Mary

Trailing at halftime for the first time all season, Palisades faced its toughest test so far and passed with flying colors to stay unbeaten Friday night in San Pedro.

Seeing his potent passing attack sputtering, coach Dylen Smith switched to the ground game in the second half and the Dolphins overcame a 13-point deficit to pull out a 35-28 intersectional victory over host Mary Star of the Sea.

“My message at halftime was we need to run the ball and we don’t need to win the game on one pass,” said Smith, who piloted Palisades to the City Section Division I final last fall. “We finally had a collective effort in the fourth quarter, Harrison Carter ran hard and the defense made stops when it needed to.”

Carter caught a 25-yard touchdown pass from Jack Thomas for the first points of the second half and later took a pitch around left end for a 50-yard score that cut the Dolphins’ deficit to 28-21 with 5:47 left in the third quarter.

After drawing double coverage and being held to one catch through three and a half quarters, star receiver Demare Dezeurn caught two touchdown passes with less than six minutes left, the second a juggling 46-yarder for the go-ahead score with 1:21 remaining.

On its ensuing drive Mary Star marched to Palisades’ 20, but Carter broke up a pass in the flat on fourth and 10 with 12 seconds left to seal the win.

Johnny Rivera scores the first of his four touchdowns runs for Mary Star of the Sea against Palisades.

(Steve Galluzzo / For The Times)

Thomas, who entered the game having thrown for 1,304 yards and 17 touchdowns without an interception, was held to 17 yards passing in the first half but finished nine of 16 for 123 yards and four touchdowns.

Carter rushed for 123 yards and caught three passes for 40 yards for the Dolphins (5-0), who are third in The Times’ City Section rankings behind Birmingham and Carson,

Johnny Rivera rushed 40 times for 217 yards and four touchdowns for the Stars (3-2), who led 20-7 at halftime and 28-21 entering the fourth quarter.

Palisades begins Western League action next Friday at Westchester while the Stars host St. Genevieve in their Camino Real League opener the same night.

Movie fans come to Toronto to get an early peek at the year’s awards heavyweights. I didn’t see a knockout punch, but I saw some strong contenders — and in a couple cases, I just got bludgeoned.

Directors Benny Safdie (“Uncut Gems”) and David Michôd (“Animal Kingdom”) faced off with competing docudramas about the sufferings of two professional brawlers whose careers peaked in the ’90s — i.e., new “Raging Bulls” for today’s nostalgists. “The Smashing Machine” is a solo effort from the younger Safdie brother after making a string of energetic cult hits with his sibling, Josh. It stars Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as MMA fighter Mark Kerr, who could beat almost anyone inside the octagon but struggled to conquer his own demons at home with his then-wife, Dawn (Emily Blunt).

Based on the names and talent involved, I was expecting anything other than what I got: a conventional biopic. Its one bit of flair is a commitment to looking as though it was filmed on VHS. But projected in Imax, it just looked dreary (as did Johnson’s hairpiece). I’ll go another round with it in a more apropos ring.

Michôd’s “Christy” shares several of the same touchstones — the bloodrush of victory, a bruising domestic life, a distracting wig — but gender-flipped. Sydney Sweeney throws a convincing jab as Christy Martin, the first female boxer to make the cover of “Sports Illustrated.” A lesbian from a conservative West Virginia family, she was pressured to hide her sexuality by wearing pastel pink in the ring and marrying her much older, emotionally abusive male coach, Jim Martin (Ben Foster). The script only has a few ideas under its belt, but they’re effective, particularly our dawning recognition that while Christy thinks she’s fighting to prove her worth, she’s really fighting for the patriarchy.

Sweeney is good, even when the leaden dialogue does her a disservice. It’s her first substantial, serious part since 2023’s underseen “Reality” and she seizes the opportunity to be talked about as something other than the internet’s most polarizing ingenue. (Social media is forever singling out one young actress to be damned now and redeemed later, sigh.) As for Foster, who first snagged my attention as the pathetic loon in “Alpha Dog,” he knows how to play a hiss-worthy heel. You spend “Christy” aching to see him get socked in the face. If you need him to take more punishment, he’s just as vile in another TIFF title, “Motor City.”

Tessa Thompson in the movie “Hedda.”

(Prime Video)

At this year’s festival, ladies in corsets did more damage than gals in padded gloves. My favorite mean girl — perhaps even my favorite film of the festival — was Nia DaCosta’s “Hedda,” a devilish and dynamic adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler,” in which the lead character (played by a fantastic Tessa Thompson) starts firing off her daddy’s old pistols as soon as the opening credits. DaCosta, who also adapted the play into a script, restages the action so that the chaos all takes place during a giant, drunken bacchanal at a rented mansion Hedda can’t afford. Thompson’s scheming newlywed manipulates the other characters with the confidence of a queen who controls all the pieces on the board, but every so often she simply has to flip the table over. The spirit is faithful; the subtext is fresh.

