Review: Tessa Thompson is the ultimate restless housewife in a viciously updated ‘Hedda’

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“What a horrible story! What a hideous play!” a theater critic for the Daily Telegraph lamented after the London premiere of “Hedda Gabler” in 1891. Victorian audiences were repelled by Henrik Ibsen’s fatally attractive newlywed who appears to have it all — the fancy house, the doting husband — only to be violently bored.

But writer-director Nia DaCosta (“Candyman,” “The Marvels”) and her star Tessa Thompson understand Hedda down to the pretty poison in her molecules. Their rollicking redo, set from dusk to hangover at a drunken bacchanal, is vibrant and viciously alive. With apologies to Ibsen’s ghost, DaCosta’s tweaks have sharpened its rage. I don’t think that long-dead critic would like this “Hedda” any better. I think it’s divine.

Thompson’s Hedda is a clever, status-conscious snot raised to believe that her sole purpose is to be a rich man’s wife. With no hobbies or career and no interest in motherhood, her only creative outlets are squandering money and machinating the success of her milquetoast husband, middlebrow academic George (Tom Bateman), who has such a flimsy hold on his bride that his last name might as well be attached to hers with Scotch tape. (It’s Tesman and it’s pointedly rarely used.) Hedda doesn’t love George. In fact, she seems to think he’s a whiny little worm. But she’s dead-set on securing him a promotion to afford her expensive tastes.

If Hedda had been born a man, she’d be leading armies into battle like her late father, General Gabler, who spawned her out of wedlock. Instead, she takes out her aggression on civilians. Using her charm offensive, Hedda goads naive spouses to cheat, recovering alcoholics to drink and depressives to wander off into the darkness with a revolver. Some of her havoc is calculated, most of it is out of pique that others are living braver, more fulfilling lives. All of it feels like a cat tipping over water glasses just to see them shatter. Like the nasty seductress of “Dangerous Liaisons,” she’s a warning that frustrated women aren’t merely a hazard to themselves — they’re a menace to the society that made them.

Inspired by her antihero, DaCosta manipulates Ibsen to suit her own goals. She’s updated the play’s setting to 1950s England, a similar-in-spirit era in which well-bred women were kept domesticated. (I can’t wait for someone to do a version among the tradwives of Utah.) From there, DaCosta has smartly tightened the narrative, which used to have a key scene at an off-stage bachelor party to which Hedda was pointedly not invited. “What a pity the fair lady can’t be there, invisible,” Ibsen’s Hedda grumbled at being left home while the men got to carouse.

In DaCosta’s version, the whole drama unfolds during a martini and cocaine-fueled rager at Hedda’s mansion, a party she’s throwing to impress George’s potential new boss, Professor Greenwood (Finbar Lynch), who she hears has a bohemian streak. At her own happening on her own turf, Hedda couldn’t be more visibly in command. She rallies the guests to hurl her former classmate, Thea (Imogen Poots), a wretchedly earnest drip, into a nearby lake and gets the whole room grooving to a dance band’s cover of “It’s Oh So Quiet,” the swinging hit that the Icelandic pop singer Björk would popularize a half-century later. It’s a great song pick with manic crescendos — You blow a fuse, zing boom! The devil cuts loose, zing boom! — that capture Hedda’s feverish mood shifts.

We know this evening will go wrong from the film’s opening shot of Hedda facing down two policemen who keep interrupting her explanation of the last 24 hours. “Where should I start?” she says with smothered exasperation. As we cut back to watch the night unfold, a shot of Hedda surveying the crowd from an upstairs landing feels like she’s looking at a game board — Clue, perhaps? — with a weapon stashed in every room. Which threat is most pressing? The pistols she keeps in a leather box, the precarious crystal chandelier or the lake’s deep waters outside?

Thompson is marvelous in the role. Even the way she chomps a cherry off a cocktail toothpick has menace. I first saw her as the lead in “Romeo and Juliet” at a 99-seat theater in Pasadena when she was barely 20 years old (there’s so much talent in our small stage scene), so it’s a nice reminder that the funny and soulful actor of the “Thor” and “Creed” franchises is also a hell of a good classical performer and a worthy star on her own.

She wears Hedda’s lovely mask with confidence — red lips, lush cheekbones, cool demeanor — and periodically allows it to slip. Editor Jacob Schulsinger often allows Hedda a tiny hesitation before she charges ahead ruining people’s lives, long enough to know that she’s considering the consequences. “Sometimes I can’t help myself, I just do things all of a sudden on a whim,” she admits to the nosy Judge Brack (Nicholas Pinnock), revealing a sliver of weakness. She’s almost (nearly) asking for help. Yet, the judge just wants to maneuver her into bed. How tedious.

