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      What’s on TV This Week: The Super Bowl and an Oscar Micheaux Documentary

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      The Super Bowl airs on NBC. And TCM airs a documentary about a pathbreaking filmmaker.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, Feb. 7-Feb. 13. Details and times are subject to change.MondayLOVE & BASKETBALL (2000) 6 p.m. on BET. Football is front of mind this week, but Gina Prince-Bythewood’s coming-of-age classic “Love & Basketball” is timeless. Set in Los Angeles, the movie stars Sanaa Lathan and Omar Epps as young people who are passionate for each other and for the game.TuesdayAMERICAN MASTERS: MARIAN ANDERSON — THE WHOLE WORLD IN HER HANDS (2022) 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). The filmmaker Rita Coburn (“Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise”) looks at the barrier-breaking contralto Marian Anderson in this new documentary. Anderson is perhaps best known for her 1939 concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, which became a civil rights milestone; she also broke the color barrier for soloists at the Metropolitan Opera and toured for the State Department. Anderson’s life and legacy — she died in 1993 at 96 — are discussed here by interviewees including the tenor George Shirley and the mezzo-sopranos Denyce Graves and J’nai Bridges.WednesdayA scene from “Fairview.”Comedy CentralFAIRVIEW 8:30 p.m. on Comedy Central. A small American town deals with big changes in this new, “South Park”-esque half-hour animated series, which counts Stephen Colbert among its executive producers. The stand-up comic Blair Socci voices the mayor of Fairview, where people’s jobs are being replaced by artificial intelligence; Covid is a concern; and, in at least one case, a student gives a school presentation on his father’s career running an explicit OnlyFans account. While moderating an interview panel at New York Comic Con last year, the comedy writer-performer Jen Spyra said to the “Fairview” creator R.J. Fried, “I understand that you take the comedy to some abjectly disgusting places.” Fried responded calmly and succinctly: “That’s for sure.” The voice cast also includes the comics Aparna Nancherla and Atsuko Okatsuka.ThursdayDavid Oyelowo and Storm Reid in “Don’t Let Go.”Lacey Terrell/Universal PicturesDON’T LET GO (2019) 5:20 p.m. on FXM. Grief seems to bend time in “Don’t Let Go,” a sci-fi thriller led by David Oyelowo and directed by Jacob Aaron Estes. Oyelowo plays Jack Radcliff, a Los Angeles detective whose niece (played by Storm Reid) is murdered. But soon after the killing, Radcliff receives what is apparently a phone call from his dead niece, speaking from the past — or perhaps from another dimension. He sets off to untangle the mystery. The result is “a likable, derivative genre mash-up,” Manohla Dargis said in her review for The New York Times. “You get lost in its thickets because Estes hasn’t wholly figured out how to make toying with time work,” she wrote. “But he has a fine cast and a good sense of place, including a feel for the spookiness of emptied-out spaces.”FridayEVERYTHING’S GONNA BE ALL WHITE 8 p.m. on Showtime. The producer-director Sacha Jenkins (“Bitchin’: The Sound and Fury of Rick James”) is behind this new three-part docuseries, which explores race and racism in America’s past and present. It does so with the help of interviewees from an array of fields — academic, political, artistic and more — including the historian Nell Irvin Painter, the human rights activist Linda Sarsour, the comedian Amanda Seales, the artist Favianna Rodriguez, the rapper Bun B and the sexuality educator Ericka Hart.SaturdayCRY MACHO (2021) 8 p.m. on HBO. Clint Eastwood plays a patinated Texas rodeo retiree tasked with transporting a boy (played by Eduardo Minett) from Mexico to the United States in this modern Western. (Or almost modern: It’s set in 1980.) Their journey is risky but roundabout, filled with 20-miles-an-hour detours that make the movie a slow burn. Its relative quiet is especially pronounced in comparison to the work that Eastwood is best known for — a trait that A.O. Scott welcomed, mostly, in his review for The Times. “This one,” Scott wrote, “is something different — a deep cut for the die-hards, a hangout movie with nothing much to prove and just enough to say.”SundayPaul Robeson in Oscar Micheaux’s “Body and Soul.” A documentary about Micheaux will air on TCM on Sunday night.Kino LorberOSCAR MICHEAUX: THE SUPERHERO OF BLACK FILMMAKING (2021) 9:30 p.m. on TCM. From 1919 to 1948, the filmmaker Oscar Micheaux made some 40 movies filled with nuanced Black characters who broke screen stereotypes and often directly addressed issues of race. This documentary from the filmmaker Francesco Zippel (“Friedkin Uncut”) looks at Micheaux’s groundbreaking work and remarkable life: Micheaux’s parentshad once been enslaved, and he turned to professional storytelling only after a stint as a homesteader in South Dakota. His first film, “The Homesteader” (1919), was based on a fictionalized memoir he wrote. Produced about a century later, this documentary features perspectives from the late contemporary filmmakers John Singleton and Melvin Van Peebles, and a handful of performers and scholars.SUPER BOWL LVI 6 p.m. on NBC. Will the Los Angeles Rams or the Cincinnati Bengals prevail? What will it be like seeing two quarterbacks who were No. 1 draft picks — Joe Burrow of the Bengals and Matthew Stafford of the Rams — face off in a championship game, an extreme Super Bowl rarity? Most important, will Matthew McConaughey grace us with another weird, surrealist commercial, as he did for Doritos last year? Find out on Sunday during this live broadcast of the 56th Super Bowl. Viewers who are in it more for the culture (and, perhaps, the guacamole) will be glad to see a stacked halftime performance lineup: Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, Eminem, Mary J. Blige and Kendrick Lamar. More

