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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘Saturday Night Live’ and ‘Hostages’

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      The sketch comedy show begins its 48th season. And HBO airs a documentary about the Iran hostage crisis.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, Sept. 26-Oct. 2. Details and times are subject to change.MondayNATIONAL TREASURE: BOOK OF SECRETS (2007) 8:30 p.m. on Freeform. This movie, the second in the “National Treasure” franchise (with a new series, “National Treasure: Edge of History,” coming in December), stars Nicolas Cage as Benjamin Gates. He is the great-great-grandson of Thomas Gates, a man who has been accused of helping to assassinate President Lincoln after being named on a resurfaced page fragment from John Wilkes Booth’s diary. From there, the younger Gates enlists the help of his friend Riley Poole (Justin Bartha) to prove that his relative is innocent, and the two go on a wild goose chase that ultimately leads them to Cibola, the mythical city of gold.TuesdayBACHELOR IN PARADISE 8 p.m. on ABC. After a pretty disastrous “Bachelorette” finale last week, “Paradise,” the show where castoffs from the franchise gather on a beach in Mexico to mingle, might be a breath of fresh air. Because cast members on this spinoff are often able to spend much more time together, the success rate of couples who come off this show engaged, versus the ones from “The Bachelor” or “The Bachelorette,” tends to be higher. Jesse Palmer will host the show — following a slew of interim hosts last season, including David Spade and Lil Jon — and Wells Adams will be the official bartender on the beach.From left, Michelle Vergara Moore, Zyra Gorecki and Eoin Macken in “La Brea.”Sarah Enticknap/NBCLA BREA 9 p.m. on NBC. After a huge sinkhole in Los Angeles brought half of the Harris family to a prehistoric land at the start of the show, they remains separated as the second season begins. The first episode focuses on Eve trying to reunite with her son, who accidentally went into a portal that brought him back to 1988, and Gavin, Izzy and Ella trying to survive in 10,000 B.C.WednesdayA scene from the Zambezi in “Rivers of Life.”Tom Varley/Wild Visions GalleryRIVERS OF LIFE 8 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Last season explored the Amazon, the Nile and the Mississippi rivers — this year the series dives into the exploration of the Zambezi, Danube and Yukon. The show tells the stories of the wildlife and people who benefit from the rivers and details the waterways’ history.HOSTAGES 9 p.m. on HBO. On Nov. 4, 1979, a 444-day international crisis began when student activists from Iran stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took more than 60 Americans hostage. This documentary uses archival footage and new interviews to tell the story of how this international incident began and how it unfolded.ThursdaySO HELP ME TODD 9 p.m. on CBS. Marcia Gay Harden and Skylar Astin star in this new series that centers on their mother-son relationship. Astin plays Todd, a former private investigator who lost his license and is generally a bit of a mess, and Harden plays Margaret, a successful lawyer. After she hires Todd to be the in-house investigator at her law firm, they navigate their personal and work relationship.CONFLICT (1945) 10 p.m. on TCM. Humphrey Bogart plays Richard Mason, a man who murders his wife in hopes of ending up with her sister, in this suspenseful film noir. “The appeal of this film, which is unpleasant and obviously morbid in theme, will be to those customers who are fascinated by the anxieties of a tortured man, who like to listen figuratively to the desperate thumping of a telltale heart,” Bosley Crowther wrote in his review for The New York Times.FridayTHE PRICE IS RIGHT AT NIGHT 8 p.m. on CBS. The daytime version of this show asks contestants to guess the prices of food and merchandise to win prizes — and so does this prime-time special, but the audience will be filled with twins. Iain Armitage and Raegan Revord, who play twins “Young Sheldon,” will be guest models showcasing the merchandise.SaturdayYVONNE ORJI: A WHOLE ME 10 p.m. on HBO. Yvonne Orji is best known for her role in “Insecure” and