Author: NY TIMES

The night of the wolf moon — the first full moon of the new year — also happened to be the last night of the couture, when John Galliano recreated a decaying Paris nightclub in the vaulted caverns beneath Paris’s Pont Alexandre III bridge across the Seine.Crepe paper streamers the color of Madeira wine were draped across walls and dangled from the ceiling amid banged-up wooden bistro chairs and scratched-up tables. Then a shirtless chanteur with a Freddie Mercury mustache rose to croon a love song, a grainy black and white film was reflected in the mirrors and the Maison…

Ultramodern factories churn out electric cars and solar panels in Hefei, an industrial center in the heart of central China. Broad avenues link office towers and landscaped parks. Subway lines open at a brisk pace.Yet at Hefei’s market for construction materials, which fills 10 city blocks, local merchants are gloomy. Wu Junlin, a vendor of doors, has closed two of his three stores and laid off all but one of his dozen employees.“I have been doing this for 20 years — after all these years, this year is the worst,” he said, sitting in his last store with no customers…

Everyone from the academy to streaming services splits cinema into two buckets: movies (comedy, romance, horror, whatever) and documentaries, lumped into one unholy pile. Besides being obviously reductive, the division is false: Nonfiction movies can be comedies or romances or horror or any other genre, and they can create new indescribable genres, too. But American audiences still tend to be fed documentaries of only a few types: true crime stories, cult exposés, hagiographies, and educational disquisitions full of talking heads.There’s more than that to nonfiction. And though plenty of star-driven, lightweight biographies show up at Sundance — famous folk on…

Officials in Israel on Friday denounced the International Court of Justice’s order seeking to prevent genocidal acts in its offensive against Hamas in Gaza but also expressed relief the court did not order it to halt its military campaign.Israeli officials had feared the judges would order an immediate cease-fire in Gaza, as South Africa had requested in its initial petition. The U.N. court ultimately ordered Israel to act to ensure that its soldiers and leaders were adhering to the 1948 U.N. genocide convention, but stopped short of demanding an end to the war.Israel has strongly rejected the accusation that it…

This was the day that President Biden and his team had feared for more than three months, the day that relatively low-level attacks by Iranian proxy groups on American troops in the Middle East turned deadly and intensified the pressure on the president to respond in kind.With three American service members killed and two dozen more injured by a drone in Jordan, Mr. Biden must decide how far he is willing to go in terms of retaliation at the risk of a wider war that he has sought to avoid ever since the Oct. 7 terrorist attack by Hamas touched…

Harrison: “I saw this lady. I asked my agent: ‘Wow! Who’s that girl?’ He said, ‘That’s Calista Flockhart.’ I said, ‘Oh, what does she do?’ He says, ‘She’s Ally McBeal.’ I hadn’t really seen it. I said, ‘Well, could you introduce us?’ He said, ‘Yes.’”Calista: “Harrison came over to say hi. When he left, I said: ‘Ugh, what a lascivious old man. What is he doing?’ After the show, we started talking. Then I was really charmed by him.”Harrison: “I had this thing, the award, in my hand, and it was easier to hold upside down.”Calista: “I joked: ‘Oh, what’s…

Months after China Evergrande ran out of cash and defaulted in 2021, investors around the world scooped up the property developer’s discounted I.O.U.’s, betting that the Chinese government would eventually step in to bail it out.On Monday it became clear just how misguided that bet was. After two years in limbo, Evergrande was ordered by a court in Hong Kong to liquidate, a move that will set off a race by lawyers to find and grab anything belonging to Evergrande that can be sold.The order is also likely to send shock waves through financial markets that are already skittish about…

Jesse Jane, a onetime Hooters waitress and beauty pageant contestant who went on to star in the highest-budget series in pornographic film history, was found dead on Wednesday at a home in Oklahoma. She was 43.The cause was believed to be a drug overdose, said Lt. Francisco Franco of the Moore Police Department in Moore, Okla. He said that officers responded on Wednesday morning for a welfare check at a house where Ms. Jane and her boyfriend, Brett Hasenmueller, had been staying. They were both found dead, Lieutenant Franco said, adding that the deaths remained under investigation.Ms. Jane, with her…

A ruling on Friday by the International Court of Justice on charges of genocide against Israel had deep historical resonance for both Israelis and Palestinians. But it lacked immediate practical consequences.The World Court did not order a halt to fighting in the Gaza Strip and made no attempt to rule on the merits of the case brought by South Africa, a process that will take months — if not years — to complete.But the court did order Israel to comply with the Genocide Convention, to send more aid to Gaza and to inform the court of its efforts to do…

Two protesters from an environmental group hurled pumpkin-colored soup on the Mona Lisa at the Louvre museum in Paris on Sunday, splashing the bulletproof glass that protects the most famous painting in the world, but not apparently damaging the work itself.As the customary crowd around the 16th-century painting by Leonardo da Vinci gasped in shock, the protesters, two young women, followed up their attack by passing under a barrier and standing on either side of the artwork, hands raised in an apparent salute.“What is more important? Art or the right to have a healthy and sustainable food system?” the activists…