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      ‘Jeanne du Barry’ Review: A Versailles Scandal at Its Snooziest

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      Maïwenn wrote, directed and stars in the film, playing opposite Johnny Depp, who is Louis XV. Though he declares he loves her, their chemistry is weak.In the wake of a tabloid-friendly divorce featuring multiple allegations of abuse, Johnny Depp’s Hollywood profile rests at a rather low point. The French actress and filmmaker Maïwenn, for her part, has made headlines in her home country — including last year, when she reportedly assaulted a journalist.One might expect a film pairing these two actors would produce combustible results. But “Jeanne du Barry,” written, directed by and starring Maïwenn, is an ultimately snoozy historical period piece.Given recent trends, it may go without saying that the picture tries to make something of a “girl boss” out of Jeanne, the most prominent mistress of King Louis XV. She transcends her humble roots, entrances the King and flouts 18th-century Versailles protocol.But she also has a, um, kind heart. At a royal dinner she is given Zamor, an enslaved person, as a gift. She befriends him. What fun they have running through the halls of Versailles! She also defends his humanity to Louis’s nasty daughters, who make the evil stepsisters in Disney’s “Cinderella” seem understated. Louis-Benoit Zamor, an actual historical figure, played a role in the eventual fate of the real Jeanne du Barry.Since Maïwenn created Jeanne for herself, it may seem paradoxical to state that she’s all wrong for it. Nevertheless, her broad performance is a consistently unfortunate case study in “whatever she thinks she’s doing, this isn’t it.”As Louis, Depp takes his role, spoken entirely in French, seriously — no Captain Jack Sparrow-style winks are called for or delivered — but the film doesn’t give him much to work with as a character.The meticulous and lush production design by Angelo Zamparutti, captured with practically dewy appreciation by the cinematographer Laurent Dailland, makes the movie easy on the eyes, but every so often its prettiness edges over into souvenir-shop kitsch.Jeanne du BarryNot rated. In French with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg’ Review

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      Subtitled “The Story of Anita Pallenberg,” this documentary gives the life of the actress and model a thorough downer of a treatment.If Anita Pallenberg was, in the words of her obituary in The New York Times in 2017, “best known for her relationships with members of the Rolling Stones,” the documentary “Catching Fire,” directed by Alexis Bloom and Svetlana Zill, shifts the focus to Pallenberg herself: the model, actress and life force who embodied a certain image of ’60s freedom.Made in collaboration with Pallenberg’s son Marlon Richards, “Catching Fire” is a redemptive portrait that nevertheless plays like a downer. Pallenberg’s story involves an unremitting cascade of drugs, addiction, volatile relationships and parenting tragedy, along with a 1979 incident in which a 17-year-old shot himself at her home, possibly playing Russian roulette. No excess is too excessive for this film, until it’s time to chronicle the later (and admittedly less sensational) period when Pallenberg calmed the turbulence surrounding her. To that, the doc devotes 10 minutes.The narrative’s spine comes from an unpublished memoir by Pallenberg. Scarlett Johansson reads excerpts in voice-over. We hear of Pallenberg’s upbringing in wartime Europe (“I didn’t learn to walk — I ran”), her encounters with Andy Warhol and Allen Ginsberg, and her abandonment of modeling for psychedelics (“You couldn’t do both, and I loved acid”). While her relationship with the Stones’ Brian Jones fell apart, a result of his reputed drug use and physical abuse, she landed in the arms of Keith Richards, the Stone closest to her rock. We’re told that, as a child, Marlon was treated as the household’s adult.There is plentiful — maybe too much — archival footage to illustrate all this. The film amasses an insightful array of talking heads, from Volker Schlöndorff, who directed Pallenberg in her film debut, to Theda Zawaiza, a former nanny for Marlon who describes Pallenberg at the time as being a virtual prisoner of a record company. Pallenberg is finally in focus. But the picture is tough to look at.Catching Fire: The Story of Anita PallenbergNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘The Fall Guy’ Review: Ryan Gosling Goes Pow! Splat! Ouch!

