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      ‘Pain Hustlers’ Review: Seeking Dr. Feelgood

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      In David Yates’s film, Emily Blunt plays a single mother who takes a job at a pharmaceutical start-up with questionable sales methods.“Pain Hustlers,” a conflicted yet entertaining dramedy from David Yates, takes its title from a group of pitchmen hawking fentanyl to clinics across the southeast. The drug is legal. Their sales methods aren’t — but in the mockumentary footage that opens the film, they try to sell the audience on their innocence. One pusher (Catherine O’Hara) huffs defensively that she’s not “El Chapo or something.”The script, by Wells Tower, is about a fictive drug named Lonafen. It’s inspired by the journalist Evan Hughes’s coverage of Insys Therapeutics, whose founder, John Kapoor, was convicted and served two years in prison. Like so many other recent movies on brands from Blackberry to Beanie Babies, it’s about how low people will sink to make a buck while justifying their misdeeds as the cost of successful capitalism. Turns out the price of a soul is pretty cheap.Our way into the story is Liza Drake (Emily Blunt), a single mother who once peddled lipstick, steak knives, and pig dung, and is scraping by as a stripper when a skeevy patron, Pete (Chris Evans), enlists her into pharmaceutical sales. Her new boss, a widower named Dr. Neel (Andy Garcia), invented a fast-acting fentanyl spray for cancer patients like his late wife. Within months, Liza propels Lonafen’s market penetration from zero to 86 percent.Liza is an enthralling huckster. In one great bit, she fast-talks a principal out of expelling her daughter (a promising Chloe Coleman) for nearly burning down the school. She’s also an amalgamation of several real people from Hughes’s book, “The Hard Sell,” which makes the character feel overstuffed with multiple personalities that flip-flop between greed and guilt. Both Blunt and the woman she’s playing come off as hard-working charmers, but it’s impossible to buy that Liza is at once Lonafen’s savviest employee and the only naïf who believes the drug is, as she insists, “safer than aspirin.”It’s not, of course. Beanie Babies fanatics lost fortunes; Lonafen users are losing their lives. The movie is constrained by its own conscience, thriving when Evans’s marvelously feral Pete is unleashed to dress like a Lonafen spray and rap about sales commissions, only to pivot apologetically from corporate bacchanals to suffering victims. There’s a wonderful, hallucinatory shot of a hooked veteran (Willie Raysor) gazing across a car lot at an inflatable sky dancer whose sagging limbs are slowed down to become an interpretive dance of addiction. Other junkies are merely sketches of mass misery, such as the anonymous horde of extras instructed to stumble toward Liza like zombies.The scariest characters, however, are the doctors. The strip mall lonely-heart Dr. Lydell (Brian d’Arcy James) writes narcotic prescriptions in exchange for fancy macarons, phony flattery from women, and cash costumed as speaking engagement fees. (One savagely funny young drug hustler played by Colby Burton even traffics in sexual favors.) Here, only the fictional Liza frets over the patients while the increasingly money-mad Dr. Neel vows to push Lonafen onto people without cancer. “Grow or die!” he orders his sales team — the language of a tumor.Pain HustlersRated R for language, nudity and drug use (legal and illegal). Running time: 2 hours 2 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Inspector Sun’ Review: A Web of Cinema Classics

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      The newly released English version of this Spanish children’s film about an arachnid gumshoe is a comic mystery indebted to Agatha Christie and swashbuckling epics.“Inspector Sun,” a computer-animated family film released in Spain last year and now arriving in an English-language dubbed version, is very clearly a product of the director Julio Soto Gurpide and the screenwriter Rocco Pucillo’s deep affection for motion picture history. The movie draws on a range of classics, from silent adventure serials to screwball mysteries like “The Thin Man” to the swashbuckling epics of Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn.This comic detective story, set largely on a flight from Shanghai to San Francisco in the 1930s, is modeled on another famous peripatetic detective story from the same decade, Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Orient Express.”This tale’s version of Inspector Poirot, however, is a huntsman spider, and his campy sleuthing takes place in a world vibrantly and charmingly populated by a host of ants, flies and other insects, including a locust crime lord and a femme fatal black widow spider. The comedian Ronny Chieng plays Inspector Sun, the arachnid gumshoe. He’s an odd fit for the inspector, who sports a thin mustache and looks like he should sound archly French or Belgian, but Chieng brings an easy cheerfulness to the performance that feels more distinctive than a full-blown Poirot parody.The humor alternates between somewhat dorky but likable wordplay (“I’m not a praying man … tis,” Sun quips at one point) and some fairly juvenile sight gags, many of them scatological (and none of them funny).But while sometimes grating, the film is always appealing, with pleasing details, down to its Art Deco end titles. I hope they make a sequel, and just adapt a Christie story outright — perhaps “Spider’s Web.”Inspector SunRated PG for some action and mild innuendo. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Four Daughters’ Review: The Role Family Plays

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      This documentary from Kaouther Ben Hania restages pivotal moments from a family’s life.Re-enactment is not an unusual or particularly novel tool in documentary filmmaking yet recently it seems to have made a pointed resurgence — perhaps because the method has a distinct relationship to trauma and offers a compelling means of picking open old wounds for cathartic and/or healing purposes. Think “Framing Agnes,” “Procession,” and Nathan Fielder’s HBO series “The Rehearsal.”“Four Daughters” is another re-enactment film, distinct for the sense of intimacy and familiarity it brings to seemingly extraordinary circumstances. Olfa Hamrouni, a Tunisian woman, has four daughters, two of whom disappeared in 2015 to join ISIS in Libya. Directed by Kaouther Ben Hania, the documentary blends direct testimony by Olfa and her two youngest daughters, Eya and Tayssir, with stagings of pivotal scenes from the family’s life. The talking-heads style confessions, beautifully framed in velvety shadows, resemble stained-glass portraits.The docufictional interludes are performed by Eya and Tayssir, as well as two actresses who play the lost daughters Ghofrane (Ichraq Matar) and Rahma (Nour Karoui). A separate actress also plays Olfa (Hend Sabri), though Ben Hania shifts between the fictional drama and a behind-the-scenes perspective, meaning we occasionally see Olfa directing her double and tweaking the performances to conform to her version of events.We learn that Eya and Tayssir, only teenagers when they fled Olfa’s home, turned to Islamic extremism as a form of rebellion; Olfa, because of an upbringing punctuated by violence and misogyny, raised her daughters with an iron fist. Despite the documentary’s exciting hybridity, the conceit is more interesting in theory than it is in practice. The re-enactments map out the family’s tension and lay bare their wounds, but the lost daughters remain cyphers — the appeal of radicalization frustratingly murky through the end.Four DaughtersNot rated. In Arabic, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Jonathan Majors’s Accuser Is Arrested but Won’t Face Prosecution

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      Grace Jabbari, who accused the actor of assaulting her in a car, was herself arrested on a countercomplaint.A woman who has accused the actor Jonathan Majors of assaulting her in a car in Manhattan in March was arrested late Wednesday on a countercomplaint he filed against her, claiming to be the true victim in the altercation, the police said.The woman, Grace Jabbari, was charged with misdemeanor counts of assault and criminal mischief and released with a desk appearance ticket that requires her to appear in court at a later date, the police said.The arrest occurred even though the Manhattan district attorney’s office said in a court filing this month that it had told lawyers for Ms. Jabbari and Mr. Majors in September that the office “would decline to prosecute” her “if she were arrested.” The filing did not explain what was behind the decision not to prosecute.A lawyer for Ms. Jabbari did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Mr. Majors has pleaded not guilty to misdemeanor assault and harassment charges arising from the March episode. Ms. Jabbari’s surrender came the same day a Manhattan judge set a Nov. 29 trial date after rejecting the actor’s bid to dismiss the charges.Mr. Majors, a 34-year-old Yale graduate, was a rising Hollywood star when the altercation with Ms. Jabbari, his former girlfriend, occurred. Performances in vehicles like the HBO series “Lovecraft Country,” the film “Creed III” and the gritty drama “Magazine Dreams” had marked him as a potential Oscar contender, and his character Kang, from “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” was emerging as a linchpin of Disney’s Marvel franchise.The fallout from his arrest was swift. The U.S. Army pulled two recruiting commercials featuring him, with a spokeswoman explaining that “prudence dictates that we