Author: NY TIMES

Raphael (Ursel Tilk), the poseur metalhead at the center of Rainer Sarnet’s subversively earnest comedy “The Invisible Fight,” set in 1970s Estonia, swaggers around flaunting a golden cross and fumbling kung fu kicks over a Black Sabbath soundtrack. To modern audiences, he’s just some doofus. But back in the U.S.S.R. — which, at various times, outlawed Eastern martial arts, Western rock music, and religion — he’s a threat to the state.Once, kids like Raphael were mocked on propaganda posters and locked in psychiatric hospitals. “Everything cool is banned in the Soviet Union,” he huffs. And so Raphael ditches the pastel…

When Yulia Seleznyova walks around her home city in Russia, she scrutinizes everyone passing by in the hope that she will lock eyes with her son Aleksei.She last heard from him on New Year’s Eve 2022, when he sent holiday greetings from the school in eastern Ukraine that his unit of recently mobilized soldiers was using as a headquarters.The Ukrainian military hit the school with U.S.-supplied HIMARS rockets on New Year’s Day. The Russian authorities acknowledged dozens of deaths, though pro-Russian military bloggers and Ukrainian authorities estimated that the real number was in the hundreds.Aleksei was not recognized in the…

En las últimas semanas, Batsheva Hay ha parado a mujeres a la salida de un estudio de danza, en el metro y en un supermercado. Se ha colado en los mensajes de texto de desconocidas.Eres guapa, les ha dicho con su tono de voz más cálido y más “esto no es una estafa”. ¿Te gustaría ser modelo?Hay es una diseñadora de moda neoyorquina, y así es como ha hecho el casting para su desfile de la Semana de la Moda de Nueva York. Los castings callejeros no son nada nuevo: es la forma que tiene el mundo de la moda…

San Marzano tomatoes are prized by chefs around the world for their intense flavor and are routinely recommended by recipe writers, but one woman in California said that her effort to make a sauce from these rich and balanced tomatoes was upset by a misleading label.Simpson Imports, a Pennsylvania tomato seller, has for years sold Roma tomatoes in cans and boxes, but the California woman, Andrea Valiente, said in a lawsuit filed last year that the company had used “highly misleading tomato packaging to trick consumers into believing that they are purchasing genuine San Marzano tomatoes, at San Marzano prices.”Simpson…

On Sept. 23, 1997, the rock band U2 performed to thousands of fans in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, the year after the 1,425-day siege of the city by Bosnian Serb forces ended.“Kiss the Future,” Nenad Cicin-Sain’s smoothly calibrated documentary, is partly a timeline of how this concert came to be and partly a sketch of life in Sarajevo during the Bosnian War. This is history told through emotions as much as through well-documented events, conveying both the resilience of Sarajevans and the power of pop music (without falling into too much celebrity self-regard).People who lived through that time, especially cultural…

When Russian missiles struck the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv a couple of weeks ago, schoolchildren and their teachers installed in newly built underground classrooms did not hear a thing.Down in the bowels of Kharkiv’s cavernous, Soviet-era subway stations, the city administration has built a line of brightly decorated classrooms, where 6- and 7-year-olds are attending primary school for the first time in their lives in this war-stricken city.“The children were fine,” said Lyudmyla Demchenko, 47, one of the teachers. “You cannot hear the sirens down here.”Ten years after the conflict with Russian-backed separatists broke out and two years into Moscow’s…

Durante años, mi esposo me dijo: “Eres el amor de mi vida. Nada de lo que hagas me haría dejarte”.Después conoció a alguien más, y nuestra relación terminó. Tal como lo prometió, no fue por algo que yo hice.Para ambos había sido el segundo matrimonio, y él ya tenía dos hijas jóvenes, un panorama abrumador para mí, que había crecido en una familia difícil y jurado que no iba a tener hijos. Pero, al igual que su padre, ellas entraron en mi corazón.Conmigo venían mis dos gatos, que nunca habían vivido con niños. Las niñas trataban de acariciarlos, pero solo…

BuzzFeed said on Wednesday that it was selling Complex — a media start-up known for its coverage of streetwear and pop culture — at a significant discount from its purchase price.The buyer is Ntwrk, an e-commerce company backed by LiveNation Entertainment and Main Street Advisors, which is paying $108.6 million for the company. It is also paying BuzzFeed $5.7 million to cover severance expenses of Complex employees whom BuzzFeed is laying off, along with other costs.BuzzFeed said it was laying off 16 percent of its remaining work force, a move it expects will save the company $23 million annually. BuzzFeed…

There’s a dreadful innocence to the tiny puppets that drive “Stopmotion,” an unusually resolute horror tale that places a spiraling animator at the mercy of her handmade figures and her own disturbed mind.Ella (Aisling Franciosi), a talented artist, is herself a puppet, forced to act as the hands of her fearsome mother (Stella Gonet), a storied animator who’s suffering from a degenerative disease.“I don’t have my own voice,” Ella complains, resentfully moving the dolls millimeter by millimeter on her mother’s barked instructions. But when tragedy frees Ella to make her own stop-motion film and she moves her materials into a…

Nestled in a dense forest, the Ukrainian military base appears abandoned and destroyed, its command center a burned-out husk, a casualty of a Russian missile barrage early in the war.But that is above ground.Not far away, a discreet passageway descends to a subterranean bunker where teams of Ukrainian soldiers track Russian spy satellites and eavesdrop on conversations between Russian commanders. On one screen, a red line followed the route of an explosive drone threading through Russian air defenses from a point in central Ukraine to a target in the Russian city of Rostov.The underground bunker, built to replace the destroyed…