review

Maria Reva creates beautiful, purposeful chaos. Informed by deep personal loss, her startling metafictional debut novel, “Endling,” is a forceful mashup of storytelling modes that call attention to its interplay of reality and fiction — a Ukrainian tragicomedy of errors colliding with social commentary about the Russian invasion.

A poorly planned crime serves as the anchor. “Endling” throws three strangers involved with Ukraine’s for-profit international matchmaking market together for a quixotic kidnapping caper in a nation on the brink of war. There’s a twisted, postmodern “Canterbury Tales”-like quality to these proceedings: Like medieval pilgrims, its central characters are each on a journey they hope will change their lives. And everyone is suffering some level of delusion.

If “Endling” has a main character, it’s the woman whose mission is to save the nation’s endangered snails; another key player is a lone wolf terrorist who hopes her political orchestrations will spark a family reunion. Then there’s the lonely, disaffected expatriate bachelor on the hunt for a quiet, traditional wife. Through their perspectives, black humor flows freely, as the motivations and experiences that brought this motley crew together rise to the surface.

Context is crucial in “Endling.” These characters cross paths early in 2022, when mass violence threatens to overwhelm every other concern. But despite the amassing of Russian troops on the border, the military invasion of Ukraine seems so surreal that no one knows what to believe or how much to fear. So these quests march on even as the crack of explosions grows louder.

The stories that emerge about our three key players are evocative, provocative and absurd — a contrast to looming darkness. Between those narratives, there are commentaries about the history and politics of Ukraine and on publishing and writing about Ukraine, plus the author’s family and its plight at the time of the book’s writing. As Reva, a native of Ukraine, writes in an early, epistolary section, in response to a magazine editor’s critique of the irreverence of her solicited essay about the war: “You’d asked for the type of reporting/response that would differ from that of a non-Ukrainian. In Ukraine, dark humor dates back to the Soviet days, giving people who live in uncontrollable circumstances a sense of power. If you can laugh about a dark reality, you rise above it, etc.”

No story better exemplifies that ethos than that of the teenage fake bride turned kidnapper who aches for her mother. Young, beautiful Nastia (a.k.a. Anastasia) — just 18 years old and six months past high school graduation — brings the group together. Ostensibly to stop the exploitation of women, this daughter of a fierce feminist activist who has long protested the tourist marriage market resolves to make an unforgettable public statement by kidnapping 100 male clients of the matchmaking service “Romeo and Yulia” at the start of one of its romance tours. Though the stunt is nominally aimed at exposing and ending degrading matchmaking practices, what Nastia really yearns for is her missing parent’s attention. When Nastia decides that a mobile trailer van in the guise of an escape room would be the perfect means of the men’s abduction, she begs Yeva, a fellow bride in possession of an RV, to rent it to her.

Like Nastia, Yeva is a “bride” with an agenda. A scientist who’s lost her grant funding, Yeva uses the marriage mart grift to sustain her life’s work. Her story exemplifies the mercenary nature of the international marriage market. While Romeo and Yulia’s “brides,” as the women are called, aren’t paid a salary, they regularly receive gifts from suitors. In exchange for allowing the agency to use her as “shimmering bait” on the website, women like Yeva “could also return tour after tour and, without bending any rules, make decent money. In fact, the agency endorsed the practice: any gifts ordered by bachelors through the agency — gym membership, cooking class, customizable charm bracelet — could be redeemed by the brides for cash from the agency office.”

Yeva’s story gives the novel a melancholy moral center. And it’s from Yeva’s quest that the book derives its title: An “endling” is the last individual in a dying species, the kind she is dedicated to protecting. After losing access to institutional support, Yeva equipped the trailer as a roaming laboratory and storage site where (at the peak) she sustained over 270 species of rare gastropods. Though she prefers mollusks to men, it’s Yeva who insists on reducing the kidnapping target from 100 to 12, a number that the trailer could humanely accommodate.

Pasha, one of the men Nastia lures to the trailer, has his own ambitions. Born in Ukraine and raised in Canada, Pasha’s secret is that he doesn’t plan to return to the West with his bride like the other clients. Instead, he fantasizes about resettling in the Ukraine and forging a life that might command the respect he craves from his parents. Pasha is the sympathetic face of Western men beguiled by nostalgia for “traditional” wives unsullied by feminism and high expectations. His motives are sincere even if his relationship with women and his family might be better served through therapy.

“Endling” isn’t an easy read, but it is brilliant and heart-stopping. Authorial interludes can feel like interruptions, but by breaking the fourth wall, Reva forces us to pay attention to the ongoing devastation behind the narrative while unpacking the compromises of storytelling. Plus, Yeva, Nastia and Pasha and the merchants of romance spin their own fictions: They have trouble telling the difference between truth and make-believe even as the sounds of war grow near and even when bullets penetrate flesh.

This building up and breaking down of artifice forces reflection on how we use fiction to explore and bend reality while undermining the comforts of distance. As the author confesses, “I need to keep fact and fiction straight, but they keep blurring together.”

Bell is a critic and media researcher exploring culture, politics and identity in art.

With its sale to Skydance Media still beyond its reach, Paramount Global has nominated three new directors to bolster its small board, which has been racked with drama and churn since early last year.

The debt-laden New York-based company currently has only five board members, including controlling shareholder Shari Redstone, who serves as chairwoman. The Redstone family holds nearly 77% of Paramount’s voting shares, giving the heiress tremendous sway.

In a proxy filing Monday, Paramount asked shareholders to elect seven directors at its July 2 annual meeting. The slate includes Redstone and three recruits: attorney Mary Boies (a member of the firm led by her husband David Boies); Silicon Valley venture capital executive Charles E. Ryan ; and former Massachusetts trial court judge Roanne Sragow Licht.

In addition to Redstone, three longtime board members — Linda M. Griego, Susan Schuman and Barbara M. Byrne — will stand for reelection.

Board member Judith A. McHale has decided to step down.

The company has grappled with a series of setbacks since it announced its sale to tech scion David Ellison’s Skydance Media last July.

The company took a $6-billion write-down on its cable television networks business, in yet another sign that Hollywood is reckoning with the ongoing deterioration of the traditional television business.

Leading independent director Charles Phillips left the board in October. His exit came six months after three other directors — Rob Klieger, Nicole Seligman and Dawn Ostroff — abruptly departed as the panel was struggling over terms of Redstone’s planned Paramount sale.

In late October, President Trump filed a lawsuit in Texas over his dismay with edits of a “60 Minutes” interview of then-Vice President Kamala Harris in the closing weeks of the election. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, a Trump appointee, opened an inquiry to determine whether the edits rose to the level of news distortion.

Trump doubled the amount of damages he was seeking to $20 billion.

Paramount has been defending against the lawsuit. In a court filing last week, Trump’s lawyers asserted the president suffered “mental anguish” due to the “60 Minutes” broadcast.

Redstone’s desire to settle Trump’s suit over the “60 Minutes” edits has carved deep divides within the company.

1st Amendment experts have called Trump’s lawsuit frivolous; CBS News executives and other journalists believe it is a shakedown to exploit the vulnerable company that is desperate to have the FCC approve the sale to Skydance.

The ruckus over the edits contributed to the departure of two top CBS News executives. Wendy McMahon, the president of CBS News and Stations, stepped down under pressure last month. In April, “60 Minutes” executive producer Bill Owens departed.

Redstone has expressed her dissatisfaction with CBS News’ coverage of the Israel-Hamas war.

Last month, three Democrat U.S. senators warned Redstone that the company could face allegations of bribery if they write a big check to mollify Trump in an effort to facilitate the FCC’s review of the Skydance takeover. The Wall Street Journal has reported that Paramount offered Trump $15 million to make the lawsuit go away, but he declined.

It’s been nearly 11 months since Paramount agreed to be sold to Skydance in an $8-billion deal that would inject $1.5 billion in capital into Paramount’s battered balance sheet.

Paramount has not revised its guidance on when it expects the deal to close — but the contractual deadline is early October.

As part of its proxy statement, the company again detailed the compensation packages — totaling $148 million to the top three executives and ousted Chief Executive Bob Bakish, who received compensation valued at $87 million. Co-CEO George Cheeks was paid $22.2 million. His counterparts Brian Robbins and Chris McCarthy were paid $19.6 million and $19.5 million, respectively, according to the filing.

Mason Daunt said he would pick up the flowers himself. Like Mrs. Dalloway, he spends the day leading up to his big party — in his case a baby shower in Los Angeles — reminiscing and worrying. Unlike Virginia Woolf’s titular heroine, though, Mason is distracted from his errands by a billionaire with a penis statue emergency, a session with a wolfman dom in his favorite virtual reality dungeon and, as if that weren’t enough, a minor zombie apocalypse.

