Aurelia Butler

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    ‘Opus’ Review: A New Album They’re Dying to Hear

    John Malkovich plays a ’90s pop star who emerges from retirement with a bloody agenda.As targets for satire, flamboyant pop stars and celebrity journalists are low-hanging fruit — maybe even slightly mushy, rotten fruit. But in “Opus,” Mark Anthony Green, a former style columnist for GQ making his first feature as writer and director, bids to say something trenchant about fame while cementing his reputation as a sleek new horror auteur. He comes up short on both counts.The protagonist is a 27-year-old magazine journalist named Ariel Ecton (Ayo Edebiri), who laments that she hasn’t written anything she considers worthwhile in three years at her job. But there’s big news: The mysterious, reclusive singer Moretti (John Malkovich) — “arguably the biggest pop star of the ’90s,” per Wolf Blitzer, in his obligatory newscast cameo — is coming out of retirement to release his first studio album in roughly the time that Ariel has been alive.And for unknown reasons, Ariel receives an invitation to Moretti’s desert compound, where she and Stan Sullivan (Murray Bartlett), her highhanded, idea-poaching boss, will join several other V.I.P.s to be the first in the world to hear it.The other golden-ticket recipients include a TV personality (Juliette Lewis), an influencer (Stephanie Suganami) and a paparazzo (Melissa Chambers). Out of all of them, Ariel is the only one inclined to show any skepticism toward Moretti’s bizarre brand of hospitality, complete with disgusting meal routines (at a banquet, diners pass around and bite from the same, increasingly saliva-saturated roll) and by-your-side “concierge” service, which in effect means that guests are guarded at all times. When Ariel goes for a jog, her minder (Amber Midthunder) even stops and starts at her pace.Like the upstate home in “Get Out” and the Swedish enclave in “Midsommar,” two movies whose influence looms unflatteringly over the proceedings, Moretti’s compound is a place where something is obviously amiss. Moretti, clearly a leader of some sort of cult, adheres to a religion that preaches a “holistic path” for creative types. There are odd rituals involving pubic grooming, wounds from oyster shucking and a puppet show in which a marionette Billie Holiday is interrogated by anthropomorphic rats.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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    A Looney Tunes Movie With Daffy, Porky and Petunia

    Subtitled “A Looney Tunes Movie,” this installment, directed by Peter Browngardt, takes bubble gum to a whole new level.Porky Pig just turned 90. His first cartoon was released on March 2, 1935; his tormentor and eventual foil Daffy Duck came along a couple of years later. These Warner Bros. comedic chaos agents were wild ripostes to Disney’s arguably saccharine Mickey Mouse. And after years of entertaining adults in the movie theaters of the early- and mid-20th century, television exposure turned Porky and Daffy, along with Bugs Bunny and others, into inspirations for generations of young wiseacres.“The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie,” directed by Peter Browngardt from a script by almost a dozen writers, races out of the gate with old-school moxie. Browngardt is a “Futurama” and Cartoon Network veteran. He’s also been honing his approach to Daffy and Porky with television’s “Looney Tunes Cartoons,” which has run six seasons on Max. Browngardt’s gnarly approach to the Looney Tunes characters seems more influenced by the gross-out antics of Nickelodeon’s “Ren & Stimpy,” than by, say, Warner’s own much-missed “Animaniacs.”The 20th- and now 21st-century pictures featuring these toons are a mixed bag. The least-inspired iterations of the characters, in the “Space Jam” movies, have been the most popular. Joe Dante’s wonderful “Looney Tunes: Back in Action,” from 2003, had the spirit of the older cartoons — it appreciated the value of dropping anvils on coyotes’ heads, and more — but failed to find box office favor. But in Browngardt’s installment, citing pop-culture references and breaking out into song have little to no place. Instead, the movie subjects Daffy Duck to a butt-crack joke, and compels him to twerk.Which feels especially weird because the style in which our heroes are depicted comes directly from the Looney Tunes of old. The movie’s technical aspects are largely admirable, and it pays homage to the greats of the animation department once known as Termite Terrace by naming the movie’s restaurants after the past masters Robert Clampett and Tex Avery.Early on, the young BFFs Daffy and Porky are instructed by a creepy character that if they “stick together,” all will turn out right for them. Sticking is a major motif here, as an alien goo renders a new brand of chewing gum irresistible. It also makes its consumers mindless zombies. With the help of a “flavor expert,” Petunia Pig, Daffy and Porky scurry to save the world from, yes, blowing up like a gum bubble. The action is frenetic and gleefully vulgar; at one point a dome of bubble gum emerges from a dog’s rear end. There’s also some old-school slapstick; chattering fake teeth turn out to be practically world-saving.But the movie’s energy doesn’t pay off in dividends of real pleasure. Anarchy has never been so mere as it is ultimately rendered here.The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes MovieRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘The Electric State’ Review: 1990s Robot Apocalypse? As if!

