Aurelia Butler

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    Jaime King Is On a Journey

    Jaime King had been feeling that something was off. “There’s this strange, volatile energy,” the actress, director and model said on a recent Saturday. She perched on the hearth of a fireplace at her home in Los Angeles, knees to her chest, gaze flitting between the fire and the view beyond a sliding-glass door. “If I’m not looking at you, it’s because I’m listening,” she said to a reporter.“I was nervous earlier, and then I was like, shaky, and then I was like, whoa, what is this vibration?”The premiere of her latest film, “Lights Out,” in which she plays a morally corrupt police officer, might have had something to do with her apprehension. Ms. King, a self-described introvert, was about to embark on a promotional blitz that would take her from the hillsides of Hollywood to the scrum of New York.“Socially speaking, I don’t really go a lot of places,” she said. “Once in a blue moon, I’ll go to the Bungalows,” meaning San Vicente Bungalows, the members-only club that has replaced the Soho House as L.A.’s premier venue for people of means. Besides that, “I’ve been keeping my circle very tight.”As a teenage model for labels like Christian Dior and Chanel, Ms. King, now 44, graced the covers of magazines, including a 1996 cover story for The New York Times Magazine called “James Is a Girl,” by Jennifer Egan and photographed by Nan Goldin.Ms. King choosing a card from Angie Banicki, a publicist turned tarot reader. “I’m used to doing readings where I have to bring the other person into it,” said Ms. Banicki. “But I came in, and the portal was open.”Damien Maloney 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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    ‘Wham!’ Documentary Had an Unusual Choice for a Director

    The director Chris Smith was not a fan of the ’80s pop band when he decided to take on the project about George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley.Two young Londoners — one of Greek Cypriot origin, the other of Egyptian descent — set up a pop band in the 1980s that goes on to sell more than 30 million records. They break up several years later, at the pinnacle of their fame, when the two hit the ripe old age of 23.That, in a nutshell, is the story of Wham!, the British pop duo, and its two stars, George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley. It’s a story that the director Chris Smith tells in a Netflix documentary, which is nominated in Sunday’s EE British Academy Film Awards, known as the BAFTAs.Other contenders in the documentary category include “Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie,” about the actor’s battle with Parkinson’s disease; and “American Symphony,” a year in the life of the musician Jon Batiste.Smith previously directed the Emmy-nominated 2019 documentary “Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened,” about a fraudulent music festival that landed its organizer in jail.Two years earlier, he directed “Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond,” on the making of the 1999 movie “Man on the Moon,” in which Jim Carrey played the entertainer Andy Kaufman.Smith said that he was approached to shoot “Wham!” by its producers. There is no narrator: The tale is told using documentary footage of the duo during their career, paired with audio excerpts from interviews with the two pop stars themselves, which are voiced over — Michael died in 2016 at 53.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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    At the Berlin Film Festival, Tension Onscreen and Behind the Scenes

    The final edition overseen by a pair of once celebrated festival directors starts Thursday. Their successor will face financial headwinds and political hurdles.When Mariëtte Rissenbeek and Carlo Chatrian took over the Berlin International Film Festival in 2019, many hoped it would mark a new beginning for the festival, one of the most important in world cinema and the largest by audience numbers.Under its previous leadership, some argued, the event had grown bloated and unglamorous compared with competitors like Cannes and Venice. They hoped the pair would reinvigorate the Berlinale, as the festival is known, by streamlining its offerings and attracting more high-profile movies.Five years later, the directors are departing under a cloud of controversy, and many will be debating their legacy at this year’s edition, which begins on Thursday.Rissenbeek, who oversees the Berlinale’s finances, announced last March that she would be retiring after this year’s festival. And in the summer, Germany’s culture minister, Claudia Roth, said that the festival would return to the leadership of a single figure, eliminating Chatrian’s position as artistic director.That decision spurred pushback: Over 400 filmmakers and artists, including the directors Martin Scorsese and Claire Denis, signed an open letter in September praising Chatrian and calling his dismissal “harmful, unprofessional and immoral.” Others have argued that Chatrian’s removal was justified, and that the pair never fulfilled their early promise.In December, Roth announced that Tricia Tuttle, an American who has previously helmed the London Film Festival, would take over the Berlinale after this year’s edition. She will inherit a sprawling program as well as financial challenges and a perilous political backdrop.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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    ‘Bleeding Love’ Review: Ewan and Clara McGregor, on the Road

