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    ‘Arctic Ascent With Alex Honnold” Is as Anxiety-Inducing as It Gets

    On “Arctic Ascent With Alex Honnold,” big-wall climbers set out to make history. Their tense conversations give a peek inside the interpersonal dynamics of those who regularly risk death.Spoilers follow.About halfway through the new National Geographic three-part docuseries “Arctic Ascent With Alex Honnold,” a vibe shift starts to creep in.Honnold is one of the greatest living big-wall climbers, whose fame ballooned after his historic ascent of El Capitan, a 3,000-foot climb in Yosemite National Park that was chronicled in the 2018 Oscar-winning documentary “Free Solo.” Here, he is outnumbered by his five adventure-mates as they cross the Renland ice cap, a vast sheet of ice in Greenland, the first known time it has been traversed by foot.They are in the thick of a harsh 100-mile, six-week trek to Ingmikortilaq, an untouched sea wall that measures nearly 4,000 feet — about the height of three Empire State Buildings. Honnold and two of the team members, Hazel Findlay and Mikey Schaefer — both superstar big-wall climbers themselves — are planning to scale it. For any elite mountaineer, it would be a daunting, perilous and most likely inadvisable undertaking. Honnold told CNN that he had “never done a first ascent of that magnitude, of a wall of that size.”About 90 minutes into the day’s march across the ice cap, whiteout conditions and howling winds bear down on them, zapping all visibility and prompting a pointed back-and-forth.Honnold wants to continue even as they approach the center of a crevasse field, where giant cracks in the surface, some hundreds of feet deep, are hard to spot until they’re nearly underfoot. “My goal for the day is to get all the way across the ice cap,” Honnold says. When Schaefer suggests the group set up camp until the weather clears, Honnold can’t believe what he’s hearing. “Are you kidding?” he asks.The team crosses the Edward Bailey Glacier in Greenland. They would soon encounter a blizzard and have to decide whether to wait it out or continue. “I don’t like stopping if I don’t have to,” Honnold says. “I’d much rather keep moving.”Pablo Durana/National GeographicWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Seth Meyers Is Skeptical of Trump’s Rising Stock

    “I’m willing to bet most of the people investing in this company have never even used Truth Social,” Meyers said of Trump’s social media outlet on Thursday.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.What Is the Truth?Trump Media’s stock price surged after going public this week, boosting former President Donald Trump’s bottom line, at least on paper.“I’m willing to bet most of the people investing in this company have never even used Truth Social,” Seth Meyers said on Thursday.“You might be asking yourself, ‘Donald Trump has a media and technology company?’ And the answer is no, he doesn’t. What he has is a dumb Twitter rip-off for MAGA trolls called Truth Social, where he posts insane, typo-riddled, all-caps screeds.” — SETH MEYERS“The only way this business could be any more of a failure is if every time you opened an account, you got a free Zune, a bottle of Crystal Pepsi, a Blockbuster card, a Motorola flip phone that came preloaded with a MySpace account and a round trip next to the door on Alaska Airlines.” — SETH MEYERSThe Punchiest Punchlines (Angry New York Drivers Edition)“Guys, New York just became the first U.S. city to approve congestion pricing, which means cars that drive into Midtown Manhattan will have to pay an extra $15. A $15 toll. And that’s not all; the city announced some other new tolls, too. You’ll have to pay $15 if you make eye contact with someone on the subway for more than three seconds.” — JIMMY FALLON“Now, personally, I can see the upsides to congestion pricing. It’s better for the environment, it reduces traffic, there’s fewer cars on the road, so there’s more space for you to get hit by delivery bikes.” — JORDAN KLEPPER“But, understandably, people are upset, and the last thing I want is angry drivers in New York. I mean, can you imagine?” — JORDAN KLEPPERThe Bits Worth WatchingThe actress Zoe Saldaña spoke about starring in her husband’s directorial debut, “The Absence of Eden,” on Thursday’s “Tonight Show.”Also, Check This OutJulianne Moore as Mary Villiers and Nicholas Galitzine as George, her son, in “Mary and George.”StarzIn the new Starz drama “Mary and George,” Julianne Moore plays a mother whose son catches the eye of King James I of England. More

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    In “Mary and George,” Julianne Moore Is a Scheming Mom

