Aurelia Butler

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    Beyoncé Becomes First Black Woman to Top Billboard Country Chart

    Her single “Texas Hold ’Em” debuted atop the country airplay chart after its release during the Super Bowl.Beyoncé’s new country single “Texas Hold ’Em” reached No. 1 on the Billboard country airplay chart this week, making her the first Black female artist to hold the top spot.Beyoncé’s other single, “16 Carriages,” released simultaneously on Feb. 11, also debuted at No. 9 on the Billboard country chart. The songs reached No. 2 and No. 38 on the Billboard Hot 100. “Texas Hold ’Em” has already drawn more than 19 million streams, and “16 Carriages” has 10.3 million streams.Historically, Black artists have struggled to gain recognition in the genre of country music, a field often dominated by white male singers. But the sudden success of Beyoncé’s country singles comes at a time when Black women have started to receive acclaim within that realm. At last year’s Country Music Awards, Tracy Chapman won song of the year for “Fast Car,” which topped country charts three decades after it was released, thanks to a cover by Luke Combs. Black female country artists like Mickey Guyton and Brittney Spencer have also gained popularity in recent years.Beyoncé is the first woman to top both the Hot Country Songs chart and the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart since they were established in 1958, according to Billboard. Both Beyoncé singles are part of her upcoming album, a country-themed follow-up to “Renaissance,” which she referred to as “Act II.” The full album, announced during a Verizon ad that aired during the Super Bowl, is expected to be released March 29. More

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    ‘Becoming King’ Review: An Actor Marches On

    This documentary about Ava DuVernay’s 2014 Martin Luther King drama “Selma” plays more like a David Oyelowo tribute than a proper look at the difficulties of making the film.“Becoming King,” a documentary on Paramount+, traces the actor David Oyelowo’s journey to playing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Ava DuVernay’s 2014 drama “Selma.”Directed by Jessica Oyelowo (the actor’s wife), it’s a lackluster, dutiful affair that plays more like a hagiographic appreciation of David Oyelowo than a tribute to the making of “Selma.” In part, the documentary seems like a reaction to Oyelowo’s Oscars snub the following year in the best actor category, though it does a lousy job at making its case.The first part of the film digs into Oyelowo’s origins: first, as a child who grew up poor in Lagos, Nigeria; and then, as a theater prodigy who took on leading roles in London’s Royal Shakespeare Company. The next step was Hollywood, where Oyelowo established himself with parts in films that, when strung together, create a history of civil rights in America: Think “Lincoln,” “Red Tails” and “The Help.”Throughout, the director weaves what appears to be home-video footage from the nearly seven-year process it took to make “Selma.” Around these snippets, which show David at home, taking work calls, or verbalizing his anxieties about playing the civil rights leader, we hear from talking heads like Oprah Winfrey (a producer on the film), Lee Daniels (who was at one point signed on to direct) and DuVernay.Nothing they say is particularly interesting; they shower the expected compliments on Oyelowo and, otherwise, offer little else beyond their own symbolic power. These are Black entertainers, coming together to make a rare high-profile Hollywood feature about Dr. King, but the documentary only rehashes these facts without truly exploring what made “Selma” such a risky project to mount. Aside from a brief segment with the actor’s dialect coach, we never really get a sense of Oyelowo’s process, either — or the challenges he faced portraying an icon who was also a flesh-and-bones human with imperfections and ambiguities. “Becoming King” exhibits the kind of self-importance that ultimately diminishes the subject, be it Dr. King or Oyelowo.Becoming KingNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 6 minutes. Watch on Paramount+. More

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    A Film Festival in the Back of a Taxi

    The TaxiFilmFest is partly a protest over the miserable state of Berlin’s taxi industry. But it’s also a celebration of the cab’s iconic place in the urban cultural landscape.Some of international cinema’s biggest names gathered on Tuesday night at the Berlin International Film Festival as the event honored Martin Scorsese with a lifetime achievement award. Before accepting his trophy, Scorsese listened as the German director Wim Wenders gave a laudatory speech to an audience including celebrities and local dignitaries.Just around the corner, parked in the middle of a busy thoroughfare, a group of Berlin’s taxi drivers crammed into the back of a worn-out taxi van to watch a double-feature capped by Scorsese’s 1976 movie “Taxi Driver.”Klaus Meier, who has been driving a cab in Berlin since 1985, handed out bottles of soda and beer, popping the caps with the blade of a pocketknife. Irene Jaxtheimer, who runs a taxi company, passed around homemade popcorn. A generator outside the cab powered a modest television, a DVD player and a small electric heater.The unconventional screening, just outside a centerpiece event for one of Europe’s most prestigious film festivals, was part of the makeshift TaxiFilmFest. Running through Sunday, it is partly a protest over the miserable state of the taxi industry these days and partly a counterfestival to celebrate the taxi cab’s iconic place in the urban cultural landscape.It’s also in objection to an exclusive partnership deal between the festival, known locally as the Berlinale, and the ride-hailing giant Uber to ferry filmmakers between the city’s movie theaters during the event. The deep-pocketed Silicon Valley company has drawn the ire of traditional cabdrivers the world over, and the protesters who packed in for the TaxiFilmFest screenings were railing against what they see as a too lightly regulated rival.Beeping horns from the busy street outside — some of them coming from sleek black Uber vehicles emblazoned with the Berlinale logo — blended with the street scenes from “Taxi Driver” playing on the tinny television speakers. “Ah, I really miss those mechanical fare boxes!” Meier said as the fares ticked away in the onscreen cab of the movie’s unhinged antihero, Travis Bickle, who drives around mid-’70s New York with growing hatred and menace.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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    Armorer Who Loaded Gun in Alec Baldwin Shooting Faces Trial: What to Know