Jonathan Parks-Ramage knows exactly what he’s doing in evoking bourgeoisie Clarissa Dalloway’s routine in the opening section of his new novel, “It’s Not the End of the World.” Woolf’s most famous book is about an upper-class woman’s busy day, sure, but it’s also about the ways in which she is caged by the very expectations that come with her privilege, and it’s counterbalanced by the cultural uneasiness following World War I and the delusions and ultimate suicide of the novel’s other main character, PTSD-ridden Septimus Smith. Parks-Ramage takes the idea of a wealthy, sometimes frivolous main character getting ready for a party and dials it up to 11. But then, in an ambitious move that brings a delightful element of camp to the novel, he abandons that relatively safe and simple premise in favor of an exercise in maximalism. Which is to say that his plot goes off the rails — and it works.

Over the course of the first third or so of “It’s Not the End of the World,” readers learn about Mason Daunt and his world. It’s 2044, Mason is a white gay artist married to Yunho Kim, a formerly successful Korean American screenwriter recently blacklisted after being questioned by the House Anti-American Speech Committee, and the two are having a baby via a surrogate, Astrid. Money is never far from Mason’s mind, and he’s constantly aware of how much he and Yunho are spending: $10,000 a month for Astrid and her girlfriend Claudia’s L.A. rental; $100,000 on the baby shower, including a WeatherMod fee to ensure that the cloud seeding technology company will get rid of the pesky wildfire smoke and leave Mason and Yunho’s backyard to bask in L.A.’s promised sunshine.

Mason has everything, it seems: a loving and virile husband, a mansion, a closeted gay billionaire buying up his morally vacant art, and the latest iOSCerebrum installed in his brain (which, in order to make the virtual BDSM dungeon he goes to authentic, is “synced with his state-of-the-art ThrashJacketTM to ensure authentic haptic violence”). What could go wrong?

Only everything, of course. As the day’s events unfold, interrupted by flashbacks of the 14 months leading up to it, a mysterious pink fog begins to appear around L.A. No one knows what it is, but wherever it descends, people seem to lose their minds. By the time Mason gets home, he’s witnessed a brutal amount of violence perpetrated by those who’ve inhaled the pink fog. Parks-Ramage delights in the gory details, the intestines and missing flesh and dangling jawbones, bringing Mason up close and personal with the ugliness that he is, otherwise, guiltily but only intellectually aware of (Mason’s sessions with Vex, his dom, involve being shamed for his wealth and his part in deepening inequality amid worsening climate change). If you’ve seen “Sinners,” and enjoyed the campiness of its vampires, you’ll have fun with the not-technically-but-functionally zombies Parks-Ramage deploys in this section of the book.

Much like the worst kind of gender reveal party, Mason and Yunho’s baby shower has consequences. Mason, shockingly still alive following the shower’s events, is charged with murder. Yunho, Astrid, her baby and Claudia have all disappeared from Mason’s life, although they are, unbeknownst to him, living in one of his mansions in Montana, and have started a utopian anarchist commune with three dozen or so people. Most of the sections that take place on the ranch closely adhere to the perspective of 4-year-old Gabriel, the child of Mason and Yunho’s good friends and business partners. At first Gabriel is very happy on the ranch, living with their care pod, but as tensions are ratcheted up with a local militia, they’re increasingly exposed to violence and trauma.

Parks-Ramage doesn’t sugarcoat how bad things could get and, in fact, leans into the absurdities of what the world might look like if climate change continues unabated, American democracy crumbles even further and billionaires meddling in government gain more legitimacy (a basically immortal Peter Thiel turns up in the novel’s last section).

“It’s Not the End of the World” is a wild ride of a novel. Its ridiculous moments are clearly deliberate, and it’s not subtle — but as Mason used to think in college when his classmates critiqued his artwork for being too on the nose, “Well, the world was on fire so what was the point of being elliptical and academic?” Sometimes you have to laugh so you won’t cry — and as is usually the case with camp, there is something true and painful running beneath the humor.

In this case, it’s the question of children: Why do we have them? Are they our hope for the future or the reason we maintain an illusion of hope? Are they merely a way to give ourselves a pretense of immortality? Parks-Ramage doesn’t come to a specific conclusion, and although some of his more righteous characters seem to be firmly on the reproduction-is-immoral side, his depiction of Gabriel’s childlike wonder and imagination is tender and loving. It’s a good reminder that, no matter how awful or hopeless things get, we can still imagine dragons.

Masad, a books and culture critic, is the author of the novel “All My Mother’s Lovers” and the forthcoming novel “Beings.”

At the beginning of “Mountainhead,” written and directed by Jesse Armstrong of “Succession” fame and premiering Saturday on HBO, three multibillionaire tech bros make their way by private plane, helicopter and SUV caravan to join a fourth in a big modernist house on an isolated, snowy mountaintop for a weekend of poker and drugs — “no deals, no meals, no high heels.” One might wish for an avalanche, were there anything higher to fall on them.

Venis (Cory Michael Smith), the world’s richest man — imagine Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg put in a blender, as perhaps you have — commands a social media site with, wait for it, four billion subscribers, and has just released new “content tools” that allow for super high-res “unfalsifiable deep fakes.” As a result, the sectarian world is going up in flames. Jeff (Ramy Youssef), a rival who had poached members of Venis’ team, has an AI algorithm capable of filtering out the bad information which Venis, closing the digital barn door after the cow is out, wants to acquire; but Jeff, for reasons of profit, power and/or ego, is not going to let it go.

Randall (Steve Carell), their gray-haired guru — they call him “Papa Bear,” though Jeff also dubs him “Dark Money Gandalf” — controls a lot of international infrastructure, including military. Preoccupied with his mortality — told by his latest oncologist that his cancer is incurable, he responds, “You are not a very intelligent person” — he’s hoping to upload his consciousness to the grid, a possibility Venis assures him is only five years off as long as he can get his hands on Jeff’s AI. The relatively inoffensive Hugo (Jason Schwartzman), whose house it is, hopes to expand the meditation app he created, into a lifestyle super app — offering “posture correction, therapy and a brand new color” — with his friends’ investment of “a b-nut,” i.e., a billion dollars. They call him “Souper,” for “soup kitchen,” because he is worth only $521 million. He’s the runt of the litter, and the comedy relief.

Jason Schwartzman plays Hugo, only worth half a million, who is the comedic relief in “Mountainhead.”

(Macall Polay / HBO)

For no given reason, they call themselves the Brewsters — perhaps just so they can crow “cock-a-doodle-brew.” They are full of themselves — “The great thing about me,” says Randall, “is that I know everyone and do everything” — and basically insecure.

They rewrite their fundamental nihilism into the belief that their business is good for mankind, whatever the actual human cost. “You’re always going to get some people dead,” Randall says. “Nothing means anything,” Venis says, “and everything’s funny and cool.” (But he does miss his mother and, in a particularly creepy interlude, his baby is brought up the mountain for an uncomfortable minute.) In the only scene to take them out of the house, the four travel to the crest of a mountain, where Hugo writes each man’s net worth in lipstick on his chest, they don hierarchical headgear and shout, “Mountain god accelerator legacy manifestation!” into the valley below, each adding a wish. It is, seemingly, something they have done before.

Randall name-checks philosophers — Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, Plato, Marcus Aurelius — he misunderstands to his advantage and drops references to the Catiline Conspiracy and the Battle of Actium to make base actions sound important and dignified. He calls the president a “simpleton” — one assumes Armstrong is reflecting on the current one — but for all their power, money and influence, they all lack wisdom. And if recent years have taught us anything, it’s that these things are not mutually exclusive.

Venis thinks the violence engulfing the globe, which cannot touch him, may prove cathartic; Randall is “excited about these atrocities.” They discuss taking over “failing nations” to “show them how it’s done.” (In perhaps the film’s funniest line, Hugo, who has been working on his house, muses, “I don’t know if I want to run Argentina on my own — not on the back of a major construction project.”) They trade in gobbledygook phrases like “AI dooming and decelerationist alarmism,” “compound distillation effect” and “bootstrap to a corporate monarchy, cyber-state it to the singularity, eat the chaos,” which for all I know is just Armstrong quoting things people of this sort have actually said. It seems possible.

As the only one with a sense of humor and a semblance of perspective, Jeff is the most sympathetic of this toxic crew. He tracks the worsening world situation with some empathetic concern, but even though he holds the key to end the madness, he does not seem in a hurry to turn it. (Mostly he is concerned with his girlfriend, who is in Mexico, not so much because of the unrest, but because he fears she’s having sex.) Still, he stands a little apart, to his peril.

