Aurelia Butler

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    ‘Sweetheart’ Review: A Seaside Crush

    In this British coming-of-age film, a young lesbian stumbles through some important firsts.AJ, the moody protagonist of the British coming-of-age film “Sweetheart,” exudes an angst that is recognizable to any person who has lived through adolescence.When she is dragged by her mother, Tina (Jo Hartley), to a family vacation at a seaside trailer resort, AJ (Nell Barlow) initially stews in frustration. She’s not charmed by nights spent watching the resort’s resident magician. And her usual wardrobe, consisting mostly of baggy sweaters, doesn’t suit the sunny weather — much to her mother’s delight.But if “Sweetheart” shows its share of evergreen teenage turmoil, the writer and director Marley Morrison also cannily observes details that feel specific to young people today. AJ is tortured by the lack of Wi-Fi. She signals her defiance not with a leather jacket or tattoos, but by wearing sunglasses and a bucket hat everywhere. AJ is concerned about the environment, and she’s just as likely to argue with her mother about methane emissions as she is about appropriate beachwear. Most crucial to the plot, when the film opens, AJ has already come out to her family as a lesbian, though she lacks romantic experience.On vacation, AJ’s boredom quickly dissipates when she meets Isla (Ella-Rae Smith), a local lifeguard, at the laundromat. Propelled by a desire to get to know this beautiful stranger, AJ stumbles forward through some important firsts for her life. She goes to parties, she smokes and drinks, and she begins to explore her sexuality.Morrison is less discerning in her depiction of Isla’s character, and at times Isla feels flat in comparison with AJ’s broad collection of quirks. But to the film’s credit, the central relationship remains realistically drawn — a teenage courtship that’s marked by misunderstandings and mood swings. The characters aren’t always sweet, but they never feel phony.SweetheartNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. Rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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    Review: No Dudamel Yet, but a Celebration at the Philharmonic

    Esa-Pekka Salonen led the New York Philharmonic the day after Gustavo Dudamel was named as its next music director.If critics ruled the world — hope springs eternal — Esa-Pekka Salonen might be the New York Philharmonic’s music director right now. A conductor and composer, incisive and dryly funny, with a broad and quirky repertory, he was favored by some of us during the process that resulted in the selection of Jaap van Zweden in 2016.Who knows how long Salonen would have stayed in the job, but van Zweden is leaving after next season, just a few years into his tenure. And on Tuesday, the Philharmonic announced that Gustavo Dudamel, the superstar music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, would replace him.Dudamel, though, is conducting on the West Coast this week. He’s coming to New York for a news conference on Feb. 20, then doesn’t lead his new orchestra until May. Because of classical music’s glacial planning cycles, it won’t be until 2026 that he officially takes up the podium.So, by coincidence, it was Salonen — Dudamel’s predecessor in Los Angeles and now the music director of the San Francisco Symphony — who led the Philharmonic’s first concert since the appointment, on Wednesday at David Geffen Hall. (One for the annals of bad timing: Just last week, the two men and Rafael Payare of the San Diego Symphony unveiled, with much hoopla, the California Festival, a coming joint venture.)If any performance could have captured the excitement the Philharmonic is feeling —  look at the photo published in The New York Times of Judith LeClair, the principal bassoon, erupting when she learned the Dudamel news — it was the joyful rendition of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony that closed Wednesday’s program.Under Salonen, the first movement steadily gained tension and excitement from the alternation — and sometimes the superimposition — of rough, abrupt accents and silkily long legato lines. He was unafraid of dramatic elongations of transitional passages: the short prelude to the Vivace section, the exchange of quietly wistful material through the winds later on.The Allegretto second movement, which under some batons can feel like an adagio dirge, was here remarkably flexible, neither too slow nor too heavy. The third movement began with a blitheness that gave the weighty trio section true grandeur by contrast. A whooshing start to the finale was soon, once again, grounded in those legato lines, headlong but fundamentally guided.It was interesting to compare with the excellent interpretation of Beethoven’s Second Symphony here last month by Santtu-Matias Rouvali. Written merely a decade before the Seventh, it is a vestige of the vanishing world of Classicism, and Rouvali scrupulously avoided breathlessness, any sense of losing rhythmic clarity and control.But in Salonen’s take on the more bacchic Seventh, you got a sense of revelry in the way this music is intricately constructed to seem on the verge of falling apart. Near the end of the first movement, there was the proper, slightly exhilarating, slightly queasy-making impression of different parts of the orchestra simultaneously speeding up and slowing down.It was appropriate in a week of Philharmonic pride that the soloist earlier in the program was drawn from the ranks of the orchestra: Anthony McGill, the principal clarinet, who was featured in the American premiere of Salonen’s “kínēma.” Replace the “k” with a “c” and you get the idea; the piece was drawn from plans for a film score.Salonen said from the stage that the roughly half-hour work, composed during the pandemic lockdown and scored for strings alone, was “practically” a clarinet concerto — made up of five “scenes” that he compared to individual rooms, each without the ranging or development we usually expect within concerto movements. (For those who wanted development, he said to laughter, there was the Beethoven symphony to come after intermission.)The first scene is a shining, dewy dawn; the second, a soft, easygoing aria over a steady repeating bass line; the third, a bright, pizzicato accompaniment to a skipping, spattering clarinet; the fourth, a restrained elegy punctuated by sudden, swiftly abandoned surges.The fifth begins with hymnlike solemnity, reminiscent of a sunset, with the violins making a high, smooth spearing sound that shades into the tone of the clarinet. Unexpectedly aggressive, sharply rhythmic music follows — this seems to be the material that Salonen joked earlier was an echo of “Psycho” — accompanied by siren cries from the soloist.It felt odd to be unleashing so much drama at the very end, a big release of something that was never quite built up. But “kínēma” isn’t unpleasant, and McGill was a stylishly reserved soloist, not one to impose himself even in virtuosic passages — his tone mellow yet direct, sweet and refreshing.The concert — beginning with Luciano Berio’s elegantly wry, 20th-century layering of four versions of an 18th-century Luigi Boccherini quintet — was a spirited union of new and old, and an aptly stirring celebration of exciting news.New York PhilharmonicThis program repeats through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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    ‘Somebody I Used to Know’ Review: Reigniting Old Flames