pause our ads until the investigation into these allegations is complete.”His movie career is effectively on hold. In part because of the continuing actors’ strike, Disney does not need to make a decision about his future involvement in the Marvel films until next year. “Magazine Dreams,” which stars Mr. Majors as a troubled bodybuilder and which generated buzz at the Sundance Film Festival, remains on Disney’s theatrical calendar for December, with the company’s art-house division, Searchlight Pictures, as the distributor.In light of Mr. Majors’s legal problems, theater owners expect Disney to push the film into next year, with an announcement coming as soon as this week. A Searchlight spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.In their filing this month, prosecutors said the episode at issue, on March 25, began when Mr. Majors and Ms. Jabbari, 30, were using a car service to go from Brooklyn to their Manhattan home.During the ride, the filing says, Ms. Jabbari saw a message on Mr. Majors’s phone that said, “Wish I was kissing you right now.” She grabbed the phone to see who had sent the message, the filing says.Mr. Majors, the filing says, began to grab the right side of Ms. Jabbari’s body and to pry her middle finger off the phone. He then grabbed her arm and hand, twisted her forearm and struck her right ear, cutting it, the filing says. Grabbing his phone, he left the car, the filing says.When Ms. Jabbari tried to get out, according to the filing, Mr. Majors picked her up and threw her back inside. In addition to the cut on her ear, the filing says, Ms. Jabbari sustained a broken finger, bruises on her body and a bump on her head.In April, after Mr. Majors had been charged, his lawyer, Priya Chaudhry, wrote to a judge that Ms. Jabbari’s version of events was a “complete lie” and that Ms. Jabbari had been the aggressor, hitting and scratching Mr. Majors.Ms. Jabbari, Ms. Chaudhry wrote, had then gone out clubbing, had passed out in a closet at home and had woken up to find the injuries to her finger and ear. Two months later, Mr. Majors filed the countercomplaint against Ms. Jabbari accusing her of assault, The police subsequently developed sufficient evidence to support the charges on which she was arrested. He faces up to a year in jail if convicted.Among the other notable details in the prosecutors’ filing was the mention of a “police report prepared by the London Metropolitan Police” as a piece of potential evidence in the case, as well as the prosecutors’ efforts to obtain “medical records from London related to an incident that occurred in September 2022.” The filing does not indicate who was involved in the incident.The filing also questions the veracity of a witness statement provided by the defense. In the purportedly firsthand statement, the filing says, the witness said that he saw Ms. Jabbari slap and “tussle with” Mr. Majors and that Mr. Majors had “gently” placed Ms. Jabbari in the car.When prosecutors presented the statement to the witness, the filing says, he said that he had not written or approved it, that he had not previously known it existed and that the statements attributed to him were false.Ms. Chaudhry did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.Brooks Barnes More

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      ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’: A Hit That Initially Unnerved Disney

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      The filmmakers look back on its 30th anniversary and recall how uncomfortable it made executives. They didn’t expect the celebrations around it today.“What’s this?” Jack Skellington sings excitedly when he first comes across Santa Claus’s snowy, colorful village in “The Nightmare Before Christmas.” That’s also what Disney executives asked with concern about the idiosyncratic stop-motion animation musical when they saw a rough cut.“Anytime you’re doing something like that, which was unknown: stop motion, the main character doesn’t have any eyeballs and it’s all music, what’s to feel comfortable about?” Burton said during a video call from London. “Of course they would be nervous about it.”Burton’s “Nightmare,” currently back in theaters to commemorate its 30th anniversary, is now more popular than ever: This weekend the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles is holding a series of live concerts around the film, Disney theme parks feature seasonal attractions inspired by its characters, and merchandise, from board games to housewares, abounds.But the eccentric and endearing movie wasn’t always a ubiquitous part of our holiday watch list. Back in October 1993, “Nightmare” was released not as a Disney title but under the studio’s more adult-oriented label Touchstone Pictures.