Aurelia Butler

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    Quentin Tarantino Teases Final Movie at Cannes Film Festival

    He played coy about the forthcoming “The Movie Critic” in a wide-ranging chat but may have dropped one major hint.Before introducing one of his favorite movies at the Cannes Film Festival on Thursday, Quentin Tarantino had this instruction for the audience.“If you want to scream at a shotgun blast, scream at a shotgun blast,” he said, imploring the viewers to be as “un-French” as possible in their reactions. “Let’s bring a little bit of American grindhouse here at Cannes!”That’s how he set up the 1977 revenge flick “Rolling Thunder” — a movie so foundational to Tarantino, with its third act of cathartic, gun-blast violence, that it’s rumored he will restage it in some fashion for his forthcoming final film, “The Movie Critic.” At least, that’s according to a co-writer of “Rolling Thunder,” Paul Schrader, who revealed that tantalizing tidbit in a recent interview with IndieWire. Though Tarantino himself has said very little about “The Movie Critic,” his film selection on Thursday may have confirmed Schrader’s tease.In the hourlong chat that followed the screening, Tarantino, 60, mostly discussed titles mentioned in his recent book of essays, “Cinema Speculation.” (He was at the festival to give a talk but wanted to present a film as well.)He began with an extended riff on “Rolling Thunder,” which stars William Devane as a Vietnam veteran pursuing the criminals who killed his family: Tarantino noted that though he loves the film, Schrader felt it departed too much from his original script.“He doesn’t recognize the movie any more than I recognize Oliver Stone’s version of ‘Natural Born Killers,’” Tarantino said, citing one of the few films he wrote but didn’t direct. Tarantino has disavowed Stone’s take on his material, but he said that Johnny Cash once told him that he was a big fan of the 1994 film, which starred Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis.“I didn’t tell him he was wrong,” Tarantino said.What is it about films like “Rolling Thunder” that he responds to? “Look, I like violent movies,” Tarantino said. “Some people like musicals, some people like slapstick comedy, I like violent movies. I think it’s a very cinematic thing to do.”Asked if he had ever watched a film where the violence wasn’t justified, Tarantino at first appeared so stumped that the audience chuckled. Eventually, he cited “Patriot Games,” the 1992 Harrison Ford thriller. Tarantino initially found the villain’s motivations so relatable, he said, that he rebelled when the character took a late swerve into psychopathic violence: “Just the fact that the villain was this much understandable, that was too much as far as the filmmakers were concerned. So they had to make him crazy. That’s what I got morally offended by.”When it comes to depictions of violence, Tarantino said there was only one line he wasn’t willing to cross. “I have this big thing about killing animals in movies,” he said to applause. “But I mean insects, too! Unless I’m paying to see some weird bizarro documentary, I’m not paying to see real death. Part of the way this all works is that it’s make-believe — that’s why I can stand by the violent scenes.”Tarantino has said his forthcoming 10th film will be his last (owing to his belief that directors have a finite amount of good films in them and ought to quit while they’re ahead), and that he hopes that more books like “Cinema Speculation” will follow once he hangs up his director’s cap. Is that why he has made a movie critic the title character of his final feature?“Well, that’s a long story,” he said at the end of his chat. “I can’t tell you guys until you see the movie!”Still, he offered a tease: “I’m tempted to do some of the character’s monologues right now,” he said. “You guys would get a kick out of it. Maybe if there was less video cameras.” More

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    ‘You Hurt My Feelings’ Review: She Can’t Handle the Truth

    The director Nicole Holofcener’s characters are known for their brazen honesty. But it’s dishonesty that drives her new film, starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus.I love a complete sentence for a title. Even better: a complete-sentence title that also describes a filmmaker’s chief concern. “You Hurt My Feelings” sums up the Nicole Holofcener experience: funny in its wounded bluntness.It’s the seventh comedy she’s written and directed since 1996. With more emotional harmony and generosity than her other films, it takes the same stock of ways we can bruise each other, partners, strangers, kids. Her characters — comfortable New Yorkers and Angelenos — tend to lash out; their preferred approach to honesty is brazenness. The new movie embraces more constructive impulses. It’s dishonesty