Penulis: Minda

In the past year, data centers have emerged as a central issue in both American politics and the gyre of discourse swirling around American politics. On blogs and podcasts, the commentariat has marvelled at the emergence of an elusive bipartisan consensus. And well they should: the most recent polling shows that an astounding seventy-one per cent of the population opposes data-center construction in their areas.

Equally astonishing, if not yet equally remarked upon, is the consensus about A.I. itself. Sixty-nine per cent of Americans are “concerned” about the technology’s role in society, according to a study that used data from NORC at the University of Chicago. A poll conducted by NBC last spring found that A.I. is less popular than such societal darlings as ICE, Donald Trump, and J. D. Vance.

The vibes, less pollable but perhaps no less palpable, are noxious. Students boo speakers who extol A.I. in commencement addresses, and consumers deride celebrities and brands that embrace the technology. For months after the film studio A24 announced a “research partnership” with Google’s DeepMind, aggrieved commenters took to the company’s Instagram to lambaste “AI24” for its treachery. “We don’t have to accept this future,” an anonymous graffitist scribbled across a subway station ad for the dystopian Friend A.I. device, as documented in a photo in the Times.

“Misty Green,” Chris Rock’s ferociously smart and darkly entrancing new movie, unfolds as a series of rude awakenings. One takes place in a hospital after a drunk-driving accident; another at a far-flung desert resort, in an ugly morning-after haze. But most of them occur in a Santa Monica beachside apartment, where Misty Green (Rosalind Eleazar), a down-on-her-luck actor in her late thirties, has been squatting since the death of its owner, her wealthy, older, married boyfriend, about a year ago. In an early scene, Misty is jolted awake by the man’s furious widow, Celine (Amy Landecker), who has just discovered the apartment on her husband’s ledgers and is intent on kicking out his mistress. Misty, still groggy from the latest of many boozy, coked-up nights, begs for some time to get her stuff together and find a new place. And Celine, surprisingly, gives it to her. She hadn’t recognized Misty at first, not until she noticed an Emmy statuette in the living room—the one that the actor won years ago, in 2009, for a supporting role on an airline-themed TV series, “The Red Eye.” “Oh, my God, I remember you,” Celine says. “You were the Black one!”

In an industry town, celebrity still wields a potent allure, even when faded, bedraggled, and accosted in a bra and fish-net tights. Misty’s lingering fame is one of a few cards she has left to play; her undiminished talent as an actor is another. One of the wry ironies of the movie, which Rock both wrote and directed, is that Misty’s abilities may have been a mixed blessing, thrusting her early on into the glare of a spotlight that she has since struggled to hold on to. After the initial waves of acclaim and success inevitably crested, Misty crashed hard. Sex, drugs, and alcohol flowed and kept flowing her way, even as roles dried up. She became an on-set liability—punching a crew member, sleeping with a co-star—which eclipsed her reputation for doing good work. Now she faces the threat of eviction: Celine has given her a week to move out. “Misty Green,” an acrid show-biz satire that reaches for, and nearly achieves, the weight and grandeur of tragedy, is also a countdown thriller, with a day-by-day structure that brings Misty’s past, present, and future into fateful collision. Her tough personal history comes into focus even as she flails in search of a career-reigniting comeback.

The most successful ever, spans thirty-odd games—many of which are very good—and has spawned multiple live-action film adaptations and television shows, nearly all of which have been terrible. The games, which follow the survivors of a zombie outbreak induced by a corporate bioweapon, popularized a genre known as survival horror, in which a normie character—as opposed to the typical overpowered hero—must carefully navigate a dangerous environment, conserving ammo and other resources, solving puzzles, and evading enemies almost as often as fighting them. (One can imagine how this would appeal to a certain kind of personality.) These games, alongside their first film adaptation, in 2002, helped revive the zombie-film genre, which had peaked in 1978 with George Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead,” before dying out in the late nineteen-eighties, as audiences moved on to smarter monsters: vampires, serial killers, Chucky.

Today, the Resident Evil franchise holds the record for the most live-action films based on a video-game series. The movies occupy a strange cultural position, though, making up a commercially successful franchise with basically zero critical acclaim. Salon described the first installment as “mildly grisly, assaultively noisy and tremendously boring”; Roger Ebert put the film and its sequel, “Resident Evil: Apocalypse,” on his most-hated-films list. The movies have been most controversial among fans of the games because of their distance from the original source material. (It certainly didn’t help that the writer and director, Paul W. S. Anderson, created a new protagonist for his films, an ass-kicking yet spiritually empty heroine named Alice—played by Milla Jovovich, his wife.) Hollywood has long puzzled over the problem of video-game adaptations: change the plot too much and alienate the fans; hew too closely to the game and alienate the masses. Either way, these adaptations—even the well-respected ones, such as “The Last of Us,” on HBO, or “Fallout,” on Prime Video—necessarily lack the thing that makes a video game enjoyable: the experience of playing it.

