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      The Best Movies and TV Shows Coming to Disney+, Max, Hulu and More in September

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      “Fight Night: The Million Dollar Heist,” “A Very Royal Scandal,” a “Walking Dead” spinoff and “Agatha All Along” arrive.Every month, streaming services add movies and TV shows to their libraries. Here are our picks for some of September’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‘A Very Royal Scandal’Starts streaming: Sept. 19Earlier this year, Netflix debuted a movie called “Scoop,” about the complicated negotiations that led to Prince Andrew’s headline-making 2019 interview with BBC Two’s “Newsnight,” covering his relationship with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The three-part mini-series “A Very Royal Scandal” tells the same story in a little more detail, with a screenplay from Jeremy Brock (the co-writer of “The Last King of Scotland”). Michael Sheen plays Prince Andrew, while Ruth Wilson plays Emily Maitlis, the interviewer, who kept pressuring the prince with follow-up questions, asking him to account for all the time he had spent with Epstein over the years.Also arriving:Sept. 10“The Money Game”Sept. 24“Evolution of the Black Quarterback”Melissa McBride as Carol Peletier in “The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon — The Book of Carol.”Emmanuel Guimier/AMCNew to AMC+‘The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon – The Book of Carol’ Season 2Starts streaming: Sept. 29When this spinoff of “The Walking Dead” was first announced, it was supposed to be the story of the soulful hunter Daryl Dixon (Norman Reedus) and his hard-edge pal Carol Peletier (Melissa McBride) venturing into new territories together in a zombie-ravaged world. But when that territory turned out to be Europe, McBride had to drop out for what was described as logistical reasons. Her Carol made a cameo at the end of Season 1 though; and she is now on board for Season 2 (as well as an already announced Season 3). This new season will find Carol searching for her friend in France, while Daryl reluctantly gets more involved with the twisted political situation overseas, trying to help some good people make things better.Also arriving:Sept. 6“The Demon Disorder”Sept. 7“All You Need Is Death”Sept. 12“The Tailor of Sin City”Sept. 13“In a Violent Nature”Sept. 16“Candice Renoir” Season 10Sept. 20“Dandelion”Sept. 26“Wisting” Season 5Sept. 27“Oddity”Sept. 30“The Bench” Seasons 1-2We 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: On ‘English Teacher,’ School Is a Battlefield

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      A new FX sitcom handles the educational culture wars with a light touch.The culture war often doesn’t have a physical frontline; it’s fought in op-ed columns, through social-media memes and inside people’s heads.Public schools are an exception. There, the state infantry of teachers, enlisted to handle potentially explosive ideas, face wave after wave of challenging students, backed by air support from helicopter parents.“English Teacher,” which begins Monday on FX, is a deft, brutal trench comedy of this battle. Brian Jordan Alvarez, the creator and viral-video comic, stars as Evan Marquez, a high school teacher in suburban Austin, Texas, struggling to get through each day with his ideals intact and his shirts unstained.His students are wily shape-shifters, a tech-enabled alien species whose ways and attitudes keep their handlers off-balance. “The kids this year, I feel like they’re less woke,” Evan tells his best friend, the history teacher Gwen Sanders (Stephanie Koenig), who concurs. One student, she said, told her she needed to teach “both sides” of the Spanish Inquisition.Evan’s real troubles begin, however, when he learns that he’s under “investigation” after a rich, influential parent reported him for having kissed his ex-boyfriend (Jordan Firstman) in front of students.His principal, Grant Moretti — a walking anxiety attack played wonderfully by Enrico Colantoni — admits that Evan shouldn’t have to deal with this, but he’s too beaten and besieged to do anything but plead with Evan to help him make the problem go away. One of Evan’s students suggests he claim discrimination as a gay Hispanic, but another says, “Gay doesn’t count anymore, and he talks like a straight white guy.”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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      Sagar Radia Balances His Alpha-Male Energy on ‘Industry’ With Some Alone Time

