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      Carl Weathers on Streaming

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      Whether dressed in American flag shorts or dirty fatigues, the versatile actor, best known as Apollo Creed in the “Rocky” movies, always made an impression.When you look back on the career of Carl Weathers, who died on Thursday at the age of 76, certain images immediately come to mind. There is Weathers, abs glistening, in American flag shorts in the “Rocky” movies. Or Weathers wearing dirty fatigues in “Predator.” Comedy junkies might immediately picture him waving alongside an alligator in “Happy Gilmore.” Throughout Weathers’s acting career, which followed a stint in professional football, he was associated with franchises that became pop culture sensations. But he was also a performer who was as comfortable goofing on his own persona as he was battling Rocky Balboa or a Predator. Here are some of his most memorable roles and where to watch them.‘Rocky I-IV’ (1976, 1979, 1982, 1985)Stream the “Rocky” films on Max.If you know Weathers for one part, it is Apollo Creed, the villain turned pal turned tragic figure in the “Rocky” franchise. Creed is introduced in the first film, the best picture winner directed by John G. Avildsen, as the man who both gives Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky his shot and stands in his way.A heavyweight champion who needs an opponent for a fight, Apollo has the great idea to give a “local underdog” the chance to go up against him. The first two movies find Rocky battling Creed. By the third, Rocky and Apollo have formed an alliance, and, by the fourth, well, I won’t spoil it if you haven’t seen it, but suffice it to say Apollo’s legacy looms large. When “Rocky II” came out, Weathers was already thinking about a future after Apollo. He told The Washington Post: “I’m looking for a Picassoesque role, something that will throw me into new period. I feel Apollo Creed has taken me so far, but now it’s necessary to go beyond that.” But it’s also understandable why Apollo is such a touchstone of Weathers’s career. In addition to showing off his incredible physicality, he made a character that could have been a one-off bad guy into a person you couldn’t help but root for every time he was in the ring. Now, the “Rocky” films have morphed into the “Creed” films. That would not have been the case without Weathers.‘Predator’ (1987)Rent or buy it on most major platforms.Weathers with Arnold Schwarzenegger in “Predator.”Sunset Boulevard/Corbis, via Getty ImagesWe 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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      Don Murray, a Star in Films That Took on Social Issues, Dies at 94

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      An Oscar-nominated role opposite Marilyn Monroe in “Bus Stop” led to a long career in film and TV and onstage, in productions that grappled with race, drugs, homosexuality and more.Don Murray, the boy-next-door actor who made his film debut as Marilyn Monroe’s infatuated cowboy in “Bus Stop” in 1956 and played a priest, a drug addict, a gay senator and myriad other roles in movies, on television and onstage over six decades, has died at 94. His son Christopher on Friday confirmed the death but provided no other details.In the postwar 1950s, when being sensitive, responsible and a “nice guy” were important attributes in a young man, Mr. Murray was a churchgoing pacifist who became a conscientious objector during the Korean War. He fulfilled his service obligation by working for two and a half years in German and Italian refugee camps for $10 a month, assisting orphans, the injured and the displaced.Back from Europe in 1954, he settled on an acting career focused on socially responsible themes. He appeared in a television drama about lawyers serving poor clients, and he had a part in the 1955 Broadway production of “The Skin of Our Teeth,” Thornton Wilder’s comedic vote of confidence in mankind’s narrow ability to survive, which starred Helen Hayes and Mary Martin.Mr. Murray, far right, in the 1955 Broadway production of Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth” with, from left, George Abbott, Mary Martin, Helen Hayes and Heller Halliday.ANTA Playhouse, via Everett CollectionThe director Joshua Logan saw that production and cast Mr. Murray in “Bus Stop,” his adaptation of William Inge’s play about a singer who is pursued by a cowpoke from a Phoenix clip joint to a snowbound Arizona bus stop, where a spark of dignity and character flame into a moving and humbling love. The film established Marilyn Monroe as a legitimate actress and Mr. Murray as an up-and-coming star.“With a wondrous new actor named Don Murray playing the stupid, stubborn poke and with the clutter of broncos, blondes and busters beautifully tangled, Mr. Logan has a booming comedy going before he gets to the romance,” Bosley Crowther wrote in a review for The New York Times. “And the fact that she fitfully but firmly summons the will and strength to humble him — to make him say ‘please,’ which is the point of the whole thing — attests to her new acting skill.”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 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