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      Jonathan Majors Settles Assault and Defamation Lawsuit by Ex-Girlfriend

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      Mr. Majors was criminally convicted last year of assaulting and harassing Grace Jabbari, who then sued him in March.The actor Jonathan Majors and his ex-girlfriend Grace Jabbari have settled the assault and defamation lawsuit that she filed against him in March, a lawyer for Ms. Jabbari announced on Friday.Mr. Majors, a formerly ascendant Hollywood star known for his work in “Creed III” and “The Last Black Man in San Francisco,” was criminally convicted last year of assaulting and harassing Ms. Jabbari, a British dancer and movement coach who was his girlfriend for two years. In April, he was sentenced to probation and a year of domestic violence counseling.The civil suit, which was filed in the Southern District of New York, was dropped in a court filing on Thursday by lawyers for both sides. The lawsuit said Mr. Majors had been violent toward Ms. Jabbari in New York, Los Angeles and London, including in one instance that left her with a head injury. It also said that he had repeatedly threatened to kill her.“Grace Jabbari has exhibited tremendous courage throughout this very long and difficult process,” her lawyer, Brittany Henderson, said in a statement. “As a result of her commitment to justice, the lawsuit that she filed against Jonathan Majors has been favorably settled. We hope that she can finally put this chapter behind her and move forward with her head held high.”Terms of the settlement were not disclosed.A lawyer for Mr. Majors did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In an interview after Mr. Majors’s criminal conviction, the actor told ABC, speaking of Ms. Jabbari, that “I was reckless with her heart, not with her body.” He added, “My hands have never struck a woman.”Ms. Jabbari’s lawsuit said that his interview was part of what it called “an extensive media campaign smearing” her. His goal, the suit said, was “convincing the world that Grace is not a victim of domestic abuse.”In February, in an article in The New York Times, two other previous girlfriends of Mr. Majors accused him of being controlling and emotionally abusive, and one accused him of being physically violent. Mr. Majors denied that he physically abused anyone.After Mr. Majors was convicted, Marvel Studios parted ways with the actor, who had been the villain Kang the Conqueror in “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” with plans to reprise that role. Over the summer, Mr. Majors was cast as the lead in an independent movie, his first role since the conviction. More

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      6 New Documentaries Our Critics Are Talking About This Week

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      Whether you’re a casual viewer or certified fan of the genre, our reviewers think these documentaries are worth knowing about.Critic’s pickRevisiting a life through photographs.Sheila Turner Seed in the documentary “A Photographic Memory.”Capariva Films‘A Photographic Memory’Rachel Elizabeth Seed’s mother, Sheila Turner Seed, died when she was 42 and Rachel was 18 months old. In this documentary, she seeks to connect with her mother through her photography.From our review:It’s a film that captures the unsettling sensation of reaching middle age, knowing the length of the road ahead is uncertain but certainly shorter than it’s ever been, and not being able to see past the age your parent was upon death.In theaters. Read the full review.Critic’s pickReviving the story of an apartheid photographer.A photograph by Ernest Cole, as seen in a new a documentary directed by Raoul Peck.Ernest Cole/Magnolia Pictures ‘Ernest Cole: Lost and Found’The South African apartheid photographer Ernest Cole died in 1990 in Manhattan after he was exiled — this documentary, directed by Raoul Peck, reviews some of the photos featured in his 1967 photo book “House of Bondage.”From our review:Peck makes use of keen observations excerpted from Cole’s writings and moves fluidly between stills (compassionate toward their subjects, damning of the subjugators) as well as quietly captivating photos he took of street life in Harlem and rural life during a road trip to the South in the 1960s and ’70s. The result is an elegantly wrought documentary that pulls off the trick of leaving viewers sated yet also craving more.In theaters. Read the full review.Critic’s pickObserving the making of a Jewish identity.Amichai Lau-Lavie, the subject of the documentary “Sabbath Queen.”Simcha Leib Productions/Roco Films‘Sabbath Queen’Directed by Sandi DuBowski, this film follows the story of Amichai Lau-Lavie, an Israel-born gay man who was ordained as a rabbi in 2016.From our review:How he went from the Radical Faeries’ joyous, transgressive vision of queerness — which led to creating his drag alter ego, Rebbetzin Hadassah Gross — to embracing Conservative Judaism is the subject of Sandi DuBowski’s fascinating look at the act of questioning yourself and your family, your surroundings and your decisions.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 Fleeting Comforts of the Celebrity Look-Alike Contest

