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      in Television

      ‘Cowboy Cartel’ Tells a Galloping Story

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      With a made-for-TV plot, this documentary series explores a ploy by Mexican drug cartels to launder money through the world of horseracing.One of many recreation scenes in the documentary “Cowboy Cartel.”Apple TV+“Cowboy Cartel,” a four-part documentary arriving Friday, on Apple TV+, traces the wild saga of a Mexican drug cartel’s money-laundering scheme through the racehorse market and the F.B.I. agents and journalists who unraveled it. The plot feels ready-made for a TV show, and “Cowboy” sometimes rises to the occasion.The story has all the makings: a determined rookie F.B.I. agent, a jazzy I.R.S. dude, a starchy state attorney, well-sourced reporters, mountains of money, wise horsefolk and a ruthless, blood-soaked cartel. “Cowboy” is admirably lucid about the ins and outs of money laundering, and it nimbly anticipates all the “is everything a criminal does a crime?” arguments a skeptical viewer or defense lawyer may have.Muddy technique adulterates this appealing clarity of thought. B-roll of Texan highways does not illuminate anything, and more egregious is the use of hazy re-enactments. Those are tedious in any true-crime documentary, but here it isn’t (just) banality that irks. It’s that the show is repressing itself, as if in its heart of hearts it wanted to be a spinoff of “Narcos” but had to be a lower-budget documentary instead. It’s the businessperson whose dreams of the stage were denied and who now finds an awful lot of opportunities to turn presentations into song-and-dance numbers. Me? Sing? I couldn’t possib —— well, maybe just this once.The blending of self-aware nonfiction with imprecise, borderline goofy recreations here makes true things feel faker. I can see with my own eyes that the guy in the recreation looks nothing like the guy he’s portraying; am I meant to believe the inanity written on his white board was on a real white board? Flabby scripted dialogue offers so little, especially when the colorful, actual anecdotes offer so much.“Cowboy Cartel” and the talking-heads featured in it know they are in conversation not only with the cultural mythologies of the glamours of crime but also with crime fiction in general. Our wholesome F.B.I. agent solemnly describes one of the captured and convicted cartel bosses as “my Hannibal Lecter,” and other people lament the public’s lack of understanding about the true depravity of cartels. The real goings-on here — the real losses, the genuine conflict, the poignant asides — are enough. More

    • 75 Shares179 Views

      in Television

      ‘Time Bandits’ Review: A Flatter Adventure

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      An adaptation of the 1981 film on Apple TV+ gives us time-traveling bandits of greater height and lesser amusement.When the bandits of the title burst into the bedroom of Kevin, an 11-year-old history buff, in the new Apple TV+ series “Time Bandits,” among the first things you are likely to notice is: no dwarfs.The show’s source, Terry Gilliam’s 1981 movie of the same title, was all about the dwarfs. There were six of them, who pilfered a map that identifies time portals and used it to try to steal whatever historical loot they could get their hands on. Along the way, they picked up Kevin, who came to serve as both the brains and the conscience of the operation.The bandits in Jemaine Clement, Iain Morris and Taika Waititi’s “Time Bandits,” which premieres on Wednesday with two of its 10 episodes, are a fully heighted bunch; their more-or-less leader, Penelope, is played by Lisa Kudrow, who towered over her female co-stars on “Friends.”Changing things up after 43 years is unremarkable, and perhaps the film’s less than nuanced presentation of the dwarf characters as a rollicking, bickering, slapstick bunch marked by physical abandon and short tempers gave the TV show’s creators pause. (On the other hand, the change in those central roles has been criticized as anti-inclusive by advocates for little people, including descendants of the actors who played the original bandits.)Among the next things you notice about this new “Time Bandits,” though, is that nothing has replaced the energy that Jack Purvis, Kenny Baker and the other actors with dwarfism brought to the film. And while Clement, Morris and Waititi share some of the anarchic sensibility of Gilliam and his co-writer, Michael Palin, they present it here in a domesticated, flattened-out form.As it follows the peripatetic adventures of the bandits — from visits to the Maya empire and plague-ravaged medieval Europe to battles with dinosaurs and demons to confrontations with Pure Evil and the Supreme Being, the Mutt-and-Jeff deities of the “Time Bandits” universe — the show is unfailingly clever, visually interesting and at least mildly amusing. It is wan, though, compared to other series that Clement, Morris and Waititi have collaborated on, like “Flight of the Conchords” and the riotous “What We Do in the Shadows.”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

