Eliana Willis

Stephen Colbert said he was both “gratified and terrified” after Warnock narrowly beat Herschel Walker for a Senate seat.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.Warnock For the WinLate night hosts had taped their Tuesday shows before the results from the Georgia Senate runoff were in, so they shared their reactions to Raphael Warnock’s win on Wednesday.Stephen Colbert said he felt a swing of emotions. “Gratified, because Raphael Warnock defeated Herschel Walker, 51.4 percent to 48.6 percent, and terrified, because 48.6 percent of Georgians looked at Herschel Walker and went, ‘Yeah, that guy should be a U.S. senator.’”“Warnock has won Georgia! It’s fitting he’s a reverend, because when I hear that, all I can say is ‘Thank God.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“But despite that, it was close. It was really, really close. In fact, if I was Raphael Warnock, my victory speech wouldn’t have been me smiling. I would have been a lot more different. He’s a gracious man. He was talking about democracy and America’s promise. I would have been up there like, ‘Are you people kidding me with this [expletive]? You guys are giving me a two point win over this walking vasectomy commercial? Are you kidding me?’ He is a better man.” — TREVOR NOAH“This is a tough break for Walker, though it’ll take him a couple days to understand what has happened.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Walker was so deeply unqualified that much of the time it seemed like he didn’t even know what was going on. Even Walker’s fellow Republicans warned months ago that he could lose. The only reason he was even a candidate for the Senate in the first place was that he was once on Donald Trump’s game show. Donald Trump fired him from ‘The Celebrity Apprentice,’ but thought he might do better in the United States Senate. [imitating Trump] ‘Herschel, I don’t know if you’re ready to sell corn dogs in Times Square, so let’s put you in charge of the U.S. military first.’” — SETH MEYERS“Rafael Warnock defeated Republican Herschel Walker in the Georgia runoff last night, giving Democrats a 51-49 seat majority in the Senate. Experts say the key to Warnock’s victory was that he wasn’t Herschel Walker.” — JAMES CORDEN“When you take a moment, when you step away from a race, you understand how crazy this was? You had Raphael Warnock, a pastor — a pastor who is preaching at the same church as M.L.K., and Herschel Walker, a man who thinks M.L.K. is how you spell ‘milk.’” — TREVOR NOAHThe Punchiest Punchlines (Herschel, What’s Next? Edition)“With this loss, Walker is expected to return to his previous job, lying about having previous jobs. But on the bright side, it gives him more time to spend with his family, and more time to figure out who that is.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“And with the election behind him, Herschel says he will now focus on his true passion, having more kids than Nick Cannon.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Herschel’s already working on his next project, which is desperately trying to learn to sing ‘Baby Got Back’ while dressed like an acorn on ‘The Masked Singer.’” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Herschel has decided to step away from the spotlight to spend more time denying allegations from his family.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Bits Worth Watching“The Daily Show” parodied holiday rom-coms with its political parody, “The Daily Show Christmas Movie: A Vote for Love.”What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightOn Thursday night, Trevor Noah will sign off with his last episode as host of “The Daily Show.”Also, Check This OutIce Spice’s “Munch (Feelin’ U)” introduces a new piece of slang. The track made all three of our critics’ lists this year.Edwig HensonWith 70 different songs spanning several genres, our critics share their picks for the best songs of 2022. More

