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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘A Small Light’ and the Met Gala

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      A new series about the woman who hid Anne Frank and her family premieres on National Geographic, and E! streams “the party of the year.”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, May 1-7. Details and times are subject to change.MondayE! LIVE FROM THE RED CARPET: MET GALA 2023 6 p.m. on E! Officially known as the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute benefit (unofficially as the party of the year) and attended by some of the biggest names in the media and art world, the Met Gala is a black-tie event that raises money for the fashion wing of the museum. This year’s themed exhibition is “Karl Lagerfeld: A Line of Beauty,” a homage to the longtime luxury brand designer who helped shape the modern fashion world. (Mr. Lagerfield died in 2019). Regina King, Blake Lively, Ryan Reynolds and Lin-Manuel Miranda are the event’s co-chairs this year.A SMALL LIGHT 9 p.m. on LIFETIME, NGC and NAT GEO WILD. This limited series tells the story of Miep Gies (Bel Powley), a Dutch woman who was the secretary to Otto Frank (Liev Schreiber), the father of Anne Frank (Billie Boullet), during World War II. Premiering on what would have been Gies’s 114th birthday with two back-to-back episodes, the series follows Gies and her husband whose lives changed when they agreed to help hide the Frank family — and four other individuals — over the course of two years.TuesdayJohn Pingayak, right, and his grandson Sonna Boy in “Life Below Zero: First Alaskans.”Tyler Colgan/National GeographicLIFE BELOW ZERO: FIRST ALASKANS 8 p.m. on NGC. This unscripted series, a spinoff of the Emmy Award-winning series “Life Below Zero,” follows Indigenous Alaskans as they survive and thrive in one of the most remote landscapes on Earth. In the show’s second season, the cast stays true to the traditions passed down from generations of Alaska Natives while adapting to 21st-century technology and advancements.COUPLES RETREAT 9 p.m. on MTV. Celebrity couples head to Las Vegas for the third season of this MTV reality series, in which they will challenge their relationships with the help of some unconventional experts. The couples, who range from R&B legends to “Real Housewives of Atlanta” alums, break out of their comfort zones in a series of adrenaline-fueled activities like zip-lining, cattle herding and wilderness training.1000% ME: GROWING UP MIXED 9 p.m. on HBO. The Emmy Award-winning producer and comedian W. Kamau Bell explores the joys and challenges of growing up mixed-race in this hourlong compilation of interviews with multiracial children in the Bay Area. Topics like casual racism, microaggressions and the pressure to pick a side are all fair game, as is a chipper rundown of the interviewees’ favorite animals and weekend hobbies.WednesdayTommy Lee Jones, right, and Garret Dillahunt in “No Country for Old Men.”Richard Foreman/Miramax FilmsNO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (2007) 10:17 p.m. on MAX. Joel and Ethan Coen “combine virtuosic dexterity with mischievous high spirits” in their film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel of the same name, writes A.O. Scott in his review for The New York Times. This neo-western thriller, which won the Oscar for best picture, follows three men entangled in a drug deal gone awry in 1980 West Texas. Javier Bardem plays Anton Chigurh, a “deadpan sociopath with a funny haircut.” Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) is a jaded sheriff, trailing the detritus Chigurh leaves behind. Both are following Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), “the human center of the film, the guy you root for.” Scott promises you will be “jangled, stunned,” and “completely and ecstatically absorbed.”ThursdayVictor McLaglen, left, and Cary Grant in “Gunga Din.”Academy of Motion Picture Arts and SciencesGUNGA DIN (1939) 3:30 p.m. on TCM. “All movies should be like the first twenty-five and the last thirty minutes of ‘Gunga Din,’” wrote Benjamin Crisler in his review for The Times. This classic adventure film, which pulls elements from Rudyard Kipling’s 1890 poem by the same name, follows three British sergeants in colonial India (Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen and Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) who fight a murderous cult, with the titular Gunga Din (Sam Jaffe) as their guide. The film was deemed culturally significant by the Library of Congress in 1999 and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.FridayRhiannon Giddens, right, and Francesco Turrisi in “The Articulate Hour.”Tom Contarino/The Ariculate FoundationTHE ARTICULATE HOUR 9 p.m. on PBS. This three-part mini-series features the journalist Jim Cotter in conversation with poets, musicians, neuroscientists and historians on a variety of topics. The first episode delves into the concept of human memory, while the second explores our contrasting needs for community and solitude.SaturdayChol Soo Lee, center, surrounded by TV news crews in “Free Chol Soo