Aurelia Butler

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    ‘Bob Trevino Likes It’ Review: From a Stranger to Found Family

    Barbie Ferreira shines as a young woman who befriends a stranger with her father’s name in this indie tear-jerker.There are two Bob Trevinos in “Bob Trevino Likes It.” One of them makes Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s character in “Hard Truths” look like parent of the year. The other starts out as a stranger, and grows into found family.The movie, written and directed by Tracie Laymon and based on her own experiences, centers on Lily Trevino (Barbie Ferreira), a lonely 20-something in Kentucky who friends Bob on Facebook. She was hoping to connect with her father (French Stewart), a deadbeat recently gone AWOL. Instead, she and Bob the introvert (John Leguizamo) develop a tender intergenerational bond.Setting aside the datedness of the technology — Lily often posts 2010s-era Facebook statuses littered with hashtags — “Bob Trevino Likes It” is a middling indie tear-jerker. It suffers from an overwritten script chock-full of tropes and artificial dialogue. “You don’t have any tools,” Bob exclaims to Lily at one point, meaning a literal toolbox, but also, you know, a metaphorical, emotional one.Any genuine feeling emanates from Lily. Ferreira pitches herself into the trite story line with enthusiasm, and her verve breathes life into even the most leaden lines. On a handful of occasions, Laymon has her protagonist gaze into the camera in shallow focus with a swirling effect around her head. The moments viscerally convey a feeling of belonging by making use of a considerable asset: Ferreira’s wide open face.Bob Trevino Likes ItRated PG-13 for family crises. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘The Alto Knights’ Review: A Double Helping of De Niro

    Robert De Niro plays the crime lords Vito Genovese and Frank Costello in this film about midcentury Mafia moves.“The Alto Knights,” a new mob movie starring Robert De Niro, carries a lot of weight from its very beginning. Not just historical weight about the Mafia — it concentrates on a stretch from the mid-1950s into the early 1970s — but cinematic weight as well.It’s the story of a gangster friendship that turns homicidally sour. The New York City crime lords Vito Genovese and Frank Costello, we’re told here by way of narration from Costello, became best friends in a Little Italy social club called Alto Knights.The criminals develop different styles. Vito stayed downtown, calling shots, literally and figuratively, from a crate-filled back room, while Frank cultivated such a high profile as a, ahem, “professional gambler” that he made the cover of Time magazine. Frank is enjoying his life so thoroughly that he doesn’t register Vito’s irritation until he survives a shooting by one of Vito’s foot soldiers, a hulking brute by the name of Vincent Gigante.Yes, it’s that Vincent Gigante, the one who eventually got the nickname “Chin” (and the actor playing him, Cosmo Jarvis, does his level best to put that facial feature forward in all his scenes). Debra Messing plays Costello’s wife, Bobbie, whose role in the marriage seems to be to smile reassuringly. Other names that will ring bells with Cosa Nostra connoisseurs include Albert Anastasia and the quaint upstate hamlet called Apalachin.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 Assessment’ Review: Meticulously Planned Parenthood

    A couple must endure a punishing evaluation process for permission to become parents in this sleek, hermetic science fiction.A sterile drama about state-controlled procreation, “The Assessment,” the first feature from the French director Fleur Fortuné, is visually stark and emotionally chilling. From the elegant severity of Jan Houllevigue’s production design to Magnus Jonck’s coolly unwelcoming cinematography, the movie repels warmth. By the end, you’ll want nothing so much as a woolly jumper.In a future dystopia, two married scientists, Mia and Aaryan (Elizabeth Olsen and Himesh Patel), live and work in their isolated seaside home. Aaryan designs virtual pets (the state has exterminated the real ones, presumably to conserve resources), while Mia experiments with sustainable methods of food production. Work, however, is not enough, and the couple wants a child — a desire that requires a weeklong assessment of their suitability as parents.Enter Virginia (a brilliantly creepy Alicia Vikander), the assessor who will subject them to an escalating program of mental and physical torment. Prim and impassive, she spies on them having sex and collects their body fluids, and her horrifying role-playing as a bratty toddler would make even the broodiest wife rethink her options. As Virginia’s behavior grows increasingly intrusive and even sinister, dislodging secrets that will shake Mia and Aaryan’s marriage, “The Assessment” builds to a baffling act of pointless destruction.Virginia has her own motivations, but the movie’s last-ditch attempt to absolve the character, and reveal the world beyond her repellent games, proves too little, too late. Prioritizing aesthetics over narrative, the film offers only superficial hints of a society riven by class and authoritarian politics: The wealthy enjoy artificially extended life spans beneath an invisible dome, while the rest inhabit an “old world” of deprivation and disease. Consequently, “The Assessment” — much like a brutally honest centenarian (an awesome Minnie Driver) whom Virginia invites to dinner — is much easier to respect than to love.The AssessmentRated R for forced sex and a frightening dinner party. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Snow White’ Review: A Princess’s Progress

