Ariana DeBose mourns 'warrior queen' mother, Gina, who died of ovarian cancer
The "West Side Story" actor and Broadway star announced her mother's death Tuesday on Instagram, sharing photos of the two of them over the years — from the younger DeBose's childhood to her historic win at the Academy Awards in 2022.
"I couldn't be more proud of her and how she fought this insidious disease over the past 3 years," DeBose wrote.
Ariana DeBose, 34, said in her tribute that her mother was her "favorite person, my biggest fan and toughest critic. My best friend." The "Love Hurts" actor said her mother "fought like hell" to support her daughter's ambitions, adding that her accolades — which include BAFTA, Critics' Choice and Golden Globe awards — belong equally to her mother.
Read more: Kate Beckinsale mourns mother Judy Loe, British actor who died at 78: 'Compass of my life'
The actor said her mother was a longtime public school teacher who devoted her life to educating young people. She was "the greatest advocate" for arts education, she said, adding that the death of the elder DeBose would deeply impact her mother's community: "She was a force of epic proportion."
Actors including "Abbott Elementary" star Quinta Brunson, "Insecure" alumna Yvonne Orji, former "Dancing With the Stars" pro Julianne Hough and celebrity fitness trainer Amanda Kloots rallied around DeBose in the comments section as she broke the news. In addition to paying tribute to her mother, DeBose highlighted several charities where supporters could donate in her mother's honor.
"My greatest and most proud achievement will always be to have made her proud," DeBose wrote. "I love you mommy. Now travel amongst the seas, the winds and the angels as I know you always loved to do."
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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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Chicago Tribune
5 minutes ago
- Chicago Tribune
Column: The Tribune's film critic Michael Phillips says so long for now
Well. Goodbye for now. The Tribune has eliminated the position of film critic, as part of a newsroom reorganization. This leaves me with two options: stick around for reassignment or take a buyout. I'm voting buyout. I'm opting in for opting out. After six newspapers in Minneapolis; Dallas; San Diego; St. Paul, Minneapolis; Los Angeles and Chicago, and 41 fulltime years in this beautiful, vanishing subset of journalism, it feels right. Forty-one years, plus six years of freelancing my way through college. Call it 47. Forty-seven years of writing, editing, gobbling research like the grad student I never was; 47 years of making my peace at the keyboard (or waging another micro-war against cliches) when faced with one more deadline. Nearly a half-century of putting work ahead of everything else, too often at everything else's expense. So now, for me, it's time for the shock of the new. The new to be named later. Through fat and lean and thick and thin and, to quote Mel Brooks, through thin, the Tribune has been good to me. They took a chance on me back in 2002 and I'm grateful. The place has brought me so much to love in this city. Plus the paper underwrote 10 trips to the Cannes Film Festival, with my name on the festival badge, once upon a time. I arrived from the Los Angeles Times as the Tribune's new theater critic. This was the result of a lengthy interview process for the finalists for the post vacated by the irreplaceable Richard Christiansen. Bizarrely, all the other finalists turned the job down, with regrets. Perhaps none of us could get our heads around the workload established so selflessly by Christiansen, and in my case I wanted enough life in my life to be there for my son, then one year old. And then Tribune editors did something sort of amazing. They agreed to fill the theater critic position with two, not one: me and Chris Jones, the latter now the paper's editorial page editor as well as Tribune and New York Daily News theater critic. In an overwhelmingly white male newsroom, there we were, two more white males. I think about that a lot. There's an Arthur Miller quote that gets a lot of reuse here at the Tribune. It's etched into a wall inside our former tower's lobby: 'A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.' Right now, any newspaper with an interest in staying urgent and relevant and alert is getting an earful of a fractious nation. Making sense of these nerve-wracking times, and everything filmmakers, artists, writers, creators create out of the din, amounts to more than a routine profession. Or a bottom line. I got paid for my first opinion at 17, which was ridiculous but educational. At my college paper, the Minnesota Daily, I knew I wasn't writing like myself yet. I wrote about movies, plays, performers and artists like a combination of critics I admired. Young actors often do the same; they learn by doing, and by borrowing, and in time by letting the false front fall away. Every text, email, letter and phone call the Tribune readers have sent my way, be it out of