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Welcome to the busiest moviegoing season of the year, when films in theaters are actually worth trekking out to see and everything hitting VOD and streaming is… the movies that came out a few months ago that are also super worth checking out. Ack!
Work at your own pace. But yeah, this weekend at home has everything from Leave the World Behind, a new Netflix film from the creator of Mr. Robot, to an animated Batman Christmas special and Martin Scorsese’s latest three-hour epic, Killers of the Flower Moon, which is hitting digital rental before eventually landing on Apple at an unspecified date in 2024.
Or you and the family could just watch The Super Mario Bros. Movie again — it’s on Netflix now. But if you need alternatives, there are many, many more. Let’s dig in.
Where to watch: Available to stream on Netflix
Photo: Jojo Whilden/Netflix
Genre: Psychological thriller
Run time: 2h 21m
Director: Sam Esmail (Mr. Robot)
Cast: Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali, Ethan Hawke
Adapted from Rumaan Alam’s 2020 novel, Sam Esmail’s directorial feature debut is an Airbnb story from hell. Mid-vacation in Long Island, a Manhattan couple hears a knock at the door. It’s the owners of their rented home, who are escaping the apocalypse. What follows promises to be a cerebral, prickly thriller that may not entirely work, but gives its all-star cast plenty to chew on. From our review:
Racial, sexual, generational, and class fault-lines are drawn but then rapidly scuffed over, almost in embarrassment, as the characters sink reflexively into a shared worldview that they can’t seem to let go of […but the] movie is brilliantly cast, at least. Hawke embodies the blinkered insouciance of progressive intellectuals, Ali has the polish and confidence that money breeds, and Roberts, as a secretly insecure striver trapped between these two worlds, flashes with a brittle testiness.
Where to watch: Available to stream on Netflix
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Image: Nintendo, Illumination/Universal Pictures
Genre: Animated adventure
Run time: 1h 32m
Director: Aaron Horvath and Michael Jelenic (Teen Titans Go! To the Movies)
Cast: Chris Pratt, Anya Taylor-Joy, Charlie Day, Jack Black
While the combined power of Barbie and Oppenheimer may have eclipsed Nintendo’s foray into animated film, let’s not forget that Mario made a mega impact earlier this year at the worldwide box office, gave its parent company the confidence to announce a live-action Zelda movie, and could very easily get nominated for an Oscar in the year 2024. The Mario movie is, if not good, important — and now it’s streaming on Netflix, ready for kids and their nostalgic parents to watch a zillion times.
Where to watch: Available to stream on Hulu
Genre: Documentary
Run time: 1h 44m
Directors: Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss (Boys State)
Heralded as one of the great documentaries of 2023, The Mission chronicles the repeated attempts by John Allen Chau, an American missionary, to bring Christianity to the Indigenous peoples of the remote North Sentinel Island. Law forbade outsiders from setting foot on the island, but that didn’t stop Chau, who was ultimately killed by arrows during his final attempt to sail ashore. From documentarians Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss (who previously directed the searing political doc Boys State), the National Geographic film promises to get the blood pumping and ask a few big questions as it unravels Chau’s life.
Where to watch: Available to stream on Prime Video
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Image: Prime Video
Genre: Animated comedy
Run time: 1h 36m
Director: Mike Roth (Regular Show)
Cast: Luke Wilson, Yonas Kibreab, James Cromwell, David Hornsby
You think you know the story: Jingle bells, Batman smells, Robin lays an egg, Batmobile lost a wheel, and Joker got away. But Batman’s first animated Christmas movie presents an entirely new perspective. When Bruce Wayne’s son Damian is left home alone on Christmas Eve, Gotham’s supervillains come out to play and a new hero of the holiday season must rise up. David Hornsby from It’s Always Sunny as the Joker? How could this be anything less than good?
Where to watch: Available to stream on Prime Video
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Photo: Colin Hutton/Prime Video
Genre: Romantic comedy
Run time: 1h 34m
Director: Jim O’Hanlon (Your Christmas or Mine?)
Cast: Asa Butterfield, Cora Kirk, Alex Jennings, Jane Krakowski
Uh oh, new couple James (Asa Butterfield) and Hayley (Cora Kirk) hoped to meet each other’s families during a Christmas vacation in the Alps, but someone messed up the lodging arrangements! Now James’ rich family is staying in a “rustic” lodge and Hayley’s penny-pinching dad is holed up in a five-star hotel! Whoops!
Where to watch: Available to stream on Paramount Plus
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Photo: Allyson Riggs/A24
Genre: Comedy
Run time: 1h 48m
Director: Kelly Reichardt (First Cow)
Cast: Michelle Williams, Hong Chau, John Magaro
Drama or comedy, never-miss filmmaker Kelly Reichardt aims for the intimate. Which means she may never make a film that causes enough splash for the Oscars or big-time top 10 lists. But here’s no surprise to anyone familiar with her work: Showing Up, which reteams her with regular collaborator Michelle Williams, cuts deep to the heart of art and the artist’s life, affirming Reichardt to being in league of her own. From our recent list of the top 50 movies of 2023, where Showing Up ranks 10th:
Reichardt’s genius is getting the audience giggling at the artists but never the art. For example, it’s funny to think that an artist dedicated a year of her life to crocheting a jumpsuit. Except then, in Showing Up, you see the outfit and it’s beautiful — an intentional undermining of the punchline. A teacher smugly opines on ceramics, but each piece he holds up is so lovingly crafted that they confidently speak for themselves.
