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‘Recovered’ Assange Promotes Cannes Documentary Wearing Gaza T-Shirt

Julian Assange poses for photographers at the photo call for the film "The Six Billion Dollar Man" at the 78th international film festival, Cannes, southern France, Tuesday, May 20, 2025. (AP)
Julian Assange poses for photographers at the photo call for the film "The Six Billion Dollar Man" at the 78th international film festival, Cannes, southern France, Tuesday, May 20, 2025. (AP)
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‘Recovered’ Assange Promotes Cannes Documentary Wearing Gaza T-Shirt

Julian Assange poses for photographers at the photo call for the film "The Six Billion Dollar Man" at the 78th international film festival, Cannes, southern France, Tuesday, May 20, 2025. (AP)
Julian Assange poses for photographers at the photo call for the film "The Six Billion Dollar Man" at the 78th international film festival, Cannes, southern France, Tuesday, May 20, 2025. (AP)

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has recovered well after his release from jail last year, his wife told AFP ahead of the premiere of a documentary Wednesday that includes never-seen-before footage of the whistleblower.

Assange is at the Cannes Festival to promote the documentary by American filmmaker Eugene Jarecki, wearing a T-shirt with the names of killed Gaza children at a photo session on Tuesday.

The 53-year-old former hacker is not talking to the media, however, with his wife Stella Assange saying, "He'll speak when he's ready."

"We live with incredible nature at our doorstep (in Australia). Julian's very outdoorsy. He always has been. He's really recovered physically and mentally," Stella, a Spanish-Swedish lawyer, told AFP.

Assange was released from a high-security British prison last June after a plea bargain with the US government over Wikileaks's work publishing top-secret military and diplomatic information.

He had spent five years behind bars fighting extradition from Britain and another seven holed up in the Ecuador embassy in London where he claimed political asylum.

Award-winning director Jarecki said his film, "The Six Billion Dollar Man", aimed to correct the record about Assange, whose methods and personality still make him a divisive figure.

"I think Julian Assange put himself in harm's way for the principle of informing the public about what corporations and governments around the world are doing in secret," Jarecki told AFP.

Anyone willing to trade years of their life for their principles, "I think you'd have to look at that person as having heroic qualities," he added.

The film includes personal videos handed over by Stella, who initially joined Wikileaks as a legal advisor and went on to have two children with Assange while he was living in the Ecuadorian embassy.

It also features testimony from people who helped spy on Assange, including a private security agent who said he installed bugs accessed by the American security services in the Ecuadorian embassy.

Former "Baywatch" actress and Assange's friend Pamela Anderson, fellow whistleblower Edward Snowden, and Australian human rights lawyer Jennifer Robinson also appear.

- Criticism -

Jarecki pushed back on some of the criticism of Assange, notably that he endangered lives by publishing unredacted US documents with the names of people who spoke to American diplomats, including informants or human rights campaigners.

He also dismissed any links between Wikileaks and Russian intelligence services over the leak of Democratic Party emails ahead of the 2016 US presidential election which embarrassed Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton.

An investigation by US special counsel Robert Mueller, who probed alleged Russian interference in the 2016 vote, found evidence Russian military intelligence hacked the Democratic Party and passed the information to Wikileaks.

"Other than from the mouths of people in the Democratic Party, we've never found any evidence of any linkages between WikiLeaks and Russia," Jarecki claimed.

Ecuador's left-wing former president Rafael Correa, who offered Assange asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, was to attend the film's red carpet premiere on Wednesday evening.

Jarecki was awarded the first ever Golden Globe for documentary at Cannes on Monday for his previous work, including his 2018 film about Elvis, "The King".

This year's festival is one of the most political for years, with hundreds of film industry figures including Hollywood heavyweights signing a letter condemning what they called "genocide" in Gaza.

It also denounced Israel's killing of Fatima Hassouna, a young Gaza photojournalist featured in the documentary "Put Your Soul in Your Hand and Walk", which premiered at Cannes last week.

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Entertainment

Movie Review: An Electric Timothee Chalamet Is the Consummate Striver in Propulsive ‘Marty Supreme’

Timothee Chalamet attends the premiere of "Marty Supreme" at Regal Times Square on Tuesday, Dec. 16, 2025, in New York. (AP)
Timothee Chalamet attends the premiere of "Marty Supreme" at Regal Times Square on Tuesday, Dec. 16, 2025, in New York. (AP)
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Movie Review: An Electric Timothee Chalamet Is the Consummate Striver in Propulsive ‘Marty Supreme’

Timothee Chalamet attends the premiere of "Marty Supreme" at Regal Times Square on Tuesday, Dec. 16, 2025, in New York. (AP)
Timothee Chalamet attends the premiere of "Marty Supreme" at Regal Times Square on Tuesday, Dec. 16, 2025, in New York. (AP)

“Everybody wants to rule the world,” goes the Tears for Fears song we hear at a key point in “Marty Supreme,” Josh Safdie’s nerve-busting adrenaline jolt of a movie starring a never-better Timothee Chalamet.

