It feels like ages since the last good movie about a "May-December" romance. Anne Hathaway, 41, and Nicholas Galitzine, playing a 24-year-old, look to break the drought with this screen adaptation of a novel by Robinne Lee. Hathaway plays an art dealer who's attending Coachella when she happens upon a boy-band heartthrob just before he and his group take the festival stage. He later tracks her down in New York City, sparking a romance that thrills the paparazzi. Thursday, May 2, Prime.

by Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie's new memoir is a book he had to write, said George Packer in The Atlantic. In August 2022, the Satanic Verses author was about to participate in a public discussion of artistic freedom when a knife-wielding Shiite Muslim man — inspired by a fatwa issued against Rushdie in 1989 — rushed the stage and stabbed the 75-year-old novelist 10 times. Somehow, the brutal assault didn't kill Rushdie. But it cost him an eye and most of the use of his left hand, and "he had to will himself through an agonizing recovery — pain, depression, disfigurement, the awful recognition that the fatwa was not behind him after all." The attack also precluded his continuing work on his next novel until he'd fully addressed the experience. Sharing his version of events, Rushdie writes, "would be my way of owning what had happened, making it mine, refusing to be a mere victim." 

"It is miraculous that anyone would manage to write anything coherent about such a recent trauma, let alone anything good," said Sanjena Sathian in NYMag.com. "And Knife is often good." Its first chapter, in which Rushdie revisits the stabbing itself, "contains some of the most precise, chilling prose of his career." Later, by imagining a series of conversations with his attacker, the Booker Prize winner "uses his ample literary talents to explore what cannot be rendered by polemic: a picture of two people, two lives, caught up in civilizational forces beyond them." Less effective is the "rushed" closing chapter in which Rushdie returns to the scene of the crime and writes, vaguely, that he has made peace with what happened. The chapter "reads like an epiphany forced on deadline," probably because Rushdie was longing to resume writing fiction — "the struggle he actually chose, not the one he was coerced into." 

"This is not, it must be said, the most elegant book," said Dwight Garner in The New York Times. Its author often free-associates, informing readers of everything from how he wooed his current wife to his opinion of Law & Order. "But Rushdie was wise to largely stick to the details and stay out of his story's way," and the book's 209 pages fly by. Rushdie never asked to become a free-speech martyr — shadowed by Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa for decades and eventually maimed by a radical believer who answered that execution order. But his humane, often witty account of the consequences is clarifying. "It reminds us of the threats the free world faces. It reminds us of the things worth fighting for.

The journalist who spent six years in captivity

Terry Anderson had just finished a Saturday morning game of tennis when they came for him. It was March 1985, and the former Marine was the Beirut bureau chief for the Associated Press, and one of the few Westerners remaining in Lebanon as the civil war reached its 10th year. As Anderson dropped off his tennis partner, three armed men jumped from a green Mercedes, grabbed him, and sped off. He'd spend the next 2,454 days in captivity, held by Islamists from the Iran-backed militant group Hezbollah. Kept in dimly lit cells, where he slept on a thin mattress on a concrete floor, he was chained, blindfolded, and beaten. During his long stretches in solitary confinement, he said after his release, only his Catholic faith — and innate "stubbornness" — kept him from going insane. "You wake up every day, and you summon up the energy from somewhere, and you get through the day," he said. "And you do it, day after day after day." 

Anderson was born in a small Ohio town where his father was "the village police officer," said The New York Times. After high school he won a scholarship to the University of Michigan but joined the Marines instead. He served in Japan and Vietnam as a combat journalist, then earned a journalism degree from Iowa State and started with AP. He reported from Japan and South Africa before heading for Lebanon, where he covered the war for several years before his abduction. During his captivity, "haggard" images of Anderson issued by his kidnappers "became familiar across the world," said The Telegraph (U.K.). In the U.S. he "came to symbolize" a hostage crisis that had ensnared 17 other Western victims. Fellow prisoners paid tribute to his "bravery and sense of humor" and described him feistily arguing religion and politics with his captors. 

Released at the war's end in 1991, Anderson returned to the U.S. and "lived a peripatetic life," said the Associated Press. He gave speeches, taught journalism, wrote a best-selling memoir, and operated a blues bar, a Cajun restaurant, and a Virginia horse ranch. But he also struggled with the aftereffects of his captivity, including post-traumatic stress disorder. "People ask me, 'Did you get over them?'" he said in 2018. "I don't know! Ask my ex-wife — ask my third ex-wife."