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    Generative A.I. Destroys a Building in Its Netflix Debut

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    The streaming company said it used the technology onscreen for the first time in an Argentine science fiction show.To make a building collapse in Buenos Aires, Netflix creators turned to generative artificial intelligence for the first time onscreen.Ted Sarandos, one of Netflix’s chief executives, said during the company’s second-quarter earnings call on Thursday that the technology was a strong tool for creators and was accompanied by “real people doing real work.”“We remain convinced that A.I. represents an incredible opportunity to help creators make films and series better, not just cheaper,” Sarandos said.But for “The Eternaut,” an Argentine show that incorporated the A.I. work, the decision also came with significant savings.The cost of creating a similar scene with traditional visual effects would not have been feasible within the show’s budget, Sarandos said. The use of A.I., he said, allowed creators to complete the scene 10 times as quickly.“The Eternaut,” a six-episode series adapted from a science fiction comic, debuted on April 30. In the series, the rare snow descending on Buenos Aires turns out to be fatal, killing anyone who comes into contact with the snowflakes. One survivor becomes determined to battle this threat, and others.The use of A.I. in movie and television production was a main concern in Hollywood in 2023, when SAG-AFTRA, the union representing tens of thousands of actors, went on strike for 118 days. The contract it reached included a specific provision about the use of A.I., guaranteeing that the technology would not be used to create digital replicas of actors’ likeness without compensation or approval.While “The Eternaut” is the first use of generative A.I. onscreen, Netflix is also considering how to integrate the technology into other areas like member experience. Gregory Peters, one of the company’s chief executives, said during the earnings call that there was “tremendous room and opportunity” for the use of new generative technology in personalization and recommendations.Netflix exceeded Wall Street’s forecasts for the second quarter, earning $11.1 billion in revenue and $3.1 billion in net income.The most-watched film during that period was “Back in Action” starring Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx, and the British drama “Adolescence” was the most-watched television show. More

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      ‘Untamed’ Review: A National Park Procedural From Netflix

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      Onscreen, at least, there are enough rangers to keep Yosemite running and to investigate a mysterious death at El Capitan.In the category of “Shows That Play Differently Under the Current Administration,” this week brings “Untamed,” a new Netflix mystery mini-series set in Yosemite National Park.On one hand, you can’t help wondering whether all those rangers would have time to investigate a mysterious death on the face of El Capitan when the National Park Service has lost nearly 25 percent of its permanent staff since President Trump took office again. Aren’t there restrooms that need cleaning?On the other, hiring rangers who look like Eric Bana and Lily Santiago — who play the primary investigators of that mysterious death — might be explained as part of the recent “Make America Beautiful Again” executive order.Bana, 20 years along from his action-star heyday (when he appeared successively in “Hulk,” “Troy” and “Munich”), plays Kyle Turner, who is not just any ranger. He’s an agent of the National Park Service Investigative Services Branch, so he’s sort of a federal cousin to the naval investigators at “NCIS.” Maybe CBS would have gone ahead and called the show “NPSISB,” but Netflix, cautious by nature, has gone with “Untamed.”The title refers both to the landscape — mountainous British Columbia locations stand in for California — and to Turner, a laconic loner with a tragic back story and an entire Douglas fir’s worth of chips on his shoulder. Even his horse thinks he’s too intense.With Bana playing a modern lawman hemmed in by bureaucracy and fueled by guilt and resentment, “Untamed” sits between neo-frontier soap opera (like “Yellowstone”) and neo-western crime drama (like “Dark Winds” or the late, lamented “Longmire”). Mark L. Smith, who created the show with his daughter Elle Smith, has experience in this region of the American imagination, having played up the brutal aspects of the western mythos as a co-writer of “The Revenant” and creator of an earlier Netflix mini-series, “American Primeval.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: ‘Too Much’ Is Not Nervy Enough

