When a film follows a path far different from its trailers, it can be a bait and switch shill, or a blessing. I can’t express how relieved I was to see that “Rocky 7,” or as it is officially titled, “Creed,” is not the film that the marketing department promised us. Unlike the brutal boxing melodrama that the previews pledged, this excellent sequel introduces new characters to the series while paying homage to the enduring appeal of its predecessors.

 “Creed” follows the themes and gambits of classic fight films but this is no paint-by-numbers imitation. It unabashedly manipulates audiences without guile, jerks tears, piles on hardships and smooths out conflicts on its way to a wholesome, uplifting finale. It is cornball as all get out, formulaic and wonderfully, amazingly delicious.

 The plot is basic. A journeyman boxer who grew up in cruddy state facilities wants to climb up the ranks to the top of the professional totem pole. On his way to the championship, he must learn how to protect his fragile soul. If you saw Jake Gyllenhaal being beaten to ground chuck in Antoine Fuqua’s grim “Southpaw” last summer, this may feel familiar. The prologue showing the hard-knocks life of brawling preteen Adonis Johnson Creed suggests he might have the menace of a Clubber Lang. Luckily, things quickly get better. The out-of-wedlock, essentially abandoned child of the late champ Apollo Creed, Adonis grows up shadow boxing to share his iconic father’s limelight.

 Michael B. Jordan (as compelling here as he was in director Ryan Coogler’s previous film “Fruitvale Station”) infuses considerable depth to the essentially likable character. Adonis has a combative hair trigger, but he’s conflicted about fighting, at times reluctant to commit to the sport that killed his dad.

 Who could be a better mentor than Rocky Balboa, the patron saint of Philadelphia? At 69, Sylvester Stallone returns to his archetypal role in a touching, deeply felt performance. He’s no longer the main character but definitely a main character. Well into retirement years, the Italian Stallion has the adorable, hangdog demeanor of an aged pet bulldog. Pro boxing is no country for old he-men, but Rocky is the ideal sidekick for Adonis in this mismatched buddy picture. Adonis convinces Rocky to guide him toward a championship bout and introduces him to everyone as his uncle.

 Never a great actor, Stallone is a good and hugely appealing one, getting by more on an affable regular guy persona than talent. As he has in earlier films, Stallone treats Rocky as a sweet, lumbering sad sack. His shy smiles, sad eyes, shambling walk and soft diction imply the physical impact of aging. It’s a sly performance, pushing away the tough guy iconography of Rocky and revealing the man.

 Creed ★★★½ out of 4 stars Rating: PG-13 for violence, language and some sensuality.

 Stallone and Jordan make a great team in the inevitable training montages, a regimen of long runs and workouts in battered boxing gyms that capture the natural rhythm of fighting. That’s the world where Rocky touches the soul of his young protégé. Tessa Thompson (“Dear White People”) reaches just as deep as the nightclub singer who becomes Adonis’ girlfriend, her dumpling cheeks and big, sharp-focused eyes appraising him with a demand for 100 percent honesty at all times.

 The story builds through a trio of key fight scenes, one three-minute barrage composed with no visible cuts as if the camera is realistically capturing a real brawl. Even in the bloodiest, there are no real villains here. As Rocky tells Adonis time and again, his toughest adversary is himself. The film is morally sound beginning to end.

 Adonis’ title fight triggers giddy heights of cathartic glee, but that’s not the story’s big ending. The stirring finale comes as Stallone and Jordan slowly mount the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the sort of nostalgic image that leaves you undecided whether to cheer or get out your handkerchief. ||||| Adonis Johnson Creed (Michael B. Jordan), the son of former heavyweight champion Apollo Creed, attempts to follow in his father's footsteps and become a boxing legend in his own right. Apollo died in the ring in the 1980s at the hand of Russian pugilist Ivan Drago, forcing Adonis to grow up without his dad in his life. The young man travels to Philadelphia to find his late father's nemesis-turned-best friend, Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone), in order to recruit him as a trainer. Balboa soon takes the young Creed under his wing and helps him get in shape for a shot at the title. Ryan Coogler directs this spin-off of the hugely successful Rocky franchise. |||||
What is a one-paragraph summary of the above article?

– The son of former heavyweight champion Apollo Creed turns up in Philadelphia to be trained by his dead father's once-opponent Rocky Balboa in Creed—a movie cheered by critics, who give it a 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Here's what they're saying: "You'd expect a boxing movie to deliver the body blows, but what's surprising are the various tender caresses the movie delivers," writes Joe Dziemianowicz at the New York Daily News. Creed not only "packs a mighty punch," but it's "an exciting, amusing, and well-acted crowd-pleaser," he says. Sylvester Stallone will "knock your socks off," he adds. Sure, the David-versus-Goliath angle is "corny, but it still works." "Despite getting laid out in excruciatingly graphic detail, the kid somehow comes roaring back, not so much struggling to his feet as leaping. Which is exactly what this energetic, hugely entertaining film does for the four-decades-old franchise," writes Tom Russo at the Boston Globe. Michael B. Jordan and Stallone are each great on their own and "develop a terrific, relaxed chemistry," he says. The movie also "works on two levels, tending equally to nostalgists and a younger crowd." "This is the best Rocky film since the original" and "one of the year's warmest and most crowd-pleasing surprises," praises Lou Lumenick at the New York Post. A training montage shows writer-director Ryan Coogler "not only respects but totally gets what made the original underdog classic win the Best Picture Oscar in 1977." It's this that helps him deliver "a knockout punch." Stallone, meanwhile, delivers "one of his most careful and nuanced performances in years." "Creed follows the themes and gambits of classic fight films but this is no paint-by-numbers imitation," writes Colin Covert at the Minneapolis Star Tribune. "This excellent sequel introduces new characters to the series while paying homage to the enduring appeal of its predecessors," he says. "It unabashedly manipulates audiences ... on its way to a wholesome, uplifting finale. It is cornball as all get out, formulaic, and wonderfully, amazingly delicious."


Given that she's the daughter of Naomi Judd and sister to Wynonna- women known for being outspoken- it's not all that surprising that Ashley Judd couldn't keep quiet after being publicly lambasted by the media over her appearance.

 Reporters have speculated that the 43-year-old actress had fillers injected into her face after she made a recent appearance with puffier-than-normal cheeks. Others have laid into the actress recently for gaining ten or 15 pounds in the last year.

 Rather than ignoring the speculation, Ashley is fighting back with an op-ed piece for The Daily Beast.

 After explaining that her puffy face was a result of steroid treatment for a sinus infection and her larger frame the result of "a lazy six months of not exercising," Judd has this to say:

 I hope the sharing of my thoughts can generate a new conversation: Why was a puffy face cause for such a conversation in the first place? How, and why, did people participate? If not in the conversation about me, in parallel ones about women in your sphere? What is the gloating about? What is the condemnation about? What is the self-righteous alleged “all knowing” stance of the media about? How does this symbolize constraints on girls and women, and encroach on our right to be simply as we are, at any given moment? How can we as individuals in our private lives make adjustments that support us in shedding unconscious actions, internalized beliefs, and fears about our worthiness, that perpetuate such meanness? What can we do as families, as groups of friends? Is what girls and women can do different from what boys and men can do? What does this have to do with how women are treated in the workplace?

 It's certainly food for thought -- but while I see her points, I think that, given her profession, the lady doth protest too much.

 Ashley Judd is a Hollywood actress, one who has played the appearance game for years. She has turned up at many a red carpet event dressed to kill and looking fabulous, even by Hollywood's difficult-to-meet standards -- and she certainly didn't seem to mind the positive media attention then.

 Like it or not, Hollywood actresses are aspirational figures -- They are thinner than normal, less wrinkly than normal, more glamorous than normal, and they are paid more than normal to look that way. They also get a more-than-normal amount of criticism when they're not meeting Hollywood's standards for beauty.

 That doesn't mean I like mean-spirited criticisms of an actress's appearance, or that I would tolerate them if they were directed toward a woman who's a public figure in a more serious and less appearance-based line of work. But I think that any woman who chooses to be a movie star also chooses to take the media knocks that come with the job. If she can't take the criticism, she should probably, with all due respect, choose another line of work.

 I fully support a woman's "right to be simply as we are, at any given moment," as Ashley puts it, but doesn't the nature of her profession mean that she has knowingly traded that right in exchange for fame and fortune?

 That's my take on the situation -- What's yours?

 Image via Splash News ||||| The Conversation about women’s bodies exists largely outside of us, while it is also directed at (and marketed to) us, and used to define and control us. The Conversation about women happens everywhere, publicly and privately. We are described and detailed, our faces and bodies analyzed and picked apart, our worth ascertained and ascribed based on the reduction of personhood to simple physical objectification. Our voices, our personhood, our potential, and our accomplishments are regularly minimized and muted.

 As an actor and woman who, at times, avails herself of the media, I am painfully aware of the conversation about women’s bodies, and it frequently migrates to my own body. I know this, even though my personal practice is to ignore what is written about me. I do not, for example, read interviews I do with news outlets. I hold that it is none of my business what people think of me. I arrived at this belief after first, when I began working as an actor 18 years ago, reading everything. I evolved into selecting only the “good” pieces to read. Over time, I matured into the understanding that good and bad are equally fanciful interpretations. I do not want to give my power, my self-esteem, or my autonomy, to any person, place, or thing outside myself. I thus abstain from all media about myself. The only thing that matters is how I feel about myself, my personal integrity, and my relationship with my Creator. Of course, it’s wonderful to be held in esteem and fond regard by family, friends, and community, but a central part of my spiritual practice is letting go of otheration. And casting one’s lot with the public is dangerous and self-destructive, and I value myself too much to do that.

 However, the recent speculation and accusations in March feel different, and my colleagues and friends encouraged me to know what was being said. Consequently, I choose to address it because the conversation was pointedly nasty, gendered, and misogynistic and embodies what all girls and women in our culture, to a greater or lesser degree, endure every day, in ways both outrageous and subtle. The assault on our body image, the hypersexualization of girls and women and subsequent degradation of our sexuality as we walk through the decades, and the general incessant objectification is what this conversation allegedly about my face is really about.

