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WASHINGTON — President Trump said on Friday he’s considering granting Hungary an exemption from U.S. sanctions on Russian energy as he sat down with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán at the White House. “We’re looking at it because its very difficult for him to get the oil and gas from other areas,” Trump said.

Orbán said it’s a “vital” issue for his landlocked country, and said he planned to discuss with Trump the “consequences for the Hungarian people” if the sanctions took effect.

In comments on Friday, Orbán said he would present Trump with several “suggestions” for implementing an exemption.

“I’m not asking for some kind of gift from the Americans or some kind of unusual thing. I am simply asking for the realization that the sanctions recently imposed on Russian energy puts certain countries like Hungary, which do not have access to the sea, in an impossible situation,” Orbán said on state radio. “I’m going to ask the president to acknowledge that.”

A large delegation of cabinet members, business leaders and numerous right-wing political influencers with close connections to Hungary’s government accompanied Orbán to Washington. The delegation rented a 220-passenger commercial jet from Hungarian carrier Wizz Air for the journey.

Prior to Orbán’s arrival on Thursday, a bipartisan group of U.S. senators introduced a resolution calling on Hungary to end its dependence on Russian energy.

The resolution was co-signed by 10 senators including Republicans Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Chuck Grassley of Iowa, as well as Democrats Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and Chris Coons of Delaware. It “expresses concern that Hungary has shown no sign of reducing its dependence on Russian fossil fuels,” and urges Budapest to adhere to a European Union plan to cease all Russian energy imports into the bloc by the end of 2027.

“Europe has made extraordinary progress cutting its energy ties with Moscow, but Hungary’s actions continue to undermine collective security and embolden the Kremlin,” Shaheen wrote in a statement. The resolution, she continued, “sends a clear message that when it comes to buying Russian energy, all allies should be held to the same standard, and that includes Hungary.”

On Friday, Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó said in Washington that he will sign a bilateral nuclear energy cooperation agreement with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, according to Hungarian state news agency MTI.

The deal will involve Hungary’s first-ever purchases of American nuclear fuel, which it currently buys from Russia, and introduce U.S. technology for the on-site storage of spent fuel at Hungary’s Paks nuclear plant. The agreement will also include cooperation on small modular reactors.

After arriving in Washington, Orbán and some of his top officials met with Eduardo Bolsonaro, the son of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who in September was sentenced to 27 years in prison for plotting a coup after an election loss. Orbán posted on social media: “We stand firmly with the Bolsonaros in these challenging times — friends and allies who never give up. Keep fighting: political witch-hunts have no place in democracy, truth and justice must prevail!”

Megerian and Spike write for the Associated Press. Spike reported from Budapest

MOST childhoods for Brits were made up of reading books like The BFG, Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Next year, you’ll be able to experience some true nostalgia as a new museum showcasing the work of famed illustrators, like Sir Quentin Blake, will open in the UK.

Sir Quentin Blake is well-known for illustrating lots of Roald Dahl’s books, as well as his own like the Mrs Armitage series.

Work is currently underway to open a £12.5 million centre called Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration.

It will be the “world’s largest dedicated space for illustration”, and the new attraction will be in Clerkenwell on a former waterworks site.

The buildings were once part of a network that supplied water across the city and was used for 400 years.

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Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration will open in May 2026, and it’s an attraction that has been 20 years in the making.

On the project, Sir Quentin said: “I have long dreamt of a permanent place with ‘illustration’ above the door, and now the amazing reality is that we have it.

“I am proud to think the centre has my name on it – illustration is a wonderful universal and varied language.

“Here we shall celebrate its traditions and welcome the astonishing diversity of visual language from across the world. Hurrah!”

Once open, the museum will have exhibitions that will feature rarely-seen works from all over the world.

Original illustrations from leading and emerging illustrators, including work loaned from Quentin Blake’s own archive, will be on show.

Also on the site will be free spaces, including public gardens, displays and an illustration library.

You can take a seat at the café which will serve up fresh food and drinks, and there will be a shop stocked with illustration gifts.

There will be illustrator residencies in London‘s oldest surviving windmill which is also on the old waterworks site in Clerkenwell.

Other events at the museum will be illustration workshops and learning programs.

Previously, the House of Illustration was in Granary Square from 2014 to 2020.

Plus, here are the 20 most-visited attractions in England that are completely free to enter.

And for even more activities, check out the top 15 UK attractions for 2025.

Tuesday is election day, and, as usual, the pundits are breathless, the predictions are dubious and the consultants are already counting their retainers. But make no mistake: Off-year elections matter. Tuesday’s results will shape the political landscape for 2026 and beyond.

Let’s start in California, where Gov. Gavin Newsom has decided to fight Texas Republican gerrymandering with a little creative cartography of his own.

Proposition 50, which began as the “Election Rigging Response Act,” wouldn’t just help level the playing field by handing Democrats five House seats; it would also boost Newsom’s presidential ambitions. Polls suggest it’ll pass.

When it comes to elections involving actual candidates, the main attractions are in New York, New Jersey and Virginia.

In the New York City mayoral contest, Zohran Mamdani — a 34-year-old democratic socialist who seems like the kind of guy who probably buys albums on vinyl — is leading both former Gov. Andrew Cuomo (running as an independent) and Republican Curtis Sliwa.

National Republicans are already making Mamdani the avatar of everything Fox News viewers fear.

President Trump went so far as calling Mamdani a “communist” and threatening to send in the troops if he wins.

One thing is for certain: Mamdani is already a symbol. If he wins, he’ll be evidence for progressives that politics can still be interesting, exciting and revolutionary. To conservatives, he’ll be evidence that Democrats have gone insane.

If you’re paying attention, these arguments are not mutually exclusive.

Across the Hudson, New Jersey Democratic Rep. Mikie Sherrill (whose resume includes having been a naval officer and a federal prosecutor) is a very different kind of politician — the “I’m a competent adult, please clap” variety.

Her gubernatorial opponent, Jack Ciattarelli, is an ex-state legislator who radiates the kind of energy usually found at bowling alleys and diners. He’s the grandson of Italian immigrants, the son of blue-collar workers and the spiritual heir of every guy in a tracksuit yelling at a Jets game.

Ciattarelli came dangerously close to winning the governorship in 2021, which should be cause for concern for Sherrill, who’s sitting on a slim lead.

The main problem for Ciattarelli is Trump, who, despite his bridge-and-tunnel aesthetic, does more harm than good in a state that hasn’t voted for a Republican president since 1988.

Trump’s termination of the Gateway Tunnel project didn’t help either. It’s one thing to be loud and populist; it’s another to cancel something that would make voters’ commutes slightly less horrible.

Speaking of commutes, a few hours south, down I-95, Virginia will also elect a new governor. Here, Democrat Abigail Spanberger — former CIA officer, former U.S. representative, professional moderate — is coasting toward victory against Republican Winsome Earle-Sears, the lieutenant governor.

Earle-Sears, a Marine, trailblazer and gadfly, is about to add “failed gubernatorial candidate” to her resume.

Her biggest headline was firing her campaign manager (a pastor who had never run a campaign before), which sounds like a metaphor for today’s GOP. Her best attack on Spanberger involved attempting to tie her to something someone else (the Democratic attorney general nominee) did (sending a violent text about a Republican politician).

Virginia has a history of electing governors from the party that opposes the sitting president, and Trump’s DOGE cuts (not to mention the current government shutdown) have outsize importance in the commonwealth.

Depending on how things shake out in these states, narratives will be set — storylines that (rightly or not) will tell experts and voters which kinds of candidates they should nominate in 2026.

For example, if Mamdani, who represents the progressive wing, wins, but Sherrill and/or Spanberger lose, the narrative will be that cautious centrism is the problem.

If the opposite occurs, the opposite narrative (radicalism is a loser!) will take root.

The postmortems write themselves: “Progressive Resurgence,” “Year of the Woman” and/or “The Return of the Center.” The problem? It’s unwise to draw too many conclusions based on Tuesday’s election results.

First, it’s misguided to assume that what works in New York City could serve as a national model.

Second, even if Sherrill and Spanberger both win, it’s impossible to know if they simply benefited from 2025 being a good year for Democrats.

Still, what happens on Tuesday will have major repercussions. Within a day of the election, everyone with a stake in the midterms and future elections will claim the outcome means what they want it to mean. Within a week, narratives will have congealed, while heroes and scapegoats will have been assigned.

And the rest of us will be right here where we started — anxious, exhausted — and dreading the fact that the 2026 midterm jockeying starts on Wednesday.

Matt K. Lewis is the author of “Filthy Rich Politicians” and “Too Dumb to Fail.”

The Painswick Rococo Garden is one of the most beautiful places in Gloucestershire – and it’s perfect for an autumn day trip or weekend escape.

Gloucestershire is harbouring a double secret.

Nestled amidst the stunning countryside, the delightful town of Painswick, often hailed as ‘The Queen of the Cotswolds ‘, is already a hidden jewel. Previously acknowledged as one of the UK’s most picturesque towns by The Telegraph – it’s easy to see why.

This tucked-away gem in Gloucestershire is perfect for an autumn day trip or weekend escape. Situated in the heart of the Cotswolds, this beautiful town is one of the best-preserved spots in the region and its allure has remained untouched over the decades.

The best part? Painswick remains a peaceful haven, unaffected by the overwhelming surge of tourists that descend on nearby villages like Bibury, The Slaughters, Bourton-on-the-Water, and Stow-on-the-Wold.

Perched atop a hill with views over the verdant Stroud Valley, the town sits beautifully and offers a harmonious mix of history, architecture, and awe-inspiring natural beauty – which isn’t surprising, really, since it’s located within an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB).

Its honey-coloured stone buildings, winding lanes, and charming chocolate-box cottages radiate that quintessentially English charm, while the town’s serene atmosphere provides a welcome respite for visitors from the hustle and bustle of the more popular Cotswold must-see destinations.

If you’re still not convinced to pay a visit, the charming town boasts an open secret that its residents take great pride in – the Painswick Rococo Garden.

The Painswick Rococo Garden, the only one of its kind in the UK, has been acknowledged as one of the top 10 per cent of attractions worldwide by Tripadvisor’s Travellers Choice Awards for 2025. Just a stone’s throw from the town centre, it’s safe to say this stunning garden is Painswick’s crowning glory.

