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      Martin Scorsese on His Tour of Catholic Saints

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      The Fox Nation series “Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints” emphasizes the human struggles behind religious legends.The director Martin Scorsese’s filmography teems with troubled protagonists struggling with moral codes. With his new project, that canon now includes the canonized.“Martin Scorsese Presents: The Saints,” premiering Sunday on the Fox Nation streaming service, is hosted and narrated by the filmmaker and dramatizes the lives of eight Catholic saints.The series is premiering in two parts, with the first four episodes rolling out weekly and featuring well-known saints, including Joan of Arc and John the Baptist, as well as more obscure ones like Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish priest who volunteered to die in place of another man at the Auschwitz concentration camp. The second part, scheduled to premiere in April, will include episodes about the Italian friar Francis of Assisi and Mary Magdalene, a follower of Jesus Christ, among others.The series was created by Matti Leshem, a founder of New Mandate Films, a production company that focuses on storytelling rooted in Jewish history and culture. Scorsese is an executive producer. Kent Jones, a frequent collaborator of the filmmaker’s, wrote the scripts, which were informed by lengthy discussions on theology he had with Scorsese.Catholic saints, who are people recognized by the church after death for their virtue as models for holiness, have long interested Scorsese. “I was always fascinated by the idea of a saint and what a saint could be,” he said earlier this week, recalling how he found respite in St. Patrick’s Cathedral as a child growing up in 1950s New York City.In an interview at a hotel on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Scorsese discussed the show, his relationship to Catholicism and why he thinks faith-based entertainment needs to have depth. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.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 Day of the Jackal’ Is a Cat-and-Mouse Thriller

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      The new Peacock series, starring Eddie Redmayne and Lashana Lynch, adapts the 1971 Frederick Forsyth novel and sets the action in the present day.Eddie Redmayne is one of our most curious actors. The British star, who won an Oscar for his portrayal of Stephen Hawking in “The Theory of Everything,” takes big swings that sometimes are captivatingly odd. (If you haven’t seen his bellowing villain in “Jupiter Ascending,” from 2015, check it out.) But Redmayne’s innate slipperiness is well-suited to his latest role: an unknowable and deadly assassin in “The Day of the Jackal,” premiering Thursday on Peacock with five episodes (of 10).You spend much of the series wondering what exactly makes the Jackal tick. Is he simply a monstrous, unfeeling killer? A family man in disguise? A straight-up psychopath? Redmayne is fascinatingly coy — warm one moment and then haunting the next.The series is an adaptation of the 1971 Frederick Forsyth novel, which was also made into a film in 1973. Created by Ronan Bennett, this version sets the action in the present day and opens with Redmayne’s gun for hire targeting a German politician. This piques the interest of an MI6 officer named Bianca (Lashana Lynch), who has an almost perverse fascination with weapons.As Bianca runs around trying to uncover the Jackal’s identity, the assassin gets a new high-profile assignment. These two characters operate on parallel tracks, just missing one another time and time again. If Redmayne’s portrayal of the Jackal is steeped in mystery, Lynch’s take on Bianca is a stirring mix of impulsivity and cunning. They are the twin engines propelling the plot.As is often the case with streaming dramas, there is some bloat in the narrative — it takes multiple episodes for Bianca and the Jackal to even end up in the same place. But there is a compelling focus on the collateral damage these two inflict. The Jackal has a beautiful Spanish wife who slowly becomes more suspicious of her husband’s activities. At the same time, Bianca is willing to put innocents in danger, including her own daughter, because she believes she is serving the greater good. Some of this material can feel like filler, but much of it deepens “The Day of the Jackal” and its depiction of the human cost of global intrigue. More

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      For One of the ‘Bad Sisters,’ Things Have Gotten Even Worse

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      Anne-Marie Duff, who won a BAFTA for her performance in this black comedy last season, discusses her character’s darker turn in Season 2.This article includes spoilers for the first two episodes of the new season of “Bad Sisters.”The first time Anne-Marie Duff applied to drama school in London, it turned her away. When she applied a second time, she received a spot on the wait-list, and she called the school every day until it admitted her.“I think they just gave me a place to shut me up,” said Duff, the 54-year-old actress who describes herself as “London Irish.”Tenacity and grit characterize many of the women Duff has portrayed throughout her decades-long career, including the indomitable Fiona Gallagher in the British version of “Shameless” and the headstrong Queen Elizabeth I in the BBC mini-series “The Virgin Queen.”But those qualities are particularly evident in Duff’s depiction of Grace Williams, the troubled housewife at the center of an elaborate whodunit in the Apple TV+ black comedy “Bad Sisters.”For much of the first season, Grace trembles under the heavy hand of her husband, John Paul (Claes Bang), a jerk known by an unprintable nickname to her sisters. But beneath her timid exterior and obsequious demeanor, frustration builds and boils as her husband belittles and badgers her — until she finally erupts in a climactic scene that ends with her strangling him.Duff’s performance won her best supporting actress at the EE British Academy Film Awards and helped secure a second season of the show, which had a two-episode premiere on Wednesday.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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      Craig Melvin Is Named Hoda Kotb’s Replacement on ‘Today’