He was the last surviving member of the team that produced the educational cartoon for ABC-TV that informed Generation X.George R. Newall, an advertising executive who was the last surviving creator of “Schoolhouse Rock,” the animated musical snippets that taught young Generation X television viewers grammar, math, civics and science for a few moments during otherwise vacuous Saturday-morning commercial programming, died on Nov. 30 at a hospital near his home in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y. He was 88.The cause was cardiopulmonary arrest, his wife, Lisa Maxwell, said.“Schoolhouse Rock,” series, which ran from 1973 to 1984 and was revived in the 1990s, used quirky cartoons and upbeat music to furtively transform rote learning into euphonious fun during regular programming and before the government, in the 1990s, mandated that stations broadcast a modicum of educational and informative fare.The show won four Emmy Awards.The series spawned books, recordings, live singalong shows and a nostalgia cult that will mark the show’s 50th anniversary next year when the Walt Disney Company presents a prime-time television special; rereleases “The Official Schoolhouse Rock Guide,” written by Mr. Newall and Tom Yohe; and publishes an adult coloring book featuring all of the program’s characters.Among the show’s perennial favorite songs were “Three Is a Magic Number,” celebrating tripods, triangles and even a couple producing a baby; “Interjection!” which depicts a cartoon character getting stuck in the posterior with a big needle; and Mr. Newall’s “Unpack Your Adjectives.”“Schoolhouse Rock” originated in the early 1970s when David McCall, president of the McCaffrey & McCall advertising agency, complained to Mr. Newall, a creative director there, that his young sons couldn’t multiply, “but they can sing along with Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones.”Could Mr. Newall put the multiplication tables to music? he asked. Mr. Newall’s search for a quirky musician who might help led him to Ben Tucker, who played bass at the Hickory House in New York, which Mr. Newall frequented regularly.“I asked Ben, and he said, ‘Oh yeah, my partner, Bob Dorough — he can put anything to music!’” Mr. Newall told The New York Times Magazine in 2018.‘He told me Bob had written a song based on the words on the mattress tag that say, ‘Do not remove under penalty of law,’” Mr. Newall recalled. “So I brought Bob in, and David gave him the assignment. He came back about two weeks later with ‘Three Is a Magic Number,’ and we were all knocked out by it.”The song inspired Mr. Yohe, the agency’s art director and a cartoonist, to start doodling. What was originally conceived as an educational phonograph record morphed into a series of three-minute films that the creative team presented to Michael Eisner, then the director of children’s programming at ABC, a client of the agency.Mr. Eisner happened to be meeting with Chuck Jones, the immortal Warner Bros. animator.“After we played the song and Tom showed them the storyboards, Eisner looked at Jones and said, ‘What do you think?’” Mr. Newall told The Times in 1994. “And Jones said, ‘I think you should buy it right away.’ It was probably the quickest deal in television history.”The first season was followed with themed series on grammar, government (to coincide with the American Bicentennial celebration), science and computer technology.In 1976, Carol Rinzler wrote in The Times, “The ‘ABC Schoolhouse Rock’ animated bits, which teach math and reading concepts and, this year, American history, are a joy. It’s worth sitting in front of your TV all morning to catch the one in which the Constitution is set to music.”Three-minute “Schoolhouse Rock” cartoons like “Conjunction Junction” tried to teach children grammar, math, civics and science.ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content, via Getty ImagesMr. Eisner later became chairman and chief executive of the Walt Disney Company, which acquired “Schoolhouse Rock” in 1996 (including new segments produced in the 1990s with J.J. Sedelmaier Productions) when it bought Capital Cities/ABC.Mr. Newall and Mr. Yohe were the executive producers and creative directors of the original episodes and worked with other collaborators. Mr. Newall composed 10 of the songs.In 1996, Atlantic Records released an album featuring alternative musicians like Moby (who croons a brassy version of “Verb: That’s What’s Happening”), and in 2002 the Disney Company issued a DVD of all the “Schoolhouse Rock” episodes and a timely lyrical explication by Mr. Newall of why some states in a presidential election are more equal than others.In 2013, Mr. Newall spoke about the show and Mr. Dorough performed “Schoolhouse Rock” songs at a free concert at the Kennedy Center in Washington.Mr. Yohe died in 2000, Mr. Dorough in 2018.George Robert Newall Jr. was born on June 17, 1934, in Lakewood, N.J. His father was a builder. His mother, Louise (DeNyse) Newall, worked for the school board in Brick Township.After attending Point Pleasant Beach High School and serving in the Army’s 11th Airborne Division Band at Fort Campbell, Ky., Mr. Newall graduated from Florida State University with a bachelor’s degree in music composition in 1960. He moved to New York City, where, starting in a mailroom at $50 a week, he worked for a number of ad agencies, including Ogilvy & Mather and Grey.At McCaffrey & McCall, he conjured up the Hai Karate brand of men’s toiletries for Pfizer with an advertising campaign that parodied the industry’s customary romanticized appeal to raw sexual passion by including self-defense instructions to fend off libidinous women.In 1978, he and Mr. Yohe started a company to produce animated educational programming. They won another Emmy for “Drawing Power,” an animated series for NBC, and awards for cartoons that promoted nutrition, cartoons that urged young viewers to read (“When You Turn Off Your Set, Turn On a Book”) and cartoons that were praised for being neither sexist nor racist.In the 1980s, Mr. Newall joined Wells Rich Greene, where he produced TV commercials in which Alan Alda pitched Atari computers.Mr. Newall is survived by his wife, the artist and singer Lisa (Chapman) Maxwell; a stepson, Lake Wolosker; and his sisters, Jessie Newall Bissey, Kathy Newall Hogan and Anne Newall Kimmel. More