her last special, “Momma, I Made It!” In her follow-up, premiering this week, the topics that take center stage include dating, the pandemic, and being a child of immigrants. The show switches between stand-up comedy and scripted vignettes, which allows Orji to discuss issues in depth. In a 2020 interview with The Times, she was asked her comedic inspirations: “Wanda Sykes, Kevin Hart, Tiffany [Haddish] and Dave Chappelle, my God,” she answered. “I also grew up watching Sommore. She showed you could be this chick that’s confident and hilarious.”SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE 11:30 p.m. on NBC. Miles Teller will host (his first time) and Kendrick Lamar will be the musical guest (his third, plus various guest appearances) to ring in the 48th season of this comedy sketch show. While “S.N.L.” recently said goodbye to several cast members, including Kate McKinnon, Aidy Bryant, Pete Davidson, Kyle Mooney and Chris Redd, this season will feature a few new faces: Marcello Hernandez, Molly Kearney, Michael Longfellow and Devon Walker.SundayVictor Garber and Jewel Staite in “Family Law.”Darko Sikman/eOneFAMILY LAW 8 p.m. on CW. This show already has two season out in Canada, but is having its U.S. premiere this week. The series follows Abigail Bianchi (Jewel Staite), a lawyer and recovering alcoholic who, after an embarrassing courtroom video of her goes viral, goes to work with her estranged father and half siblings at their firm specializing in family law.NOTHING COMPARES 10 p.m. on Showtime. In this new documentary, Sinead O’Connor sits down to discuss her rise to fame and her abusive upbringing. The film “relies on O’Connor’s own speaking voice, both today — it is husky and slightly weary, sounding older than her 55 years — and on archival footage, in which she is quiet, shy, and remarkably tolerant of interviewers harping on her shaved head,” Glenn Kenny wrote in his review for The Times. More

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      Louise Fletcher, 88, Dies; Oscar Winner for ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’

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      She was largely unknown to the public when she was cast as what the American Film Institute called one of cinema’s most memorable villains.Louise Fletcher, the imposing, steely-eyed actress who won an Academy Award for her role as the tyrannical Nurse Ratched in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” died on Friday at her home in the town of Montdurausse, in Southern France. She was 88.The death was confirmed by her agent, David Shaul, who did not cite a cause. Ms. Fletcher also had a home in Los Angeles.Ms. Fletcher was 40 and largely unknown to the public when she was cast as the head administrative nurse at an Oregon mental institution in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” The film, directed by Milos Forman and based on a popular novel by Ken Kesey, won a best-actress trophy for Ms. Fletcher and four other Oscars: best picture, best director, best actor (Jack Nicholson, who starred as the rebellious mental patient McMurphy) and best adapted screenplay (Bo Goldman and Lawrence Hauber).Ms. Fletcher’s acceptance speech stood out that night — not only because she teasingly thanked voters for hating her, but also because she used American Sign Language in thanking her parents, who were both deaf, for “teaching me to have a dream.”The American Film Institute later named Nurse Ratched one of the most memorable villains in film history and the second most notable female villain, surpassed only by the Wicked Witch of the West in “The Wizard of Oz.”But at the time “Cuckoo’s Nest” was released, Ms. Fletcher was frustrated by the buttoned-up nature of her character. “I envied the other actors tremendously,” she said in a 1975 interview with The New York Times, referring to her fellow cast members, most of whom were playing mental patients. “They were so free, and I had to be so controlled.”Estelle Louise Fletcher was born on July 22, 1934, in Birmingham, Ala., one of four hearing children of Robert Capers Fletcher, an Episcopal minister, and Estelle (Caldwell) Fletcher; both her parents had been deaf since childhood. She studied drama at the University of North Carolina and