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      ‘Mister Organ,’ ‘Destroyer’ and More Streaming Gems

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      Con artists and ghost stories are among our recommendations from the subscription streaming services this month.A unique horror omnibus, an existentialist supernatural story, and atypical star turns are among our recommendations from the subscription streaming services this month, along with some essential background viewing for one of this year’s Oscar nominees.‘Mister Organ’ (2023)Stream it on Netflix.The New Zealand journalist David Farrier has carved out an unusual niche for himself, crafting documentaries about fringe figures that at first seem to be jokey oddities, but later reveal disturbing dimensions and shadowy back stories. His previous feature, “Tickled,” took him into the bizarre world of Competitive Endurance Tickling, and the mysterious figure bankrolling it; this time, an investigation into predatory parking practices puts him in the sights of a con artist named Michael Organ. And that’s when things really get strange. As with “Tickled,” Farrier’s latest begins like a human interest story and turns into something closer to a thriller, as the peculiarities of this unstable personality reveal themselves, often unnervingly. Farrier is a solid anchor for this strange journey, proving unflappable (and capable of finding the gallows humor) in even the most extreme of circumstances.‘Destroyer’ (2018)Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.Nicole Kidman — de-glammed and borderline unrecognizable — stars as the corrupt, alcoholic Los Angeles Police detective Erin Bell, whose investigation of a stray dead body leads her down a rabbit hole of re-examining her own troubled past. The director Karyn Kusama and the screenwriters Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi, who previously collaborated on the tense and terrifying thriller “The Invitation,” expertly tell two stories at once: of Bell’s undoing in her 20s as an undercover F.B.I. agent, and of her current, perhaps irredeemable iteration. It’s a tough balancing act to pull off, but Kusama gets the job done, keeping our interest in each timeline piqued without one overwhelming the other. And this is among Kidman’s finest and most chameleonic work, expertly dramatizing both a woman in disarray and the circumstances that got her there.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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      “Poor Things,” the Weird Movie, Was “Poor Things” the Weird Novel, First

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      Hot air balloons soar above the Mediterranean. Aerial streetcars fly along ropes suspended above the alleys of a candy-colored Lisbon. Pastel green smoke billows into the night sky from the funnels of a cruise ship.This is the eye-poppingly surreal world that Bella Baxter, played by Emma Stone, thrills to in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Oscar-nominated film “Poor Things.”Bella, a 25-year-old woman who, after committing suicide, is reanimated with the brain of her unborn infant, is the daring and unusual creation of Alasdair Gray, whose 1992 novel was adapted for the movie.And it may not even be his most eccentric book. A prolific writer and visual artist who died at 85 in 2019, Gray wrote five other novels, two novellas, 89 short stories and a version of Dante’s Divine Comedy (“Decorated and Englished in Prosaic Verse”).In Scotland, Gray is something of a national treasure, his papers housed at the National Library of Scotland. (The cover flap for his illustrated autobiography, “A Life in Pictures,” described the lifelong Glaswegian as “Scotland’s best-known polymath.”)Outside Britain, however, he is not exactly a household name.“I would say he’s one of the very few writers from my lifetime that I’m in awe of,” said the English novelist Jonathan Coe, adding that Gray is “enormously respected” by writers and critics.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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      Sam Mendes to Direct Four Beatles Films

