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    ‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North’ Is a Brutal but Poetic War Drama

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    Starring Jacob Elordi, this often agonizing series takes on life’s biggest questions, about the mind and the heart, human suffering and transcendence.Jacob Elordi stars in the brutalizing five-part Australian mini-series “The Narrow Road to the Deep North,” available on Amazon Prime Video. The show is based on the novel by Richard Flanagan and combines a sweetly doomed romance, a layered domestic drama and a harrowing World War II tale.Elordi is terrific as Dorrigo, a young aspiring doctor heading off to war. Before he is deployed, he has a doting girlfriend, Ella (Olivia DeJonge), but he falls hard for his uncle’s young wife, Amy (Odessa Young), and it’s their taboo love that he visits in his mind during the darkest experiences of his life. Dorrigo is one of thousands of Commonwealth soldiers taken prisoner in the jungles of Thailand, where Japanese soldiers starve and torture them, work them to death, behead some, beat others for hours on end.We also see Dorrigo in the 1980s, now played by Ciaran Hinds; he’s a successful surgeon and a comfortable philanderer. He is haunted and hollowed-out in some ways, of course, but he has a life, a practice, and now a book of a fellow prisoner’s paintings is coming out, and he has been asked to speak about it.Each episode bounces around in time, and for once, split timelines come as a huge relief. The jungle scenes are agonizing, even by prestige-misery standards, and you, too, long to retreat, with Dorrigo, into sunny memory.Dorrigo is a poetry buff, and poems are woven into the whole show, as are painting and music, these expressions of humanity that surface during circumstances both mundane and depraved. A jolly woman plays tunes in bar; a skeletal soldier sings “The Prisoner’s Song” as he lies among his dysentery-stricken companions. The show depicts a dizzying variety of suffering, but it is also generous with its pity. There’s a visceral quality to most scenes — the clammy humidity, the golden warmth of a sandy beach, the icy sterility of a gray office — as the show teases out the pains and pleasures of the body along with its grander ideas about the mind, the heart, the world, war.“Narrow” is patient, but it isn’t slow. It is also sometimes so illegibly dark that I resorted to turning on the audio descriptions. More

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      With ‘Étoile,’ Amy Sherman-Palladino Gives Ballet Another Whirl

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      Her “Bunheads” and other ballet shows were canceled quickly. This new series, created with her husband, centers on fictional companies in New York and Paris.The dancers streamed across the stage of a historic Paris theater, leaping and turning, the women lifted high into the air and whirled aloft, before aligning to bow on the final chords of the music. “Bravo! Bravo!” cried the enthusiastically applauding audience.Then Amy Sherman-Palladino, sporting a white baseball cap, walked onstage with a Steadicam operator, consulted the choreographer Marguerite Derricks, and clapped her hands sharply. “Let’s go!” she called. Moments later, the cameraman was running frantically amid the dancers as Sherman-Palladino peered at a monitor, watching the way their movement was captured from inside the groupings.“That was great, you guys were fabulous,” she called out at the end. She turned to the audience “What do you think?” Much applause. The cameraman took a little bow.It was last May at the Théâtre du Châtelet, where Sherman-Palladino; her husband and creative partner, Daniel Palladino; and their team were filming “Étoile,” a new Amazon Prime Video series debuting on Thursday.The show (the title means “star” in French) tells the story of two major ballet companies — the Ballet National (a thinly veiled Paris Opera Ballet), and the New York-based Metropolitan Ballet Theater (a mash-up of American Ballet Theater and New York City Ballet) — collaborating on an exchange of artists in order to boost sales and drum up publicity.Charlotte Gainsbourg, center, stars as a French ballet company director who “pretends to be a very strong boss but on her own is vulnerable,” she said. “It spoke to me, that double face.”Philippe Antonello/Amazon MGM StudiosWe 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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘#1 Happy Family USA’ Is a Bittersweet Coming-of-Age Sitcom

