Aurelia Butler

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    How a Domestic Scene Creates Dread in ‘The Zone of Interest’

    The director Jonathan Glazer narrates a sequence from his Holocaust drama.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.This sequence from “The Zone of Interest,” which is nominated for five Academy Awards, including best picture, observes a weekday at the home of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of the concentration camp Auschwitz. That home is positioned directly next door to the camp. In the kitchen, Rudolf’s wife, Hedwig, sits and gossips with friends. In another room, Rudolf meets with the engineers of a crematory. But the scene primarily follows Aniela, a young Polish girl who works in the home, preparing a glass of schnapps to celebrate the commandant’s birthday, and delivering boots to him during his meeting.Discussing the scene, the film’s director, Jonathan Glazer, said that he chose to follow Aniela, rather than the main characters, “because it’s really one of the only times in the film where we can see and connect and spend time with, essentially, a victim of these atrocities.”He explained that he chose to use multiple cameras to shoot the scene, and the film overall, because “I really didn’t want to have sort of the artificial construction of a conventional film to tell this story. Rather, to view them anthropologically, as if we were a fly on the wall.”Read the “Zone of Interest” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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    SZA’s ‘Saturn,’ and 8 More New Songs

    Hear tracks by Rhiannon Giddens, Norah Jones, Les Amazones d’Afrique and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes), and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.SZA, ‘Saturn’The song SZA introduced in a commercial during the Grammy Awards, “Saturn,” has now been separated from its credit-card plug and released to streaming services in multiple versions; one, the sped-up version, brings out its clear pop structure. But the real-time version is better. The song is about a longing for the better place that her karma has earned: “Stuck in this paradigm/Don’t believe in paradise,” she sings. Arpeggios glimmer around her; a boom-bap beat brings an undertow. Her vocal lines argue with the beat as she joins generations of Afrofuturists like Sun Ra, looking beyond Earth and insisting, “There’s got to be more.” JON PARELESLes Amazones d’Afrique, ‘Musow Danse’“Musow Danse” (“Women’s Dance”) is the title track of the jubilant new album by Les Amazones D’Afrique: a Pan-African, proudly multilingual alliance of singers and songwriters carrying feminist messages to dance floors. “Musow Danse” is propelled by gritty distorted electronics and traditional drumming; it features Mamani Keïta from Mali, Fafa Ruffino from Benin, Dobet Gnahoré from the Ivory Coast and Kandy Guira from Mali, singing (respectively) in Bambara, Fon, Bété and Mooré, and sharing the chorus, “Rise up African woman!” PARELESA.G. Cook, ‘Britpop’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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    Review: A Case for Understated Majesty at the Philharmonic

    A new piano concerto written for Emanuel Ax, and an old symphony by Rachmaninoff, reward close listening in a program conducted by Eun Sun Kim.I always wince when people say they like classical music, “but not the new stuff.”Comments like that are not only shortsighted — the old stuff was, in its time, of course new and often radical — but they also don’t take into account how varied contemporary music is, and how much of it is actually quite easy to love.Take Anders Hillborg’s second piano concerto, “The MAX Concerto,” which had its local premiere with the New York Philharmonic on Thursday. Programmed somewhat arbitrarily between works by Sibelius and Rachmaninoff, it was more entertaining than either of them, and just as well crafted.First performed in October in San Francisco, the concerto acknowledges the lineage of its genre with playfulness and reverence, and showcases Emanuel Ax, the soloist for whom it was written, by matching and pushing his brand of modest, underrated virtuosity. Likable without being eager to please, thrilling without shameless dazzle, it is, like Ax, enjoyable simply because it’s excellent.And, crucially, Hillborg’s concerto works regardless of how familiar a listener is with his music, or any classical music for that matter. You could be aware of the piece’s form — its nine evocatively titled sections, performed as a single, 21-minute movement — or smile at “MAX,” a contraction of “Manny Ax.” You could pick up on the opening passage’s nod to Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto, or a later suggestion of Bach. Or you could just sit back and sense, intuitively, the genial majesty and pleasure coursing through it all.One of the great nice guys in music, Ax is a pianist who, over his five-decade career, seems to have made no enemies while sitting quietly, comfortably near the top of his field, whether as chamber partner to Yo-Yo Ma or as a champion of contemporary works premiering a new concerto by John Adams — “Century Rolls,” whose section “Manny’s Gym” is one of the single most beautiful movements written in our time.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 to Watch the 2024 SAG Awards: Date, Time and Streaming

