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      ‘Hold Me Tight’ Review: An Étude in the Key of Grief

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      In Mathieu Amalric’s new film, Vicky Krieps plays a mother who tries to stay close to her family by running away.Early one morning, Clarisse (Vicky Krieps) slips out of the house, climbs into the 1979 AMC Pacer that has been languishing under a tarp, and drives away, leaving behind her husband, Marc (Arieh Worthalter), and their two young children, Lucie (Anne-Sophie Bowen-Chatet) and Paul (Sacha Ardilly).This act of maternal abandonment, at the beginning of Mathieu Amalric’s “Hold Me Tight,” stirs up some familiar emotions and questions. What is Clarisse running away from, or toward? Is this liberation or betrayal? The answers aren’t what you might expect. “Hold Me Tight” doesn’t depend on plot twists or dramatic revelations — the central mystery is resolved early on — but if you don’t want the beginning spoiled you may hesitate to read further.This isn’t a movie about wanderlust or marital discontent; it’s about grief. Clarisse isn’t merely unhappy. Her world has been shattered, and her flight represents a desperate attempt to put it back together. She runs away from her family because she has already lost them, to a deadly avalanche during a ski vacation in Spain. Her departure keeps Paul, Lucie and Marc alive, in her mind and in front of our eyes, in a chronology that runs parallel to her wanderings.They go on without her, the years of their lives filling the months she spends on the road, revisiting the scene of her family’s death and drifting from town to town. The kids grow up, with new actors (Juliette Benveniste and Aurèle Grzesik) playing the older versions. Lucie, a gifted musician, is an especially vivid presence. Her piano playing, which progresses from a halting attempt at Beethoven’s “Für Elise” to a commanding rendition of Ligeti’s “Musica Ricercata,” is an important element in the film’s story and a driver of its moods. Bowen-Chatet and Benveniste both actually play the music, which lends gravity and credibility to the character. “My daughter is Martha Argerich,” Clarisse declares after seeing some of a documentary about that Argentine virtuoso. For a moment, it sounds less like a fantasy born of bereavement than like a proud mother’s wishful boast.Do Clarisse’s projections of the family’s life without her represent a coping mechanism or a form of denial? Amalric, adapting a play by Claudine Galea, seems less interested in the psychological implications of Clarisse’s behavior than in the structural and formal challenges her situation presents. He doesn’t mark a boundary between the real and the unreal, but rather treats them as equivalent, cutting from Clarisse to her family as if they were separated only by geography.This generates a particular kind of suspense, as you wonder whether and how the two strands of the story might collide, and to what effect. When the climax arrives, it’s unnerving but also tidy. For all the intensity of Krieps’s performance and the power of the piano repertoire, “Hold Me Tight” proceeds through the mourning process with a strange detachment, using Clarisse’s agony as scaffolding for ideas about memory and storytelling that seem more imposed on life than pulled from it.Hold Me TightNot rated. In French and German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Clerks III’ Review: From the Heart

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      Kevin Smith revisits his convenience store characters, and his life, with this sequel.These days more than ever, personal filmmaking deserves to be celebrated merely for manifesting itself. Which doesn’t mean that personal filmmaking doesn’t come in some confounding forms.From his first feature, the very low-budget, black-and-white “Clerks” (1994), the writer-director Kevin Smith has only ever made movies about himself. Not just himself as a person, but himself as a sensibility: quick-witted, working-class, pop-culture-obsessive wiseass Jersey boy. In “Clerks” he put it across perfectly. In the film’s second sequel, “Clerks III,” he is not nearly as deft.Paradoxically, some of this is because of Smith’s relative maturity. A husband and a father and a heart attack survivor who is now 52, he’s got