    The armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, is charged with involuntary manslaughter in the fatal shooting of a cinematographer on the set of the film “Rust.” She has pleaded not guilty.The armorer who loaded the gun that Alec Baldwin was rehearsing with on a film set in 2021 when it fired a live round and killed the movie’s cinematographer is heading to trial in New Mexico this week on a charge of involuntary manslaughter.The trial of the armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, will mark the first time a trial jury will weigh in on the Oct. 21, 2021, shooting on the set of the film “Rust,” which claimed the life of its cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins. A grand jury indicted Mr. Baldwin last month on a charge of involuntary manslaughter in the shooting; he has pleaded not guilty and will be tried separately later.The trial, which will begin with jury selection on Wednesday at the First Judicial District Courthouse in Santa Fe, N.M., is expected to last about two weeks.Ms. Gutierrez-Reed, 26, has been accused of criminal negligence in her handling of guns on the set of the western. Prosecutors say she failed to properly check that the rounds she loaded into the .45-caliber revolver were all dummy rounds, which are inert cartridges used to resemble live rounds on camera but which cannot be fired.“Her primary function as an armorer on the ‘Rust’ movie set was to ensure gun safety,” the lead prosecutor on the case, Kari T. Morrissey, wrote in a court filing. “Her reckless failure resulted in the senseless death of another human being.”Ms. Gutierrez-Reed has pleaded not guilty, and her lawyers have argued that she has been made the “scapegoat” of a tragic accident. They blamed someone else for the appearance of live rounds on set and charged that the production cut corners on safety in an effort to reduce costs, including by overburdening Ms. Gutierrez-Reed with two jobs that prevented her from being able to focus fully on her weapons and ammunition duties.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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    ‘Lumumba: Death of a Prophet’: Revisiting a Mythic Figure

    The 1990 documentary about Patrice Lumumba by Raoul Peck (“I Am Not Your Negro”), showing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, looks and feels newly minted.“If the prophet dies, so does the future,” the director Raoul Peck says early in “Lumumba: Death of a Prophet.” The movie, a personal essay in the form of a history lesson, is as much a poem as it is a documentary.Made in 1990 and showing for a week at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in a 4K restoration of the original 16-millimeter film, “Death of a Prophet” looks and feels newly minted.Patrice Lumumba, the first democratically elected leader of the former Belgian Congo, was brought down after a few months in power by internecine rivalry, hysterical anti-Communism and imperialist greed. His fate was sealed in the post-independence ceremonies when he followed the patronizing speech by King Baudouin of Belgium with a blunt j’accuse, citing Belgian racism and “colonial oppression.”A civil war ensued. With Belgian support, the mineral-rich Katanga province was encouraged by Belgian mining interests to secede, and the white-dominated Force Publique, the Belgian colonial army, revolted. Ridiculed and vilified in the Western press, Lumumba — who would be hailed by Malcolm X as “the greatest Black man who ever walked the African continent” — was killed in early 1961 after being undermined by the United Nations and betrayed by his allies, including his successor, the strongman Joseph-Désiré Mobutu.For Peck, best known for his essayistic James Baldwin documentary “I Am Not Your Negro,” made in 2017, Lumumba is a mythic figure. Peck spent his early childhood in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where, as Francophones, his Haitian parents had been recruited to bolster the post-independence professional class.As noted by Stephen Holden, who reviewed “Death of a Prophet” in The New York Times when the movie was shown during the 1992 New York Film Festival, Peck “boldly” inserts himself into the film. He not only narrates but often cites his mother’s account of events, puts the exorbitant fee charged by a British newsreel for a few minutes of footage in the context of a Congolese worker’s average salary and explains his last-minute cancellation of plans to film in Zaire, as Congo came to be called under Mobutu.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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    ‘Mister Organ,’ ‘Destroyer’ and More Streaming Gems

