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      Janet Mead, Nun Whose Pop-Rock Hymn Reached the Top of the Charts, Dies

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      Her upbeat version of “The Lord’s Prayer” was an instant hit in Australia, reached No. 4 in the U.S. and was nominated for a Grammy (it lost to Elvis Presley).Sister Janet Mead, an Australian nun whose crystalline voice carried her to the upper reaches of the charts in the 1970s with a pop-rock version of “The Lord’s Prayer,” died on Jan. 26 in Adelaide. She was in her early 80s.Her death was confirmed by the Catholic Archdiocese of Adelaide, which provided no further information. Media reports said she had been treated for cancer.Sister Janet’s recording of “The Lord’s Prayer,” which featured her pure solo vocal over a driving drumbeat — she had a three-octave range and perfect pitch — became an instant hit in Australia, Canada and the United States. It soared to No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 during Easter time in 1974, and she became one of the few Australian recording artists to have a gold record in the United States.The record sold more than three million copies worldwide, two million of them to Americans. Nominated for the 1975 Grammy Award for best inspirational performance, it lost to Elvis Presley and his version of “How Great Thou Art.”Along with Pete Seeger’s “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” famously covered by the Byrds in 1965, “The Lord’s Prayer” is one of the very few popular songs with lyrics taken from the Bible.Sister Janet was the second nun to have a pop hit in the United States, after Jeanine Deckers of Belgium, the guitar-strumming “Singing Nun” whose “Dominique” reached No. 1 in 1963. She died in 1985.When stardom struck Sister Janet, she was a practicing Catholic nun teaching music at St. Aloysius College in Adelaide. The video for “The Lord’s Prayer” was shot on campus.A humble novitiate who devoted herself to social justice, she donated her share of royalties for “The Lord’s Prayer” to charity. She had long helped raise money for the disadvantaged, the homeless and Aborigines and worked on their behalf.She later described the period of her record’s success as a “horrible time,” largely because of demands by the media.“It was a fairly big strain because all the time there are interviews and radio talk-backs and TV people coming and film people coming,” she told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Shunning the spotlight, she declined most interview requests and all offers to tour the United States.She had already achieved some local notoriety by staging rock masses at St. Francis Xavier’s Cathedral, long the hub of Catholic life in Adelaide. Her goal was to make the Gospel more accessible and meaningful to young people, which she succeeded in doing by presenting religious hymns in a rock ‘n’ roll format and encouraging participants to sing like Elvis or Bill Haley. Her masses drew as many as 2,500 people and enjoyed the full support of the local bishop.Janet Mead was born in Adelaide in 1938 (the exact date is unknown). She was 17 when she joined the Sisters of Mercy and became a music teacher at local schools.She studied piano at the Adelaide Conservatorium and formed a group, which she called simply “the Rock Band,” to provide music for the weekly Mass at her local church.She was making records for her school when she was discovered by Martin Erdman, a producer at Festival Records in Sydney. The label had her record a cover of “Brother Sun, Sister Moon,” which the Scottish singer-songwriter Donovan had written and sung for a Franco Zeffirelli film of the same name about St. Francis of Assisi. It was released as the A-side of a 45; “The Lord’s Prayer” was the B-side.But disc jockeys in Australia much preferred “The Lord’s Prayer.” Listeners called in demanding to hear it again, and stations gave it repeated airplay. It became one of the fastest-selling singles in history.Its phenomenal success led to Sister Janet’s debut album, “With You I Am,” which hit No. 19 in Australia in July 1974. Her second album, “A Rock Mass,” was a complete recording of one of her Masses.Sister Janet later withdrew from the public eye almost entirely, and her third album, recorded in 1983, was filed away in the Festival Records vaults. The tapes, including a 1983 version of “The Lord’s Prayer” and covers of songs by Bob Dylan, Paul Simon and Cat Stevens, were rediscovered by Mr. Erdman in 1999 and included on the album “A Time to Sing,” released that year to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Sister Janet’s hit single.Sister Janet explained her philosophy of using rock music to amplify religious themes in her liner notes for the album “With You I Am.”“I believe that life is a unity and therefore not divided into compartments,” she wrote. “That means that worship, music, recreation, work and all other ‘little boxes’ of our lives are really inseparable, and this is why I believe that people should be given the opportunity to worship God with the language and music that is part of their ordinary life.” More

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      In the Australian Outback, the Cobar Sound Chapel Quenches the Soul

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      Beneath the skies of a remote mining town, a composer and an architect created a musical chamber for marveling at the universe.Life in Cobar was a delicate thing until the arrival of the Silver Tank. In the vast, red-dirt hinterland of Australia, over 400 miles northwest of the shores of Sydney, rainwater is scarce. ​​For thousands of years, the nomadic Aboriginal Ngiyampaa people excelled at the art of survival by creating natural rock reservoirs. But after European settlers discovered copper and gold in the area in the 1870s, enough water was needed to sustain a booming mining town. Reservoirs were dug. Water was trained in from afar. Then, in 1901, a 33-foot-high steel water tank painted silver, hence its nickname, was erected about a mile outside of town. While the threat of drought remained (and remains to this day), it turned dusty Cobar, a freckle at the edge of the Outback, into something of a desert oasis.The entrance to the sound chapel, which features a bench from which visitors can listen to Lentz’s “String Quartet(s)” (2000-21), a 24-hour-long composition inspired by the Outback’s dramatic skies.Josh RobenstoneNowadays, Cobar pipes in its water from the Burrendong Dam, about 233 miles east, and the tank, whose silver finish long ago succumbed to rust and graffiti, is empty of water. It has, however, been filled with something new — music. On April 2, after two decades of work, it will be officially reborn as the Cobar Sound Chapel, an audacious sound-art collaboration between Georges Lentz, one of Australia’s leading contemporary composers, and Glenn Murcutt, an Australian Pritzker Prize-winning architect. For his reimagining of the roofless tank, Murcutt installed an approximately 16-foot cube within its cylindrical space, in which Lentz’s “String Quartet(s)” (2000-21), a 24-hour-long classical-meets-electronica work, will play on loop via a quadraphonic sound system. Inside the chamber is a concrete bench that seats up to four, from which one can look out through the ceiling’s gold-rimmed oculus. Morning, noon and night, then, the otherworldly sonic stream will reverberate throughout the concrete booth and spill out into the sky that inspired it. The artists’ hope is that their work will prompt visitors to meditate on our place in the universe. “There is a mysterious element to our existence that we ignore at our own peril,” says Lentz, 56. “By turning to something higher than ourselves, we realize we are just this tiny thing in this vast scheme.”Murcutt set a concrete cube within the tank. Inside it is a concrete bench from which one can look up at the sky through the gold-rimmed oculus.Josh RobenstoneLentz’s “String Quartet(s),” on which he collaborated with the Noise, an experimental string quartet, will play on loop via a quadraphonic sound system.Josh RobenstoneLentz has been consumed by questions of cosmology and spirituality ever since he was a child. Born in Echternach, a small town in Luxembourg that formed around a seventh-century abbey, he grew up attending classical music festivals and stargazing with his dad. Later, he studied music in Hanover, Germany. While riding the train to university in the fall of 1988, he happened upon a story in the German science magazine Geo about the creation of the universe. It threw the tininess of humanity into sharp relief for him, and he fell into a depression that left him sleepless for weeks. “It felt like an abyss you look into and go, ‘Wah!’” he says.A view from just outside the concrete chamber, which was built inside of a roofless (and now empty) water tank.Josh RobenstoneEver since, Lentz has devoted his entire body of work to exploring the questions of the cosmos, transforming his initial fear into a quest for contemplation, one that only intensified following his 1990 move to Australia and exposure to the Outback’s ocean of sky. Both a continuation and culmination of his work, “String Quartet(s)” began as an attempt to translate that sky into a score. To do so, he collaborated with the Noise, an experimental string quartet that’s based in Sydney. They used a range of techniques; to mirror a starry night, for example, the musicians invoked the pointillism of the contemporary Aboriginal painter Kathleen Petyarre, plucking their bows at the top of their instruments to create contained bits of sound. “If