“Mārama,” a striking feature debut by Taratoa Stappard, bills itself as a Māori gothic and the combination works. In 1859 England, a white-passing woman from New Zealand named Mary (Ariāna Osborne) has sailed halfway around the world seeking information about her parents. The globe-trotting lord Sir Cole (Toby Stephens) strong-arms her into becoming his niece’s governess, calling the Māori a “magnificent people” while amusing his guests with parlor room reenactments of whale-hunting expeditions done with massive puppets. “Mārama” doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it’s a good ride with first-rate cinematography and production design and a story with one or two more surprises than we expect.

Similarly, “Honey Bunch,” co-directed by Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli, is another manor-bound thriller that toys with familiar tropes. An amnesiac bride (Grace Glowicki, a go-for-broke oddball who always gets my attention) arrives at an isolated and secretive trauma center where everyone seems to be screwing with her memories, including her shady husband (Ben Petrie). Straightaway, we have our suspicions about how this is going to go. The first half of the film doesn’t deviate from the formula — it’s a little dull — but the second half is a superb right hook.

Guillermo del Toro’s grisly, occasionally great “Frankenstein,” shot in Toronto and the U.K., hews more faithfully to Mary Shelley’s novel than the 1931 Boris Karloff classic, scrapping the mob of pitchfork-wielding villagers and salvaging the wraparound story of an ambitious explorer marooned in the the Arctic ice. But it’s still very much Del Toro’s own monster. One of his smartest adjustments is retooling the romantic heroine, Elizabeth (Mia Goth), from the ideal childhood sweetheart to a science-loving pacifist with limited patience for egomaniacs like Oscar Isaac’s Victor Frankenstein. Costume designer Kate Hawley makes Goth look like an exotic beetle with antenna-ish plumes sticking out of her hair.

Jacob Elordi as the Creature in the movie “Frankenstein.”

(Ken Woroner / Netflix)

Jacob Elordi’s creature amps up the pathos a tad too much for my taste, but there’s no denying how much he’s invested in the role, or how well Del Toro’s critiques about narcissistic inventors suit the present day. Still, Del Toro knows there’s a time and place to boast: At the film’s Toronto premiere at the Princess of Wales Theatre, he playfully accused his local below-the-line crew of being too humble and made them stand up for applause. “Stop being so Canadian,” he teased.

Del Toro told the audience that when he first saw Karloff’s creation as a boy, he thought to himself, “That’s my messiah, that’s the guy I’m going to follow like Jesus.” But the prize for the most idol-worshipping film in the festival belongs to Baz Luhrmann’s “EPiC,” which stands for “Elvis Presley in Concert.” Constructed from hours of previously unseen live footage from Presley’s stint in Las Vegas, its rapturous showing felt like attending the church of Elvis.

Luhrmann insists that “EPiC” is neither a concert film nor a documentary. I don’t see the issue with calling it either, but it’s also fair to consider it a companion piece to Luhrmann’s 2022 “Elvis.” It certainly shows that Austin Butler’s Oscar-nominated portrayal of the King wasn’t one rhinestone over the top. Here, the real Presley is charismatic as hell, and looks great beaded in sanctified sweat. Whenever he throws a damp scarf into the audience, the women go so crazy you’d think it was the Shroud of Turin.

Luhrmann continues to be outraged that Col. Tom Parker constricted Presley’s artistic growth by parking him in the city of buffet tables rather than letting him tour the world. Presley only did one week of international concerts during his entire career: five shows in Canada, two of them just a 10-minute drive from my theater. You can hear Presley’s resentment toward the better-traveled (and at the time, better-respected) artists stealing his spot on the charts. “It’s so dry in here, I feel like I’ve got Bob Dylan in my mouth,” he jokes. Later, he slings a guitar around his neck to strum “Little Sister,” and then speeds up the tempo and starts belting the Beatles’ “Get Back,” a subtle dig that the boys from Britain weren’t always that original.

A scene from the movie “A Useful Ghost.”

(TIFF)

Speaking of, I can’t wrap up my final dispatch from this year’s Toronto International Film Festival without mentioning the most creative Oscar contender I saw all week: “A Useful Ghost,” which won the Grand Prix of Critics’ Week at Cannes and will be Thailand’s entry for an Academy Award. Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s arch hybrid of horror, comedy, romance and political thriller starts when a self-described “academic ladyboy” (Wisarut Homhuan) discovers that his new vacuum cleaner is possessed. From there, the movie defies prediction at every turn.

I ducked into “A Useful Ghost” on a whim, wondering how it would pair with TIFF’s world premiere of “Dust Bunny,” a nice and nasty Roald Dahl-esque adventure in which a little girl hires Mads Mikkelsen to battle a man-eating monster under her bed. I came out of the theater abuzz with energy. Even though some of this season’s noisiest awards hopefuls are rooted in classic genres, there are still directors making movies that feel entirely new — and still audiences delighted to cheer for a big swing.