The first half of the film proceeds essentially as a play for four characters. Apart from Hugo’s asking for “help with the cold cuts” or inquiring whether everyone’s cool with reusing plates, there is a scarcely a line in which people talk like people; it is all theatrical declaration. To some extent it fits the coldness of the quartet — they hug and hoot and occasionally express a droplet of emotion, but the friendship on which they insist is competitive, transactional and illusory. They are not good company, but for those of us less than impressed by the whole “move fast and break things” thing, or not willing to bow down before ChatGPT and OpenAI or the actual tech billionaires deforming the world, there is some fun in watching them fall apart. In some ways, “Mountainhead” (rhymes with “Fountainhead”) feels as much a public service as an entertainment. So thanks for that, Jesse Armstrong.

When, in the farcical, action-oriented second half, some attempt to execute a … plot, they bumble and argue and push each other to the front. It is an old kind of movie comedy, and works pretty much as intended.

“Jane Austen Wrecked My Life” is a catchy, provocative title for writer-director Laura Piani’s debut feature, but it is a bit of a misnomer. Her heroine, Agathe (Camille Rutherford), may harbor that fear deep inside, but it’s never one she speaks aloud. A lonely clerk working at the famed Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris, she gets lost in the love notes left on the store’s mirror and complains to her best friend and coworker Felix (Pablo Pauly) that she was born in the wrong century, unwilling to engage in casual “digital” connection. Highly imaginative, Agathe perhaps believes she’s alone because she won’t settle for anything less than a Darcy.

Good thing, then, that Felix, posing as her agent, sends off a few chapters of her fantasy-induced writing to the Jane Austen Residency. And who should pick up Agathe from the ferry but a handsome, prickly Englishman, Oliver (Charlie Anson), the great-great-great-great-grandnephew of Ms. Austen herself. She can’t stand him. It’s perfect.

“Jane Austen Wrecked My Life” is the kind of warm romance that will make any bookish dreamer swoon, as a thoroughly modern woman with old-fashioned ideas about love experiences her own Austenesque tumble. While Agathe initially identifies with the wilting old maid Anne from “Persuasion,” her shyly budding connection with Oliver is more Elizabeth Bennet in “Pride and Prejudice.” A pastoral English estate is the ideal setting for such a dilemma.

The casting and performances are excellent for this contemporary, meta update: Rutherford is elegant but often awkward and fumbling as Agathe, while Anson conveys Oliver’s passionate yearning behind his reserved, wounded exterior with just enough Hugh Grantian befuddlement. Pauly plays the impulsive charlatan with an irrepressible charm.

But it isn’t just the men that have Agathe in a tizzy. The film is equally as romantic about literature, writing and poetry as it is about such mundane issues as matters of the flesh. A lover of books, Agathe strives to be a writer but believes she isn’t one because of her pesky writer’s block. It’s actually a dam against the flow of feelings — past traumas and heartbreaks — that she attempts to keep at bay. It’s through writing that Agathe is able to crack her heart open, to share herself and to welcome in new opportunities.

“Writing is like ivy,” Oliver tells Agathe. “It needs ruins to exist.” It’s an assurance that her past hasn’t broken her but has given her the necessary structure to let the words grow. The way the characters talk about what literature means to them — and what it means to put words down — will seduce the writerly among the viewers, these discussions even more enchanting than any declarations of love or ardent admiration.

If you’ve read any Austen (or watched any of the films made from her novels), Piani’s movie will be pleasantly predictable in its outcome, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an enjoyable journey. It’s our expectations, both met and upended, that give the film its appealing cadence. It never lingers too long and is just sweet enough in its displays to avoid any saccharine aftertaste or eye-rolling sentiment.

There’s a salve-like quality to “Jane Austen Wrecked My Life,” a balm for any battered romantic’s soul. It may be utter fantasy, but it’s the kind of escape you’ll want to revisit again and again, like a favorite Austen novel. And, as it turns out, our main character is wrong. Jane Austen didn’t wreck her life, rather, she opened it up to the possibilities that were right in front of her.

Katie Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.

A gritty, rock-inflected comedy using the nocturnal peculiarities of Mumbai slum life as a fertile (if at times fetid) palette, British-raised Karan Kandhari’s “Sister Midnight,” about a restless young housewife’s urban malaise, easily holds your attention for long stretches when seemingly little happens, but everything feels charged.

Don’t mistake this stylish feature debut for a misery wallow, however, or some poetic character study. It’s tantalizingly oddball and indelicate: a combined daymare and night odyssey that scratches until a feral hidden strength is revealed in the misfit main character, captivatingly played by Indian star Radhika Apte.

Though the movie ultimately can’t square its episodic unpredictability with the bubbling feminist-outlaw energy at its core — not to mention the comic-book twist that shakes it all up halfway through — that’s less a bug than a feature. Like a movie DJ, Kandhari is flexing a pulpy mood of big-city dislocation, building a trippy, jarring and blackly funny experience out of a city’s stray colors, sounds and personalities.

Arriving at their one-room hovel in the dead of night, arranged-marriage newlyweds and rural transplants Uma (Apte) and Gopal (Ashok Pathak) look more like thrown-together prison cellmates adjusting to a warden’s rules than a romantic couple embracing a future together. We glean that this was a match of undesirables: the timid, sexless guy no girl wanted and the girl too outspoken to be paired.

But here they are, having to make do. Gopal at least has a job to go to, from which he often comes home hammered after drinks with colleagues. Uma, left behind in the solitude of a shack that only allows one shaft of window light, is quick to profanely protest the joyless, intimacy-challenged rut they’ve entered. Alternating between angry and exhausted, she bristles at acclimating to the domesticity that her prickly neighbor wives treat like a club handshake.

Before long, Uma’s taste for cigarettes under the moonlight turns into regular solo walks at all hours. An impulsive journey to a coastal part of town hours away leads to her taking a cleaning job in an office building (and a friendship with a glumly simpatico elevator operator). Suddenly, she’s brandishing a mop and pail everywhere like a rootless knight without a quest or a horse. Then there’s a cryptic street encounter with a goat and things get even weirder. But also, somehow, more validating.

Kandhari, with his hypnotic Wes Anderson-by-way-of-David Lynch widescreen framing and deliberate tracking shots, seems more concerned with capturing something liminal in Uma’s alternative existence, as if the city were just weird and oppressive enough to tease out any transformation that was already lying dormant. (By the time the movie introduces stop-motion creatures roaming the streets, you’ve been primed to think, “Sure, why not?”)

A mischievously off-the-wall exercise like “Sister Midnight” (which eventually embraces some gnarlier elements) needs a certain steam to keep up its deadpan wildness. Kandhari is blessed in that regard with an active visual curiosity about his cracked fable’s punk potential, helped by Sverre Sørdal’s humid cinematography and a game lead in Apte, whose middle-finger energy is sometimes hilariously offset by a wonderful silent-film-star haplessness.

One wishes it all held together a little more, instead of laying seeds that tend to sprout vibes and distractions instead of an illuminating cohesiveness. Kandhari will too often keep Uma in cartoon rebel-goddess mode, needle-dropping another classic rock cut as if daring us to accept Motorhead or Buddy Holly as the only viable soundtrack for what’s going on. But those elements are a kick, too.

Of course, the title “Sister Midnight” is an Iggy Pop staple. “What can I do about my dreams?” it growls, an apt lyric for the singularly inventive and unmanageable fever of a movie that shares its name.

Jordan Thomas didn’t want to just research and write about fire, he wanted to see it up close, and he has turned that experience into the exceptional new book, “When It All Burns.” A specialist in the cultural forces that shape fire, Thomas joined the Los Padres Hotshots, a crew that might be viewed as the Navy SEALs of firefighting. He spent 2021 battling wildfires extreme and treacherous even by the standards of these globally warmed times.

A first-person account would be compelling enough, especially given Thomas’ gift for terse, layered expository writing. But Thomas has more on his mind here. He alternates sequences of harrowing action and macho team-building with deep dives into the ecology, science, economics and, most important, Indigenous cultural practices related to fire. In Thomas’ hands these subjects are interconnected, and his writing brings new heat to an ubiquitous subject.

If you live anywhere near Los Angeles, you may very well prefer not to read “When It All Burns.” But you should. Just this last January, a series of wildfires ravaged the region, fed by gusting Santa Ana winds, drought conditions and low humidity. Projected damage from the fires had ballooned to more than $250 billion in damages in January, The Times reported. At least 30 people were killed in the fires, with economic ramifications expected to stretch into the unforeseeable future. “When It All Burns” was written well before any of this happened, and it sometimes carries the force of prophecy. The fire next time has already burned, though there will surely be more.