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      The Oscar-winning filmmaker Sam Mendes was given full rights to the band’s music and their life stories for the unusual quartet of films, planned for 2027.The British director Sam Mendes has signed on to direct not one but four biopics about the Beatles, each telling the story of the Fab Four from a different member’s point of view.Apple Corps, the guardian of the Beatles’ musical interests, and Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr and the families of John Lennon and George Harrison have granted full life story and music rights for the scripted films — a first — which will be financed and released by Sony Pictures Entertainment. The films are planned for release in 2027.“I’m honored to be telling the story of the greatest rock band of all time, and excited to challenge the notion of what constitutes a trip to the movies,” Mendes said in a statement on Tuesday. The announcement teased that the films would be released in an “innovative and groundbreaking” manner, but did not offer details.In recent years Mendes, the Oscar-winning director of “American Beauty,” has helped refresh the James Bond franchise with “Skyfall” and told the story of two British lance corporals in World War I in “1917.” As a theater director, he showed an ability to work with complicated biographical material over a long stretch of time with “The Lehman Trilogy,” a saga about the rise and fall of Lehman Brothers that earned him a Tony Award.Biopics about pop stars have grown popular in recent years: “Bob Marley: One Love” was on track to earn an estimated $33.2 million last weekend, following on the success of films including “Elvis” in 2022 and “Bohemian Rhapsody” in 2018.The Beatles have shown strength with movie audiences since they starred in “A Hard Day’s Night” in 1964, playing versions of themselves. Their fans continue to show an appetite for expansive projects: Peter Jackson’s documentary series “The Beatles: Get Back,” an over-seven-hour project, was released to much acclaim in 2021 on Disney+. More

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      In ‘Ready to Sell Out,’ Mike Epps Moves Past the Beefs

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      His new special nods at his past resentment of Kevin Hart and others. It’s part of a stand-up tradition of feuds like the ones fueled by Katt Williams.Mike Epps may be the only stand-up comic alive who’s upset that Katt Williams didn’t insult him.In a now notorious, wildly viral three-hour interview with Shannon Sharpe (59 million views and counting) last month, the comic Katt Williams fired salvos at a festival’s worth of comics including Kevin Hart, Steve Harvey and Cedric the Entertainer. Then came the response videos, the counterattacks, the commentary. Epps, unmentioned by Williams, said he was jealous. “Say something bad about me,” he pleaded in a video. “I need the press.”Of all the gifted stand-ups to emerge from the “Def Comedy Jam” scene of the 1990s, Epps is the one most likely to find humor in failure, minor humiliation, missing the boat. He understands that comedy is more about losing than winning. “I know you guys see me in the movies, but the money’s gone,” he tells an Arizona crowd in his new Netflix special, “Ready to Sell Out,” released Tuesday. Then he jokes: Why else would he be in Phoenix?Pacing the stage in a brown leather jacket and new sneakers, Epps is unquestionably a star, with credits in film (“Next Friday”) and television (“The Upshaws”), not to mention three previous specials on Netflix. But part of his persona is that he makes poor decisions. “I tried to be Muslim but got caught with a ham sandwich three days in,” he once joked.Hailing from Indianapolis, Epps is quick to tell you that he dropped out of high school and spent time in jail. He explains to the crowd in his new hour that he made all his movies on cocaine, and while he is not boasting, the way he relates his drug stories make a mockery of righteousness about addiction. “When I be doing coke,” he says, then slightly stammers and starts again: “When I used to do coke.” Then his eyebrows dance.Onstage, Epps convincingly plays that rascal who has charmed his way out of trouble. Sometimes, his charisma is a crutch. His writing can coast, especially early in this hour when he seems to be at his most generic, doing pandering or familiar jokes about prison rape, fat girls and code-switching. His most surprising moments are not punchlines, but when he says something that could in different hands come off as serious, like when he mentions he’s been pretending to dislike white people for 40 years. There’s also a moodier side to him that you get peeks of in his stand-up but that probably deserves fuller expression.His personal material is where this is most evident, especially in his commitment to digging into his own flaws, to celebrating the screw-ups in life. He pulls this off with an unexpected, even religious conviction. How is this for a comically counterintuitive defense of doing the wrong thing: “Give God a chance to keep working with you.”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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      Zelda Williams, Daughter of Robin, on ‘Lisa Frankenstein’

