A private chef dishes on HelloFresh vs. Home Chef: Which one should you get?
IDF aiming to seize strategic areas as part of expansion of war against Hamas in attempt to force release of hostages
Israel has announced a major new offensive in Gaza after launching a wave of airstrikes on the territory that killed more than 100 people, in what it said was a fresh effort to force Hamas to release hostages.
In a statement late on Friday, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said they had “launched extensive attacks and mobilized forces to seize strategic areas in the Gaza Strip, as part of the opening moves of Operation Gideon’s Chariots and the expansion of the campaign in Gaza, to achieve all the goals of the war in Gaza”.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Maya Alleruzzo/AP
© Photograph: Maya Alleruzzo/AP
Imogen Poots takes the lead in Stewart’s choppy but compelling adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch’s memoir of abuse and sexual uncertainty
Kristen Stewart’s directorial debut, adapted by her from the 2011 abuse memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch, is running a very high temperature, though never exactly collapsing into outright feverishness or torpor. It’s a poetry-slam of pain and autobiographical outrage, recounting a writer’s journey towards recovering the raw material of experience to be sifted and recycled into literary success.
The present day catastrophes of failed relationships, drink and drugs are counterpointed with Super-8 memories and epiphanies of childhood with extreme closeups on remembered details and wry, murmuring voiceovers. It borders on cliche a little, but there is compassion and storytelling ambition here.
Lidia herself, well played by Imogen Poots, is a young woman who was abused in her teenage years by her clenched and furious architect father (Michael Epp) – along with her sister (Thora Birch) who often sacrificed herself to their father’s loathsome attentions to divert him away from Lidia – and their mother went into depressive denial throughout.
Lidia throws herself into being a fanatically focused swim team champ which gets her a college scholarship that she messes up through booze and coke. The film shows how in the water she feels free; swimming laps against the clock gives her a purpose and an escape – a cancellation of identity.
But now Lidia has a terrible secret: it is not merely that she is an abuse survivor – she masturbates incessantly thinking about it, and utterly despises her weak-beta male boyfriend (Earl Cave) for being nice and gentle. (That, and being spanked by her swim coach, is also a complicating factor for her interest in BDSM.)
So when her artistic opportunity arrives, so does a toxic crisis of daddy issues. Her attempts at writing get her the chance to participate in an experimental collaborative novel being masterminded by the counterculture legend Ken Kesey (Jim Belushi) whose interest in her appears unsettlingly like her father’s. Is history repeating itself? Is degradation the price you pay for success in writing – or swimming – or anything? Her own writerly evolution is shown by the books she reads herself – Vita Sackville-West’s biography of Joan of Arc as a kid, William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury as a student, and then, as a young writer, Kathy Acker’s Empire of the Senseless.
These personal stories and their movie versions have been undermined recently by notorious fake memoirist JT LeRoy – whose alter ego Savannah Knoop was actually played by Kristen Stewart in a screen version of her troubled life.
But for all that, and some callow indie indulgences, this is an earnest and heartfelt piece of work, and Stewart has guided strong, intelligent performances.
© Photograph: Courtesy: Cannes Film Festival
© Photograph: Courtesy: Cannes Film Festival
The San Francisco 49ers and quarterback Brock Purdy have agreed to a five-year, $265m contract extension, ESPN’s Adam Schefter reported Friday. The deal includes $181m in guaranteed money, solidifying Purdy’s role as the franchise quarterback moving forward.
Purdy, 25, was the final pick of the 2022 NFL draft – familiarly known as ‘Mr Irrelevant’ – but quickly defied expectations. After stepping in as the starter midway through his rookie season, Purdy led the 49ers to back-to-back playoff appearances, including a trip to the Super Bowl in February 2024. He was also named to the Pro Bowl and finished fourth in MVP voting that season.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Terry Schmitt/UPI/REX/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Terry Schmitt/UPI/REX/Shutterstock
Cannes film festival
The U2 singer’s solo stage appearance sees him reflect on his anguished family past and have a decent go at being an ordinary Joe
The stadium-conquering rock superstar Bono finds a smaller arena than usual for this more intimate and much acclaimed “quarter-man” show, performed solo without his U2 bandmates Adam Clayton, David “The Edge” Evans and Larry Mullen Jr and filmed live on stage at New York’s Beacon theatre in 2023 by Andrew Dominik. It’s a confident, often engaging mix of music and no-frills theatrical performance, with Bono often coming across like some forgotten character that Samuel Beckett created but then suppressed due to undue levels of rock’n’roll pizzazz.
Bono delivers anecdotes from his autobiography Surrender, starting with his recent heart scare and going back to his Dublin childhood, his musical breakthrough to global fame, his post-Live Aid charity work on poverty and famine relief (though no discourse on the question of whether Live Aid was a good thing), and his religious faith which evidently morphed from a radical Christianity in his teen years to a more wide-embracing spirituality; it is all interspersed with “unplugged” versions of U2 standards accompanied by harp and cello.
Continue reading...© Photograph: Sarah Shatz/Courtesy of Apple
© Photograph: Sarah Shatz/Courtesy of Apple
© Doug Mills/The New York Times
© Doug Mills/The New York Times
© Rod Lamkey/Associated Press
© The New York Times
© Al Drago for The New York Times
© Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times
© Doug Mills/The New York Times