you repeat that,” says Oliver Miller, the Noise’s cellist and a technical and creative adviser to the chapel, “it converges into a galactic formation where you get a cluster of the Milky Way.”Two concrete slabs mark the entrance to the sound chapel, though, thanks to its oculus, music can also be heard from outside the space.Josh RobenstoneThey ended up with about six hours’ worth of music, which, through digital editing, Lentz expanded into a 24-hour, techno-infused soundscape of terror, wonder and reverence. Taking inspiration from Gerhard Richter, he layered recorded sounds as if they were in a palimpsest. In one track I sampled, a curtain of piercing strings gave the impression of a dust storm haunting the horizon. In another, I fell into a reverie as the strings receded into shiny, ethereal dots, ringing as if in an empty basement. I listened from atop a hill in Connecticut, but to hear the music inside the chapel would be an experience of an entirely different magnitude.The interior walls of the concrete chamber were cast in corrugated iron formwork and act as sound diffusers. The men chose to keep the graffiti that had accumulated on the disused tank over the years.Josh RobenstoneAround 2000, Lentz began dreaming of a music box amid a copper landscape, a place where his music could live alongside its muse. But it wasn’t until he played a concert in Cobar in 2008 that he considered the town as a potential site. He pitched the idea to the Cobar Shire Council, which later proposed the hilltop bearing the tank, suggesting it be demolished to make room. “Absolutely not!” Lentz said. Soon after, he called Murcutt, 85, who is celebrated for hand-drawn, landscape-specific designs inspired by Australian vernacular architecture, such as farmhouses and shearing sheds. “You’d have to be mad to be doing something like this,” Murcutt remembers thinking. “But it’s also extraordinary.”The morning sun creates a sliver of light on the interior of the entrance to the Cobar Sound Chapel, which will open in April.Josh RobenstoneMurcutt has always been drawn to the desert, whose sparseness resonates with the Aboriginal mantra — touch the earth lightly — by which he tries to abide. In keeping with that idea, he set out to design, largely thanks to governmental funding, a simple, solar-powered chapel that would unify sound, site and atmosphere. Two large slabs of concrete mark the entrance outside. Inside, the cubic space (which is slightly slanted to optimize acoustics) is stark, just like the desert itself. In the four corners of the ceiling, sunlight streams through windows of Russian blue glass painted by the local Aboriginal artist Sharron Ohlsen, who also employs pointillism in her work. And, over the course of each day, an ellipse of light traverses the floor and concrete walls, which were cast in corrugated iron formwork and act as sound diffusers. Music booms from a speaker in each wall, enveloping listeners, Miller says, as if they were “moving within a cosmic nebula or swimming within a school of deep-sea jellyfish.”And so, over a century after arriving in town, the Silver Tank — which promises to put Cobar on the cultural map, especially as the chapel will play host to an annual string quartet festival sponsored by Manuka Resources, a local mine — once again provides something essential. For anyone who spends time inside, it offers a sanctuary for contemplating existential questions that, particularly in the age of the pandemic, haunt us so acutely. And while the piece may not provide answers, it is also a comforting reminder that, even in a vast, seemingly empty expanse, there can still be music. More

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      David Gulpilil, Famed Aboriginal Actor, Dies at 68

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      In a career that began with the film “Walkabout” 50 years ago, he was acclaimed for changing the way Australia’s Indigenous people were portrayed and viewed.David Gulpilil, an Indigenous Australian who found film stardom as a teenager in 1971 when he was featured in “Walkabout” and went on to become Australia’s most famous Aboriginal actor, appearing in dramas like “Charlie’s Country,” for which he won a best-actor award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014, and comedies like the 1986 hit “Crocodile Dundee,” has died. He was 68.Steven Marshall, South Australia’s top official, announced his death on Monday, though he did not say when or where he died. In 2017 Mr. Gulpilil learned that he had terminal lung cancer, something he addressed in a documentary released this year called “My Name Is Gulpilil.”Mr. Marshall, in a statement, called Mr. Gulpilil “an iconic, once-in-a-generation artist who shaped the history of Australian film and Aboriginal representation onscreen.” Others had heaped similar praise on Mr. Gulpilil over the years. In 2019, presenting him with a lifetime achievement award, the National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee, which celebrates Indigenous Australian communities, said he “revolutionized the way the world saw Aboriginal people.”Mr. Gulpilil often played characters who explore or are affected by the intersection of Indigenous and modern cultures in Australia, something he knew from personal experience and did not always handle well. In between his acting roles, he had trouble with alcohol and spent time in prison, including for domestic abuse. Though Mr. Gulpilil sometimes seemed to mix easily in the broader world, Rolf de Heer, the director with whom he worked most often, said demons found him there.“David can’t handle alcohol,” Mr. de Heer said in his director’s notes for “Charlie’s Country.” “He can’t handle cigarettes, or sugary drinks, or almost anything addictive. All of these substances, foreign to his culture, both soothe him and enrage him.”One part of the moviemaking world that Mr. Gulpilil didn’t have trouble with, however, was the camera — he always seemed to be a natural, especially when, as was often the case, the setting of the film was the Australian wilds. As he put it in an autobiographical one-man stage show he performed in 2004, “I know how to walk across the land in front of a camera, because I belong there.”David Gulpilil Ridjimiraril Dalaithngu is believed to have been born in 1953 in Arnhem Land, in Australia’s Northern Territory. Missionaries are said to have assigned him a birth date of July 1.He was also assigned the name David at a government-run English school that he attended for a time.“They asked me what was my name,” he said in a 1978 audio interview posted by the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, “and I said, ‘My name is Gulpilil,’ and suddenly they said, ‘Ah, yeah, we’ll give you David.’”He didn’t care for the school and its paternalism — “You got your culture, I got my culture,” he said — and instead cultivated a reputation as an excellent ceremonial dancer. His fluidity and love of performing caught the attention of the British director Nicolas Roeg when Mr. Roeg came to Australia looking for an Aboriginal youth for “Walkabout,” a story about two white children lost in the wilderness who are befriended by an Indigenous teenager. (Few Aboriginal actors had appeared in feature films at the time, though documentarians had visited Indigenous communities.)The film led to international travel. Mr. Gulpilil, who was also a musician, used to tell the story of having his room at Cannes invaded by firefighters, who couldn’t place the sounds he was making on his didgeridoo — a traditional wooden instrument — and thought they might be the rumblings of a fire.Several television roles followed “Walkabout,” and then in 1976 Mr. Gulpilil was back on the big screen in “Mad Dog Morgan,” a drama about an Irish outlaw (played by Dennis Hopper) who is a wanted man in Australia. Soon after came “Storm Boy,” in which he played an Aboriginal man who befriends a lonely boy and joins with him in raising some pelicans.From left, Paul Hogan, Linda Kozlowski and Mr. Gulpilil in “Crocodile Dundee,” in which Mr. Gulpilil played a friend to the title character.Paramount, via Everett CollectionMr. Gulpilil reached a much wider audience when he appeared in “Crocodile Dundee.” As a friend of Paul Hogan’s swashbuckling title character, he delivers one particularly good joke after his character meets a New York journalist played by Linda Kozlowski. She immediately tries to take his picture.“You can’t take my photograph,” he says.“I’m sorry,” she answers. “You believe it’ll take your spirit away.”“No,” he says. “You’ve got the lens cap on.”Mr. Gulpilil was especially proud of his work in “The Tracker” (2002), one of several films he made with Mr. de Heer. He played the title character, who leads several white men on a brutal journey in search of a fugitive.“As he has in other Australian films, including ‘Walkabout,’ ‘The Last Wave’ and ‘Rabbit-Proof Fence,’ Mr. Gulpilil has the mystical aura of a man so profoundly in touch with the earth that he is omniscient and safe from harm,” Stephen Holden wrote in his review in The New York Times.Mr. Gulpilil in a scene from “Charlie’s Country,” for which he won a best-actor award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014.Monument ReleasingHis most acclaimed role came in “Charlie’s Country,” another project directed by Mr. de Heer; the two men share the screenwriting credit. The movie is about an Aboriginal man struggling to maintain traditional ways. Parts of it were drawn from Mr. Gulpilil’s own life. He and Mr. de Heer began developing the story while Mr. Gulpilil, struggling with alcohol at the time, was in jail for breaking his wife’s arm.His performance won the best-actor award in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes festival.Mr. Gulpilil was married several times. Australian newspapers said his survivors include seven children.Mr. de Heer, in an interview with The Herald Sun of Australia shortly after Mr. Gulpilil won the acting award at Cannes, talked about the pressures his friend felt living in the traditional Indigenous world and in the world that included places like Cannes.“He struggles in both,” he said. “He’ll say he can live in both cultures, but I don’t think he does well in either.” More

