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      Marshall Brickman, Woody Allen’s Co-Writer on Hit Films, Dies at 85

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      The duo won an Oscar for “Annie Hall.” Mr. Brickman went on to write Broadway shows, including “Jersey Boys,” and make movies of his own.Marshall Brickman, a low-key writer whose show business career ranged across movies, late-night television comedy and Broadway, with the hit musical “Jersey Boys,” but who may be best remembered for collaborating on three of Woody Allen’s most enthusiastically praised films, including the Oscar-winning “Annie Hall,” died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 85.His daughter Sophie Brickman confirmed the death. She did not cite a cause.Mr. Brickman and Mr. Allen first teamed up on the script for “Sleeper” (1973), a science fiction comedy set in a totalitarian 22nd-century America whose protagonist, a cryogenically unfrozen 20th-century man, poses as a robot servant to save his life and then sets out to overthrow the government.“Annie Hall” (1977), the Oscar-winning romance about urban neurotics, was their second project. Two smart, insecure, witty singles meet at a Manhattan tennis club, consciously couple, measure their lives in psychotherapy sessions, find lobster humor in the Hamptons and disagree about whether Los Angeles is beyond redemption. It won four Academy Awards: for best picture, best actress (Diane Keaton), best director (Mr. Allen) and best screenplay.The two men then wrote the screenplay of “Manhattan” (1979), a contemporary black-and-white romantic comedy hailed at the time as a love letter to New York. It is now most often remembered because of its central relationship: a middle-aged man’s affair with a high school girl (Mariel Hemingway), mirroring Mr. Allen’s own scandal-tarnished later years.“Manhattan” won BAFTAs, the British film and television awards, for best film and best screenplay. At the Césars, France’s equivalent of the Oscars, it was named best foreign film.In a Writers Guild Foundation interview in 2011, Mr. Brickman described his collaboration with Mr. Allen as “a pleasure and a life changer.” And if Mr. Allen, who directed and starred in all three films, dominated the process, he said, that was for the best.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 TV Shows of 2024

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      “English Teacher,” “My Brilliant Friend,” “Shogun,” “Babylon Berlin” and “Somebody Somewhere” were among the series that stood out in a year when television felt more mid than ever.As you browse, keep track of how many shows you’ve seen or want to see. Find and share your personalized watch list at the bottom of the page.Best Shows of 2024 | Best International | Best Shows That EndedJames PoniewozikBest Shows of 2024We live in the Age of Like. You can click stars and hearts from one end of the internet to the other to express your contentment. Like is fine. Like is good. But like isn’t the same as love. Love is more challenging. It asks more of you and it risks more. Like can’t break your heart.The good news is, there was a ton of TV to like in 2024. But it was harder this year than most to find those special, challenging, distinctive shows to l-o-v-e, which is what I think year-end lists like this are all about.All this is an outgrowth of a phenomenon I wrote about earlier this year: “Mid TV,” the burgeoning category of well-cast, professionally produced shows that look like the groundbreaking TV of the past but don’t actually break ground of their own. This TV has its place — I watch a lot of it, happily — but that place is not on this list. (The shows that did make it are arranged alphabetically.)Farewell, 2024; here’s to a more-than-mid 2025!‘English Teacher’ (FX)There’s a popular “Simpsons” meme in which the school principal, Seymour Skinner, wonders to himself, “Am I so out of touch?,” and concludes, “No, it’s the children who are wrong.” What the rookie-of-the-year sitcom “English Teacher” posits is: Maybe the children are wrong, and so are the adults, but we’re all also sort of right, and all this is part of life. Less apocalyptic than “Euphoria,” more acerbic than “Abbott Elementary,” the series surveys the post-Covid educational culture wars with more curiosity than judgment. That, it turns out, is one of the best ways to learn. (Streaming on Hulu.) More

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      Earl Holliman, Rugged, and Familiar, Screen Presence, Dies at 96