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      The actor charms as a swaggering stunt man, alongside an underused Emily Blunt, in the latest skull-rattling action movie from David Leitch.Like a certain energized bunny, Ryan Gosling’s charmer in “The Fall Guy” takes a licking and keeps jauntily ticking as he runs and leaps, tumbles and punches and vaults through the air like a rocket. The actor has shed his “Barbie” pretty-in-pink look, if not his signature heat-seeking moves to play Colt Seavers, a stuntman with a long résumé, six-packs on his six-packs and a disregard for personal safety. Plunging 12 stories in a building atrium, though, is just another bruising day on the job for Colt until, oops, he nearly goes splat.Directed by David Leitch, “The Fall Guy” is divertingly slick, playful nonsense about a guy who lives to get brutalized again and again — soon after it starts, Colt suffers a catastrophic accident — which may be a metaphor for contemporary masculinity and its discontents, though perhaps not. More unambiguously, the movie is a feature-length stunt-highlight reel that’s been padded with romance, a minor mystery, winking jokes and the kind of unembarrassed self-regard for moviemaking that film people have indulged in for nearly as long as cinema has been in existence. For once, this swaggering pretense is largely justified.There’s a story, though it’s largely irrelevant given that the movie is essentially a vehicle for Gosling and a lot of stunt performers to strut their cool stuff. Written by Drew Pearce and based (marginally) on the 1980s TV series of the same title starring Lee Majors, it opens shortly before Colt’s 12-story plunge goes wrong. After some restorative time alone baring his torso, he resumes stunt work, drawn by the promise of a reunion with his ex, Jody (a welcome if underused Emily Blunt). She’s directing a science-fiction blowout that looks like the typical big-screen recycling bin, with bits from generic video games, the 2011 fantasy “Cowboys & Aliens,” and both the “Alien” and “Mad Max” franchises. Cue the flirting and the fighting.Leitch is a former stunt performer who has his own estimable résumé, which includes doubling for Brad Pitt, whom he later directed in “Bullet Train.” Leitch has a company with Chad Stahelski, yet another former stunt performer turned movie director who’s is best known for the “John Wick” series with Keanu Reeves. Working in tandem with physically expressive performers like Pitt, Reeves and Charlize Theron (Leitch directed “Atomic Blonde”), the two filmmakers have, in the post-John Woo era, put a distinctive stamp on American action cinema with a mix of martial-arts styles, witty fight choreography and, especially, a focus on the many ways a human body can move (or hurtle) through space.There are arsenals of guns and all manner of sharp objects that do gruesome damage in Leitch’s movies, “The Fall Guy” included. Yet what seizes your attention here, and in other Leitch and Stahelski productions, is the intense physicality of the action sequences, with their coordinated twisting, wrenching and straining bodies. A signature of both directors is that they emphasize the intense effort that goes into these physical acts, which is understandable given their backgrounds. (Like Fred Astaire, they show off the body, head to toe.) In their movies, you hear the panting and see the grimacing as fists and feet and whatever else happens to be around (a fridge door, a briefcase, a bottle) connect with soft tissue and hard heads.Like the impressively flamboyant practical effects in “The Fall Guy,” this focus on the body reads like a rebuke to the digital wizardry that now characterizes action movies. Each time Colt crashes to the ground in “The Fall Guy,” the moment announces his and the movie’s authenticity (however you want to define that). There’s a macho undertow to this — real men, real stunts — which dovetails with how his romance with Jody is, by turns, comically, sentimentally and, at times, irritatingly framed, including via split-screen mirroring à la “Pillow Talk.” Jody may be Colt’s boss, but he’s the one who has to save the day after some gnarly business with a star and producer (Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Hannah Waddingham).The issue of authenticity is a thread that the story jokingly pulls with a scene in which Colt’s face is digitally scanned and in a subplot involving a deep fake. (It’s funnier if you don’t think too hard about the fact that A.I. was an existentially fraught issue in the 2023 actors’ strike.) Tapping into his inner Tom Cruise, Gosling makes love to the camera and performs some of his own showstopping moves, at one point while atop and almost under a speeding garbage truck. Given that “The Fall Guy” is an ode to stunt work, it’s only right to note that the actor’s stunt doubles were Ben Jenkin and Justin Eaton, his driving double was Logan Holladay while his double on that nosebleed of a plummet was Troy Brown. Kudos, gentlemen.The Fall GuyRated PG-13 for falls, fights, crashes and explosions. Running time: 2 hours 6 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Wildcat’ Review: Seeing Flannery O’Connor Through Her Stories

