ReportWire

Tag: culture

  • Milano Cortina 2026: yoga, sunsets and medals: each to their own Golden Moment

    [ad_1]

    A window within a window. Small and square, it opened automatically thanks to a simple handcrafted device. Known as a tee, it’s a feature of the mountain huts above Livigno, allowing the interiors to be ventilated without letting in too much cold. “It’s known as the window to the soul,” said our guide. During the 14th and 15th centuries, the ancient Walser people built their homes with a tiny opening on the south side to create a place of worship, reflection and hope. It was as if that little window connected a pragmatic life, dedicated to work and survival at high altitude, with this more intimate, spiritual sphere, to be experienced alone or shared with company.

    In other words, a disconnection—a place to relax, recharge and celebrate. A true mantra then for Corona Cero, a worldwide Olympic Partner, who hosted initiatives and experiences at the Winter Games of Milano Cortina 2026. This non-alcoholic version of the famous lager, an AB InBev brand, the world’s leading beer producer, took centre stage at the Olympic venues, particularly in Livigno, where we spent three days immersed in nature in the spirit of reconnection. From morning yoga to wellness programmes, from skiing or snowboarding to snowshoe hikes in the woods, we crossed an enchanting landscape of larches and mountain pines, hearing the occasional chirping of woodpeckers.

    “If we stop, we can hear the sound of water flowing under the ice,” said our guide, pointing to the stream that cuts through the Salient Valley. It was hundreds of metres away, but if we closed our eyes, it seemed much closer. Sinking our feet into half a metre of fresh snow, we slowly returned to the Corona Cero Mountain Resort, located at the Lac Salin hotel. The hotel was transformed into a natural oasis, both inside and out. The green room was a wooden structure filled with flowers where yoga sessions alternated with delicious brunches. An igloo housed the hot tub, and a brazier heated the dishes that accompanied aperitifs, served on inlaid tables among colourful cushions.

    [ad_2]

    Nicola Bambini

    Source link

  • Screening at the Berlin Film Festival: Alain Gomis’s ‘Dao’

    [ad_1]

    Mike Etienne and D’Johé Kouadio in Dao by Alain Gomis. © 2026 – Les Films du Worso – Srab Films – Yennenga Productions – Nafi Films – Telecine Bissau Produções – Canal+ Afrique

    Weddings and funerals are perhaps the rituals that most bind cultures across space and time. This affords Dao—the sixth feature by French-Senegalese filmmaker Alain Gomis—an enrapturing universality born of detailed specificity, as it presents a funeral commemoration in West Africa alongside a wedding in France a year later. The film places unrelenting emphasis on the meaning behind traditions and their subsequent evolution when people move away and return. And yet, this sharp focus on migration is expressed through liberating artistry, which engenders an alluring familiarity that makes the three-hour runtime feel like a breeze.

    Dao, named for the Taoist belief in an unceasing motion that flows through and unites all things, is a film of anthropological self-reflection, but it is also a surprising exploration of cinematic process. It begins with Gomis offering a documentary peek into his casting—or at least, a peek he frames in documentary form—before dramatizing the more intimate parts of his life. The script was inspired by a funeral ceremony for Gomis’ father in the Republic of Guinea-Bissau. The writer-director welcomes us into this personal tale through the lens of his professional identity to highlight how the filmic and the cultural, and the individual and the social, inextricably overlap.

    It’s here, in this pseudo-documentary introduction, that we meet several of the movie’s actors as they first audition and screen test together. These include the nonprofessional Katy Corréa, the film’s eventual lead, who seems reluctant to participate but whose input Gomis actively seeks. In fact, he asks most of his actresses—many of them first- or second-generation Africans in France—what types of roles they fantasize about playing. Some suggest doctors. Others conjure complicated, villainous vixens. The implicit suggestion is that this exercise is about the kinds of complex parts, or even real-world professions, they are often denied.

    Before long, Gomis introduces his bifurcated plot, in which Corréa’s character, the middle-aged immigrant Gloria, returns to her small Guinean village a year after her father’s funeral for a commemoration ceremony. It is also the first time in many years that her French-born daughter Nour (D’Johé Kouadio, also glimpsed in the movie’s opening) has visited the dusty rural locale, making it a long-overdue opportunity to connect with her roots. However, she no longer speaks any of the local languages, such as Wolof and Manjak, if she ever learned them in the first place, leaving her mother to act as interpreter and cultural guide as she meets various aunts, uncles and distant relations.

    The two women are greeted with a mix of beaming pride and subtle disdain by the poverty-stricken village, highlighting the ever-complicated dynamics of postcolonial emigration and its unavoidable class dimensions. It is here, while introducing Nour to her relatives—who inevitably comment on how much she has grown—that Gloria also mentions her daughter’s pending nuptials the following year. This quickly propels us forward in time to the wedding and its lush countryside retreat, as the plot reveals itself to be largely a cinéma vérité depiction of each series of events as they might naturally unfold.

    Cutting unobtrusively back and forth between the wedding and the days-long memorial, Gomis implicitly binds together the two halves of Nour and Gloria’s lived experiences through extended scenes of family gatherings and song and dance. He films these parallel narratives with the same warmth he brought to his musically tinged Congolese family drama Félicité, which in 2017 won the Grand Jury Prize at the Berlinale. Although Dao left this year’s festival empty-handed—a major surprise—it remains a significant contribution to contemporary African cinema.

    DAO ★★★1/2 (3.5/4 stars)
    Directed by: Alain Gomis
    Written by: Alain Gomis
    Starring: Katy Correa, D’Johé Kouadio, Samir Guesmi, Mike Etienne, Nicolas Gomis
    Running time: 185 min.

    There is no dearth of conversations in the village about the lingering effects of colonial rule, and no shortage of awkward interactions either, such as an estranged cousin arriving at Nour’s reception with a surprise pregnant girlfriend. This leads to numerous stilted exchanges and eventually a hilarious scuffle. Gomis orchestrates it all with such free-flowing verve that it feels neither academic nor overly chaotic, but entirely naturalistic, as though he had simply dropped in on a real family and begun filming.

    Gomis builds each extended scene with immense care, both for the moments themselves and for the way they adhere to the larger back-and-forth structure. The result is often euphoric. The aforementioned fisticuffs, despite their sloppiness, become the subject of some of the most rousing filmmaking you are likely to see all year, set against a jazzy soundtrack whose rhythms mirror the movie’s improvised nature. Back in the motherland, the instrumentation takes on more culturally specific tones, but the fundamentals always cross-pollinate: rhythm and percussion, joy and uncertainty.

    However, the biggest difference between the movie’s two halves is perhaps the level of rootedness in each ritual. The village commemorations are centuries old, and Nour learns their meaning for the first time as each tradition unfolds. In contrast, her wedding is a patchwork of cultures, both French and West African, with popular English-language tunes and even made-up a cappella songs included for good measure. As much as Dao is a film about death, it is also, as its title suggests, a film of cultural rebirth and of finding oneself in moments of uncertainty—not just individually, but collectively—and of conjuring tangible things and ethereal ideas to pass down.

    And yet, despite the movie highlighting the distinction between native and diaspora cultures, the very roots of tradition loop back around by its end in lucid fashion. Gomis never equivocates and avoids didacticism through a robust presentation of the village’s folkloric beliefs, which, when it comes to memorializing the dead, center on finding certainty through spiritual communion to better understand how the deceased died and what they leave behind. Regardless of where Gomis places his camera—in the place he is from or where he is headed—he finds people at their most vulnerable, reconnecting with old friends and lovers and preserving or creating rituals to confront the uncertainty of existence itself.

    Through all this, Gomis’s filmmaking embodies the very concept of Dao—perpetual spiritual motion that binds people together despite historical tumult. The result is a work of documentary simplicity imbued with a sense of occasion. When it begins, you may only have a faint sense of who is who. But three hours later, it’s as though you have spent a lifetime with these families that now feel like your own.

    More in Movie Reviews

    Screening at the Berlin Film Festival: Alain Gomis’s ‘Dao’

    [ad_2]

    Siddhant Adlakha

    Source link

  • Trump’s science and tech man lays out White House’s global AI strategy

    [ad_1]

    NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles!

    U.S. policy is often reported through announcements, personalities and regulatory skirmishes. Far less attention is paid to the economic mechanisms that actually move structures and determine outcomes.

    To understand how the White House is organizing a multipronged strategy for AI adoption and export, and how its pieces are meant to work together in practice, I had an exclusive sit down with Michael Kratsios, assistant to the president and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

    Tanvi Ratna: The fundamental issue you speak about at the summit is the widening AI adoption gap between the developed and developing world. What makes that a concern for the White House right now?

    Michael Kratsios: The divergence in AI adoption between developed and developing countries is growing every day. We see the world in two broad categories, and different tools are needed for each.