more on his mind than being a wiseass. Instead of following up the 2006 film “Clerks II” with more of that picture’s profane exuberant absurdity, he brings back Dante and Randal and Jay and Silent Bob and does some stocktaking.The movie is bouncy at first, though the actors Brian O’Halloran and Jeff Anderson, so rawly naturalistic in the earlier movies, here seem like they’re doing bits. Still, three words characterize the first third or so of the picture: not funny enough. As in, a new character is nicknamed Blockchain. Which is funnier than that character nicknamed Podcast in the most recent “Ghostbusters” movie, but, you know.Randall has a heart attack, and, realizing he has to make something of his life, decides to direct a movie. About, yes, working at a convenience store. Not funny enough turns to often not funny, a star-studded audition scene (Ben Affleck! Danny Trejo! Freddie Prinze Jr.!) notwithstanding.While Smith has often broken the fourth wall in his pictures, here he uses the make-a-movie plot to go big-time meta. But his idea of meta fails to split the difference between the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the French New Novel. It has more the manner of a pinball in a machine that’s about to enter tilt mode.For instance, at one point the trench-coated Silent Bob, played as ever by Smith, breaks character and, as Smith the filmmaker, lectures Randal about the hideous color scheme of a shot he’s framing. The joke falls flat, and not just because Smith’s visual mode is rarely mistaken for that of “The Red Shoes.”The wobbly ending combines the confounding and frequently schticky meta mode with the forced sentimentality of that Nicole Kidman AMC Theaters promo. My rooting interest in Smith notwithstanding (full disclosure: I, too, am a wiseass Jersey boy), it made me wince.Clerks IIIRated R. It’s a Kevin Smith movie. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Pinocchio’ Review: As the Story Grows

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      This live action and animated reimagining of the classic fairy tale takes too much time relaying its narrative.Surprising that Disney hired two previous directors before handing the strings of its partially-animated “Pinocchio” to Robert Zemeckis, Hollywood’s Geppetto, the creator on a quest to transform pixels into real boys (and girls and Grendels). Under Zemeckis’s attentive eye, Pinocchio’s yellow cap appears made of felt and his white gloves, affectionately hand-knit. When the marionette spirals his head like a pinewood Linda Blair, his joints make a satisfying creak. But boy oh real boy, is the script by Zemeckis and Chris Weitz a lifeless chunk of wood.The reimagining goes awry in the opening number — not “When You Wish Upon a Star,” the Oscar-winner that ascended to become the company’s signature tune, but a new ballad, “When He Was Here With Me,” sung by Geppetto (Tom Hanks) about his freshly concocted dead son. Someone wished to burden the old whittler with more motivation, and tacked on a dead wife to boot.This interminable shop sequence is paced so slowly that when a window closes, the image loiters until its latch drops into place. So slowly that when the Blue Fairy (Cynthia Erivo) freezes a screeching cuckoo clock, it feels like a cruel prank. So slowly that we forget that Hanks is ranked high among the most charming screen performers of all time as he opens his mouth to sing a second unwelcome new song in which he rhymes “Pinocchio” with “Holy Smoke-i-o.” And when Pinocchio (voiced by Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) and Jiminy Cricket (voiced by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) finally head outside for fresh air, things do not improve.The key problem is the film’s fear of the original author Carlo Collodi’s theme: that children are raw material inclined to sloth, foolishness and self-serving fibs. (Collodi’s puppet kills the cricket and is haunted by its ghost.) Walt Disney’s 1940 cartoon softened the tyke’s sins to rambunctious naïveté. Now, he’s been flattened out of having a personality at all. His lumpen goodness turns the hot-tempered fairy tale into a dull after-school special about peer pressure, which seems to suggest that Geppetto should have just carved himself a helicopter to parent the boy.In place of