Entertainment
Jennifer Lopez files for divorce from Ben Affleck after two years of marriage
Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck are officially over — again.
Lopez filed to divorce the Oscar-winning “Argo” actor-director Tuesday in Los Angeles County Superior Court, according to legal documents reviewed by The Times. The couple’s two-year anniversary was July 17 in Nevada, and the filing falls on the two-year anniversary of their wedding ceremony in Georgia.
Representatives for Lopez and Affleck did not immediately respond to The Times’ request for comment.
Lopez does not say whether she and Affleck had a prenuptial agreement, according to TMZ, which first reported the stars’ split on Tuesday.
Signs that the couple was headed for the rocks — or that the boat had hit the jetty already — have been ample in recent months, with People reporting May 17 that they were living apart and following up May 22 with word from an “exclusive source” that their marriage was “not in the best place at the moment.”
A disconnect between Lopez‘s and Affleck’s approaches to life was mentioned more than once, with a source telling People in May that “Ben hates all attention and it makes him very uncomfortable” and “Jennifer has always had a different approach.” A week into June, TMZ reported that the eight-figure Affleck-Lopez mansion and its 24 bathrooms had been quietly up for sale for a couple of weeks and that divorce was “imminent.”
The July Fourth holiday weekend saw the two on opposite ends of the country, per People: Affleck in L.A., Lopez in New York’s Hamptons.
The couple first met in 2002 on the set of “Gigli,” when Lopez was still married to her second husband, Cris Judd. JLo filed for divorce two days after she was caught kissing Affleck at her surprise birthday party.
Affleck proposed in November 2002 with a $2.5-million pink diamond, but the couple postponed their September wedding the day they were due to walk down the aisle, citing the media firestorm surrounding their relationship. By January, it was reported that Bennifer was officially over.
They spent the next 18 years apart with different partners — Lopez was married to singer Marc Anthony from 2004 to 2014 and was engaged to former New York Yankee Alex Rodriguez between 2019 and 2021. Meanwhile, Affleck was married to Jennifer Garner from 2005 to 2018; the parents of three have remained friends and even co-parented with Lopez, who has twins with Anthony.
But you can’t fight fate or power-couple status. Affleck and Lopez were spotted together again in 2021 and announced their second engagement in 2022 after he proposed in a bubble bath with a giant green ring. They were wed in Las Vegas later that year and seemed to enjoy embodying the best of early 2000s nostalgia before divorce rumors began to spread this spring, right before Lopez canceled her summer tour.
“We lost a sense of ourselves, and we needed to separate because we didn’t know how to survive it,” Lopez told Variety in February, talking about her and Affleck’s 2004 breakup under extreme media scrutiny. “I had to figure myself out, and he had to figure himself out.”
Looks as if they might have figured things out together, finally. And the answer is, “apart.”
Times staff writer Nathan Solis contributed to this report.
Movie Reviews
The Substance – NZIFF Closing Night 13th Floor Film Review
The 13th Floor’s Shamin Yazdani has been busy sitting in the dark, catching as many NZIFF as she can including The Substance on Closing Night. Here is her review and a summary of what was good and not so good at the Film Festival.
And just like that, my NZIFF experience (and selection of auteur films) comes to an end with the closing night film, The Substance.
During the film’s introduction, the audience is forewarned that we are in for a wild ride and to expect to be on the edge of our seats. In my version of events however, it’s a ride worth skipping and a seat worth ejecting.
Better on paper than on screen, the concept of The Substance, while strong, is met with weak execution by filmmaker Coralie Fargeat. Some very salient and relevant issues are acknowledged in the movie (namely aging, conflicting ideologies between the new and older generation/s, the way in which we (women?) contort ourselves in the pursuit of unattainable perfection, “the grass is greener” etc) but ultimately Fargeat falls short in examining these concepts in any meaningful way. She instead leans into lazy tropes, endorses and perpetuates the male gaze through the uninspired fetishisation of the female body, and in the final act, takes an unexpected turn into absurdist territory, which doesn’t land. It drones on in a self-indulgent attempt to provoke and shock for little reason other than to be memorable, and that’s not a good enough reason to waste two hours and 20 minutes of anyone’s time. TL;DR what it delivers in aesthetic it lacks in substance. How meta!
