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Warner Bros. Discovery has officially acknowledged the company is up for sale, marking the third time in a decade that its storied assets have been on the auction block.

The company’s board announced Tuesday that it has initiated “a review of strategic alternatives … in light of unsolicited interest the Company has received from multiple parties for both the entire company and Warner Bros.”

The Ellison family, which owns Paramount, started the bidding late last month. With financial backing from his father, Larry Ellison, David Ellison is looking to build an entertainment juggernaut. The family and RedBird Capital Partners finalized their takeover of Paramount in August, and has since made at least one offer for its rival. Paramount wants to buy the entire company, including its basic cable channels that include CNN, TNT, Food Network and HGTV.

Warner Bros. Discovery stock soared 11% Tuesday to more than $20 a share, valuing the company at $50 billion. That’s the highest level since Discovery swallowed the larger WarnerMedia in April 2022.

The company did not disclose the other entities that have expressed interest in buying the company as a whole, or its stable of assets, including premium cable channel HBO, the HBO Max streaming service and the legendary Warner Bros. film and television studio and its campus in Burbank.

“It’s no surprise that the significant value of our portfolio is receiving increased recognition by others in the market,” Chief Executive David Zaslav said in a statement announcing the strategic review.

“After receiving interest from multiple parties, we have initiated a comprehensive review of strategic alternatives to identify the best path forward to unlock the full value of our assets,” he said.

The company last summer unveiled its intention to split into two separate publicly traded entities — an arrangement that most observers saw as the unofficial kickoff of the company’s sale.

That separation process will continue, Warner Bros. Discovery said Tuesday.

The company intended to create two stand-alone entities. One would include the Warner Bros. studio and its expansive library of shows and movies, as well as the HBO Max streaming service. Zaslav was planning to run that enterprise.

The second company, Discovery Global, would comprise the basic cable channels and international operations. Chief Financial Officer Gunnar Wiedenfels would lead that operation.

“We view this as a move to initiate the entire bidding process now, for all bidders, even though not every bidder may be interested in all of WBD,” Raymond James analysts Ric Prentiss and Brent Penter wrote in a Tuesday note to investors.

“WBD is telling other bidders they can bid now instead of waiting for the split, or perhaps they even need to bid now since waiting may prove to be too late,” the analysts said.

Warner Bros. Discovery board intends to “evaluate a broad range of strategic options,” including “an alternative separation structure that would enable a merger of Warner Bros. and spin-off of Discovery Global to our shareholders,” it said in a statement.

“Our decision to initiate this review underscores the Board’s commitment to considering all opportunities to determine the best value for our shareholders,” Warner Bros. Discovery Chair Samuel A. Di Piazza, Jr., said in the statement. “We continue to believe that our planned separation to create two distinct, leading media companies will create compelling value. That said, we determined taking these actions to broaden our scope is in the best interest of shareholders.”

The company did not set a deadline or timetable for the strategic alternatives review, although it had previously said the separation into two distinct companies — Warner Bros. and Discovery Global — would be complete by April.

TD Cowen media analyst Doug Creutz indicated Tuesday’s announcement was simply a formality because investors were well aware the company was in play.

“We continue to think a transaction with [Paramount] … is reasonably likely; we are more skeptical that other, more attractive bidders will emerge,” Creutz wrote.

The announcement hit as Warner Bros. Discovery employees already are nervous about the process and the proposed Ellison takeover, which observers believe would spark a massive consolidation and the elimination of hundreds more jobs.

Some already were suffering from deal fatigue as many are veterans of the company’s two previous sales.

In October 2016, the company, then known as Time Warner Inc., announced its sale to phone giant AT&T. President Trump, who was first elected the following month, strenuously objected to the merger. The government challenged the union, and it took nearly two years to win federal approval. The AT&T years were turbulent. The company restructured, then spent billions to build the HBO Max streaming service.

After three years, AT&T threw in the towel after lining up Zaslav, who had long managed the much smaller Discovery. The April 2022 sale to Discovery burdened the company with more than $50 billion in debt.

Since then, Zaslav and his team have tried to streamline the operations, leading to thousands of layoffs. The company’s debt now hovers around $35 billion.

Allen & Company, J.P. Morgan and Evercore have been retained as financial advisors to Warner Bros. Discovery. Wachtell Lipton, Rosen & Katz and Debevoise & Plimpton LLP are serving as legal counsel.

Fortunately for avid bibliophiles, Harper Lee was an inveterate pack rat. Born in rural Monroeville, Ala., in 1926, the author of “To Kill a Mockingbird” — whose first name is Nelle, her grandmother Ellen’s name spelled backward — spent much of her adult life in Manhattan after moving there in 1949.

First, she lived in a cold-water flat on the Upper East Side (subsisting on peanut butter sandwiches and meager bookstore and airline ticket agent salaries); then in a room in a Midtown hotel where Edith Wharton and Mark Twain once resided; a third-floor York Avenue walk-up ($20 a month for five years, where “Go Set a Watchman” and “To Kill a Mockingbird” were written); and, finally four decades at 433 E. 82nd St. There, amid “piles of her correspondence and practically every pay stub, telephone bill and canceled check ever issued to her, were notebooks and manuscripts” and eight previously unpublished early short stories and eight once-published essays and magazine articles. Those writings, discovered in her New York City apartment after she died in her Alabama hometown nine years ago, have been gathered into the welcome hybrid compendium “The Land of Sweet Forever.”

The short stories take up the first half of the collection, but it’s an unusual selection in the second half, “Essays and Miscellaneous Pieces,” that may reveal as much about the burgeoning author as the fictional juvenilia. In a contribution to “The Artists’ & Writers’ Cookbook” (1961), along with entries by Lillian Hellman, William Styron and Marianne Moore, Lee offered a one-page recipe for crackling bread, complete with the authorial observation, “some historians say by which alone fell the Confederacy.” The opening instruction is, “First, catch your pig.” After that, the ingredients (water-ground white meal, salt, baking powder, egg, milk) and directions might just as well function as an analogy for the process of writing and editing a manuscript.

In her introduction, Lee’s appointed biographer Casey Cep observes that it “takes enormous patience and unerring instincts to refine a scrap of story into something … keen and moving.” Lee admits to being “more of a rewriter than a writer.” In a 1950 letter to one of her sisters, she outlines her typical writing day, working through at least three drafts:

From around noon, work on the first draft. By dinnertime, I’ve usually put my idea down. I then stop for a sandwich or a full meal, depending on whether I’ve got to think more about the story or just finish it. After dinner, I work on a second draft, which involves sometimes tearing the story up and putting it together again in an entirely different way, or just keeping at it until everything is like I want it. Then I retype it on white paper, conforming to rules of manuscript preparation, and run out & mail it. That sounds simple, but sometimes I have worked through the night on one; usually I end up around two or three in the morning.

It’s all rather like testing, perfecting a recipe. If the product was these eight short stories, then “yes, chef” has baked a perfect loaf.

Each story illuminates Lee’s quintessential talents as the “balladeer of small-town culture” and the chronicler of city life. They display narrative skills, an acute ear for dialogue (especially the vernacular), development of fully rounded characters and vivid descriptions of settings. They also introduce subjects and significant themes — family, friendship, moral compass — that reappear in her nonfiction and novels.

Country life imposes restrictions on childhood characters in the first three stories. In “The Water Tank” anxious 12-year-old Abby Henderson, reacting to schoolyard rumors, believes she’s pregnant because she hugged a boy whose pants were unbuttoned. Anti-authoritarian first grader Dody (one of Harper’s nicknames) in “The Binoculars” is chastised for not tracing but writing her name on the blackboard. Early glimpses of “Mockingbird’s” Scout and Atticus Finch appear in the amusing “The Pinking Shears” when third grader “little Jean Louie” (without the later “s”) undermines gender rules when she whacks off a rambunctious minister’s daughter’s lengthy locks.

In New York City, where “sooner or later you meet everybody you ever knew on Fifth Avenue,” urban stress leads to a shocking monologue with an incendiary conclusion about feuding neighbors in “A Roomful of Kibble,” a frivolous kind of parlor game involving movie titles in “The Viewer and the Viewed,” and a humorous parking incident when one friend agrees to help another with lighting for a fashion show in “This Is Show Business?”

The closing title short story, “The Land of Sweet Forever,” adeptly merges locations and themes. It opens with a satirical nod to Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice”: “It is a truth generally acknowledged by the citizens of Maycomb, Ala., that a single woman in possession of little else but a good knowledge of English social history must be in want of someone to talk to.” When adult Jean Louise (now with the “s”) leaves the city for home, she has a hilarious church encounter with someone she hadn’t seen since they were children, 21-year-old Talbert Wade, now with the taint of three years as an economics major at Northwestern University and a patina full of Europe, looking “suspiciously as if he had returned from a tour and had picked up a Brooks Brothers suit on the way home.” Together, they are trying to understand why the doxology, always sung “in one way and one way only” suddenly has been “pepped up” with an energetic organ accompaniment. Before it’s resolved there is an amusing anecdote about a cow obituary in verse and a concluding bow to Voltaire’s “Candide” when Jean Louise concedes that “all things happen for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds.” The story is a resounding example of Lee’s scintillating sense of wry humor.

Big themes of love, family and friendship recur in the eight previously published essays and articles (from 1961 to 2006) that appeared in Vogue, McCall’s, an American Film Institute program (about Gregory Peck), a Book of the Month Club newsletter (on the “little boy next door” Truman Capote and “In Cold Blood”), Alabama History and Heritage Festival, and O, the Oprah Magazine (a letter about the joy of learning to read). In addition to the crackling bread recipe that serves as a fingerpost to Lee’s writing process, the standout essay “Christmas to Me” details how she received a generous gift that changed her life, allowing her to become an accomplished, published writer. In 1956, best friends, lyricist-composer Michael Brown and his wife, Joy, surprised her with an envelope on the tree with a note, “You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas.” That meant $100 every month, covering more than five times her rent.

Juvenilia is tricky. It can be evanescent, exposing weaknesses or revealing strengths and talent. “The Land of Sweet Forever” reinforces Lee’s indelible voice, contributing a rewarding addition and resource to the slim canon of her literary legacy.

The recipe for crackling bread:

First, catch your pig. Then ship it to the abattoir nearest you. Bake what they send back. Remove the solid fat and throw the rest away. Fry fat, drain off liquid grease, and combine the residue (called “cracklings”) with:

1 ½ cups water-ground white meal
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 egg
1 cup milk

Bake in very hot oven until brown (about 15 minutes).

Result: one pan crackling bread serving 6. Total cost: about $250, depending upon size of pig. Some historians say by this recipe alone fell the Confederacy.

Papinchak, a former English professor, is a freelance book critic in Los Angeles. He has also contributed interviews to Bon Appetit.

“Harper & Hal,” premiering Sunday on the cinema-centric streamer Mubi, is a gorgeous, generous limited series that has nothing to show you other than people, how they are and how they do or do not get along. Its elements are not unfamiliar, because they’re drawn from life, rather than from the movies — or just from the movies, as they’re subjects to which the movies have often turned.

But, like this year’s “Adolescence,” which it (differently) resembles in its mix of naturalism and artifice, the series, written and directed by and starring 28-year-old Cooper Raiff — writer-director-star of the indie features “Shithouse” and “Cha Cha Real Smooth” — demonstrates that something fresh can still be done in an oversaturated medium.

While the story spreads out over eight episodes, the cast is compact. Harper (Lili Reinhart) is the daughter of Mark Ruffalo’s character, credited only as “Dad”; Hal (Raiff) is her younger brother. Alyah Chanelle Scott plays Jesse, Harper’s longtime girlfriend; Havana Rose Liu is Abby, Hal’s shorter-time girlfriend; Kate (Betty Gilpin) is Dad’s girlfriend. The company is completed by Audrey (Addison Timlin), divorced with two small children, who shares an office with Harper, and Hal’s roommate, Kalen (Christopher Meyer).

In scenes set in the past, Reinhart and Raiff play their younger selves, a la Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle’s “Pen15,” with less overt comedy, though Raiff’s performance as very young Hal, whom no one in the series describes as hyperactive (though I will — not a doctor) is often funny. It’s not a gimmick but a device — much as the one-shot production of “Adolescence” was not performative cleverness, but the right fit for the material — both in the sense of the child being the parent of the adult, and because it allows for a different, deeper sort of performance than one is liable to get from a first or a third grader. (As spookily good as small child actors can be.) Significantly, it unifies the characters across time.

