Entertainment
Beyoncé is Billboard's greatest pop star of the 21st century. Mom Tina isn't surprised
The end of the 21st century is still decades away, but Billboard has already declared its greatest pop star: Beyoncé.
The music magazine on Tuesday revealed that the “Crazy in Love” and “Formation” diva had secured the top spot among 25 generational pop talents, including Taylor Swift, Justin Bieber, Rihanna, Drake and Lady Gaga. Billboard’s editorial staff selected Queen Bey for her “full 25 years of influence, evolution and impact,” the outlet announced.
“She’s been Beyoncé for 25 years now, and as she continues to challenge herself (and by extension, the rest of the pop world) to find new and different ways to be define [sic] greatness,” wrote Billboard deputy editor Andrew Unterberger, “it doesn’t seem like she’s going to stop being Beyoncé anytime soon.”
As part of its Beyoncé celebration, Billboard published an essay that chronicled the “Single Ladies” singer’s career from her Destiny’s Child days in the late 1990s to her most recent album, “Cowboy Carter.” The career retrospective praised the Houston native’s consistency, her ubiquity across music and other facets of pop culture — including film and fashion — and her “commitment to innovation.”
While the music outlet dedicated thousands of words to Beyoncé’s life and career, the singer’s mom, Tina Knowles, offered a handful in response to her daughter’s latest honor.
“That’s nice. That’s very nice,” Knowles told TMZ during a brief exchange Tuesday evening on the Sunset Strip.
When the reporter asked whether her family gets “used to those titles” and accolades, Knowles simply responded, “Yeah.”
The “16 Carriages” and “Texas Hold ’Em” singer has not yet publicly addressed her latest honor.
Knowles, Destiny’s Child’s former costume designer and mother to “Cranes in the Sky” artist Solange, isn’t shy about celebrating her superstar kin. On her Instagram, Knowles hypes her daughters’ magazine covers, album sales and even their nonmusic ventures, such as Beyoncé’s Cécred haircare line and her SirDavis whiskey brand.
On Tuesday, Knowles also touted Beyoncé’s upcoming NFL halftime show. The Grammy winner’s performance will stream Christmas Day on Netflix when the Houston Texans host the Baltimore Ravens at NRG Stadium. Knowles told TMZ that “excellence” is what viewers can expect from the holiday gig.
Taylor Swift, who soon will wrap her blockbuster Eras tour after nearly two years, secured the No. 2 spot on Billboard’s list. The historic Grammy winner (she is the only artist to win album of the year four times) “is the most famous woman in the world,” according to Billboard. However, the well-meaning praise inadvertently sparked a twofold backlash last week when her ranking was announced. Before Beyoncé landed the top spot, some of Swift’s legion of fans, known as Swifties, called out Billboard about her second-place ranking and made the case for the “Lavender Haze” singer to be No. 1.
“I like Beyoncé but she’s nowhere near Taylor’s level when it comes to impact and numbers,” a fan tweeted last week. Another Swift devotee on X (formerly Twitter) also cited the “Love Story” pop star’s “commercial success” and “record-breaking sales” as reasons for her to claim the top spot.
Adding salt to the wound, Billboard included a controversial snippet of Kanye West’s “Famous” music video in its montage meant to celebrate Swift. The Billboard clip reportedly featured the music video’s infamous wax figure modeled after a naked Swift, prompting Billboard to issue an apology for including the clip “that falsely depicted her.”
“We have removed the clip from our video and sincerely regret the harm we caused with this error,” the outlet tweeted.
In Tuesday’s Beyoncé reveal, Billboard acknowledged Swift’s accomplishments, lauding her as the “lone artist who really challenged Beyoncé for the top spot” and celebrating her dominance in album sales, streaming and touring. However, she “simply hasn’t been around for long enough to be able to match the expansiveness of [Beyoncé’s] quarter-century of dominance,” the magazine said.
Still, Swift found success with Spotify, which announced Wednesday that the “Shake It Off” diva was its most-streamed artist of the year. Swift also earned the title last year.
