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    How Sofía Vergara Created Her Tony Soprano Role

    When Sofía Vergara invited the “Narcos” showrunner Eric Newman to her home in Los Angeles in 2015 to pitch a TV show about the Colombian drug lord Griselda Blanco, she’d done her research.“I watched the ‘Cocaine Cowboys’ documentary in 2006, and I was like, ‘Wow, this character has so many layers,’” Vergara, 51, said of Blanco, the kingpin who was suspected of being involved in more than 200 murders before being shot dead in her hometown, Medellín, in 2012 at age 69.The facts of Blanco’s life — the murders, the kidnappings, the tense backroom meetings with drug bosses — hardly needed embellishment for TV. But what had so hooked Vergara, she said, was the idea that “this innocuous-looking woman was raising four kids while building this insane, brutal empire.”She knew it would be a tougher sell to persuade people that after a little over half a decade portraying the feisty, fun-loving mother Gloria Delgado-Pritchett on the ABC sitcom “Modern Family,” Vergara was the right person to play the cutthroat Blanco.“I was like, ‘What are the odds that this guy is going to think that Gloria Pritchett can play this [expletive] ruthless, crazy character?’” Vergara, who is Colombian, said in a recent phone conversation from London.But her passion for the material, her biographical overlap with Blanco and her confidence convinced Newman — and soon the Colombian director Andrés Baiz, who worked with Newman on Netflix’s Medellín cartel series “Narcos” — that she could pull it off.Both, Baiz said, were driven, ambitious women who had immigrated to the U.S. from Colombia and ascended to the top of their industries. Both had grown up in a misogynist culture. Both, Baiz said, shared “an unstoppable, fierce quality.”“She knew so much about this woman,” Baiz said from Bogotá in a recent video call, which Newman also joined from Santa Monica, Calif. “And she felt strongly that there was a part of her story that hadn’t been explored onscreen before.”Vergara said she spent three hours in the makeup chair each day, donning a prosthetic nose, fake teeth and padding that compressed her figure.Elizabeth Morris/NetflixGriselda Blanco was suspected of being involved in more than 200 murders before being shot dead in 2012.El Tiempo, via Associated PressOf course, Blanco’s rise and downfall as a boss in the fearsome drug trafficking syndicate founded by Pablo Escobar in 1976 had been dramatized before, most recently in the Lifetime movie “Cocaine Godmother” (2017), which starred Catherine Zeta-Jones, and in “Cocaine Cowboys” (2006). Although HBO announced in 2016 that it was developing a Blanco biopic that would star Jennifer Lopez, the project has yet to come to fruition.Amid a landscape of South American narco tales that had been made mostly by white producers, Vergara had something different in mind. She envisioned a story told half in English and half in Spanish, with a majority-Latino cast, that put female characters front and center. Vergara would executive produce and star, with Baiz directing all six episodes. “Griselda” premieres Thursday on Netflix.“It’s hard for me to find characters because of my accent, and because I’m known for comedy,” Vergara said. “So in a selfish way I was like, ‘Oh, this is perfect for me.’”Rather than tracing Blanco’s life story, as the other projects had done, “Griselda” focuses narrowly in the late 1970s and early ’80s, starting with her arrival in Miami as the newly single mother of three sons. As she builds her empire, she is trailed by June Hawkins (Juliana Aidén Martinez), one of the first female homicide detectives in Miami, who worked to bring Blanco down.Juliana Aidén Martinez as the Miami homicide detective June Hawkins.Elizabeth Morris/Netflix“Her story offered a mirror to Griselda’s story,” Newman said of Hawkins. “Both were single mothers of Latin descent who found themselves rare women in similarly male-dominated fields.”Martinez, a Colombian American actress who was born in Miami, said that it was gratifying to be part of a project that centered the stories of its female characters, including Blanco’s friend and confidante Carla, a sex worker who is played by the Colombian pop star Karol G, in her acting debut.“The world understands the story of Griselda Blanco as something that is fiction, but we as Colombians see that story in a different way,” Karol G said in a recent phone conversation from Los Angeles. “In every family there is a story about someone who passed away because of Pablo Escobar or Griselda Blanco.”Much of the Latino cast and creative team personally felt the difficulty of a nuanced depiction of Blanco, who had an outsize role in Colombia’s sprawling drug trade and so had impacted their lives. Vergara said her older brother, Rafael, “was part of this business,” when he was fatally shot in Bogotá in the 1990s, and her younger brother, Julio, battled drug addiction and was arrested nearly 30 times before being deported from the United States to Colombia in 2011.“That era was horrible,” she said. “What it did to generations — their families, their kids — was really heartbreaking.”Baiz, who said he saw numerous friends kidnapped after they were inadvertently caught up in the drug trade when he was growing up in the 1980s and ’90s in Cali, Colombia, called the task of balancing Blanco’s business acumen with the brutality of the drug trade the show’s “dramatic challenge.”For Newman, it was important that “Griselda” resist the temptation to paint Blanco as a one-note villain.“I don’t believe in monsters,” he said. “The danger of thinking that monsters spring forth from the womb is that you miss the ones created by their environments or circumstances.”At the heart of Blanco’s story, Vergara said, was a tale of a mother trying to protect her children, by whatever means possible.“I’m a mother, I’m an immigrant, I’m a woman,” she said. “If something is happening and I have to kill someone for my son, I don’t think I would think about it, I would just do it.”At the heart of “Griselda,” Vergara said, was a tale of a mother trying to protect her children by whatever means possible. Elizabeth Morris/NetflixMore difficult was the physical transformation Vergara underwent to portray Blanco, who stood just five feet tall and, with her cleft chin and cartoonish dimples, was hardly an intimidating physical presence. Vergara said she spent three hours in the makeup chair each day, donning a prosthetic nose, fake teeth, plastic “from my eyelids up to my forehead” to hide her thick eyebrows beneath her period-specific thin ones, as well as pads to flatten her bottom and bras that compressed her breasts.“I didn’t want people to see me and say ‘Why does Gloria Pritchett think that by putting on a fake plastic nose, she’s going to convince us that that’s not her?’” she said.Vergara also developed a swaggering stride for the character, trading her “sexy Caribbean walk” for a hunched masculine slouch she’d copied from one of her cousins.“I thought it was great because it would help me with the character,” she said. “But then after three months, it was 4 in the morning and I was trying to get out of bed to go to the set, and I couldn’t do it — my back gave out.” (It was the only day of the three-month shoot, she noted, that she had to cancel filming).Many times she struggled to shake off her character after shooting wrapped for the day.“Your body doesn’t know that you’re not going through those emotions during the day,” Vergara said, explaining her character’s range of experiences during a day on set. “I was doing coke, I was killing, they were choking me, I was screaming, I was crying, so when you go home, it’s like, ‘What is happening to me?’”In her depiction, Vergara wanted to show Blanco’s resilience as a survivor of domestic abuse with no education and few options, but also how those circumstances might have shaped her violent actions.“You want to think that she’s forced to do all these things because she needs to take care of her people,” Vergara said. “But then little by little you realize, wait a minute, she had options to get away, to stop the madness. And then you understand that it was not a good intention that was making her do all of this that she did at the end.”Baiz said he hopes that, no matter what emotions people feel while watching the series — empowerment, revulsion, horror, all of the above — they will stick with it for all six episodes.“If you end the show in Episode 2, it’s a very different story that you’re telling,” he said. “We ended much later in her life story so we can see her humanity, but also her amoral and corrupt side.”Vergara hopes viewers come away not rooting for Griselda, but maybe understanding her.“I always dreamed of Griselda to be a little bit like Tony Soprano,” she said. “He was a very bad guy, but you wanted him to win; you could justify some of his behaviors.” More