moved to Los Angeles after graduation.She later told journalists that because she was so tall — 5 feet 10 inches — she had trouble finding work in anything but westerns, where her height was an advantage. Of her first 20 or so screen roles in the late 1950s and early ’60s, about half were in television westerns, including “Wagon Train,” “Maverick” and “Bat Masterson.”Ms. Fletcher married Jerry Bick, a film producer, in 1959. They had two sons, John and Andrew, and she retired from acting for more than a decade to raise them.Ms. Fletcher and Mr. Bick divorced in 1977. Her survivors include her sons; her sister, Roberta Ray; and a granddaughter.She returned to movies in 1974 in Robert Altman’s “Thieves Like Us,” as a woman who coldly turns in her brother to the police. It was her appearance in that film that led Mr. Forman to offer her the role in “Cuckoo’s Nest.”“I was caught by surprise when Louise came onscreen,” Mr. Forman recalled of watching “Thieves Like Us.” “I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She had a certain mystery, which I thought was very, very important for Nurse Ratched.”Ms. Fletcher in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” “She had a certain mystery,” said Milos Forman, the film’s director, “which I thought was very, very important for Nurse Ratched.”Herbert Dorfman/Corbis via Getty ImagesReviewing “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” in The New Yorker, Pauline Kael declared Ms. Fletcher’s “a masterly performance.”“We can see the virginal expectancy — the purity — that has turned into puffy-eyed self-righteousness,” Ms. Kael wrote. “She thinks she’s doing good for people, and she’s hurt — she feels abused — if her authority is questioned.”Ms. Fletcher is often cited as an example of the Oscar curse — the phenomenon that winning an Academy Award for acting does not always lead to sustained movie stardom — but she did maintain a busy career in films and on television into her late 70s.She had a lead role as the Linda Blair character’s soft-spoken psychiatrist in “Exorcist II: The Heretic” (1977) and was notable in the ensemble comedy “The Cheap Detective” (1978), riffing on Ingrid Bergman’s film persona. She also starred with Christopher Walken and Natalie Wood as a workaholic scientist in “Brainstorm” (1983). But she was largely relegated to roles with limited screen time, especially when her character was very different from her Nurse Ratched persona.After a turn as an inscrutable U.F.O. bigwig in “Strange Invaders” (1983), she appeared in “Firestarter” (1984) as a fearful farm wife; the police drama “Blue Steel” (1990) as Jamie Lee Curtis’s drab mother; “2 Days in the Valley” (1996) as a compassionate Los Angeles landlady; and “Cruel Intentions” (1999) as Ryan Phillippe’s genteel aunt.Only when she played to villainous stereotype — as she did in “Flowers in the Attic” (1987), as an evil matriarch who sets out to poison her four inconvenient young grandchildren — did she find herself in starring roles again. And that film, she told a Dragoncon audience in 2009, was “the worst experience I’ve ever had making a movie.”Later in her career, she played recurring characters on several television series, including “Star Trek: Deep Space 9” (she was an alien cult leader from 1993 to 1999) and “Shameless” (as William H. Macy’s foulmouthed convict mother). She also made an appearance as Liev Schreiber’s affable mother in the romantic drama “A Perfect Man” (2013). She appeared most recently in two episodes of the Netflix comedy series “Girlboss.”Although Ms. Fletcher’s most famous character was a portrait of sternness, she often recalled smiling constantly and pretending that everything was perfect when she was growing up, in an effort to protect her non-hearing parents from bad news.“The price of it was very high for me,” she said in a 1977 interview with The Ladies’ Home Journal. “Because I not only pretended everything was all right. I came to feel it had to be.”Pretending wasn’t all bad, however, she acknowledged, at least in terms of her profession. That same year she told the journalist Rex Reed, “I feel like I know real joy from make-believe.”Mike Ives More

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      Will Anyone Give ‘Don’t Worry Darling’ a Chance?