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      Earl Holliman, an iron-jawed actor who earned a star on Hollywood Boulevard for a prolific career that included a corral full of Westerns, an appearance on the first episode of “The Twilight Zone” and a turn as Angie Dickinson’s boss on the 1970s television drama “Police Woman,” died on Monday at his home in Studio City, Calif. He was 96.His death was confirmed by his husband, Craig Curtis, who is his only survivor.While never a household name, Mr. Holliman was a seemingly ubiquitous presence on both the big and small screen, collecting nearly 100 credits over a career that spanned almost five decades.Ruggedly handsome, he was a natural choice for Westerns, war movies and police procedurals. Among his many notable films were “The Bridges at Toko-Ri” (1954), starring William Holden and Grace Kelly; “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral” (1957), starring Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas; “The Sons of Katie Elder” (1965), with John Wayne and Dean Martin; and “Sharky’s Machine,” the 1981 Burt Reynolds detective thriller.Over the years, he also popped up in many television series, including “Gunsmoke,” “CHiPs” and “Murder, She Wrote.”Mr. Holliman’s career started with promise. He broke through in the Depression-era romance “The Rainmaker” (1956), winning a Golden Globe for best supporting actor for playing the impulsive teenage brother of a lovelorn woman (Katharine Hepburn) who encounters a grifter (Mr. Lancaster) promising rain in drought-ravaged Kansas.A relative unknown, Mr. Holliman managed to win the role over Elvis Presley, who was then rocketing to fame as a rock ’n’ roll trailblazer, but who took time out to read for the role. (Mr. Holliman apparently had little to worry about: “Elvis played the rebellious younger brother with amateurish conviction — like the lead in a high school play,” Allan Weiss, a screenwriter who saw the audition, recalled.)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

    • 125 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      Mark Duplass Reprises a Killer Role in ‘The Creep Tapes’

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      The murderer with the unnerving smile from the “Creep” movies is back, this time in a found-footage-style series on Shudder. Keep the camera rolling.It has been almost 10 years since Mark Duplass put on a monstrous smile in “Creep,” a found-footage horror movie about a serial killer named Josef who lures videographers to his home and slaughters them mercilessly on camera.It’s a universe removed from his Emmy-nominated performance as the high-strung Chip in “The Morning Show” — but it’s a role he seems to relish. Following a “Creep” sequel from 2017, Josef is back again in Shudder’s “The Creep Tapes,” a TV rarity in that the entire series was done in the found-footage style. Not that Duplass knew that he was doing anything particularly new going in.“If there’s anything fresh about what we’re doing it’s because there is an ignorance to the form,” he said in a recent video interview from his home in Los Angeles. “It didn’t strike me that it would be groundbreaking.”Patrick Brice, who with Duplass created the series and wrote and starred in the original “Creep,” directed all six half-hour episodes of “The Creep Tapes.” (The first two episodes debuted on Shudder and AMC+ Nov. 15; new ones arrive on Fridays through Dec. 13.) In a separate interview, he said that he had drawn inspiration for the “Creep” franchise from Jim McBride’s proto-found-footage horror film, “David Holzman’s Diary” (1967), and from the 1980s anthology series “Tales From the Darkside.”“The Creep Tapes” itself is based on an anthological concept: Every episode is purported to be footage from one of the many videotapes that Josef, as revealed in the first movie, has been amassing in his closet, each labeled with a victim’s name.Basing the show on a depraved VHS library, Brice said, allowed him and Duplass to explore more “Creep” but “not have to fully commit to a third film.” But there was another benefit.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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      Margo Martindale Pours It On in ‘The Sticky’

