Aurelia Butler

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    ‘Plane’ Review: Flight, Camera, Action

    In this thriller, Gerard Butler and Mike Colter have to avoid a hostage situation and deliver a plane full of passengers to safety.Jesters on social media have already begun chortling about this movie’s minimalist title. Where did the snakes go?The movie’s basic designation is not without precedent. Some of you may remember “Airport” and its several sequels. Most of those movies spent the majority of their time in the air rather than in the terminal, so maybe it figures that most of the action in this thriller, directed by Jean-François Richet and starring Gerard Butler and Mike Colter (“Luke Cage”), is set on the ground.The twist is that this ground is unsafe in a way that a boarding gate rarely is. Butler plays Brodie, a pilot whose Singapore-to-Tokyo flight — after which he is to reunite with his beloved daughter, because of course — is downed by violent weather. With his co-pilot and fellow family man Dele (Yoson An), Brodie manages a landing on an unidentified island run by “separatists and militias,” whose leader, Junmar (Evan Dane Taylor), has the nasty habit of ransoming, and sometimes killing, hostages. Brodie, determined to deliver his passengers to safety, powers through the jungle in search of a way to communicate with home.If you guessed that the handcuffed convict who’s part of the flight’s manifest is actually a not-wholly-bad guy looking for a shot at redemption, go to the head of the class. Playing that part, Colter makes a good match with the stalwart Butler. Half a world away, Tony Goldwyn clenches his jaw in a kitted-out corporate conference room as the only honest crisis manager in the airline biz.This is a pacey item that can be recommended on the grounds that it’s a January release that’s not even close to awful. “Plane” sinks (or rises, depending on your perspective) to “hell yeah” ridiculousness only at the end, delivering a punchline that lands at the right time.PlaneRated R for bloody violence and language. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters. More

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    ‘Kitchen Brigade’ Review: Oh Chef! My Chef!

    A sous chef is forced to take a job at a hostel for undocumented minors in this feel-good drama with a white-savior problem.Popular French cinema isn’t the most sophisticated when it comes to telling stories about race relations. It tends to fall back on ethnic stereotypes for laughs and seems to cater to viewers who might find “Green Book,” which has been criticized as tone deaf, to be a touching portrait of cross-cultural redemption. “Kitchen Brigade,” a feel-good drama set in a hostel for undocumented minors — with a kick of cooking-competition-show excitement — is far from the biggest offense to emerge from the country, but it doesn’t break the mold either.The director Louis-Julien Petit has made a career out of social-justice-oriented movies, tackling issues like workplace exploitation and the plight of homeless women through the lens of the people on-the-ground who just won’t take it anymore.In “Kitchen Brigade,” Cathy Marie (Audrey Lamy), an imperious white sous chef, eventually becomes one such angry civilian, but it takes the kindness and vulnerability of the young people to get her off her high horse.Forced out of necessity to take a job as the hostel’s live-in cook, Cathy Marie insists on maintaining the standards of a high-end establishment, which means she’ll need help. She gets it in the form of the hostel’s residents: young men with little to no cooking skills who come primarily from Africa and Southeast Asia. Cue the training process, with Cathy Marie barking orders like a coach in a sports movie, and some minor tensions with an angsty teenager who turns out to be a softy. Learning the tenets of French cuisine works as a metaphor for assimilation into French society, and the charismatic kids assimilate with glee.The real problem, however, is that the boys will be turned out of the country when they turn 18 unless they secure a way to stay, like a youth soccer contract or enrollment in a vocational school. That’s not so easy, it turns out, which galvanizes Cathy Marie into action.“Kitchen Brigade” is a white-savior story par excellence, though at least it’s not difficult to swallow — the young people are lovely, and so is the food.Kitchen BrigadeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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    ‘Skinamarink’ Review: Night Terrors

    Two children are trapped in a shape-shifting home in this spookily impenetrable horror experiment.“Where did it go?,” a child whispers early in “Skinamarink,” the unnerving debut feature from the Canadian writer and director Kyle Edward Ball. The child, Kevin (Lucas Paul), is referring to a window which has unaccountably vanished. He’s only 4, and he and his 6-year-old sister, Kaylee (Dali Rose Tetreault), have awakened in the night to find that the lights don’t work and objects in the home seem to be disappearing. And where are their parents?With a plot so rudimentary as to be virtually nonexistent, this experimental and aggressively inscrutable horror movie is mesmerizing in its dearth of action. For long stretches, Jamie McRae’s camera, adopting a child’s-eye view, patrols shadowy hallways and crawls along floors, its eerie angles and haphazard exposure settings straining the eyes and disorienting the mind. Groans and other, stranger sounds mix with the children’s panicked whispers, though their faces are mostly concealed. Time is unreliable, as is evident when a late title card forces a jolting reassessment.Opening in 1995 and resembling a long-buried