Aurelia Butler

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    How ‘September 5’ Recreates a Historic News Broadcast

    The drama chronicles the 1972 Munich Olympics attack from ABC Sports’ point of view, a perspective that resonates today. But the film arrives at a fraught time.“They’re all gone.”When the sports broadcaster Jim McKay announced the deaths of 11 Israeli Olympic team members taken hostage by the Palestinian militant group Black September at the 1972 Summer Games in Munich, it was a sentence freighted with emotion and instantly became a part of broadcast history.In the new film “September 5,” there is no actor playing McKay, who instead “plays” himself through archival footage woven throughout the drama, which focuses almost entirely on the ABC Sports control room as it retells the saga that unfolded that day.As the dramatized ABC Sports team pivots from the Olympics to breaking news, the real footage unspools on actual monitors from the era: “September 5” features a painstakingly recreated control room with 1970s technology restored to working order.The broadcasters weren’t the focus when the director, Tim Fehlbaum, and his team started their research in 2020, poring over police files and archival collections. But the ethical issues remain, more than half a century later. Fehlbaum said getting the details right was important.“The technology obviously has changed,” he said. “Maybe the bigger questions are still the same.”The 1972 Olympics have been covered multiple times on the big screen before, in movies like Steven Spielberg’s “Munich” (2005) and the documentary “One Day in September” (2000). The episode had long intrigued Fehlbaum, a Swiss director who went to film school in Munich and worked on many student films shot at the former Olympic Village.But it was only after talking to people who were in Munich at the time that they found their protagonist in Geoffrey Mason. In 1972 he was a young producer for ABC Sports thrust into a position of responsibility shortly after hearing gunshots in the distance. Mason had to weigh guidance from his superiors — the “Wide World of Sports” creator Roone Arledge (played by Peter Sarsgaard) and the longtime producer Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin) — and quickly come up with answers to difficult ethical questions like how to respond to potential graphic violence on a live broadcast watched by millions.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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    Lovable Movie Robots Are Coming to Charm Your Children

    The adult world is ever more full of robots. Children’s entertainment feels as if it’s working hard to make them seem adorable.One near certainty about raising a young child these days is that you and your offspring will be exposed to a lot of stories about robots. Another is that the robots working their charms most effectively on you will belong to a new kind of archetype: the sympathetic robot. Sitting in darkened theaters with my 5-year-old son, I have watched any number of these characters. They are openhearted and often dazzled by the wonders of everyday life — innocently astounded by, say, the freedom of playing in the surf, the bliss of dancing with a loved one or the thrill of just holding hands. They might be more winningly human than some of the humans you know.The robots in our fictions used to be more sinister. Our notion of artificial life has included the bioengineered humanoids in “Blade Runner,” the homicidal computer in “2001: A Space Odyssey” and the one that wages war on its makers in the “Terminator” movies. Long before that, we had Frankenstein’s monster in Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel and the golem in some versions of 17th-century Jewish folklore. These were often stories of hubris, of humanity’s inability to think through all that we were setting loose: Synthetic life was constantly breaking away from its creators’ grasp and committing heinous, forbidden acts. Even when the characters were more abstruse, operating beyond the ken of the people they manipulated — like the artificial intelligence Wintermute in William Gibson’s “Neuromancer” — they were, in some sense, gods that we mortals unleashed on the world and then struggled to control.This hasn’t entirely changed. We still enjoy stories about malevolent machines, like the homicidal A.I. doll in “M3gan.” With other fictional robots, it’s not clear if they’re dangerous or merely hapless: Look to “Sunny,” recently on Apple TV+, in which a human protagonist spends most of the series trying to determine if she can trust the upbeat, bumbling homebot left to her by her roboticist husband. That kind of fear and suspicion, though, has mainly been reserved for adults. Children are offered a far more optimistic view — one that has lately seemed to go well beyond the endearing robots of the past, like R2-D2 and BB-8 in the “Star Wars” films, or the Iron Giant, or Sox in “Lightyear.”Take Roz, the main character of the animated film “The Wild Robot,” which came out in September. Like the Peter Brown book series on which it is based, the movie focuses on a robot protagonist that gains emotional complexity after she washes ashore on an island unpopulated by humans, learns to communicate with the animals she meets there and becomes the surrogate mother of an orphaned gosling. Roz changes and adapts; she goes from seeing her care for the gosling as a rote task to welcoming it as a real connection. She embraces the wildness of the animals around her and ceases to be the unfeeling machine that her programming intended. Instead, she becomes an unnatural champion for the natural world — one whose touching incomprehension of how to care for a newborn makes her charming.Or consider “Robot Dreams,” an animated feature by Pablo Berger that came out earlier this year. Based on a graphic novel by Sara Varon, it is set in a version of 1980s New York inhabited by humanlike animals who can, among other things, order build-your-own-robot kits advertised on late-night television. This film, with its theme of loneliness and its surprisingly mature depiction of how relationships change, might be better for slightly older children: It follows a dog and its robot companion as they grow close and then are driven apart, exploring the ways that love can evolve over time. But near the end, it is the robot, not the anthropomorphic dog who built it, that has to make a heartbreakingly human decision.This is all in spite of the remarkably bleak near future portrayed in many of these children’s films. 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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    Thanksgiving Streaming Recommendations for Every Mood