    In Dave Franco’s new comedy, Alison Brie plays a reality television showrunner attempting to break up her ex-boyfriend’s engagement.In the catalog of comedies about city strivers who decamp to their suburban hometowns to hassle former lovers, Dave Franco’s “Somebody I Used to Know” is an upbeat but minor entry, destined to recede behind the worthier stories from which it borrows. The unfortunate irony of the movie’s title — one word off from the Gotye earworm, presumably to preserve search engine optimization, if not originality — is that the film lacks the indelible details and authentic feeling necessary to encode it in long-term memory. Indeed, soon after finishing the movie, it already feels far away.The story begins as Ally (Alison Brie), a reality television showrunner, craftily wrests a tearful disclosure from an interview subject on camera. It should be a triumphant moment, but the implication is that in her pursuit of Hollywood success, Ally has sold her soul and sacrificed her dignity. Not to worry: The chance for a reset arrives after the network declines to renew the show, and Ally, whose workaholism has left her friendless, makes the impromptu decision to visit her mother (a criminally underused Julie Hagerty) in Leavenworth, a small town situated in the mountains of Washington.This cinematic overture is among the most successful sequences in the movie, and sets us up for a conventional but comforting journey back to more wholesome roots. It also teases a gleefully unlikable protagonist who’s more schemer than achiever and more sourpuss than socialite; Brie (who co-wrote the script with Franco) has a knack for tapping into her nasty side, and as we zigzag through a handful of set pieces that don’t quite register comedically — one hinges on cat diarrhea — we yearn for our city mouse to go fully feral.Regrettably, the moment never arrives. While in Leavenworth, Ally bumps into her ex-boyfriend, Sean (Jay Ellis), and is aggrieved to learn of his recent engagement to Cassidy (Kiersey Clemons), a self-possessed local punk singer. Ally spends the remainder of the film’s running time batting eyelashes and crashing wedding events as she conspires to reignite their old flame. It’s remarkable that nobody tells her to get lost and get a life; despite some side-eyeing, even Cassidy and her protective pals seem glad to have the grating Ally around.As the movie’s co-writer and director, Franco brings a sunny disposition and a touch of idiosyncratic farce. There are the usual jaunty montage sequences and forlorn shots of characters gazing out windows, but there is also vomit, obscene texts and an overwhelming dose of public nudity. Franco and Brie are clearly riffing on a suite of movies about career women rediscovering roots and wreaking havoc on old relationships — “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” “Sweet Home Alabama” and “Young Adult” come to mind — and seek to inject the familiar premise with millennial novelty.But there’s something missing from the equation. Each of those predecessors appreciate that their heroines, in acting harshly toward their peers, also become their villains. By reeling in Ally’s ruthlessness, expunging her comeuppance and mollifying those she wrongs, “Somebody I Used to Know” actually distances us from Ally and her issues. The truth is that jealousy and cruelty are human; anything less is just a portrait with the blemishes erased.Somebody I Used to KnowRated R for full-frontal nudity. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. Watch on Amazon. More

