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An ESPN documentary looks at life inside the W.N.B.A. bubble. And a mini-series about L.G.B.T.Q. rights in America debuts on FX.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, May 10-16. Details and times are subject to change. More
Ms. Kitaen gained fame for her carefree spirit and sultry dancing in music videos for bands like Whitesnake and Ratt and her role in the movie “Bachelor Party.”Tawny Kitaen, an actress who gained fame in the 1980s for her roles in rock music videos and who starred with Tom Hanks in the movie “Bachelor Party,” died on Friday at her home in Newport Beach, Calif. She was 59.Ms. Kitaen’s death was confirmed by a daughter, Wynter Finley, who said the cause was not known.Ms. Kitaen became a mainstay on MTV in the 1980s when the network was at its peak cultural influence with music videos playing all day.With her flowing red hair and acrobatic moves, Ms. Kitaen appeared in videos for bands like Whitesnake and Ratt, coming across as both sultry and playful. She famously danced on the hood of a white Jaguar in the Whitesnake music video “Here I Go Again” and graced the cover of Ratt’s 1984 album, “Out of the Cellar.”Julie Kitaen was born on Aug. 5, 1961, in San Diego. She studied ballet and gymnastics until she was 15. After appearing in a Jack LaLanne commercial, and in television shows and movies, she gained wider exposure as Mr. Hanks’s fiancée in the 1984 comedy “Bachelor Party.”But it was her appearance in music videos that solidified her image in Generation X’s imagination as a free-spirited beauty having the time of her life.She once described working with Paula Abdul on the set of one video.Ms. Abdul, then a choreographer, asked her what she could do. Ms. Kitaen said she showed Ms. Abdul some of her moves. Ms. Abdul then turned to the director, Marty Callner, and said, “She’s got this and doesn’t need me.” She then left, Ms. Kitaen said.“That was the greatest compliment,” she said. “So I got on the cars and Marty would say, ‘Action,’ and I’d do whatever I felt like doing.”She married the Whitesnake frontman David Coverdale in 1989 and the couple divorced two years later. In 1997, she married Chuck Finley, a major-league baseball pitcher. They had two daughters, Wynter and Raine. The couple divorced in 2002.Later, Ms. Kitaen appeared on reality shows and spoke openly about her struggles with addiction to cocaine and painkillers.In a 2010 interview with The Daily Pilot, she described her volunteer work at a shelter for women who had left abusive relationships and said she herself was a survivor of domestic violence. Ms. Kitaen said that after her divorce from Mr. Finley, she became involved with a man who was physically and verbally abusive.“You don’t want to tell anybody because you feel like a complete fool for staying — you protect them,” she said. “You do everything you can so other people don’t find out that he’s abusing you.”Michael Goldberg, Ms. Kitaen’s agent, said in recent years she appeared on various podcasts and radio shows and relished talking about her time as a figure in rock history.“People still love to hear those stories because the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle is something we all fantasize about, isn’t it?” he said. “And she lived it. And had so much to say about it.”Ms. Kitaen is survived by her two daughters and a brother and a sister. More
Jason Statham plays H, a movie tough guy you don’t want to mess with, in Guy Ritchie’s action film.The filmmaker Guy Ritchie has long shown an eagerness to take a whack at almost any blockbuster format a given studio is willing to offer him. Witness the noisome “Sherlock Holmes” period pictures he’s made with Robert Downey Jr., or his more recent live-action consideration of Disney’s “Aladdin.” But his most enjoyable movies remain the tough, nasty crime thrillers with which he kicked off his career back in 1999 with “Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.”His new “Wrath of Man” is such an item, although it’s more somber and less rollicking than the likes of “Lock.” It’s also a remake, of the 2004 French film “Le Convoyeur.” Ritchie fares better here with secondhand material than he did with “Aladdin,” not to mention “Swept Away” (2002).Jason Statham plays Hill, a mysterious, taciturn tough guy who takes a job at an armored car company that recently was hit by murderous robbers. His trainer, called Bullet, shortens Hill’s name to “H.” “Like the bomb,” Bullet explains to a co-worker.H proves his mettle by single-handedly putting down a truck hijacking, during which, in an inordinately satisfying moment, he takes out a punk played by the pop musician Post Malone. H’s co-workers hail him as a hero, but other characters wonder who exactly this guy is, and what he’s doing at this job.As Kirk Douglas in “The Fury” and Liam Neeson in “Taken” have shown, there are certain men with whose family one ought not to mess with. Here Statham is one of them. The gravity of H’s true mission accounts for the movie’s tone. Ritchie reveals crucial story points with clever time-juggling editing, and keeps up the tension well into the movie’s climax, which delivers exactly what the viewer will have come to hope for.Wrath of ManRated R for violence and language. Running time: 1 hour 58 minutes. In theaters. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More