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    Netflix’s Head of Film, Scott Stuber, Is Departing

    Scott Stuber attracted Oscar-winning filmmakers to the streaming service and helped usher the entertainment industry into the streaming era.Scott Stuber, who brought Oscar-winning filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Spike Lee, Jane Campion and Alfonso Cuarón to Netflix and in doing so helped to usher the entertainment industry into the streaming era, is leaving as the service’s film chairman, the company said on Monday.News of Mr. Stuber’s departure came on the eve of the Oscar nominations. During his tenure, which began in 2017, Netflix has had eight films nominated for best picture, though a win in that category has proved elusive.“Scott has helped lead the new paradigm of how movies are made, distributed and watched,” Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s co-chief executive, said in a statement. “He attracted unbelievable creative talent to Netflix, making us a premiere film studio.”While Mr. Stuber’s slate of movies helped to boost Netflix’s business substantially, he often clashed with Mr. Sarandos over strategy. Mr. Stuber often tried to appease filmmakers by pushing for wider theatrical releases than Mr. Sarandos was willing to undertake.Still, Netflix received the most Oscar nominations of any studio in 2020, 2021 and 2022. In addition to critical hits like Mr. Scorsese’s “The Irishman,” Ms. Campion’s “The Power of the Dog” and Mr. Cuarón’s “Roma,” Mr. Stuber’s tenure produced popular hits like “Red Notice,” “Bird Box” and “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.”He made big bets on filmmakers he wanted to lure to the studio, spending $450 million to secure two “Knives Out” sequels from Rian Johnson and more than $160 million for Zack Snyder’s recent release, “Rebel Moon.” Greta Gerwig, who directed and co-wrote the blockbuster “Barbie,” is also working with Netflix on adapting two films based on the “Chronicles of Narnia” book series.“Maestro,” a biopic of the composer Leonard Bernstein, which Bradley Cooper wrote, directed and stars in, is one of the Netflix films expected to pick up several Oscar nominations this year. (Netflix will also announce its fourth-quarter earnings on Tuesday.)Netflix was sometimes criticized for prizing quantity over quality in its film strategy, a knock that Mr. Stuber acknowledged.“I think one of the fair criticisms has been we make too much and not enough is great,” he said in an interview in 2021, adding, “I think what we want to do is refine and make a little less better and more great.”In a statement on Monday, Mr. Stuber thanked Mr. Sarandos and Reed Hastings, Netflix’s co-founder and executive chairman, for “the amazing opportunity to join Netflix and create a new home for original movies.”“I am proud of what we accomplished,” he said, “and am so grateful to all the filmmakers and talent who trusted us to help tell their stories.”Mr. Stuber is scheduled to leave in March and will start his own media company. Bela Bajaria, Netflix’s chief content officer, will assume Mr. Stuber’s duties when he leaves. Last year, she essentially became Mr. Stuber’s boss, putting a management layer between him and Mr. Sarandos. More

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    What to Watch This Weekend: ‘Boy Swallows Universe’