    In the historical drama “Mary and George,” new on Starz, Julianne Moore plays an ambitious mother whose son catches the eye of King James I of England.Standing in a shadowy archway on a bridge leading into Broughton Castle in Oxfordshire, England, sheep nibbling the grass below, Julianne Moore curtsied deeply, lowering her eyes before a splendidly gowned woman. “Your Majesty,” she began, before being drowned out by a loud “baa” from the sheep. Moore burst out laughing, as did her fellow actress, Trine Dyrholm, who was playing Queen Anne of England. “Talk to the sheep!” Moore commanded the director, Oliver Hermanus. “Tell them we’re doing a TV mini-series!”That mini-series is the visually sumptuous, seven-part “Mary and George,” strewn with sex scenes that look like Caravaggio paintings and riddled with all the good things: intrigue, scheming, cunning and villainy. The show, which premieres on Starz on April 5, was inspired by Benjamin Woolley’s 2018 nonfiction book, “The King’s Assassin,” and tells the mostly true tale of Mary Villiers (Moore), a minor 17th-century aristocrat with major ambitions, and her ridiculously handsome son, George (Nicholas Galitzine), who she uses as a path to power and riches at the court of King James I (Tony Curran).James likes ridiculously handsome young men. “The king,” says Mary’s new husband, Lord Compton, “is a dead-eyed, horny-handed horror who surrounds himself with many deceitful well-hung beauties.”From left: Laurie Davidson as the Earl of Somerset, Tony Curran as King James I and Trine Dyrholm as Queen Anne.StarzGeorge’s ascent isn’t easy: Mary must get the current favorite, the Earl of Somerset (Laurie Davidson), out of the way; forge and break alliances; and murder the odd opponent. George, naïve and insecure, must learn how to deploy his beauty and charm. But over the course of the series, George becomes a powerful political figure, with Mary a formidable, frequently antagonistic, presence alongside him.“These are people who use sex not just for intimacy and relationship building, but for power, as a transaction,” Moore said in a video interview. “The most compelling thing to me about Mary was that she was very aware of how limited her choices were. She had no autonomy, her only paths are through the men she is married to, or her sons.” George, she said, “is almost her proxy; he has access to a world she doesn’t have.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘The Who’s Tommy’ Review: Going Full Tilt

    Will the Who’s rock opera about a traumatized boy hit the jackpot again?That its plot makes no sense is not really the problem with “Tommy.” When it first appeared as a concept album, in 1969, it was, after all, billed as a rock opera. And let’s face it, if you’ve ever paid attention to its story unstoned, you’re going to have some questions, just as you might with “The Magic Flute.”Nor can you complain about the rock part of the billing; there’s some pretty magic guitaring going on, and some righteously harmonized vocals.Translations to film and the stage have offered additional pleasures. The 1975 movie gave us Tina Turner in top form — enough said. The original 1993 Broadway musical, with its flying Tommy and galloping pinball machine, was a visual groundbreaker, warmed by excellent performances. Even the colder, coarser revival that opened Thursday at the Nederlander Theater, long since rebranded as “The Who’s Tommy,” offers the excitement of big, poppy belting.Who’s Tommy indeed! And whose? Despite all its incarnations, the experience that makes the most powerful use of Pete Townshend’s infernally catchy songs remains the one that takes place in the ear’s imagination. Largely freed from the burdens of literalness, the album did not need to make sense to make history.Today, though, unless you’re a die-hard fan who thrills automatically to every lick and lyric, you may want something that calls itself musical theater to offer more than a full-tilt assault on the senses. This production — directed, like the original, by Des McAnuff — won’t provide that, being less interested in trying to put across the story (by McAnuff and Townshend) than in obscuring it with relentless noise and banal imagery.To be fair, the story, set during World War II and the two decades after, probably benefits from some obscurity. We first meet Tommy Walker as a cheerful 4-year-old (Olive Ross-Kline, alternating with Cecilia Ann Popp). But when his father (Adam Jacobs) returns after several years in a prisoner-of-war camp, and kills the lover that his mother (Alison Luff) has acquired in the meantime, the boy is traumatized. Witnessing the shooting, he instantly loses his ability to hear, speak and see, leaving him a shell of a child, defenseless against his parents’ rages and his pedophile uncle (John Ambrosino). It also makes him, for a musical, a bizarre protagonist, spending most of his time staring into a large, symbolic mirror.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Logan Lerman Honors Two Families in ‘We Were the Lucky Ones’

