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      Priyanka Chopra Jonas Is OK Sitting With Idris Elba and John Cena

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      A scene in their new movie “Heads of State” involved a car chase and close quarters. “It was the smallest space for the two biggest guys I’ve ever worked with,” she said.Priyanka Chopra Jonas gets a kick out of action — the stylistic long shots, the slow-motion explosions, the stunts.And if there are a couple of hilarious sparring partners in the mix, all the better.In her new film “Heads of State,” which begins streaming on Prime Video on July 2, Chopra Jonas plays Noel Bisset, an MI6 operative on a mission to rescue the prime minister of Britain (Idris Elba) and the president of the United States (John Cena) from a global menace.After starring in shows like “Citadel” and “Quantico,” “I trust myself when it comes to action, and I get to do some really fun things,” she said. “I love learning from the stunt department. Their experience and expertise is very exciting to me.”But the most insane scene to shoot in “Heads of State” involved Elba, Cena and a tight squeeze into a vehicle known as the Beast.“It’s just the three of us and a couple of bad guys, and it’s raining bullets and bombs at us, and we’re driving through the streets,” she said. “It was the smallest space for the two biggest guys I’ve ever worked with. We used to chat about everything because you couldn’t leave the vehicle in between shots often.”In a call from her home in Manhattan, Chopra Jonas sent Malti Marie, her 3-year-old daughter with her husband, the singer and actor Nick Jonas, out on a play date before revealing why self-care days, Magna-Tiles and signature scents top her list of essentials.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 5 States Are Trying to Lure Hollywood Productions

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      States have spent at least $25 billion to attract movie and TV filming. Texas and New York are increasing their subsidies, while Georgia and Louisiana are broadening their programs.“Sinners,” about twin brothers who confront a supernatural evil through music, could have been shot in the Mississippi Delta where the story is set. Yet it was filmed in Louisiana, which has long lured Hollywood with tax incentives that the director Ryan Coogler said made the state an attractive choice.The competition for business is fierce, with states awarding at least $25 billion in filming incentives over the past two decades. Because of California’s struggle to retain movie and TV productions, state lawmakers have approved more than doubling its annual tax credit program to $750 million.Economists have called the subsidies a race to the bottom, but politicians have shown few signs of slowing down. Here is a roundup of how five other states are trying to attract productions from California.TEXASLawmakers approve $1.5 billion in spending over the next decade.For the second consecutive legislative session, Texas lawmakers voted to substantially expand the state’s incentive program.The biennial funding was below $100 million for two decades until lawmakers increased it to $200 million in 2023. This year, they overwhelmingly passed a bill that would increase the tax credits to $300 million every two years for the next decade, an additional investment of $1.5 billion.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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      Democrats Cheer Hollywood Tax Breaks They Once Called ‘Corporate Welfare’

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      California politicians once derided a $50 million proposal by Arnold Schwarzenegger. With the support of unions, they’re now strongly backing a $750 million subsidy.Time was running out to pass new California bills in 2005 when a power broker in the State Capitol got a request from the action movie star in the governor’s office. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wanted lawmakers to give Hollywood studios $50 million in tax breaks to help prevent the movie industry from leaving.But Democrats preferred to restore funding that had been cut from schools and support for disabled people. Republicans in the governor’s own party objected to the notion of assisting one industry over others. The effort fell flat, as did similar proposals over the next few years.Among many Democrats, said Fabian Núñez, who was the speaker of the California Assembly at the time, the thinking about Mr. Schwarzenegger’s plan went: “Why does he want to give corporate welfare to rich people? That doesn’t make any sense.”Times have certainly changed.California lawmakers, most of them Democrats, approved a budget on Friday that includes $750 million to subsidize movie and television production, doubling the size of the state’s incentive program while making cuts elsewhere to help close its $12 billion deficit. A bill to make the tax credits available to more types of productions is expected to be approved in the coming days.Some economists object to film subsidies, saying they are a poor financial investment for states, while proponents say they are necessary to slow an exodus of productions. Over the past 10 years, production in Los Angeles has decreased by more than one-third, according to FilmLA data. One Hollywood studio is flying Americans to Ireland to film a game show, and “The Substance,” a best picture nominee, was filmed in France even though it is set in Los Angeles.“Expanding this program will help keep production here at home, generate thousands of good paying jobs and strengthen the vital link between our communities and the state’s iconic film and TV industry,” Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, said in October when he announced his plan to increase the tax breaks.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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      Help Us Rank the Best 21st-Century Rom-Coms, Superhero Movies, Horror Films and More