Lee.”Grant DinFREE CHOL SOO LEE 8 p.m. on PBS. For Asian American and Pacific Islander heritage month, PBS’s Emmy Award-winning anthology series, “Independent Lens,” presents a documentary about Chol Soo Lee, a Korean immigrant who was wrongfully convicted of murder in 1973. Though he is ultimately exonerated, this “isn’t an uplifting movie,” wrote Ben Kenigsberg in his review for The Times, as the documentary follows Lee on his troubled post-prison journey. “Just because Lee was innocent doesn’t mean he was perfect,” Kenigsberg writes.SundayMTV MOVIE & TV AWARDS 8 p.m. on MTV. The actress Drew Barrymore will host this year’s awards show, where a number of film and television stars will be recognized for their work — among them Jennifer Coolidge (“The White Lotus”), the 2023 winner of the Comedic Genius Award, which will be presented to her at the event.THE 2010s 9 p.m. on CNN. This seven-part series, from Emmy Award-winning executive producers Tom Hanks, Gary Goetzman and Mark Herzog, examines the last decade influenced by Instagram, the former presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, marriage equality and the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements, before culminating with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. More

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      Writers, Seeking Pay Change for the Streaming Era, Prepare to Strike

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      In the 16 years since the entertainment industry’s last strike, sweeping technological change has upended the television and movie business.When the most recent Hollywood strike took place — 16 years ago — the internet had not yet transformed the television and movie businesses. Broadcast networks still commanded colossal audiences, and cable channels were still growing. The superhero boom had begun for movie studios, and DVDs generated $16 billion in annual sales.Since then, galloping technological change has upended Hollywood in ways that few could have imagined. Traditional television is on viewership life support. Movie studios, stung by poor ticket sales for dramas and comedies, have retreated almost entirely to franchise spectacles. The DVD business is over; Netflix will ship its last little silver discs on Sept. 29.It’s a streaming world now. The pandemic sped up the shift.What has not changed much? The formulas that studios use to pay television and movie creators, setting the stage for another strike. “Writer compensation needs to evolve for a streaming-first world,” said Rich Greenfield, a founder of the LightShed Partners research firm.Absent an unlikely last-minute resolution with studios, more than 11,000 unionized screenwriters could head to picket lines in Los Angeles and New York as soon as Tuesday, an action that, depending on its duration, would bring Hollywood’s creative assembly lines to a gradual halt. Writers Guild of America leaders have called this an “existential” moment, contending that compensation has stagnated despite the proliferation of content in the streaming era — to the degree that even writers with substantial experience are having a hard time getting ahead and, sometimes, paying their bills.“Writers at every level and in every genre, whether it’s features or TV, we’re all being devalued and financially taken advantage of by the studios,” said Danny Tolli, a writer whose credits include “Roswell, New Mexico” and the Shondaland show “The Catch.”“These studios are making billions in profits, and they are spending billions on content — content that we create with our blood, sweat and tears,” Mr. Tolli continued. “But there are times when I still have to worry about how I’m going to pay my mortgage. How I’m going to provide for my family. I have considered Uber to supplement my income.”Studio chiefs have largely maintained public silence, leaving communication to the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on their behalf. In statements, the organization has said its goal was a “mutually beneficial deal,” which was “only possible if the guild is committed to turning its focus to serious bargaining” and “searching for reasonable compromises.”Privately, numerous studio and streaming service executives portrayed writers as histrionic and out of touch. You can’t make a living as a TV writer? By what standard? The business has changed; get used to it.By some measures, a major strike in Hollywood is long overdue. Since the 1940s, with a couple of exceptions, strikes have shaken the entertainment industry almost like clockwork — every seven or eight years — usually aligning with upheaval in the fast-changing business. The dawn of television. The rise of cable networks.