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      Readers on the Best Movies, TV, Music and Theater of 2023

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      When our critics shared their top film, TV, pop music and theater picks, readers suggested “Billions,” “The Holdovers,” “Sabbath’s Theater” and others.Every year, our critics review numerous movies, television shows, musicals, plays, operas, dance performances, music and more. And come December, they whittle down their favorites to a list of 10.But what are best-of lists if not an invitation to critique?Here’s a look at readers’ comments across several popular categories.Television | Movies | Theater | Pop MusicCharlie (Joe Locke) and Nick (Kit Connor) in Season 2 of “Heartstopper.”NetflixBest TVIn a year when the television industry was turned upside down by strikes, and when corporate fantasies of unlimited growth seemed to find some kind of ceiling, there was still almost too much good stuff to keep up with. Luckily, we have three critics who do that for a living — and luckier still, they offered three different prisms through which to view the year in TV, at home and abroad.Of course, there is no world in which “Succession” and “Reservation Dogs” weren’t each going to appear twice, and our readers seemed OK with that. As for other reader favorites like “Only Murders in the Building” and “The Gilded Age,” maybe next year. (Sorry, “Billions,” your time is up.)Here’s a look at what some of our readers said.Michel Forest of Montreal, Quebec:No love for “Billions”? Come on! Sure, it was cartoonish at times, but it was such a fun show to watch, with great acting and some of the best dialogue on TV. Anyway, I’ll watch anything with Paul Giamatti and Damian Lewis, they are such great actors!Jodi Schorb of Gainesville, Fla.:I thought Season Two of “Heartstopper” was honest and adorable. One can only take so many murder-mysteries and moody thrillers. It’s hard to make an earnest comedy, let alone one that treats gay, transgender, straight and (a surprise) asexual protagonists with such tenderness. If we are going to add one rom-com on the list, “Heartstopper” deserves some love.Richard Laible of Winnetka, Ill.:Great list EXCEPT you left off the best show of the year, “Lessons in Chemistry”! You should really send out an edited list … and maybe an apology (j/k).Barry Keoghan stars in “Saltburn.”Amazon StudiosBest Movies“Barbenheimer” signaled a great year for movies, and our critics recognized the “Oppenheimer” half of the phenomenon, along with “Killers of the Flower Moon,” “Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros,” “Past Lives” and others. Readers, on the other hand, questioned the merits of “Asteroid City” and “Oppenheimer,” and named “The Holdovers,” “Anatomy of a Fall” and “Barbie” as favorites.Peter Malbin of New York City:I just saw “Saltburn,” and it was outstanding. Well-acted and original film set in Oxford and an English manor house. The story is entertaining and sexy. Barry Keoghan is brilliant! He was also in “Banshees of Inisherin.” “Saltburn” should be at the top of the lists!Beth Samuelson of Oakland, Calif.:Where is “Maestro” on these lists? A terrific film that should not be missed. And the reviews have been excellent!Charise M. Hoge of Bethesda, Md.:The exclusion of “Barbie” from this list is like putting her back in the box … that powerful (yes, powerful) film deserves recognition.Jill Krupnik of Brooklyn, N.Y.:I am a little surprised that my personal favorite — the wondrous “The Boy and the Heron” — didn’t make even an honorable mention, but here we are.Perhaps Brian Seifert of Cincinnati summed it up best:Critics see a lot of junk, so they like the intense, quality-issue movies that come along. Average people deal with a lot of junk, so they like lighter entertainment to escape and relax. The two groups have never been farther apart.From left, Grey Henson and Ashley D. Kelley in the musical “Shucked.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBest Theater“Purlie Victorious,” “A Doll’s House” and “Just for Us” were among Jesse Green’s picks for the year’s best theater. Many of the plays and musicals that resonated in 2023 deftly married elements of drama and comedy. Our readers pointed out some of the shows that — despite being fan favorites or being beautifully performed — didn’t make our list.Eric Bogosian, the New York actor and playwright, praised “Sabbath’s Theater,” as did several other commenters. “What are you afraid of? Great performances by three of our greatest actors and actresses? Please …,” he wrote.Marcia W. Orange of Fort Lee, N.J.:“Shucked” deserved more love and attention. It was the most original and laugh-out-loud-funny show I have seen in years … even better than “Book of Mormon.” What a pity more people haven’t seen it.Joseph LaFalce of South Orange, N.J.:How can any roundup of the best of 2023 not include the phenomenal “Parade,” including the unique staging and heartbreaking performances by Ben Platt and Micaela Diamond?Raissa Lim of New York City:RIP to the magnificent “Here Lies Love” by David Byrne. It was the best Broadway show I saw this year, and the best theater experience of my life. Never again will Broadway see that same confluence of superb talents come together to create an extraordinary and indescribable experience. It was a brand-new kind of art form, not the standard narrative theater audiences