that interests her here, the mild kind that one character calls, in his defense, “white lies” — what you tell a person because the truth would just be a whole thing.The white liar is Don (Tobias Menzies). For two years, he’s been reading draft after draft of a novel his wife, Beth (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), has been working on and telling her how good they are. The movie’s about what happens after she overhears him, at a Manhattan sporting goods store, telling her sister’s husband, Mark (Arian Moayed), that, actually, he doesn’t like the book, but the truth would kill her. He’s not wrong. She’s a weepy wreck for two scenes with the sister, Sarah (Michaela Watkins), convinced that now she’ll never be able to trust Don. But Holofcener is drawn more to the process of healing than she is to the wielding of hurt.Twenty minutes pass before that sporting goods store encounter. By that point the movie’s already shown us what Beth’s and Don’s lives are like, together and apart. They’ve got the sort of sturdy, affectionate, unselfconsciously idiosyncratic bond that means they’d just as soon share an ice cream cone as a bed. One thing that’s probably kept the marriage firm has been saying “I love this” and “it’s great,” when it’s not. White lies are like Advil for certain relationships; they keep the inflammation down. In the aftermath of Don’s bombshell, up go her quills. She starts sleeping on the sofa, ignoring him and distancing herself, and he’s confused. Then one evening, in front of Sarah and Mark and a sad bowl of underdressed salad, she tells him that she heard what he said. Then the movie does what too few American marriage comedies do: adjudicate the disappointment. It becomes about the truths that flow from that unburdening.Holofcener makes the smart decision to put Beth and Don in the constructive honesty business. She teaches writing to adults. He’s a therapist. I don’t think either of them loves what they do, but it looks like they make a good living at it. We get to watch her respond to her four students’ story ideas and, in one case, to an actual piece, and to observe him with a handful of patients. Holofcener’s films are fleet. Rarely do they exceed the 92-minute mark. But their social resonance springs from a marvel of proficiency.Every relationship Holofcener gives us — and just about every scene — explores some type of candor, some act of leveling: between Don and Beth; Beth and Sarah; Beth and Don and their foggy 23-year-old son (Owen Teague); Beth and her agent (LaTanya Richardson Jackson); Beth, Sarah and their mother (Jeannie Berlin), a widower who lives under her daughters’ skin; a pair of married lesbians with whom a tipsy Beth instigates an argument; Sarah, who appears to be an interior decorator, and the particularly particular client displeased with her taste in lighting. Plus everything with the students, the patients and Mark, whose acting career is in neutral. I didn’t mention Beth’s pretty successful memoir about her (verbally) abusive father, whose title you need to hear stumble out of Louis-Dreyfus’s mouth. But Holofcener could have used it for just about any one of her movies.Her targets, themes and tropes haven’t changed. It’s still narcissism and personal vanity (Don wants an eye job). It’s still the emotional disturbances of moneyed, dissatisfied liberals who need Black people and the poor to make sense of themselves as successfully good white folks. (Beth and Sarah do complacent volunteer work at a church’s surprisingly stingy clothing giveaway.) No American director’s more committed to exposing the smugness and self-aggrandizement of bourgeois urbanites.The cantankerous, obnoxious and cruel characters are still here, too. Most of them are just sitting on Don’s couch. The harshest of them is a couple played by (the actually married) David Cross and Amber Tamblyn. These two hate each other, and they squirt Don with their bile. Now, in a Holofcener film, we can study intense marital dysfunction from the compartmental vantage of a mental health professional, somebody who in his personal life uses a completely different approach to communicating with his wife. Menzies’ good-natured neutrality here perfectly serves both Don the shrink and Don the husband.Holofcener continues, nonetheless, to be more interested in character than in great acting. That makes sense since she needs her casts to approximate some version of us or people we recognize. Which is to say that everybody here is life-size. Louis-Dreyfus knows how to find real pathos in a hurry. She’s a pro at putting across Holofcener’s casually cranky snobbery (about new coffee shops, clean menus and $19,000 benches). Beth’s in the middle of saying something racist about the weed shop where her son works when the movie’s least believable incident goes down.Part of me thought I wanted something