agreement, frustration or just plain kindness — nothing I ever wrote meant as much as what you sent, and I mean it. The good fortune so many of us fell into back then, editing or generating arts coverage, is a dream now, a dream of a less precarious era of journalism. My first fulltime job was arts editor of the Twin Cities weekly City Pages. What was I doing? I didn't know what I was doing. I just did as much of everything as I could see and hear and watch. In the Twin Cities in the '80s, you could catch Ella Fitzgerald one night and The Replacements the next. You could marvel at some of the riskiest, most experimental regional theater in American history, right there on stage at the Guthrie Theater, under the artistic directorship of Liviu Ciulei and Garland Wright. You could have your atoms rearranged by Abel Gance's silent epic 'Napoleon' at the Walker Art Center. All in the name of work, and learning, and joy. My Tribune gigs — four years on theater, 20 on movies — were the best, toughest, most rewarding years of my professional life. Getting to know Roger and Chaz Ebert led to me filling in for Roger, when he took ill, and then co-hosting 'At the Movies' opposite Richard Roeper and then A.O. Scott. (The white man parade never really ended.) I met Robert Osborne of Turner Classic Movies when he came to town with Jane Powell for a screening of 'Seven Brides for Seven Brothers,' and then a while later, there I was, somehow, introducing a hundred or so films on TCM. I used to say it as a joke, though now it's truer than I realized: TCM may be the one entity in American culture holding this damn country together. From here, I'll continue to show up on the long-running 'Filmspotting' podcast, broadcast on WBEZ-FM, whenever the hosts Adam Kempenaar and Josh Larsen see fit. Over on Classical WFMT, I'll continue my weekly segments for the film music program 'Soundtrack,' which I adore. Next month I plan to begin my 11th year as advisor and mentor of the University of Illinois College of Media Roger Ebert Fellowship, which is the grad school I never knew but now I know. It has the added benefit of keeping Roger's spirit in my heart and in my work as an editor and a colleague. If my luck holds out, the unknown unknowns ahead include new colleagues I value as much as I do my fellow Tribune screens chronicler Nina Metz and my editor Doug George. They care, and they're pros, at a time when devaluing expertise is national political policy. It is of course bittersweet, at least for me, to see the two remaining Chicago daily newspaper film critic positions go away like . Yet Chicago's film exhibition, curation, production and non-daily coverage, of every sort, remains a beacon for much of the rest of the country. And more importantly, for Chicago. So. Goodbye for now, as the Sondheim song from the film 'Reds' put it. Thank you for reading. Keep seeking out the critical voices that make your own perceptions a little sharper, your interest in something you've seen — and something you may see tomorrow night — a little keener. For now, I'll enjoy this peculiar new feeling, captured best by another song lyric, this one from Irving Berlin's 'No Strings':
Los Angeles Times
35 minutes ago
- Los Angeles Times
The 21 movies we're most excited to see this fall
Hollywood put up decent numbers this summer and we'd be lying if we told you we didn't find much to like (even if it didn't always come in a cape). But just as inevitably as the warm months wane, ambitious actors will attempt to play rock icons. Accents will be summoned, some of them mastered. Epic musicals involving witches, wicked or otherwise, will find their conclusions. Oscar winners will play Nazis. Jared Leto will continue to do what only Jared Leto does. Pathos will be mined from the tale of a wrestler. These are the things we expect from a robust fall season and the upcoming one will not disappoint. Here's what our staff is most anticipating. In a near-future America ruled by a totalitarian regime (ah, the movies), several young men take part in a nationally televised endurance contest with one brutal rule: Stop walking and you die. Adapted from Stephen King's novel first published under his Richard Bachman alias in 1979, 'The Long Walk' is directed by 'Hunger Games' veteran Francis Lawrence, who knows his way around dystopian survival stories. The march heads toward an ending only one contestant can reach, with Cooper Hoffman ('Licorice Pizza') among the participants and Mark Hamill in villain mode as the implacable Major overseeing the ordeal. The contest unfolds in broad daylight as cameras and soldiers turn the asphalt into an arena. Adaptations of King books have been around for decades, but few promise the kind of slow, creeping dread this premise invites and the political overtones of militarized spectacle are hard to miss. Wear comfortable shoes and hydrate accordingly. — Josh Rottenberg The award for the most intriguing combo of Hollywood's fall season has to be Scarlett Johansson and June Squibb. Johansson had a hit this summer with 'Jurassic Park Rebirth' while the 95-year-old