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      Ethan Hawke teams up with his daughter, Maya Hawke, for an unconventional and somewhat muddled portrait of a singular author.Bedridden and anguished, the writer Flannery O’Connor is visited by a priest (Liam Neeson in a cameo) in “Wildcat,” starring Maya Hawke. Tormented by spiritual agony and the systemic lupus that would kill her at 39, O’Connor, a lifelong Catholic, beseeches him: “I long for grace,” she cries. “I see it, I know it’s there, but I can’t touch it.”There’s the seed of a good film in this scene, but the filmmakers can’t quite latch onto it. These intriguing wisps of ideas — about O’Connor’s struggle with faith and purpose — never coalesce into a coherent portrait in the movie (directed by Maya Hawke’s father, Ethan), which is presented as being based on O’Connor’s short stories.The film is meant to animate her life through her work, with its observations about religion, violence and society’s hypocrisy, but that adventurous conceit can’t be fulfilled without some elements of a biopic. What we are left with is a movie that flits between incidents from the life of this National Book Award-winner, writing on the family farm in Georgia, among other places, and a distracted supercut of her particular, and often darkly comic, brand of Southern Gothic fiction. Half-sketched and sometimes hard to follow, the stories glimpsed here ultimately fail to produce a fully legible or consistently engaging arc of what must be a roiling inner world.Maya Hawke’s performance, in turn, is muddled; she can be strong as O’Connor, but in the fictional pieces, her portrayals are often reduced to clumsy caricatures. The period re-creation is striking and helps generate occasionally spellbinding imagery, but the enduring sense of the film is of a family project that is by turns frustrating and briefly enlightening.WildcatNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘I Saw the TV Glow’ Review: How We Used to Escape

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      An outstanding not-quite-horror film about being a fan just before the internet took over.We’ve forgotten how hard being a fan used to be. You had to labor at it in multiple media: scouring listings and keeping tabs on schedules, reading books of lore and compiling episode recaps. Pop culture was built around presence, real physical presence: To see the latest episode of “The X-Files” or “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” you had to show up at your TV when it aired. If you missed a key episode, you were out of luck, unless someone remembered to tape it for you, at least until it went into reruns or syndication. And if your taste ran to the niche, discovering that someone else loved the same thing you loved felt revelatory, like you’d stumbled upon a person who spoke a language only you could understand.The social internet, algorithms and streaming blew most of this up, shoving our favorites at us and making them available all the time. Some of the magic disappeared as well, the uncanny immersive quality. You can bury yourself in a binge-watch for a day or a week, but then it’s over, no long in-between stretches to hash out each episode. Sustaining a relationship with the world a show built is still possible; connecting with others over your shared love is preposterously easy. Something, however, has been lost.“I Saw the TV Glow” captures this obsessive, anticipatory submersion in a long-form weekly TV show, to the point where it ignites the same feeling. A lot of movies tell you stories, but the films of the writer and director Jane Schoenbrun evoke them; to borrow a term, they’re a vibe. Like “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair,” Schoenbrun’s previous film, this one isn’t quite horror, but it gives you the same kind of scalp crawl. In this case I think it’s the mark of recognition, of feeling a tug at your subconscious. It’s oddly hard to put into words.“We’re All Going to the World’s Fair” was the tale of a lonely teenager living in the oddness of our internet era, where intimacy is free and plentiful and confusing and could be dangerous, or could be banal. “I Saw the TV Glow” dials that same tone back a generation, centering on a couple of lonely teenagers who find one another through a show called “The Pink Opaque.” It’s a mash-up show, instantly recognizable in its own way: It airs on something called the Young Adult Network (clearly a stand-in for The WB, the teen-focused TV network that turned into The CW) at 10:30 p.m. on Saturday nights, a time reserved for shows barely hanging on by a thread. The opening credits we glimpse suggest the show is “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”-adjacent (it even uses the same typeface), but with elements reminiscent of “The X-Files” and “Twin Peaks” — in all these cases, not exactly horror, but not quite anything else. (There’s also a band in the show, one that apparently performs a song in every episode, which plays expertly tuned mid-90s teen-show music; the musicians are Phoebe Bridgers and Haley Dahl.)