Aurelia Butler

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    How the Last Dinner Party Became Britain’s Hottest New Band

    One drunken evening in 2019, Abigail Morris and Georgia Davies rushed into a discount store in Brixton, south London, and bought a cheap notepad to write down their band’s manifesto.At that point, the rock group, then called the Dinner Party, only had three members, and had never actually rehearsed any songs. But Morris and Davies — the singer and bassist — knew exactly how they wanted to look and sound: “Gothic,” “Indulgent” and “Decadence” were at the top of their list.As the English literature students went from pub to pub, they added to their proclamation, including modest ambitions (playing shows with hip British bands) and more grandiose aims (“We want to be role models for younger girls”).Later in the evening, Morris accidentally cut herself on a broken glass, and dripped blood onto the notepad. “I was, like, ‘This is perfect!’” Davies recalled in a recent interview. The splatters emphasized the pair’s vision for a band teetering between the beautiful and the grotesque.Some four years later, this meticulous yet playful approach has helped Davies and Morris achieve some of their goals. Now called the Last Dinner Party, the theatrical rock group — which also includes Emily Roberts (lead guitar), Lizzie Mayland (rhythm guitar) and Aurora Nishevci (keyboards) — has this year become Britain’s buzziest new band.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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    Popcast (Deluxe): Is Reality TV in a New Golden Age?

    Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTubeThis week’s episode of Popcast (Deluxe), the weekly culture roundup show on YouTube hosted by Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, includes segments on:Season six of “Love Is Blind,” and the ways that the show’s episode rollout was interwoven with the TikTok and social media postgame that became its best promotionSeason two of the U.S. edition of “The Traitors,” which pits reality TV alums against each other in a game of deceptionSeason 46 of “Survivor” and its current casting conundrum of superfans and emotionally charged playersSnack of the weekConnect 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. More

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    Beyoncé Joins a History of Black Pop Artists Going Country

    When Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter” arrives next week, it’ll join a lineage of albums by stars including Ray Charles, the Pointer Sisters, Tina Turner and more.When Beyoncé confirmed that she would be going all-in on country music with “Cowboy Carter,” the second part of a project that began with her 2022 album “Renaissance,” conversation about pop artists turning to the genre — and how Black artists are received in Nashville — began to heat up.Country remains a cloistered segment of the music industry where Black performers continue to face an especially challenging path — despite the fact that Black pioneers have been essential to the genre, including Lesley Riddle, known as Esley, a guitarist and folklorist who taught the Carter Family in the 1930s and Charley Pride, who scored more than 50 Top 10 country hits from the 1960s through the ’80s.In the past few years, Lil Nas X sparked cultural debate and hit chart gold with “Old Town Road,” a country-rap mash-up that was followed by the arrival of Breland’s aesthetic blend “My Truck,” and songs from O.N.E the Duo, a mother-daughter group making a hybrid of country, R&B and pop. But there’s also a long history of Black artists embracing country after establishing careers in other genres. Here’s how some key figures fared.Ray CharlesRay Charles in 1962, the year he released “Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music.”REPORTERS ASSOCIES/Gamma-Rapho via Getty ImagesRay Charles’s passion for country music dated back to childhood, when his mother would let him stay up late on Saturdays and listen to the Grand Ole Opry. As he told Terry Gross on “Fresh Air” in 1998, “it was fascinating what these guys could do with these banjos and these fiddles and the steel guitars.”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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    ‘Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World’ Review: A Wild Romanian Trip

