MOVIES: You Had to Be There (2025, Nick Davis)

The musical Godspell opened off-Broadway in 1971, and was such a hit that new companies began to appear around the world within a few months. This documentary focuses on the 1972 Toronto production, which Lin-Manuel Miranda describes as the "'27 Yankees of comedy." That cast included Victor Garber, Andrea Martin, Eugene Levy, Gilda Radner, Martin Short, and Dave Thomas; Paul Shaffer was the musical director. And those are just the names that are well known in the United States; both Jayne Eastwood and Rudy Webb went on to significant careers in Canada.

The challenge for Nick Davis in making this film is that there is no video footage of the production, and the only audio recording was made by Short, who (without permission) clipped a couple of microphones to the set one night and plugged them into his portable cassette recorder. So we get a lot of talking head interviews from the entire company (except for Radner, who died in 1989), and some low-budget animated re-creations of key moments in the history of the production.

And in large part because this company was made up of such remarkable performers, those interviews are more than enough to tell the story in entertaining fashion. There are terrific memories of Radner's audition, which the rest of the group thought was a disaster; Martin's last-minute addition to the cast; the adjustments made when Garber left the company to make the film version of Godspell.

Not all of the memories are happy. One of the lesser-known members of the cast, Avril Chown, explains why she left show business a few years after Godspell, having dealt with sexual harrassment in her first venture into American television.

"You had to be there" moments can be frustrating for those of us who weren't. But when the members of this cast meet for a reunion, gathering around the piano to sing through the songs one more time, Davis almost manages to make us feel, just a little, as if we had been.

MOVIES: Wildwood  (2026, Travis Knight)

The latest from stop-motion animation studio Laika, and at 130 minutes, reportedly the longest stop-motion movie ever made. It's rated PG-13, and the violence and adult themes mean that it is not for the smallest children. It's a stunning piece of work.

Prue (voiced by Petyon Elizabeth Lee) is a young teen in Portland, Oregon. (That's Laika's home, and the first chunk of the movie is a loving depiction of the city.) Her parents (Jake Johnson & Maya Erskine) have warned her that her baby brother Mac must never leave the house, but when she's left to babysit, she decides to take Mac on a trip around town.

When Mac is kidnapped by a flock of crows and taken into the Impenetrable Wilderness -- a fantasy version of the forest just outside Portland -- Prue follows, accompanied by her classmate Curtis (Jacob Tremblay). They find a world of talking animals, including a ferocious army of coyotes who take orders from the Dowager Governess ALexandra (Carey Mulligan). It is Alexandra who has taken Mac, and Prue and Curtis must unite the rest of the forest to fight an epic battle against her.

And I do mean "epic" The final battle scene would be a massive undertaking in live action -- two armies, each with aerial support from a giant flock of birds and armed with arrows, guns, bayonets, catapults, and flaming cannonballs -- but to do it in stop-motion is astonishing, and you can understand why the movie took five years to make.

The voice cast is stellar, with small roles played by (among others) Mahershala Ali, Richard E. Grant, Angela Bassett, Awkwafina, Tom Waits, Blythe Danner, Jemaine Clement, Tantoo Cardinal, and Len Cariou.

The condensing of Colin Meloy's novel is occasionally a bit clunky, with too much background information coming in awkward dumps, and the story is a bit of a hodgepodge of elements from other fairy tales and novels. The attempts of Alexandra to sway Curtis to her side, for instance, will surely remind you of Edmund and the White Witch from the Narnia books.

But if the tropes are familiar, they are skillfully juggled; the voice cast is superb; and the animation is breathtaking. An enormous achievement, and not to be missed if you have any interest at all in animation.

MOVIES: Wicker (2026, Alex Huston Fischer & Eleanor Wilson) 

The opening title card tells us what to expect with a declaration that this movie is "based on a fable" by Ursula Wills. And indeed, we are plopped down into a medieval village where the characters have no names; they are simply identified by their job, or since this is a patriarchy, their connection to a man's job: the Butcher, the Baker's Wife, the Tailor's Wife's Sister, and so on.

Our central character is the only woman in the movie with a job of her own. The Fisherwoman (Olivia Colman) is unmarried. Combine that with the fact that she usually smells strongly of fish, and it's easy to see why she's the village outcast.

Tired of both the jokes and the solitude, the Fisherwoman goes to the Basket Weaver (Peter Dinklage) and asks him to make her a husband. "Be at the chapel in a month," he tells her. When she arrives a month later, she finds that the Weaver has made a husband (Alexander Skarsgard) for her, woven from wicker.

The filmmakers have done a marvelous job in creating the Wicker Husband, using a combination of costume, CGI, and spectacular sound design. We can see the light coming through gaps in the weaving; we hear every creak of the wicker whenever he moves; and through all the trickery, we can still see Skarsgard's expressive face.

The Fisherwoman and the Wicker Husband have so happy a relationship that even they seem surprised by it, and when that sort of happiness arrives in a village where no one else seems to know what happiness is, much less have any of it, problems are inevitable. The biggest driver of the conflict is the Tailor's Wife, a fairy tale Mean Girl played with precisely detailed bitchiness by Elizabeth Debicki.

This is a delightful movie, funny and raunchy without losing the ability to go dark when the story requires. Colman, Skarsgard, and Debicki are terrific, and Dinklage does a fine job with the pseudo-Shakespearean monologues that mark the Weaver as an outsider in his own right.

The supporting characters are admittedly on the thin side, and the plot somewhat quickly sketched out, but such is the nature of fables; Richard E. Grant makes the strongest impression in his brief appearance as the Doctor.

MOVIES: Sense & Sensibility (2026, Georgia Oakley)

When I was a senior in high school, I had to read Pride & Prejudice. It is the closest I ever came in my academic career to not finishing an assigned book. I struggled mightily to slog through that book, trying to figure out why I was supposed to care whether or not these sisters managed to get themselves married off in the proper sequence. (For some reason, that idea -- that the younger sisters couldn't get married until the older ones had -- seemed especially silly to me). And every decade or so, I find myself thinking that I should give Jane Austen another try, but I have continued to crash into her novels as if they were brick walls.

And it must be something about her prose, because when I see the films adapted from her books, I usually like them. I very much liked both the Gwyneth Paltrow and the Anya Taylor-Joy versions of Emma (and its looser adaptation, Clueless); I adored Love & Friendship, Whit Stillman's adaptation of Lady Susan; I even liked the 1999 film of Mansfield Park, which I remember Austen purists being terribly upset by.

But even in cinematic form, I struggle the most with the "marrying off the sisters" stories, Pride & Prejudice and Sense & Sensibility. And this new adaptation continues the tradition.

Don't get me wrong, it's a good movie -- smartly cast, well acted, handsomely produced -- and it strongly emphasizes the financial realities that make the Dashwood sisters' search for husbands so important, more so than I remember the 1995 Ang Lee film doing. But I still find it hard to care. I understand full well that this says far more about me than it does about Austen or about Oakley's movie.

On the off chance that you are not an Austenite, the story begins with Mrs. Dashwood (Catriona Balfe) and her three daughters nervously checking the mail each day, waiting for news of the will of Mr. Dashwood. They hope for a generous inheritance, perhaps even the family home. But alas, the home goes to Mr. Dashwood's son from his first marriage, and the financial settlement is less than the women had hoped. That makes it more urgent than ever that the two daughters of marriageable age, Elinor (Daisy Edgar-Jones) and Marianne (Esme Creed-Miles), find husbands, preferably rich ones.

Bring on the suitors: Edward Ferrars (George McKay), John Willoughby (Frank Dillane), and Colonel "No First Name" Brandon (Herbert Nordrum) (on a shallow note, these are collectively the least sexy batch of suitors I can remember seeing in an Austen adaptation) and the stories of turbulent courtships, romantic betrayals, and (of course) happy endings.

More than most Austen movies, this one is aware of the natural world outside the parlors and ballrooms. From the opening scene, it's a world of muddy petticoats, dirty fingernails, and clothes soaked through by sudden storms. The cottage to which the Dashwoods are forced to relocate after leaving the family home is delightfully cramped and grubby (fine work by set decorator Celia De La Hey)).

The cast is all solid, though none of the leads are as memorable as those in the 1995 version. The most memorable performance is that of Fiona Shaw as Mrs. Jennings; she's giving a masterclass in the subtle variations that can be wrung from a braying cackle.

I liked the movie as much as I will ever like any version of this story, I suppose, and I imagine that Austenites will be quite happy with it.

MOVIES: Gay Purr-ee (1962, Abe Levitow)

One of only two feature films released by the animation studio United Productions of America (UPA), a major player in American animation in the 1940s and 1950s. UPA is best remembered today for the Mr. Magoo shorts, and for The Gerald McBoing-Boing Show, a TV series based on a character created by Dr. Seuss.

The house style at UPA was defined in sharp contrast to the lush and relatively realistic style of Walt Disney films. UPA's backgrounds were often simplified and more abstract, and they made liberal use of limited animation.

The script for this movie was written by Chuck and Dorothy Jones; Chuck was one of the principal animators behind the classic Looney Tunes cartoons, and he also designed the characters for Gay Purr-ee, who are very recognizably in the Looney Tunes style. The backdrops are lusher than UPA's normal look, but still very much not in the Disney style; they're semi-abstract evocations of French art at the end of the 19th century.

