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Beyoncé is Billboard's greatest pop star of the 21st century. Mom Tina isn't surprised

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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.

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“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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Movie Reviews

Who Needs Gods When You Have Ralph Fiennes?

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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.”

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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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‘Oppenheimer’ actor comes out as transmasculine and nonbinary, keeping 'work name'

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‘Oppenheimer’ actor comes out as transmasculine and nonbinary, keeping 'work name'

Actor Emma Dumont has embraced their gender identity, adopting a new name in their personal life while keeping the name Emma for their professional one.

Best known for playing J. Robert Oppenheimer’s sister-in-law Jackie in Christopher Nolan’s 2024 best picture winner “Oppenheimer,” the 30-year-old star of “The Gifted” subtly shared the update on their Instagram account, listing amended pronouns “they/them” and a new name, Nick, in their bio.

A representative for Dumont did not reply immediately Friday to The Times’ request for comment.

Dumont maintains the handle @emmadumont on social media, a decision their publicist explained to TMZ.

“They identify as a transmasculine nonbinary person,” the publicist told the outlet. “Their work name is still going to be Emma Dumont, but they will go by Nick with friends and family.”

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Transmasculine is a term for a person who is “closer to masculinity than femininity but not a binary man,” according to the PFLAG National Glossary. It is often abbreviated to “transmasc.”

Meanwhile, the label “nonbinary” is often used by those “who do not subscribe to the gender binary,” according to the organization’s glossary. It also says that “some use the term exclusively, while others may use it interchangeably with terms like genderqueer, genderfluid, gender non-conforming, gender diverse, or gender expansive.”

A 2021 study from the UCLA Williams Institute, which researches issues around sexual orientation and gender identities, found that nonbinary people constitute roughly 11% of the adult LGBTQ population. And while they make up a large portion of the national transgender population (43%), the study concluded, most nonbinary LGBTQ adults are not transgender.

Fans have left supportive comments on Dumont’s Monday Instagram post, with one commenter wishing the actor a “happy coming out.”

“Love this for you!” another user wrote.

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Other celebrities who have come out in the past year include “Uncut Gems” breakout Julia Fox and R&B singer Khalid.

Before “Oppenheimer,” Dumont also appeared in the NBC series “Aquarius” and the 2021 film “Licorice Pizza.” They are also slated to star in the horror film “New Me,” which does not have a release date yet.

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Film Review: Two classic films that are great for Christmas watching are also touching reflections

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Film Review: Two classic films that are great for Christmas watching are also touching reflections

Meet Me in St. Louis is only partly a Christmas movie. The musical follows the Smith family of St. Louis from the summer of 1903 until the spring of 1904. The opening song goes “Meet Me in St. Louis, Louie, meet me at the fair” – and the fair is the St. Louis World’s Fair, known as the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. All four sections of the movie are magnificent, but the Christmas sequence is especially poignant, and it’s marked by the film’s star Judy Garland singing the beautiful, wistful “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”

One reason for the sadness is that Meet Me in St. Louis is a wartime picture. It premiered in New York on December 30, 1944, right in the middle of “The Battle of the Bulge,” the German counteroffensive that made millions of people all over the world wonder if they would ever see another Christmas. Even though the story starts in 1903, the movie signals the profound changes coming to America because of World War II. The lovely, romantic gas lights in the Smith home will give way to more efficient electric lights, but for Americans in 1944, family life, courtship, food — just about everything — will change.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (Loew’s Inc.)

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The movie poster from the film Meet Me In St. Louis. The film isn’t strictly a Christmas movie, but it does have an iconic Christmas moment.

The Christmas sequence includes a big, colorful dance for young people, and they all get matched up with the person they most like. But hanging over the family is the father’s decision to move them to New York. When Garland sings, her despairing little sister Tootie, rushes out to destroy all the snow people in the back yard. And the movie honors her despair.

But Meet Me in St. Louis is also about how World War II diminished the power of men in their families — while the men were away, the women ran the home, worked in factories, ferried airplanes all over the world and were major figures in the creation of the first computer. So, many currents run under Meet Me in St. Louis, but the complexities only make the film more astonishing and delightful. Characters cope with change and through the movie find joy and excitement — as does the audience.

American actor Jimmy Stewart is featured in a still from the film The Shop Around the Corner. Stewart would go on to be in notable holiday films.
American actor Jimmy Stewart is featured in a still from the film The Shop Around the Corner. Stewart would go on to be in notable holiday films.

German-born Ernst Lubitsch brought middle-European angst and manners to his great comedies in the ‘30s and early ‘40s. Unlike Meet Me in St. Louis, The Shop around the Corner takes place in Budapest and not the middle America. The staff of the gift shop is a cross-section of Europe. Characters are evasive, and comically terrified of giving offense. Lubitsch loved indirection and suggestion. The movie came out in 1940, but doesn’t mention the war, yet you feel it all through the picture, and audiences in 1940 knew it for certain. Lubitsch loved the interaction of real life troubles and laughter in his comic fantasies. The shop owner is even driven to attempt suicide before the affection of his staff brings him back to himself and his feeling that this little store is for him a wonderful home.

The lead clerk, played by James Stewart, and the newest employee (Margaret Sullavan) feud throughout the movie. By the rules of romantic comedy, strife will turn to love, but the convoluted getting there is pure delight. Lubitsch and screenwriter Samson Raphaelson are masters of ironic comedy and of puncturing the pompous. When the owner tells the staff that he wants an absolutely honest opinion, which of course he doesn’t, one man over and over runs for cover. But in this tiny, self-absorbed microcosm, Christmas brings out the unexpected best in its people. A former head of production at United Artists called The Shop around the Corner a perfect movie. I agree.

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Watch Meet Me In St. Louis for free on Tubi TV or on a variety of streaming services.
The Shop Around the Corner is available on many streaming services or for free here.

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