    In Radu Jude’s shambling, acidly funny movie set in Bucharest, a foul-mouthed gofer named Angela tours the troubled heart and soul of her country.Late in Radu Jude’s “Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World,” the movie shifts tones. Our heroine, a funny, foul-mouthed gofer who’s racking up miles driving in Bucharest, has just told her passenger about a road outside the city that has more memorials edging it than it has kilometers. The movie then cuts to one after another roadside memorial — some stone, others metal, some with photos, others with flowers — for an astonishing four silent minutes, and this near-unclassifiable, often comically ribald movie turns into a plaintive requiem.The woman, Angela — the sneakily charismatic Ilinca Manolache — is a production assistant toiling for a foreign company that’s making a workplace safety video in Romania. Among her tasks is interviewing men and women who have been injured on the job, the idea being that one will make a camera-friendly cautionary tale for workers. As she changes gears, and the movie switches between black-and-white film and color video, Angela flips off other drivers, acidly critiques all that she encounters, creates TikTok videos and effectively maps the geopolitical landscape of contemporary Romania. At one point, she meets the German director Uwe Boll, who’s known to have trounced a few of his critics in boxing matches.I don’t think that Jude wants to beat up critics (even if the interlude with Boll, who’s shooting a “bug-killer film,” is almost endearing); among other things, his movies tend to be well-received. Jude’s shaggy provocation “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn,” for instance, earned high praise as well as top honors at the Berlin Film Festival in 2021. At the same time, there’s a pushy, borderline abrasive aspect to how Jude strings out Angela’s time behind the wheel in “Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World,” forcing you to share in her tedium. The movie is overflowing with ideas — about history, capitalism, cinema, representation — but it also tests your patience before amply rewarding it.It’s still dark when Angela stumbles out of bed one early morning, naked and cursing. (One of her favorite expletives is featured both in the first and final words in the movie, a fitting bookending blurt that seems like a cri de coeur and one of the movie’s more unambiguously authorial statements.) Before long, she’s dressed and out in the streets, making the first in a series of TikToks in which she takes on the guise of her bald social-media avatar, a bro named Bobita, an extravagantly offensive vulgarian who brags about hanging out with his pal Andrew Tate, the online influencer and self-anointed “king of toxic masculinity.”Tate’s trajectory is lurid and gross, but the references to him are more symbolically than specifically germane to the movie. (Tate moved to Romania in 2017; he was arrested there in May 2023 on an assortment of charges, including human trafficking.) For Angela — for Jude — Tate basically functions as yet another emblem of Bobita’s grotesqueness and of a larger worldview, one that has reduced everything to its market value. Everything is part of his unending hustle, including the Maserati he brags about owning, the women he boasts about sexually conquering and, of course, himself. “Remember,” Bobita says, “like and share!” With her avatar, Angela entertains her audience with a very sharp sting.The same can be said of “Do Not Expect Too Much,” which gradually gathers shape and force as Angela motors around Bucharest. As she does, Jude cuts between her and the title heroine of “Angela Goes On,” a 1981 Romanian film directed by Lucian Bratu about a taxi driver. Produced in the waning years of the Ceausescu dictatorship, the earlier film serves as a fascinating counterpoint to Jude’s movie visually and thematically. (The opening credits announce that this movie is a “conversation” with the 1981 film.) From one angle, not much has changed, but if the roads are still jammed and people hungry, it’s now capitalism rather than communism that keeps this world busily spinning.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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    Radu Jude Brings TikTok’s Chaos to the Movies

    Radu Jude’s films are messy mash-ups of art, literature, advertising and social media, with some dirty jokes thrown in.Halfway through a recent Zoom interview with Radu Jude, the acclaimed Romanian director of “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World,” he offered a glimpse into his creative process. He pulled out one of the books he’s reading, an illustrated tome about commedia dell’arte. Then he shared his screen to reveal a collection of texts and images — Van Gogh still lifes, Giacometti sculptures, Japanese haikus — saved in folders on his computer. Jude stopped scrolling at a picture he took of a sign posted on an apartment building entrance.“It says ‘Please have oral sex so as not to disturb the other tenants,’” Jude explained, translating from the Romanian with a grin on his face.The autodidact Jude is not above a dirty joke. His work melds tragedy and farce, drawing promiscuously from art, literature, street ads and social media to fuel his brazen visions of Romanian history and contemporary life.Jude’s previous film, the Golden Bear-winner “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn,” starts out with the making of a humorously sloppy sex tape and concludes with a witch trial against one of the tape’s participants. His latest, “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World,” arrives in U.S. theaters on Friday.The black comedy follows Angela (Ilinca Manolache), a film production assistant who spends most of her 16-hour workdays in her car, shuttling clients and equipment around Bucharest, Romania’s capital. One of Angela’s gigs entails interviewing former factory employees who were injured on the clock for a chance to feature in a corporate safety video. Scenes from the present-day, shot in black-and-white, are interwoven with colorful clips of another woman named Angela: a taxi driver in the 1980s also chained to a thankless job that involves navigating the streets of Bucharest.Ilinca Manolache as Angela, a film production assistant who spends most of her 16-hour workdays in her car, in “Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World.”4 Proof FilmWe 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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    Ukrainian Conductor Oksana Lyniv Arrives at the Met Opera