temptation, the film serves up bizarre plot-fillers. Pinocchio learns about taxes and horse dung, meets a love interest (Kyanne Lamaya) and stares blankly at zingers directed toward the modern enticements of social media. (Pleasure Island now includes Contempt Corner where kids wave placards haranguing each other to shut up.) Joy can be found only in Luke Evans’s scary-fun Coachman (now saddled with unnecessary smoke monster minions) and a line where Jiminy seems to comment on the last decades of Zemeckis’s career: “Sure, there are other ways to make a boy — but I don’t think Geppetto gets out much, and I guess it’s just the best he could do with the tools he’s got.”PinocchioRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Watch on Disney+. More

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      ‘Speak No Evil’ Review: Impolite Company

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      A weekend visit turns nightmarish for an innocent Danish couple in this coldblooded satirical thriller.The opening shot of “Speak No Evil” is of a car’s headlights plowing through the darkness of a deserted, tree-lined road. The image is innocent enough, yet the soundtrack vibrates with such disproportionate dread that when, seconds later, the road was replaced by a sunny vacation scene, I still had goose bumps.Gliding inexorably from squirmy to sinister to full-on shocking, this icy satire of middle-class mores, confidently directed by Christian Tafdrup, is utterly fearless in its mission to unsettle. When a Danish couple, Bjorn and Louise (Morten Burian and Sidsel Siem Koch), receives an invitation to visit the Dutch couple they met months earlier on a Tuscan vacation, they’re initially reluctant. Yet both families have young children who seemed to get along, and it would be ungracious to refuse a long weekend in the countryside. As one of their friends points out, What’s the worst that could happen?We’re about to find out. The sight of their destination, a middle-of-nowhere farmhouse, is only the beginning of the Danes’ misgivings. Their hosts, Patrick and Karin (Fedja van Huet and Karina Smulders), are jovial and welcoming, but why does Patrick insist on feeding wild boar to Louise, knowing she’s vegetarian? And why did he lie about being a doctor, then admit he has never held a job at all? Invited to dine in an otherwise deserted restaurant, Bjorn and Louise watch uncomfortably as their hosts enthusiastically make out on the dance floor. At night, a child’s agonized, animalistic moans reverberate through the house, the sounds explained by Patrick as a result of their son’s speech defect: a foreshortened tongue.Too polite to confront their hosts’ increasingly outrageous behavior, the Danes are ill-prepared when it begins to impact their preteen daughter. In the press notes, Tafdrup, who wrote the script with his brother, Mads Tafdrup, explains his belief that social conditioning has made us too refined, blunting our survival instincts and even our common sense. For Bjorn, though, the aversion to confrontation is more complicated: Irked by his overly predictable life, he harbors a nascent attraction to Patrick’s unfettered solipsism.Cool to the touch and photographed with unerring sophistication by Erik Molberg Hansen, “Speak No Evil” is a slow-closing trap whose final 15 minutes are genuinely terrifying. As an examination of pure maleficence, the movie is less than thorough. But as a warning to always listen to your gut? It’s perfect.Speak No EvilNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Story of Film: A New Generation’ Review: The Case for Modern Movies

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      The latest installment in the filmmaker-critic Mark Cousins’s survey of movie history focuses on 21st-century developments.A decade after presenting a guided tour of cinema history in the 15-hour docuseries “The Story of Film: An Odyssey,” the filmmaker and critic Mark Cousins checks in on recent developments in “The Story of Film: A New Generation.”This latest installment is a gratifyingly international survey in which Cousins, who narrates, applies his analytical eye to movies that are still settling in the mind. If you feel like you haven’t fully absorbed such significant films as Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s “Cemetery of Splendour” (2016) or Mati Diop’s “Atlantics” (2019), Cousins’s consideration of their visual strategies will make you want to watch them again.Cousins’s assessments offer plenty to argue with, but it’s possible to enjoy “A New Generation” without agreeing that “Booksmart” “extends the world of film comedy,” as he claims, or that a shot in “It Follows” merits comparison to the camerawork in Michael Snow’s landmark experimental film “La Région Centrale.”Despite leading with “Joker” and “Frozen,” Cousins goes well beyond titles familiar to western audiences, with Indian cinema (“Gangs of Wasseypur,” “Reason”) coming in for particular praise. He also highlights works that test the boundaries of what qualifies as cinema — Beyoncé’s visual album “Lemonade,” Tsai Ming-liang’s virtual-reality experiment “The Deserted” and the interactive “Bandersnatch” episode of “Black Mirror.”If anything, technological shifts — there’s discussion of the iPhone-shot “Tangerine,” and of “Leviathan,” in which, according to Cousins, the filmmakers literalized the concept of a fisheye lens by attaching cameras to fish — get short shrift. When Cousins says that lockdown gave people time to watch “far more movies,” and that “when public life returned, we marched to the movies again,” his “we” does not entirely comport with box office realities. “A New Generation” means to look forward to a bright future of moviemaking, but it’s possible it’s a future that may not come to pass.The Story of Film: A New GenerationNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Medieval’ Review: Flaying Alive

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      Living up to its title, this ultraviolent ode to a Czech national hero bludgeons you into submission.A cohort of notable actors — including Michael Caine, Ben Foster and Matthew Goode — tromp through “Medieval,” Petr Jakl’s lumbering epic about the storied Czech warrior Jan Zizka. The movie’s real stars, though, are its gaping wounds and mangled limbs, the singing of scythe and ax more eloquent than any dialogue.On land and underwater, the verisimilitude of the violence is numbing. Horses are elbowed over cliffs; a man’s brain is leisurely puréed by means of a saw through the ears. By the end, scarcely an orifice remains inviolate, the camera’s blood lust seemingly insatiable. Yet beneath the clanging of chain mail and the gurgles of the dying, a story peeks out: The throne of the Holy Roman Empire is up for grabs and coveted by two feuding brothers. To prevent the corrupt sibling (Goode, lazily scheming) and his wealthy wing man from prevailing, a powerful lord (Caine) arranges to have the wing man’s fiancée, Lady Katherine (a wan Sophie Lowe), kidnapped. As operatic choirs muster on the soundtrack, a morose mercenary named Zizka (Foster), gets the assignment; a small empire’s worth of knights and peasants gets kaput.Glum and bludgeoning, “Medieval” serves up a melancholic hero — see how it pains Zizka to take all these lives! — and a limp love interest-cum-bargaining chip. Hauled from one battle to the next, Katherine can do little but gaze, mouth agape, at the carnage, rallying now and then to declaim on the era’s social inequities and to pack maggots into Zizka’s newly vacated eye socket.“Are you all right?” Zizka tenderly inquires at one point, though, if you ask me, the movie’s addition of that hungry lion was maybe a barbarism too far.MedievalRated R. Fans of slicing, smashing, gouging and impaling will be in heaven. Running time: 2 hours 6 minutes. In theaters. More

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      In Horror Movies This Fall, Three Faces to Watch

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      The stars of “Speak No Evil,” “Smile” and “Nanny” plumb psychological depths in very different characters.Sometimes the ordinary, the routine, the mundane can be more frightening than an arsenal of chain saws and axes. Especially when everyday interactions become uncomfortable — and maybe even threatening. This fall, a handful of outstanding performances turn what, on the surface, seem like psychological dramas into something truly terrifying. We asked the actors in “Speak No Evil” (due Friday), “Smile” (Sept. 30) and “Nanny” (Nov. 23) to discuss the transformation.Fedja van Huet, ‘Speak No