A confluence of events triggers the drama. The house Hal and Harper grew up in — and which Dad, who spends much of the series seriously depressed especially, can’t let go — is being sold. (Harper and Hal are in L.A.; the house, and Dad and Kate, are elsewhere.) Kate is pregnant; there’s a chance the baby might have Down syndrome, which leads Dad to reflect that with “a disabled kid … you gotta meet them where they are every day” and that he might have been a more present parent to his older children. Jesse has a job offer in Texas and wants Harper to come with her. Hal, a college senior who isn’t pointed anywhere in particular, though he likes to draw, breaks up with Abby after learning — when she tells him she’d like them to become “exclusive” — that up until then they hadn’t been. And Harper has become attracted to Audrey.

The loss of their mother and their father’s unresolved grief has made Hal and Harper unusually close; she’s a caretaker to her brother, who, even though he’s grown, sometimes wants to crawl in bed next to her; at the same time, Harper’s internalized the feeling that she’s holding everything together, which makes it hard to move on. They’re on an island together.

“Are we friends?” young Hal asks Harper.

“We’re brother and sister,” she replies.

“Not friends.”

“I guess we can be friends, too.”

There is an almost complete absence of expository dialogue. The characters are not afflicted with speechifying; silences allow the viewer to enter into the spaces between them, and to let their experience echo with one’s own. (If you’ve lived long enough to be reading television reviews, you’ve felt some or all of these things.) There’s no wall of declaration erected between the viewer and the viewed, but the actors, Reinhart and Gilpin especially, can destroy you with a look. (Although some writers and actors love them, there’s nothing that feels less true to life than a long monologue.)

Though the story feels organic, it’s also highly structured, stretching the length of Kate’s pregnancy, shot through with resonances and reflections — “I Will Survive,” sung by adult Harper at karaoke and in a flashback as part of a children’s chorus, or a precocious young Harper reading “One Hundred Years of Solitude.” “It’s about this family where everyone’s super lonely,” she tells Hal, shining a light back on her own, “but then it gets even worse because they withdraw and they became selfish and so miserable. But maybe it gets better.” (We see her often with a book.) There’s a slow-fast rhythm to the cutting; short scenes alternate with long; memories explode in montage. Just as Raiff doesn’t bother overmuch with explanations, he eliminates transitions. We’re here, then we’re there. You won’t get lost.

Once or twice, I fretted Raiff might be steering his ship to some cliched dark outcome, but I needn’t have worried.

Many actors talk about process but Ethan Hawke has made the act of creation central to his work. He’s played musicians and writers and when he’s gone behind the camera, he’s focused on the stories of composers, novelists, movie stars and country singers both famous and forgotten. Sometimes, it feels like he’s the unofficial patron saint of art suffering, fixated on the glory and anguish of putting yourself out there in the world.

So Hawke’s portrayal of Lorenz Hart, the brilliant but troubled lyricist responsible for beloved tunes like “My Funny Valentine,” in a story set shortly before his death would seem to be just the latest chapter of a lifelong obsession. But “Blue Moon,” Hawke’s ninth collaboration with director Richard Linklater, cuts deeper than any of his previous explorations. Imagining Hart on the night of his former collaborator Richard Rodgers’ greatest triumph — the launch of “Oklahoma!” — Linklater offers a wistful look at a songwriter past his prime. But the film wouldn’t resonate as powerfully without Hawke’s nakedly vulnerable portrayal.

It is March 31, 1943, eight months before Hart’s death at age 48 from pneumonia, and Hart has just gruffly left the Broadway premiere of “Oklahoma!” Arriving early at Sardi’s for the after-party, he plants himself at the bar, complaining to bartender Eddie (Bobby Cannavale) that the show will be a massive success — and that it’s garbage. Eddie nods in a way that suggests he’s often lent a sympathetic ear to Hart’s rantings, allowing him to unload about the show’s supposedly banal lyrics and corn-pone premise and, worst of all, the fact that Rodgers will have his biggest smash the moment he stops working with Hart after nearly 25 years. “This is not jealousy speaking,” Hart insists, fooling no one.

As played by Hawke, Hart adores holding court, entertaining his captive audience with witty put-downs and gossipy Broadway anecdotes. Begging Eddie not to serve him because of his drinking problem, which contributed to the dissolution of his partnership with Rodgers, this impudent carouser would be too much to stand if he also wasn’t such fun company. But eventually, Rodgers (Andrew Scott) and his new lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II (Simon Delaney) are going to walk through that door and Hart will have to swallow his pride and pretend to be happy for them. From one perspective, “Blue Moon” is about the beginning of “Oklahoma!” as a pillar of American theater. From another, it’s Hart’s funeral.

Set almost exclusively inside Sardi’s, “Blue Moon” has the intimacy of a one-man stage show. After Hart vents about “Oklahoma!,” he readies himself for the arrival of Elizabeth (Margaret Qualley), a gorgeous Yale undergrad he considers his protégée. (He also claims to be in love with her, which baffles Eddie, who rightly assumed otherwise.) If the universal acclaim of “Oklahoma!” will force Hart to confront his professional irrelevance, maybe Elizabeth’s beaming presence — and the promise of them consummating their feelings — will be sufficient compensation.

Linklater, the man behind “School of Rock” and “Me and Orson Welles,” has made several films about creativity. (In a few weeks, he’ll debut another movie, “Nouvelle Vague,” which focuses on the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s epochal “Breathless.”) But what distinguishes “Blue Moon” is that, for once, it’s about someone else’s achievement — not the main character. Fearing he’s a has-been, the diminutive, balding Hart slowly succumbs to self-loathing. He can still spitefully quote the negative reviews for his 1940 musical “Pal Joey.” And he nurses a paranoid pet theory that Rodgers decided to collaborate with Hammerstein because he’s so much taller than Hart. (“Blue Moon” incorporates old-fashioned camera tricks to help Hawke resemble Hart’s under-five-feet frame.) Linklater’s movies have frequently featured affable underdogs, but by contrast, “Blue Moon” is an elegy to a bitter, insecure man whose view of himself as a failure has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Of the many artists Hawke has honored on screen, he has never depicted one so touchingly diminished — someone so consumed with envy who nonetheless cannot lie to himself about the beauty of the art around him. Turning 55 next month, Hawke shares with Hart an effusive passion for indelible work but also, perhaps, a nagging anxiety about the end of his creative usefulness. If he were younger, Hawke would have come across as self-regarding. Here, there’s only a poignantly egoless transparency, exposing the lyricist’s personal flaws — his drunkenness, his arrogance — while capturing the fragile soulfulness that made those Rodgers and Hart tunes sing.

Apropos of his relaxed approach, Linklater shoots “Blue Moon” with a minimum of fuss, but one can feel its enveloping melancholy, especially once the next generation of artists poke their head into the narrative. (Sondheim diehards will instantly identify the brash young composer identified only as “Stevie.”) But neither Linklater nor Hawke is sentimental about that changing of the guard.

That’s why Hawke breaks your heart. All of us are here for just a short time: We make our mark and then the ocean comes and washes it away. In an often remarkable career, Hawke has never embraced that truth so completely as he does here. Ultimately, maybe the work artists leave behind isn’t their most important contribution — maybe it’s the love they had for artistry itself, a passion that will inspire after they’re gone. That’s true of Lorenz Hart, and it will hopefully prove true of Hawke and this understated but profound film for years to come.

It’s easy to miss the confidence of Billy Wilder or Frank Capra whenever some brave soul tries to make a comedy that takes America’s temperature by straddling cynicism and optimism. Those Hollywood masters could handily juggle the sweet, sour and satirical and, in Wilder’s case, even leave you believing in a happy ending.

With his writing-directing feature debut, “Good Fortune,” however, Aziz Ansari, who stars alongside Seth Rogen and Keanu Reeves (as an angel named Gabriel), swings big, hoping to capture that jokey truth-telling vibe about the State of Things. His subject is a fertile one too: the gig economy fostering our crushing inequity, but also the desperation of the have-nots and how oblivious the wealthy are about those who made them rich. So let’s stick it to the billionaires! Let Keanu help the downtrodden!

Ansari’s high-low morality tale, set in our fair (and unfair) Los Angeles, is a friendly melding of celestially tinged stories (“Heaven Can Wait,” “Wings of Desire”) and body-swap comedies (“Trading Places”). But as agreeable as it is, it can’t square its jabs with its sentimentality. It’s got heart, kind eyes, a wry smile and some funny lines, but no teeth when you really need things bitten into, chewed up and spit out.

Ansari plays Arj, living a serious disconnection between his professional identity — wannabe Hollywood film editor — and how he actually exists: task-gigging for scraps and living in his car. When a garage-reorganizing job for Jeff (Rogen), a Bel-Air venture capitalist, turns into an assistant position, Arj feels secure enough to use the company card for a fancy dinner with occasional colleague and romantic interest Elena (an underused Keke Palmer). Jeff clocks the charge the next day, though (a realistic detail about the rich watching every penny), and immediately fires Arj.

All along, Arj’s sad situation has touched Reeves’ long-haired, khaki-suited angel, whose life-saving purview (he specializes in jostling distracted drivers) is low in the hierarchy overseen by boss guardian Martha (Sandra Oh). Gabriel wants a big healing job to show Arj, with a little role-reversal magic, that being Jeff isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Except, of course, it is. (David Mamet’s line “Everybody needs money — that’s why they call it money” comes to mind.) The newly luxe-and-loving-it Arj shows no signs of wanting to switch back (which is apparently his call to make in the rules of this scenario), leaving out-of-his-depth Gabriel in the position of convincing a sudden billionaire why he should go back to being poor.

Which is where “Good Fortune,” for all its grasp of how Depression-era screwball comedies made the filthy rich mockable, struggles to match its issue-driven humor with its fix-it heart. While it’s funny to watch Rogen’s freshly desperate character suffer food-delivery humiliation, buying the script’s changes of heart — and the film’s naïve idea of where everyone should be at the end — is another matter. That’s why screwball comedies didn’t try to upend capitalism, just have some clever fun with it and let a simple love story stick the landing. Ansari’s ambition is admirable but he’s better at diagnoses than solutions.

His gold-touch move is giving the hilariously deadpan Reeves one of his best roles in years: a goofy meme brought to disarming life and the movie’s beating heart. Doing good can be hard work; understanding humans is harder. Plus, Reeves makes eating a burger for the first time a sublimely funny reaffirmation that sometimes, indeed, it is a wonderful life.

Trigger warning for any daughter who has ever had a fraught relationship with their mother: Gish Jen’s remarkable and heartbreaking latest book, “Bad Bad Girl,” may prompt a flood of feelings not felt since adolescence. This marvel of a mash-up — part novel, part memoir, part effort to reconnect with a dead parent who never uttered an “I love you” — has as many pain points as life lessons. Quite a few of the latter — mostly delivered in the form of Chinese proverbs — are dropped by the author’s parents, Chinese immigrants who met in New York as graduate students. Among the pearls of wisdom that stick with Jen, their eldest girl and a keen observer of her parents: “When you drink the water, remember the spring.”

In this, Jen’s 10th book, she wistfully, unsparingly commemorates that “spring” — a punishing mother she nevertheless credits for “biting my heel.” A master of the art of withholding when it came to praise or affection, her mother had no compunctions about delivering ego-shattering put-downs and physical punishments to Jen for being “too smart for her own good.” And yet, Jen writes: “I have thrived.”

Gish Jen has brilliantly structured “Bad Bad Girl” so that invented exchanges with her mother keep returning us not only to the relationship between mother and daughter, but to the present.

(Basso Cannarsa)

Still, she is not at peace. Even after her mother’s death in 2020 at 96, that censorious voice remained “embedded in my most primitive responses, in my very limbic system.” “You were a mystery Ma,” Jen writes. “Why, why, why were you the way you were?” The writer’s instinct kicks in: “If I write about you, if I write to you, will I understand you better?”