    Ewan McGregor plays father to his real-life daughter Clara McGregor in this indie road-trip movie that’s also a meandering journey to healing.This week’s Valentine blues arrive courtesy of “Bleeding Love,” a father-daughter story about love, lies and family trauma starring a real father-daughter duo. The dramatic duet opens with the nameless father (Ewan McGregor) already behind the wheel of his pickup truck with his nameless, angrily sullen daughter (Clara McGregor) riding shotgun. They’re on a highway headed toward Santa Fe, N.M., though it soon becomes evident that they’re also on the road to reconciliation — that byway many indie-film families travel in order to heal.Sincere and grindingly predictable, this particular journey mixes tears and reams of dialogue, accusations and confessions with the usual roadside attractions, including a convenience store, a quirky motel and some lightly offbeat American types. The daughter has a serious addiction problem that she won’t acknowledge despite the hospital wristband she’s wearing and the booze and pills she pilfers. Her dad has heavy issues, too, as well as a new family, and after years of being estranged from the daughter, he is unsure how to close the divide between them. So, they drive and they talk while stealing glances at each other. The miles rack up.Written by Ruby Caster and directed by Emma Westenberg, “Bleeding Love” drifts and lurches for a wearying 102 minutes. This is Westenberg’s feature directing debut (she’s also made commercials and music videos), and she handles the material with generic professionalism. She and her director of photography, Christopher Ripley, give the movie a pretty, diffused visual glow that, like the script, helps soften anything that could seem too unpleasant or potentially off-putting. The movie could use some roughness, particularly given the lifetime of heartache and grievances that the daughter voices amid cigarette drags.There are moments when Ewan McGregor’s performance — with its glints of hurt and anger — points to a tougher, truer, more nuanced movie than the one you’re watching. Clara McGregor generally has to go bigger and louder than her father, and she’s fine, though whenever her character threatens to become gnarly, the movie retreats, as if someone were worried at giving offense. It’s too bad, especially because it’s hard to see why this movie was made other than to expand Clara McGregor’s résumé. (She helped write the story with Caster and Vera Bulder, as served as a producer.) I genuinely wish her well, and better material.Bleeding LoveNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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    Beyoncé Fan’s Radio Request Reignites Country Music Debate

    A fan asked his Oklahoma radio station to play a new Beyoncé song. The request was rejected, spurring hundreds of calls and emails about the exclusion of Black musicians from the genre.In Oklahoma, a small country music station that refused a listener’s request to play a new song by Beyoncé was forced to change its tune after an uproar from fans who say that Black artists are too often excluded from the genre.On Tuesday morning, Justin McGowan requested that the D.J.s at KYKC, a country music radio station in Ada, play “Texas Hold ’Em,” one of two new songs Beyoncé released as announced in a Super Bowl commercial on Sunday.Beyoncé, who grew up in Houston, sings about hoedowns, and the twangy song also features a fellow Black Grammy winner, Rhiannon Giddens, on banjo and viola.The station manager, Roger Harris, emailed Mr. McGowan back with a concise rejection: “We do not play Beyoncé at KYKC as we are a country music station.” In sending the email, Mr. Harris unwittingly ignited a new flame in a long-simmering debate over how Black artists fit into a genre that has Black music at its roots.In the Super Bowl ad, Beyoncé joked that her new release would “break the internet.” She wasn’t kidding.Mr. McGowan put a screenshot of the rejection on social media, tagging a Beyoncé fan group in a post that drew 3.4 million views on X and sparked conversations on Reddit and TikTok.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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    Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez, the Diva of ‘Diva,’ Dies at 75

    A soprano who rose from South Philadelphia to the opera houses of Europe, she was memorably seen and heard in a 1981 film considered a paragon of cinematic style.Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez, a South Philadelphia-bred soprano who sang in the opera houses of Europe and gained even more fame for playing the title role in the style-soaked 1981 French thriller “Diva,” died on Feb. 2 at her home in Lexington, Ky. She was 75.Her daughter and only immediate survivor, Sheena M. Fernandez, said the cause was cancer.Trained at the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia and later at the Juilliard School in New York City, Ms. Fernandez made her mark in the 1970s as Bess in the Houston Grand Opera’s international traveling production of Gershwin’s “Porgy and Bess.” The tour took her to Europe, where she caught the eye of Rolf Liebermann, the impresario known for reviving the Paris Opera. He offered her a two-year contract.It was in a 1980 performance as Musetta in “La Bohème” alongside Plácido Domingo and Kiri Te Kanawa that she caught the attention of the French director Jean-Jacques Beineix, who was looking for a figure radiant enough to serve as the diva at the heart of his forthcoming film.“Diva” was considered a high-water mark in the movement known as the cinéma du look, a high-sheen school of French film often centered on stylish, disaffected youth in the France of the 1980s and ’90s. A film with all the saturated color and gloss of a 1980s music video, it was an art-house hit that became a cult favorite for the initiated.The story revolves around a young opera fan named Jules (played by Frédéric Andréi) who grows so infatuated with an American opera star named Cynthia Hawkins that he surreptitiously tapes one of her performances — despite her well-known decree that none of her work be recorded, since it would capture only a part of the power and immediacy of her grandeur.Ms. Fernandez in “Diva” with Frédéric Andréi, who played an infatuated fan.Rialto PicturesWe 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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    ‘Madame Web’ Review: Dakota Johnson Can’t Save This Spidey Spinoff