“They were afraid it might hurt their brand,” the director Henry Selick said in a video call from his home in Los Angeles. “If they had put the Disney name on it right then, it would’ve been much more successful, but I understand it just didn’t feel anything like their other animated films.”Based on Burton’s original story and characters, the unusual picture was directed by Selick, by then a seasoned stop-motion artist with spots for MTV and a variety of commercials to his name. Burton’s frequent collaborators Michael McDowell and Caroline Thompson wrote the screenplay.Sally (Catherine O’Hara) and Jack Skellington. She was the subject of a sequel novel last year. Touchstone PicturesOver the course of its original run, “Nightmare” grossed $50 million at the domestic box office. And while that number is by no means dismal, it’s a far cry from Disney animated hits like “Aladdin,” which just a year earlier brought in $217 million from U.S. screens alone.At the time, Disney couldn’t figure out how to market the operatic saga of Jack, a lanky, sharply dressed skeleton, infatuated with bringing the wonder of Christmas to his monstrous friends in uncanny Halloween Town.Selick initially worried that the number of songs Danny Elfman had composed for the movie, a total of 10 tracks for the brisk 76-minute run time, would alienate viewers. In retrospect, he said, the memorable tunes were crucial to the film’s eventual success, once audiences connected with its unconventional rules of storytelling and design.These days Selick can’t go a week without running into a fan wearing a sweater, hat or other apparel emblazoned with “Nightmare” imagery.“This year there’s a 13-foot-tall Jack Skellington you can buy at Home Depot, and people have them on their lawns,” Selick said. “I like that because it’s pretty bizarre and extreme. That’s not just a T-shirt, that’s a real commitment.”For Burton, the character of Jack Skellington embodies a preoccupation common in his work over the years: the terrifying notion of being misunderstood. “The conception of it was based on those feelings growing up of people perceiving you as something dark or weird when actually you’re not,” he recalled.Selick compared the skeletal antihero’s amusingly manic behavior to Mr. Toad from the animated classic “The Wind in the Willows,” one of his favorite Disney protagonists. “I’ve always been drawn to characters like Jack Skellington,” Selick said. “He gets carried away with something new and goes way overboard with his enthusiasm.”Burton, who grew up in the Los Angeles area, where Latino culture has a strong presence, also holds a special affinity for Día de los Muertos, the Mexican holiday that embraces mortality as a natural part of life’s cycle. That was among his many inspirations for “Nightmare. ”The film was initially a modest hit that Disney released under its adult label, Touchstone.Touchstone Pictures“I always felt a connection to that celebration. People think of it as a dark sort of thing, but it’s quite light,” Burton said. “That’s where the juxtaposition of those feelings of dark imagery with more spiritual positive feelings connected with me very early in life.”For stop motion as a technique, “Nightmare” represented a watershed right before the advent of computer-generated animation. Selick credited the director of photography, Pete Kozachik, for introducing the tools that set the production apart, namely designing and building the rigs that allowed the heavy Mitchell film cameras to move a frame at a time.“That made the film so cinematic,” Selick said. “All the stop motion before had been done in lock shots or really simple little pans,” the mostly static visual language that limited other stories told in the same medium. But, Selick continued, “what Pete brought was this freedom of camera movement, which really turned it into a bigger movie.”While there was talk of turning his concept for “Nightmare” into a TV special or realizing it in hand-drawn animation, Burton — who as a child adored Ray Harryhausen’s creations and Rankin/Bass tales like “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” — held out until there was a team to do it in stop motion.“If you’ve ever been on a stop motion set and you see its tactile beauty, it is like going back to the beginning of making movies in the sense that it’s all about artists making puppets, sets, there’s a feeling that’s unlike any kind of thing,” Burton said.Decades before he directed the stop-motion features “Corpse Bride” (2005) and “Frankenweenie” (2012), both of which earned him Oscar nominations for best animated feature, Burton dove into the painstaking technique with a 1982 short film, “Vincent.”“Other mediums are great, but for me that’s the most pure and beautiful one,” Burton added.Selick admitted that for a while the general public’s lack of awareness that he had directed “Nightmare” upset him. He’s now made peace with the lack of credit because this milestone in his career wouldn’t have happened without “Tim’s brilliance and ideas.”