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A Thanksgiving Binge Menu: 7 Fall Shows You Might Have Slept On

by SITKI KOVALI
written by SITKI KOVALI

My childhood Thanksgivings involved television in a very specific sense: After the big meal, all the men in the family would retire to the living room and promptly fall asleep in front of a football game.

The ratings for the National Football League being what they are, there are clearly still plenty of people who will spend Thursday with the Lions and Vikings and Bills, oh my, whether conscious or not. But if your taste in entertainment runs toward something less concussive, you could use those free hours to catch up on shows you missed during the frantic fall months. Here is a holiday menu of recent series worth discovering or returning to.

‘Entrapped’

The single season of the Icelandic crime drama “Entrapped” that you’ll find on Netflix is actually the third season of a series better known as “Trapped,” created by the filmmaker Baltasar Kormakur; the first two installments, from 2016 and 2019, are available from Amazon Prime Video. But “Entrapped,” whose story begins in a clash between a biker gang and an Icelandic religious sect, can be enjoyed on its own. The mystery is free-standing, and in any case the series has always been less about the particulars of murder than about the cranky, dour nobility of Andri, the cop played with exquisite stolidity by Olafur Darri Olafsson. (Streaming on Netflix.)

‘Little Demon’

The creators of this animated coming-of-age comedy on FXX — Darcy Fowler, Seth Kirschner and Kieran Valla — are all actors as well as writers, and that shows in the believability of the characters who populate its casually raunchy, hex-positive universe. Chrissy (Lucy DeVito) is the angry, alienated teenage daughter of a single mom, Laura (Aubrey Plaza); the twist is that her family is broken because her dad (Lucy DeVito’s real-life father, Danny) is literally Satan. The show was a little unfocused and ordinary at first, but around the middle of its 10-episode season, it morphed into a tough and genuinely touching family saga that just happened to involve a lot of interdimensional sex and liquefying of souls. (Streaming on Hulu.)

“Pantheon” is a somewhat “Matrix”-like story about uploading human consciousness to the cloud.Credit…Titmouse Inc/AMC

‘Pantheon’

Based on short stories by the rising science fiction star Ken Liu, “Pantheon” is a story about the consequences of uploading human consciousness to the cloud that has a family resemblance to “The Matrix.” But its effectiveness comes from its modesty and seriousness of purpose — the way it stays close to the earth while imagining limitless digital worlds. (It’s also a corporate-conspiracy thriller in which the corporation isn’t always the worst actor on the stage.) The investigations and battles in this animated drama on AMC+ take place mostly in virtual-reality landscapes while the non-virtual characters — including a feisty, heroic teenager (Katie Chang) and her sometime ally, a preternaturally gifted hacker (Paul Dano) — pace around their living rooms wearing headsets. There’s still time to binge the eight episodes of the first season before the second and final season arrives in January. (Streaming on Amazon Prime Video.)

‘The Serpent Queen’

Starz has always made room for costume dramas that are as much about shedding costumes as they are about fidelity to any recorded history. (See “Spartacus,” “The White Princess,” “The Spanish Princess,” “Black Sails,” “Outlander,” et al.) “The Serpent Queen,” starring Samantha Morton as Catherine de Medici, is in this tradition; it’s a rock ’n’ roll historical drama that puts period dress on characters who move and talk with thoroughly modern sensibilities (sometimes straight into the camera), and matches a 16th-century look with a contemporary pop sound. And it manages to not only avoid being outright irritating, but to be surprisingly entertaining, largely because of Morton’s shrewd, steely performance as the overachieving Catherine. Already the queen of France in the show’s present, she schemes and politicks while recounting her colorful history to a servant girl she takes on as her personal maid (Sennia Nanua). (Streaming on Starz.)

Charlie Hunnam, left, and Shubham Saraf in a scene from “Shantaram,” based on the autobiographical novel from Gregory David Roberts. Credit…Roland Neveu/Apple TV+

‘Shantaram’

In his first TV series since his seven-season run on “Sons of Anarchy,” Charlie Hunnam plays an escaped Australian convict who lands in 1980s Bombay — a few steps ahead of the police, embroiled with local criminals and bewitched by a mysterious Swiss beauty (Antonia Desplat). Based on an autobiographical novel by Gregory David Roberts, this Apple TV+ series presents the familiar elements of bohemian adventure and peril in warm climates with style and some genuine tension. (Streaming on Apple TV+.)

‘The Simpsons’

Is there life after 30? There is for “The Simpsons,” which has felt rejuvenated in its 34th year on Fox. The episode that has received all the attention is “Lisa the Boy Scout” from Oct. 9, a hugely enjoyable exercise in metafoolery. But the season has been sharp week in and week out. “The King of Nice,” in which Krusty the Clown reinvents himself as a cuddly, dancing daytime talk show host — and Marge discovers her true calling as his producer — is a tightly assembled, perfectly pitched satire; “From Beer to Paternity,” in which Homer and Lisa go on a road trip with Duffman to help repair his relationship with his daughter, is unexpectedly moving. High hopes for Sunday’s episode, the season’s ninth, which bears the promising title “When Nelson Met Lisa.” (Streaming on Hulu.)

A scene from the Netflix reboot of “Unsolved Mysteries.”Credit…Netflix

‘Unsolved Mysteries’

When Netflix and the “Stranger Things” executive producer Shawn Levy rebooted this venerable true-crime series in 2020, they classed it up, giving it an overhaul that moved it in a more documentary direction — a deliberate pace, a calm demeanor, no reliance on narration. (Robert Stack, the show’s longtime host, is a shadowy presence in the opening credits.) You suspect that someone involved is a big fan of Errol Morris; the investigations may not be any more thorough or balanced than those in lower-rent cable shows, but there’s an elegance to the presentation that sucks you in. The third season, which has grown to nine episodes, continues the practice of mixing in the occasional U.F.O. sighting among the steady diet of unsolved deaths. (Streaming on Netflix.)

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How Do You Tell a Vandal From a Visitor? Art Museums Are Struggling.

by SITKI KOVALI
written by SITKI KOVALI

LONDON — For Hans-Peter Wipplinger, the director of Vienna’s Leopold Museum, the last few weeks have been challenging. As climate protesters across Europe stepped up their attacks against art, Wipplinger took measures to protect his storied collection, which includes famous paintings by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. Bags were banned; coats, too. The museum hired extra guards to patrol its five floors.

It didn’t work. Last week, members of a group called Last Generation walked into the museum and threw black liquid at one of Klimt’s major works, “Death and Life.” A protester had sneaked the liquid into the museum in a hot water bottle strapped to his chest, Wipplinger said.

The Klimt, protected by glass, was unharmed. But Wipplinger said his security team could only have stopped the attack by subjecting visitors to invasive body searches, “like at the airport.” He didn’t want to even consider that prospect, he added.

“If we start such procedures, the whole idea of what a museum is dies,” Wipplinger said. “A museum is a place that should always be open to the public,” adding: “We can’t stop being that.”

With the attacks showing no sign of abating, museum directors across Europe are settling into a nervous new equilibrium, fearful for the works in their care but unwilling to compromise on making visitors feel welcome. So far, nothing has been permanently damaged. But many fear that an accident, or an escalation in the protesters’ tactics, could result in a masterpiece being destroyed.

