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      Iranian Film at South by Southwest London Offers a Dose of Hope

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      Amirali Navaee’s new film, “Sunshine Express,” screening next at South by Southwest London, is a project more focused on hope than politics.For the Iranian writer and director Amirali Navaee, portraying his country is not about depicting sadness and tragedy, which he feels has come to define the onscreen portrayal of his home in recent years.Iranian filmmakers have been as much in the news as their films have been over the past decade. The writer and director Mohammad Rasoulof fled Iran last year after being sentenced to eight years in prison while finishing “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” which tells the story of a family torn apart by protests that were violently crushed by the Iranian government in 2022-23. His harrowing journey has been well-documented, and the film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last year, with Rasoulof in attendance, where it received a special award from the competition jury. It was later nominated for best international feature at the Academy Awards.The Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, whose films “A Separation” (2012) and “The Salesman” (2017) both won Oscars for best international feature, refused to attend the Academy Awards the second time he won in protest over President Trump’s executive order that blocked entry of citizens from Iran and several other predominantly Muslim countries to the United States.And “Un Simple Accident,” from the Iranian writer-director Jafar Panahi, was awarded the Palme d’Or at Cannes last month. Panahi has been imprisoned several times in Iran because of his work but has continued to make movies in defiance of the Iranian government.“Sunshine Express” tells the story of people in a role-playing game who hope to win a cash prize.Distorted PicturesFor his first feature-length film, Navaee (pronounced nah-vah-YEE), who is also a choreographer and visual artist, said he wanted to express something more complex and less overtly political than other Iranian films. The project, “Sunshine Express,” debuted in February at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and is making its British premiere at South by Southwest London on Wednesday. Shot in a warehouse in Tehran on a small budget (Navaee, 42, said many of his friends helped finance the movie), it tells the story of people in a role-playing game on a train headed to a place called Hermia in the hopes of winning a cash prize.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Russell Brand Pleads Not Guilty to Rape and Sexual Assault Charges

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      The comedian, actor and YouTuber is now scheduled to face a trial in June 2026.Russell Brand, the comedian, actor and conspiracy-minded YouTuber, appeared in a London courthouse on Friday and pleaded not guilty to multiple charges of rape and sexual assault.In a short hearing, Tony Baumgartner, the presiding judge, said that Mr. Brand would face a four-to-five-week trial starting on June 3, 2026. Britain’s judicial system has a backlog of cases, meaning there is often a delay between defendants entering a plea and standing trial.Mr. Brand, 49, is facing one charge of rape, one of oral rape, two counts of sexual assault and another of indecent assault.Those five charges involve four women. Prosecutors say the incidents occurred between 1999 and 2005, including one in which they claim Mr. Brand raped a woman in a hotel room during a political conference for the Labour Party.During the 10-minute hearing in a courthouse filled with tens of journalists, Mr. Brand, wearing a dark gray suit and striped shirt opened to reveal his chest, stood in a plexiglass box at the back of the courtroom and responded, “Not guilty,” when each of the charges was read out.Under British law, news media outlets are not allowed to identify anyone who makes sexual assault accusations unless the accuser chooses to waive the right to anonymity. Once criminal proceedings are underway, strict rules also prevent the reporting of information about the case that could prejudice a jury at trial.Before Friday’s hearing, Mr. Brand had strenuously denied all the charges. In April, he posted a video to his social media accounts in which he said that he had once been a “drug addict, a sex addict and an imbecile,” but that he had “never engaged in nonconsensual activity.”Mr. Brand has been a star in Britain for decades and found fame with stand-up shows and as a TV and radio host for the BBC and MTV. After the period covered by the criminal charges, he gained a profile in the United States, too, when he starred in hit movies, including “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” in 2008. He was also briefly married to Katy Perry, the pop star.These days, Mr. Brand is best known as a politically charged YouTuber. He has over 6.7 million subscribers to his channel and over 11 million followers on X, where he posts videos that often touch on religion, conspiracy theories and conservative talking points. More

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      When the Whole Country Watched a Nuclear War Movie at Once

