Aurelia Butler

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    Best Movies and Shows Streaming in April: ‘Étoile,’ ‘Hacks,’ ‘The Last of Us’ and More

    “Étoile,” “Government Cheese” and an Oklahoma City bombing documentary arrive, and “Hacks” and “The Handmaid’s Tale” return.Every month, streaming services add movies and TV shows to their libraries. Here are our picks for some of April’s most promising new titles. (Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)New to Amazon Prime Video‘The Bondsman’ Season 1Starts streaming: April 3Kevin Bacon plays the hard-boiled Georgia bounty hunter Hub Halloran in this action-comedy, which has a supernatural twist. Hub dies in the opening scene of the first episode, then gets reincarnated thanks to some satanic intervention. He is then given a new job, hunting demons who have escaped from Hell. Created by Grainger David and produced and written by Erik Oleson for the horror-friendly Blumhouse Television, “The Bondsman” features all the gory splatter one might expect from a show about a heavily armed monster-killer. But the series also explores its undead antihero’s complicated personal life, which involves a an ex-wife, Maryanne (Jennifer Nettles), whose budding country music career is being handled by a highly suspicious creep named Lucky (Damon Herriman).‘Étoile’ Season 1Starts streaming: April 24The writer-producer husband-wife team of Amy Sherman-Palladino and Daniel Palladino — best-known for “Gilmore Girls” and “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” — are back with a new series, set in the world of dance, just like their short-lived gem “Bunheads.” Luke Kirby plays the leader of a venerable New York ballet company. Charlotte Gainsbourg plays the leader of a venerable Paris ballet company. When their organizations struggle, they decide to generate some public interest by swapping their top stars. “Étoile” generates comedy and drama from the very different theatrical cultures in Europe and America. The supporting cast is filled with professional dancers, so the ballet sequences should be realistic and dynamic — and not just something to fill the space between the creators’ usual fast-paced, witty banter.Also arriving:April 1“America’s Test Kitchen: The Next Generation” Season 2April 8“Spy High”April 10“G20”April 17“#1 Happy Family USA” Season 1“Leverage Redemption” Season 3Jon Hamm in “Your Friends & Neighbors,” Season 1.Jessica Kourkounis/Apple TV+New to Apple TV+‘Your Friends and Neighbors’ Season 1Starts streaming: April 11In this offbeat crime drama, Jon Hamm plays Andrew Cooper, a.k.a. Coop, a swaggering New York money manager who loses everything — including his wife and job — and compensates by becoming a gentleman thief, stealing from his wealthy pals. The show emphasizes the ironic fragility of Coop’s situation, as someone who has lived and socialized with some of the richest people in the United States, yet is suddenly on the verge of going broke. Created by Jonathan Tropper (“Banshee,” “Warrior”), “Your Friends and Neighbors” is about the high-end homes that only some people can access, and about how someone who is trusted enough to be let inside can treat these personal spaces like an A.T.M.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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    Martha Argerich, the Elusive, Enigmatic ‘Goddess’ of the Piano

    The pianist Martha Argerich had just delivered an electrifying performance on a snowy night in northern Switzerland. Fans were lining up backstage for autographs, and friends were bringing roses and chrysanthemums to her dressing room.But Argerich, who at 83 is still one of the world’s most astonishing pianists, with enough finger strength to shatter chestnuts or make a Steinway quiver, was nowhere to be seen. She had slipped out a door to smoke a Gauloises cigarette.“I want to hide,” she said outside the Stadtcasino concert hall in Basel, Switzerland, shrinking beneath her billowy gray hair. “For a moment, I don’t want to be a pianist. Now, I am someone else.”As she smoked, Argerich, one of classical music’s most elusive and enigmatic artists, obsessed about how she had played the opening flourish of Schumann’s piano concerto that evening with the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana. (Her verdict: “not so good.”) And she became transfixed by the memory of performing the concerto for the first time, as an 11-year-old in Buenos Aires, her hometown.There, at the Teatro Colón in 1952, a conductor whose name was seared into her memory — Washington Castro — had offered a warning. Never forget, he said: Strange things happen to pianists who play the Schumann concerto.At 83, Argerich is busier than ever. “They look old now,” she said of her hands, “but they still work.”Mischa Christen for The New York Times More

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    A Concept Album About Dennis Hopper? The Waterboys Made One.