Brief history of the Rococo Garden

The history of the garden is rich and layered, stretching back nearly three centuries when Benjamin Hyett designed this unique and captivating haven to entertain his guests at Painswick House in the 1740s. In 1748, he hired local artist Thomas Robins to paint the garden, and it’s this very painting that has served as the blueprint for the garden’s restoration from 1984 to the present day.

Today, this 18th-century treasure on Gloucester Road stands as the only fully preserved rococo garden in the UK, making it a truly one-of-a-kind destination for visitors. Since 1984, it has been painstakingly restored into a beautifully kept outdoor space, saved from certain ruin.

The term ‘rococo’ refers to an art period that was popular in Europe in the 1700s, characterised by ornate decoration, the use of pastel colours and asymmetry, reports Gloucestershire Live.

Why it’s so famous

The garden’s popularity is well-earned, with up to 1,000 visitors descending on the garden daily during snowdrop season, which spans from late January to early February, when the snowdrop displays are at their most spectacular.

Currently, the Rococo Garden is featured on the Historic England Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest. It has been under the care of the Painswick Rococo Garden Trust, a registered charity that has been rejuvenating the garden since 1988.

This esteemed garden, offering stunning views of the Cotswolds, includes enchanting follies, woodland strolls, a café, and a maze. There’s also a charming wooden play area for children along with a gift shop selling locally crafted produce and souvenirs, as well as top-quality plants.

How to get there and ticket prices

If you’re contemplating a trip to the Rococo Garden, you might want to consider becoming a season ticket holder. Single membership begins at £37, granting free entry throughout the year.

Alternatively, you can buy a ticket on the day. Prices range from £5.70 for children and £12.20 for adults, to £10.95 for seniors (60 and above) and £31.50 for a family ticket.

The nearest train station is Stroud, which is approximately 5 miles away from the garden. You can also utilise the Stagecoach 66 local bus route, operating hourly from Cheltenham to Stroud, Monday through Saturday.

On Sundays, the Stagecoach 166 service runs between Cheltenham and Stroud. The closest stop is at the foot of Pullens Road, roughly half a mile from the Garden.

“They’re coming to get you, Barbara” is the most famous line from 1968’s revolutionary “Night of the Living Dead.” It’s a mean taunt that comes from a sibling, unaware that civilization is crumpling around him. In a few moments, his sister will be fleeing across a field barefoot from an undead zombie (terms that are never used in the movie because it’s so ahead of its time) and any Boris Karloff impressions will quickly be forgotten.

The line also sounds remarkably comfortable coming out of the mouth of a drag queen — one of the many sides of shade served in the generously funny and sharp “Queens of the Dead.” Directing and co-writing the film is 42-year-old Tina Romero, daughter of George Romero, “Night’s” original progenitor, whose death in 2017 was met with the kind of belated cultural praise usually reserved for Oscar winners.

Tina Romero understands the legacy of her father better than most. It’s not just a matter of gathering a bunch of bickering survivors inside a besieged location — here it’s a converted Bushwick warehouse — while the outside world goes to hell. (Adding to the film’s bona fides, legendary makeup artist Tom Savini makes a cameo as the city’s mayor on TV: “This is not a George Romero movie,” he warns.) Shrewdly, “Queens of the Dead” also foregrounds the deeper meanings that gore-obsessed knockoffs sometimes miss: the idea that working together across differences is harder than it seems and maybe the monster is already calling from inside the house.

Pink-hued and queered so aggressively that only a prig won’t be able to find some RuPaul-adjacent enjoyment in it, “Queens” stars Katy O’Brian, last seen as Kristen Stewart’s sculpted lust object in “Love Lies Bleeding.” Here O’Brian has much more to do emotionally as Dre, a wanna-be impresario with big dreams for her drag event, Yum, even if her attractions keep bailing and her target audience of influencers is in the process of turning into lumbering flesh-eaters. (They still clutch onto their cellphones, a nice touch.)

Within the makeshift club — a dressing room, a bar, some dance cages that will figure later — tensions flare and Dre has her hands full. Ginsey (Nina West), a hardworking diva, holds down the fort while unreliable protégé Sam (Jaquel Spivey) chooses this moment to show up and ruffle feathers. Unhappy with second billing, a younger queen (Tomás Matos) insists on being called Scrumptious while a gruffly accommodating handyman named Barry (Quincy Dunn-Baker, a smart inclusion of George Romero’s blue-collar streak) tries to keep all the pronouns straight.

Confidently, Tina Romero makes room for a wonderfully dumb makeover montage and a daring escape via Pride Parade float. If the comedy overcompensates at the expense of landing every gag, then good on her. It’s long overdue and there’s something touching to the idea that the end of the world might unleash leadership qualities in those who’ve had a rough time existing in the old one.

But a film this well-made and cut (the pacy editing by Aden Hakimi calls back to the elder Romero’s own cutting of his major titles) shouldn’t be relegated to just one kind of audience. Anyone who appreciates horror should find something to smile at here. Maybe it’s the side plot — as satisfying as a worn-in pair of shoes — of Dre’s wife, Lizzie (Riki Lindhome), a hospital nurse, racing across town in an old Impala.

Or, true to zombie movie form, there’s the mid-film arrival of a game-changing character, the synthesizer music pumping. Here it’s Margaret Cho on a motor scooter, cruising through a cloud of exhaust. “You all look healthy enough,” she tosses off, an action hero in the making. And yes, that’s as thrilling as it sounds.

TORONTO — The Dodgers played 162 games in 193 days during the regular season. Then they played 10 more times in 18 days in the first three rounds of the playoffs.

It was a grind that gave way to a routine as comfortable as an old shoe.

That routine was upended when the Dodgers swept the Milwaukee Brewers in the National League Championship Series, giving them a week off before the start of the World Series, the team’s longest break since February. And the Dodgers looked anything but rested and refreshed in Friday’s 11-4 shellacking by the Toronto Blue Jays, which left them trailing a postseason series for the first time since last fall’s NLDS.

“I’m pretty sure the guys kind of felt the velocity a little bit more,” said Miguel Rojas, one of just a handful of Dodgers who spoke to the media after the loss. “But there’s nothing that we can do. That’s not going to be an excuse for us to underperform.”

It may not be an excuse. But it could be an omen.

This World Series is the fifth in which a team that swept its best-of-seven LCS, as the Dodgers did, faced a team that needed to go seven games to win its series, as Toronto did. The team that swept and got the break lost each of the four previous World Series, winning just two of 18 games.

Dodger manager Dave Roberts dismissed that history Friday.

“I really don’t think the week layoff had anything to do with tonight,” he said. “We were rested. I thought we were in a good spot. We had a 2-0 lead. So I don’t think that had anything to do with it.”

Blake Snell, the pitcher who gave up that lead, brushed off the break as well.

“There’s no excuses. I need to be better,” said Snell, who went 10 days between starts, his longest break since coming off the injured list in August. “I don’t care if it’s a month off. Find a way to be ready.”

He wasn’t against the Blue Jays. After averaging 16 pitches an inning in 14 previous starts, he needed 29 to get through the first inning Friday. And after giving up two runs and six hits in 21 innings this postseason, he gave up five runs and eight hits in just five-plus innings in Toronto, with two of those runs coming on Dalton Varsho’s fourth-inning home run, the only homer Snell has conceded to a left-handed hitter this year.

Emmet Sheehan, who followed Snell to the mound, hadn’t pitched in two weeks. He had his worst outing of the year, facing four batters and watching three of them score.

“I felt good going into the game. I felt the same as I have been,” he said. “I thought I made some good pitches, and they made some really good swings.

“It’s not a good feeling.”

A prolonged break can affect pitchers more than hitters because after throwing with a slightly fatigued arm all season, they suddenly feel fresh and strong and their pitches lose some of their movement.

“You don’t want to feel too good. You feel too good, you try to throw too hard because you feel good. And it doesn’t go where you want it,” said Will Klein, who mopped up for the Dodgers, pitching a scoreless eighth inning. “[The ball] doesn’t go where you want it to because you’re used to pitching a little down, like 90 or 95%. You’re never really at 100.

‘There’s such a thing [as] too fresh.”

Klein’s last appearance in a big-league game was a month ago; since then he’s been working out at the Dodgers’ facility in Arizona. He said the team tried to keep the rest of their pitchers in their familiar routine with bullpen sessions or simulated games, but it’s not the same as throwing in high-leverage situations against opposing hitters in a World Series game before 44,353 fans, as Snell, Sheehan and Klein had to do Friday.

And the history shows the Dodgers aren’t the first team who have been broken by the break.

But they had less than 24 hours to wait for Game 2, which means they’re back into the comfortable — if exhausting — routine that got them to the World Series in the first place.

“There’s another one tomorrow,” Klein said. “We can’t go and unlose today, as much as we’d like to. Thinking about today isn’t going to help you win tomorrow.”

Relations between the United States and China are tense, once again, with experts saying that the administration of US President Donald Trump “doesn’t quite know how to deal with China”.

The latest flare-up took place when Beijing, on October 9, expanded its restrictions on the export of rare-earth metals, increasing the number of elements on the list.

China has the largest reserves and the majority of processing facilities of rare-earth metals that are used in a range of daily and critical industries like electric vehicles, smartphones, laptops and defence equipment.

In a first, it also required countries to have a licence to export rare-earth magnets and certain semiconductor materials that contain even trace amounts of minerals sourced from China or produced using Chinese technology.

China’s actions on rare-earths also came after the US expanded its Entity List, a trade restriction list that consists of certain foreign persons, entities or government, further limiting China’s access to the most advanced semiconductor chips, and added levies on China-linked ships both to boost the US shipbuilding industry and loosen China’s hold on the global shipping trade. China retaliated by applying its own charges on US-owned, operated, built or flagged vessels.

“For the US, its actions on chip exports and shipping industry fees were not related to the trade deal with China,” said Vina Nadjibulla, vice president for research and strategy at the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada.

Since then, the two countries have also been in an “information war”, said Nadjibulla, each blaming the other for holding the world hostage with its policies.

But beyond the rhetoric, the world is seeing China really up its game.

“For the first time, China is doing this extra-terrestrial action that applies to other countries as well [with its amped up export restrictions on rare-earths]. They are prepared to match every US escalation, and have the US back down,” Nadjibulla said. “This is a very different kind of a trade war than we were experiencing even three months ago.”

