Aurelia Butler

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    ‘Porcelain War’ Review: A Defiant Dispatch From Ukraine

    A new documentary follows artists in wartime, on and off the battlefield.The latest documentary dispatch from Ukraine, “Porcelain War,” brings a message of hope rooted in art. Making art does feel like an act of resistance during the Russian invasion, when Kremlin propaganda attacks the very existence of Ukrainian culture. But what’s intriguing is that the directors, Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev, also celebrate Ukraine’s military defense, making for a jangly mix of idyll and warfare.Slava, who appears in the film, is both a ceramist and a member of a Ukraine special forces unit who gives weapons training to civilians turned soldiers. His partner, Anya, paints the whimsical figurines he creates, and the irrepressible couple weather the war in bombed-out Kharkiv with their more anxious pal Andrey, a painter and cameraman.Anya and Slava find some refuge in their house, and saccharine sequences show off tranquil fields and their cute dog. Some lovely animated moments set Anya’s finely wrought porcelain painting into motion; singing by the Ukrainian quartet DakhaBrakha rings out on the soundtrack.But then the focus shifts decisively to Slava’s army unit on the battlefield. Drone shots track bombs falling on Russian tanks and soldiers; Slava’s comrades hustle through ravaged buildings, equipped with GoPro cameras that give a first-person feel. Elsewhere, Andrey anguishes over spiriting his daughters away to Poland.Impressively, nearly everything was shot by the documentary’s subjects. Yet although their double duty is an awful fact of life in Ukraine, the film lurches between its varying components and tones. As the filmmakers repeatedly tie an inspirational bow on art and beauty, the good intentions yield cold comfort.Porcelain WarRated R for language and images of death. In Ukrainian, Russian and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Out of My Mind’ Review: Schooling a Teacher

    In this film adaptation of Sharon M. Draper’s novel, a nonverbal sixth-grader with cerebral palsy holds her own.Like many a self-respecting tween, Melody Brooks has a thing or two to say about this and that, and a need to be heard. But that need has a particular urgency: Melody, the central character in “Out of My Mind,” has cerebral palsy and is unable to speak.Her story, set in the early aughts and based on a novel by Sharon M. Draper, arrives onscreen with a family-friendly brightness, buoyed by upbeat montages. The director, Amber Sealey, and the strong cast keep things grounded, though, honoring the serious undercurrents while having some fun.As the ultrasmart girl using a wheelchair who longs for sparkly shoes and escape from educational segregation, Phoebe-Rae Taylor (making her screen debut and infusing the part with her experience of CP) has an expressive, knowing gaze, alive with eagerness as well as exasperation. A fan of “Friends,” Melody imagines her thoughts voiced by Jennifer Aniston and, in an effectively used narrative device, Aniston delivers the 12-year-old’s openhearted and playfully snark-tinged observations. Two effortlessly charismatic performers, Rosemarie DeWitt and Luke Kirby, play Melody’s loving, charmingly harried and ever so slightly cool parents, who battle the insurance company for access to a machine, the Medi-Talker, that enables their daughter to converse with others.One of Melody’s fiercest advocates, a sweet buttinsky neighbor (Judith Light), delivers a searing piece of wisdom in plain language. Melody takes the advice to heart when given a chance to “mainstream” with other sixth graders. She holds her own with the mean girls and schools a wisenheimer teacher (Michael Chernus). Her story is told in an uncomplicated way but not without subtlety. She’s easy to root for.Out of My MindNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. Watch on Disney+. More

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    ‘Joy’ Review: The Humans Behind I.V.F.

    Thomasin McKenzie plays an unheralded pioneer of in vitro fertilization in a new biography.In vitro fertilization is considered by many to be a miracle. It’s still controversial in some circles, as was seen in the recent election, when politicians made often contradictory pronouncements about it.But “Joy,” a biographical treatment of Jean Purdy, one of the pioneers of the science, while certainly waving the flag for the procedure, is primarily concerned with the human story behind the creation of I.V.F. It sets out to redress an imbalance — that the real-life Purdy, a nurse, was long unacknowledged for her work.This is one of those pictures where the actors outdo the conventional material they are given to work with. Thomasin McKenzie plays Purdy in a scenario that plays out over a decade. It begins in a British medical school with Purdy intrigued by the unorthodox theories on infertility put forth by Bill Nighy as Dr. Patrick Steptoe. Purdy, Steptoe and another doctor played with agreeable masculinity by James Norton team up and begin experimenting, understanding that their approach would attract disapprobation from religious and societal factions.And so it does — Jean is anonymously sent a doll with the word “sinner” scrawled across it in red marker. But she persists.The director, Ben Taylor, keeps the momentum up despite his weakness for marking the passage of time with eyebrow-raising needle drops. The movie is most effective in creating a rooting interest for Purdy’s character, while the maestro Nighy gets a nice juicy monologue at the end that he of course makes a meal of.JoyRated PG-13 for language and themes. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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    ‘Flow’ Review: A Cat’s Life

