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      Stream These 10 Movies Before They Leave Netflix in August

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      We’ve rounded up the best of what’s leaving this month, which includes a lot of favorites, among them two Oscar winners. Catch them while you can.Two recent (and worthy) Oscar winners lead the list of titles exiting Netflix in the United States this month, alongside two horror favorites, two action extravaganzas and one of the most beloved romantic comedies of its time. (Dates indicate the final day a title is available.)‘Les Misérables’ (Aug. 15)Anne Hathaway won the Academy Award for best supporting actress for her turn in this adaptation of the musical theater sensation, itself adapted from the novel by Victor Hugo. The director, Tom Hooper (“The King’s Speech”), shot live performances of the song on set — most movie musicals feature actors lip-syncing to studio recordings — and the unconventional technique made for some remarkably raw and vulnerable performances, especially in the case of Hathaway’s show stopper “I Dreamed a Dream.” Some of Hooper’s other risks don’t pay off as handsomely (casting Russell Crowe in a role requiring a strong singer was … a choice), but this one is worth streaming for Hathaway’s electric work alone.Stream it here.‘If Beale Street Could Talk’ (Aug. 31)Barry Jenkins followed up the triumph of “Moonlight” with this emotionally resonant adaptation of the novel by James Baldwin. Preserving the novel’s original setting, Jenkins beautifully recreates the Harlem of the 1970s, in which Fonny (Stephan James) and Tish (KiKi Layne) fall in love and begin to make a life, only to have it interrupted by the systemic forces around them. Regina King won an Oscar for best supporting actress, summoning her considerable force and sensitivity as Tish’s mother, who takes on a doomed mission to clear Fonny’s name; Brian Tyree Henry is unforgettable as an old friend who becomes a cautionary tale.Stream it here.‘The Italian Job’ (Aug. 31)So much of the original “Italian Job” is so delightfully but specifically of its late-60s Swinging London moment that it would seem a fool’s errand not only to remake it but also to update it. F. Gary Gray’s 2003 version pulls it off by taking a minimalist approach, choosing simply to adopt the original film’s most memorable elements (big heist, colorful crew, Mini-Coopers) and otherwise basically start from scratch. The cast — including Yasiin Bey, Seth Green, Edward Norton, Donald Sutherland, Jason Statham, Charlize Theron and Mark Wahlberg — is charismatic, the set pieces are crisply executed, and the big climax is an all-timer.Stream it here.‘A Knight’s Tale’ (Aug. 31)Another period musical, this one from the writer and director Brian Helgeland (an Oscar winner for co-writing the “L.A. Confidential” screenplay), takes a similar swing-for-the-fences approach, scoring its story of jousting and romance in 14th century England with ’70s rock hits like “We Will Rock You” and “Takin’ Care of Business.” It’s wildly anachronistic but joyfully so, as Helgeland and his attractive cast — including the charismatic golden boy Heath Ledger, the striking ingénue Shannyn Sossamon and the sneeringly villainous scene-stealer Rufus Sewell — strike just the right balance of good humor and old-fashioned earnestness.Stream it here.‘Mean Girls’ (Aug. 31)Tina Fey was still known only as a writer and an occasional on-camera performer at “Saturday Night Live” when she penned this inventively loose adaptation of the nonfiction study “Queen Bees and Wannabes,” by Rosalind Wiseman. Fey dramatizes Wiseman’s anthropological survey of teenage clique culture by telling the tale of Cady (Lindsay Lohan), a longtime home-schooler entering the hellscape of high school life for the first time. The director Mark Waters, who deftly directed Lohan in the previous year’s “Freaky Friday” remake, confidently orchestrates the curricular chaos, which includes brief but hilarious appearances by Fey and her “S.N.L.” castmates Ana Gasteyer, Tim Meadows and Amy Poehler, and by then-up-and-comers like Lizzy Caplan, Rachel McAdams and Amanda Seyfried.Stream it here.‘Paranormal Activity’ (Aug. 31)The beauty of horror, for the low-budget filmmaker attempting to break into the biz, is that it doesn’t require stars, expensive locations or even (if you do it right) elaborate special effects. The genre is the star, and if a filmmaker can create tension and suspense with minimal resources, the cash can roll in. That’s certainly what happened with this 2009 shocker, put together on a shoestring budget of $10,000 and grossing just shy of $200 million worldwide. The movie’s writer, director and editor, Oren Peli, cleverly turns his technological shortcomings into bonuses, crafting a found-footage story of things going bump in the night with gooseflesh raising inventiveness.Stream it here.‘The Ring’ (Aug. 31)Hideo Nakata’s 1998 Japanese horror thriller “Ringu” had such a beautifully simple but arresting premise — a videotape is so disturbing that anyone who watches it will die within days — that it was probably only a matter of time before it was remade for American audiences. Gore Verbinski’s 2002 variation can’t quite pack the novelty punch of the original, but it is deliciously unnerving all the same, collecting heavy helpings of dread and perturbing imagery and seasoning them with a light touch of meta-commentary. (Are we, the horror movie audience, any wiser than those poor souls onscreen?) Naomi Watts provides a rooting interest as the cynical reporter investigating the tape’s mysterious origins and the spell it casts.Stream it here.‘Salt’ (Aug. 31)Angelina Jolie fronted her fair share of action movies, but she never really seemed to find the right vehicle for her particular talents. Except this once. In Evelyn Salt — a clever super spy who may be a Russian mole, or a C.I.A. operative, or both, or something else entirely — Jolie lands on the perfect role for her distinctive blend of butt-kicking athleticism, sensuality and intelligence. She also has the right director for the job in Phillip Noyce, the spy movie specialist (his filmography includes “Patriot Games” and “Clear and Present Danger”) who can navigate breathless action sequences and espionage exposition with equal aplomb.Stream it here.‘She’s Gotta Have It’ (Aug. 31)Spike Lee helped launch the ’90s indie movement and a renewed interest in Black cinema, to say nothing of his own durable career, with this, his 1986 feature debut. Lee writes, directs, edits and memorably co-stars as Mars Blackmon, one of the three men vying for the physical and emotional attention of Nola Darling (Tracy Camilla Johns), a Brooklyn graphic artist who has decided not to settle for any one suitor. The picture’s low-budget seams occasionally show, and its sexual politics are occasionally out of date (particularly in the third act). But the cinematic energy, fierce comic spirit and unflinching realism of Lee’s best work is already on display in this formative effort, which also inspired a recent Netflix series adaptation.Stream it here.‘Sleepless in Seattle’ (Aug. 31)The writer and director Nora Ephron recaptured the box office magic of “When Harry Met Sally” (which she wrote for the director Rob Reiner) with this sparklingly romantic and sweetly funny riff on “An Affair to Remember” (and its own various remakes and iterations). Tom Hanks stars as a single father and recent widower whose searching call to a late-night radio talk show goes the mid-90s equivalent of viral; Meg Ryan is a soon-to-be-wed journalist who falls for this voice in the night and pursues his affections, against all odds (and her better judgment).Stream it here. More