“I could still certainly win bar bets for the rest of my life,” he said with a cheeky smile. “‘For $20, who directed “The Nightmare Before Christmas”?’”The movie has inspired Disney theme park celebrations, concerts and merchandise.Touchstone PicturesFor Selick, one of the indicators that the movie had become a classic came a few years after the lukewarm reception to the theatrical release, but before Disney had fully embraced it. The director recalls children coming to his house trick-or-treating on Halloween night in homemade costumes of “Nightmare” characters before officially licensed versions existed.“I’d sometimes bring them in with their parents and show them the original figure of Jack as Santa in his sled with the reindeer that I kept, and they would just scream with joy,” Selick recalled while pointing his camera to the fragile figure in a glass display case.“It’s not really mine or Tim’s or Danny’s anymore,” Selick said. “It’s the world’s movie, and I kind of like that.”Since 2001, the Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyland has been transformed every fall into a “Nightmare”-inspired attraction known as Haunted Mansion Holiday. And each year, from early September through October, Disneyland holds the Oogie Boogie Bash, a Halloween party three nights a week featuring and named after the movie’s rambunctious villain.Burton believes these displays epitomize the film’s evolution from unclassifiable oddity to a uniquely beloved property. “When I see that, I go back to the early days when the film was first being done, and thinking of the journey that it’s taken, this symbolizes it in a very strange way,” said Burton.Selick added that he was invited the first year of the Haunted Mansion Holiday. “They didn’t try to turn it into one of their other characters,” he said. “They really got the aesthetic of the designs just right.”A sequel novel, “Long Live the Pumpkin Queen,” focused on Jack’s romantic partner, Sally, and a prequel comic, “The Battle for Pumpkin King,” were published in the last year. Yet three decades on, Burton maintained that the original animated film was a one-of-a-kind feat.“In a certain way that’s the beautiful thing about it as it is. It’s one movie. It’s stop motion and it tells its story. And that helps make it special for me,” Burton explained. “It’s its own thing, there aren’t five sequels and there’s not a live-action reboot.” More

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      Richard Roundtree, Star of ‘Shaft,’ Dies at 81

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      Richard Roundtree, the actor who redefined African American masculinity in the movies when he played the title role in “Shaft,” one of the first Black action heroes, died on Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 81.His manager, Patrick McMinn, said the cause was pancreatic cancer, which had been diagnosed two months ago.“Shaft,” which was released in 1971, was among the first of the so-called blaxploitation movies, and it made Mr. Roundtree a movie star at 29.The character John Shaft is his own man, a private detective who jaywalks confidently through moving Times Square traffic in a handsome brown leather coat with the collar turned up; sports a robust, dark mustache somewhere between walrus-style and a downturned handlebar; and keeps a pearl-handled revolver in the fridge in his Greenwich Village duplex apartment. As Mr. Roundtree observed in a 1972 article in The New York Times, he is “a Black man who is for once a winner.”In addition to catapulting Mr. Roundtree to fame, the movie drew attention to its theme song, written and performed by Isaac Hayes, which won the 1972 Academy Award for best original song. It described Shaft as “a sex machine to all the chicks,” “a bad mother” and “the cat who won’t cop out when there’s danger all about.” Can you dig it? The director Gordon Parks’s gritty urban cinematography served as punctuation.A fictional product of his unenlightened pre-feminist era, Shaft was living the Playboy magazine reader’s dream, with beautiful women available to him as willing, downright grateful, sex partners. And he did not always treat them with respect. Some called him, for better or worse, the Black James Bond.He played the role again in “Shaft’s Big Score!” (1972), which bumped up the chase scenes to include speedboats and helicopters and the sexy women to include exotic dancers and other men’s mistresses. In that movie, Shaft investigated the murder of a numbers runner, using bigger guns and ignoring one crook’s friendly advice to “keep the hell out of Queens.”In “Shaft in Africa” (1973), filmed largely in Ethiopia, the character posed as an Indigenous man to expose a crime ring that exploited immigrants being smuggled into Europe. The second sequel lost money and led to a CBS series that lasted only