    • 125 Shares139 Views

      in Television

      ‘Lady in the Lake’ Review: Not Just Another Baltimore Mystery

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      Natalie Portman stars in an elaborate adaptation of Laura Lippman’s novel about a pair of 1960s murders.If you’ve read Laura Lippman’s novel “Lady in the Lake,” about a pair of murders in Baltimore in the 1960s, you will know right away that the Apple TV+ mini-series based on it has taken liberties. The Thanksgiving parade that opens the action is not in the book; neither is the man dressed as a mailbox whom we see relieving himself in an alley before resuming his place in the procession.It is a small moment characteristic of the writer and director Alma Har’el’s exhaustive reworking of Lippman’s twisty but fairly straightforward 2019 mystery. It is visually striking and nimbly staged: the powder blue and rusty red shades of the mailbox costume set against the dingy alley, the camera following the dancer in his bulky carapace as he awkwardly capers back to the parade. It’s diversely suggestive: of the distant period (mail!), of the bleak season, of a still strong civic self-regard. And it’s just there — cool and quirky, with no real weight, gone when the figure rounds the corner into the street.The prodigiously talented Har’el has worked extensively in commercials and music videos and made several documentaries, including the evocative “Bombay Beach,” filmed at the Salton Sea. Before “Lady in the Lake,” her only major fictional work was the terrific feature “Honey Boy,” written by and starring her sometime collaborator Shia LaBeouf. Based on LaBeouf’s life, it explored the porous boundaries between fantasy and real life, between performance and ordinary behavior.“Lady in the Lake,” which premiered with two of its seven episodes on Friday, has some similar ideas. But working as creator, director and primary writer, Har’el doesn’t manage to pull them together. The show is visually striking and full of sensuous atmosphere. But the ideas it is trying to put across about the wages of race, class and gender in a particular place and time don’t really translate from script to screen, and Har’el’s baroque elaborations on Lippman’s solid mystery plot start to feel increasingly artificial, in a tinselly, uninteresting way.Lippman’s novel (the recipient of a rave review in The New York Times by Stephen King) tied together two fictional cases inspired by real events, the murders of a Jewish girl and a Black woman. Her main character is a Jewish housewife and frustrated writer in Baltimore, Maddie Schwartz (nee Morgenstern), who exploits the deaths to embark on a new career as a newspaper reporter; Maddie’s reinvention also involves leaving her husband and son and having an affair with a Black cop.Har’el conflates some significant characters and adds and subtracts others while adhering, until the later episodes, to the major points of the plot. But she is less interested in that plot than in the themes of storytelling — who gets to tell the stories of Tessie, the Jewish girl, and Cleo, the Black woman — and broken dreams. Cleo’s dream of being a singer has gone unrealized, but Maddie’s dream of being a writer will be gained on the back of Cleo’s death.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

    • 100 Shares159 Views

      in Television

      ‘Me’ Is a Lovely and Distinctive Tween Drama

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      Anchored by beautiful performances, this Apple TV+ superhero show surpasses its own genre clichés.How often the world nearly ends at a middle-school dance. “Me,” a superpower tween drama arriving Friday on Apple TV+, has your standard cataclysm in its be-streamered gym and hits plenty of familiar beats along the way. But the show is anchored by beautiful performances, and its non-magical story lines punch well above their weight class. Why, it’s almost as if the real super powers lay within all along.Lucian-River Chauhan stars as Ben, our saucer-eyed hero who is trying, for his mother’s sake, to make a go of things with his doting new stepfather (Kyle Howard) and funky, precocious stepsister, Max (Abigail Pniowsky). Lucky for him, Max tries to have his back at school, where he is subjected to (unimaginative) cafeteria bullying.Our Ben is not just a put-upon little dweeb, though. He is also a shape-shifter. One morning, he wakes up not looking like himself but instead exactly like a classmate. Eventually, he learns to control this power, and he attempts to wield it justly: to stand up for people even lower in the social strata than he, to help Max ask a crush to the doomed dance, to mimic voices as a fun party trick. But there’s a reason well-meaning adults always offer the same advice. Just be yourself! Pretending to be other people is a dangerous game.As a gentle blended-family drama for young viewers, “Me” is lovely and distinctive. The relationship between Max and Ben is one rarely explored on television: stepsiblings who are allies. Chauhan and Pniowsky are terrific, and especially terrific together. Ben lets Max in on his big secret right away, and not only does she instantly believe him, she’s in his corner, helping him with his techniques and also with his ethics.This warm wholesomeness is not without its deeper tensions: Max is loyal to her own mother, too, and she resents how often her wants are dismissed in order to placate her divorced parents. Ben’s powers are thoughtfully framed as part of the natural teenage search for one’s identity, and his mother (Dilshad Vadsaria) worries, with good reason, that he’s withdrawing, pulling away.Were we to stay within the domestic realms, even with Ben’s gifts, this would be among the most emotionally literate middle-grade shows. But of course Ben’s abilities connect him to a broader world of a superpowered cabal and an evil guy seeking world domination and blah blah blah. The triteness is tiring, the mechanics and motivations of the supernatural stories do not make enough sense, and the use of split timelines only muddies the narrative.There are 10 episodes of “Me,” and they start strong, strong enough to fend off the forces of evil that threaten both the characters and the show. More