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      Review: In ‘Amour,’ Putting a Palme d’Or Winner Onstage

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      An adaptation of Michael Haneke’s 2012 movie at the Salzburg Festival eschews cinematic realism, instead taking a highly stylized approach.“How can I speak of love when I’m dead?” runs a powerful line in “Amour,” a stage adaptation of Michael Haneke’s 2012 film that premiered on Sunday at the Salzburg Festival, in Austria.Love and death are, of course, the two great themes of art, but rarely have they been brought together so hauntingly as in Haneke’s film, a portrait of an elderly couple forced to confront the issue of when life is no longer worth living. Told in Haneke’s characteristically severe style, the film earned the Austrian director both a Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and an Oscar for best foreign language film.Karin Henkel, the adaptation’s director, eschews the film’s realism, opting instead for a highly stylized and self-consciously artificial staging that achieves its visceral impact through a combination of Brechtian estrangement techniques, emotionally naked performances and biographical monologues written by onstage extras.Henkel scored a triumph in Salzburg two summers ago with “Richard the Kid and the King,” a sweeping epic of Shakespeare’s bloodthirsty monarch that ran to four hours. The German director’s “Amour” — a co-production with the Münchner Kammerspiele theater, in Munich, where it will run in late October — is as affectingly tender as her earlier Salzburg outing was grimly savage.At the beginning of the production, the stage is dominated by a white tunnel, whose pristine, antiseptic interior is progressively sullied: Its walls written on with watery black paint, its floor stained by thick black ink that trickles onto the performers, and mounds of dry earth that fall in heaps from the ceiling. One of the characters reclines on a metal-frame hospital bed that begins to resemble a medieval torture device when operated by a zealous nurse.The tunnel, with its clinical associations, is eventually dismantled, revealing an unadorned stage strewn with an assortment of chairs, a piano, microphone stands and stage lights. Muriel Gerstner’s stage design is a constant negotiation between sterile everyday objects (harshly lit by Stephan Mariani) and elemental imagery of earth, water and flowers.Like the film, however, this reimagining of “Amour” is anchored by its two central performances. Unlike the film, which starred two aging French cinema greats, the stage version is ignited by a dose of counterintuitive casting.Jung is 69 and Bach, 38. In Haneke’s movie, the actors who played their characters were in their mid-80s. Matthias HornKatharina Bach, who is just 38, brings unexpected vitality and deep pathos to her portrayal of Anne, an elderly music teacher who is paralyzed by a stroke. (Emmanuelle Riva was in her mid-80s when she played the same role in Haneke’s movie.) Bach’s is a fitful and tormented performance, marked by intense physical and dramatic control. As Georges, Anne’s still-vigorous husband, André Jung, 69, brings an embittered and defiant spirit that is a thoughtful departure from Jean-Louis Trintignant’s pained and subtle performance in the film.The German-language stage adaptation, by Henkel and the dramaturg Tobias Schuster, hews closely to the French screenplay. At the same time, they employ strategies to defamiliarize the piece. The dialogue is heightened by frequent, often uncanny repetition. And many of the script’s stage directions are read out loud by two actors, Joyce Sanhá and Christian Löber, whose limber performances — as narrators, nurses and other characters — add to the production’s anxious, off-kilter energy.Henkel’s greatest gamble is including a twelve-person chorus of nonprofessional extras. Each of them is old, infirm or in mourning, and, although they don’t speak much onstage, they have written moving testimonies about living with health conditions, or losing loved ones to illness that are recited as monologues by the main cast. In the wrong directorial hands, this sort of intervention could easily have curdled into sentimentality. Here, however, the emotional charge of these testimonies is balanced by understatement and restraint. By a similar token, the production’s depiction and discussion of euthanasia, while sometimes shocking, resists moralizing.Hovering somewhere between the cast of extras and the main performers is the actress Nine Manthei, a little girl who acts as an ambiguous intermediary. Is she a protecting angel? The personification of Anne’s soul? Along with Bach’s skillful performance, Manthei’s poise and onstage presence suggests a double exposure of Anne as an old woman and a child.“Old age might be tragic, but it is not individual,” we hear Haneke’s voice say in an excerpt from an interview about “Amour” that plays during the production.More than a decade ago, Haneke employed his formal austerity and emotional restraint to immerse us in one elderly couple’s tragedy. But where film encourages realism, theater can embrace allegory and abstraction. With her sensitive, at times idiosyncratic, approach to this same material, Henkel uses her theatrical artistry to reach the universal.AmourThrough Aug. 10 at the Salzburg Festival, in Salzburg, Austria; salzburgerfestspiele.at. More

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      Paul Reubens Was More Than Pee-wee. Here are 8 Great Performances.