“These things gotta happen every five years or so, 10 years,” Clemenza, the weathered Corleone capo explains in “The Godfather,” one of Hollywood’s most storied creations, as the film’s gangster families “go to the mattresses” against one another. “Helps to get rid of the bad blood.”Writers in Hollywood have long complained that studios treat them like second-class citizens.Dick Strobel/Associated PressFor generations, ever since the end of the silent film era, Hollywood writers have complained that studios treat them as second-class citizens — that their artistic contributions are underappreciated (and undercompensated), especially compared with those of actors and directors.Among Hollywood workers, screenwriters have walked out the most often (six times) and were responsible for the entertainment industry’s most recent strike in 2007. It was a precarious economic time — the Great Recession was underway — but “new media” was on the horizon. Apple had started to sell iPods that could play video. Disney was offering $2 downloads for episodes of “Lost.” Hulu was in the start-up stages.The existing contract between studios and the Writers Guild of America, which expires at 12:01 a.m. Pacific time on Tuesday, sets minimum weekly pay for certain television writer-producers at $7,412. (Agents for experienced writers can negotiate that up.) One problem, according to the guild, involves the number of weeks writers work in the streaming era.Because of streaming, the network norms of 22, 24 or even 26 episodes per season have mostly disappeared. Most streaming series are eight to 12 episodes long. As a result, the median writer-producer works nearly 40 weeks on a network show, according to guild data, but only 24 weeks on a streaming show, making it difficult to earn a stable paycheck.Residuals have also been undercut by streaming. Before streaming, writers could receive residual payments whenever a show was resold — into syndication, for overseas airing, on DVD. But global streaming services like Netflix and Amazon have cut off those distribution arms.Instead, streaming services pay a fixed residual. Writers say there is no way to know whether those fees are fair because services hide viewership data. A new contract, guild leaders have said, must include a formula for paying residuals based on views.Guild leaders contend that it would cost studios a collective $600 million a year to give them everything they want. The companies, however, are under pressure from Wall Street to cut costs. And gains for one group of entertainment workers would almost certainly need to be extended to others: Contracts with the Directors Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union, expire on June 30.Hollywood companies say they simply cannot afford widespread raises. Loaded with $45 billion in debt, Disney laid off thousands of employees in recent days, part of a campaign to eliminate 7,000 jobs by the end of June. Disney+ remains unprofitable, although the company has vowed to change that by next year. Disney is Hollywood’s largest supplier of union-covered TV dramas and comedies (890 episodes for the 2021-22 season).Warner Bros. Discovery, which has roughly $47 billion in debt, has already cut thousands of jobs as part of a $4 billion pullback. NBCUniversal is also tightening its belt as it contends with cable cord-cutting and a troublesome advertising market.These companies remain highly profitable. But they have not been delivering the kind of steady profit growth that Wall Street rewards.The last time the writers had a chance to negotiate a contract, the pandemic prompted a speedy agreement.Annie Tritt for The New York TimesScreenwriters come into these talks with notable swagger. In 2019, when film and TV writers fired their agents in a campaign over what they saw as conflicts of interest, many agency leaders figured that the guild would eventually fracture. That never happened: After a 22-month standoff, the big agencies effectively gave writers what they wanted.For screenwriters, there is also pent-up demand for raises, made worse by climbing inflation. When writers last had the opportunity to negotiate a contract, the pandemic was shutting down Hollywood, and so the two sides came to a speedy agreement — “essentially kicking the can down the road” in the words of Mr. Greenfield. In the negotiation cycle before that, writers focused more on shoring up their generous health plan.And writers have been incensed by mixed messaging from companies on their financial health.“NBCUniversal is performing extremely well operationally and financially,” Brian Roberts, the chief executive of Comcast, which owns NBCUniversal, wrote to employees last week, when the division’s top executive was ousted.Netflix’s co-chief executive, Ted Sarandos, received a pay package worth $50.3 million in 2022, up 32 percent from 2021, Netflix disclosed last week.“Lots of people are still getting very rich off of Hollywood product — just not the creators of that product,” said Matt Ember, a screenwriter whose credits include “Get Smart,” “The War With Grandpa” and the animated “Home.”The upshot: The situation might get worse before it gets better.“Every industry goes through course corrections,” said Laura Lewis, the founder of Rebelle Media, an entertainment production and financing company. “Maybe this is an opportunity to adjust the models for the next phase of the entertainment business.”“The question,” she continued, “is how much pain will we have to endure to get there.”John Koblin More

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      What Do ‘Candyman’ and ‘Peter Pan & Wendy’ Have in Common? A Director Explains.

