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    Erin Moriarty Is a Woman Among ‘The Boys’

    The actress in the hit superhero satire mulled her role in an age of online bullying and token feminism: “Thank God there are characters like this.”Erin Moriarty just stopped a stranger in his tracks. But it wasn’t because he recognized her as a star on one of TV’s most popular shows, or because he was taken by her charm.We were tucked into a quiet corner table on an outdoor patio in West Hollywood, where an attentive server had been mid-stride when he overheard Moriarty, a star of the hit Amazon show “The Boys,” describe her belief that feminism had become an “obligatory thing for studios to exhibit.” He tentatively performed the briefest of check-ins and scurried away.“I love how he hears the word ‘feminism’ and his approach starts to slow,” she said with a laugh. She took a sip of black iced coffee and resumed her thoughts.“I think it’s dangerous,” she said. “I feel like we’re putting a Band-Aid on systemic diseases that we’re not inoculating against.”As the highest-billed actress on “The Boys,” Moriarty, 29, has had to think a lot about performative feminism lately, and whether the show that made her famous is really part of the solution. On one level, the series, which returned for Season 4 on Thursday, is satire, centered on the exploits of a team of morally depraved superheroes known as the Seven.The show targets the steroidal conventions of the genre, along with the corporate pandering and exhibitionist feminism that often accompany it. Much of that critique is focused through Moriarty’s character, Annie January, better known as Starlight.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 Best Movies and TV Shows Coming to Amazon, AMC+, Disney+, Hulu, and More in June

    “The Boys,” “Orphan Black: Echoes,” “The Bear” and “The Acolyte” will be streaming.Every month, streaming services add movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for some of June’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‘The Boys’ Season 4Starts streaming: June 13After a two-year break, this over-the-top action series returns for a fourth season of gleefully vulgar, wickedly satirical riffs on the superhero genre. Based on a comic book franchise created by the writer Garth Ennis and the artist Darick Robertson, “The Boys” is ostensibly about the bitter rivalry between a popular, powerful, government-backed superteam and a band of cynical vigilantes. But following the lead of the Ennis-Robertson source material, the show’s writer-producer Eric Kripke has built this premise into a riotous commentary about the dangers of charismatic leaders. In Season 4, the roguish antihero Bill Butcher (Karl Urban) has to resort to drastic measures to thwart the political ambitions of the authoritarian supe Homelander (Antony Starr), even if he and his cohorts have to splatter the city with superhero blood.Also arriving:June 4“Marlon Wayans: Good Grief”June 6“Counsel Culture”June 18“Power of the Dream”June 20“Federer: Twelve Final Days”June 25“I Am: Celine Dion”June 27“My Lady Jane” Season 1Krysten Ritter and Zariella Langford in “Orphan Black: Echoes.”Sophie Giraud/AMCNew to AMC+‘Orphan Black: Echoes’ Season 1Starts streaming: June 23Set 37 years after the events in the cult favorite science-fiction TV series “Orphan Black,” this spinoff introduces an entirely new heroine, with a new mystery to unravel about the nature of her existence. Krysten Ritter plays Lucy, an amnesiac who escapes from a medical facility and builds a new life off the grid — until an accident draws unwanted attention, sending her back on the run. Then she crosses paths with a teenager, Jules (Amanda Fix), who looks remarkably familiar. Gradually, Lucy begins to piece together her past and the bizarre connection she shares with a handful of other women. A few surprise “Orphan Black” characters return for “Echoes,” as Lucy and Jules start a dangerous investigation into a secret science project gone tragically wrong.Also arriving:June 3“The Babadook”“Family History Mysteries: Buried Past”June 14“Exhuma”June 17“Inspector Rojas”“My Life Is Murder” Season 4We 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 Antihero’s Last Gasp

    In the popular Amazon Prime series “The Boys,” Hughie, an irrepressibly earnest young man who runs with the title group of misfits, is forced to decide — several times — if he’s willing to sell his soul to the devil in exchange for justice. And by “the devil” I mean Billy Butcher, the ruthless, potty-mouthed leader of the team of soldiers and assassins devoted to fighting, extorting, torturing and killing superheroes.Hughie’s our Everyman — our well-meaning protagonist who gets thrown in with Butcher’s crew and serves as his moral compass. While Butcher viciously feeds his vendetta against “supes,” Hughie tries to fight for justice without shedding more blood.In the inside-out world of “The Boys,” which just concluded its third season, Hughie discovers that there are no moral absolutes. The superheroes who are Butcher’s targets? Murderers, rapists, and (in the bland