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      He played dozens of memorable roles on big and small screens throughout his career. We’ve rounded up what to watch and where to watch it.Paul Reubens, who died on Sunday at age 70, will always be remembered for his beloved alter ego, the perpetually childlike Pee-wee Herman — a character so popular that it was able to carry a stage show, movies and a TV series. But Reubens also made memorable impressions playing a variety of supporting characters of the big and small screens — like Penguin’s father in “Batman Returns” and the turtleneck-wearing fixer Mr. Vargas in “The Blacklist,” just to name a few out of dozens.Looking for more? Here is a list of Reubens’s greatest hits and how to watch them. (Note that his recurring Emmy-nominated turn on “Murphy Brown” as the network president’s nephew is not included because that series’s original run is not streaming. Start the petition!)‘Pee-wee’s Big Adventure’ (1985)Rent or buy it on most major platforms.This film may well be one of the most extravagantly weird comedies of the 1980s — and possibly ever. A breakthrough for both Reubens and the director Tim Burton, the film built on the Reubens’s live show, which had been captured for an HBO special in 1981 (and is available on Max). Strapped into a fitted gray suit with a bright red bow tie, his face a collection of sharp angles in a kid’s idea of Kabuki makeup, Pee-wee is simultaneously innocent and crafty, unencumbered by social mores and deliciously arch, accessible to all and cultishly weird. And Reubens brought him to life in a performance of utter physical and verbal precision.‘Pee-wee’s Playhouse’ (1986-1990)Buy it on several major platforms.Like the finest children’s shows, this series delighted both the younger set and its parents. The first could laugh at Pee-wee’s antics and his gallery of wacky friends, while the second would get a kick out of the double entendres, the brilliant art direction and the surreal guest stars — like Grace Jones turning up to sing “The Little Drummer Boy” in a Christmas special. The show, which aired for five seasons on CBS on Saturday mornings, remains one of the oddest productions to ever land on American televisions.‘Flight of the Navigator’ (1986)Stream it on Disney+.Reubens had distinctive intonations, and he put them to good use in extensive voice work, especially during the 2010s. An earlier example is this family friendly science-fiction film from 1986 in which he voiced Max, the computer helming the Trimaxion Drone Ship on which the pint-size hero, David (Joey Cramer), found himself. Sadly, Reubens’s second outing with the movie’s director, Randal Kleiser, did not turn out quite as charmingly: It was “Big Top Pee-wee,” the disappointing sequel to “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.” (The final entry in the movie trilogy, “Pee-wee’s Big Holiday,” premiered on Netflix in 2016.)‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ (1992)Stream it on Max.The year after Reubens’s career was temporarily derailed by indecent exposure charges in 1991, he began quietly making his way back with small, quirky roles like Amilyn, the henchman of a vampire kingpin (Rutger Hauer), in the original “Buffy” movie. Sporting a dashing goatee and looking as if he’d just escaped from a prog-rock band, Reubens chewed the scenery with gusto. He fully embraced camp in a death-by-stake scene that went over the top, and then did not even stop there. (It continued after the end credits.)‘The Nightmare Before Christmas’ (1993)Stream it on Disney+.Reubens reunited with Burton for this stop-motion classic in which he voiced Lock, who with Shock (Catherine O’Hara) and Barrel (the composer Danny Elfman, who did the music for “Big Adventure”) forms a trio of minions who are “Halloween’s finest trick-or-treaters.” Together, they assist the villain Oogie Boogie (Ken Page) and, most important, sing “Kidnap the Sandy Claws.” Reubens and his team even went on to perform the song live.‘30 Rock’ (2007)Stream it on Hulu and Peacock.Reubens’s gift for the, shall we say, unusual found one of its most outlandishly grotesque outlets with the simultaneously funny and unsettling Prince Gerhardt — an inbred royal with a terrifying left hand who felt as if a John Waters character had suddenly invaded a prime-time sitcom. Sadly, Gerhardt appears only in Episode 12 of the show’s first season.‘Portlandia’ (2015)Stream it on AMC+; rent or buy it on most major platforms.As the lawyer defending a couple of Goths played by Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein in the series’s Season 5 finale, Reubens gets a fitting speech that includes the line “Being weird is not a crime!” He turns it into a statement of pride and a rallying cry, as well as a moment of, well, weirdness.‘Mosaic’ (2018)Stream it on Max.Reubens was terrific as the gay best friend of a successful author and illustrator played by Sharon Stone in this Utah-set murder drama from Steven Soderbergh and Ed Solomon. Sardonic and supportive, his character, J.C. Schiffer, was the dream confidante, and Reubens beautifully underplayed him. For some insights into his sensibility, you can read his account of shooting the series on his official website, complete with candid photos. More

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      In Pee-wee Herman, Joy and Fun Got Flat-Out Weird