have come to expect, so perhaps the wrong standards were sometimes applied when assessing it. Its minor narrative weaknesses were more than offset by other elements such as video artistry, lighting, set design, music, choreography — making for an overall spectacular whole. I’m sorry for those obstinate souls who didn’t see it for their own obscure reasons. They missed a once-in-a-lifetime experience (that does NOT glorify the Marcoses but instead pays tribute to a true hero). Indeed, perhaps bovine audiences get what they deserve when flying cars and dancing lions beat out truly groundbreaking artistic excellence at the box office.Caroline Polachek at the Montreux Jazz Festival in July.Valentin Flauraud/Keystone, via Associated PressBest Pop MusicOne of the albums that had the biggest impact in 2023 actually came out at the tail end of 2022: SZA’s “SOS.” Between their albums and song lists, our three pop music critics agreed “SOS” was one of the year’s best, along with LPs from Olivia Rodrigo and 100 gecs. Beyond that, their tastes widely diverged from one another — and, it turns out, from our readers’. (Michael Hasse, a reader in Paris, created this helpful Spotify playlist with albums recommended in the comments.)Roddy P Glass of London:I will add my vote to “Now and Then,” though secretly, in the quiet of my heart, I know it comes nowhere near the standard the Beatles have always given us: perfection.”Penny Beach of Boise, Idaho:Where is Noah Kahan? Definitely should be on this list.Charles Grissom of Raleigh, N.C.:I know these lists are about pop music, and that is driven by 20-somethings. But Jimmy Buffett’s posthumous 2023 album “Equal Strain on All Parts” is wonderful music and storytelling, and the song “Portugal or PEI” is an absolute gem.Patrick Tierney of Louisville, Ky.:I love these lists but [Lindsay] Zoladz’s in particular. Rodrigo, Polachek, and Debby Friday all made my top 10 and show how much the present and future of pop/rock/dance music is led by creative young women. I’d add to the group three very different artists — yeule, Die Spitz, Avalon Emerson — that made this a great year for new music.Scott McGlasson of Minneapolis, Minn.:None of my faves of the year were even mentioned: Tim Hecker, the Necks, the National, Blonde Redhead, PJ Harvey. I know, I’m old and not a music critic…John Franz of East Bangor, Pa.:I was shocked to see some songs and performers I’ve actually heard of. Peter Gabriel’s album is brilliant. Not sure if the new Stones album is their best work. I found Dolly’s album hilarious; she’s a gem who I never listened to much before this new album. That’s about it. Seems to me that any song from the Tedeschi Trucks album should be on the list. Kenny Wayne Shepherd. And how about Jason Isbell’s great new album.Dan Cain of Washington, D.C.:I vote for Yo La Tengo’s “This Stupid World.” Best album in a while from one of the founding bands of indie rock. Just listen to the first 30 seconds of the opening track, ideally at a very loud volume. It’s great.Paul Kevin Smith of Austin, Texas:I don’t know why she doesn’t get more attention, but Jessie Ware’s “Begin Again” was a perfect pop/disco song released this year.And we’ll leave the last words to John Weston of Chicago:So many comments here seem to rest on the idea that musical progress ended when John Bonham died, Lynyrd Skynyrd crashed, the Beatles broke up, the Big Bopper died, or Chuck Berry or Bessie Smith (let’s be honest, none of y’all would have cared when she died … like most of the world at the time), when “The Rite of Spring” was first performed, when Beethoven finished his Ninth Symphony or with Liszt’s use of the tritone in “Dante Sonata” (how dare he!).To all of those such commenters and thinkers, I shall quote the one and only Bob Dylan (referenced by many on this thread):Mothers and fathers throughout the land/Don’t criticize what you can’t understand/Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command/Your old road is rapidly aging/Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend a hand/For the times they are a changin’. 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      ‘The Curse’ Season 1, Episode 6 Recap: Guessing Game

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      Asher seems to be losing his grip, except when what’s in his grip is a bunch of nails.Season 1, Episode 6: ‘The Fires Burn On’The final line of this week’s episode of “The Curse” finds Asher saying, “I’m fine, don’t worry about me.” But I am starting to worry about him. It’s not quite sympathy — Asher hasn’t done enough to deserve that. Maybe it’s something more akin to concern. After all, as he says it, his left hand is dripping with blood. It’s his own fault. He filled his palm with nails to test whether Nala has some sort of psychic powers. This is a sign of a man losing his grip with reality.And there is another reason to feel worried for Asher: Whitney and Dougie have teamed up behind his back. Whitney’s hostility toward Dougie finally eases when she discovers that she needs him to make her show more interesting. And Dougie’s idea for making “Fliplanthropy” into something less utterly boring? Humiliate Asher on television.From the very first episode of “The Curse,” Dougie and Whitney have had conflicting ideas about what “Fliplanthropy” should be. Whitney sees it as a brand building exercise, a chance to show how good she is, a way of assuaging her