    Who needs dystopian artificial intelligence to destroy faith in humanity when you can watch this sci-fi extravaganza?In “The Electric State,” a young woman and a silent robot slowly make their way across the carcass of the United States, littered with beached war ships and drones. In this alternative history, machines got on a fast track to sentience during the 20th century and waged war against humanity, which barely won. By the alt-1990s, hyper-capitalism and virtual reality have destroyed communal and social bonds — people are so addicted to V.R., which they mainline via helmet-like neurocasters, that they can go into vegetative states, oblivious to the world around them. The story is muted and evocative, and it leaves you with a powerful feeling of bereavement and grief for what we, as a species, have brought on ourselves.I’m sorry, I was talking about the illustrated novel “The Electric State” (2018), by the Swedish artist and writer Simon Stalenhag.Anthony Russo and Joe Russo’s movie version, streaming on Netflix, is quite different.It does have the same context and setup, but whereas the book is elliptical in narrative, muted in color palette and melancholy in mood, the movie is obvious, garish and just plain dumb. (For those interested, the Prime Video series “Tales From the Loop” is a much worthier adaptation of Stalenhag’s universe.)Naturally, a film can have an autonomous worth, equal but distinct from its source material (“Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” and “Blade Runner” come to mind). But even considered on its own, this “Electric State” remains a hyper-processed industrial product packed with sugar and sodium (in the form of quips and battles), along with such wonderful additives as goopy sentiment and automatic-pilot acting.We still have a young woman, Michelle (Millie Bobby Brown), and she is still accompanied by a robot, Kid Cosmo (voiced by Alan Tudyk). But she is no longer central to the story or even the cast, having teamed up with a swashbuckling smuggler, Keats (Chris Pratt), and his own bot sidekick, Herman (voiced by Anthony Mackie). Because it’s easier to blame epochal collapse on one bad guy than on collective apathy, we also get Stanley Tucci as Ethan Skate, a tech tycoon up to no good.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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    ‘Black Bag’ Review: Blanchett v. Fassbender

    The actors play a glamorous couple of spies in this latest sleek collaboration from the director Steven Soderbergh and the screenwriter David Koepp.“Black Bag” is the third movie written by David Koepp and directed by Steven Soderbergh that’s been released since 2022, and it’s a banger. It’s also sleek, witty and lean to the bone, a fizzy, engaging puzzler about beautiful spies doing the sort of extraordinary things that the rest of us only read about in novels and — if we’re lucky — watch onscreen. It’s nonsense, but the kind of glorious grown-up nonsense that critics like to say they (as in Hollywood) no longer make. That’s true to a great extent despite exceptions like Koepp and Soderbergh, even if they’re too playfully unorthodox to be prototypically Hollywood.The filmmakers’ latest duet stars Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender as Kathryn and George. Cozily and happily married, the couple lives in austere luxury in a townhouse in London, where they keep long, eventful hours working for a British intelligence agency, the (real) Government Communications Headquarters. As spies go, the two certainly look and speak their roles, or at least the fictional versions of them: They’re cunning, suave and as enigmatic as the title suggests. Unlike their famed counterpart James Bond (he’s at MI6), though, they put in serious face time at the office. Inside a glass tower, they watch and are watched in turn, tracking enemies and sometimes eliminating them.The setup involves an explosively dangerous threat in the form of malware called Severus, presumably named after the despotic Roman emperor. There appears to be a mole in the agency, and George is among a select few trying to identify the culprit. He has a list of five possible candidates, all of whom work in the agency’s power ranks. Among the suspects is — ta-da! — Kathryn. Because this isn’t a problem that George can take to a marriage counselor — even if one of the main characters is an agency shrink — he does what he’s trained to do: He spies on her. It gets tricky. It also gets funny and predictably violent, with some of the sharpest, nastiest scenes unfolding across a family dining-room table.Koepp and Soderbergh are virtuosos of genre, and “Black Bag” is right in their wheelhouse. Each has made a range of films (Koepp also directs), and they last collaborated on the ghost story “Presence,” which came out earlier this year. If the two excel at thrillers, it’s partly because, I imagine, high-stakes intrigues give filmmakers room to push norms to extremes and even ditch them. Koepp and Soderbergh’s “KIMI” (2022) is another tight genre piece that embraces and detonates conventions. Its myriad influences include films about trapped women as well as claustrophobic paranoid thrillers from the 1970s like “The Conversation” and “Three Days of the Condor,” reference points that also inform “Black Bag.”To judge from George’s chic glasses and turtlenecks, the filmmakers revisited some older Michael Caine movies, too. Fassbender doesn’t have Caine’s charms, and he’s less persuasive as a romantic foil. “Black Bag” has its share of intentionally outlandish moments, some giddily funny (there are more ticklish moments than thrills), but among the less convincing plot points is George and Kathryn’s oft-stated devotion to each other. Onscreen, Fassbender and especially Blanchett have an otherworldly quality that makes them reliably interesting to watch, but it’s one that can feel like a membrane separating them from more ordinary souls. They both draw you to them, but, unlike, say, Brad Pitt, they don’t necessarily invite you in.Whether these nagging doubts about George and Kathryn’s relationship are intentional, they work in a movie that teases you with secrets and weapons, border-crossing and misdirection, and is filled out with a note-perfect supporting cast that includes Regé-Jean Page, Naomie Harris, Tom Burke and Marisa Abela. Even as the story heats up and starts to get crowded, George remains the intrigue’s central question mark. He prowls into the movie like Henry Hill strolling into the nightclub in the famously long take in “Goodfellas,” a scene that slyly suggests that George isn’t to be trusted. He may be hot for Kathryn, but there’s something “bloodless and inhuman” about him, too, as Le Carré wrote of his famous spy, George Smiley.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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    ‘An Unfinished Film’ Review: When Reality Interrupts Art

