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      ‘The Flash’ Review: Electric Company

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      In the latest DC Comics blowout, Ezra Miller suits up as the speedy superhero alongside special guests like Batman (hello, Michael Keaton).The Flash, the latest DC Comics superhero to get his very own big show, isn’t the outfit’s usual brooding heavyweight. He’s neither an old-style god nor new (a.k.a. a billionaire), but an electrified nerd who joined the super-ranks by accident, not by birthright or by design. Out of uniform, he is a normie, a goof and kind of endearing. He’s really, really fast on his feet, you bet. But what makes him pop onscreen is that when things go bigger and grimmer here, as they invariably do in blowouts of this type, he retains a playful weightlessness.That’s a relief, particularly given how the movie tries to clobber you into submission. Big action-adventures invariably give the viewer a workout, smacking you around with their shocks and awesomeness, though it sometimes feels as if contemporary superhero movies have taken this kind of pummeling to new extremes. That may be true, though movies have long employed spectacle — pyrotechnics, lavish set pieces — to bait, hook and bludgeon the audience so it keeps begging for more. If the bludgeoning feels more inescapable these days, it’s partly because the major studios now bank so heavily on superhero movies.“The Flash” is one of the more watchable ones. It’s smartly cast, ambitious and relatively brisk at two and a half hours. The story tracks Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) and his superhero persona, the Flash, as he whooshes, wrapped in tendrils of lightning; traverses space-time continuums; and tries to exonerate his father (Ron Livingston), who’s in prison for killing Barry’s mom (Maribel Verdú). As is usually the case with superhero movies, the story is nonsensical and convoluted — it’s no wonder a character uses a tangle of cooked spaghetti to try to explain a major plot point — but not calamitously so. The overall vibe is upbeat.Some of that liveliness comes from Miller, a tense and almost feverishly charismatic presence. (Their well-publicized offscreen troubles hang like a cloud over this movie.) Some of the Flash’s appeal, of course, is also baked into the original comic-book character, “the fastest man on Earth,” who first hit in 1940 (via creators Gardner Fox and Harry Lampert) and was revamped (by Robert Kanigher and Carmine Infantino) in 1956. Five years later in Issue No. 123, these versions of the Flash (there are others) discover that they exist on two seemingly separate Earths, an idea this movie, well, runs with by introducing parallel DC Comics realms.It’s a conceit that pays off the second a shambolic Michael Keaton makes his entrance as a graybeard puttering about a near-derelict Wayne Manor. Having hung up his Bat-suit in his reality (while DC has repeatedly rebooted the franchise in ours), Bruce appears to have entered the Howard Hughes chapter of his cosseted life when Barry drops by. Long story short, the two rapidly join forces, dust off the Batcave tech, furrow their brows and suit up, as other members of the DC stock company join the party, including Alfred Pennyworth (Jeremy Irons), General Zod (Michael Shannon) and Supergirl (Sasha Calle).The entrance of these company players are timed like special-guest appearances — ladies and gentlemen, Zod the Zaniac! — and they’re obviously meant to delight true believers. To a degree, they also feel like they’ve been brought in to shore up the Flash during his first stand-alone outing. Cramming the screen with established names to hedge their expensive bets is an old-fashioned studio gambit, whether in a 1920s musical revue or 1970s disaster flick. Whatever the rationale here, the results are amusing, and it’s especially nice to see Keaton, who first played Batman in Tim Burton’s 1989 film. He seems to be having a good time, and when he looks in the mirror approvingly, it’s easy to share in his self-admiration.Working from a script by Christina Hodson, the director Andy Muschietti keeps these pieces greased and quickly moving, though he almost blows it as soon as the movie begins. It opens with an unfunny protracted bit in which Barry, who’s late for work, orders a sandwich from a pokey server. (That the first villain in the story is a service worker is a choice.) While the guy readies the order, Barry turns into the Flash to help his world’s Batman (an uncredited Ben Affleck) dispatch some villains. It goes as expected — bam, splat — but then a hospital wing collapses, and newborn babies go flying, hurtling