“Bad Bad Girl” constitutes a heroic effort to do just that. But soon after Jen embarks on that quest, she realizes that while many mothers want their daughters to show interest in them and listen to their stories, “they were not my mother.” Without much to go on in the way of shared memories or documentary evidence, Jen decides to recalibrate. Instead of writing a straight memoir, she’ll chronicle what she can and construct a fictional narrative around the rest. The result is a heart-piercingly personal work that also imparts universal truths about the immigrant experience — and what it is to be a daughter, a mother and a woman in a world where men are the more valued of the sexes. If there is such a thing as an intimate epic, this is it.

Jen’s mother Agnes — Loo Shu-hsin, as she was originally named — was born in 1925 Shanghai to a wealthy and prominent banker and his much younger wife. In Part I, we are introduced to the lush beauty and extraordinary privilege Agnes was born into, sequestered in a mansion situated in the “international” section of Shanghai, staffed by maids, cooks, nursemaids, chauffeurs and bodyguards. “Proper though she may have been,” Agnes’ mother “did smoke opium.” Apparently, it was good for cramps.

Agnes was the firstborn child, a disappointment in her gender. As tradition dictated, her placenta was hurled into the Huangpu River; when it floated away, it was deemed that she too “would be raised and fed, only to drift away.” Agnes’ mother never bonded with her daughter and showed her little attention except to object to her daughter’s clear intelligence and closeness with her nursemaid. (By age 6 and beginning to read, Agnes still hadn’t been weaned.) By contrast, her father delighted in his daughter’s zeal for learning. The prevailing view was that “to educate a girl was like washing coal; it made no sense.” Still, her father enrolled her in an elite Catholic school where she was nurtured by Mother Greenough, a nun with a doctorate. She praised Agnes for her intellect and encouraged her to be ambitious. After completing her undergraduate studies amid the Japanese invasion and World War II, in the fall of 1947, after peace had finally descended, Agnes declared her intention to leave for the United States to pursue a PhD. Her father embraced that decision, in part because the communist takeover loomed and he hoped at least his eldest child could escape what was to come. “My favorite daughter, so smart and brave,” he pronounces, as the ship she boards sets sail for San Francisco.

Jen has brilliantly structured “Bad Bad Girl” so that invented exchanges with her mother — post-death, printed in bold type and interspersed throughout — keep returning us not only to the relationship between mother and daughter, but to the present. That dialogue is conversational and often funny, in contrast to the unfolding chronicle of Agnes’ journey as a stranger in a strange land. She finds her new countrymen puzzling in nearly every way. For example, “That was how lonely Americans were,” she observes, “that they should not only feed their dogs but walk them every day, rain or shine.”

Initially, Agnes’ spirits are bolstered by her privilege and her parents’ checks. Soon after arriving in New York City to begin graduate school, though, the money stops coming. The communist takeover is complete and, as she gradually discovers through their letters, now they seek financial support from her. Agnes, who’s never boiled an egg, sets to work typing and translating for her still-rich Chinese classmates. She meets and marries fellow student Jen Chao-Pe, and together they move into a dilapidated walk-up in Washington Heights, where Agnes learns to scrimp and save and paint her own walls. Her husband teaches her to cook. When she gets pregnant with her son, Reuben, she is laid low and takes a temporary leave of absence from school. Soon she is pregnant with Lillian, later nicknamed “Gish” for the silent film actor, and motherhood overwhelms her. Three more children come. Of the five, Gish is her least favorite, a girl every bit as clever as she was — a reminder of what she’s permanently put on the back burner. Whatever maternal feelings she has for her other children are missing when it comes to Gish, who becomes her mother’s scapegoat and punching bag.

Miraculously, Gish appears to have been mostly a happy child who excels socially and academically. After being accepted to every university she applies to, she chooses Harvard. She attends graduate school at Stanford and begins to pursue a writing career. She meets her husband, David, to whom she’s been married ever since — for 42 years. They have a son, Luke, and a daughter, Paloma. Jen’s children know how difficult their grandmother has been, and Paloma offers this to her mother by way of consolation: “The effects of trauma can’t be washed away in a generation,” something she’s read in a book. “You can’t get rid of it all, but you did a good job,” she adds.

How rich this book is, and how humane. Unlike, for example, Molly Jong-Fast’s merciless “How to Lose Your Mother,” “Bad Bad Girl” doesn’t read like a hit job. It’s suffused with love and a desire to finally understand. “You shut me out the way you shut your mother out. … What was my crime?” Jen challenges her mother in one of their imagined exchanges. “You were a pain in the neck,” Agnes observes, in another.

“She does not say ‘I love you’ back; she never has,” Jen writes. She doesn’t put those words in Agnes’ mouth here, even when she has the chance. But Jen does venture this about her mother: “I like to think (she) would finally agree both that this book is a novel and that there might be some truth to it.” And then in their final imagined exchange: “Bad, bad girl! Who says you can write a book like that?” Jen laughs. “That’s more like it.”

Haber is a writer, editor and publishing strategist. She was director of Oprah’s Book Club and books editor for O, the Oprah Magazine.

Kelly Reichardt’s watchful cinema is one of the indie world’s most exquisite bounties, a space for pioneers (“Meek’s Cutoff,” “First Cow”), artists (“Showing Up”) and wanderers (“Old Joy,” “Wendy and Lucy”) who command your attention the way an ER waiting room does, lingering tensely.

One might not consider a heist film in such anthropological terms. And yet “The Mastermind,” Reichardt’s latest and one of her best, while set in motion by a daylight art grab orchestrated by Josh O’Connor’s middle-class Massachusetts suburbanite, is another precisely turned Reichardt movie: honest, sad, funny and inherently philosophical about our engagement with the world. As you might expect, it’s really about the crime’s aftermath, our cut from this robbery being a deft, fascinating character study rooted in an apathy that’s starkly juxtaposed with the restive year it’s set in: 1970.

By the look of things, preppy, soft-spoken James Mooney (O’Connor), an unemployed carpenter, isn’t obvious criminal material, no matter what composer Ray Mazurek’s propulsive, horn-forward jazz score might imply. James cases his local art museum, often with his unwitting wife, Teri (Alana Haim), and two young boys in tow. Otherwise, James is just a distracted dad, checked-out husband and disappointing son living off the status and largesse of his parents, an esteemed judge (Bill Camp) and a society mother (Hope Davis).

Still, based solely on the error-prone heist — it’s been ages since pantyhose masks seemed so ridiculous — thievery isn’t this spoiled man’s strong suit either. (You didn’t think that title was respectful, did you?) When he’s stashing the stolen paintings later in a farmhouse’s hayloft and accidentally knocks the ladder out from under him, the moment is amusing and appropriately metaphorical.

Reichardt is laying bare a privileged man’s half-assed delinquency, especially with O’Connor so hypnotic at conveying self-absorbed cluelessness with his woeful eyes, posture and movement. As the movie then hits the road for his escape, the early fall colors of Christopher Blauvelt’s cinematography shift to gray tones and darker interiors, and James’ vibe is less rebel eluding capture — even if a pal he visits (John Magaro) expresses admiration — than alienated loser leaving behind a mess, an assessment radiating from Gaby Hoffmann as Magaro’s wife. The bebop groove abandons James, too, slowing into jagged drum solos.

The last contextual indignity are the details of the period itself: Nixon posters, anti-war signs, Vietnam footage on televisions, a protest march. Unforced but ever-present in Reichardt’s mise-en-scène, they remind us that this bored aesthete’s misadventure is an especially empty way to buck conformity. When good trouble beckons, why pick the bad kind?

One can even detect, in this brilliant, captivating Reichardt gem about fortune and fate, a what-if attached to her disaffected male protagonist: Would today’s version of James, just as adrift and arrogant, steal art to assuage his emptiness? Or, thanks to the internet, succeed at something much worse? “The Mastermind” may be an ironic title as heists go. But it also hints at the male-pattern badness still to come.

It’s clear from the existence and execution of “Black Phone 2” that Universal and Blumhouse never expected 2021’s “The Black Phone” to be a hit. If there was ever an inkling that the first film might have been more than a quick and dirty ’70s-style riff on a boogeyman tale, there’s no way those in charge would have let their big baddie, the Grabber, be killed off at the end of the movie.

But a hit it was and so, for a sequel, supernatural elements must be spun out and ’80s slasher classics consulted, especially since it’s now four years later, in 1982. Masked serial killer the Grabber, played by Ethan Hawke (we never really see his face, though we do hear his voice), continues to haunt, torment and maim children, despite the inconvenience of death.

Scott Derrickson and C. Robert Cargill co-wrote both films, with Derrickson behind the camera as director. The first was based on a short story by Joe Hill (the son of Stephen King) and is set in 1978 Denver, where plucky Finney Blake (Mason Thames) had to escape the clutches of kidnapper the Grabber while fielding phone calls from the ghosts of his previous victims, offering tips and tricks. What distinguished “The Black Phone” was its shocking approach to violence with its young characters, who all sported entertainingly profane potty mouths. While it was daring in its hard-R riskiness and played on our basest fears, it didn’t reinvent the wheel, or even try to. However, the film’s phone conceit played well enough and young star Thames was outstanding.

In “Black Phone 2,” Finney’s now a high school student, drowning his trauma in weed and schoolyard fights, sometimes the bully himself. He’s protective of his sister, Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), who has the gift of psychic sight, but mostly he just wants to check out from his own brain. The sequel is primarily Gwen’s movie. She starts lucid dreaming and sleepwalking, receiving phone calls from beyond — like from their dead mother when she was a teenager beyond.

The messages bring Gwen, Finney and her crush, Ernesto (Miguel Mora), to a winter retreat for Christian youth, Camp Alpine, now run by Mando (Demián Bichir) and his niece, Mustang (Arianna Rivas). As it turns out, this camp is rife with the ghosts of young dead boys — the phone keeps ringing and it won’t stop until Finney picks it up.

If “The Black Phone” dabbles in crimes that are taboo and is even unforgivable in its depiction of brutality against innocent children, “Black Phone 2” commits its own unforgivable crime of being dreadfully boring. This movie is a snooze, not just because all of the action takes place entirely during Gwen’s dreams.

The film can’t shake its lingering scent of “Stranger Things,” but the filmmakers have also turned for inspiration to another iconic ’80s-set property: The whole movie is a “Nightmare on Elm Street” ripoff, with a disfigured killer stalking his prey through their subconscious. Those sequences are fine, action-packed if not entirely scary, but at least it’s something more rousing than the awake scenes, where the characters stand in one place and make speeches to each other about their trauma and backstories. The entire affair is monotonously one-note and dour, with only a few pops of unintentional humor.

You realize almost immediately what the deal is with these ghost boys, but the film takes its sweet time explaining it all. It’s a fairly simple story, so you do understand why Derrickson gussies it up with grainy dream sequences and shaky 8mm flashbacks, and a pretty terrific electronic score composed by his son, Atticus Derrickson.

It’s also a bit surprising that “Black Phone 2” turns out to be so pious and deeply Christian, which is a bit of an odd mix. For a film about Jesus and the power of prayer, it also features a scene in which a kid’s face gets sliced in half by a windowpane. Then again, horror’s trend toward the faith-based isn’t a surprise when you take a look at the success of the Bible-thumping “Conjuring” franchise.

However, it seems like this might be the Grabber’s last hurrah. You’ll root for the characters to vanquish him only because then the drudgery might finally end. Who knows, maybe it’ll be a hit and they’ll figure out another way to reanimate this utterly uninspiring horror villain. Personally, I’ve had my fill of the Grabber’s grabbing.

Katie Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.

“Frankenstein” has haunted Guillermo del Toro since he was a kid who barely reached the Creature’s knees. Back in 2011, the writer-director was already tinkering with a version of the monster that resembled a blend of Iggy Pop and Boris Karloff with jagged sutures, gaunt wrinkles and a crushed nose. Since then, Del Toro has made changes. The 2025 model is played by Jacob Elordi, a 6-foot-5 actor often cast as the ideal human specimen in movies like “Saltburn” and who here howls to life with handsome features and rock star swagger. But your eyes keep staring at his pale, smooth seams. He doesn’t look hand-stitched — he looks a little like a modern android.

Of course he does. The decades have given Del Toro time to think about what truly scares him. It’s not monsters. He loves all disfigured nasties, be they swamp creatures, eyeball-less ogres or bolt-headed Hellboys. It’s tech bros, like the ones weaseling into Hollywood, who give their every innovation a sterile sheen.

