Aurelia Butler

More stories

  • 113 Shares99 Views

    in Music

    Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs’s Sex Trafficking Trial Begins Jury Selection

    Mr. Combs has pleaded not guilty to charges of racketeering and sex trafficking. Potential jurors were asked about their exposure to details of the accusations.Jury selection started on Monday in the federal trial of Sean Combs, which is expected to last well into the summer.The judge overseeing the case, Arun Subramanian, questioned potential jurors gathered at Federal District Court in Manhattan about what they have seen and read about the accusations against the high-profile defendant, whose alleged misdeeds have been nearly inescapable in the news and on social media for the past year and a half. He has pleaded not guilty to charges of racketeering and sex trafficking.Many of the potential jurors said they had been exposed to the case: on a television at the gym, through “water-cooler talk” among co-workers, via a comedian making jokes on Instagram. That exposure was not necessarily disqualifying as long as the potential jurors — who are not being identified by name — said they could decide the case based only on the evidence they saw in court.“You understand that Mr. Combs is presumed innocent?” Judge Subramanian asked one potential juror, who said she had heard about the case on the radio and had been aware of Mr. Combs’s music and celebrity since the 1990s.“Absolutely,” she replied.Mr. Combs has been accused by the government of running a criminal enterprise that is responsible for facilitating a pattern of crimes over two decades, including sex trafficking, kidnapping, arson and drug violations. Prosecutors have accused Mr. Combs of coercing four women into sex, including his former girlfriend Casandra Ventura, who is expected to be a star witness in the trial.The music mogul’s lawyers have said that the sex at the center of the government’s case was consensual.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

  • 100 Shares129 Views

    in Movies

    The 50 Best Movies on Max Right Now

    In addition to new Warner and HBO films, the streamer has a treasure trove of Golden Age classics, indie flicks and foreign films. Start with these.When HBO Max debuted in May 2020, subscribers rightfully expected (and got) the formidable catalog of prestige television associated with the HBO brand. But its movie library drew from a much deeper well. Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns HBO, is a huge conglomerate, and its premiere streaming service comprises decades of titles from Warner Bros., Turner Classic Movies, Studio Ghibli and more. Viewed in that light, its recent rebranding as Max seems fitting.That means a lot of large-scale fantasy series and selections from the DC extended universe. Max is also an education in Golden Age Hollywood classics and in independent and foreign auteurs like Federico Fellini, Satyajit Ray and John Cassavetes. The list below is an effort to recommend a diverse range of movies — old and new, foreign and domestic, all-ages and adults-only — that cross genres and cultures while appealing to casual and serious movie-watchers alike. (Note: Streaming services sometimes remove titles or change starting dates without notice.)Here are our lists of the best movies and TV shows on Netflix, the best movies on Amazon Prime Video and the best of everything on Hulu and Disney+.A24‘Aftersun’ (2022)Memory pieces about childhood are nearly always touched by nostalgia, however bittersweet, but Charlotte Wells’s gorgeous, semi-autobiographical debut feature is graced instead by perspective. The memory in “Aftersun” encapsulates a few days in 1999 at a downscale Turkish resort, where an 11-year-old (Frankie Corio) went on her last vacation with her 30-something father (Paul Mescal), who did a credible job at the time of masking his personal anguish in order to make her happy. The MiniDV camera footage the girl captured of the trip tells a different story about him, and the film seizes on it subtly and beautifully. A.O. Scott admired Wells for directing with “the unaffected precision of a lyric poet.”Stream it on Max‘Logan’ (2017)Superhero franchises like the MCU and the DCEU have developed such a predictable template that each new entry can feel at least partially like a paint-by-numbers exercise. Though it extends from the popular “X-Men” series featuring Hugh Jackman as Wolverine and Patrick Stewart as Professor X, James Mangold’s “Logan” has the somber tone and feel of an old-school Western, emphasizing the exhaustion of an aging, battered hero dragged reluctantly to another mission. Having retired to Mexico to look after a sick Professor X, Jackman’s Logan is tasked with protecting a vulnerable young girl (Dafne Keen) whose powers (and history) overlap mysteriously with his own. Manohla Dargis called the film “a strong argument for bringing the comic-book movie down to earth.”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