wilder from Holofcener, comedy that felt like crisis. The way some of her earlier films do; the way it does in the novels of Nell Zink and Patricia Lockwood. But her studies of ego and frailty are closer to Albert Brooks and Larry David: about breaches of etiquette rather then psychological breaks. Still, this feels like a quiet breakthrough for her. She’s put the emotional dynamite away (her steadiest supplier of TNT, Catherine Keener, isn’t here). Instead, this is a work of discipline and structure. It’s a situation comedy in the best, classical sense: These people’s ethical problems are sometimes ours. I’ve been Beth. I’ve been Don. And I had to watch half of what they’re dealing with through my fingers.You Hurt My FeelingsRated R for language (the painfully honest kind). Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More

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    Pete Brown, Who Put Words to ‘Sunshine of Your Love,’ Dies at 82

    A British Beat poet, he wrote lyrics for the band Cream and, after it broke up, continued to collaborate with Jack Bruce, the group’s lead singer and bassist.Pete Brown, a British Beat poet who wrote the lyrics to songs by the rock supergroup Cream, including the hits “White Room,” “I Feel Free” and “Sunshine of Your Love,” and who after the band’s breakup collaborated for nearly five decades with Jack Bruce, its lead vocalist and bassist, died on Friday at his home in Hastings, on the southeast coast of England. He was 82.His manager, Peter Conway, said the cause was cancer.Mr. Brown entered Cream’s circle at the request of Ginger Baker, the band’s drummer. They knew each other because Mr. Brown performed his poetry backed by jazz musicians and Mr. Baker had gotten his start in jazz combos; Mr. Baker asked Mr. Brown for help on the lyrics to the group’s debut single, “Wrapping Paper,” which preceded the release of “Fresh Cream,” its first album, in 1966.Mr. Brown quickly discovered a career-long writing partner in Mr. Bruce, whose fluid and propulsive playing provided counterpoint to Mr. Baker’s explosive drumming and the guitar pyrotechnics of Cream’s third member, Eric Clapton.In a short documentary about the making of “White Room” seen on Dutch television in 2018, Mr. Brown recalled, “It became evident that Jack and I had a chemistry, and when we wrote ‘I Feel Free,’ which was a big hit, so everyone went, ‘OK, that’s a team, let it roll.’”Mr. Brown did not provide the lyrics to all of Cream’s songs, but he was the group’s primarily lyricist. On its second album, “Disraeli Gears” (1967), he wrote the words to “Sunshine of Your Love,” a collaboration with Mr. Bruce and Mr. Clapton, as well as “Dance the Night Away” and two other songs.“White Room,” one of four songs he wrote with Mr. Bruce on the band’s third album, “Wheels of Fire” (1968), rose to No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1968. It was the second-highest ranking a Cream single achieved; “Sunshine” had peaked at No. 5 earlier that year.“White Room” began as a poem Mr. Brown wrote, inspired by his stay some years earlier in an actual white room, in an apartment.“I had been semi-destitute, a semi-bum, living on people’s floors, and eventually I began to earn some money from songwriting, and the white room was the first place I moved into,” he told the culture website Please Kill Me in 2022. In the Dutch documentary he added that he had stopped drinking and taking drugs in the room and decided to be a “songwriter rather than an itinerant poet.”“White Room,” begins with these lines:In the white room with black curtains near the stationBlack roof country, no gold pavements, tired starlingsSilver horses ran down moonbeams in your dark eyesDawn light smiles on you leaving, my contentmentI’ll wait in this place where the sun never shinesWait in this place where the shadows run from themselvesMr. Brown in concert in 1970 in Copenhagen. He found his voice as a singer in the decade after Cream broke up, performing with a number of bands.Jorgen Angel/Redferns, Getty ImagesPeter Ronald Brown was born on Dec. 25, 1940, in Surrey, England, with World War II underway. His parents had moved there after fleeing London during the Blitz. His father, Nathan Brown, whose birth name was Nathan Leibowitz, and his mother, Kitty Cohen, sold shoes.Peter started writing poems as a teenager, fired up by the works of Dylan Thomas, Federico García Lorca and Gerard Manley Hopkins. But he detoured, at least temporarily, to journalism, which he studied for nine months in 1958 at the Polytechnic-Regent Street (now the University of Westminster) in London.He returned to verse and published his first poem in 1961 in Evergreen Review, the boundary-breaking literary magazine based in the United States that filled its pages with work by luminaries like Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, Allen Ginsberg, Henry Miller and William Burroughs.In one early poem, “Few,” composed under the fear of nuclear war, Mr. Brown wrote:Alone and half drunk hopefulI staggered into the bogsat Green Park stationand found 30 written on the wall.Appalled I lurched outInto the windy blaring Piccadilly nightthinking surely,Surely, there must be more of us than that.Over the next few years, he was a working poet. He was part of the First Real Poetry Band, which included the guitarist John McLaughlin, and he had a jazz poetry residency at the Marquee Club in London.In 1965, he and more than a dozen other poets from around the world, including Mr. Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, Michael Horovitz and Andrei Voznesensky, read their work at the International Poetry Incarnation, which filled Royal Albert Hall in London. On its website, the venue recalled the event as one “where beatniks met the emerging hippie culture.”The call for help from Mr. Baker jump-started a long songwriting career, first with Cream and then, when Cream split up after two years, with Mr. Bruce on his solo work. He wrote the lyrics to songs on nearly all of Mr. Bruce’s albums, from “Songs for a Tailor” (1969) to “Silver Rails” (2014). One of their collaborations, “Theme for an Imaginary Western,” became a staple in the repertoire of the band Mountain.“I was in awe of Jack,” Mr. Brown told The Guardian in an interview last month. But, he said, “Sometimes we had to have a rest from each other — two very big personalities in the same room sometimes wasn’t good, plus his addictions got in the way.”Mr. Brown, right, with Jack Bruce in 2005. The two began collaborating on songs when Mr. Bruce was the bassist and lead vocalist in Cream, and they continued writing together for nearly five decades.Brian Rasic/Getty ImagesMr. Brown found his own voice, as a singer, in the decade after Cream broke up. He performed with the bands Pete Brown & His Battered Ornaments, Piblokoto!, Back to the Front, Flying Tigers and Bond & Brown, which he formed with the British rock and blues musician Graham Bond. He also began a long songwriting collaboration in the early 1980s with the keyboardist Phil Ryan, a former member of Piblokto!, that produced several albums through 2013.He also helped write most of the songs on “Novum” (2017), Procol Harum’s last studio album. (He replaced Keith Reid, Procol Harum’s longtime lyricist, who died this year.)Mr. Brown’s autobiography, “White Rooms & Imaginary Westerns: On the Road With Ginsberg, Writing for Clapton and Cream — An Anarchic Odyssey” (2010), is being adapted as a documentary by the director Mark Aj Waters but has not yet been finished. Mr. Brown had recently been working on an album, “Shadow Club”; one of his collaborators was Mr. Bruce’s son Malcolm, an electric bassist like his father. (Jack Bruce died in 2014.)“We’ve naturally gravitated to each other,” Mr. Brown told The Guardian, adding that he was planning to write songs with Malcolm Bruce for his next album “as long as I can stay alive for a reasonable amount of time.”Mr. Brown is survived by his wife, Sheridan MacDonald; his daughter, Jessica Walker; his son, Tad MacDonald; and a grandson.Even after he began singing, Mr. Brown said, his admiration for Mr. Bruce initially led him to avoid singing the Cream songs he had helped write.“You know, ‘I’m not good enough,’” he told Dutch television. “Then I suddenly thought, ‘OK, I wrote those songs as well,’ and I thought, ‘It’s kind of about time I started singing some of these songs.’” More

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    Salvatore Sciarrino Returns to Myth in the Opera ‘Venere e Adone’

    Salvatore Sciarrino’s “Venere e Adone,” his 15th opera, premieres this weekend at the Hamburg State Opera.When the baritone Evan Hughes agreed to sing the part of the wild boar in Salvatore Sciarrino’s “Venere e Adone,” premiering at the Hamburg State Opera on Saturday, he didn’t expect to become the star of the show.In most opera versions of the Venus and Adonis myth, like John Blow’s “Venus and Adonis” (1683) and Hans Werner Henze’s “Venus und Adonis” (1997), the boar is silent or eliminated. But in “Venere e Adone,” with a libretto by Sciarrino and Fabio Casadei Turroni, the boar, or the Monster, is not just a singing role — he is the moral core of the story.In this version of the myth, the Monster, who has five solo scenes, doesn’t mean Adonis harm. The creature has been hit by one of Cupid’s arrows, and instantly falls in love with the boy hunting him.