Thomas sets the table early on: “In the past two decades, wildfires have been doing things not even computer models can predict, environmental events that have scientists racking their brains for appropriately Dystopian technology: firenados, gigafires, megafires. Scientists recently invented the term ‘megafire’ to describe wildfires that behave in ways that would have been impossible just a generation ago, burning through winter, exploding in the night, and devastating landscapes historically impervious to incendiary destruction.”

In other words, it’s only going to get worse. As a member of the Hotshots crew, Thomas hacked away at undergrowth with a chainsaw as the firefighters made their advance, and he found himself fascinated by the subculture of people, mostly men, assigned to combat these otherworldly infernos. But the education and knowledge he carries also makes him deeply ambivalent about the very nature of fire suppression.

Author Jordan Thomas.

(Sari Blum)

For centuries, Indigenous peoples the world over have used controlled fires, or “cultural burning,” for any number of purposes, from agriculture to reducing the risk of uncontrolled fires. But such practices didn’t jibe with increasingly modern economies, and colonialists, especially in North America, saw burning as both barbaric and a threat to industrialized capitalism. Fire surpression was more than a byproduct of Native American genocide, it was part of the master plan: “In California, fire had always connected people to their food, and Americans set about its suppression with unprecedented brutality.” Researchers who tried to bring this history to light often had their work suppressed like one more controlled fire. And as the practice declined, wildfires entered the breach.

As you might expect, life as a Hotshot is fraught with medical risk: Hotshots tend to work sick and injured, loathe to pass up the overtime and hazard pay on which they depend. As Thomas writes, “The precarious lives of Hotshots are one flashpoint in an expanding field of self-reinforcing social and environmental crises. Scientists call this a sacrifice zone — a place where low-income people shoulder the burden of industrial misconduct.”

Every time “When It All Burns” threatens to get dry, like a combustible piece of brush, Thomas brings it back to his own firefighting travails, and the cast of Hotshot characters who showed him the ropes, berated him and bailed him out.

The two Los Padres leaders are Edgar, a stern drill sergeant-type who rides everyone with equal venom, and Aoki, just as demanding but with more of a shaman-warrior demeanor. Aoki conducts Thomas’ job interview as the two men hike a steep hill; Thomas eventually has to decide between asking questions, which takes up oxygen, or concentrating on the task at hand.

“At a certain level of physical suffering, the pain becomes almost comedic,” he notes, as he assesses his condition before hiking a mountain to carry an injured firefighter back downhill. “My feet were torn and oozing within my elk leather boots, and every inch of my skin was a rash of poison oak. Hours before I had been incapacitated by muscle cramps.” And moments later: “The only antidote to the discomfort was to return to the level of exhaustion where the body becomes numb.”

“When It All Burns” is one of those books that immerses the reader in the nuances of a world most of us know only through the lens of tragedy and destruction. Thomas’ visceral, crystalline prose only adds fuel to the fire.

Vognar is a freelance culture writer.

“Sirens,” premiering Thursday on Netflix, is an odd sort of a series, an interesting mix of hifalutin ideas, family drama and what might be called dark farce.

Set over Labor Day weekend on a Cape Cod island peopled by rich folks whose taste runs to pastels and floral prints, it stars Julianne Moore as Michaela, formerly a high-powered attorney who has given that up for marriage to hedge-fund billionaire Peter (Kevin Bacon) and a life dedicated to rescuing birds of prey. The queen of all she surveys, she speaks in moony aphorisms, is posing for Vanity Fair and orchestrating a fundraising gala, among minor entertainments.

Meanwhile, in Buffalo, we meet Devon (Meghann Fahy) a working-class hot mess, making her entrance out a police station door, wearing a short black dress, looking the worse for wear. Struggling to care for her father Bruce (Bill Camp), diagnosed with dementia, she goes in search of her sister, Simone (Milly Alcock), who has been working as Michaela’s personal assistant. After traveling 17 hours — carting, for reasons of comedy, the giant edible arrangement Simone has sent in lieu of an actual response to her call for help, still wearing her night-in-jail clothes — Devon will discover that her sister has been transformed: She’s removed the matching tattoos they got together, had a nose job and presents as something like the Disney version of “Wonderland’s” Alice, minus the curiosity. (“You’re dressed like a doily,” says Devon.) Ingmar Bergman fans will note the meant-to-be-noted crib from “Persona,” underlining Devon’s observation that Simone loses herself in other people.

Simone, for her part, is delighted that she gets to call Michaela “Kiki,” “which is really a special honor,” and faithfully amplifies Michaela’s mercurial requests to the staff, personified by Felix Solis’ Jose, who hate her. (They maintain a text chain to joke about her.) For all that she’s loyal to Michaela, and considers her a best friend, she’s been hiding both her working-class roots and the fact that she’s been sleeping with Ethan (Glenn Howerton), Peter’s also-rich pal and neighbor.

Ethan (Glenn Howerton), Simone (Milly Alcock) and Devon (Meghann Fahy) during a gathering at Michaela’s home.

(Netflix)

Though Michaela worries he might be having an affair, Peter, for his part, comes across as an essentially good guy, for a hedge fund billionaire. He’s friendly with the help, who worked for him before his marriage to Michaela — there are a first wife and adult children offstage — can cook for himself and hides away from the pastel people in the mansion’s tower, where he strums a guitar and smokes a little pot. But room has been left for surprises.

“Sirens” is the sisters’ shared special code for “SOS,” which seems less practical than, you know, SOS, but ties into the vague Greek mythological references with which the series has been decorated — more suggestive than substantial, I’d say, though it’s possible that is my lack of classical education showing. The house Siri system is called Zeus. One episode is titled “Persephone,” after the goddess of the dead and queen of the underworld; Simone does indeed say to Michaela, “You are literally a goddess” — she does dress like one, in flimsy, flowing gowns — while Devon thinks that something’s gone dead behind Simone’s eyes, that she’s been zombified: “You’re in a cult.”

It was the sirens’ sweetly singing, of course, that drew sailors to their deaths in the old tales, and at one point Michaela looks out over the ocean and muses on the boats of whalers crashing bloodily on the rocks. (She is particular about the blood.) There is, in fact, a sailor in the series, Jordan (Trevor Salter), who captains Ethan’s yacht and whom Devon picks up in a hotel bar, but he is perhaps the least likely character in the show to crash into anything. And Michaela is attended by a trio of women (Jenn Lyon as Cloe, Erin Neufer as Lisa and Emily Borromeo as Astrid) who, suggesting the title creatures, speak in harmony and act as one, but they are more the embodiment of a notion, a throwaway joke, than active participants in the story. Michael Abels’ score features a choir of female voices, opts for something that one might well identify as ancient Greek music even with no notion of what ancient Greek music might have sounded like.

Kevin Bacon plays Peter, a hedge fund billionaire married to Michaela.

(Macall Polay / Netflix)

The core of the series is the struggle between Devon and Michaela for the soul of Simone, though there are ancillary battles that will help decide the fate of the war. For a viewer, it’s natural to side with Devon, who, after locking horns with Michaela, will go undercover at the mansion, dressing according to the house rules while she pokes around. (There is the suggestion of a murder mystery.) However hot a mess she may be, she isn’t pretentious; she has energy, boldness and consistency, and whatever she gets wrong, she lives in the world that most of us do. (I am assuming you are not a billionaire with a mansion on a cliff, a birdhouse full of raptors and a large staff to tend to your needs and whims, but if you are — thanks for reading!) That isn’t to say that Michaela doesn’t have her troubles — indeed, her neediness, which expresses itself as caretaking, resembles Devon’s. “I take care of everything in my orb,” says Michaela, “big and small, prey and predator.”

I hadn’t known when I watched “Sirens” that it was based on a play, the 2011 “Elemeno Pea,” by Molly Smith Metzler, who created the series as well, but I thought it might be. It had the scent of the stage in the way characters — including Bruce and Ray (Josh Segarra), Devon’s boss and adulterous occasional hookup — kept piling in, along with its farcical accelerations, its last-act revelations and reversals.

At “only” five episodes, it stays more focused than most limited series, though the tone shifts a bit; some characters come to seem deeper and more complex, which is good on the face of it, but also can feel a bit manufactured. Some bits of business are planted merely to bear practical fruit later. The ending I found half-satisfying, or half-frustrating, from character to character, but there are great, committed performances along the way, and I was far more than halfway entertained.

A ‘comprehensive review’ of the US’s chaotic military withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 has also been ordered.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said that the United States is reviewing whether to designate Afghanistan’s rulers, the Taliban, as a “foreign terrorist organization”.