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      This new Netflix comedy by Lena Dunham is the surprisingly mild tale of a young woman fleeing New York after a catastrophic breakup.In a scene from the new Netflix comedy “Too Much,” Jessica (Megan Stalter), a frustrated line producer, vents to her colleagues about her resentments. A co-worker snips: “You’re realizing that middling white women feel terrible wherever they go.” Well, with frenemies like this …Created by Lena Dunham and her husband, Luis Felber, a British musician, “Too Much” follows our heroine Jessica as she flees New York after a catastrophic breakup. She moves to London for the romance of it all — the Jane Austen, the Bridget Jones, the BritBox. The distance from her grandmother (Rhea Perlman), mother (Rita Wilson) and sister (Dunham) is a perk, too, though oceans and time zones are no match for matriarchs who want to impart wisdom on vaginal health.Jessica is a pajama girlie, seen often in granny nighties, frilly tap shorts and teddies. By day, she wears baby-doll dresses and voluminous sailor-neck shifts, big bows in her hair, space buns and a pale blue manicure. She puts her gremlin dog in sweaters and gowns, and she stomps her feet when she’s angry.She also can’t stop looking at her ex’s new girlfriend’s social media. How can the knitting influencer and lizard rescuer Wendy (Emily Ratajkowski) be so happy with Zev (Michael Zegen), when she, Jessica, was supposed to be celebrating her seventh anniversary with him at this very moment? Jessica scrolls obsessively, and she records her own private video diaries addressed to Wendy, videos that bubble with post-breakup rage and confusion.But maybe all that insecurity and despair is more of the New York Jessica, because the London Jessica meets a brooding singer-songwriter, Felix (Will Sharpe), on her very first night in town. They hit it off immediately and speed-run the traditional relationship markers: the I-love-yous, the dinner with the boss, the awkward introduction to friends, the strained plus-one-at-the-wedding mishegoss, the disclosure of family baggage.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Brick’ Review: No Way Out?

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      In the overly constructed thriller from Germany, tenants are trapped in apartment building by a mysterious bulwark.“Brick” is built almost entirely of hints and twists. Even so, it feels spoiler-free to share that Liv, an architect who is trapped in an apartment building in Hamburg, Germany, concludes that the material composing the barricades is neither carbon fiber nor liquid granite.Liv (Ruby O. Fee) attempts to escape the apartment building with her video game-designing spouse, Tim (Matthias Schweighöfer). Tim is haunted by flashbacks of a family tragedy, one that provides the movie its iffy metaphorical mortar and moral. Hint: Like the building, Tim’s emotions are also entombed.The pair may be at an impasse, but skills-wise, they are well-suited for the task at hand. The couple are joined by Marvin (an amusing Frederick Lau) and Ana (Salber Lee Williams), who are drug-imbibing lovebirds, as well as the cagey veteran Oswalt (Axel Werner) and his bright granddaughter, Lea (Sira-Anna Faal). They also meet an outlier set on not escaping: Yuri (Murathan Muslu).But what, exactly, is the mysterious bulwark that transforms from a mosaic of smooth black bricks to undulating metal and back again? Does it have anything to do with the inky plume billowing near the harbor? Or is it, as Marvin frets, some sort of diabolical game ginned up by their short-term “super-host”? Or maybe it’s a high-tech fortress keeping them safe from a Deep State catastrophe, as Yuri fervidly claims. The writer and director Philip Koch teases these ideas up to the final image.Make sure to watch this thriller in its original German. Dubbed into English, it goes from mildly diverting to landing like a ton of, well ….BrickNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      How the Women of ‘Too Much’ Made Lena Dunham’s Rom-Com Just Right