    Whether you’re with hanging out with children or adults, want to laugh or tuck into an adventure, here are some specific selections to stream.“What do you all want to watch?”This question has torpedoed many get-togethers, leaving the poor soul wielding the remote at a Thanksgiving gathering to search and scroll through seemingly infinite streaming options until everyone is cross-eyed and over it. Let’s skip that part, shall we? Here are a handful of picks that might fit the bill for some common holiday dynamics.Family Friendly, but Not CornyAlex Honnold climbs El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. His feat was captured in the 2018 documentary “Free Solo.”Jimmy Chin/National GeographicDocumentary with the little ones: “Tiger” (Disney+)There is no shortage of stunning nature documentaries, but this 2024 Disneynature film from the director Mark Linfield (“Planet Earth”) goes beyond the usual script to tell a poignant family tale. Narrated by Priyanka Chopra Jonas and filmed over the course of 1,500 days, we follow a tigress named Ambar in the forests of India as she protects her cubs from predators and adverse weather while on a perpetual quest to feed them and herself.Documentary with the teenagers: “Free Solo” (Disney+)This 2018 film that follows Alex Honnold on his free solo ascent of El Capitan, a vertical rock formation in Yosemite National Park, won the Oscar for best documentary for good reason. Not only will his feat shake your understanding of what is humanly possible, but how it was captured on film (Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin directed) is just as gripping. Watch this on the biggest television you have. It’s worth it.Feature with the little ones: “Elemental” (Disney+)If you’ve already seen “Inside Out 2,” try this 2023 Pixar comedy set in Element City, where characters are divided into four strata: water, earth, air and fire, all magnificently rendered, creating a dazzling animated experience. The plot looks thoughtfully at family ties while telling a story of cross-cultural romantic love and self-actualization.Feature with the teenagers: “Spirited Away” (Max)It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly 25 years since the release of this now revered Oscar-winning fantasy anime from the celebrated Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki. It re-entered the zeitgeist this year with Billie Eilish’s track “Chihiro,” named after the film’s main character, a girl who slips into another realm, where she becomes trapped. The hand-drawn animation is transporting, and the coming-of-age themes will open the door for some deeper reflection.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 Seed of the Sacred Fig’ Review: When the World Is a Prison

    Mohammad Rasoulof’s powerful drama about the authoritarian Iranian government breaks a fourth wall, with consequences.The ubiquity of smartphones capable of filming anything, anywhere, has been a blessing and a curse to autocratic governments. On the one hand, protests and nascent revolutions can be filmed and broadcast, seen around the world, making the authoritarian’s attempt to quash dissent much more onerous.But there’s a shadow side. Autocrats can compel obedience by means of overt force, but it’s much more canny — and more insidious — to turn everyone into individual agents of surveillance. Thinking your office might be wiretapped is bad enough, but knowing whatever you do might be filmed by your snitch neighbor, or sibling, is a powerful motivator to fall into line even in the private sphere. And those phones? They’re perfect little monitoring machines.This possibility is a basic fact of 21st-century life, and Mohammad Rasoulof makes powerful use of it in his drama “The Seed of the Sacred Fig.” Titles before the film begins announce that it was made in secret, because “when there is no way, a way must be made.” In the past, Rasoulof’s films have resulted in travel bans and prison sentences in his native country of Iran, where he’s run afoul of strict censorship laws. When “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” was announced as a selection at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the Iranian government interrogated the cast and crew, subjecting them to travel bans. On May 8, less than a week before the start of the festival, Rasoulof was sentenced to flogging and eight years in prison. He and several of the film’s crew fled their country for Europe, and he remains in exile.It’s not hard to see why the film seemed so dangerous. It puts a frame around inconvenient truths. The main drama concerns a family of four: Iman (Missagh Zareh), his wife, Najmeh (Soheila Golestani), and their two daughters, 21-year-old Rezvan (Mahsa Rostami) and her teenage sister, Sana (Setareh Maleki). Iman has recently been made an investigating judge in Tehran’s revolutionary court, a position of prestige, and Najmeh is overjoyed. Iman aspires to do his job justly.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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    ‘Moana 2’ Review: It Doesn’t Rock the Boat