The Fine Arts & Exhibits Special Section

  • Bigger and Better: While the Covid-19 pandemic forced museums to close for months, cut staff and reduce expenses, several of them have nevertheless moved forward on ambitious renovations or new buildings.
  • A Tribute to Black Artists: Four museums across the country are featuring exhibitions this fall that recognize the work of African and African American artists, signaling a change in attitude — and priorities.
  • New and Old: In California, museums are celebrating and embracing Latino and Chicano art and artists. And the La Brea Tar Pits & Museum is working to engage visitors about the realities of climate change.
  • A Cultural Correction: After removing all references to Columbus from its collections the Denver Art Museum has embraced a new exhibition on Latin American art.
  • More From the Special Section: Museums, galleries and auction houses are opening their doors wider than ever to new artists, new concepts and new traditions.

The actions, which began in Britain in June, are already increasing in frequency and daring. At first protesters glued themselves to the frames of famous paintings, but since footage of activists splattering Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” with tomato soup spread rapidly on social media last month, masterpieces have been doused in pea soup, mashed potatoes and flour.

Technicians from the Bourse de Commerce, in Paris, cleaning a Charles Ray sculpture last week after protesters covered it in orange paint.Credit…Christophe Petit Tesson/EPA, via Shutterstock

Those works were all protected by glass, and the protesters’ projectiles never touched an artist’s brush stroke. Yet last Friday, protesters in Paris poured orange paint directly onto a silver Charles Ray sculpture outside the Bourse de Commerce contemporary art space. (A Bourse de Commerce spokesman said the sculpture was cleaned within a few hours.)

In a statement earlier this month signed by the leaders of over 90 of the world’s largest art institutions — including Daniel H. Weiss, the chief executive of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Glenn D. Lowry of the Museum of Modern Art in New York — museum administrators said they were “deeply shaken” by the protesters’ “risky endangerment” of artworks. The activists “severely underestimate the fragility of these irreplaceable objects,” the statement added.

Yet few museums appear to have taken bold steps to protect their collections. Norway’s National Museum and the Barberini Museum in Potsdam, Germany, have, like the Leopold Museum, banned visitors from taking bags or jackets into their exhibition halls. Others have made no changes. In London, visitors may still carry bags around museums including the National Gallery, Tate Britain, Tate Modern and the British Museum. All four inspect bags at their entrances, but the checks are often cursory. At Tate Britain last Friday, security guards waved through several visitors without looking inside their backpacks.

Wipplinger, of the Leopold Museum, said there was little that a bag check could achieve, anyway, since items like tubes of glue were easy to conceal. “If a person wants to attack an art piece, they will find a way,” he said.

With museums reticent to act, politicians are beginning to weigh in. On Sunday, Gennaro Sangiuliano, Italy’s culture minister, said in a news release that his department was considering the actions it could take, including a requirement to cover all paintings in Italy’s museums with glass. Such a program would be expensive and museum entrance fees would rise as a result, Sangiuliano added.

Anna Holland, left, and, Phoebe Plummer, activists with Just Stop Oil, raised the stakes in October when one of them threw soup over Vincent van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” in the National Gallery in London.Credit…Just Stop Oil, via Associated Press

Wipplinger said his teams had been protectively glazing works in its collection for decades, but couldn’t do that quickly for every remaining piece. Nonreflective glass was costly, he said: Work on a painting of moderate size — a square yard, say — could come in at around $1,000.

Robert Read, the head of art at the insurance company Hiscox, said that he was advising museum clients to put more works in their collections behind glass, but Hiscox’s policies did not require it. A contemporary art installation, for instance, simply couldn’t be glazed, he said.

And sometimes a barrier between a painting and its audience is contrary to the work’s spirit. Mabel Tapia, the deputy artistic director of the Reina Sofia museum in Madrid, said she would never allow that collection’s highlight, Picasso’s 1937 antiwar masterpiece “Guernica,” to be displayed behind glass. It was “a symbol of freedom, and of the fight against fascism,” she added.

Tapia said she had recently redeployed security guards so they could focus on high-profile works — something she commonly does at times of protest — but she felt there was little more she could do. “The only measure that would actually do something is if we closed the museum,” Tapia said, “and we’re not going to do that.” Museums are meant to be places where people meet to think about important issues, she added. “We need to keep them open.”

There was “no silver bullet” for dealing with the protests, Read, the insurer, said. Museum administrators just had to hope the protesters reminded “genteel, middle-class liberals” who took steps to avoid permanent damage, he added.

Florian Wagner, 30, the member of Last Generation who threw the black mixture at the Klimt painting in the Leopold Museum, said by phone that he knew before the protest that the work was protected by glass. He practiced the stunt five times at home, he said, and was convinced it would not disfigure the painting. “We are not trying to destroy beautiful pieces of art,” Wagner said, but to “shock people” into acting on climate change.

He wouldn’t be staging any more protests, he said, adding, “I think I’ve made my point.” But he said he was sure others in Austria and across Europe would continue. The actions would only stop, he added, once governments “act on this crisis.”

Elisabetta Povoledo contributed reporting from Rome.

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Review: At the Philharmonic, a Taste of Holiday Bounty

by SITKI KOVALI
written by SITKI KOVALI

Thanksgiving came a day early at the New York Philharmonic this year: the calories, the juicy fat, the whipped cream, the fun, the sense of endless bounty. The orchestra’s program at David Geffen Hall on Wednesday was an immersion in richness and in flashing, warming colors, and it left you like a good holiday dinner does: a little dazed, even happily drowsy, stumbling toward the subway truly full.

Conducted by Stéphane Denève, the music director of the St. Louis Symphony, the concert was très French — down to the tender Rameau encore played by the pianist Víkingur Ólafsson, who made his Philharmonic debut as the soloist in Ravel’s Concerto in G. (The program repeats on Friday and Saturday.)

At the center of that concerto is a time-suspending Adagio. But in Ólafsson’s performance, the dreaminess — the slight blur, the delicacy — bled into the two outer movements, too. Some pianists lean on the factory-machine regularity, the bright lucidity, of those parts to hammer home a contrast with the slow movement. But, as he also showed in a very different repertory at his Carnegie Hall debut in February, Ólafsson resists vivid contrasts.

It’s not that his touch is diffuse; it’s as clean as marble. And it’s not that the tempos he and Denève chose for the framing movements were slower than normal. But the effect Ólafsson got throughout, of a kind of virtuosic reticence, could be described in the same words I used for his performance in February: a “silk of sound, inward-looking and wistful in both major and minor keys, in both andante and allegro.”

“Céléphaïs” (2017), a nine-minute section from Guillaume Connesson’s symphonic poem inspired by the fantastical writings of H.P. Lovecraft, opened the concert with an extravagance that offers proof of the survival of the orchestrational panache of the French tradition: its lurid lushness and sly squiggles, brassy explosions and sensual strings.

Connesson’s precursors in that tradition got a hearing after intermission. The audience even got a second helping: The big, sweet slice of cake that is the Suite No. 2 drawn from Albert Roussel’s 1930 ballet “Bacchus et Ariane” was followed by another slice, the Suite No. 2 from another mythological ballet of the early 20th century, Ravel’s “Daphnis et Chloé.”

On paper this seemed like overindulgence; it kind of was, but who doesn’t like their potatoes two ways every now and again? And while there’s a familial similarity between these works, Roussel’s style is ever so slightly more angular, with an underlying feeling of logic distinct from Ravel’s billowy scene painting.

The Philharmonic played well throughout, riding the many waves and swerves of intensity and pigment, from dewy dawns to mellow dusks. There were some particularly notable contributions to the potluck: Ryan Roberts, just a few years into his tenure as the orchestra’s English hornist but already a pillar of the ensemble, matched Ólafsson’s eloquent introspection in the Ravel concerto’s slow movement.

