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      Best Movies and Shows Streaming in February: ‘The White Lotus,’ ‘Yellowjackets’ and More

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      The third seasons of “Yellowjackets” and “The White Lotus” arrive, along with “Clean Slate” and “Win or Lose.”Every month, streaming services add movies and TV shows to their libraries. Here are our picks for some of February’s most promising new titles. (Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)New to Amazon Prime Video‘Clean Slate’ Season 1Starts streaming: Feb. 6One of the last projects that Norman Lear worked on before he died in 2023 at age 101, this dramedy follows in the Lear tradition of shows that tackle controversial social issues with frank honesty and snappy humor. George Wallace plays Harry, a carwash owner in Alabama owner whose cheery outlook on life is tested when the child he knew as Desmond, who has been estranged for decades, comes back as Desiree. Laverne Cox (also a co-producer and co-writer on the series with Wallace and the co-creator Dan Ewen) plays Desiree, who comes home looking for some closure with the family and friends in her small town.Also arriving:Feb. 6“Invincible” Season 3Feb. 7“Newtopia” Season 1Feb. 13“My Fault: London”Feb. 20“Reacher” Season 3Feb. 27“House of David”Haley Louise Jones and Şafak Sengul in “Berlin ER.”Apple TV+New to Apple TV+‘Berlin ER’Starts streaming: Feb. 26If telephiles haven’t gotten enough of a vintage “ER” fix from HBO Max’s excellent recent medical drama “The Pitt,” Apple TV+ may fill the need with its latest foreign import. The simply titled “Berlin ER” stars Haley Louise Jones as Dr. Parker, an accomplished young physician who for personal reasons decides to challenge herself by taking over the emergency department in an understaffed, underfunded hospital in one of the German capital’s roughest neighborhoods. The show offers all of the visceral, fast-paced thrills that genre fans have come expect — with lots of gory injuries and life-threatening diseases, treated in seconds under appalling conditions — while also depicting one woman’s attempt to earn the respect of her cynical staff.Also arriving:Feb. 5“Love You to Death”Feb. 14“Goldie” Season 1“The Gorge”Feb. 21“Onside: Major League Soccer”“Surface” Season 2We 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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      At Sundance Film Festival, a Sense of Uprooting Onscreen and Off

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      As it searches for a new home beyond Park City, Utah, the film festival showcases a neo-western, a promising comedic debut and two unsettling documentaries.If a festival can be summed up in one word, then the word for this year’s Sundance Film Festival is weird. That was the adjective that drifted through my mind as I circled in and out of screenings, chatted with other attendees and scanned local headlines. Weird could apply to some of the selections in the event, which ends Sunday. But it wasn’t so much the lineup that struck many of us, it was the festival, the pre-eminent American showcase for U.S. independent cinema and beyond. The vibe felt off, we murmured, the energy muted.For good reason, too. The fires in Los Angeles County were still burning when Sundance opened on Jan. 23. Park City, Utah, is a long way from the Hollywood sign, but Sundance and the mainstream industry have always been codependents, and when the mainstream feels unsettled, you can feel the anxiety in the air. Making matters worse is that the conflagration in California is just the latest crisis facing the movie world, which continues to grapple with the aftershocks of the pandemic and back-to-back strikes, along with its self-inflicted wounds.Adding to this Great Movieland Unsettlement is Sundance’s search for a new home. Last year, the festival announced that it was exploring alternatives to Park City, where it has been held for decades. Among the stated reasons is that the event has outgrown the resort town, which has a population of just over 8,200 and an infrastructure that remains ill-equipped to handle such a large annual inundation. Every year, tens of thousands of movie lovers swarm into Park City, straining resources and local patience. Now, after a search, Sundance has settled on three alternatives: Cincinnati; Boulder, Colo.; and Salt Lake City, where the festival already screens movies, with some events remaining in Park City.Questions about where Sundance will land percolated throughout this year’s event, which features the usual great and good, bad and blah selections. Among the standouts is Geeta Gandbhir’s documentary “The Perfect Neighbor,” which tracks how friction between a white woman and her multiracial neighbors in Florida turned progressively heated and then horrifyingly lethal. Consisting largely of imagery culled from police body cameras and interrogation interviews, it offers up a horrifying look at everyday racial animus and stand-your-ground laws. It also underscores, as the white woman makes one 911 call after another, that there’s nothing funny about the prejudices and pathologies of a so-called Karen.“The Alabama Solution,” a documentary by Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman, looks at the state’s notoriously deficient prison system.Sundance Institute, via Associated PressWe 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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      in Theater

