Author: NY TIMES

“Dune: Part Two” and its A-list cast jump-started moviegoing in North America after a dismal start to the year.The science-fiction sequel sold an estimated $81.5 million in tickets in the United States and Canada from Thursday night to Sunday, the biggest opening for a Hollywood film since “Barbie” in July. (Taylor Swift’s concert documentary arrived to $93 million in October.) “Dune: Part Two,” directed by Denis Villeneuve, collected an additional $97 million overseas. IMAX screenings were especially strong.Legendary Entertainment and Warner Bros. spent $190 million to produce “Dune: Part Two,” not including a megawatt marketing campaign that found Zendaya, Timothée…

The International Contemporary Ensemble’s Skirball show on Saturday similarly showed the value of presenting Davis’s music on a chamber scale. It opened with “Clonetics,” the concluding fifth movement of a dance piece originally commissioned for Molissa Fenley and Dancers. The full work is on the lamentably out-of-print album “Hemispheres,” some of whose delirious rhythmic and motivic designs Davis later incorporated into “X.”On Saturday, “Clonetics” reasserted itself as a distinct, chiseled marvel: a world of overlapping rhythmic designs that split and recombine for eight explosive, finely conceived minutes. The percussionist Pheeroan akLaff, who participated in the original recording of “Hemispheres,” provided…

An unpublished investigation by the main United Nations agency for Palestinian affairs accuses Israel of abusing hundreds of Gazans captured during the war with Hamas, according to a copy of the report reviewed by The New York Times.The report was compiled by UNRWA, the U.N. agency that is itself at the center of an investigation after accusations that at least 30 of its 13,000 employees participated in the Hamas-led attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7. The authors of the report allege that the detainees, including at least 1,000 civilians later released without charge, were held at three military sites…

A Hamas delegation arrived in Cairo on Sunday for talks aimed at achieving a cease-fire in the war in Gaza and an exchange of hostages held by militants there for Palestinian prisoners, according to an official in the group, Basem Naim. But a breakthrough in the negotiations did not appear to be imminent, as Israel decided not to attend.Israel made the decision after Qatar’s prime minister informed David Barnea, the head of Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, on Sunday that Hamas had refused an Israeli request to provide a list of the hostages who were still alive, according to an…

In late January, when a friend emailed to alert me that her favorite brow person was doing a residency uptown not far from where I lived. I laughed. “I have no brows,” I responded. “I belong to the great Carolyn Bessette disappearing eyebrow generation!”I arrived in New York, young and impressionable, not long after Ms. Bessette married John F. Kennedy Jr. in 1996.For those of us who had no chance at mimicking Ms. Bessette Kennedy’s “willowy and beautiful” physique (as Time magazine described it) or her “buttery chunks” (how the hairstylist Brad Johns described her highlights), there were her eyebrows.…

Grocery store shoppers are noticing something amiss. Air-filled bags of chips. Shrunken soup cans. Diminished detergent packages.Companies are downsizing products without downsizing prices, and consumer posts from Reddit to TikTok to the New York Times comments section drip with indignation at the trend, widely known as “shrinkflation.”The practice isn’t new. Sellers have been quietly shrinking products to avoid raising prices for centuries, and experts think it has been an obvious corporate strategy since at least 1988, when Chock Full o’Nuts cut its one-pound coffee canister to 13 ounces and its competitors followed suit.But outrage today is acute. President Biden tapped…

‘Get On Up’ (March 16)Stream it here.The current vogue of jukebox biopics shows no sign of slowing, thanks to the impressive grosses of films like “Bob Marley: One Love,” even though most of these dramas are still trafficking in tropes that should have been decimated by the pitch-perfect satire of “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story” a decade and a half ago. But credit where due: Tate Taylor’s biopic about the “Godfather of Soul,” the hardest-working man in show business, the one and only James Brown, zigs where most of these movies would zag. The inventive screenplay by Jez and…

When Aleksei A. Navalny was alive, the Kremlin sought to portray him as an inconsequential figure unworthy of attention, even as the Russian authorities vilified and attacked him with a viciousness that suggested the opposite.In death, little appears to have changed.President Vladimir V. Putin has not said a word in public about Mr. Navalny in the two weeks since the opposition campaigner’s death at age 47 in an Arctic prison.Russian state television has been almost equally silent. Coverage has been limited to a short statement by the prison authorities the day of Mr. Navalny’s death, plus a few fleeting television…

But that, in the end, might be the biggest fantasy that attaches to clothes — namely, that any of us can ever have it figured out, arriving at a place of such self-knowledge that we no longer err. The way you look in clothes is, in fact, a profoundly flawed and paradoxical marker of self-knowledge, because the way you look in clothes is, ultimately, not just up to you. It’s up to other people. What’s more, as with any social compact, it’s subject to an endlessly shifting, inescapable array of historical contingencies and aesthetic renegotiations — or, as we familiarly…

Musk takes aim at OpenAI The gloves have really come off in one of the most personal fights in the tech world: Elon Musk has sued OpenAI and its C.E.O., Sam Altman, accusing them of reneging on the start-up’s original purpose of being a nonprofit laboratory for the technology.Yes, Musk has disagreed with Altman for years about the purpose of the organization they co-founded and he is creating a rival artificial intelligence company. But the lawsuit also appears rooted in philosophical differences that go to the heart of who controls a hugely transformative technology — and is backed by one…