Aurelia Butler

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    ‘Rats!’ Review: Keep Texas Weird

    This gross-out action-comedy, which sees an emo teenager sucked into a deranged conspiracy plot, lays hard on the absurdism.“Rats!”, a gross-out action-comedy in the vein of “Pineapple Express” and “Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle,” throws us back into the suburban-youth aesthetics of the mid-aughts: its Hot Topic threads, pop-punk music and chintzy stoner décor. Set in a fictional version of Fresno, Tex., called Pfresno, circa 2007, this underdog caper also satirizes the state’s conservative culture — its thing for gun rights and law enforcement.In the beginning of the film, Raphael (Luke Wilcox), a listless 19-year-old, is caught graffiti tagging a phone booth. Officer Williams (Danielle Evon Ploeger), a comically noxious policewoman, tackles the teen to the ground, leading to his arrest and his forced embroilment in a sting operation against his cousin Mateo (Darius R. Autry).Mateo is a genial weed-dealer whose roomies include a pet pig and a meth-smoking squatter — though he’s obviously not the homicidal plutonium dealer Williams suspects him to be.The directors Maxwell Nalevansky and Carl Fry build out this madcap conspiracy story with potty humor (courtesy of the very unladylike Officer Williams), bloody practical effects and surreal flourishes, which play out against intentionally unglamorous backdrops (strip malls and shabby backyards).Bizarre digressions (like the screening of a rap music video about the joys of selling crack; or the perverse relationship between a foxy, cocaine-addicted reporter and her cameraman) will leave you slack jawed, whether you vibe with the film’s particularly obscene style of deadpan absurdism or not.If anything, the onslaught of weirdness is hypnotizing. As a visibly small-scale and local undertaking, the film feels genuinely connected to a vision of working-class Texas and its various characters. “I don’t know any of these people, this is just my circumstance,” says Raphael in one scene, which feels like a meta commentary on the experience of living in a country of such vast contradictions.Rats!Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters. More

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    Gene Hackman: 5 Memorable Performances to Stream

    He played a complicated hero in “The French Connection” and an arch-villain in “Superman.” Here are some of Hackman’s career highlights.Although Gene Hackman, who died at age 95, was one of Hollywood’s most enduring and recognizable stars, it was nearly impossible to put the actor in a box. In a five-decade career, he portrayed cops, villains and men of the cloth, in thrillers, comedies and superhero blockbusters.His accolades included two Academy Awards and four Golden Globes, including, in 2003, the Cecil B. DeMille Award for outstanding contributions to entertainment.Here are some of his most notable performances.‘The French Connection’Hackman’s breakout role was as Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle, a cop investigating a heroin deal in William Friedkin’s “The French Connection.” Hackman won the best actor Academy Award for this performance, and critics immediately recognized his star quality. Stephen Farber, reviewing the movie for The Times, said that Hackman had brought “a new kind of police hero” to the screen. His character was “brutal, racist, foulmouthed, petty, compulsive, lecherous,” Farber wrote, “but even at his most appalling, he is recognizably human.”Stream, rent or buy it on Prime, YouTube, Apple TV or Fandango.‘The Poseidon Adventure’Hackman followed up “The French Connection” with three movies in 1972, including “The Poseidon Adventure,” directed by Ronald Neame, about an ill-fated ocean liner’s final voyage. Hackman played a minister who leads the other frantic passengers to safety.Stream, rent or buy it on Apple TV, Prime, Fandango or YouTube.“Superman”In the 1970s, Hackman became known as one of Hollywood’s hardest-working actors, completing movies at a frenetic pace, as shown by his appearances in the “Superman” franchise. While filming his role as arch-villain Lex Luthor for the first installment, Hackman simultaneously shot his scenes for that movie’s sequel, “Superman II.”Stream, rent or buy it on Max, YouTube, Fandango, Apple TV or Prime.‘Unforgiven’Hackman won his second Oscar — a best supporting actor award in 1993 — for “Unforgiven,” in which he played a sadistic small-town sheriff who comes up against a string of bounty hunters, including one played by Clint Eastwood. In The Times review of the film, Vincent Canby said that Hackman “delights” in the role, and he noted a shift for the performer: “No more Mr. Good Guy.”Stream, rent or buy it on Prime, Fandango, Apple TV or YouTube.‘The Royal Tenenbaums’James Hamilton/Touchstone Pictures, via The Kobal CollectionHackman also won acclaim playing in comedies. In 2001, he starred in Wes Anderson’s “The Royal Tenenbaums” as a disbarred lawyer who tries to reconcile with his eccentric children. A.O. Scott, reviewing the movie for The Times, said that Hackman had “the amazing ability to register belligerence, tenderness, confusion and guile within the space of a few lines of dialogue. You never know where he’s going, but it always turns out to be exactly the right place.”Stream, rent or buy it on Apple TV, Prime, Fandango or YouTube. More

