‘Don’t Look Up’ The academy has gone gaga for Adam McKay’s last two issue-based comedies, “The Big Short” and “Vice,” and his new satire, “Don’t Look Up” (due later this month), has higher stakes and even more star wattage. Oscar favorites Streep, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Mark Rylance and Jonah Hill all star in this ensemble comedy about a comet threatening the end of the world — a...
Now, of course, the entire nation is confronting issues of police violence against Black people; the exclusion of people of color from the museum canon; and the lack of Black and brown representation in Hollywood. But those who have followed Weems over the 40 years of her practice — through photography, video, installation, music and text — say the artist has always been ahead of her time...
Another tweak to Billboard’s chart rules last year made it harder to score big opening-week numbers. In recent years, it became common for artists to “bundle” their album, often in download form, with the sale of merchandise or concert tickets. Last year, in acknowledgment that these practices distorted the charts’ “intended goal of accurately reflecting consumer intent,” Billboard stopped...
HELLER Matthew, I’m going to circle back to you, as a theater artist whose response to the material has changed over time. Among other things, you wrote a play about the play and its impact on a Puerto Rican family. Tell us about it — and was it informed by your new insights into where the original fell short? LÓPEZ The movie did spark my nascent creative brain as a piece of drama — the music...
SANTA FE, N.M. — Helen Pashgian, the pioneering but long underrecognized California Light and Space artist, recently took a break from installing her full-on retrospective here at SITE Santa Fe to recount one of the defining moments of her life, how around age 3 she had accompanied her family from their comfortable lodgings in Pasadena to their summer shack in a secluded cove north of Laguna...
Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Metropolitan Opera’s music director, will not conduct, as planned, a revival of Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro” in January, the company announced on Monday evening. Nézet-Séguin will be “taking a brief, almost four-week sabbatical from all conducting duties commencing Dec. 19,” the Met said, and quoted him as adding, “This short break will allow time for me to re-energize...
The story turns on what happens when George marries Rose (Kirsten Dunst), a widow with a teenage son, Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee, who evokes the young Anthony Perkins of “Psycho”). Phil sees Rose as an opportunist and writes a letter of complaint to his parents, whom the brothers, more comically than fondly, refer to as the Old Lady and Old Gent (Frances Conroy and Peter Carroll). It’s a childish...
Seven years after announcing ambitious plans to rebuild its wing for Modern and contemporary art — which then had to be put on hold because of financial problems — the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Tuesday announced that it had finally secured a lead donation of $125 million, the largest capital gift in its history, from its longtime trustee Oscar L. Tang and his wife, Agnes Hsu‐Tang, an...
Adele’s new album, “30,” is about the dissolution of her marriage, and also the flickers of romantic renewal that have subsequently given her hope. But the most lively parts, the most vivid moments, are the darkest ones. The hollow pain of heartbreak activates something in her — the more self-lacerating she gets, the more sumptuous her singing becomes. “Listen, I know how low I can go, I give as...
IN ACT III, Scene 2 of “Millennium Approaches,” Louis asks, “Why has democracy succeeded in America?” It’s not exactly a rhetorical question, and Louis’s rambling attempt to answer it isn’t entirely persuasive, certainly not to his friend Belize, a Black, gay nurse who cares for men dying from AIDS-related illnesses, and who possesses an acute sense of the failures and compromises of the American...