    The new live-action version of Disney’s 1937 animated fairy tale has drawn (maddening) criticism for its casting and an updated story. But liberation only goes so far.Disney’s new “Snow White” is perfectly adequate, though the scene when our heroine stands alongside Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez chanting “no justice, no peace” did admittedly give me pause. Yes, this live-action redo of its 1937 feature-length animated film has been called out as woke, but by the end, the overall damage from Snow White’s liberation struggle proves minimal. She still smiles and sings, whistles and works, rejects evil and rescues seven potential incels. Snow White no longer trills about a prince, true, but heteronormativity still has its happy ending. Huzzah!If somehow you’ve missed the most maddening of the nitwit controversies that have been swirling around Disney’s latest remake, good for you for having a life. It is — and has been — a dispiritingly familiar spectacle of bigotry and rank nonsense, with the ugliest twittering centered on the casting of the young Latina actress Rachel Zegler (“West Side Story”), who wasn’t deemed pale enough by trolls to play the title role. Of course the 1937 character is animated and she doesn’t look white as snow, either, because people don’t unless they’re in whiteface.Criticisms of Disney aren’t new, of course, and have reliably come from film critics as well as pundits from both sides of the political spectrum. Disney’s “Aladdin” (1992) ushered in a new age of princess diversity with an Arabian royal named Jasmine, but the film itself fumbled representationally. Critics slammed some of its images as well as song lyrics that were excised from later editions of the movie. As Disney expanded its princess portfolio, it continued to generate praise and criticism for both avoiding and sometimes reinforcing stereotypes, including in “The Princess and the Frog” (2009), which showcased its first Black princess.The Snow White in the new movie isn’t coded as anything other than sweet and spunky. Like her predecessors, she comes with the usual princess prerequisites: a royal patrimony, a dead mother, a killer stepmom and a guy waiting, at times riding in from the wings on a white horse. As in the original film — the studio’s first full-length animated feature — this Snow White is born to a King and Queen who are expediently sidelined. The Evil Queen (as she’s called), who’s played by Gal Gadot with less animation than the typical cartoon royal, talks into a mirror and doesn’t like what she hears. She subsequently makes life miserable for Snow White, who remains spirited enough to sing while mopping.Zegler has enough charm and lung power to hold the center of this busy, overproduced movie with its mix of memorable old and unmemorable new songs. Directed by Marc Webb and written by Erin Cressida Wilson, Snow White 2.0 dusts off Disney’s take on the Grimm fairy tale, modernizes it with girl empowerment and tosses in a bit of “Les Mis”-style storm-the-barricades uplift. Oddly, while the prince in the first film shows up only near the start and end, Zegler’s Snow White has to deal more forcefully with her insipid love interest, presumably to pad the story. He’s a smiler, Jonathan (Andrew Burnap), who’s been demoted to a commoner and leads a merry band of dancing-and-singing thieves.One of the more striking things about the 1937 film is that as the title “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” suggests, the story largely concerns her relationship with the seven miners. Some friendly critters guide Snow White to the miners’ storybook cottage where she bustles about, cleaning and cooking for Doc, Sneezy and the rest. In effect, before she can have her happily ever after, she continues practicing the housekeeping skills she honed under her stepmother to become a mother-wife to some unthreatening male companions. Shortly after the original Doc says to “search every cook and nanny,” the old Snow White cheerfully steps into those roles. The new Snow White, not so much.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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    ‘Magazine Dreams’ Review: Pain Without Gain

    Shown at Sundance two years ago, the film was shelved when its star, Jonathan Majors, was arrested and charged with assault and harassment of his girlfriend at the time.Killian Maddox (Jonathan Majors) has one goal in life: to be the greatest bodybuilder on Earth. His focus is so single-minded that he has little else to talk about. About a third of the way into “Magazine Dreams,” the shy Killian, having finally worked up the courage to ask, takes Jessie (Haley Bennett), his colleague at a supermarket, on a date.It doesn’t go well. At the restaurant, Killian startles Jessie with his casual disclosure of his mother’s violent death. (“Someone killed her. My dad did. He shot her and then he shot himself. That’s why they’re both dead.”) He orders enough protein to feed a platoon. Then he regales her with details of his regimen and his fear that others don’t respect him. “I’m going to place and get my pro card,” he tells Jessie. “Then I bet they won’t just walk by me.”The too-briefly-seen Bennett has the Cybill Shepherd role in this strained effort to make “Taxi Driver” for bodybuilders. On the evidence, the writer-director, Elijah Bynum, has also studied Scorsese’s other work, particularly “The King of Comedy” (Killian writes obsessive letters to an idol who has made the cover of Men’s Health) and the Steadicam march to the boxing ring in “Raging Bull.”Bynum supplies his own version of that shot midway through, when Killian, having just been savagely beaten by a group of men whose store he has wrecked, arrives at a bodybuilding competition still bloody. In a single, fluid camera movement, Killian enters the building and takes the stage, flexing his muscles and visibly struggling to grin through his pain. It’s an impressive show of bravado from both the actor and the director, albeit in a way that makes it difficult to tell who’s swaggering more — the character or the filmmaker.“Magazine Dreams” bludgeons viewers to show off its sensitivity. Bynum piles on the misery in increasingly bogus ways. As big as Killian is, he has thin skin from the time a judge told him his deltoids were too small. He’s too naïve to realize that posting a video of his training online will invite nasty comments. After he crashes his car, a doctor informs him that he needs surgery. “I can’t have a scar,” Killian replies. “I’m a bodybuilder. Bodybuilders can’t have scars.” Perhaps at a loss as to how to resolve the drama in a less hackneyed manner, Bynum adds guns.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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    ‘Ash’ Review: Deep-Space Horrors