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      Paul Reubens committed to profound silliness without ever going mean or dark — though some peers were disappointed that he focused on one character.Of all the great flesh-and-blood cartoons of 1980s popular culture — Hulk Hogan, Madonna, Mr. T — the one easiest for small children to relate to was Pee-wee Herman. He made the same kind of obnoxious jokes we did (“I know you are but what am I?”), in a similar, if more overtly nasal, squeak while capturing an un-self-conscious exuberance that felt deeply familiar.That’s how it felt. In reality, Pee-wee Herman was nothing like us at all, a dreamy man-child in a red bow tie whose sugary smile could curl into a punky scowl. A singular piece of comic performance art for a mass audience, Pee-wee Herman stood out in every form he appeared in, from improv theaters to late-night talk shows to the movies to Saturday morning television.That this character could be so easy to identify with and so singularly, slyly alien at the same time is the stupendous magic trick of his creator, Paul Reubens, a true original who died on Sunday at 70.The first time I saw him do Pee-wee was on “Late Night With David Letterman,” where he was one of the oddballs the show’s executives would spotlight when they couldn’t book real stars. Unlike Brother Theodore, Harvey Pekar or Andy Kaufman, Pee-wee introduced no hostility or even conflict to the show. His appearances on that most ironic of late-night shows were like invasions from Candy Land. He brought toys and disguises, and he would get up and dance even before the music played. There was a joy in his presentation that was bracing. You laughed not because the jokes were funny, but because they were told with such commitment to the fun of it all.Letterman didn’t know what to make of him. You did get the sense that the host enjoyed his guest’s adolescent jerkiness. But there was more there. Even though Pee-wee was a broad character, something about him seemed more real than any conventional comic slinging punchlines or movie star selling a movie. This was a Bugs Bunny level of charisma, built to last.Paul Reubens (born Paul Rubenfeld) started his career doing many characters for the sketch group the Groundlings, and he went on to embody even more extreme characters, including the monocled father of the Penguin in “Batman Returns” and an Austrian prince with an ivory hand in “30 Rock.”But once Pee-wee became a hit with crowds in the 1970s, he mostly abandoned his other roles, to the frustration of Phil Hartman, his improv peer and a future “Saturday Night Live” star, who thought he was wasting his talent focusing on just one part.By the time he was starring in a Pee-wee movie directed by Tim Burton, Reubens was credited only as the writer. Pee-wee Herman played himself. This blurring of character and actor added a sense of mystery, and odd authenticity, to this stylized performance. A natural outsider, Pee-wee excelled at fish-out-of-water comedy. In “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” (1985) a classic comedy that is still Burton’s best movie, Pee-wee finds himself winning over unlikely people in a quest narrative about his search for his bike.He accidentally knocks over the motorcycles of a bunch of grizzled Hells Angels types, before charming them by jumping on the bar and dancing to the Champs’ surf tune “Tequila.” In another bit, he is talking in a telephone booth and trying to explain where he is, so he peeks his head out to sing, “The stars at night are big and bright.” A team of cowboys responds in unison: “Deep in the heart of Texas!”The world of Pee-wee is full of this loopy surrealism that could veer into innuendo but never got dark. It was always welcoming, wildly diverse, profoundly silly. The movie, along with his anarchic Saturday morning children’s show, “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” melded a child’s energy with a love of show business. Reubens, who grew up in Sarasota, Fla., nearby the winter headquarters of Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, managed to imbue such entertainment with the spirit of performance art, while never taking the easy route of going mean or dark. His work just got weirder.Pee-wee’s television stint ended in infamy when Reubens was arrested on a charge of indecent exposure in a porn theater. Late-night hosts pounced, and so did the news media. CBS took reruns of his show off the air. The controversy now seems preposterously overblown. That happened just one year before Sinead O’Connor’s career suffered a blow from her protest on “Saturday Night Live” against sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church — an episode that has come under new examination after her death last week. It’s clear that dopey moralizing scandals are far from a hallmark of our age alone.The one time I talked with Reubens, around seven years ago in an interview, he was, not surprisingly, quite different from his character: thoughtful, reserved, sober-voiced. He was modest about Pee-wee, who eventually returned.No character that beloved, that meme-able, would not be pulled back to action in our current nostalgia-driven culture. There was a Pee-wee Herman Netflix movie and a Broadway show, and, while there were small updates here and there, the character remained in essence the same: giddy, exuberant, singularly strange and primally tapped into childhood.Pee-wee got older but he never grew up. His career is an update on the Peter Pan story, except no one in Neverland would say: “That’s my name. Don’t wear it out.” More

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      ‘Oppenheimer,’ ‘Asteroid City’ and the Meaning of the Mushroom Cloud