V.H.S. tape, “Skinamarink,” with its scratchy silences and piggy bank-budget aesthetic, is chillingly surreal and infuriatingly repetitive. Yet Ball, expanding his 2020 short film, “Heck,” holds us hostage: There’s uncanny logic in his looping shots of pajama-clad legs and scattered Lego bricks, in the tinny jingle of cartoons on a flickering television screen. Like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle whose picture has long been lost, each scene promises a solution to the children’s predicament if we can only find its place within the whole.Ingeniously evoking a child’s response to the inexplicable, “Skinamarink” sways on the border between dreaming and wakefulness, a movie as difficult to penetrate as it is to forget.SkinamarinkNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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    Nicola Benedetti Prepares Her Next Star Turn: Festival Leader

    EDINBURGH — Not long into an interview with the violinist Nicola Benedetti, there was a knock at the door.“Ohhh, chips!” she whispered excitedly as a takeaway carton of haggis and fries entered the room. “I’ve been in meetings since 8 o’clock this morning. Do you mind?” A pattern quickly emerged: a question, a tidal wave of thoughts on the profundity of art, a pause for breath and then, eventually, a chip.“I think I’m in a good position to be saying, ‘Here’s why chips taste fantastic’ to somebody who hasn’t tasted them,” said Benedetti, who, in addition to her work as an acclaimed instrumentalist and educator, recently began her tenure as the director of the Edinburgh International Festival. She was describing her approach to the age-old question of attracting new audiences.That process “involves the disarming of prejudice,” she said, “but doing so in a way that still absolutely has integrity, that maintains and preserves the integrity of the art forms that we have presented and the tradition we’ve upheld for 75 years, and by not apologizing for what we do, not trying to change what we do.”Benedetti, 35, is the first Scot and the first woman to lead the festival since it began in 1947. For many, the appointment came as a surprise. “I always thought that she was keen to expand in that direction,” said Richard Morrison, the chief culture writer for The Times of London, adding, “that did rather shock me, that she’d be prepared to devote quite so much of her time and energy to that huge project.”Although Benedetti has had to be more selective in her future repertoire, and is more interested in consolidating existing musical partnerships than she is in finding new ones, she has been reluctant to press pause on her performing altogether. “Taking on this role meant I really had to double down on my commitment to continually improving as a musician,” she said.She premiered James MacMillan’s Violin Concerto No. 2 last fall, and is touring Szymanowski’s second concerto with orchestras in Berlin, Manchester and Boston this month. She has even restarted sporadic lessons, with the violinist Andrea Gajic, to help regain confidence after a wrist injury that forced her to pull out of a residency last summer at the Aldeburgh Festival in England.Benedetti premiered James MacMillan’s Violin Concerto No. 2 last fall with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.Light Press Media and Design Her brain, she admitted, goes “in 20 different directions at once.” But her aim for the Edinburgh festival is focused: “to provide the deepest possible experience for people. We’re unapologetic and uncompromising on the weight, depth and profundity of the art that the festival presents, to the maximum number of people and the broadest possible audience.”Morrison said that her vision is not elitist, but that it also does not sacrifice excellence, “which, in a way, is slightly contrary to what the politicians and the bureaucrats are pushing towards in both England and Scotland.”Benedetti’s goal of bringing in broader audiences is one that was shared by her predecessor, Fergus Linehan, who incorporated pop music into the festival for the first time, in 2015. Though her background suggests she’ll lean more toward the fine arts, Benedetti confirmed that pop will still be programmed.“The diversity of music that we hear is going to remain,” she said. She wouldn’t be drawn on specifics of programming, but expect a bigger emphasis on Scottish voices and, because of sustainability targets, “deep dives” into a more select group of international orchestras. “When you’re flying 90 people from anywhere in the world to Edinburgh, I would like audiences to really understand why we chose them,” she said. “What’s special about their sound, their identity?”There will even be an attempt to break down traditional genre boundaries, and “recategorize through intensity of experience, and type of experience,” Benedetti said. How does she plan on selling the festival’s more traditional audience on all of that? “I have a lot of trust in people,” she said. “And I expect a lot from them.”Benedetti enters this role at a time when British arts organizations are struggling. Last fall, the Edinburgh Film Festival went into administration, which is similar to bankruptcy in the United States. In November, Arts Council England announced upheaval-inducing funding reallocations. That was followed in December by reductions in the Scottish government’s own budget for 2023-24, including a £7 million ($8.46 million) cut to Creative Scotland, the country’s national arts organization.The Edinburgh International Festival’s core funding is expected to remain at the same level for 2023-24, but, with rising costs and inflation, a standstill budget amounts to a cut. Will putting an international Scottish soloist with a national voice in this leadership position help attract private donors? “The great unknown is how much, in a really tricky climate, the Benedetti factor will end up benefiting the festival,” said Brian Ferguson, an arts correspondent for The Scotsman.Benedetti said that she doesn’t expect resistance from Edinburgh International Festival regulars: “I have a lot of trust in people. And I expect a lot from them.”Robert Ormerod for The New York TimesWhat happened to the Edinburgh Film Festival, Benedetti said, “heightens the acuteness of everybody’s vulnerability, and the need even more to be bold, clear and ambitious.