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      <!–> [–><!–>Making a list of the Top 10 movies of the 21st century is hard, for those who work in movies and those who love watching them. It requires pitting very different films against each other — comedies against dramas, period pieces against fantasy films — in ways that don’t always seem fair.–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> […] More

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      Watch Brad Pitt Burn Rubber in ‘F1’

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      The director Joseph Kosinski narrates a sequence in which Pitt’s character hatches a plan different from his team during a race.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.While the racing is as swift as the camerawork in “F1,” this particular scene is built on a pause. That moment of stasis takes place during the Hungarian Grand Prix in 2023. Sonny Hayes (Brad Pitt), a veteran driver, has been recruited by the owner of a floundering Formula One team. And Sonny’s style is at odds with that of his team principal, Kaspar Smolinski, (Kim Bodnia). Here, Sonny loses a tire and needs to go into the pit.“So much of the strategy is built around tire compounds,” the film’s director, Joseph Kosinski, said during an interview in New York. “And at this particular race in Hungary, which tends to be a very hot race, you want a harder tire compound that’s going to last more laps.”“But Sonny has a different plan in mind,” Kosinski continued, “which is to try to create a safety car situation. And in order to have as much control and grip as possible, he’s asking for a soft tire because he knows he’s going to only need it for a lap or two anyway.”Sonny asks for the soft tires as he pulls into the pit, but Kaspar insists on hard ones. When the soft tires are put on, Sonny won’t move, creating the scene’s most tense moment of conflict.“You get to see the two forces coming together: the team principal, who wants to stick with the plan they all discussed, and Sonny Hayes coming in with a plan of his own that he hasn’t shared with anyone, and it makes for this great scene between Brad Pitt and Kim Bodnia.”Read the “F1” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      ‘Parasite’ and the Genre-Defying Movies of the 21st Century

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      It’s mostly the internet’s fault, but in the past 25 years, the lines we drew in the 20th century got blurry. Time and space have collapsed. Now you can attend a meeting across the country, text your long-distance boyfriend halfway around the world, and watch a decades-old movie from another hemisphere on TV at home, all in one day. We’ve learned to make friends with people we’ve never met and develop obsessions with things we’d never have known about had we lived at any other point in human history. The story of the 21st century, among other things, is a tale of crumbling contexts and newly porous boundaries.Small wonder, then, that our 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century list, created by polling hundreds of directors, stars and other film professionals, shows the same trend. Every list tells a story about its maker or, in this case, makers. It’s clear, for instance, that the movies they remember were mostly not reboots, remakes or franchise fare, which have become Hollywood’s bread and butter. Star vehicles are fading. And while streaming has elbowed in and upended how we watch movies, there’s only one film on the list produced by a streamer — No. 46, Alfonso Cuarón’s “Roma,” which Netflix gave a respectable theatrical release.All interesting trends, some encouraging and some troubling. But what strikes me most about the list is this: Long-held categories in the movie business are fading, just like they are in the broader culture.When Christopher Nolan made “The Dark Knight” (No. 28), a superhero film contending for awards seemed like an outlier. But more genre films have been entering the conversation.Warner Bros./Library of CongressUntil pretty recently, for instance, common wisdom held that commercially successful genre fare and self-serious awards films didn’t overlap, and that auteurs would pick a lane and stay there. Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” (No. 28) seemed like an outlier in this respect, a Batman movie so good that when it failed to be nominated for best picture in 2009, the academy changed the number of nominee slots from five to 10. But since then, other horror, superhero and action flicks have increasingly sneaked into awards conversations, including “Get Out” (No. 8), “Mad Max: Fury Road” (No. 11), “Black Swan” (No. 81) and “Black Panther” (No. 96).That may explain the triumph of 2022’s best picture winner, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” (No. 77), a whimsical and occasionally deranged pastiche comedy blended with a sincere-hearted family story that pays obvious, sometimes ironic homage to a number of genres: martial arts, melodrama, science fiction, surrealism, even video games. In fact, some of its references also appear on the list, like Wong Kar-wai’s “In the Mood for Love” (No. 4) and Ang Lee’s “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” (No. 16).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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      When Nobu Masuhisa Changed Sushi in America Forever