We begin in 1895 in the French countryside, where Meowsette (voiced by Judy Garland), a fluffy Angora cat, has grown bored with country life, and decides to run away to the glamorous life in Paris. Fearing that she will be in danger, her beau, Jeune Tom (Robert Goulet) chases after her, accompanied by his kitten sidekick, Robespierre (Red Buttons).  In Pairs, Meowsette falls into the clutches of the villainous Meowrice (Paul Frees), who in collaboration with his "sister," Mme. Rubens-Chatte (Hermione Gingold), plots to ship Meowsette off to America as the mail-order bride of a rich American cat.

Yes, that's right, the plot of this animated movie for the tiny tots is built around sex trafficking.

There are songs, written by Harold Arlen, some of them in collaboration with E. Y. Harburg. If anyone was hoping that re-teaming Garland with the songwriters from The Wizard of Oz would lead to the same magic, they were, I'm afraid, disappointed. "Paris Is a Lonely Town" and "Little Drops of Rain" are pleasant enough ballads for Garland, and "The Money Cat," for Frees and his quartet of hench-cats, is a marvelously animated number, but "pleasant" is the best these songs can do.

Those hench-cats, by the way, are the most interesting characters in the movie. They're all sharp angles and glowing eyes, and are often positioned so that they're only a silhouette of a cat that seems to have four heads. The other interesting sequence is the "Portraits of Meowsette," in which Meowrice narrates as we see the portraits he has commissioned of Meowsette by all of the Parisian artists of the day -- Picasso, Degas, Seurat, and so on. They're beautifully animated imitations of those artistic styles.

It's a nice movie, of historical interest as one of the first animated films to cast movie stars instead of voice actors, and to build the publicity campaign around those movie stars. (At the top of the poster: "Vive la fun! ... Vive la joy! ... Vive la Judy!")  Frees and Gingold are entertaining villains, and Goulet is charming. But it never fully takes off. The Chuck Jones-designed characters clash with the artsy backdrops, and the UPA animators can't quite get the comic precision that his style of writing requires; facial expressions and punchlines always come just a bit too late. Worth a look for animation devotees or Garland completists, but skippable for most.

MOVIES: La bola negra (2026, Javier Calvo & Javier Ambrossi)

Spain's official submission for Best International Feature Film at the next Academy Awards.

We move among the stories of three Spanish men. In 1932, Carlos (Milo Quifes) has been rejected for membership at an exclusive club because of rumors about his homosexuality; his father urges him to appeal the decision. In 1937, Sebastian (singer/songwriter Guitarricadelafuente, making his acting debut) is a soldier in the Spanish Civil War, assigned to guard Rafael (Miguel Bernardeau), an injured prisoner, and finds himself attracted to the man. And in 2017, Alberto (Carlos Gonzalez), a playwright turned history student, receives word of an inheritance from the grandfather he never met, putting additional strain on Alberto's already difficult relationship with his mother (Lola Dueñas).

Eventually, the connections among these three stories are revealed, but it takes a while, and in the first half of the movie (and it's a long movie, at 159 minutes), all of the stories feel overly familiar. It was hard to be gay in the 1930s; even in the 21st century, parents of gay men can be rejecting and difficult. I found the 1937 segment particularly irritating, because I've never been fond of narratives in which someone is convinced that the person they've just met is the Great Love of their life. If you haven't spoken more than a dozen sentences to one another, that is not love, it's lust. A powerful force in its own right, to be sure, but unconsummated lust does not a tragic romance make.

But as the dots are connected, the story those connections form is more interesting and surprising than any of the individual stories. And even when the three stories feel somewhat by the book, they are told with great style (particular kudos to cinematographer Gris Jordana), and the cast is consistently fine, with Guitarricadelafuente and Gonzalez the standouts. Penelope Cruz is also excellent in a small role as a nightclub singer. (She and Glenn Close receive the "with the special participation of" credit that occasionally pops up in European films; Close feels a bit out of place, an American tossed in with an eye towards attracting American investors and/or audiences.)

There are, I'm sure, elements of this movie that would resonate more strongly with a Spanish audience, for whom the social and political issues raised by the Spanish Civil War and the ways in which they were or were not resolved would have deeper relevance. I am mostly ignorant of that corner of history, but I know enough to understand that a piece of the story has to do with things that were forgotten or ignored after the war, in some cases officially so, and the consequences of such forgetting.

I think the movie is being slightly overpraised -- it's being mentioned as a possible Best Picture nominee-- but I liked it very much. The first half is less compelling, but not so much so that I was ever bored by it, and the payoff in the second half is very strong.

MOVIES: Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother (2026, Bassam Tariq)

For a time in the late 2010s/early 2020s, Bassam Tariq and Mahershala Ali were hired to direct and star in a Blade movie for Marvel. They eventually both left the project before it fell apart entirely, but they have re-united to make this movie, which gives Ali the chance to show off some of the martial arts training he went through for Blade.

Ali plays Latif, a hitman who works for a security company run by Mike (Laith Nakli). As the movie opens, Latif's wife has just died suddenly, leaving him a single father of three children, including an infant daughter. When his wife's breast milk runs out, Latif learns that the baby cannot digest formula, and he spends much of the movie driving around Houston, searching desperately for a source of breast milk.

That task has to be juggled with his continuing assignments from Mike, the latest of which involves Mike's dimwit nephew, Hatty (Abubakr Ali). Hatty runs a Muslim porn site, which has made him the target of a local cult leader/pastor (John Cho), who believes that Hatty's operation is a cover for human trafficking. Mike orders Latif to kill the pastor. 

Complicating matters even further, the death of his wife has triggered a serious crisis of faith for Latif, who is (or at least has been until now) a devout Muslim, and he turns to his imam (Giancarlo Esposito) for spiritual guidance.

The performances are solid; there's lovely supporting work from Adia (just the one name) as Fatiha, Latif's teenage daughter who is beginning to piece together what her father really does for a living.

The movie is, aside from its fight scenes, largely calm and quiet, with lots of conversations about faith and what it demands of us; those conversations come from multiple perspectives, including some brief appearances from the Mormon missionaries who live in Latif's apartment building. 

It's an odd combination of elements in what is, after all, an action movie at heart with fight scenes (very nicely staged) that include the obligatory hero-vs.-small army climactic battle, and it feels like it shouldn't work -- a Muslim hitman's frantic search for breast milk?!? -- but it does. An impressive achievement.

 MOVIES: The History of Concrete (2026, John Wilson)

John Wilson is to documentarians as Douglas Adams is to novelists. There is a topic/plot in their work, but only as much of it as is absolutely required to hold together the digressions which are really at the heart of what they're doing. So it's not surprising that this documentary, while it touches on concrete, wanders far afield to cover a business that preserves the tattoos of the deceased as framed artwork, a 3,100 mile road race that consists of running around the same New York block for months, a Christmas album from the late rapper DMX, and a trip to Rome that pretty much blows the budget for the movie.

It is Wilson's distinctive gift to edit together images from his near-constant videotaping of New York street scenes, interviews with people in quirky professions (meet the guy who sandblasts chewing gum off the sidewalk!), and the slightly fumbling drone of his own second-person narration into dryly witty meditations on urban life. The strange topical leaps and the unexpected detours become a commentary on human interconnection, and the meandering always does somehow circle back to the ostensible topic, if only tangentially.

To the extent that this movie has a throughline, it's Wilson's struggle to find funding for a movie on such an apparently drab topic. We get Zoom calls with potential funders, and the way the light drains from their eyes when they hear the title becomes a running joke. Wilson heads to the one course the Writer's Guild is offering during its strike -- "How to Write a Hallmark Movie" -- and decides to use those guidelines as a guide to structure his movie, which he sort of does, in his own digression-forward way.

My expectations were high walking into this movie. I adored his 3-season HBO series, How To with John Wilson, which gave us similarly semi-focused 25-minute video essays on things like how to appreciate wine, or make small talk. And the best moments of the movie live up to the standard set by that show. But it's a lot easier to make this style work in short doses than it is for 100 minutes, and the droll melancholy does wear thin at times.

If you're already a Wilson fan, this will give you enough of what he does well to be worth your time. If you're a newcomer, it might be a good idea to look at an episode or two of the TV show first, because Wilson is not everyone's cup of tea, and if you're not on his wavelength, this will be a very long 100 minutes.

MOVIES: You Can See Everything (2026, Nathan Fielder & Lance Oppenheim)

This documentary was first seen as a secret screening at the Telluride Film Festival just over a month ago, and it instantly became the most talked-about documentary -- heck, most talked-about movie, period -- of the year. This is a rare case in which you should believe the hype.

In the month before she begins her 11-year federal prison sentence on fraud charages related to her healthcare company Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes invites the directors into her home to record her life with partner Billy Evans and their children; Fielder eventually moves into the house as a 24/7 guest.

Given the 17 books, 43 podcasts, 6 documentaries, 14 TV series, and (one assumes) 3 sea shanties that have already been devoted to Holmes and her crimes, you might wonder what else there is to say. As the movie begins, the focus seems to be her attempt to let people see the softer side of Elizabeth Holmes, to humanize herself in the public eye. She is, of course, incapable of doing so because she has no softer side; she remains as brittle and socially awkward as ever. But the intersection of her awkwardness and that of Fielder, who is the primary onscreen presence for the filmmakers, proves fascinating.