smiling visage of Homelander) a proto-fascist. Clear-cut understandings of who’s a hero and who’s a villain fly — like a bird, like a plane, or like a Superman — out the window.Three members of “The Boys,” who recognize that superheroes aren’t all that super, from left: Tomer Capone as Frenchie, Jack Quaid as Hughie, and Karl Urban as Billy Butcher.Panagiotis Pantazidis/Amazon StudiosAnd with them goes the longstanding comic-book archetype meant to split the difference: the antihero. The old model — the brooding, traumatized crusader in black who toes the line between good and evil, whom we root for even as he descends into moral (and too often, literal) darkness — has become a gross parody of itself.Once a contradictory figure meant to represent both the fresh sins of a modern world and a righteous crusade for justice, the antihero is too often written to such base extremes that it negates the very reason he first became a popular trope — because antiheroes can exist only in a universe in which idealized notions of heroism, and the concept of good and bad, still exist.Plenty of observers have argued that prestige TV reached this impasse, too, when the warped values represented by such beloved characters as Tony Soprano, Walter White and Dexter Morgan grew tired, giving way to the cheery “Ted Lasso” and the family of outsiders in “Pose.”In the comic-book-spawned worlds that, for better or worse, dominate popular culture, creators have tried to resurrect the antihero, to varying degrees of success.There’s more to their struggle than fluttering capes and face-contouring masks. Comic book heroes reflect the morals of our society; the antihero has become a symbol of our muddled ethics and the contradictions we embrace under the guise of justice.‘The Batman’ as Dead EndHow did we get here? We need to talk about that billionaire with the bat fetish — Batman, the quintessential antihero.It’s 1940, just months after his comic book debut, and two goons are escaping in a truck. Into his Batplane our hero goes: “But out of the sky, spitting death the Batman!” one panel reads. In the next he grimaces from the cockpit as he looks through the sight of the plane’s machine gun. “Much as I hate to take human life, I’m afraid this time it’s necessary!” he insists while the bullets fly. He’s only a threat to Gotham’s criminals. He’ll bend the rules but won’t break them.The campy 1960s TV series rendered him into a milk-drinking do-gooder, in keeping with attitudes about violence and ethics in children’s television of the time. When the film franchise began, the directors Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher introduced the dark and garish Gotham. Still, their portrayals were threaded with loony humor and irony.In Christopher Nolan’s movie trilogy, based on the comic book writer Frank Miller’s gritty Dark Knight reboot, Gotham gradually crumbles, the rubble and squalor are palpable, the impact of a crime-ridden city meaningful.Robert Pattinson as the title hero in the preposterously dour Matt Reeves film reboot of “The Batman.” Jonathan Olley/Warner Bros.In three hours of listless dolor, Matt Reeves’s oppressively dour “The Batman,” which came out this spring, turned its hero into a comically emo Bat-adolescent. Though Bruce Wayne was traumatized by witnessed his parents’ murder, the film focuses so heavily on his forlorn expressions and tantrums that his pain seemed merely ornamental.It’s why the barbs delivered by a parody like “The Lego Batman Movie” hit their self-serious target. “I don’t talk about feelings, Alfred,” the Lego-block Batman declares while caught mournfully looking at his family photos. “I don’t have any, I’ve never seen one. I’m a night-stalking, crime-fighting vigilante, and a heavy-metal rapping machine.”The Jekyll-and-Hyde SolutionIn the 2018 movie “Venom,” Eddie Brock is a dogged investigative reporter who loses his job (and his relationship) for refusing to compromise his ideals while reporting on the shifty doings at a major corporation. Then he’s infected with Venom, a sentient alien being that controls his body and gives him superhuman abilities. Venom wants to kill and eat people; Eddie wants to help them.Explore the Marvel Cinematic UniverseThe popular franchise of superhero films and TV series continues to expand.‘Thor: Love and Thunder’: The fourth “Thor” movie in 11 years, directed by Taika Waititi, embraces wholesale self-parody and is sillier than any of its predecessors.‘Ms. Marvel’: This Disney+ series introduces a new character: Kamala Khan, a Muslim high schooler in Jersey City who is mysteriously granted superpowers.‘Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’: With a touch of horror, the franchise’s newest film returns to the world of the mystic arts.‘Moon Knight’: In the Disney+ mini-series, Oscar Isaac plays a caped crusader who struggles with dissociative identity disorder.