toward the street.It’s a creepy setup that Muschietti milks for laughs that become queasier and ickier the longer and the more gleefully flamboyant the scene plays out. It’s absurd, outrageous, digitally fabricated and needless to say the Flash will save the day. The problem is that Muschietti, who has a talent for fraying your nerves with images of child endangerment (as he showed in the “It” horror flicks), is so obviously pleased with these airborne babies that he keeps showing off (turning a microwave into a bassinet), which drains the sequence both of its outlandish comedy and of any tension that might make the Flash’s heroism resonate.The movie more or less recovers, settling into its lively groove, even if the Flash remains a curiously uncertain presence. Surrounding him with bigger superheroes may have made branding sense, but the net effect is that the movie never persuasively establishes the Flash as a confident stand-alone entity. That may make the question of Miller playing him in the future moot. Who knows? Last year, Miller apologized for their behavior and said they were seeking treatment for “complex mental health issues.” I liked “The Flash” well enough while watching it. But thinking and writing about it and everything that has gone down has been dispiriting — real life has a way of insinuating itself into even better-wrought fantasies.The FlashRated PG-13 for superhero violence. Running time: 2 hours 24 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Cormac McCarthy Movies: Stream These 5 Film Adaptations

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      The Coens and Ridley Scott are among the directors who took big swings at the novelist’s work. The distinctive writer left his mark on the big screen.By turns terse, poetic and baroque, able to find the essence of human nature in the bleakest of circumstances, Cormac McCarthy, who died Tuesday, was widely considered to be one of the greatest novelists of his generation. His writing, with its Western landscapes, noir-inflected dialogue and biblical inclinations, proved to be catnip to filmmakers, including the Coen brothers, Ridley Scott and Billy Bob Thornton. Here is a look at how this most distinctive of writers left his mark on the big screen.‘All the Pretty Horses’ (2000)Rent or buy it on most major platforms.Probably the gentlest of McCarthy’s Border Trilogy novels, this film adaptation tells the story of John Grady Cole, a young man who high-tails it across the border to Mexico, where he falls in love with a wealthy rancher’s daughter (Penélope Cruz), runs afoul of her family and the law, and navigates the horrors of prison life. Yes, this is gentle by McCarthy standards. Matt Damon, riding the success of “Good Will Hunting” and “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” plays Cole as a sensitive lad dumbstruck by love. Cruz, a native of Spain, does her best as a south-of-the-border lass. Thornton directs with lyrical respect for the source material, if not a whole lot of grit or imagination.‘No Country for Old Men’ (2007)Rent or buy it on most major platforms.The Coen brothers return to the Texas noir roots of their first feature, “Blood Simple,” for the most successful McCarthy adaptation to date. It won Oscars for best picture, directing and screenwriting, as well as Javier Bardem’s supporting turn as one of McCarthy’s nihilistic villains, an implacable killing machine who speaks in riddles and engages his prey in fatal rhetorical jousts. But the heart of the movie, about a briefcase full of money and the in-over-his-head opportunist (Josh Brolin) who pilfers it, is Tommy Lee Jones as a small-town sheriff who wants out of the game, which seems to get more sinister and incomprehensible by the minute. He is the old man of the title and the author’s surrogate, a poetic soul just trying to wait it out until it’s all over.‘The Road’ (2009)Stream it on Tubi, Vudu and Freevee.The novel that brought McCarthy’s world to a wide audience (and won a 2007 Pulitzer Prize), “The Road” redeems a postapocalyptic hellscape with the pure love of a father (played by Viggo Mortensen with heartbreaking intensity) for his young son (Kodi Smit-McPhee, already a young actor of uncommon instincts). It’s a gray land of digitally enhanced wreckage, peopled by cannibals and other desperate survivors played by the likes of Robert Duvall, Michael K. Williams and, in a brief but indelible and terrifying performance, Garret Dillahunt. John Hillcoat directs like he means it. “The Road” is up there with “No Country” as one of the purest visual distillations of McCarthy’s prose.