guilt over her slumlord parents’ financial support. But that doesn’t make for entertaining television. Dougie, he of the burn victim dating show, understands that.In the first couple of moments of this week’s installment, we see what the Whitney version of “Fliplanthropy” looks like. It is incredibly dull. The term “like watching paint dry” has never been more apt: Literally, the show features a whole segment in which there’s a discussion of paint drying. Whitney finally realizes, “something feels off,” an almost painfully obvious revelation.Dougie proposes a solution. He knows she doesn’t want to create drama around Española itself, which means they can’t discuss any of the crime or racial tension in the community. But there is a ready source of drama staring them right in the face: Whitney and Asher. Of course their marital strife is evident onscreen — in one shot, you can see her rolling her eyes at him because he has his phone in his hand while giving a gift of pottery. Why not highlight that and make their conflict the driving force of the show?Dougie sells this to Whitney as a way to make herself more appealing, as well as a way to make the series entertaining. If the audience believes she is telling them the truth about her relationship with Asher, then they will believe she is telling them the truth about everything else. Whitney is into this plan, and she doesn’t really stop to consider the potential damage to her already fragile marriage. She even has a new idea for the title of the show: “Green Queen.” If that title refers to her, what does that make Asher? Dougie suggests: “the village idiot.” Whitney laughs. It’s so mean.No one runs this plan by Asher as what is still known as “Fliplanthropy” continues to film at a local Española firehouse. Whitney flirts shamelessly with the firemen to make Asher jealous, but any potential for a blowup over that indiscretion goes away once Asher makes a mysterious discovery in the bathroom. After peeing — yes, once again we see a shot of his small penis — Asher finds a pile of cooked chicken on the sink, holding it up to his nose to confirm that it is indeed poultry.He accuses Dougie of putting it there to mess with him, an accusation Dougie denies, and then goes on a crusade to find the culprit. He interrogates the firemen, trying to discern if they had any chicken in their meals recently. (They didn’t.) Then he convinces one of them to let him go through security footage. He is so preoccupied with this that he has no idea that Whitney and Dougie are conspiring to make him look like a fool on HGTV. His absent-minded stare during filming fits perfectly within the story they are creating. It doesn’t matter that he is thinking about chicken instead of Whitney.Without a clear answer as to where that chicken came from, Asher once again suspects that Nala might be behind it. So, while doing work on her house, he starts quizzing her in an effort to determine whether she has metaphysical powers. He does this at first by hiding nails under a bucket and asking her to guess how many there are. She is puzzled by his game, but she answers nonchalantly — and correctly, three times. Clearly unnerved and tense, Asher grabs a fistful of nails and asks her to guess again. But she is too upset to guess when she sees the blood running out of his palm.At under 40 minutes, this week’s episode is the shortest of the season yet, and it does feel more transitional than the rest. The plot moves along quickly. Even though it’s still deeply uncomfortable, it seems to linger less in each setup so as to get us faster to the episode’s unnervingly bloody end.The show seems to be entering a new phase with this Whitney and Dougie alliance, one in which Asher will grow more and more isolated. Already, he has no one. His own wife is actively undermining him with his supposed childhood pal. He even can’t reach out to his old casino friend Bill, who ignores him in the hardware store. All he has is himself and his spinning mind, trying to figure out whether something supernatural is happening to him or it’s just a prank. Asher is often awful and off-putting, and yet, I pity him, and yes, I am worried.Notes from EspañolaI’m really intrigued by the interlude featuring Abshir and the chiropractor, though I’m not sure what to fully make of it. The scene may be one of the most upsetting in “The Curse” so far, and that’s saying a lot. There’s a look of terror on Abshir’s face as his body is stretched and his bones are loudly cracked. This is supposed to be curing him of his pain, but evidently it is a deeply painful experience, and the scene is filmed in a particularly violent way. I can’t get it out of my head, especially the way it appears almost without context.Once again, I’m left wanting more of this budding Cara-Dougie relationship, even if he won’t actually date her because she smokes. (He doesn’t want another wife dying on him.) It’s making Whitney extremely jealous.Notice the charge that popped up on Whitney’s phone from the jeans store. How much has she paid for stolen jeans?”Green Queen” is a terrible title for a show. More

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      Studios Are Loosening Their Reluctance to Send Old Shows Back to Netflix