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      Olivia Wilde’s new film is trying to fight free of its pre-release reputation.Years ago, when I was a film critic, I was asked out for coffee by a guy who’d just been hired at the review-aggregating website Rotten Tomatoes. I can’t remember the purpose of the meeting. I just recall the sense — as he ventilated about the site’s “Tomatometer” rating, which would soon crush all my elitist insights into hard data — that I’d been summoned to witness the digging of my own grave.This was actually fine with me. I was already demoralized by the whole enterprise. I’d always seen the role of the critic as a conduit, someone who has an aesthetic experience and then reports on what it was like; I never cared to tell others what to see or avoid, imposing a hegemony of tastes and interests that I didn’t believe in. At work, though, I was feeling the pressure to serve readers with ratings and recommendations — and, increasingly, sites like Rotten Tomatoes seemed to push a binary of “good” and “bad,” all based on consensus. It was depressing, all this holding up of fingers to the wind. Consensus is a snowball with a hard, mineral center, barreling down a slope, and few people want to be on the wrong side.Sometimes consensus accretes around the story of a movie, even before people see the film itself. A couple of weeks ago, I attended a screening of “Don’t Worry Darling,” which I’d been looking forward to since first getting a glimpse of its poster. I had been vaguely aware of some noise emanating from the film’s press rollout, I suppose, but it wasn’t until the now-infamous spit video that I realized just how much flak the movie was catching. The video showed Harry Styles, one of the film’s stars, approaching his audience seat at the Venice Film Festival, suavely buttoning his jacket, leaning down and then — according to nothing but gleeful online supposition — purportedly hocking a loogie on another of the film’s stars, Chris Pine, who stops clapping and, with his eyes, traces a trajectory from Styles’ lips to his own lap. No actual spit is discernible in the video, and no motive was ascribed. But none were needed. Those few frames of video were scrutinized, analyzed, slowed, zoomed, dissected and compared to the Zapruder film so often that the joke begged for mercy.People were happy to believe anything — even the baseless-rumor equivalent of jumping the shark.To me, though, the Cold War artifact it recalled was Kremlinology — the practice of scrying every available scrap of information to discern the hidden motivations and power struggles of distant, unknowable figures. The events that drew such close attention to “Don’t Worry Darling” were not huge ones, in the scheme of things: They included a supposed feud between the director, Olivia Wilde, and the lead actress, Florence Pugh, possibly involving a pay gap between leads; the actor Shia LaBeouf’s being replaced, under disputed circumstances, with Styles; LaBeouf’s leaking messages from Wilde about Pugh; Wilde’s being served with custody papers from her ex-fiancé, Jason Sudeikis, while onstage at CinemaCon; and, above all, Wilde’s becoming romantically involved with Styles, 10 years her junior. Where the theoretical animosity between Styles and Pine was supposed to fit in was unclear. But by then people were happy to believe anything — even the baseless-rumor equivalent of jumping the shark — as long as it kept building the story of a woman who fostered a work environment so fraught that one star would spit on another, in public and on camera, for no apparent reason.More on ‘Don’t Worry Darling’In this much gossiped-about feminist gothic, Florence Pugh plays a seemingly happy housewife whose world starts to crack apart.Review: “If Pugh’s performance never gets beneath the shiny, satirical surface, it’s because there’s no place for it or her to go,” our critic writes of the film.Publicity Crisis: It was one of the hottest projects in Hollywood. But a series of missteps on the promotional trail, hinting at supposed feuds and behind-the-scenes drama, have raised questions about the film’s viability and about Olivia Wilde, its director.Bad Reputation: Amid all the rumors and negative press, a vocal portion of the public seems to have grown oddly invested in witnessing Wilde’s comeuppance. Will that affect the movie’s ratings?“Don’t Worry Darling” is just the most recent example of a film maudit, or “cursed film.” That was the term coined for Jean Cocteau’s Festival du Film Maudit in 1949, describing works that had been wrongfully neglected, or deemed too outrageous to merit serious attention — “movies rendered marginal by disrepute,” as J. Hoberman would later write in The Village Voice. Films made by women are not the only ones stuck in this defensive position, but they seem disproportionately prone to it, often with criticism centering on the director herself. (Elaine May’s experience on “Ishtar” was such that Hoberman classed her as a cineaste maudit; she wouldn’t direct again for decades.) Hints of a production’s chaos or excess are less likely to be taken as signs of unruly genius, and more often framed as