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      Michelle Trachtenberg, ‘Gossip Girl’ and ‘Buffy’ Actress, Dies at 39

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      Michelle Trachtenberg, who rose to fame as Buffy’s younger sister, Dawn, in the dark, comedic series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and as a conniving socialite on the show “Gossip Girl,” has died, according to the New York Police Department. She was 39.The department said in a statement that officers, responding to a 911 call just after 8 a.m. Wednesday, found Ms. Trachtenberg unconscious and unresponsive in a Manhattan apartment. She was pronounced dead by emergency medical workers, who had also responded.The medical examiner will determine the cause of death, the department said, adding that criminality was not suspected.Michelle Trachtenberg in an undated photo. Beginning as a child, she had a long list of film and television credits that endeared her to a generation of fans.Online USA, via Getty ImagesBeginning as a child, Ms. Trachtenberg had a long list of credits in movies and television that endeared her to a generation of fans.In 1996, she portrayed Harriet Welsch, a precocious 11-year-old who meticulously records her observations of neighbors and classmates in “Harriet the Spy,” a movie based on Louise Fitzhugh’s beloved 1964 children’s book of the same title. The movie also starred Rosie O’Donnell as Harriet’s nanny, Ole Golly.Ms. Trachtenberg also portrayed Casey Carlyle, the heroine in the 2005 figure-skating movie “Ice Princess.” Other credits included the 2004 raunchy teen comedy “Eurotrip” and the 2009 comedy “17 Again,” which also starred Zac Efron and Matthew Perry.A full obituary will follow.Chelsia Rose Marcius More

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      Jimmy Kimmel: ‘The Whole Country Is a Fyre Festival Right Now’

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      “I think it might be time to give the planet to the apes, because we’re finished,” Kimmel said on Tuesday.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Fired FestFederal employees have been getting mixed messages about whether to respond to a mass email from Elon Musk, threatening to fire them if they didn’t justify their employment.On Tuesday, Jimmy Kimmel said the nation’s civil servants were “as confused as Elon’s kids were when they realized their father named them after a phone number.”“Elon and his musketeers — they sent an email to all federal employees ordering them to list five things they did at work last week. Trump loved this idea — he said it was ‘genius,’ and he said anyone who didn’t respond to the email would be ‘fired or semi-fired.” Which, what if that was his catchphrase on ‘The Apprentice’? ‘Meat Loaf, you’re fired. Or semi-fired.’” — JIMMY KIMMEL“OK, now I understand. It’s somewhat voluntary, but if you don’t respond, he guesses you get fired. Thanks for clearing that up.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“At this point, how is anybody supposed to know what to do with all this confusing information? Forget running the government; these clowns couldn’t get 10 bridesmaids to a paint-and-sip.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“This email created chaos throughout our government. Some agencies, like the F.B.I., told their employees just to ignore it; others, like the V.A., demanded that employees respond. At H.H.S., employees were told they could respond if they wanted to but should assume that what they write will be read by malign foreign actors. What? Russell Brand’s going to get these?” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Kash Patel told the F.B.I., ‘Don’t respond to that email.’ Tulsi Gabbard said, ‘Don’t respond to that email.’ Pete Hegseth responded to that email at 2 a.m., saying, ‘U up?’” — DESI LYDIC“And maybe the craziest part of all of it is Elon Musk has no official authority to fire anyone. He’s not an elected official — he wasn’t appointed, he wasn’t confirmed. Who knew you could fire people at a place you don’t even work? I might try it at Chipotle sometime just to see what happens.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“It’s confusing. When you walk in the White House and say ‘Who is in charge?’ everyone just shrugs like they’re working at Lids.” — JIMMY FALLON“I think it might be time to give the planet to the apes, because we’re finished.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“The whole country is a Fyre Festival right now, and Elon Musk is soaking the mattresses.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Fyre Fest: The Sequel Edition)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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      ‘A Thousand Blows’ Is a Knuckle Sandwich of a Series

