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

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

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      ‘No Man of God’ Review: Buddying Up to Bundy

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      The film dramatizes what it sees as the rapport between an F.B.I. profiler and the serial killer.“No Man of God” can’t help but play like the special Ted Bundy episode of “Mindhunter” we haven’t gotten to see yet. The movie, directed by Amber Sealey, dramatizes what it sees as the rapport that developed between Bundy (Luke Kirby) and the F.B.I. profiler Bill Hagmaier (Elijah Wood), who visited Bundy in prison and tried to pick his brain.While they aren’t the only two characters — Robert Patrick appears as Hagmaier’s boss, and Aleksa Palladino plays a lawyer trying to get Bundy a reprieve from execution — the movie is at heart a two-hander, with tense scenes of Bundy and Hagmaier interrogating each another. Will Hagmaier get Bundy to share every grisly detail? Or will Bundy crack him? In this telling, they grow comfortable enough for at least Bundy to consider it a friendship.For anyone who has heard audio of Bundy, Kirby’s impersonation will sound chillingly close to the real killer’s deadened, yet at times disturbingly raffish, cadence. Wood is persuasive, too, although Kit Lesser’s script writes the character as a cliché: the agent who gets too close.Introductory text says the film is inspired by F.B.I. transcripts, recordings and Hagmaier’s recollections, but the conversations carry a distinct echo of other serial-killer movies. Bundy wants to convince Hagmaier that he, too, would be capable of murder, and that they think similar thoughts. The mind meld becomes so intense that when Bundy unburdens himself toward the end, Sealey employs crosscutting that draws attention to the connections between them, and has Hagmaier recite dialogue that should logically be coming out of Bundy’s mouth. The film’s Hagmaier may finally have gotten inside Bundy’s head, but — even in the forthrightly nonrealistic context of the sequence — the mental-linkage conceit is absurd.No Man of GodNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Amazon, Apple TV and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More