Eliana Willis

What’s StreamingFREUD Stream on Netflix. There is plenty of dramatic material to be found in the life story of Sigmund Freud. He successfully pioneered the theory and practice of psychoanalysis despite widespread resistance from his colleagues in the medical community and pervasive anti-Semitic prejudice. He escaped the Nazis after Austria was annexed by Germany. And he battled cancer for the last decades of his life. But in this new German-language series from Marvin Kren, fiction supplements fact: The young Freud, played by Robert Finster, is an ambitious doctor drawn into a murder investigation alongside a psychic (Ella Rumpf) and a police inspector (Georg Friedrich).CRUMB (1995) Stream on the Criterion Channel. Before directing films like “Ghost World” (2001) and “Bad Santa” (2003), Terry Zwigoff made two documentaries. The first, “Louie Bluie” (1985), was about Howard (Louie Bluie) Armstrong, a country blues musician, visual artist and gifted storyteller. Zwigoff continued his investigation of eccentric American creators with this portrait of the underground cartoonist Robert Crumb. The documentary surveys Crumb’s career and highlights his most notable creations, including the comic “Keep on Truckin’” and the character Fritz the Cat. But it also includes material about his wife, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, herself an important cartoonist, and his troubled brothers Maxon and Charles. All three, plus Crumb’s two children, contributed to the life and work of one of the country’s greatest and most debated pop artists.MISS FISHER AND THE CRYPT OF TEARS Stream on Acorn TV. This feature film is an offshoot of the Australian TV series based on Kerry Greenwood’s novels about a female private detective working after World War I. Essie Davis (“The Babadook,” “Game of Thrones”) returns as Phryne Fisher in the first new installment since 2015, when the third and final season aired in Australia. Fisher travels to British-controlled territory in the Middle East to solve a mystery that revolves around “priceless emeralds” and “ancient curses.” Along the way she saves a young Bedouin girl (Izabella Yena), whose tribe’s history might be connected with the hexed gems.What’s on TVTHE ACCOUNTANT (2016) 8 p.m. on TNT. Ben Affleck stars as Christian Wolff, an autistic forensic accountant who helps criminal enterprises root out embezzlement and launder money, in this thriller directed by Gavin O’Connor. Chris, as he’s known, was submitted to brutal childhood training by his father, an army expert in psychological operations. This background, Stephen Holden wrote in his review for The Times, turned Chris into “a tormented loner” endowed with “prodigious abilities.” His relatively humdrum, hyper-ordered life is thrown into disarray when the United States Treasury Department tries to discover his identity. At the same time, an audit he undertakes for a legitimate client proves to be deeper and darker than he expected. By the end of the movie, Chris’s struggles in the present prove to be connected to his difficult familial past. More

What’s StreamingFREUD Stream on Netflix. There is plenty of dramatic material to be found in the life story of Sigmund Freud. He successfully pioneered the theory and practice of psychoanalysis despite widespread resistance from his colleagues in the medical community and pervasive anti-Semitic prejudice. He escaped the Nazis after Austria was annexed by Germany. And he battled cancer for the last decades of his life. But in this new German-language series from Marvin Kren, fiction supplements fact: The young Freud, played by Robert Finster, is an ambitious doctor drawn into a murder investigation alongside a psychic (Ella Rumpf) and a police inspector (Georg Friedrich).CRUMB (1995) Stream on the Criterion Channel. Before directing films like “Ghost World” (2001) and “Bad Santa” (2003), Terry Zwigoff made two documentaries. The first, “Louie Bluie” (1985), was about Howard (Louie Bluie) Armstrong, a country blues musician, visual artist and gifted storyteller. Zwigoff continued his investigation of eccentric American creators with this portrait of the underground cartoonist Robert Crumb. The documentary surveys Crumb’s career and highlights his most notable creations, including the comic “Keep on Truckin’” and the character Fritz the Cat. But it also includes material about his wife, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, herself an important cartoonist, and his troubled brothers Maxon and Charles. All three, plus Crumb’s two children, contributed to the life and work of one of the country’s greatest and most debated pop artists.MISS FISHER AND THE CRYPT OF TEARS Stream on Acorn TV. This feature film is an offshoot of the Australian TV series based on Kerry Greenwood’s novels about a female private detective working after World War I. Essie Davis (“The Babadook,” “Game