Holmes heads off to begin her prison sentence about halfway through the movie, which does lose energy for a bit. But Fielder and Oppenheim find a new focus for the rest of the movie and, using some of Fielder's trademark techniques, explore a part of Holmes's story that hasn't been so overexposed as her Theranos crimes.

The first half of the movie is a pretty good run-of-the-mill glimpse into a subject's life; the second half of the movie is spectacularly innovative and thoroughly fascinating, and the less you know about it going in, the more you will be delighted by it. It's not out of the question that this could be the first documentary to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, and it would be well deserved. 

MOVIES: The Weight (2026, Padraic McKinley)

The story is awfully thin in this action thriller, but Ethan Hawke is strong, and the action sequences were just enough to keep me engaged.

Hawke stars as Murphy, a veteran of World War I who's struggling to provide for his young daughter during the Great Depression. He winds up in prison, with a long enough sentence that his daughter will be removed from foster care and put up for adoption before his release.

As part of his sentence, he's sent to a labor camp, doing work to clear the way for new roads. The warden (Russell Crowe) is impressed by his cleverness and initiative, and moved by his desperation to get back to his child, that he offers Murphy a chance at early release. If Murphy and a crew of fellow inmates can transport some gold bars across many miles of wilderness within six days, the warden will grant him an early release. But, he is warned, if even one bar is lost, the punishment will be brutal.

The crew of four sets off on a perilous wilderness journey -- the role of Oregon is played by Bavaria -- eventually joined by a Native American woman (Julia Jones) whose nature skills prove useful. There are some terrific set pieces along the way -- the crossing of a rickety rope bridge, a river crossing interrupted by a dangerous log jam, confrontations with bandits out to steal the gold.

Crowe's role is significantly smaller than the movie's advertising would lead you to expect; he's present only for a few minutes to set up the journey, and for a few minutes at the end of the journey. He's very good in the role, and the scenes between Crowe and Hawke are the best parts of the movie.

Worth a look when it comes to streaming, if you like this sort of thing, but far from essential viewing.

MOVIES: Bad Apples (2025, Jonatan Etzler)

Maria (Saoirse Ronan) is an elementary school teacher in England; her students appear to be 11 or 12 years old. Her problem student is Danny (Eddie Waller), who is disruptive at best, violent at worst. After Danny breaks another student's arm, through a series of events too contrived to bother explaining, Maria winds up with Danny locked in her basement, and doesn't dare to release him for fear of the legal consequences. 

The movie's central joke, if we may call it that, is that with the "bad seed" removed from the classroom, the rest of Maria's students begin to shine, to the extent that Maria is singled out for praise after the annual government inspectors' visit.

That's a pretty bleak premise to begin with -- the way to successfully educate our kids is to lock the troublemakers away where they can't bother anyone -- and it takes an even bleaker turn late in the movie that turns the movie from a marginally tolerable dark comedy to so bleak a dystopian view of society that I was left with a sour taste in my mouth.

If you can stomach the premise, the central performances from Ronan and Waller aren't bad, and there is an unexpected sweetness in some of their scenes together. But I don't think that's reward enough to make it worth sitting through the movie's grotesque cynicism.

 MOVIES: The Musical (2026, Giselle Bonilla)

Doug (Will Brill) is a middle-school drama teacher, curdled by his failure to become a successful playwright. As he returns for a new school year, he's hoping to reconnect with Abigail (Gillian Jacobs), the girlfriend from whom he's been (he thinks) on a summer "break." He is horrified to learn that she's now dating Principal Brady (Rob Lowe, magnificently smug and smarmy).

He sets out to get revenge by destroying Brady's chance of winning the Blue Ribbon of Academic Excellence for the school by putting on one of his own plays as the annual school musical. (This point is never convincingly explained: If Doug is so convinced of his own brilliance as a playwright, then why would he think that his work would harm the school's reputation?) 

The comic tone starts dark and never lightens, as Doug drags the class into his own paranoia. "Surprise is the superpower of theater," he tells them, explaining why they have to keep the play swap a secret. And as we learn more about the subject of Doug's play and its specific take on that subject, his lessons get weirder and more conspiracy-minded.

The three principals are strong, and while none of the kids in Doug's class have enough screen time to become a fully rounded character, the young actors sketch them with smart efficiency and comic timing. I wish we'd gotten to see a bit more of Doug's musical; we get the gist in a crisply edited montage of the performance, but it would have been nice to get at least one full song.

A very promising debut from Bonilla, and I look forward to seeing what she does next.

MOVIES: The Social Reckoning (2026, Aaron Sorkin)

A "companion piece" -- not, everyone involved insists, a sequel -- to The Social Network. Sorkin, who wrote both movies, adds director to his list of duties this time, replacing David Fincher.

Our central characters are Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen (Mikey Madison) and Wall Street Journal reporter Jeff Horwitz (Jeremy Allen White). In 2019, Haugen was a member of Facebook's "civic integrity" team, responsible for user safety issues. She discovered that Facebook's policies had been altered to increase user time on the site and company revenue, despite the company's executives knowing that the changes they were making were prioritizing disinformation and rage bait over truth and the emotional well-being of their users. She begins providing company documents and information about those policies to Horwitz, eventually leading to the publication of the "Facebook Files," a long series of articles that won Horwitz the Pulitzer Prize.

The Huagen/Horwitz story alternates with scenes set in 2021, as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (Jeremy Strong) is being prepped for a Congressional hearing by a team headed up by crisis management specialist Raya (Wunmi Mosaku); Zuckerberg is challenged most bluntly in these prep sessions by former colleague Charlie Garrigan (Bill Burr), whose history of challenging Zuckerberg has led to a personal and professional estrangement between the two men.

This is the hardest kind of movie to say much about, because it's neither good nor bad to an extreme that is memorable, or that inspires any thoughtful commentary. It's fine, and I never felt that it was trying to be anything more.

The most direct point of comparison between Social Network and Social Reckoning is the portrayals of the one character they share, Zuckerberg. In Social Network, he's played by Jesse Eisenberg, who doesn't particularly look or sound like Zuckerberg, but who gives us a thrilling performance; a character emerges from the work, and we feel like we're being given some insight into who Zuckerberg is and how he things. By contrast, Strong has been styled to look very much like Zuckerberg, and duplicated his familiar vocal and physical tips. It's a skillful impersonation, but it's not much more than that, and we don't get any understanding of who Zuckerberg is beyond the superficial recreation of his social awkwardness.

The best performance in the movie is from Portia Doubleday, who is at the center of the prologue. She's a former friend of Haugen, and she's been radicalized by the white supremacist groups that have been fed to her by Facebook; we watch as she has a confrontation with the police, which she tapes and later posts to her own feed. After such a strong start, it's even more disappointing when the rest of the movie turns out to be a blandly competent march through events that just aren't very cinematic. It would take a better writer than Sorkin, I fear -- and I am generally a fan of Sorkin's work -- to make the movie's many long explanations of internal statistics dramatically compelling.

TV: Line of Fire (2026- )

Family/crime drama; NBC Monday nights, then streaming on Peacock. Three episodes have aired so far.

Meet the Hollingsworth family, a DC area clan devoted to federal law enforcement. Father Mike (Peter Krause) is a senior Secret Service agent; as the show opens, he's about to hit mandatory retirement age. His junior officers look forward to his departure, because they think he's a relic who hasn't quite kept up with 21st-century tactics and techniques. His estranged (but not yet divorced) wife, Jane (Hope Davis), is with the US Marshals Service.

There are three kids. Claire (Kat Cunning) is an FBI agent; Mike Jr. ("Micah" to his friends; played by Tommy O'Brien) is also in the Secret Service, assigned to the protection team of the president's daughter; and Russ (Taylor Bloom) is a former Marine who's just starting work in the national security division of the Justice Department.

The pilot finds the family caught up in various aspects of the case that will dominate (at least) the first season of the show: Someone is killing federal agents, and there is reason to think that the Hollingsworths might be particular targets. What we in the audience know is that the killer is Jack (Charlie Barnett), Mike's son from his first marriage. When asked about Jack, the family tells people that he is dead; it remains unclear which members of the family actually believe that, or (if any of them do) who's lying to them about it.

With that overarching serialized element of in the background, we also get procedural-style cases of the week, with each Hollingworth relying on the connections of their relatives in other departments to get hold of information that will help solve the case. Much of that assistance is not strictly legal, and it would be nice if the family and the show were more troubled by their willingness to cross departmental/legal boundaries in the name of family.

The show has a better sense of humor than crime procedurals are generally allowed; scenes in which the entire family is gathered have a touch of farce to them, especially when A wants B's help, but doesn't want C to know about it. The complexities of cross-agency negotiation over jurisdiction and secrecy are also somewhat novel, and add an interesting layer to the sometimes routine case-of-the-week narratives.

The cast is solid, and they're supported by interesting people in recurring roles: Campbell Scott as a US Senator on the Judiciary Committee who is Jane's boyfriend; Chris Chalk and Savannah Lee Smith as the President and his daughter; Antoinette Crowe-Legacy as the Homeland Security agent in charge of finding out who's killing all those agents. (It is no accident, I think, that when elected politicians make appearances, they are never identified by party; don't want to instantly alienate half your audience.)

