What’s Streaming
I AM NOT OKAY WITH THIS Stream on Netflix. “I do want you to at least attempt to have a normal high school experience,” a school counselor tells Sydney (Sophia Lillis) in this new series. That’s not likely to happen: Sydney, a teenage girl in Pennsylvania, has superpowers that allow her to destroy objects with her mind. Adapted from a graphic novel by Charles Forsman, the series follows Sydney as she discovers those powers, which she grapples with alongside family tragedy and the awkward slog of high school. Helping her are a best friend (played by Sofia Bryant) and an eccentric young neighbor (Wyatt Oleff). The series “is firmly within both the superhero and teen-angst traditions,” James Poniewozik wrote in his review for The New York Times, “and, fair warning, is not immune to the clichés of either. What distinguishes it, however, beyond a tart voice and a pair of engaging performances, is that it commits as fully to its YA half as to its biff-pow-blam half.”
UPGRADE (2018) Stream on HBO platforms. The filmmaker Leigh Whannell is behind the adaptation of H.G. Wells’s “The Invisible Man” that hits theaters this weekend. While many may be most likely to know Whannell as a screenwriter (“Saw” and “Insidious”), he has directed a couple of other movies. The most recent of those, “Upgrade,” is an action-horror romp that stars Logan Marshall-Green as Grey Trace, a man of the near future who has a technology implant that gives him superhuman abilities. He uses them to avenge his wife’s killing. “‘Upgrade’ is an energetic, superficially slick, latter-day B-movie of the ‘but dumb’ category,” Glenn Kenny wrote in his review for The Times. “That is, it’s kind of like ‘RoboCop,’ but dumb, and also like ‘Ex Machina,’ but dumb. In this respect the movie manages to be pretty funny.”
BLUEBIRD (2019) Rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. Bluebird Cafe, the landmark Nashville venue known as a haven for songwriters, is shown off in this documentary. The movie captures Taylor Swift, Garth Brooks, Maren Morris, Kacey Musgraves, Jason Isbell, Steve Earle and other musicians praising the cafe.
What’s on TV
STAR TREK BEYOND (2016) 6:30 p.m. on Syfy. After directing “Star Trek” (2009) and “Star Trek Into Darkness” (2013), J.J. Abrams jumped ship to helm “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” So directing duties for this third entry in the most recent “Star Trek” movie series went to Justin Lin, known for several of the “Fast and the Furious” movies. But “Beyond” brings back the series’s key onscreen players, including James Tiberius Kirk (Chris Pine), Spock (Zachary Quinto), Uhura (Zoe Saldana) and Sulu (John Cho). The villain this time is a warlord played by Idris Elba. “It should have been called ‘Star Trek Within,’” A.O. Scott wrote in his review for The Times, “in honor of its determination to color inside the lines, obeying the ironclad conventions of brand and genre.”
Source: Television - nytimes.com
