The Old Man IV Season 1 Episode 4 Editor’s Rating 3 stars *** «Previous Next» « PreviousEpisode NextEpisode » The Old Man IV Season 1 Episode 4 Editor’s Rating 3 stars *** «Previous Next» « PreviousEpisode NextEpisode » It’s a shame The Old Man continues to suffer from Bloated Male-Dominated Exposition Syndrome because the fourth episode is where the series’s female characters shift from quiet supporting participants to emboldened main players.

Toda Mariko, a noblewoman burdened with family shame, spends much of FX’s Shōgun yearning for death. In “Crimson Sky,” the penultimate episode of the show set during the climax of Japan’s Sengoku Jidai — the Era of the Country at War — Mariko is finally granted her wish. When Lord Ishido sends men to capture her alive, Mariko stands in front of the explosion that ends her life and possibly Ishido’s reputation.

In The Horror of Dolores Roach, Gimlet’s new fiction podcast out just in time for Halloween, Dolores returns home from a 16-year prison stint for pot possession to find her old neighborhood, Washington Heights, unrecognizable. A Chase Bank has replaced the diner, a T-Mobile has taken over the little family-run bakery. “There’s a Planet fuckin’ Fitness,” Dolores says, horrified. The only piece of the old neighborhood that remains is Empanada Loca, run by an old buddy of hers, but business is failing — until Dolores sets up a massage parlor in the basement and has an unfortunate encounter with the sleazy landlord trying to evict them, setting into motion a macabre retelling of Sweeney Todd where cannibalism is a metaphor for gentrification.

Benny Safdie in Oppenheimer. In prerelease interviews and elsewhere, Christopher Nolan has talked about how shaken early viewers were by the ending of Oppenheimer. To some, these comments may have seemed like a bit of showmanship on the director’s part. But he wasn’t making it up, either. When I first saw Oppenheimer, I couldn’t leave the theater afterward for a while; I was frozen in my seat, unable to talk or think.

The Valley The Invite Fight Season 1 Episode 8 Editor’s Rating 2 stars ** «Previous Next» « PreviousEpisode NextEpisode » The Valley The Invite Fight Season 1 Episode 8 Editor’s Rating 2 stars ** «Previous Next» « PreviousEpisode NextEpisode » While this may be the first season of The Valley, it is not the first reality-television rodeo for many of these players, which is why I’m a little bit mystified why the whole episode was taken up with the most rudimentary fight in all of the reality-television arts and sciences: who was invited to what.

Reese Witherspoon, Wild, 2014. Midway on her life’s journey, Cheryl Strayed found herself in dark woods. Or a quarter-way, really: At the age of 26, motherless, divorced, dabbling in heroin, adrift from her stepfather and siblings and her own former self, Strayed made her way to California, hoisted a backpack, and set off to hike 1,100 miles in the wilderness, from the Mojave Desert to a place on the Oregon-Washington border called Bridge of the Gods.

That’s a comet? How can it be that a show based on the most serious novel of all time is both the most gorgeous new musical in town and, for much of its length, the silliest? That may be a self-answering question. Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812, which opens on Broadway tonight, is so unlikely a mainstream entertainment that its creative team apparently felt compelled, while adapting it to ever larger venues since its 2012 Ars Nova debut, to conceal its essential nature in ever more effective disguises.

PART I: THE MUSEUM AS FAIRY TALE I ’ve spent much of my life in and in love with museums. When I was 10 years old, there was no mention of art in my home. But then my mother began driving me from the suburbs to the Art Institute of Chicago. There, she looked at art on her own for hours, leaving me to do the same. At the time, I liked being alone but hated museums.

More than a month after becoming the celebrity poster children for the coronavirus, Tom Hanks and his wife, Rita Wilson, hope something good can come from all of the fatigue, aches, and “blahs” they had to suffer through. Speaking with NPR’s Wait Wait … Don’t Tell Me! podcast over the weekend, Hanks revealed that the couple will be going on a blood- and plasma-donation spree after receiving confirmation that they are indeed carrying antibodies for the coronavirus.

Opera controversies seem to take place in a blacked-out snow globe: So far, only those who actually saw Luc Bondy’s production of Tosca live at the Metropolitan Opera got to be outraged — or to be outraged at the outrage. Everyone else had to make what they could of the descriptions of Scarpia getting physical with a statue of the Virgin Mary, and other tasteful stage business. Fortunately, there’s PBS.