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      This animated comedy, cocreated by Ramy Youssef, depicts a Muslim family in New Jersey during the fraught period after Sept. 11, 2001.A Muslim family in New Jersey facing bigotry after Sept. 11 doesn’t sound like a particularly fruitful sitcom premise. But Ramy Youssef has managed to make the subject matter grimly hilarious in his new animated series, “#1 Happy Family USA,” premiering Thursday on Amazon Prime Video.Created by Youssef and Pam Brady (“South Park”), the series is half coming-of-age story, with shades of “Big Mouth” and “Everybody Hates Chris,” and half brutal satire about Islamophobia in the early 2000s. It encourages viewers to find humor and humanity in outlandish scenarios stemming from what was a dark period for many American families.The premiere episode is set on Sept. 10, 2001. Youssef voices Rumi, an Egyptian American boy preoccupied mainly with impressing his attractive teacher (Mandy Moore), who has a thing for Michael Jordan. To that end: Rumi wears an oversized bootleg Bulls jersey that reads “Balls.” Poor kid.Of course, the next day, life for Rumi and his family suddenly changes. His father, Hussein (also voiced by Youssef), is a former doctor turned halal cart owner maniacally intent on assimilating. At the same time, however, his Princess Diana-obsessed mother, Sharia (Salma Hindy), is reconnecting with her faith and begins wearing a hijab — much to Hussein’s dismay. Rumi’s ambitious older sister, Mona (Alia Shawkat), is hiding the fact that she is gay, and an F.B.I. agent with an alcohol problem (Timothy Olyphant) moves in next door.The animation, with big-eyed character designs from the illustrator Mona Chalabi, at times literalizes Rumi’s anxiety and at others allows the story to take absurd detours. (Chalabi won the Pulitzer Prize in 2023 for a contribution to The New York Times.) When Rumi tries to code switch to appeal to his classmates’ families, he transforms physically into identities like preppy WASP and Hogwarts student. Hussein launches into musical numbers, one of which becomes the theme song. Also, there’s a talking lamb.“#1 Happy Family USA” manages to place story lines drawn from the pangs of early adolescence within the terrifying context of being a Muslim caught in a suddenly more xenophobic society — while also making fun of the peculiarities of the early 2000s. (In one subplot, Rumi panics after illegally downloading music for a mix CD.) It’s a tricky balance to strike, but Youssef and his team pull it off. More

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      ‘Her Majesty’ Is Glamorous and Salty Fun

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      A badly behaving princess is suddenly forced to take on more responsibility than she is ready for in this cynical Spanish comedy.The Spanish comedy “Her Majesty,” on Amazon Prime Video (in Spanish, with subtitles), is set within the fictional, scandal-plagued royal family of Spain. It centers on Princess Pilar (Anna Castillo), who probably should have outgrown her party-girl ways by now. She can be surly and resentful, and she isn’t as comfortable in the public eye as she’ll need to be. She’s no dummy: She knows she’ll be queen one day. But she has to step into the role much earlier than she expected.The event that precipitates her rise — if not quite an official ascension — turns out not to be her father’s death. King Alfonso (Pablo Derqui) is alive, but he has to flee to Latin America for a bit because of shady, possibly criminal financial dealings — ones the palace can’t cover up this time, despite Pilar’s pleas. Pilar isn’t the queen queen, of course, but she needs to take over the major duties of the crown. Nobody thinks she is ready for a bigger role, but there isn’t anyone else. Her mother died when Pilar was a little girl, and she is an only child. The show, and the monarchy, must go on.Suddenly she has a new attaché (Ernesto Alterio) coaching her on where to go and what to say, whom to be and whom to trust. They spar; she is prickly; he is prim; they bond. Pilar rises to the occasion, pulling the various levers of influence and even partying with the high-ranking judges as her father once did. She has an aha moment, though, when some of the justices pass her cocaine, and as she rolls up the bill, she sees her father’s face staring back at her.“Majesty” has the makings of a pop fairy tale or princess fantasy, but it is a lot saltier, more cynical and more fun than that. It’s closer to “Gossip Girl” or “Scandal,” fizzy and glamorous, with rich people behaving terribly — and illegally, and corruptly — but oh so charismatically.The show is also gorgeous. Palaces: They’re nice! Pilar’s outfits in particular have real flair, and the whole show is drenched in (crown) jewel tones, gold fixtures, glittering rhinestones and thick crystal. Even in its depictions of more modest environs, the sun still streams through the windows with enough glow to practically ache. More

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      The Streaming Rush to Turn Scripture Into Scripts

