Aurelia Butler

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    Erich Anderson, Actor in ‘Friday the 13th’ and ‘Felicity,’ Dies at 67

    Mr. Anderson had a breakout role in “Friday the 13th” and went on to appear in more than 300 TV episodes, including a recurring role as the father on “Felicity.”Erich Anderson, an actor known for his breakout role in the “Friday the 13th” franchise and recurring appearances on television series like “Felicity” and “Thirtysomething,” died on Saturday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 67.His brother-in-law, Michael O’Malley, said the cause was esophageal cancer.In the late 1980s and ’90s, Mr. Anderson played a recurring love interest on “Thirtysomething,” a drama about a group of friends navigating life and love in Philadelphia;the ex-husband of a detective on “NYPD Blue”; and the father to Keri Russell’s lead role on “Felicity,” a series about an introverted high school student who follows her dream guy to college in New York City.By 2013, he had appeared in roughly 300 episodes of television shows including “Boston Public,” “The X-Files,” “CSI,” “ER,” “7th Heaven,” “Star Trek,” “Monk,” “Tour of Duty” and “Murder, She Wrote.”But it was his first feature film role, in “Friday the 13th: the Final Chapter” — the fourth film in the franchise, which follows the serial killer Jason Voorhees — that stuck with fans throughout his career.When the film was released in 1984, Mr. Anderson thought, “I had a good time and really enjoyed the process and learning about it,” he told a “Friday the 13th” podcast in 2013. “This is out in the world now.”But over the years, especially as he began attending fan conventions, Mr. Anderson came to realize that his role as Rob Dier, who seeks to avenge his sister’s death only to be killed by Jason himself, was “by far the most enduring thing” he had done.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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    Wiener Festwochen Says ‘No Excuses Anymore’ for Inequality

    In Vienna, a series of concerts and summits will highlight women and nonbinary composers, as well as the dominance of the dead, white, male canon.In the world of classical music, progress toward gender parity can seem incredibly slow.Recent big wins have included women of the New York Philharmonic being allowed to perform in pants, and the appointment of the second woman — ever — to a music director role at one of the 25 largest orchestras in the United States. The Berlin Philharmonic, one of the world’s great ensembles, hired its first female concertmaster last year.Frustrated by the stubborn gender imbalances in classical music, the directors of the Wiener Festwochen, a prestigious arts festival in Vienna, have this year formed the “Academy Second Modernism,” an initiative that will showcase works by 50 female and nonbinary composers over five years.This season, less than 8 percent of approximately 16,000 works staged by 111 orchestras worldwide were composed by women, according to a report from Donne, Women in Music, an organization working for equity in the classical music industry. Of those works, the vast majority were composed by white women.According to the report, three of the 10 orchestras that performed the highest proportion of works composed by women were in the United States: the American Composers Orchestra in New York, the Chicago Sinfonietta and National Philharmonic in North Bethesda, Md. But at the New York Philharmonic and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, two of America’s top orchestras, only about 10 percent of the music programmed was composed by women.“There are so many of us,” said Bushra El-Turk, a British-Lebanese composer who often merges Western and Eastern musical traditions in her work. “Whether we’re given opportunities is the problem.”Rehearsing El-Turk’s opera “Woman at Point Zero,” in Vienna last month.David Payr for The New York TimesWe 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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    ‘Longing’ Review: A Test of Paternity

