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      ‘The Woman in the Wall’ Review: Searching for a Daughter Taken by Nuns

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      Ruth Wilson plays an Irish woman with a case against the Catholic church in an ecclesiastical thriller that’s also a murder mystery.On a road in the beautifully desolate Irish countryside, a passing steer stops to nose at the object in its path. It’s a sleeping woman whose white nightshirt is stained with blood. Jarred awake by the animal, she leaps to her feet in alarm and strides barefoot toward her village. A title tells us that it is 2015.Lorna Brady, the heroine of the six-episode BBC miniseries “The Woman in the Wall” (which premiered Friday on Paramount+ and will air Sunday on Showtime), is seen by much of the village of Kilkinure as crazy. She’s foul-mouthed and angry, scornful and paranoid, and when she sleepwalks she can get violent — she once took an ax to the Virgin Mary. She’s not one to seek professional help, but we quickly see where some or all of her anger is coming from: her infant daughter was taken away from her 30 years before in a Catholic “mother and baby home,” and she hasn’t seen her since.Lorna has developed her own variety of obsessive compulsion — she cares about little but her daughter, and her thoughts endlessly revisit what the nuns did to them. As played by the wickedly intelligent actress Ruth Wilson, though, Lorna is anything but one-note. Wilson, of “Luther” and “The Affair,” has a natural intensity that fits the character like a glove. But she also makes it clear that an unburdened Lorna would be practical and acerbically funny (if still a pain). It’s there in the way Lorna windmills her arms to get her blood moving before walking back to town, and in the comic charge she radiates when she gets in the face of every disdainful villager she passes.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Hickory Dickory Dock. It’s Andrew Dice Clay on TikTok.

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      In his feed on the app, the stand-up offers to help bewildered passers-by or pose for a photo. It’s an approach to fame and persona that puts his comedy in a new light.The first shot is a crooked view of a sparse Christmas tree on a narrow median in Manhattan traffic. The second is a confused man walking his dog. Then the camera swivels to show us none other than Andrew Dice Clay, tentatively muttering in a “Guys and Dolls” accent, “You wanted a picture in front of the tree with me?”The man with the dog doesn’t recognize him, his glance shifting from discomfort to pity. “I’ll take a picture of you,” he says condescendingly. Then we return to Clay stammering: “I thought you wanted one? No?”This 14-second-long video is a disarming slice of life, a minor comic humiliation staged with impromptu precision. It’s part of an oddly delightful project undertaken by Clay, the notorious comedian, now in his 60s. He still performs blustery leather-jacketed stand-up (he plays Carnegie Hall on Feb. 15), but he’s portrayed in a very different light in his social media posts: a self-deprecating series of vignettes that clash with his image while also bringing him back to his forgotten roots.

      @andrewdiceclay What Just Happened. #andrewdiceclay #comedian #comedy #newyork #christmas #tree ♬ original sound – Andrew Dice Clay We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Japanese Talk Show Host Blazed Trails for Her Gender, and Now, for Her Longevity