Evil’“I think every person has had the same experience,” Fedja van Huet said in a video call from his home in Utrecht, the Netherlands. He was describing that universally creepy sensation when someone fails to read the cues — or chooses to ignore them — and gets a little too close. “I had it with the father of a girlfriend of my daughter. And I said, ‘Why do I feel so awful? Because somebody went over your boundaries.’”There’s a lot of overstepping in “Speak No Evil,” Christian Tafdrup’s terrifying dissection of social conventions, starring van Huet as Patrick, an electrifying Dutch tourist in Italy who, with his wife, Karin (Karina Smulders, van Huet’s real-life wife), seduces an all-too-polite Danish couple, Bjorn (Morten Burian) and Louise (Sidsel Siem Koch), onto a hell ride.The Tuscan sun seems to rise and set in Patrick when we first meet him, with Bjorn captivated by his easy magnetism.But when Patrick and Karin invite the Danish couple and their daughter to Holland, Louise has misgivings whereas Bjorn is tempted. After all, what’s the worst that can happen?That’s when the squirming begins.Patrick provokes the well-mannered Danes, who leave but then return — perhaps he’s simply eccentric — despite every cell in Louise’s body screaming, “Run!” Then there’s Patrick and Karin’s peculiarly silent son.“Speak No Evil” is the first horror film for van Huet, who was still in drama school when he was cast as the lead in “Character,” which won the 1998 Oscar for best foreign language film. He is now shooting an Amazon series based on a young adult novel. That he’s the bad guy is all he would reveal.“I’m one of the usual suspects in Holland; I’ve been blessed with a lot of work,” van Huet, 49, said. And yet he and Tafdrup had never collaborated before. “You don’t have any thoughts before because you don’t know each other. So that’s fresh. That’s interesting.”The night before auditioning for Patrick, van Huet read the script and realized that “Speak No Evil” was no mere psychological drama.“I was a little upset, actually,” he said, laughing.And while he sometimes had the urge to go sinister with his eyes — he raised an eyebrow ever so slightly, transforming his face from one you could trust into one not so much — Smulders had other ideas.“She was like, ‘Don’t give it away, don’t give it away. Just be nice. Just be friendly,’” van Huet recalled. “‘That’s scary enough.’”Sosie Bacon stars as a therapist with her own issues in “Smile.”Paramount PicturesSosie Bacon, ‘Smile’Sosie Bacon hoped to do a horror movie, but not just any horror movie.“I wanted to do a good one and the right one,” she said in a video call from her home base of Los Angeles.She found it in “Smile,” Parker Finn’s exploration of childhood trauma in a scary-clown wrapping.Bacon is polished and hyper-confident as Dr. Rose Cotter, a therapist in a psychiatric hospital who numbs debilitating inner pain with work, the better to atone for the wrongdoings of her past.Then a patient starts screaming about a figure she can’t unsee before breaking into a diabolical grin and slicing into her own face. And Rose’s mask starts to crumble.“I was drawn to the psychological aspect of it massively because human beings and their psyches and therapy stuff, I just gobble it up,” said Bacon, 30. “It was important to me that there be this thing boiling under the surface.”And sometimes on it. That tic where Rose devours her cuticles with increasing intensity?“I also pick my fingers and they bleed, like, a lot so it wasn’t that difficult for me to go there,” she said.Bacon lived with her parents, Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick, when she shot “Smile” on the East Coast, and a few of Rose’s nightmares followed her off the set.“My dad has been in a gajillion horror movies, but it wasn’t until after the movie that he was like, ‘Oh yeah, it’s the worst. The worst thing to do is to have to be scared in different ways,’” she said. “I was like, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ And he was like, ‘I just didn’t want to ruin it.’”Sosie Bacon credits her stint last year as a recovering addict opposite Kate Winslet in HBO’s “Mare of Easttown” for the offer of Rose, her first lead. “I was able to make something of it and it had a lot of levels,” she said. “I think that showed people that I could really do it.”Now she’s aiming for something lighter, like a buddy comedy maybe. But the next time she ventures into darkness, she’ll prep with calming affirmations — and a reminder.