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      As ‘Sex and the City’ Ages, Some Find the Cosmo Glass Half-Empty

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      As the show became more widely available on Netflix, younger viewers have watched it with a critical eye. But its longtime millennial and Gen X fans can’t quit.Most weeks, hundreds of people board a “Sex and the City” themed bus in Manhattan that takes them to the show’s most recognizable sites: Carrie Bradshaw’s apartment, her favorite brunch spot, a sex shop in the West Village. The tour usually ends with — what else? — a Cosmopolitan.“It never gets old,” said Georgette Blau, the owner of On Location Tours. It’s a three-and-a-half-hour entry into an aspirational world many of the riders had been watching for decades, she said.Twenty years since the series finale of “Sex and the City” aired, a new generation of television watchers has grown into adulthood. After all of the episodes were released on Netflix this month, media watchers wondered how the show — and Carrie’s behavior — might hold up for Gen Z.Would they be able to handle the occasional raunchiness of the show, the sometimes toxic relationships? Were the references outdated? “Can Gen Z Even Handle Sex and the City?” Vanity Fair asked. (For its part, Gen Z seems to vacillate between being uninterested and lightly appalled about what they consider to be a period piece.)The show had a very different effect on its longtime fans, many of them a generation or two older. When it aired, “Sex and the City” changed the conversation around how women dated, developed friendships and moved about the world in their 30s and 40s.Even if some of the show’s character arcs aged poorly, many of its original fans still relate to Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda, no matter how unrealistic it may have been to live on the Upper East Side with a walk-in closet full of Manolo Blahniks on the salary of a weekly newspaper columnist.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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      What to Watch This Weekend: A Food-Fantasy Anime

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      “Delicious in Dungeon” on Netflix combines the aesthetic pleasures of anime with the food-nerd pleasures of Serious Eats.A scene from “Delicious in Dungeon.” Yes, they eat that mushroom.Netflix“Delicious in Dungeon,” a magical-quest saga with a gleeful emphasis on cooking and biology, combines the aesthetic, kinetic pleasures of anime with the food-nerd pleasures of Serious Eats. First we find the kraken, then we slay the kraken, then we practice safety in handling seafood, then we learn about parasites and the cooking methods that kill them, then we eat.So far 15 episodes of the show, based on the manga by Ryoko Kui, are on Netflix, with new installments arriving Thursdays. As with many adventures that include cloaks and swords, “Dungeon” (in Japanese, with subtitles or dubbed) follows a ragtag crew. The angelic Falin has been eaten by the Red Dragon, and now her brother, Laios, and friends Marcille and Chilchuck are determined to find the dragon, slay it and rescue her before she can be completely digested. Along the way, Laios and friends meet Senshi, a gruff and bearded dwarf who is a gifted chef and knowledgeable ecologist. They decide that their journey will also include eating all the monsters they encounter — and lo, they encounter many monsters, including plants, fungi, creatures and spirits.How ought one truss the chicken half of a half-chicken, half-snake basilisk? How can mud-based golems be repurposed as cabbage gardens? What are the gnarly ethics of eating demi-human creatures? “Dungeon” shines as food-fantasy reverie, with Senshi explaining both the physiology of magical creatures and outlining the tastiest methods for preparing them. Cook those coin-bugs belly-side down, and make sure to swing your jar of holy water through several ghosts to get the creamiest sorbet.Anyone who has ever pored over a map at the beginning of a fantasy book or wished Wookieepedia included more about the food chain will find ample pleasures here. “World-building” is too mild a term to describe the scope of detail in every episode of “Dungeon,” though I do wish Netflix offered more-detailed translations of the many, many diagrams. The lush score and rich, evocative visual language add a sense of grandeur and occasional maturity to the show that the narrative and dialogue can’t generate on their own.I could take or leave the broad plot of “Delicious in Dungeon,” but the charms of all its little asides add up. A montage of Marcille finally convincing Senshi to bathe is so poignant and darling I watched it twice, and all the ways animation can convey tastiness make even the most indulgent live-action food shows seem barren in comparison. More

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      In ‘Ripley’ on Netflix, the Con Man Gets the Art House Treatment