This decision (rib artists, celebrate art) sets the tone. We humans are artifice, a bunch of contradictory masks that we put on to match the situation and the crowd. But our creations — when we commit to a craft, whatever medium it may be — are an expression of our most vulnerable selves.
Where to watch: Available to stream on Shudder and AMC Plus
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Image: Shudder
Genre: Horror
Run time: 1h 30m
Director: Jenn Wexler (The Ranger)
Cast: Mena Massoud, Olivia Scott Welch, Gus Kenworthy, Madison Baines
After premiering at the weirdo-approved Fantastic Fest earlier this year, Jenn Wexler’s latest horror joint lands on Shudder in time for the holidays. Our editor Tasha Robinson caught this one at the fest, so I am ceding the floor. Here’s her micro-take (watch out for more on this one soon):
Jenn Wexler’s Christmas-set horror movie The Sacrifice Game takes most of its runtime to reveal what it’s really about, and that reveal is a doozy. But the wait to get there is never dull: Along the way, there’s a “sad Christmas with the left-behinds at a boarding school” story that meshes perfectly with The Holdovers, and a “dangerous cultists on the road” story that meshes equally well with Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. It’s no surprise that these two stories collide, it’s just a surprise exactly how and why they collide.
Where to watch: Available to rent on Amazon, Apple, and Vudu
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Image: Apple
Genre: Drama
Run time: 3h 26m
Director: Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver)
Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert De Niro, Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons
Some call it Martin Scorsese’s magnum opus. Others wonder if adapting David Grann’s acclaimed nonfiction book was an impossible task, even for a legend. But everyone seems to agree: You have to find a big chunk of time and watch Killers of the Flower Moon, one of the year’s most ambitious dramatic ventures. And Scorsese threw his entire self into it. From our review:
As Scorsese gets deeper into his old-master phase, it feels as though he’s running out of patience with the Catholic agonies and fire-and-brimstone filmmaking he’s known for. Killers of the Flower Moon is mostly plainspoken, sorrowful, and wise. At the very end, Scorsese makes a personal intervention on behalf of what really matters in this story. It’s a moving gesture from an artist who knows he only has time to say so much more, and who can see clearly what needs to be said.
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Matt Patches
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That was close.
After the U.S. unemployment rate climbed to 3.9% in October, stoking fears that the labor market might finally be starting to crack under the weight of the Federal Reserve’s interest-rate hikes, economic data released Friday showed that unemployment retreated to 3.7% in November.
That means the Sahm rule, an indicator devised to sniff out a recession long before one is officially declared, is now even further from triggering, after nearly brushing up against the threshold last month.
And according to the rule’s creator, former Federal Reserve economist Claudia Sahm, perhaps it won’t trigger, at least not during this cycle.
“I am more optimistic today that it doesn’t trigger,” Sahm told MarketWatch during a phone interview Friday.
Wall Street and social media were abuzz with talk of the Sahm rule last month as the rising unemployment rate sparked a debate about whether a recession had begun.
The increase brought the Sahm rule indicator to 0.30, according to data available on a Federal Reserve branch website, bringing it closer to triggering than at any time during the past two years. It also sparked a brisk conversation among professional economists and amateur market watchers about what the Sahm rule is, how it works and why investors should care about it.
After Sahm declared that the rule hadn’t triggered, some on social media accused her of misrepresenting her own rule, said the economist, who now runs her own consulting business.
She was surprised by this, she told MarketWatch, since she thought the rule’s simplicity was one of its most important features.
It was initially devised with lawmakers in mind, intended to become an automatic mechanism to send out stimulus checks more quickly as a recession begins, thus helping to shield workers from some of the worst financial consequences.
But the debate has helped her realize that perhaps the rule’s dynamics aren’t clearly understood by all.
To try to remedy this, she published a step-by-step guide explaining how the Sahm rule is calculated, or at least how Sahm and the Fed calculate it. Economists are free to devise their own variations on the rule. Here are some key points:
The logic undergirding the rule is pretty straightforward, Sahm said: The rule is grounded in the notion, supported by historical data, that once employment starts to rise, it often snowballs.
Typically it increases by anywhere between 4 and 6 percentage points during a recession, Sahm said.
But just because the rule has held in the past doesn’t mean it always will. Sahm has previously said that she wouldn’t be surprised if the rule were to break because of pandemic-related distortions in the global economy.
She affirmed on Friday that she still believes this to be the case, although she doubts the rule will trigger this cycle.