 A brief analysis demonstrates that the following “conclusions” were all made on the exact same day, March 20, about the exact same woman (me), looking the exact same way, based on the exact same television appearance. The following examples are real, and come from a variety of (so-called!) legitimate news outlets (such as HuffPo, MSNBC, etc.), tabloid press, and social media:

 One: When I am sick for more than a month and on medication (multiple rounds of steroids), the accusation is that because my face looks puffy, I have “clearly had work done,” with otherwise credible reporters with great bravo “identifying” precisely the procedures I allegedly have had done.

 Two: When my skin is nearly flawless, and at age 43, I do not yet have visible wrinkles that can be seen on television, I have had “work done,” with media outlets bolstered by consulting with plastic surgeons I have never met who “conclude” what procedures I have “clearly” had. (Notice that this is a “back-handed compliment,” too—I look so good! It simply cannot possibly be real!)

 Three: When my 2012 face looks different than it did when I filmed Double Jeopardy in 1998, I am accused of having “messed up” my face (polite language here, the F word is being used more often), with a passionate lament that “Ashley has lost her familiar beauty audiences loved her for.”

 Four: When I have gained weight, going from my usual size two/four to a six/eight after a lazy six months of not exercising, and that weight gain shows in my face and arms, I am a “cow” and a “pig” and I “better watch out” because my husband “is looking for his second wife.” (Did you catch how this one engenders competition and fear between women? How it also suggests that my husband values me based only on my physical appearance? Classic sexism. We won’t even address how extraordinary it is that a size eight would be heckled as “fat.”)

 Five: In perhaps the coup de grace, when I am acting in a dramatic scene in Missing—the plot stating I am emotionally distressed and have been awake and on the run for days—viewers remarks ranged from “What the f--k did she do to her face?” to cautionary gloating, “Ladies, look at the work!” Footage from “Missing” obviously dates prior to March, and the remarks about how I look while playing a character powerfully illustrate the contagious and vicious nature of the conversation. The accusations and lies, introduced to the public, now apply to me as a woman across space and time; to me as any woman and to me as every woman.

 That women are joining in the ongoing disassembling of my appearance is salient. Patriarchy is not men. Patriarchy is a system in which both women and men participate. It privileges, inter alia, the interests of boys and men over the bodily integrity, autonomy, and dignity of girls and women. It is subtle, insidious, and never more dangerous than when women passionately deny that they themselves are engaging in it. This abnormal obsession with women’s faces and bodies has become so normal that we (I include myself at times—I absolutely fall for it still) have internalized patriarchy almost seamlessly. We are unable at times to identify ourselves as our own denigrating abusers, or as abusing other girls and women.

 A case in point is that this conversation was initially promulgated largely by women; a sad and disturbing fact. (That they are professional friends of mine, and know my character and values, is an additional betrayal.)

 News outlets with whom I do serious work, such as publishing op-eds about preventing HIV, empowering poor youth worldwide, and conflict mineral mining in Democratic Republic of Congo, all ran this “story” without checking with my office first for verification, or offering me the dignity of the opportunity to comment. It’s an indictment of them that they would even consider the content printable, and that they, too, without using time-honored journalistic standards, would perpetuate with un-edifying delight such blatantly gendered, ageist, and mean-spirited content.

 I hope the sharing of my thoughts can generate a new conversation: Why was a puffy face cause for such a conversation in the first place? How, and why, did people participate? If not in the conversation about me, in parallel ones about women in your sphere? What is the gloating about? What is the condemnation about? What is the self-righteous alleged “all knowing” stance of the media about? How does this symbolize constraints on girls and women, and encroach on our right to be simply as we are, at any given moment? How can we as individuals in our private lives make adjustments that support us in shedding unconscious actions, internalized beliefs, and fears about our worthiness, that perpetuate such meanness? What can we do as families, as groups of friends? Is what girls and women can do different from what boys and men can do? What does this have to do with how women are treated in the workplace?

 I ask especially how we can leverage strong female-to-female alliances to confront and change that there is no winning here as women. It doesn’t actually matter if we are aging naturally, or resorting to surgical assistance. We experience brutal criticism. The dialogue is constructed so that our bodies are a source of speculation, ridicule, and invalidation, as if they belong to others—and in my case, to the actual public. (I am also aware that inevitably some will comment that because I am a creative person, I have abdicated my right to a distinction between my public and private selves, an additional, albeit related, track of highly distorted thinking that will have to be addressed at another time).

 If this conversation about me is going to be had, I will do my part to insist that it is a feminist one, because it has been misogynistic from the start. Who makes the fantastic leap from being sick, or gaining some weight over the winter, to a conclusion of plastic surgery? Our culture, that’s who. The insanity has to stop, because as focused on me as it appears to have been, it is about all girls and women. In fact, it’s about boys and men, too, who are equally objectified and ridiculed, according to heteronormative definitions of masculinity that deny the full and dynamic range of their personhood. It affects each and every one of us, in multiple and nefarious ways: our self-image, how we show up in our relationships and at work, our sense of our worth, value, and potential as human beings. Join in—and help change—the Conversation. ||||| I've never thought much about Ashley Judd beyond the blandest adjectives—she's pretty, she seems nice, her pores look really small—but it turns out she's also a smart, bold, kickass feminist. In an essay for the Daily Beast today, following weeks of tasteless speculation about the puffiness of her face, Judd smacks down her detractors and frames the entire kerfuffle (along with our celebrity-shredding culture at large) as "a misogynistic assault on all women." Which it is. My love for Ashley Judd grew three sizes this day.

 In case you haven't been obsessively following Judd-puff-maggedon 2012 (because you possess actual priorities, a conscience, a desire to take a nap, or literally anything else to do), here's a brief refresher: The tabloid press—and, by extension, the entire internet—recently noticed that medium-famous celebrity-woman Ashley Judd went from having a regular beautiful face to a very-slightly-puffier-than-average beautiful face. And everyone went fucking apeshit.

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 Ashley Judd had work done! Ashley Judd is filling her face with facial fillers! Ashley Judd gets her face stung by therapeutic bees! Ashley Judd is injecting butt-fat into her face so her face looks more like a sexy butt! Ashley Judd is a liar and a coward who is terrified of aging! Ha-ha, women, we tricked you! The only thing worse than looking old is trying not to look old because we told you not to look old! Also, you're fat!

 Um, no, says Ashley Judd. Ashley Judd's face is puffy because Ashley Judd is sick and on fucking steroids, you intrusive, judgmental dicks.

 The typical celeb response to mean, speculative shit like this is "Dehydration! Respect my privacy! But also I'm totally not mad and my new single drops next week so please buy it and I'm sorry I was so very very puffy and it won't happen again and FOR THE LOVE OF GOD JUST DON'T STOP LOVING MEEEEEEE!!!" But Judd skips that equivocating bullshit entirely and engages the broader issue with a level of sensitivity and personal transparency that we, the public, definitely don't deserve:

 The assault on our body image, the hypersexualization of girls and women and subsequent degradation of our sexuality as we walk through the decades, and the general incessant objectification is what this conversation allegedly about my face is really about.

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 The whole essay is great. You should read it. And in a cultural moment when "feminism" is still a "bad word" (YAAAAAAAAWN), it's incredibly rare for a celebrity to make such a concrete feminist statement. More importantly, Judd points out that it's women who drive a lot of this kind of sniping:

 That women are joining in the ongoing disassembling of my appearance is salient. Patriarchy is not men. Patriarchy is a system in which both women and men participate. It privileges, inter alia, the interests of boys and men over the bodily integrity, autonomy, and dignity of girls and women. It is subtle, insidious, and never more dangerous than when women passionately deny that they themselves are engaging in it. This abnormal obsession with women's faces and bodies has become so normal that we (I include myself at times-I absolutely fall for it still) have internalized patriarchy almost seamlessly. We are unable at times to identify ourselves as our own denigrating abusers, or as abusing other girls and women.

 BOOM. OMG ASHLEY JUDD JUST DUNKED ON US SO HARD.

 I'm certainly not innocent of celebrity body-snarking. And this website as a whole isn't either. But I find that the older I get the more consciously I avoid it, and the more I reject the notion that when you profit from being a public figure you become public property. We've locked celebrities (female celebrities in particular) into this impossible position—they lose five pounds and they're anorexic; they gain that weight back and they might as well call Maury Povich to airlift them out of their trailer. So what the fuck are they supposed to do? There's a line between reasonable attention and unreasonable scrutiny, and, for my part, I'd rather sacrifice a few good jokes about the flavor-of-the-week's gaping coke nostril than contribute any more to the commodification and dehumanization of women. My feminism doesn't end where your celebrity begins. That's bullshit. I'm with you, Judd. |||||
What is a one-paragraph summary of the above article?

– Ashley Judd made a TV appearance last month looking larger than normal and with a puffier face, and the ensuing criticism of her appearance led her to write a scathing but eloquent response in the Daily Beast. Judd was on steroids due to an illness (leading some to assume her puffy face was the result of having had work done) and had gained a little weight over the winter (leading some to joke that her husband must be looking for a new woman). "The conversation was pointedly nasty, gendered, and misogynistic and embodies what all girls and women in our culture, to a greater or lesser degree, endure every day, in ways both outrageous and subtle," Judd writes. Particularly worrisome is the fact that women themselves jumped right into the objectification. "Patriarchy," she writes, "is not men. Patriarchy is a system in which both women and men participate." Her piece (worth a read in full here) garnered quite a reaction. Samples from both sides: "Like it or not, Hollywood actresses are ... thinner than normal, less wrinkly than normal, and they are paid more than normal to look that way," writes Lindsay Ferrier on The Stir. "Any woman who chooses to be a movie star also chooses to take the media knocks that come with the job." Full piece here. Judd is "a smart, bold, kickass feminist," declares Lindy West on Jezebel, noting that the older she gets, the more she rejects "the notion that when you profit from being a public figure you become public property." As for West, she's done with covering "the flavor-of-the-week's gaping coke nostril. ... My feminism doesn't end where your celebrity begins." Full piece here.


