What’s Streaming
AMAZING STORIES Stream on Apple TV Plus. A smartphone-obsessed man gets more than he swiped for in this new anthology series, which is based on a 1980s sci-fi show created by Steven Spielberg. The first episode stars Dylan O’Brien as a man who is unwittingly transported from 2019 to the early 20th century through supernatural means. He makes the best of it, finding unlikely love in a rebellious local played by Victoria Pedretti.
ORLANDO (1993) Stream on Criterion Channel; rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. For a different kind of time-bending story, see Sally Potter’s loose adaptation of the Virginia Woolf novel “Orlando.” Like the book, the film distorts both time period and gender; it stars Tilda Swinton as its title character, who begins the story as a 17th-century English nobleman and ends it as a late 20th-century author and mother. Potter “takes a huge, audacious and necessary leap away from the page,” Caryn James wrote in her review for The New York Times. “The film distills Woolf’s rich literary manner into sumptuous backdrops and visual styles that change with the centuries, suggesting a pageant of art history from Renaissance chiaroscuro to misty Romanticism and beyond.”
UGLY DELICIOUS Stream on Netflix. The chef and restaurateur David Chang cooks Indian food with Padma Lakshmi, gets a lesson in “modernist cuisine” from the tech executive turned cookbook author Nathan Myhrvold and eats at an Outback Steakhouse in the second season of “Ugly Delicious.” Like the first season, the new episodes look at foods in their larger cultural contexts. (In his review of the first season for The Times, Mike Hale described the show as “an extended television essay, in the form of free-associative, globe-trotting conversations about food and culture.”) Season 2 opens with an episode built around food for children, with notable chefs discussing how to cook for kids, and how they balance their professional lives with parenting.
What’s on TV
JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 2 (2017) 5:30 p.m. and 10:05 p.m. on USA Network. Here’s a moment from this second entry of the “John Wick” series: Despite having just been struck by a four-door sedan, the former hit man John Wick (Keanu Reeves) manages to dodge about a dozen gunshots. He then vaults over the hood of a Mercedes and tackles a beefy bodyguard played by the rapper Common. The two punch and kick at each other, then tumble down a dingy Roman staircase. And that’s not even the end of the fight. The plot of the second “John Wick” movie “matters only inasmuch as it allows the returning director, Chad Stahelski, to stage his spectacular fight sequences in various stunning Roman locations,” Jeannette Catsoulis wrote in her review for The Times, “where they unfold with an almost erotic brutality.” Such scenes have proven to be a potent force at the box office: The series has grown more popular with each entry.
Source: Television - nytimes.com