    In this Hulu adaptation of a Holocaust novel, Lerman plays a character inspired by two different grandfathers: the author’s and his own.Logan Lerman has been an actor for more than two decades, starting at age 5, and he’s been sent a number of scripts about the Holocaust. They read as exploitative to him.“That’s always rubbed me the wrong way,” he said. “I’m like, ‘No, that doesn’t feel right.’”But the story of the Shoah he now stars in, “We Were the Lucky Ones,” felt different to the performer best known for his work in films like “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” (2012) and “Fury” (2014).Based on the novel of the same title by Georgia Hunter, the eight-episode series premieres Thursday on Hulu. It tracks the members of the Kurc family as they are dispersed throughout Eastern Europe, where they live, and elsewhere when the Nazis invade. Lerman, 32, stars as Addy Kurc, a musician who has been living in Paris and finds himself unable to get home to Radom, Poland. His journey takes him to Casablanca and eventually Rio de Janeiro, all while he is unaware of the fates of his beloved siblings and parents. As the title would imply, this is less a story of loss than it is of survival.While Hunter’s book is fictional, the Kurcs are named for and based on her maternal grandfather’s family, and their sagas were derived from her extensive research into their experiences. A co-executive producer of the series, she shared that background with Lerman as he set out to play Addy, who is based on her grandfather. But the actor reached into his own personal history as well, channeling his own grandfather, who was also a Jewish refugee during World War II. The result is a performance that combines both family histories, paying tribute to Hunter and Lerman’s ancestry in the process.“I also wanted to do it for the reason that I was like, ‘Oh I want to show my grandfather this,’” Lerman said in a video call.Joey King and Lerman in “We Were the Lucky Ones,” adapted from Georgia Hunter’s best-selling novel.HuluWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show Review: Out and Open

    Have you heard the one about the comedian who tried to live truthfully?Midway through “Jerrod Carmichael Reality Show,” the comedian tries to convince Jamar Neighbors, his longtime friend and fellow standup, to deepen his act by using his unhappy past as material. Neighbors, who prefers an energetic, joke-focused performance (his act includes doing back flips onstage), is skeptical about what he calls “therapy comedy.” Why should he dwell on his foster mother, he asks, when “Jeff Bezos is going to space”?“Yeah, but also Jeff Bezos is going to space because it’s some [expletive] he can’t talk to his mama about,” Carmichael says. “It always comes back to that. You’re not just going to space.”In “Reality Show,” a captivating, introspective, sometimes uneasy docuseries beginning Friday on HBO, Carmichael does not go to space. But he does go boldly, bringing family, friends and lovers on an exploration of what it means to live honestly and how it feels to deal with the repercussions.In “Rothaniel,” his 2022 comedy special, Carmichael came out publicly as gay. But that intimate and revelatory show was about more than sexual identity. It was about secrets, not just Carmichael’s being gay (and its effect on his relationship with his conservative Christian mother, Cynthia), but also his family history of deceptions, including his father, Joe, having had a second family when Carmichael was young.“Rothaniel” (the title comes from Carmichael’s actual first name, which he also revealed) was in part about how even open secrets can be corrosive, about what living in a state of knowing-but-not-saying does to you.“Reality Show” is an effort to undo that, in front of an omnipresent camera crew. The Carmichael that we see here is making up for lost time. “I came out late in life,” he says. “I was like basically 30. So I’m like, in gay years, I’m 17.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    What to Watch This Weekend: A Fun Historical Crime Drama

