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      ‘The Crown’ Auction Could Help You Live Like a Queen

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      Bonhams is selling hundreds of costumes and props from “The Crown,” including a horse-drawn carriage, robes of state and the queen’s bed.Despite all the scandals and tragedies, the royal lifestyle in “The Crown” looked enviably lavish.During six seasons, Queen Elizabeth II rode around London in a golden carriage, pulled by six horses. Princess Diana gallivanted, and moped, her way across Europe in a succession of designer outfits. For special occasions, the royals donned crowns and ermine robes.For most viewers, watching the show, which ended in December, was the closest they could get to the trappings of royal life.Until now. Sort of.On Feb. 7, the auction house Bonhams is scheduled to offer hundreds of items from “The Crown” in London, including intricate set pieces like a full-size replica of the golden state coach (with an estimated price of up to 50,000 pounds, or $63,000), as well as more affordable props that gave “The Crown” an air of authenticity. Those include two porcelain corgis that appeared on the queen’s writing desk ($380) and the Queen Mother’s drinks tray and champagne swizzle stick ($101).Some items look set to be bargains — relatively speaking. One of Princess Diana’s real dresses sold last year for more than $1 million, and her “revenge dress” — the black evening gown that she wore on the evening that Prince Charles admitted, on national television, to cheating on her — once fetched $74,000. The version of the revenge dress that Elizabeth Debicki wears on “The Crown” has an estimated lot price of $10,000 to $15,000 in the Bonhams sale.In interviews, three members of the show’s costume and set departments discussed some of the auction’s key lots. Below are edited excerpts from the conversations.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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      Best Movies and TV Shows Streaming in February: ‘Mr. & Mrs. Smith,’ ‘Shogun,’ More

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      “Genius:MLK/X,” a “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” series, a remake of “Shogun” and “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans” are among the new arrivals.Every month, streaming services add movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for some of February’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.)New to Amazon Prime Video‘Mr. & Mrs. Smith’ Season 1Starts streaming: Feb. 2Based on the 2005 blockbuster film of the same name, the spy thriller series “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” stars Donald Glover (who also cocreated the show with Francesca Sloane) as a spy code-named John who gets paired with a spy code-named Jane (Maya Erskine) in an operation that has them posing as a married couple. While trying to get a handle on their assignment, the fake spouses also have to get to know each other, and to figure out whether it’s helpful or detrimental to their mission to have actual romantic chemistry. Though there are chase scenes and explosions sprinkled throughout, this take on the “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” premise is more grounded. It’s about two attractive single people in New York City, balancing a relationship and a very, very strange job.Also arriving:Feb. 8“The Silent Service”Feb. 9“Upgraded”Feb. 13“Five Blind Dates”Feb. 16“This Is Me … Now: A Love Story”Feb. 19“Giannis: The Marvelous Journey”Feb. 23“Jenny Slate: Seasoned Professional”“Poacher”“The Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy” Season 1Feb. 29“Red Queen”Dario Argento in the documentary “Dario Argento Panico.”ShudderNew to AMC+‘Dario Argento Panico’Starts streaming: Feb. 2The Italian filmmaker Dario Argento has been a favorite of genre fans and cinephiles since the 1970s, when his stylish, blood-soaked thrillers like “The Bird With the Crystal Plumage” and “Suspiria” introduced a unique cinematic language, halfway between Hitchcockian suspense and Grand Guignol theater. In the Shudder documentary “Dario Argento Panico,” Argento and some of his collaborators and admirers (including the directors Guillermo del Toro and Nicolas Winding Refn) look back across his long career, discussing his unique vision as well as the controversies surrounding the violence in his movies and the intensity of his working methods. The film is a comprehensive introduction to an artist whose work and personality can come off as aloof and demanding, but who has long appealed to people who don’t mind a challenge.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: Come Home to ‘Expats’