“Frankenstein” is the director’s lifelong passion project: He doesn’t just want to make a “Frankenstein” but the “Frankenstein,” so he’s faithfully set his adaptation in the past. But he’s adjusted the wiring so that 1850s Europe reminds us of Silicon Valley. The result is the best movie of his career.

This Baron Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) is a short-sighted egomaniac who barks over his critics while jabbing the air with his fingers. “I fail to see why modesty is considered a virtue,” he says with a snort.

And Del Toro has written Victor an enabler: a deep-pocketed investor named Henrich Harlander (Christoph Waltz) who struts into Victor’s science lecture hunting for a whizkid to crack the code to immortality. With his gold-heeled shoes and a confidence that he’s too rich to die, Waltz’s wealthy arms dealer is a 19th century take on venture capitalists like Bryan Johnson and Peter Thiel who’ve been poking into the feasibility of pumping their veins with young blood.

“Don’t be a reasonable man,” Henrich advises Victor. The assumption is — and remains — that tycoons and geniuses deserve to run rampant. Great success demands an indifference to the rules. And if you’re wondering whether money or brains has more power, there’s a scene in which Henrich uses a chamber pot and smugly orders Victor to “flush that for me.”

Del Toro is wired into the outrage in Mary Shelley’s sly 1818 novel, a nightmarish satire about men who care only about yelling “first!” without asking what horrors come next. Centuries ago, she warned of man’s ill-considered rush to create artificial intelligence. Today, Dr. Frankenstein’s descendants keep promising that AI won’t destroy civilization while ignoring Shelley’s point, that the inventor is more dangerous than his monster.

Victor, a stunted man-child who drinks milk served by a sommelier, is frozen in the I’ll-show-him stage of growing up with an abusive father (Charles Dance) who whipped him when he got a wrong answer on his schoolwork. Victor’s name, we’re reminded, means “winner,” a symbol of the pressure he’s under to excel.

Isaac plays him with a pitchman’s exuberance that sags as the corners of his mouth wrench down in disappointment. He’s hacked how to make a disembodied head moan in agony. But having rarely felt affection, Victor doesn’t know how to generate that emotion at all. Worse, it hasn’t occurred to him to think past the triumph of his product launch, that his Creature can’t be readily unplugged. The only kind characters in the movie are a rural blind man (David Bradley) and the moth-like Mia Goth, double-cast as Victor’s mother, Claire, and his brother’s fiancee, Elizabeth. A convent girl with a creepy streak, Elizabeth sees beauty in biology, leaning over a corpse’s flayed back to appreciate the intricacy of its ventricles. But the more she studies Victor, the less impressed she gets.

Because Shelley came up with “Frankenstein” as an 18-year-old newlywed who’d just lost a baby, her message gets boiled down to gender: Women birth life, men mimic it. Really, the feminine strength of the book lies in its foxy, shifting narration that opens with a prologue from an Arctic explorer who’s gotten his sailors trapped in the ice, before transitioning to Victor’s story and then the Creature’s. Like a hostess who secretly loathes her guests, Shelley encourages her characters to flatter themselves and expose their braggadocio.

Del Toro has kept that tactic and he’s kept the book’s structure. But within that framework, he’s changed nearly everything else to make Victor more culpable. Unlike the 1931 film, there’s no Igor and no excuse of accidentally using the wrong brain. This Victor does his own dirty work and what goes wrong is his fault. Meanwhile, Del Toro amps up the action, starting the film off with a ghastly great sequence in which Elordi’s Creature punches a sailor so hard his spine snaps into a backward somersault.

“What manner of devil made him?” the Captain (Lars Mikkelsen) exclaims. Victor guiltily explains why he played God.

Being a futurist isn’t bad. Henrich, an early adopter of daguerreotype cameras, shoots photographs of women posing with skulls like he’s paving the way for Del Toro’s whole filmography. But pompous Henrich and Victor don’t appreciate that their accomplishments are built on other’s sacrifices. When the cinematographer Dan Laustsen pans across a battlefield of dead soldiers, it feels like a silent scream. Henrich made his fortune killing these men; now, Victor will salvage their body parts.

Del Toro delights in the kinetic gusto of the tale, the grotesquerie of cracking limbs and blood sloshing about Victor’s shoes. In the laboratory, dead leaves and buzzing flies whirl through the air as if to keep up with the inventor’s wild ambitions and Alexandre Desplat’s swirling orchestral score. The production design by Tamara Deverell is superb as are the costumes by Kate Hawley, who shrouds Goth in dramatic chiffon layers and dresses laced to highlight her vertebrae. (This movie loves bones as much as Sir Mix-A-Lot loved backs.)

As Victor rudely flings around torsos and limbs, it’s clear that he only values life if it’s branded with his name. So yes, of course, Elordi’s Creature looks good. He’s been assembled from the choicest bits of man flesh to show off the talent of his creator, not so different from Steve Jobs caressing samples of brushed aluminum. When Elordi’s Creature pleads for a companion, a sliver of sculpted abs peeking out from under five hulking layers of wool and fur, you expect half the audience’s hands to shoot up and volunteer.

Elordi has adopted one or two of Karloff’s mannerisms: the arms outstretched in search of warmth, the lurching walk. You can see that he’s a tad lopsided on the left side, presumably because Victor couldn’t find matching femurs. Mostly, he’s his own monster, neither the calculating serial murderer of the book nor Karloff’s reactive, animalistic killer, but a scapegoat who finally starts leveling his foes with bone-breaking efficiency.

Towering over Victor by almost a foot, Elordi’s Creature dwarfs his creator physically, morally and emotionally. There’s anguish in his eyes, and when Del Toro shows us the world through his perspective, humanity itself appears anti-life, a pestilence that destroys without hesitation.

There’s a pack of digital wolves that just looks silly. Otherwise, you trust how intensely Del Toro has doted upon every detail. I was flummoxed by a row of servants flanking young Victor (Christian Convery) who appeared to be wearing gauzy bags over their heads. What are those for? My theory is it’s a tribute to the veil Karloff sported during lunch breaks, so as not to frighten any pregnant secretaries on the Universal lot.

Eschewing mobs of pitchfork-wielding villagers, Del Toro focuses on Victor’s inability to parent his unholy son. And while the end stretch gets a bit too stiff and speechy, particularly with a line that Victor is the “true monster,” I loved the moment when the Creature, venting on behalf of all frustrated children however big they‘ve grown, growls, “The miracle is not that I should speak but that you would listen.”

This deservedly anticipated “Frankenstein” transforms that loneliness into stunning tableaux of Victor and his immortal Creature tethered together by their mutual self-loathing. One man’s heart never turned on. One can’t get his heart to turn off. Ours breaks.

An immigrant drama by Rudi Goblen about two brothers born in Nicaragua, “littleboy/littleman,” now receiving its world premiere at the Geffen Playhouse, is an American story at its core.

Lest we forget our past, America is the great democratic experiment precisely because it’s a land of immigrants. Out of many, one — as our national motto, E pluribus unum, has it. How have we lost sight of this basic tenet of high school social studies?

Our tendency to ghettoize drama — along racial or immigrant lines — reflects the failure to understand our collective story.

Goblen, who (like a.k. payne, author of “Furlough’s Paradise”) was a playwriting student of Geffen Playhouse artistic director Tarell Alvin McCraney at Yale, has created not a conventionally worked out two-hander, but an intuitively structured performance piece. Infused by live music and inflected with hip-hop style poetry, “littleboy/littleman” crashes through the fourth wall to make direct contact with theatergoers, who are seated on three sides of the playing area and always just a high-five away.

Marlon Alexander Vargas, the dynamic, sweet-faced performer who plays Fito Palomino, the more creative and mercurial of the two brothers, is on stage interacting with the audience before the play begins. As the musicians — music director Dee Simone on drums and Tonya Sweets on bass — warm up the crowd from their platform at the back of the playing area, Vargas, ever-in-motion, greets theatergoers and counts down to the start of the show.

Rules are spelled out at the top that make clear that this isn’t one of those docile theatergoing experiences, in which the audience is expected to keep mum as the actors do all the work. Spectators are encouraged to make some noise — to show love when they want to show love and to show it even when they don’t.

These friendly instructions are impishly delivered by Vargas, whose performance outside the play has an effect on our experience of his character inside the play. The fate of Fito is the emotional crux of the drama, and what happens to him matters all the more to us because of our theatrical connection to Vargas, our de facto host and impromptu buddy.

Goblen sets up a drama of fraternal contrasts. Bastian Monteyero (Alex Hernandez), the older and more straitlaced of the two brothers, has a tough, no-nonsense demeanor that’s all about discipline and conformity. He’s a bit of a recluse, but he plays by the rules and demands the same from Fito.

A street performer, Fito dreams of opening a vegan restaurant that will offer his community access to affordable, healthful meals. This idea seems far-fetched to Bastian, and he tells Fito that if he wants to continue living with him, he’s going to have to get a real job.

Bastian hooks Fito up with a friend who’s employed at a cleaning service. But scrubbing public toilets isn’t Fito’s idea of an alternative course. Bastian wants his brother off the streets. There are dangers afoot in Sweetwater, Fla., far worse than unpleasant paid work.

A law officer in town, a sadist who demands complete subservience, has it in for Fito, who describes this menacing figure as “a gangster with a badge.” He also calls him “brown on the outside, white on the inside,” and bemoans to his brother the Latino infighting (“the worst thing they ever did was give us all flags”) that only divides people who have political reason to be in solidarity.

Bastian, who affects a white-sounding Midwestern voice when he hustles donations in his telemarketing job, can’t help taking the latter comment personally. He’s made no secret that he wants to change his name so his resume won’t be ignored when he applies for management jobs.

The two brothers have different fathers, and Fito doesn’t have the option of passing. In any case, he’s more embracing of his identity as a person of color than Bastian. What both of them have in common is that they survived both their harrowing childhoods in Nicaragua and their unrelentingly challenging journeys in America, having been raised by a single mother, whose death still haunts them.

Bastian and Fito love each other, but don’t always like each other. Hernandez’s Bastian is a formidable presence, angry, strict and domineering — the qualities he’s needed to navigate a bureaucratic system that has little concern for the feelings of immigrant outsiders. Vargas’ Fito, by contrast, has his head in the clouds and his heart on his sleeve. Goblen never loses sight of their affection even as their conflict grows louder and more bruising.

Bassist Tonya Sweets, from left, Marlon Alexander Vargas and drummer Dee Simone in “littleboy/littleman” at Geffen Playhouse.

(Jeff Lorch)

“littleboy/littleman” is tricky in its theatrical rhythms. It’s like a piece of music that keeps switching harmonic structures, not wanting to get stuck in the same groove. Goblen’s manner of writing is closer to free jazz or freestyle hip-hop than traditional drama.

Director Nancy Medina’s staging, circumnavigating a theatrical circle, lifts the audience out of its proscenium passivity into something almost immersive and definitely interactive. Tanya Orellana’s scenic design and Scott Bolman’s moody lighting create a performance space that is well suited to a work composed as a series of riffs. The influence of McCraney’s “The Brothers Size” is palpable not only in the thematic architecture of the play, but also in how the piece moves on stage.

The staccato nature of the writing is helped enormously by the entrancing acting of both Vargas, who breezes through different theatrical realms as though he had wings, and Hernandez, who locks realistically into character. It’s a credit to the play and to the performers that, by the end of “littleboy/littleman,” the differences between the two brothers seem less important than what they have in common.

Not all the dramatic elements are smoothly integrated, but the production ultimately finds a coherence, not so much in the music (composed by Goblen himself), but in the emotional truth of the brothers’ pressure-cooker lives. Vulnerability unites not only Bastian and Fito, but all of us witnessing their story who hope against hope that compassion will somehow win the day.

A Grammy Award for best new artist. Four top 10 hits since September 2024. Sold-out gigs packed with admirers in pink cowgirl hats wherever she goes.

At 27, Chappell Roan has unquestionably become one of pop’s new queens. But let it never be said that this powerhouse singer and songwriter rules without mercy.

As her band vamped on the intro to her song “Hot to Go!” on Friday night, Roan surveyed the tens of thousands spread across the leafy grounds surrounding the Rose Bowl in Pasadena.

“We’re gonna teach you a dance,” she said, though few in the audience probably needed the lesson at this point in Roan’s ascent. For more than a year, social media has been awash in video clips of Roan’s fans doing a “Y.M.C.A.”-like routine in time to the frenzied chorus of “Hot to Go!”

