内容摘要：Displaced Palestinians fleeing Beit Lahia amid ongoing Israeli military operations in the Gaza Strip arrive in Jabalia, northern Gaza, on Sunday, May 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi)

Displaced Palestinians fleeing Beit Lahia amid ongoing Israeli military operations in the Gaza Strip arrive in Jabalia, northern Gaza, on Sunday, May 18, 2025. (AP Photo/Jehad Alshrafi)

and Ed Harris, confronts a dark reality of post-combat struggle with as much humor and playfulness as it does trauma and sorrow. It comes from a real place, and you can tell. Hausmann-Stoke is himself a veteran and “My Dead Friend Zoe” is dedicated to a pair of his platoon mates who killed themselves. The opening titles note the film was “inspired by a true story.”Audience disinterest has characterized many, though not all, of the films about the

and the output has pretty much dried up over the years. “My Dead Friend Zoe” feels like it was made with an awareness of that trend and as a rebuke to it.This is an often breezy and funny movie for what, on paper, is a difficult and dark story. But the comic tone of “My Dead Friend Zoe” is, itself, a spirited rejection to not just the heaviness of many films about veterans but of the grief that can consume those who have dealt with loss and post-traumatic stress disorder.Throughout the film, Zoe appears only to Merit, ala Brad Pitt in “Fight Club,” singing alongside her as she drives or impatiently waiting for Merit to come home from a run. Whether this, following some unspecified end to Zoe, is a healthy thing or not for Merit is increasingly in doubt. Merit needs to cling to her friend, or her memory of her. But Zoe also rolls her eyes at any suggestion of talking through her feelings. Zoe, as an apparition, is both the cause and relief to her pain.

There are a few other points of view, courtesy of two of our finest actors. Freeman plays the counselor of Merit’s mandatory group sessions. He refuses to let Zoe coast. To pressure her to share and participate, he threatens withholding Zoe’s certification.Meanwhile, Merit’s grandfather, Dale (Harris), a Vietnam vet, has just been diagnosed with early Alzheimer’s. Merit is tasked with keeping an eye on him at his rural lakeside cabin and helping him into a retirement community — a prospect that infuriates him. As Merit’s original inspiration for joining the army, Dale — stubborn and tight-lipped — epitomizes an earlier generation of soldier.

In toggling between the present and wartime flashbacks, “My Dead Friend Zoe” is sometimes a bumpy ride. The interplay between Merit and Zoe also shifts, beginning more like a buddy comedy and veering toward horror-film haunting, especially when Merit hesitantly agrees to a date with a worker at the prospective retirement home (Utkarsh Ambudkar).

But the movie’s earnestness carries it through these less smooth moments. So does the cast. Any opportunity to see Freeman or Harris, still at the top of their games, is a chance to be treasured. Freeman is typically sage and Harris characteristically fiery. But the leads are even better. Morales is at her finest as a cynical soldier, devoted to her friend but little else. And with compelling poise, Martin-Green (“The Walking Dead”) carries a movie that at times can feel scattershot but never not sincere.AP correspondent Charles de Ledesma reports after British journalist Dom Phillips was killed while researching an ambitious book on how to protect the world’s largest rainforest, friends vowed to finish the project. Three years later, their task is complete.

Phillips, who had been a regular contributor to The Guardian newspaper, was taking one of the final reporting trips planned for his book when he was gunned down by fishermen on June 5, 2022, in. Also killed was Bruno Pereira, a Brazilian expert on Indigenous tribes who had made enemies in the region for defending the local communities from intruding fishermen, poachers and illegal gold miners.

made headlines around the world. Nine people have been“It was just a horrifying, really sad moment. Everybody was trying to think: How can you deal with something like this? And the book was there,” said Jonathan Watts, an Amazon-based environmental writer for The Guardian who coauthored the foreword and one of the chapters.