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      It may be a coincidence that the celebrity look-alike competition returned to prominence just as American citizens were voting in what some called “the most significant presidential election in our lifetimes.” But once it happened, the appeal was obvious. Here was a different kind of democratic event: a totally insignificant one, in which attractive men with slightly off-kilter features were lined up in public and ranked by the roaring crowd.At the first contest, which convened a flock of Timothée Chalamet doubles in Manhattan last month, the New York Police Department showed up, deemed it an “unscheduled demonstration” and arrested four people. It was, in fact, only the police presence that made the event feel anything like a protest — as if the crowd were truly fighting for the right to be meaningless and absurd.In the coming weeks, as President-elect Trump revved up for his second term, doppelgängers were crowned of Jeremy Allen White in Chicago, Paul Mescal in Dublin, Dev Patel in San Francisco and Harry Styles in London. It was as if each city were electing its boyfriend. It all provided a populist diversion, though one with diminishing returns.These events have been comforting in their modesty. They are typically publicized with posters on lampposts, staged in public parks and accompanied by meager prizes. The Mescal double won 20 euro “or three pints”; the White winner received $50 and a pack of Marlboro Reds.Despite the stingy rewards, the contestants are frequently impressive — men seizing a long-awaited opportunity to put a useless talent to work. Each contest unfolds like a human scavenger hunt. The winner is a kind of modern Cinderella, the one unsung city boy who happens to slip perfectly into a fuzzy Willy Wonka hat or the blue chef’s apron worn by the star of “The Bear.”Part of what makes the searches feel pleasantly trivial is that they center on male celebrities (though not all of the contestants have been men). A Zendaya look-alike contest held in Oakland, Calif., this week is the rare exception. The public ranking of women risks activating an ugly history; it makes the apolitical political again. But also: Mimicking Hollywood femininity may require a degree of effort that intensifies the proceedings. The contest could inspire feats of makeup application, hairstyling, boob tape. The masculine look-alike, on the other hand, must simply exist. He’s just waiting to be discovered.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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      Creating New Cinematic Languages, Without Words

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      “Flow” is the latest dialogue-free animated film to look to movement and sound to express its characters’ emotions.Like Noah’s Ark minus the humans, a vessel carrying an odd bunch of creatures is afloat after a flood in the immersive computer-animated film “Flow.” Led by a black cat, the group faces the dangers of nature together, often struggling to get along yet communicating entirely without dialogue.It’s the second wordless feature from the Latvian filmmaker Gints Zilbalodis, who argues that animation is more expressive than live action.“You can use that expressiveness to convey things usually said with words,” he said in a recent video interview.We see how the animals behave — including a stoic capybara, a cheerful dog, a regal secretary bird and a rambunctious lemur — Zilbalodis added, and that’s our way into understanding the characters.The winner of the audience award at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, the world’s most prominent event for the medium, “Flow” is now the Latvian Oscar entry for best international feature film, a category for films not in English — an ironic designation, given that it’s a wordless fable.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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      Mohammad Rasoulof Had to Escape Iran to Finish His Most Daring Film Yet