    Our TV critic recommends a dreamy, violent Netflix drama from Australia, based on a book by Trent Dalton.From left, Lee Tiger Halley, Bryan Brown and Felix Cameron in “Boy Swallows Universe.”Netflix“Boy Swallows Universe,” a seven-part drama based on the book by Trent Dalton, puts a youthful spin on the accidental-criminal subgenre, blending dreaminess and brutality to terrific if incomplete effect. The whole show is available now, on Netflix.Our hero is Eli (Felix Cameron), who is both a very savvy and a very young 13 when the show begins. It’s the 1980s in Brisbane, Australia, and Eli lives with his older brother, Gus (Lee Tiger Halley, fantastic), who is selectively mute and can maybe predict the future; his mom, Frankie (Phoebe Tonkin), a recovering drug addict with good intentions but terrible taste in men; and his stepfather, Lyle (Travis Kimmel), a loving but scuzzy heroin dealer. Eli’s most important father figure and mentor is Slim (Bryan Brown), a career criminal famous for escaping from prison.“Boy” is much more a story of violence and acceptance than a sweetheart coming-of-age show. Its most intriguing trick is that it does not so much evoke being 13 as it evokes remembering being 13, the mythologizing of one’s young life. Was there really so much free-floating wisdom available, or does it only seem that way now that you know what stuck?After one catastrophic night lands Frankie in prison, Slim tries to comfort Eli. She’ll be home in four Christmases, he says. “I’ll be 17,” Eli chokes out, barely able to imagine being so grown up. When the show leaps forward those four years, we get a crushing sense of what’s been lost, for everyone.Beachy vibes overlay a real depravity here, and Eli’s and Gus’s escapes into reverie and magical realism are coping mechanisms for lives filled with people who care about them but no one to care for them. Neglect — both the benign and the pernicious strains — and squalor shape a huge part of their lives, though as one classmate points out, they are loved, just imperfectly by imperfect people.So much of this series is beautiful and surprising, blurring poppy capers with jarring blood baths, often in the same episode. Unfortunately, the finale is a bizarre letdown, leaving all the nuance and ache behind in favor of a denouement out of a Batman cartoon. But if you can tolerate a crash landing, and you like a fun soundtrack, a seedy underbelly and a poetic approach, watch this. More

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    Can Taylor Tomlinson Have It All and a Life, Too?