    Developing countries are at risk of falling behind at a fundamental inflection point. That is why we urge them to prioritize AI adoption in sectors that deliver concrete benefits: healthcare, education, energy infrastructure, agriculture, and citizen-facing government services.

    Michael Kratsios testifies before the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee’s Subcommittee on Science, Manufacturing, and Competitiveness on Capitol Hill on Sept. 10, 2025. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty)

    For too long, countries seeking development support faced a false choice. We believe the American AI Exports Program offers a different path: trusted best-in-class technology, financing to overcome adoption barriers, and deployment support, so governments can learn how and where to use these tools.

    America remains the undisputed leader in AI, from GPUs to data centers to frontier models and applications. That leadership brings with it a responsibility to share the foundations of a new era of innovation. We stand ready to work with partners around the world so creativity, freedom and prosperity shape today’s technological revolution.

    STATE-LEVEL AI RULES SURVIVE — FOR NOW — AS SENATE SINKS MORATORIUM DESPITE WHITE HOUSE PRESSURE

    Tanvi Ratna: A lot of governments say they want AI leadership. Your delegation came in talking about real AI sovereignty, rejecting global governance, and launching an export program with multiple prongs. What is fundamentally different about this approach, and how should countries understand the system you’re building?

    Michael Kratsios: The hope of the United States is that the pursuit of real AI sovereignty, the adoption and deployment of sovereign infrastructure, sovereign data, sovereign models and sovereign policies within national borders and under national control, will become an occasion for bilateral diplomacy, international development, and global economic dynamism. The American AI Exports Program exists to make that happen.

    Real AI sovereignty means owning and using best-in-class technology for the benefit of your people, and charting your national destiny in the midst of global transformations. We urge nations to focus on strategic autonomy alongside rapid AI adoption rather than aiming for full self-sufficiency. AI adoption cannot lead to a brighter future if it is subject to bureaucracies and centralized control.

    PALANTIR’S SHYAM SANKAR: US MUST USE AI AS ‘SLINGSHOT’ AGAINST CHINA OR FACE ECONOMIC DEFEAT

    We deeply believe that the best pathway for the developing world to fully realize the untold benefits of AI is through the adoption of the American AI stack. The American AI stack has the best chips, the best models and the best applications in the world, and that is what countries ultimately need to deploy AI effectively.

    Tanvi Ratna: When you say the American AI stack, are you talking about selling products, or shaping the foundation on which countries build while keeping sensitive data under national control?

    Michael Kratsios: Working with the American AI stack allows nations to build on the best technologies in the world while keeping sensitive data within their borders. Independent partners are critical to unlocking the prosperity AI adoption can deliver. That is why the president launched the American AI Exports Program.

    TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S TOP ‘SCIENTIFIC PRIORITY IS AI,’ ENERGY SECRETARY SAYS

    American companies can build large, independent AI infrastructure with secure and robust supply chains that minimize backdoor risk. They build it, and it belongs to the country deploying it.

    Michael Kratsios, assistant to the president and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, speaks at the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi on Feb. 21, 2026.

    Michael Kratsios, assistant to the president and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, speaks at the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi on Feb. 21, 2026.

    Tanvi Ratna: If this is an adoption strategy, then cost and complexity become the bottlenecks. Your public remarks emphasize financing and deployment sophistication as the two biggest hurdles for developing countries. How are you actually removing those barriers?

    Michael Kratsios: Developing countries face two major obstacles to AI adoption. One is financing. The AI stack is expensive. Through the energy and material demands of its infrastructure, it brings the digital transformation of our world back into physical reality. Data centers, semiconductors, power production all require real labor and real resources.

    CHINA RACES AHEAD ON AI —TRUMP WARNS AMERICA CAN’T REGULATE ITSELF INTO DEFEAT

    The second barrier is a deficit in the technical sophistication needed to deploy AI tools effectively. To address this, we announced a U.S. government-wide suite of support initiatives to facilitate global adoption of trusted AI systems, create a competitive and interoperable AI ecosystem, and advance the American AI Exports Program in both developed and developing partner nations.

    Tanvi Ratna: Spell out that suite. What are the prongs, capital, integration, standards, execution, and which agencies are being activated?

    Michael Kratsios: We unveiled a new set of initiatives across the federal government supporting the American AI Exports Program, which was launched by executive order last July.

    TRUMP CALLS FOR FEDERAL AI STANDARDS, END TO STATE ‘PATCHWORK’ REGULATIONS ‘THREATENING’ ECONOMIC GROWTH

    The first new initiative within it is the National Champions Initiative. It is designed to include the leading technology companies of partner countries directly into the American AI stack. We want the best technologies from all our partners and allies to be part of that ecosystem wherever the American AI stack goes.

    The second is a full suite of financing and funding opportunities. We are mobilizing support through the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, the Export Import Bank, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, the U.S. Trade and Development Agency, and a new World Bank fund, with additional programs launched by Treasury and other parts of the U.S. government. The message is simple: this is serious. Every possible financing avenue is being brought to bear.

    The third is the creation of the U.S. Tech Corps. It is a reimagining of how the Peace Corps can make an impact in the modern era. We are seeking Americans with technical backgrounds who can help deploy American technology abroad, because there is no better tool to drive economic development, health improvements, and quality of life gains than AI.

    WAR DEPARTMENT REFOCUSES ON AI, HYPERSONICS AND DIRECTED ENERGY IN MAJOR STRATEGY OVERHAUL

    And finally, we believe one of the fastest ways to drive global adoption is through standards, particularly as the next wave of innovation centers on AI agents. How those agents communicate and coordinate their actions will benefit from unified standards, which is why NIST has launched a dedicated initiative.

    Tanvi Ratna: The National Champions Initiative is easy to misunderstand. Critics hear American stack and assume dependency. Your framing suggests the opposite, integrating partner champions so countries do not have to choose between importing the stack and building domestic capability. Is that the point?

    Michael Kratsios: Exactly. To integrate partner nation companies with the American AI stack and ensure that no country has to choose between completing the stack and developing domestic AI, we established the National Champions Initiative. Partners need the opportunity to build native technology industries, and facilitating that is a core part of the exports program.

    TRUMP ADMIN WILL RECRUIT 1,000 TECHNOLOGISTS FOR ELITE ‘TECH FORCE’ TO MODERNIZE GOVERNMENT

    Tanvi Ratna: You have also criticized previous U.S. approaches to AI diffusion for restricting partners. What did that get wrong strategically?

    Michael Kratsios: The previous approach treated partners as second-tier actors with significant restrictions on access to advanced technology. That was a lose-lose AI diplomacy strategy. It cut off partners from the best technology and limited American companies from competing globally.

    Under President Trump, the United States is rethinking how it advances international development and how technology can deliver lasting impact. We believe both developed and developing countries can build sovereign AI capability if given the chance.

    FOX NEWS AI NEWSLETTER: TRUMP ACTIVATES ‘TECH FORCE’

    Tanvi Ratna: Let’s talk about the Tech Corps, because it would be easy to dismiss it as a feel-good addition. In your model, it sounds like an execution layer. What would these teams actually do on the ground?

    Michael Kratsios: These will be like Peace Corps volunteers, except the focus is on technology. We are looking for people with technical backgrounds who want to help implement AI solutions.

    If a country wants to improve agriculture through precision farming, apply AI to healthcare systems to improve hospital efficiency, or modernize digital public services, American technologists through the Tech Corps and the Peace Corps will be able to support those efforts.

    WE’RE ON OPPOSITE SIDES OF THE AISLE. BUT WE KNOW AMERICA MUST WIN THE AI RACE, OR ELSE

    A lot of young people today care deeply about real-world impact. What is special about this moment is that the United States has incredible technology, the best chips, models, and applications, and we are being more deliberate about sharing it.

    Tanvi Ratna: You put unusual emphasis on AI agents and interoperability. Why does the White House see standards as a strategic lever now?

    Michael Kratsios: The next wave of AI innovation over the next year or two will center on agents. How those agents communicate and orchestrate their actions would benefit greatly from unified standards. NIST has launched an initiative to develop standards for agents, so these systems can interoperate securely and effectively.

    IN 2026, ENERGY WAR’S NEW FRONT IS AI, AND US MUST WIN THAT BATTLE, API CHIEF SAYS

    Tanvi Ratna: You also linked this export architecture to supply chains, from chips to data centers to power and minerals. Where does Pax Silica fit? Is it the hard backbone complement to the adoption layer?

    Michael Kratsios: Pax Silica is a broader alliance focused on supply chain challenges that the United States and many partner nations have faced. It is a small, select group of countries working together to alleviate these challenges. India is a tremendous addition.

    AI adoption depends on secure physical inputs. The AI stack is tangible: data centers, semiconductors, power generation. Pax Silica helps address those vulnerabilities while the exports program accelerates adoption. They are complementary.

