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      ‘Return to Dust’ Review: Grit Against All Odds

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      Li Ruijun’s newest feature is a touching portrait of love and resiliency that doubles as a critique of China’s ruling class.According to reliable news reports, the Chinese government never confirmed having banned Li Ruijun’s quietly heartbreaking feature “Return to Dust,” a touching portrait of love and resiliency in a collapsing rural community of Gansu Province.Still, the film was pulled last fall from all Chinese movie theaters and streaming services two weeks after a successful domestic debut. It isn’t hard to see why. China’s leadership has a history of suppressing art that spotlights the failings of its ruling class and ideology, which is exactly what Li’s film does, with a script that feels only occasionally overwritten. That he succeeds without making it feel like homework — which is to say beautifully, humanely — is presumably what made the film so threatening.With superb performances by Wu Renlin and Hai Qing, “Dust” tells the story of Youtie and Guiying, middle-aged strangers pushed into an arranged marriage by families looking mostly to offload them. Youtie is a dirt-poor farmer living in a crumbling mud-brick home on the cold, arid hem of the Gobi Desert, effectively indentured to his brother and a local merchant. Guiying has a chronic illness. Her hands tremble, and she can’t control her bladder; whether her problems or her family’s abuse came first is unclear.As their awkward union evolves into one of genuine trust and affection, their fortunes, if not their long-suffering donkey’s, improve. Their methods are backbreaking, ancient and dusty but also dignified — rendered with golden, poetic sensitivity by the cinematographer Wang Weihua.Unfortunately, we’ve seen enough movies to know what that worsening tremble bodes and what kind of story that donkey is there to observe. Unless he’s friends with Shrek, it probably isn’t comedy.Return to DustNot rated. In Mandarin, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 11 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Oppenheimer’ Review: A Man for Our Time

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      Christopher Nolan’s complex, vivid portrait of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb,” is a brilliant achievement in formal and conceptual terms.“Oppenheimer,” Christopher Nolan’s staggering film about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man known as “the father of the atomic bomb,” condenses a titanic shift in consciousness into three haunted hours. A drama about genius, hubris and error, both individual and collective, it brilliantly charts the turbulent life of the American theoretical physicist who helped research and develop the two atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II — cataclysms that helped usher in our human-dominated age.The movie is based on “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” the authoritative 2005 biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Written and directed by Nolan, the film borrows liberally from the book as it surveys Oppenheimer’s life, including his role in the Manhattan Engineer District, better known as the Manhattan Project. He served as director of a clandestine weapons lab built in a near-desolate stretch of Los Alamos, in New Mexico, not far from a cabin that Oppenheimer had, he and many other of the era’s most dazzling scientific minds puzzled through how to harness nuclear reactions for the weapons that killed tens of thousands instantly, ending the war in the Pacific.The atomic bomb and what it wrought define Oppenheimer’s legacy and also shape this film. Nolan goes deep and long on the building of the bomb, a fascinating and appalling process, but he doesn’t restage the attacks; there are no documentary images of the dead or panoramas of cities in ashes, decisions that read as his ethical absolutes. The horror of the bombings, the magnitude of the suffering they caused and the arms race that followed suffuse the film. “Oppenheimer” is a great achievement in formal and conceptual terms, and fully absorbing, but Nolan’s filmmaking is, crucially, in service to the history that it relates.The story tracks Oppenheimer — played with feverish intensity by Cillian Murphy — across decades, starting in the 1920s with him as a young adult and continuing until his hair grays. The film touches on personal and professional milestones, including his work on the bomb, the controversies that dogged him, the anti-Communist attacks that nearly ruined him, as well as the friendships and romances that helped sustain yet also troubled him. He has an affair with a political firebrand named Jean Tatlock (a vibrant Florence Pugh), and later weds a seductive boozer, Kitty Harrison (Emily Blunt, in a slow-building turn), who accompanies him to Los Alamos, where she gives birth to their second child.It’s a dense, event-filled story that Nolan — who’s long embraced the plasticity of the film medium — has given a complex structure, which he parcels into revealing sections. Most are in lush color; others in high-contrast black and white. These sections are arranged in strands that wind together for a shape that brings to mind the double helix of DNA. To signal his conceit, he stamps the film with the words “fission” (a splitting into parts) and “fusion” (a merging of elements); Nolan being Nolan, he further complicates the film by recurrently kinking up the overarching chronology — it is a lot.It also isn’t a story that builds gradually; rather, Nolan abruptly tosses you into the whirl of Oppenheimer’s life with vivid scenes of him during different periods in his life. In rapid succession the watchful older Oppie (as his intimates call him) and his younger counterpart flicker onscreen before the story briefly lands in the 1920s, where he’s an anguished student tormented by fiery, apocalyptic visions. He suffers; he also reads T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” drops a needle on Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” and stands before a Picasso painting, defining works of an age in which physics folded