Squibb has repeatedly scored praise for her recent performances, including 2024's 'Thelma' in which she played a grandmother seeking revenge after being targeted in a scam. Both are winning accolades for 'Eleanor the Great,' which marks Johansson's debut behind the camera as director. Squibb stars as the lonely title character who falsely claims to be a Holocaust survivor, then privately frets as her lie snowballs into something unfixable. The film was an audience favorite at Cannes, ranking among The Times' 10 best films at the festival. — Greg Braxton Paul Thomas Anderson, who gave us the oil-soaked intensity of 'There Will Be Blood,' the sleazy excess of 'Boogie Nights' and the knotty elegance of 'Phantom Thread,' is not the obvious choice to direct a big-budget Imax action-thriller, which is exactly why 'One Battle After Another' feels like an event. Loosely inspired by Thomas Pynchon's 1990 novel 'Vineland,' the film transplants the book's tangle of political grudges to a modern-day context of former activists forced back together when their long-vanished enemy resurfaces. Leonardo DiCaprio plays a drug-and-booze-addled revolutionary trying to rescue his kidnapped daughter, with Teyana Taylor, Regina Hall and Alana Haim as his comrades, Benicio del Toro as his wild-card ally Sensei Sergio and Sean Penn as their white-nationalist antagonist, Col. Steven J. Lockjaw. Anderson last adapted Pynchon with the loopy, stoner-inflected 'Inherent Vice,' but here he's working on a grander scale. Shot on 35mm VistaVision, 'One Battle After Another' will be a rare chance to see Anderson bring his sly digressions, oddball humor and tonal whiplash to a canvas usually reserved for Bayhem. — Josh Rottenberg It's being described by early marketing as an exploration of bonds between fathers, sons and brothers through 'personal journeys and generational conflicts,' which honestly could describe 80% of all movies ever. Fortunately, though, plot is not the headline; casting is. 'Anemone' has apparently forced Daniel Day-Lewis out of the retirement he announced in 2017. And for a good reason: Day-Lewis co-wrote the film with his son, Ronan Day-Lewis, a New York-based painter who also directs. This will be the second time Day-Lewis the elder has come out of retirement — he left acting in the late '90s, only to return after Martin Scorsese convinced him to do 'Gangs of New York,' after which he won two more Oscars. (Not to put too much pressure on 'Anemone.') The film also stars Sean Bean, Samuel Bottomley, Safia Oakley-Green and Samantha Morton. — Mary McNamara What's the Rock cooking? Another crafty career pivot from face to heel: specifically, from being the face of too many franchises with too few critical hits, to teaming up with Benny Safdie, one of the beloved bad boys of indie cinema. 'The Smashing Machine' — Safdie's first film since 'Uncut Gems' (which he co-directed with his brother Josh) and Johnson's most intriguing release since 2013's underappreciated 'Pain & Gain' — stars the former wrestler as MMA fighter Mark Kerr, who won multiple gold medals in the '90s and early aughts while getting slammed by the painkiller addiction that enabled him to keep getting back in the ring. Kerr shared his story in a 2002 HBO documentary of the same name. It'll be interesting to see how (or if) the harsh truth of combat sports gets the manic Safdie treatment. Best-case scenario: No holds will be barred. — Amy Nicholson Italian director Luca Guadagnino ('Call Me by Your Name,' 'Challengers') likes erotic stories that flirt with disaster. He tweaks the audience's moral compass, and 'After the Hunt' sounds like a dangerous spin on his risque business. The #MeToo-adjacent thriller stars Julia Roberts as a college professor who freezes when her favorite student ('The Bear's' Ayo Edebiri) lodges an assault accusation against her favorite colleague (Andrew Garfield). Counter-accusations ensue, leaving Roberts' character unsure whom to believe and paranoid that this blame tsunami will cause her own ethically dubious past to surface. Guadagnino has hinted that he's interested in teasing out how different people (and generations) disagree on the definition of consent. The early buzz is that Roberts has seized onto the opportunity to deliver her richest performance in ages and it's worth noting that Guadagnino has yet to win his first Oscar. — Amy Nicholson Kathryn Bigelow, the Oscar-winning director behind 'The Hurt Locker' and 'Zero Dark Thirty,' is an expert at turning real-world crises into procedural pulse-pounders. In 'A House of Dynamite,' she trades the battlefield for the White House, tracking a team of officials scrambling to respond to an incoming-missile alert in near real time. The stacked cast includes Idris Elba, Rebecca Ferguson, Jared Harris, Greta Lee, Tracy Letts, Anthony Ramos and Jason Clarke. Shot with you-are-there immediacy by cinematographer Barry Ackroyd and edited by Fincher veteran Kirk Baxter ('The Social Network'), it's Bigelow's first feature in eight years, since her period crime drama 'Detroit.' This time, it's