Aurelia Butler

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    Directing ‘Monkey Man,’ Dev Patel Makes Himself an Action Hero

    With his feature filmmaking debut, “Monkey Man,” Dev Patel joins a list of performers known for dramas taking on unlikely parts.Ten years ago, when Dev Patel started thinking about making the film that would eventually become his feature directing debut, “Monkey Man,” he was not getting offered roles that, in his words, had “any sort of ass kickery involved or coolness.”“I think if I was to feature in an action film back then, the roles I was getting were more akin to the comedic relief, sidekick, the guy that can hack the mainframe,” he said in a phone interview. (Indeed in 2014, he was playing a tech-savvy character on the TV series “The Newsroom” and was about to reprise his role as the sweet but goofy romantic hero in “The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.”)In “Monkey Man,” however, Patel is not relegated to the sidelines. He plays Kid, a young man who slashes, punches and shoots his way through elite circles in a fictional Indian city. He seeks revenge on behalf of his mother, who was brutalized by a police chief now working for a corrupt politician, who is in turn supported by an evil guru. Inspired by the tales of the half-monkey Hindu god Hanuman, Kid takes on those in power who are abusing members of lower castes. The film, which was released Friday, is both Patel’s homage to the action genre, an obsession that started when he watched Bruce Lee’s “Enter the Dragon” (1973) as a child, and an attempt to remake it in his own image, wanting to tell a politically charged story with a hero who looks like him.Patel in “Monkey Man.” His character arc goes from underground wrestling to besuited action.Universal Pictures“Monkey Man” also marks Patel, 33, best known for his turn in the Oscar best picture winner “Slumdog Millionaire” (2008), as the latest actor to transform himself into an action star. Gone are the days when the genre belonged to the Sylvester Stallones, Jason Stathams and Jackie Chans of the world. Especially, in a post-“John Wick” era, actors who made their names in serious dramatic work (and sometimes comedy) have decided to make the leap to action.The “Better Call Saul” star Bob Odenkirk, after playing a retired assassin in “Nobody” (2021), is now set to reunite with that film’s screenwriter, Derek Kolstad, for an action flick called “Normal.” In 2022, David Harbour, from “Stranger Things,” turned into a terrorist-pummeling Santa for “Violent Night.” And this year, Jake Gyllenhaal is throwing punches in “Road House,” while Ryan Gosling is getting his stunt man on in “The Fall Guy.” (Both of those men have flirted with action before, it is worth noting.)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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    As Heartbeat Opera Reaches a Milestone, So Does Its Musical Leader

    Dan Schlosberg, who for 10 years has adapted opera classics for the company, has written its first world premiere.For the last decade, Heartbeat Opera has treated the classics like rough drafts: The scores of “Carmen” and “Madama Butterfly,” “Fidelio” and “Der Freischütz” have been starting points for something fresh, urgent and immediate.In New York, a city with fewer and fewer spaces for opera, Heartbeat sits harmoniously between the Prototype Festival, which stages new music theater at a chamber scale, and the grand tradition of the Metropolitan Opera. Heartbeat draws from the canon but reimagines it with an avant-garde spirit and an eye toward the issues of our time: gun violence, Black Lives Matter, the #MeToo movement.Performed on intimate stages, the resulting productions smartly elicit strong reactions, whatever those may be. I haven’t liked all of Heartbeat’s shows, but I’ve never walked away with a shrug, and I’ve never regretted going.Now, in its 10th year, the company is adding something truly new to the mix: a world premiere, “The Extinctionist,” which opened on Wednesday at the Baruch Performing Arts Center as part of Heartbeat’s 2024 repertory season, alongside Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin.”It’s fitting that “The Extinctionist,” an opera with good bones but a flawed presentation, is composed by Dan Schlosberg. He has been the musical soul of Heartbeat since its founding, adapting works by Puccini, Donizetti and more with a vision as creative as each production’s director.Schlosberg rehearsing with the company. He leads “The Extinctionist” from the piano.George Etheredge 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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    ‘Monkey Man’ Review: Dev Patel Is Kid, a Human Punching Bag

    Dev Patel stars as Kid, a human punching bag who comes up with a plan to avenge a past wrong. The hits keep coming and the hero keeps taking them in this rapid-fire film.The thriller “Monkey Man” opens on a tender scene and a nod to the power of storytelling, only to quickly get down to down-and-dirty, action-movie business with a flurry of hard blows and faster edits. For the next two frenetic hours, it repeatedly cuts back to the past — where a mother and child happily lived once upon a bucolic time — before returning to the grubby, raw-knuckle present. There, the hits keep coming and the hero keeps taking them, again and again, in a movie that tries so hard to keep you entertained, it ends up exhausting you.Set largely in a fictional city in India, “Monkey Man” stars Dev Patel as a character simply called Kid who, in classic film-adventure fashion, is out to avenge a past wrong. To do that, Kid, who works as a human punching bag in shadowy ring fights (Sharlto Copley plays the M.C.), must take repeat beatings so that he can, like all saviors, triumphantly rise. Before he does, he has to execute a complicated plan that pits him against power brokers working both sides of the law. As with most genre movies, you can guess how it all turns out for our hero. More

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    ‘Coup de Chance’ Review: Woody Allen’s Usual With a French Twist