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      Tetsuko Kuroyanagi has been one of Japan’s best-known entertainers for seven decades. At 90, she’s still going strong.Pushing a walker through a television studio in central Tokyo earlier this week, Tetsuko Kuroyanagi slowly climbed three steps onto a sound stage with the help of an assistant who settled her into a creamy beige Empire armchair.A stylist removed the custom-made sturdy boots on her feet and slipped on a pair of high-heeled mules. A makeup artist brushed her cheeks and touched up her blazing red lipstick. A hairdresser tamed a few stray wisps from her trademark onion-shaped hairstyle as another assistant ran a lint roller over her embroidered black jacket. With that, Ms. Kuroyanagi, 90, was ready to record the 12,193rd episode of her show.As one of Japan’s best-known entertainers for seven decades, Ms. Kuroyanagi has interviewed guests on her talk show, “Tetsuko’s Room,” since 1976, earning a Guinness World Record last fall for most episodes hosted by the same presenter. Generations of Japanese celebrities across film, television, music, theater and sports have visited Ms. Kuroyanagi’s couch, along with American stars like Meryl Streep and Lady Gaga; Prince Philip of England; and Mikhail Gorbachev, the former leader of the Soviet Union. Ms. Kuroyanagi said Gorbachev remains one of her all-time favorite guests.Ms. Kuroyanagi, who jokes that she wants to keep going until she turns 100, is known for her rapid-fire chatter and knack for drawing out guests on topics like dating, divorce and, now, increasingly, death. Even as she works to woo a younger generation — the Korean-Canadian actor and singer Ahn Hyo-seop, 28, appeared on the show this month — many of her guests these days speak about the ailments of aging and the demise of their industry peers.Ms. Kuroyanagi with a guest, Kankuro Nakamura VI, a sixth-generation Kabuki actor, as seen on a screen.Noriko Hayashi for The New York TimesHaving survived World War II, she broke out as an early actor on Japanese television and then carved out a niche as a feel-good interviewer with a distinctive style that is still instantly recognized almost everywhere in Japan. By fashioning herself into a character, rather than simply being the person who interviewed the characters, she helped establish a genre of Japanese performers known as “tarento” — a Japanized version of the English word “talent” — who are ubiquitous on television today.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Late Night Chides Donald Trump for a Lack of Self-Control

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      “He can’t even control an umbrella,” Seth Meyers said of the former president on Thursday.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Get Ahold of YourselfA judge threatened to remove Donald Trump from court on Wednesday after he could be heard muttering disparaging comments during E. Jean Carroll’s second defamation suit against the former president.“A judge actually had to tell a former president of the United States, ‘You can’t control yourself,’” Seth Meyers said on Thursday. “He can’t even control an umbrella.”“Things are so crazy right now. In a year, Trump is either going to be president again, or we’re going to see him in Times Square offering to take pictures with tourists next to Elmo and Spider-Man.” — SETH MEYERS“Now, you’re probably saying, didn’t that trial already happen? Yeah, it did. We also already did Trump versus Biden. Get used to everything happening twice. Get used to everything happening twice.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Now, Trump doesn’t believe he should be held accountable for anything. At 2 a.m., he scream-posted ‘A president of the United States must have full immunity, without which it would be impossible for him/her to properly function.’ No, Trump doesn’t believe in any accountability. He believes the presidency should be like the movie ‘The Purge,’ which is why he’s always wearing that weird leather pig mask.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“It is nice to hear him being inclusive. [imitating Trump] ‘I believe the president, whether it be him or her, Hispanic or Her-spanic, should have a private kill squad to take out those who dare speak against him.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“This is not a man who has any moral limitations, so I can’t imagine what he means by saying he should be allowed to cross the line. What’s he going to do, imprison his political opponents? Chop off California and sell it to Russia? Outlaw umbrellas?” — SETH MEYERS“This is the kind of thing that should end with Trump in prison or, best case, living alone in a motel by the racetrack. But every time he gets worse, his poll numbers get better, which explains his new 2024 slogan: ‘Welcome to Hell.’” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (Kissing Cousins Edition)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      What to Watch This Weekend: ‘Boy Swallows Universe’

