Year: 2022

Mariah Carey dazzled the crowd at her sold-out Christmas show with some help from her 11-year-old daughter, Monroe, who joined her superstar mother on stage for their first duet, “Away in a Manger.”

The Queen of Christmas and her daughter donned matching white dresses and tiaras for their performance of the “beautiful” 19th-century hymn on Friday evening at Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena.

“This is my baby girl, here,” Carey said by way of introduction. “Eleven years ago, I got the greatest gift. You know what, I don’t have birthdays, but the birthing day was the greatest gift ever when I had my twins, Roc and Roe [Moroccan and Monroe].”

Carey noted that this was the mother-daughter duo’s first time performing together, saying, “We’ve been working on this one for a minute.”

To kick off the song, Carey showed off her vocal range with some of her signature whistle tones before Monroe

How Google missed this moment isn’t a simple matter of a blind spot. It’s a case of an incumbent being so careful about its business, reputation and customer relationships that it refused to release similar, more powerful tech. And it’s far from the end of the story.

“Google thinks a lot about how something can damage its reputation,” said Gaurav Nemade, an ex-Google product manager who was first to helm its LaMDA chatbot. “They lean on the side of conservatism.”

Google’s LaMDA — made famous when engineer Blake Lemoine called it sentient — is a more capable bot than ChatGPT, yet the company’s been hesitant to make it public. For Google, the problem with chatbots is they’re wrong a lot, yet present their answers with undeserved confidence. Leading people astray

Kenny Leon began his 2014 Broadway revival of “A Raisin in the Sun” with a recorded interview featuring the voice of the late playwright Lorraine Hansberry. The director begins his current revival of “Ohio State Murders” with a recorded interview featuring the voice of Adrienne Kennedy, now 91 years old. The effect in both productions blurs the line between autobiography and fiction, and here with the Kennedy play, which opened Thursday at Broadway’s newly renamed James Earl Jones Theatre, it is also reflected in the deeply empathetic performance of Audra McDonald.

Hers is clearly a performance that goes beyond the written words in the script. McDonald’s performance also has that veracity that comes from basing her character on a living person, in this case, Kennedy herself. The actor replicates the playwright’s halting, carefully modulated delivery. It’s as if McDonald is rewriting every line a few times before she actually says

This review originally ran Sept. 3, 2022, in conjunction with the film’s world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival.

“Retrograde,” director Matthew Heineman’s searing, intimate look at the United States’ chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, opens with an aural collage of speeches from four U.S. Presidents (George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden), which offers a stark reminder of the two decades of this “forever war,” a time period starkly underlined when a Green Beret asks a 20-year-old soldier if he was even born when this war started. 

That 20 years was abruptly cut short in 2021 when President Biden was inaugurated and swore to bring the troops home. While it sounds good on paper, or in a political speech, as we found out, and as Heineman’s film — making its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival — carefully details, it was far, far more

The Roku Channel will be the exclusive English-language broadcast partner for the 71st Miss Universe competition, the Miss Universe Organization announced Tuesday.

The live event will take place on Saturday, Jan. 14, 2023, in New Orleans, Louisiana.

“For the first time ever, Americans are watching more streaming TV than cable. With this profound shift in the way audiences watch content underway, we’re thrilled to partner with The Roku Channel
 to bring the Miss Universe competition to the streaming world and reach previously untapped audiences across the United States,” said Amy Emmerich, CEO of The Miss Universe Organization.

“The Roku Channel also ranked first in reach amongst AVOD/FAST services in the U.S. and Canada  according to TiVo’s most recent quarterly Video Trends Report, and we are elated to be partnering together to find more innovative, new ways to tell the stories of these incredible women,” said Emmerich.

Rob Holmes, Vice President