But wait a minute: “There’s a dad in the crowd that’s not doing it,” Roan reported with practiced disbelief. The band stopped playing. “There’s a dad that’s not doing it,” she repeated — less incredulous than reproving now.

“But he looks really, really nice, so I’m not gonna do anything about it.”

Roan’s show Friday was the first of two in Pasadena to wrap a brief U.S. tour.

(Brian Feinzimer/For The Times)

Friday’s show, which Roan said was the biggest headlining date she’d ever played, was the first of two at Brookside at the Rose Bowl to conclude a brief run of U.S. concerts she’s calling Visions of Damsels & Other Dangerous Things. The performances in New York, Kansas City and Pasadena can be seen as something of a victory lap after the slow-building success of her 2023 debut album, “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess,” which beyond “Hot to Go!” has spun off numerous other hits including “My Kink Is Karma” and the inescapable “Pink Pony Club.”

That last song, which has more than a billion streams on Spotify and YouTube, documents a young queer woman’s sexual awakening at a West Hollywood gay club; Roan’s music sets thoughts of pleasure, heartache and self-discovery against a gloriously theatrical blend of synth-pop, disco, glam rock and old-fashioned torch balladry.

Having spent this past summer on the European festival circuit, she’s said that Visions of Damsels represents “the chance to do something special before going away to write the next album”; the mini-tour also keeps her in the conversation as nominations are being decided for next year’s Grammys, where she’s likely to vie for record and song of the year with “The Subway,” one of a handful of singles she’s released since “Midwest Princess.”

Yet as clearly as it showcased her natural star quality — the stage was designed like a gothic castle with various staircases for Roan to descend dramatically — this was really a demonstration of the intimate bond she’s forged with her fans, many of whom came to the show dressed in one of the singer’s signature looks: harlequin, majorette, prom queen, construction worker.

An hour or so into her 90-minute set, Roan sat in a giant throne with a toy creature she called her tour pet and recalled her move to Los Angeles nearly a decade ago from small-town Missouri.

“I had a really, really tough time the first five years,” she said, adding that she’d lived in Altadena when she first arrived. (In a bit of now-infamous Chappell Roan lore, she was dropped by Atlantic Records in 2020 after the label decided “Pink Pony Club” was not a hit.) She talked about how much she loves this city — “F— ICE forever,” she said at one point to huge applause — but bemoaned the “weird professionalism” she can feel when she’s onstage in L.A.

“I know there’s a lot of people in the music and film industry here, and I don’t want you to think about that,” she said. “Don’t f—ing talk about it. Don’t talk about work here. I just want you to feel like you did when you were a kid — when you were 13 and free.” She laughed.

“I’m just gonna shut up — I’m so dumb,” she said. Then she sang the lovelorn “Coffee” like someone confessing her greatest fear.

Roan said Friday’s show was the biggest headlining date she’d ever played.

(Brian Feinzimer/For The Times)

Though the castle set was impressively detailed, Roan’s production was relatively low-key by modern pop standards; she had no dancers and no special guests and wore just one costume that she kept removing pieces from to end up in a kind of two-piece dragon-skin bikini.

But that’s because at a Chappell Roan show, Chappell Roan is the show: a fearsomely talented purveyor of feeling and attitude whose campy sense of humor only heightens the exquisite melancholy of her music.

Her singing was immaculate yet hot-blooded, bolstered by a killer band that remade songs like “Good Luck, Babe!” and “Red Wine Supernova” as slashing ’80s-style rock; Roan covered Heart’s “Barracuda” with enough strutting imperiousness to compete with Nancy Wilson’s iconic guitar riff.

“The Giver” was a stomping glitter-country hoedown, “Naked in Manhattan” a naughty electro-pop romp. For “Picture You,” which is about longing to know a lover’s secrets, Roan serenaded a blond wig plopped atop a mic stand — a bit of absurdist theater she played completely straight.

The heart of the concert was the stunning one-two punch of “Casual” into “The Subway,” Roan’s most grandly emotional ballads, in which her voice soared with what seemed like total effortlessness.

After that is when the singer noticed that kindly dad shirking his duties in “Hot to Go!” Maybe the poor guy was just too dazzled to take part.

“The Chair Company,” premiering Sunday on HBO, is a conspiracy comedy — dark comedy, one would definitely have to say — in which Tim Robinson goes down a rabbit hole, from one carrot to the next, after a chair collapses beneath him. It’s a thriller in its way; there will be suspense, and injuries, and a lot of screaming, mostly by the star.

Robinson, who co-created the series with Zach Kanin (who also co-created Robinson’s Netflix sketch show, “I Think You Should Leave”), is a difficult hero. His main shtick is the madman underneath a cracking veneer of civilization; physically, he projects a sort of eccentric normality, like a critique of normal. From the beginning of “The Chair Company,” we see that Robinson’s Ron Trosper is tense and nervous and can’t relax, getting into a argument with a waitress over what and what isn’t a mall — he’s been named to lead the development of a new one in Canton, Ohio. (The action all takes place in the state.)

A presentation he’d been dreading goes well, but as he sits back down, his chair — a standard office model — collapses under him, robbing him of a moment of triumph. What most would throw off with a joke sets Ron on edge, and he begins an obsessive quest to track down the manufacturer. But all he comes up with are dead ends and empty offices, and he begins to suspect a conspiracy. When, getting into his car, he’s hit on the head with a pipe and told to stop asking about the chair, it only makes him more determined to uncover it. Lurking, sneaking and stealing will ensue. Reckless behavior. Shouting.

Along with some standard office comedy involving HR reports and Ron’s “know it when I see it” boss (Lou Diamond Phillips, aging gracefully), there is a family element. Wife Barb (Lake Bell) is moving ahead with plans to develop a more attractive breast pump. Daughter Natalie (Sophia Lillis) is getting married to her girlfriend, and wants to change the venue at the last moment to a haunted house. Son Seth (Will Price), a basketball player apparently of enough talent to mention it in the series, has discovered the pleasures of drinking just as recruiters are coming around. It’s not a developed thread, but it gives Price the opportunity to deliver my favorite line in the series: “Some nights I’ll have like four beers and I’ll sit in my room and I’ll put on Abbott and Costello after I’ve had a couple; it makes me feel good to know that [these] two guys found each other because they both seem so different.” Which is a theme of the show.

The character who makes the series breathe is Mike Santini (Joseph Tudisco), the person wielding the pipe. Ron will track him down, and eventually they’ll become partners in his investigation and, after a fashion, friends. (Though Ron is not always friendly.) Mike is the series’ most original conception, and, in a strange way, its heart — someone not beyond taking money from a stranger to hit another stranger over the head, but sympathetic. Lonely, he craves the connection. Ron, for his part, is forever running out on his family to join Mike in some misadventure.

Robinson, the rare “Saturday Night Live” worker who went from performer to writer, is quite adept at playing this character, which makes Ron exhausting company; it takes a certain sort of stamina, or a love for, this particular brand of chaos to put up with him. It seems hardly credible at times that he’s successfully helped raise two rational children, one to adulthood; has attained an upper-middle-class life (with Lake Bell!); and occupies a position of creative responsibility. There are difficult comic characters you’re nevertheless happy to see — Larry David, because he’s so centered in his world and basically right, Lucille Ball because she’s a genius. But Ron spends so much time at DEFCON 1, dialed up past 11, that it can be off-putting, and drowns out the human inside.

Nevertheless, like any mystery, it draws you along, waiting for answers. Seven episodes of eight were released to reviewers; the seventh ends on what feels like a note of quiet irresolution — if not, in Ron’s mind, satisfaction. But the eighth will surely not let things rest, and you may rest assured — and may need the rest — that eight is not the end.

In “The Last Frontier,” which premieres Friday on Apple TV+, a plane carrying federal prisoners goes down in the Alaskan wilderness outside a town where Frank Remnick (Jason Clarke) is the U.S. Marshal. Eighteen passengers survive, among them a sort of super-soldier we will come to know as Havlock (Dominic Cooper). Sad intelligence agent Sidney Scofield (Haley Bennett) is sent to the scene by her dodgy superior (American treasure Alfre Woodard).

I won’t go into it in depth, especially given the enormous number of reveals and reversals that make up the plot; pretty much everything not written here constitutes a spoiler. The production is excellent, with well-executed set pieces — the plane crash, a tug-of-war between a helicopter and a giant bus, a fight on a train, a fight on a dam. (I do have issues with the songs on the soundtrack, which tend to kill rather than enhance the mood.) The large cast, which includes Simone Kessell as Frank’s wife, Sarah — they have just about put a family trauma behind them when opportunities for new trauma arise — and Dallas Goldtooth, William Knifeman on “Reservation Dogs,” as Frank’s right hand, Hutch, is very good.

It’s as violent as you’d expect from a show that sets 18 desperate criminals loose upon the landscape, which you may consider an attraction or deal killer. (I don’t know you.) At 10 episodes, with a lot of plot to keep in order, it can be confusing — even the characters will say, “It’s complicated” or “It’s not that simple,” when asked to explain something — and some of the emotional arcs seem strange, especially when characters turn out to be not who they seem. Things get pretty nutty by the end, but all in all it’s an interesting ride.

But that’s not what I came here to discuss. I’d like to talk about snow.

There’s a lot of snow in “The Last Frontier.” The far-north climate brings weather into the picture, literally. Snow can be beautiful, or an obstacle. It can be a blanket, as in Eliot’s “Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow,” or a straitjacket, as in 2023’s “A Murder at the End of the World,” a Christie-esque murder mystery that trapped the suspects in an Icelandic luxury hotel. It’s part of the aesthetic and part of the action, which it can slow, or stop. It can be deadly, disorienting, as when a blizzard erases the landscape (see the first season of “Fargo”). And it requires the right clothes — mufflers, fur collars, wool caps, big boots, gloves — which communicate coziness even as they underscore the cold.

The snowy landscape in shows like “The Last Frontier” is part of the aesthetic and action.

(Apple)

Even when it doesn’t affect the plot directly, it’s the canvas the story is painted on, its whiteness of an intensity not otherwise seen on the screen, except in starship hallways. (It turns a moody blue after dark, magnifying the sense of mystery.) Growing up in Southern California — I didn’t see real snow until I was maybe 10? — I was trained by the movies and TV, where all Christmases are white if the budget allows, to understand its meaning.

It was enough that “The Last Frontier” was set in Alaska (filmed in Quebec and Alberta) to pique my interest, as it had been for “Alaska Daily,” a sadly short-lived 2022 ABC series with Hilary Swank and Secwépemc actor Grace Dove as reporters looking into overlooked cases of murdered and missing Indigenous women. This may go back to my affection for “Northern Exposure” (set in Alaska, filmed in Washington state), with its storybook town and colorful characters, most of whom came from somewhere else, with Rob Morrow’s New York doctor the fish out of water; “Men in Trees” (filmed in British Columbia, set in Alaska) sent Anne Heche’s New York relationship coach down a similar trail. “Lilyhammer,” another favorite and the first “exclusive” Netflix series, found Steven Van Zandt as an American mobster in witness protection in a Norwegian small town; there was a ton of snow in that show.

It serves the fantastic and supernatural as well. The polar episodes of “His Dark Materials” and “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters,” the icebound sailing ships of “The Terror” live large in my mind; and there’s no denying the spooky, claustrophobic power of “Night Country,” the fourth season of “True Detective,” which begins on the night of the last sunset for six months, its fictional town an oasis of light in a desert of black. In another key, “North of North,” another remote small town comedy, set in Canada’s northernmost territory among the Indigenous Inuit people is one of my best-loved shows of 2025.

But the allure of the north is nothing new. Jack London’s Yukon-set “White Fang” and “The Call of the Wild” — which became an Animal Planet series for a season in 2000 — entranced readers back around the turn of the 19th century and are still being read today.

Of course, any setting can be exotic if it’s unfamiliar. (And invisible if it’s not, or annoying — if snow is a thing you have to shovel off your walk, its charm evaporates.) Every environment suggests or shapes the stories that are set there; even were the plots identical, a mystery set in Amarillo, for example, would play differently than one set in Duluth or Lafayette.

I’ll take Alaska.

LOVE foreplay but have a lazy partner? Then Christmas has come early — ahem.