The principal flute, Robert Langevin, unspooled his instrument’s classic glistening solo in “Daphnis et Chloé” with conversational ease. Cynthia Phelps, the principal viola, had a russet-color turn in the Roussel, and Roger Nye, unusually seated in the first bassoon chair for that work, played with honeyed serenity.

Unlike at most Thanksgiving dinners, by the end the fullness didn’t feel like bloat. The clear, cool acoustics of the new Geffen Hall work against textures getting too heavy; they favor breezy sleekness, which is perfect for Denève, whose music-making exudes relaxation without losing forward motion. A couple of hours later, I would have been more than ready to eat — I mean hear — some more.

New York Philharmonic

This program repeats through Saturday at David Geffen Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org.

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The Tiny Dancers Who Make ‘The Nutcracker’ Sparkle

by SITKI KOVALI
written by SITKI KOVALI

“I think it’s one of the best costumes. It’s so furry and smooth and nice. But it’s also really hot.” Eleanor Murphy, left, 9. “I like throwing the cheese,” Taiga Emmer, 8. The two alternate as the Bunny.

The tree, George Balanchine knew, was not going to be cheap. But when he created his version of “The Nutcracker” for New York City Ballet in 1954, he fought for it, saying the ballet “is the tree.”

Watching the tree grow, even with its creaks and trembles — will it make it this time? — is an emotional experience. The tree produces feelings! But “George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker” is also about something else: the children of the School of American Ballet.

“Being able to dance onstage, you feel like a whole different person. You don’t feel like you. For me, I don’t get scared. I just feel in the moment.” Leia Barghout, foreground, 12, pictured with Louisa Wassenaar, 11, Polichinelles.

If last year’s production proved anything, it was that size and spirit matter. The littler the children are, the more enormous the stage seems, lending the tale enchantment. Yes, there are memorable adult characters: the Sugarplum Fairy and Dewdrop, Mother Ginger and the Mouse King. But the kids are the ballet’s heart, the glue — what guides us down that path to feel the feelings.

This year, rejoice! The tiny bodies are back — though, because of the pandemic, they have little experience. Of the 126 in the production (there are two casts) 108 are first-timers in the show.

Dena Abergel, City Ballet’s children’s repertory director, sees “The Nutcracker,” which opens Friday at Lincoln Center, as Balanchine’s training ground: It teaches children of the City Ballet-affiliated school how to become performers.

“Fritz doesn’t really like his sister so he’s annoying to her. He does a lot of stuff that you shouldn’t do if you have a sister.” Hannon Hatchett, 8, with Stella Tompkins, 9.
“I thought Santa could make me be in ‘The Nutcracker,’” Hannon said. “I wrote it down in my Christmas list.”

Generally, they start out as Angels, progressing to more technically advanced parts — like the Candy Canes and the Polichinelles — until they age out (or grow too tall for the costumes). Along the way, they learn choreography and professionalism.

But this year, with so many starting from scratch, is different. “None of the leading dancers and most of the dancers period have never been in ‘The Nutcracker,’” Abergel said. “I’ve never had a Marie who doesn’t even know what the party scene is, or a Prince who doesn’t know the sequence of the ballet. That’s just never happened before.”

As expected, this young generation is thrilled. Eleanor Murphy, 9, who alternates the part of the Bunny with Tiaga Emmer, 8, first saw the City Ballet production when she was 3. “After the show, I was screaming because I didn’t want to go home,” she said. “I took a picture with one of the Snowflakes, which was cool. I always wanted to be in ‘The Nutcracker,’ and now I’m in ‘The Nutcracker.’”

“It’s almost like you’re actually floating. When you see it, you’re going to be like, wow, amazing.” Ksenia Ilyusha, 8, Angel.

She wrapped her arms around herself and giggled. (It’s that kind of year. The cuteness is next level.)

Abergel is excited to see these kids’ fresh approach; since they haven’t grown up in the production, they will be less likely to mimic what they’ve seen other children do. “They’re really learning it from us,” she said. “In terms of my role, it’s really challenging because they don’t know anything about rehearsing. They don’t know anything about the stage. They don’t know about performing. So it’s not just teaching the Angels.”

“My brother played this role when he was a child, and it’s so funny because I have vivid memories in my head of my brother doing that pantomime.” Titus Landegger, 11, Prince.

The Angel role instructs young dancers about diagonals — how to cross the stage and to make a circle. It teaches them how to count to music. Now, this means that she is giving the students new to “The Nutcracker,” Abergel said, “a crash course to learn everything about being onstage, about rehearsing, about how to learn choreography, about remembering it and piecing it together from one rehearsal to the next.”

“It’s definitely really hot inside of the Mouse costume. You have your tail and then you have the gloves, and when you have it on, you can’t really see below it. So it’s kind of hard to move. It’s really heavy.” Natalia Paglia, 11, Mouse.

This made casting, too, unusual this year, particularly when it came to choosing Marie, the ballet’s young heroine. Abergel and Arch Higgins, the associate children’s repertory director at City Ballet, weren’t able to base their decisions on size and past experience. And they had little sense of the children’s dramatic ability, which is key for Marie, who helps to carry the ballet.

“Dancing and acting at the same time is hard because you have to do two things at once. So I just have to put that all together.” Zofia Mendez, 10, Marie.
“I’m kind of nervous about the quick change of costumes from the party scene. I don’t have fast reflexes. I’m not a fast person.” Caroline O’Hagan, 10, Marie.

Abergel made up acting sequences based on the choreography, “just to see who could convey emotion, who could tell a story,” she said. “It was very clear who stood out: Arch and I looked at each other and we were like, ‘OK, here, we go.’”

Who got the part? Two good friends, both 10, with starkly different personalities: the vivacious, dramatic Zofia Mendez and the more serene and dreamy Caroline O’Hagan. (Abergel loves it when that happens: It shows the world, she said, that you don’t have to be a specific type to be right for the role.) Zofia learned that she would be playing Marie from her mother. “My mom asked, ‘Zofia, who is Marie?’ because she wasn’t very familiar. I started crying, and my mom was so confused.”

“‘That role is amazing,’” Zofia told her mother. “So she started crying with me.”

“We don’t want anybody falling down onstage. A lot of people are watching.” Zaki Arfin, 9, Soldier, with Harper McEachin, 10, right.CreditCredit…Erik Tanner for The New York Times

O’Hagan first saw ‘The Nutcracker’ when she was 2½. “I would always come home and pretend to be Marie,” she said. “I never let my mom put away the ‘Nutcracker’ that she bought for me.”

Carrying the ballet on their small shoulders is one thing. Marie’s silk taffeta dress for the festive party scene in Act I, poses another challenge, less spoken of: its heft and stiffness. “When I go to sleep,” Zofia said, “I have dreams about myself in the most heavy dress, falling down in the middle of the stage. Oh, my goodness.”

“I love the bells because every time I move, it’s like music. Even when you don’t move it, you can hear it. I have a feeling that when I’m onstage, that’s the only thing I’m going to hear because it’s so loud — all of us Candy Canes, just dancing and moving and bells.” Anzu Angeles, 12, Candy Cane.

Abergel is nervous about other things: The coronavirus is still circulating, which means that children could be taken out of the show at a moment’s notice. “Let’s say it was Marie,” she said. “We would call the Marie from last year. But that Marie from last year is my height, so that’s no longer an option.”

That height: just under 5 feet 7 inches. “So that’s why I’m like, just have them as prepared as possible every day,” Abergel said. “Because you don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow.”