    TRUMP NATIONAL SECURITY BLUEPRINT DECLARES ‘ERA OF MASS MIGRATION IS OVER,’ TARGETS CHINA’S RISE

    Tanvi Ratna: Since India hosted the summit and joined Pax Silica, what role do you see for India within this strategy?

    Michael Kratsios: India is a technology powerhouse. It graduates an incredible number of engineers, has deep domestic talent, and is building strong products and applications. We look forward to working with them.

    India has long been a strong partner in how the United States shares technology abroad. Our major hyperscalers have data centers and research operations here and employ large numbers of Indian engineers. We believe many Indian companies can ultimately become part of the American AI stack.

    Tanvi Ratna: When critics frame this as being about China, you resist that characterization. How does the administration view competition?

    CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE FOX NEWS APP

    Michael Kratsios: We do not see this as being about any one competitor. This is about the fact that the United States has the best AI technology in the world, and many countries want it in their ecosystems. We are excited to share it and build mutually beneficial partnerships globally.

    Related Article

    What replaced USAID? Inside the Trump administration’s global health overhaul

    Tanvi Ratna is a policy analyst and engineer with a decade of experience in statecraft at the intersection of geopolitics, economics, and technology. She has worked on Capitol Hill, at EY, at CoinDesk and others, shaping policy across sectors from manufacturing to AI. Follow her takes on statecraft on X and Substack. 

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Lindsey Vonn’s Dog Died the Day After Her Devastating Olympics Crash

    [ad_1]

    In an a historic return to competitive skiing after years away, Vonn qualified for the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics. An ACL tear (Vonn’s third) wasn’t enough to keep her from the Games, but a brush with a gate during her downhill run on February 8 ended that dream. And as Vonn was rushed to the hospital to treat what would be revealed to be a complex tibia fracture, Leo suffered a crisis of his own.

    “He had been recently diagnosed with lung cancer (he survived lymphoma a year and a half ago) but now his heart was failing him,” Vonn wrote. “He was in pain and his body could no longer keep up with his strong mind.”

    Doctors advised Vonn against travel until she underwent four surgeries to stabilize the break, so she had to bid her ailing pup farewell from afar. “As I layed in my hospital bed the day after my crash, we said goodbye to my big boy,” she wrote. “I had lost so much that meant something to me in such a short amount of time.”

    Vonn wasn’t able to return home until this week, when she documented a trip taken via private plane while still reclining in a hospital bed. “My injury was a lot more severe than just a broken leg,” she wrote Tuesday. “I’m still wrapping my head around it, what it means and the road ahead… but I’m going to give you more detail in the coming days.”

    On Friday she wrote that she’d just completed a fifth surgery in a hospital in the US. “It took a bit more than 6 hours to complete,” Vonn said. “It required a lot of plates and screws to put back together.”

    “With the extent of the trauma, I’ve been struggling a bit post op and have not yet been able to be discharged from the hospital just yet,” Vonn wrote, a circumstance likely worsened by the loss of her beloved pet.

    “It’s going to be a while before I emotionally process things but I know he will always be with me,” Vonn wrote of Leo as she announced his passing this week. “There will never be another Leo. He will always be my first love.”

    First published on Vanity Fair Italy

    [ad_2]

    Massimiliano Vitelli

    Source link

  • TGIF: What’s up this weekend in Greater Newburyport

    [ad_1]

    “Art & Inspiration: Author & Artist in Conversation” will be featured at Newburyport Art, 65 Water St., Newburyport., on Saturday from 4 to 5 p.m. Join author Jane Ward and painter Christine Molitor Johnson as they discuss ideas, inspiration and influences. For more information: newburyportart.org.

    This page requires Javascript.

    Javascript is required for you to be able to read premium content. Please enable it in your browser settings.

    kAmq=24< w:DE@CJ |@?E9k^Am

    kAm%96 rFDE@> w@FD6 |2C:E:>6 |FD6F> AC6D6?ED E9C66 DA64:2= A@AFA 6I9:3:ED 😕 9@?@C @7 q=24< w:DE@CJ |@?E9 2?5 (2D9:?8E@?’D 3:CE952J] %96 >FD6F>[ ad (2E6C $E][ }6H3FCJA@CE[ 😀 @A6? $2EFC52J 7C@> `_ 2]>] E@ d A]>] 2?5 $F?52J 7C@> ?@@? E@ d A>] p5>:DD:@?i Sg 7@C 25F=ED 2?5 7C66 7@C }6H3FCJA@CE C6D:56?ED[ DEF56?ED 2?5 49:=5C6?]k^Am

    kAm*62C @7 E96 w@CD6k^Am

    kAm(6=4@>6 😕 E96 *62C @7 E96 w@CD6 2E E96 vC62E q2J %2: r9: 46=63C2E:@? @7 E96 {F?2C }6H *62C 368:??:?8 $2EFC52J 2E e A]>] t?;@J C67C6D9>6?ED 2?5 2 D4C66?:?8 @7 y6E {:’D “%2: r9: |2DE6C]” %9:D 7C66 6G6?E E2<6D A=246 2E x?E6C?2= pCED }6H t?8=2?5[ `_a qC:586 #@25[ $2=:D3FCJ]k^Am

    kAm$?@H |@@? 46=63C2E:@?k^Am

    kAmw:DE@C:4 }6H t?8=2?5 9@DED :ED $?@H |@@? (:?E6C r6=63C2E:@? @? $F?52J 7C@> b E@ e A]>] 2E $A6?46C!6:C46{:EE=6 u2C>[ d {:EE=6D {2?6[ }6H3FCJ] (2=< E9C@F89 E96 D?@H4@G6C65 7:6=5D[ 6?;@J EC25:E:@?2= xC:D9 7@=< >FD:4 7C@> z:==66D9:=[ D:A 9@E 4:56C 2?5 >2<6 D’>@C6D[ =:DE6? E@ :?E6C24E:G6 x?5:86?@FD DE@C:6D[ =62C? E@ 5CF>[ 2?5 E2<6 A2CE 😕 2 EC25:E:@?2= }:A>F4 52?46 =65 3J {2CCJ $A@EE65 rC@H |2?? @7 E96 ~9<6E62F rF=EFC2= r6?E6C] %96 6G6?E 4F=>:?2E6D H:E9 H2E49:?8 E96 $?@H |@@? C:D6 @G6C E96 7C@K6? 7:6=5D 2E di_h A]>] |6>36CD[ Sdj ?@?>6>36CD[ S`_j >6>36C 72>:=:6D[ Sa_j ?@?>6>36C 72>:=:6D[ Sad] r2== hfgceaabec 7@C >@C6 :?7@C>2E:@?]k^Am

    kAmu:=>D 2E E96 u:C69@FD6k^Am

    kAm%96 U=5BF@ju:C69@FD6 u:=> $6C:6DUC5BF@j 762EFC6D U=5BF@j%2?8=65UC5BF@j @? $F?52J 7C@> c E@ e A]>] 2E u:C69@FD6 r6?E6C 7@C E96 pCED[ ` |2C<6E $BF2C6[ }6H3FCJA@CE] p== E:4<6ED 2C6 A2J H92E J@F 42?] r@>6 5C6DD65 2D J@FC 72G@C:E6 492C24E6C] u@C >@C6 :?7@C>2E:@?i k2 9C67lQ9EEAi^^7:C69@FD6]@C8Qm7:C69@FD6]@C8k^2m]k^Am

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Eric Dane, Star of Grey’s Anatomy and Euphoria, Dead at 53

    [ad_1]

    Actor Eric Dane announced in April of 2025 that he had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which is also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. “I’m fighting as much as I can,” he said a few months later, shortly after finishing work on the third season of Euphoria, on which he played Cal Jacobs, the father to Jacob Elordi‘s Nate Jacobs. But ALS is an unrelenting and merciless degenerative disease, for which there is no cure. And on February 19, the 53-year-old actor died, after final days spent with friends and family.

    “With heavy hearts, we share that Eric Dane passed on Thursday afternoon following a courageous battle with ALS,” Dane’s family has said via a statement shared with media. “He spent his final days surrounded by dear friends, his devoted wife, and his two beautiful daughters, Billie and Georgia, who were the center of his world. Throughout his journey with ALS, Eric became a passionate advocate for awareness and research, determined to make a difference for others facing the same fight.”

    Dane was born on November 9, 1972, in San Francisco, California. He fell in love with acting as a youth, after he was cast in a high school production of All My Sons. He moved to Los Angeles after graduation to seek his fortune as an actor, but it took a while for Hollywood to catch on to his easy grin and athletic charm. Eventually, he started winning small roles in the TV shows of the day: Married… with Children, Saved by the Bell, and Roseanne.