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      When building their own streaming companies, many entertainment studios ended lucrative licensing deals with Netflix. But they missed the money too much.For years, entertainment company executives happily licensed classic movies and television shows to Netflix. Both sides enjoyed the spoils: Netflix received popular content like “Friends” and Disney’s “Moana,” which satisfied its ever-growing subscriber base, and it sent bags of cash back to the companies.But around five years ago, executives realized they were “selling nuclear weapons technology” to a powerful rival, as Disney’s chief executive, Robert A. Iger, put it. Studios needed those same beloved movies and shows for the streaming services they were building from scratch, and fueling Netflix’s rise was only hurting them. The content spigots were, in large part, turned off.Then the harsh realities of streaming began to emerge.Confronting sizable debt burdens and the fact that most streaming services still don’t make money, studios like Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery have begun to soften their do-not-sell-to-Netflix stances. The companies are still holding back their most popular content — movies from the Disney-owned Star Wars and Marvel universes and blockbuster original series like HBO’s “Game of Thrones” aren’t going anywhere — but dozens of other films like “Dune” and “Prometheus” and series like “Young Sheldon” are being sent to the streaming behemoth in return for much-needed cash. And Netflix is once again benefiting.Ted Sarandos, one of Netflix’s co-chief executives, said at an investor conference last week that the “availability to license has opened up a lot more than it was in the past,” arguing that the studios’ earlier decision to hold back content was “unnatural.”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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      ‘Carol & the End of the World’ Review: An Affirming Apocalypse

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      An animated Netflix miniseries, about a quiet woman navigating the last days of the planet, looks for hope where you wouldn’t expect to find any.In Netflix’s new animated miniseries “Carol & the End of the World,” the question is not whether the apocalypse can be averted. The rogue planet that is definitely going to collide with Earth in about seven months is steadily growing larger in the sky. Humanity has accepted its fate; heroics are of no use. With the time they have left, people are out partying, traveling and hang-gliding, all of which are now clothing optional.Amid the bacchanal, the question — at least for Carol Kohl, an introverted 42-year-old woman in an unnamed American city — is what to do if you don’t care to join the fun. Carol is a happy creature of habit, and she does not see why the imminent end of the world means that anything has to change. Her wealthy parents may be spending their days naked and in a passionate throuple with her father’s hunky caregiver, but Carol just wishes she could still go to Applebee’s after work. What she would really like to do is to go to work, period.“Carol & the End of the World,” which premiered on Friday, was created by Dan Guterman, an Emmy-winning comedy writer and alumnus of The Onion who has worked on a small but interesting roster of shows that includes “At Home With Amy Sedaris,” “The Colbert Report,” “Community” and “Rick and Morty.” His new series has elements of science-fiction and dystopian workplace mystery, but it’s essentially a gentle, cleareyed coming-of-middle-age story. Carol is remarkable in her unremarkableness, and the show’s tension lies in whether she will come into her own in the little time she has left. Guterman doesn’t exactly find hope in the apocalypse, but he holds out for common humanity and a flicker of redemption.The actress and stand-up comedian Martha Kelly voices Carol with an abashed drone that has a core of dogged resolve. (She played another low-key character, Martha the claims adjuster, on the Zach Galifianakis comedy “Baskets.”) Carol is an odd, lonely, awkward duck, but she is that by choice. Her sister, who is spending her last days trotting the globe with younger men and compulsively skydiving, says: “She always did her own thing. Do you know how hard that is? I always do what everyone else does.”The world of the show has a surface realism and a fairy-tale logic: No one is going to work, but somehow the trains still run and cable news networks still report; benignly silent soldiers fold laundry and ring up groceries. Traveling the mostly empty, gently trashed streets of the city (the whimsical, colorful animation is by Bardel Entertainment, the Canadian studio that also does “Rick and Morty”), Carol discovers the mysterious venue around which the story revolves: a bustling, brightly lighted accounting department in which towers of paper are shuffled for no obvious purpose or any apparent employer. For Carol it’s nirvana, but even here she has trouble getting with the program. She is determined both to learn the office’s secret and to instill some camaraderie in its silent, shellshocked work force.Carol’s new sense of purpose sends her and two co-workers, the formidable Donna (Kimberly Hébert Gregory) and the effervescent Luis (Mel Rodriguez), on missions that have a dry, deadpan comic edge. The 10 half-hour episodes are also fleshed out with separate story lines involving Carol’s family (Bridget Everett is the voice of her frenetic sister, Elena), and a sad father (Michael Chernus) and son (Sean Giambrone) with whom Carol is briefly embroiled. Some of the later episodes take on stylized forms, like a riff on an “Endless Summer”-style surfing documentary or a human resources investigation recounted in true crime voice-over.Guterman and his fellow writers, Kevin Arrieta and Noah Prestwich, let the story wander here and there, and their epiphanies can be small-bore; if you’re not on the show’s wavelength, you may find it aimless or mundanely sentimental. But it has a shaggy, slightly ethereal charm and sympathetic characters whose varied reactions to the end of the world ring largely true. “Carol & the End of the World” resonates with all the medical, meteorological and political terrors that animate the current wave of apocalyptic entertainments, but it’s not out to scare you or to lecture you. It’s for people like Carol who live inside their heads and need a little more time to emerge, even when the world is on fire. More

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      Cord Jefferson on ‘American Fiction’

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      The Emmy-winning writer and former journalist drew on personal experience for his feature debut, a layered sendup of race and hypocrisy in the book and film worlds.Before he read “Erasure,” Percival Everett’s satirical novel about Black representation in the publishing industry, Cord Jefferson had never really thought of himself as a movie director. He had hoped to direct for television — his writing credits include several episodes of “Master of None,” “The Good Place” and HBO’s “Watchmen,” for which he shared an Emmy in 2020 — but even that seemed like a stretch.“I thought they might let me direct something that I helped write or create,” he said in a recent interview. “And even then it would be like Episode 4 of 10, not the pilot or the finale.”Things changed in December 2020, when Jefferson, 41, picked up “Erasure” and became enchanted. The book, published in 2001, is the story of Thelonius Ellison, known as Monk, a disillusioned Black intellectual whose mocking attempt at writing a stereotypical “ghetto novel” becomes a straightforward best seller.“Twenty pages in, I knew I had to write a film adaptation,” Jefferson said. “By the time I finished the book, I knew I had to direct it.” “American Fiction,” his take on the novel — and feature film debut as both a writer and director — is in theaters Friday. It stars Jeffrey Wright as Monk, Issa Rae as a rival novelist and Tracee Ellis Ross and Sterling K. Brown as Monk’s siblings. In September, it won the top prize at the Toronto International Film Festival, a precursor for an Academy Awards nomination for best picture for the past 11 years.Over lunch in the NoHo neighborhood of Manhattan, Jefferson, a former journalist and editor at Gawker, discussed his personal connection to Everett’s story, his adoration of the writer-director Nicole Holofcener and shedding tears in a pitch meeting. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.What was it about the book that spoke to you?There was so much. The most obvious is just the conversation that it’s having about the expectations of a Black artist in this country, what people want or think that Black art should be. That was a huge part of my life when I was still working in journalism. I wrote this article called “The Racism Beat,” which is very much about the expectation that Black journalists are just there to write about the bad things that happen to Black people and racism and violence.But besides that, there are three siblings in the book, and I have two older siblings. And there’s an ailing parent in the book, and my mother passed of cancer in 2016, after two years of struggling. One of the siblings in the book is charged with caring for the parent because the other two are off doing their own thing, and that was the dynamic with us. My oldest brother shouldered that responsibility. He went about it stoically and never complained or anything, but I had this residual guilt over not being there.From big things to small things, there was just all of this stuff that felt like it was speaking to me directly. I went to a college in Virginia called William & Mary, and there’s a reference to William & Mary in the novel. Nobody ever talks about William & Mary in pop culture! It just felt like somebody had written a gift specifically for me, like, “I made this for you.”The parts about the expectations facing Black artists, did they match your own experience when you arrived in Hollywood?Oh, definitely. I thought I was going to get there and it would be like, “Oh yeah, there’s a world of opportunity and we’re just going to write about whatever. The Black experience in America now includes everything, all the way up to being the president of the United States.” But there’s genres for “prestige Black projects”: slave overcoming adversity and escaping, Black civil rights activist overcoming white racism, inner-city gangland stuff, poverty and broken homes.I’ll tell you a true story of something that happened to a friend that exemplifies this perfectly. She went into a meeting at this production company and they’re like, “What are you interested in writing?” She says, “I’m interested in romantic comedies, like ‘When Harry Met Sally,’ ‘Sleepless in Seattle,’ classic, generational, Nora Ephron comedies. I would also love to write a ’90s-style erotic thriller.” They’re like, “All