View Images Astronomers have found a galaxy far, far away—13.1 billion light-years from Earth, to be exact.

 Photograph by V. Tilvi (Texas A&M), S. Finkelstein (UT Austin), the CANDELS Team, and HST/NASA

 Astronomers have found a galaxy 13.1 billion light-years from Earth, making it officially the most distant object ever detected.

 A faint, infrared speck of light from this ancient galaxy, called z8_GND_5296, was spotted using the Hubble Space Telescope and one of the world's largest ground-based telescopes, a ten-meter telescope at Keck Observatory at the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii.

 Light from this baby galaxy began its journey when the universe was about 700 million years old and just emerging from the cosmic mist left over from its birth, said Casey Papovich, one of the lead authors of the study and an astronomer at Texas A&M University in College Station.

 The former record holder is a fellow youngster, an ultra-faint galaxy about 100 million light-years closer to Earth.

 Past claims of galaxies at these extreme distances were mined from deep field images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. But many of these would-be candidates turned out to be much closer than previously thought, according to Papovich.

 "Some of our candidates have turned out to be very cold stars—brown dwarfs—in our own galaxy," he explained.

 Redshift Reveals

 The only way to confirm a galaxy's true distance, however, is to do follow-up measurements analyzing the spectrum of light emitted. This can enable astronomers to determine a candidate's redshift—how far its light is shifted into the red part of the spectrum—and thereby its distance.

 Redshift occurs because wavelengths of light stretch out as galaxies move away from observers on Earth. So the higher the redshift number, the more distant the object from Earth.

 Papovich's team found this faint galaxy's redshift was 7.5, compared with the previous record holder's 7.2.

 "Until you have a redshift, there is always some doubt about the exact nature of the galaxy," said Papovich.

 "All the other objects out there with claimed 'most distant galaxy' in their titles are candidates selected using only imaging, and no spectroscopic confirmation like what we have done here."

 The find, described in a study published this week in the journal Nature, is expected to help researchers better understand the so-called era of reionization, when newborn hot, massive stars and their galaxies transformed the opaque hydrogen fog—which filled the cosmos in the first billion years after the Big Bang—into the transparent intergalactic space we see today.

 "The galaxies themselves [in this era of the universe] would be filled with the newly formed, massive stars, many of which could be a thousand times the mass of our own sun," Papovich explained.

 "We have yet to identify any conclusive evidence that these 'first-generation' stars exist in even this distant galaxy."

 How Far Back Can We Go?

 Can we push the record back even further, closer to the Big Bang?

 Richard Ellis, an astronomer not connected to the study, says it is definitely possible. But we do not yet have telescopes powerful enough to do the job.

 "We have the capability, in principle, to push to redshifts of ten and beyond, corresponding to a time when the universe was only 350 million years old, or only 3 percent of its present age," said Ellis, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

 The conundrum for researchers is that looking at larger distances means looking further back in time. That means galaxies become ever fainter as we push closer to the birth of the universe and the Big Bang.

 "For most of the early galaxies being seen by Hubble, there's little hope of confirming their distances with spectroscopy until we get powerful new facilities such as the James Webb Space Telescope and the Thirty Meter Telescope," said Ellis.

 "Ultimately, to chart the universe in detail at these early times, we need the next-generation facilities." ||||| An artist's rendition of the newly discovered galaxy z8_GND_5296. The galaxy looks red in the actual Hubble Space Telescope image because the collective blue light gets shifted due to the expansion of the universe and its large distance from Earth. (V. Tilvi/S.L. Finkelstein/ C. Papovich/Hubble Heritage Team)

 Scientists have discovered the most distant galaxy ever confirmed, whose light took just over 13 billion years to reach Earth, providing a snapshot of the early universe. The faraway system resides in the night sky just above the handle of the Big Dipper.

 One curious trait about the record-breaker is that it forms stars at an incredible rate, about 330 per year — more than a hundred times faster than our Milky Way galaxy. This could be a trademark of the universe’s early days, when hydrogen gas for star formation was much more plentiful.

 “We wanted to figure out how galaxies evolve,” said Steven Finkelstein, lead author and University of Texas at Austin astronomer. “One way to do that is to push back deeper and deeper into the history of the universe.” The study was published online Wednesday in the journal Nature.

 At first, the landmark discovery was a little bit of a let-down, the scientists said.

 The team of astronomers used images from the Hubble Space Telescope to identify 43 possible faraway galaxies and then used state-of-the-art spectrographic equipment at the W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii to confirm their distances. In the end, Finkelstein and his colleagues could only retrieve data from this lone galaxy.

 1 of 71 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × The year in space View Photos In 2013, scientists captured stunning images of the planets, a galaxy, a planetary nebula and more from space. Caption Over the past 12 months, scientists have captured stunning images of the planets, a galaxy, a planetary nebula and more from space. This composite image provided by NASA shows before and after images taken by the Opportunity rover. At left is an image of a patch of ground taken on Dec. 26, 2013. At right is in image taken on Jan. 8, 2014 showing a rock shaped like a jelly doughnut that had not been there before. The space agency said the rover Opportunity likely kicked up the rock into its field of view. Opportunity landed on Mars in 2004 and continues to explore. NASA/AP Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue.

 “We were first excited, then a little disappointed because we only saw one, and then excited again,” he said. “We would have hoped for some number bigger than one.”

 With advances in instrumentation technology, astronomers continue to stretch their detection capabilities further outward from the Milky Way. Because light takes time to travel such long distances, remote objects allow them to peer back through time.

 Take the sun as a simple example, said study author and Texas A&M University astronomer Vithal Tilvi. Sunlight takes a little over eight minutes to reach Earth.

 “That means that when we are looking at the sun, we are actually looking at the sun as it was eight minutes ago,” he said.

 In comparison, the light detected from this outlying galaxy — with the official catalogue name z8_GND_5296 — left the galaxy 13.1 billion years ago. This gives us a glimpse of the universe as it was when it was only 700 million years old.

 In other words, we’re looking 95 percent of the way back to the Big Bang. To put that into human terms, that would be like an 80-year-old watching a video of himself on his fourth birthday.

 “From observing these distant galaxies, we can understand how the universe was when it was very young,” Tilvi said. “There’s no other way to look into the past.”

 1 of 14 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × Kepler mission discoveries View Photos Here’s a look back at some of the space telescope’s discoveries. Caption Here’s a look back at some of the space telescope’s discoveries. The newly discovered "mega-Earth" Kepler-10c appears in the foreground of this artist's illustration. Its sibling in red, the lava world Kepler-10b, is in the background. Both orbit a sunlike star. Kepler-10c has a diameter of about 18,000 miles, 2.3 times as large as Earth, and weighs 17 times as much. Comprised of all solids, it may possess a thin atmosphere shown here as wispy clouds. David A. Aguilar/Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue.

 Setting out to find the most distant galaxy isn’t a single eureka moment, but rather a careful process of confirmation and remeasurement. Further-away galaxies than z8_GND_5296 have been identified but failed a double-check process along the way.

 The team first perused a month’s worth of images from the Hubble telescope for possible candidate galaxies. Hubble avoids the snags that Earth-bound telescopes can run into, such as clouds and bad weather, to more easily spot the red blobs that signal a distant object.

 The same effect that causes a passing ambulance siren to change pitch as it zooms by, called the Doppler shift, makes the most distant galaxies appear red. Because the universe is expanding, the galaxy’s light moves away from us and gets stretched into a redder wavelength.

 “These galaxies from within the first billion years of the universe are so far away that they have shifted into the infrared, or redder than our eyes can see,” Finkelstein said.

 How red the light of the object is gives some sense of how far away it is, but a technique called spectroscopy is the true litmus test that accurately confirms the distance. The researchers spent two days at the Keck Observatory, near the summit of the Mauna Kea volcano, looking for a characteristic piece of data called the Lyman-alpha emission line.

 The Lyman-alpha line tends to be a bright signature of old-universe galaxies that are forming stars at a high rate. Once found for a particular galaxy, an exact distance from Earth can be calculated.

 Although disappointing at first, finding only one Lyman-alpha line is an intriguing discovery, the scientists say.

 One theory says that, after cooling down from the Big Bang, a cosmic fog of neutral hydrogen gas cloaked our early universe.

 “That was the case until the very first galaxies lit up,” said Harvard University astrophysicist Avi Loeb, who was not involved in the study. “They produced the ultraviolet radiation that broke up hydrogen.”

 Gradually, the universe started a “reionization” process — first with bubbles of ionization around individual stars, then dwarf galaxies. As those young galaxies grew in size and overlapped, they formed larger regions of ionization that eventually became today’s fully ionized universe.

 “Perhaps we are seeing the evidence that it ended right around this galaxy,” Loeb said, and this one happened to peek through the fog where the other 42 candidates could not.

 Loeb also believes the unusually high star-formation rate may have to be reconfirmed. Although there are other galaxies that birth hundreds of stars per year, they are often quite massive, while z8_GND_5296 is considered a dwarf galaxy.

 “It’s not unusual to find small galaxies at those early times, but finding such a small galaxy making so many stars at once is unusual,” he said.

 Kim is a freelance science writer based in Philadelphia. ||||| This is an artist's rendition of the newly discovered most distant galaxy z8_GND_5296. (The galaxy looks red in the actual Hubble Space Telescope image because the collective blue light from stars gets shifted toward redder colors due to the expansion of the universe and its large distance from Earth.) / NASA, C. Papovich,V. Tilvi, A. Aloisi, The Hubble Heritage, ESA, S.L. Finkelstein, and AURA., HST, STScI

 Discovering and studying distant galaxies allows astronomers to develop a better understanding of how the universe formed. The further the distance, the older the galaxy, and the more insight it offers.

 Now, researchers are even closer to locating the first galaxies that formed after the Big Bang, the colossal event that created the universe about 13.8 billion years ago.

 In a study published Oct. 24 in the journal Nature, astronomers from the University of California at Riverside explain that they've discovered the most distant -- and therefore oldest -- galaxy yet.