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      The esteemed character actress has spent decades enlivening films and series in just a few scenes or episodes. In this new Amazon heist comedy, she is first on the call sheet.Let’s say you need a woman who can slit someone’s throat, who can poison someone’s whiskey, who can smash her son’s fingers with a hammer, who can commit armed robbery with precision and glee. Perhaps you are responsible for “The Sticky,” a new Amazon heist comedy, premiering on Dec. 6, and you require an actress who can reliably crash most of a maple tree through the glass doors of a provincial office building.Then you should absolutely call the three-time Emmy winner Margo Martindale.So it was a mild shock, one morning in mid November, to find Martindale — just back from Toronto, where she is shooting a Richard LaGravenese series — tucked away at a tasteful Manhattan brunch spot. A further surprise: Martindale, 73, has lived nearby since 1978. She arrived for breakfast looking elegant in a black-and-white caftan, the picture of an Upper West Side matron, a matron without a sizable body count.“I am a wimp,” Martindale confessed as she pushed some eggs around her plate. “I’m scared of my own shadow. I’m afraid of the dark.” Those dangerous women? That’s acting.An esteemed character actress — in the Netflix animated comedy “Bojack Horseman,” in which she voiced a felonious version of herself, she was typically introduced as “Esteemed Character Actress Margo Martindale” — she has spent the last two decades playing a deluxe assortment of baddies, women with steel wool and spite where their hearts should be. She’ll often show up for only a few scenes in a movie or a handful of episodes on a show, just long enough to make the extremes of human behavior seem wholly plausible.In “The Sticky,” Martindale plays a farmer seeking revenge on the bureaucrats trying to take her farm.Jan Thijs/Amazon StudiosBut in “The Sticky,” she is the star of the series, first on the call sheet. Martindale plays Ruth Landry, a reluctant maple syrup farmer who plots to steal millions of dollars of syrup from the bureaucrats who are trying to seize her farm. (Landry is an invented character, but the series is based — very loosely — on actual events.) To hear her tell it, Martindale approached this lead the same as she would any of her character parts — all acting should be character work, she said.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

      ‘The Agency’ Is a Slick and Pleasing Spy Drama

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      Based on the French show “The Bureau,” the new Showtime series stars Michael Fassbender as a spy who must readjust to life after living undercover.Pity the C.I.A. agents deploying their enhanced interrogation techniques, beating hostages and meddling; truly it is they who suffer. It’s hard work being a spy — but the hardest work of all is loving yourself.“The Agency,” beginning Friday on Paramount+ (and debuting on Showtime at 9 p.m. Sunday), is set mostly within the London office of the C.I.A., where one of the primo dudes (Michael Fassbender), code name “Martian,” has been abruptly yanked back from a mission in Ethiopia. He was undercover there for six years, living as Paul and falling in love with Sami (Jodie Turner-Smith), a Sudanese historian and political activist. He wasn’t ready for the mission to end, and he is definitely not ready for their relationship to end — but c’mon, what are a few bent rules in the interest of hot-people diplomacy?“This isn’t national security; this is personal,” Martian insists to his boss (Jeffrey Wright). “It’s the agency,” the boss bellows back. “Nothing is personal!” Ooooh!The series is based on the terrific French show “The Bureau,” and in the four episodes (of 10) made available for review, it deploys a lot of spy-show standards: the rookie to whom everything must be explained, the ambitious but naïve flunkies, the secretly cooperative foreign attaches, the higher-ups who seem institutional and out of touch until they drop some monologue wisdom on our heroes.Fassbender’s mesmerizing performance is the biggest draw here, giving viewers a real taste of what it’s like to love a liar. We’re never quite sure what his angle is, how much of his seemingly vulnerable moments are all part of the game. He finds an intriguing sparring partner in the agency’s therapist (Harriet Sansom Harris), with whom he is required to meet on account of how hard it is to reintegrate into real life after living undercover for so long. Other story lines for secondary and tertiary characters feel comparatively unmoored.But on the whole, it’s all very slick and overtly, pleasingly fancy-schmancy. The show’s reflective-surfaces budget alone puts some national G.D.P.s to shame. The London of “The Agency” is a pallid grayscape where even the mall is dreary, where real life is the same color as CCTV footage. Every move here is surveilled, and the show revels in that constant unease. As the saying goes, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you. More