That is largely because, as Sahm sees it, the rise in the unemployment rate has been driven not only by slowing job creation, but by workers returning to the workforce, a sign that supply-and-demand dynamics in the U.S. labor market are coming back into balance, and that maybe employers won’t need to be as precious about hiring in the future.
“If [the rebalancing] happens fast enough, then we won’t trigger. But if it slows down, then maybe we’ll trigger, but we’ll likely see unemployment move sideways before coming back down,” Sahm said.
Labor Department data showed the U.S. economy added 199,000 jobs in November, surpassing economists’ expectations for 190,000 new jobs. The number was also higher than the 150,000 created during the previous month.
See: Job report shows gain of 199,000 in November. Wages are still hot.
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U.S. stocks closed higher Friday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average scoring its longest weekly winning streak since February 2019, as investors digested the latest job report.
For the week, the Dow eked out a gain of less than 0.1%, the S&P 500 edged up 0.2% and the Nasdaq advanced 0.7%. All three major indexes rose for a sixth straight week, according to Dow Jones Market Data.
U.S. stocks ended higher Friday as investors parsed a stronger-than-expected job report.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics said Friday that the economy added 199,000 jobs in November, while the unemployment rate fell to 3.7% from 3.9%. Economists polled by the Wall Street Journal had forecast that 190,000 jobs would be added in the month.
“It’s nice to see that a soft landing still can take place,” Yung-Yu Ma, chief investment officer at BMO Wealth Management, said by phone Friday. But the market had been getting “too optimistic” about potential interest-rate cuts by the Federal Reserve in the early part of next year, he added.
The job report is “perhaps a wash” for markets as “average hourly earnings growth came in a little on the high side,” Ma said. That could contribute to inflationary pressures and push a Fed pivot on rate cuts further out in 2024 than markets were expecting.
“The Fed can probably be patient for a while,” he said. Fed Chair Jerome Powell may “strike a bit more of a hawkish tone” after the central bank’s monetary-policy meeting next week, potentially pushing back against some of the enthusiasm for earlier rate cuts, Ma said.
Average hourly earnings rose 0.4% in November, up 4% year over year, the job report shows.
“Even though the headline 199,000 new jobs created is just slightly above consensus estimates for 190,000 new positions, the lower unemployment rate of 3.7%, coupled with higher-than-expected average hourly earnings, caused a jump higher in Treasury yields,” Quincy Krosby, chief global strategist at LPL Financial, said in emailed comments.
The yield on the 10-year Treasury note
BX:TMUBMUSD10Y
climbed 11.5 basis points Friday to 4.244%, according to Dow Jones Market Data. That’s below its high this year of about 5% in October.
Meanwhile, the stock market’s so-called fear gauge remained low, with the CBOE Volatility Index
VIX
declining to 12.35 on Friday, FactSet data show.
See: The VIX says stocks are ‘reliably in a bull market’ heading into 2024. Here’s how to read it.
In other economic data released Friday, the University of Michigan’s gauge of consumer sentiment rose to a preliminary reading of 69.4 in December, its first increase in five months. Inflation expectations also moderated, the university’s survey of consumer sentiment showed.
Such a big swing for a single reading of the survey is unusual, said Claudia Sahm, a former Federal Reserve economist who now runs a consulting business. “These data usually don’t move like that,” she said during a phone interview with MarketWatch.
Next week’s economic calendar will include a reading on U. S. inflation from the consumer-price index as well as the outcome of the Fed’s two-day policy meeting, scheduled to conclude Dec. 13.
Meanwhile, the S&P 500 notched a sixth straight week of gains, its longest such winning streak since the stretch ending Nov. 15, 2019, according to Dow Jones Market Data. The Dow Jones Industrial Average logged its longest stretch of weekly gains since February 2019.
Steve Goldstein contributed.
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WASHINGTON — Hunter Biden was indicted on nine tax charges in California on Thursday as a special counsel investigation into the business dealings of President Joe Biden’s son intensifies against the backdrop of the looming 2024 election.
The new charges — three felonies and six misdemeanors — are in addition to federal firearms charges in Delaware alleging Hunter Biden broke laws against drug users having guns in 2018. They come after the implosion of a plea deal over the summer that would have spared him jail time.
Hunter Biden “spent millions of dollars on an extravagant lifestyle rather than paying his tax bills,” special counsel David Weiss said in a statement. The charges are centered on at least $1.4 million in taxes Hunter Biden owed during between 2016 and 2019, a period where he has acknowledged struggling with addiction. The back taxes have since been paid.
If convicted, Hunter Biden could face up to 17 years in prison. The special counsel probe remains open, Weiss said.
In a fiery response, defense attorney Abbe Lowell accused Weiss of “bowing to Republican pressure” in the case.
“Based on the facts and the law, if Hunter’s last name was anything other than Biden, the charges in Delaware, and now California, would not have been brought,” Lowell said in a statement.