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      As the director of “Lisa Frankenstein,” she embraced a tale in which no one was concerned whether grief was palatable to others.Zelda Williams never intended a teenage zombie rom-com to be her feature filmmaking debut. For one thing, the project, “Lisa Frankenstein,” was a big concept to sell, a high-camp period piece set in the fuchsia-and-teal ’80s. There was grief, violence and a floofy-haired love interest who was — not to put too fine a point on it — not only mute but dead.For another thing, Williams, 34, the only daughter of Robin Williams, the Oscar-winning comic superstar, worried that making her first big step out with a comedy would inevitably draw the wrong kind of attention. “It’s the one thing I thought people are going to be particularly mean to me about,” she said.But the script for “Lisa Frankenstein” came courtesy of Diablo Cody, who found one-liners, and an Oscar, in adolescent trauma with “Juno,” and who also wrote the feminist teen horror flick “Jennifer’s Body,” lately hailed as a cult classic.Some of the themes in “Lisa Frankenstein” resonated with Williams’s own life, as a person who experienced shock waves of anguish after her father’s sudden death in 2014. Plus, the film came wrapped in a pastiche of references from ’80s and ’90s movies she loved, like “Heathers,” “Weird Science,” “Beetlejuice” and “Death Becomes Her.” Williams was sold on it immediately, and of all the projects she was considering, it was the first to get greenlit.So she tucked away her trepidation, drew up her storyboards and shot list, and showed up on location in New Orleans, where she promptly got Covid and had to spend the first week directing from inside a van.Kathryn Newton and Cole Sprouse as the Creature in “Lisa Frankenstein.”Michele K. Short/Focus FeaturesWe 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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      Juliette Binoche on Working With Benoît Magimel in “The Taste of Things.”

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      The star of “The Taste of Things” explains why working with her former romantic partner Benoît Magimel was freeing, and weighs in on an Oscar controversy.Some actors come to embody a national cinema through an alchemical combination of demeanor and film choices. You might say that Clint Eastwood is the quintessential American icon, for example, or that Hugh Grant is the embodiment of a certain kind of Britishness.When it comes to France, one of the country’s archetypal stars is Juliette Binoche, whose understated elegance and cryptic smile have graced art-house and popular movies alike since her domestic breakthrough playing an ingénue actress in “Rendez-Vous” (1985), followed by worldwide fame a decade later with the romantic drama “The English Patient” (1996), for which she earned an Academy Award.Now Binoche has two projects arriving at the same time in the United States: Tran Anh Hung’s “The Taste of Things,” in which she plays a self-effacing 19th-century cook, and the Apple TV+ series “The New Look,” in which she portrays Coco Chanel — meaning Binoche essentially carries the flags of food and fashion, the most visible signifiers of French culture abroad.During a recent interview in New York, the actress looked amused when asked about being a national symbol. “I’m fine taking on that role,” she said, laughing. “What’s important is what people feel, because the audience relates to something that is unsaid, something beyond ideas. Of course, the theme is food in ‘The Taste of Things,’ ” she continued, “but it’s also love and creating together” (Which, come to think of it, is also associated with the French.)Adding seasoning to the pot-au-feu, the movie paired Binoche with her former romantic partner Benoît Magimel. Although they broke up two decades ago, the actors’ intimacy seemed to return onscreen, like muscle memory.Tran recalled that Magimel went rogue while shooting the complex finale. When Binoche’s character, Eugénie, asked whether she was his cook or his wife, Magimel’s gourmand was meant to say, “You are my cook,” to acknowledge her mastery. Except that the actor added “… and my wife.”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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      If You Liked ‘Saltburn,’ Consider This Much Better Movie

