December 23, 2005

Toward the end of Terrence Malick's elegiac film, ''The New World,'' the young Indian princess known as Pocahontas -- the ''delight and darling'' of her father, the king of the Powhatans of coastal Virginia -- pauses in front of a gilt cage containing a live skunk. Brought from the New World to the Old in 1616, this morose creature, curled as tight as a fist, is being presented to the English court alongside a bald eagle, an Indian priest and Pocahontas herself. The princess, dressed in Jacobean costume, a ruff collar fluting around her throat, and played by the sublimely lovely newcomer Q'orianka Kilcher, looks both at ease and entirely foreign. When she sees this pitiful captive, does she see any part of herself? If that question is never answered in ''The New World,'' it is because Mr. Malick, who wrote and directed the film, his fourth in three decades, never presumes to know the answer. For the filmmaker, who is more poet than historian, Pocahontas is clearly a metaphor (virgin land, as it were), but to see her as exclusively metaphor would only repeat history's error. What interests Mr. Malick is how and why enlightened free men, when presented with new realms of possibility, decided to remake this world in their own image: free men like Capt. John Smith (Colin Farrell), who marvels at the beauty of a place where ''the blessings of the earth are bestowed on all'' while Indians lie bound in his boat, and who claims to love, only to destroy.

New York Yankees new center fielder Johnny Damon gets hair cut in preparation for his introduction; photos (M)

Kuwait is close to opening its lucrative oil production business again to outsiders thirty years after foreign oil companies were expelled from country; move, expected to be approved by Parliament in January, means that one of top producers in Persian Gulf finally will lift some of restrictions imposed on foreign operators; recent high oil prices have encouraged governments to further tighten rules governing foreign participation and prompted new wave of 'resource nationalism'; Venezuela, Russia and Bolivia each have pushed for greater control, while Britain plans to increase taxes on its production from North Sea; photo (M)

Actors from Broadway attend six o'clock Mass at St Malachy's Roman Catholic Church, also known as Actors' Chapel, every Sunday evening; many Broadway performers are Christian and rely on their faith to get them through business filled with rejection and uncertainty; photos (M)

WITH his latest film, ''Munich,'' Steven Spielberg forgoes the emotional bullying and pop thrills that come so easily to him to tell the story of a campaign of vengeance that Israel purportedly brought against Palestinian terrorists in the wake of the 1972 Olympics. An unsparingly brutal look at two peoples all but drowning in a sea of their own blood, ''Munich'' is by far the toughest film of the director's career and the most anguished. Mr. Spielberg has been pummeling audiences with his virtuosity for nearly as long as he has been making movies; now, he tenders an invitation to a discussion. The film's title suggests that this is the story of what happened at Munich in September 1972, and it is, though only in part. Most of the action -- and if nothing else, this nail-biter is a full-on action movie -- takes place in the immediate aftermath of Munich, after 11 Israeli hostages were murdered by members of a Palestinian terrorist group known as Black September. Based on George Jonas's disputed book ''Vengeance: The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team,'' and adapted to the screen by the oddball couple of Eric Roth and Tony Kushner (''Forrest Gump'' meets ''Angels in America''), the film pivots on five Israeli agents, who, recruited to exact revenge by a country that will officially deny their existence, zigzag Europe as they hunt suspects over months and then years.