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      ‘Burning’ Review: Pulling the Fire Alarm in Australia

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      A new documentary looks at the visceral impact of wildfires and climate change on the country, from its beleaguered people to sickly koalas.If you think what climate change portends for America is scary, wait until you hear about Australia. That’s the gist of “Burning,” which focuses on that country’s sadly familiar experiences with warming temperatures: terrifying wildfires, drill-baby-drill politicians, and activists desperately trying to save us all by pointing out the facts about the future.The big difference is that Australia’s fires are the biggest: Over 50 million acres burned during its so-called “Black Summer” (2019-20), dwarfing losses in California or the Amazon. The director, Eva Orner (“Chasing Asylum”), makes her contribution to documentaries on climate change by sticking to Australia and underlining the visceral impact on Australians. It’s hellish: red skies and dark days, fear and helplessness, pregnancy complications and death.Orner’s flood of talking heads and footage from the field (including beleaguered locals and sickly koalas) settles into a drumbeat of worry — justified, obviously, but numbing. The film also suffers by comparison with a more complex and stimulating look at climate change, Lucy Walker’s alarming “Bring Your Own Brigade.” But the young activist Daisy Jeffrey does provide this film with a smart rebel leader, versus Australia’s prime minister, Scott Morrison, and his coal-friendly politicking.Like many environmental docs, Orner holds up a possible savior (a tech billionaire pitching a pivot to renewables) and a prelapsarian vision (the Aboriginal stewardship of the land before European arrival). Her film is ultimately another in a series of distress signals for the world, with the hope that Australia doesn’t become a continent-sized Cassandra.BurningNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. Watch on Amazon. More

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      Jane Campion Is Taking Cinema to the Darkest Human Places

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      Jane Campion believes in rigorous preparation. When directing a film, she works sometimes for years to ready the environment — and herself. Before she began shooting her new feature, “The Power of the Dog,” she returned again and again to the mountain range in New Zealand she had chosen as a location, checking what the light was like at different times of day, in different weather, across seasons. She went to visit the ranches in Montana where Thomas Savage, who wrote the novel on which the film is based, grew up. She sent Benedict Cumberbatch — who stars as Phil, a vicious, hypermasculine rancher — to Montana as well, to learn roping, riding, horseshoeing, whittling, banjo and bull-calf castration.But in rehearsals, her approach tends to be more oblique. For “The Power of the Dog,” she gathered the actors for a few weeks to hike, improvise and do exercises. They ate together, cooked together or just sat in rooms, in character, not talking. She asked Cumberbatch to write a letter as Phil to Phil’s dead lover, Bronco Henry. Then she had him write back as Bronco Henry. She asked Cumberbatch and Jesse Plemons, who play brothers, to waltz together, to help them learn intimately how the other’s body smelled, felt and moved, visceral qualities that boys who’ve grown up together would know.Campion also tried something new: She went to see a Jungian dream analyst out of Los Angeles, hoping to more deeply connect with Phil’s psychology, and she suggested Cumberbatch do the same. Campion normally doesn’t dream much, but soon she began having the same nightmare over and over. She was riding a black horse, beautiful and skittish, down a steep, narrow pathway along the face of a cliff. As they went farther down the trail, she realized that the path was vanishing into nothing, that the horse’s hooves would inevitably hit an angle too sheer to support their weight. We’ve got to back up, she thought. But the horse, too frightened and not yet trusting her, wouldn’t listen. It pressed forward, toward the vanishing point.Oh, this is certain death, she thought, and she woke up.“Of course Jane Campion’s dreams are so rich in imagery,” Cumberbatch joked on the phone. “Sexual, fantastical, spiritual, just exploding orchids of blood. Whereas I’m dreaming that I can’t quite climb the tree.”Campion was more self-effacing. “Your dreams are inscrutable to yourself for a good reason,” she told me when we met in New York. “They’re keeping secrets from the mind, you know?” We were walking west in Central Park on one of those glowing days in late September that look like the set of some movie — not a Campion movie, maybe a Nora Ephron.Campion tends to seek eye contact, and she is quick to ask fourth-date questions. (During our walk, she asked whether I liked being married, really wanting to know. She is divorced and a bit skeptical of the institution.) She laughs raucously and frequently, and she inserts impish comments into every conversation in her clipped New Zealand accent. She has the drape of fine, silver hair you might associate with a mystic, but everything else about her — the square, chunky black glasses and understated, monochromatic outfits — indicates, aesthetically speaking, what she is: the most decorated female filmmaker alive, an auteur in the lineage of Luis Buñuel, François Truffaut and Pedro Almodóvar.Campion’s work is both ethereal and brutal. This is a woman who conceived of a television show that deals with incest and pedophilia but set it in the most transcendently beautiful place in the world. For another movie, she wrote a scene in which poor, sweet Meg Ryan cradles her sister’s decapitated head.Despite the grim realities faced by her characters, her films often resemble allegories or myths — or, actually, dreams. They are so densely layered with visual metaphor, so flush with archetypes and symbols, that they operate like their own semiotic systems. A cat is never just a cat. There is often someone missing or just out of sight. The action sometimes seems to proceed according to dream logic, both bewildering and inevitable. The films are radiant and even psychedelic in their detail, so intense in their gaze — at the back of a neck, the twitch of a curtain, the color of water — that they seem transmitted directly from the subconscious or directly into the subconscious. They come back to you at odd times, like a puzzle your mind keeps trying to solve.Campion is probably best known for “The Piano,” from 1993, for which she was the first woman to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes and the second female director to be nominated for an Academy Award; the film also won her the Oscar for best original screenplay. She started writing it when she was 31 or 32, an ode to Emily Brontë, a longtime hero. (She told me she admired Brontë’s “fierce independence” and her ability to create “a character like Heathcliff out of her imagination, with no experience of men whatsoever personally.”) In the film, Holly Hunter plays Ada, a mute Scottish woman who communicates her emotional life by playing her piano. Ada arrives in New Zealand with her young daughter to marry a man she has never met. Her husband takes her to live in a forest and sells her piano. When he learns that she has fallen in love with the piano’s new owner, he cuts off one of her fingers so she can never play again.“The Piano” offers a blueprint to Campion’s creative preoccupations: the feminine confronting the masculine in exchanges marked by both violence and desire; the use of landscape to evoke psychological states; mothers and daughters; family units struggling with feelings of love, alienation and betrayal. Her films — and her one foray into prestige television, “Top of the Lake” — have in common a series of traumatized heroines in confrontation with terror, desire and the sublime. Domestic spaces are full of intimacy and danger; sex blows life wide open in starshine or devastation; the threat of violence glimmers around the edges of daily life, irradiating it.Campion’s work is both ethereal and brutal. Ruven Afanador for The New York TimesWhile there are consistent themes running through Campion’s work, she seems resistant to repeating herself. She works only when she wants to, on the stories she wants to tell, in precisely the way she wants to tell them. After “The Piano,” Campion made the sexual, somewhat campy “Holy Smoke!” before moving on to an experimental, psychological adaptation of Henry James’s “The Portrait of a Lady.” Her next two films after that were “In the Cut,” a gory, erotic thriller about a woman who starts sleeping with a cop she begins to suspect is serially murdering and dismembering women, and “Bright Star,” a film about Fanny Brawne and John Keats that is pure Romanticism.