space and time into space-time.This fast pace and narrative fragmentation continue as Nolan fills in this Cubistic portrait, crosses and recrosses continents and ushers in armies of characters, including Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh), a physicist who played a role in the Manhattan Project. Nolan has loaded the movie with familiar faces — Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Gary Oldman — some distracting. It took me a while to accept the director Benny Safdie as Edward Teller, the theoretical physicist known as the “father of the hydrogen bomb,” and I still don’t know why Rami Malek shows up in a minor part other than he’s yet another known commodity.As Oppenheimer comes into focus so does the world. In 1920s Germany, he learns quantum physics; the next decade he’s at Berkeley teaching, bouncing off other young geniuses and building a center for the study of quantum physics. Nolan makes the era’s intellectual excitement palpable — Einstein published his theory of general relativity in 1915 — and, as you would expect, there’s a great deal of scientific debate and chalkboards filled with mystifying calculations, most of which Nolan translates fairly comprehensibly. One of the film’s pleasures is experiencing by proxy the kinetic excitement of intellectual discourse.It’s at Berkeley that the trajectory of Oppenheimer’s life dramatically shifts, after news breaks that Germany has invaded Poland. By that point, he has become friends with Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett), a physicist who invented a particle accelerator, the cyclotron, and who plays an instrumental role in the Manhattan Project. It’s also at Berkeley that Oppenheimer meets the project’s military head, Leslie Groves (a predictably good Damon), who makes him Los Alamos’s director, despite the leftist causes he supported — among them, the fight against fascism during the Spanish Civil War — and some of his associations, including with Communist Party members like his brother, Frank (Dylan Arnold).Nolan is one of the few contemporary filmmakers operating at this ambitious scale, both thematically and technically. Working with his superb cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, Nolan has shot in 65-millimeter film (which is projected in 70-millimeter), a format that he’s used before to create a sense of cinematic monumentality. The results can be immersive, though at times clobbering, particularly when the wow of his spectacle has proved more substantial and coherent than his storytelling. In “Oppenheimer,” though, as in “Dunkirk” (2017), he uses the format to convey the magnitude of a world-defining event; here, it also closes the distance between you and Oppenheimer, whose face becomes both vista and mirror.The film’s virtuosity is evident in every frame, but this is virtuosity without self-aggrandizement. Big subjects can turn even well-intended filmmakers into show-offs, to the point that they upstage the history they seek to do justice to. Nolan avoids that trap by insistently putting Oppenheimer into a larger context, notably with the black-and-white portions. One section turns on a politically motivated security clearance hearing in 1954, a witch hunt that damaged his reputation; the second follows the 1959 confirmation for Lewis Strauss (a mesmerizing, near-unrecognizable Downey), a former chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission who was nominated for a cabinet position.Nolan integrates these black-and-white sections with the color ones, using scenes from the hearing and the confirmation — Strauss’s role in the hearing and his relationship with Oppenheimer directly affected the confirmation’s outcome — to create a dialectical synthesis. One of the most effective examples of this approach illuminates how Oppenheimer and other Jewish project scientists, some of whom were refugees from Nazi Germany, saw their work in stark, existential terms. Yet Oppenheimer’s genius, his credentials, international reputation and wartime service to the United States government cannot save him from political gamesmanship, the vanity of petty men and the naked antisemitism of the Red scare.These black-and-white sequences define the last third of “Oppenheimer.” They can seem overlong, and at times in this part of the film it feels as if Nolan is becoming too swept up in the trials that America’s most famous physicist experienced. Instead, it is here that the film’s complexities and all its many fragments finally converge as Nolan puts the finishing touches on his portrait of a man who contributed to an age of transformational scientific discovery, who personified the intersection of science and politics, including in his role as a Communist boogeyman, who was transformed by his role in the creation of weapons of mass destruction and soon after raised the alarm about the dangers of nuclear war.François Truffaut once wrote that “war films, even pacifist, even the best, willingly or not, glorify war and render it in some way attractive.” This, I think, gets at why Nolan refuses to show the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, world-defining events that eventually killed an estimated 100,000 to upward of 200,000 souls. You do, though, see Oppenheimer watch the first test bomb and, critically, you also hear the famous words that he said crossed his mind as the mushroom cloud rose: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” As Nolan reminds you, the world quickly moved on from the horrors of the war to embrace the bomb. Now we, too, have become death, the destroyers of worlds.OppenheimerRated R for disturbing images, and adult language and behavior. Running time: 3 hours. In theaters. More

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      Barbie: Reviews of Greta Gerwig, Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling

