Eliana Willis

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    ‘The Porter’ Is a Rich Period Drama About Labor and Dignity

    The series is substantive, well crafted and a little melancholy, centered on a group of Black train porters in Canada in the 1920s.“The Porter” is a Canadian drama from 2022 that originally aired on the CBC in Canada and on BET+ in the United States, and it’s now available on the Roku Channel, too. The show is set in the 1920s and centers on a group of Black train porters who are trying to improve their lives, some through labor organizing and others through bootlegging.Beyond its porters, the show also follows people at a night club, a brothel, the beginnings of a medical clinic; it covers Canadian politics, American politics and railroad politics. Sure, the characters are all miraculously connected through the enchanting magic of narrative television, but the idea that one’s plight is tied to another’s is also one of the main ideas of the show. Solidarity matters — and the people who tell you that you’re one of the good ones and to slam the door behind you are the people who benefit from your exploitation, not your success. Don’t trust someone else to define dignity.It’s a show about a train, so there’s a sense of real momentum and destiny. Things are moving, and the characters are motivated, so the story feels exciting even when it’s tragic. The camera here is shaky and searching, sometimes tilting with the rocking of the train cars but also, like the characters, always scanning the scene for someone to trust, always a little unsettled.So many streaming shows feel like the TV equivalent of gray laminate Zillowcore, resigned to a lack of specialness and taste in favor of volume and repetition. Part of what’s so pleasurable about “The Porter” is how full its moments are, how crafted. There’s a melody to the clacking of its typewriters and a viciousness to the half-eaten sandwiches on its plates.“Every task is a chance to show your excellence,” says Zeke (Ronnie Rowe), our labor hero, explaining the virtue of the perfect place setting. (I’ve thought about this line every single time I’ve folded a napkin in the past three years.)There’s only one season of “The Porter,” which is a shame, but luckily it is an excellent rewatch. I like it even more now than I did when it debuted. More

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    All Aboard a Steam Train to See ‘The Railway Children’

    The steam train departed the station with a gentle chug, belching clouds of steam that streamed past the carriage windows. Gathering speed, the locomotive transported its passengers through a damp green valley, past gray stone buildings, rain-dripping oak trees, banks of ferns and hillsides dotted with sheep.For many visitors to the Keighley and Worth Valley heritage railway, the picturesque five-mile route through northern England from the town Keighley to Oxenhope village is the main attraction. But for the passengers on Tuesday, it was just the beginning.A theater adaptation of Edith Nesbit’s classic children’s book, “The Railway Children,” awaited them when they stepped down from the train in Oxenhope. To take their seats, passengers headed into a large engine room shed next to the platform, where they sat on either side of a railway track. The scenes played out on a movable set that shunted up and down the tracks. And at certain key moments in the play, a second real steam train rolled in as part of the action.It was a fitting setting for a play set entirely around a small village station in the steam age. “The Railway Children” follows three children — Bobbie, Peter and Phyllis — who must leave their comfortable London home for a simple cottage in the countryside after their father is imprisoned on suspicion of being spy. The children are cheerfully resilient in the face of sudden poverty and are soon welcomed into the rural community.The audience for “The Railway Children” boards a steam train in Keighley, a town in northern England.Ellie Smith for The New York TimesKeighley is a stop on a railway line that opened in 1867 and closed in 1962. Locals and locomotive enthusiasts later revived the route as a heritage line.Ellie Smith for The New York TimesWe 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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    Cannonball with Wesley Morris: Has Dining Gotten Too Fine on ‘The Bear’?

    Wesley Morris talks with Samin Nosrat, a chef and food writer, about her love-hate relationship with “The Bear,” a show that’s always racing against the clock. She says the best moments, in the show and in our own kitchens, happen when things slow down.You can listen to the show on your favorite podcast app, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music and iHeartRadio, and you can watch it on YouTube:CreditsCannonball is hosted by More

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    ‘Untamed’ Review: A National Park Procedural From Netflix