This was a “power play” by China in the run-up to a planned meeting later this month between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in South Korea because “China has decided that the leverage is on their side,” said Dexter Tiff Roberts, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council Global China Hub, pointing out that after some initial noise with Trump saying there was no reason to meet Xi any longer, the meeting is back on.

“If you look at the approach of the Trump administration right now, they are all over the place,” said Roberts.

Roberts was referring not only to the multiple tariff threats that the US has issued both on China and on specific industries and the carve-outs that were soon announced on those, but also in its statements on the Trump-Xi meeting, with Trump saying it was not happening, only to reverse that two days later.

“The Trump administration doesn’t quite know how to deal with China,” said Roberts. “They don’t understand that China is willing to accept a lot of pain,” and will not be easily cowed by US threats.

Beijing, on the other hand, has realised that Trump is determined to get his big deal with China and wants his state visit to seal that, maybe because “he feels that is important to his credentials as a big deal maker,” added Roberts, but that he cannot get there without giving more to China.

“China saw that they could push harder in the lead-up to the meeting.”

Wei Liang, a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies who specialises in international trade and Chinese economic foreign policy, agrees.

“Trump has a track record of TACO,” she said, referring to a term coined by a Financial Times columnist in May, which stands for “Trump always chickens out” in reference to his announcing tariffs and then carving out exemptions and pushing out implementation dates.

“He cares more than any other US president [about] stock market reactions, so definitely will be more flexible to making concessions. This is the inconsistency that has been captured by his negotiation partners,” Liang said.

China’s defiant stance also comes at a time of its own political concerns, Liang added.

While the domestic economy is “a black box” with no reliable data available on growth, employment and other criteria, the consensus among China experts is that the country has been hit by the tariffs, economic growth has slowed, and unemployment has ramped up.

As China started its four-day fourth plenary session on Monday where it plans to approve the draft of its next five-year national economic and social development plan, Xi can use the moment to tell his domestic audience that the country’s problems are stemming from Trump’s policies and the whole world is suffering because of those tariffs and it’s not related to Chinese policies, Liang said.

A possible decoupling

All of this also signals that Beijing seems to be prepared to “decouple” from the US more than ever, a significant change in mentality, as, in the past, the standard response to the idea was that it would be a “lose-lose” situation for both countries, Liang told Al Jazeera.

But in the last few years, China has diversified its exports to other countries, especially those in its Belt and Road Initiative, the ambitious infrastructure project that it launched in 2013 to link East Asia through Europe and has since expanded to Africa, Oceania and Latin America.

Even when it comes to things that it needs from the US – soya beans, aeroplanes and high-tech chip equipment – it can find other suppliers or has learned to work around that need, as is the case for the chip equipment, Liang pointed out.

In the meantime, especially in the years since the US-China trade war started under Trump as president in his first term, China has brought in a set of national security laws – including its version of the US Entity List, through which it is setting limits on those exports, Nadjibulla said.

“Everybody should have been preparing the way the Chinese have been preparing. We breathed a sigh of relief when there was a change in government [in the US after the first Trump administration], but China kept preparing,” she said.

“This should be a wake-up call for all countries to find other sources for its needs. Everyone should be redoubling their efforts to diversify, because we have now seen the Chinese playbook.”

The Centralny Port Komunikacyjny (CPK) in Warsaw, Poland, is a $32.5 billion project that aims to link the entire continent in unprecedented ways – but will it rival the likes of Dubai?

A swanky new airport could be landing in Europe, set to give London’s Heathrow and even the esteemed Dubai International a run for their money as it aims to connect the entire continent in ways never seen before.

The Centralny Port Komunikacyjny, a proposed $32.5 billion project, is a fresh aviation gateway in Warsaw that carries the weight of Poland’s ambitious mega airport dreams. However, the idea is rapidly advancing, with the official approval and handover of the passenger terminal design marking a significant step forward.

This indicates the massive airport is officially moving into its next phase of development. The question remains, will this new progression challenge the dominance of the Middle East, home to both the world’s largest airport, King Fahd International Airport in Saudi Arabia, and the busiest, Dubai International Airport?

While it still trails behind the world’s largest airport, CPK’s predicted passenger capacity makes it a strong contender as the new hub for Europe. In contrast, Dubai is on track to handle 100 million passengers by the end of next year, thanks to its strategic geographical position with other continents, while the Polish project will eventually accommodate up to 44 million.

Even the busiest airports in Europe can’t compete with Dubai, which saw its top airport process a staggering 40 million people in the first half of 2025. Despite significant growth, mega hubs like Milan Malpensa and Athens still can’t match the sheer volume of passengers that Dubai is handling, reports the Express.

Construction of CPK is due to kick off in 2026, with an ambitious plan to integrate both air and high-speed rail travel. The design aims to revolutionise connectivity across the continent, covering a whopping 450,000 square metres.

The major plans include around 140 check-in desks with the capacity to expand to up to 170, as passenger demand increases, according to Gulf News.

As for the aircraft, the terminal will feature over 20 dedicated contact stands for both narrow-body and wide-body planes, with plans for a phased expansion.

These ground-breaking plans, designed by Foster + Partners and Buro Happold, are three times the size of Warsaw Chopin Airport’s current terminal. But the impressive figures don’t stop there.

Their mega airport will initially be designed to handle up to 34 million passengers annually, with plans to increase to 44 million.

This ambitious multi-billion-pound project is set to include an underground railway station as part of the Warsawod High-Speed Rail Line. The rail system is slated for completion by 2029, while the airport is not anticipated to be fully operational until 2032.

Gulf News has reported that the initial estimates for the CPK project were a staggering $32.5 billion up to 2032; however, recent figures suggest this could soar to an eye-watering $34 billion in total. The mammoth airport is aiming to snatch a ‘meaningful share of Europe’s air traffic’ and transform into a multi-modal hub, but will it be worth its sky-high cost?

A MAN lived with a transplanted pig liver for more than a month in the most successful operation of its kind, scientists say.

The terminally ill 71-year-old received the genetically modified organ in Anhui, China, last year.

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It then functioned normally for 38 days – five weeks – before having to be removed due to blood clotting, a complication from the op.

The patient was the first living person to have the procedure and survived for 171 days, about six months, afterwards.

He had run out of treatment options for liver cancer and scarring caused by hepatitis B, and died from internal bleeding months after the transplant was removed.

His survival is not as long as the record for a patient with a pig’s kidney, at six months and counting.

But it was longer than the previous record for a liver, set by a brain-dead patient whose life support was turned off after 10 days.

Scientists have also experimented with transplanting a lung into a brain-dead patient.

A new era has started

Dr Heiner WedemeyerThe Journal of Hepatology

Surgeon and study author Dr Beicheng Sun, from Anhui Medical University, said: “This case proves that a genetically engineered pig liver can function in a human for an extended period.

“It is a pivotal step forward, demonstrating both the promise and the remaining hurdles.”

Scientists hope that organs from pigs could be used to save people at risk of dying on transplant waiting lists.

They are similar in size to human body parts and gene editing can cut the risk of the immune system rejecting them.

Writing in the Journal of Hepatology, Dr Sun said more experiments are needed to perfect the procedure.

Dr Heiner Wedemeyer, editor of the journal, said: “A new era of transplant has started.”

You have to look long and hard for stability and continuity in this era of transfer mania, but Beaumont football coach Jeff Steinberg is proud to point out that 26 of his 27 players in the starting rotation have been at Beaumont since their freshman seasons. The only one that didn’t came as a sophomore.

That kind of loyalty and confidence in a program produces community pride and helps build community support every time Beaumont plays.

The team is 5-1 and is favored to win the Citrus Belt League and be a factor in the Southern Section Division 2 playoffs.

Linebacker Matt Casas is a tackling machine with 52 tackles. Beaumont owns wins over Cathedral and Chaminade. Its only loss was 21-14 to Vista Murrieta.

Imagine how many fans from the Beaumont area will show up to playoff games. Can you say sellout?

This is a daily look at the positive happenings in high school sports. To submit any news, please email [email protected].

After the mess, the mop-up.

That’s one way to understand Taylor Swift’s new album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” on which music’s biggest star offers up a dozen precision-cut pop songs just 18 months removed from last year’s sprawling and emotionally unstable “The Tortured Poets Department.”

That earlier LP, which contained 16 tracks before Swift expanded it with 15 more, was perhaps the most divisive of the singer’s two-decade-long career; it racked up bonkers sales and streaming numbers, of course — at this point, she’s truly too big to fail — but its mixed reception among tastemakers and even some fans seemed to rattle Swift, who for all her alertness to the brutality of being a woman in the public eye has become accustomed to a certain level of idolatry.

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So here’s “Showgirl,” her 12th studio LP, for which she stepped away from her longtime creative partner Jack Antonoff to reteam with Max Martin and Shellback, the two hit-making Swedish producer-songwriters who helped her transition cleanly from country to pop in the mid-2010s with blockbuster albums like “Red” and “1989.” Swift has said she made the new album while roaming around Europe in the summer of 2024 on her record-obliterating Eras tour, which explains the title even as it begs all sorts of questions about her psychotic work ethic.

And let’s be clear: These three can craft a hook as neatly and as skillfully — as deviously, really — as anyone in the business. In contrast with the bleary “Tortured Poets,” which yielded only one pop-radio monster in the Hot 100-topping “Fortnight,” “Showgirl” is likely to spin off several, not least the album’s lead single, “The Fate of Ophelia,” which rides an irresistible new wave groove that evokes the veteran hookmeisters of Eurythmics. (Look ’em up, kids.)

As a piece of psychological portraiture, though — the framework, for better or for worse, by which Swift has trained us to interpret her music — this collection of expertly tailored bops falls well short of its predecessor; “Showgirl” feels like a retreat from the vivid bloodletting of “Tortured Poets,” which captured a woman whose one-of-one success had emboldened her to speak certain toxic truths.

Is that because she’s ended up in a healthy romantic relationship with Travis Kelce, the NFL star whom she’s engaged to marry? One hates to indulge hoary ideas about happiness being bad for songwriters. Yet there’s no denying that Swift’s lyrics about love here lack the kind of depth she’s mined in tunes thought to have been inspired by the dastardly likes of John Mayer and Matty Healy.

