Aurelia Butler

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    ‘Holy Cow’ Review: How to Become a Big Cheese

    Louise Courvoisier’s debut feature follows a teenager in the French Alps who, when thrust into caring for his sister, forges a path in cheese making.The low-key charms of the coming-of-age story “Holy Cow” emerge gradually but steadily. Set amid the rolling slopes of the Jura, a mountainous region in eastern France, the movie traces a teenager’s progression from carefree, at times careless youth to adulthood after a life-altering tragedy. That might lead to a rainstorm of tears elsewhere, but this is a world of dry-eyed pragmatism. And here everything does ripen, an eventuality that this movie charts with wry humor, appreciable regional sensitivity and many wheels of artisanal cheese.The writer-director Louise Courvoisier fills in the contemporary story with light, brisk economy. Shifting between the specific and the general, she quickly lays out the narrative coordinates, introducing a people and a place that are at once geographically isolated and interdependent. The first time you see the 18-year-old Totone (Clément Faveau) he’s at a county fair — where people are milling about with cows — soused and demanding beer. One moment, he is standing on a table and being goaded to take it all off by the raucous crowd; in the next, a cigarette is dangling from his mouth and his briefs are puddled around his ankles.Totone’s striptease turns out to be a prelude for his character’s ensuing, more freighted adventures. With quick-sketch portraits, Courvoisier fills in Totone’s life, including his testy relationship with his father, a cheesemaker who’s soon out of the picture. Abruptly unencumbered by parents (his mother is missing-in-action), Totone becomes the sole caretaker for his sober-eyed 7-year-old sister, Claire (Luna Garret). He also finds himself without much of a safety net. With only some friends to help — unlike in many French films, no government functionaries come to the rescue — he fends for him and his sister largely on his own. He sells most of his father’s equipment and takes a job with another cheesemaker.Courvoisier grew up in the Jura, where her parents are farmers. She has an insider’s unforced ease with this world, which she economically opens up with piquant details, lived-in spaces, careworn faces and just enough shots of the landscapes to convey both its beauty and its isolation. It’s never clear if Totone truly sees this loveliness and how pretty the cows look on the misty fields. Like all the performers in the movie, Faveau is an nonprofessional actor, and while he has a bright, expressive affect, Totone is one of those characters whose inner life is largely expressed externally through his grins and grimaces, his gestures and actions.Even so, from the movie’s amusing opening image of a calf inexplicably standing inside a small, otherwise empty car, Courvoisier underscores the intimacy between the region’s people and their world. These connections come more into play once Totone begins working at the dairy, a multigenerational family enterprise that produces prizewinning Comté. There, the story begins gathering momentum as he finds tension and trouble, along with a romance with the owner’s daughter, Marie-Lise (Maïwène Barthelemy), who tends the cows. Also crucially, Totone discovers that the awards the dairy has won come with hefty cash payouts so he does what you’ve expected him to do from the start: He tries to produce his own cheese.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 Friend’ Review: The Writer vs. the Great Dane

    Naomi Watts plays a writer in mourning who is given a formidable gift from a friend in this adaptation of the Sigrid Nunez novel.Across the compact space of a rent-controlled Manhattan apartment, a frazzled writer and a dog the size of a small pony exchange pleading looks. It’s a classic odd-couple setup, and you might call the central duo in “The Friend” unlikely roommates. But, more to the point, they’re two grieving souls, brought together by the death of a man who was a pivotal figure in both their lives.As the writer, Iris, Naomi Watts is an engaging fusion of intellectual acuity and emotional translucence. The role of Apollo goes to a magnificent fellow named Bing, a harlequin Great Dane with one brown eye, one blue, and an exceptionally expressive pair of eyebrows. Left to Iris by her friend and mentor Walter, a literary lion and a bit of a cad played with a mournful gaze by Bill Murray in a few well-deployed flashbacks — or perhaps merely hoisted upon her by Walter’s dog-averse widow (Noma Dumezweni) — Apollo is no magical creature, no cuddly cure for writer’s block. He’s a full-fledged character, and a mysterious one at that.At first the screen adaptation of Sigrid Nunez’s exquisite novel of the same name, a quiet miracle woven of wry glances at New York literati and a piercing ache, feels too smooth, too glossy. But if Scott McGehee and David Siegel, the writer-directors, can’t match the novel’s sharp first-person narration, they find the sweet spot between sardonic and openhearted as Iris and Apollo get to know each other, and as she sorts out the complexities of her friendship with Walter. Theirs was a bond that inspires a bit of envy on the part of his widow and former wives (a sympathetic Carla Gugino and Constance Wu, in hissable frenemy mode).Refreshingly, Iris’s single status is not viewed as a problem to be solved. The problem is whether she should keep Apollo, and given his size, it’s a situation that announces itself to the world, sparking the warnings of her building’s superintendent (Felix Solis), the concerns of a neighbor (Ann Dowd) and snarky cracks from strangers.McGehee and Siegel (“Montana Story”) juice this smart, affecting feature with sly nods to big-screen New York romances. This is a love story, after all, and one with a keen grasp of the mournful, curious glances between its two leads — of how much goes untranslated between them, and how much is conveyed.The FriendRated R for sexual references and doggie genitalia. Running time: 2 hours. In theaters. More