At heart, this is a fairly familiar crime-of-the-week story, but the cast and writing are a cut above the standard, and the serialized elements are integrated into the story more smoothly than usual. I'm not a huge fan of most American police shows, but I'm enjoying this one.

 TV: Eterally Yours (2026- )

New sitcom; CBS Thursday nights, then streaming at Paramount+. Only one episode has aired, and the ending of that episode sends the show veering in a very different direction than the first 20 minutes had led us to expect. It's hard to talk about that show without talking about that ending, so this will be a bit more spoilery than my usual comments, at least for this specific episode. But like most first episodes, it's all setup anyway, so I don't feel too bad about giving away that ending.

The original pilot script for this show has been bouncing around Hollywood for a decade or more. At one point, it was considered dead enough to be featured on the podcast Dead Pilots Society, in which each episode features a table read of a TV pilot that never made it to air and an interview with the writers. It was good enough, though, to get writers Joe Port and Joe Wiseman a job as showrunners for CBS's adaptation of the British sitcom Ghosts. Now that it's finally made it to air, it is somewhat baffling to me that CBS hasn't paired it with Ghosts. To be sure, the idea of creating a schedule that will keep audiences from changing the channel between shows is less important than it was, now that most people are watching things on streaming anyway, but still, two supernatural-themed sitcoms would seem a logical pair.

The supernatural element of this one is vampires. We meet Liz (Allegra Edwards) and Charles (Ed Weeks, who had played the same role in that podcast table read) in 1526 when they are young and so in love that Liz is willing to be made a vampire to marry Charles. Five hundred years later, they're still married -- vampires are not allowed to divorce, we are told --  and suffering through a really long marital rut.

Their adopted daughter, Emma (Helen J. Shen), has also been made a vampire in order to save her life during a childhood illness. She's got a new boyfriend, Max (Jaren Lewison), and her parents don't approve of her dating a human.

Also living in the family home are other members of the vampire coven (I'd never heard that word applied to vampires before). Jesse (Parker Young) is a personal trainer who appears to be in his late twenties; his human wife, Phyllis (Rose Abdoo), is in her mid-70s, and gets her memory wiped whenever she stumbles into learning about the vampires. They have twin sons -- one whom got all the "good" vampire powers, and the other can talk to the dog.

So it seems very clear for the first 20 minutes or so what sort of a show we're headed for. Max and Emma date; Liz and Charles frown with disapproval; there will be lots of "oops! he almost found out we're vampires!" moments and misunderstandings.

And then -- here comes that mildly spoilery twist ending -- while visiting Emma's home for the first time, Max gets bonked on the head hard enough to kill him, and Charles has to bite him in order to save his life. And suddenly, it's not a show about the human boyfriend and his girlfriend's big secret; instead, it's a show about the new vampire learning what it means to be a vampire and how to hide that secret from his own friends and family.

That's not a bad concept for a show in its own right, and probably an improvement given that the memory-wiping shtick with Jesse and Phyllis is already wearing thin by the end of the pilot, but it's an odd choice to spend all that time setting up one show only to pull the rug out from under us in the last two minutes. Feels like a risky move; people who liked the show they thought they were getting could be alienated by the abrupt switcheroo, and people who disliked the apparent concept may have bailed out before finding out that the show they were actually getting would have been more appealing.

Sitcoms are always harder to judge out of the gate. They need more time to set up the premise and to figure out what particular comic skills their cast has, and which combinations of actors work best to tell which jokes. And this one is so busy setting up and discarding premises that it has even less time than usual to develop any of its characters beyond a single characteristic. But the cast is always at least likable, and in some of them, I can see potential for their character to develop in interesting ways.

A strange pilot, but with just enough talent and potential to keep me watching for a week or two to see how things develop.

MOVIES: Fjord (2026, Cristian Mungiu)

Mihai (Sebastian Stan) and Lisbet (Renate Reinsve) met in Romania when she was working there as a missionary. They have recently moved with their five children to Lisbet's home village in Norway. When their teenage daughter Elia (Vanessa Ceban) arrives at school with bruises on her face and back, the school refers the matter to Child Services, suspecting abuse. The cause of the bruises turns out to be nothing particularly troubling, but when they are questioned, the parents acknowledge that they have spanked, and occasionally still do spank, their children, and suddenly the investigation isn't merely a civil court matter, but a criminal one. 

An already complicated process becomes more so because the Gheorghiu family are conservative evangelical Christians, and Mihai in particular believes that these investigations are a form of religious persecution. We follow the legal process as the parents fight for the return of their children, who have been removed by Child Services and placed with foster families.

The biggest problem with the movie is that Mungiu is fighting harder to play fair between the two sides than is justified by the facts of his story (which is based loosely on actual events of about a decade ago). Unless you live in a theocracy, religion is not a legitimate defense when you've violated the law, and Mungiu's attempts to present child abuse as a culturally/religiously defensible practice can only fail. The Gheorghius are abusive parents, and their children should be removed from their home; their (and Mungiu's) arguments that this prosecution is a violation of Norway's stated value of respecting diversity is a flimsy bit of both-sides-ism that falls flat.

Still, the cast is strong. Stan is very effective as Mihai, who is constantly seething with anger; and while I don't like the way the government prosecutor has been written -- he's condescending and smug in a way that is meant to increase our sympathy for the parents -- Christian Rubeck's performance is precisely detailed.

But the cast can't overcome the flaws of the storytelling, which is trying extraordinary hard to defend the indefensible.

MOVIES: Verity (2026, Michael Showalter)

Colleen Hoover is, at the moment, our hottest author of romantic thrillers; this is the fourth cinematic adaption of one of her novels in the last two years.

It's the story of two authors. Verity Crawford (Anne Hathaway) is the Colleen Hoover of her universe, a massively best-selling novel of dark thrillers, always written from the villain's point of vew. Lowen Ashleigh (Dakota Johnson) writes in the same genre, and has recently published her first novel, which was greeted with general indifference. It is understandably a surprise, therefore, when Verity's husband, Jeremy (Josh Hartnett), offers Lowen a ghostwriting job. The Crawfords' young daughter died recently in a boating accident, and Jeremy tells Lowen that Verity is still indisposed. The new novel is due soon, though, and publisher due dates wait for no author, so Jeremy wants Lowen to complete the current novel. She'll have full access to all of Verity's notes and outlines, and Jeremy even offers to let her stay with them at their ridiculously remote, even more ridiculously large and palatial Vermont home.

Lowen takes the job -- the promised pay is too large to turn down -- and arrives to find that Verity is not merely "indisposed;" she's catatonic and getting full-time nursing care. And among the notes and writing waiting for her in Verity's office, Lowen finds several pages from the draft of an autobiography in which Verity puts a very different spin on her marriage and the death of their daughter.

And so we dive into a "who can you trust?" erotic thriller that never quite lives up to its potential, mostly because Dakota Johnson doesn't seem capable of giving it the campy, manic energy that something this goofy really needs.

When a friend asked me to describe the movie, I told him it was an old-fashioned "had I but known" story. He wasn't familiar with the phrase, and I said, "You know, 'had I but known the evil waiting behind the doors of the mansion...'," and he instantly started laughing. And that is precisely the correct reaction to a story this overwrought; it should be played -- well, perhaps not entirely for laughs, but at least with an understanding that this setup and the endless series of Shocking! Twist! Revelations! that follows cannot be played with a completely straight face. It really is silly on some level, and the movie desperately needs to be aware of that and to steer into it. (That understanding is one of the things that makes, for instance, Fatal Attraction work so well.)

Johnson either can't or won't do that. She's playing this as if it's the drabbest of kitchen-sink drama. Hartnett could, I think, find the right tone, if he had a different scene partner. But Johnson's bland performance traps him in the same style, and because he is (to his credit) trying to at least be consistent, he's nearly as dull even in his scenes with Hathaway, who comes closest to getting the right tone. Replace Johnson with, for instance, Olivia Wilde or Amanda Seyfried, and this movie could have soared. As it is, when we get to the final twist and the "was anyone ever telling the truth?" ending, it's hard to even care anymore.

MOVIES: Shaun the Sheep: The Beast of Mossy Bottom (2026, Steve Cox & Matthew Walker)

The third movie in Aardman Animations' Shaun the Sheep series of movies for small kids. The stories aer set on a farm called Mossy Bottom, where Shaun and the other sheep get into comic tangles involving the Farmer and his dog, Bitzer.

This one begins when the Farmer accidentally destroys the pumpkin patch that Shaun has been growing so that the littlest lamb will have jack-o'-lanterns for Halloween. Shaun goes full-on mad scientist, attempting to create a super growth serum in order to quickly grow at least one pumpkin, but it accidentally winds up in the Farmer's hands.

The Farmer's nervously planning to ask the local vet to the Halloween dance (not knowing that she's just as nervously planning to ask him), but he's insecure about his baldness. Thinking that Shaun's serum is a hair-growth tonic, he rubs it into his scalp, and before long, the Farmer is nowhere to be seen and there's a great hairy beast roaming the streets of the local village. Shaun, Bitzer, and the vet, each with only partial knowledge of what's going on, attempt to solve the crisis and restore order to the farm and village. 

