What’s on TV
CAPTAIN PHILLIPS (2013) 9 p.m. on SundanceTV. Directed by Paul Greengrass, who quickened the pace of several Bourne franchise movies, “Captain Phillips” is fraught with urgency. It’s a thriller — enhanced by its basis in true events — about an American cargo ship captain whose vessel is taken over by Somali pirates. The captain, Richard Phillips, is played by Tom Hanks, who “can convey a sense of old-fashioned American decency just by standing in the frame,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The New York Times. But underneath the plot’s fast-paced action and Phillips’s all-American heroism, the movie succeeds in its humanization of the Somalis, providing “an unsettling look at global capitalism and American privilege and power,” Dargis wrote.
THE KITCHEN (2019) 8 p.m. and 11:15 p.m. on HBO. Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish and Elisabeth Moss star in this twist on a mob movie where, this time, women are in charge. After their husbands are locked up, Kathy (McCarthy), Ruby (Haddish) and Claire (Moss) find themselves struggling to make ends meet. But it’s 1978 in Hell’s Kitchen, and jobs for women outside the home are scarce, so, naturally, the three become crime bosses to feed their families. Much is amiss in this feminist undertaking by the director Andrea Berloff, Dargis wrote in her review for The Times, but “the leads are appealing and Berloff gives each time to do her thing.”
What’s Streaming
FLY AWAY HOME (1996) Stream on Criterion; rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube. Amy Alden (Anna Paquin) is 13 when her mother dies in a car crash, uprooting her from New Zealand, where she was raised, and sending her to rural Canada, where her father lives. Her father, Thomas Alden (Jeff Daniels), is a quirky inventor trying desperately to connect with his estranged daughter. But the plot takes off when Amy finds an abandoned nest of goose eggs and — looking for a project — decides to hatch and raise them herself. “A string of enchanting, unsentimental girl-and-geese scenes are the film’s central highlight,” Janet Maslin wrote in her review for The Times, and the cinematographer Caleb Deschanel “finds miraculous new ways to show off pastoral green landscapes and back-lighted yellow fuzz.” Complications arise when the geese must fly south for the winter, and the Aldens must lead the way.
GABRIELLE (2005) Stream on Mubi. Based on “The Return,” a short story by Joseph Conrad, the French film “Gabrielle” is given new life by the director Patrice Chéreau in his onscreen adaptation. Dargis wrote in her review for The Times that it’s “a film of eccentric beauty and wild feeling,” starring Pascal Greggory and Isabelle Huppert. Greggory is Jean Hervey, a well-to-do member of Paris’s pre-World War I bourgeoisie who frequently finds himself itemizing what he considers his life’s greatest possessions — including his wife, Gabrielle (Huppert). When Gabrielle leaves her husband a letter saying she is leaving him for another man, Jean’s meticulously arranged life comes crashing down.
Source: Television - nytimes.com