      Chappell Roan, Kai Cenat, Shannon Sharpe Are Among Our Breakout Stars of 2024

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      Audacious, original and wielding a clear vision, the stars who rose to the top in 2024 pushed boundaries and took bold, even risky, choices. Here are 10 artists who shook up their scenes and resonated with fans this year.Pop MusicChappell RoanIt’s almost incomprehensible to think that last year, Chappell Roan still had time to work as a camp counselor.It’s not that she hadn’t been pursuing pop. Her debut album, “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess,” was released in 2023. One of its now-hit singles “Pink Pony Club” was released back in 2020.But it was this year that all the pieces coalesced: Her album hit No. 2 on the Billboard 200 album chart and No. 1 in album sales; her extravagant drag-inspired persona, 1980s-influenced pop sound, soaring vocals and edgy performances have become wildly viral; she outgrew her tour plans; and her dance-along anthem “Hot to Go!” was even featured in a Target ad and played at sporting events.All the while, her lyrics tackle queer issues frankly. Her track “Good Luck, Babe!” — about a relationship between two women that collapses because one is, as Roan has put it, “denying fate” — was one of the biggest hits of the summer.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Home Alone’ Star Macaulay Culkin Delights Fans With Nostalgic Screening and Q&A

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      In Chicago, where the suburbs served as locations, a showing of the film featured an appearance by the star. Delighted fans made their devotion known.It has been 34 years since Kevin McAllister paint-canned two sour-faced bandits in “Home Alone.” And every Christmas since, fans have taken self-made tours of suburban Chicago sites in the classic holiday movie, which finds 8-year-old Kevin defending himself against robbers after his family leaves for a vacation without him. The stately residence where exteriors were shot in Winnetka, Ill., is the area’s top tourist attraction, with thousands of visitors annually.This year, Macaulay Culkin, who played Kevin and became a 10-year-old international superstar as a result, created his own multicity tour, holding screenings of the comedy followed by a Q&A. Billed as “A Nostalgic Night With Macaulay Culkin,” it played last week in Rosemont, Ill., just outside Chicago, and that proved a big draw for “Home Alone” stans.They flocked to the Rosemont Theater in T-shirts quoting John Hughes’s script — “Keep the change, ya filthy animal!” — and roared at the burns and pratfalls of the bumbling thieves (Joe Pesci and Daniel Stern). Parents toted fleece blankets and stuffies for past-bedtime children; many were watching the movie, directed by Chris Columbus, on the big screen for the first time.The appeal was intergenerational and uncomplicated. “It feels like growing up,” said Monti Smith, 26, a mega-fan from Nashville.The SettingFans have been flocking to the house where the film’s exteriors were shot ever since “Home Alone” was released. Lyndon French for The New York TimesThe five bedroom, 9,126-square-foot brick home at 671 Lincoln Ave. in Winnetka has been a Mecca for movie buffs — and real estate agents. Its sale listing, for more than $5 million, went viral this year. (After a week on the market, the house found a buyer.) When a car pulled into the gated driveway last Friday, the driver paid no mind to the steady stream of onlookers or the traffic stopping for selfie-takers.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Richard Gere Calls ‘Blonde on Blonde’ His All-Time Favorite

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      “He’s our Picasso,” the actor said of Bob Dylan.It has been more than four decades since an Armani-clad Richard Gere slunk around Los Angeles in Paul Schrader’s “American Gigolo.”Now Gere, 75, and Schrader have reunited on “Oh, Canada,” an adaptation of Russell Banks’s 2021 novel, “Foregone,” about a dying documentarian who wants to confess, mostly to his wife.Gere and Schrader were each dealing with end-of-life losses when they jumped into the project: Banks, a close friend of Schrader’s, had died from cancer in 2023. Gere’s father also died that year.“We were coming from emotional places,” Gere said.In addition to “Oh, Canada,” Gere made his American TV series debut last month in “The Agency,” an adaptation of the French hit “The Bureau.”“My wife and I binge-watched the French show and genuinely loved it,” he said. “So when I got a call saying they wanted to do an English-language version, I thought, Hmm, that’s kind of a double-edged sword. One, yeah, that sounds interesting, but two, the French one was so good, would they screw this up?”Gere was about to travel from Paris to Marrakech to meet his family when he called to talk about his admiration for former House speaker Nancy Pelosi and the chef-humanitarian José Andrés, the Dylan song he can’t imagine not existing and the importance of Tibet. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Maura Delpero’s Family Story Became Her Latest Movie