‘The Sunset Limited’ (2011)Stream it on Max.Sometimes McCarthy likes to take a couple of characters, wind them up and just let them riff on what it all means. His 2022 novel, “Stella Maris,” fits this bill, as does this HBO film version of McCarthy’s play “The Sunset Limited,” about a God-fearing ex-con called Black (Samuel L. Jackson) and the secular humanities professor, called White (Tommy Lee Jones), whom Black saves from jumping in front of a subway train. Confined to Black’s apartment, they thrust and parry, Black offering a brand of streetwise divinity, White stewing in his own suicidal juices. Both actors clearly relish the opportunity to speak McCarthy’s dialogue, and who could blame them? This is some of Jackson’s best work, allowing him to return to his theater roots with a high-wire act of philosophy and feeling. Jones’s direction is workmanlike, but that’s all this material really needs.‘The Counselor’ (2013)Rent or buy it on most major platforms.Ridley Scott directs the only original screenplay on McCarthy’s résumé, an unfairly maligned and misunderstood blast of criminal nihilism that carries the noir direction of “No Country” to its apotheosis. Michael Fassbender plays a glib lawyer whose taste for the finer things gets him in deep with a Mexican cartel. Other players come and go, including Brad Pitt, Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Bruno Ganz and Cameron Diaz, who has an amorous encounter with a luxury car that you will never unsee. This is McCarthy and Scott having infectious fun with humanity’s dark side, including two bravura murder scenes notable for their cruelty and creativity. More

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      ‘Miles Ahead,’ ‘The Exiles’ and More Streaming Gems

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      Inventive riffs on the biopic, the movie musical, the classic Western and the celebrity bio-documentary are among the highlights of this month’s roundup of under-the-radar streaming movies.‘Miles Ahead’ (2016)Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.Viewers hoping for a traditional music-legend biopic in the style of “Walk the Line” or “Ray” will likely be baffled by this portrait of Miles Davis from Don Cheadle, who directs, co-writes and stars as the jazz great. Cheadle eschews the cradle-to-grave approach typical of such endeavors, instead building his narrative around a tall tale of Davis and a music journalist (Ewan McGregor) attempting to recover stolen tapes of his latest album. This mostly fictional fabrication gives Cheadle the leeway to create a playful, unpredictable and unexpected work — a cinematic reflection of the music that made him famous. Emayatzy Corinealdi is heart-wrenching as Davis’s wife Frances, while LaKeith Stanfield and Michael Stuhlbarg stand out in memorable supporting roles.‘The Lure’ (2017)Stream it on Max.The Polish director Agnieszka Smoczynska made her feature directing debut with this exhilaratingly odd mash-up of cabaret musical, sex comedy and folk horror tale. Michalina Olszanska and Marta Mazurek are Gold and Silver, a pair of mermaid sisters who leave their comfortable undersea homes in pursuit of a handsome human (shades of “The Little Mermaid”), and end up bumping and grinding at a seedy nightclub. Smoczynska takes this literal fish-out-of-water tale and spices it up with unexpected genre flourishes; it’s the kind of movie where, if you’re not enjoying yourself, you merely have to wait a few scenes for it to become something else entirely.‘St. Vincent’ (2014)Stream it on Netflix.The gruff but lovable geezer, the harried and hard-working single mom, the hooker with the heart of gold — the character types on display in Theodore Melfi’s comedy-drama are, to put it charitably, well-worn. Yet they’re written with such sensitivity and played with such nuance by Bill Murray, Melissa McCarthy and Naomi Watts that the amiable viewer won’t much mind; in fact, these overly familiar characters, and the stock situations Melfi writes them into, allow these actors to give them a good, old-fashioned, movie-star spit shine. All three pros are in fine form, with McCarthy particularly good in a lived-in, semi-dramatic turn that predicts her affecting work in “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” But the standout is young Jaeden Martell, charismatic and charming as the kid who brings them all together.