right, great. We’ll come back to you later with some ideas.” About three hours later, they call her and say, “We’ve got this story about a blind slave who, thanks to a wealthy white benefactor, learns to play the piano and becomes a piano prodigy. Are you interested in this?”Wow.They see a Black person and they can’t see past that. I think there’s a lot of people who say, “Well, why would we hire you to write a rom-com? Why would we hire you to write an erotic thriller?” There’s an inability to think of us as having our own passions and our own complex existence outside of this very limited window of what they allow us to say about our lives. These are things that people of color have been talking about for a very long time. To me, the real spiritual ancestor for this project would be “Hollywood Shuffle” [Robert Townsend’s satire of Black representation in Hollywood, released in 1987].That was a real foundational text for me when I was a kid. I loved that movie. I probably saw it before I was 10. It opened my eyes to this idea that you can talk about these things that are very serious but also have fun with them, that not only is it OK to laugh, you need to laugh because otherwise you’ll just be miserable all the time. It blew my mind wide open.From left, Sterling K. Brown, Jeffrey Wright and Erika Alexander in “American Fiction.” The movie won the top prize at the Toronto International Film Festival.Claire Folger/Orion PicturesIt’s funny because the two references I kept thinking about while watching your movie were “Hollywood Shuffle” and Nicole Holofcener, which is a cool combination.Dude, love Nicole Holofcener. She’s a genius. I’m so happy you said that. To me, that’s the greatest compliment. I love her so much. I saw “Friends With Money” [2006] when it first came out, and I was just blown away. She’s a huge influence on me. She has such a subtle, deft hand with class dynamics. And I love her character work. I’m forgetting the one with Gandolfini and Julia Louis-Dreyfus …“Enough Said.”Yeah. I just feel like she has an attention to detail when it comes to how human beings actually interact and live their lives. What I set out to make with this movie was something that felt a little bit like life. To me, even in the most miserable times, I’ve always found ways to laugh and enjoy myself and time with my family and friends. There are all these things that buoy your spirits. I think it’s a disservice to the human experience to not reflect that. And that’s something Nicole Holofcener does really well. I think Noah Baumbach does, also. Spike Lee, Bong Joon Ho. All people who’ve inspired me over the years.I wanted to ask you about something that happens toward the end of the film, which is this really interesting conversation between Monk and Sintara (Issa Rae) that raises the question of whether his distaste for her novel masks a distaste for a certain kind of Black person. In your mind, what do you think Monk’s relationship is with other Black people?Something Jeffrey and I talked about the first time we met and that we agreed on instantly was we didn’t want this movie to be some Talented Tenth, respectability politics [expletive]. We didn’t want it to feel like we were finger wagging and saying, “This is the right way to be Black, and all you other people are doing it wrong.” Both of us knew the movie could not be that. So that scene was important because we didn’t want people to come away being like, “Oh, well, she’s the villain and he’s the hero.” There are no villains or heroes.What I really like about that scene is I don’t really know who I agree with, ultimately. They both make interesting points. But I will say that when she says that line, “Potential is what people see when they think what’s in front of them isn’t good enough,” I think it’s the first time we see Monk confronted with the idea that he might be a little self-loathing, that he might have an internal problem with his Blackness. It’s one of the first times that we see him really get clammed up.Do you think it’s directing now for you? Or will you go back to writing television?I’m working on four different movies right now and I want to keep writing and directing movies, but I also want to do TV. I published a short story last year, and I’d love to do more of that. I’m about 60 percent done with a stage play. I just want to keep making stuff. When T Street [a producer of “American Fiction”] told me that they were greenlighting the movie, I started crying in the meeting. I had been told no for so long. I’d worked on all these things that just sort of went nowhere. It starts to break your heart eventually. You wonder, “Is this ever going to happen for me? Or is this just going to be a thing that I wanted to do my whole life?” The fact that I was able to crack the door a little bit to make this. … I feel incredibly honored. More

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      Ice Spice, Brian Jordan Alvarez and More Breakout Stars of 2023