“I said yes to the project before I even really understood that the Monster was a sympathetic character,” Hughes said in an interview. “He only becomes violent because of the outside world.”Salvatore Sciarrino, a composer of stage scores that are intimate, fragile and sparse.Andreas Meichsner for The New York TimesIn an interview at his home in Città di Castello, Italy, Sciarrino, 76, said he considered the Monster to be the most human character in “Venere e Adone.” At the beginning, the Monster sings from a sort of existential limbo, unsure of who he is or what he wants. When he kills Adonis, who is hunting him, the Monster thinks he is caressing and kissing the most beautiful creature he has ever seen. Instead, he is mauling him to death.“What is life for you is death for another,” Sciarrino said. “It is one of the keys to being in the world.”“Venere e Adone” will be led by the Hamburg State Opera’s music director Kent Nagano and staged by it artistic director, Georges Delnon. It is the first Sciarrino production that Nagano has conducted, and although Delnon has known the composer for about 25 years, this is their first collaboration on a new opera.The project began when Turroni, 59, a writer and former tenor, approached Sciarrino with a draft libretto based on a version of the Venus and Adonis myth by the Italian Baroque poet Giambattista Marino.Sciarrino and Turroni began meeting frequently, often at a bar near the train station in Bologna, to shape the text together. (Drunk people can be useful sources of literary inspiration, said Turroni, who also works as a bartender in Bologna.) Over several months, they adapted it to the needs of the music; the final performance libretto was extracted directly from the score.Evan Hughes, left, as the Monster, and Scotting in a rehearsal for the opera.Andreas Meichsner for The New York Times“Venere e Adone” broadly follows the contours of the myth. Venus, the goddess of love, has descended to earth to be with Adonis, enraging her husband, Mars. Adonis wants to prove to Venus that he is not just handsome but also strong, so he makes a plan to go hunting. Venus discourages Adonis; petulantly, he ignores her. In battle, the boar sinks its tusks into Adonis’s groin.In Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” Adonis is transformed into a flower by Venus as a memorial to his short-lived beauty. In Turroni and Sciarrino’s version, both the beauty and the beast who kills him are transformed into this flower, becoming one with nature and each other.“Venere e Adone” is Sciarrino’s 15th opera. His first, “Amore e Psiche,” also based on a mythical theme, was completed 50 years ago. In these works, Sciarrino has honed an unmistakable theatrical style: intimate, fragile and sparse, with clearly audible text.While some artists go through distinct periods, Sciarrino has spent his career pursuing his peculiar brand of beauty. “I don’t really see a radical departure or sudden burst of experimentation that’s taken place over the years,” Nagano said in a video interview. “Rather, I would say that it’s a deepening and perhaps refining of a language so that it speaks in evermore poetic ways.”From left, the conductor Kent Nagano, the director Georges Delnon and Sciarrino at the Hamburg State Opera.Andreas Meichsner for The New York Times“It is impossible to hear a human voice and remain indifferent,” Sciarrino once told the Brooklyn Rail.He added: “Using the voice means employing simultaneously two forces, words and music. Singing without words is nonsense, like making a car without wheels.”Unlike opera composers whose orchestral music reflects both the conscious and unconscious emotions of the characters, Sciarrino writes instrumental parts that summon their environment. In “Venere e Adone,” there is little accompanying music at all. Furtive echoes, forlorn bird calls and windlike breath sounds evoke a naked earth.“The music of this opera is very dry,” Sciarrino said. “There are not so many sounds in this world, because it is an empty world.”In “Venere e Adone,” the vocal music is also restrained. The singers intone the text quickly while sliding downward with their voices, or hold long, clear notes that blossom into brief melismas.The countertenor Randall Scotting, who plays Adonis, compared “Venere e Adone” to an Emily Dickinson poem. “There’s so much in it,” he said, “but you have to think about it, interpret it, bring your own things to it in order to understand it.”Sciarrino’s vocal style can be challenging for singers. The Canadian mezzo-soprano Layla Claire, in the role of Venus, spent so much time walking around her house while practicing rapid Italian phrases that her two young daughters started repeating fragments of the libretto.Delnon’s production aims for the artificiality of Baroque opera.Andreas Meichsner for The New York Times“Once I started listening to Sciarrino’s music, I realized it was a language I didn’t speak,” said Hughes, the baritone. “As I started to work on it, I felt the same way that I felt at the beginning of studying, singing, learning a language that I really didn’t understand, like trying to sing in Russian.”But Sciarrino’s vocal style isn’t completely unfamiliar. He