DaCosta boldly layers race and sexuality on top of Ibsen’s tale. She’s gender-swapped Hedda’s ex-lover, Eilert, into a lesbian named Eileen (a swaggering Nina Hoss), a brilliant, openly norm-defying author who is George’s job-seeking competition (and the only person Hedda enjoys kissing). If earlier incarnations of Hedda didn’t dare defy social rules when she was white and straight, being Black and queer adds so much additional peril that the script barely needs to say out loud. The new tension is there in just a few whispers, as when Hedda overhears a guest murmur that their hostess is “duskier than I thought she would be.” Hedda doesn’t acknowledge the slight. That would mean admitting vulnerability. She simply starts destroying the speaker in the very next scene.

What’s wiser? Eileen’s determination to face down the boys and be accepted for her full self or Hedda sneaking around and steering everyone’s fates behind the scenes? They can’t team up — they’re doomed to tear each other to shreds. And as much glee as we get watching Hedda’s rampage, it aches to see these two formidable women reduce each other to hysterics (to use the medical diagnosis of the day).

From our 21st century perspective, they both have a right to be mad and they both might be mentally ill. DaCosta doesn’t offer a verdict, but she plunges us so deeply into Hedda’s headspace that we can hear how certain things set her off. Insults hit her with a knife-like hiss of air; fresh schemes get her charging around to Hildur Guðnadóttir’s tumultuous, percussive score.

Costume designer Lindsay Pugh has done incredible work outfitting the film’s central female roles. Hedda wears bullet-like strands of pearls that choke her neck and a jade-colored gown that seems to molder into a festering, jealous shade of green. When her rival, Poot’s Thea, arrives underdressed, Hedda forces her into a hideous frock with fussy bows and an ungainly skirt. Poots, her nose raw and red, her character kicked when she’s down, gamely looks a fright, trusting that moral fiber will expose Hedda’s ugly insecurities.

But Pugh’s stroke of genius is putting Eileen not in some sort of mannish suit but in a bombshell dress that highlights her curves like a primal goddess. It’s pure feminine power — just like the film itself — and when Eileen struts into a room of her all-male colleagues, that dress exposes how fast the tenor can shift from awe to jeers and how little wiggle room she or any woman has for error.

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Satellite images show before and after of demolition of White House East Wing

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By MICHAEL BIESECKER

WASHINGTON (AP) — New satellite images taken Thursday show the scale of the demolition of the White House East Wing as President Donald Trump moves forward with the construction of a new ballroom at the White House.

See the change in images from Oct. 23 and Sept. 26, 2025 in images from Planet Labs PBC:

This satellite image from Planet Labs PBC shows the White House in Washington, Sept. 26, 2025, with the East Wing intact before demolition began. (Planet Labs PBC via AP)
This satellite image from Planet Labs PBC shows demolition of the East Wing of the White House in Washington, Thursday, Oct. 23, 2025. (Planet Labs PBC via AP)

East Wing demolished, photos show

The East Wing, where first ladies created history, planned state dinners and promoted causes, is now history itself. The two-story structure of drawing rooms and offices, including workspace for first ladies and their staffs, has been turned into rubble, demolished as part of the Republican president’s plan to build what he said is now a $300 million ballroom nearly twice the size of the White House.

Trump said Wednesday that keeping the East Wing would have “hurt a very, very expensive, beautiful building” that he said presidents have wanted for years. He said “me and some friends of mine” will pay for the ballroom at no cost to taxpayers.

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Trump allowed the demolition to begin this week despite not yet having approval from the relevant government agencies with jurisdiction over construction on federal property.

Preservationists have also urged the Trump administration to halt the demolition until plans for the 90,000-square-foot (8,361-square-meter) ballroom can go through the required public review process.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation said the review process, including time for members of the public to comment on plans for the ballroom, would “provide a crucial opportunity for transparency and broad engagement — values that have guided preservation of the White House under every administration going back to the public competition in 1792 that produced the building’s original design.”

The Trust also expressed concern to the National Capital Planning Commission, the National Park Service and the Commission of Fine Arts that the size of the proposed ballroom will overwhelm the Executive Mansion, which stands at 55,000 square feet “and may permanently disrupt the carefully balanced classical design of the White House.”

Both commissions have jurisdiction over changes to the White House. The park service manages the White House grounds and has a role in the process as several trees on the South Lawn have been cut down as part of the construction. Both agencies currently are closed because of the government shutdown. Trump installed top aide Will Scharf as chairman of the planning commission.

The National Park Service said in August, after the White House announced the ballroom project, that it had provided historic preservation guidance and support as part of a broader consultation process. It said final decisions are made by the Executive Office of the President.

Rare dinosaur mummies help scientists recreate their prehistoric lives

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By ADITHI RAMAKRISHNAN, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — Researchers have unearthed a spooky pair of dinosaur mummies that seem to have been preserved in an unexpected way.