“The Power of the Dog” is another departure: an American Western, set in the 1920s. The Western is an unexpected choice for Campion. Not because it’s an archetypally masculine film genre — Campion has often been the lone woman in male-dominated spaces — but because it’s her first feature in which the protagonist is the violent figure, as opposed to the violated. Much has been made of the fact that it’s also her first project centered on a male leading actor. (She waved this off. “They obviously haven’t met Benedict,” she joked.)Like many of Campion’s films, “The Power of the Dog” dramatizes a clash between the masculine and the feminine — Phil’s own sense of manliness is bound up with emotional remoteness and animosity toward softness. He is a classic American cowboy, skulking around in enormous sheepskin chaps, though he lacks the instinct for chivalry that’s sometimes a hallmark of that type. He hates and terrorizes Rose (played by Kirsten Dunst), the sensitive woman his brother has married and brought to live in their shared home, as well as her son, an excruciatingly willowy, delicate teenager whose walk alone is an affront to the ranch hands. The film is full of inversions and queerness — Phil, it turns out, is a sensualist and attracted to men, and the boy, it turns out, has more violence in him than we think.Campion read Savage’s “The Power of the Dog,” which was published in 1967, for fun, not thinking initially of adapting it for film, but the story stayed with her. “I couldn’t stop thinking about the themes in the book,” she told Sofia Coppola onstage at the New York Film Festival this year. She was also impressed with the opening scene, in which a rancher castrates a bull. “I just went, Oh, my God. OK, so we’re neutering masculinity. That’s pretty interesting, right off.”Even Campion’s softest works have a touch of, as she once described it, “what was nasty, what isn’t spoken about in life.” In the director’s commentary for her first feature-length film, “Sweetie,” she describes an urge that has shaped her oeuvre, one that is on display in new ways in “The Power of the Dog.” She wanted to make work, she said, about what “has always been on those margins of what’s acceptable … what we as wild creatures really are, as distinct from what society wants us to buy into.”When she writes, she often sits on the great island of her bed and does nothing else. One reason she liked the Jungian dream work, she said, is that the analyst’s language matched some of her own philosophy. “She says it’s like throwing chum out, seeing what surfaces,” she said. This is what writing feels like for her. “It’s an amazing moment when you realize there’s a channel. In my case it was just like sitting down for four hours. That was it. Something comes to you. You write. You don’t read, you don’t use the phone, you don’t do anything else, because then the psyche starts to trust the time.”“So many writers have an aversion to just sitting down and waiting,” I said.Campion nodded and then paused. “I think it makes them afraid.”When she is not working, Campion divides her time between Australia and New Zealand. She likes walking, especially walking tours, as well as the Brontës, the short stories of Lucia Berlin and YouTube, where she has spent more time than she wants to specify. She drafts by hand into large, cheap notebooks. Anything more expensive, anything “fancy,” makes her nervous.She makes all her notes on paper, which she then stacks into piles and saves. She likes to draw and storyboard while she’s thinking through a scene — she studied painting at art school, in her 20s, before switching to filmmaking. “I just draw little expressions on their faces, or just the feeling of the work. I’m thinking about the feeling while I’m drawing.” All directors have a way of “bringing the work inside,” she said. She takes the drawings to set as references for the director of photography.She picked up her habits of careful preparation after overworking herself so aggressively on one of her first short films that she landed in intensive care. She had been staying up all night to prepare for the next day’s shoot, working long days and existing in a more or less constant state of stress. She got bronchitis, which worsened the asthma she has had since childhood, “and then I just couldn’t breathe.” It took most of a year to fully recover.“I’m a little bit like a machine,” she said, smiling. “Like, if it can be done, I will do it. I will do it as best as can be done by me. I can’t stand if I’ve got an idea how to improve something not to do it.”Anna Paquin and Holly Hunter in “The Piano.”Everett CollectionThe student film that made her sick, “Peel,” was eventually screened at Cannes, where it won the Palme d’Or for best short film, making Campion the first New Zealander to win that distinction. But Campion knew that if a seven-minute film wrecked her so completely, she would need a different way of working. “I thought, God, if anyone finds out I’m in the hospital trying to make a seven-minute film — it’s actually nine with credits — no one’s ever, ever going to hire me!”So she undertook a mission to come down into her body. “I really noticed that if I got panicky or in my head about things — I don’t know if you’ve ever had that experience.” She looked at me with a little grin.“Once or twice,” I said.She burst out laughing. “You just can’t think at all! It’s just the most horrible frightening feeling. Your mind is frozen. So, I had to learn to bring my energy down. Down into the body.” She did yoga every day for about 20 years. Now she meditates an hour most days. She knows she has to sleep full nights when shooting and have reasonable workdays. She has to be grounded and relaxed and strong. “It’s really strange having a really strong will and yet a fragile — ” She paused to look down at her arms and legs. “These bodies are fragile. And you have to learn to listen. And make friends with that.”If as a screenwriter Campion is interested in uncovering what lies hidden from our conscious minds, as a director she is interested in presence. “If you’re watching on set and you’re in your head,” she told me, “you can’t actually feel the impact of what they’re doing, the actors. And you’re the only person who’s looking from that point of view.” She half-gestured, opening her palms outward slightly, squaring her shoulders. “You’ve got to be relaxed, like an audience would be — just relaxed and open. You’ve just got to watch and then figure, Where’s my attention? If my attention wanders, I know it didn’t work.” Without being calm, focused and in the moment with the actors performing, she can’t do what she sees as her primary job, which is to sense whether the moment feels right.“I’ve never worked so much in parallel with the director on a project to create a character,” Cumberbatch said. “I’ve had support before, for sure, and a great deal of attention and love, but never somebody who wants to understand — and deeply understand — a character at the same time as an actor going through his process.”Benedict Cumberbatch and Jesse Plemons in “The Power of the Dog.”Netflix“You really are working on your trust relationship between you and the actors,” Campion told me. “You’re creating a situation where they feel relaxed and confident that you are with them, that you’re never going to judge them or go against. You’ll just try in every way to help.”A result is a quality of unguardedness in the performances so acute it’s almost painful to watch. In “Bright Star,” for example, Abbie Cornish and Ben Whishaw, as Fanny Brawne and John Keats, are so brimming with … something that they can be sitting on camera doing practically nothing and you are just about brought to tears.Campion said that she wanted, in that film, to convey to the actors “that it’s OK to do nothing. That that’s presence, and that’s actually richer than all the pretending in the world.” She described how all the actors came to rehearsal with their pretty accents and period-piece formality. “I just felt … nothing. I felt sort of sick.” So she waited, offering no real notes, no expression, just having them do little tasks, like write a letter. “No encouragement,” she said, laughing, “because I kept wanting them to look for something else.” The actors, confused, would try again and again, getting first nervous, then frustrated, then bored. Eventually, they would give up on pleasing her, or doing much of anything, and something would happen. “I would just wait till I was interested in them, and then go, Oh! Something true is happening here. I would say: ‘I’m really interested in what you’re doing right now. Where are you right now?’ And they started to get it.”Campion had mentioned she was fascinated by horses, and I suggested to her that the tactic she was describing with her actors — give no feedback until they do what you want, and then praise; let them slowly learn, through comfort and encouragement, what they are supposed to do — resembles the method many people use to train horses.She shrugged. “Well, we are animals.”A documentary about the making of “The Portrait of a Lady” shows Campion speaking softly to a frustrated, weeping Nicole Kidman as they work through an emotionally fraught scene. At one point, she takes Kidman in her arms and rocks her slightly from side to side. Elsewhere, we see her soothing Shelley Winters, who seems to be somewhere between panicking and throwing a tantrum. “Will somebody pull my socks up?” Winters complains, and Campion stoops to do it herself.Nicole Kidman in “The Portrait of a Lady.”AlamyIn each of our conversations, Campion brought up the subject of tenderness. “Tenderness is very important to me,” she said, sort of hesitating.