    The awards, which are streaming live on Netflix for the first time, will offer a preview of some key Oscars races. Barbra Streisand will be on hand, too.Cord-cutters rejoice: Normally, watching an awards show involves subscribing to a live TV service (or remembering which of your email addresses you haven’t already used for a free trial).But on Saturday, for the first time, Netflix will be streaming the annual Screen Actors Guild Awards, potentially bringing them to a much wider audience.The 15 awards, which are voted on by actors and other performers who belong to the SAG-AFTRA union, honor the best film and television performances from the past year. They can be a bellwether for the Oscars, happening this year on March 10. (Since 1996, 83 of the 112 stars and films that won Oscars for best picture or acting first won a SAG Award.)This year’s ceremony is shaping up to be a “Barbenheimer” rematch: The two summer blockbusters — “Oppenheimer,” Christopher Nolan’s biopic about the physicist known as the father of the atomic bomb, and “Barbie,” Greta Gerwig’s unique spin on the Mattel doll — each picked up a pack-leading four nominations and will be competing for the guild’s top prize, best ensemble.There’s also intrigue in the best film actress race: Lily Gladstone, who plays an Osage woman married to a white man involved in a murderous conspiracy in “Killers of the Flower Moon,” has blazed a trail through awards season, taking home honors from the Golden Globes, the National Board of Review and the New York Film Critics Circle. But Emma Stone, who plays a grown woman with the mind of a child in the “Frankenstein”-inspired black comedy “Poor Things,” came out on top at the BAFTAs and the Critics Choice Awards (and won her own Globe in the musical or comedy category).Now, on Saturday night, we’ll get our strongest indication yet as to which way academy voters are leaning. We’ll also get an appearance from Barbra Streisand. Here’s how to watch.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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    In This Heroes’ Tale, Real People Risk Their Lives to Get to Europe

    Matteo Garrone’s Oscar-nominated feature “Io Capitano” dramatizes the harrowing journeys made by thousands of Africans each month looking for a better life in Europe.At the end of “Io Capitano” (“I Captain”), Matteo Garrone’s harrowing contender for best international film at next month’s Academy Awards, a map tracks the journey taken by the film’s two teenage protagonists: over 3,500 miles from Dakar, Senegal, to Sicily, via the scorching Nigerien desert, horrific Libyan prisons and a nerve-racking Mediterranean crossing aboard a rickety vessel.Such perilous voyages, taken each year by countless Africans seeking a new life in Europe, is “one of the great dramas of our times,” Garrone said in a recent interview, and “Io Capitano” is framed as an epic, modern-day Odyssey, with protagonists no less valiant than Homer’s hero.“It’s a journey that’s an archetype so that anyone can identify with it,” said Garrone, who is best known to international audiences for the hyper-realistic 2008 drama “Gomorrah” and his dark and fantastical “Pinocchio” (2019).“Io Capitano” is also, he said, a “document of contemporary history.” This month alone, over 2,000 people reached European shores by crossing the Mediterranean, while at least 74 died, bringing the number of people who have gone missing in that sea in the last decade to more than 29,000, according to the International Organization for Migration, a United Nations agency.Many Europeans learn of these landings, and deaths, from short news segments, often accompanied by clips of lawmakers pledging to stop illegal migration. Garrone’s film, which won the Silver Lion for best directing at last year’s Venice Film Festival, goes beyond the statistics with a plot based on stories of real people crossing the Mediterranean.Garrone said that the migrants’ stories he heard called to mind the likes of Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad.via Cohen Media GroupWe 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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    Documentaries That Examine Russia’s War in Ukraine