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      Our TV critic recommends a Nicole Kidman-led family drama in which no one’s quite sure where home really is.Brian Tee and Nicole Kidman star as grieving parents in “Expats.”Prime Video“Prestige TV” is often synonymous with “show about rich people being sad,” and by that metric, “Expats” (Amazon Prime Video) is easily among the most prestigious shows. Early on, its silky misery feels hollow — trite, even — but over six episodes, that emptiness becomes less of a void and more of a vessel, holding elegant, complicated ideas about class, pain and mothering.Nicole Kidman, whose presence alone connotes wealthy woe, stars as Margaret, an American mother living in Hong Kong because of her husband’s career. When viewers meet her, she’s in a state of fragile, paralyzed mourning, though the specifics of her agony remain vague until the end of the second episode, leaving the audience in the uncomfortable position of hungering for something terrible happening to a child, just to get things moving already.Luckily — well, unluckily — things do indeed start moving. Mercy (Ji-young Yoo), a Korean American young woman scrambling to find herself, or at least rent money, believes she’s cursed and accidentally catalyzes catastrophe. Margaret’s friend and fellow expat, Hilary (Sarayu Blue), has her own marital crisis, exacerbated by the fallout from Margaret’s tragedy. Essie (Ruby Ruiz), Margaret’s live-in housekeeper and nanny, mourns with her employers and misses her own adult children back in the Philippines. Puri (Amelyn Pardenilla), Hilary’s housekeeper, both admires and resents her boss. Margaret says Essie is “family.” Puri calls Hilary her friend. In each instance, the woman’s peers try to correct her.Over and over throughout the show, mothers tell their children to “come home.” No one is quite sure where that is, though, geographically or psychologically. Isn’t home wherever you hang your violent resentments? Love and suffering pour forth in equal velocity here, with money or lack thereof as a stand-in for both. When mothering is reconfigured as paid labor, what happens to both mothering and labor?“Expats,” created and directed by Lulu Wang, and adapted from the novel “The Expatriates,” by Janice Y.K. Lee, is a story of overlaps. Money, pain, guilt, peace, agency — they all pile on top of each other, in Hong Kong’s dense high-rises and in the characters’ fraught family trees. B-roll of construction abounds, and every driving scene seems to be on a hill. In a clever, artful trick, dialogue from one scene often begins before the previous scene is quite finished, an argument starting up before we even know its combatants. Characters’ stories collapse into one another, iterations of one grand maternal conflict.Two episodes of “Expats” arrived Jan. 26, and the following four arrive weekly, on Fridays. The first and second episodes are fine; the third and fourth episodes are good; the fifth and sixth episodes are stunning. More

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      Susie Essman Says Goodbye to ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’

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      The comedian Susie Essman spots them regularly, out in the urban wild: fashion doppelgängers.We had barely begun our lunch at Cafe Luxembourg on the Upper West Side when she leaned in and gestured conspiratorially. “That’s a total Susie Greene outfit,” she said, spying a woman entering the restaurant in a hooded, salmon-orange jumpsuit crosshatched with mint green slashes. “And she’s got a leopard-print purse, look at that!” She sat back, delighted.Power clashing is the life force of Susie Greene, the singular character that Essman has inhabited on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” since the HBO series, created by Larry David, began in 2000. There is no one in the entertainment universe who dares to dress like her — not just a clash but a dogfight of pattern, color and texture, with a dollop of feather — and few who communicate as she does, in an ornery gush of inspired expletives.As Greene, the much put-upon wife of David’s manager, played by Jeff Garlin, Essman is more than just a fan favorite. She is an instigator — “a scene-driver,” as she put it — whose costumes and insults get even wilder on the 12th and final season of “Curb,” which starts Feb. 4. She is also the person who, her castmates said, makes David crack up most regularly.Essman, 68, and David, 76, the “Seinfeld” co-creator who stars as a heightened, less scrupulous version of himself, have known each other since their stand-up days in the ’80s. He cast her, in what was then a small part, after seeing her withering set at a roast of Jerry Stiller in 1999. “She was filthy, profane and hilarious — exactly what I wanted,” David wrote in an email.Essman in the 12th and final season of the show. John Johnson/HBOHe didn’t give her much to go on — no character description or deep back story, just telling her that the show would be improvised and that he and the on-screen Susie would have, he said, “a contentious relationship.” The rest was on Essman.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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      Maya Erskine, of ‘Mr. & Mrs. Smith,’ Thinks She Would Make a Good Spy