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      When Lena Dunham moved to London in 2021, she had given up on love. “The rest of my life is just going to be about my family and my animals and my job,” she remembered telling herself.If you have seen Dunham’s previous work, which often skews anti-romantic, this will make a special kind of sense. In the six-season HBO series “Girls,” a generation-defining traumedy, Dunham, a writer, director and occasional actor, viewed love with a conjunctival eye — itchy, gritty, irritated.But love had not given up on Dunham. Just after her move, she met the musician Luis Felber. She didn’t anticipate anything serious. “I was seeing it as fleeting — it’s fun to hang out with a boy during the pandemic,” Dunham said on a stupidly beautiful June morning in New York. She was wrong. By the fall of that year, they were married.Soon, there were reports that Dunham and Felber were developing a show based on their relationship. That 10-episode show, “Too Much,” arrives on Netflix on July 10.“Too Much,” with Will Sharpe and Megan Stalter, was inspired by Lena Dunham’s own story of meeting her husband, Luis Felber.NetflixIs “Too Much” a romantic comedy? Yes. Is it inspired by Lena’s own story? Sure. But “Too Much” wants more — inclusivity, expansiveness, a reconsideration of the love stories we tell and about whom we tell them.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Bet Your Life’ Is a Perky, Ghostly Dramedy

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      This Turkish Netflix series puts a metaphysical spin on the small-town murder mystery formula.Ata Demirer, left, and Ugur Yücel in a scene from “Bet Your Life.”Nazim Serhat FiratThe Turkish dramedy “Bet Your Life,” on Netflix (in Turkish, with subtitles, or dubbed), is a prototypical, even generic streaming show on most fronts. Guy returns to small hometown and gets roped into solving a mystery — one he’s more connected to than he realizes — while flanked by a pesky sidekick and a beautiful love interest. Along the way, he has to resolve some daddy issues, which he resists for the majority of the season until a big meltdown in the penultimate or maybe antepenultimate episode breaks down his defenses, at which point he will pant, weep and transform. Solve the crime, get the girl, mature from man-child to man.The spin here is that the pesky sidekick is a ghost, the mystery surrounds his murder, and everything plays out in a small Turkish town.Isa (Ata Demirer) is a gambling columnist who hasn’t made a good bet in years. Now he’s in a mountain of debt, and some unsavory types are after him. Before he can flee home, Refik (Ugur Yücel) shows up at his apartment — Refik, the local richie rich whose suicide was just on the news. Refik knew Isa’s late father, who in his day also channeled the spirit world, and Refik’s estranged daughter, Seda (Esra Bilgic), owns the vineyard where Isa’s aunt and cousin work. Perhaps they can help each other.Refik and Isa bicker to no end while Isa also clumsily romances Seda and learns more about his own family. Isa shows off his vintner skills, dreaming up a wine coupage to save Seda’s business, but she eventually grows concerned with his habit of having conversations with what appears to her to be thin air. But how can he say, “Actually, I’m talking to your dead dad, whom you hated and who is indeed a pain, though he and I have grown to love each other in gruff ways”? How indeed.The formula for these kinds of shows is a formula for a reason, and it works shockingly well here, even as various facets of “Bet” are either not very good or get lost in translation. A lot of the series exists on a wholesome, hokey plane, but flashes of cleverness, especially from Yücel’s performance, help, and the mysticism is fun and appealing. It’s not that the show qua show is so wonderful, but the same-but-different intrigue of an international McDonald’s applies here, too. More

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      ‘The Old Guard 2’ Review: Uma Thurman vs. Charlize Theron