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      From the Trinity test to “Oppenheimer” and “Asteroid City,” the symbol of nuclear destruction has held multiple but equally disturbing meanings.Witnesses to the Trinity test, the inaugural atomic bomb experiment in 1945 portrayed in “Oppenheimer,” described the billowing blast in various ways. It was said to resemble a chimney, a parasol, a raspberry and — shades of science fiction — a “convoluting brain.” The physicist Enrico Fermi and others likened the furiously rising cloud in the New Mexico desert to a mushroom, and that became the shape now inextricably associated with nuclear explosions.The enduring shorthand of the mushroom cloud has taken on different meanings over the decades, reflecting fantasies and fears as it boomed and bloomed across American culture, including, most recently, onscreen in “Oppenheimer” and “Asteroid City.” A multiplicity of meanings is appropriate for a weapon that was partly conceived as a symbolic demonstration in the first place, meant to cow Japan into surrender in World War II.Once the cloud appeared, it quickly stood in for that watershed moment in history. By the beginning of nuclear testing at Bikini Atoll in 1946 — meant to measure the effects of such blasts on warships — one reporter referred to the mushroom as “the common symbol of the atomic age.” At a reception to celebrate the first round of tests, the commander of the operation, Vice Admiral William H.P. Blandy, even cut a cake shaped like a mushroom blast.From Armageddon to dessert decoration in a little over a year: The rapid progression captures the wonder-horror duality that the bomb elicited. On the one hand, the looming form fed easily into a military and jingoistic pride. What other instrument of war essentially left a trademark in the sky? On the other, it provoked sheer terror with its vision of godlike destruction funneled straight up to the heavens. The co-pilot of the Enola Gay bomber put it more succinctly: “My God, what have we done?,” words that Oppenheimer echoed with his momentous quotation from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”David Lynch depicted the Trinity test in a hallucinogenic scene in “Twin Peaks: The Return.”ShowtimeAnd yet something so novel and dazzling couldn’t help but make its way into popular culture. If the Bikini test could inspire the name of a swimsuit, then of course the mushroom cloud would be picked up as a titillating marketing gimmick. A few beauty queens were deployed as “Miss Atomic Bomb” and the like, wearing mushroom-shaped headgear or swimwear, part of a general fad for atomic-themed kitsch (as memorably chronicled in the documentary “The Atomic Cafe”). The Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce offered calendars with detonation times for watching the mushroom clouds from desert tests. In Wes Anderson’s desert-set “Asteroid City,” characters also observe an atomic test on the horizon, trooping out of a diner to watch with nonchalance.But a golden era of sci-fi movies in the 1950s ensured that the deadly possibilities of the atomic age were also explored in vivid visual fashion. These mushroom clouds directly addressed new sources of anxiety: the arms race (set off after the Soviets’ 1949 atomic test), the effects of radiation, and the hydrogen bomb and its even bigger boom. Monster and alien movies (and sci-fi book covers) featured the cloud as a modern Pandora’s box, a foolish unleashing of unknown forces.From early on, it could signify the unthinkable — the erasure of civilization — as in Arch Oboler’s movie “Five” (1951), which opens with explosions and a montage of historical monuments. The cloud could represent the beginning or the end (to echo the title of a 1947 docudrama about Oppenheimer). It might be the prelude to a plot about surviving the aftermath of a nuclear blast, or the doomsday finale to a story that has gone very, very wrong. Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove,” from 1964, falls into the second category, concluding with a montage using footage from explosions (including the Trinity test).But Kubrick alters our understanding of the mushroom clouds with the ironic usage of Vera Lynn singing “We’ll Meet Again,” originally a British World War II standard. Viewed silently, the explosions might have induced the usual dread, an emotion that in a way also fed back into awe and fear of military prowess. Kubrick’s peerless satire redirects our focus toward those in power, the absurd-sounding game-theory strategies at work, and the self-serving vanities involved — including the image of Slim Pickens riding the bomb, bronco-style, American soldier as cowboy.All of which undercut the mushroom cloud as totemic image that ends all discussion. It wouldn’t last long: President Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1964 campaign ad “Daisy” distilled the nuclear menace in just under two minutes. This is the cloud as the eternal “or else” of the protecting patriarch. The stakes are too high to ignore, Johnson intones in voice-over, as a girl counts the petals on a flower; the audio segues into a countdown toward an explosion that fills the screen. So, you know, get out and vote!The horrors of the mushroom cloud approached new levels in the 1980s thanks to realistic depictions of global nuclear war. As tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union reached a fevered pitch during the Reagan administration (as if fulfilling the fears of “no nukes” protesters), “The Day After” (1983) broke television ratings records portraying explosions from incoming missiles and the ensuing graphic suffering in Kansas. In Britain, “Threads” (1984) did much the same, while in Japan, Shohei Imamura’s 1989 “Black Rain” dramatized the Hiroshima bombings anew. These films reconnected the near-cliché of the mushroom cloud with its human context of death, destruction and chaos.But in the ensuing decades, the mushroom cloud became the ultimate special effect for blockbusters. James Cameron’s “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” (1991) faithfully replicated the fiery annihilation of a bomb blast, hauntingly explicit but still part of a science-fiction thriller with robots. Three years later, a nuclear explosion was just the icing on the action-adventure cake in Cameron’s “True Lies.” Call it the decadent era of nukes onscreen: Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis embrace after the umpteenth thrilling escape, with a warhead’s mushroom cloud for a romantic backdrop.Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis in “True Lies,” which uses a mushroom cloud as a romantic backdrop.Lightstorm EntertainmentThe entertainment value of disaster briefly lost its appeal in the wake of Sept. 11 (when a number of films were postponed or altered). But atomic devices were useful plot devices with increasing prominence in 2010s blockbusters, deploying the shock of the mushroom cloud whenever useful, as in the jaw-dropping World War II-set opening of “The Wolverine” (2013). When Nagasaki is bombed by the United States, Logan (Hugh Jackman), prisoner of war, shields a Japanese soldier from the blast, thereby rendering the cataclysm as simply part of the X-Men back story.Will the mushroom cloud reacquire the same foreboding quality it had at the height of the Cold War? David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks: The Return” (2017) demonstrated one possibility in its genuinely destabilizing Episode 8, drawing out the full uncanny horror of the atomic age and the possibility of evil. The Trinity test is depicted with a hallucinogenic slow camera movement into the cloud from far away, and in one of the ensuing surreal sequences, a mutant creature hatches on the bomb site years later. Oppenheimer said that his scientists had “known sin,” and Lynch, a voyager into the American unconscious, restores some sense of the atomic blast as locus of a 20th-century original sin.“Oppenheimer,” directed by Christopher Nolan, presents the latest entry in the iconography of the mushroom cloud with its chronicle of the Manhattan Project’s explosive results. We do see the traditional rising plume, but at a certain point, this turns into an IMAX-size wall of flame, blotting out the landscape. It’s a fearsome sight, yet the reaction shots of the observers are just as important. Cillian Murphy’s title character — who is more or less haunted by subatomic particles even in his dreams as a student years earlier — looks briefly disarmed or stricken by the infernal sight of the blast. We hear the famous words from the Bhagavad Gita, but in Nolan’s telling, they’ve been previously uttered in a wildly different context that suggests the atomic bomb as the ultimate psychosexual release.It’s a depiction that manages to fulfill and tweak expectations at the same time. Nolan returns the nuclear explosion from the realm of symbolism to a primal zone of fears and urges — a cataclysm created by other human beings like us. More