situation rooms, red phones and competing chains of command. The fuse is bureaucratic and the stakes are global. — Josh Rottenberg The most terrifying movie of the year, unsurprisingly, is about a mother just trying to get through a day — or maybe it's her whole life? Rose Byrne stars as Linda, a Montauk therapist in an emotional tailspin: she's tending to a sick daughter with a mystery illness that prevents her from eating normally, there's a hole in her ceiling that's gushing water, her husband is MIA and she's desperate for counsel from her own aloof therapist (Conan O'Brien). Mary Bronstein's sophomore feature skillfully takes a darkly funny look at the harrowing isolation and chaos of motherhood, often zooming in on Byrne's face as she's pushed to the brink. It's also worth mentioning that rapper ASAP Rocky plays James, an unlikely partner-in-crime with a gnarly internet browser history whom Linda comes to know when her water disaster forces her to move into a motel. The A24 film, which counts Josh Safdie among its producers, earned raves out of this year's Sundance and critics are already heralding Byrne's performance as Oscar-worthy. — Yvonne Villarreal AI continues to evolve onscreen — for every Entity threatening the end of civilization in 'Dead Reckoning,' there's a M3GAN 2.0 ready to come to our aid with an eye roll. 'Tron: Ares' looks to split the difference: Mean-looking skyscraper-sized machines face off against Jared Leto. Never mind. You didn't watch these movies for the plots anyway. Besides the welcome return of a cameoing Jeff Bridges from the 1982 Atari-era landmark, the new movie brings on Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross doing a proper industrial-rock score under their old moniker Nine Inch Nails, a soundtrack they've called 'grittier' compared with their other stuff like 'Challengers.' That's reason enough to go, head-bobbing your way through lightcycle race sequences to the groove. A summer movie smuggled into the fall? Fine, we'll need a few of those, especially as the awards drumbeat gets deafening. — Joshua Rothkopf Do you remember comedies? Do you remember the experience of going to a movie theater and laughing with a room full of complete strangers? Do you remember Aziz Ansari? 'Parks and Recreation,' yes. But also the charming rom-com Netflix series 'Master of None,' the one that Ansari starred in and co-created, often writing and directing as well. It's been a minute. Ansari was set to make his feature film directorial debut in 2022, but production was halted and never resumed due to a complaint of inappropriate behavior lodged against Bill Murray. Now we finally have Ansari's first feature, a comedy about a guardian angel (Keanu Reeves) swapping the lives of a struggling gig worker (Ansari) and his wealthy boss (Seth Rogen). Think of it as 'Trading Places' with a dash of Wim Wenders. It could be sublime. It could be a train wreck. But it's an original story from a multi-hyphenate who was viewed, not that long ago, as a major talent. I'm interested. — Glenn Whipp At their boldest, movies can demand a reckoning, a reconsideration. Iran's Jafar Panahi swept into Cannes with this sad and furious political thriller, about the lingering aftermath of a torture master's abuses, taking the Palme d'Or in an almost cosmic reversal of fortunes for a filmmaker who has often suffered in prison or under house arrest, his art forbidden. 'It Was Just an Accident' has revealed more to me in thinking about it, especially about the precarity of everyday manners. Without ruining it, the closest comparison is to something like 'Death and the Maiden.' When the tables are turned, is revenge itself a moral dead end? Based on an especially tough-minded piece of writing, this is a film that will get you contemplating pettiness and righteousness both. There's no fall movie season without the Palme winner and last year's 'Anora' went all the way. — Joshua Rothkopf There is still something astonishing that Greek-born filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos has become as commercially successful and awards-friendly as he has, given that his work tends to be abstract, allegorical and at times willfully off-putting. Nothing if not unpredictable, Lanthimos now offers up a remake of the 2003 South Korean film 'Save the Green Planet!' in which a pair of activists kidnap a pharmaceutical executive they believe to be a space alien, with Jesse Plemons as one of the plotters and Emma Stone as their target. Lanthimos' work often combines dark comedy and an unexpected romantic streak with a potent political charge and his latest film looks to tap into the volatile energy of conspiracy theories and radical anti-corporate sentiments. Stone, who won an Oscar for her performance in Lanthimos' 'Poor Things,' continues to use her Hollywood star power to champion challenging filmmakers. This is their fifth film together. — Mark Olsen The cynical take would be: This is a naked attempt at the same commercial success as music-themed dramas like 'A Complete Unknown' and 'Bohemian Rhapsody.' But