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      “I am so glad I didn’t give up on my life and kept going,” says the chef, who’s the subject of a new documentary about his remarkable career.Nobu sits along the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, with ocean waves lapping under its outdoor deck. It is an interlude of tranquillity along a road that is a maze of construction crews, police cars, fire trucks and the charred frames of beachfront homes — evidence of the wildfires that raced through here earlier this year.But at 11:45 a.m. on a recent Saturday, the crowd stretched 200-feet deep waiting for Nobu to open for lunch. By 12:30, every table was filled. It was a testament to the endurance and appeal of a restaurant that encapsulates — in food, celebrity and style — a global phenomenon that began 38 years ago, and 20 miles away, when the chef Nobu Matsuhisa opened a modest sushi restaurant in Beverly Hills.At 76, Matsuhisa today sits atop a restaurant and hotel empire that stretches almost entirely around the globe. He is the chef who, as much as anyone, transformed the sushi scene in New York and, to a lesser extent, Los Angeles. He was one of the first chefs, along with Wolfgang Puck, to have soared beyond the boundaries of his first restaurant to become a celebrity in his own right. And he is now the subject of a new documentary, “Nobu,” tracing the arc of his life, from growing up in a small town outside Tokyo to becoming a magnate with homes in Japan and Bel-Air.“I am step by step,” Matsuhisa told me. “When I opened my first restaurant in 1987, I never thought about growing. Always I had the passions — always my base was cooking. And now I have so many, we have so many restaurants around the world.”“There are a handful of people who have changed the way the world eats,” the critic Ruth Reichl says in the documentary. “Nobu is certainly there in that pantheon.”AGC InternationalAs Matt Tyrnauer, the filmmaker who spent two years making the documentary, said over plates of sushi at the Nobu in Malibu: “He’s gone from one modest restaurant on La Cienega to becoming a global luxury brand centered on food and hospitality. There are not a lot of people that have pulled that off.”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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      Amie Donald Has the Moves as the Killer Robot in ‘M3gan 2.0’

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      The sunny 15-year-old dancer-turned-actress is about as far as you can get from the role she’s best known for: a deadly A.I. doll.Onscreen, Amie Donald is best known for her role as the killer robot M3gan in the sci-fi horror franchise.But, in real life, Donald, 15, spends a majority of her days in the idyllic, sun-soaked setting of lushly forested New Zealand, where kiwi roam and she’s apt to take a bush walk outside her parents’ home in Papakura, a suburb in South Auckland.“I really enjoy all the nature here,” she said on a video call from the house on a recent morning. Her long red hair fell in beachy waves as sunlight danced on her white sweater. Framed photos of her and her parents and older brother filled the walls behind her.Donald is about the furthest you could get from the cutthroat killer robot returning in the new sequel, “M3gan 2.0.” For one thing, she smiles far too much. Other people, she said, would describe her as “very caring.” She wasn’t a fan of horror films until landing “M3gan” — though she’s since started watching them with her father, and now counts “It” and “The Purge” among her favorites. “I love them so much,” she said.M3gan, the robot that becomes frighteningly protective of a young girl named Cady, was Donald’s first role in a film, following her TV debut as Maya Monkey, an acrobatic girl with simian features, in Netflix’s postapocalyptic series “Sweet Tooth.”Amie Donald embodies the killer doll in the original and “M3gan 2.0,” although a synthetic mask covers her face.Geoffrey Short/Universal PicturesWe 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