“Why is that your word,” I asked, maybe the third time it came up.“Because it is what brings me to my vulnerability, I guess. And I feel like that’s probably a hard place for me to go to, and it is the place where I feel most touched by life. I guess it’s the leading edge, you know, of my experience.”“Tenderness” is not the first word I think of when I consider Campion’s work. I cannot shake the image of the title character in her first feature, “Sweetie,” shoving porcelain horse figurines into her mouth and chewing them until blood spills out of her smile. But after a while, the tenderness starts to emerge. It’s a bit like the experience of looking for a long time at a portrait and then realizing, as you look, that the reason the portrait makes you feel so much is the way the painter worked with the negative space, the shadows, the things you don’t immediately know you’re looking at. Tenderness may not be the first thing you see in a Campion film, but it is fundamentally what she’s painting with.This is especially true in “The Power of the Dog,” where tenderness and brutality amplify each other painfully. There’s the castration, the cruelty, the extremity of suffering, but there’s also the gentle way a teenage boy’s hands shape the paper flowers he likes to make; Dunst’s trembling lip and the soft way she dances with her husband in the sunset on the day of their marriage; the nakedly sensual, gentle scene of Phil lying in the tall grass, communing with a lost lover by trailing the dead man’s scarf so that it caresses his face and body; the way he begins to make room for the boy whose paper flowers he mocked. Where there is tenderness, something is unguarded. Tenderness invites a moment of suspense: Care or real hurt can happen next. Campion’s gift is showing the chaotic mix of wounding and care in human activity, and how the terrifying moment of being opened to both possibilities is an experience of the sublime.One of the eerier achievements of “The Power of the Dog” is how precisely it captures the way the fear of violence can seep throughout a house, and a life. Phil terrorizes Rose without being anywhere near her. Strains of his banjo floating down the stairs mock her as she plays the piano. His gaze, judgment, even the smell of him seems to be everywhere.Campion didn’t realize the depth of her personal connection to the material until late in the process — “a lot later,” she said, “until I remembered about some stuff in my own childhood.” When she and her sister, Anna, were young, and their brother was a newborn, their parents hired a nanny, “a really disturbed woman,” who abused and terrorized them. On one occasion, she whipped Jane until there were welts on her back. At first, both girls kept silent about how they were treated. “It was like this secret world, this secret dark world that was parallel to life. She was with us from when I was about 5 until 10 or 11. And there was just no getting away from it.”She paused a moment before continuing. “We were really little, and it was a lot to carry when you’re really little. But it did make me think, That’s how I understand the terror of Phil. I would always know where she was in the house.”I asked if she or her sister ever told her parents about the abuse.“Yes, we did.” She has a vivid memory of standing with her sister outside her parents’ room, getting ready to go in and tell them about the nanny. She balked at the last minute. “I just can’t bear that they may not do anything about it. I couldn’t live with that. I could live with — you know …” She swallowed. “But I couldn’t bear that they would be told and then they wouldn’t act. I don’t know, I was probably 6 at the time. I feel really bad now that I didn’t support her, but that was the reason.” Anna went in alone and came out a few minutes later, shaking her head.Campion’s gift is showing the chaotic mix of wounding and care in human activity, and how the terrifying moment of being opened to both possibilities is an experience of the sublime.They lived with the nanny for another five or so years, until she died. Anna and Jane refused to go to her funeral. Over the years, they tried to convince their parents what it had been like for them, and they were never quite believed.Campion describes her parents as loving but fundamentally absent during her childhood. The Campions were an important couple in New Zealand theater. They became founders of the first professional touring company in the country, the New Zealand Players, shortly before Jane was born. Richard Campion was a director, and Edith was one of the great New Zealand actresses of her generation. In 1959, she was awarded the M.B.E. for her theatrical work. But it was a troubled household — Richard was engaged in a series of affairs, and Edith suffered from depression, which led her to multiple suicide attempts and several stays in institutions throughout her adult life.Edith appeared in an early film of Campion’s, “An Angel at My Table.” (More than two decades later, Campion’s daughter, Alice, had a lead role in “Top of the Lake.”) Campion remembers her mother as delicate, sensitive and witty. When her children were young, she turned to writing, eventually publishing a collection of short stories and a novella. She encouraged Campion’s creative pursuits, but she was also moody and remote. When Campion was little and visited friends’ houses, she would interview the mothers, trying to get a sense of their schedules, their habits, what they did. What were mothers like?Campion told me about the day that her mother took her out of school for a dentist appointment. “We didn’t do very many things by ourselves together, so I was very excited to show her where I hung my coat.” After the dentist, they had a picnic in a park, and Campion could sense that her mother’s mind was elsewhere. “I tried to do all sorts of amazing things — somersaults and handstands, to entertain her, to get her attention — but she still looked off into the distance. It probably was depression. I remember she had an egg on her lap, and it just … rolled off.”There was a time when Campion was so bewildered and persuaded by her mother’s despair that she told her she would understand if she wanted to die. “It really scared me to be close to her complete lack of hope,” she told an interviewer in 1995. At university, she decided to study structural anthropology, examining the ways humans use myth and social structures to resolve the fundamental oppositions of existence: life and death, light and darkness.Campion said that feeling vulnerable is harder for her than for most people: “I associate it with fear.”“You’re so averse to feeling vulnerable,” I said, “but tenderness is the core of your work!”“Well, if it didn’t have much meaning for me, it wouldn’t matter,” she said. “It’s got power. And really, my attention decides: What do I pay attention to in the world? Can you fake that, really? Can you really fake attention? Attention is love.”In October, I met Campion in Paris. She had just come from the New York Film Festival and then the Lumière film festival in Lyon, where she received the Prix Lumière. (In September, she also won the Silver Lion at Venice, one of the top honors a filmmaker can achieve.) We exchanged emails as she arrived in Paris. How was Lyon? I asked. “Lyon was a mosh pit where I became very briefly a rock star!” she wrote. There were a huge number of women at the festival, many of whom came, it seemed, because they wanted to see a female filmmaker awarded the Prix Lumière for the first time.Our plan was to have a long lunch and then go to the Picasso Museum. (I had wanted to watch YouTube together; she demurred.) As we got settled at our table, I asked her how she was dealing with the outpouring of emotion from women who seem so invested in successes, and she threw up her hands. “Defense and denial,” she joked. “I’m a New Zealander; we don’t do this sort of stuff. It’s something you can go to jail for, thinking too much of yourself.” She shot me a smile. “I mean, I try to listen to them. To some extent they’re giving their testimony.” She has spent a long time being one of the only women at the forefront of her field, a mantle she took up with ambivalence. (A second female director, Julia Ducournau, finally received the Palme d’Or this year.) Once, after “The Piano” came out, a woman working in a pharmacy approached Campion and told her, in a quivering voice, that seeing the film was the most amazing experience of her life.“And I was, like, quipping,” Campion said. “And then I just saw how I hadn’t received it, and how shattered she looked for not being heard with respect. And I learned something from her, that she really needed me to hear it in a better way than I was doing.”It has gotten easier over the years to feel comfortable with what her work means to the world. She pulled up an email from one of her own heroes, Annie Proulx, who wrote an afterword to a 2001 edition of Savage’s novel. After Campion visited Proulx during her research for “The Power of the Dog,” the two kept up their correspondence. “The 60s and 70s can be pretty good years,” Proulx wrote. “One is still agile, nothing major crouched on the bedposts at night; and one’s sense of judgment and understanding is probably at maximum power. You ‘get’ most situations with a depth and understanding unknown to the more youthful. But some of the gilt wears off in the 80s and you tend to see the hard rusted iron under the fancy metals.”Jane Campion, right, on the set of “The Power of Dog” in New Zealand.NetflixCampion, still in her 60s, is in the former state — feeling very much at the height of her powers. She doesn’t know if she’ll make another film, but for the first time in a while she feels energized and inspired to keep working. She is starting a film school in New Zealand, where filmmakers will study for free under her and a few other friends. (Onstage at the New York Film Festival, Sofia Coppola volunteered to teach as well.)After lunch, we zipped around the Picasso Museum for half an hour while she waited for a friend and his week-old baby, whom she was eager to meet. The museum was collaborating on a joint exhibit with the nearby Rodin Museum, so there were sculptures from various parts of Rodin’s career. We stood together for a bit in front of “The Thinker.”