is fascinated by the art and music of the Italian Renaissance and the Baroque periods. The walls of his home are covered in paintings, including a 17th-century depiction of Adonis and his mother Myrrha by an anonymous Venetian artist.Sciarrino himself almost became a painter. The influence of Renaissance and Baroque art will be palpable at the premiere of “Venere e Adone.” Delnon and his team have hung historical depictions of the Venus and Adonis myth in their rehearsal space at the State Opera, adapting the stylized gestures from the paintings to the stage. The set designer, Varvara Timofeeva, and the costume designer, Marie-Thérèse Jossen, are developing sleek, minimalist interplays of black, white, gray and blood red.Like Baroque opera, “Venere e Adone” uses a chorus, but to ambiguous ends.Andreas Meichsner for The New York TimesDelnon is aiming not for psychological realism, but for the artificiality of Baroque opera in his production. “You stage it in a way that you’re not trying to be the character,” he said, “but just trying to show the character.”“Venere e Adone” also includes music that sounds explicitly Baroque. For Scotting, it is the rare work where his early and contemporary music come together. “There’s this thread of antiquity that ties into it all,” he said.Sciarrino also uses the Baroque trope of a chorus that narrates and comments on the action. But while operas from that era often use the chorus to superimpose a neat moral on the story, Sciarrino deploys the vocal ensemble to more ambiguous ends. “Venere e Adone” concludes with a question: “Who triumphs, love or death?”Here, the Monster is redeemed by those universal forces. “It’s as if Sciarrino is saying that the Monster is almost rewarded,” Delnon said, “and Adonis is punished.”Sciarrino said the question was intentionally absurd and unanswerable. But, he continued with a laugh: “To tell the truth, love always wins. Or what we call love. That is the power of the word.” More

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    ‘The Wind & the Reckoning’ Review: A Hawaiian Story of Resistance

    A docudrama follows a family fighting to stay together and avoid exile to a leprosy colony, but fails to carry an emotional punch.It’s a story as old as the United States itself: American business interests drive white men onto Indigenous lands, where they displace and impose their own rule of law on an otherwise sovereign group of people. The docudrama “The Wind & The Reckoning,” directed by David L. Cunningham, tells the true story of a group of Native Hawaiians who resisted the government-mandated exile implemented to address a leprosy outbreak in Hawaii in the late 1800s. A provisional government, put in place after American businessmen overthrew Queen Lili’uokalani and dissolved the Kingdom of Hawai’i, forced Natives suspected of infection onto the island of Moloka’i. There, marriages were no longer recognized, and thousands died and were buried in unmarked graves.“The Wind & The Reckoning” follows Pi’ilani (Lindsay Marie Anuhea Watson), her husband, Ko’olau (Jason Scott Lee), and their son, Kalei (Kahiau Perreira), as they fight to stay together after the latter two are infected. As Pi’ilani, who never contracts leprosy, says in a voice-over, “No man, no government could break the bonds of marriage and family.”Sadly, the film does not carry the emotional punch that the subject matter warrants. “The Wind & The Reckoning” is centered on gunfights between Ko’olau and the soldiers, and one would have liked to get a sense of the broader world outside of this battle — the people in the leprosy colony, for instance, or the political turmoil of the time. The story feels too self-contained and the characters too one-note, which, despite the merits of the subject, makes it hard to feel immersed in their world.The Wind & the ReckoningNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘We Might as Well Be Dead’ Review: Housing by Neighborhood Watch

    A single mother fights for her place in a dystopian high rise in this unfocused satire.A housing board rules over a dystopia in the off-kilter satire “We Might as Well Be Dead.” The film follows Anna (Ioana Iacob), a single mother and security guard whose role in her high rise home is to interview and introduce candidates for new housing. The film doesn’t specify what kind of apocalypse has made residency in the high rise so prestigious, but new applicants treat their adjudication as a life or death matter, begging on their hands and knees for sanctuary.Anna wasn’t born in the community she now calls both home and employer. She isn’t a perfect citizen by the board’s standards. She’s a single mother and her daughter, Iris (Pola Geiger), has started to show signs of buckling under the closed society’s pressure, hiding full time in the apartment bathroom. Anna’s tenuous position in the building