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      The 1983 ABC movie “The Day After” was a landmark moment that proved contentious even before it aired, as a new documentary shows.In 1980, the year the new documentary “Television Event” (in theaters) opens, researchers found that about three-quarters of Americans believed there would be nuclear war in the next 10 years. Schoolchildren participated in evacuation drills. There were enough nuclear weapons in America and the Soviet Union to wipe out the world’s population many times over. And yet, as participants in the film repeatedly point out, for the most part people couldn’t bear to think about it. We find it hard to live with our own imminent destruction and also remember to take out the trash regularly.That knowledge, though, gave rise to “The Day After,” the controversial TV movie that aired on ABC in 1983 and was watched by more than 100 million people, about 67 percent of the American viewing public that evening. The film, shot in Lawrence, Kan., depicts the very real-feeling aftermath of a nuclear attack.The production and release were fraught. Some executives felt that TV wasn’t the place to scare people; there was a lot of strife behind the scenes. To tell the story of “The Day After,” the director, Jeff Daniels, weaves together copious behind-the-scenes production footage with contemporary interviews. The “Day After” director, Nicholas Meyer, still seems a little scarred by the experience. Brandon Stoddard, then president of ABC Motion Pictures, talks about conceiving the idea for a movie that “has meaning, that has import.” The more skeptical, practical Stu Samuels, then vice president of ABC Motion Pictures, speaks at length about the many challenges of getting this kind of movie shot and on the air, including run-ins with the network’s standards department. Edward Hume, who wrote “The Day After,” and Stephanie Austin, an associate producer, talk about the film, as does Ellen Anthony, who lived in Lawrence and played the youthful Joleen, a girl who must live in an underground bunker with her family.“Television Event” makes a very compelling case that “The Day After” was a groundbreaking cinematic achievement, even if it was made for the small screen. There were plenty of difficulties, both on the ground and in the edit room; there was network skepticism and even, eventually, some disapproval by the federal government. One flaw in documentaries of this sort can be a chorus of interviewees who all echo one another and seem basically in agreement, but that is not the case here: The subjects of “Television Event” often express skepticism or outright animosity toward one another, giving different versions of events and opinions about the process. That not only makes it a fascinating glimpse into this production, but reminds the audience how tricky it is to get anything made, let alone a movie like “The Day After.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Best True Crime to Stream: Dramatizations That Deliver

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      Across television, film and podcast, here are four picks that successfully give well-known true-crime stories the scripted treatment.Not long ago, comically bad re-enactments were the cornerstone of true-crime movies and TV shows. Despite their cheesiness, these staged scenes served a purpose: to bring scenarios to life, of course, but also to offer some relief from talking-head interviews and still shots of photographs and documents.But in the last decade or so, the number of true-crime stories that have received scripted treatment, often casting A-list actors, has exploded. It’s a phenomenon due in part to Ryan Murphy’s true-crime anthology series “American Crime Story” — which debuted in 2016 and has taken on the O.J. Simpson saga and the assassination of Gianni Versace — and more recently “Monster.”Coming this summer is a Paramount+ mini-series about the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, the child beauty queen who was found strangled to death in her family’s Colorado home in 1996. It will star Melissa McCarthy and Clive Owen as JonBenet’s parents. And over at Hulu, a scripted series about the Murdaugh family murders is being developed. Like their predecessors, these series will most likely aim to hew closely to their stranger-than-fiction origins while giving the creators artistic license in how the cases are brought to life onscreen.Ahead of those, check out these four offerings that give such stories the dramatized treatment to great effect.Mini-Series“The Staircase”Few true-crime stories have held my attention over the years as this one about Michael Peterson, a North Carolina novelist and aspiring politician who was charged with the death of his wife, the telecom executive Kathleen Peterson. She was found crumpled and bleeding at the base of the staircase in their upscale Durham home in 2001.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Mia Threapleton Created Her Deadpan Nun in ‘The Phoenician Scheme’

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      When Mia Threapleton learned that Wes Anderson wanted her to star in his next film, she did what any normal person would: She asked her agent to call the casting director back to make sure there had been no mistake, and then found a quiet spot on the train she was riding in, curled up and sobbed.“I couldn’t believe it,” the 24-year-old British actress said. In Anderson’s latest, “The Phoenician Scheme,” Threapleton plays Sister Liesl, a nun who is estranged from her father, the eccentric businessman Zsa-zsa (Benicio Del Toro). He wants to reconnect and make her his heir.Chic in a white sleeveless top, her long blond hair falling in loose waves around piercing blue eyes, Threapleton was preparing to head to the Cannes Film Festival, where “The Phoenician Scheme” premiered this month. The movie is by far her most prominent role to date — not that you would recognize her in it even if she were a familiar face.“It was a lot,” she said of the I-did-my-makeup-in-a-closet-and-cut-my-hair-with-garden-shears look: blunt brunette bob, garish turquoise eye shadow, bold red lip. But she trusted Anderson because she had long admired his work. She grew up with the director’s stop-motion “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” and his coming-of-age romance, “Moonrise Kingdom,” is a personal favorite.“I remember watching it and thinking, ‘I’d love to be able to do that,’ so then having this opportunity to do that was such a surreal experience,” said Threapleton, who, unlike Sister Liesl, laughs readily and occasionally breaks into a smile that plays up the likeness to her mother, the actress Kate Winslet.Threapleton as Sister Liesl in “The Phoenician Scheme.”TPS Productions/Focus FeaturesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Karate Kid: Legends’ Review: The Student Becomes the Teacher