    His big break was a recurring role in short-lived Y2K medical drama Gideon’s Crossing, followed soon thereafter by a central role in the later seasons of supernatural series Charmed. That combination of roles cemented Dane as the go-to for a certain type of sturdy and appealing television role, but it was his role as Dr. Mark Sloan beginning in the second season of Grey’s Anatomy that made Dane a household name—that, as well as his 2004 marriage to actor Rebecca Gayheart. Dane left the show six years later, in 2012, but reruns and syndication kept his lab-coated figure in the public eye long after that.

    While he worked consistently in the years since, it was his role on Euphoria that opened a new chapter in Dane’s career. As closeted Cal Jacobs, the seemingly perfect family man living a double life, Dane received some of the best reviews of his career. As Variety‘s Daniel D’Addario wrote in 2022, “Dane is simply spectacular” in the role, citing a Jacobs-centered episode as “a high-water mark for an exceptional series.”

    “I don’t know what it’s like to be Cal, but I know what it’s like to live a double life,” Dane told Vanity Fair in 2022. “I’ve had my own experience with drug and alcohol abuse. That’s a double life.

    [ad_2]

    Eve Batey

    Source link

  • Gen Z Has Waltzed Right Into Vienna’s Fairy-Tale Balls

    [ad_1]

    One of them was Carmen Bracho, 30, an engineer in Toronto who planned an entire trip to Vienna with her boyfriend for the Philharmonic Ball this January.

    “I started seeing it come up more on my socials,” Bracho says. “What captured my attention was that fairy-tale aesthetic and all the traditions, like the waltzing, the live music, the performances from the debutantes. In North America, we don’t have long-lasting traditions like that.”

    Bracho says the price for the ball was comparable to a concert ticket, but instead of a couple of hours of live music, she had eight, from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. “In Toronto, there’s nowhere to go where you can dance all night,” she says.

    One of the highlights, she says, was the quadrille. During Viennese balls, when the clock nears midnight, suddenly and as if on a cue, hundreds of people form two long lines in the ballroom. While the emcee gives instructions, the room descends into chaos as groups of strangers try to follow the steps to a dance set to Johann Strauss II’s “Fledermaus” at an increasing pace. Toward the end, people grab partners and race around the ballroom in a gallop through a tunnel of arms, an exhilarating experience—especially in heels—that leaves the heart pumping and the quads sore for days. Consider it community building, 19th-century-style.

    “I was surprised they still do things like this, and everyone kind of knows what’s happening,” Bracho says. “I absolutely loved it. I was very lost, but it was so fun.”

    Over the centuries, the biggest draws of Viennese balls have remained consistent: live performances of classical music by some of the world’s premier musicians and the opportunity to waltz in beautiful clothes in spaces where entry is usually restricted, like the grand halls of the Habsburg imperial palace, Vienna’s Neo-Gothic City Hall, and the State Opera.

    But many of the balls have adapted to the times, adding rooms with live bands and DJs, lounges serving aperitivi, and sometimes even karaoke.

    The most famous of the balls is the Opera Ball, which closes the season and has been attended by guests like Kim Kardashian, Jane Fonda, and Goldie Hawn. The guest list is high-profile enough that the street in front of the building, a main artery in the city, is cordoned off for the entire evening, disrupting tram service, and dozens of police officers are stationed outside. Activists, some calling for higher taxes on the rich, have gathered in large and small groups outside the Opera Ball for decades.

    For this year’s Opera Ball, held on February 12, around 600 pairs applied to dance in the opening—triple the number of applicants than in 2019, the year before the coronavirus pandemic. Like many other balls, the Opera Ball opens with a waltz performed by 160 bright-eyed and bushy-tailed young couples, who are referred to as debutantes.

    Entry tickets for the Opera Ball start at 410 euros, or about $487, and go as high as around $30,000 for a tiered box, and official partners include Swarovski and Lancôme. Giorgio Armani designed this year’s costumes for the professional ballet dancers before he died in September.

    [ad_2]

    Valeriya Safronova

    Source link

  • Dylan Mulvaney Is Finally a Broadway Leading Lady, Haters Be Damned

    [ad_1]

    “Once I stepped into my womanhood, I felt like the main character of my life,” Dylan Mulvaney tells me, while sipping her lemon drop. “So now that means that I can be the main character on stage.” The social media star and I are dining at Arno, a traditional Italian restaurant, on a frigid evening in January in lower Midtown, a stone’s throw from Penn Station. There’s a good reason we’re dining in a less-than-ideal location—Arno is blocks away from Ripley-Grier Studios, where Mulvaney has just spent the day rehearsing for her Broadway debut as the second, and most infamous, of Henry VIII’s wives, Anne Boleyn, in the Tony-winning musical Six.

    Mulvaney’s penchant for girlish giggles and squeals between bites of her spaghetti pomodoro stand out in Arno, especially when juxtaposed against the sea of older gentlemen in an assortment of ill-fitting grey blazers sitting behind her at the bar. She’s wearing a black ballet dress with her long brown hair half up, half down, instantly reminiscent of Audrey Hepburn—something that was by design. “I noticed if I look good for rehearsal, if I fuck up, I’m like, Oh, well, at least I look good,” she says. After years of living in Los Angeles, she’s adjusting to life in NYC. “I feel like if I walk outside for five seconds, I run into somebody that I’ve slept with or somebody that I want to sleep with. You kind of have to look good all the time.”

    Mulvaney’s about a week into a four-week rehearsal process to fulfill a lifelong dream of hers—starring in a Broadway musical. It’s not an understatement to say that the world has watched her reach this moment. Her legion of social media followers—1.5 million on Instagram and 9 million on TikTok, as of publishing—have been hooked on Mulvaney’s confessional online content since she began her series “365 Days of Girlhood” on March 13, 2022, which served as a daily chronicle of her gender-affirming transition from male to female. Mulvaney left nothing off the table—the highs, the lows, and the messy in-betweens of becoming the woman she always knew that she was.

    But even pre–social media fame and pre-transition, the San Diego native had grease paint roaring through her veins, but didn’t necessarily know where to put that energy as she struggled with her gender identity. Her theatrical dreams “were so small because I hadn’t found my true self. In order to confine myself to a gender that I knew that I wasn’t,” Mulvaney shares. “I had to be like, ‘Oh, I want to be in the ensemble. I want to be in the back. I want to be tree number three.’” Looking back, she could count on one hand the roles that she felt even partially represented in as a child struggling with their gender identity—Kurt from Glee, Ernst from Spring Awakening. “There were so few roles that I could even find femininity in,” she says

    Despite her misgivings, she persisted, studying musical theater at the University of Cincinnati College of Music, a prestigious musical theater program, and even playing Elder White in the national tour of Book of Mormon. There, again, her ambition and dreams were stifled by her present-day reality, trapped in a body that was anathema to her. “When I was doing Book of Mormon, I was like, ‘Well, hopefully I’ll just do this for the rest of my life, and I get a lot of Botox,’” she says, wryly.

    [ad_2]

    Chris Murphy

    Source link

  • Exclusive: OpenAI Has Poached Instagram’s Celebrity Whisperer

    [ad_1]

    OpenAI has hired Instagram’s vice president of global partnerships, Charles Porch, to serve as the AI company’s first-ever vice president of global creative partnerships. The newly created position is the latest move in OpenAI’s push to win over a skeptical entertainment industry.

    In his over 15 years at Instagram, Facebook, and Meta, Porch was instrumental in bringing high-profile figures to the platforms. He facilitated the exclusive Instagram launch of Beyoncé’s self-titled album in 2013, coordinated Instagram’s portrait studios at Vanity Fair’s Oscar Party and the Met Gala, convinced Pope Francis to join the social media platform in 2016, and led an initiative in 2025 to lure TikTok creators over to Instagram Reels with “Breakthrough Bonus” payments.

    OpenAI is hoping to reap similar benefits from Porch’s deep relationships with both talent and management in the worlds of music, film, fashion, art, sports, and the creator ecosystem.

    While Porch and the company offered sparse details on the still-evolving role, which will begin in March, the most likely applications of his talent include arranging deals to license entertainers’ likenesses to appear in OpenAI’s video generation model Sora, building out the future of interactive AI platforms, and promoting AI tools for artistic development in industries like music, fashion, and film.

    In an interview with Vanity Fair this week, Porch explained, “I’m going to be the person that’s talking to creative communities around the world to figure out how we build the best products to serve them.”

    AI companies have so far received a frosty reception in Hollywood over fears that the technology will replace jobs, erode creativity, and devalue intellectual property. In 2023, dual writers’ and actors’ strikes paralyzed the industry, held up largely by complex negotiations over the usage of artificial intelligence. Both unions won a number of protections, including guarantees of compensation should actors’ images be used to create digital doubles and guardrails on studios’ ability to replace human labor with AI. These contracts are set to expire this summer, however.