Like the other movies in the series, there is virtually no dialogue, only very expressive grunts and groans, so Natalie Holt's score carries more of the narrative load than usual, and it's a charming bit of work. It helps to set the movie's tone, which is scary enough to be fun for four-year-olds without giving them bad dreams at bedtime.

The movie is, in essence, a sort of Baby's First Horror Movie, and watching the kid-friendly version of classic horror tropes play out gives the adults in the audience something to be amused by. There's a torch-and-pitchfork wielding mob chasing the monster through the countryside, the poor hairy Farmer boxed into a crate to be carried off to remote Bigfoot Island, the Frankenstein-esque lab in which Shaun creates his growth potion and the antidote -- all of them adding just the right tinge of horror to Aardman's usual charming British comedy.

As we've come to expect from Aardman, the stop-motion animation is beautifully done and the jokes are impeccably timed. Unless you are (like me) unusually fond of animation, you probably don't need to see this unless you have a child to watch it with. But if you are an animation geek, or if you do have a preschooler who needs to be entertained, this will make you and the kids happy without any guilt about rotting their brains away with mindless drivel.

MOVIES: Digger (2026,  Alejandro G. Iñárritu)

Already firmly ensconced as the biggest flop of the year, maybe of the decade. But while it is indeed not a good movie, it's not as bad as you may have heard, and there are some things in it that I liked very much.

The challenge for my purposes here is that there is a major reveal about 30 minutes into the movie which should not be given away (too many reviews have, so read with caution), and it's hard to talk about a lot of the movie without spoiling things.

We open in the mansion of oil tycoon Digger Rockwell (Tom Cruise, buried in prosthetics and a fat suit), who is getting the news from assorted underlings of a disaster at his oil field in Greenland. A massive ice shelf has broken off the coast and is drifting into the North Sea, where it is likely to cause catastrophic tsunamis and flooding throughout northern Europe.

Digger's head of environmental security (Riz Ahmed) shows up to tell him that, no, the folks in Greenland are not exaggerating; it really is going to be that bad. So Digger meets with the blustery President (John Goodman), the ineffectual Vice President (Michael Stuhlbarg), and the Cabinet -- all of whom come to his mansion, because he's just that important -- to discuss the crisis.

It's at about this point that the major reveal lands, and it forces us to recontextualize everything we've seen. Some of the movie's stranger choices -- the generally enormous acting styles, some set design eccentricities -- begin to make more sense, and Cruise takes on a second character (who isn't nearly as interesting as Digger).

Critics have been strongly divided on whether what Cruise is doing here is good acting, but there's no doubt that it's a lot of acting, or that he's making very big choices. Sometimes they work: A scene in which Digger addresses the world's political leaders, giving his version of the "you can't handle the truth" speech from A Few Good Men, is the movie's high point, aided greatly by striking costuming that has Digger in a dark reddish brown suit, sharply popping against the greys and beiges of all the other suits and of the room itself.

Riz Ahmed is the most successful in finding a way to fit in with the general bombast while still finding some room for subtlety and understatement; and in a smaller role, Jesse Plemons does very well with a monologue late in the film that drops the movie's other big twist/reveal. The rest of the cast is generally weighted down by Iñárritu's directing choices and by the clomping screenplay (by Iñárritu and multiple collaborators).

This is very much a story about men. At one point during one of the Cabinet meetings, the President scolds someone for cursing: "Watch your language, there are ladies present!" Everyone looks around and bursts into laughter, because of course, there are no women in the room. Sandra Hüller has the largest female role in the movie -- she's Digger's sister and business partner -- and she's barely present.

Ultimately, though, the movie's a mess. The exaggerated volume and style of the performances is eventually explained, but that doesn't make it any more pleasant to watch. There is too much reliance on a handful of unfunny jokes, such as Goodman's President being forced to explain repeatedly that he has "cancer of the asshole."

But the movie looks remarkable; Ahmed is quite good; and if nothing else, it's nice to be reminded that Cruise can do something more than run really fast and perform elaborate stunts. Give him a real part to play, and a director who will push him to use all of his skill, and he can do some fine acting. I fear that the poor reception of Digger will send him running away from ever taking such chances again, and that he'll be content to spend the rest of his life making fourteen more Mission: Impossible movies.

 Took a little longer than I had hoped to resolve the computer problems, but let the great catching up begin! You can expect a couple of posts every day for the next week or two. And the fun begins with...

 Aaaugh! Falling behind again, this time because I'm having computer problems. Hoping to have everything resolved by Tuesday or Wednesday, at which point there will be a flurry of posts for a few days.

MOVIES: By Any Means (2026, Elegance Bratton)

The movie begins with a "based on a true story" text card, and ends with text telling us that the FBI has never confirmed any of the story the movie tells. It would seem that Bratton has left it up to us how much faith we should put in his ostensibly true story.

It is, if nothing else, a colorful tale, and a few parts of it are confirmable history. In 1966, the home of Mississippi civil rights activist Vernon Dahmer is firebombed by the KKK; Dahmer dies in the fire. The FBI sends one of its agents, a Black man originally from the area, to investigate.

And here we have our first "really?" moment. It is unsurprising that no one in the area is willing to talk to anyone from the FBI, for fear of Klan retribution; surely even the blinkered white guys at the FBI would have understood that a Black agent was even less likely to get cooperation. It also seems unlikely to me that they would place in charge of the investigation an agent who was a close friend of the deceased.

But in this telling of the tale, at any rate, they send a Black agent, who gets no cooperation. And that leads his superiors at the Jackson field office to send him a partner, a Brooklyn Mafia hitman who is sent in with instructions to get information -- ideally, to get a confession -- by any means necessary, including violence, torture, and murder. The hitman has done this before, he tells the agent, working on the investigation into the Chaney/Goodman/Schwerner murders. The FBI agent is initially shocked, but eventually swayed by the results the thug is getting.

Bratton has certainly assembled (with one exception, which we'll get to) a fine cast to tell his story. Yahya Abdul-Mateen II is Agent Wayne Strider; Nicole Beharie is his wife, Allison. Dahmer and his wife, Hattie, are played by Giancarlo Esposito and LaChanze. The bosses at the FBI field office are Josh Lucas and David Strathairn, and LisaGay Hamilton shows up for one impeccable scene as Dahmer's neighbor, who witnessed the firebombing and is reluctant to say anything.

There are moments when those actors deliver fine work, and Bratton's movie comes to vibrant life. The Dahmers and the Striders chat after a voting rights rally; that lone scene between Abdul-Mateen and Hamilton -- in those moments, the movie is populated with real people and genuine emotion.

But too often, especially as the violence gets more intense, Sascha Penn's screenplay is content to skim the surface, offering us the familiar cliches of the 1960s civil rights movie. And when he does veer away from cliches, he does so in improbable ways. Is it really likely that Agent Strider would need to have Malcolm X's "by any means" philosophy explained to him, or that a dimwitted Mafioso would be the one to do it?

And the even bigger problem, the one that really sinks the movie, is the casting of Mark Wahlberg as the Mafia hitman. Wahlberg dives cheerfully into full "dese/dem/dose" mode, playing the cartoon version of a violent thug; you get a better, more nuanced portrayal of evil from Foghorn Leghorn in Coyote vs. Acme.

I mostly liked Bratton's first feature film, The Inspection,  a semi-autobiographical story of a gay Black man in Marines basic training. It had the typical problems of a first film, but as is (mostly) true in this movie, Bratton got strong performances from a smartly chosen cast. I'm happy to see that his work on that movie has gotten him the opportunity to work with bigger names and a larger budget. Given his usually sharp eye for finding the right actors, I'd be willing to bet that Wahlberg was foisted on him by a studio that wanted at least one possible box-office draw (albeit a somewhat faded one) in a big role.

I am hugely skeptical about the "true story" aspect of this movie; its unusually violent version of a "white savior" narrative is extremely icky; and there is no getting past the sheer awfulness of Wahlberg's performance. But the things that do work here are enough to keep me interested in following Bratton's career

MOVIES: The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982, Colin Higgins)

We are still at heart an intensely Puritan nation, and sex makes us uncomfortable. We've made some progress in recent years -- some of us are more likely to use the phrase "sex workers" than the word "whores," and to treat them with at least a little bit more respect than we once did  -- but I don't think we're ever going to fully get over our queasiness about the fact that sex is pleasurable enough that some people are willing to pay for it, and some people are willing to sell it.

And so it is a measure of just how much America loves Dolly Parton that in a movie released in the dark ages of 1982, she plays a madam and has us fully rooting for her in the first five minutes of the movie. Miss Mona might be a prostitute, but by god, she is also Dolly Parton, and that matters more.

The movie's premise is efficiently laid out by our narrator, Deputy Fred (Jim Nabors, doing the full Gomer Pyle voice, and a character only a smidge less dimwitted and naive), who explains that Mona has recently taken over the management of the Chicken Ranch, the bordello on the outskirts of Gilbert, Texas. Local men have been visiting the Chicken Ranch for generations, and it is a beloved local landmark. It has earned that status by hard work on the part of Mona and her predecessors, who use their arguably ill-gotten gains to benefit the community; we see Mona dropping off a check to pay for uniforms for the entire Little League team, and it's clearly not the first time she's done something similar.