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      For the new Disney+ retelling, David Lowery drew on a range of unexpected influences, including the 1992 horror film, art-house classics and “Raising Arizona.”It was “E.T. the Extra-Terrestial” that turned David Lowery into a lifelong fan of “Peter Pan,” specifically the scene in which a mother reads the section about Tinkerbell’s possible death to her daughter while the friendly alien hides in the closet. “You just watch E.T. listening to that story, and it’s so emotionally resonant that it hooked me to ‘Peter Pan,’ no pun intended, more than any film version of it did early on,” Lowery said.For his second live-action retelling of a classic Disney film — following “Pete’s Dragon” (2016) — Lowery imagined his own variation on Neverland in “Peter Pan & Wendy,” with the young actors Alexander Molony and Ever Anderson in the title roles and Jude Law as the villainous Captain Hook. Initially, however, Lowery underestimated the task.“When I first took the job, I thought, ‘It’s Peter Pan, how hard could it be?’ It turned out to be the hardest but most exhilarating creative endeavor I’ve done to date,” he said. The difficulty, he thinks, stemmed from his desire to introduce a new shade to a fairy tale while honoring the story’s legacy.The original J.M. Barrie novel about Peter Pan and Wendy as well as the numerous film adaptations — Steven Spielberg’s “Hook,” P.J. Hogan’s “Peter Pan,” Joe Wright’s “Pan” and, of course, Disney’s 1953 animated rendering, among them — all swirled in Lowery’s mind as he reconsidered the boy who never grows up.Speaking during a recent video interview from Cologne, Germany, Lowery, 42, laid out some of the less obvious influences for his reimagining of “Peter Pan & Wendy,” now streaming on Disney+.Peter Pan’s Flight at DisneylandTo remain faithful to Disney’s take on “Peter Pan,” Lowery closely observed Peter Pan’s Flight, one of the original rides at Disneyland based on the 1953 film. The attraction, he said, “represents the movie distilled into a physical experience.” Although stunningly crafted, some the animated film’s defining iconography, most notably the image of Captain Hook straddling the jaws of the crocodile, has a greater impact on younger audiences when they see it immortalized in three dimensions in Peter Pan’s Flight.That the old-fashioned theatrical illusions the ride employs, like the use of forced perspective for London’s skyline, could still elicit wonder even in an age of digital effects, impressed him. Lowery rode Peter Pan’s Flight while preparing to shoot “Peter Pan & Wendy,” and hearing the excited reactions of children and adults alike reminded him of how beloved the animated version is. “Seeing this film condensed into a theme park ride, I realized the weight that these stories, as told by Disney, have in popular culture,” he said.‘Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom’Lowery first watched the Steven Spielberg action adventure at the tender age of 7, and it immediately ignited his creative aspirations. “It’s a real kitchen-sink experience,” he said. “It’s a musical, it’s a drama, it’s a romance, it’s a horror film.” For the emotional approach to “Peter Pan & Wendy,” Lowery drew on the eclectic tone of “Temple of Doom” as well as its juvenile sense of humor.When creating the pirate hideout Skull Rock, Lowery tried to evoke the underground mines, in a cavernous space illuminated by lava, where the film’s Temple of Doom was located. “There’s also one shot in particular of Tiger Lily, the Lost Boys and Wendy looking down as John and Michael are about to be executed that is a direct homage to Indy, Willie Scott and Short Round looking down into the temple as the poor gentleman is about to be sacrificed to Kali,” Lowery explained.Andrei TarkovskyLowery sought to reconceptualize how Peter Pan and Tinkerbell are introduced to the Darling children. As he wrote the sequence in which Tinkerbell sprinkles Wendy with pixie dust, ostensibly to float her all the way to Neverland before she wakes up, the image of the sleeping woman levitating in the Russian auteur Andrei Tarkovsky’s surrealist “Mirror” (1975) came to mind. He added a screen grab of that moment to his look-book and then replicated it with Wendy.‘Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World’To differentiate his movie from traditional pirate films, including Disney’s “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise, Lowery looked to Peter Weir’s 2003 high-seas saga, which informed how he thought about Captain Hook and his crew. Instead of mere scoundrels, Lowery saw Captain Hook’s men as pirates playacting as soldiers and Hook himself as a decaying version of Captain Jack Aubrey (played by Russell Crowe in “Master and Commander”).