The White House declined to comment on Thursday’s indictment, referring questions to the Justice Department or Hunter Biden’s personal representatives.
The charging documents filed in California, where he lives, details spending on everything from drugs and girlfriends to luxury hotels and exotic cars, “in short, everything but his taxes,” prosecutor Leo Wise wrote.
The indictment comes as congressional Republicans pursue an impeachment inquiry into President Biden, claiming he was engaged in an influence-peddling scheme with his son. The House is expected to vote next week on formally authorizing the inquiry.
No evidence has emerged so far to prove that Joe Biden, in his current or previous office, abused his role or accepted bribes, though questions have arisen about the ethics surrounding the Biden family’s international business.
The criminal investigation led by Weiss has been open since 2018, and was expected to wind down with the plea deal that Hunter Biden had planned to strike with prosecutors over the summer. He would have pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor tax evasion charges and would have entered a separate agreement on the gun charge, getting two years of probation rather than jail time.
It was pilloried as a “sweetheart deal” by Republicans, including former President Donald Trump, who is facing criminal charges in multiple cases.
The agreement also contained immunity provisions, and defense attorneys have argued that they remain in force since that part of the agreement was signed by a prosecutor before the deal was scrapped.
Prosecutors disagree, pointing out the documents weren’t signed by a judge and are invalid.
After the deal fell apart, prosecutors filed three federal gun charges alleging that Hunter Biden had lied about his drug use to buy a gun that he kept for 11 days in 2018. Federal law bans gun possession by “habitual drug users,” though the measure is seldom seen as a stand-alone charge and has been called into question by a federal appeals court.
The defense is planning to push next week for dismissal of the “unprecedented and unconstitutional” gun charges, Lowell said.
Hunter Biden’s longstanding struggle with substance abuse had worsened during that period after the death of his brother Beau Biden in 2015, prosecutors wrote in a draft plea agreement filed in court in Delaware.
He still made “substantial income” in 2017 and 2018, including $2.6 million in business and consulting fees from a company he formed with the CEOs of a Chinese business conglomerate and the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, but did not pay his taxes on a total of about $4 million in personal income during that period, prosecutors said in the scuttled Delaware plea agreement.
He did eventually file his taxes in 2020 and the back taxes were paid by a “third party” the following year, prosecutors said.
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“‘ ‘You want to know what has contributed to inflation in this country? Yes, it’s more government spending. Yes, it’s the fact that we’re printing too much money. Absolutely. But it is also the increase in prices that were driven by Donald Trump’s tariffs.’”
That was former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie swinging hard against GOP frontrunner Donald Trump during Wednesday’s Republican debate at the University of Alabama.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy joined Christie onstage in the fourth Republican presidential primary debate, which aired on NewsNation and the CW.
Former President Donald Trump skipped this debate, as he has done with the first three. But his presence was still felt, especially on the heels of his Fox News interview with Sean Hannity the night before, where he refused to rule out abusing power or seeking retribution if he gets re-elected.
While discussing foreign policy and inflation, Christie placed much of the blame for higher prices at the former president’s feet, while also blasting his trade relations with China.
“The proof that he wasn’t good on trade with China is that all he did was imposed tariffs, which raise the prices for every American,” Christie said.
“You can’t say he was good on trade, because he didn’t trade. He didn’t change one Chinese policy in the process. He failed on it.”
Related: Opinion: 5 questions about China that Wednesday’s Republican presidential debate needs to answer
That wasn’t the only swing that Christie took at Trump. The moderators opened Wednesday night’s debate by pressing the candidates on whether they are really electable, when most polls show the majority of Republican voters supporting Trump. And Christie responded by warning that Trump is “unfit” to serve as the commander-in-chief for a second term — even comparing him to “Harry Potter” villain Voldemort, who was a facist, evil wizard.
“We’ve had these three [candidates on stage] acting as if the race is between the four of us. The fifth guy [Trump] doesn’t have the guts to show up and stand here,” Christie said. “And yet, I’ve got these three guys who want to seemingly compete with Voldemort — he-who-should-not-be-named. They don’t want to talk about it.”
Christie also blamed Trump’s high poll numbers on many of his Republican rivals, whom he accused of condoning Trump’s more controversial actions and comments, including those that have landed him in legal trouble.
“‘You want to know why those [Trump] poll numbers are where they are? Because folks like these three guys on the stage make it seem like his conduct is acceptable.’”
“This is an angry, bitter man who wants to be back as president because he wants to exact retribution to anyone who disagreed with him, anyone who has tried to hold him to accountable for his own conduct,” Christie said, noting that the other colleagues on stage had raised their hands during the first GOP debate in August to show they would still support Trump, even if he was convicted of federal crimes.
“You want to know why those poll numbers are where they are? Because folks like these three guys on the stage make it seem like his conduct is acceptable,” Christie said. “Let me make it clear. His conduct is unacceptable. He’s unfit.”