    Richard Gere plays it way too cool as a man learning about the son he didn’t know he had.Plausibility complaints always feel cheap, but “Longing” strains credulity well past the breaking point. This is the Israeli writer-director Savi Gabizon’s second try at this premise — he is remaking his 2017 feature of the same title — but it is difficult to imagine that it ever made sense.The movie opens with Daniel (Richard Gere) meeting a former partner, Rachel (Suzanne Clément). He has little time for her, until she drops a bombshell. When they separated, she was pregnant, and their son, Allen, unknown to Daniel, has just died at 19 in a car accident.Daniel travels to Hamilton, Ontario, where they lived, and things get even stranger. Daniel arrives for a graveside memorial service, but no one is present except a priest. Rachel’s husband, Robert (Kevin Hanchard), later informs Daniel that Rachel has been in the hospital for two days. But did Allen have no other friends or relatives?“Longing” soon turns into a series of mostly one-on-one interactions in which people tell Daniel about Allen. Allen’s friend (Wayne Burns) asks Daniel for money that he and Allen owed a drug dealer. Daniel finds that Allen had an obsession with a teacher (Diane Kruger) that escalated to the point of expulsion and possible police involvement. Most disturbingly, Daniel learns that Allen had been staying long-term not with Rachel and Robert but with another family and may have been preying on the family’s underage daughter (Jessica Clement). Unfathomably, Daniel does not immediately question Rachel and Robert about this news.Is the city of Hamilton playing an elaborate prank on the self-absorbed Daniel? No, everything is on the level. Gere coasts on movie star charisma, a quality that apparently enables Daniel to remain cool when any rational person would be continually enraged.LongingRated R. Dark themes concerning teenagers. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘I Used to Be Funny’ Review: Bruising Punchlines

    The film, which stars Rachel Sennott as a stand-up comedian, looks at the aftereffects of trauma on a character who wields quips as both weapon and shield.The perceptive dramedy “I Used to Be Funny” features a mic-drop performance by Rachel Sennott as a rising stand-up comedian derailed by a vague, internet-viral crime. What happened to Sam (Sennott) is no laughing matter. But she and her fellow comics crack oblique jokes about it, anyway. Making her first feature, the writer-director Ally Pankiw lets most zingers land. Comedy is just how these strivers communicate — it’s how they break awkwardness, bond, fight, forgive and heal.Pankiw warms up the audience with Sam’s roommates Paige and Philip (Sabrina Jalees and Caleb Hearon, both terrific) poking fun at a 14-year-old runaway, Brooke (Olga Petsa), last seen smashing in their front door. “She’s probably loving the missing person posters,” Paige drolls. “They used a selfie, she looks great.”Before she was a recluse, Sam was the lost girl’s nanny. The film is peppered with happier flashbacks to when Sam and Brooke were best pals, a team-up that annoyed Brooke’s humorless dad (Jason Jones). We track time through the perkiness of Sam’s posture and ponytail. Depression films can be a drag. Fortunately, Sennott is entertaining even as a mope.The script takes an annoyingly long time revealing what went wrong (and then rushes the resolution). Pankiw is more focused on the aftereffects of trauma on a character who wields quips as both weapon and shield. A former stand-up herself, Sennott holds a stage with command. Off-duty, unshowered and unable to move on, Sam is self-aware enough to know that she is exhausting her friends — and the film keeps tabs on how often she and her gang must claim they’re just kidding around.I Used to Be FunnyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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    Francis Ford Coppola: ‘You Can’t Be an Artist and Be Safe’

