Aurelia Butler

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    ‘Blind Injustice’ Opera Spotlights Wrongful Imprisonment

    “Blind Injustice,” which is being staged at Montclair State University, tells the stories of people freed with the help of the Ohio Innocence Project.Near the end of “Blind Injustice,” an opera about six people who were wrongfully convicted of crimes and later freed, the exonerees reflect on the time they have spent behind bars.“What makes a person strong enough to endure injustice?” they sing. “What makes a person free?”Questions of prejudice, guilt and resilience run throughout “Blind Injustice,” composed by Scott Davenport Richards to a libretto by David Cote, which has its East Coast premiere on Friday at Peak Performances at Montclair State University.The work, which was commissioned by Cincinnati Opera and premiered there in 2019, explores the effects of wrongful convictions on the prisoners and their families, and the help to overturn their convictions that they received from the Ohio Innocence Project, a nonprofit organization at the University of Cincinnati College of Law.One man who was sent to death row describes spending 39 years in prison after being wrongfully convicted of murder. A bus driver falsely accused of sexual abuse describes the pain of being separated from her four children. “Oh Lord, protect them!” she sings. “Oh, God! Deliver me!”And a mother of a young man accused of murder pleads for his release. “Smash bricks into dust!” she sings. “Bust it! Bust it! Bust it! Bust this goddamned prison down!”The creators of “Blind Injustice,” from left: Scott Davenport Richards, Robin Guarino and David Cote.Jeenah Moon 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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    ‘Monolith’ Review: Friend of the Pod People

    Lily Sullivan plays a podcaster investigating a supernatural mystery in this thriller from Matt Vesely.In “Monolith,” a single-setting thriller from the Australian director Matt Vesely, a recently disgraced investigative journalist attempts to salvage her career by accepting an ignoble and humiliating task: starting a podcast. She calls it “Beyond Believable,” and it’s a sort of spooky true-crime show about stranger-than-fiction mysteries — or rather, as she confesses in a moment of frustration, a “clickbait podcast” for listeners with “I.Q. levels below a lobotomized monkey.”It’s a far cry from her broadsheet glory days, but the juicy intrigue of a big scoop proves seductive. When she lands on a story that involves mass hallucinations, bizarre artifacts and (possibly) alien body snatchers, she and her audience become obsessed. How far she will go to pursue that obsession is the driving force of the film.Lily Sullivan plays this unnamed reporter with cagey, harried intensity, and she is more than capable of carrying this one-woman show. (The only other characters are voices on the phone.) Vesely makes good use of the single location — a large, sparely furnished modernist house in the Adelaide Hills of Australia — and he derives much tension from mundane things, such as a murky bathtub and slow-moving automatic curtains. The film is most effective when at its most granular, as Sullivan’s character carefully splices snippets of audio recordings and pores over research materials, scenes strongly reminiscent of Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Blow-Up” and Brian De Palma’s “Blow Out.”But “Monolith” becomes harder to take seriously as the drama escalates, especially when Sullivan, finding herself in danger, charges on with an impassioned plea: “I have to continue this podcast!”MonolithRated R for strong language, frightening situations and some disturbing podcasting. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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    ‘The 2024 Oscar Nominated Short Films’ Review: Small Running Times, Large Themes

    Many of this year’s films take a darker turn, but there is some levity among the bunch.The Oscar-nominated short films are being presented in three programs: live action, animation and documentary. Each program is reviewed below by a separate critic.Live ActionWhatever your takeaways from the live action section of this year’s Oscar-nominated short films, a good laugh is unlikely to be among them. Suicide, abortion, bereavement, discoloring corpses — they’re all here, in a deluge of downers that only the Danes (and, depending on your tolerance for extreme preciousness, Wes Anderson) can be trusted to alleviate.Those Danes, though! In Lasse Lyskjer Noer’s magnificently morbid comedy, “Knight of Fortune,” two grieving widowers bond over toilet paper and the trauma of viewing a loved one whose flesh — as warned by a pair of ghoulish mortuary attendants — might be the color of a banana. Although, bathed in the sickly spill of the morgue’s fluorescents, no one’s complexion here is exactly glowing.If “Knight of Fortune” is a gentle nudge to the ribs, Misan Harriman’s “The After” is a two-by-four to the gut — and not in a good way. Trafficking in the kind of forced sentiment that can break you out in hives, this handsomely shot movie, featuring a garment-rending David Oyelowo, follows a London ride-share driver in the wake of a shocking personal tragedy. A trite, bullying soundtrack herds us toward the histrionic climax of a film that doesn’t trust us to get there on our own.More restrained, and infinitely more resonant, “Invincible” observes the final 48 hours in the life of a 14-year-old boy (Léokim Beaumier-Lépine) as he struggles to corral his emotions and earn release from a center for troubled youth. The acting is impressive and the direction (by Vincent René-Lortie, drawing from a painful real-life memory) is bold and intuitive. Subtly intimate photography by Alexandre Nour Desjardins does much to enhance a movie that understands when it comes to emotions, less is often more.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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    ‘Onlookers’ Review: Portraits of Picture Takers