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 Galaxy z8_GND_5296 formed 700 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was just 5 percent of its current age. The galaxy is producing stars extremely rapidly, much more rapidly than the Milky Way. This is consistent with other galaxies that formed within one billion years of the Big Bang.

 In a joint effort between the University of California at Riverside, University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M; University and the National Optical Astronomy Observatories, astronomers sorted through Hubble Space Telescope images of more than 100,000 galaxies. Based on color, they selected 43 candidates to study further.

 "The most reliable way to select galaxies is to use the color because the further out you go in the universe, galaxies get redder and redder," UC Riverside's Bahram Mobasher explained to CBSNews.com. "So, that is an indication of the distance." The color shifts as a galaxy expands over time.

 Simply looking at red color is not enough to verify that a galaxy is the furthest away. Dust in the atmosphere will turn a galaxy red, Mobasher explained, so a nearby yet dusty galaxy will falsely appear to be distant. An abundance of heavy elements will also lead to a deeper red hue.

 To account for these potential fallacies, the team next examined the candidate galaxies using spectroscopy using the Multi-Object Spectrometer for Infra-Red Exploration (MOSFIRE) instrument on the Keck Telescope in Hawaii.

 "The MOSFIRE gives us a unique opportunity to study distant galaxies whose light shifts to the infrared," said Mobashar. "That confirmed the redshift, the velocity of the galaxy."

 Spectroscopy measures the change in the wavelengths of a galaxy's light as it travels towards Earth, specifically how much it shifts towards the red end of the spectrum. This expansion velocity is called "redshift." Because redshift and galaxy distance are proportional, astronomers use redshift to determine distance.

 The MOSFIRE instrument is able to detect infrared light in multiple objects at the same time, which allowed the astronomers to study all 43 candidates in just two nights.

 They specifically looked at the Lyman alpha transition, a measurement of hydrogen emission, to see when the galaxy transitioned from an opaque state (when most of the hydrogen is neutral) to a translucent state (when the hydrogen is ionized).

 The Lyman alpha transition is present in most galaxies that formed more than one billion years after the Big Bang. Detecting it in older galaxies is difficult, but that doesn't mean the galaxies don't exist, explained co-author Naveen Reddy of UC Riverside.

 "The difficulty of detecting the hydrogen emission line does not mean that the galaxies are absent," Reddy said in a statement. "It could be that they are hidden from detection behind a wall of neutral hydrogen."

 In this galaxy, the redshift measured 7.5. This beats the former distance record of 7.2.

 The team will return to the Keck telescope in November and December to examine other galaxies.

 "This is just an absolutely exciting time for doing this type of research," Mobashar added, "because the Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck telescope, they compliment each other and pave the way for finding more and more of these distant galaxies. By looking, we essentially look back in time. The further away we look, further back in time we look.

 "We are at the point where we can study and understand how galaxies form, and we're going to find more distant ones, absolutely."

 Editor's note: This story was updated at 2:41 p.m. ET to reflect that the galaxy formed 700 million years after the Big Bang. ||||| Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The BBC's Rebecca Morelle: "We are talking about the most distant confirmed galaxy in the universe"

 An international team of astronomers has detected the most distant galaxy yet.

 The galaxy is about 30 billion light-years away and is helping scientists shed light on the period that immediately followed the Big Bang.

 It was found using the Hubble Space Telescope and its distance was then confirmed with the ground-based Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

 The study is published in the journal Nature.

 Because it takes light so long to travel from the outer edge of the Universe to us, the galaxy appears as it was 13.1 billion years ago (its distance from Earth of 30 billion light-years is because the Universe is expanding).

 Lead researcher Steven Finkelstein, from the University of Texas at Austin, US, said: "This is the most distant galaxy we've confirmed. We are seeing this galaxy as it was 700 million years after the Big Bang."

 The far-off galaxy goes by the catchy name of z8_GND_5296.

 Astronomers were able to measure how far it was from Earth by analysing its colour.

 Because the Universe is expanding and everything is moving away from us, light waves are stretched. This makes objects look redder than they actually are.

 Astronomers rate this apparent colour-change on a scale that is called redshift.

 They found that this galaxy has a redshift of 7.51, beating the previous record-holder, which had a redshift of 7.21.

 This makes it the most distant galaxy ever found.

 Image caption z8_GND_5296 is churning out stars at a remarkable rate, say astronomers

 The system is small: about 1-2% the mass of the Milky Way and is rich in heavier elements.

 But it has a surprising feature: it is turning gas and dust into new stars at a remarkable rate, churning them out hundreds of times faster than our own galaxy can.

 It is the second far-flung galaxy known that has been found to have a high star-production rate.

 Seeing into space Human eyes can see long distances, but the further away an object gets the harder it is to see in detail

 Telescopes make a distant object appear larger by collecting its light and focusing it to a point

 The large reflecting Hubble Telescope creates images from the Universe's visible light and can also detect infrared and ultraviolet radiation

 The optical and infrared Keck Telescopes examine young stars and can look into the centre of galaxies How do telescopes let us see so far into space? How do we know the Big Bang happened?

 Prof Finkelstein said: "One very interesting way to learn about the Universe is to study these outliers and that tells us something about what sort of physical processes are dominating galaxy formation and galaxy evolution.

 "What was great about this galaxy is not only is it so distant, it is also pretty exceptional."

 He added that in the coming years, astronomers are likely to discover even more distant galaxies when Nasa's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is launched and other ground-based telescopes come online.

 Commenting on the research, Dr Marek Kukula, Public Astronomer at the Royal Observatory Greenwich, told BBC News: "This, along with some other evidence, shows that there are already quite surprisingly evolved galaxies in the very early Universe .

 "This high star-formation rate maybe is a clue as to why these galaxies can form so quickly."

 Prof Alfonso Aragon-Salamanca, from the University of Nottingham, added: "This is an important step forward, but we need to continue looking for more.

 "The further away we go, the closer we will get to discovering the very first stars that ever formed in the Universe. The next generation of telescopes will make this possible."

 But Dr Stephen Serjeant from the Open University said: "Chasing ultra-high redshift galaxies is a very exciting but equally very difficult game, and many claims of extremely distant galaxies have since turned out to be more nearby interlopers." |||||

Write a summary.

– Residents of the Milky Way, meet z8_GND_5296. That's the not-so-great name of a newly discovered galaxy that just happens to be the most distant—and thus oldest—ever spotted, reports CBS News. Scientists say it formed a mere 700 million years after the Big Bang, and it could shed further light on how the universe came to be. The BBC adds this little mind-bender: "Because it takes light so long to travel from the outer edge of the universe to us, the galaxy appears as it was 13.1 billion years ago." Not mind-bending enough? Try this from the Washington Post: "We’re looking 95 percent of the way back to the Big Bang. To put that into human terms, that would be like an 80-year-old watching a video of himself on his fourth birthday." The discovery comes courtesy of images taken by the Hubble Telescope and follow-up analysis by astronomers at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii. One weird quirk of the galaxy: It produces stars at a much faster clip than our own, a trait that might have been more typical in the early days of the universe. So can we go even further back? In principle, yes, explains National Geographic, but we'll need bigger telescopes.


Article:

By now you’ve probably read a number of scathing reviews of “The Mummy,” Universal’s inaugural entry in a possibly grievously ill-advised “Dark Universe” franchise, wherein the legendary studio intends to reboot its most Famous Monsters of Filmland. Perhaps I’m becoming jaded in my old age, but I was more amused than appalled.

 Don’t get me wrong. “The Mummy,” directed (if that’s what you want to call it; I honestly think the better term here is “ostensibly overseen on behalf of the studio executives”) by Alex Kurtzman from a script by David Koepp, Christopher McQuarrie, and Dylan Kussman, has plenty to get irritated about. I got sand in my synapses during an early scene in which Tom Cruise, as a looter named Nick Morton (oh, “Mort,” I get it now), and his sidekick, played by Jake Johnson, casually slaughter a bunch of “Iraqi insurgents” trying to track down a mysterious treasure. Oh, sure, filmmakers, by all means use a tragic and unnecessary war that’s still yielding horrific consequences for the world as the backdrop for your stupid horror movie plot machinations, no problem here.

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 And, of course, there’s the movie’s very old-school sexism. "The Mummy" has two female characters: One is corrupt albeit not unattractive ancient Egyptian royal Ahmanet, who, once freed from her tomb in the present day, is the incarnation of all evil and stuff. (She is played by Sofia Boutella, whose filmography testifies that she’s accustomed to being ill-used in motion pictures). The other is faux-archeologist/genuine anti-evil secret agent Jenny (Annabelle Wallis) who’s mainly around to be rescued by Nick, and whose surface venality suggests that his business card describes him as a “lovable rogue.”

 So yes, should one choose to take offense, one certainly may. But I have to be honest—speaking of venality, I found something almost admirable about the film’s cheek. It’s amazingly relentless in its naked borrowing from other, better horror and sci-fi movies that I was able to keep occupied making a checklist of the movies referenced. At its opening, remnants of a past civilization are discovered while workmen are tunneling underground for a new subway route. That’s from “Quatermass and the Pit,” aka “Five Million Miles to Earth.” As many other reviewers have noted, once Jake Johnson’s character buys in and is reborn as a wisecracking undead sidekick warning Nick about how he’s been cursed by incarnation-of-evil Ahmanet, it’s “American Werewolf in London” time, albeit with PG-13-rated special effects rather than the side of ketchup-dipped corned beef that fell from Griffin Dunne’s face in the earlier movie. What else? A woman whose kiss drains the life force out of those who receive it, from the wacky space-vampire movie “Lifeforce”? Check. A brain-draining insect in the ear from “Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan”? Check. Spavined slapstick undead assaulters out of “Evil Dead”? Check. Underwater fights with the undead out of Lucio Fulci’s “Zombie”? Check. (These too are toned down considerably from the source material.) Someone saying “Plans?” with the precise intonation Sir Ralph Richardson used in “Tales from the Crypt”? Also check. Don’t even get me started on the, um, appropriation of a famous line from the Universal monster movie “Bride of Frankenstein.” But that’s life, and that movie literally IS Universal’s property.