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    ‘Death of a Unicorn’ Review: Into the Woods (Chomp, Chomp)

    Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega play a father and daughter who run down a mystical beast and end up running amok with a monstrous brood.There’s no real spoiling “Death of a Unicorn,” an unabashedly nonsensical movie that doesn’t take anything too seriously, itself included. There are misty-eyed parent-child moments, digs at the wealthy, nods at the environment. Mostly, though, the whole thing is a wall-to-wall goof, despite the grandeur of its mystical attraction, whose traditional rangelands have included the King James Bible, illuminated manuscripts, medieval tapestries, fantasy literature, pop culture, children’s playrooms and Ridley Scott films (well, two: “Blade Runner” and “Legend”). Here, it nearly ends up as roadkill on a remote Canadian highway.The guy behind the wheel, Elliot (Paul Rudd), is busy yammering and trying to placate his demonstrably unhappy daughter, ahem, Ridley (Jenna Ortega), when he hits something big with his rental car, causing it to spin out. Elliot is en route to his boss’s remote family compound to deal with some pressing business that he hopes will insure his and his daughter’s future. They’re clearly loving but also clouded with grief from the death of Ridley’s mother, a tragedy that informs Elliot’s determined careerism and Ridley’s melancholy, both of which flicker on and off throughout the movie, amid jokes and pratfalls, scheming and dealing, firing guns and rampaging monsters, some with two legs and others with four.What happens next is a high-concept, middlebrow, low-stakes comedy about the haves and the (kind of) have-nots that’s effectively an elevator pitch — be afraid of unicorns, be very afraid — stretched to feature length. The setup is a mush of old standbys (the comedy of rich fools, the horror of other people) spiced up with myth, headline news and cinematic allusions. The writer-director Alex Scharfman has, for one, borrowed visual and thematic ideas from the unicorn tapestries at the Cloisters, the medieval branch of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and he’s clearly watched nerve-shredders like “Alien.” As he’s noted in interviews, he has also drawn inspiration from the Sackler family, the longtime owners of Purdue Pharma.The story kicks in once the unicorn in question goes splat. Much of what ensues takes place at the boss’s preposterously grandiose lodge — nay, castlelike fortress — tucked in wilderness and protected by armed guards. There, Elliot and Ridley pull up with a small motionless unicorn in the car that soon proves very much alive; high jinks ensue with enough scrambling silliness to suggest that Scharfman is also familiar with Abbott and Costello. To that comic end, Rudd and Ortega soon run amok with the rest of the sterling cast, starting with the peerless Richard E. Grant as Odell Leopold, the paterfamilias whose villainous bona fides are evident the minute you hear that this brood owns a pharmaceutical giant.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 Ballad of Wallis Island’ Review: A Sour Note

    Carey Mulligan briefly warms this damp, downbeat comedy about two lonely men and their musical obsession.Like many of us nowadays, I needed a reason to laugh. My mistake — encouraged by the offbeat bona fides of the British performers Tom Basden and Tim Key — was expecting “The Ballad of Wallis Island” to provide one.Bereft of chuckles or even a substantial story, this maudlin musical fable never escapes the drag of a lead character with supporting-player energy. From the instant Herb McGwyer (Basden) washes up — quite literally, having tumbled out of a rowboat — on the fictional Wallis Island, it’s clear he’s a drip. A decade earlier, Herb was a big deal in folk music as one half of the popular duo McGwyer Mortimer; now he’s a struggling solo artist who can’t even finance his latest album.All of which explains his sodden arrival on this depopulated rock, the home of an eccentric lottery winner named Charles (Key), who has offered Herb an astonishing half-million pounds to play a single concert. Herb’s annoyance at the lack of a showbiz welcome — no car, no publicist, no fancy hotel — intensifies when he learns that his host, a lonely widower, will be the sole audience member. And that this McGwyer Mortimer superfan has also persuaded Herb’s former bandmate and erstwhile lover, Nell (Carey Mulligan), to join them, apparently hoping that the two will rekindle their artistic, and perhaps even their romantic alchemy.For the sake of Nell, who now prefers cooking chutney to composing tunes, viewers should hope otherwise. Petulant and whiny, Herb is such a charmless sourpuss it’s a relief when Nell shows up with a cheery husband, Michael (Akemnji Ndifornyen), in tow. Yet rather than mine this awkward ménage for much-needed humor, Basden and Key’s screenplay hustles Michael hastily offscreen to search for puffins. (Lest we be left in suspense, he pops back at the end to confirm he found them.)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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    ‘Art for Everybody’ Review: The Hidden Life of the ‘Painter of Light’