Meet The Poet by Smile Makers. Made with clever air-suction technology, this toy is no ordinary vibrator.

The Poet, £79.95 £55.95 from Smile Makers

It’s designed for earth-shattering clitoral orgasms. Add a bit of lube, and it practically mimics real oral sex — a godsend for those of us whose partners skip foreplay… or are single.

As a devoted fan of oral, I like to make it the main course — who needs guys anyway?

Its silky-smooth silicone material feels amazing against the skin, and with three interchangeable heads, you can find your perfect fit.

It’s already racking up glowing reviews and boasts a 4.7-star rating online — so guys, consider yourselves warned!

Pros

• Rechargeable battery
• Three interchangeable ‘mouths’ 
• Cheaper than similar toys on the market
• Waterproof
• Very quiet (if not totally silent)
• Two-year guarantee
• Five pulsation modes 

Cons

• Better for solo play than intercourse
• There are already similar products on the market
• Packaging could be more enticing 

Rating: 9/10

How I tested The Poet

The Poet, £79.95 £55.95 from Smile Makers

As The Sun’s Sexpert, I’ve tried my fair share of vibrators over the years — you can read my round-up of the best sex toys for women.

Where possible, I test the toys by myself, and then my partner is usually roped in for a test drive (not that he ever minds!).

The Nitty Gritty

First impressions

Okay, so the packaging could be a little more enticing, but once opened, the toy itself is very pretty and female-friendly.

Its purple-rose design is elegant enough to sit on your bedside table — no need to hide it away in a drawer.

The instructions are simple to follow, and the toy is easy to use.

Does it… Deliver?

The Poet, £79.95 £55.95 from Smile Makers

As someone who loves oral sex, I can honestly say this is one of the best air-suction toys I’ve tried.

I actually prefer it to toys from Womanizer, one of the first brands to use this kind of clitoral stimulation technology.

It’s more comfortable to use, gentler yet somehow more powerful, and much prettier too. 

Add plenty of lube and it really can feel as good — if not better — than the real thing.

It really can feel as good — if not better — than the real thing.

And yes, lads, you might want to be a little worried about that!

It’s also waterproof, so you can elevate your bathroom game with a cheeky solo session in the shower or bath.

Plus, it’s rechargeable (no more faffing about with batteries) and comes with a cute satin bag to tuck it away in.

How much is The Poet?

At £79.95, it’s cheaper than its racy rival, the Womanizer, as well as Lelo’s Sona 2, which, until trying this, was the best I’d tried.

Plus, it’s currently on sale for £55.95.

Lelo’s Sona 2 is pricier at £100.62 (currently on sale).

So, while this toy is a little up there in price, it’s still more affordable than many other premium brands — and it comes with a two-year guarantee.

Orgasms that are insured — what’s not to love?

Where to buy The Poet

Thanks to the sale, the best place to buy The Poet is probably the Smile Makers website.

But, it’s also available from retailers like SheSpot and Cult Beauty.

It’s worth shopping around, as different sites often run their own discounts.

Alternatives

At the premium end of the market, the Womanizer Next retails at £189 – almost £100 more than The Poet.

Both use air-tech suction, are whisper-quiet, waterproof, and made from soft silicone.

But I find the Womanizer a bit more rigid and less comfortable to hold and use than The Poet.

At the budget end, there’s LoveHoney’s Clitoral Rose Suction, which is super cute and very reasonably priced at £54.99.

It also uses clever air-tech suction technology and is waterproof, but it’s not as comfortable to hold as The Poet, which seems to mould perfectly to the body.

Then, bang in the middle, there’s Lelo’s Sona 2.

Like the Womanizer, it specialises in air-suction clitoral stimulation and is one of my favourite toys.

But The Poet is cliterally the best — and cheaper. 

“Kiss of the Spider Woman,” a sexual and scatological dazzler about an inmate‘s obsession with a favorite musical, sounds like the kind of thing some folks won’t watch even if they, too, were locked in a prison for years. Their loss. In the spirit of the film, I’ll try to change their mind.

It’s 1983 Argentina, the last days of a militarized dictatorship under which 30,000 people have been disappeared. Scraggly, severe Valentin (Diego Luna) is a political prisoner with ties to the revolutionary underground. His new cellmate is a brazen chatterbox named Molina (Tonatiuh), a gay window dresser serving an eight-year sentence for indecency in a public bathroom. They have zero shared interests. But to pass the time — and, more importantly, to get Valentin to put down his biography of Lenin and talk a little — Molina recounts the plot of a Golden Age spectacular starring the fictional movie star Ingrid Luna (Jennifer Lopez), a red-lipped, pineapple-blond beauty whose vintage posters brighten their wretched gray walls.

“I hate musicals,” Valentin complains.

“Then I pity you,” Molina says breezily, charging into the first scene.

Through beatings and starvation, poisonings and betrayals, all under the gaze of the oppressive warden (Bruno Bichir), Valentin and Molina escape into Technicolor in a desperate need for distraction. The writer-director Bill Condon (“Chicago,” “Dreamgirls”) has savvily, unabashedly reworked the 1993 Broadway extravaganza (already a bold adaptation of the 1976 experimental novel and 1985 Academy Award-winning drama). He’s double-cast Luna and Tonatiuh as the film-within-a-film’s leads and changed the imaginary tale from a Nazi propaganda flick to a melodramatic but moving South American romance between a glamour queen and a noble photographer. Its themes of love and sacrifice come to mirror Valentin and Molina’s own relationship.

The songs themselves are the same rather-forgettable numbers by John Kander and Fred Ebb who did a zingier job mixing fascism with feathers in “Cabaret.” “Live inside me on a movie screen,” Lopez’s Ingrid sings, luring Molina to get lost in daydreams. Behind her, dancers gyrate like victims being electrocuted. (I wouldn’t have minded more jolts of morbid humor.) Unhummable as the music is, its message has a spark: In the war for liberation, it’s OK to take mental breaks.

In fact, pleasure is necessary, especially for the regularly tortured Valentin who seems to have been numb for a long time. (Communist memoirs don’t stir the soul.) A hardline ascetic, Valentin won’t even alert the medics when he’s sick, in case they give him morphine.

The two roommates comically bicker about what scant pop culture Valentin knows, taking shots at “Raging Bull,” Meryl Streep and his own crass insistence that Ingrid’s character, Aurora, is frigid due to some kind of childhood trauma. (“Oh, God, let her be,” Molina sighs.) Yet, their conversation always pirouettes back to the gap between the real world and the movies.

“I hate to break it to you,” Valentine says, “but nobody sings in real life.”

“Well, maybe they should,” Molina huffs.

Maybe in confinement they can’t.

Condon smartly limits who sings and why and when. In the 1985 drama, which starred Raul Julia and William Hurt (who won the Oscar for Molina), both men remained trapped in this horrible dungeon and never sang a song. On Broadway, all of the characters — even cranky Valentin — crooned numbers the whole way through. But Condon draws a thick line between reality and fiction to highlight how much his leads need the freedom for radical self-expression.

“Kiss of the Spider Woman” is about a lot of things: Valentin reconnecting with his emotions, Luis discovering that he’s more than a self-described trivial sissy. (“I cringe every time you make fun of yourself,” Valentin growls.) But it’s fundamentally about those scenes in which the palette and polish of the film shifts and cinematographer Tobias A. Schliessler switches from handheld to Steadicam. The putrid chamber drama becomes a fantasia, befouled rags turn into tuxedo pants and it’s finally safe to belt how they feel.

Earlier incarnations of this story had activism as the end goal, Valentin for his principles and Molina for his new friend. Condon is more focused on their humanity. Caring for each other makes this bleak world worth fighting for. Without joy, we’re already in chains.

People will come out of “Kiss of the Spider Woman” gushing about Tonatiuh and with good reason. Striding confidently into his first starring role, the L.A.-born breakout talent is a bright new discovery with shining eyes and brash exuberance. He needs to be excellent for the movie to succeed and he’s pretty darned close, even pulling off a glib beat where Molina recoils from a battered man and quips, “If I looked like that, I’d want a bag over my head too.” There are scenes where he comes off arch and a little telegraphed, although in fairness, that’s also just who Molina is — performance is protection. And when Tonatiuh cowers from the guards, we get a hint of what Molina has suffered without Condon ever having to show the abuse.

To keep things faithful to 1983, Tonatiuh’s Molina doesn’t identify as transgender — the character sticks to the limited vocabulary of the time. But you see Molina’s subtle disappointment when Valentin, trying to be supportive, insists, “You’re not a monster, you’re a man.” And Condon has tweaked a climactic refrain, changing the pronoun to “Her name was Molina.”

Playing Ingrid-as-Aurora — the heroine of a film that, even its biggest fan admits, is “no ‘Citizen Kane’” — Lopez is shellacked under two layers of diva artifice. But at this point in her career, she’s suited to being an icon. She’s long since given up pretending she’s still Jenny from the Block, and Condon has shaped the role of Ingrid to her like a corset. You hear it in the line, “No matter how hard Hollywood tried to make her all-American, she never stopped being Latin” and more than that, you see it in Lopez’s delight as she flashes her legs and tosses her hair. She knows she can nail this role and she really hoofs it. There’s a wide-angle shot of a nightclub where Condon gives her and a dozen background performers a full, uncut minute to twirl. Most impressively, Lopez grabs a martini, slowly does a one-legged spin to the ground and then uncoils herself to stand back up and cheer.

She has a harder time commanding the screen in a third role, when Ingrid also acts the part of the sinister Spider Woman, a spiky-haired, taloned jungle goddess who smooches her prey to death. The movie’s stiff Spider Woman set pieces are a relic of the ’90s musical that put Chita Rivera in a massive web. Trapped in them, Lopez can’t do much more than a predatory grin. But it’s still better than how Condon’s “Chicago” chopped up its choreography into close-ups (and here, there’s still a few gratingly askew camera angles). The new film is the director’s penance: an apologia to musical lovers who want to see the star do every inch of the dancing.

Still, my favorite performance has to be Luna’s, whose Valentin is at once strong and vulnerable, like a mutt attempting to fend off a bear. He’s the only one who doesn’t need to prove he’s a great actor, yet he feels like a revelation. Watching him gradually turn tender sends tingles through your heartstrings. For his second role as Ingrid’s onscreen boyfriend, Condon resurrects a discarded number from the original musical where Luna croons about being “An Everyday Man,” his warm voice perfectly imperfect. Even when he’s grouchy and filthy, you get why Molina would imagine Valentin as the ideal romantic lead.

I don’t want to spoil the ending other than to say that Condon adds an exclamation point to his insistence on music as emancipation with a new scene set after the fall of the junta and its right-wing abduction squads. The camera looks down at the jail as the inmates spill into the courtyard. Then it pulls up for an aerial shot of the entire block. We see citizens flood the streets. We hear honking horns and spontaneous street music. The whole country is free to sing.

In “Boots,” a new miniseries set in 1990, Miles Heizer plays Cameron Cope, a scrawny, bullied gay teenager who is out only to his best (and only) friend, Ray (Liam Oh). Ray, who is joining the Marines to make his disciplinarian but not unkind father proud, convinces Cam to join alongside him. (The recruiters sell a buddy system, which is a bit of a come-on.) Cam told his messy but not unkind mother, Barbara (Vera Farmiga), where he was going, but she wasn’t listening.

Though the series, which premieres Thursday on Netflix and is based on Greg Cope White’s 2016 memoir, “The Pink Marine,” is novel as regards the sexuality of its main character, it’s also essentially conventional — not a pejorative — and largely predictable. It’s a classic Boot Camp Film, like “An Officer and a Gentleman,” or Abbott and Costello’s “Buck Privates,” in which imperfect human material is molded through exercise, ego death and yelling into a better person, and it replays many tropes of the genre. And like most every military drama, it gathers diverse types into a not necessarily close-knit group.

Cam’s confusion is represented by externalizing his inner voice into a double, “the angel on my shoulder and, honestly, sometimes the devil,” with whom he argues, like a difficult imaginary friend. (It’s the voice of his hidden gayness.) Where basic training stories like this usually involve a cocky or spoiled character learning a lesson about humbleness and teamwork, Cam is coming from a place of insecurity and fear. At first he wants to leave — he had expected nothing worse than “mud and some bug bites and wearing the same underwear two days in a row” — and plots to wash out; but he blows the chance when he helps a struggling comrade pass a test. He’s a good guy. (Heizer is very fine in the part.)