  • 100 Shares199 Views

    in Movies

    ‘Thunderbolts*’ Axes the Asterisk for Surprise Title Reveal

    A plot twist that comes in the movie’s final moments will now be front and center on billboards. The director Jake Schreier explains the rebrand.If you wondered why there’s an asterisk attached to the title of the new movie “Thunderbolts*,” you won’t have to wait any longer to find out.Sure, you could have satisfied your curiosity the old-fashioned way by seeing the movie in theaters over the weekend, where it claimed the No. 1 spot at the box office. But as of Monday morning, the big reveal teased by that symbol will now be front and center on the movie’s billboards, which have switched from “Thunderbolts*” to the surprising title introduced in the film’s closing credits.(If you would like to remain unspoiled, read no further and avert your eyes from billboards for the time being.)So long, Thunderbolts: This team of misfits, headed by Florence Pugh’s weary assassin, Yelena Belova, ends the film rebranded as “The New Avengers.” And now, on billboards, the movie itself will follow suit.The name change happens in the final scene of the Jake Schreier-directed film: The wily C.I.A. director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) tricks the newly assembled superteam into storming a news conference at which she introduces them to the world as the New Avengers. Then, as the end credits begin, the title “Thunderbolts*” is ripped away like a comic-book page, revealing the new moniker.After three days in theaters, that rebrand has now made its way to billboards. “It felt like, if Val is also trying to pull a switcheroo and sell the New Avengers to the world, we could do that, too,” Schreier said in an interview with The Times on Saturday. “Especially given that the asterisk has been on the movie for a year, hopefully it doesn’t feel sweaty — it feels like this was a plan and we built up to it.”Incorporating the new moniker into the marketing may also be an acknowledgment that keeping a movie secret is harder than ever these days, when surprises can be splashed across social media within milliseconds of release. Schreier, who pitched the asterisk during his initial meetings on the movie, credits Marvel Studios and its president, Kevin Feige, for a willingness to experiment with the title switch.“It’s very fun that they were open to embracing that,” Schreier said. He acknowledged that clips containing the spoiler have already made their way online, so why not make it work in their favor?“It’s so interesting in this world, and Kevin talks about it sometimes, where sometimes they wanted things to leak and they don’t,” Schreier said. “I think we all assumed that it would be a bigger part of the conversation already, so it’ll be interesting to see what happens.” More

  • 188 Shares169 Views

    in Music

    Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Jury to Decide if He Led an Entourage or a Criminal Enterprise

    Selection of jurors is to begin Monday in a federal case that accuses the music mogul of deploying his employees to help him commit crimes.Running the life of Sean Combs has long involved a large retinue of employees, including security guards, personal assistants, household staff and higher-ranking supervisors.At the music mogul’s trial on charges of racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking, the jury will be confronted with the question of whether Mr. Combs led a typical celebrity entourage or, as prosecutors will argue, a criminal enterprise responsible for enabling years of sexual exploitation and other crimes.The selection of that jury begins on Monday as prosecutors and defense lawyers work to choose a 12-member panel for a sprawling case that will put much of Mr. Combs’s life on trial and focus particular scrutiny on the conduct of his employees over two decades.The government says employees set up hotel rooms, procured drugs and arranged for male prostitutes ahead of what prosecutors have described as “drug-fueled coercive sex marathons.” They paid women to keep them under Mr. Combs’s financial control, investigators say, and when Mr. Combs became violent, they managed the aftermath.“They facilitated the cover up of those assaults,” prosecutors wrote of Mr. Combs’s staffers in court papers, “by helping the defendant bribe witnesses, arranging treatment for the victims, secreting the victims away from the public until their injuries healed, and contacting victims in the aftermath of the defendant’s assaults.”In a search of Mr. Combs’s home in Miami, prosecutors said, law enforcement seized firearms and ammunition, including two AR-15s with defaced serial numbers in his bedroom closet.Dave Sanders 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

  • 163 Shares149 Views

    in Movies

    Wim Wenders on Where the War in Europe Really Ended 80 Years Ago

    Wim Wenders, the renowned German film director, is nearly 80 years old, as old as the peace in Europe that followed the capitulation of the Nazi regime.“From my childhood onward, I have lived 80 years in peace,” he says in a short film he has directed to commemorate the end of World War II. But now, with a war in Ukraine that he calls “a war against Europe,” Wenders says that the stakes have rarely been higher.“Eighty years after the liberation of our continent, we Europeans are realizing again that peace cannot be taken for granted,” he says in the film. “It is now up to us to take the keys to freedom into our own hands.”In an interview in his Berlin office, Wenders said that the decades of peace “defined my life,” as the war had defined the life of his parents. His father, an army surgeon, spent five years at the front and was the only one of his class who did not die there, Wenders said. “I had the privilege to be among the first generation of Germans who lived for 80 years in peace,” he said. “None of my ancestors had that privilege.”Europe and Germany are crammed with varied efforts to remember the end of the war this week, including somber memorial events at concentration camps like Dachau and Bergen-Belsen. But Wenders’ film is a rare personal and political testament from the man behind award-winning movies including “Paris, Texas,” “Wings of Desire” and “The American Friend.”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