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      “I think there’s this common misconception that actors are these big extroverts, and I couldn’t disagree more. Most actors I know don’t need to be the center of attention.”Sagar Radia calls Rishi Ramdani, the take-no-prisoners market maker he plays on the HBO finance drama “Industry,” a walking red flag.“He’s an alpha male, he leads with his chest out,” Radia said. “And he’s the epitome of bravado, which is so fascinating, because for someone like myself who comes from a British South Asian background as an actor, we don’t get the chance to play those types of roles.”He added: “Unless your name is Riz Ahmed or Dev Patel, everything in between is so limited.”So when Radia, 37, was told that he would be getting a stand-alone episode in Season 3, which started last month, he thought it was a lovely idea but didn’t expect it to happen. And yet it did.He recalled reading the script for the fourth episode, in which Rishi’s life spirals into chaos as he tries to extract himself from snowballing debt, and thinking, “I need to do everything I can to make them feel like they made the right choice.”In a video call from London, Radia talked about the pleasures of a “Suits” rewatch, working in retail as a struggling actor and the crepes he’ll happily stand in a 45-minute queue for.These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1CarsMy first car was a Rover 500, a very, very basic car that my mom was lucky enough to let me drive. It was hers. She insured me on it. And my second car was this Vauxhall that we had. It was a step up for me. And now, without sounding too bougie about it, I drive a Mercedes GLA. I’m an incredibly independent person. And I just really love driving.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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      in Music

      LL Cool J Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop. (And Why Would He?)

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      At a dusty studio space in an industrial corner of Los Angeles, LL Cool J bounced and vibed in black satin and bulging, size 13 Balenciaga boots.The actor and rap luminary was filming a video for a sexy track, “Proclivities,” from his new album — but he wasn’t in front of the cameras, or rehearsing. He was just cheerfully shooting the you-know-what, with a late night of production ahead of him. Background players in feathered dresses floated by; his security circled. He did a little dance, demonstrating the inspiration for another song. He walks with a swagger and stands with a spring, too much rhythm in his 6-foot-3 frame to keep still. “Making fantasies happen,” he said, grinning, taking all of it in.LL Cool J is 56, and has been a hip-hop eminence for 40 years: His whole life is a stretch into realizing the improbable, including a sneakily successful pivot into network television. Even before adulthood, he strode with a preternatural confidence in his abilities, and a willingness to dig into the work. His rap career is not now — and, to hear him tell it, has never been — about the money, the trappings of celebrity or the cultural prestige.“I do it because I love it,” he said. “I love a fresh beat. A new lyric, a chord, the feeling — and then sharing that. Putting that on the easel of life, so to speak, for people to walk through the sonic gallery and listen to this, these vibes. I love that. I wanted my voice to be heard, and I wanted to share.”Because he started so young, the first to sign to the then-fledgling label Def Jam, when he was just 16 — and when hip-hop itself was only a decade old — he influenced an entire pantheon of artists who followed, including contemporaries his same age. Hits like the bruising, Grammy-winning “Mama Said Knock You Out,” from 1990, and plaintive grooves from his lovelorn Lothario persona (“I Need Love”; “Around the Way Girl”), cemented his legacy as a crossover pop superstar.LL Cool J outside a concert in the late 1980s. He was the label Def Jam’s first signing, when he was just 16 years old.Michael Ochs Archives/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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      Stream These 12 Titles Before They Leave Netflix in September