messiness or lack of authority. The more that talk swirled around “Don’t Worry Darling,” the more its quality — and then, specifically, Wilde’s competence — were called into question.Out comes the Tomatometer, and the party’s over.Cinema has a century’s worth of lore about films troubled by budget overages, clashing personalities and on-set affairs: Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski’s wanting to kill each other while making “Fitzcarraldo,” mental breakdowns on the set of “Apocalypse Now,” Peter Bogdanovich’s leaving his actual genius of a wife after an affair with a young Cybill Shepherd on “The Last Picture Show.” These productions were plagued by bad press and rumors, but they never faced the wrath of stan Twitter. These days, fans spread rumors and memes, which are picked up by media outlets, which disguise their prurience with speculation about box-office prospects or reviews. Then out comes the Tomatometer, and the party’s over.But of course the idea that this consensus opinion emerges from some pure, objective place is disingenuous. Press always colors reviews — and now some vocal portion of the public seems oddly invested in Wilde’s comeuppance, a fact we may see reflected in ratings. (Given statements Wilde has made about some of the film’s real-world inspirations, it’s not hard to imagine the online response including the kind of organized backlash that has greeted other disfavored films.) And while critics’ responses won’t be actively malicious, they won’t be magically free of their own biases, either. “More or less the definition of the history of cinema,” Richard Brody wrote in The New Yorker in 2012, “is: the stuff that most of the best-known critics didn’t like, or damned with faint praise — it isn’t that they didn’t care for it, but that they didn’t care about it.” Male film critics outnumber female ones 2 to 1, and tend to award “slightly higher average quantitative ratings to films with male protagonists,” according to studies conducted by Martha Lauzen of San Diego State University’s Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film.It’s odd that this could be the fate of “Don’t Worry Darling,” a film about men trapping women in a regressive, suffocating place where dissent means repudiation and exile — a film whose big plot developments must be hard for Wilde to resist talking about, given how much the narrative surrounding the film echoes their point. But it’s impossible to discuss without spoiling the story, so I’ll just share an anecdote. My 14-year-old daughter came with me to the screening, unencumbered by external baggage. When the credits began to roll, she announced, “That was the best movie I’ve ever seen in my whole life.” Seeing Wilde’s name among the cast, she asked which character the director had played. When I told her, she was impressed. She said: “I want to be her. I want to do what she does.” It made me happy to hear this. And then I started to worry.Source photographs: Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images; Screen grab from Warner Bros.Carina Chocano is the author of the essay collection “You Play the Girl” and a contributing writer for the magazine. She frequently writes for the magazine’s Screenland column. More

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      ‘Lou’ Review: Unfinished Business

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      A child’s kidnapping ignites a protracted bid for redemption in this down-and-dirty thriller.Whatever else one might say about the Netflix thriller “Lou,” making it must have been murder. Pummeled by near-constant rain, soaked in swampy mud and battered by frequent bouts of hand-to-hand combat, the movie’s headliners look to have suffered miserably.Consequently, my admiration for Allison Janney, already high, skyrocketed. As the formidable title character, a woman of indeterminate vintage commonly accessorized with shovel, rifle or deer carcass, Janney leaves spry in the dust. Unfazed either by the working conditions or by Maggie Cohn and Jack Stanley’s ridiculously over-the-top screenplay, she lends her grouchy character more than a ramrod spine and steely stare: She gives her a woundedness that keeps us watching long after this prolix quest for redemption should have reached its preordained conclusion.When the plot — a dense weave of familial pain and political misdeeds — requires Lou to leave her cabin in the Pacific Northwest and help a young mother (Jurnee Smollett) reclaim her abducted preteen daughter, Lou barely hesitates. Abandoning her careful plans for a final exit, she takes off through a storm-lashed forest on the trail of the kidnapper, distraught mother in tow. The journey will be filled with perils and flashbacks, regrets and secrets as Lou excavates her past; yet the director, Anna Foerster — who, aside from the instantly forgettable “Underworld: Blood Wars” (2017), has worked mostly in television — pays greater attention to the movie’s impressive fight choreography than to the details of its central mystery.Methodically violent and more than a little silly, “Lou” delivers a kick in the head to ageism. When did you last hear an arthritic heroine warn a woman half her age not to slow her down?LouRated R for knives, fists, bullets and a lethal tin can. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘A Jazzman’s Blues’ Review: Tyler Perry Revisits a Jim Crow-Era Romance

