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Hamdan Ballal was assaulted by masked attackers in his home village in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, witnesses said. The Israeli military said he had been detained for questioning.A Palestinian director of the Oscar-winning documentary “No Other Land” was beaten bloody near his home by Israeli settlers and detained by the Israeli authorities in the occupied West Bank on Monday evening, witnesses said.The director, Hamdan Ballal, was set upon in Susya, his home village, by at least 20 masked people, mostly teenagers armed with rocks, sticks and knives, according to Joseph Kaplan Weinger, 26, who said he had come upon the attack after it began. Mr. Weinger is part of a volunteer initiative that provides protection in areas vulnerable to settler violence.It was not clear what prompted the attack, but Mr. Weinger, who is also a doctoral student in sociology at the University of California in Los Angeles, said the group had descended on Susya, which is south of Hebron, and assaulted West Bank residents as they were breaking the fast during the holy Muslim month of Ramadan. Some mockingly shouted holiday blessings as they did so, he said.Mr. Weinger said that he began honking the car horn in an attempt to alert nearby Israeli soldiers to the attack, but that the Israeli forces prevented him and two companions from reaching Mr. Ballal’s home.“Soldiers just stood around,” he said. “Later, when we got there, we saw his blood on the ground.”Mr. Ballal, 37, was one of three Palestinians detained, according to witnesses and the Israeli military. Leah Zemel, a lawyer representing the detainees, said that she had been informed that they were being held in a military center for medical treatment ahead of questioning, but that she did not know the reason for their detention.The Israeli military said in a statement that “several terrorists” had hurled rocks at Israeli citizens, damaging their vehicles near Susya and prompting a “violent confrontation” that involved “mutual rock hurling between Palestinians and Israelis.” The military said that when its forces and the police arrived, “terrorists” threw rocks at them.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

“The Lion King,” first released as an animated film in 1994, has spawned multiple adaptations and sequels, including Julie Taymor’s 1997 Broadway production and a soundtrack companion album by Beyoncé for the 2019 computer-enhanced movie version. The plot of the story, about a young lion finding his place in the world, has been compared to which play by William Shakespeare? More

Sasha Stone, who has been covering awards season since the ’90s, has recast herself as a voice against what she perceives as the industry’s liberal status quo.Earlier this month Sasha Stone watched the Oscars alone at her home in a town outside Los Angeles. For someone who has spent more than two decades as one of the premier chroniclers of awards season, it was a notably unglamorous way to take in the ceremony. But she was thrilled that “Anora,” the frantic story of a New York stripper’s romance with a young Russian man, took top honors as part of a historic haul.Stone believed the film had the virtue of not pushing a partisan agenda, which has become one of the top criteria for her when judging a movie. When she made her name as an Oscars blogger, Stone believes she fit neatly into the Hollywood status quo and the brand of liberalism it represented — often onscreen. She says now she sees the error of her old ways, even if she continues to understand the old ways better than conservatives who were never part of that world.“Here is where I run into problems with the right,” Stone said in an interview the day after the ceremony. “They’re never going to give any credit to the Oscars or Hollywood. I knew the script was going to be, ‘The Oscars suck,’ and I was going to have to stand apart from that.”Stone’s advice to the right: Take the win. And after some Monday-morning carping, it collectively did. The ceremony drew praise from conservatives for its largely apolitical content (just one brief comment about President Trump by the host, Conan O’Brien) and for Kieran Culkin’s acceptance speech, in which he publicly asked his wife for more kids — “relatable to any middle-American,” said a Daily Caller writer.Mikey Madison in the Oscar-winning “Anora,” a favorite of Stone’s. NeonStone, 60, is that increasingly familiar figure in conservative life: an apostate from the mainstream, in recovery from her earlier liberalism. During the 2010s, as popular culture appeared to be moving to the left, she had been out in front, celebrating pathbreaking Oscar winners like “Moonlight” and “Parasite.” She also publicly supported Democrats including Hillary Clinton and Joseph R. Biden Jr.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

It is the sort of buzzy production that was once a staple of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Tennessee Williams’s “A Streetcar Named Desire,” with its Oscar-nominated lead man, Paul Mescal, has people clamoring for tickets to BAM’s production this month.The excitement recalls a period when the performing arts center consistently drew crowds to see imports like the Royal Shakespeare Company or cutting-edge work by directors like Peter Brook, composers like Philip Glass or choreographers like Pina Bausch and Martha Graham.Over the past decade, though, critics say the academy’s pioneering triumphs have been scarcer, the schedule thinner and the productions more modest.BAM’s financial condition, while improving, is still fragile. In the five years ending in June 2024, the staff declined by more than a third, the endowment lost ground and its nearly $52 million operating budget is still smaller than it was 10 years ago.“Their inability to drive revenues and manage cost escalation makes it harder to pursue their artistic mission,” Declan Webb, a consultant to nonprofit arts organizations, said in a recent interview. “You have to do less and you’re much more risk-averse and that is not a recipe for artistic growth.”In 2016, Mikhail Baryshnikov appeared in “Letter to a Man,” based on the diaries of Vaslav Nijinsky, the dancer, and directed by Robert Wilson.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe 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