“And not just get a marketing company to write statements about why you’re relatable to people,” she added. “The uncomfortable but necessary position of the festival is one where natural tensions lie.”IF BENEDETTI IS AMBITIOUS, that stems from her father, Gio. An Italian émigré who left school in Scotland at age 15, he would later embark on a series of financially successful, idiosyncratic business ventures in dry cleaning, cling-film dispensers and first-aid kits.“He had a real spirit for change, for making stuff happen, and was very, very ambitious about owning something, and about making money,” Benedetti said, adding, “he’d be the first one to say that, he’s not bashful at all about that.”She’s inherited her father’s uninhibitedness. When asked what kind of house she grew up in, she replied, “a big one.” After first picking up the violin at 4, Benedetti swapped the picturesque Ayrshire village of West Kilbride in Scotland for the “extreme environment” of the Yehudi Menuhin music school in Surrey, England, five years later.“If your priority in life is not to play your instrument to the highest possible level, I would not encourage people to go into that environment,” Benedetti said, but then defended the school’s specific commitment to excellence. “What do we want from the world? Do we all really have to be the same? Does everything have to follow one exact format?”After winning the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition in 2004, her public profile raced ahead of the security she felt in her own playing. “I didn’t win the Tchaikovsky Violin Competition, I didn’t win the Joachim Competition — that’s not what I won,” she said. “So in terms of my violinistic chops, I had a long way to go, in full view of the public.”To make matters worse, she added, “I was sometimes in a total fight-or-flight mode on‌stage, and I wasn’t playing at all how I could play.” Today, it’s a different story. She delivered an assured performance of the Szymanowski concerto with the conductor Karina Canellakis in Berlin, finding a meaty yet tender sustained sound.But for Benedetti, the more significant change has been psychological: feeling grounded enough in her technique to free up and really explore, even in the fastest, most intricately patterned corners of her repertoire, like Wynton Marsalis’s Violin Concerto, written for her in 2015 and reprised by Benedetti on many occasions. “I feel like I’ve become a lot more confident over time as a violinist,” she said.Teddy Jamieson, senior features writer for The Herald in Scotland, said of Benedetti, “She’s always been very serious about what she does, and really interested in the place music has in society — its role, its worth.” That, coupled with her undimmed energy as a self-starter, resulted in the Benedetti Foundation, a music education project she started in 2019, which provides large-group opportunities for string players of all abilities.“Too many times in my life I’ve seen, ‘Let’s have the whole nation playing the violin in two years,’ and people saying, ‘Our world will be fixed if that happens,’” Benedetti said of the organization’s constructive role within the wider education ecosystem. Within minutes, she flipped from arch idealist to blunt realist: “I’m in a position which is constantly doing this,” she said, putting her index fingers together, and wiggling them like a seismometer needle.Benedetti quickly shuts down questions about her personal life, and about the large ring on her finger. Otherwise, there’s a friendly gregariousness to her that belies her solitary violin work. “There’s a lonely quality to the soloist world, and especially because I didn’t go to college,” she said. “I left school at 15 and between the ages of 15 to 23, where you form some of those really strong bonds, I was basically on my own out there. That made an already quite lonely profession a bit more lonely.”A summer day in Berlin last year offered an alternative to that; Benedetti found herself shielding from “too much community,” focusing on her concert there rather than on a city full of friends. And the best friend she’s made around the world? “This person,” she said, pointing to the ring.“And family,” she quickly added. Benedetti used to live in London but is now based in Surrey, which she said has strengthened her support system: “I get excited about going home, and I can’t say that I ever really felt that when I lived in London.”The move places her close to relatives for the first time since she was a child; she’s a 15-minute drive from her sister (and fellow violinist) Stephanie Benedetti, along with her 1-year-old nephew Nico and 3-year-old niece Sienna, who received her first miniature violin for Christmas.There is a sense that personal connections come first for Nicola Benedetti. “I’ve refound in the last six or seven years,” she said, “such a community developed through the teaching and educating world, different parts of the industry that you wouldn’t necessarily access through being a touring concert soloist.” More

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    Is Stephanie Hsu the ‘Dark Horse’ of Award Season?