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      A lot of great movies and TV shows are leaving for U.S. subscribers this month. Watch them while you can.A wide array of terrific titles are leaving Netflix in the United States in September, including three beloved CW comedies, a movie musical classic, a recent family favorite and two of Eddie Murphy’s best. (Dates indicate the final day a title is available.)‘Beverly Hills Cop’ / ‘Beverly Hills Cop II’ (Sept. 3)Stream ‘Beverly Hills Cop’ here and ‘Beverly Hills Cop II’ here.To supplement the July release of the Netflix original “Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F,” the service added the first two outings of the long-running franchise, quintessential examples of the ’80s action-comedy. (They didn’t bother with the much-derided “Beverly Hills Cop III,” to no one’s objection.) The 1984 original introduced Eddie Murphy as Axel Foley, a wisecracking Detroit street cop who invades the tony environs of 90210 to investigate a friend’s murder. The director Martin Brest cleverly mixes hard-hitting action sequences with flashes of character-based comedy, all held aloft by Murphy’s confidence and charisma. The 1987 sequel was directed by the master stylist Tony Scott, so it feels a bit more like a straight-up action picture (albeit a fine one), but Murphy still teases out big laughs where he can find them.‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’: Seasons 1-4 (Sept. 5)Stream it here.The best TV comedies are frequently the outgrowth of a singular sensibility, like Larry David’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Lena Dunham’s “Girls” and Tina Fey’s “30 Rock.” Add to that list this CW series from Rachel Bloom, the star and co-creator, who infuses the formula of the television rom-com with generous volts of manic, theater-kid energy. She stars as Rebecca Bunch, an unhappy Manhattan corporate lawyer who abandons her career to follow an old summer camp crush to California. With its oddball musical numbers, candid depiction of mental illness and winking inversions of romantic conventions, it’s a true, terrific original.‘iZombie’: Seasons 1-5 (Sept. 5)Stream it here.That same year, the CW debuted this wryly funny and thankfully light addition to the seemingly endless canon of undead television entertainment. The charming Rose McIver stars as Liv, a young doctor whose ill-advised ride on a cursed booze cruise turns her into a flesh-eating zombie. She makes the best of it, taking a job at a morgue, where there’s an endless supply of fresh brains — which she soon discovers hold the memories of their deaths, turning the show into an unlikely but enjoyable crime procedural.‘Jane the Virgin’: Seasons 1-5 (Sept. 5)Stream it here.Our CW trifecta concludes with this sparkling and screwy telenovela spoof, which ran on the network from 2014 to 2019. Gina Rodriguez found her breakthrough role as the title character, a waitress and would-be writer who takes a vow of chastity until marriage, then finds herself in a state of near-constant challenge to that vow. Rodriguez is a spark plug, playing Jane with equal emphasis on the heart, mind and libido, while Jennie Snyder Urman, the creator and showrunner, introduces endless and frequently preposterous romantic entanglements without subverting the genuine warmth at the story’s center.‘Bodies Bodies Bodies’ (Sept. 19)Stream it here.The director Halina Reijn assembles a gifted ensemble cast — including Maria Bakalova, Pete Davidson, Lee Pace, Rachel Sennott, Amandla Stenberg and Chase Sui Wonders — in this inspired mash-up of locked-room whodunit and “Spring Breakers”-style party movie. Davidson is a spoiled-rotten trust fund kid who hosts a rager for his friends as they ride out an incoming hurricane, and it’s all fun and games and drunken revelry until guests start turning up dead. Reijn threads a delicate needle here, making her characters flawed but not quite loathsome, and sending up current trends of online activism and halfhearted wokeness without punching down.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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      in Television

      With New FX Sitcom ‘English Teacher,’ Brian Jordan Alvarez Takes Another Leap

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      For over a decade, Brian Jordan Alvarez has been bootstrapping his way across platforms and screens big and small, collecting fans and followers.In the early days, he starred with friends in short comedic sketches he posted on YouTube. Then in 2016, on a paltry budget of around $10,000, he created “The Gay and Wondrous Life of Caleb Gallo,” a five-part comedy web series about a misfit group of queer friends in Los Angeles. Alvarez wrote and directed it, and starred as the title character.“Caleb Gallo” quickly found an audience. It was shown at the Tribeca Film Festival that year, earned a Gotham Award nomination and topped IndieWire’s list of best web series of 2016, edging out Jerry Seinfeld’s “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.” The next year, Alvarez landed a recurring role in the three-season revival of “Will & Grace,” as the fiancé, then husband, of Jack McFarland (Sean Hayes).In 2023 he leveled up again, starring alongside Allison Williams in the horror comedy box office smash “M3gan” and reaching new heights of virality with a stable of absurdist face-filtered characters. The most famous of them, the bug-eyed, duck-lipped pop star TJ Mack, delighted millions on TikTok and Instagram with the earworm “Sitting” (pronounced “Sittim”).Alvarez plays an English teacher at a high school in Austin, Texas, who is navigating relationships and discussions of hot-button topics.Richard Ducree/FXNow Alvarez is taking another major leap: “English Teacher,” a feel-good sitcom with an edge that he created and stars in, debuts on FX on Sept. 2.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 Highly Deceptive, Deeply Loved, Down-to-Earth Carol Kane