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      These eight performers and artists broke away from the pack this year, delighting us and making us think.Gutsy and offbeat, with an abundance of heart. The stars who rose to the top in 2023 shared a similar mentality: do it their own way and go full tilt without sacrificing emotion or authenticity. Here are eight artists who shook up their scenes and resonated with fans.TelevisionBella RamseyAs the TV landscape continues to fracture, one new show emerged as a bona fide phenomenon: “The Last of Us,” HBO’s stunningly heartfelt zombie apocalypse thriller. Given that its source material was a beloved, acclaimed 2013 video game that has sold over 20 million copies, the bar was extraordinarily high. The show’s debut season delivered, in large part because of the synergy between the duo at its center: Pedro Pascal as Joel and Bella Ramsey as Ellie, two characters who find themselves on a cross-country quest, dodging reanimated corpses to (hopefully) save the world.Ramsey, 20, who was born and raised in central England, offered a layered, tenacious, haunting performance as a teenager who is coming-of-age while being humanity’s possible last hope. They have been a working actor since they signed on to “Game of Thrones” at age 11, as the scene-stealing giant slayer Lyanna Mormont, and went on to have celebrated turns in the BBC/HBO adaptation of “His Dark Materials” and Lena Dunham’s 2022 period comedy, “Catherine Called Birdy.”For “The Last of Us,” Ramsey nailed a specific combination of contradictions — funny and quirky, but violent and rough — that Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, its creators, were looking for. “There are few people better between the words ‘action’ and ‘cut,’” Mazin told The New York Times.Ramsey’s performance earned them an Emmy nomination, for outstanding lead actress in a drama, joining the likes of established stars such as Keri Russell and Elisabeth Moss. “It’s only recently that I’ve accepted I am Ellie, and I can do it, and I am a good actor,” Ramsey told us.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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      in Television

      Kal Penn: ‘Biden’s Only Crime Is Having a Messed-Up Son’

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      “The Daily Show” guest host said that impeaching President Biden would “be a terrible precedent to set — I don’t want to see Tom Hanks go to jail.”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.Not-So Like Father, Like SonHunter Biden spoke outside of U.S. Capitol this week, criticizing Republicans for making light of his addiction struggles and also offering to publicly testify on behalf of his father in the new impeachment investigation into President Joe Biden.On “The Daily Show,” guest host Kal Penn joked that President Biden’s only crime “is having a messed-up son, which would be a terrible precedent to set — I don’t want to see Tom Hanks go to jail.”“That’s right, Hunter Biden spoke to reporters yesterday and said that his father was, “not financially involved in any of his business ventures.” Well, I believe that. He seems like the kind of dad who wouldn’t even get involved in your lemonade stand when you were a kid. [imitating Joe Biden] ‘You want to sell lemonade, do you? I guess you better get busy planting a lemon tree.’” — SETH MEYERS“To be fair, we can’t say for sure whether Biden ever did anything shady with his son’s business dealings. Their story has changed over time, but we do know that Republicans don’t actually give a [expletive] about people profiting off the presidency, because Donald Trump was the president. He had so many schemes going on, running the country was basically his side hustle.” — KAL PENN“Unfortunately, when it comes to Hunter Biden, Republicans are also struggling with addiction.” — SETH MEYERSThe Punchiest Punchlines (Got Milk? Edition)“To be fair, before leaving town, Congress did tackle the nation’s most pressing issue and passed a bill allowing schools to serve whole milk. I mean, what are the chances of that passing — 1 percent, 2 percent, tops.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“It’s all part of Congress’s new dairy campaign: ‘Got anything that’ll distract people from our incompetence?’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Now, this bill passed with bipartisan support, but it was a particular priority for Republicans, which makes sense. I mean, you can’t look at this party and tell me you’re surprised they are obsessed with milk.” — KAL PENN“How much energy does milk give you if Santa has to stop and drink more at every house? Santa doesn’t need milk, he needs one of those Panera lemonades.” — KAL PENN“By the way, are kids really out there demanding whole milk? They’re school kids — they want Capri Suns or, at best, milk-flavored vapes.” — KAL PENN“But, I got to be honest, there isn’t actually a good reason not to expand milk options for kids: Milk is kind of disgusting. Like is that weird that we drink milk as a species? It’s not your mom’s milk. It’s not even your friend’s mom. It’s like a completely different animal.” — KAL PENNThe Bits Worth WatchingLouis Virtel, a “Jimmy Kimmel Live” writer, offered advice to gay Americans going home for the holidays.Also, Check This OutMadonna performing at Barclays Center in Brooklyn on Wednesday night.The New York TimesMadonna’s Celebration Tour is a career retrospective that thematically explores her past and provides a glimpse of her future. More

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      in Theater

      Review: Onstage, the ‘Stranger Things’ Franchise Eats Itself