    In December, OpenAI made a major breakthrough with a $1 billion agreement with Disney. The three-year licensing deal will allow Sora to produce content featuring “animated, masked, and creature” characters from the worlds of Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars.

    Licensing the likeness of real people will be a far taller order. In recent months, big-name stars like Matthew McConaughey, Michael Caine, and Gwyneth Paltrow have licensed their voices to be recreated by AI companies ElevenLabs and Speechify for audio content, signaling an openness from talent and agencies to dipping a toe into the world of AI, provided the right compensation models, data privacy agreements, and level of creative and reputational control.

    [ad_2]

    Julia Black

    Source link

  • Inside Bunny Mellon’s New York Home, Immortalized in Watercolor

    [ad_1]

    Over the next six years, Snowy served as the Mellon family’s live-in artist at their residences in Upperville, Virginia, Washington, DC, and New York City, as well as on Cape Cod and Antigua. In her watercolors, Campbell captured the colors, light, and ambiance of the very rarefied rooms therein.

    Dream job that it was, Snowy nonetheless eventually gave her notice to Bunny when marriage and motherhood claimed her. Over the last half-century, the artist’s luminous paintings remained in the archives of the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, on the Mellon estate in Virginia. This month, with the release of The Enchanting Interiors of Bunny Mellon: Paintings by Snowy Campbell (Rizzoli), they are published for the first time.

    Being the Mellons’ New York City redoubt, their home at 125 East 70th Street was arguably more opulent than the couple’s other residences. Yet there was nothing showy about the eight-bedroom, 11,000-square-foot mansion, because it followed the template Mrs. Mellon had created. As Mr. Mellon once explained: “One of the most engaging features of all our houses is their friendliness. Major works of art live side-by-side with small objects of art, children’s drawings, and bronzes of favorite horses. Bunny’s quest for comfort and informality has been nurtured with care; a little natural shabbiness in an old chair cover is sometimes purposely overlooked.”

    Truman Capote, Lee Radziwell and Rachel “Bunny” Lambert Lloyd arrive at an event at the Asia House hosted by Jacqueline Kennedy for John K. Galbraith in New York, 1965

    WWD/Getty Images

    Bunny’s aversion to anything looking too new was duly noted by Truman Capote. In a 1978 interview with Time magazine, he reported that Mrs. Mellon always carried a small pair of scissors in her purse: “When things are looking a little too neat, she takes a little snip out of a chair or something so it will have that lived-in look.”

    [ad_2]

    Source link

  • Robert Duvall’s Life in Photos

    [ad_1]

    Fans of Robert Duvall are mourning his passing on Sunday February 15 at age 95. The star of films including 1962’s To Kill a Mockingbird (he played Boo Radley), Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H, and Network began his career on stage, then working alongside fellow icons Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman. In the 1970s and ’80s, Robert Duvall was a big-screen mainstay, even winning the Academy Award in 1983 for his role as a down-on-his-luck country singer in Tender Mercies.

    Below, find 28 images that barely scratch the surface of his epic career.

    [ad_2]

    Eve Batey

    Source link

  • Robert Duvall, Oscar-Winning Actor, Dies At Age 95

    [ad_1]

    As Tom Hagen, the trusted consigliere to the Corleone crime family in The Godfather saga, Robert Duvall did what he did better than any other actor of his generation—a generation that fed and fueled the New Hollywood revolution of the late ‘60s and ‘70s—he listened.

    Make no mistake, Duvall was a bona fide Hollywood star with seven Oscar nominations and one win (for 1983’s Tender Mercies) to his credit. But deep down, the California native was a character actor through and through. On screen, he was authentic and selfless, pushing those around him to shine a little brighter than they otherwise would have. Showboating just wasn’t his style. Instead, he propped up others like a reinforced steel buttress, never demanding the close-up or the girl. No one could turn a side dish into an entrée like Duvall did during his brilliant seven-decade career. “It all begins with and ends with talking and listening,” Duvall once said. “I talk, you listen; you talk, I listen…. That’s the journey in an individual scene. There’s no right or wrong; just truthful or untruthful.”

    Duvall died on Sunday, February 16 at age 95, his wife Luciana Duvall announced Monday via Facebook. “Bob passed away peacefully at home, surrounded by love and comfort,” she wrote. “Thank you for the years of support you showed Bob and for giving us this time and privacy to celebrate the memories he leaves behind.”

    Scrounging for any kind of role in 60s New York, chasing girls, lending money to whichever of them was the most broke, Gene Hackman, Dustin Hoffman, and Robert Duvall shared the risks, the rejections, and a fascination with the human drama. As they remember, stardom was unlikely—and irrelevant.

    Born in San Diego in 1931, Robert Duvall was the child of a Navy rear admiral and a mother who had put her own acting ambitions aside to raise a family. His father thought that Duvall would follow in his footsteps with a career in the military, but instead the path that the young man would forge was his mother’s unfulfilled one.

    After graduating from Illinois’ Principia College where he majored in drama, Duvall served in the army from 1953 to 1954, narrowly missing out on the Korean War. On the GI Bill, he began studying at The Neighborhood Playhouse in New York City under the legendary Sanford Meisner. His classmates included two other struggling actors, Gene Hackman and Dustin Hoffman, with whom he shared a shabby apartment when they weren’t passing one another on the way to menial jobs and no-hope auditions. They were hungry, in every sense of the word.

    Duvall paid his early dues in New York’s exploding off-Broadway scene in the late ‘50s, taking parts in such stage classics of the era as Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge. About that production, Hackman recalled to Vanity Fair: “In the first rehearsal, Bobby already had this kind of physical thing he was doing—like an animal—kind of glided across the stage. I was really impressed.” Night after night, performance after performance, tears would wet Duvall’s cheeks during his final monologue. By the early ‘60s, Duvall had segued into supporting roles on television (Naked City, The Twilight Zone) and eventually motion pictures. As luck would have it, Duvall’s debut film would become an instant classic—1962’s To Kill a Mockingbird—in which he played the misunderstood small-town bogeyman Boo Radley. Hoffman told Vanity Fair in the same 2013 article, “The feeling was that Bobby was the new Brando. I felt he was the one, and probably I wasn’t.”

    [ad_2]

    Chris Nashawaty

    Source link

  • At Nancy Guthrie’s Home, a Surreal Scene of Chaos and Camaraderie

    [ad_1]

    “It’s Monday morning quarterbacking,” Nanos said. “I do it all the time, so you can do that for me. I’ll take that hit.” And to a question about whether possible evidence could have been contaminated? That’s a later problem. “I’ll let the courts worry about that.”

    Even a widely reported SWAT action at a residence near Guthrie’s home Friday night was accompanied by little context: Media assembled at a designated point, expecting an update, but were told hours later that there would be no formal statement. “Because this is a joint investigation, at the request of the FBI – no additional information is currently available,” the PCSD said via X. According to CNN, no suspects were detained in the law enforcement swarm, which blocked a road about two miles from the primary scene.

    Day after day for almost two weeks, a growing number of people—media professionals and self-appointed citizen investigators alike—have flocked to Nancy’s home in the Catalina Foothills outside Tucson, where information comes out in drips and drabs, sudden flurries of activity erupt and then abruptly die out, and that crime scene tape goes up and down again and again. Consider that though the FBI on Tuesday released several still shots and clips of a person approaching Nancy’s door, recovered from home surveillance cameras, law enforcement continues to decline to confirm or deny that there were signs of forced entry to the home. “I have no clue where that comes from,” Nanos said in that news conference. “We are not discussing that at all.”

    In the same media briefing, he seemed to shut down hope that any footage would be recovered, saying, “the tech company that we sent that camera off to, they’ve run out of ways to recover any video.” Because Nancy didn’t have an active subscription, the footage wasn’t saved.

    Then, those images were released on February 10, along with a joint statement from law enforcement citing “residual data” on “backend servers” that “uncovered these previously inaccessible new images showing an armed individual appearing to have tampered with the camera at Nancy Guthrie’s front door the morning of her disappearance.” What change that made this possible? They’re not saying.

    FBI and SWAT units during an operation related to Nancy Guthrie’s kidnapping on February 13.

    Brandon Bell/Getty Images

    Ford Hatchett, a journalist with Phoenix’s ABC15, arrived at Nancy’s house on Monday, February 1, the morning after her disappearance, and has been back and forth between Phoenix and Tucson several times in the days since. He tells Vanity Fair that while he’s covered crime stories before, “this particular case has been pretty bizarre.”

