‘The Velvet Underground’ Review: Todd Haynes’ Music Documentary Is A Dazzling Historical Collage, but Not a Definitive Portrait

Brian Steinberg Senior TV EditorNBCUniversal wants to add an interesting new story to Jenna Bush Hager’s “Today” book club.For nearly four years, the co-host of the 10 a.m. hour of “Today” has chosen a book each month for members of her “Read with Jenna” club to peruse and discuss.

Nick Vivarelli International CorrespondentEmmy-winning “The Crown” star Josh O’Connor will be the protagonist of Italian auteur Alice Rohrwacher’s next film “La Chimera,” which is set in the world of archeological looting and is currently shooting in and around Southern Tuscany.O’Connor, who in “The Crown” played the young Prince Charles, in “La Chimera” is playing a young British archeologist named Arthur who gets involved in an international network of stolen Etruscan artifacts during the 1980s.Also starring in “La Chimera,” which can be loosely translated as “The Unrealizable Dream,” are Isabella Rossellini as a retired opera singer; Brazilian actor Carole Duarte (“The Invisible Life”) who plays another non-Italian woman who intersects with Arthur; Alba Rohrwacher as an international artifacts trafficker; and Vincenzo Nemolato (“Martin Eden”) who plays one of the “tombaroli,” literally grave robbers, as artifacts thieves are known in Italy. “‘La Chimera’ is the story of a young English archaeologist who gets involved in the underground world of the ‘tombaroli,’ the nocturnal raiders of Etruscan tombs,” the director said in a statement.Rohrwacher added that the film “is the final piece of a triptych on territory that I started with ‘The Wonders’ and which poses a central question: what to do with the past?” “Is the past merely a lost world, or does it intimately concern our present?,” Rohrwacher asks.“The Wonders,” which screened in Competition in 2014 at Cannes, winning the Grand Prix, was followed in 2018 by “Happy as Lazzaro” that also launched from the Croisette where it scooped the award for best screenplay.

Naman Ramachandran U.K. broadcaster BBC has acquired CNN‘s Primetime Emmy winning series “Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy.” The six-part series follows Oscar nominee Stanley Tucci as he travels across Italy to discover the secrets and delights of the country’s regional cuisines.

The Batman is planning to skip his child’s birth in order to see the DC movie on its opening day.It comes after his wife took to Reddit to complain about her husband’s actions.“My (25F) husband (28M) and I are expecting a baby. As you may know, there is a new Batman movie releasing on early march.

SNK Global has denied reports of Metal Slug: Awakening coming to PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, after a “fake” trailer was revealed.Fans of the Metal Slug series were excited when a Twitter account shared what looked like a gameplay trailer of a game based on the Metal Slug series. The Twitter account bio referred to its efforts as “restoring classics to appetite old fans and new fans”, however at time of writing it has now been removed from Twitter shortly after SNK dubbed it “fake”.“Metal Slug: Awakening was announced by an unofficial account,” reads a tweet from SNK Global’s official Twitter account, which adds that “this news is fake, so please be careful what you read online.”METAL SLUG: AWAKENING was announced by an unofficial account.

Camilla has tested positive for coronavirus, a spokesperson for Clarence House has confirmed. A spokesperson said today: “Her Royal Highness The Duchess of Cornwall has tested positive for COVID-19 and is self-isolating.

Reality TV royalty Gemma Collins is set to expose a new and intimate side to herself in her upcoming Channel 4 documentary Gemma Collins: Self-Harm and Me. The show, which airs on Wednesday 16 February, will chart Gemma's 20-year battle with self-harm and expose a side to the The Only Way Is Essex star that the public are yet to see.

Former Neighbours star Natalie Imbruglia has spoken of her devastation that the popular Aussie soap is being axed in the UK. Speaking on the Heart Breakfast show with JK and Kelly Brook, Natalie, 47, reflected on her time playing Beth Brennan in Ramsay Street, as she backed a fan petition to save the soap from being cancelled. Natalie, who portrayed Beth from 1992 to 1994, told the show’s hosts she was gutted about the news, saying: “Oh I think it's really sad!” The Aussie star, who was crowned the winner of The Masked Singer on Saturday 12 February after impressing the star detectives and fans, continued: “I think at this point we just thought it was gonna go on forever so, I, you know, people are petitioning.

endlessly youthful Ringo Starr spent time doing what a lot of us did: Cruising the Internet, looking at old photos, finding cool stuff, reevaluating life. But, of course, as the Beatles’ former drummer, cool stuff hit him a little differently than it might have the rest of us.