Rubio told the House Foreign Affairs Committee during a hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on Wednesday, “I believe that classification is now, once again, under review.”

The response came a day after US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered a “comprehensive review” of the United States’s chaotic military withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, an evacuation operation in which 13 US service members and 150 Afghans were killed at Kabul’s airport in an ISIL (ISIS) bombing.

Hegseth said in a memo on Tuesday that after three months of assessing the withdrawal, a comprehensive review was needed to ensure accountability for this event.

“This remains an important step toward regaining faith and trust with the American people and all those who wear the uniform, and is prudent based on the number of casualties and equipment lost during the execution of this withdrawal operation,” Hegseth wrote.

Former President Joe Biden’s administration, which oversaw the pull-out, mostly blamed the resulting chaos on a lack of planning and reductions in troops by the first Donald Trump administration, following its deal with the Taliban to accelerate the withdrawal of US forces.

Trump had signed the deal with the Taliban in Doha in February 2020 aimed at ending its 18-year war in Afghanistan, beginning with the withdrawal of about 4,000 troops “within months”.

The then-Trump administration had agreed it would withdraw from the country by May 2021 if the Taliban negotiated a peace agreement with the Afghan government and promised to prevent internationally designated terrorist groups, such as al-Qaeda and ISIL, from gaining a foothold in the country.

After assuming office in January 2021, Biden said he had to respect the agreement or risk new conflicts with the Taliban, which could have required additional troops in Afghanistan.

On the 2024 campaign trail, Trump frequently criticised Biden and his administration for the withdrawal, saying that the manner in which it was done “was the most embarrassing day in the history of our country’s life.” Trump said that the withdrawal should have been done with “dignity, with strength, with power.”

Senior US military officials, including then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and the then-top US general, Mark Milley, have already appeared before lawmakers to give their testimonies regarding the withdrawal.

The war in Afghanistan from 2001-2021 was the US’s longest war, surpassing Vietnam.

It remains unclear how Hegseth’s review would differ from the many previous reviews carried out by the US military, Department of State and Trump’s fellow Republicans in the House of Representatives.

US Central Command, which oversees operations in the Middle East, has also carried out an investigation into the ISIL attack on Kabul during the last few days of the withdrawal.

LIKE a beloved old pet dog, DOOM: The Ages is impossible to put down.

It’s a demonic drug, a hit of horrifying annihilation that makes you want more and more. Because it slays more than Taylor Swift in a glitter hat factory.

10

Care must always be taken when trying to improve a cult classic – and the original Doom rightfully belongs among the icons of gaming history.

So it’s a huge relief to see that idSoftware has not only been respectful in making this DOOM, they’ve also been really smart. But is The Dark Ages the best game since the original release?

Hell yeah!

10

First off, there’s a more involved plot than previous follow-ups like DOOM (2016) and 2020’s DOOM: Eternal.

You play the heavy-footed Doom Slayer called upon by the Night Sentinels of Argent D’Nur and the mysterious Maykrs in their battle against the dark forces of Hell. Your job? To save humanity.

The Maykrs have a strange hold over the Slayer who gradually starts to think, and fight, on his own terms.

Previous follow-ups to this mega franchise were decent nods to the original but they weren’t truly great games. They lacked what makes a DOOM game utterly brilliant – an intense, mind-blowing run-and-gun experience which takes your breath away. Literally.

The Dark Ages, however, achieves this in bundles.

10

Because you become so engrossed in dispatching the multitude of enemies spawning all around you that you forget to breathe.

I lost count of the times where I finished a chapter (there are 22 to smash through), let out an exhausting breath… and noticed that I was two feet away from my gaming chair.

Such is the intensity of The Dark Ages.

10

It’s not just a blast and dash game either. This time round you have to be more tactically astute in your demon-slaying ways.

The sheer number of enemies that bear down on you during battle is daunting, but this just increases the adrenaline rush you get when your planned destruction works.

This immersive action results in hours lost wiping the floor with growling Pinky Riders and horrible Hell Knights.

10

The arsenal is as kick-ass as it is clever. And each new weapon brings slightly different whoops of joy as you learn more about what can be achieved when you pull the trigger.

For example, the Impaler is brilliant for headshots and once you get your upgrades to a certain point, it can then slow down time to get the perfect hit.

10

The Shredder can dispatch hordes of Imp Stalkers all at once and again, use your upgrades wisely, and it can auto-charge to a more destructive ammo when following a melee attack.

10

But id Software’s addition of a shield is a masterstroke – this can rip through multiple foes or deflect attacks. It’s upgradable too and becomes an essential tool at your side. That is until you get the ball and chain – talk about an epic flail!

Each chapter is gorgeous in its detail and impressive in scope. The map is easy to read and offers a clear pathway to cute collectables, gold chests and secret areas you won’t want to miss in your 20+ hours of the game. 

10

Even the soundtrack is gloriously DOOM-esque. A head-banging barrage of heavy metal which delights the senses when blasted through decent headsets – I couldn’t help but ramp up my Turtle Beach Stealth 700s to complete the experience.

It all makes for an epic romp in Hell – you won’t just dip your toes in the Lake of Fire, you’ll want to go skinny-dipping and plunge in head-first.

10

The Dark Ages is intense – a cacophony of chaos that impales itself firmly as a Game of the Year contender.

10

DOOM: The Dark Ages

• FORMATS: PS5 (reviewed), Xbox,  PC
• PRICE: £69.99
• PUBLISHER: Bethesda Softworks
• DEVELOPER: id Software
• RELEASE DATE: Out now
• AGE RATING: 18+
• SCORE: 66/6 (erm, 5 out of 5)

The lure for music stars to cinematize their success will never grow old, and the movies — in need of high-wattage attractions as ever — always seem ready to oblige. The latest to enter that terrain is Abel Tesfaye, the artist known as the Weeknd, whose chart-toppers over the last decade-plus have painted, in club colors and through his haunted falsetto, a hedonist performer’s ups and downs.

It’s one thing to croon about the aftertaste of youthful excess to a dirty, mesmerizing dance beat, however, and another to draw the subject out to a compelling feature length, which the turgid psychodrama “Hurry Up Tomorrow,” starring Tesfaye and directed by Trey Edward Shults, mostly fails to do. But not for lack of trying from the visually vibey “Waves” filmmaker, who wrote the movie with Tesfaye and Reza Fahim, and from co-stars Jenna Ortega and Barry Keoghan, roped into playing along in the superstar’s sandbox of tour-nightmare solipsism.

The title also belongs to the latest hit album of Tesfaye’s, released this year, which the singer-songwriter has hinted in the press to be a redemptive mic drop of sorts for his mysterious sex-and-drugs-fueled Weeknd persona. Whether you call the film a promotional tie-in or companion piece — it was filmed two years ago, before all the album’s tracks were recorded — it’s still little more than a long-form music video vanity project, straining for importance, fumbling at resonance.

A tight frame on Tesfaye’s boyish, anxious-looking face, his angry girlfriend’s breakup voice message (“I used to think you were a good person!”), and superficial pumping up from his manager (a bro-mode Keoghan), let us know all is not right backstage for this musician on the first night of a big tour. Elsewhere, a distraught young woman (Ortega) drenches a house’s interior with gasoline and sets it on fire, then drives to a gas station to refill her canister.

These tortured souls meet the night his coked-up, busted-heart malaise triggers a walk-off midperformance, and she’s there backstage to lock eyes with him and ask if he’s OK. (He’s not!) From there it’s an escapist date of air hockey, carnival rides and, once they settle in a fancy hotel room, the sharing of a sensitive new song.

In the cold light of day, though, when her vulnerabilities bump up against his reset untouchability — Ortega gets a great line, “You don’t look worried, you look scared” — this impulsive star/fan connection takes a violent turn. Anyone familiar with the HBO series “The Idol” that Tesfaye co-created will soon sense an unwelcome reprise of that short-lived showbiz yarn’s retrograde misogyny.

The germ of an edgy fantasia about an isolated pop icon’s ego death is swimming somewhere in the DNA of “Hurry Up Tomorrow,” but it’s been flattened into a superficial, tear-stained pity party. Shults and cinematographer Chayse Irvin are gifted image makers, but they seem hamstrung applying their bag of style tricks — different aspect ratios, multiple film stocks, 360 shots and roving takes — to so shallow and prideful an exercise. There’s always something to look at but little that illuminates.

As for Tesfaye, he’s not uninteresting as a screen presence, but it’s an embryonic magnetism, in need of material richer than a bunch of close-ups that culminate in a howl of a ballad. In the flimsy narrative’s pseudo-biographical contours — notably the real-life voice loss he experienced onstage a few years ago — parallels to what Prince sought to achieve with the real-life-drawn “Purple Rain” are understandable. But that film was a cannier bid for next-level success, offsetting its three-act corniness with emotional stakes that led to a crescendo of its genius headliner’s performance prowess.