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      The writer-director returns to his first screenplay — a dark melodrama with soulful musical numbers — after two decades.“A Jazzman’s Blues,” Tyler Perry’s melodrama about ill-fated teenagers who fall in love in rural Georgia, marks the writer-director-studio head’s return to his first screenplay, w‌hich he wrote in 1995. In the meantime, he broke through with a slew of Madea comedies, and whetted the skills required to deliver the faceted beauty of Bayou — his richest male character to date — with dramas like 2010’s “For Colored Girls.”It helps, too, that he has found a perfect portrayer in Joshua Boone (“Premature”). Bayou, who is embodied with a luminous sincerity by Boone, offers a touching take on the kind of compassionate man a so-called mama’s boy might become.The movie begins in 1987. An elderly version of Hattie Mae Boyd (Daphne Maxwell Reid) paces around her home, listening to a white political candidate (Brent Antonello) being interviewed on television. He blathers about his family’s civic legacy. When he begins nattering on about not being racist, she shuts off the TV. Then, in short order, she arrives at the candidate’s office with a stack of love letters — proof, she says, of her son’s killing in 1947. As the man begins reading the letters, the movie shifts to the past, where it stays for much of the star-crossed, racism-infused romance.Amirah Vann (in a bulwark turn) portrays the younger version of Hattie Mae, the loving mama of Bayou and his brother, Willie Earl (Austin Scott). Solea Pfeiffer, in a promising onscreen debut, is Leanne, the intended recipient of Bayou’s missives.From the get-go, Bayou and Leanne recognize in each other something wounded, yet also sheltering. But their clandestine affection is upended when Leanne’s mother, Ethel (Lana Young), bent on passing for white, wrenches her daughter away. The romance is briefly rekindled when a war injury sends Bayou home to his mother’s juke joint outside Hopewell, Ga., and Leanne arrives, newly wed to a scion of the town’s reigning family.With this turn, the movie might have collapsed under the weight of its twists or drowned in the sentimentality of Aaron Zigman’s score. A volatile scene between Leanne and her childhood-friend-turned housekeeper, Citsy (played with fierce sensitivity by Milauna Jemai Jackson), helps shore it up.When Bayou leaves, this time to avoid a lynching, he heads with Willie Earl and his brother’s music manager, Ira (Ryan Eggold), to Chicago. There, Ira lands a nightclub gig for Bayou, a honey-voiced singer, and his trumpet-playing, heroin-shooting brother. (It is here that the composer Terence Blanchard, who wrote songs for the film, and the choreographer Debbie Allen create some of its most exuberant musical numbers.)“A Jazzman’s Blues” is packed with outsize emotions, but also grand themes. The relationship of antisemitism to white supremacy gets a significant nod. And while addiction, domestic abuse and rape have in the past been Perry staples — and appear here as well — they’re now in the service of a more expansive, chastising saga.A Jazzman’s BluesRated R for scenes of substance abuse, violence, rape, brief lovemaking and cruel language. Running time: 2 hours 7 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Athena’ Review: Oh Brothers, Where Art Thou?

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      A besieged French housing project is the setting for Romain Gavras’s relentlessly kinetic action movie.“Athena” begins in a state of maximum tension and escalates from there. An angry crowd has gathered outside a police station near a high-rise housing project in the suburbs of Paris. A video of the killing of a local teenage boy, apparently by uniformed officers, has gone viral, igniting long-smoldering resentments. Violence breaks out quickly, and before long, the talk on social networks and news broadcasts will be forecasting not civil unrest, but outright civil war.At the center of the maelstrom, spinning in different directions, are the slain teenager’s three surviving brothers. Abdel (Dali Benssalah), the first one we encounter, is a soldier in the French Army, recently returned from combat in Mali. He’s inside the police station when the trouble (and the movie) begins, and his long walk to meet the demonstrators outside symbolizes his predicament. He’s pulled apart by conflicting loyalties, caught between the power of the state and the rage of the streets.His brother Karim (Sami Slimane) is a militant leader in the process of becoming a military commander as protest accelerates toward armed conflict. With guns and vehicles seized from the forces of law and order, Karim and his army of young men stage a small-scale revolution, taking control of the courtyards and corridors of Athena, the high-rise complex where they have grown up in poverty and alienation.Another brother, Moktar (Ouassini