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      From Chad, a Filmmaker and a Star Committed to Telling Stories of Home

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      In “Lingui, the Sacred Bonds,” the director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun works again with Achouackh Abakar Souleymane, this time on a wrenching drama about abortion.As Chad’s most lauded auteur, the director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun remains committed to portraying his sub-Saharan African homeland onscreen. Early in his career he focused on the fallout from the nation’s multiple civil wars, which forced him to migrate to France in the 1980s. But in the aftermath of the conflict that concluded in 2010, he has shifted his attention to other social ills.With his newest drama, “Lingui, the Sacred Bonds,” which debuted at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival and reached American theaters on Friday, he takes on the topic of abortion through the plight of a Muslim woman, Amina (Achouackh Abakar Souleymane), who is helping her teenage daughter, Maria (Rihane Khalil Alio), terminate her pregnancy after a sexual assault. The film has received rave reviews, with The Times’s Manohla Dargis making it a Critic’s Pick.While abortion is in theory legal in Chad under strict circumstances, the stigma (often associated with religious beliefs) and restrictions around it push some to resort to clandestine clinics or, worse, to carry to term and then kill the newborn.In a joint interview, Haroun, speaking from Paris, and Abakar Souleymane, in N’Djamena, Chad, shared more on the relevance of their second film collaboration. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.Why did you decide to make this film at this moment in Chad?MAHAMAT-SALEH HAROUN I read an article about a newborn child discovered in the garbage, and all these situations of unwanted pregnancies. But I was first really traumatized by the same subject when I was a child. I was 7 or 8, and we found a baby in the garbage. Several decades later when I read this article, I said, “That’s not normal. I have to do something.” I started investigating, asking nurses, and I discovered that it was a huge problem women are facing every day, because the fact is that in Chad, in our local languages, the word “rape” doesn’t exist. We know that rape exists, a lot of women are victims of it, but there is no word to express it. It’s always as if it’s the women’s fault, like they are guilty because they are pregnant. Sometimes they deny the pregnancy or sometimes, when they discover it’s too late to even think of an abortion, they keep it secret until they have the kid and then they kill it because they don’t have any solutions. I had to tell that story from a Chadian point of view in a human way that resonates with the same problems in the United States, in Argentina, in El Salvador, and in other countries in Africa.ACHOUACKH ABAKAR SOULEYMANE It’s horrible because if you’re not married and you are pregnant, you cannot talk about it. Sometimes these young women are just on their own. If you’re raped, you don’t talk about it, you just deal with it. As a woman, as a single mom, I was happy to be that person that can show it to the whole country and tell women that if this happened in your life, it’s happening to a lot of other women, and you can do something about it.Achouackh Abakar Souleymane in a scene from the film.MUBIDid you or the film face any pushback from government officials or religious groups?HAROUN When we were in Cannes, people said a lot of things against the film on social media, but they hadn’t seen it. But then when we showed the film in Chad, no one said anything because it’s just the reality. We even have some support from the government. I remember the Ministry of Culture was very happy and we had also a state minister at the screening. He called my assistant the day after and said he wanted to organize his own screening for the whole government because he thought that the film should be shown to all those people who don’t know a lot about this subject. I refused because you never know with politics; sometimes you are manipulated. But it was really well received and even for Achouackh, who being in Chad you might think she could be a victim of hate, she has only received congratulations.ABAKAR SOULEYMANE People would come up to me and say, “You are so brave for being able to do that.” That was shocking.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      Watch Time Stand Still in ‘The Worst Person in the World’