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    Oscars 2025 Predictions: Who Will Win Best Picture, Actor and Actress?

    The best picture race has been full of twists and turns. The best actress race is closely contested. Our expert predicts which films and artists will get trophies on Sunday.Best PictureMark Eydelshteyn and Mikey Madison in “Anora.”Neon✓ “Anora”“The Brutalist”“A Complete Unknown”“Conclave”“Dune: Part Two”“Emilia Pérez”“I’m Still Here”“Nickel Boys”“The Substance”“Wicked”After a few years where the best picture winner was practically ordained from the start of the season, at least this race has given us some twists and turns.First, there was the saga of “Emilia Pérez,” which led the field with a near-record 13 nominations but collapsed in controversy after the unearthing of disparaging tweets by its star, Karla Sofía Gascón. Then “Anora,” a front-runner that was utterly shut out at January’s Golden Globes, scored top prizes from the producers, directors and writers guilds.Those wins usually presage a best picture victory, especially because the producers guild uses a preferential ballot similar to the Academy’s. But in the late going, another contender began to surge as “Conclave” took the top prize at the Screen Actors Guild Awards (where “Anora” was once again shut out) as well as best film honors at the BAFTAs, the British equivalent to the Oscars.One thing gives me pause, though: If “Conclave” had the sort of across-the-board Academy support that a best picture winner can usually count on, it shouldn’t have missed out on slam-dunk Oscar nominations for directing and cinematography. “Anora” earned all the nominations it needed to, and its guild spread is hard to argue with, so that’s the film I project will win.Best DirectorJacques Audiard, “Emilia Pérez”✓ Sean Baker, “Anora”Brady Corbet, “The Brutalist”Coralie Fargeat, “The Substance”James Mangold, “A Complete Unknown”Baker picked up the DGA trophy but has strong competition from Corbet, who won best director at the BAFTAs. Still, I suspect the Academy will embrace “Anora” in both of the top categories. It helps that Baker has turned every acceptance speech he’s made this season into an upbeat rallying cry for theatrical independent filmmaking.Best ActorAdrien Brody in “The Brutalist.”Lol Crawley/A24✓ Adrien Brody, “The Brutalist”Timothée Chalamet, “A Complete Unknown”Colman Domingo, “Sing Sing”Ralph Fiennes, “Conclave”Sebastian Stan, “The Apprentice”Brody has been collecting prizes all season, though his reign was halted last weekend when Chalamet scored a last-minute SAG win. But Chalamet faces headwinds from an Academy that remains stubbornly resistant to recognizing young men: No one under 30 has ever won the best actor Oscar except for Brody himself, who notched his win for “The Pianist” at age 29. Come Sunday, he’ll add a second Oscar to the mantel.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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    Conan O’Brien on his Oscars Hosting Gig