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      Andrew Scott stars in a Netflix series that looks like what you might get if Antonioni or Resnais had directed a season of “The White Lotus.”Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel “The Talented Mr. Ripley” sets its dark action in a succession of colorful Italian locales: the Amalfi coast, San Remo, Rome, Palermo, Venice. Movies based on the book, like René Clément’s “Plein Soleil” (released in the United States as “Purple Noon”) and Anthony Minghella’s “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” have taken the opportunity Highsmith gave them to capitalize on sun and scenery. The audience gets its brutal murders and brazen deceit wrapped in bright visual pleasure.For “Ripley,” an eight-episode adaptation of the book that premieres on Netflix on Thursday, Steven Zaillian has decided to do without the color. Shot — beautifully — in sharply etched black and white by the Oscar-winning cinematographer Robert Elswit (“There Will Be Blood”), “Ripley” offers a different sort of pleasure: the chilly embrace of the art house.Reflecting what the more high-minded filmmakers of the show’s time period (it is set in 1961) were up to, Zaillian, who wrote and directed all the episodes, takes an approach that harmonizes with Elswit’s austerity. The entire season moves along sleekly — you could say somnolently — at the same measured pace, with the same arch tone and on the same note of muted, stylish apprehension. Highsmith’s pulpy concoction, with its hair-trigger killings and sudden reversals, is run through a strainer and comes out smooth. It feels like what you might get if the early-’60s Antonioni or Resnais had directed a season of “The White Lotus.”And Zaillian appears to have asked his actors to practice a similar restraint. Their overall affect isn’t flat, exactly, but it’s within a narrow range, with physicality tightly reined in and the eyes asked to do a lot of work. When you have the eyes of Andrew Scott, the gifted Irish actor (“Sherlock,” “Fleabag”) who plays Tom Ripley, that’s not a big problem.Zaillian has been faithful, in broad outline, to Highsmith’s story. Ripley, a slacker and a con man grinding out a living in postwar New York, is sent to Italy to try to persuade a trust-funded idler to come home and take over the family business. He has only a passing acquaintance with his target, Dickie Greenleaf (Johnny Flynn), but in the first of a long series of misunderstandings and lucky strokes that go Ripley’s way, Greenleaf’s father thinks they are good friends.Highsmith’s novel is a training manual for the sociopath: Once Ripley sees the indolent lives led by Greenleaf and his sort-of girlfriend, Marge Sherwood (Dakota Fanning), in a picturesque fishing village on the Amalfi coast, he ups his game from tedious grifting to full-contact identity theft. Wedging himself between Dickie and Marge, he becomes obsessed — an obsession in which the lines between befriending Dickie, sponging off Dickie and becoming Dickie are progressively erased.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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      Demetri Martin’s Netflix Comedy Special Confronts His Veteran Career

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      In his new Netflix special, “Demetri Deconstructed,” he tries a more conceptual approach than the simplicity he was known for.A comedy career can be a tricky puzzle. You must evolve to stay relevant and interesting, but change too much and fans will revolt.The prolific stand-up Demetri Martin, 50, has always had the mind of a puzzle-maker and a knack for paradox. A characteristic joke: “I am a man of my word: That word is unreliable.” In “Demetri Deconstructed” (Netflix), the inventive seventh special of what has become a major, joke-dense career, he seems to be answering a riddle: How does an eternally boyish alternative comedian mature into middle age?Martin steers clear of common temptations like storytelling or culture war or revelation. He is now married with kids, but he’s not the kind of comic to tell jokes about parenting. After two decades, including three books and a movie, “Dean” (2016), he directed and starred in, we barely know him. The move he’s making with the new special is away from a lodestar: simplicity. His jokes always sought out absurdity in as few words as possible; the delivery was unvarnished and there was little physicality. His floppy hair and crisp bluejeans are so consistent that they have become a kind of uniform.Embracing the increasingly cinematic aesthetic of stand-up specials, his new hour, which he directed and is actually closer to 50 minutes, takes his act and wraps it around an intricate high concept. The first step to this move was in his previous special, “The Overthinker” (2018), which was funnier, if less radical. The theme there was in the title, and he illustrated it through the formal device of occasional interruptions with narration that represented his inner voice.In one bit, his narrator wondered what the cartoon sitting on an easel next to him onstage would like from the balcony, which led to a shot from farther back where you couldn’t make out the picture at all. This perspective shift was heady: It wouldn’t get a big laugh but made for a memorable critique of comedy in big rooms and a self-mocking joke about how not everyone would get him.“Demetri Deconstructed” doubles down on such experiments. Instead of occasional intrusions of thought, the conceit here is that the special takes place entirely inside his mind, allowing for a more surreal visual language. A framing device has him hooked up to an EEG of sorts with a dubious doctor who wants him to imagine a comedy show. (Think “The Matrix” but for comedians.)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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      As ‘Ripley’ Revives the ‘Talented’ Con Man, Here Are Earlier Versions