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      Do you hear Carol Kane before you see her? The voice that can go pipsqueak high or deep rasp, wavering at just the right moment? Or do you imagine first the mass of golden curls, which telegraph unruliness while actually framing exactly what she wants you to experience?She modulates that distinctive quaver to match the character, too — “whether it should be lower, or denser, or higher, or an accent,” she said. “I work a lot on that. I get it as specific as I can.”It’s nearly absent in her “Annie Hall” grad student, and filtered through quiet Yiddish in “Hester Street,” the 1975 immigrant drama that earned her an Oscar nomination at 22. It swings from the pinched cadences of Simka, with her invented language on the sitcom “Taxi,” to the brash Lillian, the batty, mouthy New York landlord on “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.”And in her newest film, the Sundance favorite “Between the Temples,” in which Kane stars opposite Jason Schwartzman, she runs the gamut from vulnerable to sharp — a vocal confidence scale that’s not far from how her own real-life lilt changes. “It depends on the second, the moment, the day,” she said, laughing.More than an eccentric character study, Kane, 72, who has been acting professionally for nearly 60 years, is actually a deceptively versatile performer who, through friendship and dedication to craft, is connected to Hollywood’s golden age — but also appeared at a sci-fi convention this month. (She joined the second season of “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds” on Paramount+ as an alien engineer with an unplaceable accent — her twist.)There were long stretches when the phone didn’t ring, then periods like now, a late renaissance (Kanaissance) when the superlative parts stack up. What she has learned, Kane said in a recent interview, is that in her career, “one thing does not necessarily lead to another — no matter how well-received or successful. It’s kind of a life lesson in a way.”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 Rings of Power’ Season 2 Premiere Recap: All That Glitters

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      The new season picks up roughly where Season 1 left off — with most of the same strengths and flaws.Amazon released the first three episodes of Season 2 of “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” at once; read the recaps for Episode 2 here and Episode 3 here.Season 2, Episode 1: ‘Elven Kings Under the Sky’When last we visited Middle-earth in the Amazon Prime Video series “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power,” our heroes were recuperating from two massive blunders. An army of Númenóreans had failed to prevent the orc-father Adar (Sam Hazeldine) from establishing the shadowlands of Mordor in the realm formerly known as the Southlands; and the regal elf warrior Galadriel (Morfydd Clark) had failed to recognize that Halbrand (Charlie Vickers), the man she intended to install as the Southlands’ rightful king, was in fact her sworn enemy Sauron, in human form.Good effort, everyone. But not exactly a rousing success.The same could be said of “The Rings of Power” itself, which had a first season that delivered a lot of what its creators, J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, said they had intended: blockbuster-level special effects and scenery, spectacular action sequences, an epic sweep and a deep exploration of the fantasy world created by the author J.R.R. Tolkien (arguably even deeper than any of Peter Jackson’s gargantuan “Lord of the Rings” and “Hobbit” movies).But what the show failed to deliver was the kind of “Game of Thrones”-level cultural buzz and critical acclaim that such an expensive project needs to survive. So just as Galadriel and her allies have a lot to prove as Season 2 begins, so do Payne, McKay and their “Rings of Power” cast and crew.In the season’s first three episodes, released all at once on Prime Video, very little has changed in the creative team’s approach to telling a story. The action picks up roughly where Season 1 left off and continues in the same basic format, with each episode following just a few of the show’s many story lines, in long sequences that resemble chapters in a book. (It takes all three episodes to bring back every character and plot from the previous season. If you’re anxious to find out what’s happening in Numenor, you’ll have to wait a couple of hours.)The flaws of Season 1 are still evident, right from the start. The novelistic approach leads to some sections that drag on too long; and the series on the whole can feel a bit over-serious and leaden. That said, the Season 2 premiere also contains everything that worked well in the previous season: the visual splendor, the wide narrative canvas, the rich performances and the complex consideration of how and when to wield extraordinary power.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