“Venom” is one of several recent films and TV series that make the antihero into a Jekyll-and-Hyde figure, caught between his worst inclinations and best intentions.The Hyde side of the Jekyll-and-Hyde-like antihero Venom.Sony Pictures, via Associated PressIn this year’s “Morbius,” the title character is a Nobel Prize-winning scientist on a search for a cure for his chronic illness. He combines his DNA with a bat’s and becomes newly healthy, but a feral human vampire. He regrets his research, deciding he’s made himself into a monster. Yet when his best friend steals some of the serum for himself, he transforms into an even more vicious beast whom Morbius must stop.That’s another trick to keep the antihero in play: Throw in someone who’s worse than our protagonist. Morality is relative, so at least for a moment, while there are worse villains in the world, we can have something that resembles a hero.Laughing MattersAnother way the culture industry has kept antiheroes popular is by lacing their stories with a dose of often self-deprecating humor. Deadpool, Harley Quinn and the Peacemaker — in the movies and TV series built around them — break the rules and kill rampantly, yet still save innocents.All the while they get distracted by zany side-quests, pal around with odd sidekicks and preen narcissistically. We laugh because they remain fully aware of the pitfalls of hero worship and the ridiculous notion of a bad hero; they either embrace the gray area between good and evil or all but erase it completely, acknowledging that the world is rarely that simple.Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool, whose violent ways are laughed off in the movie of that name.Joe Lederer/20th Century Fox, via Associated PressEven his allies find holes in the moral code put forth by the Peacemaker, played by John Cena. “I think liberty is just your excuse to do whatever you want,” one tells him.HBO MaxThe Peacemaker, a character who appeared in James Gunn’s 2021 film “The Suicide Squad” and this year got his own spinoff series on HBO Max, starring John Cena, is a dimwitted, misogynistic Captain America-esque hero who fights for justice — even if that means killing women and children.In “The Suicide Squad,” his teammate Bloodsport calls out the inconsistencies in the Peacemaker’s moral code: “I think liberty is just your excuse to do whatever you want.” And in the series, other characters point out his glaring biases, like the fact that most of the “bad guys” he confronts are people of color.It’s worth stopping to point out that some of the disparity in how antiheroes have evolved can be attributed to the different philosophies of competing franchises.In the family-friendly Marvel Cinematic Universe (owned by Disney) the antihero can be rehabilitated. Black Widow, Hawkeye, the Winter Soldier, Scarlet Witch, even “The Avengers” antagonist Loki all get redemption arcs, despite the wrongs they’ve committed in the past.The challenge — and it’s a big one, as the franchises morph and blend and reboot, to keep going and going and going — is maintaining any sense of coherence or moral logic.In 2016’s “Batman v Superman,” DC’s miserable Batman fights a miserable Superman over who has the authority to be the hero. In “Captain America: Civil War” from that same year, Marvel’s Captain America and his allies fight Iron Man and his friends over whether or not their actions should be regulated by the government. These battles are equally inane.If one hero is a vigilante on the run for protecting his assassin best friend, and one hero is pro-government but made his money selling guns for warfare, who has the moral high ground? Is there really any difference between a hero and an antihero if everyone is making rules up as they go?Women WarriorsAs I’ve been talking about antiheroes, I’ve been using the pronoun “he.” That’s intentional, because the antihero is so often an avatar of traditional markers of masculinity. He broods over his past. He muscles his way through his obstacles, almost always with a six-pack and bulging biceps. He’s a rapscallion who can fight the law because coded within the archetype is a male privilege that depicts him as an unstoppable force; he is his own judicial system.The female antihero (as scarce as they still are) resists being a cookie-cutter figure. She is less emotionally opaque than her male counterparts, but she can be devious. She is willing to break the rules because she realizes the rules weren’t created for women like her anyway.Krysten Ritter, the title character in “Jessica Jones,” being terrorized by David Tennant as Killgrave.David Giesbrecht/NetflixTake Harley Quinn. She arrived on the scene as the girlfriend of the Joker in an animated “Batman” series. But thanks to Margot Robbie’s dotty performance in “Suicide Squad,” her popularity led to her own film, “Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn).” As its lengthy subtitle suggests, the movie frees the character from being a sidekick.The brutally hilarious “Harley Quinn” animated series from 2019 does the same work; it begins with another female villain, Poison Ivy, helping Harley Quinn to realize that her self-worth lies outside of her toxic relationship with the Joker. She can make for herself a life of both high jinks and crime.Jessica Jones, the title character of the Marvel series of the