He continued: “My three colleagues are afraid to offend. If you’re afraid to offend Donald Trump, then what are you gonna do when you sit across from President Xi, you sit across from the Ayatollah, you sit across from President Putin?”
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Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley pushed back when pressed at Wednesday’s primary debate on whether she’s too tight with billionaires and corporate interests, saying those supporters won’t affect her stances on key issues.
“When it comes to these corporate people that want to suddenly support us, we’ll take it, but I don’t ask them what their policies are. They ask me what my policies are, and I tell them,” said Haley, a former ambassador to the U.N. and former South Carolina governor.
“Sometimes they agree with me, sometimes they don’t,” she added. “Some don’t like how tough I am on China. Some don’t like the fact that I’ve signed pro-life bills. Some don’t like the fact that I may oppose corporate bailouts.”
Also see: Republican debate: Chris Christie says Trump’s China tariffs helped drive inflation
GOP rival Vivek Ramaswamy attacked Haley over her time on Boeing’s
BA,
board of directors and the money she’s received from Silicon Valley billionaire Reid Hoffman.
“Nikki, you were bankrupt when you left the U.N.,” the entrepreneur said. “Now you’re a multimillionaire. That math does not add up. It adds up to the fact that you are corrupt.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis criticized her as well, saying: “These Wall Street liberal donors, they make money in China. They are not going to let her be tough on China, and she will cave to the donors.”
AFP via Getty Images
Haley, meanwhile, said she wasn’t bankrupt after her stint as ambassador, but rather she and her husband had been in public service. She also spoke highly of Boeing, but noted she left the airplane maker’s board because she didn’t support its efforts to get a bailout during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“In terms of these donors that are supporting me, they’re just jealous,” Haley added, referring to DeSantis and Ramaswamy. “They wish that they were supporting them.”
The comments came Wednesday night at the 2024 Republican presidential primary’s fourth debate, held at the University of Alabama. Besides DeSantis, Haley and Ramaswamy, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie also took part in the clash.
The primary’s frontrunner, former President Donald Trump, skipped the debate, just as he steered clear of the previous three.
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ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — A special election to pick a successor to George Santos, the New York Republican who was expelled from the U.S. House last week, will be held on Feb. 13, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced Tuesday.
The race for a seat representing some Long Island suburbs and a small part of the New York City borough of Queens is expected to be a high-profile contest that will mark the start of a year of consequential congressional elections in the state.
For Democrats, the election will be a test of the party’s ability to flip districts around New York City that are seen as vital to their plans to retake control of the House. Republicans enter the contest with heavy momentum on Long Island and will fight to hold on to the district as they look to maintain their narrow House majority.
From the archives (December 2022): Yes, top House Republicans knew of George Santos’s lies before his election in November
Candidates in the special election will be picked by party leaders, not voters.
Former U.S. Rep. Tom Suozzi has emerged as the potential frontrunner nominee for Democrats. Suozzi, 61, represented the district for six years before launching an unsuccessful campaign for governor last year, and previously held political posts as a county executive and mayor on Long Island.
The centrist Democrat’s deep ties in Long Island politics may provide name recognition and the ability to quickly stand up a campaign — vital attributes in an narrowly focused election where voters will have a limited amount of time to pick their representative.
From the archives (January 2023): George Santos has ‘disgraced’ U.S. House and should resign, say fellow Long Island Republicans
Suozzi had announced his campaign for the seat before Santos was expelled, and has been promoting a series of endorsements from local politicians and labor groups after the district became vacant.
Also vying for the Democratic nomination is former state senator Anna Kaplan, who has in recent days taken potshots at Suozzi’s record and sought to center the special election on passing federal legislation guaranteeing abortion rights.
On the Republican side, potential names include retired police detective Mike Sapraicone, Air Force veteran Kellen Curry and Nassau County legislator Mazi Pilip, an Ethiopian-born Jewish woman who served in the Israeli military.
Sapraicone, who is also the founder of a private security company, said he has been interviewed by county Republicans who will select the nominee, with the panel quizzing him on his political stances, his ability to fundraise and quickly launch a campaign.
Like Suozzi, Sapraicone launched his campaign before Santos was expelled and has already begun to fundraise, with his campaign coffers including $300,000 of his own money, he said.
“For us to maintain the House and retain the majority is so important,” Sapraicone said. “It’s so important that New York sets the tone here in February.”
Democrats want to flip at least five House seats in New York next year, with the Santos seat being a potential early indicator of their chances in November.
The party has dedicated significant financial and organizational resources to the state, after a series of losses last year in the New York City suburbs helped Republicans take control of the House and brought down heavy criticism on state Democrats.
President Joe Biden won the district in 2020, but Republicans have notched electoral gains on Long Island in recent years as moderate suburban voters there, in contrast to urban areas in much of the country, have shown signs of gravitating toward the GOP.
In the latest sign of Republican strength on Long Island, the GOP won several local elections last month, including races in the now-vacant district.
Santos was expelled from the House last week following a scandal-plagued tenure in Congress and a looming criminal trial. He is only the sixth member in the chamber’s history to be ousted by colleagues.