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      Some critics viewed the highly-anticipated movie as satirically capitalistic, while others saw it as capitalistically satirical.As reviews for “Barbie” rolled out ahead of its weekend opening, a critical divide emerged.Some thought that Greta Gerwig, the acclaimed director of “Lady Bird” and “Little Women,” had met the expectations for a more subversive take on the 11.5-inch Mattel phenomenon. They thought Gerwig’s script, which she collaborated on with her partner, Noah Baumbach, succeeded in acknowledging the criticisms that the Barbie brand has received over the years — including unrealistic representations of women’s bodies and, up until recent years, a lack of diversity in its collection — while presenting a comedy that leans into the delightful weirdness of the Barbie universe. Others felt that the director did not go far enough in dinging her corporate sponsors, keeping the critiques of consumerism and female beauty standards at surface level.Critics tended to be unified in their praise of the movie’s stars, however, celebrating Margot Robbie’s surprising emotional depth as the so-called stereotypical Barbie who embarks on an eye-opening journey outside of the meticulously manufactured dolls’ world, as well as Ryan Gosling’s deadpan comedy as a Ken who delights in his discovery of the patriarchy.Read on for some highlights.‘Barbie’ May Be the Most Subversive Blockbuster of the 21st Century [Rolling Stone]The movie does more than avoid delivering a two-hour commercial for Mattel, David Fear writes, suggesting that the movie could be “the most subversive blockbuster of the 21st century to date.”“This is a saga of self-realization, filtered through both the spirit of free play and the sense that it’s not all fun and games in the real world — a doll’s story that continually drifts into the territory of ‘A Doll’s House,’” Fear writes. “This is a movie that wants to have its Dreamhouse and burn it down to the ground, too.”We Shouldn’t Have to Grade Barbie on a Curve [Vulture]In one of the most critical reviews of the movie’s approach to gender politics, Alison Willmore writes that “it’s not a rebuke of corporatized feminism so much as an update,” noting “a streak of defensiveness to ‘Barbie,’ as though it’s trying to anticipate and acknowledge any critiques lodged against it before they’re made.”“To be a film fan these days is to be aware that franchises and cinematic universes and remakes and other adaptations of old IP have become black holes that swallow artists, leaving you to desperately hope they might emerge with the rare project that, even though it comes from constrictive confines, still feels like it was made by a person,” she writes. “‘Barbie’ definitely was. But the trouble with trying to sneak subversive ideas into a project so inherently compromised is that, rather than get away with something, you might just create a new way for a brand to sell itself.”There are limits to how much dimension even Greta Gerwig can give this branded material [New York Times]Manohla Dargis, the chief film critic for The Times, offers high praise to Gerwig as a director, writing that her “directorial command is so fluent she seems born to filmmaking,” but she asserts that the movie largely dodged the “thorny contradictions and the criticisms that cling to the doll.”“While Gerwig does slip in a few glints of critique — as when a teenage girl accuses Barbie of promoting consumerism, shortly before she pals up with our heroine — these feel more like mere winks at the adults in the audience than anything else,” Dargis writes.A doll’s life is richly, unexpectedly imagined by Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie [The Chicago Tribune]“Any $145 million studio movie based on a doll, accessories sold separately, no doubt comes with a few restrictions,” Michael Phillips writes. “And yet this one actually feels spontaneous, and fun.” Giving the film 3.5 starts out of 4, he contends that Mattel “could have played things far more safely” and that “a lot of the biggest laughs in ‘Barbie’ come at Mattel’s expense.”Ryan Gosling is plastic fantastic in ragged doll comedy [The Guardian]Peter Bradshaw was among the critics who felt that Gosling steals the show with Barbie herself reduced to the “bland comic foil.” He was in the more cynical camp of reviewers when it came to the film’s self-awareness, calling the film “entertaining and amiable, but with a softcore pulling of punches: lightly ironised, celebratory nostalgia for a toy that still exists right now.”Welcome to Greta Gerwig’s fiercely funny, feminist Dreamhouse [Entertainment Weekly]Describing the movie as “packed with winking one-liners,” Devan Coggan acknowledges the praise of Gosling but contends that Robbie “remains the real star.”“Physically, the blonde Australian actress already looks like she stepped out of a Mattel box (something the film itself plays on during one particular gag), but she gives an impressively transformative performance,” she writes, “moving her arms and joints like they’re actually made of plastic. Robbie has brought a manic physicality to previous films including ‘Babylon’ and ‘Birds of Prey,’ but she now embraces physical comedy to the max.”Greta Gerwig’s World of Plastic Is Fantastic [Collider]Ross Bonaime writes that “Barbie” could have been “little more than a toy ad,” but it instead became an “existential look at the difficulties of being a woman, the terrifying nature of life in general, the understanding that trying to be perfect is absurd, while also encapsulating everything that Barbie has meant to people — both good and bad.”Calling Gerwig’s work behind the camera “vibrant and bold,” Bonaime also praises the narrative work of the popstar-packed soundtrack, which includes songs from Lizzo, Billie Eilish, Nicki Minaj and Ice Spice.Margot Robbie doll-ivers [Los Angeles Times]Describing the film as a “conceptually playful, sartorially dazzling comic fantasy,” Justin Chang suggests that “Barbie” succeeds in making the arguments both for Barbie haters and Barbie lovers.“Gerwig has conceived ‘Barbie’ as a bubble-gum emulsion of silliness and sophistication, a picture that both promotes and deconstructs its own brand,” he writes. “It doesn’t just mean to renew the endless ‘Barbie: good or bad?’ debate. It wants to enact that debate, to vigorously argue both positions for the better part of two fast-moving, furiously multitasking hours.” More

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      Can’t Decide Whether to See ‘Barbie,’ ‘Oppenheimer’ or Both? Our Barbenheimer Quiz Can Help.