    Despite its Parisian setting, the setup is familiar from any of Allen’s New York movies: An act of infidelity presents a dilemma. Some of the jokes are funny.“Coup de Chance,” the latest from Woody Allen, looks and plays like many of his recent movies, only better; it sounds like them, too, except that it’s in French. Set entirely in France, it features well-heeled, loquacious narcissists who circle one another in a comic-dramatic story that touches on existential worries and folds in lightly jaundiced observations about life. There are pretty people and handsome homes, repressed lives and unleashed desires, the usual. As is often the case in Allen’s movies, there’s also an act of infidelity, which presents a dilemma, if not an especially torturous one. The jokes are fairly muted; some are funny.In a pleasant surprise, it centers on a woman, Fanny Fournier (Lou de Laâge), who didn’t make me cringe once. She’s intelligent as well as attractive, for starters, somewhere in her 30s and on her second husband, Jean (Melvil Poupaud). She lives in Paris, works at an auction gallery and seems interested in the world. Her life has texture and perhaps meaning, even if it’s a haut bourgeois bubble. There’s a Birkin bag on her arm when you meet her, as well as a maid to fetch drinks and a driver to deliver her and Jean to their country house, one of those quietly expensive retreats that most of us read about while waiting to get our hair cut. More

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    John Sinclair, 82, Dies; Counterculture Activist Who Led a ‘Guitar Army’

    His imprisonment for a minor marijuana offense became a cause célèbre. He was released after John Lennon and Yoko Ono sang about him at a protest rally.John Sinclair, a counterculture activist whose nearly 10-year prison sentence for sharing joints with an undercover police officer was cut short after John Lennon and Yoko Ono sang about his plight at a protest rally, died on Tuesday in Detroit. He was 82.His publicist, Matt Lee, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was congestive heart failure.As the leader of the White Panther Party in the late 1960s, Mr. Sinclair spoke of assembling a “guitar army” to wage “total assault” on racists, capitalism and the criminalization of marijuana. “We are a whole new people with a whole new vision of the world,” he wrote in his book “Guitar Army” (1972), “a vision which is diametrically opposed to the blind greed and control which have driven our immediate predecessors in Euro-Amerika to try to gobble up the whole planet and turn it into one big supermarket.”He also managed the incendiary Detroit rock band the MC5. Their lyrics — “I’m sick and tired of paying these dues/And I’m finally getting hip to the American ruse” — were a kind of ballad for the cause.Mr. Sinclair, right, with members of the MC5, the rock group he managed, and friends in 1967.Leni Sinclair/Michael Ochs, Archive, via Getty ImagesMr. Sinclair’s command of this “raggedy horde of holy barbarians,” as he described them in his book, was upended in 1969 when Judge Robert J. Colombo of Detroit Recorder’s Court sentenced him to nine and a half to 10 years in prison for giving two joints to an undercover police officer.During the hearing, Mr. Sinclair argued that he had been framed.“Everyone who is taking part in this is guilty of violating the United States Constitution and violating my rights and everyone else that’s concerned,” he said. He added, “There is nothing just about this, there is nothing just about these courts, nothing just about these vultures over here.”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 an Elaborate One-Shot Montage in ‘Música’

    Rudy Mancuso, the film’s director, composer, co-writer and star, narrates this sequence, which plays out in real time with movable sets.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.What’s the best way to narratively portray a life that has become nearly impossible to manage? How about with a one-take montage sequence that seems nearly impossible to pull off?That’s what Rudy Mancuso goes for in his debut feature, “Música” (streaming on Amazon Prime Video), which he directed, composed, co-wrote (with Dan Lagana) and stars in.The character he plays, Rudy, has been dividing his attention between the three closest women in his life: his girlfriend, Haley (Francesca Reale), with whom he’s hit difficult times; his mother, Maria (Maria Mancuso), and a new woman he is getting to know, Isabella (Camila Mendes). He’s lying to all three. “On the page, it was actually called the ‘Rhythm of Lies,’” Mancuso said in his narration.The scene is shot on a warehouse stage, with sets flying in and out to represent the different encounters Rudy has with these women. He moves from setup to setup, changing his clothes along the way, with lighting cues syncopated to the music. (Watch for that moment where Rudy starts a kiss with one woman, freezes in place and finishes the kiss with another woman.)Mancuso said that he and his crew needed half a day of rehearsal and a half a day of shooting 14 takes to pull it all off along.“This would not have been possible without the hard work of my production designer, Patrick Sullivan, and my amazing DP, Shane Hurlbut,” he said.Read the “Música” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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    ‘Scoop’ and Prince Andrew’s Newsnight Interview: What to Know

    A new Netflix film dramatizes the 2019 BBC conversation that led to the royal stepping back from public life.When Prince Andrew, Queen Elizabeth II’s second son, agreed to be interviewed on the BBC in November 2019, he likely didn’t expect it would one day inspire a feature film. But “Scoop,” which comes to Netflix on Friday, follows a TV musical and a documentary in depicting the 58-minute interview and its fallout. (Amazon is also producing an upcoming limited series.)In the explosive conversation, Prince Andrew discussed his friendship with the financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and denied allegations that he had sex with a 17-year-old girl. Viewers were appalled by his comments, and British and international news media characterized the appearance as a PR disaster. In the following days, Prince Andrew announced he would step back from public life.Though the interview was conducted by the journalist Emily Maitlis, “Scoop” emphasizes the work of Sam McAlister, the producer who secured it. The Netflix film is based on McAlister’s memoir, “Scoops: Behind the Scenes of the BBC’s Most Shocking Interviews,” which was published in 2022.Here’s what else to know about the interview and its fallout.Why did the interview take place?When Maitlis asked Prince Andrew on-camera why it was the right time to “speak out” and give a rare public interview, he replied: “Because there is no good time to talk about Mr. Epstein and all things associated.”By November 2019, Prince Andrew was widely acknowledged as one of Epstein’s friends, with whom he was known to have vacationed and partied. In a 2015 civil case, Virginia Roberts Giuffre accused Epstein of forcing her to have sexual relations with Prince Andrew when she was 17. Buckingham Palace denied the accusation.Sewell, and Gillian Anderson as Emily Maitlis, in “Scoop.”Peter Mountain/NetflixWe 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