Author: NY TIMES

Paramount has decided to formally open negotiations with a bidding group led by Sony Pictures Entertainment and the private equity giant Apollo, according to three people familiar with the matter. The move comes after a period of exclusive talks with the Hollywood studio Skydance lapsed on Friday night.A special committee of Paramount’s board of directors met Saturday and signed off on beginning deal talks with Sony and Apollo, which last week submitted a letter of interest valuing the company at $26 billion, the people said. The committee also decided to push for further negotiations with Skydance, a studio founded by…

When Madonna stepped out onto the mammoth stage constructed on Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana Beach on Saturday night in a gleaming halo headpiece and black kimono, she was greeted by the largest live crowd of her four-decade career.The free show, announced in late March, was a grand finale to the pop superstar’s latest world tour, which has delivered 80 performances since last October. Without ticket data, concert crowd sizes can be difficult to gauge; Riotur, the municipality’s tourism department, estimated that 1.6 million people flooded onto the 2.4-mile stretch of sand on Saturday that had been turned into a roughly…

The latest round of negotiations between Israel and Hamas hit an impasse on Sunday as mediators struggled to bridge remaining gaps and a Hamas delegation departed the talks in Cairo, according to two senior Hamas officials and two other officials familiar with the talks. An Israeli official also confirmed the negotiations had stalled and described them as being in “crisis.”For months, the negotiations aimed at achieving a cease-fire and a release of hostages have made little progress, but signs the two sides were coming closer to an agreement appeared over the last week. Israel backed off some of its long-held…

Laurent Cantet, an eminent director who made penetrating films about the prickly undersides of French life and society, died on April 25 in Paris. He was 63.His screenwriter and editor, Robin Campillo, said he died of cancer in a hospital.Mr. Cantet’s best-known film was “Entre les Murs” (“The Class”), which won the Palme d’Or, the Cannes Film Festival’s top prize, in 2008 and was nominated for an Oscar as best foreign-language film. “The Class” was something new in French filmmaking: an extended snapshot of the inside of a schoolroom in a working-class district of Paris, using a real-life ex-teacher and…

There are many associations that come to mind with the Kentucky Derby. Horses, naturally. Mint juleps too. But to be a true participant in the Derby spectacle, one needs a proper Derby hat.The tradition for wearing eye-catching attire to America’s most famous horse race began in the 1870s. The founder of the Kentucky Derby, Meriwether Lewis Clark Jr., was inspired by the fashionable dress codes at events like Ascot in Britain and Paris’s Grand Prix. Creating his own, he figured, would transform his racetrack from a place of ill-repute to one for well-heeled high society.On a sunny spring Monday in…

The American job market may be shifting into a lower gear this spring, a turn that economists have expected for months after a vigorous rebound from the pandemic shock.Employers added 175,000 positions in April, the Labor Department reported Friday, undershooting forecasts. The unemployment rate ticked up to 3.9 percent.A less torrid expansion after the 242,000-job average over the prior 12 months isn’t necessarily bad news, given that layoffs have remained low and most sectors appear stable.“It’s not a bad economy; it’s still a healthy economy,” said Perc Pineda, chief economist at the Plastics Industry Association. “I think it’s part of…

Barbara O. Jones, an actress whose captivating work in films like “Bush Mama” and “Daughters of the Dust” helped define the cerebral, experimental and highly influential Black cinema movement that emerged in Los Angeles in the 1970s, died on April 8 at her home in Dayton, Ohio. She was 82.Her brother Marlon Minor confirmed the death but said the cause had not been determined.Starting in the early 1970s just a few miles from Hollywood, a generation of students at the University of California, Los Angeles, began making films that pushed hard against many of the tropes of commercial moviemaking.Budding filmmakers…

The leader of the World Food Program said that parts of the Gaza Strip are experiencing a “full-blown famine” that is spreading across the territory after almost seven months of war that have made delivering aid extremely challenging.“There is famine — full-blown famine in the north, and it’s moving its way south,” Cindy McCain, the program’s director, said in excerpts released late Friday of an interview with “Meet The Press.” Ms. McCain is the second high-profile American leading a U.S. government or U.N. aid effort who has said that there is famine in northern Gaza, although her remarks do not…

On his first visit to Europe in five years, the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, appears intent on seizing opportunities to loosen the continent’s bonds with the United States and forge a world freed of American dominance.The Chinese leader has chosen three countries to visit — France, Serbia and Hungary — that all, to a greater or lesser degree, look askance at America’s postwar ordering of the world, see China as a necessary counterweight and are eager to bolster economic ties.At a time of tensions with much of Europe — over China’s “no limits” embrace of Russia despite the war in…

When Kendall Jenner attended the 2022 Met Gala in a Prada gown with an enormous flowing skirt, getting her to the Metropolitan Museum of Art required special transportation. A limousine would not do, nor would an SUV — walking in the dress was a challenge; sitting, impossible. The solution: Ms. Jenner would be driven, standing, in a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter van.On the way to the event, as a way to relieve her anxiety about running late, Ms. Jenner relieved herself in an ice bucket while standing in the van. “Best decision I ever made,” she said of that moment in an…