    [ad_2]

    Kase Wickman

    Source link

  • It’s Fashion Week vs. an Art World Awakening in New York City

    [ad_1]

    And I think you’ll be incredibly excited to know that the New Museum is also gifting downtown Manhattan with a new restaurant that is—I think I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s cool—accessible through Freeman’s Alley. It’s from Oberon Group’s Henry Rich and chef Julia Sherman, and there’s a number of artist collaborations at the restaurant, spanning the entire ecosystem of the dining experience—more to come on all that.

    Hop the F train to the 7, and you’ll find yourself at MoMA PS1—which this year is hosting another anticipated edition of Greater New York, only staged twice a decade—an event that aims to take the temperature of the five boroughs and its artists. Few details were released apart from the artist roster, and and some of the artists chosen stuck in my mind, including the only non-living artist represented: Jay Carrier, who died last year and had a show at 47 Canal in January 2025, which was truly one of the year’s highlights for me.

    It was also the week when the mega galleries started rolling out their first major shows of the year in Chelsea. There’s the intricately installed Michael Heizer show at Gagosian, really it has to be seen in person to soak it up, though no doubt you’ll get pretty heavy doses of it via Instagram. Matthew Marks on Thursday night opened three shows—Anne Truitt, Ron Nagle, and a three-person exhibit called “Plein Air”—and Hauser & Wirth opened a show that features, and only features, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s fantastic Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform).

    But the real news lighting up my group chats wasn’t about an art gallery, but an art magazine. On Wednesday, Artforum announced that editor in chief Tina Rivers Ryan, who had been at the helm for two years, would be stepping down, and in her stead, the new co-editors would be Rachel Wetzler, currently the executive editor at the magazine, and Daniel Wenger, who has worked at The New Yorker and Harper’s, and is also a practicing artist who has shown work at galleries such as Moran Moran, Paul Soto, and STARS. The news came as something of a shock—there was no indication that Ryan was about to head out, but at the same time, the general consensus was that she steadied the great ship that is Artforum for two years following the departure of former editor David Velasco, and set up the magazine for another era of greatness. I personally think that Wetzler and Wenger are excellent choices to lead the once-and-still reigning Art World Bible. I should probably disclose that I’ve known both of them for well over a decade, but, if I can speak objectively, they’re incredibly smart, well-respected people, who clearly love the magazine. Look no further than Wetzler’s excellent cover essay on the artist Banks Violette, chronicling a remarkable career that has included a number of Irish exits from the scene and an improbable comeback via Hedi Slimane and Celine. I devoured Wetzler’s story as one should: in the ad-stuffed print magazine, heavy on my coffee table at home, after the children were fast asleep.

    I would be depriving you of information if I didn’t let you know about the galas—like the wonderful RxART Gala that honored the adviser and collector, Glori Cohen, and the artist Mickalene Thomas. If you’re not familiar with RxART, it’s an incredible organization that commissions artists to make works for hospitals around the world. Another spectacular gala happened not in New York but in the glorified confines of Palm Beach. Yes, that would be the Norton Museum of Art Gala, which I attended last year and enjoyed thoroughly, resulting in a quite lengthy dispatch, which I recommend you take in, if just to soak in the weirdness that was Palm Beach after the inauguration.

    [ad_2]

    Nate Freeman

    Source link

  • This TikTok Reveals Instinct Women Are Told To Ignore | RealClearPolitics

    [ad_1]

    If you’re on the fence about having kids, I think you should have them – and have a lot.

    [ad_2]

    Nicole Russell, USA Today

    Source link

  • Charli xcx is in Her Movie Star Era—Here’s How Her Stylist Chris Horan Bridged the Gap Between Brat, The Moment, and Wuthering Heights

    [ad_1]

    I like that you don’t put her in any sort of movie or character cosplay, because she’s not actually in the movie, and it wouldn’t make sense for her. What are things you lean into, and what do you avoid?

    I mean, this is a controversial take, but I think as I’ve matured into this profession, I’ve realized that it really is, especially with Charli, about personal style. I think we, the collective we, have found what that truly is, so it’s always about staying true to that instead of a reinvention for every single project. Brat of course is a part of that vision, because people think of her in a specific way as that was when she really broke out, but she has elements that are definitely not Brat about her style too. Think of the Grammys on Sunday, it’s not Brat but it’s also a continuation of something, an evolution, but still very core her.

    We now have a pretty established look and feel, at least a feeling, when she wears something. With Wuthering Heights, yes, we’re playing a little bit more into it, and we also don’t get to wear big dresses a lot, so that’s fun. I’m not a huge “method dressing” fan, so I would rather lean more into her wearing British designers and some little Easter eggs.

    Right, and to your point, “method dressing” is not a very Charli thing. The gag of Charli as a public figure is that she is Charli consistently in whatever context, which makes it fun.

    She also can wear anything. I mean, her energy and power is very strong, so I feel like it’s so much more credit to her than it is to even the clothes. She can just kill anything.

    I’m curious about how you think of The Moment.

    For The Moment, we were more thinking about playing into the Brat of it all, because it is about that. I thought that we could definitely dip back into those concepts way more frequently. For the L.A. premiere, for example, it was the Brat remix. I call it the Megamix [laughs]. And that wasn’t even the plan. We had something that we had fit, a really low-rise capri and a black leather bra, but the day of Charli wasn’t feeling it, so I was at my studio and I still had the Ludovic [de Saint Sernin] Jean Paul Gaultier corset she wore at the Grammys [in 2025] and I was like, what if we just put something together with pieces of greatest hits? It felt like a good sendoff to everything, and it felt like it had meaning.

    Charli xcx at the Los Angeles premiere of The Moment.

    Michael Buckner/Getty Images

    [ad_2]

    José Criales-Unzueta

    Source link

  • Celebrating the Power of Film and the Best of Humanity at Park City’s Last Sundance

    [ad_1]

    The Friend’s House Is Here was covertly filmed in the streets of Tehran amidst violent government crackdowns against citizens. Courtesy of Sundance Institute

    There is a scene about halfway through first-time writer-director Stephanie Ahn’s romantic drama Bedford Park—which premiered in the U.S. Dramatic Competition in last week’s Sundance Film Festival—where the lead characters are stuck in New Jersey traffic, fiddling with the radio. “Keep it here,” says reluctant passenger Eli (South Korean actor Son Suk-ku) when he hears Bill Conti’s Rocky theme Gonna Fly Now. While Eli—whose cauliflower ears speak to his high school wrestling days and whose furtive and combative manner suggests he has never stopped fighting—bobs his head and shakes his fists, Irene (a devastating Moon Choi), an on-leave physical therapist in an emotional free fall, stares ahead, saying nothing, her eyes silently filling with tears.

    Sitting in a Press & Industry screening at the Holiday Village Theaters in Park City, so did mine. Of course, it had much to do with the authenticity and masterfully observational patience of Ahn’s film. But the film served as a powerful metaphor for the festival itself, which was also uniting a bunch of broken people around their shared and largely nostalgic love of movies. A dense cloud of wistfulness threatened to overtake the festival every time audiences watched Robert Redford, its late founder and spiritual guide, reflect on the power of storytelling in gauzy footage projected onscreen.

    While Bedford Park was my favorite film I saw at the festival, it didn’t pick up one of the big awards. (Beth de Araújo’s Channing Tatum–starring drama about an 8-year-old crime witness Josephine swept both the Jury and Audience awards, while Bedford Park received a Special Jury Award for Debut Feature.)

    What Ahn’s film brought home instead was something even more valuable: a distribution deal. Sony Pictures Classics—whose co-presidents and founders Michael Barker and Tom Bernard were battling for good movies and ethical distribution against the indie movie dark lord Harvey Weinstein back in Sundance’s buy-happy ’90s heyday—made the film its second acquisition of the festival behind director Josef Kubota Wladyka’s crowd-pleasing Ha-Chan, Shake Your Booty! It was an anachronistically bullish stand by the 34-year-old specialty arm in what has been a largely bearish acquisition market.

    The relatively quiet marketplace, Redford’s passing and the immutability of 2026 being the end of the festival’s Utah run (Main Street’s iconic Egyptian Theater being unavailable for festival programming felt like a don’t-let-the-door-hit-you statement from both city and state) combined to give this outing a bit of a Dance of Death feeling. Respite from this sense of gloom came from the most unlikely of places: documentaries on seemingly depressing topics.

    A man with a close-cropped haircut holds two telephone receivers to his ears, smiling slightly while seated on a patterned couch.A man with a close-cropped haircut holds two telephone receivers to his ears, smiling slightly while seated on a patterned couch.
    Joybubbles in his living room. Photo by Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

    Joybubbles, the effervescent directorial debut from longtime archival producer Rachael J. Morrison, tells the story of Joe Engrassia, a man who copes with his blindness and the cruelty he experiences as a result of his visual impairment through his relationship with that great relic of the 20th Century: the telephone. As a child, he found comfort in its steady tone when his parents fought; as a young man, he learned to manipulate its system to make calls across the world with his pitch-perfect whistling; as an adult, he entertains strangers through a prerecorded “fun line,” telling jokes and stories from his life. In one scene, Morrison captures a caller recollecting taking Joe—who late in life legally changed his name to Joybubbles to reflect his commitment to living life as a child—to Penny Marshall’s 1988 movie Big, and describing it to him in the back of the theater; the moment moved me as deeply as the Rocky interlude from Bedford Park.