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      After the success of “The Chosen,” Amazon and Netflix are converting Bible stories into films and TV shows with “Game of Thrones”-style intrigue and romantic comedy elements.A once-beloved king slips into madness as wary confidants surround him, breathless for his next maneuver.A soldier wrestles with his dueling loyalties toward family and friendship.A young man from a humble background defeats a brute, not knowing that the victory sets him on a path to ascend into power.With its interpersonal intrigue and battlefield bloodshed, “House of David” looks like it could be an alternate-universe of “Game of Thrones.” But rather than an adaptation of a high fantasy franchise from the 1990s, its source material goes back millenniums.“House of David,” a series that premiered on Amazon Prime Video on Thursday, tells the story of David, the biblical shepherd who used a sling and stone to defeat the giant Goliath before assuming King Saul’s throne. It is part of the original faith-based programming that streaming services are unveiling to court the viewers who have made “The Chosen,” a prestige drama about the life of Jesus Christ, one of the most successful crowdfunded television or film projects of all time.“The sheer size of the audience is enormous,” said Jon Erwin, who pitched “House of David” to Amazon and co-directed several of the first season’s eight episodes. “It is the largest underserved niche audience in the world.”Viewership figures from streaming shows are rarely made public, but the team behind “The Chosen” estimates that the show has been watched by more than 280 million unique viewers worldwide, a third of whom it says are not religious. The hit show feels more like a workplace comedy-drama, a version of “The West Wing” set in Galilee, than the direct evangelism of the widely translated “The Jesus Film” (1979) or the storybook sermons of the 1990s animated series “VeggieTales.”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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Katy Perry and Gayle King Are Among Blue Origin’s All-Female Space Crew

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      They will be aboard the New Shepard, the centerpiece rocket of Blue Origin’s space tourism business, in a launch this spring.The singer and songwriter Katy Perry and the broadcast journalist and show host Gayle King will be among the all-female crew on the next mission of New Shepard, the space tourism rocket that is operated by Jeff Bezos’ private company, Blue Origin.Blue Origin announced the lineup on Thursday, ahead of a planned spaceflight this spring, though no specific date has been announced for the launch. It will also include Aisha Bowe, a former NASA engineer; Amanda Nguyen, a research scientist; Kerianne Flynn, a film producer; and Lauren Sánchez, who is Mr. Bezos’ fiancée and a helicopter pilot.The company has garnered attention for its flights by including celebrities or highlighting new milestones in spaceflight.The spring launch will be the 11th flight carrying passengers and the 31st mission overall for New Shepard. The suborbital rocket is named after Alan Shepard, the first American to reach space in 1961 and one of the astronauts who walked on the moon.Flights on the fully reusable vehicle last just over 10 minutes and take participants to an altitude higher than 62 miles. Astronauts aboard the International Space Station, by contrast, orbit about 250 miles above the Earth.Mr. Bezos, the founder of Amazon and one of the wealthiest men on the planet, was among the first passengers on New Shepard in 2021, the year of Blue Origin’s first crewed flight.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Amazon Gains Creative Control Over the James Bond Franchise

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      The British family that has for decades held complete control over everything involving the globe-trotting superspy is relinquishing it to Amazon.The British family that has steered the James Bond franchise for more than 60 years, zealously protecting the superspy from the indignities of Hollywood strip mining, has agreed to relinquish control to Amazon.The deal, which was announced Thursday morning, comes after a behind-the-scenes standoff between Barbara Broccoli, who inherited control of Bond from her father, and Amazon, which gained a significant ownership stake in the franchise in 2021 as part of its $8.5 billion purchase of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Ms. Broccoli and her brother, Michael G. Wilson, another Bond producer, had chafed at some of the ways in which Amazon hoped to capitalize on the property, The Wall Street Journal reported in December.In a statement released by Amazon, the siblings and the tech giant said they had agreed to form a new joint venture to house Bond; the parties will remain co-owners. But Amazon MGM Studios “will gain creative control” after the transaction closes later this year. Ms. Broccoli and Mr. Wilson previously had ironclad creative control, deciding when to make a new Bond film, who should play the title role and whether remakes and television spinoffs got made.They also had final say over every line of dialogue, every casting decision, every stunt sequence, every marketing tie-in, and every TV ad, poster and billboard.Daniel Craig in “No Time to Die.” The movie marked the end of a five-film series with him in the lead role. No decisions have been made about a successor.Nicola Dove/Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures, via Associated PressMike Hopkins, head of Prime Video and Amazon MGM Studios, thanked the siblings for their “unyielding dedication” to the franchise and said the company looked forward “to ushering in the next phase of the legendary 007 for audiences around the world.”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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Brisk and Juicy Australian Family Drama