“The big jump is really fun,” said Eleanor Murphy, left. “You pull the Mouse King’s tail because the Prince is in a fight with the Mouse King and he is, like, hurting him. It’s your part, your own thing that’s special to you. You save the show.”
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‘The Rat Trap’ Review: Together for Better, but Mostly for Worse

by SITKI KOVALI
written by SITKI KOVALI

Sheila Brandreth and Keld Maxwell are in love and about to get married. She is a novelist and he is a playwright, both at the start of their careers: It’s a union made in literary heaven, and Sheila (Sarin Monae West) looks forward to “the joy of working together and helping one another to make our way in the world.”

But when Keld (James Evans) is out of earshot, Sheila’s roommate, Olive Lloyd-Kennedy (Elisabeth Gray), offers a more jaundiced perspective. “You are much the cleverer of the two,” she tells Sheila, “and because of that I prophesy that you will be the one to give in.”

Alas, it is Olive who is right.

This is not much of a spoiler considering that the play is called “The Rat Trap,” the title revealing a gloomy — cynical souls might say realistic — view of marriage as terribly wrong for one party, possibly even both. That this all ends on an uncompromisingly depressing note is all the more startling considering that the show, presented by the Mint Theater, was written in 1918 and is meant to be a comedy.

Then again, its author is Noël Coward, whose view of matrimony was like a cocktail of Champagne and strychnine.

Written when Coward was 18, “The Rat Trap” was first staged in London in 1926 and is just now making its American debut. Elements of his signature style already figure in this piece of juvenilia, including such epigrams as “Marriage nowadays is nothing but a temporary refuge for those who are uncomfortable at home.” What’s more remarkable is that the teenage Coward had an uncanny sense of the agonizing friction between artistic ambitions and domestic life.

Alexander Lass’s underpowered production at New York City Center does not bother exploring some tantalizing possibilities — like, for example, the nature of Olive’s feelings for Sheila — and it does not quite manage to hit either the comic highs or the dramatic lows. (There are also some questionable set and blocking choices, like a sofa positioned in such a way that the actors sitting on it must contort themselves to avoid showing their backs to the audience.)

But West shines, first as a woman in love then as one who shrivels into seething disillusion when her career stalls while her husband’s blossoms. Because of course Sheila’s ambitions end up taking a back seat to his. “I gave up my working brain for you,” she tells Keld, who responds with a classic anthem of weaselly self-justification.

The play appears to suggest this imbalance is baked into the conventions of bourgeois relationships. But it also satirizes the bohemian pretensions of Naomi Frith-Bassington (Heloise Lowenthal) and Edmund Crowe (Ramzi Khalaf), a couple of proto-hipsters who prefer free love to the officially licensed kind.

Coward later wrote that “The Rat Trap” had some merits, but “the last act is an inconclusive shambles.” He was too harsh — the ending is trenchant rather than inconclusive. In love as in war, it seems to say, everybody loses.

The Rat Trap
Through Dec. 10 at New York City Center Stage II, Manhattan; minttheater.org. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes.

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Lars von Trier Had the Key to the End of ‘The Kingdom’ All Along

by SITKI KOVALI
written by SITKI KOVALI

In the first two seasons of Lars von Trier’s haunted-hospital drama “The Kingdom,” hailed since the 1990s as Denmark’s “Twin Peaks,” von Trier appears in a tuxedo at the end of each episode to offer a droll recap and wish viewers a pleasant evening. With an impish grin and an appeal to “take the good with the evil,” he ends with a devil-horn salute.

But in the belated five-part conclusion, “The Kingdom Exodus,” which begins streaming Sunday on Mubi, von Trier delivers his closing remarks from behind a curtain.

“I’ve retired a bit physically,” he says, his shoes peeking out from under the curtain, citing “vanity” as the reason. “The 24 years that have passed since the old episodes have left their mark, and I can’t compete with the unbearably cocky young Lars von Trier.”

It is, on one level, a gag typical of von Trier, 66, a filmmaker who never has never taken himself too seriously, sometimes to a fault, even as he has created some of the most ferociously imaginative, rule-bending and at times infuriating movies of the last 30 years, including “Breaking the Waves,” “Dancer in the Dark” and “Dogville.”

But the comment is also a reflection of his current state. In August, von Trier’s production company, Zentropa, announced that he had Parkinson’s disease. Weeks later, a visibly trembling von Trier gave a surprise, prerecorded introduction at the premiere of “The Kingdom Exodus” at the Venice Film Festival, later telling Variety that he intended to take a break from filmmaking. In a video call from his home in Copenhagen this month, he warned he would not be able to speak as precisely as he wanted.

“That took at least a quarter of my brain, in the sense that I can’t find the words,” he said of his illness, “and in English it’s twice as difficult.” Or as he said in a second interview later in the week, his dark, self-deprecating humor coming through: “I would like to say to you that I am not as stupid as you think I am right now.”

Von Trier was joking, as he does almost compulsively in conversation, his sense of humor no less mordant or provocative now than it was when the first two seasons of “Kingdom” aired on Danish television, in 1994 and 1997. A combination of horror and satire set at the Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen, the series was an early international breakthrough for von Trier, and finishing it completes a circle of sorts, one with origins dating to his 1987 feature “Epidemic,” which used the hospital as a location.

Episodes of the first two seasons of “The Kingdom,” which aired in the 1990s, ended with a recap by von Trier and an appeal to “take the good with the evil.”Credit…Zentropa/Mubi
In “The Kingdom Exodus,” which begins streaming on Sunday, von Trier delivers the recaps from behind a curtain. Credit…Zentropa/Mubi

Still, as he considers what’s next, he seemed more circumspect than the von Trier who raised eyebrows at the Cannes Film Festival in 2009 when he declared, “I am the best director in the world.” Or who, two years later at the same festival, expressed sympathy for Hitler and delivered the line “OK, I’m a Nazi” — another joke, but one that got him temporarily barred from Cannes. (Unprompted, he expressed regret over the over the 2011 incident when we spoke, referring to it as “the catastrophe.”)

The actor Willem Dafoe, who began working with von Trier on “Manderlay” (2005) and plays the satanic Grand Duc in “Exodus,” spoke of two qualities that keep drawing him back to von Trier — the director’s ability to communicate without speaking and his habit of speaking too much.

“He’s well known for not having a filter, and sometimes it gets him into trouble because he goes to places socially that may be difficult to accept,” Dafoe said. “But creatively, that kind of looseness, that kind of allows him to contemplate the unthinkable.”

At Venice this year, “Exodus” was received as a return to form, but the fact that it was even completed was improbable. The franchise is a ghost story in more ways than one.

The series was always meant to have a third, final season. But after Season 2, the principal actors started to die. Ernst-Hugo Jaregard, who played the imperious, dyspeptic Swedish physician Stig Helmer, died in 1998. Kirsten Rolffes, who played the malingering spiritualist Mrs. Drusse, died in 2000. After a while, von Trier said, he gave up.

“But then four years ago I had a mental situation that was not good,” he said, “and I knew the only thing that could help was to work.” “Exodus” was simply the easiest thing to do.

A third season of “The Kingdom” was stalled after its principle characters began dying, including Ernst-Hugo Jaregard (as Dr. Stig Helmer), who died in 1998.Credit…Zentropa/Mubi
Mikael Persbrandt plays Helmer’s son in “Exodus.” Like his father, he is a Swede who complains constantly about Danes.Credit…Zentropa/Mubi

Von Trier, who shares screenwriting credit across the series with his longtime collaborator Niels Vorsel, wrote much more slowly than he usually did. (“Dogville,” he said, was written in 10 days.) His ambition was to give the series as much of an ending as possible. This season is also, he thinks, the funniest of the three.