    Con artists and ghost stories are among our recommendations from the subscription streaming services this month.A unique horror omnibus, an existentialist supernatural story, and atypical star turns are among our recommendations from the subscription streaming services this month, along with some essential background viewing for one of this year’s Oscar nominees.‘Mister Organ’ (2023)Stream it on Netflix.The New Zealand journalist David Farrier has carved out an unusual niche for himself, crafting documentaries about fringe figures that at first seem to be jokey oddities, but later reveal disturbing dimensions and shadowy back stories. His previous feature, “Tickled,” took him into the bizarre world of Competitive Endurance Tickling, and the mysterious figure bankrolling it; this time, an investigation into predatory parking practices puts him in the sights of a con artist named Michael Organ. And that’s when things really get strange. As with “Tickled,” Farrier’s latest begins like a human interest story and turns into something closer to a thriller, as the peculiarities of this unstable personality reveal themselves, often unnervingly. Farrier is a solid anchor for this strange journey, proving unflappable (and capable of finding the gallows humor) in even the most extreme of circumstances.‘Destroyer’ (2018)Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.Nicole Kidman — de-glammed and borderline unrecognizable — stars as the corrupt, alcoholic Los Angeles Police detective Erin Bell, whose investigation of a stray dead body leads her down a rabbit hole of re-examining her own troubled past. The director Karyn Kusama and the screenwriters Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi, who previously collaborated on the tense and terrifying thriller “The Invitation,” expertly tell two stories at once: of Bell’s undoing in her 20s as an undercover F.B.I. agent, and of her current, perhaps irredeemable iteration. It’s a tough balancing act to pull off, but Kusama gets the job done, keeping our interest in each timeline piqued without one overwhelming the other. And this is among Kidman’s finest and most chameleonic work, expertly dramatizing both a woman in disarray and the circumstances that got her there.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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    “Poor Things,” the Weird Movie, Was “Poor Things” the Weird Novel, First

    Hot air balloons soar above the Mediterranean. Aerial streetcars fly along ropes suspended above the alleys of a candy-colored Lisbon. Pastel green smoke billows into the night sky from the funnels of a cruise ship.This is the eye-poppingly surreal world that Bella Baxter, played by Emma Stone, thrills to in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Oscar-nominated film “Poor Things.”Bella, a 25-year-old woman who, after committing suicide, is reanimated with the brain of her unborn infant, is the daring and unusual creation of Alasdair Gray, whose 1992 novel was adapted for the movie.And it may not even be his most eccentric book. A prolific writer and visual artist who died at 85 in 2019, Gray wrote five other novels, two novellas, 89 short stories and a version of Dante’s Divine Comedy (“Decorated and Englished in Prosaic Verse”).In Scotland, Gray is something of a national treasure, his papers housed at the National Library of Scotland. (The cover flap for his illustrated autobiography, “A Life in Pictures,” described the lifelong Glaswegian as “Scotland’s best-known polymath.”)Outside Britain, however, he is not exactly a household name.“I would say he’s one of the very few writers from my lifetime that I’m in awe of,” said the English novelist Jonathan Coe, adding that Gray is “enormously respected” by writers and critics.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 Beyoncé Jolted the Cuban Singer Daymé Arocena Into a Fresh Era

    The prodigious jazz singer came to embrace her inner pop star on a new album made with Visitante from Calle 13.Running her fingers through her dreadlocks in an outdoor cafe overlooking San Juan’s grittily trendy Calle Loiza strip, Daymé Arocena reflected wistfully on an old flame.“There’s a song on the album, ‘American Boy,’ that I wrote 10 years ago,” she said, discussing a track from her latest LP, “Alkemi,” due on Feb. 23. “He was a serious bass player from New York, the first person who introduced to me free jazz. But I felt the song was so simple, so easygoing, so … pop, that it didn’t fit what I wanted” at the time.“American Boy,” which oscillates between a Yoruban ñongo rhythm and an ’80s-style funk groove replete with Earth, Wind & Fire-style horns, distills the essence of Arocena’s new direction: a move from serious jazz to what she calls “pop” — with a focus on Afro-Latina pride. It’s a major shift for an artist who has made four eclectic albums that combine complex jazz arrangements with Yoruban spirituality and an occasional love song with English-language lyrics.Arocena, 32, grew up in Santos Suárez, a neighborhood in Havana, with a family immersed in rumba folklore so passionately that they turned household objects into musical instruments. She entered the Amadeo Roldán Conservatory at age 10. “I had that double world of rumba at home and Bach at school,” she said and smiled.As she grew into adolescence, Arocena became the lead singer of the big band Los Primos, then created Alami, a jazz band made up of all women. (It later was reformed as Maqueque with the Toronto-based saxophonist and bandleader Jane Bunnett.) In 2014, the French D.J. and producer Gilles Peterson, who founded the London indie label Brownswood Recordings, invited Arocena to participate in “Havana Cultura Mix — The Soundclash,” a collaboration between international electronic artists and Cuban musicians.In some ways, Arocena’s tendency to mix Afro-Cuban folkloric music, post-salsa “timba” music and outside influences like R&B reflected the mid-2010s Havana scene that Peterson encountered, one that produced the funk master Cimafunk. He sang in Interactivo, a crucial band from this period that was “the soundtrack of an entire generation,” Arocena said. “Every Wednesday, all the cool kids would go to see them at the Bertolt Brecht” cultural center, she added, peppering her speech with an occasional English word or phrase.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