“I Saw the TV Glow” is set in 1996, right at the moment when entertainment was about to dive over the cliff and become what media theorists sometimes refer to as convergence culture. Back then, TV was still a few years away from being participatory for most youthful viewers. The internet wasn’t mature enough yet for the majority of teens to really haunt it, and those who did were posting on the kinds of message boards and websites that would eventually come to define both the TV and the fan-driven internet of the early aughts. (“The X-Files,” for instance, which premiered in 1993, was one of the first shows with a developed online fandom; they communicated through a Usenet newsgroup.) If you knew how to find message boards and chat rooms, you might have bonded with other fans. But if you were just a kid at home in the suburbs, you were most likely planning your schedule around episodes.The story of “I Saw the TV Glow” mostly belongs to Owen (played as a seventh grader by Ian Foreman, and then from high school up by Justice Smith). He is nervous and anxious and sheltered, but he catches an ad for an episode of “The Pink Opaque.” He doesn’t know what it is, but he’s obsessed. One day, waiting for his parents to finish voting in the school cafeteria, he wanders into a room and finds Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) reading a book that recaps episodes of the show. Maddy explains the show to Owen: It’s about two girls, Tara (Lindsey Jordan, the musician Snail Mail) and Isabel (Helena Howard), who meet at camp and discover they share a connection that enables them to fight that most stalwart trope of ’90s TV dramas: the Monster of the Week. There’s a Big Bad in their world, too — the mysterious Man in the Moon named Mr. Melancholy. Owen is even more consumed.Owen’s father won’t let him stay up to watch the show, but Maddy and Owen concoct a way to make it happen. This is where “I Saw the TV Glow” starts to leave the realm of straightforward plot and slip-slide into some nether region at the intersection of fantasy, nostalgia, fear and longing. Escapism has always belonged to children’s literature, fantastical other worlds into which we might leave the ordinary behind and discover ourselves special. Owen and Maddy are trapped in their own worlds, but “The Pink Opaque” gives them the sense that a parallel dimension might be where they really belong.There’s a heartbreak at the center of this film that made me gasp to see it, an acknowledgment that sometimes it’s better not to go back to what we once loved because now, in the cold light of adulthood, it all looks very different. There are other layers, too: implications that awakenings around gender dysphoria and sexuality are tied up in the teens’ obsession with the show, though they barely understand. Even more broadly, the immense pain of pushing down your true self, and the brittle breaking of that shell, is woven throughout.But what’s most effective, and staggering, is Schoenbrun’s storytelling, which weaves together half-remembered childhood elements in the way they might turn up in a nightmare, weaving in sounds and lights and colors and the gloriously inexplicable. Teenage malaise, untreated, can sour into an adult psychic prison; the TV is just one way that we escape.I Saw the TV GlowRated PG-13 for some really trippy stuff. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Turtles All the Way Down’ Review: 10 Things I Hate About Germs

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      Hannah Marks’s adaptation of John Green’s blockbuster young-adult novel builds a dynamic depiction of a teenager with obsessive-compulsive disorder.The assured coming-of-age film “Turtles All the Way Down,” based on John Green’s blockbuster young-adult novel of the same name, takes its title from an apocryphal story: An older woman at a science lecture posits that the Earth rests on the shell of a tortoise, which in turn sits on the back of a larger tortoise, and so on, to infinity.A never-ending stack of reptiles is an evocative image and an expressive paradox. It’s especially fitting for “Turtles,” a movie based on a book propped up by an ever-expanding young-adult canon that traffics in the romance of pain and the pain of romance. (Which came first in that sequence of romance and pain? It’s turtles all the way down.)Directed by Hannah Marks (“Don’t Make Me Go”), the movie centers on Aza (Isabela Merced), a teenager