    In September, the night before the comic Taylor Tomlinson made her Radio City Music Hall debut, she called one of her three siblings in tears, asking: “Why do I feel like it’s not enough?”This emotional moment had long passed when she strode onstage the next day wearing a stylish black suit, sleeves rolled up, and commanded the cavernous room with an hour of cheerful, intricately woven jokes delivered at a fast clip. One theme was how professional success does not necessarily translate into personal happiness. She killed. The following afternoon, sitting outside at a Manhattan coffee shop near her hotel, Tomlinson described dispassionately how she cried before the career highlight of selling out Radio City. “There have been times when I thought I’m only good to people 40 feet away,” she said.Tomlinson, 30, who undertook her first theater tour just two years ago, has emerged as one of the most acclaimed, in-demand superstars in comedy, the rare young stand-up with mass appeal in the current fragmented landscape. After two Netflix specials produced in her 20s (and a third premiering next month), she became the only woman to make the top 10 grossing comic tours of 2023. She performed 130 shows, more than anyone else on that list, including Kevin Hart, who topped the list. And to follow that up, she is taking over the late-night TV slot vacated by James Corden on CBS, debuting Jan. 16 as the host of the comedy show “After Midnight.”I followed Tomlinson for 10 months, tracking the development of her new special, periodically seeing shows and debriefing her afterward. What I saw up close is that spending the year in and out of hotels is isolating, but so is being a rapidly ascendant comic at her level of success. “There sometimes feels like there isn’t anyone my age to talk to,” Tomlinson told me.Tomlinson with Stephen Colbert when it was announced she would be taking over the late-night spot following his show.Scott Kowalchyk/CBS via Getty Images“IF YOU WANT to make yourself feel sad, compare your career to Taylor’s,” Dustin Nickerson, her good friend and the opening comic throughout her recent global tour, told me, before comparing her to a five-tool player in baseball who has all the skills to be great. “Watching her this past year has been watching someone become a celebrity.”The actor and comedian Hannah Einbinder described Tomlinson as “the voice of her, of our generation,” before calling her the Taylor Swift of comedy. “She talks about universal experiences — relationships, love — but in a new way. She’s the most evolved comic out there. She’s for everyone.” Einbinder paused, adding: “It’s hard to be for everyone.”Tomlinson is too modest (and a die-hard Swiftie) to accept the comparison to the pop star, but it’s a useful one. Just as Swift established herself in country music, Tomlinson, another blond, wholesome-seeming prodigy, began in a conservative niche: the church circuit. Both Taylors are prolific artists whose work resonates with broad swaths of people through personal stories, sometimes about ex-boyfriendsTomlinson began working on her new hour focusing on comedy about being single after many years of serial monogamy. Then she started seeing someone, so she incorporated him until they broke up, which she told me was inevitable because she was working on new material and Swift was putting out an album. “All the signs were there,” she joked. “Those are my horsemen of the apocalypse.”After the split, an uncomfortable thought immediately occurred to her: This will be good for my career, bad for my life.Around the time of the Radio City performance, she was interviewing for “After Midnight,” a show built on a rotating cast of comics joking about memes or viral stories. She got the job in November, becoming one of the few comedians hosting a nightly show on network television, the kind of plum gig that has long been a Holy Grail for entertainers. Yet when the show’s producers asked her in an interview why she wanted the job, Tomlinson said she responded: “I’m kind of lonely.”She has been open in her comedy about mental health issues, including a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, and she has a joke where she says every one of her emotions “demands a parade.” Onstage, you might say she often leads the marching band, which, incidentally, she performed in during high school. Mixing goofy act-outs with punch-line-dense jokes filled with surprising pivots, Tomlinson makes even the heaviest subjects seem spikily funny. Her sets never go long without a laugh.Offstage, she has a more patient and coolly professional manner, impeccably grateful, remarkably free of kvetching and trash talk. She enjoys analyzing the mechanics of comedy and is at her most expansive there, in the details. But there is a certain haunted quality that periodically emerges, a past hovering over her present, one that she has been excavating in therapy.“I stopped talking to my father last year,” she said in a club in 2022, then noticed something shift in the crowd: “People get really sad when you say you don’t talk to your parents anymore because they wish they had the balls to do it.”When I first met her, backstage at a February show in Boston, that bit was gone and she said she missed some of the heavier subject matter she used to include in her set, without being more specific. Some of that would creep back in, on the margins. One funny bit refers to taking a boyfriend to meet her parents as visiting “the scene of the crime.”Raised in a conservative Methodist family north of San Diego, she has talked about the scars left by her mother’s death from cancer when Tomlinson was 8. It bonded her to her siblings, all of whom remain close. Brinn, two years younger than Taylor, the oldest, told me by phone that Taylor took the role of “surrogate parent.”When the producers of the new late-night show “After Midnight” asked Tomlinson why she wanted the hosting job, she said she told them, “I’m kind of lonely.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesMany comics come off as the reckless kid looking for attention, but part of what makes Tomlinson’s comic persona different is that she projects the image of a responsible young adult who can’t help but reveal the insecurities and bubbling emotions beneath. In the weeks before taping her special, she lost her voice, and only a few days before, her doctor told her she had mono. She took a steroid and did the show, brushing aside any possibility of postponing. “A lot of people have pushed through far worse,” she told me not long after. “Maggie Smith had cancer when she filmed ‘Harry Potter.’ Like, I’m fine.”Her father has lately been a more remote figure in her comedy specials than her mother. He was, however, critical to her stand-up origin story. He not only drove her to a comedy class that got her started on this path. He also took the class with her when she was 16. In the show at the end of the course, with an audience of 40 at a hole-in-the-wall church, she got the closing spot. When asked why her father didn’t, she said matter-of-factly: “’Cause I was better.” Sensing how this might come off, she added: “Look, he can sing and I can’t.”SINCE SHE WAS YOUNG, Tomlinson has known she wanted to do something creative, be an actor, a writer. But that first show was when, as she described it, the “real me” came out. Her best friend, Courtney Lem, was one of the audience members sitting on folding chairs that day and described the show as a revelation. “She was someone else, not nervous or shy,” Lem told me. “It was like seeing real magic for the first time.”One of the jokes Tomlinson told eventually made its way into her first late-night set on “Conan.” Its premise was that being abstinent was hard for a religious kid because “every time I miss a period, I’m like, ‘Oh no, I’m carrying the messiah.’”When her mother died, her father remarried 10 months later. At the time, Tomlinson didn’t think that was too soon, but as she got older, her mind-set shifted. “I’ve said to him as an adult: I wished you waited longer for us. He did not agree with me.”She described her childhood relationship with her father as rocky but felt on more solid ground after doing stand-up. “When I could do this trick, when I was a good performer, he was interested. And he was impressed. And I was somebody worth paying attention to.”In her telling, her father was a performer, a singer, who chose having a family and stable career as a teacher over pursuing his dreams. She was on the same path, she said, explaining that her entire family got married between the ages of 18 and 22. That was her plan, too. In college, she imagined marrying her religious boyfriend, having children and doing standup on the side. When her future husband broke up with her, he told her that she should keep doing comedy. It’s a conversation she describes as formative, but not as much as her next boyfriend, a comic, saying she was funny but didn’t work hard enough. “He’s very funny and talented and I have a lot of jokes about him,” she said. “Got a lot of closers out of that guy.”Her career took off soon after she left school for the college stand-up circuit, which led to a stint on “Last Comic Standing.” At 23, she was booked on “Conan” and received a network development deal. Tensions between her past and future emerged. She lost a church gig over this tweet: “I’m a wild animal in bed, way more afraid of you than you of me.” She eventually quit Twitter and stopped doing church gigs.Her first exposure on Netflix, a 15-minute set in the 2018 series “The Comedy Lineup,” was a turning point for her career and her relationship with her father and stepmother. “They liked the success but they didn’t like what I was saying,” she said. “They loved when I was clean. And when I did the 15 minutes, they were disappointed.”Over the past year, she’s examined this part of her life in therapy and locates a lot of her trouble here. “There were times when I felt my self-worth is so tied up in this job and what I could do and why is that?” she said, then added, referring to her father, “A big part of it is I felt it impressed.”Tomlinson projects the image of a responsible young adult, even pushing through mono instead of postponing a show.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesParadoxically, Tomlinson is an introvert, uncomfortable in groups of people. Dustin Nickerson said she’s the kind of person who wants to get invited to the party but won’t attend. When asked when she’s happiest, he mulled it over before saying: when she is making a connection with one person.And yet her work has often resonated most when she digs into her own personal mess. She describes herself not as a topical or political comic, but as one who finds humor that other people can relate to by drilling down into her own life. Before putting out her second special, which dealt with mental illness and her mother’s death, she showed it to her friend Lem, who was in town to help her move stuff out of a boyfriend’s place after a breakup. Lem was amazed that she could be so open, asking, “How could you talk about this stuff?” Tomlinson recalled telling her, “I can’t really help it.”She’s trying to pick her spots more now. She describes her new special as “lighter” than her last one, though it’s vulnerable in subtle ways, like how much it ingratiates or refuses to. She said she had been more sparing about what she reveals in podcasts and interviews. And the late-night show will, she hoped, provide a stabilizing force, a home base, a community where she will once again be a parental figure of sorts. Her sibling Brinn, who just recently left the restaurant business to work for their sister, describes it as a game-changer in giving her balance, saying: “I have never seen her happier to be doing something that is social.”After she got the late-night show, Tomlinson said she heard from a lot of people, including friends and family. Asked if that included her father, she paused for several long seconds, considering her next move. Then she very politely thanked me for the question but said she would rather not talk about it.Tomlinson knows she can’t appeal to everyone, but her goal is to appeal to as many people as possible — and that makes her alert to what resonates. For a comic who cares about being relatable, success can be tricky to navigate. What will not change is how she prioritizes stand-up above all else. She agreed to take the late-night job only after being assured she would just need to shoot the show three days a week, allowing her to tour over the weekend.Ever since watching and studying comics like Kathleen Madigan and Maria Bamford in high school, she has not only connected with standup but leaned on it. She said that she first lost some religious faith when her mother died (“They told me praying would work. That shook me.”) but just as important, she said, was entering stand-up. “I was raised in this environment where if you’re not Christian, you’re probably a bad person because no one’s holding you accountable,” she said. “In clubs, I found a lot of these people are more empathetic and kinder and open-minded than people I’ve been around. Far less judgmental in the stand-up world.”Even as a late-night host, what Tomlinson sounds most excited about is the community of stand-ups. And she thinks, rightly, that the show will provide a valuable new platform for young comics. She said she wished she was more social earlier in her career. When asked if Taylor Swift’s trajectory holds any lessons, she pointed to how the musician had evolved but didn’t completely reinvent herself and cited the musician’s Eras Tour charting her different phases: “She’s still her but saying, ‘This is the place I am at right now.’”You could say that Tomlinson is now entering her late-night era. She said that when she was younger, she used to dream of being a legend; she talked about that with Lem, her friend. They saw Swift in concert together last year in Los Angeles.A few eras into the show, Tomlinson said, she turned to Lem and said, “I changed my mind. I want to be a legend.” Tomlinson cracked up reflecting on this moment, then added: “Two eras later, I was like: ‘Looks too hard. Think of the amount of stalkers.’” More