“What I would say to someone taking on a horror movie is, ‘It’s not all fun and games.’”Anna Diop plays a Senegalese domestic worker dealing with a Manhattan family in “Nanny.”Amazon StudiosAnna Diop, ‘Nanny’“That was the easiest ‘yes’ I’ve ever come across,” Anna Diop said of taking on Aisha, a Senegalese domestic worker for an entitled Manhattan family, in “Nanny.” “I’ve known her my whole life.”Aisha is laser-focused on saving money to bring her young son to New York, despite the cost to herself. Similarly, Diop’s mother, a Senegalese immigrant who worked as a babysitter and nanny, brought her own family to the United States when Diop was 5. (The Sierra Leonean mother of the film’s director, Nikyatu Jusu, did domestic work as well.)“There are so many parallels to my personal life that my mother’s story is indistinguishable in a lot of ways from Aisha’s,” Diop, 34, said in a video call.Indistinguishable, perhaps, save for the inexplicable cracks that soon leave Aisha awash in a wave of madness.Diop, who is in Toronto to shoot Season 4 of HBO Max’s “Titans” as Kory Anders, a.k.a. the superhero Starfire, prepped for “Nanny” by color-coding every scene on giant corkboards so that she could track the ascension of the horror seeping in.“But outside of that, I approached it just as a human story,” she said, noting that she tried to keep Aisha grounded by working from a place of logic: Is her mind playing tricks on her or are these things really happening?“It’s a woman who is a mother who loves her child and who’s determined to do this one specific thing,” she added. “And the internal and external obstacles she faces in trying to do that is all my focus really needed to be about.”Still, the day the movie wrapped, Diop returned to her apartment and sobbed, a release she hadn’t allowed herself while filming.“I felt Aisha, throughout the story — and so many women immigrants can relate to this — was just holding it together because you need to get done what you need to get done, whatever other horror or trials are happening to you,” she said. “You just power through. And that was me during it.” More

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      September 2022: What’s New on Amazon, Hulu, Apple TV+ and More

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      Every month, streaming services add movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for some of September’s most promising new titles.(Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)Morfydd Clark and Benjamin Walker, center, in “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.”Amazon StudiosNew to Amazon Prime‘The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’ Season 1Starts streaming: Sept. 1When J.R.R. Tolkien died, the author of “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” left behind thousands of pages of partial stories and detailed notes, which collectively expanded on the history of his fictional Middle Earth and its surrounding lands, across many cycles of war and peace. The expensive Prime Video series “The Rings of Power” — which could cost around a billion dollars by the time its planned five-season run ends — draws on some of those stray Tolkien tales as the inspiration for an epic saga set thousands of years before “The Hobbit,” at a time when the world’s different races formed wary alliances in an effort to thwart the dark power of Sauron. The show maintains the bright look and sense of wonder that made Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” movies so popular, though the large cast and varied settings also recall “Game of Thrones.”Also arriving:Sept. 9“Flight/Risk”Sept. 16“Goodnight Mommy”Sept. 21“Prisma”Sept. 23“September Mornings”Sept. 30“Jungle” Season 1“My Best Friend’s Exorcism”Maddie, voiced by Katie Chang, and David, voiced by Daniel Dae Kim, in the animated series “Pantheon.”Titmouse Inc/AMCNew to AMC+‘Pantheon’ Season 1Starts streaming: Sept. 1The acclaimed Chinese American science fiction and fantasy author Ken Liu is known for stories that consider ordinary human lives and relationships in the context of pulpy scenarios that are not too far