He had survived an expulsion vote just a month earlier.
Read on:
Will George Santos still qualify for a pension and strolling around the House floor?
There’s a George Santos bobblehead with a Pinocchio-style nose — and that’s no lie
John Fetterman buys a George Santos Cameo for ‘ethically challenged colleague’ Bob Menendez
House Republicans scuttle Democrats’ effort to expel George Santos
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Moody’s Investors Service on Tuesday cut the outlook on China’s debt to negative from stable citing expectations that the national government will have to step in to rescue regional and local governments.
Moody’s kept China’s long-term rating at A1.
“The change to a negative outlook reflects rising evidence that financial support will be provided by the government and wider public sector to financially-stressed regional and local governments and state-owned enterprises, posing broad downside risks to China’s fiscal, economic and institutional strength,” said the note from the rating agency, which last month cut the outlook on the U.S.
China’s property troubles mean that regional and local governments face a loss of land sale revenue, which accounted for 37% of their revenue in 2022 outside of central government transfers. Moody’s says regions that relied most heavily on land sales won’t be able to offset that revenue loss from other sources.
Moody’s estimates one-third of state-owned enterprises debt — some 40% of GDP — has an interest coverage below 1, which indicates weak debt sustainability. “While not all [state-owned enterprises] are likely to need direct government support, even a moderate proportion doing so over the medium term would represent a significant crystallization of contingent liabilities for the sovereign, increasing the costs of financial support and diminishing fiscal strength,” said Moody’s.
In a rough day for Chinese stocks, the Hang Seng
HK:HSI
fell 1.9%, and the Shanghai Composite
CN:SHCOMP
dropped 1.7%.
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JERUSALEM (AP) — The Israeli military said Friday that its fighter jets have begun striking Hamas targets in the Gaza Strip, in the clearest sign yet that the war has resumed with full force after a weeklong truce.
The announcement came 30 minutes after the cease-fire expired at 7 a.m. (0500 GMT) Friday.
Earlier Friday, Israel accused Hamas of having violated the terms of the cease-fire, including by firing rockets toward Israel from Gaza.
The temporary truce in the Israel-Hamas war expired Friday morning, without immediate word from mediator Qatar on an extension, raising the possibility of renewed fighting.
The halt in fighting began a week ago, on Nov. 24. It initially lasted for four days, and then was extended for several days with the help of Qatar and fellow mediator Egypt.
During the week-long truce, Hamas and other militants in Gaza released more than 100 hostages, most of them Israelis, in return for 240 Palestinians freed from prisons in Israel. Virtually all of those freed were women and children.
Reaching agreements on swaps appeared to be growing harder as most women and children held in Gaza had already been released.
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Chris and Andy talk about the decision to run Only Murders in the Building on ABC this January and compare it to a similar move to run Andor on cable channels (1:00). Then, they talk about the first two episodes of Slow Horses Season 3 and how the show has found a formula that works (24:48), before discussing the third episode of The Curse (39:34).
Hosts: Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald
Producer: Kaya McMullen
Subscribe: Spotify / Apple Podcasts / Stitcher / RSS
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Chris Ryan
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WASHINGTON — Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the diplomat with the thick glasses and gravelly voice who dominated foreign policy as the United States extricated itself from Vietnam and broke down barriers with China, died Wednesday, his consulting firm said. He was 100.
With his gruff yet commanding presence and behind-the-scenes manipulation of power, Kissinger exerted uncommon influence on global affairs under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, earning both vilification and the Nobel Peace Prize. Decades later, his name still provoked impassioned debate over foreign policy landmarks long past.
Kissinger’s power grew during the turmoil of Watergate, when the politically attuned diplomat assumed a role akin to co-president to the weakened Nixon.
“No doubt my vanity was piqued,” Kissinger later wrote of his expanding influence. “But the dominant emotion was a premonition of catastrophe.”
A Jew who fled Nazi Germany with his family in his teens, Kissinger in his later years cultivated the reputation of respected statesman, giving speeches, offering advice to Republicans and Democrats alike and managing a global consulting business. He turned up in President Donald Trump’s White House on multiple occasions. But Nixon-era documents and tapes, as they trickled out over the years, brought revelations — many in Kissinger’s own words — that sometimes cast him in a harsh light.
Never without his detractors, Kissinger after he left government was dogged by critics who argued that he should be called to account for his policies on Southeast Asia and support of repressive regimes in Latin America.
For eight restless years — first as national security adviser, later as secretary of state, and for a time in the middle holding both titles — Kissinger ranged across the breadth of major foreign policy issues. He conducted the first “shuttle diplomacy” in the quest for Middle East peace. He used secret channels to pursue ties between the United States and China, ending decades of isolation and mutual hostility.
He initiated the Paris negotiations that ultimately provided a face-saving means — a “decent interval,” he called it — to get the United States out of a costly war in Vietnam. Two years later, Saigon fell to the communists.