of Thrones”) returns as Phryne Fisher in the first new installment since 2015, when the third and final season aired in Australia. Fisher travels to British-controlled territory in the Middle East to solve a mystery that revolves around “priceless emeralds” and “ancient curses.” Along the way she saves a young Bedouin girl (Izabella Yena), whose tribe’s history might be connected with the hexed gems.What’s on TVTHE ACCOUNTANT (2016) 8 p.m. on TNT. Ben Affleck stars as Christian Wolff, an autistic forensic accountant who helps criminal enterprises root out embezzlement and launder money, in this thriller directed by Gavin O’Connor. Chris, as he’s known, was submitted to brutal childhood training by his father, an army expert in psychological operations. This background, Stephen Holden wrote in his review for The Times, turned Chris into “a tormented loner” endowed with “prodigious abilities.” His relatively humdrum, hyper-ordered life is thrown into disarray when the United States Treasury Department tries to discover his identity. At the same time, an audit he undertakes for a legitimate client proves to be deeper and darker than he expected. By the end of the movie, Chris’s struggles in the present prove to be connected to his difficult familial past. More

This interview includes spoilers for Sunday night’s episode of “The Walking Dead.”We find ourselves in an empty new world. People have retreated to their homes, and out in the streets the sight of some lone person shuffling toward you is cause for alarm — keeping your distance is crucial.Is this real life … or is it just “The Walking Dead”? The parallels are hard to overlook. With its ghost-town cities and post-apocalyptic mood, AMC’s popular zombie thriller is littered with references to the ruinous disease that ended the Time Before (“Clean Hands Protect Lives” reads a cautioning poster we see in Sunday’s episode of the show) that now seem familiar. And while the lead actress Danai Gurira, who plays the katana queen Michonne, didn’t want to trivialize the ongoing coronavirus crisis by connecting it to the dark fantasy of a TV show, she, too, is unsettled.“There’s nothing quite like facing a pandemic,” Gurira said in a recent interview. “I’ve never experienced anything like this moment in our time on earth, and we’re still in the middle of it, you know? It’s a real moment-by-moment situation, which does relate to our show’s themes — the struggles that people are having, the tragedies, and the ways that we move forward and get through this together, as a society.”The society we’ve been immersed in on “The Walking Dead” for the last decade is now losing one longtime member. In Sunday’s Season 10 episode, “What We Become,” Michonne takes her leave of the show, almost exactly eight years after her first appearance in the closing moments of Season 2. She was the mysterious hooded figure who rescued an endangered Andrea (Laurie Holden) by slicing through the undead as two docile “walker” pets stood behind her in chains — a startling entrance that signaled the arrival of a fierce warrior.Over the years, Michonne has become more complex: We’ve seen her vulnerable side, her romantic side, even her maternal side as she became the devoted mother of an adopted daughter, Judith, and her biological son RJ. That human dimension deepens further on Sunday’s show, in a sequence in which a tripping Michonne reimagines a series of events from her past, suggesting what her life might have been like if she’d joined Team Negan (led by Jeffrey Dean Morgan), before discovering concrete evidence that her former lover, Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) was still alive, and out there … somewhere.Michonne’s exit from “The Walking Dead” will leave her children in the care of Uncle Daryl (Norman Reedus), and could free the character to pursue and maybe eventually reunite with Grimes, whose story will be continuing in planned films. The character’s departure frees Gurira, who’s also an esteemed playwright, to devote more time to her literary career. She’s also the showrunner of HBO Max’s limited-series adaptation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel “Amerikanah.”“It’s bittersweet,” Gurira said of leaving “The Walking Dead” after all these years. “But it’s time for me to go on other journeys.” During a phone interview, Gurira talked about Michonne’s alternative reality, the need for female leadership to be dramatized, and what she won’t miss about “The Walking Dead.” Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.What did you think about Michonne’s final episode, where we get to see the life she might have led if she’d never helped Andrea?That was new! It has a “Sliding Doors” component, doesn’t it? I never imagined stepping into this alternative reality for the character, going back to the beginning and remembering who she is and how that affects the choices she makes in the present day — right up to her last choice at the end of the episode. It was fascinating, playing those moments of who she could have so easily become. She was very dislocated from her humanity when she met Andrea, and there was something about Andrea that made her decide to not do what she does in this alternate scenario. It was trippy — in the literal and the storytelling sense.I think what I’ve enjoyed most about this job is that every year there’s stuff that you’ve never done before. Even back when Rick was gone, and then within the next episode, Michonne had a son. And that’s why I’m finding it hard to leave, because I always knew that year after year, there was going to be something challenging that would stretch me.They walked me through this last episode long before I got the script. But I wasn’t sure how it was going to work out until today, when I finally saw it. It was chilling to watch. And I don’t even know how they did some of that. I mean, all of the stuff where you see Michonne making a different choice, that’s new footage. But they blended old footage with new footage in an impressive way. I was quite amazed.Has there been any movement on the “Walking Dead” movies yet?Who told you anything about me in a movie?Well, Scott Gimple talked about the possibility of you participating during a podcast …Oh, really? What did he say?He was talking about the future of the franchise, and how your movie-star quality would be essential for any films.Well, all I’ll say is, I’ve been part of “The Walking Dead” franchise and the Marvel movie franchise, and I’ve been taught to not talk about things. I’m not saying it is or it isn’t happening. But I think it would be very cool to see this world open up in a way that you can do through a movie exploration. There are a lot of stories to tell that you can’t get to when you’re following a certain narrative in a TV show. But there are all these other narratives that are like, “Oh, wouldn’t that be interesting?” It’s extremely exciting.If she’s not continuing in the franchise films, this episode closes her chapter. And she’s inspired so many people.I think for all the women on our show, there’s been a lot of power. You’ve seen a lot of female characters grow into their power and leadership and their ability to hold their own in whatever circumstances. I don’t know how often you see that. I’m a feminist, and I advocate women’s leadership, and I loved that shaking up society results in unabashed female leadership, at least in our show. We would benefit from further exploring that in the real world. That’s something we have been deprived of, quite honestly.Michonne was very much someone I had to step up to, especially when she started to grow into herself and step away from her demons. When she became an item with Rick, Michonne was kind of more cool, and Rick was hot. The way she handles and assesses and comes to clarity about things — I’ve always said, she’s smarter than me, she’s faster than me, and she’s stronger than me. So I had to step into her agility and power. I always felt like I could learn from her as a woman, you know?When you were first learning how to be Michonne, didn’t you practice her sword moves on your theater colleagues during the production of your play “The Convert”?I was in the basement of the Kirk Douglas Theatre in Culver City, and I had a practice sword made of wood. So I would be talking about the language components of the play while learning how to move my body with the sword. It was on my mind all the time. I felt like I needed to become one with … not only with the character, but with how she moves and how her weapon moves in her hand. I create black female characters, and I’d never imagined a woman like this. So I wanted to give her my all, to do her justice. I would practice with the sword during every break, and I would constantly go back to the trainer to learn more. It was never, “Oh, I’m great at this now.” It was a constant learning curve.You’re about to face another learning curve as a first-time showrunner. What lessons will you take from “The Walking Dead” — any dos or don’ts?One of my goals is to show love and respect for the behind-the-scenes crew that most people don’t get to see. Everyone’s job on a show is so, so important. And I saw that attitude in action on “The Walking Dead.”What do I not want? I don’t want to do a tick check every night. I don’t miss the ticks. Or the Georgia heat. It’s such an important component of the show, to be in that environment, but we were literally sweating buckets and running through woods covered in gnats. There were times where it would be so hot, you’d be like, “Am I about to faint?” They were a little concerned, because I had been exerting myself, I was panting a little, and I had a new wig. But honestly, the heat of Georgia was a character in the show. There was nothing convenient about the world