Bruce Springsteen and the raw, stripped-down recordings of his 1982 'Nebraska' album seem earnestly in opposition to such artless gamesmanship. Adapted and directed by Scott Cooper, the film stars Jeremy Allen White (perfectly suited for a post-'The Bear' step into movie stardom), along with Jeremy Strong as Springsteen's faithful manager Jon Landau and additional supporting turns from Paul Walter Hauser, Stephen Graham, Gaby Hoffmann, Odessa Young and Marc Maron. A soulful, searching '70s-style character study on the making of a now-classic '80s album with some of the most exciting performers of 2025 is both slightly counterintuitive and something that makes total sense. — Mark Olsen That title seems to have lost a comma since Cannes, but who cares? Director Lynne Ramsay has no patience for grammatical formalities and her latest burns with the punk ferocity of her finest film, 2002's 'Morvern Callar.' Ramsay has found a fellow traveler in Jennifer Lawrence, who, these days post-'Causeway,' is reinventing herself in a focused, fearless register. It's impossible to watch 'Die My Love' and not be hypnotized by its swampy psychodrama: the violent postpartum death throes of a marriage that has little reason to continue. Lawrence and her co-star, Robert Pattinson, play a city couple who move to Montana only half-believing in their own future together. Ramsay teases out something delicate and distracted in both of them. You'll hear about these sex scenes. There's more to the movie than that. — Joshua Rothkopf In November 1945, two dozen high-ranking officials of the Nazi Party were charged with crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity. At their center was Hermann Göring, Adolf Hitler's second-in-command. Not surprisingly, Göring is a central character in the upcoming James Vanderbilt film 'Nuremberg.' Based on Jack El-Hai's 2013 book 'The Nazi and the Psychiatrist,' 'Nuremberg' focuses on the relationship between Göring, played by Russell Crowe, and Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), the psychiatrist tasked with determining if Göring and the other Nuremberg defendants were capable of standing trial. Though in hindsight Göring's conviction seems inevitable, many of the Allied leaders had initially preferred summary execution to prevent the Nazis from gaining any kind of sympathy. Bombastic, unrepentant, with a ribald sense of humor and a defense that leaned heavily into his desire to make Germany great again, Göring came out swinging. It is difficult to imagine an actor better suited to this role than Crowe, just as Malek seems a perfect fit for Kelley, who never recovered from his discovery that the Nazis 'were no different from a group of intelligent executives anywhere.' — Mary McNamara Director Dan Trachtenberg rejuvenated the 'Predator' franchise with his 2022 prequel 'Prey,' a period piece that pitted a ferocious young Comanche warrior (Amber Midthunder) against a new iteration of the iconic alien hunter while also weaving in conflict with terrestrial interlopers. I've been ready for Trachtenberg's next offering from this world ever since. While 'Prey' was set during Earth's past, 'Predator: Badlands' moves the action to a remote planet in the future. There are no human protagonists needed to outmaneuver a deadly alien foe this time around. 'Badlands' centers a young Predator outcast (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) who encounters an android (Elle Fanning) created by the 'Alien' franchise's Weyland-Yutani Corp. while on his quest to hunt the deadliest of beasts. The idea of a Predator and a synthetic's odd-couple team-up was intriguing even before the visual of an alien warrior carrying half an android on his back grabbed this 'Star Wars' fan's attention. — Tracy Brown As the follow-up to their breakthrough collaboration on 'The Worst Person in the World,' Norwegian filmmaker Joachim Trier and actor Renate Reinsve return with 'Sentimental Value,' which won the second-place Grand Prix award when it premiered at Cannes earlier this year. In a richly layered study of family, legacy and nothing less than the purpose of art, Reinsve plays an emotionally fragile actor whose filmmaker father (a galvanizing Stellan Skarsgård) has written a part for her. After she refuses to even consider it, feeling that the baggage between them is too fraught, he moves on to casting an American ingenue (Elle Fanning), who may not be up to the demands of the role. (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas as Reinsve's sister is also something of the film's sneaky secret weapon.) Able to switch moods and tones with a stylish, skillful ease, Trier brings out the best in all the film's performers, mixing a knowing, bittersweet humor with deep insights. — Mark Olsen Did we dream it at Sundance? A classically proportioned drama about the building of the American West, mostly seen from the eyes of one logger, that approaches the quiet grandeur of a Terrence Malick movie? Nope, 'Train Dreams' is here and there's something about its poise and intimacy that makes it feel, finally, like