Aurelia Butler

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    ‘Captain America: Brave New World’ Review: Anthony Mackie’s Turn

    The latest Marvel movie introduces a new Captain America in the form of a political thriller.Picture this: a suspected killer running from the government; a gruff president staving off enemies on a plane; a brainwashed former soldier embroiled in a conspiracy. It’s not the spiky political thrillers “The Fugitive” or “Air Force One” or “The Manchurian Candidate,” it’s “Captain America: Brave New World.”Then again, the film recruited Harrison Ford into a cinematic universe that single-handedly welded the modern movie wink — why not give us what we expect? In its early goings, “Brave New World” does indeed read partially as a paranoid ’90s genre film trapped in a Marvel movie, struggling to break free from its franchise constraints: too much setup, too many villains, too much thinly scattered lore.After Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie), a.k.a. the new Captain America, retrieves a valuable substance known as adamantium from the villain Sidewinder (Giancarlo Esposito as a hammy iteration of Gus Fring, his “Breaking Bad” character), he brings it back to a grateful President Ross (Harrison Ford). At a gathering meant to announce a global treaty around adamantium’s usage, the president is nearly assassinated by Isaiah Bradley (Carl Lumbly, a bright spot), a former soldier who goes rogue. Wilson, in turn, goes off to find the mystery villain who is controlling not only Bradley, but also what eventually becomes a hulking-mad Ross.It’s all a lot to process and yet not nearly enough to hold your attention. For all of the movie’s genre ambitions, the only wisps of tangible political intrigue to be found are in the ones unintended, or via allusions to ones already explored (global class politics and the mixed messages about a Black Captain America in the film’s TV precursor, “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier”).What’s left instead is a movie whose idea of tension is mostly to move at light speed with constant explication. The film, directed by Julius Onah, has the frayed tailoring of a movie marked by reshoots and changes: The writing is stiff and the ensemble is mostly charmless, while the visuals are slapdash.As the new Captain America, Mackie was perhaps doomed from the start. And yet, he lacks the megawatt magnetism to elevate, or even just obscure, the poor construction of a tentpole franchise on his own. He is a far better actor elsewhere, but here his stand-alone avenger and the bad blockbuster only show the loose seams.What the film mostly relies on instead is Ford, not only as an actor, but as his alter ego. When the Red Hulk finally does appear, it’s an add-on — a last-ditch effort to instead recapture the kind of fan-service glee of Marvels old. With its cheap action and garish visuals, it’s then that we enter yet another genre altogether: action-figure commercial.Captain America: Brave New WorldRated PG-13 for hulk smashes. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. In theaters. More

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    Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Sues NBC Over Documentary That He Says Defamed Him

    The documentary, “Diddy: Making of a Bad Boy,” began streaming on NBCUniversal’s Peacock platform last month.Sean Combs, the music mogul facing federal racketeering and sex trafficking charges, sued NBCUniversal and its streaming service Peacock on Wednesday, accusing them of airing a documentary that “shamelessly advances conspiracy theories” about him.The documentary, “Diddy: The Making of a Bad Boy,” is one of several about Mr. Combs’s life and career that have been developed amid mounting allegations of sexual abuse and violence that led to the criminal charges and more than three dozen civil lawsuits.Mr. Combs, who is in a Brooklyn jail awaiting his criminal trial, has pleaded not guilty to the charges, has denied sexually assaulting anyone and has depicted the allegations as fabrications or distorted accounts of consensual sex. In recent weeks, he has begun to go on the offensive, filing lawsuits against people and companies he says have defamed him.The newest defamation suit focuses in part on a segment of the Peacock documentary in which one interview subject asserts that Kim Porter, Mr. Combs’s longtime girlfriend with whom the mogul had three children, had been murdered.The documentary includes an image of Ms. Porter’s autopsy report, which says she died of lobar pneumonia, and notes that the local police did not suspect foul play. She died in 2018 at 47 years old.But it also includes an interview with Albert Joseph Brown, a former singer who goes by the name Al B. Sure!, that the suit characterizes as defamatory. In the interview, Mr. Brown, who had a child with Ms. Porter, describes seeing her and says, “It was two, three weeks prior to her murder — am I supposed to say ‘allegedly’?”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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    Carnegie Hall’s 2025-26 Season: What We’re Excited to Hear