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      “Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” a London theater show based on the Netflix series, pummels the audience with sensory overload and its lavish budget.As theatergoers took their seats, a buttery waft of popcorn in the auditorium was an indicator of what was to come. “Stranger Things: The First Shadow” — a spinoff of the hit Netflix series, “Stranger Things” — brings a high-octane, TV-movie sensibility to the stage, pummeling the audience with horror-show frights and sensory overload: eerie smoke effects, mind-boggling levitations, scary vocal distortions reminiscent of “The Exorcist” and noise — so much noise.Directed by Stephen Daldry (“Billy Elliot: The Musical”; “The Crown”) and written by Kate Trefry and Jack Thorne in collaboration with the TV show’s creators, the Duffer brothers, the show runs at the Phoenix Theater, in London, through Aug. 25, 2024. It’s a gaudy, vertiginous fairground ride of a play, exactly what you’d expect from a show co-produced by Netflix: Cheap thrills, expensively made.“Stranger Things: The First Shadow” is billed as a prequel to the Netflix series, which is set in the fictitious town of Hawkins, In., during the mid-1980s. The location is the same, but the year is 1959, and the play tells the origin story of Henry Creel, who appears as a malevolent sociopath in Season 4. We meet him here as a troubled, withdrawn adolescent (played with great aplomb by Louis McCartney) burdened with psychic, clairvoyant and telekinetic powers of unknown provenance.Henry, a newcomer to Hawkins, strikes up a tentative friendship with another oddball, Patty Newbie, played with a winning blend of naïve compassion and halting self-doubt by Ella Karina Williams. The two youngsters bond over their shared, deeply uncool, love of comic books and, somewhat improbably, land the lead roles in their high-school musical. When several of its cast members find their household pets mysteriously killed, Henry appears to be implicated. His peers take it upon themselves to investigate, and stumble, “Blair Witch”-style, into a baroque nightmare.Henry and Patty Newbie, played by Ella Karina Williams.Manuel HarlanAmid the horror, the play carries a sentimental message about young misfits finding solace and community. Patricia, an adoptee, never knew her mother (“My whole life I’ve been the girl from nowhere,” she laments,) and feels a kinship with Henry because he is misunderstood. He reassures her by pointing out that many of their favorite comic book characters are orphans: “Having no parents is basically a prerequisite to being a superhero.” Similarly, Henry is desperate not to let his strange powers define him. (He insists: “I’m not a freak! I’m normal!”)In these respects the tale is redolent of Young Adult fiction, but the can-do vibes are served up with a bleak twist, since the odds — as we know from Season 4 — are stacked against Henry. A research scientist, Dr. Brenner (Patrick Vaill), ostensibly enlisted to help him, has nefarious motives; the influence of Henry’s father, Victor (Michael Jibson), who has severe PTSD from World War II, is also a source of intrigue. All avenues lead, inexorably, to a big conspiracy involving a secret government program. The supporting cast comprise a panorama of recognizable social types — dumb jocks, deadbeat boyfriends, vapid bimbos, oafish policemen — whose antics provide light relief.Miriam Buether’s set evokes 1950s small-town life with a nostalgic, homey touch: a crescent of school locker rooms for the high school scenes, the community church and a local liquor store are elegantly rendered. Later on, a government psychiatric facility is a neon-lit, white brickwork affair, cold and clinical.In the show, Henry meets with Dr. Brenner (Patrick Vaill), right, a research scientist with questionable motives.Manuel HarlanSome of the backdrops are staggeringly elaborate. The opening scene, depicting a nautical disaster, is like something from a Hollywood action movie. In keeping with this aesthetic, the sound, by Paul Arditti, is quite simply relentless. Thunderously loud crashing sounds occur with nerve-shredding frequency — the “jump scare” technique beloved of horror movies. Henry’s paranormal powers are obscurely connected to electromagnetic energy, so there are lots of buzzing electrical noises whenever he has one of his moments.In its totality, the production is lavish to the point of embarrassment, and the sheer scale of the thing is hard to reconcile with the play’s rather modest intellectual aspirations and lack of originality. One is left simultaneously impressed and a little bewildered. Haven’t television and cinema already got these bases covered? Is this what theater is for?“Stranger Things” first aired in 2016. It’s over four years since Mike Hale suggested, in his Times review of Season 3, that the show might be suffering from “franchise fatigue.” The original concept had a certain straightforward appeal — weird goings-on in a backwoods town, sinister machinations of shady state agencies, sympathetic nerds getting a chance to shine — but it was never quite strong enough to sustain serious longevity. The show powered on regardless, because there was money to be made.“Stranger Things: The First Shadow” achieves what it sets out to do, and die-hard fans will surely lap it up — but it may well prove to be a death throe. The real spectacle here is that of a franchise eating itself.Stranger Things: The First ShadowThrough Aug. 25, 2024 at the Phoenix Theater, in London; uk.strangerthingsonstage.com. More