Welcome to our portfolio of paradoxes. The first is that artists emblematic of great acting in moving images have been captured in still photographs. Another involves the state of the art itself. We chose 10 performances and could easily have doubled that tally, yet all of that talent finds itself in an iffy place. There are no guarantees for a screen actor anymore. There are no guarantees for a screen actor’s audience. We’re not even sure what we mean by “screen.” Read More

We walked into “The Woman King” intrigued (what, exactly, would a machete-and-sandal melodrama starring Viola Davis look like?) and left astonished. A great performance can amount to something in addition to craft — personality, zeal, observation, lunacy, exactitude, risk, freedom. And that movie had all of those right there in almost every performance. Davis, for instance, did her usual bruising work — an actor at peak intensity. But not only did the film showcase and redouble the might of an established star; it also made one out of Thuso Mbedu, who plays Davis’s — well, just treat yourself.

Here is someone whom we moviegoers deserve to get to know for years to come. But in what kinds of movies? As what sorts of people? Mbedu can act. But there just isn’t the variety of movies that could sustain all the acting she and many of the performers in the portfolio that follows could do — names you may not know, like Freddie Gibbs and Frankie Corio and, loosely, Vicky Krieps — but who once upon a time would have had a few chances to show what else they’re made of.

Those chances feel imperiled. And not for the old reasons (for being a woman, for not being white) — although there’s still some of that. The peril is industrial shortsightedness. There’s diminished interest in the human scale of storytelling, particularly in American movies, which increasingly feel the need to go big or risk the audience’s staying home. Perhaps that’s why we’ve turned, along with many an actor, to television, where the ground feels more fertile. Maybe to the point of feeling overgrown.

And that may be yet another paradox: a state of wild abundance that can seem a lot like scarcity. Talk of the “golden age” of television has receded in the face of the streaming gold rush. There are so many characters and narratives to keep track of. In an economy of scale, the aesthetics of scale can get out of whack. Stories that might have filled out a feature are stretched into six episodes. Eight-episode limited series flop into multiseason epics.

Yet, somehow, acting thrives in this environment. Mediocre shows and films are often made watchable by the gift and grit of performers (George Clooney and Julia Roberts in “Ticket to Paradise”; Adrien Brody and Rob Morgan in “Winning Time”). There is enough outstanding work on television alone to fill a portfolio twice or three times the size of this one. To that end, we enfolded limited series into the survey and collided with Jon Bernthal, who, on “We Own This City,” managed to turn crooked-cop work into a feat of appalling macho cheer; and were blown away by Toni Collette on “The Staircase,” for which, despite centuries of actors’ simulating death, she invented at least four new and distressing ways to perform dying.

But there is still, in the midst of all of that, the special lure and allure of the movies, which haven’t actually gone anywhere. Yes, you can stream “The Woman King” at home, but you would miss the bubbling joy of the families with kids — daughters and sons alike — when Davis and Mbedu get in each other’s faces and then join forces to purge their land of slavers.