is threatened further when a neighbor’s dog goes missing, and an atmosphere of paranoia settles over the community. Anna tries to convince her neighbors that the dog’s absence is an accident rather than a conspiracy, but her efforts are met with increasing frenzy, and the mob soon begins to turn on her.The director, Natalia Sinelnikova, draws out a sense of dread through canted angles and harsh lighting. The camera is often placed below the faces of the actors, peering up at them from perspectives that seem off-kilter. When the camera pulls back, the inhabitants of the high rise seem crowded into doorways and long dwindling halls. The images are artfully crafted, but the narrative lacks momentum. The film flirts with themes of surveillance and immigrant anxieties, but its allegoric ambitions are continually thwarted by yet another neighborly grievance.We Might as Well Be DeadNot rated. In German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Will-o’-the-Wisp’ Review: A Prince Throws Off His Privilege

    Or, at least, he kinda-sorta tries to rebel in this romantic, futuristic fable from the Portuguese director João Pedro Rodrigues.“Will-o’-the-Wisp,” an off-balance provocation from the Portuguese titillater João Pedro Rodrigues, is a prank in fancy dress, a plastic boutonniere that squirts battery acid. The joke is on everyone, particularly the powerful and those holding out hope that the powerful will save the planet.Portugal booted its monarchy in 1910, but in this alternate timeline, the royals still reign. When the do-gooder prince, Alfredo (Mauro Costa), shocks his family by becoming a firefighter, Rodrigues drops him into an eroticized firehouse for a beefcake feast, concocting a calendar shoot to bend the fighters into, um, suggestive poses. Later, the director assembles a slide show of genitalia which the waify blond prince and his working-class Black lover, Afonso (André Cabral), liken to various climates. (Petrified forest, barren grassland — you won’t have to strain your imagination to see the resemblance.)The movie, co-written by Rodrigues, João Rui Guerra da Mata and Paulo Lopes Graça, opens with Alfredo on his deathbed in 2069 — the film’s most subtle sexual reference. Then it flashes back to the prince’s youth, where he’s escorted through ancient pines by the king (Miguel Loureiro). Some viewers might recognize the woods as the Leiria Pine Forest whose timber and sap built the ships that built the Portuguese empire. The Leiria was decimated by wildfires in 2017, and the interstitial titles — “Slash and Burn,” “Charred,” and so on — make it clear that a blaze is coming for everyone. Smoke wafts through the palace while the conservative queen (Margarida Vila-Nova) putters around anxiously snuffing candles.The symbolism is blunt, and the film’s style, striking and severe. Scenes are staged as precisely as painted tableaus, with handsome shadows and gratuitous whippets. At one point, the prince stands at the dinner table and delivers Greta Thunberg’s U.N. Climate Action Summit address straight to the camera — “The eyes of all future generations are upon you” — as though to convince the audience he kinda-sorta tried to get his parents to do something. Unmoved, his mother instead fusses over a more politically correct title for the family’s 18th-century oil portrait, a mocking depiction of eight Black and Indigenous dwarfs who were collected by Queen Maria I of Portugal (and of Brazil, where she was called Maria the Mad).We already know that the prince won’t grow up to fix much. (Ingeniously, the cinematographer Rui Poças and the sound editor Nuno Carvalho evoke a desolate, airship-patrolled future using only a shadow and a loudspeaker.) But he keeps that portrait, which inspires reveries of his affair with Afonso. Their fleeting moments of joy make up the bulk of the running time. Rodrigues’s mind is on social upheaval, but his heart is with Afonso’s lavishly lit abdomen and the parts just below.Rodrigues blows past good taste with an explicit tête-à-tête in the scorched forest where his brave leading men pant racial slurs into each other’s nether regions. It’s a rough watch, but Rodrigues balances this shocker with a scene of shocking loveliness: a dance number where the pair’s slight stiffness makes their burst of emotional expression feel tender and sincere.Will-o’-the-WispNot rated. In Portuguese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 7 minutes. In theaters. More

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    The Pianist Pavel Kolesnikov Makes a Rare Visit to New York