Cameron (Miles Heizer), left, is convinced by his best friend (and only friend), Ray (Liam Oh), to join the Marines with him.

(Alfonso “Pompo” Bresciani / Netflix)

Press materials describe “Boots,” created by Andy Parker, as a comedic drama, although, after the opening scenes, there’s not much comedy in it — even a food fight is more stressful than funny. Using “Also Sprach Zarathustra” as the soundtrack to a long-in-coming bowel movement — I just report the news — was already dated and exhausted in 1990, and is bizarrely out of joint with the rest of the production. “Boots” isn’t anywhere near as disturbing as, say, “Full Metal Jacket” — which Ray told Cam to watch to prepare, though he opted for a “Golden Girls” marathon instead. But it makes no bones about the fact that these kids are being trained to kill. “Kill, kill, blood makes the grass grow,” they chant, and “God, country, Corps, kill.” And sometimes just, “Kill, kill, kill.” And things do turn violent, sometimes for purposes of training and sometimes because someone just goes off his head.

Still, that Cam survives, and, after a period of adjustment, thrives (that’s not a spoiler, Cope White lived to write the book) makes this, strictly speaking, a comedy. (And, by implication, an endorsement of the program.) “We’re killing our old selves so we can be our best selves,” he’ll say to Ray. The Marines may make a man of him, but it won’t be a straight man.

Rhythmically, “Boots” follows scenes in which someone will break a little or big rule — I suppose in the Marines, all rules are big, even the little ones — with some sort of punishment, for an individual or the platoon. Laid across this ostinato are various storylines involving recruits working out the issues that have brought them to this Parris Island of Misfit Boys. Cody (Brandon Tyler Moore) was taught by his father to look down on his twin brother, John (Blake Burt), who is in the same outfit, because he’s fat. Slovacek (Kieron Moore), a bully, has been given a choice between prison and the military. Mason (Logan Gould) can barely read. Santos (Rico Paris) is slowed down by a bum knee. Ochoa (Johnathan Nieves) is a little too much in love with his wife. And Hicks (Angus O’Brien) is a chaos-relishing loon, having the time of his life. Obviously, not everyone who joins the Marines is compensating for something; Nash (Dominic Goodman), a more or less balanced character who seems to be sending Cameron signals, is there to pad his resume in case he runs for president one day; but he’ll have his moment of shame.

Sgt. Sullivan (Max Parker), left, is one of the drill instructors who takes an interest in Cameron (Miles Heizer).

(Alfonso “Pompo” Bresciani / Netflix)

Though they all raise their voices and get in people’s faces, the drill instructors do come in various flavors. Staff Sgt. McKinnon (Cedrick Cooper), the senior instructor, is imposing but obviously sane and sometimes kind; Sgt. Howitt (Nicholas Logan) is an unsettling sort who will prove to have some depth, while Sgt. Knox (Zach Roerig) is a twitchy racist, soon to be replaced by Sgt. Sullivan (Max Parker), tall, steely and tightly wound. He doesn’t yell as loud as the others, but even his posture is intimidating. He focuses immediately on Cameron; make of that what you will. He’s the series second lead, basically.

There are some respites from the training, the running and marching, the room full of tear gas, the dead man’s float test, the hand-to-hand combat, the flower planting. (That part was nice, actually.) The yelling.

Ray winds up in sick bay, where he flirts with a female Marine. We get a few perfunctory glimpses of what the brass is like when they’re out of uniform and quiet; it comes as a relief. McKinnon’s wife is having a baby; he makes Cookie Monster noises on the phone for his son. Capt. Fajardo (Ana Ayora), “the first woman to lead a male company on Parris Island,” is heard talking to her mother, presumably about her daughter’s wedding: “I would rather not spend the time or the money because she can’t live without love.” Of her position, she observes that it “only took 215 years and a congressional mandate.” McKinnon, who is Black, offers a brief history of Black people in the Marine Corps as lived by his forebears.

The social themes become more prominent in the second half, and we learn or are reminded just how toxic the military was to gay people, and how backward was its attitude. “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” wasn’t in effect until 1994, and it wasn’t until 2011 that openly gay soldiers could serve. Now, as civil rights are being beaten back to … backwardness by small-minded politicians, there’s a timely element to this perfectly decent, good-hearted, unsurprisingly sentimental miniseries.

AS someone who tried and failed for years to master the art of the at-home blowout, I have the rise of air tools to thank for my transformed hair styling routine.

Every hair tool under the sun promises “salon-worthy results at home,” and I’ve been testing the Shark FlexStyle hair tool for a year to determine if it can truly deliver.

Shark FlexStyle Air Styler and Hair Dryer, £229.99 (was £279.99)

Known originally for its popular vacuums, Shark branched out into the beauty tech space in 2022 with the launch of the FlexStyle Air Styling and Drying System.

The beauty gadget features five different attachments, with an option to build your own bundle based on your hair type.

All of the FlexStyle attachments can also be bought separately on the Shark website for £24.99 each, so you can add to your collection over time.

Shark swooped in at a time when beauty enthusiasts were searching for a more affordable alternative to the £400+ Airwrap.

At £279.99, it’s still an investment, but it’s a fraction of the cost of a Dyson Airwrap i.d.

Is it worth ditching your current tools for an all-in-one gadget? Read below for my full Shark FlexStyle review.

Pros:

• Creates voluminous blow-outs
• Minimal heat damage
• Requires little effort (once you nail the technique)
• Multiple attachments included
• Option to build your own set
• Easy to switch between styler and dryer
• Cheaper than similar alternatives

Cons:

• Noisy
• Bulky for travelling
• Takes a while to master the technique
• Hot brush attachment can feel rough on the hair

Rating: 8/10

How I tested the Shark FlexStyle Air Styler

Shark FlexStyle Air Styler and Hair Dryer, £229.99 (was £279.99)

As The Sun’s Fashion and Beauty eCommerce Writer, it’s my job to try out products that are causing a buzz in the industry.

I’m obsessed with all things beauty, so I’ve tested my fair share of hair stylers over the years, including the best Dyson Airwrap dupe and my Dyson Airwrap i.d review, but it takes a lot for one to become a regular in my routine.

The hype around the Shark FlexStyle is still going, and I can confidently share my thoughts after trialling the tool for a year.

The Smoothing Concentrator (hair drying nozzle) and Auto-Wrap Curling Barrels are my go-to FlexStyle attachments, so I’ll be talking mostly about them.

But I’ve also tested the Paddle Brush, Oval Brush and Fizz Fighter heads.

For reference, I have long, wavy hair that can get frizzy after washing, and I have extensions.

Shark FlexStyle 5-in-1 air styler review: The Nitty Gritty

First impressions

1

Shark FlexStyle Air Styler and Hair Dryer, £229.99 (was £279.99)

Every beauty influencer in existence seems to own the FlexStyle, so I was pretty familiar with its appearance before trying it out.

While sleek in design, the cable and attachments together are on the bulky side (which is to be expected due to its multiple functions), but it’s meant I’ve avoided travelling with it so far.

When purchasing the FlexStyle, shoppers can select the five-in-one bundle, or mix and match their own (choosing four attachments).

I have the model that comes with five attachments: Auto-Wrap Curlers (one for each side of the head), a Paddle Brush, an Oval Brush, a Styling Concentrator, and a Diffuser.

My Fizz Fighter Finishing Tool is a new addition, which I bought separately to try and tame my frizz at my roots.

As I have attachments in my bundle that I don’t use (the diffuser, as it’s designed for curly/ coily hair), I would recommend the Build Your Own Hair Styling and Drying System to get the most for your money.

Does it deliver?

If you’re looking for a way to create bouncy blow-outs yourself, the Shark FlexStyle absolutely delivers, but it does take practice to perfect the process.

My biggest reservation about the FlexStyle before trying it was the drying system.

Shark FlexStyle Air Styler and Hair Dryer, £229.99 (was £279.99)

A multitasking styler runs the risk of being a jack of all trades but a master of none, but Shark has ensured its hair dryer doesn’t compromise on power.

I swear by my Dyson Supersonic Hair Dryer for quick results on my long hair, and the FlexStyle pretty much matches its drying time.

Call me easily pleased, but the way the tool rotates between a dryer and a styler is one of my favourite features.

The fact that it twists into a right angle makes it so much easier to use, and — in a common theme with the FlexStyle — it never makes me feel like I’m overworking to get results.

There are three heat and power settings (I tend to use mine on full blast), and following the instructions of online videos, I always use the Cool Shot feature for locking the style in place.

The Paddle Brush (for straight styles) and the Oval Brush (for blow-outs) both have boar and plastic bristles that are great for gripping the hair, but I’d recommend being gentle to avoid snagging the hair.

The newest addition to my routine is the Frizz Fighter Finishing Tool.

Like the barrels, it attracts the hair, gliding from the root to smooth frizz and flyaways, essentially enhancing the effects of the other attachments.

Now, for quite possibly the main selling point — the Auto-Wrap Curling Barrels.

Shark FlexStyle Air Styler and Hair Dryer, £229.99 (was £279.99)

I have to admit, I was quickly humbled when I realised that the beauty influencers were making the process look far easier than it is.

The airflow technology makes the air wrap around the barrel automatically to create a curl, but I struggled with getting it to pick up the hair for the first few attempts.

And when I did, the curl would drop out within the first few hours.

After plenty of practice (and TikTok tutorials), I managed to master the method, but patience is needed.

I found the key is keeping the sections small as it makes it easier for the hair to wrap, and use a product to hold the curls (I swear by the Colour Wow XL Volumiser).

Unlike when I use curling tongs, the curls aren’t going to last me for days on end, but they do look great that day, and after sleeping on them, I’m left with a subtle wave that I’ll sometimes go over with the barrels.

I also find the whole process to be far more enjoyable than curling my hair with tongs (which could be down to years of the same routine) – and the airflow makes creating curls far more efficient.

The one thing I’d change about the FlexStyle is the noise.

Shark FlexStyle Air Styler and Hair Dryer, £229.99 (was £279.99)

When my roommate borrows it, I can hear the whirring from the other side of the flat, so it’s not one you could use while watching TV or late at night.

Keeping heat damage to a minimum is important to me as I already put enough strain on my hair with bleach, extensions and frequent styling.

Can I confidently say that the FlexStyle causes zero damage? No.

But can I confidently say that it creates a salon-worthy blow-out while causing far, far less damage than other hair tools? Absolutely.

Results aside, I can tell when I’m using the FlexStyle that it’s transferring way less heat than a tong or straightener (you can read my article on the best hair straighteners here).

There’s no burning smell (and if there is, you may need to clean the filter), and my hair has felt healthier since ditching the tongs for the FlexStyle regularly.

I love how my hair turns out every time I use the Shark FlexStyle, and it’s absolutely worth investing time to master the technique in order to get professional-looking results.

Shark FlexStyle FAQs:

Shark FlexStyle price

The Shark FlexStyle isn’t cheap, but if you’re keen to invest in a does-it-all hair tool, it’s more affordable than its competitors.

Shark’s 5-in-1 Hair Dryer and Air Styler with Storage Case is currently on sale for £229.99, while the Build Your Own bundle is slashed to £199.99.

Refurbished models are also available on eBay, a cheaper alternative to buying the FlexStyle brand new.

Shark released a 2025 edition of the FlexStyle earlier this year, which beauty fans can buy for £279.99.

Where to buy the Shark FlexStyle 5-in-1 air styler and hair dryer?

The Shark FlexStyle is available to buy online at Boots, Amazon and of course, the Shark website.

Most major beauty retailers are also currently stocking the styler, including Sephora, Lookfantastic and Cult Beauty.

There are several colourways to choose from, including the limited-edition sparkle FlexStyle that comes in stunning champagne and black shades (and would be perfect if you’re buying the styler as a gift).

The full list of places to shop online:

Is the Shark FlexStyle worth it?

Using the Shark FlexStyle takes some practice to get it right, but once you get the technique down, it’s so worth it.

The styler works effectively on long and thick hair, but those with fine hair will need to work harder for long-lasting curls.

At over £250+, it’s not cheap, but if you blow-dry and curl your hair regularly, it’s an investment worth considering.

The best part about the FlexStyle?

