Author: NY TIMES

‘Blind War’Stream it on Hi-Yah!During a hostage crisis gone wrong, the SWAT captain Dong Gu (Andy On) loses his eyesight and Cena (Yang Xing), a villainous murderess, sees her sadistic lover die. As she’s hauled off to prison, Cena promises revenge against Dong Gu and the criminal gang who betrayed her. Months later, when Dong Gu’s violinist daughter is kidnapped by a sex trafficking ring, he unwittingly teams with the disguised Cena, who’s recently escaped from prison, to retrieve her.Yang and On are a fascinating pair: Yang plays a corrosive open wound of a woman, while On portrays an honorable…

My life, like yours, I suspect, can feel like it has been ingeniously designed for the sole purpose of strangling serendipity. Work days are built around back-to-back meetings and video calls; evenings revolve around children’s bedtimes; date nights have to be scheduled weeks in advance; even phone calls to catch up with friends can take multiple rounds of back-and-forth coordination by text.I have found a secret antidote to all that structure, a magic portal that has no clock or key. It is a neighborhood stoop, or rather, the discarded books that gather there. For you, maybe that translates into a…

Conor Thomas Cahill was wearing a Santa suit and a cast boot when he made eye contact with Jenna Ann Wynne at the Public House in Midtown Manhattan in December 2015.A group of mutual friends had met at the bar for drinks during SantaCon, a yearly Santa Clause convention in Manhattan. Ms. Wynne, a wedding singer, had to work that night, but she stopped by the bar before heading to her gig.The two started chatting, and Mr. Cahill explained that he had broken his foot while playing basketball a few weeks earlier. They exchanged numbers, and for their first date,…

On a recent Wednesday afternoon, Dan Perkin and Scott Bissmeyer, work buddies on vacation, sat on metal bleachers watching the Portland Timbers play the San Jose Earthquakes in the first of four preseason Major League Soccer games that day.They had spent $125 each on V.I.P. day passes, which included food, drink and access to tents to keep cool. Self-described “M.L.S. road trippers,” they have visited numerous M.L.S. stadiums, and have watched teams in Tucson, Ariz., where as many as 11 clubs came together for preseason training in the past.But this year, with 12 M.L.S. teams — along with two from…

“Hello, my name is Jonathan Glazer, and I’m the writer and director of the ‘Zone of Interest.’ So we open the sequence on a prisoner gardener, one of whose duties is to clean Rudolf Höss, the commandant’s boots. So everything you’re going to see in this scene was shot simultaneously with 10 cameras. We’re watching Hedwig Höss here with her friends having — it’s a typical weekday morning in the Höss house. The cameras just shot those women in the kitchen, is running simultaneously with the cameras in here shooting this girl. And she is a character called Aniela, who…

At least nobody can accuse Asia’s soccer authorities of failing to sweat the small stuff. It would be easy to overlook the little things, after all, when their job is to nurture and promote the most popular sport on the planet for the benefit of almost five billion people spread across a third of the world’s landmass.In many ways, then, it is admirable that the Asian Football Confederation (A.F.C.) can still find the time to dictate precisely which water bottles, with which labels, fans should be allowed to carry into stadiums. That kind of attention to detail should reassure you…

Eight months after they met, Alison Michelle Eggert and Raylynne Michelle Perez were married. Plenty of family members and friends had wondered why so soon. The answer was twofold.“The first is that we both feel like we’ve waited long enough to find this love and don’t want to wait anymore,” Ms. Eggert said. “But the second is that we are keenly aware that our legal right to marry each other could disappear at any time.”The two, who lived in Houston, matched on Bumble on June 7, 2023. Ms. Eggert had joined the dating app that very day, and Ms. Perez’s…

Credit card debt is rising, and shopping for a card with a lower interest rate can help you save money. But the challenge is finding one.Smaller banks and credit unions typically charge significantly lower interest rates on credit cards than the largest banks do — even among customers with top-notch credit, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau reported last week.But online card comparison tools tend to emphasize cards from larger banks that pay fees to the sites when shoppers apply for cards, said Julie Margetta Morgan, the bureau’s associate director for research, monitoring and regulations. “It’s pretty hard to shop for…

In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.This sequence from “The Zone of Interest,” which is nominated for five Academy Awards, including best picture, observes a weekday at the home of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of the concentration camp Auschwitz. That home is positioned directly next door to the camp. In the kitchen, Rudolf’s wife, Hedwig, sits and gossips with…

Henry Rono, a Kenyan distance runner who was unable to walk until he was 6 after a gruesome injury to his right leg when he was a toddler but went on to break four world records in just 81 days in 1978, died on Thursday in Nairobi. He was 72.His death was announced by Athletics Kenya, an amateur athletic association. He died in a hospital, where he had spent 10 days with an unspecified illness.Rono was twice denied shots at Olympic glory in his 20s, when Kenya joined boycotts of the Games in 1976 and 1980. Even so, he was…