    Onscreen, at least, there are enough rangers to keep Yosemite running and to investigate a mysterious death at El Capitan.In the category of “Shows That Play Differently Under the Current Administration,” this week brings “Untamed,” a new Netflix mystery mini-series set in Yosemite National Park.On one hand, you can’t help wondering whether all those rangers would have time to investigate a mysterious death on the face of El Capitan when the National Park Service has lost nearly 25 percent of its permanent staff since President Trump took office again. Aren’t there restrooms that need cleaning?On the other, hiring rangers who look like Eric Bana and Lily Santiago — who play the primary investigators of that mysterious death — might be explained as part of the recent “Make America Beautiful Again” executive order.Bana, 20 years along from his action-star heyday (when he appeared successively in “Hulk,” “Troy” and “Munich”), plays Kyle Turner, who is not just any ranger. He’s an agent of the National Park Service Investigative Services Branch, so he’s sort of a federal cousin to the naval investigators at “NCIS.” Maybe CBS would have gone ahead and called the show “NPSISB,” but Netflix, cautious by nature, has gone with “Untamed.”The title refers both to the landscape — mountainous British Columbia locations stand in for California — and to Turner, a laconic loner with a tragic back story and an entire Douglas fir’s worth of chips on his shoulder. Even his horse thinks he’s too intense.With Bana playing a modern lawman hemmed in by bureaucracy and fueled by guilt and resentment, “Untamed” sits between neo-frontier soap opera (like “Yellowstone”) and neo-western crime drama (like “Dark Winds” or the late, lamented “Longmire”). Mark L. Smith, who created the show with his daughter Elle Smith, has experience in this region of the American imagination, having played up the brutal aspects of the western mythos as a co-writer of “The Revenant” and creator of an earlier Netflix mini-series, “American Primeval.”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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    Why Did the Indie Film Studio A24 Buy an Off Broadway Theater?

    The Hollywood upstart has upgraded the Cherry Lane Theater for plays and more. Coming this fall: films chosen by Sofia Coppola, food from Frenchette and the voice of Barbra Streisand.In the two years since A24, the artistically ambitious film and television studio, purchased Manhattan’s Cherry Lane Theater, the historic West Village building has been dark, at least from the outside. But inside, the company behind “Moonlight,” “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and “Euphoria” has been quietly overhauling the facility, and in September Cherry Lane will reopen as the first live performance venue run by the indie powerhouse.The company says it plans a wide-ranging slate of programming, prioritizing theater — Cherry Lane describes itself as the birthplace of the Off Broadway movement — but also featuring comedy, music and film.Another attraction: food. A24 has enlisted the Frenchette Group, which runs several lauded eateries in Manhattan (including Frenchette, Le Rock and Le Veau d’Or), to open a small restaurant and bar at Cherry Lane. The restaurant, called Wild Cherry in a nod to the theater’s name, will be Frenchette’s second collaboration with a downtown cultural institution — it also operates a bakery cafe inside the Whitney Museum.Among the initial programming highlights will be a Sunday film series curated by Sofia Coppola (first film: Adrian Lyne’s “Foxes” from 1980) and a five-week run of “Weer,” a one-woman show from the clowning comedian Natalie Palamides (each half of her body plays a different partner in a romantic couple). There will also be a week of opening events, starting Sept. 8, that includes comedy, music, a play reading and a block party. The venue does not plan to announce a season, or to have subscribers — it wants the nimbleness to extend or add events as it goes.In keeping with theatrical tradition, Cherry Lane has a ghost light, which is used for practical and supernatural safety when other lights are off.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“First and foremost, we really want this to be a place where people can be sure they’ll see a great, good quality piece of live performance,” said Dani Rait, who spent a decade at “Saturday Night Live,” helping to book hosts and musical guests, before A24 hired her to head programming at Cherry Lane. “And it’s an opportunity for discovery — for artists to have a stage and connect with audiences in a really intimate way.”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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    Why ‘Jaws’ Works

    A new documentary explores how Steven Spielberg’s hit reshaped the movie industry 50 years ago and why it resonates today. Hint: It’s not the shark.On the most basic level “Jaws” is a movie about a relentless great white shark, terrorizing the residents of a beach community during a Fourth of July weekend. It was the razor-toothed beast who adorned the onslaught of T-shirts and other merchandise when the film came out 50 years ago, premiering in June 1975 and all but creating what we think of as the modern blockbuster. It was the shark who got the two-note tuba treatment from John Williams’s ominous score.But the new National Geographic documentary “Jaws @50,” now streaming on Disney+ and Hulu, makes one thing as clear as a summer day on Amity Island: “Jaws” is primarily about flawed people, not a scary fish. The real villain is not the shark, who, after all, would be happy to be left alone. (As the shark conservation biologist Candace Fields says in the documentary, “The sharks are not infesting the water. The sharks live in the water”).The bad guy is the avaricious mayor (Murray Hamilton), who insists on keeping the beaches open during peak season rather than shutting down for safety. The three heroes — the police chief Brody (Roy Scheider), the sea captain Quint (Robert Shaw), and the oceanographer Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) — form a carefully drawn triangle, written with a depth that has eluded most post-“Jaws” spectacles to this day.For Laurent Bouzereau, the author and filmmaker who directed “Jaws @50,” the human touches were what made “Jaws” a classic, and what guided a young Steven Spielberg as he turned Peter Benchley’s best-selling novel into a runaway hit movie.“The humanity of Steven’s approach to everything in his career started emerging in a movie like ‘Jaws,’ where it’s much more about people’s reaction to a crisis rather than the crisis itself,” Bouzereau said in a video interview. “You feel like you know these people, and they all stand out.”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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    ‘Rematch’ Recreates a Cultural Touchstone