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      Barbenheimer is upon us, and moviegoers must decide between two chisel-cheeked midcentury marvels: “Oppenheimer,” Christopher Nolan’s three-hour biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer, “father of the atomic bomb,” or “Barbie,” Greta Gerwig’s Day-Glo feminist-magical realist take on Mattel IP. While box office trackers say “Barbie” is likely to far outpace Oppie, at least 40,000 fans have already bought tickets for both. Should you opt for a head-snap of a double feature? Or see just one – and which one, at that? Answer these five questions to find out if you’re a Barbie girl, an Oppie nerd or a bona fide Barbenheimie.3 of 5Warner Bros. PicturesIs there an opposite-gender character who serves as a lesson on sexism? Oh boy, is there! In “Oppenheimer,” it’s one female scientist, played by Olivia Thirlby. In “Barbie,” it is, of course, just Ken. (A lot of Kens, who belatedly learn about the patriarchy.) More

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      Ghibli Park Celebrates “Totoro” And Other Miyazaki Movies

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      One of our first infractions at Ghibli Park was hoisting our 1-year-old onto the polyester tummy of a woodland spirit creature. Another was letting him slip under a barricade and shelter inside a furry bus with cat eyes for headlights.“He’s not following the protocol,” I told my wife, as the staff overseeing the cat-bus play zone looked on anxiously.“He’s making a mockery of it,” she said. But we didn’t stop him.Ghibli Park, which opened in November outside Nagoya, Japan, pays homage to the eccentric, enchanting films of Studio Ghibli, a company co-founded in the 1980s by the director Hayao Miyazaki. We took our two toddlers there because their favorite movie is “My Neighbor Totoro,” a beloved 1988 Miyazaki film starring the spirit creature and its cat-bus sidekick.As parents, we thought it would be fun for our boys, 3 and 1, to experience a “Totoro” immersion. And as longtime Ghibli fans, we were keen to see what the place looked like.Ghibli Park has said that a clock tower on the premises was influenced by the “late 19th century sci-fi architecture” that features in some Ghibli movies.Andrew Faulk for The New York TimesThe park includes a recreation of an antiques shop that features in the 1995 Ghibli film “Whisper of the Heart.”Andrew Faulk for The New York TimesAmerican visitors may wonder how Ghibli Park compares with Disney World. It doesn’t really. It feels much lower-key and has no rides, exotic animals, jumbo turkey legs or animatronic American presidents, among other things. The main point is to wander around soaking up Miyazaki vibes.Also, the park is not finished. Grafted onto an existing municipal park, it opened late last year, but as of early July only three of five planned ticketed sites were open. When I booked for a June visit, tickets to only one of those sites — a building called “Ghibli’s Grand Warehouse” — were available to international visitors reserving through the park’s website. (It was possible to book the other two sites through Japanese travel agencies, but I only learned that much later, from a Japanese speaker.)Susan Napier, a biographer of Mr. Miyazaki at Tufts University who visited Ghibli Park in April, told me that it had struck her as a “work in progress.” She also described the ticketing process, which has included lotteries and long online queues, as “byzantine and not fun.”Maybe this is why Studio Ghibli itself seems ambivalent about promoting Ghibli Park. In Japan, it has run advertisements advising fans to “take your time” visiting.A hypothetical theme park celebrating Nintendo or Pokemon, two other iconic Japanese creative brands, would almost certainly feel more Disney World-like, said Matt Alt, the author of the 2021 book “Pure Invention: How Japan’s Pop Culture Conquered the World.” But he added that the park’s diffuse layout and low-key marketing were in character for a studio co-founded by Mr. Miyazaki, a director who has never hidden his anticapitalist politics.Ghibli’s Grand Warehouse is the size of a modest mall or sports arena, with replicas of structures from the films, and long lines to get close to them. Andrew Faulk for The New York TimesGhibli Park is not a place to “turn your brain off,” Mr. Alt told me. “It demands a level of intellectual engagement that most parks do not.” When I booked our visit, in March, a bit of mental stimulation sounded nice. I imagined wandering the grounds in dappled sunlight, musing on Mr. Miyazaki’s cinematic oeuvre as our boys paused to collect acorns — just as the two sisters who star in “Totoro” do. (The boys, who are Anglo-American, love the acorn scenes so much that they learned the Japanese word for the nut, donguri, before the English one.)In reality, we arrived just before our three-hour afternoon visiting slot at Ghibli’s Grand Warehouse, and our intellectual capacity was limited. Our parental nerves were fraying from the hourlong journey from Nagoya and the general struggle of moving tiny, diapered humans around an unfamiliar place.Our morning in Nagoya had already been tarnished by a 4 a.m. wake up and some public displays of unchecked toddler emotion. On the grounds of the 17th century Nagoya Castle, for example, our 3-year-old, nicknamed T, burst into tears when he learned that the castle was closed for renovation.To break his mood, we took the emergency measure of buying him and his brother, nicknamed B, ice cream cones as a second breakfast. That stopped the crying, but our mounting fatigue had raised the stakes for our visit to Ghibli Park. Would the trip to meet our favorite magical creatures make all the time, money and energy that it entailed worthwhile?The park lets visitors interact with their favorite characters, including Marnie from “When Marnie Was There.”Andrew Faulk for The New York TimesA visitor catches Sheeta from “Castle in the Sky.”Andrew Faulk for The New York TimesGhibli Park may see a bump in domestic tourism this summer because Mr. Miyazaki released a new film in Japan this month. But, for my family, making a pilgrimage there was all about seeing Totoro and the cat bus.