    A cat, a dog and a capybara embark on an epic adventure in this earnest and refreshingly unconventional animated film.“Flow,” an animated adventure film with a touch of magical realism, is a welcome entrant in the cat-movie canon, exuding a profound affection for our four-legged friends.Its hero, a plucky black cat with round, expressive eyes, doesn’t speak a word of dialogue, and acts more or less like a domestic house cat, but under the Latvian director Gints Zilbalodis’s doting gaze, he’s as well-developed as Atticus Finch, a noble character you can’t help but root for. Purring, scratching and scrabbling up walls, this cat virtually leaps off the screen.“Flow,” written by Zilbalodis and Matiss Kaza, concerns the cat’s survival during a flood of almost biblical proportions. The story, simple but compelling, unfolds as a kind of feline picaresque, as he clambers aboard a passing sailboat that drifts from one scenic exploit to another. He soon encounters other stranded animals, including a guileless Labrador retriever and a benevolent secretary bird, who tag along to form what eventually resembles a charming, ragtag menagerie. Their adventures together range from hair raising, as when a thunderstorm threatens to capsize their ship, to endearingly mundane, like when a rotund capybara helps a lemur gather a collection of knickknacks.It sounds saccharine, but Zilbalodis largely avoids the sort of whimsy and sentimentality that might plague, say, a Disney movie with the same premise. The animals act like real animals, not like cartoons or humans, and that restraint gives their adventure an authenticity that, in moments of both delight and peril, makes the emotion that much more powerful. With the caveat that I’m a cat lover, I was deeply moved.FlowRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Ernest Cole: Lost and Found’ Review: Chronicling Apartheid and Beyond

    Raoul Peck looks at the compelling South African photographer, who died in 1990, whose work gets a second life onscreen.Ernest Cole, the groundbreaking South African chronicler of apartheid, died in 1990 in Manhattan. He was 49 and had been in exile since 1966. A new documentary directed by Raoul Peck, “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found,” revives interest in the photographer, who trained his gaze on fellow Black South Africans living with the daily outrages and violent outbursts of a system that controlled their movements but not their meaning.In 2017, a trove of Cole’s work was found in a safe deposit box in Sweden. Amid that cache were the black-and-white images that were featured in his acclaimed photo book “House of Bondage.” First published in 1967, the book guaranteed the then-26-year-old’s banishment from his homeland.Peck makes use of keen observations excerpted from Cole’s writings and moves fluidly between stills (compassionate toward their subjects, damning of the subjugators) as well as quietly captivating photos he took of street life in Harlem and rural life during a road trip to the South in the 1960s and ’70s. The result is an elegantly wrought documentary that pulls off the trick of leaving viewers sated yet also craving more.Like Peck’s James Baldwin film, “I Am Not Your Negro,” this documentary also mixes the subject’s words with the filmmaker’s musings. “The total man does not live one experience,” the actor LaKeith Stanfield says in voice-over, quoting Cole. With its aching recognition of Cole’s creative triumphs and travails (he was, for a while, homeless), Peck’s film stands as a requisite biography, but also a personal homage: The response of one politically conscious artist to the call of another.Ernest Cole: Lost and FoundNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Bread & Roses’ Review: A Spirit of Resistance

    Three Afghan women struggle for rights in Sahra Mani’s documentary of life under Taliban rule today.When the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan three years ago, one of the group’s first orders of business was to systematically erase women’s rights. Girls’ schools shuttered, women were barred from public spaces and female professionals were told not to return to work.“Bread & Roses,” which follows the lives of three Afghan women in the wake of the Taliban’s return to power, does not communicate these prohibitions in voice-over or title cards. Instead, the director, Sahra Mani, makes the deliberate choice to clear the way for her subjects to reach the audience directly, in their own words.Through cellphone footage captured on the fly, the documentary zeros in on three subjects defying their loss of freedom: Sharifa, a former government employee stuck at home because of restrictions to being out in public; Zahra, a dentist taken by the Taliban after protesting for her rights; and Taranom, an activist sheltering in a safe house in Pakistan. Intercutting among scenes of these experiences, the film illustrates the effective options for women living under Taliban rule: house arrest, prison or exile.As the three stories veer off in different directions, the film struggles to coalesce around a clean narrative. It doesn’t help that we often only receive snippets of episodes, with the contexts hazy and the relations among those onscreen uncertain. But while the immediacy of the storytelling may blur out precise details, it excels at building stakes. When, in one memorable scene, young girls address the camera to demand brighter futures, the movie’s message and ongoing mission are thrown into sharp relief.Bread & RosesNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Watch on Apple TV+. More