removed from reality. The animated series “Pantheon” combines multiple Liu short stories into one interconnected drama. At the show’s center is a troubled teen named Maddie (voiced by Katie Chang) who receives advice on the internet from someone who may be her late father (Daniel Dad Kim) living on in the cloud as an “uploaded intelligence.” Her situation swells into a broader crisis, keyed to the potential dangers of a future where people’s lives feel “realer” online than in physical reality.Also arriving:Sept. 2“Rubikon”Sept. 9“There Are No Saints”Sept. 16“Official Competition”Sept. 23“Section 8”Sept. 30“Sissy”Sidney Poitier as seen in the documentary “Sidney.”Apple TV+New to Apple TV+‘Sidney’Starts streaming: Sept. 23The actor Sidney Poitier, who died earlier this year at 94, set a standard of excellence that placed him among the all-time greats. The documentary “Sidney” (directed by Reginald Hudlin for Oprah Winfrey’s production company Harpo) covers Poitier’s life from his childhood in the Bahamas through his rapid rise in the theater and then in Hollywood at a time when the opportunities for Black actors were slim. The film features an impressive slate of A-list actors and directors — plus one of the final interviews with the man himself — all explaining how Poitier’s influence as an artist and as a Civil Rights pioneer continues to endure.Also arriving:Sept. 9“Central Park” Season 3“Gutsy”Sept. 30“The Greatest Beer Run Ever”Diego Luna as the title character in the new Stars Wars series “Andor.”Disney+New to Disney+‘Cars on the Road’Starts streaming: Sept. 8The “Cars” crew is among the most popular of Pixar’s creations, inspiring three feature films, a spinoff franchise (“Planes”) and countless toys, games and theme park attractions. The new series “Cars on the Road” sends the champion racer Lightning McQueen (voiced by Owen Wilson) and his tow-truck buddy Mater (Larry the Cable Guy) on a trip across the country, parceled out across nine short episodes that more or less add up to an hourlong “Cars” mini-movie. Unlike the grander big-screen adventures, these little eight-minute morsels are comic vignettes, set in a variety of locations and always rooted in the unlikely bond between these two mismatched pals.‘Andor’ Season 1Starts streaming: Sept. 21The latest addition to the “Star Wars” TV universe is a prequel to a prequel, filling in the backstory of one of the major characters from the 2016 movie “Rogue One” — and, in the process, fleshing out more of the pre-“A New Hope” saga of the Rebel Alliance’s rise as a legitimate challenge to the dominance of the Galactic Empire. Diego Luna reprises his role as Cassian Andor, a cynical crook with a tragic past, who is persuaded to use his talents for deception and thievery to aid the Rebel cause. The 12-episode first season will be followed later by an already in-the-works 12-episode second season, which will take “Andor” all the way up to to the part of the “Star Wars” timeline where “Rogue One” begins.Also arriving:Sept. 8“Epic Adventures with Bertie Gregory” Season 1“Growing Up” Season 1“Pinocchio”“Remembering”“Tierra Incognita”Sept. 16“Mija”Sept. 19“Dancing with the Stars” Season 31Sept. 21“Super/Natural” Season 1Sept. 28“The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers” Season 2Sept. 30“Hocus Pocus 2”From left, Fred Armisen, Ana Fabrega, Julio Torres, Bernardo Velasco and Cassandra Ciangherotti in the second season of “Los Espookys.”HBONew to HBO Max‘Los Espookys’ Season 2Starts streaming: Sept. 16For their unclassifiable “Los Espookys,” the creators Julio Torres, Ana Fabrega and Fred Armisen have brought a gently surreal comic sensibility to the weird adventures of a horror-loving theater troupe in a fictional Latin American country. Torres and Fabrega play two members of the troupe, Andrés and Tati, who alongside their visionary leader Renaldo (Bernardo Velasco) and their more pragmatic partner Úrsula (Cassandra Ciangherotti) hire themselves out to people looking for someone to provide realistic haunted house effects. Season 1 introduced this eccentric crew and featured subplots with Renaldo’s Uncle Tico (Armisen), a valet parking attendant who lives in Hollywood. It’s hard to predict what’s in store for Season 2, given that the first run featured such a unique mix of supernatural fantasy and low-key