“I thought, ‘What if Captain Hook at some point commandeered a Napoleonic vessel and executed all the other soldiers on board and he and his pirates took over this ship and he now thought of himself as an admiral on the HMS Bounty?” Lowery said. To help the actors, the director brought in consultants to teach them how to realistically operate a ship. One bit of unexpected synchronicity: John DeSantis, who plays Bill Jukes in Lowery’s fantasy, also appeared in Weir’s Oscar-winning film.‘Death in Venice’Since Captain Hook is horrified at the notion that he has grown up, Lowery introduced the idea that he dyes his hair. “He wants to maintain his youth as an affront to Peter,” Lowery explained. The inspiration came from Luchino Visconti’s “Death in Venice”: In the Italian director’s historical drama, an aging composer played by Dirk Bogarde colors his hair and wears makeup to appear younger. “At the end, when he’s on the beach, the hair dye just starts running down his face, exposing the deceit at the heart of Bogarde’s character,” Lowery said.Bill the Butcher and ‘Candyman’For Captain Hook’s image, Lowery drew from multiple sources. When he first pitched the project to the studio, he edited a hook for a hand onto a photo of a mustachioed Daniel Day-Lewis in 19th-century attire as Bill the Butcher in Martin Scorsese’s “Gangs of New York.” “That became the Captain Hook I saw in my mind while I was writing the script,” he recalled.With the hook itself, Lowery wanted to stay away from the precise, shiny devices used in other adaptations, like Spielberg’s “Hook.” The one Jude Law would wield in “Peter Pan & Wendy” had to look like a less refined, “pugilistic instrument of violence.” Lowery gave the prop department an image of the actor Tony Todd in Bernard Rose’s 1992 horror film “Candyman,” about a ghostly killer with a hook for a missing hand. “We want it to be rusty,” Lowery added, “and to feel like it was a piece of metal that he pulled from the boat and had a blacksmith hammer into a barely usable form.”‘Raising Arizona’There’s a vivid montage near the end of Lowery’s movie that shows Wendy’s adult life. She overcomes nostalgia and embraces the potential that lies ahead. “I wanted to capture the idea that growing up could be a beautiful thing,” he said. The montage is an allusion to a sequence, known as “Dream of the Future,” in the offbeat Coen brothers comedy “Raising Arizona,” in particular the shot where the kidnapper H. I. McDunnough (played by Nicolas Cage) imagines himself and his wife in old age with their large family gathered around a table. “As someone who is still in the process of growing up, it’s really helpful for me, on a therapeutic level, to see a character look at the future with a sense of wonder and anticipation,” Lowery said. More

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      Under the Hollywood Spotlight, a Fading Welsh Town Is Reborn

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      A former industrial hub, Wrexham had long been in decline. Now, it’s reviving as the globally famous star of a reality series about its once forlorn soccer team’s rejuvenation.In the Welsh language, the virtually untranslatable word “hiraeth” (pronounced here-ayeth) describes a blend of nostalgia and longing for a time that can never be recreated.For Wrexham, a working-class town in northern Wales, it was a feeling that came to define a postindustrial malaise that descended in the 1980s as the last remaining coal mines shuttered their rickety gates and, later, the furnaces at the nearby steelworks ran cold.Only the beloved soccer club, Wrexham A.F.C., remained: the oldest team in Wales, a perennial also-ran but still an indomitable source of local pride.“We went through so much as a town,” said Terry Richards, 56, a lifelong fan of the club as he sat at home in the team’s bright scarlet jersey. “Those were difficult times.”Wales has its legends of heroes returning to save the day, but few could have predicted that an unlikely pair of Hollywood actors, Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, would waltz into town just over two years ago and buy the ailing club. That set off a chain of events that catapulted the town out of the doldrums and into the international spotlight, casting the residents as the main characters in their own Hollywood reality show based around the soccer club, “Welcome to Wrexham.”Few could have predicted that the two famous actors would walk into the town in the first place. But Mr. McElhenney, an American who had binged on sports documentaries during lockdown, conducted an exhaustive search for a down-and-out soccer team with growth potential, landing on Wrexham A.F.C., and persuaded Mr. Reynolds to join him in his pet project.Players from Wrexham A.F.C. practice at the Racecourse Ground while crews from the documentary series “Welcome to Wrexham” film them.Mary Turner for The New York TimesAfter paying the bargain sum of around $2.5 million, they moved into town (the Canadian-born Mr. Reynolds even bought a house) and began overhauling the team’s operation. They revitalized the training facilities and upgraded the roster, offering comparatively enormous salaries that attracted established players from the upper levels of English soccer.Last Saturday, that Hollywood story finally got its very own Hollywood ending — the team’s promotion after its winning season into the English Football League, the next tier of England’s multilevel soccer pyramid, after a 15-year absence. As the referee blew the final whistle, generations of teary-eyed supporters leaped from the stands onto the rain flecked field in joyous celebration.In that moment, a town was reborn, and that lingering “hiraeth” was no more. More

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      Watch an Awkward Party Scene in ‘Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret’

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      The screenwriter and director Kelly Fremon Craig narrates a sequence from her film.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.A party game becomes the source of dramatic tension in “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,” the screen adaptation of Judy Blume’s beloved novel about adolescence.In this sequence, Margaret (Abby Ryder Fortson) attends a party at the home of one of her classmates. Things get rowdy when Nancy (Elle Graham) proposes a game for the group: Two Minutes in the Closet. The girls are all given numbers. The boys draw those numbers from a bowl. The two people whose numbers match retreat to the closet, or in this case, a guest bathroom, for two minutes.The director and screenwriter Kelly Fremon Craig staged the scene in a heightened way, creating a thriller-like intensity while also playing key moments for laughs.“Where I placed all of the actors was a conscious decision,” Craig said in an interview, “because it was important to me how far they had to walk to get to each other, how far Margaret had to walk to get to the bathroom, all of those things.”In addition to the blocking, the scene comes together through a combination of performance, lighting and song selection, with the Dusty Springfield hit “Son of a Preacher Man” helping to further elevate it.“This was the luckiest I’ve ever gotten on a needle drop,” Craig said, recalling that she and her editor haphazardly added the song during the editing process. “It wound up that it scored the moment so perfectly that we couldn’t believe it. And actually, we have never moved it, even a single frame from that very first time we dropped it in.”Read the “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” review.Go behind the scenes of the film.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      Stream These 6 Titles Before They Leave Netflix in May

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      A couple of comedies, a couple of coming-of-age tales and more are leaving for U.S. subscribers next month. Catch them while you can.This month’s mix of titles leaving Netflix in the United States include two coming-of-age comedy dramas, a twisty thriller throwback, a wrenching Holocaust documentary and two uproarious comedies (one of them smuggled into an animated family film). Give them a stream before they’re gone. (Dates reflect the last day a title is available.)‘Side Effects’ (May 16)The director Steven Soderbergh is always a little bit ahead of the curve, and back in 2013, years before the current vogue of nostalgia for the erotic thrillers of the ’80s and ’90s, he assembled this steamy, twisty story of sexual deception and left-field double-crosses. (It was the early 2010s, so there is also a healthy dose of villainy for the health-care and pharmaceutical industries.) The final film before his short-lived retirement, it had Soderbergh reuniting with several of his previous stars, including Jude Law (“Contagion”), Catherine Zeta-Jones (“Traffic”) and Channing Tatum (“Magic Mike”), who are joined by Rooney Mara in a femme fatale turn that is alternately sensuous and scary.Stream it here.‘The Last Days’ (May 18)The first film released by the Shoah Foundation, and executive produced by no less a major name than Steven Spielberg, “The Last Days” won the Academy Award for best documentary feature of 1998. It tells the story of a grim and lesser-known chapter of the Holocaust: how German troops invaded Hungary in March of 1944, long after it was clear that World War II was lost, and proceeded to murder hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews anyway. This chronicle of pure evil is told by the director James Moll as a story of survival and perseverance, focusing on five survivors of the Holocaust and the inspirational ways they spent their spared lives.Stream it here.