And he pursued a policy of detente with the Soviet Union that led to arms control agreements and raised the possibility that the tensions of the Cold War and its nuclear threat did not have to last forever.
At age 99, he was still out on tour for his book on leadership. Asked in July 2022 interview with ABC whether he wished he could take back any of his decisions, Kissinger demurred, saying: “I’ve been thinking about these problems all my life. It’s my hobby as well as my occupation. And so the recommendations I made were the best of which I was then capable.”
Even then, he had mixed thoughts on Nixon’s record, saying “his foreign policy has held up and he was quite effective in domestic policy” while allowing that the disgraced president had “permitted himself to be involved in a number of steps that were inappropriate for a president.”
As Kissinger turned 100 in May 2023, his son David wrote in The Washington Post that his father’s centenary “might have an air of inevitability for anyone familiar with his force of character and love of historical symbolism. Not only has he outlived most of his peers, eminent detractors and students, but he has also remained indefatigably active throughout his 90s.”
Asked during a CBS interview in the leadup to his 100th birthday about those who view his conduct of foreign policy over the years as a kind of “criminality,” Kissinger was nothing but dismissive.
“That’s a reflection of their ignorance,” Kissinger said. “It wasn’t conceived that way. It wasn’t conducted that way.”
Tributes for Kissinger from prominent U.S. officials poured immediately upon word of his death. Former President George W. Bush said the U.S. “lost one of the most dependable and distinctive voices on foreign affairs” and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Kissinger was “endlessly generous with the wisdom gained over the course of an extraordinary life.”
Kissinger’s consulting firm said he died at his home in Connecticut.
Kissinger was a practitioner of realpolitik — using diplomacy to achieve practical objectives rather than advance lofty ideals. Supporters said his pragmatic bent served U.S. interests; critics saw a Machiavellian approach that ran counter to democratic ideals.
He was castigated for authorizing telephone wiretaps of reporters and his own National Security Council staff to plug news leaks in Nixon’s White House. He was denounced on college campuses for the bombing and allied invasion of Cambodia in April 1970, intended to destroy North Vietnamese supply lines to communist forces in South Vietnam.
That “incursion,” as Nixon and Kissinger called it, was blamed by some for contributing to Cambodia’s fall into the hands of Khmer Rouge insurgents who later slaughtered some 2 million Cambodians.
Kissinger, for his part, made it his mission to debunk what he referred to in 2007 as a “prevalent myth” — that he and Nixon had settled in 1972 for peace terms that had been available in 1969 and thus had needlessly prolonged the Vietnam War at the cost of tens of thousands of American lives.
He insisted that the only way to speed up the withdrawal would have been to agree to Hanoi’s demands that the U.S. overthrow the South Vietnamese government and replace it with communist-dominated leadership.
Pudgy and messy, Kissinger incongruously acquired a reputation as a ladies’ man in the staid Nixon administration. Kissinger, who had divorced his first wife in 1964, called women “a diversion, a hobby.” Jill St. John was a frequent companion. But it turned out his real love interest was Nancy Maginnes, a researcher for Nelson Rockefeller whom he married in 1974.
In a 1972 poll of Playboy Club Bunnies, the man dubbed “Super-K” by Newsweek finished first as “the man I would most like to go out on a date with.”
Kissinger’s explanation: “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”
Yet Kissinger was reviled by many Americans for his conduct of wartime diplomacy. He was still a lightning rod decades later: In 2015, an appearance by the 91-year-old Kissinger before the Senate Armed Services Committee was disrupted by protesters demanding his arrest for war crimes and calling out his actions in Southeast Asia, Chile and beyond.
Heinz Alfred Kissinger was born in the Bavarian city of Fuerth on May 27, 1923, the son of a schoolteacher. His family left Nazi Germany in 1938 and settled in Manhattan, where Heinz changed his name to Henry.
Kissinger had two children, Elizabeth and David, from his first marriage.
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As the environmental, political, and above all, economic tension between the ultra-rich and the rest of the world continues to grow, it’s a topic that keeps driving dark, memorable movies — from Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winner Parasite to 2022’s The Menu, Pig, and Triangle of Sadness to a sub-track at the 2023 Fantastic Fest film festival, including this year’s Nick Stahl movie What You Wish For and the blistering Brazilian movie Property. Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn, which played as a secret screening at Fantastic Fest, seems to fit the bill perfectly as well: It follows an Oxford freshman, Oliver (Barry Keoghan, sure to turn up in awards-season conversation again) as he awkwardly infiltrates the social circle of his ultra-rich classmate Felix Catton (Priscilla co-star Jacob Elordi). What follows is part horror movie, part classic Gothic novel, as Oliver hungers to be like Felix — or just to be Felix.
But in an interview after Fantastic Fest, Fennell told Polygon she doesn’t entirely see Saltburn as yet another eat-the-rich exercise.
“I think I consider it more ‘Lick the rich, suck the rich, and then bite the rich, and then swallow them,’” she said.