“There’s definitely a brutish quality to the muscularity, isn’t there,” she said quietly after a minute.I agreed. “Doesn’t it look like his head is kind of too small for his body?”“Like a kind of Neanderthal,” she said.“Exactly.”“Poor guy. Seems puzzled, like he can’t figure it out.” She chuckled. “It’s actually quite moving.”She had been showing me photos of a few of the marble Rodin sculptures she admired, and she pulled me over to look at a few similar pieces on display nearby. She preferred them to the big bronze casts. They were of children’s faces, or women, emerging from the stone with a hazy, dreamlike quality. These pieces were so different from Rodin’s more famous sculptures of men, in which every muscle and vein was articulated. It was incredible, she thought, taking more pictures, how you could get that kind of softness out of marble.Jordan Kisner is the author of the essay collection “Thin Places.” She last wrote about the scholar and theorist of domestic labor Silvia Federici. Ruven Afanador is a Colombian-born photographer in New York known for his black-and-white portraits with a focus on contrasts. His most recent exhibition was at the National Museum of Colombia in Bogotá this year. More

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      The Best Movies and TV Shows New to Netflix, Amazon and Stan in Australia in November

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      Our picks for November, including ‘tick, tick … BOOM!’, ‘The Great’ Season 2, and ‘Passing’Every month, streaming services in Australia add a new batch of movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for November.New to NetflixNOV. 5‘A Cop Movie’An inventive and tricky hybrid of fiction and nonfiction, the documentary “A Cop Movie” tells the mostly true story of two Mexico City police officers: a man and woman who briefly dated and were dubbed “the love patrol” by their colleagues. The director Alonso Ruizpalacios defies expectations throughout, using dramatic recreations, surprise reversals and raw interviews to keep the audience guessing about whether this is an earnest film about the challenges of being a cop or an exposé of institutional corruption.NOV. 10‘Passing’Based on Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, “Passing” stars Tessa Thompson as Irene and Ruth Negga as Clare, two Black women who were friends when they were younger and who meet again later in life. Irene is a social activist, living with her husband (André Holland) in an upscale Harlem brownstone. Clare is passing as white, and is married to a rich, racist businessman (Alexander Skarsgard). Written and directed by Rebecca Hall — herself biracial — this handsome-looking black-and-white period drama examines the boundaries of race and class in early 20th century New York.NOV. 19‘Cowboy Bebop’ Season 1This live-action remake of the popular anime series “Cowboy Bebop” retains what made the original so beloved: a genre-bending story about planet-hopping bounty hunters, an eye-catching style that draws on old westerns and film noir, and a jazzy up-tempo Yoko Kanno score. John Cho stars as Spike Spiegel, who, alongside his partner Jet Black (Mustafa Shakir), chases criminals across the colonies built by the refugees of a post-apocalyptic Earth. The heroes add allies and enemies with each new adventure, in a show that mixes action, comedy and science-fiction weirdness.‘tick, tick…BOOM!’Netflix‘tick, tick … BOOM!’The “Hamilton” creator and star Lin Manuel-Miranda makes his feature film-directing debut, paying homage to one of his biggest influences: the late “Rent” writer and composer Jonathan Larson. In this adaptation of Larson’s lesser-known, semi-autobiographical theater piece, Andrew Garfield plays an aspiring Broadway composer named Jon, still working at a diner and waiting on his big break at the dawn of the 1990s. Miranda and the screenwriter Steven Levenson tinker a little with the stage production (which originated as a concert, before being turned into a small-scaled musical by David Auburn), turning “tick, tick … BOOM!” into more of a straight biopic with catchy songs.NOV. 24‘Bruised’Halle Berry both directs and stars in this underdog sports melodrama, about a down-and-out MMA fighter named Jackie Justice who comes out of retirement after the son she gave up for adoption shows up on her doorstep. Berry had to train hard to play an experienced, hardened athlete, and to take on this role of a woman trying to shake herself out of a fog and prove to her family and her sport that she’s still a winner. ‘Robin Robin’This half-hour Christmas special comes from the team at Aardman Animations, the studio behind Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep. “Robin Robin” tells the story of a small bird (voiced by Bronte Carmichael) who was raised by a family of mice, and who goes on an adventure during the holiday season where her unusual upbringing proves to be an asset. The adorable character-designs and the voice performances of Richard E. Grant (as a magpie) and Gillian Anderson (as a cat) accent what should be another of Aardman’s classy, funny, cleverly constructed family comedies.Also arriving: “The Claus Family” (Nov. 1), “The Harder They Fall” (Nov. 3), “The Club” Season 1 (Nov. 5), “Love Hard” (Nov. 5), “Narcos: Mexico” Season 3 (Nov. 5), “The Unlikely Murderer” (Nov. 5), “Father Christmas Is Back” (Nov. 7), “Swap Shop: Dash for Cash” Season 1 (Nov. 9), “Gentefied” Season 2 (Nov. 10), “Red Notice” (Nov. 12), “Christmas Flow” Season 1 (Nov. 17), “Tiger King” Season 2 (Nov. 17), “The Princess Switch 3: Romancing the Star” (Nov. 18), “Blown Away: Christmas” Season 1 (Nov. 19), “Waffles + Mochi’s Holiday Feast” (Nov. 23), “A Boy Called Christmas” (Nov. 24), “True Story” (Nov. 24), “A Castle for Christmas” (Nov. 26), “School of Chocolate” Season 1 (Nov. 26), “Charlie’s Colorforms City: Snowy Stories” (Nov. 30).New to Stan‘The Great’ Season 2StanNOV. 5‘Bobby’Sometimes written as “Bo66y” — to commemorate England’s 1966 World Cup championship — the title of this documentary refers to Bobby Moore, the star defender and team captain whose creativity and doggedness electrified his home country. After his pro career ended, Moore struggled with money and health woes, and at times felt like a forgotten man. “Bobby” is an attempt to right some of those wrongs, telling a triumphant and tragic story via thrilling vintage footage and impassioned testimonials from teammates and fans.NOV. 8‘Yellowstone’ Season 4One of TV’s most popular dramas returns, after a season three finale which saw the Montana ranching family the Duttons facing multiple threats. Will the “Yellowstone” creator Taylor Sheridan actually kill off any of his leads? Probably not. (Sheridan’s central antihero, the grizzled cowboy power-broker John Dutton, is played by Kevin Costner, one of the show’s producers.) After a season which saw the Duttons beset by investment bankers, environmental activists and revenge-minded outlaws, a few bombs and machine-guns shouldn’t keep them down too long.NOV. 20‘The Great’ Season 2Elle Fanning returns as Catherine II and Nicholas Hoult as Peter III in season two of the satirical dramedy “The Great,” an “occasionally true” look back at the tumultuous marriage between a cruel Russian emperor and his ambitious, coup-minded young bride. Gillian Anderson joins the cast this season, playing Catherine’s mother, who tries to manipulate things behind the scenes as her daughter prepares to become a mother herself. Expect more of the creator Tony McNamara’s puckish mix of purposeful anachronisms and courtly intrigue.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      The Best Movies and TV Shows New to Netflix, Amazon and Stan in Australia in October