seven weeks.But the films had made their impact. As the film critic Maurice Peterson observed in Essence magazine, “Shaft” was “the first picture to show a Black man who leads a life free from racial torment.”Mr. Roundtree in a scene from the 1972 movie “Shaft’s Big Score,” the first of two sequels.Stanley Bielecki Movie Collection/Getty ImageRichard Arnold Roundtree was born on July 9, 1942 (some sources say 1937), in New Rochelle, N.Y., the son of John and Kathryn (Watkins) Roundtree, who were identified in the 1940 census as a butler and a cook in the same household.Richard played on New Rochelle High School’s undefeated football team and, after graduating in 1961, attended Southern Illinois University on a football scholarship. But he dropped out of college in 1963 after he spent a summer as a model with the Ebony Fashion Fair, a traveling presentation sponsored by a leading news and culture magazine for Black readers.He moved back to New York, worked a number of jobs and soon began his theater career, joining the Negro Ensemble Company. His first role was in a 1967 production of “The Great White Hope,” starring as a fictionalized version of Jack Johnson, the early 20th century’s first Black heavyweight boxing champion. A Broadway production starring James Earl Jones opened the next year and won three major Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize for drama.After “Shaft,” Mr. Roundtree made varied choices in movie roles. He was in the all-star ensemble cast, which also included Charlton Heston and Ava Gardner, of the 1974 disaster movie “Earthquake.” He played the title role in “Man Friday” (1975), a vibrant, generous, ultimately more civilized partner to Peter O’Toole’s 17th-century explorer Robinson Crusoe.In “Inchon” (1981), which Vincent Canby of The Times described as looking like “the most expensive B movie ever made,” he was an Army officer on the staff of Gen. Douglas MacArthur (Laurence Olivier) in Korea. He starred with Clint Eastwood and Burt Reynolds in “City Heat” (1984) and with a giant flying lizard in “Q” (1982).On the small screen he played Sam Bennett, the raffish carriage driver who courted Kizzie (Leslie Uggams), in the acclaimed mini-series “Roots” (1977). That show was transformational, Mr. Roundtree said in an ABC special celebrating its 25th anniversary: “You got a sense of white Americans saying, ‘Damn, that really happened.’”Richard Roundtree in 2019. He remained busy as an actor for more than four decades after his first big role.Celeste Sloman for The New York TimesMr. Roundtree’s name remained associated with the 1970s, but he was just as busy during the next four decades.He was an amoral private detective in a five-episode story arc of “Desperate Housewives” (2004); appeared in 60 episodes of the soap opera “Generations” (1990); and played Booker T. Washington in the 1999 television movie “Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years.” He was a big-city district attorney in the film “Seven” (1995) and a strong-willed Mississippi iceman in “Once Upon a Time … When We Were Colored” (1996).After the year 2000, when he was pushing 60, he made appearances in more than 25 small-screen series (he was a cast member of or had recurring roles in nine of them — including “Heroes,” “Being Mary Jane” and “Family Reunion”) and was seen in half a dozen television movies and more than 20 feature films.In 2020, he starred as a fishing boat’s gray-bearded captain in “Haunting of the Mary Celeste,” a supernatural maritime movie mystery. In 2022, he acted in an episode of “Cherish the Day,” Ava DuVernay’s romantic drama series.Mr. Roundtree married Mary Jane Grant in 1963. They had two children before divorcing in 1973. In 1980, he married Karen M. Cierna. They had three children and divorced in 1998.Mr. Roundtree is survived by four daughters, Kelli, Nicole, Taylor and Morgan; a son, John; and at least one grandchild.The Shaft character, created by Ernest Tidyman in a series of 1970s novels, endured — with Hollywood alterations. Samuel L. Jackson starred as a character with the same name, supposedly the first John Shaft’s nephew, in a 2000 sequel titled “Shaft.”In 2019, another “Shaft” was released, also starring Mr. Jackson (now said to be the original character’s son) and Jessie T. Usher as his son, J.J. Shaft, an M.I.T.-educated cybersecurity expert. The film felt something like a buddy-cops comedy, but the smartest thing it did, Owen Gleiberman of Variety noted in a review, was to take Mr. Roundtree, “bald, with a snowy-white beard,” and “turn him into a character who’s hotter, and cooler, than anyone around him” and whose “spirit is spry, and tougher than leather.”Orlando Mayorquin More

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      The Best True Crime to Stream: Stories That Are Very Scary, and Real