“Hurry Up Tomorrow” is thinner and sloppier. It won’t slam the door on Tesfaye’s movie ambitions, but as a bid to conquer the big screen, it’s an off-putting, see-what-sticks wallow that treats the power of cinema like a midconcert costume change.

After humans, and arguably before dogs and horses, there is no character more vital to the screen, and more vital onscreen, than the automobile.

Driven or driverless, the car is the most animated of inanimate objects, sometimes literally a cartoon, with a voice, a personality, a name. Even when not speaking, they purr, they roar. They are stars in their own right — the Batmobile, the Munster Koach, James Bond’s Aston Martin DB5, K.I.T.T. (the modified 1982 Pontiac Trans Am from “Knight Rider”), the Ford Grand Torino (nicknamed the Striped Tomato) driven by Starsky and Hutch. They might represent freedom, power, delinquency or even the devil. Whole movies have been built about them and the amazing things they can do, but even when they aren’t jumping and flipping and crashing, they play an essential role in helping flesh-and-blood characters take care of business.

Perhaps in some sort of reaction to our enlightened view of the effects of our gas-guzzling ways, two new series fetishizing the internal combustion engine arrive, Max’s “Duster,” now streaming, and Prime Video’s “Motorheads,” premiering Tuesday.

Created by J.J. Abrams and LaToya Morgan and named for the supernaturally shiny cherry-red Plymouth the hero drives, “Duster” is stupid fun, a comic melodrama steeped in 1970s exploitation flicks, with a lot of loving homage to period clothes, knickknacks and interior design. The driver is Jim Ellis, played by Josh Holloway, in what reads like a turn on Sawyer, his charming, criminal character from Abrams’ “Lost,” topped with a shot of Matthew McConaughey.

Jim, a man who has never bothered to make a three-point turn, works out of Phoenix for Southwest crime boss Ezra Saxton (Keith David, monumental as always), picking up this, delivering that. The first delivery we see turns out to be a human heart, picked up from a fast-food drive-through window, destined for Saxton’s ailing son, Royce (Benjamin Charles Watson). Along for the ride is little Luna (Adriana Aluna Martinez), who calls Jim “uncle,” though you are free to speculate; her mother, Izzy (Camille Guaty), is a big-rig trucker — trucking being another fun feature of ’70s pop culture — who will find cause to become a labor leader.

Keith David, left, as Ezra Saxton and Benjamin Charles Watson as his son, Royce.

(Ursula Coyote / Max)

The Ellises and the Saxtons, also including daughter Genesis (Sydney Elisabeth), have history — Jim’s father, Wade (Corbin Bernson), served with Ezra in World War II, and his late lamented brother had worked for him as well. Saxton is the sort of bad guy with whom you somehow sympathize in spite of the violence he employs; there’s genuine affection among the families, though one is never sure when or where a line will be drawn, only that one probably will be.

Into Jim’s low-rent but relatively settled, even happy world comes FBI agent Nina Hayes (Rachel Hilson, sparky), fresh out of Quantico and ambitious to make a mark. As a Black woman, she’s told, “No one’s clamoring for an agent like you,” but she’s been assigned to Phoenix “because we have no other options.” She’s partnered there with cheerful Navajo agent Awan (Asivak Koostachin), as if to corral the minorities into a manageable corner, and assigned the Saxton case, regarded as “cursed” and so intractable as to be not worth touching.

Which is to say, agents deemed not worth taking seriously — along with underestimated “girl Friday” Jessica (Sofia Vassilieva) — have been thrown a case deemed not worth taking seriously. This is a classic premise for a procedural and strikes some notes about racism and sexism in the bargain, not out of tune with the times in which it’s set, or the times in which we’re watching.

Nina, who has managed to gather evidence of Jim crossing state lines to deliver the heart, which was stolen, and that Saxton may have been responsible for his brother’s death, bullies and tempts him into becoming a confidential informant. Thus begins an uneasy partnership, though their storylines run largely on separate tracks in separate scenes.

“Lost” was not a show that bothered much with sense in order to achieve its effects, and “Duster,” though it involves a far-reaching conspiracy whose payoff plays like the end of a shaggy-dog story, is a show of effects, of set pieces and sequences, of car chases and fistfights, of left-field notions and characters. These include Patrick Warburton as an Elvis-obsessed mobster named Sunglasses; Donal Logue as a corrupt, perverse, evangelical policeman; Gail O’Grady as Jim’s stepmother, a former showgirl who doesn’t much like him; LSD experiments; absurd puzzles (also see: “Lost”); an airheaded version of Adrienne Barbeau (Mikaela Hoover), with the actual Barbeau, a queen of genre films, making an appearance; Richard Nixon (in a few creepy seconds of AI); an oddly jolly Howard Hughes (Tom Nelis) in his Kleenex-box slippers; and a “Roadrunner” pastiche. Though not devoid of genuine feeling, it’s best experienced as a collection of attitudes and energies, noises and colors. Don’t take it any more seriously than it takes itself.

The opening titles are super cool.

Zac (Michael Cimino), left, Caitlyn (Melissa Collazo) and Marcel (Nicolas Cantu) in Prime Video’s “Motoheads.”

(Keri Anderson / Prime Video)

“Motorheads” is a familiar sort of modern teenage soap opera but with cars. For reasons known only to series creator John A. Norris, the whole town is obsessed with them, and along with its human storylines, the series is a tour of automotive entertainments — drag racing, street racing, ATV racing, go-kart racing, classic car collecting. I have no idea whether this will resonate with the target demographic, but there is much I cannot tell you about kids these days.

As is common to the form, our young protagonists — Michael Cimino as Zac and Melissa Collazo as Caitlyn — are new to town, having been brought back from New York City by their mother, Samantha (Nathalie Kelly), to the oxymoronically named Rust Belt hamlet of Ironwood, where she was raised, and which is the last place anyone saw their father, Christian (Deacon Phillippe in flashbacks), 17 years earlier. He’s an infamous local legend, admired for his skill behind the wheel; aerial footage of Christian threading his way through a cordon of police cars as the getaway driver in a robbery keeps making its way into the show, though if you live in Los Angeles, you see this sort of thing on the news all the time. Marquee name Ryan Phillippe plays the kids’ Uncle Logan, who runs a garage that apparently does no business, but he has love and wisdom to spare.

Though at the center of the series, Zac’s storyline is a little shopworn, not just his wish to become, almost out of nowhere, Ironwood’s top speed racer, but his textbook interest in rich girl Alicia (Mia Healey), the girlfriend of rich boy Harris (Josh Macqueen), a Porsche-driving bully who is also hurting inside — so feel free to get a crush on him, if that’s your type. More interesting is sister Caitlyn, who prefers building cars to racing them and is perhaps the series’ most emotionally balanced character.

She becomes friends with shop classmate Curtis (Uriah Shelton), tall and good-looking, whose criminally inclined older brother, Ray (Drake Rodger), will become a sort of dark mentor to Zac. With the addition of Marcel (Nicolas Cantu), the archetypal “geek who becomes the hero’s best friend,” who works at the diner his father (grieving, drunk) used to own and dreams of designing cars, the four constitute the show’s outsider band of good guys.

They’ll have their not-always-happy business with each other — being teenagers, you know, things happen — and with their elders, as their elders will with one another. The past is not past in Ironwood; old feelings will resurface and old plots unravel. (And no one knows what happened to Christian.) Except for the cars sprinkled on top, it’s old stuff, not very deep, but produced with an engaging naturalism that rounds off the narrative extremes, enhances what’s commonplace and makes “Motorheads” easy to watch. (Colin Hoult is the sensitive director of photography, it’s worth mentioning.)

Drive on.

CANNES, France — Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt arrived in France in 1996’s “Mission: Impossible” clinging to a high speed train through the Chunnel, pursued and nearly skewered by a helicopter. It was, as the French might say, une entrée dramatique. In 2018’s “Mission: Impossible — Fallout,” he leapt from an airplane to plummet four-and-a-half miles down to the glass roof of Paris’ Grand Palais and now, for the big finale of his franchise, “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning,” he’s come to conquer the Cannes Film Festival.

One boisterous fan outside the premiere shoved her Chihuahua at Cruise so he could see it was wearing a pink sweatshirt with his face. Another brandished a DVD of 2000’s “Mission: Impossible 2,” arguably the worst entry in the series. Cruise took a photo with her anyway. “Le selfie!” the red-carpet announcer cried.