with obsessive-compulsive disorder whose contamination anxieties are impeding her ability to build intimacy with others. These struggles grow urgent once Aza reconnects with Davis (Felix Mallard), a childhood friend who wants to be more than that. She likes him back, but panics at the thought of kissing him; brushing lips would mean swapping bacteria.Aza squirms through this dilemma in sessions with her therapist (Poorna Jagannathan) and on hangouts with her gregarious best friend, Daisy (Cree, a scene stealer). But other than Aza’s daily dose of anxiety, which often prompts her to prick at her finger until it bleeds, much of the movie wants for conflict. When the story begins, Davis’s ultrarich father has gone missing, but even that great mystery is less a source of forward momentum than an excuse for our teenage lovebirds to frolic without supervision.The movie’s ambling, novelistic rhythms might have passed muster had the movie filled its empty spaces with strongly delineated characters. As is, only Aza emerges fully formed; the handsome Davis is more statuette than human, and Daisy mostly suffers a bad case of Sidekick syndrome: pluck without complexity. A hasty third act tries to frame the movie as a friendship love story, redirecting attention from the trials of smooching to the value of mutual support. But the efforts feel like too little, too late.What “Turtles” does offer in surplus is texture, thanks to Marks’s springy, stylish direction. Any time Aza confronts a thought spiral about germs, Marks pairs voice-over of Aza’s frantic inner monologue with images of neon-colored microbes writhing in a petri dish. These moments are intrusive and unsettling, and together form one of the more dynamically authentic on-screen depictions of O.C.D. that I’ve seen.Like many adolescent stories of this subgenre, the movie’s central question hangs on identity and its enigmas. Among Aza’s deepest worries — and this brings us back to the turtles — is that her personhood is like a Russian doll: a series of empty casings with nothing at the core. What makes Aza Aza? Is O.C.D. an essential part of who she is, or is it holding her back from her true self? “Turtles,” to its credit, never locates a specious source of Aza’s troubles, nor does it try to unveil a solution to her suffering.Turtles All the Way DownRated PG-13 for debilitating anxiety and other adolescent woes. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. Watch on Max. More

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      ‘The Idea of You’ Review: Surviving Celebrity

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      Anne Hathaway headlines a movie that’s got a lot to say about the perils of fame.Women of a certain age (that is, my age) feel like they grew up alongside Anne Hathaway, because, well, we did. We were awkward teens together when she made “The Princess Diaries” in 2001. We felt ourselves to be put-upon entry-level hirelings right when “The Devil Wears Prada” came out in 2006. We understood her broken-down narcissistic addict in “Rachel Getting Married,” because who couldn’t? And we watched the Hathaway backlash, pegged to public perception that she was trying too hard, and worried that people saw us the same way.Now we’re 40-ish. We know for sure that Gen Z considers millennials to be cringe, and, thankfully, we no longer feel the need to care. The greatest gift of reaching middle age is having settled into yourself, and that is apparently what Hathaway, age 41, has done. She has been through the celebrity wringer (and more) and come out the other side looking radiant, with a long list of credits in movies that swing from standard commercial fare to auteurist masterpieces.This is perhaps why it’s so satisfying to see her name come first — alone, before the title credit — in “The Idea of You,” which is on its surface a relatively fluffy little film. Based on the sleeper hit novel by Robinne Lee, “The Idea of You” is plainly fantasy, in the fan fiction mold, that poses the question: What if Harry Styles, the British megastar and former frontman of One Direction, fell madly in love with a hot 40-year-old mom? In this universe, the Styles character is Hayes Campbell (Nicholas Galitzine), the British frontman of a five-member boy band called August Moon.Hathaway plays Solène Marchand, an art gallery owner whose arrogantly useless ex-husband, Daniel (Reid Scott), buys v.i.p. meet-and-greet tickets for their 16-year-old daughter, Izzy (Ella Rubin), and her two best friends, all of whom were huge August Moon fans … in the seventh grade. The event is at Coachella, and Daniel is set to take the teenagers but backs out at the last second, citing a work emergency. Solène reluctantly agrees to take them, and while at the festival, mistakes Hayes’s trailer for the bathroom. They meet, it’s cute, and you can guess what happens next.Or can you? It was clear about 10 minutes into the