These dinosaur remains are different from the wrapped mummies of Egypt or natural human mummies that get accidentally preserved in bogs or deserts. Mummified dinosaurs are so old that their skin and soft tissues fossilize. Scientists use these rare remnants, along with dinosaur bones, to recreate what these prehistoric creatures may have looked like.

Scientists have been uncovering dinosaur mummies for over a century. Some were buried quickly after dying, while others sank into bodies of water or dried out.

This image provided by the University of Chicago shows impressions of a mummified dinosaur’s foot. (Tyler Keillor/The University of Chicago via AP)

Many of them — including a duck-billed dinosaur mummy discovered in 1908 — hail from an area in eastern Wyoming. In the new study, scientists returned to this so-called mummy zone and found new remains, including the mummy of a duck-billed dinosaur that was only a few years old when it died.

“This is the first juvenile of a dinosaur that really is mummified,” said Paul Sereno, a University of Chicago paleontologist who was involved in the discovery.

Surprisingly, the new mummies seem to have been preserved without any evidence of fossilized skin. Instead, they left impressions of their skin and scales on a thin layer of clay that hardened with help from microbes.

This image provided by the University of Chicago shows the scaly skin of a young mummified dinosaur found in Wyoming. (Tyler Keillor/University of Chicago via AP)

This style of mummification has preserved other organisms before, but scientists didn’t think it could happen on land. It’s possible that other mummies found at the Wyoming site could have formed in a similar way, Sereno said.

Scientists used these clay templates to paint a clearer picture of what the duck-billed dinosaurs might have looked like when they were alive, including spikes on their tail and hooves on their feet. The new findings were published Thursday in the journal Science.

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Understanding how dinosaur mummies form can help scientists uncover more of them. It’s important to look not just for dinosaur bones, but also for skin and soft tissue impressions that could go unstudied or even picked away, said Mateusz Wosik, a Misericordia University paleontologist who wasn’t involved with the discovery.

More mummies offer more insights into how these creatures grew and lived.

“Every single time we find one, there’s such a treasure trove of information about these animals,” said Stephanie Drumheller, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who wasn’t part of the study.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Dinosaurs were thriving in North America before the mass-extinction asteroid strike, study suggests

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By CHRISTINA LARSON, Associated Press

Scientists have long debated whether dinosaurs were in decline before an asteroid smacked the Earth 66 million years ago, causing mass extinction.

New research suggests dinosaur populations were still thriving in North America before the asteroid strike, but it’s only one piece of the global picture, independent experts say.

“Dinosaurs were quite diverse and now we know there were quite distinct communities” roaming around before being abruptly wiped out, said Daniel Peppe, a study co-author and paleontologist at Baylor University.

In this photo provided by researchers, Caitlin Leslie collects paleomagnetic samples in the San Juan Basin of northwestern New Mexico in May 2016. (Daniel J. Peppe via AP)

The latest evidence comes from analyzing a portion of the Kirtland Formation in northern New Mexico that’s been known for around 100 years to contain several interesting dinosaur fossils.

Scientists now say those fossils and the surrounding rocks date from around 400,000 years before the asteroid struck, which is considered a short interval in geologic time. The age was determined by analyzing small particles of volcanic glass within sandstone and by studying the direction of magnetic minerals within mudstone of the rock formation.

The results show “the animals deposited here must have been living close to the end of the Cretaceous,” the last dinosaur era, said Peppe.

In this photo provided by researchers, Daniel Peppe, Utanah Denetclaw, Anne Weil and Blake Gorman collect paleomagnetic samples in the De-Na-Zin Wilderness area of the San Juan Basin in northwestern New Mexico in May 2011. (Steven L. Brusatte via AP)

The findings were published Thursday in the journal Science.

Differences between the dinosaur species found in New Mexico and those found at a site in Montana that were previously dated to the same time frame “run counter to the idea that dinosaurs were in decline,” he said.

The fossils previously found at the New Mexico site include Tyrannosaurus rex, a huge, long-necked dinosaur, and a Triceratops-like horned herbivore.

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Scientists who weren’t involved in the study cautioned that evidence found at a single location might not point to a broader trend.

“This new evidence about these very late-surviving dinosaurs in New Mexico is very exciting,” said University of Bristol paleontologist Mike Benton, who was not involved in the study. But he added, “This is just one location, not a representation of the complexity of dinosaur faunas at the time all over North America or all over the world.”

Although scientists have found dinosaur fossils on every continent, accurately dating them can be a challenge, said paleontologist and study co-author Andrew Flynn of New Mexico State University. Easily datable material such as carbon doesn’t survive in fossils, so scientists must look for surrounding rocks with precise characteristics that can be used to determine ages.

Further research might help complete the picture of what range of dinosaur species was alive globally on the eve of the asteroid crash, said Flynn.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content.