    A series dramatizes the 1997 chess match between a world champion and an IBM computer, a precursor of modern anxieties about artificial intelligence.It is rare that chess grabs the public’s attention — most people consider it to be too slow or too arcane to be engaging. But every now and then, the game transcends those obstacles, as it did in 2020, when Netflix released “The Queen’s Gambit,” about a girl genius who rises up to conquer the game of kings.It happens with real chess matches, too. It happened in 1972, when against the backdrop of the Cold War, a match for the world championship was played in Iceland between the American Bobby Fischer and the Russian Boris Spassky. Fischer won.And it happened again in May 1997, when Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion, played a match against a black, six-and-a-half-foot tall, 1,500-pound computer named Deep Blue, developed at IBM.The last event is the subject of another television series, called “Rematch,” now streaming in Britain on Disney+. (It is not currently streaming in the United States; Disney declined to say when or if it would.) The six-part series walks viewers through what led up to the weeklong match held in midtown Manhattan and the unfolding drama culminating in (spoiler alert) Kasparov’s historic loss.Spinning a tale of human drama, corporate skulduggery, double-dealing and even espionage, “Rematch” also makes several explicit references to the attention that the match received, including by weaving in actual clips from contemporaneous news broadcasts.Though there are some fictional elements in the series, the hype was real.It was not hard to understand. The match pitted man against machine, something right out of science fiction. (In one scene in “Rematch,” characters joke about naming Deep Blue after sinister robots from “Alien” or “Terminator.”)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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    Late Night Fact-Checks Trump on His Uncle and the Unabomber

    Jordan Klepper and other hosts poked holes in the president’s claim that his uncle had been the future terrorist’s professor at M.I.T. 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.Weird Flex, BroAt an A.I. conference in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, President Trump said his uncle, John Trump, had been the “longest-serving professor in the history of M.I.T.” and held “three degrees in nuclear, chemical, and math.” Trump added that his uncle’s students had included Ted Kaczynski, who he described as being “seriously good.”“Wow, we went from zero to Unabomber like that,” Jordan Klepper said on Wednesday’s “Daily Show,” snapping his fingers.Klepper pointed out that while the president’s uncle had indeed been a well-known M.I.T. professor, he was not the longest-serving one, nor did he have degrees in “nuclear, chemical and math” (he had a Ph.D. in electrical engineering). He said it was also highly unlikely that he had told his nephew Donald a story about teaching the Unabomber, “because nobody knew who Kaczynski was until 1996, and Trump’s uncle died in 1985.”“Kaczynski did not go to M.I.T. He went to Harvard. [imitating Trump] ‘Yes, but sometimes old Ted would take the crosstown bus over to M.I.T, then he would go around correcting people. He’d say, ‘I actually didn’t go to school here, you know, you don’t actually know me. I’m a figment of the imagination of your dumbest nephew.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“So the whole thing we just heard wasn’t just a small lie, it was like a full hallucination.” — SETH MEYERS“Now, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe Trump just misspoke, made a slip. I mean, who among us hasn’t accidentally told people that our uncle taught the Unabomber?” — JORDAN KLEPPER“What I’m saying is, isn’t it great that we finally have a president whose brain works perfectly?” — JORDAN KLEPPERThe Punchiest Punchlines (Snoozefest Edition)“But the big story today is that Trump lashed out at his own supporters who are criticizing him over the Epstein files, calling them ‘weaklings who have bought into B.S. hook, line and sinker.’ Trump hasn’t been this mad at the people he loved since McDonald’s introduced salads.” — JIMMY FALLON“No, he’s right. The Epstein saga is a total snoozefest. I mean, the most powerful man in the world is blocking information about a cabal of the rich, the famous and the royal befriending a con man, who regularly flies off on his private plane to his private island to do super-illegal sex stuff. Then the con man is arrested, people are afraid he’s going to name names, but before he can, he mysteriously dies right after being taken off of suicide watch in a federal prison during the administration of the guy who is blocking the release of the information. Boring!” — STEPHEN COLBERTWe 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