The series hasn’t been kind to its French actors: Emmanuelle Béart was shot, Jean Reno blown up by exploding chewing gum, Léa Seydoux kicked out of a window at the Burj Khalifa. (Pom Klementieff, whose character’s name is Paris, has survived to co-star in this eighth entry.) Yet, you didn’t have to parler français to glean the excitement on the ground.

This is only Cruise’s third trip to Cannes and it took him nearly half an hour to walk the 60 yards of red carpet, an exhausting amount of waving, even for someone lauded for his cardio. He took care to acknowledge everyone who’d come to cheer, even trotting back down a few steps to make eye contact and thump on his heart for the fans in the corner flank.

In 2022, as part of the lead-up to “Top Gun: Maverick,” the blockbuster that would defibrillate the pandemic box office, Cruise received an honorary Palme d’Or and a salute from eight zipping French jets. During his first visit, for 1992’s “Far and Away,” times were different and he felt free to be outspoken, telling the press that the then-recent Rodney King verdict “sickened me.” Today, he seems to feel the weight of championing the theatrical experience, just as Ethan Hunt is repeatedly forced to shoulder the burden of saving the world. Neither of them truly has the freedom to “choose to accept it.” More than any of his movie star peers, Cruise seems aware that someone has to symbolize an increasingly bygone era of filmmaking, to be this century’s Charlie Chaplin.

The vibe before the screening of “Final Reckoning” was a bit bar mitzvah. The DJ alternated between dance-floor classics — Kool & the Gang, Joan Jett — and remixes of Lalo Schifrin’s pulsating “Mission: Impossible” theme, one by four beatboxers who mimicked police sirens, another classed-up by a live saxophone and violins. This year’s big Cannes fashion headline is that women are no longer allowed to wear “voluminous” frocks on the steps. Nevertheless, Hayley Atwell, who plays Grace, a pickpocket-turned-secret-agent, wore a gown on the daring end of puffy. Red with large flares at her hips and ankles, she resembled the vintage biplane Cruise dangles from in the film. He could have clung onto her elbow for a teaser.

But when the movie started, the mood turned funereal. This farewell to Ethan Hunt begins with a three-decade-spanning montage of Cruise that could double as the intro to his inevitable honorary Oscar. “I want to thank you for a lifetime of unrelenting and devoted service,” Angela Bassett’s President Erika Sloane tells Ethan in the opening minute. Later, she slips him a code with an important date — May 22, 1996 — which also happens be the day the “Mission: Impossible” franchise launched. The whole film is a panegyric: big speeches and weighty moments with very little sense of play. Tonally, it starts with an ending and keeps on ending for the next 2 hours and 49 minutes.

The eight “Mission” films can be cleaved into two groups. The first four made a point of swapping directors and moods and even Ethan’s core identity: Brian De Palma made him a jaundiced naif; John Woo, a hot-blooded flirt; J.J. Abrams, a devoted husband; Brad Bird, a near-mute human cartoon. The last four are all helmed by Christopher McQuarrie (who’s co-written this script with Erik Jendresen) but neither has added much to his personality. We’re told, over and over, that Ethan is a gambler and a rule-breaker — and paradoxically, that he’s the only human worthy of our trust, an odd thing to say about a spy who wears masks of other people’s faces like party hats.

Of all the “Mission: Impossible” films, this is the only one that needs you to remember what happened in the previous entry, 2023’s “Mission: Impossible — Dead Reckoning Part One,” which introduced an all-knowing AI villain called the Entity and its equally unemotional minion Gabriel (Esai Morales) that made a fun foil for Cruise himself, as a sinister duo that values digital trickery over human sweat. Now, the Entity intends to annihilate humanity in four days unless it can be taken offline by a key that accesses a gizmo in the Arctic Sea that connects to a whatsit that Ving Rhames’s weary Luther is attempting to invent from a makeshift hospital bed somewhere in the subway tunnels of London. A grunting Cruise batters a goon while huffing, “You spend! Too much time! On the internet!”

That last film managed to introduce Atwell’s Grace and collect the key while still enjoying a sense of play, like an axle-cracking Fiat chase through Rome and flirtations manifested via close-up magic. Here, the plot weighs everything down. Not just the threat-of-extinction stuff, which includes Bassett’s POTUS debating which American city to blow up as a preemptive gesture, but by its own irritating God’s-eye omniscience that rarely allows the suspense to spool out in the present. The editing is always cutting to the past or the future. There’s flashbacks to things that happened five minutes earlier and flash-forwards to how a stunt could look instead of just getting on with it.

Just as exhausting is how the entire cast trades lines of exposition to explain Ethan’s daredevil feats before he actually does them. There are almost no conversations, only premonitions and plans delivered in bullet-points like a group research project. No one steps on anyone else’s dramatic pauses. They may as well be reciting how to build an IKEA Billy bookcase. I can’t think of anything more thrill-stifling, even with cinematographer Fraser Taggart lighting everybody’s eyeballs to look so shiny that the actors continually appear on the verge of tears. Still, even within those limitations, Simon Pegg is delightful as Hunt’s longtime tech-whiz teammate Benji, as are new and returning ensemble members Tramell Tillman, Lucy Tulugarjuk and Rolf Saxon, the latter of whom plays a throwback character once threatened with manning a radar tower in Alaska — a punishment that did, in fact, come to pass.

But Cruise is reason audiences will, and should, see “Final Reckoning” on a large and loud screen. His Ethan continues to survive things he shouldn’t. (One too-miraculous rescue attempts to distract us from asking questions by inserting an out-of-place close-up of Atwell’s heaving bosom.) Yet, what I’ve most come to appreciate about Ethan is that he doesn’t try to play the unflappable hero. Clinging to the chassis of an airplane with the wind plastering his hair to his forehead and oscillating his gums like bulldog in a convertible, he is, in fact, exceedingly flapped.

The flight chase is fantastic. It’s what Isaac Newton might have made if he’d demonstrated velocity by placing an apple in a bucket and whipping it in circles. But even its exhilaration gets bested by a centerpiece underwater sequence in which Cruise scuba dives alone in silence suffering stunts that you cannot believe. I couldn’t tell you how long he swam — at some point, my heart stopped — but there are images of vertical sheets of water and the star in shivering, fetal isolation that felt like the franchise wasn’t just trying to top itself, but hoping to best “Titanic” and “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

As the sound design rumbled with queasy creaks over shots of a submarine teetering on the edge of a deep-sea cliff, I found myself thinking most of all of that famous sequence of a frozen shack sliding off a cliff in Charlie Chaplin’s 1925 “The Gold Rush,” which celebrates its centennial anniversary this fall. By coincidence or grand design, a gorgeously restored “The Gold Rush” was also the first movie screened at this year’s Cannes. If there’s a Cannes in 2125, maybe it’ll play a 100-year-old Tom Cruise classic. It won’t be this “Mission: Impossible” over the first, third or fourth. Regardless, I bet the fans will still be cheering.

Near the end of an evening ruled by queens, a king was keeping Chaka Khan waiting.

“Stevie Wonder’s in the house tonight,” Khan said late Sunday as she stood in the spotlight at Inglewood’s Kia Forum. “I don’t know where he is.” The veteran soul-music star wandered over to the edge of the stage, the black fringe of her bedazzled cape swaying with every step, and peered out into the crowd. “Steve, you over there?”

Khan was in the middle of her set to close Sunday’s installment of a traveling R&B revue called “The Queens” that launched last week in Las Vegas and has her on the road through the fall with three fellow lifers in Patti LaBelle, Gladys Knight and Stephanie Mills. (One longs to have been in the room when they decided who plays last.) She’d come out singing “I Feel for You” — saucy, casual, effortlessly funky — then glided through “Do You Love What You Feel” and “What Cha’ Gonna Do for Me.” Now her would-be special guest was nowhere to be found.

Chaka Khan performs with Stevie Wonder.

(Carlin Stiehl/Los Angeles Times)

“Stevie Wonder!” she said again, attempting to summon him to the stage. “We go back a long, long way. I remember once we did a tour, he and I — must have been back in the ’80s, the ’70s or something. It was that long ago. We were on tour for dang near two years. Two friggin’ frack years.” Khan went on for a minute about a vexing old record deal then seemed wisely to think better of that. “Call him,” she instructed the crowd, which started up a “Stevie” chant.

“What?” boomed a voice at last over the sound system. It was Wonder, shuffling out from the wings wearing his signature shades and beret to join his old friend for — well, for what? Khan had set up Wonder’s cameo by saying they should do “I Feel for You” again since Wonder played harmonica on the original record in 1984. But Wonder didn’t appear to have gotten that note: After clasping hands with Khan, he started telling the story of writing “Tell Me Something Good” a decade earlier for her group Rufus, which led Khan to cue her backing band on that number instead.