Unlike the first two installments, which were mainly studio productions, “Exodus” was filmed principally at the real-life Rigshospitalet, during Covid, no less. The story brings back some original characters in supporting roles while presenting substitutes for the departed leads.

In place of Stig Helmer, “Exodus” offers Stig Helmer Jr. (Mikael Persbrandt), who takes a job at the hospital to experience living in the nation that drove his father mad. (Like his father, he constantly carps about Danish customs.) In place of Mrs. Drusse, the show has Karen (Bodil Jorgensen), a sleepwalker who, in the first of many meta touches, is introduced watching the closing credits of Season 2’s final episode and complaining, “That’s no ending.”

The shoot was difficult for von Trier, who remembered receiving his diagnosis during the course of the production.

“I have never felt so bad on a shoot before,” he said. “But on the other hand, I enjoyed especially the work with the actors.”

The feeling was mutual for Jorgensen, who had starred in von Trier’s “The Idiots,” from 1998. On a set in 2014, she was run over by a tractor, and her lungs collapsed. Her road to recovery was long. The shared experience of having overcome physical obstacles had bonded her and her director, she said. “I survived, and Lars survived.”

She added: “What I experienced was that every day, he got more and more interested in the telling of the story.”

In early seasons, Kirsten Rolffes plays the Miss Marple-type character Mrs. Drusse, who is in touch with the spiritual realm. Rolffes died in 2000.Credit…Zentropa/Mubi
In place of Mrs. Drusse, “Exodus” has Karen (Bodil Jorgensen), a sleepwalker who seems similarly attuned to the supernatural.Credit…Zentropa/Mubi

Von Trier said he has always considered “The Kingdom” a “left-hand work,” a money job that permits a certain kind of freedom. He likes that sort of abandon, even if he cares more for his feature films. “The good side is of course that you take any idea and say it’s good enough and put it in,” he said.

Still, one subplot in “Exodus” plays with fire, even for a director inclined toward controversy. In it, Stig Jr., who is working to make the hospital more inclusive (new rules on pronouns abound), tries to initiate a romance with a colleague (Tuva Novotny) by asking her consent by email. She winds up running to a lawyer (Alexander Skarsgard), who somehow represents them both.

The references to sexual harassment risk appearing pointed: In 2017, Bjork, who starred in “Dancer in the Dark,” accused a “Danish director” who was widely understood to be von Trier of unwanted touches and sexual advances. That same year, Peter Aalbaek Jensen, who co-founded Zentropa, was accused of sexual harassment by multiple women at the company, to which he later responded, in The Hollywood Reporter, “I’ll stop slapping asses.”

Von Trier said that the subplot of “Exodus” was inspired by broader cultural discussions in Denmark. He has consistently denied Bjork’s accusations. (“I don’t have to defend,” he said during our interview. “I have nothing to defend.”)

Whatever ways “Exodus” dares being called objectionable, the response so far has been enthusiastic. Alberto Barbera, the director of the Venice Film Festival, suggested that the audience’s familiarity with the original — and with von Trier’s prankishness — played a role in its positive reception.

As “often happens with cult works,” he wrote in an email, there was “lively participation accompanied with a mixture of spontaneous applause, laughs and — probably for many — moments of nostalgia for being taken back.”

Jorgensen, who has had health struggles of her own, said that the shared experience of having overcome physical obstacles had bonded her and von Trier.Credit…Christian Geisnæs/Zentropa

To the extent that he ever did, von Trier no longer considers himself the best director in the world. “It’s not like running 100 meters, and then the stopwatch will tell you if you won,” he said. “You can’t compare art, and you can’t compare films.”

But there are some constants. He still hasn’t been to the United States. He still doesn’t fly. (If he allowed himself one flight? “To Iceland, to meet Bjork in person and really talk this through.”) He is still searching for projects now that “Kingdom” is completed, but he said his health would need to improve before he started something new.

In the meantime, he has his routines. Our first conversation took place the day of the Danish general election, and he had just voted — as usual, he said, “for the most-left party I could find.” (In case anyone still wondered whether he is a Nazi.) Jorgensen, who lives near von Trier, mentioned taking regular walks with him, saying it was good for his Parkinson’s.

Then there is one project that he is already shooting — a video series with the working title “Report From Lars.” He wants it to be available free, perhaps on the internet.

In each chapter, von Trier will share insights that he has learned about filmmaking.

“Then people who hate my films can do the opposite,” he said.

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A Los Angeles Hotel with a Theatrical Flair

by SITKI KOVALI
written by SITKI KOVALI

Visit This

A New Boutique Retreat in West Hollywood

The front desk at Palihouse West Hollywood.Credit…Jakob Layman, courtesy of Palisociety

By Sara Tardiff

“We didn’t want to craft a space that takes itself too seriously,” says the Palisociety founder Avi Brosh of his approach to the brand’s newest property, Palihouse West Hollywood. He sought to soften the West Third Street building’s stark exterior with an eclectic, layered interior, taking cues from playful California luxury and the unpredictable charm of a stylish European inn. There is a theatrical feel throughout, starting with the check-in desk, which was designed to look like a stage with its curtains drawn. Each of the 95 rooms is adorned with antique pieces, custom light fixtures and artwork in abundance. And while there’s plenty to see and eat nearby — LACMA, La Brea Tar Pits and Caviar Kaspia are all a short drive — the hotel offers its own ecosystem of entertainment. All-day California fare is served in the lobby lounge, cafe and bar; the Pool Lounge offers complimentary refreshments like lemonade and candy; and on the mezzanine floor, you’ll find a sake bar with Japanese-fusion small plates like pressed sushi and a chicken katsu sandwich — with an accompanying late-night takeout window. Palihouse West Hollywood opens Dec. 1, rooms from $295, palisociety.com.

Covet This

Minjae Kim’s Sculptural, Symbolic Furniture, on View in Miami

Left: the multidisciplinary designer Minjae Kim with one of his moon jar lamps at the Nina Johnson gallery in Miami. Right: Kim’s Rocking Chair 2_cloud made of lacquered Douglas fir and mahogany.Credit…Dominik Tarabański

By Gisela Williams

The Miami-based gallerist Nina Johnson first became acquainted with the multidisciplinary designer Minjae Kim last summer when she saw his work at Marta, a gallery in Los Angeles. She immediately acquired a sculptural floor lamp built of highly lacquered dark Douglas fir with a fiberglass shade. And when she decided to add a library space to her gallery complex in Little Haiti, all designed by Charlap Hyman & Herrero, she knew she wanted to commission Kim to create furniture for it. “I wanted to show an artist whose work would engage with the architecture,” she explains. The New York-based Kim was born in Seoul and his work is often inspired by his multicultural identity; his wood and fiberglass chairs, tables, lamps and cabinets are typically crafted using Korean techniques and are often loaded with references both personal and historic. “The chair that I make can have more meaning than just a place to sit,” Kim says. “I try to hide the fact that the objects I make have a function.” For the opening of Johnson’s library, the 33-year-old designer created an exhibition of unique pieces under the name “IYKYK” — if you know, you know. To Kim it means that “someone with a Korean background will see another layer.” He was inspired by ancient Asian objects that he’s been researching for years, such as a traditional ceremonial chair and a light in the shape of a moon jar. “Being multicultural sometimes means you enter a realm of endless confusion,” says Kim. “But then it does make things that much more interesting.” “Minjae Kim: IYKYK” is on view from Nov. 28 to Jan. 7, 2023, ninajohnson.com.