    Thomas Kinkade turned himself into a ubiquitous brand — but there was more to him than that, a new documentary shows.One of my high school jobs was stocking shelves and tending the register in a Christian bookstore in upstate New York. “Bookstore” is a bit of a misnomer: while we did sell books — Bibles, relationship manuals about love languages, “Left Behind” novels — most of the store’s floor space was devoted to things that were not books at all: Christian music CDs and cassette tapes, plus “gift” items, usually displayed in themed zones: baptisms, amusements and brands like Willow Tree, Precious Moments and Veggie Tales.When I was there in 2001, our biggest sellers came from one section in the store that was set up to resemble a small living room, with a couch and a rug and a wall hanging. This was the Thomas Kinkade section, named for the artist who created the images of colorful homes nestled into sweet landscapes that were then painted and embroidered and printed onto anything a typical Christian bookstore patron might desire. You could buy Thomas Kinkade collectible plates, Thomas Kinkade throw blankets, Thomas Kinkade lamps, Thomas Kinkade crosses, Thomas Kinkade mass-produced cross-stitched Bible covers. With the flick of a button, Thomas Kinkade framed prints would convert images of glowing windows to actual glowing windows via little embedded lights. You could deck your whole life out in Thomas Kinkade.Kinkade, who turned out these original images and called himself the “Painter of Light,” is the subject of the new documentary “Art for Everybody,” directed by Miranda Yousef. Kinkade is sort of the Kenny G of American art, ubiquitous and beloved and very easy to deride. The documentary brings in a variety of art critics, journalists and historians to do just that, with reactions ranging from sniffs to an earnest consternation over what Kinkade’s anodyne, even retrograde images signify about their buyers. The New Yorker writer Susan Orlean, who profiled Kinkade in 2001, provides some background from a decidedly outsider perspective: she hadn’t heard of Kinkade in his ’80s and ’90s heyday, and found him to be as much of an oddity as a cultural phenomenon.But I suspect Orlean is an outlier, and not just because according to the documentary, at one point one in every 20 American households purportedly purchased “a Kinkade” — meaning a licensed print — to put on the wall, and possibly many more. For those who grew up in and around Christian culture in the United States, especially the evangelical flavor, he was ubiquitous from the 1980s onward, present in church lobbies and grandma’s living room. As the art critic Blake Gopnik notes in the film, Kinkade “fed on the disdain” of critics and the establishment, positioning himself as diametrically opposed to an art world seen as degenerate and anti-family during the 1980s and ’90s culture wars. Kinkade served up a vision of a perfect, beautiful world, with himself as a defender (as he says in archival video) of “family and God and country and beauty.”All of this was very lucrative for Kinkade, who was a marketing genius — one interviewee suggests Warhol might have been jealous — and an outspokenly religious family man. But that makes his death in 2012, at the age of 54, even more startling. After a precipitous decline owing to mounting alcoholism and including public urination, heckling and erratic behavior (plus a failed stint in rehab), Kinkade died of an alcohol and Valium overdose.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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    Herb Greene, Who Photographed the Grateful Dead and Other 1960s Rock Acts, Dies at 82