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      The actor and writer will star alongside Donald Glover in a series reboot of the 2005 action comedy in which newlyweds turn out to be enemy agents.“What would happen if James Bond had a blister?” Maya Erskine wondered recently.Erskine, 36, an actor and writer, has been thinking of hypotheticals like these ever since Donald Glover (“Atlanta,” “Swarm”) approached her about starring in “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” the reboot of the 2005 action comedy.That film, which starred Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, was a stylized, sexed-up spy story, in which newlyweds discover that each is an operative assigned to assassinate the other. This eight-episode series, created by Glover and the writer Francesca Sloane, arrives on Amazon Prime Video on Feb. 2. It trades some of that sex for a more faithful approach to marriage and espionage.The new John and Jane Smith, played by Glover and Erskine, are spies hired by a shadowy organization to pose as a married couple. (Phoebe Waller-Bridge was initially announced as Glover’s co-star, but she left in 2021, citing creative differences.) While completing high-risk missions and racking up casualties, John and Jane are also achieving various relationship milestones — first date, first kiss, first vacation. Blisters and other minor injuries abound, as well as conversations about annoying eating habits and gas.Erskine, best known as a creator of the Hulu comedy “PEN15,” in which she starred as a heightened version her seventh-grade self, was grateful or this less glamorous version. “It’s easier for me to not have to try to be attractive, because then I don’t fail,” she said. Then again, having spent three seasons in a bowl cut, almost any role would have felt chic by comparison. She also said that she thought that she and Glover were only average-looking, which was sweet.During a video call from her sunlit Los Angeles home, Erskine, snacking on saltines, discussed acting, espionage and how the show, which begins and ends with multiple homicides, is essentially marriage propaganda. (The couple that slays together stays together?)A still from the “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” series, starring Donald Glover and Erskine.David Lee/Prime VideoWe 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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      Late Night Weighs In On the Trump-Swift Thing

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      As the ex-president takes on the pop megastar, Jimmy Kimmel predicts this might be the offense that finally brings down Donald Trump.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.‘I’m the Problem, It’s Me’Former President Donald Trump picked a fight with Taylor Swift and her fans this week when he reportedly said that he is more popular than the pop star, insisting his fans “are more committed than hers.”“This fight he’s about to pick with Taylor Swift, this might be what does it,” Jimmy Kimmel said on Wednesday. “It won’t be Jan. 6, it won’t be the election fraud or the sexual assault or dancing with Jeffrey Epstein, or even fathering Don Jr. What’s finally going to bring down Donald Trump will be an army of pissed-off Swifties.”[Imitating Trump] “I’m way better than Taylor. Don’t they know it’s me? Hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“This is how much the Republican Party has changed. There was a time when a famous singer dating a football player and spending quality time with his family would have been their dream. They used to elect politicians who were football players or ones who looked like footballs. And may I remind you, her last boyfriend was British. We almost lost one of our greatest national treasures to the Brits!” — SETH MEYERS“And unlike your rallies, her tickets aren’t free. People paid hundreds and even thousands of dollars to see her — and that’s just here in America. How’s your popularity in Tokyo? And Singapore? How’s your popularity in Gelsenkirchen, Germany? Because she’s doing three nights at a soccer stadium there that holds over 62,000 people even though no one has ever heard of Gelsenkirchen, Germany. It might not even exist.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Committed Edition)“I’m not sure Trump has more committed fans, but he definitely has more fans who have been committed.” — JIMMY FALLON“If Taylor Swift told her fans to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, they would have succeeded. They would be running the country right now.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Taylor Swift is so popular, people want to watch her watching a football game.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“If Donald Trump had a rally at SoFi Stadium here in L.A., they would still have enough empty seats to also hold a Taylor Swift concert that night.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“This country dumped Donald Trump and we are never ever getting back together.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingKathryn Newton, the star of “Lisa Frankenstein,” told Jimmy Fallon why she wanted to be a part of the new “zom-com” on Wednesday’s “Tonight Show.”What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightLarry David will tease the final season of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” on Thursday “Late Night.”Also, Check This OutTom Hollander, center, as Truman Capote in “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans,” which premieres on Wednesday.FXRyan Murphy’s new FX series “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans” has a star-studded cast including Tom Hollander, Naomi Watts, Diane Lane, Chloë Sevigny, Calista Flockhart and Demi Moore. More

