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    Wayne Lewis, Singer With the R&B Mainstay Atlantic Starr, Dies at 68

    The group reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1987 with the ballad “Always” and went on to leave a lasting impression on modern-day artists.Wayne Lewis, the dapper vocalist and keyboardist who was a founder of the group Atlantic Starr, a fixture of the 1980s rhythm and blues scene, died on June 5 in Queens. He was 68.His brother Jonathan Lewis confirmed the death but did not specify a cause. He said that Wayne Lewis collapsed while running on a treadmill at a gym and was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.A suave performer with piercing eyes and a rollicking sense of humor, Mr. Lewis served as one of the singers and songwriters of Atlantic Starr, whose ballad “Always” topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1987 and whose other hits included “Secret Lovers” and “Circles.” The band was nominated for three Soul Train Awards and an American Music Award.Writing with his brothers Jonathan and David, Mr. Lewis translated the universal emotions of love, lust and heartbreak into evocative verses backed by lush arrangements. His performances of the sentimental soul ballad “Send for Me,” released in 1980, became a calling card.Fluent in the sartorial language of showbiz, Mr. Lewis meticulously color-coordinated the group’s outfits, Jonathan Lewis said. His own suits — flashy, textured and patterned — were often showstoppers.Reviewing a concert for The Washington Post in 1982, Mike Joyce noted the “pop sheen romanticism” at the heart of Atlantic Starr’s music. As Wayne and David Lewis took center stage, he observed, they brought with them “a heartthrob appeal akin to the Jacksons’.”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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    Watch Dakota Johnson and Pedro Pascal Spark in ‘Materialists’

    The writer and director Celine Song narrates a sequence from her film, which also features Chris Evans.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.A meet-cute, an intriguing drink order and a stealth character in the background make for a clever scene in Celine Song’s latest film, “Materialists.” Narrating this sequence, the writer-director said she chose this particular scene to discuss for this series “because it’s the first scene that I wrote.”In it, Harry, played by Pedro Pascal, is at the reception following his brother’s wedding. He rearranges his name card so he can sit next to Lucy (Dakota Johnson), a matchmaker he quickly starts to hit on.Discussing the scene, Song said she wanted the camera to settle on a long two-shot, in which Lucy and Harry have a thoughtful conversation.“This really reflects how incredible my actors are,” she said, “because we’re really treating them like they’re theater actors having to have a whole conversation while sitting in this two-shot.”During that discussion, Song adds to the narrative with a background moment, a quick introduction of the film’s third lead, John (Chris Evans), who walks through the frame while the two are talking.“I really did want the sound design and the way that he walks by to be something that is maybe not easy to spot in the first watch, but it’s a bit of a secret.”That moment pays off when Lucy tells Harry her drink order toward the end of the scene.Read the “Materialists” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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    Celine Song’s New Rom-Com ‘Materialists’ Takes a Deep Look at Love and Value

    In her 20s, long before she wrote and directed the Oscar-nominated “Past Lives,” Celine Song spent six months working as a matchmaker in New York. By day, she’d meet with single women rattling off requirements for a potential mate, from appearance and height to income. By night, over beers with her artist friends, she couldn’t help but notice a disconnect: Many of her favorite people would be instantly rejected based on those criteria.“I’d be like, ‘You guys would be not good mates for any of my clients,’” she said. “I spent all day listening to these women describe them as worthless people they do not want to meet, even though I ascribe so much worth to them because they are creative and brilliant and amazing.”That tension lies at the heart of Song’s new rom-com, “Materialists,” which stars Dakota Johnson as Lucy, a New York City matchmaker with an enviable track record of steering single women toward successful men. But when Lucy meets the handsome and rich Harry (Pedro Pascal), who’d prefer to woo Lucy instead of her clients, she must decide if the material things he can offer are more valuable than the deeper connection she feels with John (Chris Evans), her broke ex-boyfriend.Before making movies, Song worked as a matchmaker. Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesSong wrote the screenplay for “Materialists” in 2022 as she awaited the release of “Past Lives,” about a South Korean immigrant reunited with the childhood friend who still carries a torch for her. When I met Song last month over drinks at a West Hollywood hotel, she spoke candidly about love and longing as a creative through line in her work.“When I talk to people who are really, really smart, who seem to know everything, if you start asking them about their romantic life, everything falls apart,” she said. “They’ll just admit that they don’t know things about love, or they’ll be like, ‘I don’t know, she makes me feel like a kid.’ They’ll say things that are not becoming of the put-together, intelligent people they are, because love is a mystery.”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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    Remembering Sly Stone and Brian Wilson

    Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTubeThis week, pop music lost a pair of world builders: Sly Stone, who created visionary psychedelic rock, soul and pop that helped integrate popular music and captured harsh social realities under the guise of big-tent cheer; and Brian Wilson, the macher of the Beach Boys, whose ear for elevated harmony helped create some of the defining sounds of the 1960s. Both men were 82.Wilson and Stone excelled in a moment in which the country was shaking off the staidness of the 1950s. Wilson’s work with the Beach Boys initially took on themes of American freedom before evolving into a more complex outfit on “Pet Sounds.” After that album, Wilson descended into mental instability, and remained largely out of view for decades. Stone had his commercial peak in the early 1970s with up-tempo funk numbers riven deep with social meaning. But he, too, lost his grip on his career, and was heard from only intermittently in subsequent years.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about Stone’s improvisational genius, how he channeled his social moment through music, and what it took to turn the life stories of Stone and Wilson into books and film.Guests:Ben Greenman, a longtime journalist who collaborated with Stone on “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin): A Memoir” and Wilson on “I Am Brian Wilson”Joseph Patel, a producer of the documentary “Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius)”Vernon Reid, a rock musician who was the founder of Living Colour and a co-founder of the Black Rock CoalitionConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica.Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. More