    The filmmaker talks about the inspirations for the characters in “Megalopolis” and “The Godfather,” and responds to recent allegations.The first time that Francis Ford Coppola had a movie in competition at the Cannes Film Festival was in 1967. He was 28 and the movie was “You’re a Big Boy Now,” a neo-screwball studio comedy about a young guy trying to cut loose from his parents. Coppola made it while he was in film school at the University of California, Los Angeles, and it became his master’s thesis project. A month after the festival, he began directing his first big-budget studio film, “Finian’s Rainbow.” It flopped. He then poured some of his savings into a low-budget studio movie, “The Rain People.” It flopped. The next film he directed was “The Godfather.”Coppola, now 85, was back again at Cannes last month with the epic fantasy “Megalopolis,” a big-screen dream that he has nurtured for more than 40 years. It’s his first movie since “Twixt” (2011), a little-seen horror tale about a genre novelist who says he wants to make something personal. It’s a plaintive refrain that Coppola has voiced repeatedly throughout his career. However celebrated he remains for the studio films that he has directed, Coppola is and has always been an unequivocally personal filmmaker, one whose love for the art of film has recurrently put him at odds with the industry and its media mouthpieces.Given Coppola’s history of independence and specifically his record of great financial risks (as with “Apocalypse Now”) and sometimes staggering losses (“One From the Heart”), it was no surprise that much of the initial chatter about “Megalopolis” wasn’t about the movie per se or the sprawling ensemble headed by Adam Driver. Rather, much of the pre-festival talk was about how Coppola had helped bankroll it with “$120 million of his own money,” a phrase that was reflexively repeated in news reports. Even at Cannes, where the word “art” is used without embarrassment, money keeps an iron grip on both minds and movies.By the time the festival opened on May 14, though, the talk about “Megalopolis” had changed course dramatically. That day, The Guardian published a long article on it. Much of the story was based on anonymous sources and was dedicated to gripes from crew members about Coppola’s methods — “‘Has this guy ever made a movie before?’” the headline read — echoing complaints that have dogged the filmmaker throughout his career. More alarming were the allegations that Coppola had tried to kiss female extras during production. In response, one of the executive producers, Darren Demetre, said he “was never aware of any complaints of harassment or ill behavior during the course of the project.”Adam Driver and Nathalie Emmanuel in “Megalopolis.”American Zoetrope/Mihai Malaimare Jr.A FEW DAYS AFTER “Megalopolis” had its premiere at Cannes, I walked under a canopy of clouds to a ship docked near the festival’s headquarters, to speak with Coppola. The yacht belonged to an Italian-Tunisian distributor and Coppola was, as he put it, “mooching” as assorted relatives, friends, colleagues and support staff buzzed around him. He looked tired, and while that’s normal for many attendees at the world’s largest film festival, it was hard not to think that grief had taken its toll, too. On April 12, Eleanor Coppola, his wife of more than six decades, died. On May 18, his longtime collaborator Fred Roos — a producer on numerous Coppola family films, “Megalopolis” included — also died.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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    ‘Tuesday’ Review: Expiration Point

    Julia Louis-Dreyfus journeys from denial to acceptance in this imaginative fantasy-drama about grief and motherhood.Before a word of dialogue is spoken in “Tuesday,” a series of magical images introduce Death in the form of a greasy-looking bird as it visits the dying. The beast’s head clamors with their suffering, their terror and bargaining, the sick and the simply worn out. Young and old, human and animal, they call to him before breathing their last beneath the shadow of his gently raised wing.In this fantastical first feature from the Croatian filmmaker Daina O. Pusic, striking special effects and a richly textured sound design lend a cosmic chill to a simple story of maternal grief. The mother in question is Zora (a very fine Julia Louis-Dreyfus), so deep in denial about her daughter Tuesday’s terminal illness that she can’t handle being alone with her. Creeping out of the house each morning, pretending to go to work, Zora wanders from coffee shop to park bench, ignoring Tuesday’s calls.Yet Tuesday (beautifully played by Lola Petticrew) understands. Unable to walk and struggling to breathe, she’s a bright teenager who seems ready when Death appears. Out of sight of her pragmatic nurse (Leah Harvey), Tuesday bonds with Death, requesting time to prepare her mother, and these scenes have a lightness that prevents the film from becoming an extended moan of unrelieved sadness. Like many of us, Death, it turns out, enjoys a joke and the music of Ice Cube. It seems fitting that his taste is vintage.As voiced, quite wonderfully, by Arinzé Kene, the bird — not the expected raven, but a macaw — is a digital star that the human actors must constantly negotiate with for visual and narrative space. Swelling and shrinking in size, he switches in an instant from cute to monstrous, amusing to terrifying, the voices in his head briefly silenced as he confesses that he hasn’t spoken in 200 years.“I am filthy,” he growls, coughing up words like hairballs and flapping his blackened wings, as if the darkness of his mission has stained his once-bright feathers with the dirt of the grave. Yet while Tuesday seems perfectly at ease with her grim visitor, Zora responds with an increasingly hysterical campaign to — literally — swallow her greatest fear.Without much to distract from the three central characters, “Tuesday” can feel overlong and a little claustrophobic. Yet this compassionate fairy tale works because the actors are so in sync and the imagery — as in one shot of the bird curled like an apostrophe in a dead woman’s tear duct — is often magical. Alexis Zabé’s cinematography is both intimate and expansive, reaching beyond the characters’ emotional struggles to show the apocalyptic consequences if Death should be vanquished. The sum is a highly imaginative picture that, while considering one family’s pain, also asks us to ponder the possibility that a life without end means nothing less than a world without a future.TuesdayRated R for pejorative language. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Am I OK?’ Review: When It’s Time to Grow Up