    This experimental nonfiction feature from Kimi Takesue aims to reflect on travel and tourism in Laos, but offers few striking images.A tourist in extreme long shot snaps a selfie in front of what looks like a mud-covered temple. A procession of monks shown in depth traverses a narrow bridge. Four people, accompanied by a dog, sit on low stools by a roadside, not paying much attention to one another or to the passing motorcycle traffic.That last image is rhymed at the end. The roughly 70 minutes of Kimi Takesue’s “Onlookers,” filmed in Laos, consist of found tableaus like these. It is a movie about travel in which the camera never moves. Some shots center on obvious visitors, others on apparent locals and still others on both. Takesue eschews context, and there is almost no audible dialogue. Rather, the director puts viewers in the position of interlopers — making them wonder whether a woman is hitting a gong correctly, or why an open-air lounge is showing reruns of “Friends.”The simplest way to look at this experimental nonfiction feature is as a consideration of tourism, a role that moviegoers often occupy themselves. Not infrequently, “Onlookers” consists of pictures of other people taking pictures. And even when Takesue’s camera — she’s credited with direction, producing, cinematography, sound and editing — isn’t actively looking at outsiders, it retains a detached outsider’s gaze.It also doesn’t capture much that is interesting. Ziplining and tubing episodes notwithstanding, the film does not contain much in the way of incident. And despite the exoticized location, “Onlookers” offers surprisingly few striking images. This is a concept in search of a movie, and an academic exercise that doesn’t give observers much to work with.OnlookersNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 12 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Land of Bad’ Review: Tech Ops in the Jungle

    Fighters on the ground, assisted by drone pilots, including Russell Crowe, half a world away — in Las Vegas.From a U.S. military installation in the Sulu Sea — where, a title card tells the viewer, “We are in a war … we just don’t know it” — soldiers board a chopper to execute a “sterilized op” (contemporary lingo for “secret mission”). The soldiers are played by a couple of Hemsworth brothers; a onetime Face of Reebok, Ricky Whittle; and a pumped-up Milo Ventimiglia. Their backup is a couple of drone pilots half a world away, providing lethal firepower from the comfort of Las Vegas.“Land of Bad,” directed by William Eubank from a script he wrote with David Frigerio, is commendable in the abstract for depicting the realities of 21st-century warfare both narratively and thematically: Its settings include a jungle and gnarly underground jails. “At the end of the day,” Whittle’s character says, in the jungle, “when tech fails, it all comes down to one very simple thing — man killing man.” He then welcomes a rookie soldier to “the land of bad.” What the squad subsequently encounters feels like several strains of global terrorism reconfigured into a jingoistic theme park.The former action star Russell Crowe plays Reaper, a drone guy at the other end of the soldiers’ communications devices. He’s not only fighting to keep this squad alive after the mission goes upside down, but to convince indifferent upper brass to pay attention.Moments presumably conceived to create suspense, like Reaper’s stop at a grocery store late in the picture, merely contribute to its longueurs. When Reaper, trying to keep a seemingly stranded soldier’s spirits up, recounts his career trajectory (“The Air Force found my responses to authority were not normal”), he doesn’t sound so much like Tom Cruise’s Maverick in an alternate universe as he does Robert Hayes boring a fellow passenger to death in “Airplane!”Land of BadRated R for language and violence. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘God & Country’ Review: One Nation, Under the Cross