Or you would miss the sound of a stranger in the next seat sobbing into his mask during the final shot of “Aftersun,” Charlotte Wells’s memory film about a father and his daughter on holiday in Turkey. All you’re looking at is Corio, playing an 11-year-old Scottish sprite named Sophie, mugging for the camera that her father, Calum (Paul Mescal), is holding as she prepares to board a flight home from their vacation. It’s a jumpy, grainy amateur image (the film takes place in a not-so-distant pre-smartphone past), but it’s also cinema in the most exalted sense.

Obviously, we hunger for what an actor can do for a movie: for the gruff poetry of Brendan Gleeson in “The Banshees of Inisherin”; for the salty sibling rivalry of Keke Palmer and Daniel Kaluuya in “Nope”; for the pizazz and poignancy of Michelle Williams in “The Fabelmans.” The year’s biggest hit stars Tom Cruise, and its staggering popularity is emphatic proof of what his stardom continues to mean to us. Cate Blanchett, meanwhile, playing a problematic maestro in “Tár,” matched and perhaps even exceeded the character’s mastery. Forget about the multiplex: That’s a performance fit for a concert hall.

So now that we’ve poured one out for movie-industry scarcity and rebattened the hatches for gushingly abundant TV, what is our true task here? It can’t be lamentation. We’re worried — it’s a critic’s job to be worried — but not yet woebegone. We want to applaud, marvel at and salute the achievement of screen acting, the increasing miracle of it in challenging and confusing circumstances. Because to watch the 10 artists here is to sense that acting remains in fine shape; to watch them is both life-giving and life-affirming. In one montage in “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” time warps everything around Michelle Yeoh except the astonishment on her face. Her surprise — which inspires our own — is proof of the beautiful mystery of the art form, and a reason to reconsider a longtime star’s endurance. How — how — did she pull that off?

This issue of the magazine is testament to our inability to answer that question. Every great performance is a unique amalgam of training, talent, collaboration and luck. In the end, we don’t know how they do it. What we do know is that we can’t stop watching. More