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      Four terrifying, unnerving picks across television, film and podcast.It’s the time of year when I tend to push the boundaries of how many scary stories I can stomach. That includes horror movies, but also, true crime offerings that I may have skipped. Of course, with true crime, that self-soothing mantra of “at least it’s not real” doesn’t apply, which makes it all the more haunting. Here are four picks that shook me to my core.Documentary“Beware the Slenderman”On May 31, 2014, in Waukesha, Wis., Anissa Weier and Morgan Geyser, then 12 years old, lured their friend and classmate Payton Leutner into a forest and stabbed her 19 times. Weier and Geyser were trying to appease the fictional character Slender Man, a tall, lanky, faceless ghoul and modern-day boogeyman whose image had been disseminated on the Creepypasta Wiki, a horror-centric online forum. The girls believed that if they killed their friend, they would save their families from Slender Man’s wrath and get to live forever in what they called Slender Mansion.This 2016 documentary, directed by Irene Taylor Brodsky, uses chilling footage of the girls recounting the precipitating events to police officers hours after the stabbing. And Brodsky spent 18 months with the parents of Weier and Geyser ahead of their trial on charges of attempted first-degree murder.Particularly hard to shake is how Slender Man captivated young people. The character originated from a Photoshop challenge to create convincing paranormal images, then spread to platforms across the web and became the basis of popular online games. In the documentary, mental health experts talk about the role of internet as companion; the abundance of grotesque imagery online; and what I found most disturbing: the concept that a meme with great spreadability is in fact a virus of the mind.Docuseries“John Wayne Gacy: Devil in Disguise”The term “killer clown” would normally send me running for the hills. But I was curious about this 2021 six-episode Peacock docuseries, which is a comprehensive exploration of the crimes committed by the serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who preyed on boys and men and was sentenced on 33 counts of homicide in 1980. Gacy, who had been a respected and well-connected figure in his Chicago community and who performed for children as Pogo the Clown, was executed at an Illinois prison in 1994.Along with interviews of investigators, a sister of Gacy’s and family members of victims — as well as film of the excavation of his home, under which dozens of bodies were buried — the series includes a great deal of previously unseen footage of a 1992 interview with Gacy by the F.B.I. profiler Robert Ressler, who is credited with creating the term “serial killer.” (For “Mindhunter” fans, Ressler inspired the character of Special Agent Bill Tench.) Most indelible to me is how utterly ordinary and unremarkable Gacy seemed.While serial killers like him have often been too heavily glorified, there is value in not forgetting the systemic failures that allowed such horrors to continue unchecked. Much as they did with the crimes of Jeffrey Dahmer, the police ignored warnings and pushed aside clues, including pleas from a victim who’d survived, because of entrenched homophobia.Podcast“Dr. Death”: Season 1I decided to binge this 10-episode series on a 12-hour road trip with my dogs. Not even one episode in, I had to pull over and get out of my car for some air. But I persevered, so don’t let that dissuade you.Season 1 of this Wondery podcast, reported and hosted by the science journalist Laura Beil, tells the story of Christopher Duntsch, a young neurosurgeon who arrived in Dallas in 2010 and charmed his patients with confidence and charisma. He claimed that he could cure back pain when nothing else worked. Under his care, which amounted to butchery, over 30 patients were severely injured; two died.As stomach-turning as these accounts are, revelations about how he slipped through the medical system are worse.“In the Dark”: Season 1In 1989, 11-year-old Jacob Wetterling was kidnapped on a dead-end country road in his small Minnesota town, a kidnapping that would fuel an already fast-growing national paranoia: that pedophiles were snatching up America’s children. The search that followed was one of the largest manhunts in U.S. history. Though the investigation was terribly mishandled — as the host Madeleine Baran, an investigative journalist, and a team of reporters make clear over nine episodes and two bonus episodes of this American Public Media podcast (it found a new home at The New Yorker earlier this year).For 27 years, there were no answers, but a couple of weeks before Season 1 was set to debut, in 2016, Wetterling’s remains were discovered, changing everything and taking a story from decades ago and placing it breathlessly in the present. More