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      The director Joachim Trier narrates a fanciful sequence from his film, starring Renate Reinsve.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.Ever wish you could put a pause on your current life decisions to explore a different option? The Norwegian film “The Worst Person in the World” takes this question literally in one scene.The 30-year-old Julie (Renate Reinsve) is in a relationship with an older man, Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie). But she recently met Eivind (Herbert Nordrum) at a party and was smitten by him. To consider how things might be with Eivind, Julie — and the film — stop time so she can go across town and see him. As she wanders through Oslo, everyone else but the would-be lovers are frozen.Discussing the sequence, the film’s director, Joachim Trier, said that he didn’t want it to feel supernatural.“It’s not about, oh my goodness, she’s discovered a time machine,” he said. “Rather, it’s sort of a musical romantic sequence that plays around with the idea of how it feels to be in love as if time stands still.”Rather than rely heavily on digital effects to make the moment work, Trier and his crew brought in extras to stand still around Oslo. This involved temporarily stopping traffic and sometimes having only brief moments to allow everyone to run into position and capture the shot.Trier said people in Oslo still come up to him to complain about the time he blocked traffic at busy intersections for his shoot.“But it’s become a popular movie in Norway,” he said, “so I hope people forgive me.”Read the “Worst Person in the World” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      ‘Book of Love’ Review: Lust (Eventually) in Translation

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      Unbeknown to the author of an uninspired romance novel, the book takes a sharp turn into erotic territory in its Spanish-language release.“Who wrote the book of love?,” the Monotones once mused. It couldn’t possibly be Henry Copper (Sam Claflin), a stodgy author whose debut romance novel is so devoid of passion that it sells only two copies in his native Britain. But when an audacious translator named María Rodríguez (Verónica Echegui) reimagines Henry’s chaste love story as soapy erotica, he becomes a surprise sensation in Mexico.In “The Book of Love” (on Amazon), María is not only a remixer for Henry’s duller passages, she is also his assigned escort on his book tour of Mexico. Henry, who doesn’t speak Spanish, is excited — if perplexed — by the legions of fans who turn out, titillated by the telenovela-worthy sex scenes María added to his work without consulting him. But once several comic exchanges bring her poetic license to light, his thrill turns to rage. Choking on sanctimony, Henry agrees to continue on the tour, but only to preserve his reputation.When, and in which picturesque city, Henry and María will acknowledge their mutual affection is the burning question of this romantic comedy trifle, which offers a few laughs and many more exasperated groans. As our leading man, Claflin alternates between a pout and a wan smile, and shows all the charm of beans on toast. As for María, there is something tired and clichéd about a Mexican woman’s being deputed to help a British fuddy-duddy embrace narrative spice. It’s a shame that the movie, written and directed by Analeine Cal y Mayor, can’t see that María has better things to do.Book of LoveNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. Watch on Amazon. More

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      ‘Lingui, the Sacred Bonds’ Review: Love, Ferocious and Limitless