The New York Film Festival is a feast of many parts, but its divisions are mainly symbolic. Such major festivals as those in Cannes, Berlin, and Venice are competitive; they offer prizes and make a distinction between movies in the main competition and those in other sections. Thus, the value judgments in those programming decisions have practical effects. The New York Film Festival is different: it was conceived as a “festival of festivals,” presenting movies that made their débuts at other festivals. The N.Y.F.F. also reliably features some world premières, but they’re nestled among a throng of movies already seen elsewhere. The festival’s parsing of films into its Main Slate and its other sections (principally Spotlight, Currents, and Revivals) is an unofficial consumer guide. The Main Slate is the prime showcase of what’s deemed best in the year of world cinema; the Spotlight offers what’s widely anticipated; and, in this year’s program guide, Dennis Lim, the festival’s artistic director, calls Currents “our home for films that push against the conventions of cinematic form.”

As a result, it should come as no surprise that one of the best films of the festival (and of the year) is screening in Currents: “Red Rocks,” by the French filmmaker Bruno Dumont. He’s among the world’s great directors of children—from the tough North Sea adolescents in his political crime comedy “Li’l Quinquin” (2014) to the child Joan of Arc in his rock opera “Jeannette” (2017). But the most original work he has done with children is in this new film (which premièred at Cannes in May). “Red Rocks” is a high-tension melodrama, set mainly in a calm, gentrified town on the French Riviera, about two groups of idle youths who meet by chance and clash when a girl from one group and a boy from the other become romantically involved. The characters, like the actors who portray them, are somewhere between five and seven years old.

To Europeans, the early United States was a curiosity: rich in resources yet poor in history. They were used to a storied landscape, where it was impossible to go for a stroll without tripping over the lithic remnants of some distant era. America, by contrast, seemed blank. The French writer Alexis de Tocqueville scoffed at the “day-old ruins” of deserted log cabins—the closest thing to historical depth that this pathetically young country could manage.

He should have spent more time in Ohio. Settlers there were finding thousands of ancient Native mounds and earthworks, some bafflingly large. Refusing to believe that the ancestors of Native Americans could have built such monumental structures, writers floated bizarre theories as to who had. Perhaps it was a lost tribe of Israel, or an extinct race of giants. (Why not both?)

If oversized Jews were indeed behind it, they must have been especially fond of Pickaway County. It boasted mounds aplenty and the earthen remains of two forts, one circular and another square, constructed with startling geometric precision. In 1810, surveyors latched on to the circle and founded a city, named Circleville, in concentric arcs around it. This was “probably the only city in North America developed in a radio-concentric plan,” the historian John W. Reps wrote in 1955. (There’ve been others since.) It was also, he observed, probably the only settler city built around an Indigenous form.

arry Baimbridge spent thirty-one years with the Houston Police Department, including stints as a homicide detective and as commander of the SWAT team. In 2023, he took a job as chief of police for the Spring Branch Independent School District, most of which is within the city. The job was more low-key—no more shootouts with snipers—but it came with its own challenges. After the 2022 shooting in Uvalde, Texas, which left nineteen elementary-school students and two teachers dead, the state legislature had neglected to pass any meaningful restrictions on guns; instead, the state required that every school campus have an armed security officer. “Of course, they didn’t provide enough funding for it, but that was the mandate,” Baimbridge said.

The Spring Branch district served thirty-one thousand students across forty-odd campuses—“a very wealthy area on one side of the freeway and a very poor area on the other side,” Baimbridge said. Late in the school year, on February 18, 2025, he got a phone call from Brian Ennesser, a supervisory special agent at the F.B.I.’s Houston field office. The two men had met the year before, when Ennesser formed a threat-mitigation task force, a group that specializes in disrupting targeted mass violence, including at schools. Baimbridge knew right away that something was up; Ennesser usually texted or e-mailed. “Hey, man, we’ve got a problem,” Ennesser said.

The F.B.I. had received a tip about a potential threat to a local school. It involved two teen-agers, one a student at Spring Branch, the other at a school district north of Houston. Both were girls. “Once we identified it being two females, we were double-checking our work,” Ennesser later told me.