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      “Ripley” on Netflix is the latest riff on the con-artist character the author Patricia Highsmith invented in the 1950s. Here’s a look at the earlier versions.One of fiction’s most famous impostors returns on Thursday with the debut of Netflix’s “Ripley,” the latest adaptation of a character invented in the 1950s by the author Patricia Highsmith. In eight episodes, all written and directed by the Oscar-winning screenwriter Steven Zaillian (“Schindler’s List,” “The Night Of”), a classic chameleon changes colors yet again, returning to a few core elements of Highsmith’s original creation while also boosting the creepiness quotient.Over nearly seven decades, Tom Ripley has appeared in five books by Highsmith, five films, multiple television episodes and even a radio show. He has been played by interpreters as varied as Matt Damon, Alain Delon, Dennis Hopper, John Malkovich and now, Andrew Scott. What has made him so enduring?The details change, but the foundation of the character remains the same: a con artist who becomes a killer, someone so enamored by upper-class comfort that, once he experiences it, will do anything to hang on to it. Ripley dreams of a better life for himself, which makes him relatable. What makes him fascinating is his willingness to go to murderous lengths to secure it.As a new version of Tom Ripley arrives, here is a look at how this grifter has evolved over the generations.The BooksThe character debuted in Patricia Highsmith’s “The Talented Mr. Ripley” in 1955.By the time Highsmith created Ripley, she was already an accomplished writer. She burst onto the scene in 1950 with her first novel, “Strangers on a Train,” which would be adapted into the Alfred Hitchcock film a year later. Other acclaimed Highsmith works include “The Two Faces of January,” made into a 2014 film starring Viggo Mortensen; and “Deep Water,” adapted into a 2022 film starring Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas. Using the pen name Claire Morgan, Highsmith also wrote “The Price of Salt,” renamed “Carol” for Todd Haynes’s 2015 film adaptation.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 Best Movies and TV Shows Coming to Netflix in April