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      The latest installment to the long-running franchise is a messy entry that tries to throw too many legacies into a blender.“Karate Kid: Legends,” the latest installment to the franchise that spawned from the 1984 team of Ralph Macchio and Pat Morita, a.k.a Mr. Miyagi, certainly shouldn’t come as a surprise. And yet, among the modern crop of revamped movie franchises, it is, in fact, a somewhat bizarre outlier.In many ways, the original film should by all means have become a fond and nostalgic relic of the 1980s, a sleeper hit that almost wholly symbolizes the retrospective cheesiness we project onto that decade. Instead, its remarkably simple story, of a master fighter teaching a kid how to defeat bullies, has retained tremendous staying power, spawning, across decades, several sequels and reboots, a Netflix spinoff show and now a revamp merging its past iterations.As if fully aware of the humble and ultimately thin material for another franchise restart, “Legends” tries to make practically three movies in one, tossing all of its legacies into a blender that’s powered more by Macchio and Jackie Chan’s names than anything else.Adhering to its blueprint, “Legends,” directed by Jonathan Entwistle, starts with a kid traveling to a new city, falling in love with a girl and facing a violent bully. Li (Ben Wang) is a martial arts student in Beijing, studying under his Uncle Han (Chan), until his mom (Ming-Na Wen) moves them to New York City. While there, Li quickly takes a liking to Mia (Sadie Stanley), much to the chagrin of Conor (Aramis Knight), a vicious karate student who begins harassing Li. But rather than learning how to fight off Conor, Li instead trains Mia’s father, Victor (Joshua Jackson), who enters a boxing tournament to pay off his debts to a local thug (who is also Conor’s karate teacher).That’s all in the first two-thirds of the film. In the latter third, Jackson disappears entirely, Li must prepare for his own fight tournament, and Chan and Macchio are clumsily looped in, as if the film suddenly remembered who was on its poster. What we end up with is a “Karate Kid” movie with three teachers, two students in two tournaments and many training montages.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Tornado’ Review: She Wants Revenge

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      In the title role, the singer-songwriter Koki is both charming and indomitable as she goes after a band of thieves led by Sugarman (Tim Roth).This crackling movie begins with what some might take for a bit of misdirection: a quotation from a poem by Arseny Tarkovsky, the father of the great filmmaker Andrei. “I would readily pay with my life / For a safe place with constant warmth / Were it not that life’s flying needle / Leads me on through the world like a thread.”Given that the movie concerns Tornado, a young swordswoman who has to make her way through a hostile British countryside after wastrels kill her father, one might wonder what Tarkovsky has to do with it. But first consider the statement rather than its origin.Tornado (Koki) has been touring with her samurai father (Takehiro Hira) through rural England, performing a charming puppet show. An initially prankish bit of business involving two sacks of stolen gold gets the duo in big trouble with a pack of thieves led by Sugarman (Tim Roth).The writer-director John Maclean, who deftly played with genre in his 2015 feature debut “Slow West,” is similarly sure-handed here. The movie quickly establishes itself as a revenge narrative, and each bad guy goes down in a way designed to suit the viewer’s justified bloodlust.In the title role, the singer-songwriter Koki is both charming and indomitable; when she announces “I am Tornado,” you feel your internal applause sign light up. And Nathan Malone, who plays the little boy following Tornado as she eludes the bad guys, is reminiscent of the nervy star of Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Ivan’s Childhood.”TornadoRated R for lots of violence, some raw language. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Ghost Trail’ Review: A Cat and Mouse Thriller

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      A hypnotizing Adam Bessa anchors this tale about a Syrian refugee living in France who believes he has found the man who tortured him.The fuzzy line between justice-seeking and vengeful vigilantism is by now a common staple of the crime thriller, casting a dark shadow of moral ambiguity over even the most righteous crusades. Jonathan Millet’s “Ghost Trail” takes a mostly conventional approach to this blueprint, in which a protagonist loses their head (and their humanity), but it offers a novel context: the Syrian refugee crisis.Hamid (a hypnotizing Adam Bessa), a former literature professor, was imprisoned and tortured under the authoritarian Assad regime — which was toppled in 2024, with the end of the 13-year presidency of Bashar al-Assad. We meet the somber Hamid in Strasbourg — at the border of France and Germany — scouring refugee centers and questioning other Syrian refugees about the figure in a blurry photograph, whom he claims is a relative.Bessa’s brooding performance, which conveys devastating inner struggles without appearing clichéd, adds to the mystery of this first act. Millet keeps his cards close, slowly and inventively revealing the stakes. From the point-of-view of a computer game, in which a soldier runs aimlessly around a desert battlefield, we hear Hamid conversing in code with other users whom we soon realize are members of a clandestine group seeking to bring down Syrian war criminals in hiding. Though Hamid has never seen his torturer’s face, he knows his smell and voice — and he’s convinced that a man studying at the nearby university (Tawfeek Barhom) is the same guy.The cat-and-mouse game, which involves Hamid tracking his suspect throughout campus, plays out in a relatively low-key manner, with the film relying on Bessa (and eventually, an eerie Barhom) to deepen the survivor’s dilemma. Hamid’s calls with his mother, who is living in a refugee camp in Beirut, and his hapless flirtations with another Syrian refugee working at a laundromat, remind him that he’s meant to start a new life in Europe. He has this in common with Barhom’s student, which adds a provocative, more cerebral undercurrent to the film’s portrait of modern immigration. What is lost by forgetting the past? What is gained?Ghost TrailNot rated. In Arabic, French, English and Turkish with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters. More