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      Uma Thurman joins the expanded cast in this sure-footed sequel to the action blockbuster about a team of immortal heroes.Five years ago, “The Old Guard” injected a tired genre of superhumans in capes with existential alienation and grit. The aim of that film, about a crew of immortal vigilantes who go on rescue missions to help mankind, was admirable but also frequently one note.What could another installment offer? The best that a sequel can: buff out those blemishes, expand the universe and subvert the genre again. In “The Old Guard 2,” superheroes saving humanity is out, gods beefing with gods is in. The film, directed by Victoria Mahoney, is a sure-footed romp that tightens the screws, most immediately by flexing a bigger cast and broadening the lore of the original comic book series. All this expansion starts right where the last one ended. Believed to be lost under the sea for centuries, Quynh (Veronica Ngo), a fellow immortal and lover of Andy (Charlize Theron), has returned. She’s discovered by Discord (Uma Thurman), another mysterious immortal who is opposed to Andy’s meddling in human affairs. Aggrieved and feeling abandoned by Andy, who is now mortal, Quynh then becomes a useful tool for Discord.Whereas the first film was focused on the arrival of a new immortal named Nile (KiKi Layne), this one has forgotten immortals popping up (like Tuah, played by Henry Golding). That means a lot of drama, and fertile ground for these supreme beings reckoning with the most human of experiences: love and betrayal, guilt and regret, all complicated by being alive for millenniums.Ngo is the key anchor to these feelings, providing a strong emotional counterpoint to Theron that was just present in flashbacks the first time around. The shared history in their gazes and the pain and recriminations of losing and finding each other again translates the wistful burden of immortality that the first film mostly said, but couldn’t really make you feel.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Somebody Explain Why Everybody Loves Phil Rosenthal

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      When Phil Rosenthal, host of the Netflix food and travel show “Somebody Feed Phil” and creator of the enduring sitcom “Everybody Loves Raymond,” began selling out live shows last year, no one was more surprised than Ray Romano.Mr. Romano, the sitcom’s star, showed up at the Paramount concert hall on Long Island, expecting to stir up excitement among fans and help out during the Q&A. No one had a question for him, he said; they just wanted to tell Phil about their favorite places to eat in Lisbon or Nashville.“How did this happen?” the actor asked me over the phone last week. “I’ve been doing stand-up for 30 years. He goes to Poland and eats meatloaf and sells out theaters around the world?”There is no shortage of armchair-travel television: It pours from Hulu, Amazon Prime, National Geographic and Food Network, not to mention the fire hose that is social media. But somehow, Mr. Rosenthal has broken through and become a global star.Ray Romano, left, the star of “Everybody Loves Raymond,” said Mr. Rosenthal forced him to travel overseas for the first time by writing episodes set in Italy. (Brad Garrett, right, played Mr. Romano’s brother.) NetflixSeason 8 of his show dropped on June 18, making it the longest-running unscripted show on Netflix. In August he’ll start a North American tour, and a second cookbook, “Phil’s Favorites” — the first was a New York Times best seller — will come out in November.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Old Guard 2’ Review: Thurman vs. Theron

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      Uma Thurman joins the expanded cast in this sure-footed sequel to the action blockbuster about a team of immortal heroes.Five years ago, “The Old Guard” injected a tired genre of superhumans in capes with existential alienation and grit. The aim of that film, about a crew of immortal vigilantes who go on rescue missions to help mankind, was admirable but also frequently one note.What could another installment offer? The best that a sequel can: buff out those blemishes, expand the universe and subvert the genre again. In “The Old Guard 2,” superheroes saving humanity is out, gods beefing with gods is in. The film, directed by Victoria Mahoney, is a sure-footed romp that tightens the screws, most immediately by flexing a bigger cast and broadening the lore of the original comic book series. All this expansion starts right where the last one ended. Believed to be lost under the sea for centuries, Quynh (Veronica Ngo), a fellow immortal and lover of Andy (Charlize Theron), has returned. She’s discovered by Discord (Uma Thurman), another mysterious immortal who is opposed to Andy’s meddling in human affairs. Aggrieved and feeling abandoned by Andy, who is now mortal, Quynh then becomes a useful tool for Discord.Whereas the first film was focused on the arrival of a new immortal named Nile (KiKi Layne), this one has forgotten immortals popping up (like Tuah, played by Henry Golding). That means a lot of drama, and fertile ground for these supreme beings reckoning with the most human of experiences: love and betrayal, guilt and regret, all complicated by being alive for millenniums.Ngo is the key anchor to these feelings, providing a strong emotional counterpoint to Theron that was just present in flashbacks the first time around. The shared history in their gazes and the pain and recriminations of losing and finding each other again translates the wistful burden of immortality that the first film mostly said, but couldn’t really make you feel.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More