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      In the early months of 2024, a few weeks into the shooting of his new film, “The Seed of the Sacred Fig,” Mohammad Rasoulof learned that his lawyers received a letter. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Court had processed his case, composed of several charges against his previous movies and activism, and sentenced him to eight years in prison. Rasoulof asked his lawyers how much time he had before the authorities took him in. The process of filing an appeal, they told him, could take up to two months. He still had some time.Rasoulof and his team worked around the clock on shooting and postproduction. Another call came in. The court had rejected the appeal, and his eight-year sentence was to start immediately. To make an example of him, his lawyers warned, government agents would probably storm his house in the middle of the night, handcuff him and take him to jail.Rasoulof had to make the most difficult decision of his life. He was always determined to live and work in Iran, which had been a wellspring of inspiration throughout his filmmaking career. He had already been arrested in 2010 for shooting a movie about the Green Movement, a period of mass unrest in the wake of the 2009 presidential election, which he never finished. He was sent to jail for seven months in 2022 after signing a petition that was critical of the government. So he didn’t fear being in prison, and he felt no urge to flee from regime interrogators and torturers. If anything, those encounters had provided fodder for his work. Yet this time was different. Already confronted with the likelihood that he would have to serve at least five years of his eight-year sentence, Rasoulof expected that the court would probably open a new case once it learned about “Sacred Fig,” which he was shooting in secret, without the appropriate approvals. Serving five years, plus whatever the latest charges would yield, would surely end his career. So Rasoulof decided to leave Iran.He had learned, from another inmate during one of his prison stints, about a network of people who specialized in helping persecuted citizens escape Iran. When Rasoulof contacted them, they advised him to leave everything behind, including his electronic devices and IDs, throw some clothes in a backpack and meet them in a town near Tehran.Rasoulof was taken to a hiding place and, from there, driven on a side road to another city. After a few days of traveling along abandoned roads, he reached a small village on the border. He stayed in a small room for a few days, preparing for the final leg of his journey, which involved a hike over the mountains into a neighboring country. The villagers, who had met many people in his circumstances, suspected he was important because the network regularly checked in about his well-being. For the villagers, harboring such an escapee entailed more risk, which meant more pay. When it was time for Rasoulof to depart, they refused to release him.Astonished by this turn of events, members of the network negotiated a deal with the villagers. At midnight, he was delivered to a spot in the middle of nowhere. It was so dark he couldn’t see anything. Money changed hands, and he was returned to the people he hired to smuggle him out of the country. They then took him to another border village, from which the passage to the neighboring country was longer and more treacherous.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 Complexities of Fighting for Democracy

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      “Night Is Not Eternal,” which follows the Cuban activist Rosa María Payá, is the rare nuanced political documentary that is likely to challenge every viewer’s perspective.If you’ve watched a lot of political documentaries, especially those that deal with American politics, I think you’ll agree with me on this: Many, if not most, are overly simplistic. It’s just hard to explain the current social and cultural moment, or adequately chronicle the rise of a controversial figure, in a couple of hours. Most often I find they fall along ideological lines with easy answers, rarely challenging partisan orthodoxies or prodding the viewer into new mental territory.“Night Is Not Eternal” (streaming on Max) is not one of those films. The movie’s director, Nanfu Wang, has spent her career making truly provocative documentaries, often about her homeland of China. Her first feature, “Hooligan Sparrow,” about Chinese human rights activists, resulted in Wang herself being surveilled by the government. In “One Child Nation,” she explored the ramifications of China’s one-child policy. “In the Same Breath,” about governmental response to the start of the Covid-19 pandemic both in Wuhan and in the United States, finds uncomfortable similarities between the two.Wang’s films often blend personal experience with broader political and social critique, and her newest does the same. Wang emigrated to the United States in 2011, and her political perspective is informed by firsthand experience of both Chinese and American public rhetoric. That lends an outside-the-box point of view to “Night Is Not Eternal,” which on its face is a film about the Cuban activist Rosa María Payá, whom Wang met at a film festival years ago. Payá’s father, the anti-authoritarian activist Oswaldo Payá, died in 2012 in a suspicious car crash, declared by official Cuban state TV to be an accident (an account later refuted by a report from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights). His daughter took up his fight as her own.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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      Jon M. Chu Waited 20 Years for the Chance to Direct ‘Wicked’