    The latest addition to Mike Scott’s eclectic catalog features Fiona Apple, Bruce Springsteen, Steve Earle and more exploring the life of the actor and director.In 1977, several years before Mike Scott founded the Waterboys, the band he still leads today, he started Jungleland. At the time, he was an 18-year-old obsessed with music and literature, living in Ayr, a seaside town on the west coast of Scotland. Jungleland wasn’t a band — it was a fanzine named after a Bruce Springsteen song in which Scott wrote about the artists that enthralled him, including the Clash, Richard Hell and the Sex Pistols.Scott, 66, has always worn his enthusiasms on his sleeve, and as the singer, songwriter, guitarist and only consistent member of the Waterboys, he has used his songs to broadcast his passions. The band’s first single from 1983, “A Girl Called Johnny,” is a breathless, saxophone-drenched ode to Patti Smith. The Waterboys’ biggest hit, “The Whole of the Moon,” is an exuberant celebration of the power of inspiration itself.“I like to be absorbed in the things that fascinate me,” Scott said during a video call from his home in Dublin. “Then I go all the way.”This is certainly the case with the Waterboys’ new album, “Life, Death and Dennis Hopper,” due Friday. The record follows the arc of Hopper’s life, from growing up in Kansas through the peaks and valleys of his career in Hollywood to his death in 2010. “It’s not a tribute record,” Scott said. “It’s an exploration. It’s not just Dennis’s story. It’s a story of the times.”It’s also the kind of unconventional turn that has become a hallmark of Scott’s career. In the mid-1980s, “The Whole of the Moon” and the album that spawned it, “This Is the Sea,” showcased the Waterboys’ ability to synthesize Scott’s punk-rock influences and literary aspirations on an arena-sized scale, drawing comparisons with bands like U2 and Simple Minds, and kicking off a mini-movement named after a Waterboys song: big music. But rather than build on this success, Scott reinvented the band, decamping to Ireland, immersing himself in Celtic folk music and making an equally compelling but completely different follow-up album, “Fisherman’s Blues,” in 1988.“It’s just my character,” Scott said. “I want to keep finding new things I can do that I couldn’t do last year. That’s my No. 1 aim. I’m like Sherlock Holmes. If he doesn’t have a case to solve, he gets depressed.”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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    Why Morgan Wallen’s Abrupt ‘S.N.L.’ Exit Is Being Dissected

    The pop-country superstar followed his departure from the stage with a social media post about needing to get “to God’s country.”At the end of every “Saturday Night Live” episode, the host, the musical guest and cast members assemble onstage to say goodbye to the audience and viewers at home. While the music plays and the credits roll, they make small talk, shake hands and say their farewells.There’s not much to think about.Usually.Social media has been abuzz since Morgan Wallen, the pop-country superstar who was the musical guest on Saturday, walked offstage while the end credits rolled, leaving behind the host, Mikey Madison, and the rest of the “S.N.L.” cast. It is not clear whether his sudden exit was an intentional message.Here is what we do know.What happened?After Madison made her closing remarks, she turned to Wallen and hugged him. They shared a few words off mic before he walked offstage into the audience past the camera. Shortly after the show ended, Wallen posted a picture to his Instagram stories of a jet with the caption, “Get me to God’s country.”It was unclear what Wallen, who in recent years was rebuked by music industry’s gatekeepers after a video surfaced of him using a racial slur, meant by the statement or why he left the stage.Representatives for Wallen, who performed two songs from his upcoming album “I’m the Problem,” and “S.N.L.” did not immediately return requests for comment on Monday. (Variety cited anonymous sources to say that the exit was an “oops” moment and that it was the route Wallen had used all week.)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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    Review: A Kronos Quartet Glow Up: New Players, Newly Lustrous Sound