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      “Sex and the City” and a new adaptation of “The Talented Mr. Ripley” highlight the new offerings this month.Every month, Netflix adds movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for some of April’s most promising new titles. (Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)‘Sex and the City’ Seasons 1-6Starts streaming: April 1The latest HBO original to land on Netflix is one of the network’s most popular and influential series: a fast-paced and quippy dramedy that helped prove a cable TV show could be at the center of the cultural conversation. Adapted from a Candace Bushnell newspaper column by the writer-producer Darren Star (in close collaboration with the writer-director Michael Patrick King), “Sex and the City” premiered in 1998. It stars Sarah Jessica Parker as the columnist Carrie, who meets up regularly with her friends Samantha (Kim Cattrall), Charlotte (Kristin Davis) and Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) to dine at New York hot spots and dish about their love lives. With its romantic melodrama, raunchy jokes and fabulous fashions, this show has been a comfort watch for women and men for over 25 years.‘Ripley’Starts streaming: April 4The writer-director Steven Zaillian becomes the latest filmmaker to adapt Patricia Highsmith’s novel “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” turning the book into an eight-episode mini-series that aims to capture more of the nuances of Highsmith’s slippery antihero. Andrew Scott plays Tom Ripley, a small-time New York con artist who is hired by a shipping magnate to travel to Italy and check in on the idle heir Dickie Greenleaf (Johnny Flynn), a man Ripley barely knows. Clumsily at first — and then more confidently — Ripley integrates himself into the life of Dickie and his girlfriend, Marge (Dakota Fanning), before mapping out a way that he could live the couple’s jet-setting lifestyle forever. Shot in black-and-white, Zaillian’s “Ripley” takes the character back to his pulp-noir roots, emphasizing the dark desperation at his core.‘Scoop’Starts streaming: April 5In 2019, Prince Andrew tried to quell a growing scandal about his relationship with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein by sitting for an hourlong TV interview with BBC Two’s “Newsnight.” The interview went horribly for the prince, who suspended his royal duties not long after it aired. The movie “Scoop” is about that bombshell “Newsnight” special. Rufus Sewell plays Prince Andrew, while Gillian Anderson plays Emily Maitlis, the journalist who calmly, persistently grilled him. The director Philip Martin and the screenwriter Peter Moffat cover the prep that the royal family and the Maitlis team put in before the conversation. “Scoop” though is primarily about Sam McAlister (Billie Piper), the producer who landed the interview by persuading all concerned that, whatever the outcome, this was a story that needed to be told, for the sake of Epstein’s victims.‘The Antisocial Network: Memes to Mayhem’Starts streaming: April 5During the 20-plus years that 4chan has been online, the website has rarely gone more than a few months without being at the center of some radical social movement — or some disturbing controversy. The directors Giorgio Angelini and Arthur Jones (who previously collaborated on the documentary “Feels Good Man,” about the Pepe the Frog meme) try to make sense of 4chan’s turbulent existence in “The Antisocial Network,” a film that traces how some adolescent jokes and pranks evolved into conspiracy theories, public protests and cyberterrorism. Through interviews with some of the most influential 4chan (and 8chan) users, Angelini and Jones end up covering topics as far-reaching and significant as Rickrolling, Anonymous, Occupy Wall Street, Gamergate, QAnon and the Jan. 6 riots.‘City Hunter’Starts streaming: April 25Tsukasa Hojo’s “City Hunter” franchise started as a manga serial in 1985 and has since been adapted into multiple anime series and animated movies, along with video games and a few live-action movies. The latest live-action film comes from the director Yuichi Satoh and the screenwriter Tatsuro Mishima, who make it easy on “City Hunter” newcomers by starting at the beginning of the story, when the suave private detective Ryo Saeba (Ryohei Suzuki) begins working with his late ex-partner’s tomboy sister Kaori Makimura (Misato Morita). The two of them patrol the flashy, modern streets of Tokyo’s Shinjuku area, looking cool as they offer help to the helpless.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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      How ‘3 Body Problem’ Created a Spectacular Disaster, With Strings Attached

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      Technical artists used a combination of digital and practical effects to slice an oil tanker into pieces in the fifth episode. Here’s how they did it.It begins slowly, almost soundlessly. As an oil tanker glides through the Panama Canal, the flow of a hose slows to a trickle. The hose has been sliced in two. Then the man holding the hose falls apart, his body severed at the knees and waist. Strands of nanofibers, each a hundredth the thickness of a human hair and strung across the canal at its narrowest point, knife through the ship, cutting smoothly through walls, through pipes, through flesh and bone. The sundered ship fans out like a deck of cards then collapses, smoldering. Every soul onboard — a thousand people, many of them children — has been killed.This harrowing sequence occurs in the fifth episode of the first season of “3 Body Problem,” the new Netflix adaptation of a popular science-fiction trilogy by the Chinese author Liu Cixin. Occurring in the first book, it lasts just a few pages and as a plot driver, it is minor. (The ship is destroyed to obtain a hard drive containing messages from an alien race.) But onscreen, as a marvel of televisual imagination and an example of a seamless integration of practical and computer-generated effects, the scene is unforgettable.“It’s basically an egg slicer going through this big tanker,” Stefen Fangmeier, a supervisor of visual effects, said. “You’ve never seen anything like that.”In the episode, nanomaterials created by Auggie Salazar (played by Eiza González as perhaps the world’s most beautiful materials physicist) are employed to deadly effect. To understand how the science might work, the series creators — David Benioff, D.B. Weiss and Alexander Woo — consulted Matt Kenzie, a physics professor at the University of Cambridge whose father had worked with Benioff and Weiss on “Game of Thrones.”Together they imagined how nanomaterials that don’t yet exist — or exist only in minute quantities in carefully controlled lab conditions — could be deployed. The goal wasn’t necessarily realism — “It’s a science-fiction show, so in some cases the fiction has to take precedence,” Kenzie said — but a sense of plausibility given current technology.“You try not to veer into things that just look wrong or cannot be possible,” Kenzie said.The opening moments of the sequence depict the nanofibers slicing through first a hose and then the man using it.NetflixWe 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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      Stream These 12 Movies Before They Leave Netflix in April