“In her Global Top Artist era,” Spotify tweeted Wednesday. “Congratulations Taylor Swift on the over 26+ billion streams in 2024.”
Joining Swift as the audio platform’s top 10 global artists are fellow Billboard 21st century greatest pop star honorees Drake, Ariana Grande, The Weeknd, Bad Bunny and Kanye West.
“You guys are unbelievable. What an amazing thing to find out going into our last weekend of eras shows,” Swift wrote to fans Wednesday in an Instagram story. “THANK YOU!”
For Beyoncé and Swift, their respective Billboard and Spotify wins can be a boon as they prepare for the 2025 Grammy Awards. In November, Beyoncé earned 11 nominations, the most of the latest crop of Grammy hopefuls. Top nominees also include Charli XCX, Billie Eilish, Kendrick Lamar, Post Malone, Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan and Swift.
Who will win the top Grammy prizes? It’s best to stick around, ‘round, ‘round for when the ceremony is broadcast on CBS and streams live from Los Angeles’ Crypto.com Arena on Feb. 2
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Movie Reviews
Movie Review: “Y2K,” back when the end was nigh
Why “Y2K?” Why now?
Seriously, WTF, Gen Y, Kyle Mooney and A24 Films?
The ex-“SNL” player Mooney co-wrote, directed and co-stars in “Y2K,” a “horny teenager” comedy that aims to be a sort of Gen Y “Superbad” or “Can’t Hardly Wait” or any teen movie with a party. But it’s about as deep and um “funny” as Billy Joel’s Boomer nostalgia anthem “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”
No, making scores of pop culture references — “The Macarena,” AOL and “You’ve Got Mail,” video stores and their “garden of Earthly delights” (porn-packed) back rooms, Alicia Silverstone — does not constitute a “good song,” or viable a screenplay. It’s barely worthy an “SNL” sketch, one Lorne Michaels would have no doubt “cut for time.”
And then “Y2K” morphs into a “singularity” apocalypse, a “This is the End” with electronics run amok and bringing the world to the brink horror comedy
It fails on pretty much every level, from the recycled cliches of teen party comedies — bullies, standing up to bullies, finally getting to know the cute/smart girl whose computer skills are already sharp enough to merrit teen tech bro sexism — to the relationships set up, the comic set pieces in that video store, at that party and in their school, which is where the machines will meet up to plot their end game for humanity.
Here’s what’s funny. New Zealand’s hobbit-born WETA Workshop cooked-up robots that computers, camcorders, skillsaws and the like DIY into the stumbling waffle-iron-footed beasts that kill humans and round others us for “assimilation” into the tech “future.”
And another Kiwi export, that “Hunt for the Wilderpeople” kid Julian Dennison scores a few giggles as the sassy, rotund bestie to nerdy wallflower Eli, played by aging-out-of-child actor Jaeden Martel of “It,” “St. Vincent” and “Knives Out.”
They play the kids who try to warn their classmates of the danger that errupts at midnight at the not-that-wild teen party they’re attending.
“That’s like, racist against MACHINES!” is what they hear in response.
But events conspire to throw assorted punks, the video store clerk (Mooney himself, in dreads and dreadfully unfunny), the besties, Goth-punk Ash (Lachlan Watson) and exotically gorgeous Laura (Rachel Zegler of “West Side Story”) together in a sluggish scramble to survive New Millennium Eve.
The dialogue — that which isn’t mumbled-by-in-a-rush — is forgettably unquotable.
The nostalgia is very much a mixed bag, with those pop culture references from that era hammered home with the music of Chumbawumba, Harvey Danger and Blink 12, and with the film opening with President Bill Clinton updating the nation on Y2K eve on what a competent administration does to fix a possible major problem — by tackling it in advance.
Fred Durst makes an entrance. OK. Sure. Fine. Remember Limp Bizkit?
But did we really need to bring back that comic bad penny Tim Heidecker (playing Eli’s dad, with Silverstone as his mom)?