‘The Old Way’ (2023)Stream it on Hulu.So much of today’s B-movie output consists of Xeroxed action movies and unimaginative horror that it’s easy to forget how the Western was once a key corner of that world. This revenge melodrama from the director Brett Donowho serves as a reminder of the genre’s vitality, even on a low budget. Though burdened by a thin script and a distractingly contemporary look, the picture’s flaws are handily outweighed by the presence of Nicolas Cage in the leading role — shockingly, his first turn in an oater in a 100-plus film career. He brings a hard-fought gravitas to this old gunslinger character, his familiar face sharpened by weary eyes and deeply set lines reminiscent of old-school Western stars like Randolph Scott and Audie Murphy.‘Run All Night’ (2015)Stream it on Max.This Liam Neeson vehicle was released the year after “John Wick,” and feels, in retrospect, like the first of that film’s many imitators, with Neeson as a former Mob enforcer who puts his own life in jeopardy when he kills his boss’s trigger-happy son. Whatever its origins, this is one of Neeson’s better late-period action efforts, thanks to a stellar supporting cast (including Vincent D’Onofrio, Ed Harris, Bruce McGill, Lois Smith plus a “John Wick: Chapter 2” co-star, Common) and a tightly focused Neeson performance; he has one especially good scene at the hospital bed of his dying mother, wearing the face of a man who knows how much he’s let her down.‘The Exiles’ (2023)Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.Christine Choy, the initial subject of this documentary from the directors Violet Columbus and Ben Klein, is such a compelling, colorful character — a foul-mouthed, chain-smoking, no nonsense local legend — that one could watch a film merely of her telling stories and barking complaints. But Columbus and Klein are up to much more than that. “The Exiles” details how fellow documentarian Choy spent much of the summer of 1989 interviewing “political exiles” from China’s Tiananmen Square protests (and subsequent massacre) and attending their Stateside events. Decades later, she rediscovers that footage and sets about reconnecting with her subjects, a process that results in poignant reflection and righteous indignation over how their cause was adopted but eventually discarded by the U.S. government.‘Call Me Kate’ (2022)Stream it on Netflix.Katharine Hepburn is the subject of the documentary “Call Me Kate.”NetflixNetflix is notoriously reluctant to license films from Hollywood’s golden era (frankly, it can be hard to find much of anything from the 20th century in general). But they will offer up the occasional documentary study of cinema history, such as “Five Came Back,” “Is That Black Enough for You?!?,” and this recent British documentary valentine to the one and only Katharine Hepburn. The writer and director Lorna Tucker draws from rare archival audio and home movies, elegantly assembling a portrait that both celebrates and demystifies her considerable legend. Intimate and unapologetic, it leaves the viewer with a keener understanding of Hepburn — the person and the persona.‘Tim’s Vermeer’ (2014)Stream it on Hulu.The current hullabaloo over A.I. and visual art makes this a fine time to revisit this provocative and pointed documentary, written by the magicians and self-appointed debunkers Penn and Teller, narrated by the former and directed by the latter. They detail the efforts of inventor Tim Jenison to both investigate and replicate the methodology of Dutch master Johannes Vermeer, whose photorealistic paintings have impressed admirers and challenged skeptics for years. Assembled with the pair’s usual and potent mixture of cynicism and curiosity, it’s a compelling journey into the past with implications for the future. More

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      Jacques Rozier, Last of the French New Wave Directors, Dies at 96

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      Though he never achieved the fame of Jean-Luc Godard or François Truffaut, he was considered by many to be their equal.Jacques Rozier, who directed critically acclaimed films like “Adieu Philippine” and “Du Côté d’Orouët” and who was considered the last surviving member of the French New Wave, if an underrated one, died on June 2 in the village of Théoule-sur-Mer in southern France. He was 96.His death was announced on social media by his friend and former collaborator Michèle Berson.Mr. Rozier was in his 30s when he emerged as part of the French film vanguard of the late 1950s and 1960s, channeling the same insurrectionary spirit as New Wave contemporaries like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, whose last names became one-word signifiers of swashbuckling directorial brilliance.Such luminaries acknowledged him as a member in good standing in what amounted to one of cinema history’s most exclusive clubs, collectively committed to reinventing the art form by upending conventional notions of what a movie could be.And he outlasted them all. After the death in 2019 of Agnès Varda, another director associated with the movement, Mr. Godard said in an interview with the Swiss public broadcasting network RTS that there were now only two of the original New Wave directors left, himself and Mr. Rozier. Mr. Godard, a longtime friend of Mr. Rozier, died last year.