The Silver Lining – the closing night film was by no means a reflection of the calibre of this year’s selections (and hopefully not an indication of 2025’s lineup)! My ratings:
We Were DangerousXXXx
Head South XXXX
The Crossing XXXX
Sasquatch Sunset XXXXx
Eno XXX
The Substance XXx
Shamin Yazdani
Shamin is an Iranian New Zealander and multi-hyphenate creative engaged in storytelling across diverse mediums and platforms. She began her professional journey in the UAE and London, steadily advancing to creative producing in broadcast television. Shamin’s contributions in film and creative direction have featured on various platforms and publications including BBC World News, Vogue Arabia, Elle Arabia, Harper’s Bazaar Arabia, The Gulf Film Festival, MENA Film Festival, and London Shubbak Festival.
Movie Reviews
Here’s What People Are Posting On Letterboxd After Watching “It Ends With Us”
Since It Ends With Us was recently released in theaters, the book adaptation has garnered a lot of attention for the way it was marketed to audiences, as well as the alleged drama that unfolded between the cast and the film’s director. But while a lot of people have opinions about these above topics, what about the movie itself? Well, let’s just say people have a lot of thoughts. Below, we rounded up some of the most opinionated Letterboxd reviews of It Ends With Us:
Note: We provided copies of the reviews underneath the images just in case the text is hard to read.
Entertainment
Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's daughter Shiloh officially drops Pitt from last name
The daughter of actors Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt appears to have officially dropped her father’s last name.
Shiloh Jolie, who submitted a petition to remove her father’s surname from hers in May, filed a decree Monday asking the court to officially recognize the change, according to court documents reviewed Tuesday by The Times. She will be legally known as Shiloh Nouvel Jolie instead of by her birth name, Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt.
The “Kung Fu Panda 3” voice actor filed her petition in Los Angeles County Superior Court upon her 18th birthday in May and later published a name-change notice in the July 8 edition of The Times. The notice, which some outlets mischaracterized as the youngster “taking out an ad” to announce her departure from her famous father, is in fact part of a state legal procedure that helps screen disingenuous name changes.
Shiloh hired and paid her own lawyer to see the matter through, NBC News reported. The attorney, Peter Levine, previously told The Times that the media “should be more careful in their reporting, especially when covering a young adult who has made an independent and significant decision following painful events, and is merely following legal process.”
Levine did not immediately respond Tuesday to The Times’ request for additional comment.
The petition was postponed in July after a clerical error delayed Shiloh’s hearing. The hearing was rescheduled for Monday and the petition was granted with little fanfare, TMZ reported.
Shiloh was born on May 27, 2006, in Swakopmund, Namibia. She is the third-eldest of the former Hollywood power couple’s six children and the eldest of their three biological children. Oscar winners Jolie and Pitt also share kids Maddox, 23; Pax, 20; Zahara, 19; and twins Knox and Vivienne, 16. (Although the “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” stars have yet to finalize details of their divorce, they were declared legally unmarried in 2019.)
Shiloh’s younger sister Vivienne recently dropped Pitt from her last name when it appeared in the Playbill for “The Outsiders.” Zahara also introduced herself without her father’s moniker during a presentation with her sorority at Spelman College.
In September 2016, Jolie filed for divorce from Pitt days after they allegedly had a physical altercation on a flight home on a private plane from Europe. Several of the actors’ children were also allegedly involved in the incident, according to an FBI report.
Details about the 2016 confrontation emerged in a 2022 lawsuit Jolie filed against the FBI. The alleged incident was also brought up during Jolie and Pitt’s battle over Chateau Miraval, their winemaking estate and family home in the South of France that also served as the site of their 2014 nuptials.
Pitt has not publicly addressed his daughter’s legal move, but People reported that the “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” star was “aware and upset” by the change.
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