    Our critics choose a dozen highlights from the season, which heavily features the music of Arvo Pärt and includes series by several artists.Carnegie Hall announced its 2025-26 season on Wednesday, with much of it devoted to celebrating the 250th birthday of the United States through a citywide festival featuring genres including jazz, rock, hip-hop, musical theater and classical music.Clive Gillinson, Carnegie’s executive and artistic director, said that the festival was meant to showcase “the sheer breadth and dynamism of America.”“Whether you look at film, Broadway, jazz or hip-hop, it’s all very vivid music-making,” he said. “It runs across the whole population.”The season will open in October with the conductor Daniel Harding leading the NYO-USA All-Stars, an ensemble affiliated with Carnegie, in works by Bernstein and Stravinsky. That performance will also include Yuja Wang leading Tchaikovsky’s grand Piano Concerto No. 1 from the keyboard.The composer Arvo Pärt, who turns 90 in September, will be honored at Carnegie all season, with his friends and collaborators leading performances of his works. Pärt, Gillinson said, “always has spoken in a language that everybody can engage with.”Carnegie’s season — some 170 performances — will also feature the conductor Marin Alsop, the pianist Lang Lang, the vocalist Isabel Leonard and the violinist Maxim Vengerov, who each will organize a series of Perspectives concerts.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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    Gints Zilbalodis Discusses ‘Flow’ and the Movie’s Oscar Nominations

    “We beat James Cameron!” the filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis said with a shy smile during a recent video interview. “Flow,” his second animated feature, is now one of the highest grossing films ever in his native Latvia, surpassing even Cameron’s “Avatar” franchise at the local box office.Latvia has a population of roughly 1.8 million people, and “Flow” has sold more than 255,000 admissions since it was first released in August 2024. The film is still playing in Latvian theaters.“We still have sold-out screenings in week 23 now,” Zilbalodis, 30, said.A critical and commercial success, Zilbalodis’s computer-animated, dialogue-free film follows a group of animals helping each other survive a flood. It received two Oscar nominations last month, for best animated feature and best international feature, and is the first Latvian production nominated for any Academy Award.A scene from “Flow,” which is nominated for two Academy Awards.Sideshow/Janus FilmsZilbalodis also recently won Latvia’s first Golden Globe, beating out two major American studio contenders, “The Wild Robot” and “Inside Out 2,” in the animated feature category. That “Flow” is an independent production largely financed with public funding and conceived on free, open-source software called Blender, makes the victory feel even more of a feat.And the director’s Baltic homeland is not being subtle about their joy over this triumph. The Golden Globe was exhibited for a week at the Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga, the country’s capital, guarded by two cat statues, in an allusion to the movie’s protagonist, a dark gray feline.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 Lost Silent Film About Lincoln Was Unearthed by an Intern

    “The Heart of Lincoln,” a 1922 movie directed by the pioneering filmmaker Francis Ford, was found at a stock-footage library on Long Island.No intern task is too small. Not getting coffee, not running errands and certainly not rummaging through piles of old films only to dig up a long-lost piece of history.When Dan Martin was asked to sort through dozens of old film cans, some of which were rusted shut, at Historic Films Archive, a stock-footage library on Long Island, he was happy to do the unglamorous work. He described the company’s climate-controlled storage vault as a “dark, concrete basement” flush with films.“This is the sort of thing that you go to school for as a film preservation student,” said Martin, 26, who is studying at Toronto Metropolitan University.Standing in the vault during the final week of his internship last August, Martin could have picked his next stack of films from any number of shelves. The one he happened to select included a remarkable discovery: five film cans containing 16-millimeter film of “The Heart of Lincoln,” a 1922 picture that was one of more than 7,000 silent films considered lost by the Library of Congress.“The Heart of Lincoln,” directed by and starring Francis Ford, was among roughly 10,000 films donated about 20 years ago from a university in the Midwest, said Joe Lauro, the owner of Historic Films Archive. “Most of the films from that collection were educational films that were shown in classrooms,” he said. Those films were typically discarded by the institutions when they became worn out.It is the second Lincoln film by Ford — a pioneer in early Hollywood and the older brother of John Ford, the Oscar-winning director — that has been found in recent years. In 2010, a copy of his “When Lincoln Paid” (1913) was discovered by a contractor during a demolition of a New Hampshire barn.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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    Watch Adrien Brody Defend His Art in ‘The Brutalist’