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      in Movies

      Thanksgiving Streaming Recommendations for Every Mood

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      Whether you’re with hanging out with children or adults, want to laugh or tuck into an adventure, here are some specific selections to stream.“What do you all want to watch?”This question has torpedoed many get-togethers, leaving the poor soul wielding the remote at a Thanksgiving gathering to search and scroll through seemingly infinite streaming options until everyone is cross-eyed and over it. Let’s skip that part, shall we? Here are a handful of picks that might fit the bill for some common holiday dynamics.Family Friendly, but Not CornyAlex Honnold climbs El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. His feat was captured in the 2018 documentary “Free Solo.”Jimmy Chin/National GeographicDocumentary with the little ones: “Tiger” (Disney+)There is no shortage of stunning nature documentaries, but this 2024 Disneynature film from the director Mark Linfield (“Planet Earth”) goes beyond the usual script to tell a poignant family tale. Narrated by Priyanka Chopra Jonas and filmed over the course of 1,500 days, we follow a tigress named Ambar in the forests of India as she protects her cubs from predators and adverse weather while on a perpetual quest to feed them and herself.Documentary with the teenagers: “Free Solo” (Disney+)This 2018 film that follows Alex Honnold on his free solo ascent of El Capitan, a vertical rock formation in Yosemite National Park, won the Oscar for best documentary for good reason. Not only will his feat shake your understanding of what is humanly possible, but how it was captured on film (Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin directed) is just as gripping. Watch this on the biggest television you have. It’s worth it.Feature with the little ones: “Elemental” (Disney+)If you’ve already seen “Inside Out 2,” try this 2023 Pixar comedy set in Element City, where characters are divided into four strata: water, earth, air and fire, all magnificently rendered, creating a dazzling animated experience. The plot looks thoughtfully at family ties while telling a story of cross-cultural romantic love and self-actualization.Feature with the teenagers: “Spirited Away” (Max)It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly 25 years since the release of this now revered Oscar-winning fantasy anime from the celebrated Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki. It re-entered the zeitgeist this year with Billie Eilish’s track “Chihiro,” named after the film’s main character, a girl who slips into another realm, where she becomes trapped. The hand-drawn animation is transporting, and the coming-of-age themes will open the door for some deeper reflection.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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      Jimmy Kimmel Doubts Trump’s Grasp of Economics

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      Kimmel called the president-elect’s plan to hit Mexico, Canada and China with sweeping tariffs “the dumbest thing he’s come up with since Don Jr.”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.Just Tariff-icPresident-elect Donald J. Trump said he would impose sweeping tariffs on all goods from Canada, Mexico and China on his first day in office.As Jimmy Kimmel noted, economists say that would lead to higher prices. “Almost everyone who knows anything about economics believes these tariffs to be a terrible idea,” Kimmel said.“Some say this is the dumbest thing he’s come up with since Don Jr.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Whoever would have guessed that the mail-order steak salesman who declared bankruptcy six times would be so bad with money?” — JIMMY KIMMEL“If you want to purchase a tie from the Donald J. Trump collection, you’d better get it immediately, or it’s going to cost an extra 10 percent.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Apparently, Trump’s tariffs on Mexico will cause the price of Modelo and Corona beer to go up. Every MAGA supporter heard and was like, ‘Well, guess it’s time to forgive Bud Light.’” — JIMMY FALLON“So by next year, if you want extra guacamole, it’ll be cheaper to go get it.” — SETH MEYERS“And poor Canada is like, ‘What did we do? I mean, be honest: Is this because of Drake?’” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Thanksgiving Edition)“Over the next 48 hours, millions of Americans will travel back to their family homes to be reminded once again of why they left in the first place.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“I read that the most popular time to eat Thanksgiving dinner is between 2 and 3 p.m. It’s strange. It’s like for one day we all become President Biden.” — JIMMY FALLON“Serving dinner at 2 p.m. is a polite way of telling your guests, ‘We’d love to get you out of here as soon as possible.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Luckily, there’s no turkey shortage this year, though. Yeah. I remember the year Biden had to walk up to the turkeys he’d just pardoned and said, ‘Fellas, I’ve got some bad news.’” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingGwen Stefani joined Jimmy Fallon and the Roots for a spirited rendition of her hit “Hollaback Girl,” played on classroom instruments.What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightJennifer Hudson will appear on Wednesday’s “Late Night with Seth Meyers.”Also, Check This OutMattel’s version of Glinda from “Wicked.”MattelThe “Wicked” merchandising juggernaut includes Barbies, Crocs and hair dryers. More