Buy This

Italian Splatterware That’s Meant for Everyday Use

A footed fruit bowl and tableware by Giulio Lucarini for Ivo Angel.Credit…Charlotte Bland

By Alice Newell-Hanson

At her Italian home in Cortona, a medieval hilltop town in Tuscany, Jennifer Perez Crisanti keeps a large green-flecked terra-cotta bowl in her kitchen sink. The Canadian-born founder of Ivo Angel, an online store selling handmade Italian splatterware, uses it for doing the dishes. Like all good design, splatterware pottery, characterized by its rapidly applied splotches of colorful glaze, is not only beautiful but functional: It’s durable, affordable and easily produced. Popularized by England’s Staffordshire potteries in the 18th century, the craft has long been practiced in Italy, and Perez Crisanti collaborates with a local master artisan, Giulio Lucarini, to make Ivo Angel’s pieces, which range from generously proportioned mixing bowls and sturdy water jugs to a ruffle-edged fruit stand. While working in his studio, Lucarini likes to tell stories about life in Cortona (“some of them are quite scandalous,” Perez Crisanti says), where his family has been based for generations. She hopes the pieces, which are intended for everyday use, will become similarly entwined with their owners’ lives. “It’s important to surround ourselves,” she says, “with things that have a soul.” From $20, ivoangel.com.

Wear This

An Elegant Cross-Continent Fashion Collaboration

Left: the entrance to the Arts & Science women’s store in Aoyama, Tokyo. Right: a Zanini with Arts & Science coat made from Japanese double-faced cashmere.Credit…Left: Marco Zanini. Right: Courtesy of Arts & Science

By Becky Malinsky

The Italian designer Marco Zanini launched his women’s fashion brand Zanini in 2019 to an instantly devoted audience. Prepandemic, his collections were shown during biannual fashion weeks in his treasure-filled Milanese apartment turned salon for clients and buyers who felt like he’d created his precise tailoring and feminine layers just for them. It was this intimacy that made it impossible to keep the small, self-funded brand afloat as Covid restrictions continued on two years later. But during the long days at home, the designer kept in touch with the friends he’d made while producing his line. It was one of these chats with Sonya Park, the founder of the Japanese retail destination Arts & Science, that ignited his most recent project. Park suggested he send his fabrics and patterns to Japan, where she would produce a capsule collection. So started a back-and-forth design project where signature Arts & Science shapes and styles were rendered in the Italian designer’s fabrics — and vice versa — like a Zanini suit cut in a Japanese-woven salt-and-pepper cashmere and a boxy, classic Arts & Science blouse made from a Zanini wool-and-silk checkerboard fabric. “We were like kids playing together in a sandbox,” Park says of the partnership. Zanini is giddy with excitement about the experiment, considering it a “genius” way for him and other small designers to stay connected to their work. “Sonya was an inspiration for me when I launched my business, so this is really a dream come true,” he says. The collection is meant to be the kickoff of a continued collaboration, officially calledZanini with Arts & Science, now available at Arts & Science stores.

Eat This

A Restaurant From the Architects of the Yves Saint Laurent Museum in Marrakesh

Left: a table made of oak at the just-opened Sahbi Sahbi restaurant in Marrakesh, a project from architectural firm Studio KO and French restaurateurs Pierre Pirajean and Helena Paraboschi. Right: all the furniture in the Moroccan restaurant, except for the Isamu Noguchi lamps, is designed by Studio KO and made by artisans in Marrakesh, including the wood-firing bread oven.Credit…Pascal Montary

By Gisela Williams

Not only did the architects Karl Fournier and Olivier Marty design the celebrated Yves Saint Laurent museum in Marrakesh but, almost 20 years ago, the duo behind Studio KO also helped restore the city’s legendary restaurant and meeting place, Grand Café de la Poste. They spent three years transforming the building for the French restaurateur couple Pierre Pirajean and Helena Paraboschi. This month, the same team has come together again to open Sahbi Sahbi, a jewel box of a restaurant in the neighborhood of Gueliz. Inspired by traditional family recipes and built around the concept of a nonhierarchical, women-led kitchen team, Sahbi Sahbi serves Moroccan dishes like cumin-spiked lamb and tagine with chermoula-marinated sea bass. Fournier says that, like the food, the idea behind the design was “to pay tribute to Moroccan crafts.” A variety of textured surfaces — a wall of triangular tiles and carved ceilings — made of natural materials such as brick and cedar surround a central open kitchen, which is meant to act as a stage for the women who run it. “It’s brave and difficult for women in Morocco to work in a place that serves alcohol,” explains Paraboschi. “They have to get several authorizations just to be allowed to be employed here. I have wanted for many years to create an authentic Moroccan restaurant that honored and gave opportunity to women.” The concept appealed so much to the two architects that they asked to be partners in the business, making it their first project as restaurateurs. That’s why it’s called Sahbi Sahbi, which means “soul mates” in Moroccan Arabic. sahbisahbi.com

See This

New York’s Native Art Market, in Person Again

Left: Melvin Platero’s contemporary take on a Navajo squash blossom necklace. Right: Tuscarora raised beadwork by Grant Jonathan.Credit…Left: courtesy of the artist. Right: courtesy of the National Museum of the American Indian

By Kelly Boutsalis

Ahead of the holidays, the National Museum of the American Indian is hosting its 15th annual Native Art Market showcasing artists selected by a committee of curators and cultural specialists. In the Diker Pavilion, located within the grand columned museum at the southern tip of Manhattan, the Tuscarora beadwork artist Grant Jonathan will display his ornaments and the Navajo artist Melvin Platero will bring the contemporary gold and silver jewelry he creates using traditional tufa casting techniques. The group of 39 featured artists also includes the trailblazing designer Dorothy Grant, who pairs traditional Haida art with fashion design, and the renowned Diné inlay jewelry artist Jimmie Harrison. This year marks the annual market’s return to an in-person event after a two-year hiatus because of Covid restrictions. (The museum’s Washington, D.C., counterpart will hold its Native Art Market at the same time, with a different roster of artists.) The museum’s head of public programs, Shawn Termin (Lakota), is thrilled that this will mean more interactions between collectors and artists. “Through the close one-on-one conversations that take place between art market visitors and the artists, people can develop a deeper understanding of Native art and cultures,” she says. Museum members get first pick at a preview reception held on Dec. 2. The National Museum of the American Indian’s Native Art Market is on view Dec. 3 and Dec. 4, americanindian.si.edu.

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Holiday Table Settings From Our Archive

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‘White Noise’ Review: Toxic Events, Airborne and Domestic

by SITKI KOVALI
written by SITKI KOVALI

Late in “White Noise,” after the ecological disaster known as the “airborne toxic event,” on the heels of a professional triumph, and in the throes of marital woe, Jack and Babette engage in a discussion of religion with an acerbic German nun. Instead of piety, she offers a pragmatic, borderline cynical view of how faith operates. If she and her colleagues “did not pretend to believe these things,” she says — referring to “old beliefs” in stuff like heaven and hell — “the world would collapse.”

The nun, played by the formidable Barbara Sukowa, has been carefully airlifted from the pages of Don DeLillo’s 1985 novel into Noah Baumbach’s new film. So have Jack Gladney (Adam Driver) and his wife, Babette (Greta Gerwig), who head up a rambunctious blended family in a Midwestern college town. Jack, known in academia by the decorative initials J.A.K., is the founder of the college’s department of Hitler Studies. Babette teaches life skills to the elderly and infirm.