“Please, God, bring me a best friend who I think is hot,” she sings, somehow, in the electro-trappy “Wish List,” which recounts all the hoping and dreaming she did before she finally met Mr. Right; “Wood,” a kind of kiddie-disco number that sounds like Martin was aiming it for the “Trolls” movie franchise, exults in the erotic thrill of a guy brandishing “new heights of manhood.” (In case you missed it, I’m sorry to say that’s a reference to Kelce’s podcast, on which Swift recently appeared and dropped a bar about her fiancé — “He may not have read ‘Hamlet,’ but I explained it to him” — that she really should have saved for “The Fate of Ophelia.”)

Elsewhere, she makes familiar complaints about the punishing experience of celebrity, as in “Elizabeth Taylor” — “Oftentimes, it doesn’t feel so glamorous to be me” — and “Cancelled!,” which feels like a goth-Nirvana redo of “Look What You Made Me Do,” from 2017’s genuinely startling “Reputation.”

And then there’s the acidic “Actually Romantic,” which seems to be a response to Charli XCX’s “Sympathy Is a Knife,” in which Charli expressed her anxieties about being compared to Taylor in a zero-sum pop scene; Swift gets off some funny lines about chihuahuas and cocaine but totally forgoes the sense of empathy that made her such an icon to every pop songwriter who’s come up behind her.

What’s good on “Showgirl”? “Opalite” is a gorgeous soft-rock tune about overcoming old instincts — “I had a bad habit of missing lovers past / My brother used to call it ‘eating out of the trash’” — while “Ruin the Friendship” looks back at a shoulda-woulda high-school dalliance with the pin-prick precision that Swift has always mustered when writing about her adolescence. Both songs ride coolly laidback Fleetwood Mac-style grooves that feel new for Martin and Shellback, who throughout the album rely more than you’d expect on live instrumentation. (Hang with “Wish List,” if you can, for a killer bass line that shows up in the second verse.)

Swift sings more than once about legacy and inheritance on this album: “Father Figure,” which interpolates George Michael’s late-’80s classic of the same name, is narrated by a mentor who’s betrayed by his protégé; the Broadway-ish title track, which closes the album with a feature from Sabrina Carpenter, tracks the aspirations of a showbiz hopeful from fresh-faced naivete to all-knowing cynicism.

Maybe those songs are Swift’s way of telling us that she knows “The Life of a Showgirl” isn’t as sharp as it could’ve been. We’ll see if it’s as tidy as it needed to be.

SAN JOSE — Matt Mahan didn’t set out to be a scold and pain in Gavin Newsom’s backside.

He doesn’t mean to sound like a wrathful Republican when he criticizes one-party rule in Sacramento. Or a disgruntled independent when he assails a Democratic establishment that’s become, as he sees it, “a club of insiders who take care of each other” and mostly go along to get along.

Maybe because that’s “my diagnosis of it,” said the 42-year-old San José mayor, “I have tried very consciously to not fall into that trap of just wanting to be liked.”

He is, Mahan insists, a Democrat to his core, his roots sunk deep in the loamy soil of working-class Watsonville, where, over the mountains and light years from Silicon Valley, he grew up the son of a mail carrier and a high school teacher.

That makes his candor all the more bracing, and refreshing, at a time when Democrats are struggling nationally to regain their footing and find a meaningful way forward.

“We have become so caught up in our own rhetoric of helping the little guy that we’ve stopped actually checking to make sure that we are doing that,” Mahan said over lunch at a cantina downtown.

Results, he said, are what matter. Not good intentions.

And certainly not the performative pugilism that some, including the hyper-online Newsom, pass off as leadership. “A sugar high,” Mahan called it.

“I think a lot of Democrats are frustrated and feel powerless, and so that rhetoric has this cathartic effect,” he said. “But I don’t know that it actually, over time, moves us toward success, and I mean not just success in society, but even political success, because ultimately, if you’re not offering solutions, I think you can have a hard time getting to a majority position.”

Mahan comes by his outsider status naturally.

In high school, he rode the bus four hours a day — from Watsonville to San José and back again — to attend a college prep academy on a work-study scholarship. (“My golden ticket,” he called it.) He worked on the grounds crew to help pay his way, and continued on to Harvard, where his dorm mates included Mark Zuckerberg. (The two hung out in college and still talk occasionally.)

After a year in Bolivia, helping family farmers, and a stint teaching middle school, Mahan co-founded a social media company that focused on civic engagement and raising money for nonprofits. He was elected to the San José City Council in 2020. Even before his first term was completed, Mahan launched an upstart bid for mayor.

The front-runner was a member of the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors, a former San José vice mayor and longtime civic leader. Waging a nothing-to-lose campaign — “we had no endorsements, we had much less money” — Mahan knocked on thousands of doors. He asked voters what they had on their minds.

It turned out to be rudimentary stuff. Potholes. Public safety. A sense they were paying a whole lot of taxes and getting very little in return.

The experience impressed two things upon Mahan: a need for accountability and the importance of voters’ lived experience, as opposed to vague promises, abstract notions and politically fashionable statements.

“I think ultimately political success and policy success comes from offering better ideas and demonstrating impact,” Mahan said, sounding very much like the technocrat he calls himself.

Mahan won the mayor’s race — narrowly, in a major upset — and was reelected two years later in a November 2024 landslide. (The year Mahan was elected, San José voted to shift its mayoral contest to correspond with presidential balloting, which cut his first term in half.)

Soon enough, Mahan found himself at odds with some major Democratic constituencies, including powerful labor unions, which pushed back over wages and a return-to-office policy, and homeless advocates who bristled at Mahan’s focus on short-term housing and threat to arrest homeless people who refused multiple offers of shelter.

“Homelessness can’t be a choice,” Mahan said at a spring news conference announcing the move.

His heresies don’t end there.

Mahan broke with many Democrats by vigorously supporting Proposition 36, the 2024 anti-crime measure that stiffened penalties for repeated theft and crimes involving fentanyl. Despite opposition from Newsom and most of the state’s Democratic leadership, it passed with nearly 70% support; Mahan has since criticized Newsom and the Democratic-run Legislature for stinting on funds needed for implementation.

But his most conspicuous breach involves the governor’s Trumpy transformation into a social media troll.

While the mockery and memes may feel good as snickering payback and certainly stoke the Democratic base — boosting Newsom’s presidential hopes — Mahan suggested they are ultimately counterproductive.

“If we don’t have a politics of solutions and making people’s lives better, I just don’t know where we end up,” he said, as his enchiladas sat cooling before him. “It’s politics practiced in bad faith, where we just … tell people things that test well because they sound nice, and then we just blame the other side for being evil, incompetent, corrupt. … It’s just a race to the bottom.”

He took particular issue with Newsom’s taunting reaction after Bed Bath & Beyond recently announced it won’t open or operate new stores in California.

It wasn’t “a reasoned argument,” Mahan wrote in a scathing opinion piece in the San Francisco Standard. The tart headline: “How about less time breaking the internet and more time fixing California?”

“‘Breaking the internet’ doesn’t solve real-world problems — quite the opposite,” Mahan wrote. “More often than not, it’s just political theater that serves to excuse inaction and ineffective policies.”

He elaborated over lunch.

“You have an employer who’s pointing out real issues that everybody else who’s watching thinks are real issues. Talking about business climate, cost of doing business, public safety issues, retail theft, untreated addiction and mental illness,” Mahan said.

“When we start turning on constituents because we don’t agree with their ideology, or attacking Trump is more important than actually solving problems or listening to the criticism … I think we’re heading down a dangerous road.”

Inevitably, there’s the question: To what end all this poking of thumbs in his fellow Democrats’ eyes?

Mahan has drawn wide notice, in particular from the more pragmatic wing of the party. His back-to-basics approach has yielded some measurable success. A recent study called San José the safest major city in the country and, while the overall homeless population grew slightly, there’s been progress moving people off the streets into city shelters.

He considered plunging into the race for governor, but the timing wasn’t right. Mahan has two small children and a wife who’s flourishing in her career as an educator. Besides, Mahan said, he’s quite content being mayor of California’s third-most populous city.

“I have a wonderful marriage,” Mahan said. “I have two wonderful kids. I loved working in the private sector. I’ve got a lot of great friends. I’m doing this because I genuinely want to make our city better, and I love the job. But it’s not who I am, and I can separate myself from the job.”

That grounding and perspective, so different from those politicians oozing ambition from every pore, may be Mahan’s best commendation for higher office.

If and when.

“Is football a game or a religion?” the sports broadcaster Howard Cosell once asked with exasperation. The horror film “Him,” a striking but vacuous gridiron Grand Guignol by Justin Tipping (“Kicks”) takes it as faith that the answer is both. Any fan with a sacred good luck ritual and any player who’s thanked the man upstairs for a touchdown knows the two overlap as tightly as a freshly laced pigskin.

In the home of young elementary schooler Cameron Cade (Austin Pulliam), the fictional San Antonio Saviors quarterback Isaiah White (Marlon Wayans) is the messiah. Next to the TV, there’s even a shrine with devotional portraits of their icon. When White wins a game while suffering a nasty injury, Cameron’s father seizes the moment to deliver a sermon: “That’s what real men do,” he insists. “They make sacrifices.” The candles on the altar flicker ominously.

Tipping, working from a Blacklist script by Skip Bronkie and Zack Akers with Jordan Peele as his producer, considers the sports-as-religion idea so obvious that the film doesn’t bother analyzing why it exists. Instead, “Him” wonders what kind of spiritual practice it is: hero worship or a sinister cult?

Fourteen years later, Cameron (now played by Tyriq Withers) has grown up to become a star college quarterback in line to be the NFL’s top draft pick and take over Isaiah’s position on the Saviors. A violent concussion knocks him off course, but Isaiah, a living legend still leading the team, offers to vouch for the kid if he passes a private training camp at his intimidating desert estate. It couldn’t be more obvious that Isaiah doesn’t have Cameron’s best interests at heart if he blared a warning on the Jumbotron.

The film’s title comes from a bit of braggadocio — “I’m him” — that started sprouting up in sports leagues during the last five years. (It’s why you’ll sometimes see Lakers shooting guard Austin Reaves called “AustHIM” Reaves.) Anointing someone the GOAT, as in “Greatest of All Time,” has been around longer, but the silly thing about both compliments is they’re getting handed out like Halloween candy. Whether Cameron can become the next GOAT is the movie’s main obsession. Yet it resonates, albeit vague and unexplored, with biblical references to goat offerings and images of Jesus as a sacrificial lamb and the movie’s visual allusions to the goat-headed occult idol Baphomet. Plus, it offers us in the audience the thrill of wondering if someone will get spit-roasted.