“Totoro” follows the two sisters, Mei, 4, and Satsuki, 10, as they settle into a spooky house in the Japanese countryside with their father, an archaeologist. Their mother is stuck in a nearby sanitarium, suffering from an undisclosed illness.After Mei meets Totoro by stumbling into its lair inside a giant camphor tree (and falls asleep on its tummy), she and her sister encounter the creature a few more times and learn more about its magical powers. Eventually, as their mother’s condition appears to worsen, they call in some very important favors from Totoro and the wild-eyed cat bus.Professor Napier told me that “Totoro” illustrates an aesthetic that runs through the Ghibli catalog, and which tends to be more ambiguous and subtle than Disney’s. She described it as “the immersive, low-key magic of being a human being connected with other things.”“It’s a world that you like,” Professor Napier, who is writing a book comparing Ghibli with Disney, said of Mr. Miyazaki’s animated universe. “But it’s also full of the unexpected and complex, and sometimes scary.”Totoro and the cat bus can indeed be a little frightening, especially when they flash their teeth. But the movie is much sweeter than it is scary. It’s set in “a time before television,” as Mr. Miyazaki once told an interviewer, and infused with sublime, hand-drawn pastoral imagery — pastel sunsets, a snail crawling up a plant stalk — that makes you want to be a kid growing up in rural idyll.The face of the cat bus, a magical creature that figures in the 1988 Ghibli film “My Neighbor Totoro.”Andrew Faulk for The New York TimesNo Face, a character from the Oscar-winning 2001 Ghibli film “Spirited Away,” sits in a recreation of a train car.Andrew Faulk for The New York TimesThe film also celebrates a child’s sense of wonder. Mr. Miyazaki created “Totoro” with kids in mind — he said he hoped it would make them want to pick acorns — and many critics have seen it as an ode to childhood innocence. It’s no accident that Totoro and the cat bus are visible only to the sisters, not adults.Maybe this is why I still cry every time I watch the final credits roll: “Totoro” reminds me that my boys will never be this young or innocent again.In our Seoul apartment, they play with Totoro and cat-bus dolls, sleep in Totoro pajamas and sit on a Totoro potty. Their fandom is so intense that my mother-in-law bought us tickets to a “Totoro” stage adaptation at the Barbican Theater during our last trip to London.In Nagoya, before we left for Ghibli Park, B demonstrated his enthusiasm by bringing a plastic cat bus to the hotel buffet — and feeding it a breakfast of whipped cream. He also showed the toy to a man in a ninja costume who posed for a selfie with us outside the castle.The ninja cracked a knowing smile, indicating that he, too, was a “Totoro” fan. “Cat bus,” he said in Japanese, as if the phrase were a code word.In Children’s Town, a fuzzy Totoro lies sleeping in its carpeted lair.Andrew Faulk for The New York TimesA robot from the Studio Ghibli movie “Laputa: Castle in the Sky”Andrew Faulk for The New York TimesGhibli Park lies in Nagakute, a small city in the hills outside Nagoya, a few stops down a highway from an Ikea. There’s no Ghibli entrance gate, exactly; you just wander into an unremarkable municipal park and look around for the Ghibli sites for which you have reserved tickets months in advance.The Grand Warehouse is a sleek, multistory building the size of a modest mall or sports arena, with plenty of sunshine streaming in through skylights. It sits near a grassy lawn, an ice rink and some future Ghibli sites that are under construction.Inside, there are replicas of structures from the films, including the towering bathhouse from the Oscar-winning 2001 film “Spirited Away,” and dozens of made-for-Instagram tableaux of Ghibli scenes and props.The attention to detail is striking. In an area devoted to the Ghibli film “Arietty,” I saw a giant drop of plastic dew affixed to a giant fake flower, for example. Nearby was an intricately detailed replica of the castle from “Howl’s Moving Castle,” my older son’s favorite Miyazaki film after “Totoro.”“The castle, daddy!” Three-year-old T said with delight. At last, a Japanese castle that didn’t make him cry.The problem was that most of the tableaux were mobbed with Ghibli fans — and lines that we didn’t have time to stand in with restless toddlers. The building’s only restaurant was similarly oversubscribed. We eventually found a kiosk advertising cake, but the staff said that the cake had run out.Yubaba, a character from “Spirited Away,” sits at a wooden desk.Andrew Faulk for The New York Times After about an hour of canvassing the warehouse, we headed for “Children’s Town,” a play area devoted to scenes from “Totoro” and other Ghibli films.Children’s Town has three rooms. The first is a labyrinth combining scenes from more Ghibli films than I could count: The orange train from “Laputa: Castle in the Sky,” the bakery from “Kiki’s Delivery Service” and so on. The boys loved it, even if daddy thwacked his head following them through a crawl space.The other rooms were devoted to “Totoro” and had mercifully higher ceilings. There was the house where Mei and Satsuki live with their dad. Over there was the camphor tree, where a giant Totoro lay regally beside some oversize donguri. And in the far corner sat the majestic, furry cat bus.It all looked fun, kid-friendly and immersive — almost, in fact, like something you’d find at Disney World. The boys were in heaven.