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      Maura Delpero’s film “Vermiglio,” which won the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival, is inspired by her own family in Italy during World War II.The mountaintop village of Vermiglio in the Italian Alps is blessed with picture-postcard views of snowy peaks and verdant valleys. It’s also the scene of a dramatic World War II story that moviegoers outside Italy will soon discover.“Vermiglio,” written and directed by Maura Delpero, is inspired by the story of Delpero’s grandparents, whose bucolic existence as a family of 10 was disrupted in the 1940s by a young Sicilian deserter romancing one of their daughters. The film won the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival in September, and is Italy’s submission to the list of contenders for the Academy Award for best foreign language film.Watching the movie feels like watching life itself: A succession of rustic tableaux — cow milkings, family meals, classroom lessons — are interspersed with moments of high drama that are filmed in the same slow-paced, naturalistic way, without fanfare.Delpero with the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize, which the film won at the Venice Film Festival in September.Louisa Gouliamaki/ReutersIn a recent video interview, Delpero, 49, who splits her time between Italy and Argentina, spoke about life behind the camera and the future of cinema. The conversation, translated from Italian, has been edited and condensed.This movie was sparked by the death of your father in August 2019. He was one of the eight surviving children of your grandfather, the Vermiglio village schoolteacher. Can you talk about that?We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      European Directors Sometimes Get Lost in Translation When Going Hollywood

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      The history of European directors “going Hollywood” and making the leap to English-language filmmaking is long and uneven.When Pedro Almodóvar’s “The Room Next Door” won the Golden Lion for best film at this year’s Venice Film Festival, it was the first time that the Spanish director had garnered the top prize at one of Europe’s major film festivals. What made this victory even more impressive and unusual was the fact that “The Room Next Door” was Almodóvar’s first full-length film in English.For a leading auteur of contemporary cinema, and one whose work is so bound up with the textures of his native tongue, Almodóvar’s late-career shift to English-language filmmaking feels daring. If the film’s reception at Venice is any indication, it appears that the gamble has paid off and that he has succeeded where many others have failed.Almodóvar, 75, is only the latest in a long line of European directors to make the leap to English-language filmmaking. The history of such transitions is uneven, and ranges from the Golden Age Hollywood classics of the Austrian-born Billy Wilder to infamous missteps by Ingmar Bergman and François Truffaut.The Hungarian filmmaker Kornel Mundruczo said that both working in English and directing Hollywood stars presents European directors with a unique set of hurdles. “It was a huge challenge to understand the cultural differences and not to create something which is symbolically, say, sinking into the Atlantic Ocean,” he said, recalling the making of his English-language debut, “Pieces of a Woman,” in a recent phone interview.“There are so many movies like that,” added Mundruczo, who finished shooting “At the Sea,” his new film starring Amy Adams, in Boston this August.Kornel Mundruczo, center, on set with Ellen Burstyn, left, and Vanessa Kirby in 2020, making “Pieces of a Woman.” Mundruczo, a Hungarian filmmaker, has found creative opportunities working in English.Philippe Bosse/Netflix, via Everett CollectionWe 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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      in Music

      Timothée Chalamet Sings Live for the Bob Dylan Biopic, ‘A Complete Unknown’

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      The actor’s vocals so impressed the film’s director that he used the live recordings, instead of those prerecorded in a studio. Here’s a look at other actors who have hit their own high notes in musical biopics.In one trailer for the upcoming Bob Dylan biopic, “A Complete Unknown,” a fan pleads with the musician, played by Timothée Chalamet, saying that she can’t hear the music at his sold-out concert.Chalamet, his eyes hidden behind Dylan’s trademark Ray Ban sunglasses, his hair a frizzy mop, responds: “I’ll sing louder.”Biopics have often relied on creative license to portray a star, but Chalamet’s words are not just blowin’ in the wind. The songs in “Unknown,” directed by James Mangold, have resonated through generations, and Chalamet’s voice was so impressive that his live vocals — sung while performing in character — were kept for the final cut.That is not the industry standard. Some films use an original artist’s track while an actor lip-syncs. When actors in biopics do sing, it is common for them to record the vocals in a studio and then overdub them onscreen. Singing live on camera can leave a performance falling flat, especially if the actor is not a trained vocalist.But when done well, live vocals can add a touch of realism.“The idea was to get a little bit different sound in each different venue by using practical microphones from the period,” Tod Maitland, the sound mixer for “Unknown,” said in an interview with Variety this month. “That helped create a nice tapestry of sounds. But Timmy went 100 percent live. It was pretty amazing.”It’s not Chalamet’s first time at the mic — he sang in the 2023 film “Wonka,” and attended LaGuardia High School, a performing arts school in New York City.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More