But here’s the thing: everybody may want to rule the world, but not everybody truly believes they CAN. This, one could argue, is what separates the true strivers from the rest of us.

And Marty — played by Chalamet in a delicious synergy of actor, role and whatever fairy dust makes a performance feel both preordained and magically fresh — is a striver. With every fiber of his restless, wiry body. They should add him to the dictionary definition.

Needless to say, Marty is a New Yorker.

Also needless to say, Chalamet is a New Yorker.

And so is Safdie, a writer-director Chalamet has called “the street poet of New York.” So, where else could this story be set?

It’s 1952, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Marty Mauser is a salesman in his uncle’s shoe store, escaping to the storeroom for a hot tryst with his (married) girlfriend. This witty opening sequence won’t be the only thing recalling “Uncut Gems,” co-directed by Safdie with his brother Benny before the two split for solo projects. That film, which feels much like the precursor to “Marty Supreme,” began as a trip through the shiny innards of a rare opal, only to wind up inside Adam Sandler’s colon, mid-colonoscopy.

Sandler’s Howard Ratner was a New York striver, too, but sadder, and more troubled. Marty is young, determined, brash — with an eye always to the future. He’s a great salesman: “I could sell shoes to an amputee,” he boasts, crassly. But what he’s plotting to unveil to the world has nothing to do with shoes. It’s about table tennis.

How likely is it that this Jewish kid from the Lower East Side can become the very face of a sport in America, soon to be “staring at you from the cover of a Wheaties box?”

To Marty, perfectly likely. Still, he knows nobody in the US cares about table tennis. He’s so determined to prove everyone wrong, starting at the British Open in London, that when there’s a snag obtaining cash for his trip, he brandishes a gun at a colleague to get it.

Shaking off that sorta-armed robbery thing, Marty arrives in London, where he fast-talks his way into a suite at the Ritz. Here, he spies fellow guest Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow, in a wise, stylish return to the screen), a former movie star married to an insufferable tycoon (“Shark Tank” personality Kevin O’Leary, one of many nonactors here.)

Kay’s skeptical, but Marty finds a way to woo her. Really, all he has to say is: “Come watch me.” Once she sees him play, she’s sneaking into his room in a lace corselet.

This would be a good time to stop and consider Chalamet’s subtly transformed appearance. He is stick-thin — duh, he never stops moving. His mustache is skimpy. His skin is acne-scarred — just enough to erase any movie-star sheen. Most strikingly, his eyes, behind the round spectacles, are beady — and smaller. Definitely not those movie-star eyes.

But then, nearly all the faces in “Marty Supreme” are extraordinary. In a movie with more than 100 characters, we have known actors (Fran Drescher, Abel Ferrara); nonacting personalities (O’Leary, and an excellent Tyler Okonma (Tyler, The Creator) as Marty’s friend Wally); and exciting newcomers like Odessa A’Zion as Marty’s feisty girlfriend Rachel.

There are also a slew of nonactors in small parts, plus cameos from the likes of David Mamet and even high wire artist Philippe Petit. The dizzying array makes one curious how it all came together — is casting director Jennifer Venditti taking interns? Production notes tell us that for one hustling scene at a bowling alley, young men were recruited from a sports trading-card convention.

Elsewhere on the creative team, composer Daniel Lopatin succeeds in channeling both Marty’s beating heart and the ricochet of pingpong balls in his propulsive score. The script by Safdie and cowriter Ronald Bronstein, loosely based on real-life table tennis hustler Marty Reisman, beats with its own, never-stopping pulse. The same breakneck aesthetic applies to camera work by Darius Khondji.

Back now to London, where Marty makes the finals against Japanese player Koto Endo (Koto Kawaguchi, like his character a deaf table tennis champion). “I’ll be dropping a third atom bomb on them,” he brags — not his only questionable World War II quip. But Endo, with his unorthodox paddle and grip, prevails.

After a stint as a side act with the Harlem Globetrotters, including pingpong games with a seal — you’ll have to take our word for this, folks, we’re running low on space — Marty returns home, determined to make the imminent world championships in Tokyo.

But he's in trouble — remember he took cash at gunpoint? Worse, he has no money.

So Marty’s on the run. And he’ll do anything, however messy or dangerous, to get to Japan. Even if he has to totally debase himself (mark our words), or endanger friends — or abandon loyal and brave Rachel.

Is there something else for Marty, besides his obsessive goal? If so, he doesn’t know it yet. But the lyrics of another song used in the film are instructive here: “Everybody’s got to learn sometime.”