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      By selecting Mr. Melvin, a familiar face on the show, network executives chose to go the steadiest route possible.Craig Melvin, the veteran NBC News host, will succeed Hoda Kotb as an anchor of the network’s flagship morning show, “Today,” the company announced Thursday morning.Mr. Melvin will start in the new role, teaming with Savannah Guthrie, on Jan. 13.The position, one of the most prominent in television news, opened after Ms. Kotb, who has been at the network for more than two decades, announced in September that she would step down early next year. Ms. Kotb, who will remain as a contributor to the show, said at the time that she wanted to spend more time with her young children, and that it was “time to turn the page on what has been a dream book, a dream quarter-century.”Ms. Kotb, 60, will take her final turn as co-anchor of “Today” on Jan. 10.By selecting Mr. Melvin, 45, network executives chose to go the steadiest route possible. He has been the news anchor of “Today” since 2018, frequently joining Ms. Guthrie and Ms. Kotb on the set at some point in the 7 a.m. hour. He is also a co-host of the show’s 9 a.m. hour, and used to be an anchor of the weekend edition of “Today.”Mr. Melvin also was an anchor on MSNBC before leaving his daily 11 a.m. show on the cable network two years ago.“Dreams do come true,” he said in an interview before the news was announced on “Today.”“As someone said to me, this is an obit job,” he continued. “When you die one day, this is the first thing that gets mentioned in an obituary after it mentions you were a husband and a father.”Mr. Melvin said he found out about his selection several weeks ago. (NBC News executives kept it under wraps until after the presidential election.) Ms. Kotb said in an interview that it was such a secret that they had to develop a code term in order to toast his success, since so few people knew of it. The code? “Let’s Go Mets.”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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      With Aldis Hodge, ‘Cross’ Seeks Justice … for Its Title Character

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      If your idea of Alex Cross is Morgan Freeman from the movies “Kiss the Girls” (1997) and “Along Came a Spider” (2001), the Amazon series “Cross,” based on a best-selling series of novels by James Patterson, might come as a surprise.With his bulging biceps encased in sprayed-on sweaters, Aldis Hodge, who plays the title character in the series, cuts a rather different figure indeed.“They always had me in mediums,” Hodge said, laughing, in a recent video chat. “Actually, the only thing I really had for wardrobe was like, ‘Yo, I need these sweaters to be a little thicker because we are shooting in Canada in the winter.’”Fans of Patterson’s long-running franchise shouldn’t fret, though: The new series, which premiered Thursday on Prime Video, was only shot in Toronto — it is still set in Washington, D.C., like the books. But productions do that all the time. Perhaps more important, Hodge’s Cross lands closer than ever to the way the character is described on the page: tall, 38 in the first novel (like Hodge) and strong enough that, as described in “Kiss the Girls,” he can still pounce after being shot in the heart with a stun gun.Hodge’s character in “Cross” is a widower; one of the show’s central relationships is between Alex Cross and colleague and longtime best friend, Sampson (Isaiah Mustafa). Keri Anderson/Prime VideoObviously this is a helpful quality for a forensic psychologist.“I did tell the casting teams at Paramount and Amazon that as we started to search for our Alex Cross, I’d like to use Aldis Hodge as sort of the blueprint for that,” the series’s showrunner, Ben Watkins, said by phone.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: ‘Dune: Prophecy’ Is Still Looking for Its Voice

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      A long-gestating prequel, about the women who seek to guide a galaxy, is splashy, somber and insufficiently spicy.“Dune,” the multi-novel, multi-movie saga, is in part about the battle for a precious commodity hoovered up from a desert planet to enrich the rapacious nobility. It’s called spice.“Dune: Prophecy,” the six-episode prequel series beginning Sunday on HBO, also concerns a valuable resource hoarded by empires and processed through machinery. It’s called intellectual property.Spice is a dangerous substance, controlled through violence, but at least the universe gets something out of it. Its mind-expanding properties make hyperspace travel possible and can induce prescience in the user.I.P., on the other hand, tends to simply give us lavish, lesser copies of things we already have. “House of the Dragon” is “Game of Thrones: Blonder and Blander”; “The Rings of Power” substitutes the mystic wonder of “The Lord of the Rings” with C.G.I. and metalsmithing.“Dune: Prophecy” is set 10,000 years before Timothée and Zendaya strode the sands. Its action unfolds shortly after an uprising against “thinking machines” that enslaved humanity. But the series itself is securely in the control of the I.P. machine.Its focus is the Sisterhood, the precursor to the Bene Gesserit of the films, now overseen by the ruthless and subtle-minded Mother Superior Valya Harkonnen (Emily Watson). A combination of deep-state apparatus and deadly yoga colony, this secretive society of female mentalists provides “truthsayers” (human lie detectors) to the ruling nobles while guiding history with a genetics program designed to breed ideal rulers. (Humankind may have faster-than-light spaceships, but the galaxy remains a patriarchy that women can influence only by stealth.)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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      Late Night Chides Biden for Keeping His Cool With Trump