    Conan O’Brien is not a cynic — at least not when it comes to the Oscars, which he is hosting for the first time on Sunday. The Emmy-winning comedian, podcaster, traveler and movie buff is genuinely excited — “I get to do this!” he enthused — but also thoroughly worried.“It’s the thing I wake up and think about at night: What’s the best way to tackle this? How? In a way that makes me creatively happy?” he said.Since he accepted the job late last year, O’Brien, 61, has had an emotionally taxing few months. In December, his parents, who were in their 90s, died three days apart, in his childhood home in Massachusetts. Not long after the double funeral, just as he was settling back in Los Angeles to work on the Oscars, the fires started there, and his home was evacuated. When his wife called to ask what to save, his only thought was of a 1980 letter from the author and essayist E.B. White. O’Brien had written to him, as a teenage fan, “and he wrote me back a really sweet letter,” O’Brien said. “So I said, just grab that. And if the rest goes, it goes.”He is still living in a hotel, where he has hung the letter on a wall, he said in a video interview from his office on Monday. The conversation was discursive — pensive and funny. Though he hosted the Emmys twice (most recently in 2006), he has never attended the Oscars. “This was the only way I could get invited,” he joked.His preparation has included bringing in 10 of his own writers to work with Oscar-night stalwarts, running jokes by the crew, and dropping in at clubs in Los Angeles to try out material. “I started seriously writing comedy around the time I was 18,” he said, “and it’s what I think about all the time.” Yet even for him, there is no formula. “It’s frustrating, but it’s not math. You can’t prove it. The only way to find out is to try it on people.”“This was the only way I could get invited,” O’Brien joked about his hosting duties.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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    Benmont Tench, Still a Heartbreaker, Is Carrying on Solo

    Ninety pounds, the approximate weight of a Farfisa organ, nearly kept Benmont Tench from his destiny.It was late 1971, and Tench, a native of Gainesville, Fla., was home from college for Christmas. His favorite local band, Mudcrutch, was playing a five-set-a-night residency at a topless bar called Dub’s, and they’d finally invited him to join them onstage. He started to load his gear into his mother’s station wagon, hoisted his Fender amp onto the tailgate and then went to grab his organ.“I picked this thing up and it was so damn heavy,” Tench recalled. For a moment, he considered blowing the whole thing off. Instead, he heaved the Farfisa into the car. That night, he played with Tom Petty and Mike Campbell for the first time, forging a musical bond and forming the nucleus of what would eventually become the Heartbreakers. “But it almost didn’t happen,” Tench said in a recent interview, shaking his head at the memory. “I mean, it was that close.”More than half a century later, the Heartbreakers themselves are a memory: The group ended abruptly after Petty’s death in 2017 from an accidental drug overdose. But Tench, 71, continues to make music. His second solo album, an elegiac collection of songs titled “The Melancholy Season,” will be released on March 7.The album follows a 10-year period that included a second marriage for Tench, to the writer Alice Carbone, the birth of his first child and the loss of Petty, his longtime friend and band leader.Benmont Tench’s first solo album since 2014 was born in a tumultuous period that included the death of his longtime collaborator, Tom Petty.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesWe 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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    Ione Skye Was an Enigma in Her 1990s Heyday. Now She’d Like a Word.

    When Ione Skye was in middle school in the early 1980s, a group of popular, mean girls she calls “the Aprils” brought her — shy, bookish, not yet famous — into their intimidating fold. She was surprised they even knew her name.“Part of me wanted to punch the girls’ smug faces,” she writes in her memoir “Say Everything,” due out from Gallery Books on March 4. Another part of her, though, “burned with excitement.”Those preteen memories, which she wrote down, felt important. Cinematic, even. “My own story captured my imagination,” Skye told me during a video interview from Los Angeles. “I had a big ego, I guess.”For almost 40 years, since Skye made her film debut at 15 alongside Keanu Reeves, Crispin Glover and Dennis Hopper in the teen crime drama “River’s Edge,” her name has been associated with powerful people, mostly men. There’s her father, the Scottish folk singer Donovan, whose early abandonment of Skye, her mother and brother, connects her experiences from “Girlhood,” as the first section of the book is called, to “Womanhood,” the second.Ione Skye with John Cusack in the 1989 movie “Say Anything.”20th Century FoxThere’s her relationship with the Red Hot Chili Peppers frontman Anthony Kiedis, which started when she was 16. There’s her marriage to Adam Horovitz, better known as Ad-Rock from the Beastie Boys, which ended in divorce after Skye (“I was a serial cheater,” she writes) rediscovered her bisexuality and embarked on a series of affairs with women, including Jenny Shimizu, Ingrid Casares and Alice Temple. She’s now a mother of two and has been married to Ben Lee, a musician, since 2008. They live in Los Angeles but just spent the last year in Sydney.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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    ‘My Dead Friend Zoe’ Review: On the Battlefield and at Home