Netflix has a big awards winner, provided viewers can get beyond Joel Edgerton's bushy beard. The performance is taciturn and nonverbal; he's got a mouthpiece in Will Patton's folksy narration, but what Edgerton is doing is worth leaning in for, complex and fascinating. Co-written by Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar, the team behind 'Jockey' and 'Sing Sing,' and adapted from Denis Johnson's 2011 novella, this gorgeous movie could put you in mind of a less frenetic era and also, via its piney fog-shrouded exteriors, of the country that still exists beyond all our noise. — Joshua Rothkopf An aging movie star reflects back on his life and career, contemplating what it was all for as he heads to Europe to receive a lifetime achievement award. The new 'Jay Kelly' stars George Clooney but is also in some ways about George Clooney — or at least the kind of existential crisis that only someone like George Clooney could truly understand. The latest film directed by Noah Baumbach, who co-wrote the screenplay with Emily Mortimer, 'Jay Kelly' may also be full of the filmmaker's own inner ruminations following the dismissive response to 2022's 'White Noise,' his previous film, and the overwhelming success of 'Barbie,' which he co-wrote with Greta Gerwig. The stacked cast of 'Jay Kelly' includes Adam Sandler, Laura Dern, Billy Crudup, Riley Keough, Stacy Keach, Jim Broadbent, Mortimer and Gerwig. Baumbach's signature serio-comic touch, in which the humor lacerates as much as the drama, should be in full effect here. — Mark Olsen Seven years ago, a movie fan tweeted at director Edgar Wright to ask if he'd ever helm a remake. 'The Running Man,' Wright replied — and now he's done just that. Prescience has always been part of this action-thriller's hold on the imagination. Stephen King dreamed up the idea of a deadly TV competition in 1982, years before 'Survivor' brought the thrill of watching real-life desperation into our living rooms, and set his dystopian story in the then-distant future of 2025. Today, King's grim satire doesn't seem quite as far-fetched, so Wright's challenge will be making sure his update still packs a wallop. Glen Powell has stepped into Arnold Schwarzenegger's running shoes as a gritty, hardscrabble contestant who flees for his life, with Josh Brolin, Colman Domingo, Lee Pace, Michael Cera and Katy O'Brian rounding out the cast. Here's hoping this long-awaited project makes it across the finish line with panache. — Amy Nicholson It feels like I've been holding space for Part 2 of Jon M. Chu's musical extravaganza for as long as film star Cynthia Erivo stretched out that final 'aaaaaaaaaaahhh' battle cry in the showstopping 'Defying Gravity' number. Adapted from the long-running Broadway musical, the bifurcated epic is mostly set before 'The Wizard of Oz' and explores the origins of green-skinned Elphaba (Erivo) before she became known as the Wicked Witch of the West and her complex dynamic with rival-turned-friend Glinda (Ariana Grande). The first movie, which introduced the young women as students at Shiz University who developed an unlikely friendship after being forced to bunk together, ended with Elphaba learning about the dark realities of oppression within Oz's Emerald City and launching onto a path of resistance, quite literally, by taking flight on her getaway broomstick and fleeing the city. This second half will explore the diverging roads the two friends take as they become the adversaries we originally came to know through Dorothy and Co.. It's hard to say which will be more entertaining, the promotional tour or the actual movie. — Yvonne Villarreal
Newsweek
2 hours ago
- Newsweek
Laufey Is an 'Anxious Cinderella' on New Album 'A Matter of Time'
"Dark sarcasm" isn't something that one would expect to hear in the jazz- and classical-influenced pop of Laufey. The 26-year-old Icelandic-Chinese musician is known for her romantic and dreamy tunes inspired by the Great American Songbook—a canon of classic pop songs, Broadway numbers and jazz standards from the first half of the 20th century, including works by such composers as George Gershwin, Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hammerstein—and rendered with a Gen Z perspective. Yet several songs on her upcoming new record, A Matter of Time (August 22), take a more candid—and at times, sobering—tone that contrasts with her earlier material about growing up and being in love at a young age. Album announcement Album announcement Emma Summerton "I'm a very sarcastic person," Laufey (pronounced Lay-vay) tells Newsweek. "With the last album [2023's Bewitched], I showed the light, and I wanted to show a little bit of darkness on this album. I had a lot of fun doing it. It's kind of like an anxious Cinderella." A Matter of Time, Laufey's third studio record, marks another step in the career of the Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter, whose story reads like a fairy tale come to life. Since her 2022 debut album, Everything I Know About Love, Laufey has played sold-out shows; performed with such