    Dakota Johnson stars in an expansive friendship comedy about coming out in your 30s and finding yourself.The appeal of the late bloomer movie is rooted in its parent genre: the coming-of-age story. Our heroine begins a little naïve and learns some hard but good lessons, maybe falls in love. Sometimes a mentor provides wisdom before leaving her to stand on her own two feet. In a traditional coming-of-age story, the protagonist is usually very young, so that world is full of possibility. Anything could happen next.But with a late bloomer, the world’s possibilities have been shut down a little, and that shifts the tone. Decisions about career, friendships and family have already been made; the stakes of change are higher. That means a late bloomer story could be a comedy, or it could feel more melancholy, even like a tragedy. There’s an inherent realism in a film like “All of Us Strangers” or “Her” or “20th Century Women” that’s bracing and invigorating.Depending on your age, Lucy (Dakota Johnson), who is 32, may not feel old enough to be termed a late bloomer. But she certainly feels like she is. The protagonist of “Am I OK?” has settled into a quiet, unchallenging Los Angeles life. She’s the kind of person who stares at a diner menu full of options and then orders the same meal — veggie burger, sweet potato fries, black iced coffee — every time. She spends most of her free time with Jane (Sonoya Mizuno), her childhood best friend, and keeps her life ripple-free. She’s never been in love. At the end of dinners with Ben (Whitmer Thomas), the guy she’s ostensibly dating, she shakes his hand.By her own admission, Lucy is nervous all the time, “scared of everything.” Worse, she says, she’s not sure if she’s ever been happy, or what even makes her happy. She has built herself a comfortable box to live in, as long as nothing changes.Her box is about to cave in. One day, Jane announces that she’s moving to London for work, and Lucy suddenly feels unmoored. A feeling that’s been growing inside her is now too strong to ignore: Lucy knows she’s attracted to women. And she’s especially attracted to Brittany (Kiersey Clemons), the peppy new masseuse at the spa where she works as a receptionist.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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    Diane von Furstenberg, a Fashion Lioness in Winter

    Diane von Furstenberg’s friends like to tease that, had she been on the cinematic Titanic, she would have found a way to hoist up Jack from the freezing water and onto that wooden door. Three days later, Jack in tow, she would have sashayed into a soignée New York dinner party wearing that 56-carat blue diamond necklace.The woman has a strong will.I realized that the first time I met her in 1975, when I was a cub reporter at The Washington Star. At 28, Ms. von Furstenberg was already a sensation with the phenomenally successful $86 wrap dress; she had conjured it after seeing Julie Nixon Eisenhower on TV defending her father during Watergate, wearing a DVF wrap top and skirt.The tycooness, on a visit to D.C. to promote her brand, was in a rush to get to the airport and asked if I could come down to her car for the interview.I felt like I was climbing into a cage with a panther. I got into the back of a black limo and there she was in a dark mink coat, her long dark hair with a henna sheen spilling over her shoulders, her legs sheathed in black fishnets. She was nibbling from a box of dark chocolates on her lap. In her sultry Belgian accent, she offered me one. Her voice, as her late friend, Vogue’s André Leon Talley, said, “wraps itself around you like a cozy, warm cashmere muffler.”That half-hour in her limo was a revelation. In an era when we were instructed by male “experts” to dress and act like men to get ahead, Ms. von Furstenberg insisted on living a man’s life in a woman’s body. Her message was bracing: Meet men as equals but don’t imitate them. Ambition and stilettos can coexist.I immediately tossed out all my hideous dress-for-success floppy ties.I caught up with Ms. von Furstenberg recently to talk about a new Hulu documentary, “Diane von Furstenberg: Woman in Charge,” on her vertiginous, glamorous life, a life darkened by the Holocaust, AIDS, her bout with tongue cancer and her periodic business woes.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