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      After Outcry, Writers Guild Tries to Explain Silence on Hamas Attack

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      Facing mounting pressure from more than 300 Hollywood screenwriters questioning why it had not publicly condemned the Hamas attack on Israel this month, the Writers Guild of America West sent a letter to its members on Tuesday that sought to explain its silence while also calling the attack “an abomination.”The letter, signed by the guild’s leadership and viewed by The New York Times, said the reason the union had not issued a statement after the attack on Oct. 7 was not “because we are paralyzed by factionalism or masking hateful views” but rather because “we are American labor leaders, aware of our limitations and humbled by the magnitude of this conflict.”The guild’s letter acknowledged that it had publicly commented on other situations “which could be characterized as beyond our scope,” but that it had not made any statement following, for instance, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.“It can be an imprecise science for a labor union to pick and choose where it weighs in on both domestic and world affairs,” said the letter, which was signed by the president, Meredith Stiehm; the vice president, Michele Mulroney; and Betsy Thomas, the secretary-treasurer.Still, they added, “We understand this has caused tremendous pain and for that we are truly sorry.”(The west and east branches of the W.G.A. are affiliated unions with separate leadership that together represent more than 11,000 writers.)On Oct. 15, a group of screenwriters sent an open letter to the guild asking why it had not publicly denounced the attack on Israel, noting the union had made public statements in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and the #MeToo reckoning. They also noted that other major Hollywood unions had issued statements condemning the attack.The letter has now been signed by more than 300 writers, including Jerry Seinfeld, Eric Roth (“Killers of the Flower Moon”) and Amy Sherman-Palladino (“The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel”). Some Jewish screenwriters had begun to question whether they should remain part of an organization that they felt did not support them.Ms. Stiehm’s initial reply to the open letter was an email to inquiring members saying that the lack of response was because “the board’s viewpoints are varied, and we found consensus out of reach.”The letter on Tuesday, which said the guild’s leadership was “horrified by the atrocities committed by Hamas,” was an attempt to stem the outrage. “I really appreciate this statement,” said the screenwriter Howard Gordon (“24” and “Homeland”), who added in an interview that the silence from the guild had prompted responses from both Jewish and non-Jewish members ranging from rage to fear to the desire to resign from the organization.“I hope this letter goes a long way to sort of calming some of it down,” said Mr. Gordon, who signed the open letter to the guild. “Hopefully something constructive comes out of this, which is an acknowledgment of how we combat and confront and talk about antisemitism.”For Dan Gordon, however, the apology came too late. Mr. Gordon, 76, sent a letter Tuesday morning resigning his membership in the organization, calling its silence “appalling.”“It is corrosive to me as a writer and repugnant to every fiber of my being as a person of conscience,” wrote Mr. Gordon, who has no relation to Howard Gordon and is best known for “The Hurricane” and “Wyatt Earp.” “I am resigning my membership not because I wish to work on nonunion projects, nor cross any picket line, but because I no longer wish to be a fellow traveler with those who hide behind the fetid veil of a morally bankrupt wokeism and stand silent in the face of unadulterated evil.”Mr. Gordon’s latest film, “Irena’s Vow” — about a young Polish-Catholic woman during World War II who hid 12 Jews in the basement of a German officer’s house without his knowledge for almost a year — debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival in September.He will change his guild membership status to “financial core,” according to his letter. Under that designation, he will still receive the contract benefits earned by the guild but he will no longer be able to vote or attend any guild meetings. The designation is irreversible and viewed by the guild as an act of disloyalty. The W.G.A. maintains an online list of members who have chosen this status, with a reminder that “Fi-Core is forever.”Mr. Gordon called Tuesday’s letter from the guild “pusillanimous” and faulted it for not calling for a release of the hostages.“I don’t retract anything I said,” he added in an interview. “If one cannot condemn, clearly, and without reservation, what Hamas perpetrated, one’s moral compass is absent, not broken.” More