What’s Streaming
THE LAST THING HE WANTED (2020) Stream on Netflix. The director Dee Rees’s 2017 adaptation of the novel “Mudbound,” about a black family and a white family in rural Mississippi in the 1940s, picked up four Oscar nominations, and Rees was the first black woman to be nominated for the best adapted screenplay Oscar. Like “Mudbound,” Rees’s latest film, “The Last Thing He Wanted,” is also adapted from a novel — but that’s about where the similarities end. Based on Joan Didion’s 1996 book of the same name, “The Last Thing He Wanted” is a geopolitical thriller about a Reagan-era journalist (Elena McMahon, played by Anne Hathaway) who goes to Central America to investigate illicit weapons sales. Its cast also includes Ben Affleck (as an American diplomat) and Willem Dafoe (Elena’s shady father).
STAR WARS: THE CLONE WARS Stream on Disney Plus. Disney’s new streaming service had success late last year with “The Mandalorian,” its gritty, Western-inflected live-action “Star Wars” series that birthed the toy-mold-ready Baby Yoda. Its next dispatch from the galaxy that George Lucas built is a new season of “The Clone Wars,” a 3-D animated series that garnered a loyal fan base when it aired on Cartoon Network for several years beginning in 2008. The series, set during the time period covered by Lucas’s 2000s “Star Wars” prequel movies, strikes a lighter tone than its blockbuster counterparts; it’s a good choice for younger viewers, or those curious about creative “Star Wars” set pieces outside the confines of live action.
STANDING UP, FALLING DOWN (2020) Rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes and Vudu. Ben Schwartz is in the biggest movie in the country right now, but you won’t see his face in it: He voices the digital title creature in “Sonic the Hedgehog.” See Schwartz in the flesh in this indie dramedy, in which he plays a failing Los Angeles stand-up comic who moves back home to Long Island, where he forms an unlikely friendship with his dermatologist (Billy Crystal).
What’s on TV
THIS WEEK AT THE COMEDY CELLAR 11 p.m. on Comedy Central. Since the main character of “Standing Up, Falling Down” (above) isn’t an A-grade comic, don’t expect to see any superb stand-up sets in it. For that, consider “This Week at the Comedy Cellar,” a series filmed at the Comedy Cellar in New York that features sets from some of the club’s regulars. The show returns for a third season on Friday. Past episodes have featured Chris Gethard, Roy Wood Jr. and Bonnie McFarlane.
THE HOURS (2002) 10:30 p.m. on TCM. Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep star in this adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1998 novel, about Virginia Woolf (Kidman) and two women whose lives imitate Woolf’s art. Stephen Holden called it “deeply moving” in his review for The New York Times, adding that it is “an amazingly faithful screen adaptation of a novel that would seem an unlikely candidate for a movie.”
Source: Television - nytimes.com