    Every time Stephanie Hsu thinks she has gotten used to the reactions to “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” something new manages to throw her for a loop.And on Friday night at a West Hollywood hotel bar, it was Steve Buscemi.“I’m sorry to be so rude,” said the 65-year-old actor, who sidled up to our table during an interview to say hello to Hsu. It turned out that Buscemi was a major fan of “Everything Everywhere,” the sci-fi hit in which Hsu plays the unhappy daughter of Michelle Yeoh’s multiverse-skipping savior: He’d seen the movie multiple times, including at an actors guild screening earlier that evening.Hsu, 32, is often stopped by people who love “Everything Everywhere,” but this was a pinch-me moment that she met with a big grin. Buscemi asked for a picture, and the buoyant Hsu leaped out of our booth to pose with him, then returned to her dirty martini. “That was crazy,” she told me after he left. “It’s all crazy!”Though the film came out nearly a year ago, its award-season afterlife has proved so potent that “Everything Everywhere All at Once” has begun to sound less like a title and more like the organizing principle of Hsu’s day planner. On the day we met, she had just completed several interviews and a pit stop at the Palm Springs International Film Festival; a few days later, she’d attend the Golden Globes, where her co-stars Jamie Lee Curtis, Ke Huy Quan and Yeoh were all nominated and where the latter two won major awards.Hsu was not nominated for a Globe, and as the ensemble’s least-known member, she has sometimes been left out of the awards conversation, though she did receive a Screen Actors Guild nomination on Wednesday morning. Funny and refreshingly honest, Hsu understands that nothing is guaranteed this awards season, and many may see her as an underdog. “The elephant in the room,” she said, “is the dark horse of me.”Still, even if Hsu isn’t as famous as her veteran co-stars, her presence is no less pivotal. In “Everything Everywhere,” Hsu plays Joy, who is crestfallen that her mother, a Chinese American laundromat owner named Evelyn (Yeoh), makes so little effort to understand her. It’s crucial that we feel for Joy because we soon learn that in every other universe but ours, she’s a flashy, universe-collapsing supervillain named Jobu whom our Evelyn is charged with defeating. Hsu drew a map to track how fed-up Joy became the nihilistic Jobu, and tried to imbue her baddie with a strong emotional core: Underneath it all, this is a supervillain who wants nothing more than to be embraced by her mother.Hsu bristled initially when Jamie Lee Curtis advised her to stay centered with the film starting to take off. But Hsu added, “As the year has unfolded, I’ve realized how little I knew about anything.”Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesThe result is a big-screen breakthrough for Hsu, who had been best known for playing Mei Lin on “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” and for Broadway roles in “SpongeBob SquarePants: The Musical” and “Be More Chill.” She likens her awards-season stint to film school on steroids. “There are moments where it’s so fun, so joyous, so inspiring,” Hsu said. “And then there are moments where maybe you feel a little bit icky, because you realize that something’s happening behind the curtain that perhaps you were always suspicious about, but you just didn’t know how political it gets.”Still, whenever she gets too caught up in award shows and industry attention, Hsu endeavors to remember the often-tearful reactions of the fans who have flagged her down to talk about how much “Everything Everywhere” moved them.“I’m witnessing other people’s humanity in a way that is very alive,” she said, “and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, we did that. We did something that made people start crying even when they think about it.’ And that’s crazy. That came from our labor of love.”Inside the World of ‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’In this mind-expanding, idiosyncratic take on the superhero film, a laundromat owner is the focus of a grand, multiversal showdown.Review: Our film critic called “Everything Everywhere All at Once” an exuberant swirl of genre anarchy.The Protagonist: Over the years, Michelle Yeoh has built her image as a combat expert. For this movie, she drew on her emotional reserves.A Lovelorn Romantic: An ‘80s child star, Ke Huy Quan returns to acting as the husband of Yeoh’s character, a role blending action and drama.The Costume Designer: Shirley Kurata, who defined the look of the movie, has a signature style that mixes vintage, high-end designers and an intense color wheel.Gotham Awards: At the first big show of awards season, which is a spotty Oscar predictor but a great barometer for industry enthusiasm, the film took the top prize.Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.It’s been almost a year since “Everything Everywhere” came out, and you’re still going. How does it feel at this late date?A whole pandemic happened between when we filmed and now, so it’s kind of surreal. Obviously, it’s my first time on a press run like this, and it’s been wild, but so many people haven’t actually seen the movie yet, and it’s been really delightful to still bring it into people’s lives. I think its superpower is to somehow be able to make you feel a part of the mess of humanity again. To feel those roller-coaster feelings beside a stranger is a special thing.This script came to you shortly after you wrapped the third season of “Mrs. Maisel,” which you shot alongside “Be More Chill.” Did you feel ready for it?That was the first year where I finally admitted to myself that I was an actor. I’ve always been a little bit punk rock — probably in an impostor syndrome way — where everything always felt like an accident: How did I stumble onto Broadway? How did I stumble onto this TV show? And to do a show on top of that, it asked so much of my discipline and rigor that I was like, “OK, this is what I do.” And with that came a lot of responsibility and weight.It’s not fun to talk about identity or race because you want to talk about art and the craft, but the reality was that I’d never seen myself as a lead on Broadway because I was like, “I’m not a ‘Miss Saigon’ person, so there’s no path for me there.” And I never thought I could be in a period piece on television because every version I’ve ever seen of that is incredibly offensive. And so that year, I was breaking down all these barriers that had been placed around me, carving my own path in a really real way.Hsu, left, with Ke Huy Quan, Michelle Yeoh and James Hong in “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”Allyson Riggs/A24, via Associated PressBefore you had those stage and screen roles, you spent a lot of time doing experimental theater. Do you think you were rejecting the mainstream because you thought it might reject you?At the time when I was finishing school and living in New York, those roles were not available in the mainstream. And I had no interest in selling myself or just shrinking myself to an inappropriate cameo just so that I could say I added one more thing to my résumé. I remember in 2012, I went into a commercial audition and they were like, “OK, could you do it again, but with a more Asian accent?” And I said, “I’m so sorry, but this role is not for me. I don’t do that and I’m not interested in this part.”I walked out and I was fuming. I sat next to this actor and asked him, “Did they ask you to do an accent?” He was Asian and spoke perfect English, and he was like, “Well, yeah.” And I’m like, “Did you do it?” And he said, “I have no other choice.” I understand that people want to make it and they only see one path and have to bend and fold to have a life in the arts, but I always thought if that’s how it’s going to go for me, then I’m going to work at a bar or in a wood shop. I have to make things that matter to me. Life is too short to completely dehumanize yourself.When you came on board “Everything Everywhere,” did you think about how the movie would resonate for people who also don’t tend to see themselves onscreen?I knew the movie was going to be special, but I had no idea it was going to do what it has done. And it’s been really healing for me to hear how many people have been affected by it. So many daughters and mothers have been coming to me crying, saying, “I saw myself in the movie,” or “My relationship with my mother is just like that.”When you say that it’s been healing, what was it healing in you?I don’t know if I could ever make this film again because at that point in my life, I had nothing to lose. There really were no eyes on me, so I got to bring everything I value as an artist into that role, and the affirmation I have received has validated that the wildness and imagination inside of me is really resonating with a large mass of people.Your directors, Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan, said this awards season has been emotional for the cast and crew. How have you experienced it?At the Gotham Awards, [the “Tár” director] Todd Field said we have to eradicate the word “best” when we talk about how we value art, and I felt that so deeply. But also on the same evening, when Ke won best supporting actor, I stood up so fast and screamed so loud that I almost passed out. And then when we won best picture, I couldn’t believe it. I’m not sentimental about this kind of stuff and yet I could not stop crying onstage.Why do you think you reacted that way?Even as a kid with ideas, I just never thought it could be me up there with my friends, making something I believe in that is being celebrated. I remember sitting in front of a TV when Halle Berry won at the Oscars — the only woman of color who’s ever won best actress — and I don’t remember anyone else who won that night, but I remember that moment. I’ve been reflecting on that a lot, because I didn’t realize how much I had deleted the possibility from my mind that I could actually ever be a part of this industry in a real way, doing something that I value and love. So to get to be there and feel this big hug from our peers felt completely surreal.I’m still processing all of it. I’m trying to allow myself to also feel vulnerable in this ride, because there are highs and there are definitely a lot of lows. I think the biggest thing I’ve been trying to balance is how to genuinely receive the goodness while not protecting myself too much that I can’t enjoy the ride. It’s a sweet, sweet moment that may never come again. But also, you can’t get attached to the sweetness, because then you start chasing something that’s not real.Hsu saw few actresses of color winning honors when she was coming up: “I didn’t realize how much I had deleted the possibility from my mind that I could actually ever be a part of this industry in a real way.”Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesTell me more about those highs and lows.After Jamie Lee Curtis saw the movie at South by Southwest, she took me aside and said, “This year is going to be a total roller coaster for you. Center yourself.” And I remember thinking, “Jamie, listen, I’m a grown-ass woman and I’ve been around the block. I know how to stay centered.” But as the year has unfolded, I’ve realized how little I knew about anything.You have to hold onto your self-worth in such a profound way, and it’s hard, because it feels like other people’s opinions of you are going to affirm whether or not you get to keep making movies, which is such a crazy trap and also very real, right? But I’ve had to continue to remind myself that I got to this moment without anyone ever knowing anything about me, so it really is just all about the work.And it’s work that people are responding to with a lot of passion.Yeah, but this industry is weird. You have moments like the one we just had with Steve Buscemi, and then you also have moments where you walk on a carpet and people are like, “Lana Condor, Lana Condor!”No! Did that happen?It was just once, but it was very pronounced. In everybody’s defense, my mom also thinks I look like Lana Condor: She sent me a picture of Lana Condor a year ago and was like, “You look like this woman.” But after the Lana Condor thing happened, we were at a screening in New York, and a bunch of people kept going up to my publicist and the Daniels’ publicist, who are both Asian, and they were like, “Congratulations, your performance is incredible.” And they were like, “Huh?”So listen, this ride is amazing, but that is real. We have not transcended this moment, right? James Hong [who plays Yeoh’s father] started acting at a time when people wouldn’t even say his name, they would literally just call him “Chinaman” and say “Get on your mark.” Michelle waited almost 40 years for her first chance of being No. 1 on the call sheet, and Ke left acting for [nearly] 20 years. As successful as this film has been, the biggest fear on the other side is “What if this is my last chance?”How different are you now than you were a year ago?The biggest thing I’ve learned from this past year is how to continue to show up for myself. This is not something I ever thought I would be in the conversation for, but I know I brought something to this project that is completely singular. Sometimes, things have made me want to just completely disappear into the background, but there are people who felt something in this character, people who are rooting for roles like this to exist, people who are rooting, also, for me to elbow more space or even just to stand here.And so it really is the masses that have been continuing to push me forward to show up for myself. Because as confusing as all of this is, I am so proud of our movie and what I was able to bring to it, and proud for it to be my big introduction to what I believe art can or should be. Whether that is clean enough for people to digest, that’s a whole other story. More

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    With Different Singers, One Opera Classic Can Seem Like Two

    Alongside a winning “L’Elisir d’Amore,” our critic returned to four works at the Met in the middle of their runs to hear new rotations of artists.As the first act of Verdi’s “La Traviata” ends, Violetta, a high-end prostitute, is suffering the symptoms of tuberculosis. A well-to-do young man’s declaration of love shakes her seen-it-all cynicism; should she put an end to her life of pleasure and accept him?Screw it, she decides: As champagne fizzes of coloratura rise and rise, she declares that she is “forever free” and brings the curtain down in defiance.At the Metropolitan Opera in November, the soprano Nadine Sierra sang that moment with luxuriant ease and confidence, a woman certain that she still had all the time in the world. On Sunday at the Met, though, Ermonela Jaho — her tone far less plush than Sierra’s and the aria less easy for her — made it a kind of mad scene. Violetta’s fragility, her sleep-when-I’m-dead mania, were scarily center stage.Same words, same notes, an entirely different effect: This is one of the best parts of my job. In addition to attending first nights at the Met with other critics — as on Tuesday, when a delightful revival of “L’Elisir d’Amore” opened with the power to make you giggle one minute and choke up the next — I spent the last few weeks returning to four classic titles in the middle of their runs to see them with new rotations of singers.Especially in the standard repertory, the Met often cycles through multiple casts in a single season — and then does it again, year after year, Violetta after Violetta after Violetta. Ticket sales in this not-quite-post-pandemic period have blinked red lights at this practice. Houses are full for new productions, even of contemporary works. But revivals, less obviously newsworthy and less widely promoted, are no longer certain draws.The tenor Javier Camarena, center, emanates sincerity and modesty in “L’Elisir d’Amore.”Marty Sohl/Metropolitan OperaThere is not the audience there once was to hear “La Traviata” twice over a couple of months. There is not even the audience there once was to hear it twice over a couple of years.Which is something to mourn. Being a lover of the performing arts is about the thirst for the new play and concerto. But it’s also about relishing the Hamlet of cool distance next to the one of slovenly aggression; about how Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony can be noble or ferocious in the hands of different orchestras and conductors; about how each new soprano increases our sense of what is possible in a work, and suggests how capacious we are, too.Not that every contrast is quite as extreme as in the Met’s “Traviata” this season. In November I had been impressed by Sierra, who in her mid-30s is coming