    Pavel Kolesnikov took on a test of pianism, the “Goldberg” Variations, and assembled a conceptual program inspired by Joseph Cornell.Few pieces in the piano repertoire are as revealing of a performer as Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations. With few indications of tempo or articulation, they force constant interpretation. It’s hard to think of a better personality test.Except, perhaps, programming. A pianist’s choice of what to play can be more illuminating than the performance itself. A recital might focus on a single composer or group together a few sonatas; but there’s also another route, more conceptual, of compiling something more akin to a playlist.Over two evenings at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan this week, the pianist Pavel Kolesnikov shared his artistry with both routes, with one concert devoted to the “Goldbergs” and the other a moodily nocturnal collage inspired by Joseph Cornell’s assemblage “Celestial Navigation.”Kolesnikov, a Russian-born pianist who lives in England, is at 34 already a stalwart of the London music scene. He has recorded the “Goldbergs” and performed them alongside the choreographer-performer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. But he has been virtually absent from New York’s stages.He shouldn’t be. His two Armory recitals exhibited pianism of poetic freedom, assured interpretive choices and a D.J.’s ear for subtle musical connections.His Bach was boldly argued — the kind of performance that invites disagreement but is defended so persuasively, even detractors can’t help but appreciate it. His take on the “Goldbergs,” an Aria followed by 30 variations and a return to the original theme, was openly personal, the score more like a coloring-book outline filled in with a palette of Kolesnikov’s creation.In Bach’s mathematical construction, the 32 movements are mirrored in the Aria’s 32 measures, which are split into two 16-bar passages that are both repeated — a structure that recurs throughout. Like most pianists, Kolesnikov approached the first run of each passage straightforwardly, with a clarity that rendered the score’s precise architecture in vivid detail.On the repeat, however, he seemed to put that structure through a stress test. Near-constant pedalwork shaded phrases with anachronistic nuance. One variation might bleed into another, such as the closing G of the Fifth being held into the first measure of the Sixth, which starts with the same note; the Quodlibet variation emerged from a haze of sustained, hammered chords at the end of the 29th.This was a reading of the “Goldbergs” too modern for purists of historically informed performance, yet also far from the slack indulgence of Lang Lang’s divisive recording. I didn’t remember, until I returned to my notes for Kolesnikov’s second recital, that I had described his treatment of the Aria’s return as Chopinesque — which turned out to be just the word to describe his program “Celestial Navigation (After Joseph Cornell).”Cornell’s sculptural assemblage — a muted evocation of how humans have made sense of the night sky, with references to mythology and science — doesn’t exactly lend itself to musical translation in the way that, say, a synesthetic painting by Kandinsky would. But Kolesnikov’s program is cleverly similar in its juxtapositions, unlikely pairings united not in aesthetic or time but in something loftier.It’s always refreshing to see musicians interacting with other mediums, and for Kolesnikov this isn’t even a first: He has also put together a recital inspired by Proust. As a conceptual thinker he resembles the pianist Vikingur Olafsson. But while Olafsson approaches programming like an essayist laying out a constellatory argument, Kolesnikov cultivates a mood. His performance at the Armory was a gathering of congenial poets.At the heart of the evening was a trio of suites that followed a basic construction: a Messiaen piano solo, a Chopin Nocturne and a fragmentary reprise of the Messiaen. Surrounding those were a Pavane by Louis Couperin (not the more famous François); Ravel’s “Une Barque sur l’Océan”; and Thomas Adès’s Dowland-inspired “Darknesse Visible.” Then, in the second half, Kolesnikov closed with Schubert’s D. 935 Impromptus.Covering nearly 350 years of music history, these pieces couldn’t possibly belong to the same sound world. But Kolesnikov nudged them as closely together as possible — again applying modern pedalwork to the Baroque, and using Chopin as a stylistic anchor. The result was often disorienting; Messiaen’s colors shone more brightly, and Schubert leaned with blunter emotions toward the Romantic.Kolesnikov’s blanket dreaminess lent a memory-like remove even to passages of storminess and, in one of the Chopin Nocturnes, a moment of “I could have danced all night” bliss. These were idiosyncratic interpretations in service of a greater whole.As in the “Goldbergs,” some of this could be seen as sacrilege. Maybe. What is inarguable, though, is that given two opportunities to reveal himself to New York, Kolesnikov came out and declared what kind of pianist he is: entirely, confidently, eloquently himself. More