Disney knew that remaking “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” as a live-action musical would be treacherous.But the studio was feeling cocky.It was 2019, and Disney was minting money at the box office by “reimagining” animated classics like “Aladdin,” “Beauty and the Beast” and “The Jungle Book” as movies with real actors. The remakes also made bedrock characters like Cinderella newly relevant. Heroines defined by ideas from another era — be pretty, and things might work out! — were empowered. Casting emphasized diversity.Why not tackle Snow White?Over the decades, Disney had tried to modernize her story — to make her more than a damsel in distress, one prized as “the fairest of them all” because of her “white as snow” skin. Twice, starting in the early 2000s, screenwriters had been unable to crack it, at least not to the satisfaction of an image-conscious Disney.“Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” which premiered in 1937, posed other remake challenges, including how to sensitively handle Happy, Sneezy, Sleepy, Dopey, Bashful, Grumpy and Doc. (One stalled Disney reboot had reimagined the dwarfs as kung fu fighters in China.)Still, Disney executives were determined to figure it out. They had some new ideas. More important, the remake gravy train needed to keep running.“It’s going to be amazing, another big win,” Bob Chapek, then Disney’s chief executive, said of a live-action “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” at a 2022 fan convention.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

When Wes Anderson was just starting out and wanted to reshoot some scenes for his 1996 debut “Bottle Rocket,” the rookie director got a shock. Columbia Pictures had sent all the movie’s props off to a store, which had then sold them for next to nothing.So when he made his next movie, “Rushmore” (1998), Anderson decided the same thing would never happen again. He put everything into an S.U.V. when the shoot was over, then drove the hoard away to look after it himself.That decision ended up helping not just Anderson himself. Over the past two-and-a-half years, curators at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris and the Design Museum in London trawled Anderson’s storage facility in Kent, England — which contains thousands of items from his movies — to compile a museum retrospective of the director’s work.The show opened at the Cinémathèque Française this week, where it runs though July 27. It will transfer, expanded, to the Design Museum in the fall.Max Fischer’s Academy uniform from “Rushmore.”The fur coat worn by Margot Tenenbaum in “The Royal Tenenbaums.”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

Contains spoilers about past episodes but not the Season 2 finale.In “Severance,” the Apple TV+ series about a shadowy company where some employees have their consciousness split into two parts, with the “innie” doing all the work and the “outie” remembering none of it, the office is sparse and lifeless.The show reinforces that theme with its cinematography and production design. Here are some of the ways “Severance” invokes and inverts classic film tricks to create its corporate hell.IsolationRepetition Removes IndividualityFrom the earliest days of moving images, filmmakers have used the rigid geometry of desks and cubicles and dense repetition to create images of people together, yet isolated, trapped and stripped of identity by corporate bosses.Films like “The Apartment,” from 1960 (below, top left), and even Pixar’s 2004 animated movie “The Incredibles” (top right) use these repetitive shots to suggest a corporate mass that takes away individual identities to instead create “company men,” said Jill Levinson, a professor at Babson College and the author of “The American Success Myth on Film.”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

The French director Alain Guiraudie’s latest film, a bent kind of murder mystery, presents life at its basest and gamiest.In “Misericordia,” a rakish youngish guy named Jérémie drives back to a French village for the funeral of his old boss, a baker, who has kicked the bucket at 62. And the instant the widow lets Jérémie (Félix Kysyl) into the living room, he and the baker’s adult son, Vincent (Jean-Baptiste Durand), a mushroom forager, share the sort of charged eye contact that tells you “Yup, these two definitely did it.” We don’t know when or how far things went. Something happened, though. But because “Misericordia” (Latin for “mercy”) has wafted from the cauldron of the writer and director Alain Guiraudie, it’s possible I’m wrong.Ambiguity? Mixed motives? Casual lawlessness? These are his considerable strengths. “Misericordia” culminates in kink, killing and some gloriously literal deus ex machina. So maybe what I’m experiencing as an erotic charge is caution. But again: it’s Guiraudie, the man who brought us the 2014 murder-at-the-gay-nude-beach sensation “Stranger by the Lake” and a bedroom farce (“Nobody’s Hero,” 2023) whose component parts included racism, terrorism, sex work, domestic violence, paranoia, jogging and vaping. The caution is erotic.His movies, meanwhile, prove absorbingly absurdist, this new one especially. It’s got its own rhythm. If Guiraudie isn’t mocking the way we’ve been trained to receive stories, films, people, then he’s at least disrupting the usual patterns. Retraining us to see anew, to suspend expectation and abandon comfort, the way that John Waters and Mike Leigh, Aki Kaurismaki, Hal Hartley and the other oddball live-action cartoonists have. It’s risky, but something thrilling and often true usually comes of it.Guiraudie presents life at its basest and gamiest. So I trust my instincts about Jérémie and Vincent. I know hunger when I see it. And “Misericordia” is dotted with hungry eyes. Jérémie stays the night at the widow’s. The room she offers is the one Vincent grew up in, maybe the room where It Happened. Jérémie and Vincent even make the bed together. But rekindling’s not on the program. Regression, maybe. The bed all made, Vincent — who’s pushing 40, is bald, and has a lisp and a cleft lip — suggests playing some Yahtzee, like they used to. Jérémie declines.From there, reunion curdles into disunion. And the homecoming movie you might have been wanting becomes the funkier tale of a sociopath who opts to overstay his welcome. Jérémie doesn’t get up to much: the occasional drive around town, a walk in the forest, some horseplay with Vincent on the forest floor where he should be foraging for mushrooms. What does he want? The late baker’s clothes, for one thing; his shoes, too. The widow, Martine (Catherine Frot), seems super OK with that. She doesn’t even appear to mind the probability that Jérémie’s list of infatuations likely included her husband. They flip through a photo album together and admire how good the dead man looked in a Speedo. (They’re not wrong.)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