 There have been a lot of crocodile tears already shed about the fact that The Mighty Tom Cruise has allowed himself to be used in such dreck, and also that Russell Crowe has been compelled to continue to sink into a form of self-parody by appearing as the head of Jenny’s anti-evil agency, a character named Dr. Henry Jekyll, and yeah, it’s the same guy. Or some iteration of the same guy. As it happens, Dr. Jekyll was never one of the Universal Studios monsters, but the character IS in the public domain, so I guess the corporate overlords of the Dark Universe figured “what the you-know-what.”

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 Anyway, I cannot feel too aggrieved for either star. As Richard Harris and Richard Burton found out for themselves many years before Crowe came along, there comes a time in the career of every loose-cannon macho actor where the any-port-in-a-financial-year-storm approach to career management is all for the best. As for Cruise, he is known for his try-anything-once sense of cinematic adventure, and he does like his franchises. The Morton character is admittedly more of a callow nothingburger than any he’s played. And given how the movie ends I’m a little disappointed that he wasn’t named Larry Talbot. But who knows, maybe he’ll be obliged to change it for the next installment. Which I am looking forward to, out of nothing but base curiosity. ||||| PLOT An explorer disturbs a mummy’s tomb and unleashes an evil force. CAST Tom Cruise, Sofia Boutella, Russell Crowe RATED PG-13 (violence, scary images, suggestive content, partial nudity) LENGTH 1:50 BOTTOM LINE A blaring, bloated zombie of a movie.

 What happens when you update Universal Pictures’ classic monster movies, with their old-world charm and Gothic elegance, for a new audience accustomed to the high-tech action and postmodern sarcasm of Disney’s Marvel movies? The answer, in the case of “The Mummy” — a big-budget reboot of the 1932 Boris Karloff gem — is a hideous Frankenstein of a film that seems doomed to repulse anyone who comes across it.

 Sorry for the mixed monster metaphor, but this is one massive mess of a movie. The first in a planned series of reboots, in which everyone from the Wolf Man to the Hunchback of Notre Dame will live in a shared Dark Universe, “The Mummy” sets a tone of thematic confusion and box-office desperation. Written by what seems to be a conflicted three-man team (including David Koepp, of “Jurassic Park”) and directed as if in a panic by Alex Kurtzman, “The Mummy” is an action-horror-fantasy driven entirely by special effects, with incongruous elements of black comedy, eroticism and gadgetry — all laid atop the narrative blueprint of an “Avengers” movie.

 Not even the charisma of Tom Cruise can shine through this film’s CGI-generated murk. Cruise plays Nick Morton, a mercenary tomb raider who discovers the sarcophagus of the cursed Egyptian princess Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella, half-naked and covered in rune tattoos). Once reanimated, she gets the hots for Nick and appears to him in gauzy hallucinations that resemble a perfume commercial. Luckily, Nick’s sort-of girlfriend, Egyptologist Jenny Halsey (an oddly icy Annabelle Wallis), knows who to call: a genial if somewhat unstable doctor whose last name is Jekyll (Russell Crowe).

 This may be the movie’s worst conceptual misfire. “The Mummy” wants to establish Jekyll/Hyde as its own Banner/Hulk, but also as its own Nick Fury, the top commander behind the Marvel heroes. Crowe is surprisingly fun in the role — he plays Hyde like a steroidal Cockney gangster — but the character can’t serve triple duty as head honcho, superhero and mad scientist all at once.

 Virtually everything in this movie seems like the wrong decision. Why does “The Mummy” spend so much time in 12th century England? Why is it partly a zombie comedy, in which Nick is pestered by an undead wisenheimer (Jake Johnson)? Why are the one-liners so dopey? It has to be said: This “Mummy” makes even the Brendan Fraser versions of the franchise seem like classics. |||||

 Sofia Boutella stars in “The Mummy.” This monster flick starts in the Middle East but ends up mostly involving chase scenes with the mummy on the loose in England, kissing innocent people to death, then reanimating them. (Universal Pictures)

 Given that “Spider-Man” is getting its third reboot since 2002, it’s a small miracle that Universal waited as long as it did to resurrect 1999’s wildly successful sleeper hit “The Mummy.” In the midst of franchise mania, the studio is launching its very own universe of monster flicks, and the Tom Cruise-led action thriller heralds the start of a world that may include “The Bride of Frankenstein,” “The Invisible Man” and “The Wolfman,” to name a few.

 That’s some pressure the movie doesn’t shoulder well, considering it’s hardly the unqualified success of other trial balloons, like “Iron Man,” “X-Men” or even “Man of Steel.” In fact, “The Mummy” might make a viewer wonder whether this universe will even take off at all.

 It won’t be for a lack of star power. Cruise plays Nick Morton, a brave, foolish soldier of fortune who, along with his buddy Chris (Jake Johnson), scours the Middle East looking for antiquities to loot and sell on the black market. During one such trek he stumbles upon an Egyptian crypt. But as his recent bedfellow, archaeologist Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis), breathily describes it: “This is not a tomb — it’s a prison.”

 We already know what that means, thanks to some thoroughly informative voice-over narration by a certain Dr. Jekyll (Russell Crowe), who reveals the identity of the woman buried at this site. The daughter of a pharaoh, Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella) made a pact with Set, the god of death, before murdering her father, his wife and their newborn baby so that she could take the throne. She was caught before she could carry out the prophesy — using a fancy dagger to kill a man so that Set would have his very own body — and was mummified and buried alive far from Egypt.

 She’d be forever stuck under a pool of mercury if Nick’s reckless gunfire didn’t upend the complex cable-and-pulley system holding her there. She appears to Nick in one of many daydream sequences to say how pleased she is with this turn of events, although once again Jenny is on hand to overexplain things: “We’ve angered the gods,” she laments.

 Boutella stars as Ahmanet, a mummy unleashed by treasure hunter Nick Morton (Tom Cruise). (Universal Pictures)

 The rest of the movie, directed by Alex Kurtzman, is mostly chase scenes with the mummy on the loose in England, kissing innocent people to death, sucking the life out of them and then reanimating the corpses to create her own zombie army. In fact, “The Mummy” has more in common with “The Living Dead” movies than the 1932 horror film or its 1999 remake, although the dead aren’t the only ones working for this villainess. She also has rats and spiders on her payroll, among many other creepy-crawlies designed to make the audience squirm and shudder.

 Nick joins forces with Jenny and her boss, Jekyll, who is hammered into the story so that we don’t forget this is the start of a franchise rather than a stand-alone movie that already has plenty going on without yet another plot thread.

 Nick (Cruise) and Jenny Halsey (Annabelle Wallis) in “The Mummy.” Universal Pictures’ action-horror movie, which seems to be the first in a series of reboots, has star power and a few thrills, but the convoluted story decays before our eyes. (Chiabella James/Universal Pictures)

 Some of the action is thrilling, especially a brilliantly choreographed plane crash that has Nick and Jenny tossed around the cabin before he straps her into a parachute and pulls the cord, whisking her out into the sky. The movie also has a few genuinely funny moments. When the mummy ominously runs her long nails over Nick’s torso, he starts giggling; he’s ticklish, apparently.

 But the big thrills and few laughs are no match for the cumbersome, convoluted story, not to mention the nonexistent chemistry between Cruise and Wallis. (We’re not going to pin the blame on her considering the way her connection with Cillian Murphy popped off the screen in “Peaky Blinders.”)

 The whole thing culminates in an underwater chase scene that’s painfully lugubrious. After the fast-paced thrills of the “Fast & Furious” franchise, among other action movies, seeing Cruise breaststroke away from some zombies is bizarre and comical. If something is in fact being launched with “The Mummy,” it’s not off to a very snappy start. ||||| How meh is The Mummy? Let me count the ways. For all the huffing and puffing and digital desperation from overworked computers, this reboot lands onscreen with a resounding thud. Tom Cruise should have played the Mummy – that way his face would be swathed in bandages and his fans wouldn't have to see him sweat so hard to get this lumbering loser off the ground.

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 In a gender flip, the title role originated by Boris Karloff in 1932 is played by Algerian actress Sofia Boutella (Kingsman: The Secret Service). She's Ahmanet, an evil Egyptian princess who killed her daddy a few millennia back – she wanted to be pharaoh instead of her baby brother, see – and for her trouble got buried alive for several millennia in Mesopotamia, currently known as Iraq. Cruise takes the role of Nick Morton, a hustler in antiquities who unearths the tomb of this "3000-year-old prune," a hellion who wants to use our hero's body to house Set, the god of the dead.

 Still with me? Director Alex Kurtzman – who, as a screenwriter, has tackled everything from Alias episodes to a Transformers movie – can't seem to make sense of a script by numerous writers clearly unashamed of hack work. Nick, his blond British squeeze Jenny Halsey (Peaky Blinders' Annabelle Wallis) and his wisecracking best-friend-forever Chris Vail (New Girl's Jake Johnson) all end up in modern-day London fighting Ahmanet and her ghouls. How do you win a fight against the undead? My point exactly.

 Meanwhile, Russell Crowe, looking winded and all-too-aware of the schlock he's selling, shows up as mean Dr. Jekyll and his even meaner alter ego Mr. Hyde. No reason, except to set the stage for Universal's coming Dark Universe series of which The Mummy is the first installment. You heard us right. They are already prepping revamps of Jekyll & Hyde, The Invisible Man with Johnny Depp and Bride of Frankenstein, starring Javier Bardem as the monster. This anticipation killer is not going to help. It's a monster fail. |||||
What is a summary?