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      On a recent morning, Jon M. Chu was in his office in the Toluca Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, describing what it was like to direct “Defying Gravity,” the thrilling finale of his forthcoming adaptation of “Wicked.” In the Broadway version of the scene, the green-hued Elphaba, a.k.a. the Wicked Witch of the West, rises above the stage atop a huge platform, its mechanical guts hidden behind an enormous black cape. Onstage, the effect is showstopping.In Chu’s version, however, Elphaba really flies, crashing through windows and barnstorming Oz. “We’re whipping her around with C.G. monkeys and C.G. backgrounds on a physical set,” Chu said. The Wizard’s guards are rushing in, the wind is blasting, and Cynthia Erivo, who plays Elphaba, is performing the signature song live, “even though I said she didn’t have to.”“That scene took all of us,” Chu said. “But without Cynthia, who is just a powerhouse, it would have been all for nothing.”Directing a film adaptation of “Wicked” would be a plum assignment for any fan of American musicals. Since its debut in 2003, “Wicked” has become one of Broadway’s most beloved shows, winning three Tonys and playing to more than 63 million people worldwide, from London’s West End to Tokyo. So how did Chu, who’s done lots of movies with music, but not a whole lot of musicals, get the gig? “I really am a newbie in the musical world,” he admitted. “So I feel like I’m living the theater kid’s dream.”Scenes from a career: Chu’s credits include, clockwise from top left, “Justin Bieber: Never Say Never,” “Step Up 2 the Streets,” “In the Heights” and “Crazy Rich Asians.”Indeed, Chu, 45, has been a lover of musicals dating to his earliest days. As a boy, he regularly saw shows in San Francisco and grew up on a steady diet of film musicals, including “The Sound of Music” (“That was on all the time in our house”) and “Singin’ in the Rain.” An early viewing of “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” the 1942 George M. Cohan biopic, inspired the young fan to start signing his name “Jon M. Chu,” in tribute.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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      ‘Spellbound’ Review: Borrowed Wonder

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      Any magic this animated musical has feels distinctly, almost insultingly poached.Princess Ellian, heir to the throne of Lumbria, has a problem: A year earlier, her parents, traveling through the Dark Forest of Eternal Darkness, fell under a curse. That sort of thing happens when you’re passing through a wood “so dark they named it twice” — but let’s not cast blame. The curse transformed the king and queen into roaring, rampaging monsters. They can’t comprehend much or speak, but they can be distracted with chew toys.Ellian (voiced by Rachel Zegler), now 15, has assumed their duties and, along with two government ministers (Jenifer Lewis and John Lithgow), helped hide news of the metamorphosis from Lumbrians at large. She hopes that somewhere, deep under her parents’ new scales and feathers, the minds of the king and queen are still there. So, too, may viewers of “Spellbound” occasionally sense the enchantment zones of their brains lighting up, more as a reflexive response to dim memories of past animated features than as a genuine reaction to the derivative pastiche onscreen.The movie, directed by Vicky Jenson, one of the filmmakers behind “Shrek,” has assembled all the standard ingredients: fairy tale trappings; a treacherous, “Oz”-ian journey across a mystical land; wizard types voiced by Broadway pros (Nathan Lane and Tituss Burgess), for comic relief; and would-be earworms by Alan Menken and Glenn Slater that are catchy in the moment but that you might struggle to hum afterward. Lithgow’s “I Could Get Used to This,” an “Under the Sea”-style showstopper that his character sings after swapping bodies with Ellian’s purple rodent pet, is an exception.It isn’t fair to say that “Spellbound” lacks musical or visual invention. Zegler can belt out a song, and the evil storm that transmogrified the royals is pleasingly lo-fi. (It looks like a scribble-scrabble twister.) But the magic feels distinctly, almost insultingly poached. Ellian rides with her friends on giant, flying cats (shades of “The Neverending Story” and “How to Train Your Dragon”). The idea of emotions made physically manifest is a concept that animated features have used quite recently (“Inside Out,” “Soul”). The oracles played by Lane and Burgess, who argue about having traded in multiple wands for a universal fob, engage in the sort of self-conscious riffing that has become a de facto requirement of family filmmaking.The king and queen eventually find their voices — one assumes that Javier Bardem and Nicole Kidman, reunited from “Being the Ricardos,” were well-paid for what sounds like swift work — but even flurries of excitement, like an escape over a quicksand desert, can’t shake the sense that “Spellbound” has been consciously designed to play things safe. One of its big numbers is called “The Way It Was Before,” words that sound suspiciously like a mission statement.SpellboundRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More