artists as beabadoobee, Norah Jones, Barbra Streisand and Billy Joel; and won a Grammy Award in 2024 for her second record, Bewitched. Her music attracts nearly 19 million monthly listeners on Spotify, and her TikTok account has 8.7 million followers. Larger and Bolder Sound For A Matter of Time, Laufey says she wanted to make a work that sounded larger and bolder. "But at the core," she adds, "I didn't want to move too much away from my own sound. There's definitely more sonic exploration on the album, which was really important to me." Helping Laufey achieve that vision were her longtime producer Spencer Stewart and, for the first time, The National's Aaron Dessner, whose production credits include albums for Taylor Swift and Gracie Abrams. "I've always wanted to work with Aaron," Laufey says. "I'm such a big fan of his and The National. I worked with Aaron [on] a session, and something felt really right about it. It brought a level of speed and shine to the album that I was looking for." An example of Laufey branching out stylistically for this record is the country-inspired track "Clean Air." "It's about letting go of something toxic from the past, whether it's a job, a relationship or a friend," she says. "It immediately landed in this dreamy country world. I love the harmonies of Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris. I wanted to have that sound in some way, and it felt like it wasn't a far toss from my world." The song "Silver Lining," the first single released ahead of the new album, recalls early 1960s pop music; Laufey wrote it while she was at Electric Lady Studios in New York City. "I found this vintage electric guitar in a corner and was like, 'I want to write a '60s song with the fun strings and this mid-century vibe and reverbed-out kind of sound.' I wanted it to be a love song, but sarcastic. Icelanders are not good at saying things very directly. We find these side ways of saying it. And I think 'Silver Lining' was kind of my way to do that." Yet A Matter of Time isn't a drastic stylistic left turn from Laufey's first two albums—the lush and elegant arrangements and her sublime torchy singing voice remain the cores of her work, such as on the bossa-nova-styled "Lover Girl" and "Clockwork." But her perspectives about love and the world around her have matured. "It's definitely more bold as well," she says of the lyrics. "It's more honest. It's more raw. It was a fun challenge finding growth within myself." Snow White lead Snow White lead Emma Summerton The feisty "Tough Luck," which finds Laufey throwing shade at a rotten boyfriend, is a notable counterpoint to her usual romantic perspective. "I just wanted to write a mean song," she says. "I had this experience, and it was so funny to me. I was like, 'This is a song.'" On the lush and heartbreaking "Snow White," she critiques idealized beauty with the ironic lyric: "A woman's best currency is her body, not her brain." "I was frustrated with beauty standards and myself for needing to compete with those standards," she says. "Like, 'Why can't I just remove myself?' The lyrics are about how the world has kind of set us all up to need to fit into those standards to compete." "Sabotage" is the album's final and most dramatic track, featuring a dissonant-sounding coda that seems more appropriate for an indie rocker than a pop song; Laufey calls "Sabotage" the album's thesis statement. "It's about that contrast between this glass-like beauty and chaos. This album, for me, showcases the complexity of female emotion to the world. So often, we're good at putting up a beautiful front on the outside, but then there's a noise or mess going on inside, this anxiety. I wanted to find a way to use songwriting and music to describe that contrast." Although Los Angeles is her current home, Laufey pays homage to her Icelandic roots on the track "Forget-Me-Not," recorded with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra; some of the lyrics were written in her native language. "It's a song about the experience of leaving your home country and feeling like you're losing it a little bit," she says. "This was my way of reaching back and reminding it that I love [Iceland] and pleading to 'not forget me.' And so the lyrics—at least in the chorus—had to be in Icelandic because I want to speak to its soul." Born Laufey Lín Bing Jónsdóttir, she was introduced to classical music through her Chinese violinist mother, and her exposure to jazz-pop standards came courtesy of her Icelandic father's record collection. At a young age, she played both cello and piano. "I was like listening to orchestra rehearsals in my mother's womb," Laufey, who was raised in Reykjavík and Washington, D.C., says. "I was given a violin when I was 2. Classical music was what I've heard at home my whole life. But also, it was a lot of jazz music and the Beatles." Although she harbored the idea of becoming a singer in addition to being a musician, Laufey initially didn't think it was realistic for her to forge a career in the vintage music that she grew up with. "I didn't have any