Aurelia Butler

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    ‘Desert of Namibia’ Review: Ups and Downs

    Yoko Yamanaka’s film is a brilliantly observed portrait of a young woman simmering with frustrations and coming to terms with her relationships and place in the world.It’s rare that a movie portrays the kind of messy and absurd arguments that can unfold in relationships, so there’s a special awe to seeing a movie that goes for it. Yoko Yamanaka’s brilliantly observed “Desert of Namibia” often boils over with the anger of its young protagonist, Kana (Yuumi Kawai), but it often also just simmers with her frustrations about her place in the world.Outright fights are just one facet of the film’s unvarnished fidelity to Kana’s state of mind. She upends parts of her life, sometimes for the better in the long run, but can’t always reassemble the pieces into a satisfying future. Her boyfriend, Honda (Kanichiro), dotes on her at their shared apartment, but she lurches into another relationship with a writer, Hayashi (Daichi Kaneko), whom she’s seeing on the side. Her mind-numbing job at a hair-removal salon doesn’t help.What clinches the portrait is the sure-handed direction and Kana’s organic performance of a daunting character. Dramatically, Yamanaka finds unpredictable ways into and out of scenes, and she has an eye for the poignant details amid the angst, like neatly packed baggies of food in a refrigerator, and for underplaying other moments, like the breeziness of a doctor who diagnoses Kana over a video call.Kana’s spikiness (which recalls Kit Zauhar’s similarly candid triumph “Actual People”) segues into an eventual need for stability. But Yamanaka is admirably in no hurry to simplify or explain what Kana is still sorting out for herself.Desert of NamibiaNot rated. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 17 minutes. In theaters. More

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    How to Win Eurovision in 7 Easy Steps

    What’s the best way to win the Eurovision Song Contest, the world’s most watched cultural event?Should you enter a disco track about a long-forgotten military conflict (like Abba once did)? A French-language workout song (like Celine Dion’s 1988 winner)? Maybe some swaggering rock about marching to the beat of your own drum (like Maneskin)?We analyzed the music, lyrics and onstage performances of every winning act since 2000 to learn the secrets of a perfect Eurovision song.NO. 1Sing about personal liberationConchita Wurst (Austria) performing her 2014 winning song “Rise Like a Phoenix.”A good start is to have a track about believing in yourself, owning your own destiny, or not caring what society thinks.Take Conchita Wurst, a bearded drag queen who represented Austria in 2014 with the epic song “Rise Like a Phoenix.” The self-help bona fides were clear from the title: Wurst was emerging from the ashes of past troubles, and nobody could stop her.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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    Billy Woods Is Scary Good at Rapping

    His 12th solo album, “Golliwog,” arrives at a peak in his career as a verbally inventive, independent hip-hop artist. It’s also full of horror stories.When Billy Woods was a child, he was afraid of lots of things.Born in Washington, D.C., but raised in Zimbabwe, where his father was a member of Robert Mugabe’s revolutionary government, the boy who would grow into one of his generation’s beloved underground rappers was frightened by a storage room under the stairs in his family’s house. At night, he imagined that something was beneath his bed, and if his closet door was ajar, that was cause for alarm too. He was scared of apartheid South Africa, which bordered Zimbabwe to the south, and the soldiers he encountered at roadblocks. Sometimes he was scared of his parents.“I didn’t grow up around reasonable people,” he said in a recent interview, a charged understatement about a childhood tumbled by history.Woods typically plans his solo projects around a particular conceit or theme, and “Golliwog,” his 12th, which was released last week, is a collection of horror stories. Some are darkly comic, others decidedly less so. They draw on his youthful experiences and contemporary geopolitical terrors, as well as more mundane adult concerns, like romance and renting in modern-day New York, where he has lived on and off since 1995.“Golliwog” arrives at a peak in his decades-long career as an independent artist, carrying on a local tradition of proudly trend-resistant, verbally inventive hip-hop that includes acts like MF Doom, the Juggaknots and Company Flow. All of Woods’s solo music is available through Backwoodz Studios, the label he founded in 2002, which also releases the work of like-minded artists including his frequent collaborator, Elucid; together the pair record as Armand Hammer.“Something that my mother always was stressing was that if you wanted to do art, you couldn’t expect to pay your bills with it,” Woods said. He is in his late 40s now, the father of two children, and noted that “for most of my adult life I have been hustling to make ends meet.” He refuses to own a car, and up until 2018, lived with roommates to save money.Woods started releasing solo LPs in 2003. Billy Woods, which he styles in lowercase letters, is not his real name; he avoids showing his face in photographs.Griffin Lotz/Rolling Stone, via Getty ImagesWe 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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    ‘Deaf President Now!’ and the Biases of a Hearing World