Back to Sister Hermann Marie: “It is our task in the world to believe things no one else in the world takes seriously,” she says. This may or may not be true of nuns, but it can often feel glumly applicable to writers and filmmakers, especially those who try to chart an independent course. Somebody has to care about art and literature. With respect to DeLillo, Baumbach is very much a believer. His “White Noise” is a credible adaptation and a notably faithful one — what an earlier Baumbach character might call the filet of DeLillo’s bristling, gristly book. Very little has been added, and what’s been taken out will be missed only by fanatics. (A warning and maybe a spoiler for DeLillo-heads: The most photographed barn in America is nowhere to be seen.)

The challenges inherent in the project are bravely faced and honorably met. The novel straddles domestic realism and speculative satire. It’s a campus comedy stapled to a family drama and tied up with a ribbon of allegory. Its contemporary topics — no less relevant now than in the ’80s — include intellectual fashion, pharmacological folly, environmental destruction and rampant consumerism. These collide with eternal themes: envy, love, the fear of death.

Baumbach’s reverence for the material is evident from the trompe l’oeilopening sequence — footage of car crashes from old movies, accompanying a lecture by a professor of popular culture — through the end credits, which turn DeLillo’s vision of supermarket heaven into a bouncy LCD Soundsystem music video. Driver, paunchy and swaybacked, is the very model of a modern middle-aged professor, his intellectual curiosity muffled by a certain complacency. He’s a happy man whose vocation is horror.

In the campus lunchroom, he sits in on bull sessions with colleagues, inhaling gusts of competitive explanation. The movie’s dialogue, compulsively true to DeLillo, bristles with explanations and random facts. Except for the toddler, the kids in the Gladney household — Jack’s son, Heinrich (Sam Nivola), and his daughter, Steffie (May Nivola); Babette’s daughter, Denise (Raffey Cassidy) — bounce around the kitchen like human Google results pages, asking out-of-left-field questions and citing semi-relevant data. Jack and his pal Murray (Don Cheadle), the car-crash scholar looking to expand his academic portfolio, are more inclined to hermeneutics. In one of Baumbach’s bravura set pieces, they improvise a classroom duet for an audience of rapt undergraduates, comparing and contrasting mother-love and the death drive in Hitler and Elvis.

What they have to say sounds pretty dubious — Murray and Jack broadcast the kind of mock-profundity more common among students than faculty — and the question is to what extent that’s deliberate. “White Noise” is a frequently funny movie that is also utterly in earnest.

The kids do say the darnedest things, but they are also vessels of anxiety and avatars of vulnerability. The wounds and salves of family life, in particular the abrasions of matrimony, are Baumbach’s specialty. Jack and Babette’s particular marriage story, which comes into focus in the final third of the movie and is tied up with a noirish pharmaceutical subplot, is the heart of “White Noise” — rawer and sweeter than the surrounding material. Driver and Gerwig give warmth and texture to characters who were, in DeLillo’s pages, a little abstract. Their function was largely to organize the novel’s ideas.

Don Cheadle, left, as Murray. He and Jack (Driver), his friend and colleague, project mock profundity in their studies of Elvis and Hitler.Credit…Wilson Webb/Netflix

The status of those ideas is the biggest problem with Baumbach’s film. He is perhaps too dutiful in transcribing DeLillo’s vision of contemporary life, a landscape of material comfort and intellectual dread, dominated by brand names, untrustworthy information and the looming threat of destruction.

Random insights, like Murray’s observation that the family is the origin of misinformation, are preserved as if they were museum pieces in a carefully curated historical exhibit. Making “White Noise” a period film — the uncannily precise ’80s environment is the work of Jess Gonchor, the production designer, and Ann Roth, who did the costumes — inevitably blunts its impact. Things that might have made readers squirm in the 1980s are shrouded in nostalgia in 2022. It’s hard to feel existential terror when you’re ogling the A.&P. supermarket, the landline phones, the printed classified ads and the boat-shaped rear-wheel-drive station wagons.

Within this world, you can see premonitions of our own, most notably in an evacuation shelter where anxious people create in effect an IRL prototype of Twitter, gathering around unverified experts (including Jack’s son, Heinrich) and parroting their wisdom. Baumbach, working on a larger scale than he has before, pulls off a few fine cinematic coups, one of them involving that station wagon fording a swollen stream.

But there is something detached about the film, a succession of moods and notions that are often quite interesting but that never entirely cohere. “White Noise” is an expression of sincere and admirable faith. I just wish I could believe in it.

White Noise
Rated R. The fear of death. Running time: 2 hours 16 minutes. In theaters.

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‘Devotion’ Review: An Airman in Reflection

by SITKI KOVALI
written by SITKI KOVALI

“Devotion,” directed by J.D. Dillard, recounts the landmark career of Ensign Jesse L. Brown, the son of a Mississippi sharecropper who became the U.S. Navy’s first Black aviator in 1948, and, two years later, its first Black officer to die in the Korean War. Brown’s wingman, a wealthy white United States Naval Academy graduate named Thomas J. Hudner Jr., risked his own life in an attempt to save Brown, and was subsequently awarded the Medal of Honor.

Their story could be simplified into a sentimental tale of colorblind brotherhood. (Adam Makos’s 2015 nonfiction book of the same name quotes a contemporary journalist as guilelessly cheering, “The key to Jesse’s popularity was his assumption that no race problem existed and, as a result, none did.”) Instead, Dillard and the screenwriters Jake Crane and Jonathan A.H. Stewart dig deeper into Brown’s pat quotes to the press, revealing a man who didn’t share his anguish with outsiders — a reticence their Brown, played at a lidded simmer by Jonathan Majors, seems to feel toward the very movie he’s in.

The goal is to scrub the symbolism off Brown and restore him to humanity: a 24-year-old striver, husband and father who loathes being singled out as a special case. His odd couple dynamic with the easy-grinning Hudner (Glen Powell) is the steadiest narrative thrust in a film that tends to drift from one set piece to another, much like the military itself in this sliver of years between the end of World War II and the rise of the Cold War era. Here, Brown and Hudner’s squad might be stationed in the Mediterranean to scare off Soviet ships and wake up from an evening spent in Cannes flirting with a teenage Elizabeth Taylor — a true story, modestly embellished — to learn they’re abruptly pivoting to snowy Sinuiju.

Dillard’s curiosity about this often-overlooked time of transition adds some shading to stretches that otherwise feel like a “Top Gun” prequel with the sleek jets swapped out for ungainly gull-wing Corsair propeller planes, heavy beasts that resemble a rockhopper penguin slumped over at the end of a saloon. Dillard and the cinematographer, Erik Messerschmidt, allow a scene or two of crowd-pleasing spectacle, say a dogfight with an enemy MIG, or a shot of ocean surf reflected in the steel belly of a skimming aircraft. But despite its emotional score, the film is more interested in unheroic details: insults ignored, insignia easily discarded, platitudes that dissipate in the air. It refuses to build to the kind of operatic weepie Brown himself wouldn’t respect. As an intellectual dismantling of white savior narratives, “Devotion” is smartly done; as an enjoyable heartwarmer to watch with your uncle, it’s stiff when it should soar.

Still, Majors — one of our most sincere actors — does sob early and often, particularly in a searing moment in front of a mirror when he stares directly at the lens and spits racist insults at his own reflection as though inuring himself to poison. This choice to keep his pain private becomes a window into how Brown wanted to be viewed in life and death: not as a victim in need of rescue, but as his own man.