same name, offers a useful contrast to what Batman has become. She, too, witnesses the death of her parents. In her case, it’s caused by an accident that leaves her with superhuman abilities.She is an alcoholic and a loner with trust issues, who for years was assaulted and manipulated by the mind-control villain Killgrave. Her suffering is gender-specific, and when she uses her powers in ways that are less than heroic, she feels utterly human.When Fans Call the ShotsIn a widely seen photo of the Jan. 6 Capitol riots, a Proud Boy jumps the railing in the Senate chamber; on his vest, printed over an image of the American flag, is a white skull.This is the logo of the popular comic book character known as The Punisher.The Punisher has been featured in three live-action movies and, most recently, a Marvel TV series starring Jon Bernthal. He’s a Marine-turned-vigilante who begins a vicious war on crime after his family is killed by the mob. Murder, torture, extortion — the Punisher’s methods make Batman’s worst throttlings look like playful slaps on the wrist.Jon Bernthal, who stars in “The Punisher” on Netflix, has publicly taken issue with the alt-right fans who’ve embraced the character as a hero.Jessica Miglio/NetflixHe is also the character who makes most clear that if not handled with care, the ambiguity and sympathetic back story granted a violent antihero can offer real-world cover for despicable actions.For years police and military officers have embraced the character as a can-do man of action. But more recently he’s been adopted by the alt-right Proud Boys, the skull image showing up at the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville as well. Both Bernthal and the character’s creator, Gerry Conway, have publicly chastised the alt-right fans who’ve heralded the Punisher as a hero and adopted him as a model of justice.In fact, this year Marvel Comics has officially moved the Punisher to the dark side; he’s now an enforcer in The Hand, an underground syndicate of supervillains.“The Boys” is especially shrewd on this dilemma, explicitly satirizing toxic fandoms. As the so-called heroes got even more brazen this season, lying and committing crimes in public, their fans grew more enamored with them. What used to look like an engaged fan community was perverted into an incipient fascist movement.Where ‘The Boys’ May Take UsIn the original “Boys” comics on which the TV series is based, everyone is equally corrupt and equally punished. It’s a thoroughly nihilistic vision.The TV version, now that we’re three seasons in, is more optimistic, contending that people are as good as they challenge themselves to be, redeemable when reckoning with their wrongs.In the beginning of this season, Hughie seems to have found a middle place in the war between Butcher’s crew and the superheroes: He leads a government agency set up to regulate the behavior of heroes who’ve stepped out of line.Butcher scoffs at Hughie’s career move, and turns out to be right. Hughie soon discovers the job isn’t what he thought it would be, and the challenges are more than bureaucratic: There’s corruption on this path as well. So Hughie decides Butcher’s brutal approach has been right all along: stopping the superheroes by any means necessary.Butcher, meanwhile, bends his absolutism, occasionally granting supes mercy and even looking after Ryan, the superpowered child who accidentally killed his wife.The categories of hero and villain — and, yes, antihero — don’t do the job in “The Boys,” which is why the series is so arresting. We’re left with complex individuals breaking from the simple archetypes these scripts so often place them in.Such labels are certainly letting us down, and not merely in the world of the comics. Tales of heroes and villains feel, right now, like the stuff of fables. Mass shootings, climate change, human rights, women’s rights — each has been twisted into a narrative of right and wrong that suits the needs of the storyteller, whether that’s the politician, the judge, the voter, the media.About halfway through “The Boys,” one do-gooder supe tries to convince a corrupt corporate henchwoman to do the right thing, but she replies, uneasily, that she doesn’t have superpowers.How can she help save the day? The hero replies, “You don’t need powers. You just need to be human.”Forget the capes, the masks and the powers. We need humans — being good, being bad. As for heroes? They’re the ones who make mistakes and atone for them, who try — and fail, but still try — to stay honest in a broken world. More

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    Antony Starr Contends With Accountability, Onscreen and Off