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      Zach Galifianakis Lives in the Cringe

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      The comedian and star of “The Beanie Bubble” feels proud to be an American when he watches “The Simpsons.” These are some of his other favorite things.Zach Galifianakis grew up on Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, Redd Foxx and David Letterman, but he never sat in front of the family television thinking he wanted to be them. He was more interested in keeping up with his family.He liked the way his older cousins imitated people. His parents were hilarious. They all performed skits at reunions. He once dressed his sister up as the Ayatollah Khomeini. He got good at doing the robot.“The way we communicate is through humor,” the comedian and actor said in a phone interview in July, before Hollywood actors went on strike, adding: “It’s as basic as: I enjoyed the sound of people laughing.”In his latest film, “The Beanie Bubble,” he portrays the billionaire behind Beanie Babies, the stuffed animals that were a cultural craze in the 1990s. There are moments when viewers might not know whether to laugh or cringe.“You don’t see it much in movies because movies want to sometimes show a different side of humanity,” Galifianakis said. “I live in the awkward and cringe because I find life can be like that.”Galifianakis, a 53-year-old resident of the “Canadian woods,” discussed writing jokes on his tractor, avoiding Twitter, and the radio he listens to on the road. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1NatureI grew up rural, and all I wanted to do was run to the city. Now that I’m older, all I want to do is run back to the woods. I always tell people: Don’t forget about the woods, because as city dwellers, as urbanites, as suburbanites, we forget. There’s a lot of poetry in the woods.2Nature DocumentariesI often go back to “Alone in the Wilderness,” this documentary about Dick Proenneke, a man who lived in a remote cabin in Alaska that he built himself. I’m envious of his skill, of being able to live off the earth. There’s something beautiful about that kind of life. I’m a complete hypocrite. I’ll never get there. But had I reworked a couple things, I would’ve probably aimed a little bit more for that kind of life.3Local RadioI don’t know how to work apps. So, when I’m in the car, I listen to the radio. In Canada, CBC always has something good on. When I’m working in Atlanta, radio there has a lot of good, old hip-hop. And when I’m in California, I listen to KCRW, which still plays new music.4Gardening-Adjacent HobbiesWhen I first moved to Los Angeles, I planted peanuts, and I’ve been gardening ever since. My hobbies are usually garden-related, like making my own fertilizer. My kids will go get deer bones out of the woods, and then I’ll grind them up and make my own bone meal.5Grilling for DummiesI cook pizza on my Big Green Egg, which I bought during the pandemic. I’d always been intimidated by grilling. But any moron can cook on that thing and you’ll think you’re eating at an amazing restaurant.6Thinking While on My TractorI’ve had a tractor for a number of years. It’s where I do most of my thinking about standup — specifically joke-writing. It lets me sit there and numb out and think about jokes I’ve done and try to add to them.7Visiting Greece and Taking It EasyThis is the thing about Greece, where my dad’s family is from, and Europe in general: It’s about walking to go get a coffee. It’s about sitting down and having a conversation. I feel like these older societies have their priorities a little bit more in check sometimes. They’ve been through it. They’ve seen it. So there’s a coolness to me about Greece. And I just agree with the lifestyle. Also, the history there is unbelievable.8‘The Simpsons’ (Made in the U.S.A.)I’m always pleasantly surprised at how much that show can still make me gut laugh. There’s not many shows like that. Shows like “The Simpsons,” and the fact that Prince was from America, that just makes me proud to be an American.9A Book Worth Paying Attention ToWhen I read a book, I want everyone to know I read books, so I talk about it to everyone. “Stolen Focus,” by Johann Hari, is basically a deep, deep dive into the phone and social media. When you finish this book, you’ll go: We’ve all been duped, especially young kids who feel social media and constant contact is a must. I highly, highly recommend it, especially for parents.10IRL ObservationsThe biggest crime of social media is that it’s so boring. I’ll hear people say: You should see what I just tweeted out. As soon as I hear “Twitter,” my face glazes over. For somebody like me, I have to observe. I need to see the small spaces in life as an actor, as someone that tries to make people laugh. I’m not going to get that from Twitter. But, look: I’m 53. I’m old. I’m out of the loop. Nobody should listen to me. More

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      in Television

      What’s on TV This Week: ‘Run the Burbs’ and ‘The Trial’