Devotion
Rated PG-13 for strong language, smoking and scenes of war. Running time: 2 hours 18 minutes. In theaters.

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Business

Why the N.F.L.’s Big Streaming Deal Is Going Into Overtime

by SITKI KOVALI
written by SITKI KOVALI

Roger Goodell, the National Football League’s commissioner, flew to Sun Valley, Idaho, this summer for Allen & Company’s annual media conference, confident that the N.F.L. was close to announcing its latest blockbuster TV rights deal.

“We will probably have some decision by the fall,” he told CNBC at the time.

But nearly five months later, the league is still looking for a technology or media company willing to replace DirecTV as the rights holder for Sunday Ticket, which allows fans to watch every N.F.L. game, not just those broadcast in their region. The negotiations are now expected to extend into next year, according to five people familiar with the talks.

The Sunday Ticket negotiations have been closely watched by analysts and executives. Live sports, particularly N.F.L. games, are one of the last remaining staples of traditional television. Who the winning bidder is, how much it pays and how the deal is structured will have seismic implications for the sports, media and technology industries.

Bidding for Sunday Ticket’s valuable package of games could set a precedent for how much tech firms like Apple and Google are willing to pay to take viewers from traditional TV companies, which still rely on cable subscription fees and advertising to stay afloat.

The competitive landscape for Sunday Ticket has shifted as the talks have dragged on, the people familiar with the talks said. Sports and media executives have long considered Apple to be the front-runner, with some involved in the bidding process saying they thought the tech giant had reached an agreement.

Roger Goodell, the league’s commissioner, has said he’s confident that it will find a media partner.Credit…Kirby Lee/USA Today Sports, via Reuters

But in the absence of a deal, Google has stepped up its pursuit, aiming to win the package for YouTube TV, the company’s streaming-cable service, four of these people said. Other interested bidders include Amazon and Disney’s ESPN.

More on Big Tech

  • Microsoft: The company’s $69 billion deal for Activision Blizzard, which rests on winning the approval by 16 governments, has become a test for whether tech giants can buy companies amid a backlash.
  • Apple: Apple’s largest iPhone factory, in the city of Zhengzhou, China, is dealing with a shortage of workers. Now, that plant is getting help from an unlikely source: the Chinese government.
  • Amazon: The company appears set to lay off approximately 10,000 people in corporate and technology jobs, in what would be the largest cuts in the company’s history.
  • Meta: The parent of Facebook said it was laying off more than 11,000 people, or about 13 percent of its work force

Robert Kyncl, YouTube’s chief business officer, has played a key role in Google’s pursuit. Though he will take a new job early next year as chief executive of Warner Music Group, Mr. Kyncl has committed to working with YouTube to see the deal through, three people familiar with his priorities said. He has a relationship with Brian Rolapp, the N.F.L.’s chief business officer, who worked with Mr. Knycl during Google’s unsuccessful bid for Sunday Ticket in 2013.

The league’s negotiations with Apple, Google and others have become protracted because it is trying to bundle the package of out-of-market Sunday N.F.L. games with other media assets, including NFL Network and the NFL RedZone channel, according to these people.

Last year, the N.F.L. hired Goldman Sachs to help it explore selling a stake those media businesses. The decision was partly driven by the league’s the recognition that Sunday Ticket competes for subscribers with the RedZone channel, which jumps back and forth among live Sunday football games as teams get close to scoring touchdowns.

By seeking investors in that channel and other media businesses, the N.F.L. must negotiate how to structure a joint venture with an investment partner that would likely want a voice in the co-owned company’s operating structure, these people said.

One media executive who has negotiated with both Apple and the N.F.L. cited another reason for the monthslong impasse: Both sides are used to getting their way in negotiations.

The N.F.L.,Apple, Amazon and ESPNdeclined to comment. Google didn’t immediately have comment.

As negotiations have dragged on, several bidders have emerged to secure the TV rights deal.Credit…David Richard/Associated Press

The league is asking for more than $2.5 billion annually, a $1 billion increase from the current eight-year deal, which expires at the end of this season. It wants a long-term partner for the rights, having locked up its marquee packages last year for games on Thursdays, Sundays and Mondays with 11-year agreements.

The slowing economy could create another challenge for the N.F.L. as it tries to close a deal that could top $10 billion over its life. Tech and media companies alike are under pressure from Wall Street and investors to cut staff and control spending, a reversal after years of lavish spending.

The downturn has helped sour some Wall Street analysts on Amazon’s $1 billion-a-year deal for “Thursday Night Football.” Tom Forte, an analyst with D.A. Davidson, an investment bank, said he was skeptical that the company would bring in enough new Amazon Prime members or advertising revenue to cover its costs. He added that Amazon’s struggle to make money meant it was highly unlikely to make a serious bid for Sunday Ticket.

“At a time when technology companies are tightening their belts, it would be shocking to see Amazon spend more for N.F.L. rights given the challenges they have already had,” Mr. Forte said.

Robert Kyncl, chief business officer of Google’s YouTube, has expressed interest in working with the N.F.L.Credit…Danny Moloshok/Associated Press

There’s similar skepticism about the viability of a bid from ESPN. Rich Greenfield, an analyst at LightShed Partners, said Robert Iger’s return as chief executive made Disney, which owns 80 percent of ESPN, more likely to cut costs at ESPN or sell it. He cited Mr. Iger’s remarks at a conference hosted by Vox Media in September, when he said he was “not bullish” on certain traditional media businesses.

Google has also faced pressure to cut costs and thin its ranks. After reporting in October that sales had slowed on YouTube and search, Google’s executives committed to cut hiring in half and reduce spending.

But Mr. Kyncl has said cutting a deal for Sunday Ticket wouldn’t be subject to the company’s belt-tightening, said two people familiar with his thinking. He has said it would be a good investment because of the YouTube TV subscribers it would deliver, which could rival the estimated two million subscribers whom DirecTV credits to its current Sunday Ticket deal.

Apple has avoided a slowdown in its business for much of the year, but an outbreak of Covid-19 at its largest iPhone factory in China derailed production and could reduce its sales over the Christmas holidays. Still, Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, has said he believes in investing through a downturn, and a deal with the N.F.L. for a decade would fit that philosophy.

The N.F.L. aggressively pursued Apple as a Sunday Ticket partner earlier this year in part because it didn’t have any major business relationships with the tech giant, three people familiar with the talks said. But the urgency cooled after the league struck a deal this fall to make Apple the presenting sponsor of the Super Bowl halftime show.

Brian Rolapp, chief operating officer of NFL Media, has led the league’s negotiations.Credit…Brendan McDermid/Reuters

As Sunday Ticket talks languished, the N.F.L. focused on a separate search for an independent studio that could help produce and distribute football-related movies alongside the league. NFL Films, which makes documentaries and other shows, put out a proposal that drew interest from bidders including Sony, A24, North Road and Skydance, the studio that co-produced “Top Gun: Maverick,” according to two people familiar with the search.

Mr. Rolapp, who led negotiations for the league, met with bidders in recent months and settled on Skydance Sports, which will team up with the N.F.L. to develop and distribute film and TV projects. One of the N.F.L.’s biggest objectives is marketing the sport by reaching younger audiences and viewers outside the United States.

Work on the deal shifted the league’s focus away from Sunday Ticket talks, some of these people said. Only a few top N.F.L. executives are involved in media negotiations, making it difficult for the league to fully engage in numerous simultaneous negotiations. Now that Skydance has been selected, the league is expected to pick back up the Sunday Ticket talks.

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