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    The Best Movies and TV Shows Coming to Netflix in January

    Sofia Vergara’s narco queenpin miniseries and a crypto documentary highlight this month’s slate.Every month, Netflix adds movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for some of January’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.)‘Bitconned’Now streamingThe collapse of big-time cryptocurrency exchanges like FTX grab a lot of headlines, but these are far from the only crypto businesses that have misled investors into losing fortunes. The documentary “Bitconned” tracks the rise and fall of Centra Tech, a company that promised — dubiously, in retrospect — to make crypto assets accessible via a debit card. Directed by Bryan Storkel (best-known for the quirky docs “The Pez Outlaw” and “The Bad Boy of Bowling”), the film is anchored by extensive interviews with the Centra Tech masterminds, as well as with some of the journalists who figured out early that something was fishy here. The details of the story are at once amusing and alarming, involving easily persuaded celebrity spokespeople, phony apps engineered to demonstrate a nonexistent technology and a FOMO culture where the bold promise of quick cash drowns out common sense.‘Fool Me Once’Now streamingThe author Harlan Coben’s novels are prime adaptation fodder for two simple reasons: He creates sympathetic protagonists with relatable anxieties; and he writes twisty plots that keep readers guessing. In the British miniseries “Fool Me Once,” Michelle Keegan plays a typical Coben hero, Maya Stern, an ex-military special operations agent who is shocked one day to look at the footage from her home security camera and see her husband, Joe (Richard Armitage), whom she thought had been murdered. Her investigation into this mystery leads to Maya crossing paths with a distrustful homicide investigator (Adeel Akhtar) and Joe’s rich and powerful mother (Joanna Lumley) — as well as some family members of her own who believe Joe’s strange case may be tied to the death of Maya’s sister.‘Society of the Snow’Starts streaming: Jan. 4In 1972, a plane crash in the Andes left over two dozen passengers stuck on a remote, icy mountain, with little hope of rescue and only a small amount of food to share. Famously — or infamously — the survivors resorted to cannibalism while waiting for the spring thaw. But the director J.A. Bayona (adapting a book by the journalist Pablo Vierci) doesn’t make the eating of human flesh the primary point of emphasis in his film “Society of the Snow.” He’s more interested in hardships like extreme cold and sudden avalanches, and in how a desperate situation strengthened the bond between these people, many of whom played together on the same rugby team. This is film about young men fighting hard to stay alive for each other’s sake, in a landscape at once picturesque and cruel.‘The Brothers Sun’ Season 1Starts streaming: Jan. 4The two brothers in the action-dramedy “The Brothers Sun” couldn’t be more different. One is Bruce (Sam Song Li), a cash-strapped Los Angeles college student with aspirations to be an improv comic; the other is Charles (Justin Chien), a skilled amateur chef who also happens to be a top-level assassin in a Taiwan triad. Michelle Yeoh plays the boys’ mother, Eileen, who has been sheltering Bruce from the criminal life in America. But when killers from the old country start invading her suburban sanctuary, she has to get her gangster groove back to keep her family safe. Created by Brad Falchuk (a creator of “Glee” and “American Horror Story”) and Byron Wu, this series combines dynamic martial arts sequences with scenes where the dysfunctional Suns relearn how to trust each other.‘Griselda’Starts streaming: Jan. 25Sofia Vergara plays the notorious drug lord Griselda Blanco in this miniseries, created by the writer-producer Ingrid Escajeda alongside some of the team behind the Netflix favorite “Narcos.” (Vergara, a Colombian herself, is also a producer on the project.) Blanco’s story has been told before in documentaries and TV movies, most of which treat her as a larger-than-life criminal legend. “Griselda” aims to be more grounded, following the cocaine queenpin from her origins in Medellín to her dominance of the Miami market, while frequently jumping back and forth in time to compare the mild-mannered immigrant mother that Blanco once seemed to be with the ruthless woman who went on to outfox the mob’s macho men.Also arriving:Jan. 1“You Are What You Eat: A Twin Experiment”Jan. 5“Gyeongseong Creature” Season 1, Part 2Jan. 10“The Trust: A Game of Greed” Season 1Jan. 11“Champion” Season 1“Detective Forst” Season 1“Sonic Prime” Season 3Jan. 12“Lift”“Love Is Blind: Sweden” Season 1Jan. 19“The Bequeathed” Season 1“Sixty Minutes”Jan. 22“Not Quite Narwhal” Season 2Jan. 23“Jacqueline Novak: Get on Your Knees”“Love Deadline” Season 1Jan. 24“Queer Eye” Season 8“Six Nations: Full Contact”Jan. 30“Jack Whitehall: Settle Down”Jan. 31“Baby Bandito” More