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      Our TV critic recommends a dreamy, violent Netflix drama from Australia, based on a book by Trent Dalton.From left, Lee Tiger Halley, Bryan Brown and Felix Cameron in “Boy Swallows Universe.”Netflix“Boy Swallows Universe,” a seven-part drama based on the book by Trent Dalton, puts a youthful spin on the accidental-criminal subgenre, blending dreaminess and brutality to terrific if incomplete effect. The whole show is available now, on Netflix.Our hero is Eli (Felix Cameron), who is both a very savvy and a very young 13 when the show begins. It’s the 1980s in Brisbane, Australia, and Eli lives with his older brother, Gus (Lee Tiger Halley, fantastic), who is selectively mute and can maybe predict the future; his mom, Frankie (Phoebe Tonkin), a recovering drug addict with good intentions but terrible taste in men; and his stepfather, Lyle (Travis Kimmel), a loving but scuzzy heroin dealer. Eli’s most important father figure and mentor is Slim (Bryan Brown), a career criminal famous for escaping from prison.“Boy” is much more a story of violence and acceptance than a sweetheart coming-of-age show. Its most intriguing trick is that it does not so much evoke being 13 as it evokes remembering being 13, the mythologizing of one’s young life. Was there really so much free-floating wisdom available, or does it only seem that way now that you know what stuck?After one catastrophic night lands Frankie in prison, Slim tries to comfort Eli. She’ll be home in four Christmases, he says. “I’ll be 17,” Eli chokes out, barely able to imagine being so grown up. When the show leaps forward those four years, we get a crushing sense of what’s been lost, for everyone.Beachy vibes overlay a real depravity here, and Eli’s and Gus’s escapes into reverie and magical realism are coping mechanisms for lives filled with people who care about them but no one to care for them. Neglect — both the benign and the pernicious strains — and squalor shape a huge part of their lives, though as one classmate points out, they are loved, just imperfectly by imperfect people.So much of this series is beautiful and surprising, blurring poppy capers with jarring blood baths, often in the same episode. Unfortunately, the finale is a bizarre letdown, leaving all the nuance and ache behind in favor of a denouement out of a Batman cartoon. But if you can tolerate a crash landing, and you like a fun soundtrack, a seedy underbelly and a poetic approach, watch this. More

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      How ‘Last One Laughing’ Took Over (Most of) the World