“Adieu Philippine” (1962) was Mr. Rozier’s debut feature, a story about a young television technician’s breezy seaside dalliance with two teenage girls before he heads off to serve in the Algerian War.While the film was not a commercial success, it inspired an emerging generation of mavericks.Cahiers du Cinéma, the French film magazine that served as the bible of the movement, put the movie’s female stars, Yveline Céry and Stefania Sabatini, on the cover of an issue titled “Nouvelle Vague” (“New Wave”) and described the film as “the paragon of the New Wave, the one where the virtues of jeunes cinéma shine with their purest brilliance.”The celebrated directors Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette, who were also aligned with the movement, declared “Adieu Philippine” a masterpiece. Mr. Truffaut wrote that it was “the clearest success of the new cinema where spontaneity is all the more powerful when it is the result of long and careful work.” Before its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, Mr. Godard called the film “quite simply the best French film of recent years.”Even so, it took Mr. Rozier, a single-minded director known for feuding with his producers, years to achieve even modest acclaim across the Atlantic. When “Adieu Philippine” finally premiered in New York in 1973, the critic Roger Greenspun of The New York Times wrote in his review that it was “especially ironic” that “perhaps the most agreeable, and surely one of the loveliest, of all New Wave movies” should have “had to wait so long.”Even then, Mr. Rozier spent the next decades largely as a darling of critics and cineastes. The New Yorker called him the “odd man out” in a 2012 appreciation by the critic Richard Brody, a champion of his work. Observing that none of his five feature films were available in the United States, Mr. Brody wrote that Mr. Rozier “gets the award for Best French Director Undistributed Here.”Mr. Rozier was born on Nov. 10, 1926, in Paris. After graduating from the Institute for Advanced Film Studies (now La Fémis) in his home city, he worked as an assistant in television and on film productions, including “French Cancan,” a 1955 musical directed by Jean Renoir. Mr. Rozier would go on to direct many French television shows throughout the 1960s.Information on his survivors was not immediately available. His former wife, Michèle O’Glor, a writer and actress, died last year, following the death in 2021 of their son Jean Jacques Rozier, who worked as an operator on several of his father’s films.Nine years after “Adieu Philippine” premiered at Cannes, Mr. Rozier returned to that fabled French Riviera festival with “Du côté d’Orouët,” a rambling comedy released in 1973 that was shot on 16-millimeter film. It followed three young women from Paris embarking on a vacation on the west coast of France.More than two and a half hours long “and ultra casual, ‘Du côté d’Orouët’ is the epitome of what Quentin Tarantino would term a ‘hang out’ movie,” the Australian film site Senses of Cinema noted in 2018.A scene from ”Adieu Philippine” (1962), about a young television technician’s dalliance with two teenage girls.via UnifranceRambling seaside films were common for Mr. Rozier. Among them are the 1976 comedy “Les Naufragés de l’île de la Tortue” (“The Castaways of Turtle Island”), about a travel agent who sets up Robinson Crusoe-style vacations in Caribbean islands, and “Maine-Océan” (“Maine-Ocean Express”), a 1986 road comedy set on a train traveling from Paris to Saint-Nazaire on the coast of Brittany.His movies, including his final one, the theater-world comedy “Fifi Martingale,” from 2001, “are deliciously unstrung,” Mr. Brody wrote in his New Yorker appreciation.“He builds them on the basis of elaborate improvisations, constructing long scenes of comic misadventures and amorous misunderstandings,” he wrote. “He casts the minutiae of daily life as cosmic playthings of destiny and invests them with an extraordinary, bittersweet romantic energy.” More

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      ‘Horseplay’ Review: Boys Will Be Boys