movie that what was required for enjoyment was to surrender to the daydreaming, and so, with very little internal protest, I did. How could I resist? Solène is smart, competent, kind and secure; she has great hair and a great wardrobe; and most important, she seems like a real person, even if the situation in which she finds herself greatly stretches the bonds of credibility. More than once, I was struck by how authentically 40 Solène seemed to me — a woman capable of making her own decisions, even ones she thinks might be ill-advised — and how weirdly rare it is to see that kind of character in a movie. She has a kid, and friends, and a career. She reads books and looks at art, and she is flattered by this 24-year-old superstar’s attention but takes a long time to come around to the idea that it may not be a joke.Solène also feels real shame and real resolve in the course of the winding fairy tale story, which predictably has to go south. But most of all, she’s in a movie that doesn’t try to shame her, or patronize her, or make her appear ridiculous for having desires and fantasies of her own. She’s just who she is, and it’s simple to understand her appeal to someone whose life has never been his own.Directed by Michael Showalter, who wrote the adapted screenplay with Jennifer Westfeldt, “The Idea of You” succeeds mostly because of Hathaway’s performance, though she and Galitzine spark and banter pleasurably (and he can dance and sing, too). It tweaks the novel in a number of ways — Hayes is older than the book’s character, for one thing — and also seems to implicitly know it’s a movie, and that movies have a strange relationship with age-gap romances.In fact, that’s one of its strengths. Several times, characters remark on the double standard attached to people’s judgment of Solène and Hayes’s relationship, hypothesizing that in a gender-swapped situation, people would be high-fiving the older man who landed the hot younger star. Sixteen years looks like a lot on paper, but in the movies, at least, it is barely a blip.That musing is interesting enough, if a familiar one. More fascinating in “The Idea of You” is its treatment of the cage of celebrity. Hayes seems mature compared with his bandmates and the girls who follow them around, but he’s also clearly stuck in some kind of arrested development. And I do mean stuck: He is self-aware enough to tell Solène, plaintively, that he auditioned for the band when he was 14 and not much has changed beyond his level of fame. He wants a life beyond the spotlight, badly.And that’s just what he can’t get. Neither can Solène, nor, eventually, anyone around her. The idea of living a quiet life might obviously be out of reach, but the added elements of tabloid news and rabid fans unafraid to treat Hayes as if they know him make things far worse. The film starts to feel a little like the tale of a monster, but the monster is parasociality, encouraged by the illusion of intimacy that the modern superstar machine relies on to keep selling tickets and merch and albums and whatever else keeps the star in the spotlight.It’s probably coincidental that “The Idea of You” comes on the heels of Taylor Swift’s latest album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” on which she strongly implies that her carefully cultivated fandom has made her love life a nightmare. But spiritually, at least, they’re of a piece — even if the origins of the film’s plot seem as much borne of parasociality as a critique of it. And that makes Hathaway’s performance extra poignant. She’s been dragged into that buzz saw before. And somehow, she’s figured out how to make a life on the other side of it.The Idea of YouRated R for getting hot and heavy, plus some language. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. Watch on Prime Video. More

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      The Best Movies and TV Shows Streaming in May

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      “The Idea of You,” “Scrublands,” “The Big Cigar” and “Hacks” are streaming.Every month, streaming services add movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for some of May’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.)New to Amazon Prime Video‘The Idea of You’Starts streaming: May 2Anne Hathaway plays a middle-age woman on a wild, globe-hopping adventure with a new lover in this romantic dramedy, based on Robinne Lee’s best-selling novel. Hathaway stars as Solène, who accompanies her teenage daughter to Coachella, where she meets and discovers an instant rapport with Hayes Campbell (Nicholas Galitzine), a 24-year-old lead singer of a mega-popular boy band. The movie’s director, Michael Showalter — who also co-wrote the screenplay with Jennifer Westfeldt — has shown a facility with blending low-key humor and realistic relationship angst in his films “The Big Sick” and “Spoiler Alert.” So while “The Idea of