Melvin Van Peebles had to go to France to make “The Story of a Three Day Pass,” the tale of a Black soldier on leave that’s full of bold directorial choices.I don’t think anyone who sees the title “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song” forgets it. The eye-popping film made Melvin Van Peebles a pioneer of 1970s American cinema and pure independent hustle. But a few years earlier, Van Peebles directed his first trailblazer in France: “The Story of a Three Day Pass,” his feature debut, which was released commercially in 1968 and is opening at Film Forum on Friday in a new restoration. More
Sergei Loznitsa’s new found-footage documentary illuminates Soviet life in the immediate aftermath of the dictator’s death.Joseph Stalin died on March 5, 1953. “State Funeral,” the Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa’s fascinating and elusive new documentary, shows what happened in the next few days, as Stalin’s body lay in state at the Hall of Unions in Moscow before being transferred to the Lenin mausoleum. (It was removed eight years later, but that’s another story).Composed entirely of footage shot at the time in various parts of the Soviet Union, the film is a haunting amalgam of official pomp and everyday experience, the double image of a totalitarian government and the people in whose name it ruled.At the beginning, crowds gather to hear news of the dictator’s death, read out in stately, somber tones over loudspeakers. Those broadcasts, which continue as the masses shuffle past Stalin’s wreath-laden coffin, supply an abstract, rose-colored interpretation of his life amid frequent invocations of his immortality. His subjects — his comrades, in the idiom of the time — are reminded of his undying love for them, as well as of his “selflessness,” his courage and his monumental intelligence. He was, among other accomplishments, “the greatest genius in human history.”This kind of rhetoric is evidence of the cult of personality that would be disavowed a few years later when Nikita Khrushchev came to power and undertook a program of de-Stalinization. “State Funeral” captures the official manifestations of that cult, including the gigantic portraits of Stalin hanging from public buildings and the arrival of delegations from other communist countries. Fulsome elegies are delivered by the distinctly uncharismatic men who — briefly, as it turned out — took Stalin’s place: Georgy Malenkov, Vyacheslav Molotov and Lavrenti Beria. (Khrushchev, who would shortly kick them out, serves as master of ceremonies).But Stalin’s famous visage, with its bushy mustache and sweptback hair, is upstaged by the throngs of ordinary citizens who gather to bear witness and pay tribute. The anonymous camera operators, shooting in color and in black and white in far-flung shipyards, factories, oil fields and collective farms, are Loznitsa’s vital collaborators. Intentionally or not, they gathered images that complicate and to some extent subvert the somber, emptied-out language of the regime, disclosing a complicated human reality beneath the ideological boilerplate.It’s the parade of ordinary Soviets that makes “State Funeral” both moving and unnerving. It is hard not to be touched by the tears shed by grandmothers, soldiers, old men in fur hats and bareheaded young women, even though they are mourning a monster. Other responses are harder to read. Does that steady, unsmiling gaze signify stoicism or defiance? Is that faint smile an expression of relief? Of gratitude? Of terror? When someone looks directly into the camera, do the eyes register suspicion or solidarity?A brief note at the end of the film reminds the viewer of Stalin’s crimes against his own people — the tens of millions purged, imprisoned, starved and slaughtered. That knowledge sits uncomfortably with what has come before, not because the leaden language of the scripted obsequies is persuasive, but because the grieving citizens are so real. In their variety and particularity, these people don’t seem to belong to a distant place and time. They seem entirely modern and familiar.Which can be taken as a warning: Any population can be swayed and subjugated by tyranny. They could be us. But the tone of “State Funeral” is more meditative than admonitory. It contemplates the Soviet state at almost the exact midpoint of its existence, illuminating the faces of those who lived there and at the same time reckoning with the dead weight of history.State FuneralNot rated. In Russian, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. At Film Forum. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More