hangout comedy.Also arriving:Sept. 17“Secret Origin of the Batwheels”Sept. 21“Escape from Kabul”Sept. 22“The Hype” Season 2Sept. 28“Hostages”Rachel Bloom, left, and Krista Marie Yu in Hulu’s show-within-a-show comedy “Reboot.”Michael Desmond/HuluNew to Hulu‘Reboot’ Season 1Starts streaming: Sept. 20This inside-Hollywood farce pokes fun at the modern phenomenon of streaming services and TV networks reviving classic shows. “Reboot” is about a neurotic writer (Rachel Bloom) who sells Hulu an edgy update of a long-cancelled family sitcom, but then discovers that the original showrunner (Paul Reiser) still has the rights to make new episodes. The show-within-the-show’s cast members — Keegan-Michael Key, Judy Greer and Johnny Knoxville — encourage the old guard and the new to work together to bring some heat back to their own flagging careers. The veteran TV writer Steven Levitan (“Modern Family”) created “Reboot,” drawing on his own years in the complicated business of making “comfort” comedies that are equal parts funny and true.‘Ramy’ Season 3Starts streaming: Sept. 28In Season 2 of the comedian Ramy Youssef’s semi-autobiographical dramedy, his title character tried hard to straighten out his life by recommitting himself to his Muslim faith and even pursuing a traditional marriage. Then all of Ramy’s plans fell apart, leaving him with a choice at the end of the finale: to stay on the righteous path he had been on, or to backslide. The belated Season 3 will pick up that larger story, about one man’s attempts to balance his interest in religious traditions with the pleasures of a secular American life. “Ramy” will also continue to spend time with the character’s eclectic batch of friends and family members, who face traumas and hangups of their own.Also arriving:Sept. 1“The Mighty Ones” Season 3Sept. 7“Grid” Season 1“Tell Me Lies”Sept. 8“Wedding Season” Season 1“The Zone: Survival Mission” Season 1Sept. 14“The Handmaid’s Tale” Season 5Sept. 16“Atlanta” Season 4Sept. 19“Best in Dough” Season 1Sept. 22“The Kardashians” Season 2Sept. 26“A Chiara”“Chefs vs. Wild” Season 1Sept. 27“Reasonable Doubt” Season 1Sept. 28“The D’Amelio Show” Season 2New to Paramount+‘The Good Fight’ Season 6Starts streaming: Sept. 8The sixth and final season of one of TV’s best dramas adds Andre Braugher and John Slattery to its ace cast, as part of the aftermath to a Season 5 finale which saw the venerable attorney Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski) step away from her partnership with Liz Reddick (Audra McDonald) in their progressive Chicago law firm. Braugher plays the firm’s charismatic new partner, while Slattery plays Diane’s doctor, helping her adjust to whatever comes next. “The Good Fight” — a spinoff of the long-running legal drama “The Good Wife” — has been through multiple on-screen and behind-the-scenes upheavals since its 2017 debut, but what has remained consistent is the head writers Michelle and Robert King’s sharp-witted approach to ripped-from-the-headlines political stories, which playfully examine how the American justice system is trying to hold the line against the tumult of our crazy times.Also arriving:Sept. 3“Taylor Hawkins Tribute Concert”Sept. 7“Ink Master” Season 14Sept. 23“On the Come Up”New to Peacock‘Last Light’Starts streaming: Sept. 8Though based on a 2007 Alex Scarrow novel, the thriller miniseries “Last Light” is very much of the moment, with its story of a society thrown into chaos by a sudden drop in the oil supply. Matthew Fox plays Andy Yeats, a brilliant chemical engineer who gets summoned to a key Middle Eastern petroleum reserve to investigate a potentially catastrophic problem. Joanne Froggatt plays his wife Elena, who is in Paris helping their young son through an experimental eye operation, while their college-aged daughter Laura (Alyth Ross) is home in London raising awareness about climate change. When the long-feared fuel crisis hits, the family has to race across the world to reunite, dodging street-riots and a cabal of powerful people who don’t want Andy to make public what he knows.Also arriving:Sept. 2“Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul.”Sept. 14“Hell of a Cruise”Sept. 15“’Til Jail Do Us Part” Season 1“Vampire Academy” Season 1Sept. 21“Meet Cute”“Shadowland”Sept. 28“Sex, Lies and the College Cult” More