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    ‘The Black Sea’ Review: Bulgarian Dreams

    In this quietly sweet indie, a Black Brooklynite finds himself stranded in a Bulgarian seaside town, where he finds unlikely redemption“They have dreams in Bulgaria?” Khalid asks a man, hiding from the downpour, in “The Black Sea.” One might say they do: “Like the American dream, but in Bulgarian way,” the stranger responds. In a sense, it’s what Khalid (Derrick B. Harden) has unwittingly found as he tidies up in the cafe he’s cobbled together in a small seaside Bulgarian town.Things move fast and somehow both bizarrely and believably so at the start of this somewhat peculiar but endearing indie directed by Crystal Moselle and Harden. We’re barely introduced to Khalid, a charismatic if unfocused Brooklynite, before he finds himself stranded in Bulgaria after the sugar mama he met on Facebook and came to meet is found dead seemingly the moment he arrives.Grounded by Harden’s natural and loosely charming performance, Khalid treats his nightmare scenario with an alternating sense of anxiety and buoyant, joshing can-do attitude. He gets a job with a town-running bully (who’s also his sugar mama’s son) named Georgi (Stoyo Mirkov), but when things go sideways, he turns instead to Ina (Irmena Chichikova), a local travel agent who gives him a place to crash. He finds his footing, makes friends with locals and starts slinging open-faced grilled cheeses and matcha teas out of a makeshift cafe.The fundamentals of this film are just about as arbitrary as Khalid’s personal journey — it’s not everyday that a low-budget American indie focuses on a stranded Black Brooklynite moving and shaking his way to a new life in small-town Bulgaria. Not that there needs to be a point at all.Regardless, Moselle and Harden work with a subtle naturalistic touch that makes for a quietly sweet movie about unlikely redemption. This is mostly rooted in the partnership between Khalid and Ina, a relationship that, in its avoidance of overt romantics, blossoms and finds meaning in the gentle progression of their closeness.The Black SeaRated R for language and some sexual material. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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    In Praise of Adele and the Long Black Dress

    As the artist brings her Las Vegas residency to an end, she leaves behind a major fashion legacy. Just call her Madame A.This weekend, Adele’s Las Vegas residency comes to an end and with it what may have been the most striking series of LBDs since Audrey Hepburn stepped out of a cab in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” wearing Givenchy. Those initials don’t just stand for little black dress anymore.By the time the artist takes her last bow, she will have worn more than 50 long black dresses in Vegas (to say nothing of her concerts in Munich and London, where she also wore LBDs) — a different one every weekend. She started in an off-the-shoulder velvet Schiaparelli, with a long satin sash caught up by a gold buckle speckled with nipples (you read that right). She wore David Koma with crystal roses on Valentine’s Day 2023. She channeled Morticia Addams on Halloween that fall in Arturo Obegero. She got Loro Piana to make its first va-va-voom gown this month.She has worn, in no particular order, LBDs from Stella McCartney, Dior, Carolina Herrera, Harris Reed, Prada, Vivienne Westwood, Robert Wun, Proenza Schouler, Armani, JW Anderson and Ralph Lauren, to name but a few. All were custom-made. She has worked with names from across the industry and rarely repeated a designer twice.The only guidelines, according to Fernando Garcia, the co-creative director of Oscar de la Renta, who made the glittery sunburst number she wore for her Christmas 2022 performance, were that they be black, long, cut on the curve to show off her waist and needed to have enough give to let her lungs go.Adele has fancied the LBD for almost as long as she has been in the public eye (see the night-sky Armani LBD she wore to the Grammys in 2012). But the sheer number of black gowns she has worn during her residency, the variety and the consistency of her presentation, marks a new milestone in what may be the most timeless garment in the fashion pantheon.At the start of her Las Vegas residency, Adele wore a velvet Schiaparelli with a satin sash and gold buckle speckled with nipples.Kevin Mazur/Getty ImagesIn October. she wore a Gaurav Gupta LGD with an off-the-shoulder neckline that resembled wings.Raven B. VaronaWe 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