This season focuses on the willful delusion of the wealthy — and how easily preyed upon people who evade reality can be.Early in the second season of “The White Lotus” — Mike White’s HBO satire of the leisure class, currently set in a five-star Sicilian resort — there’s a sequence that offers an overt, shot-for-shot homage to a scene in “L’Avventura,” from 1960, the first film in Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Trilogy of Decadence.” Coolly removed and virtually plotless, Antonioni’s three films were intended as an indictment of the entropic passivity of wealth. All starred Monica Vitti, the glamorous Italian actress with whom Antonioni was romantically involved. In “L’Avventura,” she plays Claudia, a young woman whose best friend, Anna, disappears during a yacht trip off the coast of Sicily. As Claudia and Anna’s boyfriend, Sandro, search for the missing girl, they drift into an unconvincing relationship. When they arrive at the lone hotel in the town of Noto, Claudia, suddenly worried about facing her friend, tells Sandro to search inside without her.What we are looking at is the experience of being looked at.The scene “The White Lotus” recreates takes place outside, in the piazza, where Claudia is accosted by a horde of leering men. The aesthetics are disconcerting: Antonioni uses the town’s baroque architecture to pile men around and atop Claudia. She looks afraid, for a moment, but then has a sort of detachment from reality. Walking slowly through the crowd, she seems to give herself over to the experience, allowing herself to become a spectacle, subject to the men’s (and the audience’s) scrutinizing, consuming gaze.Welcoming You Back to ‘The White Lotus’The second season of “The White Lotus,” Mike White’s incisive satire of privilege set in a luxury resort, begins on HBO on Oct. 30.Michael Imperioli: The “Sopranos” star is enjoying a professional renaissance after years of procedurals and indies. In the new season of “The White Lotus” he tries his hand at comedy.Season 1: The series scrutinized the interactions between guests and staff at a resort in Hawaii. “It’s vicious and a little sudsy and then, out of nowhere, sneakily uplifting,” our critic wroteUnaware Villain: The actor Jake Lacy plays Shane, a wealthy and entitled 30-year-old on his honeymoon, in the first season. Here is what he said about bringing to life the unsavory character.Emmys: The series scooped up five Primetime Emmys on Sept. 12, including for best TV movie, limited or anthology series, and best supporting actress for Jennifer Coolidge’s breakout performance.Even before “The White Lotus” fully replicates this image, though, we see one character — a batty gazillionaire named Tanya McQuoid, played by Jennifer Coolidge — explicitly name-check Vitti. Describing her fantasy of a day in Italy to her husband, Greg, she stays resolutely on the surface: “First, I want to look just like Monica Vitti,” she says. “And then this man in a very slim-fitting suit, he comes over and he lights my cigarette. And it tastes really good. And then he takes me for a drive on his Vespa. Then, at sunset, we go down really close to the sea, to one of those really romantic spots. And then we drink lots of aperitivos and we eat big plates of pasta with giant clams. And we’re just really chic and happy. And we’re beautiful.” Greg obligingly rents a Vespa. But Tanya is not the character who will feature in the Antonioni homage.“L’Avventura” is not the only film referenced in “The White Lotus,” which is positively haunted by movies and the fantasies they engender. As Tanya casts herself in her superficial version of an Italian film, Bert Di Grasso — a grandfather whose family trip to Sicily has been upended by the women in the family’s refusing to come — is exalting the ethos of “The Godfather,” in which he sees men who are free to do as they like. After her ill-fated Vitti cosplay leaves her alone and betrayed, Tanya takes up with Quentin, part of a group of “high-end gays,” as she calls them, who recast her as a tragic heroine. Quentin tells her about his own lost love, but it sounds like the plot of “Brokeback Mountain,” and he takes her to the opera to see “Madama Butterfly,” which, in this context, can’t help but call to mind “M. Butterfly,” and a very specific form of romantic deception. As the line blurs between stories and lies, the vibe shifts closer to “The Talented Mr. Ripley.” If the first season of “The White Lotus” was about the casual destructiveness of wealth, this one seems to be about its willful delusion — and how easily preyed upon people who evade reality can be.In Antonioni’s film, Vitti’s wealth and beauty grant her character access to a world of glamour, but they also trap her in a lie, concealing a real world of rot and corruption. “L’Avventura” means “the adventure” — ironic, since nothing much happens in the movie, and its central mystery is never solved — but an “avventura” is also a term for an illicit affair, often one entered out of boredom, for kicks. This is precisely how everyone in this season of “The White Lotus” gets into trouble. For both show and film, “love” is a dance of deception and self-delusion, in which it’s hard to tell who’s the mark.The only character who still clings to purity — the only innocent left to corrupt — is Harper Spiller, played by Aubrey Plaza. And she is the one who ends up in Noto, recreating the Monica Vitti scene in the piazza. Like Claudia, Harper has drifted here by accident — by virtue, another character observes, of being pretty. The newly rich wife of a tech founder, she has come on a luxury vacation at the invitation of his college roommate. Harper is suspicious of the whole endeavor: of getting rich quickly, of old friends who materialize suddenly after you get rich, of rich people who spend their lives disengaging from the world and drifting from one fantasy locale to the next. In Noto, she finds herself alone and surrounded by men, exactly like Vitti. Just as in the film, the scene feels over the top and surreal — part paranoid fantasy, part dissociative experience, and even stranger now that it’s 2022, not 1960, and Aubrey Plaza doesn’t cut quite so otherworldly and surprising (for Noto) a figure as the statuesque blonde Vitti did.As we watch Harper drift through the crowd, what we are looking at is the experience of being looked at. Along with Tanya — who aims to imitate Vitti but is instead brutally compared, by a tactless hotel manager, to Peppa Pig — she offers a metaphor for how thoroughly we can give ourselves over to imposture.Antonioni started working during the Italian neorealism movement, when films were shot on location, making use of nonactors, telling stories about working-class people and poverty and despair. But it was “L’Avventura,” with its focus on the alienation of the moneyed, that made him internationally famous. I know this because I took an Italian-neorealism class during a junior year abroad in Paris, and — not surprisingly, I suppose, for the kind of person who takes an Italian-neorealism class during a junior year in Paris — I, too, preferred Antonioni’s trilogy about disaffected rich people to the stuff that had come before: children stealing bicycles, Anna Magnani worrying about unpaid bills, that sort of thing. Struggle is hard to watch; it is much more pleasant to have our moral judgments projected into a world of aestheticized, escapist pleasure.We carry a desire to inhabit images we’ve seen, reified symbols of love, glamour, happiness, success. The “White Lotus” scene in Noto is a perfect representation of this recursive fakery and its nightmarish endpoint. Like so many travelers in the Instagram age, the show’s characters drift through their adventures without any real purpose other than to reproduce the pretty scenes and special moments they’ve seen elsewhere, trying to locate themselves in endless reflections. Among them, it is only Harper who remains unaffected by visual culture. Her scene in Noto feels like an inflection point. It is easier than ever to mistake beauty for truth — or pretend to. Which, the show asks, will Harper choose?Source photographs: HBO; Cino del Duca/PCE, Lyre. More