    In its best and most exciting moments, “Manhunt” is the only show brilliant enough to ask: Why can’t Abraham Lincoln be in the “The Fugitive”?Tobias Menzies stars in “Manhunt.”Apple TV+So much of “Manhunt” is a deft modern chase thriller that one can almost feel the phantom F.B.I. windbreakers. You’d swear you can hear a ’90s office phone ringing, or that someone’s face is lit only by their late-night computer session. Yes, there’s an investigator’s crazy wall, but those photos aren’t 8x10s. They’re milky tintypes, because it is 1865, and we’re chasing John Wilkes Booth.In its best and most exciting moments, “Manhunt” is the only show brilliant enough to ask: Why can’t Abraham Lincoln be in the “The Fugitive”? Tobias Menzies stars as Edwin Stanton, the secretary of war under Lincoln who led the 12-day search for Booth. As portrayed here, Stanton is intense, asthmatic, married to the job and thus neglecting his actual wife; you know the drill. His relationship with Lincoln (Hamish Linklater), seen in doting flashback, feels like an amped-up version of Josh and President Jed Bartlet on “The West Wing” — tender, Socratic, grand. And so when his mentor and their vision for America are destroyed with a single shot, Stanton leaps into aggrieved action.“Manhunt” wears its historicity lightly, and its tone and dialogue lean decidedly contemporary. Mostly this does not undercut the intensity of the proceedings but instead adds flair and personality as well as an aerodynamic urgency. In other moments, though, modern lingo and mismatched performances make “Manhunt” feel uncomfortably like “Drunk History,” particularly when characters are either crying or sermonizing.The show is also, deeply, a showbiz story. Booth (Anthony Boyle) is a mopey dirtbag actor, desperate for fame and approval and thrilled to deploy “Don’t you know who I am?” when given the chance. He reads coverage of the assassination as an insecure star reads his reviews, and he bristles when fans repeatedly tell him he’s shorter than they thought he’d be. Characters jockey for flattering media coverage and argue about advancing their own narratives both for vanity and for the sake of a fragile nation. A whistle-stop tour of Lincoln’s body is framed as a flashy PR strategy. All the world’s a stage, and … uh … some of us get assassinated in the audience.“Manhunt” thrives on taut, terrific little moments. Stanton loathes Andrew Johnson (Glenn Morshower), who doesn’t seem to care much. “You could be the first man to call me ‘Mr. President,’” Johnson oozes. “Touch a Bible first, Andy,” Stanton snaps back. The show also builds tension with real aplomb: ticking clocks underscore many scenes, and characters rush through frames, hurrying themselves and the story.Even when it gets dopey, “Manhunt” is still engrossing — fun, even. New episodes arrive Fridays through April 19, on Apple TV+. More

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    Stephen Colbert Recaps the Ronna McDaniel Drama at NBC

    “In case you’re unfamiliar with McDaniel, she is terrible,” Stephen Colbert said of the former Republican National Committee chairwoman.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.‘Representation Matters!’The former Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel was fired by NBC just five days after being hired as an on-air contributor.“In case you’re unfamiliar with McDaniel, she is terrible,” Stephen Colbert said, recalling McDaniel’s involvement with former President Donald Trump and his denial of the 2020 election results.“Happy Women’s History Month, gals! It’s 2024 — you, too, can be morally bankrupt dictator-enabling douche-nuggets. Representation matters!” — STEPHEN COLBERT“[imitating McDaniel] Before, I was carrying water for a fascist wannabe dictator — now I’m getting bangs!” — STEPHEN COLBERT“But, yes, Ronna McDaniel lasted just five days at NBC, which is less screen time than dead bodies on ‘Law & Order’ get” — JORDAN KLEPPER, guest host of “The Daily Show”The Punchiest Punchlines (Disciples Are Standing By Edition)“Trump is still allowed to defend himself. He’s also still allowed to hawk [expletive] products in a desperate bid for money, arguably the most American thing you can do.” — SETH MEYERS“Yes, Donald Trump is now hawking a Bible. It’s just like any other good book, except in the middle of this one, there’s a centerfold.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“It’s like if Mike Pence was selling copies of ‘50 Shades of Grey.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Yep, the guy who’s about to go on trial for paying hush money to cover up an affair with a porn star is selling Bibles. And because it’s a Trump Bible, most of the Ten Commandments are blacked out.” — SETH MEYERS“Now this has come as no surprise to anyone — making a profit is Trump’s religion. As his Jesus famously said, ‘It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle if you pay me four easy installments of $19.95. Act now; disciples are standing by.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“He has to have spare Bibles because every time he holds one, it bursts into flames.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingJerry Seinfeld and Jimmy Fallon asked each other random questions on Wednesday’s “Tonight Show.”What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightThe singer-songwriter Sheryl Crow will appear on Thursday’s “Late Night with Seth Meyers.”Also, Check This OutClassics abound in the horror novelist Stephen King’s literary catalog.Philip Montgomery for The New York TimesWant to read Stephen King but not sure where to start? Here’s a guide to the horror master’s most essential works. More