Director Ryan Coogler and artist Mary Corse will be honored at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s 14th annual Art+Film Gala, the museum announced Sunday.

The splashy, high-fashion dinner is co-chaired by LACMA trustee Eva Chow and Leonardo DiCaprio, and is scheduled to take place on Nov. 1. It will be the last such event to occur before the museum opens its new Peter Zumthor-designed building next spring.

Los Angeles is uniquely suited for the gala, which seeks to highlight and strengthen the connections between film and visual art by bringing the two communities together in grand style. Last year’s honorees were Baz Luhrmann and Simone Leigh, and per usual, a host of celebrity guests attended the party including Blake Lively, Kim Kardashian, Laura Dern, Viola Davis, Andrew Garfield and Sarah Paulson. Charli XCX closed out the night with a banger.

LACMA Director and Chief Executive Michael Govan called last year’s event, which raised $6.4 million, its most successful ever. Proceeds go toward LACMA’s mission of making film more central to its programming, as well as toward funding exhibitions, acquisitions and educational programming.

Mary Corse will be honored at LACMA’s Art + Film gala.

(Indah Datou)

Other previous honorees include artists Helen Pashgian, Betye Saar, Catherine Opie, Mark Bradford, Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Barbara Kruger, David Hockney, Ed Ruscha and John Baldessari. On the film side there has been Park Chan-wook, Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro, George Lucas, Kathryn Bigelow, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, Stanley Kubrick and Clint Eastwood.

Coogler — who directed “Black Panther,” “Creed” and “Fruitvale Station” — is having a stellar year. His gory Southern-vampire horror film “Sinners,” which was released in mid-April, has been a massive hit. The film, which had a budget of $90 million, grossed $48 million in ticket sales in the U.S. and Canada during its opening weekend, and has gone on to gross more than $365 million worldwide.

Topanga-based painter Mary Corse is known for her connection to Southern California’s Light and Space movement, but her career has been defined by her willingness to experiment with form and various materials, including ceramics and acrylic on canvas. Corse devoted much of her life to her “White Light” series, which involves layering tiny glass beads — called microspheres — over white acrylic paint for a constantly shifting, reflective effect.

“Mary Corse has continually expanded the possibilities of painting in her exquisite works, which invite us to think deeply about the nature of perception,” said Govan in a statement. “Ryan Coogler’s films do something equally transformative. Through masterful storytelling and visual innovation, he reframes history, redefines narratives and opens new worlds of possibility.”

“Who can turn the world on with her smile?” It’s Mary Tyler Moore, of course, and you should know it.

To be precise, it’s Mary Richards, a person Moore played. But the smile was her own, and it worked magic across two situation comedies that described their time in a way that some might have regarded as ahead of their time. Although Moore proved herself as an actress of depth and range and peerless comic timing again and again, on the small and big screen and onstage, “The Dick Van Dyke Show” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” made her a star, and incidentally a cultural figurehead, and are the reason we have a splendid new documentary, “Being Mary Tyler Moore,” premiering Friday on HBO. Were it titled simply “Being Mary,” there’d be little doubt who was meant.

Moore was driven to perform from an early age, which she relates to wanting to impress her father — though that seems too simple. She trained as a dancer, and right out of high school played a pixie, Happy Hotpoint, in a series of appliance commercials. (A visible pregnancy ended that job.) She played a faceless switchboard operator on “Richard Diamond, Private Detective,” from which she was bounced when she asked for more money, and a typical assortment of starlet roles in television and movies. A failed audition to play the older daughter on “The Danny Thomas Show” led to her being called for “Van Dyke,” of which Thomas was an executive producer. Creator Carl Reiner remembers, “I read about 60 girls, and I read the whole script with them. She read three lines, three simple lines. There was such a ping in it, an excitement, a reality to it.” They soon discovered her gift for comedy.

“The Dick Van Dyke Show,” in which Moore played Laura Petrie to Van Dyke’s Rob, came into the world in the first year of the Kennedy administration, and there is something of that new White House, torch-passed-to-a-new-generation spirit in the Petries’ New Rochelle, N.Y., home. (Van Dyke was 35 when the show premiered — just old enough to be president himself — to Moore’s 24, but the two never seemed generationally distinct.) They were modern, with modern tastes. This was not the old-fashioned, small-town family comedy of “Father Knows Best” or “Leave It to Beaver.” If you lived in my household, you might have felt right at home with them.

Then again, “Dick Van Dyke” was not really a family comedy; some episodes might involve their son, Richie (Larry Mathews), but many more would not, and when child-rearing was the subject, it would more likely highlight the foolishness of the parents. The Petries were suburban in the sense of being connected to, not remote from, the city — sophisticated, fun, elegant. They threw parties, went out in formal wear, tried the latest dances. They were sexual. And they held the stage with equal strength and force.