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      From the creator of “Peaky Blinders” comes another brutal and dingy underworld drama, this one set among the boxers and criminals of 1880s London.“A Thousand Blows,” on Hulu, is a grimy historical drama, an evocative boxing drama and a festive crime drama. Its biggest draw, though, is that its creator is Steven Knight, who also created “Peaky Blinders,” and the shows resemble each other quite a bit in their muddy brutality. “Blows” is less brooding, though.The show, based on a true story, follows Hezekiah Moscow (Malachi Kirby) and his best friend, Alec (Francis Lovehall), who emigrate from Jamaica to London in the 1880s. Hezekiah is there to be a lion tamer at the zoo. But when faced with a slew of demeaning setbacks, he winds up in the boxing ring instead, where he becomes something of a star. He catches the eye of Mary Carr (Erin Doherty), the leader of an all-female crime ring, who sees him as “the last chess piece” in her plan.“And I am a pawn?” he asks.“More like a knight in battered armor,” she says.Not everyone likes Hezekiah’s shine, though, especially Sugar Goodson (Stephen Graham), a bare-knuckle boxer and generally volatile dude who has known Mary since she was a kid. They share a destitute, Dickensian background. Most of the characters here are fueled by a lust for vengeance against villains from their past, and they also suffer from shabby treatment in the present because of their race, class, gender or ethnicity. Sometimes they cope with this by forming exciting criminal and romantic allegiances, and sometimes they save their feelings for the boxing ring.Characters in “Blows” punch and get punched a lot, and viewers might feel that they too are on the receiving end of an absolute dagwood of a knuckle sandwich. Some of this thick bleakness is cut with fun sequences of Mary and her crew’s high-end robberies. Glamorous parties — some of which are also part of Mary’s high-end robberies — add trapeze work and candelabras to the show’s mix; one cannot live on bloodied visages and sooty urchins alone.Although much of the show feels predictable, radiant performances — especially from Kirby, Graham and Doherty — lend it a sense of freshness and verve. There’s a fieriness to everything, and at just six episodes, also a breathlessness. That sense of forward momentum carries through the finale, which ends with coming attractions for more episodes.SIDE QUESTS“Peaky Blinders” is on Netflix.If you want a different, slower British period drama starring Tom Hardy and created by Knight (alongside Hardy and Hardy’s father, Chips), “Taboo” is on Peacock.Kirby and Graham are both in the tense restaurant movie “Boiling Point,” and Graham returns for its terrific and different TV sequel, also called “Boiling Point.” (You don’t have to watch one to watch the other.) The movie is on Peacock, and the show is on Amazon Prime Video, Netflix and the Roku Channel. More

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      ‘Exterior Night’ Review: Life in Perilous Times

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      The Italian master Marco Bellocchio turns to TV, revisiting the mysteries of the Aldo Moro affair.When the great Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio made “Good Morning, Night” in 2003, about the 1978 kidnapping and killing of the politician Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades, he provided a fanciful, heartbreaking coda: an image of Moro walking away from captivity, looking not much worse for wear after 55 days in a small cell.Bellocchio revisits the Moro affair in his first television series, “Exterior Night,” and once again he frees Moro (Fabrizio Gifuni) for just a bit. This time the scholarly, prickly statesman gets to stare down his colleagues in Italy’s Christian Democratic Party and tell them exactly how and why they have allowed him to die.(Released in 2022, the series is now available in the United States on MHz Choice, where the third and fourth of six episodes will stream beginning Tuesday.)Moro’s abduction and death was a watershed moment in the “years of lead,” when politically motivated bombings, shootings, kidnappings and assassinations convulsed Italy and other European countries. But it is a story that can speak to anyone who has a sense of living in perilous times. As a character in “Exterior Night” says, a society can tolerate a certain amount of crazy behavior, but “when the crazy party has the majority, we’ll see what happens.”What makes Moro’s fate such prime material for dramatization, though, are its elements of mystery and imponderability and its hints of conspiracy, as murky today as they were four decades ago. Why did Moro’s own government — of which he would have become president later that year — refuse to negotiate for his release? Why did the Red Brigades finally kill him, knowing it probably would be disastrous for their cause?“Good Morning, Night,” told from the point of view of a female captor who begins to sympathize with Moro, was a splendid film, both passionate and razor sharp. Working across five and a half hours in “Exterior Night,” Bellocchio spreads out, adding historical detail and giving space to players he had little or no room for in the film.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Late Night Laughs at DOGE’s Work Force Demand