Late night hosts were thrilled after the former president’s company was convicted on all 17 counts it faced, including tax fraud.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.A Christmas MiracleOn Tuesday, the Trump Organization was convicted on 17 counts of tax fraud and other crimes.“Oh, Santa, you got my letter!” Stephen Colbert riffed on the news.“Trump is bragging it’s the most counts ever.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“And you know what that means? Donald Trump is going to prison — to visit all the lower-ranking people that did this without his knowledge or his permission.” — TREVOR NOAH“Nothing ever happens to Donald Trump. He’ll probably try to convince us he’s never even heard of the Trump Organization.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“All the successes and Trump’s organization, they are due to the genius of Donald Trump. All the crimes, he had no idea. He’s like, [imitating Donald Trump] ‘That’s right, folks. I have zero control over the things I run, which is why you should vote for me to run the country so I can run it like one of my companies, which I don’t even run. I don’t even run.’” — TREVOR NOAH“What happened was, top execs in the organization got around paying their fair share of taxes through a series of schemes that included off-the-books perks like luxury cars and free apartments. Because nothing makes you look less guilty than giving all your execs a getaway car and a hide-out.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“There’s no word yet on how this is going to impact Trump’s re-election campaign. The reason for that is that it probably won’t.” — JAMES CORDEN“Executives in the organization received fancy apartments, Mercedes-Benzes, even private school tuition for relatives, none of which they paid tax on. I just have to ask: Are they hiring?” — JAMES CORDEN“I don’t get this — how is the organization guilty, but not Donald Trump? This is like if McDonald’s got in trouble, but the Hamburglar got off scot-free.” — JAMES CORDENThe Punchiest Punchlines (Herschel Walker’s Last Push Edition)“In Georgia, Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker are going head-to-head injury in the Senate runoff.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Walker spent the day making one final push, which is unusual for him. Usually during the final push, he’s miles away from the hospital at a Waffle House telling a waitress she could be ‘the one.’”— JIMMY KIMMEL“Voters were out at the polls all day, and at 11:35 Eastern time, with 0 percent of precincts reporting, because we taped the show at 5:30, ‘The Late Show’ is ready to project that Herschel Walker does not belong in the Senate.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“The U.S. Senate is no place for people whose brains don’t work because of football injuries; it’s a place for people whose brains don’t work because they’re 1,000 years old.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“It’s not like Herschel didn’t try — he spent years fathering as many voters as possible.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingAmy Poehler and Maya Rudolph appeared on Tuesday’s “Late Night,” where they challenged Seth Meyers to ask them a tough question.What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightThe Linda Lindas will perform on Wednesday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”Also, Check This Out“Who am I?” asks Orlando, played by Emma Corrin, in a new production at Garrick Theater in London.Marc BrennerEmma Corrin straddles genders and centuries in Neil Bartlett’s breezy adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel “Orlando,” now playing at the Garrick Theater in London. More