    • 138 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ Is a Throwback Amid Summer Blockbusters

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      Directed by Greg Berlanti, the film amounts to a Hollywood experiment: Is there still room at the multiplexes for original movies aimed at grown-ups.“Fly Me to the Moon” is the kind of movie that isn’t supposed to succeed in theaters anymore, at least if you listen to franchise-obsessed studio executives.The story is a period piece and completely original: In 1968, a government operative (Woody Harrelson) hires a marketing virtuoso (Scarlett Johansson) to convince the public — and Congress — that a troubled NASA can pull off its scheduled Apollo 11 moon landing. Stylish and devious, she clashes with the rigid launch director (Channing Tatum) and secretly — as a backup, to be used only in an emergency — arranges for a fake landing to be filmed on a soundstage. What’s the harm?Hollywood marketers will tell you that ticket buyers eschew movies that mash together genres. And “Fly Me to the Moon” is part drama, part comedic caper, part romance, part fiction and part true story. Particularly in the summer, studios prefer to serve up mindless popcorn movies aimed at teenagers. “Fly Me to the Moon” is entertainment for thinking adults, the kind that Mike Nichols (“Working Girl”) and James L. Brooks (“Broadcast News”) made in the 1980s.So the question must be asked: How on earth did “Fly Me to the Moon” manage to score a wide release in theaters at the height of blockbuster season? The film rolls into 3,300 theaters in the United States and Canada on Friday.Shouldn’t it be going straight to streaming?In many ways, the film’s unexpected journey to multiplexes reflects the degree to which Hollywood runs on the vagaries of chance. “Fly Me to the Moon” started out as a streaming movie — full stop. Apple TV+ paid an estimated $100 million for the project in March 2022, and the contract called for no theatrical release of any kind.But then Greg Berlanti got involved.It was June 2022, and Mr. Berlanti, the wunderkind television producer, had just turned 50. That milestone prompted a degree of uncomfortable self-reflection, compounded by his mother’s recent death. At the same time, the entertainment business was changing — the streaming-driven “peak TV” era was winding down — and Mr. Berlanti wasn’t entirely sure where to focus his professional attention.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

    • 75 Shares169 Views

      in Television

      ‘Sunny’ Is a Dreamy Robot Dramedy

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      This stylish sci-fi series, on Apple TV+, stars Rashida Jones as a grieving woman with an unexpected new companion.Rashida Jones stars as a grieving, alienated ex-pat in “Sunny,” a quirky new 10-episode dramedy that begins Wednesday on Apple TV+. Suzie is an American woman living in Japan, who is married to a Japanese man but has to rely on an in-ear translator when she is out and about on her own. After her husband and young son disappear in a commercial plane crash, she feels totally untethered, often clashing with her chilly mother-in-law, Noriko (Judy Ongg), and spilling her guts to a friendly bartender, Mixxy (Annie the Clumsy).Her husband’s colleague drops off a homebot for her — a chirpy humanoid named Sunny (voiced by Joanna Sotomura) with a noggin like the Las Vegas Sphere. Suzie’s husband, Masa (Hidetoshi Nishijima), designed and programmed the robot especially for her, the colleague says. How odd! Masa always told Suzie that his job at the big technology company was in the refrigerators division …. (She does indeed have a snazzy refrigerator: buttery yellow with a ridged porthole window on the freezer.)It is also odd because Suzie claims to hate robots. “A robot killed my mother,” she says dryly; it was a self-driving car, explains Noriko. But Suzie isn’t really in a position to turn down help and companionship, and Sunny is awfully persistent. “Robots are expressions of their creators,” the colleague tells her, and any lingering tidbits of her husband are of course quite precious. Especially because, now that you mention it, maybe Masa was lying about a lot of things, including his connections to organized crime. And — eek! They’re after us!Much of the story and plotting in “Sunny” is chasing its own tail, but gosh it’s a fun loop. At a time when many shows have ceded ground to second-screen viewing, “Sunny” has a distinctive visual style. Drab, gray swaths are punctuated by pops of yellow, and scenes of seedy nightlife and packed shopping kiosks burst with neon squiggles and candy-bright outfits. It’s all exceptionally evocative, and the show’s mood and vibe linger like a lover’s perfume.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