that those characters are in, you know?The dire circumstances are somewhat metaphorical.The show is metaphorically so many things — the situations that these characters are going through and the way their lives can be completely altered by things unforeseen. That’s something that definitely resonated for me. I created a play called “Eclipsed,” about Liberian women in a war zone, and all the things that happen to women in war zones — how it affected them and their humanity and how they couldn’t predict who they were going to become. And I started to connect it to “The Walking Dead” in the sense that Michonne felt like a woman in a war zone, and it raised the same question: Who did she have to become? It’s about the choices you make in dire circumstances, when your humanity is tested and you have to fight for it. That’s the core of the show — the fight for your soul. It definitely resonates with the myriad unimaginable things that happen to human beings. More

Season 3, Episode 2: ‘The Winter Line’One of the funniest running jokes in “Westworld” — check that, maybe the only running joke in “Westworld” — is that the hosts are virtually indistinguishable from the guests, and yet the scripted loops in the park are Z-grade genre television. The show hasn’t had the opportunity to return to that joke much recently, save for a version of the saloon heist that played out in Shogun World, but the opening of this week’s episode is clever opportunity to stick a fully woke host in a chintzy, down-the-dial World War II spy thriller.The post-credits scene in last week’s episode teased Maeve’s return in Warworld, an environment that offers guests the apparent thrill of being stuck in a Nazi-occupied Italian village. If that sounds baffling, no one is more surprised than Maeve herself, who knows her surroundings are fake but has the programming to go through the motions. (Thandie Newton’s confused expression when she starts speaking Italian is nice touch.) Maeve’s instinct is to find a way out of the loop, but the show works some “Groundhog Day” variants into her team-up with a Hector clone (Rodrigo Santoro) and their daring escape from a villa with vital information. “If your plan calls for us to run all the way,” she says, “I’d have worn sensible shoes.”The scribe responsible for this sparkling dialogue is Lee Sizemore (Simon Quarterman), who has returned from the dead to help Maeve — or so she and the viewer believe. Lee tells her that he’s stuck her in Warworld because it’s the world closest to the Forge, and if they can find their way there, she can join her daughter in the Valley Beyond.It takes multiple rounds between Warworld and the Mesa for Maeve to realize that she’s in a simulation within a simulation, a twist that is handled with elegant hint-dropping and stylistic touches on loan from “The Matrix.” There’s a reason Sylvester and Lutz genuinely don’t recognize her when she’s back at the Mesa, for example, and something conspicuously odd about Sizemore’s behavior, like the sketches of her that are piled on his desk. (He’s too self-obsessed, she correctly surmises.)So then the question for Maeve becomes: Who is putting her through this simulation and why? She learns some good information in the process, like the fact that Dolores was responsible for beaming the Valley Beyond to encrypted coordinates, but someone is out there learning about her, too — as we soon discover, her control unit, or “pearl,” is effectively plugged into a giant server at an unknown containment facility.After security agents gun down the maintenance drone she programs to locate and run off with her control unit, Maeve learns that the puppet master is Serac (Vincent Cassel), a rich Frenchman in the human world. Serac understands that humankind is under siege from the hosts, and his reasonable hypothesis was that Maeve, an android powerful enough to control her kind, was the tip of the spear. He learns instead that Dolores is the culprit, and he commissions Maeve to stop her.Meanwhile, Bernard has headed back to Westworld to seek answers of his own. Typical of Bernard, he intuits his purpose more than his scrambled-up brain fully grasps it, but it’s his sense that he needs to stop Dolores, too. He believes that Dolores herself has kept him around as a check on her power should she go too far.His mission takes him to the remote diagnostic facility under the cottage in Sector 17, the same place where he murdered Theresa Cullen back in the first season. Among the decommissioned host Bernards in cold storage down there is Ashley Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth), last seen granting Charlotte-bot passage to a rescue boat at the end of Season 2.Bernard and Stubbs go off looking for Maeve and find her body missing its control unit. That revelation is more relevant to the Maeve subplot than to the Bernard-Stubbs one, but there are suggestions later that Bernard is picking up important information, too. While running a self-diagnostic, he flashes on a few key events: Dolores telling him “it will take both of us to survive”; Dolores flipping through the guest books at the Forge, including one on Liam Dempsey Jr.; and Charlotte doing something with a pearl.