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    Annie Mac’s Before Midnight: A Dance Party With an Early Bedtime

    The Before Midnight parties promise all the thrills of a hedonistic night out, but with a respectable finish time for older dance music fans.It was Friday night, in a 2,000-person capacity nightclub in London, and the dance floor was packed. A heavy-duty sound system pounded out house music and a huge disco ball turned overhead. Only one thing was off: It was 9.30 p.m.A woman in the crowd gleefully yelled to the throng of people around her: “I’m 15 weeks postpartum and I’m in the club!”The party, called Before Midnight, is organized by the Irish D.J. Annie Macmanus, who plays under the name Annie Mac: It promises all the thrills of a club — just with an early bedtime. Starting at 7 p.m. and wrapped up by 12, Before Midnight is one of several recent variations on the hedonistic all-night sessions in which dance music is usually enjoyed, aimed at older fans juggling children and careers.“There’s an inherent belief that clubbing is for young people,” Macmanus said recently by phone. “There’s now a generation of people who experienced clubbing in its most popular guise, and still want to do that, but don’t feel like they belong there anymore.”Macmanus explained that Before Midnight was born out of her desire to fit a music career around her duties as a mother of two children, ages 6 and 9. Late-night D.J. sets didn’t mix well with their weekend activities, she said.“It felt like I had jet lag,” Macmanus said. “It just wasn’t accommodating for where I’m at in my life right now.”Annie Macmanus, who D.J.s as Annie Mac. Before setting up Before Midnight, she fronted BBC radio’s flagship dance music show.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesMacmanus said this reckoning coincided with her decision, in 2021, to stand down as the presenter of the BBC’s flagship dance music show, on BBC Radio 1 — a gig she had held for 17 years and which cemented her name as a musical tastemaker in Britain.Before Midnight was her next act, she said, a fresh project to restore some work-life balance. The premise was simple, she added: “a definitive club night that’s just like a normal one, only earlier.”The first night, held last year at the Islington Assembly Hall, a London music venue, was a one-off experiment. It sold out, and, at the end of last year, Macmanus announced a 10-date Before Midnight tour of Britain and Ireland. The tour’s two remaining London dates are also taking place at Outernet, a new, subterranean nightclub in the city’s West End that is the largest live events space built in central London since the 1940s.Before Midnight is particularly popular with women, who Macmanus estimated make up about 75 percent of the crowd. Jodie Brooks, 44, who has attended every Before Midnight party in London to date, was in the crowd this past Friday. “I just didn’t want the night to start at 1 a.m. anymore,” Brooks, who works in advertising and like Macmanus has two children age 6 and 9, said later by phone. “I never wanted parenthood to change me in that way, but, inevitably, it just does. You have to get up and do the Saturday-morning football practice at 9 a.m.,” she said.The coronavirus lockdowns of 2022 and 2021, which took clubbing temporarily out of the mix, made many people in their 30s and 40s re-evaluate how they wanted to spend their weekends. Some, like Brooks, emerged determined to get back on the dance floor, but on new, more wholesome terms. With Before Midnight, she said, “You can go for a really lush dinner at six. By eight you’re in the club,” and “by 12 you’re out.”Before Midnight is particularly popular with women, who Macmanus estimated make up about 75 percent of the crowd.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesOthers realized that they liked dance music, but not nightclubs. Adem Holness, who leads the contemporary music program at the Southbank Center, a central London arts venue, said that many of the venue’s offerings suited electronic music enthusiasts at a more mature life stage: Performances are seated, and finish in time to catch the last Tube home.“We have a menu of different options for people,” he said. “It’s about making the model work for all kinds of people.”In the last year, D.J.s and dance music performers including Fabio & Grooverider, Erykah Badu and Peaches have all played gigs at the Royal Festival Hall, a concert hall managed by the Southbank. “I’m seeing people wanting to experience really great music that you might think or assume belongs in a club, somewhere else, or in a different way,” Holness said.Before Midnight’s London dates are at Outernet, a new, subterranean nightclub in the city’s West End.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesUpcoming parties are scheduled for Manchester in northern England, Glasgow and Dublin, among other cities.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesBefore Midnight was also influenced by the experience of bringing club culture into a more rarefied space, Macmanus said. In 2019, she recalled, she played in New York at MoMa PS1’s Warm Up, the art museum’s summer series that sets experimental and electronic music alongside contemporary art and design. There, she saw a multigenerational audience dancing together, she said. “It had a big effect on me as a D.J.,” she added. “I’m always going to try and reach that type of a dance floor.”The Before Midnight concept was simple, Macmanus said: “a definitive club night that’s just like a normal one, only earlier.”Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesMacmanus added that an early-starting dance party wasn’t a totally original idea. Tim Lawrence, a professor of cultural studies at the University of East London who researches nightlife has been running a monthly London dance party that starts at 5 p.m. since 2018; in an interview, he said that events like Before Midnight were a way to “pluralize the culture.” During a 2017 tour of the United States to promote his book “Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor,” Lawrence recalled, he attended an invite-only party in New York called Joy that started around dinnertime.Lawrence brought the concept back to London with him and co-founded his monthly dance party called All Our Friends. “It’s about confounding certain ideas that come with the all-night or late-night thing,” Lawrence said. The earlier timetable allows for a different approach to dancing, he said, which can “potentially be more expressive, more interactive and go a bit deeper on a social level.”But for Brooks, the advertising worker, the appeal of Before Midnight was much simpler: It was an opportunity to dance to the music that she loves, in a club like any other, and be home in time for bed.“You get all the joy and the love,” she said. “You get to be a part of something again. And you don’t feel out of place.”Confetti released just before midnight signaled the party was almost over.Lauren Fleishman for The New York Times More