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      “It’s like the government is being run by BuzzFeed,” Jimmy Kimmel said on Monday about Elon Musk’s work-tracking request to federal employees.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Return to SenderOn Saturday, Elon Musk emailed federal employees and asked them to respond with their top five accomplishments during the previous workweek or risk being fired.“It’s like the government is being run by BuzzFeed,” Jimmy Kimmel said on Monday.“It’s not just that they’re firing thousands of federal workers; it is the glee with which they’re firing. Ordinarily, you have some compassion when you lay people off — you wish them well, you thank them for their work. Not MAGA. Not the DOGE Bros.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Federal workers who got this email had no idea what to do, and their Trump administration bosses didn’t seem to know, either. New Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told personnel at spy agencies not to respond. F.B.I. Director Kash Patel told F.B.I. staff to pause any responses, and Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr. sent out an email saying, ‘Free roadkill in the break room!’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Our federal work force is in the clutches of a heartless billionaire who wants to colonize Mars with vehicles shaped like his penis, by which I mean Cybertrucks. He should see a doctor.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“I mean, seriously, if that guy walked into your office and told you he was there to start making cuts, everybody would jump on him and put him in a headlock, right? You’d zip-tie him and hold him until the cops showed up.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Five Things I Did Last Week Edition)“Well, guys, I’m having an odd day. This morning I got an email from NBC asking what I accomplished last week.” — JIMMY FALLON“Yep, they need to respond with five accomplishments from the last week. Federal workers wrote back: ‘I received this email, I opened this email, I read this email, I laughed at this email, and I deleted this email.’” — JIMMY FALLON“He followed up by tweeting, ‘Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.’ Now, obviously, the only proper email response to that is: ‘What did I do last week? Your mom, your mom, your mom, your mom, and your mom.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Of course, the workers were furious, mostly about getting a work email on a Saturday.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingJon Oliver scrutinized Facebook’s new posting policies on Sunday’s episode of “Last Week Tonight.”What We’re Excited About on Tuesday NightThe “St. Denis Medical” star Wendi McLendon-Covey will sit down with Desi Lydic on Tuesday’s “The Daily Show.”Also, Check This Out“Leigh Bowery,” by Fergus Greer (1988), from the exhibition “Leigh Bowery!” at Tate Modern in London.Fergus Greer. Courtesy of The Michael Hoppen GalleryA new Leigh Bowery exhibition at Tate Modern will introduce the artist’s work to a broader audience. More

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      The Singular Charm of Parker Posey

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      One January morning, I arrived at the East Village studio of a “sound facilitator,” prepared to heal. The facilitator introduced himself as Gary. He led me past a refrigerator cloaked in an Indian tapestry and into an emptied living room, where I found Parker Posey perched cross-legged on a mat, facing a row of gongs. She appeared cozy and at ease, as if she had known the gongs for many years. Posey had invited me there to experience a sound bath, a New Age therapy that she first tried in Thailand, where she filmed the third season of the HBO anthology series “The White Lotus.” During a sound bath (according to Gary’s website), various chimes and bowls are played in an intentional therapeutic sequence; the treatment may uplift the spirit, release stuck energies and rouse engagement with the surrounding environment. Or it may not, but Gary seemed nice anyway.I joined Posey on the floor. The room filled with sounds that resembled the wait music for a planetarium. Gary then advised us that we were approaching the first full moon of the year, which he called “the wolf moon.” Posey turned to face me with spooked eyes, her mouth pulled into an arc of wry expectation. Then she stretched her legs high in the air, laid flat on the mat, and piled a sweater atop her face.Ninety minutes later, the two of us burst onto the street as if from a saloon door. When I arrived at the appointment, we were both wearing flowy black pants and black sweaters, and I was pleased I had guessed the correct attire for our encounter. But by the time we left, she had applied her Parker Posey costume over the base layer: earrings like glass shards, a pearl hair clip in the shape of a vine-picked berry, a slippery high-necked plaid overshirt, a prismatic silk scarf and a pair of round rose-tinted glasses. We walked in woozy circles around the village. Occasionally she produced her phone and waved its digital map in front of us as if it were a homing device. Whatever had happened up in Gary’s studio — brain-wave entrainment, or maybe just a permission structure for taking a film-length nap — my spirit was in fact uplifted, and Posey was engaged with her surrounding environment.To walk alongside Posey is to be reminded that a New York City sidewalk is a habitat still teeming with life. “Ha ha ha HA,” she said as we closed in on a poodle in a little sweater. “Yeah, I speak poodle!” she trilled to another. Manhattan’s pedestrians typically navigate its steroidal landscape in a dissociative state, but with Posey, every poodle is acknowledged, every commotion registered. A car drove up beside us and stopped at a light, blasting an accordion-forward Latin track. “I love this song!” she screamed to its occupants, craning her head toward the open window. Once she squatted on the sidewalk to greet a familiar dog, then crept over to retie both of my sneakers in double knots. “That was so fun, tying your shoelaces,” she said as she sprang up. “I’m a little mommy.”In the coming weeks, whenever I told anyone that I was profiling Parker Posey, they invariably had a story about her impish appearance in their own life. A journalist colleague said that as she reported to work on Sept. 12, 2001, Posey drifted past her, roller-skating through Lower Manhattan. Seemingly everyone below 14th Street has had a pleasant encounter with her at a dog run. Walton Goggins, Posey’s friend and co-star in “The White Lotus,” told me that when he first met her, at a friend’s barbecue in the Catskills, he felt instantly drawn into her world. “She has this fairylike quality about her,” he said. “She’s a person capable of doing what Emerson said so long ago — to see the miraculous in the common. And she uses phrases like, Isn’t that a gas?” Natasha Rothwell, who plays the weary spa manager, Belinda, on “The White Lotus,” said in an email that when Posey first approached her on set, Posey said she had lost her wallet and had just said a prayer to Saint Anthony, before asking Rothwell if she wanted to be her neighbor at the hotel. “She then gave me a hug and seemed to float away.”Parker Posey with Sarah Catherine Hook and Sam Nivola in the current season of the HBO series “The White Lotus.”Fabio Lovino/HBOWe 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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      ‘Zero Day’ Is a Throwback Thriller With Modern Echoes