This is the moment two hoodlums turned a recovery truck into a fireball in a late-night attack.

A killer son who filmed his dying father on Twitter has been ordered to remain in hospital.

Software giant Microsoft has sent the Shiba Inu cryptocurrency community into a spin on social media with speculation over a recent tweet about dogs participating in online meetings in its business communication platform.

As the cost of living crisis continues to soar, many families across the country are being left to figure out how to deal with rising prices.

Next week marks the 65th anniversary of the disappearance of beloved Coatbridge schoolgirl Moira Anderson - and police have confirmed it remains a "live investigation".

drug cartels has opened up about how she beheaded a disabled man during a gruesome initiation ceremony.During an interview with investigative journalist Marianna Van Zeller for new National Geographic show Trafficked, Sonja told how she was ordered to commit the act when she was aged just 16.Nicknamed the "Cocaine Queen", she said: “He begged me not to kill him.“I didn’t want to do it but my boyfriend said if I didn’t kill him I wouldn’t be accepted into the group.“To show him I was worthy, he gave me a machete and told me to cut his throat.“I didn’t want to do it, but he insisted. We cut off his head and threw it in the river.”Sonja is a member of the Los Caparros cartel – also known as the Virgilio Peralta Arenas Front - based in Colombia.According to insightcrime.org, the group controls cocoa plantations in the Uraba region, and turned them into cocaine factories, shipping the drug all over the world.It currently has power over around 12,000 hectares of cocoa leaf plantation, while also being involved in illegal mining.The later is said to bring in around £500,000 per month just from one mine in the rural area of El Bagre.The gang is known for its cold-hearted acts of brutality, which recently involved kidnapping a coach load of young footballer players, on their way to play a local match.Just three were freed, while another was found dead.Sonja admitted that they were kidnapped in the hope of “recruiting” them, which would have forced them into becoming narco-soldiers.She refused to confirm if any of them were still alive, but said: “If they say yes, we send them to the troop.

K.J. Yossman “The Velvet Underground” director Todd Haynes said one of the biggest challenges of making his first feature documentary, which premiered in Cannes this week, was bringing Lou Reed to life on screen.“We used his voice from archival material a lot, but to keep having his presence be sort of imbued into the film I think was the biggest one of the challenges,” said Haynes during a press conference at Cannes.“We’ve all seen those images of the [Velvet Underground’s] screen tests, you know, mostly in stills because the lighting is so fantastic and they all look so great and sexy.

Fresh off premiering his first feature documentary at Cannes Film Festival last night, The Velvet Underground filmmaker Todd Haynes told press today that he remains committed to theatrical, despite the movie heading to Apple TV+ in the fall.

So far 2021 is turning out to be quite the year for documentaries unearthing long-buried or unknown musical treasures of the ’60s. The current Summer of Soul highlights a series of Harlem-based concerts with iconic Black artists, a kind of African American Woodstock stuck in someone’s basement for half a century and now getting a much-acclaimed film directed by Questlove made from those tapes.

The always artful filmmaker Todd Haynes totally ignores the one clichéd anecdote about the iconoclastic rock group The Velvet Underground in his superb, eponymic doc “The Velvet Underground,” a film that should always be experienced at top volume. Attributed to the similarly groundbreaking musician/ producer Brian Eno, the oft-repeated phrase claims the debut VU record only sold 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band.

Todd Haynes reinvented the music biopic not once but twice, first with the controversial glam rock epic Velvet Goldmine (1998), a pastiche of the life and times of David Bowie, and then with 2007’s I’m Not There, a dazzlingly surreal look at the many faces of folk poet Bob Dylan, sanctioned by the man himself. His latest, bankrolled by Apple TV+, might seem tame by comparison; a documentary about The Velvet Underground, it traces how Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Maureen Tucker—four disparate Manhattan musos shepherded by pop-art legend Andy Warhol—changed rock and roll forever.

Director Todd Haynes is no stranger to musically-inclined films. He took on the glam rock genre with 1998’s “Velvet Goldmine” and made a truly singular biopic about Bob Dylan with 2007’s “I’m Not There.” Now, for his documentary feature debut, Haynes tackles a legendary rock group in “The Velvet Underground.” READ MORE: Cannes Film Festival: Gaspar Noe, Bill Murray, Ari Folman Titles Added To Line Up The documentary has its world premiere out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival this week.