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Television

      ‘Presumed Innocent’ Review: Jake Gyllenhaal Steps In for Harrison Ford

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      Jake Gyllenhaal steps in for Harrison Ford in a new, highly strung adaptation of Scott Turow’s legal thriller for Apple TV+.Scott Turow’s first novel, the 1987 best seller “Presumed Innocent,” is a clever murder mystery and courtroom drama with an 11th-hour twist. Before that denouement, it throws out red herrings to distract us, paralleling the strategy of its protagonist, Rusty Sabich, a prosecutor accused of killing the female colleague with whom he was having an affair. The 1990 film adaptation starring Harrison Ford necessarily condensed Turow’s plot but stayed true to its outlines and to the identity of the killer, a closely guarded secret through most of the story.It’s possible that the new “Presumed Innocent,” premiering Wednesday on Apple TV+ and starring Jake Gyllenhaal as Sabich, ends up at the same place, with the same killer. But after watching seven of its eight episodes, I didn’t really care. The claustrophobic atmosphere, the emphasis on psychology and trite family drama over well-made mystery and, especially, the crescendoing melodrama that makes a mockery of Turow’s courtroom credibility (even though he is credited as a co-executive producer) had done me in.The book is narrated in the first person by Sabich, and its most striking stylistic feature is his continual, detailed analyses of his professional and personal lives. Those passages are not there just for their own sake — Turow uses them to ground us in the milieus and the motivations of the courtroom and the prosecutors’ office. He cares about the inner life of Sabich, but he cares just as much about providing the framework for a page-turning mystery.Onscreen, the emphases have been different. Alan J. Pakula’s film was a chilly affair, elegantly assembled (with cinematography by the great Gordon Willis) but lacking the juice of a real thriller. It was more interested in the ethical and philosophical ramifications of Sabich’s situation, favoring judgment over action. (It was fun to watch once the case got into the courtroom, though, thanks to the performances of Raul Julia and Paul Winfield as defense lawyer and judge.)David E. Kelley, the veteran television writer who created the “Presumed Innocent” series, has the opposite temperament from Pakula — he’s all about the juice. He’s a master of taking material with a lurid or sensational edge and slickly packaging it for a mainstream TV audience. When he’s in his relaxed mode, on “The Lincoln Lawyer” for Netflix or the risibly pulpy “Big Sky” for ABC, the results can be entertaining, summoning distant memories of his days as chief writer on “L.A. Law.”When he takes things more seriously, though, he gets in trouble (though it doesn’t necessarily affect his success, as “Big Little Lies” demonstrated). Like Pakula, he makes “Presumed Innocent” more about Sabich than about the presumably less interesting question of whether Sabich is guilty of murder. But all he has to offer are tortured psychology and transgression, presented slickly and repetitively, with head-scratching surprises in place of new ideas. Meant to be provocative, it’s just wearying.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

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in Television

      In ‘The Big Cigar,’ a Black Panther Stars in a Fake Movie

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      This new series is based on the unlikely true story of a Hollywood producer who used a bogus film production to help Huey Newton flee to Cuba in 1974.When the movie producer Bert Schneider met the Black Panther Party leader Huey P. Newton, he swooned.Schneider, who had helped revolutionize the movie industry (and made a lot of money) as a producer of films like “Easy Rider,” wanted to shake up things off the screen as well. He saw Newton, who had already done a prison stint for the killing of a police officer — Newton denied that he shot the officer, and the conviction was eventually overturned — as the real deal, a star on the front lines of the actual revolution.Their unlikely partnership is now the heart of the new limited series “The Big Cigar,” premiering April 17 on Apple TV+. It’s a caper about how Newton (played by André Holland) fled to Cuba in 1974 after he was arrested and charged with the murder of a prostitute (also a crime he claimed he didn’t commit). Schneider (Alessandro Nivola) ponied up cash and logistical assistance, including a fake film production, to help Newton escape.Holland and Alessandro Nivola, as Bert Schneider, in “The Big Cigar,” which is based on a true story.Brendan Adam-Zwelling/Apple TV+“Cigar” tells a wild tale with shootouts and chases and a couple of strange bedfellows: a Black revolutionary on the run and a well-coiffed Hollywood power player looking to bankroll him. Even as it takes some liberties with the facts, the series reflects the ties that existed between some counterculture entertainment figures and radical organizations of the ’60s and ’70s.“We didn’t see it as a story of Hollywood patting itself on the back,” Jim Hecht, the writer and an executive producer, said in a video interview. “There was a time when people actually did put their bodies on the line and do things for a cause that they believed in. They took personal risks to do things that were political.”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