If they were well on the safe side of bohemian, they were arty in their way, Rob a comedy writer, Laura, like Moore, a dancer — a former dancer in the show, which was not so ahead of its time to imagine a working mother. Still, the series found opportunities to let her dance. (“I will go to my grave thinking of myself as a failed dancer, not a successful actor,” Moore says in the documentary.)

Famously — and at once realistically and, for TV at that time, radically — she wore pants, tight ones; Moore is nearly synonymous with Capris. I turned on a random episode the other night (Season 4, Episode 1, “My Mother Can Beat Up My Father”), one I’d somehow never seen, in which a drunk at a restaurant bar begins to harass Laura. Rob tries to get him to back off, claiming he knows karate, and gets a punch in the nose — at which Laura, to her own surprise, flips the drunk with a judo move. (She’d learned self-defense when she was entertaining at Army bases.)

It winds up in a society column. Laura finds it funny. Rob, whose ego is as bruised as his proboscis, childishly lashes out.

Rob: “How come you never dress like a girl?”

Laura, incredulous: “What?

“Well, honey, I mean, shirts and slacks, shirts and slacks, that’s all I ever see when I come home.”

“You love me in shirts and slacks.”

“Yeah, well, but whatever happened to dresses?”

“Rob, you know, this is the stupidest conversation we’ve ever had.”

Mary Tyler Moore with Dr. Robert Levine, to whom she was married from 1983 until her death in 2017. Levine is an executive producer on “Being Mary Tyler Moore.”

(From Robert Levine / HBO)

“Dick Van Dyke” stories were divided equally between home and work, with the two worlds frequently intersecting. “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” took that model and put Moore in the center of the action, amid a brilliant comic cast. Her move to Minneapolis, which begins the series and lands her in the newsroom at WJM, was not born from tragedy or pressure; she moves on her own initiative, recovering from nothing but the possibility of a life that won’t suit her.

That Mary was a single woman in no rush to be married was something new for television — but it could hardly be said that she lived alone; her apartment was subject to regular incursions from Rhoda (Valerie Harper) and Phyllis (Cloris Leachman), a company of women hashing out their different lives in a sort of dialectical comedy. (There were women in the writing room; Treva Silverman, whose comments are featured prominently in “Being Mary Tyler Moore,” was the first woman to win an Emmy with a solo credit.)

Whether this was or was not a feminist series is a question that still prompts think pieces. Gloria Steinem thought not, and Moore did not identify herself as such — though in the opening scene of the documentary, in a 1966 interview with a backward David Susskind, she does say, “I agree with Betty Friedan and her point of view in her book ‘Feminine Mystique’ that women are, or should be, human beings first, women second, wives and mothers third.”

Unlike the Norman Lear comedies — “All in the Family,” also on CBS, premiered a few months after “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” — the MTM-produced comedies, which also included the “Moore” spinoffs “Rhoda” and “Phyllis,” were contemporary and “adult” without being issue-oriented. But because they were realistic about their characters, they couldn’t help but engage with their times and the culture. If the feminism of “Mary Tyler Moore,” which is in a sense just a function of its intelligence, is not explicit, it is in the bones of the show. And Mary, like the woman who played her, “inspired as many women as Eleanor Roosevelt,” in the words of series co-creator James L. Brooks.

If Moore never repeated the massive television success of her first two series, well, that would have been practically impossible. Some failed later shows, including the sitcom “Mary,” which found her working at a Chicago tabloid, and “The Mary Tyler Moore Hour,” which blended variety with a backstage sitcom, go unmentioned in the documentary, but are not without interest and may be found floating in cyberspace. Various dramatic roles, onscreen and onstage, demonstrated the subtlety and depth of her acting, though you could find that in most any episode of “Mary Tyler Moore” as well.

Her last great triumph — though not at all the end of her career — was her Oscar-nominated turn in Robert Redford’s “Ordinary People,” whose cold mother is deemed closer to her own character; she had a reputation, she says, for being “an ice princess.” Redford decided to cast her having once seen her walking on the beach, looking sad. (“He saw my dark side.”)

It is the point of nearly any show business biography that the person we know from their work is and is not the person who lived the life. Indeed, the very title “Being Mary Tyler Moore” suggests that “Mary Tyler Moore” was both a part she played and a person she was, similar in some respects and markedly different in others. Directed by James Adolphus, with Moore’s widower, Dr. Robert Levine, on board as an executive producer, the film has access to a wealth of family photos and home movies — including footage of her bridal shower, featuring a hilarious Betty White — and does a fine job of illuminating the private Moore, with testimony from (unseen) colleagues, friends and family.