example of success from somebody who looked or sounded like me in current times. My favorite singers were from the '40s, '50s and '60s. So I just didn't believe it. I knew that music was always going to be a huge part of my life. I was just too scared to jump into it. Laufey later attended Berklee College of Music in Boston on a scholarship, which was a turning point for her. "There were so many people writing around me, and it kind of empowered me to explore my sound and try things. So I started writing in a way that reflected my favorite music, which was songs from the Great American Songbook. I realized that if I wrote in that form but used modern experiences, it could create something that people would be interested in." Her breakthrough came when she wrote and released a single, "Street by Street," in 2020 that topped the Icelandic radio charts. Laufey's fame grew around this period when she started posting popular videos online of her performances of classic standards by jazz legends such as Ella Fitzgerald and Chet Baker, as well as her original compositions. Through AWAL, a record company that allows its artists to retain ownership of their work, she released her albums Everything I Know About Love and, a year later in 2023, Bewitched. 'A Generation of Mixture' Much has been written about Laufey's huge popularity with her Gen Z audiences, which is remarkable given that jazz and pop songs from the 1920s to the 1960s are generally a tough sell to mainstream youth. One major aspect of Laufey's appeal to her young fan base is that, underneath the music, her mostly autobiographical lyrics are relatable and contemporary. "I loved it [the Songbook sound] so much growing up.... It's very natural to me to advocate for that. I couldn't fake being a pop singer—this is just what I do. I'm so lucky that people are interested in it. I think it's because Gen Z is just so open to different styles of music. And with the amount of access we have to music from all different genres and decades, the palette of young listeners has really changed. "There are so many artists who have styles that don't fall into a certain box, but are applauded because we are a generation of mixture. So many of my fan base are mixed race like me or from different cultural backgrounds. I think that's a part of it." Laufeyperforms with Gustavo Dudamel & LA Phil at the Coachella Stage during the 2025 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival on April 19, 2025 in Indio, California. Laufeyperforms with Gustavo Dudamel & LA Phil at the Coachella Stage during the 2025 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival on April 19, 2025 in Indio, Coachella Laufey will be touring large arenas in support of the new album—further evidence of her growing popularity—including two nights at New York City's Madison Square Garden. Yet she has stayed mostly grounded through all of the attention. "I've been practicing that since I was so young," she says, "like the highs and lows of going on stage, playing a recital, coming back home and knowing that I still have to finish my homework the next day. My Chinese upbringing is, 'Stay humble and thankful and respect everyone around you.' That is something that I carry with me always." "I am in true shock over my career," she adds. "It's always surprising to me. It's very hard to have any sort of ego about it when I'm kind of curious as to how it even happened in the first place." Further Listening Everything I Know About Love [ARTWORK] Everything I Know About Love [ARTWORK] Emma Summerton Everything I Know About Love AWAL, 2022 If someone was listening to Laufey's 2022 debut album for the first time and did not know that its music consisted of mostly original material, they could've sworn she was interpreting classic Broadway and jazz-pop songs from the era of Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee and Tony Bennett. That's a credit to how Laufey faithfully mines that era with letter-perfect precision and authenticity: from the melodies and lovelorn lyrics to Laufey's wistful and sultry voice. "It's about dealing with growing up," Laufey said of the album in a press release at the time. "It's also very 'hopeless romantic.' All the songs are based on my personal experiences in the past years, but the way I write about them is like fiction." Bewitched Cover Bewitched Cover Emma Summerton Bewitched AWAL, 2023 Laufey didn't experience the dreaded sophomore slump with Bewitched. Instead, it won a Grammy in 2024 under the best traditional pop vocal album category. In addition to containing the hugely popular "From the Start" and the title song, Bewitched features Laufey's cover of the Erroll Garner standard "Misty." "This is a love album," she said in a previous statement, "whether it be a love towards a friend or a lover or life. The first album also touched a lot on things like moving out of my childhood home and moving into a new city for the first time—being an adult. With this one, I've experienced a little bit more of that, and I'm writing about the magic in the love of being young."