    After the death of Russian dissident Aleksei A. Navalny, these four movies examine the war in unexpected ways.Veselka, the Ukrainian diner on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, is one of the few restaurants in the city that truly deserves to be called venerable, even iconic. Mention it to most anyone — especially those of us who were here around the turn of the 21st century — and it provokes pierogi- and borscht-inflected rhapsodies, happy memories of a late-night tuck into a steaming plate of Ukrainian comfort food.Veselka has also become a center for New York’s support for embattled Ukrainians, as shown in Michael Fiore’s new documentary, “Veselka: The Rainbow on the Corner at the Center of the World.” (David Duchovny narrates.) Veselka’s third-generation proprietor, Jason Birchard, is of Ukrainian ancestry, and many of the staff are from the country as well. When war broke out, the restaurant started collecting money and clothing to send to the front; what’s more, Birchard began helping staff sponsor family members in their efforts to move to safety in America.The film (in theaters now) starts as a fun story about a New York institution, and its tone is resolutely hopeful and convivial. But it rapidly becomes a demonstration of a community’s efforts to support loved ones under siege, and that makes it much richer and fuller than it might otherwise have been. If you know Veselka, you might choke up a bit.I happened to be watching “Veselka” the day news broke of dissident Aleksei A. Navalny’s death in a Russian prison, which is not the same story but certainly related. I wrote about “Navalny,” Daniel Roher’s Oscar-winning documentary that covers his opposition to Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, and thought of other films that help illuminate the war in Ukraine years into the struggle.“Donbass” (streaming on the Criterion Channel and Kanopy) is Sergei Loznitsa’s darkly absurd comedy that elliptically pokes miserable fun at the way ordinary people become caught up in propaganda, violence and systems of repression, specifically in eastern Ukraine. “Donbass” isn’t technically a documentary (there are actors and a script), but Loznitsa often makes nonfiction, and elements threaded throughout this film blur lines between fiction and nonfiction, making you wonder what you’re actually looking at.“A House Made of Splinters” (rent on most major platforms), directed by Simon Lereng Wilmont, was nominated alongside “Navalny” at last year’s Oscars. It’s an observational film, set in an eastern Ukraine home for children who are separated from their parents. Through their eyes, we gain a new view of the bleak human factors that spring up in wartime — violence, drugs, poverty — and that suggest, with an almost unbearable gentleness, the generational repercussions to come.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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    Cartier’s Perfumer Creates Scents for ‘Prometheus’ Music

    Mathilde Laurent, Cartier’s perfumer, has created a scent poem that enhances the experience of Scriabin’s synesthetic score for “Prometheus.”It was time to smell Scriabin’s “Prometheus: The Poem of Fire.”This music, from 1910, has an element of synesthesia in its score, which calls for a color organ — a keyboard instrument that projects lights of a dozen hues — along with a full orchestra, a piano soloist and a choir. But in October at Davies Symphony Hall, the home of the San Francisco Symphony, the piece was being prepared with an additional sense in mind.A group had gathered in the auditorium to test an almost unheard-of idea: that a performance could be accompanied by something like an olfactory poem, a narrative series of perfumes released through diffusers between seats and a set of futuristic cannons, called vortexes, that were developed for this occasion to shoot out rings of scented smoke.Onstage, the pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet practiced his solo part in “Prometheus,” which the San Francisco Symphony will perform March 1 through 3, while the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen listened attentively to the wooden vortexes as they were being tested; the sound they made while emitting smoke, he noticed, was nearly a G.Mathilde Laurent, Cartier’s longtime perfumer, who had designed the scents, double-checked notes on her iPad. For this day’s test, without the orchestra, she wanted to be sure the diffusers were timed to match the music. So they were going to play a recording overhead.They had settled on one that Claudio Abbado made with the Berlin Philharmonic and the pianist Martha Argerich in the 1990s. After the Breton engineers who had designed and assembled the vortexes told everyone to take their seats, the “Prometheus” team quieted down, and waited.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