    Dan Partland’s blunt documentary follows the rise of Christian nationalist voters and argues that they threaten pluralism and democracy.The separation of church and state is a foundational principle of the United States, but as Dan Partland’s ominous documentary “God & Country” argues, a daunting portion of the country’s Christian voters may not hold this truth to be self-evident.Partland, who directed the 2020 documentary “#Unfit: The Psychology of Donald Trump,” draws upon Katherine Stewart’s book “The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism” for his new film.“God & Country” describes the growing threat to democracy posed by voters who subscribe to the belief that the United States is above all a Christian nation and that this should influence policies on abortion, public education, immigration, and so on. The film’s insights about the role of religion in politics feel especially well-informed because many of its commentators draw on their own personal and professional experiences with the Christian church. They’re believers, too, and they’re worried.The historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez; the pastor Rob Schenck; Reza Aslan, the author of “Beyond Fundamentalism”; and David French, an Opinion columnist for The New York Times, all discuss the ways in which this movement can threaten political and civic life.The rise of Donald J. Trump as a presidential candidate and his subsequent term in office galvanized antidemocratic attitudes in the country, and in the film the former president is likened to a fire-and-brimstone televangelist. A pocket history lesson charts how televangelists grew in power in the 1970s and ’80s, opportunistically using wedge issues such as abortion for conservative political goals.The film’s format can be blunt, cutting between unsettling talking head interviews and clips of crowds cheering on Christian leaders at politically charged events or conservative politicians making brash proclamations. But rather than come off solely as a grim forecast, the film presents possible alternatives for the country, most notably from the Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, the minister and social activist who offers a voice of hope and inclusivity that feels genuinely healing.God & CountryRated PG-13. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Poor Things’ Choreographer Uses Dance to Tell the Story

    Constanza Macras, founder of the Berlin dance company DorkyPark, uses “dance as a function, as a language,” in her work, be it for the stage or the screen.“I have become the thing I hated, the grasping succubus of a lover,” sulks Duncan Wedderburn, the charming rake played by Mark Ruffalo in a scene set in a belle epoque Lisbon restaurant midway through Yorgos Lanthimos’s “Poor Things,” which is nominated for 11 awards at Sunday’s EE British Academy Film Awards, known as the BAFTAs.Bella Baxter, the film’s heroine played by Emma Stone, doesn’t seem to hear him. She is captivated by the rhythmic thump-thump-thump of the orchestra serenading the dinner guests. As if possessed, she follows the beat to the dance floor, where she lets loose with a joyous, primitive and sublimely wacky dance that has become one of the year’s defining screen moments.For Constanza Macras, the film’s choreographer, that scene was about more than just having fun. “It’s a moment that defines the relationship,” explained Macras, 53, who hails from Argentina and is based in Berlin.Macras noted that “what is great about Yorgos is that dance is a ‘pivot moment’ in his movies.”Schore Mehrdju“It’s the moment that she starts to go free from Duncan,” Macras said of Stone’s character — a woman reanimated with the brain of her unborn infant. Duncan has whisked her on a trip around the world in the hopes of debauching her.Instead, the Lothario finds that he can’t keep up with her in the bedroom or, as the scene under discussion reveals, on the dance floor. When Duncan leaps to his feet as well, he tries to save the situation and assert his control. “He’s trying to constrain her, he’s trying to show her how to dance normally,” Macras 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

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    Schubert’s Operas Were Failures. Is Their Music Worth Saving?

    “I feel myself the most unhappy and wretched creature in the world,” Franz Schubert, suffering from syphilis and reeling from professional failures, wrote in March 1824 to his friend, the painter Leopold Kupelwieser. Imagine a man, he said, who will never be healthy again, and “whose most brilliant hopes have perished.”In the same breath, Schubert expressed sorrow over the fate of his attempt at a grand Romantic opera, “Fierrabras,” which had been canceled in Vienna, and that of another stage work, “Die Verschworenen,” which didn’t make it past a private performance. “I seem once again,” Schubert, then 27, wrote in his letter, “to have composed two operas for nothing.”He wouldn’t return to the genre again. And even after his death in 1828, at 31, when many of his works enjoyed posthumous adulation and were performed widely, none of his theatrical undertakings entered the standard repertoire.It’s surprising that opera eluded Schubert, who by most counts started about 20 stage works, completed fewer than a dozen and saw the premieres of just two. After all, he wrote some of the most beautiful vocal music in the repertoire: the song cycles “Die Schöne Müllerin” and “Winterreise,” and hundreds of beloved lieder like “Gretchen am Spinnrade” and “Ave Maria.”And yet the operas remain curiosities better heard than seen, often composed to clumsy librettos and denied the revisions that could have accompanied rehearsals.A scene from “L’Autre Voyage” at the Opéra Comique in Paris. Stéphane Degout, left, and Siobhan Stagg.Stefan BrionWe 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