You” features fabulous-looking people and catchy songs, it’s mostly about how the two leads’ genuine yearning for each other helps them withstand some uncomfortable public scrutiny.Also arriving:May 9“The GOAT” Season 1“Maxton Hall: The World Between Us”May 16“Outer Range” Season 2May 23“The Blue Angels”“The 1% Club”May 24“Dom”May 31“The Outlaws” Season 3Jay Ryan in “Scrublands.”Sundance NowNew to AMC+‘Scrublands’ Season 1Starts streaming: May 2In the opening sequence of this Sundance Now mystery series, a priest (Jay Ryan) in a run-down Australian Outback town pulls out a rifle after Sunday services and kills five of his congregants. One year later, a burned-out investigative journalist (Luke Arnold) is assigned to write a short article about how the community is recovering from the trauma. But thanks to a helpful local (Bella Heathcote), the reporter quickly realizes that the official story about what happened that Sunday may be wrong. Based on a Chris Hammer novel and directed by Greg McLean (best-known for the Aussie horror classic “Wolf Creek”), the moody and twisty “Scrublands” is about a town with dark secrets and a man who risks his life and career to expose them.Also arriving:May 3“Skeletons in the Closet”May 12“Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire” Season 2May 13“Harry Wild” Season 3May 15“In the Kitchen With Harry Hamlin” Season 1May 17“Nightwatch: Demons Are Forever”May 27“The Truth”May 31“Stopmotion”André Holland in “The Big Cigar.”Apple TV+New to Apple TV+‘Dark Matter’Starts streaming: May 8Based on a novel by Blake Crouch (who also serves as the series’ showrunner), this trippy science fiction thriller stars Joel Edgerton as Jason, a physics professor who has a happy life with his wife (Jennifer Connelly) and their teenage son (Oakes Fegley). When Jason is attacked one night by a masked stranger, he finds himself transported to an alternate reality where he has no wife and no son — but where he does have the kind of prestigious reputation that his brilliant scientist brother (Jimmi Simpson) has always enjoyed. Once he shakes off the initial disorientation, Jason faces a choice: to accept that this new version of himself is who he was always meant to be, or to use his knowledge of quantum theory and inter-dimensional travel to embark on a quest through infinite worlds, to find his way back to his family.‘The Big Cigar’Starts streaming: May 17The magnificent actor André Holland plays the Black Panther Party founder Huey P. Newton in “The Big Cigar,” which tells the strange but mostly true tale of his friendship with the politically progressive Hollywood producer Bert Schneider (Alessandro Nivola). When Newton was wanted for murder, Schneider reportedly helped him escape to Cuba, using a fake movie production as a cover. The mini-series recreates the headiness of the early 1970s, when various artistic, social and cultural movements were pushing hard against the establishment. This historical drama is based on a magazine article by the reporter Joshuah Bearman, whose work previously inspired the Oscar-winning movie “Argo,” a similar story about the worlds of showbiz and politics colliding.Also arriving:May 1“Acapulco” Season 3May 8“Hollywood Con Queen”May 22“Trying” Season 4Jim Henson, in “Jim Henson Idea Man,” a documentary.Disney+New to Disney+‘Jim Henson Idea Man’Starts streaming: May 31Jim Henson will always be remembered for creating the Muppets, which have been beloved since they debuted on television in 1955. But Henson was also a filmmaker, a visual artist, and a businessman shrewd enough to use the commercial appeal of his creations to bankroll his more ambitious projects, most of which were made to celebrate to the warmer side of the human spirit. For the documentary “Jim Henson Idea Man,” the director Ron Howard and his team were allowed extensive access to the Henson archives. The film combines archival clips of the Muppets with rare home-movie footage and diary entries — along with behind-the-scenes photos and sketches and new interviews with some of Henson’s collaborators — to tell the story of a visionary who built an empire out of feelings and felt.Also arriving:May 4“Star Wars: Tales of the Empire”May 5“Monsters at Work” Season 2May 8“Let It Be”May 10“Doctor Who” Season 14May 22“Chip ’n’ Dale: Park Life” Season 2May 24“The Beach Boys”Tomoaki Hamatsu, or Nasubi, in “The Contestant.”DisneyNew to Hulu‘The Contestant’Starts streaming: May 2In 1998, an aspiring comedian named Tomoaki Hamatsu — nicknamed Nasubi, the Japanese word for eggplant, because of his long face — won the opportunity to compete on an extreme kind of game show. Locked in a spartan apartment and stripped naked, Nasubi was challenged to survive off whatever he could win from mail-in contests advertised in magazines. Unbeknown to him, his ordeal was broadcast to a rapt nation. Clair Titley’s documentary “The Contestant” looks back at Nasubi’s year