into her own vocally. But, as in her sumptuously sung “Lucia di Lammermoor” last year, she has not yet solved one of opera’s fundamental challenges: making rich, ample tone convey desperation, illness and frailty.Desperation, illness and frailty happen to be Ermonela Jaho’s stock in trade. We often hear about opera singers being larger than life onstage; Jaho manages to be smaller, to give the sense of death incarnate, a walking, singing corpse.About 15 years Sierra’s senior, she has a slender, meticulous sound that she doesn’t push to be bigger than it is. Her “Ah, fors’è lui” and “Dite alla giovine” were murmured reveries, ghosts of tone; you got the sensation of thousands of people in the audience leaning in to overhear private musings. I can’t remember experiencing such prolonged passages of extremely soft yet palpable singing in the Met’s huge theater, which artists often think they need to scream to fill.Jaho can be shamelessly old-school; this was probably the most coughing I’d ever heard from a Violetta, and her “Addio, del passato” in the final act milked every wide-eyed tremble and gasp for air. She didn’t summon the fullness of voice that an ideal Violetta requires, at least at certain moments. But Jaho unsettlingly lives this unsettling opera, providing a sensitive, unique vision of a classic.The tenor Ismael Jordi, making his Met debut as Alfredo this season, was on Sunday a gawky more than dashing presence, who spread mellow legato lines like schmears of cream cheese. The baritone Amartuvshin Enkhbat is also making a company debut — this one rather more impressive — as Alfredo’s father, the elder Germont, with his burnished-mahogany “Di Provenza il mar” providing the most deeply satisfying singing of anyone onstage.In another Verdi work, “Rigoletto,” the shift of personnel marked a less dramatic change but resulted in a keen performance. On Dec. 17, the soprano Lisette Oropesa sang Gilda with a tone a few shades brighter and more finely vibrating than the softer-grain Rosa Feola had earlier in the fall.Lisette Oropesa, left, and Luca Salsi in Verdi’s “Rigoletto.”Ken Howard/Metropolitan OperaThe baritone Luca Salsi, in the title role, sounded firmer and less haunted than had Quinn Kelsey, with his echoey, indelibly wounded voice. The tenor Stephen Costello sang with blithe, poised arrogance — and his characteristic physical stiffness, his stock gestures, somehow worked. He became something of an automaton of power.When “Aida” — yet more Verdi — opened in the beginning of December, it was one of the season’s shakier efforts, with Latonia Moore struggling in the title role. Michelle Bradley had always been scheduled to take on the part in the new year, but her entrance was accelerated when Moore dropped out after the first performance.I returned on Dec. 27, and found Bradley in pleasant form: a demure, even reticent Aida. The tenor Brian Jagde was more nuanced, if also less steady, than he had been in his unrelenting first performance a few weeks earlier.The mezzo-soprano Olesya Petrova, who stayed on in the run when Anita Rachvelishvili, who was supposed to replace her, canceled after a single evening, also seemed more settled in. The most salutary change was Kelsey, who turned from Rigoletto to Amonasro, and who gave his trademark smoky tone and aura of threat to a role that, earlier in the month, George Gagnidze had rendered merely tight and querulous.In the machine that is the Met’s abridged holiday presentation of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute,” the baritone Benjamin Taylor, the second-cast Papageno, was the highlight on Dec. 28, his voice compact yet resonant, his charisma easygoing without being cloying. But for charm, even he couldn’t beat this “L’Elisir d’Amore.”Donizetti’s comedy is one of my favorite operas, but it can easily go awry. While laugh-out-loud funny, it is not a farce. Bartlett Sher’s quaint production interpolates a bit too much physical violence, presumably to raise the emotional stakes, but understands that the piece is at heart a small, sweet romance, drawing both smiles and tears.Thankfully, a cast led by the tenor Javier Camarena and the soprano Golda Schultz, and the spirited conductor Michele Gamba, in his Met debut, trust “Elisir” to reach the corners of the vast Met without overstatement or caricature.Camarena, as always, emanates sincerity and modesty; his Nemorino is a simple guy, but not a buffoon. After the slightest bit of burr to his top notes early on, they were pure and ringing by the end, and his “Una furtiva lagrima” began conversationally before breaking into golden rhapsody.Schultz’s tone had the gentle, silky glow of moonlight, but with a glisten that penetrated, and she gave a sense of both Adina’s independence and her vulnerability. The baritone Davide Luciano was suave as the conceited army sergeant Belcore; as the quack doctor Dulcamara, who provides the cheap wine that Nemorino takes as a love potion, the baritone Ambrogio Maestri was robust without being over-the-top.This was as lovely as opera gets. And it’s not over yet. After five more performances with this cast through January, “Elisir” comes back in April with Aleksandra Kurzak; the newcomers Xabier Anduaga and Jonah Hoskins; Joshua Hopkins; and Alex Esposito.Before that, in March, the soprano Angel Blue will star when “La Traviata” returns yet again. What will she add to Sierra’s and Jaho’s angles on the doomed, desperate Violetta? I know I’ll be there in the audience, ready to find yet more facets in these diamonds of the repertory. More