It causes far less heat damage than tongs and conventional hair straighteners – not to mention that it’s significantly more enjoyable to use.

How to use Shark FlexStyle?

For best results, start with towel-dried hair and dry with the Smoothing Concentrator until your hair is roughly 80% dry.

You can use the Paddle Brush attachment to straighten your hair and add shine, or the Oval Brush to add bounce and volume.

The Auto-Wrap Curlers use a clever technology that wraps and curls your hair around the barrel automatically.

All you need to do is hold your hair in place for 10-15 seconds, and then use the shot button to lock in your curl before releasing.

Repeat across sections for a full head of soft, bouncy curls.

Shark FlexStyle 5-in-1 Air Style alternatives

It’s no secret that the Dyson Airwrap i.d is the FlexStyle’s main competitor (make sure to read our Dyson Airwrap i.d review).

Revlon, Bondi Boost and Silk’n all have similar hair tools, and the Sun Shopping team also tried and tested the Babyliss Air Style 1000 in a Dyson Airwrap dupe review.

Beauty fans who are mostly tempted by the Oval Brush attachment on the FlexStyle should also check out our round-up of the best hot brushes.

Over the last decade or so, publishers of American genre fiction have borrowed a page from Hollywood’s playbook by essentially packaging novels like films, grafting together collaborators from two different A-lists: those that feature bestselling novelists and major celebrities. Large commercial rewards have been reaped from these crossbred literary partnerships. Bill and Hillary Clinton, to name just two examples, have both enjoyed bestsellers with big-time writing partners James Patterson and Louise Penny, respectively.

Now we have Reese Witherspoon, already a major force in American publishing, teaming up with Harlan Coben, one of the world’s biggest selling thriller writers, to create “Gone Before Goodbye,” a book that taps into our fascination with the follies of the impossibly rich at the same time that it ponders real questions about the ethics of social engineering via medical advances in organ regeneration.

Now, it must be said that book critics are cynical snobs by nature, and something like “Gone Before Goodbye,” which at first blush seems to have been a project drummed up in a talent agency conference room, is prone to be received with a derisory scoff and a stiff-armed shove from those who are just waiting to sink their teeth into the new Thomas Pynchon novel. But this is Harlan Coben and Reese Witherspoon we’re talking about here, two formidable talents whose track record for delivering smart entertainment is unimpeachable. “Gone Before Goodbye” is not some magpie creature patched together from shopworn thriller tropes, even if certain plot elements feel a bit much. Instead, what the two authors have delivered is a story that pulls the reader deep into a rarefied world where ethics are mere technicalities and the needs of the rich take precedence over petty trivialities like, say, morality.

The book’s protagonist, Maggie McCabe, a brilliant Army combat surgeon who, along with her husband, Marc, and their friend Trace, teamed up after college to create WorldCures Alliance, “one of the world’s most dynamic charities, specializing in providing medical services for the most impoverished,” working as field surgeons risking their lives on the front lines in Afghanistan and the Middle East. The trio once had big plans centered on the prototype of an artificial heart they designed, THUMPR7, which they were convinced would change the world by extending the lives of millions, rich, poor or otherwise.

When the book begins, these plans have been torn asunder: Marc, as it transpires, has been killed in a rebel attack on a refugee camp in Libya. Trace has gone missing along with the artificial heart prototype. And Maggie has lost her medical license due to a hiccup of bad judgment on her part. At loose ends and broke, Maggie, and the reader, are then swept into a strange adventure when a successful cosmetic surgeon named Evan Barlow approaches her with an offer to wipe out her family’s debts in exchange for Maggie committing to perform surgery for a client in Russia who is willing to pay her millions.

Off Maggie goes into the dirty world of the Russian oligarchy, in a city called Rublevka, “perhaps the wealthiest residential area in the world,” where a shady creep named Oleg Ragoravich, one of the 10 wealthiest and most reclusive Russian billionaires, has a job for her. It’s well below Maggie’s pay grade: Oleg wants augmentation mammoplasty for his mistress Nadia. Ragoravich is predictably oleaginous, a man with a file cabinet full of hidden agendas, but he is charmingly persuasive, and the money has already been wired into Maggie’s account. She is in before she even has a chance to back out.

Naturally, there is a great deal more involved than a simple boob job. Without giving too much away, Witherspoon and Coben in this novel have tapped into the wealthy’s obsession with using technology to foster super-agers. As the stakes get higher, the plot ripples out into larger and larger concentric circles that envelop Maggie’s life and everyone in it. But there is so much to take in while this happens, so much voyeuristic pleasure to be had as Maggie acclimates into an almost impossibly lush and lavish world that toggles between Russia and Dubai, the de facto playground for raffish oligarchs intent on bad behavior.

Witherspoon and Coben revel in the details. The plane that spirits Maggie from New York to Russia is a “full-size 180-seat Airbus A320 renovated for private use,” kitted out with a 65-inch contoured TV, a gourmet kitchen and a marble ensuite bathroom with an “oversize rain showerhead.” Ragoravich’s dacha is a “garish and almost grotesque” palace clad in marble that makes Maggie think of Versailles, but in a way that makes Versailles seem dumpy. Everything within is “not so much an attempt to classily suggest opulence and power as to batter you with it.” This is the kind of thriller that invites you into a gilded empyrean that compels you and repels you in equal measure.

The book’s plot mechanics hum along with great pace and verve, even if a few of its particulars are too far-fetched to swallow. With “Gone Before Goodbye,” the two authors deliver a fun ride into a shadow land where the rich are convinced that money can insulate them from everything, including their own mortality — even if they have to murder a few people to get there.

Weingarten is the author of “Thirsty: William Mulholland, California Water, and the Real Chinatown.”

Fans of the seminal, long-running podcast “WTF With Marc Maron” — and I count myself among them — have been treated to thousands of deep-dive interviews with a starry array of actors, musicians, comics and even some politicians (Barack Obama was a guest in 2015). It’s also been an intimate window into the conflicted inner life of the show’s eponymous host. Maron has seemingly pulled few if any punches in his podcast’s opening monologues as he’s held forth on everything from his fraught emotional state and his two-decade struggle with drug and alcohol addiction (he’s been sober since 1999) to the untimely 2020 death of his romantic partner, the well-regarded indie filmmaker Lynn Shelton (“Humpday,” “Your Sister’s Sister”).

Much of this personal territory and more is revisited in the absorbing, fly-on-the-wall-style documentary “Are We Good?” (named after Maron’s “WTF” sign-off phrase), produced and directed by Steven Feinartz.

Feinartz, who also directed Maron’s last two HBO stand-up specials, began filming his subject in 2021. He trailed Maron as he performed in comedy clubs from Los Angeles to Montreal, recorded his podcast from the garage studio of his Glendale home, visited with his elderly father and, most pivotally, worked through the soul-crushing loss of Shelton. That loss becomes the driving force of the doc, with Maron’s grief informing his daily life and thought process, while also providing cathartic, darkly humorous fodder for his stand-up gigs.

It’s a tricky balancing act that Feinartz depicts with candor, grace and patience, never letting the film’s provocative pathos turn overly grim or sentimental. A stand-up bit in which Maron recalls his ghoulish urge to snap a hospital selfie after bidding goodbye to the deceased Shelton (don’t worry, he decided against it) provides a gulp-worthy example of the comic’s brazen yet reflective approach to the world around him.

That Shelton died at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic made for an additionally cruel and difficult time for Maron, who was unable to share his pain with many others as social distancing took over. He eventually found the funny in that conundrum as well, incorporating the memory into his routine with satiric glee.

Anyone familiar with Maron’s grumpy, F-bomb-tossing persona will likely savor these 90 or so minutes in his swirlingly neurotic company. He unabashedly leans into that vibe here, even while wrangling his pair of self-possessed cats. While Maron sometimes kvetches about Feinartz’s hovering cameras, he seems to have given him a kind of all-access pass to his daily life in a way that belies his trademark crankiness. He may be a reluctant showman, but he’s a showman nonetheless.

The uninitiated, however, might find Maron somewhat less engaging. He readily self-identifies as “selfish, anxious and panicky” and for some, a little of that may go a long way. Still, it’s not hard to relate to his many cogent musings (“How do you love somebody else if you really can’t love yourself?”) as well as to respect he clearly had for Shelton, who’s seen here in an array of luminous, heartbreaking clips.

Other comic talents such as Nate Bargatze, David Cross, Caroline Rhea, Michaela Watkins and John Mulaney also weigh in, bringing a mix of the sincere and the droll to their frank and friendly observations about Maron. On his podcasts and elsewhere, Maron has spoken at length about growing up with narcissistic, emotionally detached parents and how that dynamic likely laid the groundwork for his problematic sense of self. Although that’s not discussed in great detail here, the scenes between Maron and his dad, Barry, now in his mid-80s and living with dementia, have a subtle poignance that shows a kinder, more accepting side of the comedian than perhaps even he might have expected.

Meanwhile, a bit more could have been made of Maron’s acting work, a sideline that’s gained momentum over the last decade or so with worthy roles on TV’s “Glow” and “Stick,” and in films including “Joker” and the upcoming “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere.” Maron’s oft-stated uncertainty about his acting ability and the push-pull he has admitted to feeling might have dovetailed nicely with his other qualms.

That said, the profile, which features vivid archival and personal footage and photos of Maron throughout the years, is by no means comprehensive, nor does it try to be. At heart, it’s about a vulnerable man at a unique moment in time and how his past has prepared him — or perhaps not. And we are definitely good for experiencing this singular artist up close.

Mercedes Bryce Morgan’s horror film “Bone Lake” announces itself with a startlingly cheeky opener and closes with a bloody gore-fest, the song “Sex and Violence” by U.K. punk outfit the Exploited spelling out the thesis of the film for us. It’s about the intertwining of sex and violence, you see. But what unfolds between these naughty, viscera-drenched bookends is less of a traditional horror film and more of a psychosexual thriller, like “Funny Games” played between two, young attractive couples, with a setup borrowed from “Barbarian.”

In the script by Joshua Friedlander, a double-booking of a secluded rental mansion becomes a double date when Will (Alex Roe) and Cin (Andra Nechita) stumble in on the intimate weekend vacay of Sage (Maddie Hasson) and Diego (Marco Pigossi). The couples decide to make the best of it and stay, promising to rock-paper-scissors for the house if anything gets “weird.”

And get weird it does. While Diego and Sage seemed perfectly happy on arrival, the sexy, uninhibited Will and Cin have a way of nosing out their insecurities, finding the cracks in their connection and weaseling their way in. Suddenly, their lackluster sex life is on trial, and Sage’s resentment about financially supporting Diego while he pursues his dream of writing a novel bubbles to the surface.

Like any weekend-goes-awry horror movie (e.g., “Speak No Evil”), the female half of the couple catches a bad vibe that her male partner dismisses, due to his vested interest in wanting to stay. For Diego, it’s the promise that Cin will share his writing with his favorite author, for whom she claims to work. They overlook the red flags, blow off their opportunities to leave and decide to go all in with this wanton pair, drinking, playing games, breaking into secret rooms and dodging sexual overtures from each of them.

Morgan and her cinematographer Nick Matthews make the location fun to look at, with a saturated color palette and clever camera movements. However, there are scenes where the film is frustratingly dim and underlit, even if it might be justified by the power going out during a storm.

While there’s a certain verve and style to the middle section, where Will and Cin draw in their prey and toy with them, the Grand Guignol climax bears no rhythm or suspense; it’s merely a bludgeoning of the audience with carnage — too much too late.

Other blunt instruments? Roe and Nechita, who don’t play their roles with any subtlety. Roe’s Will comes off as a dangerous himbo; Nechita’s Cin is an over-the-top minx in her seduction of both Diego and Sage. While Hasson’s Sage is a plausibly strident freelance journalist type, you wonder if she has much experience with female friendship, because Cin’s manipulation is so painfully obvious. Pigossi’s self-obsessed novelist, however, is perfectly pitched in his all-around obliviousness.

There’s a kernel of something fascinating at the center of “Bone Lake,” a melding of sex and violence into gestures that are familiar from true crime stories. But there’s not enough motivation baked into the big third-act twist, and the performances just aren’t strong enough to suggest anything deeper.

“Bone Lake” offers up an appealing surface but it’s ultimately too shallow to get you immersed.

Katie Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.