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    Stream These 9 Movies Before They Leave Netflix in January

    A lot of big movies by big-name directors are leaving soon for U.S. subscribers. Watch them while you can.In January, several big movies from an impressive coterie of marquee directors — including Sofia Coppola, Luca Guadagnino, Yorgos Lanthimos, Spike Lee, Jordan Peele and Robert Rodriguez — leave Netflix in the United States, along with a zippy comedy, an entertaining animated sequel and what may be the most famous runner-up in Oscars history. (Dates indicate the final day a title is available.)‘BlacKkKlansman’ (Jan. 5)Stream it here.Better late than never: Spike Lee won his first competitive Oscar for co-writing the screenplay to this deft combination of social satire and police procedural, which he also directed. It details the true story of how the Colorado police detective Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan — despite the fact that Stallworth is Black. Lee plays Stallworth’s ruse, achieved with a clever combination of phone calls and undercover work by his white, Jewish partner (Adam Driver), for laughs. But the danger of the operation is ever-present, building considerable tension to a conclusion that ingeniously and gut-wrenchingly ties the past to the present.‘Get Out’ (Jan. 5)Stream it here.When Jordan Peele’s crossover to feature filmmaking was announced in the mid-2010s, most audiences — familiar only with his work as half of the sketch comedy team Key & Peele — presumed he would continue to work in that wild comic style. No one could have predicted that he would turn the entire horror genre upside down, but that’s exactly what he did with this nail-biting combination of social commentary and scary movie. What begins as a “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” riff — a wealthy young white woman (Allison Williams) bringing her Black boyfriend (Daniel Kaluuya) home to meet her parents — turns into something far more sinister and unpredictable; Peele’s insights as a screenwriter are pointed and even profound, and his directorial instincts are striking from Frame 1.‘Spy Kids’ (Jan. 12)Stream it here.Just as it’s hard to remember that Peele wasn’t always associated with horror, recall that there was once a time when the idea of Robert Rodriguez — known then for his hyperkinetic action movies — making a family film was shocking. But he changed all of that with this 2001 smash, in which two average kids (the charismatic duo of Daryl Sabara and Alexa Vega) discover that their seemingly boring parents (Antonio Banderas and Carla Gugino, both delightfully game) are in fact globe-trotting super spies; a mission has gone awry, and the kids have to save them. Rodriguez’s imaginative scenario plugs right in to childhood play, and his handmade style is a smooth fit for kid-friendly cinema. (The second and third chapters in the franchise leave Netflix the same day.)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?  More

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    5 Action Movies to Stream Now