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    Steven Spielberg Gets a Record 13th Directors Guild Award Nomination

    The all-male list omitted major contenders this season like James Cameron, Baz Luhrmann, Sarah Polley and Gina Prince-Bythewood.The Directors Guild of America announced its feature-film nominees on Wednesday, awarding a record 13th nomination to Steven Spielberg, who also won the best director Golden Globe this week for “The Fabelmans.” The four other directors nominated for the DGA’s top prize were Todd Field (“Tár”), Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”), Joseph Kosinski (“Top Gun: Maverick”) and Martin McDonagh (“The Banshees of Inisherin”).Several big names were shut out, including James Cameron (“Avatar: The Way of Water”) and Baz Luhrmann (“Elvis”), who directed two of the year’s most successful films. And though the last two DGAs for feature-film directing were won by Jane Campion (“The Power of the Dog”) and Chloé Zhao (“Nomadland”), representing the first time in the guild’s history that women triumphed in that race in back-to-back years, all five of this year’s nominees were men, as contenders Sarah Polley (“Women Talking”) and Gina Prince-Bythewood (“The Woman King”) failed to make the shortlist.Typically, four of the five DGA nominees are also nominated for the best-director Oscar: Last year, DGA nominee Denis Villeneuve (“Dune”) was the only one to not make the cut, as Oscar voters chose “Drive My Car” director Ryusuke Hamaguchi instead. The year before, DGA pick Aaron Sorkin (“The Trial of the Chicago 7”) fell short and was replaced in the Oscar nominations by Thomas Vinterberg (“Another Round”).Here is a rundown of the nominees in the major film and television categories. For the complete list, including commercials, reality shows and children’s programming, go to dga.org.FilmFeatureTodd Field, “Tár”Joseph Kosinski, “Top Gun: Maverick”Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, “Everything Everywhere All at Once”Martin McDonagh, “The Banshees of Inisherin”Steven Spielberg, “The Fabelmans”First-Time FeatureAlice Diop, “Saint Omer”Audrey Diwan, “Happening”John Patton Ford, “Emily the Criminal”Antoneta Alamat Kusijanovi, “Murina”Charlotte Wells, “Aftersun”DocumentarySara Dosa, “Fire of Love”Matthew Heineman, “Retrograde”Laura Poitras, “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed”Daniel Roher, “Navalny”Shaunak Sen, “All That Breathes”TelevisionDrama SeriesJason Bateman, “Ozark” (“A Hard Way to Go”)Vince Gilligan, “Better Call Saul” (“Waterworks”)Sam Levinson, “Euphoria” (“Stand Still Like the Hummingbird”)Aoife McArdle, “Severance” (“Hide and Seek”)Ben Stiller, “Severance” (“The We We Are”)Comedy SeriesTim Burton, “Wednesday” (“Wednesday’s Child Is Full of Woe”)Bill Hader, “Barry” (“710N”)Amy Sherman-Palladino, “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” (“How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall?”)Christopher Storer, “The Bear” (“Review”)Mike White, “White Lotus” (“BYG”)Movies for TV and Limited SeriesEric Appel, “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story”Deborah Chow, “Obi-Wan Kenobi”Jeremy Podeswa, “Station Eleven” (“Unbroken Circle”)Helen Shaver, “Station Eleven” (“Who’s There”)Tom Verica, “Inventing Anna” (“The Devil Wore Anna”) More

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    Jennifer Coolidge Wins First Golden Globe for ‘The White Lotus’

    Jennifer Coolidge, who returned to her role as a needy heiress in the second season of “The White Lotus,” won her first Golden Globe, thanking the people who hired her for years of smaller acting roles that led up to this moment in the spotlight. Directing her attention toward one of those people — the show’s creator, Mike White — Coolidge gave an alternately goofy and heartfelt speech that reduced White to tears, turning it into one of the most memorable moments of the night.“I had such big dreams and expectations as a younger person but what happened was they get sort of fizzled by life,” Coolidge said, having placed her trophy on the ground for safekeeping. “Mike White, you have given me hope for — just, you’ve given me a new beginning.”The award, for best supporting actress in a limited series, comes after Coolidge won her first Emmy last year for her performance in the HBO dramedy’s debut season, which was set at a five-star hotel in Hawaii.Since then, Coolidge’s character, Tanya, a fan favorite for her comic cluelessness and overwrought energy, appeared in Season 2, this time vacationing at a sister property in Sicily with her new husband, Greg. (They were the only returning characters from the first season.)In Season 2, Coolidge was given more space to flex her dramatic acting muscles when, in the finale, she ends up on a yacht full of “high-end gays” whose intentions she begins to question. As one of those companions puts it, Tanya — and by extension, Coolidge — has become the heroine in her own Italian opera.After nearly three decades in film and television (highlights include “American Pie,” “Best in Show” and “Legally Blonde”), Coolidge has received the most critical praise of her career for “The White Lotus,” which also won best limited series on Tuesday.In the speech, Coolidge said White had changed her life in a “million different ways,” noting in an aside that her neighbors actually spoke to her now. (“I was never invited to one party on my hill and now everyone’s inviting me!”)“He’s worried about the world, he’s worried about people, he’s worried about friends of his that aren’t doing well,” Coolidge said of White, adding, “You make people want to live longer — and I didn’t.” More