So can a single-minded striver ultimately learn something new about his own life?

We'll have to see. As Marty might say: “Come watch me.”

Entertainment

Nicki Minaj Surprises Conservatives with Praise for Trump, Vance at Arizona Event

CEO and Chair of the Board of Turning Point USA Erika Kirk (L) listens to US rapper Nicki Minaj speak during Turning Point's annual AmericaFest conference in Phoenix, Arizona on December 21, 2025. (Photo by Olivier Touron / AFP)
CEO and Chair of the Board of Turning Point USA Erika Kirk (L) listens to US rapper Nicki Minaj speak during Turning Point's annual AmericaFest conference in Phoenix, Arizona on December 21, 2025. (Photo by Olivier Touron / AFP)
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Nicki Minaj Surprises Conservatives with Praise for Trump, Vance at Arizona Event

CEO and Chair of the Board of Turning Point USA Erika Kirk (L) listens to US rapper Nicki Minaj speak during Turning Point's annual AmericaFest conference in Phoenix, Arizona on December 21, 2025. (Photo by Olivier Touron / AFP)
CEO and Chair of the Board of Turning Point USA Erika Kirk (L) listens to US rapper Nicki Minaj speak during Turning Point's annual AmericaFest conference in Phoenix, Arizona on December 21, 2025. (Photo by Olivier Touron / AFP)

Rapper Nicki Minaj on Sunday made a surprise appearance at a gathering of conservatives in Arizona that was memorializing late activist Charlie Kirk, and used her time on stage to praise President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance, calling them “role models” for young men.

The rap star was interviewed at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest convention by Erika Kirk, the widow of Charlie Kirk, about her newly found support for Trump — someone she had condemned in the past — and about her actions denouncing violence against Christians in Nigeria.

The Grammy-nominated rapper's recent alignment with the Make America Great Again movement has caught some interest because of her past criticism of Trump even when the artist's own political ideology had been difficult to pin down. But her appearance Sunday at the flagship event for the powerful conservative youth organization may shore up her status as a MAGA acolyte.

Minaj mocked California Gov. Gavin Newsom, referring to him as New-scum, a nickname Trump gave him. Newsom, a Democrat, has 2028 prospects. Minaj expressed admiration for the Republican president and Vance, who received an endorsement from Erika Kirk despite the fact he has not said whether he will run for president. Kirk took over as leader of Turning Point.

“This administration is full of people with heart and soul, and they make me proud of them. Our vice president, he makes me ... well, I love both of them,” The Associated Press quoted Minaj as saying. “Both of them have a very uncanny ability to be someone that you relate to.”

Minaj’s appearance included an awkward moment when, in an attempt to praise Vance’s political skills, she described him as an “assassin.”

She paused, seemingly regretting her word choice, and after Kirk appeared to wipe a tear from one of her eyes, the artist put her hand over her mouth while the crowd murmured.

“If the internet wants to clip it, who cares? I love this woman,” said Erika Kirk, who became a widow when Charlie Kirk was assassinated in September.

Last month, the rapper shared a message posted by Trump on his Truth Social network about potential actions to sanction Nigeria saying the government is failing to rein in the persecution of Christians in the West African country. Experts and residents say the violence that has long plagued Nigeria isn’t so simply explained.

“Reading this made me feel a deep sense of gratitude. We live in a country where we can freely worship God,” Minaj shared on X. She was then invited to speak at a panel at the US mission to the United Nations along with US Ambassador Mike Waltz and faith leaders.

Minaj said she was tired of being “pushed around,” and she said that speaking your mind with different ideas is controversial because “people are no longer using their minds.” Kirk thanked Minaj for being “courageous,” despite the backlash she is receiving from the entertainment industry for expressing support for Trump.

“I didn’t notice,” Minaj said. “We don’t even think about them.” Kirk then said “we don’t have time to. We’re too busy building, right?”

“We’re the cool kids,” Minaj said.

The Trinidadian-born rapper is best known for her hits “Super Freaky Girl,” “Anaconda” and “Starships.” She has been nominated for 12 Grammy Awards over the course of her career.

In 2018, Minaj was one of several celebrities condemning Trump’s zero-tolerance immigration policy that split more than 5,000 children from their families at the Mexico border. Back then, she shared her own story of arriving to the country at 5 years old, describing herself as an “illegal immigrant.”

“This is so scary to me. Please stop this. Can you try to imagine the terror & panic these kids feel right now?” she posted then on Instagram.

On Sunday on stage with Erika Kirk, Minaj said, “it’s OK to change your mind.”