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      Our picks for October, including ‘Colin in Black & White,’ ‘Poltergeist’ and ‘Diana: The Musical’Every month, streaming services in Australia add a new batch of movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for October.New to NetflixOCT. 1‘Diana: The Musical’The writing and composing team of David Bryan and Joe DiPietro — who won four Tonys, including Best Musical, for their show “Memphis” — reunite for this high-energy, rock ’n’ roll fueled version of the Princess Diana saga. Jeanna de Waal plays the popular, scandal-plagued royal, in a story about her seemingly storybook romance with Prince Charles (Roe Hartrampf) and its unhappy ending. “Diana: The Musical” officially opens on Broadway later this year, but the cast and crew taped a performance over the summer, giving theater fans who can’t make it to New York a chance to see the show.‘The Guilty’In this taut mystery-thriller, Jake Gyllenhaal plays a dedicated but overzealous police officer, who is stuck working at a dispatch desk when he gets a call from a woman (Riley Keough) who claims to be in fear for her life. The director Antoine Fuqua and the screenwriter Nic Pizzolatto follow the lead of the intense 2018 Danish film on which “The Guilty” is based, telling the story mostly from inside the police station. The hero scrambles to use all the investigative resources available to him from his computer and his phone, to try to figure out how to stop what may or may not be a crime in progress.‘Maid’Netflix‘Maid’Based on Stephanie Land’s memoir, the mini-series “Maid” stars Margaret Qualley as a broke single mother named Alex, with very few viable options for work, child-care or safe housing. When she takes a job working for a cleaning service catering to wealthy families in the Pacific Northwest, Alex becomes acutely aware of how much her survival depends on a steady paycheck and a lot of good luck. Qualley gives an outstanding performance in this riveting drama, which turns something as simple as having gas money (or a functioning car) into a source of nail-biting tension.OCT. 6‘There’s Someone Inside Your House’The director Patrick Brice (best-known for the offbeat genre films “Creep” and “Corporate Animals”) and the screenwriter Henry Gayden (who co-wrote the lively superhero movie “Shazam!”) have adapted Stephanie Perkins’s young adult novel “There’s Someone Inside Your House” into a different kind of teen horror movie. Sydney Park plays Makani, the new girl at a Nebraska high school where students with dark secrets are being stalked by a serial killer who wears a mask that resembles the victims’ faces. While these kids try to dodge murder, they also hustle to avoid having their deepest regrets made public.‘The Baby-Sitters Club’ Season 2One of 2020s most delightful surprises returns for a second season of family-friendly television. Based on Ann M. Martin’s beloved book series, “The Baby-Sitters Club” is about a circle of industrious teenage friends who run a child-care business while also helping each other with their problems. The show uses the plots of the novels as a starting point for modern stories about school, parents, relationships and responsibility.‘Colin in Black & White’NetflixOCT. 29‘Colin in Black & White’The Colin in the title of “Colin in Black & White” is Colin Kaepernick, the former NFL quarterback and social activist who sparked controversy across the United States when he started kneeling before football games during the singing of the national anthem. Here, Kaepernick and the producer-director Ava DuVernay tell the athlete’s story by looking back at his childhood, revisiting moments when the biracial Colin (Jaden Michael) came into conflict with his coaches, his classmates and his adoptive white parents (played by Nick Offerman and Mary-Louise Parker) as he tried to embrace his cultural roots.Also arriving: “On My Block” (Oct. 4), “Backing Impossible” Season 1 (Oct. 6), “Pretty Smart” (Oct. 8), “Bright: Samurai Soul” (Oct. 12), “Convergence: Courage in a Crisis” (Oct. 12), “The Movies That Made Us” Season 3 (Oct. 12), “The Four of Us” (Oct. 15), “Karma’s World” (Oct. 15), “You” Season 3 (Oct. 15), “Found” (Oct. 20), “Night Teeth” (Oct. 20), “Stuck Together” (Oct. 20), “Sex, Love & goop” (Oct. 21), “Inside Job” (Oct. 22), “Locke & Key” Season 2 (Oct. 22), “Maya and the Three” (Oct. 22), “Hypnotic” (Oct. 27), “Army of Thieves” (Oct. 29).New to Stan‘Sort Of’StanOCT. 6‘Sort of’ Season 1This Canadian dramedy stars Bilal Baig as Sabi, a gender-fluid child of Pakistani immigrants. While working as a nanny by day and a bartender by night, Sabi tries to maintain meaningful relationships with both their traditionalist family and their L.G.B.T.Q. friends — two very different factions who are sometimes equally confounded by what it means to be nonbinary. This is a show about a person making a space for themselves, outside of the conventional categories.Oct. 8‘One of Us Is Lying’ Season 1Like the Karen M. McManus young adult mystery novel on which it’s based, the teen drama series “One of Us Is Lying” is part “The Breakfast Club,” part “Gossip Girl” and part Agatha Christie whodunit. When five students are framed by a troublemaking peer and stuck in after-school detention, four of them become murder suspects after one of their group — an incorrigible gossip named Simon (Mark McKenna) — drops dead under strange circumstances. To clear their names, the other kids work together, forming an “us against the world” bond as their secrets become public.OCT. 16‘Boogie Nights’The cinephile favorite writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson has a new movie coming out later this year: “Licorice Pizza,” a teen dramedy set in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley in the 1970s. So now is the perfect time to revisit Anderson’s breakthrough film, 1997’s “Boogie Nights,” also set in the Valley in the ’70s (and ’80s). Ostensibly the story of a fast-living, sweet-natured porn star named Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg), “Boogie Nights” is really about L.A. misfits forming a makeshift family and then fighting to hold it together as drugs, money, fame and changing cultural attitudes start pulling everything apart.OCT. 21‘Poltergeist’Looking for some classic horror this October? You can’t go wrong with 1982’s “Poltergeist,” a witty and frightful tale about ancient spirits terrorizing a pristine new suburban subdivision. Directed by Tobe Hooper (best-known for “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre”) and produced and co-written by Steven Spielberg (riding high at the time from the success of “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “E.T.”), “Poltergeist” starts out as a dryly funny portrait of a pleasant middle-class family. Then all hell breaks loose, turning an ordinary American neighborhood into a village of the damned.OCT. 28‘Love Life’ Season 2The romantic comedy anthology series “Love Life” returns for a second season with a new story, featuring a few of the first season’s characters in smaller roles (including last year’s protagonist Darby, played by the show’s co-producer Anna Kendrick). This time out, William Jackson Harper takes the lead as Marcus, a New Yorker still reeling from a recent divorce from the woman he thought would be his partner for life. As he re-enters the dating world, which has changed drastically since the last time tried to find a mate, Marcus takes the opportunity to re-evaluate what he really wants from a relationship.Also arriving: “A Good Man” Season 1 (Oct. 13), “Canada’s Drag Race” Season 2 (Oct. 15), “Hightown” Season 2 (Oct. 17), “All American” Season 4 (Oct. 26), “The Last O.G.” Season 4 (Oct. 27), “Sisterhood” Season 1 (Oct. 29), “Walker” Season 2 (Oct. 29).New to Amazon‘Welcome to the Blumhouse’ Season 2AmazonOCT. 1‘Welcome to the Blumhouse’ Season 2The second round of original feature-length horror films for Blumhouse Productions’ anthology series “Welcome to the Blumhouse” follows a slightly different formula from last year’s batch. The movies “Bingo Hell” (about senior citizens protecting their gentrifying neighborhood from a demonic villain), “Black as Night” (about a New Orleans teen hunting vampires who prey on the homeless), “Madres” (about Mexican American migrant workers plagued by terrifying premonitions), and “The Manor” (about a nursing home under siege from supernatural forces) put unique twists on conventional genre fare, telling stories about people on society’s margins who battle insidious evils.OCT. 15‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’ Season 1Based on a 1973 Lois Duncan horror novel (and its hit 1997 movie adaptation) the teen slasher series “I Know What You Did Last Summer” follows a group of high school friends and acquaintances whose lives change after a terrible accident. As a serial killer targets the kids involved in a fatal car wreck, they realize they have to abandon their carefully crafted public personas so they can solve the mystery of who knows their terrible secret.OCT. 29‘Fairfax’ Season 1In this edgy animated satire, the voice actors Skyler Gisondo, Kiersey Clemons, Peter Kim and Jaboukie Young-White play a group of Los Angeles teens who dedicate most of their energy and talent to becoming social media influencers. “Fairfax” is partly a knowing look at plugged-in American youth in the 2020s, and partly an absurdist comedy in which the pursuit of clout frequently turns into surreal adventures.Also arriving: “All or Nothing: Toronto Maple Leafs” (Oct. 1), “My Name Is Pauli Murray” (Oct. 1), “Justin Bieber: Our World” (Oct. 8). More

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      The Best Movies and TV Shows New to Netflix, Amazon and Stan in Australia in September