    In this benign sequel, the Disney princess continues her seafaring ways and remains admirably uninterested in finding a prince.“Moana,” Disney’s breezy foray into Polynesian myth and culture, was released almost exactly eight years ago. Anyone remember what was going on that month? Amid an election, a reckoning and political anxiety, Moana’s anthems about voyaging beyond the confines of her coral reef (the tropical version of a glass ceiling) to save her people from environmental disaster rang out with special feeling.That resonance doesn’t really carry over into “Moana 2,” a sequel that seems to abide by the “if it ain’t broke” rule. Directed by David G. Derrick Jr., Jason Hand, Dana Ledoux Miller, the movie charts a parallel course to its predecessor, following Moana (voiced by Auliʻi Cravalho) as she leaves home on an odyssey with her island’s future at stake. Along the way, she meets up with Maui (Dwayne Johnson), the burly, smug demigod still prone to jaunty jibes — he often calls Moana “Curly” — and corny metatextual commentary written, presumably, for the benefit of the millennial and Gen-X adults in the room. (“That’ll make sense in 2,000 years,” he quips, after using the term “butt dial.”)Coming off a successful restoration of the hydrosphere’s ecological balance, Moana, now a practiced voyager, begins the sequel by expressing an upgraded objective: establish contact with inhabitants of nearby islands. Soon enough, she receives a vision from her ancestors on the very topic, encouraging her to take an arduous journey across the ocean. Upon her dad’s urging, Moana assembles a small and somewhat haphazard way-finding crew, including a crotchety agriculturalist (David Fane), an excitable marine engineer (Rose Matafeo) and a muscled communications expert (Hualalai Chung). This jumble of new faces often feels like a waste of screen space, especially when the ocean, a wonderful animistic motif, is perfectly capable of buoying Moana on her travels.The group’s destination is Motufetu, an island that once served as a hub for disparate Pacific Islanders before Nalo, an evil storm god, sank it beneath the ocean. To bring back Motufetu and restore social harmony, humans need to find the land and step foot upon it. Onscreen, the details of this fabricated, composite mythology get a little murky. But squint your eyes against the specifics, and the odyssey tends to deliver a mood that fluctuates along a scale of benign to bright.The musical numbers, from Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear (picking up the reins from the original movie’s Lin-Manuel Miranda), as well as Opetaia Foa‘i and Mark Mancina, are competently written and arranged (save for one painful rap sequence). The big anthem is “Beyond,” a corollary to “How Far I’ll Go” that has Moana rehashing the pull to go out exploring, just a tad farther than last time. The song is a reminder that Moana is a member of the new and improved Disney kingdom, in which heroines reach happily ever after through personal growth, coming-of-age and finding themselves. Notably, and perhaps admirably, there remains no prince to Moana’s princess, although she does retain her animal sidekicks of rooster and pig.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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    Kim Hill Is Building Her Seat at the Table

    After walking away from the Black Eyed Peas, the artist and designer has been making work on her own terms.Before the Black Eyed Peas were a stadium act fronted by Will.i.am and Fergie, they were a trio of quirky Los Angeles-based rappers who often collaborated with Black female singers. Macy Gray, best known for her 1999 hit “I Try,” sang on their first two albums, released in 1998 and 2000. But their closest female collaborator in those days was Kim Hill.Hill, now 54, never formally joined the group (she got her own solo deal with the band’s label, Interscope Records), but she toured with them for five years and contributed vocal hooks to tracks like “The Way U Make Me Feel” (which she co-wrote) and “What It Is,” both released in 1998. The video for the latter shows her mugging for the camera alongside Will, Taboo and Apl.de.ap and, while her sultry vocals temper their young-man energy, she’s too goofy and fully clothed (in a fuzzy tangerine bucket hat, jeans and a trench coat) to present as what she calls a “come hither” chanteuse.That kind of typecasting never appealed to Hill. Growing up in a suburb of Syracuse, N.Y. — where she sang gospel at church but also performed with the city’s predominantly white children’s choir — she learned to use her wit to put people at ease and honed her sense of when it was time to make an exit. “I never feel like I have to be stuck somewhere that doesn’t feel good energetically or spiritually,” she says. “When it’s time to dip, it’s time to dip.”After majoring in dance at Philadelphia’s University of the Arts, she moved to Los Angeles to pursue music. Label representatives looking for the new Mariah or Whitney were befuddled by this Black girl performing folksy songs with R&B vocals over hip-hop beats. But she connected with the Peas’ misfit energy when she met them at an artist showcase in 1995. She remembers thinking, “These are my people.”For the next five years, Hill traveled the world with the group, but eventually, she believes, her bandmates seemed to resent the attention she was getting from fans and the press. At the label, she perceived an ambient though unspoken discontent about her refusal to sexualize her image. In 2000, she says, she got word that the band was getting a raise from which she’d been excluded and felt sure it was time to part ways. When the Peas’ third album, “Elephunk” (2003), introduced Fergie — who proved central to their crossover success — Hill watched the group’s ascent with the pain of one left behind, as well as some big-sisterly pride.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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    Danielle Deadwyler Goes Deep in “The Piano Lesson”