It’s no secret that her life was marked by tragedy. (She was a private person, but she wrote books. And some things you can’t keep out of the papers.) She had a drinking problem. Her sister died from an overdose of alcohol and painkillers. Her son, Richard, accidentally shot himself. Diabetes led to numerous problems with her health. But “Being Mary Tyler Moore” is a happier story than one might expect, which in itself makes it a moving one. Moore and Levine were married from 1983 to her death in 2017, and they settled into a life filled with dogs and horses; there were good works too, on behalf of juvenile diabetes.

We can too easily measure the worth of a performer’s life by their professional success, as if there’s nothing more terrible than a canceled sitcom, a box office flop or the lack of good roles all but a few actors eventually face. “Being Mary Tyler Moore” reminds us not to make that mistake.

Project Hail Mary is one of the most talked about upcoming blockbusters for next year, but there’s another gripping science fiction thriller you should check out first

Science fiction fans can stream this critically acclaimed blockbuster right now ahead of the new Ryan Gosling-led thriller, Project Hail Mary.

The upcoming space epic will be hitting cinemas next March and a recent trailer has teased a high-octane thrill ride beyond the solar system.

Starring Gosling as school science teacher Ryland Grace, he’s plunged headfirst into a dangerous outer space mission to protect the Earth from catastrophe – but can he save his own life in the process?

Helmed by the genius directors behind 21 Jump Street and Into the Spider-Verse, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, this jaw-dropping adaptation of Andy Weir’s bestselling novel is guaranteed to be a must-watch cinematic experience.

Sci-fi readers will already be well-acquainted with Weir as the author of the equally gripping novel The Martian, which was adapted into a major film directed by Ridley Scott and starring Matt Damon back in 2015.

10 years later, this nail-biting space survival thriller remains one of the most beloved sci-fi films of the century so far – and fans can stream it right now.

Whether you’ve already experienced this riveting space adventure or it’s somehow passed you by, make sure you stream The Martian on Disney+ at some point before March to get yourself well-prepared for Project Hail Mary.

One five-star Google review calls it: “An Absolute Masterpiece of Sci-Fi Cinema.”

They went on: “Adapted from Andy Weir’s equally captivating novel, this film takes you on an exhilarating journey to the red planet, Mars.

“From the very first scene to the closing credits, The Martian is a thrilling and suspenseful rollercoaster of human ingenuity, resilience, and survival.

“Matt Damon’s portrayal of Mark Watney, an astronaut stranded on Mars, is brilliant. His charismatic and witty performance keeps you engaged throughout the film.”

Someone else raved: “What makes The Martian so rewatchable is its tone. It’s intense when it needs to be, but never loses that touch of optimism and wit that makes it so enjoyable.

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“The soundtrack fits perfectly, the pacing keeps you engaged, and the visuals of Mars are stunning without ever feeling overwhelming.

“It’s a film that makes space feel both terrifying and oddly comforting, a rare mix. Whether you’re into science fiction, survival stories, or just well-made cinema, The Martian is the kind of film you’ll gladly watch more than once.”

The accolades continued over on Letterboxd, where yet another five-star review says: “An effortlessly engrossing and excellently rendered science fiction epic of survival, Ridley Scott’s Martian immediately ranks as one of the director’s most satisfying works.

“A love letter to the power of science, problem solving, and human will, the film provides a smart and soaring experience that rivets as much as it satisfies.

“Scott and company tell a story that is buoyant, nail-biting, and life affirming.”

This modern masterpiece isn’t leaving Disney+ any time soon, so there’s plenty of time and absolutely no excuse not to stream one of Damon’s best blockbusters before the torch is passed to Gosling next year.

The Martian is available to stream on Disney+.

Ryan Gosling puts the “not” in “Astronaut” in the new trailer for “Project Hail Mary.”

The upcoming sci-fi film, based on Andy Weir‘s novel of the same name, stars Gosling as middle school teacher turned reluctant astronaut Ryland Grace, who’s tasked with saving humanity from the effects of a dimming sun. However, when he wakes up from a coma as the sole survivor aboard a spaceship, he must overcome his amnesia to remember where he is and why he was sent there.

“It’s an insanely ambitious story that’s massive in scope and it seemed really hard to make, and that’s kind of our bag,” Gosling said of “Project Hail Mary” at CinemaCon in April, where he debuted footage from the film, according to Variety. “This is why we go to the movies. And I’m not just saying it because I’m in it. I’m also saying it because I’m a producer on the film.”

The trailer, released Monday by Amazon MGM Studios, opens with Gosling startling awake on the spacecraft, his hair and beard uncharacteristically long. “I’m several light-years from my apartment,” he proclaims, “and I’m not an astronaut.”

It then jolts back in time to show Grace pre-launch as he learns from Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller) that if he does not journey into space, everything on Earth will go extinct. According to Stratt, who heads the mission, Grace is the only scientist who might understand what is happening to the sun and surrounding stars.