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      The new Netflix series is a contemporary update of a ’70s-style political drama that is even more contemporary than its creators anticipated.The new Netflix limited series “Zero Day” has been in development for several years, but it is arriving at a time when its primary themes — regarding presidential overreach, the hacking of the federal government and the persistence of disinformation — are dominating the actual news cycle. It is a contemporary update of a ’70s-style political drama that is even more contemporary than anticipated.Asked if the time is ripe for a resurgence of the conspiracy thriller, the executive producer Eric Newman was succinct: “We’re living in one.”Created by Newman and two executive producers with journalism backgrounds — Noah Oppenheim, a former president of NBC News, and Michael S. Schmidt, an investigative reporter for the Washington bureau of The New York Times — “Zero Day” depicts a nightmare scenario in which the United States has been attacked and the person in charge of the response might not be of sound mind.After a cyber-strike cripples U.S. transportation systems, leaving 3,400 dead from transit accidents and other disasters, a former president named George Mullen (Robert De Niro) is selected to lead an investigative commission. But Mullen has been having hallucinations and keeps hearing the same Sex Pistols song, “Who Killed Bambi?,” on a loop in his head. Is he cracking up? Has his brain been tampered with, à la “The Manchurian Candidate” (1962)?Whatever the cause, Mullen is soon trampling over civil liberties and resorting to 9/11-era “enhanced interrogation” techniques, including torture, with U.S. citizens.While “Zero Day” makes explicit reference to 9/11 and the Patriot Act, its details are more current. As evidence seems to implicate Russian agents in the attack, Mullen grows obsessed with a leftist hacktivist collective, a provocateur talk show host (Dan Stevens) who fans the conspiratorial flames and an extremist tech billionaire (Gaby Hoffman) who would be happy to tear the whole system down.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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      SAG Awards: Complete List of Winners

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      The thriller about choosing a new pope took home the top film prize, while Demi Moore and Timothée Chalamet won individual honors.The papal thriller “Conclave” won the top prize at the 31st Screen Actors Guild Awards on Sunday night, thwarting a guild sweep by “Anora,” which had previously scored big wins earlier this month at ceremonies thrown by the producers, directors and writers guilds.The last three winners of SAG’s top prize — “Oppenheimer,” “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” and “CODA” — all went on to win best picture at the Oscars. Some of those had been season-long sweepers, unlike “Conclave,” which can boast only one other best-picture award, from the BAFTAs. Still, the win indicates that the Oscar race remains fluid leading up to the March 2 ceremony.SAG’s lead-actor race produced an upset victory, too, as “A Complete Unknown” star Timothée Chalamet finally nabbed a prize for his portrayal of Bob Dylan; the award had gone all season to Adrien Brody (“The Brutalist”). “I’m really in pursuit of greatness,” Chalamet said when accepting his award. “I know people don’t usually talk like that, but I want to be one of the greats,” he added.Over the last three years, every individual acting winner at SAG has gone on to repeat at the Oscars except last year’s SAG winner Lily Gladstone (“Killers of the Flower Moon”), who lost the best-actress Oscar to Emma Stone (“Poor Things”).This year’s best-actress battle is even more competitive, with “The Substance” lead Demi Moore and the “Anora” actress Mikey Madison trading industry prizes all season. And although the Golden Globe winner Fernanda Torres (“I’m Still Here”) was not nominated at the SAG Awards, she has nevertheless mounted a late surge with many Oscar voters I’ve spoken to, who have just gotten around to watching her movie.At the SAG Awards, it was Moore who triumphed. As she did at the Golden Globes in January, she gave a galvanizing speech that she dedicated to “that little girl who didn’t believe in herself.” As she grew emotional, Moore closed with, “The words are kind of beyond me. So I’m just going to have to say thank you.”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