‘Edge of Seventeen’ (May 31)One of several gay-themed coming-of-age comedy-dramas of the late 1990s, this earnest and truthful tale from the director David Moreton and the screenwriter Todd Stephens has become something of a classic in the queer canon, and for good reason. Set in Stephens’s hometown, Sandusky, Ohio, circa 1984, it beautifully captures a moment when both explicit and coded gay content was becoming part of the mainstream, and when its sensitive teen protagonist, Eric (Chris Stafford), was finding out that his romantic ideals were not quite reflected by his Midwestern, mid-80s reality. Moreton’s direction deftly approaches its rom-com conventions with uncommon candor.Stream it here.‘Galaxy Quest’ (May 31)This wry and witty cult comedy from the director Dean Parisot mixes two wonderful comic ideas well. It is, first and foremost, a winking satire of not only “Star Trek” but also the entire (and, at the time of its 1999 release, comparatively nascent) fan-catering “geek” culture, focusing on a short-lived “Trek”-style television show that has become an obsession object for a generation of super fans. And it is also a swashbuckling comic adventure of its own, playfully borrowing the “Three Amigos” model of fictional characters mistaken for real heroes, as the cast of the sci-fi show is drafted to prevent a real alien invasion. Sigourney Weaver is having a blast, Tim Allen invokes the bloated ego of his Shatner-esque star with ease and Alan Rickman steals the show as the classically trained Shakespearean thespian saddled with the show’s Spock role.Stream it here.‘My Girl’ (May 31)Every generation has its own story about the movie that unexpectedly reduced them to a weeping mess. And if their parents were ripped to shreds by “Old Yeller,” most ’90s kids can tell you their own sob story about heading to the multiplex for what looked like Macaulay Culkin’s charming follow-up to “Home Alone,” only to find … well, not that. Let it suffice to say that the future fast-talking, foul-mouthed “Veep” co-star Anna Chlumsky (the film’s actual star; Culkin’s was a minor supporting role) is charismatic and sympathetic as a young woman going through one of those summers where everything changes, while Dan Aykroyd and Jamie Lee Curtis provide both warmth and comic relief as the grown-ups in her life.Stream it here.‘Rango’ (May 31)The Disney juggernaut (and, to a lesser extent, the Illumination Entertainment invasion) has become so pervasive in family entertainment that it’s easy to miss kid-friendly entertainment that appears without that imprimatur. But this 2011 adventure from Nickelodeon Movies and Paramount Pictures is a delight, offering as much entertainment for parents as for kids — or perhaps more, as the screenwriter is the “Gladiator” scribe, John Logan, and his clearest inspiration is the decidedly adult ’70s classic “Chinatown.” Gore Verbinski directs his “Pirates of the Caribbean” leading man, Johnny Depp, in the title role of a lost chameleon who becomes sheriff of a small animal town in the desert; the similarly adult-friendly supporting cast includes Ned Beatty, Isla Fisher, Timothy Olyphant, Bill Nighy, Harry Dean Stanton and Ray Winstone.Stream it here. More

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      In Nida Manzoor’s World, Martial Arts and Jane Austen Belong in the Same Movie

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      The writer-director set out to make “a joyful film about South Asian Muslim women” that didn’t revolve around trauma. The result is “Polite Society.”“Polite Society” is an action caper filled with martial arts battles and secret lairs. It’s a romance in which two smart, impossibly attractive people fall in love. It’s a Jane Austen-esque comedy of marriage in which a teenager meddles in her older sister’s love life while their parents look on in dismay.It’s also a movie with a lavish, Bollywood-inspired musical number, because why settle on a single genre when you can cram in as many as possible?Yet this new British film does not feel tonally inconsistent or stylistically scattered; rather, form imaginatively fits function.“It’s about women dealing with norms and expectations and rules, and wanting to push them,” the writer-director Nida Manzoor explained in a video conversation from Bristol, England. “When they’re breaking them, I’ve got to break genres as well. So it all felt like it was working together, not just me being insane.” She laughed. “Maybe a bit of me being insane.”Reviewing “Polite Society” for The New York Times, Amy Nicholson called it a delight that signals the arrival of Manzoor as “a promising new thing: a first-time filmmaker impatient to evolve cultural representation from the last few years of self-conscious vitamins into crowd-pleasing candy.”Kansara, left, and Ritu Arya as South Asian Muslim sisters in Britain. Parisa Taghizadeh/Focus FeaturesIn the film, Ria, the youngest in a British Pakistani family, attends high school while training hard to fulfill her dream of becoming a stuntwoman. (She idolizes Eunice Huthart, a real-life Liverpudlian with extensive experience as a Hollywood stunt double.) And so the actress portraying her, Priya Kansara, had to get with the program — fast.