  • 163 Shares199 Views

    in Movies

    Cora Sue Collins, a Busy Child Actress in the 1930s, Dies at 98

    She was in films with Greta Garbo, who became a friend, and Myrna Loy, Bette Davis and others. She ended her career after being sexually harassed.Cora Sue Collins, who as a dimpled, chubby-cheeked child actress in the early 1930s appeared opposite A-list stars like Greta Garbo, Myrna Loy and Merle Oberon, but who cut her career short after being sexually harassed by a screenwriter, died on April 27 at her home in Beverly Hills, Calif. She was 98.Her daughter, Susie McKay Krieser, said the cause was complications of a stroke.Miss Collins made about 50 pictures over 13 years, including 11 in 1934 and another 11 in 1935. She was one of the era’s galaxy of child stars, a list that included Shirley Temple, Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, but she did not become as famous as they did. In her first movie, the 1932 comedy “The Unexpected Father,” she played a waif whose newly wealthy adoptive father (Slim Summerville) hires a nurse (ZaSu Pitts) to care for her. Praise for 4-year-old Cora Sue came quickly.Miss Collins made her movie debut in “The Unexpected Father,” a 1932 comedy in which Slim Summerville played her adoptive father and ZaSu Pitts played a nurse.Universal PicturesA critic for The Richmond News Leader in Virginia labeled her a “baby star” with “amazing acting ability and an appeal that walks right into your heart.” The Kansas City Journal wrote, “The little Collins girl walks away with the picture.”Miss Collins played Garbo as a child in “Queen Christina,” the acclaimed 1933 movie about the Swedish monarch. At the time, she told one newspaper that Garbo “ was so friendly and liked my new teeth a lot.”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

  • 113 Shares179 Views

    in Music

    Komische Oper Berlin Turns ‘Don Giovanni’ Into a Requiem

    In Berlin, the director Kirill Serebrennikov’s new production dispenses with the opera’s final sextet and leads directly into Mozart’s Requiem.Partway through the dissident Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov’s new production at the Komische Oper in Berlin that pairs Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” and Requiem, text is projected across an abstract set piece representing a graveyard. “Here,” it says, “the dead teach the living.”At this point in the opera, the statue of a murdered man is about to come to life to confront his killer. But there is perhaps another meaning to be found in the text. “It’s a requiem,” Serebrennikov said in an interview, “for all of us.”His production, which runs through May 23 before returning next season, follows a pre-20th-century performance tradition of dispensing with the final sextet of “Don Giovanni,” a pat moral lesson sung after its title character is dragged to hell. Instead, the hellfire blaze of D minor and major leads directly into the soft, D-minor chords of the Requiem.That work was left unfinished at Mozart’s death, in 1791. Serebrennikov, together with the choreographers Evgeny Kulagin and Ivan Estegneev, stages the roughly 20 minutes of music that Mozart completed as dance theater. Don Giovanni’s soul, embodied by the former Pina Bausch dancer Fernando Suels Mendoza, struggles against and finally accepts death as the chorus and soloists perform last rites.“The Requiem is not only a funeral Mass,” Serebrennikov said. “It was written, like ‘The Tibetan Book of the Dead,’ not just for those still living, but also for the dead: to help them find a condition for themselves after death.”Serebrennikov’s production — the final in his cycle of the Mozart-Da Ponte operas at the Komische Oper — opens with Don Giovanni’s funeral, and transforms the plot into a nonlinear series of scenes set in the bardo, the Tibetan transitional space between life and death. He leans into the enigmas of the title character and the work as a whole, starting with its label as a “dramma giocoso”: “funny tragedy,” Serebrennikov said, “the mixture of all genres, all intentions.”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

  • 138 Shares99 Views

    in Movies

    Where Would Hollywood Find Its Guillotines or Pay Phones Without Them?

    When the Netflix series “Wednesday” needed a guillotine recently, it did not have to venture far. A North Hollywood prop house called History for Hire had one available, standing more than eight feet high with a suitably menacing blade. (The business offers pillories too, but the show wasn’t in the market for any.)The company’s 33,000-square-foot warehouse is like the film and television industry’s treasure-filled attic, crammed with hundreds of thousands of items that help bring the past to life. It has a guitar Timothée Chalamet used in “A Complete Unknown,” luggage from “Titanic,” a black baby carriage from “The Addams Family.”Looking for period detail? You can find different iterations of Wheaties boxes going back to the ’40s, enormous television cameras with rotating lenses from the ’50s, a hair dyer with a long hose that connects to a plastic bonnet from the ’60s, a pay phone from the ’70s and a yellow waterproof Sony Walkman from the ’80s.History for Hire’s 33,000-square-foot warehouse has aisles and aisles of items grouped together by topic or theme.Need a guillotine? They can help.They have a large collection of vintage cameras.History for Hire, which Jim and Pam Elyea have owned for almost four decades, is part of the crucial but often unseen infrastructure that keeps Hollywood churning, and helps make it one of the best places in the world to make film and television.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