Cameron enters Isaiah’s home to discover his host surrounded by what looks like taxidermy sheep skins. Nearly all of the film takes place in his compound, a circular warren that looks like a combination of an ancient temple and the Superdome. We’re continually happy to discover all the menacing delights that production designer Jordan Ferrer has concocted. Inside, there’s unnerving minimalist furniture, dramatic saunas and ice baths and an indoor football field with a throwing machine powerful enough to knock out a tooth. Even more terrifying, there’s Isaiah’s lifestyle-influencer wife, Elsie (Julia Fox), who stomps around with a pointy shard of jade that Cameron is supposed to stick up his rear. (You know, for peak performance.) Meanwhile, outside the gates, Isaiah’s cult followers — like visibly brain-fried Marjorie (Naomi Grossman) — are furious that their champion may retire.

Like “Kicks,” Tipping’s excellent 2016 feature debut about a kid who risks his neck for a pair of Nikes, “Him” is about the bloody quest for respect. It wants to be “The Substance” with jockstraps: a Satanic-tinged, steroidal “Rosemary’s Baby.” The film is so stylishly done that I could accept it on those plain terms. Every shot is a stunner, from stark images of eerily spinning footballs to goalposts that loom like devil’s horns. Editor Taylor Joy Mason and cinematographer Kira Kelly have put together queasy-brilliant montages with some kind of an eye-popping camera technique — a mix of thermal imaging, X-ray footage and visual effects — that seems to see right inside the actors’ bodies to their gristle and goo. Bobby Krlic (a.k.a. the Haxan Cloak), who also composed the music for “Midsommar,” wows us with a tragic, thundering score.

But the movie’s thoughts about pain and devotion and locker-room manipulation are still gestating. After I made it to the end of the story and ran it back, little of the plot hung together. I couldn’t with any conviction answer rudimentary questions such as how much does Cameron even want to play football? Or what in Hades will happen to the surviving characters?

Part of the issue is that Tipping and Withers have created a rising football player who might be too authentic. Withers moves with physical confidence and perfect posture and drilled obedience. Participating in a mock media training day, you buy that he was born to sell sneakers.

He speaks with an athlete’s guardedness, too, that post-game interview cadence where each wooden sentence tries to bore the camera into leaving them alone. Cameron describes his football career clinically and neutrally like he’s a product; he refers to himself “performing,” not “playing,” as the latter would imply he’s on the field to have fun.

Surrounded by trainers and doctors and his childhood hero, he acquiesces to pretty much everything, from receiving random injections to a brutal bludgeoning. (At least he doesn’t do you-know-what with that jade crystal.) I’m willing to blame some of that passivity on his head injury, but it’s hard to care about a character who only has a personality for three minutes.

At least Wayans gets to cut loose. His bullying Isaiah sprints from pep talks to threats in the same breath and runs around in nifty outfits covered in weighted beads. He’s in such peak physical condition that you believe Isaiah’s conviction that it’s possible to outrace Father Time. Realizing afterward that Wayans is 53 — almost a decade older than Tom Brady when he retired after announcers even more bold than Cosell treated him like Methuselah — you just might be tempted to bow down to Baphomet yourself.

TORONTO — Welcome to a special daily edition of the Envelope at TIFF, a newsletter collecting the latest developments out of Canada’s annual film showcase. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.

Our photo gallery’s latest includes Angelina Jolie, Dustin Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Richard Linklater and more.

But click through for our video interviews, including Mark Olsen’s sit-down with Sydney Sweeney and the crew of her boxing movie “Christy,” which required a total transformation.

Sydney Sweeney in “Christy,” a portrait of boxing champ Christy Martin, having its world premiere at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival.

(Allie Fredericks / TIFF)

Here’s a taste of their exchange:

Sydney, people are already really talking about the physical transformation you make in the movie, the training that you did. What was it about the role that made it seem like you wanted to make that kind of commitment?

Sydney Sweeney: I mean, I couldn’t let Christy down, and I also love transforming for characters. That’s the whole reason of being an actor, is to be something different from yourself and to challenge ourselves.

So I had like two months of training. I built gyms in my house and I had a boxing trainer, I had a weight trainer, I had a nutritionist and would work out and train every single day.

And it was amazing. I loved it. Being able to completely lose yourself for somebody else and then have that person there next to your side. It was transformative.

Katy O’Brian, co-star: It was exhausting watching her do it.

Ben Foster, co-star: And in tribute to Syd, we’d shoot a 12-hour day that was dense, we’ll say, that would be a gentle word. She would then go train and choreograph the fights that she would do back-to-back after, one after another.

Sweeney: I’d be put in the middle of a ring and I’d have like nine girls and they would just drill me with all the different fights, one after the other for like two hours after we would wrap.

Because I really wanted the choreography to match the exact fights that she had in real life. So we would watch all the footage from her fights and memorize all the combinations and then implement those into the fight.

So everything you see were her actual fights. And so I’d wrap, I would do that for two hours, and then I would weight train.

David, there is something very unflinching about the movie. Why was it that you wanted to tell Christy’s story in a way that wasn’t afraid to explore these really dark and disturbing moments in her life?

David Michôd, director: In a way, the dark and disturbing was what made me want to make the movie. I had a clear sense that in this really wild and colorful story of a ’90s boxing pioneer was actually, underneath, it was a very important story to tell about how these coercive control relationships function.

And trying to wrap my brain around what keeps them functioning over, in this case, 20 years. And I knew that where Christy’s story went, it was harrowing.

And what the challenge for me then as a filmmaker was just to go, how do I do this being very conscious of not wanting to step into a world of representations of violence against women and all that kind of stuff, but not shying away from the horror that is very much there and is very palpable.

I could see a big sprawling movie that would start almost as a kind of conventional underdog pioneering sports movie and then morph into something that was deeply moving and important.

Sydney, Ben, what was it like for the two of you performing some of those darker scenes in the film and how did you keep some sense of humanity between the two of you?

Sweeney: There were so many conversations around a lot of those moments, and both Ben and I, we don’t like to rehearse and we kind of just want to feel it. And I think we both became very connected to who we were portraying and —

Foster: Listening.

Sweeney: We just listened

Foster: And Dave created a space where we could do that. And we would block it, we did a lot of talk privately, and then we would come in and jam and nudge. But the truth is Dave is quality control and would fine-tune moments.

The day’s buzziest premieres

‘EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert’

Elvis Presley performing live, as seen in Baz Luhrmann’s archival concert movie “EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert.”

(TIFF)

How deep did Baz Lurhmann go researching his 2022 movie “Elvis”? Forty stories. That’s the depth of the Kansas salt mine where Warner Bros. had stored 59 hours of unseen recordings from Elvis Presley’s seven-year stint in Las Vegas.

Lurhmann studied it for his Oscar-nominated biopic, which mourned Presley as an artist in a cage and wondered who the curious, music-loving boy from Tupelo might have become if Col. Parker had let him, say, visit an ashram with the Beatles.

This time, the “Moulin Rouge!” director has said that he wants to use found footage to “let Elvis sing and tell his story” — as in, Lurhmann’s own spectacular sensibilities will cede center stage to Presley himself, who can still wow a crowd even during a late-career moment when his own fans feared he had more jumpsuits than ambition.

I’ll definitely be at the premiere to pay my respects to the King. — Amy Nicholson

‘Hamnet’

Jessie Buckley, center, in director Chloé Zhao’s “Hamnet.”

(Agata Grzybowska / Focus Features)

You’re going to be hearing a lot of Oscar buzz in the coming months about various movies, along with people insisting that — seriously — this is the one you need to see. “Hamnet” is, far and away, that film, for three specific reasons.

First, Paul Mescal has now done three masterful turns, between this, “Aftersun” and “All of Us Strangers” confirming what a truly special talent he is. Mescal and the “Hamnet” crew came through our TIFF studio.

Clockwise from right: Paul Mescal, Noah Jupe, Jacobi Jupe, director Chloé Zhao, Jessie Buckley and Emily Watson, photographed in the Los Angeles Times Studios at RBC House during the Toronto International Film Festival.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

Second, I needed director Chloé Zhao to rebound after the mess that was “Eternals” to the confidence she displayed on “Nomadland” — and she’s done exactly that. Read our Telluride interview with her.

Finally, Jessie Buckley has uncorked one of the year’s most impressive turns: a grief-stricken plunge that elevates her to the level of Casey Affleck in “Manchester by the Sea.” Do not be surprised if, like Affleck, she goes all the way. — Joshua Rothkopf

TORONTO — The smile is beatific, blissed out, even at an ungodly hour on our Zoom call from France. A week later, when I finally meet 43-year old filmmaker Oliver Laxe in person at a private Toronto celebration for his new movie “Sirât,” he radiates serenity. He’s the happiest (and maybe the tallest) person in the room.

“One of the first ideas that I had for this film was a sentence from Nietzsche,” he says. “I won’t believe in a God who doesn’t dance.”

Laxe goes to raves — “free parties,” he clarifies, indicating the ones you need to hear about via word of mouth. He’s thought deeply about what they mean and what they do to him. “We still have a memory in our bodies of these ceremonies that we were doing for thousands of years, when we were making a kind of catharsis with our bodies.”

It’s almost the opposite of what you expect to hear on the fall festival circuit, when directors with big ideas make their cases for the significance of the art form. But the body, the return to something purely sensorial, is Laxe’s big idea.

Steadily, “Sirât” has become, since its debut at Cannes in May, a growing favorite: not merely a critic’s darling but an obsession among those who’ve seen it. (The film will have an awards-qualifying run in Los Angeles beginning Nov. 14.) A dance party in the desert set at some vaguely hinted-at moment of apocalypse, the movie is something you feel, not solve. Its pounding EDM beats rattle pleasurably in your chest (provided the theater’s speakers are up to snuff). And the explosions on the horizon shake your heartbeat.

“I really trust in the capacity of images to penetrate into the metabolism of the spectator,” Laxe says. “I’m like a masseuse. When you watch my films, sometimes you’ll want to kill me or you’ll feel the pain in your body, like: Wow, what a treat. But after, you can feel the result.”

An image from the movie “Sirât,” directed by Oliver Laxe.