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      “Last One Laughing,” an Amazon Prime show in which contestants try not to crack up, has spawned spinoffs in more than a dozen countries — though not the United States.In early 2016, James Farrell, then the head of content at Amazon Studios for Japan, was looking for original programming that could help the streamer gain a foothold in the region.After months of searching, Farrell recalled recently, he was open to any concept, no matter how strange or unconventional. Then, over a late night dinner, one of the country’s most prominent comedians, Hitoshi Matsumoto, suggested an idea to Farrell that he said the Japanese networks had never let him do: Ten comedians gather in a room and try to make each other laugh. The last one to keep a straight face wins.It might not sound like much. But Farrell, who is now a vice president at Amazon Studios, based in Los Angeles, thought “‘That’s it. That’s the one,’” he said. “I was so certain that this was the monster I was looking for.”The resulting program, a four-episode, roughly three-hour comedy game show called “Hitoshi Matsumoto Presents: Documental,” quickly became one of the most popular shows on Prime Video in Japan, producing a rabid fan base and 13 seasons over the past eight years.Hitoshi Matsumoto pitched “Documental” to James Farrell, then the head of content at Amazon Studios for Japan, in 2016. The show spawned 13 seasons and many spinoffs around the globe.Sports Nippon/Getty ImagesIt also launched a sprawling international franchise, with local versions in more than a dozen territories around the world. Rebranded abroad as “LOL: Last One Laughing,” the format remains almost exactly as Matsumoto first pitched it, with each version drawing contestants from the country’s top comedians and comedy actors. It now has iterations in Italy, Mexico, Spain, France, Canada (both in French and in English), Denmark, Colombia and more — each of which, almost without exception, has found an enthusiastic audience in its country of origin.“On paper, the idea of people not laughing for however many hours doesn’t sound like it’s going to be entertaining,” said the comedian Graham Norton, the host of an Irish version of “LOL” that premieres Friday. “And yet when you watch it, you realize that it is fun — it is oddly entertaining.”The comedy antics — some prepared, some improvised — are often amusing. But it’s the contestants’ strained efforts to suppress their laughter that is really compelling. They moan and scream; their faces cramp and contort wildly. There’s an air of frenzied desperation. “I think of it almost like a psychological experiment, a human experiment,” said the actress Anke Engelke, who has starred on “LOL Germany.” “It’s an intense experience.”Juan Carlos Nava and Juan Carlos Casasola in “Last One Laughing Mexico.”Amazon StudiosThe cast of “Last One Laughing Canada.”Alex Urosevic/Prime VideoIn its early days, the franchise’s success didn’t seem guaranteed. Even after the runaway success of “Documental,” Farrell and his colleagues had a hard time persuading producers in other territories to take a chance on the format. Part of the problem was the Japanese version’s style of humor, which skewed ribald and scatological: Some of the contestants stripped nude to make their competitors crack up, and the gags could sometimes get outrageously suggestive. “I’d show it to other countries,” Farrell said, “and they’d be like, ‘Uh, we don’t have to get naked, right?’”Michael Bully Herbig, a German comedian who hosts “LOL Germany,” was put off immediately. “I thought it was too weird,” he said. The show’s German production company, Constantin Entertainment, convinced Herbig that theirs would be a more family-friendly version. He ultimately agreed, in large part, because he assumed “LOL Germany” would be a niche show: “I said, you know what? Let’s try it. Nobody will ever see it anyway,” he said.Instead, it became the most-streamed series on Amazon Prime Video in Germany, spanning four seasons and a Christmas special, and was recently nominated for an International Emmy Award. “Nobody could have ever imagined how successful this would be,” Herbig said. “It’s the best job I ever had.”Michael Bully Herbig, center back, with the cast of the third season of Germany’s “Last One Laughing.” The show is on its fourth season, despite the host Herbig’s fear it would be “too weird.”Frank Zauritz/Prime Video“LOL Germany” is made by Germans for Germans, and despite its Emmy nomination it has not found an audience elsewhere: pretty much the only people watching “LOL Germany” outside of the country, according to Farrell, are Germans living abroad. That’s been the true of each version of the show. “LOL France” is a hit among French viewers; “LOL Mexico” is adored in Mexico and Mexico alone. It is specific, highly localized content, entirely by design.Pretty much the only place “Last One Laughing” is not a hit is the United States. Prime Video’s American programming teams, Farrell said, are responsible for big-budget spectacles such as “Reacher,” “The Rings of Power” and “The Boys” — broad, widely accessible action and fantasy blockbusters which draw audiences across the world.“But for the price of one of those big U.S. shows, I can make 20 versions of ‘LOL,’ and in aggregate those 20 ‘LOL’s will do as well as any of the big tent-poles,” Farrell said. According to Amazon, the third season of “LOL France” had the biggest day-one launch ever on Prime Video, and “LOL Italy” is its most watched Italian show.From left: Estevam Nabote, Thiago Ventura and Nany People in “LOL: Se Rir, Já Era!” the show’s Brazilian version.Reproducao/Prime VideoBasketmouth, the host of the Nigerian spinoff of “LOL.”Amazon StudiosThat allows “LOL” the freedom to lean in to cultural specificity. The Japanese version had its over-the-top raunchiness; the Germans are milder and more PG. Though the format never changes, each version, owing to the national character of the humor, feels unique.“One of the things I enjoy about the show is that they didn’t try to make it bland, or international,” like so much of contemporary TV, Norton said. “The Irish version “is so Irish,” he said. “Lots of the references in the show are deep-dive Irish references, things that a U.K. audience wouldn’t even understand.” (A possible British version has been rumored, though not confirmed.)Not every iteration of “LOL” has been a resounding success: The Australian, Hindi and Tamil versions only had one season apiece. But because “LOL” is so inexpensive and quick to produce (it takes about a day and a half to shoot a series), and because it features a group of famous comedians, “it’s always going to do at least OK,” Farrell said.“It isn’t something that can really bomb,” he added. “The floor is really high.” More

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      Ruth Wilson on the True Horrors of ‘The Woman in the Wall’