    Starr, who plays the cruel superhero Homelander on the Amazon Prime Video series “The Boys,” returns to TV after his conviction in an assault in Spain earlier this year.One lesson taught repeatedly by “The Boys,” the superhero series on Amazon Prime Video, is the danger of celebrity: Do not be too worshipful of any public figures, it warns, because you never really know what they’re like behind the scenes.The show’s most vivid embodiment of this message is the character of Homelander, a seemingly virtuous crime fighter played by Antony Starr. In the eyes of the wider world, Homelander can do no wrong; he is stalwart and honorable, with blond hair, a gleaming smile and a striped, star-spangled cape.But as viewers of “The Boys” know well, this is all a facade. Beneath these superficialities, Homelander is self-centered, manipulative and cruel.“The Boys,” which returns Friday for its third season, takes place in a morally gray world where good deeds are not always rewarded and transgressions are not always punished. Its other characters can be measured against Homelander and by the choices they will or won’t make in the service of stopping him, but he himself is the one person who cannot be redeemed — the unapologetic heel of the show.Actors are not the roles they play, but Starr, 46, a veteran film and TV star from New Zealand who has gained new visibility from “The Boys,” knows exactly what he signed on for.As he said in an interview recently, “The standard superhero movies that are out there, they’re bound to their moral compass. Even if Superman goes bad, you know he’s coming back to true north because that’s the model.”But in “The Boys,” if Homelander were to find a glimmer of goodness in himself, Starr said, “you’re going to have to turn him back into a narcissistic psychopath at some point.”It is not a role every performer might want for a long-term assignment, but Starr said he appreciated how it offered moments where all pretenses are dropped and the truth of the character is revealed.Citing a favorite expression from an old acting teacher, Starr explained, “He said you’re never more yourself than when you eat alone, and I love that this show gives us those moments of eating alone, where we really get to see what’s going on.”Starr has faced a different sort of reckoning in recent months. In early March, he was arrested after he assaulted another man in Alicante, Spain, where Starr was filming a movie. The actor was drinking in a pub late one night when, after a brief confrontation, he twice punched the man, 21-year-old Bathuel Araujo, and hit him with a glass, the Spanish newspaper Información reported.Starr pleaded guilty in a local court. He was given a 12-month suspended sentence and ordered to pay a fine of about $5,500.In our interview nearly three months later, in late May, Starr did not dismiss questions about the assault, but he tended to speak about it in general terms.“You mess up,” he said. “You own it. You learn from it. You move forward.”Starr spoke with me in a video interview from his home in Los Angeles. Freed from his Homelander guise, the actor had dark brown hair and a shaggy beard and wore a pair of rectangular, Clark Kent-like eyeglasses.And he had little of his alter ego’s zealotry as he spoke about the country where he now resides. “I love America,” Starr said. “America’s been very good to me, but the old girl is definitely in need of some therapy at the moment.”Working in the film and TV industry of his native New Zealand, Starr broke through with a series of roles, most notably on the series “Outrageous Fortune,” a comic crime drama that cast him as identical twin brothers with diametrically different personalities.In America, he gained notice for his lead performance in “Banshee,” an action series about an ex-convict masquerading as the sheriff of a fictional Pennsylvania town, which ran on Cinemax from 2013 to 2016.When Starr was first approached about portraying Homelander on “The Boys,” which is adapted from a comic-book series by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, he was busy with other work and initially dismissive of a request to film himself for an audition.In the earliest script pages he was given, Starr said, “There wasn’t a hell of a lot for me to go on, other than ‘Bad Superman.’ So I did the audition almost out of anger. Threw it down, sent it in and went, there’s your audition.”But as Starr got further into the tryout process and learned more about the series, he became intrigued with the opportunistic Homelander, who has no compunction about using his abilities for his own gain and delights in punishing anyone who might try to expose him for who he actually is. He saw an opportunity to connect with audiences by playing the character’s deficiencies to their fullest degree.“I want people to revel in seeing him in pain,” he said. “I want people to really enjoy watching him do horrible things with a little bit of a glint in his eye.”Erin Moriarty, a “Boys” co-star who plays a more trustworthy and righteous hero named Starlight, said her scenes with Starr can sometimes be “gut-wrenching” to film, because of the raw emotion involved and also “the possibility that he could just laser her right there and kill her.”