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      “The Dreamers,” Bernardo Bertolucci’s notorious 2004 coming-of-age drama, pushes the same buttons, but it makes serious points along the way.I was at my mom’s house in the suburbs when I watched Barry Keoghan make love to his bestie’s grave in Emerald Fennell’s “Saltburn.”“Promising Young Woman,” Fennell’s previous film, a rape-revenge thriller for the girlboss generation, was a toothless bid at provocation. “Saltburn” seemed to promise a similar blend of all style, no substance, but the online hype had piqued my curiosity. So, there I was, watching Keoghan as an Oxford student named Oliver become one with the soil, my mother snoozing beside me.The moment brought back memories from adolescence of the dozens of times she’d walk into my teenage bedroom — or the same living room where I was watching “Saltburn” — to find me slack-jawed in the middle of “Basic Instinct” or “A Clockwork Orange.” Naturally, she always seemed to waltz in during the most morally compromised or sexually bewildering scenes.One movie in high school that had me constantly looking over my shoulder was “The Dreamers,” Bernardo Bertolucci’s notorious coming-of-age drama. Like “Saltburn,” it’s a story about cloistered wealth and beautiful students with deranged and obsessive desires. An outsider like Oliver, Matthew (Michael Pitt) is a blue-eyed American doing a year abroad in Paris, where he’s pulled into the decadent world of the twins Theo (Louis Garrel) and Isabelle (Eva Green, in her first credited role). The French teenagers live with their intellectual parents in a luxurious loft and frequent the Cinémathèque Française like devout churchgoers. This is 1960s France, when going to the movies had all the luster and sex appeal of rolling up to the hottest nightclub.In “Saltburn,” as in “The Dreamers,” there are wealthy siblings (Jacob Elordi, center, and Alison Oliver) as well as a friend staying with them (Barry Keoghan).Chiabella James/Amazon StudiosReleased in the United States 20 years ago this month, “The Dreamers” arrived from overseas radiating scandal. The original version was rated NC-17, but American audiences — thanks to paranoid distributors — got the slightly shorter, R-rated cut. Bertolucci, the Italian director of divisive films like “Last Tango in Paris” (1972) and “The Conformist” (1970), had long established himself as an auteur of sexually explicit cinema. Yet “The Dreamers” pushed the boundaries of the collegiate sex movie, rivaling (and arguably surpassing) what were then Hollywood’s most scandalous stabs at youthful lusting, like “Wild Things” and “Cruel Intentions.”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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      How Flight Attendants Fought Back Against Sexism in the Airline Industry

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      Decades ago, “stewardesses” earned less than men, couldn’t get married or gain weight, and had to retire at 32. A key figure in a landmark lawsuit looks back at a not-so-golden era.In 1958, when Mary Pat Laffey Inman became a stewardess — as they were then called — for Northwest Airlines, she was 20 years old and the clock was already ticking. At 32, she would be forced to retire. That is, if she didn’t marry, get pregnant or even gain too much weight before that: All were grounds for termination. It was the golden age of aviation for everyone except, perhaps, the women serving in-flight meals to the nattily dressed passengers.Six years later, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, outlawing discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin, and female flight attendants began to join forces against sexism.In 1970, Ms. Laffey Inman, a union leader and Northwest’s first female purser — the lead attendant on a flight — spearheaded a class-action suit, Laffey v. Northwest Airlines Inc., that resulted in the airline paying more than $30 million in damages and back wages in 1985. It also set the precedent for nondiscriminatory hiring of flight attendants across the industry. But even then, not everything changed: Flight attendants on some airlines were still subjected to “weigh-ins” into the 1990s. (Northwest merged with Delta Air Lines in 2008.)Now, decades after the landmark decision, Ms. Laffey Inman, 86, is one of several former flight attendants featured in “Fly With Me,” an “American Experience” documentary that chronicles how women fought to overcome discrimination in the airline industry. It premieres on PBS on Feb. 20. The New York Times spoke to Ms. Laffey Inman about how she made history. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.Ms. Laffey Inman in her Northwest uniform in 1968, around the time she became the airline’s first female purser, or lead attendant on a flight.Courtesy of Mary Pat Laffey InmanWhat inspired your career in the airline industry?I was working at Montefiore Hospital, in Pittsburgh. I always wanted to travel, ever since I was a kid. As a flight attendant, I could travel — all expenses paid. I thought it was wonderful. Other stewardesses and I laugh about how lucky we were to be in the industry at that time. We would bid for three-day layovers in Paris, London, Amsterdam, Tokyo. A limo would be there to pick you up and take you to the hotel.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