    A young Army veteran struggles with her memories and guilt in this heartfelt independent drama.I’m not sure how much attention to ascribe to this, but given that Zoe is Greek for “life,” the title of “My Dead Friend Zoe” feels a bit wry. Directed by Kyle Hausmann-Stokes from a screenplay he wrote with A.J. Bermudez, it’s a competently performed drama about an Army veteran named Merit (Sonequa Martin-Green) who fought in the Afghanistan War and must come to terms with both the loss of her friend Zoe (Natalie Morales) and the burden of taking care of her grandfather (Ed Harris), whose Alzheimer’s disease is rapidly advancing.Some of that would probably qualify as a spoiler if it wasn’t for the title of the film, which sounds a little sardonic, a little jokey, when in fact there’s nothing sardonic or jokey about this film at all. It is achingly sincere, a tribute to two soldiers with whom Hausmann-Stokes, an Army veteran, served in Iraq.If anything’s sardonic about the film, it’s Zoe, who has never met a joke she didn’t want to crack. Merit and Zoe spend a lot of their deployment time together, and at the start of the movie, they’re debating what they’ll do after this tour of duty ends. Merit is planning to go to college; Zoe, who seems a bit lost in life, resents Merit’s plans — college, she says, is for “rich kids and snowflakes” — and is thinking about re-enlisting.Most of that we encounter in flashbacks. In the present, Merit is living a small life, working in a warehouse and spending a lot of her free time running, a way to shake off memories of Zoe. But Zoe shows up anyhow, at least in Merit’s mind — especially during group therapy, led by Dr. Cole (Morgan Freeman). But when her mother calls and asks her to look after her grandfather, who is himself a Vietnam veteran, Merit is forced into a closer confrontation with her memories, the version of Zoe in her mind and the feelings that’s she’s been trying to escape.Most of the filmmaking in “My Dead Friend Zoe” feels workmanlike, proficient and straightforward in its storytelling — a promising feature debut for Hausmann-Stokes. The film’s best feature is its performances from a uniformly excellent cast, including Harris being gruffly pensive, Morales at her energetic best and Utkarsh Ambudkar as Alex, the funny local guy with whom Merit strikes up a friendship, or maybe something more. Martin-Green is tasked with carrying the story, and she does it, evoking real emotion as she processes the feelings she’s stuffed down.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 Hart Has One Foot in Jazz’s Past and the Other in Its Future

    Onstage at Smoke in late January, the all-star septet the Cookers were surging into high gear. The catalyst: their drummer, Billy Hart, who stirred up rhythmic eddies and punched out stinging cymbal accents while fixing the saxophonist Azar Lawrence with an eager, heat-of-battle grin.On “Just,” a new album by Hart’s own long-running quartet, out Friday, he reveals some of that intensity in a more understated guise, playing alongside vanguard musicians a quarter century or more younger — the saxophonist Mark Turner, the pianist Ethan Iverson and the bassist Ben Street — and pulling off what has become, across his six-decade-plus career, a trademark Billy Hart feat: sounding effortlessly and perpetually contemporary.“He’s a continual, consummate student of the music,” Turner said of Hart, 84, in a phone interview. While Hart’s style draws on the many eras in which he has been active, he continued, “he hasn’t changed his language into something that is based in a period.”The bassist Buster Williams has worked with Hart since the early ’60s, first meeting him on a gig with the vocalist Betty Carter and later aligning with him in many other contexts, including the Mwandishi band, Herbie Hancock’s trailblazing electric-jazz sextet of the early ’70s. “He’s got that fresh understanding of things,” Williams said in a phone interview. “His vision is always looking forward.”Could the young Billy Hart, growing up in Washington, D.C., have envisioned such a long and thriving career? “Of course not,” he said with an incredulous laugh.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesOutside the jazz world, Hart is largely unknown. But within the genre — where peers and fans refer to him as Jabali, or “rock,” one of the Swahili monikers bestowed on the members of the Mwandishi band by their associate James Mtume — his esteem is near-universal, a status reflected in a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master designation and his staggeringly broad discography, encompassing more than 600 albums.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