    The venerable quartet returned to Zankel Hall with a typically eclectic program and a newfound emotional intensity.The Kronos Quartet was at Zankel Hall on Friday with a typically eclectic program that included new works drawing on jazz, psychedelic rock and Nordic folk music. The vibrant performance was not only the ensemble’s return to a space it reliably fills with devoted fans; with the quartet’s ranks refreshed by three brilliant new players, it also felt like a comeback.In recent years, the aging ensemble — founded in 1973 by David Harrington, who continues to lead it as first violin — sometimes seemed to have had slid into an identity crisis. The Kronos brand was still strong: Ambitious commissions kept pushing the boundaries of quartet music, resulting in more than 1,000 new works and arrangements drawing on every imaginable style. In the run-up to its golden jubilee, the ensemble initiated a commissioning project, 50 for the Future, and made the sheet music to all 50 pieces available free online.But the quality of the playing had become inconsistent. And the spoken introductions the players offered at concerts felt perfunctory and tired. When the violinist John Sherba and the violist Hank Dutt, who had been in the lineup since 1978, retired last year, the quartet might have disbanded. Instead, Harrington brought in fresh talent and — judging by the music-making on Friday — strong personalities. The quartet’s middle voices now belong to the violinist Gabriela Díaz and the violist Ayane Kozasa, who join the composer and cellist Paul Wiancko, who came onboard in 2022.During the kaleidoscopic first half of the concert the two women asserted themselves as the quartet’s engines of emotional intensity and a newly lustrous, rich sound. This came through most powerfully in Aleksandra Vrebalov’s incantatory “Gold Came From Space,” which gradually grows in sonic density and expressive intent from tremulous whispers. Time and again, Kozasa’s viola stole the spotlight with its absorbing mixture of lyricism and throaty candor. She channeled Nina Simone’s tough-nosed tenderness in Jacob Garchik’s arrangement of “For All We Know” (composed by J. Fred Coots) and set the tone for Wiancko’s arrangement of Neil Young’s protest song “Ohio.”Two songs by Sun Ra, “Outer Spaceways Incorporated” (wittily arranged by Garchik) and “Kiss Yo’ Ass Goodbye,” in a psychedelic arrangement by Terry Riley and Sara Miyamoto, sparkled with experimental glee. That exploratory zest had always been a hallmark of Kronos. But the heart-on-sleeve directness the group brought to Viet Cuong’s stirring “Next Week’s Trees,” in which the quartet sometimes sounds like a giant harp, felt new.The second half was taken up by a single work, “Elja,” by Benedicte Maurseth and Kristine Tjogersen. Maurseth, who joined the Kronos players for the performance, is a master on the Norwegian hardanger fiddle, a violin-like instrument with four extra resonating strings and a curved neck and carved scroll that evokes the bow of an ancient ship. For the 45-minute piece, which also featured recorded nature sounds, the Kronos players switched to hardanger versions of their own instruments. (The viola and cello fiddles were specially built for Kronos by the Norwegian luthier Ottar Kasa.)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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    Time to Get Over Eurovision? ‘Hell No!’ Says Joost Klein, a Disqualified Contestant Says.

    Joost Klein was thrown out of last year’s contest after being accused of threatening a camerawoman. On a new album, he’s still stuck in that moment.In the run-up to last year’s Eurovision Song Contest final, Joost Klein was amped for victory.Klein, a Dutch pop star, was a favorite to win with “Europapa,” a madcap song in which he raps over a bouncy beat and circling piano riff about a journey through Europe. The track ends in a hyperfast dance break, but the upbeat song also has a melancholy side: Klein wrote it as a tribute to his father, who died when Klein was 12.Then, just hours before the finale, Klein’s chance to honor his father vanished when Eurovision organizers threw the singer out of the contest, saying he had threatened a camerawoman. When Klein learned he was in trouble, he was backstage and dressed up in a comically large blue suit for a rehearsal. He begged to talk to the upset camerawoman, in a desperate bid to change his fate. But his pleas went nowhere: Klein was out.Nearly a year has passed, and the incident doesn’t appear to have hurt Klein’s career. He now has over three million monthly listeners on Spotify, and in February, he released a new album, “Unity,” to rave reviews in the Netherlands. After finishing a string of large European dates, this week he is embarking on his debut U.S. tour, including two shows at Irving Plaza in New York.Still, in a recent interview in London before a show, Klein, 27, was stuck under the cloud of his Eurovision misadventure. “Everyone’s like, ‘Hey, your career grew,’” Klein said. “I don’t care.”“Everyone’s like, ‘Hey, your career grew,’” Klein said. “I don’t care.”Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesThe disqualification still “stings,” he said, and he didn’t expect to get over it soon. Klein said that both his parents died before he was 14, and it took him more than a decade to process their deaths. He feared that shrugging off the Eurovision fiasco could take just as long. His new album features several tracks brooding on the incident.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 Conductor Joana Mallwitz Mixes Intensity With Approachability