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      A Canadian sitcom debuts on the CW. And a hard-to-find Orson Welles movie airs on TCM.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, July 31 — Aug. 6. Details and times are subject to change.MondayRUN THE BURBS 8:30 p.m. on the CW. Is it redundant to have a set of those cute family-member bumper stickers on the back of a blue Toyota minivan, that icon of suburban soccer-practice shuttling? Is that not a bit like sticking a “baby on board” sign to the handlebars of an infant’s carriage? Don’t tell that to the Phams, the family at the center of “Run the Burbs,” who have a set on their shiny van. A Canadian sitcom cocreated by Andrew Phung (a star of “Kim’s Convenience”) and Scott Townend, the program follows the Phams — a mother, Camille (Rakhee Morzaria), and father, Andrew (Phung), and their two children (played by Zoriah Wong and Roman Pesino) — as they navigate contemporary suburban life. The debut episode, which airs Monday, is built around preparations for a neighborhood block party.BREEDERS 10 p.m. on FX. The yin to the “Run the Burbs” yang, this dark and bold British comedy was encapsulated by a line that Paul, a father played by Martin Freeman, said to Ally (Daisy Haggard), his wife, in the very first episode: “I would die for those kids, but often I also want to kill them.” Since its debut in 2020, the show has mined humor from the least glamorous sides of family life. Major themes of its fourth and final season, which picks up five years after the previous season and is set to debut Monday night, include divorce, aging and teen pregnancy. In a 2020 interview with The New York Times, Freeman (who is also a creator of the series) explained that the show was interested in giving a frank look at less-discussed parts of parenting. “In nice sort of lefty, liberal circles,” he said, “you don’t really talk about how you want to throw your kids out of the [expletive] window.”TuesdayICONIC AMERICA: OUR SYMBOLS AND STORIES WITH DAVID RUBENSTEIN 10 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). This documentary series, hosted by the philanthropist David Rubenstein, has been loose with what constitutes an “iconic” part of America’s identity: Previous episodes have been dedicated to the history of both physical sites (including the Statue of Liberty and the Hollywood sign) and shared imagery (cowboys, bald eagles). Tuesday’s episode looks at the Golden Gate Bridge.WednesdayAnthony Perkins in “The Trial.”Rialto Pictures/StudioCanalTHE TRIAL (1963) 5:45 p.m. on TCM. Orson Welles once declared that “The Trial” was the best movie he’d ever made, but it has been out of print in the United States for years. A new restoration, which played in theaters around the end of 2022, is set to be released for at-home viewing by the Criterion Collection in September, but for now this TCM broadcast remains a relatively rare opportunity for U.S. audiences to see the movie easily. Adapted from a Franz Kafka novel, the film stars Anthony Perkins as Josef K., a man living in an anonymous city who is charged with a crime that is kept unclear to both him and the audience. His journey to find out more brings him across an array of oddball characters, including a legal advocate (Welles) and an artist (William Chappell), but little light is shed. TCM will show the movie alongside several other films with Perkins, including PSYCHO (1960), at 8 p.m., and FEAR STRIKES OUT (1957), at 10 p.m.ThursdayJAWS (1975) 8 p.m. on AMC. In the same way as fast cars, secret agents and creepy dolls, there’s something about sharks that makes Hollywood salivate — like a beast of prey drawn to the scent of past box-office successes. (“Meg 2: The Trench,” in theaters everywhere Aug. 4.) Few attempts at big-screen shark tales have come close to matching Steven Spielberg’s original “Jaws” movie, though — or the one-two bite of John Williams’s score.FridayOlivia Colman in “Empire of Light.”Searchlight Pictures/20th Century StudiosEMPIRE OF LIGHT (2022) 6:05 p.m. on HBO 2 and 1917 (2019) at 9 p.m. on Showtime 2. Here’s an interesting do-it-yourself double feature: A pair of collaborations between the filmmaker Sam Mendes and the cinematographer Roger Deakins. First up is “Empire of Light,” a period drama that stars Olivia Colman as the duty manager of a cinema in a British seaside town in the 1980s. As she struggles with her mental health, she develops a relationship with Stephen (Micheal Ward), a new employee. Their story is a far cry from the one told in “1917,” a WWI drama about two British soldiers (played by George MacKay and Dean-Charles Chapman) sent on an exceedingly treacherous mission behind enemy lines.SaturdayTHE WILD SIDES 8 p.m. on BBC America. The first entry in this new, three-part documentary series picks up during a drought in the Botswana wilderness. It introduces a slate of animals — elephants, cheetahs, leopards, jackals and baboons — whose lives are connected in some surprising ways.SundayQuincy Isaiah in “Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty.”Warrick Page/HBOWINNING TIME: THE RISE OF THE LAKERS DYNASTY 9 p.m. on HBO. The 1979-1980 season of the Los Angeles Lakers — and that era’s stars, including Magic Johnson (played by Quincy Isaiah) and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (Solomon Hughes) — got a ritzy coat of HBO paint in the first season of this drama, which debuted last year. The plot of the new, second season, which begins Sunday, runs through the 1984 finals, when the Lakers and the Celtics landed in a rematch. In a trailer, the Lakers owner Jerry Buss (as played by John C. Reilly), sets up the rivalry as a classic underdog story: “They’re the dynasty,” he says. “We’re the flash in the pan.” More