Even Ed Earl Dodd (Burt Reynolds), the county sheriff, is willing to ignore the law when it comes to the Chicken Ranch, if only because he and Mona have an ongoing romantic relationship.

But the Chicken Ranch's cozy position is disrupted by TV consumer watchdog Melvin P. Thorpe (Dom DeLuise), who has made it his mission to shut the place down.

I am not familiar with the musical on which this movie is based. About half of Carol Hall's songs have been chopped for the movie; of the surviving songs, the only one I knew (and I suspect the only one anyone else is likely to know) is "Hard Candy Christmas," a melancholy ballad sung by Mona and her girls late in the movie (Parton also recorded a solo version, which did well on country radio).

And the reason you probably haven't heard any of Hall's other songs is that they aren't terribly interesting. "Hard Candy Christmas" is by far the best of them, and even it pales in comparison to the two Parton songs that were added to the film. To be sure, most songs look flimsy next to "I Will Always Love You," but Parton trumps Hall even with the relatively minor "Sneakin' Around," a duet for Parton and Reynolds.

What you remember about the Hall numbers in the movie is not the quality of the songs, but the skill of the performance. "The Aggie Song" is an energetic ensemble dance number for a college football team; "The Sidestep" gives us an unexpectedly nimble bit of song and dance from Charles Durning, playing the Texas Governor.

You may have guessed from the cast list that this movie steers firmly into broad comedy. Parton, Reynolds, and Nabors are skilled comic actors when playing within their comfort zones, but none are given to nuance or understatement. Even by those standards, though, Dom DeLuise is off in a world of his own. It is a performance so enormously flamboyant, so vastly over-the-top, that it is too big for even this movie; I'm not sure any technology exists that is powerful enough to contain what DeLuise is doing here. He struts across the screen dressed as if he'd been invited to the Sgt. Pepper's cover shoot, gesturing so broadly and screaming so loudly that the audience could hear him from across the Grand Canyon. It is painful and unpleasant, and the realization at one point that he is about to break into a second reprise of his song ("Texas Has a Whorehouse in It") is the most depressing thing in the movie.

But the movie survives or fails on the charm of Parton and Reynolds, which is considerable. In her memoir, Parton talks about how unpleasant this shoot was for her, and how poorly she and Reynolds got along. None of that shows.  Their relationship is convincing whether they're flirting, arguing (the audience I saw the movie with gasped audibly when Ed Earl hurled the word "whore" at Mona), or reconciling; and Parton tones down her voice enough to allow Reynolds to keep up in their duet, which is his only singing in the movie.

DeLuise aside, it's a likeable bit of fluffy musical comedy, and I'm grateful to my local AMC for taking the sad opportunity of Parton's death to put it on the big screen for a few shows.

TV: House of Cards (1990) / To Play the King (1993) / The Final Cut (1995)

British trilogy of miniseries, each consisting of 4 one-hour episodes; loosely adapted into an American political context by Netflix beginning in 2013. All three miniseries are streaming in the US at Peacock, with the latter two identified as House of Cards: To Play the King and House of Cards: The Final Cut.

Ian Carmichael stars as Francis Urquhart, fictional Chief Whip (*) of the Conservative Party and a master of political scheming and manipulation. In the first installment of the trilogy, Francis maneuvers his way into becoming the party's new Prime Minister. To Play the King finds him confronting the new King -- never given a more specific name than "the King," but clearly modeled on then-Prince Charles -- who has the audacity to express political opinions in public; even worse, the King's opinions do not align with those of Francis and his Conservative government. The Final Cut begins at the (fictional) funeral of Maggie Thatcher -- in reality, she would live for another 18 years -- as Francis approaches her record as the longest-serving post-war Prime Minister.

(* -- There's no real equivalent to this position in the US government, but it's sort of as if the Speaker of the House was a Cabinet official who had a lot more insitiutional force and tradition behind him to hold members of his party in line on key votes.)

When Michael Dobbs wrote the novel that served as the source for the first miniseries, he had no thought of continuing it; he actually killed off Francis at the end of the book. But the TV version was so popular that Dobbs was forced to ignore that death to write the novels that were adapted as the second and third installments in the series.

When this began airing, 36 years ago, it must have felt like pure escapism. Surely politics wasn't this  viciously nasty and cruel in the depths of its conniving and struggling for power, but there was a naughty thrill in imagining that it might be. Watching it these days, I suspect it plays more darkly than it once did; if there's any escapism left in it these days, it probably takes the form of longing for the good old days when this was as bad as it got.

Whatever the era and however the story might compare to the politics of the real world, the great constant of the series is Ian Carmichael's magnificent performance. Francis frequently breaks the fourth wall to directly address the audience, commenting on the stupidity of political colleagues and rivals, the ease of manipulating the media, and (of course) his own unparalleled political brilliance. It's a performance of silky smarm and oozing charisma, and remains one of television's towering achievements. 

The supporting players don't quite rise to that level, but there are fine performances among them. Susannah Harker shines in House of Cards as a naive young reporter who trusts Francis too much for her own good; Michael Kitchen finds the precisely correct mix of smug self-satisfaction and genuine concern for his people as the King in To Play the King; and throughout, Diane Fletcher performs her own subtle manipulation as Francis's wife, a Lady Macbeth manque who takes on a steadily increasing role in the scheming, truly coming into her own in The Final Cut.

At heart, this is trashy soap opera, Dallas set in the world of British politics instead of Texas oil. But it's the classiest possible version of trashy soap opera, and it's a grand good time.

TV: Ellis (2024 - ?)

British police/crime drama; streaming in the US on Acorn, where it's labeled as Inspector Ellis. Two seasons, each short even by British standards; season 1 is 3 90-minute episodes, and season 2 is 4 45-minute episodes, comprising two 90-minute stories. Haven't been able to find info on whether a third season is planned.

Sharon D. Clarke stars as DCI Ellis (her first name is never revealed), who is sent by her boss in London to lead murder investigations at smaller police departments that don't have the staffing or experience to deal with complicated major crimes. On her first case, she's partnered with DS Chet Harper (Andrew Gower) who will leave his position in that local department to become Ellis's partner in traveling investigation. 

The "I'm from the city, and I'm here to help" sets up an unusual dynamic, with local departments usually resenting Ellis's presence and the implication that they aren't up to the task; their attitude is often one of reluctant cooperation at best, outright hostility at worst. And in some of those rural departments, the hostility is only made worse by the fact that Ellis is a Black woman.

Clarke is terrific here, and it's a challenging role, because she's not given a large, colorful personality to play. She's reserved, quiet, and actively resists small talk. When she finally, near the end of the first season, tells Chet that she has a daughter (we viewers have known that fact, and gotten some hints that their relationship might be strained, but we don't know any more than that), it's a major step forward in their partnership, the first moment in which she's acknowledging that either of them has a life beyond the job. That daughter is the show's biggest step towards any sort of serialized storytelling; this is firmly a case-of-the-week procedural, which these days, is a refreshing change.

Gower's role is more familiar -- the junior officer, almost puppyish in his eagerness to impress the boss -- and the writers haven't done much to broaden him beyond that trope. (Three of the five stories are written or co-written by the show's creator, Sian Ejiwunmi-Le Barre.) He gets to flirt a bit with the IT officer (Charlotte McCurry) who occasionally joins Ellis and Harper on their cases, but even that slight hint of personality is quickly closed off when he finds out that she's married.

The opaque nature of the lead characters is the most frustrating element for me, and if there is a third season, I hope that Ellis and Harper will be allowed to develop a more relaxed relationship and reveal more, even if only between themselves. But that's my only mild problem with the show. The cases Ellis and Harper are sent to work on are interesting and complex, darker and grittier than the cozies we usually get in rural settings. Each story gives us a large cast of suspects, friends, and relatives, played very well by actors who will mostly be unfamiliar to American viewers; Mark Addy was the only major guest actor I recognized at all, and he's not exactly a household name here.

Not essential viewing, but a good solid procedural, greatly aided by strong casting from top to bottom.

Still trying to get back in the habit of posting here more regularly after watching something. There are a few posts waiting to be written, and I plan to get caught up by the end of the weekend.

MOVIES: Coyote vs. Acme (2026, Dave Green)

Coyote vs. Acme first made news in 2023, when Warner Bros. Discovery announced that they were going to shelve the finished film and take a tax writeoff instead of releasing it. There was great backlash, especially because the few people who'd seen the movie said it was good, and WBD eventually agreed to let the movie be released. Ketchup Entertainment bought the distribution rights; the movie's now in theaters; and whaddya know? It really is good.

It's based on a 1990 New Yorker piece by Ian Frazier, and tells the story of Wile E. Coyote's lawsuit against Acme for the many, many defective products he has bought from them in his endless pursuit of the Road Runner. He hires personal injury lawyer Kevin Avery (Will Forte), who has generally been content to file petty nuisance suits against Acme, collecting a few hundred dollars at a time for his client, but his niece/intern (Lana Condor) and Wile E. force him to file a much larger suit.

(Kevin is a partner at the firm of Avery, Jones, and Maltese. Those are the last names of Tex, Chuck, and Michael, three of the legendary creators of the original Looney Tunes.)