The trailer, which progresses through an intense montage set to Harry Styles’ “Sign of the Times,” teases Gosling’s signature humor. “I can’t even moonwalk!” the “Barbie” actor declares at one point. (Gosling portrayed moonwalker Neil Armstrong in another recent space movie, Damien Chazelle’s “First Man.”)

Everything leads up to Grace meeting an alien, who isn’t shown in full — but fans of the book know it plays an integral role in saving planet Earth and beyond.

The film, directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, marks the second book-to-movie adaptation for Weir, whose novel “The Martian” became an Oscar-nominated 2015 blockbuster starring Matt Damon. An adaptation for his book “Artemis” is also in development with the same directing team.

“Project Hail Mary” hits theaters March 20.

WASHINGTON — Donald Trump’s upbringing in a deeply dysfunctional family makes him a uniquely destructive and unstable leader for the country, his estranged niece writes in a scathing new book released Tuesday, perhaps the most personal in a series of deeply unflattering tell-all accounts about the president.

Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist, describes her uncle as deeply insecure and unscrupulous, saying he paid a friend to take his SAT so he could get into college. She accuses him of “twisted behaviors” and “cheating as a way of life,” citing a lifelong habit of lying.

“Donald is not simply weak, his ego is a fragile thing that must be bolstered every moment because he knows deep down that he is nothing of what he claims to be. He knows he has never been loved,” writes the 55-year-old daughter of the president’s eldest brother, Fred.

The Times obtained an early copy of her 240-page book, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man,” before its official release.

The book, which portrays the president as almost pitifully desperate for affirmation, provides a harsh contrast to Trump’s self-made image as a tough and successful businessman. It also represents an extraordinary breach in the wall of secrecy that he has erected around his life.

More than any modern president, Trump has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal or distort major details of his private life, barring his schools from releasing transcripts, refusing to disclose his tax returns or detailed health information, and requiring employees and others to sign nondisclosure agreements to prevent release of unflattering material about his business and personal affairs.

The author says the president’s late father, Fred Sr., was domineering and a “high-functioning sociopath,” and his late mother, also named Mary, was “emotionally and physically absent.” They left Trump, she argues, without empathy and “fundamentally incapable of acknowledging the suffering of others.”

“Honest work was never demanded of him, and no matter how badly he failed, he was rewarded in ways that are almost unfathomable,” she writes.

“Now the stakes are far higher than they’ve ever been before; they are literally life and death. Unlike any previous time in his life, Donald’s failings cannot be hidden or ignored because they threaten us all,” she adds.

The president, the fourth of five Trump siblings, argued that in writing the book, his niece violated a nondisclosure agreement that she signed two decades ago as part of the settlement of a bitter dispute over the family fortune.

His younger brother, Robert, sued to block the book’s release, but a New York appeals court decided that publisher Simon & Schuster could distribute the book. Another state judge ruled on Monday that Mary Trump could not be barred from publicly speaking about the book’s contents, saying that “would be incorrect and serve no purpose.”

She had told the court that the confidentiality agreement should be declared invalid because Trump lied about his net worth and other business affairs during the negotiations.

Sarah Matthews, a White House deputy press secretary, said her allegation in the book that Trump paid someone to take the College Board admissions test for him “is completely false.” Trump enrolled at Fordham University in 1964 but transferred two years later to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in business.

Matthews also said “the president describes the relationship he had with his father as warm and said his father was very good to him.”

According to the book, the Trump family was caustic, cold and calculating.

“Donald suffered deprivations that would scar him for life,” Mary writes, and he developed personality traits that included “displays of narcissism, bullying, grandiosity.”

He also became practiced at bending the truth, a precursor to becoming a president who has uttered and tweeted thousands of falsehoods since taking office.

“For Donald, lying was primarily a mode of self-aggrandizement meant to convince other people he was better than he actually was,” Mary writes.

According to her account, Trump got his older sister, Maryanne, to complete his school homework, and he paid a friend to take his College Board admissions test.

“That was much easier to pull off in the days before photo IDs and computerized records,” Mary writes. “Donald, who never lacked for funds, paid his buddy well.”

Mary Trump relies on her training as a clinical psychologist to analyze the president. She blames him for the unraveling of her father, Fred Jr., who died in 1981 at age 42 after struggling with alcoholism.

Fred Jr., often called Freddy, had been expected to take over the family real estate business, but he was uninterested, and Fred Sr. ended up favoring Donald instead.

“Donald, following the lead of my grandfather and with the complicity, silence, and inaction of his siblings, destroyed my father,” Mary writes.

Freddy became a commercial airline pilot, disappointing his father, who described him as a “bus driver in the sky.” While Fred Jr. was living in Massachusetts with his wife, Donald visited and berated him for his alleged failings.