Entertainment

'Avatar: Fire and Ash' Launches With $88Mn Domestically, $345Mn Worldwide

This image released by 20th Century Studios shows Kiri, performed by Sigourney Weaver, in a scene from "Avatar: Fire and Ash." (20th Century Studios via AP)
This image released by 20th Century Studios shows Kiri, performed by Sigourney Weaver, in a scene from "Avatar: Fire and Ash." (20th Century Studios via AP)
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'Avatar: Fire and Ash' Launches With $88Mn Domestically, $345Mn Worldwide

This image released by 20th Century Studios shows Kiri, performed by Sigourney Weaver, in a scene from "Avatar: Fire and Ash." (20th Century Studios via AP)
This image released by 20th Century Studios shows Kiri, performed by Sigourney Weaver, in a scene from "Avatar: Fire and Ash." (20th Century Studios via AP)

“Avatar: Fire and Ash” opened with $345 million in worldwide sales, according to studio estimates Sunday, notching the second-best global debut of the year and potentially putting James Cameron on course to set yet more blockbuster records.

Sixteen years into the “Avatar” saga, Pandora is still abundant in box-office riches. “Fire and Ash,” the third film in Cameron’s science-fiction franchise, launched with $88 million domestically and $257 million internationally. The only film to open bigger in 2025 was “Zootopia 2” ($497.2 million over three days). In the coming weeks, “Fire and Ash” will have the significant benefit of the highly lucrative holiday moviegoing corridor.

But there was a tad less fanfare to this “Avatar” film, coming three years after “Avatar: The Way of Water.” That film launched in 2022 with a massive $435 million globally and $134 million in North America. Domestically, “Fire and Ash” fell a hefty 35% from the previous installment. Reviews for “Fire and Ash” were also more mixed, scoring a series-low 68% “fresh” score on Rotten Tomatoes.

Yet those quibbles are only a product of the lofty standards of “Avatar.” The first two films rank as two of the three biggest box-office films of all time. To reach those heights, the “Avatar” films have depended on legs more than huge openings.

“Avatar” (2009), opened with $77 million domestically but held the top spot for seven weeks. It ultimately grossed $2.92 billion worldwide. “The Way of Water” also held strong to eventually tally $2.3 billion globally.

“The openings are not what the ‘Avatar’ movies are about,” said David A. Gross, a film consultant who publishes a newsletter on box office numbers. “It’s what they do after they open that made them the #2 and #3 biggest films of all time.”

Should “Fire and Ash” follow in those footsteps, “Avatar” would become the only movie franchise with three $2 billion installments. Working in its favor so far: strong word-of-mouth. Audiences gave it an “A” CinemaScore.

In interviews, Cameron has repeatedly said “Fire and Ash” needs to perform well for there to be subsequent “Avatar” films. (Four and five are already written but not greenlit.) These are exceptionally expensive movies to make. With a production budget of at least $400 million, “Fire and Ash” is one of the costliest films ever made.

“Fire and Ash” was especially boosted by premium format showings, which accounted for 66% of its opening weekend. A narrow majority of moviegoers (56%) chose to watch it in 3D.

The “Avatar” films have always been especially popular overseas. “Fire and Ash” was strongest in China, where its $57.6 million opening weekend surpassed the two previous movies.

“Fire and Ash” didn’t have the weekend entirely to itself. A trio of other new wide releases made it into theaters in hopes of offering some counterprogramming: Lionsgate’s “The Housemaid,” Angel Studios’ “David” and Paramount Pictures’ “The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants.”

In the race for second place, “David” came out on top. The animated tale of David and Goliath collected $22 million from 3,118 theaters, notching the best opening weekend for Angel Studios.

“The Housemaid,” Paul Feig’s twisty psychological thriller starring Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried, opened with $19 million 3,015 theaters. The Lionsgate release, which cost about $35 million to make, is set up well to be one of the top R-rated options in theaters over the holidays. Based on Freida McFadden’s bestselling novel, it stars Sweeney as a woman with a troubled past who becomes a live-in maid for a wealthy family.

Trailing the pack was “The SpongeBob Movie: Search for SquarePants,” which collected $16 million from 3,557 theaters. The G-rated film, based on the Nickelodeon TV series, is the first “SpongeBob” theatrical movie since 2015’s “The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water.”

All of this weekend’s new films will hope the ticket sales keep rolling in over the upcoming Christmas break. Starting Dec. 25, they’ll need to contend with some new wide releases, including A24’s “Marty Supreme,” with Timothée Chalamet; Focus Features’ “Song Sung Blue,” with Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson; and Sony’s “Anaconda,” with Jack Black and Paul Rudd.

Before expanding on Christmas, “Marty Supreme” opened in six theaters over the weekend, grossing $875,000 or $145,000 per theater. That was good enough for not only the best per-theater average of the year, but the best since 2016 and a new high mark for A24. The film, directed by Josh Safdie and starring Chalamet as an aspiring table tennis player in 1950s New York, is the most expensive ever for A24.