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      In this film from Argentina, a bunch of guys rent a villa and, well, act like a bunch of annoying guys renting a villa.Boys will be boys, as the saying goes. In “Horseplay,” the sleek, expansive villa that a group of young, straight-identifying men relax in for the holidays starts to close in as their games of machismo — dumping water on a sleeping guest, for instance — push one another to the breaking point.There’s not a lot of forward momentum in “Horseplay,” directed by Marco Berger and set outside a city in Argentina. Instead, the film plays like a perverse riff on a hangout movie, the “no homo” antics of a film like Richard Linklater’s “Everybody Wants Some!!” taken to extremes, both in its laid back pace but also in the consequences of its characters fooling around.They take naked photos together, send them around, slap each other’s butts. The audience sees something roil in one member of the group, Poli (Franco de la Puente), as he gazes at some of the young men faking fellatio and playacting penetration. But everyone else is content to lounge in the cognitive dissonance of the blurry boundaries of their homosocial intimacy rituals.If only it weren’t all a bit inert. Without a piercing point of view to cut to the core of this male bonding, everything unspools slowly and without propulsion. “Horseplay” is less an acutely mapped-out anthropological study into toxic masculinity and pervasive homophobia and misogyny, and more like having to spend a day chilling with the most annoying guys you know.HorseplayNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. Rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      Treat Williams, Actor Known for ‘Hair’ and ‘Everwood,’ Dies at 71

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      The veteran actor also starred in the movie “Deep Rising.” He died after a motorcycle accident in Vermont.Treat Williams, the actor known for his roles in the movies “Hair” and “Deep Rising” and the TV show “Everwood,” has died. He was 71.Mr. Williams died on Monday after an S.U.V. crashed into his motorcycle in Dorset, Vt., the Vermont State Police said in a statement.The crash occurred in the late afternoon near the Vermont-New York State border.The Vermont State Police said that a southbound S.U.V. attempting to turn left into a parking lot drove into the path of Mr. Williams’s northbound Honda motorcycle, adding that Mr. Williams was “unable to avoid a collision and was thrown from his motorcycle.”Mr. Williams, who was wearing a helmet at the time of the accident, suffered critical injuries and was pronounced dead at a medical center in Albany, N.Y., after being airlifted there, the state police said. The 35-year-old man whose vehicle hit Mr. Williams was not hospitalized.The police said an investigation was underway. No other details were immediately available.Richard Treat Williams was born in Stamford, Conn., in 1951. “Treat” is a Welsh name that has been in his family for generations.Mr. Williams moved with his family to Rowayton, Conn., as a young child, he told Vermont Magazine in a 2021 interview. His father was a World War II veteran who later worked for the Merck pharmaceutical company. His mother owned a sailing and swimming school on Long Island Sound.“Looking back on my younger years, I had an idyllic childhood, but I didn’t initially realize how idyllic it truly was until I grew older,” he told the magazine.Mr. Williams began acting in seventh grade, he told Vermont Magazine. Later, at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania, he quit the football team to focus on acting.Within a few years, he was on Broadway as the understudy to four of the male leads in “Grease,” including John Travolta. Then he began picking up roles in films starring James Earl Jones, Michael Caine and other A-list stars. One of his highest-profile roles was playing a hippie in the 1979 film version of “Hair,” directed by Milos Foreman.But his success wasn’t always assured. After a movie he starred in flopped in 1980 — the comedy “Why Would I Lie?” — Mr. Williams started flying planes for a company in Los Angeles.“I’d done eight films, none of which had been successful,” he told The New York Times in 1981. “I felt so out of control. I wasn’t working with people I wanted to work with. I was very frustrated.”Mr. Williams eventually came back to show business and racked up four more decades of roles in a wide variety of film and television projects.Among other highlights, he played the lead roles of a police officer-turned-informant in the 1981 film “Prince of the City” and a boat captain in the 1998 action movie “Deep Rising.”He also starred in “Everwood,” a WB television series about a New York neurosurgeon who starts a new life with his family in the mountains of Colorado after his wife dies in a car accident. The show debuted in 2002 and ran for four seasons.More recently, Mr. Williams played the impossibly single old flame of a woman who tries to sell her hometown in the 2020 Netflix musical “Dolly Parton’s Christmas on the Square.” He also played a retired detective in the 2022 HBO series “We Own This City.”Information about Mr. Williams’s survivors was not immediately available.Hours before he died, Mr. Williams, who lived in Manchester Center, Vt., posted a photo on Twitter that he appeared to have taken from the seat of his lawn mower.“Mowing today,” he wrote. “Wish I could bottle the scent.”Jesus Jiménez More