“Toe-toe-row! Toe-toe-row!” B said, standing inside the tree, with the same intonation as the movie’s rousing, marching-band-style theme song.“Hey, Totoro!” said T, who had been carefully inspecting the giant acorns. “Wake up!”But even though Children’s Town seemed designed to nurture the child’s sense of wonder that Mr. Miyazaki celebrates in his movies, the warehouse staff informed us of several rules that dampened the vibe. Notably, it was forbidden to put children on Totoro’s plush tummy, or to allow them to play inside the cat bus zone for longer than three minutes — even if the zone was not crowded, which it wasn’t.The staff members were friendly, but their rules made little sense for kids as small as ours. I wondered if that was another sign that Ghibli Park was still a bit rough around the edges. Take your time visiting, as the studio says.We grudgingly agreed to the no-tummy policy, but B wished to play nowhere else but inside the cat bus. We were with him. We had spent several months — a good chunk of his life! — waiting for this moment.The staff, sensing our resolve, suggested a compromise. A special time extension could be granted under the circumstances, they said. Rather than the usual three minutes, our B could have six.Make that nine. Then 12. Et cetera. At 5 p.m., he was among last, and smallest, Ghibli fans to leave the building.Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram and sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to get expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2023. More

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      In Hollywood Strike, Actors and Studios Are ‘Far Apart’ on Key Issues

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      The actors’ union and the organization that bargains on behalf of the studios traded statements underscoring how much work needs to be done to reach an agreement.As tens of thousands of actors go into their fifth day of a strike versus the Hollywood studios, the two sides have shown no signs of returning to the bargaining table — and are even exchanging barbed messages that underscore how far apart they are.Late Monday, leadership of SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union, sent members a 12-page memo laying out its demands and the studios’ counterproposals. They “remain far apart on the most critical issues that affect the very survival of our profession,” the note said.“We marched ahead because they intentionally dragged their feet,” it continued.The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, the organization that bargains on behalf of the studios, answered with a note to the news media arguing that the message from the union “deliberately distorts” the offers it had made.“A strike is not the outcome we wanted,” the alliance said. “For SAG-AFTRA to assert that we have not been responsive to the needs of its membership is disingenuous at best.”Thousands of Hollywood actors went on strike on Friday after failing to reach a new contract with the major studios, including old-line companies like Paramount, Universal and Disney and tech giants like Netflix, Amazon and Apple.The actors joined 11,500 screenwriters who went on strike 78 days ago, the first time both unions had walked out at the same time since 1960. The writers have not returned to the bargaining table with the studios since their negotiations collapsed in early May.SAG-AFTRA’s note said the two sides remained far apart on several key issues, including compensation, guardrails against artificial intelligence, and health care and pension costs.The union’s leadership said it had asked for 11 percent wage increases in the first year of a new contract; the studios came back with an offer of 5 percent, the union said.When it comes to artificial intelligence, the union’s leaders said they had argued for a number of provisions to protect them “when a ‘digital replica’ is made or our performance is changed using A.I.”They said the studio alliance “failed to address many vital concerns, leaving principal performers and background actors vulnerable to having most of their work replaced by digital replicas.”The studios said that the union’s note to its members “fails to include the proposals offered verbally” during negotiations, and that its overall package was worth more than $1 billion in wage increases, improvements on residuals (a type of royalty) and health care contributions.Regarding artificial intelligence, the studios said they had offered a “groundbreaking proposal, which protects performers’ digital likenesses, including a requirement for performer’s consent for the creation and use of digital replicas or for digital alterations of a performance.”Union leadership sent out a chart laying out each proposal and the studios’ response. Over more than two dozen proposals, the studio response amounted to one word, according to the union: “Rejected.”“So who’s making the T-Shirt that says ‘Rejected’?” the actress Senta Moses posted on Twitter.“This is why we’re on strike,” the union note said. “The A.M.P.T.P. thinks we will relent, but the will of our membership has never been stronger. We have the resolve and unity needed to defend our rights.” More