“You know, Dad’s really sick of you wasting your life,” Donald said, according to the book.

Fred Jr.’s drinking worsened, and an attempt to return to the family business didn’t pan out. At the end of his life, no family members accompanied him when he was taken to the hospital, Mary writes. She says Donald went to the movies the night his brother died.

According to the book, Trump internalized Fred Sr.’s treatment of Freddy.

“He had plenty of time to learn from watching Fred humiliate his older brother and Freddy’s resulting shame,” Mary writes. “The lesson he learned, at its simplest, was that it was wrong to be like Freddy: Fred didn’t respect his oldest son, so neither would Donald. Fred thought Freddy was weak, and therefore so did Donald.”

Trump, not known for introspection, has expressed rare doubts about his treatment of his older brother. “I do regret having put pressure on him,” he told the Washington Post last year.

After Fred Sr. died in 1999, Mary and her brother, known as Fritz, were angered to learn that they would inherit far less than they expected. When they challenged the will, the Trump family cut off their medical insurance — a devastating blow to Fritz, whose new son was born with cerebral palsy and needed constant care.

Mary and Fritz eventually settled for less money than they felt they were entitled to, but the legal sparring had consequences down the road.

In the book, Mary reveals herself as the key source for the New York Times’ investigation into Trump’s alleged tax fraud as he inherited his father’s real estate empire. She communicated with one of the reporters using an untraceable phone and visited her former lawyer’s office to collect computer files and nineteen boxes of documents.

The book also describes unflattering comments made by Maryanne, Trump’s older sister and a retired federal judge. When he announced he was running for president, Mary writes, Maryanne dismissed him as “a clown.” And when he started to build support among evangelical voters, she was outraged.

“The only time Donald went to church was when the cameras were there,” Maryanne said, according to the book. “It’s mind boggling. He has no principles. None!”

Trump’s well-documented lewdness extends to his interactions with his niece, she says. After asking Mary to help ghost write one of his books, he refused to grant an interview but provided her with “an aggrieved compendium of women he had expected to date but who, having refused him, were suddenly the worst, ugliest, and fattest slobs he’d ever met.”

Around that time, Mary went with her uncle to Mar-a-Lago, his Florida resort. She writes that when he spotted her in a bathing suit, the future president looked at his 29-year-old niece “as if he’d never really seen me before” and told her “you’re stacked!”

Several former senior members of Trump’s inner circle have also shared withering criticism of the president as he seeks reelection.

Last month, John Bolton, Trump’s third national security advisor, released a scorching behind-the-scenes account of what he viewed as the president’s incompetence and servile behavior toward authoritarian leaders.

Roozbeh Farahanipour sat in the blue-green glow of his Westwood restaurant’s 220-gallon saltwater aquarium and worried about Iran, his voice accented in anguish.

It was Sunday morning, and the homeland he fled a quarter-century ago had been bombed by the U.S. military, escalating a conflict that began nine days earlier when Israel sprang a surprise attack on its perennial Middle Eastern foe.

“Anger and hate for the Iranian regime — I have it, but I try to manage it,” said Farahanipour, owner of Delphi Greek restaurant and two other nearby eateries. “I don’t think that anything good will come out of this. If, for any reason, the regime is going to be changed, either we’re facing another Iraq or Afghanistan, or we’re going to see the Balkans situation. Iran is going to be split in pieces.”

Farahanipour, 53, who’d been a political activist before fleeing Iran, rattled off a series of questions as a gray-colored shark made lazy loops in the tank behind him. What might happen to civilians in Iran if the U.S. attack triggers a more widespread war? What about the potential loss of Israeli lives? And Americans, too? After wrestling with those weighty questions, he posed a more workaday one: “What’s gonna be the gas price tomorrow?”

Such is life for Iranian Americans in Los Angeles, a diaspora that comprises the largest Iranian community outside of Iran. Farahanipour, like other Iranian Americans interviewed by The Times, described “very mixed and complicated” feelings over the crisis in Iran, which escalated early Sunday when the U.S. struck three nuclear sites there, joining an Israeli effort to disrupt the country’s quest for an atomic weapon.

About 141,000 Iranian Americans live in L.A. County, according to the Iranian Data Dashboard, which is hosted by the UCLA Center for Near Eastern Studies. The epicenter of the community is Westwood, where the neighborhood’s namesake boulevard is speckled with storefronts covered in Persian script.

On Sunday morning, reaction to news of the conflict was muted in an area nicknamed “Tehrangeles” — a reference to Iran’s capital — after it welcomed Iranians who emigrated to L.A. during the 1979 Islamic Revolution. In some stores and restaurants, journalists from CNN, Spectrum News and other outlets outnumbered Iranian patrons. At Attari Sandwich Shop, known for its beef tongue sandwich, the pre-revolution Iranian flag hung near the cash register — but none of the diners wanted to give an interview.