    The documentary recalls the 1988 protests that erupted at Gallaudet University when trustees rejected deaf candidates to lead it.In 1988, the board of trustees of Gallaudet University was preparing to announce its pick for the institution’s next president. That’s not an unusual task for a board. What’s unusual is what happened next, as told in “Deaf President Now!” (streaming on Apple TV+).Directed by Nyle DiMarco and Davis Guggenheim, the documentary plays like a high-stakes political thriller, but in an unconventional venue. The film chronicles the week of turmoil and transformation that followed the announcement of Elisabeth Zinser as president. (DiMarco is a Gallaudet alum.)Gallaudet University — founded in 1864 as a school for deaf and blind children, through a law signed by Abraham Lincoln — is the nation’s only liberal arts university designed specifically for deaf and hard-of-hearing students, and it’s officially bilingual, with instruction in both English and American Sign Language. In 1988, however, Gallaudet had never had a deaf president. And Zinser, a hearing person with a background in nursing, had been chosen over two deaf, arguably more qualified candidates.To tell the story, “Deaf President Now!” weaves together archival footage and contemporary interviews with a number of the students and faculty, now middle-aged and older, who led or were involved in the protests. All of the interviewees, filmed against a simple black background, give their answers in ASL, with an off-camera voice (rather than subtitles) providing the translation for hearing audiences.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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    ‘Love’ Review: Connection, Oslo Style

    A poetic drama weaves together the lives of Norwegians as they pursue connection in their own ways.The subject of “Love” is right there in the title. But that might be deceptively simple: The director Dag Johan Haugerud’s gently humanistic drama is one of those films that feels akin to a prism, refracting its theme into the array of colors it contains.“Love,” one of a trilogy of films from Haugerud set in Oslo (the others are named “Sex” and “Dreams”), braids a few stories into one another, the way its characters’ lives are woven together. The central strands are Marianne (Andrea Braein Hovig), a middle-age urologist in Oslo, and the nurse who works most closely with her, Tor (Tayo Cittadella Jacobsen). She is straight; he is gay; they’re both single. One evening after work, they find themselves on a ferry to a neighboring island, where Marianne and her friend Heidi (Marte Engebrigtsen), who’s organizing the city’s centenary celebrations, are meeting with some people involved with the planning. (January 2025 marked 100 years since the name of the city was changed from Kristiania to Oslo.)One of those people is Heidi’s friend Ole (Thomas Gullestad), a soft-spoken architect. Marianne and Ole vibe immediately. He’s divorced, with children, and his ex-wife lives next door. Marianne can’t deny her attraction to him, but the whole thing seems pretty complicated, and she doesn’t mind being alone. On the way back, though, she finds herself on the ferry with Tor, and they fall into a conversation about Tor’s own relationship philosophy — one that’s much more casual and expansive than hers. She decides to try it out for herself.Meanwhile, Tor meets Bjorn (Lars Jacob Holm) one night, then runs into him at the urology office, where he’s been diagnosed with prostate cancer. He finds himself falling into a different sort of relationship with Bjorn than he’s ever sought with another person. It turns out Tor and Marianne both have a lot of room to grow.“Love” moves slowly through its languid moments, set against the backdrop of Oslo and its architecture. There’s a loveliness to every scene, quiet urban beauty that leaves space for the audience’s contemplation. Characters spend a lot of time conversing, with frank openness, about their connections to others and themselves, about the ways they navigate the world. Sometimes during these conversations, the camera pulls back and drifts over the Oslo rooftops, shining in the bright August sun. The voices continue, but we’re observing a broader cross-section of the city, a reminder that these kinds of conversations are happening everywhere in town, all the time. People are interested in love, looking for love, swiping on their apps for love. And for each of those people, love looks a little different.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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    ‘Final Destinations: Bloodlines’ Review: Born to Die