– The Mummy marks a return to the past and a nod to the future for Universal: Taking inspiration from its 1932 and 1999 films of the same name, it's the first installment of a new "Dark Universe" franchise that is set to include flicks like Jekyll & Hyde and Bride of Frankenstein. Tom Cruise stars as an antiquities hunter who disturbs an Egyptian sarcophagus and awakes an evil spirit. Here's what critics are saying: Peter Travers calls The Mummy "a monster fail" that kills anticipation for future franchise flicks. It has too much CGI, and director Alex Kurtzman "can't seem to make sense of a script by numerous writers clearly unashamed of hack work," he writes at Rolling Stone. He adds Russell Crowe appears as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for no good reason. Crowe is "surprisingly fun" in this role, but the film's attempts to make him into "head honcho, superhero, and mad scientist all at once" may be its "worst conceptual misfire," Rafer Guzman writes at Newsday. But then, "virtually everything in this movie seems like the wrong decision." It's a "massive mess of a movie" that "seems doomed to repulse anyone who comes across it," he writes. Glenn Kenny was also thrown off by the Jekyll character, but that's just one reason he's warning that the "Dark Universe" franchise might be a "grievously ill-advised" one. Its first installment has "plenty to get irritated about," including some "very old-school sexism," he writes at RogerEbert.com. It's "amazingly relentless in its naked borrowing from other, better horror and sci-fi movies" to boot. It's not all bad, though, writes Stephanie Merry at the Washington Post. "Some of the action is thrilling, especially a brilliantly choreographed plane crash," and there are a "few genuinely funny moments." But those moments "are no match for the cumbersome, convoluted story, not to mention the nonexistent chemistry between Cruise and [Annabelle] Wallis," she notes. Not a good start, Universal.


Article:

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 The computer network at Neiman Marcus was penetrated by hackers as far back as July, and the breach was not fully contained until Sunday, according to people briefed on the investigation.

 The company disclosed the data theft of customer information late last week, saying it first learned in mid-December of suspicious activity that involved credit cards used at its stores. It issued another notice on Thursday, elaborating slightly.

 The latest notice said that “some of our customers’ payment cards were used fraudulently after making purchases at our stores. We have taken steps to notify those affected customers for whom we have contact information.”

 The company apologized again, and said it did not believe the customers’ Social Security numbers or birth dates — key pieces of personal data — had been compromised.

 Neiman Marcus defended its decision not to disclose anything until last week, saying it waited to confirm evidence. The company said nothing about when the attack began and when it was contained.

 Photo

 In a call with credit card companies on Monday, though, Neiman acknowledged that the attack had only been fully contained a day earlier, and that the time stamp on the first intrusion was in mid-July, people briefed on the call said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the investigation.

 The issue at Neiman appears to have gone on for significantly longer than the widespread attack on Target. In Target’s case, however, the data that was stolen appears to be much more significant and ripe for fraud. Target has said card numbers from 40 million customers were stolen, along with encrypted PINs for debit cards. It also estimated that other personal information belonging to 70 million people had been stolen by the hackers.

 Neiman Marcus said on Thursday that it had “no knowledge of any connection” between its data breach and Target’s.

 Neiman has not publicly given any estimate of how many credit card numbers were stolen, or how many customers were affected. But it noted that it does not collect PINs in its stores.

 The company only publicly acknowledged the data breach last Friday after facing inquiries from a journalist specializing in computer security, Brian Krebs.

 But Neiman had told credit card companies around Christmas, in an industry phone call, that it had evidence that credit cards used at Neiman Marcus were being used to make fraudulent purchases, people who were briefed on those phone calls said.

 Neiman has faced criticism for not telling customers about the breach sooner. Target informed its customers about its attack within a few days of learning about it for the first time, pushed also by inquiries from Mr. Krebs. Target’s acknowledgment came right before the final holiday shopping weekend, and put a significant dent in Target’s sales in the final seasonal rush.

 Some people briefed on the investigation questioned Neiman’s decision not to disclose anything to the public until the shopping season was over.

 One person briefed by law enforcement on the investigation noted: “January 1 is conveniently timed after the holiday season.”

 A spokeswoman for Neiman Marcus, Ginger Reeder, asserted on Thursday that the holiday season had nothing to do with its decision.

 In its notice on Thursday, the company said: “We quickly began our investigation and hired a forensic investigator. Our forensic investigator discovered evidence on Jan. 1st that a criminal cybersecurity intrusion had occurred. The forensic and criminal investigations continue.” Neiman said it would provide customers with one free year of credit monitoring, similar to what Target has offered.

 A growing group of state attorneys general, including those from Connecticut, New York and Illinois, are jointly investigating both the Target and Neiman Marcus breaches.

 The authorities are examining whether the two attacks are related. Both appear to have been committed by criminal groups in Eastern Europe, people briefed on the investigation said. ||||| A 17-page report from a computer firm hired to look into the massive data breach at Target stores provides new insight into the holiday hacking that endangered data for more than 100 million customers.

 The report, from computer firm iSight, was filed to the U.S. Secret Service and obtained by NBC News. It details the type of software used in the massive hack, how it was effective and mentions regions known to have the software coding prowess to pull off this kind of digital heist.

 The report however does not draw conclusions on who is ultimately responsible for the attack that scooped up credit and debit card data for tens of millions of customers, citing an active U.S. government investigation.

 The data breach was caused by a type of malware, similar to a computer virus, placed in a store's point-of-sale systems, it said.

 "While some components of the breach operation were technically sophisticated, the operational sophistication of the compromise activity makes this case stand out," according to the iSight report. "The intrusion operators displayed innovation and a high degree of skill in orchestrating the various components of the activity."

 The report details specific regions where software capabilities exist to create the malware.

 "Memory scraping capabilities has been available in the Russian-language underground for some time," the report reads. "While Eastern Europe has been the focal point for POS malware development and use, cyber criminals in Brazil have used the technique since at least 2009. Globally, this trend will probably continue because malware offers important cost and risk advantages over hardware skimming techniques."

 Here's how the malware works, according to the report: The insidious file triggers a "hook" and starts to suck up information on transactions in the memory of the cash register system or the server that controls it. Since the data on credit cards is encrypted, the system works by getting it in the authorization stage while it is in the memory of the POS system, unencrypted.

 The tactic used during the Target holiday hackers is "new to eCrime," the report says, and "covertly subverts network controls and common forensic tactics to conceal all data transfers."

 The report concludes that since this style of POS hacking can net big rewards for the cyber crooks with little risk, cardholders can expect more of this type of breach.

 NBC News' Matthew DeLuca contributed to this report.

 More from NBC News Investigations:

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  ||||| The holiday data breach at Target Corp. appeared to be part of a broad and highly sophisticated international hacking campaign against multiple retailers, according to a report prepared by federal and private investigators that was sent to financial-services companies and retailers.

 The report offers some of the first details to emerge about the source of the attack that compromised 40 million credit- and debit-card accounts and... |||||
What is a summary?

– It looks like the hackers that hit Target had lots of other, well, targets. The Department of Homeland Security recently sent retailers and financial service companies a secret memo warning that the Target hit appeared to be part of a larger international campaign, the Wall Street Journal reports, an insight gleaned with the help of Dallas cybersecurity firm iSight Partners. Yesterday, iSight released its own report, saying that a virus it's calling KAPTOXA "has potentially infected a large number of retail information systems"—and noting that the "intrusion operators displayed innovation and a high degree of skill," particularly in terms of the "operational sophistication" of the hack. The Journal shares this feature by way of example: The virus focused on stealing data during the peak hours of 10am and 5pm; the data was housed in a Target server that the hackers later accessed. The virus attacks point-of-sale systems in a way that is "new to eCrime," subverting traditional efforts to protect consumer data, the report warns, according to NBC. Parts of the code, which is impervious to all known antivirus software, have been online since last spring. It's partly in Russian, which US officials think may indicate a link to organized crime in the former Soviet Union. The finding follows reports of similar breaches at Neiman Marcus. That breach had gone unnoticed since July, the New York Times reports today; Neiman's system was only fully secured Sunday.


Article:

The US military's takeover of emergency operations in Haiti has triggered a diplomatic row with countries and aid agencies furious at having flights redirected.

 Brazil and France lodged an official protest with Washington after US military aircraft were given priority at Port-au-Prince's congested airport, forcing many non-US flights to divert to the Dominican Republic.

 Brasilia warned it would not relinquish command of UN forces in Haiti, and Paris complained the airport had become a US "annexe", exposing a brewing power struggle amid the global relief effort. The Red Cross and Médecins Sans Frontières also complained about diverted flights.

 The row prompted Haiti's president, René Préval, to call for calm. "This is an extremely difficult situation," he told AP. "We must keep our cool to co-ordinate and not throw accusations at each other."

 The squabbling came amid signs that aid was reaching some of the hundreds of thousands of people in desperate need of water, food and medicine six days after a magnitude 7 earthquake levelled the capital, killing more than 100,000, according to Haitian authorities.

 The UN was feeding 40,000 and hoped to increase that to 1 million within a fortnight, said the secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, as he arrived in Port-au-Prince yesterday. "I am here with a message of hope that help is on the way," he said, speaking outside the severely damaged national palace. He also acknowledged "that many people are frustrated and they are losing their patience."

 Ban said he has three priorities in Haiti: saving as many lives as possible, stepping up humanitarian assistance and ensuring the co-ordination of aid coming into the country. "We should not waste even a single item, a dollar," he said.

 The plight of 80 elderly people at a partially collapsed municipal hospice just a mile from the airport, now a huge aid hub, showed the desperate need. The body of a dead 70-year-old man rotted on a mattress, nearly indistinguishable from the exhausted, hungry and thirsty people around him. "Others won't live until tonight," an administrator, Jean Emmanuel, told the Associated Press.

 The Haitian government has established 14 food distribution points and aid groups have opened five emergency health centres. Water-purification units – a priority to avert disease and dehydration – were arriving.

 But with aftershocks jolting the ruins, bloated bodies in the street and severe shortages of water and food many survivors had had enough: an exodus trekked on foot out of the city to rural areas.

 The security situation worsened, with some looters fighting with rocks and clubs for rice, clothing and other goods scavenged from debris. In places the embryonic aid machine did not even try to organise distribution. Aid workers tossed out food packets to crowds and US helicopters took off as soon as they offloaded supplies, prompting scrambles in which the fittest and strongest prevailed.

 "They are not identifying the people who need the water. The sick and the old have no chance," Estime Pierre Deny, hoping to fill a plastic container with water amid a scrum of people, told Reuters.