    This month’s picks include tales of Southern crime, a slick Japanese remake, a hunt for hidden treasure and more.‘Fast Charlie’Rent or buy on most major platforms.I never knew I needed to hear Pierce Brosnan with a Southern accent until Phillip Noyce’s “Fast Charlie.” The former Bond plays the titular “problem solver,” as he calls himself, cooler than a summer breeze. A turf war between his boss, Stan (James Caan in one of his final film roles) and a New Orleans gangster named Beggar (Gbenga Akinnagbe) results in the apparent murder of Stan and his entire crew, pushing Charlie to seek vengeance before Beggar finds him, too. Charlie’s predicament also envelops his lover, Marcie (Morena Baccarin), a sharp-talking taxidermist.Charlie is rendered in the mold of John Wick, if Wick remained in the biz until his actual retirement age. Brosman moves quietly and efficiently while leaning on smartly delivered one-liners. “What do you want?” Beggar asks. “You, not breathing,” Charlie retorts. Some old dogs do well without new tricks.‘The Dirty South’Rent or buy on most major platforms.Another Southern revenge story, this time in Northern Louisiana, occurs in the writer-director Matthew Yerby’s grim and gritty “The Dirty South.” Weighed down by an alcoholic father and an absent, ne’er-do-well mother, Sue Parker (Willa Holland) is on the verge of losing her family bar to the town’s wealthy patriarch, Jeb Roy (Dermot Mulroney), if she doesn’t come up with $30,000 in three days. Lucky for her, Dion (Shane West), a petty pickpocket from an equally broken family, just rolled through town. Sue teams up with Dion to rob Jeb, striking a blow to Jeb’s fief.At its heart, “The Dirty South” is a heist flick. The resourceful Dion teaches the determined Sue the tricks of his trade and quickly falls in love with her. The climatic heist, a brawling affair between Sue and Jeb, is soundtracked by “Carol of the Bells,” ripping the bow from Yerby’s rough and tumble holiday treat.‘Hard Days’Stream it on Netflix.Having previously written about “A Family” and the “The Village,” I’m persistently on the lookout for the Japanese director Michihito Fujii’s next film. His special interest in random bystanders who become stuck in larger, nefarious webs re-emerges in his slick, unhinged remake of the Korean action film “A Hard Day.” Fujii’s “Hard Days” opens on Detective Kudo (Junichi Okada) accidentally hitting a pedestrian with his car. This victim turns out to be at the heart of a battle between a corrupt internal affairs investigator, Yazaki (Go Ayano), who’s tasked with retrieving a key to a vault, and the elderly gangster (Akira Emoto) who is intent on stealing its contents.The messy situation immerses Kudo into a pure comedy, turning scenes requiring subterfuge — a traffic stop or his mother’s funeral — into hilarious near catastrophes. Okada builds his performance from broad physical gags toward a showdown against a crazed Yazaki among the tombstones of a Buddhist temple, not unlike the ending to the classic western “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.” Their battle of the wills even leaves an opening for a sequel.‘The Legend and Hag of Shaolin’Stream it on Hi-Yah!The Chinese director Zhang Dicai’s “The Legend and Hag of Shaolin,” with its faceless white-clad cult following its holy goddess on a trail to a MacGuffin treasure map, certainly qualifies as offbeat. Zhang leans into the comedic potential of this otherworldly premise through the two martial arts warriors — Hong (Gu Shangwei) and Shiyu (Zhao Wenzhuo) — who take the map into hiding. In a country village, the pair run an acupuncture clinic that, despite their best efforts to lay low, becomes a hit with the town’s women.Though corrupt martial arts masters, a romance and a major twist arise, the lighter-than-air fighting is the film’s primary vehicle. Clean frames and fluid choreography imbue Hong’s leaps and slides with balletic grace. The Foley artists, the key engine to any good action film, propel these staged confrontations, making Hong’s trusty spear sound like a whistling crystal searching for blood.‘Robbing Mussolini’Stream it on Netflix.Pietro (Pietro Castellitto) is a small-time gun runner, who, with his sharpshooting partner Marcello (Tommaso Ragno), works to earn a living during the waning days of World War II. Though Pietro deals with the resistance, he isn’t a revolutionary. He’s on the side of earning the kind of money he hopes will impress his girlfriend, Yvonne (Matilda De Angelis), who happens to be the mistress of Achille Borsalino (Filippo Timi), a brutal Fascist commander. After hearing about the Italian leadership’s plan to flee the country with a bounty of gold, Pietro forms a team to steal the treasure first.The Italian director Renato De Maria’s “Robbing Mussolini” is an inspired blending of “Inglourious Basterds” and “Sunset Boulevard,” relying on lush period detail, ornate Art Deco sets and resplendent gowns emblazoned with intoxicating splashes of red. The heist itself, in a nearly impregnable square surrounded by high walls, barbed wire and snipers, is equally imaginative: Long tracking shots capture the bevy of explosions and well-choreographed firefights, with biting precision and arresting flair, on an audacious scale. More

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    Love a TV Show? Now You Can Live It.