No. No we did not. Not under any circumstances. And if Heidecker’s who Mooney thought of or thinks is funny, I think I see the problem right there.
Rating: R, graphic violence, drug abuse, sexual situations, profanity
Cast: Jaeden Martel, Rachel Zegler, Julian Dennison, Alicia Silverson, Lachlan Watson, Kyle Mooney and Fred Durst
Credits: Directed by Kyle Mooney, scripted by Kyle Mooney and Evan Winter. An A24 release.
Running time: 1:31
Entertainment
Review: A real-life incident of white-power terrorism is told with chilling clarity in 'The Order'
The stare burns hard and clean, with an undercurrent of malice that you’d be a fool to miss. And then there’s another man, also with cold eyes, who gives off the stink of unmet expectations, marital dysfunction and alcohol. The first character, the real-life white supremacist Robert Jay Mathews, is played by Nicholas Hoult, itself a surprise when you consider the actor’s overall likability, something he hasn’t been able to shake since his cherubic turn in 2002’s “About a Boy.”
But it’s that second performance, a frowsy FBI agent named Terry Husk, that really stuns you, because it’s Jude Law, going darker than ever. “There’s something about you, coming in here, having these talks around the kids,” a mother tells Husk at a party where he’s already several beers deep. “I don’t like that,” she concludes. “You scare me.” This is a person she’s barely met, but what she senses is enough.
“The Order” is about these two taciturn men coming face to face, told with a pared-down tension that, decades ago, made stars out of actors like Charles Bronson. It’s also about a string of brutal 1980s heists and the murder of Jewish radio talk-show host Alan Berg (Marc Maron) that coalesced in the minds of investigators as not the work of run-of-the-mill criminals but something far more dangerous and insidious — the coordinated expressions of a hate group inspired by racial animus, trying to bring about a revolution.
The movie’s Australian-born director, Justin Kurzel, has long had a thing for bleakness, and his new movie won’t disabuse you of that characterization. Yet in working from a no-nonsense script by Zach Baylin (based on an account called “The Silent Brotherhood,” by Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt), Kurzel has — just as David Fincher did with “Zodiac” — found a magnifying glass for his gifts. The potent image-making and performative ferocity turns what could have been a crime thriller into a near-metaphysical showdown.
It’s quite possible you haven’t heard much about “The Order,” which was made in Canada and had its debut as one of the less glamorous entries at this year’s Venice Film Festival — this despite its star power and overall excellence. The reason for that is obvious, if a little disturbing. There’s a straight line from this film’s Idaho hate group to the Oklahoma City bombing and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. (A bracing end-credits card calls that incident what it was, an insurrection.)
Kurzel presents the iconography of America’s off-the-grid militia members — flags, swastikas, flyers in bars inviting the curious to meetings — with admirable straightforwardness. The ideas are extreme enough. Most eye-opening are the crude drawings from an early edition of 1978’s “The Turner Diaries,” a red-covered, FBI-flagged book that basically functions as a six-step guide for murderous governmental overthrow.
The chillingly smooth-voiced purr of veteran actor Victor Slezak as neo-Nazi minister Richard Butler brings a certain conventionality to the film, but his presence is essential in order to demonstrate the power of Hoult’s rawer Mathews, a younger figure on the rise and not afraid to call for action. “Defeat, never — victory forever,” he leads the men in a chant (and it is mostly men, it should be said). The slanting afternoon light lends his ascent a spooky, otherworldly glow.
“The Order,” however, is ultimately not about words but the force of personality. It may be the most timely movie of the season. Don’t let Husk’s redemption fool you. Kurzel ends on a note of vigilance, the target in sight, the work just beginning.
‘The Order’
Rated: R, for some strong violence, and language throughout
Running time: 1 hour, 56 minutes
Playing: In wide release Friday, Dec. 6
Movie Reviews
Who Needs Gods When You Have Ralph Fiennes?