 Frustration over aid bottlenecks among donors became tinged by national rivalry as it became clear the US was taking ownership of the crisis. A vanguard of more than 1,000 US troops was on the ground and 12,000 were expected in the region by today, including marines aboard the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson which anchored offshore as a "floating airport".

 The Haitian government, paralysed by the destruction of the presidential palace and ministries, signed a memorandum of understanding formally transferring control of Toussaint L'Ouverture airport to the US. Former president Bill Clinton said he will travel to Haiti today to meet with government officials and deliver much-needed emergency supplies.

 The UN mission, which had a 9,000-strong peacekeeping force in Haiti before the quake, seemed too stunned by its own losses to take control. Its dead include its Tunisian head, Hédi Annabi, his Brazilian deputy, Luiz Carlos da Costa, and the acting police commissioner, Doug Coates, a Canadian.

 Flights seeking permission to land continuously circle the airport, which is damaged and has only a single runway, rankling several governments and aid agencies. "There are 200 flights going in and out every day, which is an incredible amount for a country like Haiti," Jarry Emmanuel, air logistics officer for the UN's World Food Programme, told the New York Times. "But most flights are for the US military. Their priorities are to secure the country. Ours are to feed. We have got to get those priorities in sync."

 France, which as the former colonial power expects a prominent role, protested when an emergency field hospital was turned back. The foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, said the airport was not for the international community but "an annexe of Washington", according to France's ambassador to Haiti, Didier Le Bret.

 Brazil, which saw its leadership of the UN peacekeeping mission as a calling card of its burgeoning influence, was also indignant when three flights were not allowed to land. The foreign ministry reportedly asked Hillary Clinton to grant Brazil priority over chartered flights. Nelson Jobim, the defence minister, said Brazil would not relinquish command duties and suggested it, not Washington, would continue to lead UN forces. Analysts said it was vital command issues be resolved.

 The Red Cross and Médecins Sans Frontières complained about flights with medical staff and equipment which were redirected to the Dominican Republic. "We are all going crazy," said Nan Buzard, of the American Red Cross.

 The Obama administration has enlisted former presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton to spearhead relief efforts. In a series of interviews both men deflected right-wing accusations that the White House was seeking political advantage from the disaster. "I'd say now is not the time to focus on politics," Bush said, as he sat beside his predecessor. "You've got children who've lost parents. People wondering where they're going to be able to drink water." ||||| But with Haitian officials relying so heavily on the United States, the United Nations and many different aid groups, coordination was posing a critical challenge. An airport hobbled by only one suitable runway, a ruined port whose main pier splintered into the ocean, roads blocked by rubble, widespread fuel shortages and a lack of drivers to move the aid into the city are compounding the problems.

 About 1,700 people camped on the grass in front of the prime minister’s office compound in the Pétionville neighborhood, pleading for biscuits and water-purification tablets distributed by aid groups. A sign on one fallen building in Nazon, one of many hillside communities destroyed by the quake, read: “Welcome U.S. Marines . We need help. Dead Bodies Inside!”

 Haitian officials said the bodies of tens of thousands of victims had already been recovered and that hundreds of thousands of people were living on the streets. A preliminary Red Cross estimate put the total number of affected people at 3.5 million.

 The United Nations also confirmed the death of three of its most senior officials in the quake: the secretary general’s special representative for Haiti, Hédi Annabi; his deputy, Luiz Carlos da Costa; and the acting police commissioner for the peacekeeping force, Doug Coates of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. They were meeting with eight members of a Chinese police delegation in the agency’s headquarters, the Christopher Hotel, when it collapsed on Tuesday.

 Even as the United States took a leading role in aid efforts, some aid officials were describing misplaced priorities, accusing United States officials of focusing their efforts on getting their people and troops installed and lifting their citizens out. Under agreement with Haiti, the United States is now managing air traffic control at the airport, helicopters are flying relief missions from warships off the coast and 9,000 to 10,000 troops are expected to arrive by Monday to help with the relief effort.

 The World Food Program finally was able to land flights of food, medicine and water on Saturday, after failing on Thursday and Friday, an official with the agency said. Those flights had been diverted so that the United States could land troops and equipment, and lift Americans and other foreigners to safety.

 “There are 200 flights going in and out every day, which is an incredible amount for a country like Haiti,” said Jarry Emmanuel, the air logistics officer for the agency’s Haiti effort. “But most of those flights are for the United States military.

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 He added: “Their priorities are to secure the country. Ours are to feed. We have got to get those priorities in sync.”

 In a notice over the weekend, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration said priority would be given to search and rescue, military and humanitarian aircraft, in that order. Flights were being routed through a command center at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida and pilots must tell controllers what they have on board and when they would like to arrive.

 American officials said they were making substantial progress. Mrs. Clinton said the military was beginning to use a container port in Cap Haitien, in northern Haiti, which should increase the flow of aid.

 The United States Agency for International Development was helping choose sites and clear roads for 14 centers for the distribution of food and water. Rajiv Shah, the agency’s administrator, said the United States had moved $48 million of food supplies from Texas since the quake and distributed 600,000 packaged meals. It has also installed three water-purification systems capable of purifying 100,000 liters a day.

 Yet problems remain. American officials said that 180 tons of relief supplies had been delivered to the airport, but much was still waiting for delivery. While the military has cleared other landing sites for helicopters around the capital, they are thronged by people looking for help, making landings hazardous.

 Fuel shortages were mounting. At several gas stations around Port-au-Prince, attendants or customers said that even though the stations had fuel left in their tanks, there was no electricity to work the pumps.

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 Some aid workers were critical of the United Nations, as well, arguing that the agency had the most on-the-ground experience in Haiti and should be directing efforts better.

 But many United Nations employees were killed in the earthquake. And Stephanie Bunker, the spokeswoman for the United Nations humanitarian relief effort, said Saturday that a United Nations logistics team was trying to coordinate with other agencies, and that the peacekeeping forces were trying to clear roads.

 Criticism of the United Nations “may reflect people’s frustrations with the entire effort because it is such a grueling effort,” she said. “It takes a long time for all this stuff to be cleared up and fixed.” She noted that all modes of transportation — air, road and sea — were still limited. A shortage of trucks remained a problem.

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 Michel Chancy, appointed by Mr. Préval to coordinate relief, said that much of the aid to Haiti was coming to a government that was itself under siege.

 “The palace fell,” he said. “Ministries fell. And not only that, the homes of many ministers fell. The police were not coming to work. Relief agencies collapsed. The U.N. collapsed. It was hard to get ourselves in a place where we could help others.”

 At the American Embassy in Port-au-Prince, American rescue teams continued to roll out of the gate. Most of their equipment had arrived, and at any given time, the teams were working on several different piles of rubble throughout the city.

 “People need to get the message, we’re out, we’re doing stuff,” said Craig Luecke, a coordinator with the search and rescue team from Fairfax County, Va., who has been tracking American efforts in advance of Mrs. Clinton’s arrival here. “My Google Earth map is filled with American activity.”

 Though the numbers are fluid, he said four American teams had helped pulled nearly two dozen survivors from the rubble. The State Department said 15 Americans were confirmed dead in the earthquake.

 Some airplanes, after circling the capital’s airport, have been turning back or landing in Santo Domingo , in the neighboring Dominican Republic . Its airfield was growing ever more crowded with diverted flights.

 “We’re all going crazy,” said Nan Buzard, senior director of international response and programs for the American Red Cross . “You don’t have any kind of orderly distributions of food, water, shelter, clothing. The planes are in the air, the materials are purchased. It remains a profoundly frustrating situation for everyone.”

 Among the aid groups avoiding the logjam in Port-au-Prince by entering Haiti from the Dominican Republic was International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies.

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 A caravan of eight trucks from the federation was creeping toward the Haitian border on Saturday morning, carrying medical equipment and aid workers.

 The group had originally planned to touch down in Haiti, but the delays at the airport forced them to divert to Santo Domingo, delaying their arrival in Haiti by about 12 hours, said Paul Conneally, a Red Cross spokesman who was traveling with the convoy.

 “Every minute counts, I know that, but we cannot be on standby to land at Port-au-Prince because it may not be for two or three days,” he said. “It’s problematic to go across roads, but it’s a small price to pay.”

 Mr. Préval, speaking at the airport, now the effective seat of the Haitian government, urged patience. He showed a map covered with red dots, indicating the worst-hit areas. When the earthquake struck, he said, “We in Haiti thought it was the end of the world.”

 Mr. Préval said he was making food, water, medical supplies and the re-establishment of communication the priorities for his government. “We have a lot of work to do,” he said. |||||
What is a summary?

– The global relief effort in Haiti has devolved into a nasty power struggle, with countries and aid agencies furious at the US takeover of emergency operations. France, Brazil, which runs the UN peacekeeping operation in Haiti, Doctors Without Borders, and the Red Cross all lodged complaints after their aid shipments were diverted to the neighboring Dominican Republic so that US military flights could land at Port-au-Prince's congested airport, where just one runway is operable. "We are all going crazy," a Red Cross official told the Guardian, as a UN World Food Program officer complained in the New York Times that US military has muscled out other relief efforts. "Their priorities are to secure the country. Ours are to feed. We have got to get those priorities in sync." The Haitian president begged the squabbling powers to stay calm: "We must keep our cool to coordinate and not throw accusations at each other."


News article:

'Focus’ review: Will Smith just stole $12 from your pocket

 Photo: Frank Masi / Frank Masi / Warner Bros. Pictures Image 1 of / 4 Caption Close Image 1 of 4 Will Smith plays Nicky and Margot Robbie is Jess in “Focus.” Will Smith plays Nicky and Margot Robbie is Jess in “Focus.” Photo: Frank Masi / Frank Masi / Warner Bros. Pictures Image 2 of 4 Will Smith plays a big-time swindler, with Margot Robbie as his latest apprentice, in “Focus.” Will Smith plays a big-time swindler, with Margot Robbie as his latest apprentice, in “Focus.” Photo: Frank Masi / Frank Masi / Warner Bros. Pictures Image 3 of 4 Margot Robbie and Will Smith in “Focus.” Margot Robbie and Will Smith in “Focus.” Photo: Frank Masi / Frank Masi / Warner Bros. Pictures Image 4 of 4 Adrian Martinez plays a con artist in “Focus.” Adrian Martinez plays a con artist in “Focus.” Photo: Associated Press 'Focus’ review: Will Smith just stole $12 from your pocket 1 / 4 Back to Gallery

 February is the time for movies that look slick and promising but turn out to have something major wrong with them; otherwise, they’d be opening in May. “Focus” fits right into that pattern, a movie about con artists that’s itself an elaborate con.