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      Why We Keep Rewatching ‘Gilmore Girls’

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      The show, which ended in 2007, was still one of the 10 most-watched shows across major streaming platforms last year, according to the research firm Nielsen.Some things have inexplicable staying power. The Hermès Birkin bag. Cheetos. Crocs.And for nostalgic millennials, there is “Gilmore Girls.” The show ended its seven-year run on the WB and CW networks in 2007, yet viewers keep returning to the familiar comfort of the fictional town of Stars Hollow, Conn., where the series was set.Netflix recorded 500 million viewing hours for the show from January to June of last year, surpassing hits like “Seinfeld” and “Stranger Things,” and data released on Monday by the research firm Nielsen showed that “Gilmore Girls” was among the Top 10 most-watched shows across the major streaming platforms in 2023.The show, which concluded the month before the iPhone was introduced, is even finding a younger audience on TikTok, where users post scenes they love and argue about their favorite romantic partners for every character.Yanic Truesdale, who played the grumpy inn concierge Michel, lovingly called it “the show that will never die.”“I’ve had hundreds, if not thousands, over the years, of people saying, ‘I got a surgery, and your show kept me going,’” he said. “Or, ‘I lost my dad,’ or ‘I lost this person, and I would watch the show and I would feel better.’”He added that he still meets fans who offer testaments to its popularity: “I’m always amazed that 10-year-olds, 15-year-olds — kids — are watching it as if it just came out.”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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      ‘Feud: Capote vs. the Swans’ Review: Cold Blooded

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      In FX’s series about Truman Capote’s downfall, there’s nothing waiting at the rainbow’s end.“Feud: Capote vs. the Swans,” which premieres Wednesday on FX (streaming on Hulu), is something that its protagonist could not abide: a bore.The second season of the anthology series “Feud” stretches the story of Truman Capote’s falling out with the “swans” of New York society across eight episodes and more than seven hours. Much of the action takes place between the publication of the thinly fictionalized story “La Côte Basque, 1965” in November 1975 — in which Capote spills the tea about the misbehavior of many of his rich acquaintances — and the death in July 1978 of Babe Paley, one of the socialites who dropped him after the piece came out. Flashbacks touch on his grim childhood, his ascent to fame in the 1960s with the revolutionary “In Cold Blood” and his happy days as a dinner-party darling; other scenes cover his late 1970s to early 1980s spiral into alcoholism and addiction, leading to his death of liver disease in 1984.This could be the framework for gossipy, sexy, stylish, tragic entertainment, but that does not appear to be what the show’s creators — who include the writer Jon Robin Baitz; Gus Van Sant, who directed six episodes; and the executive producer Ryan Murphy — had in mind. They have gone instead for chilly, moralistic and cautionary. “Capote vs. the Swans” feels as forbidding and vindictive as the society wives who pass judgment on Capote.An element in that affect is the fashionably fractured approach the show takes to its storytelling. The action jumps back and forth relentlessly in time. One result is that it can take a few beats, even when there are titles with the years, to figure out whether what we are seeing is happening before or after the pivotal publication of “La Côte Basque, 1965.”Another, more important result is that the themes the show puts forth — the discrimination and condescension Capote faces as a gay man, even from those who champion him; the rigid patriarchy that oppresses the swans despite (or because of) their social standing; and the rapid changes in the culture that perplex all of them — are not elaborated on in a dramatic way. Ideas don’t develop — they agglomerate in a repetitive, undifferentiated jumble, and the power they might have drains away. The show is peculiarly lacking in dramatic tension (though not in melodramatic flourishes); it’s eight episodes of Capote circling the drain, bobbing higher or lower depending on the time frame.Chloë Sevigny as C.Z. Guest, one of the socialites Capote betrayed with his 1975 story in Esquire.FXWe 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