Empress

The musician Empress Of, real name Loreley Rodriguez, is trying to tell me about her new album, but there is a problem. A Los Angeles native, she’s in London for a week of press, with starry trappings: a show at the Jazz Cafe; an appearance on Radio 1; dinner with friend and fellow pop star Rina Sawayama at a Mayfair restaurant, where she was stunned to find the chicken priced at £140.Now she’s in a corner on the third floor of the Barbican centre, finishing her coffee before we head into its exhibition on textiles. No…

If a director or producer were ever tempted to make a female version of the Indiana Jones story, they would need look no further than the life of Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt for inspiration. This was a daredevil whose real-life antics put Hollywood fiction to shame.As a young curator at the Louvre, during the occupation of France, she fought to protect the museum’s greatest treasures from Nazi plunderers – while also working for the resistance and surviving interrogation by the Gestapo. Some of her colleagues did…

Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.Thanks for joining us for one last newsletter of the year. We’ll be taking next week off.Dance of anxiety in ‘White Noise.’ It’s no secret that Noah Baumbach is one of my favorite contemporary filmmakers, and his adaptation of Don DeLillo’s novel “White Noise” is both a departure and somehow totally in line with his previous work examinating family life and everyday anxieties in the face of extraordinary events. As…

Marie Kreutzer grew up in Vienna, where the 19th-century empress Elisabeth of Austria is a tourist-shop darling. She smiles from tea towels, chocolate boxes and all manner of tat. “Her face is on every other souvenir. She is not someone who is cool or interesting here,” the director shrugs over Zoom from her apartment in the city.So, when the Phantom Thread actor Vicky Krieps suggested they make a biopic about Elisabeth (or “Sisi”, as she is affectionately known), Kreutzer laughed it off. “I didn’t think she was serious.”…

An austere drama imagining a year in the home life of Empress Elisabeth of Austria has won top prize at the London film festival.Corsage, directed by Marie Kreutzer, is a fresh take on one woman’s emancipation from the role that is expected of her. It follows Elisabeth, played by Vicky Krieps, as she prepares to turn 40 in 1877. Though renowned for her beauty, she is suffocating in the stuffy Habsburg court and carrying out desperate acts of rebellion, giving the film echoes of the Spencer and Marie Antoinette historical…

“I’m telling y’ all my business,” quips Gladys Knight, pinpointing part of her appeal. For an hour and a half, the empress of soul pours her heart and voice into songs that span the spectrum of human emotion. “There was rain in my heart for a long time, so this is personal for me,” she says.She is 78, but 13 years after her so-called “farewell” tour, looks fantastic in a sparkling outfit. And her voice remains outstanding. Her first extended note triggers the first of several spontaneous standing ovations.Few performers…

League of Legends is returning to the darkness of the Void, as the next playable Champion has been revealed: Bel'Veth, the Void Empress.The 160th Champion to join the game since its launch in 2009, Bel'Veth is a malevolent force born within the Void, a realm of nothingness within the League of Legends universe. According to her official bio, Bel'Veth craves for new memories, "devouring whole cities and their populations before repurposing the information into a sprawling alien landscape known as the…

Royalty and the pedestal-prison of womanhood is the theme of this new film from Austrian director Marie Kreutzer, imagining the home life of the Hapsburg Empress Elizabeth of Austria in 1877, the year of her 40th birthday. Like Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette and Pablo Larraín’s Princess Diana, the kaiserin lives in a luxurious delirium of loneliness: notionally cherished, actually patronised.The movie even shows the empress riding at the Northamptonshire estates of Diana’s ancestor, the fifth Earl Spencer – and enjoying…

Book: Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan Author: Ruby Lal Publisher: Penguin-Viking Pages: 308 Price: Rs 599 For certain generations of Indians, the cinematic fable of Anarkali is perhaps the most celebrated, but cliched, introduction to royal court intrigues of the Mughal era, in which an enraged Emperor Akbar orders the confinement of Shehzada Salim or Jehangir's lover and semi-fictional heroine in a nondescript portion of a wall at the Lahore fort, following an elaborate courtship,…