That puts him up against Acme's lawyer, Buddy Crane (John Cena), his old law school nemesis, and against the deep pockets of the generally beloved Acme ("we're a family values company that values our family of companies").

The Looney Tunes characters exist in the live-action world, and the mix of the two is beautifully done. The focus is on the classic Looney Tunes; none of the new characters from Animaniacs, Space Jam, or other more recent projects make an appearance. Eric Bauza has been voicing these characters for years, and while it's hard not to miss Mel Blanc, Bauza's imitations are solid. Wile E. remains silent throughout, communicating only through the occasional sign.

All of the major Looney Tunes characters, and a lot of minor ones, are here. Foghorn Leghorn gets an unexpectedly large role as an Acme executive, and in the current climate, the thought of United States Senator Elmer Fudd feels less absurd than it probably should.

Forte and Cena have the bulk of the human-toon interaction scenes, and they deal with that challenge in very different ways. Forte tones way down to let the toons dominate their scenes, playing a sad sack who is just as used to constant failure in the human world as Wile E. is in the toon world. Cena, on the other world, goes bigger than life, essentially transforming his already implausible physique into just one more cartoon character. A conversation between Cena and Acme agent Tweety Bird is one of the movie's comic highlights.

The jokes are funny; in particular, kudos to writer Samy Burch for finding the perfect way to slip in a joke about Pepe le Pew, whose womanizing is significantly less charming these days than it might have seemed in the Looney Tunes' heyday. The climax of the movie, an unexpected meeting between Coyote and Road Runner, hits with an emotional punch I wasn't expecting.

I was happy to see that the movie had a strong weekend at the box office, and I hope that word of mouth will keep it in theaters for a while.

TV: Minx (2022-2023)

Comedy; two seasons/18 episodes. Streaming on Netflix.

It's the early 1970s, and Joyce Prigger (Ophelia Lovibond) wants to start the first magazine devoted to the growing feminist movement. She heads to the magazine publishing convention to make her pitch to publishers. The only taker is Doug Renetti (Jake Johnson), whose Bottom Dollar Publishing is devoted to cheap porn magazines with titles like Naughty Nurses; he sees Joyce's magazine as a vehicle to target a still untapped market for porn: women.

The era is right for both ideas. The first issue of Ms. was published in 1971, and the first issue of Playgirl in 1973. What would have happened, this show asks, if the two had been combined in one magazine?

Joyce and Doug are optimistic as they launch Minx, but even they are taken off guard by its success, and it causes problems for both of them. Joyce isn't used to being in the spotlight, and isn't really prepared to be a guest on The Dick Cavett Show. Doug is used to scraping by, barely meeting budgets each month; keeping up with the demand for Minx is a logistical nightmare. And while the success is a thrill, neither of them knows how to cope with the controversy the magazine is generating.

Lovibond and Johnson are a solid pair of leads, and the show gets a lot of crisp comic energy from their  contrasting personalities, as her slighly prissy academic feminism clashes with his cruder street smarts.. Elizabeth Perkins joins the show in the second season as a wealthy widow who provides financial backing for the magazine, and the rest of the supporting cast is terrific. Jessica Lowe was the standout for me, playing Bambi, the centerfold coordinator for all of Doug's magazines, whose intelligence and people skills are too often overlooked by co-workers who only see a perky bimbo. 

The show was originally made for cable/streaming; HBO Max was the original home for season one, and after they cancelled the show, Starz picked it up for the second season. But even by cable/streaming standards, there is a lot of nudity here -- the show is set in the porn industry, after all-- including full frontal male nudity, still a rarity on TV. You'll see more penises in the first episode than you've probably seen in your last decade of TV watching.

For the cliffhanger-averse among you, the end of the second season does leave the next step for most of its characters somewhat up in the air, but the major plotlines of that season are pretty well wrapped up. The suspense is more in the nature of setting up stories for a potential third season instead of leaving second season stories unresolved.

Cheerfully raunchy, with memorable characters, witty dialogue, and a few thoughtful ideas hiding beneath it all.

TV: You're Killing Me (2026- )

One six-episode season is currently streaming on Acorn, with a second arriving sometime in 2027.

In a quaintly charming Maine village, a 60-ish mystery writer uses her professional skills to help solve the shockingly large number of murders that take place around her. You could be forgiven for thinking of Murder, She Wrote; it's an obvious inspiration for this show. Our heroine, though, is not Angela Lansbury's Jessica Fletcher, but Brooke Shields's Allison "Allie" Chandler, and our quaint village isn't Cabot Cove, but Founder's Cove.

(Take a moment to picture Angela Lansbury at the beginning of Murder, She Wrote. Now picture Brooke Shields today. Shields is about three years older than Lansbury was.)

As the first episode opens, the annual mystery awards convention has come to Founder's Cove to honor Allie for her many (many, many, many) award-winning romantic mysteries. The convention is disrupted by the murder of one of the other authors, one of Allie's dear friends. Allie is drawn to investigate, as is Andi Walker (Amalia Williamson), a local true-crime podcaster some decades younger than Allie. They reluctantly team up to solve the crime, and agree to continue their partnership to write a true-crime book about the case.

Murders keep coming to Founder's Cove, and Allie and Andi keep investigating them, to the annoyance of the town's new sheriff, Jack Kerrigan (Tom Cavanagh). Lurking in the background is the mystery of Andi's mother, who mysteriously abandoned Andi and her dad 15 years ago and hasn't been seen or heard from since.

Everything is gentle and cozy and comfortable. The bickering banter between Allie and Andi is entertaining enough, as is the tastefully polite flirting between Allie and Jack. The audience is likely to have more success spotting the murderer than most murder shows allow, as the cases aren't that complicated.

No one's going to be surprised or blown away by anything that happens on You're Killing Me. It's not an exciting show, and it's content to rework familiar territory. But if you like that territory, this show will take you there and give you precisely what you're looking for. The acting and writing isn't likely to win any awards, but it's a notch or two above mere competence.  It's a good enough light comic murder-of-the-week show; it aspires to nothing higher than that. That may not be the most ambitious target, but the show hits that target squarely in the bullseye.

TV: I, Jack Wright (2025- )

Family drama/murder mystery. One six-episode season, with a second in the works. Streaming in the US on BritBox.

Jack Wright (Trevor Eve) has died, in what initally seems to be a suicide. The officer assigned to the case (Harry Lloyd) is suspicious, though; "very few people shoot themselves in the chest," he notes.

And his family is large enough to provide plenty of suspects. First wife Rose (Gemma Jones) has cancer, and the inheritance she's expecting could pay for top-quality treatment. Her older son, Gray (John Simm), is an addict who's deeply in debt to some violent thugs; second son John (Daniel Rigby) is tired of playing second banana at the family business. Gray's daughter, Emily (Ruby Ashbourne Serkis), could use some extra money for the tech business she's trying to get off the ground.

Third (and current) wife Sally (Nikki Amuka-Bird) is two or three decades younger than Jack. She claims they were entirely devoted to one another, but might she be more interested in the dashing French businessman (Jalil Lespert) who's been negotiating some sort of deal with Jack? Her son, Josh (Samuel Small), is so grumpy and sullen a teenager that nothing seems too extreme as a possible expression of angst.

And what are we to make of the occasional references to a deceased second wife, and the daughter who no one has seen or heard from in years?

The family drama gets kicked up another notch at the reading of the will -- and we're still in the setup phase of the first episode! --when Rose and her sons get pittances, Sally and Josh get nothing, and the bulk of the money goes to Emily, along with the top job at the business. All of the family's buried resentment, anger, and jealousy come roaring back to life.

Each episode begins and ends with a few short moments of the characters addressing the camera, apparently being filmed for a documentary (a true-crime series, perhaps?) sometime after all of this drama has played out. We can get some clues from those moments -- one of the characters appears to be wearing a prison uniform -- but they are mostly cryptic teases that will only really make sense in retrospect.

It's a grandly over-the-top soap opera, with performances precisely calibrated at just the right level of too much-ness. Amuka-Bird, the closest thing to a lead character in the large ensemble, is a standout as Sally, whose inherent icy reserve makes it difficult to believe her protestations of love, even if they are sincere. Jones does lovely work as the self-sacrificing Rose, and Simm is an impeccable sniveling weasel as the man trapped by his own vices and addictions.

Be warned, if you are wary of such things, that the first season ends on a giant cliffhanger, resolving very little. The answers to the mysteries of who killed Jack, why he changed his will, and whether he was of sound mind when he did so will have to wait for season two.

MOVIES: The End of Oak Street (2026, David Robert Mitchell)

We open in a Michigan suburb in 1982, where the Platt family is under a lot of stress. Denise (Anne Hathaway) is writing a novel, obviously more autobiographical than she'll admit, about a woman trapped in an unhappy suburban marriage; Greg (Ewan McGregor) hasn't told the family that he's been fired, and that his "side job" of pizza delivery is actually his only job. The kids aren't much happier. Audrey is realizing that her dream of going to Cornell to study with Carl Sagan is financially out of reach, and Brian is a second-tier bully who's recently broken another kid's arm, and now lives in fear of that kid's big brother, the neighborhood's first-tier bully.