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      In this electric liberation story from Chad, a mother struggles to protect her daughter’s future and finds both herself and a world of possibility.Freedom doesn’t come easily in “Lingui, the Sacred Bonds,” an electric liberation story about a mother and daughter. It is fought for — and seized — by women who, in saving themselves, save one another. For the daughter, autonomy means securing an abortion in a country that forbids it. For the mother, an observant Muslim, self-sovereignty is a revolutionary act, one that necessitates a shift in thinking and in being. It means saying no, dancing, sneaking smokes and fighting when need be. It means finding new ways to be a woman in this man’s world.The story unfolds in present-day N’Djamena, Chad, where Amina (Achouackh Abakar Souleymane) spends much of her time on just getting by. With her 15-year-old daughter, Maria (Rihane Khalil Alio), Amina lives in a humble home with a rickety gate, thick walls and a sweet, playful dog and charming kitten. For money, Amina makes small, ingeniously designed coal stoves using steel wires that she painstakingly salvages from old car and truck tires she buys. When she’s made enough, she covers her head and body, gingerly balances the stoves on her head and roams the city selling them for the equivalent of a few dollars.The family’s domestic tranquillity has already been disrupted when the story opens, though you’re as in the dark about what’s gone wrong as Amina is. The writer-director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, however, is a fast worker — the movie runs just shy of 90 minutes — and he rapidly sketches in the story and the grim stakes for both mother and daughter. Maria has been expelled from school because she’s pregnant. (“It’s bad for our image,” a school official coolly explains.) Maria won’t name the father. And she does not want a child, partly because she doesn’t want to end up like Amina, who has suffered for being a single mother.Much as in the American independent movie “Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” the struggle to obtain a safe abortion here is difficult, life-changing and profound. Narratively, the effort to secure one rapidly takes the shape of an odyssey, a voyage filled with misadventures, harrowing threats and gendered hurdles. For Amina, these obstacles include government prohibitions on abortion, empty pockets, wagging fingers and shaking heads. There’s the hectoring imam (Saleh Sambo) who questions her faith; and there’s the pesky neighbor (Youssouf Djaoro) who’s happy to flirt with her but won’t lend her money.Haroun has a gift for distilling volumes of meaning in his direct, lucid, balanced visuals, which he uses to complement and illuminate the minimalist, naturalistic dialogue. And while you worry about his characters and their fates, it’s instructive that he opens “Lingui” with a close-up of Amina, her face pouring sweat, intensely focused on something outside the frame. The light is soft and lovely, and the sounds of her progressively deeper breaths blend with the melodic music and murmurings heard in the background. A few more cuts and close-ups reveal that she is using a blade to slice open a large tire. It’s difficult, punishing work.But Amina keeps at it, keeps wrestling with the tire, and then she stands and puts her entire body into this laborious endeavor, using every muscle to extract the wires. You know this woman within minutes of the movie opening, before you even hear her name. And while you see the modesty of her circumstances, what hits you, what gets under your skin and into your head, are the dust and the sweat, her grit and her unwavering focus. Amina gets the tough, exhausting job done. And then she puts on a flowing robe and sails into the city, presenting an image — a costume — of classic, demure femininity.Haroun complicates that image beautifully in “Lingui.” The movie is about a great many different things, including the colors and textures of this world, its tenderness and cruelty. But while the story is organized around Amina’s heroic efforts to secure a safe abortion for Maria, each step in this difficult venture expands the movie’s narrative and political horizons. This is a story about a handful of specific women. It’s also about the bonds that connect them, even when frayed, and that help form a larger sisterhood that includes Amina’s long-estranged sister (Briya Gomdigue) and an obliging midwife (Hadjé Fatimé Ngoua).That sisterhood is complex and at times fragile, but it is always rooted in the lived experiences and bodies of these women. Again and again, Haroun shows you Amina and Maria alone and together, at times exchanging hugs or tenderly bowing their heads toward each other. Every so often, you see each running along a street alone, her clothes fluttering and body straining with effort. He shows feet and braids, a flash of a bared leg, the teasing glimpse of a belly. He shows you women in motion and in revolt, fleeing and escaping and at times running sly, joyous circles around the men in their lives. And, if you watch the final credits, you will hear the sounds of women’s laughter, too — a divine and triumphant coda.Lingui, The Sacred BondsNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Alone With You’ Review: An Anniversary for One