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      Our picks for September, including ‘Billions,’ ‘Goliath’ and ‘Worth’Every month, streaming services in Australia add a new batch of movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for September.New to NetflixSEPT. 2‘Q-Force’ Season 1The animated series “Q-Force” is both a campy social satire and a parody of over-the-top action-adventure movies. It follows the exploits of a team of secret agents who are frequently undervalued by their government handlers, because many of these superspies are openly gay. Sean Hayes cocreated the show and also voices the main character, Agent Steve Maryweather (dubbed “Agent Mary” by his dubious bosses). Wanda Sykes, Matt Rogers and Patti Harrison voice some of the hero’s colleagues, who have to fight both the nation’s enemies and their peer’s prejudices.SEPT. 3‘Worth’Kenneth Feinberg was the attorney assigned by the U.S. government to help manage its 9/11 compensation fund, intended to get the terrorist attacks’ survivors and the victims’ families paid quickly — while saving American businesses from potentially devastating lawsuits. In the provocative drama “Worth,” Michael Keaton plays Feinberg as a well-meaning pragmatist, who changes his way of thinking about the project after many of his potential payees take offense at the idea of putting dollar values on human lives. Sara Colangelo directed and Max Borenstein wrote this film, which has a unique take on the true cost of 9/11.‘Blood Brothers: Malcolm X & Muhammad Ali’NetflixSEPT. 9‘Blood Brothers: Malcolm X & Muhammad Ali’The boxer Muhammad Ali and the activist Malcolm X were close friends for a few years in the early 1960s, leaning on each other for advice and support at a time when they were each defying an establishment determined to silence them. The director Marcus A. Clarke’s documentary “Blood Brothers” — based on a book by Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith — uses new interviews and vintage footage to tell the story of how these two men urged each other on, while also examining the circumstances that eventually drove them apart.SEPT. 10‘Kate’In this gritty thriller, Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays the title character: a skilled assassin who gets dosed with a deadly poison, leaving her with 24 hours to find out who is trying to kill her. As she races through Tokyo, Kate seeks the guidance of her longtime handler, Varrick (Woody Harrelson), while also trying to protect a teenager, Ani (Miku Martineau), who is related to one of her former targets. This story of violence and redemption puts an all-too-rare spotlight on Winstead, a fine actress and a compelling action heroine.‘Chicago Party Aunt’NetflixSEPT. 17‘Chicago Party Aunt’ Season 1The actor and comedian Chris Witaske is probably best-known as part of the cast of the Netflix series “Love,” but for several years Witaske has also run a Twitter account called “Chicago Party Aunt,” writing in the voice of a fictional Windy City long-timer who has spent some wild nights with nearly every famous Chicagoan. That Twitter feed has now been adapted into an animated series, with Lauren Ash voicing the legendary libertine Diane Dunbrowski, who knows how to find a good time in every neighborhood dive from Wrigleyville to Armour Square.SEPT. 22‘Monsters Inside: The 24 Faces of Billy Milligan’In the late 1970s, an Ohio man named Billy Milligan was accused of being a serial rapist. He was ultimately committed to a mental hospital instead of a prison term, after a team of psychiatrists determined that Milligan suffered from multiple personality disorder, and thus had no conscious awareness of having committed his crimes. The four-part docu-series “Monsters Inside: The 24 Faces of Billy Milligan” looks back at a trial and verdict which still raise a lot of questions today about mental health and justice.SEPT. 24‘Midnight Mass’The writer-director Mike Flanagan — the creator of Netflix’s “The Haunting of Hill House” — combines supernatural horror with small-town melodrama in this mini-series about a floundering fishing community which sees its fortunes start to change with the arrival of a mysterious new Catholic priest, Father Paul (Hamish Linklater). The increasingly strange and possibly dangerous phenomena that sweep across this tiny island cause the locals to face their past mistakes and regrets. Particularly shaken up is Riley Flynn (Zach Gilford), an ex-con hoping to repair his broken life without the aid of any shady miracles.Also arriving: “Afterlife of the Party” (Sept. 2), “Money Heist” Season 5, Part 1 (Sept. 3), “Kid Cosmic” Season 2 (Sept. 7), “Into the Night” Season 2 (Sept. 8), “JJ+E” (Sept. 8), “Lucifer” Season 6 (Sept. 10), “Metal Shop Masters” (Sept. 10), “Pokémon Master Journey: The Series” Part 1 (Sept. 10), “Prey” (Sept. 10), “Nailed It!” Season 6 (Sept. 15), “Schumacher” (Sept. 15), “Too Hot to Handle: Latino” (Sept. 15), “Sex Education” Season 3 (Sept. 17), “Confessions of an Invisible Girl” (Sept. 22), “Dear White People” Season 4 (Sept. 22), “My Little Pony: A New Generation” (Sept. 24), “Ada Twist, Scientist” (Sept. 28), “Sounds Like Love” (Sept. 29), “Love 101” Season 2 (Sept. 30).New to Stan‘Minari’StanSEPT. 1‘Animaniacs’ Season 1Aimed primarily at the ’90s kids who grew up watching the original “Animaniacs,” this revival mostly sticks with what fans loved the first time: zany irreverence, a blizzard of pop-culture references, and an animation style that is broadly cartoony and un-slick. The new series features the same core characters: the kooky siblings Yakko, Wakko and Dot, and the would-be world-dominating mice Pinky and the Brain. The show features a lot of the same entertaining schtick, balancing third-wall-breaking, “Looney Tunes”-style slapstick adventures with some cleverly snarky songs.SEPT. 2‘The Dissident’Bryan Fogel’s documentary “The Dissident” is an illuminating piece of investigative journalism, digging into both the scandalous murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the rise of tech-savvy authoritarian regimes around the world. The film is about how Khashoggi and the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — who has been accused of ordering the reporter’s assassination — each used the media to shape the international community’s opinions about the future of the Arab world. Fogel asks his audience to consider what becomes of society if the powerful decide which voices are heard and which crimes go unpunished.‘Billions’StanSEPT. 6‘Billions’ Season 5, Part 2This popular drama about the rivalries of the mega-rich was in the middle of another great season last year when COVID-19 shut down production. The creative team was finally able to reassemble to shoot the last five episodes, continuing a story which has seen the venture capitalist Bobby Axelrod (Damian Lewis) try to buy respectability by founding his own bank, while the ruthless U.S. attorney Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti) is using every quasi-legal method at his disposal to bring Bobby down. “Billions” fans have been waiting for over a year to see how the season ends; they should savor every juicy plot twist still to come.SEPT. 16‘Minari’Youn Yuh-jung won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role in the writer-director Lee Isaac Chung’s semi-autobiographical dramedy “Minari,” about a Korean immigrant named Jacob (Steven Yeun) and his wife Monica (Yeri Han), who move to rural Arkansas to establish a produce farm. Youn plays Monica’s mother, who joins the family and urges them to preserve their cultural traditions as they pursue their American dream. Chung surrounds his leads with vivid detail, placing the humor, the anxiety and the hope of this family in the context of the sometimes welcoming and sometimes alienating Southern state where they try to make a home.SEPT. 26‘Black Mafia Family’The producing team of Randy Huggins and Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson (best-known for the “Power” franchise) turn to the true crime genre for their latest series, which begins in Detroit in the late 1980s. Demetrius “Lil Meech” Flenory Jr. plays his own father, “Big Meech,” who alongside his brother Terry “Southwest T” Flenory (Da’Vinchi) rose from low-level drug trafficking to become nationwide gang bosses and players in the hip-hop industry. As with Huggins’ and Jackson’s other shows, expect “Black Mafia Family” to be frank about what it takes to get ahead in the criminal underworld — and about the toll it takes on those who succeed.Also arriving: “The Zhu Zhus” Season 1 (Sept. 1), “Code 404” Season 2 (Sept. 2), “Les Misérables” Season 1 (Sept. 2), “A.P. Bio” Season 4 (Sept. 3), “Jamie’s American Road Trip” Season 1 (Sept. 3), “Scaredy Squirrel” Season 1 (Sept. 3), “Dead Pixels” Season 2 (Sept. 7), “Where the Wild Men Are” Season 1 (Sept. 8), “Wu-Tang: An American Saga” Season 2 (Sept. 9), “Spliced” Season 1 (Sept. 10), “Love, Inevitably” (Sept. 10), “The Remarkable Mr. King” Season 1 (Sept. 10), “The Departed” (Sept. 12), “Liar” Season 2 (Sept. 15), “Storks” (Sept. 15), “The Fear” Season 1 (Sept. 16), “Streamline” (Sept. 16), “They Call Me Dr. Miami” (Sept. 19), “Pacific Rim” (Sept. 21), “New Amsterdam” Season 4 (Sept. 22), “Home Economics” Season 2 (Sept. 23), “Trigonometry” Season 1 (Sept. 23), “The Town” (Sept. 26), “Supernova” (Sept. 28), “Silk Road” (Sept. 30).New to Amazon‘Everybody’s Talking About Jamie’AmazonSEPT. 17‘Everybody’s Talking About Jamie’The title character in the hit British stage musical “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie” is a teenage boy who challenges the bullies at his school and ultimately wins over his classmates when he opens up about his dream of becoming a drag performer. In the movie version, Max Harwood plays Jamie, while Richard E. Grant plays one of his drag mentors and Sharon Horgan plays a teacher who urges the youngster to get back into the closet. The show’s writer Tom MacRae also wrote the lyrics to its songs, set to upbeat and crowd-pleasing music by Dan Gillespie Sells.SEPT. 24‘Goliath’ Season 4In the fourth and final season of this moody, noir-influenced legal drama, the underdog attorney Billy McBride (played by Billy Bob Thornton, in peak form) tackles the big opioid companies, joining his ambitious colleague Patty (Nina Arianda) at a high-class San Francisco firm. “Goliath” has quietly been one of TV’s best crime shows since its 2016 debut; and while it’s too bad it’s coming to an end, at least it’s going out with another season of tense confrontations, big surprises, and stellar performances.Also arriving: “Cinderella” (Sept. 3), “LuLaRich” (Sept. 10), “Pretty Hard Cases” (Sept. 10), “The Voyeurs” (Sept. 10), “Do, Re & Mi” (Sept. 17), “The Mad Women’s Ball” (Sept. 17). More