As a newly transplanted family tries to adjust to the countryside, the son is desperately pulling strings to cure his seriously ill mother.The keen affinity the actor David Oyelowo has for his fellow performers is the best thing about “The Water Man,” his feature directorial debut. Scripted by Emily A. Needell, the picture is a family drama with a supernatural angle, centered on illness.Lonnie Chavis plays Gunner, a sensitive and creative tween who works on his graphic novel (the inked frames become animated and speak to him as he draws) while his parents deal with life in a rural town. (The movie was shot in Oregon.) As the father, Oyelowo is a little dim about his son’s real passions — he accidentally overturns a bottle of Gunner’s ink when asking him to come outside to “toss the ball around.”And his mother, (Rosario Dawson), is increasingly challenged by illness. One morning, Gunner goes into his favorite fantasy bookshop and says “I’m gonna need every book you have on leukemia.”Gunner soon learns about “the water man,” a local legend who walks the earth with a flame of hope in his heart. He gets more information from a reclusive eccentric (Alfred Molina). Then he enlists a slightly older semi-Goth tough girl (Amiah Miller) — whose background of abuse is the polar opposite of Gunner’s loving home — in an ill-advised forest trek.The mythos the movie trucks in carries hints of Miyazaki’s “Princess Mononoke” and the Y.A. novel and film adaptation “A Monster Calls.” But this picture is a more anodyne vision overall; even when the narrative calls in a wildfire to raise the emotional stakes, the viewer remains confident that things will work out. That the movie’s executive producer is Oprah Winfrey kind of tips the movie’s hand; the ultimate point here is that flame of hope.The Water ManRated PG for mature themes. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More
Lili Taylor plays a mother who spirals into madness in this unfortunately bland melodrama.The mother and daughter duo at the center of the family drama “Paper Spiders” are close enough to be casual about the things they fear. Dawn (Lili Taylor) frets about how Melanie (Stefania LaVie Owen) will soon leave home for college, but Melanie brushes off her worries with ease. Melanie breezily spends her days touring campuses and indulging in first high school romances. She trusts her mother to manage empty-nest concerns.But Dawn’s run-of-the-mill anxiety soon explodes when she becomes fixated on the man who lives next door. Dawn is convinced this neighbor is bugging her home, and she rants about imagined attacks with rocks and electromagnetic rays. Melanie knows her mother is spiraling, but despite all their former closeness, she is unsure how to step into the role of caretaker.Maternal paranoia has historically provided rich material for movie melodramas, but the style of the director Inon Shampanier’s filmmaking is diffident. The home that becomes the site of Dawn’s delusions is not gothic, it’s not grand guignol, it’s not giallo. The house is simply suburban — anonymous, like all of the film’s images. In absence of a bold visual style, the performers are tasked with providing the movie with its energy. It is a pleasure to see Lili Taylor sink her teeth into a starring role, and she plays her character’s manic descent with a palpable and heartbreaking practicality. Her performance suggests that no one clings to logic more than a person who has started to lose her mind.Paper SpidersNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More
A writer slaughters her online nemeses in this low-stakes serial killer movie from the Netherlands.A writer is thrown into the cyber snake pit when her op-ed criticizing Black Pete — a traditional Dutch Christmas character who typically appears in blackface — is published. Suddenly, swarms of disinhibited men inundate her Twitter account with death threats and misogynist nastiness. Oh, to be a woman online.In “The Columnist,” a glossy and intentionally ridiculous psycho-thriller, the writer, Femke Boot (Katja Herbers), refuses to let the haters bring her down. She makes sure of that by becoming a literal troll hunter who spends her evenings stylishly executing unkempt dudes.The director Ivo van Aart gets to the carnage quickly. Femke tips a neighbor off his roof when she discovers his toxic online presence, then slices off one of his fingers — the first in her soon abundant collection.At the same time, Femke’s daughter (Claire Porro) wages war against her school administrators in the name of free speech. Steven Death (Bram van der Kelen), a surprisingly down-to-earth horror novelist with kohl-rimmed eyes, finds his way into Femke’s bed. His bad-boy public persona helps boost his book sales, but in private he’s a sweetheart and a keeper.These elements have something to say about the trickiness of navigating social media, but they’re not meaningfully explored so much as sprinkled on amid Steven’s unheeded instructions to never read the comments.The complexities of Femke’s mental state are sidelined to make room for more gleeful brutality and violent spectacle, flattening her character into a kind of homicidal girlboss. That said, “The Columnist” doesn’t seem to care about making a cogent statement about feminist revenge or online culture. Perhaps it just needed an excuse to carry out its bloody high jinks, which are decent fun in their own right.The ColumnistNot rated. In Dutch, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. Rent or buy on Google Play, FandangoNow and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More