Embarek), is a drug dealer whose business is disrupted by the chaos. He and his associates are trying to get out of Athena while Karim is trying to lock it down and Abdel, increasingly desperate and less and less secure in his convictions, is attempting to calm the situation.Fraternal melodrama and social turmoil provide fuel for relentless action. In principle it’s not a bad formula, and “Athena,” directed by Romain Gavras from a script he wrote with Ladj Ly and Elias Belkeddar, is not shy about evoking gangster movies, classic westerns and classical tragedy, investing its contemporary story with brutal, archaic power.Gavras’s filmmaking is technically impressive. He pulls the camera through complex, kinetic tableaus in long, breathless takes. Some of these sequences are thrilling, but after a while they become repetitive, and Athena feels more like a video game background than an actual place. There’s no modulation: Nearly every scene ends in either a screaming argument or a literal explosion. Karim and Moktar rarely utter a line without shouting. Abdel is more of a brooder, at least for a while — Benssalah has a clenched, melancholy watchfulness that holds your attention in the midst of all the noise — but eventually he starts yelling, too.There are other characters: a young riot policeman (Anthony Bajon) who is taken hostage, and a terrorist mastermind (Alexis Manenti) who is coaxed out of retirement to join Karim’s rebels. Their presence complicates the plot, and amplifies the film’s hectic, hectoring gestures toward topical urgency. But like the three brothers, these secondary figures are sociological composites, inserted into a carefully diagramed, ultimately incoherent narrative scheme.You could argue that “Athena” uses the syntax of action cinema to make a point about the state of French society. And while it’s true that there are real issues at play here — police violence, racism, the disaffection of the immigrant underclass — the filmmakers don’t so much explore as exploit them, giving a loud and sloppy genre exercise a patina of relevance.AthenaRated R. Nonstop violence. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Sidney’ Review: A Lovingly Assembled Career Portrait

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      Sidney Poitier is memorialized in this thorough, and thoroughly conventional, documentary.“Sidney,” a documentary about the actor and filmmaker Sidney Poitier, who died in January, is a compendium of hero worship. The director is Reginald Hudlin, but, in tone and temperament, this lovingly assembled encomium is peak Oprah Winfrey. As one of the film’s producers and a close friend of Poitier (whom she calls her “great Black hope”), Winfrey glows with emotional authenticity. Her breakdown at the end is unexpectedly moving, if not entirely unexpected.Oblivious to the film’s fire hose of adulation and thicket of talking heads, Poitier (speaking mainly in a 2012 interview with Winfrey) softly addresses the camera, unfailingly modest and supremely chill. Around him, Hudlin unrolls a life that, Poitier believed, fulfilled the predictions of the soothsayer his mother consulted when he was not expected to survive infancy. Having exchanged Bahamian poverty for Jim Crow-era America, barely literate, he claimed, and baffled by segregation, Poitier discovered that acting was therapy, a way to express the many personalities roiling inside him. (Much later, he would require many years of actual therapy in part to process his love affair with the gorgeous Diahann Carroll.)Painstakingly thorough, “Sidney” scans a career freighted with political and social significance, its litany of firsts — including the first Black leading man to win an Oscar for best actor; the first Black director to make a $100 million movie — no deterrence to those who would later accuse Poitier of subservience to the desires of white audiences. Spotlighting the courage of Poitier’s civil rights activism and the daring of his acting choices, Hudlin labors to convey their significance to Black Americans: The man who had grown up without ever seeing a mirror was now tasked with reflecting Black lives back to an audience avid for recognition.The inescapable impression is of a picture buckling beneath the weight of its subject’s achievements. Yet there are moments when the focus shifts and the movie shrugs off its hagiographic shackles: Lulu, the Scottish pop star, belting out the theme of “To Sir, With Love” (1967), her pipes barely corroded; the tart, mischievous interjections of interviewees like Denzel Washington and Spike Lee; and Poitier’s first wife, the admirable Juanita Brady, explaining how she gave her inexperienced spouse critical financial advice, even selling her mink coat to invest in “A Raisin in the Sun,” the 1959 stage play in which he starred.These interludes act like lemon juice squirted on heavy cream, brief reagents in a movie that, despite the meticulousness of its making, seems a peculiarly orthodox tribute to a revolutionary life.SidneyRated PG-13 for racial slurs. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. Watch on AppleTV+. More