But the family's going to have to work together when they wake up after a strange electrical storm to find that a two-mile chunk of their neighborhood has somehow been transported back to the age of dinosaurs, and there are killer beasts everywhere. It's an inverse Jurassic Park; instead of bringing the dinosaurs to our world, the movie sends modern people back to theirs.

Mitchell does a terrific job of building suspense in the opening of the movie, hinting at the lurking monsters in clever ways before finally revealing them to us. The movie is a tight 99 minutes, and there's not a wasted minute in it. Deaths are both gory -- this one is definitely not for the smallest kids, or for the most squeamish adults -- and funny; action sequences and chase scenes are thrilling; and the characters are more rounded and better developed than you expect from this sort of movie.

We already know that Hathaway can cry on cue, and she gets plenty of chances to do so here; what is less expected is what a great scream queen she makes. She delivers perfectly calibrated terror and determination, and it is Denise who is the most practical and realistic about what it will take to survive this ordeal.

This is a excellent family adventure thriller. The jump scares work, and never feel as cheap and desperate as jump scares often do. There are enough jokes to leaven the suspense and fear. There is one narrative choice late in the movie that I thought didn't work; it cheapens the most consequential moment in the movie. But that's a small flaw in an otherwise delightful movie.

And for those who particularly worry about such things, the family dog will be just fine.

TV: Line of Duty (2012- )

I've recently added BritBox and Acorn to my roster of streaming services, so I'll likely be catching up with a lot of British TV over the next several months.

This is an excellent crime drama, with six seasons (36 episodes), and a seventh due in 2027. It's streaming in the US on both BritBox and Acorn, though BritBox is missing season 5. That's an important season to the show's overarching story, so if you're a BritBox subscriber, you will want to do a free trial subscription to Acorn in order to binge that season there.

The setting is AC-12, one of several offices in the London police department devoted to investigating cases of possible police corruption. (I think in the US, we'd more often refer to it as an "internal affairs" department.) Our central characters are officers Steve Arnott (Martin Compston) and Kate Fleming (Vicky McClure), and their commanding officer Ted Hastings (Adrian Dunbar). 

Each season features a fourth top-billed actor, playing the officer who's being investigated that season; not all of those actors are well-known in the US, but they're well-known to British TV audiences, and they are surely a big draw. They are, in order: Lennie James, Keeley Hawes, Daniel Mays, Thandiwe Newton (still using the name Thandie back then), Stephen Graham, and Kelly Macdonald.

Over the course of the six seasons, there's also a larger throughline being developed. We come to realize that the individual investigations into these possibly corrupt cops are tied into the same organized crime group, and the officers of AC-12 find themselves in search of the officers even higher up the ladder who are running the network of organized crime and corrupt cops.

There have been a lot of TV shows -- Burn Notice comes to mind -- that have gotten too caught up in an overly elaborate backstory that came to dominate the show, slowly strangling it to death. Line of Duty avoids that peril, doing an impeccable job of balancing each season's primary investigation with the increasing revelations about the identity of the ringleader(s).

The show does everything you want a police drama to do, and does all of it well. Chase scenes and heists are thrilling; office politics feel realistically frustrating; the dangers of the job are neither exaggerated for melodrama nor downplayed to make the audience feel comfortable.

Best of all are the show's interrogation scenes. Dunbar particularly shines in these scenes, especially at the end of a season, when it's all that Hastings can do to keep his anger in check as he faces down the officers who have betrayed their duty to the public, which Hastings views as a sacred trust. And when Hastings himself comes under suspicion in one season, it's a delight to watch him on the other side of the interrogation. (Guest star Anna Maxwell Martin is terrific as the officer tasked with questioning him, a coldly collected bundle of passive aggression, always offering precisely the amount of polite respect that is required of her, but no more than that.)

This is police drama at its finest, and unless you are allergic to the genre -- some are these days, and I can't say I blame them -- it's absolutely worth the time.

MOVIES: The Rivals of Amziah King (2025, Andrew Patterson)

Patterson's first movie, The Vast of Night, had the bad fortune to be scheduled for release in the spring of 2020, so like a lot of movies that year, it wound up with a graceless dump onto streaming and never found the audience it deserved. Not that it would have been a massive box office hit, but it was a smart take of 50s SF paranoia that did a lot on very limited resources. (Sadly, it doesn't seem to be streaming anywhere at the moment.)

Six years later, he's back with a bigger budget and a couple of actual movie stars. Matthew McConaughey is Amziah King, a widowed Oklahoma beekeeper. As the movie opens, he and some friends are jamming in the parking lot of the local fast food place when a state cop asks for his help. They've intercepted a shipment of stolen honey, and they hope Amziah can help them figure out whose honey it might rightfully be.

The first half of the movie is shaggy and rambling, never sticking to any particular plotline or moment for very long. Amziah is reconnected with Kateri (Angelina LookingGlass, making an impressive film debut); fifteen years ago, she was one of many children for whom he and his late wife served as foster parents. He has more jam sessions with friends; there's a good amount of music here, all of it great fun in a sort of amateur Mumford & Sons style.

But the long chain of digressions is entertaining, and a couple of them are spectacular set pieces. McConaughey has a delightful monologue (Patterson also wrote the film; he's credited under the pseudonym "James Montague") in which he introduces Kateri to her new neighborhood by explaining the backstory of every casserole at the church potluck, and a bee emergency at the local elementary school is the movie's comic highlight.

A sharp narrative turn brings the back half of the movie into tighter focus, and moves Kateri into the spotlight. It also introduces Kurt Russell (with an unnerving resemblance to Steve Bannon) as the local industrial agriculture tycoon.

This is McConaughey's first on-screen role in six years (he's done some voice work), and Patterson makes impeccable use of his laid-back charm. It's a strong enough performnce to carry us through the meandering first half of the movie, and when the turn comes, we realize just how sharply he's used those seemingly random scenes and moments to define Amziah's character. LookingGlass matches him at every turn, and as Kateri is forced to draw upon the strength that Amziah helped her to find, LookingGlass gives a performance of sly resilience and determination.

Russell isn't asked to do much more than be a hissable villain, but he does that with enthusiasm and crisp comic timing. The assorted locals to whom Amziah and Kateri turn for friendship and aid are played by a fine assortment of character actors -- Scott Shepherd, Cole Sprouse, Rob Morgan, Tony Revolori.

Currently in limited release; opens wide on the 21st. Well worth the time if it's playing near you.

MOVIES: Six: The Musical Live! (2026, Liz Clare)

The musical proshot seems to be turning into more than just an occasional novelty; this is at least the third one to play in theaters in the last year (Merrily We Roll Along came out at the end of 2025, and Hadestown just a few weeks ago). It was filmed in 2022, and reunites the 2018 West End cast.

The show begins with the entrance of six women, who announce that they are the wives of Henry VIII. They wear magnificent costumes, designed by Gabriella Slade, that fuse the style of a Renaissance royal court with the sparkle and short skirts of a modern pop diva. At the back of the stage are Ladies in Waiting, their four-woman band. The wives are getting ready for a tour, and they want the audience to choose their lead singer by deciding which of them had the worst marriage.

From there, Six becomes essentially a rock concert, with each wife getting a solo number (the other women sing backup) telling her story. Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss have written pop songs, each loosely inspired by one or two specific divas; Catherine of Aragon (Jameia Richard-Noel) is a Beyonce/Jennifer Hudson type, Katherine Howard (Aimie Atkinson) is a mix of Britney Spears and Ariana Grande, and so on. (I am mildly surprised, given the success of the show, that the producers have never put together some sort of EP in which the songs are sung by the pop stars who inspired them; it'd be a terrific charity fundraiser.)

Most of the songs are tightly tied to each character's history, which makes it difficult to imagine them having any sort of independent life outside the musical. The exception is "Heart of Stone," a ballad for Jane Seymour (Natalie Paris). Seymour tells most of her story in pre-song dialogue, and the song is an emotional response to those events.

Marlow and Moss wrote the show while they were still university students, and there's an "aren't we clever young things" attitude throughout, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. That sort of winking attitude is entertaining for a while, but it can wear thin; they were probably wise to keep the show short, coming in just under 90 minutes.

The history is often framed in very contemporary terms. Anna of Cleves (Alexia McIntosh), for instance, explains that Henry sent for her from Germany after being impressed by her portrait, but he was disappointed when she arrived, as the portrait had exaggerated her beauty. In her song, "Get Down," Anna explains that "you thought that I tricked you / cause I didn't look like my profile picture." McIntosh is terrific in this number, a Nicki Minaj-inspired rap/song hybrid, and it's the highlight of the film.

By the end of the show, it's clear that Marlow and Moss are less interested in getting all of the historical details precisely right than they are in using the wives as a way to explore the broad (and limited) types into which women are sorted, both by history and by musical theater. The final moments pound the feminist message home with a little too much clunky enthusiasm, but there's a sense of humor that is strong enough to keep that message from derailing the show.

Is Six an important musical that's likely to endure for decades? No, I don't think so. But the cast is superb, the songs are skillful pastiches of modern pop styles, and it's a terrific calling card that marks Marlow and Moss as composers to watch. Not a movie you need to rush right out to theaters to see, unless you're a massive fan of the show or of musicals in general, but worth watching for when it comes to streaming.