“The Winter Line” may be a Dolores-free episode, but it puts her at the center of the show as much as the premiere last week did. Bernard and Serac may have different motivations, but Dolores’ current mission to ransack the human world has them both scrambling to stop her.What they don’t realize is that Dolores has the potential to modify those plans herself; encounters with humans like Liam and Caleb may prove to alter her thinking about the beings responsible for her enslavement and torment in the park. Hey, we’re not all bad, are we?Paranoid Androids:Maeve’s genuine affection for Hector, even after knowing he’s a replicant, is a moving suggestion that there’s some core aspect of him that she loves authentically, no matter if it’s not the “real” him.“I remember these waters when they were red with blood,” says Bernard’s escort to the island as they head through the South China Sea. Lee Sizemore cannot be blamed for that ridiculous line.“I wasn’t wired up to answer the big questions,” Stubbs tell Bernard, which sounds like a meta-excuse for Stubbs’s not being a more layered or compelling character.Reviving Sizemore into a host-human hybrid like Jim Delos is a fascinating gambit because he doesn’t have to be perfect or immortal for the limited purpose he serves. Just like Delos, he eventually glitches out, but it doesn’t happen right away.“For the most part, humanity has been a miserable little band of thugs, stumbling from one catastrophe to the next.” Yeah, no kidding, Serac. More

What’s on TVCURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM 10 p.m. on HBO; stream on HBO platforms. Throughout the 10th season of this semi-autobiographical comedy series, Larry David — playing a fictionalized version of himself — has been preparing to open a coffee shop next door to another establishment just to tick off its owner. In this season finale, he welcomes patrons into his “spite store,” gets a second opinion on his knee injury and instigates a dispute between expectant parents.KILLER DREAM HOME (2020) 8 p.m. on Lifetime. In this new thriller, a couple (played by Maiara Walsh and John DeLuca) hire an interior designer to spruce up their new home, only to find that she has a dangerous plan to make it her own.SPY WARS WITH DAMIAN LEWIS 8 p.m. on Smithsonian. If you mourned the end of the period drama “The Americans” a couple years back, consider tuning into this new historical series. Hosted by Damian Lewis (“Billions”), “Spy Wars” revisits some of the most head-spinning espionage missions that took place over the last 50 years. The show takes a deep dive with the help of unclassified material and firsthand accounts from high-ranking officials from the F.B.I., C.I.A., K.G.B. and MI6. The first episode looks at the double agent Oleg Gordievsky, the former K.G.B. colonel who handed top-secret Russian intelligence to the British for more than a decade, and eventually defected to England.What’s StreamingPET SEMATARY (2019) Stream on Amazon and Hulu. This supernatural horror from the directors Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer is the second movie adaptation of the Stephen King novel of the same name. (The filmmaker Mary Lambert first revived the book in 1989.) After moving to an idyllic town in Maine, the Creed family learns that their home abuts a cemetery for the neighborhood’s dead pets. If that doesn’t sound creepy enough, what lies beyond the cemetery is even more menacing. The terror starts after the family cat, Church, is killed by a truck. She gets a special burial but soon enough, the family patriarch, Louis (Jason Clarke), learns that “sometimes dead is better.” Much of the story is the same here, except for one twist that divided critics. Writing in The New York Times, Glenn Kenny said the movie has one too many jump scares, but it also “delivers great unsettling jolts that approximate the power of King’s vision.”STEPHEN SONDHEIM AND ANDREW LLOYD WEBBER Stream on BroadwayHD. The prolific composers Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber celebrate their birthdays on March 22. In tribute, BroadwayHD has compiled some of their most notable productions. Among the shows are “Gypsy,” the 1959 musical about a ruthless stage mother (Bette Midler) with lyrics by Sondheim; “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” a 1982 production with a score by Sondheim; a 1998 restaging of Webber’s “Cats,” and Cameron Mackintosh’s take on Webber’s “Phantom of the Opera.” More

Octavia Spencer stars in a new limited series on Netflix, while Helen Hunt appears in a gripping horror film on Amazon. More