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      ‘Petrov’s Flu’ Review: Roaming a Grim, Rowdy Underworld

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      In this fever dream of a movie by Kirill Serebrennikov, a Russian man wanders a wild urban landscape that he regularly hallucinates his way out of.When the phantasmagoric “Petrov’s Flu” opens on a crowded bus — a nightmare of jostling, babbling bodies — it seems obvious that there’s more troubling its hero than a typical seasonal malady. Sweaty and unsteady, he navigates through the other surging, grumbling passengers. Then a man yanks him off the bus, someone hands him a gun and Petrov is suddenly in a firing squad mowing down prisoners — and then he gets back on the bus and rejoins the clamorous horde he never wholly escapes. Welcome to Russia!For the next two and a half hours in this droll, chaotic, fitfully dazzling movie (it was at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival), Petrov (Semyon Serzin) continues to sweat and stagger as he roams a derelict urban landscape. Feverish and often plastered, he is in bad shape, and so is his world, with its ominous faces, soupy gloom and rowdy human comedy. His reason for rambling isn’t obvious. But as he wanders, he keeps slipping into outlandish reveries amid meeting friends, drinking and drinking some more. It’s unclear at first whether he’s seeking to escape reality or whether it is eluding him.Much of what happens in “Petrov’s Flu” is intentionally and enjoyably destabilizing. It takes place over a fairly compressed period of a day or two (maybe!), but includes several long flashbacks that expand the overall time frame by decades. And while the story is relatively straightforward — Petrov travels through a strange, at times hellish realm, evoking Odysseus and Leopold Bloom in their respective underworlds — the filmmaking is richly imaginative and unbound by the usual time-and-space constraints. When Petrov enters one location, he sometimes exits someplace entirely different.In recent years, the director Kirill Serebrennikov has been best known abroad for his difficulties with the Russian government. In 2017, he was placed under house arrest, accused of embezzling around $2 million. The charges have been seen as retaliation from the Kremlin for both Serebrennikov’s work and his expressed views on, among other issues, Russian censorship, the country’s aggression abroad and its persecution of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. He was put on trial and sentenced, but in March, after the remaining sentence was suspended, Serebrennikov fled to Germany, where he remains.It’s hard not to take this history into account while watching “Petrov’s Flu,” which paints a bleak, wistful, tragically funny portrait of a man, a people, a world. Yet despite the grimness, the violence and the grotesque bleating of some hateful, prejudiced trolls, the movie never drags you down (though it might exhaust you) because it’s buoyed by Serebrennikov’s bravura, unfettered filmmaking. As the gorgeously restless camera travels alongside Petrov — as walls disappear and locations melt into one another — it starts to feel like both the character and director are trying to imagine a way out.As Petrov dreams and boozes and meanders, a sketchy portrait of him emerges. He has a family, though it’s complicated. He says he’s divorced but refers to his ex, Petrova (Chulpan Khamatova), as his wife. Like Petrov, she too experiences lurid, vicious fantasies. The pair have a young son, and all three seem to live in the apartment where Petrov draws comics. He and Petrova also sleep together, having sex that turns uneasily aggressive and, at one point, inspires Petrov to get out of bed and draw. Some of the comic panels he’s working on seem to mirror what happens onscreen.Part of what gives the movie its tension and kick is that it’s not always clear how much of what transpires is happening in Petrova’s and Petrov’s heads. The movie is based on the Russian novel “The Petrovs In and Around the Flu,” by Alexey Salnikov. Despite the English-language title, the movie regularly shifts from Petrov to Petrova, who also experiences hallucinations. These take place during fraught, frustrating encounters with other people. She pauses, as if possessed, her eyes briefly blacken, and she wreaks terrible violence: She pummels one man’s face and slits another person’s throat.Whether these dark thoughts originate in Petrov or Petrova seems beside the point. What matters is that these frenzied visions recurrently engulf the characters — and the movie — transporting them from their everyday brutish reality into an equally brutish fantasy world. Asleep or not, they are dreaming, but their dreams are nightmares that are, by turns, inventive and liberating, grotesque and suffocating. At least Petrov flashes back to his relatively pacific childhood, a period of light and tenderness, a time before Russia’s current regime. And of course Petrov is an artist, which I imagine is finally his salvation as much as it is for the wildly talented Serebrennikov.Petrov’s FluNot rated. In Russia and English, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes. In theaters. More