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      A nimble mini-series on Amazon crams a lot of believable texture and chemistry into a tidy package, with just six 15-minute episodes.The actual title of this Australian mini mini-series isn’t printable, but it is available on Amazon Prime Video under the title “F*%#ing Adelaide.” The show is just six 15-minute episodes, but it crams in plenty of story and depth, a travel-size version of the sunny but textured family drama in which adult siblings come to a new understanding of their childhoods — and thus themselves and one another.Eli (Brendan Maclean) is a would-be glam rocker, playing marginal afternoon gigs and scrapping with bartenders. He reluctantly returns home to Adelaide after an insistent phone call from his mother, Maude (Pamela Rabe). His older sister, Emma (Kate Box), has also been summoned, with her family, from her nonprofit work in Thailand. His younger sister, Kitty (Tilda Cobham-Hervey), is somewhat distracted from the family reunion by the anonymous sex she likes to have, however contrived or inconvenient it may be.Maude declares that she is selling the house, which resurrects everyone else’s feelings about their abusive, now-absent father. All the planets here are in different orbits, though. Kitty doesn’t even remember the guy, and she yearns for a connection, despite what everyone else says. Eli and Emma recoil from the mere mention of his name, and Maude’s various storage boxes suggest she is hanging onto more than just stuff. Despite its short run time, “Adelaide” gets in some juicy squabbles, and the chemistry among the adult siblings has a fun edge and a barely contained feral physicality. The house feels too full, the boxes stacked too high, the bathroom always occupied.“Adelaide” takes a surprising turn in its final two episodes, one that cannily changes the weight of the previous four. The show also weaves in Eli’s style of looping music, in which certain lines and syllables from the dialogue are remixed as breathy songs. The resulting omnipresent score is sometimes poignant but also sometimes like being around a draining 9-year-old who is discovering the pleasures of recreational echolalia.I know what you’re thinking: Is there a gender-nonconforming tween magician in this show? And the answer is, You know it, baby. Cleo (Aud Mason-Hyde), Kate’s child, gets some of the best scenes. In one, Cleo and Maude are playing a guessing game, with Maude describing the attributes of the person she has in mind. Cleo guesses Kitty, and then Emma, and then Eli, but oh! Maude is describing herself. Somewhere, a shrink is buying a new couch. More

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      Margo Martindale Pours It On in ‘The Sticky’

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      The esteemed character actress has spent decades enlivening films and series in just a few scenes or episodes. In this new Amazon heist comedy, she is first on the call sheet.Let’s say you need a woman who can slit someone’s throat, who can poison someone’s whiskey, who can smash her son’s fingers with a hammer, who can commit armed robbery with precision and glee. Perhaps you are responsible for “The Sticky,” a new Amazon heist comedy, premiering on Dec. 6, and you require an actress who can reliably crash most of a maple tree through the glass doors of a provincial office building.Then you should absolutely call the three-time Emmy winner Margo Martindale.So it was a mild shock, one morning in mid November, to find Martindale — just back from Toronto, where she is shooting a Richard LaGravenese series — tucked away at a tasteful Manhattan brunch spot. A further surprise: Martindale, 73, has lived nearby since 1978. She arrived for breakfast looking elegant in a black-and-white caftan, the picture of an Upper West Side matron, a matron without a sizable body count.“I am a wimp,” Martindale confessed as she pushed some eggs around her plate. “I’m scared of my own shadow. I’m afraid of the dark.” Those dangerous women? That’s acting.An esteemed character actress — in the Netflix animated comedy “Bojack Horseman,” in which she voiced a felonious version of herself, she was typically introduced as “Esteemed Character Actress Margo Martindale” — she has spent the last two decades playing a deluxe assortment of baddies, women with steel wool and spite where their hearts should be. She’ll often show up for only a few scenes in a movie or a handful of episodes on a show, just long enough to make the extremes of human behavior seem wholly plausible.In “The Sticky,” Martindale plays a farmer seeking revenge on the bureaucrats trying to take her farm.Jan Thijs/Amazon StudiosBut in “The Sticky,” she is the star of the series, first on the call sheet. Martindale plays Ruth Landry, a reluctant maple syrup farmer who plots to steal millions of dollars of syrup from the bureaucrats who are trying to seize her farm. (Landry is an invented character, but the series is based — very loosely — on actual events.) To hear her tell it, Martindale approached this lead the same as she would any of her character parts — all acting should be character work, she said.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? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More