(Festival de Cannes)

Laxe can speak about his influences: cosmic epics by the Russian master Andrei Tarkovsky or existential road movies like “Zabriskie Point” and “Two-Lane Blacktop.” But he is not a product of a typical grad-school trajectory. Rather, it’s his escape from that path after growing up in northern Spanish Galicia and studying in Barcelona (he tried London for a while) that’s fascinating.

“I was not good,” he recalls. “I didn’t find I had a place in the industry or in Europe. I was not interested. I had bought a camera, a 16-millimeter Bolex, and I knew I was accepting that my role was to be a kind of sniper that was working in the trenches but making really small films.”

At age 24, Laxe moved to Tangier, Morocco, where he would live for 12 years at a monastic remove from the glamour of the movies, collaborating with local children on his films. The experience would grow into his first feature, 2010’s “You Are All Captains,” which eventually took him all the way to the prize-winning podium at Cannes, as did his second and third films, all of which came before “Sirât,” his fourth.

“Slowly, the things we were making were opening doors,” he says. “In a way, life was deciding, telling me: This is your path.”

Path is what “Sirât” means in Arabic, often with a religious connotation, and his new movie takes a unique journey, traversing from the loose-limbed dancing of its early scenes to a train’s tracks stretching fixedly to the end of the line. There’s also a quest that gets us into the film: a father and son searching among the ravers for a missing daughter, potentially a nod to “The Searchers” or Paul Schrader’s “Hardcore,” but not a plot point that Laxe feels especially interested in expounding on.

“Obviously I have a spiritual path and this path is about celebrating crisis,” he says. “My path was through crisis. It’s the only time when you connect with your essence. I just want to grow. So that’s why I jump into the abyss.”

“My path was through crisis,” says director Oliver Laxe of his steady rise. “It’s the only time when you connect with your essence. I just want to grow.”

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)

Laxe tells me he didn’t spend years perfecting a script or sharpening dialogue. Rather, he took the images that stuck with him — trucks speeding into the dusty desert, fueled by the rumble of their own speaker systems — and brought them to the free parties, where his cast coalesced on the dance floor.

“We were telling them that we were making ‘Mad Max Zero,’ ” he recalls, but also something “more metaphysical, more spiritual. A few of them, I already knew. There are videos of us explaining the film in the middle of the dance floor with all the people dancing around. I mean it was quite crazy. It’s something I would like to show to film schools.”

Shot on grungy Super 16, the production drove deep into craggy, sandblasted wastelands, both in Morocco and mountainous Spain, where the crew would make hairpin turns along winding cliff roads that would give even fans of William Friedkin’s legendary 1977 misadventure “Sorcerer” anxiety.

“It was my least dangerous film,” Laxe counters, reminding me of his “Fire Will Come,” the 2019 arson thriller for which he cast actual firefighters. “We were making the film in the middle of the flames, so I don’t know. I’m a junkie of images and I need this drug.”

There is a Herzogian streak to the bearded Laxe, a prophet-in-the-wilderness boldness that inspires his collaborators, notably longtime writing partner Santiago Fillol and the techno composer Kangding Ray, to make the leap of faith with him. But there also seems to come a point when talking about “Sirât” feels insufficient, as opposed to simply submitting to its pounding soundscapes, found-family camaraderie and (fair warning) churning moments of sudden loss that have shaken even the most hardy of audiences.

“The film evokes this community of wounded people,” he says. “I’m not a sadistic guy that wants to make a spectator suffer. I have a lot of hope. I trust in human beings, even with their contradictions and weaknesses.”

For those who wish to find a political reading in the movie, it’s there for them, a parable about migration and fascism but also the euphoria of a headlong rush into the unknown. “Sirât” is giving odd comfort in a cultural moment of uncertainty, a rare outcome for a low-budget art film.

Its visionary maker knows exactly where he is going next.

“I got the message in Cannes,” Laxe says. “People want to feel the freedom of the filmmaker or the auteur. What they appreciate is that we were jumping from a fifth floor to make this film. So for the next one —”

Our connection cuts out and it’s almost too perfect: a Laxian cliffhanger moment in which ideas are yanked back by a rush of feeling. After several hours of me hoping this was intentional on his part, the director does indeed get back to me, apologetically. But until then, he is well served by the mystery.

Sunday was gut-check time for the Dodgers.

A day where, as a clearly frustrated Dave Roberts put it before the game, the team needed to “not get embarrassed” in the face of a potential three-game sweep by the Arizona Diamondbacks, and play with a level of “pride” that had been missing the previous two nights.

“Whatever it is, we’ve got to do it right now,” the manager said. “We’ve got to win today. We’ve got to play better baseball. … There’s more in there. There just is.”

Whatever Roberts was looking for, the Dodgers provided just enough Sunday.

Despite blowing a three-run lead that tied the game going into the ninth, the Dodgers prevailed on Will Smith’s pinch-hit, walk-off home run, beating the Diamondbacks 5-4 to move two games up in the National League West standings after the San Diego Padres’ rubber-match loss to the Minnesota Twins earlier in the day.

The win should have been simpler.

Yoshinobu Yamamoto delivered a seven-inning, one-run gem, tying his career-high with 10 strikeouts while also not allowing a walk. The Dodgers lineup, meanwhile, wore down Arizona starter Brandon Pfaadt, scoring twice in the first and again in the fourth and fifth to chase him from the game early.

Tanner Scott almost wasted those efforts. In the eighth, he gave up a pair of two-out singles before Corbin Carroll took him deep for a tying three-run blast. Scott was booed off the mound, his earned-run average rising to 4.44 in a disastrous debut season in Los Angeles.

Dodgers pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto delivers during the fourth inning Sunday against the Diamondbacks.

(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)

Smith, however, saved the day, coming off the bench and hitting the second pitch he saw into the left-field pavilion to ensure the Dodgers didn’t come out of this weekend empty-handed.

Of course, any feeling of progress from the Dodgers will remain tempered for now.

Friday and Saturday, after all, produced the kind of maddening performances from the club that have dogged them throughout the second half of the season.

The team looked lifeless at the plate both nights, scoring one run off Arizona’s beleaguered pitching staff in 18 total innings. They committed fundamental miscues on the bases and on defense, lapses Roberts boiled down to a simple lack of focus. And, as has become a recurring theme during their 22-27 rut since the Fourth of July, they once again played down to a level their $400-million roster simply shouldn’t.

“There has to be a point where that has to be sharpened,” Roberts said. “And that’s where, I feel, the time is now.”

Given the roller-coaster nature of the season, it’s impossible to know if — and when — the next drop is coming.

The Dodgers (78-59) have shown flashes of improvement at times in the last two months — like when they swept the Reds to start this homestand, or swept the Padres at the end of the previous one — only to quickly revert to a lesser version of themselves again.

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1. Dodgers catcher Will Smith celebrates after hitting a walk-off home run in the ninth inning Sunday. 2. Freddie Freeman, left, and Alex Call, center, and other Dodgers players celebrate with Will Smith, right, as he crosses home plate. 3. Will Smith, left, celebrates with Alex Call, right, and his Dodgers teammates. (Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)

Asked why that has been the case pregame, Roberts struggled to find an answer.

He alluded to a potential World Series hangover, noting that “when you’re playing a long season, you’re defending champions, people are coming after you — which we know and understand — it’s just hard to keep that dialed-in focus every single night. That’s just reality.”

He highlighted the lack of consistent production from veteran players — coinciding with his decision Sunday to leave Teoscar Hernández on the bench, in favor of Alex Call in right field, amid a recent three-for-27 slump that has been compounded by persistently shaky defense.

“He’s an everyday guy,” Roberts said of Hernández, whom the team hopes will benefit from a “two-day reset” between Sunday’s day off and Monday’s travel day. “But I do think that where we’re at, you’ve got to perform too, to warrant being out there every single day.”

Dodgers reliever Tanner Scott pitches in the eighth inning Sunday.

(Carlin Stiehl / Los Angeles Times)

Roberts said that mindset applies to the rest of the roster as a whole, from left field (where Michael Conforto has been better of late, but is still batting under .200) to other superstars at the top of the lineup.

“No one is going to be exempt,” Roberts said. “We’ve got to ramp it up and we’ve got to be better. If some other guys deserve more opportunities, then they’re going to get them. That’s just the way it should be.”

It all reflected what Roberts hopes will be a switch-flipping moment from his club; that disaster-averting wins like Sunday outnumber the kind of clunkers they had on Friday and Saturday.

“I do think that a flip can be switched,” Roberts said. “Each day should be equally important. Every little play, pitch, should be equally important. ‘How you do anything is how you do everything,’ that kind of adage, I believe in that. When you’re playing a long season, it’s hard to be that locked in every single pitch. But I’m not going to not try to ask our guys to do that, though.”

TELLURIDE, Colo. — It’s customary at Telluride for a director premiering a movie to step onstage, say a few words and slip away before the lights go down. On Friday night, before unveiling her new film “Hamnet,” Chloé Zhao admitted she couldn’t find the right words. For a film centered on William Shakespeare, the most famous wordsmith in history, that felt oddly fitting.

Instead, the 43-year-old Zhao led the packed Palm Theater in a meditative “ritual” she and her cast had practiced throughout the shoot, from before the script was even written until the final day on set. She asked the audience to close their eyes, place a hand over their hearts and feel the weight of their bodies in the seats and the surrounding Rocky Mountains holding them safe. Together, the crowd exhaled three long, loud sighs, then tapped their chests in unison, repeating softly: “This is my heart. This is my heart. This is my heart.”

By the time the film ended, those same hearts were left aching. Adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel, “Hamnet” tells the story of Shakespeare’s marriage to Agnes (played by Jessie Buckley) and the devastating death of their 11-year-old son, Hamnet. Paul Mescal plays Shakespeare — not the untouchable bard of legend but a husband and father reckoning with grief. At once grounded and dreamlike, the film drew perhaps the most rapturous and unanimous response of any debut in this year’s lineup.

Eight years ago, Zhao came to Telluride with “The Rider,” fresh from Cannes and still largely unknown. In 2020 she returned with “Nomadland,” which received a Telluride-sponsored drive-in screening at Pasadena’s Rose Bowl due to the pandemic and went on to win best picture and make Oscar history, with Zhao becoming only the second woman — and the first and only woman of color — to win the directing prize. Then came Marvel’s “Eternals,” a massive undertaking that thrust Zhao into the franchise machine and brought with it a bruising critical reception. With “Hamnet,” she’s back to a smaller canvas, trading cosmic spectacle for intimate human drama.