    On a recent Sunday morning in West Hollywood, the actress Danielle Deadwyler wore all white, clad in a pristine Tory Burch dress.“You know what white represents?” she said. “Spiritually, it’s rebirth: You get baptized, you put on a white robe, and you allow yourself to be witnessed in a certain way and to be changed. I think I’m in the midst of all of that.”Did she have a sense of where that change would take her?“Hell no,” Deadwyler said. “But I’m open.”Certainly, she appears headed in the right direction. After supporting roles in “The Harder They Fall” and “Station Eleven” established her as an actress to watch, Deadwyler’s career breakthrough came two years ago with the film “Till,” about the 1955 Mississippi murder that helped catalyze the civil-rights movement. For her deeply felt performance as Mamie Till, whose 14-year-old son Emmett was slain by white supremacists, Deadwyler won leading honors from the NAACP Awards, Gotham Awards and National Board of Review.She’s every bit as powerful in Netflix’s “The Piano Lesson,” which premiered on the streamer last week and is once again earning the 42-year-old actress awards buzz. Based on the play by August Wilson, “The Piano Lesson” casts Deadwyler as Berniece, a widowed mother at odds with her brother, Boy Willie (John David Washington), in post-Depression-era Pittsburgh. Both siblings must contend with generational trauma that’s wrapped up in the fate of their family piano: Though Boy Willie wants to sell it to buy land, Berniece insists the piano should stay put, since it serves as a totemic reminder of what their enslaved ancestors have been through.Danielle Deadwyler stars as Berniece in “The Piano Lesson,” an adaptation of August Wilson’s play.As Berniece deals with Boy Willie, rebuffs the preacher Avery (Corey Hawkins), who seeks to court her, and shares a surprising, erotically charged moment with her brother’s friend Lymon (Ray Fisher), Deadwyler feels compellingly real in the role. “I’ve never felt like I was watching Danielle in this, I never thought of her outside the role,” said Denzel Washington, who produced the film. Unlike other actors who are determined to show their work, Deadwyler simply embodies the character, Washington said: “If you can dissect it, then they’re probably not very good, right? It’s what you get from it that’s proof of what they’re doing — it’s what you feel.”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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    Lauren Mayberry of Chvrches Is Making a Statement on Her Own

    Lauren Mayberry was in the bunk of her band’s tour bus in the winter of 2021, rolling between Denver and Boulder, Colo., when she started wondering how old Gwen Stefani was when she released her first solo record.“I had an overly romantic notion of being in a band, this kind of ‘Goonies’ mentality,” Mayberry said, referring to her role since 2011 as frontwoman for the Glaswegian synth-pop trio Chvrches. “I was very conscious of not wanting to be perceived as disloyal.”Despite her hesitation to step out on her own, “If the only reason you’re not doing something is because of how it might make other people feel,” she continued, “you’re going to people-please yourself to death.”In the end, she took the plunge: Mayberry’s solo debut, “Vicious Creature,” due Dec. 6, is a fresh start that allows the singer and songwriter, 37, to approach her career from a different aesthetic and more empowering angle. Mayberry was only 23 when she joined Chvrches, years younger than her bandmates, the multi-instrumentalists Iain Cook and Martin Doherty. Over four albums, Cook and Doherty supplied a dizzying architecture of synth soundscapes that she filled with broody lyrics and her clarion vocals. The band inspired word-of-mouth buzz from the beginning — a little more than a year after anonymously releasing their first song, Chvrches were opening for Depeche Mode. But Mayberry worried her purpose was at times decorative.“I remember feeling really out of my depth and lonely,” she said.Mayberry onstage in 2023. She will soon be preparing for a “Vicious Creature” tour that kicks off in early 2025, although she has already been playing songs from the album live for more than a year.Jc Olivera/Getty ImagesSeated at her kitchen table in the cozy Los Angeles bungalow she shares with her musician boyfriend, Sam Stewart (son of the Eurythmics co-founder Dave), Mayberry quickly moved a scented candle before it burned the tail of their cat, Cactus. She admitted she would invoke the production term “quantizing” during early interviews without knowing its meaning, and flashed a droll smile when asked what distinguishes her solo songs from the Chvrches catalog. “Less synths,” she replied.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