of deprivation and isolation, which was framed for the TV audience as a hilarious and heartwarming adventure. The truth, of course, was far more complicated, which Titley covers in a film that examines how fans of reality TV can sometimes forget they’re watching — and judging — real people.Also arriving:May 1“Elvis”“Shardlake” Season 1May 2“Welcome to Wrexham” Season 3May 3“Prom Dates”May 7“Billy & Molly: An Otter Love Story”May 8“In Limbo” Season 1May 9“Black Twitter: A People’s History”May 10“Biosphere”“Eileen”“Past Lies” Season 1May 12“Where the Crawdads Sing”May 14“The Killing Kind” Season 1May 15“Uncle Samsik” Season 1May 17“Birth/Rebirth”“The Sweet East”May 22“Chief Detective 1958” Season 1May 24“Ferrari”Jean Smart in Season 3 of “Hacks.”Hilary Bronwyn Gayle/MaxNew to Max‘Hacks’ Season 3Starts streaming: May 2The first two seasons of the dramedy “Hacks” followed the codependent relationship between a complacent stand-up comic, Deborah Vance (Jean Smart), and the cynical, self-sabotaging comedy writer Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder), hired to help add edge to Deborah’s Las Vegas act. Season 2 ended with the ladies parting ways after working together on a hit comedy special; but they reunite in Season 3 as Deborah makes plans to right some old wrongs by landing a gig as a late-night talk show host. “Hacks” is about the sometimes wildly varying values of two different generations of comedians. It’s also about two women who have made a lot of messes in their lives — and have come to rely on each other to help with the cleanup.Also arriving:May 2“Turtles All the Way Down”May 3“Stop Making Sense”May 9“Pretty Little Liars: Summer School”May 10“The Iron Claw”May 11“Nikki Glaser: Someday You’ll Die”May 20“Stax: Soulsville U.S.A.”May 23“Thirst with Shay Mitchell”May 29“MoviePass, Moviecrash”From left: Katja Herbers, Aasif Mandvi and Mike Colter in “Evil.”Elizabeth Fisher/Paramount+New to Paramount+‘Evil’ Season 4Starts streaming: May 23One of TV’s most unusual and entertaining dramas comes to an end with its latest season, which finds its demon-hunting heroes dealing with satanic cults and devil babies. Katja Herbers returns as Dr. Kristen Bouchard, a forensic psychologist who works alongside the Catholic priest David Acosta (Mike Colter) and the tech whiz Ben Shakir (Aasif Mandvi) to investigate paranormal phenomena. The job frequently puts them at odds with the mysterious sociopath and impish mischief-maker Dr. Leland Townsend (Michael Emerson). Created by Michelle and Robert King (the team behind “The Good Fight” and “Elsbeth”), “Evil” is a witty and often genuinely creepy horror procedural, which considers whether the modern world’s wickedness is supernatural in nature or just a case of humans being humans.Also arriving:May 1“Behind the Music” Season 2May 7“Kiss the Future”May 10“The Chi” Season 6, Part 2May 14“Pillowcase Murders”May 17“Mourning in Lod”“RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars” Season 9“RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars: Untucked” Season 9May 21“LOLLA: The Story of Lollapalooza”May 30“Pyramid Game”Harvey Keitel in “The Tattooist of Auschwitz.”Martin Mlaka/Sky UKNew to Peacock‘The Tattooist of Auschwitz’Starts streaming: May 2In this historical drama based on a true story, an older Jew named Lali Sokolov (Harvey Keitel) meets regularly with the aspiring author Heather Morris (Melanie Lynskey) to tell her a story he had previously kept to himself, for almost his entire life: all about how he survived Auschwitz by making himself useful to his jailers. Based on the book that the real-life Morris produced from interviews with Sokolov — a blend of unflinching Holocaust testimony and page-turning fiction — “The Tattooist of Auschwitz” portrays the moral compromises required to endure an atrocity. But it’s also about an unlikely love affair, which develops between Lali (played by Jonah Hauer-King in flashbacks) and Gita (Anna Prochniak), a woman he befriends while he’s tattooing her arm.‘We Are Lady Parts’Starts streaming: May 30One of Peacock’s best foreign TV acquisitions, this British sitcom is the brainchild of the writer-director Nida Manzoor, whose work draws on her love of pop culture and her experiences growing up in a Pakistani Muslim family. Last year she released her debut feature film “Polite Society,” a martial arts comedy; and now Manzoor returns with a second season of the wonderful “We Are Lady Parts,” which stars Anjana Vasan as Amina, a dorky college student and observant Muslim who joins a radical all-female, all-Muslim punk band. In Season 1, this eclectic group of ladies became a cult success. In Season 2, they have an opportunity to record an album and grow their audience but find themselves unsure if that’s what they really want.Also arriving:May 3“The American Society of Magical Negroes”May 7“Eurovision Song Contest 2024”May 9“Love Undercover” Season 1 More