On Sunday morning in Telluride, still processing the reaction to her latest film, Zhao sat down to talk — speaking so softly that even in a hushed room her words can be hard to catch — about why she took on O’Farrell’s story, how she approached Shakespeare’s world and the delicate task of turning heartbreak into art.

Jessie Buckley, center, in the movie “Hamnet.”

(Agata Grzybowska / Focus Features)

When I interviewed you for “The Rider” in 2018 you said you’re a very pessimistic person and when you get a good review, you’re just waiting for the bad one to drop. What are you feeling right now? Did you expect anything like the reaction “Hamnet” has received?
I was nervous. I’ve walked through fires. I’ve been through the fire — a very painful fire — and I think there is probably a bit of fear around that.

What was the fire? You mean the reaction to “Eternals”?
I’m not going to say out it loud, because when I do, things always get … [trails off]. Let’s just say we were very scared.

I think the fear mainly came from the fact that we felt so sure of what we experienced. It changed all of our lives and mine so profoundly that it’s still reverberating. You think: Were we crazy? And no one else will get it but us?

You go through this long, treacherous journey to deliver these things to safety and now it’s very tender because you look back at all the loss and the sacrifices along the way and you haven’t really had time to process it.

I’m curious what your history was with Shakespeare growing up in China and then moving to England and later Los Angeles as a teenager. What kind of early impression did he make on you?
Shakespeare is very revered in China. In Chinese theater, they do Chinese versions of his plays. When I studied in the U.K., I didn’t speak English at the time and I did have to learn Shakespeare, which was very difficult. I don’t think I’m anywhere near where Paul and Jesse are with their understanding of Shakespeare. The language was always a barrier but the archetypal element of his stories was big for me — particularly “Macbeth.” In high school in Los Angeles, I performed Lady Macbeth’s speech on the stage because everybody had to do some kind of monologue for a project. And I barely spoke English.

You’ve said you initially weren’t sure that you were the right person to direct this movie. What was your hesitation?
There were three elements to that. One is that I’m not a mother. I never felt particularly maternal. People in my life say, “That’s not true, Chloé,” but I don’t see myself stepping into that archetype at all. The second was the idea of a period film — how can I be authentic and fluid in a period film, where you can’t just make things up in the moment, you can’t be spontaneous? The third was Shakespeare. I wondered if I needed to be scholarly.

So how did you come around?
I was driving near Four Corners, New Mexico, when Amblin called. I said, “No, thank you.” Steven [Spielberg] really wanted me to consider it. Then my agent said Paul Mescal wanted to meet me. I didn’t know his work. “Aftersun” was the secret screening here [in Telluride 2022], and we went for a walk by the creek. I watched him talking and thought, “Could he play young Shakespeare?” He already read the book. Then I read it and thought, if Maggie [O’Farrell] can write this with me, she can show me that world. As soon as I read the book, I said, “Can you set a meeting with Jessie Buckley?” I couldn’t see anyone else but her as Agnes.

Paul Mescal as William Shakespeare in the movie “Hamnet.”

(Agata Grzybowska / Focus Features)

You’d just come off “Eternals” after making small films like “Songs My Brothers Taught Me” and “Nomadland.” Now you’re back with something more intimate again. Did it feel like a reset?
Every child has its own beauty and troubles. This budget was maybe six or seven times “Nomadland,” but much less than “Eternals.” But it’s also a period film, which has its own challenges. I come from a tradition of: Tell me how much money you have and I’ll make something with it.

But I changed a lot after “Nomadland” and “Eternals.” In my 30s, I wanted to chase the horizon. I didn’t want it to ever end. I’d just keep running. Then, at the end of “Eternals,” I felt I couldn’t film another sunset that would satisfy me the way in the way it had with “The Rider” and “Nomadland.” I went through a lot of difficult personal times and pushing midlife, I realized I’d been running like a cowboy, like a nomad.

When you stop running and stop chasing horizons and you stay still, the only place you can go is above or below. I descended pretty heavily these last four years. By the time I got to “Hamnet,” I was ready. The difference now is a different kind of humanity: older, more vertical.

We know so little about Shakespeare or his son. Some parts of your film are grounded, others dreamlike. How did you balance that?
First of all, what’s real? Ancient mystics tried to understand what is being. “To be or not to be” goes beyond suicidal thought — it’s about existence itself. Every film has its own truth. For me, the truest thing is what’s present in the moment. I hired department heads and actors with knowledge of the history, but also the capacity to stay present and shift as we go. If someone came in too factual and literal, I said no. I wanted people who could do the research but also stay alive to the present.

Shakespeare’s name isn’t even spoken until late in the movie. This isn’t the icon — he’s a husband and father. Was it appealing to free him from the iconography?
Maggie’s book laid the foundation, really focusing on Agnes. For the film, I wanted it to be about two people who see and are seen by each other. They’re archetypal characters. I’ve studied Jungian psychology and Hindu Tantra — the energies of masculine and feminine, being and doing, birth and death. If we don’t have a healthy connection to our roots, those forces battle within us. By creating two characters who embody that, the story can work at a collective level and an internal one. The alchemy of creativity lets those forces coexist. Hopefully it becomes something more than a story about marriage or the death of a child.

Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal in the movie “Hamnet.”

(Agata Grzybowska / Focus Features )

The loss of a child is hard to film and for audiences to watch. We’ve seen it tackled in different ways on screen, from “Ordinary People” to “Manchester by the Sea.” How did you approach portraying that kind of grief honestly without it being too much for the audience to bear?
It might be for some people, which is understandable. I love both those films you mentioned very much and watched them multiple times. I’ve been making films about grief for a while. I don’t think about what’s too much or too little. Agnes’ wailing — I could do that right now in front of you. We should be allowed to. The silence for thousands of years has done great damage.

How do you mean?
Think about ancient warriors coming back from battle — they danced, screamed, healed together. In Tantra, sexuality was part of healing. Now it’s: Talk to a therapist, take medication, go back to your family. The body is restricted. Telling a woman to be quiet when she gave birth and pinning her down. We know why this control happens. But I think people are responding to films where actors are embodied, because we miss that.

How do you see grief as a through-line in all your films?
All my films start with characters who’ve lost what defined them: dreams, home, purpose, faith. They grieve who they thought they were in order to become who they truly are. That’s grief on an individual and collective level. I wasn’t raised to understand grief. So I made films to give characters catharsis and through that, myself.

My friend [“Sinners” director] Ryan Coogler, who knows me so well, sat me down after seeing “Hamnet” and he said, “The other films were beautiful but you hid behind things. This is the first time I saw you in there. You’re finally being seen.” It took four films, working with that kind of grief and fear to get to that point.

The Oscar chatter has already started. You’ve obviously been through this before. How do you tune that out and just focus on what’s in front of you?
The same way that me, Paul and Jessie were doing on set. We made the film by being present. It’s difficult, so I’m trying to take that practice daily — just saying, “OK, today is all we have.” It’s flattering and nice but after what I’ve experienced in my career, you cannot possibly predict how things are going to go. I never expected “Nomadland” to go on that journey. So I surrender to the river.

Do you know what you’re doing next?
I just wrapped the pilot on the new “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” series, which is set 25 years later. My company is part of developing it. The fandom is so special to me and I’m excited about how that’s going to go into the world. Then I think I want to do a play. I was working on “Our Town” and I had to let that go in order to do “Hamnet.” But I figured maybe I’ll learn something from this film and come back to the stage.

The industry feels pretty shaky right now: fewer jobs, studio consolidation, anxiety around AI. As a filmmaker, how do you see the state of the business and the art form?
I sense we’re at a threshold — not just the film business, everything. It’s uncomfortable. We’re like Will standing at the edge of the river when, at least in our film, the “to be or not to be” monologue was born. We can’t go back and we don’t know how to go forward. In physics, when two opposing forces pull so strongly, a new equilibrium bursts out. That’s how the universe expands. I think we’re there. We can kick and scream or we can surrender, hug our loved ones and focus on what we can do today.

Hopefully I’m not so pessimistic now. Or at least a little bit less.

Last year, Isabela Merced was living a double life. By day, she was running around the set of “The Last of Us” in Vancouver — dodging Infected, WLF soldiers and Seraphites alongside co-star Bella Ramsey.

Then, after wrapping what was sometimes a 15-hour workday, she’d be on a flight 4,500 miles away to Atlanta — doing costume fittings and fight training to become Hawkgirl in James Gunn’s “Superman.”

“I didn’t know I could do that,” she tells De Los. “I proved to myself that I’m capable of more than I think.”

The Peruvian American actress has the kind of career that any young actor would aspire to: She made her Broadway debut at 10 years old in “Evita,” earned critical acclaim acting opposite Benicio del Toro in “Sicario: Day of the Soldado” at 17 and starred in the live-action film adaptation of the massively successful “Dora the Explorer” franchise when she was just 18.

In the last year alone, she’s grown into a certified action star, making waves in huge franchise entries like “Alien: Romulus,” “The Last of Us” Season 2 and “Superman.” At 24 years old, her filmography of formidable heroines, scrappy spitfires and multifaceted young women in major blockbusters has put her on a path that’s been largely inaccessible to so many of the Latino actors who came before her. It’s why she also has her sights set on producing, hoping to provide more opportunities for her community in front of and behind the camera.

Yet this month, she’s turning her focus away from the screen and toward her other creative calling: music.

In 2020 she released her debut EP, “The Better Half of Me,” which showcased her bilingual prowess through soulful Latin pop tracks, written and produced alongside her brother, Gyovanni Moner, during quarantine. Now, she’s revisiting the project in a collaboration with the Grammy Award-winning Peruvian artist Tony Succar. Their new single “Apocalipsis,” released Friday, transforms Merced’s 2020 song of the same name from a slow jam to a modernized salsa groove fit for a Miami nightclub.

With “Superman” now out on digital platforms, Merced spoke with De Los about donning Hawkgirl’s helmet, working with Succar on “Apocalipsis,” and what’s coming up next.

It seems like everything is kept pretty under wraps for these massive superhero movies. How much did you know going into your “Superman” audition?
Initially, I had no idea who I was auditioning for because everything had secret names. I think mine said “Cyclone” in the script. I didn’t actually find out who I was until the day of the camera test with the [Justice Gang].

