Author: NY TIMES

Late in Radu Jude’s “Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World,” the movie shifts tones. Our heroine, a funny, foul-mouthed gofer who’s racking up miles driving in Bucharest, has just told her passenger about a road outside the city that has more memorials edging it than it has kilometers. The movie then cuts to one after another roadside memorial — some stone, others metal, some with photos, others with flowers — for an astonishing four silent minutes, and this near-unclassifiable, often comically ribald movie turns into a plaintive requiem.The woman, Angela — the sneakily charismatic Ilinca…

The Biden administration accelerated efforts to halt the Gaza war on Friday as Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken met with Israeli leaders in Tel Aviv and the C.I.A. director traveled to Qatar, where mediators were trying to narrow gaps between Israel and Hamas over a cease-fire deal.Mr. Blinken met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and with members of Israel’s war cabinet at a period of high tension between the allies. U.S. officials have become more vocal in criticizing Mr. Netanyahu’s war strategy, including his plan to mount a military offensive in Rafah, the southern Gazan city packed…

A week after Russia invaded Ukraine, in March 2022, a host of the British podcast “The Rest Is Politics” explained what it was like to be in a room with President Vladimir V. Putin.Alastair Campbell, who worked as the director of communications and strategy in Tony Blair’s Labour government, said that when he first met Russia’s president in 1999, he was “almost timid, very slight, very small, quite quiet.” But Putin’s aggression increased over time, Campbell said on the podcast, and at a dinner in 2003, the president had hurled abuse at Blair. Putin didn’t say that the British prime…

On my spouse Eli’s 27th birthday last year, I sat in a hotel room in Montreal — seeking refuge from a conference happy hour — scrolling through old photos and videos of us on my phone. I had looked at these photos and videos hundreds of times in the nearly two years since Eli had died in a hiking accident. Now I’d passed an inflection point in my camera roll where I had more photos without Eli than photos with Eli.And that imbalance would only grow. There would never be a new photo or video of him to add to…

It looks like there is little that can trouble investors at the moment.The S&P 500 is on course for its best week of the year so far, with a gain of about 2.5 percent with one more trading day to go. That added to gains that have lifted the benchmark index more than 10 percent this year, setting a series of record highs.Other major indexes, like the Dow Jones industrial average and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite, have recently traded at or near record highs, as have individual companies as varied as Microsoft, JPMorgan Chase and Walmart. Shares of the social…

It’s safe to say that the Mauritanian French director Med Hondo’s “West Indies: The Fugitive Slaves of Liberty” is a unique film. That might be the only safe thing about it.The first African movie musical, it traces nearly four centuries of French colonialism with unsparing clarity and relentless creativity, shot entirely on a replica of a slave ship built within an abandoned Citroën factory in Paris.Since its wonky release in 1979, it has quietly built a group of devoted fans, including the Oscar-winning filmmaker Barry Jenkins, who placed it at the top of his list of the greatest films of…

One of Israel’s longest hospital raids of the Gaza war stretched into a fourth day on Thursday, as the military said that it had killed dozens of people it described as terrorists in the previous 24 hours in its operation at Al-Shifa Hospital.Israel has staged a series of raids on Al-Shifa in northern Gaza, the largest medical facility in the territory, arguing that Hamas used it as a command center and concealed weapons and fighters in underground tunnels there. Since the latest attack began on Monday, the Israeli military has reported killing more than 140 people it said were terrorists…

The first time Colton Dakota Elliott asked out Allie Londyn Hill, it didn’t go particularly well.“In seventh grade he asked me to be his girlfriend for the first time,” Ms. Hill said. “And I was like, ‘No, I’d really like to be friends.’”He tried again in eighth grade, making an unsubtle post about his crush on Facebook, but Ms. Hill still wasn’t interested.Ms. Hill, 27, and Mr. Elliott, 26, both lived in Lexington, Tenn., at the time, but they fell out of touch when Ms. Hill’s family moved to Jackson, Tenn., just before she began high school.They always remained friendly…

Eisner gave DealBook an exclusive statement:In 1983, Disney was under attack by corporate raiders trying to take over the company. That would have ended the Disney Company as we know it, for the studio, theme parks, and hotels were suggested to be sold off. The board turned to me and Frank Wells, and a different story was written, one that was continued by Bob Iger and his executive team.Today, a similar situation exists, so let’s remember the lessons from 40 years ago. Bringing in someone who doesn’t have experience in the company or the industry to disrupt Bob and his…

Shortly after Jonathan Kanter took over the Justice Department’s antitrust division in November 2021, the agency secured an additional $50 million to investigate monopolies, bust criminal cartels and block mergers.To celebrate, Mr. Kanter bought a prop of a giant check, placed it outside his office and wrote on the check’s memo line: “Break ’Em Up.”Mr. Kanter, 50, has pushed that philosophy ever since, becoming a lead architect of the most significant effort in decades to fight the concentration of power in corporate America. On Thursday, he took his biggest swing when the Justice Department filed an antitrust lawsuit against Apple.…