    The director Brady Corbet narrates a scene from his film, which is nominated for 10 Academy Awards.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.An architect defends his work to concerned financiers in this scene from “The Brutalist.”In the period drama, Adrien Brody stars as the Jewish Hungarian architect László Tóth, who has been commissioned to design a community center in Pennsylvania. During this sequence, László is walking a group of community advocates and financiers through the construction site. One of those people is Jim Simpson (Michael Epp), a local architect concerned more about the ballooning costs of the project than the vision of it.Narrating the sequence, Corbet said that they shot the scene in a granite quarry outside of Budapest “because we couldn’t afford to build a set.”The conversation in the scene becomes heated, and builds up to a moment where László essentially tells Jim that everything ugly in the world is Jim’s fault. The one-take sequence has a single establishing cutaway shot.Corbet said that he prefers to shoot his scenes in one take because, “that sunlight-in-a-box feeling that you have, that you’ve captured this ephemeral thing, it only occurs in sequence takes.”Read the “Brutalist” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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    Chubby Checker, Phish and Outkast Among Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Nominees

    Billy Idol, the Black Crowes and Maná will also appear on the ballot for the first time, alongside Oasis, Joe Cocker, Mariah Carey and others.Outkast, Phish, Chubby Checker, Billy Idol, the Black Crowes and the Mexican band Maná are among the first-time nominees for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.This year’s ballot, announced by the hall on Wednesday, will also include Oasis, Joe Cocker, Mariah Carey, Cyndi Lauper, the White Stripes, Bad Company and Soundgarden, as well as Joy Division and New Order, the band that members of Joy Division formed after the death of its lead singer, Ian Curtis.As in recent years, the latest nominees represent a mix of eras and subgenres. Those include boldface rock ’n’ roll names from the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s (Cocker, Idol), punk and alternative heroes (Joy Division, Soundgarden, the White Stripes), arena-filling giants (Oasis, Phish), a hip-hop act (Outkast) and a nod to the world outside mainstream Anglo-American pop (Maná).Given the intense pressure the Rock Hall has faced in recent years to correct its poor record of admitting women to the pantheon, the inclusion of just two female performers — Carey and Lauper, neither of them new to the ballot — may bring yet more scrutiny to the institution despite its promises to reform.For longtime Rock Hall watchers, the biggest news this year may be Checker. His song “The Twist” — a cover of a B-side originally released by Hank Ballard and the Midnighters — was a global phenomenon in the early 1960s, and it stands as one of the biggest hits in the history of the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. But until now, Checker, 83, has been ignored by the Rock Hall, despite years — decades, even — of complaints from his fans and protests by Checker himself. (Ballard, who died in 2003, was inducted into the hall in 1990.)In 2001, Checker took out a full-page ad in Billboard magazine calling on the Rock Hall — along with nominators of the Nobel Prizes — to recognize him for the song that, he said, became “the biggest dance of the century.”“I want my flowers while I’m alive,” he wrote. “I can’t smell them when I’m dead.”In 2018, the Rock Hall included “The Twist” in a new honor, a list of singles that shaped rock ’n’ roll.Artists become eligible for nomination 25 years after the release of their first recording. The nominations are voted on by more than 1,000 music historians, industry professionals and inducted artists.The winning nominees are to be announced in April, and this year’s induction ceremony will be held in Los Angeles in the fall. More