Oh, wow. How did they tell you?
They didn’t want to make it obvious that they were about to tell me, so it was all really mysterious. I’d been doing all the fittings, and the fight training, and then I got pulled into James [Gunn’s] trailer with the producers and everyone, and they were like “Do you want to be Hawkgirl?” As soon as I found out, I was really, really excited because I was like “Oh thank God, it’s someone I know.”

What was your connection to Hawkgirl before this?
I grew up watching [the “Justice League” animated series] and the character is canonically Latina, so I loved that. Her history is really complicated, and it gets even crazier when you get into the comics, but I was a huge fan of her in the show, and I drew a lot on my memories of Maria [Canals-Barrera’s] version of her. I mean, they’re two different characters, but they’re still of the same spirit because they share memories of their past lives.

What made you most excited about this version of the character? Did you connect with her at all?
She’s the only young woman in this group of guys, in an industry that’s mostly headed up by men, and in a movie that’s mostly led by men. It was a really cool opportunity to exercise a different way of being in that kind of environment. She’s kind of the unfiltered and disconnected, doesn’t-care-how-she’s-perceived version of me, and that was really cathartic to play.

Isabela listened to punk music to get in the mindset to play Hawkgirl.

(Jason Roman)

Because you also have a music background, I’m curious about whether you use music as a tool to get into character?
Oh, yeah, definitely. Every character I play, I make a playlist of songs that remind me of them, and I’ll play them before I go to film. With Hawkgirl it was a lot of punk music that I was discovering, with all these really strong singers. Then there were songs that Bella [Ramsey] and I really loved by Adrianne Lenker that informed our experience a lot as Dina and Ellie [in “The Last of Us”]. There was some ‘80s music in there too, maybe some early 2000s, but in general, just really soft, sweet, romantic songs.

You’re releasing a salsa remix of your 2020 single, “Apocalipsis,” with Tony Succar. How did that come about?
I mean, “remix” almost feels like an understatement because it feels like a completely different song. That’s thanks to Tony, who’s the first Peruvian to win a Grammy. He came to me with this opportunity four years ago, and we recorded the song, but I was signed to a label and we weren’t able to release it. Now that I’m free and independent, and he won his Grammy, he wanted to put it on his EP, and I was like, “Hell yeah, let’s do it.” He gave me the freedom to do the video for it, and I’m really happy with how it turned out. I got to dance for it, and I learned all the choreography in an hour and a half. It was crazy, but I’m really excited for people to see it.

How would you describe your music taste? And how does it connect to the type of music you want to make?
It’s hard to pin down. If I’m looking at my most recents, it’s Hermanos Gutiérrez. But it’s also Dick Gaughan, Big Thief, Los Mirlos, which is a Peruvian band, and the Andrew Oldham Orchestra. There’s no through line there other than good music. I already have a lot going on with acting, so if music could stay something fun and light for me, and not so disciplined, I think that would be nice.

Is there a musical or an idea for a musical that would get you excited about returning to Broadway?
Have they done a Selena musical? No, I think I would have remembered that. But that would be cool, getting to dance on stage. It would be like a concert-slash-musical theater experience, kind of like what they did with Gloria Estefan’s “On Your Feet!” If it was made by the right people with respect to her life and her legacy, I think that could be dope.

But honestly, if I were to do something on Broadway, I would love for it to be an original composition. I’m currently working on one right now. I’m producing it, and also going to be in it. Things are moving along really well, and it’s another project with friends. I think we have to take more bold chances when it comes to Broadway, because everyone’s trying to reach a younger audience — but I think the most efficient way of doing that is by allowing the younger audience to bring their stories forward and tell them.

You’ve mentioned that you’re getting into producing. What kind of projects do you have in the works right now?
I’m producing one movie that’s shooting in September called “Psyche.” I’m really excited about it. We have Latina director, and also the project I’m supposed to do next after that is going to be directed by a Peruvian woman. So there’s some really, really cool s— that I’ve been trying to do, where I’ll have more creative control and freedom — but also a lower budget, so, you know, roughing [it] compared to what I’ve been doing the last few years. But I’m excited to get to the root of why I love to do this and feel it fully.

Your career is so interesting because it’s just getting started, and yet, it’s not the kind of career that many Latino actors have historically been able to achieve so early on. How do you process that?
I’m in an interesting position because I think Hollywood is really comfortable picking Latino actors who are sort of white-forward or mixed before they’re willing to cast Indigenous people. And look, I’ll take anything I can get, because, girl, I’m just trying to work in this economy. [Laughs]

But I think being aware of that is really important because when I go off and do my own projects, and have the power, I can hire people that look more like the people that I grew up with, or that look like my family. But it doesn’t always happen that way. Financing is hard to get, and when you’re trying to bring people on, they want someone who’s already known, and Hollywood just hasn’t given many of those opportunities to people of certain skin colors.

Because you’ve grown up in this industry, I’m curious what your experience has been like learning to speak up for and advocate for yourself?
Something I’ve learned is that there’s always a power struggle going on, whether that’s on a personal level, or on a bigger level, or even socially. I think we’re constantly fighting for power. And because of that, we can become very defensive. So I think the biggest challenge for me wasn’t necessarily what I went through, but how I reacted to it: by choosing to keep an open heart and still love freely and trust in people because of how I was raised. I think we all have a choice to make when we’re harmed, and that’s to either close up and harm others, or to keep going. It sucks, but I won’t let that dictate the way I move through life.

“Miracle Mile” takes place in a city in the throes of chaos as Angelenos flee the threat of a nuclear strike. The film was released in 1988, but it has resurfaced in the last few years, attracting sold-out crowds at the American Cinematheque and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Written and directed by Steve De Jarnatt and made for $3 million, the film was restored and re-released by boutique film distributor Kino Lorber in 2024. In her commentary for the Blu-ray, author Janet Fitch (“White Oleander”) said “Miracle Mile” depicts “the kind of apocalypse that L.A. people imagine.”

Los Angeles knows how to weather a crisis — or two or three. Angelenos are tapping into that resilience, striving to build a city for everyone.

And even though it did not make a big impression when it opened, De Jarnatt said the film has gained what he called “cult status.”

Much of the appeal of “Miracle Mile” appeal can be attributed to the film’s obvious affection for the stretch of Wilshire Boulevard bordered by La Brea and Fairfax Avenues. Featured locations include the May Co. and Orbach’s department stores (now the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures and the Petersen Automotive Museum, respectively), the nearby Park La Brea towers and Johnnie’s Coffee Shop, which is closed and used primarily for film and TV productions.

The movie, which takes place over the course of 24 hours, starts out as a lighthearted romance. Anthony Edwards plays Harry Washello, a struggling trombone player who falls for coffee shop waitress Julie Waters (Mare Winningham) after they meet cute at the La Brea Tar Pits. The couple make a date to meet after her evening shift is over.

But their plans fall apart. Harry unwittingly intercepts a call at a phone booth, and the caller tells him nuclear missiles will strike Los Angeles within the hour. As the city unravels, Harry and Julie try to save their upended romance.

The ending is both sad and happy. “To be with the one you love at the end, even if it’s a brand new love who you met at the La Brea Tar Pits, which is like a time portal and a museum dedicated to extinction, is as good a way as any to go out,” De Jarnatt says.

(And it was a particularly happy ending for Edwards and Winningham, who bonded while filming the project. At the time, both were married to other people and stayed friends while working together on other projects — including “ER,” in which Edwards played the lead role as Dr. Mark Greene. The two eventually became a couple and wed in 2021.)

For centuries, mythology looked to gods to explain a disquieting world. But in the new documentary “Folktales,” from “Jesus Camp” filmmakers Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, which follows a trio of jumbled Scandinavian teens to a remote Norwegian school that builds character in the snowy wild, the answer to life may just lie in what “god” spells backward.

In other words, yes, let’s go to the dogs: sled dogs, specifically, whose personalities, purpose and compatibility are the secret sauce to a lesson plan that seeks to get kids out of their heads and into a stronger sense of self. The beautiful Alaskan and Siberian huskies that animate the dog-sledding instruction at Norway’s Pasvik Folk High School are what help lift this handsomely photographed film above the usual heart warmer.

Ewing and Grady are no stranger to this scenario, having observed at-risk Baltimore youth striving for stability (“The Boys of Baraka”) and unhappy Hasidic Jews attempting to remove themselves from all they’ve ever known (“One of Us”). The situation is less sociologically dire in “Folktales,” but it isn’t any less compelling as a subject or less worthy of empathetic attention, especially when the stage for potential transformation is as rapturous as the birthplace of Vikings.

Pasvik is 200 miles north of the Arctic Circle, which means self-reliance isn’t optional and knitting carries more practical weight than learning a math formula. As gap-year institutions dedicated to nurturing the transition to adulthood, folk schools have roots going back to the 19th century. Pasvik sees survival training as unlocking potential in teens too devoted to their phone screens. As convivial dog-sledding teacher Iselin puts it to the students, she wants to “wake up your Stone Age brains.”

For anxious, bubbly 19-year-old Hege, who lost her father and struggles with image issues, unplugging is tough at first. But she responds to its benefits, especially when entrusted with the care of Odin, a gorgeous, lovable canine with an expressive howl. Socially awkward Bjorn wants to stop harboring sad thoughts and second-guessing his nerdiness. Nothing like a majestic creature who rewards your undivided attention, then, to refocus one’s energies. When the students are tasked with spending two nights in the forest alone with just their assigned huskies and camping acumen, their struggles give way to a turning point, what another kindhearted instructor describes as the special inner peace that comes with just “a fire, a dog and a starry sky.”

You also gather that Ewing and Grady may have been seeking some inspiration themselves. Hence, some arty montages of the icy wilderness (including some woo-woo yarn-and-tree symbolism) and an ambiance closer to warm spotlight than objective inquiry.

That makes “Folktales” decidedly more powdery than densely packed — it’s all ruddy cheeks, slo-mo camaraderie and the healing power of steering a dog sled through breathtaking terrain. It looks exhilarating, and if the filmmakers are ultimately there to play, not probe, that’s fine, even if you may not know these kids at the end any better than you did at the beginning. It’s hard to say whether negative-minded high school dropout Romain will wind up on the other side of what troubles him. But we see how happy he is making friends and catching a glimpse of moose in the wild. It’s a simple message, but “Folktales” sells it: Nurture via nature.