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      “I’m not saying booby-trap the place, but you don’t have to be overly helpful,” Seth Meyers said after the president welcomed Donald Trump to the White House.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.Smooth OperatorsOn Wednesday, President Biden hosted President-elect Donald J. Trump at the White House, where they exchanged pleasantries and promised a “smooth transition.”Seth Meyers called Biden’s accommodation “just a little confusing.”“You correctly called him a criminal fascist and threat to democracy. I’m not saying booby-trap the place, but you don’t have to be overly helpful. I mean, how are you going to accommodate him anyway — upgrade all the toilets so they can handle more classified documents?” — SETH MEYERS“Trump said they had a ‘really good’ meeting. He said that Biden was ‘gracious’ and that they ‘really enjoyed seeing each other.’ Last week, Joe Biden was an evil force who weaponized the justice system to put Trump in prison for the rest of his life; today, they had fun.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Joe complimented Trump on overcoming many obstacles that he has also faced, like stairs.” — GREG GUTFELD“Now that’s a man who appreciates a smooth transition of power, as long as it’s transitioning toward him. If it’s transitioning away from him, there’s going to be some Jan. 6-ing, but if it’s toward him, smooth.” — JORDAN KLEPPER“I mean, they did both try to hang Mike Pence, just out of tradition, but other than that, it was very cordial.” — JORDAN KLEPPERThe Punchiest Punchlines (New Low Edition)“During the campaign, I thought if Trump won, he would do the worst things I could imagine. Turns out, I don’t have much of an imagination.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Matt Gaetz as attorney general — this is a new low. I mean, not as low as our age-of-consent laws are about to be, but pretty low.” — JORDAN KLEPPER“Quick question: the Department of Justice isn’t within 100 feet of a school, is it?” — JORDAN KLEPPERWe 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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      Amazon Is Phasing Out Its Freevee Streaming Service

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      Its shows have moved to Amazon Prime, where they will remain free.Amazon is folding Freevee, its ad-supported streaming service, into Prime Video, where its shows will remain free to viewers who don’t subscribe to Prime.The move had been expected, after Amazon started including advertisements this year on Prime Video, which already hosts free original programs and movies. All Freevee programming will be available on Prime Video for free, the company said.Freevee began in 2019 as IMDb TV, an offshoot of Amazon’s IMDb film site. Some of its original shows were hits, including the social media sensation “Jury Duty,” “Bosch: Legacy” and “Judy Justice.” The service will be phased out within weeks.Amazon already has a streaming behemoth in Prime Video, and the company decided to put all of its entertainment content on one platform “to deliver a simpler viewing experience for customers,” an Amazon spokesperson said Wednesday.An ad-supported version of Prime Video is included with Amazon’s delivery service, which costs $14.99 per month, or $139 per year. An ad-free version of Prime Video is also available for an additional $2.99 per month. A stand-alone streaming subscription costs $8.99 per month.Like most streamers, Amazon mostly declines to give viewing numbers, but Freevee had built up its audience to about 65 million monthly active users in the United States in the first half of 2022. Amazon Prime has at least 180 million users, according to Consumer Intelligence Research Partners.“Judy Justice,” starring Judge Judith Sheindlin, known as Judge Judy, quickly became Freevee’s No. 1 original show when it debuted in 2021. Viewers watched more than 150 million hours of it over its first two years, according to Amazon data. Judge Sheindlin’s success in her first streaming show allowed her to spin off additional shows on Freevee.Freevee’s most unexpected hit, however, was “Jury Duty,” a hybrid documentary-sitcom in which an ordinary man unwittingly participates in a staged trial among actors. It became Freevee’s most-watched show after it premiered in 2023 and earned four Emmy nominations, including one for outstanding comedy series.“Bosch: Legacy,” which premiered in 2022, was based on the popular police detective book series by Michael Connelly. It became a New York Times Critic’s Pick, with the reviewer Mike Hale writing that the series came with “cleverly interlocking story lines and the general lack of pretense and contrivance.”Other free, ad-supported streaming platforms, like Pluto TV, Tubi, and Roku Channel, have enjoyed significant growth. Viewers have flocked to them as many other subscription-based streaming services raised their prices. While the free services are built on a stable of older TV programs and movies, many consumers are seeking cost savings, nostalgia and even terrible movies.There are at least 170 million ad-supported subscriptions in the United States, up from at least 93 million at the end of last year, according to Antenna, a subscription research firm. More