    Oksana Lyniv, who is leading “Turandot” at the Metropolitan Opera, has used her platform to criticize Russia and promote Ukrainian culture.The Ukrainian conductor Oksana Lyniv was preparing for a performance of Puccini’s “Turandot” at the Metropolitan Opera this month when she saw the news: A Russian drone had hit a building in Odesa, not far from the home of her parents-in-law.She called her family to ensure they were safe. But images of the attack, whose victims included a young mother and children, lingered in her mind. When she conducted that night, she felt the pain of war more acutely, she said, praying to herself when Liù, a selfless servant, dies in the opera’s final act and the chorus turns hushed.“In that moment, I saw all the suffering of the war,” she said. “How do you explain such sadness? How do you explain who gets to be alive and who has to die?”Since the invasion, Lyniv, 46, the first Ukrainian conductor to perform at the Met, has used her platform to denounce Russia’s government. She has also set out to promote Ukrainian culture, championing works by Ukrainian composers and touring Europe with the Youth Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine, an ensemble that she founded in 2016.The war has raised difficult questions for artists and cultural institutions. Russian performers have come under pressure to speak out against President Vladimir V. Putin. Ukrainians have faced questions too, including whether to perform Russian works or appear alongside Russian artists.Lyniv, who now lives in Düsseldorf, Germany, has sometimes felt caught in the middle. She protested last month when a festival in Vienna announced plans to pair her appearance with a concert led by the conductor Teodor Currentzis, who has come under scrutiny over his connections to Russia. (The festival canceled his appearance.)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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    ‘William Shatner: You Can Call Me Bill’ Review: Living Long

    A documentary on the “Star Trek” actor unboldly goes where other profile movies have gone before.The line between star and character gets thoroughly blurred in “William Shatner: You Can Call Me Bill,” a profile documentary that treats Shatner, the sole interviewee, as if he were as polished as Capt. James T. Kirk — as opposed to merely being the durable, hard-working actor who played him on “Star Trek” and a terrific raconteur.The director, Alexandre O. Philippe, churns out movie-themed documentaries that veer between insightful (“78/52: Hitchcock’s Shower Scene”) and obsequious (“Memory: The Origins of Alien”). The fawning “You Can Call Me Bill” makes you like Shatner. Still, listening to the actor’s wit, wisdom and drippy insights for 96 minutes is enough to tempt any viewer to channel his or her inner Spock. (“Most illogical!”)“You Can Call Me Bill” is tedious when Shatner shares his thoughts on animals and spirituality (“You reach a connection with a horse that can be something mystical”) but sharp when he reflects on acting. It’s interesting to hear that he felt influenced both by the traditionalism of Laurence Olivier and the Stella Adler training of Marlon Brando; he suggests that split was related to his being Canadian, torn between British and American cultures. He probes deeply into his craft when speaking of selecting differentiated traits that an audience could identify in scenes that featured multiple Kirks and of wanting another take of his death scene close-up in “Star Trek: Generations” (1994).It’s hard not to smile during footage of Shatner, then 90, becoming the oldest person ever to travel to space. But “You Can Call Me Bill” is fundamentally a case of an actor presenting himself as he wants to be seen.You Can Call Me BillRated PG-13 for some language that would mostly pass on 1960s television. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Riddle of Fire’ Review: Tiny Terrors

    Three children embark on a mystical journey in this charming but shapeless first feature.In “Riddle of Fire,” Weston Razooli’s too-fanciful-for-words debut feature, three adventuresome children set off on a mythic quest for a speckled egg. They need the egg to bake a blueberry pie; they need the pie to unlock a television password; they need the password to play their new video game. Viewers may need the patience of Job to remain in their seats.Not that this fairy-tale western is a chore to watch, exactly. Set in Wyoming (and shot in Utah by Jake L. Mitchell, using 16-millimeter film), the movie captures a natural world of golden light and rustling grassland. As Jodie (Skyler Peters), Alice (Phoebe Ferro) and Hazel (Charlie Stover) follow a family of miscreants known as the Enchanted Blade Gang into a forest, their progress is monitored by soaring mountains and stretching skies. Enya-adjacent music and a smattering of inscrutable narration enforce the dreamlike mood, as does the gang’s matriarch, a stag-hunting taxidermist (Lio Tipton) who uses witchcraft to control her brood.Despite its ethereal vibe, “Riddle of Fire” has minor flares of violence and a central trio who curse, drink and thieve with some regularity. The young actors are winsome but inexperienced, too often forced to wrangle improbably precocious turns of phrase. Razooli wants us to see the fantastical narratives children conjure to manage real-world uncertainties, but his vision lacks focus. Indoor spaces heave with clutter, and odd religious touches — the video game is called Angel, and the gang’s truck is inscribed with the weirdly punctuated “destination; heaven” — distract the eye.Aside from a cheekily entertaining opening sequence, “Riddle of Fire” is frustratingly slack and in dire need of whittling. Had Razooli reassigned his editing duties, this unusual picture might have gained the shape and volition it so clearly requires.Riddle of FireRated PG-13 for menaced kids and mumbled dialogue. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. In theaters. More