    A drama full of unconventional touches recalls a time when all we had were our screens.It’s a little hard to get a grasp on what “An Unfinished Film” is at first. This semifictional drama opens with a film crew booting up a 10-year-old computer, hoping their footage will still be there. And after a little finagling, the screen springs to life. Director Xiaorui (Mao Xiaorui) watches, rapt, as a younger version of himself appears onscreen.This is a film he tried to make 10 years ago, but abandoned for reasons that start to become clear as he explains the plot to others. Director Xiaorui watches as his aborted film’s star, Jiang Cheng (Qin Hao), appears onscreen as well, and starts to get some ideas. Jiang is now a big movie star, married and with a baby on the way, but when the director calls and asks him if they might try to finish the film, he’s intrigued. Why not?This is a straightforward enough start to a movie, but it’s all a little meta. For instance, Mao, the actor who plays the director, has served as assistant director to Lou Ye, the actual director of “An Unfinished Film.” And Qin, who plays Jiang Cheng, is another frequent Lou collaborator. The footage that they’re watching is in fact outtakes and B-roll from others of Lou’s films, including “Suzhou River,” “Mystery,” “Spring Fever” and “The Shadow Play.” And Lou has some experience with filmmaking stops and starts; his movies have repeatedly been banned in China for running afoul of censors, and he has been put under several-year prohibitions from filmmaking several times as well — dictates he has at times ignored.So this feels personal for Lou, and it keeps getting more personal, in ways that global audiences will easily understand. Director Xiaorui, Jiang and the crew decide to shoot the rest of the film just before the Chinese New Year — but it’s January 2020, and they’re shooting in a hotel located near Wuhan. News of a virus spreads. By the time they decide to shut down production and head to their homes to wait it out, it’s too late. After some confusion and panic that feels ripped straight from zombie films, things become eerily quiet. Everyone must quarantine, alone, in their rooms. They don’t know when they’ll get out.Now reality narrows down to what they can see on their phones and computer screens, including for Jiang, whose wife, Sang Qi (Qi Xi), is increasingly panicked about Jiang ever making it home. Alone in his room, trying to retain his sanity, he watches the world coping with quarantine, observing videos of people dancing and recording his own videos for his child.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 Actor’ Review: No Direction Home