Ralph Fiennes in The Return.
Photo: Bleecker Street
Anyone who saw Ralph Fiennes onstage in Straight Line Crazy, David Hare’s 2022 play about the career of Robert Moses, came away with the realization (or at least the reminder) that this man is one of our most physical actors. As the controversial New York bureaucrat and city planner, Fiennes strode and charged across a stage dominated by a map of the city, his body a metaphor for Moses’s ability to plow through forests and hills and villages and neighborhoods. The performance was so explosive, the actor so driven, that you wondered if at some point he might bound off the Shed’s modest proscenium and into your lap. That sounds like a joke, but it felt real at the time — and somewhat dangerous, given Fiennes’s hawkish intensity.
In Uberto Pasolini’s The Return, Fiennes plays Odysseus, the ancient Greek king of Ithaca, whose long journey home from the Trojan War was mythologized in Homer’s The Odyssey. The film presents the final section of the ancient epic: Odysseus’ arrival as a stranger in Ithaca after ten long years, and his discovery that his wife Penelope (Juliette Binoche), who’s had no news of him, is now being pursued by a small army of suitors out for his throne. Odysseus is dressed as a beggar, ragged and ruined. Nobody recognizes him, and he’s repeatedly humiliated. It’s a fine showcase for Fiennes’s physicality not just in movement but stasis as well. Odysseus famously burns with anger; Homer describes him “rolling side to side, as a cook turns a sausage, big with blood and fat, at a scorching blaze, without a pause, to broil it quick.”
I say this with nothing but admiration: Ralph Fiennes makes for a great burning sausage. He can do coiled menace and rage, but he also knows how to use his stillness. In his other big film this year, the raucously entertaining papal drama Conclave, the actor brings an anguished softness to the role of Cardinal Lawrence that speaks to the character’s honest cultivation of doubt, an effective contrast to the bulletlike schemers around him. These two seemingly passive roles demonstrate, in subtle ways, the actor’s range. Fiennes spends much of The Return wallowing in paralyzing indecision, watching and wondering and waiting, but here, his hesitancy is nothing like Conclave’s Lawrence. Because we’re aware, through the actor’s simmering body language, that revenge and slaughter are nigh — that a blowup and a bloodbath are inevitable. (That’s not a spoiler; you’ve had 2,500 years to familiarize yourself with The Odyssey.)
Gone are the story’s overt mythical elements, the gods and goddesses changing shape and toying with these mortals’ fates. (Who needs gods when you have Ralph Fiennes?) Instead, Pasolini introduces some slight modern psychology, tempering Odysseus’ rage with grief and indecision. Traumatized by the war and the toll of his journey (which saw him lose all his men), Odysseus no longer seems to recognize himself. He doesn’t know if he deserves his old life back. When he finally confronts Penelope, he can’t bring himself to reveal his identity; she doesn’t recognize him either, but their exchange suggests that maybe, on a subconscious level, she understands something deeper about this vaguely familiar figure standing before her.
If only the rest of this otherwise wan film were at Fiennes’s and Binoche’s level. I can see how Pasolini, wanting to strip the tale down to its essentials, might go for dramatic austerity. Homer’s poetry, of course, is gone, but so too is any real sense of dynamism. When people speak in The Return, they generally just stand across from each other and talk with little emotion or vitality. The director’s namesake, the legendary Pier Paolo Pasolini, also adapted some of the classics back in the 1960s and ’70s, and he too adopted an unadorned, matter-of-fact approach to retelling these tales. (The two men are not, as far as I can tell, related; Uberto, a former producer, is actually a nephew of the great Luchino Visconti!) But Pier Paolo had a painter’s eye and a poet’s sensibility; in simplicity he found his own mythic grandeur. Uberto, by contrast, finds mostly inertia — save for whenever Fiennes is onscreen, which thankfully is quite often. The Return works neither as a CliffsNotes version of The Odyssey nor as its own stand-alone tale. But it does remind us that Ralph Fiennes is an immortal.
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