    The setup of Sam Green’s The Oldest Person in the World seems high concept: a globe-spanning chronicle of the various holders of that dubious Guinness World Record title over the course of a decade. But in the hands of Green, a Sundance vet who has premiered a dozen films at the festival dating back to 1997, what would be rote instead blossoms into a consistently surprising, deeply personal and strangely exhilarating exploration of what it means to be alive.

    A glossy, cartoonish glass pitcher with a smiling face sits onstage under bright colored lights, surrounded by a crowd of onlookers at a tech conference.A glossy, cartoonish glass pitcher with a smiling face sits onstage under bright colored lights, surrounded by a crowd of onlookers at a tech conference.
    Ghost in the Machine delivers a thought-provoking takedown of Techno-Fascism. Courtesy of Sundance Institute

    Ghost in the Machine, Valerie Vatach’s exploration of the eugenicist roots and colonial and anti-environmental reality of the A.I. arms race, had the exact opposite effect. It tells the tale of a society that has lost its moral and humanitarian bearing at the behest of techno-oligarchs, amalgamating our own labor to keep us divided. The film’s denouement—showing ways we as a society can still fight back—was the only unconvincing part of Vatach’s film essay.

    Meanwhile, the miles-deep societal pessimism of Ghost in the Machine was being tragically echoed by real events. Indeed, the most shocking and vital clip of the weekend was the footage of the Minneapolis murder of protester and ICU nurse Alex Pretti at the hands of federal agents that festivalgoers watched on their phones in stunned silence while waiting in lines. A day earlier, U.S. Congressman Max Frost was physically assaulted at the festival in an attack that was both politically and racially motivated.

    It all made for a tense mood for one of the more anxious events of the festival: that Sunday’s premiere of Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie, from Alex Gibney, another longtime Sundance veteran. Culled from footage shot by Rachel Eliza Griffiths (Rushdie’s wife) of the novelist’s recovery from the 2022 attack on his life and adapted from his memoir of that event, the film was most effective when Gibney recounted the since-rescinded 1989 fatwa against Rushdie, an example of, as the author told the theater audience, “how violence unleashed by an irresponsible leader can spread out of control.” (Security measures for the event included a full pat-down, metal detectors, and bomb-sniffing dogs.)

    As trenchant as it felt in that moment, Knife was also an example of a documentary where the subject may have been a bit too in control of the final product; in addition to providing the footage, Griffiths served as executive producer and Gibney was her and Rushdie’s handpicked director.

    American Pachuco: The Legend of Luis Valdez, which premiered in the U.S. Documentary Competition and took home the Audience Award, also drifted toward hagiography. But in telling the story of Valdez, the Chicano arts trailblazer who founded El Teatro Campesino to inform and entertain newly unionized farmworkers, the film powerfully demonstrates how politically and socially engaged arts serve both as a morale booster and a clarion call in the fight against oppression.

    Nowhere was this idea better expressed than in my second favorite fiction film in the festival: The Friend’s House Is Here. Directed by the New York–based husband and wife team of Hossein Keshavarz and Maryam Ataei and covertly filmed in the streets of Tehran amidst violent government crackdowns against citizens, House is at its heart a joyful “hangout” movie about two close but very different friends pushing the limits of their creative expression in current-day Iran. The film—whose cast includes Iranian Instagram star Hana Mana, theater actor Mahshad Bahraminejad, and a troupe of actors from a local improvisational theater company—rightfully took home the Special Jury Award for its ensemble cast.

    A young girl and a man recline in sunlit beach chairs beside dry grass and driftwood, both with their eyes closed in quiet rest.A young girl and a man recline in sunlit beach chairs beside dry grass and driftwood, both with their eyes closed in quiet rest.
    Maria Petrova in Myrsini Aristidou’s Hold Onto Me. Courtesy of Sundance Institute

    Aside from The Friend’s House Is Here crew, the best performances in Sundance films were given by children. This includes Maria Petrova as a dour 11-year-old beach rat reconnecting with her estranged conman father in Myrsini Aristidou’s Hold Onto Me, which won the World Cinema-Dramatic Audience Award. Mason Reeves’ complex and nervy turn as an 8-year-old who witnesses a rape in Golden Gate Park during an early morning run with her fitness-obsessed dad (Channing Tatum) is by far the best thing about Josephine, writer-director Beth de Araújo’s multiple award winner; the film’s narrative and emotional force are deeply undercut by the abject cluelessness shown by the child’s parents, played by Channing Tatum and Eternals stunner Gemma Chan.

    Not all of the films at this year’s festival were engaged with our fraught political moment. Longtime Sundance mainstay Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex (the programmers’ fixation on inviting old hands felt like a combination of sentimentality and branding) was born of the kind of sassy, candy-colored provocations the director helped pioneer in the 90s in its telling of Cooper Hoffman’s art intern embarking on a Dom/Sub relationship with his boss, played with preening relish by Olivia Wilde.

    A man on the left and a woman on the right gaze into each other's eyesA man on the left and a woman on the right gaze into each other's eyes
    Cooper Hoffman and Olivia Wilde in Gregg Araki’s I Want Your Sex. Courtesy of Sundance Institute | photo by Lacey Terrell

    Along with her Sex costar Charli XCX, whose premiere of her mockumentary The Moment created the closest thing the 2026 fest had to a media scrum, Wilde became the celebrity face of the festival. The bidding war to acquire The Invite—the middle-age sex comedy she directed and stars in alongside Seth Rogen, Edward Norton and Penélope Cruz—was eventually won by A24 and provided one of the few pieces of red meat that kept the trade reporters engaged.

    Otherwise, the festival overall seemed much more focused on its past than its present or even its future. (That said, Colorado Governor Jared Polis showing up to premieres in his trademark cowboy hat—in anticipation of Sundance’s move next year to Boulder—did feel like the ultimate Rocky Mountain flex.)

    In addition to its reliance on programming new films by filmmakers who had movies in previous festivals, this year’s festival also featured special screenings of films from its illustrious past, among them Barbara Kopple’s American Dream, Lynn Shelton’s Humpday, and James Wan’s Saw. Still, the festival’s most potent dose of uncut nostalgia was Tamra Davis’ The Best Summer. A stitched-together chronicle of a 1994 Australian indie rock festival that featured the Beastie Boys, Bikini Kill, Pavement, Foo Fighters and Sonic Youth, Davis’ film felt like the ultimate in Gen X hipster home movies.

    But did all of this chronic looking backwards sap the festival of its vitality? Maybe a little. But despite the sentimentality that covered Park City more heartily than the snow, films like The Friend’s House Is Here reminded us how remarkable good films can be at discovering and celebrating humanity, even as Ghost in the Machine showed us that the moment to do something about it may have passed.

    More from Sundance

    Celebrating the Power of Film and the Best of Humanity at Park City’s Last Sundance

    [ad_2]

    Oliver Jones

    Source link

  • Lady Victoria Hervey on Her Appearance in the Epstein Files

    [ad_1]

    Though far-right politics have an upper-class history in the UK, Hervey thinks the Reform UK pitch is “getting voters from everywhere.” She adds, “It appeals to everybody. It doesn’t matter what your background is. Rich, poor background, it’s just—do you love your country? Are you patriotic?”

    In February, her phone was stolen out of her hand in Pimlico. She partly blames immigration for certain changes in the UK. “It’s a little bit like America, you know? In England, we’re having the same problem. War veterans and people like that are being forgotten, and yet they’re giving people money that are coming over the border, and these people are getting housing, and they’re getting credit cards.” (Impoverished asylum seekers in the UK are often given debit cards loaded with about $60 for food, clothing and toiletries.)

    And so, she found herself at the penthouse of the Hay-Adams Hotel just days before the inauguration in January, at the “Stars and Stripes and Union Jack Party,” where Farage toasted the deep ties between the Trump movement and his upstart political party. British Serbian opera singer Nevena Bridgen sang a mashup of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “God Save the King.” The night’s attendees included right-wing royalty Steve Bannon and Liz Truss, along with bicontinental political strategists Raheem Kassam (an investor in DC hotspot Butterworth’s), Michael Pack, Nile Gardiner, and former diplomat Andy Wigmore.

    The MEGA plan to make her homeland look more like it used to is simple, according to Hervey. “Strong borders, low taxes, safe place,” she says. “Have a proper police.” Two days after the inauguration, she flew back to London to join Farage for a high-class Reform UK fundraiser at the private club Oswald’s, which was founded by second-generation nightlife impresario Robin Birley in 2018.