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    ‘Prime Minister’ Examines a New Zealand Leader and a Global Issue

    The film is a memoir of sorts for Jacinda Ardern, who governed at a time of multiple disasters. But it was misinformation that proved hardest to cope with.When she became prime minister of New Zealand in 2017, Jacinda Ardern was the world’s youngest female head of state, at 37. From the start, she was playing on hard mode. After giving birth to a daughter not quite eight months later, she led her country through a series of generational catastrophes — shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, a deadly volcanic eruption, the Covid-19 pandemic — all while pushing a hefty set of progressive reforms through the legislature and getting re-elected, too.The new documentary “Prime Minister” (in theaters) mostly covers this tumultuous period, showing how Ardern, the Labour Party leader at the time, navigated her choices while also giving space to her misgivings. But it’s not a biopic or a puff piece. It’s more of a memoir: a bigger story told through the events of one person’s life. That tale goes far beyond Ardern, even beyond New Zealand.The directors Lindsay Utz and Michelle Walshe drew on a variety of sources. There’s footage from 2024, with Ardern teaching as a fellow at Harvard and working on her new book, “A Different Kind of Power.” But that’s just the framing device. The bulk of “Prime Minister” leans on video that her husband, Clarke Gayford, shot during Ardern’s time in office, including intimate glimpses of her home life and private thoughts, as well as audio interviews that haven’t been previously released.The result can be uncommonly frank. Ardern talks about reluctant governing and impostor syndrome. Her political journey, she says, has been a battle between two parts of herself, “the one that says that you can’t and the one that says that you have to.” She speaks her mind but is also in tune with her emotions. You can hear her voice crack when she contemplates the grieving families of the people slain in the Christchurch massacre, or considers the implications of pandemic lockdown policies on children who depend on school for food and women who will face domestic violence in isolation.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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    Inside the Jury Room at the Weinstein Trial, Rancor and Recrimination

    As the panelists deliberated over whether the former Hollywood mogul should be convicted of sex crimes for a second time in Manhattan, accusations began to fly.Inside the jury room at the second New York sex crime trial of Harvey Weinstein, things were getting tense.The 12 jurors had already acquitted the former Hollywood mogul on one felony sex crime charge, and they had begun to deliberate on a second when the discussions suddenly turned pointed, and personal.One juror, who had been calm and had even prayed with the others, abruptly began accusing another of having been “bought out” by Mr. Weinstein or his lawyers.The moment, which occurred on the second day of deliberations in a case that was brought by the Manhattan district attorney’s office after its earlier sex crime conviction against Mr. Weinstein was overturned, foreshadowed the rancor and dysfunction that would ultimately consume the panel.Although it ultimately voted to convict him of the second felony sex crime, it reached no decision on the third charge in the case, deadlocking on Thursday over whether Mr. Weinstein raped an aspiring actress in a hotel room in 2013.This account of what occurred in the jury room is based on interviews with several jurors, particularly one panelist who came forward twice to voice concerns to the judge about the behavior of his fellow jurors.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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    Brian Wilson and Beach Boys’ Style Showed What California Living Looked Like

    In Pendleton shirts and khakis, Mr. Wilson and the Beach Boys showed the world what easy Southern California living looked like.The band name was a fluke. Looking to cash in on the burgeoning surf culture in the United States, the record executive who first brought Brian Wilson, Dennis Wilson, Carl Wilson, Mike Love and Al Jardine together on the obscure Candix Records label in Southern California wanted to call the assembled musicians “The Surfers.’’But another group, as it happened, had already claimed the name. And then there was an additional problem: only one of the band members, Dennis Wilson, actively surfed.And so, as Brian Wilson — the architect of the band’s sound and image, whose death, at 82, was announced by his family on Wednesday — tweeted back in 2018, the promoter Russ Regan “changed our name to the Beach Boys.” He added that the group members themselves found out only after they saw their first records pressed.Originally, the band had another name. It was one that speaks not only to the aural backdrop the Beach Boys provided for generations but also to their enduring influence on global style. As teenagers in the late 1950s and early ’60s, the band had styled itself the Pendletones. It was a homage to what was then, and in some ways still is, an unofficial uniform of Southern California surfers: swim trunks or notch pocket khakis or white jeans, and a blazing white, ringspun cotton T-shirt worn under a sturdy woolen overshirt.The shirts the Pendletones wore were produced by the family-owned company, Pendleton Woolen Mills of Portland, Ore., and had been in production since 1924. The shirts were embraced by surfers for their over-the-top durability and the easy way they bridged the intersection between work and leisure wear. The blue and gray block plaid, which Pendleton would later rename as the “Original Surf Plaid,’’ was worn by every member of the Beach Boys on the cover of their debut album, “Surfin’ Safari.” It was a look that, novel then, has since been quoted in some form by men’s wear designers from Hedi Slimane to Eli Russell Linnetz and Ralph Lauren.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