“You have to be able to shake it off at the end of the day,” Moriarty said. “It might take a second, but it definitely helps that Antony, in addition to being professionally present as a human being, is so unlike Homelander and so kind and so funny.”And as Starr anticipated, his work on “The Boys” has led to other prominent projects, including his role in the upcoming action film, directed by Guy Ritchie and starring Jake Gyllenhaal, that he was working on in Spain earlier this year.Información reported that Starr and Araujo had encountered each other at the pub. Araujo told Información that a friend with him had asked a friend of Starr’s to calm down the actor who appeared drunk. Araujo said Starr began to curse and shove him, and that when he pushed back, Starr punched him and hit him with a glass. After Starr was ejected from the pub, the two men encountered each other outside, Araujo said, and they scuffled further.In our interview, Starr did not offer an account of what happened on the night of the assault. “There’s not much point in me re-litigating the facts,” he said. “They’re out there. They’ve been said. I’ve got nothing to add to that.”He added that he is a someone who “believes in accountability and taking responsibility.”“I got myself into a situation that was negative and I reacted poorly, and the way forward from that was very clear,” Starr said. “It was quite simply to take ownership of it, which I do, and then really learn from it and move forward.”Had he considered quitting drinking after this incident?“I wish it was that simple,” he replied. “I don’t know anyone that hasn’t, on a personal level, got things that they want to work on.”Contacted on social media, Araujo reaffirmed his previous descriptions of his confrontation with Starr. He said that he did not bear the actor the actor any ill will.“I feel that all humans have the right to make mistakes and he was no exception,” Araujo wrote. “He has lived the consequences of his actions and I hope he has learned from it. I wish him good things and I hope he doesn’t go through the same thing again.”Moriarty said she felt no hesitation about continuing to work with Starr in the future.“There’s no world in which I would feel uncomfortable or unsafe,” she said. “I think he’s a wonderful dude that got caught up in a moment and is implementing the lessons appropriately. It’s not impacting my perception of him at all, as an actor and as a human.”Since Will Smith’s slapping of Chris Rock in late March, Hollywood has had to confront the question of what sort of consequences are appropriate when celebrities engage in violence, however brief. For Starr, the incident in Spain does not appear to have affected his status on “The Boys.” In recent weeks, Starr he has continued to appear in magazine features promoting the series and he attended a premiere event for it with his co-stars in Paris.Eric Kripke, who developed “The Boys” for television and is its showrunner, declined to comment for this article.Starr, however, seemed uncomfortable examining himself through a broader cultural lens. “I’ve really just kept this issue to a personal level, because it is a personal issue — a personal issue that I’ve taken responsibility for,” he said.He spoke with more enthusiasm about “The Boys” and its seemingly inexhaustible versatility at the present moment.On the one hand, he said the show can be viewed as a caustic parody of countless other films and TV shows adapted from comic books, one that uses now-familiar elements of the genre to comment on the frustrations and futility of 21st-century society.Or, Starr said, it can simply be watched as a superhero entertainment itself, where good guys and bad guys put on colorful costumes and engage in combat until only one side is left standing.“You could take it at face value,” he said. “Let it wash over you and go, aha — there’s blood and gore and fun stuff, and enough drama to make it interesting.”“I think you can go as deep as you want,” he said. 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    Beyond WandaVision and Justice League: Superhero Streaming for Every Taste

    Even if Avengers and Justice Leagues leave you cold, there’s probably some superpowered champion out there for you. Here’s a guide to the best nontraditional superhero stories available to stream.We get it: Superheroes have overrun pop culture.Even though last summer’s blockbusters were thwarted by the coronavirus, Warner Bros. still brought an Amazon warrior to our TVs and laptops in December, and Disney+ has shrunk the Marvel Cinematic Universe to fit the smaller screens as well, with “WandaVision” and “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.” If you thought the capesters’ reign was irksome back when Avengers were dominating multiplexes, you’re probably even more exasperated now. You’ve seen one guy in a mask and cape, you’ve seen them all, am I right?Well, not exactly. The surprisingly meta, genre-bending “WandaVision” was one example of a superhero show that tried something different, delivering knowing sitcom parodies and, in the process, offering something for people besides M.C.U. fans.And “WandaVision” isn’t alone. For years, superhero stories have branched beyond action-hero conventions, within many different genres. Whether you like noir, horror, spy thrillers or teen dramas, we’ve got a TV or movie pick for you — that just also happens to be about heroes.I’m really into film noir … More