Aurelia Butler

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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

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    ‘Limbo’ Review: Pensive in the Outback

    Long on atmosphere and short on plot, this stylish Australian noir pulls through thanks to a haunted performance by Simon Baker.Those who know Simon Baker only as the sleek title character on the TV series “The Mentalist” might do a double take when they discover his Travis, a stern detective sent out to close a 20-year-old cold case in Ivan Sen’s “Limbo.” Projecting an austere, old-fashioned gravitas, the actor calmly stitches conventional markers from the Genre 101 textbook (drug habit, terseness, tattoos, broken relationships) into a whole that feels organic and lived in.Archetypes are very much on the mind of Sen, an Indigenous Australian filmmaker whose best-known movies, “Mystery Road” (2013) and “Goldstone” (2018), are often called neo-noir, though they’re equally neo-western. At its best, his work lays bare his country’s poisoned roots in striking tableaux. Here, Travis tries to figure out what happened to a First Nations girl who went missing in the titular desert mining town — the movie was shot in Coober Pedy, a surreal outpost where many facilities, including pubs and hotels, are underground, creating a feeling of simultaneous openness and claustrophobia. But the solving of the mystery takes a back seat to Travis’s relationship with the girl’s siblings, Charlie (Rob Collins) and Emma (Natasha Wanganeen), who must navigate their distrust.Sen, who also handled both the black-and-white cinematography and the editing, has a terrific eye for shot composition and sets a deliberate pace that feels implacable rather than merely slow. Tellingly, “Limbo” is more effective in building atmosphere than in plotting, but it’s hard not to want to know more about the haunted people we barely got to meet.LimboNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Free Time’ Review: Take This Job and Shove It. (Now What?)

    Colin Burgess carries this comedy by Ryan Martin Brown about a 20-something who quits his job and finds that life without work isn’t all that thrilling.In “Free Time,” a movie written and directed by Ryan Martin Brown, it quickly becomes clear that Drew (Colin Burgess), a New Yorker in his late 20s with a steady job in data analysis, doesn’t like how his work is defining him. So one day, after querying his boss, Luke (James Webb), on his options, Drew just up and quits.“I think I’m going to go out and live life. Live life to the fullest,” Drew proclaims to his roommate Rajat (Rajat Suresh), who works from home “writing clickbait,” Rajat says, which Drew briefly considers as a new employment option.Drew spends an afternoon biking, downs four edibles before going solo bar hopping and annoys his roommate’s hostile girlfriend, Kim (the comedian known as Holmes, who’s very funny throughout) with his loud television. He is soon desperately bored and in need of another job.This may be because Drew, played with dry, middle-class-Everyman goofiness by Burgess, appears to have no interests — a cursory involvement in an unpromising music project notwithstanding — and a barely discernible inner life. He unexpectedly finds himself a guru to the unemployed before the movie winds down.Burgess carries this succinct (and arguably slight, narratively disjointed) comedy without making you want to strangle his often willfully naïve character. Which is no mean feat, especially in the scene in which he obliviously squanders an erotic opportunity that almost literally drops into his lap.Free TimeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 18 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Femme’ Review: Bad Lovers

    In this white-knuckle thriller set in London, a drag performer seduces his attacker, an intensely closeted hustler played by George MacKay.In “Femme,” a white-knuckle erotic thriller directed by Sam H. Freeman and Ng Choon Ping, the formula of the conventional revenge plot is scrambled. The victim in the film uses his sexuality to break down his attacker, but along the way he develops a dubious affection for his foe that explores the performance of gender and its kinky connection to dynamics of dominance and submission.By night, Jules (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) is a headlining drag performer at a queer nightclub in East London. In the beginning of the film, a few blocks from this sanctuary, he’s brutalized by a thuggish homophobe with neck tattoos.Months later, Jules heads to a gay sauna where he finds his aggressor, Preston (George MacKay), lurking in a corner. Preston doesn’t know that Jules is the same man he beat up, and the two begin regularly hooking up. Jules’s terrible secret and Preston’s short fuse give the film its underlying current of menace, while jittery, intimate camerawork homes in on the men’s wary, jaw-clenched faces, their bodies seemingly always on the verge of violence.Jules is weirdly turned on by Preston’s bullish machismo, though he plans to gain the other man’s trust long enough to shoot a sex tape. Outing the intensely closeted Preston is Jules’s intended form of revenge. Preston’s toxic-bro roommates always seem to be hovering when the men plan their trysts, so Jules has plenty of opportunities to blow Preston’s cover. Yet Jules goes through the bulk of the film in a hoodie and slacks (his straight-guy costume), per Preston’s request.On the one hand, “Femme” makes a lot of effort to humanize its homophobe, played by a stellar MacKay with the defensive swagger of an abused dog. But it’s a questionable focus when the story is ostensibly about a Black man’s rehabilitation and victory over his white abuser. Yet the film avoids a cut-and-dried triumphalism for something more slippery and, perhaps, more meaningful, too: Sometimes vengeance pales in comparison to the realization that your enemy is too small and pathetic to bother kicking around.FemmeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Shirley’ Review: A Woman Who Contained Multitudes

    This staid biopic of Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to the U.S. Congress, is less interested in what she did than what she represented.Shirley Chisholm was an American heroine who challenged simplistic political narratives of victory and defeat. Though her most famous effort — her bid for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 1972 — wasn’t successful, it was one chapter in a life’s worth of grit and innumerable wins, only a few of which can be measured by votes or contests.She was the working-class daughter of Caribbean immigrants who achieved academic excellence despite financial struggles; an educator who advocated powerfully the rights of children, particularly those from immigrant backgrounds; a self-made politician who, at the local and state levels, fought successfully for better representation for women and minorities; and, in 1968, the first Black woman elected to the U.S. Congress.It is a pity, then, that “Shirley,” John Ridley’s new biopic starring Regina King, focuses rather narrowly on Chisholm’s failed presidential campaign. The film reaches for the urgency of a political thriller, jumping between campaign meetings, backroom negotiations and rousing speeches. But the staid visuals — bright period colors softened by a nostalgic glow — and a script made up of a string of losses convey a dull sense of a fait accompli.Complex, meaningful events from Chisholm’s life and career become reductive paving stones in a despairing story of ill-timed ambition. An early scene, set soon after her election to Congress, shows her railing against her appointment to the Agriculture Committee and convincing the speaker of the House to reassign her. No mention is made of the fact that she served for two years on the committee, and found a way to use her position to expand the food stamp program.The problem is that “Shirley” is interested less in what Chisholm actually did than in what she represented, as a Black woman daring to see herself as the leader of the nation. At home, Chisholm struggles to maintain her relationships with her husband and her sister, who resent the self-absorption her career requires. Her advisers (played suavely by Terrence Howard and Lance Reddick) clash with her over her unwillingness to take partisan stances; younger, more radical supporters dislike her liberalism; and in public, she receives both support and racist, sexist barbs.King is magnetic onscreen, nailing Chisholm’s accent and her steely persona. But there is little for her to do other than trade quips with the other characters, in a drama that is too content with telling rather than showing.ShirleyRated PG-13 for discomfiting depictions of misogynoir. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More