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      A Ryan Gosling detective comedy, a Formula One racing drama and the romantic musical “Mamma Mia!” are among the movies exiting the streaming service.Fast cars, jazz drummers, time travelers, bounty hunters — you’ll find everything but the kitchen sink in this month’s roundup of noteworthy titles leaving Netflix in the United States. (Dates indicate the final day a title is available.)‘The Nice Guys’ (April 8)Stream it here.Ryan Gosling is having a bit of a moment — he may not have won the Oscar for best supporting actor, but he won the Oscars telecast for his performance of “I’m Just Ken” — and those who prefer the intense actor in his loosey-goosey comic mode would be wise to check out this 2016 comedy-mystery. Gosling stars as a bumbling private detective who teams up with a bone-breaker-for-hire (an uproariously gregarious Russell Crowe) to solve a convoluted missing person case. The co-writer and director is Shane Black, who helped popularize the buddy-action comedy with his “Lethal Weapon” screenplay, and subsequently perfected it here and in “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.” Keep an eye out for the up-and-comers Angourie Rice (“Mean Girls”) and Margaret Qualley (“Drive Away Dolls”) in supporting roles.‘Rush’ (April 15)Stream it here.Ron Howard spent a fair amount of his youth appearing in vroom-vroom car movies like “American Graffiti,” “Eat My Dust” and “Grand Theft Auto” — the latter marking his feature directorial debut — so it’s not surprising that he was drawn to this thrilling dramatization of the mid-70s glory days of Formula One racing. He tells the story of a rivalry between two of the sport’s stars: James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) and Niki Lauda (Daniel Brühl), a study in contrasts, the matinee idol and the ugly duckling, the party boy and the teetotaler. The nuanced screenplay by Peter Morgan (who penned Howard’s earlier “Frost/Nixon,” and would go on to create “The Crown”) mines the complexities of their relationship, while the thrilling race sequences effectively place us in the driver’s seat through the hairiest moments of trading paint.‘Synchronic’ (April 15)Stream it here.Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead make brainy sci-fi pictures, small-scale indie movies like “The Endless” and “Something in the Dirt” that traffic in ideas over special effects. This 2019 effort was the closest they’ve come to a play for the cinematic mainstream, casting Marvel mainstay Anthony Mackie and “Fifty Shades” star Jamie Dornan in the leading roles. But their signature style and thematic occupations remain thankfully intact in this tale of two New Orleans paramedics who discover the mind-bending effects of a new designer drug. The central conceit is ingenious, but the filmmakers don’t just rely on its cleverness; there are genuine, human stakes, and the payoff is refreshingly poignant.‘The Hateful Eight’ (April 24)Stream it here.Quentin Tarantino followed “Django Unchained” by again riffing on the venerable Western genre, this time by crossing it with the Agatha Christie-style “locked room” mystery. He populates his story, of a poisoning in a tucked-away haberdashery during a deadly blizzard in the post-Civil War West, with faces familiar from his previous films, including Samuel L. Jackson, Kurt Russell, Tim Roth and Michael Madsen; they’re joined by an Oscar-nominated Jennifer Jason Leigh, in a particularly foul-mouthed and ill-tempered mood. Tempers flare, blood is shed and vulgarities fly in typical Tarantino fashion, but in its unflinching portraiture of the racial hostilities of a splintered country, the work is by no means exclusive to its period setting. (Also leaving on April 24: the Netflix-exclusive “The Hateful Eight Extended Version,” which adds footage and breaks the film up into four one-hour episodes.)‘Malignant’ (April 26)Stream it here.James Wan started out directing bone-crunching horror pictures like “Saw,” “Insidious” and “The Conjuring” before going mainstream with “Furious 7,” “Aquaman” and its sequel. Between those two superhero flicks, he directed this gloriously unhinged, go-for-broke horror thriller, in which a young woman (Annabelle Wallis) is haunted by visions of grisly murders — visions that prove to be true, and suggest some sort of a psychic link to the brutal killer. If that sounds slightly peculiar, boy, just you wait. The screenplay by “M3GAN” writer Akela Cooper (with story assists from Wan and Ingrid Bisu) is an admirably unrestrained trip into the genre’s wilder corners, full of inventive kills, bananas story turns and cuckoo supporting characters, all rendered in a baroque, hurdy-gurdy visual style.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