“No thank you; [I’m] not really political,” one middle-aged guest said with a wry smile.

Kevan Harris, an associate professor of sociology at UCLA, said that any U.S. involvement in a military conflict with Iran is freighted with meaning, and has long been the subject of hand-wringing.

“This scenario — which seems almost fantastical in a way — is something that has been in the imagination: the United States is going to bomb Iran,” said Harris, an Iranian American who wrote the book “A Social Revolution: Politics and the Welfare State in Iran.” “For 20 years, this is something that has been regularly discussed.”

Many emigres find themselves torn between deep dislike and resentment of the authoritarian government they fled, and concern about the family members left behind. Some in Westwood were willing to chat.

A woman who asked to be identified only as Mary, out of safety concerns for her family in Iran, said she had emigrated five years ago and was visiting L.A. with her husband. The Chicago resident said that the last week and a half have been very difficult, partly because many in her immediate family, including her parents, still live in Tehran. They recently left the city for another location in Iran due to the ongoing attacks by Israeli forces.

“I am talking to them every day,” said Mary, 35.

Standing outside Shater Abbass Bakery & Market — whose owner also has hung the pre-1979 Iranian flag — Mary said she was “hopeful and worried.”

“It’s a very confusing feeling,” she said. “Some people, they are happy because they don’t like the government — they hate the government.” Others, she said, are upset over the destruction of property and death of civilians.

Mary had been planning to visit her family in Iran in August, but that’s been scrambled. “Now, I don’t know what I should do,” she said.

Not far from Westwood, Beverly Hills’ prominent Iranian Jewish community was making its presence felt. On Sunday morning, Shahram Javidnia, 62, walked near a group of pro-Israel supporters who were staging a procession headed toward the city’s large “Beverly Hills” sign. One of them waved an Israeli flag.

Javidnia, an Iranian Jew who lives in Beverly Hills and opposes the government in Iran, said he monitors social media, TV and radio for news of the situation there.

“Now that they’re in a weak point,” he said of Iran’s authoritarian leadership, “that’s the time maybe for the Iranians to rise up and try to do what is right.”

Javidnia came to the U.S. in 1978 as a teenager, a year before revolution would lead to the overthrow of the shah and establishment of the Islamic Republic. He settled in the L.A. area, and hasn’t been back since. He said returning is not something he even thinks about.

“The place that I spent my childhood is not there anymore,” he said. “It doesn’t exist.”

Gogglebox fan favourite Mary Killen has revealed that she’s become ‘addicted’ to vaping in her 60s, despite having never smoked a cigarette – as she reveals her plans to quit

Googlebox fan favourite Mary Killen has revealed she’s become addicted to vaping, despite never having smoked cigarettes.

The star rose to fame in 2015 on Channel 4’s Gogglebox as she and her husband Giles have the nation in hysterics every week as they sit down to watch the latest TV shows.

Despite knowing the ins and outs on their thoughts on the latest episode of Love Island, fans aren’t privvy to much of the Gogglebox stars’ personal life. However, Mary has now opened up about an addiction she just can’t shift – vaping.

Mary, who says she was never interested in cigarettes, revealed that she picked the habit up two years ago, when her friends son, James, 22, offered her a puff of his Juul. “I loved inhaling the odourless air and blowing it out again. It just looked so chic and felt cooling in the palm of the hand,” Mary wrote in her column for MailOnline.

James allowed Mary to keep the vape, and she later found herself buying replacement pods when it ran out. “I reasoned that it would be good if I were to appear to have at least one addiction.

“I would be ‘levelling myself down’, so to speak, in a way that could make me more socially acceptable in drinking circles,” she wrote.

However, her habit doesn’t come cheap, as she explained in her column that she “wastes about £14 a week on four Juul replacement pods.” She then questioned how to break the expensive habit, which she also admits self-pitying and argumentative when she runs out.

Mary admitted she’d “probably kill or be killed by my family members,” if she tried to go cold turkey – revealing that she was going to sign up to a course to help people quit vaping.

It’s not the only revelation Mary has made in her column. Recently, she told viewers about her controversial sleeping arrangements, telling fans she and Giles allowed the dogs on the bed.

Mary and Giles met when they were both 21 years old while Giles was studying at Wimbledon Art School and Mary was working as a model. The pair have been blissfully married for over 30 years, most of which time they have spent living at their cottage in Wiltshire.

The stars share two grownup children who prefer to stay out of the limelight. However, it was actually one of Giles’ daughters that were originally due to appear on the show with her dad before she backed out at the last minute.

After a lengthy phone call to producers, Giles managed to convince Mary to join the show – and the two have become fan favourites ever since their arrival.

Little more is known about Mary and Giles’ daughters however it has been revealed that they are both grown and no longer live at home with their parents.

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