    André Holland plays an actor with amnesia in this wonderfully surreal and poignant mystery.As a teenager, I had a recurring dream of visiting my grandmother, only to find her gone, and everything — her street, her rowhouse — looking just a little bit off. Confused, I would sit down on her front step and think, “This is just a dream. I’ll sit here until I wake up.”That sense of being trapped in a dimension partway between the real and the unreal, the familiar and the strange, is the disorienting force of Duke Johnson’s “The Actor.” Adapting the Donald E. Westlake novel, “Memory” — written in the 1960s and published posthumously in 2010 — Johnson and Stephen Cooney have shaped an unsettling, sorrowful journey from damage to a kind of deliverance. However, the man taking that journey, a theater actor named Paul Cole (André Holland), might disagree.A “Twilight Zone”-style voice-over sets a spooky tone and underscores the movie’s committed theatricality. After being caught in flagrante by a furious husband, Paul lands in the hospital with a head injury and without the ability to remember. Stranded in small-town Ohio in the 1950s, knowing only that he has an apartment in New York City, Paul finds a job in a local tannery, a room in a boardinghouse and begins to save for a bus ticket home. Before he can do that, he meets the lovely Edna (a wonderful Gemma Chan) and begins to fall in love — if that’s even possible when your meetings can vanish like missing frames on a roll of film.The notion of life being edited without your knowledge or consent lends “The Actor” a sadness and surreality that the cinematographer, Joe Passarelli, takes to heart. His smudged, smoky images cast a veil of nostalgia over Paul’s plight as he returns to Manhattan and learns from friends that he may not have been a very nice person. Yet, if you can’t remember, does it matter? Do you cobble together a self from others’ memories of you, or do you ditch the past and start over?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 Parenting’ Review: Meet the Poltergeist

    A family getaway turns ghastly when a demon is awakened in this juvenile, meanspirited horror-comedy.“The Parenting,” a raunchy, gross-out horror-comedy directed by Craig Johnson, has plenty of toilet humor and gay jokes stuffed into its tedious running time, few of them clever or funny. Its best bit is in the setup: After a family is killed at home in the early 1980s, the house sits empty until the present day, when it is converted into an Airbnb that the young couple Josh (Brandon Flynn) and Rohan (Nik Dodani) rent for a weekend getaway. “This place is a mansion,” Rohan enthuses, about what in the ’80s was an ordinary suburban household. The punchline is that in this economy, no one can afford to buy even a haunted house anymore. Yes, there’s a 400-year-old poltergeist terrorizing inhabitants. But it would sure beat renting.The boys have secured this spacious if malevolent abode as an occasion to introduce each other to their parents, who are played by television royalty: Lisa Kudrow, Dean Norris, Edie Falco and Brian Cox. Some early water-and-oil mingling feels like a tepid riff on “Meet the Parents,” but when the demonic intrigue ramps up, the tone shifts to full-blown slapstick lunacy, with heads spinning “Exorcist”-style, family members projectile vomiting, and in a meanspirited fashion, more than one Pomeranian getting brutally butchered. The cast is game — especially Cox, who gets to do some over-the-top Linda Blair mugging — but the script, by a “Saturday Night Live” writer, Kent Sublette, is puerile and abrasive, lacking the wit of “Evil Dead” (an obvious influence) and the brio of “Scary Movie.”The ParentingRated R Rated R for crude humor, strong language, violence and some mild drug use. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Watch on Max. More

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    Interview: Tori Amos on Her Children’s Book and Her Reading Life

    What inspires the Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter? Her first picture book, “Tori and the Muses,” offers an answer. In an email interview, she shared how her gently rebellious mother made her a reader. SCOTT HELLERWhat books are on your night stand?“Medicine Cards: The Discovery of Power Through the Ways of Animals,” by Jamie Sams and David Carson. It’s an interactive book and card set where you can pull a card and read about the healing properties that each animal embodies as it relates to mind, body and spirit. Jamie Sams was of Indigenous heritage, and I feel like some of it was passed down to her as a gift she has channeled for us all.How do you organize your books?Let’s put it this way: Being a librarian is a fantasy of mine. In my album “Tales of a Librarian,” I’m dressed in different imagined librarian costumes, and in the liner notes the tracks are organized by the Dewey Decimal System. My own little libraries don’t have a system, but I have dreams of one! What kind of reader were you as a child?My reading was all inspired by my mother, Mary. My father, a pastor, believed that she was reading me Bible stories. But what she was doing, and I’m convinced this was her rebellion — her Methodist minister’s wife rebellion, because it was difficult to rebel, especially as a minister’s wife in the late ’60s if you wanted to stay married and accepted by the parishioners and society at large — was reading to me from the collection of Edgar Allan Poe’s works. What’s the best book you’ve ever received as a gift?“Growing Up,” by Russell Baker, which I got a few years ago from my friend Mary Ellen Bobb. I’d never heard of Baker and I couldn’t put the book down. The way he could tell the story of his life made me feel like I knew everybody in it by the time I finished. I grew up in Baltimore and he put the city in a different light for me: more like a shining city on a hill.What’s the last great book you read?I’m rereading “Landmarks,” by Robert Macfarlane. The way this man writes about landscapes, particularly in the U.K., makes the wild tracks and the sea roads come alive.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