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    ‘Of an Age’ Review: A Boy’s Own (Coming Out) Story

    In 1999 Melbourne, a teenage outsider meets a young man who’s smart, kind, sensitive and looks mighty fine in a tight black T-shirt.One of the trickier hurdles that romantic movies need to clear is convincing the viewer to swoon, too. That bar proves insurmountably high in “Of an Age,” a confident if unpersuasive story about a quintessentially alienated teenager falling for guy in his mid-20s who checks all the heartthrob boxes: He’s kind, good looking, has a nice smile and seems to like the attention directed at him. Yet why this object of desire, an ostensibly serious thinker en route to grad school, would fall for our charisma-challenged protagonist remains thoroughly mystifying.The writer-director Goran Stolevski made a modest splash at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival with his feature debut, “You Won’t Be Alone,” a silly witchy-woman horror movie set in 19th-century Macedonia that effectively flicks at your nerves without taxing your brain. For his new movie, Stolevski has shifted focus and swapped genres to create a low-key, intimate portrait of a young man’s awakening — sexual and otherwise — in Melbourne. It’s the summer of 1999 when Kol (Elias Anton), a Serbian immigrant a few weeks shy of 18, encounters Adam (a fine Thom Green), who over the course of a day upends the teen’s life.Overlong story short, they meet strainingly cute through Adam’s sister Ebony (Hattie Hook), who’s Kol’s dance partner and only apparent friend, though mostly just an off-putting script contrivance. Her role is to get the guys together, which she does in a protracted opener that settles down with Adam behind the wheel and Kol riding jumpy shotgun. They talk and talk. Adam not-so-casually shares that he’s gay and single, news that Kol receives with transparent anxiety and obvious interest. Later, they attend a party where a couple of girls are mean to Kol, who’s rescued by Adam. The guys hit the road again, and talk and talk some more.Stolevski, as his earlier work shows, knows his way around a camera. Working with the cinematographer Matthew Chuang (who also shot “You Won’t Be Alone”), Stolevski uses the physical confines of the car with intelligence, shrewdly marshaling its tight space to create a sense of claustrophobia that subtly shifts into intimacy as the men warm to each other. He also does nice work with the Australian light, in some sequences giving the visuals a blurry radiance that softens every hard edge, turns an ordinary cityscape into a jewel box and looks particularly lovely when bounced off Adam’s bare skin.It’s too bad then that, for all the bashful and gawking looks he employs playing Kol, Anton just doesn’t cut it as a timid, socially awkward adolescent outsider, a serious impediment to the movie’s fragile realism. The actor makes more sense in the role when the story jumps forward in time, bringing a now-strappingly adult Kol with it. The movie’s greater, intractable problem, though, is that Stolevski has burdened his characters with such obvious narrative instrumentality — Kol is the sensitive naïf while Adam is the appealing, gentle exemplar of an authentic life — that the two simply never come to life as people, either as individuals or as a couple. They say and do everything that they should, and also everything that you expect.Of an AgeRated R for language. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Hannah Ha Ha’ Review: Making Ends Meet