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      Summer Fashion Inspired By Eric Rohmer’s Films

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      The outfits featured in the late French filmmaker’s work, celebrated by a new Instagram account, offer an antidote to all that is plastic and pink.She’s rolling in the grass dressed in sunflower yellow, kissing a man about whom she’s passionately ambivalent (“Boyfriends and Girlfriends,” 1987). She’s strolling through the countryside in a fleecy blue sweater, having no fun at all (“The Green Ray,” 1986). She’s lounging on a beach in a red bikini and ivory bucket hat, about to embark on a confusingly ambiguous friendship with the shirtless Frenchman she’s observing (“A Summer’s Tale,” 1996).This is summer love, Eric Rohmer-style: It isn’t easy, but it sure is chic.The outfits featured in the late French filmmaker’s works have long been celebrated, and continue to build a following, now quite literally, on an Instagram account called @Rohmerfits, which debuted in May.Rohmer’s films, which spanned the 1960s to 2000s, were famous for their unhurried plots: Characters bounce around France, in between the countryside, the seaside and the city; they analyze their romantic entanglements; they read Balzac; they seduce and irritate each other — and they do it all while wearing Mediterranean-blue sweaters, high-waisted jeans, billowy cotton shirts and pops of red.“There’s just this air about them where you want to be within them,” Alexandra Tell, the creator of @Rohmerfits, said of the costumes. The characters are “often on vacation, so you want something that’s sort of breezy that you can move in,” she said. “His clothes aren’t extravagant, but they’re elegant in this easy, ineffable way.”The secret to such aesthetic ease may lie in Rohmer’s devotion to naturalism. Like his contemporaries Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, Rohmer, who died in 2010, began as a film critic. These critics-turned-auteurs “were very much against a sense of artificiality that stemmed from the shooting in studios,” said Ludovic Cortade, a film scholar who teaches French cinema at New York University.Amanda Langlet plays Margot in “A Summer’s Tale” (1996). Rohmer often asked actors “to come up with several costume options that would reflect their own tastes,” said Ludovic Cortade, a film scholar.via The Criterion ChannelAn extension of that naturalism, Professor Cortade said, was Rohmer’s decision not to use costume designers for many of his films, and instead asked actors “to come up with several costume options that would reflect their own tastes, which was a great strategy to convey a sense of authenticity.”The aesthetic is a sharp contrast to movies like the upcoming “Barbie,” which will be released this month. While “Barbie” plays with literal plastic, Rohmer did the opposite. “Maybe the ‘Barbie’ world is more reflective of our reality,” Ms. Tell said, while Rohmer’s earthy naturalism now “feels like more of an escape.”Though the looks were fastidiously curated by Rohmer, they never felt forced, Professor Cortade said. In “Boyfriends and Girlfriends,” for example, a marigold tank top and belt, as worn by Blanche, who is played by Emmanuelle Chaulet, match the color of some orange juice in a glass cup. “You can see the wrinkles in the clothes,” said Ms. Tell, a 32-year-old writer and curatorial assistant who lives in Brooklyn. “It’s very tactile.”The outfits’ simplicity allows audiences to focus on the characters and their relationships as they grapple with complex questions of morality and love. Though Rohmer’s tone could be witty and farcical, his films astutely tackled “the challenges of personal interactions and the awkwardness behind that” — a dynamic that has only been heightened with the advent of digital technology, Professor Cortade added.In “Boyfriends and Girlfriends,” a marigold tank top and belt, as worn by Blanche, who is played by Emmanuelle Chaulet, match the color of some orange juice in a glass cup.via MetrographIn “The Green Ray,” Delphine is wearing a crimson blazer when she says to a friend, played by Rosette, through sobs: “I need a real vacation.”via The Criterion ChannelOnce she does go on vacation, Delphine wanders around morosely, lonely and dressed in all blue.via The Criterion ChannelIn other words, it’s Rohmer’s blend of aspiration and realism that keeps his films — and costumes — so fresh, Ms. Tell said: His characters, like Margot in “A Summer’s Tale,” played by Amanda Langlet, wear clothes you would wear, but better styled. They too have challenging so-called situationships, but with the handsome Gaspard, played by Melvil Poupaud, and amid the backdrop of a grassy path.In one scene in “The Green Ray,” Delphine, played by Marie Rivière, moans about going on vacation with her family after a breakup. Clad in a glorious crimson blazer, Delphine says through sobs: “I need a real vacation.” A friend, played by Rosette, convinces her to join a trip to Cherbourg, promising her they’ll “have fun and meet people.” Instead Delphine wanders around against the muted sun, morosely, lonely and dressed in all blue. More

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      ‘Barbie’ vs. ‘Oppenheimer’: The Real Winner May Be the Box Office