 The movie’s con is that it’s showing us a secret underworld, something real that we’ve never seen or imagined, that it’s revealing how the big boys operate. But it’s not doing any of those things. “Focus” is ridiculous in every detail. It’s a movie with no truth that teaches nothing and shows nothing, that has only its audacity to recommend it. Once that’s realized, it’s possible to take it for what it is and enjoy it, a little.

 Forget the con artists, and think of it as a movie about Will Smith’s jaded charm and about how Margot Robbie looks completely different with her hair up than she does with it down. Think of it as scenes disconnected from other scenes, which are amusing for their own sake but that have little to do with each other. Then you won’t be disappointed.

 One scene in particular captures the strengths and weaknesses of “Focus.” Smith and Robbie are in a VIP box at a football game, making small bets with each other, and an Asian businessman asks if he can bet with them. As the stakes rise, from $10 into the multiple thousands, the businessman goes from seemingly innocuous to sinister, and the personal dynamic is fascinating. You can’t take your eyes off of BD Wong, who plays the businessman with an arresting mix of giddy playfulness and menace.

 But the scene itself is absurd, not just far-fetched, but groan-out-loud ludicrous. And the resolution — that is, the explanation that comes afterward — only makes it worse.

 Nicky (Smith) and Jess (Robbie) meet cute, with Jess trying to swindle him. When she realizes that she can’t cheat a cheater, that she has hooked the Yoda of crooks, she begs him to give her lessons in stealing. He proceeds to give her a tutorial on picking pockets. Apparently, it’s all about focus.

 The first hint that the movie is just plain silly is Jess’ audition scene, in which she picks about a dozen wallets and assorted jewelry, in a series of intricately choreographed moves involving multiple accomplices. Pretty good for a first time out. The second hint comes when we see Nicky’s operation — a massive warehouse in which wallets and jewelry are coming in from multiple sources. For some reason, all these independent pickpockets feel the need to kick up to him. Maybe they owe him. Maybe he did for them what he did for Jess, taught them how to become masters of the craft in just one five-minute lesson.

 Yet for all this, the nature of Nicky’s business remains vague; it seems to be whatever the script wants it be at any given moment. So, though we’re introduced to him as the Mozart of pickpocketing, we’re also to understand that he’s a swindler of international scope. Most of the film, in fact, takes place in Buenos Aires, with Nicky working a con for a major tycoon — but by this time, you don’t know what’s going on. You just know that nothing can be as it seems. That really means watching the movie waiting for the trick, which is not the same as being fooled.

 There are some scattered good moments; for example, the disconcerting sound of race cars whizzing by outside, as two people converse in the track’s cafe. They sound like powerful mosquitoes. And Adrian Martinez has a couple of funny scenes as a socially maladroit con artist.

 But the emotional core of the movie, the relationship between Nicky and Jess, lacks impact, mostly because you can’t believe a word that they say, but also because Smith is not a strong leading man. Smith’s idea of playing romance is to act cool, and his idea of playing cool is to act withdrawn and serious. That means the eclipse of the thing that made him a movie star in the first place, his personality.

 Mick LaSalle is The San Francisco Chronicle’s movie critic. E-mail: mlasalle@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @MickLaSalle

 Focus

 Drama. Starring Will Smith and Margot Robbie. Directed by John Requa and Glenn Ficarra. (R. 104 minutes.) ||||| Musical chairs or Russian roulette? Sometimes there’s as much tense drama in the casting of a Hollywood movie as there is in the finished product. This week’s example: Focus, a caper film about a veteran con man and the young woman he takes as his accomplice. Ryan Gosling, then Brad Pitt and Ben Affleck were touted as the dapper con, while the female lead was reckoned to be played, at one time or another, by Jennifer Lawrence, Emma Stone, Kristen Stewart, Michelle Williams, Jessica Biel, Rose Byrne, Olivia Munn — basically, every working actress under 35.

 Since Focus conjures up a more relaxed time in Hollywood history, when the top stars radiated their golden appeal in romantic comedies about duplicitous souls, writer-directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa might have dreamed of Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, who paired in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1955 To Catch a Thief. Grant had just hit 50, and Kelly was 25, but their upmarket glamour and wiles made a perfect match for a movie about an aging cat burglar and the young American heiress who dares to play his game.

 Ficarra and Requa, the authors of this script that everyone and nobody wanted to star in, finally settled on Will Smith, 46, and Margot Robbie, the 24-year-old blond Aussie who shared Leonardo DiCaprio’s bed (and a ton of cocaine) in The Wolf of Wall Street. The mix of longtime star and minx on the rise is one tasty element in the success of a movie that approaches the modest goals and effortless allure of a 60-year-old Hitchcock.

 “I can convince anyone of anything,” says Smith’s Nicky Spurgeon, and the man is not boasting. The con in con man is short for confidence — what he radiates, and what he extracts from his marks before fleecing them. The blithe smile, the genial but steely authority he wears like a bespoke suit: that’s Smith since his Fresh Prince days.

 What’s odd is that in most of his movies — from the time he sauntered into action stardom with Independence Day, through a decade of dystopian sci-fi roles in I, Robot, I Am Legend, Hancock and the misfortune known as After Earth — Smith has been obliged to glower, macho-man style, as if Bruce Willis hadn’t already patented the stoic scowl. Even in the Men is Black movies, the actor’s cool was deadpan; the smile had to be inferred. So Ficarra and Requa deserve some credit in letting Will be Will in the star’s first charm barrage since 2005’s Hitch.

 Spurgeon (whose Urban Dictionary definition genteelly translates as “the man of all men”) runs a con outfit of 20 or so filchers who work casinos, racetracks, football games — any place where cocky rich guys can be separated from their loot. He’s on hiatus when he meets the creamy blond Jess Barrett (Robbie), who pulls a clumsy ruse that he plays along with simply from professional curiosity. Out of her league but a quick study, Jess learns to pick the pockets of smitten strangers and earns her bona fides. She’s now ready to be Nicky’s partner, and perhaps rival, in con. “Congratulations,” Nicky’s aide-de-camp Horst (Brennan Brown) tells Jess, “you’re a criminal.”

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 The dapper-con genre, which includes The Lady Eve and The Sting, with a brief recent revival in Now You See It, demands of its audience only a readiness to fall for the flimflam, as Nicky’s marks do. The big gamble in Focus: it’s a Will Smith movie that dares to be small. It leads its stars into swanky peril with a zillionaire gambler (B.D. Wong) and an Argentine race-car mogul (Rodrigo Santoro), in games the viewer is wise to trust no one.

 Ficarra and Requa, who pulled off a more brazen act of sex and treachery in I Love You Philip Morris, here just want to have and provide a good time. Which they do. They’ll even take an R rating for the fun of some raunchy wit spouted by one of Nicky’s pals (Adrian Martinez).

 And Robbie validated the filmmakers’ trust at the end of a long casting process. Suggesting a modern Grace Kelly who wears her libido on the outside, and is a bit more self-conscious in her scheming, Robbie is really closer to a high-end knockoff of the young Michelle Pfeiffer. But that’s O.K. too: it adds to the film’s playful sense that everything, including star quality, is a con.

 Except for Smith, of course. He may not be the 21st-century Cary Grant — who could be? — but as a Hollywood charmer, he’s still the real deal. ||||| The character suits Smith to a tee, given that his ability to persuade anyone of anything is the linchpin of his work. Though his career began as a rapper, it took the NBC hit comedy "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air," which began its six-season run in 1990, to establish him as an actor. As a street-smart Philly teen working his magic on the upscale California relatives who took him in, Smith found his sweet spot, and it started a trend — the actor charming his way into high society in "Six Degrees of Separation" or softening up his crusty crime-fighting partner played by Tommy Lee Jones in "Men in Black." |||||
What is a shorter version of the above article?

– Will Smith stars as Nicky, an established con man who takes on a new apprentice, Australian newcomer Margot Robbie's Jess, in Focus. They both love the con game, but who's playing who? Here's what critics are saying: Richard Corliss at Time is a fan. "The mix of longtime star and minx on the rise is one tasty element in the success of a movie that approaches the modest goals and effortless allure of a 60-year-old Hitchcock," he writes. Smith "takes a welcome break from glowering sci-fi roles" and writer-directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa "deserve some credit in letting Will be Will in the star's first charm barrage since 2005's Hitch." Steven Rea at the Philadelphia Inquirer admits Smith "shows some of the movie-star wattage that's been missing from his recent pics. He charms." There's also "combustible chemistry" between Smith and Robbie, but the movie just "disappoints," Rea writes. "Even if you're willing to forgive its sinkhole plotholes and farthest-fetched conceits, the film ... ultimately makes no sense." Betsy Sharkey, on the other hand, says this "rom-com-con" is "an irresistible reminder of all the reasons we first fell for the Fresh Prince so many years ago." Writing at the Los Angeles Times, she notes the romantic role of Nicky fits Smith perfectly, while Robbie is "more than holding her own" as his match. "The scams are Rubik's Cube complicated, but what keeps you guessing is whether the romantic connection between Jess and Nicky is real or just another con." But Mick LaSalle at the San Francisco Chronicle isn't convinced. In a review titled "Will Smith just stole $12 from your pocket," he argues Focus is "ridiculous in every detail. It's a movie with no truth that teaches nothing and shows nothing, that has only its audacity to recommend it." Nicky and Jess lack "impact," partly because "Smith is not a strong leading man," he says. Viewers are left "waiting for the trick, which is not the same as being fooled."