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      Golden Globes Are Sold and Hollywood Foreign Press Is No More

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      After a series of ethics, finance and diversity scandals, the embattled awards show will continue but the group that was behind it for decades will not.The Hollywood Foreign Press Association, a group of entertainment journalists from overseas that, despite frequent missteps, built the Golden Globe Awards into a marquee event, died on Monday after a series of scandals. It was 80.The end of the embattled H.F.P.A. was announced after California officials agreed to a complicated reorganization plan that will allow the Golden Globe Awards to continue.Eldridge Industries, a holding company owned by the billionaire investor Todd Boehly, and Dick Clark Productions, which is part of Penske Media, agreed to buy the foreign press association’s Golden Globe assets for an undisclosed price. The proceeds will go to a new nonprofit, the Golden Globe Foundation, which will continue the H.F.P.A.’s philanthropic efforts; it gave more than $50 million to entertainment-related charities over the last three decades.Members of the foreign press association — primarily freelance entertainment journalists — will become employees of a yet-to-be-named for-profit entity that will try to expand the Golden Globes as a brand, according to an Eldridge spokesman. The former members (there are fewer than 100) will earn $75,000 annually for five years, with duties that include watching films and television shows and voting for the awards; and producing promotional materials, including writing articles for a Golden Globes website. It was unclear if the members could continue freelancing (mostly celebrity interviews) for publications overseas.The Los Angeles Times discovered in 2021 that the H.F.P.A. had no Black members, setting off an outcry in the entertainment industry that resulted in NBC canceling the 2022 Globes telecast. The ceremony returned to NBC in January under a one-year agreement. Eldridge and Dick Clark Productions, which has produced the Globes telecast for decades, have since been looking for a new broadcast network or streaming service partner.The 81st Golden Globe Awards ceremony has been scheduled for Jan. 7.In a statement, Mr. Boehly called the dissolution of the H.F.P.A. a “significant milestone in the evolution of the Golden Globes.” He thanked the association’s former president, Helen Hoehne, for helping push through reforms, including “a robust approach to governance” that had helped professionalize an awards entity long known for infighting and scandal.“We have a great team in place to grow this iconic brand,” Jay Penske, the chief executive of Penske Media, said in a statement.The foreign press association had long been viewed as unserious and slippery. In the late 1960s, the Federal Communications Commission had the Globes temporarily booted from the airwaves, saying it “misled the public as to how the winners were determined.” In the 1990s and 2000s, Harvey Weinstein, the since-imprisoned Miramax co-founder, manipulated the organization in ways big and small — expensive gifts and special access to stars and his own time, at a moment when other studio chiefs could barely hide their derision. He was often rewarded with a stunning number of nominations.Hollywood stopped turning a blind eye to the organization’s failings in 2021, after the killing of George Floyd in police custody in 2020 prompted a national conversation about racism and inequity. More than 100 publicists closed ranks, refusing to make stars available for Golden Globe appearances and contributing to NBC’s cancellation of the 2022 telecast. More

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      Netanyahu Trial Gets a Hollywood Mention From a Political Rival