    Herb Greene, whose evocative portraits of the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin and others helped define the rock scene that emerged in San Francisco in the mid-1960s, died on March 3 at his home in Maynard, Mass. He was 82.His wife, Ilze Greene, said the cause was pancreatic cancer.Mr. Greene pursued music portraiture in his spare time while working for about a dozen years in the 1960s and ’70s, as a fashion photographer for the Joseph Magnin department store and the men’s wear retailer Cable Car Clothiers.Instead of photographing concerts, which did not interest him, he invited bands and musicians to various studios in San Francisco, including one he had on Front Street, and to his apartment, where some of them stood in front of a dining room wall filled with hieroglyphics drawn by a roommate with knowledge of Egyptology.His pictures of the Dead, a favorite subject, include Jerry Garcia, the band’s leader, in a vest and tie, playing a banjo while seated on a stool, with a wall-sized American flag behind him; Ron McKernan, the Dead’s organist, known as Pigpen, striking a threatening pose in front of Mr. Garcia; and the band on the corner of Haight and Ashbury Streets, in the district known as a center of the hippie counterculture.Mr. Greene’s many pictures of the Grateful Dead, a favorite subject, include a well-known one of Jerry Garcia against a wall-sized American flag.Herb Greene, via Greene familyHe also photographed Ron McKernan, the Dead’s organist, known as Pigpen.Herb Greene, via Greene familyMr. Greene photographed the Grateful Dead (from left, Mr. Garcia, Mr. McKernan, Phil Lesh, Bob Weir and Bill Kreutzmann) on the corner of Haight and Ashbury Streets, in the district known as a center of the counterculture.Herb Greene, via Greene familyWe 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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    Eddie Adcock, Musician Who Pushed Bluegrass Forward, Dies at 86

    A master improviser on banjo, he understood the genre’s roots but was also in the forefront of the later “newgrass” movement.Eddie Adcock, a virtuoso banjo and guitar player who served as a bridge between the formative early years of bluegrass and the innovative “newgrass” movement of the 1970s and beyond, died on March 19 in Lebanon, Tenn. He was 86.His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by Dan Hays, a former executive director of the International Bluegrass Music Association, who said Mr. Adcock had a number of chronic health problems.Mr. Adcock brought his improvisatory fretwork to musical settings ranging from the first-generation traditionalism of Bill Monroe to the newgrass, or “new acoustic,” sounds fashioned by forerunners of modern bluegrass like the Country Gentlemen and II Generation.Mr. Adcock was best known for his tenure in the 1960s with the Country Gentlemen, a group based in Arlington, Va., that, through advances in style and repertoire, all but redefined bluegrass music. Employing a traditional string-band format, they broadened the genre’s appeal with their impromptu arrangements of folk and pop songs and material written by artists, like Hedy West and Gordon Lightfoot, whose work fell outside the bounds of bluegrass.Mr. Adcock’s contributions were consistently among the quartet’s most daring, notably his dazzling string-bending and his use of the thumb-style guitar technique of Merle Travis to create a unique jazz- and blues-inflected approach to playing the banjo.“I released all my insides, all my creativity, into the band,” Mr. Adcock said of his heady early years with the Country Gentlemen in a 2016 interview with Scottsville Monthly, the magazine of his hometown, Scottsville, Va. “I was ready to say something of my own, and that’s where I made my mark.”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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    How ‘No Other Land’ Became an Unlikely Box Office Success

    The Oscar-winning documentary has surpassed $2 million at the box office despite the lack of a traditional distribution deal.“No Other Land” has racked up festival awards, critical acclaim and the Oscar for best documentary feature. Yet the film, a narrative exposé about Israeli demolitions of Palestinian homes directed by two Palestinians and two Israelis, has not been acquired by a traditional North American distributor. This is partly a reflection of the collapse of studio interest in newsy documentaries as well as hesitance around a movie that condemns Israeli policies.But as the filmmakers rolled out the movie without the marketing muscle and prestige of a typical release, it has flourished. By the admittedly parched standards of post-pandemic theatrical releases of topical documentaries, it is a hit.“No Other Land” has been a top 25 film each of the past three weeks since its Oscar win, according to the film database Box Office Mojo, with ticket sales set to eclipse $2 million domestically by the end of next weekend. It was playing on 130 screens across the country last weekend, a small number when compared to the thousands of a studio blockbuster, but robust given its circumstances. (The film’s theatrical rights have been acquired in more than 20 other countries.)“Documentaries are having a harder time theatrically these days,” said Connie White, who has programmed “No Other Land” at a dozen theaters from Brookline, Mass., and Pleasantville, N.Y., to Tucson, Ariz., and Omaha. “This is remarkable.”At Film Forum in Manhattan, “No Other Land” sold out seven shows its opening weekend in February and a week’s worth of evening screenings after its Oscar win. It “is shaping up to be among the highest-attended films in our 55-year history,” said Sonya Chung, the cinema’s president and director.At the national Alamo Drafthouse chain, which screens studio tentpoles like “Captain America: Brave New World” and “Snow White,” “No Other Land” has been the 14th-biggest film since its Jan. 31 release, a spokesman said.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