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      in Theater

      Despite Acquittal, Kevin Spacey Faces Uphill Battle for Hollywood Roles

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      The actor, who was cleared of sexual assault charges in Britain this week, has parts in two small upcoming films. Yet his tarnished public perception makes starry roles unlikely.The two-time Oscar winner Kevin Spacey said last month that he was ready to return to acting after years in the wilderness following sexual assault allegations.“I know that there are people right now who are ready to hire me the moment I am cleared of these charges in London,” Mr. Spacey told a German magazine, referring to accusations that he had assaulted four men. “The second that happens, they’re ready to move forward.”Mr. Spacey was right in several ways: A British jury found him not guilty of nine counts of sexual assault this week, nearly a year after a federal jury in Manhattan cleared him of battery in a civil case filed by the actor Anthony Rapp. And he has two small projects awaiting release, with directors who could not be more publicly supportive.But the starry Hollywood roles, like Mr. Spacey’s conniving politician in “House of Cards” and droll advertising executive in “American Beauty,” may not come back anytime soon, if at all.Despite Mr. Spacey’s legal successes, his public perception is tarnished and a turnoff to studios and streaming services desperate to avoid controversy, said Stephen Galloway, the dean of Chapman University’s Dodge College of Film and Media Arts.“He’s in real trouble,” said Mr. Galloway, who previously served as executive editor of The Hollywood Reporter. “On the 0-to-10 scale, this is like a minus one.”During Mr. Spacey’s trial in Britain, he testified about the damage to his career after the public accusations began to emerge in 2017. “There was a rush to judgment and before the first question was asked or answered, I lost my job, I lost my reputation, I lost everything,” he said.Within months of the initial allegation, Mr. Spacey’s character was killed off in the final season of “House of Cards,” his scenes as J. Paul Getty in “All the Money in the World” were reshot with a different actor, and Netflix scrapped the film “Gore,” in which he played the writer Gore Vidal.Beyond two recently filmed parts listed on IMDb, a movie database, it is unclear whether Mr. Spacey is attached to any new projects. His team did not respond to a request for comment, and Mr. Spacey did not provide career insight after being acquitted this week. “I imagine that many of you can understand that there’s a lot for me to process,” he said from the courthouse steps.Mike Paul, a public relations expert who specializes in reputation and crisis management, said that considering the nature of the accusations Mr. Spacey faced, he must avoid “pouring gasoline back on issues that you don’t want gasoline on.” Hollywood, he said, wants to see a time of reflection and quiet analysis.The best bet, Mr. Galloway said, is for Mr. Spacey to develop projects for his production company, Trigger Street, or to pursue indie projects that value his acting prowess or consider the publicity a boon.Mr. Spacey’s two known upcoming roles are in minor movies: “Control,” a British film in which he plays a hacker who takes over a politician’s smart car (his part is voice only), and “Peter Five Eight,” a comedic thriller in which he plays a shadowy stranger who arrives in a small mountainside community.Spacey plays a shadowy stranger in the upcoming comedic thriller “Peter Five Eight.”Ascent Films Forever Safe ProductionsMichael Zaiko Hall, the writer and director of “Peter Five Eight,” said in an email that the film, which does not have an official release date, represented a return to the smaller independent films with which Mr. Spacey started his career.“We have here a double Oscar winner with legendary screen presence whose name has just been cleared,” Mr. Hall said. “I imagine there will be a thaw period, followed by a re-emergence into the culture.”Gene Fallaize, the writer and director of “Control,” said that he approached Mr. Spacey for the voice role last fall, and that the recent verdict showed “our gamble had paid off.” Before the jury’s decision, his movie had distribution deals in Germany, Russia and the Middle East. Now, Mr. Fallaize said, it was negotiating with American and British distributors.Mr. Fallaize added that Mr. Spacey might need to do independent movies for a year or two, showing he could generate commercial returns, before major studios would be prepared to work with him. Those movies might have to be in countries that have a more “lenient” view to allegations made against stars, Mr. Fallaize added.“It’s more likely for Europe to be receptive,” agreed Dominik Sedlar, a Croatian-born director and friend of Mr. Spacey’s whose father made a movie this year in which the actor played the country’s first president.Mr. Sedlar said that although Mr. Spacey had twice been vindicated by juries, Hollywood studios might keep shunning the actor “rather than admit they were wrong.”In recent years, both the Venice and Cannes film festivals have been happy to showcase work by directors and actors whose reputation has been stained in the United States, including Woody Allen, Roman Polanski and Johnny Depp. On Thursday, spokeswomen for both festivals said their artistic directors were unavailable to comment on Mr. Spacey.Comebacks have always been hard in Hollywood, which may be politically liberal but is artistically and financially conservative.Andy Rain/EPA, via ShutterstockThere was similar reluctance from members of the London theater world, where Mr. Spacey was a regular star in the 1990s and 2000s and served as the artistic director of the Old Vic theater from 2004 to 2015. Representatives for 15 producers, West End theater owners and artistic directors either turned down or did not respond to interview requests to discuss Mr. Spacey’s future.Alistair Smith, editor of The Stage, Britain’s major theater newspaper, said in an email that Mr. Spacey’s return was “highly unlikely.” In 2017 the Old Vic published the findings of an independent investigation into Mr. Spacey’s tenure that revealed that 20 unnamed people accused him of unstated inappropriate behavior.“Those allegations have never been satisfactorily addressed by Spacey,” Mr. Smith said. “Unless they are, I can’t see him working in London theater again.”Comebacks have always been hard in Hollywood, which may be politically liberal but is artistically and financially conservative. For those who have succeeded, such as Mel Gibson and Robert Downey Jr., the road was long.“You need to completely reset your reputation,” Mr. Galloway said. In “fortress Hollywood, the drawbridge is pulled up, and it’s a dangerous moat to swim across.” More