And what a number it was — that slinky up-and-down riff still a marvel of rhythmic ingenuity that inspired Khan and Wonder to go off in a volley of ad libs like the seasoned pros they are.

Patti Labelle performs.

(Carlin Stiehl/Los Angeles Times)

Signs of life such as that one are precisely the reason to go to a concert like “The Queens,” in which the vast experience of the performers — Mills was the youngest at 68, LaBelle the oldest at 80 — serves not as a safeguard against the unexpected but as a guarantee that whatever might happen is fully roll-with-able.

Mills got up there Sunday and discovered an unwelcome climate situation — “I wish they would cut that air off,” she said, “it’s blowing so cold on me” — but went ahead and sang the bejesus out of “Home,” from “The Wiz.” LaBelle put out a call for willing men from the audience — “Black, white, straight, gay,” she made clear — then presided over an impromptu talent show as each guy did a bit of “Lady Marmalade” for her. And then there was Knight’s handler, who seemed to show up a few beats early to guide her offstage after “Midnight Train to Georgia.” No biggie: He could just stand there holding her arm gently for a minute while she traded “I’ve got to go’s” with her background singers.

Gladys Knight performs.

(Carlin Stiehl/Los Angeles Times)

Another reason to go to “The Queens,” especially on Mother’s Day, was to behold the finery displayed onstage (and in the crowd). Knight wore a crisp red pantsuit with glittering figure-eight earrings, Mills an off-the-shoulder mermaid gown. LaBelle showed off two outfits, emerging in a silky blue suit before changing into a long tunic-style dress. During “On My Own,” she kicked off her heels, sending them hurtling across the stage; later, she spritzed herself from a bottle of fragrance then spritzed the front row for good measure.

As a three-hour program — Knight opened at 7 p.m. on the dot — Sunday’s show moved quickly, with a rotating stage that whirred to life after each woman’s set. And of course nobody stuck around long enough to offer up anything but hits. The musical pleasures were the ripples of detail in all those familiar tunes: a little ha-ha-ha Knight used to punctuate “That’s What Friends Are For”; LaBelle’s frisky vocal runs in “When You Talk About Love,” which she sang as a stagehand came out to help put her in-ear monitor back in; the way Khan toyed with her phrasing in “Through the Fire,” slowing down when you thought she’d speed up and vice versa. (Nobody wants to start a fight here, but Khan was undoubtedly the night’s best singer.)

Stephanie Mills performs.

(Carlin Stiehl/Los Angeles Times)

After bringing the Mother’s Day audience to its feet with “I’m Every Woman” — somewhere out there was Khan’s own 91-year-old mom, she said — she started to make for the exit when her band revved up the throbbing synth lick from “Ain’t Nobody.”

“Oh, one more?” she said to no one in particular. “S—. One more!”

BUYING a used car involves lots of decisions. What size and style do you want? Are you petrol, diesel, hybrid or EV? Should you buy as cheaply as possible or invest as much as you can?

We can’t answer any of these questions, but we can tell you what the UK’s most popular car for sale on Sun Motors is.

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It is, of course, the ever-reliable Nissan Qashqai.

When it was launched, this compact crossover SUV pretty much defined the category. It’s nearly 20 years old but remains as popular as ever. 

I’ve driven the Nissan Qashqai and I’ll give you my honest opinion of its good points, bad points and anything else I can remember that’s relevant.

What are the most popular used cars?

Sun Motors is a nationwide marketplace that connects thousands of buyers and dealers. We keep track of every purchase and can reveal our list of the 10 most popular used cars in the UK.

You already know that at the top of the charts is the Nissan Qashqai. Here’s a list of the rest…

1. Nissan Qashqai
2. VW Golf
3. Mercedes A-Class
4. Mini (all models)
5. Kia Sportage
6. BMW 1 Series
7. Ford Kuga
8. BMW 3 Series
9. Audi A3
10. Hyundai Tucson

Buying a used car? Find cars for under £200 on Sun Motors here.

Nissan Qashqai used car review​

The Nissan Qashqai may have a name that you’ll struggle to spell, but its appeal isn’t hard to spot.

It’s a crossover SUV, which means it looks like a car that’s capable of running off-road and has an elevated driving position, but in reality, it’s a pretty refined and reliable city car.

We’re going to talk about the second-generation (and subsequent) models that launched in 2013.

With this version, Nissan ironed out all the faults and created the UK’s favourite (sort of) SUVs.

It’s now beloved by middle managers, school-run mums and dads and anyone for whom a MINI was just a little bit too small.

Modern versions are even more aggressive-looking but, for our money, don’t look as good.

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The high-up driving position offers great visibility, and the responsive handling makes the car manoeuvrable enough to slide into that supermarket parking spot.

OK, so it’s not going to knock your socks off or make you smile too much, but it’s a family car, so we never expected it would.

Sun Motors: Buy your next vehicle today

If you’re part of the 3.3 million Brits looking to buy a used vehicle this year, Sun Motors is an ideal place to start

*If you click on a link in this boxout we will earn affiliate revenue

Sun Motors is a seamless, straightforward, transparent platform that ranks by customer searches, not payments. It offers innovative financing and concierge services, ensuring a simple, fair car-buying experience.

Enjoy:

• A choice of fuel type whether it’s petrol, diesel, electric or hybrid
• A range of models from convertible, estate, saloon and many more
• A range of top brands such as Ford, Volkswagen, Toyota and BMW
• Financing options
• Trusted dealers

Get started finding your next used vehicle here.

There have been far too many engine variations (including petrol, diesel, hybrid and the latest e-POWER powertrain) for us to run through them all.

Reviewers seem to favour the 1.3-litre DIG-T 140 mild-hybrid petrol engine, and we won’t argue.

Bad points are, as you’d expect, few and far between. The Qashqai is quite expensive as a used car, with other makes and models perhaps a little cheaper to buy, run and insure.

The Qashqai is, like lots of crossovers, a bit of a fake too. It’s not really an off-roader like the Range Rover, but not many people need that sort of performance (or can afford the price).

Are Nissan Qashqais reliable​?

The Nissan Qashqai isn’t quite as reliable as the bullet-proof Nissan cars of old, with the 2014-21 diesel models in particular suffering from engine and exhaust problems.

Overall though, it’s a sturdy family motor that shouldn’t leave you stranded by the roadside. 

Try to buy one with a full service history, ensure all recalls are done and check receipts for any work.

How much is a Nissan Qashqai?​ 

Nissan Qashqais start from £5,000 for a 10-year old (2015) model with over 100,000 miles on the clock. Nearly new models, including the e-POWER version, can cost over £35,000.

As a ballpark, expect to pay around £15-17,000 for a 2020 Qashqai.

It’s not the cheapest car on the market, with some used models that are as expensive as a new Dacia Duster, for example, but it’ll hold its value.

Is Nissan Qashqai a 4×4?

The Nissan Qashqai isn’t a true 4×4 like a Land Rover, Range Rover, etc, but you can find both front-wheel drive (FWD) and four-wheel drive (AWD) models on the market. 

In off-road mode the 4×4 Qashqai will tackle difficult terrain like mud and gravel, more much more confidently than the 2WD version. 

Most drivers who really need 4WD performance should look elsewhere. In the end, they probably already were.

Used Nissan Qashqai​s for sale

We’ve scoured Sun Motors to find three top used cars for sale. You’ll need to get in quick to secure these…

Bargain basement: 2020 Nissan Qashqai Acenta Premium

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This isn’t the cheapest Qashqai on the market, but it’s arguably one of the best-value used motors we’ve seen.

Don’t let the 60,000+ miles on the clock put you off. This Acenta Premium model comes with 17” alloys, a good touchscreen and parking sensors.

It’ll do 55mpg all day long, too. That’s why this is our bargain buy.

Awesome auto: Nissan Qashqai​s SUV 1.3 DIG-T Tekna

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Reviewers love the 1.3 litre DIG-T petrol engine for its power, control and reliability.

This automatic Qashqai is in Tekna trim, featuring cool 18-inch alloy wheels, a Bose sound system, and a head-up display. Nice.

High-class hybrid: Nissan Qashqai 1.5 E-Power Acenta Premium 5dr Auto

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The 2024 Qashqai is a thoroughly modern car. Its petrol/electric hybrid motor produces an impressive 188bhp.

It’s quiet, quick and has the mean look of the new Qashqai.

This particular car has fewer than 5,000 miles on the clock, so it’s as nearly new as it gets.

Buying a used car? Check out Sun Motors and find your next vehicle today. Whether you’re looking for automatic, manual or electric, use Sun Motors to decide on your next model.