    Streamers and networks are creating live experiences to promote series like “Squid Game” and “Only Murders in the Building.” But do they amount to anything more than just marketing?On a sun-nuzzled morning in Los Angeles, 25 people filed into a narrow, windowless room. They were about to participate in “Squid Game: The Trials,” an interactive experience based on the popular, dystopian Netflix franchise.A South Korean series about an indebted man who enters a deadly tournament, “Squid Game” was a surprise hit for Netflix two years ago. In November, Netflix released a companion reality series in which 456 players competed, less lethally, for a $4.56 million prize. Now anyone with $39 — or $99 for a V.I.P. pass that includes parking and coat check — can play along in real-time. A ticket is an entree to a 70-minute roundelay of dire versions of children’s playground games, with Korean snacks, claw games and shopping to follow.The original “Squid Game, ” a savage anticapitalist satire, delights in blood sport. The reality version, though gentler, takes a dim view of human nature. But in the rooms of the interactive experience, housed on the former soundstage of “The Price Is Right,” the mood was cheerful, even giddy. “Squid Game” fans — dads and sons, friend groups, couples, a grandmother celebrating her birthday — thrilled to each callback and Easter egg. Many of them had come in tracksuit costume. Once the trials were complete (the grandmother had won, via light cheating), they happily browsed the snack stalls.Some players came to “Squid Game: The Trials” in tracksuit constumes.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesThe event was held in the former home of “The Price Is Right,” but its games were much gorier.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York Times“Squid Game: The Trials” is the latest in a trend of immersive experiences designed to lever an imaginary world into our real one. Referred to as brand activations or brand experiences, these events transform television shows (and films and sometimes consumer products) into multidimensional happenings.“It’s moving and it’s organized and it’s becoming a lot more expected,” Fri Forjindam, whose company Mycotoo specializes in immersive design, said of the trend.This past year, in New York City alone, fans could snuggle on the couch during a “Friends” experience, wander through an opulent theater during an “Only Murders in the Building” experience, solve a murder at “Welcome to the Continental: The Hotel Bar Experience,” dance the night away at a ball out of “Bridgerton” or sip cocktails while ogling Carrie Bradshaw’s shoe closet. Really, the options are legion. (In 2017, the FX series “Legion” rated an experience, too.)“We are bringing a theme park to people,” Marian Lee, Netflix’s chief marketing officer, said. “We are going to where the fans are.”These participatory and walk-through experiences have been part of the media landscape for more than 20 years, but until recently they have been rare and exclusive, the province of events like Comic Con or the South by Southwest festival or some of the splashier premieres. An amalgam of theater, commerce, viral marketing and fan service, they were intended to publicize shows in ways more forceful and creative than a Sunset Boulevard billboard.“You don’t hear from people necessarily about billboards that they see,” said Barrie Gruner, Hulu’s executive vice president of marketing and publicity. “But these types of activations are what really help drive word of mouth.”In recent years, these experiences have multiplied, particularly for prestige shows. “The Walking Dead” has sponsored a zombie-ridden obstacle course. “Game of Thrones” has birthed an interactive studio tour. The pandemic accelerated the trend. Many viewers consumed unusual amounts of television during lockdown. When live events returned, marketing and publicity departments looked for innovative ways to engage those fans. Hulu debuted a “Nine Perfect Strangers” activation in 2021. The next year Netflix created elaborate experiences in multiple cities based on three of its most popular properties: “Bridgerton,” “Money Heist” and “Stranger Things.”“We’ve seen an acceleration, post-Covid, of people wanting to be out,” Lee said. “This is how fans are engaging.”Not every show or movie lends itself to an experience, but many do: Walking away from the “Squid Game” immersion, I stumbled across a lollipop-filled “Wonka” pop-up that had taken over part of a nearby shopping center.An experience based on the Netflix period dramedy “Bridgerton” was styled as a ball.NetflixAn amalgam of theater, commerce and viral marketing, the activations are designed to publicize shows and keep fans engaged.Federico Imperiale/NetflixThese activations offer titles another way to stand out, literally, amid a crowded mediascape. For series, specifically, they offer a way to retain fans between seasons.“A lot of shows can get hot for a season or two, but we’re really looking and interested in sustained success,” Gruner, from Hulu, said. “In order to do that, you need more than fans, you need advocates.”These brand extensions take different forms, which typically gesture toward older varieties of entertainment. Some resemble museum exhibits. Others, which can involve dozens of actors, resemble plays.“They’re not theater,” said Sarah Bay-Cheng, an academic who studies the intersections of theater and media. “But they are theatrical.” And now some of them are in fact theater, as in the case of “Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” a prequel that recently opened in London.Not every activation invites or demands absolute fidelity to its source material, though an experience risks disenchanting fans if it deviates too far. While streamers and networks typically outsource activations to external marketing farms, those firms tend to work closely with writers and producers to preserve the spirit of the work.“We’re all making sure that we’re coming to it from a place of authenticity,” said Forjindam, who has helped to design experiences for “Stranger Things,” “The Mandalorian” and “Westworld.” “And then from there, you break all the rules.”An “Only Murders in the Building” activation included props and costumes from the show.Mo DaoudGuests were invited to solve the mystery of the most recent season.Mo DaoudA recent “Only Murders in the Building” experience, held in September at Upper Manhattan’s United Palace theater, where the show had filmed, was a faithful, playful recreation of the show. Guests could wander onstage, backstage and through the lobby, surveying actual props and costumes from the show. Using special flashlights to illuminate clues, they could attempt to answer the most recent season’s whodunit just days before the finale aired.A week later and a few miles downtown, at “Welcome to the Continental: The Hotel Bar Experience,” fans would encounter all-new characters and an original mystery, inspired by the Peacock series “The Continental,” a prequel to the “John Wick” franchise. Inside the Beaver Building, which had lent its facade to the movies, ticket holders, who were encouraged to dress as assassins, were free to move from room to room, engaging actors at will. Or they could congregate at the bar and swallow some very strong cocktails.“We wanted guests to feel like they were the main character in their own show,” said Ollie Killick, whose company, Fever, designed the experience.But is the show really about them? Or are activations like these merely a means to a marketing end? If an experience delights fans, those fans, by documenting and posting, often in meticulous detail, become part of a show’s advertising campaign.An event to promote “The Continental,” a “John Wick” prequel, included an original mystery and cocktails.Bryan Bedder/Peacock“We do look at social buzz,” said Shannon Willett, the chief marketing officer at Peacock. “We want people to have a great time, have that great experience, post on social, talk about that experience to other people.” Though expensive to produce, such immersions will have a greater impact on fans and will likely lead to more social media impressions than a traditional billboard or print ad.Netflix’s Lee put the emphasis elsewhere. “For us, it’s about the fans,” she said. “We don’t approach it as advertising.” Netflix recently announced a plan to open destinations known as Netflix Houses, where fans can engage in rotating live experiences while also eating branded food and shopping for souvenirs.Though perhaps not conceived as an advertising ploy, a venue like this achieves some of what advertising intends, building brand identification and loyalty. And they may lack the intellectual and emotional nourishment that theatrical or museum experiences might offer.Last year, in Toronto, Bay-Cheng attended the “Bridgerton” ball. She was named the diamond of the season, which involved confetti, glitter and great fanfare. “It was just this amazing moment of totally unearned adoration,” she said.While she enjoyed the ball and understands these activations as reflecting the desire for a live experience, she worries that the form is inherently limiting, feeding fans more of what they already enjoy rather than challenging them with something new.There were true challenges at “Squid Game: The Trials.” (The marbles were nearly impossible.) And if the experience could not be reasonably mistaken for theater or art, it did provide moments of exhilaration, affection, collaboration and joy, which is more than most billboards can say.Had it felt like living inside the show? “No,” a woman said after the final challenge. “But it was fun.”Why would a person pay to immerse herself in a dystopia, albeit a fun dystopia? Mike Monello, whose company, Campfire NYC, designed the “Only Murders” experience, has one theory. If you love something, he believes, then you must want to share it, even if the thing you love, as in “Squid Game,” is a caustic drama with an alarming body count.“Opportunities like this offer people a chance to get together with your tribe and experience something unique,” Monello said. “We have the need to share in the things we love. And it’s a lot more fun to do it in person.” More