    The sixth installment in the horror franchise might be the most self-consciously silly of the bunch — and it’s all the better for it.It’s no surprise that the “Final Destination” franchise — a schlocky, spectacularly gory series of horror films that kicked off in 2000, spawning a total of five movies — has staying power. Unlike most horror properties, there’s no big baddie (à la Jason Voorhees or Leatherface) — or at least not one capable of getting old and seeming played out. The villain is Death itself, and both onscreen and off, it’s coming for us all, though in the “Final Destination” movies this unseen force is a shameless showboat.That’s no exception in the new, sixth installment, “Final Destination: Bloodlines,” which begins with a terrifically tense set piece in and around a Space Needle-style glass tower in the 1950s. Iris (Brec Bassinger) is on a date with her beau on the building’s opening night when she experiences a vivid hallucination of their imminently brutal deaths by towering inferno. The vision allows Iris to escape her grisly fate and save everyone around her. In this regard, “Bloodlines” follows the template of all the “Final Destination” movies (the first movie saw its characters escaping an airplane explosion, the second film a highway pileup and the third a roller coaster malfunction).But as things go in the “Final Destination” universe, Death doesn’t like being cheated — and it’ll take its lives, one by one, in what has become the franchise’s claim to fame: ingeniously choreographed kill scenes that turn everyday settings and objects into potential murder weapons. Consider some of the series’s greatest hits: death by tanning bed; by head-mashing weight machine; by, uh, slipping on spaghetti and getting your eyeball pierced by a falling fire-escape ladder.“Bloodlines,” gleefully directed by Adam Stein and Zach Lipovsky, offers a compelling tweak on its predecessors by introducing — with a wink and a shove — the element of inherited trauma. The opening glass-tower tragedy, it turns out, happened decades ago and the premonition takes the form of Iris’s granddaughter’s nightmares. Stefani (Kaitlyn Santa Juana) is flunking out of college because of these recurring visions, leading her to return home and reconnect with her long-estranged grandmother (Gabrielle Rose).Of the dozens of people who were supposed to die that night, Iris was nearly the last. Death proceeds in the intended order of the original blood bath, meaning it has taken years to work through all its victims — including the children those people were never supposed to have. Iris is now something of a doomsday prepper, having single-handedly fended off Death’s wrath by sheltering in a remote cabin. Her family thinks she’s nuts, but it’s not long before Death works its way down the family tree, making conspiracists out of all of them.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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    Tom Cruise Teaches Cannes About Star Power

    Whether in “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning” or on the red carpet, the 62-year-old actor ensured that all eyes were on him.At Wednesday night’s Cannes Film Festival premiere of “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning,” the film’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, shared a story with the audience about his imaginative childhood, then clasped a hand on the shoulder of his star, Tom Cruise.“I got to grow up and have my very own action figure,” McQuarrie said.With his deep tan, blinding smile and He-Man haircut, Cruise surely looked the part of a kid’s favorite toy. Certainly, Cannes has proved ever eager to play with him: Even in recent years, when Cruise has moved away from auteur-driven dramas to focus almost exclusively on action films, the festival continues to find new reasons to welcome him back.Three years ago, Cannes honored Cruise with a fighter-jet flyover for the premiere of “Top Gun: Maverick,” where he sat with an obsequious moderator for a 90-minute talk about his devotion to big-screen filmmaking. This time, Cruise’s presence was more subdued. Instead of a solo spotlight, he made a surprise appearance at the end of McQuarrie’s panel, and while major studios often hold lavish parties at Cannes, Paramount staged no such celebration for what’s been billed as the final chapter of the “Mission: Impossible” franchise.(Perhaps the movie’s rumored mega-budget of around $400 million played a part in the studio’s penny-pinching.)The “Final Reckoning” premiere had to stand on its own, then, and Cruise ensured that it would. At two hours and forty-five minutes, the film already dwarfed every Cannes title in competition for the Palme d’Or (though the movie, which opens May 23 in the United States, isn’t in the running for the prize). Cruise further goosed the experience beforehand by signing autographs outside the Palais, where the festival is held, for fans who offered him hand-drawn portraits and beckoned him in for selfies. Even on the red carpet, even as the film’s sprawling cast gathered for a group photo, most photographers kept their cameras focused solely on Cruise.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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    Cassie Testifies Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Used Sex Videos as Blackmail

    Ms. Ventura, Mr. Combs’s ex-girlfriend, said he threatened to use tapes of their sexual encounters, known as “freak-offs,” to control her behavior.Casandra Ventura, the singer and model known as Cassie, told a jury in Manhattan on Wednesday that her life with Sean Combs had its moments, but was largely filled with beatings, threatened blackmail and even a rape.During more than five hours of testimony in Mr. Combs’s sex trafficking and racketeering trial, Ms. Ventura recounted how he had stomped on her in the back of his car and how she suffered a gash above her eye when he threw her against a bed frame.She also recounted how, after the pair had dinner in 2018, Mr. Combs raped her in her living room.“I just remember crying and saying no, but it was very fast,” she testified.At the end of her testimony, Ms. Ventura said through tears that after she had broken up with Mr. Combs, the trauma remained and she enrolled in treatment for drug abuse. Even so, she said, she contemplated taking her life by walking into traffic. She said her husband stopped her.Ms. Ventura told the court she stayed with Mr. Combs despite beatings and other abuse partly because of the nagging, persistent fear that videos of their sexual encounters with male prostitutes, the hundreds of “freak-offs” that she said Mr. Combs enjoyed watching and recording, would be posted online.Hers was not idle anxiety based on what she viewed Mr. Combs might be capable of, she said, but the consequence of repeated threats he had made to use the material to damage her if she deviated from his wishes. In one case, she described sitting beside him on a flight when he displayed for her videos that she thought had been destroyed.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