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      A woman hoping for a romantic night with her girlfriend instead finds herself trapped in her Brooklyn apartment, facing down demons.In the long history of horror, lesbian relationships have been something of a fixation for directors. That fascination has produced works of camp, wildly homophobic characters and, occasionally, refreshing representation. “Alone With You,” the first feature from the writing-directing duo Emily Bennett and Justin Brooks, is the latest horror film to join this lineage. Unfortunately, its lesbian representation is so shoddy that its scares also suffer.The film centers on Charlie (Bennett), a makeup artist in New York who lives with her girlfriend, Simone (Emma Myles), who is a photographer. Charlie is excited for Simone to return home on the night of their anniversary, but as Simone becomes increasingly unreachable and Charlie finds herself locked in their Brooklyn apartment, a more sinister narrative begins to creep in. It appears that Simone is not who she says she is, but neither, it seems, is Charlie.First, the lesbian problem: The female leads never kiss (or, for that matter, touch), but there are multiple shots of Simone, who is mainly depicted as neglectful and untrustworthy, kissing a man.The horror problem is slightly less dire. “Alone With You” is often canny in its creepiness, layering ominous oddities atop each other before the jump scares emerge. But because Charlie and Simone’s relationship is already doubtful, the whole third act — including the “why” behind all this terror — falls apart. Is Charlie a tortured lover or just another textbook lesbian psycho? Either way, the film’s climactic reveal is regressive, treading the same ground as “High Tension” or “What Keeps You Alive.”Alone With YouNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. In theaters now, on demand Feb. 8. More

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      ‘Moonfall’ Review: Out of Orbit

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      Halle Berry and Patrick Wilson save the world from a rogue moon in the latest disaster movie from the director of “Independence Day.”In the disaster movie “Moonfall,” the moon goes out of orbit and starts coiling its way toward Earth, causing environmental disasters and setting the clock on humanity. Scientists calculate ellipses; screenwriters ready their exclamations. “Everything we thought we knew about the nature of the universe has just gone out the window,” a N.A.S.A. official (Halle Berry) proclaims. But for the director Roland Emmerich (“Independence Day,” “The Day After Tomorrow,” “2012”), who treats the planet to potentially life-ending cataclysms with the regularity of dental checkups, it’s not much new under the sun.To learn more, Berry’s character, Jocinda, visits a restricted N.A.S.A. compound, where Donald Sutherland, as the staff deep-secrets keeper, appears to have been waiting, growing his hair long and listening to Mahler with a gun ready. Jocinda will need to team up with Brian (Patrick Wilson), an ex-astronaut who hates her after the fallout from an accident years earlier. Their moonshot to save the world, carried out as a rogue mission while the authorities stupidly ready their nukes, will involve traveling through space without electricity. Their seatmate — a fringe-science guy (John Bradley) whose mantra is “what would Elon do?” — should probably turn off his smartphone.This off-world adventure flirts with the transcendently goofy, but Emmerich spoils it by crosscutting to a useless narrative thread on Earth, where Brian and Jocinda’s sons (Charlie Plummer and Zayn Maloney) have been thrown together to seek safety in Colorado, for reasons that make as little sense as anything else. (Hearing that the planet is on the brink, Michael Peña, as Brian’s ex-wife’s current husband, announces, “We should go to Aspen.”)While geologic shifts have made geography fungible, they aren’t responsible for the shoddy rendering of the New York skyline. And they can’t be blamed for the dialogue, which expresses clichés in unusually direct terms: “You’re putting the fate of the world in the hands of your ex-wife and some has-been astronaut!” Better that than to trust Emmerich for anything beyond incidental fun.MoonfallRated PG-13. Dumb decisions. Running time: 2 hours 4 minutes. In theaters. More