    The actress stars as a clairvoyant in the latest entry to the Spider-Man franchise, using her charm to rise above this flat, predictable movie.The only real bummer about “Madame Web,” the latest installment in the Spider-Man chronicles, isn’t that it’s bad, but that it never achieves memorably terrible status. The story is absurd, the dialogue snort-out-loud risible, the fights uninspired. Even so, there are glimmers of wit and competency. And then there’s its star, Dakota Johnson, who has a fascinating, seemingly natural ability to appear wholly detached from the nonsense swirling around her. Most actors at least try to sell the shoddy goods; Johnson serenely floats above it all.A misterioso clairvoyant, Madame Web is a secondary Spider-Man character who met the web-weaver in the comics in 1980 while regally parked on a life-support system shaped like a round-bottom flask. Blind and plagued by a debilitating autoimmune disease, she had a standard super-type get-up — a black unitard veined with lines that converge in a web — that was offset by a white-and-black hairdo that suggested she shared a stylist with Peter Parker’s editor J. Jonah Jameson. She entered with “a smell of ozone and disinfectant and age,” the classy intro explained, and with “a voice that crackles like ancient parchment.”Johnson’s Cassandra Webb — Cassie for short — is far younger and seems more like a patchouli and cannabis kind of gal, despite the frenetic wheel skills she displays in her job as a New York paramedic. Her powers haven’t yet emerged when, after a preamble in the Peruvian Amazon, she is speeding through the city in 2003. As with many superheroes, Cassie has a tragic back story and so on, a generic burden that Johnson’s palpably awkward charm humanizes. If the actress at times seems understandably baffled by the movie she’s in, it’s because she hasn’t been smoothed into plastic perfection by the star-making machinery. Johnson seems too real for the phoniness thrown at her, which is her own super power.The British director S.J. Clarkson has multiple TV credits on her résumé, including a few episodes of the Netflix series “Jessica Jones,” about the hard boozing, fighting and fornicating superhero. Johnson’s Cassie is sadder and more naturally offbeat than Jones, and like most big-screen superheroes, Cassie doesn’t seem to be getting any noncombative action. Yet she too doesn’t fit easily in Normal World. One of the better scenes in “Madame Web” happens at a baby shower, where Cassie inadvertently wipes the smiles off the faces of a roomful of women by talking about her dead mother. It’s squirmy, funny filler: the guest of honor is Mary Parker (Emma Roberts), Spidey’s soon-to-be mom, who chats with his future uncle, Ben (Adam Scott).Clarkson shares screenwriter credit with Claire Parker as well as with the writing team of Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless, whose collaborations include a string of critically maligned box-office fantasies: “Dracula Untold,” “Gods of Egypt,” “The Last Witch Hunter” and “Morbius.” (That’s entertainment!)“Madame Web” hits the prerequisite genre marks, more or less, as Cassie starts developing her second-sight skills and begins shuffling into the near future and back. One of the character’s more attractive attributes is that her powers are mental rather than physical, which seems to have flummoxed the filmmakers. The movie never coheres narratively, tonally or, really, any way; one problem is the people behind it don’t know what to do with a woman who thinks her way out of trouble.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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    A Model for Modern ‘Ring’ Operas Is Unfolding in Brussels

    Romeo Castellucci’s production of Wagner’s “Ring” at La Monnaie embodies ideas that the Metropolitan Opera should take note of for its own staging.Before Act II of Romeo Castellucci’s new staging of Wagner’s “Die Walküre,” at La Monnaie in Brussels, a note projected onto the curtain reads: “This production respects animals and takes care of their well-being as a priority.”At a recent performance, the message seemed like a follow-up to the first act, a way to explain the presence of a wolflike dog that stalked Sigmund and Sieglinde like an angel of death. But then the animals kept coming: at least 15 birds, then a horse for each of the nine Valkyries at the start of Act III.The use of animals is impressive on its own. Their entrances, though, are coups de théâtre on top of the already impressive stage magic in this high-risk, high-payoff “Walküre” — the latest installment in Castellucci’s “Ring” cycle at La Monnaie. (“Das Rheingold,” which I watched on video, opened last fall; “Siegfried” premieres in September, followed by “Götterdämmerung” in January.)As the Metropolitan Opera in New York shops around for its own “Ring” production later this decade (basically next week in the industry’s long planning cycles), its leaders might take notes from La Monnaie. Castellucci’s staging is a reminder that spectacle can have substance, that a “Ring” can be both abstract and theatrical and, above all, that an audience can handle intelligence — beliefs that the Met lost sight of with its most recent “Ring.”A bird, one of many used in “Die Walküre,” flying over Bretz, left, and Marie-Nicole Lemieux as Fricka.Monika RittershausCastellucci is an auteurist director who makes the extraordinary seem natural, who conjures surprises that baffle and amaze, sometimes self-indulgently, but often brilliantly. Driven more by imagery than plot, he has been best suited to staging oratorios or concert works like Mozart’s Requiem and Mahler’s Second Symphony. When it was announced that he would direct his first “Ring” in Brussels, there were scattered groans among opera fans who wondered whether his non-narrative style could sustain 15 hours of music.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