    Joana Mallwitz, one of Germany’s fastest rising stars, makes her Metropolitan Opera debut in “The Marriage of Figaro” on Monday.The conductor Joana Mallwitz rehearsing at the Met.The conductor Joana Mallwitz apologized for arriving late for her interview at the Metropolitan Opera House last week, but she had needed to catch her breath after rehearsal. “Conducting is sweaty business,” she said, as she settled into a straight-backed posture on a sofa in the press lounge, her striking hands with long fingers elegantly crossed at the wrists.On Monday, Mallwitz, 39 — the music director of the Konzerthaus Berlin and one of the fastest rising classical stars in her native Germany — makes her Met debut with Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro.” She has been in close relationship with that opera since her first job, at 19, at Theater Heidelberg, a small house where her duties included “everything that one does as Kapellmeister,” she said: rehearsing singers, playing the continuo part on the harpsichord and, when needed, jumping in at short notice to conduct a performance.“You develop a relationship with such a work,” she said of “Figaro.” “You get to know each other.”“You develop a relationship with such a work,” Mallwitz said of “The Marriage of Figaro.” “You get to know each other.”Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesAt the end of that afternoon’s rehearsal she had worked with the orchestra on minute details in the overture, finessing dynamic contrasts and highlighting the shock value — “like rock music,” she told the musicians — of the loud outbursts that interrupt the garrulous bubbling fast notes. The key, she said afterward, was to “bring a certain energy into the sound that doesn’t become hard when the playing gets louder.”Working with the Met musicians, she said, was a joy because after fine-tuning a small section, “they are able to feel what my style is and transfer it” to the rest of the piece. “They’re able to pick it up because mentally, too, they are virtuosos,” she said. “It’s incredible what this orchestra is able to deliver in terms of tempo and transparency and diversity of effects. You want to draw on all of that but also achieve a combination of lightness and drama.”Lightness and drama, approachability and uncompromising seriousness in her approach to a score — these are at the heart of Mallwitz’s striking rise to prominence in a profession long dominated by men. In 2014, at 28 she became the music director of Theater Erfurt, the youngest conductor to hold such a position in Europe. In 2018, she took over the leadership of the Nuremberg State Theater, an institution that had also served as a springboard for the conductor Christian Thielemann when he was 23. In her second season there she was voted best conductor of the year by a jury of German critics. A celebrated run of Mozart’s “Cosí Fan Tutte” at Salzburg in 2020 catapulted her to international attention.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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    Linda Williams, Who Introduced Pornography to Academia, Dies at 78

    One of the first to write seriously about a fraught subject, she also played a major role in developing the field of film studies and feminist film theory.Linda Williams, a trailblazing scholar whose research was foundational to the field of film studies and to feminist film theory, and who wrote extensively about pornography, died on March 12 at her home in Lafayette, in Northern California. She was 78.Her husband, Paul Fitzgerald, said the cause was complications of a hemorrhagic stroke she had five years ago.“Linda was there before there was any such thing as feminist film studies,” B. Ruby Rich, the former editor in chief of the journal Film Quarterly, said in an interview. “She played a pivotal role in its development, but she was not orthodox.”Ms. Rich continued: “She did not stay in her lane at a time when people were really guarding boundaries and really policing what others were doing. She was fearless about following her inquiries wherever they would lead. In any branch of academics or scholarship, that is really, really unusual.”A longtime professor of film and media at the University of California, Berkeley, Ms. Williams wrote and edited articles and books on subjects as diverse as surrealism, spectatorship and the television series “The Wire.”She was keenly interested in how various film genres affected the body — for example, the way horror movies could induce shivers — and in her 2002 book, “Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White From Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson,” she explored how the tropes of melodrama figured in widening and narrowing America’s racial divide.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