    In this sleek film by Flying Lotus, Eiza González plays a marooned explorer haunted by the killing of her crew mates.The high-concept sci-fi horror film “Ash,” a hazy story about an amnesiac deep-space explorer who awakens to discover her entire crew was killed, is light on answers but heavy on style.The movie begins with a staggered Riya (Eiza González) surveying the mutilated bodies on the cold minimalist floors and walls of her interstellar outpost. There is an unexplainable gash on her forehead and a robotic system alerting her to abnormal activity happening around her. She and her crew members arrived on this distant planet — a craggy world curtained by cobalt-blue shadows and white embers — in search of a potential new home for mankind, but found something far more sinister. If only she could remember what happened.Though not as adventurous, “Ash,” from the musician-turned-director Steven Ellison, known as Flying Lotus, conjures comparisons to “Alien” and “Mission to Mars.” Its futuristic science: a terraforming planet, celestial alignment, parasitic beings — is equally wonky. Because the fractal script doesn’t aim to provide explanations, this film can be confusing. But that incomprehensibility is part of its aesthetically alluring package.By applying psychedelic medical patches to her neck, Riya is able to channel gruesome memories in loud drips and booming drops, releasing a wave of scratchy, blurred frames recalling melted faces and stomach-churning scenes set to Flying Lotus’s brooding score. When another voyager (Aaron Paul) arrives, this incites further questions whose revelations inspire a grisly third act freak-out; the mesmerizing barrage of gore makes for a memorable display.AshRated R for bloody violence, gore and language. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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    Jensen McRae and 10 More Artists to Watch

    Every week, our critics spotlight notable new songs on the Playlist. Here’s more about 11 artists behind them, selected by the pop music critics Jon Pareles, Jon Caramanica and Lindsay Zoladz; a culture reporter, Joe Coscarelli; and Caryn Ganz, the pop music editor for The New York Times. (Listen on Spotify and Apple Music.)an interview withJensen McRaeJensen McRae writes constantly: journals, poems, fiction, screenplays and, most publicly, songs. “I’ve always wanted to do a million things with regard to writing and telling stories,” she said. “But music was always the first choice.”Born in Santa Monica, Calif., and still based in Los Angeles, McRae, 27, joins a long history of California folk-pop songwriters — the legacy of the Laurel Canyon era — who draw on the diaristic specifics of their lives for songs that listeners take to heart. Her second album, “I Don’t Know How But They Found Me!,” is due April 25, with a tour that starts in May.As a child, “I was usually one of the only Black kids in a class,” McRae recalled in a video interview. “When you’re put into the observer, outsider position early on, it makes it pretty easy to figure out who you really are and what you really want, because conformity isn’t a choice. I started to develop this identity of being a narrator and a collector of details about my life, about other people’s lives.”McRae has old-school inclinations. Her music relies on hand-played, organic instruments and the power of her unadorned voice. Her 2022 debut album, “Are You Happy Now?,” included stark songs like “Wolves,” about sexual predators, accompanied only by her guitar.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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    Touring Kennedy Center, Trump Mused on His Childhood ‘Aptitude for Music’

    During his first visit to the Kennedy Center since making himself the chairman of its board, President Trump had a lot to say about Broadway shows, dancers in silk tights, the Potomac River and Elvis Presley.But in a private discussion at the start of a meeting of the center’s board on Monday, Mr. Trump offered something he usually steers away from in bigger settings: a personal anecdote about his childhood.He told the assembled board members that in his youth he had shown special abilities in music after taking aptitude tests ordered by his parents, according to three participants in the meeting.He could pick out notes on the piano, he told the board members, some of whom he’s known for years and others who are relatively new to him. But the president said that his father, Fred Trump, was not pleased by his musical abilities, according to the participants, and that he had never developed his talent. One person in the room said Mr. Trump appeared to be joking about his father. “I have a high aptitude for music,” he said at one point, according to people at the meeting. “Can you believe that?”“That’s why I love music,” he added. Mr. Trump’s remarks have not been previously reported. They were not part of an audio recording of the board meeting obtained by The New York Times earlier this week.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