    The directors Jordan Tetewsky and Joshua Pikovsky offer a warm examination of what it means to do meaningful work in a world that undervalues it.The aimlessness of young adulthood is well-trodden ground in the world of indie cinema, but few movies offer the nuanced, lived-in portrayal seen in “Hannah Ha Ha.” The film follows the day-to-day life of Hannah (an illuminating Hannah Lee Thompson), a 25-year-old in small-town Massachusetts. She engages in odd jobs around the area, farming vegetables and teaching guitar lessons, while living with her aging father, Avram (Avram Tetewsky). Under the pressure of her rise-and-grind yuppie older brother, Paul (Roger Mancusi), who reminds her she’ll be booted off Dad’s health insurance on her impending 26th birthday, Hannah attempts to find herself a “real job,” first in the jargon-fueled tech world her brother occupies and then, after that fails, the service industry.Jordan Tetewsky and Joshua Pikovsky, the filmmaking duo who wrote and directed the movie, are natives of the semirural townships southwest of Boston, and their familiarity with the region and its people is what makes “Hannah Ha Ha” transcend — or, in many cases, take full advantage of — its shoestring budget. Like Hannah herself, the film views the world through a soft-focus lens. It lingers on scenes of friendship and community that have little to do with being on the clock: people at bonfires, in a mom-and-pop creamery, going on weekend bike rides through the woods. During a smoke break at her mind-numbing fast-food night shift, Hannah gazes across the parking lot and quietly observes the characters, mundane or not, who have chosen to pull their cars into the strip mall that evening.The past few years have led many to question their relationship to employment, and why being a kind and caring member of one’s community isn’t enough to make a living wage. As Hannah struggles to answer that question herself, she regularly listens to the voice of her uncle (Peter Cole), a radio D.J. who hosts a call-in show popular with local misanthropes. It’s unclear whether his listenership stretches much further than that. But to a chosen few, his work is essential.Hannah Ha HaNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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    ‘Attachment’ Review: Demon Lover

    Mysterious behavior leads to an over-familiar reveal in this supernatural horror movie.Shacking up soon after meeting up could strain any relationship, but “Attachment” stirs in the extra spice of demonic possession. In Gabriel Bier Gislason’s compact supernatural story, Maja (Josephine Park) and Leah (Ellie Kendrick) move into Leah’s London flat not long after a meet-cute in a Danish library. Their sole neighbor is Leah’s mother, Chana (Sofie Grabol), whose extreme protectiveness lights a slow-burning fuse of dread.Leah suffers from strange seizures and fugue states, and Maja starts clashing with Chana, an Orthodox Jewish homemaker, over how best to take care of her. The mutual suspicion simmers as Maja hears creaks in the night and finds Chana’s habits peculiar, though a welcome streak of light humor lets the whole story keep a toe in rom-com waters. (By chance this film arrives shortly after a recent, creepier entry in dybbuk horror, “The Offering.”)When a neighborhood bookseller, Lev (a wry David Dencik), hints to Maja that something evil is afoot, a mystery develops as to whether Leah’s secretive mother has her daughter’s best interests in mind. But this buildup keeps us waiting for a reveal that then feels instantly familiar, despite nice subtle sinister touches in Kendrick’s performance.One could imagine another version of “Attachment” that identifies the nature of Leah’s situation early on, and then watches the couple cope with it. As it is, the ticktock horror plotting muffles the romantic spark that brought Maja and Leah together in the first place — the thrill replaced by a lukewarm chill.AttachmentNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Watch on Shudder. More

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    ‘Consecration’ Review: Something Unholy

    This unsatisfying horror film follows a woman’s search for clues after her brother’s mysterious death at a seaside convent.“Consecration,” a new horror film from the director Christopher Smith, begins with a cryptic declaration from its protagonist, Grace (Jena Malone): “My brother used to believe I had a guardian angel. And I used to believe in nothing. Now, I’m not so sure.” During this voice-over, an older nun saunters over and points a gun at the camera, which is to say, at Grace’s face.The film eventually gets to what prompts this toothlessly jarring shot, but the payoff isn’t particularly satisfying. Grace, an eye doctor, travels to the seaside convent where her brother, a priest, died. Her brother, a suspect in the murder of a fellow priest, is believed to have taken his own life, but Grace has her doubts. Suspicious of the nuns, stern traditionalists led by a dour mother superior, Grace begins looking for evidence of foul play. While she searches, she’s haunted by apparitions and visions of death, and the film often flashes back to her grim childhood in which the religious and the darkly supernatural were entwined.Yet the mythos of Grace’s past isn’t filled in thoughtfully or interestingly enough to buoy the present story’s mysteries and twists. The plot, as a result, can’t quite find its momentum; it doesn’t help that most of the film’s scares fall flat on a visual and technical level. Malone does what she can to keep it all afloat, and Danny Huston lends a bit of gravitas as Father Romero, a visiting priest who may or may not be there to help Grace. Either way, it’s not much of a thrill to find out.ConsecrationRated R. Bloody, violent content and some language. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More