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      Yair Lapid, a former colleague and now nemesis of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, testified that he had been asked to help a wealthy film producer with a tax break.The leader of Israel’s political opposition, Yair Lapid, testified on Monday in the long-running corruption trial of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, recounting how Mr. Netanyahu had lobbied him nearly a decade ago to back tax breaks favoring an influential Israeli film producer.The claim is a small part of a yearslong prosecution in which Mr. Netanyahu is accused of granting political favors to several businessmen and media moguls in exchange for expensive gifts and positive news coverage, charges that he denies.The appearance of Mr. Lapid — once a colleague of Mr. Netanyahu’s and now his nemesis — enlivened a slow-moving courtroom process that has largely receded into the background of Israeli public life since it began with great fanfare more than three years ago.Mr. Lapid served as prime minister for several months last year, before losing power to Mr. Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving leader, in December.Mr. Lapid briefly gave evidence about two short conversations with Mr. Netanyahu in 2013 and 2014, when he served as Mr. Netanyahu’s finance minister in a coalition government. Mr. Lapid said that Mr. Netanyahu twice had raised the possibility of extending tax exemptions for Israeli citizens who had returned to the country after living abroad, a mechanism that Mr. Lapid opposed.The extension would have benefited Arnon Milchan, a producer of scores of major Hollywood films including “Fight Club” and “Pretty Woman.” Prosecutors say Mr. Milchan gave Mr. Netanyahu’s family expensive gifts, including cigars and Champagne, in exchange for political favors.According to Mr. Lapid, Mr. Netanyahu twice described the tax exemption as “a good law.” But Mr. Netanyahu did not pursue the matter beyond those two exchanges, Mr. Lapid said. The prime minister gave the impression that he simply wanted to go through the motions of asking about it so that he could tell Mr. Milchan that he had tried, Mr. Lapid added.“The whole issue was marginal in real time,” Mr. Lapid said, according to Kan, the Israeli public broadcaster. “It’s hard to remember all the details.”Mr. Netanyahu has been accused of granting political favors to businessmen and media moguls in exchange for expensive gifts and positive news coverage, charges that he denies.Pool photo by Menahem KahanaThe trial began in 2020 and will most likely not hinge on Mr. Lapid’s evidence: It is expected to last several more years and features several more accusations. Among other claims, prosecutors accuse Mr. Netanyahu of promising to pursue legislation that would create unfavorable business conditions for a newspaper owned by Sheldon Adelson, a billionaire supporter of Mr. Netanyahu and President Donald J. Trump, in exchange for positive coverage from one of the newspaper’s competitors.Many Israelis have tuned out of the day-to-day proceedings, with a large proportion having already made up their minds about Mr. Netanyahu. His supporters view the trial as a trumped-up effort to delegitimize an elected prime minister, while his critics say it should disqualify him from office.But regardless of its outcome, the trial has already caused unusual political instability. It has divided Israeli society almost equally between Mr. Netanyahu’s supporters and critics, making it difficult for either Mr. Netanyahu or opponents like Mr. Lapid to win a stable majority in Parliament. That has caused several successive governments to collapse prematurely, leading to five elections in less than four years.The trial is also at the center of an ongoing dispute about the future of the Israeli judiciary.Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition seeks to overhaul the court system, giving the government greater control over the selection of Supreme Court judges and diminishing the court’s power over Parliament. Mr. Netanyahu says the overhaul is necessary to reduce the influence of unelected judges over elected lawmakers, but his critics fear that the plan will ultimately allow him to end his trial. Mr. Netanyahu denies any such intention.Mr. Lapid’s appearance highlighted the nuances beneath the surface of Israeli politics: Though he now seeks Mr. Netanyahu’s political downfall, Mr. Lapid was once his political ally — and socialized with and briefly worked for Mr. Milchan. Under cross-examination, Mr. Lapid recounted how he interviewed Mr. Milchan in the 1990s, during his previous career as a journalist, and even joined Mr. Milchan’s production company for several months.“We remained friends after that,” Mr. Lapid said, according to Kan. “When he would come to Israel, we would meet for dinners. He is a charming man and I liked him.”But that friendship did not extend to helping Mr. Milchan with his tax, Mr. Lapid said.Gabby Sobelman More