    In a sequined black minidress and black fur coat, Hervey moved through a crowd that billionaire property developer Nick Candy, Candy’s then-wife, singer and actor Holly Valance, former Tory MP Andrea Jenkyns, and Charles James Spencer-Churchill, 12th Duke of Marlborough, a relative of Winston Churchill.

    “Photos weren’t allowed. I had one of them on my Instagram, and I had gotten told off by Nick Candy—I had to get it off!” Hervey says. “People were having a good time. I think they really raised money that night and got some big donations.”

    [ad_2]

    Erin Vanderhoof

    Source link

  • All The Stars Expected at the Opening Ceremony of the Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics

    [ad_1]

    The countdown has begun. We are now just days away from the official opening of the Milan-Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics, scheduled for February 6 at Milan’s San Siro Stadium. For the first time, the ceremony will be spread across multiple locations, uniting Milan, Cortina, and other cities in a choral project involving more than 1,300 cast members from over 27 countries, managed by at least 950 operators and technical staff. The Milano Cortina Foundation calls it “an event of global scope, the result of a choral project involving thousands of people and artistic, technical and organizational skills of the highest level.”

    At the center of the narrative is a simple but powerful concept: Harmony. According to Marco Balich, creative lead for the ceremony, “Harmony means transforming our values into images, sounds and shared emotions. It is a journey inside the colors of Italy, but it also speaks to the whole world.” The key word thus becomes the common thread of a show that unites cities and mountains, tradition and innovation, art and sport.

    Tina and Milo, the mascots for the 2026 Winter Olympics. Both are stoats, a small carnivorous mammal native to parts of Eurpoe and Asia.

    PIERO CRUCIATTI/Getty Images

    “Fantasia Italiana,” the official theme of the Games, was composed Italian songwriter Dardust, who was tasked with creating an anthem that will evoke both the territories that will host the competitions and the Italian musical tradition. “I wanted to create a lasting emotion,” Dardust says, “a contemporary sound that pays homage to collective memory but also looks to the future.”

    Over 500 musicians have engaged in more than 700 hours of rehearsals between Milan, Cortina, Livigno, Predazzo, and Arco della Pace for the opening ceremony, with special attention paid to costumes, makeup and hairstyles. Watch for 182 original designs, and more than 1,400 costumes, 1,500 pairs of shoes on the performers, who are supported by 110 make-up artists and 70 hair stylists.

    Image may contain Mariah Carey Performer Person Solo Performance Adult Leisure Activities and Music

    Mariah Carey

    Samir Hussein

    [ad_2]

    Stefania Conrieri

    Source link

  • Trump backlash over ICE builds across American culture, from The Boss to Sam Altman to Martha Stewart | Fortune

    [ad_1]

    No longer confined to the partisans and activists, the fierce backlash against Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown has begun to break out across American culture, spanning the worlds of business, sports and entertainment.

    Bruce Springsteen released a new song Wednesday that slammed “Trump’s federal thugs.” OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman told employees that “what’s happening with ICE is going too far,” referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And lifestyle icon Martha Stewart lamented that “we can be attacked and even killed.”

    “Things must and have to change quickly and peacefully,” Stewart wrote to her 2.9 million Instagram followers this week.

    A little more than one year into his second term, Trump is facing a broad cultural revolt that threatens to undermine his signature domestic priority, the Republican Party’s grip on power and his own political strength ahead of the midterm elections.

    Trump, a former reality television star often attuned to changes in public opinion, tried to shift the conversation this week by dispatching border czar Tom Homan to Minnesota to replace Greg Bovino, a Border Patrol commander who has been a lightning rod.

    But it’s unclear if the move will change anything on the ground.

    Thousands of federal agents remain in Minnesota, where two U.S. citizens have been killed and communities have felt besieged by Trump’s crackdown. Meanwhile, operations have expanded into Maine as well.

    White House is ‘spooked’

    Republican strategist Doug Heye said it’s too soon to know whether Trump’s attempt to control the fallout will work. He’s been in communication with Republican leaders across Washington in recent days who are worried that the escalating situation could jeopardize control of Congress in this fall’s midterm elections.

    “It’s very clear that the administration is spooked,” Heye said.

    And while some in the party may be concerned, Trump’s Make America Great Again base remains largely unified behind him and the immigration crackdown that he promised repeatedly on the campaign trail. They’re pushing the president not to back down.

    “It’s time for President Trump to ramp up mass deportations even more,” Laura Loomer, a Trump loyalist who has the president’s ear, told The Associated Press. “And if Minnesota is any barometer, it’s time for the focus to be on deporting as many Muslims as possible.”

    Such advice is at odds with a growing faction of prominent voices across American culture.

    Who is speaking out?

    Joe Rogan, a leading podcast host who endorsed Trump during his comeback campaign, said he sympathizes with concerns about immigration agents’ tactics.

    “Are we really going to be the Gestapo?” Rogan said. “’Where’s your papers?’ Is that what we’ve come to?”

    Over the weekend, more than 60 corporate executives, including the leaders of Target, Best Buy and UnitedHealth, released a public letter calling for de-escalation following the death of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old Veterans Affairs nurse fatally shot during a confrontation with federal agents.

    The outcry intensified as the week progressed.

    Apple CEO Tim Cook on Tuesday issued a memo to employees saying he was “heartbroken by the events in Minneapolis.”

    “I believe America is strongest when we live up to our highest ideals, when we treat everyone with dignity and respect no matter who they are or where they’re from, and when we embrace our shared humanity,” Cook wrote in the memo, first reported by Bloomberg News.

    Tech billionaire and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla used stronger language on social media to condemn “macho ICE vigilantes running amuck.”

    Jason Calacanis, a prominent tech podcaster, on Wednesday warned of dire consequences for Trump if he does not make sweeping changes among the people running the immigration crackdown.

    “President Trump needs to replace them all and reverse his plummeting ratings, or the entire Trump 2.0 agenda is over,” Calacanis wrote to his 1 million X followers. “America needs to put this dark and disgusting chapter behind us and unite behind a crisper immigration policy.”

    Actors and musicians speak up

    More outrage came from the entertainment industry, which is often viewed as a liberal bastion.

    Springsteen dropped his new song, “The Streets of Minneapolis,” on Wednesday. The famed musician referenced Pretti’s death directly.

    “Trump’s federal thugs beat up on his face and his chest. Then we heard the gunshots. And Alex Pretti lay in the snow, dead,” Springsteen sings.

    Other actors and entertainers who spoke out in recent days include Natalie Portman, Elijah Wood, Olivia Rodrigo and Billie Eilish. Actor Mark Ruffalo described Pretti’s death as “cold-blooded murder.”

    The sports world has also begun to engage.

    Minnesota Timberwolves head coach Chris Finch called the shootings “unconscionable” and expressed support for protesters. So did superstar NBA player Steph Curry.

    “There’s a lot of change that needs to happen,” Curry, who plays for the Golden State Warriors, told reporters this week. He said he’s been glued to news coverage of the latest Minnesota shooting.

    Guerschon Yabusele, of the New York Knicks, went further the day after Pretti’s shooting.

    “I can’t remain silent. What’s happening is beyond comprehension,” he wrote on X. “We’re talking about murders here, these are serious matters. The situation must change, the government must stop operating in this way. I stand with Minnesota.”

    Trump may be getting the message

    Trump appears to be softening his tone on immigration — at least by his standards.

    “We’re going to de-escalate a little bit,” he said during a Tuesday interview on Fox News. He also chided Bovino, whom he displaced from his role.

    “Bovino is very good, but he’s a pretty out-there kind of a guy,” he said. “In some cases, that’s good. Maybe it wasn’t good here.”

    But Trump pushed back on the characterization that he was scaling back his operations in Minnesota. And in a social media post, he warned Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey that he was “PLAYING WITH FIRE” by refusing to enforce federal immigration laws.

    Even before Pretti’s death Saturday, public opinion was starting to turn against Trump on immigration, which was among his strongest issues at the beginning of his second term.

    Just 38% of U.S. adults approve of how Trump is handling immigration, down from 49% in March. That’s according to an AP-NORC poll conducted Jan. 8-11, shortly after the first shooting death of a U.S. citizen in Minnesota.

    There’s also some indication that Trump’s approval on immigration could be slipping among Republicans. The president’s approval among self-described Republicans fell from 88% in March to 76% in the January AP-NORC poll.

    A separate Fox News poll, which was conducted Friday through Monday, found that 59% of voters described ICE as “too aggressive,” a 10-point increase since last July.

    ___

    AP writer Linley Sanders in Washington contributed.

    [ad_2]

    Steve Peoples, The Associated Press

    Source link