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      Her fictional character lives in an unstable reality and may have killed someone. But the history of Ireland’s notorious “Magdalene laundries” is all too real.Ruth Wilson has ducked into a cabin in the French Alps, taking a break from an activity she enjoys when she isn’t acting. “I’ve been skiing this week,” she said last week in a video interview. “It’s been a passion for years. It’s very dangerous. I can go head-down into something.”She said that last part with a smile. Wilson, an English actress known for playing Idris Elba’s psychopathic nemesis in “Luther,” likes going to extremes and working without a net. Last year, at the Young Vic theater in London, she tested her endurance in “The Second Woman,” a 24-hour production in which her character goes through the same breakup scene 100 times, with 100 different scene partners. (Some, like Elba and Toby Jones, were trained actors; most were not.) For her first professional Shakespeare assignment, a 2019 Broadway production of “King Lear,” she played both Cordelia and the king’s Fool (opposite Glenda Jackson’s Lear).Wilson’s latest role, in the limited series “The Woman in the Wall,” is no less daunting. (It premieres on Friday on Paramount+ With Showtime, having debuted in Britain in August.) She plays Lorna, a woman haunted by her years at one of Ireland’s “Magdalene laundries,” at least a dozen of which operated across the country from the 19th century until the last one closed in 1996. Run by Catholic nuns, the mostly for-profit laundries used unmarried, pregnant and otherwise ostracized women for hard, unpaid labor, often after mothers were forcibly separated from their children.Lorna, who is packed off to a fictional laundry at age 15, wants desperately to find her daughter. Like many babies born to unwed Irish mothers like Lorna, she was sold into adoption against her mother’s will. Hundreds of others are buried in unmarked graves.“We’re trying to land on what it must feel like for some of these women from the laundries, for this constant trauma to be coming back,” Wilson (with Frances Tomelty) said.Chris Barr/BBC with Paramount+ and ShowtimeAs the series begins, Lorna, a chronic sleepwalker and outcast, is startled to find a dead body in her home. This happens around the same time a popular priest is found murdered. The six-episode series leans into Lorna’s tortured perception and subjective experience; she is antisocial and unstable but also the target of gaslighting by those in her seaside Irish town who insist that nothing all that bad happened to her when she was young.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Jimmy Fallon Ribs Vivek Ramaswamy for Embracing Trump

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      “Yep, Ramaswamy took the stage and praised Trump for eight minutes,” Fallon said. “Then he was, like, ‘Wait, Donald, this is your speech. Sorry!’”Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.‘Stop the Hug!’Vivek Ramaswamy dropped out of the 2024 presidential race on Monday after finishing fourth at the Iowa caucuses. The 38-year-old entrepreneur endorsed former President Donald Trump and supported him at a rally in New Hampshire on Tuesday.“Everyone was on the edge of their seat just to hear how Trump would pronounce Vivek Ramaswamy,” Jimmy Fallon said.“Yep, Ramaswamy took the stage and praised Trump for eight minutes. Then he was, like, ‘Wait, Donald, this is your speech. Sorry!’” — JIMMY FALLON“Vivek Ramaswamy announced this week that he was suspending his presidential campaign. He plans to return to his true passion, tearing down the teen rec center to build a shopping mall.” — SETH MEYERSAfter Ramaswamy ended his speech, he welcomed Trump to the stage with an awkward and lengthy embrace.“I didn’t know if they were hugging or burping each other.” — JIMMY FALLON“Stop the hug! Stop the hug!” — STEPHEN COLBERT“To be fair, that’s pretty much every embrace between a guy in his 30s and a guy in his 70s. It’s, like, ‘Hey, I don’t know what you’re doing. Are we hugging?’” — JIMMY FALLONThe Punchiest Punchlines (I-o-wanna Edition)“The big news today is the big news from Monday. Donald Trump won the Iowa caucus with 51 percent of the vote. Iowa: apparently, short for ‘I-o-wanna live in a democracy anymore.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“So the DeSantis train is steaming on to New Hampshire, where he is currently polling at 5 percent. But don’t give up, Ron, because when asked which candidate they preferred, 2 percent refused to answer. If they’re ashamed to say it out loud, that’s a DeSantis voter.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“ABC and CNN decided to cancel their New Hampshire debate coverage because Trump and Nikki Haley said they would not attend. So, the good news is if you still want to hear two Republicans who will never be president argue about politics, you can always go visit your parents.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Bits Worth WatchingThe “Ted Lasso” star Juno Temple talked about finding her Minnesota accent for the new season of “Fargo.”What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightThe singer-songwriter Sierra Ferrell will perform on Thursday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”Also, Check This OutFatima Robinson, foreground, on the set of “The Color Purple,” with Fantasia Barrino-Taylor, in white, and Oprah Winfrey.Eli Adé/Warner Bros.“The Color Purple” choreographer Fatima Robinson realized a lifelong dream with her work on the new musical film adaptation of Alice Walker’s 1982 novel. More