“I have no prior martial arts experience or anything like that,” Kansara said in a video chat. “I was cast around six, seven weeks before we started the shoot, so that’s the time I had to learn as many of the stunts and the fight choreography. It was intense because there was so much to get through. And Ria is just a crazy kid; she doesn’t really stop.”The plot moves at a fast clip peppered with a lot of action, which is nearly always layered with rambunctious comedy. When Ria, who usually has no time for “girlie” accouterments, is forced to endure a wax, the scene is shot like a dramatic interrogation in an early James Bond movie — “but with this kind of villain Auntie character,” Manzoor said, referring to Ria’s nemesis, played by Nimra Bucha.The film is often cathartic in the way it lets girls and women do — with contagious glee — things we have seen men do onscreen for decades. When Ria and her sister, the art-school dropout Lena (Ritu Arya), go out for burgers, they wolf them down with memorable gusto.“Nida came up to us, like, ‘Just go for it, eat like you haven’t eaten in hours and you cannot wait to get into it,’ ” Kansara said. “Me and Ritu took the note literally and we went for it. After that take, Nida came back up to us and was like, ‘OK, maybe not that much.’ ”“Polite Society” lets Kansara, left, and Arya do things onscreen the way men have for decades.Samuel EngelkingFor Arya (best known as Lila Pitts in the Netflix series “The Umbrella Academy”), being encouraged to chomp was a refreshing change from what she usually sees in movies or on television. “I love watching people eat, but onscreen they are often sort of playing around with their food because of the amount of takes they have to do,” she said in a joint chat with Kansara. “Which is why it’s satisfying when you see people actually eating. I love that scene for that reason.”Arya was familiar with Manzoor’s sensibility because they had worked together before, most notably on the 14-minute comedy “Lady Parts,” which Manzoor made for Channel 4 in 2018 and in which Arya played the lead singer of the short film’s titular punk band, a raucous quartet of Muslim women. (Because of scheduling conflicts, the part was recast when the short became the series “We Are Lady Parts,” which streams on Peacock in the United States; Manzoor is currently writing Season 2.)Manzoor started writing “Polite Society” around 10 years ago but kept running into obstacles as she tried to get the project off the ground. Very early on, before such suggestions became less acceptable to make, potential financiers would ask if she could make the central family a white one. Others would have preferred something a little bit less action and more art house. Later, the emphasis on comedy became a problem: Couldn’t there be some weighty issues like, say, an arranged marriage?Manzoor did not budge. “It was like, ‘It’s a joyful film about South Asian Muslim women,’ ” she said. “So much of the reason I’m a filmmaker is because I want to not have our stories only be about trauma.”Giving “Polite Society” emotional ballast is the bond between Ria and Lena, which was inspired by the one between Manzoor and her own sister, Sanya, who is a year older. (Their brother, Shez, worked on the soundtrack.) After collaborating with Arya on “Lady Parts,” Manzoor felt she was a natural fit for the role of Lena. “She has the quality of my oldest sister,” Manzoor said, “that natural, inherent sort of alternative brown girl, which is quite rare, actually, in actors. It’s kind of mercurial and wild and vulnerable at the same time.”Even a brutal brawl between Ria and Lena, at a low point in their relationship, was inspired by real life. “I used to fight with her — we used to do martial arts together,” Manzoor said of Sanya. “I have this memory of when we were in a martial arts class and our instructor always wanted us to fight when we did sparring.” She laughed. “It was kind of creepy.”Asked why she was so keen to put women being active and physical at the heart of her film, Manzoor dug back into her past again.“I used to love sports, and doing martial arts and dancing,” she said. “And then around 12, 13 years old, your body changes and you become objectified. I felt so alienated from my body, so ashamed of it. I realized I’m drawn to genres that allow women to be in possession of their bodies: playing an instrument, being onstage. That was something I lost when I was a teenager, that physicality,” she added. “In my art, I’m always trying to show women have it or regain it or find it.” More