racketeering conspiracy and transportation to engage in prostitution. Mr. Combs has pleaded not guilty, and his lawyers have strongly denied that any of his sexual encounters with women were not consensual.In much-anticipated court testimony this week, Ms. Ventura — who is visibly pregnant with her third child — described the freak-offs in sometimes excruciating terms. During hours of testimony on Tuesday, she cried and occasionally dabbed her eyes with tissue.The first freak-off happened when she was 22, when Mr. Combs hired a male stripper from Las Vegas to come to a home that Mr. Combs was renting in Los Angeles, she testified. Ms. Ventura said she wore a masquerade-style mask and provocative clothing from a “sex store,” and that she and the man took Ecstasy and drank alcohol before they had sex and Mr. Combs watched.The freak-offs “made me feel worthless,” Ms. Ventura testified, “like I didn’t have anything else to offer” Mr. Combs.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