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      The toy-based comedy is expected to draw $100 million; the biopic half that. But in an uneven year for movies, the duel seems to be engaging audiences.It’s a matchup for the ages, up there with Ali vs. Frazier, the Hatfields vs. the McCoys and Athens vs. Sparta.Well, let’s not get carried away.But it is fair to say that with “Barbie” vs. “Oppenheimer,” Hollywood has not captured the popular imagination in this way for quite some time. On Thursday night, the two wildly incongruous Hollywood megamovies arrive in theaters after weeks of internet meme-ification and questionable marketing tie-ins. (We’re looking at you, Barbie-inspired Burger King sandwich topped with what looks like chewed bubble gum.) Together, the movies could generate the biggest crowds at North American multiplexes in four years, numbers not seen since before the pandemic, box office prognosticators said.“‘Barbie’ and ‘Oppenheimer’ are basically the perfect frenemies at the box office this weekend,” said Dave Karger, the Turner Classic Movies host. “Yes, they’re technically competitors, but they’re largely going after different audiences, and the Barbenheimer hype seems only to be helping both films.”Greta Gerwig’s candy-coated “Barbie,” which cost an estimated $145 million to make, not including marketing costs, has the potential to earn $100 million in the United States and Canada through Sunday, according to analysts who track audience interest and use complex formulas to forecast box office performance. Christopher Nolan’s weighty “Oppenheimer,” which cost at least $100 million before marketing, is looking at around $50 million in domestic ticket sales over the same period.Warner Bros., citing presales of about $30 million, said it was expecting closer to $75 million in weekend ticket sales for “Barbie.” (Studios try their darnedest to downplay expectations.) The studio has booked the PG-13 comedy onto about 4,200 screens in North America.Universal Pictures, the studio behind “Oppenheimer,” an R-rated historical drama about the making of the atomic bomb, declined to comment. It will unfurl Nolan’s film on about 3,600 domestic screens.“Barbie” has a run time of just under two hours. “Oppenheimer” stretches three, limiting the number of screenings that theaters can squeeze into the weekend. “Oppenheimer,” however, has the benefit of playing on most of North America’s large-format screens, which come with a ticket surcharge of up to $12 in New York. IMAX is devoting its entire footprint to Nolan’s opus for the next three weeks (to the chagrin of Tom Cruise, who hoped his “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One” would continue to play on some of those screens after opening last week).AMC Entertainment, the world’s largest cinema chain, said on Monday that more than 40,000 people had purchased tickets to see “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” as a double feature, up from 20,000 last week.Hollywood urgently needs a weekend that exceeds — or even meets — expectations. This was the year when moviegoing was finally supposed to bounce back from the pandemic, which closed many theaters for months on end and sped the growth of streaming services in homes. At last, cinemas would reclaim a position of cultural urgency.But ticket sales in the United States and Canada for the year to date (about $5 billion) are down by about 20 percent from the same period in 2019, according to Comscore, which compiles box office data. Blips of hope, including strong sales for the innovative “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” and the hyper-violent “John Wick: Chapter 4,” have been blotted out by disappointing results for expensive franchise films like “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” “Shazam! Fury of the Gods” and “Fast X.”The latest “Mission: Impossible” film arrived last weekend to solid results, but below what Hollywood had been expecting.Ticket buyers seem to be tiring of new installments in decades-old franchises. What is succeeding? For the most part, characters that have not been onscreen in recent memory (“The Super Mario Bros. Movie”), new chapters in series that are not as well worn (“Creed III”) and movies that cater to audiences ignored by Hollywood (“Sound of Freedom,” which has been promoted by the right).For all of her world domination, Barbie has never before had her own big-budget movie. “Oppenheimer” is based on the 2005 biography “American Prometheus” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. “Both studios went all-in on original films, directed by notable auteurs with an interest in pushing the envelope,” said Paul Dergarabedian, a senior Comscore analyst. “These are not the tried-and-true safe bets that are the hallmark of the summer movie season.”“Barbie” has major movie stars — Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling — while “Oppenheimer” cast the lesser-known Cillian Murphy in the title role. “Barbie” is aimed at women, while “Oppenheimer” has the edge with men. One represents what many cinephiles loathe about Hollywood: movies based on toys. The other was written and directed by one of Hollywood’s most serious cinephiles.Comedy against drama. The brightest side of human imagination vs. the darkest. Creating worlds, destroying worlds.The contrasts are irresistible.While rare, such box-office matchups are not without precedent. Just ask Nolan. In July 2008, his sinister Batman movie “The Dark Knight” (Warner Bros.) arrived head-to-head with Universal’s silly, sun-drenched “Mamma Mia!” His was No. 1 that weekend, but both movies became runaway hits. More