Image: Prime
Saltburn is an intoxicating experience: a visually rich, caustic crime thriller in the vein of The Talented Mister Ripley. Oliver, whose background takes a while to fully unfold within the film, is obsessed with the luxury, comforts, and casual arrogance of Felix and his wealthy family. But as they spend more time with Oliver, embracing his attractiveness and cleverness and welcoming him into Saltburn, the family estate, they also drop hints that he’s probably just the plaything of the season, likely to be discarded out of boredom.
Fennell’s movie — her follow-up to the challenging, much-discussed revenge story Promising Young Woman — isn’t entirely sympathetic toward Oliver, who’s clearly grasping and needy as well as ruthless. At the same time, it isn’t fully on board with Felix and his superficial, selfish family members, either.
“It’s really about having sympathy with everyone, always,” Fennell says. “Certainly for me as a writer and director — and for the actors, too — it always has to be an exercise in empathy. None of these people thinks of themselves as a bad person. It was the same with Promising Young Woman. It’s not interesting for me to make things that make moral judgments about people — all I’m interested in doing is understanding. So for me, the first thing about the Catton family was that we understood why Oliver would be, against his better judgment, completely and utterly beguiled.”
As Fennell has explained in other interviews, Saltburn is a movie about fame, fandom, the internet, and parasocial relationships, about the kind of connections people make from a distance and build into elaborate, often unhealthy fantasies. Part of drawing that line was making Felix the kind of superstar who would earn a fandom: He’s handsome, charming, and skilled at everything he tries, but he’s also surprisingly kind.
“It’s the thing about Felix — we think we’re going to hate him, we assume we’re going to hate him,” Fennell said. “And then the moment we meet him for the first time, it’s impossible to resist. They’re all impossible to resist. The world is impossible to resist. It was important that we understood from the get-go why, against our better judgment, we would all want to be at Saltburn, and would do anything to get in and anything to stay.”
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Image: Prime
Both Saltburn and Promising Young Woman are about toxic hunger, about a protagonist so monomaniacal about getting something that they’re willing to cut any moral corners to get there. In terms of other connections, though, Fennell says her own obsessions may be showing in the new film.
“You’re always trying to do something new and make something different, but you can never get too far away from yourself,” she says. “I think certainly I have a preoccupation with genre, and the way we use it as filmmakers and experience it as cinema goers. Promising Young Woman was looking at the specific genre of the female-lead revenge movie. Saltburn is looking at the Gothic country-house tradition. Promising Young Woman was looking to subvert the genre, and that’s exactly what I’m hoping to do here.”
The reason Saltburn feels like so many classic British stories about class, Gothic manors, and dark secrets is because Fennell wanted the movie to be a recognizable world, a genre exercise where viewers think they know what the rules are, and what’s coming next.
“It’s only with that familiarity that you can really apply pressure, and dig into the genre,” Fennell said. “So stylistically, I’m always going to be preoccupied with where a movie exists in the world of movies. You can’t pretend a movie exists outside of the world.”
As far as other comparisons to her work go, Fennell notes that both Promising Young Woman and Saltburn are thwarted love stories. “They’re stories about what we do with love that can’t be, for whatever reason, that can’t carry on in the form it starts in. With Promising Young Woman, it was the love story between Cassie and Nina, and it was a love story with Ryan, Bo Burnham’s character — both of them loves that kind of can’t work out. And Saltburn is a movie about loving someone, and loving his world — a world that’s never going to love you back. What do you make yourself into? What do you do to yourself when that becomes apparent? How do you get that love?”
It may seem a little counterintuitive to compare internet fame with Gothic novels like Brideshead Revisited, Wuthering Heights, and Northanger Abbey. But Fennell thinks of these books and online obsessions as closely connected.
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Image: Prime
“There is always a tension, always, between ourselves and other people,” she said. “If the Gothic tradition is about an outsider being introduced to a world which is both desirable and frightening — that’s absolutely what we’re doing with the internet, and our relationship with the world of fame and beauty.
“Online, fame isn’t just about people anymore. It’s about their wardrobes, the way they organize their wardrobes, the labels they put on their drawers, every detail of people’s lives. It’s their food, their clothes, it’s everything. I think we are absolutely, now more than ever — and particularly post-COVID — in this kind of voyeuristic, sadomasochistic relationship with these things. I certainly, myself, feel a new desire post-COVID to touch.”
Referencing one of the more visceral and much-described scenes in Saltburn, where Oliver licks Felix’s bathwater out of the drain, Fennell said, “I think it makes sense that this film is preoccupied in many ways with the stuff of human secretion, in whatever form that is. There’s a transgression now, post-COVID, to touching and feeling, and getting intimate, in ways that may be surprising. And I think that’s absolutely what the Gothic tradition was always about. It was about introducing people, but particularly women, to this idea of the transgressive desire, and the things that maybe weren’t within reason. They’re outside of reason, they become completely all-consuming.”
Saltburn is in theaters now.
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Tasha Robinson
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